1939–1943 Robinson was a 17-year-old
journalism student at Columbia University in 1939 when he was discovered by Batman co-creator
Bob Kane, who hired him to work on that fledgling comic as an
inker and
letterer. Kane, with writer
Bill Finger, had shortly before created the character
Batman for
National Comics, the future
DC Comics. Robinson rented a room from a family in
The Bronx near Kane's family's
Grand Concourse apartment, where Kane used his bedroom as an art studio. He started as a letterer and a background inker, shortly graduating to inking secondary figures. Within a year, he became Batman's primary inker, with
George Roussos inking backgrounds. Batman quickly became a hit character, and Kane rented space for Robinson and Roussos in
Times Square's
Times Tower. In addition to Batman, Robinson and Roussos did inks and backgrounds on
Target and the Targeteers for
Novelty Press. Roussos recounted of his collaboration with Robinson: It was hard to make the deadlines, because Jerry was a heavy sleeper. I used to have to go to the Bronx to get him to come to work. I'd go and wake him up 2 o'clock in the afternoon so we could work all night. ... We were committed to do about 13 pages a week. Jerry was always behind - he was always
whiting out things and re-inking them. Bob's stuff was so sketchy, Jerry had to do a lot of work. Batman's nemesis, the
Joker, was introduced around the same time, in
Batman #1 (Spring 1940). Though Kane claimed he and writer Bill Finger came up with the idea for the Joker, most comic historians credit Robinson for the iconic villain, modelled after
Conrad Veidt in the 1928 film
The Man Who Laughs. In 1943, when Kane left the Batman comic books to focus on penciling the daily
Batman newspaper
comic strip, Robinson took over the full penciling, along with others such as
Dick Sprang. Only Kane's name appeared on the strip.
1944–2007 From 1944 to 1946, Robinson and his friend Meskin formed a studio which produced material for the short-lived
Spark Publications (Atoman, for example). Robinson worked on numerous other characters for several publishers, at one point doing freelance illustrations for a textbook publisher. After leaving superhero comics, he became a newspaper cartoonist and drew the science fiction strip
Jet Scott, which was written by Sheldon Stark and ran from 1953 to 1955,. In 1959-1961 he was the primary artist on
Dell Comics'
Bat Masterson 9-issue comic book based on the television series, mostly scripted by
Gaylord DuBois. He created
True Classroom Flubs and Fluffs, which ran during the 1960s in the
New York Sunday News (later incorporated into the
Daily News). Robinson also did a political satire cartoon panel feature,
Still Life in 2006 Robinson never saw himself only as a comic-book artist. In the 1950s, he started drawing cover illustrations for
Playbill and tried his hand at political sketches, producing what he considered his best work: "I did 32 years of political cartoons, one every day for six days a week. That body of work is the one I'm proudest of. While my time on Batman was important and exciting and notable considering the characters that came out of it, it was really just the start of my life." Robinson was president of the
National Cartoonists Society from 1967 to 1969 and served a two-year term as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists starting in 1973. During the mid-1970s, Robinson was a crucial supporter of
Jerry Siegel and
Joe Shuster in their long struggle with
DC Comics to win full recognition and compensation as the creators of
Superman. With comics artist and rights advocate
Neal Adams, Robinson organized key support around Siegel and Shuster, to whom DC, in December 1975, granted lifetime stipends and a credit in all broadcast and published Superman works. In 1978, he founded
CartoonArts International, which as of 2010 has more than 550 artists from over 75 countries. During 1999, Robinson created an original manga series,
Astra, with the help of manga artist Shojin Tanaka and Ken-ichi Oishi. This was later on released in English through
Central Park Media by their manga line CPM Manga as a comic book
miniseries and then a
trade paperback. On May 26, 2007, DC Comics announced that Robinson had been hired by the company as a "creative consultant". The press release accompanying this announcement did not describe his duties or responsibilities. Robinson was among the interview subjects in
Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle, a three-hour documentary narrated by
Liev Schreiber that premiered posthumously on
PBS in October 2013.
Death Robinson died in his sleep at age 89 on the afternoon of December 7, 2011 in
Staten Island. ==Books==