Don R. Christensen, R.I.P.

Sadly but not unexpectedly, we now have confirmation of the passing of veteran comic book and animation creator Don R. Christensen at the age of 90. Chad Frye, the president of CAPS, spoke to his daughter a few minutes ago and called to let me know.

I don't know if most comic/animation fans reading this can imagine the length and breadth of the man's career. Don was an animation storyman at Warner Brothers (Bob Clampett called him one of their best) before he began doing comic books. He produced a staggering number of scripts for Western Publishing's Los Angeles office, working on all the major Disney, Warner Brothers, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera comics. He's easily one of the ten most prolific writers the medium has ever seen.  He was also a very nice gentleman.

Don R. Christensen

Someone who knows not of time zones woke me up at 6 AM to ask if I could confirm the death of Don R. Christensen, the prolific comic book writer (and occasionally, artist) for Western Publishing Company and other firms. And this wasn't even a magazine or newspaper calling. It was just a devout fan of Disney Comics who couldn't wait another minute to know. He'd sent me an e-mail at 4 AM my time and when I didn't respond in two whole hours, he decided to phone. A number of other folks were content just to write and to not expect us to be checking the mailbox here, 24/7.

All I know, I'm afraid, is that one Italian-language Disney site is reporting that Don passed away on October 18. I found this out by checking Tom Spurgeon's fine news site, The Comics Reporter. The Italian site just says that Don died and there's no explanation of how and where they learned this. Since Don was born in 1916, one tends to assume a report like this is true but I think I'd like a more direct source, preferably in English, before I leap wholly to that conclusion.

And the next time someone wakes me up at that hour to ask me anything, I'll post an obituary about them. And then I'll go make it accurate.

Live or dead (and I'm still hoping for live), Don was one of the great talents in the world of animation and "funny animal" comics, and one of my favorite people when he lived in Southern California and I fraternized and occasionally worked with him. He authored countless scripts for the Dell Comics and Gold Key Comics produced by Western Publishing Company, including Magnus, Robot Fighter and one of my all-time favorite specials, Donald in Mathmagic Land. Don was also Western's "go-to" guy when a comic book required that puzzle pages be designed, plus he authored dozens of non-comic kids' books for the outfit.

Because people are always making the understandable mistake, let me remind the comics/animation community that there have been two separate and unrelated men named Don Christensen in the cartoon business, along with a Don Christiansen — who also was not the same person. The Don Christensen of whom I write here is Don R. Christensen, who sometimes signed his work as "Don Arr" or "Don Arr Christensen." He is not the Don Christensen whose name you'll see in the credits of old Filmation cartoons, although Don R. did do a few brief jobs for that studio.

Of course, if anyone has any solid info on his current health or lack thereof, please write. Or phone at a decent hour.

ASK me: Mickey Mouse, Secret Agent

From Bob Pfeffer comes the following question…

I recently picked up a copy of Mickey Mouse #107 which says on the cover, "The NEW Mickey Mouse! New Art! New Adventures!" When I opened it up, I saw what was clearly the artwork of Dan Spiegle. It was not a rush job either, it was top tier Spiegle. But the odd thing was that all the characters and backgrounds were drawn in the usual Spiegle manner in this spy story except the characters of Mickey and Goofy, who were on-model cartoon characters.

Mickey was about half the size of a standard human character. The plot involved a secret agent group called P.I. (Police International) recruiting Mickey to work for them and hunt down bad guys because Mickey was famous for already doing that. It was played straight with Goofy getting a few laugh lines. It was an odd mix, probably trying to ride the wave of popularity of James Bond and other spy based entertainment of the day.

Credits I've found for this issue online say artwork is by Spiegle and Paul Murry. How did that work? Did Spiegle leave blank spaces for the Disney characters and Murry filled them in? Or were the Disney characters drawn and then Spiegle created the rest of the artwork around that? Was the artwork passed back and forth from pencils to inks or did each artist do their work completely and then send the artwork to the other? How did the editor handle this whole situation? Was the comic laid out by the editor so it could be planned who did what?

It looks like this approach continued for the next two issues of Mickey Mouse, but after issue 109, Spiegle was no longer doing Mickey stories. I found the whole issue fascinating to look at and read. I'll need to try and hunt down issues 108 and 109. Any insights into this would be greatly appreciated.

You've come to the right place because back when I was working for Western Publishing, I asked about these issues myself and discussed them with Dan and also with Chase Craig, who was the editor, and Don R. Christensen, who wrote those issues. Here's how it went down…

Sales on the Mickey Mouse comic book were dipping…a little, not a lot. Someone over at Disney, taking note of the then-current James Bond craze, suggested this idea. This was back when Western Publishing was doing the Disney comics under license and the guy over at Disney — whose name no one remembered — had the power to insist that they at least try it.

They tried it. Don wrote the scripts. Dan Spiegle would lay the pages out roughly in pencil. Dan was one of those artists who almost always inked his own work and what he did in the pencil stage was always very rough with no backgrounds so that the editor could okay how the story was being "told" and the letterer could letter in the copy. He did 90% of the drawing in the ink stage.

The letterer on this story, by the way, was a gentleman whose name was either Rome Siemen or Rome Siemon. I was never able to nail down the exact spelling. He was a letterer for Western Publishing's Los Angeles office, lettering thousands of Dell and Gold Key comics from around 1952 until around 1970 when he died (I believe) and was largely succeeded by Bill Spicer. In the entire history of American comic books, there has probably been no one who had so much work published without almost anyone knowing his name.

Either before or after the lettering but probably after, Spiegle's rough pencils would go to Paul Murry. Murry — another unsung talent in comics — was the main artist for Mickey Mouse stories for Western from the late forties until Western stopped producing Disney comics in 1984.

He was, like most of the artists who drew Disney comics for Western including Carl Barks, a man who'd worked for the studio and later found he preferred the lifestyle of working at home, freelancing for Western. He did other comics for the firm, as well. Murry would pencil and ink the figures of Mickey and Goofy, then the pages would go back to Dan Spiegle to be finished.

According to Chase Craig, he didn't think any of this was a good idea. He said no one at Western did…and even before there were any sales figures received on those issues, the whole idea was dropped. Other folks at Disney saw the work in progress and said things like "Are you mad?" and there was a strong outcry from the publishers of Disney comics in other countries.

Don Christensen was pretty sure he wrote at least one more issue that was never published. He wasn't sure whether or not it was even drawn. Spiegle vaguely remembered starting on another story but being stopped before it was completed.

I thought it was kind of interesting as a novelty…and at a time when few comic books were at all experimental — especially something as staid and steeped in tradition as a primal Disney comic. In 1966, the idea everywhere was that every issue should be in the same style as the issue before…and giving any comic book a "new look" was rare. It was something you only did when it was on the verge of being canceled and Mickey Mouse, even when its sales were down a bit back then, was not in any such peril.

I asked Chase if when the sales figures finally came in, they were up or down. He said, "I don't think I even bothered to check. We weren't about to do it again."

ASK me

Foto File

I got out of the habit of doing this and I'm now resuming. Lately, I've been unearthing and digitizing old photos from my files, mainly of folks in the comic book field. Here are three great friends who are no longer with us.

The gentleman at left is Don R. Christensen. There have been a couple of Don Christensens in the comic book and cartoon industries. This one, who sometimes signed his work "Don Arr," is best known for writing countless comic books for Dell and Gold Key — mostly funny animal stuff, though he occasionally did an issue of something like Magnus, Robot Fighter. He was a storyman in animation, including a stint in Bob Clampett's unit at Warner Brothers, and he wrote and sometimes drew a lot of great silly comics for publishers like Standard and ACG.

The fellow in the middle is Zeke Zekley, who was best known for his many years assisting 'n' ghosting for George McManus on the newspaper strip, Bringing Up Father, aka "Maggie and Jiggs." McManus wanted Zeke to take over the strip after he died but when that day arrived — in a scandalous tale Zeke only told me about nineteen times — someone else got the gig. Zeke went off to do other strips on his own, including a Dagwood-like one called Dud Dudley. Comic strip bylines were never more colorful than when you could read Dud Dudley by Zeke Zekley. Later, he ran a company that produced "commercial" comics for advertising and educational purposes, and he employed the other two men in this photo.

At right is Alfredo Alcala. That's right: This photo runs the gamut from A.A. to Z.Z. Alfredo was, of course, a star artist of the Filipino comic world who came to America and graced hundreds of our comics, mostly ghost titles or Conan the Barbarian. He just may have been the fastest comic artist who ever lived, especially if you factor in the sheer number of lines he put on a page. I thought he was a brilliant talent, quite apart from his sheer volume, though I don't think the U.S. comic industry ever knew quite what to make of him or where to put him.

This pic was taken — I think by me — in my front hall around (I'm guessing) 1980. The thing on the wall behind Don's head is a painting that C.C. Beck did for me of Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel and Cap Junior standing at attention before Shazam. I still have the painting. I wish I still had these three people around.

How 2 Write Comic Books

As I have said several times on the blog, there are many different ways to write a comic book…and here I'm talking about page format and the way a writer conveys what he or she wants the artist to draw. Let me repeat that and put it in boldface for emphasis: THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS TO WRITE A COMIC BOOK. It has been my experience in 50+ years of working in this industry that most writers and editors know a grand total of two, if that many.

In this article, I'm going to tell you about one method but first, an anecdote: One day in the eighties, I was at a comic book convention and I happened to have a copy of a script that Carl Barks (i.e., The Great Carl Barks) had written for Gold Key's Junior Woodchucks comic book. I showed it to Julius Schwartz, who most of you know was a longtime editor of comic books for DC. It was in the format that I'm about to describe.

Mr. Schwartz looked at it and said, "Hey, that's an unusual way to write a comic book!" I said, "No, it isn't. Thousands of published comic book stories have been written this way, especially funny comics, especially of the 'funny animal' variety." Julie looked at me like I'd just told him I was from the planet Twylo and was here to enslave mankind with walnuts. He said, in an incredulous tone, "Really?"

This is Julius Schwartz, who then had been editing comic books since the original lungfish crawled onto dry land. And he had no idea a lot of comic books were ever written that way.

Most everyone in or around the field knows of The Full Script Method in which the writer types out a script which specifies how many panels go on each page and then describes what is to be drawn in each panel and he or she supplies the captions, word balloons and sound effects. Within this format, there are many variations of how this information is arranged on a page but it's basically one method. Zillions of great comics have been done this way along, of course, with some not-so-great.

There's also The Marvel Method, which most of you know about. In this method, the comic starts with a plot which may be very detailed or fairly loose or it could even be one sentence like "[Name of Hero] fights [Name of Villain]." It may even be verbal.

This "plot" may have come from the writer, it may have come from the artist or in some cases, it may have come from a third, perhaps uncredited person or a committee meeting. The penciler draws the comic before dialogue and captions are written and may, depending on how detailed the plot is, make up a little or some or most or even all of the story. The writer composes the words later to fit what the penciler has drawn. Again, this system has yielded countless great comics along with the not-great.

But in all my years of writing about comic books or discussing them with others, I've seen precious little mention of what I am calling here The Sketch Method. That's the name I've given it because, like I said, very few people ever discuss this method and so I've never heard of a commonly-used name for it. It is most easily explained by showing you an example. Here is the script for a page from a Bugs Bunny comic book. It's on the left and next to it is the printed page that was drawn from that script. If you click on the image below, it will get much larger on your computer screen…

Click above to enlarge.

Let me get some credits out of the way here. The finished page was penciled by Tom McKimson, who I wrote about in this message. I'm not sure who inked it but there's a good chance it was a gent named Joe Prince. The editor markings on the script were done by Chase Craig, who was the Senior Editor for many years at Western's Los Angeles office and most of the time I wrote for them, he was my boss. The lettering was by Bill Spicer, who was the main letterer for that office for a long time.

The script on the left was by John Brady…and I'm afraid I don't know much about Mr. Brady other than that he was a cartoonist, he sometimes drew comics instead of just writing them and he was amazingly productive. I can't back this up with any hard numbers but it wouldn't surprise me if he belongs in a list of The Ten Most Prolific Comic Book Writers of All Time.

He sketched his scripts out like you see…on 8-and-a-half by 11" typing paper and he often partially colored them with colored pencils. This puzzled me when I first saw his scripts in the Western Publishing office since those scripts were never seen by the mysterious people who colored Gold Key Comics. (I'll tell you about them one of these days. Wanna know their names? So did I but even Chase didn't know.)

I asked Chase why Brady's scripts were colored like that and he said, "John enjoys doing them that way." That, he assured me, was the only reason.

Anyway, as you've no doubt figured out by now: In what I call The Sketch Method, the writer just draws out the comic page in rough form. An awful lot of the writers who wrote Dell and Gold Key comics for Western Publishing worked this way. It was more common on the "funny animal" comics but it was done on adventure titles, too. There were issues of Magnus, Robot Fighter done this way. It was used a lot at Archie and Harvey…and even sometimes at DC, though apparently not often enough for Julius Schwartz to notice.

With The Sketch Method, the artist who pencils the page for publication is free to follow the writer's staging or ignore it. My observation, seeing pages go through the Western office, is that most artists would use some of the writer's staging but not all.

McKimson, for example, decided to draw Bugs in a walking pose in the first panel, which I think was a good change. It suggests the idea that Bugs and Porky have just arrived and that we are not coming in on the middle of a conversation. On other pages, he may have deviated a little or a lot.

Tom McKimson also drew Bugs Bunny stories that I wrote. When I was selling scripts to Western, most of them were typed, though in a format I've never seen used elsewhere. In some future post, I'll show you that format. I did do a few Sketch Method and sometimes, I'd type a script but also sketch out what I saw in my head for a certain panel or sequence. Looking just at the published comics, I do not think it would be possible for anyone to discern which stories were drawn from which method of script-writing.

This method, like the two described above, has its good points and bad points, and they have a lot to do with the skills of the writer and artist involved. Of course, one big consideration is whether the writer can draw or whether they can type. If the writer can do both, then you have to ask how good is that writer's staging? Can the artist improve on it? There's also the matter of time…

When I did scripts via The Sketch Method, it took me twice as long (or longer) to finish one as opposed to typing it out. Don R. Christensen, who wrote in both formats for Western Publishing, told me that sketching was usually faster for him than typing. And Roger Armstrong, who drew scripts for Western by both Don and myself said that he preferred working off typed scripts. He said that once he saw a writer's staging of a scene, it inhibited his ability to "tell" the story his way.

Roger's view reminded me of certain actors who like their scripts to not tell them how a certain line should be read, or of some directors who like minimal description from the writer. Some in both job descriptions like to know everything the writer had in mind and some like to feel free to react to the material however they react.

Another very prolific writer for Western was Vic Lockman, who certainly belongs on that imaginary list I mentioned of The Ten Most Prolific Comic Book Writers of All Time. Lockman might be in the Top Three. He wrote his scripts via The Sketch Method and often complained when the artist changed his staging. But Chase told me that sometimes, Vic would write a script and then be assigned to pencil the story also…and he'd change the staging the writer (that is to say, Vic Lockman) dictated.

Watching all of this at the various companies for which I've worked led me to a conclusion which I'd kind of like to sell to anyone who works in comics or is interested in how best to create them. It's not only that there are many ways to write a comic book — including ways unmentioned in this post — but that the method should be tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of the creative personnel.

Even if the writer can't draw or can't type, there are many variations within what they can do. John Brady and Vic Lockman and all the other folks who worked via The Sketch Method did it the same way, no matter what the assignment was or who was going to draw it. In those cases, they had absolutely no contact with the artist (unless they were the artist) and I think that may not have been the ideal way to make good comics.

I've worked for 40+ years with a brilliant artist named Sergio Aragonés who possesses a flair for visual humor that, to put it bluntly, most other comic book artists do not have. It would be such a waste of that talent to handcuff him into working via a method that did not take advantage of that or his great facility with plots and storylines.

For a few years of my life, I was simultaneously working on Groo with Sergio, a book called The DNAgents with Will Meugniot (and later, other artists) and also on Blackhawk — and later, Crossfire — with Dan Spiegle. Sergio, Will and Dan had a few things in common. They were all excellent artists. They were all friends of mine so we talked a lot and had lunch together when we could. Day or night, they could get me on the phone and ask, "What the hell is this thing I'm supposed to draw on page 8?"

They were all guys who turned in work that never disappointed me in any way…but they were all different people with different skills.

Sergio came up with (and still comes up with) almost all the storylines for Groo. Will contributed lots of storylines and ideas for characters in the comics we did together and would sometimes take a sequence I'd figured out and then figure it out a different, better way to handle it.

Dan would have told you he contributed absolutely nothing to the plots of the comics on which we collaborated. He kind of took the "it's not my job, man" attitude about that and put all his attention into drawing what I wrote as well as he could. When Marvel called and tried to get him to draw for them, they usually wanted him to pencil (only) from a loose plot and that was not the way to use him best. He had to have a full, complete script and he had to ink the comic himself. That's if you wanted to get the best work out of him.

The method I worked with each of these three artists — and also many more including Scott Shaw!, Gene Colan, Erik Larsen, Jack Manning, Roman Arambula, Pete Alvarado, Doug Wildey and dozens of others — varied to suit the artist and, of course, the material. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that great or even good comics were always the result because I don't think that way and I also don't want to sound like one of those YouTube Chefs who insists that everything they cook is The Most Delicious Thing Ever. But I will tell you that I think better comics resulted from custom-fitting the way I worked with each of those creative partners.

In some future piece here, I'll talk about still other ways writers and artists have collaborated and how I think it impacted the end product. Mostly, I'd like to encourage other writers and artists to come forth with ways they discovered to work as a team…or even ways they wished they'd been able to work as a team. It has always bugged me that when people write books or essays about how to write comics, they so often talk about the only way they've done it, the only way they know. That might be fine if every story had the same creative elements and every artist had the exact same skill set.

There's a saying that when all you have is a hammer, every job you have to do looks like a nail. I think better comics might result if some people had a larger toolbox. It doesn't have to be huge but it should have more in it than just one hammer.

Detective Comics

We were talking here about my favorite TV detective series, Harry O, and about its similarity to the longer-running series, The Rockford Files, which I liked but not as much. The two shows both started veteran TV actors — David Janssen was Harry Orwell and Jim Garner was Jim Rockford — and they both played private eyes who lived on the beach, had good senses of humor and rarely got involved in fights or shootings.

Harry O debuted on ABC on September 12, 1974 and Rockford Files debuted on NBC on September 13, 1974. And recently, my friend Scott Shaw! reminded me that they both were adapted into Gold Key comics that came out the same month and — this is the amazing part — their first issues had the same plot and the same teaser line on their covers!

You'd suspect collusion or that it was a deliberate plan of some sort but no. The first issue of Harry O was produced out of the Los Angeles office of Western Publishing. It was written by Don R. Christensen and drawn by Dan Spiegle. The first issue of Rockford Files was produced out of the company's New York office and it was written by Paul S. Newman and drawn by Jack Sparling…and yes, I was pretty upset that the editor I worked for in the L.A. office didn't give the Harry O assignment to me and —

— I'm sorry. I can't go through with this. As with certain earlier Gold Key Comics I've written about on this site — like here and here and here and here and here and here — all of this is fake. Western/Gold Key never put out a Harry O comic book or a Rockford Files comic book or any of the others.

I made up those covers in Photoshop…in this latest instance because Scott asked me to. It was all his fault. He lured me back into a life of crime. It won't happen again. I hope.

Ask ME: My First Funnybooks

Joe Petchik wrote me to inquire…

I've seen you joke that you started reading comic books right out of the womb and that when the doctor spanked you, you dropped a copy of Mickey Mouse. But really, do you remember your first comic book? And when you began working in comics, did you work with any of the people who'd worked on that comic?

No to remembering my first but it was probably a Dell and it probably featured some cartoon character I already knew from TV. Might have been a Disney, might have been a Warner Brothers. I remember as a kid buying (or having my parents buy me) every comic book I saw with Hanna-Barbera characters or Jay Ward characters but I'm sure I was reading comics before 1957 when Ruff & Reddy (the first H-B show) debuted. The first Jay Ward show was Rocky and His Friends in 1959.

At one point, my folks gave me the money to send away for a year's subscription to the Dell Comic of my choosing, which cost an entire buck for twelve issues. I sent off the coupon for Looney Tunes and for some reason, they proceeded to send me the next dozen issues of Tom & Jerry. The error, which I guess is what it was, didn't bother me that much because I collected that comic, too. What did bother me was that subscription copies came folded.

When I began writing for Western Publishing on their Gold Key Comics in 1971 and later in the seventies when I ran the Hanna-Barbera comic book department, I worked with lots of people who'd produced Dell Comics in the fifties. That list would include Pete Alvarado, Karran "Kay" Wright, Dan Spiegle, Tom McKimson, Phil DeLara, Tony Strobl, Don R. Christensen, Del Connell, John Carey and Chase Craig.

I also became good friends for a time (and collaborated) with Alex Toth, and I know I read some of the Zorro comics he did under the Dell logo in the late fifties. (If you are baffled, as so many are, about the relationship between Dell Comics and Gold Key Comics, perhaps my greatest contribution to comic book fandom is to have explained it here.)

However, I can identify the first super-hero comic book I read. It was Action Comics #250, cover-dated March of 1959 although the copy I first read did not have a cover on it. It appeared on newsstands in January of '59 but I didn't buy or read the comic then. A year or so later, there was a charity-type bazaar at Westwood Elementary School, the place where you could then find me most weekdays. There were games and a big bake sale and in one room, an array of stuff for sale that looked not unlike a swap meet. There, I found for sale, bundles of comic books missing all or a third of their covers.

Comic book fans of my age or older will know what this was. They sold comic books in those days on newsstands which took them on a returnable basis. A newsstand got, say, twenty copies of the new World's Finest Comics and put them out for sale. At any point, though usually when the next issue of World's Finest came in, the newsstand could send back the unsold copies — including any that got damaged by kids pawing through the racks — for full credit. They only paid for what they sold.

The returns went back to the regional distributor. In a few cities, those distributors would yank out the damaged books and ship the still-sellable ones overseas to certain distributors there to sell. In all cities, books that would remain officially unsold would be made unsellable by having crews — and this was done mainly by hand — tear the covers off the comics. In some cases, they'd just tear off the top third of the cover containing the title logo and issue number. The covers or partial covers would go to the national distributor to prove the books were not sold; ergo, the distributor didn't have to pay for them either.

The remainder of each comic was supposed to be pulped but in truth, a lot of them were sold unscrupulously through various outlets either coverless or with the partial covers. Some newsstands and second-hand bookstores had them. People sold them at swap meets. In San Diego, there was a used book shop where at any given time, you could go in and select from thousands of recent coverless comics for a nickel each or 25 for a dollar. And in various shops that were not unlike today's Dollar Tree or 99-Cents-Only shops, you could buy bundles of these comics — sealed in plastic bags or tied-up with twine — for similar cut rates.

The problem with those bundles of course is that you could usually only see the top comic in each bundle and you didn't know what else you were purchasing. If you bought ten bundles, you might get them home and find out that they all had the exact same books with a different one in first position. Or you might get a bundle with a lot of comics that you already had or didn't want to read no matter how cheap they were.

That day at the Westwood Elementary School Bazaar, I bought one bundle because it had a Woody Woodpecker comic or a Daffy Duck or something like that showing. And that's how I got my first super-hero comic book — that Action Comics #250.

I knew Superman from the George Reeves TV show and also from the old Paramount cartoons on local TV. I liked Superman and I can't really tell you why I hadn't bought his comic books before then. But I read that comic, liked it and soon was buying super-hero comics to the point of crowding out the "funny" comics that had previously made up my collection.

I even went to the extreme of hauling my boxes of Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck to a local second-hand bookstore where you could trade them in on a two-for-one deal. For every 100 Disney comics, I could take home 50 Batman or Superman books. I even found a copy of Action Comics #250 with a cover. Many years later, I would start buying replacement copies of the books I'd traded-in.

In the meantime, I bought super-hero comics from the used book stores and new ones off the comic book rack. I'm fairly sure the first one I bought new was Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #45 with a cover date of June 1960. It came out in April of that year.

So that Action #250 was my first. As for working with the folks who worked on it: Curt Swan drew the cover. I got to spend time with Curt and get to know him but several times when he was about to draw something I'd written, he got yanked away for another assignment so that never happened. The Superman story in that issue was written by Bill Finger (I met him briefly) and drawn by Wayne Boring (Never worked with him but we exchanged mail).

In the back of the comic was a story of Congorilla, written by Robert Bernstein and drawn by Howard Sherman, neither of whom I ever knew. There was also a Tommy Tomorrow story written by Otto Binder and drawn by Jim Mooney. I never met Otto but I'm proud that I got to know Jim Mooney and work with him on a few things. He was a terrific guy, a terrific artist and very, very prolific. Every so often when we were talking or having dinner together, I would say to myself, "This is the guy who drew that Tommy Tomorrow story you read when you were eight years old." It's still a little hard for me to accept that that was humanly possible.

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Today's Video Link

This is a great find for some of us. It's an unsold game show pilot from around 1977 called The Smart Alecks, hosted by Allen Ludden and with a panel consisting of Don Meredith, Pat Carroll and a new comedian named David Letterman. The "game" isn't very impressive but a lot of you will be interested in this video because of Mr. Letterman.

Me, I'm interested because the first contestant is an old friend of mine, Don R. Christensen. Don, who passed away in 2006, was one of the most prolific comic book writers of all time. He also drew a lot of comics, sometimes under the name "Don Arr," and worked intermittently in animation. He worked for Disney from 1937 to 1941, then spent a few years in the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, primarily in Bob Clampett's unit. At some point, he connected with Western Publishing Company and began working on Dell and later Gold Key Comics. He wrote for all their funny animal comics — Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Woody Woodpecker, Bugs Bunny and so on — and occasionally on adventure comics, including Magnus, Robot Fighter.

Don was a great, clever guy. Among the zillions of comics he wrote was one of my all-time favorites — a 1959 special called Donald in MathMagic Land. He was also responsible for an awful lot of the puzzle and activity pages that ran in Dell and Gold Key comics, and as you'll see in the video, he was also an inventor. I was pleased to stumble across this video and to be able to see and hear him again…

TV Funnies – Part 4

Time for two more of these fake Gold Key comics of mine that some people thought were real…though I usually left a pretty big clue like calling them "spurious." Hello, people! Anyway, this was posted here April 9, 2004 and there really was a Gold Key series of Adam-12. In fact, I almost wound up writing it. But otherwise it's all like Strawberry Fields…

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Time for two more of the obscure, even spurious comic books based on popular TV shows which Western Publishing Company issued in the sixties and seventies under the Gold Key (and sometimes Whitman) labels. These two are so difficult to find that some people have accused those of us who write about them of perpetrating some sort of hoax on an unsuspecting public…

There were eight issues of the Hawaii Five-O comic book, all produced out of Western's New York office. Paul S. Newman wrote the first, second and fifth issues and the rest were reportedly scripted by George Kashdan. All of the artwork was done by Luis Dominguez who did such fine art for Western's Boris Karloff and Twilight Zone titles.  Above is the cover of #3 which contained the story, "The Beachcomber Burglar," in which Steve McGarrett matches wits with a daring daylight thief who is stealing things apparently not for their value but to tweak McGarrett.  He leaves behind clues and the entire "game" distracts McGarrett and his men as they struggle to figure out where he will strike next.  My favorite moment in the story is when McGarrett is sitting in his office late at night, staring out the window as Danny Williams walks in.  You can almost hear the serious tones of actor Jack Lord as he asks, "What kind of man would steal fifteen crates of cat toys?"  Danny absently jokes, "Someone who's distracted by shiny objects" and that jars McGarrett's thinking and causes him to realize that the Beachcomber Burglar's crime spree is intended to distract.  A shipment of $20,000,000 in untraceable currency is being transported to a bank on Oahu and if Five-O follows the Beachcomber's leads, they will be miles away from there at the time of the delivery.  "That has to be it, Dan-O," he shouts as he calls for his car and back-up units.  And sure enough, when Beachcomber Bob shows up to steal the money, figuring McGarrett and his men are off on another island, there they are.  A very clever tale.

Three issues of Dragnet 1969 and one more of Dragnet 1970 (continuing the numbering) were published out of Western's Los Angeles office with scripts by Don R. Christensen and artwork by Doug Wildey.  Doug told me that he was allowed to visit the set on the Universal lot and to sketch Jack Webb and Harry Morgan from life.  "It was not a big deal," he said.  "Webb's face didn't change much no matter what he was doing."  The first issue (pictured above) presented a story called "The Big Puzzle" in which Joe Friday and his partner Bill Gannon investigate a string of murders all occurring within a two-hour period on the same afternoon.  The three victims were all killed in the same manner and obviously by the same murderer…but there was no apparent connection between them.  Friday's gut tells him that the key to finding the culprit is to figure out why those three people were killed.  He and Gannon investigate all their lives and can't find anything…until he realizes what they had in common. I won't ruin the story for you by telling you what it is but Wildey drew a great sequence showing Friday and Gannon, once they figure out the pattern, racing to prevent Murder #4!

More of these in a week or so.

Two Classic Funnybooks

This was posted here on June 16, 2002 and I have nothing to add, nothing to change…

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Everyone who ever avidly read comic books has a couple of issues in their past that made a big impression on them; that linger forever in the memory like a favored childhood toy. They may not be the best comics ever done but they hit you at just the right moment with ideas and imagery that were at least new to you. Just like a guy never forgets his first girl (or vice-versa), you never quite forget your first favorite comic book.

For most folks who are around my age — I hit the half-century mark last March — that favored first comic is usually a DC or Dell from the late fifties/early sixties. My friend Al Vey — the comic book artist with the shortest name in the biz, one letter less than Jim Lee — always remembered a Dell/Disney special called Donald Duck in MathMagic Land, which came out in 1961. He told me this some years ago at a party at one of the San Diego Conventions and, by one of those loopy coincidences, we were standing next to Don R. Christensen when he said it. Don is a lovely, older gent who has been in animation and comics forever, and who was an extremely prolific funnybook author. When Al said what he said, I immediately turned him around to face Don and made him repeat it. The conversation went as follows:

Al: I was just telling Mark that my favorite comic book when I was growing up was a special called Donald Duck in MathMagic Land.

Don: (after a moment of reflection) Oh, yes, I wrote that.

I love moments like these: Al was thrilled to meet the man who'd created his favorite comic book. Don was thrilled that someone Al's age (and in the business) remembered the book all those years and loved it so.

Anyway, it wasn't the first comic I bought or even the hundredth but I always liked Around the World With Huckleberry and his Friends, a Dell Giant that came out the same year as Al's fave. The book was drawn by Pete Alvarado, Kay Wright, John Carey and Harvey Eisenberg. Years later, when I began writing comics, I got to work with the first three of these gents and — I have to admit — there was a giddy little thrill there. It was the same as the thrill I got working in TV with people like Stan Freberg and June Foray, whose work I vividly recalled loving as a kid. Never got to write a comic drawn by Harvey Eisenberg — he died before I got into the field — but I did work with and became good buddies with his son, Jerry.

The writers are unknown but, at the time, a lot of these comics were being written by Vic Lockman, Jerry Belson, Del Connell, Lloyd Turner and several others. Lockman and Don R. Christensen were the most prolific writers but Don tells me he didn't work on this particular book.

Its contents may seem unremarkable — short stories of various Hanna-Barbera characters of the day, each dispatched to a different foreign clime. Huckleberry Hound went to Africa, Pixie and Dixie to Switzerland, Yakky Doodle to Australia, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy to Ireland, Yogi Bear to Egypt, Snagglepuss to Spain, Snooper and Blabber to England, Hokey Wolf to Italy and Quick Draw McGraw to the Sahara Desert. I can't tell you what I found so delightful about it and I really don't want to oversell it, since the joy of most of the stories was in their simplicity. But the Hokey Wolf tale, to name one, was about a criminal who was running around Rome, chopping up all the spaghetti so it was impossible to get long strands. At age 9, that premise and its resolution (the culprit was a messy eater, traumatized by having stained his clothes, determined to make chopped-up spaghetti popular) struck me as outrageously funny.

I'm not suggesting you seek this comic out. Unless you're nine, it probably won't have the same impact on you…and it also helps to have a certain fondness for the early H-B characters, as I still manage to retain. I don't like everything that I liked then but somehow, the early Hanna-Barbera output — the characters primarily voiced by Daws Butler — still strike me as amusing. And of course, when I devoured the comic books of them, I had Daws's superb voice and comic delivery in my head, and was able to read the word balloons accordingly. It all made for a comic that has stayed with me for more than forty years. Best twenty-five cents I ever spent…

The Name Game

Here we have a posting that originally ran on this site on 2/20/07. I wrote it then and I repost it now to answer a question that I often get. In the comic books that Dell published in the forties through the seventies, we saw all these characters who were famous from Disney cartoons, Warner Brothers cartoons, MGM cartoons (etc.) and they sometimes weren't the same in the comics as they were in the cartoons. As you'll see, when I was a lad I made the erroneous assumption it was because the folks doing the comics weren't very familiar with the cartoons. Wrong. They not only were very familiar with the cartoons, they were often among the people who'd made those cartoons. Here's what I wrote then…

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We all love Wile E. Coyote, the long-suffering Road Runner chaser. But, uh, what does the "E" stand for?

I guess I don't know. I mean, none of the cartoons directed by Charles "Chuck" Jones and written by Michael Maltese ever said. Only a couple of them ever even said his name was Wile E. Coyote.

But it has just (this morning) been brought to my attention — thank you, Devlin Thompson — that more than a thousand websites say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert. The source for this is a 1973 story that appeared in the comic book, Beep Beep the Road Runner, published by Western Publishing Company under its Gold Key imprint. This is noted by Jon Cooke over on this page and as he also reveals, it was the question/answer to the Final Jeopardy question on the 1/18/07 episode of the game show, Jeopardy!

In the story, which was called "The Greatest of E's," Wile E. Coyote realizes he doesn't know and gathers together some of his relatives to answer the question. One is an uncle named Kraft E. Coyote who informs him and the world that the "E" stands for Ethelbert. That is, as far as I know, the only piece of fiction licensed or otherwise blessed by the Warner Brothers company that ever said such a thing.

This raises one of those moral issues that has no firm answer. What makes something like this an "official" fact in the world of animated cartoons? I mean, we know Bugs Bunny is named Bugs Bunny because…well, we just know. But what is the name of the frog that sings and dances in the Jones-Maltese masterpiece, One Froggy Evening? It's Michigan J. Frog, right? Apparently…but that name appears nowhere in the cartoon. As I understand it, the moniker was coined years later when there was some merchandising interest in the character…or maybe when W.B. decided to try and generate some merchandising interest. Chuck or Mike may have come up with it then or someone at WB may have and then Chuck and Mike endorsed and used it…but anyway, that's the frog's name. I suppose. I mean, if the guys who made One Froggy Evening didn't argue the point, who are we to say it isn't?

For that matter, even if some "fact" appears in a cartoon that doesn't make it inviolable. There were WB cartoons where Sylvester the Cat could talk and was owned by Granny. There were others where he couldn't talk and was Porky Pig's cat. Quick: If I asked you, "Who owns Sylvester?," you'd probably forget about all cartoons to the contrary and say it was Granny, who also owned Tweety. There were Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons where for no apparent reason, those characters lived in other eras. Elmer Fudd had a couple of different middle initials in different shorts and characters' appearances were often changing and we could list hundreds of other inconsistencies. The films weren't intended to have an airtight continuity from one to another. Some "facts" were meant to be forgotten.

It was the same with the comic books. Western Publishing licensed the right to do comics of those characters for around thirty years, and the editors at Western thought of the comics as separate entities from the cartoons. The Donald Duck that Carl Barks and others wrote and drew for Western's Disney comics was not exactly the same Donald Duck that appeared in the Disney cartoons. They adapted the character, rethinking and redesigning him for a different medium. (It's a funny thing: When I was a kid and read Bugs Bunny comic books, I always "heard" the wabbit's dialogue in Mel Blanc's voice from the shorts. But when I read a Donald Duck comic book, I never thought that duck spoke with the voice Clarence Nash supplied for Donald in his cartoon appearances…maybe because I understood so little of what the animated duck said and I could read every syllable of the comic book Donald's word balloons.) In some ways, the Donald of the comics was the same character but in others, he was a different but similar creature. And I never quite related the Mickey Mouse of the comic books or strips to any of his animated appearances.

While Western was doing the Warner Brothers-based comics, they changed a lot of the characters to make them — they thought — more workable for print media. They didn't think matching the cartoons closely mattered because, for one thing, those films weren't on TV every week then. During the forties and early fifties, they weren't on TV at all. Many of the kids who bought the comics rarely, if ever, saw the animated shorts and certainly didn't see them over and over and over, like they would in later years. So it didn't matter a whole heap if the comics matched the cartoons; only that they worked as comic book reading experiences. Back then in the Bugs Bunny newspaper strip, which was read by millions, Elmer Fudd rarely appeared and I don't think Yosemite Sam ever did…but Sylvester was a regular. He was a hobo who wasn't owned by Granny, didn't chase Tweety Birds and who had a British accent. Someone thought it made for a better strip that way.

This is why, for instance, the Road Runner in comic books differed so much from the Road Runner in cartoons. When I was a kid enjoying both, I was puzzled. I'd seen Road Runner cartoons. They were tough to come by then but I'd caught one or two and in them, there was one Road Runner and one Coyote and neither spoke. In the comics, the Road Runner not only spoke, he spoke in rhyme. He had a name — Beep Beep — and in some stories, he had a wife and a family of either three or four youthful road-running kids. The Coyote spoke too, though not in rhyme, though that didn't bother me as much. The Coyote had spoken in a couple of non-Road Runner cartoons.

I wondered aloud back then if the folks who made the comic books had ever viewed one of those hard-to-see cartoons — but of course, they had. As I learned much later, Michael Maltese wrote many of those comics and the early ones were drawn by Pete Alvarado. Pete handpainted all the backgrounds for the first Road Runner cartoon, Fast and Furry-ous. Almost all the other writers and artists who did the comics (Phil DeLara, Don R. Christensen, Warren Foster, et al) had worked for the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, if not in Jones's unit then right down the hall. They knew that in the cartoons, the Road Runner didn't talk — in rhyme or at all and it had been a conscious decision to change it for the comics. The editors and creators had also decided to not worry about consistency from comic book to comic book. In some, there was a Mrs. Road Runner and four kids. But there were several years there where the wife and one of the kids disappeared…except that every now and then, they'd inexplicably turn up for a story or two or in a reprint sandwiched in among new adventures.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's no more a "fact" that the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert than it is that the Road Runner is named Beep Beep, has a wife and kids and speaks in doggerel. It said the "E" stood for Ethelbert in one comic book story but that's just one obscure comic book story…and even the guy who wrote it didn't intend it as anything more than one joke on one page of one story in one issue.

How do I know this? Because, as some of you may have guessed by now, I was that guy. I wrote that story. I think I was around twenty years old at the time. I'm pretty sure, by the way, that that one was conceived in a lecture hall at U.C.L.A. while I was simultaneously jotting down script ideas and feigning attention to what a tedious Anthropology professor was teaching. Mike Maltese had been occasionally writing the comics in semi-retirement before me…but when he dropped the "semi" part, I got the job and that was one of the plots I came up with. For the record, the story was drawn by a terrific artist named Jack Manning, and Mr. Maltese complimented me on it.

Still, I wouldn't take that as any official endorsement of the Coyote's middle name. If you want to say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert, fine. I mean, it's not like someone's going to suddenly whip out Wile E.'s actual birth certificate and yell, "Aha! Here's incontrovertible proof!" But like I said, I never imagined anyone would take it as part of the official "canon" of the character. If I had, I'd have said the "E" stood for Evanier.

PS on PS

Most folks know the late Will Eisner for his work on The Spirit, a legendary comic strip/book soon to be a Major Motion Picture. But from 1951 'til 1972, Eisner's big project was PS Magazine, the Preventive Maintenance Monthly. It was a magazine he did for the Army that basically taught soldiers how to care for their equipment, with a special emphasis on the Motor Pool. It included a comic section and the mildest of pin-up girl drawings and is interesting primarily for Eisner's skill in using comics to educate. You can get a look at this work at a new website that has scans of many issues.

Something worth noting: This magazine represented a heckuva lot of work. Each month, Eisner had to take technical notes written by experts, distill it all down to comic and visual format, then take the layouts in for severe scrutiny. Army officials would go over every millimeter of every page and demand numerous corrections…and to hear Eisner or his successors describe the process, it sounds like every freelance artist's idea of Hell. Still, Will felt it was a better existence than doing conventional comics for DC or Marvel. That should tell you a lot about the comic book industry of the fifties and sixties.

I have one semi-correction. The website lists some of the artists who worked on PS and makes it sound like my frequent collaborator Dan Spiegle worked for Eisner on it. Not so, and it's kind of interesting what happened. PS was a government contract, back when the bureaucracy used to insist that companies bid on such projects instead of just awarding them as lucrative no-bid deals to Halliburton. Every few years, the contract was up for bids and Eisner had to compete with any other party who was interested.

In '72, Will decided to give it up and let someone else have it — Murphy Anderson, the fine artist who'd been doing a lot of the drawing for him in the previous few years. Murphy set up a whole studio to produce the magazine and did it for a time…but in the late seventies, he lost the contract to a man named Zeke Zekley. Zeke, whose obit you read on this site some time ago, was an old hand in comics — a one-time assistant to George McManus on Bringing Up Father. He had a company called Sponsored Comics that designed comics for advertising purposes, and he went after the PS contract and managed to underbid Murphy and wrest it away.

So Zeke set up an operation to produce it. To draw the bulk of the book, he sponsored the immigration of Alfredo Alcala, the gifted Filipino comic book artist. To draw the color comic sections in the center, he hired Spiegle. (He offered me the job of writing 'em but when I saw what it involved, I passed. I think Don R. Christensen wound up with the job.) Zeke and his crew did PS for several months of what he described as "doing every issue over and over a dozen times until the Army would give approval." He finally called Murphy Anderson and talked him into buying the contract from him and taking PS back.

Anyway, the point is that Spiegle didn't work for Eisner. I guess I could have just told you that but I find it fascinating that the magazine involved so much labor and so many corrections. And that for twenty years, Will Eisner managed to produce a monthly book that, no matter how well it paid, was just plain too much work for some other folks.

Tales from the Script

Over on his site, Michael Barrier has posted something that interests me greatly…and if you're interested in how to write comic books or even animation, it should interest you. As you may have seen me pontificate many a time, there are many ways to write a comic book script. This is because there are many different kinds of comic books and many different kinds of people who write and draw them with many different modes of talent and expertise. It has long amazed me how many people who work in the field or so aspire learn one way and thereafter believe it is the only way. In some cases, it's not that they think it's the best way. They literally think it's the only way.

Well, one way is for the writer to just sketch the whole thing out on typing paper, doing simple drawings and writing in the copy. I would guess that a solid majority of "funny animal" comics — and maybe even a majority of those about similarly "funny humans" — have been done that way. It was especially prevalent in years past at any company where most of the writers were gagmen or animators who were moonlighting or escaping from jobs at a cartoon studio, and some even wrote adventure or other non-funny comics this way. (Somewhere here, I have a copy of Don R. Christensen's sketched script for a Magnus, Robot Fighter.) Still, I have met experienced comic book writers and editors who deal exclusively in typed scripts and are stunned when they see one executed in this manner. They act like they spotted a unicorn.

Sketched scripts also confuse fans and historians, who think that the guy who did the script did layouts or breakdowns and is therefore deserving of co-credit for the resultant artwork. Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn't. This is a more subjective call that can vary not only from job to job but from panel to panel. As you'll see on the example before us on Barrier's site, the artist sometimes followed what the writer did and sometimes didn't. In such jobs, the artist nearly always has the freedom to just take the idea of each panel and stage the action however he or she may prefer.

What Mike has posted is a twelve-page Porky Pig script for a 1948 issue of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. The script was written by one of my mentors and early employers, Chase Craig, who was an editor for several centuries at Western Publishing, the company that produced these comics. It was drawn (and also lettered, by the way) by Roger Armstrong, who was one of Western's best artists and one of Chase's favorites. The two men had a very odd, occasionally contentious relationship and working with both of them in the seventies, I kept finding myself in the middle of squabbles. Through them all however, Chase's admiration for Roger's drawing was undiminished.

As you can see, most of the changes Roger made were a matter of flipping the action from left to right or vice-versa, and probably for the better. I've seen examples where the artist stayed closer to the sketched versions and also where he changed almost every panel; also, cases where the sketched script was more or less detailed. For the record, I don't think "sketched" scripts warrant the writer receiving partial art credit except maybe in cases like with Harvey Kurtzman or Jack Kirby, where as writer (or plotter usually in Jack's case) he roughed things out on the final drawing paper. I believe this despite the fact that as you can see, Roger got a lot of his ideas for poses and attitudes from what Chase drew.

I guess this raises the question of whether a better comic book results if it's written by someone who sketches out the story, as opposed to someone who types. My experience at Western Publishing (and with Chase and Roger) suggests that no one who was doing comics in that era thought it mattered to the end product; that the determination was made wholly on the comfort of the writer. Some guys couldn't type or preferred not to so they sketched. Some couldn't sketch or preferred not to so they typed. Some (including Chase Craig) could go either way so they just worked in whatever manner they felt like using at that moment.

Some writers even drew because they thought it was more fun to draw. One of the main writers for Western for many years, a gent named John Brady, not only sketched out his scripts but partially colored them with colored pencils. I once asked Chase why Mr. Brady wasted his time doing that since it was so meaningless, since no one involved in the coloring of the printed comic would ever see what he did. His answer was along the lines of, "He just likes doing it. I guess it helps him create. Some guys have to be wearing a certain shirt or facing north or drinking lemonade in order to work. John needs to use his colored pencils." Chase didn't care one bit if a writer sketched or typed and didn't think it mattered to the final product, especially when the artist was going to be someone he respected as much as he respected Roger Armstrong.

Roger Armstrong, R.I.P.

Illustrator Frank Kelly Freas (L) and Roger Armstrong

Roger Armstrong, a giant in the world of cartooning and a teacher to countless art students, passed away in his sleep on Thursday at the age of 89.

This is a very difficult obit to write because Roger did so much and meant so much to so many people. I want to underscore, so it doesn't get lost in the career details, that while he had an amazing life as a cartoonist, he had an equally important — perhaps more important — life as an art teacher and watercolor artist. His landscapes were exhibited in every major gallery in Southern California and hundreds of accomplished artists cite him as a great tutor and source of inspiration. He encouraged so many to paint and draw, and led by example.

Roger Joseph Armstrong was born in Los Angeles on October 12, 1917. His father was a writer and a gagman for silent comedies at Mack Sennett and later a screenwriter for Twentieth-Century Fox. Roger began drawing about the time he started walking and by age sixteen was selling cartoons to local advertising agencies. His first drawings adorned the walls of the Pacific Electric Streetcar Depot in downtown Los Angeles. He attended Chouniard Art Institute for two years (1938-1939) but when the family hit a bleak financial period, Roger was forced to quit art school and take a job at Lockheed working on airplanes. Soon after, through a mutual friend, he met Chase Craig, who was editing the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comic book for Western Publishing, and Chase hired him away from Lockheed to draw Bugs Bunny comics.

A quick aside. Roger always told people he was in the first issue of Looney Tunes. One San Diego Con, I bought a copy of that rare book, took it over to him and asked him to point out his work in it, since I couldn't seem to find it. Roger hadn't seen the issue in thirty-some-odd years but he paged through it…and couldn't find anything he'd drawn. With semi-mock horror, he wailed, "I'm ashamed! I wasn't in the first issue of Looney Tunes!"

But he was in most of the ones that followed…for years after. Eleanor Packer, the senior editor at Western Publishing, hired him to draw other comics for the company, including many of their Disney and Walter Lantz comics. Packer also recommended him personally to Lantz, who hired Roger to work at his studio for several years as a layout artist and animator. He worked intermittently in animation but preferred the comic strip and book format. He drew several newspaper strips for long runs but somehow managed to never get his name on any of them. They included Napoleon and Uncle Elby, Ella Cinders and Little Lulu, plus he drew the Disney Scamp strip from 1978 to 1988. For Western, he drew most of the Disney comic books at one time or another, most notably those featuring Scamp, Pluto, Goofy (or Super Goof)…and he seemed to have a special affinity for the Seven Dwarfs whenever they needed to be drawn. He did all the Warner Brothers comics but often specialized in Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig. He even dabbled occasionally in adventure-style comics and was pretty good at them, though he said they took so long he couldn't make any money in that style.

I worked with Roger a number of times, writing Super Goof during a period when he drew it, and on The Flintstones for a time. In the seventies, we were hired to whip up a few weeks of a Woodsy Owl comic strip but it failed to sell. He was also one of the first members of the Comic Art Professionals Society when we formed it. I have a very vivid memory of him arriving at the first meeting and being introduced to another charter member, Don R. Christensen. Roger had been drawing Don's scripts for comic books for over twenty years and this was the first time they'd met.

Roger was everything you'd want a cartoonist to be. He was funny and he loved to draw. He sure did it well…and for a long time. I haven't heard any details yet about a memorial service but I can guarantee you that if there is one, it'll be packed with artists who'll credit him as a champion, as a role model and most of all, as a good and glorious friend.

The Name Game

We all love Wile E. Coyote, the long-suffering Road Runner chaser. But, uh, what does the "E" stand for?

I guess I don't know. I mean, none of the cartoons directed by Charles "Chuck" Jones and written by Michael Maltese ever said. Only a couple of them ever even said his name was Wile E. Coyote.

But it has just (this morning) been brought to my attention — thank you, Devlin Thompson — that more than a thousand websites say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert. The source for this is a 1973 story that appeared in the comic book, Beep Beep the Road Runner, published by Western Publishing Company under its Gold Key imprint. This is noted by Jon Cooke over on this page and as he also reveals, it was the question/answer to the Final Jeopardy question on the 1/18/07 episode of the game show, Jeopardy!

In the story, which was called "The Greatest of E's," Wile E. Coyote realizes he doesn't know and gathers together some of his relatives to answer the question. One is an uncle named Kraft E. Coyote who informs him and the world that the "E" stands for Ethelbert. That is, as far as I know, the only piece of fiction licensed or otherwise blessed by the Warner Brothers company that ever said such a thing.

This raises one of those moral issues that has no firm answer. What makes something like this an "official" fact in the world of animated cartoons? I mean, we know Bugs Bunny is named Bugs Bunny because…well, we just know. But what is the name of the frog that sings and dances in the Jones-Maltese masterpiece, One Froggy Evening? It's Michigan J. Frog, right? Apparently…but that name appears nowhere in the cartoon. As I understand it, the moniker was coined years later when there was some merchandising interest in the character…or maybe when W.B. decided to try and generate some merchandising interest. Chuck or Mike may have come up with it then or someone at WB may have and then Chuck and Mike endorsed and used it…but anyway, that's the frog's name. I suppose. I mean, if the guys who made One Froggy Evening didn't argue the point, who are we to say it isn't?

For that matter, even if some "fact" appears in a cartoon that doesn't make it inviolable. There were WB cartoons where Sylvester the Cat could talk and was owned by Granny. There were others where he couldn't talk and was Porky Pig's cat. Quick: If I asked you, "Who owns Sylvester?," you'd probably forget about all cartoons to the contrary and say it was Granny, who also owned Tweety. There were Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons where for no apparent reason, those characters lived in other eras. Elmer Fudd had a couple of different middle initials in different shorts and characters' appearances were often changing and we could list hundreds of other inconsistencies. The films weren't intended to have an airtight continuity from one to another. Some "facts" were meant to be forgotten.

It was the same with the comic books. Western Publishing licensed the right to do comics of those characters for around thirty years, and the editors at Western thought of the comics as separate entities from the cartoons. The Donald Duck that Carl Barks and others wrote and drew for Western's Disney comics was not exactly the same Donald Duck that appeared in the Disney cartoons. They adapted the character, rethinking and redesigning him for a different medium. (It's a funny thing: When I was a kid and read Bugs Bunny comic books, I always "heard" the wabbit's dialogue in Mel Blanc's voice from the shorts. But when I read a Donald Duck comic book, I never thought that duck spoke with the voice Clarence Nash supplied for Donald in his cartoon appearances…maybe because I understood so little of what the animated duck said and I could read every syllable of the comic book Donald's word balloons.) In some ways, the Donald of the comics was the same character but in others, he was a different but similar creature. And I never quite related the Mickey Mouse of the comic books or strips to any of his animated appearances.

While Western was doing the Warner Brothers-based comics, they changed a lot of the characters to make them — they thought — more workable for print media. They didn't think matching the cartoons closely mattered because, for one thing, those films weren't on TV every week then. During the forties and early fifties, they weren't on TV at all. Many of the kids who bought the comics rarely, if ever, saw the animated shorts and certainly didn't see them over and over and over, like they would in later years. So it didn't matter a whole heap if the comics matched the cartoons; only that they worked as comic book reading experiences. Back then in the Bugs Bunny newspaper strip, which was read by millions, Elmer Fudd rarely appeared and I don't think Yosemite Sam ever did…but Sylvester was a regular. He was a hobo who wasn't owned by Granny, didn't chase Tweety Birds and who had a British accent. Someone thought it made for a better strip that way.

This is why, for instance, the Road Runner in comic books differed so much from the Road Runner in cartoons. When I was a kid enjoying both, I was puzzled. I'd seen Road Runner cartoons. They were tough to come by then but I'd caught one or two and in them, there was one Road Runner and one Coyote and neither spoke. In the comics, the Road Runner not only spoke, he spoke in rhyme. He had a name — Beep Beep — and in some stories, he had a wife and a family of either three or four youthful road-running kids. The Coyote spoke too, though not in rhyme, though that didn't bother me as much. The Coyote had spoken in a couple of non-Road Runner cartoons.

I wondered aloud back then if the folks who made the comic books had ever viewed one of those hard-to-see cartoons — but of course, they had. As I learned much later, Michael Maltese wrote many of those comics and the early ones were drawn by Pete Alvarado. Pete handpainted all the backgrounds for the first Road Runner cartoon, Fast and Furry-ous. Almost all the other writers and artists who did the comics (Phil DeLara, Don R. Christensen, Warren Foster, et al) had worked for the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, if not in Jones's unit then right down the hall. They knew that in the cartoons, the Road Runner didn't talk — in rhyme or at all and it had been a conscious decision to change it for the comics. The editors and creators had also decided to not worry about consistency from comic book to comic book. In some, there was a Mrs. Road Runner and four kids. But there were several years there where the wife and one of the kids disappeared…except that every now and then, they'd inexplicably turn up for a story or two or in a reprint sandwiched in among new adventures.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's no more a "fact" that the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert than it is that the Road Runner is named Beep Beep, has a wife and kids and speaks in doggerel. It said the "E" stood for Ethelbert in one comic book story but that's just one obscure comic book story…and even the guy who wrote it didn't intend it as anything more than one joke on one page of one story in one issue.

How do I know this? Because, as some of you may have guessed by now, I was that guy. I wrote that story. I think I was around twenty years old at the time. I'm pretty sure, by the way, that that one was conceived in a lecture hall at U.C.L.A. while I was simultaneously jotting down script ideas and feigning attention to what a tedious Anthropology professor was teaching. Mike Maltese had been occasionally writing the comics in semi-retirement before me…but when he dropped the "semi" part, I got the job and that was one of the plots I came up with. For the record, the story was drawn by a terrific artist named Jack Manning, and Mr. Maltese complimented me on it.

Still, I wouldn't take that as any official endorsement of the Coyote's middle name. If you want to say the Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert, fine. I mean, it's not like someone's going to suddenly whip out Wile E.'s actual birth certificate and yell, "Aha! Here's incontrovertible proof!" But like I said, I never imagined anyone would take it as part of the official "canon" of the character. If I had, I'd have said the "E" stood for Evanier.