Russ had once worked as an assistant to Leonard Starr (Mary Perkins On Stage), and we would sometimes trade anecdotes about incidents at the Wally Wood studio and the Leonard Starr studio. These discussions eventually led us to script "Ghost Artist," a satire on the interactions of comic book and comic strip artists with their assistants.

You can spot first name references to Leonard Starr and Charlton editor Sal Gentile. I asked Charlton Spotlight editor-publisher Mike Ambrose about the transition at Charlton of editors Gentile and George Wildman, and he responded, "George's earliest editor credits appear in some of the late 1971 ghost books, and by January 1972 he was credited as editor across the line. Sal Gentile moved up into the magazine division, as had Pat Masulli before him. I don't know what happened to him after that, but he evidently died a few years ago, because I bought a group of his sketches and stuff from an estate sale in December 2002, from a Florida seller."

In the story, the name of comic strip artist Jimmy Elder is not a reference to Bill Elder. It's actually a combination of people Russ knew in the UK film industry--writer-director Jimmy Sangster and writer-producer Tony Hinds, who used the pseudonym John Elder. Sangster and Hinds scripted Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966). The name of our character Tony Sansom also combines Hinds and Sangster, since John Sansom was a pseudonym used at least three times by Sangster. Further, Russ devised his own pseudonym, Jack Younger, as the flip side of John Elder. In 1976-79, Russ used Jack Younger as his byline on a half-dozen or so horror-fantasy novels, including Claw, Curse of the Pharaohs, Demon, Devlin, Maniac!, Rest in Agony and Satan Sublets. However, to make it even more confusing, there are some comic book stories credited to "Jack Younger" which were actually scripted by me.

The "personal habits" sequence of "Ghost Artist" has specific references to Starr's "French cigarettes" and to Wood's overheated studio and his psychoanalytical reflections. Once Wood went into a self-analysis monolog and later left for an appointment, leaving me and Dom Sileo both working at the studio drawing tables. After some ten minutes passed, Dom said in frustration, "Why does he have to tell us all that?"

The ending of "Ghost Artist" is probably inspired by my memory of "Portrait of the Artist," Harry Harrison's short story about a comic book artist who is replaced by a computer. It was published in the November 1964 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and reprinted the following year in New Dreams This Morning, James Blish's memorable anthology of science fiction stories about musicians and artists. (Harrison became familiar with computer theory and gunsight computers during WWII when he was trained to repair the secret Sperry Mark I.)

Since Russ and I had written and illustrated several stories for Charlton by this time, we anticipated doing the artwork for "Ghost Artist," but Wildman instead gave the script to Steve Ditko. I was disappointed we weren't going to illustrate the story, but as you can see, Ditko brought an intensity with a striking contrast between the two characters. He also added a nice touch by making Jimmy Elder a caricature of Russ!

For another Ditko story about a comic book artist, "The Blue Men of Bantro," go to Yoe's arflovers.

Walter Berndt (1899-1979) drew Smitty for more than 50 years. The Smitty daily began November 27, 1922, and the Sunday strip followed three months later on February 25, 1923. Smitty came to an end when Berndt retired in 1973. His memory lives on with the Berndt Toast Gang, a group of Long Island cartoonists who named their organization in his honor.

Here Smitty tries to beat the heat on August 1, 1948:

. Control click heading above to hear 1948 Spike Jones radio program with guest Peter Lorre.

The story "A Rottin' Trick!", illustrated by Joe Orlando, was published in EC's  Tales from the Crypt 29 (April-May 1952). When the story was reprinted in hardcover in 1979, the larger page size and b/w reproduction on quality paper revealed the artwork in greater detail than was evident in the original comic books on newsprint.

Some noticed unusual human figures cavorting in the fabric design on the drapery in the background of page three. Covered by murky. dark purple ink in the original comic book, these drawings went unseen by both editors and readers in 1952. Given the censorship climate of the 1950s, the discovery then of this single panel could have been devastating for EC publisher Bill Gaines.

Eventually, during the 1980s, someone brought the page to the attention of Gaines, who sent a photocopy to Orlando and demanded an explanation. Orlando responded by writing a letter to Gaines about the artwork on February 29, 1988. The closing sentence about "your brother Rex" is a joke, a reference to a funny hoax Gaines pulled in the 1950s, when he had the Mad office boy convinced that he had an identical twin brother, the evil Rex Gaines, who sometimes visited the Mad office.

This was not the only time a prank was slipped into an EC story. In Frontline Combat 4, the story "Bomb Run," illustrated by John Severin and Bill Elder, has an unusual last panel. It shows a copy of Homer's Odyssey, but the drama of the story is diminished because words from the familiar Ajax Cleanser singing commercial were lettered onto the page of the open book by prankster Elder: "Ajax the foaming cleanser Buh Buh Buh Buh Buh Soaps the dirt right down the drain". Perhaps he assumed that the lettering would reduce and become illegible or that it would be deleted before publication. (The full lyrics went something like this: "Use Ajax (boom boom), the foaming cleanser... (boom bub boom buh boom boom boom) soaps the dirt right down the drain... you'll stop paying the elbow tax when you start cleaning with Ajax! So remember... use Ajax, the foaming cleanser, soaps the dirt right down the drain. bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-boom!") In this case, after EC received a stack of letters from puzzled readers, they apologized in Frontline Combat 6 for their "clumsy oversight".

For the earlier installment on this subject, describing some of the EC art pranks which did not get published, click here.

In Gary Vandenbergh's film, Will Elder: The Mad Playboy
of Art (2002), Kurtzman and Elder discuss their working methods.