My pal Douglass Abramson informs me that the new Broadway version of 1776 — the one where genders and races are scrambled — is playing Los Angeles next April 5-May 7 down at the Ahmanson. Here's a list of where it's roaming and when.
Doug reminded me that it was originally going to be at the Ahmanson before New York but that was before COVID. And I have a vague recollection that I bought tickets for it back then and will have to dig around and see if they got refunded or what.
Dave Sikula sent me this easy-to-answer question about Jack Kirby…
Your discussion of Jack's work at DC reminded me of The Losers. You mentioned that Kamandi was a book that a lot of people think was some of his best work, but I felt like "The Losers" was wildly underrated. For me, it seemed like an incredibly personal comic (far moreso than, say, Sgt. Fury) that he was really pouring his own wartime experiences into.
From your timeline, I'd guess you'd already stopped working for him by the time he was doing it, but I wonder if you have any impressions of how it lined up with anything he might have said about his service. (I acknowledge here that, like a lot of WWII vets (such as my parents — who met on the hospital ship they were serving on — and father-in-law), he may not have talked about it.
You obviously never met Jack Kirby. If you had, you would have known Jack talked an awful lot about his World War II experiences…to the point where Doug Wildey, if he walked into a room and Kirby was there, would shout, "No World War II stories!" Anyone who was around Jack for any length of time heard them…and though I can't draw a direct line between any I recall and any story Jack did for "The Losers," I'm confident there was at least some connection between every issue and something that Jack actually observed or lived through. He was constantly revisiting his wartime life in wake-up-at-5AM-type nightmares.
Jack did twelve issues of Our Fighting Forces featuring "The Losers" and, Fourth World books aside, they're my favorite work he did for DC during that period. And it was especially impressive because it was a very bad assignment for him. Steve Sherman theorized that the folks at DC sat down and thought, "What book can we assign Kirby to that he'll absolutely hate doing?" I do not concur with this theory but there might have been a little of that.
It was, first of all, a book created and written previously by someone else. Jack didn't like handling or altering someone else's characters. Secondly, the "someone else" in this case was Robert Kanigher, a DC writer who was not shy about dismissing comics by others — especially Marvel's and especially Kirby's — as shit. Thirdly, Jack thought "The Losers" was a horrible name for a comic about a bunch of World War II soldiers and, fourthly, that this was a messy assemblage of a bunch of leftover characters who'd flopped in their own comics, thrown together for no visible purpose.
But it was an assignment and it was about World War II. So Jack gave it his all and his all was pretty good, I thought. Sales took a notable hike, so much so that when DC received the first reports, they upped the book from bi-monthly to monthly. When Jack left it and Kanigher returned and put everything back the way he had it before, sales dropped.
What I wish DC had done was to dump "The Losers," give the book to Jack and let him do something more autobiographical, the way they had Sam Glanzman doing those "U.S.S. Stevens" stories based on his own experiences in the war. That would have been, I think, even more wonderful.
Every single time I saw Judy Tenuta perform, she made me laugh. Every. Single. Time. And it was always fresh and original and quite unlike any other comic I'd ever seen. If the goal of a performer is to connect with the audience and make them enjoy every moment they spent with that performer, she scored 100%. So sad to lose someone like that.
Readers of this site know that I'm a big fan of the 1969 musical 1776. I didn't see the original on Broadway but the movie, which employs most of the same cast, is said to be very close to that production and I think the movie's sensational. Also, the Roundabout Theater Company did a revival on Broadway in 1997. That, I did see — twice — and both times, it was one of the best evenings I spent in a theater in Manhattan.
So now we have a new revival from the Roundabout operation. This one is different in that it's cast with an entirely female, nonbinary, multi-racial cast. And to take that one step further, their Thomas Jefferson is visibly pregnant. It is not a whole bunch of older white guys like in past productions and, of course, the original troupe of Founding Fathers in the title year.
Is this a good idea? I dunno and I'm unlikely to find out for myself. It's a limited engagement — there through early January — and I'm unlikely to get back to N.Y.C. while it's being performed. I just read a mess of opening night reviews (they're indexed here) and they're decidedly mixed, not so much on the quality of the staging and the acting, which are mostly praised, but over the whole concept.
And the ones that think (a) they understand the statement being made via the casting and (b) that it's an effective statement mostly describe a pretty simple, obvious statement: That this country was founded by a buncha old white guys. I thought we all knew that and that the original production made that statement efficiently by casting a buncha old white guys.
I'm not going to say I don't get it because you have to see the show you're supposed to get before you do or don't get it. Ye Olde Internet is too full of people who feel qualified to review books they haven't read and movies they haven't seen…and even movies that haven't yet been made. I'm just sitting here wondering aloud if it's possible to take color-blind and gender-blind casting too far.
Elia Kazan used to say you cast actors for a quality. If you're casting The Odd Couple you look for a guy who's convincing as a slob and another guy who's convincing as a neat freak. I suppose you could make a statement by casting Tony Randall as the slob and Jack Klugman as the neat freak but I'm not sure what that statement would be.
But maybe if I get back to New York before this production closes, or if other such 1776s are mounted, I'll see one and understand.
My few remaining synapses must be firing less & less often because it just occurred to me to ask you: Is the William Conrad you note as one of the Rocky & Bullwinkle cast the same William Conrad who went on to star in Cannon, Nero Wolfe and Jake and the Fatman?
Wikipedia seems to indicate that he was, but, with a range of roles so vast, I needed to hear it from a real, live expert to believe he had that kind of range (and sense of humor). I guess that's why they call it "acting," huh?
Yes, definitely the same guy. He had a real good career in radio — among many others, he was Marshal Dillon on Gunsmoke in those days — and lots of on-camera roles in film and television. He was also an announcer in many commercials and TV shows…The Fugitive (the show with David Janssen) for one. Usually, he was hired for a deeper, slower voiceover and that's how he narrated the earliest Rocky & Bullwinkle shows but they soon were having him talk faster and when he did, his voice went up in pitch.
Conrad was the narrator on all the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons Jay Ward produced and on a few of the Dudley Do-Right cartoons, though Paul Frees wound up narrating most of those. The entire cast of the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons consisted of Frees, June Foray, Bill Scott and Mr. Conrad. There were no guest stars in any of the episodes because it was impossible to write a role that one of those four people could not do.
And while Conrad's job in most was confined to the narration, every so often when there was a crowd scene and multiple voices were needed, they'd have him do one of them. He was a great announcer but he did not do a very good job of not sounding like William Conrad.
The worst thing about gas prices going up is having to listen to everyone talk incessantly about gas prices going up. Second worst is people blaming whoever's in office at the moment that they want to see removed from office. They never blame their guys when it happens.
I'm not inviting anyone else to do this but Marcus Bressler sent me his recollections of discovering MAD magazine…
I was introduced to MAD magazine by my "cool" cousin in NY. He had given me one of his copies to take home with me to my latest address in Norristown (Blue Bell), PA. I somehow forgot about it until one morning I felt ill and had to stay home from school. My mother was to take me to a doctor appointment and I needed some reading material (I still do to this day — I am not the kind to sit and meditate or be still) and while searching, I found that MAD magazine. It was one of the early ones that I specifically remember because on its back cover, it had a representation of those composition books that schoolkids had to use to write assignments in. The idea was you could sneak your MAD into school by laying it upside down amongst your other books and the teacher would never know.
Anyway, I was reading it in the waiting room when the nurse called us into our appointment and my mother made me leave it there — "Don't bring that in with you," she instructed. I complied and left it on a side table with other magazines such as Highlights for Children, which I found boring.
Of course the story concludes with us leaving the doctor's office with a prescription but not with my only copy of MAD. I forgot about it until we got home and I couldn't even think about asking my mother to take me back to get it. I regret losing that MAD to this day.
MAD actually did the composition book gag twice. In 1955, Harvey Kurtzman made the front cover of #20 (a comic book issue) look like a composition book and then his successors put a composition book on the back cover of #64, which was the July, 1961 issue. It was a clever gag and I'll bet the only thing that stopped them from doing it again is that students stopped using composition books.
You had a copy of #64, Marcus. The back cover looked like a real composition book and if you looked real closely at the border around the center label, you'd see in tiny type: "This cover specially designed so teacher won't spot student reading MAD in class…this cover also designed so principal won't spot teacher reading MAD in lounge…also so school board won't spot principal reading MAD…also so students won't spot school board reading MAD."
And the gag was all the funnier when you realized that this was on the back cover of that issue of MAD. So if the students, teacher, principal or school board were trying to read MAD and look like they were reading a composition book, they were going to have to be reading it upside-down.
Okay, we need to settle this. In this post here, I said he'd won eleven. I got that number from this page over on the website of the Television Academy — the people who give out the Emmy Awards. That oughta settle it, right?
Not right. I got this e-mail late last night from my pal Jef Abraham, who's one of the best publicists in the business we call "Show"…
I worked as a Carl's publicist off and on over the years — the last time being in 2018 when Carl was nominated for his 13th Emmy Award for narrating the HBO documentary If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast. This nomination put Carl in the Guinness World Records as the oldest living Emmy nominee. He was 96 years and 114 days old. Carl used to joke says winning No. 13 would create a problem: how to divide the awards evenly among his 3 children.
I had read various articles that gave conflicting numbers as to how many Emmy Awards Carl actually had. I went as far as having his assistant physically count the statues so we would have actual confirmation — 12.
Carl unfortunately did not win his 13th Emmy and eventually his Guinness Record was broken by Norman Lear in 2019 when he won an Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special for Live in Front of a Studio Audience: All in the Family and The Jeffersons at age 97. And in 2020 at age 98, Lear surpassed his own record when he won another Emmy Award.
Today, many of those Emmy Awards at the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York.
If Abraham says it, it's so. And I can't help but remember many years ago when I was in New York and I took Mr. Reiner's co-star Imogene Coca out for dinner at Sardi's and then we walked across the street to the Shubert Theatre and saw the musical, Crazy For You. Imogene was living on a high-up floor in a lovely security building in Manhattan and when I took her home and she showed me around her apartment, I saw a broken Emmy on a shelf. It was literally in about four pieces.
I asked her what happened there. She said it fell out the window…but she didn't recall just how that had happened. I told her that I'd heard the Academy replaces damaged Emmy statuettes and if she liked, I'd call up and try to arrange that. She said, "Oh, don't bother. I have another one around here someplace."
That's how I've told that story ever since and that quote from her is absolutely true. What probably isn't true is that she had another one around there someplace. I didn't think to look it up until just now but according to this page, she was nominated six times but only won once — as the Best Actress of 1952. Unless they'd already sent her a replacement Emmy, she didn't have an undamaged one. She deserved many.
When people asked Johnny Carson who his favorite guests were, he almost always mentioned Carl Reiner…and Mr. Reiner claimed (and he was almost certainly right about this) that he was the only person who guested with every host of The Tonight Show during his lifetime. Here from January 3, 1964 is his first appearance with Johnny.
In it, they discuss the fact that Carl has five Emmy Awards. He eventually won eleven. Carson says he's never won one and Reiner predicts Johnny will win one of these days — and Johnny did but not until 1977 when they finally did what he and Carl discuss in this segment. They rewrote the categories so Johnny and his program were a little more likely to win…
If you attended Comic-Con International in San Diego this past July…or you attended Comic-Con Special Edition last Thanksgiving…or you attended both…and you wish to attend Comic-Con International in San Diego next July…read this. Returning registration opens eleven days from now…on Saturday, October 15.
Yesterday, Donald Trump filed a lawsuit accusing CNN of defamation and he says he's seeking $475 million in punitive damages. This article will tell you how ridiculous this suit is but I wanted to highlight one paragraph from it…
Barb McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and University of Michigan law professor, also chimed in on Twitter saying that the "lawsuit is a naked publicity stunt that Trump knows will be dismissed before discovery. It will never reach deposition stage. He will make more money off of fundraising over this legally baseless lawsuit than he will pay the court in sanctions. Winning!"
More and more, that's what everything Trump does is about: Gin up outrages that will cause his loyal followers to donate money. His whole run for the presidency in the first place may have been nothing more than that. It's kind of like putting on a play you know will flop so you can keep the backers' investment money.
This year, MAD magazine and I both celebrate our 70th anniversaries. I was born on March 2, 1952 and the first issue of MAD, which was then a ten-cent comic book, reached newsstands on July 10, 1952…and on 3/2/52, a brilliant gent named Harvey Kurtzman was probably writing that first issue. I'm technically a few months older and, I'd like to think, a few months wiser.
MAD was a newsprint four-color comic book for its first 23 issues, edited and mostly written by Kurtzman. The first few issues didn't sell all that well because, one suspects, there'd never been anything quite like it on those newsstands and the kind of people who might like such a publication weren't yet looking there for one. Also, though it was a parody comic, it took a few issues before they figured out just what they should be parodying. The comic took off when Kurtzman realized it should be movies, TV shows and (especially) other comic books. Sales began to rise and the publication started being noticed in higher-brow publishing circles.
But it was still a comic book and Kurtzman was embarrassed by the comic book industry. In 1952, there was a lot there to be embarrassed by and he was even uncomfy with other comic books from the publisher who published MAD, filled as they were with horror and violence. He may have even been more down on the package. Comics were a dime and they were printed on the cheapest-possible paper.
He wanted to be part of a "real magazine" printed on better paper. William M. Gaines, the publisher of MAD (and all those comics filled with horror and violence) believed MAD could not survive without Kurtzman so when Harvey got an offer to go work for what seemed to him like a "real magazine," Gaines agreed to make MAD into a magazine printed on better paper.
The first magazine issue of MAD, #24, came out in May of 1955. Kurtzman left it a few issues later for what he thought (wrongly) was a better opportunity but MAD kept on a-going, becoming bigger and better and more influential. A man named Al Feldstein took over as editor and assembled a team of some of the best cartoonists and comedy writers ever…and sales just went up and up and up.
The magazine has declined in the last decades — as have just about all magazines — but it's still going. It's been almost all reprint for a while now but its 70th Anniversary Issue (featuring more new material than usual) is due out any day now.
I remember exactly where I purchased my first issue of MAD. It was issue #70 and I bought it in early February of 1962 at the long-gone Westward Ho market on Westwood Boulevard in West Los Angeles. The cover depicted Alfred E. Neuman ice-skating, happily leaping over a number of barrels and blissfully unaware he was about to collide with another skater leaping over those barrels from the opposite direction. I did not realize at the time how now important this magazine would be to my life.
Well, maybe in a teensy way, I did. But I didn't dream that, for example, I would get to know most of the people who worked for it in its glory days — one of them is my best friend — and write a book about it and an article or two for it. More important to my life has been that it's one of the reasons I became a writer of comedy.
That issue #70 started it. I immediately began hitting second-hand bookstores around Los Angeles searching for back issues. I think I said here once that my mission was so successful that by the time #71 hit the newsstands, I had a complete collection. That, I later realized, wasn't quite true. By the time that next issue came out, I owned copies of #28 and #30-69. Soon after, I found #24-27 and #29. It took longer to get my hands on the first 23 issues because I didn't know they were comic books…and even if I had, they were difficult to locate. I have not missed an issue since.
Also before #71, I found and purchased copies of all twelve MAD paperbacks that had been issued: The MAD Reader, MAD Strikes Back, Inside MAD, Utterly MAD, the Brothers MAD, The Bedside MAD, Son of MAD, The Organization MAD, Like MAD, The Ides of MAD, Fighting MAD and The MAD Frontier. They all contained reprints of material from the magazine but the next one to come out — Don Martin Steps Out — was the first to feature all-new material and it was very wonderful. So were a lot of subsequent MAD paperbacks by Mr. Martin and other MAD contributors. I don't think the original MAD paperbacks have gotten the attention they deserve, nor are any of them in print now.
I'd better wrap this up soon because I could write about MAD so long and so much that it would make my recent Blackhawk series look like a Tweet. I could write about its glories and I could write about the occasional periods when, as is inevitable over seventy years, it didn't meet its own standards. I just wanted to remind you that it's still being published and tell you that I just got my copy of that new celebratory issue in the mail and that its best years deserve way more attention and respect than they've received. Even if the magazine was produced by The Usual Gang of Idiots.
It's not so bad these days but during my first two or three decades in the comic book business, I often witnessed an unfortunate tendency in the comic book field to wholly blame the talent if a book doesn't sell well. If it does great…well, the writer and artist obviously had something to do with that but so did the publisher's overall success and the brand loyalty of those who buy their other books and the skill of their marketing and promotional people and whatever editorial or creative input came from the folks in the office. But if they decided (rightly or wrongly) to cancel your comic, the reason was simple: You didn't do your job well.
I encountered that policy a lot in the TV business. It always seemed to be either "Our show is a hit" or "Your show bombed."
In the eighties, I was briefly an investor in a restaurant in Hollywood and I learned a little about that business. Sales were good for a year or two, then they started a downward spiral and it soon became a better financial option to close the eatery and sell the land to a company that wanted to build a mini-mall in its place. Which is how I got out of the restaurant business, probably forever.
One of the other partners had way more experience in this field than I did. I asked him what he thought had gone wrong and he said, "When a restaurant closes, you always blame the chef."
I didn't quite grasp what he was telling me so I asked, "But the chef didn't change…and how come some branches of Olive Garden or Denny's succeed and others don't? The food is exactly the same at all of them."
He said, approximately: "In reality, restaurants succeed or fail for a million different reasons — location, what kind of competition is nearby, how much advertising they do, how effective that advertising is, not keeping up with changing tastes and trends, letting the restaurant itself get run down or uncomfortable, ease of parking, the courtesy and efficiency of your wait staff, the quality of the meat and produce your suppliers deliver to you…" He listed about fifteen more and then he summarized: "Bad food is definitely a big reason but when a restaurant goes under, everyone who was in charge of those other things just blames the chef!"
And I thought, "Gee, that's a lot like every other business I've ever been in."
I do not have a high opinion of the management at DC Comics between, say, 1968 and 1976, in part because of this attitude and it certainly applies to certain periods at Marvel, as well. I also thought the folks running DC then were way too quick to cancel books before they had a chance to catch on, and I'm not just talking about Jack Kirby's.
Dick Giordano
When I was named editor of Blackhawk, I reported mainly to Dick Giordano, who now held the titles of Vice-President and Executive Editor. But I didn't report much to him and when I complained (always nicely) about something, he usually fixed things. When he didn't, he had this amazing way of telling me — this was the gist of it, not the precise words he used — "You're right, we're wrong but it's not going to change" and then he'd take the time to explain why. I still liked and respected him. Sometimes, honesty trumps the little song-and-dance when they promise you things will change, knowing full well they won't.
Dick and I did not talk much. As I've said, DC left me surprisingly alone on this comic. But he'd occasionally call and tell me he loved something we'd done. I liked to think it was earnestly meant and maybe it was but it was always followed by "I'm sorry I have to tell you that sales are down another notch." On the plus side, when we stopped doing Blackhawk, he did offer other books to Dan and to me, and he personally hired Dan to ghost-pencil a few comics that were officially drawn by Dick Giordano.
I called Dick once to complain that DC's Production Department was insisting I replace the colorist that Dan and I wanted. Dick's response was basically "You're right, we're wrong but it's not going to change." I called him a couple of times to complain about the overt lack of promotion I felt the comic was getting. Dick's response was another variation of "You're right, we're wrong but it's not going to change." But again, he explained why it was the way it was, which had to do with the over-all health of the company. I understood. There was some justification for channeling promotional efforts towards certain books and not others.
The problem with the colorist was solved via a compromise. The problem with the promotion was not solved. One aspect of it was that each month, I'd send in a description of what would be in the next issue of Blackhawk that dealers would be ordering. It did not seem to be the fault of anyone in particular but somehow, the description would not get to the proper folks at the proper time and when the solicitations went out, it would just say of the next issue of Blackhawk, "No information available at press time." I don't know how much that hurt us but it sure didn't help.
me and Dan, 2006.
I had this friend named Bill Liebowitz, who owned and operated the Golden Apple bookstore here in Los Angeles. It was then the place to go if you collected comics and a lot of folks would have told you Bill was the wisest retailer, if not in the country than certainly in our half of the state. I asked Bill over and over what I could do…and I wasn't asking how to make it a top seller. I just thought if we could get sales up a skosh, Dan and I could get to do the comic a little longer.
Bill was a pretty straightforward guy about this kind of thing. He said, "There's really nothing you can do. DC is not behind this book." He told me that when he mentioned to some DC rep that he might have Dan Spiegle and me in the store for a signing, the rep told him not to waste the energy. He quoted the guy as saying, "I can see if we can get Marv Wolfman and George Perez to come by and sign Teen Titans. Now, that's a hot book these days."
"But don't take my word for it," Bill also said. He invited me to a meeting of a little group he convened now and then — maybe a dozen guys who operated comic book shops in Southern California. I drove with him down to the meeting, which was held in the back room of one of their stores and I answered their questions about the business for half an hour. Then Bill said, "Okay, now let's flip the script. Does anyone have any advice for Mark on how to boost the sales of Blackhawk?"
There were no suggestions.
They all told me stories not unlike Bill's about DC reps urging the promotion of other DC books. And by the way, when I say there were no suggestions, I'm not counting the guy who said it might help if the book was instead written or drawn by someone "hotter" than Dan or me. He emphasized that he was not saying "better." Just "hotter." He mentioned an artist whose work, he said, was very popular with his customers but "personally, I think his comics suck."
I was not angry at anyone, not even the DC reps. In their position, I might have advised the same thing. I think it's important to be realistic about these things; to realize that the buyers are going to buy what the buyers want to buy. You can nudge them and call things to their attention and dress the product up to look more attractive and some of that may work. But if they don't want to see a movie, all the powers of Hollywood and the zillions they can spend on promotion cannot stampede ticket buyers to the Cineplex. Usually.
A few days after that meeting with the local dealers, Dick called. DC had raised their cover price from 60 cents to 75 and they were now looking at sales figures impacted by that change. As might be expected, everything was down a little bit. That little bit didn't matter much to a top-selling book but it mattered to one like ours.
Then soon after, someone else in the office called to tell me that the company that bought the rights to republish DC comics in Germany had decided to stop taking the ones set in World War II. I wasn't surprised by that. I was actually surprised that they'd ever been interested in publishing comics that were basically all about killing Germans. But they had been and weren't anymore so DC war titles became less lucrative…for DC.
Dan Spiegle lived near Santa Barbara. I lived (and still live) in Los Angeles. It's a distance of about 85 miles and we'd decided that Thousand Oaks was about the midway point. Every so often, we'd meet there for lunch at a delicatessen to which I also sometimes took Jack and Roz Kirby, who lived nearby. The day I heard about Germany canceling, I called Dan and asked him to meet me for lunch the next day.
Over burgers in Thousand Oaks, I told him, "Blackhawk as we know it is not long for this world. They'll probably cut us to bi-monthly any day now. That's the best case scenario. They may just cancel it or decide to see if some other writer and artist can turn it around. But I have an idea of something else we could do."
I was concurrently doing The DNAgents for Eclipse with Will Meugniot and there was an obvious, crying-out-to-be-done spin-off called Crossfire there. Dan had drawn some sequences of the character in DNAgents and was the perfect artist for an ongoing series if we wanted to ongo. Before I could lay out several possible scenarios for us, he said that whenever Blackhawk went away, he'd be delighted to do a Crossfire book with me for Eclipse. When I got home, I called Dean Mullaney, who was running Eclipse, and he said, "Great. Whenever you want to start." I started writing the first issue that evening.
Not long after that, Mr. Giordano called and said they were going to have to cut Blackhawk to bi-monthly. I said, "In that case, Dan and I would like to leave at whatever time will not cause you any problems." Dick replied — and these were his exact words — "I'm not surprised and I don't blame you. You two gave us a much better book than we expected and we didn't treat it very well."
I have been in and around the comic book business since 1969. I cannot tell you how rare it is for someone in Dick's position to say something like that and he even phoned Dan and repeated it. Others then running the company said similar things to me. DC was a very creative-friendly company in those years under the management of Jenette Kahn, Paul Levitz and Dick.
We soon decided to end with Blackhawk #273, which I think came out around the same time as Crossfire #6. Somehow, descriptions of what would be in the next issue of Blackhawk were still not getting into the dealer solicitations and instead, it often said "No information available at press time"…so I decided to entitle our last story, "No Information Available at Press Time." One or two people at DC were miffed or didn't see the humor but most told me it was a funny idea.
To my surprise, DC decided they would try to keep the Blackhawk comic going after we left. The book was assigned to a different writer-artist team and they began doing their first issues while Dan and I were still doing our last ones. The writer worked at Marvel's animation studio in North Hollywood and one day when I was out there for meetings on a project, I ran into him in the men's room. He told me that my Blackhawk work was a "nice try"…
…but he was doing it so right that DC was going to put it back to monthly and promote the hell out of it. Not only that but Steven Spielberg was hiring him to write the screenplay for that big Blackhawk movie. I have the vague feeling that neither DC Comics nor Mr. Spielberg ever knew any of this. I do know DC didn't even publish the issues he did. Once someone in upper management saw what they were doing, it was decided to terminate the Blackhawk comic with the last issue by Dan and me.
Not all that long after though, someone with a lot more talent than that writer-artist team produced a three-issue Blackhawk mini-series. That was Howard Chaykin, who took things, probably wisely, in a different direction. That led to a couple of other revivals, including a series in Action Comics, a new Blackhawk comic that got a #1 (I'm jealous) and a special. Some aspects of the property have popped up in other DC Comics as well but I haven't followed any of this closely enough to write about it here. It does look like the franchise has generally been in good hands.
Dan Spiegle and I did Crossfire in various forms for a few years and we were both very happy. I miss doing a monthly comic book and I miss Dan. And whenever I think about either book, as I did a lot while writing this overlong article, I miss him even more. I don't like to re-read old comics I wrote but often at a convention, when someone brings me a copy of anything I did with Dan to sign, I flip through the pages and think just how fortunate I was to know and work with that man.
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.
