My longtime pal Jeff Wasserman writes…
Reference was made in that Bill Scott documentary that he wrote comic books after being blacklisted in the 1950s. Did he work on Dell Comics edited by Craig Chase out of the Western Publishing office in LA?
Yes, though Bill had only vague memories of what he worked on and who he worked for. He recalled what he did was for "Bugs Bunny and other Warner characters" and that he worked for Chase but also for other editors there. He could not recall any specific stories or dates.
I suspect there were very few artists or storymen who worked in the animation field in Hollywood in the forties or fifties who didn't at least attempt to get work from Western, if not on the Dell Comics they were producing then on their activity books, kids' books, coloring books, etc. It was a great way to moonlight for some extra bucks or even make a living when your studio laid you off and you couldn't immediately land work elsewhere. Some folks, like Carl Barks or Phil DeLara, came to prefer working for Western over working for Disney, Warner Brothers or wherever they'd been making cartoons.
(Just had a thought: I should probably link you to this piece I wrote for anyone unfamiliar with the unique relationship between Western Publishing and Dell Publishing.)
Western Publishing was a huge operation, a fact which many folks at other comic book companies tried to not believe. There was a longtime gent at DC Comics who steadfastly refused to admit any company ever sold better than the firm from which he got his paycheck.
But Western did. In a few weeks, I'll be resuming my series of articles about the company. Right now though, I think I‘ll tell a story that will make certain of you weep…
Western transitioned over the years from a very large company to a small one before becoming a just-about-nonexistent one. One constant though at their L.A. office was a lovely, grandmotherly lady named Zetta Devoe. I'm not sure when she started with the company or what her official job title was but when I worked for them in the early seventies, she'd been there a lonnng time and was responsible for all sorts of paperwork and scheduling.
Among her many duties was maintaining records on every story, every cover, every feature page that was prepared for the comic books produced out of that office. She had them in a series of loose leaf binders on a shelf over her desk. A few times, she let me page through them.
Each page listed the elements that went into one issue. It showed who'd written each item, who'd penciled it, who'd inked it and who'd lettered it and how much everyone had been paid and when. The earlier volumes showed who'd done the coloring but at some point in the sixties — I was never able to pinpoint exactly when — the Los Angeles office stopped handling the coloring of their comics and it was all supervised by the New York office.
Comic book historians reading this are probably wondering what became of those notebooks. Well, here's what became of them and you're not going to like it…
After Western closed that office, Zetta called me one day to say hello and to ask me a question that is of no relevance to this story. She told me she was enjoying her retirement but missed all the people she'd worked with. I finally got around to asking her about the notebooks and here, approximately, is what she told me…
"Oh, they sold or threw out everything in that office or shipped it back to some warehouse the company had back east. Everything except those notebooks. Nobody seemed to care about them so I called The Disney Archives department over on the studio lot. They didn't want them so I called the division of Warner Brothers we dealt with on the Bugs Bunny comics and they said, ‘Why in the world would we want that?' I think I called a few other licensors and they weren't interested…
"…so I threw the notebooks out a couple weeks ago."
I think she heard me gasp because she then said, "Maybe I should have called to see if you wanted them."
See? Told you you wouldn't like the way this story ended.
I have nothing to add except this observation: Looking through those books the few times I did, I saw a lot of familiar names…even my own. But I also saw an awful of names I did not recognize.
Those of us who try to identify uncredited writers and artists from back when most comics did not have credits tend to work under the following assumption: That the work under scrutiny was done by someone whose name we know from credited comics or other sources. That is often so.
But I think that over the years, Western bought scripts or art (probably mostly scripts) from folks who were never known to work for Western…or in some cases, for any comic books published anywhere. We cannot put a name to certain pieces of work because the correct name exists nowhere in the Grand Comics Database or other repositories of comic book history.
And it probably never will. I can't imagine how we could ever find out for sure which comics Bill Scott wrote.
