Yep, it's Part 8 and it's about time. So before you launch into it, you might want to go back and re-read some or all of Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and — you guessed it! — Part 7.
You may wonder how it was decided which Gold Key Comics were produced out of the Los Angeles office and which ones were done out of the New York office. Back when Western Publishing Company was doing comics under the Dell label, it was pretty simple. Western (not Dell) had the license to do comics based on the properties of the Walt Disney Studio, Walter Lantz's studio, the Warner Brothers cartoon operation, the M.G.M. cartoon studio and a few others based in Los Angeles because they were based in Los Angeles.
One exception: The comics Western did based on Jay Ward cartoons were done out of the New York office. When I asked why this was, this was the answer I got: "Here in the L.A. office, we had too much to handle and the New York office didn't." Which I guess made sense.
The folks at the L.A. office were very close with the folks at those studios whose comics they produced. An awful lot of the comic books prepared in Western's Los Angeles office were written and/or drawn by storymen, animators and other artists who had worked or still worked for Disney, Warner Brothers, Walter Lantz, etc. Chase Craig, who was my main editor at Western's L.A. office, told me great stories about going over to the Disney lot and showing pages and covers to Walt himself…and Western was one of the early investors in Walt's harebrained, ridiculous, can't-possibly-succeed notion of building an amusement park in Anaheim.
Chase had worked at the Warner Brothers studio long ago and knew everyone there. Another editor in the L.A. office, Del Connell, was a former Disney storyman and he still wrote things for the studio including, for a long time, the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip.
To put it simply: Walt Disney trusted Chase and Del and the other Western employees to take good care of his mouse, his duck, his dogs, his cats, etc. The folks at Warner Brothers trusted Western with their duck and also their wabbit and their tweety bird and their road runner and all the rest.
Walter Lantz made cartoons from around 1924 until around 1972 but even before he stopped — and he told me this himself — he regarded the L.A. office of Western Publishing almost as an extension of his studio. He was fiercely proud of Woody and his other properties and protective of them the way a parent is protective of a child. But he trusted Western to take care of his kids. That one time I got to talk with him, I mentioned that I'd written a few of those comics, he said, "Well, I'm sure it was good work or Chase wouldn't have published them."
So it was for years a no-brainer that all those comics should come out of Western's L.A. office. Here's one moment from my life that drove that point home…
I was writing Porky Pig comics for Chase and I had a sudden urge to do one with the Tasmanian Devil in it. The character had not appeared in comics for a number of years. When I asked if it was okay to do what I wanted to do, he said that there was no problem with that contractually but there was one possible snag: "We don't have model sheets for the Tasmanian Devil. We did a comic with him once so we must have had them but the office moved since then and I wouldn't know where the hell they were…if we have them at all."
I asked, "Can't Warner Brothers supply one?" At that moment — this was '72 or so — there was no real studio; just an office somewhere within the corporation that controlled the endless reruns and merchandising. Chase said, "I'm dealing with a lady there…I'd be surprised if she even knows who the Tasmanian Devil is." I said, "Come on…how can someone work for that company and not know who the Tasmanian Devil is?"
He said that she'd once read a story in the Bugs Bunny comic and called him up and said, "Bugs wouldn't do that." He told her that story had been written by Michael Maltese. She asked, "Who's Michael Maltese?"
If you don't know who Michael Maltese was, you're forgiven…unless you're in a position of power over the classic Warner Brothers characters as she was. (Here's who Michael Maltese was.)
Chase concluded the story to me by saying, "If she doesn't know who Michael Maltese is, there's a good chance she's not going to know who the Tasmanian Devil is." But then he had a thought. He picked up the phone, dialed someone and put the call on the speakerphone so I could hear…
"Phil, if I send you a script with the Tasmanian Devil in it, do you need scrap to draw him?" ("Scrap" is an artist term for reference material.)
From the speaker: "Are you nuts? I was the lead animator on every damned cartoon the Tasmanian Devil was ever in! I can draw that creature with my eyes closed and my drawing hand tied behind my back!"
"Phil" was Phil DeLara, who worked on Warner Brothers cartoons from around 1940, mostly in Robert McKimson's unit, until the studio closed its doors. At some point, he began moonlighting for Western's L.A. office, not just on the comics of the WB characters but all of them. He was then drawing, among others, the Porky Pig comic book.
I learned from that experience so when for no visible reason, I decided I wanted to use Beaky Buzzard in the Bugs Bunny comic, here's what I did. I had become friends with Bob Clampett, who as we all know directed many a great Bugs Bunny cartoons including the 1942 Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid, which was Beaky's first appearance. I asked him if he had a model sheet and if so, could I pretty please get a Xerox of it? Bob, who was a very friendly and nice man — and one of those people who saved everything — was glad to comply.
A few days later, I received in the mail a Xerox — autographed by Bob to me — of the first Beaky Buzzard model sheet. It was drawn by a great animator who worked for Bob back then, Tom McKimson. I made a Xerox of that Xerox and handed it in to Chase along with my script featuring Beaky Buzzard and Chase sent both over to the man then drawing the Bugs Bunny comic book who was…
Well, you're way ahead of me. Tom McKimson was amused that Bob had signed the model sheet he'd drawn back in the forties.
The Los Angeles office also did the Edgar Rice Burroughs comics and Magnus, Robot Fighter and a few others. The New York office did Turok, the ghost books like Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery. They did Dark Shadows, Star Trek, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Little Lulu, the Jay Ward comics, comics about cartoon shows produced out of New York like Underdog and some others. Each division was pretty independent of the others but there were jurisdictional disputes. The only two times I ever saw Chase mad, it was because of such disputes.
At some point around 1973, there was some shake-up or argument within the Western Publishing hierarchy. I was a freelancer for the firm, uninvolved with the intra-company squabbling so I only know what Chase told me and what he told me was this: Someone wanted to shift a number of titles from the L.A. office to the N.Y. office. Comics with Disney characters, Walter Lantz properties and Warner franchises were mentioned. Chase and Del were furious at the suggestion.
Two-thirds of the problem went away when Chase got some exec at Disney — and Walter Lantz, himself — to write letters to the appropriate execs at Western. They said they were very happy with what the Los Angeles office was doing with their properties and would object to any change. But that lady at Warners apparently said, "Sure…let's give it a try." And the L.A. office was notified that henceforth, the Yosemite Sam comic and the Tweety & Sylvester comic — which were the two best-selling comics in that group — would be produced out of New York.
Chase was nearing the point where his contract with Western would have allowed him a comfortable retirement soon. They'd asked him to extend and he later told me this was the moment when he decided not to do that. The decision was never reversed even though those two comics went steadily down in sales after the switch. When I visited the New York offices of Western the following year, the editor there — a nice man named Wally Green — asked to me to talk with some of the people he had writing those two books to get them more on-target.
One of them admitted to me he'd never seen a Warner Brothers cartoon. My advice to him was to see some Warner Brothers cartoons.
There was another jurisdictional dispute when Western secured the rights to do a comic book based on the TV series, Adam 12. The show was set in Los Angeles and filmed in Los Angeles and it was initially planned as a book Del Connell would edit out of the L.A. office. I was picked to write it, Dan Spiegle was picked to draw it, and arrangements were made for us to spend a day on the set, meeting the producers and actors. Before that could happen though, the book was shifted to New York. There was no explanation and Chase and Del, once again, were furious.
But the larger problem at that time was that Western's comic book line was falling apart, mainly due to bad distribution. I'll talk more about that in a future chapter but during that trip I took back east, Wally Green told me that he knew of nowhere in the state — not just the city but the state of New York to buy a Gold Key comic book. Sales weren't bad where you could find the books but you couldn't find the books…and it doesn't really matter what you put in a comic book if no one can find it.
Wally had more to do with the business end of the firm than Chase or Del. He said they were pinning their hopes for the future on alternate means of distribution — selling comics in plastic bags of three through toy stores, for instance. This worked for a while but then it stopped working and Western was out of the comic book business.
But I'm getting way ahead of this story. We still need to talk about panel borders — and we will in the next part.
