The previous posting here prompted Paul Dushkind to write and ask…
I was wondering who drew the black-and-white caricature of Don Rickles in the frame with the big head on the Jimmy Olsen cover.
We don't know. When Rickles' publicist gave the approval for Don to guest in the comic, he sent over a few publicity photos he had around so Mr. Kirby could use them for reference. Jack picked out one for the cover of that issue and one for the next. The caricature was one of the photos sent and it was unsigned. A lot of people seem to assume Jack drew it but he didn't.
In the meantime, Jeff Watters found an old interview in which I said that my then-partner Steve Sherman and I helped with the writing of those issues and he jumped to the conclusion that we had written some of the Rickles-style dialogue. The jump is wrong. There was a subplot in those two issues about the Newsboy Legion and Jack had us write out an outline for that…and then he didn't follow much of it.
We wrote no dialogue and no part of the panels that involved Rickles or his look-alike. We did give Jack a page of insults that Don Rickles could hurl at Superman, as well as a few to be lobbed at Clark Kent, but Jack never got around to having Rickles meet either character.
When people hear that I — someone they know as a writer — assisted Jack Kirby, they often assume I did some of the writing on those comics. And that might be a logical assumption but, you know, not all logical assumptions are correct. I'd certainly be proud to say I did because I think the writing on those books is superb…but it ain't mine.
As I've explained many times, I wrote one page in one issue of Mister Miracle. I dialogued one story that was intended for Spirit World but which ran elsewhere with incorrect writing credits. I wrote the outline for the first issue of Kamandi, which mostly consisted of typing up Jack's ideas, and Steve and I wrote some outlines for portions of Jimmy Olsen, the Deadman appearance in Forever People, and a few of the mystery stories, plus we wrote any text pages that had our names on them. In the case of the outlines, they were all for stories drawn by Jack and he didn't follow them that closely, not even when we were regurgitating his own ideas back to him.
All in all, it adds up to very little and nothing of particular importance. It was more like "busy work" because Jack wanted to find an excuse to pay us some money, and because he hoped to convince DC to let him edit some comics he didn't write or draw, and was trying to sell them on the idea that we were writers who could be trusted.
I've said this on many occasions and so has Steve. Still, people write me or ask at conventions if I wrote this or that in some issue of Jack's New Gods. I fixed a couple of what were basically typos in Jack's New Gods — and not even that many of them — and that was all. Maybe it's too alien a concept in comics for someone to not claim credit for someone else's ideas, especially when that Someone Else is Jack Kirby.
