Robert Kanigher

[There’s a peculiar and protracted story behind this interview. Steve Whitaker and Tim Bateman, having met veteran editor/writer Robert Kanigher several times at the United Kingdom Comic Art Convention during the 1980s, agreed to interview him for Martin Skidmore’s print incarnation of Fantasy Advertiser.

In 1989, when the Kanighers were holidaying in London, Tim and Steve conducted the interview using, as far as anyone can remember, two tapes, only one of which is transcribed here.

Owing to the caginess and eccentricity of Mr Kanigher, there are many frustrating gaps in the tapes, where Kanigher insisted that the record be turned off. Originally, these were going to be reviewed after transcription, and possibly filled in by less controversial statements.

However, Steve and Tim never got around to transcribing the tapes. The print FA passed out of Martin’s hands, and, fleetingly, into mine before ceasing publication. Then, the tapes were going to be transcribed and run in Comics Forum magazine, which I was editing for the Comics Creators Guild.

But still, no transcripts.

After Kanigher’s death in 2002, it seemed we would have had a freer hand in filling in the gaps from the memory of the interviewers – if we’d been able to get hold of the tapes!

One tape was eventually transcribed by Tim Barnes, though I had to go through and correct/amend mishearing and confusions between the two interviewers.

Then, in 2008, we sadly lost Steve Whitaker, who died of a stroke at the absurdly early age of 51.

The transcript as it’s reproduced here was approved by Martin for publication on FA Online after I submitted it to him. Tim Bateman was approached to see if he’d like to contribute any memories of what was in the gaps, but didn’t come up with anything, and then Martin was of course distracted (as by association many of his close friends were) with what proved to be his terminal illness.

February 22nd was the fifth anniversary of Steve Whitaker’s death, so it seems appropriate to release now – in however fragmentary and frustrating a form – one of the longer interviews he’s conducted that has never previously been published.

If the other tape ever surfaces, I’ll be sure to let people know.

– Will Morgan.]

A Joe Kubert caricature of Robert Kanigher, done for the cover of the Comics Journal.

Robert “Bob” Kanigher.

Legendary writer/editor Robert Kanigher’s career spanned half a decade, from the early 1940s to the late 1980s, as writer and editor. Beginning at Fox (Blue Beetle), MLJ/Archie (Steel Sterling) and Fawcett (Captain Marvel Adventures), by 1945 he was established at the All-American Comics subdivision of DC Comics, where he wrote Justice Society Of America, Hawkman, Green Lantern, Johnny Thunder, and a twenty-year run of Wonder Woman following the demise of her creator, William Moulton Marston. Among the many characters and series Kanigher created are Sgt Rock, The Metal Men, Black Canary, Suicide Squad, Haunted Tank, The Losers, Enemy Ace, Rose & The Thorn, Sea Devils, Unknown Soldier and Viking Prince. During his lengthy career, Kanigher also wrote radio plays, film treatments, short stories and plays.

When holidaying in London, he was interviewed by Steve Whitaker and Tim Bateman on the 22nd October 1989. One of the tapes being believed lost, we open in the middle of a conversation:

Robert Kanigher: I’d written a Wonder Woman story which opens up with Wonder Woman’s mother Hippolyta during a storm at night, she spent the entire night being lashed by storm and rain and so forth. Great secret. The great secret is her fornication with Hercules, and she had to do that every night. That was the beginning of the story. Paid for, but it will never see the light. I wrote another story for Colan. Unfortunately it was going to be backed by the United States Air Force, and they were going to buy I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of copies, so that made it easy-

(Interruption in tape)

Robert Kanigher: … I wrote, and then I looked at it and everything I said was true, but I was putting more of myself into Ditko, also I was being unnecessarily critical, unnecessarily rude, so I cut and looked at the second verse and I was still unnecessarily critical for a blurb, for a recommendation, and I cut again. I didn’t change anything: I cut. I cut three paragraphs out of what I had originally written. If I can remember, this is… this should be off the record.

Steve Whitaker: Oh, OK.

(Tape stopped)

Robert Kanigher: Shooter came out of his office excited and said “Look at them: Kanigher and Ditko, two living legends arguing right in front of my office in our hallway”, it was the production department. He wanted us to do a book, and he didn’t care what it was about. Any idea we had, any way we wanted to handle it, a graphic novel. So Ditko starts to argue about why it’s called a graphic novel, that there is no such thing as a graphic novel. And he tried to force meanings where meanings did not exist. But he tried to tell me that I knew nothing about romance, because his idea of romance was professorial, pedantic. I know what romance is, I’ve written more romance probably than anyone alive. Romance is an excess of passion, and I don’t care if there’re a thousand books that says romance is not that, romance is a time period. Tchaikovsky is a romantic. Excessive, that’s what romance is. So to say that my idea of excessive emotion is not romantic… This man’s idea of emotion is entirely different than mine and I am willing to change mine. My idea of emotion might be different to those living in 1200, or in 12000. My idea of God would change depending on where I come from. Right now? I would lo- There is something I must bring out right now.

Steve: Perhaps you’d finish this piece off rather than interrupt-

Robert Kanigher: No, let it on, let it on, there’s nothing to do with Ditko. No, Ditko is honest and Ditko is sincere, and he’s conscientious, but I think he’s mired in the marble of the past, and he cannot get out. He has a certain philosophy which is immovable. Now, I respect obsessions. That doesn’t mean that I agree with them. Certain obse-

Steve: Does this mean that basically you found that you couldn’t work on something together for Shooter, or you just had to put it into abeyance until you come up with something that you both agree on.

Robert Kanigher: No, well first of all, it all depended on Shooter.

Steve: Who isn’t there anymore.

Robert Kanigher: Shooter isn’t there anymore, and Shooter… Shooter was felled by something I never dreamed, that never occurred to me. I was in Europe at that time. Shooter was the most powerful man in comics, and he deserved it. He was very successful.

Steve: That’s undeniable.

Robert Kanigher: He was very successful. Because certainly, Marvel made a lot of money in his reign, and made us number two, made DC number two. But that much success-

Steve: I think it became a regime toward the end though, didn’t it?

Robert Kanigher: Nothing wrong with a regime as long as it works, and it was working. I was in his office when he was with the utmost courtesy and politeness trying to tell a female editor there that she was proceeding all wrong in a particular project she was doing. And she became extremely defensive, and he said “I know what she’s going to do, she’s going to complain about me”, which is exactly what happened.

Steve: This is Lynn Graeme, is it?

Robert Kanigher: Huh?

Steve: Lynn Graeme? No?

Robert Kanigher: I don’t know.

Steve: There haven’t been many female editors at Marvel, so I wondered which one it was.

Robert Kanigher: I don’t know.

Steve: It doesn’t matter.

Robert Kanigher: I do know that… when someone is as successful as that in the comics field, creates a lot of enemies, they’re waiting for a chance to pull him down. The thing that never occurred to me that what pulled him down was hubris. And you know what hubris is?

Steve: Well, perhaps for our readers.

Robert Kanigher: Hubris is only found amongst Greek heroes or Greek kings. It is a fatal flaw which is not apparent. It is something that the Gods do to bring down who is, you know…

Steve: Full of themselves.

Robert Kanigher: Powerful. No, powerful. Powerful.

Steve: No, surely it’s…

Robert Kanigher: No, see… you’re giving me your negative ideas, about Shooter, and it’s very apparent to me, you’re entitled to it, but I am telling you that the Shooter I saw was not the Shooter that the other people complained about.

Steve: I’ve only met the man once and I’ve had no dealings with him, so I couldn’t possibly pass judgement on him, it’s presumptuous…

Robert Kanigher: As I told you, I found him very intelligent, very decisive, very quick, very courteous, very friendly, and instantly ready to listen to reason.

Steve: But his downfall was hubris.

Robert Kanigher: His downfall was that he went in when the… that’s what I was told… he was doing the work not only of the Editor-in-Chief, and that was his title, but he was really the publisher and he was really the president of that company. And what I was told is that he went in and demanded the title of publisher, and they fired him.

Tim Bateman: That is hubris?

Robert Kanigher: That’s hubris.

Tim: In Marvel Comics terms. It’s pride by a king, possibly any other mortal, putting himself on a level with or above the gods.

Robert Kanigher: Well, that’s one phase of hubris. There are other phases, but that is one.

Tim: Shooter was putting himself above Stan, or on a level with Stan Lee, who is the god of Marvel, if you like. It’s difficult to swallow.

Robert Kanigher: The man doesn’t exist. I mean, where? I don’t understand. He’s in California, isn’t he?

Tim: Yes.

Robert Kanigher: How come every single story published at Marvel, every single story, says “Stan Lee presents”. I mean, does Stan read every story, look at every piece of artwork?

Steve: Isn’t it just a question of-

Tim: I’d hope not, for his sake!

Steve: – when Stan Lee sold Marvel Comics to Cadence Industries in ’72 or ’73, one of the provisos was that every story from then on had to be presented by him. He had to remain the publisher.

Robert Kanigher: Oh, you mean it was like…

Steve: He inherited Marvel Comics from Martin Goodman, and in the process inherited the rights to Kirby, Ditko, Don Heck, Dick Ayers, everyone else’s work. They all belonged to him, basically.

Robert Kanigher: You mean even if they collaborated in the characters, he was able to claim total…

Steve: Effectively, because he had a work-for-hire contract with Kirby and Ditko and the rest of them, the characters all belonged to Marvel Comics, and when Marvel Comics belonged to Stan Lee, consequently he could sell the copyright to the Fantastic Four to Cadence Industries for X million pounds, or X million dollars, sorry, and as a result of that I think one of the things is that he had to stay publisher, it had to say “Stan Lee presents”, you can’t do a Marvel Comic without it saying that. Possibly the Epic Comics, I don’t know.

Steve: I was interested in hearing the rest of the story about Ditko, just because I’m an admirer of Ditko, and I’d like to hear whether you thought about working with him seriously or not.

Robert Kanigher: No.

Tim: I think it would be absolutely impossible.

Steve: I don’t know: he’s a realist, he could work with a sensible script from someone who knows how to…

Robert Kanigher: Oh, I don’t think he’s a realist-

Steve: What I mean is a realist in terms of work, he’s a craftsman, isn’t he, he knows his job.

Robert Kanigher: Oh, no question about it, but…

Steve: I mean you’ve worked with people presumably who you don’t know at all, I don’t know if you know people like Frank Redondo and people like that at all, but I mean you’ve had an association with Frank Redondo for something like seven or eight years on Sgt Rock before they got Joe Kubert’s son-

Robert Kanigher: Frank Redondo. Name sounds awfully familiar.

Tim: He drew Rock for about five years.

Steve: Seven years.

Tim: He took over from Russ Heath. I think he took over from Russ Heath.

Robert Kanigher: Frank Redondo, you mean he took over Haunted Tank?

Steve: No, he drew Sgt Rock. For something like seven or eight years.

Robert Kanigher: Does he live in Manila or something? Is he a…

Steve: I expect he does, yeah. The point I was making was you probably don’t know the guy at all…

Tim: Obviously not!

Steve: But he’s a craftsman who you’ve relied on before.

Robert Kanigher: If Kubert was the editor, then it was Kubert’s responsibility as far as the artwork is concerned, and I had nothing to do with it. I do know that Giffen asked Boltinoff to do a story or two of mine, which were atrocities, absolute atrocities.

Steve: Keith Giffen isn’t very popular in this country.

Robert Kanigher: Well… he is a force…

Steve: We’re rather closer to Europe, so we actually spot where he steals all his material from.

Robert Kanigher: Well, this is hearsay, so it’ll have to be off the record.

Steve: OK.

(Tape stopped)

Steve: Good idea.

Tim: Blitzkrieg.

Robert Kanigher: I went into Carmine. I said I want to do a book called Blitzkrieg. This guy says “go ahead”. Carmine had assured me previously… I had told him I was not going to do any new books any more unless I was the editor, and he said yes. So I did Blitzkrieg. I took three characters, I told it from the German point of view and I went obviously from the nobility and eroticism of World War I’s Enemy Ace. And you know, that came into being because no-one knew about it. It would have been instantly rejected by Jack Liebowitz, if he knew about it.

The ‘stealth’ cover for Our Army At War # 151, Enemy Ace’s debut.

Tim: Oh, so that’s why it’s in the back of Our Army At War and not on the cover?

Robert Kanigher: But suppose I had said I am going to do a new story about a new character, German World War I ace, and I need more space, so I’m going to take it away from Sgt Rock. Which I did. If you looked at that issue, Enemy Ace is longer than Rock. I stole about six pages from Rock, the lead. No-one knew anything about it. See that is what they just don’t understand. Like this Graeme said, “DC decided that they’d show war in it’s reality, that people were killed.” Not DC. DC never knew what I was doing. I decided. Or here: Phantom Stranger. See, I wasn’t prepared for this interview, but there were a couple of things I carried around. Phantom Stranger 4: “There Is Laughter In Hell This Day”. Story: Robert Kanigher, art: Neal Adams. For many this is the quintessential Phantom Stranger story. The decision had been made to do all-new material in this previously reprint book. First time I ever heard of it. It was further decided that the book would take on heavy supernatural tones. Never heard of it. And more of a larger than life quality. I never heard anyone tell me that. Joe Orlando asked me to do it. That was all: period. And I picked it up from there. And I made Phantom Stranger a creature of light, and good.

Steve: And Tala was an equally luminous character, wasn’t she?

Robert Kanigher: She was a creature of darkness.

Steve: But a very dazzling, very beguiling darkness, which is what was fascinating about that issue.

Robert Kanigher: Yeah, but to me… I’m Gemini, the male/female twins, that’s the way the mind works. Also it’s a matter of balance: instead of having one big strong male ballsy character, I’ve got a woman who has as many balls as he has or more.

Steve: Well, in fact, he is actually quite androgynous, isn’t he, and slim, and gaunt, which I really liked, I liked a lot.

Phantom Stranger 4 – which opened up a can of unexpected worms for our hapless interviewers!

Robert Kanigher: If I were a psychiatrist, I would say you told me everything that I would want to know in seeing you for three years at an hour each time. I mean, you have no idea what you’ve just said, but that’s OK.

Steve: I think I do, actually, but let’s not argue on take.

Robert Kanigher: This is not argument.

Steve: OK.

Robert Kanigher: I’m just telling you I’m a chemical animal. I pick up things immediately. Anyway… All right, so you read the “androgynous”, not I. To me, Phantom Stranger is a part of myself, and I am pretty male.

Steve: Yeah, but I wasn’t saying… I think what I was saying was that there isn’t the same-

Robert Kanigher: The more you say, the worse-

Steve: -chest beating stuff you get in all the other comics of the time.

Robert Kanigher: You’re throwing up a smoke screen.

Steve: OK. Fair enough.

Robert Kanigher: It’s OK with me.

Steve: Yeah, sure, I mean…

Robert Kanigher: Everything is OK with me.

Steve: And later people have also interpreted the Phantom Stranger as being a fallen angel or… there’s been some awful interpretations, actually.

Robert Kanigher: I don’t… y’know… you see you’re telling me things…

Steve: Which are nothing to do with you.

Robert Kanigher: No. Try to understand. Everyone came in at nine o’clock. I came in at ten o’clock with Jack Liebowitz. Mort, who was the most successful editor there, commercially, had a touch, a Midas touch, he was called in by the Internal Revenue Service, obviously for something he did, and he came out with a $1500 article. And I think I told you Mort’s private joke was if he and I went down in the same plane, DC would have to close.

Steve: I’m sorry, I’m muddying the waters and we’re supposed to be getting on.

Robert Kanigher: No no no no no no no no no. Look, look… I work… the way I work, no-one has ever worked before or since and I did not have the status that Stan Lee had.

Tim: Are you talking as an editor, or as a writer or as both?

Robert Kanigher: I was an editor/writer at all times. I was invited as an editor/writer. It was clearly understood that I was to write, to continue writing. I wrote in the office. I probably wrote a minimum of two lead stories a week, every single week, in the office as well as doing a maximum editorial role and as well as rewriting most of the stuff because it was so terrible. But that’s not it.

Steve: I mean… what I was going to say, continuing on, we were talking about the Phantom Stranger for a moment.

Robert Kanigher: Don’t go back to the Phantom Stranger, please!

Steve: Did you write more than one story, or did you write further Phantom Strangers?

Robert Kanigher: Well, I wrote several.

Steve: Several. Yeah, because, I mean, there aren’t that many by-lines on… so some of them aren’t…

Robert Kanigher: I’m surprised I got a by-line at all. I don’t recall, because I didn’t get by-lines

Steve: To be honest I remember that story vividly, but I didn’t know it was by you.

Robert Kanigher: Well, I didn’t know it was by me, but according to this article, it is.

Tim: That’s from, what, Amazing Heroes… ?

Robert Kanigher: I don’t know. Yes, Amazing Heroes.

Steve: It would be.

Tim: But, all this rewriting you were doing. This was on presumably on people like Bob Haney?

Robert Kanigher: I… I… He is… he… he is conducting a one-sided vendetta against me (because I won’t respond), but I’ll tell you this off the record…

(Tape stopped)

Steve: I’m sorry to be strict about this…

Robert Kanigher: No no…

Steve: But I have a feeling we’ve got to be…

Tim: We’ve been told that we have to be strict-

Steve: Yeah.

Tim: -command from HQ.

Robert Kanigher: Anyway, the thing is…

Steve: Well Tim’s got all the official questions.

Robert Kanigher: DC never never never never spent a cent or displayed any interest in the entire war line. Never helped. When I went into, let’s say Paul Levitz, I said “Look, now is the time, it’s been on so long, now is the time to give it some publicity, to give it some backing, some support, something”. He said “why rock the boat, things are doing so well”. In general and in… what’s ironical is that the so-called mature fans never knew that the most mature subjects were in the war stories. I don’t know what they thought the war stories were about.

Steve: There’s an awful lot of simple prejudice about war comics, which is simply that they, because they are, because of their subject matter, no matter whether it’s-

Robert Kanigher: The subject matter-

Steve: No matter whether it’s noble or not, or whether it’s a fine story or not, because of their subject matter, they’re keeping the idea of warfare and guns and stuff like that current, when maybe it should be suppressed. I don’t ascribe-

Robert Kanigher: Tell me the difference between-

Steve: A lot of people think just it’s a war comic, it’s vile, that’s it.

Robert Kanigher: Well, what about these mutants, with all those horrible arms, legs, ears, eyes, nose, fumes, noxious fumes… I mean they’re more terrible than anything that was ever devised in a war… And what are they doing? In a war you are fighting for a cause, whether rightly or wrongly doesn’t matter, it is for a cause. But all these people that are coming by the car load, what are they doing? What are they doing to us? What the hell did we do to them? Nothing. No, they’ve got it all wrong, the fans have it all wrong.

Tim: Well, it’s been said before, but in most comics fans are in fact superhero fans.

Robert Kanigher: A man who throws himself on a live grenade is more of a superhero than anything Superman ever did. Why didn’t Superman stop the war? He could have done it by sneezing at Hitler and the Nazis. One sneeze from one nostril and the Wehrmacht would have been finished. The Luftwaffe would have tumbled down and crashed into the ground.

Steve: Well of course, we are crossing over into a rather a difficult situation there, since Superman doesn’t exist and war does.

Robert Kanigher: Well, any of the characters. Flash could have run around the entire German forces so fast that they would have gotten dizzy and apoplexy, and died of a heart attack or whatever, it’s ridiculous.

Steve: I can see, I can believe that I could meet someone like Wildman or Bulldozer or Ice Cream Soldier or Rock: they’re all possible people, they’re all just people with nicknames, they’re not people who can sort of run up walls or…

Robert Kanigher: No they can’t, they’d bleed.

Steve: Or radiate thought waves or something.

Robert Kanigher: All right. Questions…

Steve: Go on Tim.

Tim: Well, something you said earlier sparked a new question, which I haven’t got written down, when you said you weren’t Toth’s editor.

Robert Kanigher: I wasn’t what?

Tim: You said that you weren’t Alex Toth’s editor. I’m sorry, he did work on the Johnny Thunder books.

Robert Kanigher: Not with Johnny Thunder.

Tim: Johnny Thunder was edited by?

Robert Kanigher: Schwartz.

Tim: What about the book called Danger Trail?

Robert Kanigher: I created Danger Trail.

Steve: Yeah, King Faraday.

Tim: You edited?

Robert Kanigher: Yes. Not Schwartz. Schwartz is claiming that he was co-editor. I’ve just been informed about it. Co-editor. No. I created King Faraday, who preceded James Bond by a number of years Robin had the whole list down.

Steve: I think Toth and Infantino both drew that, didn’t they?

Robert Kanigher: Correct. Well, I had a number of people working on it. What I did was I set a scene, say in Bombay, or the Orient- the Paris/Istanbul Express, you know, luxury train. I insisted that they get ‘stats of the actual places and draw them exactly in the story, give it a documentary flavour… this is Bombay, this is the street, this is the monument, this is the statue, this is the Paris/Istanbul Express, which they did. King Faraday I created as a lead, and I’ve been told that he preceded James Bond by a number of years, about a year and a half.

Steve: Well presumably that’s why they reprinted the King Faraday, two of the King Faraday things in Showcase in the sixties just when James Bond was becoming popular again. I remember those.

Robert Kanigher: Well, what happened-

Steve: I think they just called it “Secret Agent” or something.

Tim: I Spy, they called it.

Robert Kanigher: That’s correct.

Tim: That’s the only time I’ve ever read King Faraday. The first James Bond novel was ’53, which is just after…

Robert Kanigher: Now I… I created a lead-in to the revival, of a three-pager in which I brought him up into the present. I think that’s when Julie was brought in by, etc.

Steve: That’s an interesting idea of co-editing, isn’t it?

Robert Kanigher: But he didn’t edit it.

Tim: A lot of this business about you and Schwartz somehow working together, or being co-editors, or making decisions and all that sort of thing, these… these legends…

Robert Kanigher: Never co-edited, that is… it’s sheer myth.

Tim: Occur out of the fact that a lot of the artists who worked for Schwartz worked for you, and vice versa… Infantino and Toth… whereas the other editors, Mort Weisinger…

Steve: Jack Schiff…

Tim: Jack Schiff, George Kashdan, they each had freelancers who would only work for the one editor.

Steve: Kashdan wasn’t really an editor, was he?

Robert Kanigher: Ka- Well, he was fired for incompetence.

Steve: Didn’t he just… He just retired, didn’t he, in the middle of the sixties or something?

Robert Kanigher: Kashdan? No, he was fired.

Steve: Really?

Robert Kanigher: It was the first time an editor was fired at DC, because DC was a paternal organisation.

Tim: And presumably Murray Boltinoff took over all the books he’d been editing.

Robert Kanigher: Gee, I don’t know about that. I want to bring back this just this single point, if I may. I came in at ten o’clock with Jack Liebowitz. When Mort came in late he would become very flustered and apologise: his car broke down, it was an accident (they both came in from Long Island). I just said “good morning”, I didn’t believe in giving any excuses, why should I?

Tim: Well, Mort did, you know. You had this contract, you were saying, where, which you didn’t do nine-

Robert Kanigher: I didn’t have a contract-

Tim: Well, precisely. Mort was supposed to be there nine to five.

Robert Kanigher: That’s correct, but it was a verbal-

Tim: or you can just edit books –

Steve: I’ve got this on tape already, Tim.

Robert Kanigher: Yeah, but…

Steve: We’ve got this on tape already, Tim.

Robert Kanigher: It was verbal. I did it on nerve, on what Jules called chutzpah. I just did it.

Tim: Not to be confused with hubris…

Robert Kanigher: No no no… entirely different. No, if you had chutzpah, you could never have hubris. I mean, hubris wouldn’t dare enter the picture.

Steve: What Hercules wouldn’t give for a bit of chutzpah.

Robert Kanigher: Yeah, oh yeah.

Steve: Or Arachne, or any of the other people that…

Robert Kanigher: We had a damn good book in Savage Worlds.

Tim: Savage Worlds?

Robert Kanigher: Of course, you never saw it: Jenette killed it.

Tim: What was this?

Robert Kanigher: I think I told you. You know, first of all I created, by the way… Julie… I happened to draw the line… Julie Schwartz said “some unknown genius” at a story… at an editorial conference… thought up the concept of Showcase. Some “unknown genius”… he couldn’t remember who the “unknown genius” was…

Tim: We’re about to find out I think, aren’t we?

Not only did Kanigher create the Showcase concept, he was responsible for the reinvention of the Flash which kick-started DC’s Silver Age…

Robert Kanigher: I said to Jack Liebowitz at this conference “Let’s have a book called Showcase. Every month a new book.”

Steve: Because didn’t you do things that-

Robert Kanigher: Wha- ?

Steve: You did “Fireman Farrell” and stuff like that and… or did you?

Robert Kanigher: “Fireman Farrell“? No, that was Mort Weisinger’s.

Steve: That was Mort Weisinger, was it?

Robert Kanigher: Doomed to failure, I mean, who the hell is interested in… How can you put down a fireman in pages? They’re combustible in which case, you know, the thing goes on fire and all right, you’ve got a gimmick. Now…

Tim: So you’ve to buy another copy of the comic. It would have sold millions.

Robert Kanigher: You’re not kidding. So I said, a book called Showcase, each month the readership would know that in Showcase there would be a new character, whole new concept. So, we have Weisinger, Schiff, Boltinoff, Schwartz, Nadel, Kanigher.

Tim: Six. Was George Kashdan not there at that time?

Robert Kanigher: He wasn’t there. So I said six editors, that means that each editor working in rotation will have to do no more than supply two ideas a year.

Steve: Well, in fact I think it was bi-monthly, wasn’t it, as well, or something like that?

Robert Kanigher: That I don’t know. I want them to be monthly.

Steve: They rarely had monthly comics, did they, most of them were eight times a year.

Robert Kanigher: I don’t know, I really don’t know. I conceived of it as a monthly and that the easiest thing in the world would be for an editor to come up with two idea a year. When Carmine and I left my desk, Carmine wanted me to come back. I said “give me Showcase, I guarantee you six issues a year, new ones, each one a new character.” I said “I’ll give you twelve if you want twelve, but let’s say six. I’ll run it for several issues, see if it goes. If it goes, you can give it to another editor because I will be working on other Showcases, and there’ll be a constant stream.” I didn’t get it.

Further popular Showcase alumni, the Metal Men were created by Kanigher over the course of a weekend when another Showcase team failed to turn in their pages!

Steve: Do you know roughly when you suggested this to Infantino, because I know something like the last eight to ten issues of Showcase, almost all of them were edited by Mike Sekowsky, and they’re all Mike Sekowsky’s projects, like Jason’s Quest and Manhunter… and there was another one…

Robert Kanigher: You’re talking about characters that were already done.

Steve: No no no no. They were new Showcase characters, which Sekowsky did. Jason’s Quest was new, Manhunter was new. This was his own Manhunter 2070 or something.

Tim: I think Robert was talking about after Showcase was cancelled in the seventies.

Steve: Well I mean to a certain extent from what I’ve-

Robert Kanigher: There was no Showcase when-

Steve: Because at one stage, Jack Kirby’s New Gods, that he did for DC was supposed to be the next issue of Showcase.

Robert Kanigher: Well, you know more than I do.

Steve: And I’ve even seen the paste-up cover for it, and they said, “let’s put this in its own book, and let’s cancel these books” because from what I heard, Sekowsky fell from grace or fell out with Infantino or something, and so practically everything that Sekowsky was doing just disappeared.

Robert Kanigher: That I don’t know.

Steve: Even Sekowsky, who was editing his own letters pages was dropping very heavy hints about it, saying if you have any complaints about these comics go and –

Robert Kanigher: Sekowsky wanted to kill me. I don’t know…

Steve: Really?

Robert Kanigher: Oh, I know what it was.

Steve: Because he took over Metal Men from you, didn’t he?

Robert Kanigher: He didn’t take over… you see, I was supposed to go away for six weeks, no more. I mean they wanted me to take a vacation at their expense. They thought I was coming back in six weeks. This’ll have to be off the record.

Steve: OK.

(Tape stopped)

Robert Kanigher: I never asked… I… I never worked with anyone. That is, I never worked with the publisher, the assistant publisher, the editor-in-chief, I… nobody. Whit started it by just giving me titles and that’s the last I saw of him. And then… those were the romance titles, and no-one seems to know anything about the romance editors, do they?

Steve: It’s another thing that the fan-addicts-cum-superhero fans don’t bother with.

Robert Kanigher: Well, I taught Zena Brody, who was the first, and she edited like myself. The hell with the continuity, full speed ahead! And then there was Ruth Brant from Montana, no, Dakota, North Dakota. Beautiful girl. Zena left to marry her doctor. I mean, her boyhood sweetheart became a doctor and she married him and they got in Ruth Brant from North Dakota, beautiful girl.

Tim: So is that “Brant” or “Grant”?

Robert Kanigher: B-r-a-n-t.

Tim: Right, for the record… Nobody knows anything about all these people, especially over here.

Robert Kanigher: Then when Ruth went back for personal reasons, I recommended Phyllis Reed, who was the switchboard operator.

Steve: At DC?

Robert Kanigher: But they didn’t know that she was an artist, they didn’t know she was highly intelligent, they didn’t know that she became a switchboard operator because it was an idiot’s job during which she could plan the painting she was going to do that evening. And I taught her how to be an editor and I taught her how to write. So when I was asked for a recommendation, I knew… they said, “switchboard operator? what does she know?”, I said she’s much more than that, I said she’s an artist and does art and she’s intelligent, she knows writing. I didn’t tell her what I was doing privately, I didn’t tell her then what I was doing privately. I had every confidence in her and she was good. The way it worked with her is she would make a sketch of a cover and give it to me and I would write the feature stories.

Tim: Can’t resist it: Julie Schwartz used to work like that as well.

Robert Kanigher: From… well… And then she became pregnant and left for East Hampton, and the editor Larry Nadel, for reasons I cannot… he was in charge of the funnies and so forth

(Microphone repositioned)

Robert Kanigher: So I was asked… Jack says “I’ll let you know”. I was doing all that work… “I don’t want you to get sick” (and so forth and so on). Who do I recommend? Well a lot of people came to me and asked. Bill Finger was one of them. I refused to-

Steve: The romance books?

Robert Kanigher: What? The romance books. Because I couldn’t trust Bill. And I made the worst choice in my life, it was Jack Miller who was eventually fired – for petty theft. He sold artwork.

Tim: That’s rather…

Robert Kanigher: That’s off the record too.

Steve: Yeah, sure, OK.

Robert Kanigher: All right, Jack did…

Steve: Because Jack Miller disappeared from DC and my impression was I thought that Miller had died.

Robert Kanigher: He was fired. He was fired. He did die.

Steve: He died in about 1969 or something like that, didn’t he.

Robert Kanigher: He did die. He fell in love with a little snot-nose, and she had him buying her stockings and things like that. I mean it was… it was… you know, out of the pulp romance things. That’s where vengeance came in. Not because of me…

Steve: So Jack… You got Jack Miller in and that was… Jack Miller hadn’t worked for DC before that.

Robert Kanigher: Yes, he was copying my romance stories, I didn’t know about that.

Steve: But he’d never edited before.

Robert Kanigher: No.

Steve: Because he’s another editor name that we didn’t mention before, wasn’t he?

Robert Kanigher: No, no. No, he begged me, and he said he would never take it unless I continued doing what I had always done, which was to write all the romance features. And then he began to complain; he had so much inventory, every time I met him: inventory, inventory. I lost the heart to write, so I stopped writing romance, and I was getting $10,000 a year just from romance alone. I found out that he and his girlfriend were writing all the stories, and they had gotten rid of all my people, but the Gods caught up…

Steve: So, by the middle of the sixties, you weren’t writing anything for the romance lines at all.

Robert Kanigher: What, romance?

Steve: Yeah.

Robert Kanigher: No. I would say no. No, and as I say, it was costing me $10,000 a year.

Steve: All I can remember… I mean, I’m an admirer of the romance books, but you can’t get them-

Robert Kanigher: All the leads… Well, the leads were gone, when, you know, city hospital nurse, advice to the lovelorn editor, the Hollywood starlet…

Steve: This is all fifties stuff, isn’t it really?

Robert Kanigher: Yeah. When they stopped, it was because I stopped and I didn’t write romance any more.

Steve: I see.

Robert Kanigher: Now, I should have taken over the romance magazines, but I think Kirby had a contract with Carmine… Carmine was felled by hubris too. He came in on a Friday and… better not have that down. It’s not known.

(Tape pause)

Steve: OK. As long as you say, let’s just leave it on.

Robert Kanigher: Now you see, I knew Carmine… Carmine mafias many people, including full Italians. Colletta cried to me because he thought so much of Carmine, what Carmine did to him. I mean, Carmine had comic friends and he ordered sangwiches – s-a-n-g- I knew that when he met the higher-ups he had to go. He can’t order sangwiches and be the publisher/president of the company. I don’t know his relations with the people upstairs, but he must have acted true to form and he came down on Friday and was told to clear out by the end of the day, clear his desk. That’s how much warning he was given. He never showed his face at DC again. He continued working, but he sent his work in by messenger. I said, all he had to do was come in just once, just once. Most likely no-one would make any remark, but if anyone would make a remark, it would be just once and then it would be gone and forgotten. But he didn’t have the guts to face the audience. So, he never came back. Everything was by messenger. And Carmine, to me, is the epitome of a comics illustrator, completely a comics illustrator, whereas Kubert is capable of rising… I won’t say rising above… I took him with me to my fencing salle, and he made sketches of the people, but he didn’t make any of me, the bastard, but one of them, a doctor or gynaecologist, wanted to buy the sketch that Joe did. And the only time that Joe ever gave away something for nothing was when he gave this doctor the sketch. This can go on for ever, but this is raw. What do you want to know?

Tim: It’s all absolutely fascinating.

Steve: Well, actually, we got to the end of your talk about romance and stuff like that, so you didn’t have anything to do with the romance books, surely you came back onto the romance line towards the end of the sixties, maybe even seventies, was it just as a writer, and Dorothy Woolfolk was editor.

Robert Kanigher: Dorothy Woolfolk quit. And that’s when Carmine called me back: please take over, etc., etc.

Tim: So this was…

Steve: And she was doing Lois Lane and…

Robert Kanigher: Yeah, and I think Wonder Woman, also. I’m not sure. I think all the romance books, Wonder Woman, Lois Lane.

Steve: Yeah, she inherited Wonder Woman, because there was a lot of trouble with it when Sekowsky was booted out, they didn’t know what to do with it.

Steve: And she conned Carmine into giving her an assistant. She was the first one to have an assistant.

Tim: Who was that?

Robert Kanigher: It was an attractive blonde who married an Italian musician, that’s all I can tell you. And I counted, oh about ninety scripts she had bought but never read, you know. And she was late with everything. But I ripped everything together and… I was conned too by Carmine and Harrison, because they said all I had to do was get the scripts and Colletta would take care of everything from there on.

Tim: You’re not saying Colletta was drawing them all?

Robert Kanigher: Inking.

Steve: Well, he was inking it and-

Robert Kanigher: Only inking.

Steve: And producing it.

Robert Kanigher: Only inking, and I had to share part of my freelance fee for each (I was getting a freelance fee for each magazine). So I thought… they were after me incessantly: “You won’t have anything to do, just get the scripts, he’ll do everything else. It’ll be easy.” And so on and so on. I wound up doing everything. Colletta inked over DC, over the whole building, he was exhausted with the inking he was doing. He inked everything. He used to lie on the floor, fully stretched, exhausted.

Steve: Well, this is presumably where all the stories about Colletta taking the stuff home and his whole family would ink it.

Robert Kanigher: Well, that I don’t know.

Steve: Well some of it looks like that.

Robert Kanigher: That I don’t know. I don’t know. But… that was Carmine… and… a story… I came back from Europe and Carmine had a conference and I lost all the books, they were given to Kirby. And he told me that he would make it up to me, no question about it and all that kind of stuff. Well…

Steve: The romance books were given to Kirby?

Robert Kanigher: Then, who else was there? There were a couple of people there. Wait, there was Simon. Who’s the writer? Simon?

Steve: Joe Simon was writing for DC at the time.

Robert Kanigher: OK. Then there was Simon. Simon was under contract and…

Steve: Yeah, that makes sense because he’d been an editor for Harvey for some-

(Tape breaks off)

Steve: So we had Simon-

Robert Kanigher: -who was under contract, he had to give him something, like he… I think Kirby did the Losers?

Steve [?]: Yeah.

Robert Kanigher: Also because of contract, and the Losers went into the ground after one year.

Tim: In what way: saleswise?

Robert Kanigher: Bombed.

(Tape runs out)

Steve: That’s what, Our Fighting Forces?

Robert Kanigher: I happened to have read a letter in the Losers when Kirby was doing it, from a reader who said that… all of Kirby’s character- villains are incarnadine, you know, Kanigher’s, sometimes you can’t tell the difference between a hero and a villain, because they change places. I didn’t make such-

Steve: That’s a little bit unfair, I think, a little bit unfair. There are some truly memorable characters in Kirby’s Losers.

Robert Kanigher: No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m telling you that the reader, speaking of the Losers only, said that there was too much black and white only as far as the opposition was concerned. So I mean he was nice enough to allow the letter in, and I got the stuff back. See, I had always…

Steve: So around about that time, as well as taking- they took the romance titles away from you, which you were working on, and I mean, presumably you were editing… were you editing Our Fighting Forces when you were writing the Losers? I mean, because you were…

Robert Kanigher: No, I took over Dorothy’s desk.

Steve: Yeah.

Robert Kanigher: But-

Steve: You weren’t editing anything much.

Robert Kanigher: As far as I remember. No, that’s correct, because I say, I told Carmine I’m not giving any more new ideas unless I edited, and he said yes and I found that Joe was editing.

Tim: Rima, and the Ragman and…

Robert Kanigher: And Panzer, for instance, which could have been a great book, about a German tank crew.

Steve: And this is where Blitzkrieg and stuff like that comes in.

Robert Kanigher: And Blitzkrieg came in…

Steve: Gravedigger, Men of War and all that stuff…

Tim: I don’t think that Gravedigger is…

Robert Kanigher: No. No. I had nothing to do with that.

Steve: But you did Enemy Ace in the back of Men of War, didn’t you?

Robert Kanigher: Yeah. Yeah. And the worst one was done by Chaykin. What I saw was a lot of spaghetti. I couldn’t see any characters, just spaghetti on all the pages. He also did a cover of a revival of Sgt. Rock, and it was awful. First of all, it wasn’t Rock at all, it was just a man, a soldier, standing up, you know, like this {presumably gestures}. A cover has to be an idea, a single idea, one idea, that’s what a cover should be. Not a story, but a provocative idea. One, simple, nothing complex. That was always my idea of what a cover should be: to draw you in, not to tell you the story.

Tim: Fair enough.

Steve: And there’s probably also Weird War Tales, you probably did some stuff in that, didn’t you?

Robert Kanigher: Well, yeah.

Steve: All introduced by Death, or someone or someone who seemed to be…

Robert Kanigher: Schwartz was the editor of Weird War Tales except Nelson Bridwell did the editing. Nelson called me and asked me to do the Weird Commandos, no… not the Weird Commandos –

Tim: Creature Commandos.

Robert Kanigher: Creature Commandos. So I called Robin, and I said who are the Creature Commandos, I don’t know anything about them. He told me, and I said I can’t do them, they’re too repulsive! So I made them as human as possible and I introduced a female character, Dr Medusa. Whenever I came near anything that was repulsive, I tried to humanise it.

Steve: Weren’t some of those Grandenetti or something like that, Creature Commandos. Pretty unmemorable looking, actually, if I remember.

Robert Kanigher: That I don’t know.

Tim: I think a couple- well, some of them, were drawn by Dan Spiegle.

Steve: Ah, that’s probably why they looked nice.

Robert Kanigher: Spiegle did some good work on the annuals that I did.

Tim: On the Rock annuals.

Robert Kanigher: On the Rock annuals.

Steve: With Larry.

Robert Kanigher: I brought back Larry Rock.

Steve: They’re great stories.

Robert Kanigher: Rock’s brother.

Steve: The one on the ski lift… (rest unclear)

Robert Kanigher: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim: And he also drew a two or three part Balloon Buster, which you did in the back of Unknown Soldier.

Robert Kanigher: Could have been. Could have been.

Tim: He doesn’t remember!

Robert Kanigher: No, I don’t!

Steve: Sorry, I was thinking for a moment about the Enemy Ace meets Balloon Buster, but that’s Frank Thorne, isn’t it?

Robert Kanigher: Yeah.

Steve: Who you also worked with on Tomahawk.

Robert Kanigher: With who?

Steve: Son of Tomahawk.

Robert Kanigher: Yes, yes, that’s right.

Steve: That’s something I remember. I remember you doing a story in Hawk, Son of Tomahawk, which was called something like “Christmas” or something like that, and the splash- you open the splash page, and it’s Easter. It’s the Crucifixion.

Robert Kanigher: That I don’t know. That I don’t know. I know I did a story-

Steve: I liked those stories very much. You didn’t really have an awful lot of time to get anywhere with them, because I think it only lasted about ten issues, that spree on Tomahawk.

Robert Kanigher: Well, I continued… See, I always thought that I would get the wartime books when I left staff, say. Because I was on- see, the people don’t know, I was on staff all the time. I left a desk, but I was on staff, I was being paid a salary, my editorial salary, against a number of pages. In other words, those pages paid my salary, but the rest was freelance. And that was until a couple of years ago. That’s what they did. Giordano didn’t want that.

Tim: See, I presumed you had a contract which said you’d be paid-

Robert Kanigher: I had no contract.

Tim: But you can’t be on staff if you don’t have a contract. Or can you?

Steve: No, I think-

Robert Kanigher: (sounding tired) I never had a contract.

Steve: They must have a piece of paper somewhere, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to pay you, legally.

Robert Kanigher: I never signed anything.

Steve: Ah. That’s interesting.

Tim: Well, that’s the way big comics companies work.

Robert Kanigher: Well, you see, I never signed anything that said Rock- that for one penny I gave- I sold Rock to DC. There is no evidence anywhere of my ever having signed away any of the characters that I created, which are almost two hundred.

Tim: Right. But I mean, well that’s the same with every other comics creator, as far as I’m aware, apart from very few exceptions.

Steve: Not quite true with the artists, because an awful lot of the cheques used to have a statement on the back of the cheque…

Robert Kanigher: All the cheques…

Tim: The writers’ cheques, the editors’ cheques…

Robert Kanigher: All the cheques, on the back, every possible right, including publishing in the Moscow urinals.

Steve: Well, I mean the Marvel contract says something like “all rights forever”.

Tim: And even if they haven’t yet been invented…

Steve: Well, exactly…

Tim: Well, that’s the word…

Steve: I’m terrified by the fact that I’ve signed one of those contracts, when I was doing colouring for Marvel about four or five years ago-

Tim: For the British-

Steve: For the British comics. I mean, if I do anything else for them, it’s quite possible they’ll just bring out this contract and say everything I do for Marvel Comics belongs to them forever. That’s what this piece of paper says.

Robert Kanigher: Well, the cheques that we got, the back of it contained – at least half of the back – a single space, every possible right that the Warner lawyers could think of was down there. You cashed the cheque, the rights belonged to them. About ten years ago, lawyer- writers from Sick magazine sued the publishers and won the case. Because they said, it was ruled that it was servitude. That these were freelance, that they were not Dupont chemists working for a weekly salary at the Dupont laboratories where everything belonged to Dupont. These were people who worked freelance, on their own, and therefore what they brought in could not belong to the company. So what happened? The Sick publishers and the Warner lawyers thought up the “work for hire”, where during the period of time in which you are doing a piece of work, you are hired by them. So you are in the same position as a Dupont chemist. That’s what they are fighting against, and that is going to be overthrown.

Tim: I think a lot of- Yes, I was reading in the Comics Journal about “work for hire” was either dead as they-

Robert Kanigher: That’s going to be over-

(Everyone talks at once)

Tim: Part of the point about being a Dupont chemist, and being an employee of Dupont or Ford Motor Company on the assembly line, if you’re an employee and you’re ill, they give you sick pay. When you retire, when you’re sixty-five, you get a pension.

Steve: Not if you’re a freelancer.

Tim: And if you’re a freelancer, you don’t. And like, that’s the difference between the two. And the way Comics companies are working it now is they’re having it so that with “work for hire” they’re having it so they’ve got all the advantages of having employees, of owning everything, without any of the- having to pay the price.

Steve: I think what you said about servitude is… actually that’s the perfect word for it, really, in a lot of ways.

Robert Kanigher: Except, remember, you do have thousands of people who will do anything to see their name in print, for nothing.

Steve: Not for long, no.

Robert Kanigher: No, we hope not.

Steve: Probably not. I have a feeling that anybody that gets their name in print finds out pretty quickly that it’s far nicer to have some security alongside it.

Robert Kanigher: What do you think the fan letter writers… you got fan letter writers, you have fan letter writer editors who hire fan letter writer writers, and it perpetuates itself.

Tim: Right. Part of what’s wrong with comics today…

Robert Kanigher: It’s becoming a fan-oriented/led/written/drawn…

Steve: It is a little world, it is a little… it lives off itself to a certain extent…

Robert Kanigher: Questions? Some questions?

Tim: Right, the Phantom Stranger, back in the fifties. Did you edit that? Or write it?

Robert Kanigher: No.

Tim [?]: You didn’t?

Robert Kanigher: Orlando did.

Tim: No, we’re talking about the 1950s.

Robert Kanigher: Oh no no no no no…

Tim: That was somebody else.

Robert Kanigher: No. No. That was a ridiculous thing.

Tim [?]: Did you have anything to do with the Unknown Soldier?

Robert Kanigher: I wrote Unknown Soldier.

Tim: You wrote it?

Steve: Wasn’t it Haney who claims to have created that at one time?

Robert Kanigher: Well, let’s put it this way: when I first became an editor, I suggested an idea for a character called the Unknown Soldier. My first dig at it was in the forties. My idea was that at a critical point, whether it was the air force, infantry, navy, tanks, or whatever, at a life and death point this stranger would appear and the stranger would get them out of the situation. By stranger I mean he’d be a navy man, he would be a pilot, or whatever was necessary. And he would disappear. And I would call it the Unknown Soldier. And it was not accepted.

Angel & the Ape, a previously-unsuspected Kanigher creation?

When I say it was not accepted, I mentioned that it’d… I mentioned it in passing, like the last thing before I left my desk I said to Irwin I have an idea called Angel and the Gorilla. Angel is a dumb blonde in the classical sense, she runs a private detective agency. Her assistant is a gorilla, a real gorilla. Two things he liked, bananas, he was just like any ordinary gorilla, except he liked to wear mod [?] clothes. And he was very sensitive about being called an ape or a gorilla, that’s all, otherwise he was an animal, and he was her strong man. And he didn’t respond, so on my way out I passed Carmine, and Carmine was tired of working alone at his home, so they gave him a cubicle to work in. I told Carmine the whole idea. I was going to bring it to the papers, I thought it was a natural for the newspapers.

Tim: This is a newspaper strip?

Robert Kanigher: Next thing I hear, Carmine tells me OK, ready, we can go. I sold it to Irwin, whatever, you can do Angel in the… I said I’m not ready to do it, I’m, I’m out of my desk. Great. I was not ready. He asked me a couple of times, I said wait. The next thing I knew Orlando was the editor, and I don’t know who wrote it, and the two of them hadn’t the faintest idea of what the concept was about, because it was fantasy, and fantasy can be successful only when it is reality. That is, once you accept the fantasy concept, just the concept alone, then everything must be absolutely real, like that movie where the prize-fighter crashes and the angel comes too late and he assumes another body. Warren Beatty revived it, it was very successful.

Steve: Heaven Can Wait.

Robert Kanigher: Here Comes Mr. Jordan or something I think, that was the original.

Steve: Yeah, it was remade as Heaven Can Wait.

Robert Kanigher: Now, I wrote a play that was straight, absolutely straight, but the combination of the two would have been absolutely farcical, the reactions and everything.

Steve: You weren’t pleased with what DC did with it then?

Robert Kanigher: I didn’t…

Steve: I must say I thought that some of Bob Oksner’s best work, beautiful work…

Robert Kanigher: I don’t know anything about it, I just know when I was told that one of the stories concerned that the gorilla was peddling artwork to comics…

Steve: It was a satire on Stan Lee in fact, he was called something like…

Robert Kanigher: Stan Brag, that’s right.

Tim: Appropriately!

Robert Kanigher: Well, it bombed.

Steve: Well, the last issue was called Meet Angel, and even that didn’t work.

Robert Kanigher: All right, now, how many people know that I created it?

Tim: No-one.

Robert Kanigher: Orlando…

Steve: You claim it, in different interviews, you have claimed that you created it yourself.

Robert Kanigher: Yes, but I mean, ordinarily they assume that Carmine created it, and Orlando said Carmine created it, in my presence, in a room full of people, and Carmine was there, I said “Who created Angel and the Ape?”, he said “you did”, so that was established.

Tim: So you were going to do that as a newspaper strip, and at some point-

Robert Kanigher: I couldn’t any more.

Tim: Well you- yeah.

Robert Kanigher: It would have been good.

Steve: That’s something that I was going to ask, that’s one of my questions on that piece of paper actually, was I know that you’ve mentioned before that you worked on the Flash Gordon strip for Dan Barry in the fifties.

Robert Kanigher: Oh, I did it for a year.

Steve: For a year.

Robert Kanigher: Yeah, that’s right.

Steve: I mean, a lot of people were aspiring to get into newspaper strips because obviously the payment from the syndicates was much better than what you’d be getting from someone like DC. How come you never went into that? Or maybe you did and we don’t know about it?

Robert Kanigher: Dan Barry was late. They were all late. They were always late.

Steve: Notorious.

Robert Kanigher: So he called me and we got together and I’d never done anything like it, so I said all right. And he said that I would do the daily and then I would do the Sunday. The Sunday was the carrot dangling before me.

Steve: And of course Barry wasn’t doing the Sunday, it was nothing to do with him.

Robert Kanigher: Barry was doing the Sunday.

Steve: No. It was Mac Raboy, he did the Sunday from 1946 to 1968 (when he died).

Robert Kanigher: All right, then I’ll tell you what Seymour Barry told me. Maybe Dan did the Sunday after this fellow died.

Steve: That’s possible. It’s 1968, though. It’s a lot, lot later.

Robert Kanigher: Well I did the… I did two weeks at a time, in about two hours. And I had an idea for a character, I went in with Irv Novick, and Seymour Barry liked it, and he presented to a board and they thought it was too much like something else, which it wasn’t: they simply didn’t understand it. And Seymour said to me “Why is it that the dailies are so good and the Sundays so bad?” and he says “Dan Barry’s keeping it secret that you are writing Flash Gordon.” He says, I knew it I knew it immediately. He says-

Steve: I remember you saying, “so I see you’re writing Flash Gordon now”.

Robert Kanigher: Yeah, I thought he’d recognise my style. I said “I am not doing the Sunday, Dan is doing the Sunday. And after about a year, Dan said that “I’m not satisfied”, he says “you’re taking Flash away from me, from what I want to do with Flash“. He said “I’ll give you all the greatest letters of recommendation {tails off into a mumble}, but I want to do it myself again”. I said “don’t give me any letters of recommendation”. Some time later, Bill Finger came to me. He said that Barry had approached him, and a number of other people, to write, because Barry was falling behind again. And he said “he gave us as an example of a script to follow, one of yours”.

Steve: Hypocrisy. Lovely. What can one say? I mean, Barry is well, it’s well known that Dan Barry basically took on Flash Gordon, he gave a damn about the strip, he loved the strip, but he had so much other work on his plate that he just farmed it out to all sorts of people. He had Harvey Kurtzman, and-

Robert Kanigher: Harvey Kurtzman worked for me, you know.

Steve: Well, we’ll get on to that, that sounds fascinating, but I mean, he had Kurtzman and Frank Frazetta and other people all working for him at the same time on the strip-

Robert Kanigher: That I don’t know.

Steve: -and Barry was just possibly inking it, or possibly inking it with an assistant even.

Robert Kanigher: I really don’t know because I never looked at it. Forgive me, but I consist-

Steve: They recently printed quite a nice edition of something like a year and a half’s worth of Flash Gordon, which contains the short sequence which Frazetta put together, and all of Kurtzman’s stuff, because Kurtzman was basically writing it by doing storyboards with word balloons, which is the way he works.

Robert Kanigher: I don’t know about that, I just know he gave me $40 for doing the dailies and he was going to give me $75 for doing the Sunday. And, as I said, I used to sit down and in two hours I was able to do two weeks at a time.

Steve: That’s twelve tiers.

Robert Kanigher: So that was easy, and I was waiting to do the Sunday, which I never got. OK.

Steve: I think he was pulling the wool over your eyes.

Robert Kanigher: Of course he was, there’s no question about it.

Steve: So you never did any other syndicated work as a result?

Robert Kanigher: I had this one- I had another idea, but I never did anything with it, and that was… archaeologists like Cousteau say, but Americans, were diving in the Mediterranean and one comes up with this beautiful goddess (which is not very new), marble, and he falls in love with her, you know… she was lying at the bottom of the sea, brought her up, and brings her aboard the ship, a sailboat (it wasn’t a big one like Cousteau’s scientific), it was a big sailboat, and he hauled her up obviously, craned her in, he’s sleeping and he wake- looks up and there she is, standing over him. He had her on deck, and he takes her back with him and she becomes the most sought after model in the world, but there are times when she turns-

Steve: This is all pre-My Fair Lady and stuff like that, is it?

Robert Kanigher: Oh yeah. There are times when she- bu- there are times when she turns back into marble again, so he gets into difficulties that way. He’s making love passionately to this beautiful goddess, and all of a sudden, there’s stone-

Steve: That’s a cold shoulder-

Robert Kanigher: -which it probably could have given a hernia to him, many different aspects of him. So he-

Steve: Well did you do a treatment on that and stuff and submit it?

Robert Kanigher: Well, no. You see there are a number of things I intend doing, I mean there’s a line of them. You can call them works in progress. I gave an idea – you can leave this…

Steve: Yeah, sure.

Robert Kanigher: I gave a concept to Larry Hama called Archangel, and he says it’s too good for comics. He says “if you don’t need the money and you’re patient enough to wait about a year”, he and his partner, a woman producer are going to see the head of Paramount or someone who rules over these things, they had a number of concepts for movies also. One of them, he told me, was about a surfer. I didn’t say anything. I’ll tell you what my idea was, but it has to go off.

Steve: Sure.

(Tape does goes off at this point)

Steve: – and they’re in his debt, and he makes his escape on her horse then after that. And just the counterpoint of the nun, as opposed to the situation with Denise, where she’s saying things like “I could never be frightened of you” and stuff like that and you know there’s some kind of chemistry there, which is, you know, doomed.

Robert Kanigher: Isn’t that wonderful, this is all new to me.

Steve: I really enjoyed it.

Robert Kanigher: Anyway, very simply, I know I can handle it, I know him, he will accept it , it would be a monumental, it would be a Homeric-

(Tape goes off accidentally?)

Steve: Sorry to cut you off.

Robert Kanigher: No, that’s all right.

Steve: In one of the-

Robert Kanigher: You can mention that these are works in progress.

Steve: Sure.

Tim: Right, we’re discussing works in progress. Robin Snyder, in a little prose piece at the end of one of the war digests, about five years ago, says Kanigher doesn’t only write comics, he’s a painter and a poet, and he’s written novels. I’ve not been able to find any reference to these novels. Have you written them under a pseudonym or something?

Robert Kanigher: No, they haven’t been published.

Tim: They haven’t been pub-? Ah.

Robert Kanigher: Gregory Peck starred in a play of mine, which was on radio, a one hour play called Young Major Washington. I had a… House of Mystery, I think was NBC, also. And I was a director…

Steve: Does the House of Mystery serial have anything to do with-

Robert Kanigher: I’m not talking about the comic magazine.

Steve: DC choosing that title though?

Robert Kanigher: Gee, I really don’t know, I don’t know.

Steve: Fair enough.

Robert Kanigher: I really don’t know. I don’t pay attention.

Tim: It may have been an influence.

Robert Kanigher: Well, I wrote this book which I called Breakthrough, and published one called How to Make Money Writing. That was a hardcover and also six paperbacks. And that’s hard to find. Robin wrote me, he just found one of them.

Tim: There were six paperbacks did you say?

Steve: Six editions or something?

Robert Kanigher: Well, the hardcover was divided into sections. This was a very smart publisher. He divided them into 64 pages each and each paperback was 64 pages and he sold them through the mail as a paperback and published it as a hardcover. And the paperbacks individually cost more than the hardcover.

Steve: Of course. Marvellous. Because I’ve never seen that. I’d be interested to see them.

Tim: I think that’s called entrepreneur, isn’t it.

Robert Kanigher: It’s called How To Make Money Writing, which title I never made. I’d be too embarrassed.

Steve: Perhaps he should do one himself about how to make money… How To Make Money Publishing “How To Make Money Writing Comics”.

Robert Kanigher: Well, as a matter of fact, Joe Orlando asked me could he xerox the How To Make Money Writing Comics part, to show his readers. I did it in six weeks-

Tim: The whole book?

Robert Kanigher: -with my tongue in cheek, and yet it’s a very valuable book according to people who read it.

Steve: And this is what? Late forties/early fifties, somewhere like that?

Robert Kanigher: Oh I don’t know-

Steve: It’s quite a while-

Robert Kanigher: Wait a minute, 1943, I published the telephone story of Steel Sterling to Irv Novick, and that was reproduced in the book, so the book was published in ’43.

Tim: It’s early on.

Robert Kanigher: So they’re talking about writing about comics, well then it has to be before ’43.

Tim: OK.

Steve: Do you mind if I ask briefly, I remember you mentioning that Kurtzman had worked for you. I don’t want to go into it depth, but I’m very interested to know-

Robert Kanigher: He did funny pages for me. Whit wanted me to fire him. I didn’t. I don’t know what happened.

Steve: Do you remember what the funny pages were? They were just fill-in things?

Robert Kanigher: They were fillers. They were just fillers. Now when I saw the war stories that he did, they reminded me of Rudyard Kipling’s “Mud, mud, blood, blood, marching up and down again”.

Steve: Yeah.

Robert Kanigher: They were not… to the comics field they may have been something new; they weren’t to me. I felt that all I had to do was keep on writing about people and he kept on writing about nuts and bolts. He sent Alex Toth to Connecticut to go inside a submarine in order to be able to draw a submarine accurately, and the stories became more and more mechanically accurate, and less and less human. I know I’d knock him out of the box as well as the magazine.

Steve: But- but I guess, you know, just like two film directors, that- that was his penchant..

Robert Kanigher: Listen, it’d probably be all right, but I knew that… I knew that the human characters would triumph over nuts and bolts.

Tim: This thing, about he was going into nuts and bolts, I mean he was also going into looking at things more historically. They started out, the war books, you focus on a mortar team or one pilot or a squadron of pilots, and then as they go along, at the same time as you’re getting more and more of this nuts and bolts and that sort of thing, there’s more and more of drawing out, and saying, like, this is the story of the whole battle, historically accurate.

Steve: But, but what about-

Robert Kanigher: But that’s not war.

Steve: What about something like The Big If, then? I think The Big If is very like something that a Robert Kanigher would be happy to publish, which is a story about a young soldier. The story is all about If… he hadn’t done this and If… he hadn’t stopped to tie his bootlace and If… he hadn’t done that, and you’re wondering what the If… is, and you realise at the end of the story that he’s actually… he’s actually… a booby trap has exploded and he’s dying-

Robert Kanigher: I did that story already.

Steve: And, you know, all the way through it, it’s overseen by these Korean devil posts or something like that. And the devil posts are smile- laughing down at him, and the big If… is, you know, If… he hadn’t been killed by these devil posts, by this booby trap And I thought that… that has the emotional currency that you’re talking about, doesn’t it, so Kurtzman perhaps doesn’t always go for the mechanical, I don’t think. He has a talent for-

Robert Kanigher: I remember a splash: a landing at Inchon and everything, you know, it was ridiculous. War is one man with one yard of ground ahead of him. That’s all he knows. The general staff can have the most perfect of battle plans. The moment the first shot is fired, the moment the first man goes ashore, it’s entirely out of their hands. They are helpless. To me, war has been one person and one yard of ground. It’s life… one person facing life directly. That’s war, that’s life.

Tim: Right. Next question.

Robert Kanigher: And there’s nothing whatever to do with the goddamn nuts and bolts. And… Whit hated Krigstein’s work and wanted me to fire him. And I fired Krigstein, though later for lying to me. That’s the one thing I would not forgive anyone: that was my rule, I live by street ethics. Krigstein drew me characters that were five feet wide and five feet tall.

Tim: That sounds like him, yes.

Robert Kanigher: And I had the production department, with a razor, cut the characters down so that they were recognisably human. They slimmed them down, and draw in…

Steve: I bet that pleased him.

Robert Kanigher: I don’t care. But eventually I fired him for lying. I fired Sam Burlockoff for lying. And I fired… and I fired…

Steve: We don’t know who Sam Burlockoff is.

Robert Kanigher: Huh?

Steve: We don’t know who Sam Burlockoff is. An artist?

Robert Kanigher: I fired Arthur Peddy for telling the truth.

Tim: I don’t know who Arthur Petty is.

Steve: Arthur Peddy, not “Petty”, “Peddy”.

Robert Kanigher: P-e-d-d-y.

Steve: I don’t think we saw much of Arthur Peddy after the end of the fifties, I don’t think. I don’t know what happened to him. He worked for Schwartz as well.

Robert Kanigher: Peddy never brought in a complete story. That is never a complete character. Not a complete figure, it was always a part of a figure: a head, an arm. I said “why not?” you know and we argued back and forth, I became very bored with the argument. But finally, he said ” it takes too much time”. I fired him immediately.

Steve: Fair enough. Maybe he decided not to go back into comics after that. I don’t think-

Robert Kanigher: That I… don’t know.

Steve: I don’t think Peddy has been… I mean he’s not known for anything… he did some work in the forties which…

Robert Kanigher: This man drew fragments.

Steve: You mean all the characters were sort of like going off the edge of panels?

Robert Kanigher: Parts of panels. Parts. Parts. Parts. Not for dramatic purposes, but simply because it was faster to draw that way.

Steve: To get away with it…

Robert Kanigher: Oh, that reminds me, I fired Paul Reinman for the same reason. You know, Reinman, he’s German, came to me for work. I said look… here’s a script, bring in the roughest of roughs… stick figures, so that when I make a correction, you won’t have any work to do. Don’t try to bring me your finished work… give me a circle for a face, I’ll be satisfied. He came back with completely finished work, and… I blue-pencilled every single panel, showing how to improve them. He says, “I can’t afford to work for you!” Although he got less than half from the other company he came from, he could make more because he never had to make any corrections.

Tim: They just took it as he draws it. Now, talking of artistic corrections, or alterations, this brings us onto something I wanted to ask. There are a lot of the Kubert war books, when he took over editing them…

Robert Kanigher: I heard… I know… I know what you’re going to say.

Tim: Why does he keep redrawing panels by Frank Thorne, Doug Wildey-

Robert Kanigher: You mean why does he do it?

Tim: Yes.

Robert Kanigher: I didn’t know about it, because I didn’t… you can’t get it through your head that I don’t read comics, including my own. I may glance at it, but generally speaking…

Tim: So it’s just something you’ve never noticed because you haven’t looked at the stories. Fair enough. You can’t answer that then, can you?

Robert Kanigher: It could be… Kubert honestly feels that… Kubert is the definitive Rock artist. If he’s the definitive Rock artist, then he should have continued to have drawn Rock.

Steve: He did. On the covers.

Robert Kanigher: No…

Yeah, well…

Steve: Who else can draw the covers to Sgt Rock?

Robert Kanigher: That’s not the point. It also… associated him with Rock continually, even though he had nothing to do with the insides. It was his signature, it was his showcase… but if he felt… see…

Steve: Some people might say it’s rather like Bob Kane wanting to redraw something that… I don’t know…

Tim: Dick Sprang.

Steve: … Dick Sprang or Carmine Infantino or someone has drawn for Jack Schiff, then Bob Kane comes in and says “I want to earn my money so I want to redraw this hand” or something like that, which seems to me rather a daft way of approaching things really.

Robert Kanigher: (sighs) He probably felt, and undoubtedly was correct, that he could draw a better Rock than they did. However, he forgot that he himself, an artist, gave another artist responsibility of doing a script, and he should have accepted what they did, otherwise he should have done the whole thing himself.

Tim: Well, if only he had.

Robert Kanigher: Well. I always felt that if I had anything else, a novel or a movie script, to do, I would have continued doing Rock, out of respect for Rock and the Rock readers. I would have somehow found time to do it.

Steve: I wish DC would find the time to let you do it too.

Tim: Yes.

Steve: I really do.

Robert Kanigher: No. They won’t. I seem to be some kind of a threat. I don’t know why, because I wouldn’t go back for a million dollars.

Steve: Individuals are always a threat to a corporation aren’t they?

Robert Kanigher: Well… that’s what I was told, and I don’t understand it, because I worked in my own timewarp, I was unaware of any of these other people. I never went to- First week I was an editor I went to lunch with them, I saw how stupid and ridiculous it was to go to lunch with these people because there are only two things that they had in mind: where are we going to eat today, and when they got there, what are we going to eat. And I wasn’t interested in that, so I left and I went to the Museum of Modern Art, I walked along the river, I never went- I never saw them again.

Steve: You just munched a sandwich as you walked through the Museum of Modern Art.

Robert Kanigher: Yeah. I had no fights with anyone. Weisinger, Schiff and maybe Boltinoff used to fight all the time. Schwartz and I never had a word, that’s why I was so startled by his behaviour.

Tim: Isn’t there a question about that, about other editors, you know? There is a question about what other editors you worked for, I think you covered that.

Robert Kanigher: Worked for?

Tim: You didn’t work for any of them.

Steve: Didn’t you do any writing for people like Schiff and Schwartz? I’m sure there is some science fiction stories you did for Julie’s titles.

Robert Kanigher: I said that every single costumed character I wrote for, Schwartz edited. No question about it.

Steve: There’s one or two back ups in things like Mystery In Space, and things like that, that are definitely-

Robert Kanigher: I don’t recall that part of it. I know there were a load that I had, at writing the characters I created… Julie would get in a panic on a Friday and on a Monday he would get a script from me. I didn’t… I didn’t need the money, I didn’t want to do it, but he was in trouble, so I helped him, which he will deny. I don’t know why.

Steve: Well, there you are.

Tim: You wrote an issue of Iron Man, the Marvel comic, about 1971.

Robert Kanigher: Yeah.

Tim: How did that come about? Have you written anything else for them? Was it ever published and so on?

Robert Kanigher: Have I written anything for them…?

Steve: I wondered whether you’d worked for them earlier than that or not.

Robert Kanigher: No. You don’t understand: I didn’t know anything about comic companies. I never heard of DC. I never heard of National. I was like a frog, leaping from one place to another that I heard about. I didn’t hear- and I heard about them one at a time. Fox, I merely answered an ad in the Times. What the hell did I know about comics? I made up a story as I was walking along to Fox’s desk. It sold.

Steve: So, basically you just wrote that Iron Man story-

Robert Kanigher: Oh, the Iron Man story? I was booby-trapped but I didn’t know it. See, I like to take people at face value… once. I give everyone one chance. I forgot the man’s name, he’s fairly well known, he gave me a completely detailed plot…

Tim: Archie Goodwin?

Robert Kanigher: No, no, no, no…

Steve: Someone who worked for Marvel at the time…

Robert Kanigher: A writer… it wasn’t an editor.

Steve: Roy Thomas, Archie-

Robert Kanigher: It wasn’t Thomas.

Tim: … Steve Gerber, Doug Moench…

Robert Kanigher: No, no, no, I er…

Steve: This was before them, this is 1970, isn’t it?

Robert Kanigher: No, I saw Stan Lee, and I thought I would see him for ten minutes…

Tim: Not Gerry Conway?

Steve: No, no, no, he was about 19 at the time.

Robert Kanigher: I met Stan Lee for the first time, I thought I would see him for ten or fifteen minutes, and he kept me for an hour, and then he called in Roy Thomas. Before he called in Roy Thomas, he said “you have the most dangerous… thing in the field… be careful”. So what is it? He says “talent”.

Steve: I can understand Stan Lee calling it dangerous…

Robert Kanigher: Anyway, I was given this plot, I looked it over, and I made a minor character a major character, because, you see, the most interesting thing here… and also I went all out (I think I overwrote). In fact I’m sure I overwrote, because I wanted it to be better than anything that was ever done at Marvel. That was my mistake: I overwrote, you know… I was doing Crime and Punishment, or War and Peace.

Tim: Crime and Punishment with Iron Man in it.

Robert Kanigher: I should have been… much…

Tim: Your normal understated self.

Steve: Dumas rather than Dostoevsky?

Robert Kanigher: Yeah. Whatever. But… someone would have worked… oh, Roy. This guy also told me about the importance of balloons. He filled me, you know, with the most important things in the world. Balloons come first, and they have to be done in a certain way. Not the story, the balloons. And he gave me a number of… I didn’t know anything, you know… First time I went to Marvel… rules, regulations and so forth, he was booby-trapping me. So I was following him instead of being myself.

Steve: And isn’t this around about the same time you- didn’t you do some work for Sky- Sol Brodsky’s company as well, Skywald.

Robert Kanigher: Yeah.

Steve: I remember Steve Englehart mentioning that you did some stuff with them.

Robert Kanigher: Yeah. I preceded the movie Young Frankenstein, because I created Frankenstein’s great-nephew, who was deeply ashamed of his great-great-great grandfather, I made it a very human thing. There were some other things –

Steve: Oh, I remember a jungle type comic, which I don’t think anyone was publishing at the time. A Lord of the Jungle, or something like that.

Robert Kanigher: I wrote a story called “Murder By Computer”, which I’m going to turn into a movie, that’s one project I’m working on. A computer – you better turn that off –

(Tape stops)

Robert Kanigher: I’d like to invent the wheel.

Tim: I’d like to throw out this thing I have, this theory, about Von Hammer and Steve Savage, Enemy Ace and Balloon Buster, you mentioned before that they were exact opposites because Von Hammer is European, traditional, he has this tradition of knights in shining armour behind him, and as you say he’s an intellectual, and the opposite is Steve Savage, who comes out of a much younger country…

Robert Kanigher: Pure white trash…

Tim: Yes, he’s got no tradition behind him, he’s not the skilled pilot that Von Hammer is, probably a skilled horseman as well –

Steve: He’d probably have an inferiority complex…

Robert Kanigher: Because of his father, and the way he was brought up. Savage is nothing but a flying gun; that’s all he is! He’s

(Tape ends)