The Adventures of Jerry Lewis #89

History

The series was edited by Murray Boltinoff and produced in New York primarily by writer Arnold Drake and artist Bob Oksner, the creative team most closely identified with the book's Silver Age identity. Oksner later stated he drew the series from very early in the run straight through to its final issue, and acknowledged that he had contributed more to the writing than his uncredited role suggested — a situation complicated by an editorial arrangement in which his writing payments were quietly diverted. For issue #89 specifically, GoCollect's credits index lists Drake and Henry Boltinoff as the issue's writers, Bob Oksner and Henry Boltinoff as artists, and Gaspar Saladino as the cover letterer — Saladino being a fill-in for regular series letterer Ira Schnapp, whose cover work Saladino would eventually take over full-time beginning in 1968.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published July–August 1965 (on-sale date logged variously as July 10 and July 15, 1965) by DC Comics as part of the solo Adventures of Jerry Lewis series, which had continued numbering from the earlier Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
• The series that contained this issue ran from issue #41 (1957) through #124 (1971), picking up where the Dean Martin co-starring title left off at #40 — making the combined run one of the longest-running comic books ever to star a real person.
• Writer Arnold Drake and artist Bob Oksner are the credited creative team for the issue's main content, with Henry Boltinoff contributing short humor filler pages — the same core arrangement that defined the book throughout the 1960s.
• Gaspar Saladino provided the cover lettering on #89, one of a handful of fill-in assignments he did on the title before taking over all cover lettering with issue #106 in 1968 — his work on this cover is specifically discussed by lettering historian Todd Klein as an early example of Saladino finding his footing on the title.
• Murray Boltinoff served as editor of the series throughout this period, overseeing both the humor content and the occasional DC Universe guest appearances that the title would begin deploying more aggressively with the 1966 Batman TV craze.
• The issue appeared just before the explosion of 'Batmania' triggered by the ABC television series (January 1966), placing it in the last wave of issues where the Jerry Lewis comic operated without superhero crossover support — the Batman team-up landmark came with issue #97 (Nov.–Dec. 1966).
• DC created and owned original supporting characters for this series — most notably Jerry's mischievous nephew Renfrew and the housekeeper Witch Kraft — even though Jerry Lewis himself was a licensed character whose stories were copyrighted by Lewis's own Patti Enterprises, Inc.
• The combined Martin-Lewis and solo Lewis run was later retroactively placed in DC's Earth-Twelve continuity by Absolute Crisis on Infinite Earths (2006), formally integrating the title into DC's multiverse.

Cast · 1 character

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