I first met Gerry Conway in a hallway at the DC Comics offices in New York. This would have been a few days before the July 4th weekend of 1970. I also on that trip and in those hallways, first met Len Wein and Marv Wolfman, who would become two of my best friends. Len, Marv and I got to talking that first day about how Gerry had just done the impossible. He'd sold his first professional comic book script and he'd sold it to Murray Boltinoff. It just might have been the last time a young writer sold his or her first script to Murray Boltinoff.
We didn't know it at the time but 1970 was a major turning point in the history of comics. Some would tell you that's when the "Silver Age of Comics" ended. I've never been much for assigning specific years to when the "Golden Age" started, when it ended, when the "Silver Age" started and ended, when the "Bronze Age" started and ended, etc. Those are questions with no answers on which most people could ever agree. But things were changing in comics in and around 1970.
DC was undergoing a radical transformation under the leadership of Carmine Infantino. Jack Kirby had left Marvel and come over to DC. Marvel began publishing Conan. Comic book prices were about to experience a major increase. A lot of longtime talent had left the industry, some of it not by choice. There were all sorts of markers and a big one was an influx of New Talent…kids who'd grown up reading comics were starting to get jobs writing and drawing them. (I oughta know. I was one of them.)
Murray Boltinoff was a longtime editor at DC. Unlike the other editors there then — Joe Orlando, Julius Schwartz, Dick Giordano, Joe Kubert and others — Murray was largely resistant to give work to folks in my (our) age bracket. He would hire some of us (not me but others) once we were well-established with other DC editors or even at other companies. But he was not about to give anyone their first sale.
I can make a case for his attitude. The industry then did not pay royalties or reprint fees or offer health insurance or vacation pay or anything of that sort to its freelancers. If they bought a six-page script from you, they paid you six times your page rate and that was it. The one perk they could give you…the closest thing to any kind of financial security…was that once you were "in," they'd usually (not always) buy work from you on a sorta steady basis.
It was not a contractual guarantee but the editors at the comic book companies then were all men who'd grown up in ways impacted by The Great Depression. They understood that if you were going to pay rent, buy groceries and raise a family, you needed a more-or-less regular income. To the extent their bosses would allow it, they'd try to give you one. Murray didn't want to buy scripts or art from new people when he had long-serving writers and artists who counted on that income.
As far as I know, he never said this policy out loud. If you submitted something to him, he gave it proper professional consideration because that was his job. But ultimately, he spent what he was allowed to spend on veteran writers and artists, including some guys whose incomes had been hurt when, a couple blocks away down Third Avenue, Western Publishing (aka Gold Key Comics) cut back. He just felt that obligation to men of his generation.
Marv and Len and other new writers politely pestered all the DC editors for work and most of them succeeded eventually. Gerry was one of those and, unaware of Murray's reticence in this area, submitted stories to him. And what happened was this: Murray saw Gerry so often in the DC hallways visiting other editors that he thought Gerry was selling scripts to them…so he bought a script from Gerry.
One. Gerry's first sale. And once Murray found out that it was Gerry's first sale, he never bought anything else from him, at least for a long, long time. Gerry said that long, long time was "forever" and it may have been.
But it didn't hurt Gerry's career because other editors were discovering how good he was and how dependable. He really was amazingly prolific, sometimes writing five or six complete comics a month. If he hadn't ventured into other things — novels and a pretty impressive career writing for television — he might have been the most prolific comic book writer of all time. And there were some very good, memorable stories on that list.
One time, we were having lunch at Art's Deli on Ventura Boulevard and on the way out, I ran into a friend of mine who was a longtime comic book reader. I introduced him to Gerry and he immediately began good-natured but earnestly-meant complaining about the Spider-Man story Gerry wrote which killed Peter Parker's love interest, Gwen Stacy. But he ended it with, "On the other hand, I always loved The Punisher. Oh — and that first Superman/Spider-Man crossover!" (I think that's just been reprinted. Gerry was real proud of it…and still bothered that Neal Adams and John Romita had retouched Ross Andru's drawings of the lead characters. He assured me what Ross had drawn was much better.)
This coming July at Comic-Con in San Diego, Gerry's wife Laura will be accepting his Hall of Fame honor. I'm pleased Gerry knew it was coming and sad he didn't live long enough to accept it himself. He certainly deserved it for a truly amazing body of work…and he was a nice guy, too. That counts for a lot in my book…and selling a first script to Murray Boltinoff? That's something I don't think anyone else achieved. Hell, give him the trophy just for that.