F a t h e r   o f   u r b a n   d a r k n e s s ________Batman creator Bob Kane, who died yesterday, ________created one of the most sinister -- and typically ________American -- characters in our literature. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY BOB CALLAHAN Bob Kane died yesterday. Kane created Batman, one of the most sinister and spooky characters in all of comic book history, back in 1938. And yet, on the darkened streets of Gotham this very night, how many crack dealers do you figure will even pause to note that a New York City kid by the name of Kane once created a real man-killer of a comic book character just to go after punks like them? Kane was born in New York City in 1916. He went to school in New York at the old Cooper Union. His generation created the comic book. Kane was actually in New York in 1938 when Joel Schuster and Jerry Siegel created the very first Superman comic. The immediate commercial success of Superman inspired other young illustrators and script writers to come up with costumed heroes of their own. Superman had captured the market for the all-American type. But there was still room -- hell, there may always be room -- for a man with a weird idea about a bat. The comics trade, in those days, was made up of many young Irish-American and Jewish artists. Will Eisner remembers that the whole superhero tradition, which Superman initiated, was one way the Jewish artists, with the help of their Irish friends, could go out and help fight the Nazis. And indeed it wouldn't be very long before Batman, Superman and the rest of this new legion of superheroes were about the business of busting Nazi spy rings operating brazenly right out of New York harbor. The men who created the comics quickly realized that it required a new and purely iconographic language. Words were necessary to create good stories, but it was pictures that delivered the knockout punch. Not since Dickens had the challenge of creating someone who actually looked like Old Smelly Jim presented such a delicious challenge. The terrible truth about Bob Kane was that he couldn't draw all that well. But this really didn't hurt him. Batman's seedy world consisted of ugly, misshapen criminals and fringe types. Once the immortal cape and cowl was added, all Batman had to do was stand up a little more stiffly than anyone else. Thus a star was born. What was remarkable about Kane's Batman was that he was never a nice guy. He was a comic book extension of a very old and very mean American archetype. Kane's new character was half bat, half vigilante. You knew him the minute he slinked into the alley. He was the guy who once stretched your Uncle Willie's neck with a rope. Kane's Batman was Charles Bronson before there was a Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood before Dirty Harry ever thought to take my last name. If you were casting Bob Kane's character by disposition, you would never in a million years think Michael Keaton or George Clooney. Good God: George Clooney? If you were casting Bob Kane's Batman, even the likes of Tim Roth or Christopher Walken would be much too lighthearted to play this demonic avenger. Kane's Batman was an urban terrorist. He grew out of the very same sewer system that had mothered the criminals in his stories. He would laughingly and lovingly manipulate their fears, superstitions and insecurities to enact his revenge. The fact that he was OUR urban terrorist, taking revenge on criminals who were no better than pond scum, turned him into some kind of really weird new hero in the end. A creation of the popular literature of the '20s and '30s, resonating with some of the very same frenetic dysfunctional energy that had birthed his fellow pulp man James M. Cain, Kane's Batman was one of the first great antiheroes. The sign of Batman -- the blackened, outlined form of a bat silhouetted by klieg lights on the side of a city wall -- warned that the Dark Age of American literature, the age of noir, was about to descend upon us all like a storm. A hundred different writers have written Batman over the years, and 100 different artists have drawn his character and his various adventures. The first great sea change in the Batman series would come after World War II. By the late 1940s this old vermin carrier had been cleaned up and turned into a God-fearing representative of the local Chamber of Commerce. Some wonderful work was done during this period, but it just wasn't Batman anymore. Under the politically correct pressures of the age, old Flying Rat-Boy had been turned into some kind of smarmy do-gooder, an urban version of a cowboy hero in a white hat. He would stay that way -- as lame as most of the movies later to be made about him -- for the next couple of decades. Then the '80s came around, with their own crushing need for darkness, and Batman finally got to go home. Today, on the day of Bob Kane's death, there is probably some academic somewhere crediting the rebirth of Batman to the age of Newt Gingrich. In fact, it was the sheer stubborn cleverness and skill of comic strip creator Frank Miller who returned Batman to his original identity in the fantastic "Batman: The Dark Knight" series, published in 1986. Looking for all the world like Jesse "The Body" Ventura on a really bad-hair day -- before he lowered himself to enter into politics, that is -- Miller's new Batman gave us more bat than man once again. And lo and behold, Miller's series took off like the proverbial shot off a shovel to become the bestselling comic book series of all time. (It's interesting that America embraced two huge comic book creations during this period. One was Batman; the other was Art Spiegelman's "Maus," in which the author told the story of his father's Holocaust experience in a comic book form where all the Nazis were drawn as cats, and all the Jews as mice. I am not exactly sure what it means when the two most popular comic icons in a given age are rats and bats, but the age of noir has clearly got some ink left in its jets.) Today Batman has become a part of the essential gallery of American folk heroes and folk deities, joining Davey Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Popeye, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse. (That Batman always preferred living in the company of men, and could have occasionally used the Bat Signal as a means of getting a date, changes nothing.) Some of us are blessed to write a few memorable poems; others may pen a fine first novel. But few of us luck into the creation of a bona fide American archetype. SALON | Nov. 6, 1998 Bob Callahan is one of the creators of Salon's Dark Hotel. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTO: AP/WIDE WORLD