Yesterday, I ran a message here from Jeff Thayer and part of it said…
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.
Yeah, it is but I'm credited only for "Story Idea." Here's what happened: DC had made a deal with a group of very able comic book artists in The Philippines to draw stories for them. Later, many of those artists (like Alfredo Alcala and Nestor Redondo) would relocate in the United States and be paid U.S. page rates but at the time, they were living over there and were satisfied with much, much less per page than DC was paying American artists.
The styles of the Filipino artists seemed to lend itself best to ghost/mystery stories and DC's books in that genre were selling well. There were some plans to add several more comics of the sort per month and to also get as much of that kind of material drawn while they had access to all that cheap labor. That meant a sudden rush to buy scripts that those artists could draw.
I was invited — as I'm sure were many others — to submit as many premises (short outlines) for ghost-type stories as I liked. If Joe went for any of them, I could submit a finished script and, assuming he liked that finished script, I'd be paid $10 per page for it. We're talking here about stories of 6-8 pages mostly. At the time, Gold Key Comics was paying me $12 a page and I didn't have to submit premises first but I thought it might be good to write different kinds of comics for different publishers. I dashed off a half-dozen premises and sent them off to DC.
One of the problems you often encounter as a freelancer is that you're outta the loop as to what they want as their needs change. On Monday, they tell you "We want stories about fifty-foot monsters with big noses" and you start writing premises and pitches for stories about fifty-foot monsters with big noses, unaware that on Wednesday, they decide they have too many stories about fifty-foot monsters with big noses.
And then on Friday, your submissions arrive in their office…and of course, they're D.O.A. and they probably go unread. Back when I was submitting work on that basis, that happened to me a number of times.
In this case, I sent my premises in right away and heard nothing for several weeks. Then Joe wrote me back that he liked a couple but he was suddenly committed to giving script assignments to certain of DC's "regular" writers so what he wanted to do was to buy some of my premises for $10 each — that would be the entire pay — and then have his regulars turn them into scripts…if that was okay with me. I wrote him back politely it wasn't OK with me; that I didn't think the compensation was sufficient.
I didn't hear anything more from Joe but a week later, I got a check from DC for $10 for one of my plots…and it was turned into that House of Mystery story scripted by Robert Kanigher. I decided not to make a fuss about it. I just forgot all about it until you reminded me. I'm only telling it here because it's a situation that happens in some form to most freelance writers. When you try to sell scripts to people far away, you're sometimes quite unaware when their plans change.
I have a couple of other stories about this kind of thing happening. Maybe I'll post one in the coming weeks. Thanks, Jeff.
