As you may recall, I hosted Stu's Show the other day. Instead of being the guest as its listeners expected, I took over the program and grilled its host, Stu Shostak, on his career and plans for the future. A number of e-mails came in from listeners asking questions of me…but since the subject of the program was Stu, I opted to not read those and said instead I'd answer them here. One person wrote to ask what I think of the new Looney Tunes TV show. Easy Answer: I think I haven't gotten around to watching it yet.
Paul Fitzpatrick wrote to ask…
If you have time on Wednesday, could you ask Mark Evanier to talk about "The Man Who Stole Thursday," an all-star 52-page Hanna-Barbera epic he wrote for a giant edition Laff-a-Lympics book for Marvel? Three artists collaborated on this story, and it contains not only the Laff-a-Lympics regulars, but also the Flintstones, and cameo appearances by a lot of other H-B characters, including the Jetsons. It's a big epic with a time machine, a comic book convention, and a stone-age Laff-a-Lympics match. I am interested in hearing how this exciting project was put together.
I edited and wrote comics for Hanna-Barbera for several years in the seventies, some published in America by Marvel; others printed in various editions around the world, rarely in English. We had done two big "treasury" edition specials for Marvel — a Flintstones Christmas special and a Yogi Bear Easter book. The folks at Marvel decided they didn't want a third one so we didn't do a third one. Then a few months later, they called up and said, "Uh, did anyone tell you we want a third one?"
I said, "No, nobody told me you want a third one. When do you want a third one and what do you want in it?"
The person who called me referred to a schedule that had been printed up many weeks before but which no one had bothered to send to me, the guy who had to edit and write this third treasury. He said, "According to this, it's a Laff-a-Lympics summer special and we need it…" and here he mentioned a date that was less than a month off. A little more than three weeks, as I recall.
To assemble a 48-page comic book (52 with covers) in that space of time — to get it written, pencilled, lettered, inked, colored and shoved through the production process — was utterly impossible. So naturally, I said we'd do it. I wrote the script in two nights, structuring it so I could divvy up its pages between many artists — more than three — and have several working on it simultaneously. Various pages were drawn and/or inked by Owen Fitzgerald, Frank Smith, Scott Shaw!, Dan Spiegle, Joe Prince, Paul Norris, Pete Alvarado and me. Bruce Berry lettered the insides. I laid out and lettered the cover which was drawn by Willie Ito and Scott Shaw! Carl Gafford colored the whole thing in a lot less time than he should have been given for the job…
….and somehow, we not only got it done but had it in on the exact date I was told it had to be in.
I was rather proud…not that it was the greatest comic ever done or even the greatest I'd done, but I thought it was darned good given the amount of time we had to do it in. Two weeks later, someone at Marvel called to ask a production question about it and I made the sound of Scooby Doo going "Ruh?" and said, "I thought that book went to the printer two weeks ago." And of course, since I had yet to learn how often it works like this, I was surprised when the person said, "Oh, no. We may have given you that deadline but it doesn't ship until next month." In other words, I had plenty more time and hadn't really had to cut all the corners I'd cut and hadn't had to nag artists so relentlessly to get everything done a.s.a.p.
Or in the words of another dog in that book, Mumbly, "Razzl frazz snazz!"
We then did two more H-B treasury editions (a Scooby Doo Halloween book and another Flintstones Christmas special) at a more human pace but before they saw print, Hanna-Barbera and Marvel had an accounting dispute over sales figures and parted ways. The American line ended and those two treasuries were never published.
That's pretty much all there is to the story. Hope that's the kind of answer you were expecting, Paul.