Creator Conversations - Retro

In the time between January 2007 and June 2015, journalist Bryan Stroud had the opportunity to interview several members of the Old Guard of the comic book community. These are the people who worked in the bullpens, creating characters that are still loved today and crafting the visual style of graphic storytelling for generations to come. Some of these industry pros were happy to tell stories while others chose short, to-the-point answers - but all of them were generous with their time. Watch this page for weekly Wednesday updates.

September 19, 2018

An Interview With Guy Lillian III - A Letter Column Contributor Made Good

September 19, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Guy H. Lillian III is a Louisiana lawyer, former letter column contributor, and science fiction fanzine publisher notable for having been twice nominated for a Hugo Award as Best Fan Writer and having had a row of 12 nominations (without winning) for the Hugo for Best Fanzine (for Challenger). He is the 1984 recipient of Southern fandom's Rebel Award.

Having studied English at Berkeley, writing at the UNC Greensboro, and law at Loyola University New Orleans, he practiced as a defense lawyer in the field of criminal law in Louisiana as his day job.

As a noted letter column contributor and fan of the comic book Green Lantern, Lillian's name was tributized for the title's 1968 debut character Guy Gardner.

A Guy Lillian letter published in the Flash-Grams letter column about Ross Andru & Mike Esposito taking over art duties with Flash #175. — A **Guy Lillian** letter published in the **Flash-Grams** letter column about **Ross Andru** & **Mike Esposito** taking over art duties with **Flash #175**.

One day it occurred to me that it would be interesting to try and track down some of the prolific lettercol contributors from back in the day - and better yet, those who had transitioned to the professional ranks in one form or another. E. Nelson Bridwell was probably the first fan-turned-pro, but there were others to follow. One of them, of course, was Julie Schwartz's "favorite Guy," the one and only Guy Lillian III, who had some wonderful memories to share.

This interview originally took place over the phone on January 13, 2010.

Bryan Stroud: Quite obviously you were a comic fan as a youngster. What prompted you to start writing in?

The Flash (1940) #133, cover by Carmine Infantino.

Guy Lillian III: I was 12 years old and I was at my grandmother’s house in a little town called Rosamond, California. It was there I first found a copy of The Flash in a stack of old magazines – and been hooked. I read in the letter column some of the things people were writing in. At the time Julie Schwartz was editing Flash, and had a contest going, where the people who sent in the cleverest letters won original artwork and scripts. They can’t do that now. So, what they would do was write unbelievably corny, pun-filled letters. And for some reason Schwartz responded to that, and awarded artwork to these terrible letters. That ticked me off, frankly, because here these guys are getting all these treasures and I didn’t have any of these things, so I got upset about it. I wrote – by hand, on a tiny lined pad (I still remember it) saying that these guys were lousy comedians and he should save his prizes for more worthy efforts. Then I forgot about it.

The next thing I know, I’m living in Riverside, California. I was about 13, I guess and I’m buying Flash #133. It featured the stupidest Flash cover of all time. It showed Flash as a wooden puppet running past a poster of Abra Kadabra, one of his villains, who was shooting a ray out at him. The thought balloon read: “I’ve got the strangest feeling I’m being turned into a puppet!” Ludicrous cover. Anyway, I looked in the letter column and I saw at the very end, I’ll never forget this, “And finally –Guy Lillian—despite himself—is stuck with the original script for ‘Kid Flash Meets the Elongated Man’.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. I leafed through the letter column and found my letter. I raced home, ecstatic. I just couldn’t believe it. Sure enough, they sent me the script. “Kid Flash Meets the Elongated Man”, which was a John Broome script. The script was fascinating. I saw the way scripts were put together over at DC and I really enjoyed it. So I kept writing letters of comment, and Julie kept publishing me, and the rest is history.

Stroud: Do you still have the script?

Phantom Stranger (1969) #34, featuring “A Death In The Family!” written by Guy Lillian & Arnold Drake. — Phantom Stranger (1969) #34, featuring “*A Death In The Family!*” written by Guy Lillian & Arnold Drake.

GL III: Yeah, someplace. I don’t know exactly where. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get artwork because that would have been much cooler, but I eventually did get some: a Hawkman issue. I had to sell it eventually, because I was so broke. But the years when I was Julie’s “Favorite Guy” were an amazing time.

Stroud: As you got acquainted with Julie, what were your impressions of someone I presume was one of your heroes at the time?

GL III: I’ve got two stories to tell about that. The first one took place in 1966, a few years later. I’d become friends with Mike Friedrich, who was a fellow comic letter hack. I was in high school and Mike, who lived in Castro Valley, California, organized a little comic book convention for local comic book fans. Most of these guys were a couple of years older than me and were involved in things like CAPA ALPHA, a comic book amateur press association. It was a lot of fun; we talked with cartoonists from the local newspaper who came by and watched the Republic Captain America serial, but here’s the thing: Julie Schwartz was visiting San Francisco, which is across San Francisco Bay from where we lived. Very close. And he said, “Why don’t you guys come and see me at my hotel?” And we were all excited because a Mike and I and a couple of other guys were going to see Julie Schwartz.

Mike wanted to write for comics and had written a script to show Julie, a pretty terrible, amateurish job. (Of course, he eventually ended up being a comic book writer.) Of course, partway to San Francisco he realized he’d forgotten the script, so we had to go back to get it. On the way back a woman, who was getting groceries and apparently not busting with intelligence T-boned us. It was a complete disaster. The other two guys and I ended up in the hospital. I had a hematoma in my leg and was laid up for days. I felt worse for Mike, because while we could sit around in the emergency room and cheer each other up, he had to go home and sit in his little room. He had to call Julie and tell him we couldn’t make it, so he was very alone and depressed, whereas I and the other two guys were just celebrating the fact that we were still alive in the hospital. That was July 9, 1966. I’ll never forget it.

Challenger (1993) #17, cover by Paul McCall. Edited by Guy Lillian.

I finally did get to New York in 1972. I was in graduate school at the University of North Carolina, getting my Master of Fine Arts. A long time had passed. Six years. I decided to jump on the bus to New York City. Of course, I had to go by DC Comics. I called Julie and asked if it was okay if I drop by. He said, “Sure,” and so I did. I went up there and met the man. I met him and I met Sol Harrison, the one who would eventually become my boss; Carmine Infantino came in and Elliot Maggin. Great guy. I think Cary Bates may have been there. I had a fine time just yakking away and wandering around and just having a great day. So, while I was in North Carolina getting my Master’s I became friends with a lot of the young staffers like Paul Levitz and Carl Gafford and some of the Marvel guys like Tony Isabella.

Some of those cats and I joined CAPA ALPHA. I was already involved in science fiction fanzines – the mighty Southern Fandom Press Alliance – so I joined CAPA ALPHA, doing fanzines about comics. I was already known for my letters to Julie; he’d published about a hundred. I had 120 published all total. So I just started hanging out at DC. Then one day Paul Levitz calls me up and says, “Look, how would you like a job?” “Sure.” So, after I graduated with my Master’s degree I got a job at DC Comics at the magnificent salary of $100.00 a week to start, which was later raised to an even more magnificent sum, $110.00 a week. In New York City. It was paradise. It was terrific. I had a great time.

Stroud: I can just imagine. It had to be surreal at the beginning.

GL III: It was weird. I used to come up to DC Comics all the time while I was in North Carolina and they got used to seeing me around. As a matter of fact, once or twice, I think, I just sat down in a little room there and wrote up a letter of comment and they published it. Later on, after I started work, we began The Amazing World of DC Comics, a fan-oriented magazine. It was basically a response to FOOM (Friends Of Ol’ Marvel) which was much, much less sophisticated than Amazing World. I had some ace assignments.

Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #3, cover by Joe Kubert.

I went over to Joe Kubert’s house and interviewed him. I did an interview with Maggin and Bates, which was lots of fun. I did an interview with Mort Weisinger, the Superman editor at one time. The big thing I did was write a biography of Julie Schwartz for Amazing World #3. I got Kubert to do a portrait of Julie for the cover. Among other people – this is amazing – I interviewed Alfred Bester at his home on Madison Avenue. He was a phenomenal conversationalist. I have never met anybody like that. One of the greatest conversations in my life. When I read the article I eventually wrote nowadays, it seems amateurish and “gosh, wow”, but Bester liked it. He called Julie and paid me an enormous compliment. He said, “If I were still at Holiday magazine, I’d hire that guy.”

I worked at DC comics for a year and then I got itchy. I was in love with a girl in New Orleans, so I wanted to move back there. I’d lived in New Orleans before. New Orleans is the type of town that gets its hooks into you. You never get over it. So I wanted to go back there, which was stupid but as it happens all the young staff got fired and then rehired a couple of months after I left, when DC Comics went through an upheaval. Carmine got fired as publisher and everything went topsy-turvy. I don’t know if I’d have been able to survive. Certainly not with the salary I made. Also, I was living in East Harlem in a high rise, so I’d lean out my window at night and watch knife fights. I am not kidding.

Stroud: Oh, no.

GL III: Yeah, it was just horrible. So, I wanted to go home to New Orleans. It was stupid and immature and I wish I hadn’t done it, but that’s the way the corn flakes. Life took me in a different direction. I kept in touch with these guys and I still kind of keep tabs. But no regrets about my DC experience; it was a life-altering and a life-enriching experience. I met some incredible people. I got to watch some of the most creative commercial guys in the world. Julie Schwartz, number one, of course. Hell’s bells, when I wrote that article about him, Ray Bradbury sent me a little note that I printed. Ray hasn’t done much recently, but at the time he was Valhalla. And he wrote me a letter! And of course, I knew Kubert and I knew [Bob] Kanigher, who was a wild man, but I really loved his work and him, too. I can’t pass up Sol Harrison. He was very generous to me. All of these people – it was just an incredible experience. An incredible year and a great way to spend part of one’s youth.

Stroud: It just had to be beyond belief. Did you get to work much with Jack Adler?

GL III: Jack Adler was the production manager, wasn’t he?

Stroud: Yes, and ultimately Vice President.

GL III: Yeah, Jack and Sol had known each other since they were young and it was really a riot to talk to them. At that point in time he was at his best, training cats like Steve Mitchell and Bob Rozakis, who later took over his job. Jack loved to pass long old Jewish sayings and explain them because we didn’t know any of that stuff from the old neighborhood. He was a really funny man and I liked him a great deal.

Who else did I know there? Kurt Schaffenberger was one of the artists, as you know. He was the guy who did a lot of Lois Lane and he was just a terrific artist. And Curt Swan. Man, this guy never got the credit he deserved. He wasn’t young. He wasn’t fancy. But he was very workman-like and could really hold a story together. And he could draw. He was just great. Murphy Anderson was a nice guy. I only met him once. A very, very good artist. These guys were real pros. They were just outstanding.

I met Neal Adams. Neal was flighty, but he was an incredible talent. He had problems with deadlines. A lot of them did. Mike Kaluta had terrible problems with them, but he was a terrific artist. These were great guys, but they just couldn’t understand that you had to get the work finished and to the printer on time. It was a generational difference that was really striking there. Joe Orlando, too. He was a nice man. Another great artist, of course.

Secrets of Haunted House (1975) #5, featuring “Gunslinger!” written by Guy Lillian. — Secrets of Haunted House (1975) #5, featuring “*Gunslinger!*” written by Guy Lillian.

Stroud: One of the best. It’s amazing the contributions he made to the genre both as an artist and an editor.

GL III: He gave me the job that was probably the one I enjoyed the most: re-writing dialogue for unused stories that he had on file. He had the finished artwork, but he didn’t like the way the stories were told. The writing was stodgy. He gave me a chance and said, “Why don’t you try to write the dialogue for these?” I wrote about six. They were all published. I really enjoyed doing that.

Stroud: There’s a rumor that there’s a DC character named in your honor. Any truth to that?

GL III: I always thought that. The DC character was one of the alternate Green Lanterns named Guy Gardner. I always suspected that he was named after me and Gardner Fox, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. Nobody ever said yea or nay.

Stroud: The common wisdom is that Fox was honored with that one and Gardner Grayle of the Atomic Knights.

GL III: (Laughter.) One of the big disappointments in my comics fan history came when Julie was taken off DC’s science fiction titles: Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures. Strange Adventures had three great series; The Atomic Knights, Star Hawkins and Space Museum, which I really liked. Because that was the one place where he allowed Carmine Infantino to ink his own pencils. Carmine loved to do that, and his inks were very expressive, but a little bit raggedy. I liked the way he did it. But Julie didn’t like it, so he just kept it in Space Museum. He didn’t let him do it on the other two things he did, Adam Strange and of course Flash. I really liked those science fiction books and it was a shame when he lost them. But they gave him Batman, so you can’t knock that.

Stroud: Yeah, and he brought it back from the brink by all accounts.

A Guy Lillian letter published in Detective Comics (1937) #375 - continued below. — A **Guy Lillian** letter published in **Detective Comics (1937) #375** - continued below.

GL III: Julie always gave himself a lot of credit for that. I think he deserved more credit for saving Superman than he did for saving Batman. When he took over Batman it made a great deal of difference, I think, but I believe the guy who really saved Batman was Frank Miller. But that’s speaking as a fan and not as a friend of Julie’s. And Julie became a very good friend. After he retired from editing, and became a roving ambassador of good will for DC, I’d see him all the time at science fiction conventions. We’d hang together. He was just a wonderful cat. We just had a great time together. I used to say “Would you like to see my Julie Schwartz imitation?” and doff my hat and show everyone my bald head. He was an amazing man. Very funny. Very warm. A very kind gentleman.

If you ever read my article in Amazing World about him, it looks a little bit hurried to me now, but he liked it. He was very proud of it; he sent copies to a bunch of his friends. I was very, very pleased with that. He was the first adult ever to pay attention to what I had to say. All through my adolescence he was there, a great, great influence on me. He called me “his favorite Guy,” which I thought was very corny, but what the hell, it was a compliment – one of the best I’ve ever had.

Stroud: (Laughter.) You were a man of letters at that time and yet you went into something considered rather lowbrow at the time. Did you give that any second thoughts?

GL III: Not at all. A job was a job was a job and I always have respected the genres. When I was in college I invited myself up to see Poul Anderson. Instead of having me shot like he should have he was generous and got me involved in science fiction fandom. I’ve never looked back. My wife Rosy and I have gotten to go to Australia through science fiction fandom. I’ve had 12 Hugo nominations, including ten for my magazine, Challenger, which I’m very proud of.

A Guy Lillian letter published in Detective Comics (1937) #375 - continued from above. — A **Guy Lillian** letter published in **Detective Comics (1937) #375** - continued from above.

I regard myself as a science fiction fan more than a comics fan these days, and I prefer science fiction fandom to its comics cousin. I’ve been to comic cons. I used to go to Seuling cons in New York City in my youth and they were okay, but comic conventions are a little young for me now. They’re also very commercial, so I kind of stay away and avoid them.

Stroud: I’ve never been to one, but it sounds like the comics are beginning to get shunted aside in favor of movies and television and video games and such.

GL III: That’s true. The mark of our success in science fiction is that the movies took over. That typically means that SF was good, and what does good mean in the commercial sense? Movies and the enduring popularity. People recognize your quality; they know who you are and who the characters are. People know who Superman is. People know who Spider-Man is. My wife works in the communication department at the university in Shreveport and they had a class in comic book movies. Movies taken from the comics. So, it’s there. It’s the mark of our success that our own genres have gotten away from us.

Stroud: My best friend and I recently attended the Faster Than a Speeding Bullet art display of original comic work at the University of Oregon and it covered work through all the decades and I couldn’t help but think things have come a long way from when they were trying to ban all this in the 40’s and 50’s.

GL III: Well, what they were trying to ban in the 50’s was the EC horror stuff more than anything else. Everything in comics got tarred with the same brush, which was unfortunate. But some of that horror stuff was kind of gross. But that was a different breed of cat from the superhero comics. Their appeal was to a slightly older, slightly more sophisticated audience. It was like the competition between Marvel and DC. I didn’t really see it as a true competition because Marvel appealed to a little bit older audience than DC. DC Comics was for tweeneers -- kids in early teen years. Marvel appealed to kids who were in their mid-teens and so on. I didn’t see any problem with that. I always enjoyed everyone’s stuff. I couldn’t stand the competition in a lot of ways, because frankly some of their people got kind of obnoxious, but I’m sure they said the same thing about me.

Unexpected (1968) #201, featuring “Do Unto Others!” written by Guy Lillian & Mary Skrenes. — Unexpected (1968) #201, featuring “*Do Unto Others!*” written by Guy Lillian & Mary Skrenes.

One thing I remember is when I went and interviewed Bob Kane. I never saw a better collection of comic book art than he had on his wall. Prince Valiant originals – man! But the poor guy, everything in his life was dominated by Batman. The soap in his bathroom was those little squirt dispensers of bat-soap and it was decorated with Batman wallpaper because he got it all for free. He didn’t let me print the interview I did with him because he thought it would interfere with his autobiography.

(“Batman and Me,” which sits on my bookshelf was published in 1989.)

Stroud: There are some pretty notorious stories about Mort Weisinger. How did you find him?

GL III: I enjoyed my interview with Mort. It was the last interview I did for Amazing World. One thing he liked to do was show people the checks he got for some of his other writing. I got the feeling he always resented his association with Superman, where he was the editor for so many years. Everybody tried to tell him, “Look, this is an absolutely great thing to be a part of. This is American folklore. Ask people the world over, if they’ve heard of your novel about beauty pageants and no one will say so. But have they heard of Superman? Of course! There isn’t a human being on this planet that hasn’t heard of Superman!”

Another thing I can say about Mort is that he and Julie enjoyed a lifetime of friendship. It was quite fun to listen to Julie talk about Mort and the other guys that he knew back in the day – because he knew everybody. I mean the man knew Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft and Howard corresponded, but they didn’t meet, but Julie met both of them. It was fun to talk to Julie about his early days in science fiction fandom because he helped found it. He was the first guy to do a science fiction fanzine. I think of myself as being in his lineage.

Stroud: I’d say so, especially since you’re still keeping up with it after all this time.

GL III: My genzine, Challenger (www.challzine.net), has gotten me a lot of recognition and as I already mentioned my wife and I got a wonderful trip to Australia. An incredible experience. It gets us to the best parties in the world science fiction community, too.

Challenger (1993) #19, cover by Ned Dameron. Edited by Guy Lillian.

Stroud: Not bad at all. Did you ever do any writing for the comics?

GL III: No. When I went down to New Orleans I didn’t give up reading comics, but I did give up writing letters. Frankly, I’d said what I had to say. I wrote a couple afterwards – one to The ‘Nam is memorable – but I gave it up as a hobby.

As to writing comics stories, that’s not really what I ever wanted to do. When I got back to New Orleans I pursued another old interest and went to law school. I’m only a public defender, which is at the bottom of the heap according to a lot of lawyers, but I love doing it; it’s very rewarding emotionally. The stories you hear are just fantastic.

The real world has its distractions. Some are horrid. I interviewed one of the Manson girls once and I’ve known some people I wouldn’t let my wife in the same time zone with, but appearing in court, arguing for people, doing trials, that is very rewarding, entertaining, and enlightening. You learn an awful lot about human nature.

Have I given up writing altogether? No, I’ve still got some ambitions. It would require an awful lot of work because I think my writing is a little stodgy, but nevertheless I still write articles for myself for my amateur magazine. I like to write about the people that I’ve known and the things that I’ve seen and some of the events that I’ve attended. It’s been a fascinating life and I want to preserve some of that.

A small gallery of Challenger fanzine covers

Challenger (1993) #20, cover by Frank Wu. Edited by Guy Lillian.

Challenger (1993) #21, cover by J.K. Potter. Edited by Guy Lillian.

Challenger (1993) #22, cover by John Dell. Edited by Guy Lillian.

Challenger (1993) #24, cover by Brad Foster. Edited by Guy Lillian.

Challenger (1993) #28, cover by Sheryl Birkhead. Edited by Guy Lillian.

Challenger (1993) #30, cover by Frank Kelly. Edited by Guy Lillian.

Challenger (1993) #37, cover by Ron Sanders. Edited by Guy Lillian.

Challenger (1993) #41, cover by ?. Edited by Guy Lillian.

September 12, 2018

An Interview With Gerry Conway - Prolific Author and Co-Creator of The Punisher & Power Girl

September 12, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Gerard Francis Conway (born September 10, 1952) is an American writer of comic books and television shows. He is known for co-creating the Marvel Comics' vigilante The Punisher and scripting the death of the character Gwen Stacy during his long run on The Amazing Spider-Man. At DC Comics, he is known for co-creating the superhero Firestorm and others, and for writing the Justice League of America for eight years. Conway also wrote the first major, modern-day intercompany crossover - Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man.

Writer, editor, editor-in-chief, Hollywood guy and all-around good guy, Gerry Conway has cut a huge swath in the pop culture realm. He was gracious enough to share memories about the various realms and what it really takes to make it.

This interview originally took place over the phone on December 3, 2009.

Batman (1940) #358, written by Gerry Conway.

Bryan Stroud: From my little bits of research I gather you grew up in the city?

Gerry Conway: I did. If by the city, of course, you mean New York City, because there is no other.

Stroud: (chuckle) Exactly. I take it you were probably a comic book fan as a boy?

GC: Oh, sure. That was my primary interest as a kid growing up. That and movies and science fiction.

Stroud: You’ve pulled a hat trick then as far as eventually working in all those genres.

GC: Yeah, I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve had that opportunity. It’s rare that you get to fulfill almost all your childhood dreams.

Stroud: How exactly did you get your start, Gerry?

GC: As a kid in my early teens I was going into Manhattan to visit the different comic book companies. I’d been a reader of comics and a fan and I wanted to write them…or draw them. I think my first preference was to draw, but I didn’t actually have any artistic talent, so that was a bit of a problem. DC comics used to have a weekly tour that they gave of their offices during the summers. This was the mid-60’s and one particular summer I started going almost every week and I discovered that after you got in through the front door with the tour group you pretty much were free to sort of slip off and knock on different editor’s doors and talk to them and ask them if they wanted certain stories and that sort of thing so I ended up doing that and met a number of different editors and I often volunteered myself to be a summer intern for a couple of weeks and came up there and worked in the production department which also gave me the opportunity to meet people.

Weird Western Tales (1972) #45, written by Gerry Conway.

Amazingly, to me, looking back on it, I was an extremely forward and aggressively self-confident teenager in that I would do this. I ended up being known well enough by the different editors that they would take my calls and listen to my story pitches. I finally got to the point where an editor named George Kashdan - who was the editor on Hawkman after Julie Schwartz gave it up - was taking some story ideas that I had and was actually at the point, I believe, of buying one of them when they went through a major change in editorial staff and Dick Giordano came in and replaced him and Joe Orlando came in and Carmine Infantino became the publisher and so on. At that point, Dick Giordano became my mentor. He gave me a lot of input. He was very kind and open to giving me direction and after about a year or so of attempting to break through I finally sold my first story. Not to Dick, but to Murray Boltinoff who shared an office with him and was under the impression that I was already writing for Dick. So my first story was basically a sale by mistake because Murray would never actually have bought a first story from someone.

Stroud: Interesting.

GC: From there, as they say, the rest is history. I wrote a number of stories for Dick Giordano, eventually became the main writer of what was known as the interstitial material on House of Secrets, writing all the little introductions between stories by the character Abel the Caretaker and that led to other assignments and eventually to work at Marvel and so on.

Stroud: That’s quite a circuitous route.

GC: Basically, the way things worked back then is that you had to make a personal connection with the editors before they would even read what you were sending them. They would read your letters, but I don’t think they would really even take you seriously if they didn’t know you. And it’s amazing that they actually even let us in. (Mutual laughter) Because these days these companies are such monoliths, the idea of just sort of wandering in and hanging out at Marvel or DC is pretty fantastic. It’s not something that they’re open to.

House of Secrets (1956) #140, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: It is a completely different world over the last few decades. They’re both corporate conglomerates, so I guess your story is probably one that will never be repeated.

GC: I don’t think so. I mean, it was sort of a mom and pop setup in the sense that it was a very small group of people that were the gatekeepers. At DC I think there were six full-time editors and at Marvel there was basically Stan [Lee] and Roy Thomas and a rotating cast of proofreaders and editorial assistants. It was a small community, too. The entire comic book community in 1968 or ’69 might have amounted to 100 to 150 people total. Total. If that. You’re really talking about a very small pool of people who all basically knew each other. We all knew each other socially. Once you were in that group it was like a very friendly group. There was some competition, but it wasn’t as ruthlessly competitive as it is today I would think, just because it was a smaller group of people and you’d trade off with people. I used to, with Len Wein, for example, we were roommates at one point; and we would help each other out on stories. People still do that today, obviously, it’s not that people aren’t cooperative and helpful, but I think there was more a sense of camaraderie in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Stroud: More of a collegial atmosphere.

GC: It was just a small group of people that were doing it. Everybody knew everybody. (Chuckle.) I’m really amazed when I think back on it.

Stroud: I believe it was Anthony Tollin that told me that at that time you could actually kind of afford to live in New York.

GC: It was possible. New York was bottoming out at that point. By the mid-70’s it was at its worst as a city. The most unlivable that it could be. That was during the period when you had that famous Daily News headline: “President Ford to New York City: Drop Dead!” (Mutual laughter.) Which of course was a gross exaggeration, but a very cool headline. That was the time when you had The Son of Sam and riots and you had a really depressed real estate market.

Carnage (2016) #1, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: A perfect storm.

GC: Yeah. It’s hard to believe now. I lived in New York and given that the worth of money was very different then than now, but in 1970-71 I was making about $25,000.00 to $30,000.00, which was a very substantial salary. My dad at that point was a blue collar, lower middle-class kind of guy and he was making maybe $10,000.00 or $15,000.00. So, I was doing way better than him and I was just out of high school. But my rent was maybe $500.00 or $600.00 a month and that was for 7 or 8 room apartments on the west side of Manhattan. The building I was in when we were leaving it in the mid-70’s was just about to go co-op and we could have bought our apartment for about $50,000.00 or $60,000.00. That apartment today in that neighborhood would be worth upwards of 2 or 3 million dollars.

Stroud: Staggering.

GC: That’s what the difference is in that environment compared to now. So, yeah, you could live in Manhattan. You could live in the city. You could work and earn a good living as a comic book writer and this was without royalties and without any ancillary money.

Stroud: Just on a page rate, then?

GC: Yeah and the page rate was like $20.00 or $30.00 per page, so it wasn’t even that much. (chuckle.) My first comic book story, I got paid $10.00 a page and the rate really didn’t go above $20.00 for something like 6 or 7 years.

Stroud: It’s hard to imagine.

GC: Well, it was a different age and a different time. Its decades ago. (Mutual laughter.) We are talking 40 years. That’s a lo-o-ong time. To put it in perspective, which I tend to try to do for myself, 40 years before 1969 was 1929. (Laughter.)

Freedom Fighters (1976) #2, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: That does do it.

GC: Doesn’t it? Imagine people in 1969 talking about 1929: “Yeah, back before the crash, before the Great Depression…”

Stroud: That is indeed a generation. You seemed to come in at a time when there was almost an unofficial changing of the guard. Were you aware of any of that at the time?

GC: I think we were. We certainly were aware that a lot of the people that were ubiquitous icons in the industry were vanishing around us. I came in and Gardner Fox and John Broome and Bob Haney were all being pushed out (and I’m just talking about the writers, I’m not even talking about the artists) and I think much like in the film business there was a sense that in order to compete and appeal to the newer readers, the more sophisticated readers, you had to suddenly get this new blood into the business. I remember Denny O’Neil used to refer to us as the young snots. We were all the young snots. Denny was like 26 and I was 16, 17, Len Wein was maybe 20, Marv [Wolfman] was 21. We were all (chuckle)…we were kids. And we were supposedly the people who knew how to reach this market that they knew that they needed to get into.

I’m talking about DC comics as opposed to Marvel, because Marvel actually I think felt like they had that market. They understood that market, but DC didn’t understand the market. That’s why they replaced people like George Kashdan and Jack Schiff and brought in editors like Dick Giordano and Joe Orlando which was an attempt to change the whole creative thrust of the business. Which they did. It really did go from the generation that had created comic books to the generation that grew up reading them.

Stroud: A logical transition and that kind of echoes something that Denny told me when he described DC as having the feel to him of your father’s comic books while Marvel was more the wild west.

Amazing Adventures (1970) #11, written by Gerry Conway.

GC: Yeah. Marvel was rock and roll and DC was Lawrence Welk and trying to get Lawrence Welk to do rock and roll…

Stroud: (Laughter.)

GC: I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember that transition in television terms, but you take the Ed Sullivan Show, which was a very popular show through most of the 50’s and into the 60’s and it was a variety show that was designed to appeal to the average middle class American, and over the course of the 60’s it basically lost its audience and it tried to reach the other audience, but there was just something so awkward and stodgy about the attempts. At the same time, you come along with a show like Laugh-In, that came out in the late 60’s and it just immediately hit that audience, that hipper, more attentive audience. But if you’re a producer and a creator, how do you go from Ed Sullivan to Laugh-In? It’s impossible to turn Ed Sullivan into Laugh-In. That’s why it took DC comics so long to catch up, because it had an entire mentality that had to be basically thrown out.

Stroud: I don’t mean to cast any stones, but when you read things like Bob Haney’s attempts to add hip language to the Teen Titans it was just embarrassing.

GC: It really was and it was sad, too, because Haney had tremendous ability. I have a really sad story about Bob Haney in that he was an extremely bitter guy and he was at one point the highest paid writer at DC and their most successful writer. He was their go to guy. The fans always admired people like Gardner Fox and John Broome among the DC writers, but in terms of sales, Haney’s books always outsold them. He was considered the guy who really got it. That’s weird for us to think of. We don’t think of it that way, but you look at Murray Boltinoff and Murray was the only guy who lasted as an editor from the 50’s through the 60’s and well through the 70’s at DC. Why is that? That’s because his books sold better than everybody else’s books. Even Julie Schwartz’s.

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #121, written by Gerry Conway.

I’m not saying they sold better in the sense that they had these fantastic numbers and everything, it’s just that consistently, month in, month out, he met the sales. And people like Bob Haney were the guys that helped him do it. Well, when I was breaking in and I finally became fairly well established, in I guess the late 60’s and early 70’s, as a newcomer, there was this effort in the early 70’s to create something called the Comic Book Writer’s Guild. This was something that we were supposedly all going to become members of this and put pressure on the publishers to treat us more fairly. (Laughter.) Like that was going to happen. We would have these meetings, and at these meetings you would have all these different generations of people. It was also at the Illustrator’s Club in Manhattan, which was like the grownups club. That was where the newspaper illustrators have their townhouse clubhouse. It was like where the grownups were. And they also had a bar.

So, we would go there and of course we’d get drunk. And I remember hanging there one time for this meeting and Bob Haney was there and Bob was definitely a bit smashed and he came over to me and we were chatting and I had very mixed feelings. He was a guy whose work I liked on things like Metamorpho, but I hated on things like Teen Titans, because he didn’t get me as a kid. But if you just looked at what he did on Metamorpho, I mean he was pretty good. When you put him in this other context, he’s not. So he was standing there and we were talking and he points to me and he says, “You know, you’ve got a lot of potential.” I was like, “Oh, really?” And he said, “I used to have a lot of potential.” (Laughter.) How’s that for grim? And I’m standing there going, “Ah, um, okay.” And I thought about it recently and Bob was probably younger than I am now when he said that, and I thought, what a sad, sad way for someone to feel at that point in his life. I don’t really know what happened to Bob after that, but he was pretty much pushed out of the business by people like Denny. Denny took over writing Brave and the Bold and working with Batman and Haney’s ability to adapt just wasn’t there and I don’t think there was much willingness on the part of people like Carmine to push him toward that and I don’t think he wanted to, to be honest. I don’t know what he wanted to do.

Stroud: It begs the question, because it sounds like Arnold Drake was in kind of the same mold there for a while. I’m told he was in the thick of trying to instigate this guild idea and it didn’t enamor him to the higher-ups.

All-Star Comics (1940) #58, written by Gerry Conway.

GC: I think Arnold Drake and Gardner Fox and Joe Gill and Bill Finger were all trying to get just things like health insurance and they were all fired. They were all let go and we were brought in. We didn’t realize that we were basically scabs. But we’re talking about two different guilds. There was an effort in the mid-60’s, like ‘67/’68 to try to pressure DC into providing health insurance for the writer and artists, by the writers and artists who were working at that time. People like Gardner and Bill Finger and they were basically told, “Screw you. We’ve got these new up and coming talents and those are the guys we’ll go to. They don’t care.”

Stroud: And who will probably work for less.

GC: It’s not less really; we just won’t give them any trouble.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

GC: Really. We were kids. We were just happy to be let into the play area.

Stroud: Sure. That’s another thing that I’ve noticed is that there was kind of a different attitude between what I guess you’d call the first generation and the succeeding generation because in many cases they were there just trying to make a living and the succeeding ones were more along the lines of loving to work in that particular genre.

GC: A lot of that earlier generation, many of them, and I’ve said this before, not pejoratively; they perceived themselves as failures. Most of them, I think, at least among the artists, wanted to be newspaper artists or illustrators and they either couldn’t do that work, or they found that they couldn’t make a living doing that work because of the kind of ruthless nature of the newspaper business. So they ended up doing comic books and believe me, comic books were not a culturally acceptable alternative for most of these guys. I mean these were guys who wanted to live in the suburbs and they wanted to be Don Draper in Mad Men. I don’t know if you’ve watched the show Mad Men.

Captain America (1968) #150, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: I’ve seen it.

GC: That was DC comics. If you want to know what DC comics looked like and how the people in it behaved, that’s what it was like. I knew these guys, because when I came into DC in the late 60’s those guys were the ones who were leaving. The suits. The guys who would dress up, who would come into the office in a suit and tie and drop off their artwork. Then they’d take their paycheck and they’d go home and they’d pretend that they didn’t do that. It was almost like they were secret pornographers. They did not feel like this was a legitimate art form. At least some of them. I would say Joe Kubert certainly thought it was a legitimate art form. That’s why Joe Kubert continues to be a relevant artist in the field.

But there were plenty of artists for whom this was not something that they wanted to be known for doing. It was not their preferred career. That’s why I say we were meeting at the Society of Illustrators, at their townhouse, and that was the grownups. Those were the important guys. Those were the guys who won Pulitzers for their newspaper strips and were treated as cultural icons. They were the Milton Caniff’s and the Hank Ketcham’s and the Charles Schulz’s and these guys weren’t. They didn’t get any respect. Ultimately, from a cultural icon point of view, these guys were just as important, and in many cases better than some of the guys who were touted by the society that was giving it to them.

Stroud: Yeah, and that’s a great point, because that was the brass ring at the time; to have a syndicated strip or maybe to work in advertising and those were considered honorable professions whereas the comic book work was not for whatever reason.

GC: That’s why it was so interesting that Neal Adams made the move that he did, because Neal was an extremely successful commercial artist and illustrator who had a career in advertising and chose, basically, to become a comic book artist, because he loved it. This was like a mind screw to these guys. (Chuckle.) They couldn’t understand why he was doing it. “You’ve got the brass ring. Why are you giving it up to do comics?” And even though he only did it for a relatively short period of time in terms of his overall career, his impact was enormous. Because again, he was the guy who represented that turn, from people who did it because they had to do it, because it was a job, to someone who chose to do it because it was an art.

Detective Comics (1937) #523, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: A complete shift in paradigm to say the very least. The impacts were reverberating throughout the industry after he and Denny changed Batman from the TV show back to his roots.

GC: Right. Or at least an interpretation of his roots, because seriously if you go out and look at Batman before Denny and Neal did it, even if you go all the way back to the first appearances of Batman you’d have to go back to the first two or three stories before it became silly. (Laughter.) It’s not like there was some halcyon Golden Age of serious Batman stories before Denny and Neal came along. (Chuckle.) You’d have to really go all the way back to the first three or four stories to get anything remotely like a dark Batman. I give them an enormous amount of credit for conceptualizing that. In other words, they did not go back to find something, they created something. They created an interpretation that had the feeling of what a dark Batman should be and it felt like it was an inevitability. But it really wasn’t. A guy running around in a bat costume with pointy ears. Trunks and boots, I mean, you know… (Mutual laughter.) No reason to think that’s going to be dark and spooky and existential. It’s really not an inevitability.

Stroud: Does the name Francis X. Bushmaster mean anything to you?

GC: Well, it means two things to me. Francis X. Bushmaster was actually a relatively famous silent movie actor in the early 20th century and it’s the name of a pseudonym that was suggested to me by Joe Orlando for some stories that I did. (Chuckle.) I didn’t know that he was a famous actor, but Joe said, “Call yourself Francis X. Bushmaster.” “Okay.”

Stroud: It certainly sounds grandiose. What was the purpose behind that?

GC: I don’t really remember. It may have been that I was already moving to do stories at Marvel and Joe just wanted to not make it an issue that I had done stories at DC. I don’t know.

Firestorm (1982) #1, written by Gerry Conway.

Conan the Barbarian (1970) #227, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: That seemed to be typically the case, although Denny told me that his Sergius O’Shaugnessy handle was more because he was still doing newspaper work and didn’t want to be sullied by his involvement with comic books.

GC: Exactly. See? I didn’t feel it was a dishonorable thing, so I’m not really sure why that pseudonym came up. It may even have been a joke. There was at least one story that Len Wein and I did together as a round robin that Joe published and I don’t think that was a Francis X. Bushmaster story, but we might have used a joint pseudonym for that reason. I don’t think I used it more than once or twice.

Atari Force (1984) #1, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: You talked about collaborating with Len and he was telling me how he and Marv used to do that sort of thing. Was that due to time constraints or just a fun way to work?

GC: In at least one case it was fun. We came up with a story idea to do a round robin and we did that for Joe and I think the other time that we collaborated was on a Star Trek story that Len was way behind on deadline and had to deliver something the next day, and so he and I did a round robin and we did this overnight. One of us would be writing page one while the other one was writing page two and the goal was to figure a way to get page one to dovetail to the top of page two, and it was to just get it done as fast as we could. We did a 25-page story overnight. It was actually fun and I think it turned out reasonably well. I don’t remember anything more about it other than that we got it done and the editor thought it was okay. (Laughter.)

Stroud: High fives all around. It reminds me of that famous story where Joe Orlando and Wally Wood were working furiously on pages and Joe would barely finish the pencils when Woody was inking over them.

GC: Absolutely and it’s still done where you have this kind of grind-it-out-to-meet-the-deadline, and it can be a lot of fun and sometimes it can be really good work and most of the time it’s not. (Mutual laughter.)

Stroud: Len did say to me, and I’m curious if it’s the same for you, that while he hates them, the deadline is his friend because otherwise he’d probably never get anything finished.

GC: Oh, absolutely. I totally agree. It’s very hard for me to write anything on spec. By spec I mean on speculation that someone is going to buy it or to write it just because I want to write it. And that’s unfortunate. I think I had more desire to do that when I was younger. You spend 30, 40 years writing for a living and you just end up not being able to juice it up unless you have an assignment and know where it’s going.

Daredevil (1964) #83, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: I forget who it was I was talking to, but they made an interesting observation or speculation and I don’t know if it’s the case now, but it probably speaks very well to people like yourself. They said probably the ideal combination would be a little bit more seasoned, mature writer teamed with a young artist as far as turning out a good comic book story because writers tend to get better as they get older just through their life experience and so forth whereas artists, unfortunately sometimes deteriorate as time goes by for physical reasons.

GC: It may be true. I mean I don’t know that there’s a hard and fast rule with that, but I think there is certainly some evidence that at least artists do tend to peak in their 30’s. It’s also true and I think this is an interesting counterpoint between the artist and the writer mentality; artists, as they get older, it’s not so much that their work deteriorates, but that they become more and more abstract in their approach, in that they have less interest in the extraneous detail. It’s like their work pares down and gets more and more minimal or minimalist. And that can be good in some cases.

You take someone like Jack Kirby, who I think sort of peaked in his late 30’s or early 40’s. I’m thinking now in like the mid-60’s. He peaked doing this incredibly detailed, very vibrant, very involved material, and then as you watch his work as it progressed, further and further it became more and more abstract. Bigger and bigger figures and less and less detail on the page. It was as if he was paring it all down to the most minimal interpretation and what I would say about that is not to take the negative, “Oh, he’s getting weaker. He’s not as good as he used to be,” but it’s that his patience for what he considered to be the less relevant parts of the art got reduced. He just wanted to do the big element that mattered to him. Now for a writer, what ends up happening is that you actually accumulate experience and you want to say more as you get older. It’s like you have more to say. You have more to put in. Rather than reducing, you’re trying to add more to the material. More layers, more sophistication, more senses of meaning, so it’s like the two arcs are moving in opposite directions. (Laughter.)

Wonder Woman (1942) #233, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: Of course. It’s interesting that you make that notation. I was wondering to myself…I haven’t read a lot of it, but I’ve picked up a couple of Steve Ditko’s recent independent works and I thought it was pretty flat and two dimensional.

GC: Yeah, but to give it a kind interpretation, you could say it’s sort of like Picasso when he got to the point where the line suggested everything else that he would ordinarily have put into the picture. He, himself, only felt like he needed to put in one line. And the same with good comic book artists. The bad ones just deteriorate because they never had that much to bring to it in the first place, but if you take a look at it and start to say to yourself, “Okay, it’s not that the guy has gotten lazy. It’s not that he’s no longer got the chops. What could it be?” Well, what it could be is that he’s actually able now to see more in that single line than maybe we do, but for him that single line represents all the other lines that would have surrounded it in the past. I’m being very abstract myself, because it’s very hard for me to really express it because I’m not an artist and I don’t have the vocabulary for it, but that’s sort of my impression of it. Thinking about people like Kirby or people like Ditko or people like Gene Colan whose work became looser and looser in certain ways as time went by. And it’s not that they’re bad artists or anything, it’s that their patience for the extraneous got reduced.

Stroud: I like it. I think you’re onto something. It’s almost like a shorthand.

GC: Yeah, exactly. Shorthand. The single line expresses for them everything they want, that they feel they need to express. Joe Kubert is a perfect example. Joe Kubert is a wonderful artist whose graphics have remained, I think, as sophisticated and as full today as it was 45 years ago, but you look at his brush strokes and the amount of detail that’s in his work and there’s far less of it now than there was then. And what could that mean? I think it means that he feels that he’s expressing everything he needs to express with much more minimal line work than he did before.

Stroud: Yeah. It doesn’t require the same degree of embellishment.

Last Days of Animal Man (2009) #1, written by Gerry Conway.

GC: It’s because he has more confidence in that line and less patience for all the other extraneous stuff, which we might actually love. We might look at the old stuff and say, “I love all this detail work.” That’s what may appeal to us, but an artist may be looking at it in a totally different way.

Stroud: I noticed that a lot of big-name artists have interpreted your scripts. Just a short list includes Gil Kane, Ross Andru, Gene Colan, and Steve Ditko. Did you feel anyone represented your ideas particularly well?

GC: I had three favorite artists that I worked with in my career and they would be Ross Andru, for the work that he and I did together on Spider-Man, which I think is among the best work that both of us did anywhere. I would say Jose Garcia-Lopez at DC. He and I did some work on books like Atari Force and Cinder and Ash and various Superman and Batman stories that we did over the years, and Gene Colan. Because we had two really good runs together on Daredevil in the early 70’s and on Batman in the early 80’s. Those are sort of the three artists who I feel happiest in terms of long relationships with. There were individual stories by different artists that were just fabulous and I was so pleased to have them work on it, but in terms of a continuing relationship, those were the guys I think I did some of my best work with who interpreted that work.

Stroud: Was there ever any degree of frustration when you’d release a script and not know what would become of it?

GC: That happened more I think at DC in the late 70’s and early 80’s when I was writing six or seven titles a month and I would be just turning scripts out and, in some cases, not really know who the artist was going to be. (Laughter.) But I worked with artists that, in some cases, just didn’t have the chops to put down what I envisioned and you learned how to compensate for that and try to write a bulletproof script where the story is covered. Where the artist can bring it. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Ms. Marvel (1977) #1, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: I think Len was the one who described it as defensive writing where he would sometimes follow the old Army method of instruction: Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them and hope that some of it sinks in.

GC: Right. Tell me three times. That’s certainly true. And the other thing that happens is that when you’re working with an artist and you get familiar with their strengths and weaknesses you tend to write toward those strengths and defend yourself against those weaknesses, so if you know an artist is particularly good at mood and dramatic confrontation rather than action, your stories for that artist tend toward mood and dramatic confrontation. Because it’s a collaboration. Neither one of you stand-alone and hopefully if you’re working well with an artist you’re communicating on some level even if it’s not directly. You’re communicating your understanding of each other, so the artist is giving you what you need, hopefully, and you’re giving the artist what he needs.

Stroud: Getting a true partnership going.

GC: Absolutely. And it’s really important that happens because otherwise it can be just a grind.

Stroud: Did you have a preference between full script vs. Marvel method?

GC: You know, they both have their strengths and weaknesses. When you write full script you’re more in command of the structure of an individual sequence. You know how it’s going to pace. You know how it’s going to play out and you can control that. You can’t necessarily control the execution of it in terms of what the artist gives you, so sometimes the dialogue that you’ve written isn’t really reflected in the art and you end up with this kind of dissonance between the two.

Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man (1976) #1, written by Gerry Conway.

So, in those cases, obviously writing it Marvel style is better because your dialogue is then reflecting what’s on the page, but you’re losing input over the actual pacing of the scene. You can describe it as detailed as you want; how you want the scene to be broken down, but ultimately if the artist is not working from a full script it’s going to reflect his sense of pacing and his emphasis of what is the important moment in the scene rather than what you might have intended. So, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. Depending on the artist I was working with, I would rather do it one way or the other. With somebody like Ross Andru, we were so much in sync in terms of our sense of how to pace a story and how to tell a story that working Marvel style was actually the most efficient and creative way for us to work together. With another artist where I wasn’t in sync with them, I’d rather do it full script.

Stroud: When you did what is obviously one of your best-known works, the grand company crossover, the Superman vs. Spider-Man book - who called the shots as far as the artist? Did you request Ross?

GC: Yeah. It was one of those weird circumstances because I came over to DC comics from five years at Marvel as one of their top writers at just the moment when they were closing this deal and as it turned out the setup was that Marvel was going to provide the artist and DC was going to provide the writer and since I was the new fair-haired boy at DC and Carmine loved to tweak Stan’s nose he put me on as the writer, and in effect the editor of the book and we both recommended and suggested Ross because Ross was someone who had drawn both Superman and Spider-Man and who would be familiar with both worlds as it were, and I had the extra reason of wanting to work with Ross again. (Chuckle.) It was like a great opportunity to do what amounted to, I think, possibly the best thing he ever did as an artist, at least up to that time. And he’s done some really fine work, so it wasn’t like this was a big surprise.

Swordquest (1982) #1, written by Gerry Conway & Roy Thomas

Stroud: No kidding, and the results were really smashing. It’s hard for me to fathom how you could get such a good product when you had what seemed to be so many cooks involved in it.

GC: It was surprisingly few cooks. That was what was so amazing about it. This is where the Marvel method played to the advantage of the book, which was at Marvel, what they tended to do was, at least at that point; it changed a few years afterward, but writers were given titles to write and they were basically made the de facto editor of the story. They would talk with the editor-in-chief, at that point Roy Thomas, in general terms about it, but it wasn’t overseen to the degree that it would be overseen at DC.

So, there was nobody at Marvel who was going to come in and supervise the project. I brought in Roy Thomas as the supposed editor/consultant from Marvel, but Roy didn’t care. (Chuckle.) He was like, “What? Fine.” He was my friend. He basically said, “You go ahead and do it. I’ll just stay over here.” And at DC, I was the editor, in effect, of the book, so there was nobody overlooking us. We had one real criteria that we tried to apply to it, which was that it was going to be an equal balance between the two characters. There would be the same number of big images of Superman as of Spider-Man. If Spider-Man was featured prominently in one 2-page spread, then Superman would be featured prominently in the next 2-page spread, and so on. That was the only internal pressure and we brought that pressure on ourselves as the creative team. It was actually a challenge that we gave ourselves to try and make this an almost equal balance between the two characters and their supporting cast, which I think we succeeded in doing.

Stroud: I would agree. How long did it take to crank out the final script? Do you recall?

Iron Man (1968) #92, written by Gerry Conway.

GC: I was writing while we were drawing, so we would do five to six pages of plotting. We had the overall story and we knew what we were going to be doing, but we would plot this thing in four to six-page segments and as Ross was drawing it I was writing the dialogue for it, so it took two or three months, I think, for it to be all done. Ross was doing it while he was doing other work for Marvel as well and Dick Giordano was inking it while he was doing other work, so I’m not sure exactly how long it all took, but it wasn’t more than two or three months.

Stroud: Were you aware of Neal Adam’s uncredited work on that project?

GC: Yeah, I’ve heard that Neal said that he redrew the faces for Superman and some of the figures on Superman and that’s probably true, but it’s not that much more than was done in general with art at that point. Inkers were brought on very often to work over the pencils. One of the reasons we brought Dick on to be the inker was because we wanted to smooth out some of the rough edges that Ross had in his art. And this was not uncommon. You look at Joe Sinnott working on Jack Kirby. It’s a very different look than what Chic Stone did on Jack Kirby and very different from what Vince Colletta did on Jack Kirby. Neal and Dick Giordano shared office space together. They were part of a company called Continuity Associates that was doing advertising work and I think they did a lot of things like that where Neal had an assignment and he was drawing it and inking it and Dick would come in and work on some of the pages and vice versa.

Stroud: Not such a strange or unusual thing.

GC: I think it’s certainly true that Neal did it. I don’t think that anybody really cared. (Laughter.) I honestly don’t think it made any difference. Yeah, it probably improved the look on Superman a little bit, but it’s not like there was anything wrong with what Ross had done.

Stroud: Yeah and goodness knows Dick Giordano didn’t need any lessons on being an inker.

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #129, written by Gerry Conway.

GC: Obviously not. I think it’s more just that Neal wanted to be a part of it. He couldn’t help himself. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: I was watching Coyote Ugly the other day and it occurred to me that it must have been kind of a kick to see your Punisher introduction issue of Spider-Man be a subplot on a movie.

GC: I wasn’t really aware of that. What was the subplot?

Stroud: Well one of the main characters is an aspiring singer in New York City and her love interest, an Aussie, bribed a way for her to perform on a local stage by offering his mint copy of Spider-Man #129 (poor Australian accent) “Look here. The first appearance of The Punisher.”

GC: That’s funny. I didn’t notice that. I’d seen the movie years ago and I’m actually a Piper Perabo fan and she’s in it, so it’s funny. I’ll have to look at that. Cultural icons, what can I say? (Mutual laughter.)

Stroud: I just thought, “That had to make Gerry feel good.” Your character became coin of the realm.

GC: Oh, it is in many ways, but not coin in my pocket, but it’s certainly coin for somebody.

Stroud: Denny was telling me…I don’t know if it was strictly as a courtesy and I don’t know if he has any actual input, but he says he often sees the Batman scripts for the movies. Did they show you any of the same courtesy on any of the Punisher films?

GC: Oh, no. I wasn’t even aware that these things were being made until they came out in some cases and they’ve never given me any credit. It’s just a “Marvel Comics creation.”

Doorway to Nightmare (1978) #2, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: Oh, geez. The consistent story I hear is that DC is much kinder and generous to their creators.

GC: Well they have been over the years. Whether that will continue now that Paul Levitz is no longer in charge is a good question.

Stroud: That’s the other thing. There has been very consistent praise for Paul’s efforts in that regard. I know Len in particular told me that if it weren’t for Paul’s insistence that he get a creator contract or whatever it is for Lucius Fox, “just a guy in a suit” he would have missed out on a substantial sum of money because of his major part in the last two Batman films.

GC: It’s true. DC has been very good about making sure people are taken care of and this is after treating [Jerry] Siegel and [Joe] Shuster horrendously for many years. I think their experience of humiliation when the first Superman movie was in development and Neal Adams made a big public stink over the fact that Sigel and Shuster were like on welfare, receiving nothing and getting no money on this film. That’s really when things started to turn around for the creators in the business and it was as a result of that, I believe, that DC started to become more proactive.

Stroud: Good for them, or whomever. Paul has obviously been a force in it and I suppose that stems from his being a creator himself.

GC: In addition to that he was also a fan and he approached this in part as a fan, wanting to do the right thing for the creators because he saw that was good business, but it’s also the morally correct thing to do. And there are very few people in the world, certainly in the entertainment world who have any clue at all about the morally correct thing to do. (Laughter.)

Stroud: Throw money into the mix and it all tends to go out the window, unfortunately.

Thor (1966) #193, written by Gerry Conway.

GC: Well, money and ego are the two worst things to deal with in the entertainment business. There are ample supplies of both.

Stroud: I don’t doubt it for a second. With all the work you’ve done for Hollywood how has that compared? Was that an easy transition?

GC: Creatively, it was very easy and actually professionally it was fairly easy. It took maybe two or three years to make that crossover. I’ve heard people refer to Hollywood as high school with money and that’s true and it’s also true that it’s comic books with money. It’s very similar in terms of both the ethos, the aesthetic and creatively it’s very similar. It’s about telling stories visually and there’s a lot of money involved. It’s all the same. Telling stories visually and creating mythology.

Stroud: So, it wasn’t a tremendous leap.

GC: It was and it wasn’t. The things that worked for me in comics worked for me in films and television. My ability to be adaptable to writing other people’s characters, to work in collaboration with people, to understand that my take on something wasn’t necessarily the definitive take. A lot of people don’t have that.

Stroud: I see you’re still doing comic book work now. Do you see that continuing on for a while?

GC: I’d like it to. I’ve pitched a couple of more projects to DC and hopefully they’ll give the go ahead to at least one of those things. At this point in my career I’m pretty much semi-retired. I’m not writing for film and television any more and that’s something I’m very happy about. So I’m just enjoying doing some writing for comics.

Justice League of America (1960) #200, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: Gene Colan described being an artist as sort of a grand love affair, a passion where you almost have to do it. Do you see writing in that same light?

GC: Yes. It’s probably less of a passion than something that feels right to me. When it works well I’m extremely happy that it works well. I feel satisfied with the work and I feel good about myself and all that. It’s not a compulsion for me the way it once was in my early days as a writer when I had to write and I was teeming with ideas and I couldn’t resist putting the material down on paper and all that. Now it’s more like, “That would be a good thing. I’d like to do that.” I guess part of that is 20 years writing for film and television and dealing with a lot of frustration working with people who are far less creative than the average comic book editor.

Stroud: (Laughter.) But certainly have a superior opinion.

GC: Oh, certainly they believe they’re much more creative. Their self-regard is without peer.

Stroud: I think I’ve met the kind. Probably not on the scale you have.

GC: You know there’s a bully in every playground and usually he thinks he’s just great. Unfortunately, in the film world those bullies are primarily the people you’re working for.

Stroud: I’m sure there’s a whole discussion there all by itself. I notice you keep a blog. Has that been pretty enjoyable?

GC: It has, but I haven’t actually kept the blog up for six or eight months or maybe even a year now. I mostly twitter and update my Facebook page. That’s my primary Internet social networking platform now and I enjoy that. I get more instant feedback and it keeps me in the public eye to the extent that I want to be kept in the public eye.

Worlds Unknown (1973) #6, written by Gerry Conway.

Stroud: When you were doing the Star Trek daily strip what were the differences involved in that as opposed to other types of work that you’d done and did you like it?

GC: I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. I actually wrote for two newspaper strips. I did that one and I did a Superman strip, I believe with George Tuska for six or eight weeks. Some fairly long story arc. I think I did the Star Trek strip for about a year. It was fun. It was sort of a challenge to do something in a different format, to learn how to express a story in three panels at a time, trying to create a story that lasts over a number of weeks. It was a very interesting process, and it happened at a time when I was transitioning from comics to film and it was a good opportunity to help make that transition.

Stroud: Do you feel all the recent raging successes of the superhero films the last several years is sustainable and is it good for the industry overall?

GC: I think it’s a fad. I’ll tell you that. And I think any continuation is going to depend on the quality of the material. The film business looks for what they call franchise properties where they don’t have to think about a project. The studios do not want to have to make a decision on whether something is good or not.

Stroud: Hence the sequel.

GC: Hence the sequel. Yeah. It’s a low-pressure decision. “If something did well, we’ll do it again.” That’s really it. And as a result, comic material is perfect for that because you can do endless numbers of them, and from the point of view of the film executive, they’re always looking for a way to defend their position. He’s not looking for what’s great or what’s fun or what’s interesting or what he thinks people want to see. He’s looking for a way to say, “I didn’t make a bad decision.” And one way you can do that is to say, “Look, this was already published. Somebody else had bought it before me.

Secret Society of Super-Villains (1976) #14, written by Gerry Conway.

So, it must have been good.” That’s the main appeal that comic books have to film executives. It’s a pre-established franchise material. So, it’s like a sequel without having to go through the process of having made the first film. Therefore, it’s a safer bet. It’s not a consideration of whether it will be successful; it’s just a safer bet from the ability to defend your decision. It’s all defensive. What people outside the film business don’t understand about how things are made in the film business is that decisions are very rarely made because people think that they’re going to make money on a project. They may make money on a project and they certainly hope to make money on a project, but there’s two aspects of a decision that are the primary driving force: The first, of course, is it’s defensible. “I can defend my job by saying I made a decision that was a reasonable decision for me to make based on the fact that other people already thought it was a good idea.” And the second part of it is, they want to be able to talk about it at cocktail parties.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

GC: Why actors are hired, why writers are hired, why directors are hired is simply so that producers can have something to tell the sexy young woman that they’re trying to seduce, that they’re working with Tom Cruise, they’re working with this hot new writer, they’re working with this hot director. That is the entire purpose of why certain things get done. It defensible. “I hired Tom Cruise, because his last three movies made millions and millions of dollars. I did nothing wrong. I’d like to be able to get laid.” That’s it. That’s the full extent of what creative process goes on in the minds of the people who are actually getting the green light to film. Creators definitely have passion and have things that they want to do and that’s all very well and good. That’s what actually drives it, but why do things get made? It’s for those two reasons.

Logan's Run (1977) #1, adapted by Gerry Conway.

Cinder and Ashe (1988) #1, written by Gerry Conway.

ThunderCats (1985) #9, written by Gerry Conway.

September 05, 2018

An Interview With Gene Colan - Drawing the Horrors of Dracula and Howard the Duck

September 05, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Eugene Jules "Gene" Colan (born on September 1, 1926) was an American comic book artist best known for his work for Marvel Comics, where his signature titles included: the superhero series Daredevil, the cult-hit satiric series Howard the Duck, and The Tomb of Dracula, considered one of comics' classic horror series. He co-created The Falcon, the first African-American superhero in mainstream comics, and the non-costumed, supernatural vampire hunter Blade, which went on to appear in a series of films starring Wesley Snipes. Gene was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2005.

Mr. Colan passed away on June 23, 2011 at the age of 84, following complications from cancer and liver disease.

Gene was such a wonderfully gentle soul and so generous with his time. Despite the fact that we only exchanged a few e-mails beyond this interview, I was very saddened when we lost him. His penciling technique was so ephemeral that many had a hard time inking it, but it was so breathtakingly beautiful, you almost wish a lot of it had never seen ink. Ladies and Gentlemen, Gene "the Dean" Colan!

This interview originally took place over the phone on October 2, 2009.

Adventures into Terror (1950) #27, cover by Gene Colan.

Bryan Stroud: I understand your artistic tendencies started very early in your life.

Gene Colan: I think they started at about age 3.

Stroud: That’s pretty early.

Colan: Yes, my folks told me that anyway. I was drawing all the time. That much I do remember.

Stroud: Well, it led to great things.

Colan: Yes, it did. I had quite a run.

Stroud: According to my research your first work was for Fiction House in the 1940’s?

Colan: That’s right. I worked for them for a summer, along with Murphy Anderson. Do you know who he is?

Stroud: I sure do. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with him.

Colan: A very sweet guy. At the time I got the job I don’t remember seeing him, but somewhere along the line he came aboard and that was for the summer and right after that I went into the service. So it was just a summer position.

Stroud: That was a good way to get a start, though.

Colan: It certainly was. I enjoyed it. I met a lot of professionals there that gave me a few pointers. I was very young, of course and from then on I enlisted and did a stint over in Manila in the Philippines and then they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima while I was in basic training, I think, and then instead of being released they sent me over to the Philippines as part of the occupation forces. My service was not quite two years. Very quick. But I wound up doing some artwork for the Manila Times and then I got out.

Our Army at War (1952) #9, cover by Gene Colan.

My goal had always been to work for DC comics. I thought they were the MGM of entertainment at the time, but I could never make a breakthrough. It was very difficult. They told me to go back to school and so I did. I went to the Art Student’s League on the G.I. Bill for about a year or so and then I went back again and then I decided that DC was not the only publisher and the next one that I picked up on was Marvel. At that time, it was called Timely Comics and I went up there and met Stan Lee for the first time.

Evidently the art director saw a lot of merit in my work and they asked me to wait outside in the waiting room and I knew that was always a good sign. He came back in about 10 minutes and that was a good sign, too. If they don’t want you, it’s in and out. But 10 minutes is like waiting for 10 hours. And sure enough, they asked me to come inside where Stan was. It was during the lunch break and I remember distinctly that it was in the summer and he had a beanie cap on with a propeller.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Colan: Always a kid, Stan. He was fun to be with, and the window was wide open and a good stiff breeze would come in and that propeller would swirl around. (Chuckle.) I looked at this and thought, “Is this the managing editor or the editor or what?” So, he said to me, “You want a job in comics?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Then sit down.” All the particulars were handled then and there and I got the job and that was the beginning of a wonderful career. Not that it didn’t have its ups and downs, and it sure did, but that’s business for you. There isn’t a business in the world that doesn’t have its problems.

Stroud: You’re absolutely right, although its interesting that at the time you began comics was still not exactly considered reputable work.

Colan: No, it never was. I’ve seen people read comic books behind their newspapers on the trains in subways and commuter cars. Nobody would dare open a comic book out in the open. I think it may still exist to some extent, but the older fellows today don’t care. If they want to read a comic book, they’ll read a comic book. They don’t care who’s watching, and why should they?

Stroud: Exactly, and unfortunately the current crop aren’t really aimed at kids any more.

Colan: Yes and no, but generally no. It seems to fit into the 20-25 age bracket, but today anybody can come up to the table. I’ve seen elderly people come up who’ve been comic fans all their life. In the early days it was geared mostly for children, but it just simply turned into something else. Stan always said to me, “You know, you’re really not drawing for the children. This is really for kids, but you’ve got an adult point of view when you draw these things.” He was beginning to question whether I was on the right track or not. I always felt that I was and I didn’t view it any other way. Every story that he gave me was something that I took seriously. It was a serious story. No fooling around. This is not a comedy, it’s a serious story, and so I treated it as such. And that’s really how I began.

Stroud: It certainly bore fruit. You’ve had such a long and diverse career over the years.

Colan: Yes. The trick is to live long enough to see all the perks that just may come your way. (Chuckle.) But I never expected anything like what it’s turned into. Gee, I just loved to draw and tell stories. That was really the motivating factor in the comics and also, above all, to see my stuff in print. It was very exciting. It’s like let’s say you’re a movie star, or trying to be one, and you’re in a film for the first time and you go to a movie theater and see the playback and there you are, huge up there on the screen and it’s an exciting experience. Well, it was the same for me. To see my stuff in print and with color was unbelievable to me.

Stroud: It had to be extremely gratifying.

Colan: Very. I might have done something in school where they’d take some of my little drawings of cartoons and mimeograph them and even that was exciting because before that I’d never seen my stuff in print anywhere.

Stroud: It seems like initially Stan used you a lot in books that had anything to do with “Battle.” In your credits I saw “Battle Action,” “Battlefront,” “Battleground;” was that by choice or did it just happen to be the assignment?

Colan: Well, at first, I did a lot of crime stories. Then I graduated to other things. I worked for other publications along the way and I seem to have drifted into that genre of action. Doing things about the war or crime stories or even horror stories. Always very serious and very frightening and that’s just the kind of work I generally got.

Stroud: I know that quite a bit of the things you did…you already mentioned the horror titles and the war books and so forth. When they introduced the Comics Code, due to the things you were working on did that become a stumbling block?

Colan: Not to me, because I would edit my own work. If there was something I thought the kids shouldn’t be seeing, or anyone for that matter, I would edit it in a way that would convey the message, but not as obvious as actually showing it. It could be a silhouette on the wall of someone being stabbed or something, but just indicating it with the silhouette. That way you weren’t seeing it directly. So that’s the way I would do it. I thought it was also appropriate. It helped to develop even more interest in the story itself. It’s always what you can’t see that’s more frightening than what you can see.

Stroud: I agree completely and that’s a technique that seems to be getting lost in a lot of modern storytelling. It doesn’t seem like we’re left much to our imaginations any longer.

Colan: Well, I want to say this: Telling a story in comics and drawing a story are two different things. If you can do both then you’ve got it made, but if you’re a wonderful artist and you do mostly one panel situations, but can’t tell a story, it’s worthless. I shouldn’t say worthless, sometimes when you’ve got someone who is basically an illustrator they’ll have them illustrate a cover, but in the time when I started the artists themselves did the covers. I did a few. Most of it was storytelling and in the company they had their favorites and other artists to do just the covers, or mainly the covers. That’s how they ran it.

My Greatest Adventure (1955) #74, cover by Gene Colan.

Stroud: It’s funny that you mention that. I’m holding right here in my hand a copy of a comic that you did the cover and the interior story it refers to in “My Greatest Adventure.” It was “Doom Was My Inheritance.” I don’t know if you remember that or not.

Colan: What’s the cover?

Stroud: It shows a man sitting in a wheelchair, interestingly enough, long before anyone thought of the Chief in the Doom Patrol or Professor X, and he’s sitting at this control panel, looking at a monitor and the balloon says, “You escaped my first trap, but you’ll never survive this one—never!” The monitor shows a man and a woman in a whirlpool.

Colan: I don’t even remember such a thing. Did I sign it?

Stroud: There’s no credits on it, but according to the Grand Comic Database you are the artist on the cover and the accompanying story. This was an anthology book and yours was the last story. As I look at it I can see what appears to be some Milt Caniff in your work.

Colan: Oh, yeah. You hit it right on the nail head. Milt Caniff, while I never knew him personally, his work always inspired me. I would go for the Daily News every week, the weekend edition with the full color page of his work and I was just drawn to it like a fly to flypaper. I loved his stuff. Just loved it. And I guess that was my biggest influence.

There were so many other great artists like Alex Raymond and Hal Foster, and they were really fine illustrators, but Milton Caniff had a very solid black and white look and since I loved to do things so heavily in black I was attracted to it.

Stroud: It really shows. The realism in this particular story, the inking in particular is just really impressive.

Iron Man (1968) #1, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Mike Esposito.

Colan: Did I ink it?

Stroud: You’re given credit as the inker.

Colan: I hated inking. I really didn’t like it because it took me way too long to do it; it made me nervous, because if you make a mistake with ink it’s very difficult to fix it so I stayed away from it. I could do things much more quickly with just pencils.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. In fact, another professional was just recently explaining things to me. He said that the typical pencil methods back in the day were layouts, which was just basically composition and not much else; and then breakdowns, which had a little more detail and therefore tended to pay a little bit better; and finally, full pencils which could easily work without any inking at all. Which one did you usually work in, Gene?

Colan: Full pencils. I never did layouts; I never did anything other than full pencils. At one time when they couldn’t recreate or copy pencils I tried to get Marvel to reproduce one of my stories in pencil and they did attempt to do it, but it came out awful. The printing system at that time wasn’t sophisticated enough to pick up the lines. So, it was a failure, but I knew I was heading in the right direction. Of course, today it’s not difficult at all. And since I love to work in pencil only I have no trouble having my work reproduced in pencil. The trouble that I do have is getting a good colorist.

Stroud: I can imagine, because that’s an art all unto itself.

Colan: Yes, and that’s the trouble I have because I think the colorists feel that since I like to do murky, dark subject matter that they have to color every panel in a dark way where you can’t really see what’s going on.

Stroud: You mentioned your preference for penciling. Did you have a favorite inker on your work?

Tomb of Dracula (1972) #34, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Tom Palmer

Colan: Tom Palmer. Eventually I got to meet him and he did all the Dracula work. Other excellent inkers I liked were Frank Giacoia, Bill Everett and frankly I was happy with most of them. I would like to mention that in my recent work on Captain America, Dean White has done a fabulous job. He really knows highlighting. The Dracula series ran the longest for me. It must have been a good ten years of a once a month book. Can you imagine all that work?

Stroud: That’s a lot of pages.

Colan: Yes it is. I believe it was a monthly and Tom wasn’t there at first. I inked one or two and there were a couple of other inkers, but when he came in the whole face of it changed for the better. Tom is a first-class illustrator and painter so he knows a lot about a lot of stuff and he came along and made the work look great. You know a great penciler can put his work in the hands of just a fair inker and the work will come out fair, but if you’re not the best penciler and you put your work in the hands of a great inker it can look much better than you can usually do. It will wind up looking even better than what you did.

Stroud: It’s really interesting how someone gifted with a brush or a pen can really do that kind of thing. I’ve seen some examples over the years where you can distinctly tell who the inker was because they tended to almost make it their own.

Colan: That’s right.

Stroud: I was thinking of Sid Greene over at DC. His stuff always had a very familiar look to it, but interestingly when I was talking to Bernie Wrightston and he once inked over Steve Ditko, and he said the thing with Ditko was that his stuff is so strong that no matter who inks it, it looks like Ditko. So, I’ve seen it work both ways.

Doctor Strange (1968) #180, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Steve Ditko

Colan: Yes. His work is very definite and you can’t go awry with it. I mean it’s all there. Lines to follow, but with my work there’s a lot of guess work involved. Is there something in the shadows or not? That kind of thing. It’s very difficult for many inkers to figure out what I had in mind. Also, I put a lot of half tones in. And I know full well they’re never going to use those half tones, because that means cross hatch work and line work and the artists can’t make money that way and I don’t blame them because it takes a lot of time to do that, but I put it in anyway. If they don’t want it, they can leave it out. But I’ve satisfied myself. When I’ve finished doing a page, that’s how I did it, and they accepted it that way. They never complained.

Stroud: And after all, if you’re not enjoying yourself, why do it at all?

Colan: That’s another element that can come up. You have to be careful. If you want to do your best work you just have to keep plugging away at it and it becomes a marriage really, to the work. You’d rather do that than anything. You have to love it. It’s a real love affair with the art work. Any kind of art work. Even composers have to love what they’re composing and the music they’re composing. Writers are the same. They need peace and quiet and a certain atmosphere around them to write a story. Painters, too. Usually they live in the country. I lived in Vermont for 13 years or so and I could have stayed there forever, but my wife thought there wasn’t really anything there to hold her attention because it was a one-horse town that we lived in. Manchester, Vermont, near Bennington. I loved it. I loved the atmosphere and everything about it. When it was Christmas you knew it was Christmas. And when it snowed, oh, brother. (Chuckle.) I was always kind of a loner and if you ever wanted to find me I’d be at my board.

Stroud: It seems to be a solitary exercise so you have to be comfortable and you have to really love what you’re doing.

Astonishing Tales (1970) #29, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Frank Giacoia.

Colan: Sure, absolutely it is that way, but you get lost in it. It’s a big adventure and you get lost in it. I do have my misgivings about it with family life and all because if you have children you’re sometimes not much of a parent. As a father I wish I could do it over again. I like to feel that I would do it differently, but I probably wouldn’t. It’s just the way I feel about the art. Now I’m glad to be able to take some time off from it a little bit. And I can’t do the stories any more. There’s too much art work involved and too much thinking in telling a good story and I’ve had it with that pretty much.

Stroud: Well, you’ve certainly put your time in.

Colan: I would think so. I did put plenty of time in.

Stroud: Amongst the many, many things you did, whether it was Western, Romance, Horror or superheroes, did you have a place where you felt most comfortable?

Colan: Probably with the horror. Probably with something like Dracula. I love that kind of thing. Something with a castle and a lot of fog. (Chuckle.) But I’ve been ridiculed by some artists in the past thinking I wasn’t able to draw the full figure and so I covered it up with a lot of fog.

Stroud: Oh, that’s ridiculous.

Colan: Well, people have their thoughts and that isn’t the case, but there it was and there’s always somebody who’s going to find some fault, but that goes with the territory and it’s something I can manage. Not easily, but I can manage.

Stroud: Well, you can’t please everyone, of course, and there are always those who are more vocal than others. Your work on Nathaniel Dusk was kind of unique because as you mentioned before that translated without the benefit of any inking. How did that one come about?

Nathaniel Dusk (1984) #1, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Dick Giordano.

Colan: It started out not too well because they didn’t quite know how to do it at DC. They thought they knew how, but they really didn’t and it took some experimenting on their part to figure out the best way to recreate the pencils. And they did. They licked it. By the third issue I think they had it nailed pretty good. Then of course there was Dean Mullaney. Do you know who he is?

Stroud: I don’t think so.

Colan: Well, he’s put out a lot of comic books in his time and he’s still in the business. Before DC got a hold of it, he actually did it on a story of mine called Ragamuffins. They were the first ones to recreate the work from pencil where it looked really great. Don McGregor was the writer and I worked with him for a good number of years and that’s really where it started and they eventually began doing some art work for DC and then they took up the baton at that point and all the issues of Nathaniel Dusk were done that way.

Stroud: The kind of work you’ve done over the years often seems to translate best in black and white and when you were working for Warren that was really a showcase for it. Was that publisher a good fit for you?

Colan: Yes, it was. I inked my own stuff at that point, which I didn’t mind. It was a departure from what I usually did and I could put wash tones in by watering down the ink and it developed a nice tone of grey, so I could fiddle with it and get some effects that I could never get before, so I enjoyed that. It was short lived. I did some stuff for Archie Goodwin up at Eerie, I think it was, and Combat comics. I did a few war stories and one submarine story and the fans keep remembering those things. I made a breakout at that point. But again, it was short lived. I got back to doing regular stuff.

Stroud: Were there any writers that you particularly enjoyed interpreting their stories?

Colan: Yes, there was one. His last name was Greg Potter. He did work for DC and it was a new character and I had a crack at developing him. It didn’t last long, though. His writing style was so unique, so great. I loved his stuff and I just don’t know what became of him.

Marvel Classics Comics (1976) #28, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Tom Palmer

Zoom Suit (2006) #1 Colan Variant, cover by Gene Colan.

Little Shop of Horrors (1987) #1, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Dave Hunt.

Stroud: What was the timeframe?

Colan: The early 70’s, I believe.

Stroud: And the character?

Jemm, Son of Saturn (1984) #1, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Klaus Janson

Colan: It was a creature from outer space that had come to Earth. Jemm, Son of Saturn. An alien of a type and I enjoyed it. There was a certain amount of philosophy, I thought, with his work. The way he wrote seemed to contain philosophical points of view and no one ever did that before. He included a little quote that began every new story and I loved it. I loved his writing. And of course, Steve Gerber on Howard the Duck. Funny, funny guy. I loved his work. I had a good long run with Howard.

Stroud: Yes, and you’re the co-creator of that character are you not?

Colan: Well, as far as the duck goes I don’t think I started it that way. There might have been one or two other tryouts for it, and it always turned out looking like Donald Duck. So that’s how I drew it. I was wondering how they got away with it, because it was such a steal from Disney that I said to myself, “Surely they’re going to hear about this.” And they did. The only thing that Disney wanted them to do really to make a difference was to put pants on Howard.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Colan: Can you imagine that? Put pants on him. So that’s what we did to sort of make it a little different than what Donald Duck looked like.

Stroud: Not bad. That’s a pretty small concession to have to make.

Colan: Very small.

Stroud: On another topic, do you think comic characters translate well to the big screen?

Colan: Yeah, they certainly do. It’s made a lot of money for places, the publishers and Hollywood. They’re always looking for something different to do and these days, of course, the special effects department needs to be working on something that requires special effects and they’ve got it down to such a degree that you can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t.

Howard the Duck (1976) #10, cover by Gene Colan.

Stroud: Yeah, computer generated imagery has opened a lot of previously closed doors.

Colan: In the 40’s this kind of stuff was created by the studios themselves in the back room. They had to come up with ways of portraying things like the Invisible Man which was all trick stuff. They had to pioneer these things without the benefit of the technology we have available today. Even then they had some good stuff. I remember asking relatives and others, “How do they do that?”

Stroud: Now did you ever work on a syndicated strip?

Colan: Yes. Howard [the Duck] was syndicated and I worked on that for awhile and was actually burning the candle at both ends, working on the syndicated strip and also working on the publication version at Marvel. I didn’t want to leave the one for Marvel because if the syndication didn’t work out then I didn’t want to be left high and dry.

Stroud: Sure. Gotta keep those checks rolling in.

Colan: Well, being a family man, that was something I had to do. Eventually my health didn’t hold up too well keeping hours like that. It was terrible. So I let go of the syndication. I just couldn’t keep up with it.

Stroud: The regular deadlines are brutal enough without something like that. Joe Giella was telling me that the syndicate has no sense of humor when you blow a deadline. I guess the fines are pretty hefty.

Colan: Well, and they didn’t pay well to begin with. King Features, Field’s Features and the others. They just didn’t pay all that well. They work you to death and you’re just not making all that much out of it, but at least you don’t have to worry about where the next check is coming from. At least you know you have something that you can fall back on. But it’s a brutal way to work. Just brutal, because you’re working all the time, around the clock, late hours. It’s bad.

Batman (1940) #345, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Dick Giordano

Stroud: There’s never really a day off. It’s a year-round thing.

Colan: Oh, you don’t have a life at all. It’s bad enough without it, but this is like solitary confinement.

Stroud: Did you have any editors you worked particularly well with, Gene?

Colan: I got along very well with Stan Lee. Always have, but I can’t always say the same for others. I also liked John Verpoorten, Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman. Some were good, some weren’t, but there was one particularly bad one and I had this guy for a good number of years and he was just horrible. He was not connected with Marvel, he was connected with DC, back in the 1950’s. There’s no point in mentioning his name, but he was bad and I didn’t know enough to complain to the higher-ups that I needed to get to a different department to work with a different editor, because this one was a nightmare. But I put up with it and in the end, I lost my job there because I finally blew my top and said something to him he fired me on the spot and I couldn’t get back into comics there or anywhere else for about six years.

Stroud: Oh, good grief.

Colan: Yes, so I had to flounder around and look for work. I couldn’t get comic book work so I picked up work at studios. I did film strips and things like that. I worked for a banking advertising company and I did little illustrations. Some of them were cartoons and some of them were realistic. I worked for them for a couple of years. I hated the job. That was also when there was a big distribution problem with comics and they couldn’t get their books distributed and they damn near went out of business, including Marvel. And nobody could get work and of course I fell right into that category. So, I had to get work wherever I could. See DC was around. They held their ground. Marvel had a tough time, but they also held their ground. Between Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, they managed to hold on and keep things afloat. Martin Goodman owned Marvel and what a sweet fellow he was. Just wonderful. A real home guy and if you needed help personally he’d help you. He was wonderful. I once had a situation with a check that got lost in the mail or something and didn’t get to me and so I was desperate and I contacted him and he wrote me a personal check just to keep me going. Eventually, of course, he sold the business for $6 million. Today, of course they just sold Marvel for $4 BILLION dollars.

Captain America (1968) #116, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Joe Sinnott

Stroud: Who could have ever guessed back in the day?

Colan: (Chuckle.) Impossible. So, who knows where they’ll be going from here? I don’t have the faintest idea where it’s all going to wind up.

Stroud: The two companies look almost to me like they’re going to start focusing more on the licensing of the characters for movies, games and cards and less on the publishing side.

Colan: Yeah. To me it’s wonderful that I’m able to sell these characters through the internet to all the fans without DC or Marvel jumping all over me. I’m making a living off these characters that I do not own, but its great advertising for them. So, they say nothing. One feeds the other and that’s a good thing, but where it’s all going to go I don’t know. I keep thinking of the great…I’m a film buff, so to me the movie screen is just a big comic book panel and I think of the great stories that were written years and years ago by Hollywood screen writers. Original stories. Some were not original, but they were great. They were wonderful and today, I don’t know. Some great stuff is still being put out, like “Doubt,” “Looking for Richard,” and that film that Al Pacino produced personally. I’m not sure how far it went into theaters, but it was a very small film that he and Jerry Orbach were in called “Chinese Coffee.” It’s something you could rent and I think you’d enjoy it. Are you a writer?

Stroud: Well, I dabble. It’s not how I make my living, but I’ve had the most darn fun the last couple of years trying to be an amateur historian of the Silver Age, but yes, I very much enjoy films.

Colan: It’s about the ups and downs and the frustrations of two writers that are living down in the Village and you can easily put yourself in that position of trying to make it and they’re practically living on poverty row.

Stroud: Speaking of film, you’ve drawn the definitive Dracula stories, so I wonder what you think about the success of Twilight as a vampire film.

Tomb of Dracula (1972) #53, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Tom Palmer

Colan: Well, Twilight is really aimed at the teenaged crowd while the Dracula I did is a grownup sophisticated guy. When I got the assignment I actually fashioned him after Jack Palance. I used Palance as a model. I struggled with that until I could get his face right and I finally managed to do it, I think. Then it just kept on growing and it lasted for a long time.

Stroud: Do you consider him your signature character?

Colan: Yes, I would probably say Dracula, but Iron Man came way before Dracula and Daredevil before that. I think Daredevil was the first full feature book that I was involved with. Usually I worked on six-page stories and crime stories and stuff like that. By the way I was green as grass when I started out. I knew nothing really about drawing. I was very fortunate to be among so many professionals and one of them who was the manager of the art department, a fellow by the name of Syd Shores guided me. He was an artist himself. There wasn’t a thing he couldn’t draw. He helped me an awful lot.

Stroud: So, you had some good mentoring.

Colan: Very. I mean it was better than school and I was being paid at the same time, which was great. What an opportunity I had. But I do have to say that Stan had seen something in me and had the ability to look ahead and see that perhaps he had somebody there that might make the company look good or at least help make it look good.

Stroud: Foresight and vision. It sounds like the mark of a true leader.

Colan: Well, the only thing that motivated me in any of it was to be as good an artist as I could be and if it meant changing my style a dozen different times I was willing to do whatever I had to do until I could reach some kind of a point that I was satisfied. Not fully, but at least I could feel I was on my way. That’s important. Style is nothing that you can purposely do unless you’re trying to copy another artist, and we all do that. All artists copy somebody else that they think is better. Somebody who is up there. It’s like water finding its own level. Eventually you will settle down into what comes natural to you without being told you don’t have a style. I’ve been told that. But I do have a style only it wasn’t developed enough at the time.

Daredevil (1964) #44, cover by Gene Colan.

Stroud: But in time all good things come.

Colan: Yes, they do eventually. You just have to stay with it. That’s another thing that a lot of the great artists…they’re all very young now and some of them are just fabulous at what they do, but again the storytelling ability, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases, is not there. Also, if they are given the opportunity to do a story, and they can do it very well; they may do two, they may do three, but after that they’ve lost their interest. How do you develop a character, after doing two or three stories? You can’t. You have to be in there all the time and then you begin to change things. I mean I did Iron Man for a good number of years, certainly and Daredevil for a good number of years and I grew with the character as an artist, because I was with it long enough, as an artist.

Stroud: Sure. It could only become that symbiotic relationship you were talking about earlier.

Colan: Yes, but they lose their patience, you see. They don’t have the patience, but they want overnight success and there is no such thing. You’ve got to put your time in, you’ve got to be devoted and above all you have to love it. You’re very fortunate if you’re in a position where you love what you’re doing. They may not be paying you what you’re worth, but you’re still doing what you love doing and you’re being paid anyway. Somewhere it’s going to change. You’re going to get so good at it that you’ll be able to eventually demand more money and have more people wanting you to work for them.

Stroud: Makes perfect sense, and you’ve worked for them all and been recognized. You’ve won Shazam and Eagle, Inkpot, Sergio and the Will Eisner Hall of Fame honors.

Colan: My health doesn’t permit it, but they were going to have a dinner for me in Los Angeles that I can’t attend. I wish I could, but that means getting on a plane and I only recently got out of the hospital.

Eerie Magazine (1965) #3 pg.48 drawn by Gene Colan.

Stroud: How was San Diego for you this year?

Colan: Wonderful. I didn’t really do any work. Usually I do some sketching, but my wife didn’t want me to. She said, “You’ve worked hard enough.” So what I did was sign books and took down little requests. I draw things on a card at home. A little bit bigger than a stamp (chuckle) of any superhero that they want. It doesn’t cost much and is something everybody can afford. Today money is awfully tight everywhere. The best part of the time there was having time to visit fans and colleagues.

Stroud: That’s a fact and that’s a neat service you’re providing. I notice you’ve got a solid presence on the web. (*www.genecolan.com has since been taken down)

Colan: Yep. I worked at it. My wife takes care of all the intricate stuff. Do you work a computer?

Stroud: Yeah.

Colan: I can’t. I don’t know how. I’ve never taken an interest in it really, and it’s very complicated, but she can. She can do an awful lot of stuff so she takes care of the business for me. I do the art work and she does the arrangements and the website and everything. She’s brilliant in more ways than one. She’s been taking me around to the different doctors, which is no easy task. She’s always on the road or at home on the computer. She hardly gets a free moment for herself.

Stroud: Sounds like you got a good one there, Gene. I understand you did some teaching for awhile. Did you enjoy that?

Captain Marvel (1968) #1, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Vince Colletta

Colan: Yes, I did, for awhile, but that’s a talent all by itself. A different set of skills. It’s not easy. You just have to know how to deal with it. As an artist, you know what to do and how to come about what you do, but to explain how you did it is something else again. It’s difficult. Sometimes you can’t. It’s a feeling that you have and the explanation doesn’t always match up with the feeling. You think, “Maybe I can explain how I arrived at a certain thing,” and you just can’t do it. At least I couldn’t. Again, it’s another skill. But I stuck with it.

I worked at SVA (School of Visual Arts) and FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology). I was there for a good number of years at both places. I ran up against some of those problems, but you’re bound to anyway when you’re dealing with young people. Sometimes they take a hairy fit and walk out because they don’t have the patience. Or frustration sets in. Who knows? I stuck with it a good seven years or so and then I just gave up on it. I couldn’t keep going back and forth. I commuted even from Vermont to New York once a week, but then I had two classes back to back, so I was at school all day.

By the time the day was over it was dark and I had to go make a big train trip all the way back to Vermont. So, I did that for awhile to keep things rolling in different directions. I probably would be willing to go back and try it again, simply to have a good paycheck. (Chuckle.) At least I could fill the gap in with that. But I don’t think I have the get up and go for it any more, although I’m only about 20 minutes out of Manhattan over here in Brooklyn.

Stroud: That wouldn’t be quite as daunting. Ric Estrada told me about his time teaching at the Kubert School, which he enjoyed, but it got to be a grind after awhile.

Colan: It does. Sometimes it felt like the same things being repeated over and over again. With different kids of course. Kids move on and you get a new batch in and start the whole process all over again. But some people who do the kind of work I do manage it and they do a good job and they’ve found someplace else for themselves.

Heart Throbs (1949) #96, cover by Gene Colan.

Stroud: And thank goodness because that’s how new talent gets produced.

Colan: Sure.

Stroud: What was your usual production rate?

Colan: Oh, a very slow worker. It was tough. I’d start around 10:00 or so; often earlier and break for dinner and around 3:30 or closer to 4:00 I’d finish the first page with steady work. Then with the rest of the day I could hardly bring out the second page. Sometimes I could, sometimes I couldn’t, but as time went on I was able to do it without too much trouble. I’d usually quit around 2:00 a.m. and could produce two to two and a half pages per day. I was able to pace myself better and draw in sort of a different way to make sure that I could get the work out on time. The schedule was always very important to me, so I would allow enough time at the table to be working so that I could turn it out even if it meant staying up real late to do it.

Stroud: Part of the package.

Colan: Yeah. There’s no such thing as a nine to five job in this business.

Stroud: Not at all. You’re pretty well known for your meticulous research. What were your methods?

Colan: For research? Photographs, magazines, books and whatever I could get on the subject that I needed. When I was doing Dracula a lot of it took place in Boston so I actually went there with a camera and took pictures everywhere. Alleyways and main thoroughfares; the architecture of the place. Whatever I could grab that I could possibly use in the story. I would have gone anywhere. If I could, I did, just to make it authentic. Everything I did had to be authentic. If I couldn’t get it authentic I had to sort of bend my mind in a way that I could maybe get away with it because I didn’t have time to fool around and research every detail. Today it’s so easy. You get on the computer and whatever you need you can get a picture of it.

Dracula Commission penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Dave Gutierrez.

Stroud: It’s really put a whole new light on everything. I haven’t quite made up my mind about digital production of comic books. It seems to lack…

Colan: Hands on stuff?

Stroud: Yes. Like lettering almost being gone in the way it used to be done.

Colan: Yes, which is a shame. You know old people always feel that way about the past. My grandfather always thought it was a shame that things weren’t the way when I was a kid as they were when he was a kid. It’s progress. Time marches on.

Stroud: True. You can’t turn the clock back.

Colan: You can’t change anything. But it always works out.

Captain America (1968) #117, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Joe Sinnott.

Daredevil (1964) #45, cover by Gene Colan.

Doctor Strange (1968) #173, cover by Gene Colan.

Doctor Strange (1974) #35, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Bob Wiacek

Howard the Duck Annual (1977) #1, cover by Gene Colan.

Marvel Classics Comics (1976) #20, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Ernie Chan.

Marvel Preview (1975) #16, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Tom Palmer.

Night Force (1982) #1, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Dick Giordano.

Our Love Story (1969) #18, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by John Romita.

Phantom Zone (1982) #1, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Dick Giordano.

Savage Return of Dracula (1992) #1, cover by Gene Colan.

Secret Origins (1986) #5, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Mike Gustovich.

Silverblade (1987) #1, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Neal McPheeters.

Tomb of Dracula (1991) #1, cover by Gene Colan.

Wonder Woman (1942) #288, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Dick Giordano.

August 29, 2018

An Interview With Walt Simonson - Master of The Mighty Thor & Friend of The Fourth World

August 29, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Walter "Walt" Simonson (born September 2, 1946) is an American comic book writer and artist, best known for a run on Marvel Comics' Thor from 1983 to 1987 - during which he created the character Beta Ray Bill. He is also known for the creator-owned work Star Slammers, which he began in 1972 as a Rhode Island School of Design thesis book. He has also worked on other Marvel titles (such as X-Factor and Fantastic Four), on DC Comics books (including Detective Comics, Manhunter, Metal Men and Orion), and on licensed properties such as Star Wars, Alien, Battlestar Galactica and Robocop vs. Terminator. Simonson has won numerous awards for his work and has been named as an influence by artists such as Arthur Adams and Todd McFarlane.

He is married to comics writer Louise Simonson, with whom he collaborated on X-Factor from 1988 to 1989 - and with whom he made a cameo appearance in the 2011 Thor feature film.

Thor (1966) #351, interior panel from pg.18 - by Walt Simonson.

You'd have to travel far and wide to find a more genuinely nice guy than Walt Simonson. Not only is his career fascinating, but he's a thoughtful gentleman who's been there and done that and continues to do so. At one point he talks about his then-unnamed book, The Judas Coin, which was just a magnificent bit of storytelling and if you knew what you were looking for, you could spot him in a cameo in the Thor movie. Walt was a complete delight and I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did conducting it.

This interview originally took place over the phone on September 23, 2009.

Hercules Unbound (1975) #12, cover by Walt Simonson.

Bryan Stroud: Your start in the business came from kind of an interesting direction, going from Geology and switching to art school and it’s well documented that you used your Star Slammers as your senior degree project. How did you get from Point A to Point B?

Walt Simonson: The simple answer is that I, even as a kid, really had two interests. One was dinosaurs and one was drawing. My dad was a soil scientist and, while not a geologist, he studied the earth - so the family had a scientific sense to it. When Dad’s friends would come from out of town they were usually scientists coming into D.C. to do stuff, so I never thought about art as a career. I just drew because it was fun to draw. But I also liked dinosaurs and thought I’d pursue that as a vocation. I went to college and was a geology major. Typically when you want to study dinosaurs your undergraduate career is either geology or biology and then you become a verto-paleo or whatever you’re going to be as a grad student. In my case I got to the end of my senior year and I’d actually done some Paleo research as part of my senior thesis, but I reached a point where I decided, about two months before graduation, I could see this was not what I wanted to do as a vocation. I’m sure my parents were thrilled…

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Simonson: They discussed that with me and they were nothing but supportive the whole time, but I ended up, literally, graduating from college with no real idea of what I wanted to do except that it was not in the geology/paleontology realm. What happened then was I took a year off. I was one of the very early boomerang kids. I moved back home, I lived in my old room, I got a job in a local bookstore and along about fall, having graduated in May, I decided to apply to art schools - really because that was my other interest. I really hadn’t taken very much art, and the art that I had taken I hadn’t been wild about. Mostly because in art courses back in junior high school and places like that you go through a curriculum like, “Okay, this week it’s paper mache sculpture; next week it will be toothpick construction; the week after it will be origami.” I just wanted to draw. I just wanted to be left alone so I could draw.

Eternals (1985) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

So, my art school grades tended to be in the “B’s,” though I had an “A” one year because I had a teacher who let me do what I wanted to do and taught me the stuff I needed to know. My original introduction to perspective was in the 8th grade because Mrs. Pope actually let me draw on a regular basis and graded that stuff and taught me perspective, so that was one year I had a pretty good grade in art. But, I didn’t know what else to do really as a graduate senior with a degree in geology. So, as I said before I applied to art schools and eventually ended up going to the Rhode Island School of Design and while I was there I got really interested in telling stories through comics. The funny part is that during my initial college career, while I was a geology student, I discovered Marvel comics. This was back in the mid-60’s, and it was right when Marvel was hitting what I regard as their first big golden age where Jack [Kirby] and Stan [Lee] and Steve Ditko and Don Heck and all these guys…some were doing brilliant work and the guys whose work wasn’t as brilliant were still doing some of the best work of their careers. They just had some phenomenal stuff.

So, about 4 or 5 years of really enjoyable comics. I read them all and I had a great time. Right about the time I went to art school I wasn’t reading as many, but I began to become interested in trying to tell stories in the form and that’s really a big part of where the Star Slammers and my degree project came from. So by the time I graduated from RISD, I had a 50-page comic that I had written, penciled, inked and bound in the second half of the volume, and over the 2 years I was working on it; my junior and senior years, my work went from being what would be regarded as pretty decent fan work to the last two or three chapters being marginally professional and they were well designed. That was just the direction I was headed in. I learned in art school and incorporated a great deal of what I’d learned into my comics, so the work tends to be a little on the eclectic side. It gave me, basically, a portfolio to take into New York City to try to get work in the business.

Stroud: Outstanding.

Marvel Graphic Novel (1982) #6 - Star Slammers by Walter Simonson.

Simonson: And back at that time, around 1972 when I graduated, I went to New York in August of that year, and Marvel and DC were the only companies at that time producing the type of adventure comics that I wanted to draw. This, of course, was before the internet, it was before FedEx, it was before all that stuff. There was no overnight delivery of any kind, so pretty much if you wanted to do comics like that you had to live near the publisher, because you had to take your work in.

So, the result was that a generation of guys; one of the last generations of guys, really, where we all moved to New York. Probably guys all about my age, so I knew all the guys who got into the business from perhaps ’67 to ’75 or so. We all lived in Southern Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn, but you’d go into the companies and drop stuff off and you pretty much met everybody, so I know all the guys from my generation, which was actually very cool and it was very exciting and very inspiring because you could see the type of work they were doing. I still remember going into DC and Bernie Wrightson brought in maybe the 4th issue of Swamp Thing. It was a werewolf story and there was a full page interior splash of the werewolf with a lot of Zipatone, a lot of tonal work on it and it was just so stunning we thought we should probably take Bernie out behind the bar and mug him.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Simonson: It was just great and it made you want to go home and say, “Geez, I’ve got to level up my game.”

Stroud: The bar just got set that much higher.

Secret Origins (1986) #22, cover by Walt Simonson.

Simonson: Oh, man. So it was cool. It was a neat time to be doing comics. I was lucky enough to get work really rapidly. I wasn’t doing a regular series. Back in those days you pretty much weren’t put on regular series to start with. Back-up stories, when there were back up stories, was where you got your training. Now you probably get your training in some of the smaller, independent companies, but I got some backup stories and made enough money to pay my rent…sort of, and eat…sort of, at least until I could bring my own game up to a level where I was offered better work, but really it worked out pretty well. I was very lucky and I was able to get into the business and pretty much stay there.

Stroud: Well, right out of the gate you won Shazam Awards among others, so that must have validated your career choice.

Simonson: Well, you know what it did? It made the rest of my career possible. Basically the year I got into comics it was in early August of ’72 and by March or thereabouts of ’73; less than a year, Archie Goodwin, who was an editor at DC and became my editor on several of my backup stories and had become a good friend offered me this new strip he was getting ready to do in the back of Detective Comics called Manhunter. It ran for a year. Detective Comics was a bi-monthly comic and Manhunter was an 8-page chapter in each issue at the end of it except the sixth chapter, which was 9 pages and the last chapter was 20 pages where we crossed over with Batman and basically that strip really made my career. Between Archie and me we won six awards over two years, the Shazam Award and others. What it meant for me really, in terms of a career, was that it was before organized fandom like you have now. Fandom today is not only organized, but they’re all on the web and everything gets around in 4 seconds…including the misinformation, but everything gets around in 4 seconds.

Back then there were fanzines. I did drawings for some of the science fiction fanzines before I got into comics and I knew fandom. I knew guys who were fans. I was more of a science fiction fan as far as the organized part of fandom as well as a comics fan, but what it meant by winning the awards was that people in the industry knew who I was, and so when in the early 70’s I began doing the strip, I was one more young guy doing comics. Then about a year later when the strip was through, pretty much all the editors knew who I was at both Marvel and DC, so essentially it did kind of validate my professional credentials. I think that really helped in getting offered work. Having people know who you are rather than having to introduce yourself and show your portfolio…that really made a big difference. So Manhunter was the strip that really made me, professionally.

Metal Men (1963) #47, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: That became your calling card.

Simonson: Yeah. All the work afterward was quite different from that, like the Metal Men and some other stuff, but I didn’t have to introduce myself after Manhunter.

Stroud: You’re a triple threat as a penciler, inker and a writer. Which role brings you the most satisfaction?

Simonson: They’re all neat. That’s one of those cheesy answers, but it’s absolutely true. The things that I would be most concerned about doing comics over the years I’ve been working, especially in the old days when there were no royalties, you produced a fair amount of work in order to make a living and I always felt there was some danger in that of repeating yourself too much; of falling into formula to the extent that you could crank stuff out, but it might not be that interesting. Not only would it not be interesting to look at, but I’m not sure it would be interesting to do, at least not for me and so I worked fairly hard over the years to do different aspects. To write, or to draw, be it penciling or inking, to work with other artists I would write for, or to work with other writers I would draw for - partly as a way for varying my own job so that I would retain interest in what I was doing. To tell the truth, when I got into comics (as Neal Adams never fails to remind me when I see him) I thought I’d be in comics 3 or 4 years or maybe 5, and at the end of that time I thought I’d have probably learned everything I could from comics and I’d move on to something else. Now here I am 30 (humph) some years later…

Stroud: (Laughter)

Simonson: Anyway, I feel I’m still learning. I do still feel that there are challenges when I get up every day trying to figure out a page layout or design or how to draw something, how to ink something. I work pretty hard at that and I feel that the work has done pretty well as a result. I don’t think I’ve lost a lot while trying to do the different kinds of things I’ve worked on. That in turn keeps my interest in the work and that makes it worth doing.

Sword of Sorcery (1973) #5, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: And that would keep you refreshed in the process. I can see how important that can be.

Simonson: Hopefully. Another reason working with other people is important is because if you’re working with another writer or you’re working with another artist, they will bring stuff to your story, whether it’s the writing part of the art part that you will never have thought of, and I find that very refreshing. I prefer working what’s called Marvel style, which is where you supply the artist with a plot or I get a plot and then you draw the drawings and the writer works from there. It’s not a commonly done approach these days I believe. It’s certainly my preferred approach. I find in some ways it’s more like working without a net, which keeps it more exciting and for me brings a certain life to the work that I don’t always feel in work with full script.

Stroud: That sort of echoes something I heard about the joy of working with Dick Giordano as an editor when they brought a page in or what have you and he said, “Well, that wasn’t really what I had in mind, but this is great.

Simonson: In a way it kind of allows for happy accidents. I always say you either have mild disasters…though I’ve learned over the years that there’s almost no art that’s so bad that you can’t write something that makes sense out of it. (Chuckle) Probably the same is true for scripting as well, and for drawing from scripts that you’re not entirely happy with, although to be honest I’ve really been very lucky in the partners I’ve worked with over the years either as writers or artists. I’ve been kind of careful about it as well, but I’ve been able to work with an awful lot of people and I don’t really have any jobs to look back on where I go, “Gee, I wish I hadn’t done that.” It just hasn’t happened. But I do find that in working Marvel style, at least for me, the gifts that the other partner has, whether it’s a writer or a penciler that you’re working with, those gifts, it seems to me, if you are able to work together well kind of get maximized in a way that I don’t always feel is true if I’m working out of a full script. I’ve never actually written a full script myself, so I don’t know. Maybe it works out just fine. It just seemed like more work than I wanted to do.

Alien the Illustrated Story (1979) GN, illustrated by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: It sounds familiar. Len Wein said something to that effect. Something like putting a straitjacket over another straitjacket.

Simonson: Oh, that’s very funny.

Stroud: Well, over the course of your long and diverse career you’ve drawn many of the iconic characters: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Conan, and Hercules. Was any particular assignment really memorable or fun?

Simonson: The ones I’ve really liked are probably the ones I’m best known for. Manhunter is certainly my sentimental favorite because I so loved working with Archie [Goodwin]. I worked with a lot of really good writers and I’ve said this before and I mean no disrespect to all the writers I’ve worked with (and those who know Archie, don’t take it that way) but I probably haven’t worked with anybody that I was more in harmony with than Archie on the Manhunter stuff. It was very early in my career and it was really a high-water mark and even though I didn’t have much prior experience, maybe a year and a half by the time it was done, I understood at the time what a pleasure it was and what a high point it was for me to be able to do what I did on that strip and to work with Archie on it.

Another character that at the time was a best seller that I enjoyed working on was the adaptation of the movie Alien for Heavy Metal. I got to work with Archie again and I got to do all kinds of stuff with that book that was very exciting. I got a lot of help from the studio with reference. A lot of very cool stuff that I could go on and on about, but that’s a whole different interview. Alien was a lot of fun and I thought it came out very well. Thor, naturally, and honestly although it wasn’t read very widely, I loved doing Orion for DC. That ran for 25 issues. Two of them were double issues. I thought that was some of my best work. In terms of the writing and the character, it was an interesting challenge and it’s amazing how well it worked out. One of the things I like about it is Orion himself is rather a difficult character and it was fun to write a guy who’s not just…I mean, you know I wouldn’t mind living next to Thor except of course he’d keep getting attacked by frost giants and that wouldn’t be good for the neighborhood, but he’d be a cool guy to hang out with and know.

Orion (2000) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Orion, on the other hand, is the guy I probably wouldn’t want to live within 500 miles of, really, but he was an interesting guy to write because he had these inner demons but he was still interesting and worth following. It’s a little hard to describe, but I thought he was a complex character who was not necessarily the best liked guy on the block, but he had other qualities and I tried to bring those out in the storylines. So I had a great time. I did some graphic stuff in that book that I really, really liked. When I look back I’m still very pleased with some of the graphics in that book. Some of the story telling and the images in that book I had to go and find.

Something else I liked a lot, I got to work with Mike Moorcock on an Elric story for an almost 200-page graphic novel encompassing four chapters. I’ve known Mike for a long time. I read his Elric stuff back when I was in college and so doing some new Elric material…we did almost an Elric Year One where actually the material in terms of continuity precedes the first Elric book. So that means I got to draw Elric when he was still living at home, he still had his Dad, he had his first crack at getting a hold of the storm bringer, the rune sword, he had his first meeting with Ariak his kind of patron demon lord or lord of chaos, really, so I got to do a lot of origin stuff for Elric and I got to draw it, so that was great and working with Mike is always a gas. He’s such a sharp guy and he gives you way more visual stuff than you can possibly cram into a comic book. We did 4 forty-eight page comics to make the entire graphic novel, a series of four story arcs, and honestly I could have easily drawn each of those comics as an 88-page graphic novel and had plenty more left over to draw when I was done.

Stroud: Holy cats!

Simonson: It was fun. We worked from a full script and Mike and I had worked together before on the Multiverse work, which was also fun, and Mike really gave me carte blanche to do the visuals and storytelling as I felt it needed to be done. So it gave me a great deal of freedom in the visual structure of the story and I like to think I took advantage of that and still told the story he wanted told. He seemed very happy with the results.

Elric_The Making Of A Sorcerer (2004) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: Nice. You can’t ask much more.

Simonson: No. It was great. So I’ve done a bunch of stuff. I’m working on a graphic novel right now for DC that I’m sort of inclined not to say very much about yet because it won’t be out until well into next year some time, but basically it’s six short stories that kind of tie together on a theme, or are tied together by a theme and they run a timeline from about 70 or 74 A.D. up into the not too distant future and each story, containing mostly lesser known DC characters, and what I’m trying to do there, and see me again later to see if this is successful. I don’t know. Or I won’t know until I’m done, but what I’m trying to do is draw each story in a somewhat different style. That’s because what I’m working at is trying to derive a style…I mean it will all clearly be me. I’m not going to suddenly become Moebius in one job and Joe Kubert in another. It won’t be that far apart. I wish it were that far apart. But what I’m trying to do is to derive the stylistic approach to the storytelling of the drawing for each story from the tale I want to tell. I’ve got some ideas I’m very pleased about as a way of approaching it and we’ll see how it actually works out in the end. I have no idea. I’m in the middle of that right now. It’s challenging to try and think of that stuff and try to figure out how to handle it and so far I’ve had a lot of fun. It will be up to somebody else to tell me how good it is…or not.

Stroud: Intriguing. When you’ve followed someone else who’s done a spectacular job, let’s say like in the case of Orion and you’ve also done some work on Bat Lash, so following in the steps of someone like Nick Cardy or Jack Kirby, did that intimidate you or did you just approach it as a new gig?

Simonson: You know, without being too egotistical about it, it really doesn’t, and that’s probably more where I come from professionally in terms of my time in comics more than anything else. You’ve got to remember when I came into comics in ’72, really almost all the work that all of us were doing was derived from earlier comics. Some guys like Mike Grell with the Warlord and others had their own characters, but a lot of the stuff you did you just came in and you were doing Thor and the Fantastic Four and Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and the Avengers. You were doing books that a lot of great talent had done before you. And really if you came in and were terribly intimidated by that, I think you probably wouldn’t have lasted very long. I mean I didn’t come in and say, “Well, I’m going to out-Kirby Jack on Thor.” It was not that kind of an approach, but it was certainly an approach that was inspired by the work that had gone before and you still wanted to do your best, but it wasn’t like you came in nervous that those guys has preceded you. I will say at the time that if I had to draw Hawkman it might have freaked me out looking at Joe Kubert’s Hawkman originally. I’m not sure. I didn’t happen that early, so it’s okay.

Jack Kirby's Fourth World (1997) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

Simonson: And then with a character like Manhunter I got my feet under me doing a character that I got to help invent. My training in comics from day one was on characters that in a number of cases, very great talents had already had a crack at and in some cases of course invented, so it was never really an issue thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I’m drawing a character that Jack Kirby drew!” I mean I knew Jack. Not well, but I knew Jack. He was a neat guy who did fabulous work and it wasn’t really a question of coming in and being antsy following in his footsteps because in some ways, back in those days, we all were. Or in the footsteps of Curt Swan or Gil [Kane] or Joe [Kubert] or all the guys you could name. But that was the way the business was back then. Now there are a lot of places you could get into the business and do things that were not at all out of what those guys did, but it was different. It’s a different game now.

What it really means is that I don’t come in on a book and…now there’s no bigger fan of the Fourth World stuff than me. There are other guys who I will say are probably almost as big fans as I am, and probably there are some who know more or have memorized more than I have, but I’m a huge fan and I loved doing Orion for DC. The Fourth World material for me remains some of Jack’s very best work he did. There are probably people who will argue about that. That’s okay. I don’t care. But it seemed in some ways his most personal book.

Frank Miller and I were talking about it years ago. Frank said that he thought in some ways it was the first independent comics. What I think he meant was that there was a quality of personal vision in them that a lot of other books, even really good comics, didn’t always have in mainstream American comics back then, and even allowing for that, and I’m certainly a huge respecter of that material, when I get to work on a book like Orion, I’m happy to do it. I was delighted to do it. I was dying to do the character, but I don’t feel I’ve got to walk exactly in Jack’s footsteps or even anywhere else. I try to find out what I like about the book; what I like about the character, what I like about all the characters and then tell stories that derive from the material, but hopefully don’t just feel like they’re the same stories told over again. I’ve been through comics when they’ve back and simply been rehashing the old stuff. I can recognize that stuff pretty fast. I’d like to not do it if I don’t have to.

Freex (1993) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: Yeah. Build on the foundation rather than rebuilt everything.

Simonson: Yeah. But I really kind of build my own structure and in a way it’s not so hard because my drawing is so eclectic and borrowed from so many sources. Jack is certainly a huge part of the understructure of my drawing, but he’s not the only guy. And when I get done, as much as it may owe to Jack or Moebius or Jim Holdaway or other guys, it still looks pretty much like me at the end if the day and I think the writing is the same way. I pretty much approach the writing on my own terms, which gives me a shot at doing stuff I enjoy and it won’t come out feeling like the stuff someone else has done.

Stroud: You’ve worked with so many of the titans of the industry over the years. Was there anyone you didn’t get a chance to work with that you wish you could have?

Simonson: I’m sure there are. (Laughter.) I never got to write a story for Jack Kirby to draw and that would have been pretty awesome. And then there’s Alan Moore. That’s probably okay. I’ve seen Alan’s scripts and I’m not sure I could draw one of those. But still Alan is one of the giants of writers in comics. I’m sure I’m leaving out a million guys, but I have got to work with a lot of people and I’ve been very pleased. I got to draw a Stan Lee story; I got to work with Wallace Wood and other guys generations in front of me. It’s been a real privilege.

Stroud: Good deal. It seems you’ve been presented some great opportunities over the years.

Simonson: I’ve been pretty lucky on some stuff, I have to say, and in some cases I’m just in the right place at the right time. A lot of life is timing and it’s not always timing you can control. It’s funny. I got to work with Stan Lee over at DC, which is kind of a funny place to work with Stan Lee, but it worked our great. I had a really delightful time. I knew Stan from the old days a little bit and we had some nice chats on the phone and he was really easy to work with. He was very free on stuff. He really was one of the guys who invented the Marvel method and he was great working like that and he really works without a net so it was very enjoyable.

Batman (1940) #366, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: It seems there’s hardly a publisher you didn’t work for. I saw where you had credits for Gold Key, Seaboard, Warren, Dark Horse, Malibu, Acclaim and of course the Big Two. How did the different companies compare? Were there real strengths in a particular place you enjoyed or more artistic freedom?

Simonson: I don’t know about artistic freedom other than within the world of mainstream comics I’ve been able to do jobs I wanted to do and I’ve pretty much been able to do them the way I wanted to do them. I haven’t really run into problems with censorship or whatever. I’m very much a mainstream kind of guy in my sensibilities as well. Back in the old days about the only differences you discussed were between Marvel and DC. It was a source of endless discussion and I don’t think any answers were ever actually derived from that discussion. If anything, at the time, this was back in the 70’s, I would say the generalization was that DC was a bit more corporate because they were owned by Warner Brothers and Time-Warner eventually, and there was a more corporate feeling to DC the way it was structured as compared to Marvel which was freer and easier. That was a long time ago. I haven’t worked at Marvel in a long time, so I don’t have much of a sense of it as a company gestalt these days. I know people that work there; I just haven’t worked there myself so I don’t have any first-hand knowledge.

Other than that, the companies I’ve worked at I can say I’ve been really fortunate to work on projects or be offered projects that I wanted to do. When I wrapped my work up at Marvel in ’91 I was going to move on to other companies and I got a call out of the blue from Frank who wanted to know if I wanted to draw a Robo-Cop/Terminator mini-series he was going to write for Dark Horse. Frank and I at that point…we had been studio mates for awhile, so we went back a ways, but I don’t think we’d actually worked together on anything. I think I inked a couple of his covers. That was probably about it. He’d laid out a calendar piece for me when I was too busy to lay it out myself, so when we were in the studio he laid out the calendar piece for Hulk and Spider-Man for me and I worked it up into a drawing and rendered it. But that was the first book we worked on together and it was just a gas. It was a gas to do. It was a good story and I had a lot of fun drawing it, so we got to do that together. Then much later when I did Orion I was actually able to persuade Frank, probably at gunpoint, I’m guessing, to draw a short backup story for me. For Orion I had different guys doing backup stories for me and so he drew the backup story for me and he wrote a bunch of dialogue in the margins to cover some stuff and I happily picked up all those lines and claimed the credit.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Battlestar Galactica (1979) #4, cover by Walt Simonson.

Multiverse (1997) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Star Wars (1977) #52, cover by Walt Simonson.

Simonson: It was fun. It was stuff like that where I got to work great people. On Orion I got work with Dave Gibbons. I’ve known Dave forever and we’ve done a couple of small jobs together and that was one of them. Howard Chaykin is an old pal and we’ve done some stuff together as well. So the guys in my generation, I’ve done a lot of stuff with them in a lot of different places over the years, but I’ve gotten to work with most of the guys I’ve really wanted to do stuff with and even some guys I wouldn’t have necessarily expected, but ended up doing some neat stuff. Working with Michael Moorcock is something I never would have thought of but a couple of things developed in the past 10 years and I got to do a couple of long projects with Mike and just had a gas doing both of them. I’ve just really lucked out on getting to do some things I really wanted to do.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) #2, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: You’ve mentioned Alien and Robo-Cop and I know you’ve done work on Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and Raiders of the Lost Ark. When you’ve got established, licensed characters like that with a particular look to them is that more difficult or easier as an artist to deal with?

Simonson: It very much depends on what the deal is that the publisher has with the licensor, and it would depend on the licensor itself. For example in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which I penciled for Marvel and Battlestar Galactica which I penciled and wrote a few of them for Marvel, in both of those cases Marvel did not have likeness rights. What that meant was that you could not draw the lead characters to look like the actors. I believe when Frank and I did Robo-Cop, Dark Horse did not have the likeness rights to use Peter Weller’s likeness. So I’m not a huge likeness guy. I’ve got friends like John Bogdanoff who’s a phenomenal hand at drawing likenesses. I am not. I can do it if I work at it, but it’s never easy. It looks easy for John. I can only hope it’s not. (Chuckle.)

So anyway, on Battlestar Galactica, Klaus Janson is inking that book and I just went ahead and drew the actors. Since I’m not really a huge likeness guy, by the time he finished inking them and we got them colored and stuff they didn’t look that much like the guys, but they looked like okay comic renditions. We kept that late-70’s hair over the ears, so they all had the same hairstyles and it didn’t matter much what they looked like underneath that. They kind of looked like themselves sort of in the comic. We had one thing that was actually pretty funny. There was one issue that I penciled and inked. I’m not sure why. Anyway it was a story I really liked a lot, so it was a one off story and I inked it and we got word back from Glen Larson or whoever it was that owned that property that the Apollo character looked too much like Apollo, the one played by Richard Hatch. It looked too much like Apollo and we were directed to change that. We kind of went around on that some and eventually…this was a long time ago, so they can’t sue me now; what really happened was we didn’t change anything and then somewhere along the line we discovered they really didn’t mean Apollo, they meant Adama, the Lorne Greene character, so even they couldn’t keep it straight. If they couldn’t keep it straight, we weren’t too worried.

Green Lantern (1960) #200, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Simonson: So I pretty much drew the guys as they appeared and nobody cared. Nowadays it would probably be a much bigger deal. Back then it was not, but I thought if they couldn’t even keep the characters straight, I just wasn’t going to worry about it. We had a similar issue with the Robo-Cop/Terminator job where again I was using Peter Weller’s basic structure. I tried to draw Peter Weller, but not get an exact likeness, but I was trying to get a flavor of that and the funny part about that was that in the last issue there’s a picture of the character where he’s human again, briefly. I think it was a dream sequence or something and he’s screaming. Now screaming faces that maintain likenesses are hard to do, because really your face is so distorted it’s hard to get a guy where he screams and still looks like whoever you’re drawing and I had no screaming pictures of Peter Weller, so basically that’s probably the one place where I just drew a head screaming. I tried to keep the hairline about the same and the eyebrows, but it was not like it was really him. Of all the drawings in the book it was probably the least like Peter Weller and that was the drawing that whoever owned Robo-Cop objected to, saying it looked too much like Peter Weller. Really, it looked nothing like Peter Weller. Even on a really bad day Peter Weller didn’t look like that.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Simonson: So there were things like that occasionally that were just sort of odd, but that’s how licensing works. I don’t know that I would do licensing now, because there’s so much more emphasis on likenesses and there’s so much more likeness approval stuff and my feeling is that for comics what that does is it kind of sucks off the creative energy into other avenues where you don’t pay as much attention to the story or the drawing. You’re trying to make sure that so and so the actor or actress is happy with their likeness. And that’s where your creative energy is going and I think the comic storyline is going to suffer and also you have things in comics where the comics have not been allowed to show certain things.

Thor (1966) #337, cover by Walt Simonson.

Take Close Encounters all those years ago. They did not want us to show the smiling alien at the end of the comic. That was a huge secret. So I ended up doing a silhouette with some Zipatone which worked out pretty well, but how much did you really see even in the movie? But there was a lot of stuff like that. Some comics that I didn’t do any work on but was aware of had restrictions where you can’t show things during the movie, which really makes it hard to tell the story when you have to leave major elements of the movie out. These are some of the problems with licensed projects, especially in conjunction with movies and probably other things. It makes doing a good comic difficult and I don’t care about the movie. My concern is that when I’m done, my name is on the comic and I’d like that comic to be really good.

In the case of Alien, we really had unprecedented cooperation from 20th Century. Part of that was Charlie Lipincott, who was our liaison with 20th Century and was a comics fan, and so he had a pretty good idea of what it took to make a good comic, and he was very helpful and very encouraging to Archie and me to do what we could. For example we had three different script revisions of that film of different versions as they were revising and revising and revising it, and we were able to actually take chunks out of different revisions of it and include it in the comic because we thought it made the best story. So we were able to incorporate a couple of things into the comic that weren’t in the film. The film itself was great, but what it did for us was give us a coherent comic and storyline that I thought worked really well in the graphic novel. So we were essentially able to take the Alien story and tell it as we thought best in order to make the graphic novel work. That’s an experience I really haven’t had in any other licensing venture I’ve been a part of, where the comic took precedence and you could do as good a comic as you could manage. That was one of my best comic experiences, working on Alien. It just worked out really well.

Stroud: It certainly sounds like it. You’ve worked on virtually every genre; too, over your career whether it was superhero, war, fantasy, western or you name it. Did you have a favorite?

Young Love (1949) #125, cover by Walt Simonson.

Simonson: The short answer is I like drawing. I like telling stories. If I’ve got a good story to tell, I don’t care what genre it’s in. The only thing is I’d probably prefer stories where I feel that the character of the characters is revealed through action rather than through talk because I want stuff to draw. I’m not particularly eager to draw guys who are sitting around shooting the breeze. I can do it, but I would prefer to have their characters revealed through the things they do, and that gives you more stuff to draw. But really I just like drawing and telling the stories, so if it’s a western or a science fiction or fantasy or superhero, whatever it is, I’m cool.

Stroud: You’d have got along famously with Jim Mooney. He told me once that he wasn’t fond of drawing pages of what he called talking heads.

Simonson: (Laughter.) I don’t think I ever met Jim. I knew his stuff, of course. I read his stuff when I was a kid. But yeah, I like things to be happening.

Stroud: What in your opinion is the greatest challenge for a comic book artist?

Simonson: I think telling the story. In my own case I taught for nine years at the School of Visual Arts and one of the things I tried to teach my students generally about doing comics, which I think is true for any comic, is that there are a lot of skills involved in drawing a comic. Besides just doing continuity and storytelling from panel to panel and design compositions for a single panel, then there’s the overall composition for the entire page, being able to draw the human figure, being able to maybe manage typography, being able to manage costume design, the ability to draw clothing, to be able to handle perspective, to be able to draw rooms that are persuasive, or spaceships, all that kind of stuff.

There are a lot of things that go into it, and because there’s so much to go into it there are a lot of artists who don’t do everything well, but they do enough stuff to do great comic books, which is fine. But what I tried to teach my students is that with all the things you’ve got to keep track of, whenever you make a decision, and you’re making decisions all the time; everything from whether to use five lines or to do this by 3-point perspective or to draw this costume this way or that way, the question at the bottom of all the decisions you make is: Is this making a better story? And that’s not always an easy question to answer, but for me it’s always the question you should be asking at the bottom of every decision you make. That’s kind of the tough part. All the other things are things you’ve got to learn; the craft, but the art, in a way, comes from how you tell the story. For me, that’s what comics are about; the storytelling medium. That’s the part that’s most important.

Bizarre Adventures (1981) #29, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: Yeah. The very fundamental basis. Unquestionably. I thought I’d share this quote with you. I was speaking with Anthony Tollin awhile back and we were talking about Jack Adler and he had this to say, which I thought was fascinating: “Jack Adler was always one of the biggest boosters of young talent in the company, including Paul Levitz, Howard Chaykin, and especially Walt Simonson, who he kind of saw as a modern day Toth in that he was pushing the boundaries the way Alex had.” How do you respond to that?

Simonson: (Laughter.) Well, that was very sweet of Jack. Here’s the other side of that story. It’s nice to be thought of like Alex Toth, but I’m not sure that’s quite correct. It’s a nice person to be compared to, but I don’t want to push that comparison too far. What did happen was when I got into comics, the short version of that is that I went to New York with my portfolio of Star Slammers material and I went up to DC comics because at the time, ’72, DC was putting out the kind of comics I was most interested in. They were doing a lot of oddball stuff; they were trying a lot of things. A lot of them didn’t succeed in the long run, but they were actually doing a lot of very cool stuff and it was very interesting and exciting.

At that point, again in ’72, Marvel I felt, myself, was kind of retreading and repeating old stories. The Thing went after the third time and got sucked in by the Wizard and they betrayed the FF or whatever was going on. It seemed like I had read those stories already. And DC was trying stuff I had not read. So I went to DC first looking for work. If I hadn’t got work at DC I’d have gone to Marvel and kept my trap shut. So I went to DC and I ended up talking to an editor at DC who largely looked over my work and said, “Well this is nice. What else can you do?” So I did not walk out of his office with a job. So I’m sort of depressed and head for the company break room, and in the coffee room I think were Chaykin, Kaluta, Bernie Wrightson and I think Alan Weiss. I think those were the four guys hanging out in the coffee room. The young guys who were all working at DC at the time. I sat down and I had actually met Howard about a year before at a convention in Washington D.C. so I knew him a little bit. I knew the work of the other guys, so we all sat down and shot the breeze and it was, “What are you doing here?” I showed them my stuff. I had my book with my originals in it and they seemed to like it. Michael Kaluta said, “Let me show this to Jack.” Well there’s a guy sitting behind us. An older gentleman, which means he was way younger then than I am now, but he was probably 40 or maybe 45.

X-Factor (1986) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: The ancient of days. (Chuckle.)

Simonson: And Michael shows him the work. It was Jack Adler, whom I did not know at the time. So Jack looked it over and he liked it and he said to me, “I’d like to go show this to Carmine.” And Carmine Infantino at that time was…I don’t remember his official title, but he was the editorial director or the publisher or whatever, but basically he was at the top of the ladder. I knew who Carmine was. I’d read the Flash and Adam Strange and I knew his work. So I said, “Okay, sure.” So Jack leaves the coffee room and I’m talking kind of nervously with Howard and Alan and Bernie and Kaluta and after a few minutes Jack comes into the room, not quite at a dead run, and he says in one word, “Carmine wants to see you, let’s go.”

So, I found myself in Carmine’s office, and we talked about comics for five or ten minutes. I remember very little of the conversation. I’d seen Carmine a year earlier at a talk at Brown University, so I knew him. I’d actually talked to him very briefly up there. We talked about comics, and the thing I remember about the conversation was he wanted to know if I’d been influenced by Bernie Krigstein. Now at the time I might have seen Krigstein’s Master Race job or I might not have. I had not seen his EC work. I knew about it, but I’d never seen his EC work at the time, and later I could see what Carmine meant because my work, particularly at the time, and it’s kind of back there now, was very linear and it was very designy. And some of the jobs that Krigstein did for EC were very linear and very designy jobs and they contained very elaborate storytelling and the work I had in the Slammers also contained very elaborate storytelling. It was not at all like Krigstein's, but it was the use of breaking panels and the small moments and it was more probably a topographical graphic approach than what Krigstein was doing with breaking down moments of time, but nevertheless I can see now what Carmine meant. We just talked about it. Basically Carmine liked my stuff and he liked it enough that he called three of his editors into the room and before I left he made them all give me a job.

Stroud: Nice

Balder the Brave (1985) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Simonson: Now they were all short stories. This is when they still had short stories, so they were like four and six page stories; very short little things and squibs, but I walked out of his office with a page rate and three small jobs and that’s because Jack Adler took my work in and showed it to Carmine, so in some ways I really owed the beginning of my career to the four guys in the coffee room and to Michael Kaluta and to Jack Adler and to Carmine because literally those were the guys I ran through without having any clue what the hell I was doing and went out of the office that day with some stuff to do. And then after that one of the jobs was for Archie. A little short science fiction job and Archie liked it enough that he kept feeding me little bits of things. A four page job here, a three page job there. I did a couple of Gold Key jobs for Twilight Zone at that time, so again I was making just about enough money to stay alive and go find an apartment in New York City.

Then in about six months Manhunter happened and that was the beginning of my professional career, but Jack Adler and Carmine really liked my work and really were instrumental in my being able to get into comics and become a professional artist. I didn’t become a writer for another five or six years before I actually began writing stuff. I drew to begin with and in my early work I basically penciled and inked all my own stuff. So in fact, my very first job, which was a job in Weird War #10 written by Len Wein, “Cyrano’s Army,” which was an inventory job Joe Orlando had in a drawer and gave to me at Carmine’s behest, on that job I not only penciled and inked but I lettered it at well. I learned very rapidly that I was not a major letterer and should not be doing lettering on a professional basis. I learned a few things in my early days. I lettered one of Howard Chaykin’s Iron Wolf jobs and I lettered a couple of my own stories here and there and that was okay.

Stroud: Well, when you’ve got people like Gaspar [Saladino] out there it’s kind of hard to reach that mark.

Simonson: Yep, but it was still fun and it had a lot to do with my sense of design for the pages overall. Even though I didn’t have to do that later on I kept a pretty close track on lettering and how it looked on my work and tried to make sure that there was a good marriage of the graphics and lettering because that’s one of the things that appeals to me most about comics is that combination of pictures and letters.

Just Imagine: Sandman (2002) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. And I’ve been told by Clem Robins that ideally a letterer’s work should be invisible in that it shouldn’t take away from the story, but complement it so that you don’t even really notice it so much.

Simonson: Well that’s true. I would add to that, however, that I do think that the word balloons and the use of them and the use of sound effects and display lettering in a comic, those are important shapes in the drawing so that they’re not exactly invisible. I’m not saying that lettering that’s so weird or so bad that you notice it because that’s a different thing, but I do think that the forms of the word balloons and the forms of the topography that address the sound effects and the special lettering that you need, that those things are important visual elements on the page and that you need to consider that stuff as much as you consider how you draw a head.

Stroud: I wouldn’t disagree. You’re married to a literal cover girl, Walt. (Chuckle.)

Simonson: Yeah. After a long career in comics, that’s what I should be known for. “Yeah, wasn’t she the cover girl for that Swamp Thing try out that Bernie drew?”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Simonson: I think that’s the picture they’ve got for her on Wikipedia, or maybe they don’t any more, but for awhile they had that cover up, which was pretty funny.

Stroud: How long have you two been together now?

Simonson: We began dating in 1974.

Stroud: Quite some time then.

Simonson: Yep, and we’re still trying to get it worked out. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: I’m just at the 23-year mark myself. Any advice for someone who wants to hang on as long as you have?

Simonson: We’re just still good friends and we get along real well and also just as it happens she’s in the business as well and on those few times, and there have only been a few, where we’ve actually worked together, we work together very well. I’ve worked with Weezie when she was my editor and I’ve worked with her when we were co-writing stuff, I’ve worked with her when she was writing something I was drawing and all of it actually worked out quite nicely.

Stroud: Outstanding. Partners in every sense of the word.

Simonson: Yeah, it’s worked out very well.

Stroud: One last question. Any thoughts on the recent upheavals at both Marvel and DC as far as the buyout and restructuring?

Hulk! (1978) #23, cover by Walt Simonson.

Simonson: I don’t have any real thoughts about it because I don’t know what it means. I mean I’ve heard the stories. I’m a big Paul Levitz fan. Paul has been a real friend to me and also a good publisher to work for. I regret his going on to other stuff. That said, I kind of expect some stuff to change, but what stuff that will be I have no idea. I can think of 8 million different things, but whether any of them will change or it will be something I don’t expect, I really have no idea.

I do know that generally on a much smaller scale in the business, occasionally books will be moved over to other editors and when that happens usually the book shifts direction. Usually a new editor comes on and he or she has their own ideas where the book should be going, where the character should be going. They’re really kind of the guardians of the character and frequently that means an editorial shift in the art or in the writing, even the coloring. Whatever it might be. I don’t know that it happens every time, but it happens often enough that when there’s a shift in editors you kind of wait for the other shoe to drop and that doesn’t necessarily mean things will be worse, it just means it’s going to be different. So in that regard I expect that at least in the long run there will be some differences both at Marvel and at DC. I have no idea what they would be and whether it will come down the food chain far enough to affect where I am or not. I can’t say, but I would think that there will be some changes coming along as time goes by. I haven’t the faintest idea what they are, so like everybody else I’ll be kind of curious. I’ll wait to see how it shakes out, but I’d be really surprised if everything stayed exactly the same. I mean I’m not in the upper echelons of the business, but usually when they shake things up it’s with the idea that things will change somewhat for whatever reason. I just don’t know what they will be and I don’t have any predictions for it. Like everyone else I’m just going to wait and see.

We have included a small cover gallery showcasing some of the variety available in Mr. Simonson's work. There is SO MUCH good stuff to see in his portfolio! Enjoy!

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #222, cover by Walt Simonson.

Thor (1966) #347, cover by Walt Simonson.

Destroyer (1991) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

The Judas Coin (2012) GN, cover by Walt Simonson.

Fantastic Four (1961) #334, cover by Walt Simonson.

Superman (1939) #666, cover by Walt Simonson.

The Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans (1982) #1, cover pencilled by Walt Simonson & inked by Terry Austin.

Sherlock Holmes (1975) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Marvel Comics Presents (1988) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Shadow Cabinet (1994) #0, cover by Walt Simonson.

Marvel Premiere (1972) #57, cover by Walt Simonson.

Red Sonja (1983) #1, cover by Walt Simonson.

Mighty Thor (2011) #17, cover by Walt Simonson.

New Gods (1995) #15, cover by Walt Simonson.

Multiverse (1997) #7, cover by Walt Simonson.

August 22, 2018

An Interview With Tom Orzechowski - The Letterer Behind The Uncanny X-Men

August 22, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Tom Orzechowski (born March 1, 1953) is an American comic book letterer, primarily known for his work on Uncanny X-Men for Marvel Comics. Coming up through the fan community in Detroit in the late '60s, Tom's first professional work (in 1973) was on Marvel's British weekly titles. He quickly got pulled over to the lettering department and in 1979 he became the letterer for the Uncanny X-Men. Over the course of Orzechowski's enduring career, he has lettered something on the order of 6,000 pages of long-time X-Men writer Chris Claremont's scripts. He also created several logos for Marvel, including a New Mutants logo and a long-lasting Wolverine logo. Tom also worked extensively on the localization of several early manga series, including Nausicaa, Appleseed, Dominion, and Ghost In the Shell. In 1992, he joined Image Comics as the Title Copy Editor for Spawn. In the early 2000's Orzechowski re-teamed with Chris Claremont for X-Men Forever and then New Mutants Forever.

Todd Klein, Clem Robbins, David Marshall, Tom Orzechowski, & Gaspar Saladino

Ever since my first interview with Gaspar Saladino, I've had a soft spot for letterers and Tom Orzechowski has not only been an incredibly prolific letterer, but he's a legitimate comic book historian in his own right, as you'll soon see. I'm pleased to say that since this interview, I've had the chance to attend several conventions (including San Diego) and I even got to meet Tom in person at a small venue in Portland, Oregon a couple of times. Once he was a guest, and the second time he was a fellow attendee, so we had a grand time walking around and talking comics like a couple of fans. You'd have to go far and wide to find a greater guy and conversationalist.

This interview originally took place over the phone on February 24, 2009.

X-Men (1963) #86, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Bryan Stroud: The earliest credit I could find for you was in 1973. Was that about when you began?

Tom Orzechowski: Exactly. It was January 2nd. It’s easy to remember. If Marvel had been open January 1st it would have been January 1st. Tony Isabella is a dear old friend and he got an editorial job there toward Halloween of ’72 and I think Klaus Janson was already there and he immediately started pulling his fan friends into different positions. The same thing was happening at DC. Starlin and Milgrom had already started. Buckler had already been in New York for a couple of years. I was the next one tapped. He almost literally picked me up off the street. I didn’t know where I was going to stay that night, but it didn’t matter. I was on staff at Marvel in the day time. The rest of the year could just take care of itself. I was immediately doing touch-ups on the British editions of the earliest Marvel stories for Spider-Man Comics Weekly/Mighty World of Marvel. They were being published somewhat wider than the American books so they had to have the artwork extended to the sides a little bit and I had to take out topical references to different things and to re-spell a few things like “cheque,” and “elevator” becomes “lift.” There was quite a list, actually. You’d be surprised how many minor differences there are. Things like re-spelling “color.” All that “o-u” business instead of just “o.” Re-spelling jail; which was actually good training, because I started with Chris Claremont that same year. A couple of years before X-Men. And his parents were British. In a way, I guess they still are. And he spent his first few months living in “Olde (something)” and got the accent and the spellings down in that time, so early on I was changing his Britishisms into Americanisms. So having worked on these American to Brit comics alerted me to a lot of the things that Chris would do in the other direction.

Stroud: So that worked out very well.

Orzechowski: Yeah. Kind of a nice little synchronicity falling into place for me. It was a very wide-open time. I’m sure Marvel is quite regimented now. I haven’t been up to the office in 25 years so I don’t know what things are like.

Stroud: Tom, what sort of training did you have?

Alpha Flight (1983) #2 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Alpha Flight (1983) #2 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: I had no training. There was a comics club in Detroit. I stumbled onto these guys during a convention in ’68 and they had gatherings across town to talk about the current books and bring out the old ones as well. I thought, “Oh, this is perfect. I’ve been waiting my entire 15-year old life for this.” And sure enough they had copies of Black Magic and Boys Ranch and all kinds of different stuff, and pretty soon there was this ‘zine, which was a news gathering ‘zine - which was in kind of a friendly competition with the Thompson’s. Then one day in the summer I was over there and we needed some stuff, so they said “Why don’t you just call DC and poke around?” I said, “Call DC?!” And I did and who did I get on the phone but Carmine [Infantino]? The publisher. And here’s this pimply faced 17-year old trying to pump him for stuff that to him is just as boring as anything. And he’s an interesting artist. He said, “Well, [Bernie] Wrightson is doing some stuff on House of Secrets, I think…” Just completely not helpful. But I was making notes and trying to get the hang of talking to these guys. They realized they had to talk to the fans occasionally. Carmine answered his own phone when I just called the switchboard at DC! Incredible! I thought I’d be dealing with at least 3 or 4 layers of intermediaries before reaching the guy if you can reach him at all. Particularly not someone like me. So that kind of helped to demystify the thing a bit, because here’s the guy that publishes the stuff and he couldn’t think of anything noteworthy to tell the press.

Stroud: (Mutual laughter.)

Orzechowski: I think they had just hired [Dick] Giordano around that time so they had Jim Aparo then and Steve Skeates and Aquaman had been revamped and maybe that’s when they were doing Phantom Stranger. There was all sorts of stuff happening. [Mike] Kaluta was there doing The Shadow. I think Shazam! you know, all sorts of things going on and he was just hemming and hawing and dealing with production sheets and trying to make sure the cost of paper didn’t go up too much this month and so on. The content of the books was the last thing on his mind.

Stroud: Bogged down in the weeds.

Frank Brunner, Mike Friedrich, Don Glut, and Tom Orzechowski in a Star*Reach panel at SDCC 1974.

Orzechowski: I guess so, because I’d wondered when I was a lot younger how it was the guys I was working for, like Sol Brodsky and Frank Giacoia up there, how they could give up…especially Sol, who’d been a tremendous inker on all of Jack [Kirby]’s covers in the 60’s and [Joe] Orlando with DC; how they’d give up pushing the pencils, pushing the brushes and take a desk job. How do you get tired of drawing this stuff to the point where you’d just want to work out production schedules and make assignments and never really consciously look at the finished work? But that’s what I think Carmine did as publisher. He was simply the top administrator. As the art director he’d lay out the covers. Additionally, it demystified the fact for me that this is a business. Stan [Lee] created this myth of the jolly Marvel bullpen, and we just assumed that Marvel owned a building and everyone came to work every day and you had a good time. No. Everyone worked at home and no one ever came into the office. There were five people in the office; Stan and Roy [Thomas], Marie Severin, Sol Brodsky and maybe one or two other people like the guy that shoots the Photostats and that was it. That was the Marvel bullpen. “Okay.” (Chuckle.) Imagine my disappointment when I found this out.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. So much for all the hype.

Orzechowski: Yeah, but the hype worked, thanks to Stan Lee. And I don’t know if he looked at the finished books once he gave up scripting them. That’s the stuff I never took and was very pleased I was never offered them. Because for the sake of benefits and job security it might have been kind of tough to be a production manager.

Stroud: That was one thing Carmine told me that was news to me at the time was that the editors and the production people were the only ones on staff. I don’t know what I thought it was configured like, but it was quite a revelation.

Captain Marvel (1968) #29 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Captain Marvel (1968) #29 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: Well, picture the Eisner/Iger thing that we kind of keep in loving memory. There’s Bob Powell and Chuck Cuidera and all these guys in the same room at the same time doing the Spirit supplements and the Quality Comics and all.

Stroud: Yeah, I guess that’s what I had envisioned. An assembly line process with people nine to fiving it.

Orzechowski: Yeah, comparing pages and making jokes. When I got there, I first saw Marvel when I was 16. I lived in Detroit, as I mentioned and I took a portfolio back there. I went to a convention and afterward I went to DC and I went to Marvel (and maybe to Warren) and at Marvel I couldn’t even get in the door. I got a glimpse and it was maybe the size of your living room. Cardboard partitions up and a few people. Maybe [Frank] Giacoia was there and maybe [Mike] Esposito doing art corrections and probably a lettering correction guy. There was almost no one there. No one to actually greet a person like myself and talk them through the process. When I got hired there it was a somewhat larger office which they shared with an outfit called Magazine Management and they were the same company. Management Magazine produced what they called men’s sweat magazines. They’d have covers painted by Earl Norem and people that later painted covers for the Savage Sword of Conan; guys wrestling bears with scantily clad women and guys with rifles shooting eagles or something. All these manly, testosterone situations and they were on the same floor and they carried the same house ads as the Marvel comics, which explains why Marvel had all these muscle builder ads and sneezing powder ads and all this weird stuff that didn’t seem like it would appeal to comics folks.

Stroud: Ah-hah!

Strange Tales (1951) #181, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: And they were in those magazines, which I guess appealed to them and they just sold scads of ads with guaranteed distribution which kept both the comics and the magazines, they were the same corporate entity, going. So, I’d run into those editors almost as frequently as I did the Marvel editors. It was kind of an impressive shop. A lot of people in small rooms and a lot of drawing tables everywhere and all the heroes like Giacoia, Esposito, Brodsky. John Romita was there as the art director. I guess he’d always been the art director. Wow! Legends. Just everywhere you’d look. You couldn’t walk around for three seconds with your eyes closed without seeing somebody famous. And they were just these guys. “I’m just trying to make a living here.” Now, of course it’s quite corporate looking. There’s a lot more money involved with the movies and what not. In ’73 it was still very much seat of the pants. It was only 12 years into Marvel in 1973. It was all brand new. Like Spidey #120 came out that year; Conan #25 was out the day I came in the door. So, working on the British books as I was I ended up retouching The Hulk #1 through #6 and it was fairly recent issues. I got to work with Lee & Kirby and Lee & Ditko and Lee & Heck and Lee & Ayers and all those things. It was a real thrill. It was almost like being back in time a little bit to the earliest groundswell of Marvel. But again, it was just fairly recent. I’d bought those books, and now I’m working on them. A weird déjà vu.

Stroud: Heady stuff.

Orzechowski: Now those are like granddad’s comics. They’re still available on CD Rom and what not. Marvel seems to be repackaging everything at all times.

Stroud: Yeah, as you mentioned earlier with the popularity of the movies it’s the next natural step to cash in on the catalog.

Orzechowski: I recently saw a hardcover of what was first Amazing Adventures and then Amazing Adult Fantasy and finally Amazing Fantasy #1 through #15 for like a hundred bucks. A big, oversized book like the EC reprints that Cochran put out and there’s the whole Amazing Fantasy run. Gee. I’ve got them all, but here it is. What a thing, though. Almost anything I bought from say 1960 through 1985…I just saw DNAgents, almost all that stuff has been reprinted somewhere, somehow. Only Sugar and Spike haven’t been reprinted. There’s a Blackhawk Showcase volume now.

Master of Kung Fu (1974) #19 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Master of Kung Fu (1974) #19 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: I think Shelly Mayer had some sort of exclusive ownership on Sugar and Spike, but I don’t know.

Orzechowski: Could be. I know the Sugar and Spike plush toys came out awhile back.

Stroud: I’ve heard of them, but not seen them. I do have a pair of the Bat-Mite and Mxyzyptlk plush toys.

Orzechowski: I think they came out around the same time.

Stroud: Speaking of them, do you remember doing the “World’s Funnest” book?

Orzechowski: Yes, I do.

Stroud: Good night! I went through that thing and I thought, “How many years did it take him to letter this beast?”

Orzechowski: Fewer than you’d think, but more than I’d wish. I’ve got a good collection. I’ve got a lot of Quality Comics. Blackhawk was my passion for a lot of years around 1970 to 1973. So, I’ve got almost every issue of Blackhawk back to #9, the first one and a couple of dozen of Military Comics. Sam Rosen was the letterer for a lot of the Quality Comics early on. He also did the Spirit for the first several years. So I just enlarged those for the work and I traced them feverishly and I traced [Gaspar] Saladino’s stuff, traced Costanza’s stuff, traced C.C. Beck and Ben Oda and everybody. I spent hours, which was really good discipline. It was really good just to get the feel of somebody else’s proportions that way. That sounds obscene, doesn’t it?

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Marvel Graphic Novel (1982) #21, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: As a calligrapher, I studied many different hands and got passably okay at italic, roundhead, uncil and other different things and copied, as well as possible, the Saladino stuff, the C.C. Beck stuff. It gave me a whole different set of just how the different letter shapes could look. That was among the final books I lettered by hand. It was right around 2000 or 2001. Now that I’m doing Savage Dragon by hand I’m trying to have a rather different approach to the letters there. I’m still using the same pen I was using since the middle 80’s.

Stroud: Which is?

Orzechowski: An Osmiroid India Ink Sketch Pen. You can’t find them anymore. I don’t think Osmiroid has even existed in 10 years. This is a piston-driven cartridge pen. So I can go page after page without re-filling it, without dipping it. And the nib is a gold alloy. I don’t know how much percentage of gold, but it gives it some flexibility. The nib is probably worth more than my life at this moment. I pulled it out of mothballs to work on Dragon. I honed it down a little bit. Saved all the shavings and sold them. It’s giving me such a nice line. It’s so wonderful to work with ink, with pen and ink again.

Stroud: I was going to ask. Has that been pretty enjoyable?

Orzechowski: It’s just joy.

Stroud: I read the most humorous comment at Mark Evanier’s blog one day talking about lettering and how he’d tried his hand at it and I’m paraphrasing, but he didn’t appreciate how much wrist strength is required for the job. He said something to the effect that after awhile his letters looked like Katharine Hepburn had done them while riding a bobsled.

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #111 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Uncanny X-Men (1981) #111 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: It’s true. You’re making motions…letter forms involve five different movements. That’s it. And you’re making them less than 1/8” tall and looking the same every time, within percentages. And real rapidly, and you have to pay attention to the script more than what you’re doing. So, it’s like being on stage. If you’re working on Daredevil it’s almost like if you’re performing Henry VIII or Henry III. Olivier did it or Kenneth Branagh. All these incredible people did it before you and it’s a very old work; it’s been seen by millions of people; everyone’s heard of it whether or not they’ve ever seen it and you’re part of a tradition. People will be doing it after you. So, you’re just trying to kind of stay invisible while putting some of your own feeling into what it means to be doing cerebral balloons or something. Because other people will do them later, other people did them before you, then someone else will come along like Todd Klein or Comicraft or someone and quantify a newer version that will be the boilerplate for awhile and then someone will do a newer version later. But it’s this grand scheme of being part of a large entity, I guess would be the word for it. So, it’s kind of awesome in a way. It’s still kind of awesome to me. This is the X-Men. They’ve been on the big screen and animated and you can get them on Slurpee cups. Sometimes that’s MY work on the Slurpee cup. It’s possible that in the opening rapid-fire panels in the X-Men movies before just Marvel; those are probably some of my panels. If you slow it down on your Tivo on your laser player, you’d see me. I didn’t get a penny for it, but there I am. There’s Costanza and there’s Artie Simek and it’s all in there if you’re self-conscious about things like I am.

Stroud: That’s beyond cool. And after all weren’t you on the X-Men for something like 18 years?

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #282, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Uncanny X-Men (1981) #282, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: Yeah, 18 years for that first stretch and then…one thing and another. It just felt like it was time to do something else. I was signing books for people that weren’t as old as my stint on the book…

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Orzechowski: That comes as something of a shock. Suddenly that existential moment. “Okay, let’s look at this.” And the editor and I weren’t getting along too well. I don’t even remember why any more. That’s it. Claremont had just been bounced and I stayed for another year anyway just because its work and then I had enough and said, “Now what am I going to do?” And of course, anyone else would have just called one of the six other Marvel editors and said, “Well, I’ve got some time now. Do you have any books lying around?” But no, I didn’t know what to do next and fortunately [Todd] McFarlane called me that same week as Image was being launched. I guess that was ’92. So, yeah, 18 years doing 100 pages a month sometimes or more, between New Mutants and Wolverine and the various Annuals and Specials.

Stroud: Holy cats, and as I recall those Claremont scripts were pretty darn copy heavy.

Orzechowski: That’s my boy.

Stroud: There’s a rumor out there that you had to be getting some kind of extra compensation for all that additional work. Any truth to that?

Orzechowski: Uh, there are rumors, yeah…

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #167 pg.6, original art to printed page. Lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: Chris was writing on 8-1/2 x 14 pages, not 8-1/2 x 11 and sometimes he’d go onto a second one.

Stroud: Good Lord.

Orzechowski: Well, its eight characters on a page, 8 characters in a panel. Hearts being broken, universes being destroyed. There was a lot to say. And maybe he was going overboard, but it was kind of a funny relationship, too. I was not living in New York. He and I had been pretty good chums and when I go to New York I stay with him. But I left New York pretty quickly. I just couldn’t deal with it. Manhattan was too big for me; too intense in so many ways. And I went west and they kept sending me scripts, which was really amazing when you think about it because everything was very office centered. In other words, Rick Parker and Jack Morelli and all these people and they were sending things to me. Why they just didn’t keep them in New York I’ll never understand.

Stroud: Oh, I have a notion.

Orzechowski: Well, okay, thank you. But there was me and Chris and it was working out well. Nobody else wanted to touch the script because they were too long, and I said, “Send me more.” And so we survived about six editors-in-chief, and I’ve lost all count of how many actual editors we went through. Probably at least six or seven and countless assistant editors. It was always me and Chris. A new editor would come on and normally a new editor likes to put his or her own print on a series like a new logo or a new creative team, but it was always Chris and me. And when he was ultimately off the book I missed the rhythm of his work. The characters didn’t sound right any more. So, I gave that about a year and then it was time to go. It wasn’t my team any more. And as soon as a project of his came on the plate again around the year 2000, Ralph Macchio gave me a call and I was back.

Coyote (1983) #9, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Coyote (1983) #9, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Very nice.

Orzechowski: And I’m just about to start a series called X-Men Forever. I think Tom Grumman is the penciler. And as I understand it, it picks up pretty much where he (Chris Claremont) left off the series at #280 in 1992; the same team, I guess within percentages, the same plotline, the same subplots. I think that’s all been reprinted by now, too. So, it won’t have to be backtracked too heavily. There will have to be some back-story filled in, I’m sure, but that will be so exciting for me, because he’ll get his full team back. Storm and Wolvie and Colossus and Kitty and they won’t have died and been reborn twice or whatever’s going on. I can’t read these things.

Stroud: You and me both. Modern continuity for the most part just leaves me cold. I find myself gravitating toward familiar names like Len Wein with his recent guest shot on the Justice League.

Orzechowski: Yeah, it’s kind of an awkward place to be, which I think is why people embraced The Ultimates so greatly. Let’s go back to first issues. New concepts, new timetables, characters in addition to different times, different relationships; because who wants to have 40 years of back-story to deal with? They kept trying to reinvent Spider-Man and kind of eliminated the back-story with that Ben Reilly thing that comes to mind. And it just never really worked. I don’t know why Marvel can’t do these things the way DC did. Because for DC it seemed like it was a roaring success when there was John [Byrne]’s Superman and George [Perez]’s Wonder Woman. Those characters are 70 years old this year, or awfully close to it.

Stroud: Remarkable, isn’t it?

X-Men (1963) 135 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: It’s impossible to deal with that kind of back-story. I knew George Ovshesky (the indexer) when I was in Toronto some years ago, in the middle or late 70’s and he was self-publishing these Marvel indexes. Nice covers and full credits and synopses, and it was his contention then that Peter Parker was in fact about 32 years old and all of the stories actually happened in canon and he was actually aging realistically, and I said, “No, no. The stories become anecdotal over time and Parker’s only about 23 or maybe 22 and time is compressed and this is fiction. You can’t take these things seriously in that kind of historical way, because he couldn’t possibly have had all those adventures and still be only an age where he’d still be in college.” He said, “Well, he’s a grad student. He’s just doing it really long term.” “Well…”

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

Orzechowski: Occasionally you’ve got to scrape away the barnacles and understand that a lot of the stuff just never happened. This is fiction. And I guess when a character’s been roaming around for 40 or 60 years and you really love the stuff, you love the costumes and creators and so forth it’s hard not to take it seriously. I mean really, come on.

Stroud: When I was talking to Joe Rubinstein, who I guess would be a good contemporary of yours, he was talking about how he was being perceived as old-fashioned at 50 years of age and had a dry spell for awhile getting any work.

Orzechowski: There’s a weirdness that’s permeated comics and probably pretty much everything else. By the time you’re 50 you become invisible. That’s when Giacoia found himself outclassed with the Scott Williams guys, the guys who became Image people around 1990. Wayne Boring was out of a job on Superman when he was about 50. I don’t think Shelly Moldoff lasted much longer than 50 or 55. DC managed to keep itself looking pretty static for a very long time. Marvel edited itself a lot more and a lot more frequently. At my age I’m just delighted to have as much work as I can handle and then a bit more. I’m not on the books that have the buzz any more, but the checks clear the bank, and if you’ve got a choice, yeah, I want my bank balance to be steady.

Thor (1966) #356, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Absolutely.

Orzechowski: Todd Klein and Nate Peikos and a few other guys get the books that have all the notoriety, all the attention and well, I can’t knock a thing that they do. They do fabulous work, and maybe one of these days if Todd’s too busy and Nate’s too busy, maybe I’ll get the next Secret Invasion type of series.

Stroud: Well, your name is certainly one of the more prominent ones among your contemporaries, there’s no question of that.

Orzechowski: Yeah, it’s probably the most famous Polish name in the lettering world. No one can pronounce it, but they recognize it on sight.

Stroud: (Laughter.) It seems like I read somewhere that you were one of the pioneers as far as computerized lettering. Is that true?

Orzechowski: I guess so. It was in ’89 that I started doing Manga. Viz comics had three titles that Eclipse was distributing and a friend of mine named Toren Smith was packaging under the house called Studio Proteus and some of those were published by Eclipse (Dark Horse ended up absorbing this company under their own outfit) and those were very copy heavy and very sound effects intensive. That was really the time-consuming part, because we had to put English language sound effects on top of the kanji’s and kana’s and make them look as if they belonged there without having to do an awful lot of redrawing. That ended up taking all the time. And then lettering and cutting and pasting the stuff, it was several layers of production. Several layers of time being consumed. And Toren said, “Tell you what. Why don’t you go and get yourself a PC and get a font design program and just take care of the lettering digitally and maybe even have someone else generate that while you do the work that’s more of the complicated stuff.” Other people said, “You should get a Mac. A PC has such clunky technology. You should get a Mac if you’re doing graphics.” But Toren said, “Ah, they can do the same things on PC’s that you can do on a Mac.”

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #262 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

But it took a year, because the font salesman lied to us about the capability of what he was actually selling us. I actually had a font where I could type “A, B, C,” and realized I had something there. By the middle 80’s I had a small staff called Task Force X. There were five or six of us, sometimes all together in the same time. Generally, I’d have two or three people helping on an X-Men deadline or a Manga deadline and I’d do the copy placements on the X-Men books, you know position the balloon concepts and somebody else would letter the text and I’d balloon them, which gave it a certain continuity of appearance and I would do the sound effects generally. It came across as a fairly uniform look. I insisted the people I worked with learn calligraphy up to a point just so they knew what the letter forms looked like as ideal concepts. It would more or less match my approach. And it looked pretty good and a lot of them got their own careers. And that kind of obviated the need to get a whole lot of typography done for quite a long time and meanwhile, and again this is in San Francisco, and Richard Starkings was running full speed ahead with Comicraft and taking over Marvel, because they could produce essentially identical results employing, say, a dozen people, I have no idea, but a lot of people that could just break a book up into segments and so if it was really a deadline hell, a whole book could be lettered before lunch. You just give 22 pages to 10 different people and everyone does 2 or 3 pages and it’s done. And that changed everything and suddenly made the digital thing impossible to ignore. I was the last holdout. I was lettering Spawn by hand until about 2001 or 2002 and when I started working for Marvel again in 2000 it was all digital. When I left them and I left DC which was about ’99 I guess it was all still by hand.

I had the capacity to do digital work, but I resisted because the look is not as fun, not as organic, but now it’s 2009 and that’s old thinking. It doesn’t matter any more. There are now countless body copy fonts; fifteen, twenty, thirty body copy fonts. Nate Peikos has fifteen or twenty himself. So, there are a lot of varieties possible. Clem Robins is the absolute master of developing fonts. There are things known as contextual ligatures where the letters like “ly” and “lw” are created like an individual letter concept, the two letters together, so every time you type a thing with “ly” at the end it defaults to the contextual ligature. So, they’ll be nicely spaced next to each other just automatically. And he’s created such a series of different letters for the contextual ligatures that on Hellboy you can read a page and sometimes not see the same letter “e” twice. If it’s against the letter “o” he’ll make it somewhat recessive to the center, if it’s against the letter “w” he’ll make it somewhat longer at the bottom. So, it all has that organic look as if it were made by someone who was considering each letter however rapidly as he was making it. Just ingenious. The volume size of these fonts must be into just megabytes.

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #270, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Fabulous. I’ve seen examples of what you’re talking about, too. I got a copy of Hellboy awhile back and asked Clem if he was doing it by hand and he was so happy that it looked that way to a reader.

Orzechowski: He puts a texture into the font, which is something I try to do in my earliest versions also to make it look as if it’s got some of the tooth of the Bristol board still showing and the point size he does on Hellboy is so large; it’s larger than most books so you can see that little bit of texture of the Bristol board showing through which adds to the organic appearance of it. The fonts I’ve done tend to be rather smooth and I’ve promised myself this year that I’m going to go back and produce two new fonts because the ones I’ve got are several years old and I know they’re kind of showing their age.

Stroud: Innovate or pass the torch.

Orzechowski: Yeah, that kind of thing. I need to look as good as Blambot.

Stroud: I heard that your wife does or did some lettering also?

Orzechowski: Yeah, she was part of Task Force X. She also lettered a fair amount of stuff on her own. The last stuff that really caught anyone’s eye was when she was lettering for a guy named Jim Silke, who was a good friend of Dave Stevens, and Jim was drawing a series called Rascals in Paradise as well as Bettie Paige comics and Rascals is the same kind of stuff where these ladies’ clothing just keeps falling off every few pages, running through the jungle with something and oops! Rascals was more of a science fiction thing with much the same kind of verve and feeling and pastel quality of Dave Stevens’ work. And she was being hyper-expressive on those things in a way that you really didn’t see since the old days on, say, Pogo, and she was really going to town but then everything went digital and there was no way to retrieve that look again. It would take just ghastly amounts of time to slip that many fonts in. It left her kind of annoyed. Things moved on. There’s no way to resurrect hand lettering on any kind of a mass scale except in the indie comics and even they’re being driven that direction.

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #153 interior page, lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Uncanny X-Men (1981) #153 interior page, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Is Savage Dragon considered an indie or more of a mainstream title?

Orzechowski: I don’t know if indie has to do with the number of units sold. Image is certainly a powerhouse publishing empire. I don’t think anyone imagined fifteen years ago that they’d have so many titles and be looked upon as more than just a vanity project and is in fact now another publisher. Another place to take your interesting proposal. I don’t think it’s an indie, because I’m working on issue #148 right now. And except for Cerebus, nothing goes beyond a couple of dozen issues. Maybe Stranger in Paradise, but for the most part…I’m going to have to try and find a working definition for indie.

It used to be that you had DC, Marvel, Tower, Charlton and those were the major publishers. Then you had the Indies like Eclipse and Pacific and Dark Horse. That’s kind of preposterous by now. Because the whole Eclipse thing was to look as mainstream as possible and then better. I think indie is kind of in the eye of the beholder and maybe whoever’s ordering the comics. I don’t know if Diamond has any particular distinction in the way these things are organized or if it’s just all alphabetical. I think Dragon is as mainstream as it gets. And it’s a fun comic. I think of any of the Image books that have made it all these years, Dragon is the most comic-booky of them. Erik [Larsen] has got just a wicked sense of humor. A real love of the “flip-er” kind of comics, which certainly takes us to the middle-60’s Marvel and a lot of Frank Miller’s work. The thing with the comic book is that as its being put on the page, you kind of revel in the fact that this is preposterous stuff and we know it, but we’re going to treat it like its serious business anyway.

The Dragon book has just stupendous dialogue and the drawing is top notch. Very emotive and the tongue is planted firmly in the cheek. I never read Dragon before I started lettering it, which is issue #136 or #137, so I really don’t know what it’s all about. I’m only just tuned in to the fact that his name is Dragon. He has no other name. He doesn’t know who he is. He’s just here. And everyone treats him like a guy. But he’s got two kids and meanwhile he’s out there fighting crime and his girlfriend is also a crime fighter, so they tell the kids to do their homework and they’ll be home by 10:30 while they go out and battle the forces of evil. Okay.

Weird Wonder Tales (1973) #16, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Why not?

Orzechowski: It’s a very simple way of trying to bridge the stupidity I guess you’d say of Marvel comics at their best and a kind of a sitcom life. I am raising kids. I am responsible. But I’ve got to fight the Crazy 88’s. I’ve got to go out there and do the job because no one else can do it. And I’ve got kids. So there’s a lot of poignancy in the book. It’s a very well considered and well written book. I’m very glad to be part of it.

Stroud: It sounds like a cool concept. I’ve only seen a few panels which Todd had posted on his blog as examples of your work. The sound effects in particular really caught my eye.

Orzechowski: You can’t do that digitally. John Workman kind of created a new paradigm, a new status of doing sound effects by taking markers, you know Magic Marker pens and drawing the effects that way and rather than averaging out the strokes and making it more like John Costanza’s effects for example, he had them look like they were drawn with a marker. Which sounds awfully obvious. It was quite a step forward in kind of admitting what it is you’re doing. Taking the mask away and saying, “Yes, this is drawn with a marker and this is exactly what they look like.” Miller has got that same gestalt with his effects and Erik asked me to do that, too. The book was coming out bi-weekly for about six months, so I lose track sometimes of where we’re at.

Stroud: That’s a brutal pace.

Orzechowski: Very brutal, very grueling and somehow, we kept it lively and fresh and it snapped me back into working effectively very quickly. Because I hadn’t lettered by hand in about 7 years at that point. I had to reacquaint myself with the tools.

Stroud: I imagine muscle memory and things like that came into play, too.

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #143 pg.5, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: It did, but also the fatigue. You mentioned that comment by Evanier. It’s hard to do that little motion hour after hour if you’re used to just doing keystrokes for a long time; when you can enlarge everything on the screen and get everything down to really tight tolerances. To letter that small, that often, that quickly and then run to FedEx. No service, gotta run to FedEx. Oh, what a burden. (Chuckle.) You have to stop working and take it to a courier? How crazy. How 20th century.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Yeah, back to the Stone Age.

Orzechowski: Yeah, normally I can just work until dawn or later and having everything loaded on the server by the time Marvel opens for the day, and then go to bed. But with Dragon I’ve got to stop by 3:00 in the afternoon and run up the street a few blocks to the FedEx drop. Crazy. I’ve got to stop working. What’s that all about? 21st century. Eh…

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Orzechowski: I found that those New Exiles came to an end after 18 issues. As the final issues were drawn I was trying to make the sound effects look more hand drawn. Put more balance in there; put more variables, which took far too long. Working with fonts instead of just taking a marker and working these things out organically. But I like that look.

Stroud: It’s hard to beat.

Orzechowski: It ought to be a requirement somehow, though I can’t imagine how it could be implemented or enforced, that all these new lettering folk have to work by hand for awhile. Just to see what it feels like. Just to actually construct sound effects and understand ratios and space by making mistakes. Fonts make no mistakes. You can easily just goose the thing up a little bit. It’s no trouble. But having no safety net; actually putting pen onto the Bristol; that can be really scary. Particularly since there’s no decent correction paint any more. I can correct inside the balloon, inside the sound effect, but not outside because the ink doesn’t really want to sit well on the Pentel on the Bic correction paint.

Stroud: All this stuff that gets missed.

Orzechowski: The stuff I used to use was an alcohol-based thing called Snowpaque, and it’s still manufactured in the U.K. but not here in the states and it used to have kind of a weird alcohol base to it and now I guess you can’t use that any more.

Stroud: Probably Hazmat.

Orzechowski: Yeah, so you can’t thin the stuff out, so it clogs up in the bottles and you have to buy a dozen bottles in the first place and I don’t want a dozen bottles, I want to buy one and see if it works. So, I guess I’ll just stick with my Pentel correction paint and just hope Erik is merciful and forgives my misjudgment, my little smears here and there.

Stroud: You bring up an excellent point. I’ve wondered on occasion if the craft of writing has benefitted or suffered from things like grammar and spell check.

Orzechowski: I don’t think that’s really an issue as much as the fact that the sort of people writing the books have changed. And of course, it’s awfully easy to make generalizations, but at one time you had writers and one time you had editors. And Archie Goodwin might have been the first guy to do both jobs superbly, but often times you had people who were…and I won’t name them, who should not have been their own editors because they needed someone to go back and say, “You know, none of this makes any sense at all.” (Mutual laughter.) “Where’s the motivation? Does anyone really care about the outcome of this? Why is this person so obsessed with “X” if repercussions will never be felt anywhere? There’s no emotion centered on this character.” All these sorts of things that an editor would point out to a writer who’s just doing guts and glory and having a wonderful time going straight ahead, but not stepping back to think that, “There’s no consequence to this villainy. If this villain really wants to kick the hero’s ass that badly, why is he going through such complicated ways of doing it?” Of course, it makes a good cover, but is that reason enough? Is this real life or is it a comic book, and if it’s a comic book then there ought to be some point to the villainy, right? Not just a grudge match that involves threatening everyone with a skyscraper.

X-Men (1963) #141 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Absolutely.

Orzechowski: There was a fellow named Perelman. He was at Revlon. I guess he might still be the CEO of Revlon. He bought Marvel Comics in the early 90’s. I think Jerry Jones wrote a book about this. And he didn’t know what he was buying, he just figured, “Oh, Disney has theme restaurants and Warner Brothers has theme restaurants, I’ll just make Marvel-themed restaurants and merchandise these characters in the same way,” without realizing you can’t really do a Hulk-themed restaurant, or Wolverine placemats. It doesn’t make any sense, because there’s no gooshy-gooshy good feeling about these characters in the same way. You can’t have murals painted in Kindergarten’s of the X-Men. It wouldn’t make any sense. You can do that with Warner Brothers characters.

Stroud: Right.

Orzechowski: And, as a cost-cutting measure, the first thing he did was fire all the editors, and so all the assistant editors became editors and all the interns became assistant editors. He probably shaved a third off his costs that way. But that means that completely inexperienced people then took over writing the books, editing the books, and that was a dark age for Marvel. And some of these people have gone on to have fabulous careers and become extraordinary writers, but for the entire corporate structure to change that way instantly… And then within months Lee and Toddy [McFarlane] and Robby Liefeld left the company, so suddenly there was no one to do training for on the job training.

Stroud: A recipe for disaster.

Wolverine (1982) #1, logo created by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: That created a culture…I don’t think exclusively at Marvel, because by then you had so many smaller presses as well, but there was just no editorial oversight with any gravitas; any long view. And this was a time when the Marvel characters were really showing their age because by then they were getting to be 35 or 40 years old and then, again, you’ve got all that back-story. How many times can you bring Doctor Octopus back before it stops having any weight, any bearing? At the same time the Image boys ran off and said, “We don’t need editors. We don’t need writers. People buy these books based on visuals, and so we need strong concepts and strong visuals and that will carry the day.” And it wasn’t long before they were getting writers and editors also. Because the visuals didn’t really build enough mythology to carry these things for a truly long time. I think Todd’s extreme close involvement with his book has kept that quite fresh and he keeps reinventing it. I couldn’t even tell you what the high concept of the sport is any more. There have been so many evolutions. And Dragon is a cop and he fights bad guys by beating them up. It works every time.

Stroud: You were talking a little bit about Manga earlier and I noticed in my wanderings around that it’s just beginning to dominate the graphic novel section of the bookstores. Any idea why?

Orzechowski: Well, there are two or three answers to that. The easiest answer is that they’re there because nobody is buying them. As I understand it, TokyoPop has cut their output by a third, I think the last two years. A problem with Manga beyond entertainment value is that they have no collector value. So, no one is scrambling to get all the issues of Mai, the Psychic Girl, or Fist of the North Star, or you name it. It’s usually good for two more printings, but nobody cares if it’s the first printing or the fifth printing, they just want to read the material. So, there’s no clamoring to fill in the gaps in the collection at conventions because they take up so much space; they’re kind of expensive; and they don’t have whatever verve, whatever sex appeal that comic books have that cause people want to get the entire run and not a reprint.

Uncanny X-Men 172 pg. 10, original art to printed page. Lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Manga might have been kind of a generation thing that ran its course up to a point, but I don’t think I see as many kids at Borders and Barnes and Noble just sitting there reading Manga all day long any more. I think Manga brought an awful lot of people into the stores, into the concept of comics as a valid entertainment form which they’ll carry into their adulthood, and their kids will therefore be exposed to more comics, so in the multigenerational sense it’s a fabulous thing.

Also, I think it added more legitimacy to DC’s Showcase Presents line and Marvel Essentials and just the fact that you can have things in black and white with square spines that sit on the shelf and you don’t have to buy the pamphlets because the collection is the same. It stands on a shelf, you can read a whole bunch at a time; you can buy the whole bunch for seventeen bucks. So, it’s given us a different packaging strategy for the comics and it will keep them in people’s hands to make them affordable. If you want to pick up the new Claremont X-Men Forever, you can pick up every issue before it, in Essentials volumes, for less than a hundred bucks all together. If you’ve got the time to read all those things, you can be up to date with the book as soon as it comes out. Instead of buying the pamphlets which would cost…well, you tell me.

Stroud: You’d be combing eBay for months.

Coyote (1983) #14, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Coyote (1983) #14, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: Yeah, I was at the shop the other day and there was a Blackhawk Showcase book and a couple of Challengers volumes and I’m tempted by them, but I’d never have the time to read them, but to have Superman Family featuring Jimmy Olsen reprints back to 1956? Oh, man, I’m there. That’s just fabulous and I think Manga had a lot to do with this, because it brought a different introspection to the part of the buyers. “Hey, we can have them cheap. I want them cheap. Why hunt for back issues? Let’s just have them in one block.” So that’s one thing that Manga did that was just incredible for us.

Stroud: I’d never made the connection. It makes perfect sense.

Orzechowski: It’s all about marketing, which sort of gets back to what I was saying earlier about Orlando and Carmine and these other guys giving up the drawing table for the administrative desk. “How do we get these things into the hands of a lot of people? What are the trends out there?” And Manga kind of came out of nowhere. When Toren started publishing Studio Proteus books he was trying…well, they had a satellite book and a teenage girl superhero book. Kind of a high school girl and a military thing. Area 88, Air Force and Toren was going for science fiction for the most part. Some samurai and mostly science fiction. He wanted them to look as much as possible like the American comics.

So, he brought me on board for my sense of the sound effects for the body copy and this was in ’89 so it was 20 years ago and they became, to everyone’s complete astonishment, an enormous genre. (Something) Communications became just a powerhouse. They were backed by one of the Japanese publishers, Shogo (something?). They do voiceovers for animation; they’ve got a couple of rather fat weeklies; a couple of things that were about ¾” thick for five bucks, which really seemed like market suicide in superhero comics, but in Manga, people want to get a whole lot of this stuff in a big chunk just like the Japanese do. They wanted to get the Japanese experience.

X-Men (1963) 116 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

There had been kind of a schism forming, because even as early as ’89 or so Lois thought, “Why aren’t you publishing the books in the Japanese format, back to front, then why are you taking all this trouble to recreate the sound effects? Why not just read them like the Japanese do?” And that was dismissed out of hand as crazy. “Oh, the Americans just want to read these things the way they want to read them.” But by now Manga is so ubiquitous and so ordinary to a whole generation that they want to see the experience, they want to see the sound effects as they were, they want to read the books back to front, and be as close as possible, including in some cases really bad translations.

Stroud: The Godzilla effect?

Orzechowski: Kind of the Godzilla effect, kind of the thought that these writers are just working by the seat of their pants to begin with and they’re not the best writers doing it, but the visuals are awfully strong. But, I only know what I see in the stores, and it’s getting a little scary in the stores. You mentioned the Secret Six, well that’s out there again. The Creeper’s out there again, the Challs are out there. Everything that was ever in print; Two Gun Kid, Bat Lash, everything comes back from time to time. It’s amazing. DC being especially prominent in this one, there’s every character they’ve ever had in his or her own series, except maybe Hawk and Dove, are back in a series. I don’t know who’s buying them all.

Stroud: Good question. I get the sense that in some cases the revenue from licensing is actually outstripping the publishing.

Wolverine (1988) #48, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Wolverine (1988) #48, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: I can believe that. I’m sure Dark Horse makes a pile on the Zippo lighters and the lunch boxes and those nice little bisque figures. I’m not a collector of that sort of thing myself, but I’ve got a Wonder Woman Golden-Age figure here and a Superman Golden-Age figure. They’re beautiful. I think the fascination with the 40’s material and even into the middle-50’s is that they didn’t really know what they had. Superman in the post war era was in domestic situations and was having battles of wits with Lois’ eight-year old niece. This is a guy who can move planets and fix dams and fly with 50 criminals strapped to his back and he’s having a battle of wits with an 8-year old. They just didn’t know what they had. They were desperate for sales, they couldn’t figure out who was buying these things any more.

There was just such a charm and innocence to the 40’s stuff, where the costumes were kind of ineffectual and would get in the way, at least in contrast to what current costume perceptions are supposed to look like. It was the Disney philosophy for years as expressed to me by a friend of mine who worked for the Disney comics arm back in the early 90’s. Another Rainbow or someone was publishing the Disney comics and then Disney said, “Well, we could just do it ourselves. Why license these things out? Let’s just keep them and make all the money ourselves.” And they published them for about a year and then when the numbers came in they realized they can make more money by selling a $10.00 Mickey Mouse poster to a kid at a theme park than a comic book for $2.00, because a comic book is instant litter. It’s going to be dropped because it’s too small to hold onto. The kid reads it once or twice and he’s done. But give him a poster and it’s going to be on his wall for 10 years. And he’s going to treasure it and carry it carefully because he doesn’t want to crumple the thing up and so they were simply much better off from the corporate point of view to not perpetuate Mickey as a character you care about, but as one image in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Let’s just cast him in stone that way.

So, Another Rainbow or whoever got their license back for a few years and they’re probably still publishing Disney comics. But the company itself never really cared if the character had any vitality, or any progression or friends in their life. It was all about selling these posters with their markup and they’re better off. I don’t buy the Wonder Woman comic, but I’ve got a figure of her on my desktop and that’s all I need. The gestalt of Wonder Woman with the khoulats and the weird outfit with the eagle on her chest rather than the “W-W.”

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #253, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: The classic icon.

Orzechowski: And kind of normally proportioned. In the same way that Superman in the 40’s is proportioned pretty much like a guy, like a well-built guy, but still like a guy. The costume seemed so wrong, because it was more impressive than his physique was. In other words, his physique didn’t match the costume. You have to look really out of the ordinary to wear a costume like that in order for it to make sense, it seems to me. I think that might be partly behind the Jim Lee costume design philosophy with all the buckles and straps and stuff. It’s basically just a leotard with the flash and the bits of leather here and there across the biceps and buckles but nothing as pronounced as the classic outfits, the Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman things where you’d need a really large physique to make the costume not look too much. I think Kirby had the same thing going with the original Challengers jumpsuits and the original X-Men jumpsuits. Enough of these people are remarkable. Why do they have to look so outstanding just by themselves? And I guess you could go back and forth on this.

Stroud: There’s a lot of logic to that.

Orzechowski: Just don’t think about it too hard.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Yeah, after all this is comics we’re talking here.

Orzechowski: I think it was Len Wein that tried a couple of redesigns on Black Canary when he was writing Justice League and he also redid the Zatanna outfit once or twice and they just didn’t evoke the same feeling as the stupid outfits that was just basically bathing suits with fishnet stockings. The fishnets were dressy enough for the other one that just kicks ass for a living and the other one who says everything backwards. What kind of outfit do you need if you’re just going to say things backwards? The fishnets, the body stocking and a top hat. That’s all she needs. They kind of fulfill the male fetish stereotype in a way, but so what? It’s not like all of them are wearing that thing, it’s just her. She’s a stage magician.

The Marvel Fumetti Book (1984) 1, cover created by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Why mess with what works?

Orzechowski: In fact, I think on Smallville, I’m kind of behind on these things, but I think on the Smallville show the Canary character pulled on a mask, which was beautifully done, and she was wearing a body stocking and fishnets, which works very well on a T.V. concept. I don’t know if Clark is ever going to wear the costume. They seem to be leading up to something. I don’t know if this is the final season of the show.

Stroud: I don’t know either, but if it is going to happen they’re certainly taking their sweet time about it.

Orzechowski: Lex is dead. Anyone who knows what he can do has been pretty well written out of the show. Clark has never worn glasses, so he doesn’t have a disguise as such, but it is conceivable that the final moment of the final scene before the curtain draws for all time, he’ll have the costume on. But since he’s still got Clark Kent’s face, I don’t know how they can truly do that, unless he’s wearing a mask. I guess we’ll find out by about June.

Stroud: I see on your webpage that you’re doing logo design and so forth. Could you describe that a little bit?

Orzechowski: I always enjoyed the letter forms a great deal since I started looking at calligraphy when I was in my 20’s, and then at the same time old movie posters, opera posters, packaging design, and trying to incorporate those elements into comic book logos, which is completely different from what Marvel was doing at the time. The only one of those I did that’s still in use is the Wolverine logo. I did a lot of things for Eclipse, a lot of things for Manga. But that’s all pretty transitory. At the moment I’ve got a book in front of me for Eclipse called “Pug.” It’s about a boxer and it takes place between about 1951 and 1956, and so for the cover…remember the old film noir posters?

Stroud: Yeah.

New Mutants (1983) #1, logo created by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: That kind of stark minimalism that kind of evokes an emotional feeling without a whole lot going on. Also, I’ve got a 3-letter word. (Chuckle.) That’s a little challenging. But I’ve got about eight things I’ve roughed out. P-U-G, you’ve got your round letters. So, you could square off the edges, you could really play with the roundness, a lot of bottom-heavy or top-heavy, ragged edges; there are many, many possibilities. And since it’s a short word I could do more treatments in less time than a title like Wolverine, which is almost all the letters of the alphabet when you get right down to it. I’m not doing as many logos as I’d hoped to be doing at this time, because Marvel keeps a lot of that stuff in house, and I’d probably have to go back to New York and make an acquaintance with a lot of people to get my hat back in that ring because Klein does countless logos. Pretty much any new titles for anything, the Elseworlds books, anything they’ve done in the last 20 years was probably done by him. I think he’s got a lot of this stuff on his website. Just countless treatments of the word Batman; countless…I mean you name it. The range of what he’s been called upon to do is a testament to him. He keeps it fresh.

I never did more than about 20 or so myself and then locally I was doing things in the music world, like bars. The smaller level music thing. But I’d love to get back into it. I keep sketchbooks. Letters are incredible. If you follow them historically there have been so many variations in their elemental forms. Between the calligraphy versions, Helvetica, the more stringent typeset versions and the more florid things. There’s always been…and now more than ever, they’ll have a type of brand new ways of announcing the same old things. The free font sites, like PC fonts, they’re not truly free, of course, but if you don’t use them for anything that makes money they’re free. There are thousands! I went through 37,000 fonts one day and saw eight that I thought I could use. For web purposes especially, there’s just an endless hunger for more fonts.

Stroud: Good grief.

Orzechowski: Not so much for product packaging. I see that some of the Blambot fonts are showing up in product packaging, which is a fabulous thing. Because it kind of pulls comics and the real world ever tighter. It blurs the difference is what I’m trying to say.

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #268, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Yeah, it creates a bridge that way.

Orzechowski: Yeah, American culture especially. The bridge connecting pop culture and comic books has never been stronger. Everyone’s heard of Spider-Man movies. You see Spider-Man backpacks, Spider-Man piñatas; it’s amazing the saturation of Wolverine and Spidey and Superman and Batman. Everyone knows that Superman is Clark Kent. Everybody. Everyone has heard of Kryptonite. Because of Heath Ledger everyone’s heard of the Joker if they didn’t before. Everyone’s heard of Batman. It was inconceivable not that long ago.

Stroud: Yes and the irony, at least when I’ve spoken to some of the creators who worked in the Golden Age, like for example Jim Mooney, who told me that back in the day you’d tell people you did almost anything other than work in comic books.

Orzechowski: Well, consider my business. I do lettering for comics. I don’t even make up the words. “No, I don’t make up the sound effects, thank you very much. I’m just typing dictation.” But it’s fun. It’s a design thing. I think the comic book art stigma is gone partly because the royalties were so fat in the 80’s and 90’s that some people, like the Image guys, got to the point where they could do anything they wanted. And there’s Miller who became outright a prominent star, and pulled comics into more respectability just by doing weird comics. I don’t know how many people saw Sin City, but everyone saw that imagery and everyone knows it was drawn as tightly as possible to the comics, likewise 300. The Spirit has received a mixed reaction. But I think he’s going to be doing other things anyway. All in all, this is a great time for comic books; I just wish the sales would improve.

Stroud: That’s just it. The figures seem to be pretty dismal. It makes you wonder what the future holds.

Orzechowski: I don’t know what the economies of scale are. I don’t know if it’s in their interests to keep publishing books that sell 20,000; 30,000; 40,000 copies. There’s got to be a certain amount just to keep the number of people employed because that’s your idea factory for the movies and the animation. Who’d have thought there would be a Legion of Super-Heroes animated show? And it’s actually good.

Stroud: It really is. Have you seen the Brave and the Bold?

Orzechowski: My wife has seen it and didn’t care for it too much.

Stroud: I was taken by the fact that they seem to be fairly true to the heritage. The art reminds me very much of Dick Sprang. I also loved the fake ad on one episode selling Plastino Kitty Snacks. I told Al about it.

Orzechowski: Yeah, they do a lot of nods to the older guys. Al Plastino is an artist I’ve come to appreciate a lot more as time has gone by as I’ve seen more of his early work. Because he was best known for, dare I say, the kind of doofus looking Superman of the late 50’s and early 60’s, but in the early 50’s his stuff and Boring’s had the same kind of punch, the same kind of real vibrant vivaciousness to it. Then in the middle 60’s again he was almost handling the Clark and Lois stuff in such a way that it was almost like a romance book. He had a very sensitive line in there.

Stroud: Al had a great versatility.

Orzechowski: I was always impressed with the artists who could follow the same model sheets with the same vivacity and how they could bury themselves in someone else’s style to that extent. Drake was drawing Blondie for awhile and he looked just like Chic Young.

Stroud: You bring up a good point. Someone had suggested to me that Shelley Moldoff’s work for so many years doing another style may have lost his own artistic identity.

Secret Wars II (UK) (1986) #72, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — Secret Wars II (UK) (1986) #72, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: I’m kind of piecing his stuff together, as a matter of fact, because I’ve got a passion for coverless 50’s DC comics. I’ve got a couple hundred of them by now and I usually get them…I just got the final H.G. Peter Wonder Woman issue from ’57. $5.50.

Stroud: How could you beat it?

Orzechowski: Yeah, with the cover it’s five times as much, but without the cover… I can just download the cover from Heritage Auctions or somewhere. In one batch of 50’s comics, a grab bag with House of Secrets and a bunch of other titles there was a copy of Mr. District Attorney that was Shelley’s pencils and Sy Barry’s inks, who was the definitive 50’s DC inker. Giacoia got a lot of his chops by looking at his stuff and Esposito used to look a lot smoother along those same lines. Very brush oriented.

Moldoff was doing Batman at the same time, but this Mr. District Attorney stuff evoked a lot of what he was doing in the new look of Batman. I think if he’d had an inker more like Sid Greene, who was a bit more flamboyant rather than Joe Giella who would bring everything down a notch, kind of averaging out the look of everybody, it might have been better received. But I don’t know if he lost his own approach to the stuff, but it must have been kind of tough to subsume your own work to the look of someone like Bob Kane, or anyone else for that many years. He kept inking. He was inking Dick Dillin’s Blackhawk’s from time to time. He was inking a lot of covers; I think to keep a sense of himself intact. He did a lot more work than you might think. At the same time Dillin, I didn’t realize this until later; he was penciling World’s Finest covers and some other stuff for quite a long time while drawing Blackhawk.

Stroud: I didn’t realize that either.

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #245, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: I never really thought that much about World’s Finest. This would be about the early 60’s. They were good solid covers. Moldoff had a line a bit more like Giacoia’s. A bit broader. Not as fine as Chuck Cuidera’s. So, it was pretty clear when he was inking the Blackhawk covers, when he was inking Dillin on these other covers. So, it makes it more understandable that how it is when the Blackhawks were canceled around ’68 and I think [Mike] Sekowsky had finally had enough of drawing Justice League that they put Dick Dillin on that book. He’d been drawing some of those characters on covers. He didn’t just come out of nowhere. He’d been more of a DC mainstay than we thought because the covers were just never signed.

It was determined early on by some Hollywood producer that people were going not just to see these Little Tramp movies; they wanted to know who the Little Tramp was. So, they started pushing Charles Chaplin, and his female co-stars and then the movie magazines. Then there were more credits on the posters and more credits on the films, but to begin with people just wanted to see their entertainments and who cares who the players are? But then the players very quickly became very important. And how it is that Stan [Lee] saw this, I don’t know, but whoever were the powers to be at DC at that time did not see it and it’s always been a mystery to me.

Stroud: The only inkling I’ve ever heard was from Jim Shooter about Mort Weisinger. Apparently, he told Jim something to the effect, “I want them to care about Superman, I don’t want them to care about you.” Jim’s reaction was, “Fine, just send me the check.”

Orzechowski: I guess he kind of had a point. Speaking of Superman, it had been Plastino, Boring and Swan drawing that book for 15 years. Each issue would have those three guys, Al Plastino and maybe two Boring stories. So indeed, it was Superman himself, but when Stan was pushing credits so hard and people were signing the covers, I’m kind of surprised that DC didn’t tweak to the fact that Marvel is getting all this strength because they’re selling more than just the characters. It was Stan selling this whole bullpen mythology. Everyone had a nickname and he was making more of a clubby kind of thing. Here’s DC being all grown up and losing sales and wondering what happened. People have conjectured, this is based on talks with the senior guys at DC, the Jack Adler generation, that they figured finally the reason Marvel comics sold so well is because they were so ugly. They were really drawn to that ugly Kirby and Ditko artwork.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Orzechowski: Is that the best they can come up with? And then within five years Ditko was drawing the Creeper for them and inside seven years Jack was busy drawing Forever People and so on. DC was so tied to its long time stable. Infantino, Kane, Moldoff, and a few other people. Jack kind of compared to cool jazz. And Marvel was Rockabilly. And the two schools were something that DC just could not see that this incredibly, almost testosterone driven Marvel stuff; this crazy, whacky Marvel stuff would have any appeal because it was jumping off the page. It was just nuts. They had Lantern and Flash being all mannered and nice and polite. The Thing, meanwhile, was punching people off the page. That’s why kids like it.

Stroud: It sounds like something Alan Kupperberg wrote when he was comparing the two cultures and saying something like, “At DC we make comics wearing neckties!”

Orzechowski: They did. In my early days working at Marvel it was all sweatshirts and jeans. I had long hair and was unshaven. It was quite a place. At DC you’d find Murphy Anderson there with his white dress shirt and tie and he’d be inking Superman or whatever and Al Milgrom is there assisting him doing the secondary characters and looking more like a Marvel guy but I think he played himself up a bit because that was the DC ethos. “We’re adults here.” I think that was George Bush’s comment about President Obama, also. You still have to wear a shirt and tie to the office. Well, maybe. I guess it depends on who you’re meeting that day and maybe how late you worked the previous night. But Marvel was the fun place and DC was…the office. They had beautiful offices, up there on Lexington Avenue at the time. They’d been in the same place for numerous years with this big, sprawling space with windows. Marvel had no windows. But the entire feeling of the people just doing the scut work around the office; very different. And I felt kind of self conscious at DC because I just wasn’t dressed well enough. Now, of course you’ve got Paul Levitz and others in there that are of my generation.

Stroud: It’s been an interesting evolution.

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #271, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: You mentioned the earlier generation of editors and they were kind of formal. George Roussous, a fine gentleman who would come into Marvel at the time when we were all scruffy; he’d be there in a dress shirt and a tie and he was carrying a briefcase, and he’d set himself into a small partitioned area in Sol Brodsky’s bullpen and he’d be listening to the ballgame or classical music or something and be coloring fabulous covers. He treated it like a job. I’m sure his neighbors didn’t know what he did. He was just this professional man who worked in the city somewhere, and he treated it like a professional occupation and not like an extension of the ‘zines like we did. We didn’t know at that time, because comics’ history was such that we were just starting to get a sense of the background. There were no reprints of the old material except for the Jules Feiffer book, “The Great Comic Book Heroes.”

Stroud: A true classic.

Orzechowski: George was inking for Bob Kane in the first year of Batman. He wasn’t the first rung of the ladder, but he was just an inch above the first rung of the ladder. He was inking all sorts of stuff on Superman as well as the Batman books. He was universally inking everything at DC it seemed at that time, and we didn’t know that. It had only been about 25 years earlier, but that was the ground floor; the beginning of the whole thing. He was there! He met all those people when they were still having their fresh ideas. All these first inklings. Incredible! But I think if he’d have told us we wouldn’t have left him alone. “What was Bob Kane really like? What was Bob Kanigher really like?” He just did his job. I guess I haven’t been up there in 25 years so I don’t know what Marvel or DC looks like. I see these people at conventions, of course, but…actually I don’t see that many people at conventions because everyone’s always mobbed. That’s one of the reasons some decide not to do the conventions very much.

Stroud: I’m sure they can be daunting. I’ve heard a few legends. I haven’t been to one yet and frankly I’m a little bit intimidated.

Orzechowski: You’ve never been to a comic’s convention?

Wolverine (1982) #1, logo created by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Nope.

Orzechowski: Oh, come on.

Stroud: It’s not easy to get to them from where I live.

Orzechowski: You’ve never been to San Diego?

Stroud: Nope.

Orzechowski: How old are you?

Stroud: 46.

Orzechowski: My God.

Stroud: I know. Sheltered existence.

Orzechowski: Every year since ’68 I’ve been to two or three conventions. Maybe that’s obsessive. I went to San Diego pretty much every year between 1975 and 2000. Then it just all became too expensive. Last year in San Diego I think they had 185,000 there, but that might be an exaggeration. The harbor is a beautiful sight and there are a lot of 60-story hotels within a stone’s throw. I understand that the Hyatt immediately next door to the site books for $350.00 a night for a room. And that was last year. I believe they’re about to officially open the housing division for the convention. You send them your list of your top 3 hotels and they place you as they can. Tumultuous numbers of things have to be done immediately because everybody wants to nail down their room at once. Some people get together groups of people to rent condos nearby. I’ve got my own place picked out, but I’m not going to mention them because that’s my secret.

Stroud: It gives a whole new meaning to the term “cottage industry.”

X-Men Forever (2009) #24 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski. — X-Men Forever (2009) #24 pg.1, lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Orzechowski: Oh, yeah. Kind of like Obama’s inauguration. People are just leasing their condos out for $7,000.00 a night or something because everybody wanted to see the inauguration. It’s just a colossal event. Last year I went there for the first time in awhile acting as a business person. I had a portfolio with me, I had my business cards and I went to every single table, and we’re talking dealer’s tables half a mile long and three city blocks deep. I went to every table twice. I did the entire room twice, which took the full five days. I bought one comic book. In this sea of popular culture, I bought one comic book.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Must have been quite a book.

Orzechowski: It was five bucks. It was a DC western from around ’58. It had a cover, but the cover had a tear halfway across it, but otherwise all the pages were there. The cover was all there, it just had a tear across the cover. Carmine and Gil and I think Howard Sherman were all on the third story, so that’s a good five-dollar comic book. A thousand miles to the south and back. Air travel has become ghastly expensive.

Stroud: Well, and a hassle, too. Have you tried to travel with a laptop lately?

Orzechowski: I have to. I have to take in the after con parties, which are legend. Everyone is there. If you have a British accent, people buy drinks for you.

Stroud: So, have you perfected yours yet? (Mutual laughter.)

Orzechowski: But I had to do an issue of something. I forget what it was. Maybe it was New Exiles. So, every night I was pounding the pixels from about 6:00 p.m. to midnight and then catching cold because the convention is like Kindergarten. Everyone is shaking hands and everyone is coughing in everyone else’s face. I was sick for two weeks afterward. That’s a con, boy! You really should try it sometime, though San Diego would probably be far too much for a first experience. Having come up through it all these years, because I think the Detroit convention I went to then was in the low 100’s of people. More than dozens, fewer than 100’s, and I’ve just watched the whole thing grow. When I was first in San Diego it was probably no more than about 5,000 people. And of course, there’s no way anyone could have ever imagined that it was going to become such a focus. I’m not sure if it’s the proximity to Hollywood or what that made it The One. Why not New York, because that’s where everyone is?

Uncanny X-Men (1981) #284, cover lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Stroud: Maybe a chance to get out of town?

Orzechowski: Again, being along the harbor it’s just quite a nice place to be. It’s quite warm there, quite nice.

Stroud: One final question, Tom. The bulk of your career has been with Marvel and I was curious, between the fairly significantly differences in the way that Marvel and DC script, did the Marvel method work better for you or did you like full scripting, or did it even matter from a letterers perspective?

Orzechowski: Full scripting is more of a balance. It does depend on the artist giving you what you, the writer, are asking for, and reading DC from the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and so on you can see that often times the artist didn’t care as much about what the writer was asking for as the writer did. So, lots of the panels were rather different. A lot of the dramatic settings were different from what the writer may have been asking for or even from what the writer was intending, so the two don’t match that well.

Chris [Claremont] is writing full script as often as Marvel style and he’s sometimes asking for more than the artist’s wanting to produce, so he’ll ask for maybe seven panels on the page and only get five. It’s easy to describe things that can’t really be drawn. In your mind’s eye you can see them, but on the other hand the Marvel style tends toward over-scripting. So, it’s really on a case by case basis, because often times with a full script you don’t know who your artist is going to be, while obviously with the Marvel style you’re working off the art.

The New Mutants logo designed by Tom Orzechowski.

The Wolverine logo designed by Tom Orzechowski.

August 15, 2018

An Interview With Mike Friedrich - Co-Creator of Thanos & Drax, Publisher of Star*Reach

August 15, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Mike Friedrich (born March 27, 1949) is an American comic book writer and publisher of one of the first independent comics. Mike co-created (with Jim Starlin) the cosmic characters Thanos and Drax the Destroyer for Marvel Comics - and he also (with Neal Adams) co-created Merlyn the Archer for DC. Though he is known for the stories he wrote for Justice League of America (for DC) and Iron Man (for Marvel), Friedrich's most notable contribution may be his 1970s anthology series Star*Reach - a forerunner of the independently produced comics that proliferated in the 1980s. Eighteen issues were released between 1974 and 1979, with Mike's Star*Reach Publishing expanding to include other series as well. For his efforts, Friedrich received an Inkpot Award in 1980. He closed Star*Reach as a publisher in 1979 but reopened it as a talent agency in 1982. Starting in 1987 (in partnership with Joe Field) Mike owned and operated WonderCon for 15 years before selling it to Comic-Con International in 2001.

Star*Reach (1974) #1, published & edited by Mike Friedrich.

From lettercol contributor to writer to editor and some publishing on the side, Mike Friedrich (not to be confused with Gary Friedrich) had a remarkable career and he was gracious enough to share it with me.

This interview originally took place over the phone on July 11, 2009.

The Spectre (1967) #3, written by Mike Friedrich - his first published work.

Bryan Stroud: It’s been suggested that the Silver Age was also the beginning of more serious fandom through the famous letter columns. Would you agree?

Mike Friedrich: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was definitely the letter columns that Julie Schwartz set up along with sort of what Stan Lee did at Marvel around the same time, but I think Schwartz started it first. He really created a fan community that hadn’t really existed before.

Stroud: I think that’s quite accurate. It’s also been mentioned that he kind of cherry-picked the most articulate writers and this may sound a little bit self-serving, but was that your observation also?

Friedrich: Well, I learned later that there was less there than it appeared. He certainly was trying to encourage people to write in and encourage people to take a longer-term interest. What he was hoping to do was to discover readers that would stick with the comics longer. He’s trying to encourage longer term readership. But a few years after I was having letters printed I was actually on the other end of the spectrum and I was reading the letters. The number of letters that were well written that came in were actually rather sparse. He’d maybe print three letters per column and he probably had less than ten to choose from on any given comic. And probably the three that were printed were the three that were the most well written and then there’d be a pretty dramatic fall off.

One of the stories behind the comics that he taught me when I first met him was that - what he did when a letter came in was he’d grade it. Kind of like a school teacher. He’d grade it by how well it was written and then he’d put a plus or a minus next to it based on whether it was a positive comment or a negative comment. And what he’d like to do is if he had space for three or four letters he liked to have two positives and one negative or three positives and one negative. He liked to engender a little bit of controversy in the sense to encourage the idea that readers would disagree. And that’s generally how he did it.

Stroud: Okay, so try and have a little ongoing dialogue so to speak.

Fear (1970) #20, written by Mike Friedrich.

Friedrich: Yeah, but the critical thing that I think built creating fandom was the whole idea that he did for quite awhile, that he printed people’s actual addresses, and this really encouraged the fans to write each other. I was one of those people and I became pen pals with three or four other fans who had their letters printed and 45 years later I still know two of them. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: That’s pretty impressive.

Friedrich: Now that didn’t last very long. There got to be privacy concerns and things like that and you notice that Time Magazine doesn’t print mailing addresses.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Friedrich: Neither do the comics, but then again, they don’t have letter columns any more. You’ve got to go online and that’s its own story. You’ve got the same community event happening because people can reply to the e-mail addresses.

Stroud: That’s true, but there’s still that shroud of anonymity.

Friedrich: Yes, but there was a long period where the only way you could meet another fan was through the conventions and the letter columns were part of the process for a limited period of time. Whatever it was. Less than 10 years. And then it wasn’t until the online era showed up and the people were posting online comments allowing people to directly communicate without having to go someplace.

Stroud: Absolutely. You’re part of kind of a unique group of prolific…

Friedrich: The right place at the right time.

Star*Reach (1974) #17, published & edited by Mike Friedrich.

Stroud: (Laughter) Well, I think of some of your contemporaries or peers if you will like Roy Thomas or Nelson Bridwell or Marty Pasko or Bob Rozakis and of course Irene Vartanoff - who also kind of spring boarded from being a regularly printed fan into actually professionally writing and/or editing. In fact, you ended up as an editor, did you not?

Friedrich: Well, I worked as an assistant editor at DC and then at Marvel and of course I edited the comics that I published.

Stroud: Ah, yes. Star*Reach.

Friedrich: So, depending on what you count I edited for about eight or nine years.

Stroud: Was that preferable to writing or did it make much difference to you?

Friedrich: Well, the story I like to tell about that is that I’m a superhero comics fan and what are superhero comics about other than power? So, as a reader I wanted to have power over these characters, and so I wanted to write them. I started to write them and I discovered the people who really had power were the editors. All right, so I became an editor. Then as an editor and a publisher I discovered the people who really had power over how these things were received were the retailers and distributors, and so I got into setting up distribution and got into the whole marketing and distribution era and then of course once I got really deep into that I discovered that the people who really had power were the readers.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Friedrich: (Chuckle.) So, I was back all the way…

Stroud: …full circle.

Challengers of the Unknown (1958) #66, written by Mike Friedrich.

Friedrich: Full circle. Now it’s taken me a long time to get to be a reader again, but now that I’ve more or less retired from comics; that I’m now able to read again, I’m not writing letters to anybody, so I have no power whatsoever. (Mutual laughter.)

Stroud: Well, Mike, I suspect that when you started writing in you had no inkling it would springboard you into a career, or did you have aspirations in that direction?

Friedrich: No, it was all just stumbling from one thing to another. I was a teenager, of course, when I started writing the letters and was still a teenager when I started writing for the comics and I was writing professionally for maybe three years before I really thought this might be something I’d like to do as a grownup. It was very definitely just something I was doing because I enjoyed doing it. It only later turned into a career…that lasted 40 years.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Not bad for a couple of unplanned steps. I was talking to Shelly Moldoff a few weeks back, wishing him a happy 89th birthday and he remarked that he’d enjoyed 70 years of not having to look for work. When you did begin editing I was curious how much of Julie’s style may or may not have influenced you. I understand he was very hands on as an editor.

Friedrich: Yeah, and I guess it influenced me in the negative, in that I was much more attracted to the Marvel comics approach to editing - which was find the right people, point them in a direction, and let ‘em go. And then if they don’t deliver, you find somebody else. So, I had a relatively light hand. The challenge that I had as an editor was to articulate the direction I wanted people to go, and that took awhile to get to learn. Then, most of the editing I was doing were people who were somewhat volunteering to work for me. It wasn’t like no one was making a living drawing alternative comics.

Red Wolf (1972) #1, written by Mike Friedrich.

So, it was as much trying to deal with carrots as it was with sticks. With Julie’s editing, he had a hard time communicating with me, and a lot of this was just me being young and stubborn. In fact, I would say most of it was me being young and stubborn. He had a hard time getting through to me what it was he wanted, and he was kind of frustrated by that and I could tell that. I just wasn’t getting what it was he wanted. Looking backwards, I can look at the stories that I wrote and I see all the flaws and I see what he was trying to get at, what he was trying to get me to do and it was probably beyond me. That was probably a large part of it. And that was frustrating for him and therefore he sort of micro-managed a lot of copy-editing that I never really quite got. I was the same writer when I was working at Marvel and they barely did anything. They’d edit my copy for grammar and that would be it. There was never really any editing for content, or very rarely edited for content.

Stroud: I’ve heard the two companies contrasted by people as, “Your Father’s Comic Books,” referring of course to National/DC and then “The Wild West” over at Marvel.

Friedrich: Yeah, and there was a sense of that. That’s a good way of looking at it. Some of it was just the economic bottles that both companies had. Marvel was putting out as many comics as DC and Marvel had one editor and DC had six, and the editor was writing half the comics himself or a third of the comics himself. Anyway, so he had no time to edit. So, when he brought in people to be his assistants…I never worked for Stan (Lee) actually. I always worked directly for Roy (Thomas). Although Stan’s name was on them, Roy was actually my editor. I mean Roy himself was a writer who sort of edited on the side. And it was more being a managing editor than a copy editor. More like a, “What are you doing and generally where are you going, and where do you want to go?”

The amazing development in editing these days is that I would say maybe 20 years ago the publishers actually figured out that they should plan things a year in advance. I think it started with Mike Carlin over doing the Superman books at DC, but now both companies are doing this a lot where they really sit down with their writers; multiple writers, and hash out plot lines for a very extended period of time. Looking backwards, if I had been 18, 19, 20 and I had been involved in those kinds of discussions I would have been much more energized and much more interested in figuring out how to make these better stories.

Batman (1940) #200, written by Mike Friedrich.

Stroud: Okay, so you think that’s a better approach then.

Friedrich: Oh, yeah, very much so. It was very difficult, because I had a vision of where I wanted the characters to go and was semi-articulate and the editors of the characters were static, and to me they were kind of more organically growing and it was hard to work that out. Ultimately, for me it didn’t work out. After about three years of doing that I moved.

Stroud: Just sort of reached the end of your fount, I suppose. Do you think any of it was due to generation gap issues?

Friedrich: Quite a bit of that. I mean I walk in the door and people are wearing white shirts and ties and I’m wearing t-shirts and shorts, and that was a big, big difference. And of course, the people who were doing it were the people who had survived the huge contraction in the 50’s. They were sort of inherently conservative in that respect; not really trying to take any chances, where the younger crowd coming in was much more wrapped up in the characters and there were positives and negatives about that, but there were a lot of positives where we cared a little more passionately about what we were doing and it was less of a job and more of a hobby, and again, there’s good stuff and bad stuff about that.

Stroud: You’re the first one to ever mention that and that really rings very true. I’m sure to some there’s a bit of befuddlement as to the interest in what to them was just a way to make a living.

Friedrich: Right, right, and that was part of the trouble I remember coming in is that I had a hard time relating to people for whom this was a job. I now am at a place in my life where I have a job and I understand it. I go to work, I do my work, I come home, I turn it off. And that’s very different from how I treated writing comics, which was a 24-hour occupation.

Stroud: A grand pursuit.

Iron Man (1968) #55, written by Mike Friedrich & Jim Starlin.

Friedrich: Yeah, and where I credit Julie an awful lot, was that he, of course, in his youth, had been a science fiction fan and he sort of knew what it felt like to be a teenager and a young adult fan of a medium and so he had an appreciation for fans that the other editors really were baffled by. But then when the fans became professionals then they sort of proved themselves and then the other editors started picking them up. But Marvel did as much to bring in fans as DC did.

Stroud: That’s true. Building up the mythos of the bullpen and all that other good stuff.

Friedrich: Right. Always as a fan, I was a DC fan. When I went to work for Marvel these were not characters I had some passionate interest in. I was a writer now and it was more of a job and less of a passion, but I thought I did better work. I was older and more experienced.

Stroud: Yeah, you’d earned some of your stripes, so to speak.

Friedrich: But through all of this we’re talking about a really, really young kid. I mean I started writing when I was 18 and stopped when I was 25.

Stroud: That is quite a short period of time, particularly when you take into account Jim Shooter who started at 13 and only recently finished up his latest run on the Legion.

Friedrich: Which was actually quite good.

Stroud: I thought so, too. I let him know, too. He was kind of unhappy with the way they abruptly cut him off on his run.

Friedrich: Well, he should know as somebody who had to do that to other people. That’s what it’s like. (Chuckle.) As a reader it was very obvious that they just suddenly stopped.

Green Lantern (1960) #74, written by Mike Friedrich.

Stroud: Yeah. Exactly. It was like somebody just hit the brakes. Even though I’m far from being a kid at this point I thought, “Okay, this is kind of insulting. Changing the writer to “Justin Tyme.” Come on.” I had to chuckle. I was looking through my House of Mystery reprint volume from Showcase Presents and the depiction Gil Kane did of himself, Joe Orlando and you in that story…was that with your blessing or was that a surprise?

Friedrich: No, no. That was all done on purpose. I’m actually somewhat embarrassed by that story. I was roped into a prank that Joe Orlando played on Gil Kane. Joe came up with the idea and worked with me to plot it out and the idea was to satirize the artist and then have the artist himself be the one to draw it, but there was actually a little bit of viciousness that’s in there that I regret now. But it was intended to be the principals. Joe’s in it, Gil’s in it, I’m in it and we set it up that way. Gil and I met so he knew generally what I looked like and he knew Joe of course pretty well and he could look at himself in the mirror, so that was pretty easy.

Stroud: The little gremlins that were helping to draw? Someone suggested that was a Carmine [Infantino] caricature. Is that correct?

Friedrich: Yes.

Stroud: Okay. For some reason that slipped right by me the first couple of times I looked at that and then I thought, “Yeah, I can see that.”

Friedrich: That was really Joe Orlando’s idea. I didn’t come up with that story at all. It was entirely Joe’s story. It was my copy and Gil was one of the artists I enjoyed working with the most. I had grown up with his work and I really understood it. I knew how to write stories that played to his strengths and avoided his weaknesses and almost every story he drew of mine I was satisfied with the outcome, and that was rarely true. I didn’t feel that I had very good artists to work with, or perhaps sympathetic artists to work with most of the time, but with Gil I enjoyed 8 or 10 stories of mine that he drew and I liked them all.

Marvel Feature (1971) #4, written by Mike Friedrich & Roy Thomas. — Marvel Feature (1971) #4, written by Mike Friedrich & Roy Thomas.

Stroud: I was going to ask. It seems like different writers have particular art partnerships that they thought really, really worked or really understood what they were trying to get across and your commentary sounds consistent. I’ve heard more often than not it was really hard to find somebody who truly “got” what you were trying to convey.

Friedrich: Well the one who did it the best was Neal Adams. He actually could find things in my stories that I didn’t know were there and pulled them out and made them part of the stories so he made me look better than I was. Gil was somebody who gave you what you asked for, so it wasn’t like he added anything, but I knew what to ask for, so it was that kind of relationship in that it was very clear what I wanted and he was able to deliver it and it came out very, very well. But most of the time I’d be describing things that artists just didn’t know how to draw or I didn’t describe it in a way that they could understand. I dealt with George Tuska for 4 or 5 years on Iron Man and we were never in synch.

Stroud: That’s a shame. Jim Shooter told me he dearly loved working with Gil and Woody. He said Wally Wood always did very well by him, but he dropped a couple of other names that he just was not too pleased with at all.

Friedrich: Interestingly enough the other guy…I only had the opportunity to work with John Buscema once, and that was really a total pleasure. It was very much like working with Gil, but John added stuff that gave more life to it. I also worked quite a bit with Sal Buscema, and Sal was not nearly as talented, but it was kind of like Gil. You sort of had a known range of expressions and action poses that you could do and it didn’t take too long to figure out how to play to that. What worked with him and what didn’t work with him and I did some Captain America with him that I really enjoyed.

Stroud: Did you have a favorite writing assignment over the years, Mike?

Friedrich: Well, I always enjoyed writing Batman more than writing anything else. I had the opportunity to write I think 3 Green Lantern stories and I enjoyed those quite a bit, too. Those were my favorites.

Justice League of America (1960) #88, written by Mike Friedrich.

Stroud: You and Denny O’Neil are in good company. He said he preferred writing human- scaled characters, so he said rather than some of the demi-gods he loved doing Batman and to a lesser extent perhaps, Green Arrow.

Friedrich: It’s interesting. When I read the Green Lantern stories that I wrote…they’ve recently been reprinted in these large volumes, so I’m looking at them for the first time in quite awhile and I saw that I treated Green Lantern more like he was a human-scaled character and not a galactic-scaled character, and that I didn’t really take advantage of his power ring very much, and so yeah, like Denny, I think I was more in that level than elsewhere. On the other end I had a good time writing Justice League. There were a lot of different kinds of characters in Justice League and I enjoyed playing around with that. That was a reasonably good assignment.

Stroud: That’s saying something. It had to be kind of tough to integrate all those different kinds of characters even though not necessarily all of them were involved in every story. Of course, I imagine it’s even worse from the artist’s standpoint. When I read Crisis on Infinite Earths I thought George Perez has to be enshrined in a hall of fame somewhere after this mess. (Chuckle.)

Friedrich: Oh, it’s astonishing.

Stroud: As you look back over things is there anything you’d have changed or done differently or wish you’d have done?

Friedrich: Oh, yeah, but that would take me two more hours. I was a hard guy to talk to. I was ambitious and stubborn and really full of myself and had a hard time…I mean the stuff that I could figure out on my own I did well with, but I didn’t learn very well from other people. What I wish now is there had been a way to learn more from the resources and people that were around me, to have made the work better. I kind of cringe reading a lot of that stuff now. There was kind of an energy to it that you could see, which is why I think I got the work at all. It was obvious that it was energetic. I was passionate about it, but most of the stories just do not hold together very well and there are some pacing issues that are tough and I didn’t really get a good rhythm down on a lot of things.

Strange Tales (1951) #176, written by Mike Friedrich.

Stroud: Hazards of youth, I suppose.

Friedrich: Yeah, and a lot of it was just lack of personal maturity. I just didn’t have a lot of emotional development or experience, so it was hard to do much when I was tapping into a very narrow range of relatively shallow emotions in those stories. That’s something you can’t go back and fix.

Stroud: Yeah, you’ve either got it interjected at that point or you don’t.

Friedrich: Right. I’m intrigued now by the fact that the writers are 20 years older than the artists. You’ve got these 40 or 45 years old writers and these 25-year-old artists; which seems to be the industry model these days, and that’s very, very different than ever before. So, there’s more maturity in the writing while the young energy of the art is still there.

Stroud: That’s probably a pretty good combination as you stop and think about it.

Friedrich: I think it’s working out very well. I’m really enjoying the stuff I receive through DC’s comp list and that’s what I’m familiar with. I haven’t been keeping up with Marvel at all. But the stuff that I’ve been reading from some of the writers and artists teams has really been quite solid.

Stroud: Was the Comics Code ever any kind of hang up for you?

Friedrich: I had a couple of things changed that were at the time very silly, but it was never really a frustration. My favorite Comic Code story had nothing to do with me. It was my friend Marv Wolfman and when he was hired by Joe Orlando one of the first things he did was one of these House of Mystery stories and they were doing credits, and so they gave credit and the Comics Code said, “You’ve got to change the writer’s name. That’s obviously terrible.” So, they had to send Marv down there with his ID to prove that was his actual name.

Teen Titans (1966) #19, written by Mike Friedrich.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Bernie Wrightson told me a great one and maybe you’re already aware of it, but it’s another Joe Orlando story. He said that the Comics Code was objecting because Swamp Thing was “undraped.” He appeared to be naked, and we couldn’t have that. (Chuckle.)

Friedrich: I never heard that one. That’s pretty good.

Stroud: Bernie apparently heard part of the conversation or something and Joe was literally on the phone going over the story panel by panel and pointing out that he’s always in shadow and they weren’t trying to get away with anything, but he’s not really a human being, he’s a creature.

Friedrich: He’s got nothing to hide. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Yeah, but “undraped.” Good grief.

Friedrich: This is a plant costume. He’s draped as a plant. (Mutual laughter.)

The Flash (1959) #197, written by Mike Friedrich.

Mike Friedrich at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con.

Warlock (1972) #8, written by Mike Friedrich.

August 08, 2018

An Interview With Steve Skeates - Prolific Pontifications From A Worldly Wordsmith

August 08, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Steve Skeates (born January 29, 1943) is an American comic book creator known for his work on such titles as Aquaman, Hawk and Dove, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and Plop! Starting his career writing comics in 1965, Steve would go on to work for most of the major comic publishing houses in his time including: Marvel, Tower, Charlton, DC, Gold Key, Red Circle, Archie, and Warren Publishing. Though he is most often thought of in connection to his superhero stories (or his early westerns), Skeates also wrote horror stories for several different companies as well. His stories "The Poster Plague" (from House of Mystery #202) & "The Gourmet" (from Plop! #1) earned him 3 Shazam Awards and a Warren Award in 1972 & '73. In July 2012, Mr. Skeates received the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing.

Denny O'Neil, Steve Skeates, & Dick Giordano at a convention in the '60s.

Steve Skeates was a writer I wasn't all that familiar with, though I was aware of his awards and the work he'd done on Aquaman in particular. He's graciously helped me on a couple of my Back Issue assignments since, both with Aquaman anecdotes and valuable information on his Plastic Man run. Steve is always friendly, helpful and seldom at a loss for words.

This interview originally took place via email on June 5, 2009.

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (1965) #4, featuring stories written by Steve Skeates.

Bryan Stroud: I've found there are numerous interesting paths to becoming a writer. What's your "origin?"

Steve Skeates: "A dreamer" is how my parents tended to describe me. The way I seemed to prefer to play by myself rather than interacting with other children. The manner in which while in the midst of one chore or another (like raking, a continual horror, cleaning up after what, even as a kid, I referred to as "the dirtiest tree in existence," the Catalpa, an ugly monstrosity that was forever dropping something or other all over the lawn; during one season it'd be large white flowers so malodorous that one's stomach would start churning within but a few moments of raking; at another time it'd be long cigar-shaped seed pods that were particularly adept at avoiding the effects of the rake, while of course in the Fall, looking not unlike an avalanche of pukey-green elephant ears, mounds of large ugly leaves would be everywhere; it was only somehow during the winter when in fact I'd be busy anyway, busy shoveling snow, that this evil entity would refrain from providing me with one or another of something or other decidedly off-putting that I had to dispose of, but to get back to what would happen even as I was doing so) I'd suddenly space out, stop working and go all glassy-eyed as abruptly I'd obviously get lost within the recesses of my mind -- not particularly dark recesses, not back when I was a kid, though only too soon (thanks to Val Lewton and William M. Gaines, amongst others) such as that would become a significant aspect of the inner-workings of this particular correspondent

Anyway, was my suddenly obviously being somewhere other than where in fact I was actually standing an indication that I was somehow an intellectual? Or was it conversely that I was much more autistic than the artistic that I (to this day) tend to conclude as being the exact nature of where it was I was at? I suppose, being totally logical, my reaction to both of those inquiries should be a resounding "Nah!" It was instead merely just as my parents had said it was – I was a dreamer! And often those dreams of mine would have a definite silly aspect to them! Like my wanting to become a writer -- a rather romantic notion especially in that it made the scene despite the easily discernable reality that I was far from being particularly adept at reading! I was (as a matter of fact) one of the world's slowest readers and that combined with the aforementioned spacey-ness I possessed would often mean that by the time I reached the end of a not even particularly long sentence I'd have long since forgotten what had been said at the beginning of the darn thing!

Star*Reach (1974) #1, featuring a story written by Steve Skeates.

To elaborate, were there among the questions that comprise this very interview one concerning the comic book or comic strip character I most closely identify with, my answer (at least at this particular point) would undoubtedly be Albert (the alligator in Walt Kelly's Pogo) who fancied himself a writer even though he didn't know how to read. He was forever typing something up, then asking Pogo to read it to him so he could find out what he had written. As a kid I enjoyed the utter silliness of all of this, whereas these days, as I glance backwards, I see it more as but a slight exaggeration of my own youthful plight. Obviously, then, the big question is, why would someone as utterly ill-suited as all of that ever want to become a writer? Had I at too early an age seen the movie My Dear Secretary (a definite favorite of mine) featuring Kirk Douglas as the fictional iconic irresponsible fun-loving best-selling romantic novelist Owen Waterbury? Quite likely! In any event, by the time I got to junior high and especially while in high school itself, I was already at least masquerading as an intellectual, bookish, hanging out at the local library, searching for some particular form of literature (if it even existed) that I could understand and follow well enough to perhaps even one day be able to write! What I found was humor! Blissfully short pieces by the likes of James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, Donald Ogden Stewart, S.J. Perelman, Ira Wallach, and the great Robert Benchley. Parody, satire, cynical observations – nothing of all that much depth, yet entities just snarky enough to appeal to a dreamy loner's disappointment with reality, a potential Utopian's overly critical nature. And, although Perelman would often offer long hulking sentences which I'd get totally lost within, most of the others had a tendency toward simplicity, toward getting straight to the point, mainly due to the fact, I easily surmised, that confusion is hardly helpful when what one is doing is setting up for a joke. I read as much of this stuff as I could, perused them over and over again, analyzed them, got into exactly how they worked, and then finally noticed the dates on most of them, and, with a bit more research, realized that humor-writing was basically and rapidly becoming a thing of the past, a twenties and thirties and forties phenomenon that in the fifties was being done in by that new one-eyed monster that was taking up space in everyone's living room and by the fact that the American public (traditionally far removed from any sort of intellectualism to begin with and damn proud of it too) preferred watching Milton Berle to trying to sound out the words in even the simplest of laugh-inducing literature. In other words, to employ a familiar phrase of those times, I had been born too late.

Abbott & Costello (1968) #1, featuring stories written by Steve Skeates.

And so it was that I abandoned those dreams in which I in some beautiful future became a popular American humorist and fell back on my other forte, the fact that I had been rather a math whiz in both grade school and high school. Thus, in 1961, I entered Alfred University as a mathematics major! It wasn't long, though, before the collegiate scene itself (fraternity parties, available co-eds, all the booze, etc.) began to take its toll, especially for someone carrying such a heavy load of courses within such an exacting field as math! I was on the cusp of flunking out, but then I remembered how in high school, though I was such a slow reader, too slow to ever finish any of my reading assignments, I was able (at least in English class) to fake it enough to even get high grades! Perhaps I could do the same thing in college!! So, I became an English major, something I probably should have done from the git-go, considering my dream and all, although now I had no idea what I was gonna do once I hopefully got my degree! Most of the other Alfredian English majors were on the road to becoming high school teachers, but I certainly didn't want to go that route! Then, suddenly, down at the pool hall where they sold the more lurid magazines, there was an influx of comic books featuring such heroes as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Iron Man, all written by someone named Stan Lee, who possessed a nifty over-the-top style and was able to infuse his stories with lots of comedy, and, since comics had pictures which made them easier to read than straight prose, I saw this as yet another something that I might be able to do! Therefore, I wrote to Marvel Comics, asking about employment possibilities (on a whim constructing my letter as though it were a bunch of comic book captions) and (believe it or not) received a phone call from Stan Lee himself, offering me the position of assistant editor! Truth be told, I didn't last long in that position, my incompetence causing me to almost immediately get demoted to being a western writer, while Roy Thomas was called in to take my place as assistant editor! But still, there I was, in New York City, working for Marvel, living my dream of being a professional writer!

Stroud: You wrote quite a few scripts for Charlton back in the day in numerous genres to include humor, mystery and superhero adventures. Which do you think suited you best?

NoMan (1966) #1, featuring stories written by Steve Skeates.

Skeates: Wow! That's quite some leap, jumping from Marvel all the way on up to Charlton, and in the process bypassing all sorts of desperation, those heavy labor jobs I procured in order to put food on the table even as I was trying to get myself established as a reliable freelancer, plus there was even another comic book company in there as well, one I worked for on a regular basis in-between Marvel and Charlton! Far from a well-established firm, a brand-new entity is what this baby was, something that seemingly just suddenly popped up from out of nowhere (then, unfortunately, but a few years later, once I had really truly gotten into the swing of writing for these people, this upstart of a company bit the dust in what I can only describe as an equally spontaneous fashion!). Still, I don't wanna make too big a deal out of the work I did for Tower Comics (yep, 'tis indeed that particular concern helmed by Harry Shorten, Sam Schwartz, and Wallace Wood that I am indeed talking about here!), seeing as, back in that particular day, I was still learning the ropes, still groping my way around, and, more often than not while attempting what I usually figured was a clever-to-the-max bit of business I would resoundingly fall flat on my literary face! Oh sure, there are (as a matter of fact) pieces I produced for Tower that I'm actually proud of (like what in my estimation is the very best collaboration I ever performed with the great Gil Kane, an Undersea Agent tale entitled "To Save A Monster"), yet, all in all, I was there basically honing skills that I would put to far far better use once I made the scene at Charlton and got involved in all that variety you just now spoke of. That is to say, although I had already worked on four fairly interesting westerns at Marvel (the most controversial of which – if, that is, you can swallow abject silliness, a pervasive too-far-over-the-top flavoring, and a storyline that comes off more like a superhero adventure than any sort of actual western drama as somehow being "controversial" -- was a Kid Colt sagebrush saga that Roy Thomas helped me plot; as a matter of fact, Roy ultimately, once said comic had hit the stands, got called in on the carpet by his boss, none other than the aforementioned Stan Lee, concerning this particularly crazed collaboration of ours, whereas by then I had already left Marvel and moved over to working for Tower, making for Roy being the only one who got dressed down for all those silly plot twists and unwarranted far too bizarre character developments that had essentially sprung forth from my so-called mind rather than from anything of a similar ilk that Roy possessed.

Kid Colt Outlaw (1949) #219, written by Steve Skeates & Roy Thomas.

As for my other three Marvel westerns, they were all beautifully drawn by the great Dick Ayers and starred that ever-popular masked do-gooder known as The Two-Gun Kid -- one even featured Two-Gun bumping into that real-life legendary outlaw known as Billy the Kid), and although I had (at that aforementioned place I subsequently moved on to) also provided scripts for a number of short, punchy, ten-page mini-epics detailing the adventures of various superheroes of a decidedly secret agent sort (thirteen Lightning stories, six NoMan episodes, a couple of tales chronicling the antics of just about all the Thunder Agents – and quite the cumbersome, multi-powered, getting-in-each-other's-way crew that was, lemme tell yuh! -- plus six or seven Undersea Agent yarns), it wasn't until I made the scene at Charlton that I was given what can best be described as a vast variety of genres in which to immerse myself! Superheroes, however, had very little to do with my experience at what turned out to be my all-time favorite company to work for! In fact, there were only two stories I worked on during all my years at Charlton that could properly be referred to as superhero sagas! The first was something I created as well as doing both the plotting and the scripting, a ten-page tale introducing the heroic efforts of three college students who just happened to possess the power to telepathically communicate with one another (this was their only superpower, as a matter of fact) and who called themselves The Tyro Team, a crime-fighting tale sandwiched in-between a couple of other superhero try-outs (by other authors, of course) there within the very first issue of something called Charlton Premiere – the idea being that the series idea that received the most favorable fan mail would be awarded its own book, but, unfortunately, by the time that mail arrived the entire Charlton action hero line had been unceremoniously cancelled due to slumping sales and just about everyone who had worked on Premiere had left that company and was now working over at DC! But I don't wanna get ahead of myself here, so let's jump back to Charlton, as I point out that the other superhero piece I worked on there had been merely a dialoging job that (in fact) I even did under a pen name!

Hercules (1967) #1, featuring the first Thane of Bagarth back-up story by Steve Skeates.

What there were, though, there at Charlton, were westerns -- sagebrush scenarios that seemed more adult in their attempts to capture the pathos of life in the old west, far far more adult than anything that had been going on years earlier (in fact, it was still going on, though I of course was no longer an active participant) over at Marvel! Kid Montana, Captain Doom, Outlaws of the West, Gunfighters – characters and comics that had a dark and brooding edge going on in there! And, speaking of all the various genres, there was more, much more, happening here! For but one example, there was the chance I got to develop that caption-heavy Prince-Valiant-like seemingly endless historical pastiche known as The Thane of Bagarth (based, in fact, upon what little I could remember from my college days concerning the legend of Beowulf), which, as it turned out, became the initial series that was produced by those who in the not too distant future would become best known as the late sixties/early seventies creative personnel behind Aquaman, i.e.: Dick Giordano, Jim Aparo, and myself! Still, let us not forget the ghostly stuff (The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, Strange Suspense Stories), nor the humor (something called Go-Go as well as Abbott and Costello)! Plus, there was even a private eye in there (Sarge Steel, both as a back-up series in the Judo-Master book and in his own book which rather enigmatically sported the title Secret Agent!)! Like I said, quite a nifty variety!

Dick seemed to think that humor was my long suit, but that might merely be because there were so few people in the comic book industry who knew how to write humor (a situation which unfortunately still has an insistent grip upon a definite majority of those who work within the comic book biz); thus humor became the most valuable commodity I possessed, while nevertheless not necessarily being my forte! Meanwhile, fellow Charlton scribe (who soon would be joining me and a number of others in our giant leap on over to DC) Dennis J. O'Neil somehow came to the conclusion that the Thane of Bagarth was the best thing I was producing! As for me, back in the day, I personally felt that the westerns (which incidentally rarely carried any by-lines) were the best that I had to offer! Nowadays, however, it suddenly appears (to me, at least, having just now once again perused much of what I did way-back-when) that it's actually my ghostly output that has deftly grabbed the coveted brass ring within that ratings game known as the proverbial test of time! What strikes me as being an especially interesting aspect here is how much work (especially considering how little I was getting paid back in those days), how much thought and intensive creative energy I obviously poured into such tales as "The Best of All Possible Worlds," "The Ghost of Man," and "One Last Chance!" I was definitely giving these things my all, and that does indeed show! Of course it doesn't hurt that these three tales (as well as so many of my others) were drawn by Jim Aparo, Pat Boyette, and Steve Ditko, respectively!

Secret Agent (1966) #10, featuring stories written by Steve Skeates.

Stroud: Do the names Warren Savin and D.C. Glanzman mean anything to you? When Denny O'Neil told me about his Sergius O'Shaugnessy alias he said it was to make sure he was free of the stain of being a comics writer. Was that your modus operandi as well?

Skeates: Sounds more like a gag line on the part of O'Neil than anything even partially resembling a full disclosure of actual factual details, especially considering that Denny's real name was right out there in plain sight on a number of comics that were being published at the same time as those that bore his bizarre Sergius O'Shaugnessy moniker!

The former were Marvel comics; the latter were Charlton products. And, instead of trying to hide from the ignominy of writing for anything as overwhelmingly salacious, as utterly in the gutter, as comic books, what Denny was really up to was attempting to work for two companies at the same time back at a time when Stan Lee demanded total exclusivity from anyone and everyone who worked at Marvel!

Not that it was a bad gag, mind you – you know, something that has no connection whatsoever with reality! After all, when Denny and I first got involved in comics there were still a number of people involved in that industry who flat-out didn't want to publicly admit that comic books was what they did for a living! Mainly writers and editors, many of who (for whatever reason) were currently working at DC – people who had been producing stuff for one or another of the comic book companies back when Dr. Frederic Wertham, The Reader's Digest, and the United States Congress placed that big fat stain upon the entire industry! Writers and editors who in the fifties couldn't help but react to what was being said about their means of feeding their families (that comics were some sort of pornography of violence, that they warped children's mind, that they were the direct cause of a number of childhood suicides) with oodles of shame, and still, in effect, as late as the seventies, carried the stain of that shame around with them, even though pretty much the whole rest of the world had long since come to see the comic book witch hunts of the fifties as having been but another instance of a paranoid Puritanical overreaction typical of that era (seasoned, in this case, with a unhealthy dash of parental buck-passing); thus the lingering effects of that insanity, I would venture to guess, is mainly what O'Neil was making fun of!

Blue Beetle (1967) #4, featuring the Kill Vic Sage back-up story co-written by Steve Skeates. — Blue Beetle (1967) #4, featuring the **Kill Vic Sage** back-up story co-written by Steve Skeates.

But enough of that! Let's quickly now move along to my heartfelt desire to totally disown that silly D.C. Glanzman appellation! I am of course well acquainted with the fact that there has been for years a rumor extant that I'm the one who wrote under that name, but, as I've said before and will undoubtedly be forced to say again, that simply is not true! I furthermore have no idea what the actual reality of this situation was, yet there's another rumor that I feel makes a lot more sense than that one about me! The way this one goes is, first of all there really was (and maybe still is) someone named D.C. Glanzman, someone who worked in the main office of Charlton Comics up there in Derby, Connecticut! From what I was told, he was a relative of that popular war story and western artist (and all-around nifty individual) Sam Glanzman! Also, good ol' D.C. may have even helped polish some of Steve Ditko's dialogue for both the Blue Beetle and The Question! In any event, D.C. allowed his name to be put upon those stories, whereas something like 98% of the scripting work on those tales was actually performed by Ditko himself!

I will, however, own up to the fact that Warren Savin was indeed a pen name of mine! What I find most fascinating here is that quite a few people seem to think I wrote a fairly large number of stories in which I employed that pseudonym, whereas, in all actuality, there was a sum-total of but one story that I slapped that particular moniker upon! Yep, only one! And, within that one I was essentially doing what I just now speculated as to being the major contribution to the scripting process provided by D.C. Glanzman, although (being a bit of an egomaniac) I would like to stress that there (within that story generally referred to as "Kill Vic Sage") I performed a bit more than a mere 2% of the labor involved in making this particular eight-page story such a memorable (if I do say so myself) reading experience! The plot was all Ditko's, as was the first draft of the dialogue! What I mainly tried to do was soften the shrillness of that dialogue, make it a little less like everyone was overreacting to everything! Make those demonstrating against Vic Sage seem a bit more reasonable, a bit less like a mere parody of an actual demonstration! Even tried to make The Question a bit less of a stiff, and, in the latter, I may have gone a bit too far, seeing as I received a six-page letter from Ditko detailing why The Question would never say what I had him saying. You can even see (in panel five on page five) where some of my dialogue that Ditko found particularly offensive was just before publication hastily removed! After that, I'm still surprised that Ditko didn't vehemently object to my being chosen to do the dialogue for The Hawk and The Dove!

The Hawk and The Dove (1968) #1, written by Steve Skeates.

But, to actually answer your question, it was mainly due to some misplaced modesty that I wrote The Question under my Savin pen name! Since I was slated to take over the scripting chores on both of the series in the Blue Beetle book (a deal that fell through due to the aforementioned cancellation of the entire Charlton action-hero line and the fact that that led to a large portion of the talent at Charlton leaving that company and moving over to DC), I had strangely decided that it would be somehow unseemly to have my name on both stories in that book, that it would come off as too egomaniacal or something like that! Therefore, I had decided to do the main series (The Blue Beetle) under my real name, and to employ a pseudonym on the back-up feature! As things turned out, as I just now indicated, I never did get to write the Blue Beetle, but at least I got to work on "Kill Vic Sage," a story so compelling that it is still (after four decades) continually discussed and argued about on-line and within various fan publications!

Stroud: I've heard a couple of slightly differing stories about the move of the old Charlton alumni to DC. How do you recall the time?

Skeates: My most vivid memory of that particular period is all about a certain quantity of inwardly-focused recriminations, each laced with a hefty layer of both fear and neurotic self-loathing, balls of blame and self-doubt that started bouncing around in my brain as soon as I had somehow (for some unfathomable reason) forced myself to say over the phone to Dick Giordano: "Sounds like a good idea to me!" Obviously what I'm speaking of here is Dick back there in 1968 having just informed me of his reaction to the higher-ups at Charlton abruptly canceling that company's entire action-hero line, of how he now planned to move from Charlton over to DC, while, within the midst of that recitation of his determination, even making mention of his hopes of being accompanied there (if we were agreeable) by Aparo, Boyette, Ditko, O'Neil, and myself, whereas I (clearly in a moment of idiocy) had just voiced my approval, my acceptance of my role in what Dick was planning, making for what had almost instantly begun to bounce about up there within that squishy gray slop at the top of my head to ultimately manifest itself as a batch of inquiries, plaintively shouted, frantically growing louder and louder -- questions like "What have I done?" and "What have I gotten myself into?" repeated over and over again! After all, in that attempt of mine in the mid-sixties to pick up as much freelance comic book work as I could possibly get my hands on, I had visited DC on several occasions, and I had found it to be a very unfriendly place – snotty, snooty, stiffs in suits and ties with no indication within those offices that this was where comic books were put together (editorially-speaking) – no pictures of superheroes on the walls, no stacks of what they produced anywhere to be seen! It all came off like I was visiting a bunch of CPAs! Or a bunch of pallbearers! And, since I was more casually dressed than these people, looking more like a comic book person than did any of the stiffs who actually worked there, what I mainly received from those folks was a collection of uptight self-righteous superior-being sneers!

Creepy (1964) #47, featuring stories written by Steve Skeates.

DC Graphic Novel (1983) #2 - Warlords, written by Steve Skeates.

Howard the Duck (1979) #9, featuring a story written by Steve Skeates.

And then, there was what they actually produced! Comic books that were nearly as stiff as they were, stories at least twenty years out of date, employing slang even older than that! Like still using the word "hep" – how utterly ancient can anyone get? Sure, I knew (as we all did) that we were set to get plunked down within this surreal variation upon the mummy's tomb (or something like that) in order to give that half-dead company an infusion of new blood, but would that work? Or, since we'd be outnumbered, would it all get turned around, with the six of us ultimately being forced to produce typical DC stuff? – stiff, boring, lackluster, with those usual big blocky unnecessary captions, ones that would heavy-handedly inform the reader of what he had already figured out for himself simply by looking at the art! Arrgh! Luckily, my fears were far from realized!

The Flash (1959) #202, featuring a Kid Flash back-up story written by Steve Skeates.

Having made judgments based on fairly superficial data (rarely a particularly wise or even slightly accurate means of predicting much of anything at all), I had severely underestimated the desire on the part of just about everyone who worked in those sterile and stogy DC offices to have that institution become once again a viable company, an actual money-making concern, worthy competition for that seemingly both in-the-know and in-the-now cross-town rival of theirs known as Marvel! After all, it had been DC that had started the sixties superhero revival, testing the waters via tentatively reintroducing characters like Green Lantern and the Flash (i.e.: doing so within their Showcase title) and thus discovering that there was indeed a new crop of kids out there who wanted to read about superheroes! However, once Stan Lee tumbled to what it was that DC had just discovered, he lost no time in veritably flooding the market with his own brand of superdudes -- characters with a sixties edge to their psyches, flaws that endangered their heroic stature, actual infirmities that made their choice of occupation seem even further over-the-top within the realm of the utterly outlandish, past mistakes and disconcerting transgressions discoloring their view of the future, a truly unruly crew of angst-ridden guilt-ridden infirm tortured neurotic misfits -- and, in doing so, had whipped the sales right out from under DC!

For nearly a decade DC had been essentially merely going through the motions, publishing as few comics as it could get away with while still keeping the company somehow alive, just barely alive, comics that had hardly changed at all story-wise character-wise in well over ten years, just the sort of tired lackluster fare you'd figure would flow forth from those who were basically sleep-walking through their jobs, and do let us not forget that many of these people had had their souls virtually shattered and were still uncomfortably numb from the effects of the aforementioned witch hunts of the fifties. Then suddenly these people discovered a new burgeoning ripening interest in the antics of superheroes, and they'd be damned if they were gonna let those self-satisfied self-congratulatory cretins over at Marvel steal what they had stumbled onto!! Then again, though, it had just become quite obvious that the sorts of comics these people were used to producing were simply not gonna cut it anymore, especially if they wanted to wrest back what Marvel had grabbed away from them! In other words, what was needed here were characters more like the ones that Stan was already busy as hell constructing all sorts of adventures around, characters that actually had a modicum of personality in there, plus stories that not only possessed some oomph to them but also actually spoke to the times, to current reality! In short, then, what these people needed (and even wanted) was someone (or, more accurately, a bunch of someones) who could wake them up and drag their half-dead carcasses into the second half of the twentieth century! And, that's why the six of us were there – to take the point, to lead these injured souls out of that morgue of their own making and into a place where they could honestly be productive!

Teen Titans (1966) #28, written by Steve Skeates.

Stroud: They seemed to use you in a number of different arenas at DC. I found credits for stories in such diverse offerings as Supergirl, the Teen Titans, Plastic Man, Phantom Stranger, the Spectre, Aquaman (of course) and Plop! Where do you feel your talents worked most effectively?

Skeates: The way I see it, talent (and I'm not all that comfortable with that term, seems a bit pretentious, a tad "grandiose," elevating something that's mainly comprised of the hard work of learning one's craft up and up and up to the silly level of supposedly being some sort of innate ability that's God-given, but for the sake of getting down down down to what I want to say here, let us, at least for the moment, let slide my objections to the term itself) is (as that previous parenthetical comment has already made pretty much perfectly clear) not something that's solid and pre-set and in the business of looking for the proper and fitting venue in which to unfold itself! So-called talent is instead a changeable thing, particularly affected by the forever madly fluctuating worldview of the individual who is said to possess that talent! And, all of that makes for there being more than one answer to your inquiry here – a multitude of answers actually and all of them revolving around my being in the right place at the right time; yet I'm not speaking of the "right place" externally; I'm talking about the place I was in within myself!

Take Aquaman for example – I landed that assignment at a time when I was young and innocent enough to believe in the actual possible existence of a super altruistic good guy, whereas later certain things happened to me within the comic book industry itself – books I enjoyed working on were cancelled for some reason other than poor sales (which is the only reason books should be cancelled), editors repeatedly went back on their word, costing me not merely a bunch of sleep but quite a bit of moolah as well, and I even lost a number of writing assignments to writers who couldn't hold a candle to yours truly in the creative sweepstakes, getting blind-sided and shafted thanks to their employment of sleazy office politics to procure for themselves work that should have been mine, etc., etc. – things that caused this raconteur to grow bitter and cynical, and suddenly I was no longer any good at producing believable superhero epics; yet this was when I started pulling in all sorts of awards for writing humor and horror, both of which were definitely at that point a far better fit than those guys who ran around in leotards and flew with the aid of a cape!

Aquaman (1962) #40, written by Steve Skeates.

Furthermore, to bring these proceedings rather up to date, I do quite honestly believe (what with the passage of so many years, as well as this particular individual in various recent interviews looking back at his career and finally realizing how lucky in so many instances I really was) that now at last I've calmed down a bit, learned even to forgive, and am no longer encumbered by various grudges the holding of which undoubtedly hurt me more than I inflicted any damage upon anyone else, and thus I may (in fact) (for whatever it's worth) even be ready to write superheroes once again!

Stroud: Many terrific artists have interpreted your scripts, to include Bernie Wrightson, Bill Draut, Jim Aparo, Chick Stone, Steve Ditko, Sergio Aragones, Dick Dillin and Frank Robbins. Was there anyone in particular that you felt really got the feel of your stories?

Skeates: My initial impulse here is to add names to the list – Gil Kane (whose work on "To Save a Monster" I've already mentioned), Ogden Whitney (having been a big fan of Herbie The Fat Fury, it was indeed a thrill to have this dude illustrate a number of my NoMan stories over at Tower), Pat Boyette (even though Ditko and Aparo also worked on the book, Pat was hands down my favorite when it came to someone who'd embellish my spooky offerings for The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves), George Evans (that first mid-seventies Blackhawk story the two of us put together is definitely up there, amid the top five favorites of mine vis-à-vis any specific comic book I've ever gotten involved in), Ramona Fradon, Mike Sekowsky, Tony DeZuniga, Gene Colan, Marie Severin, Jaime Brocal, Alex Toth, John Buscema, Alfredo Alcala, Ric Estrada, and what can I say about a guy whose work I had revered from as far back as the fifties, back when (as a twelve-year-old) I had a subscription to the original comic book version of Mad? And, yes, I am indeed talking about that creative powerhouse known as Wally Wood! The only problem with all of this is that there are so many – rarely respected artists who did fine by me, big-name illustrators who were truly a pain to work with -- too many even when you don't even consider every category imaginable, making for the distinct possibility that I've already accidentally left out someone who was extremely important and perhaps even somehow instrumental in shaping my career!

Plop (1973) #1, featuring "The Gourmet" written by Steve Skeates.

Be that as it may, however, let us nonetheless (in order to keep these proceedings from, say, sinking to the bottom of some mossy swamp of utter minutia, or whatever) move right along now to a couple of the names you mention – specifically, Wrightson and Aragones, highly individualistic artists who (obviously!) helped me immeasurably in the landing of at least two of those Shazam Awards I picked up in the seventies and were as well undoubtedly more than a little responsible for this particular tale-spinner winning those other two chunks of congratulatory Lucite I glommed onto back in those crazy days! The way I see it, no way would "The Poster Plague" and "The Gourmet" have been recognized as the best humor stories of 1972 and 1973 respectively had Sergio and Bernie not perfectly (interestingly enough, via such utterly differing styles) pounced upon the feel of what I was up to vis-à-vis these strange little dramas, call them "humorous horror stories" or "horrible humor stories" – the nomenclature, though admittedly one of the choices here does seem to possesses more than a smattering of the pejorative, is nevertheless entirely up to each individual witness to one or the other or both the destruction of a certain college campus and the freakish fate of a certain fat man! In retrospect, however, what I actually find most puzzling here (especially in the case of "The Gourmet") is how little follow-up there was! I mean, despite the well-publicized actuality that on our very first job together Bernie and I had reeled in one big fat prestigious award (for, in fact, a story that has gone on to be reprinted more often than any other comic book tale I can in all honesty think of), we were weirdly never asked to team up again, obviously making that first collaboration of ours the only one we ever got to do! Of course one might conjecture that we simply didn't possess enough available time to get it together for a repeat performance, Bernie having suddenly gotten so enormously busy with all those early Wein-Wrightson Swamp Thing adventures he was illustrating, whilst I was simultaneously quite occupied producing scripts for House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Weird Mystery Tales, Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion, Secrets of Sinister House, and Plop, leaving the decision as to who would be drawing whatever story of mine you're wondering about totally up to the editor, Joe Orlando. As to the strangeness of Joe apparently simply never thinking to give one of those stories to Bernie (something I'm now rather baffled about), do allow me to expand upon that lack-of-time theme I just mentioned by pointing out that surely said phenomenon included when it came to this particular scripter an absolute absence of minutes set aside for the expressed purpose of wondering why something-or-other wasn't happening, especially when you consider (for example) that the horror books were not the only ones I was working on for Joe; there was also Adventure Comics featuring Supergirl and Captain Fear! There was Jimmy Olsen! And there were those various back-up stories I was producing for the Phantom Stranger book. And, let us not forget the other editors at DC I was working for, not to mention the other companies I was selling scripts to! I was spread (lemme tell yuh!) way too thin and leading a truly frantic existence, with little time to contemplate the overriding weirdness of (now that I stop to think about it) many a seventies' editorial decision!

House of Mystery (1951) #202, featuring "The Poster Plague" written by Steve Skeates.

Things stacked up in a much more reasonable and logical fashion as far as Sergio was concerned, with the two of us collaborating on quite a number of crazed yarns that quickly followed in the wake of "The Poster Plague," the best of which were undoubtedly "A Likely Story" in Plop #8 and "The Secret Origin of Grooble Man" in Plop #10! Those two potboilers (plus a number of the other collaborations I just now mentioned) quite likely elicited the requisite number of giggles, guffaws, and chuckles, I suppose, yet none of them (I'm sad and even halfway embarrassed to say) came anywhere near the general vicinity of possessing the sort of underlying structural integrity comprised of serious subject matter compellingly presented as that which (in fact) informed our initial collaboration -- specifically, a believable intellectual atmosphere in which our main character's theorizing has gone seriously awry via taking a turn toward a certain sort of paranoia, the seemingly insane delusional variety which nonetheless ultimately proves itself to not be all that crazy after all but instead the harbinger of some pretty damn deadly fruit, with worthy characterization and even a hint of the autobiographic thrown in for good measure!

Oh well, it's hardly a well-kept secret that when one is writing for a living, no way can every single thing said writer produces be a gem! In fact, the general consensus amongst all the other writers I've talked to about this tends toward being that there's a 25-50-25 split going on here, i.e.: twenty-five percent of what you write is great, stuff you can truly be proud of; fifty percent is so-so, with another twenty-five taken up by those pieces that truly suck! The trick is to make the so-so stuff and somehow even the sucky stuff just passable enough so that you don't get fired! And, in point of fact, what I just now described is definitely where I was at in the seventies! However, I'm not all that convinced that this was how things worked for yours truly a bit earlier than that, back (that is to say) in my Charlton and early DC daze!

Hey now, say now, don't get me wrong here -- I'm not trying to imply that I was once different from all those other writers I was just now blathering about, that I was once better than any of them, better than all of them put together, or anything like that! The truth of the matter is, I think this happens to a lot of us when we're younger, especially when we land the proper character and get teamed with what each individual amongst us would deem his own personal best of all possible artists! And what I'm talking about here is climbing aboard a roll, hopping astride a sweet something powered primarily by youthful enthusiasm wherein the great stories just keep coming, the so-so tales become a rarity, and the icky sucky stuff takes a powder, slinks off to some Republican graveyard somewhere and politely bites the dust! As for that 25-50-25 deal, I have no idea how that caught on or why so many people have wound up believing that bilge, but I will say it's my honest opinion that those figures were originally devised by an older author as a way of saying "most of my stuff may be pretty terrible, but that's how it is with everybody else too!" Yeah, right.

Gunfighters (1966) #52, featuring stories written by Steve Skeates.

Furthermore, pursuant to serving more than one god, let it at last be known that everything within those previous two paragraphs (the very ones you have just now perused) has come here this evening to proudly stand acutely self-evident as but a portion (albeit an integral portion) of an indication (complete with bells and whistles) that this insufferably verbose storyteller is now finally (can you believe it?) about to provide an actual answer to your long-standing "get-the-feel-of" inquiry, and that answer is Jim Aparo! Or, to get right down to it, while working with Jim on a number of mystery stories, plus that Thane of Bagarth series in the back of the Hercules book, and even a western, something called "The Coward" which made its appearance in Gunfighters #52 (all of that for the folks at Charlton), I came to realize that Jim and I were (to employ rather appropriate sixties vernacular) pretty much on the same wave-length, that we seemed (that is to say) to somehow view reality is the same "quirky" manner! Thus, as but an example of what was happening here, as time passed the picture descriptions I'd provide within those specific scripts of mine that would be sent to Jim became shorter and shorter, less elaborate, less specific, because I began to trust (implicitly!) that with but a few words (sometimes, believe it or not, it'd only be one word) that Jim would immediately firmly grasp what it was I wanted him to draw! Best of all, though he would often give me more than I expected and in doing so very pleasantly knock me for a loop, more importantly he would never ever give me anything less than what the story needed! As all those superlatives undoubtedly make fairly obvious, now all we needed to get aboard one of those aforementioned rolls was to be given the proper character! Then, when the two of us (along with Dick, Denny, Ditko, and Pat) moved on over to DC, Jim and I were handed Aquaman!

Stroud: I found you've written for virtually all the publishers such as Tower, Seaboard, Archie, Marvel and a long run at Warren. How did they compare? Did you feel more artistic freedom at any particular publisher?

Weird Mystery Tales (1972) #4, featuring stories written by Steve Skeates.

Skeates: Ah, yes, freedom for those who toil so strenuously within the sun-drenched fields of Art, that forever-sought-after forever-wished-for forever-dreamed-of bombastic release from what can only be described as the unspeakably emasculating shackles of editorial restraint! Or, am I perhaps overstating the case just a smidge here? I do quite honestly suspect, after all, that "artistic freedom" means something slightly different to each of those who have somehow come to consider themselves (whether rightly or wrongly) to be within that elite conclave known around these parts as The Art Gang! And, of course (especially within these particularly troubled times wherein economic considerations too easily infect everything anyone attempts to discuss) I must say that seeking that aforementioned freedom (no matter how it is described) can often be downright monetarily counterproductive, garnering you a dollop of respect from your peers whilst simultaneously putting you upon the path to the poorhouse! Furthermore, in my particular case, my desire for "artistic freedom" may go a long way in explaining various aspects of my so-called career which otherwise (upon, for example, the usual journeyman journalist's cursory examination) might seem quite utterly enigmatic! Consider, then, though it paid a mere pittance when compared to the loot one could glom onto at DC and Marvel, Charlton nonetheless remains my favorite among all the companies I ever worked for! Now, add to that the fact that I definitely never (as much as I could have anyway) pursued working (on a far more regular basis than I did) under the influence of that highly respected editor, Julie Schwartz! And, while you're at it, you might as well throw in there a consideration as to why I never warmed up to what is generally referred to as The Marvel Method!

Taking that trio of bizarre happenstances in order, then, let us attack my attitude toward Charlton by first of all examining a certain statement John Schwirian made during his interview with this particular author! In reviewing the Abbott and Costello book I did for Charlton, John not only said my stuff therein was rather funny; he also pointed out that he liked it better than the Plop material I did later on! I of course continue to stand by my response that I'm still way too close to those two books to make any sort of informed judgment as to which contained the funniest material; however, if Abbott and Costello is indeed funnier than Plop, I'd say the reason for that lies in the hands of our old pal Artistic Freedom! After all, up at DC, in order to do up a Plop story, I had to come up with a plot outline, type up said outline, talk that over with the editor, get told the page count by the editor, and then finally go write the story. And, really now, nothing kills comedy faster than belaboring it. As for those earlier efforts of mine, that stuff starring Bud and Lou, I'd come up with an idea, plunk myself down at the typewriter, and just start writing, to some extent allow the story to write itself, allow various jokes that weren't part of the original idea to worm their way in there, and just keep going until I was done, making the story as long or as short as I wanted it to be. You ask me, that's the way that sort of stuff should be done.

Eerie (1966) #33, featuring stories written by Steve Skeates.

Moreover, what with the truth hopefully herewithin getting laid out like we're in the business of performing an autopsy upon it or something, do allow me to indicate that (when all is said and done) I'm really not merely speaking of humor pieces here; I'm embracing the entire magilla, which is to say what I just now described within that previous paragraph is in fact my preferred manner in which to write any comic book story – devising the mere rudiments of an idea that somehow vaguely resembles a plot and immediately immersing myself within the writing of that tale, letting that aforementioned so-called plot develop even as I'm typing up the particulars of the piece! That, as matter of fact, stands as pretty much the bulk of my own private definition of "Artistic Freedom" – being able to avoid having to write (and then even get approved) a preliminary plot outline and thereby boxing myself in, severely limiting my own freedom! Furthermore, that's why I loved working for Charlton – they allowed me to work in my preferred manner; only once during the years I worked there was I asked to produce a preliminary plot outline!

Sometimes, back in those days, to get right down to the particulars here, I wouldn't even know how a story of mine was going to turn out until I reached page five or six of a nine-pager and would suddenly have a revelation as to where I was really headed! In that way I would often be as surprised as hopefully ultimately the reader would be, and that was definitely a major part of the fun of the process! Oh, sure, there were problems that would arise vis-à-vis this particular approach – writing myself into a corner, coming up with a yarn that started well but then just sort of petered out! But that was offset by those tales that I already did have an idea for the ending to, yet halfway through writing the piece I'd come up with a much much better ending and be very happy that I could actually do it the new way, that I wasn't hemmed in by a previously approved plot outline, as surely would have been the case at DC or Marvel! Certainly, the editors at those two larger companies did tend to talk a good game when it came to their own so-called flexibility! More often than not, though, in reality they were stiff as a board, and it was close to impossible to talk them into changing the ending of a plot that had already been approved!

Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham (1985) #1, written by Steve Skeates.

There was, though, of course, far more to the problems I had at DC and Marvel than something that so rarely arose anyway as trying to get an ending to a previously approved story changed. At Marvel there was for example that thing called the Marvel Method, that whole plot-then-pencils-then-script-then-inks idea, an approach to comics that (in my honest opinion) made for an even tighter straight jacket that I had to ensconce myself within! I mean, not only was everything in the story worked out in advance preliminary-plot-outline-wise (making the actual writing of that story, in my opinion, rather a bore), but at Marvel the actual flow of the piece was taken out of my hands as well and given over to the penciler. Certainly, I can see why certain writers would actually prefer to have the artist work out the action and the flow, and maybe this makes me a bit of a control-freak or something! But, really now – I wanted to be the one who decided when to move in for the close-ups; I wanted to figure out where to place the jump cuts and the scene switches and all of that!

I never really thought of it this way before, but actually there was a definite similarity between my problems with the so-called Marvel Method and my reluctance to work with Julie Schwartz. Within the former case, decisions as to the pacing and the flow of a story would be ripped away from my control, while, with Julie, it would be the actual plot to whatever story I'd wind up working on that would no longer be primarily my own! Instead (generally) a writer would go into Julie's office with a couple of ideas, maybe three or four, nothing more than that, whereupon the two of them (the writer and Julie) would toss those ideas back and forth and back and forth and all around as they worked out a plot – a plot that would usually turn out to be mainly Julie's rather than the writer's! Hey, I love the way those World's Finest stories and that one Spectre tale of "mine" that I did with Julie turned out, but still (being a selfish bastard!) I wanted to write my own stuff, not his!

I do quickly wanna toss in here that my situation at DC was not anywhere near as bleak and dismal as the last three or four paragraphs may have seemed to make it appear. After all, at DC I was mainly working for Dick Giordano, the very editor who at Charlton had basically never required me to write a plot outline. Now that we had both moved on to one of the big companies, there was a bit of give and take (on both our parts) going on – I was putting up with having to write preliminary outlines, while Dick was putting up with those outlines being quite poorly written and rather sketchy, knowing that I was saving my good stuff for the stories themselves! Additionally, I was ultimately able somehow to convince Julie that a back-up series didn't need a big two-hour-long plotting session, that it would be better if I simply did those simple little seven-page Kid Flash stories I produced in the early seventies on "spec" – in other words, turn in a completed script without there having been any preliminaries whatsoever! Of course this meant that upon occasion Julie would flat-out reject one of those seven-page scripts I'd come in with, but even taking that into account, this was still my preferred way to work!

World's Finest Comics (1941) #203, written by Steve Skeates.

Stroud: Stan Lee has said that doing a continuing storyline allowed him to avoid having to come up with new material all the time. Did the "Quest for Mera" series in Aquaman serve in that capacity to a certain extent?

Skeates: Although your inclusion within this specific question of the phrase "to a certain extent" does go a long way in making me want to come down (albeit rather begrudgingly) upon the affirmative here, my answer (upon reflection) nonetheless still gravitates unerringly toward being one of denial, especially when one considers both intention and desire! In other words, there were all sorts of forces in play here that reached well beyond the itch to avoid having to devise new and different plots all the time. First and foremost is the fact that we were new to this character and furthermore wanted to take him in a new direction! Certainly no need, though, to barge off into anything so outrageous that it'd be like a baggy zoot suit or something of a similar uncomfortable ilk, some utterly bad fit for such a regal personage, particularly considering the vast quantities of unrealized potential that were sitting right there right in front of our faces, potential within both the sea king himself and that bizarre world in which he lived. The thing to do, then, would be to explore that world, to visit the various communities that abounded there at the bottom of the sea, and Dick figured the best way to accomplish that would be to send Aquaman on a quest.

So, no, I didn't (and don't) see the overriding plot here (Mera's kidnapping and Aquaman's search) as any sort of means of avoiding the construction of new plots; I saw it instead as but a momentary backdrop upon which to pin all the many new and different plots we were (in fact) downright eager to devise! The Sorcerers of the Sea, followed by that strange symbiotic society of the Depths, on into the savagery of the Maarzons, and Aquaman's adventures within each of these communities treated as though these were individual stories, tales with their own distinctive beginnings, middles, and ends, even as those aforementioned overriding concerns, elements that admittedly suggested that these weren't stories after all, that they were instead mere pieces of some larger whole – the sea king's seemingly endless search, his frustration, his mounting anger – allowed us to at last provide this formerly cardboard character with an actual personality.

Aquaman (1962) #42, written by Steve Skeates.

As to there even being back then a desire upon my part to avoid having to concoct new and different plots – no way, man! No way to the max!!

I don't mean to come off here all defensive (or self-aggrandizing, for that matter), yet I do want to bring to the fore my own frustration, even anger, over Dick's decision a number of months later to so soon upon the heels of our nine-issue arc present yet another multi-issue tale! You see, once our nine-part story had done its job (or what I personally mainly perceived as having been its job) of endowing Aquaman with a viable personality – strength and determination with just a touch of volatility, a touch silent, withdrawn, even a bit of a loner, yet all in all a downright likeable guy -- I wanted to immediately involve this stalwart character in a rather lengthy series of one-shots, single issue stories, self-contained 23-page yarns that would be satisfying unto themselves rather than dependent in any way upon any of the other entities within this or any other series! Unfortunately, Dick had other plans!

However, in order to immediately quash even the merest possibility of this particular bon vivant being categorized by those in the know (including especially a certain Mr. Giordano) as one truly ungrateful unreasonable (not to mention utterly miserable) misanthropic malcontent, do please allow me here and now to point out that what I'm talking about here was far far from being entirely (or even majorly) Dick's fault. That is to say that Dick (in point of fact) had absolutely nothing to do with getting the ball rolling here; instead this thing that at least I (honestly and subsequently) would term "a truly pathetic mess" was initiated by that ultimate evil known as the specter of illness! To elaborate, beyond being a consummate professional who would (as I indicated earlier) put his all into everything he did, Jim Aparo was the sort of artist who was into producing a page a day, and by that I mean doing up the entire magilla – pencils, inks, and letters! It was here that illness struck, making it impossible for Jim to ink any of what was to be the penultimate issue of our seemingly endless Quest arc, the episode entitled "The Explanation," whereupon I was asked to expand what was going to be the final issue of that arc from 23 pages to 30, then split it in half, so that it could be spread out over two issues (with reprints of older Aquaman stories employed as back-ups) thus considerably lightening the load that Jim would have to carry!

House of Secrets (1956) #105, featuring stories written by Steve Skeates.

Jim ultimately rallied enough to get back into doing a full book, truly putting his all (and then some!) into Aquaman #49, the first of what I was (as I just now indicated) hoping would be a long line of one-shots (as well as, in this particular case, being a rather brash attempt to demonstrate that the Skeates/Aparo/Giordano team could whenever we damn well felt like it easily produce the sort of socially conscious melodrama that O'Neil and Adams were so totally into over at the Green Lantern/Green Arrow comic), and I do indeed love the way this baby turned out – the totally wordless two-page introduction, that fist fight within a burning factory, the sympathetic qualities of "the villain" nicely played up in the artwork! Yet, all of that took a lot out of Jim and put him on a path toward a possible relapse; thus he requested that he be able to go back to doing but fifteen pages an issue, at least for a while.

The thing is, Dick at this point had no desire to once again use reprints for the back-ups -- the response to the ones he had employed in issues 47 and 48 had hardly been of a positive nature; thus he wanted to do something new and original this go-round, something that would in fact help draw even more readers into becoming regular members of our audience! Furthermore, Dick also wasn't particularly taken with the idea of our doing at the front of the book a series of fifteen-page one-shots (although personally I still contend that that would have been a far better idea than that lame three-issue lost-in-Mera's-ring storyline that we ultimately settled upon). Or, to expand upon what I just now mentioned parenthetically – what evolved here was a three-parter within which the sea king was basically trapped within a bizarre alternate reality and was trying for all he was worth to find his way back to Atlantis so that he might be reunited with his Queen, a storyline essentially devised by our aforementioned editor and one which (at least in my opinion) bore way too many similarities to that nine-part extravaganza we had finally put the kibosh upon but a few issues earlier; this new one, then, coming off like some weak-kneed watered-down sad and lackluster imitation of that quite brightly-lit chunk of fiction we had not long ago just spent a year and a half producing! And, as for the back-up here, there was a three-part Deadman adventure written and drawn by Neal Adams that somehow interacted with this utterly unfortunate Aquaman retread!

The Generic Comic Book (1984) #1, written by Steve Skeates.

Judging from everything they said and did as well as the work they produced, Jim, Neal, and Dick were totally into this project! As I believe I've sufficiently indicated, I was not! Yet, I did try to suck it up and be professional about this situation I suddenly found myself trapped within, tried hard to write it well despite not being into it, even added certain elements I do quite like, such as the bubble-guns and a weird religion wherein conversation outside the confines of a church is seen as a sin!

I mention all of this because beneath my frustration over having to participate in this travesty was my desire to get back into doing up that batch of one-shots I had merely scratched the surface of back when we produced our socially conscious 49th issue, a desire that I must say stands as more or less the exact opposite of the attitude you quoted Stan Lee as speaking in favor of! I wanted more than anything else to come up with some new material, to devise a whole bunch of stories, sagas, sea chanteys (if you will) that would stand on their own! And, finally, after merely a half a year (with Jim now apparently fully recovered), I at last got my wish, and we were able to produce what I still contend are the three best issues of Aquaman ever (plus a fourth one that wasn't half bad either) – "Is California Sinking?," "Crime Wave" (I do indeed consider it an utterly out-of-this-world honor that a number of critics have cited this one as being an Aquaman tale as though written by Philip K. Dick – like I might ever be in a league with that dude!), "Return of the Alien" and "Computer Trap" (definitely this issue was the clunker of the four, yet the two stories here did allow me to establish some of the sea king's more liberal political attitudes whilst simultaneously enabling me while still holding on for dear life to the last vestiges of being in my twenties to do up a tale based upon that silly hippie axiom, "Don't trust anyone over thirty!"), and finally supposedly the best of the lot, "The Creature that Devoured Detroit!" Hey, talk about being on a roll – a Kaiser with poppy seeds I believe it was!!

There's more, of course! There's always more that can be said! Yet, I do like that as an ending! Just the proper amount of not taking all of this all that seriously! So…

**As an added bonus for our readers, here are the complete printed versions of "The Gourmet" and "The Poster Plague". Enjoy!**

"The Gourmet" - Written by Steve Skeates with art from Bernie Wrightson.

"The Gourmet" pg.1

"The Gourmet" pg.2

"The Gourmet" pg.3

"The Gourmet" pg.4

"The Gourmet" pg.5

"The Gourmet" pg.6

"The Poster Plague" - Written by Steve Skeates with art from Sergio Aragones.

"The Poster Plague" pg.1

"The Poster Plague" pg.2

"The Poster Plague" pg.3

"The Poster Plague" pg.4

"The Poster Plague" pg.5

"The Poster Plague" pg.6

"The Poster Plague" pg.7

August 01, 2018

An Interview With Ernie Chan - A Go-To Cover Artist For DC & Marvel

August 01, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Ernesto "Ernie" Chan (born July 27, 1940) was a Filipino-American comics artist known for his work at both Marvel and DC Comics, including long runs on Conan the Barbarian, Batman, and Detective Comics. Ernie Chan was born Ernie Chua due to what he called "a typographical error on my birth certificate that I had to use until I had a chance to change it to 'Chan' when I got my [U.S.] citizenship in '76." Ernie received an Inkpot Award in 1980. In 2002, he retired from comic work except for commissioned art but returned to draw writer Andrew Zar's adult-oriented webcomic The Vat in 2009. Mr. Chan passed away on May 16, 2012 after a nearly yearlong battle with cancer.

Ernie Chan did scads of cover work for DC back in the day and of course nearly everyone knows it was a simple typographical error that for years identified him as Ernie Chua. Whatever you may call him, his talent was indisputable. He may have been a man of few words, but his work spoke volumes. Just check out the gift from my life long best friend to attest to that (below).

This interview originally took place via email on May 23, 2009.

A Batman piece drawn by Ernie Chan and gifted to Bryan Stroud. — A Batman piece drawn by **Ernie Chan** and gifted to **Bryan Stroud**.

Bryan Stroud: It looks like your career at DC began in about 1972, is that correct?

Ernie Chan: You’re right. Those were the days.

Stroud: What made you decide to go into comic illustration?

Chan: That’s what I had been doing back in the Philippines, illustrating local comics for 8 years, before migrating to the USA in 1970. I always loved to draw since I was a kid.

Stroud: Were you part of Tony DeZuniga’s so-called Filipino Invasion?

Chan: I apprenticed for Tony back in the Philippines for a couple of years. Tony came to the USA a year ahead of me. So I looked him up and apprenticed for him again for several months, then I went on my own. You can say the ‘Filipino Invasion’ was initiated by Tony and me.

Stroud: Was the language barrier ever a problem?

Chan: It’s not a problem. We were taught English in school, and it is our second language.

Stroud: Please tell me about your art training.

Chan: It was mostly self-taught, observing and imitating other artist’s styles that appealed to me and a lot of practice and hard work.

Stroud: You’ve got an impressive list of credits and worked on everything from Batman to Swamp Thing with stops in between on westerns, war books and superheroes. Which was most enjoyable?

Batman Family (1975) #3, cover by Ernie Chan.

Chan: Actually, I am challenged every time I encounter a new character assignment. But I enjoyed Batman the most

Stroud: Is there a character you feel represents your work best?

Chan: I guess Batman represents my work best.

Stroud: Do you prefer penciling or inking?

Chan: I prefer penciling. But I enjoy inking too.

Stroud: Which tools do you favor?

Chan: I favor a mechanical pencil with 2B lead for sketching, a flexible pen and fountain brush filled with India ink for inking.

Stroud: Did you have a favorite writer to work with?

Chan: David V. Reed was my favorite writer at that time.

Stroud: How about a favorite editor?

Chan: Julius Schwartz. He was easy to work with.

Stroud: How did Marvel and DC compare?

Chan: For me, it’s like comparing apples and oranges. At DC, I am more of a penciller. While at Marvel, I am more of an inker.

Stroud: Did you have a preference between full script and Marvel method?

Ghost Rider (1973) #28, cover by Ernie Chan.

Chan: With a full script, the writer dominates the storytelling. With the Marvel method, I have more flexibility in the story breakdowns. I prefer the latter.

Stroud: You worked on both Claw the Unconquered and Conan. Was Claw basically a knock-off of Conan?

Chan: Yes, I agree that Claw was a knock-off of Conan at the beginning. But if Claw had been given a longer run, I was pretty sure it would have branched off to something all its own.

Stroud: You worked on almost the entire run of the Joker book. Was that an interesting assignment?

Chan: Yes. The Joker was and still is the best villain character for Batman.

Stroud: You became the designated cover artist for DC for awhile and had a particular gift for them. Did you like doing covers over interiors?

Chan: I like doing covers way better than working on interiors. In interiors you have to deal with the 6 panels on average and tons of captions and dialogs; while in covers I just leave a third top portion of the space for the logo and stuff. And sometimes, if I am lucky, I can overlap my design over a part of the logo.

Stroud: Do you paint?

Chan: I love to paint. But back then, my opportunity to paint is limited, because I could only paint in between a long span of black and white jobs. Nowadays, I have more time to paint.

Stroud: According to your website you did some T.V. and movie animation. Which projects? Was it an interesting change of pace?

Conan the Barbarian (1970) #75, cover by Ernie Chan.

Chan: I went into TV, movie and video animation for the sole purpose of being able to learn to use the computer tools. But I found it difficult, because I went in at a late age. It would have been a different situation if I had started it earlier in life. But I left with enough knowledge in computer tools for me to utilize the internet, e-mails, Photoshop, etc.

Stroud: You do lots of commission work these days. Are you involved in any other projects?

Chan: At present I am not involved in any projects. I do lots of commission work, and I enjoy it.

Stroud: Did you ever try writing stories?

Chan: I dabbled in writing and creating my own characters. The fun in doing these personal projects is that I am not pressured to finish in any scheduled time. I just do them whenever I feel like it. And I don’t have to reveal it till I am good and ready.

Stroud: Do you produce work on the computer or is it still all by hand?

Chan: I can produce work on the computer but it is very frustrating when I don’t have the latest software and a more powerful computer. Besides, fans prefer art that is hand made.

Stroud: Do you hit the convention circuit much and if so is it fun for you?

Chan: I enjoy very much attending comic conventions. I am a regular at the San Diego Comicon, SF WonderCon and the SJ SuperCon. I never turn down an invitation to any Conventions around the country or overseas, if there is no scheduling conflict.

As we sometimes do on the shorter interviews, Nerd Team 30 has added a gallery of Ernie's cover work to compliment the article. Enjoy!

Batman (1940) #283, cover by Ernie Chan and Vince Colletta.

Captain America (1968) #216, cover by Gil Kane and Ernie Chan.

Claw the Unconquered (1975) #5, cover by Ernie Chan.

Crypt of Shadows (1973) #6, cover by Gil Kane and Ernie Chan.

Defenders (1972) #61, cover by Ed Hannigan and Ernie Chan.

Detective Comics (1937) #461, cover by Ernie Chan.

Frankenstein (1973) #12, cover by Ron Wilson and Ernie Chan.

Godzilla (1977) #7, cover by Herb Trimpe and Ernie Chan.

House of Secrets (1956) #132, cover by Ernie Chan.

Incredible Hulk (1968) #210, cover by Ernie Chan.

Justice League of America (1960) #124, cover by Ernie Chan.

Marvel Classics Comics (1976) #23, cover by Ernie Chan.

Master of Kung Fu (1974) #17, cover by Ernie Chan.

Secret Society of Super-Villains (1976) #5, cover by Ernie Chan.

Savage Sword of Conan (1974) #34, cover by Ernie Chan.

Secrets of Haunted House (1975) #3, cover by Ernie Chan.

Strange Tales (1951) #173, cover by Rich Buckler and Ernie Chan.

Supernatural Thrillers (1972) #6, cover by Gil Kane and Ernie Chan.

Super-Villain Team-Up (1975) #10, cover by Gil Kane and Ernie Chan.

Swamp Thing (1972) #23, cover by Ernie Chan.

Tales of Ghost Castle (1975) #3, cover by Ernie Chan.

Weird Mystery Tales (1972) #17, cover by Ernie Chan.

What If (1977) #13, cover by John Buscema  and Ernie Chan. — What If (1977) #13, cover by John Buscema and Ernie Chan.

Worlds Unknown (1973) #6, cover by Gil Kane and Ernie Chan.

July 25, 2018

An Interview With Sam Glanzman - One Of The Last Golden Age Artists

July 25, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Samuel Joseph Glanzman (born December 5, 1924) was an American comics artist and memoirist. Glanzman is best known for his Charlton Comics series Hercules, about the mythological Greek demigod; his autobiographical war stories about his service aboard the U.S.S. Stevens for DC Comics and Marvel Comics; and the Charlton Comics Fightin' Army feature "The Lonely War of Willy Schultz" - a Vietnam War-era serial about a German-American U.S. Army captain during World War II.

In 2003, Glanzman began working on webcomics, writing and drawing the 19th-century nautical adventure Apple Jack, and re-teaming with his "Willy Schultz" writer, Will Franz, on the Roman centurion series The Eagle. In 2012 and 2013, new "U.S.S. Stevens" stories by Glanzman appeared in the Joe Kubert Presents six-issue anthology limited series.

Mr. Glanzman passed away on July 12, 2017.

Unpublished Sleepy Holler comic strip by Sam Glanzman. — Unpublished **Sleepy Holler** comic strip by **Sam Glanzman.**

Sam Glanzman was one of the last of the Golden Age artists and I felt it a particular privilege to speak with him. He was warm and personable and his autobiographical U.S.S. Stevens stories made me feel like I was sort of acquainted before we ever started. During the interview he mentions his "Sleepy Holler" strip that he tried to shop to the syndicates (I later learned the brothers were named after he and his real life brothers) and one day he surprised and delighted me by sending the proof sheets and one original strip from the unpublished series, which is a treasured memento of a great gentleman and a genuine World War II participant who deserves our undying respect and thanks. Fair winds and following seas, shipmate!

This interview originally took place over the phone on May 13, 2009.

World War Stories (1965) #3, cover by Sam Glanzman.

Bryan Stroud: I did a little research and I see the Grand Comics Database has listed over 1300 credits for you. That’s a pretty impressive body of work and I’m sure it doesn’t include everything. Does that figure surprise you at all?

Sam Glanzman: No, it doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve done a lot of work, but I haven’t counted it.

Stroud: I’m sure you haven’t. It looks like you started back in the early 40’s, is that correct?

SG: Well, my first published comic was the Flyman. I can’t remember if that was after the war or before the war. Anyway, that was my first job and it paid practically nothing for the storyline and the pencils and the inks.

Stroud: You had to do the whole thing, huh?

SG: Yeah. I didn’t do the lettering. I’ve never done any lettering.

Stroud: Well, that’s okay. You’ve done everything else. Has anyone else ever inked after you or have you always just done your own?

SG: (Chuckle.) No, nobody could ink my pencils because my pencils are almost like stick figures.

Stroud: Very loose, huh? I see that you’re basically self-taught as an artist.

SG: Yeah, when I was a kid I copied Hal Foster and a fella by the name of Kidd who used to illustrate for the Daily News. I can’t even think of all the guys I used to copy.

Stroud: Milt Caniff, maybe?

Battlefield Action (1957) #30, cover by Sam Glanzman.

SG: No, I never copied Caniff, but Hal Foster, yes. I copied a lot of the pulp guys. Wood pulp magazines. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them.

Stroud: Yeah, I sure have.

SG: Morton Stoops was one of them. He was a wood pulp artist, and I already mentioned Kidd. I used to copy everybody, and that’s how I learned how to draw.

Stroud: Well, it worked out for you just fine.

SG: (Laughter.) Yes, it did. It became my second profession.

Stroud: What was your first?

SG: Bullshit artist.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

SG: Joking, just joking. Actually, I had all kinds of professions. I used to work in lumber yards and cabinet shops and boat yards and Republic Aircraft. Before comics I spent most of my time in cabinet shops.

Stroud: I guess it wasn’t too hard to switch to something a little easier on the body.

SG: That’s right.

Stroud: Back when you were at it, Sam, comics sometimes didn’t have a very good reputation. Did that give you any second thoughts?

SG: Well, I forget who they were, but a couple of guys didn’t pay up and they disappeared. Another thing, too, this was maybe before the war and you know I’ve got a Jewish name. My father was Jewish and my mother was Catholic and they were against Jews during the war and so I used to use the name “Glanz,” and sometimes another name just to get free from that. I can’t remember what the other name was.

Stroud: That’s okay. You’ve got a lot of things to look back on, so some of it may be a little hazy.

SG: Speaking of a lot of things, I’m trying to clean up my studio as we speak and you wouldn’t believe all the crap I’ve got around here. Unbelievable. I’m throwing away a bunch of old comic books and everything.

Stroud: I bet there’s a few years accumulation there.

SG: Yeah, I’ve got a lot of the Sgt. Rock and G.I. Combat stuff.

Stroud: That was how I stumbled across you, actually, Sam. I was looking through an old issue of G.I. Combat and back at the end in the letter column you’d written up a mini-autobiography and a self-portrait sketch.

SG: Which issue was that?

Stroud: #175.

SG: Maybe I’ve got it here. (Pause.) I guess I’m not that far yet. So far I’m only up to #146. Anyway, I’ll have to check that out.

Marvel Graphic Novel (1982) #30 - A Sailor's Story by Sam Glanzman.

Stroud: Among other things you were talking about riding a Freedom Machine. I presume that was your Harley?

SG: (Laughter.) No. All my life I’ve wanted a Harley. I used to buy a bike and ride it and then I’d sell it and take the money to go to casinos hoping I could win enough to buy a Harley. I must have owned about seven bikes over the years, but I sold them off and I never did get my Harley. Now I don’t have a bike, I don’t have a Harley and I don’t have the money! I sold my last bike in 2004 and I’m thinking I’m pretty old now and the wife is a little worried about me driving them, but I sure would like to get another one.

Stroud: I can’t blame you, though I can’t blame her, either. I had a teacher once who got a bike a little later in life and he had a cartoon on his desk showing an old man in leathers on a chopper in front of his wife with the caption, “As the years dwindle down to a precious few I figured…what the hell?”

SG: (Laughter.) You know what my saying is? I ain’t afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens. That’s my favorite saying. I got it from someone else.

Stroud: It’s very good. I’m guessing your Navy service was a big help in your later career.

SG: Well, I write a lot of stories about her, my ship, you know. Yeah, that really helped because DC picked up on my war stuff.

Stroud: Yes, and a lot of the equipment you drew looked so accurate it looked like reference material all on its own.

SG: Well, I had a sketchbook and I think I gave it to the guy who did Jonah Hex stuff.

Stroud: Tony DeZuniga?

Jonah Hex Two-Gun Mojo (1993) #1, cover penciled by Tim Truman & inked by Sam Glanzman. — Jonah Hex Two-Gun Mojo (1993) #1, cover penciled by Tim Truman & inked by Sam Glanzman.

SG: No. Tim Truman. Anyway, the sketchbooks were what I often used for reference and I remember a lot of my ship and also of course I’ve got a good reference file on ships and stuff like that.

Stroud: I was really impressed with your aircraft and tanks and so forth. They were just outstanding.

SG: Well, I don’t just draw them out of my head. I use a lot of reference, buddy. I want to make sure its right.

Stroud: That’s what Russ Heath told me, as well.

SG: Russ’ stuff is very good. Russ is great. Next to Joe Kubert. Joe Kubert is tops. Nobody can come anywhere near Joe Kubert.

Stroud: He’s fantastic, isn’t he?

SG: Joe Kubert is unbelievable.

Stroud: He’s still doing work, too. I guess you knew that.

SG: Oh, yeah, he still works. By the way, did I hear right that Ric Estrada died?

Stroud: Yeah, just this month.

SG: He was good, too. Ric Estraada was good, too. I don’t think many people picked up on him. He was very good.

Stroud: He sure was. A sweet man, too. I got to talk to him just a few weeks ago.

SG: Nice guy, yeah. I got to meet him a few times when I used to go to the conventions.

Jonah Hex Shadows West (1999) #1, cover penciled by Tim Truman & inked by Sam Glanzman. — Jonah Hex Shadows West (1999) #1, cover penciled by Tim Truman & inked by Sam Glanzman.

Stroud: Do you go to them any more, Sam?

SG: No. I used to have a camper, so we’d go from New York to California with the camper, my wife and I. We just recently got rid of it, so no, I don’t go to conventions any more. I’d like to. Maybe I’ll pick up another one again. I don’t know.

Stroud: It looks like the vast majority of your work was in Westerns and jungle adventures and animal stories and of course the war titles. Did you have a favorite?

SG: Yeah, my own. Kona and Attu. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of that.

Stroud: I believe so.

SG: That one (Attu) I made up completely and did everything except the lettering. I had the idea of him going into the future and everything else. I’ve got a bunch of ideas in my head for new stories, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to it.

Stroud: I notice you’ve done some script work. Do you like to write or do you prefer to draw?

SG: Well, I like the script work because I get paid for the storyline. So if I do the script I get paid for that. If I’m doing someone else’s story I don’t get paid for that. I like doing my own script when I can. I’ve done Sgt Rock with other writers and Haunted Tank, of course.

Stroud: Is it true that you created the Sarge Steel character?

SG: No. The only thing I created was the U.S.S. Stevens, Attu and “A Sailor’s Story.” I did some stuff for Marvel called “Mas.” That was a war thing, too.

Stroud: Did the comics code ever cause you any trouble?

SG: It seems like something I did with Tim Truman might have been a little bit of a problem, but they never bothered me. By the way, you should be on the lookout for a new book that I think is called “Joe Kubert Presents.” It should be coming out pretty soon. In fact, I just did a story for him and I’m waiting to get paid. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Oh, good. You’re still doing some work then.

SG: Hell, yeah.

Stroud: Good for you.

SG: The story I did for him, of course, is the U.S.S. Stevens. The first one is titled “My son, my son.” So, look for it when it comes out.

Stroud: I sure will.

SG: I don’t know too much about the project. I hadn’t really bothered Joe about it, but apparently, it’s going to be a thick book.

Stroud: Sounds like it will be a nice anthology edition.

SG: Well, as I said, I don’t know too much about it, but when he told me he would like me to do some work for him I said, “Send it up. I’m ready!” He asked me to do the storyline and everything, so I did the story, the pencils, the inks, the coloring. Everything but the letters.

Stroud: Wow. That’s impressive, Sam. How long did it usually take you to do a page?

Marvel Graphic Novel (1982) #48 - A Sailor's Story Book 2 by Sam Glanzman.

SG: (Chuckle.) What a funny question. I never timed them. First of all I’ve got to think about it, and then I’ve got to lay it out and decide how many panels. Then I’ve got to figure out what to put in the goddamn panels, and I’ve got to figure out composition. I’m very tight on composition. It’s important to me. How can I explain this? You’re looking at a page of comic book art?

Stroud: Yeah.

SG: Well, I don’t want you to take your eye off of that page. That’s my purpose. So, I try not to have any of the figures looking off of the page, or any of the airplanes flying off the page, or any of the ships going off the page, you follow what I’m getting at?

Stroud: Yes, I do.

SG: In other words, I want to hold your interest. If a plane is going off the page, it’s likely that just for an instant your eye may go off the page and you see something interesting and you forget, you know what I mean?

Stroud: Absolutely.

SG: I like composition from the old masters. All of their corners are strengthened. It’s like building a house. You’ve got to strengthen the corners. It’s very involved. I used to make thumbnail sketches of the masters. When I lived on Coney Island I did a lot of comic book work and I used to have to go to Manhattan in New York. I had to take a train to get there from the island. The train used to stop at Grand Central Station and there used to be an art museum in the station if I remember correctly and every time I’d take my work into the comic publishers, I’d stop by the art museum and study the masters. I used to take a pen and pad and I would make rough sketches in black and white of their composition of their paintings. If you notice most of them…it’s very subtle, you’ve got to really know what you’re looking for, when you look at the old masters you’ll see that all of their corners are strengthened. And by that, I mean, take for example a picture of a house and a tree. You’ll notice in say, the upper right-hand corner you’ll see a tree branch coming off in such a way that it’s strengthening that corner. It’s very difficult to explain. I’d have to draw you a picture, buddy.

GI Combat (1952) #164, cover by Sam Glanzman.

Stroud: I think you did a pretty good job. Did you ever do any covers, Sam or was it all interior work?

SG: I think only for my own stuff like Attu and “A Sailor’s Story.” I think I did one cover for DC for The Haunted Tank. It was pretty lousy. I’d like to do it over again.

Stroud: Did you ever do any syndicated strip work?

SG: No, but I was a fraction of an inch close to getting a job with the syndicate. The owner of the syndicate really loved it. It was a storyline about three guys who lived up in the mountains and it was called “Sleepy Hollow.” He loved it and I had to draw up 15 issues or more, I forget how many I did now, and they printed them up and his salesman took my job, “Sleepy Hollow,” and also that Viking comic strip. What was the name of that one?

Stroud: Hagar the Horrible?

SG: Right. That’s it. So, his agent took my stuff and Hagar around trying to sell it to the various newspapers and apparently, they liked Hagar better than mine. I think they pushed Hagar and Hagar took and mine didn’t take.

Stroud: Oh, doggone.

SG: (Chuckle.) Well, what can you do?

Stroud: You’ve worked for a lot of the publishers, Sam, like Harvey and Dell and Marvel and Charlton and of course DC. Did you have a favorite?

Attack (1966) #3, cover by Sam Glanzman.

SG: I would do my work, take it in, drop it on the desk and leave and go home, so it was all the same to me. That’s the trouble with me, buddy. I don’t know anything about my business. (Chuckle.) And I never asked for my artwork back. I’ve got thousands of pages of artwork out there somewhere and somebody’s making a buck on it, but I ain’t. Well, I should mention DC used to give me my stuff back. Most of it anyway. But I never thought to ask for it, either.

Stroud: Well, and who knew back then that one day it would be worth a lot?

SG: Yeah, if I knew back then what little I know now, which is nothing…

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

SG: I’d still be nowhere. But, Joe likes my stuff and that’s good.

Stroud: It sure is. I saw where you’d done some work as recently as 2006 for Image Comics?

SG: I’m not sure. Every so often I’ll get a request to do a one-page feature. I don’t pay much attention to who it’s for.

Stroud: It doesn’t look like you did hardly any superheroes. Was that because nobody asked or did you not care to do them?

SG: I did a superhero way, way, way back. Right after I got out of the service. I think it was called Blue Bolt. Did you ever hear of that guy?

Stroud: I sure have.

Navy War Heroes (1964) #1, cover by Sam Glanzman.

SG: I think I did a couple of issues on him, but that’s about it. Well, that and Flyman. Those were the only superheroes.

Stroud: Is it true that D.C. Glanzman is your brother?

SG: Yeah, that’s my younger brother Dave. Now listen my older brother, Louis Glanzman, he’s the real painting artist. You can’t get anything off of him unless it’s six figures. He’s got stuff hanging everywhere. He did I don’t know how many covers for Time Magazine. His work is in museums. He did a lot of work for National Geographic. He’s a real painter. He’s 87 now and I don’t think he’s doing any current work.

Stroud: It sounds like artistic talent runs in the family.

SG: Well, Dave didn’t do artwork.

Stroud: He was a writer at Charlton, wasn’t he?

SG: Well, I don’t think so. I think somebody pushed that idea, but I doubt it. I don’t think so. He had something to do with the printing. Checking the pages or something. I don’t know.

Stroud: Like an editor?

SG: No, not an editor. Just a workman.

Stroud: Are you still doing commission work, Sam?

SG: Not really.

Thief of Sherwood (1991) interior art for pg.13 by Sam Glanzman.

Adventures of Robin Hood (1991) #1, cover by Sam Glanzman.

July 18, 2018

An Interview With Anthony Tollin - Remembering DC's Production Dept.

July 18, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Anthony Tollin (born February 20, 1952) is a comic book colorist best known for his work on Green Lantern, The Shadow, and Infinity Inc. Tollin started working for DC Comics in the early 70s as an assistant to Tatjana Wood in the coloring department. In the early 80s, he became the main colorist for DC, coloring almost all of the covers for the company at the time. Tollin worked for DC until the early 90s, when he started branching out to work for other publishers. He currently publishes the pulp adventures of The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Avenger, and The Whisperer, under his Sanctum Books imprint.

The creation of comics fascinates me, from the script to the art to the production process, and when I got to speak to Stan Goldberg about how things were done at Marvel, it stood to reason that I needed to find out how it was at my favorite publisher, DC. So I managed to track down the wonderful Anthony "Tony" Tollin to get his take on coloring and production and some of the wonderful folks he interacted with. It was time well spent and he was among those I got to finally meet face to face and shake hands with at the 2015 San Diego Con.

This interview originally took place over the phone on December 28, 2008.

Bryan Stroud: I’m still learning about how the production department worked, so would you please share your experiences?

Anthony Tollin: The production department, under Jack Adler…and this was encouraged by Jenette Kahn, by the way, there was an emphasis on creativity and finding new and better ways to do things. Jack had developed the 3-D system that was later used by View-Master. He was into photography and he invented the step-down meter, and Jack developed the whole color separation method that comic books and newspaper strips were separated by from the 1930’s on. Before that it took a good separator a week to do a Sunday page. Jack’s method cut it down considerably with much better results. If you look at a Prince Valiant page that he did, it was just superb.

World's Finest Comics (1941) #312, cover drawn by Paris Cullins & Klaus Janson, colored by Anthony Tollin.

I went to work for Jack at DC and learned to really appreciate color. At that time there was no comparison between the quality and level of production at DC when compared to Marvel, where it was all but non-existent.

Stroud: Yeah, Mike Esposito was explaining to me how they had to make the ink lines so thick just to keep the colors from running at Marvel.

Tollin: There was a sense of pride in the DC production department. The fact that we were doing the best production work of any comic book company, and there was an attitude that DC’s books had always had the best production. And when you look at the talent we had in the production department; before me there was Carl Gafford, you had Joe Letterese who had lettered the “BAMS!” and “POWS!” for the Batman T.V. series, you had Todd Klein and John Workman, who became art director of Heavy Metal, and Steve Mitchell who was an inker, and Bob LeRose, who had done work for Johnston and Cushing. He did work on the magazines like Boy’s Life and advertising strips for Sunday newspapers and such. Bob was one of the early boosters of Neal Adams’ career. You know Bob Rozakis, of course.

Stroud: Yes.

Tollin: Not to mention the earlier years with people like Ira Schnapp and Ray Perry. But you look at the kind of covers when Jack had done the separations, and the cover department ended up being largely shut down because there had been one member (who shall remain nameless) in the 1960’s DC color staff who was an alcoholic at the time.

You had Jerry Serpe and Jack Adler who were covering things. They made the color separation department less cost effective, but if you look at the kind of separations… if you look at some of the things Jack did, like that famous Green Lantern #8 cover with the Gila Monster, and you look at his coloring on the first Mike Kaluta Shadow cover, this was someone from a plotting standpoint who really understood what tones would work with washes, to come with a painted look.

You look at some of the work Jack did coloring the Neal Adams stories or some Alex Toth stories. Jack was always one of the biggest boosters of young talent in the company, including Paul Levitz and Howard Chaykin and especially Walt Simonson, who he kind of saw as a modern day Toth in that he was pushing the boundaries the way Alex had.

Batman (1940) #429, cover drawn by Mike Mignola and colored by Anthony Tollin.

So, you had this push to be as good as you could and to be as creative as you could. One of the great things about Jack is that he didn’t want us to color just like him. He wanted us to tell the story, and Jack had very strict ideas on story-telling and he’d trust me to notice anything colored wrong in a costume or little continuity things, but Jack would frequently look at color guides upside down, just to see where his eye went when you weren’t distracted by the art. With Jack Adler style coloring, which unfortunately when a new color editor came into DC in the 90’s, who I really don’t think understood story-telling with color, got rid of a lot of Jack’s people, including Adrienne Roy (my former wife) and myself.

Stroud: Oh, no.

Tollin: He told Adrienne she didn’t know how to color Batman, and she’d been coloring all the Batman comics for the previous 16 years. Now I’d seen a lot of Marvel comics where color was just thrown around indiscriminately, and I see that happening in modern comics a lot. In a DC comic book supervised by Jack Adler…in real life you’ll see a lot of bright red chairs in living rooms and such. Comfy chairs and such with bright colors. The problem is, in a comic book, if it’s the brightest thing in the page or the panel, your eye is directed to it. In a Jack Adler story, if there was a bright red chair, and it was the brightest thing on the page, there had better be ten million dollars hidden in it. It had better be somehow important to the story, because a lot of our job as colorists was to direct the attention of the reader to what was important and kill what was unimportant.

I see a lot of bad comics where color was used as whatever was on the brush, or they simply don’t understand that concept. It’s very much like how a master like Orson Welles would light a film. There was a scene that was done, I believe it was an optical job, where there were three separate filmings put together just to get the lighting the way Welles wanted it where when Susan Alexander King attempts suicide, and Orson Welles (as Charles Foster King) breaks into her bedroom, and it’s lit so that you see her action on the bed and you see the bottle of pills. Your eye goes to the important elements, because it’s lit that way. And that was our job as colorists; to try and unify the art, to try to make the story flow, but more than anything to tell the story. To focus the attention on what was important, because if color is thrown around indiscriminately, your eye is being distracted all over the place.

New Teen Titans (1984) #60, cover drawn by George Perez and colored by Anthony Tollin.

Stroud: Thereby missing what’s vital.

Tollin: One of the problems I see with modern comics is you now have all this tonality and all this quality of reproduction that you didn’t have before. You have better papers and better reproduction, but just because you can do tons of detailing and shading doesn’t mean you should on everything. I sometimes point out on Alex Toth or Russ Manning’s art on Magnus, Robot-Fighter, and Manning was a master of having a character with a detailed costume against a bare background, or a very bare, open costume against a detailed background. If you render everything with the same amount of detail, and you don’t simplify some of it, you just get a muddy mess to look at.

Stroud: Absolutely.

Tollin: You see a lot of comics from the last 10 years where I’ve actually heard people complain that it’s tiring to read a comic book, because there’s just so much unimportant detail that just kind of clutters up your brain when you absorb it.

Stroud: Right. Too busy.

Tollin: Now some of the coloring I’m proud of, like on “The Shadow Strikes” with Eduardo Baretto. That was a Baxter book and I later incorporated some of the same techniques into other Baxter books, but one of the problems with Baxter paper, especially with the offset printing, is that because it wasn’t as porous and as absorbent as the newsprint, the ink tended to lay on top of the paper instead of being absorbed into it.

There was a huge problem with Baxter books having a Day-Glo effect. The color would just be so bright. On “The Shadow Strikes,” I traded in the solid values. On the Baxter books…for years we only had 25, 50 and 100 percent, but on the Baxter’s we also had 70 percent. But I traded in the solid yellow, the 100 percent yellow, the 100 percent red and the 100 percent blue for a 10 percent and a 20 percent Key-tone, a gray tone. “Key” means actually not black, it is a black plate, but it means key, the key plate. The plate the art is on.

Stroud: Okay.

Brave and the Bold (1955) #200, cover drawn by Jim Aparo and colored by Anthony Tollin.

Tollin: So, I traded it in for gray tones. The black plate. And then I had nothing heavier than a 70 or 75 percent tone. It actually came out at something like an 80 percent tone or so, but it didn’t have that Day-Glo effect. I was trying to go for a muted Rotogravure effect, like a 1930’s Rotogravure printing section. A Rotogravure magazine. And I think it really worked on The Shadow, because I think you had to have more of a muted color scheme on The Shadow, and that’s the kind of coloring I would never have been able to do without my training by Jack Adler. Jack had trained me and I understood how the dot patterns worked and such. I’ll give you another example of Jack’s expertise and he fought this and he lost the battle. Let me ask you a question. What causes the level of darkness on a color on a printed page? Let’s say you have a purple or a navy or a turquoise green or an olive green or something. What causes the level of darkness?

Stroud: I can’t answer you, Anthony. I don’t know.

Tollin: Most people would say the dot patterns and how large the dots are. That’s kind of the inverse answer. What actually does it is how much of the white of the paper shows through. That lightens it. Now here is the example, and this was explained to me by Jack: In the late 60’s Chemical Coloring in Bridgeport, who did all the DC separations at that time, although Murphy Anderson and some other people took it over later, got new cameras and Jack fought very strongly against it, but they started doing all their separation work on these new cameras, and that’s at the same time the original art size went down from 14x22 to 10x15.

Up until that point, the red plate and the blue plate had been printed with the dot patterns diagonal to each other. Let me explain. Spread your fingers and put your two hands with the fingers overlying each other, perpendicular to each other; one horizontal and one vertical, and no matter how you move your fingers around, you have about the same amount of background showing through, but once the cameras were on the same angle…put your fingers vertically, and the fingers could line up right together with all the background and imagine all that white showing, or they could line up so that almost all the background is obscured when the fingers going between each other.

Legion of Super-Heroes (1980) #333, cover drawn by Steve Lightle and colored by Anthony Tollin.

Stroud: Right. Got it.

Tollin: That was what were fighting in the 70’s and 80’s comics as colorists, because it was luck of the draw on every page and every panel. If you had a 50 percent blue and a 50 percent red, whether the dots would print on top of each other, or slightly off each other, or you might get a 50 percent blue and a 50 percent red overlaid completely off each other. Where they alternated it would almost obscure the background and you’d end up with a very dark value. That was one of the things we were fighting. Not only terrible paper.

And Jack and those of us he explained it to were just about the only people in the business who understood it. But it was Jack’s background in photography and engraving…I mean that was the great thing about working for DC, because you had Sol Harrison who did color separations on Action Comics #1 and put the staples in Famous Funnies #1, or Funnies on Parade, the first comic book ever and did the interior coloring, and Jack Adler who had done Prince Valiant. By the way, just as a little bit of a sideline on Sol Harrison, who I consider myself very lucky to have worked for. Jack always called him “The Buddha,” because Sol never got excited.

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

Tollin: Here was a man who had been a comic book inker and a comic book letterer, and an engraver, and a color separator and who also had a Master’s in Business Administration, was President of DC comics most of the time I was on staff. I started when Carmine [Infantino] was President. In the case of Sol, if we had a crisis…if we had a major emergency in production, I remember Sol coming in and he would say, “What’s the problem and how do we fix it?” Then Sol would take off his suit jacket, roll up the sleeves on his dress shirt and say, “What can I do to pitch in and fix it?” This was the President of the company, who was still an artist at heart; still a craftsman and instead of yelling for someone else to fix it, would pitch in to help.

Stroud: True leadership.

Green Lantern (1990) #1, cover drawn by Pat Broderick & Mark Nelson and colored by Anthony Tollin.

Tollin: Yeah. And he knew how to letter and he knew how to ink, and he knew how to color. The last things he colored for years…he was doing the ads and the tabloid covers for the big tabloid size books until…he was as impressed with Adrienne’s coloring as Jack and Adrienne started coloring the tabloid covers under his supervision. Jack wanted all the colorists to bring their own artistic sense into it. He wanted us to work within the structure of telling a story. But he didn’t want Anthony Tollin’s coloring and Tatjana Wood’s coloring and Adrienne Roy’s coloring to look like Jack Adler’s. He wanted to be able to have creative, talented colorists who each had their own style and you could tell by looking at it whose coloring it was by the coloring effects and that we weren’t all carbon copies.

Adrienne, who was my wife at that time and was assisting me when we had a colorist skip town to escape creditors. We were in a deadline bind and Jack asked me if we could try out Adrienne. He tried her out first and it was on a 34-page Batman and Sergeant Rock book that Ric Estrada had drawn. Then she did a Brave and the Bold Annual and then she did something else and then a Doorway to Nightmares story. Generally, mystery was the last thing Jack would give to a colorist. He wanted his most experienced people on a mystery book. Tatjana Wood, for example. By the time Adrienne brought that in, Jack called me into his office and closed the door and said, “Adrienne’s going to be the best colorist at DC. Maybe in the business. She’s going to be better than anyone else, including you.” I was the cover colorist, though, because I understood the separation technology better, and I learned a lot from Adrienne, too. Adrienne hopefully learned a lot of craftsmanship from me and I learned a lot about art from her. Adrienne was just suddenly in within a month or two of her starting coloring. Julie Schwartz and all the writers and artists…as color coordinator, my biggest problem was telling everyone, “You can’t have Adrienne on every book.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Tollin: Which, by the way, Paul Levitz did as an editor. “No, you can’t have Adrienne coloring George Perez on both Teen Titans and Justice League.” As a colorist, you got paid the same for each page whether it was George Perez or Ric Estrada, and you really didn’t want to do two team books illustrated by Perez.

Justice League of America (1960) #194, cover drawn by George Perez and colored by Anthony Tollin.

Stroud: Oh, no. That would be brutal.

Tollin: I got killed on Crisis on Infinite Earths. I colored 8 issues of it, and that paid the same per page as any other book. George Perez was getting royalties. Luckily, I remembered costumes pretty well and I had a huge comic collection including a complete Julie Schwartz super hero collection in my attic, but I didn’t get color notes on the characters. Most of the work Adrienne and I did as a team, especially after I left staff as colorist, generally almost any book she had the byline on, I would do at least a third of the coloring. And anything I did, with my byline, she would do at least a third. Not covers generally, but I would take the last half of the book and she would take the first and then we’d trade off. So that way, we wouldn’t get tired.

You’d get kind of worn out with the ashtrays and the wastebaskets and other little things that needed to be colored. You could switch pages and it would be fresh for the other person and then that person wouldn’t be burned out on that half of the story. I did about five covers a week and together we did probably 100 pages. Once again that’s a real example where Carl Gafford’s coloring didn’t look like Tatjana Wood’s, didn’t look like mine, didn’t look like Bob LeRosa’s, didn’t look like Adrienne Roy’s.

Stroud: It sounds like Jack was a natural teacher.

Tollin: And he had the attitude, and I really liked this, and Dick Giordano was great this way, too; where, say, I’d bring a Batman cover that I’d colored into him, or a cover that Dick had drawn, and Dick would look at it and say, “Hey, this is totally different than how I expected this to look colored. I was thinking of something totally different, but what you did is just as good as what I was thinking of and maybe better. It’s just not what I was expecting.” And Dick Giordano had that talent to be able to evaluate something for how well done it was, not whether it was what he would have done himself, and that’s a great talent.

Stroud: That’s outstanding.

Infinity Inc. (1984) #1, cover drawn by Mike Machlan & Jerry Ordway and colored by Anthony Tollin.

Tollin: That’s one of the reasons Dick was so popular with creative people is that he didn’t try to make you into something else. He respected you as an artist, or as a craftsman or as a writer.

Stroud: He didn’t try to make clones.

Tollin: I am so glad I was at DC at that time and also back then production was valued and we had actual windows in the production department. We could see the sky. It was open and we had desks behind each other. There was my desk and Joe Letterese was behind me, Morris Waldinger behind him until Morris departed, and Todd Klein. On the other side of the room you had Adrienne and John Workman and Steve Mitchell and Bob LeRose and now it’s cubicles with dividers between everyone. Back at the time we were working, but we were talking to each other while we worked. It was open air and you had the sky and the New York skyline outside your windows. Production was valued enough to give you windows in the production department.

The wonderful thing about working for Jack is that in the five and a half years that I was his assistant, he probably told me to do something five times. He trusted me to know what needed to be done. Every day was different, too. The afternoons would be largely spent going over printer’s proofs and quality control issues, but in the mornings, I’d look around and see what needed to go out that day and if there was a backup in art directions I’d grab a book and do some art directions. If there was a backup in the darkroom, I’d go into the extra darkroom and shoot some stats so that those would get done. If an ad, say a Twinkie ad needed to be colored or an ad for a new book, I’d color it. So, it was just a matter of looking around and seeing what needed to go out that day and doing it.

Stroud: It’s quite obvious he trained you very well and apparently, he knew how to do empowerment before it became a buzz word.

Tollin: Jack assembled a really top-notch team and then trusted us to do good work. He didn’t babysit us.

Star Trek (1984) #1, cover drawn by George Perez and colored by Anthony Tollin.

Stroud: A good leader recognizes talent and gets out of the way.

Tollin: At DC we were proud of the production, we were proud…in Alter Ego I told the story after the Jack Adler thing in a letter I wrote, where as great as Jack thought the Ross Andru and Dick Giordano art was on the Superman/Spider-Man tabloid, that there were these panoramic views, and he felt it would be plused by having a 1/16” halo around some of the major figures. It would just give a perspective and set it off from the background. And Jack and I went in with brushes and painted white opaque, just very finely around some of the figures just to break them and if you look, you will see it works. This was Jack, who had this lifetime in the business.

That’s why I started at Warren and I worked briefly at Marvel, but I wasn’t happy at Marvel. At that time there were all these young people at Marvel and there was nobody I felt who could really teach me. You also had a lot more turf wars at Marvel, I think, because you had a whole lot of ambitious young people at the same time. Whereas at DC, there were people like Jack and Sol and Julie Schwartz, who could really teach.

Stroud: The grown-ups were still in charge.

Tollin: Yeah. When you’re 21 or 22 and had just gotten into the business, I wanted to learn from the best. I count myself so lucky to have worked at DC when I did as opposed to now. I didn’t say goodbye to comics. Comics said goodbye to me. Everything was fine when I was 25 and the editor was 60, but when I was 40 and the editor was 25, there was a lot of cronyism with their friends and such.

Stroud: A different ballgame altogether.

Detective Comics (1937) #571, Cover drawn by Alan Davis and colored by Anthony Tollin.

Tollin: With the older editors, if you did good work and were a solid professional and you turned in the work and did quality work, there was sort of an unwritten contract at DC that you had a job for life. You may not be paid that well, but you were there pretty much as long as you wanted to be. It was an interesting time, too, because after years of no new talent in the business, other than the occasional Nelson Bridwell coming in the mid-60’s and such as that, but suddenly you had the period in the early 70’s where suddenly you had Bernie Wrightson and Mike Kaluta and Denny O’Neil who’d come in from newspapering and Charlton and the people inspired by Neal Adams.

Neal had just come to DC in the late 60’s after years in newspaper strips and advertising. Some people compared it to the prime in literary circles. There was, in the days before FedEx, this talent pool in New York of young, creative people who were socializing together and inspiring each other. You’d had that in the early 40’s when Jerry Robinson was starting in the business. You had the Robinson’s and the Meskin’s and the Joe Shuster’s and the Jack Kirby’s. It was a young group and suddenly you’d gone a couple of decades without new talent. You got a little bit of new talent during the EC era, but suddenly it was 30 or 35 years after Action #1 and there really hadn’t been a lot of new people in the business since the 40’s. So suddenly all these new people had gravitated to New York and generally we were young and living in Manhattan or close by and we would socialize at parties and the Wrightson/Kaluta/Jeff Jones/Barry Smith studio or Neal Adams’ Continuity Studio. It was a great time to be in the business.

Stroud: Yeah, just a groundswell of change there with all the new blood.

Tollin: We had the Woodchuck’s at DC and we were all being groomed to take over, and Jack was one of those who was really recruiting the best people he could and strongly promoting people like Wrightston and Chaykin and Walt Simonson. These are the people he saw as the future of the business. Regrettably, a number of people who had been so generous with the young people, like Jack, ended up being not treated terribly well by the next generation of comics people.

Stroud: That’s a tragedy.

July 11, 2018

An Interview With Dick Ayers & Irwin Hasen - More Teachers From the Joe Kubert School

July 11, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Richard Bache "Dick" Ayers (born April 28, 1924) was an American comic book artist and cartoonist best known for his work as one of Jack Kirby's inkers during the late-1950's and 1960's period known as the Silver Age of Comics, including on some of the earliest issues of Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four. He is the signature penciler of Marvel's World War II comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, drawing it for a 10-year run, and he co-created Magazine Enterprises' 1950's Western-horror character the Ghost Rider, a version of which he would draw for Marvel in the 1960's.
Dick was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2007.
Mr. Ayers passed away on May 4, 2014 at 90 years of age.

THE JOE KUBERT SCHOOL IN DOVER, NEW JERSEY.

Dick Ayers was one of the stalwarts of the medium, being one of the founders of Marvel's famed bullpen, but I didn't realize he'd taught at Joe's school, so it gave me a wonderful excuse to give him a call. He was happy to comply, but his remarks were brief, so I included Irwin Hasen's thoughts as well.

These interviews originally took place over the phone on March 3rd & 4th, 2009.

Avengers (1963) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby, inked by Dick Ayers.

Bryan Stroud: What initially led you to the Kubert School, Mr. Ayers?

Dick Ayers: My friend Henry Boltinoff, the cartoonist, he was teaching there and it was coming toward the end of summer, so he said Joe Kubert was looking for somebody. “Why don’t you ask him?” So, I asked him, and he said, “Okay, come on out to indoctrination day, and we’ll introduce you to the students.” So, I went out and we met the students and as we left we met some of the other teachers and I said to Joe, “Gee, you never introduced anyone as teaching anatomy.” He said, “Well, you’re doing that.” So, I ended up teaching anatomy.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) You didn’t even know what you were interviewing for, huh?

DA: No. It was two classes I did and it was the same group because it was a two-year course, and I was pretty proud of the fact that the students asked Joe to have me carry right on with the second year, so I had the whole two years. When it came to the end of the second year, and I had them in front of me for about the last time, I said, “Now you guys are all my competitors.” I quit teaching.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) So, it was just the two years that you spent teaching?

DA: Just about that, yes. ’76 and ’77 I believe. I liked the class very much. I liked teaching them. In fact, there was Jan Duursema, Tom Mandrake, the fella that does Archie now.

Stroud: How did you come up with your curriculum?

DA: Usually by being a day ahead of them. (Chuckle.) If it was something I didn’t know on the day I was there I’d say, “Well talk about that tomorrow.” I taught on Fridays, come to think of it. Just Fridays.

Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos Annual (1965) #3, cover by Dick Ayers.

Stroud: Not a whole lot of commuting to do, then. Now you did most of your work at Marvel, so had you met Joe before?

DA: No. Only one time or another when I was looking for work. I never did anything for DC until later on when I did know Joe from the school and somehow, I just made my way over to DC and got on Jonah Hex and Kamandi.

Stroud: Were you inking after Jack Kirby again on Kamandi?

DA: No. When I got over there I was penciling layouts and somebody else would do the inking.

Stroud: Okay. My knowledge is geared more toward DC’s Silver Age, but I read recently that you were considered one of the Big Four at Marvel: Kirby, Ditko, Ayers and Heck.

DA: Yeah. We were at the beginning. Kirby came along a little bit later. In that period, it was mostly Paul Reiman and [Don] Heck and Ditko and me and then along came Jack just about the time when Stan started the monsters. And he was a natural for that, boy. That was a good series.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. He made a real reputation with that even though the later hero stuff eclipsed it. That time period can’t be underestimated.

DA: No. I loved it. The pencils I got done were delivered by mail. Special delivery. And he always came at 7:30 in the morning and when I opened it up that was when I first saw the stories, for the first time. The monster stories. And I’d be really elated to see these gigantic monsters, and at the time we were drawing them we were doing them on 12 x 18 pages.

Stroud: Oh, yeah, the twice-ups.

Where Monsters Dwell (1970) #5, cover penciled by Jack Kirby, inked by Dick Ayers.

DA: Twice-ups, yeah. It was great. Get a No. 6 brush and really lay on it.

Stroud: Never to be seen again. I’m sure you’ve seen how much is done on the computer now.

DA: It’s horrible. And the guys using the color overdo it. They haven’t been taught when to stop. It’s all just a mish mash and runs in together. They don’t see the pictures by themselves and progress with the story, if you follow me.

Stroud: Yeah. Stan Goldberg said something similar. He thought the modern coloring techniques weren’t stacking up at all.

DA: I’ll get one of the westerns sometimes and they’ll have some new title of western and they’re well drawn, but the color is horrible. You don’t have the distinction. With Stan it stayed simple: Reds, yellows and blues. I loved Warren Beatty for that, because when he did Dick Tracy the movie, he stuck to those colors. He had Dick Tracy wearing a yellow hat and a yellow coat.

Stroud: Any other significant memories?

DA: I remember Henry Boltinoff telling me that Joe will never ask you to work for him, you’ve got to ask to work for Joe.

I’d enjoyed a nice interview with Irwin Hasen awhile back, but we didn’t talk much about his time at the Kubert School. Irwin was a long-timer, only retiring in the recent past after a 30+ year run.

Stroud: How did you happen to start at the school, Mr. Hasen?

Irwin Hasen: Well, I’ve known Joe Kubert since we were both about 19 years old. That goes back about 70 years ago. So that’s a long time to know somebody. And we became friends and then he went on his way and I went on my way doing my strip and everything and one day he said, “I’m opening up a school.” This is 30 years ago. He said, “Would you like to come and teach?” I said, “Yeah. Once a week would be fine.” That’s the way it worked out.

Green Lantern (1941) #10, cover by Irwin Hasen.

Stroud: Terrific. I’ve seen that famous photo of you and Joe on the beach in California back in the day.

IH: That’s right.

Stroud: When I talked to Joe he thought most people who came to teach at the school did it mostly out of a sense of giving something back.

IH: Well, it wasn’t for the money, that’s for sure.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

IH: All I wanted to do was get the hell out of the house in the morning once a week.

Stroud: I can’t blame you a bit. I’m sure being a freelancer like that you’d start climbing the walls.

IH: Yeah, that’s right. So, this is a good chance for me to have a nice day; a full day and also, I was interested in those kids.

Stroud: Good for you. What was your specialty?

IH: My specialty was how to draw. Not how to draw a comic strip, but just how to draw for comic books mostly.

Stroud: So sequential art then.

IH: Yeah.

All-Star Comics (1940) #33, cover by Irwin Hasen.

Stroud: Were there any students that really stand out in your mind?

IH: Oh yes, quite a few, but the names are not coming to mind right now. Steve Bissette was one of them, who is now a top guy in the business. There were some people who left that school in very good shape.

Stroud: Oh, yes. Joe said one of his goals was to create an environment that would make them viable candidates to go into the industry.

IH: That’s right.

Stroud: Apparently, it’s been very successful.

IH: Very much so.

Stroud: Did you find it rewarding to be a teacher?

IH: Oh, yes. That’s why I did it. I wouldn’t have done it if I got bored. There have been a few top guys in the business who come there to teach and inside of two months they leave. It’s the nature of the beast. An instructor or teacher really has to put his heart into it.

Stroud: I’m sure it’s a labor of love.

IH: Absolutely.

Stroud: You were at it for over 30 years?

IH: 30 years. I can’t believe it. While I was doing my strip, Dondi, I was teaching once a week. Why, I don’t know.

A Dondi strip from 1986, by Irwin Hasen.

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

IH: I have no idea what drove me to do this.

Stroud: Several factors, I’m sure, not the least of which enjoying what you were doing.

Wonder Woman (1942) #50, cover by Irwin Hasen.

IH: Yes, I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t.

Stroud: How did you come up with your curriculum?

IH: I just went home one day before I started and worked out a curriculum that I thought would be advantageous to the students that would cover what they’d encounter when they got out of school.

Stroud: Kind of a practical guide then.

IH: Absolutely.

Stroud: Since you were there so long you must have run across some other good teachers.

IH: Oh, yes. Hy Eisman, who did Popeye and the Katzenjammer Kids. He does a syndicated strip and he was the first instructor, by the way, before me. The Hildebrandt Brothers did wonderful poster work. They were illustrators and they came for a couple of years. There was a wide spread of different artists who felt they wanted to teach. Very few of them lasted as long as Hy and myself. Some I never saw because we all taught on different days.

Stroud: Did either Adam or Andy [Kubert] come back to teach?

IH: I believe so, but of course they’re busy working for DC.

Stroud: They’re definitely in demand.

IH: Oh, yes. Very talented. I taught them everything they knew.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

July 04, 2018

An Interview With Ric Estrada - Illustrator, Cartoonist, and Teacher at the Joe Kubert School

July 04, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Ric Estrada (born February 26, 1928) was a Cuban American comics artist who worked for several publishing companies including DC Comics. He also worked in comic strips, political cartoons, advertising, storyboarding, and commercial illustration.

In the 1950's, Estrada penciled and inked "Bunker", the first comic-book story to feature an African-American hero, and "Rough Riders". Both stories were for the EC Comics series Two-Fisted Tales. He drew for Dell Comics, Hillman Periodicals, St. John Publications, and Ziff-Davis. In the late fifties he drew almost half the satirical articles of the first two issues of the Mad Magazine imitator Frantic. After that he moved to Germany, where he stayed for three years. He did political cartoons for the Spandauer Volksblatt in the morning and did storyboards for the advertising company Deutschen Documentar in the afternoons.

An interior page from All-Star Comics (1940) #58, the first appearance of Power Girl. Pencils by Ric Estrada, inks by Wally Wood. — An interior page from **All-Star Comics (1940) #58**, the first appearance of **Power Girl**. Pencils by **Ric Estrada**, inks by **Wally Wood**.

In 1967 and 1968, he drew stories for Warren Publishing's black-and-white horror comics magazine Eerie. Much of Estrada's comic book career after returning from Germany was spent working for DC Comics. Though superheroes were not his preference, Estrada worked on Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, and Richard Dragon, and he co-created Lady Shiva and Power Girl. Estrada drew noir comics, romance comics, war comics and a few horror stories for DC. In 1976, Estrada's work was in such high demand from DC that he illustrated the premiere issues of six separate titles that year: All-Star Comics, Blitzkrieg, Freedom Fighters, Isis, Karate Kid, and Super Friends.

Estrada drew the Flash Gordon syndicated newspaper comic strip in sporadic stints from the 1950's to the 1970's. In the 1980's, he collaborated on the animated television series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Galtar, The New Adventures of Jonny Quest, and Bionic Six.

Mr. Estrada passed away on May 1, 2009 after a lengthy battle with prostate cancer.

I got a glimmer of an idea back in early 2009 and my interview with Ric Estrada kicked things off. What if someone were to interview some of the instructors from the Joe Kubert School? I'd been looking for a good excuse to interview Ric and this seemed like a perfect opening. He was so pleasant and kind that I'll always remember our conversation and I was recently asked to provide contact information for his estate so that a couple of his stories could be reprinted in a new book about comics and the Holocaust that recently came out titled, "We Spoke Out." Ric was a special guy and any time I bring his name up to other creators, he is universally admired.

Dick Ayers mentioned to me that he used to car pool to the school with Ric Estrada. Even though Ric had been enduring chemotherapy treatments for awhile, he very graciously gave me a good chunk of his time to talk about his experiences teaching at the school for a two-year period, which I believe was the first two years it operated.

This interview originally took place over the phone on March 6, 2009.

Ric Estrada: My memories of the two years I taught at the Kubert School alongside men like Dick Ayers and Dick Giordano and there were others, but those are the two that come to mind right away. As you may or may not know Joe Kubert was at the time an editor at DC comics. He was the editor of the Sgt. Rock series and I had worked with him on some of the backup stories in the Sgt. Rock books. I always liked to do backup stories. They were usually only six pages long, so I got paid for them much faster than when I did a 20-page story. (Mutual laughter.) I’d do six pages in 3 days and on day number 4 I’d go back to the office and I get paid.

Wonder Woman (1942) #207, cover by Ric Estrada.

Stroud: Not bad.

RE: Well, I had a family to raise and it was a growing family that ended up being 9 children. Anyway, my main purpose in life was to feed my family and art was a wonderful, God-given talent, but at the same time it was a tool rather than an end in itself. So I was very pleased and honored when Joe Kubert opened his school in Dover, New Jersey; the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning. He asked a few of the people he worked with, among them Dick Ayers and Dick Giordano and myself and he asked us to be the first instructors during the first couple of years. That was a tremendous learning experience for me in addition to the honor to work with a group of very, very talented young men and women. Most of the students were ages, oh; I would say 16 to 30. The oldest was about 30. The youngest was about 13 years old, a little girl who was very sweet and very introspective and believe it or not after graduation she was the first one to get a well-paying job doing cartoons for a newspaper.

Anyway, it was very nice to commute to Dover, New Jersey. I lived in New York City at the time, and it was a 45-minute ride - and the school was in a beautiful old building that had been some rich person’s mansion at one time and now he had all these wonderful students. Some of them were actually lodging in a nearby servant’s quarters down in the other end of the gardens, and it was a beautiful place. The students were fantastic, and out of those students you had guys like Rick Veitch. Some very, very talented cartoonists came out of there, and some of them, because of their youth…I was already a man in my 40’s, and here I was dealing with teenagers and people in their early 20’s and some of them were a little rebellious and strangely enough some of the most talented ones were the most rebellious. (Chuckle.) I would give them an assignment and they would sort of twist it around to show me that they knew better. That was a complete challenge. In fact, I heard from Rick Veitch recently. You may or may not know that Joe Kubert lost his wife recently.

Stroud: I sure did and was sad to hear of it.

Falling in Love (1955) #104, cover by Ric Estrada.

RE: Muriel was the heart of that school. She was the administrator. She was the soul of the place. She was so spirited and so talented and so alert. She was not an artist, but she didn’t have to be. She knew everything else. And we all worked with her. She took care of the materials when people needed drawing paper or pencils or pens or ink. She was there administering those sales. The school was a delight to work for, and I worked two days a week; Tuesdays and Thursdays all day long. My course was art and storytelling composition and also the business of art. So, on the one hand I taught the kids the technique of telling a story in picture continuity and how to compose the pictures so that they would be sort of cinematic; so they wouldn’t be boring. “Move the camera, move the camera, move the camera.” That was the motto. Down shot, up shot, middle shot, medium long shot, long shot, up, down.

And the other thing that I taught was, as I said, the business of art, which was how to prepare a portfolio and show it to as many people as possible, and get used to being rejected by some - but keep trying until somebody would say, “Hey, this is what we want.” Those were my two subjects; storytelling and composition. Also, I taught color with markers. And the students were fantastic. Many times, Dick Ayers, who lived not too far from me when I was in a town about 45 minutes north of New York City and he lived in a nearby town and sometimes we rode together to the school and we had long conversations about art and especially cartoons. What do you think cartoonists talk about? Cartooning.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Imagine that!

RE: (Chuckle.) So, to a cartoonist, another cartoonist is great company because they talk about what you want to hear about, and we all have our likes and our dislikes and our gripes and our glories. The gripes in cartooning are really the deadlines and an occasional grumpy editor who will kind of growl at our work, but generally doing comic books was a delight in the creative sense. Dick Ayers is a fantastic storyteller and we had the privilege of working during the Silver Age, which was one step beyond the Golden Age. In the Golden Age, the cartoonists had a slightly more primitive style. When you look at the Superman of the Golden Age, he’s a little more primitive. When you look at the Superman of the Silver Age, he’s a little more detailed. More muscles, more shadows, more anatomical detail. In the Silver Age we were trying to refine what had been done before.

Welcome Back, Kotter (1976) #6, cover by Ric Estrada.

After that came the Bronze Age and whatever age came after that. The Silver Age was the 60’s and early 70’s. I did the bulk of my work for DC Comics in the late 60’s and through the 1970’s. The last story I did for them was in 1982. I had moved to California and I did a series called Amethyst, Princess of Gem World. Now Dick Ayers was able to work for both DC and Marvel. I never worked for Marvel. It was either out of loyalty to DC or squeamishness about maybe walking out of there and never finding another job. (Chuckle.) I stuck it out with DC for all those years.

You’re familiar with Neal Adams. Neal Adams is a fantastic cartoonist. We often met each other in the office and I complained sometimes about the pay in those days, which was so skimpy. You’d get $50.00 a page and some people were getting $30.00 a page, which is really very little, because it takes you a day or two to draw one page, and Neal gave me a wonderful secret. He said, “You know the secret of getting your page rate hiked? You work for DC for awhile and then you walk away and you go to Marvel and you say, ‘I’d like to work for you guys, but I’d like to get better pay than at DC,’ and they’ll give you better pay. After a few months you walk out of Marvel and come back to DC and you say, ‘They were paying much more than what you’re paying.’ So little by little you hike up your page rate.”

Stroud: Ah.

RE: I never had the gumption to really go for it. As I said, my main thing was to get my weekly paycheck for the six pages and go home and buy the groceries for the kids.

Stroud: No one could ever fault your priorities.

RE: Well, that was my priority and it has been over the years. Over the years I discovered little by little that my work was very well known, because I worked like crazy. I often did two pages a day, so my six pages I did in three days and one day Joe Orlando, who was one of the editors at DC, and a very good cartoonist in his own right, Joe Orlando said, “Look at this fan magazine from England. Listen to what they’re saying about you.” And the fan magazine said, “American comic books have an epidemic disease called “Estradaitis,” because everything that comes out of there is signed by him.” So rather than a cartoonist, I became an epidemic. (Mutual laughter) I’ve never been able to live it down. He showed that to me way back in 1976 or 1977 and here it is 30-odd years later and I’m still thinking about it. (Chuckle.)

Girls' Love Stories (1949) #140, cover by Ric Estrada.

Anyway, the Kubert School was a delight, and any time you talk to someone who was taught, on any level, in any subject, you always find out that the instructor always learns more than the pupil, at least at the beginning. For the first time in my life I had to look at what I had learned over the years. I was in my late 40’s and I had been working like a fiend for many, many years. I got my first cartooning job when I was 21 years old, and so I’d been working for over 20 years already, but I had never really taken inventory of the things that I had learned along the way. Teaching at the Kubert School forced me to look at what I knew and then I began to fill a notebook with the lessons I was going to teach.

The first couple of weeks I just talked and talked and talked and tried to teach them everything I knew, and then I realized that it wouldn’t work. The kids were just confused. So, then I began to pace myself and to bring out some of the things I knew and I’m sure that Dick Ayers and Dick Giordano and some of the others probably felt the same way. I don’t know if you know the story of the preacher who came to a new parish and there was one parishioner sitting in the first row and nobody else showed up, and he gave this tremendous sermon and at the end this young preacher came down to the parishioner and he said, “What did you think of my sermon?” The man answered with, “Look, I’m a farmer, and when only one cow shows up, I don’t feed him the whole load.” (Mutual laughter.) The first two weeks I was feeding the kids the whole load and then I said, “I’d better start pacing myself.”

So, as I said, I learned a lot of things about the things I already knew, and I began to broaden myself. “Today I’ll teach them about composition in terms of this or that and then next week I’ll teach them about how to handle close-ups; how to move the angles from down shot to up shot and things like that.” Then, some years later I met some of the students. I went to the San Diego Comic Con, the big comic book convention there. I’ve always been a guest of the San Diego Comic Con, and I ran into some of the students and they said, “You know, Ric, the things you taught us; actually it took us over 5 years to begin to really, really assimilate what you taught us, because you taught us so much and so much of it was way over our heads,” and they also said something else that was very rewarding: “Not only were you teaching us the technique of art, the technique of cartooning; you were teaching us how to have self-confidence.” Which is something most artists don’t have, because you tell your parents, “I want to be an artist,” and the first thing they say is, “Oh, you’ll starve.” “I want to make a career in art.” “Art? You’ll starve.” The word “art” and the word “starving” come together. (Chuckle.)

Wonder Woman (1942) #208, cover by Ric Estrada.

What I was trying to show them, though, is that there are thousands of artists all over the country and all over the world. We see Van Gogh and hear about those who had miserable lives, but we don’t stop to realize that Walt Disney never starved. Walt Disney was an artist, and he invented a funny mouse and the funny mouse became Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney became a millionaire and he hired hundreds, maybe thousands of art students and they all made a good living. Parents never understand that. So, I tried to teach along those lines; to have confidence, no matter what their parents or relatives or even friends would say about, “Art? You’ll starve,” because that’s not true. If you work like a fiend, and you learn your basic principles, you’ll never starve, and the basic principles are how to draw decently and how to prepare a portfolio and to show your work to as many people as possible.

But all those things became very clear in my mind during those years at the Joe Kubert School. Before, I did them unconsciously. Now, I was very conscious of these things, and my own work improved as a result. So those are my reminiscences of the school. It was a wonderful atmosphere. Joe is a terrific guy. Very positive. A fantastic artist. He could take a piece of chalk and just draw on the chalkboard and in five strokes draw Sgt. Rock or a tank or an airplane. It’s just incredible. His mind is unbelievable. Working with him and for him was always a challenge and always a learning experience.

But as I said, in the school you have to gather what you know and put it in a certain order so the kids would understand. What else can I tell you about the school? Once in awhile we had a dinner and we all got together and we were very sociable and we had a lot of fun. There was also another artist that came at the time; the widow of Walt Kelly who did the Pogo comic strip. I forget her first name (Selby Daley), but she came to the school as well and I met her a couple of times, but we were all so busy that we didn’t have much time except for that one dinner every three or four months. We didn’t have much time to socialize. We just taught and taught and taught and taught and it was an amazing experience. For me I would never have had the chance to teach like that.

Richard Dragon Kung-Fu Fighter (1975) #12, cover by Ric Estrada.

Before that I had been a junior art director at the Famous Artist’s School in Westport, Connecticut, but as an art director, you don’t have the one on one experience of working with a group, and I had learned quite a few things at that time during my one year as junior art director putting together a course for talented young people, and I had been able to gather a lot of information, but never like at the Kubert School, where you had 25 students in front of you, throwing questions at you, and you try to please them all and you try to give them something valuable. That’s my memories of the Kubert School.

Stroud: Oh, and wonderful memories they are. It sounds like it was a wonderful fit for you. Did you consider going for a longer tenure there? I’m curious as to why it was only two years if you don’t mind.

RE: I don’t remember exactly. I think part of the reason was that I had other plans. Let’s see. That was the late 1970’s and I had an offer from a friend of mine who’s a very good cartoonist: Leo (not sure how to spell the last name). He’s from Argentina originally. I had met him at DC comics and his English was very shaky. So, I was able to translate for him when he came over and we spoke Spanish between us. He went to Mexico and he telephoned me from Mexico and he said, “There’s a great chance here in Mexico. The Mexican government’s Ministry of Education wants to hire bi-lingual artists who can do comic books on Mexican history. They have accepted the fact that the people here will never read books - but they will read comic books, so they want to give them a solid knowledge of history through comic books.” So I put my portfolio together and I flew to Mexico. They offered me a fantastic contract and at the time, the late 1970’s, something like $90,000.00 a year to do these comic books on Mexican history.

Stroud: That would be hard to turn down.

Young Love (1949) #121, cover by Ric Estrada.

RE: Very hard, and I think that was one of the reasons I moved on from the Kubert School. I took my whole family, all six children we had at the time and we drove for days and days until we got to Mexico. We found a home there, we found a bi-lingual school there for the kids and I began to do the Mexican comic books on Mexican history and as luck would have it, two months after I got there, they altered the exchange rate. I wasn’t being paid in dollars; I was being paid in the equivalent in Mexican Pesos. They devaluated the currency to half its value. So suddenly the $90,000.00 became $45,000.00.

Stroud: Oh, no!

RE: Then two months later they devaluated to half all over again and the $45,000.00 became $22,500.00. So suddenly I was scrambling around trying to find freelance jobs in Mexico and writing to New York to some of my old clients trying to get comic book assignments and advertising assignments from other agencies that I’d worked for and then I met with a Cuban…I’m originally Cuban as you may know; that’s my funny accent. (Chuckle.)

So, I met a Cuban publisher, who had been exiled from Cuba since the Castro regime took over, and this Cuban publisher asked me to develop an idea for him and take it to New York City and try to sell his idea for him - and he pays for the trip. I took my oldest son along. He was about 12 at the time, and went back to good old, wonderful New York. I love New York. As far as I’m concerned, that’s my home town. I spent my childhood and my teens in Havana, but I spent 30 years of my life in New York City, so to me, that’s my town. So, we tried to sell this fellow’s idea to the T.V. networks and to DC comics and to Marvel comics and whoever would take it, and nobody would buy the idea.

So, by now I was totally disconnected from the Joe Kubert School. Then my little son and I went from New York to California and again we went to every studio in California and we were lucky enough that Hanna-Barbera Animation Studios saw my presentation and said, “We don’t like the idea. We don’t want to buy the idea, but who did this presentation? Did you do it?” I said, “Yes.” They said, “We’d like to hire you to do similar presentations for us.” So, I was offered a very good job at Hanna-Barbera. I ran back to Mexico to pick up the rest of my family. It took us about three weeks to get ourselves together. We got back to California and I went back to Hanna-Barbera and met the art director, a very nice man; Iwo Takamoto, a Japanese-American, and he said, “Oh, my gosh, it took you three weeks to get back here and I had to give the job to somebody else.”

Wonder Woman (1942) #209, cover by Ric Estrada.

So, there we were in California, a new place for us, and I scrambled all over town looking for another job. Then I ran into Stan Lee, who was the head of Marvel Productions there. They did animated cartoons based on their comic book characters in New York and he hired me on the spot. He knew my name from comics and we hit it off beautifully and for the next six months I worked for him. Then Iwo Takamoto of Hanna-Barbera called me and he said, “I offered you a job and then I couldn’t give it to you and I’ve been feeling pretty guilty about it and the job opening is ready for you again. Please give me an answer in a day or two and come and work with us.” And that’s what I did. I went to work with them and I spent eleven years working for Hanna-Barbera.

Stroud: Not bad at all!

RE: Not bad at all. In fact, at Hanna-Barbera I discovered the animation film industry is a very flimsy industry. You get hired for production, whether you’re doing a movie, or you’re doing… the studio system was on the way out, and you get hired to do a production or two and after that everybody goes home. So, I was an oddity in that I stayed there for eleven years, when I saw people coming and going every two years. When Ted Turner bought out Hanna-Barbera, as happens in all those mergers, Ted Turner brought his own people, and the people who were there were let go and Ted brought in his own people and that was that. It was lucky for me because I was able to work for Dreamworks and for Warner Brothers and for Universal. I worked for many other studios, but on more of a short-term basis. One season, two seasons.

So, my experience in comic books helped me develop the technique of story-boarding for film. With story-boarding you get a script; somebody hands you a whole bunch of words on paper and you turn those words on paper into sort of a comic strip to show the angles and how the story develops. So those years in comic books were priceless in the animation industry. We stayed in California for 17 years and I was working all the time. So I can’t complain. So then here in Utah I was offered a job I couldn’t resist. Again, the money was very good and we moved to Southern Utah and there I worked for 3-1/2 years for a small studio that treated me very well until they folded and then I kind of semi-retired. I’m still doing work. I’m illustrating children’s books and writing novels, but I’m not running to an office every day.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) That’s not all bad.

RE: Not all bad at all. I put in 17 years in California, but work-wise I put in 20 years worth of work for the Animation Guild and they’ve given me a very nice pension. I’m not rich, but I can live on it, plus Social Security. All our children but one are grown up, on their own and married. We have 11 grandchildren and they live all over the country and we have a little girl with us; a little girl with special needs. She is our youngest and has Downs Syndrome and my wife, my little girl and myself are trying to live happily ever after. (Chuckle.)

Falling in Love (1955) #105, cover by Ric Estrada.

Girls' Love Stories (1949) #141, cover by Ric Estrada.

Heart Throbs (1949) #124, cover by Ric Estrada.

Welcome Back, Kotter (1976) #7, cover by Ric Estrada.

Wonder Woman (1942) #210, cover by Ric Estrada.

Young Love (1949) #122, cover by Ric Estrada.

June 27, 2018

An Interview With Mike Grell - Champion of the Human Heroes

June 27, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Mike Grell (born September 13, 1947) is an American comic book writer and artist, known for his work on books such as Green Lantern/Green Arrow, The Warlord, and Jon Sable: Freelance. Mike entered the comics industry as an assistant to Dale Messick on the Brenda Starr comic strip in 1972 - but in 1973 he moved to New York City and began his long relationship with DC Comics. His first regular assignment at DC was on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, a high-profile assignment for an artist with no prior comic book experience. At DC, Mr. Grell worked on characters such as Aquaman, Batman, and the Phantom Stranger in arcs or single-issue stories. He and Elliot S. Maggin launched the Batman Family title in 1975 and Mike would work with Denny O'Neil on the revival of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series the following year.

During his time in the industry, Mr. Grell has created many enduring characters including The Warlord, Jon Sable, and Joshua Brand - and revitalized older books like the Legion of Super-Heroes and Green Arrow. His mini-series "The Longbow Hunters" is seen by many as the definitive Oliver Queen story.

"Iron" Mike Grell was probably the first artist I came to recognize in the early days of my youthful comic book enthusiast phase (which continues, of course, to this day). I was a big fan of the Legion of Super-Heroes and while I did and do appreciate Curt Swan's work on the title, there was something about Mike's depictions that thrilled me. The realism, perhaps or maybe the updated costumes. In any case, his work made a big impression on me and so it was a particular thrill to get to interview him. As you'll soon see, he's an excellent interviewee, too, with plenty of great stories, humor and memories to share. He's always graciously helped me with BACK ISSUE assignments as well. Mike is just a great guy! Two quick anecdotes: I first met Mike in person in Portland, Oregon at a show and just about fell over when I realized he was boarding the same shuttle that we were on the way to the center. Later he made an appearance at the Denver Con and when I walked up to his booth to say hello he said, "Great! I need to find my assistant. Man the booth and don't discount anything!" With that he walked away. So, I manned the booth and thankfully only a couple of people wandered up while he was gone. A young lady in a Princess Leia outfit asked how much I wanted for a sketch. "You don't really want one from me." And now, the great Mike Grell!

This interview originally took place over the phone on March 4, 2009.

Superboy (1949) #202, containing Mike's first published DC work.

Bryan Stroud: I understand your mother was an artist and helped spark your interest that direction.

Mike Grell: Yeah, as a matter of fact my Mom was a great artist. Not professional by any means, but she always drew when we were kids. I was impressed by that and growing up in a house without television - in fact there was no television in my whole area at that time (chuckle) so I wasn’t particularly deprived) - I never saw a television set until I was 8 and we didn’t get one until I was 11, so I grew up with radio, and for our entertainment we had comic books and radio and movies and whatever you could make yourself and a lot of that activity was devoted to drawing. My brothers and I all loved to draw. Bob and Dick were actually better artists than me, they just never pursued it. But Mom had a real gift that she got from her Dad for being able to draw whatever she saw and she turned out some amazing pieces of art. I listened to her for years commenting that someday she wanted to take a painting class to learn how to paint in oils. I eventually enrolled myself in a painting class to learn color, to learn how to paint and after the first week I kidnapped her and dragged her into the class and somewhere along the lines of a year later she had a show.

Batman: Masque (1997) GN, written & illustrated by Mike Grell.

Stroud: Magnificent!

MG: Yeah. I never had a one person show.

Stroud: Good for you and good for her for passing on that legacy.

MG: We would spend hours and hours; my brothers and I would buy and trade comic books with other kids and we’d draw pictures from those, but one of the fun things that I think my brother Dick started was if we saw a movie the night before he’d sit down and draw scenes from the movie and make a comic out of it. He was four years older than me so I was basically copying what I saw him do and we used to do that all the time. When the new car models came out we’d get the brochures and we’d trace the pictures and practice drawing and everything else, so we were always sitting there with a pencil in our hand.

Stroud: What sort of comics did you read as a kid?

MG: Just about everything. On a good week we’d get a 25-cent allowance, which was pretty darn spendy back then. I was born in 1947, so we’re talking the early 1950’s here - where a quarter was actually worth something back then. If some weeks things were tight, then we’d maybe get a dime, but geez, for a dime we could each get a comic book. I was always picking up something that had to do with cowboys or something like that. My brother Dick was really interested in Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge kind of stuff and Bob, the oldest, went straight for the axe-in-the-head EC comics. We’d read them all. We always bought different kinds of comics.

When I bought superhero stuff that was fine, but none of us could buy the same comic book. That was the rule, so we could trade them. Then you could read the other two and to get into EC comics for a 7-year old kid…(laughter). That left an impression! But then we’d finish our comics and there were other kids in town who had the same deal going. They’d get a comic book a week and we’d trade with them. Lord only knows what we may have traded off over the years. Eventually I settled on the ones I really liked, such as the Tarzan comics - which I really liked a lot - and in particular Russ Manning’s backup stories, “The Brothers of the Spear,” and that really made an impression on me. Manning was the first artist that I learned to recognize his work and learned to look for it. Of course, when he took over the front of the book, that was really impressive. Then I guess probably Doug Wildey after him. I just came across a box of my old comic books awhile back and in there is all those Russ Manning and Doug Wildey Tarzan comics.

Karate Kid (1976) #1, cover by Mike Grell.

Stroud: And then years later you got to do the syndicate version of Tarzan, did you not?

MG: Yes, I did. That was a real thrill for me. Probably the most fun I’ve ever had doing comics. I got so excited that the night I was finishing my first Sunday page I started to hyperventilate and then I started to laugh and my wife was in the other room and thought I was having some kind of breakdown or something. (Chuckle.) It was just hysterically funny. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t work any more. I got to meet Russ and Doug at the San Diego Comic Con the year that I was doing Tarzan and it was a thrill for me, but talk about pressure. The very next day I was doing a convention sketch for a guy of Tarzan and the Golden Lion and Russ Manning wanders over and he hovers over my shoulder and then he yells, “Hey, Wildey, come over here! Look at this! This is how you draw a lion! Your lions look like hairy dogs!”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

MG: So, I’ve got one over each shoulder, and they’re hovering like vultures and they’re commenting on every damn line I draw and I broke out into a flop sweat and a big old bead of sweat rolled down my nose and dripped on the paper and they laughed their asses off and went away! And being a professional little brother, I got ‘em in trouble for that about five years later. We were at a convention in Las Vegas and Dodie Manning, Russ’s wife, was there and I told her that story, (laughter) and she turned around and said, “What are you doing being mean to this boy?” They said, “Later on we’re going to take you out in the parking lot and kick the crap out of you.”

Stroud: Terrific story! How much formal training did you have, Mike?

Invaders Now (2010) #5, variant cover by Mike Grell.

MG: Well, I started off with the idea that I was going to become the next Frank Lloyd Wright, but I couldn’t handle the math involved. So after a year at the University of Wisconsin (where I learned absolutely nothing about drawing) I dropped out and I was going to transfer to a private art school where I thought I could learn a little bit, but I got caught up in the draft and talked my way into being an illustrator in the Air Force - which was great on the job training. Basic graphic artist stuff. Sort of learn the ropes, to get you a job in an art studio or a commercial art outfit in the civilian world. While I was there in the Air Force I ran into a guy who convinced me that I should give up the idea of being a commercial artist and to be a cartoonist instead, because according to him, cartoonists only worked two or three days a week and they make a million dollars a year.

Stroud: If only.

MG: Yeah. Somebody owes me…let’s see, I’ve been in the business 36 years now; someone owes me about 30 year’s vacation and about 35-1/2 million dollars.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

MG: But while I was in the Air Force, I did have the opportunity to do a lot of drawing, a lot of cartooning, aircraft drawings and things like that. I did the “Escape and Evasion Tips” cartoons for the Air Force while I was in Saigon and started taking the Famous Artist’s School’s Correspondence Course in Cartooning with the idea that I would become the next Al Capp. The funny, bigfoot kind of stuff. Then a pal showed up with a few of his comics in tow and he showed me Green Lantern/Green Arrow and that changed everything. That was what made me decide to get some serious instruction and learn how to actually draw.

Green Lantern (1960) #90, cover by Mike Grell.

So, after the Air Force I went to the Chicago Academy of Fine Art for a couple of years and moonlighted as a commercial artist at the same time for two different studios. One was more of a print operation and the other one was specifically illustration and they both offered me a chance to go full time. I took the one that paid one third the salary because I was learning so darn much at it. That was well worth it. That was about it as far as formal training. Lots of on-the-job, hands-on stuff. Other than that, it’s a continuing education. I don’t think an artist, if he knows what’s good for him… an artist shouldn’t be satisfied with something that he strikes on. He should leave himself open for growth and change. Otherwise you wind up being stagnant, and the sound you hear behind you is some young lion charging up and is about to run up your butt.

Stroud: Yeah. Complacency kills. I understand your career at DC began with some good timing.

MG: Oh, yeah. It couldn’t have been better, actually. I more or less stumbled into the job on the Legion of Super-Heroes. I was practically walking in the door as Dave Cockrum was walking out. I had just shown my stuff to Julie Schwartz and Joe Orlando and had got my first assignment and turned that in. Joe gave me a second assignment and when I got home the phone was ringing and he said Murray Boltinoff, the editor, is on vacation and when he comes back he’s going to discover that he doesn’t have an artist for the Legion of Super-Heroes. “Would you mind if I put you in for the job?” “Would I mind?” Good Lord. You go to New York, cold-- I’d packed up my wife and the dog and everything in our exploding Pinto and there we were, so yeah, that was very fortunate. The luck of the draw.

Stroud: And boy, what a challenging assignment with all those characters to do.

Superboy (1949) #207, cover by Mike Grell.

MG: Oh, yeah. It was sooo much fun. It was the best break of my life, really and the hardest book I’ve ever drawn. Twenty-six characters, and of course the mandate was that at least five of them had to appear on every page (chuckle), sometimes in every panel and usually by the end of the book there would be at least one spread where there would be everybody lined up on one side against all the bad guys on the other side, so it was a challenge. Working with Cary Bates was a godsend, though. Cary would tell you what angle he wanted. He would give it to you in such clear language, that all you really had to do was draw it as he told it, and he’s a very, very visual writer. He solved 90% of the problems of who to put in the panel, what they should be doing, where they should be standing and everything else. All I had to do was draw what he told me.

Stroud: I’m sure that did reduce the anxiety considerably. How did his scripts compare to, say Jim Shooter’s? I know you did some of his also.

MG: A Cary Bates script would run between one page and maybe a page and a half for every page of story. A Jim Shooter script would run 70 or 80 pages.

Stroud: Wow! Was a lot of that reference?

MG: It was mostly stuff I ignored. (Laughter.) Jim felt that it was necessary to go into extreme detail in his descriptions of every tiny little thing, and of course that sort of attention to detail is terrific if you’re drawing it, or if you’re the guy who is either writing a novel or creating something like a film where all the backdrop and texture and everything else is all vitally essential, but I would get sketches in there of things like, for example, a universal adapter, which he spent half a page describing this thing and even included a drawing and in the end it turned out to be a three-pronged adapter and it had really nothing to do with the story at all except he needed it in order to connect a couple of machines. Which they did, but what the thing looked like was not important.

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes (1976) #222, cover by Mike Grell.

What they were doing was important, and it seemed like a lot of Jim’s scripts were dedicated to the thing rather than the action or the story. That was my view of it, that’s all. As I said, Cary Bates would write a page or a page and a half for every page that you got in the story and Denny O’Neil, by contrast to both of them, would write a half a page. In a Denny O’Neil page the panel description would be “Close Up Two Shot,” and then the dialogue. That’s three lines for a panel. Because Denny knew that he could trust his artist. He gave you the essentials of what you needed; what angles he wanted if it was a long shot or a close up or a medium shot or whatever, you’d get that on the page, but briefly enough that it allowed the artist a lot of freedom and creativity and I think that brought out the best in the artists that he worked with.

Stroud: I can see where that would be very attractive. A little economy there and just go with your instincts. You obviously impressed the powers that be, because it wasn’t very long before they put you on covers. It seemed like you took over for Nick Cardy or maybe you two were running in tandem.

MG: We were very much in tandem. Nick did several layouts for the covers that I did, in fact. Carmine Infantino liked to do layouts himself. Occasionally Nick would do the layouts, uncredited. It was my name that showed up on the darn cover, but a lot of those covers were Nick’s layouts.

Stroud: I was kind of curious, because a few of them did look like classic Infantino ones where he loved to go at that kind of corner angle.

MG: Yep.

Stroud: I haven’t heard you referred to this in quite some time, but when you were first introduced it was “Iron Mike,” which almost sounds like a Stan Lee invention. Where did the nickname come from?

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes (1976) #239, cover by Mike Grell.

MG: (Chuckle.) It came from a comic strip that I was trying to peddle. I created it when I was still in Saigon and I had samples that I showed to a couple of the newspapers with no luck. It was part of a portfolio that I had with me when I went out to talk to the guys at DC, but there was never really anything that ever came of it. “Iron Mike” does have a new incarnation, as a matter of fact, that doesn’t have anything to do with the way it was originally.

It was a basic hard-boiled private detective kind of thing. But to this day, because when I arrived at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art…I came at the second semester in mid-year and I was one of, let’s see… There was Mike Yurkovitch, who got to keep “Mike,” because he was there first; there was another little guy that we called “Beatnik,” but his name was Mike as well; there was another Michael and there was me. And they went, “All the names are taken. We could call you ‘Mickey.’” And I went, “You could die.” So, my pal Art Tyska, who was looking through my portfolio, started calling me “Iron Mike.” To this day he still calls me “Iron.”

Stroud: The bane of most people working on comic books is the dreaded deadline. How did you deal with them?

MG: Considering the fact that I worked, on average, 100 hours a week, on a short week, it was no problem for me at all. I had come from the Air Force, where everything we did was on deadline. If a job came in during the morning, in general it had to be out by the middle of the afternoon, and that was going slow. If you had the luxury of working on something over a period of several days, it was a miracle. We used to say, “ASAP is the lowest priority we have.” And that was the truth. I spent a lot of nights living on coffee and not much else.

Batman Family (1975) #1, cover by Mike Grell.

When I first started in the business I met Joe Orlando’s wife, Karen, and I think I met her within the first two weeks that I was in New York. Two months later I ran into her again and she said, “Oh, my God, what happened to you?” “What do you mean?” She said, “You look terrible.” I didn’t feel terrible. I had had almost four hours of sleep that night. And I went and looked at myself in the mirror and I had aged. (Chuckle.) I mean I had really aged. I was working on the supposed Frank Lloyd Wright system of catnapping. I would work until I was completely exhausted and that generally meant that I would work 24 or 28 hours in a row and sleep for two, and then wake up and work another twelve, and then I would sleep for three, until I was getting into longer and longer sleep periods. But it was catnaps. Just enough to get my brain back alert and to get my body functioning again and then back to the drawing board, and it took its toll, but that’s the reason why in the first two years I was in the business suddenly my name appears on all those stories.

Stroud: Good grief. No wonder she described you the way she did, because after all that’s when the body regenerates, during the sleep cycle.

MG: I used to have trouble getting served in bars, but after that first few months I never got carded again. (Laughter.) It was pretty interesting. Joe and I collaborated on some of the National Lampoon stories. As a matter of fact, if you look at Animal House, it’s actually based on a story we did called “First Lay Comics.” Michael O’Donoghue wrote it and Joe hired me on to do the pencils and he did the finishes because it needed that Orlando touch. So, Michael O’Donoghue would call Joe up on a Wednesday or Thursday and say, “I’ve got a five-page story,” and Joe would say, “I’m on my way over to pick up the script,” and O’Donoghue would say, “Well, I haven’t written it yet. Come by on Friday night and pick it up.” So, on Friday night Joe would pick it up and he would do rough layouts that evening and then Saturday morning I’d meet him and pick up the layouts. We’d talk it over and Sunday morning I’d deliver the finished pencils. So that’s five pages in 24 hours. When are you going to sleep? And Joe, being Joe, would spend the next 24 hours working on the inks on the thing, taking them with him on the train in the morning and hand them off. There they’d be. That was considered a long deadline for Lampoon back in those days.

All-Star Comics (1940) #58, cover by Mike Grell.

Stroud: Holy cow.

MG: Joe was quite a guy. He was very much my mentor. He used to tell stories about working on tight deadlines with Wally Wood where Woody would be penciling a page, starting at the upper left-hand corner and pencil down the page and Joe would sit across the desk from him and ink it upside down!

Stroud: Oh, good night!

MG: Yeah. And sometimes they’d finish the page practically at the same time.

Stroud: Incredible. But as you said, I guess you do what you’ve got to do. You worked with some of the legendary editors there at DC. Did you have a favorite?

MG: My other mentor, of course, was Julie Schwartz. I just loved the guy. He was so much fun to work with. He could be hard-nosed and tough, and he certainly had his own ideas about what a story should be and how it should be told. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but I always loved the guy. As far as editors, those in terms of cooperation and creative inspiration; the two guys who had the most impact on me were Denny O’Neil and Mike Gold. Mike Gold, not at DC, of course, but at First Comics.

Mike and I have been pals since, oh Lord, ’75 or so, something like that, and he’s been editor on almost all of my creator-owned books. Even when I was working over at Image Comics doing Shaman’s Tears and Bar Sinister, I hired Mike as an in-house editor, because I think the worst thing in the world is to not have someone you’re answerable to, and there’s nobody in the business that I respect more than Mike. He’s got a really sharp mind. He knows the industry better than anybody and he understands good story-telling and he can keep me honest with a phone call. On occasion he’s phoned up and said, “This just isn’t working for me,” and we’ll sit down and it always annoys the hell out of me, but he’s always right. You can’t ask for much better than that.

Stroud: Not at all, and it’s to your credit that you recognize that synergy. You’ve done work for a laundry list of publishers, some that you’ve already mentioned: Dark Horse, DC, Acclaim, Valiant, Image, Pacific, Marvel, and First Comics. How did they compare?

MG: It’s like comparing apples and Volkswagens. Apart from the fact that we’re all involved in producing comic books, the methods, the personalities and the systems are all so vastly different, it’s like learning all over again. Just because you can ride a bicycle doesn’t mean you can fly a B-29, and it’s sometimes that way. The biggest difference between a company like DC and Marvel and a company like, say Pacific Comics or First Comics at the tail end there was that if DC comics owes you .12 you’re going to get a check. If they sell something of yours 20 years later, and there’s a royalty due for thirty-five bucks, you’ll get that check. It’s just the way they do business.

Bar Sinister (1995) #1, cover by Mike Grell.

Shaman's Tears (1993) #2, cover by Mike Grell.

Jon Sable: Freelance (1983) #2, cover by Mike Grell. — Jon Sable: Freelance (1983) #2, cover by Mike Grell.

With some of the smaller publishers, they’ve got other things on their mind and occasionally it can be a problem. That certainly occurred with Pacific and at the end of First Comics. That was the case, I think, for just about everybody. The more established companies are great because you can rely on them, because it’s just the way they do business. That’s something that you can always bank on. No pun intended, but it’s pretty literal. You can depend on them because they’ve been around so long. You know they’ll be around next week and next year.

On the other hand, there’s a tradeoff, and the biggest tradeoff for me and the reason why I went with the independents, was that at the majors you didn’t own your own material. I don’t own The Warlord. Right now, I have a piece of it, which is really great, because DC has changed their policies and they’ve sort of retroactively done a deal with the creators that allows them pretty much a guaranteed share of future exploitation of their properties. And that’s terrific, but back in the day, the standard was like working for IBM: you invent a new computer and at the end of your 20 you get a gold watch and a pat on the head, because it was your job, and that was very much the way it was with the major publishers. You didn’t own anything. They owned it, they controlled it and if they wanted to dump you off, they could do so any time they chose, or they could make a 300-million-dollar movie and not pay you a dime, which is pretty much the reason why Stan Lee (chuckle) wound up suing Marvel Comics over Spider-Man. It was tough in the old days, but I tell you what…people wouldn’t be getting royalties on their books today if it weren’t for the guys who took a stand way back then and took a chance.

Stroud: Yeah. Neal Adams was telling me about some of his efforts and of course he wasn’t alone.

MG: No. Neal was outspoken, but he never seemed to quite bridge that gap into the independent publishing that he could have taken advantage of at the time. He became disenchanted with the comic industry because frankly he was making so darn much more money in commercial art. And that was a fact. If you were a commercial artist you could draw one figure and get paid $200.00 or in comic books you could draw an entire page and get paid $60.00.

Stroud: That doesn’t take a lot of math skills to analyze.

MG: Right.

Stroud: Therefore, Continuity Studios became what it did.

MG: He was smart. The only mistake I think Neal made, and it certainly wasn’t a mistake for him, because he had a business plan of where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do, but in terms of what his continuing contribution to the comic industry could have been, is that if he had kept his hand in and produced maybe the equivalent of a graphic novel a year; just think of the great stuff that would be out there.

Stroud: What might have been. Over the course of your career, Mike, you’ve done lots of super heroes, adventure, science fiction, and mystery. Did you have a place you felt like you really fit?

Jon Sable_ Freelance (1983) #1, cover by Mike Grell.

MG: I think I found that with Sable. It’s set in the real world, of course, and deals in stories pretty much from the headlines and doesn’t involve superheroes. I continued that flavor and that theme when I did Green Arrow. Green Arrow is my favorite comic book character - I didn’t create it, but he’s always been my favorite comic book character. Working on the Longbow Hunters and doing the series, it was just a heck of a kick in the pants.

So, I like the guys who are not super powered, because I think when you give someone too much power they become less interesting. That’s why when I did Iron Man, for instance, I actually weakened him from where he had been before and went back to the old routine of him having to recharge his batteries, otherwise his heart could give out and I added the aspect that it was possible (since they both ran off the same power source) that he could use up too much energy and wind up killing himself. I kind of enjoyed the fact that they included that in the film. But I was more interested in the man inside the iron and I think that’s pretty much always been the case. Now the other genre that I love, of course, is the fantasy/adventure like The Warlord or Tarzan. The idea of some guy running around in the jungle wearing leopard-skin skivvies and swinging a sword or swinging from trees is just my cup of tea. I like that kind of stuff. Man against nature.

Stroud: That goes back to one of the comments that stuck out in my mind when I spoke to Denny O’Neil. He said he found that he liked human-scaled characters and you pretty much echoed that sentiment.

MG: Very much, and that’s what I saw in the Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics. The two characters of Green Lantern and Green Arrow, on Denny’s watch, were so perfect together because they were an absolutely perfect balance. You had the one guy who is the letter of the law. That’s Green Lantern. “The law is the law is the law is the law.” Right or wrong, it’s the law, so you uphold the law. Then you had Green Arrow, who is Robin Hood. He’s there for right. He’s there for justice. And I think that came through in every one of Denny’s stories, even when he was dealing with grand issues. When he was doing sweeping epics, when he was doing bug-eyed monsters in outer space there was still that human aspect to it.

Green Arrow (1988) #1, cover by Mike Grell.

Stroud: The weaponry you portray is always incredibly detailed. Do you use lots of reference or is it from personal expertise?

MG: Let me reach over here and just pick up my broom-handled Mauser while we’re talking.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

MG: In my studio I’ve got bows and arrows, I’ve got a rifle sitting in the corner, I’ve got a functioning replica a broom-handled Mauser, the full-automatic version. It’s made of plastic, but it fires caps and the slide actually works and the whole nine yards. Guns, knives, swords, all that stuff. That’s my bag.

Stroud: Tools of the trade.

MG: Tools of the trade. Very much so. My wife and I raise horses. We raise Friesian horses. You know that black horse they used in Ladyhawke?

Stroud: Oh, yeah.

MG: That’s it, and they’re not really quite as big as they appear on screen. You have to remember that Matthew Broderick is pretty tiny and Michelle Pfeiffer is infinitesimal. She’s a very tiny person, so when they’re standing next to this big horse it really isn’t that big, but Lauri and I belong to the group called the Seattle Knights. You can check them out at www.seattleknights.com. We sword fight and joust and fall off the horses and everything else.

Stroud: Sounds like a kick.

MG: Yeah, it is. The farthest away I’ve been with the show is Colorado, but it was a lot of fun.

A pencil commission of Galactus done by Mike Grell in 2015.

Stroud: You’ve done a little bit of everything, it seems; penciling, inking, painting, writing. What brings you the most satisfaction, Mike?

MG: Boy, oh boy. I think I’m a better writer than I am an artist. I love to draw in pencil. My penciling is far more satisfying to me than my inking. I can do it. I consider myself to be a decent inker, but it’s not easy for me, and I’m certainly not fast at it. When I do a page, I can pencil it maybe in a couple of hours, but the inking process will take 8 or 9 hours to do a page and I’ve just never been able to do quality work much faster than that. Certainly, back in the day I was turning out on average a page and a half of finished artwork a day, but that was also working those 18-hour days. So right at the moment I’d say it’s kind of a tossup between penciling and writing. Penciling a story is still basically story-telling. I consider myself to be a story-teller first and foremost. I get a lot of joy from it. Once I’ve gotten past the pencil stage where I’ve worked out all the problems and everything else that’s when the sheer labor starts. Although these days I am enjoying painting a lot, too.

Stroud: What mediums do you work with?

MG: Oil, although a lot of it is mixed medium; commercial art technique. Start with a pencil and add a little bit of this and a little bit of that. You use a bottle of stump water by the light of the full moon and a dead cat in a graveyard.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

MG: Wait a minute. That’s for warts. I always get ‘em mixed up. But it’s close to that. It’s not quite as alchemical, but darn near. By the time I’m done, what I use for paint, though, is Windsor-Newton Artisan Oils, which are water soluble, so I don’t stink up the house. You can actually wash your brush with soap and water. The thing with water soluble oils is you can use a drying enhancer, which I do, in order to speed up the drying time. And you can work in either a thin water color technique or a very thick oil technique and my work is generally both, starting with the foundation of a pencil drawing - sometimes ink; maybe charcoal or something like that; something underneath - and then building up from there.

A pencil commission of J.L. Linsner's Dawn done by Mike Grell in 2015.

Stroud: You do dabble in a lot of different things. Al Plastino was telling me that he can use oils, but sometimes it never feels like it’s done, so he sticks more closely to water colors.

MG: I think with water colors you reach a point where you’re either done or (chuckle) or you might as well be. Water colors are generally a fairly fast medium. The reason I use the drying enhancer is that I can speed up or slow down my drying time by using more or less. And, again, the stuff I use dries at about the same time as acrylic does. So, why don’t I use acrylic? Well, there are times when I wanted to go slower. That’s all.

Stroud: It gives you that flexibility.

MG: Yeah, and I don’t have to have two sets of paints around here in order to do this stuff. I don’t know how to use an airbrush. Okay, I know mechanically how to operate an airbrush, but I don’t do it very well. I think I did two pieces that involved airbrush and the second one came out so bad that I wound up painting over it with just a regular brush. It came out a lot better.

Stroud: It sounds like it’s just not worth the hassle at this point.

MG: No. Too old.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) I wouldn’t go that far. You were discussing The Warlord a little bit earlier and of course he’s making a comeback thanks to you. What kind of plans do you have for the character? Anything you can talk about?

MG: Oh, yes. I’ve already finished writing the first 6-issue story arc, which is being drawn by Joe Prado and after that there’s a 2-issue arc that I’m writing and drawing myself. At some stage of the game here I’m going to do a 6-issue arc that will incorporate a storyline that I’ve had cooking in the back of my brain for some time, but I have plans for where this goes. We’re kicking this off as if the readers are completely ignorant of who and what The Warlord is, which I think is the only way to do it. Starting pretty much where I left off but bearing in mind that it’s been so many years now that at least three generations of comic readers have come and gone. Well, okay, two at any rate have come and gone without picking up an issue of one of my Warlord’s. So, they don’t have anything to base it on or judge it on - so I’m trying very hard to reintroduce all the aspects of the world The Warlord lives in, reintroduce all the characters as we go along here, and introduce a new cast of characters with new conflicts and new personalities and it’s possible these form new directions to go with the stories.

1st Issue Special (1975) #8, cover by Mike Grell.

Stroud: It sounds great! It sounds like a very rich and detailed adventure coming along.

MG: It’s going to be a lot of fun. By the time you’re done with the first book you understand pretty much who the characters are, and how the world operates, but as you go along you will get the entire background and history of The Warlord told through the eyes of various people, so that by the time we’re halfway through the story everybody’s up to speed and everything can progress from there.

Stroud: In your 30+ years as a professional, what changes have you seen, good or bad, in the industry that are most notable?

MG: I miss newsprint. I miss the old, smelly, fall-apart-in-your-hands newsprint where the page on the back of it bleeds through. I miss the old crumbly paper. I miss the fact that comics will deteriorate if you don’t take really good care of them. But that’s just me. The biggest changes, of course, from the publishing end, has been independent publishers. Quality printing. Incredible quality printing on superb quality stock. Computers. Being able to use computers, in some cases, to produce an entire comic. It’s now possible to draw entirely on the computer, though why you would want to, I could never understand.

I did one piece of art where I penciled it, scanned it in and then I colored it on the computer, and at the end of three days that it took me to figure my way through this thing, I had a nicely colored piece on the computer, but (chuckle) my original drawing was the black and white pencil drawing and I really had nothing to show for that three days except the pencil sketch. But to a lot of guys that doesn’t matter. Their art is what they produce inside the computer and a print is just as good to them as an original painting hanging on the wall. Unfortunately, that print is going to deteriorate pretty fast and a hundred years from now somebody is going to find a moldy old canvas in the attic and turn it over and there’ll be a Warlord painting on it. I think I might be ahead of the immortality game with that.

The other thing that I’ve seen, of course, as with anybody who began in comics almost four decades ago; content has changed dramatically. The flavor of comics today is almost totally different from what it was when I was a kid. Much more adult story lines and themes in general. You look, for a prime example, at the Dark Knight compared to the Bob Kane Batman. It would be impossible to equate the two if you didn’t have 45 years in between. Spider-Man today isn’t the same as he was in the 60’s. The stories are different, the characters are different. The costumes are the same, and that’s sometimes about as close as they come. Even Superman has changed pretty dramatically and whether that’s good or bad I can’t really say. Some characters lend themselves really well to a darker, more realistic aspect and some of them just need to remain heroes. I don’t think the world needs a dark Wonder Woman. That would be like a dark Donald Duck. Believe me, Donald Duck is dark.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

MG: He’s violent, he’s nasty. He’s got a terrible disposition. He’s rude to everybody. Yeah, Donald Duck is dark, but he’s got nothing on Daffy. Absolutely nothing on Daffy. The one mistake that I think comic companies made as the years went on is that as our readers got older and older and our readership changed from when I was first starting in comics; the average reader was 7 to 10 years old, and Julie Schwartz told me that. He figured that their books were best written for audiences in the 8 or 9-year-old range. Now I think there’s a lot to be said for having books that are understandable and reachable for an 8 or 9-year old, but you want to keep them coming back later on. You don’t want them to get bored, and it’s possible to do both.

Look at Shrek. Shrek is a great example of a story that works for the young kids and it works for adults. But it’s a lot of work. You have to really know what you’re doing to pull it off. And not many guys do. So, there was a tendency to go the direction of stories that were more suited toward older and older audiences.

Jon Sable_ Freelance (1983) #7, cover by Mike Grell.

By the time I was doing Sable the audience demographic on that book was 18 to 34 years old according to our survey. We had everybody sort of across the board. They calculated that they were sort of in the middle-income bracket. You could draw a line across the country sort of along the Mason-Dixon line and Sable was really great below the Mason-Dixon line and, west of the Mississippi, the Northern conservative states liked it, but the liberal states didn’t enjoy it a lot. The audiences, though, as they got older the comics also got older and now you’re writing comics for an audience that is not 18 to 34 years old any more. They’re anywhere from 10 or 12 years old on up to 40 or 50 or 60 years old, because face it; I got that old and my readers got that old right along with me. It’s strange how that works.

As you go along you notice that the kids have been left behind. The entry level comics just aren’t there for the audiences any more, except for a few. The Legion of Super-Heroes just had their 35th anniversary this past year and I was in San Diego and sitting in on a big panel. Someone asked the question: “Why do you think the Legion has had such longevity?” And I said, “It’s really simple. I still have people coming up to me today that will hand me a copy of the first Legion book they ever picked up; an old one way back when and say, ‘You know, this is the best thing you ever did.’” And they don’t mean that as an insult. What they’re saying is that that’s their favorite comic, because it was probably the first comic they ever picked up. And for a kid, the Legion of Super-Heroes is a great entry-level book. Millions of great characters. It’s a story about young people with super powers. Well, not so young any more, but in general it was. Young people with super powers. That was attractive to young readers. They’d pick it up and it was one of the first comics they ever read. It makes an impression on them and it sticks with them. The Legion fans are absolutely the most loyal fans in the business. If they take you into their hearts, they will never forget you. And if you piss ‘em off (laughter) they will never let you live it down.

Stroud: Woe be.

MG: There are still guys who are upset about that costume I did for Cosmic Boy.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Well, I don’t know what to say about that, but going back to my adolescence, the things you did for Saturn Girl and Princess Projectra I have long appreciated. (Chuckle.)

MG: Well, you know, I can’t take all the credit for that. Very little, in fact. Yes, I did push the envelope a bit. Princess Projectra’s costume became lower and lower and wider and wider divided in the front under my watch, but Dave Cockrum designed those costumes. I think the only costumes I actually designed for the Legion were Dawnstar and Tyroc (which was just an awful character) and that Cosmic Boy costume.

Stroud: Okay.

MG: Anyway, that was all Dave. I had a notebook full of his sketches for the costume designs. The editor, Murray Boltinoff, gave it to me and years later I told Dave how I never would have gotten through one story if I hadn’t had that book sitting open on my desk the whole time and he said, “I had the same book.” (Mutual laughter.) It took me forever to figure out that all of that lace in the front of Shrinking Violet’s costume over her cleavage is the letters “S-V.” I just had no concept that that’s what it was. I just looked at it and saw all the different shapes and I drew the different shapes, but I never understood it as being “S-V.”

Stroud: Well, neither did I until you just said it.

MG: That part dawned on me about 3 years ago when I was doing a convention sketch. (Laughter.)

X-Men Forever Giant-Size (2010) #1, cover by Mike Grell.

Stroud: All these subtleties. Have you ever taught art, Mike?

MG: Nope. I never taught, although sometimes when you’re working with a young artist I’ve had assistants working for me. It’s a mentorship or maybe more of an apprenticeship, where you pass on your information the best you can. Joe Orlando used to sit me down when I came into the office and he’d go over my pages and, more than that, he would whip out a pad of tracing paper and he would show me how I could make something better. He would show me how I could make a gesture more dynamic, how you could shade the face a little bit differently, and all of that stuff stuck with me and I would always thank him and he always said the same thing: “Pass it on.” So that’s what I believe in doing. If you’ve got the knowledge and skill sets and it can be of use to someone along the line you’ve got a duty to the next generation to pass it on.

Stroud: An excellent philosophy. I see where you’ve fully embraced the internet with your own website (www.mikegrell.com), your commission sales through Catskill Comics (www.catskillcomics.com), and your work at Comic Mix (www.comicmix.com). Do you think online publishing is the future of the business?

MG: I think so. How far they go with it is going to be up to the individual companies, but I see it as a perfect interim step, actually. It’s a great way to get the material produced and out there and get paid as you go along so that you can afford to take the time to produce a large volume of work that can ultimately go into a trade paperback, and trade paperbacks are currently where the publishing industry is going.

Stroud: I would agree. The graphic novels and the reprints like Showcase Presents and Marvel Masterworks seem to dominate the shelf space.

Green Arrow_Longbow Hunters (1987) #1, cover by Mike Grell.

MG: Yep, and the great thing about that is that unlike a comic store where you’ve got a maximum two-month shelf life; in a bookstore it’s infinite. As long as that book is selling it can stay there on the shelf.

Stroud: Good point. You’re a regular at the convention circuit, as we’ve talked about. You must enjoy interacting with the fans.

MG: I do. I get a kick out of going to the shows. I think I’ve been in every state except Louisiana. One of these days I’d like to get to New Orleans. It doesn’t have to be real soon, but before I shuffle off the mortal coil.

Stroud: You mentioned your horsemanship and so forth. Any other hobbies you indulge in when you can get away from the drawing board?

MG: I love to hunt. I grew up in Northern Wisconsin where if your Dad didn’t hunt, your family didn’t eat meat, and I like to get out and spend as much time out in the boonies as possible. It doesn’t matter if I’m actually shooting anything. I once spent 10 solid years hunting every day of the deer season and never fired a shot, but during that time I had a flock of chickadees land on me. There must have been fifty of them. One of them was walking on my hat and he walked on the edge of the brim, hung by his toes and looked me right in the eye, and of course that did it for me. I laughed and they all flew off.

I had a squirrel come down a tree and sit on my arms while he ate a pinecone and I had a rabbit come hopping down the trail and hop right up next to my leg and sit in a patch of sunlight. I got dive-bombed by a turkey who was coming in for a landing on what he thought was a nice perch and it turned out to be my tree stand. Luckily, he saw me at the last minute. I had a deer walk up so close to me that I reached out and touched her as she went by. She had no clue I was there. Those are all sorts of things I never would have experienced if I hadn’t been out there in the woods. It’s hard to take the time to just go spend days on ends in the woods, but if you’ve got a gun in your hands, you can always say that’s your excuse.

Shaman's Tears (1993) #5, cover by Mike Grell.

Stroud: There you go. As a wise man once said, “Your life span is not reduced by the time you spend fishing.” Same theory. (Chuckle.)

MG: Was that Thoreau?

Stroud: If it wasn’t it should have been. (Laughter.)

MG: It sounds like either Thoreau or Will Rogers. Will Rogers once said, “The best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse.”

Stroud: I like it a lot.

MG: Groucho Marx said, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

MG: Not even remotely related, but…

Stroud: Have you ever read any of Pat McManus’ work?

MG: Oh, yeah. Half the stuff he’s written about his childhood is stuff I lived as a kid.

Iron Man (1998) #59, cover by Mike Grell.

Iron Man (1998) #60, cover by Mike Grell.

June 20, 2018

An Interview With Elliot S! Maggin - A Superman Author Worthy of the S!

June 20, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Elliot S! Maggin holding his Inkpot Award at SDCC 2013. — **Elliot S! Maggin** holding his **Inkpot Award** at SDCC 2013.

Elliot S! Maggin (born November 14, 1950) is an American writer of comic books, film, television, and novels. He wrote steadily for DC during the Bronze Age of comics in the 1970's and 1980's. He is particularly well known for his time spent with the Superman character.

Mr. Maggin started working as a professional writer in his teens, selling historical stories about the Boer War. His first published work for DC was a Green Arrow story titled "What Can One Man Do?", released in 1971.

He has been active with the Democratic Party of the United States, twice running for a seat on the U.S. House of Representatives — once from New Hampshire's 2nd congressional district in 1984, and then from California's 24th congressional district in 2008.

Elliot also served as an editor for DC from 1989 to 1991, where he edited the Challengers of the Unknown limited series written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Tim Sale.

Elliot S! Maggin is a writer whose work I had admired a great deal as a young comic book fan. It really struck a chord with me when I got my hands on the issues of Justice League of America where he and Cary Bates and Julius Schwartz were featured on Earth Prime and they interacted with the famous heroes and villains I'd enjoyed for so long. Elliot was gracious with his time and memories and I even got to shake his hand at the Denver Comic Con a couple of years ago.

This interview originally took place via email on February 9, 2009.

Bryan Stroud: What made you decide to try your hand at comic scripts?

Elliot S! Maggin: When I was about 18 – and I really hadn’t read a comic book in five or six years – I found myself running a tutoring and recreation program for about 300 kids in the town where I was going to college. We worked out of this veterans’ housing project in Waltham, Massachusetts and the city housing authority gave us an unoccupied apartment to use as a clubhouse for the kids. It was empty except for a bunch of ratty old pieces of furniture so I dug up about a hundred old Superman comics out of these big galvanized steel boxes my dad had made and I scattered them around the apartment. The kids swiped them or ripped them up or ate them in really short order so rather than deplete my old collection further I started buying new ones and I noticed there was a difference.

Green Lantern (1960) #87, featuring the first DC story from Elliot S! Maggin: What Can One Man Do? — Green Lantern (1960) #87, featuring the first DC story from **Elliot S! Maggin**: **What Can One Man Do?**

I latched onto Denny [O'Neil] and Neal [Adams]'s Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories and I noticed there were bylines – there hadn’t been any in the early Sixties – and the guys doing these stories weren’t just blowing them off. They were taking some care. Putting some craft in the things. I realized that I was a writer pretty much because of all these comic books I’d read in my pre-teen years and it occurred to me that comics were a decent place to be a writer. They really were. Still are. I’ve written all kinds of stuff besides comics, and managed to sell most of it, but I’ve never had a better education than when I had to write a comic story a week for five years straight. Pick up Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, would you? Getting a craft right is more about putting in a lot of hours doing something you love than it is about any kind of native talent. I must have spent easily ten-thousand hours those first five years just writing words. You do that and you’ve got to get good at it eventually. What was the question?

Stroud: Superman was your ticket to DC and you’re very much identified with him, enjoying about 15 years writing his adventures. Is that your favorite character?

Maggin: He is. All of those characters associated with the Superman legend make a very organic whole. You’ve got to give Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster a lot of credit, of course, but this is an ensemble cast that evolved over time through the hands of dozens of storytellers. I’m very proud to have been associated with that crew for so long.

Stroud: Did you imagine he’d still be going strong after 70 years?

Maggin: Sure, I did. He’s an archetype. Like Zeus and King David. He’ll live as long as the American nation lives in historical memory, and that’s not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. He’s part of our identity.

Justice League of America (1960) #123, written by Cary Bates & Elliot S! Maggin.

Stroud: You pretty well stuck with the super hero genre. Was that a conscious choice?

Maggin: I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve ever done anything that has to do with writing stories consciously.

Stroud: One of my all-time favorite stories as a kid was the annual JLA/JSA crossover in #123 and #124 that featured appearances by you and Cary and others on Earth Prime. How was it decided that Cary would be the villain?

Maggin: We probably flipped a coin. I still think those stories are just horrendous.

Stroud: Whose idea was Earth Prime?

Maggin: I think it was Gardner Fox’s. Or Julie Schwartz’s. I know it wasn’t mine.

Stroud: Did you think Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin depicted you well?

Maggin: Well I guess they did. I got fan mail from women who wanted to meet me. I got stalkers, for heaven’s sakes.

Stroud: Len Wein described how he and Marv Wolfman worked when they co-wrote a story. How was it for you and Cary?

Maggin: Cary wrote the scene descriptions and I wrote the dialog. Both of us felt like we were doing less than half the work. Sometimes we did it on this clunky little Sony cassette recorder, but mostly he’d type out scripts with space between the shots and I’d fill them in on my own typewriter. Remember typewriters? I went right from a manual Olympia to a word processor. I never saw the value-added in an electric typewriter.

Stroud: What other writers did you admire?

Maggin: In comics, Denny O’Neil has always been the best as far as I’m concerned. I never understood why he felt he never got the hang of Superman, but that worked out well for me. In other media my favorite living writers these days, I think, are Orson Scott Card and Russell Baker. And Bob Dylan although his poetry gets a little precious and purposefully obtuse. Then there are a whole bunch of dead people, and I think I managed to name all the best of them in my introduction to the Kingdom Come novel. I mentioned Aristocles there (whose pen-name was Plato) and I think I left out Aldous Huxley and Theodore Sorensen – who’s living, I know, because I still run into him on the street once in awhile.

Stroud: Did you spend much time at the DC offices?

Maggin: Yeah. Going there was a great excuse to blow off time I might better have spent writing. It used to drive Sol Harrison up a wall when I showed up in jeans or shorts.

Stroud: Tell me your memories of Julie Schwartz.

Julie Schwartz sitting with Elliot S! Maggin.

Maggin: He always wore a tie. What, you want more?

Julie was like a dad. I had a real dad until very recently – and they got along well, actually, Julie and my dad. Julie was really gruff and brusque, and I always got the impression he was being that way because he thought it was somehow charming. He had this notion that he wasn’t capable of really intimidating anyone, and in fact he was a very intimidating guy to a lot of people. Harlan Ellison is like that too, but I think he’s more self-aware. I think he picked up that attitude from Julie, to whom he was never able to say no about anything. Julie and I were like a couple of Jewish kids from the streets, constantly arguing and making up and going for months or years without talking to each other and then falling back into the same paths with no one ever apologizing for anything. I still have to get better at apologizing for stuff. After his wife Jean died, and I still lived in the east, I started inviting Julie over for my family’s Passover Seder and we always had a good time with that. He’s one of the really important people of my life. I miss him.

Stroud: Was your story “Make Way for Captain Thunder!” in Superman #276 originally intended to feature Captain Marvel?

Superman (1939) #416, written by Cary Bates & Elliot S! Maggin.

Maggin: Nope. I never intended for Superman and Captain Marvel to meet. We had all these alternate universes kicking around the Multiverse, remember. I figured Superman and Cap lived in non-contiguous worlds where you just couldn’t get there from here without getting caught in a very treacherous probability field trying. With Captain Thunder I told Curt Swan to think of Captain Marvel the way he’d look in “the real world.”

Stroud: You seemed to be the designated writer for Superman for quite awhile. Was that something you sought out or was it a matter of being in the right place at the right time?

Maggin: I think necessarily it’s always a little of both. I was in the right place at the right time, certainly, because I fell into place at a time when Superman was kind of out of fashion among comics mavens. When Mort Weisinger retired and Julie took over Superman I don’t think anyone knew quite what to do with the character. Mort’s approach had been that he was telling fairy tales for children. When I showed up with this classic liberal education, I brought this notion that Superman was a contemporary icon and had to reinterpret that iconography in twentieth-century terms. It’s an evolving process of which I’m convinced Mort was only vaguely conscious. Julie started out by trying to be Mort who, by his own admission, was just making it up as he went along. Julie got all agitated whenever I told him I was trying to write stories that I’d want to read myself. I think it took awhile before he realized I was consciously applying the same humanistic approach that Mort had done unconsciously all those previous years. I like to think I caught on with the fan base because I wanted to catch on; because I got the joke out of the starting gate.

Stroud: Which artists did you particularly enjoy as far as interpreting your scripts?

Maggin: Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, of course, on Superman. I always wished I’d been able to do more work with Neal Adams, Walt Simonson and Bernie Wrightson. I think I did a total of one story with each of those guys. Probably my favorite, though, turned out to be Alex Toth, with whom I also did just one story in all the time we shared space on this planet.

Marvel Classics Comics (1976) #26, written by Elliot S! Maggin.

Stroud: Did you ever provide much reference with your scripts?

Maggin: When I worked with Julie he always seemed to have access to more reference than I did. He had this file cabinet full of the most arcane stuff. Images from Teutonic mythology. Gnostic texts. A joke file from the Friar’s Club. What-all. He left a lot of that reference material behind, and the last time I saw Paul Levitz, a few months ago, he yanked out this manila file stuffed with all these Elliot references. The original of the letter Julie wrote me accepting my first script. Old scripts themselves. “You going to keep all this stuff?” I asked Paul. And he said, “No, you are.” I have no idea what I’m going to do with it. I’m tempted to scan everything and post it on my website and put the originals in some university archive. Maybe Brandeis or Columbia, where I went to school, if they’d appreciate it. I hear the University of Wyoming has a nice pop cultural collection, and the Library of Congress has lately gotten around to indexing their comic book collection. Who knows? Now we’ve got the internet, and I can provide reference for anything I like without leaving my desk.

Stroud: How long did it usually take you to knock out a story?

Maggin: When I was working at writing comics full time I turned out about twelve pages a week like clockwork, rewrites and all. I used to do a lot of rewrites.

Stroud: Did you have any editors you especially enjoyed working with?

Maggin: Julie, of course, and Andy Helfer. I did a few stories with Mark Waid and Brian Augustyn when they were editing. That was lots of fun.

Stroud: You’ve written a little for other publishers like Archie, Continuity, Marvel and First Comics, but DC was your mainstay. Did you feel a particular loyalty to them?

The Joker (1975) #4, written by Elliot S! Maggin.

Maggin: To DC? Sure. They’re like having an institutional family. Like belonging to a temple.

Stroud: You wrote almost half the stories for the short-lived Joker series. That one was unique because the Joker had to be captured at the end of each story to abide by the comics code. Was that a tough challenge?

Maggin: I don’t think that was so much tough as it was bizarre. I really liked that series. Especially the Black Canary story. The Joker got to be heterosexual for a change. Those Comics Code rules were really wacky. Good riddance. I think I’d like to do a Joker series like that in the current atmosphere. You can be funny and brutal at the same time. That’d be cool, I think.

Stroud: You wrote quite a few Shazam! Stories. Was that an enjoyable assignment?

Maggin: Yeah. I remember Denny and me comparing notes. We both thought we were getting away with something doing those scripts. That was a blast. Would’ve been nicer if they’d ever caught on.

Stroud: Was Green Arrow sort of your alter ego?

Maggin: That’s what I thought at the time. I even introduced Neal to my girlfriend at the time to get him to model Dinah after her. I think he liked my girlfriend. I wrote a weekly column for my college newspaper in those days and it tended to have a really eccentric terminology and expression set. I think Green Arrow was an alter ego for the guy I was in those columns.

Stroud: You’ve done some editing. How did it compare to writing?

Maggin: When I’m writing I’m always in the zone. Even now, answering these questions. Time passes without my noticing. When I’m editing I have to do it in the real world. It’s much less fun.

Kingdom Come, a novel written by Elliot S! Maggin.

Stroud: How did you get tagged for the Kingdom Come novelization?

Maggin: Novel. “Novelization” is a process. “Novel” is a product. I’m compulsive that way. Sorry.

Mark Waid called and said he’d like me to adapt the story and asked if I’d seen the series. I hadn’t, and I told him I certainly wouldn’t want to do it, but I was glad to hear he was writing the series because I liked his sensibility about that stuff. He said he was sending me the two books that had already come out and the scripts for the other two and I should please read it and tell him what I thought then. So I said fine, of course I’d read the thing. Great stuff. What tied it, though, was that when I got to the end of the script for number four I saw he’d dedicated the series to me. So, I called him and thanked him and I said now I’d have to do it and he had put me in a lousy bargaining position because clearly, I couldn’t allow anyone else to do it. I loved writing the thing. Just loved it. I wished I could have just written it in a vacuum with no one to bother me about it. I got really possessive about every comma and apostrophe. Especially the apostrophes.

Stroud: What made you decide to move on to other things?

Maggin: I’m not sure. I don’t think I remember. I wanted to do other things, to do books and screenplays and be a Hollywood guy, and I had kids to raise. So, I came out to L.A. and ran around town trying to sell stuff. And I sold a lot of stuff, but nothing got produced, and I got involved with internet programming and got hooked. I think in my advanced years I want to do what I want to do and I don’t want anyone telling me what to do, and it’s not like I ever did, but now I know I don’t have to put up with it. So as long as I’m managing to raise my kids – they’re a medical student and a high school senior sports phenom these days – I think I ought to do what I want. So I am – profitable or not. I’m talking to DC about a new bunch of graphic novels, and I’m writing a book – it’s called Lancer – whose first draft I’m posting online as I write each chapter, and I’ve got another graphic nonfiction book in the works and that’s what’s going on. So now you know as much as I do. I’ll keep you posted. Honest.

Incredible Hulk (1968) #230, written by Elliot S! Maggin.

Stroud: Jim Shooter told me that being a writer is a good foundation for all sorts of other projects and your career echoes that. Have you enjoyed some of your other forays in film, television and video games?

Maggin: Yeah, mostly. Being a writer is a lot like being a lawyer that way. I like being someone who can do a bunch of disparate things relatively credibly. I train people in software systems. I’ve written for newspapers. I’ve taught high school. I’ve been a ski bum for years at a time. I’ve run for office. The politicos, of all people, were actually pretty intimidated, it seemed, by my bizarre resume. I didn’t fit into any of the normal boxes. I like it that way.

Stroud: You still write a few stories here and there for DC. Do you have any desire for another regular gig?

Maggin: I have a desire for an irregular gig. Unless they let me bring back the Joker book. Or maybe Krypto.

Stroud: Do you think comics have much of a future?

Maggin: I used to think comics were that ten-cent thing that came off a rotary press in 1931. Eventually I realized, as Jim Steranko said, that the comics have been around since some caveman painted a five-legged antelope on a cave wall to indicate that it was running. Comics are alive and well. It’s all in the execution. Just like the rest of the Universe.

Stroud: What projects are you working on today?

Maggin: Two graphic novels. A piece of graphic nonfiction. A screenplay. Two prose novels, including the one I’m posting online. Isaac Asimov used to work in this big room in his basement in Boston that had a circular table with three typewriters and three concurrent projects on it. When he ran short on one he’d go to the next chair and get to work on another. People would ask him if he ever got writer’s block and he’d laugh. My role model.

Tee-hee.

Be sure to check out Elliot's website to see more of his work!

Superman (1939) #300, written by Cary Bates & Elliot S! Maggin.

Superman: Miracle Monday, a novel written by Elliot S! Maggin.

Julie Schwartz looks over artwork with Assistant Editor Bob Rozakis and Elliot S! Maggin. — **Julie Schwartz** looks over artwork with Assistant Editor **Bob Rozakis** and **Elliot S! Maggin**.

June 13, 2018

An Interview With Jack Adler - Comics Innovator of the Golden Age

June 13, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Jack Adler (born July 1, 1917) was an American artist who started off his career in comic books in 1946 as a colorist and inker for DC Comics. One year later (in 1947) Jack took on a staff position doing production and coloring for the entire DC line. He held this position until 1960, when he became DC's assistant production manager - a position he held for the next fifteen years. In 1972, Adler was the visual inspiration for the Swamp Thing villain Ferrett, drawn by Bernie Wrightson in the first issue of the hit series. From 1975 until his retirement in 1981, Jack was DC's production manager and Vice President of Production.
Mr. Adler passed away on September 18, 2011.

Jack Adler, drawn by Neal Adams. — **Jack Adler**, drawn by **Neal Adams**.

Jack Adler has contributed so much to the comic book genre right from the very beginning that it’s difficult to underestimate the scope of those contributions. His first job was painting on engraving plates for comic books. He was, in fact, the first to color Superman in Action Comics #1, and he did so much more from that point on, up to and including doing the art restoration on what is generally agreed to be the first Golden Age reprints in Jules Feiffer’s “The Great Comic Book Heroes.” And let us not forget his ascension to Vice President of DC Comics before he retired.

This interview was epic and much like the one I enjoyed with Jerry Robinson, Jack Adler had been involved with so much of the industry and the many creators, and didn't seem to have an enemy in this world, that I found many in my Rolodex who were glad to share their memories of working with him. So, in addition to this historic interview, I also got inputs from such greats as Joe Kubert, Murphy Anderson, Paul Levitz and more!

This interview originally took place over the phone on October 20, 2008.

Green Lantern (1960) #76, cover by Neal Adams and Jack Adler.

Jack Adler: You know what my age is?

Bryan Stroud: If my information is correct, you’re 90 years old.

JA: I am 90 years old.

Stroud: Congratulations.

JA: Thank you.

Stroud: You and Irwin [Hasen].

JA: Yep.

Stroud: I understand you graduated from high school at a very young age. 15, weren’t you?

JA: Fifteen.

Stroud: And then you went on to get a degree in Fine Art?

JA: Yeah, and I spent only one year in college during the day and the rest of it was at night. I worked and was going to college at the same time. I started to get my Master’s, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t able to afford it. College was very cheap for me. Would you care to take a guess at what it cost me for a semester?

Stroud: I’m sure I’ll foul it up. A hundred?

JA: Two dollars a term.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JA: Two dollars. Me, my wife and my daughter. Two dollars.

Stroud: That’s a far cry from what it is today.

JA: Oh, God. I don’t know how they manage it.

Stroud: I understand you’re a man of many talents. They say that you were a good sculptor, penciler, inker, painter and photographer.

JA: The only thing that I wasn’t was a penciler. That’s the only thing I didn’t do. I was known as a “can do.” They’d say, “Can you do this?” And I’d say, “Yeah, no problem.” And many of the things that were innovations were all mine. For example, the color separation system that was used around the world was mine. I started out by working at an engraving plant with the old Ben Day system where they were doing the Sunday pages and a guy doing the Ben Day, putting the dots on spent one week on one page. On Little Orphan Annie and stuff like that. And there’s no way you could have done a comic book. It involved a problem and I was in a position where I had to do something in order to stay in the field and I worked out the system of color separation, and it was used around the world. I never got any money for it. Never got a penny for it. Not even a Christmas present for it.

Western Comics (1948) #69, cover by Gil Kane and Jack Adler.

Stroud: That’s dirty.

JA: No, that’s the way it was. Things I had to do. And most of the innovations were…I don’t know how to put this. Someone else took credit for what I did because he was my boss.

Stroud: So, it kind of belonged to the company, then?

JA: That was Sol Harrison. Sol Harrison took credit for it and it sort of belonged to the company. You know who Sol Harrison is?

Stroud: Yeah, you two worked together for many, many years.

JA: Well, we went to school together.

Stroud: Oh, I didn’t realize that.

JA: We were in the same class. He was in a 4-year program in art and I only had one year because I was on a souped-up program. I was intellectually gifted so that I went through school very quickly.

Stroud: It was obvious to me when I learned how early you graduated high school that you had a lot of brainpower. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, didn’t you have some involvement in the first issue of Action Comics?

JA: Correct. I was working at the engraver doing color separation.

Stroud: Wow. That’s quite a milestone to be there right at the beginning like that.

JA: I have a sad story to tell you about that. I worked on that first issue and I took three copies and put them away. Some years later I began to have a health problem and the doctor said to me, “Do you have any old paper in the house?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Get rid of it, because you’re allergic to the fibers and that’s causing your problem.” So, I threw them out.

Action Comics (1938) #1, cover by Joe Shuster and Jack Adler.

Stroud: Oh, no!

JA: Do you know what the last copy of that sold for?

Stroud: Not off the bat, but I know it’s a tremendously expensive thing to have.

JA: $185,000.00 was what the last one sold for and I had three of them!

Stroud: You’re right. That’s a very sad story.

JA: I should have killed that doctor.

Stroud: (Laughter.) No one would have blamed you, either. I’m reminded of that recent news article where someone discovered a near mint copy of Detective #27 in an attic someplace in Pennsylvania.

JA: What did he get for it?

Stroud: He immediately put it into some kind of careful storage and I don’t know if it’s been sold or not, but you can only guess the value of that one, and of course it doesn’t compare to what you’re talking about.

JA: That was my retirement right there.

Stroud: Easily, but who knew at the time? Back then comic books didn’t have a very good reputation.

JA: Not at all.

Movie Comics (1939) #1, cover by Jack Adler.

Stroud: I remember Jim Mooney telling me that you’d tell people you did almost anything other than working in the comic book industry.

JA: (Chuckle.) Right. At the beginning I worked at the engraver’s. Emil Strauss was my boss, the engraver and Lee Woods and Donenfeld made a fortune at the very beginning and Emil Strauss was kind of peeved and wanted to do the same thing, but he couldn’t do it because they were his accounts. So, he figured out something that he would do to be in the comic field. It was called Movie Comics. Are you familiar with that?

Stroud: No, I don’t think so.

JA: Okay. The Movie Comics were done this way: They got the script from Hollywood along with photographs and they put together six pictures per page. The problem with it was that there was no sequentiality with the photographs. They were scattered photographs and it meant that somebody had to straighten them out, which meant that sometimes you had to add a hat or change a tie or change a uniform. Sometimes you had to draw somebody from the back, because you didn’t have a photograph that fit the picture. That required a great deal of art work and it required people who were able to do that. And one of the tools that was required for that was an airbrush. You know what an airbrush is?

Stroud: Yes, I’ve seen them used on photographs and painting custom work on vehicles.

JA: Yeah. Now I knew nothing about any of that, and he decided that he had to have somebody do the retouching; the airbrushing. Immediately Emil Strauss ordered the airbrush and pointed to me and said, “You’re my airbrush artist.” I knew nothing about how to hold the airbrush. You hold it sort of like a pencil. I held it upside down.

Challengers of the Unknown (1958) #11, cover by Bob Brown and Jack Adler.

Stroud: Oh, no.

JA: Yeah. And I learned how to do it upside down, and I became very proficient at it. But I didn’t know anything about it. I wrecked the airbrush the first day and there was no problem about that. He immediately had it fixed and I puttered around with it and never really learned how to do it. Emil Strauss saw that and said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to hire somebody to teach you.” So, he hired a Hungarian Jew who was a famous newspaperman in Germany. But he was Jewish, and he was having a great deal of trouble making a living. So, Emil decided to bring him over and he did. He hired him. And he hired a man called Emory Ghondor. Now Emory Ghondor was a tall, thin guy who looked like a stalk, and his emblem was a stalk, and he made his living by doing demonstrations with paper and scissors. He’d call out to the kids and say, “What kind of an animal would you like?” They might say an elephant and he’d make a couple of snips in the paper and would have a four-footed elephant with a trunk that was able to stand up.

He was just a whiz at it. That’s how he had to make his living. He couldn’t make a living because he was Jewish in Germany. Anyway, Emil hired this guy and this guy was going to teach me, and I was puttering around with it and never really learned how to use the airbrush and time started to pass and nothing was happening, he didn’t do anything. One day I said to him, “Emory, I’ve got to start doing the airbrushing. When are you going to start teaching me? I’ve got to start doing the work.” He said, “Okay.” So, he takes the airbrush, put some black wash in it, makes a splat; does it again; makes another splat, and again. My heart sank. I realized that he didn’t know how to use it! So, I looked at him and asked him how I was going to learn to do this and here’s what he said to me, in his heavy accent, “Don’t vorry, Jackie dear, ve vill learn togezzer!” And so, we did.

Stroud: You did some work on the Prince Valiant strip also, didn’t you, Jack?

Batman (1940) #244, cover by Neal Adams and Jack Adler.

JA: Yes. I did four pages of separations with the new system that I had worked out and the publisher…what was his name? I have trouble with names. In fact I had an experience once. My boss then, Jenette Kahn called me in one day and she said, “We’re doing a film, and we’re going to call all the people in from all over the world who have something to do with comics, whether it’s shipping or anything at all related, and you have a good voice, so we’d like you to do the voice over. I died. I died! I walked into my office and I had my secretary, Gerda Gattel and she looked at me and said, “What’s wrong?” So, I told her and she knew what my problem was, so she said, “Jack, what are you going to do?” I said, “I’m going to have you next to me, and every time I have a problem on a name, you’re going to do it.” You know that I didn’t miss a single name?

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Note: A little later, Jack shared some more details about his groundbreaking work on the Prince Valiant strip:

JA: When I was working on Prince Valiant, I did four pages of Prince Valiant with a system that I had devised for doing the color separations, and they were four of the most beautiful pages that Prince Valiant ever had. So, I’m working on it and my boss, Emil Strauss, brings this big guy in and said, “This is William Randolph Hearst. I’d like you to explain to him what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Of course, I was kind of shaken because I remembered what history taught me about him; that he was the one who instigated the Spanish-American War.

Stroud: Yes, that’s quite a historical figure there.

JA: Yeah, so I was impressed with the man. He was a big guy. I explained what I was doing and showed him how I was doing it. Someone took a picture and I wish I could find it. But that was the end of my exposure to Hearst, because my boss would not give them a contract. I don’t know what the reasoning was, but he didn’t want to give him a contract and then had me going on to something else. As simple as that.

Sea Devils (1961) #1, cover by Russ Heath and Jack Adler.

Stroud: What an unfortunate turn of events.

JA: I don’t know if it was unfortunate or what it was, but that’s the way it went. My contact with him was minimal and I’m grateful for that contact.

Stroud: Absolutely, and didn’t you say he was very intrigued with what you were doing?

JA: Oh, yeah. He was delighted and he wanted a contract for me to continue doing Prince Valiant. My boss had other ideas, though and wanted me to move on. I don’t know why he turned him away.

JA: I have to be careful about what I say sometimes, because I know where all the bodies are buried.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) I’ll bet you do.

JA: One that was a problem was Kanigher, but I had a good relationship with him. Bob Kanigher and I got along very well.

Stroud: What do you think the secret was?

JA: My interest in music. We had lots of discussions about music and he was a phony, really. But a great writer.

Stroud: He was certainly prolific.

JA: But he had a formula that was so obvious. He could write a story on his way into work. He’d come in with the story all scripted.

Stroud: Remarkable. Of course, when I was talking to Mike Esposito he talked about how they cranked out that first Metal Men story in record time. By the way, what was the hardest thing to deal with in your shop as far as deadlines? How late did they make changes on you?

House of Mystery (1951) #93, cover by Nick Cardy and Jack Adler.

JA: Oh, the only one that was on time, all the time, was Julie Schwartz. He was a gem. Never late. And my name is Jack. I had a problem with him. He never called me Jack, he called me Adler. I think that was his way of being funny and he got paid back once. My grandson worked with us for awhile and saw Julie's name and wrote it as Julias. Julie became Julias.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JA: But he was a gem. I loved him.

Stroud: Len Wein called him a wonderful curmudgeon.

JA: He was absolutely great, and he was so precise about everything. And he was so knowledgeable. You know what his background was, in science fiction?

Stroud: I know he did some work in the pulps and didn’t he represent Ray Bradbury at one point?

JA: Yeah. He was his agent.

Stroud: Good eye for talent.

JA: Yeah. He was a no-nonsense guy. And very calm. He never yelled. He was just never that way.

Stroud: Good for him. You don’t need to be abusive if you know what you’re doing.

JA: Correct.

DC Special (1968) #10, cover by Nick Cardy and Jack Adler.

Stroud: Now one of the neat things that you did were the washtones. How much of that was your idea and how much was Jerry Grandenetti’s? Wasn’t he involved in that?

JA: No. I was the one who thought up the idea of doing stuff in washtones for the covers; they were not line drawings, but wash drawings, and I did a number of them to show the artist what I wanted. In other words, I did what I guess you’d call the inking on covers in order to show the artist what I wanted; what I needed; and that was it. There were many things that I did that way where I did the first of it in order to show someone how to do it. And I did everything.

Stroud: So, you really were the unsung hero.

JA: I had a problem. The problem was that I had a boss who took credit for everything I did.

Stroud: Sol [Harrison.]

JA: Yeah, and so whenever I did an interview, I had to say “we.” I never said “I.” And today it bothers me that I didn’t speak up. My daughter, who knows exactly what occurred, said to me, “Dad, you couldn’t, because he was your boss.” In any place it’s the boss who counts.

Stroud: That’s right. There’s always a certain amount of politics that you’ve got to endure.

JA: Right.

Stroud: Your story reminds me a little of Bill Finger.

JA: Oh, God. That really is a crime.

Windy and Willy (1969) #3, cover by Bob Oksner and Jack Adler.

Stroud: Did you know Bill at all?

JA: Yeah, he used to come to my house.

Stroud: What do you remember about him?

JA: He was bright. A good writer. And he was uncomfortable because he wasn’t given enough credit for anything. I liked him.

Stroud: It sounds like everyone did. A likeable guy that just took a real shellacking.

JA: Oh, God. Did he ever.

Stroud: When I talked to Jerry Robinson he was very quick to give Bill full credit for his work on Batman. It’s a sad story. Irwin Hasen lovingly called Bill a loser.

JA: He was a loser, absolutely. There are people who go through life like that. And there are people who go through life where everything turns to gold. I have a friend like that. There isn’t anything he touches that doesn’t make him richer. He was an engineer working on submarines and he just didn’t like it, decided to try other things and he really made out well.

Stroud: Going back to the washtones for a moment, it seems like they sold very well when that technique was used.

JA: Oh, yeah. Every time I made an innovation, sales went up enormously.

GI Combat (1952) #87, cover by Russ Heath and Jack Adler.

Stroud: But it doesn’t seem like that one was used terribly often. Do you know who made the decision on its use?

JA: Each editor made his own decision on that.

Stroud: It seems like they were mostly used on the war books by Kubert and Russ Heath. It added a great deal of drama.

JA: You said Russ Heath is still working?

Stroud: He sure is.

JA: And Joe Kubert is one of my closest friends. He’s a gem. He’s a gentleman. He’s exactly what the character is: Rock. That’s Joe. Have you met him?

Stroud: I haven’t had the pleasure. I’ve always wanted to.

JA: He looks like a rock, and he is.

Note: I called Joe up to ask him about his recollections of Jack and he graciously shared the following:

Stroud: When I talked with Jack it occurred to me that Jack had worked with literally everyone at DC and he absolutely adores you and said, “If you get a chance, talk to The Rock.”

Joe Kubert: (Chuckle.)

Stroud: I said, “The Rock?” He said, “Yeah, Joe Kubert.” So, please tell me about Jack, Mr. Kubert.

Our Army at War (1952) #49, cover by Joe Kubert and Jack Adler.

JK: Joe, please. Well, my relationship with Jack; he’s a terrific guy and has been a good friend, and the first thing, right up front, is that a great deal of what I’m doing concerning the school is a direct result of discussions and talks that I had with Jack prior to my opening it.

Stroud: He mentioned that he kind of helped you set things up.

JK: Well, the questions I had, I knew nothing about a school or anything that had to do with opening up this kind of an institution, and I tried to get as much of an education in that direction as I could, but the details and the mechanics of it were not really what I was looking for from Jack. What I was looking for from Jack was his information as to what he felt a cartoonist coming into the business should know in order to be assured of being able to make a livelihood at it. And so, we talked about what the curriculum should be, which is, of course, the most important factor that has to do with the school. And with that information and with the discussions I had with Jack I was able to set up, I feel, the kind of curriculum that prepares those people coming out of the school to be able to make a living in this business.

Stroud: History has certainly shown you to be correct. You’ve got a pretty impressive string of alumni that lead right back to your door.

JK: Yep, and I’m proud of that and Jack also should be proud of that because a good piece of that belongs to him.

Stroud: If I understood correctly, he said you were actually talking about having him on staff?

JK: Yeah, oh, yeah, I would have loved to have had him be able to work here, but distances just proved to be impossible, and I know how difficult that would be. One of the reasons that I was able to open the school was that I only live five minutes from the building, and if I had to commute or travel I don’t think I’d have ever opened the school. So, I could understand completely Jack having to come all the way from Queens to come in here to teach, it was just too much.

Brave and the Bold (1955) #44, cover by Joe Kubert and Jack Adler.

Stroud: Sure. It sounds almost like what Dick Giordano was telling me about commuting from Connecticut into the city when he was freelancing.

JK: Yeah. Dick taught at the school here, too, incidentally.

Stroud: I didn’t realize that.

JK: Oh, yeah, he was great. He was a terrific teacher.

Stroud: You’ve really had an all-star cast there.

JK: I really have. And that, in particular, Bryan, was humbling, because the guys who agreed to come here…I think a great deal of the reason they did what they did was because it was kind of a payback. I think all of the guys, including myself know that without the help of guys in the business, like Jack, it would have been impossible for us to really learn what we had to know. So having acquired that ability and knowing how difficult it is to get that kind of information, I think the guys that came here to teach felt that more. They sure as hell didn’t do it for the money, I can tell you that. (Mutual laughter.)

Stroud: Well, the love for you and the institution obviously showed through. I know Irwin Hasen kind of regretted having to hang up teaching at the school, but things being what they are…

JK: When you start hitting 90, I guess things start slowing down. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Oh, yeah. I shared one with Jack just yesterday. He called me back and had another tidbit to share with me and I asked how he was doing and he said he was fine, all things considered, and I shared a line I heard from a gentleman who was in the latter part of his life: “The Golden years are filled with Lead.”

JK: (Laughter.) Well, that may or may not be true, but I tell you, if you’re lucky enough to be able to kind of handle that lead, you can still get along.

Our Army at War (1952) #238, cover by Joe Kubert and Jack Adler.

Stroud: That’s exactly right. Anything else you’d like to share about Jack?

JK: Just to let you know I think Jack was probably one of the most brilliant guys around. You know back in the 50’s I was involved in putting out a three-dimensional comic book that included the red and green glasses to give it a three-dimensional image to the illustrations. Jack was the first guy that not only figured out how it was done; not only figured out a better way of doing it; but was able to also introduce color on top of that with the mechanicals and the reproduction and the means of doing the kind of work that we did prior to the introduction of computers. Jack was incredible. Absolutely incredible.

As you probably know he’s a wonderful photographer. He took beautiful, beautiful pictures. He knew comic book production…any kind of book, production or reproduction backwards and forwards. That guy is really a fountain of knowledge when it comes to this kind of business, plus the fact that he’s the kind of a guy that is more than willing to share it in any way he can. It’s been my experience in this business, and a lot of stuff that I’ve done that the more a guy knows, the more sure he is of what he knows, and the better he knows it, the more apt he is to give that information out to other people, and Jack is really the epitome of that.

Stroud: Oh, yeah, I mean if you’re confident and capable, you don’t feel intimidated or insecure about sharing knowledge like that.

JK: Yeah. It’s only the guys that are kind of worried that if they give too much knowledge and information that this guy they’re talking to is going to take over their job; it’s only that kind of a guy with that sort of insecurity that kind of holds the stuff to himself.

Stroud: Yeah, precisely. As I recall on your new TOR series that just wrapped up you did some of your own coloring. Was that a result of what you’d learned from Jack?

GI Combat (1952) #78, cover by Joe Kubert and Jack Adler.

JK: No, (chuckle) I’m trying to learn how to do this coloring with the computer and stuff. That’s what I’m working with now and I’m kind of stepping in very tenderly, but excitedly and it’s really an exciting thing for me to be able to get a handle on it. Number one to learn a new color process and reproduction and number two to be able to control as much as I possibly can, all the things that go into putting my stuff together.

Stroud: Yeah, and since you own that character, of course you’ve got much more flexibility than you would ordinarily.

JK: Yeah, I’ve been a very lucky guy. Very lucky.

Stroud: And your gifts have shown above all else. It’s been remarkable. I can’t think offhand if it was ever done, but was Jack’s gray tones ever used on any of your war book covers?

JK: Oh, yeah, I did some wash drawings…under his tutelage, really. He directed me and I don’t recall if Sol, Sol Harrison participated. I don’t think so. I think it was all Jack who really was so knowledgeable with the reproduction factors and how the grays would work and how they should be converted into line from a wash drawing. Jack was extremely helpful to me with that.

Stroud: I’d seen several examples, like your old Hawkman covers.

JK: Yeah. There was a Hawkman cover that I did in wash and as I said that was pretty much under Jack’s direction.

Stroud: That was a real pioneering effort by him, and I understand those tended to sell a lot more books when they were done that way.

JK: Well, I think that’s true of covers in general, but yeah, if you can create something outstanding or something that piques the interest of a potential reader you’ve got the possibility of selling a hell of a lot more books.

Batman (1940) #78, cover by Win Mortimer and Jack Adler.

Stroud: Weren’t you involved in setting up the art school with him?

JA: (Chuckle.) Not involved, I set it up. He called me…I have a background not only in fine art, but in education as part of my college schooling, and he called me one day and we talked about it. He asked what was needed and we sat down and we talked about it. I outlined what he needed. He sent it in and it was approved immediately, and then he offered me the job of running it, and I didn’t want to move out there.

Stroud: New Jersey didn’t appeal, huh?

JA: New Jersey is okay, but its way out in the boondocks.

Stroud: That’s neat that you were so deeply involved.

JA: I laid out the entire program for him and the thing that amazed me is that it was instantly approved.

Stroud: Something to be proud of. You developed the 3-D comic book, too, didn’t you?

JA: Correct. Sol Harrison came to me and said there were rumors that people were working on 3-D and did I know how to do it. He always came to me for help. I said, “Yeah.” His words to me were strange. He said, “Crap or get off the pot.” So I said, “Give me a picture,” and that same day I did the thing and showed him with the red and green glasses and that was it. We went ahead and worked with it. Joe Kubert was working on that with Norman Maurer. I don’t know if you knew that.

Stroud: No, I sure didn’t.

The Flash (1959) #203, cover by Neal Adams and Jack Adler.

JA: They worked out a system, but I refined it so that mathematically we did certain things. It was great. You know one of the things that my daughter held against me was that I didn’t go to the conventions and sell my autograph. You know these guys were getting $25.00 an autograph and making a fortune on it and I never did. I was not a businessman. I never cared about that. Never cared about money. I made a lot, but I never cared about it.

Stroud: Well, you avoided getting obsessed with it, which I think is probably good. Is it true that you also developed the 3-D technology for the Viewmasters?

JA: Yeah. It’s a sad story. I applied for a patent on it, and it was turned down on the grounds that I was using materials that had been used before, which is ridiculous.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. A unique application should stand on its own.

JA: Anyway, it was turned down and that was it. It took Viewmaster seven years to figure out how I did it. My interest was in the science of optics and it led to that. Also, I’m a woodworker. I have a complete workshop and I built furniture. I built most of the furniture in my house.

Stroud: You’re a man of many talents. Perhaps you’ve got the soul of an engineer.

JA: I don’t know what I’ve got, but I was happy with what I was doing. Every day was fruitful and I loved it.

Stroud: So, you never actually “worked” a day in your life.

JA: That’s correct. Do you know anything about cameras?

Stroud: Just a little.

Plop (1973) #18, cover by Basil Wolverton and Jack Adler.

JA: I invented the stop-down lens. And the mistake I made was that I went to show it to one of the top companies and they’d just come out with the Stop-o-matic diaphragm, and it was a copy of what I did.

Stroud: Speaking of photography, you were also the innovator in using photos in creating comic book covers as well, isn’t that correct?

JA: Absolutely.

Stroud: What brought that to mind?

JA: Damned if I know. I don’t know how it came to me. I usually went to bed with something on my mind, and about 3 o’clock in the morning I’d wake up and had the solution to what I wanted to do.

Stroud: Marvelous.

JA: Don’t use the word Marvel!

Stroud: (Laughter.) Fair enough, Jack.

JA: One of the things I had to promise when I left was that I wouldn’t go to Marvel. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: They didn’t want them to poach you, huh?

JA: That’s right.

Stroud: You were a DC or National exclusive. That was something Carmine [Infantino] told me that I didn’t realize was that the editors and the production people were the only ones actually on staff.

JA: Correct.

Stroud: You must have felt you were fairly treated to stay there so long.

JA: It didn’t matter. I was doing something I liked. I will say that I never got the kind of money I should have had, and one of the problems is that I never was able to get past Sol Harrison. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Sure. He ended up as publisher while you were ultimately Vice President in charge of production?

JA: Correct.

Shazam (1973) #6, cover by CC Beck and Jack Adler.

Stroud: You obviously worked with pretty much all the editors and we already talked a little about Julie. Did any others stick out in your mind?

JA: Jack Schiff was a gentleman. Joe Kubert, of course. In fact, Joe came out to see me with Irwin Hasen about a year ago and he’s planning to come out again.

Stroud: Nice that he still remembers his friends. Did you run across Bob Kane at all?

JA: (Chuckle.) Which one?

Stroud: (Mutual laughter.) That says it all right there, Jack.

JA: Bob Kane was lucky. His father was an accountant and a close friend of Jack Liebowitz’s, and he was the one who set Bob up with a contract, and Jack Liebowitz was nice enough to set up that contract and it made a fortune for him, whoever he was. (Chuckle.) Also, I have photographs of most of the people, the artists who freelanced for DC back in the day. I’m an excellent photographer. I use photography instead of drawing. I replaced my drawing capability by doing photography, and my photographs have everybody.

Stroud: What a great thing to look back on. How long did you and Sol end up working together?

JA: Until he left.

Stroud: Okay, so literally decades.

JA: Yeah. As a matter of fact, he came to visit me and I asked him why he retired and he said, “Because I didn’t want to die on the job.” He was having a problem with Jenette [Kahn] and I got involved in it, which was stupid of me; it cost me…I don’t know if I should go into it.

Stroud: Whatever you feel comfortable with.

JA: You might ask me again.

Stroud: Okay. What memories do you have of Ira Schnapp?

JA: Ira Schnapp was a gentleman, and I have a very funny experience about him. I was up in Cape Cod in a famous restaurant up there and I saw a picture on the wall which had a drawing of Ira Schnapp; a watercolor of Ira Schnapp that I had done. I don’t know how it got there and I never found out. How a portrait of Ira Schnapp that I’d done got there, I’ll never know. I used to do sketches of the people I worked with. I used to get by on 4 hours of sleep a night. I worked full time and did freelance work for agencies around the country doing color separation work.

I did many magazines. I did the first copy of Ms. Magazine, the cover, for example. I did a lot of that. I did a lot of work with Murphy Anderson. He can tell you a lot of things about me. He’s the best friend I’ve got, I think. The nicest man I’ve ever met. He asked me to give him space in the department because he didn’t want to work at home. So, I gave him a desk and he came in every morning and worked and if he took a pencil…he stayed past the time I was there, in the morning he’d bring one in. He’s replace it, and you know, there were pencils all over the place. He didn’t have to do that.

Stroud: Just a man of the highest integrity.

JA: Absolutely! I can’t say enough about him.

Brave and the Bold (1955) #62, cover by Murphy Anderson and Jack Adler.

Note: I gave Murph a call and asked him what he remembered of working with Jack and he graciously shared the following:

Murphy Anderson: We worked on a lot of freelance projects together.

Stroud: Was anything particularly memorable to you?

MA: Mostly licensing projects. People would get a license to do various things from DC and it would be for any number of different projects. They’d get permission to use the art and so forth and Jack would help me with the coloring and that kind of thing. I remember working on toys, too and he helped me a lot. Advertising things, too.

Stroud: He did say you had your own space in the production department where you liked to work.

MA: He and Sol Harrison, who was his boss most of the time had things arranged there in the shop.

Stroud: Right, he mentioned that he and Sol moved up the ranks together.

MA: They went way back and were also involved with A. L. Strauss who was the father of another good friend of mine, Andy Strauss. I never knew the older Strauss, but he was a color separator and up until then they’d never done much work in comics, but Sol and Jack, with their interest in comics, they got to work on a lot of comic projects. They were very capable. They were doing commercial work in advertising and that sort of thing.

Stroud: He did tell one kind of amusing story about you. He said anytime you were in there doing any kind of work if you happened to pick up a pencil you made absolutely sure that it got returned. He said despite there being pencils everywhere you wanted to make certain you didn’t take anything that didn’t belong to you.

MA: That’s kind of true, I guess. (Chuckle.) That was a bit of a problem when you had a guy like Milt Snappin who was taking care of things and was also an artist who did a lot of lettering, but he could only squeeze that kind of work in on his lunch hour, so lunch time would come and Milt would have some kind of freelance project, but he had no tools, so he’d wander around while other guys were away from their desks and borrow things so that he could use them. He tried to return them all most of the time, but sometimes he didn’t. (Chuckle.) He just left them where he finished the job. So that created a bit of consternation. (Chuckle.) A lot of shouting and hollering for awhile.

Stroud: Did you and Jack socialize much at all?

MA: Not a whole lot, but we did some. We knew his wife and his daughter. His daughter would come up fairly often to the office and so I got to know her quite well. Dorothy was a very nice lady and Jack would invite us over and she’d tolerate us. (Chuckle.) We always had a good time. Dorothy was one of a kind. Never very boisterous or anything and she obviously felt a great deal of affection for her husband.

Stroud: Always so nice to hear. He had fond memories of working with you on the P.S. Magazine as well.

MA: Right. He colored and did some of the separations on it. Separations only on the four-color section of it. I introduced the Army to a type of color separation they did at DC. Jack and Sol were the guys who invented the process and they did it for Andy Strauss. In fact, I discovered that Andy Strauss was close by to me and could help me, so when I got the P.S. contract he did all the photography and the engraving for us, but someone had to do the color separations and that brought Sol and Jack back into it. Well, not Sol so much, but Jack mostly and they were both delighted because they had a good relationship with Andy’s father.

Spectre (1967) #1, cover by Murphy Anderson and Jack Adler.

Stroud: It sounds almost like a homecoming.

MA: It was. They (A.L. Strauss) were doing the engravings of newspaper comics as I think about it along with advertising. One of the things they worked on was Prince Valiant. They did the plates and color separations for that. Jack and Sol were instrumental in introducing the unique separation technique they’d arrived at. They created a process that allowed them to do it without such an elaborate process. So they pioneered there and then later were hired by DC and they started doing their covers like that and adapted the process they’d been using on newspaper strips.

Stroud: Magnificent. I also asked Jack about his innovations with the washtones.

MA: That’s right. They did it as a wash and shot it and matched it up with the line art and added tone to color. They understood color so well that they could make a mix of 3 or 4 colors if they had to in order to achieve a color and have it work out to be a brown or some other color that normally was not used much in comics. DC’s covers were unique in that respect. The other publishers didn’t have anything quite like it. While the folks up at Chemical knew how it was done, they had no one with the expertise to do it really. They didn’t have the ability that a trained artist did to take care of the drawing as well as the color separation. Of course, I’m just giving you a layman’s view of what they were doing. It was very involved and very technical and they did it extremely well.

Stroud: I have no doubt and unfortunately a layman’s viewpoint is probably about all I could understand anyway. (Laughter.)

MA: They would often take black and white photos and color them so that they looked like color photography.

Stroud: You worked with him on the P.S. magazine, too, didn’t you?

Green Lantern (1960) #8, cover by Neal Adams and Jack Adler.

JA: Correct. I did all the separations. I did it every month. I taught Murphy how to do the separations and he set up a system for himself. I turned it over to him. I began to have a problem with one eye. Macular degeneration. I have 20-20 in the other eye.

Stroud: That would make depth perception difficult.

JA: Yeah, the image is displaced and the center is blacked out. It’s weird.

Stroud: Someone was telling me that toward the end Ross Andru was having vision troubles that made it difficult for him to do some of his penciling.

JA: Nice guy, Ross.

Stroud: I’ve heard good things about him. Did you know Mike Sekowsky?

JA: Oh, Mike was funny. Mike used to do little sketches, that I saved, fortunately, that are light. He had a good sense of humor. I’ll give you an idea of the kind of thing he’d do. He’d draw a sundial and write “Tick, tock, tick, tock” on it. He did one thing where, “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s Rye Bread,” and he had some sort of insect on it. He was always very funny. Very cute drawings. A lot of stuff I didn’t save. As a matter of fact, I have a number of awards, and I’m hunting like crazy for them. Not for me. Of course, I never cared about them, but I have two great-grandchildren now and I was looking for them. I’m trying to find everything I can. I’m finding some treasures, and I look at the stuff that I did and I marvel about how good an artist I was. I really marvel at it. I’m impressed with me. (Mutual laughter.)

Stroud: Speaking of saving treasures, I was going to mention to you that I’m lucky enough to be the beneficiary of one of your efforts. When the so-called Jack Adler Collection was being sold on eBay, I ended up with one of the approval covers that you rescued.

Green Lantern (1960) #8, cover by Gil Kane and Jack Adler.

JA: Which one?

Stroud: Adventure Comics #374.

JA: Ah. I’m looking for a cover that I did for Green Lantern. I think its #8. It was the wash cover, and it was stolen by one of my assistants and given to one of the artists and I’ve not been able to find it and I could get a fortune for it. If you come across it, I’d appreciate hearing about it. I’m looking for it. It’s the one with the prehistoric monster. Gil Kane did the pencils.

Stroud: Ah, Gil. Now there was an artist.

JA: (Laughter.) I have a very funny story to tell you about him. I used to take photographs and on Wednesday night I would have a model come in at the Art Student’s League, and we would invite the writers and the artists to come in and they’d sketch. It was a coffee klatch kind of thing. And I took pictures of the artists, not the models, and Gil Kane had one of the ugliest noses you ever saw, and when I made the prints, I printed it, but I never showed it to him, because he would have been embarrassed by it. He met a girl who said she’d marry him on three conditions: That he fixed his teeth, because they were baby teeth; that he’d change his name, which he did, from Eli Katz; and that he’d fix his nose.

Stroud: She didn’t ask for much…

JA: He did all three. Of course, he screwed around and married someone else. Anyway, when he had it done, Julie Schwartz came in and said, “Gil is coming in with his new nose. Can we play a gag on him?” So, I thought for a minute and I said, “Yes. I have a picture of him,” and I told him what I wanted to do. So, he said, “Fine.” Now the place had windows in all the offices, so everyone could see into every office. I said, “When Gil Kane comes in, I know he’s going to ask me to take a photograph.” That’s exactly what happened. He came in and incidentally the guy did a gorgeous job on him, he was now a good-looking guy. He was six foot two and handsome. And he came in and as soon as he saw my camera he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m taking pictures of some of the people. I do it regularly.” He said, “Will you take a picture of me?” I said, “Yes.”

Mystery in Space (1951) #55, cover by Gil Kane and Jack Adler.

When he came in to the sketch class, I set him up in the same position as that earlier picture. He said, “When are you getting it back?” I said, “It’s going out and will be back by the end of the day.” I get a call that the photographs are in. I set up about a hundred photographs with his at the bottom, and I went to Julie and said, “Julie, I have all the photographs,” and he said, “Come in.” Gil Kane is on my back waiting to look at the picture. We’re going through each one slowly, and Gil is dying. Finally, we get to that and he looks at it and I hear him say, “Wha? Wha?” He turned white as a sheet and didn’t speak to me for two years! I made up my mind then that I’d never play a stunt like that on anyone again, and I never have. He used to talk to me all the time about the movie stars and how they moved. He was really a great artist.

Stroud: I fully agree. When they had the so-called DC explosion with the introduction of all the new titles how did that affect you?

JA: It didn’t affect me at all. I just had more work. I had a good crew and I was able to get the stuff out. When I was originally made production manager, at that point they were paying a fortune for shipping the plates because every one of them was late. They told me that my job would be to try to correct it, because it cost a fortune. So what I did was that I worked out a system. What I decided was to do it without telling anybody and what I did was when the schedule was made out I added one day each month. Nobody caught on except Julie Schwartz who came in and said, “Adler, what are you up to?” He was the only one who understood what I was doing. Eventually I got it down to where everything was shipped on time.

Stroud: When they did the oversized issues, what sort of challenges did that present?

JA: I had to make copies from the old books and I figured out a system for bringing out the image. They asked me if there was any way I could copy the stuff that was in the books and I gave them two systems. One was a very simple system that didn’t get very good copies but needed a lot of clean up work and the other one was sophisticated, but slow and expensive. And of course, they chose the cheaper one, and that was the way it went and they made the larger books.

House of Secrets (1956) #92, cover by Bernie Wrightson and Jack Adler.

Stroud: Sounds like quite a challenge.

JA: That’s what I lived on. I wasn’t aware of the things I’d accomplished until the convention when I was given an award.

Stroud: San Diego.

JA: In San Diego. When I ended the interview on the question “How do you feel about it?” I said, “I’m proud of all I did.” It was the first time I realized all that I had done. You know when you’re doing your work, it’s simply your job, and I just never thought about it.

Stroud: It adds up.

JA: When I look back now, it was quite a career. I hate to sound like I’m bragging.

Stroud: Well, as they say, if you did it, it’s not bragging.

JA: Correct. Correct.

Stroud: Stan Goldberg and Mike Esposito told me that the paper and ink quality at Marvel was so poor that they had to make the ink lines extra thick. Did you run into any of that?

JA: No. I checked every page and our stuff was fine. And as far as the color was concerned, I had total control. I was responsible for the change in color at DC. I was never interested in anything that Marvel did. I never looked at their stuff, their coloring, nothing. I was only interested in what I could do for my company.

Stroud: So you were competing with yourself.

JA: Correct.

House of Mystery (1951) #178, cover by Neal Adams and Jack Adler.

Stroud: Do you remember when they drew you and the other members of the production department in the Inferior Five comic book?

JA: I was in a number of comics. I was kind of a foil for them.

Stroud: Okay. That was the only depiction I’d seen of you.

JA: I don’t remember that one.

Stroud: I’ll send you a scan of the page.

JA: Okay, good.

Stroud: You said you taught Neal Adams quite a bit.

JA: Adams sat with me and when he caught on to what I was doing, he came in and sat with me and asked questions of everything I was doing. He wanted to know all about color and color production. The only problem I have with Neal Adams is when they do an interview with him about me, he talks about Neal Adams. He is great, though. A great artist. I think there’s only one artist who was better and that was Alex Toth. He was a gem, and one of the things I’m proud of is that Alex Toth liked my coloring and asked me to color a story of his, which I did. He needed no color really. The title of the story was, “A Dirty Job,” and it had to do with the crucifixion, and he’s the only one who ever showed the crucifixion without the gore. He showed it from the back. And he just showed the crown of thorns with the light emanating from it.

He was great. The thing that was great about him was not what he drew, but what he left out. It wasn’t just the clean lines. You look at his drawings, and you look at a girl’s face and there’s nothing on there. Two little dots for the nose, the eyes and the mouth and it was a gorgeous girl, and there was nothing else. No shading of any kind. Nothing. It was just a beautiful girl. He drew a figure like that. Nothing in there. What he left out, you saw. You were able to discern what was there. He was also the only one who didn’t care about money. He gave his stuff away. I wish he had given some to me. I could have asked him for anything, and I just didn’t. To me he was amazing, just amazing.

Western Comics (1948) #82, cover by Gil Kane and Jack Adler.

Stroud: You’re obviously a fan, as is Irwin Hasen. He really liked Alex.

JA: If you speak to Irwin Hasen, give him my best.

Stroud: I’ll be happy to. When did you retire, Jack?

JA: About 25 years ago.

Stroud: So, you’ve had time to reflect on your career. I was going to mention that Todd Klein has a webpage and he recently posted what he described as one of his very few treasured pieces of original artwork, which is the color guide to the debut of Swamp Thing in the House of Secrets that he received from you and your signature is on it.

JA: Oh, God. I hired Todd Klein. I hired many of the people that worked there. I hired them as kids. And now they’re senior citizens. (Chuckle.) Unrecognizable.

Stroud: Todd has established quite a reputation as a letterer.

JA: He’s a great letterer. So was Ben Oda.

Stroud: Frank Springer told me some great stories about Ben.

JA: I worked with Frank Springer on a project. It was a special book that he did, but I can’t think of the name. You might call Frank and find out.

Note: I did just that and Frank responded thusly:

Jack Adler - one of the greats in this business - did the color separations on "The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist" which I illustrated as you know, and perhaps other jobs I worked on at the National Lampoon.

Back in '04 at the San Diego Comic-Con, I found myself on a panel with Jack. I was so delighted to see him - and frankly to know he was still around! Warm greetings all around!

I don't know the color process today, but back then no one did it better than Jack Adler.

Stroud: Did you pal around with anyone from the office?

GI Combat (1952) #93, cover by Russ Heath and Jack Adler.

JA: Not really. I spent my time at work and at home. I was married for 64 years to one woman. She passed away in ’01. She was beautiful, she was courtly and very bright. In fact, I have a story about her. I used to meet her at night at the subway back when you could walk the streets, and I’d take her home. She’d call me if she was going to be late, and I’d walk out to the train and pick her up. One night she called to say she’d be late. They were doing an audit. Okay. She called me the next night and same thing. She’s going to be late because of an audit. I said, “What the hell are they doing a second audit for?” She said they’d found some kind of an error. I let it go at that. I didn’t know what she was doing. She was doing Top Secret work for Franklin Roosevelt. President Roosevelt decided that the British and the French needed help, and Congress would not give them any money. So, on his own he made a program of lend/lease, giving money to the British and the French to build their planes and their boats. My wife handled all of that. In her job she was an executive at the Federal Reserve Bank. A brilliant, brilliant woman. And she never said a word to me about it. She had a phone under her desk, and she was told that when you were talking into that phone, don’t smile or anything, and she was talking to top brass in France and England. I didn’t know anything until one day a note came from the Queen of England with a little pin thanking her for her work.

Stroud: So, she had a big part in history.

JA: Absolutely. And she never told me a word about what she was doing. When I would go up to visit her, they would send a guard with me, even if I wanted to go to the john, and I couldn’t understand why they sent a guard with me. She was working on that project and never indicated anything to me. By the way, does the name Ray Perry mean anything to you?

Stroud: I don’t think so.

Green Lantern (1960) #84, cover by Neal Adams and Jack Adler.

JA: He did the drawings for Story Pages. Ray Perry worked until he was 93 years old. He was still working. He played the cello. He played it badly, but he played it. And we swapped; I did a photograph of him and he did a watercolor sketch of me that is so good I hate it, because he was able to catch the look in your eyes, and I was bored! Anyway, at 93 he had surgery and when I met him he said, “Goddamn doctors! They screwed me up and I can’t have sex any more.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JA: Remember, he’s 93. I believe he lived on 34th street in Manhattan. It was a major thoroughfare. The building that he was in was one window wide. You know, these narrow buildings in the city. One right next to the other. On the day he died, his building collapsed to the ground! And on the building right next to it you could see the outline of his green painted room. Remember he had a cello and he had called me and said, “Jack, I want you to have my cello.” I said, “Are you crazy, Ray? Why?” He said, “Because my wife is a bitch, and if I die, she’s going to sell that cello. And I want that cello to go to a student, and I know you’ll honor my wishes.” I said on those grounds I’d take it. I took his cello, and I put it in my basement. The day he died, as I said, the building came down to the ground. The next day he was cremated and I attended the ceremony, and when I came home, my wife said, “Something’s wrong. You don’t look right.” I said, “No, I had a terrible experience.” She said, “So did I.” “What do you mean?” She said, “I can’t tell you. Go down into the basement and take a look.” I went down and there was the cello, totally unsprung. Every glued joint was unsprung. Did that curl your hair?

Stroud: It sure did. That’s simply astounding. I’m reminded of Creig Flessel, working right up to his passing at 96 awhile back. He told me all he ever wanted to do was to draw.

JA: That’s what I did when I was a kid. When I was 6 years old and had started school, the teacher asked me to bring my mother in. I thought I was in trouble. When she came in and sat down, the teacher said, “Did you know that at the age of 6 your son is an artist?” It came from the other side, and she didn’t know what the hell it was. She had no concept of it, and that was it. I was an artist at 6 and I have some of the drawings that I did and the sculptures that I did in soap.

Stroud: Your life’s calling. You found what you loved and you stuck with it.

JA: Absolutely.

One final note: Jack mentioned that when Sol Harrison became publisher at DC he congratulated him and immediately suggested he hire Paul Levitz, who of course ultimately succeeded Sol. I shared the anecdote with Paul and he responded with the following:

I enjoyed working with and learning from Jack for many years. He taught a generation of us DC folks how to think in color and set a high standard for to do production work back when it was a very personal craft.

At the time Jack mentions, I'd been laid off the formal payroll and remained on the DC staff working directly for (and paid personally by) Joe Orlando and Gerry Conway. Jack was a good advocate, and a good friend...even teaching me how to wire my first stereo.

As you can see, Jack cut a very broad swath during his career and earned the love and respect of many of his peers and I’m more than grateful for so many who shared their thoughts about this fine gentleman who did so much behind the scenes to help bring us some of the excellent reading that enthusiasts of the genre have enjoyed for decades.

June 06, 2018

An Interview With Josef Rubinstein - An Old-School Inker For the Modern Age

June 06, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Josef "Joe" Rubinstein (born June 4, 1958) is a comic book artist and inker, most associated with inking Marvel Comics' The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and the 1982 four-issue Wolverine miniseries by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. He is also known to be the one to have given artist Art Adams his first professional work.

Joe first entered the industry as an office assistant to Neal Adams and Dick Giordano at Continuity Associates. While working this position, he learned how to ink from Giordano.

Among his extensive inking credits (which include more than 2,500 comic books), were work with Michael Golden on Micronauts, Jim Starlin's Warlock, and Aquaman with Don Newton. Later assignments included a mini-series for Dark Horse called ArchEnemies, and issues of DC Comics' Ion and Green Arrow/Black Canary series.

In 2016, Mr. Rubinstein was inducted into the Joe Sinnott Inkwell Hall of Fame. In his acceptance speech, he once again named Dick Giordano as his mentor.

If I'm not mistaken, Josef Rubinstein still holds a record for inking and you'll soon see why. He's worked with EVERYONE and for many years was considered a true wunderkind. To my delight, he actually contacted me about giving him an interview and I was certainly glad that he did. I finally got to shake hands with Joe and visit at the Colorado Springs Con 2017 and he's as much fun in person as he is on the phone. Joe's got the goods and the stories. See for yourself.

This interview originally took place over the phone on December 30, 2008.

The 99 (2007) #3, cover penciled by Ron Wagner and inked by Joe Rubinstein. — The 99 (2007) #3, cover penciled by Ron Wagner and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Bryan Stroud: As I researched some of your work I was frankly amazed at all you’d accomplished for someone of your youthful demeanor.

Joe Rubinstein: (Chuckle.) Actually, you should see me walking right now. Uncle Joe is moving slowly at this juncture. I was in a car accident, so my lumbar is not a happy place to be. I was on Topanga Canyon Drive, which is a nice, long, narrow downward slope road and I got off this slanted driveway, turned on the car, turned off the emergency brake, started to travel, went for the brake, brake wasn’t working, brake wasn’t working, car wasn’t on! I’m frantically looking for the emergency brake and it was 10:30 at night, so I hit the side of the mountain and bounce off, about 20 feet down the ravine. The car is totaled, a little fire inside for good measure and my back is not happy.

Stroud: Ugly.

JR: Well, it could have been many, many, many times worse, but it still hurts. And naturally, in my business, it hurts more to sit than to stand.

Stroud: Perfect.

JR: So, I forget. Your interviews go into some sort of database on the history of comics?

Stroud: Kind of. A few years ago, my best friend started this webpage dedicated to DC’s Silver Age, and after a couple of years into it he suggested I do reviews of comic books from that era since we’re both either still in our first childhood or entering our second prematurely, so I did that for awhile and then through a few interesting twists and turns, about two years ago I started contacting some of the creators and have been having an absolute ball learning first hand how things went back in the day.

JR: How old are you?

Stroud: I’m 46.

JR: I don’t think I can talk to you.

Adventure Comics (1938) #503, cover penciled by Ross Andru and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: Oh, sure you can. (Chuckle.)

JR: All right. Well, I’m 50. When you were 13 reading your comic book that I inked, I was 17.

Stroud: That’s what I understand. That was your first professional work.

JR: Yeah, I was working at Neal Adams’ studio as Dick Giordano’s assistant when I was 13. I guess that doesn’t count. I was doing a little ghost assistant thing for them with The Crusty Bunkers and whoever. Then when I was 17, I got three jobs on my first day and now its 33 years later and boy are my arms tired.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) How many pages do you estimate you’ve done over that time period?

JR: I don’t have a clue. There was a real fallow period there for about 7 or 8 years where no one hired me, but prior to that for 24 years I was as busy as I could possibly be. The worst month, or the best, depending upon how you looked at it, was 104 pages. The trouble is that because I produced so much work - and wasn’t married and didn’t have kids and never get out of the house - is that all I did was work and work and work and work and I had assistants who would run errands and do my laundry and get me food. So basically I never had to get up from the chair, so the rumor got around that I just didn’t do my own work because it’s not possible that anybody was doing this much work. Sometimes I would get a job from an editor and they would say, “Okay, but you are going to do this one yourself, aren’t you?”

Stroud: Oh, jeez.

JR: So that began to hurt my reputation quite a bit because people started to doubt that I was the one artist on it. Kyle Baker, who’s quite the genius, was this kid up at Marvel and I saw this wonderful drawing he did called “Captain America and Buckwheat.” Kyle is half black, so he can get away with stuff like that. So, I found out who did it and I said, “You’re really good. Do you want to be my assistant?” He said, “Okay.” So, Kyle, in interviews, has actually given me the credit for changing the focus of his life. (Chuckle.) He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with it until I gave him the job offer. I also had another assistant at the time, a guy named Jose Marzan, and Jose was better than Kyle, and Kyle wasn’t quite figuring it out. I mean he was okay, or I wouldn’t have used him, but he wasn’t picking it up as fast as Jose was and then one day the fuse was lit.

Avengers, The (1963) #194, cover penciled by George Perez and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Kyle just took off, like the genius that he is; the rocket went into the air and exploded and all that, and Kyle is crazy, but in a good way. Kyle one day sat down and penciled a 22- page Shadow job and then he inked it the next day. I said, “What are you doing penciling 22 pages in one day?” He said, “Well, I don’t like to work a lot, so I like to get it out of the way at the beginning of the month.” So, Kyle calls me up one day and said, “I have this issue of “Web of Spider-Man” that’s due. Can you help me out on inking it?” I said, “Okay.” Then he shows up with this totally untouched 22-page Mark Silvestri job, and I proceed to try and ink as much as I can in one day. About five pages. I don’t even care what it looks like at this point. He needs it done; it’s done. Then I’m exhausted and I need to get to sleep. So, the next morning Kyle has inked the entire rest of the book AND a 22-page Butch Guice New Mutant layout job. So, Kyle inked, what is it? 39 pages that night.

Stroud: Holy Moses!

JR: So, when they say, “You couldn’t do it. Nobody could do it all in one day.” Well… Then once I went over to Tony DeZuniga’s sweat shop…Tony is a very lovely guy, but it was a sweat shop, when he rented two floors, like a condo or something on Madison Avenue, and he and his wife Mary lived upstairs, (chuckle) and everybody else was chained downstairs. There was Alfredo Arcala, a certifiable genius also, would sit there and draw at the table and he had a cot to sleep in when it was too much and I think there was a box or something. One day I think they did a 25-page John Buscema Conan job in one day, because Tony was doing Conan and Alfredo is doing the bad guy and someone else is doing these guys. Now that example was a group of people, but yeah, jobs can get turned out if that’s the necessity.

Stroud: And here I thought it was always impressive when you’d hear the legends about Kirby cranking out five pages a day. That puts it all to shame.

JR: Well, no, no. I mean, it’s Kirby. It’s Kirby when it’s done, right? (Chuckle.)

Stroud: True.

Black Panther (1977) #12, cover penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: Anybody can draw five pages, but it’s Kirby. He didn’t suck. And you know, that is a barrier that they talk about in comic books. You know how you break the sound barrier or the four-minute mile or whatever? If you can produce a comic book a week, and have it at a good, professional level, you have broken the Kirby barrier. So, when Frank Miller laid out the Daredevil mini-series that I inked, Frank did one of those a week, but they were layouts and not full pencils the way the Daredevil books were. Consequently, I wasn’t quite sure what do with this stuff because then…maybe then, but definitely now and for the last ten or fifteen years, my favorite inker in the business is Klaus Janson. Klaus is just so unpredictable and so spontaneous that I thought Klaus and Frank were the perfect combo. It couldn’t be done better. I was happy to get the Wolverine series to ink, but I just felt totally inadequate. I think it’s something as if someone asked, “Angelina Jolie is separated from Brad; you wanna sleep with her?” I’d say, “I gotta follow Brad Pitt? Really, I’m not sure I care who I’m following. I get that woman? Yeah, I’ll try.”

So, I got to do Frank’s Wolverine, but if I remember correctly the first issue took eight weeks to do, which is a lot slower than I was in those days. Then the second issue took six weeks and the third issue took four weeks and then the last one took something like 2-1/2 or 3 because I’d figured it out by that point. I was still really trying to figure out what to do, so if you look at the Daredevil's from that period in comparison to the Wolverine’s, they don’t have a lot of similarity because Frank laid out one and penciled the other. Mind you, for decades; I don’t remember if Wolverine was ’80 or ’82 or something, for decades people would compliment me on the thing and I would politely say, “Thank you,” but I felt totally and utterly inadequate and I thought it was a very poor job on my part and I was embarrassed. Then a couple of years ago I decided to actually look at it again just to see what it was all about and now I can look at it and think, “It’s not bad.” I’m no longer completely devastated by not being Klaus Janson on the job. I thought it had its moments.

Stroud: Absolutely.

Wolverine (1982) #1, cover penciled by Frank Miller and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: There’s a splash, like a full-page head…oh, by the way, for everybody; and most people don’t know, if you look at the face of Wolverine on the cover of #1, he’s based after Jack Nicholson. He’s got this big shit-eating grin on him, and then if you look at him for the rest of the series, especially the very first splash page, he’s based on Clint Eastwood, because I need somebody real in my head to make it make sense for me, not just be a bunch of features, but I have a person I can visualize. When he grinned, he looked like Jack Nicholson to me. I don’t honestly remember if Frank told me that or not, but that’s definitely who he is on the first cover. But then Frank sent me a “The Films of Clint Eastwood,” book with directions to specifically look at the photos of “The Eiger Sanction,” because the Wolverine series starts with Wolverine climbing up a mountain, which is what “The Eiger Sanction” has as a part of its plot. He said, “Really emphasize the crags in the face.” So that’s what that was all about.

Stroud: You were following a pretty well-established tradition there. It was only within the last few years I discovered that Gil Kane’s Green Lantern was based on Paul Newman. I had no idea.

JR: (Chuckle.) I didn’t until this very second, as a matter of fact. I knew that Captain Marvel is based on Fred MacMurray.

Stroud: Yes.

JR: And Bugs Bunny is based on Clark Gable.

Stroud: That’s a new one on me.

JR: In “It Happened One Night,” when they’re hitchhiking, at one point Clark grabbed a carrot and he starts chewing on it, and Clark was known for having big old ears and that was the inspiration.

Stroud: (Laughter.) I love it. And your explanation to being able to relate a character to someone makes a whole lot of sense.

Batman (1940) #424, cover penciled by Mark Bright and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: Yeah. I don’t necessarily have to ask the penciler who they had in mind, and maybe they didn’t, but I take an acting class. I did before I got to Hollywood and now I still do, and when I do a monologue, I don’t just speak the words I say the intention; I ask, “What’s it all about? What are we doing here? What do I want? What do I want from you? How am I getting it? Who are you, anyway?” That makes the words come out in a completely other way, so deciding that Elektra looks like Jennifer Garner gets it to make sense to me. Actually, who I always thought Elektra looked like when I did her was a beautiful actress named Barbara Carrera. When I did the X-Men with [Dave] Cockrum, every one of them related to somebody I knew. Kitty Pryde looked like my teenaged niece; I’m the height and build of Wolverine…I mean Wolverine’s supposed to be 5’4” and everybody seems to ignore that fact in the movies. Colossus; my brother’s Russian, and he has dark hair like Colossus. I had a good family friend who’s a black woman who liked to dress up as Storm with a white wig, so that one wasn’t tough.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: My family comes from Germany, and there was Kurt and Xavier…I think by that point I was fairly bald, but I don’t remember. Right now, I look very much like Vin Diesel. I’m just like a short, bald, wide-nosed guy.

Stroud: I saw your picture at your mySpace page. I don’t know how recent it is, but it gave me a bit of a notion.

JR: It’s recent enough. I look like that or Dr. Bernie Siegel, depending on what your orientation is, or reference. Or actually when I was in acting class and we were supposed to make believe we were talking to an agent, and I said, “I look like Alan Arkin.” A young Alan Arkin. I do.

Stroud: It’s interesting, Joe. You’re the second creator I’ve spoken to that has an acting background, too. Frank Springer said that for years he’s been doing local theater.

JR: I didn’t know that about Frank.

Captain America (1968) #250, cover penciled by John Byrne and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: He also said it gave him a wonderful perspective on doing scenes and so forth for his comic work and it does seem like a natural complement.

JR: Actually, comic books are lousy with people who want to be in show business or to be directors or movie makers. Kevin Maguire is in an improv comedy group and I know he wants to direct films. Actually, I had this kid assistant who was 17 years old, his name is Kevin Van Hook, and Kevin Vincent became the editor at Valiant Comics and we lost track for a whole bunch of years and I found him on the internet and asked, “What are you doing?” “Well, I got a studio.” “Really? What do you draw?” “Cartoons.” “What kind of cartoons?” “Well, I’m actually the Vice President of Film Roman. We do The Simpson’s.” “Okay.”

Then as it turns out Kevin also had a contract to write and direct live action movies for the Sci-Fi Channel. I think it’s a five-movie contract deal. I don’t know how many he’s done. So, Kevin’s a guy who just kind of left comic books and found himself making the movies that most comic book people wish to make. Even Neal Adams has tried to get directing gigs, but…what can I say here that won’t get me sued? If I say that Neal’s particular view of how it should go did not necessarily jive with the people with the money, maybe. They didn’t want him to direct the stuff he wanted to do. But believe me, you ask enough people and, well, Del Close used to write comics for First Comics and he was a famous comedy and theatrical coach from Second City, and John Ostrander, I think, was an associate who learned a lot from him there. You’ll find that lots and lots of creative types need another venue; another outlet. If they draw, they’ve got to play the guitar at night. If they write all day they’ve got to go paint pictures. Even people like Klaus, who does a magnificent job with the black and white stuff; he tells me that he does abstract painting which nobody gets to see, which I guess is his way of getting that creative urge out without being stuck with representationalism.

Stroud: Ah, okay.

JR: With me, I’m home all day, alone, because if there’s anybody around I start telling stories, like I’m telling you, and never get any work done. Then I’ve got to go to acting class and that means I’ve got to get out of the house and talk to other people and access another part of my brain and my emotional life that I ordinarily don’t get to and have to collaborate. And even though I’m a collaborator in comic books, I can do it alone, thank you very much.

Cloak and Dagger (1990) #14, cover penciled by Rick Leonardi and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: Right. It is a very solitary exercise after all is said and done, and it’s been remarkable, the examples of your work I’ve seen, you seem to have an amazing ability to adapt to the penciler. Some of the things I saw made me think, “Gosh, that doesn’t look a thing like what I just looked at.” Case in point: When you did that work over Carmine’s pencils for that famous Batman and Robin one that Murphy Anderson did originally. It looked to me like Murph.

JR: That’s easier only because I have a very firm guide to follow, but Dick Giordano is the one who taught me how to ink when I was a kid, and Dick very much believed in giving the penciler the respect they’re due. If Dick were inking a Neal Adams job, he would try to be more representational and more subtle about it. If he got a Mike Sekowsky job on Wonder Woman, then he would ink it more like a fashion illustration. Big, fat, bold. Chop, chop, chop. And that would absolutely decimate a Neal Adams piece. Or if he got a Gil Kane, he didn’t ink Gil Kane like Neal Adams, so I thought that was the way to do it, because if I were to pencil something; and I did something for Dick to ink. It was a project up at Continuity Associates, the studio he shared with Neal Adams. Dick inked it, and some stuff wasn’t what I wanted to have happen, but he was respectful of it.

Now if most people who are good, good inkers are also good pencilers; good draftsmen; like Murphy Anderson you mentioned earlier, but more often than not, they have this attitude of, “Okay, well your job is done, so now I’m going to make it mine.” And I don’t know if it’s an ego, or a lack of sympathy, or it never occurred to them that they didn’t want me, since they hired me. Now if you get somebody like Kevin Nowlan, you will get a beautiful, beautiful job. Kevin is one of the superior artists around, in my opinion, so you’re happy to get it, but what happens if Frank Frazetta, by some miracle, comes out of retirement and draws a job and they give it to Kevin Nowlan? Well, Kevin will probably be in awe and terribly respectful of it, but you’ll probably get a Kevin Nowlan job when it’s done. So, what would be the point of that? So, when I get some job in front of me; somebody new to me, I make a phone call, and I discuss it with them. “What do you like? What don’t you like? Who have you liked? Who haven’t you liked? What tool do you ink with?” I try to get a sense of what they want.

Conan the Barbarian (1970) #112, cover penciled by John Buscema and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Now sometimes, they don’t know what they want, and sometimes they tell me, “Oh, you’re Joe Rubinstein, you do it any way you want,” and sometimes they say, “Well, just do it like Joe Rubinstein” and that’s a frustration to me, because I don’t know what that means, because I don’t know what they were looking at. Were they looking at my Justice League or my Wolverine or my Superman? So, I very much try and give the respect that I would want because I think of it as a relay race. Somebody else started the direction, and if I respect them, to proceed in that direction. Don’t say” You know, you guys are getting it all wrong. I’m going to run over on this course for awhile.”

Scott Williams told me one day that he thought that was a detriment to my career because the editors didn’t know what they were going to get when they gave me a job. There were a couple of jobs…. Jimmy Palmiotti called me up once and stated, “Hey, this Eric Larson Spider-Man/Wolverine job just came out and they gave you credit for it, but you didn’t ink it.” Yeah, I did, but I just tried to make it like Eric Larson. Another time, my favorite time; Joe Kubert, to me, is maybe the greatest comic book artist who ever lived. Yes, there’s Jack Kirby, and Jack Kirby invented everything and Jack Kirby is the Galactus of comic book pencilers, and there’s no denying (chuckle) that one of those Fantastic Four splashes in your face is 3-D whether they did it or not, but a piece of Joe Kubert artwork…an Enemy Ace with that thick fur around his face, or a Tarzan with those muscles all sinewy takes my breath away. I just love Kubert work more than anybody’s work and when we did this Heroes for Hunger book which was a benefit book for African relief in about 1986, Starlin organized it, and he asked me, “Well, who do you want to ink?” I said, “I’ve always wanted to ink Garcia-Lopez.” So he called up and he said, “Well, we got you somebody, but it’s not Garcia-Lopez.” I said, “Who did you get me?” He said, “Joe Kubert.” I did a Danny Thomas spit take (water shoots out): “What !!!?”

Stroud: (Laughter.) Oh, yeah!

JR: It’s like Rembrandt does a sketch and he hands it to me and says, “Here, kid. Work it up.” So, the pages show up. They were as beautiful as anything you’ve ever seen by Joe Kubert, because they weren’t sketchy pencils like he would do for himself. They were fully realized pencils, as if the page had been reproduced in graphite from ink. And now, I’m in real trouble; because if I trace it, I will lose all the vitality that is Joe Kubert. If I don’t trace it, then I will lose Joe Kubert! How do I do this? So, I inked some of it, after taking a deep breath and probably looking at it for a week. I would sleep and there would come a voice down the hall taunting me, (sotto voce) “Ink me, you wimp!”

Daredevil (1964) #163, cover penciled by Frank Miller and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: So finally, I started to do it, and I didn’t like what I was doing, and the luxury of that particular job was that I didn’t have to have it done right away, so I put it away for several days. Then I looked at a whole ton of Kubert comics and I tried to absorb it, and then I inked the thing, and I was really rather pleased by what I had done. I was so pleased that I wanted the okay of the High Father. I sent copies to Kubert, who is a lovely, lovely guy. Anything you hear about Kubert, he’s a good guy on all levels. I sent him these Xeroxes, waiting for the feather to drop down the well and hear the splash. The splash didn’t come. So finally, I called him up. “Joe, did you get the Xeroxes?” He said, “Yeah.” “What did you think?” He said, “Well, overall I don’t think it turned out badly.” And I was crestfallen. I thought to myself, “Well, I think I have to give up and do something else now with my life.” But I didn’t. And then I told Joe’s sons, Adam and Andy the story, and they said, “Oh, that was like a rave from our father.” “Oh, okay.” I wish I’d known. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Yeah, get the translation.

JR: To settle this all up, Marshall Rogers called me up and he said, “Hey, they got your credits wrong. It was obvious that Joe Kubert inked somebody else on that page, and it says you were the inker.” “I was the inker.” I couldn’t do it, if Joe hadn’t been there, meaning if somebody said, “Ink this entire job like Joe Kubert.” I’d say, “Well, I’ll try, but the fact that he’s there establishes the look I’m after, so that made it easier for me.

Stroud: Oh, mercy, and you must be in an extremely exclusive club. I can’t think of hardly anybody else that’s inked Joe.

JR: I think there are six guys, and I told Joe this, and he couldn’t even remember one of them. The six guys are: Murphy Anderson, Russ Heath, Al Milgrom, and Dick Giordano, me, and kind of, sort of Nestor Redondo, the Filipino on those Bible jobs that he laid out very small.

Stroud: Oh, right, right.

DC Versus Marvel (1997) #1, cover penciled by Dan Jurgens and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: I don’t think he actually penciled them so much as laid them out in miniature, but yeah, they sure look like Joe Kubert.

Stroud: They do for a fact.

JR: That’s why I inked a thing called, “The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.” I did it on and off for twenty years. Mark Grunwald, I don’t know what I’d inked for Mark beforehand, but Mark was a nice guy, and he said, “We’re going to do this thing like an encyclopedia called “The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe,” and why don’t you ink these three pieces and we’ll see how it looks.” I don’t remember what they were, but it seems like one was maybe a Dave Cockrum Nightcrawler piece.

So, I brought it back and he said, “Okay, good. How many of them do you want to ink?” “All of them. Why would I want to give any of this away? Just give it to me.” And he did, but you know what? I think I made his life a much easier place, because as he’s balancing 46 different pencilers for this book, he knows to send it to one inker. One inker who has proven he can alter his approach so that it will still look like Kerry Gammell and Bill Sienkiewicz and Al Milgrom when it’s done, but still have a unifying feeling to it.

As a matter of fact, I was sitting there one day inking four pieces simultaneously, that’s how I work, because I don’t want to worry about wet ink smearing, so I just ink some of this, I go to that one, I go back to this one, I go to this one, and I have like four pieces in front of me and they were possibly a Bill Sienkiewicz, an Al Milgrom, a Frank Miller and a John Buscema. So, I’m inking on this one, I’m inking on that one, and I suddenly get to this realization similar to when you’re reading and you suddenly are aware of the fact that each word is a word instead of a concept. “And_he_went...” And I looked at this and I thought to myself, “How am I doing this? Because the pencilers were sort of the four points of the compass, stylistically.

Defenders (1972) #70, cover penciled by Herb Trimpe and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

On one I’m using a real short, kind of dot-dash stroke. I’m inking this that way. Milgrom used a big, fat thick pencil with a long stroke; I’d pick up a brush. Sienkiewicz is short and kinetic, I used that. So, it’s not like I have so much of a plan as I allow myself to be open for the stimuli to tell me what kind of a stroke happened. Which is, by the way, in comic books nowadays…. a lot of the work is done where a page is mailed to you electronically, and then you print it out in a light blue ink, which is non-reproducible, and then you ink it in the regular manner, and you e- mail it back. Well, I do that. I do that a lot, but I prefer not to, only because I believe there is a physical energy on the page, from the penciler, which I can feel, which is, of course, totally lost in the reproduction. Because, when you feel a penciler’s hand go from left to right, and you can see the dent in the paper, or how his hand sort of smeared it slightly as his hand went across it, I get the understanding that he went left to right. Maybe I should make my stroke left to right. I can see where he used the side of his thumb to smear this in. Maybe I should use a bigger brush or something. So, I just try to be sympathetic and responsive to my stimuli.

Stroud: The results are very telling. As I mentioned before, I could hold two or three of your pieces up and look at them and think, “Gosh, this doesn’t look like the same guy did them.” It’s absolutely astonishing.

JR: I think maybe that’s why a lot of pencilers asked for me over the years. Because they weren’t sure what they were going to get if they got some other guy, but they knew they were going to get them if they got me. So, I think that’s why people wanted me to be on their books over the years.

Stroud: Yeah, in fact Clem Robins commented to me recently, “Can you imagine what your average penciler must feel like…the helplessness, in surrendering your work to someone else to finish?” So, yeah, obviously people feel that they’re safe in your hands.

Evil Dead 2 Revenge Of Dracula (2016) #1, cover penciled by Yvel Guichet and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: The penciler would say, “Oh, God, who are they going to stick me with this time?” And the inker was saying, “Hey, who do I get to play with this time?” And there were some pencilers who…Look; there were a lot of bad inkers. There still are a lot of bad inkers, but that brings up the question: If you have a really good job by John Buscema, not any more, of course, but if you have a really good job by John Buscema and a mediocre job, and Klaus Janson is available for work, do you give him the good Buscema, or do you try to give him that bad job to raise higher because Klaus is inking it?

So maybe what you’ll have, if the inker on the Buscema is okay, maybe you’ll have two pretty good jobs because Klaus can do just so much. Or, do you have a really great job and a really poor job? I personally feel that if you’re hiring really poor pencilers, fire them, firstly. And secondly, don’t waste the best on mediocre. Give the best to the best and get Klaus to ink the Buscema job. But nowadays there’s also the situation where the pencilers are expected to pencil so, so, so tightly, that it doesn’t matter who the inker is any more. Even Eric Larson said in an interview awhile ago, “When it was Rubinstein or Janson or McLeod, you knew it was them. Now you have no idea.”

And I actually ghosted a couple of jobs for Top Cow where they broke up some jobs and they needed some help, so I did two or three or four pages for some books for Top Cow and then the comp copy that was mailed to me came in and I looked through it and I couldn’t remember which were my pages. It’s because they’re not asking for contributions of style, and mind you, I don’t think that’s the inker’s job, but the stuff was so tight that it didn’t much matter. And by the way, when I was doing the Justice League sequels, “I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League,” and “Formerly Known as the Justice League” with McGuire, I was supposed to go with those guys to do The Defenders, and then when the editor saw how tight the pencilers were, he said, “Why do we need this stuff inked?” May he rot in hell…

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Excalibur (1988) #8, cover penciled by Ron Lim and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: He said, “We’ll just reproduce from the pencils.” So, they saved the money of paying me. I think Kevin worked just as hard as he always does and gets more money for it because now they’re going to reproduce from the pencils and so there were several people who came up to me at conventions and said, “Hey, that Defenders stuff is pretty good, but did you try something different with the inking? It didn’t quite look the same.” I said, “I didn’t ink those. Nobody inked those.” So, there was something lacking. Not to say the stuff wasn’t gorgeous because Kevin’s a wonderful artist, but there’s something that a brush and a pen can do that a pencil can’t, and if you’re paying attention, and if you’re sensitive to such things, it will be lacking. Now I think Kevin will never let anybody ink his work. He just wants it to be reproduced in the pencil. I think it’s probably more in Kevin’s case, an economic issue. It’s practically the same amount of time for more money, so why not?

Stroud: Yeah. It does come down to the fact that it is a business after all is said and done.

JR: And of course, they’re trying to get rid of inkers as much as possible. They’re trying to do computer inking and what have you.

Stroud: I was going to ask you about that. Obviously, you’ve got a vested interest, but is computer inking the wave of the future? Is it viable?

JR: Well, there are books being done right now 100% on the computer by the artist. He does the sketch and then scans it in and makes it his own. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but I found him on mySpace. He’s very good and I could be very wrong, but I think he’s doing Iron Man and the guy is great, and there was no need for an inker and maybe there won’t be really soon, but there has always been people who could draw and couldn’t quite figure out how to use ink; there were people who could ink who weren’t really interested in pencils and you’d match them together. Maybe now a person who doesn’t know how to ink just needs to know how to manipulate the computer and that’s it.

Stroud: That does seem to be the way lettering is going these days.

Fantastic Four (1961) #215, cover penciled by Ron Wilson and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: It’s gone. There’s an entire profession of people who lettered, and now, as far as I know, other than some corrections in the production department, there is no hand lettering. The only lettering is by people like John Workman who were letterers who just use the computer. I never understood why you needed to letter first, but I guess it gives you some experience. So, yeah, it went the way of silent film music accompaniment. Its like, “We don’t need that any more.”

Stroud: Despite my use of a computer all the time it seems a bit unfortunate to me, but that’s technology, so what are you going to do?

JR: Well, I think there’s a perception problem that if it’s been done before, it’s not worth it. It’s too old-fashioned. I didn’t work at Marvel or DC for 3 or 4 or 5 years. I may have gotten a back-up gig once in awhile or something, but for the most part they didn’t hire me because my name was too well known. The perception was that “He does that old stuff.” As a matter of fact, I’m doing a book now, Green Arrow / Black Canary for DC; First time in, I think 7 years that I have a series at DC and Mike Norton is the penciler and when Mike worked at another company; he’s a fan of mine back from the Captain America - Byrne days, and I’ve been sending samples to this company of a more contemporary look, as a matter of fact.

I also ghosted some…just a few pages, but I ghosted some of Scott Williams’ pages on the X-Men when he was working with Jim Lee, and nobody ever said anything like, “What are these old-fashioned pages doing in the middle of all of this?” because I was appropriate for the look of the book. I was doing Scott Williams’ style. Not as well, because Scott does his style the best. So, I sent in these samples to this company of the same look that I’d done it and Mike Norton said, “We’ve got to hire him.” “No, no. He does old stuff.” “But look at this work.” But the publisher is still going, “No, he does old stuff.” And that’s the end of it. He wasn’t even going to consider what it really looked like. It’s just the perception.

Stroud: Oh, ridiculous.

Formerly Known as the Justice League (2003) #1, cover penciled by Kevin Maguire and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: Well, thank you, but I mean that’s what editors are like nowadays. Here’s the sad part about it. I did the same thing to the generation before me by accident. I showed up. I wanted to work. That’s all. My dream was to be a comic book artist and I wanted to work with John Buscema and Gil Kane and Curt Swan, and so I start getting work and Klaus and McLeod and Wiachek and Austin. Then Mike Esposito, Frank Giacoia, Joe Giella and all those older guys start finding themselves unemployed. And I’m sure they looked at our stuff and said, “What is this crap? It doesn’t look like Milton Caniff or Dan Barry or Alex Raymond.”

So, I was taking work from them, but I was just trying to get work. That was all. So, I’m doing this stuff and a new bunch of inkers comes around and a new look comes around, and they say, “Well, let’s hire this guy and that guy.” I say, “But I can do that,” and maybe I can and maybe I can’t, but their perception is that, “You’ve been doing it, and I like this new guy.” Editors like to bring in their own people and have a relationship going and what have you. So that’s how all the old dinosaurs, as they keep calling us, left comic books. I know Keith Pollard told me he didn’t retire. Work stopped coming. Lee Weeks who is great; Lee is just wonderful. I don’t think Lee gets much work in comics any more, because his stuff is too illustrative. It doesn’t have the more anime influence to it. Thank God that they do keep hiring Adam Hughes, who’s just a genius and this new guy, Ryan Sook. He is great. I really enjoy his work. Kevin Nowlan is great. I think there’s a guy named SkottieYoung and I saw his work. He’s wonderful. Tommy Lee Edwards. Dougie Braithwaite. Great, great artists, but for the most part I think they’re looking for the Image derived kind of look. The Jim Lee stuff.

Now mind you, David Finch; he’s wonderful, and he’s kind of from that world, so I’m not saying there isn’t room for it, it’s just that…look; why does one actor show up in everything in the world once he becomes a hit? Because they know that this guy got sales and people are paying attention. So that’s who’s hired and they don’t hire the guy who got the attention last year, because that’s last year. That happens in movies and it happens in T.V. and I imagine it happens in literary circles. The big hit novelist of last year has been done already, so let’s find the next one.

G.I. Joe A Real American Hero (1982) #60, cover penciled by Mike Zeck and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: I’m sure you’re right. I’m reminded of when Al Plastino told me that he was taken aback when they said he was getting to the age he should be retiring and he said something like, “What? Have I lost my chops?”

JR: Look what they did to Wayne Boring. In all honesty, Wayne Boring’s work is old-fashioned, as is Al Plastino’s, but if Joe Sinnott said, “I would like to do a book at Marvel Comics,” I bet you Marvel Comics would give him a book because he is who he is, and there is room for more retro looking work and there’s room for modern stuff, too. I don’t think they all have to look the same. Look, editors aren’t necessarily qualified for their job. Some aren’t. Some are. Some are great. Like Archie Goodwin, who was a universally loved, respected, talented man with great taste on what comic books should look like, but there was a woman at Marvel who, when she was editing a book, she looked at something Steve Ditko did, and honest to God, she said, “Oh, Steve Ditko. What did he do before?”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: If I were doing some sort of a modern movie adaptation of the next Star Wars movie if there ever is one, I wouldn’t hire Jack Kirby either. Because I don’t think he would look right for it. But if they did Thor again I don’t think Jack Kirby would be wrong for Thor, or even Iron Man. It’s just, I think, a bunch of people in their 20’s and 30’s and 40’s and 50’s who are trying to figure out what somebody in their teens would think is really cool, and how would you know that because you aren’t in your teens.

Stroud: Exactly. It reminds me of when Bob Haney was doing the writing for the Teen Titans back in the day and the dialogue was just so hokey and then I thought, “Well, wait a minute. At this stage in his life, how could he even guess what the kids were saying?”

Ghost Rider (1973) #50, cover penciled by Bob Budiansky and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: I hope I don’t offend Bob Haney’s descendents here, but he always did superficial, stupid stories where he would do a Brave and the Bold and he’d know that Deadman can enter people’s bodies, so that was the trick, and they were usually pretty dopey stories and he stopped getting work because the stories weren’t very good. But the same sort of holocaust happened to comic book pencilers as writers. I think if you hadn’t had your own T.V. or movie series, Marvel Comics didn’t want to hire you as a writer any more. You had to be J. Michael Straczynski or this guy who wrote some movie here or something there. It was, “Well, these are the real writers. We don’t want these comic book guys any more.”

Stroud: Just tossed out with the bath water.

JR: Well, it’s a business.

Stroud: It often comes down to just that. Joe Giella told me once, “Thank God for Mary Worth.” Here he is in his 80’s still chugging along.

JR: Every now and again I call him up and say, “Are you ever going to take a vacation? Just pencil a week for me to ink. Just a week. That’s all I’m asking.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: That’s the great thing an inker can do over most everybody else in comics. Sure, a writer can call up Frank Miller and say, “Hey, you wanna do a project together?” but Frank can write it without you, thank you very much, and I don’t call Frank any more and say, “Can I ink something of yours?” because Frank can ink it, but I do go up to whoever and say, “I really like your stuff. If you ever need an inker…” And I’ve gotten several jobs from it just because they said, “Oh, I didn’t realize you’d want to ink me,” and I’ll go, “Yeah!” The first time I ever did Superman, I had Curt Swan’s Superman in front of me. Not anybody’s, but Curt Swan’s.

Godzilla (1977) #12, cover penciled by Herb Trimpe and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

So, I was terrified and I did it and Curt was very, very hard to ink because Curt was suggestive in his pencils. They weren’t super tight. There were a lot of tonalities, to you had to turn tone into lines, so there’s a lot of interpretation, which is one of the reasons that Murphy Anderson’s pages never looked like Bob Oksner’s or something like that, but I got to be an infinitesimal part of the history of Superman, because I got to ink Curt Swan’s Superman. Yeah, I guess you could write Batman and say, “I’m now part of the Batman legend,” but when I got a Flash job to ink over Carmine Infantino…and I actually said to the editor, “I’m happy to do it, but why aren’t you getting Murphy?” They said, “Well, we’ll try something different.” So, Murphy was kind of shafted by the ageism there, too. When the thing showed up and I read the story, and it suddenly dawned on me, “This is not a Flash job by Carmine; this is a Barry Allen/Flash job.” This was a flashback job. I got to ink Barry Allen. That’s so cool.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. Clear back to ’56 where it all began.

JR: The recreation you’d referenced earlier. This guy wanted me to ink this piece and I was thrilled, and I was terrified, and I was thrilled and the thing showed up and it was big. Comic book pages are about 17” tall. 11 x 17 and the actual working dimensions are 15 x 10 or something. This thing was 24” tall. So, it was a monster, and it was probably closer to the size it was originally done, because comic book pages have shrunk over the years.

Stroud: Yeah, the old twice-up.

JR: And I opened up the package and there’s this pencil job by Carmine. He drew it, but he really more or less traced the old thing. It’s not like he re-drew it, but that’s great. He’s still got it just the way he wanted it, and inside of the box I pull out another piece of paper, and it’s the same size and drawing by Carmine of the very first Flash cover where you see this kid sitting in the foreground and Barry Allen and the Earth Two Jay Garrick Flash are both racing at him for some reason. I think it was the very first time that Jay Garrick appeared in the Silver Age Flash comics.

Hardcore Station (1998) #1, cover penciled by Jim Starlin and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: Right. “The Flash of Two Worlds.”

JR: And I looked at this thing and thought, “They didn’t tell me about this.” I called up and asked, “So you wanted me to ink this, too?” They said, “No, that’s for Joe Giella to ink. After you’re done with everything, could you just mail both of them to Giella?” And I asked, “Can I ink it and give him the money?”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: It was like, “Wow!”

Stroud: Yeah, when will this ever come up again?

JR: Absolutely. Carmine is old. Speaking of old. (Laughter.)

Stroud: 83, as a matter of fact.

JR: A lady decided to give her husband a comic book convention for his birthday. So my art dealer called up and asked, “You want to go to Vermont for the weekend for this guy’s birthday? They’re not paying you anything, but they’ll put you up and you’ll have a weekend away. “All right. When do we fly up?” He said, “No, they’re going to send a stretch limo for you.” “Okay.” So, who’s in the limo? Carmine Infantino, Joe Giella, his son Frank, Nick Cardy, Irwin Hasen, Julie Schwartz and me.

Stroud: Holy cow!

JR: So, you combine the age of everybody in this thing and it’s 347. And Julie, who is like the classic old curmudgeon…when I got this Superman job, the one I referred to earlier, I had a question about it, so I went into Julie, and I said, “What do you want done here with this?” And Julie, who spoke with a lisp, said, “Oh. They’re giving you thish job to shcrew up.” Okay. Like I’m not nervous enough already. The guy who gave me the job was the production coordinator or whatever. Traffic manager. I said, “What are you giving me this job for if Julie doesn’t want me?” He said, “Julie asked for you.” That’s Julie. Julie would never let you know his feelings. So, we’re in this Tribunal of the Elders in this limo and Julie, seeing who’s in the limo, says to me, “What are you doing here?”

Incredible Hulk (1968) #217, cover penciled by Jim Starlin and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: I was invited, Julie. So, five times that weekend, no exaggeration, five times; Julie walked up to me personally and said, “You know I’m 85 now, right?” “No, Julie, I hadn’t heard.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: And then Julie passed away something like three years later. And you know what? I know so many personal stories, and I just don’t know which ones I can tell to the world. (Laughter.) I have a great Julie story. Julie Schwartz was actually a paid assassin for the Russians…never mind. Julie worked for the mob and was in this bar…never mind. Can I tell this story? Can I not? Okay. I can’t stand it any more. Julie was probably born in 1903. Julie’s from the olden days. Julie must have come from a very orthodox or religious, strict background. He married an Irish Catholic girl.

So, for the next 30 years or however many that Julie was married, Julie would go back to his parent’s house as long as they lived and have Sunday dinner. But he never mentioned the fact that he was married and had a daughter. I’m sure Julie’s parents must have thought he was a fagala (little bird). I guess Julie just didn’t want to break their hearts or be disowned or something. I don’t know. But for 30 years (chuckle) Julie Schwartz had a wife and daughter and doesn’t mention it to the family. That’s a very interesting dynamic to go through your life with. How do you not call up your parents when your baby is born and say, “Hey, you’re grandparents?”

Stroud: Holy cats. That’s astounding.

JR: These are the people who are molding the minds of teenagers.

Justice League International (1987) #25, cover penciled by Kevin Maguire and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: That’s it.

JR: I’ve got lots of these things I could tell you. Plus, I used to date a woman who was a publisher in comics, not Jenette Kahn, if anybody’s asking, though I always thought Jenette was a babe. I’ve got to admit that. Anyway, once I dated her, I started to hear all the stories that I wasn’t privy to. Which parties they would invite the girl to, not me. Which guy she dated who told her about this person in comic books or that sexual peccadillo and stuff. I heard a story about a guy who’d gone to an S&M club and was tied up to this rack and was getting beaten and what have you. (Chuckle.) So the next time I saw the guy it was very difficult not to imagine him tied up. You get this vision and sometimes you just don’t want to know stories about people because you just can’t stop laughing directly into their face. And mind you I don’t judge the guy for having done what he was doing, but then when I began thinking about how often there was a sado-masochistic sort of storyline or subtext to his work, I went, “Oh-h-h-h.”

Stroud: It all becomes clear now. (Chuckle.)

JR: Oh, absolutely. When there’s a mystery and it just doesn’t make sense and then this one little thing is put into place and you go, “Oh, yeah, of course.” Kind of like why J. Edgar Hoover said there was no mob. He’s got a lovely, frilly outfit in the closet.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Neal Adams had a few choice tales about Bob Kanigher he wouldn’t let me tell, either.

JR: Oh, you’ll have to tell me later. I didn’t like Bob Kanigher one bit.

Stroud: You’re in the vast majority.

Kamandi (1972) #59, cover penciled by Jim Starlin and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: When I met him, and he was such a jerk, I wish I was older and told him to just go fuck himself right on the spot. But because, “Oh, my God, it’s Robert Kanigher and I’m just a kid, I’m new in the business, he’s got a reputation.” You know what? I don’t care. We were talking about Degas earlier. When they asked Degas what he thought of the Dreyfuss case, which was this very notorious case about a supposed spy in 19th century France who was sentenced to Devil’s Island, he said, “Well, I think he should be sent to Devil’s Island with all the rest of the dirty Jews.” All right. Well, you’re not getting invited to Passover this year.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: But, I’d still like to hear how you made that composition work, and then I’ll go home. Anyway, I’ve expressed my admiration for Kubert, who was a very big buddy of Kanigher’s and it’s difficult to say, “Hey, Joe. Is he as big a dick as everybody says and how did you do it?”

Stroud: It’s funny. I kind of alluded to that with Neal Adams, telling him it seemed like Joe Kubert was the only one that grooved with him really well. He said, “Well, you’ve got to understand, Joe Kubert doesn’t take shit from anybody.”

JR: So maybe what it is is that you put him in his place and Kanigher was more respectful.

Stroud: Maybe so. Neal told me that Bob was giving him a raft one day and so he followed him into his office, closed the door and said something like, “Tell you what, Bob. How about I draw and you write and never the twain shall meet?” Bob apparently said, “I guess that would be okay.” And I guess they never had a problem again.

JR: Everyone is an amateur psychologist. Supposedly Kanigher cut a swath as a lover through just everywhere, but he struck me as being a very effeminate man, which makes me think he was proving something to everybody. I wasn’t there. I don’t know. But when you run into these incredible egotists, and I’m not even talking about Kanigher now, because I have very little experience with him, but when I run into these unbelievable egotists and they’re so obnoxious I'm thinking, “There’s really a very troubled, scared person in there, but I don’t care.”

Kobra (1976) #6, cover penciled by Mike Nasser and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: “I’m sorry that you were beaten senseless as a child; and no, you can’t stick your axe into me. Get some help.” There was one guy in comics. He was very big, very popular. Obnoxious, obnoxious man. Nobody liked him, ever, and it finally got to the point where very few people were willing to work with him. Just two editors. Now it's gotten to the point that nobody likes to work with him because now he’s not hot any more. And that will happen to you. You get cold, and people let you know.

Stroud: It sounds almost like Mort Weisinger. Jim Shooter told me amazing stories about the crap he endured from that man.

JR: Weisinger was just evil. You could tell that he just got a sexual high from belittling people and there’s just no reason to do it. There really isn’t. I teach life drawing and inking occasionally. Sometimes at comic book conventions I’ll do a 3-hour seminar and I wish I were a better artist than I am a teacher, but people tell me what a great teacher I am because I am sensitive to this: Nobody walks into a classroom to try and be bad. Nobody doesn’t want to get it, and I don’t believe anybody should prove me wrong. “I don’t think you can do this, prove me wrong,” is not the way to teach. “I think you can do this, now let’s see you get there.” You have to instill a sense of pride and confidence.

So, I don’t think there’s any reason ever to make somebody feel badly. It’s one thing to expect professionalism, but there are people who are just so obnoxious. I was an assistant when I was 13, so I’ve never had a corporate job. I’ve never had to be somewhere and deal with the same people day to day, but there are people in comic books who would like to screw with your schedule and shorten your deadlines just because it made their lives an easier place, and they didn’t care one bit if it was a fair thing or not. But you know, we need the job, we need to make a living and in a small industry, word gets out if you are perceived as a troublemaker, so you’ve got to be careful about who you tell to screw off.

Marvel Premiere (1972) #43, cover penciled by Dave Cockrum and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: More than one professional has told me that same thing. “This is a very small pond.” I understand you worked with Woody for awhile. How was he?

JR: I was Wally Wood’s assistant, among others. Woody was a very sweet, child-like, sensitive man. So sensitive that he had to drink himself into oblivion to not feel. I didn’t know Woody in his really active drinking years, but even though my work doesn’t really resemble Woody’s stylistically, a great deal of what I know came from him gently pointing out what was going on in my work, speaking of the deep end of the pool, Woody once gave me this piece and said, “Ink the background.” “But…but…but, how do you do that?” He said, “Ink it busy.”

So, I got out my tools and inked it careful and precise and beautiful and accurate and I showed it to him with pride and he said, “All the lines connect up.” “Yeah!” “Don’t do that again.” I understood what he meant, because for something to look real, it’s not about an architectural drafting of a building or a catalog drawing of a knife or a car or something, it’s about “How do you make them look real?” How do you make this line loose and sloppy and wiggly, and how do you suggest this and that and the other thing? Then you start looking at Woody’s work, and you say, “Okay, here’s where he left that line out here and where he left this.” With the editors now…I was showing my samples to a very prominent inker in comics, and I didn’t tell him who I was. It was at a convention. He started to point out, “Well, this line is a little sloppy. This one is shorter than the one next to it. See this one? You should have used the French Curve there.” And I thought, “God. This is everything I hate about contemporary inking that he’s talking about.” And I didn’t much respect the guy’s work anyway, but I knew he was getting work, and I just wanted to see what he thought about why I wasn’t getting it. Then when he found out who I was, he said, “Oh, I can’t do what you did there. Can you look at my work?”

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

Marvel Team-Up (1972) #103, cover penciled by Jerry Bingham and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: I said, “No.” “That’s not fair.” “It’s not about fair.” The reason I wouldn’t do it is because we had very little common ground about what I was wanting to do compared to what he was doing. It’s as if a Republican and an Anarchist were discussing how they might form a committee together. So, contemporary inkers are trying to make…yes, there are exceptions and I’m not saying Scott Williams is one of them even though he’s contemporary, but there’s a lot of people who have made the line their god. “How do I get this line to be just right?” And if you look at the people I admire; Joe Kubert and Alex Raymond and Frank Springer and Dick Giordano and John Prentice, Hal Foster, Jim Holdaway and a million other guys, it’s never about the line. The y didn’t say, “Oh, God, I hope I can get this line from point A to point B without any variation.” It’s the difference between John Singer Sargent’s paintings…all you comic book geeks will have to look him up now, and Ingres. Magnificent draftsmen, both of them. They couldn’t get better at what they were doing.

Some people think Sargent was the greatest portraitist of all time. With Sargent the paint flew on. It had a life of its own. It had personality. It had rough patches and smooth patches and elegance. Ingres; his paintings look like they are on porcelain. Everything is smooth. There is no artist’s hand available. There are no little brush strokes. There is no little scrubby area. It is just a magnificent lacquered vase of a painting. I’d rather be Sargent. I would rather be Joe Kubert than the guy who wants to suck out all the little variations in it. Now, that’s not what they’re buying nowadays. You’ve got to be realistic. Do you want to work or not? Well, lucky for me, my former assistant editor on Marvel Universe and Formerly Known as the Justice League called up and said, “We’re changing the look of the Green Arrow book. We’re keeping the same penciler, but we want a whole other kind of a rawness to it. Do you want it?” “Yeah.” When Richard Dreyfuss did the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus” and it starts out when he was a young man and then it goes to when he’s in his 60’s. When they made him a young man they gave him a toupee and probably some tightening up of his neck and lines and added more color to his skin. He said, “When they made me an old man they just took off my toupee.”

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

Master of Kung Fu (1974) #76, cover penciled by Mike Zeck and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: So, with me, I wasn’t trying to be raw. I just wasn’t trying to be smooth, that’s all. So, my not trying to be smooth apparently is raw nowadays. That’s what you’re looking for. I suspect the editors might feel the same way about Kevin Nowlan. With Kevin the physical line is not such a big deal, but Kevin is such an excellent draftsman. I’m looking at a Batman Confidential cover that Kevin inked over Garcia-Lopez, and Garcia-Lopez is considered the artist’s artist. Even people like John Byrne acknowledge that they can’t approach the drafting skills of a Garcia-Lopez. I’m not making this up. John said something to that effect, as rare as that might be. And Kevin just doesn’t care about the line, he cares about the effect. That’s what I’m after. I don’t want to spend my life polishing and polishing and polishing and defining and polishing that one stroke. I want you to see Batman coming at your face. As a matter of fact, I did a job (chuckle) that no one has ever seen because I would have to bring this from house to house and show it to people. It was for the American Bible Society and it was a respectful re-telling of the crucifixion story as drawn by Rick Leonardi. I got these eleven pages in front of me and I tried to ink them the way I felt they should be inked and as I would start the line, I would think, “But they’re not buying this. They’re buying Scott Williams and Matt Banning and Norm Rapmond and all these people.” And I would lose faith, ironically enough about a job with this subject matter.

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

JR: And I’d start and again I’d say, “They’re not buying this.” I haven’t gotten work for a long time in comic books because I’m perceived as old-fashioned and I’m about to do this job. It was a day of this and finally I said, “You know what? I have to do this job the way I believe it should be done, and if they hate it, they hate it, but if they hate it, I can defend it. And if they hate it and I did it the wrong way, then I have nothing to defend.” So I inked this job and I think it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I really think this is one of the high points of my career as far as being faithful to the intentions of the pencils and stylistically, because it’s a crucifixion job.

Ms. Marvel (1977) #21, cover penciled by Dave Cockrum and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

So, my line is jagged, and it’s painful. What else are you going to do on the crucifixion? By the way, in my mind what I did was, “I’m going to ink this job like Klaus Janson, but with no Klaus Janson in front of me. I let my memory of what Klaus looks like dictate how the ink came out.” So ultimately it was published in a thing called “The Unforgiven” from the American Bible Society. It got very, very little distribution. You can see it in my member’s gallery at www.ComicArtFans.com. I would like to ink Rick again and every now and again I send copies of the job out as a sample of what I can do. If David Finch had drawn this job I would not have inked it the same way because it didn’t start the same way, but hopefully David would have been sensitive enough to the subject matter to give it a line and a personality that that job deserves. Not all actors are created equal, and not all parts are the same, so if they were doing a new casting of Cleopatra, Rosie O’Donnell would do as good a job as she could, but she just wouldn’t have been right for it. By the same token, not every penciler should draw every job and depending upon which era of Jack Kirby, the early 60’s, for example, I think he’d have done an incredible crucifixion job. By the last part of his career, when he was so abstract, I don’t think that would have been right.

Stroud: I can see that. I’ve noticed you do quite a bit of fine art, using oils and pastels and charcoals and so forth. Do you have a favorite medium for that kind of work?

JR: It depends upon the intention, like anything else. I have a gallery at a site called redbubble.com, which show my portraits for the most part. I think of myself primarily as a draftsman, not a painter. To me, there’s nothing more important than drawing, even though everybody seems to go everywhere else with it, drawing is the only thing that holds it all together. So obviously the mediums that you can draw directly in are charcoal and graphite and pastels, so those are the ones I tend to lean to. When I do oils I try to be a little less draftsman-like in those. I want the paint to have a personality, like we were talking about the crucifixion before. It’s not only the subject matter, but how the paint goes down. Rembrandt, certainly the older Rembrandt, painted with very, very thick paint. Rembrandt did a painting of a woman entering a pool of water and she’s wearing a nightshirt and the slabs of paint on it are so thick, but they are long to indicate the smoothness of the thing that she’s wearing. Then he did a painting before or after of a cow in a slaughterhouse hanging dead, upside-down and the paint was so crusty that you felt flesh on this thing. So, it’s not only what you paint, but how you paint. How the paint goes down that communicates. As an artist, you don’t particularly want the public to stop and go, “Look at that paint. Nice paint!”

New Gods (1971) #15, cover penciled by Rich Buckler and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

JR: But you do want it to have some kind of effect, where they’re not even aware of why they’re looking at it, but they’re liking it. If I’m going to paint a little kid, I probably won’t use thick, crusty paint, but I might. But when I use an oil, I want to play the whole range from those thick and imposto places to the thin, thin, thin washy places, and that gives me a range. Recently, I’ve been doing these trading cards or sketch cards for Rittenhouse and a few other places with the X-Men and Marvel and the Fantastic Four, and what Rittenhouse recently did was they send the artists back two blank cards, which are called artist’s proofs. The term makes no sense, because you’re not proofing anything. They’re blank.

The reason Rittenhouse does it, is because they know the artists will make money doing commissions on these blank cards. So, I got two commissions for my two cards and I decided, “I’m gonna learn how to use watercolor.” And I don’t know how to use watercolor except in a very rudimentary way, so I figured well, why not get paid to learn on these things? I enjoyed it, but also because putting up oils is a pain. You’ve got to spread them out, you’ve got to make sure they don’t splatter and you’ve got to clean up afterwards. Watercolors are a lot easier. Then after that I just did a Dr. Strange commission in watercolor and a Tarzan recreation and I figured, “Why not?” I’m learning to do those with watercolor, and there’s going to be some subject matter which are better for pastel and some are better for watercolor, but being an inker, and being part of a team is a great thing. But if I couldn’t do it all by myself, I think I would wither away and die. I need the artwork that starts with me and ends with me. I got an assignment from a comic book art dealer who called me up and said, “I want you to do an illustration of the Alamo.” I couldn’t have been a worse choice for this.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: I have no particular affinity or knowledge of that subject matter or the West, or horses or guns or any other thing like it. Primarily, I’m a portrait guy. So, I sat down and I researched and I lost sleep and I thought about it and I lost sleep and I tried it and I was panicked and I thought about it and I got the thing done and they loved it. I have since done fourteen more of them. You know, cattle drives and dead soldiers and patriots standing there defending the Alamo and they’ve all been done with charcoal and pastels and recently in ink, and they’ve made me grow as an artist because I’m being forced to do a lot of subject matter that I would never have considered. These pieces are about 20 x 30 each. You can see some of those at my MySpace page.

Nth Man (1989) #15, cover penciled by Ron Wagner and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: This is a lot of work.

JR: Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but it made me grow as an artist. Then I got an assignment through my former assistant/student Brett Breeding. He was offered a job, but he thought I would be better for it, and now I’ve been doing portraits and spot illustrations of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Lord of the Flies.”

Stroud: Oh, for books?

JR: They tell me they’re for PowerPoint presentations. So, they are portraits, plus scenes from the books. When I did, for instance, “The Great Gatsby,” I looked at J.C. Linedecker’s illustrations from the 20’s. The Saturday Evening Post covers and all that stuff, because to my mind, that is the 20’s and Gatsby is the 20’s, so why go elsewhere? While I didn’t do an out and out imitation of Linedecker, I did try to get that feeling into it, and then I got more naturalistic illustrations when I did “To Kill a Mockingbird.” When I just did “Lord of the Flies,” I did it, believe it or not, a little bit more like Drew Struzan, the guy who does those Indiana Jones posters and Star Wars posters. It was all children’s portraits and scenes and I thought of when he did the “Adventures in Babysitting” posters and in my mind, I associated him with a modern, youthful look to his work.

I’ll bet if you looked at any these pieces nobody would ever pick up on any of this stuff, but that’s what’s in my head and I need it as an anchor instead of, “Well, draw a face.” Okay, I’m drawing a face, but this guy is the bad guy, or this is Piggy from “Lord of the Flies,” and he’s got to have a sensitivity to him, or in Gatsby they describe someone (not Jay) who is rather elitist and not very likeable, and I thought, “Oh. Thurston Howell III as a young man.”

Stroud: The patrician look.

JR: Yeah, so I’m doing card commissions and I’m doing portraits for regular people. My friend Chris Stamp is the former manager of The Who and he also discovered Jimi Hendrix and had his own label and his brother is Terence Stamp from the Superman movie and “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” He also worked with the Beatles on their T.V. projects like “Magical Mystery Tour.” I’ve got Beatles stories, too, but what did I draw for Chris? What else, but a portrait of a little, fluffy poodle. Maybe it wasn’t a poodle, but a little white-faced thing that looks like Lyle Talbot as the werewolf. You know what? When you’re a commercial artist…I don’t want anyone to hire me to do a very firm architectural rendering of a locomotive, but if I get the gig and it pays enough, I’ll learn how to do that and maybe I’ll become a better artist, because I will have understood what locomotives feel like. That’s the cool part about being an artist, at least this type, and I’m sure it’s true for plenty of the comic book pencilers; they have to draw stuff they never would have drawn and research things to find out how this works.

Stroud: You get stretched in all kinds of different directions. In fact, I think I noticed where you’d done a portrait of Dorothy and Toto, so you’ve done at least two dogs. (Chuckle.)

JR: The very first horses I ever drew were in the Alamo pieces. I’d inked horses before, but never drew them. I have one client for whom I've drawn everyone from the Wizard of Oz except the witch, Glinda and none of the flying monkeys. You know that old joke? “Who would you rather have sex with; Ross Perot or one of the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz?” The answer is, “Do the monkeys have money?”

Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Deluxe Edition (1985) #1, cover penciled by John Byrne and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: I gave my friend the Cowardly Lion portrait and she called me up one day and said, “A friend of mine is here and she wants it.” I said, “Well, okay. It’s yours to give her.” “Yeah, but you have to say it’s okay.” I said, “Who is it?” She told me it was a movie star and gave me the name, which I’m not going to repeat, but her voice is very distinctive. I knew it was her. “Well, yeah, she can have it.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, I’ll do another one for you.” So, I did another one and I did another one for the movie star and the second Cowardly Lion one was better. Then I drew the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and all these other people.

There is a very prominent portrait artist named Everett Raymond Kinstler, and Kinstler was the first artist who ever did Zorro before Toth as he points out to everyone, and also did Hawkman in the 40’s when he was a teenager. I’d been a student of his and there’s an 19th century smoking club, a dark wood place in Gramercy Park in New York City…Gramercy Park is a very posh area, and they have the Arts Club there where artists belong and you have studio space that you have to inherit. Very close to it is The Player’s Club. The Player’s Club is for actors, directors and writers in theater and they have actual Sargent’s on the wall. Ray called and said, “I have a job for you, and it’s to do a portrait for the permanent collection of The Player’s Club if you want to do it.” “Yeah, I want to do it. What is it?” “A portrait of Bert Lahr,” and he didn’t know I’d painted the cowardly lion twice before.

The fee to doing this painting is to get a lifetime guest membership at The Player’s Club, so when I’m in town I can get an overpriced meal there. So, then what I did was contact the Lahr family. I already had Bert’s biography in my library, which I hadn’t read yet, but I bought it for when I had the time. John, his son wrote it when he was 27 years old and now I think he’s in his 60’s. Then it turns out that John’s sister Jane had edited a book with one of the artists I studied with two years earlier and the family gave me access to private family photographs and archives and I went to New York and I looked through the stuff and I got reference and I read the book. I guess some people say, “Here’s a photograph. Paint it,” but I want to know what this man is all about before I do his picture.

Power Man and Iron Fist (1974) #55, cover penciled by Bob Layton and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: I’m sure the quality difference would be immeasurable.

JR: I had a teacher once and we had a screaming fight in front of the entire class because I said it’s important to know who you’re painting and he thought that was utter bullshit and didn’t affect anything of the painting. Then he painted another man I know and if I didn’t know it was that man I wouldn’t have recognized him. So, I win. On top of that, if you look at a painting that Rembrandt did of his first wife, Saskia…actually it’s a drawing of her leaning on her hand with her finger on her cheek and she’s got this hat with this enormous plume in it and I think it was drawn on the day of their betrothal. That man loved that woman. Whoever that man was, loved whoever that woman was in the drawing and it came through. I think if you’re painting your wife, pregnant with your first or even your fifth child that, if you have any soul at all, comes through. So, I believe you can’t know all your clients, you may not necessarily like most of your clients, but at least know enough to understand why they walked into the room and why somebody wants their picture painted.

Stroud: Sure. After all, art in its purest form is an expression. It doesn’t get any more fundamental. By the way, I don’t know if you’re still working on it or not, but I noticed a fascinating project where you’re doing a ceiling mural. How did that come about?

JR: It was the same client who got me the Alamo work. He’s actually the agent for somebody and they have maybe the best private museum of everything. Just name it, it’s there. Sports and rock and roll and animation and X-Files and Star Wars and Desilu. They have a Heisman Trophy there, they have a baseball bat that belonged to Gherig and Ruth and scorebooks from the 1926 World Series. It’s just the best personal collection probably in the world. So, the assignment was to paint all these undersea mountains. Once again, I’m not the guy for this gig, because I don’t do landscapes.

So, I research it and I go to New York and buy up all the books I can find on this thing and make sketches and sit in my back yard with an oil set and do some studies of rocks and mountains and all that and then I go to the museum and I draw this thing out. It’s a curved archway ceiling fifteen and a half feet tall, sixteen foot arc, twenty three feet long and eight feet wide. So, they build a scaffold. I don’t like heights. And I’m having to climb up this thing and it hurts because you’ve got to get on with your knees and I’ve got to wear knee-pads because it’s killing me to drag me up on this thing and I’m drawing this thing and I’m drawing it out and then finally I get to painting.

Punisher (1987) #43, cover penciled by Bill Reinhold and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

I painted about ten feet a day of this thing and I’m swinging my arm as far as I can to cover as much room as I can. After about eleven days I’m ready to die, but it was done. And I’m glad I did it, for sure. It also made me understand that I should have more play when I paint my portraits because I used a palette knife, which is like a little trowel. They come in different sizes and shapes. I tried to use my palette knife 100% of the time because I wanted to get the feeling of rock and crust on this thing and when I would use a brush I always felt like I failed. But after I was done with this project I thought, “You know what? I should figure out how to do this more in my portraits.” Go back to a child-like joy of application. I haven’t had a lot of room to do it, but maybe that would help me. Actually, that one wasn’t tough. I went to a home in Maui on September 10th, 2001 and the next morning I got a phone call from home that the World Trade Center, that you could see outside my window, was bombed. I was supposed to be in Maui for three weeks. I stayed for three and a half months.

Stroud: Holy cow.

JR: I painted a series of seven murals throughout this house on the life of Christ in chronological order as you walk through their compound. The biggest one was twenty-five feet long, fifteen feet wide and the figures were eight and a half feet tall, and the heads were thirteen inches tall, which is much bigger than a human head. So, I’m on my back painting these things from about 9:00 in the morning until it got dark at about 6:00 or so and feeling channeled, by the way, as I’m working on stuff. I’ m going, “That’s a pretty good foot. How did I do that? Where did that come from?” It was based on a painting called “Jesus giving the key of knowledge to man.” So below is Jesus and five or six or seven figures as he presents a key and then up above them are clouds and cherubs and angels rejoicing.

Stroud: So, you had your own Sistine Chapel experience.

Rawhide Kid (1955) #148, cover penciled by Gene Colan and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: And six more. I really wanted to get out of there after three and a half months. I had a life and I wanted to see how it was. The last one was…masonite is that sort of dark brown chip board, and it was a masonite tablet ala Moses, with Moses on his knees, on some rocks as the hand of God comes out and presents him with the tablets if I remember right. That one I got to climb a ladder on and paint it vertically instead of on my back. That one took three and a half days. “Let me out of here!” I mean, I’d like to go back and do more. I haven’t seen them in seven years.

So many of the people who ink that are fine, fine draftsmen, like Jerry Ordway, Kevin Nowlan, Dick Giordano; they tend to impose themselves onto the work. I don’t have a style. I know what I gravitate towards, but I don’t really pencil much, so I don’t really have a style. So, if I’m presented with your pencils, I’m just excited to get into your philosophy, and not make you into me. Fine with me. When I first started to do The Official Hand Book of The Marvel Universe series, Walt Simonson asked that I not ink his pencils directly, but to lightbox them, which means to trace them and then ink them. And I felt kind of insulted. Walt was trying to pacify my feelings. “Oh, no, I just want to ink these later for some portfolio.” But by the end of the run, what Walt told me, and Walt is a universally liked guy, but what he told me was the first time he saw me ink his work he really didn’t like what I did, and he just didn’t want me to screw it up. By the end of the run, when I’d figured out what I was supposed to do, because it takes a minute, he said that he thought I was doing a great job on it and that if he ever had something that needed inking he wouldn’t mind having me do it.

Stroud: Pretty high praise.

JR: Yeah, it is, and I was glad to hear it, but I still suspected that he was telling me a lie at the beginning and he was. But that’s the thing. When I start working with a new penciler, I say, “Look. It’s going to take me about three issues. I’m going to try on the first one, but by the third one maybe I will have gotten rid of all my preconceptions of what it should be and do what it is. Which reminds me of a story.

Rom (1979) #1, cover penciled by Frank Miller and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

I did a Dick Dillin cover. I liked Dick’s work and I liked him on the Justice League and I liked when Dick Giordano would ink Dick Dillin’s work. Then I got this one cover of his to ink early on, and its okay. I think I did a professional job, but it wasn’t right, because I was pushing the square peg into the round hole. I was going to make him be what I thought he should be, instead of what he should have been and if I’d just gotten an issue or two to do…and then he died shortly thereafter. So, decades and decades later, I’m at a painting demonstration at the Art Student’s League by a guy named John Howard Sanden who is a very prominent portrait guy affiliated with Billy Graham and people like that. I think his father was a minister, which is where the connections came from. So, one of my mutual friends there says, “I want you to meet a friend of mine. His uncle used to do comic books.” “Oh, okay.” “This is Paul Dillon.” “Oh, was your uncle Dick Dillin?” “No, my uncle was Alex Raymond.” I said, “Okay, let’s forget about the demo, I want to talk to you.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: So, Paul is a portrait artist and he tells me that his mother and father were the models for Flash and Dale. And Paul doesn’t look much like either Flash or Dale to my mind, but I absolutely believe him. Then it’s pointed out to me that Paul’s sons are Matt and Kevin Dillon. The actors.

Stroud: Ah-h-h-h.

JR: And then I think about Matt Dillon’s face. The long face, the cheekbones, the slim nose. I go, “Ooo! It’s Flash Gordon’s grandkid.” Then years later I get hired to do a very teeny little part on Entourage with Kevin Dillon and I bring up the fact that I know his father and all that. You know what’s funny? I’m in a health club in New York and there’s Matt Dillon. I say, “Oh, hey, hi, Matt. I know your father. It’s really cool that we’re painters and we know each other.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” “And you know the thing about you and Flash Gordon.” Then he stopped and went, “Who are you?”

Secret Society of Super-Villains (1976) #7, cover penciled by Rich Buckler and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: I realized then that after a lifetime of people saying, “Hey! Can I talk to you?” You build a wall and, “I’m not talking to you.” I said, “I’m not a fan, okay? I know your father.”

Stroud: What a great story. Six degrees of separation.

JR: By the way, a holy trinity story; comic book art holy trinity; my drawing teacher when I was twelve or thirteen or fourteen years old was Arthur J. Foster, Hal Foster’s son.

Stroud: Oh, for crying out loud.

JR: I used to correspond with Mr. Foster. Harold. I wanted to study with Arthur J. Foster because he had the comic art connection. He was a lovely, sweet older guy and then he retired. He actually had been groomed to take over the strip when Mr. Foster retired, but he just didn’t want to do it. Then the guy I studied with after that for ten years was a guy named Anthony Polumbo and he studied with Burne Hogarth and if I’m not mistaken in the same class with Williamson and Frazetta. That’s the anecdote. I’m not absolutely sure it’s true, but I know that Mr. Polumbo studied with Hogarth. To which I asked, when he was teaching me anatomy, I said, “Should I go buy Hogarth’s book?” He responded, “God, no. It’s all wrong!”

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

JR: It is. He wrote an entire book and it’s incorrect in so many not even subjective ways. It’s wrong. So that’s sort of my holy trinity story. Oh, and Caniff. I saw Caniff at a convention. I had to go up and shake his hand. It was Milton Caniff, so what are you going to do?

Stroud: Certainly. That would be like breezing by Jerry Robinson.

Silver Surfer (1987) #1 cover penciled by Marshall Rogers and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: I was at a convention once with Toth and Toth was a volatile personality and I was with a young lady at the convention and Toth tried to make a play for her. (Chuckle.) He didn’t care who she was with. He wanted her and he was Alex Toth and he was going to do what he could. I’ve met a lot of my idols and you’ve got to be careful. Sometimes you’ll wish you hadn’t.

Stroud: Yeah, they don’t always live up to what you have in your mind, I’m sure.

JR: Almost never. Joe Kubert did, for sure and Al Williamson. Well, Al Williamson, who is maybe one of the best draftsmen ever; it’s universally told that Al Williamson is a great guy; but never to me. He would say snide stuff to me and I don’t understand why. Speaking of separating the artist from the art, right? So, one day I get a royalty check from Marvel Comics and I look it up and I didn’t ink the comic. Al Williamson did. I found his phone number and called up and said, “I’m returning this check to Marvel, but you should know that it exists and you should look for it, because they just might keep it.” And from that point on, we were very friendly because I think Al had heard stories about me and never experienced me. As a matter of fact, there was talk of me doing a portrait of his wife years ago before he got ill, so that’s how much of a compliment it was. So it’s back to that. If there’s one piece that doesn’t make sense and then it drops in.

Stroud: Right. I guess my only recent similar story was last year when I initiated a correspondence with Steve Ditko for a little while and he wasn’t that interested in talking about comic book stuff.

JR: He actually wrote back?

Stroud: Yeah, believe it or not. I got about a half dozen letters and then I said something wrong and ticked him off and that was it.

JR: Was he ticked off or just didn’t write back?

Star Trek (1980) #9, cover penciled by Dave Cockrum and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: Well, I’d seen where Marvel was now doing these online comics and they were starting with the old classic stuff and I made mention of it to him and asked if he got royalties for it. I wasn’t prying; I just wondered if he was aware and he wrote back and said, “Well, if you’re interested in Marvel’s business practices you ought to ask them if you think you have the right.” I thought, “Uh-oh.” The misunderstanding kind of went from there. I apologized, but that seemed to be the end of it. I guess I screwed that up, but he was nice enough to give me his impressions of being Jerry Robinson’s student and Jerry was happy to get a copy of it.

JR: I refer to Ditko as the J.D. Salinger of comic books. I’ve told this story before, but I may as well. I knew Steve a little bit and I ran into him several times around the Times Square area which I’m told is sort of where he lives, or maybe lived. I don’t know. One day I had done a poster for Marvel of Spider-Man/Peter Parker, half/half. Ron Frenz drew it and I inked and colored it and I saw Steve and I had nothing to lose, apparently. I said, “Hey, Steve. I figured out the secret of drawing Peter Parker.” “Yeah?” “You make him like he’s sort of constipated.” He cracked up.

And for all of you who don’t know what Steve Ditko looks like; last time I saw him, which was quite awhile ago, he’s slim, tallish, but I’m very short so everyone looks tall to me, bald, trim of hair, broad smile, looks like your pharmacist. Glasses; nothing particularly startling about the guy. So, I had missed an issue of Playboy, and unlike most people, who buy Playboy, I buy it for the pictures, because I didn’t even know there were articles. So, I missed an issue of it, and you would find these 3-packs of similar magazines being sold at newsstands. So there the Playboy was in a 3-pack. So, I bought it. And one of the other two magazines was this crappy British thing and as I’m flipping through it, there’s these three black and white comic book pages. I looked at it and thought, “This isn’t bad. Hey! This is good. Hey! This is Steve Ditko!” Or at the very least it was Ditko’s inking. It was an S & M thing, like women tied up and all that and I remembered Clea in the early Dr. Strange issues being tied up with these ball gags in her mouth. “Well, this is interesting.” So, I run into Ditko again, and I said, “Hey Steve, I bought this British magazine with these three pages of an S & M thing and it looked like you did it.” He said, “Nobody can prove that.”

Star Wars (1977) #106, cover penciled by Cynthia Martin and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: So, I didn’t have a lot of room to go on that subject. I used to share studio space up at Continuity Associates with Jack Abel and Jack was also one of Jerry’s (Robinson) students and Jack spoke well of Jerry, too.

Stroud: Stan Goldberg had wonderful things to say about Jerry, too. In fact, didn’t you ink some of Stan’s stuff?

JR: Yeah. There was a character in the 60’s, orthodox Jewish comics called “Mendy and the Golem.” The Golem is a Jewish sort of a Frankenstein that comes around to help people out. There used to be, and probably still is, a third Thursday gathering on Long Island of all the cartoonist’s and friends of cartoonist’s who felt like coming to have a meal and some guy would get up and sing and artwork would be on display and all that and it was called the Burnt Toast Club. God knows why.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. It’s a tribute to Walter Berndt.

JR: Okay. Frank Springer was there, and Creig Flessel who was probably the world’s oldest living comic book guy, and I used to sit at the power table. I only went two or three times as a visitor, but I used to sit at the table with John Buscema, John Romita, Stan Goldberg and Mort Drucker.

Stroud: Oh, wow.

JR: One day I get a phone call from Stan Goldberg who said, “I’m doing this project and I want you to ink it.” Once again, wrong casting. What the hell do I know about that style? And I said, “Okay. Sure. You know my work?” He said, “No.” “Why are you hiring me?” He said, “Because Big John Buscema recommended you. And if it’s good enough for John…” So, I inked the very first issue of the new Mendy and the Golem and then Stan left that project and Ernie Colon took over for the next five issues. It was a very strange company. The writer had a writer’s block and instead of firing him, they would just wait two, three, four months until he got around to writing something again.

Superman (1939) #325, cover penciled by Rich Buckler and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: That is strange.

JR: As a matter of fact, I was trying to ink this thing over work in what I perceived to be an Archie comic style appropriate for what Stan was drawing, but after a short time I thought, “I can’t do this. This is not what I do. I’m going to have to ink it the way I want to,” and as a friend of mine put it, I added bones to people. I sent Stan some of it for his approval and he was very lukewarm about it and I thought, “O-o-okay. Well, I’ve screwed this up, but I’ve got to do it the way I want to do it.” Then when it was all done, Stan made a point of calling me up to just compliment me over and over again about how much he loved what I had done and it was great to hear, because I thought he didn’t like it. So, as they referred to it, it was my action/adventure inking, which is just putting bones in people.

Mort Drucker, who is obviously the best at what he does, is someone I would go and visit and he wasn’t particularly taken with my comic book stuff, but I’d show him my portraits and my paintings and he liked those. There’s a great Mort Drucker story. Mort had a job to do three illustrations for a Bob Hope movie in the 60’s called “Bwana Jim” or something like that. Some sort of jungle themed movie. So, he did them, but they had to be in color and Mort didn’t really know color, so he went down the road to his local illustrator pal and said, “Would you color these for me?” So, the guy did and they were gorgeous and then Mort got another color job to do and he went to the same guy and the guy said, “Mort, don’t you think it’s time you learned how to use color?” And so, Mort has since. Well, the name of the guy who did the coloring on those first three illustrations? Frank Frazetta.

Stroud: Oh, good night.

JR: So, unless they’re destroyed, somewhere out there are examples of Mort Drucker/Frank Frazetta artwork. That wouldn’t be bad finding them.

Stroud: Boy, I guess.

Tarzan (1977) #15, cover penciled by John Buscema and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: So, John Buscema…John was one of the greatest draftsmen to ever hit comic books; I showed him my stuff, because you bring things to show at the Berndt Toast lunch’s, and John was like (New York accent) dis big, like Long Island guy. He was a guy! “Oh, you want 16 pages by Tuesday? Okay, and your car will be ready, too.”

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

JR: Once Jim Shooter hired John to teach a class at Marvel. Anybody that wanted to show up could go and get the words of wisdom from John Buscema, and the only person I actually remember being there beside myself was Lee Weeks. Oh, there was a guy there, a colorist for awhile who painted a project that John drew. Peter Ledger. Peter asked, “John, how do you draw something difficult like Conan resting on his stomach, drinking from a pool?” And John said, “Oh, you know, like this,” and then ask: “John, how do you draw faster?” “Well you know, you draw less lines.” “Okay, John. Now how do you draw Thor’s face looking up?” “Well, you know, you kinda draw these lines and then you connect ‘em up, and it’s Thor!”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: I guess this is what you get with a genius. Mozart said, “I make music as an apple tree makes apples, it just comes out of me.” He also said, “I make music as a sow piddles.” So, I brought my stuff to show John and I brought my portraits and all that and it was a great high for me, because John looked through my portfolio going, “I hate dis guy! Look at dis! I hate dis guy. I hate dis guy!” Then I said, “Do you want to trade some art?” And John traded me something like 60 or 70 of his layout sheets for a pastel portrait, which I was happy to do.

Stroud: Oh, good Lord, I guess.

JR: And then I loaned those sheets to the Joe Kubert School and they tell me they were mailed back and I’ve never seen them since.

Thor (1966) #304, cover penciled by Keith Pollard and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: Heartbreaking.

JR: I’ll give you one even worse. I would solicit pencilers for Marvel Universe to make it interesting for me, because a lot of it was dull; a lot of it was the same guys, so if I could get John Severin or John Bolton or Nestor Redondo that would wake me up and I’d enjoy it. So, I said, “I’m going to get Will Eisner.” So, I make a trip to the School of Visual Arts, which is where he taught, and the day before I had copied one of the Spirit portraits out of one of his books and I inked it in his style, or as close as I could get it to his style. It was to show, “Look, if you draw something for me, I can ink it like you, I won’t just ignore what you penciled.” So, I came in and said, “I’d like you to do this project.” He said, “Well, why would I draw something I didn’t create?” It didn't compute. “Well, I would love to ink you.” “Well, if you want to ink me…” And on the same sheet that I had this portrait on, he drew a ¾ drawing of the Spirit sort of leaning on his elbow.

Stroud: Wow!

JR: Well; I never inked that drawing for sure. Then in the process of moving from one studio to the other I asked my assistant where that drawing was and he lost it and that’s the last of it.

Stroud: Oh, no…

JR: That’s the heartbreaker. I don’t have that idiot assistant any more. I don’t have any idiot assistants any more. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Really a tragedy. What led you to the West Coast, Joe?

JR: My girlfriend wanted to live here and I didn’t want to lose her, so we relocated. It’s warmer here.

Uncanny X-Men (1963) #150, cover penciled by Dave Cockrum and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: I guess that’s kind of the beauty of the way things work now. FedEx goes everywhere.

JR: Right. Prior to that if you wanted to be a comic book artist or an illustrator, you had to live or travel to the tri-state area and that was that. The Filipinos, when Joe Orlando was recruiting and hiring them, would do their artwork on thin, thin, thin paper, roll it into a tube and mail like a 22-page job back from the Philippines because it was the cheapest way they could make this stuff happen. I don’t know for a fact that DC paid them less money than the American artists, but I would imagine on American rates they could afford real postage. And now, of course, with electronics you don’t have to live anywhere near the companies any more and nowadays some inkers never even get the physical pencil artwork in their hands. They e-mail it to an ftp site and download it, print it, ink it and send it back. I imagine that cuts back on FedEx costs and returning artwork costs and so on.

Stroud: It’s a different world. Dick Giordano, your mentor, commented to me that he had to make that commute from Connecticut for awhile. That must have been difficult. He said he’d do work on the train.

JR: I think he worked on the train by writing and editing, but he didn’t do any artwork.

Stroud: I’m sure you’re right.

JR: I just want to make it public right now: Every time I see Dick Giordano I kiss him on the lips. There, it’s out, I’m proud.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: Dick’s an Italian man, and Dick taught me what I know, and he’s a very nice guy and I just kiss him. You know when your father passes away, the art of hugging and kissing fat men usually leaves with them.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Vision and the Scarlet Witch (1982) #2, cover penciled by Rick Leonardi and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: And Dick usually fights me. “No, I gotta kiss you.”

Stroud: Good for you, Joe. How did you guys get acquainted?

JR: I was at a comic book convention. My father, who hated comic books and didn’t want me to go anywhere near them, brought me to my first comic book convention and there was this guy there, my idol at the time, Neal Adams, and I wheedled my way into an invitation to his house for dinner and when I was there he said they’d just opened this new studio called Continuity Associates, and I said, “Can I work there? Mop floors and clean up and stuff?” It was the summer time and they let me and it was a horrible, traumatic experience, which I’m still talking about in therapy today. And then when winter came and school was back in session, I was allowed to come after school and do errands and stuff and when there was an opportunity, I would practice. I would get Xeroxes of Neal’s pencils on some advertising job and I would get Dick’s inks and then I would get a sheet of tracing paper, put it over Neal’s pencils and then imitate Dick’s inks to learn how to use a brush.

I was going to the Art Student’s League at the same time and then Dick eventually started letting me do blacks on his pages and touch up the panel borders, do a little bit of inking here and there. When Russ Heath, who was working there, and would go to lunch I would go and pick up the magic brush; this incredible brush that would render two-page spreads of Tiger tanks with the rendering on the tread and I’d pick it up and I’d dip it in ink and it was like using a turd. “Oh, I get it. It’s not the brush, it’s the guy.”

I would work in Jack Abel’s room and he’d start letting me do some assistant work and then Woody rented space there and that’s how I started to work for Woody. I went to the High School of Art and Design which was a vocational art high school and I don’t think I had money, but I know I didn’t want to continue studying, I just wanted to work. There was a new guy there named Mike Nasser who eventually became Mike Netzer (chuckle) and I asked if I could work on his samples and I did and he liked what he saw and he had just gotten his first job, appropriately titled “Tales of the Great Disaster” in the back of Kamandi and he brought my samples up and Gerry Conway hired me for what I found out was the cheapest rate anybody was being paid in the industry: $20.00 a page.

Believe me, if it sounds cheap now, it really was cheap then, but only by a little, because I found out the rates people were usually hired at was $23.00 a page. I wasn’t that fast and I figured at this pay rate, the most I’ll ever make in my life is $10,000.00 a year. I wasn’t anticipating raises. So, then I started to freelance and I got some jobs and then I couldn’t get any more jobs. I went to Israel for a visit, which is where I’m from. When I came back I thought maybe I could help people like Bob McLeod or Klaus Janson meet deadlines. If I remember right the first day when I was looking for work I got three jobs. One was from a penciler named Jim James who hired me to ink something that I don’t know if it ever got published and I got the Kamandi thing and something else I don’t remember now. The way I got the DC job was that Sol Harrison, who I hope is sharing a room with Mort Weisinger, by the way, said, “Okay, I’ll give him the work, but (speaking to Dick) only if you watch him.” So, I did the job and I brought it to Dick and he said, “Okay.” That was “watching me.”

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

JR: I managed to get work from then on. I was the youngest guy in comic books for awhile. I was 17 and Trevor Von Eeden was penciling Black Lightning. I think he was 16. I was lobbying for us to do something together so that we would be the youngest team in comic books, but that didn’t happen until I was the ripe old age of 20, I think. I remember Joe Orlando looking at my latest job and he went, “I remember when Al Williamson used to come into the EC Comics offices and he was 21 and we couldn’t believe how young he was.” The nice thing about being an inker is that you’re allowed to not know what you’re doing for the first two years because you can hide behind the pencils. Pencilers can’t hide anywhere, but if you get tight enough pencils and you just follow them without actually falling out of your chair, people will think you’re not bad. So I was working at DC for two years, but I was really champing at the bit to ink the Buscema’s and Colan and Don Heck and I don’t remember who else, but the guys who were only at Marvel that you couldn’t get at DC. Then Jim Starlin, who’s done this to several people, came up to me and said, “I’m doing this annual. Do you want to ink it?” “Yeah!”

Wolverine (1982) #2, cover penciled by Frank Miller and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

JR: He had started on parts of it, but I guess he said, “I don’t like inking and I’ve got other things to do with my day.” So that was the Avengers Annual, along with its immediate sequel, the Marvel Two-in-One Annual and they got noticed. I remember John Beatty told me, I’m not sure how much younger John is than me, but he said he bought the comic book and thought, “Hey, who’s this guy?!” The thing is, I wanted to work on good pencilers. I just wanted to do Conan. Not because I have such an affinity for Conan, but because it was John Buscema and Frank Miller was this kid from Vermont who was starving who I used to buy lunches for when he would come to the studio to show his latest stuff, so I guess that’s why Frank got me to ink the first Daredevil cover he drew simply because he knew that I would try. Then they ask, “You want to do a Wolverine mini-series?” “Sure. I love Frank’s work now.” I never thought, “Oh, this is the first one ever. It’s historic. The pages will be worth $5,000.00 each in 30 years, if you can find them.” I guess it’s like movie and T.V. stars have said: “We did a job. We did the best we could and then somebody paid attention to it.” And now it’s part of people’s fantasy, folklore, childhood, history and so forth and they really want to know what it was like inking the first Wolverine mini-series. “Like a job.”

Stroud: Exactly. I remember Frank Springer saying, “Hey, I was happy to have the work. I needed to feed my kids, buy my house, and buy my car.”

JR: Someone asked Simonson, “Were you intimidated following Kirby?” He said, “Well, pretty much everything at Marvel in those days was following Kirby.” He did The Hulk, The Avengers, Captain America. It was all following Kirby. He did his job.

Stroud: That’s true.

JR: Personally, I think if you’re going to do a character that Kirby invented, go look at Kirby. After that, it got diluted. Now, maybe I’m being reactionary, but if you’re going to do Galactus, do Kirby’s.

Stroud: That’s right.

JR: I was thinking, “I am inking John Buscema, can I do this justice?” When I’m inking Gene Colan: “Oh, my God. Gene Colan. Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Dracula.” Tom Palmer was very much one of my influences, so now there’s that never-ending debate: Am I going to do it like Palmer, because I can’t do it as well as Palmer? Am I going to not do it like Palmer? Well then it won’t look like what I think it should look like. Am I doing Palmer even though I intended not to do Palmer? And sometimes you would find its like when I did Byrne’s Captain America. I thought, “Well, there’s a lovely, decorative quality to what Terry Austin was doing on the X-Men, but he didn't have any nostalgia to me then, like it does to plenty of people now. It wasn’t what I grew up on, it’s what I’ve seen going through the offices. “Oh, this is kind of nice. Yeah, I like this,” but I wasn’t saying, “Oh, God-oh-God-oh-God, are they going to judge me against Terry?”

Now I did do that with Klaus, but as I said Klaus almost always blew me away in what he did. I remember when I would get the latest issue of Daredevil I would look at it two ways, and I had to be very disciplined about it. I read the story, because I wanted to get the impact; then I went back and looked at the artwork, because if I looked at the artwork then I would lose the train of the story.

So, when I did Byrne’s Captain America… I realized that Terry wasn’t inking John the way I would do it. He was interpreting a whole other set of stuff even though I’m sure John was more or less drawing them the same way. “Okay. I feel no obligation to give it an X-Men look, because I’m just going to respond to the pencils in front of me.” And all these years later people keep referring to it as a true highlight in my career, and I don’t disagree, but my frustration is I wish they would hire me to do more John because I think I’m a better inker now, and you’d get a better job. But, John tends to ink his own work nowadays. If you go to WWW.ComicArtFans.com it’s got tons of original artwork that people have bought for their own galleries, and a big, big John Byrne fan is the inker Tim Townsend who is known primarily for his X-Men stuff. Tim hired me to ink a Captain America commission that he had John drew and I loved it. I loved doing it; I loved the nostalgia of it. I think John and I look very good together, and Tim was really pleased by the thing. I think it’s better than my Cap stuff. There’s a lot of themes on this website like drawings of Batman or Catwoman and this one guy has Chameleon Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes turning into various things. A collector named Michael Finn has his theme called “One Minute Later…”

Stroud: I’ve seen some of those. They’re very interesting.

JR: The idea is “What happens one minute after this cover?” Like Batman punches the Joker and one minute later the Joker has risen and blasts him or vice versa. “What would have happened?” Michael commissioned Byrne to draw a Captain America cover, which is the one where Baron Blood, I think it’s #254, but Baron Blood is standing over Cap and is about to kill him. So what Byrne drew was the tables were turned and now Cap has Baron Blood pinned with his legs as he’s picked up the shield and is about to decapitate him. And that was great. It was great inking it and everybody reacted to the fact that they hadn’t seen a new Byrne/Rubinstein cover in 25 years.

Stroud: Wonderful!

JR: I also do recreations where some kid might have had his grandmother buy him his first X-Men comic or Captain America, etc. And he always loved that cover, and now its 30 years later and he’s got a little bit of money and he contacts me or Frank or John or anybody, because they can’t buy the actual original art. They’re crazy expensive, even if you can find them. So, they commission me or whoever to do recreations of the cover. One day it occurred to me what we are selling: Its joy. What good does a piece of artwork do in a portfolio or even on a wall unless you look at it and you recall a fond memory or some friend comes over and you say, “Look what I've got!” You get joy from, “Look at this! It’s Daredevil!” And that’s what we do. As a matter of fact, Tim sent me an e-mail, and he said, “I just bought a Captain America cover for the equivalent of a middle-sized car.” He said, “I think you’ll be interested in it.” So, the cover starts to scan down from the top of my monitor. So, I start to see the Captain America logo, and it keeps going down and I’m waiting for a Kirby cover to pop up eventually. Then it gets low enough where I realize it’s one of mine with Byrne. So that’s the kind of money that original art, some original art, goes for nowadays and it’s rather prohibitive for most people to afford that, but it’s not as bad if you get somebody to recreate it for you.

X-Factor (1986) #1, cover penciled by Walt Simonson and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: Yeah, and as you said, that’s an opportunity to buy back a memory and that’s absolutely priceless. I take it you enjoy doing them.

JR: Yeah. Very often when I’m re-doing them I’ll think, “Who is this schmuck inker? What is he thinking? I would change this.” But I don’t, because nobody asks me for the new and improved version. “I wouldn’t have done it that way now, but that’s not what they’re asking for.”

Stroud: If I’m reading you correctly it sounds like rather than having favorite genres you have favorite collaborators.

JR: Yeah, but I like superheroes, a lot. I even like love stories and romantic stuff because you get to do pretty girls. I’m not particularly versed in Westerns or war stories and I hate doing metal. I don’t want to do a robot. I don’t want to do the Transformers and Rom doesn’t particularly turn me on either, but if they called up and said, “Ditko did a Rom, do you want it?” I’d take it. But I like superheroes and I like pretty girls. I don’t mind mystery jobs and jungle jobs because I like doing organic things like trees and rocks and boulders, but if I have to do airplanes or spaceships it bores the crap out of me.

Stroud: Ah, back to that straight-line precision stuff.

JR: Yeah. With a muscle you have a certain amount of leeway in how it goes and where it goes, but if the fuselage is too much this or not enough that, it’s wrong, and I’d rather not be restricted that way.

Stroud: I can understand. That would not cause the creative juices to flow much.

X-Men vs Avengers (1987) #3, cover penciled by Marc Silvestri and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: Mind you, Dave Simons - who used to do the Ghost Rider book - is a motorcycle enthusiast and he loved doing Ghost Rider because of the motorcycle, so good for him. It’s just not my thing. I like people. I like the look of people and the way clothing falls and how hair looks and I like pretty girls and whatever it takes.

Stroud: Joe, you’ve drawn pretty much every major character. I can’t think of a single one you haven’t drawn. Do they translate well to the big screen?

JR: Well, I’ll answer your question, but who cares?

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: I mean, what do I know? Just because I do comic books doesn’t mean I have taste. I think…I enjoyed the Spider-Man movies. I enjoyed the first more than the last, but the last with that Sandman effect was wonderful. I liked Daredevil. I hear lots of people didn’t. I liked Daredevil a lot. I liked both Hulk movies, but there’s no denying the last one was wonderful. Now that they have the technology and people don’t look like they’re wearing cloth outfits…I looked at the Batman movie and Christian Bale is a wonderful, wonderful actor, but I think to myself, “You think people aren’t going to identify you from your teeth?”

Stroud: (Chuckle.) It does seem a bit absurd.

JR: Somehow Smallville has not…I don’t know if they ever will. No one is dealing with the fact that when Clark puts on the costume nobody knows it’s Clark and that never made any sense. It just didn’t. But you know what’s funny? When I inked my first Superman with Curt, I inked Superman and then I inked Clark and I thought, “Wait a second. This is not the same face.” He was drawing a different face for Clark. It’s not that he took off the glasses. He was absolutely doing something different when he drew Clark. Then the writers did a story that was trying to reconcile this, because as the kids grew up, became adults and they became writers they said, “This is stupid. It makes no sense.” They wrote this story where Kal-El, unbeknownst to himself, was sending out a hypnotic suggestion to everybody who looked at him so he wouldn’t look like Clark when they saw him. This was a real story, not a “What if?” So, what can you do?

Daredevil (1964) #158, cover penciled by Frank Miller and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: That’s funny. It reminds me of something I read somewhere that was very similar. It was a retro explanation where Jay Garrick, who didn’t wear any sort of mask when he was the Flash, supposedly vibrated his features when he was in costume so that they couldn’t identify him.

JR: What are you going to do? I just saw the Spirit movie, and I can’t tell how good a movie it is because I was just too fascinated with watching Frank’s pictures come to life. “Oh, look, it’s a Frank Miller shot. It’s a water tower in silhouette.” So I’m not the audience for it. On top of that, I’m usually the only guy laughing at scenes in comic book movies. It’s like in the Daredevil movie Matt’s father has to fight this guy and his name is Battlin' Romita, or something. And the character says, “Yeah, you know that Romita’s a scumbag!” I’m laughing, because I get it.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) I know what you mean. I guess I’m officially a geek because the new animated Batman, Brave and the Bold that just started showing on Friday nights a few weeks ago had one episode where the opening scene showed a couple of kids watching a television and the screen flashes a quick advertisement that made me do a double take. “Did I really see that?” I contacted my best friend and asked, “Was it me or did that screen show an ad for Plastino Kitty Snacks?” “You’re right.”

JR: I liked the way the Spirit movie showed Ditko’s Delivery Service or something. I thought, “Of course Frank has great admiration for Ditko, but he’s not a Spirit guy, c’mon!” There was a Feiffer mentioned in there and I think Donenfeld, who was the original owner of DC comics. When Howard Chaykin had something to do with the Flash T.V. show decades ago, I would watch it, and I didn’t particularly like that show, because the Flash was too damn bulky, but I would watch it and I would just listen for the names like, “Yeah, we’ve got to meet you over at Simonson and Milgrom.” Of course, Kirby Plaza is in “Heroes.” Why not?

Stroud: Sure. All the inside jokes.

Uncanny X-Men (1963) #145, cover penciled by Dave Cockrum and inked by Joe Rubinstein.

JR: Think of it as tributes. Well, look at Smallville. Chris Reeve’s character was Professor Swan. That was no mistake.

Stroud: Right. Of course, back in the day that was one of the fun stories Joe Giella told me about when he was drawing the Batman strip and of course contractually it had to be signed “Bob Kane” no matter who did it. He said his only alternative was just every so often to slip in a delivery truck with “Giella’s Donuts” or something.

JR: I’ve drawn myself and my then-girlfriend into things and I did a Justice League International Annual with Bill Willingham and it was set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, having nothing to do with me for the story, except that’s where I grew up. Nobody asked me and I wasn’t consulted on plot. Brighton Beach, Brooklyn is where a large contingent of Russian Jews immigrated and there was a scene where they’re dancing in a Russian nightclub and so I just made sure one of the guys was my father. You do stuff like that.

Stroud: Nice. Personalize it a little and keep it fun. Joe, I’ve burned up two and a half hours of your night, my friend.

JR: Well, luckily, I got to do a card while we were talking.

Stroud: I can’t thank you enough, not only for your time, but for contacting me in the first place. I’m not sure what caught your attention, but I’m sure glad it did.

JR: You’re welcome.

http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryRoom.asp?GSub=3674

May 30, 2018

An Interview With Clem Robins - Bronze Age Letterer Extraordinaire

May 30, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Clem Robins (born 1955) is an American comic book letterer who has worked for just about every big comic publisher in the country at one time or another. He is best known for his work on series like Preacher, Black Orchid, and 100 Bullets for DC's Vertigo imprint and his extensive work in the Mignola-verse for Dark Horse Comics on titles such as Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and B.P.R.D.

From 1998 through 2007 he taught figure drawing and human anatomy at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Mr. Robins' book The Art of Figure Drawing was published in 2003 by North Light Books, and has since been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German and Chinese.

Clem currently runs a website (which can be found at ClemRobins.com) where he has a blog and showcases his paintings.

August Concert, painted by Clem Robins. — **August Concert**, painted by Clem Robins.

Clem Robins was actually instrumental in getting me going on this gig. He'd posted something on a website about knowing the identity of Mockingbird from the Secret Six series, so I sent him an e-mail asking if he'd share and wondering how he knew. "Oh, I spoke to the writer, E. Nelson Bridwell. I'm a professional letterer." He later asked where my article was going to appear and he said he liked what I was doing, but it would be a lot better if I included some interviews with the talent. "Well, sure it would, but how would I pull that off?" "I can put you in touch with Gaspar Saladino and a few others." I was stunned and it led to some wonderful things. Clem has been working steadily all these years, doing a lot of work on Hellboy and of course 100 Bullets. He recently lettered Neal Adams' latest run on Deadman, too, and Clem is a great guy.

This interview originally took place over the phone on November 17, 2008.

Bryan Stroud: You began your professional career about 30 years ago, is that correct?

Clem Robins: The first job was in January of 1977, so it would be 31 years ago, going on 32.

Stroud: Who hired you for that first job?

CR: A man named Paul Kuhn at Gold Key. I showed my samples all around town. I’d moved back to New York City from Nebraska in August of ’76 and I made up some samples and showed them all around town. I went to Gold Key, I went to Marvel, I went to DC and they all liked them, but there was no room for anybody, so I got little jobs around town. I worked as a paste-up artist and I ate starvation meals. Then in January Paul Kuhn at Gold Key expressed some interest so I came in and he gave me a Dudley Doright story to letter. I think the rate, and obviously this was the new person’s rate, but the page rate was I believe $4.00 a page, which seemed like a lot of money to me. So I did the story and brought it in. There was another editor there named Al Weiss and Al looked at it and said, “Beautiful it’s not, but I think we can use you.”

Definitely it was not beautiful. I get weak in the knees when I look at some of the stuff I did back then. But they gave me another story. The second one I think was the one Arnold Drake wrote. It was a Heckle and Jeckle story. It was very funny. I didn’t know it was Arnold because there were no credits on these things, but I lettered that and I asked the editor who wrote this and it was Arnold Drake. I guess Arnold was pretty much blacklisted out at DC ever since he tried to unionize the writers and artists there. Arnold went to his grave wanting to do that. He still believed that was something that needed to be done. Those guys make a fortune if they’re any good. So that’s how the whole thing started.

100 Bullets (1999) #50 pg.03, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: How exactly did you settle on the specialty of lettering? I presume you took some art training at some point.

CR: I was going to the Art Student’s League and here is what I thought: I thought I didn’t want to spend my life in comics. I wanted to be a serious painter. I still do. And I thought if I did something like penciling it would exact such a huge claim on my energy and time and sense of aesthetics that I would just end up being nothing but a penciler and I’d never do any good painting. So, lettering seemed like an easier way to go. What I didn’t know at the time is that it takes about 15 years to become a decent letterer.

Certainly, it takes at least 5 years. It’s not something small, it’s not something easy, it has its own sense of aesthetics and they’re not easily learned. You know what I was? I was somebody that appreciated and loved the goofiness of the known letterers like Gaspar Saladino, and what I didn’t understand at the time was the sheer discipline that underlay all that goofiness. I’m going far afield of your question. You asked me why I got into lettering. I got into lettering because I thought it wouldn’t exert so huge a drain on my legendary creative resources. (Chuckle.) As I got into it I just thought it was a hoot. Gold Key got rid of me after about two months when I refused to letter a story for them which I thought was in very questionable taste, considering the book was intended for very young children. I wonder sometimes if I should have just kept my mouth shut. But a week later DC finally called me and gave me work. It was a World’s Finest story. It was drawn by Trevor Von Eeden. Do you remember him?

Stroud: I’ve heard the name but I’m not super familiar with his work.

CR: He’s a young guy. Younger than I am. At that time very young. I think he was in high school and also black. I think he was from the West Indies and for his age he was very, very good. It was a Black Canary/Green Arrow story written by Gerry Conway and penciled by Trevor and I forget who inked it, but I was in a figure drawing and human anatomy class at the Art Student’s League at the time so I got these 10 pages and I brought them in and showed all my classmates. My teacher, who was an exquisitely well-mannered Boston patrician and probably the best artistic anatomy teacher this country has ever had (until I started teaching it, of course) he took the page and he used it in his lecture and he pointed out the gluteus medius and the tensor of the fascia lata. It was a real hoot seeing the stuff and bringing it in.

I remember there was one sequence in that story where Black Canary…boy, I wouldn’t mind seeing this again as long as I didn’t have to look at the lettering; I think it was in this — no, it was a Spider Woman story a couple of years later, that’s it. But Trevor drew it; Spider Woman is going undercover. She’s trying to find something from a criminal element, and although it’s not spelled out, she’s clearly dressed like a whore, including the hot pants and the fishnet stockings, and the way Trevor drew the story, instead of using spiraling lines to indicate the fishnet stockings going over Spider Woman’s thighs, he just wrote the word “sex” over and over again. Very subliminal. I don’t know if you remember this but there were these books that were floating around at that time about subliminal messages and erotic pictures put into ice cubes in Scotch ads and stuff like that. Have you ever read any of these things?

Aliens_ Wraith (1998) #1 pg.05, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: Sure.

CR: Subliminal seduction. I guess this was Trevor trying his hand at it, but the inker — Mike Esposito, I think — didn’t waste his time with that. He turned those things into spiraling lines. I can’t believe I remember all this. In that first story, the Black Canary thing, Trevor used some kind of a gummy, non-repro blue pencil on that story and it repelled the ink and so it made my stuff look even worse than it would have otherwise. To think they gave me work. They put up with a lot, bless their hearts. Bob Rozakis, who I think you interviewed, didn’t you?

Stroud: I did.

CR: He parceled out the lettering projects at DC. Jack Adler was, I guess, the head of production.

Stroud: You told me once that the scripts you typically see are not necessarily the ones that say the pencil and ink team would see. Something to the effect that what you see is sometimes just the tip of the iceberg.

CR: Hmmm. Well, back then it was much more like an assembly line job. If it was full script the writer would write it in such a way to tell the artist what he wanted and give it to him and in some cases, once the penciler had done his job the writer, particularly if he was on staff, like Bob Rozakis was, might look over the pencils and re-write his script to suit. Now today it’s very different. Today, because lettering is digital, if they want to change something; instead of having people on staff to re-letter it, they feel free to re-write everything after it’s been lettered, and except in very rare cases, the letterer has to re-letter it. At times it’s been a nightmare in that regard, but it’s certainly added to the quality of the writing in comic books. You can’t get around that. Anyway, you do Silver Age, but all that’s fresh in my mind is what I’m doing today. I do a comic called 100 Bullets. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it.

Stroud: Not yet. I’ve seen it but haven’t picked it up.

CR: It wins a gazillion awards. The artist doesn’t speak much English. He lives in Argentina. He’s very good. You look at these scripts for it and the art direction is so minimal it’s ridiculous. The writer has been very generous with all of us, letting us just do our thing. So, the artist will often completely bypass the art direction of the script, but you’d really have to see it to understand what I’m talking about. Now with Marvel method scripts, it was what you see is what you get. That was mostly what I was doing. When I started at DC I seemed to be the catch basin for everything Gerry Conway wrote. He was very facile, he was very fast. I’m guessing, but I’d say it probably took a day for him to write a script.

BPRD: Plague of Frogs (2004) #1 pg.12, lettered by Clem Robins. — BPRD: Plague of Frogs (2004) #1 pg.12, lettered by Clem Robins.

That’s the thing about the Marvel method. Although Stan Lee made all kinds of claims of it being uniquely creative, it was really something done to save time so that a small number of writers could write a large number of comic books. So Gerry was very copy heavy and because of that and because I was the new guy on the block and I wasn’t very good I seemed to end up with all his stories and they were publishing a gazillion books at the time. Some of them you really wish hadn’t been published.

They were putting out all this stuff around 1977 and then they had the big DC implosion in 1978 and everything fell apart. Bob Rozakis called me to tell me the bad news that I was losing all my books and I said, “That’s okay, I just moved to Marvel anyway.” (Chuckle.)

Stroud: When the implosion happened was it just simply a matter of too much crap thrown up on the wall and nothing was sticking, or a business decision or do you have any insight into it?

CR: I have no insight into it, but I’m sure if you contacted Bob Rozakis again he could tell you all about it. If sales were not awful, I don’t know why they weren’t. A lot of this stuff was just dreadful. I think it was just a terrible time in the history of the medium. The same sort of thing actually happened in 1968 and 1969. They introduced a whole bunch of books, gave them a lot of fanfare and none of them really sold very well. The Hawk and the Dove, The Creeper, Angel and the Ape. Do you remember that?

Stroud: Yeah, that’s right. Some of Bridwell’s stuff.

CR: Yeah, Secret Six. They all got canceled within a short time. I think it was like that here only more so. And they were in the process I think of losing their audience. I don’t know why that happened. I’ve seen in some of these other interviews you do people speculating on why the kids are not reading comics.

Stroud: There seems to be no lack of conjecture, but not a lot of consensus overall. I’ve heard everything blamed from video games to cell phones to all of the above to just flat-out lousy product, or as you said, just losing the audience. I think one of the things you stressed to me more than once was that you felt that writers were given undue clout over editors.

CR: Let me put it another way for you: You’re about my age. I’m 52 and you’re 45?

Captain America (1968) #242 pg.09, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: 46.

CR: So, you weren’t reading these things in the 60’s, but I guess you’ve made up for that. You read a lot of the 60’s comics.

Stroud: Very much so.

CR: In general, at least at DC; I don’t know what Stan was like at Marvel, but at DC, editors were tyrants. Now they could be nice tyrants, like Julie Schwartz, or…I can’t think of any other nice tyrants. Editors were tyrants, and they had a lot of clout, and they knew what they wanted, and they got it. Today editors are certainly not tyrants. With very few exceptions, most of them are extraordinarily nice people, especially at DC. They’re nice people and you want to treat them nicely, and so the nature of the relationship between the writer and the editor I think has changed. And you can’t argue with the fact that the writing is better now, at least as an adult looking at these things. It’s better, but what the hell do I know? I don’t read comics. I work on them, but the books that I do for Vertigo, DC and Dark Horse; the Hellboy books, the writing is very good for the most part. Very craftsman-like. They’re not afraid to leave you asking questions. They’re not afraid to really challenge the hell out of you. But these are comics for adults. If my kids were school age, they’re all grown up now, but if I had kids I couldn’t imagine them reading 100 Bullets or Black Orchid or Preacher or any of these other things. Another thing is that the Comics Code really has become a joke.

Stroud: I was going to ask you about that. It seems to me that if I’m picking up on what you were trying to convey that in its own perverse way it had a major impact on how well the stories used to be written back in the day.

CR: If you had somebody real smart, who knew how to imply stuff, then it really did. Did you ever read Doom Patrol? Particularly in its later issues after Rita and Steve got married?

Stroud: Yes.

CR: Even when I was 11 years old reading that, there was no question in my mind that there was a very sexual relationship between these two people. It was there. You just didn’t see it, but it was there. You saw it in the way that they looked at each other. You saw it in the subtext of the things they’d say to each other, and this was while they were battling alien monsters and stuff like that. It was just good. I doubt if Arnold Drake appreciated the constraints he had to work under, but I think they sharpened him and disciplined him.

Stroud: You mentioned that both he and John Broome really stood out as writers in your mind…

DC Comics Presents (1978) #2 pg.08, lettered by Clem Robins.

CR: In my opinion, yeah. Drake more than Broome, but Broome…well, you look at some of those old things he wrote. It was great craft in the way he would shape a sentence. That story you tore apart, “Hate of the Hooded Hangman?”

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Oh, yeah…

CR: Read that sucker again. It was one of the most perfectly written and drawn comic book stories I’ve ever seen. Beautifully, beautifully done. Broome was very good and I’m sorry I never got to work on any of his stuff. He either left the business by the time I got in or I just wasn’t getting his books. Or was he fired along with everyone else in 1968?

Stroud: I know that he kind of went on that sabbatical abroad. If I may shift gears a little bit, you told me once that Gil Kane was a lot of the reason you became an artist and became involved in comics ultimately. I was wondering if you’d elaborate on that.

CR: DC is reissuing a lot of the old stories in black and white.

Stroud: Yeah. The Showcase Presents series.

CR: Yeah. I’ve looked at some of those. Now there are holes in Gil’s draftsmanship, especially when he inked his own pencils. Gaping holes in it. He was self-taught, and the stuff ain’t perfect, but I like what Stephen Grant wrote in his eulogy for Gil. I believe he said that the comic page could not contain his designs. It was just too huge. Arabesques. Just great diagonal movement. Some of this stuff is just beyond freaking belief. I think he was just fabulous. Stan Lee has called John Buscema the Michelangelo of comics. That’s overselling him a bit, but if you want to talk in those terms, then Gil was the Rubens of comics. He composed in such a fashion that he kicked you through the story. He was irresistible. I would have to say the all around best comic book artist who ever drew breath is Joe Kubert, or maybe Alex Toth, but below that you’ve got some marvelous, marvelous people. When I started studying anatomy, I saw some of the things that Gil had been doing with the human body and respected him so much more. Just for fun, take a look at the rib cages on any of his super hero characters. There was an incredible sense of volume in them. People think anatomy is about muscles, but the great draughtsmen are much more passionate about bones. They learn the bones from every possible angle. They’re the basis of any kind of construction of the figure.

Look at those damn rib cages. Look at the knees. Look at those fantastic hands. Look at the heads. A lot of times, modern comic artists make people’s heads look like action figures, or even like balloons. When Gil drew the human head, it was clear that he understood the structure of the human skull, from any possible angle. I teach figure drawing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and the biggest reason I make my students learn anatomy is that it tells you, in advance, where the surface of the body is hard or soft. You draw a line differently if it is describing a surface underlaid with bone, or with muscle, or with fat. And you see all that stuff in Gil’s work, especially when he inked his own pencils. He was an interesting guy. It was impossible for Gil to be neutral about anybody. He either liked you or hated you from the day he met you, for no apparent reason, either. But he liked me and you would know if Gil liked you. Gil would have liked you, too, if he were still in the picture. You would know if Gil liked you, because he would never call you by your name. He’d call you, “My boy,” or “Sonny-boy.”

El Diablo (2001) #1 pg.14, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: That’s charming.

CR: I’d call Gil every once in awhile, because I worked on a book for him at Malibu. I got his phone number and it was like talking to God, for me. He’d keep you on the phone for two hours just talking about everything. A fascinating conversationalist. He was great. There was a period of time in the late 60’s where I believe he was trying to get out from under a marriage and so he was trying to pull together a fierce amount of money just to get rid of his wife and he was drawing too damn much at that point. It became very formulaic, but then he really got his mojo back in the 80’s and 90’s and did marvelous work. I was very proud of him. Somebody else who really got to me was Carmine Infantino. A great designer and a marvelous story-teller. Look again at “The Hate of the Hooded Hangman.” There’s a scene early on in that where the Hangman character has just won a wrestling match or is in a wrestling match and the crowd is jeering him. Does that ring a bell for you?

Stroud: It sure does.

CR: Look at how he drew that crowd. You can almost smell their sweat, and their cigars. Look at how he designed that page. And then when I got into the business and I’ve lettered four or five of Infantino’s stories; you wouldn’t believe what those pencils look like. It’s just a mare’s nest of scribbles. How anybody could possibly pull an image out of that I don’t know, but this is the way he worked and why there was such an energy and flow to his stuff. I guess when you interviewed him he said that Frank Giacoia was his favorite inker?

Stroud: Yeah. That was the one he specified.

CR: I think Joe Giella was a better match, but that’s my opinion. Can you imagine that? Drawing something in pencil and not only surrendering it to somebody else who would do the actual reproduced drawing, but not having a choice as to who that person is going to be?

Stroud: I never thought of it that way. That would have to be frustrating in large measure for some of these guys. Carmine never came out and said so to me, but I was under the impression that he didn’t like the way Murphy Anderson inked him.

CR: I would have to agree with him on that. Murphy made Carmine’s stuff behave. It was like breaking a horse. He filtered the energy out of it. Murphy Anderson is a great craftsman. You can’t get around that. I believe it was Monet who said it’s very difficult to do even a bad painting. Anybody who has been a penciler or an inker has paid a huge price for what he does. That stuff is not easy. And it’s time consuming, and it’s brutal. The deadlines. All of that. So I don’t badmouth anybody.

Stroud: One last thing on Gil before we move on. You mentioned you had the opportunity to paint his portrait once. How did that come about?

Flinch (1999) #1 pg.20, lettered by Clem Robins.

CR: I believe it was in the Comics Journal that there was a two-part interview with Gil and I heard a rumor they were going to take that and make a book out of it and so I called Gil and said, “Can I paint your picture to use as the cover for this thing?” So, he sent me a photograph. The photograph was taken in the 70’s. Gil looked nothing like that at that time. He’d lost his hair, probably due to the chemotherapy, but this photograph of him taken 30 years ago was what I used for a watercolor painting, and I sent it to Gil and I was very nervous. I mean, I’m sending artwork to Gil Kane. I had a good friend at the time who was a pretty hot penciler and inker at DC and I asked Gil what he thought and Gil said, “This guy’s the worst artist I’ve ever seen in all my life.” So Gil was pretty forthcoming in his opinions. So anyway, he called me back when I sent this, and his hat was in his hand. He said, “Is there any way, sonny-boy, I can have this once it’s used for the cover of the book?” What the hell am I going to say to Gil Kane?

Stroud: Oh, sure.

CR: And he sent me a piece of original art with some western strip or something like that. So, yeah, I painted his portrait and was proud to do it.

Stroud: You didn’t keep any kind of a copy I don’t suppose?

CR: No, I didn’t particularly like it. I didn’t like it because I didn’t like the photograph I worked from. I hate working from photographs.

Stroud: I imagine it makes it kind of hard.

CR: Well, if you’re talking about serious painting it is very difficult to work from a photograph. The things a painter looks for are not the things that the camera sees, and I’m talking about a realistic painter. The things that make a painting work are not the same things that make a photograph work. So you have to guess about a lot of things working from photographs. And this print wasn’t really that great an image of him, but it was a stock photo that was used for years. So yeah, I painted Gil’s portrait. It was nice.

Stroud: What in your opinion makes a good letterer?

CR: I know it when I see it. The great ones, and the good ones…Tom Orzechowski is a great letterer. Ben Oda was a great letterer. Todd Klein is a great letterer. Sam Rosen was a great letterer.

Stroud: What’s his name? Saladino? (Chuckle.)

CR: Gaspar is the best there ever was. I’ll quote Orzechowski, from a post he wrote on a letterer’s blog only yesterday: “Gaspar Saladino was the best we will ever see. Top of the stack. He. Got. It. Absolutely.”

The great ones had a sense of style to what they were doing. But the great ones and the good ones; good ones being guys like me, Milt Snappin, Irving Watanabe; the ones that were good and the ones that were great all had a sense of cleanness about what they were doing. The same thing that happened when he designed type. If you look at a block of text, if it’s in a good typeface, or if it’s well lettered and if you look at that block of text from a distance, it will fuse into a kind of gray, and it won’t be a spotty gray, it will be an even gray. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Stroud: I think so.

CR: If it’s spotty, then it’s calling attention to itself. It’s kind of a hard thing to describe. There’s a Vermeer painting called “Allegory of the Faith.” Have you ever seen it?

Allegory of the Faith (c.1671), painted by Johannes Vermeer. — **Allegory of the Faith** (c.1671), painted by Johannes Vermeer.

Stroud: It doesn’t ring any bells.

CR: Go to Google and look it up. It’s a very lovely picture. Vermeer was in many ways the greatest painter who ever drew breath. In the picture this woman is in ecstasy over something she’s just read in the New Testament, and there’s this copy of the New Testament on a pedestal next to her and its open so there’s a huge amount of text on it. Vermeer managed to just suggest all that text with a patch of gray. The picture is at the Metropolitan museum. I’ve looked at it many times. It’s just gray. But it’s such a good gray. It’s such an appropriate gray for the place in the image that you totally buy into it. You accept it as text. Same kind of thing coming from the opposite direction.

Anyway, what makes a good letterer is that cleanness. It’s very, very hard to achieve and takes a whole lot of time. Other good letterers were Danny Crespi at Marvel. He was a very good letterer. Morrie Koramoto at Marvel was also very good. I think John Costanza was a great letterer. Willie Schubert is a great letterer. Some are very cool and they stand back and they try hard not to draw attention to themselves. That’s where you get a Ben Oda or certainly Artie Simek and to a lesser extent Sam Rosen. But for one it was just party time and that was Gaspar. It was a party, but it was a very elegant little party. And the other thing about how they used to make comics but don’t any more; not at Marvel, where the script wasn’t written until the pictures had been drawn, but at DC where for the most part artists worked from a script where everything was laid out for them to do, if there was a title, or a sound effect, or even the balloon shapes, the artists were expected to rough those in for you.

So, when you worked on a DC book, and you did sound effects, quite often those sound effects had been penciled in by the artist. Going back to Gaspar Saladino, if you look at his work on…who are the great designers? You’ve got Carmine. You’ve got Gil Kane. You’ve got Joe Kubert. I think Gaspar lettered one issue of Doom Patrol for Bruno Premiani, and these are all just great, great illustrators. If you look at the sound effects in those different guy’s stuff or you look at the balloon shapes, or the titles; yeah, Gaspar did them, but Gaspar took his cues from these great designers. That’s why titles looked different in Green Lantern than they did in Flash or differently than they did in the Kubert war books, or anything like that. So, it was very nice. It was a nice relationship between letterer and artist. They were more subservient, but in a very healthy way. It was very nice. The lettering and especially the sound effects just had a more organic relationship with the artwork.

Ghost Rider (1973) #39 pg.12, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: Was the lettering one of the final phases in the production?

CR: The classic way of doing it at DC was script and pencils, then lettering, then inks. In the 80’s and especially the 90’s I saw more and more of my own work that was practically never getting original art to letter on. It was all done on overlays and this was done because the pencilers were always late. So if the penciler was two weeks late getting the story in, then rather than send his art to me, they Xeroxed it and got the artwork to the inker immediately so the inker could save the penciler’s butt like they always seemed to end up doing. So in the meantime I would letter on vellum overlays over Xeroxes and then they’d have these poor coolies in the production department who would have to paste up the lettering on to the artwork. But that was then. Today almost all of it is computerized, although Tom Orzechowski is getting to do some hand-lettering. So that’s the way it was done then. Today, sometimes I’ll have to letter pencils, sometimes I letter over fully inked artwork.

Stroud: I was thinking of what was, to my mind, for the era, the most unique thing when Carmine Infantino would have those gesturing hands on each of his caption boxes. I thought, “Okay, how does this all fit together?”

CR: Well that’s an example of what I was talking about before. The letterers did what the artists wanted them to. So if Carmine would scribble in those hands, they’d be indecipherable to anyone except the inker. Those hands would emerge from a caption box and the letterer would undoubtedly rule the caption box, but then the inker would ink the hand coming out of it. So when you would see that, one letter writer would call that “Helpful Hands.” When you saw “Helpful Hands” in an Infantino book it was lettered by Gaspar, but Gaspar did not ink those hands. That was the responsibility of the inker.

Stroud: Okay. I was wondering about that because it’s almost like there’s an overlap there in responsibility and I wondered, “Okay, who trumps here?” (Chuckle.)

CR: I didn’t understand or appreciate, because nobody explained it to me, how important this was; this taking cues from the penciler. There was a war book I did in, I think, 1978 that Jerry Grandenetti penciled and then inked it. I lettered it and I saw all these sound effects and the shapes that Jerry had indicated and I thought, “These are stupid. I’ll do it my way.” The damn thing had to be re-lettered, and I never got work off that editor again…until he became President of DC comics. (Mutual laughter.)

Stroud: It seems to me you made a comment once that Julie Schwartz was somewhat underwhelmed with the first job you did for him.

Hellboy In Mexico (2016) #1 pg.28, lettered by Clem Robins.

CR: Well, the first job I did for him was also the last job I did for him. I just didn’t understand. I thought Julie, of all people, should love me because I’m pretending to be Gaspar. But Julie didn’t buy work from Gaspar because it was crazy, he bought work from Gaspar because Gaspar was so damn good he could get away with anything. So I was a libertine without the discipline, and I didn’t understand it at the time. So, yeah, it was when Julie was editing Superman or one of the Superman books, and Curt Swan drew it. It was very, very well drawn and Julie didn’t like it and I didn’t blame him one bit. If there was anything that I could change about my relationship with DC when I started out, it’s that I wish I had been mature enough to ask more questions and get more feedback, and I wish that they had been more proactive in training me, but for some reason certain people liked my work and assumed it was okay, and then didn’t monitor me until I had made some bonehead mistakes. I can’t believe I’ve survived. (Chuckle.) A particular Wonder Woman story I did, because Gerry Conway had written it, and as I mentioned before I was the catch basin for everything Gerry wrote. He’s one of the producers now on one of those Law and Order shows.

Stroud: I think I remember you telling me that once. That was an interesting transition, although it seems like he’s not the first writer to make the leap into television. I think Cary Bates has done some of that as well.

CR: Has he? Brian Vaughn, who was a very big Marvel writer, and of course he wrote a book for Vertigo called “Y The Last Man.”

Stroud: Oh, yeah, quite the legendary tome, although I’ve not read it.

CR: He’s one of the producers on a show called “Lost,” which, if you’ve never seen it, you and I are the only ones.

Stroud: (Laughter.) I did watch it for a little bit and lost interest after awhile.

CR: Anyway, I did this Wonder Woman story; I did a bunch of Wonder Woman stories, but in this case, I don’t know what I was thinking. I think I was thinking that it would be real cool if all my horizontal strokes became diagonal. And when I started doing it I thought, “Wow! I’m a genius!” So, the letter “E” has got one vertical stroke and three horizontal strokes; well those horizontal strokes weren’t horizontal any more. I made them diagonal and thought, “Wow! This is really, really cool looking!” So, I lettered this issue of Wonder Woman that way and the damn thing was published and Jack [Adler] called me up and he sounded sick. He said, “This issue of Wonder Woman cannot be read.” This was an important book because I think the T.V. show was on at the time. So, youth. They shouldn’t hire 20-year old guys to letter their comic books. That’s the moral of the story. Now it’s all done on a computer so anyone can letter a comic book. Now this is sacrilegious, but I think I’m a better letterer on the computer than I was as a hand-letterer. If you letter on a computer…well, my sound effects were probably better as a hand-letterer, but nine tenths of it is designing type. Designing type is a fascinating procedure anyway. But all the goofiness and fun, and at the same time rigidity and discipline that a comic book needs to have, that has to be built into the way you design type, and it takes quite awhile to learn how to do it. I’ve got some bells and whistles in my operation over here…well, in a block of copy; just a paragraph, what letter is going to appear most often?

Incognegro (2008) #1 pg.16, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: Hmmm. S?

CR: E is the most common letter of the alphabet. So when I started doing this stuff on computer it began to drive me crazy that in one speech there might be fifteen identical “e’s.” So, I cooked up a way to defeat that. I’m very proud of this and it’s not entirely finished yet, but I can send you a block of copy where no two “e’s” are identical, and I don’t have to do anything to make it happen, it’s all in the design of the type. Anyway, I look at this stuff and I think my stuff is better now. I was cleaning up the studio yesterday; I try to do that once every fifteen years, and I ran across this issue of Preacher from 1999 done by hand, and I looked at it and looked at the stuff I do now, and I’d have to say my computerized stuff looks better than my hand lettering did.

Stroud: Well, I know I was sure impressed with your work on the Hellboy issue I got on Free Comic Book Day that I’d told you about, and it looked to me like it was hand drawn.

CR: Bless your heart. That’s what I try for. Thank you very much.

Stroud: I don’t have the most discerning eye, but I was genuinely surprised when you told me it was done on the computer.

CR: Mike Mignola is a very interesting guy to work for. He wants things done a certain way, and if you’re smart, you don’t argue with him. He’s got his own sense of aesthetics. A lot of things he likes I thought were idiotic, but the customer is always right, so I started doing things his way, and in many ways I think it’s made up for my stupidity when I was starting out at DC and ignored the layouts provided to me by the pencilers. He’s got a good design sense and I’ve tried to accommodate him. He’s very challenging to work for, but it’s even harder for the colorists. Dave Stewart has won all kinds of awards for his coloring on Hellboy. He deserves every bit of it.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Not an easy task, huh?

CR: Mike is a very nice guy. I like him very much. That was not a slur against him. If you work for David Selznick, you do things David Selznick’s way. If you work for Barack Obama, you do things the Barack Obama way. If you work for Mike Mignola, you do it Mike’s way, and he seems to know what he’s doing.

Stroud: The character is going strong. No question about it. Back when you were still doing things by hand what were your favorite tools of the trade?

Jonah Hex (1977) #10 pg.05, lettered by Clem Robins.

CR: I used a Speedball B-6 point sharpened a certain way that I learned when I was on staff at Marvel comics. At Marvel at that time John Costanza was the hot letterer and some of the things you needed to know how to do if you worked in their bullpen was how to correct John’s lettering and have it look more or less like John did it. So, Danny Crespi, who ran the production department, a wonderful guy, he showed me how John Costanza sharpened a pen point and how he held it and I liked the effect very much and pretty much adopted it for my own. The Speedball B-6, sharpened a certain way, can be used for regular words and bold-faced words. You just rotate it. So I used that and had a bunch of other points for different thicknesses, for sound effects; screaming, stuff like that.

Stroud: You told me kind of a humorous story about the FB-6 which was Gaspar’s favorite and you couldn’t get it to work, was that right?

CR: Yeah, I couldn’t, and at the same time Gaspar’s art supplier didn’t sell them any more and he was hearing rumors that the point was being discontinued, so I went to my art store. I was living in Boise at the time and I bought every FB-6 in the place and sent them to him. He was very grateful. He said he was almost going to have to retire.

Stroud: So, you kept him going there. That’s cool.

CR: I guess. He was already being eased out. I guess his last book for DC was Flash, wasn’t it?

Stroud: I’m not sure. I know a whole lot of hoopla was made over the Arkham Asylum book, but I don’t know where that was chronologically.

CR: Was that in the 90’s? I think it was the early 90’s.

Stroud: I’m thinking so. Of course, obviously that was a one shot deal rather than a regular gig, but I almost have it in my head for some reason that was one of the last big production jobs that he did and they’ve really praised that one to the rooftops for all the different designs and unique takes he took on things, especially incorporating…as he seems to be a master in doing, incorporating it into the character. The mad, chaotic nature of the Joker.

CR: At the same time, though, if you look at it, look at the discipline in it. It’s all legible and clean. The guy was wonderful. I took over Hellblazer at Vertigo from Gaspar and I heard a story which I confirmed later with Gaspar. When Jamie Delano was writing Hellblazer it was very, very copy heavy, and I don’t know if it was one of Jamie’s scripts, but there was a lot of text in one place and Gaspar just left about half of it out. Karen Berger called him up and asked, “Why did you do this?” “Ah, it didn’t need all those words.”

Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth (1972) #55 pg.04, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

CR: What do you want? He’s Gaspar. He can do that. (Chuckle.) At Marvel…I don’t know if this is still true, but one of the differences between the Marvel books and the DC books, going way back to the 60’s, is that at Marvel, balloons had to be one shape. They could be an oval, or they could be kind of a rounded oblong. But at DC, if you needed to do it to fit it in, a balloon could be a combination of two or four or seven different curves. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Stroud: Yes.

CR: Okay, that’s called scalloping. At DC you could do that. At Marvel, it was absolutely verboten. So, when I started doing work for Marvel I couldn’t scallop my balloons any more and I really missed it because scalloping was something Gaspar did so well and I was still pretending to be Gaspar, but I was a good little boy and I did my balloons the way they wanted me to and then I saw this book that Costanza lettered and there were scalloped balloons all over the place. “How come Costanza gets to do that?” Danny Crespi said, “Because he’s Costanza.” Danny Crespi, has anyone talked to you about him?

Stroud: Not at all.

CR: Delightful, sweet guy. One of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and that’s going some. There are a lot of very good people in this racket. But he was sort of the godfather of lettering at Marvel. He was a first-rate letterer himself and he trained people. Just a terrific guy.

Stroud: Has most of your time been on staff or as a freelancer over the years?

CR: Very little of it was on staff. I’d been on staff at DC and Marvel both, but just as a temp. In both cases it was working in the production department, usually making corrections on people’s work. I think I worked for maybe three weeks at DC. There was a time at Marvel when I figured if I just took one of their desks there and did my freelance lettering there that I’d be very available for fill-ins on staff and I’d be able to pester them for work. I worked for a few months in the bullpen at Marvel. Marvel was a much more fun place to work than DC. I don’t know if it still is or not, but Marvel was a party. Marvel was goofy. DC was very stolid and uptight. No fun at all.

Stroud: Sounds like something I read that Alan Kupperberg wrote at his website. Something to the effect that at DC, “This is serious business. Here we wear neckties when we make comic books!”

The Losers (2003) #16 pg.18, lettered by Clem Robins.

CR: They all did wear neckties. I wore a t-shirt and blue jeans. Probably just one t-shirt and one pair of jeans. I was pretty poor at the time. I didn’t get paid very much. They didn’t pay very much at Marvel either. But Marvel was a really fun place to work. Everybody should work there. I don’t know what it’s like now. This was when Shooter was running the place. Shooter, who I’ve come to respect much more than I did at the time. He was cold, he was distant, but he was brilliant and very smart. All the funny things happened at Marvel. There was a comic called ROM. I think it was one of those comics based on a toy.

So, they were going to do a ROM comic book. There was an artist, a Palestinian, I believe, and his name was Mike Nasser. First rate draftsman. Really a draftsman. One of the best I’ve ever seen. Mike was drawing an issue of Marvel Team-Up. It was Spider-Man teaming up with Nightcrawler, and Joe Rubinstein was inking it and I was lettering it. Michael was very slow, because he was just a great craftsman. I got the first eight pages and lettered them, and this ROM comic book is being brought into being and Mike Nasser really wanted to draw it, and so he submitted a cover design for it. I’ve never seen it, but apparently it was outrageously bad, or there was something wrong with it. Anyway, he brought the cover design in and gave it to the editor, who I think was Jo Duffy, and I guess Jo shook her head and said, “This is terrible. We can’t use this.” So Mike writes on the back of it in broken English, “You no like my pictures, I no work for you no more,” and he takes this note and rips it into a gazillion pieces, heads out the door, gets into a cab, heads out to JFK, I guess on his way to Palestine. He has no money and he tries to get on the plane. They won’t let him on the plane, and Nasser just disappeared from off the face of the earth. Maybe they just took him somewhere for a well-deserved rest.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

CR: Meanwhile, there’s an issue of Marvel Team-Up that needs to be drawn, and I’d lettered eight pages (I was freelancing, so if I didn’t get work, I didn’t eat, so I was getting pretty desperate), and I walk into the office one day and there’s Mike Nasser sitting at a desk drawing pages of Marvel Team-Up, and I said, “Hey, isn’t that Mike Nasser?” And Al Millgrom grabbed me and steered me as far away as he could and said, “Don’t say anything to him. He’s here. Leave him alone.” Mike managed to draw four or five more pages of it and then disappeared again, so Rich Buckler finished the story. Nasser was looney, but most of the people I’ve dealt with are not. Most are just plain nice people. Professionals, at least in my experience.

Stroud: It seems like the creative gene makes people a little bit more amicable. I always think back to that comment Shelly Moldoff made to me: “Comic book people are usually good people.” I think I’ve managed to corroborate that with the vast majority of the people I’ve been in touch with.

CR: There’s a humility about people who draw if they’re any good. And I think the reason for it is if you’re going to draw, and draw realistically, you’ve got to cultivate a real respect for nature. A great respect for the creation itself. You see this among painters. They may be a pain in the ass, but most of them that I’ve known are very humble people, and I’ve known some of the best. I do this Tuesday night figure drawing group with one of the hottest portrait artists in the country. A brilliant and psychotic still life painter and a beautiful woman who is a sculptor. Top drawer people, one and all.

Marvel Team-Up (1972) #87 pg.15, lettered by Clem Robins.

New Gods (1995) #1 pg.17, lettered by Clem Robins.

Orbiter (2003) TPB pg.67, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: You were mentioning Jim Shooter a few minutes ago, and of course you read the interview, but he made an interesting comment. He said that once text gets to be about 40 words in one panel that you were in trouble. Is that a good rule of thumb?

CR: 40 words? I don’t know. I guess I can out myself as a nerd here. At the time that I was doing about 300 pages a month in the early 90’s I felt I had to find a way to keep track of my time so that if nothing else I’d be in a better position to make and keep promises about deadlines. So, I started counting words. There’s a very simple and quick way to do it. When I counted the words and counted the number of characters, then I could estimate to within a half an hour how long it would take me to letter a comic book, and without boring you with the details, I ended up with…boy, you’re going to think I’m the biggest nerd on the planet. I ended up with a database of character counts per page and I found across the board…I was lettering all kinds of projects for all kinds of different writers. The average number of characters on a page, including spaces is about 500. So, you said 40 words in a panel?

Stroud: Yeah, that was what he was suggesting.

Preacher (1995) #50 pg.18, lettered by Clem Robins.

CR: So, if we divide 500 by six panels to a page you get 83 characters per panel and the average word is, shall we say, five letters, and by golly, it looks like you’re right. Some of these guys really pushed it. Roy Thomas really stuffed the words. So did Bob Kanigher. So did Gardner Fox. John Broome could, but John was a nice lean writer. Anyway, I’d never run across that figure. You say 40 words per panel?

Stroud: Yeah. He just made that offhand comment that once the text gets to about 40 words in a panel you’re probably in trouble as far as obscuring the background and so forth.

CR: Well consider that Jim, if he’s talking about his experience at Marvel, they weren’t using full scripts, or at least very seldom did. Sometimes they did. So that would make sense because the artist would have to draw his pictures leaving a certain amount of dead space for the copy to go. It sounds good to me. 40 words? All right. I think they had a rule of thumb at Marvel that one quarter of the area in a panel should be reserved for text.

Stroud: I’d just never heard somebody come up with something like that and I didn’t know if it rang true from your perspective.

CR: Things have changed, too. When it was done by hand, if you’ve got a copy heavy writer like Roy Thomas or Don McGregor or Gerry Conway or Gardner Fox or Bob Kanigher or any of these people, that translated directly into an enormous amount of time, whereas if you got something fun without a whole lot of words then you could play around a little bit more. Now on a computer that is a less onerous task. You can copy and paste into Illustrator and it doesn’t take as long to do, although it’s still pretty difficult.

Stroud: Has the advent of computerized production improved or made things worse for your line of work?

CR: It’s made it worse. In many ways it’s made comics better, but it’s made my line of work worse. We are expected to make corrections where they used to have staffs in production doing. The rates have been lowered. All of the rates have been lowered. The dirty little secret of the comic book industry for years was that if you wanted to be creative you could be a penciler or an inker or a writer, but if you wanted to make lots and lots of money, be a letterer or a colorist, because once you learn how to do it, it was like having a license to print money. That all changed, but what the hell? That’s technology. I have no objection to that. In the 1700’s when somebody built a machine that made stockings and the 1600 or so women in England who, as a stay at home job made stockings, they and their husbands wanted to start riots, they wanted to break the machine, they wanted to hang the guy who built the machine, they said, “This is going to destroy our industry,” you’ve heard this before?

Rune (1994) #7 pg.01, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: It sounds similar to the old buggy whip analogy.

CR: Well, within 10 years, instead of 1600 people in England making stockings, there were something like 100,000 people in England making stockings, and everybody could now afford stockings. You could say hand made stockings are better, but they’re not better if you can’t own them.

Stroud: That’s right.

CR: Computer lettering usually looks awful. I kind of like how mine looks and how Todd Klein’s looks and a few other people; like Rob Lee at DC does it pretty well. Jared Fletcher at DC does it pretty well. There are others, but for the most part it’s dead looking, but on the other hand anybody can get a comic book lettered. Badly, but it can be done. There was a wonderful band out of Los Angeles in the 80’s called Wednesday Week. I was a DJ at the time and played the album a lot. I thought it was terrific. I got to be friends with the lead singer of the band, and one of the things that bugs her a lot is that now with computers anybody, absolutely anybody, can make a CD. She feels that it dilutes the specialness of actually being able to make an album, and maybe she’s right, but I think these things always work out for the best. Technology always enriches life in the long run. Maybe in the transitional times people suffer, but in the long run, it’s better.

Stroud: I would tend to agree. Moveable type certainly created a sea change back in the day.

CR: It certainly did. Are we better or worse for having books? I would cheerfully submit that we’re better.

Stroud: Yes, indeed.

CR: Calligraphers can’t make a living any more.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

CR: That’s why God made McDonald’s, so they’d have jobs to do.

Stroud: Well, in looking back over 3 decades worth, is there anything that you’d have liked to have done that you haven’t had a chance to do yet? Did you ever have a desire to write or pencil?

Secret Defenders (1993) #5 pg.08, lettered by Clem Robins.

CR: Well, I wrote a book, but that’s a how to book on drawing the human figure. No, I think I made the right call. I wish I had trained harder as a painter. I’m working very hard at that now. I’m doing some good work, but I wish I’d done it when I was in my 30’s or my 20’s. As far as doing things differently as a letterer, I wish I had been more coachable, and I wish I had listened or sought out the advice of other people. Todd Klein did. One of the reasons Todd’s stuff is so good is because he was on staff at DC for two or three or five years and he paid attention to what people needed and to what they wanted, and he found ways to give it to them.

When Todd started out he wasn’t all that hot, and then in 1979 or 1980 Todd could do Gaspar better than Gaspar could. If you look at that Marv Wolfman/George Perez Teen Titans thing you can see it. Todd was playing Gaspar. That’s what he was doing. It was funny to see it, because he went beyond that shortly thereafter, but he’s been able to do these things. For one thing he’s a very talented guy, but for another thing he had a great deal of respect for the industry, for the artists, and he wanted badly to find a way to get them the best work he could. What would I have done differently? I think I’d have tried to be more like Todd. But I have no complaints. The funny book industry has been very, very nice to me. Very nice.

Stroud: It seems to continue on. You’re still finding work quite obviously.

CR: Yeah. It’s good work. The wacky thing about this is that it really has nothing to do with who you are, but if you get on a book that’s respected then you’re sort of associated with it. Preacher, for example, had a very bizarre ending which I, as an extremely devoted Christian found very hard to take, but it was still one of the best-read comic books ever done. Very, very well drawn. It was just brilliantly done. So, I lettered all the issues of Preacher and Transmetropolitan or Hellboy or Fly or 100 Bullets. Some of these things are just very well done. It’s a pleasure to be associated with them. And some less so. I’ve known some people that were a pain in the neck and I think inkers are way underappreciated. I’ve seen some pencilers routinely…not many, but it seems some, the pencilers who were the most irresponsible, the ones who month after month the inker saved his or her ass, by covering for the fact that the penciler couldn’t meet a deadline. It’s those pencilers that always seemed to me to be least appreciative of what those inkers were doing for them.

Stroud: The Vinnie Colletta’s of the industry.

CR: I don’t think Vinnie is a good example. Joe Giella, I think is a good example. Stan Woch is a good example. Rodney Ramos is a good example. Jose Marzon, who inked “Y, The Last Man,” is a good example. A lot of times these guys had to fix the artist’s drawing mistakes. I’ve done it. I inked a comic book in 1990 I think it was and we drew a lot of stuff. You had to, because the perspective was wrong or the eyes were placed in the wrong place or something like that. I think they’re way underappreciated, and underpaid, too. I’m a letterer. It takes me anywhere from a day to two days to do a comic book. If you’re an inker, particularly with the level of detail and craft that they demand of inkers these days, which is very high, if you’ve got a monthly, you’re married to that monthly. It’s not unusual for it to be 10-hour days, 7 days a week.

Transmetropolitan (1997) #10 pg.03, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: Brutal.

CR: Some guys can pace themselves really well and it’s just like a job, but a lot of times with penciling and inking, you’re married to that thing. So if you’re the inker on a book, and it lasts 60 issues and then the series ends, unless you’ve been pretty aggressive about marketing yourself, you’re suddenly unemployed. And I’ve seen that happen to inkers more than anybody else. That’s tragic to me.

Stroud: Poor payment for what they accomplish.

CR: Yeah.

Stroud: What can you tell me about sound effects?

CR: They’re different based on what’s going on. The good letterers were able to pick up on that. Batman might get hit on the head and it might say “Bonk!” Or Jerry Lewis might get hit on the head and it might say “Bonk!” But they’re not the same “Bonk!” They all require a different kind of a “Bonk!” That’s true of sound effects and it’s also true of the lettering itself. There’s a personality response on the part of the letterer to what he’s doing. This is the part of lettering that a computer is blind to, and the only way you can make headway in being responsive is in designing type. It’s very difficult to do. It takes forever, but I love it. Designing type is the thing I like the most.

Stroud: You said you had a story about inking.

CR: I inked a book in 1990. I was supposed to ink a mini-series for a small company and found I could have been pretty good at it if I’d stuck with it, but in the time it took me to ink the book I could have made four times as much money lettering, so I got out from under that.

Stroud: That dovetails with what you said earlier about how colorists and letterers, at least back in the day, did very well comparatively speaking.

CR: I’ve also done courtroom drawing for television off and on since 1982. It’s a lot of fun. I started doing that when…I left school kind of abruptly and went to Boise, Idaho, just on kind of a whim and I didn’t have much money and thought I could get a job doing paste-up or something. There was no work doing that, so I thought maybe the local T.V. stations might need someone to do graphics or layout for them, so the first one I called I got the news director. He said, “No, we don’t need anyone to do that, but we’re looking for someone to cover a trial and make pictures for us. Can you do that?” When you’re asked a question like that…well, to begin with I’d wanted to do that all my life. I thought it would be one of the coolest jobs imaginable. So, I said, “Sure, I can do that. I’ll bring in my samples.” So, we set up an appointment and I had practically no money, so I bought a pack of typing paper and a fountain pen and on the way to the meeting with this guy I sat in a coffee shop and drew pictures of the other people at the coffee shop and those were my samples. Have you ever seen the movie “The Falcon and the Snowman?”

Unknown Soldier (2008) #3 pg.04, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: I think I have, but it’s been ages.

CR: Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. I think it came out in 1981, but it was about a traitor; a guy who sold some secrets to the Soviets named Christopher Boyce. He was convicted and then he escaped from jail and did the most intelligent thing you can imagine. He started robbing banks with his friends. This while under a life sentence for treason. He was finally caught in Boise and it was a very high-profile trial and that was what they needed me to cover. They actually had another courtroom artist, but this news director’s hobby was firing people. He just loved to fire people, and so he wanted to get rid of this woman who was doing the pictures for him and that was why they hired me. I was happy as a clam. After being in Boise for three days not having work and running out of money and all of a sudden, I was going into the courtroom and my name was on television every night. That was great. I don’t know if it’s still true, but at that time Idaho was rather well known for its white separatist movement in the upper panhandle of the state. A lot of these goons would get caught and their trials would be very highly publicized and they’d send me in for those. So, I got to know all these Neo-Nazis.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Friend of the famous and the infamous.

CR: Yeah, and I got curious because I don’t trust the media, even though I’ve been a part of it for all of my professional life. I decided to find out what these people have to say for themselves. I’m pals with everybody. So, I met the head of one of the more prominent groups. It was called Aryan Nations and I said, “Look, I’d like to hear what you have to say. I’m open to hear anybody’s story. Can I interview you some time?” He said, “Sure.” So, we made arrangements for me to visit their headquarters. Idaho is a huge, huge state. This was about 20 years ago. I think it was fall of 1988. So, we made arrangements for me to go and visit this guy. It was about 450 miles north of Boise, not far from the Canadian border. I drove up there and discovered that the panhandle of Idaho is one of the most beautiful places on the face of the earth. It’s just breathtaking, especially in the fall. I got up there and stayed in a motel and I called the next morning and asked if the appointment was still on. He said, “Sure,” and he gives me really good directions to get there. It was about 15 miles outside of Coeur d’Alene.

So, I pull up there. I don’t know what to expect. I come to the entrance to their property to an unmanned guard tower with two signs on it. One said, “Whites Only,” and the other one says, “Welcome Aryan Warriors.” Now I’m pretty sure for reasons that will become obvious that I wasn’t Aryan, but I’m reasonably white, so I figured that’s okay. I came in and found the head office of the Aryan Nations, which proved to be a double-wide trailer and went in. The man’s secretary was also his wife and told me to have a seat. The waiting room was walled with books that you could purchase for your home study. I came in a bit early, so I looked at some of the books and saw some about Jews being evicted from every country in Europe and why and books about this and that. But the best one, and I actually ended up buying a copy, was a book called, “The Hitler We Loved.” It was a picture book of sentimental photographs of Hitler doing various things. Playing with children, visiting troops at the front, his romance with Eva Braun and all these books had very indignantly written captions on them, like, “This is the man they call a monster,” while he’s pinching a little child’s cheek or something. (Chuckle.)

Vigilante (2005) #1 pg.06, lettered by Clem Robins.

Apparently, he was this really swell guy, but then it’s time for my appointment. This guy’s name was Reverend Richard Butler. As far as I know he’s still alive. He sits me down and I’m all set to ask him some questions, but he just wanted to talk, and I think he was touched that someone working in television actually was willing to listen to him. But once he got going, you couldn’t stop him. He explained to me their belief system. He said they had no violent desires to hurt anybody and I knew that wasn’t true because I’d seen secretly video-taped coverage of him at a Klan meeting urging the death of various groups of people. Then he got into religion and he explained to me the forming and creating of man in Genesis 1 applied only to the Aryan race and that all other races were not descendants of Adam. So, I asked who they were descended from. He explained that the other races are what they call mud people. Have you ever heard this before?

Stroud: I think I did on a talk show once.

CR: It’s an accurate term as far as this being the way they talk. I was writing a book at the time which I never finished, but it was going to be a cheap, trashy detective thriller, and this is really why I wanted to interview this guy, because it was going to be set in Idaho and I wanted to use white separatists as a red herring to distract the reader from realizing who the real villain was. But when I tried to write dialogue to put into these white separatist’s mouths they all sounded like Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

CR: So more than anything else, I wanted to hear how these people talked and what they wanted and why they wanted it. I just wanted to hear their story. So he tells me their story all right. So supposedly there are real human beings who are the Teutonic people, the Aryans. There are mud people, who are all the other races; Orientals, African-Americans and so forth and then there’s one other group, and that’s the Jews. I guess I should give you my mea culpa here. I’m Jewish. So, this is very interesting to me. The Jews, he explained to me, are the direct descendants of Satan himself. As he’s explaining this to me I tried to ask him questions, but he wasn’t too interested in questions. He wanted to talk, but I realized…if you’ve ever read the 8th chapter of the Gospel of John, there’s a very heated dialogue between Jesus Christ and the group of Pharisees who later on would be responsible for his torture and execution. Jesus told this group of people, “Ye are of your father, the devil.” And that must have been where he got this thing. He was extrapolating that to all Jews.

Stroud: Incredible.

CR: This is why, I guess, according to these people; and I don’t know what this has to do with comic books, but I guess this is why they had such an animus toward Jews. So, I’m sitting there and he’s pouring out the secrets of his heart to me and he doesn’t realize he’s talking to anti-Christ.

War Dancer (1994) #1 pg.03, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

CR: But it was all very interesting and entertaining. I wish he’d let me ask him questions. But after about an hour and a half it started to get pretty tedious and there was no end in sight. It didn’t seem like there was a waiting list of people who had appointments with him and he could have gone on all day. So, I began to get a little bit tired of it and I wanted to find some polite way to excuse myself, so I said, “Sir, could you give me a tour of your property? I’d like to see it.” He said, “Sure, great idea.” So we get up and he tells his wife to hold his calls and he puts on his overcoat and we for the door. As we head to the door, there’s a group of fellas, part of the group getting ready to go out hunting Elk, which is kind of a manhood ritual in that part of the country.

Stroud: I grew up in Eastern Washington, so that rings true.

CR: So, we chatted with them for a little while and then he takes me on the tour. He shows me his house, he showed me the guard tower, he showed me the other guard tower which vandals had blown up; he showed me the church where he preaches. He shows me all this stuff and then he has one more thing he wants to show me. He leads me to the woods. There’s a path into the woods and we walk on this path and it’s an October morning. It’s beautiful. The sky is clear and there’s a bracing coolness in the air and Douglas Firs and Ponderosa Pines are rising up around us and the birds are chirping and it’s just breathtaking and I don’t know where the hell he’s taking me. We walk a couple hundred feet down this path and it opens up into a clearing, and in the clearing the grass is neatly trimmed and what are there in the center of that clearing, but a bunch of picnic tables. He gets really quiet. He just looks at this beautiful scene and whatever’s on his mind, this is serious shit to Reverend Butler. “This is our sanctuary, son. This is where we come when we want to visit with each other. We’ll have a picnic with our families and talk about the challenges we face in the ministry. Do you know why this is our sanctuary, son?” I said, “No. Why?” “Because this is the only place left in America where no Jew has ever set foot.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

CR: Now ask me the question.

Stroud: Did you say anything at that point?

CR: No. I got my ass the %$# out of there and I’ve never been back.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

X-Men_ Phoenix Endsong (2005) #3 pg.06, lettered by Clem Robins.

CR: Now you know why the white separatist movement in America has never gotten very far. It’s because I defiled their sanctuary. A lot of mud people and anti-Christ’s owe me.

Stroud: (Laughter.) The irony is flowing across the floor.

CR: So that court sketching is really a lot of fun. It really is. Especially arraignments, which last about 15 seconds on average. You’ve got to be really clever to cover an arraignment. I’ve ridden down in elevators with suspects just to try to memorize their features. I did a trial of some abortion clinic bomber a couple of years ago who was caught in Cincinnati and I covered it for a local station and then CNN bought the drawings after that, so I made a lot of money for practically nothing except having fun.

Stroud: Nice. Who would have thought of that as a sideline?

CR: It’s great. The people that do it full time…I don’t know if there are any of them left, but I know one woman who did it for NBC who probably made as much money as I did when lettering was at its highest. It’s a good gig. I’d do it and pretend I was Domier. It’s the same kind of drawing style, except he was much better at it.

Stroud: I know of the one book you’ve published, but have you done any other writing?

CR: Nothing that’s been published. I like to write. I’m probably better at that than anything else, but I haven’t proven it by making any money. My sister is a writer, or did I already tell you that?

Stroud: I thought you’d said she was an editor.

CR: She has been an editor. She’s been all over the place. She was an editor at Acclaim for about three years, but when she was about 19, she’d read enough regency period romance novels that she knew the formula back and forth. So, she figured, “I can write better than this stuff.” So, she wrote a manuscript and it was published and led to contracts and she gave up the regency romances after awhile. She wrote a book that was on the New York Times list of the ten best science fiction books of the year 2001. It was called “The Stone War,” and it did very well. She also cooked up a series of mystery novels starring a woman in Victorian England somewhere around the 1700’s or early 1800’s. She’s a detective, but being a woman, she has very limited access to society to roam freely and to do her investigations, so she had to dress as a man. She wrote three or four books of that character and I’m not sure what she’s up to next. What writing have I had published? I was one of those geeks that wrote to Julie Schwartz’s letter column in the 70’s. I realized how to get these things published; what kind of thing Julie liked and so I wrote them. I found it was so easy that I started writing letters under various names and sending those in, too.

Young Justice (1998) #46 pg.15, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

CR: In at least one issue of something, from like maybe 1971 or 1972 where I had two letters published in the letter column and they expressed different opinions. There used to be a bulletin board at Marvel when I was on staff and it was called the embarrassing fan letter bulletin board. So many people that worked in the bullpen or the freelance pool had written letters to the editor earlier and a lot of them were incredibly stupid, especially my own, and so you had letters on the bulletin board from Klaus Janson or other people. What else can I tell you here? Lettering went all digital, but as we speak I’m preparing to do my first hand-lettering job I’ve had in years.

Stroud: Was it specified as being done by hand?

CR: Yes. Actually, it’s a card for some executive at Time-Warner who’s leaving and it was done up as a comic book page, and unlike real comic book pages it’s not only going to be hand lettered and hand inked, but it’s also going to be colored right on the board. So whoever this guy is, they’re pouring a lot of money into saying goodbye to him.

Stroud: True custom work then. Last time we talked you were also starting to go into effects and how they worked or didn’t work so well in a computer medium.

CR: It’s kind of funny. When you’re hand lettering, you’re trying to make this stuff as neat as possible. You want every letter of the alphabet to look exactly like itself no matter where you see it. Then I got on computers and that lofty goal can be achieved by a chimpanzee. Because of course the nature of computer type is that it’s all uniform. So, I have gone bonkers in the last five years trying to defeat the perfection of computer lettering to make it look funky.

Stroud: Give it some character.

CR: It’s not just giving it some character, it’s giving it some flaws; giving it kind of an organic look. If you’re lettering; if you’ve got a pen in your hand and you are about to letter, say the word “act,” the lower part of the “c” in the word “act,” the letter “c” being a semi-circle, that lower part is going to extend farther to the right than the upper part. You won’t even know you’re doing it. But you’re doing it to compensate for the fact that there’s this hollowed out space on the left side of the “t.” So, you just do that kind of stuff. If you get a master, like Gaspar, and you take a magnifying glass to it, you see that kind of thing all the time. In type that’s referred to as contextual ligatures and it’s really the next big thing in digital type. When I do a book on computer, it’s almost impossible for the same letter “e” to appear more than once in a block of copy. I don’t know if anybody notices this stuff, but I notice it. I work very hard at it. But getting back to sound effects, they have to carry the mood of the story. I think we talked about that.

Zombie World_ Champion of the Worms (1997) #1 pg.02, lettered by Clem Robins.

Stroud: Yeah.

CR: Earlier we were talking a little about the Legion and Jim Shooter’s work on it along with Curt Swan.

Stroud: Yes.

CR: Swan knew how to make characters look like they were thinking and emoting. Everybody became kind of introspective. Edmond Hamilton was writing some of them and you had these marvelous stories. Did you ever review “The Legionnaire Who Killed?”

Stroud: Oh, yeah. Star Boy.

CR: That was one hell of a story. Have you read it? Do you remember it?

Stroud: I sure do. It’s been on the list to do one of these days.

CR: You ought to. There’s only one piece of action in the entire story, and that’s the opening sequence where, in self defense, Star Boy kills this guy. The rest of the entire story is talking heads and it is so compelling and so beautifully paced it’s ridiculous. The Legion was a hell of a book once Swan got on it and he made people appear to be actually thinking and having emotions. Then Shooter walks into this thing and you’d never seen anything like it. It was just so damn good. Even though Swan didn’t draw the first Shooter story, it was…you interviewed him…

Stroud: Shelly Moldoff.

CR: Right. But all these guys, including Swan, who’d been drawing for ages, they were working off Shooter’s layouts because they just worked so damn well.

Stroud: It’s remarkable how gifted the man is and in my opinion the stories are still pretty strong.

CR: He’s a very visual guy and most writers are not. Some of the best stuff I’ve seen in comics, particularly in recent years, has been stuff where there’s been a very close relationship between the artist and the writer. In situations like that the writer doesn’t have to tell the artist very much. The artist knows what the guy is going after. You don’t follow 100 Bullets, but 100 Bullets is a very inscrutable, huge storyline, and very difficult to understand. There are so many characters and they all have their own secret agenda and Brian Azarello is the most inscrutable writer you’ve ever seen. He doesn’t care if you’re going to be confused by something you’ve seen for five years.

Siri's Lettuce Field (2017) oil on linen, painted by Clem Robins. — **Siri's Lettuce Field** (2017) oil on linen, painted by Clem Robins.

I’m somebody who should really know what’s going on with 100 Bullets because I see the manuscripts every month. The manuscripts tell you nothing. The visual style on that is 100% Eduardo Risso. That’s been a nice thing. It’s ending. We just finished issue #98. It’s going two more issues. That’s been a nice situation. Brian Azarello really wanted a team of people that he could just trust, and the same people, with the exception of the early issues, which were colored by somebody different than Patricia Mulvahill; Grant Goliash I think, but we’ve been able to really groove together, even though I’ve never met most of them, and he believes he’s safe in our hands and we trust him and it’s been nifty. I’m going to miss it.

Stroud: I bet. That’s really a long-term project. Is it a monthly or a bi-monthly?

CR: It went bi-monthly for a short period of time. At the time we also did that “Broken City” storyline for Batman that was in ’03 or ’04, but short of that it’s been monthly. For awhile when Brian was writing “Loveless,” it was bi-monthly. It’s monthly now. Buy a copy. You won’t understand one word of it. It’s funny. The person responsible for getting it green-lighted was Paul Levitz. The people at Vertigo didn’t want to do the book. The editor did, but the people above him did not. It was Levitz, eventually, who green-lighted it. I don’t think it’s made that much money because sales have been lousy for the last five years, but it gets smashing reviews and they keep wanting to make a movie out of it or a Showtime series.

Stroud: I was going to say, I’ve run across it in a couple of critically acclaimed editorials or some such thing, so obviously it’s getting attention.

CR: It’s received a lot of attention, but all things come to an end.

Stroud: It’s nice that you’re affiliated with it.

Amethyst World (2012), painted by Clem Robins. — **Amethyst World** (2012), painted by Clem Robins.

CR: Yeah, which with a dime will get you a cup of coffee. It is very hard to stay afloat in this racket these days.

Stroud: Where do you see yourself in the future?

CR: I’d like to do more painting. I’d like to be able to sell more paintings. That’s where I see myself. The industry has been very nice to me. If I’d known when I was 21 when I got into it that I’d still be doing it at age 52 I’d have been very non-plussed, but it’s been very good to me. I’ve been able to support a wife and children. That’s been nice, although my wife now makes more money than I do.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) So, you’re a kept man.

CR: No, no. I make almost as much money as she does. She’s the one who drives around in the BMW. But I’ve got a pretty good life here. I can keep up with my comic work on about 25 hours a week and spend the rest of my time painting. So that’s been nice. I’ve met very few people in the industry that I didn’t like. Very few. Of course, other than the occasional stints on staff I didn’t see people that much. But they’ve shot very straight with me and I’m very happy with what I’ve been able to have.

If you would like to see more from Mr. Robins, you can follow him on Twitter @ClemRobins.

May 23, 2018

An Interview With Berni Wrightson - A True Master of Horror

May 23, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Bernard Albert Wrightson (born on October 27, 1948), sometimes credited as Berni Wrightson, was an American artist, known for co-creating the Swamp Thing, his illustration work on the adaptation of the novel Frankenstein, and for his other horror comics and illustrations, which feature his trademark intricate pen and brushwork.

Berni's career as an illustrator began in 1966 and continued on for more than 50 years. In that time, he became known as a master of horror and suspense - and earned the respect and adoration of comic fans and fellow artists alike.

Wrightson announced in January 2017 that he was retiring because of his battle with cancer. He passed away on March 18, 2017, at the age of 68.

Bernie Wrightston took a little while to track down, but it was so much fun. He couldn't have been any more personable or kind and it was such a joy when we finally had our conversation. When I attended the 2015 San Diego Comic Con, his table was the first one I visited. Extending my hand, I said, "Bernie, it's such a joy to get to meet you at last." "Hi, Bryan." "Uh...I've been told I have one of those voices, but..." "I read your badge." We had a good laugh and I miss chatting with him on the phone. He was taken from us far too soon.

This interview originally took place over the phone on November 17, 2008.

Creepy (1964) #113, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Bryan Stroud: What first triggered your interest in art?

Bernie Wrightson: It was actually a T.V. show. When I was a kid it was a Saturday morning T.V. show called “Draw with Jon Gnagy,” and it was a half hour show that was just a drawing lesson. He would start with a circle and a triangle and a square and he would show you how to make the triangle into a cone; how to make the square into a cube; how to make the circle into a ball with shading and casting of shadows and so forth, and he said that if you can learn to draw these basic shapes, you’ll be able to draw anything, and he was right. A lot of my artist friends who are my age remember him, too and they watched the show also, and it was what got them started as well.

Stroud: Just a good lesson in fundamentals.

BW: Yeah, it was just very simple and very easy for a kid to understand. It was great. It gave me something to do on a Saturday morning. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Great. I understand that other than a correspondence course that you’re pretty much self-taught?

BW: Yeah. I really had no formal education in drawing. There are a lot of places you can go now that teach how to draw commercially. There’s the Joe Kubert School for drawing comics, for example, but there was nothing like that in the 50’s and 60’s.

Stroud: Sure, and Joe [Kubert]’s school filled a vast chasm that was there for a very long time.

BW: A lot of really good artists have come out of there.

Weird Mystery Tales (1972) #21, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: I got the chance to speak to him briefly a couple of weeks ago when I was getting his impressions of working with Jack Adler and he was commenting that Jack was instrumental in helping him set up the curriculum and so forth and he said, “We’re awfully proud of the string of alumni we’ve managed to produce. It’s been very gratifying.”

BW: Great. You were speaking of Jack Adler in the past tense, is he…?

Stroud: No. He’s still with us. 90 years old, for goodness sake.

BW: Wow! That’s great.

Stroud: I had the privilege of giving him an interview a few weeks ago and he was very gracious. He’s still quite a pistol at this stage of his life.

BW: He’s terrific. I last spoke to him a couple of years ago. I had a nice long phone conversation with him and I remember him very fondly from the old days at DC. He was a great guy to work with.

Stroud: He was telling me, “I know where all the bodies are buried.” He said everyone sooner or later ended up in the production department, so he knew what was going on from every angle. (Chuckle.) I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, he’s busy copy editing the transcript as we speak, I hope. Murphy Anderson was telling me he thought you were probably a little bit of a student of some of the old masters like Hogarth and Foster and Caniff. Would that be an accurate statement?

BW: Yeah, but again just coming out of being a fan of those guys. I never even met Foster and I only met Burne Hogarth once, but I got his book. As far as Hal Foster I used to just pore over the Prince Valiant strips in the Sunday paper when I was a kid.

Stroud: It’s an excellent guide for certain. He was incredibly talented and the overall design was unequaled at the time. It spawned a whole generation of aspiring artists.

Bad Planet (2005) #2, cover by Berni Wrightson.

BW: Oh, yeah. Frazetta got a lot from Foster.

Stroud: Did you have a goal to get into comic book work or was it one of those circuitous routes that just kind of happened?

BW: All I ever really wanted to do was draw, and when I got old enough; 11, 12, 13, I began to think about drawing for a living, but I really didn’t know what. Comic books? Comic books kind of presented the opportunity to just do an awful lot of drawing.

Stroud: A good place to get your feet wet and some people enjoy the pool and just stay.

BW: Absolutely. It was great. I started to learn about story telling and page composition and all this other stuff that you need to know and I just kind of picked that up as I went along. Comic books are a great school if you can actually work in comics when you’re young and kind of use them for a training ground.

Stroud: Exactly. More than one creator has made that same comment to me. It’s a great training ground despite the headaches of deadlines and other inherent difficulties, but they couldn’t think of another place they could learn so much so quickly.

BW: It’s absolutely true. With the absence of any formal drawing course at the time, this was great. I got to meet and hang out with the other comic artists and get a lot of tips from them and watch them work.

Stroud: Who do you cite as some of your biggest helps at that point in time?

The Studio: BerniWrightson (left), William Michael Kaluta (middle), Jeff Jones (right), Barry Windsor-Smith (back)

BW: All of my contemporaries at the time, like Jeff Jones and Mike Kaluta, and up at DC Joe Orlando was my editor for a long time up there. He was the editor on Swamp Thing and the House of Mystery and the House of Secrets and Joe was especially helpful. He kept a pad of tracing paper in his desk and he would take that out and lay it over a page that I had done and kind of quickly re-draw panels that I had done and point out things to me about composition and story telling. It was very valuable.

Stroud: You can’t put a price on that. I’m reminded of what Tony DeZuniga said. He adored Joe and said that he took the time to mentor and coach and help along with things.

BW: Yeah, yeah. He was like that with everybody. Joe was just a total sweetheart of a man. I miss him very much.

Stroud: I can well imagine. I’ve heard nothing but wonderful stories about him. I take it perhaps he was the first one to hire you at DC?

BW: No, I was actually hired by Carmine Infantino, who at the time wasn’t drawing; he was the president at DC at the time. He was the head guy, and he hired me and kind of handed me over to Joe. He introduced me to Joe and said, “You’re going to be working with him now.”

**Note: I decided to give Carmine a call and ask about Bernie’s debut. He remarked that,

“He’s a terrific artist. When he came in, they showed me his work, and I called the editors in and I said, “Any editor that doesn’t hire him is fired.” And of course, Joe Orlando took him on immediately. He’s an amazing artist. Very talented.”**

Of course, I knew Joe’s work from EC comics and was a huge fan, so it was a great thrill to be working with him, and at the time; this would have been the late 60’s, Neal Adams was working in the office.

'68: Hallowed Ground (2013) #1 Variant, cover by Berni Wrightson, Kelly Jones, & Jay Fotos. — '68: Hallowed Ground (2013) #1 Variant, cover by Berni Wrightson, Kelly Jones, & Jay Fotos.

Stroud: Right, right, so you were part of that wave of new blood that was coming in.

BW: Yeah, and I was familiar with Neal’s work from the comic strip Ben Casey. He did that as a daily strip for a few years, so I had seen his work in the comic strips, and again, it was a big thrill to meet him and there he was actually working, and we’d all crowd into his tiny little office. He had this room that was the size of a closet and it was practically filled with this big overhead projector and he’d sit in there with the lights off and just the light from the projector shining down and he would do little breakdowns, like maybe three inches high. Just very sketchy little things on typing paper. He would sketch out his pages and then he’d put them on the projector and use those as the guide for his finished pages. So, we’d just go in there and crowd around and he was great. He could talk and joke and still work at the same time. It was great hanging out with Neal. He was always terrific. It was like some separate part of him was able to draw while the other part of him could socialize.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) The original multi-tasker. In fact, I seem to have stumbled across something somewhere where you were considered one of the Crusty Bunkers at some point. Is that accurate?

BW: Not on a full-time basis. Neal eventually got his own studio in New York and we’d go up to his studio to hang out because Neal was there all the time, day and night and any time we were in mid-town doing business or something we’d stop by the studio and he always had work. There was always something going on. There was a lot of comic book work, there was a lot of advertising work, and Neal was usually doing that. Sometimes we’d just pitch in and help with something. I remember doing a little bit of drawing and inking when I went up there, but I can’t remember any more exactly what. There were guys up there who were a lot more full time than me.

Stroud: Well and we’re talking several years ago. I’m sure a lot of it just runs together.

BW: Oh, God, yeah. I have trouble keeping last week in my head.

Batman: Nevermore (2003) #1, Cover by Berni Wrightson. — Batman: Nevermore (2003) #1, Cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: (Laughter.) It’s disturbing. I’m 46 and I thought, “Man, the things my father didn’t warn me about middle age.”

BW: I know. It’s all lost. I just turned 60 a few weeks ago. It’s strange. I still feel like a kid.

Stroud: Oh, exactly. That was something I was telling Len Wein when we were discussing something similar. I said, “Somehow I’m still 23 in my head,” and he said, “Oh, you’re older than me.” (Mutual laughter.) Do you remember what it was like making the transition from doing the fanzines to working for DC?

BW: I got paid.

Stroud: (Laughter.) A big plus.

BW: (Chuckle.) That was a great big plus. I’m the kind of person, and I think a lot of my friends would say the same thing, we’d be doing this all on our own and maybe working in an office somewhere doing something to make a living and then come home and draw. We all grew up drawing. We spent our teenage years sitting in the basement in our parent’s houses, or a back bedroom or something with a drawing table and drawing instead of going out on dates; really kind of socially retarded.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) I can certainly relate. I was not much on sports as a kid, let’s put it that way.

BW: I loved doing physical stuff, but I never got into sports.

Stroud: And the world is richer for your decision. When your full-page drawings were first used for the 100-page Super Spectaculars on Weird Mystery Tales did it feel like you’d arrived?

Captain Marvel (1968) #43, cover penciled by Al Milgrom & inked by Berni Wrightson.

BW: You know there is something thrilling about seeing your work in print for the first time. I never had the feeling that I’d arrived. My friends would say, “Hey, you’ve arrived,” and I would say, “Yeah, okay, whatever.”

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Missed the memo.

BW: Yeah, another moment that I missed. It’s always exciting to see something that I’ve done in print.

Stroud: When you and Len struck gold with Swamp Thing was there any kind of an inkling that you were onto something special?

BW: I think we knew. We knew we had something special. There was just nothing else around at the time that looked like that, and that was really the whole point. I remember starting Swamp Thing with my eyes completely open and thinking, “I think this is going to be a hit.” It just seemed like the time was right for something like that. It did very well for…I think I did the first two years. I remember that it sold really, really well. I remember someone telling me that there were a couple of months where it outsold Superman, but I don’t know if that’s true. But it certainly did make a splash.

Stroud: Absolutely. I was kind of curious, I’ve managed to get acquainted with Gaspar [Saladino], and of course the Swamp Thing logo is one of the most distinctive ever created. What was your impression the first time you saw that?

BW: Oh, I thought it was great. Gaspar was just always one of the best. We were just so lucky to get him.

Stroud: In fact, I think he was the letterer on the run there for the longest time, wasn’t he?

BW: He was. If I’m not mistaken he lettered all the ones that I did. The first ten issues.

House of Secrets (1956) #92, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: Magnificent. When I talked to Len I was asking him about the characters in that debut story and he said, “Bernie himself I think is sort of Alex Olsen. All of the people in it…it was one of those sorts of things where Bernie was trying something and basically had many of the shots posed and took photos and worked from that.”

BW: Yeah, was that in the short story?

Stroud: Yeah. Is that how it went?

BW: Yeah. I remember that came along and the deadline was really short. And again, don’t trust me and my memory, but my impression is that I had something like a week or maybe a weekend to do that story and it was 8 pages and I just thought, “Maybe the quickest way to do this would be to photograph everything first.” So, we just had a big picture taking party. All of us got dressed up in kind of facsimile period clothing, and I was the hero, of course.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Of course.

BW: Mike Kaluta was the bad guy in that one and there were a couple of shots where you can really recognize him. He had this great, full mustache at the time and I remember kind of waxing it and turning it into this Snidely Whiplash kind of thing. Mike did some drawing on that; Jeff Jones did some drawing on it; Al Weiss did some work on it; just about everyone who was around at the time had a hand in it.

Stroud: Cool.

BW: Well, it was one of these things where we all got a chance to pitch in for everyone else when they were up against a deadline.

Stroud: Nice. A real collaborative effort. Was that a one-shot or was photo reference a standard technique for you at the time?

Swamp Thing (1972) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

BW: Oh, no, no this was very unusual for me. I hardly ever work from reference.

Stroud: Okay. When Len first told me that I thought, “Oh, I wonder if that’s where Alex Ross came up with it?”

BW: No, no, no. Jeff used to do that. Jeff would use a lot of photo reference for his paintings and he was actually a very skilled photographer. He had his own darkroom setup in his apartment and he would develop and enlarge prints like black and white photos to work from. I was fascinated by this. I used to love to watch him do it, but I just never got into the habit of doing that. It all seemed to take too long.

Stroud: And perhaps the medium of paint is a more logical approach from that standpoint.

BW: I think so. You take a few reference photos and you spend a week or two on a painting, but with comics you really have to crank this stuff out. There was an old saying (chuckle) up at DC: “Don’t do it good, do it Thursday.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

BW: Meet your deadline, no matter what. And sometimes there was just no choice.

Stroud: Sure. When you’ve got them breathing down your neck, that’s just the way it goes. Do you paint at all, Bernie? Is that something you’ve dabbled with?

BW: I’ve dabbled, but I don’t think of myself as a painter. I’m not real happy with my painting, so I don’t do it that much. I dabble from time to time, but my first love is drawing. I love working in black and white.

Scream Door (1971) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: Yeah, and since your particular genre works best in those stark shades…

BW: Well, I grew up in a black and white world. In the 1950’s and even pretty much about halfway through the 60’s, we only had a black and white T.V. and a lot of my early influences were black and white movies. Tarzan movies and such, those were all in black and white.

Stroud: It makes sense. By nature of what you typically draw and drew back in the day, was the Comics Code ever difficult to navigate?

BW: No. The Comics Code was never really a problem. I can’t remember what happened when we did the Werewolf story in Swamp Thing. I think maybe around then the Code was beginning to loosen up a little bit. I can’t remember any problems with the Werewolf, but I do remember at some point when we were pretty well along; we were about a year into the Swamp Thing series at the time and I remember going up to the office and Joe was sitting at his desk laughing. I said, “What’s so funny?” He said, “I just got a call from the Comics Code Authority about Swamp Thing.” I said, “What was the problem?” He said, “They just saw (I’ll say) issue #6, and they’re just noticing for the first time that he’s not wearing anything.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

BW: Their term for it…I think he had a letter, and in the letter, their term for it was, “This character is undraped, and we can’t have this.” So, Joe had to talk with them and I think he had to go through every issue, panel by panel and show them that we weren’t up to something, and point out to them that this is a non-human character. This guy is a monster, and every time you see him, that whole part of him, his whole mid-section is always in shadow. It’s always black, and there’s nothing going on. I think they grudgingly let him alone after that, but I just thought that was very funny.

Roots of the Swamp Thing (1986) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: Oh, yeah and what a pretentious way to put it: “Undraped.” That’s hysterical. Did you think it was inevitable that you’d eventually end up doing some work for Warren?

BW: I don’t know if it was inevitable, but I was always a huge fan of Creepy. I was a big fan when I was a kid of the EC comics and of course when they disappeared, when they stopped publishing the horror comics I was really too young to understand. I guess I just noticed that, “Gee, the horror comics aren’t around any more.” Then Creepy started coming out in the mid-60’s and that was wonderful, because I remember buying the first issue of Creepy, and they’d advertised it in Famous Monsters, which I bought every issue of Famous Monsters, so I was ready. I bought the first issue of Creepy and it was great. I recognized all these artists from the EC days like Frazetta and Williamson and Jack Davis, Reed Crandall, and it was great to see them again, and it was especially great to see their stuff in black and white.

Stroud: It’s the perfect medium for that.

BW: Yeah, and again for me it was like a free art lesson.

Stroud: How did working between the big two compare? Did the full script versus Marvel method work any differently or better for you?

BW: I don’t really have a preference. It was just a different way to work. Len and I did Swamp Thing using the so-called Marvel Method. What we did was we’d get together in Joe’s office, just the three of us, and close the door and we’d plot out the issue in an afternoon, and it was mostly Len. I’d say it was all Len. He had the story in his head, and he’d just kind of walk around the office acting out the different parts and tell the story, one page at a time. And I would take visual notes. I would sit there with a pad of paper and just kind of sketch the pages out and make notes as we went along. Then I’d take that home and draw up the pages, and when I got the pages all penciled, they would go to Len and he’d do the dialogue and then he would send the pages to Gaspar for lettering.

Marvel Chillers (1975) #3, cover penciled by Gil Kane & inked by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: It sounds like it worked out very well.

BW: Yeah. That’s how we did all the Swamp Thing books.

Stroud: In fact, Len had divulged to me that he started out as an artist, so he still retained that artistic sensibility when he was telling a story and so it made it a little easier because he could speak the language a little better.

BW: Absolutely. And don’t let him fool you. I don’t know what he told you about his drawing, but he’s really a remarkably good artist. I’ve seen some of his drawing and he’s terrific. He could do that for a living if he wanted to.

Stroud: It seems like you gravitated or maybe the assignments were such that you didn’t do a lot of actual true-blue superheroes over the years. Was that by choice?

BW: Oh, I hate superheroes. I don’t mind reading superhero comics, but the thing is, I can’t get into it. I can’t believe superheroes. Batman is different, because he doesn’t have any super powers. He’s just a guy. He dresses up in the costume, but he’s a human being. Superman I could just never relate to, and I think it comes from being a kid, and reading comics. I read Superman comics when I was a kid, and I guess little boys always fantasize about being Superman. How fun would that be? But at the same time, you know you could never be Superman because you didn’t come from Krypton. You’re not a strange visitor from another planet.

Stroud: Kind of hard to overcome that obstacle.

BW: Yeah, you’re kind of screwed from the get go. But when you’re a kid and you’re reading Batman you think, “Well, yeah, I could be Batman.” It’s conceivable.

Batman (1940) #241, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: Absolutely. You’re in good company, for what it’s worth because Denny O’Neil told me he never felt comfortable with characters that weren’t human scaled and Russ Heath was a little more blunt about it, saying something to the effect that, “I always thought the whole concept of superheroes was ridiculous.” (Mutual laughter.) He’d do a western or a war comic or Batman in a heartbeat, but no thanks on the rest. Did you ever catch any static at DC for sometimes implying an outline without actually drawing one?

BW: How do you mean?

Stroud: It seemed like in the day the production department kind of insisted on everything being outlined and in a lot of your work you don’t actually put the outline in there. It’s more an implied thing than actually there.

BW: Right. Yeah, they would occasionally get on me about that, and I never really took it to heart. I just pretty much did it the way I wanted to do it. (Chuckle.) I was influenced by guys like Frazetta and Al Williamson was great. I loved the stuff he did where he would leave the outline off and just let the form or the motion of the character kind of carry your eye through. I loved looking at that and just thinking, “Wow, you don’t have to put an outline on it.” I understand the production department’s concerns. It’s very hard to color something if you don’t have an outline.

Stroud: I just didn’t know if you had to endure any guff over it.

BW: Occasionally. Not a lot. I remember having conversations with Jack Adler about it, and with me, he was always pretty easy about that. I remember working with him on a couple of things; a couple of covers, I think; working with him about the color on the covers, like ideas that I had for them. He was great. He was always great to work with. He was very good about telling what was possible and what was flatly impossible, and I remember a few times when he would say, “Hmmm. I don’t remember ever seeing this done before, but I think maybe we can do it.” Considering the limitations at the time, this was the days before computer color. I guess everything is computerized now. Back then it was all done by hand.

Aquaman Annual (1994) #4, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: Right. The separation processes and such. It sounds like it was complex and very much an art.

BW: It was, and a lot of what we wanted to do really depended on artistic ability on the part of the colorist, and most of the colorists…I’m trying to think of a diplomatic way to put it. The people who actually worked at the plant where they did the separations, for the most part they weren’t artists. In the old days when you look at some of the old Sunday comic strips like Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant, the color is amazing. Especially when you stop and think that this was all done by hand and the reproduction techniques were very limited at the time, but you look at some of that stuff and it’s almost a water color effect. The color just faded off to white and they managed to do these beautiful things with very crude techniques and tools. I think in the 30’s and 40’s, the heyday of the Sunday full color comics, there were artists working in the production end of it and there were people there that really went the extra mile and they really put the extra effort in to make it beautiful and to make it look like a painting. I don’t think it was ever that way with comic books. Comic books don’t really pay well.

Stroud: Right and they didn’t really garner any respect in the day. If you had a syndicated strip you were somebody, and if you were in comic books, at least for quite some time, you were just kind of a hack.

BW: Exactly. There was a huge gulf between comic books and comic strips. That probably doesn’t exist any more. I remember at the time if you were doing a newspaper strip that was it. You were at the top and that was easy street. A lot of guys in the 60’s and 70’s were still talking about, “Oh, geez, I wish I could sell this idea to a syndicate for a newspaper strip.”

Stroud: There was a certain prestige there.

Badtime Stories (1972) OGN, cover by Berni Wrightson.

BW: And it paid a lot better, too. It depended on how many newspapers you had. It was possible to get rich in cartooning.

Stroud: You bet. Look at Percy Crosby who ended up having an equestrian estate in Virginia and it was certainly possible.

BW: Sure, and Hal Foster was certainly rich from Tarzan and Prince Valiant. Well, look at Charles Schulz.

Stroud: Sure. You were one of the first artists to use two light sources on each side of the face with that undulating patch of black dividing the head. What inspired that technique?

BW: I stole that from EC comics. They used to do that all the time and I loved looking at the lighting effects that people like Graham Ingels and Wally Wood could do with the shadows and reflected light and multiple light sources.

Stroud: An extremely effective technique. In fact, I would guess that perhaps that was your major ability as far as setting the mood in a panel or would you say it was more with spotting blacks?

BW: I think it was mostly that I was just using more black than anybody else at the time and a lot of the stuff I was doing was almost like silhouette where a figure would be mostly in shadow with just a little bit of light on his face. It’s very dramatic looking and it also saves a lot of work. I remember Jeff Jones telling me one time…I was drawing something and the more I worked on it, the darker it became and the more in shadow it became and I remember Jeff looking at it and I was telling him, “I don’t know how far I should take this. Do I make it mostly silhouette or something?” Jeff said, “You know what? It’s not a total loss until it goes completely black.” (Mutual laughter.)

Dark Horse Presents (1986) #100-2, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: I like it. So many of the examples I’ve seen of your work include just incredibly detailed backgrounds. What was your typical production rate like, or did you ever employ assistants for that?

BW: No. I pretty much always worked alone. There were times where I asked my friends to help me like I said earlier, back in the old days when you just had to meet a deadline and many hands make light work. But for the most part I worked on my own and I’m very, very slow. I’m not one of these guys that can do two pages a day.

Stroud: There don’t seem to be many who could actually pull that off. I’ve heard legends about [Jack] Kirby and Mike Sekowsky, but beyond that it seems to be something of a patient man’s game.

BW: It is for me. I was never really good at churning out a lot of work. I really admired people like Kirby and Mike Sekowsky and I hear Jack Davis also was incredibly fast.

Stroud: The only other one that ever came up was…it was Al Plastino. He was telling me that when he shared a studio with Jack Sparling that Sparling could just knock them out like crazy and he said, “It kind of got into my blood and I felt like I wasn’t working fast enough.” Of course, sometimes quality gets sacrificed for quantity, but not necessarily for those we’ve talked about. It’s a difficult line to walk, I’m sure, particularly when you’re talking about your livelihood.

BW: Almost always you put in a lot more hours than you’re actually being paid for in order to meet deadlines. I remember many nights just staying up all night to get a job done.

Stroud: Did you have a favorite scripter you liked to interpret back in the day?

Captain Sternn_ Running Out Of Time (1993) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

BW: I don’t think I could nail it down to a favorite. I’ve been really lucky in my career. I’ve worked with some of the best people in the business. I loved working with Len and with Bruce Jones and I’ve been doing some things lately with Steve Niles and I’ve been having an awful lot of fun with that. Jim Starlin. Just all the really great writers that I’ve been able to work with over the years. I’ve been really, really lucky.

Stroud: I know you did a little bit of work with Bob Kanigher back in the day and it seems like the general consensus was that he was kind of formulaic in his approach. Did you find him to be that way?

BW: I don’t really remember working with Bob. I don’t think I did that much with him. I do remember conversations with him up at the office. He was a fascinating guy.

Stroud: I’ve heard some interesting stories. It sounds like he was one of those unforgettable types. I also see where you worked on The Spectre with Denny O’Neil.

BW: Yeah, I liked working with Denny, too. I also remember a Batman mini-series with Jim Starlin and at that time Denny was the editor. I always loved Denny. He was one of my favorite people, and he’s just a tremendously talented writer.

Stroud: I would agree. He had some great stories when we spoke. It looks like you nearly always did your own inking over your pencils. Did anyone else ever ink you?

BW: Occasionally. Not too often. There were a few times in the old days when we would jam together and Jeff Jones did some inking and Mike Kaluta and Al Weiss; and I did a Punisher mini-series about 10 or 12 years ago for Marvel that Jimmy Palmiotti inked.

Stroud: Okay, so definitely not the normal procedure for you.

The Spectre (1992) #58, cover by Berni Wrightson.

BW: No. Usually I liked to do it all myself.

Stroud: You’ve got better control then. I was talking to someone recently and they were saying, “Just imagine penciling a story and then completely surrendering it to someone else.”

BW: Yeah. I know I’m going to be inking my own stuff, so when I pencil I take a lot of short cuts because I know what I’m going to do with the inking. There’s a lot of stuff that just doesn’t need to be penciled for myself.

Stroud: You have on occasion inked other artists. I saw where you inked over Steve Ditko once, for example. Mike Esposito said he made the attempt to follow Steve once and he found it very difficult. Was that your experience?

BW: I wouldn’t call it difficult. Everything was there with Ditko’s pencils. No matter who’s inking him it always comes out looking like Ditko. He gives you very little to work with. It’s just kind of basic shapes and outlines and if you’re just going to ink him you just follow what he gives you and it comes out looking like Ditko. It’s that strong. If you want to make it look like you, you really have to re-draw it. That was my experience with it anyway.

Stroud: Do you recall inking anyone else?

BW: Occasionally, yeah. I inked Gil Kane a few times and Kaluta and I inked a whole issue of Green Lantern over Neal Adams.

Stroud: That must have been fun.

BW: It was. I think Dick Giordano was the regular inker on that and he got sick or there was work overload or something and they asked me to pitch in for one issue. That was a lot of fun and again, it came out looking like Neal, because Neal’s stuff is just very, very strong. I just found that there was very little that I could bring to it. It was all there. All I did was follow his lines.

Doctor Strange-Silver Dagger (1983) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: What sort of equipment do you favor?

BW: I like inking with a brush. I very seldom use a pen.

Stroud: Have you ever tried your hand at writing?

BW: I’ve written a few things, but it comes very hard to me. So just to get things done and to make a living I’m much more comfortable drawing.

Stroud: You’ve collaborated on some of Stephen King’s work. What was that like as opposed to what you typically do?

BW: I loved working with Stephen King. I’m just a huge fan of his. I’ve been reading his books since they first started to appear in I guess the mid-70’s and I’ll work with him any time.

Stroud: It seems like a perfect match. I think I saw a few examples in “From a Buick 8.” It almost looked like it was strictly pencil work or is my memory failing me?

BW: No, “From a Buick 8” those were paintings.

Stroud: Okay. Maybe I didn’t get a good enough copy. (Chuckle.) I read where a large book of your Frankenstein work is either about to be released or has been. Has that been a pretty exciting project?

Frankenstein (2008) HC, cover by Berni Wrightson.

BW: Oh, yeah. Very much so. It’s been around for awhile. This is actually the 25th anniversary edition. It’s coming out from Dark Horse and it’s a beautiful book. They did a great job on it.

Stroud: So it’s been released or is going to be soon?

BW: It’s already out.

Stroud: I’ll have to go find it. I saw a credit for you on a variant cover for a new House of Mystery book. Was it kind of like coming home again working on that?

BW: Oh, yeah. It was great. I was so excited when they called me about it.

Stroud: It seems like there have been a lot more of, for lack of a better term, retro work being done lately. You’ve got Jim Shooter scripting the Legion of Super-Heroes and you doing work on the House of Mystery it certainly feels like a homecoming for me as a reader.

BW: It’s great. It’s very nostalgic for me. I have such fond memories of House of Mystery and it’s really where I got my start.

Stroud: Did you prefer covers to interior work?

BW: It really didn’t make a whole lot of difference. What was great about doing covers was that it was one single picture. It was just one single piece and I could do a cover comfortably in two days, whereas a comic book page would take the better part of a week. So, if I ever got into a situation where I could do a bunch of covers, one right after another, that was great. It was lots less work and more money.

Web of Horror (1969) #3, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: What more could you ask? You’re a regular on the convention circuit and in fact you were recently the guest of honor at the Baltimore Con. That must have been kind of a triumphant homecoming.

BW: It was great. My wife and I actually stayed an extra day in Baltimore and I took her around and showed her the old neighborhood and everything. It was really fun. There’s so much there that hasn’t changed that I still remember.

Stroud: Do you have any current projects going that you can talk about?

BW: I’m working on a 3-issue mini-series for IDW with Steve Niles. It’s called “The Ghoul.”

Stroud: When will it be released?

BW: I don’t think it’s been scheduled yet. We’re really just getting started on it.

Stroud: Something to look forward to. You’ve got a very active presence on the web. Have you found it to be a good tool to keep fans updated and so forth?

BW: Actually, I have no idea. My wife runs the website and I recently threw my computer out the window. (Chuckle.) Not literally, but I had a computer, just like everybody else, and I tried to keep up with e-mails and the internet and all that stuff and it’s such a time-consuming thing and I’m just no good with technology. The computer got some kind of virus or something and it finally just shut down completely and I got so frustrated with it. It literally sat here for almost two years not being used because it was corrupted and I couldn’t log on or anything. I thought, “What a piece of crap.” It’s just this absolutely useless piece of furniture. It’s taking up room and I finally just got rid of it. I don’t even have a computer any more. I don’t do e-mails. I hate e-mails.

Jonah Hex (1977) #9, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) They do have a way of expanding to fill every void.

BW: It’s not really that, it’s just that nothing ever gets said on an e-mail. Most of my e-mails consisted of things like, “Oh, great to hear from you, Bernie. I’ll get back to you soon.” Its like, “If it’s so great to hear from me, why don’t you pick up the damn phone?”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

BW: “And then we could have like, a conversation.”

Stroud: That lost art.

BW: You say something, I say something and maybe it’s funny and we laugh together. I try to put the word out to all my friends, “If you want to talk to me, pick up the phone and we’ll talk. Actually say words and stuff.” (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Yeah. My wife and I have this running joke, “Have we just got such superficial relationships that people only call us when they want something?” I get to where I hate to answer the phone half the time.

BW: It seems like that sometimes and if you really let yourself think about it, it’s pretty depressing.

Stroud: Yeah, so I’d just better move along from that one. (Chuckle.) Are you actively doing any commission work?

BW: No, I don’t do commissions. One of the things that has kept me out of advertising work all these years is I hate art directors. No, I shouldn’t say that because some of them, I’m sure, are very nice people. I hate art direction, and I hate being art directed. I’ve tried doing a few commissions and it always turns out to be art direction. Someone will ask for a drawing of Batman, so I’ll do a really nice, moody, atmospheric drawing of Batman, and the client will see it and say, “Oh, this is great! Um…could you put a moon over in this corner? And on the other side have the bat signal shining? And while you’re at it, could you turn around so he’s facing the other way?”

Punisher: P.O.V. (1991) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson. — Punisher: P.O.V. (1991) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Stroud: (Laughter.) I can see where that would get old quickly. That explains in part, other than the sheer quality of your work, why so many of your pieces of art go for such astronomical prices. Sheer scarcity.

BW: Yeah. I really haven’t done that much. My God, I shudder to think what will happen when I die. (Chuckle.) The prices will just go through the roof.

Stroud: Unquestionably. What do you like to do to unwind, Bernie?

BW: Watch T.V. and drink a few beers. I don’t really have that many interests. I don’t like sports, so I never go to sporting events. I’ll occasionally watch a baseball game on T.V. if it’s a team I’m interested in and going out have become very expensive. I stopped going to movies a few years ago mostly because the audience is just rude.

Stroud: Too fully engaged sometimes.

BW: Or distracted. The last movie I saw…I can’t even remember what the movie was, but I remember a bunch of teenaged girls sitting right behind me on their cell phones and describing the movie to their friends. Its like, “Did you people get in here free? Did you not pay $15.00 to come in here? Are you rich? Does that money mean nothing to you? So you can pay that much money to come in here and not even watch the movie?” Anyway, (chuckle) I’m getting a reputation in my old age as a real grouch.

Stroud: Well, save a seat, because I think I’m right beside you. More and more I find myself being a homebody, because it’s a lot more peaceful.

Frankenstein (2008) interior, art by Berni Wrightson.

BW: Well, yeah and you’re pretty much in control of your life when you’re at home.

Stroud: That’s it. Bernie, I can’t thank you enough for your time.

BW: My pleasure.

We are including a small gallery below to showcase just a little bit more of the fine cover work produced by the Amazing Mr. Bernie Wrightson!

Batman-Aliens (1997) #2, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Chamber of Darkness (1969) #8, cover by Berni Wrightson.

House Of Mystery (1951) #193, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Freak Show (1984) TPB, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Heavy Metal (1977) #5, cover by Berni Wrightson.

I'll Be Damned (1970) #4, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Marvel Graphic Novel (1982) #29, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Swamp Thing (1972) #7, cover by Berni Wrightson.

This Is Legend (1970) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Secrets of Haunted House (1975) #5, cover by Berni Wrightson.

So Dark the Rose (1995) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

The Night Terrors (2000) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

The Weird (1988) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

Tomb of Dracula (1972) #43, cover by Berni Wrightson.

The Gargoyle (1985) #1, cover by Berni Wrightson.

May 16, 2018

An Interview With Marv Wolfman - Creator of Blade, Bullseye, and The New Teen Titans

May 16, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Wesley Snipes with Marv Wolfman on the set of Blade (1998). — Wesley Snipes with Marv Wolfman on the set of **Blade** (1998).

Marvin Arthur "Marv" Wolfman (born May 13, 1946) is an American comic book writer. He is best known for lengthy runs on Marvel Comics' The Tomb of Dracula (for which he and artist Gene Colan created the vampire-slayer Blade), and DC Comics' The New Teen Titans and the Crisis on Infinite Earths limited series with George Pérez.

I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. While I enjoyed nearly every interview, a clinker would inevitably show up. Marv Wolfman didn't seem to be all that excited to talk with me and he "lost" my questions a couple of times and flatly refused to answer a couple, which is certainly his right, but this one just didn't go as well as some.

This interview originally took place via email on September 21, 2008.

Doctor Strange Annual (1976) #1, written by P. Craig Russell & Marv Wolfman.

Marvel Treasury Edition (1974) #28, written by Jim Shooter & Marv Wolfman.

Detective Comics (1937) #408, written by Len Wein & Marv Wolfman.

Bryan Stroud: Len Wein told me that both of you got into the business on the coattails of fandom and that you’d done some fanzines. Did you enjoy the transition?

Marv Wolfman: It's partially why I did fanzines; I felt a need to tell stories and that's what was available to me.

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #194, written by Marv Wolfman.

Stroud: They say you were pretty heavily influenced by science fiction. That almost seems like a gateway to comics. Would you agree?

Wolfman: When I was younger I love(d) SF. I don't read it as much these days as so much has gone into fantasy, but SF opened my mind and let me see other possibilities in ideas. SF is something that let's you realize there could be more than just what you can see. It's not a gateway to comics; it's a gateway to letting your imagination run wild.

Stroud: Several of the characters you’ve written for have gone on to big screen fame, like Ghost Rider, Transformers, and Iron Man, to name a few. Do comic book characters transfer well to the big screen? Is it gratifying to see them there?

Wolfman: You picked characters I may have written but had nothing to do with in any way. Blade, Bullseye, Titans, etc. those among others are characters I created that went on to movies and TV. Some characters can transfer well if they have interesting stories to tell as people. Some are better meant to be done in comics because of the strengths of the comics medium. Movies and comics may both be picture and story but that doesn't mean they are interchangeable. Some work as film and some don't. As for any gratification on seeing my work on the screen, there is in that it means I created something that resonates with millions of people.

Stroud: Full script or Marvel method?

Wolfman: I write both plot style and full script, depending. Both have strengths.

Stroud: You became an editor at a relatively young age. Did you feel you were ready?

Wolfman: I started as an editorial assistant, moved up to assistant editor then became an editor. Because I had the very best editors training me at the time, I felt I was ready. Of course, I started full editing at Warren so it made it a bit easier. My strength as a writer is structure so that is good for helping others and knowing the basics of story and helping someone tell their story in a clear, concise fashion.

Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985) #1, written by Marv Wolfman & Robert Greenberger.

Stroud: You worked with some true legends over the course of your career. Would you give me some of your recollections of… Jack Kirby

Wolfman: Jack was the King for a reason. An incredible artist, thinker and more important, a dear, dear person. They don't make people like him anymore.

Stroud: Steve Ditko

Wolfman: I was such a fan of his and really enjoyed working with him. He was someone I very much enjoyed talking to.

Stroud: Ross Andru

Wolfman: Ross was incredibly smart and one of the best story-tellers I've ever known. He was great to work with.

Stroud: Carmine Infantino

Wolfman: I grew up a fan of his Flash, Adam Strange and Space Museum stories so it was a thrill to work with him on Nova and Spider-Woman.

Stroud: Cary Bates

Wolfman: A much better writer than anyone at the company realized at the time. We worked together on V and then a number of other projects nobody knows about. A real solid writer.

Stroud: Nelson Bridwell

Tomb of Dracula (1972) #10, written by Marv Wolfman.

Wolfman: Didn't really work with him bit I enjoyed talking to him. One of the smartest people I've ever met.

Stroud: Gene Colan

Wolfman: What can I say? Brilliant artist and a real great guy. He was a wonderful partner on so many different comics.

Stroud: Gil Kane on the animated Superman project?

Wolfman: Gil drew a great Superman and we seemed to be somewhat in synch on it. I was a huge fan of his and again it was great working with him on Superman for the cartoons, in the comics and also on John Carter.

Stroud: I think you’ve written for every genre, to include jungle, science-fiction, superhero, comedy, action, western, war and horror. Where were you most comfortable?

Wolfman: I like writing everything so I keep fresh. If I did any one genre I'd be bored in about ten minutes.

Stroud: You’ve written and edited on some iconic titles, such as Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Superman and Batman in World’s Finest. Was your approach different depending on the character? How much research did you do, or did you try to stay true to history?

Wolfman: I re-read everything and try to figure out what made that character work. Then I proceed from that. It’s understanding core concepts.

Stroud: You’re forever identified with the Teen Titans and worked on them for many, many years. What sort of magic did you use to cause them to create such a sensation?

Tales of the Teen Titans (1984) #44, written by Marv Wolfman & George Perez.

Wolfman: God knows. If I did know I'd bottle it.

Stroud: What involvement did you have with the animated Teen Titans?

Wolfman: I wrote some episodes.

Stroud: You pretty well stayed with the big two publishers. You were even EIC at Marvel. How did they compare?

Wolfman: Both have great characters and as a writer I loved writing both of them. As a creator there were very few differences. Business wise they are very different but I don't get into that kind of stuff.

Stroud: While you spent more time at Marvel than DC, you were tasked with the truly monumental Crisis on Infinite Earths for DC, rehashing and revamping pretty much every single character from half a century. I can’t imagine what you must have gone through, but can you describe it?

Wolfman: I had been reading DC since I was five so I actually spent far much more time with the DCU characters. Crisis was huge but it would take more time that I have to describe it. Suffice it to say it took several years to plot the story so it worked.

Stroud: I suppose you’re aware that it looks like the new Crisis series is resurrecting Barry Allen. I think I read someplace that you left a very subtle loophole in your story that would allow him back. Care to share what it was?

Wolfman: It's on my website under Q&A.

Note: Indeed it is at www.marvwolfman.com:

Captain Marvel (1968) #23, written by Marv Wolfman.

"So many people actually saw that comment I made in my forward and have asked me how I'd bring back the Flash, that I've finally gotten tired of explaining it. So that I don't ever have to explain it again, here it is now, once and for all. Please remember, this is a very comic booky answer and you can probably blow holes in it somehow (but then nobody really complained how an anti-matter villain could co-exist with a positive matter good guy, so maybe physics isn't anyone's strong suit). This is what I proposed to DC back in 1985. Please note that I didn't think it was a good idea to kill The Flash but those were my marching orders, so I did the best I could to make his death as moving as I could. Here is the given I worked from: Much of the reason the people in charge didn't care for Barry Allen was that he was considered dull. I felt if I could come up with a way of making him vital again while keeping him alive, then perhaps Barry would be given a second lease on life.

I came up with the idea of Flash moving back through time, flashing into our dimension even as he was dying. So, thought I, what if Barry was plucked out of the time stream at one of those moments he appeared? What if that meant from this point on Barry knew that he was literally living on borrowed time, that at any moment the time stream could close in on him and take him to his inevitable death. What would this mean to Barry? 1: from now on the fastest man alive would literally be running for his life. 2: He knew he didn't have much time left and believed (as Barry would) that he had to devote it to helping others. 3: This meant Barry would become driven and desperate to help others with each passing tick of the clock. I felt this new revitalized attitude might be enough to make the formerly dull police scientist into someone who now had to push himself as he never had to before. I was hoping that this would make the character interesting enough to live. Earlier, I said my explanation was comic booky. In many ways it is because none of us knows when we are going to die. But this knowledge would haunt a man like Barry Allen and change him from an unassuming character into a driven hero. At least that was the plan!"

Stroud: Superman is 70 years old now. Has the superhero outlived its run?

Wolfman: Nope. I can still come up with ideas we've never seen before.

Captain America (1968) #192, written by Marv Wolfman.

Stroud: Have you ever taught a writing class?

Wolfman: I do at conventions and people tell me they really like the class I give. Maybe some day someone will pay be to do so. It's fun.

Stroud: What counsel would you give to an aspiring writer?

Wolfman: Write. Listen. Then keep writing some more.

Stroud: You’ve written animation and television. Do you find there’s much difference in writing for other mediums?

Wolfman: You look at the strengths of each medium and cater to it. That's all. They are different.

Stroud: More than one creator has told me that DC has done better by them than Marvel for compensation for past work or creations. Since you’ve created Tim Drake as Robin, Nova and other characters, has that been your experience?

Wolfman: I'm at DC. That should tell you something.

Stroud: You’re writing Nightwing now for DC. Is it good to be back?

Wolfman: I'm off the book; I was supposed to only do four issues but I did a year and a half. I enjoyed it very much.

Stroud: Your “Homeland” book is going great guns. That must feel good after all the work that went into it.

Wolfman: It was awesome. The hardest work I've ever done and we've gotten many major mainstream awards for it (although no comic book awards). That has been very gratifying.

John Carter Warlord of Mars (1977) #1, written by Marv Wolfman.

Stroud: Any other projects in the hopper?

Wolfman: Many but none I can talk about.

Stroud: Len told me that “Almost no 14-year olds are buying comics?” Do you concur? Why do you think that is?

Wolfman: I think the cost is one thing and for most of the country comic shops aren't nearby. Some cities don't even have any. I think if a 14 year could find a comic they might like it.

Stroud: If you were king for a day what would you do to bring the comic book back to its former glory?

Wolfman: Totally change the distribution system.

Stroud: You do something unique at your website by selling scripts. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing that. Is there a big demand?

Wolfman: Not a huge one but I do get requests.

Nova (1976) #1, written by Marv Wolfman.

Spider-Woman (1978) #1, written by Marv Wolfman.

Daredevil (1964) #131, written by Marv Wolfman.

Doctor Strange vs Dracula (1994) #1, written by Marv Wolfman.

Fantastic Four (1961) #201, written by Marv Wolfman.

Star Trek (1980) #1, written by Marv Wolfman.

New Teen Titans (1980) #1, written by Marv Wolfman & George Perez.

Skull, the Slayer (1975) #1, written by Marv Wolfman.

Amazing Spider-Man Annual (1964) #13, written by Marv Wolfman.

Teen Titans Annual (2006) #1, written by Geoff Johns & Marv Wolfman.

May 09, 2018

An Interview With Stan Goldberg - Colorist for Marvel & Artist for Archie

May 09, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Stan Goldberg (born May 5, 1932) was an American comic book artist, best known for his work with Archie Comics and as a Marvel Comics colorist who in the 1960's helped design the original color schemes of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and other major characters. He was the National Cartoonists Society Hall of Fame inductee for 2011, which is accompanied by the organization's Gold Key Award - presented to Goldberg on May 26, 2012. He passed away on August 31, 2014 at the age of 82.

Stan Goldberg was so very kind when I called him about his time as a student of Jerry Robinson and the longer we talked, the more I realized I had another interview on my hands just from the friendly, open way he was sharing some memories. He was a true gentleman and I was saddened when he left this world. He even sent me a pencil sketch of Archie with his edits to the transcript and it's a gift I treasure.

This interview originally took place over the phone on January 7, 2008.

Stan Goldberg: We think we do the right thing all the time and everybody else does the wrong thing. And that’s true. I do the right thing all the time.

Bryan Stroud: I’ll buy into that. (Laughter.)

SG: You’re interviewing Jerry?

Stroud: I got to interview him just shortly before the New Year and during the course of the conversation I was asking him a little bit about his teaching career and he was saying that he thoroughly enjoyed that and then he mentioned a few of the students, as I said…

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby, inked by Steve Ditko, & colored by Stan Goldberg.

SG: Steve Ditko was one of them.

Stroud: Right. I actually got Steve to send me a little note about what Jerry was like as a teacher to him.

SG: My God. Wow.

Stroud: Yeah, I about fell out of my chair.

SG: Yeah, you’re probably the first one in 50 years. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Yeah, in fact Jerry was stunned. He said, “Would you please send me a copy?”

SG: I was gonna say that. You should frame that.

Stroud: But he told me someone is apparently working on a biography of him right now. He said, “I’m sure he would absolutely love to have this as part of the work he’s doing to research the book on me,” and I said, “Mr. Robinson, it would be my great pleasure to send you a copy.”

SG: There you go. What is this for? A book you’re doing on Jerry or a magazine article?

Stroud: Actually, I write up comic reviews and interviews for a webpage dedicated to DC’s Silver Age and of course Jerry goes back into the Golden Age, but still, you wouldn’t have a Silver Age without the Golden Age.

SG: Exactly.

Stroud: And he was gracious enough to give me some of his time. Anyway, I just thought it would be nice to check with a couple of names that he mentioned to get any impressions or thoughts to include in there and I’ll be happy to send you a link when it’s finished if you like, or maybe I’m overestimating your interest. (Chuckle.)

SG: No. Jerry and I go back a few years (chuckle), that’s for sure. Before I go ahead, the NCS Annual Reuben Awards have these big long weekends every year where we give out all the major awards. Jerry came over to me, I was nominated for one of the awards, and Jerry comes over and he says, “Stan, I’m gonna be the presenter of that award.” I said, “Well, that’s nice. That’s great.” He didn’t tell me, but later I found out he wrote a piece about more than just him being a presenter and me, one of the nominees, but like everything that you prepare for, I didn’t win the award, and that was just perfectly fine with me, at this stage in my life, but he came over later and he said, “I had this whole speech lined up,” and if I remember now, I think he read it off to me while I was standing with a drink in my hand. “This is what I was gonna say about Goldberg.”

Marvel Super-Heroes (1967) #12, cover penciled by Gene Colan, inked by Frank Giacola, & colored by Stan Goldberg.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

SG: Jerry and his wife, Gro, I’ve known them forever and it’s one of those few guys that are still around that you could touch bases with and…another interesting side bar, many years ago, we go down to Mexico every year. A little town called San Miguel, and the first time we went down there about sixteen years ago, we spent a couple of months there every winter. I met the great Frank Robbins, who lived down there.

Stroud: Oh, wow.

SG: And I grew up on Frank Robbins and we touched base and when we got together down there, he passed away a few months after that, but I had real quality time with him there and he was a sweet, great man and a lot of his contemporaries back home, like Jerry and Irwin Hasen and people like that, they were all close buddies and they thought that Frank just disappeared. They knew he loved Mexico, but they thought he’d passed on because he was not in touch with any of these compatriots, all these guys that he used to hang out with. Jerry told me an interesting story about Frank Robbins. He said Frank Robbins got him, got Jerry, his first job for Look Magazine. Frank couldn’t do this job and this was about 1938 or 1939 and he passed it on to a young Jerry Robinson to do. And that was like Jerry’s first big job for a major magazine.

Stroud: Oh, I’ll be darned.

SG: That was a nice little side bar. And then Irwin Hasen, who I know quite well, he was also very close with Frank when they all hung out together and all worked in syndication and worked in the so-called Golden Age. And I sit back and I just listen to these guys and it was quite a time.

Stroud: Oh, yeah, talk about some living history right there. That had to be just wonderful.

SG: It sure was. So, whatever else I can tell you just shoot and I’ll try to answer a question or two.

Stroud: Okay. Well, thank you so much. When you took the classes from Jerry what sort of principles did you take away from your time being his pupil?

SG: It’s interesting. That had to be 1950, I think. Just to go back a little bit, I started working for Timely Comics in 1949. I think I just turned 17 or I was still 16 at the time, I don’t remember, and I was one of the staff guys and running the coloring department…not running it at that time, I took it over about two years later, but I was one of the colorists there and then 1950 rolled around and I started coloring some books and figured I’ve got to continue going to school. I enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in the evening classes and one of my instructors was Jerry Robinson. Now Jerry didn’t’ know me from Adam, but when I went into that class I told him who I was and I’d just got through with the day of coloring some of Jerry Robinson’s war stories and some of the books that we were putting out. Jerry was doing a lot of war stories at that time. So that’s how we touched base right away.

Tales to Astonish (1959) #13, cover penciled by Jack Kirby, inked by Steve Ditko, & colored by Stan Goldberg.

Stroud: Oh, fantastic.

SG: And Jerry’s art…he wasn’t one of the ordinary, good artists, he was better than 99% of them, and I especially remember his war stories so well. It was so authentic and so realistic and he was magnificent. People remember him for certain things, but he was a good artist, really a great artist and it was so sad because the coloring we were able to do in those particular books at that time was so poor. So here Jerry was and everything was so authentic looking; the tanks and the uniforms and all that, but those were all colors that half the time you put down on what we used to call silver prints, you had to keep your fingers crossed and hope you got something close to that because it was very difficult getting the browns and the grays.

Certain colors that demanded three or four of the major colors and a certain percentage of them to make this great gray uniform or the color of mud or the color of a plane. And half the time Stan [Lee] was telling me, “Look, its difficult getting those colors. I would have no problem if you made the tanks,” I’m exaggerating now, but more or less he said, “if you make the tanks red, you make one guy’s uniform blue and the other guy’s uniform yellow…” And here I was trying to be so authentic. I would go to the library and get the correct color, and I felt bad that Jerry was putting all this work in and I’m sure he realized, and he knew who I was, I was coloring his stuff, because I told him right off the bat that it’s difficult getting it right.

In those days when the color of the paper in the comic book was almost a gray color, it wasn’t even white, then some of those colors would come through the pages. And up at Marvel, Timely at that time, it was quite poor. But that was the class and it was quite a kick to have there, as my teacher, was a guy that I was working on his stuff, and I knew of his work even before I came into the business. I was aware of his artwork. It was so distinctive and I loved it. What sticks in my mind mainly, as I continued working in the bullpen and ran the whole coloring department, I came into the job wanting to draw stories so Stan would give me little horror stories to do, little adventure stories and things like that, so I would do those things and maybe, I don’t know if I would bring them in and show them to Jerry. I have no recollection of that at all. I remember Steve Ditko being in our class and I got to know him quite well, fairly well at that time. We were all young guys and there were a few other artists that were around at that time. They didn’t stay that long in the field. They just maybe went on to something else, but there were three or four of us, some of them worked for Timely at that time, but Steve hung in there and I stuck in there and then the years roll by and in 2009 will be 60 years. 1949 to 2009, yeah, I think that’s 60 years.

Stroud: Oh, it sure is. That’s a very good, long run, Mr. Goldberg.

SG: It’s a great career. I love story-telling. I would do that as a little kid. I would make up little stories, not only just drawing a picture, but just doing a little continuity and breaking it down into panels and putting pieces of paper together and make up a little whatever it was. Having spent my career in teenage and humor was all because of Stan Lee. He wanted me to do the humor stuff in the late 50’s and I told him I would like to draw something else, more adventure stuff. He said, “No, we need a humor book, we need another teenage book,” and that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me and so the humor has been my field and I enjoy it tremendously and I certainly don’t think I would have lasted this long drawing adventure because I would have just tired myself out very quickly. Humor is fun, especially when you’re deal with an audience of young, mainly gals, but young boys also. They wouldn’t own up to it so quickly. When you meet them later, some of these guys that are like 40 or 50, when they were buying comic books they would buy their Fantastic Four and their Spider-Man and Thor, whatever it is and then they would tell the dealer, “Could you give me some of those Archie books? I want to bring them home to my sister.”

Journey Into Mystery (1952) #83, cover penciled by Jack Kirby, inked by Joe Sinnott, & colored by Stan Goldberg.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

SG: Before their sister got them, they read the book first.

Stroud: That’s right.

SG: They can’t fool me, but they own up to it now. They said they read them, too. It’s fun.

Stroud: Absolutely and as you said, it’s obviously treated you well all this time.

SG: Yeah, it’s been a good career and paid all the bills. I’ve done lots of other things since and work for the major publishers was fine with me. It’s good to see your books on the news stand in the days when the independents; you can’t find them too quickly or the print run are small. You’d always see Millie the Model or Scooter and Binky from DC and then all the Archie books from Archie Comics. So it’s nice.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. You definitely covered all the bases there and there was such a trend at the time it seems like because when Millie the Model and Binky came out it seems like they were also pushing similar things, knock-offs you might say, like The Maniaks and Angel and the Ape.

SG: You can’t keep up with the young audience, because what they love today, tomorrow they’ll find somebody else that they’re in awe of, so if you can just keep close to them and I always liked to go to schools and work with the kids and talk to them and find out what they’re reading and what they’re enjoying and even something as recently as two weeks ago, I have a granddaughter who is 6 years old and she was having a birthday party and all her girl friends and a couple of her boy friends, they were also 6 years old, and she loves when I draw pictures for her. She likes to draw, too, and even though they’re just barely able to read now, but she knows all the characters so well.

And at the party I was drawing pictures and she was describing each character, talking about Reggie and what kind of guy he is, because he’s not really a nice guy, but she says, “Yeah, he tries to get Archie in trouble all the time. He goes to Mr. Weatherbee and causes some problems, he tells Weatherbee what Archie did.” I’m listening to my granddaughter, and I can’t believe it. Maybe her dad, my son, reads some of the things to her, but she absorbs it. She’s a 6-year-old kid and she’s been doing it since she was 4 or 5 years old.

Stroud: That’s terrific. And after all, my parents had the theory that any reading you’re doing is good and so they didn’t discourage me at all from reading comic books.

SG: Exactly, exactly. That’s a foregone conclusion. When Stan found that out; Stan and I were close for a number of years when we were putting the stuff out. I cleared all the color schemes for all the super heroes from 1960 to 1965.

A Date With Millie (1959) #1, cover by Stan Goldberg.

Stroud: Oh, wow. Right in the thick of things.

SG: Yeah, all those things, and when he started getting these letters from not only college kids, but their professors also, it opened up a whole world to him and there they were. He was doing what he loves to do and turning it out and creating all these great situations and there was a world that opened up and God bless him, he’s still going strong.

Stroud: Yeah. I talked to Jim Mooney a few months ago and he couldn’t say enough good about Stan from when he was working over at Marvel in the 60’s and onward.

SG: He and Stan were old, old friends. They went back many years ago. In the 40’s, I think, they were good buddies. I met Jim a few times and from what I gather from those few times he’s one of the great guys.

Stroud: Very much so. He was really a delight to talk with and of the 17 or so creators I’ve had the privilege to chat with I haven’t run across anyone I haven’t taken a great liking to.

SG: It’s an industry that…I can’t answer for anybody that’s come in the past 25 or 30 or 40 years, really. I don’t read the books at all. I can’t read them. I have a lot of problems with them; I’m not going to go into that, but the guys that I started working with and being at my age, these guys would survive with 10 or 15 years, they were the old-timers. Of course, they came in when they were quite young, guys like Bill Everett, Carl Burgos and Fred Kida and John Severin and people like that who I knew and worked in the bullpen with them for so many years. All through the 50’s anyway. Joe Maneely, who unfortunately died so suddenly. There was the ultimate tragedy in the industry. I was with him that day. He went home that night. He lived in New Jersey. He was on a train and he fell off the train, I guess went in between the cars and maybe had a little too much to drink that day, wanted to clear his head and fell off the train and there they found him, dead and still holding his briefcase.

Stroud: Oh, no.

SG: But working with these guys; and there are a few of them that are still around. Joe Sinnott is still around, and he’s another one of those giants of the industry and John Romita, of course and on and on. There’s still a few of them. But with me, I’m the guy who’s just as busy now as I was 30 or 40 years ago, and I’m not complaining, it’s just that more time is taken up just going to see the doctor. Years ago, you just didn’t go to the doctor, but now any little thing, you go to the doctor.

Stroud: Yeah, it’s one of those sad facts. As I told Jim, I heard a wise man say once that the Golden Years are filled with Lead.

SG: That was the name of a comic strip I worked on with another old-time artist and we got pretty close. It was called The Golden Years, but this was awhile back and I remember the syndicate liked it, even though we handled it as the characters, the stars of the show, these Golden Years, they still had a mother and father. So, we treated them with love and respect and a lot of fun. We had a character that was 75 or 80 years old, and he still had to call his mother up every day to see if everything was okay.

Binky (1970) #78, cover by Stan Goldberg.

Chili (1969) #1, cover by Stan Goldberg.

Date With Debbi (1969) #18, cover by Stan Goldberg.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) I think we have similar attitudes. I quit reading them after the late 60’s. They just didn’t do anything for me any more and once in a blue moon I’ll take a peek at one and they just, they leave me cold. Everyone I’ve spoken to has been a Silver or Golden Ager, so we’re talking…I mean the youngest guy I think I’ve spoken to is Neal Adams.

SG: I did something with Neal and his daughter a couple of years ago. There was a whole series of books. Archie meets a character called the Web and this is supposed to be coming out some place or other, but I hear about it, I got paid for it, and it’s over with. All these people I’ve been able to work with and some were so great and then they died.

One was John Buscema, so there was probably the best of them all. And every time I say the best of them all, then I think of someone else like Jack Kirby, who was the best of them all, and I think of them as friends. People will say, “You knew Jack Kirby. You knew John Buscema, you knew this one. I said, “Yeah,” I said, “Why? Is that so important?” They were just guys I knew in the business. Some of these other people will ask, “What was this guy like, or that guy?” Well, we just worked to make a living. John Buscema would tell you that.

Archie Meets the Punisher (1994) #1, cover by Stan Goldberg.

The first 30 years that we knew each other, occasionally we’d see each other up in the office and we’d bring the work up to Marvel all through the 60’s and sometimes we’d get a cup of coffee and just chat for awhile and he’d go home. He was raising his family and getting his stories out and I was doing the same thing and then in the 90’s they got together and decided to do a book where Archie meets The Punisher. At the time it was kind of a joke, but it went well. People still talk about that. There was a sequel to it, but I think that was when Marvel Comics went into bankruptcy - I think, and so they held off on that and whatever, but it was good. It was a nice challenge, and Tom Palmer tied the whole thing together. He inked the whole book. John’s stuff and my stuff.

Stroud: That’s pretty impressive, and your story sounds consistent with what some of the others have told me. I talked to Frank Springer just about a week ago…

SG: Oh, that’s my ace buddy. In fact, I have to call him. So, what did Frank have to say?

Stroud: He was very similar in his thoughts. He said, “I felt really fortunate. I enjoyed what I did. I raised five kids, paid for the house, never starved,” but he said it was a living.

SG: Sure. When I think about it, I raised three kids, had a house, two cars, and I tell my sons what I made in those years and they think I’m joking, you know? We went on vacations a few times and when a freelancer goes on vacation that means a non-paid two weeks. There’s nobody paying us when we put our pencil down. It’s as simple as that. But it was very important, those times away with my family.

Stroud: Yeah. You’ll never regret it and they’ll never forget it. It’s a win-win all the way around.

SG: I’m glad you reminded me about Frank. I gotta give him a call. He moved upstate, not upstate but to Maine. He lives up there now.

Stroud: Yeah, he told me he’s got his place up for sale. He’s planning to move back to Long Island.

SG: Hoping to. He misses hanging out with the cartoonists. We have a group of cartoonists out here on Long Island. We’ve been hanging together for about 30 or 40 years. It was started by Creig Flessel and Walter Berndt and Frank and a few other guys who were there in the beginning with all those guys putting it together.

Stroud: I’d never heard of the Berndt Toast Gang until I got acquainted with Joe Giella and of course he’s very involved and tries to never miss a luncheon and he’s another superb gentleman. I really enjoy chatting with him.

SG: We go back many years. We’re working on a few things together and we speak on the phone quite often and he’s one of the guys at the Berndt Toast.

Fantastic Four Annual (1963) #3, cover penciled by Jack Kirby, inked by Mike Esposito, & colored by Stan Goldberg.

Stroud: He tells me he keeps trying to get Carmine [Infantino] to come out and so far, he won’t do it.

SG: Carmine. A very interesting man.

Stroud: He is. He was gracious enough to talk to me.

SG: We were all in Italy together and Carmine was along and I don’t think he said two words. So, I just take it as it comes. However he feels that day. I like him. I loved his art.

Stroud: We’ve had several conversations.

SG: He and Irwin Hasen. They go back close to 70 years and both of them have always been bachelors and sometimes when they get together they fight and yell at each other like a man and a wife fighting. But that’s the way they are and Irwin is another interesting guy that I’ve become very close with over the years.

Stroud: He was kind enough to chat with me just a little bit.

SG: Irwin you’re talking about.

Stroud: Yes.

SG: He had been ill. He got sick about a year ago. The first time practically in his whole life that he really came down with a big problem, but he’s back and I speak to him, in fact I just ordered his new Dondi book that just came out.

Stroud: Yeah, I saw that and I was looking for a copy.

SG: Yes, and I’ll be going to see him in a couple of days with the book to get him to sign it. He’s doing okay. He taught at the Kubert School for almost 30 years.

Stroud: He was telling me about that and I was kind of surprised that he’d retired, but he just said that it was time.

SG: Yes, at a certain time you just have to cut it loose. That’s the way it goes.

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #50, cover penciled & inked by John Romita Sr. and colored by Stan Goldberg.

Stroud: I hit him up for his autograph and he very kindly put it on a little piece of card stock and did a head shot of Dondi for me, so that was sweet.

SG: He’s one of those guys that can draw better now than 90% of the guys that are drawing pictures in his own inimitable style. He has a simplicity to his look and his likenesses of people are so good and he can tell stories with his pictures.

Stroud: Exactly. And let’s see, your neighbor on the island there, Al Plastino, what a hoot.

SG: I never met him. And there aren’t many that I haven’t met, of course.

Stroud: He’s just a pistol at 86 and just going strong. I was really pleased that I was able to steer a commission job to him, so he’s still at it.

SG: I wasn’t able to help you too much about taking the class with Jerry, but the part I was telling you about coloring his stuff and the colors and getting his war stories to draw, I mentioned that to him very clearly and I was kind of unhappy about it because of the way I had to color it. I couldn’t color the great authenticity he was putting into the drawings. I couldn’t get it. Now you could do it. The coloring in the books, I see some things, how they’re colored. Sometimes they go too overboard on a lot of stuff. I can’t even see what the art work looks like. That’s one reason I stopped looking at it. I can’t follow it and the coloring is too heavy handed. There’s more grays and deep browns and burnt umbers and things like that and I can’t see the damned art work any more.

Stroud: Yeah, you know Russ Heath told me the exact same thing because he’s still doing a little bit of work and he said once the colorist gets ahold of it it’s just a mess and he has no control over that.

SG: Yeah, even on the humor stuff sometimes I complain about Archie. The people that color, they do the computer coloring of the covers. They get so heavy handed. I say, “Look, these are not for 40-year old guys with beards and want to see these dark colors. These are for the little girls that like pretty pinks and blues and yellows and lovely purples, not deep purples and you don’t need all these heavy colors in the background. You should tone them down.” It just bugs me sometimes what they’re doing on some of the covers.

Stroud: Yeah, and to a trained professional like yourself I’m sure it’s more readily apparent than to those of us who just enjoy the finished product.

Fantastic Four (1961) #48, cover penciled by Jack Kirby, inked by Joe Sinnott, & colored by Stan Goldberg.

SG: Yeah. And especially, you know, I did all that color work and even occasionally some people want me to do certain things because they like my name on a recreation because half of the time I colored those. There’s just a few of us that are left. Jack is not around any more and the few of the guys that drew those covers are not around any more, but at least they get somebody that they can copy a particular style and they would get me because I was the original colorist on those books and when they put my name down I guess they can pay me a few more bucks to do it. And sometimes I enjoy doing it also. I say sometimes. They’re not paying me that much that I can retire and then live on an island someplace, but it’s almost like the fun I had coloring something that I colored in 1961, like the first this or the second issue of Thor or Fantastic Four #14 or things like that. It’s a good career and I’m still going strong.

Stroud: Good for you and obviously you fall into that category where the work keeps you young.

SG: It does. You could say that. I think it does because I can’t think of what else I would be doing because I stopped playing golf about 40 years ago and tennis, I took a couple of lessons and I found out I had work on my desk, so why should I be playing tennis? I had a family to support and I said, “I’d better do these pages before I go out on the courts and start hitting the ball.” So that was the extent of my tennis. (Chuckle.) I still take a lot of time off because that’s very important. My wife and I travel. We’ll be leaving for Mexico in a few weeks to this little town where we’ll spend two months. We’ll be doing that very shortly.

Stroud: Fantastic. Right during the harshest part of the winter up there in the Northeast. That will be good.

SG: I take my work with me down there, because that good old brown UPS truck follows me down there.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) You can’t ask much else. Mr. Goldberg, you’ve certainly been very kind and I appreciate your remembrances and your generosity.

SG: And I’ll probably see Jerry very soon because this year the Reubens, the National Cartoonist’s Society will be going to New Orleans for about four days. I know Jerry comes down there pretty often and comes to these things if he’s feeling up to it and I hear he’s doing okay now and I’ll be seeing him. Another thing about Jerry; my son who got married about a year and a half ago lives in a house right next door to where Jerry lives in Manhattan.

Stroud: It’s a small world even in the big city. When is the Reuben award thing happening?

SG: They usually have it over Memorial Day* every year and this year it will be over in New Orleans and I’ve been there before and I love the place. It’s just a lot of fun and I’m sure the guys will have a good time.

*Note: The Reuben Award weekend in New Orleans has come and gone, and according to Stan a good time was had by all. Al Jaffee, another good friend, was voted cartoonist of the year and Stan couldn’t have been happier for him.

SG: My son is a graphic designer and he does good stuff and he does a lot of new stuff on my website, so check it out. There’s a lot of fun stuff on it. www.stangoldberg.com

Stroud: I sure will. It sounds like the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

SG: He’s a good guy, but he was smart enough to say when he was 16 years old, I said, “Bennett, how about we work together?” He said, “Not right now, Dad. Down the road maybe.” Now it’s been 23 years or so later. He’s almost 40, I think. We did some nice work together on some new projects I was working on outside of comics that he and I put together and you’ll see it on my website.

Stroud: I’ll be sure and check it out. It sounds a little like when Lew Sayre Schwartz was telling me about his son’s involvement in graphic design. It’s funny how that’s happened more than once.

SG: There you go. Just before we hang up the classic one whose son is just as good as his old man is John Romita, Jr. They’re both very good. They’ve got completely different styles and they’re both good guys. I remember John Jr. when he was a little kid and he’s turned out some major work and then he tells me, “No, Stan, I’ve been in the business 30 years.” “You’ve been in the business 30 years? I remember before there even was a John Jr. in the business.” So, they’re catching up on you. You’ve got to stay one step ahead of them. I said, “But John Jr., could you draw Archie?” He probably could, I think, because his old man could. One of the few guys that could draw humor and good serious stuff, so probably the apple doesn’t fall too far.

Stroud: I’m sure you’re right.

SG: So, on that note, you’ll send that out to me? I’d love to see it.

Stroud: I’d be delighted to and thank you so much for all your help, Mr. Goldberg.

SG: Sure. I’m glad I spoke to you. A lot of times I just feel like talking about an industry that I had some fun with.

Stroud: And it’s obvious that you did. It comes across very well.

SG: Good. Thank you very much.