Monthly Archives: September 2022

• So do you think Donald Trump's starting to get the idea that if you stick a political ally in a position of power, they just might double-cross you and do the job properly rather than in some dishonest way that benefits you?

As I used to mention here often but haven't lately, the main beverage in my life is water. I don't drink coffee or tea or juices or soda or milk or turpentine or Drano® or…well, fill in the name of any liquid that is not water. And my favorite water is Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water, which is available in many areas under many labels.  They bottle it under their own name.  They bottle it under other names.  In some markets, two versions of Crystal Geyser water are sold side-by-side with different names on them and often, different prices.  But it's the same water in the same bottles.

I buy a dozen gallons at a time and when the weather's hot, as it's been lately where I am, a dozen bottles don't last long.  I just had a dozen delivered and it took the delivery guy a long, agonizing time to transport them all from his car to my porch, just as it took a helluva long time for me to transport them from my porch to where I store them.  Why?

Because the bottles had no handles on them.  You see those paper handles in the picture above?  My bottles arrived sans handles.

I called the market from whence they came.  The manager there said, "Yeah, that's the way they've been arriving and we're getting lots of complaints.  And don't think we aren't complaining to the company."

Well, I figured, if they can complain to the company, I can complain to the company.  I called the Crystal Geyser folks, accessed their Consumer Support line and got a message telling me to press "1" if I was calling about the lack of handles on their gallon bottles.

"1" was pressed and I heard a recording that explained that due to "an interruption in our supply lines," they have to ship the gallon bottles out without handles.  The message apologized and said they're working on the problem (including looking into alternative packaging) but it stopped short of saying the problem would be fixed soon.  So I guess it won't be.

I may have to find another drinking water, at least for a while.  Those bottles are difficult to handle without handles.

I could not reach an actual person there but I left a voice message of despair and abandonment.  If you would like to leave one, the phone number is here.

This is another good week to not be Alex Jones — not that every week isn't — and it's turning out to be an exceptionally bad week to be Donald Trump. I am reminded of the line Chris Rock often uses: "There isn't a white guy in this room who'd trade places with me and I'm rich!"

As you probably heard, Trump and certain family members are now being sued by New York Attorney General Letitia James for allegedly running a ten year fraud scheme drenched in financial wrongdoing. The online debate I've seen so far is not about whether they're guilty. Even people who love Trump think he's guilty of a lot of stuff like that. The debate seems to be about whether and his lawyers will be shrewd enough to dodge the bullet, as they have so many times in the past. I suspect not but I wouldn't bet serious money on it.

For those of you who can't keep track of Trump's legal woes, Ian Millhiser of the website Vox wrote an article explaining Trump's major legal problems and Mr. Millhiser keeps updating it with new developments. He updated it today.

Before you read this, you'll certainly want to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7…

Now then: When I took over as editor of Blackhawk, I was more involved in the design of covers and I had to handle the occasional submission from some writer who'd send me a pitch or even a complete Blackhawk script under the erroneous impression that I might be eager to replace myself.  (Advice to aspiring writers: If you're going to go to any effort to apply for a job, apply for one that might be open.)

Also, it mattered a little more when I complained to the marketing people that the comic was not receiving the usual amount of promotion. That is not to suggest it changed anything. This was a battle that went on for the book's entire run and yes, I am well aware that almost no one ever thinks their comic has had sufficient promotion.

But I had a couple of egregious examples of neglect to point to, one being when the company did a big push for subscriptions.  They advertised a good price to subscribe to any comic in the DC line…well, almost any comic. For reasons no one could explain — and I still haven't ruled out a mistake — Blackhawk was the only one not listed on the form.  There were other examples I'll get to.

I still meet people who think the book was a top seller for DC. No, no, no, never. Not even close.  It just sold better than anyone had expected, making a little money instead of losing.  One thing that might have boosted sales a tad was that we had some splendid covers drawn by Dave Cockrum, Howard Chaykin and, near the end, Gil Kane.

There is a theory, and I'm not saying I subscribe to it or don't, that it helps the sales of a comic if the cover is not done by the person who does the interior.  The thinking goes like this: You have Artist A drawing the story.  He or she has a certain following and those followers will buy the comic.  No more of them are going to buy it if Artist A does the cover but some followers of Artist B might buy the comic if Artist B does the cover.

It may have helped sales a bit more that some issues had short back-up stories that fell under the heading of "Detached Service Diary." This was a feature that had appeared in Blackhawk comics many, many years before I ever came near the franchise. There'd be a lead story with the whole Blackhawk Squadron and then there'd be a short story of one of the members of the team on a solo adventure. This was to put one character in the spotlight so we'd get to know him better and I suppose it also spared the artist having to draw as many pages with seven soldiers on them.

Sometimes, they wouldn't be "Detached Service Diary" stories. Sometimes, they'd flash back to the past and we'd get a "World War II Combat Diary." Same idea but set during those not-fun years.  Since our new run of Blackhawk was wholly set in World War II, we didn't need any of those…but suddenly, Detached Service Diary stories became part of the overall plan.

It happened back when Dave Cockrum declined the offer to draw this new Blackhawk series. He said at the time something like, "If I have time, I'll do some covers and a couple of Detached Service Diary back-ups." No one had decided yet that we'd even have Detached Service Diary back-up stories but once Dave said that, everyone decided we would. I think I'd have preferred to just devote all 23 story pages in an issue to one story drawn by Dan Spiegle but that was not an option. And like I said, maybe the guest artists helped sales. We sure had some good ones.

Dave drew the first two. Then John Severin drew the next one. I wrote all of these with the specific artists in mind but Marv Wolfman, who was the editor at that moment, sent the second one I wrote for Dave to John and the first (and only) one I wrote for John to Dave. Intentionally. He thought it might yield some interesting results and I guess it did.

Both men did great jobs. I remember receiving copies of what John Severin had done. He was, of course, a long-time favorite and a perfect choice for that kind of material. The same day I received the copies, my amigo Sergio Aragonés dropped by my house and I showed the pages to him.

I expected him to say something like, "Wow! John Severin drawing Blackhawk! What a perfect match of a great artist with the right feature!" He had already said that about the pages he'd seen drawn by Dan Spiegle. Instead, he looked over the Severin story and said, "Uh-huh. Fine."

I said, "That's all you've got to say? 'Fine?' This is the first time John Severin ever drew Blackhawk!"

He said, "What do you mean? This artist drew Blackhawk for years." I told him that was not so. He said, "You're wrong. When I was a child in Mexico, I loved his work on this comic book. He was one of my favorites!"

It took a while but we finally cut through the confusion: When Sergio was a lad in Mexico, he read Mexican Blackhawk comic books drawn in Mexico. And one of the main artists who drew them there was a John Severin imitator…and not a bad one.  He copied from comics John Severin had drawn in America.

The next back-up was drawn by Bill Ziegler. You may not know who that is — or rather, was. Bill died back in 1990. He was a lovely man who drew comic books and strips for about forty years. This one Blackhawk story was the only thing he ever drew for DC Comics and one of the few times he ever got his name on his work. He was mainly an assistant to others. He assisted on the Annie Oakley newspaper strip and the Dragnet newspaper strip and the Casey Ruggles newspaper strip and the Mary Worth newspaper strip. Near the end of his life, he became the lead artist on Mary Worth and actually got credit on it for a while.

Bill also assisted on the Katy Keene comic books and drew dozens of westerns and TV tie-in comics for Western Publishing for the Dell and Gold Key lines…all uncredited. I liked him and I liked his work and that's why I asked him to squeeze that story into his workload. After he saw it, DC head honcho Dick Giordano called me, got Bill's phone number and offered him a new book DC had in the works. Bill, alas, was already committed to Mary Worth and had to decline.

About this time, we had an odd problem I never would have expected. Dan Spiegle didn't have time to draw the next Blackhawk and it wasn't because he was slow. As I've mentioned here, he was one of the most dependable artists who ever worked in the industry. Folks at DC were so taken with his work and reliability that they were sending him other jobs on other books, including a couple that were in deadline danger. At first, he could fit them in between Blackhawk jobs but at some point, he couldn't start on my script because he had work he had to do for other editors first.

One of them was a Superman educational comic that was for RadioShack or some other company. I've never seen a copy of it so perhaps it was never published but it took up a few weeks of Dan's time and caused great consternation. The DC editor who engaged him and sent him the script neglected to also send Dan any reference on the established characters in it. DC had been sending him copies of all their current releases and he was able to find Superman, Clark Kent, Lois Lane and all the others…all but master villain Lex Luthor.

Dan called the editor and asked him to send reference on Lex Luthor. The editor said, "Oh, you don't need reference. Just draw Telly Savalas." Dan asked, "Are you sure?" The editor said, "Sure, it'll be fine." So Dan penciled and inked the comic and I think his daughter lettered it and he sent it in, whereupon the editor was horrified and sent it back for corrections…

…because Dan had drawn Telly Savalas. It didn't look like Lex Luthor, at least the way Luthor was being drawn then. It looked like Telly Savalas. Not all bald guys are indistinguishable from one another. I hope they paid Dan extra for redrawing all the panels he had to redraw.

I was not yet editor of Blackhawk at this point but I complained — politely and good-naturedly, as is my style — about other editors kidnapping my lead artist for their needs. I had the same problem when I wrote a forgettable New Gods series for them. Mr. Giordano was, as he always was, polite and good-natured but he explained to me how DC needed to position its freelancers where they'd do the most good. I think Dan had committed the dangerous mistake of turning in work ahead of the deadline. That always made them think he could handle more.

Anyway, with all these demands on his time, we were facing a deadline problem on the next issue on Blackhawk. In the next chapter of this series, I'll tell you how we solved it and also more about the Detached Service Diary stories.

But I want to cover one other thing, lest I forget: The BLACKHAWK logo that adorns this series of articles was the logo designed for our revival and it was designed by Tom Orzechowski. Tom's lettering and logos have brightened many a Marvel comic but I believe this is the only cover logo he ever did for DC. I further believe know that DC staffer Anthony Tollin was a big Blackhawk fan, knew Tom was one too, and suggested him for the assignment.

The classic BLACKHAWK logo that appeared on most of the covers when the comic was published by Quality Comics and then taken over by DC, was designed by a gent named Al Grenet, who was an artist and staffer and editor for Quality. Orz (as folks too lazy to type out "Orzechowski" call him) took that logo, tweaked and reshaped it and wound up with, I think, a much better design. Logo designers just never seem to get enough credit in comics. They probably have more impact on sales than most folks realize…and I've certainly seen comics where I thought the best thing in them was the lettering by Orz.

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Merrill Markoe was the head writer on David Letterman's NBC show and the inventor of an awful lot of things that Dave used to full advantage throughout his career. Here, she picks some of her favorite moments from the show…

• Every time I can't find something in my files now, I can't shake the suspicion that it's in an unsecured room at Mar-a-Lago.

You may at some point in your life have tasted and perhaps enjoyed a beverage made with water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, and less than 2% of: Concentrated Juices (Apple, Clarified Pineapple, Passion Fruit, Orange), Fruit Purees (Apricot, Papaya, Guava), Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Citric Acid, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Pectin, Acacia Gum, Ester Gum, Red 40, Blue 1, Sucralose and Potassium. Sounds tasty, right?

It's more commonly know as Hawaiian Punch and, of course, it was not invented in Hawaii. It was concocted in a garage in Fullerton, California by A.W. Leo, Tom Yeats, and Ralph Harrison, who thought of it originally as something to pour over vanilla ice cream. At the time, it contained five fruit juices — orange, pineapple, passion fruit, guava and papaya…and perhaps those real juices at one time comprised more than 2% of every can.

No, I did not know any of this by heart. I cribbed all this info off the Internet just as you would have. And whether or not you have ever tasted Hawaiian Punch, you probably have seen one of the many commercials featuring a little mascot they call Punchy. Here he is doing his one and only joke…

In high school, I had an Art Teacher whose names was not Mrs. Nyberg but I'm going to call her that in this article.  She was very nice and she seemed to know her stuff and we got along well.  At this stage of my life, I was aiming for the career I'd decided on back when my age was in single digits — Professional Writer — but I still thought of Artist as a side vocation. I liked to draw and later, I actually made some money (not much) doing it. I was not good compared to actual pro cartoonists but I wasn't bad compared to my classmates, and I was pretty decent at lettering.

One Friday, Mrs. Nyberg gave us the oddest homework assignment: Monday, we were to bring household trash to class. It had to be either an empty box — like a box that had held cereal or detergent or something — or a can that had held canned goods or a beverage. The box or can was to be completely empty and if it was a can, it was to have been rinsed out and clean. Oh — and it couldn't be damaged or dented or anything. We didn't understand why but we did as we were told.

Monday, she had a nice display on the front table of forty boxes or cans and she explained what we were going to do with them. Our assignment for the week — starting that day and finishing by the end of class on Friday — was to design a new label for one of these products and paste it on the box or can. "Imagine," she said, "that the company that makes this product has hired you to give them a whole new look for their product."

We all thought this was a great idea. It would be fun and for anyone considering a career in commercial art, it would get us to thinking about pleasing customers. She had all our names on little slips of paper in a bowl and she drew them out, one by one. When your name was called, you got to go up to the table and pick the empty box or can whose front you'd be redesigning. You weren't allowed to pick the one you'd brought to school.

I set my sights on either the box of Sugar Frosted Flakes or the one of Trix cereal. The cartoonist in me thought it would be fun to draw Tony the Tiger or The Trix Rabbit but other classmates beat me to those. When my name was called, I picked the empty can of Hawaiian Punch.

I already had my design in mind: On the front of the can, I'd draw their mascot, whose name I did not then know was Punchy. He'd be standing under the big new HAWAIIAN PUNCH logo I'd design and he'd have a word balloon. It would read, "How about a nice Hawaiian Punch?" Then on the back, we'd have things like ingredients and some sales copy and a shot of him punching that guy he always punched in the commercials. (If you were doing a box, you just had to do the front of it. If you were doing a can, your new label had to wrap all the way around.)

We spent the rest of the class doing rough sketches for our products. That evening, I went through some magazines we had at home until I found an ad I remembered of the mascot punching the guy and I used it as reference. I did a whole batch of sketches of the two characters in various poses. I did not copy or trace their poses from the ad.

The next day, my classmates were still working on rough sketches but I had my design all in my head. I picked out a kind of drawing paper that was thin but could handle ink and water color, and I cut it to the proper size to wrap around the can. I could probably have finished the whole thing on Wednesday but nobody likes a show-off so I took my time and finished when everyone else in class did on Friday.

Mrs. Nyberg was delighted with what some of us did. You kind of had to divide a class like that into two groups. You had the students who had no artistic ability or interest and were just taking the class because it was required. You also had students who had some talent and might continue to develop it either for career reasons or just as a pleasing hobby. Some in both groups did some pretty impressive designs.

Mine was pretty good and a lot of kids told me it was the best one. I hadn't done so well when Mrs. Nyberg had had us painting or sketching real objects. I was particularly bad at painting. But by turning the assignment into an effort of cartooning and lettering, I was playing to my few strengths. When Mrs. Nyberg was doling out the grades, I got an "A." Can't do better than that.

A week or two later, a note for me was delivered to my Homeroom/Period 1 class. It was from Mrs. Nyberg and it asked if I could come see her at our lunch period that afternoon. Lunch preceded my fifth period class…Art with Mrs. Nyberg. I had no idea what she wanted.

When I got there, I found out in a hurry what she wanted. She wanted to scold me, lower my grade on the Hawaiian Punch can, and tell me how deeply, deeply disappointed she was in me for plagiarism and passing someone else's work off as my own. Turned out she had never seen Punchy or the commercials and she'd thought I had designed that cute little cartoon character myself. Someone had told her I hadn't.

"Stunned" does not begin to describe what I felt. If she'd told me she was a werewolf from the planet Clarion, I could not have been more surprised. I stammered out, "It was just like on Bonnie's Sugar Frosted Flakes box when she drew Tony the Tiger or on Phil's Trix cereal box when he drew the rabbit on the package. They were drawing the established mascot for the product. That's what I did."

It turned out Mrs. Nyberg didn't know any of those characters. She didn't watch television and didn't buy those products and I guess she didn't look at ads in magazines. But she knew Tony the Tiger was on the Sugar Frosted Flakes box because he was on the real box Bonnie had modified, just as the Trix rabbit was on the box of Trix over which Phil pasted his new design. My crime was that Punchy had not been on the Hawaiian Punch can I'd redesigned. She said, "You thought I wouldn't know he was a pre-existing character."

I said, "No. I had no way of knowing you don't watch TV and had never seen a commercial that runs every six minutes. If I was going to steal a character design, I would have picked a character who isn't world famous!"

She said, "This character is not that famous. I'm going to have to lower your grade on this project to an 'F.'"

I said, "How about this? When class starts, you hold up my can and ask how many students in the room are sick of seeing that little guy on television. If even one student does not put up their hand, I'll accept an 'F." If it's unanimous, you let my 'A' stand."

She thought it over for a second, agreed, and when class convened and she polled the room, every single pupil raised a hand. Instantly. She nodded to me and then, without explaining why she'd asked, began that day's lesson. After class when we were briefly alone, she told me, "I'm sorry. I keep believing that because I'm a teacher, I'm expected to be right all the time."

When I graduated, she wrote in my yearbook, "Thank you for reminding me that teachers are human and we're allowed to make mistakes." I'd buried the whole incident in one of those corners of my mind where I rarely look but the inscription reminded me of it and I thought, "Hey, I oughta tell that story on the blog."

It's a good point and it's not just teachers. It's everybody — all of us — and it may even apply to guys who write comic books and blogs. Never admitting you're wrong is not the same thing as always being right.

Hell, it might even apply to those who hold or seek public office but few of them ever seem to learn it. Maybe we need Punchy to give some of them a nice Hawaiian Punch.

I seem to have caused some of you some concern about my sleeping.  It's fine, thank you.  Went to bed last night at a decent hour and stayed there until I'd had quite enough shuteye.  Thank you for worrying about me but you needn't worry about me.  Ever.

Many of you have written to tell me that Norm Macdonald was included in the "In Memoriam" montage at the 2021 Emmys.  That's true.  Tell that to all the people who are still griping that he was "snubbed" at the 2022 Emmys.  That kind of thing turns out to be the case half the time when folks are outraged that some favorite celebrity was omitted from this year's.  (And of course, no one ever complains about them leaving out a director or writer or anything but an on-camera performer…)

I have a number of requests to not make this blog so much about Blackhawk every day.  They come from folks who have no interest in comic books but were still wise enough to donate to my now-concluded Telethon.  So I may make like a Congressperson or Senator and listen to them.  But the Blackhawk series will be concluded soon.  Two or three more parts to go.

In this recent post, I mentioned the 1952 Blackhawk movie serial starring Kirk Alyn and I said I've never seen it. Well, our video link today is the 1952 Blackhawk movie serial — all fifteen chapters of it. I made it through about a third of the first one so far.

Interesting to see the credits I freeze-framed above.  George H. Plympton wrote tons of serials for Columbia including Tarzan the Fearless (1933), Flash Gordon (1936), The Spider's Web (1938), The Phantom Creeps (1939), The Green Hornet (1940), Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940), The Masked Marvel (1943), Chick Carter, Detective (1946), Brick Bradford (1947), Superman (1948), Batman and Robin (1949), and Atom Man vs. Superman (1950). I copied that info off his Wikipedia page.

Royal K. Cole was a cartoonist turned screenwriter who sometimes was credited as Royal B. Cole and sometimes as Royal King Cole. He worked on the Ace Drummond newspaper strip and the Winnie Winkle strip and in the fifties, he wrote the Hopalong Cassidy TV show and that led to him being hired to write the Hopalong Cassidy newspaper strip which was drawn by Dan Spiegle, the man who drew the Blackhawk comic book when I wrote it. Cole also had lots of credits on serials (including the 1944 Captain America one and several of the above he worked on with Mr. Plympton) and on adventure-type TV shows of the fifties.

Sherman Lowe was also an accomplished writer of movie serials and later a writer for TV shows like Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid and Ramar of the Jungle.

It was odd to see Reed Crandall get a credit on the serial.  He was a fine artist and he had much do with the success of Blackhawk but you'd think there'd be a mention of Quality Comics, its publisher in that space.  Or maybe they could have acknowledged the writers and certain other artists who had created characters and story points that appeared in the serial.

And it was really odd for them to give Crandall that credit at a time when he was leaving Quality Comics and Blackhawk.  The following year, he did his last work for them and began drawing horror and crime comics for E.C.  Maybe Quality arranged for the credit to butter him up and try to entice him to stay.

Anyway, thanks to Michael Kilgore and a couple of other folks who told me the serial was on archive.org. It's not a bad print.  See how far you get in it…

• I have a friend who seeks advice from everyone and then listens to the last voice he hears. Unfortunately for him, that only works if you ask people in the order of ascending intelligence.

Before you read this, you probably want to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6…

Our story picks up with my longtime (and much-missed) friend Len Wein. Len was then a DC editor and he'd volunteered to take on the new proposed Blackhawk comic and select its creative personnel. I suspect the writer he would most have liked on the book was Len Wein because he truly loved the characters.  And he'd have done great with it but he was just too overworked to take it on, lucky for me.  He went looking for a writer who also loved the characters and he was looking for an artist who could draw a war-type comic and was really, really good at airplanes.

Dave Cockrum was the first choice as artist and he very much wanted to do it…but Marvel was then paying him a helluva lot more money than DC was paying him.  There are times in the freelance business when you pursue certain passions regardless of the pay and times when you really can't.  This was, for Dave, the latter and they weren't about to give him that kind of raise, especially to draw a comic they didn't expect to sell very well no matter who drew it.  He did agree to draw some covers and to try and squeeze some short back-up stories into his schedule.

I'm not sure how many other folks said no before Len called me…and he wasn't even calling to offer me the writing assignment. Finding the right artist seemed like the tougher search so he phoned to tap that thing I fool people into thinking is my brain. He asked if I had any thoughts about who should/could/would draw a new Blackhawk comic.

I absolutely did. I said, "There is no one in the history of comics who draws airplanes better than Dan Spiegle." Len practically shouted, "You're right! Give me his phone number!" I had worked very closely with Dan on other projects and thought he could draw anything…but this seemed like a particularly good fit.

Len called Dan. Dan had never heard of Blackhawk but said that if it involved drawing airplanes, he wanted in. He asked who'd be writing it. Len said he didn't have anyone yet. Dan asked, "How about Mark?" Len said, "Hey, that's not a bad idea!" He then called me back, thanked me for suggesting Dan and asked, "Do you think the comic should be set in the present day or back in World War II?"

I said, "World War II, of course. Blackhawk in the present-day is just another of the eighty zillion super-hero teams running around these days. It was conceived as a World War II comic and it should remain one. And besides, no one, except maybe Jack Kirby, is going to come up with a master villain better than Hitler."

Len said, "How'd you like to write the comic?" I said, "I would very much like to write the comic." Just then, I had a Call Waiting beep and I told him, "I have Dan Spiegle calling me on the other line." Len said, "Take that call and you and I will talk tomorrow. But you're hired."

I switched over to Dan's call. He was phoning to thank me for getting him the job and to ask if Len had called me about writing it. I said, "Yes and we're already three months behind." Dan chuckled and asked me to tell him what Blackhawk was.

And that's how Dan and I got the job. Len and I talked the next day about what should be in the first issue. I wrote the first issue. I sent it to Len. He said fine. He sent it to Dan. Dan drew the first issue. The few folks at DC who read it liked the first issue. We did the second issue and the third and so on.

A working method quickly fell into place. I'd talk with whoever was the editor of Blackhawk that week — as you'll see, it kept changing — and we'd discuss what the next issue was about. He'd say "fine" and get someone busy drawing a cover…maybe Dave Cockrum if he was available.

I'd write the script and send it to Dan. He'd draw it with his daughter Carrie doing the lettering. She would usually leave the display lettering (like the story titles) for me to letter. Dan would send the almost-finished art to me. I would proofread and fix any lettering mistakes and do the display lettering. I might also, after seeing Dan's art, decide to rewrite or even remove a few captions or word balloons.

There was a clarity to his work that, in my opinion, few other comic book artists have ever attained.  If I was writing a comic and I had a scene set in a mansion and if it was important to establish that the guy who lived there was filthy rich, I'd usually have some character say something like, "Wow!  This guy must have so much money he has to scan it and store it on CD-Rom." Or hopefully a better line that that. But when Dan Spiegle drew such a scene, the picture he drew made it utterly clear the guy was loaded.  I didn't need a line of dialogue like that and I'd sometimes take it out.

That he was brilliant at knowing what to draw to properly service the story was not just my observation.  During the period we did Blackhawk, I was also editing and writing comic books for Hanna-Barbera and after Blackhawk, I did another comic with Dan called Crossfire.  When I went to the H-B Studios, which was about twice a week, I'd often have Spiegle pages in my car as I made good use of the office copiers there.

And then on the way home, I'd sometimes stop off to visit Alex Toth, whose home was on my route.  Alex would always demand that if I had Spiegle art in the car, I bring it in and let him study it.  A lot of people hail Alex as the best "story-teller" in comics but he was openly jealous of what Dan was doing on some of those pages…and the sheer productivity.  So were Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Dave Stevens and many, many other artists with whom I worked.

Dan was also utterly reliable.  I worked with this man for more than thirty years and not one single job was ever late. Not one.  And not one single job ever looked rushed.  In fact, Dan would occasionally finish a page, look at it, decide he could do it better, toss it out and redraw the entire thing.   He was an absolute joy.

I just loved receiving finished pages from him.  He made my silly ideas look less silly and he made the whole thing look like a professional comic book.  As I said, I just made some lettering adjustments on those issues of Blackhawk and then I sent the completed issue off to DC in New York…and no, I am not omitting a step. After the first issue I did with each editor, he'd say, "I don't need to approve the scripts. Just write 'em and send 'em to Dan."

This was how we worked even after the editorship shifted from Len to Marv Wolfman and then to Ernie Colón. When Ernie decided to leave his editorial position, there was a brief meeting in New York to determine who should become the fourth editor of Blackhawk in something like fourteen issues. I heard it was Marv who said, "Evanier's already editing this comic. Why don't you just give him the title and the salary?"

They did that, whereupon I got a little more money and a few added responsibilities.  One of them was to hire the artists who did the back-up features.  I'll tell you all about that in Part 8.

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My favorite horror movie host was a gent named Larry Vincent who appeared on Los Angeles TV a half-century ago under the name "Sinister Seymour." I watched him every time he was on even though it often meant sitting through horror movies I would never have bothered with had it not been for his interjections. I even wrote some interjections and patter for him and I penned this article about him in 1999. Here's a photo I took on his set at one taping…

For a long time, film of Seymour was nearly-impossible to find but some has turned up. You can see him briefly on a billboard and again on a TV screen in Mr. Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. A few more clips have emerged which you can see if you watch the video below. It's an episode of The Retro Time Machine, a YouTube series/podcast that flashes back to entertainment of the seventies…and once in a while, adjacent decades.

In this episode, your host Jay Jennings talks about Seymour for an hour and 37 minutes with Larry Vincent's daughters. If you were ever a Fringie (that's what Seymour called his devoted followers), you will enjoy this…

This is the "In Memoriam" segment from last week's Emmy Awards. As usual, some folks are outraged that that certain people were omitted — Olivia Newton-John and Norm Macdonald seem to be the most glaring — and you'll notice that those complaints are only about performers. No one ever complains because they left out an important producer or director or writer or costume designer or musical director or anything but on-camera talent. I don't get angry about anyone in particular being left out but if I did, I think I'd get angry about that.

A lot of folks don't like that they've turned these segments into live musical performances. I don't mind that but I wish they'd make sure everyone who's shown in the montage gets a full-frame shot. My old cohort George Yanok was in there but you might not notice as he was way in the background. So were a couple of folks whose names I didn't catch at all…

Several folks have written to ask me how Chuck Cuidera pronounced his last name. I introduced him on panels and he didn't correct me when I pronounced it "Quid-Dara," first part rhyming with "kid," second part rhyming with "Sarah."

And Tom Galloway found an article online that indicates Steven Spielberg still has the movie rights to Blackhawk and they've even had a script developed. I'm sure Mr. Spielberg has lots of projects and lots of scripts that will never get in front of a camera but maybe a Blackhawk movie by him is likelier than I thought. Here's the article if you're interested.

Before you read this, you might want to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5…

As noted, DC Comics canceled the long-running Blackhawk comic book in 1968 with issue #243. Apparently, there were occasional discussions after that about bringing it back, spurred on often by some foreign publisher who'd been buying reprint rights to the book asking if and when DC might have more to offer. But it wasn't until 1976 that publication resumed with issue #244.

Gerry Conway had become a DC editor and they were adding some new books under his supervision. Blackhawk was one of them and I thought they did a very good job of it. Steve Skeates was the writer (with one issue written by David Anthony Kraft) and George Evans was the artist. Evans, of course, went back to the days of EC Comics and he was, I thought, an excellent choice. A few other artists assisted him with layouts and inking but the book looked good inside and read well.

I thought it should have lasted longer than the seven issues it did. Why so short a run? It's anyone's guess but I think (a) it didn't have very good covers and (b) it was a period when the whole DC schedule was kind of a mess. They were starting and stopping comics abruptly to the point where I don't think readers wanted to even begin reading any of their new books. Why should you when they probably wouldn't be around for very long? I thought that was the problem at DC the first time they canceled Blackhawk, too.

Also, I think it was rougher on bi-monthly comics then, which this Blackhawk comic was. The most popular books were all monthly and readers weren't used to waiting twice as long for the next issue. And Gerry Conway left DC and Carmine Infantino was fired as publisher and nothing was really stable. It was a shame because not only did Blackhawk deserve better but that particular reincarnation deserved better.

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So now we get to the next revival of Blackhawk, which is the one I worked on. This piece of the story will run several chapters and it's not because I think what we did on it is any more important than any other version. It's just the one I know the most about and the one people keep asking me about. In fact, I started writing this series of blog posts just to answer questions about my time on the comic — ergo, the title of this string of articles. Then I decided to go back and make it an overview of all the versions.

As you'll see, there are a lot of "Someones" in the first part of this next part…

Contrary to what one website once claimed, it was not my idea to revive the book in 1982. It was Someone's notion but I do know the reason: Steven Spielberg inquired about the movie rights to Blackhawk…or maybe someone did on his behalf. In any case, he had expressed some interest. Having recently made Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Mr. Spielberg was as hot as a film director could possibly be. So Someone at Warner Brothers Studio decided they'd better make sure the film rights were locked up so that if and when Mr. Spielberg ever did decide to make such a movie, he'd make it for them.

Obviously, he has not. The one and only Blackhawk film ever made professionally was the 1952 15-chapter movie serial starring Kirk Alyn as Blackhawk. Mr. Alyn, of course, had previously starred as Superman in two serials. I have never seen the Blackhawk serial nor have I heard particularly good things about it. If you want to judge for yourself, the DVD seems to be outta-print but there always seem to be copies available on eBay. [LATER ADD-ON TO THIS ARTICLE: Or you may be able to watch it here.]

There was also a Blackhawk radio series for a few months in 1950. Oddly enough, the guy who played Blackhawk on it had also played Superman. It was Maurice Fitzmaurice, who supplied the voice of The Man of Steel on his radio show after Bud Collyer gave up that lofty position.

Getting back to Mr. Spielberg and the various Someones: As we all know, he never has made such a film and we have no reason to believe he ever will. But it would not surprise me if Someone is still making sure the film rights are under option or a holding deal or something.

Then Someone at DC Comics said, "Hey, if Spielberg's interested, this might be a good time to revive the comic." I get asked often why DC restarted it with #251 instead of putting out a Blackhawk #1 as was then the custom with new titles. Collectors like #1 issues, often buying them by the pound for investment reasons.  Readers often take them as a cue to jump on the bandwagon while it's starting to roll. Someone told me that Someone Else decided that not restarting the numbering would call less attention to the fact that the property had been dormant and deemed uncommercial for several years. And if you can't believe Someone about Someone Else, who can you believe?

I do not think there were any Someones at DC — not one — who thought the marketplace was clamoring for a new incarnation of the comic. Nevertheless, they went ahead. For a month or three, there was talk of various Someones doing it. At one point, Marv Wolfman and Dave Cockrum — both big fans of the original series — were at the top of the list of Someones. The problem was that Marv had a huge following due to the Teen Titans comic he was then doing and Dave had one due to his connection to the X-Men book at Marvel.

Someone said, "If Marv and Dave want to do a comic together, let's put them on something more marketable than Blackhawk." Marv and Dave did not wind up teaming on any project for DC but some time earlier, they'd done two issues of a proposed new comic for Marvel called Skywolf, which was very similar to Blackhawk. Every Someone who has ever mentioned it to me, including Marv and Dave, kept calling it Skyhawk.

It was quite good and it did something that DC had yet to try with Blackhawk: They'd set it in World War II instead of in the present day. Still, Someone at Marvel decided it wasn't strong enough to be a new comic so the material was shelved. Later, another Someone — and I think this Someone was Al Milgrom — decided to publish those stories in Marvel Fanfare #16 and 17. If you ever see copies at a reasonable price, grab 'em.

Once Marv and Dave were no longer being talked about for Blackhawk at DC, Someone — and this may be our next-to-last "Someone" — thought maybe they should go the other way with casting.

DC had writers and artists who were contractually guaranteed a certain amount of work. There were a few for whom no current project seemed right. So for a week or two, there was talk of issuing this new Blackhawk quarterly — only four issues a year — and to assign it to a certain writer and a certain artist in the "Well, we have to give them something" category.  Yes, I know who they were.  No, I'm not giving their names.

No other comic from a major publisher was then quarterly but the Someone who proposed this figured this was a way to say "Yes, we're publishing it" but to minimize how much they'd lose from it. It would also help keep that writer and that artist off comics the company cared about.

When the project was assigned to Len Wein as editor, Len said, "No, we're not going to do that." Len loved the old Blackhawk comics and he convinced everyone there they should at least try to do a book that readers would like. I gather this was not a tough sell at all. It would be monthly and they'd put Someone on it who might be able to make it good. How that Someone became me is a story for another day, possibly tomorrow.

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