I am informed that cartoonist and comic book writer Vic Lockman died last June 1 at the age of 90. This may be the first obit published on the 'net of the man who just might have been the most prolific comic book writer of all time and the least well-known. A great many folks who consider themselves expert comic book historians who will read this and say, "Who the heck was that?" I'm afraid I can't tell you much about the man other than what little follows.
He wrote thousands of comic book stories for Western Publishing Company beginning around 1950. These were for their Dell and Gold Key comics. For an explanation of the relationship between Dell Comics and Western Publishing, click here.
Mr. Lockman was also an artist who occasionally penciled what he wrote, usually puzzle pages or one-page gags. More often, he would letter and/or ink a story that someone else had penciled. Most often, he just wrote.
For which comics did he write? Lockman stories ran among scripts by others in all the Disney comics, all the Warner Brothers comics, all the Walter Lantz comics, all the Hanna-Barbera comics and any other "funny" comics produced out of Western's Los Angeles office. He was the main guy behind a seventies comic called The Wacky Adventures of Cracky and he has been credited with creating the Disney character, Moby Duck. For years, a division of the Walt Disney company in Burbank was also producing comic book material for European publishers who needed more pages than they got by translating all the Gold Key books. Lockman also did hundreds of scripts for them.
After Western shut down its comic book division in 1984, he wrote a few scripts for later American publishers of Disney comics but he seems to have redirected most of his efforts to his other endeavor — comics for the Christian marketplace. More on them in a moment. First, let's discuss how many stories Lockman might have done for non-religious comics…
I can't give you a precise total but I'm sure it was a staggering number. In a self-promotional piece Mr. Lockman issued in the mid-seventies, he claimed he wrote one script a day, Monday through Friday, for a total at that point of around 7000. We don't have a clear idea of what time period he was basing that on but if you figure five scripts a week and 52 weeks per year, that's 260 scripts annually. As noted, he started around 1950 so if he'd adhered to that schedule, he would have written 7000 scripts by 1977 — and he was actively producing scripts for Western and the Disney foreign comics program in 1977. At that rate, he might have hit 8000 by the time he stopped writing.
I'm skeptical anyone could keep up that pace but it's not impossible. He was probably counting the Christian comics and also scripts that his editors at Western and Disney didn't accept. When I was writing for Western, they rejected about 15% of what I wrote and my editor there, Chase Craig, used to tell me, "Don't feel bad. You should see how many of Vic Lockman's scripts I turn down." Lockman might have sold some of his rejected Disney scripts for Western to the Disney foreign comic program (or his rejects from them to Chase) but some of them probably went unpublished. And since he had no other place to sell his rejected non-Disney scripts for Western, they were presumably never published. Those all would be impossible to count.
Further complicating that count is that in the fifties and sixties, so much of what Lockman did for Western was one-page puzzle and gag features. He did hundreds upon hundreds of them. Was he counting each of those as a "story?" Probably.
That's important to consider if we weigh his output against that of Paul S. Newman, who was recognized by The Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific comic book writer of all time. They credit Paul with more than 4,100 published stories totaling approximately 36,000 pages. If each of Lockman's one-pagers is to be considered a story than he might have topped Newman in total stories but lost to him in total page count. It's kind of an Electoral College situation.
Newman was able to present sufficient documentation to get the Guinness people to accept his claim. I doubt that kind of proof could be assembled for Vic Lockman — or for that matter, for two other contenders for the title: Charlton Comics writer Joe Gill or Archie writer Frank Doyle. I would not doubt for a second though that Lockman was one of the five most prolific comic book writers of all time, probably one of the three most prolific…and possibly Numero Uno.
And I could not begin to estimate his productivity for the Christian marketplace. His vast catalogue of books, many of which he published himself, included titles such as Biblical Economics in Comics, a multi-volume series called Catechism For Young Children With Cartoons, God's Law for Modern Man, How Shall We Worship God?, Psalm Singing for Kids, The Big Book of Cartooning (In Christian Perspective) and hundreds of self-published tracts. I have — shall we say? — problems with some of his lessons but it's obvious Mr. Lockman was a very sincere and talented cartoonist.
He sold many of these through his website and you can still see them there, though I have no idea if anyone is still filling orders. In some of them, he argues, a la Judge Roy Moore, that his interpretation of God's word is the only true one and that it outranks any law made by Man. In my brief contacts with Mr. Lockman — two phone calls almost 30 years apart, nothing in person — he was cordial to me until he began to proselytize and I declined to convert on the spot.
The second of these conversations was a few years ago when I called to sound him out as a potential recipient of the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing, which I administer and which goes to writers who have not received sufficient recognition and/or reward. Since Lockman certainly qualifies for lack of recognition, I wanted to see if he'd consider accepting it should the judging committee select him some year. I am not sure I completely understood his response but it was unmistakably negative about the award and the whole concept of celebrating comic books that do not celebrate God's covenants.
Each year, the Finger Award goes to one recipient who is alive and to one posthumously. I decided not to propose Mr. Lockman for the "alive" one until such time as a few nominators did. Since we started the award, we've received over a thousand nominations for around 250 different writers. We have received one or less for Vic Lockman…which kind of proves he has not received the attention he deserves. Maybe we can do something about that with the posthumous award one of these years. A career like he had is absolutely deserving of attention.