Irwin Donenfeld has died. Irwin was the son of Harry Donenfeld, the founder of DC Comics, and he literally grew up in the comic business. He was twelve years old when the first issue of Action Comics was published and so was probably the first kid in the world to read the debut story of Superman. Later, in the tradition of nepotism that pervaded most early comic book companies, Irwin became a senior executive in the company. Harry was an alcoholic with a penchant for getting into trouble and an inability to run his own business. The financial decisions therefore fell to his former accountant, Jack Liebowitz, and the creative ones to the editorial division. Bridging the gap between them for a little more than twenty years was Irwin.
He held the title of "editorial director," which pretty much meant that he consulted with Liebowitz to decide what they'd publish, continuing in that position even after Harry passed away. The editors he "directed" liked him, though they sometimes didn't understand his deductions about how to maximize sales. Precise numbers about how many copies each book sold were generally kept from the editorial crew. Irwin would have the accountants enter that data in scrapbooks, each issue's sales figures accompanied by a photo of the book's cover. Then he'd spend long hours each week studying the trends, trying to decide what elements on each cover had caused sales of that issue to go up or down. (He was generally uninterested in the contents of the books, believing that good, intriguing covers were about all that mattered. He once said the only DC Comic he made a point of reading every issue was Sugar and Spike.) Every now and then, he'd tell the editors, "Sales went up when you put a dinosaur on the cover" or "Sales go down when you use a lot of brown on the cover." The books would promptly be readjusted to reflect Irwin's conclusions, which explained the unlikely appearance of prehistoric monsters in Batman, Blackhawk, Tomahawk, war comics and other books that seemed to posit a different, less fantastic reality.
He had good ideas and bad. In 1956, when DC was in desperate need of new comics but afraid that flops would injure a depressed marketplace, Irwin suggested a new book called Showcase, each issue to "test" a new concept. Most of the company's successes of the next ten years came out of such tryouts. On the other hand, in 1966 with DC sales dropping and Marvel's rising, Irwin came up with the idea of pasting a checkerboard pattern on the top of every DC cover to make their books stand out on the newsracks. They called them "go-go checks" and they were the ugliest thing anyone ever did to the front of a comic book…and a symbol of the company's inability to arrest its steady descent. Before things fell too far, Liebowitz and the Donenfeld family sold their company to a corporation called Kinney National Services which eventually morphed into Warner Communication and then into Time-Warner.
Liebowitz moved on to a seat on the Board of Directors of the parent company and Irwin had expected to remain in his post, co-managing DC with Carmine Infantino, an artist he had promoted into management. But everyone else decided that more of a shake-up was necessary and when the dust cleared, Irwin Donenfeld was cut out of the company his father had founded. He dabbled for a time in other kinds of magazine publishing but eventually retired on the not-inconsiderable fortune he had realized from the corporate buyout. Thereafter, he became a community leader in his home city of Westport, Connecticut. This obit in a Westport newspaper lists a few of his achievements in this area. (It will also tell you that he died Monday night at the age of 78, but awkward phrasing makes it sound like he didn't take over running DC until his father died in 1965. His responsibilities may have increased a bit then but he was involved in management there by the time he was out of his teens.)
Irwin, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing at the 2001 Comic-Con International, retained some amount of bitterness at having been squeezed out of the comic book industry. He was also quite defensive at the often-expressed belief that his father had cheated Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster out of Superman, or even that Harry was as irresponsible as others described. I enjoyed chatting with him during that panel and in several private conversations, though I came to the conclusion that he was not a source of unvarnished history. I also understood why the company felt the need to sever him in 1970, as his thinking was rooted firmly in marketing concepts that, by then, were simply not operative. He told me how amazed he was by the convention, seeing how big and important "comics" had become, and admitted a definite regret that he had been separated from the field. Still, he was glad that so many of us knew of his contributions and were interested to know as much as we could possibly extract from him. He had planned to be there again last year but illness made that impossible, and he phoned to tell me how he regretted not being able to be attend. And I seem to recall him saying in that call, "…and I still can't believe what's happened to the business we started."