And here's another video about Jerry Herman…
Turning for a sec to those who come to this blog to learn more about how comic books are created: A commonly-held but erroneous assumption by some is that a comic book story is the work of five separate people — six if you count the editor. There's the person who writes it, the person who pencils the artwork, the person who letters the artwork, the person who inks the artwork and the person who colors the artwork. The sequence in which those five actions are done may vary but a lot of folks think there are five distinguishable stops on the assembly line…and sometimes, that's true.
But there are sometimes folks who merge several of those functions. In any of these Jerry Herman docs, you'll hear him talk about creating the words and music of a song as a single act of creativity. He didn't do one and then the other…and neither did Stephen Sondheim or Irving Berlin or a lot of other great composers. Jack Kirby, when he wrote and penciled a comic didn't do one and then the other. I doubt Will Eisner did or Charles Schulz did or Russ Manning did. They could separate the two if they wanted to and maybe some did but most writer-artists wear both hats at the same time.
There's nothing wrong with separating writing from drawing just as there was nothing wrong with Lerner and Loewe or Rodgers and Hammerstein dividing the functions up. Alan Lerner couldn't write music and Frederick Loewe couldn't write lyrics. Put them together and you got My Fair Lady. There have been great writer-artist tag teams in comics too. I'll write more about the dynamics of these pairings one of these days.