I should never have had the opportunity to work on a fill-in issue of this title. That I wrote Omega the Unknown #7 (March 1977) was purely the result of being in the right place at the right time. Many writing assignments back then ended up being handed out in that way.
Steve Gerber, the creator of Howard the Duck, was also the creator of Omega the Unknown, an intriguing series that was revealing its secrets slowly. Unfortunately, that was not the only thing that was being done slowly. For reasons I no longer remember (The writer? The penciller? The inker?), the book was in danger of missing its printing schedule. The editor-in-chief at the time, Jim Shooter, was determined to crack down on what was referred to in those days as the Dreaded Deadline Doom. So Shooter took Roger Stern and me out to dinner and told us that we were going to write the next two issues of Omega, basically overnight, allowing the hero to have adventures while making sure nothing important was left changed about the characters at the end of either issue.
We were each assigned an artist to whom we had to quickly turn over a plot, and I was thrilled to nab Jim Mooney as my artist. I had a sentimental attachment to Mooney, since he had drawn the adventures of Supergirl back in Action Comics in some of the first comic books I ever read. But one panel of his did not make it into print exactly as drawn, thanks to the censors at the Comics Code Authority. On the last page of the story, the villian of the piece, named Blockbuster, runs off, slugging a policeman as he goes. Since one of the rules of the Code was that no villainy was allowed to go unpunished, we had to white out the policeman, so that Blockbuster was left swinging at empty air as he ran off into the distance.
And so the morals of the children of America were once more kept safe.
The Scarecrow
When I started working as an assistant editor at Marvel Comics, the comic book field was in the midst of a horror boom. Comics were being published about all sorts of dark characters—vampires, zombies and sons of Satan.
I was an assistant editor in the Marvel Bullpen at 575 Madison Avenue when Len Wein asked me to come up with a new horror hero.
That turned out to be the Scarecrow, as pictured on the cover of Dead of Night #11 (August 1975), in an illustration pencilled by Gil Kane and inked by Berni Wrightson. For a while, it looked as if the Scarecrow was going to get his own title, rather than appearing in other magazines—at one point I was actually shown a publishing schedule with it listed as a bi-monthly. But then the horror boom was followed by a horror implosion, and the title was canceled before the first issue even hit the stands. The Scarecrow only appeared in one other solo adventure.
I remember that second appearance, in Marvel Spotlight #26 (February 1976), more for its mention of Andy Kaufman (see panel at left) than for the the story itself. I spent most of the summer of 1975 at the Improv Comedy Club in New York, loved Kaufman's act, and asked him, in those pre-Taxi days, if he minded if I mentioned him in print. And so I had two of the characters enter a scene debating whether Kaufman was funny or a faker. Unfortunately, I never heard whether or not he liked it.
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I wrote Captain Marvel from issue #49 (March 1977) through #55 (March 1978). I had the misfortune to follow the popular writer/artist Jim Starlin, who at the time was considered to have already done the perfect Captain Marvel. So I was in a no-win situation. Believe me, there were days at the beginning of my brief run on the title when I didn't have fun opening the mail.
I should never have had the opportunity to work on a fill-in issue of this title. That I wrote Omega the Unknown #7 (March 1977) was purely the result of being in the right place at the right time. Many writing assignments back then ended up being handed out in that way.