Recently, a gentleman (I guess he's a gentleman) sent me a manuscript he's shopping around for a history of the comic book business. He asked if I could find any errors in it…and as politely as I could, I wrote him back that it might save time if I just listed the stuff he got right. Just the parts about me, the least important person mentioned in the book, had enough errors to fill a week's worth of Fox and Friends. I was especially amused by one sentence…
In 1970, he [this is me he's talking about] went to work for DC Comics and immediately became one of their top writers. His income from writing comics for them was so high that he immediately quit U.C.L.A., where he'd been attending college.
Okay, Fact Check: In tandem with my then-partner Steve Sherman, I went to work for Jack Kirby in 1970 and he paid us, not DC…and since there wasn't much for us to do, there wasn't much to pay us for. It was a few hundred dollars a year, not because Jack wasn't generous but because…well, much to his frustration, very few of the projects he'd hired us to do ever materialized. I started working for Disney in 1971, then for Western Publishing (Gold Key) in 1972 and because of that income plus a few other factors, I quit college in that year, not 1970.
1972 was also the year I did my first work directly for DC. Just to convince this guy that he didn't know what he was writing about, I dug out, scanned and sent him this tax form I have which lists my total income for the year from DC — or as we called it then, National Periodical Publications — and I thought someone out there would enjoy seeing it. I have no idea what they paid me the fifteen bucks for but I guarantee you, I didn't look at it and decide to quit school.