Background
George Gladir was born in New York City, the son of Russian immigrants, and attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.
George Gladir was born in New York City, the son of Russian immigrants, and attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.
Afterward, he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York before reenlisting in the Army and becoming an intelligence officer serving in Germany during the Korean War.
Primarily known as a scripter for Archie Comics, he co-created that publisher"s character Sabrina the Teenage Witch, with artist Dan DeCarlo. Serving in the United States. Army during World World War II, he became a German prisoner of war after having taken part in the invasion of Normandy. He became a full-time comic book writer in 1959, doing one-page gag fillers for Archie Comics" Archie"s Joke Book and other titles.
Writer and artist credits were not routinely given in comic books at that time. and Gladir"s first confirmed cr is the gag page "Sign Language", drawn by Dan DeCarlo, in Archie"s Girls Betty and Veronica #59 (November 1960).
Gladir went on to write stories for several Archie Comics titles, including Archie"s Pal Jughead, Reggie and Maine, Betty and Maine, and, primarily Archie"s Girls Betty and Veronica. In Archie"s Madhouse (the logo sometimes given as Archie"s Mad House) #22 (October 1962), the character Sabrina the Teenage Witch, by Gladir and DeCarlo, debuted in the humor anthology"s lead story (the logo then spelled "Teen-Age").
She would eventually become one of the publisher"s major characters, appearing in an animated series and a television sitcom. Gladir recalled in 2007,
I think we both envisioned it as a one-shot and were surprised when fans asked for more.
We continued to do Sabrina stories off and on in Mad House until 1969 when we were flabbergasted to hear it was to become an animated.
When it came to naming Sabrina I decided to name her after a woman I recalled from my junior high school days.. who was very active in school affairs, and who assigned a number of us to interview prominent people in the media. In addition, the woman"s name had a New England ring to lieutenant Some years later I recalled the woman"s name was not Sabrina, but actually Sabra Holbrook.
In the early 1960s, Gladir also began started writing for the satiric magazine Cracked, eventually become its head writer
Over the next 30 years, he wrote approximately 2,000 pages for the magazine, many of them illustrated by John Severin. In the late 2000s, Gladir and Stan Goldberg created the one-shot comic book Cindy and Her Obasan for Rorschach Entertainment.
Gladir, who was living in Oceanside, California, died on April 3, 2013.