September 2025 – Who's Out There?

Fifty Years of Kotter: A Talk With Elliot S! Maggin

September 23, 2025October 17, 2025gasp65Leave a comment

« I think people will believe anything about someone they haven’t seen for a while. » — Gabriel Kaplan

I’ve been meaning to do a Welcome Back, Kotter post for several years. But when I thought about it, I understood that hitching it to the show’s fiftieth anniversary made considerably more sense than, say, its forty-seventh. And while I adore William Johnston‘s sextet of tie-in novels, it would be quite a stretch for a comics blog to cover. Far closer to the mark lies Arnold Drake‘s trio of WBK storybooks, illustrated by Mel Crawford and Jack Sparling. But in the end, I bided my time and managed to get in touch with the scribe first assigned the Kotter Komic assignment, Elliot S! Maggin. And boy, am I glad I did. And so, fifty years to the day of the airing of its pilot episode*, let’s talk Kotter!

Remember the DC TV line? This ad ran in several DC titles over the summer of ’76.

WOT: First, a bit of context: correct me if I’m wrong, but in the early stages of your career writing comics, you always worked alongside editor Julius Schwartz. Then, in late ’75 or early ’76, something changed, and you began writing for other editors’ titles. What’s the story?

ES!M: Well, Julie was kind of proprietary about me for most of the time I was working with him.

WOT: A sideways sort of compliment.

ES!M: I guess. At some point, Dorothy Woolfolk was editing the Lois Lane book, and… he introduced me to her. She just came into his office for some reason. She said: « Oh, you know, you should write some stuff for me! » And he said « No, he’s very busy, go away! » And he chased her out of the office. And I’m thinking, « Oh, okay. That’s how we’re doing it. »

So I didn’t really go about… I didn’t really make friends with many of the other editors. I tried to make friends with Joe Orlando. You know, I’d have lunch with him once in a while, I guess.

This is **Welcome Back, Kotter no. 1** (Nov. 1976, DC); cover by Bob Oksner.

ES!M: But around the time Kotter came out…

You know, people used to hang out outside of Julie’s office door, listening to us plot, because it was so loud. We would yell and scream at each other constantly. He was this Jewish boy from the Bronx, and I was this Jewish boy from Brooklyn, and once I got comfortable working with a guy thirty-five years older than me, we’d just fight all the time. And every once in a while, we’d get serious.

WOT: Serious fighting, or serious work?

ES!M: Yeah, yeah! The fighting was work.

WOT: Sometimes that line is dreadfully thin.

ES!M: I guess at that point, he got mad at me, and I didn’t get work for a couple of weeks. I went to Joe, and I said: « What ya got? », and he said he’s doing this Welcome Back, Kotter book, and I said « Great! I watch that show, that’s fun. » So I wrote the first issue, and that was fine.

Here’s a quartet of pages from the première issue. Pencils by Sparling and finishes (and surely likenesses) by Oksner.

Aw, Maggin’s Mr. Pevey would have made a great addition to the TV show’s cast.

ES!M: They called me down in Carmine‘s office, to watch episodes of the show. It had been on maybe six weeks at that point. Episodes I had already seen, but I liked hanging out in Carmine’s office, because it was big, and he had a lot of toys around. So they set up this video tape… thing, and I watched the shows again, and I wrote the second issue.

This is **Welcome Back, Kotter no. 2** (Jan. 1977, DC); cover by Oksner.

Art-wise, the second issue seemed comparatively rushed, and *sans* Oksner, likenesses pretty arbitrary. See what I mean? The GCD attributes the inks to Sparling, but I lean towards Frank Springer.

ES!M: I was living in an apartment complex on Long Island, and there were all these kids around… little kids. And I would work at home, mostly. So they would hang around with me, whenever they realized I was home. They would… shoot me through the window or… something. At some point, whenever I’d write a gag, I would…

WOT: … run it past them?

ES!M: Yeah! And they’d laugh, and run off and play some more. And I figured, as long as they laughed, it was okay. Because they were hearing the voice of Barbarino, or whoever. At some point Travolta would say, « Uh? », or « Duh », or « What d’you think? », something dull, that he delivered in a funny way. And the kids related what I wrote to what Travolta did on screen, so they were getting it. And at some point I realized that Joe [editor Orlando] didn’t watch the show.

WOT: Oops.

ES!M: And he would then object to my Barbarino bits, or Horshack bits, or whatever. So I told him « You’ve got to watch the show, you’ll get it! » But you know, after maybe… how many issues did I write, three, four?

WOT: Just two, I’m afraid. You wrote the first couple, then Tony Isabella did one, then Mark Evanier…

ES!M: I’m sure he (Evanier) watched the show — he watched everything.

WOT: He was even the show’s story editor for part of its second season. So… then Bob Toomey wrote four issues, Scott Edelman two, and there was a leftover story by Evanier that saw print in the WBK Collector’s Edition in 1978.

ES!M: But Joe did not. I mean, he didn’t have time, and he was madly in love with his wife, and he didn’t watch television at all (laughs). He wasn’t paying attention to the source material.

WOT: That happens. But it seems a pretty unfortunate blind spot for a book’s editor.

ES!M: I wrote two issues, and at some point, Joe said: « You can’t write! ». He said « No, you can’t write! »
A blanket condemnation of everything I’d ever done.

WOT: Oooh.

ES!M: By that time, I’d made up with Julie, and I was writing more Superman stuff. After that, wherever any of my fights with Julie got serious, I’d go down the street to Marvel, and do something there. Then I would make up with Julie, and they’d never see me again… until I had another fight with Julie.

That was my experience writing Kotter.

And here’s what undoubtedly has to be the Guernica, if you will, of Kotter art: Bob Oksner‘s superlative cover for **Limited Collectors’ Edition C-57**, from 1978, DC’s final — and finest — WKB publication. Feel free to open it in another tab for a fuller view… I provided a larger image so you can fully take in the wealth of details.

WOT: In closing, how are you keeping busy these days?

ES!M: I just wrote a book called Lexcorp. A novel. Which you should probably plug.

WOT: Done!

ES!M: It’s a first-person story that Lex Luthor tells. And he identifies himself as an unreliable narrator, like… Huckleberry Finn. But it does tell the story of how he saves the world. Stuff like that.

I’m working on another book, working on a time travel story. And my ex-wife asked me to write an autobiography so my grandchildren know who I am.

I have all these people I know with Pulitzer Prizes; and at some point in the autobiography, I wrote: « I have about a dozen Pulitzers floating around through my life, and none of them are mine. This book is available for consideration. »

WOT: Mr. Maggin, thank you so much for taking the time to share these stories with us!

-RG

*the pilot episode, for some reason, was aired third, on September 23, 1975, while the show premiered on the 9th of September with ‘The Great Debate‘ (featuring a wonderfully smarmy James Woods).

Hot Streak: P. Craig Russell’s The Spectre

September 16, 2025September 16, 2025gasp653 Comments

« Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. » — H. Rider Haggard

Here at WOT?, we’re both Russell aficionados, but with some reservations. I think I needn’t delve into such details, when my partner ds already eloquently laid it out in her post Grains of Golden Sand: P. Craig Russell’s Fantasies… and I happen to fully agree with her reasoning.

What’s perhaps not been explicitly stated is Russell’s virtually infallible way with a cover, both in design and execution. As I keep emphasising, great — and consistently great at that — cover artists are pretty thin on the ground.

Someone at DC must have seen his gorgeous seven-issue run of covers for Elric Stormbringer*(1997, Dark Horse/Topps) and offered him the Spectre gig.

Hey, something from this century! This is **The Spectre no. 19** (Sept. 2002, DC). A nice bit of Kirby tribute on Darkseid. In this case, and in fact throughout the Russell sequence, the expressive colours are the work of Lovern Kindzierski.

This is **The Spectre no. 20** (Oct. 2002, DC). It’s worth pointing out the added value of Russell being a consummate letterer/font designer. Without a logo set in stone (as is generally the case, usually at the insistence of the marketing department) the savvy artist benefits from the extra freedom of counting the title logo among the moving parts of his design. Cue the *de rigueur* Will Eisner/Abe Kanegson mention.

This is **The Spectre no. 21** (Nov. 2002, DC). When I showed her these, ds expressed some surprise at her failing to devote a Tentacle Tuesday Masters entry to Mr. Russell.

This is **The Spectre no. 22** (Dec. 2002, DC).

This is **The Spectre no. 23** (Jan. 2003, DC).

This is **The Spectre no. 24** (Feb. 2003, DC).

This is **The Spectre no. 25** (Mar. 2003, DC).

This is **The Spectre no. 26** (Apr. 2003, DC).

This is **The Spectre no. 27** (May 2003, DC). Thus ends the streak…. with the series.

It doesn’t hurt that The Spectre, the brainchild of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel (1914-1996) and artist Bernard Baily (1916-1996), boasts one of the best-designed superhero costumes of all, virtually unchanged since his introduction, some eighty-five years ago. The exception in this case is the chest emblem, which I presume is meant to indicate that *this* Spectre is former Green Lantern Hal Jordan, instead of defunct flatfoot Jim Corrigan. A bit of a boneheaded notion, imho, and typical of the incessant rebooting and tinkering these poor legacy characters are subjected to by dishwater-dull ‘creatives’.

-RG

*The Elric series was also under consideration, but The Spectre’s nine-issue streak is numerically more impressive.

Rik Cursat, Yours in Absurdity

September 3, 2025September 4, 2025gasp65Leave a comment

« Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. » — François-Marie Arouet

Going back to 1975: for a few years, I’d been buying Vaillant’s Pif poche (and sometimes its companion titles, Pifou, Arthur, Placid et Muzo, Totoche, and Gai-Luron… poche) as well. However, since the 1973 putsch by the raging primitives* and sundry bean counters, the publisher’s output had largely gone to seed.

I was still picking up, when faced with a dismal crop at the newsstand, the occasional ‘poche’, mostly for the games and puzzles, which comprised half of the editorial content. I was intrigued by an oddly-named stylist, one ‘Rik Cursat’ (unusual name for a Frenchman, I thought… still, nice of him to sign his work!), whose assured line and friendly absurdity had caught my eye.

A game page from **Placid et Muzo Poche no. 80** (Aug. 1975, Éditions de Vaillant). Sometimes he used his initials, sometimes he signed in full. « *Using all letters above the drawing, find the names of two fruits.* » The answers: PÊCHE and CITRON.

This one appeared in **Pifou Poche no. 63** (Sept. 1975, Éditions de Vaillant). « *Using all the letters above the drawing, put together the names of two animals.* » The answers: CANE and CHIEN.

It was only decades later that I thought to dig a little deeper. To my delight, it turns out that Cursat had a long and prolific, award-festooned career. Given his international success, it’s a bit of a mystery why he would have slummed it in the (presumably) low-paying back pages of frankly disposable kids’ publications. My guess is that his output was continuous and downright profligate, but he was reluctant to let a good drawing go to waste.

Henri ‘Rik’ Cursat** (1928-2006) was born and died in France’s third-largest city, Lyon. Deeply attached to his hometown, he reportedly produced over the course of his career some 20,000 drawings for its various daily newspapers, especially Le Progrès de Lyon, in whose employ he remained for some thirty-two years.

And since his body of work was so gargantuan and diverse, I’ll keep my focus narrow, borrowing from Absurdement vôtre, a 1977 selection of his cartoons published in Éclats de rire, a gags ‘n’ gals rag not unlike the American ‘Humorama‘ digests. He was, in fact, Éclats’ editor-in-chief for nearly a decade. Yet somehow his own cartoons are anything but crass or lowbrow.

Cursat had some pet recurring themes. One was literal gallows humour.