Jerry Robinson, Creator of the Joker, Dishes on Superman

It turns out that the Joker -- pop culture's pre-eminent villain -- was created by one of the good guys.

N.C. Christopher Couch's new book, Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics (Abrams ComicArts, 224 pp., $35.00), recounts how, in 1939, Robinson, then a 17-year-old preparing to study journalism at Columbia, met artist Bob Kane, who had an unexpected comic-book hit on his hands in the form of a mysterious crime-fighter named Batman.

Robinson, who'd always loved to draw but had received no formal art training, began inking Kane's pencil drawings and was soon contributing story and character ideas, including a baroquely psychotic criminal based on a playing card.

Beyond documenting eight decades of Robinson's comics, illustrations, paintings, and photographs, Ambassador of Comics chronicles the adventures of a scholar, teacher, political cartoonist, and human-rights activist. Robinson is currently at work on multiple projects: a memoir, a graphic novel starring the Joker, and an updated edition of The Comics, his seminal 1974 history of the comic strip.

Recently, we sat down with the 88-year-old comics legend in his Riverside Drive apartment to discuss political cartoons, jailed dissidents, ripped-off artists, heroes, and villains.

In going through the new book, I was struck by the way your drawing style always seems to inhabit the subject, as opposed to the other way around.

I adopt the method of drawing that I think is best suited to tell that story. So naturally Batman is going to look different from "Jet Scott" [a sleek adventure strip Robinson drew in the 1950s], which is going to look different from "Flubs and Fluffs" [Robinson's cartoony humor page, syndicated from 1964 to 79] or from my political cartoons. I use the pen line or the brush stroke that's suited to the subject -- if I do a book on the civil war, I use a pen technique that's more evocative of the civil war; if I do a space thing, I paint it entirely differently.

In the 60s and 70s, you wrote and drew "Still Life," a syndicated political cartoon done with a quick brush line that featured inanimate objects discussing current events. In 1964, it got you in trouble because of a Goldwater cartoon.

That one led to my exit from the Daily News. The tagline was "All that glitters is not Goldwater." It just so happened, that day the chairman of the board of the News was having a meeting with the Goldwater supporters, and one of them says, "You're the chairman of the pro-Goldwater committee, we're trying to raise funds, and you're running a cartoon against Goldwater." He didn't even know it -- he was embarrassed. So he called the editor and said, "I don't want to see that guy in the paper again." [Laughter]

Through your cartoons, you've been both an observer of and a player in politics for decades -- what do you think of the times we're living in now?

They're more polarized. I don't remember it being quite so vitriolic or so far out.

In the early 80s, you were involved in some pretty far-out politics yourself, concerning Francisco Laurenzo Pons. [Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer had asked Robinson to help Amnesty International free Pons, a cartoonist jailed and tortured for his opposition to Uruguay's ruling junta.]

He had done nothing but draw and write against the regime -- he wasn't a bomb-thrower; he didn't kill anybody. On that basis I called editorial cartoonists scattered all over the country. I said, "Here but for the grace of God go us -- he did nothing more than what we're doing and he's tortured in jail." I invented an award to give him: The Distinguished Foreign Cartoonist Award. Then I had the further idea -- I knew the leading cartoonist in Poland, Eric Lipinski. He was a dissident in a Communist country, so that would make the award more believable -- that we got somebody from a right-wing country and a left-wing country.

Sandy [Campbell, then president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists] and I went to Washington, to the Uruguayan embassy. We didn't let on that we knew Laurenzo was in jail. We met with the ambassador and said we had a great honor for Uruguay and we wanted to invite Laurenzo Pons to Nashville, where a leading cartoonist from Poland would also be presented an award.

Well, they didn't fall for that.

We got the call back, saying, "Unfortunately we cannot let him out of the country, but we'll give his wife a visa to come accept the award."

So we held that event anyway. Everybody was walking around Nashville with "Free Francisco Laurenzo Pons!" shirts. [The singer Tom T. Hall, who wrote "Harper Valley P.T. A.," had had T-shirts printed for the fundraiser.]

The end of the story is that suddenly [in 1984] Laurenzo's wife gets a notice that he's going to be released. He'd served almost six years, and his official term was six and a half -- of course, that meant nothing, it could have gone on for ten years more. Later I found out that the two men incarcerated on either side of him had committed suicide.