Author’s Note: In an issue of Alter Ego, a comic book fanzine, I learned of Jim Miele’s death. He died with his head and upper torso lying on his drawing table.
When I read of Jim Miele’s demise and where it took place, it reminded me of my dear friend, illustrator-cartoonist Lou Priscilla. Lou was an anatomy whiz who supplemented his teaching income with sales of cartoons to the leading journals of the day: Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post were two of them. He eventually realized the culmination of a life-long dream, his own art school, which he ran right up to the day he died in 1957.
I heard of Lou’s death in a phone call from his publisher, who told me that Lou had collapsed on a benumbed, wintry day on bustling Lexington Avenue in New York City. I was saddened by this information, because Lou’s family, an ex-wife and two young kids, lived somewhere in Texas and he was alone in the city. The picture in my mind of this noble Roman, cold, alone and quite dead, on an icy pavement in America’s largest city, was painful to visualize.
At an art exhibition on 57th Street, a good six months later, I found out that Lou had not hit any sidewalk with a mighty thud. In truth, he cashed in his chips, so to speak, in the sack of his girlfriend and art student, a lovely young thing who was incredibly talented as an artist. She told me of Lou’s last minutes and, when she did, I beamed with delight. Of course, it did not make it any easier for me to reconcile with Lou’s death. I merely glowed upon learning about the change in venue.
Jim Miele’s death at his desk was a bitter-sweet incident, because his entire life was wrapped up in his work. What was more fitting than for him to breathe his last while in the rapture of creating another fairy tale where he was among his imaginary friends who had nourished his mind and exhilarated his soul for years and years?
A good story always raced through his mind. Jim had a vivid imagination; his stories were fanciful, designed to delight readers of all ages. But he was an awful writer. His manuscripts were replete with clumsy sentences, horrible grammar and wretched spelling. His art was equally atrocious; his drawings were too awful to even be called “primitive.” But, he loved every day he spent working on comic books. Jim was a kid who never grew up. I thought his death at his desk was a fitting end to this man, who would, with cigarette in one hand, drink in the other, fervently relate his latest tale of castles, ogres and princesses to one and all in a circle of interested listeners.
Paradoxically, he would, every once in a while, casually boast that he was half Indian and half Italian. When asked from what tribe he was descended, he would answer that he was a Chippe-Wop. Today, in our politically correct environment, we wince at this, but we must remember that he voiced this joke back in the fifties. In view of this, I have to mention that, as far as I knew, this was Jim’s only indiscretion. I’d never heard any other remark from him about anyone’s background and heritage.
Actually, Jim Miele was an uncommonly fair person. The following incident illustrates this character trait. Louis Zara, who was a vice president at Ziff-Davis, ran the comics division during this time. He had been hired to take charge of the company’s book publishing division when they were still in Chicago. Zara was a published novelist (This Land is Ours, Rebel Run and Ruth Middleton were three of his titles that I remember), and Ziff hired him because he must have thought that Zara’s experience as a novelist, one of constantly dealing with his editor, would make him ideal as executive editor of the book division at Z-D.
When I joined the company, the book division was already gone; it had bit the dust while they were still in Chicago. Zara was kept on, however, as vice president, and he was put in charge of the rapidly growing, and increasingly important, comics division. He was my boss and, furthermore, was a very nice guy. Everyone in the division worked well with him.
Not long after all this, Jim Miele joined the company. While with Harvey Comics, he worked on Casper the Friendly Ghost, which made him a natural to edit the “kiddie” books we were publishing: Nursery Rhymes, Fairy Tales, Alice, and Dolly. He was tailor-made for this position.
We had two other editors on hand to help us prepare the 25 plus titles we had at the time. They were Ben Martin and Harry Stein. Ben came to us from the New York Herald Tribune, where he had served as Comics Editor until the newspaper folded its Sunday comics section. Harry’s reputation, and quite a checkered one, I heard, was made at Quality Comics where, according to Harry, he buddied with publisher Busy Arnold, quite a roué himself, I also heard.
The books I edited were G. I. Joe, Z-D’s best-selling comic, along with Wild Boy, Crime Clinic, Bob Feller’s Baseball Thrills, Red Grange’s Football Thrills, Bill Stern’s Sports Book, and a few others whose titles escape me. The way I worked with writers was to have them write synopses, which I would then approve or turn down. Of those I approved, I would ask the writer to give me the number of pages I thought the story merited. All the other editors worked the same way.
One morning, Lou Zara came to my desk with a large manila envelope. “Herb,” he said, “here’s a script for G.I Joe. It’s from a neighbor of mine. She’s a housewife-writer.” With this he shrugged, as if to say, “What can I do, she’s a neighbor.” Then, tossing the envelope onto my desk, he said, “I’ve already read the story and it looks okay. See what you think. If it’s all right, let me know, I‘ll put it through for payment.” And he walked away. I fished out the stapled script. There was, at the top of page one, a typewritten name: “Bertha Robbins,” but no address and no phone number. I was a bit miffed because I was presented with a finished script rather than the one-page synopsis I was accustomed to working with.
I read the story. It was awful. The most terribly written script I’d ever seen, either at Hillman (my previous publisher) or with Ziff-Davis. Since it was getting onto five, I cleaned up my desk and motioned to Jim Miele, giving him the internationally recognized sign for a drink by forming my fingers to make a cup, then bringing it to my lips. Some minutes later, at the bar of our favorite restaurant, I told him about Zara and the script.
He listened intently, and then said, “Put the story through.” I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Didn’t you hear me?” I asked.
“I heard every word. Now, put the story through.”
“For what reason?” I asked.
“I can’t say any more,” Jim answered.
I didn’t take Jim’s advice. The following morning, I walked into Zara’s office and handed him the story. “Mr. Zara, this is positively the worst story I have ever read. I simply can’t okay it.”
Zara didn’t say a word. He just nodded, lifted his attaché case onto his desk, opened it and withdrew another manila envelope. Handing it to me, he said, “Try this one.”
I left his office and saw Jim waiting for me at my desk.
“What happened?” he asked.
“He gave me another script by Bertha Robbins.”
“Put it through, Herb,” Jim said.
“Can’t you tell me why you’re so insistent?” I asked Jim.
“All I can tell you is ‘who’s who.’” And he walked away.
I was puzzled. All day, I tried to figure out what Jim had meant and why he would not tell me why. I tried him again later that day at our cocktail lounge.
“Look,” he said. “All I can say is who’s who, the book.”
The next morning, after an agonizing night of attempting to decipher Jim’s terse remark, it hit me. Could he be talking about Who’s Who in America?
The next morning, among our reference books, I found a copy of Who’s Who in America. I looked at the entry for Louis Zara, and there it was, after his name and occupation: Married: Bertha Robbins.
Jim had known this as soon as he had met Zara. Having heard that he was a novelist, he turned to the volume of “Who’s Who” to learn more about his new boss. At that time, the woman Zara was married to meant nothing to Jim until I told him about the “housewife-writer neighbor.” Now, knowing the true identity of this writer, Jim was trying to protect me from getting into the serious trouble he thought I would get into by rejecting the boss’s wife’s script. Simultaneously, he didn’t want to betray the trust he had brought upon himself by unearthing information about our boss that no one else in our corps of editors was aware of.
Well, the second script was just as awful as the first and I repeated my first visit to his office to announce that I was rejecting it. As I mentioned earlier, Lou Zara was a nice guy and I never heard any more about Bertha Robbins wanting to be a comic book writer for Ziff-Davis.
Jim Miele was a strange, lonely man. I knew him a long time, but never really knew anything about him. He never mentioned his family – nothing about his mother and father, zero, too, about siblings. He did mention a couple of wives though, but that was all. We were together a lot, going out for coffee at break hours. The first time we were at a lunch counter for coffee and pie, he specifically pointed to a piece of apple pie that was firm and plastic looking and definitely stale. It was mid-afternoon and the pie had survived the many customers who had passed that way. It was easy to see why. Right next to it was a blueberry pie oozing with luscious berries. I ordered a piece and asked him why he chose the stale-looking pie.
“It looks better,” he said. “Yours is too messy, too runny.” He then went on to explain that, due to the number of cigarettes he smokes, and has smoked, he had lost his senses of smell and taste. In order to enjoy his food, he had to rely on how food looked to him. This got him into trouble, he further explained. Women he had dated and women he had married would spray on perfume and toilet water before dates with Jim, but would wonder why he never commented on these fragrances. It appears he never told them about losing these important senses and ended up bearing the brunt for what they considered to be his crude affront to their efforts to please him.
At this point, I have to tell you of a friend who visited me regularly at Z-D. (I have been punishing my mind because of its failure to come up with a name for this man. For the sake of this account, I will call him Len, because this name fits him perfectly.)
Len was in his sixties and was retired from King Features Syndicate where he sold comic strips to newspapers. His stories about his career regaled me at lunches and after-work drinks. At lunch one day, Len casually mentioned that syndicates were always looking for features to fill the gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, a hiatus of about 20 plus days. Of course, the feature had to be about Christmas. If I happened to have a Christmas story that could be run during that period, Len told me, it wouldn’t be hard to sell to a syndicate.
Jim had written a story for one of Z-D’s holiday books. It was a charming little gem called The Snowman’s First Christmas. Jim not only wrote it, but he also did the art. The story was a delight, but the writing and drawing were dreadful. I asked Jim how he would feel were I to rewrite his story. He agreed to this and, also, to having his story completely redrawn. Once I had his permission, I called Marv Levy (pen name Lev), who had drawn some marvelous stories for Hans Christian Andersen, the book I edited for Z-D. I asked him if he would be interested in doing the strip. It would have to be on spec. He said he would. I then started to completely rewrite The Snowman’s First Christmas.
At any rate, we were in the late spring of the year and had plenty of time to get everything done. I broke down the story into twenty-four strips, which amounted to four weeks of six daily strips. Marv’s drawings were superb. We had no trouble selling the series to The George Matthew Adams Service. I don’t remember how we came up with this syndicate, but they loved it. The Snowman ran for three years. We split the take three ways.
I was happy, certainly, for this extra income, but I was happy, too, for Jim, who now had a beautifully drawn and written rendition of his beautiful Christmas story. It, and many others, sprang from the fertile imagination of this gentle giant who never grew up.
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Biographical Sketch:
Herb Rogoff has amassed an amazing resume of professional accomplishments in the world of art – cartooning, illustrating, writing, editing, publishing, and public relations. He drew more than 8,000 illustrations over a period of four years for “American Sign Language,” a dictionary for the deaf, edited by Martin L. A. Sternberg and published by Harper & Row.
Please click on his name in the left sidebar for a more comprehensive biographical sketch and a list of other articles by this author.
