After he read this posting here, Jeff Thayer wrote to ask…
You said on your blog that the first time you got a writer credit on a comic book you wrote was Welcome Back, Kotter #4 from DC which came out in February of 1977. But one online database says you wrote a story in House of Mystery #214 which came out in 1973. I happen to have that issue and your name is on that story.
Also, what was it like to write the Welcome Back, Kotter comic book when you were also writing the Welcome Back, Kotter TV show? I assume the money was better on the TV show.
Taking the last question first: Yes, the money was better on the TV show, which was only right since it was being seen by about seventy kajillion more people than bought the comic book. But there were advantages to the comic book job. I wrote the comic book all by myself in one or two days, whereas each episode of the TV show involved a solid week of collaborating with, at various times, anywhere from four to eight other writers.
That's an awful lot of meetings, some of which ended at 3 AM. And sometimes, you just want to be able to look at the finished product and think "I wrote that" instead of "Oh, there's one of my jokes…I think!"
Also, when I wrote the comic book, no actor came up to me to complain that he didn't have enough lines or didn't like the ones he had. I didn't get notes from eighty different network reps, producers, Standards & Practices people, etc.
I did get one (and I think only one) note from the editor of the comic book, Joe Orlando…and I need to preface this story by saying I generally got on well with Joe, though we had our differences, one of which related to that House of Mystery story. When Joe got my script for that issue of Welcome Back, Kotter, he phoned me and insisted I change one line.
The "Sweathogs" on Kotter were always "ranking" each other, hurling schoolyard insults. At the time, a big news story in this country was that motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel had announced he was going to jump the Grand Canyon on his bike. Without a lot of thought — which, as should be obvious, is the way I do most of my writing — I had one of the characters, Arnold Horshack, insult a particularly talkative other character by saying, "Hey, Evel Knievel just called. He wants to know if he can jump your mouth!"
As anyone who ever watched the show can tell you, that was a perfectly normal line for Welcome Back, Kotter. But Joe didn't like it. He said, "I've watched the show, Mark. I don't think Horshack would say something like that!" I told Joe that Horshack would definitely say something like that. He told me that Horshack would never say something like that.
Back and forth we went for a minute or so. I think somehow Joe had forgotten that I was a Story Editor on the TV series, living with those characters seven days a week. I was, in fact, taking that call from a phone right outside the rehearsal hall as we were working on that week's episode.
Just then, Ron Palillo — who played Horshack on the show — walked past me. I asked Joe to hold for a moment, put my hand over the phone mouthpiece and said to Ron, "Hey, in that scene where you're arguing with Judy Borden, how about if you say…?" And I told him the line. Ron said, "Oh, that's great. Can we put that in?" I told Ron, "It's in" and then I went back to Joe and I agreed to cut the line out of the comic book script.
It was heard on the show we taped that week and it got a big laugh. In fact, ABC used it the promos for that episode and it aired constantly in the days before. I still wonder if Joe Orlando ever saw one of them.
I'll tell the story about the House of Mystery script tomorrow.