Michael Tallan sent in this question which others have asked before and I don't know why I didn't answer it before…
What was the very first comic that had your name on it as a writer? (I'm not counting appearances in letter columns.) Could you talk about how you felt when you saw it?
And I just realized why I didn't answer this question before. The reason is that I don't know. I'll try and figure it out right here in front of you…
I started out (1) working with Jack Kirby, (2) writing foreign Disney comics for the Disney Studio and (3) writing American comics (some Disney, some not) for Gold Key Comics — in that order. My name was on letter pages that my partner Steve Sherman and I assembled for Jack but we're not counting letter columns here. And Jack put our names on Forever People #9 and #11 but I never thought of those as writer credits. They were kind of arbitrary. As far as I was concerned, he could have put our names on any issues during that period or left them off. We didn't contribute that much.
The first comic book published in America that I felt I actually wrote was the first issue of The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, a Gold Key publication that came out in February of 1973. I sold quite a few scripts to that company before I wrote that one but that was the first one to see print. But Gold Key didn't have credits on their books then — and they never added them to the licensed titles. It was still a bit of a thrill to hold an actual, for-real comic book in my hand that I wrote but not because of the credit because there weren't any.
There were a few comics for DC that my name should have been on. I wrote (with some help from Mr. Kirby) a ghost story that ran in House of Secrets #92, the infamous issue that featured the first Swamp Thing story. Two of the four stories in that comic carried credits but the one I wrote didn't — I don't know why — and some online sources credit it to Joe Orlando. Jack and I co-plotted and I dialogued a story for Spirit World #2 that wound up in Weird Mystery Tales #2 after they decided not to publish Spirit World #2. They credited it wholly to Jack.
And no, this kind of thing didn't bother me. At the time, I didn't think I had much of a future in comic books. I was doing a lot of writing for things other than comic books and my name wasn't on very much of them either. I was so happy that my work was in print that I didn't care all that much that my moniker didn't accompany it. Some of that stuff, I'm glad didn't have credits.
I may be wrong but I think the first time I got an actual writing credit in a comic book was issue #4 of DC's Welcome Back, Kotter comic book, which came out in February of 1977. At the time, I was a story editor (i.e., writer) on the TV show and my name was on that every week so seeing it in the comic book didn't strike me as a big deal. I recall a huge, exciting tingle the first time I saw my name in a comic book letter column — that happened in 1966 — but no tingle whatsoever from seeing it in that issue of Welcome Back, Kotter or other projects that followed.
