Originally Posted by First Amongst Daves
O'Neal was pretty obsessive about Azrael. It was his pet character. I read somewhere that the title would have been shut down years before because of poor sales, but O'Neal kept it alive through insistence. One Reddit pundit put it down to another "self-insert": https://www.reddit.com/r/batman/comments/11zr9a8/the_dennis_oneal_azrael_self_insert_is_a_little/

I'm both surprised and not surprised.
I was unaware of O'Neil's special attachment to the Azrael character, although it could have been guessed by O'Neil having personally scripted a 100-issue run on the series.

AZRAEL series (Feb 1995-May 2003)
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Azrael-1995/Issue-1?id=32952

In addition to O'Neil being an avid runner (and New York City is not exactly a safe city to nightly jog in), O'Neil was also a practitioner of martial arts, which also comes out in a number of O'Neil's comics series and other writings, in BATMAN and DETECTIVE, in THE SHADOW, in JUSTICE INC., in his RICHARD DRAGON series, in the MASTER OF KUNG FU series he edited, in the "Last of the Dragons" series in EPIC ILLUSTRATED, and others.

Harlan Ellison in his infamous COMICS JOURNAL interview (issue 53, 1980) described that while O'Neil and Ellison were good friends who spent a lot of time together, he said O'Neil had this weird image of himself as a self-styled pulp hero of sorts, that Ellison described as a rather unhealthy self-image for a man in his 40's.
In later writings, Ellison let on that O'Neil was really pissed at Ellison for saying that, particularly saying it in a published interview, and that he was a while reconciling with O'Neil after the fact.
(And needless to say, Ellison pissed off a lot of people he mentioned in that interview. Among them Don Heck, Gerry Conway, and most of all Michael Fleisher, who almost bankrupted COMICS JOURNAL and Fantagraphics with an 8-year lawsuit, that finally went to trial in 1987, where Michael Fleisher lost to an unconvinced jury. )