Here's a message from Robert Rose which reminds me of a story I don't think I've told much…
With respect to the DC Comics Presents title, and how it (and the similar The Brave and the Bold title, featuring team-ups with Batman) often featured some pretty obscure characters: I wondered if one of the purposes of the title was to give the company a chance to keep such characters in a kind of "active" status, for copyright/trademark purposes. (Which of course wouldn't have been necessary for Blackhawk at the time since it had its own title running.) Is that a correct impression?
Yes. The editors of those two team-up comics would sometimes be informed by someone down the hall that they wanted a certain property in print again and not just for copyright or trademark reasons. Sometimes, it was just to test the waters of interest out there and I think occasionally, it was to show someone who might be interested in an old DC property for new merchandising reasons that the company considered it current.
I mentioned that Julius Schwartz asked me to write a Superman-Kamandi crossover for DC Comics Presents. I should have mentioned that he told me he "had to" do one and that I suspected he'd never read the comic and was counting on me to know it well enough so that he wouldn't have to. And the funny thing about that is that I didn't know the property that well…then.
When I was working for Jack Kirby, I did a lot of work on Kamandi #1. The ideas in that comic were almost all his but he had to go through some outlines and presentations to "sell" DC on the book…which at that point, he thought/hoped would be a comic he'd edit, supervising another writer and another artist, hopefully both local. The writer probably would have been me and the artist we had in mind was Dan Spiegle, who at that point, I had neither met nor worked with. But I suggested him — he was close to "local" — and Mike Royer got us his phone number. Jack called him and one day when I was not there, Dan came to Jack's home and they really hit it off.
At the time, Dan was the guy who drew Korak, Son of Tarzan and Space Family Robinson for Gold Key Comics…and when you think about it, Kamandi was kind of like those two comics put together, though Jack had never seen either of them when he came up with it. Dan never drew anything to show how he'd handle the new comic but when he showed Jack those books that day, Jack loved what he saw.
So I wrote up those "selling" pages and Jack did some presentation art, some of which I haven't seen since back then. Carmine Infantino at DC loved the concept, though they spent a little time going back and forth with Carmine throwing in what we all thought were bad ideas. I think the only one that got in was to prominently display a semi-destroyed Statue of Liberty in the first issue to somehow make it more like Planet of the Apes. Jack wound up doing the first issue of The Demon before he wrote and drew the first issue of Kamandi.
Infantino vetoed Spiegle with kind of an "Well, I've never heard of him so he can't be very good" attitude. At that point, he wanted each book, after Jack drew the first few of each, to be drawn by one of the Filipino artists who were just beginning to work for DC. Then after Jack actually did those first few, Carmine decided he wanted to "suspend" (cancel) New Gods and Forever People so Jack could stay on the new books. Jack was devastated by this decision but he complied.
I left Jack's employ about the time he was finishing the third issue of Kamandi and I didn't read the comic — or The Demon for that matter. Purchased them all but never got around to reading them. The concepts just didn't appeal to me at the time and I guess it felt wrong to me that Jack was doing those rather than the books they displaced on his schedule.
Before someone asks: I stopped working with Jack because it had become obvious that he didn't need me; not that he ever really had. But he kept thinking DC was going to allow him to edit books he didn't write or draw and he might have had some use for me if that had happened. Since it clearly wasn't going to, and since Gold Key was offering me as much work as I could handle, I quietly absented myself from Jack's employ but not his life. And soon after, my editor at Gold Key asked me if I'd like to write the Scooby Doo comic book, which was drawn by Dan Spiegle. So that's how that relationship started.
Ten years later when Julius Schwartz asked me to write a Superman-Kamandi story, I said yes because…well, it was Julie asking and because I thought, "Hey, maybe this would be a good time to read all those Kamandi comics I have." So I devoured Jack's entire run over about three days and really, really enjoyed it. I understood why some people still think that was one of the best things he ever did and I later understood that about The Demon when I finally read those. I guess enough time had passed since they replaced The Fourth World that I didn't resent them as I once had.
