"Nice human interest."
"But here's the next twist. The doctor takes a shot of the medicine and thinks he's safe. Then his daughter walks into the lab, and when he kisses her, she dies. The medicine won't cure him any more."
By now Migg is in orbit. "I got it! I got it! First we run a caption: IN THE LONELY LABORATORY A DREADFUL CHANGE TORTURES DR.-whatever his name is-HE IS NOW DR. RADIUM!!! Nice name, huh?"
"Okay."
"Then we run a few panels showing him turning green and smashing stuff and he screams: THE MEDICINE CAN NO LONGER SAVE ME! THE RADIUM IS EATING INTO MY BRAIN!! I'M GOING MAD, HA-HA-HA!!! How's that for real drama?"
"Great."
"Okay. That takes care of the first three pages. What happens with Dr. Radium in the next ten?"
"Straight action finish. Captain Hero tracks him down. He traps Captain Hero in something lethal. Captain Hero escapes and traps Dr. Radium and knocks him off a cliff or something."
"No. Knock him into a volcano."
"Why?"
"So we can bring Dr. Radium back for a sequel. He really packs a wallop. We could have him walking through walls and stuff on account of the radium in him."
"Sure."
"This is gonna be a great character, so don't rush the writing. Can you start today? Good. I'll send a messenger up for it tomorrow."
The great George Burns, bemoaning the death of vaudeville, once said, "There just ain't no place for kids to be lousy any more." The comics gave me an ample opportunity to get a lot of lousy writing out of my system.
The line ". . . knocks him off a cliff or something" has particular significance. We had very strict self-imposed rules about death and violence. The Good Guys never deliberately killed. They fought, but only with their fists. Only villains used deadly weapons. We could show death coming---a character falling off the top of a high building "Aiggghhh!"---and we could show the result of death---a body, but always face down. We could never show the moment of death; never a wound, never a rictus, no blood, at the most a knife protruding from the back. I remember the shock that ran through the Superman office when Chet Gould drew a bullet piercing the forehead of a villain in "Dick Tracy."
We had other strict rules. No cop could be crooked. They could be dumb, but they had to be honest. We disapproved of Raymond Chandler's corrupt police. No mechanical or scientific device could be used unless it had a firm foundation in fact. We used to laugh at the outlandish gadgets Bob Kane invented (he wrote his own squinkas as a rule) for "Batman and Robin" which, among ourselves, we called Batman and Rabinowitz. Sadism was absolutely taboo; no torture scenes, no pain scenes. And, of course, sex was completely out.
Holiday tells a great story about George Horace Lorrimer, the awesome editor-in-chief of The Saturday Evening Post, our sister magazine. He did a very daring thing for his time. He ran a novel in two parts and the first installment end with the girl bringing the boy back to her apartment midnight for coffee and eggs. The second installment opened with them having breakfast together in her apartment following morning. Thousands of indignant letters came and Lorrimer had a form reply printed: "The Saturday Evening Post is not responsible for the behavior of its character between installments." Presumably our comic book heroes lived normal lives between issues; Batman getting bombed and chasing ladies into bed, Rabinowitz burning down his school library in protest against something.
I was married by then, and my wife was an actress. One day she told me that the radio show, "Nick Carter," was looking for scripts. I took one of my best comic book stories, translated it into a radio script, and it was accepted. Then my wife told me that a new show, "Charlie Chan," was having script problems. I did the same thing with the same result. By the end of the year I was the regular writer on those two shows and branching out to "The Shadow" and others. The comic book days were over, but the splendid training I received in visualization, attack, dialogue, and economy stayed with me forever. The imagination must come from within; no one can teach you that. The ideas must come from without, and I'd better explain that.
Usually, ideas don't just come to you out of nowhere; they require a compost heap of germination, and the compost is diligent preparation. I spent many hours a week in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. I read everything and anything with magpie attention for a possible story idea; art frauds, police methods, smuggling, psychiatry, scientific research, color dictionaries, music, demography, biography, plays . . . the list is endless. I'd been forced to develop a speed-reading technique in law school and averaged a dozen books per session. I thought that one potential idea per book was a reasonable return. All that material went into my Commonplace Book for future use. I'm still using it and still adding to it.
And so for the next five or six years I forgot comics, forgot science fiction and immersed myself in the entertainment business. It was new, colorful, challenging and---I must be honest---far more profitable. I wrote mystery, adventure, fantasy, variety, anything that was a challenge, a new experience, something I'd never done before. I even became the director on one of the shows, and that was another fascinating challenge.
But very slowly an insidious poison began to diminish my pleasure; it was the constraints of network censorship and client control. There were too many ideas which I was not permitted to explore. Management said they were too different; the public would never understand them. Accounting said they were too expensive to do; the budget couldn't stand it. One Chicago client wrote an angry letter to the producer of one of my shows, "Tell Bester to stop trying to be original. All I want is ordinary scripts." That really hurt. Originality is the essence of what the artist has to offer. One way or another, we must produce a new sound.
But I must admit that the originality-compulsion can often be a nuisance to myself as well as others. When a concept for a story develops, a half-dozen ideas for the working-out come to mind. These are examined and dismissed. If they came that easily, they can't be worthwhile. "Do it the hard way," I say to myself, and so I search for the hard way, driving myself and everybody around me quite mad in the process. I pace interminably, mumbling to myself, I go for long walks. I sit in bars and drink, hoping that an overheard fragment of conversation may give me a clue. It never happens but all the same, for reasons which I don't understand, I do get ideas in saloons.
Here's an example. Recently I was struggling with the pheromone phenomenon. A pheromone is an external hormone secreted by an insect---an ant, say---when it finds a good food source. The other members of the colony are impelled to follow the pheromone trail, and they find the food, too. I wanted to extrapolate that to a man and I had to do it the hard way. So I paced and I walked and at last I went to a bar where I was nailed by a dumb announcer I knew who drilled my ear with his boring monologue. As I was gazing moodily into my drink and wondering how to escape, the hard way came to me. "He doesn't leave a trail," I burst out. "He's impelled to follow a trail." While the announcer looked at me in astonishment, I whipped out my notebook and wrote, "Death left a pheromone trail for him; death in fact, death in the making, death in the planning."
So, out of frustration, I went back to science fiction in order to keep my cool. It was a safety valve, an escape hatch, therapy for me. The ideas which no show would touch could be written as science fiction stories, and I could have the satisfaction of seeing them come to life. (You must have an audience for that.) I wrote perhaps a dozen and a half stories, most of them for Fantasy & Science Fiction whose editors, Tony Boucher and Mick McComas, were unfailingly kind and appreciative.