Nice to see a lot of folks on the 'net have picked up the news about the passing of Paul Norris. I realized last night that though Paul told me that Aquaman drawing he did for me in 1995 was the first time he'd drawn the character in decades, that's not so. In 1987, DC commissioned this amazing "jam" drawing of all their major characters and Paul drew his waterlogged co-creation for that. I don't know if he forgot about that or if he was just trying to make me feel my piece was all the more special.
And I remembered two stories about Paul that I'll share here. In 1972, Gold Key Comics lost the rights to Tarzan. In a move it later regretted, the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate stopped the long-running Dell/Gold Key run and shifted their ape-man over to DC. The Gold Key version had been written since about the twelfth century by a man named Gaylord DuBois and it had been drawn its last few years by Paul. Missing nary a beat, the editors at Western Publishing (which published the Gold Key books) had them create something similar, which they did, and Gold Key began publishing The Jungle Twins. The above covers, I should mention, are paintings not by Paul but by a man named George Wilson. Paul drew the insides.
Part of what prompted this is that there had been a recent issue of the Gold Key Tarzan comic that had adapted the Burroughs kids' book, The Tarzan Twins, and that issue had sold particularly well. In fact, Western had been in talks to launch a bi-monthly Tarzan Twins comic when the Burroughs people made their move, so the publisher did The Jungle Twins instead with DuBois and Norris. Oddly, the "Tarzan Twins" issue of Tarzan had not been drawn by Norris and it was one of the very few issues not written by DuBois. Both functions were done on that one by Mike Royer.
So one day I'm up in the Gold Key offices and I'm browsing through the incoming artwork piles…and I come upon a just-finished issue of The Jungle Twins in which there's an amphibian character named Aquaman. Storywise, he isn't much like the DC Aquaman and even though he's drawn by Paul Norris, he doesn't look anything like that Aquaman…but he is called Aquaman! I go to the editor and inform him that, uh, DC Comics has a character named Aquaman and they've only been publishing him for, oh, about thirty years.
The editor was a gentleman named Del Connell, and Del just plain didn't read other comic books. Obviously, Mr. DuBois didn't, either. But before Del gives the order to change the character's name, we both wonder why Paul Norris — co-creator of the other Aquaman — hasn't said anything about it. Del phones him up to ask and Paul responds, "I didn't know if my Aquaman was still being published and I just figured you knew what you were doing."
By the way: The Jungle Twins wasn't a big success as a comic book. It started out with decent sales, actually outselling DC's Tarzan I heard, but that didn't do so well, either. There were seventeen issues of The Jungle Twins before it was cancelled in 1975. A few years later, Sid and Marty Krofft's company optioned the property for a potential live-action Saturday morning series and I wrote a pilot script that caused ABC to briefly place the show on its schedule…but then they changed their minds over there. In fact, three years running, they did that to me: Picked up a pilot I'd written and then changed their mind. The year after, it was another jungle show — an animated version of Lee Falk's comic strip, The Phantom. On and off the schedule in under a week.
It was, in the case of The Jungle Twins, quite a shame. As fans of such Krofft shows as Magic Mongo and ElectraWoman and Dynagirl are aware, Sid and Marty sometimes put some pretty attractive young ladies in revealing outfits on Saturday morn TV. In the comic book, The Jungle Twins were both boys. In my script — which had very little to do with that comic book, I'm afraid — one of the Jungle Twins was a girl and we actually got as far as some preliminary casting before the project fizzled out. If we'd cast the actress we were thinking of casting and we'd had her running around in jungle girl garb, there wouldn't have been a male in America — young or old, straight or gay — who wouldn't have been watching.
During this period, I was working with Paul on the Hanna-Barbera comics and one time when we got together, I took along a photo of this actress. Before I showed it to him, I asked, "Remember those two boys you drew in Jungle Twins? Tono and Kono?" Paul said he did. I said, "Well, if we do this show, this is what Kono's going to look like" and I handed him the picture in which the young lady was wearing about as much covering as one gets from a medium-sized Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid™. Paul took one look, grinned and said, "I must say, Hollywood has considerably improved on my work."