Category Archives: Obituaries

Most people knew Alan Sues best from his years on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In playing, among other roles, the most outrageously gay characters ever on television. He played non-gay characters too but he's best remembered as the outrageously gay sportscaster, the outrageously gay kiddie show host, etc. Fewer people know that before and immediately after Laugh-In, he had a pretty decent career as a serious stage actor which included Shakespeare and dramatic work, including a well-reviewed Broadway debut in the original Tea and Sympathy, directed by Elia Kazan. He also had a stand-up comedy act and a cabaret act…and he worked a lot. Then.

His presence on Laugh-In was probably predestined as he'd appeared in two ventures that laid a foundation for that groundbreaking series — The MAD Show (the 1966 off-Broadway revue based on MAD Magazine) and before that, The Nut House. The Nut House was an unsold TV pilot in 1964 produced by Jay Ward's company. It came and went with little notice but in 1967 when Laugh-In became a smash hit, a lot of folks recalled The Nut House and said, "Same show but ahead of its time." Laugh-In went on in '67 and Alan joined its cast in 1968, reportedly via his connection to Joanne Worley, his fellow cast member in The MAD Show.

I used to poach on the Laugh-In set, watching them tape on Stage 3 of NBC in Burbank. Alan seemed to be in every sketch I saw and he was very funny, especially in the takes that got too improvisationally silly and dirty to get on the air. He'd do the routine as per the script with Henry Gibson or Joanne Worley and once the director had it on tape, they'd let the cast do it again a few more times playing with the material and pushing it farther and ad-libbing. I don't think a lot of those attempts made it onto NBC but they were awfully funny in a non-broadcast way.

Owing to a health problem that Alan never wanted discussed, he slowed down in later years. If you sat one-on-one with him as I got to on a few occasions, he was still very funny and you'd catch sparks of the old Laugh-In Al, the kiddies' pal. I'm sorry we didn't see more of that in his later years.

Alvin Schwartz, a top writer for DC Comics in the forties and fifties, died the morning of October 28 from heart-related complications. He was 95 and had been ailing for some time.

Born in New York City in 1916, he showed a flair for writing at an early age. His first credit in comics appears to be a story for Western Publishing that appeared in Fairy Tale Parade in 1939. When I interviewed him in the nineties, he recalled that he'd done such an assignment but had no memory of how it came about. The job led to occasional work for Fawcett on Captain Marvel but mainly to a long stint at DC. Alvin began writing Batman comic books in 1942 and the Batman newspaper strip two years later, followed almost immediately by him taking over the writing of the Superman newspaper strip, as well. Until 1958, he wrote for most of the company's comics including Aquaman, A Date With Judy, Buzzy, House of Mystery, Tomahawk, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern. The latter two were the 1940's versions. He contributed much to the Superman legend but his best-remembered work would probably be his refinement (and probably, as he claimed, creation) of the character and concept of Bizarro.

In 1958, he got out of comics. His stated reason at the time was that he was having trouble with one editor at DC and that was apparently true. But he was also undergoing what he later called a "spiritual journey," discovering that writing heroic characters — Superman, especially — was giving him issues of identity and a wide array of emotions over his own worth as a human being. His feelings were complicated and though he told me about them directly and I read about them in two books of his — An Unlikely Prophet and A Gathering of Selves, I'm not sure I completely understand his troubles.

Clearly though, he felt he needed to get away from comics and he did, working for a time in market research and also writing novels under an array of names, and motion pictures including several for the National Film Board of Canada. For a long time, he believed his comic book work had been forgotten but several fans tracked him down in the late eighties and he began attending conventions and letting me interview him at several. He was a fascinating man who obviously put a lot of thought into his work before he did it, while he was doing it…and for decades after. He was also a very fine writer and we were happy to present him in 2006 with the Bill Finger Award for his lasting and important work.

Author Les Daniels, who produced the "official" history books for DC and Marvel, died last week. Here's the New York Times obit.

Bil Keane, who died yesterday at the age of 89, created the comic strip Family Circus and produced it for more than a half a century. He was an enormously nice, witty man…and funny. Family Circus was a pretty successful enterprise but a lot of folks who knew Bil said if it had been as funny as Bil was in person, it would have been the most popular comic ever. As it was, it was always good for a smile and a chuckle…and sometimes a nod of recognition for some striking capture of human foible.

I only knew Bil from a few cartoonist gatherings. He was the acknowledged master at hosting and giving hilarious speeches and at a National Cartoonists Society banquet one year, I gave him a joke that he used. It felt exactly the same as when I once gave George Burns a joke that he used on Johnny Carson's show. I mean that as a compliment of Bil, not of myself. In front of a hall of his peers, he was as big a comedy star as Burns or Jack Benny or any of them…and just as beloved.

That, obviously, is not a picture of Hal Kanter. It's a shot of Diahann Carroll and Marc Coppage in the TV show Julia created by Hal Kanter. Hal would have praised my selection and said, "Who'd want to look at me when they could look at her?"

Launching TV's first starring vehicle for a black woman who wasn't a maid would be enough to get Hal into the history books if he'd done nothing else. As it turns out, he did plenty else including writing for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby (individually and collectively), directing Elvis Presley, producing (at times) Chico and the Man and All in the Family, writing on the Academy Awards telecast for over thirty years and being one of the funniest speakers at luncheons, dinners, roasts, etc. Even in his nineties (he died Sunday at the age of 92), he was still hilarious and, as they say of certain young comics, edgy. We occasionally shared a dais and I was always happy not to have to follow Hal.

Comic book fans may be interested to know that Hal's father Albert Kanter was the founder of Classics Illustrated, and Hal worked briefly for the firm. He told me once he probably would have stayed in the comic book business had he not landed a job writing radio comedy at an early age.

He was a good man, universally loved and respected in the TV and movie communities. And he had one of the most extraordinary careers of anyone who ever knew how to write a funny line.

P.S., added later: Just found a photo of Hal Kanter. He'd say, "You're still better off with a picture of Diahann."

I never met Sid Melton but I couldn't let his passing (at age 94) pass without notice. A lot of people knew him as the sidekick on Captain Midnight; others as Danny Thomas's agent on The Danny Thomas Show or as Alf Monroe, one of the carpenters on Green Acres. The guy worked a lot, appearing in more than a hundred movies and TV shows.

He was one of those actors who was regarded as utterly dependable. Once on The Dick Van Dyke Show, they had an episode about a delicatessen owner who has a crush on Sally Rogers (Rose Marie) and tries wooing her with sandwiches and roses. Gavin McLeod was originally cast in the role but when he had to undergo an emergency appendectomy, the producers had to scramble for a replacement. They looked no farther than the soundstage next door to theirs where The Danny Thomas Show filmed. Melton stepped into the part and was very good in it.

One year in the late sixties, my parents and I went to the Greek Theatre here in Los Angeles to see Carol Burnett perform. She took questions from the audience and one little obnoxious man kept asking her to marry him. Apparently, Ms. Burnett couldn't see him from the stage and she tried to move on to another questioner but the annoying guy kept yelling, "Why won't you marry me?" and people around him started to laugh. We could all see it was Sid Melton even if Carol couldn't. Finally, enough people were laughing that Burnett took a closer look, recognized her suitor as Sid Melton, and literally fell down laughing. "My God, you're in everything," she said…and she was right. For a time, he was.

As you've probably noted if you know who he was, Norman Corwin passed away the other day at the age of 101. Fans of classic radio are mourning this fine writer…and there's really nothing I can say that Leonard Maltin didn't say better.

Radio's Howard Stern reported on yesterday's show that his cousin Jack Adler had passed away over the weekend at the age of 93. Jack Adler was a staffer at DC Comics from 1946 to 1981, working in the production department and eventually becoming vice-president in charge of production. What that means: The folks in the production department are the ones who prep a comic book to go to press, taking care of the technical specifications and doing art corrections and mechanical tasks. Adler did all that. And at DC, it meant supervising and often doing the coloring.

It would not be exaggerating to say that Jack Adler was the guy in charge of color in DC Comics for 35 years. It would actually be understating his contribution because Jack invented many of the procedures and techniques used to print comic books, especially their covers. During that period, he colored most of DC's covers and even did the color separations by hand on them for many years. He also designed the color schemes of most of their characters.

Adler's involvement in DC Comics supposedly dates back to the beginning. It is said (some dispute this) that he did some of the color separations for Action Comics #1 which in 1938 featured the debut of Superman. That was done for one of several outside art services that Adler worked for before joining DC in '46. The photo above shows him working for one of those firms, doing by hand the color separations for a Prince Valiant Sunday newspaper page. The one below is him in the DC offices in 1974…

He was brought in by his friend and former classmate Sol Harrison, who had been hired to run DC's production department. Adler and Harrison had a long but sometimes contentious relationship. In 2004, Jack was a Guest of Honor at the Comic-Con International in San Diego and I had the pleasure of interviewing him on several panels and speaking with him in private. He made it clear in both venues (more forcefully in private) that he felt he'd received insufficient recognition for his many technical breakthroughs and inventions; that too often, credit had gone to Sol and the entire department. Many who worked there supported his view. DC Editor Julius Schwartz called Adler, "The guy who knew more about how to color and print a comic book than any man alive."

Others called him that, as well. The company put out a good-looking product for decades and a lot of that was due to Jack Adler.

And boy, was that subject line hard to type. We've known it was coming for weeks now but it was still hard to type. Just as it's hard to tell you that a really great fellow named Earl Kress died about thirty minutes ago from the cancer he'd been fighting since earlier this year. He turned sixty last month.

Earl was a writer, an actor, a producer, a puppeteer, a voice artist, an animation historian…and he was very good at all of those endeavors. He hailed from Philadelphia and worked in broadcasting there before relocating to Los Angeles in the mid-seventies to broaden his avenues. Most of his efforts were in animation and he toiled for a time for Disney mostly on story (on The Fox and the Hound, mainly) but occasionally doing voice acting jobs, such as on The Rescuers Down Under. For TV, he wrote for dozens of shows including The Oddball Couple, The Transformers, Taz-Mania, Pound Puppies, Yogi's Treasure Hunt, The Addams Family, Road Rovers and Baby Looney Tunes. He won two Emmy awards for writing on Pinky and the Brain and several nominations for that show and Animaniacs as well as a Prism Award and an Annie Award, plus he wrote the last Road Runner theatrical short, Little Go Beep. His most recent animation project to be released was the Direct-to-DVD movie, Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes. It's real good and like everything Earl ever wrote involving classic characters, utterly faithful to its source material.

Other credits? He did scripts for comic books including The Simpsons and DC's Looney Tunes. He collaborated with me on June Foray's autobiography and ghosted a book for Yogi Bear, Life is a Pic-a-Nic that was released to tie-in with the recent movie. He produced CDs of vintage Hanna-Barbera music and contributed to the special features of many recent DVD animation releases, especially Top Cat where you can see him interviewing most of the surviving cast members. He did voiceovers for comedy bits on Jay Leno's Tonight Show. He served as an officer in Local 839, the Animation Guild, and was a forceful voice during contract negotiations, particularly about improving the lot of writers. The last few years (excepting this year for obvious reasons), he co-hosted the Cartoon Voice Panels with me at the Comic-Con International.

He handled puppets. In the finale of The Muppet Movie, there's a shot of darn near every Muppet singing the final lines of the closing song. Next time you see it, see if you can spot Ernie from Sesame Street. The person operating him in that shot is Earl Kress.

As a voice actor, Earl studied with a man he loved dearly, the late/loved Daws Butler. One day, Daws said to him, "There's a writer I know…I think the two of you would get along." Daws said much the same thing to me about Earl and he was, of course, right. Daws was always right. Earl and I became fast friends and logged hundreds of hours talking about animation and cartoon history and show business and other shared interests like Soupy Sales, Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers, The Muppets and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Everything I liked, he liked…and I also liked Earl.

He had many health problems in the time I knew him and at age 38, he underwent a heart transplant. Surgeons installed one that had formerly belonged to a teenage girl and after a rough period, he made a good, solid recovery…though I did try to convince him that any day now, he would begin menstruating. He never believed it, though one time when he came over, he asked if I had any tampons around. Just in case.

It turned out the transplant had a much more serious potential side effect. The doctors warned him before the surgery that a certain medication he had to take to get through the transplant could make him more prone to cancer. As I understand it, this drug is no longer in use but at the time, they had no option but to administer it and Earl understood the risk.

A few months ago, he was complaining of aches in one hip and elsewhere, and tests revealed that he had indeed gotten cancer and that it was spreading fast. At the end of March, one of his kidneys was removed and this was followed by other hospitalizations and treatments. His doctors kept thinking they'd arrested the problem but every few weeks, they'd find it in a new place. In early June, his wonderful wife Denise called and said that a test showed it had reached his brain. Later, it was in his liver and other Earl parts. I wouldn't wish what that man went through on my worst enemy…and Earl was about as far from my worst enemy as any person could be.

He wasn't anyone's enemy. In an industry where jealousy and resentment sometimes seem as prevalent as nitrogen, Earl was utterly undespised. I don't know anyone who didn't like the guy. He was smart. He was funny. He had good, honorable motives for every single thing he did.

I try not to make these too personal but with this one, it's impossible. I have lost enough folks who were close to me that I no longer waste energy wondering why a loved one had to die. They never "have to." They just do and often you want to treat the cause of death like it's Gilbert Gottfried after some tragedy and yell "Too Soon" at it. But of course with some individuals, any time is "Too Soon." If Earl lived to be 105, it would still be "Too Soon" for someone like that to go away.

A memorial service will, I expect, be announced shortly. If there is one and you attend, you might be amazed how many pals Earl had and how every one of them really loved him. I am one of those people and right now, I feel like I lost my best friend.

We lost Del Connell this past weekend. He was 93. Del was a major figure in the history of animation, comic books and comic strips. He was an artist and later a storyman for Disney Studios during what some would call its Golden Era. He was a very productive writer and later an editor for Western Publishing on its Dell and Gold Key comics during what some would call its Golden Era. He wrote, without credit, the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip for several decades. And all that doesn't begin to describe his lifetime output. It was all largely anonymous, though last month at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, he did receive the Bill Finger Award for Achievement in Comic Book Writing. It was one of the few times in his amazing career he ever had his name on anything.

I really wanted to get Del down to the ceremony to receive it and an ovation in person. His doctor advised against it but Del's son Brady was toying with the idea of ignoring that advice and bringing the old man down anyway. The morning of the event though, when he visited Del in the nursing facility, he decided against it. I'm sure I would have, too. Brady — who by the way, produces the popular TV series Extreme Home Makeover — came as his father's representative and gave an eloquent, expertly appropriate speech. I'm glad we were able to send him home with that trophy to show Dad. (I spoke briefly to Del on the phone that evening and he was his usual humble self, telling me that others probably deserved the honor as much if not more. If he'd been there and able to make a speech, that's probably all he would have said.)

This posting and this recent newspaper article will tell you more about Del's amazing career. He was not only one of the most prolific writers ever in comics, his creations including Space Family Robinson, Super Goof, Daisy Duck's nieces, Wacky Witch and so many more. During the fifties, he routinely wrote comics with sales figures well into the millions.

I do need to add a personal note. When I was in college, I began writing comic books for Western Publishing. My main editor there was Chase Craig but Del's office was about five yards from Chase's and we talked often, and later when Chase retired, Del became my editor for a brief time. He was a man to be admired. He was clever. He was compassionate towards his freelancers — not the case with everyone in comics who ever held the job of editor. He worked very, very hard. And like I said, he was genuinely, almost maddeningly humble. I liked him a lot, even before I realized he'd written an awful lot of the best comics I'd read as a child…comics that inspired me to take up writing.

I will leave the last word for now to Mr. Disney. This framed cel was one of Del's most precious keepsakes…

It's from The Cold-Blooded Penguin, a 1945 Disney short that was incorporated into The Three Caballeros. Del wrote it while he was in the Army and away from the studio in 1944, mailing it in from Panama. Walt bought it for $500…and Walter Lantz later "borrowed" the premise for his popular character, Chilly Willy. Ironically, Del wound up writing and/or editing a lot of the Chilly Willy comic books.

In case you can't read it, the inscription from Walt on the cel says, "To Del — Thanks for a swell story." I'd like to say thanks to Del Connell for hundreds of swell stories. He was a very important and creative man and I treasure that I got to know and work with him.

Sad to hear about another funny man dying. Vic Dunlop was just one of those naturally-funny guys. You couldn't not laugh at him and he was much loved among other comedians. He was always helping out others, running benefits and showing up at benefits that others ran. Just a funny, nice guy.

He hailed from New York and was the son of a prominent character actor, Victor Marko. Despite his weight, which was often way out of control, our Vic served in Vietnam and would later speak of it as good training for a comedian. Out of the service, he soon became a regular at The Comedy Store and then made his TV debut on the TV series, Make Me Laugh. For a long time, he commuted between Vegas, where he opened for Tom Jones, Gladys Knight and other top singing acts…and Los Angeles, where he appeared on a number of TV series including Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, Harper Valley, P.T.A. and the short-lived Richard Pryor Show. (A few days ago here, I posted a clip from a series I worked on called The Half-Hour Comedy Hour. Vic was a regular on that show, too.)

Medically, Vic was an absolute mess. He was Diabetic and he couldn't handle it. It seemed like every time I ran into him, he'd just lost a toe or part of a leg…and those were just the problems he had from the waist down. There were plenty above. Still, he never seemed to let any of it nuke his spirit or harm his sense of humor. I'm not sure which of his many ailments ended his life but he had surgery for one of them about a week ago and it obviously didn't help. He was 63 years old.

Here's a video of Vic in action. You'll notice that in both this clip and the photo above, he's wearing the same pair of Three Stooges suspenders. Vic loved the Stooges and I always thought that on stage, he somehow managed to play Moe, Larry and Curly all at the same time — with maybe a touch of Joe Besser in there…

We're always sorry to report the passing of funny people. Sam Denoff sure was one. He was mainly a writer and producer, though occasionally an actor, and he gained his greatest fame as half of the team of Persky and Denoff. He and Bill Persky wrote for and later produced The Dick Van Dyke Show. Remember the one where Laura went on the game show and told the world Alan Brady was bald? That was theirs. Remember the one where Rob thinks they brought the wrong baby home from the hospital? Persky and Denoff. They wrote a lot of the best episodes and won a couple of Emmys for them.

Later, they went on to create Good Morning, World and That Girl and a half-dozen other shows, and Denoff wrote some things without Persky and vice-versa…but they were all well-respected programs. An amazing couple of careers there.

Elsewhere, I've told the story of how when I was just shy of thirteen, I got in to see an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show filmed. It was very exciting and that trip had a lot to do with me answering the question you get all the time when you're a kid: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" There were two men on the set during the filming who weren't performers (something I already knew I could never be and didn't really want to be) but they were important people there who belonged on that stage and you could tell that they had a lot to do with that show's creation each week. I somehow figured out that their function was in the areas of writing and maybe producing and I also thought, "Hey, that's what I want to do." One of those men was Bill Persky and the other one was Sam Denoff.

I only got to know Sam casually. We're both members of a group of comedians and comedy writers called Yarmy's Army but he's been ill the last few years and rarely at meetings. But I got to tell him the above tale and to thank him for being a role model. I am by no means the only person who ever told him that. He heard it a lot.

All the obits for Peter Falk focus, of course, on his stint as the rumpled and crumpled Lt. Columbo. Not to take anything away from that masterful creation but we do have to mention that he was a key player in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — a curious bit of casting. The premise was that they were going to hire very famous comedians…and at the time, Mr. Falk was not very famous and certainly not thought of as a comedian. My research suggests that the answer to most questions like this — why were some people in the film and not others? — is simply a matter of who was available at a given moment and who wasn't and whether a deal could be made. And also, there were a few stars who didn't get in because they unwisely tried to hold out for better roles, billing or money and the film's producer-director Stanley Kramer chose to not play that game and instead opted for someone else. I suspect Peter Falk was the beneficiary of one of those contests.

However he got in, he was very good in the film. The two or three times I got to meet him, we always got to talking about that movie and he was very, very proud to have been a part of it. He called the few lines he had with Spencer Tracy "the moment I knew I'd arrived in Hollywood." Yeah, that would do it.

He did so many wonderful things in his career that the obituaries can't begin to mention them all. In addition to Mad World, most don't seem to be mentioning a TV series he starred in called The Trials of O'Brien. I haven't seen an episode since they first aired in 1965-1966 but I recall thinking it was one of the best dramatic shows I'd ever seen. Maybe someone will resurrect them some day so we can all see if they're as good as I remember.

I only have one real Peter Falk anecdote and I'm afraid it's more about me than about him. But I'm going to tell it anyway because it's an example of what a nice man he seems to have been.

This was back around 1976 or so. Mr. Falk was doing Columbo and he was, of course, a very big star. I was a relatively new writer in the teevee business. One day, I got a phone call from a woman at Universal Studios who identified herself as Peter Falk's secretary. She was calling to verify my address because Mr. Falk was having something messengered to my home. I told her she had my address right but there still was some mistake. Peter Falk didn't have a clue who I was.

She said there was no mistake. Mr. Falk had just handed her an envelope along with my name and address. He told her to have a messenger deliver the envelope to me.

I asked her what was in it. She said, "I don't know. It's 9 by 12 and it has papers inside it. It's too thin to be a script but it might be an outine or treatment or something like that." She told me I'd have it within the hour and I could open it myself and find out what it was.

For the next hour, I wondered. And wondered. What in the world could Peter Falk be sending me? I kind of half-decided that he'd read something I'd written (I had no idea what or how) and had decided I was a writer of great skill. He had some outline for a movie or maybe a short story he wanted to turn into a movie or something and he'd decided I was the guy. But even though I couldn't think of anything else it could be, I couldn't believe that.

The package arrived. I signed for it and immediately tore it open. It was a copy of the previous day's Hollywood Reporter.

I hadn't received my copy of the Hollywood Reporter the day before. I went through the one Mr. Falk sent me, looking for a note or an article that had been circled…anything that would explain why he'd gone to the trouble of having a messenger bring it to me. Nothing. In the grand spirit of Lt. Columbo, I decided to conduct a dogged, time-consuming investigation.

The delivery label on the envelope had the phone number of the woman who'd called me. I called and told her what was in the package she'd sent over. She didn't understand, either. She said, "Mr. Falk should be back here for a meeting shortly. I'll ask him and let you know."

A half-hour later, she rang me back with the answer: My copy of the trade paper had accidentally been delivered to him. I looked and sure enough, the copy he'd messengered to me had my mailing label on it…a little clue that, like any good TV detective with 90 minutes to fill, I'd overlooked at first. Apparently, the machine that affixed mailing labels to subscriber copies of the Hollywood Reporter applied them in alphabetical order and "Evanier" came right before "Falk." My copy had gotten stuck to the back of his.

Both were delivered to his home. Peter Falk brought my copy into the office the next day, copied my name and address onto a slip of paper, stuck the Reporter in an envelope and sealed it, then handed the paper and the envelope to his secretary and said, "Send this over to this guy."

Now, admittedly it was probably Universal Studios that paid for the messenger…to hand-deliver me a little magazine that cost fifty cents. But I thought that was darned nice of Peter Falk to do when he could have just chucked my copy into a wastebasket. Those times I got to meet and chat with him — once because he wanted to meet my partner, Sergio Aragonés — he struck me as, yes, that nice.

I figure you already know what a terrific actor he was and yes, it's possible that he wasn't always as considerate and caring as he was in my very, very brief encounters with the man. But I'd like to think he was always both. He sure was always a great actor.

Gene Colan, one of the most prolific and respected artists in comics, has passed away at the age of 84. Gene worked in comics from around 1944 until his retirement in just the last few years, working for every major company in almost every genre and on a large percentage of all the major characters, but is probably best known for his work for Marvel in the sixties and seventies. For them, he drew Daredevil, Howard the Duck, Tomb of Dracula, Doctor Strange, Iron Man and so many others. There are many fans who consider his versions of some of those characters to be the defining versions.

Gene was born in the Bronx on September 1, 1926. "I began drawing at an early age and never stopped," he once said. A graduate of the Art Students League of New York, he did some work in comics before enlisting in the Army Air Corps. After his discharge in 1946, he went to work for Timely Comics (now Marvel) and would ever after credit its star artist and art director, Syd Shores, with teaching him the business. In 1948, Timely laid off much of its staff and Colan began freelancing for every company that would buy his work. He continued working for Timely/Marvel drawing hundreds of tales for their war, western and mystery comics of Atlas Comics. He also became a mainstay of DC's war, romance and western comics, including a long stint as the main artist of their Hopalong Cassidy comic book.

In the sixties, the DC editor who most often bought his work was Robert Kanigher. Colan did not get along with Kanigher and that drove Gene to pester Stan Lee for work on the Marvel line. When another artist defaulted on the assignment of drawing a new Sub-Mariner feature, Stan gave the job to Gene, who worked under the pen name of "Adam Austin," lest Kanigher find out. Colan's unique, photographic approach to comics did not mimic the style of Jack Kirby, which was then the norm at Marvel but it was exciting and even revolutionary in its own way. Before long, Stan had Gene drawing Iron Man and then Daredevil…and the name of Adam Austin was displaced in the credits by that of Gene Colan. Readers learned to know it usually promised a well-drawn, dramatic tale.

In the early eighties, a clash with the then-current management at Marvel drove Gene to DC where he drew Batman, Wonder Woman and many others. As you can tell, it's difficult to list all the work Gene did in his long, fruitful career. It might be easier to list the comics he didn't draw.

As a reader, I loved Gene's work. There was a credibility about it: No matter how outlandish the premise or plot, Gene somehow made you believe it. His pencil art was magnificent…in many ways, too good for the assembly line production process and the flimsy printing that it usually received. As good as his work looked in your comics, it was always probably better.

I later got to love Gene. He was a charming, self-effacing gentleman who was genuinely moved when fans tried to tell him how good he was and how much joy his work had given them. He heard that a lot and remained utterly unspoiled by all the praise. In a way, it seemed to make him try harder to improve his drawing and live up to what they said he was.

His last decade or so was heartbreaking, plagued by constant eye problems and other illnesses, as well as financial woes. In 2010, his second wife Adrienne was consumed by severe emotional and drug problems. She injured Gene in a physical altercation and later took her own life. Gene spent most of the rest of his life in and out of hospitals as doctors tried to deal with a wide array of injuries and heart failures. That he survived as long as he did had a lot to do with the well wishes and efforts of his friends, especially writer Clifford Meth. (Cliff, thank you.) Given what Gene was going through, I am frankly surprised he lived as long as he did.

I'll write more about him in the coming days, I'm sure. His passing was not, of course, unexpected and yet it's still jarring. Gene was so much a part of comics as long as I've read comics. He was the kind of artist who rarely drew less than two comics a month (sometimes, three) and I think a lot of people took him for granted. If he had drawn a handful of comics as fine as what he did in the sixties and seventies and then gotten out, readers would still be haunting their comic shops, praying for his return. I also enjoyed his friendship…and I have to tell you that the one time he drew a script of mine was one of those moments when I would have paid the company for the honor. I received Xeroxes of his pencilled pages — so much more wonderful, of course, than the printed product — and I just grinned for days…because I'd just written a comic drawn by Gene Colan. He always made everything look so damned good.

Lew Sayre Schwartz, one of the many anonymous men who drew great Batman stories signed "Bob Kane," died last Saturday morning at the age of 85. Shortly before, he'd taken a bad fall and struck his head, resulting in a brain hemorrhage. Surgery did not alleviate the problem and his son Andrew reports that, "…when the life-support was removed, it was a fast and peaceful departure."

I guess I'd better explain about Kane's odd working arrangement with DC Comics. In the mid-forties, he signed a deal with them that called for him to draw a specified number of pages per month…or at least to deliver that amount. Some of the Batman material that appeared in Batman and Detective Comics was purchased by DC editors from artists with no Kane involvement, even though it bore his signature. Some was provided by Kane under a contract that paid him a very high page rate. It was so high that he could afford to hire someone like Lew Schwartz (or at other times, Sheldon Moldoff or a few others) to actually draw the pages. Kane might occasionally draw or redraw a little of it but usually he turned the ghosts' work in to DC as they drew it. After paying the men who'd really drawn the material, Kane still made enough off the work to live very well.

Schwartz was working for King Features Syndicate as a production artist when Kane first tapped him to ghost some Batman material for him in 1946. By 1948, he was doing almost all of it, a situation which persisted until 1953 when Schwartz, as he put it, "just got tired of the arrangement." He went on to do more work for King Features and segued into advertising, where he was involved with commercials that won numerous Emmy and Clio awards. He was also a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York and largely responsible for the founding of their film department.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Schwartz along with the other two surviving Kane ghosts (Sheldon Moldoff and Jerry Robinson) at the 2009 Comic-Con. He was a delightful gentleman and there was an odd sensation of "bonding" among our panelists as they shared tales of their days with Mr. Kane. It was also fun to watch so many people tell Lew that he'd drawn their all-time favorite Batman stories. He certainly drew a lot of mine.