Since
The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis was still selling well when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis ended their partnership, DC Comics's initial reaction was to ignore the split. They continued publishing fictional adventures of the defunct duo for another year. However, with no new Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies on the horizon, DC ultimately decided that they needed to drop one or the other from the series. They chose Dean Martin because he was increasingly focusing on his career as a singer, and they preferred the series to star a comic. The new series featured Lewis in a variety of humorous situations. Infrequent guest stars included
Batman,
Bob Hope,
Lex Luthor,
Superman,
the Flash, and
Wonder Woman, thus establishing Jerry Lewis as existing within the
DC Universe. However, the creative team most associated with the series is writer
Arnold Drake and artist Oksner. Drake explained why he added the new characters: "The Hope and Lewis books were both dying when I took them over. I knew that the reason for this was that the kids couldn't relate to these characters. [Hope and Lewis] were not of their time. What the kids were relating to then was science fiction and horror. So I determined to inject science fiction and horror into Hope and Lewis. And it worked." In 2007, Bob Oksner stated that he had had a greater role in writing the comic than previously acknowledged, explaining that the comic's editor,
Larry Nadle, had persuaded Oksner to allow his writing credit (and thus payment) to be transferred to "another cartoonist" who Nadle described as being in debt to DC; in reality, Nadle was keeping the money. When this was discovered after Nadle's death in 1963, Oksner was suspected of collaborating with Nadle on the scheme and had to show his thumbnail sketches of the stories. ==See also==