Back in 1962, Metal Men was my favorite comic book for about an hour and a half. It was the creation of a prolific writer-editor at DC named Robert Kanigher who was often hailed as the fastest writer of comic books who has ever lived. His speed may have been because of his unique approach to writing, which was to sit down at the typewriter and just start filling the paper with whatever came to mind. That, he often insisted, was how a truly brilliant writer created his work. An inferior writer — like, for example, anyone else who wrote comic books and was not Robert Kanigher — would have to "plot" — i.e., figure out where the story was heading.
Or at least, that's how he explained it to me on two of the four or five separate occasions when we met, and also in some of our letters. We corresponded for a time in the late sixties and in a moment, I'll be excerpting one of his stream-of-conscious epistles for you.
I never knew how seriously to take Mr. Kanigher's diatribes and pontifications. It was especially hard to separate the self-loathing from the genuine arrogance he often seemed to voice towards others. But his writing did have a certain energy that a friend of mine once likened to careening out of control down a hill. It always got you there and there was a certain excitement to the journey, even if it ended with you crashing into a brick wall. It didn't always. Some of the best comics ever done have been created at a breakneck clip with more instinct than careful planning. When Kanigher was on-target with an idea — and maybe even when he had a solid notion of where he was heading, in spite of his claimed abstinence from "plotting" — he wrote some superb stories, mostly for DC's war comics. Then again, when he didn't have an idea, he wrote it, anyway. For around twenty years, he scripted Wonder Woman and it was one of those comics I collected because I collected everything…but I found most of them unreadable. Or sometimes, when he crafted a great creation like his Enemy Ace series, he'd then keep writing the same story over and over until either he or the readers got sick of it. Usually, it was the readers.
In spite of all this, I admired Kanigher's writing greatly, especially when he came up with Metal Men. Over at Comic Book Resources, Brian K. Eason has a brief history of the comic and I wanted to add the following to the historical record. This is an excerpt from a letter Kanigher wrote to me in 1968. He's referring to how the strip made its debut in Showcase, which was a "try-out" comic DC published at the time. I'll add in a few notes so you can understand what the man is saying…
Showcase was supposed to be a place to test new ideas. It turned into a place to test editors in hand to hand combat. Each of us in turn [had to] come up with a new comic to fill it and woe unto you if yours was no hit. In editorial meetings, I.D. [Irwin Donenfeld, the company's editorial director and son of its owner] would proclaim your latest entry as a flop. No numbers were given, just a general thumbs down. This was meat for the others to pounce upon and so would come the lambastes of the other editors with [Superman editor Mort] Weisinger leading the I told you sos. Woe unto you. Your book failed and you failed or so said all the other editors who had never created a success.
One day I.D. comes into my office. Showcase has an emergency. The book for the next issue was unpublishable. The editor had failed before his book had even gone to press and there were legal problems. I.D. says he has to send a Showcase off to press in two weeks and there is nothing drawn. There is no idea. I am the fastest writer in the office so it's up to me. Whatever I want to do will be the next Showcase.
I have many ideas that could be in it and I have a free hand to do whatever I want. How often is a writer in that position? I run through some possibilities and realize I have painted myself into a corner. My ideas are too innovative and too different for Showcase where readers have been trained to expect the predictable. Take an old failure, dress it up in new clothes and call it a new idea. I had done that with Flash and it had rejuvenated the company. I should do it again but cannot bring myself to but I also cannot bring myself to throw away one of the truly innovative ideas into that arena. It might not sell and then [would come] the meeting with everyone celebrating the failure of R.K.
I move to the middle ground. It will be a new idea but not a new idea. I.D. said that readers liked robots on covers so I began to build robots. I became Dr. Will Magnus building robots and soon they got away from me the way Magnus' robots got away from him. I had one night to write the script and did, then I sat back and read it to discover what I had written. The parallels told me I was on to something. The robots had gotten out of my control just as they had gotten out of his control.
I should next have called in my fastest artist, [Joe] Kubert. Instead, I called my slowest, Ross Andru. The robots in my mind looked like they had been drawn by Andru so it had to be him. I told him I needed the book drawn in a week. Andru, a frightened man, told me it could not possibly be done and then proceeded to do it. The robots had taken control of him as well. They took control of I.D. demanding more issues of Showcase. Usually a new book got three issues because by then you knew if readers were taking to it. Metal Men got four. The sales on the first were so strong that I.D. could not believe them and ordered the fourth just to make sure. I already knew and had added a new Metal Men comic to my schedule. The robots were in control as they will some day be in control of us all.
The four Showcase issues of Metal Men were Kanigher at his finest and so were the first ten or so of the ongoing Metal Men bi-monthly that followed. But then the other Kanigher kicked in and he ran out of ideas, writing the same story over and over, turning cliché characters into ever-greater clichés.
DC issued a hardcover collection last year that presented, in color, the four Showcase issues and the first five issues of the Metal Men comic book. They're about to come out with a big black-and-white volume that will contain the four issues of Showcase, the first sixteen issues of Metal Men and one odd issue of The Brave and the Bold in which they teamed up with The Atom. You might want to give one collection or the other a peek. It's pretty good stuff up to a point.