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Bob Kane (birth name Robert Kahn) was born on October 24th 1915 in New York. He is best known as the creator of Batman. In fact Bob Kane was relatively new to comics when he began working on Batman.

Kane was actually a high-school friend of Will Eisner (The Spirit). He studied art at Cooper Union before joining the Max Fleischer studio as a trainee animator in 1934. Just two years later he moved into comics as a freelancer for Wow, What A Magazine!. By 1937 he was working at Eisner & Iger, a studio that produced comics on demand for publishers. During this time Kane produced work for the two companies which would eventually combine to form DC Comics. His work included Oscar the Gumshoe for Detective Comics and Professor Doolittle for Adventure Comics.
Image via Wikipedia
Inspired by DC Comics success with the superhero Superman in 1939, Bob Kane drew up a character he called The Bat-Man. According to Kane he drew on Zorro, the movie The Bat Whispers and Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing of an ornithopter in creating his design.

After discussions with writer Bill Finger who was part of Kane’s studio, Kane modified his Bat-Man design somewhat, replacing the wings he had original drawn with a cape and cowl and moving to a gray and black color scheme.

Bill Finger wrote the first Batman story and Kane drew the art. The character debuted in Detective Comics #27 and was an instant hit. Within a year Kane had art assistants (Jerry Robinson and George Roussos). However when DC wanted more stories than Kane’s studio could provide, they began to use in-house pencillers as ghost artists under Kane’s supervision.

Bob Kane left the Batman comic books in 1943, but continued to work on the character, penciling the daily Batman newspaper strip which ran until 1946. After the strip finished, Kane did return to the comic books.

By the 1960s Kane was not working as actively in comics. He worked in TV animation creating the characters Courageous Cat and Cool McCool and also displayed his artwork in galleries.

In 1989 Kane published an autobiography called Batman and Me in 1989 and followed it with Batman and Me, The Saga Continues in 1996.

Kane died on November 3rd 1998 in LA, at the age of 83. He left behind a wife, a daughter and a grandson.

While he did branch out into other areas, Bob Kane heavily relied on ghost artists at many stages in his career and he is almost entirely defined by his creation of Batman. His contract with DC stipulated that he be credited as the creator and as a result, Bill Finger who wrote most of the early stories does not get the credit he deserves.