My longtime friend (30+ years) Tom Stern writes about that photo I posted of the Flesh Gordon premiere, and also about the one I took of Harvey Kurtzman…
There is a very simple reason you don't remember taking that picture at the premiere of Flesh Gordon: you didn't take it. I did. We had both gone that day to Westwood; you to write about the movie, and me to take photos for you.
And while I don't have a photo of the young lady who wanted to play Little Annie Fanny, I do have some of the woman who decided to get her body autographed. I still remember Harvey's reaction, which was to yell "Whoopee!" flip the marker in the air, catch it in mid-spin, and write (starting on her hip) "Best of Luck from Harvey Kurtzman and Little Annie…" (pulling down the back of her shorts) "…Fanny."
I remember that. Harvey looked like it was the high point of his life…and I believe that woman's ass is up for bids in the next Heritage Auction. Anyway, my apologies for thinking I took that photo. I was there and I had a slide of it amidst hundreds I did recall taking at other locales so I assumed what anyone would assume.
Then: You all might recall a discussion here of a man named Lionel Ziprin, whose obits said he wrote Dell Comics. We were wondering which ones he'd written and I just received this from J. Reed…
I knew Lionel Ziprin and spoke with him about his comic writing for Dell. He never told me about any of the WW II titles he worked on. He did tell me that he wrote several issues of Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle but was uncredited. One issue that he told me about featured a creature that could pull itself apart into 22 pieces and be reformed as something else. This was an allusion— for Lionel anyway, probably not to the readers of Kona — to the kabala and the formation of words from the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Does that ring a bell?
No, but I haven't read a Kona in twenty-some-odd years. I'll bet I hear from someone who knows which issue, though.
In any case, this would indicate that Ziprin worked for Dell in the mid-sixties, so the bio of him had events somewhat out of sequence. The war comics he wrote were probably for Dell's titles of the same period like Combat…so some of those books which have usually been credited to Paul S. Newman were probably written by Mr. Ziprin.
And since he worked for Dell then, he had to have been misremembering or exaggerating when he said he got ten dollars a page for his scripts. Dell paid around half that in the sixties. He was also far from reality when he said, "…I was America's best-selling writer of comic books, my comic books sold in the millions of copies." Dell, back in the fifties, did have a few comics that sold in the millions — mainly Disney titles — and it's unlikely but possible that he worked on a few of them. Dell of the sixties was an entirely different company (see explanation here) and it never had a comic that sold above around 300,000 — and even that was rare. Kona sold about half that.
Thanks for the info, though. These people never received the credit they deserved. Sorry Mr. Ziprin didn't get more before he left us.