Here are a couple of short questions that fell into my inbox. The first one's from Johnny Achziger…
Many times you'll see in old Gold Key comic "REPRINTED BY POPULAR DEMAND." Really? Was there actually a demand for reprints? And if not, why would they advertise that it was a reprint? I never understood why they'd put that on reprinted stories. I assume they reprinted as a money saving prospect, but why make note of it?
There was no known demand from readers. Gold Key rarely had letter pages and so they rarely received letters. When I worked for them in the early seventies, they got about two a month and I doubt any of them said, "We want more old stories," with this exception: As comic book fans became more aware of the name Carl Barks and knew that it denoted the writer-artist of some of the best Disney comics ever done, there were a few letters asking for more Barks reprints…though by that time, the company had stopped identifying reprints as reprints.
When they did, any demand they had probably came from the folks at the firm who controlled the budgets. I'm a little fuzzy as to why they put that announcement on most (not all) reprints but I vaguely recall there was a reason.
I believe it had something to do with the fact that so much of that material was sold to companies in other countries that translated and reprinted Gold Key comics. There had been some sort of mix-up where a publisher overseas bought reprint rights to some story they thought was new but it was actually a reprint of a story that publisher had purchased and printed years before, and the publisher hurled accusations of deception.
Or something like that. Like I said, it's a bit fuzzy. I think that's why they identified reprints for a while until someone decided it was no longer an issue.
This question comes to us from Simon Cummings…
Before Garfield and Friends, were you offered a writing job on Heathcliff, either by Ruby-Spears or later DiC?
Not by DiC, but when the Ruby-Spears animation studio was doing a Saturday morning show of Heathcliff, I was hired to write a prime-time Heathcliff special for Halloween.
This is another one of those endless stories about how in show business, your projects often fall through for reasons that have nothing to do with you. I had written an ABC Weekend Special called Bunnicula that everyone liked a lot — everyone but me, I believe. Actually, I thought it was okay but due to network dictates, the show ended up deviating way too much from the popular children's book on which it was based. Changing another writer's work that much always makes me at least a little uncomfy.
Anyway, ABC loved it and the idea arose — I dunno whose it was — to run it in prime-time. ABC then felt the need to do some Halloween programming. After all, candy companies advertise. But the network also wanted to save money and it would cost them next-to-nothing to run Bunnicula one evening. The problem was that it was a half-hour and there was no half-hour time slot to put it in that made sense. They would have to pre-empt an hour episode of something and then what would they put in the other thirty minutes?
So someone else — maybe even the same person? — decided Ruby-Spears, which had produced Bunnicula, should quickly produce a Heathcliff special and they'd run them back-to-back. I was hired, a very rough outline was approved and I started writing. I was on page 10 or so when I got a call to stop. ABC had screened Bunnicula in-house and decided that the animation on it, though OK by Saturday morn standards, was not ready for prime-time playing.
There was then a brief discussion about maybe having Bunnicula reanimated: Same script, storyboard, soundtrack and design but better animation. They worked out what it would cost to do that and then another one of these mysterious someones said, "Wait a minute! The whole idea behind running this was to save us money and now it's running into money. Let's just forget the whole thing!" So they forgot the whole thing, including the Heathcliff Halloween Special.
I don't recall if I got my whole fee or if I settled for a partial amount but I do know I never got past page 10. Which was fine with me. I read over those pages a few months ago and realized I had no idea where I was going with it. I may have been lucky I didn't have to finish that one.
