Robert Bernstein was a writer Rosenberger met while drawing for Brevity, Inc., a company which produced industrial, political, and educational comics in booklet form. The pair pitched an original serial newspaper strip called "Sands of the South Seas" a couple of years later. The proposal resulted in the publication of one issue of a comic book (retitled "Sands of the South Pacific") by Toby Press. Future newspaper strip pitches were less successful, with both "Christopher Crown" (1959) and "Chris Cross" (1965) rejected by the syndicates, but the two would become frequent creative collaborators on other projects.