Bill Harris, R.I.P.

Comic book writer-editor Bill Harris died January 8 at the age of 84. Harris started and ended his career in the field of advertising and promotion, moving from company to company for many years. When he secured a post doing promotional work for Dell Publishing, he took a special interest in their comic book line and wound up moving into editorial work on it. That meant leaving Dell and going to work for Western Publishing, which produced Dell's comic book line until 1962. (If anyone isn't clear on the relationship between Western, Dell and Gold Key, I explained it here.)

Harris continued working for Western. He was proudest of his editorial work on Western's Bullwinkle comics and of his writing work on the comic starring Lee Falk's classic character, The Phantom. In 1966 when the King Features newspaper syndicate attempted to start their own line of comics, Bill was hired as editor of its small list of titles which included Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom, Blondie, Beetle Bailey and Popeye. The line was not successful, lasting a little over a year and while Bill briefly did editorial work for Warren's Creepy and Eerie, he did not work much more in comics. Most of his career thereafter was spent working in the promotional department of the New York Times.

One of his innovations when he was in comics was that he was one of the first editors to recognize that there was a promotional value in comic book fanzines. Many of the early zines of the sixties featured letters from Bill, telling fandom what would be forthcoming in the comics he edited. Few others in comics at the time saw any value in that but Harris predicted correctly the growing impact that fanzines and comic conventions would have on the field. For that and for writing some pretty good Phantom comics, he certainly deserves to be remembered.