DC Comic Creator and Artist Advocate Jerry Robins Dies
The creator who developed well-known characters for DC Comics, such as Robin and the Joker, has passed away today at the age of 89.
Jerry Robinson passed Wednesday afternoon, in New York City. At the age of 17, Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, recruited Robinson as an inker after noting drawings that had been etched on his jacket.
During this time he heavily contributed to the Golden Age of comic books and pursued a career in comics until their slowing decline in the early 1940’s.
According to one of the senior staff Jim Lee, Entertainment Co-Publisher and artist of "Batman: Hush" at D.C, “Jerry Robinson illustrated some of the defining images of pop culture’s greatest icons. As an artist myself, it’s impossible not to feel humbled by his body of work.”
For the next thirty years he created newspaper comics and Broadway Playbills. In a 2009 interview with Geoff Boucher of the L.A Times Robinson said, “I did 32 years of political cartoons, one every day for six days a week…that body of work isn’t the one I’m proudest of.”
In the 1970’s Robinson returned to the comic world as an historian and advocate for artists. He was most well known for championing the creators of “Superman” Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
Robinson served as president for both the National Cartoonists Society and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Michael Uslan reported to the Daily News that Robinson “fought to bring respectability to the artists and writers who created the comics and who had long been ignored by society.”
On his career in comics Robinson noted, “It was a new industry and we were pioneering a new mythology. We had no past so we had very few rules. We also didn’t expect any of it to last.”
