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When I embarked on my chosen career — Professional Writer — there were a few jobs that, depending on one's definitions, I could count as my first sale. I choose to say it was some work I sold to a short-lived publication called Laugh-In magazine, based on what was then a pretty popular TV show. The magazine was so short-lived that it went out of business before it could print more than a few nuggets of my writing.
That was kind of how my early days in the marketplace went. Before that, I had an amazing 1-2-3 near misses trying to write for comic books published on the other side of the country. I don't guarantee the order in which these things happened and you will note a common theme throughout…
NEAR MISS #1: Dick Giordano, editor at Charlton Comics, liked a script I'd submitted for Ghostly Tales or The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves or any of the comics his company published in that genre. He wrote back that there was a short buying freeze there because they were overbought. But he liked my script so — with my permission — he'd hold onto it and the moment he was allowed to buy more scripts, he'd buy mine. I wrote back that that was fine with me.
A month or so later, I received a letter from him that he was leaving his job for a better one with DC Comics…but he assured me that his replacement would purchase my script the second he could. I never heard from that replacement, nor did I hear from Mr. Giordano after he was ensconced at DC. Two years later when I met him in person, he had no memory of my submission.
NEAR MISS #2: I developed a pen-pal type of relationship with Jack Miller, an editor at DC. He was impressed (he said) with the thoughtfulness and verbiage of my correspondence and invited me to submit ideas to him. He had just taken over the Metal Men comic book from its co-creator/writer/editor Robert Kanigher and was told to find a few writer and give the book a serious makeover of some sort.
He asked if I had any thoughts and I quickly sent him a letter outlining what I would do with it if given the chance. He wrote back that he loved my idea and would pitch it to his "boss," which I assumed meant Carmine Infantino, who had recently taken over as Editorial Director. Once this boss said yes, I would be engaged to write the first of what Mr. Miller and I both hoped would be many scripts for Metal Men…
…and of course, I never heard from Jack Miller again.
Kanigher continued to write the comic with a new direction that was not unlike my proposal. In fact, it was very much like my proposal. I later learned that Kanigher had been demoted from his editorial position at DC but given a contract to write a hefty number of scripts for them. That, I'm sure, is why he was writing Metal Men and I wasn't. And soon after, Jack Miller was fired. (And yes, I briefly thought my idea had been purloined but eventually decided it was more likely coincidence. Either way, it was no sale.)
Are you noticing a pattern here? Editor decides to hire Evanier…but before he can, editor is out of his job. Here's another example…
NEAR MISS #3: Mort Weisinger, editor of the Superman comics, was also impressed with my letter-to-the-editor writing and invited me to submit to his books. I believe this was the period when a number of DC's longtime freelance writers were making unionizing-type noise about demanding things like health insurance and reprint fees. Mr. Weisinger was probably thinking, "Hmm…I might need some new writers soon." That might have been what was on Jack Miller's mind as well.
But I didn't know anything about that; just that an editor told me if I wrote a script, he'd consider buying it. When you're just starting out, you can't ask for much more than that. So I wrote a Jimmy Olsen story which, in hindsight, was an amazing piece of work. I mean, you just don't see many scripts that make every single friggin' mistake a fledgling writer can make in one story. Usually, you have to write a whole pile of scripts to do that many things wrong and here, I'd somehow managed to run the board in one try.
It was outright (and properly) rejected but with some useful criticisms that helped me an awful lot with my next submission — a Krypto story for, I hoped, the back of the Superboy comic that Weisinger edited. He wrote back that when he returned from a vacation, he would send me notes to revise it and that if I couldn't fix it to his liking, he'd buy it and have it rewritten in-house.
That was exciting news but — say it with me, now — I never heard again from Mort Weisinger.
DC Management had decided — for office-political reasons, I was later told — to take one of the Superman titles away from him and the one they took away from him was Superboy. Not long after, Weisinger left the company. I happened to meet him on his last day with DC and he had no memory of my script. And I subsequently realized that the person who'd been sending me those letters signed with Weisinger's name was more likely his assistant, Nelson Bridwell, writing what Weisinger told him to write. Nelson was the author of that fine critique of the rotten Jimmy Olsen story.
So that was the pattern for a while and there were a few other near-misses with submissions that weren't for comic books. I never got depressed or discouraged by all the near-missing. I took comfort in the fact that, with the exception of that Jimmy Olsen monstrosity, my scripts were not going unbought because someone thought they were poor. The no-sales were due to circumstances beyond my control. Even if it was because I was a jinx to editors, that was beyond my control.
And it happened again in a way with Laugh-In magazine. The editor there bought a bunch of things from me and then gave me an assignment — to write and draw a double-page spread. It would be a big mob scene of people at a cocktail party as seen weekly on the TV show and there would be jokes all throughout it.
You might be wondering why he wanted me to draw it. I was wondering that, too. I had rough-sketched out some of the pieces I'd submitted to him, not because I was expecting to draw them for publication. I did it just because that seemed a better way to present the ideas. He thought the sketches showed more artistic talent than I thought I had. I told him, "You must have artists who could draw this better than I could" and he said, "No, I don't."
That might have been true. He showed me an illustrated article he'd just bought and the illustrations were pretty awful. There were two guys in suits and ties and I asked if they were supposed to be recognizable. He said they were supposed to be Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. This was Laugh-In magazine and the drawings were so bad that the notion they might be Rowan and Martin did not occur to me.
Ergo, I decided to take a crack at drawing my piece and I spent a couple of days penciling and erasing, penciling and erasing on this big two-page crowd scene. I didn't try to draw Goldie Hawn, Judy Carne, Henry Gibson or any of the Laugh-In cast members. Mort Drucker or anyone else then working for MAD, even that Sergio guy, could have done that but I sure couldn't.
I drew generic partygoers and really, really slaved over it. Long after I should have turned it in, I finally decided it was as good as it was going to get. Then I took it up to the office, asked to see the editor and the receptionist told me he didn't work there anymore.
I was not the least bit surprised.
