One of comics' most prolific writers, Robert Kanigher, passed away yesterday at the age of 87. Early in his career, Kanigher dabbled in all kinds of writing — radio, stage, pulps, short stories — before settling into the comic book industry in the early forties. He worked for almost every publisher but most notably for MLJ on Steel Sterling and their other heroes before settling in at DC for a very long haul. Over 40-some-years, he produced hundreds of scripts for their books, creating many of their key characters and also working as an editor for about half that time.
He was known for being incredibly fast and fiercely outspoken, and the best of his writing was very, very good. Most of it was on DC's war comics but he also wrote (and edited) Wonder Woman for twenty-some-odd years, authored the first episode of the Silver Age "Barry Allen" Flash, scripted dozens of stories of Batman, Flash, Black Canary, romance stories, etc. If I start listing the comics he authored, your browser will be loading this site for the next hour.
Colleagues referred to him as a Writing Machine and told tales of him turning it on and off with little contemplation. Another editor at DC would peek into his office and say, "Bob, I'm desperate for a quick six-page ghost story" and Kanigher would stop whatever he was doing — probably another script he was halfway-through — roll fresh paper into his typewriter and immediately begin writing Page One of the six-page mystery story without any idea what would happen on Page Two. The result would sometimes read like the writer hadn't a clue where he was going but he succeeded a lot more often than one might imagine.
From my viewpoint as a reader, he generally had good ideas and insight, but often wrote far past the point when he had anything to say. One of my favorite books of his, Metal Men, illustrated this mercurial nature of his work. He created and wrote it and the first dozen-or-so stories were terrific, while the remaining issues read like feeble imitations of the first dozen-or-so. His acclaimed Enemy Ace series was the same way: The same brilliant, fascinating portrait of a German World War I pilot told over and over with diminishing returns. His Wonder Woman stories…well, I don't think he or anyone ever wrote any great Wonder Woman stories but Kanigher kept wringing out variations on some template that worked for him.
The big exception to this was Sgt. Rock, the long-running war feature about a hero with whom, you could tell, Kanigher deeply identified. It had its missteps — Rock and his beloved Easy Company meeting another Kanigher hero, the anachronistic Viking Prince, for instance — but, over the years, it was always worth a read when Kanigher wrote it. Even late in the game, he retained the capacity to bring something new and oddly personal to a hero of simple premise. I never felt Rock was quite Rock when anyone else wrote him.
Among his peers, Kanigher was deeply controversial. About half the artists who worked with him loved the guy; the others fantasized about his painful demise. In the sixties, several fled to Marvel, preferring to work for lower pay than to work for Kanigher. Still, it seemed to me, all respected the quantity of his work and a respectable percentage of its quality. A lot of us who write comics still count him among our influences and I'd sure like to see his better work reprinted in permanent, collectible volumes. There sure was a lot of it.