What was the deal with Star Spangled War Stories #144?

I've gone through this a number of times on chat boards.  I'm posting it here so instead of writing the story up again and again, I can just link to it here. It was a significant event in the history of comics and I was in a unique position to observe what occurred.

Enemy Ace was a somewhat-popular feature in DC war comics for many years.  It was created by Robert Kanigher (writer) and Joe Kubert (artist) and at the time of this incident, all published stories had been by that team.  It's important to keep that in mind.

In late 1968, Enemy Ace stories had been filling a DC book called Star Spangled War Stories for some time.  I never understood why a strip about a German World War I pilot was in a comic with "Star Spangled" in its title but that's another matter.  What's important here is that Mr. Kubert was not only the artist on the feature but also the editor of all of DC's war comics, and he wanted to stop drawing this one so he could devote that amount of time to new projects.  In particular, he was developing a new comic called Firehair which he (wrongly) expected would become a regular book. If/when it did, that would just be too much work on his schedule so he went looking around for an artist who could take over Enemy Ace.

An obvious possibility was Alex Toth.  Alex was widely respected as an artist and the subject matter of Enemy Ace — war and airplanes — seemed perfect for him. DC was also looking to find a way to get more of Alex's art into their books. He'd had a long, stormy relationship with the company, fighting with many editors over the years. If there were two things that everyone in comics agreed on about Alex, it was that he was one of the best artists to ever work in the field…and that he was very difficult to work with.  He had a tendency, not just in comics but in his other area of employment — TV animation — to quit in a fury if he felt he was wronged…and he often felt he was wronged.  I don't think he always was.

But Enemy Ace seemed so right for him and he'd had a pretty good relationship with Joe Kubert. Alex did not respect a lot of people who were in power at any comic book company but he seemed to respect Joe. Also important to mention: This was a project done by phone and mail. Kubert worked out of the DC offices in New York. Alex lived in Los Angeles — in the Hollywood area, very close to the famous Hollywood Bowl.

There is some question as to whether DC approached Alex or if Alex, hearing that they were scouting for a new Enemy Ace artist, contacted DC to suggest himself. Either way, it was decided that Alex would do one issue as a "fill-in," just to see if he and DC could get along. It wasn't exactly an audition but when I discussed it later with both Alex and Joe, they agreed that Alex had just committed to the one issue and after it was done, there would be discussions about him maybe doing the book indefinitely.

That was one of the few things they later agreed upon. I'm going to really try to give you both sides here. When I spoke with both men about it, it was years later and they'd buried most of the hatchets between them…which didn't mean they both still weren't angry about the matter.

Kubert sent Toth a script by Kanigher called "Death Takes No Holiday." As editor, Joe had done a little bit of editing on the script and had approved it. This was standard procedure. It was 23 pages in length but a few of those pages were not full-pages. The story content for Page 6, for example, was to cover only two-thirds of the page in the printed comic, the rest being given over to an ad for Revell models.

Joe did almost all the covers for the war books and he'd already drawn one for this issue based on Kanigher's script. The story concerned a squadron of pilots who dressed as skeletons and Kubert had designed their look when he drew one of them on the cover. When he sent Alex the script, he also sent a stat of the cover so that when Alex drew the skeleton pilots, he could match the design.

In his past work for DC, Alex had occasionally angered his editors by rewriting scripts. Joe later told me that in his phone conversations with Alex, he'd told him, "If you have any problems with the script, call me and we'll discuss them." He also said he made it clear to Alex that they wanted the Toth Enemy Ace to look like the same character. Alex might well go on to become the strip's regular artist, in which case the design could migrate in his direction…but if he only wound up doing the one issue, they didn't want that one issue to look like a different comic about a different guy.

Alex later said that this discussion was not as specific and formal as Joe made it out to be. More on what he thought in a moment.

Alex penciled and inked the story he'd been sent and turned it in well before the deadline.  He lettered in the sound effects and the display lettering (like the story title) but left the captions and balloons in rough pencil so that copy could be lettered-in by a DC letterer.  He also included a revised copy of the script which had been extensively rewritten, probably with the help of a certain friend who is now, like everyone else in this tale, deceased. I'm not identifying the friend because I don't know for sure that Alex involved him. (Some have speculated it was me. It was not.)

Joe received the package in the mail, opened it, saw what Alex had done and exploded. He was furious, first of all at the rewrite which he thought was inferior, and he was mad that Alex had done this without consulting him. Alex's story was also 24 pages, not 23, and he had moved around the spaces that would be left for advertising. For example, the space left for the Revell ad that was supposed to be on Page 6 was now on Page 7. That mattered because Revell had purchased space on that right-hand page not just in that book but in many concurrent DC books. Alex had moved it to a left-hand page.

Mostly though, Joe was mad that (in his opinion), Alex had changed the whole look and feel of Enemy Ace. It looked to him like a different character flying a different airplane, battling a rival pilot in a skeleton suit that didn't look exactly like the one on the already-finished-and-off-to-press cover.

There were several ways to view all this but the way Joe chose was this: Alex Toth had decided he could write Enemy Ace better than the guy who'd co-created the character and written every other Enemy Ace story to date. Alex also believed that the editor (Joe) had bought and okayed a crappy script and that it needed a major rewrite. And Alex had also decided that he could design a much better look for the title character than what Joe — the editor of the comic and the co-creator — had been doing.

Kubert said Alex had been explicitly told not to change the look on his first and perhaps only issue. Alex said he didn't think that was a serious command and that Kubert should have expected that a Toth Enemy Ace would not look exactly like a Kubert Enemy Ace. He did not think he had changed it that much.

Joe packed up the pages and sent them back to Alex with a terse note that said Alex had not delivered what he was supposed to deliver. Alex later told me he was so upset that he vowed he would never do a lick of work for DC for the rest of his life. As near as I can figure, he made good on this vow for about two months. He drew more stories for DC editors Dick Giordano and Joe Orlando, and before long would be drawing some stunning back-up stories for Kubert's war books.

Once he'd rejected Toth's work, Joe had the immediate and pressing problem of getting the script drawn by someone else in time to meet the printer's deadline. Neal Adams suggested he could pencil the issue if Joe would ink it. In record time, it was done and it was a pretty good-looking issue, though you'd never know Adams had anything to do with it if not for the credits or the quick change that was made in a cover blurb. Kubert later commented, "It was like inking a ghost of myself."

What Adams drew was the exact same Robert Kanigher script that Toth felt needed a major rewrite. If you get a copy of that issue, you can judge for yourself how good or bad it was. Personally, I always felt that the Enemy Ace strip was the same story over and over, none of them particularly worse or better than any other, and this was one of those.

If you thought it was an awful script, you felt as Alex did. He told me he considered it his job to deliver a good, publishable issue and he could not do that with the script he'd been sent. He said he tried to draw it but couldn't…and he felt if he called Joe and told him that, Joe would argue with him, tell him it was fine and to just shut up and draw it, as is. So he did what he did and he honestly felt that the folks at DC would read his version, decide it was better and not only publish it but turn the comic over to him to write and draw thereafter without editorial interference.

If this sounds like an unlikely scenario to you…well, it has always sounded like an unlikely scenario to me, too.

Folks who knew Alex were eager to see the rejected story but Alex told them that it had been destroyed. He'd left it in the trunk of his car, he said, and water had leaked in during some rainstorm and ruined the pages. During this period, Alex was drawing with a variety of markers and it indeed would have been catastrophic to the art if the pages got wet. But I know he had it in his house for a while because I saw it there.

I was visiting Alex about every two weeks back then and he'd ask me to bring along original artwork and/or old comics from my collection so he could see them. He'd sit there and study what I'd brought with great intensity.  Alex did just about everything he did with great intensity. In the meantime, I could rummage through a couple of portfolios he had of his artwork — both old published work and recent, as-yet-unpublished pages and doodles. In one of those folios on one visit, I came across the infamous Enemy Ace pages. This was a few years after the blow-up with Kubert.

The pages were, of course, beautiful. Alex was an amazing, amazing artist…but of course, I thought some of his work was better than other work. I would not call what I saw there his best work. Keep in mind that what I'm writing here is based on seeing the pages for about fifteen minutes more than forty years ago.  Comparing it to the published Adams/Kubert version, I would say Neal and Joe did a lot more close-ups of the people piloting the planes while Alex drew a lot more shots of the planes.

I didn't read the story closely enough to have an opinion on whether it was better than Kanigher's script but it was easy to see Alex could have gotten it into the exact same number of pages.   I did not think the title character as drawn by Alex looked like the same Hans von Hammer that Kubert had drawn but I didn't think it was terribly far off.  But of course, the look and feel of the comic was quite different. And that's all there is to this story…and probably all there will ever be.