Creativity Quote by Bob Kane

A little ego, a little grievance, and a lot of brand management hides inside that mild, almost sheepish admission. Bob Kane is best known as the artist who put Batman on paper, but the line "I am also a writer" is a quiet bid to rebalance the ledger of credit. It works because it sounds like a simple clarification while smuggling in a complaint: the public has misfiled him, and not by accident.

The subtext is about authorship in an industry built to blur it. Mid-century comics were assembly lines and corporate properties; "creator" often meant whoever signed the work, not necessarily whoever wrote the myth. Kane's phrasing - "also" and "in general" - is telling. He doesn't declare himself a writer outright; he tacks it on, as if correcting a record that has already hardened into common knowledge. The passive construction, "not known by the public", shifts the burden away from him and toward a faceless audience, sidestepping the messy question of who benefited from that ignorance.

Context sharpens the bite. Kane's public legacy has long been tangled with disputes over collaboration, especially with writer Bill Finger, whose foundational contributions to Batman were historically minimized. Read against that backdrop, Kane's line can scan less like modesty than preemptive positioning: don't reduce me to a draftsman; don't hand narrative authority to someone else. It's a sentence that wants to sound factual while fighting over mythology, money, and the right to be remembered as the mind, not just the hand.