Regular readers of this blog should probably be grateful to Brian Dreger, who sends me some of the best questions I receive — like this one…
You've said that your earliest writing work included comic books for Disney's overseas market. I'm curious why you were only working for the overseas market. Was it because you were new and the new people started out working on the overseas content? Was writing for the US market a goal to eventually achieve, or was the overseas market just as important as the US market?
The two "markets" were of equal importance to everyone involved…but you've made me think of a story I don't believe I've ever told here, at least in full. So settle back. This may take a while. In fact, I should probably post one of these…
Okay, you've been properly warned. I grew up wanting to be a writer but for the longest time, I wasn't sure what I could be a writer of. This was back when I thought (wrongly) that I'd have to pick one area and stick with it for all or most of my career. Comic books, though I loved them dearly and owned more of them than anyone I knew, were not high on the list, This was not so much because I didn't want to write them but because every interview I read of someone who worked in comics said that to write for the publishers in New York, one had to live in or around Manhattan.
I didn't. Nor was I ready to scratch off writing for television — live-action or animation — by relocating to the east. I also had some sense, especially after I met Jerry Siegel, that the comic book industry didn't treat its creative folks all that well.
There was a brief time when I almost did sell a couple of comic book scripts by mail — to Dick Giordano (then editor at Charlton) and to Mort Weisinger and Jack Miller (editors at DC) but it was only because they'd asked me to submit to them. They were impressed somehow with letters-to-the-editor I'd sent in…and it was kinda funny: Giordano was going to buy a script I wrote for Ghostly Tales but then he left Charlton for DC and I somehow didn't connect with him there.
Weisinger was about to buy a script I'd written for Superboy but then he was taken — kicking and screaming, I later heard — off the Superboy comic. Jack Miller wanted me to write an issue of Metal Men but before that could happen — to my surprise and I think his — he was no longer on the DC staff.
It felt like there was a secret rule then for comic book editors: If you even think of hiring that kid out in Los Angeles, you lose your job. So I just wrote off writing comics…and it wasn't really a disappointment because I'd never thought it could become much of a reality. This was shortly before Jack Kirby moved out to Southern California.
Now, you might be thinking, "You were living in Los Angeles. Why oh why didn't you start submitting scripts to the Gold Key Comics office (based in L.A.) or to the Disney Foreign Comics Department (based on the Disney lot in Burbank)?" And the answer is that I didn't know about the latter…and it just plain didn't dawn on me to submit to the former.
As you probably know, I started working with Mr. Kirby in early 1970, teamed with a great guy named Steve Sherman. Jack believed (then) that the only way to elevate one's self in the comic book business (then) was to create a new comic. Taking over an existing book, no matter how well you did it (then) or how much its sales soared (then), would probably not translate (then) into much more money for you. It was why Jack really didn't want to take over Jimmy Olsen at DC in 1970 and didn't want to return to Captain America at Marvel in 1975. He would have preferred to only create new books and I think it was a bad decision on those publishers' part to not let him. I believe both companies made a number of very bad decisions as regards to Jack Kirby.
But that was how it went at the time. One day, Jack suggested that Steve and I create some new comics. None of us were quite sure just what we'd do with these ideas but if Jack thought it was a wise move…okay. He knew the business a lot better than we did.
So Steve and I spent a few days throwing around ideas and we came up with six concepts for new comics. They were all different enough from what was then being published that they genuinely qualified as Fresh Ideas — but not so different that they wouldn't fit in on the newsstands. That's the sweet spot you usually want to hit. We wrote up presentations and pitched them all to Jack and he said they were all terrific. But of course, that was what Jack said to almost anyone who showed him an idea or art samples, no matter how crude. The only times he didn't give out with encouraging words were when he was shown something that looked lazy or plagiarized or, as was sometimes the case, both.
At the time, Steve and I were talking a lot with my friend Mike Royer, who had not yet wrangled the assignment of inking Jack's then-new books for DC. Mike was working for a great many other markets including Western Publishing, which was the company that published, along with so many other things, Gold Key comics. One day, he mentioned to me that Gold Key was looking for new, original comics. We had nothing to lose so Steve called their offices and got an appointment for us to meet with Chase Craig, who was the editor-in-chief there.
We went in, met Chase and told him our six ideas. He listened politely and seemed to think a couple of them had possibilities — but he warned us that it was not up to just him. A whole lotta people within the company had to say yes. We left him copies of our presentations and a week or two later, he sent them back to us with a nice note that said, approximately, "I'm sorry but I couldn't get anyone else interested in them." Very professional. Not in the least surprising.
Only much later, I realized that if I'd started submitting scripts to Chase for the comics he was editing — the Disney comics, the comics featuring Bugs Bunny and his cohorts, Woody Woodpecker, etc. — he would have given them professional consideration and I might have begun selling him scripts a year or two earlier than I did. That, alas, just plain did not occur to me. Ah, hindsight.
And if I had thought of submitting work to Chase, I probably wouldn't have followed through because of someone else…
I used to go visit Alex Toth — one of the greatest comic artists of all time and a man who, I did not then realize, had some serious anger issues at everyone in the industry. On one visit, I mentioned to Alex that Steve and I had tried to sell some ideas to Chase Craig. Alex exploded, yelling about how Chase, for whom he had once worked, was a horrible, evil, incompetent Spawn of Satan…or worse. He was someone to be avoided at all cost.
That's what Alex told me and it took many years before I learned two things about Alex. One was that he talked that way regarding just about everyone in the industry. The other was that he was wrong at least 90% of the time. He wasn't the main reason I didn't pursue writing for Chase but he was a reason.
Some time passed. Mike Royer finally got the job as Jack Kirby's inker. To thank me for my role in that — and because he no longer had time to pursue it himself — he told me about the Disney Foreign Comics Department. One of the eighty jillion revenue streams at The House of Mouse was that they'd sell foreign publishers the right to publish comic books featuring Mickey, Donald and other Disney Superstars…and then they'd sell them the reprint rights to the comics of those characters that Western Publishing was creating.
In most of those countries, there was a huge demand for Disney comics — so huge that after the publishers in those countries bought and translated the Gold Key material each month, they still needed way more pages. To fill that void, Disney set up a division on their Burbank lot that bought more stories and art — hundreds of pages each year that would never be published in this country. Mike had some sort of "in" there and was going to try working for them before he got the job inking Jack's work, which was a full-time-and-a-half gig.
He told me who to contact there, I did and I began selling them scripts. A very nice man named George Sherman was my editor there and it was also in his job description to be a kind of liaison to Western Publishing. One day, he and Chase were talking and the conversation went something like this: George told him he thought some of the scripts lately for the comics Chase was editing were weak. Chase agreed and explained that a couple of his best writers had recently retired or died or something. Most of the folks working for Chase were people with decades of experience in the animation and/or comic book business so they had a tendency to retire…or die.
George said something like, "We've got a kid writing for us whose work we really like" and he sent Chase Xeroxes of a couple of stories I'd written for the division. Chase liked them and one life-changing day, I got a phone call from him asking, "Can you write scripts like that for me?"
I gave it a whack — cautiously at first but it only took an assignment or two for me to realize Alex Toth could not have been more wrong about Chase Craig. And I mean "wrong" the way I'd be wrong if I told you that Hannibal Lecter was a real person, a nice guy and a helluva great gourmet. A lot of people in the comic book industry have been good to me — honest, benevolent and helpful — but if you made me pick a Top Three, it would be Jack Kirby, George Sherman and Chase Craig, not necessarily in that order. Here's a photo of Chase at his desk…
I wrote a lot of comics for Chase, originally when I was attending college at U.C.L.A. Writing for him was such a good experience that I got to thinking that maybe I oughta quit college — where I was learning absolutely nothing that would ever be of any use to me — and become a full-time writer. Chase did not know I was thinking that when on one other life-changing day, he told me, "If you could write a lot more scripts for me, I could probably buy almost all of them."
I'm probably not remembering his words exactly but I definitely recall sitting in his office after he said what he said. Then and there, I decided to quit U.C.L.A. — which I did. I am not suggesting that would be the proper move for someone else in different circumstances at a different time but it was the absolute right move for me at that moment. I hedged the decision a bit by enrolling in some part-time curricula at Santa Monica City College but soon quit that, too.
So this has been a very long, long answer to the question as to why I didn't try writing comic books for Gold Key earlier than I did. I probably could have given you this as a one-sentence answer: "There was an opportunity there but I was just too friggin' dumb to see and take advantage of it." I can now think of many times in my life I've made similar mistakes and there have probably been many more I don't know about.
