This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people.

Nowadays, Batman is a household name. His list of comic issues, let alone live action movies,

animated films, and TV shows, video games, you name it. Well, it's nothing short of astounding.

But this wasn't always the case. Today, Andrew Farago, curator at the

Cartoon Art Museum, an author of Batman, the definitive history of the Dark Night in comics,

film, and beyond, is here to tell us the story of the dark night.

I suppose it's appropriate for a character

whose secret identity is a millionaire

and later a billionaire.

But money was kind of the driving force

behind Batman at the beginning.

So a struggling and fairly undistinguished cartoonist named Bob

Kane was working for national periodical publications doing funny animal comics. He was doing

adventure comics. He was doing anything he could to try to make a name for himself, try to

just make a living.

And he heard that Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who were the co-creators of Superman,

were making a really nice living hundreds of dollars a week,

you know, just out of the Great Depression,

tail into the Great Depression from their creation.

He talked to his editor and editor said, yeah, you bring me another Superman and this will be

...