Robert Kanigher was a writer-editor at DC Comics from 1945 until around 1985. He was amazingly prolific and several folks who worked around him told me, with only slight variations, the following: That one of the other editors could go to him and say, "Bob, I'm in a jam. I need an eight-page romance script" and Kanigher would drop whatever he was doing, roll a fresh piece of paper into his typewriter and without pausing to mull, start writing Page One with no idea whatsoever what might happen on Page Two or subsequent pages. The story, of course, would be done in an hour or so…
…and it would always be publishable. It might be wonderful, it might not but it would always be something they could use with one possible exception. The only reason it might not be used is that it might be the same story Kanigher had written a few months or years before. He had a tendency to repeat himself without realizing it…as any longtime reader of Wonder Woman, Metal Men, Enemy Ace, Sgt. Rock or any other comic he wrote could tell you.
Needless to say, he made a lot of money writing comics…a fact which I think prevented him, as it prevented others in comics, from branching out to other areas. We had a few interesting encounters, including one time when he explained to me that every single comic book ever published by Marvel and most of the non-Kanigher comics published at DC were pure shit.
He always struck me as perpetually angry that he felt trapped in a profession that probably didn't allow him to explore the full range of his abilities. He also struck me as just plain perpetually angry and a lot of folks who worked with him found him difficult to work for. There was a point in the sixties when a lot of DC artists were migrating to Marvel, usually hiding under pseudonyms at first. They were almost all artists who'd worked for Kanigher.
Here he is in a 1972 episode of the game show, To Tell the Truth…