More on Leo Dorfman

Paul Levitz, lord high master of DC Comics, reminds me that among the many achievements of Leo Dorfman was that he created a comic for that company called, simply, Ghosts. It was one of those anthology titles filled with disconnected stories about ghosts and as Paul says in an e-mail to me, "…while it wasn't a fan favorite (then or in retrospect), it was a disproportionately good seller. When Leo passed, editor Murray Boltinoff never found a satisfactory replacement, and a lot of the title's distinctive character faded (ouch)."

During the same period, Leo was writing a lot of scripts for the ghost comics that Gold Key was publishing — Twilight Zone, Ripley's Believe it or Not, Boris Karloff Mystery and Grimm's Ghost Stories. One of the editors there told me, "Leo writes stories and then he decides whether he's going to sell them to DC [for Ghosts] or to us. He tells us that if they come out good, they go to us and if they don't, they go to DC. I assume he tells DC the opposite."

By the way: I always thought it was odd that Gold Key was publishing ghost comics hosted by two actual dead human beings, Boris Karloff and Rod Serling. I never wrote for those books when I was working for that company but if I had, I would have tried to write the host's intros by having them say things like, "This story is so chilling, I had to come back from the great beyond to share it with you…"