A supplement to a prior blog:
See my original review of the Bronze age comic book Warlord from DC Comics.
To quote my review of the series Warlord: “(issue #2’s) … story does not end in a cliffhanger per se, as had the previous issue, but it had an open ending. Yet “The End” was prominently written on the final page. Did Messers. Grell and Orlando know this was the last issue? Did they know it would come back in a few months?”
Scoop is an excellent e-newsletter and I recommend anyone who enjoys my blog to subscribe.
Recently Scoop featured an interview with Mike Grell and he addressed Warlord’s hiatus:
“ … when I turned in pages I would pick up the letter pages and stand in the office and read through it, proofread to make sure there were no errors that needed sent back for corrections before I did the finished inks, when it came to issue 3, I was in Joe’s office and at the end of the book instead of saying “Next Issue” it said “The End.” I turned to Joe and said, “This is wrong. It says ‘The End’ but it should say ‘Next Issue.’” Joe said, “Yeah, well, Carmine cancelled the book.” I said, “He can’t do that, he promised me a year’s run.” And Joe says, “Yeah, well, he lied. He does that.”
“Fortunately for me and for the Warlord, within a couple of weeks Carmine Infantino was out and Jenette Kahn arrived on the scene. It turned out that Jenette was a pretty astute cookie and she had studied the entire lineup very thoroughly before she ever took over the company. I come to find out that Warlord was one of her favorite books. She looked at the production schedule and said, “Where’s the Warlord?” I told her, “Well, Carmine cancelled it.” She said, “Carmine’s not here anymore, put it back.” So that’s how Warlord got continued on past issue 3.”
So the mystery is solved!
Read the entire interview, where he also talks about his time on the Legion of Super-Heroes.
Interview with Mike Grell ©2017 Gemstone Publishing, Inc., Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, Diamond International Galleries, and/or the Fandom Advisory Network. They hold all rights.
Currytakeaways 
I don’t know much about Carmine at the helm of DC. I believe he was very instrumental in getting Jack Kirby there, and he was leading the company during the Battle of the Century (Superman v.s. Spider-Man!) so those go into his plus column. However, when Infantino was contacted by the folks at Playing Mantis Toys around 1998 to find out who at DC had done Captain Action box art for Ideal in the 1960s, Carmine was quick to sniff out a profit and answered that, indeed, he had done that work. In fact, Murphy Anderson had done much of the beautiful CA accessory and costume sets box art, including characters not even under the DC licensing, and not Infantino. The PM people knew no better, and quickly signed Infantino up to do all the box art on the new re-issue line they were prepping. So CA fans like myself were treated to a new CA line graced with Later Era Infantino Art (i.e., not great) instead of seeing Anderson’s work reunited with the legendary toy line he had put his distinctive and beautiful mark on 30 years previous. Murphy was still active and available then, he just got bypassed by a former colleague. It was a shameful move on Carmine’s part, and I never see his work or his name without that negative association coming up now.
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