10 September 2014

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

From Marc Tyler Nobleman’s interview with comics scripter Arnold Drake:

when Bill [Finger] was looking for an idea for Batman, one of the tricks that he used was to open up the Yellow Pages in the phone book and just kind of ripple through it. Where his fingers stopped he’d say, “Piano tuner…I wonder if there’s a story in a piano tuner?”
And then, of course, Finger would imagine the piano to be giant-sized.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

All right, what in the world is supposed to be happening with that piano? That is the worst representation of a piano action mechanism that I have ever seen --
Your friend, The Piano Tuner

J. L. Bell said...

I believe the Dynamic Duo have been captured, tied up, and left lying on the giant piano strings. They're rolling away from the hammers striking the strings. And yes, those hammers don't look like anything involved in an ordinary piano.

J. L. Bell said...

Now, to be fair, this sequence comes from an episode of The New Batman Adventures called "Legends of the Dark Knight," in which kids tell each other stories about Batman. This particular adventure is an homage to the Bill Finger–Dick Sprang comics of the 1950s. Within the TV show it's filtered through the memory of an unconscious guard and the imagination of a child, so it's (ahem) not supposed to be realistic.