As is common knowledge in the comic book business, Bob Kane did not draw all the hundreds of Batman comic book stories adorned with his signature. He did illustrate the early stories, albeit with increasing assistance — but early on, the character caught on big and DC wanted to publish more material than Kane could produce, even with folks like Jerry Robinson and George Roussos helping him. So an arrangement was made with Kane and DC's editors began hiring others (like Dick Sprang) to draw Batman stories that Kane had nothing to do with, even though they were usually signed with his name. Later on, Kane decided he didn't want to spend his days slaving away at a drawing table so, as part of a settlement with DC regarding the rights to Batman, he worked out a deal that made this possible.
They negotiated a contract whereby Kane agreed to produce a specified number of pages for DC each month, and to receive a high-enough page rate that he could hire someone else to ghost the work and live very well off the balance. He engaged a wonderful man named Sheldon Moldoff and thereafter, DC sent scripts to Kane, Kane sent them to Moldoff, Moldoff drew the pages and sent them to Kane, and Kane delivered them to DC and picked up the check. Once in a while, especially at the outset, Kane seems to have done a smidgen of art correction on Moldoff's pages — but for a decade or two, the work Kane handed in to DC was 90% Moldoff.
DC often reprints stories that originally appeared with incomplete or erroneous credits. They can usually manage to figure out the writer credits on material that originally appeared without any and to identify uncredited artists. In the past, they have sometimes credited Moldoff on the material he ghosted for Kane…but recently collections do not do this. A hardcover anthology released in the last month lists Bob Kane as the artist on stories that no one disputes are primarily or wholly the work for Sheldon Moldoff. People are writing me to ask why.
I have spoken to no one at DC about this but I'll bet I can guess. DC paid Kane to do that work in the first place. That he subcontracted to someone else is one of those cans of worms that no one is eager to open, and not just because of Bob Kane. A lot of comic book artists over the years have employed assistants or ghosts. To just cite a few examples here, there were a number of artists like Frank Giacoia, Vince Colletta and Sal Trapani who were primarily inkers. When someone gave them an assignment to pencil a story, they would often hire a friend to do the pencilling for them — for example, stories that were obviously pencilled by Steve Ditko and inked by Sal Trapani appeared in Strange Adventures #188 and 189. Sometimes, artists would share assignments: A lot of stories inked by Giacoia or Joe Giella feature pages by the other. Gil Kane, when he got behind, would sometimes have Mike Sekowsky pencil a few pages of Green Lantern or Atom. Plenty of guys have employed assistants who could come forward to argue credits, demand royalties, dispute copyrights, etc.
As students of the art form, we can and should identify credits and let nothing stand in our way but certainty. But DC probably has to recognize the legal realities, which is that their business relationship on any given story was with a certain person. Lawyers are probably getting nervous that it could lead to a lot of headaches and perhaps it already has. My guess is that it's neater and safer for them to not get into it. So it's up to us independent historians to identify who done what.