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.

December 26, 2018

An Interview With Mike Netzer - Continuity Studios and A Spiritual Awakening

December 26, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Mike Netzer, holding a Batman commission.

Michael Netzer (born Michael Nasser on October 9, 1955) is an American-Israeli artist best known for his comic book work for DC Comics and Marvel Comics in the 1970s. Mr. Netzer joined Continuity Studios in 1973, where he created art for both Marvel and DC as a member of the Crusty Bunkers. In the late seventies, Mike left Continuity in a move that eventually saw him relocated to Isreal. In the early 1990’s, Netzer would open litigation against Neal Adams claiming ownership of the character Ms. Mystic - a claim that he maintains to this day.

This particular installment of the Crusty Bunker series was especially fascinating. Not only did Michael have a lot to share, but it was my first time reaching out internationally, as he was (perhaps still is) in Israel at the time. Michael was generous with his time and remembrances and boy, did he have some adventures, as you'll soon see.

This interview originally took place over the phone on September 25, 2010.

Adventures on the Planet of the Apes (1975) #7, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Klaus Janson.

Bryan Stroud: There seem to have been a few different paths to Continuity. What was yours?

Michael Netzer: I was invited by Neal [Adams]. I was about 18 years old at the time. I was in Detroit at a big comic book convention there put together by Greg Theakston and it was called the Detroit Triple Fan Fair. Greg was someone that I knew in high school and he was encouraging me to try and break into the business. He saw something. He saw my enthusiasm for it and he sort of helped push me into it. He had this convention and he invited Neal Adams among other guests, like William Shatner and some of the Star Trek people. Jim Steranko was there and as I remember Vaughn Bode was invited. He (Greg) asked me to be in charge of Neal and to pick him up at the airport and to make sure that he had everything he needs and so on. He did that purposely because he knew how much I was attracted to Neal’s art and what an influence it was becoming on my own work.

So, when Neal came I went to pick him up at the airport. It was a pretty odd situation because instead of the sort of vehicle you might expect, I went to pick him up in my 1964 Mustang. This was in 1973 and it was like going to a convention in a car that looked like it had been through World War II or something. I bought it for $100.00. It featured a convertible top with a hole in it. As it turns out, on this September day that I was picking him up it began to rain a little bit. So, we’re driving and water is starting to get into the back seat and I’m sure Neal was wondering what he’d gotten himself into.

So, this was my first big comic book convention. I may have been to one smaller one in Detroit, but this was my first direct contact with comics fandom and it was a very big deal for me. Neal had seemed to particularly take interest in things personally. He hadn’t yet seen my work, but he seemed good with this kid who had come to pick him up who was, at the time, very much the quiet type. Very withdrawn. I didn’t say much and didn’t appear to have an outward involvement in very much. But I was a good listener, and Neal was a good talker. (Chuckle.)

We got to the convention and there seemed to be a good chemistry between us. As things went along and he started seeing my work he took an interest in it. He invited me to come to New York and work at Continuity if I ever had the chance. I have to say that my work at the time didn’t look much like it was influenced by Neal at all. Mostly what I had to show were drawings I’d done in a life drawing class that I did in college. Interestingly enough it had a look altogether different from the comic book work that I do. It had more of a drawing look, more like an illustration, but at that period in time I was drawing more for drawing as opposed to comic book art. I think maybe that was what interested him more than anything. He knew I was a big fan of his work and was enamored of it before he came to Detroit through Greg Theakston. So, at the end of that convention I got the invitation, which was a very big deal for me.

Star Trek (1980) #7, cover by Mike Nasser.

As an aside I’ll tell you at that convention I had done an exhibit of some art that was 6 pieces of the Star Trek crew and at the end of the con Neal was there when Greg told me that one of the drawings was missing from the exhibit. They thought that somebody had taken it. They were apologetic about it, but it seemed to me that it was kind of cool that someone liked my drawing enough to take it from there. I say that because recently someone contacted me from Detroit and said they’re putting on a convention in remembrance of those days of comic fandom from the 60’s and 70’s and they’re calling it the Detroit Fan Fair, not the Detroit Triple Fan Fair. But the guy that contacted me told me that several years ago he had bought a box of old comic books and inside of it was a few drawings and one of them was this drawing of Captain Kirk and that my name was signed to it and he asked me what I could tell him about that and how it had come about. I told him the story that this was the drawing that was taken from the exhibit and he basically invited me to this convention that’s coming up in October where he’s going to return it to me. Along with that we’ll be publishing a sketchbook of the last few years and the story of that drawing will be in the front of the book.

It’s an interesting theory that a big circle is being closed right now from that convention that was exactly 35 years ago to now.

Stroud: Oh, what a magnificent story.

Netzer: Arvell Jones, another of the Detroit area people along with Keith Pollard broke into the business in the 1970’s and they were together at the time. Keith Pollard worked for Marvel back then. They were driving up to New York to try and break into the business. This would have been late October 1975. The asked me if I wanted to come along for the ride and see if I could get in, too. Of course, I had the invitation to go to Continuity, so that was a good step. I had something to rely on, so I took my meager funds, maybe $100.00, knowing I at least had a place to stay for a short time.

So, I took that ride with them and went to Continuity the next day. Neal told me, “Look, I don’t have much work right here, but here’s the phone book and a list of contacts including DC and Marvel. Call them up and see if you can get an appointment to show them your work.” I did just that and had a couple of appointments lined up. One was with Jack C. Harris at DC Comics, who promptly gave me a script for a story in Kamandi. That’s how my career started. I also did a little bit of commercial work with Neal, penciling story boards and sometimes inking backgrounds. So that’s how it started, in late 1975.

Chamber of Chills (1972) #24, cover penciled by Al Milgrom & inked by Mike Nasser.

Stroud: So, you kind of got spring boarded from Continuity into your comic career.

Netzer: Exactly. Now I’ll try to give you my perception of what Continuity was at the time. Naturally, Neal’s personality was the dominant one. To me it was a whole new world. I’d just come from a limited home/school life and was thrust into New York City and the hopper of the comic book industry. So, there was a feeling of being overwhelmed and also taking into consideration my age at the time, barely 20, and was still a very withdrawn and introverted man. Aside from wanting to be a comic book artist, and being thrust into this situation, I just tried to make the best of it. My own personality was fairly optimistic. I had the feeling inside that I was living at a very important time and that some very big things were awaiting us. I’m speaking generally as a civilization. There was something in the air. Something important about being there at this particular time.

Now most of the people in Continuity were young people who were looking to break into the business. Maybe they’d got their first independent script to draw. There were a few artists like that at least. I basically became attached to some of the artists like a guy named Mark Rice, a guy named John Fuller. Joe Rubinstein was one of those. They’d not really done any independent work. Along with that there were a lot of established professionals there like Cary Bates, Larry Hama, Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson. A lot of them were beginning to make a presence for themselves in the industry. Continuity was a hub in every sense of the word.

When I landed in New York it was basically in the throes of helping out Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. The day I landed I was in the front room all the time and Siegel and Shuster were visiting at Continuity and Neal was giving them some details on how to move forward and convince DC Comics to give them a little compensation for the creation of Superman. That was a pretty big event and this was when I began to understand the rather peculiar personality which was Neal and that he was very involved in the industry and very involved in making things better for others in the industry.

This was a little bit unique because most other artists seemed to be more than anything else worried or concerned with advancing their own career. Very few were showing the kind of extending of themselves towards this sort of activity. So right away I became a part of a very good spirit that was in the studio, which kind of had an overall look at the industry and it seemed that there was a feeling that from Continuity, there was a very big influence over what was going on in the comic book industry.

Wonder Woman (1942) #231, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Vince Colletta.

Stroud: I think your describing it as a hub seems very appropriate, at least from what I’ve heard from others who were involved there. It has been described as a middle ground between the big two publishers.

Netzer: There is certainly that. There were artists and writers and editors from both companies who felt at home there. And people who worked at Continuity were working for both companies. It was a middle ground and it was also a place where the people who were involved in it seemed to have some influence over what was going on in the industry. Meaning that Cary Bates was writing Superman and having the regular writer of Superman at Continuity meant that everything that was going on with Superman and everything that was going on at DC Comics at the time was known and by knowing that it kind of helped us to do our jobs a little better and maybe people who weren’t exposed to this kind of environment wouldn’t be aware of it.

Now I just want to add one more aspect to this. At the time, on that first day, there was something very interesting that happened. A big poster on the wall next to Neal’s desk in the front room was a map of the Earth. I believe it was a map of the ocean floor. It was a picture of the ocean floor without the water. It was a very interesting picture that I’d never seen before. Somehow, right away, I was pulled into this discussion and I remember Neal looking at it and he said, “You know that geologists are saying that the continents have moved around and they used to be together, but they’ve spread apart. Now look at this map. Does it look to you like the continents can move around on the ocean floor the way they show it?” I said, “What are you talking about?” It was a little bit of overload. I wasn’t familiar with the theory. I mean I’d heard of Pangea, but never really got into the details and I found myself going out and reading and researching so I’d have an idea what they were talking about. At that time Neal hadn’t yet started talking about the planet may be growing and that the continents spread out because of it. All this about the organic matter coming from inside. But he was trying to pick peoples minds and say that there was a problem with this theory. The idea that the continents were moving around just didn’t make sense to him. This would have been around 1975, so it was the period when Neal was starting to formulate his resistance to a very popular new scientific theory and he was looking around to maybe see what people thought of it. A lot of people came in and whenever he found people to be of interest, he would open up that discussion in the front room.

Ghosts (1971) #97 pg.4, art by Mike Nasser.

It’s interesting that most of the people there didn’t have anything to say about it and Neal was going to go up against the scientific community and who would know more? People just didn’t seem to know where he was heading with that, but you could see back in 1975 the beginning of this idea which for Neal has become a very important part of his work. You could see the seeds to it right there.

So, to me I felt that I’d pretty much found myself in the middle of a very serious and pertinent kind of place. And here I was in the midst of the place and person whose artwork had pulled me into the comic book world. This man was proving to be a lot more than just a comic book artist with great ability, but also someone working on a humanitarian level and with an overall view of the world and he seemed to care a little more and be involved in it. He felt he could be an influence on any aspect of it. A conversation with him would move from anything to politics, to social issues, to what was going on in the comic book industry. He was someone whose view was more than just worrying about advancing his own career. Rather he was someone who would be engaged in many aspects of the world we were living in. To me that was very important. I had been instinctively pretty much the same way.

So as time went on, this interesting bond was forming between us. I would say that it may not be like a lot of people that shared that engagement that Neal had in the studio. I like to think I lent my support to that right from the beginning and it created a very strong bond between us.

Another interesting aspect to this is that I saw a lot of artists come in to show their work and some of them were not so bad. Let’s say that they were…I wouldn’t want to grade anyone, but I would say that it seemed like almost regardless of what identity these people were bringing in, Neal’s criticism of their work was evidently harsh. It took me a long time to understand how or why he would do it. What was interesting was that with me, particularly, is that I never faced that criticism from him. He seemed to treat me with kid gloves and it was just the opposite when some of these kids would come in to show their work. There were times when he would bring them back to my table and he would actually pull out one of the drawings that I did. I remember a splash page from the Deadly Hands of Kung Fu that I did during that early period and spent a lot of time on and he would bring them back and he would say, “See that? This is how good you have to draw to get into the business.” So he would use me as an example to show young artists the extent of the work that they had to do.

Megalith (1989) #7, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Rudy Nebres.

So, what I would take from all this is that from my situation, personally, my work seemed to be a little different than what most other young artists were facing at Continuity. I think it can be attributed a lot to a very positive outlook of mine toward the future in this new life that I was beginning in New York.

Stroud: That’s quite a remarkable chain of events that you’ve described.

Netzer: It is pretty remarkable. Again, I think it was something in the chemistry between us. I have to say that I think there was an aspect to me that contributed to the whole thing. I’d basically been raised in Lebanon. I was born in Lebanon, but I came to America and by the time I came to America, between the ages of 12 and 19, those critical school ages, I was extremely withdrawn. I wasn’t really engaged in American culture. I had to do some catching up. There was some culture shock to deal with and it felt like instead of starting my life at 5 years old, where you typically start going to school and so on, I started at 12, so I had something like 7 years missing. I felt like I was behind everybody else.

I found myself a little bit disengaged from the kind of life that most kids my age were living. So, by the time I got to New York and began working, I was missing basically a lot of the culture that my colleagues had. I hadn’t grown up in America throughout that whole period. There was Greg and others and these were the people who were at the forefront of media and culture in America. Comic book artists and writers were just very interested in what was going on in film and in books and science fiction and everything. So the conversation between them would inevitably be around certain things. People would talk about Humphrey Bogart and Casablanca and Citizen Kane and James Cagney and things in the culture that left a very big impression on them from the world of film and television and actors and books and so forth and I just didn’t have any of that.

It was like an immediate overexposure to the world. When everyone else seemed to be involved in these conversations it would bring out the impact of these things in comic book stories and so on and I had very little of that. I found myself always on the outside and learning and absorbing as much as I could. I had a lot of catching up to do. I was very interested in knowing what everybody was talking about. I think that contributed to something that was distinguishing me from everybody. Maybe that needed someone who was like a little kid in an environment of a lot of grownups who needed this kind of perception. I think Neal instinctively felt in this situation that he took it upon himself to be that guy, to be the one that would take care of me as I was taking these steps of getting acquainted with everything.

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #207, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Al Milgrom.

I think that also contributed to the bond and contributed to the difference in this particular relationship that we had, relative to the kind of relationship he had with other artists.

I would also say that I shared and supported his larger outlook on the world. That being engaged and using the position you have, or using your time in this journey through life to do what you can to contribute to making your environment a little better. It’s to have an overall large outlook on things so that you can be engaged in almost anything you need to see where you can contribute in a positive way. This was a little bit unique and I think that Neal was pretty much wanting to do that. It was the crux of what he was doing in this life and I think he still feels that way, and you can see it even today in everything that he does.

It wasn’t such a shared thing…it wasn’t clear to everybody in the studio and in that environment shared that feeling with him and sometimes it was even said that it was just an eccentricity of Neal’s that he was that way.

With most people, you have your career and you have your life and you have your own things to take care of and that’s enough of a chunk to deal with. A lot of people thought, “Well, that’s all there is. I can’t change the world.” Certainly, we all run into this situation where we get cynical. “So, what, you think you can change the world? The political situation, the economic situation?” But then some actively try to see where the weaknesses are in what humanity is going through and try to improve them in some way. And here I was in the situation I was brought into, drafted into this thing with the kind of optimism that you have the ability and yes, you can do that. To have someone like Neal around just pulled me right into that inner world of his. And there was a big feeling, at least for me, and I’m sure it was for him, that this bond that was developing between us was something that is going to lead to some kind of an ability to be some kind of a contributing factor. The steps that we were making for ourselves.

Neal has a big world within him. It’s really rare that he expresses the depths of that world that is within him, so he has his own way of concentrating on things that open up certain avenues, especially the way he talks about his contributions. How the comic book industry was shaping up. To me it was very clear. When Neal and I would talk about the idea that comics…and this was back in the 1970’s. You have to remember that comics were going through a very difficult time. They had been through the 50’s already and there was some new energy coming into the business now with artists like Wrightson and Kaluta and Jones. Having gone through the Green Lantern/Green Arrow run. The feeling that comics were now somehow becoming pertinent. The sales of comics was still very much questionable at that time. There wasn’t a lot of optimism in the industry for where the industry at large was heading.

Batman / Green Arrow: Poison Tomorrow (1992) 1, cover painted by Mike Netzer.

As a matter of fact, I say this all the time. A lot of creators from that time would be very enthused about what was going on in comics at that time. They might not be getting a piece of it. They might not have a lot of work because there was so much talent and a lot of the creators from that time found themselves jobless and outside the industry and they had to look for their work somewhere else. Still, most of the creators I’m in touch with still cannot deny that at the time, in the 70’s, they never dreamed that comics would have the influence they do today in our culture. This is a very important thing because we seemed to have, at that time, during that early period, this new spirit that was new and that Neal had injected into the industry through Continuity, being a hub where a lot of creators were coming in.

This led to a serious effort to get the artists and writers together to create a comic book creator’s guild. Something that Arnold Drake had tried in the 60’s after working at DC, and it didn’t work. We found the same thing. I remember Neal asking me to try to write some kind of beginning of a charter of why we needed to do this. There was a lot of talk with a lot of artists. It was amazing the resistance we had from the actual artists and writers themselves. It was amazing how many established creators were reluctant to put their name onto this piece and to support the idea that we present a unified stance to the publishers. People were just afraid for their jobs. They were afraid that DC and Marvel would stop giving them work and so we had to work very hard to get the things that we did on it.

Tomb of Darkness (1974) #22, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Pablo Marcos.

In the end it turned out that it really wasn’t enough to put together a guild. But the effort was made. Steps were taken and some things were written and names were signed on. What this indicated was a general feeling that the industry was not up to speed with the vision that seemed to be coming out of Continuity. That made for an interesting struggle and dichotomy for a particular problem that we faced. Because if we could not do this, then it seemed that the industry would continue to develop in such a way that the state of the creators would remain as that of an underdog because we didn’t have the ability to put forth a unified stand in order to be rewarded fairly for the work and the contribution we were making to the industry.

Now just to put that a little bit in perspective, I think it’s really important to understand one of the reasons we felt comic book creators really should be at the top of the pyramid. The main reason being, most everything that the comic book industry was basically came from creators. There isn’t a character, there isn’t a property you could say that a publisher created. At best you could say, “Well, look at Stan Lee. He was the publisher and look what he did.” Stan wasn’t a publisher. Stan was a writer/editor. Basically, everything he did, he did under the auspices of him being a comic book creator, not as a comic book publisher. Stan was editor in chief, but without Jack Kirby it would be very questionable whether Stan could come in and create the surge that Marvel went through in the early 60’s with the characters and stories and properties.

This is the thing that came from comic book creators. The people who owned Timely, which became Marvel, were not the ones who created these properties.

Stroud: Not at all.

Netzer: The same with DC. You could look at everything that DC has developed over the years and it all came from the creators. The creators were the source of everything that the comic book industry has become. And when you look historically at what the comic book industry has become and where it’s going, it is the leading source for entertainment properties in the world today. I’m not just talking about the super heroes, I’m talking about everything. The breadth of the comic book industry, the independents and everything that has come from the periphery of the indies world. It’s going into film. This is all the work of comic book creators. Without them, none of this could be.

The Huntress (1994) #1, cover by Mike Netzer.

And yet, even to this day, I finished a job for Dynamite Entertainment and I’m still getting a contract that says, “Work for Hire” for doing these eight pages for Dynamite. I know that the page rate I get from Dynamite puts me back to a time from 20, 25 years ago. It’s like half the page rate I was getting from DC comics in the 90’s when I returned to do a few Batman stories. That’s the story, that’s the situation comic book creators are living in. A situation where the publisher is taking these properties, making millions and billions of dollars on them, from properties that no one there had created themselves. It all came from the creative community and they find themselves fighting for every bit of right that they get. For every little morsel of bread that they get. Droppings that they get from the table of the publishers.

It’s kind of like there is a serious, serious injustice going on and being perpetuated in the comic book industry that comic book creators find themselves powerless to change. Even to this day. That’s kind of an interesting dichotomy, because you could say, “Well, back in the 70’s, that was also the same situation,” but back then nobody dreamed that the industry would flourish to what it’s become today.

On the other hand, we have a very interesting situation where the comic book publishers continue to this very day to keep presenting the same situation that the comics aren’t really making enough money. “We can’t compensate you any more than we do for your work.” I don’t know. Someone is cooking the books, it seems, or someone is telling these weird kinds of stories, because comic book companies are making a lot of money. If there’s a reason that comic books are not making a lot of money, then somebody has to look at whether the publishers are happy with the situation. I mean, come on. Why would the publishers continue making this product that isn’t making any money? Well we all know that they’re making money. They’re making it from peripheral projects. It seems almost like it’s in their best interest, the publishers, that the comic books don’t sell a lot and they make a lot of movies and a lot of products that make a lot of money and this is very much in the interest of the publishers because they can keep the creators at bay and say, “Well, look, the comics aren’t making money, so we’re not in a situation to compensate you for the amount of work and contribution that you’re making for the industry.” This way they can get off the hook and keep the creators at bay and they will have to settle for a situation where they give away their intellectual property for characters that they create or they never get a proportionally fair reimbursement for the work that they’re doing.

DC Special Series (1977) #1, Batman-Kobra penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Because the industry just isn’t making money. As far as the publishers are concerned it’s a wonderful situation. If the publisher tells you that the comics aren’t making any money, it seems to me the publishers haven’t bought anything to help the comic books themselves make any money because they don’t need to. And it serves their interests because the creators can’t get for themselves what they need. It’s a terrible, vicious circle. I think that we began seeing that in the 70’s. I think we saw the germination of that, which has continued even to this day. The industry has grown and grown and grown and creators are still at the very bottom end of this thing although they are the major contributors to this industry.

Stroud: The sales figures would seem to bear out their position. I think they peaked in the post World War II timeframe, so pointing to that it would be easy to say, “Sorry, guys, but we’re just not selling enough copies.”

Netzer: Exactly. They might come and show you the numbers and, “Look at the numbers, look at the sales. We’re only selling 40,000 copies of Superman.” Back in the 70’s they were selling a couple hundred thousand of Superman and Batman. Today the numbers are like half or a third of what they were selling back then. And nobody can argue with that, you know? The comic book industry is like on the ropes. Well, it’s not true. They lie. That’s a really big distortion of reality. The publishers are making a lot of money from the comics. They might not be making it from the comic books themselves, but without the comic books they would not have these properties to make films from and to do all these other things and produce the merchandise that they are producing.

Stroud: The licensing. I suspect it’s not accident they keep getting sold to larger conglomerates like Marvel to Disney for example.

Netzer: Exactly. They’re not stupid. Now of course throughout all this we saw some very nice things in the 80’s. Certainly, the idea of the Image guys coming together and the opening up of the industry on the one hand was a very good thing. It seems to me like the distribution is a factor. I look at the distribution and I can’t believe that the people who are running the industry are so stupid that they think this is a good distribution system that we have today.

Marvel Two-In-One (1974) #70 pg.2, penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Gene Day.

Marvel Two-In-One (1974) #70 pg.3, penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Gene Day.

Marvel Tales (1964) #100 pg.26, penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Terry Austin.

If you have a property that has any potential, any shot at being successful, the distribution system is working against that right from the beginning. The idea of direct sales and selling your books ahead of time before you see the project, and basically that the success or failure of the book has already been predetermined before the book is published? By the amount of the advance sales at the store where it’s being sold? You want to tell me that this is the best way to sell a product? Wouldn’t it be better to put it out there, without selling it in advance, without putting it into a situation where people have to pre-sell the amount of books they’re going to sell? How do they know? Do they know only by the PR the company is putting out? That means the company determines ahead of time what comics are going to make it by the amount of PR, the campaign they give to every product? Regardless of whether it’s a good product or not, this is a very good situation for the publisher because they can say, “Well, you know, we’re going to do Infinite Crisis and Endless Crisis and one Crisis after another…”

Armageddon: Inferno (1992) #1, cover by Mike Netzer.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Netzer: “Crossovers. And these are the ones that we’re going to push. And they will sell because we pushed them ahead of time, and whether this product is good or bad and whether the readers wanted it or not, we don’t care. In fact, we’re determining the sale of this product from the beginning.” And the readership really has nothing to do with it because the readers don’t buy the book. It doesn’t matter. The company has made their money. And they really don’t care if the stores are able to sell them or not. It doesn’t matter. No one can do anything about it because of the distribution system that exists. This is the awful situation. There is no other product being sold that way in the world!

Stroud: You’re absolutely correct.

Netzer: It’s a very strange situation.

Stroud: It doesn’t seem to reflect the market in any realistic way.

Netzer: No. The market is forced to like or not like this product that is being spoon fed to it. They are forced to like or not like it based on the position on the scale that the publisher is giving this product. Again, it seems to me that if I were the publisher at DC or Marvel and I was looking out for the interest of the publisher, and was trying to keep the creative community at bay, then this would be the best way to do it. I would support the system because this way I could control a system where we can control the sales and we can make it look like these properties are not selling very well, not selling enough. To decline, over the years, and they continue to decline, and we can make all of our money on films and other merchandising and this way we can maintain full control of the properties and acquire these intellectual properties to ourselves without the creators having any leg to stand on to get the rights that they duly deserve as creators.

Now I didn’t really want to get into this whole negative thing with the industry situation. I do want to get back to Continuity. That is what this is about. (Mutual laughter.)

Megalith (1989) #6, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Neal Adams.

Stroud: Well, I appreciate the insight just the same. How many years did you spend at Continuity?

Netzer: The peak of my career was basically two years between 1975 and 1977. After 1977, those two years were the learning curve for me. What is very interesting is I got to New York and in a way that one aspect of my art, which is drawing stuff, that ability to draw seemed to go on the back burner and I became more of a comic book artist. I wasn’t drawing drawings, I was drawing comic books. The 70’s, working at Continuity, and the two years of doing art took a front seat and I worked so much that it was a little scary at times because it wasn’t just drawing. Our handwriting was the same (mine and Neal’s). My natural handwriting was pretty much like his and everything seemed like this synergy of things at Continuity with Neal. Those were those two years. It was a big learning curve, learning to do what Neal does.

I wasn’t looking to do it better than he does. I was just trying to do things the best that I could. I didn’t think it could be done better than he does. I wasn’t aware of where I would be taking my art at the time. I just pretty much put my mind to concentrating on that learning curve of absorbing everything I could in those two years. The cultural world that was around me, at Continuity, whether it was the actual craftsmanship of drawing, or whatever. I think during this two-year period you could see a marked improvement in everything I did. There seemed to be an attitude there of, “Keep an eye on what this guy is doing, because it looks like he’s getting better really fast.” It took something like a year and some time in the later part of ’76, maybe the first book I did which was a Challengers #82, the second Challengers where Neal got the bundle that came in from DC Comics to Continuity and he flipped through the bundle and he looked at that Challengers that I had done and he saw me working on it and he looks through it and comes back out and he’s holding the book in his hand and he was really enthused about it.

To me it seemed to be a turning point. It was also a bit of a turning point on the Batman/Kobra that I did. The turning point was like I’d gone from the point of being like someone who was looking for his way as an artist to one who had at least developed the ability to put together a good comic book. I wasn’t really looking at what Mike Nasser, who I was at the time, was like as an artist. I was still in the state of the learning curve.

Batman (1940) #480, cover by Mike Netzer.

Certainly, by that time there was a turning point where we had went from the amateur/rookie that was groping around in the dark for something to hold onto to, “See, here’s a guy who can do professional comics.” It was an interesting change. There was a lot of criticism, still, of my work. Because it was so much like Neal’s. But it really didn’t bother me. I had such admiration for Neal’s work that when it would come up that, “Well, you’re a Neal Adams clone,” well, if I’m going to be a clone, then I’m happy to be the clone of one of the better artists out there.

It seemed to be enough for me at that time. It was that second year that things started changing. I had a personal situation that wasn’t very easy going on in Detroit and then her mother, who I couldn’t bring to New York when I was making $30.00 or $40.00 a page at the time and sometimes a page would take a couple of days to do and living in New York was a very expensive thing. I was sharing an apartment with people who were young artists who were still looking to get work. Whatever money I was making at the time sometimes had to be shared with the people you’re working with. Sometimes someone would want to go out to eat or something and because not everybody is working so whatever money was being made was going out more quickly than it was being made.

I worked very hard to make a living in comics at that time. Especially when living in a community type of thing. So, there was a bit of a change happening in that second year, slowly building up. “You know, there’s something about this that isn’t working.” It made me invest a lot more time in working, trying to develop the craft more and more and more and there was an improvement. You could see from issue to issue that I was investing more time than I did on the issue before. It was improving and I was getting a lot of commercial work with Neal, doing illustrations for magazines, like a nice little illustration of Bjorn Borg, the tennis player that showed an ability to do a painted type of work, which was a very good piece. I had a good name, I had a good reputation, but something just wasn’t really working.

I needed to see where it was going. I couldn’t see myself forging a career in this particular direction that things were heading into. The business was not compensating enough for the work needed in order to do really good work. Neal at Continuity, had a whole different reality. He was into commercial art long before he came into comics. He had an infrastructure. He wasn’t doing that much comic book work. The little bit of comic book work he was doing at the time was really supplemental to a large amount of commercial work, so he never really had that problem.

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #228, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Joe Rubinstein.

For me it was like I was still young. I was coming into my own. I became aware that this was a time in life when you had to decide what you wanted to do. Who you are and what you’re going to do with your life? I had some friends who were very uptight at the time. It was very interesting. They would say things like, “This work is so good, but why are you doing comic books?” I would say, “Well, what else would I do? What else can I do? I’ve been drawing illustrations.”

Certainly, today in hindsight that wouldn’t have been a very good choice because the illustration work was all being done in the commercial art market the way it was in the 70’s was totally different. You had commercial artists doing movie posters and magazine illustrations…you don’t see that any more. Or at least very little of it.

Stroud: Right. It’s all gone to photography.

Netzer: Exactly. On the other hand, and I think this is what creates the turning point, there was a world of comic book fandom that we were part of which was a very interesting situation. We would go to these conventions, whether in New York or New Jersey and we were invited to these conventions in Detroit and so on and we would go like celebrities, like stars. They’d pay your way, give you a motel room and you’d get to the place and you could do sketches and make a few hundred dollars doing that and at the convention you could sell original art. The reception from fandom was phenomenal! I mean you go to a convention and you sit on a panel with a few hundred people in the audience and you could talk about anything you wanted to and it seemed like the audience were completely fascinated. “Tell us what you’re doing. Tell us about the comic book world. Tell us about these characters. Tell us about this, tell us about that.”

This was an interesting phenomenon, and to me it seemed to be more important than anything else that was happening around me. It was like this wonderland and anything that was happening in my life was this cycle and to me that was very important.

Now the thing about it is that whatever the problems were at the comic book industry personally at the time, they weren’t just problems of the industry itself. The industry is part of a larger, financial wheel that the whole world was in at the time. There was a course that the world was taking at the time, it seemed to me, that was not portending good news for the long road ahead. Further ahead in the future. It seemed at the time pretty clear to me that things were going to get worse and not get better. It seemed like, from the little experience that I had, from working those two years, that the direction was that financially, for people like us, it was going to get harder and harder as we moved along. Not just for us, it seemed like for everybody in the world.

House of Mystery (1958) #276 pg.12, art by Mike Nasser.

The world was heading on a course where the strong were going to get a lot stronger and the weak are going to get weaker. It’s just the nature of things. And certainly, looking back on it today 35 years later, it has borne out to be a fact. You could say that life is better for some people, but I think generally that the general picture is that life has become harder for almost everybody. And if you are succeeding and are able to find your place, then you can count yourself among some of the lucky ones, but that generally isn’t true for everybody. It certainly isn’t a situation where you could say that the general quality of life is getting better for everybody.

It’s like the myth of capitalism. The myth of capitalism was that everybody has an opportunity. Well, it’s true that everybody has an opportunity, but everybody can’t succeed. They might try very hard, but it takes a lot of things for someone to succeed. The savvy to be able to be a good businessman, which sometimes means that you have to be pretty tough with people and take things by force and do things in your position and stature in order to basically get something from someone that you couldn’t get otherwise. And what if you’re not that materialistic sort of guy? If you’re an artist, sometimes you’re just interested in the craft. “I want to tell stories. I want to draw well. This is what I love doing.” Well, that’s like a whole different reality from someone who is a savvy businessman and is going to succeed.

I mean, come on. You have guys like Mike Kaluta and Bernie Wrightston out there. Where are they? Why aren’t they working? Why aren’t they doing projects? The popular interest in artists and writers in comic book properties is like with DC and Marvel where we discussed that “We will decide what’s going to be popular and what isn’t. We make the distribution decisions and we do this and we do that.” It’s to the point where talent like Jeffrey Catherine Jones, who is one of the most phenomenal artists who probably exist on the face of the earth today, is relegated to doing commissions. Like an unemployed artist. He’s doing commissioned artwork for collectors because there aren’t any jobs in the industry based on who gets picked and chosen. It’s a really wild situation if you think about it. The great artists of our generation, of that time period, basically have no place to work today. And I’m not just talking about them, I’m talking about the regular people like Bob McLeod and George Harras and everybody who were important to the industry at that time. Today it’s like they’re on the margins and have to fight for any one particular job, and it remains that way.

The Defenders (1972) #87, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Al Milgrom.

I believe that at the time I had a feeling that this is how things would go and it’s going to take something very serious and big to be able to affect any kind of change. I think around the time of my second year up there that I sank into this state of repositioning myself. And maybe in a search for myself; who I am, what I am, what am I going to do with my life; in order to come out of it in such a way that I can find a direction that would offer something a little better than the one that was being offered to me at the time.

I suppose you’ve heard stories about that particular period. Basically, what I’ve given you up to now is a bit of the important background to explain the necessity I felt for some kind of change.

Now, the change that I was going through at the time…and I remember many times being out with Howard Chaykin and Gray Morrow sitting and having a drink downstairs and I remember Howard saying, “Mike has really become quiet. He seems to be not engaged in anything any more.” This was in the later summer of 1977, and I really was at a point of change. I was still at Continuity and I kind of disengaged myself totally from everything that was going on. I was still doing some work, on a big collaboration story and it was done and I was at sort of a standstill. I had friends at Continuity, the younger crowd who pretty much felt maybe the way I did, although they were still chugging along trying to find themselves and get a footing in the industry.

At some point I came to some conclusion that this wasn’t working and I needed to change. I just wasn’t sure where. But I did start asking myself, “What do you want to do?” I think that from that position that I was in, instead of going in the direction of, “Well, why don’t you take care of yourself, maybe go find some other career and see if you can go somewhere else, maybe leave New York and go back to Detroit and see if you can set up a home for a family, try to keep the family back there together,” instead of doing that, I did another thing. I said, “I want to see what I can do to change things.” I know it’s a big thing that you can’t really change. Look at the economy; look at government; look at the world infrastructure, which everything in your environment is connected to; which everything in your local environment is influenced by. This is the beast that you have to deal with. This is the world that you’re dealing with and if you want to change something you have to deal with the whole thing in order to influence your local environment. And unless you can have some kind of effect on the whole package, you’re not going to be able to change anything.

The Comet (1991) #12, cover penciled by Mike Netzer & inked by John Beatty.

At that point, for me, it was like I had nothing to lose. I simply had nothing to lose, so at that point, when you’re going into this spiritual thing and you’re asking yourself, “What do you believe in?” It brought me to a place saying, “Well, I’m the kind of guy who looks at history and where humanity is today and I look at all of the influences that have historically had their impacts on civilization.” I realized there are a lot of factors that need to be touched on in order to have an influence on what’s going on in the world. Some of them being religious, some of them being spiritual, some of them being economic, some of them political…but there were a lot of things.

I think that I took it upon myself to be some kind of person who would at least step aside form this thing and see what you could do and at least find out who you are. For me, at the time, when I think of it, of what drove me into this particular corner, I would say that I certainly had an idea of history. I thought that historically, the kind of local world we live in wasn’t always in tune or in touch with the larger picture of how humanity has evolved to become what it is.

Let me give you an idea: Here we are, a group of comic book creators, working in an industry like underdogs, being taken advantage of. We can’t get our shit together enough to put together a union or a guild, and yet the same creators who are not able to create this one simple stand as a group of people, these are the creators that are sitting down and writing and drawing stories of the greatest heroism that humanity can imagine: The mythology of superheroes, which involves sacrifice, and of good fighting evil. It’s like we were able to write it, but we can’t live it. We are powerless. It seemed like a big dichotomy. Even a hypocrisy, I would say, to sit and write these stories but we’re not able to do the slightest kind of thing to improve our lot in this life.

Stroud: Ah-h-h-h.

Netzer: Ah-ha! So, I was starting to see my environment and saying, “Guys, what are we doing here?” It started becoming like meaningless. It seemed to me that you have to show, throughout your whole life, that we need that same thing that we’re writing about in the comics. We needed to because the world needs it. Because we need it. Because our children will need it. Because the way things are going, it’s going to get worse and worse. And there doesn’t seem to be anybody that is making a real stand. If it was Neal, then he was a lone soldier. There were a few. But Neal certainly didn’t seem to have the support of the industry. If the comic book creators had come together to help create this guild, then they would have. But their fear for their particular state prevented them from doing the heroic thing that needed to be done. The very same thing they were writing about in the comics all the time! They were writing about it! They were writing stories about sacrifice and fighting evil and it was just, “We were writing about it, but I’m sorry, we can’t do it. I don’t want to jeopardize my income here.”

Kobra (1976) #6, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Joe Rubinstein.

Stroud: Quite the contrast.

Netzer: So, to me a lot of this took a rather…let me tell you this story. As a kid, I remember being 4 years old and I was in Lebanon. In Lebanon, just like in America, just like in every other culture, a kid growing up, one of the things he hears, that I heard at least, which made a big impression on me…just imagine yourself as a kid: Everything is new in the world and somebody says, “The painter is coming to paint your house.” And you see the guy coming to paint your house and you know what that is. And if someone says “painter,” you see that he paints houses and then you ask an adult, “What does that painter do?” That is the most simple, basic curiosity: To learn new things, and as a kid that’s what it is: A series of learning one new thing after another.

So back at the age of 4 I remember hearing all the time people saying, “God forbid, God willing,” this whole thing where God is all the time coming out of people’s mouths. I remember asking an adult one day at 4 years old, sitting on the steps of the house, “Where is this God?” It seemed like this must be a big guy that everyone had this reverence for, and I was wondering who he was. “What are they talking about? Who is this guy?” I had this impression about him, but he never came around. I never did see him. So the guy looks up and he points at the sun and says, “You see that? On the other side of that, he’s over there.” It kind of drove me crazy at the time. “Really? Come on, I’m not stupid. I know that you don’t mean it, right?” You’re talking about something that you believe in, and yet you really don’t know what it is. I was really enamored with the subject. And it was on a slow burner. As a kid growing up, I would conceive of these stories. I was into science fiction, and I was into the superheroes, and it seemed like all of the stories I tried to put together and write, whether I was doing samples, or whether I was looking ahead at a time when I would become a comic book artist, a lot of them involved some kind of future that put forth the idea of discovering the Creator and what he was.

It seemed that this was all good and fine for a child, but at this particular point in my life that we’re talking about, my second year of comic books, I began to think, “Well you know, Mike, you could take it upon yourself to go out and try to change the world; the way things are, but you know this sounds like a really big (something.) It would be good for you to include that in all the periphery of options that you are considering. Whatever it is that you decided to do.”

Marvel Team-Up (1972) #101, cover by Mike Nasser.

It reached a point where I was sitting with this girl in New York, a friend, and she asked me, “What are you going to do now? You’re not finding yourself in the comics.” I said, “I don’t know. I wish I could use my talents in the industry to say something to the world.” She said, “What would you say?” I remember writing down, “We should love each other.” This seemed to me to be a very important message. She said, “Okay, so what? Where do you want to take this?” It seemed to me this was a very big message, and then the connection came: This really is the core. I’m not talking about religion. Surely religion hasn’t really fomented that message. But the source of religion does. And I thought that I would want to go and figure that out. To see what it was that source was talking about.

So at some point I put myself in that position, and at one point I said, “This is going to be the next step.” Then I made the decision to leave New York and to go spend some time in the mountains and on the beaches of California. Just to clean up inside. To disengage from the hustle and bustle of what was going on in New York and to clear out my mind. It seemed there was something in all that that I could grab. So I did that.

One day, it was the 19th of November, exactly three years after I went to Continuity, and after two years of a very intense comic book career, I met somebody early in the morning at Continuity and I said, “Tell everybody I’ll be gone for a month or a month and a half and don’t worry about it. I’ll be back.” And that’s what I did. I had ten dollars in my pocket and went out on the George Washington Bridge and hitchhiked out to California.

Stroud: Wow!

Netzer: In search of whatever it was I needed to find. I won’t go into every little thing that I learned, but the bottom line is I arrived in San Francisco exactly 7 days later. It was Thanksgiving Eve. I’m traveling by hitchhiking. I have nothing on me. I’m living from day to day and moment to moment in whatever it is I run into along the way. I’m surviving, though the ten dollars was gone the first day. I was having this experience where I was going to see that if you believe God is with you on this thing, let’s put it to the test. We’ll see if he’s still there on the road. And it did in terms of being afraid. I mean if you’re going to go hitchhiking with nothing on you, what are you going to eat? Where are you going to sleep? And yet everything along the way seemed to take care of itself. I never was in need of anything.

Challengers of the Unknown (1958) #82, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Joe Rubinstein.

I arrived in San Francisco and there was a Thanksgiving dinner there being given to those who were homeless and so on, so I joined them and had a nice Thanksgiving dinner. Then I walked out of the place and I see this ad pasted on some glass looking for an illustrator with a phone number. Now interestingly enough, Mike Friedrich at Star*Reach had contacted me and wanted me to do the first 8 pages for that magazine. I was starting to do it, and I never got around to doing it, and when I saw this name I thought, “Oh, my God. He needs that job in another couple of weeks,” so I called Steve and said, “Steve, this is Mike and I’m here in San Francisco. I’m not going to be able to finish that job and you can tell Mike I’m really sorry.” He said, “What are you doing in San Francisco? Come on up here and we’ll talk about it. Mike won’t want to let you go.”

So, I make my way to Steve and he calls Mike Friedrich and Mike comes by and asks me what I’m going to do. “I can’t do comics any more.” “Well what are you going to do?” “I don’t’ know. Maybe I’ll go around the country and talk about bringing about world peace.” I was in a frame of mind for setting things up for a larger situation. He said, “Well, the story you were going to work on wasn’t really regular science fiction, it was just a special thing, but maybe you could write down what you’re going through and we could do a special feature.” So that’s what I did. Basically, I stayed with Steve for a couple of days and that’s what I produced. That 8-page story that was in Star*Reach. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

Stroud: I have not.

Netzer: It’s got three parts and in “The Final Testament,” it basically represents our coming to the point that we’re colonizing another planet. I was looking at our religious history as a catapult to our future and that’s the last chapter of our history, like spiritually. It’s basically being applied toward a continuation of humanity, colonizing in outer space on another planet. I specified Titan, the moon of Saturn. I don’t know where that came from at the time. There was just a feeling about Titan because I’d read a lot of books about Titan and there was this thing in mythology about Titan being very earth-like. I really knew very little about it, but I needed somewhere, so I set that up as the target.

So, I left it at that. I was in such a state at the time that I really didn’t understand it. Any effect that it would have. But as strange as it was, Mike Friedrich thought that it was worth publishing. At that particular time and place it seemed like a good thing. The message was a positive one, so he published it and he wrote an editorial about what I was going through and I think it contributed a lot to a big story that was starting to form about what had happened with my leaving Continuity and I came and saw him and I’m studying religion and I still had no idea where this was going.

The Defenders (1972) #88, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Armando Gil.

So I left Steve and Mike and went out to Southern California to San Clemente and spent a lot of time on the beaches and in the mountains and I met people here and there and I took a Bible from somewhere and I read it through four times. I just wanted to know it. I’d never read it through completely and I wanted to know all that history. I wanted to know what was in the book. There certainly was grandeur in the stories. I’m not talking in a religious sense. I’m talking as stories. In the sense of what the people did. The prophets and what they did and that was the sort of force that we needed today. It seemed to me that this was what was needed in the infrastructure to face what was bringing civilization down. The main reason for it was to encourage. To bring out the spirit of hope and goodness in humanity. This was what it was all about. Everything that was missing from the jargon of modern civilization. Not necessarily in the sense of religion, but of what’s right. There are people that need help here. There are people that have a lot of power and a lot of money and then there are the people that are starving and dying and it seems that the powerful are only engaged in getting more power for themselves and engaging in activities that are only distracting everybody and not being able to face the evil that is standing in front of us. That connected to me.

It took a long time to be able to put that into perspective. Maybe 20 or 30 years. But I really didn’t have a choice at the time. I was already into it. I had stepped into the cold water and I found myself in the mountains of California, walking around, living outside, living with whatever nature had out there and reading this book and absorbing it. And what did I find in it? Well, I found a lot of things, but very interestingly I found it in both the Old and New Testament that they had a common thread that touched me. In the book of Daniel, it mentions the name Michael in this very strange context; like at times, Michael will stand up. Looking at this verse and at the whole thing that preceded it, I had no idea what it was about. There were things about the kingdom of the north and the kingdom of the south, but it turns out to be a very important prophecy and there’s this name. Somebody is going to come in time and they have this name and I thought, “What is this? Is this a set up?” Then I continue reading through the New Testament and you get to Revelation and there you see the name being used again! “They will rule all nations with a rod of iron and there was one in heaven, Michael and his angels,” and I really didn’t put the two together, but coming back again in a similar context and I found the name and thought, “All right. I’ll do it.”

Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man (1976) #37, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Joe Rubinstein.

So, I came back to New York, feeling new and invigorated and being sent from God kind of thing and I arrive at Continuity and everybody is looking at me kind of strangely. Neal said, “Mike, you have religion!” He’s laughing it up and I’m really serious. This isn’t some kind of joke for me. I’m not a happy guy any more. I’m not that kind of person any more. I’m very serious. I don’t know what’s going on here, I’m just walking into the lion’s den and I have no idea what’s going on. So, I just shut up, go back to my room and sit with Marshall Rogers and ask to be left alone.

So, I went back to the room and suddenly there was tension. That night I’m sitting with Joe Barney and it’s 3 or 4 in the morning and Joe Barney is one of the artists who work at Continuity and there’s this radio talk show from one of the New York stations and they’re talking about Steve Ditko. It was a show that talks about comic books and Joe Barney is trying to get a few words out of me. “What happened? What’s going on with you?” I still didn’t know how to put it into words and I said, “Look, Joe, do you see this?” I showed him Revelation, Chapter 12, and he says, “Mike, you know, that’s talking about the second coming of Christ. You’re not saying you’re the second coming of Christ?” I said, “Joe, I’m just saying, I went out there looking for something to do and I found this in the book. I don’t know.” He said, “Well, if you really believe it, why don’t you get on the radio and say it here? I’ll dial it.” So, he dials into the radio talk show, and I get on there and I said, “I’m Mike Nasser and I’m working at Continuity,” and they move me right up to the front. I didn’t have to wait very long. The guy comes on and suddenly I’m on the air and this guy says, “We have Mike Nasser, and he works at Continuity Studios, and he might have something to say about Steve Ditko. Hello, how are you? What’s on your mind tonight?” I said, “We’re putting together at Continuity a political party for the 1980 elections.” Then there’s a silence like, “Where did that come from?” I mean, I’m Mike Nasser, and I’m supposed to be talking about comics. He said, “That’s very interesting. I have a feeling there’s something else you want to say.” I said, “It was written that the second coming of Christ would be a man named Michael.” More silence. And the guy said, “Well, Mike, if you really believe it, then I wish you all the luck. Thank you very much for calling.”

So, it’s like 9:00 and Neal comes bursting into the studio, “Was that your voice I just heard on the radio?” I said, “Neal, I was just answering his questions.” I felt I was placed into this position by one event after another. I can’t even begin to tell you what the beginning of this thing was, but certainly up until Joe Barney said that word, I had no idea that the use of it was intended. And yet I went into this with open arms and an attitude of whatever happens, happens. Suddenly it started becoming bigger than life. I was hearing, “Mike, this is Continuity Studios. We do comic books. We don’t make political parties here, and we certainly aren’t running any kind of movies here, so this isn’t going to be easy for you.”

So basically, what you have is this thing developing, with 20 or 30 people always visible in the studio and everybody has their own feelings and they just don’t talk about this thing. I mean Continuity really isn’t the kind of place for a born-again, religious type of thing. It’s not a church. That wasn’t what I had in mind, certainly. I was thinking, just take it a step at a time and see where it goes.

So, I went to a convention a couple of days later and somebody took a picture of me, with my beard and they published that in the next Comic Buyer’s Guide and some of the magazines and they published a few articles and the picture and it said, “Mike Nasser,” with just the photo and nothing under it. Usually there would be something about the guy. “We saw Michael here,” or something. Instead it was just the photo and why? Because there was a buzz. It was about Mike having gone crazy and coming back with this religious thing and him thinking he’s the second coming of Christ and now it was a matter of how do we deal with that? Then it was a matter of somebody saying, “Look, you can’t do that and you’ve got to go.” This was Mike Nasser, who had become a big, promising talent in the comic book industry and it just wasn’t going to be that easy.

The thing is, Neal, interestingly enough, caught on right away. Now if you think of everything we talked about before, it’s very interesting that Neal, who might not give away what he believes in religiously or not, though he has a couple of times; and I would only say that there was an interview he did with Silver Bullet Comic Books a few years ago called “Neal Adams, Renaissance Man.” If you search for it, you’ll see a 5-part interview with him and he makes this interesting statement, and this is probably one of the few instances where we see what Neal thinks of the subject. So, what does he say there? It’s interesting that this happened at a time when my there was some talk about Mike coming back from this Messianic trip and here it is 30 years later and Neal is being interviewed and when asked about religion he said, “You know, I think there’s a lot of truth in religion. But I think there’s also a lot of lies. And I think one of the reasons I like talking about growing earth and science is maybe because people are uncomfortable talking about religion. Maybe people will be more comfortable talking about science and maybe one day they’ll be comfortable talking about religion. They might want to stone me to death one day for saying the things that I say, but I think one day that it will need to be said.”

Uri-On (1987) #1 pg.1, art by Mike Netzer.

I read that and I’m thinking, “Gee. I’ve never heard Neal talk about that.” I know Neal. So, what happened was, back then, Neal understood exactly where I was coming from. He used to say, “Mike, you’re a fluke. What’s a fluke about you? The fluke about you is that you’re this guy who is like looking at the big picture of things and you have this long-range vision of where you see your name in the book and you want to take on that role, and you’re in a position where you can effect something.” It was like the comic industry in the 70’s. Everybody else didn’t understand how big the comics industry would get, but we understood. Neal and I certainly did. We knew that the comics industry would become a very pertinent part of the culture in the world. Everything that was happening in the comic book industry would eventually have an impact in the world. He thought that at the time, just like I did. This was exactly where I was coming from. And we’re not talking small potatoes any more. We’re talking about the kind of thing that says, “Well, we’ve got comics fandom. We’ve got a lot of people and we have to open up the subject.”

The end point is to present this kind of a figure, that maybe it’s worth it to be able to change something in this world. He understood me, exactly the way I’m saying it. And he supported me. A lot of other people thought, “Well, Mike is just going through this religious thing.” Nobody else understood. I remember him coming back to my room a few days later while all this was happening. I did this 8-page story for Hot Stuff magazine which had this spiritual intonation to it. Not necessarily religious, but certainly spiritual, and I remember him coming back there and saying, “Mike, you can’t just sit there, you have to do something with comic books. Use them as your wheels.” It was like he was egging me on to get off my butt and do something, draw something, look for work instead of just sitting there and acting like some sort of prima donna and acting like I didn’t need to make a living like everyone else. Which is what I was doing at the time, because I really had no idea what it is I needed to do.

Shazam (1973) #35, cover by Mike Nasser.

So, he comes back and he says that and Larry Hama comes back and he says, “Neal, why are you encouraging him like this?” Neal turns to him, kind of flabbergasted, and he says, “You know what, Larry? One day, Mike’s trip to California is going to become the basis of a new religion,” and I thought to myself, “My God, Neal, what the hell are you talking about? That’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t want a religion. I think most religions are pretty bad as far as what religions have done to the institutions of the world. It’s not been a very positive thing.” I mean, the most positive thing you can say about religion is that they have preserved the writings of great stories that have an influence on the common people. But the average religious person I don’t think would come out and do the things that they’re supposed to do. I don’t see anything in the Bible that says set up a religion. I don’t see Jesus saying to establish Christianity. I don’t see Moses saying, “Become religious.” Not at all. I see stories about righteousness; about justice. I see stories about people having a personal relationship with their faith. But I don’t see a call in the writings to establish a religious institution. I don’t see the writings calling for worship of the institutional type that religion has become. Then you look through the history and you realize it’s true.

Just think about the story of Jesus. Just as an aside. He comes, and he’s not into worship. He goes out and basically spends a few years on the road talking to people and eliciting popular support for a movement that stands up to religious hypocrisy. By teaching what the actual meaning of the scriptures are. And his biggest enemies are the religious people. The people who basically come together to run to Pilate to put him to death are the religious people. Much of it run by the high priests. So this is how religions were developed. A prophet comes along, goes out on the street, brings the voice of the people against the establishment, writes the story down, the writings later become the basis for a new, specialized religion, that basically at some point will need another prophet to come and stand against them. That’s religious history. It’s not about the spiritual. The only thing that the church has done or the synagogue or any institution, basically, is preserve the writing. But it seems that the writing would have preserved the stories anyway. Or at least what we could expect from religious institutions, what we could expect is to receive the message of the writing. And the message of the writings do not ask for this kind of separatism. Or this kind of pride in being; a religious pride that creates an animosity between you and those who choose not to be religious. The writings don’t ask for that. That’s what religious institutions do.

The Defenders (1972) #89, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Joe Rubinstein.

So, the question is, why is all this important to a comic book artist working in New York at Continuity in the mid-70’s? (Mutual laughter.) I don’t have an answer for that, but what I do know is that I went in this direction and I found a big world that was like finding my way a little closer to the truth about all this and what do I find? I find resistance. I find people back here saying I can’t say that, I find other people saying I can’t say that. I get, “Oh, Michael, you can’t talk that way about that.” What I’m talking about is really a lot more truth in the original writings and the spirit of the stories that came out of the writings that the world seems to be ruining in many ways. I mean look at what’s happening in America today.

The political conflict in the world today, the political dichotomy, it seems that the powers that be today are very happy that people are at each other’s throats. You’ve got the Right and the Left and the Liberal and the Conservative and they’re all at each other’s throats and the powers that be are happy because we can just forget paying attention to how they’re just running our world into the shit heap. Humanity is basically being subjugated and the economic structure is such that we’re being left powerless to do anything in the way of good in the world any more.

Now on the humane level, people have the choice to do good and to help make their environment better and they do. The only thing is that we’re working against really tough odds. Because the general spirit of things and the good that we try to do, we’re doing it against overwhelming odds against a very big, strong infrastructure which is not really interested in the well-being of everybody. It seems to be more interested in its own well-being and power and subjugating everybody.

So, at that age and that position I took all that on and basically one thing was clear to Neal and to myself. I’m saying if I’m going to see this through, and he would be there, I knew that he would, he would be there to be a part of it, I know, I’ve been in touch with him enough to know, that we basically understand each other. We have this history, which has not always been on the best of terms. We went through this thing in the 90’s with the lawsuit and there might be some blood between us, but still, both of us, I think, understand that as far as the big picture is concerned, nothing has changed. What he did back then at Continuity after that period of my going and coming back and making that first stand and trying to change the spirit of things in the studio at least to try and set up for some kind of creation of something that would go beyond talking about the superhero and trying to do something of some heroic value in the world, it was clear to me and Neal that it was like it would have to step out of the comics periphery.

Challengers of the Unknown (1958) #81, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Neal Adams.

I think that it was inevitable that I would not be able to keep working at Continuity. I think Neal understood it, too. Interestingly enough, if Neal had not pushed when he did, he pushed me not to forget, “This is what you took on. This is what you said you were going to do.” I remember at that point, after I’d come back from California, that first day, I had my room and Neal was trying to bring me down to earth as far as having this big Bible in the front room and he was reading it all the time and he was arguing with me about not looking at things in the religious sense, but in a spiritual sense, but he was doing it through the Bible. He was showing me verses that had to do with work and it had nothing to do with worship and he basically understood exactly what I was going through and he was trying to guide it into a particular framework that would be practical in a way that we both thought would have an influence on the industry and on the world.

In that sense, he pushed me into this thing. I might have, if it wasn’t for that, those first couple of years from about ’77 to ’81 when I left New York for Israel, if it wasn’t for his particular pushing, I might have said, “All right, guys, I just went through this thing and I’m sorry, I’m back to doing comics.” I might have done that. But Neal wouldn’t let it happen. So, I found myself back to like before. There’s this harmony between us. He was saying things one way and I was pushing more in another direction and it’s very hard to explain now, but I remember one issue. I did the Batman Spectacular at the time, which was the one with Marshall Rogers and Michael Golden which was a Superstar Spectacular, a DC Special, and that one story, which was one of my better stories, which was in early 1978 and after it was done it was like my roommate, John Fuller, said, “Come on, let’s go. Why don’t you come back to California? It doesn’t look like you have many friends here,” and that kind of thing. So, I said, “That’s a good idea. That fits into my plans. I need to be outside a little more.” So, I went to California. I drove across the country and spent some time in California. But the thing with Neal was like he was representing this position as to where he thought this thing should be and it was if he was challenging me. “Mike, if you think what you think; if you believe what you say here, then you have to be able to present yourself…” He was challenging me, and I can’t put it any other way, so while I was in California, all this was running through my mind and he kept asking, “Are you going to be able to answer all these important things about this history and when I got the answers together I thought, “Well, it’s time to go back to New York.” So, I got back to New York and I did this 11-page story, which wasn’t really a comic book story, but it was in comic book form and it was from what I’d done during that period.

Secrets of Haunted House (1975) #24 pg.20, penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Vince Colletta.

So I came back to the studio and it was like, “Okay, Mike, you can come back and work here, but one thing is that you can’t work on your religion here.” He was now pushing me more into a corner and it was like, “All right, I’ll work on comic books.” So, I came back and within a few weeks I found myself like... (Connection lost.)

Stroud: I’m sorry, I lost you.

Netzer: Well, maybe that’s’ a good thing. I can try to wrap it up now. (Chuckle.) So just to try and finish that last part, I basically found myself in a situation where I was still really very young, about 23 years old, and I’d put myself in this situation that maybe I was not really prepared to deal with at the time and I found myself really not being able to work on comic books any more, at least not the way things were before and I had this direction that needed more exploring at least. And I kind of realized it was going to be the end of the road at Continuity.

So, I started making plans to head out to Israel because I thought it was important to be here and come back to the roots of where all of that began and to study it a little more and to understand it a little more. So, if there was any truth in what I was going through, this would be the place from where to do it. I didn’t have the means to do it, but I had my father in Lebanon, who at the time was interested in seeing someone in the family. This was 1981 and he was going into open heart surgery and nobody else in the family was able to make it, so I got a call from my brother asking me if I could go to Lebanon. I thought this was a good thing and I could go to Israel from Lebanon. That’s basically what I did. In Lebanon I got caught up in the war, the Israel/Lebanon war and that took up a little more than I would have wanted and by August of ’93 I was basically able to escape a very tough situation and got into a cab and drove south to the border and came to Israel and started a new life here.

I think basically what I’ve told you is the story that maybe for the first time, more clearly than before, puts together some of that experience with a career which was maybe Continuity in its heyday because it was soon after 1981 after I left that things began changing over there. They wanted to buy the building Continuity was in, they wanted to make an arrangement to have Neal leave there and still have enough compensation to open up another place and the new Continuity became something else. It would no longer be that open hub of comics that it used to be and it became more of a commercial art place and it had a very important and pertinent chapter in the history of the comics industry. Continuity in the 1970’s and early 80’s came to an end. A new Continuity came into being somewhere else, which really wasn’t that much engaged in the comics as it used to be.

Stroud: So, an era came to an end.

Netzer: Pretty much so, I would say, in the early to mid-80’s. I was gone already, so I don’t know much about what happened other than what I’ve heard in stories.

Stroud: You were certainly a first-hand witness in the heyday, as you so aptly put it. I thank you for taking the time to share.

Netzer: It’s a big story, at least from my point of view. I still have a hard time putting it all into words. I think the whole scope of it touches on so many things; ambition, creativity, and other things. It’s very hard to be able to put it all into words and to express exactly what happened. You can talk to others who were there and everyone will have their particular point of view and some will say, “Well, Mike just lost his mind,” and all that kind of stuff, and that’s one aspect of it, and maybe it looked that way, and maybe there was some truth to it, but certainly for me it was never that way that it was described. Even Neal said that I went off the deep end. You could put it that way and it would be unfortunate to put it that way, but overall, I think things set the tone for the industry and what I went through. I can’t argue with everybody else’s view. That’s what they think and how they see it, but I know there are other people who look at it a little bit differently and some people still to this day think that, “Well, at least he tried. He did something.” And the point is, the story isn’t over. I’m still here. I still have a hand and a footing in the industry. I’m still working toward a time when we can have an effect on a change in the world in one way or another. I keep looking for an opportunity. Certainly, that period of time at Continuity in the 70’s and early 80’s was a hub where everything was kind of the Ground Zero of my life, at least. I hope that one day the story will be told in a way that will show really what it was all about. Not only from the perspective of somebody looking at it form the outside trying to put it into perspective as far as how successful of a career you had, or how good of an artist you were. That’s not the sum of what life is all about.

Time Warp (1979) #4 pg.13, art by Mike Nasser.

Wonder Woman (1942) #232, cover penciled by Mike Nasser & inked by Vince Colletta.

Mike with Ms. Mystic, drawn by Mike Netzer.

December 19, 2018

An Interview With Alan Kupperberg - Beginning His Career With Continuity

December 19, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Alan Kupperberg (born on May 18, 1953) was an American comic artist known for working in both comic books and newspaper strips. Mr. Kupperberg entered the comics industry by working at Neal Adams' Continuity Studios and was a member of the Crusty Bunkers inking crew. He began writing and drawing for Marvel Comics in 1974, mostly doing fill-ins and one-shots. He later worked on team books such as The Invaders and The Defenders and drew several issues of What If. In 1983, Alan created the one-shot comic Obnoxio the Clown vs. the X-Men - taking on the writing, all art duties, and lettering for the issue. Through the late '80s he contributed to several of the Spider-Man titles, including Spider-Ham back-ups for Marvel Tales. Mr. Kupperberg passed away on July 17, 2015 after a battle with thymus cancer.

The Continuity train continues to roll as I got the opportunity to speak with Alan Kupperberg, who was one of the original members of the Crusty Bunkers at Continuity.

This interview originally took place over the phone on September 24, 2010.

Detective Comics (1937) #421, cover by Neal Adams, Alan Kupperberg, & Dick Giordano.

Bryan Stroud: How did you come to spend time at Continuity?

Alan Kupperberg: When Continuity was getting started, Neal Adams sub-let a room from a guy who leased the whole third floor at 9 East 48th Street. He was a well-known commercial director or producer and Neal just rented one room to start with. Eventually Neal took over the entire floor. When Neal and Dick began Continuity, the room we had was probably about eight or nine feet by nine feet. There were four desks squeezed in there. Three drawing tables and one regular desk. Dick Giordano had the desk (he used a lap board for “arting”) and Neal had one drawing table and Steve Mitchell and I had the other two. Steve and I would come in the morning and open up the place and answer the phones and hold down the fort until Neal and/or Dick showed up. That’s how it started.

Before this, Neal had operated out of the Art-O-Graph room at DC Comics over at 909 3rd Avenue, when he wasn’t working out of his studio room at home up in the Bronx. Neal stopped working up at DC because he opened up Continuity. I had been fired from DC, and I don’t remember if Neal asked me to come over to Continuity or if I just showed up there and started working. It was a long time ago.

Stroud: So, you were right there at the literal beginning.

Kupperberg: Yes. I don’t know if Steve and I made any money at first. I don’t know how the hell I made a living.

I’ll try to describe it for you a little bit. There was a gigantic back room that Mike Hinge eventually rented. The next room in line was that small room we had when we first started Continuity. When we were all still in that room Jack Abel called Neal. Jack was still working out at Wally Wood’s studio in Valley Stream, Long Island. Jack needed someone to pencil a job for him and Neal recommended me. Because I was the only guy there. So that’s how I made a living. I went to Valley Stream and started working for Jack Abel and then for Wally Wood. Eventually I went back to Continuity. Continuity had the entire floor by that point. So, I was there in the very beginning and then I wasn’t there for a while and then I went back to Continuity.

House of Mystery (1951) #228 pg.20, Art by Alan Kupperberg & Neal Adams.

I’m pretty sure that Neal never liked me. I think one of the reasons was because I didn’t react to him the way the other people reacted to him. Neal was a god back then. These days I think only he thinks he’s a god. But back then we all thought Neal was a god. And, artistically, he really was the greatest thing around back then. He was a brilliant guy. But he was an evil genius. Neal liked to make people to jump through the hoops. I probably jumped too, but I don’t think I ever jumped in the direction he thought I would. Neal and I kind of had a similar ability. We could figure out just what would freak people out and he would zing them and manipulate or upset them that way. I instinctively knew how to push people’s buttons and I did that to people too. But I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t know I was doing it. When I found out what I was doing, I tried to stop it. Because I don’t think it’s nice.

Stroud: Some maturity kicked in.

Kupperberg: I hope so. Neal is still doing that shit to people. And I try not to. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded… but even if I was going to do it, the effect is totally different. I don’t have the power that he has because I’m not Neal Adams. I’m just a guy.

Now, I’m not saying Neal hasn’t done good. He certainly helped Siegel and Shuster and so forth, but in my opinion, he wasn’t doing it in order to help people, he was doing it to enhance himself so he can say, “Look what I did.” But the results for Siegel and Shuster were wonderful. One can’t take that away. So, what if Neal did it for himself? It had a wonderful result for those two men who deserved it. But of course, Neal leaves out Jerry Robinson, who had a huge amount to do with it also - and so did a lot of other people. Jerry Robinson may have had more to do with it than Neal did, but he doesn’t toot his own horn that way.

What If (1977) #38, cover by Alan Kupperberg.

Stroud: Jerry seems like a true gentleman in the interactions I’ve had with him. So, you were working sort of as the office gopher initially…

Kupperberg: Yep. Making the coffee and scrubbing the toilet. All the glamorous stuff.

Stroud: Jerry seems like a true gentleman in the interactions I’ve had with him. So, you were working sort of as the office gopher initially…

Kupperberg: Yep. Making the coffee and scrubbing the toilet. All the glamorous stuff.

Stroud: I assume at some point you were called upon to use your artistic talents.

Kupperberg: What talent I had manifested at that time. By the time I went back to Continuity after working for Woody, I had learned a good deal of stuff from Woody. When I came back to Continuity the firm was all the way to the front of the building by that point. Neal was doing a lot of motion boards at that time. I had to draw Lee Iacocca, president of Ford and doing that Ford logo was a lot of fun…not! We did motion boards for brands like Stove-Top Stuffing and that kind of stuff.

Stroud: The sorts of things that were probably more lucrative but not that creative, I’m guessing.

Kupperberg: I started my account book at that point, so I’ll look in there. Ah, Trac II razor blades, Slo-Pokes, Volkswagen spots, and in late 1972, maybe early 1973 we were working on Ford. In January of 1973 we started working on Warp, the Broadway show.

Poster for Warp! done by Neal Adams. — Poster for **Warp!** done by Neal Adams.

Stroud: Quite a cross cut.

Kupperberg: Are you familiar with Warp?

Stroud: I’m not.

Kupperberg: The Organic Theater Group out of Chicago, which was run by Stuart Gordon the movie producer, was running this play in Chicago. Warp was billed as, “The World’s First Epic Science-Fiction Play in Three Parts.” A three-part play. And they’d mounted the first part on Broadway. But it didn’t succeed, so the other two parts didn’t get produced in New York. Neal drew the play’s poster, designed the costumes and the sets and the theater marquee and the play’s logo. I lettered the Playbill cover, which Neal drew. I think I may have even cut out the Zipatone that was transformed into the Ambassador Theater’s marquee. So that’s my Broadway experience. The actor John Heard was in that. I think I still have one of his rejected superhero costumes for that show.

Stroud: Wow!

Kupperberg: Not the cool leather costume, the one with the sequins on it. I don’t wear it out much…

Stroud: (Laughter.) I can’t blame you there.

Kupperberg: It was a lot of fun being involved with all that.

Stroud: Getting back to Continuity, how long were you there?

Kupperberg: It’s tough to say. As with many other people, we were in and out of there as ours and Neal’s wants or needs dictated or warranted.

DC Comics Presents (1978) #96, cover by Alan Kupperberg.

Stroud: It seems like it was very fluid.

Kupperberg: Yes, it was, very. Jack Abel had the middle room and there were 3 or 4 other drawing tables in there. People came and went. But Jack Abel would sit at his drawing board in that room and ink all day. Jack was an anchor. Jack would show up every morning at Continuity, and he’d plant his ass in that chair and he’d work all morning. Then we’d go downstairs for lunch, to Kenby’s (For Fine Food) and then he’d come back upstairs and work until the end of the day. Because Jack was a real guy who drew comics. I’m a comic book artist, not a real guy.

Now, Neal might live in the studio for a week and not go home. There was this crummy couch back in the original room, and we’d all go back there for naps.

Gray Morrow might be working at Continuity one day and Russ Heath or Bob Brown might be there. Lots of people.

Stroud: Fantastic. So just a drawing point for some of the area talent.

Kupperberg: Yeah, mostly the young guys, though, because they needed the space and Neal liked sycophants. Neal liked to run people around and put them through their paces. Bear in mind that this is all just my opinion. I may be totally wrong regarding these observations. I have enough perspective to realize that this is all from my point of view and maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Neal is an unadulterated saint. Maybe I’m crazy. I’m not so in love with my own opinion that the thought I could be wrong doesn’t exist. I would never fight to the death for what is simply my opinion.

Stroud: We all certainly have our own viewpoints and it speaks well when the realization is that perhaps we’re not the be all and end all.

Kupperberg: Perhaps? (Laughter.)

Alan Kupperberg in 1972 (photo by Jack Adler).

Stroud: You mentioned a little about compensation earlier…

Kupperberg: I’m looking at my book and I can give you some figures. For example, I got $69.00 for lettering the Warp Playbill cover and $90.00 for penciling and coloring an Evel Kneivel motion board. By the way the motion board coloring was all with magic markers. Neal liked working with markers. So, it was $25.00 here and $50.00 there. We didn’t need that much money to live on back in those days.

Stroud: Did you learn things while you were there at Continuity?

Kupperberg: I don’t remember particularly learning anything from Neal per se. Neal’s way of “teaching” was to come up behind you when you were working -- and Rich Buckler remembered this the same way -- and Neal would sort of hug himself and put his arm out with this weird gesture and he’d point at something in your drawing and say, “What’s that?” And you wouldn’t know what to say. You had to defend yourself all of a sudden and you had nothing to say. Because you didn’t know what you were doing. Now, if you were a dummy -- and I was a smart kid and people expected a lot from me. But I wasn’t as smart as people thought. People kind of overestimated me. But I was very stupid in several important areas. But people didn’t understand the stupid part of me and they often thought I was just mean. But I was stupid and it didn’t bother me if and when Neal did that to me. As far as I was concerned it was just Neal being Neal. But some people couldn’t take it. They would run away and never come back.

Invaders (1975) #29, cover by Alan Kupperberg & Ernie Chan.

Stroud: Hmmm. I don’t have a lot of credibility on the subject, but it always seemed to me that creative people need to be nurtured.

Kupperberg: With Neal it was more of a challenge. It was Neal’s way of trying to make you think about what you were drawing. If one could run the gauntlet, survive and come out the other end, you might make it. A lot of us did. Neal never hurt me one bit except maybe my feelings. He may have tried, but Neal never did anything that wound up hurting me. He helped me. He called up John Verpoorten one time and he said, “I’ve got a kid here, he can letter. I’m gonna send him over there, give him a lettering job.” So, I went over to Marvel and John Verpoorten looks at me and he knew me, probably didn’t like me, but John promised Neal he’d give me a lettering job and he did. So, Neal got me a job. Neal did the same thing with Joe Orlando. My first penciling job in House of Mystery, I would not have gotten it if Neal hadn’t told Joe to give it to me. So thank you, Neal. I appreciate it. He was very good to me until he wasn’t.

Neal could make Bob Kanigher jump. Neal would do to Kanigher what Kanigher did to his freelancers. Neal did have a sense of justice. But the thing is that Kanigher was a sick guy, an effete poseur, who didn’t know he was acting out his neuroses. But Neal did it for the glee of doing it. Neal knew he could do it, so he did it. It was impressive because Neal didn’t have any “power” over Kanigher, but Bob would still jump through the hoops Neal held up. Kanigher could do it to his freelancers because he had the power. The funny thing was Kanigher didn’t realize that Neal was pushing his buttons. And the freelancers Kanigher did it to knew it was being done to them, but they had to grin and bear it. He was the editor. Now, if you didn’t work for Kanigher you’d probably punch him in the nose if he pulled his shit on you. But if he had power over you --.

Stroud: The power of the check.

Kupperberg: Neal had no power in that sense, in relationship to Kanigher, so it was justice in a way, a sort of retribution. And in that it was Kanigher, it seemed okay -- because Kanigher was a prick.

Marvel Two-In-One (1974) #88, cover by Alan Kupperberg & Frank Giacoia.

Stroud: I know Russ Heath said that Kanigher would look for a weak spot.

Kupperberg: That’s a good way to put it. Neal was like that too, and if I had a weak spot, Neal didn’t find it. I think I was too stupid to have a weak spot. I met Neal when I was 14 years old. I started going up to National (DC) comics in the late 60’s when Carmine Infantino was still just the cover editor.

I was around when Neal stared doing his wonderful run of covers from Carmine’s layouts. I used to see him work on those covers. He’d often do the final touch-ups in the production room at National. This was back at 575 Lexington Avenue. So, I’ve known Neal for a more than 40 years.

Stroud: Ah, that’s right. Jack Adler mentioned you were his assistant for a time in the production department.

Kupperberg: I loved Jack Adler. I loved Jack to death. Jack is a great talent. A wonderfully talented man in everything he does. He does great woodworking. He invented stuff, including a 3-D process, just a wonderful talent.

Stroud: Do you recall any of the things you picked up from all these mentorships?

Kupperberg: It was my experience that when you work for someone they don’t often “teach” you. It’s up to you. You have to learn. I learned a tremendous amount about the process of working by being around Woody. I learned a lot about composition from Jack Abel and Howard Chaykin. When I’m drawing, and I come to a place where someone has given me advice, or I learned something in the past, I always remember where and when I got that knowledge when I apply it. I have learned a lot of stuff, even in negative instances. You very often learn by making mistakes.

Stroud: Absolutely true. I’ve met some people who are great examples of what not to do, too.

Kupperberg: A cautionary tale.

House II The Second Story (1987) #1, cover by Alan Kupperberg.

Stroud: What were the hours like at the studio?

Kupperberg: It was a 24/7 operation. You could work around the clock if you wanted to or had to. That was the fun part of it. The front office in the building had these huge windows. I remember one time at midday, Steve Mitchell was going across the street to Charles & Co. to bring back some sandwiches. We’re all in the front room, hanging out the windows and Chaykin looks out and sees this beautiful blonde on 48th the street. Chaykin starts yelling out the window at Steve, “Hey, Mitchell, look at that!” Steve looks around and all Steve sees is the Today Show movie critic, Gene Shalit. So, Steve points at Shalit as if to say, “Oh, look, its Gene Shalit.” And Chaykin screams out the window, “No, f*** Gene Shalit, look at the tits on that blonde!” Now, everyone in the street is staring at Shalit and the blonde.

Those kinds of situations were among the things I loved. Downstairs on the ground floor was Kenby’s Coffee Shop, where we ate lunch most of the time. We were in New York City and in the middle of everything. All this stuff was going on around us. You’d see it all in Midtown.

When you’re young and stupid you can have a lot of fun. I’d be walking down the street and literally meet Cary Grant. I could walk out of an office building and suddenly the Queen of England went by in an open car. I met Jimmy Carter on Madison Avenue. I saw the Pope. Last year I looked out of the window I’m looking out right now and saw Obama and Clinton go by in a car. In New York City if you keep your eyes open, you can see a lot of people. Somehow, I can often recognize people from the backs of their heads. I believe its part of being an artist. You notice details and little things. You can recognize a building from a brick in photograph. It’s a very strange thing.

Stroud: I remember my art appreciation professor mentioned that artists are more aware and notice things.

Falcon (1983) #3, cover by Alan Kupperberg.

Kupperberg: Yes, so you can recall them and use them later. My history of art teacher in school was Bernie Krigstein. But he wouldn’t talk about comic books. I did a 12-panel page, a sword fight sequence and showed it to him and when he looked at it he said, “Oh, I didn’t realize you knew what you were talking about.” I wasn’t even very good at that time, but I guess he saw I wasn’t just talking nonsense.

Stroud: Do you feel your time at Continuity helped your career?

Kupperberg: In a sense. When I went from there to work for Woody, I soon found myself penciling, inking and lettering his strips. That was a direct result of having been at Continuity.

Stroud: Who did you most enjoy working with?

Kupperberg: Jack Abel was very special to me. If not for Neal I probably wouldn’t have had and enjoyed my relationship with Jack. I first met a lot of these people at DC, but Neal’s place was like a DC, Jr. Continuity was sort of like DC’s coffee room moved over to Neal’s. DC actually did have this coffee room with nice Formica tables and coffee machines and hot chocolate and sandwich machines and so forth. Sergio Aragones came in one day and with a fine tipped marker he filled up a Formica table top with his little cartoons. Sol Harrison came in and hit the roof. Sol took a wet paper towel and wiped them all out.

Marvel Team-Up (1972) #96, cover by Alan Kupperberg & Terry Austin.

Obnoxio the Clown Vs The X-Men (1983) #1, cover by Alan Kupperberg.

Thor (1966) #321, cover by Alan Kupperberg & Brett Breeding.

December 12, 2018

An Interview With Greg Theakston - Remembering His Time At Continuity Studios

December 12, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Greg Allen Theakston (born November 21, 1953) is an American comics artist and illustrator who has worked for numerous publishers including Marvel & DC. He is known for his independent publications as a comics historian under his Pure Imagination imprint, as well as for developing the Theakstonizing process used in comics restoration. Theakstonizing is a process which bleaches color from old comics pages, which are then re-colored for reprinting.

Wonder Woman Is Bettie Page by Greg Theakston. — ***Wonder Woman Is Bettie Page*** by Greg Theakston.

For much of the 1970's Theakston helped organize the Detroit Triple Fan Fair, credited as one of the first conventions in the United States dedicated to comic books, eventually owning it.

Theakston built his portfolio and expanded to paperbacks and magazines, including Dell, Ace, Ballantine Books, and Galaxy Science Fiction - among others. He was an original member of the Crusty Bunkers, and worked closely with Neal Adams at Continuity Studios between 1972 and 1979, producing animatics, storyboards, comic art and various commercial advertising assignments.

In 1975 Theakston started Pure Imagination Press which publishes comics and companion/reader books, including The Betty Pages, The Complete Jack Kirby, and The Steve Ditko Reader.

The Continuity journey continues with a long, fascinating chat with Greg Theakston, who had a volume's worth of stories to share about his time there. Developer of the "Theakstonizing" process, he's been in on some interesting times.

This interview originally took place over the phone on September 17, 2010.

DC Comics Presents (1978) #84, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Greg Theakston.

Bryan Stroud: How did you end up at Continuity Studios?

Greg Theakston: I met Neal Adams at the 1970 New York Comic Con, sporting a beard. That’s where I also met Frank Frazetta, Jeff Jones, Berni Wrightson, Vaughn Bode, Jim Steranko…I mean that was like a landmark show for me. I was sixteen at the time.

Stroud: No kidding. That’s a Who’s Who right there.

Theakston: And Bill Everett, who was dressed in a gray sharkskin jacket and a black shirt, and he had pushed the sleeves up and rolled up the cuffs. I didn’t even know what smarmy was at that point, but I knew smarmy.

Stroud: (Laughter) Quite the fashion plate.

Theakston: Yeah…not so much. So, Neal Adams and Jim Steranko in 1970 were red hot and on fire. This may have been pre-Continuity. I don’t remember exactly when I arrived there, but it was in the early 70’s. Before 1974 certainly. ’71-’72 maybe. And it was a Mecca, because Adams had come out of a studio system with Johnstone and Cushing. Lou Fine was working there. They had taken Neal under their wings and he understood the obligation of the creative to tutor the next line of creatives because there was no school. The only way you could learn to be a comic book artist is to try and fail miserably every time or show your stuff to a guy who knew his stuff and he would say, “This is what you’re doing wrong.”

So, Carl Lundgren, an illustrator, and myself would visit there whenever we were in New York. Carl and I were still living in Detroit. Two or three times a year we’d scrape together enough dough to go to New York City and try to break in the business. At the time I got there Neal was renting about a third or half of the studio. He was sub-letting from a larger commercial art studio. Carl and I got there about 7:30 one night. Somebody called us and said, “There’s this gigantic jam going up at Continuity right now and they’re looking for people to come and pitch in.” It was a Pellucidar story by Alan Weiss. An orange cover, I believe. I don’t think it was the first story. I think it was the second. Now Alan had a bad reputation for being late, which goes with his astrological sign. So he had arrived at the DC offices on a Friday, on time, job completely penciled, very proud of himself, out to prove everybody wrong. “I can make my deadlines.” Joe Orlando, the editor, looks at it and says, “Yeah, but it was supposed to be inked, too.”

Ex-Chameleon: Daredevils LTD (1987) paperback cover art by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: Oh, no…

Theakston: Twelve pages. “Really great pencils, but…” So, he goes to Neal and says, “Neal, I don’t know what to do. Can we corral some guys and maybe get this thing done by the end of the weekend for Monday?” So word went out on the grapevine, and all these young bucks came out of the woodwork. I think that [Ralph] Reese and [Larry] Hama were already there sharing a studio space. I know Jack Abel was there. So as Carl and I are arriving, Jim Starlin and Berni Wrightson are leaving. There were twelve pages and its about half done. This is a Friday night turning into Saturday morning.

So, working out of two different rooms were Carl and I and Larry and Ralph and Neal. I don’t think Terry Austin was there yet. I don’t think [Bob] Wiacek was there yet. And of course, Weiss himself, kind of overseeing the whole thing. Brushes and pens flying everywhere. So of course, I’m the low man on the totem pole in this situation, so I’m inking backgrounds and filling in blacks. Neal would do the faces and the major figure work and he’d leave spaces open that were supposed to be blacked in and he’d put an “X” there and you’d fill in all the areas with blacks. Carl and I put in two or three hours and Neal and I think Larry kept talking about “Crusty Bunkers.” How it was kind of a funny sounding phrase. I got there a little late to learn just how it all started, but Neal kept saying “Crusty Bunker.” So, it was decided that we were the Crusty Bunkers.

So, the twelve-page job was pretty well finished. I’m pretty certain Alan wrapped it up. He took it in on Monday, to an amazed Joe Orlando, very self-satisfied. The job looked great. I mean you’ve got Jim Starlin and Berni Wrightson and Ralph Reese and Neal Adams inking your stuff.

Stroud: Hard to go wrong.

Theakston: And everybody was doing the thing they excelled at. Everybody had the personal expertise and the job looked spectacular. Alan goes in to see Orlando on Monday morning and plops it on his desk and the following Friday he comes in to get his check and he happens to go through the production department and there it is, just sitting there. No stats, no coloring. Five days later it’s still just sitting on the shelf in the production department. “Well apparently you didn’t need this on Monday, did you?” I mean Alan could have inked two pages a day and got the whole thing done by himself.

Galactus, penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: How strange.

Theakston: After that, word kind of got out that if you were jammed up with a job, the Crusty Bunkers could turn it out literally overnight. So, whenever there was a pinch, or somebody had maybe a little more time and just wanted Neal Adams to ink, they’d shove a job in our direction. And when I finally moved to New York City, there were moments when I’m pounding the pavement looking for paperback cover work and I’d stop in at Neal’s. It was a place where all of the new guys felt welcome and they washed up there. I worked on Crusty Bunker jobs where I would take an hour and fill in some blacks for Neal. Two or three pages and didn’t even expect to be paid. Because it was fun to just be sitting there inking with Neal. Very interesting guy. I owe Neal up and down. Most of us that went through those doors do. Rich Buckler, Howard Chaykin, Wiacek and Austin, Marshall Rogers. Mike Nasser particularly.

It was the first opportunity that you really had to work in a professional situation. And if you were doing something wrong, Neal would tell you and you wouldn’t do it wrong any more. He had come out of the studio system where he had learned. And he was acutely aware of how important it was to orally transfer the art that we were doing. And when I eventually moved there in ’78…and by the way I would take these 7- or 8-day sojourns to New York City to deliver a job and try to dig up some more and he let me sleep there in the back room on a stinky couch. In the far back room, they had a big sofa. So, it was free rent. All you needed was airfare and food money.

Stroud: No small consideration.

Theakston: And a lot of guys took advantage of that. I always tried to contribute back to the studio. I mean there were plenty of times when it was one in the morning and the place was empty and what do you know, there’s two buckets of white paint. “I’ll paint the room, or I would take some Glo-coat and wax the studio floor.” I remember sleeping in the back room, which was hermetically sealed, so it was a really good room to sleep in, and Neal comes in about 10 or 11 in the morning and he wakes me up and says, “Hey, what’s the deal with the floors?” I said, “You know, I thought I heard some Brownies in here last night, but I might be wrong.”

An illustration for Wonderama Magazine by Greg Theakston. — An illustration for **Wonderama Magazine** by Greg Theakston.

So, an hour or two later I get up, stretch, get my clothes on and go into the front room and Neal announces to all the young bucks there in the front room, “I don’t’ want to see you guys scuffing up this floor. It looks beautiful.” And I mean to tell you every evil eye in the room looked in my direction. In retrospect I understand what was going on, but at the time I didn’t. Here were all these guys from all over the United States trying to break into comics and I didn’t feel competitive, but all of these guys did. It was never announced or anything, but it was always… I wouldn’t even try to say they were trying to curry favor, but it was every man for himself and I didn’t feel that way. Because I was getting work on the lowest tiers from men’s magazines and painting cheap paperback covers. But getting work on my own.

Stroud: Keeping body and soul together anyway.

Theakston: Well, I was just doing what I wanted to do. And in a lot of respects this was the only “in” that these guys had toward becoming a professional artist. These guys are 20, 21, 22 with not fully realized personalities. To some extent myself included. There were moments of…slight discomfort. You know, young bucks are rutting around and scratching. I was talking to [Alan] Weiss about this once. I said, “You know, every once in awhile you’d go into the front room in Continuity and you say something and everybody’s back stiffens but Neal’s and you know that you’ve just crossed some invisible line. You don’t even know what you did!”

The studio probably had 12 guys working in there at any given time, so you’re dealing with 12 different personalities, and you’re 22 and don’t know yet how to deal with different personalities.

During the time that I worked there it was like a Conga-line of wannabes. Somebody would show up and Neal would take them under his wing and provide him with some direction. Neal was doing a lot of storyboard work at the time and animatics, and while I had not yet mastered drawing, I could color like a mo’fo’. My coloring really excelled. Neal even used to let me color the faces and special effects.

Stroud: Quite a compliment.

Super Powers (1984) #4, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Greg Theakston.

Theakston: Yeah. I would occasionally touch something up, but pretty much I just cranked it out. We’re talking hundreds of storyboards. His agent would come in at three or four in the afternoon expecting eight storyboards with 20 panels apiece due the next morning. Which is the way commercial art works. The creatives dicked around until the very last minute. I would look at it some, and they’d come up with some horrible ideas. Really stupid stuff. But it wasn’t up to me to judge, it was up to the client. It was up to me to color. And everybody would have a box of markers. I guess there were at least 24 colored markers. They were these wooden boxes with row upon row upon row of markers, color-coded, so that you always knew where it was when you instinctively grabbed a flesh-tone, for example. And the front room by 3 or 4 in the morning in an alcohol-fumed smog. And everybody would be high.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Oh, no.

Theakston: Yeah, you’d been breathing these fumes for 4 or 5 hours with no ventilation. There was this gigantor air-conditioner in the back, but all it did was recycle the fumes. And the markers would begin to give out and as the markers began to give out they would squeak. They would twitter. “Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee!” Neal used to call it “the insane twitter of Magic-Markers.” So, there is nothing but the classic rock station, Allison Steele, “The Night Bird,” and it’s the same twitter of drying out markers. And you never really knew who’s going to be there. There was the usual gang of idiots, but there was always somebody dropping in making a quick 200 or 300 bucks and in 1978 that was good money for night’s work.

When we inked for the Crusty Bunkers, once the job was inked, we would do a full-sized Xerox. There was a Xerox machine there that would do a full 150% art work reproduction and then someone would tape tracing paper on all of the Xeroxes and then everybody would take a different color magic marker and circle the things that they did and sign their name or initials or whatever, and then Neal would go through and calculate what he thought everybody had earned. That’s how we were paid. Backgrounds didn’t pay as much as figure work, but Neal would mentally calculate. “This, this, that, that. Okay, he gets $57.00.” And that’s how those jobs were broken up and paid for.

Art for a Camel Cigarette ad by Greg Theakston. — Art for a **Camel Cigarette** ad by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: Innovative.

Theakston: We didn’t generally write bills; Kristine would just pass out checks. It was super cool. Because you’d get your check the next day.

Stroud: Can’t beat it.

Theakston: Oh, listen, for starving young men it’s a Godsend. “Oh, good Lord, I can eat again.” Neal would pass me a $20.00 and say, “Go to the bodega across the street and get some Entenmann’s,” which is a New York brand of cheesecake, coffee cake, biscuits, whatever, and that was a high-toned treat. Chocolate cake.

The third room back from the front room held an art-o-graph, which really sped things along. An art-o-graph is an overhead projector.

So, if the story has a call for a whale, you just go to the clip file, get a picture of a whale, slap it in the art-o-graph and trace it off projected onto your paper. It saved a lot of time. Neal would take an 8-1/2 x 11 paper and fold it in fourths and then he would do all of his layouts, four pages of layouts on this tiny thumbnail version. Which is brilliant, because if it will work small, it will work big. You could see the whole page. You’d put your hand over it and it was gone. You take your hand off of it and it works. So, Neal would do these fold-ups and then take them to the art-o-graph and blow them up and then he’d throw these roughs away. And man, there was this mad scramble for Neal’s garbage can. Because to him it was just a tool, some kind of function for him and not the final art. So, people were always rummaging through Neal’s garbage can.

Stroud: Didn’t you auction off a cast-off Deadman sketch awhile back?

Theakston: Yeah. He’d just toss these things in the garbage can and be done with it. It wasn’t even worth his time to wad it up. So, he’s in the art-o-graph room with all the lights off and he’s got an Entemann’s chocolate cake with white icing and sprinkles on the top, and he’s eating it while he’s drawing, and he says, “Oh, I do love those crunchy sprinkles.” And somebody not realizing that he’s in there working, steps in the room and turns on the light and there are roaches all over the top of the cake!”

Batman & Robin, penciled by Bob Kane & inked by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: Whoa!

Theakston: Mmmm. Crunchy sprinkles. Yes, it was like that. So anyway, we weren’t starving and actually there was this guy that came up, Bill, and he’s still working as an artist. Another guy from Detroit. A lot of guys from Detroit washed up there. Buckler, Mike Nasser, me, Terry Austin…I don’t think I ever saw Al Milgrom up there, but it’s not out of the question.

Stroud: Doesn’t Tom Orzechowski hail from there, too?

Theakston: Tom Orzechowski as well. I knew Tom when he was 16. And off the point here a little bit, Detroit had the first comic book convention in America. Maybe the world: who knows? We had guys like Jerry Bails who lived in Detroit. So, it was kind of a magnet. Richard Buckler used to show once-a-month a 16 m.m. film in his living room. Arvell Jones, Desmond Jones, all of us thrilled to something we hadn’t seen. So, we all got together and we all wanted to work for Marvel comics, but we all stink. Richard, who was clearly way ahead of the rest of us would give us critiques. So, it was a very unified fandom in Detroit, from, I would say, ’67 to ’70. Maybe a little after. We had the Fantasy Fan and Comic Collector’s Group. The F.F.C.G., which put out a news fanzine called The Fan Informer. I think by the time I left Detroit, twenty-three issues had been published, which is remarkable for any fanzine.

Stroud: I was about to say, that had legs.

Theakston: Once a month I would take a ride to the east side of Detroit and spend the night with Arvell and Desmond and we’d work on the fanzine. I don’t know if it was monthly at that point, but it was pretty regular. So, there was camaraderie among the people there and when we all ultimately hit New York we gravitated toward Continuity. A friendly island in the middle of a tsunami. And Neal always had work to do, so he was glad to have the staff to do it. Because if you were going to do fifteen storyboards in a night, you’d better have a staff.

Betty Pages Annual (1992) #2, cover art by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: Unquestionably.

Theakston: Ultimately in 1978 I moved to Lexington & 45th Street and Continuity was on 48th Street between 5th & Park, so it was a very, very short walk to work. Now, I could have worked out of my apartment, but I liked the camaraderie, the communal thing and Neal always had good paying jobs, so if there was nothing cooking on my desk I’d head over to Continuity.

So, I got a room there next to Ralph Reese and Larry Hama’s and later on Larry and Cary Bates’. On the other side, toward the front of the building was Wiacek and Terry Austin. I said, “Look, Neal, I really don’t need to rent space here, because I live 5 blocks from here.” New York City blocks are small blocks. I said, “I’ll tell you what: Let me be your studio manager and we’ll just trade off space for my services.” So, we wrote up a contract and I was the studio manager of Continuity between ’78 and ’80.

If somebody left the coffee on and burned the pot it was my job to clean out the burned coffee with a Brillo pad. Sweep up once in awhile. Neal wanted to upgrade the studio and he bought boxes and boxes and boxes of corkboard. We’re talking 2-1/2 feet by 18 inches. Slabs. And I started at the front of the studio, and as you’re facing 48th Street, the wall to the left, and corked the whole studio all the way to the back. Tenants bitched about that.

Stroud: Holy cow.

Theakston: The cement was really pungent and I’d be punchy by the end of the day. Part of my duties began with collecting the rent. I’m not going to name any names, but the deadbeats gave me a lot of trouble. “Oh, yeah, yeah. Catch me in a week.” So that eventually was turned over to his daughter, Krissy.

Return of the Swamp Thing ad from 1988, art by Greg Theakston.

There was this constant ebb and flow of young guys in and out of the studio. And the guys from California for some reason, you knew they wouldn’t be there at the end of the month. Mark Rice. John Fuller. California guys just couldn’t take New York. It ate them up. I remember John Fuller arriving. He was kind of a tall guy with steel-rimmed glasses and sort of a John Lennon quality about him. Somehow you just knew instantly that this guy was in over his head. He went up to Dell/Whitman trying to draw Bugs Bunny or just anything, to get any kind of work and they looked at his samples and said, “Well, this is all superhero stuff. Go back and do some funny animal stuff and bring it back.” So, John took a Bugs Bunny comic book out of the studio library and put it in the art-o-graph and traced it off. And I’m thinking, “Look, they’re going to give you a script and you won’t be able to trace it off of an old Bugs Bunny comic.”

Stroud: (Chuckle.) This won’t do it.

Theakston: He was also diabetic and he stopped taking his insulin. I generally had the table to the right of Neal. There were four tables that faced 48th street with picture windows. Left to right it was Carl Potts, Neal Adams, Greg Theakston, Joe Brosowski. There were two tables behind us. One at the crook which Bruce Patterson worked at for a long time, the one in the other corner which Russ Heath eventually perched in. So I was literally Neal’s right hand man.

And there comes this moment when John Fuller comes out of the back room off the couch without his shoes on, and shuffling. I don’t remember precisely what Neal said, but I think he said, “I think it’s time for you to contact your parents and get some money and go home.” He was in insulin shock.

Stroud: Not good.

Tease Magazine (1994) #2, interior illustration by Greg Theakston.

Theakston: I don’t hold anything against Mark Rice. He’d been a child actor in the Bob Cummings show among other things, but at the time, he was a very pissy character and I won’t say we nearly got into “it,” but there were moments where the situation became tense. And there were moments like that with Alan Kupperberg. Neal and Paul had a falling out, but he would occasionally show up and it was another case of “Why is this guy so pissed off?” It took me years to realize that he had terrible parents. That made him unhappy. I couldn’t relate to it because I had great parents. [Howard] Chaykin, too. He had real issues with his father. He would take it out on anybody at the drop of a hat.

You would know who was going to be a keeper and who was not. You could tell probably within the first week if this guy was going to work out or not. And Bill from Detroit comes in. and he’s living out of the back room. He comes shuffling on some morning and Neal looks at him and he says, “When was the last time you had something to eat?” Bill says, “Last night.” Neal says, “What did you eat last night?” “Half a tube of toothpaste.” So, Neal passes him a ten and says, “Go get something to eat and then come back and do some work.” So, we’re sitting there and directly across the street from the studio on 48, second or third floor, there’s always been some debate about this. I always thought we were on the second floor. Nasser is pretty sure it was the third. I think he’s right in retrospect. Anyway, it’s got a pretty good view of the street and we see Bill dodge traffic and go towards the Alpine, which is like a high-falutin’ restaurant for a hamburger. Neal saw what was about to come and announced, “Not there! Not there!” Now we’ve got a Burger King right around the block where at the time you could get a hamburger for .79 or a buck or whatever. You could eat for a week on ten dollars and Neal sees him walking into the Alpine and just shakes his head. There goes that ten bucks on one burger.

Star Wars Galaxy I - Card #130. Art by Greg Theakston.

It was that kind of savvy that would save you or doom you in New York City. Don’t spend eight dollars on a hamburger. And of course, he was gone within the month.

The point in coming to Neal’s was, this is a jump-off point. You could take the work that you had done with Neal, point to it and say, “Look, I’m being published by your company.” So, Bill…I don’t know what he’s like now, but he was an oddball then, I’ll tell you that much: he shows up at DC and he’s got a zebra-skin bathroom rug tied around his neck and a wrestler’s mask on with his portfolio. He shows up at the receptionist’s and says, “I’m here to see Carmine Infantino.” The receptionist says, “Do you have an appointment?” Bill says something like, “No, but he’ll know the genius that I am when he sees my work!” The guards then escorted him out. At that point I learned that you have a lot more credibility if you show up in a suit and a tie with an appointment.

Let’s see, who else was there? Bill Draut, who had a hell of a pompadour for an old guy. He lived with his two cats.

Stroud: Just one of those eccentricities, I guess.

Theakston: Tex Blaisdell showed up. He worked there for a while. And I kick my ass around the block for not interviewing these guys. Here they were, sitting down at work and I could have just set up my tape recorder and got all this history. And Russ Heath. What a character. I remember we were working on a Peter Pan records “Spider-Man vs. Dragon Man” story. It’s Friday and we’re trying to finish this thing up and get out the door before closing time and Heath rolls in at about 4:30 and says, “What have we got?” “Spider-Man vs. Dragon Man.” “Okay, give me a page.” And the very last panel of the story Dragon Man is turned into a tiny lizard. So, Russ inks this little lizard, inks it, washes out his brush, and hands the page to Neal and says, “Who wants to go for drinks?” That was Russ Heath’s work ethic.

Super Powers (1984) #5, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Greg Theakston.

He’s one of the seniors, one of the deans. This guy had been around since forever and he would say, “Ah, I’m a little tight until my next check. Can you loan me twenty bucks?” “I’d rather have you do me a drawing for twenty bucks, but yeah, here’s twenty bucks.” Now let me phrase this carefully: He had overdrawn his salary to the point…well, generally the tops of the desks were covered with a piece of matte board and when the matte board became dirty, you’d just peel it off and put a new piece of matte board on and throw the old one away. So, he’s got like a list of people he owes money to. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Oh, boy.

Theakston: Well, on the other hand that’s very commendable. He’s at least keeping track. So, I come around behind him and I don’t know what the deal was. Delivering work maybe. I was just talking to him and I see this list and it’s like, “This guy owes $250.00 to everybody around here.” And he slaps his hand over this list and he says, “Nobody told you to look at my accounting!” I said, “Don’t write it on your desk.” The next time I passed his desk he had taped a piece of paper over it so you couldn’t see his accounting.

At some point, Mike Nasser was there and he was drawing something on Heath’s matte cover and the next day I go back to visit Mike in the seventh room back and Russ has taken a big Magic Marker and scrawled over the entire desk, “RUSS HEATH DOES NOT LIKE HIS DESK WRITTEN ON.” Mike is like, “What am I going to do about this? Paint the thing?” I said, “Have you got a Phillips head screwdriver?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Let me at this.” I get under the table on by knees and take out four screws, turn the thing over so it’s fresh wood and screw the thing back in. “Easy peasy. It’s all done.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Cover for Telengard, a 1976 video game.Art by Greg Theakston. — Cover for **Telengard**, a 1976 video game.Art by Greg Theakston.

Theakston: Now you’ll have to ask Mike about this, because I don’t remember what happened, but there became this thing where he and Neal started doing pranks on each other. Ha! I can tell you exactly how it started. Mike Kaluta comes in and he pulls something out of his portfolio and says, “You want to see something really funny?” Neal had drawn this picture of Superman flying toward you; it’s in the Neal Adams Treasury I with a little bit of Metropolis in the background. “You guys want to see something really funny?” He takes this piece of acetate out of his portfolio and it’s black. It’s been trimmed into the shape of a giant ink spill. Neal is out. Kaluta puts this on top of this drawing of Superman and takes an empty bottle of ink and he places it strategically so it looks like a bottle of ink got knocked over and ruined his piece of artwork. Ha!

So, Neal walks in and it’s “Oh, my God! What happened?” We’re all snickering. He finally gets the joke and pulls the piece of acetate off and holds the thing up and says, “Who do we do this to next?” (Mutual laughter.)

That’s pretty congenial, don’t you think? So Neal goes out again and Mike takes the Superman drawing out to the art-o-graph and copies it, and Mike could do a pretty good Neal imitation, and then he takes the acetate splotch and he outlines it and then he fills it in with real ink. And he puts it back on Neal’s desk. (Chuckle.) And Neal comes in and says, “I know this joke!” Then he picks it up and it looks like his artwork is really f---ed up. And again, we’re all about to explode from trying to hold it in.

So, this started a prankster war between Neal and Mike, and Mike comes in one morning and his art table is gone. Neal has disassembled it and reassembled it in the very tiny bathroom. There’s no way to get it out. Mike is going to have to take it apart and get it out and reassemble it.

Stroud: Oh, geez.

Theakston: So, I’m in there working on the storyboards around midnight and Nasser comes in and says, “Where can I get 60 feet of rope at this hour?” “Sixty feet of rope? What are you talking about?” “Yeah, yeah. What I want to do is take Neal’s desk and go up to the roof and lower it down so that when he gets in his desk is outside the window.” I said, “This has gone too far. (Chuckle.) You guys need to cut it out!”

Personality Comics Presents Sports Classics (1991) #1, cover by Greg Theakston.

Greg Theakston’s original painting for Personality Comics Presents Sports Classics (1991) #1.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) This can’t end well.

Theakston: What next? Neal’s got to top this. And you know that Neal will. He’s the boss. He’s got to. Give up this rope idea. What happens if it kills somebody? And he even wants the light and all the papers to be on the desk as well. Antics went on like that a lot at that studio. I was very partial to Doritos. I would finish painting to deliver and I would have a fresh bag of Doritos on my desk, and when I got back half of the bag would be gone! I’d go up to the front room and Neal’s fingers would be orange. “You sonofabitch you ate half my bag of Doritos!” So, I started hiding my Doritos and Neal took it as a challenge. He’d come in when I was out and scour my office for my Doritos. I hid some behind some books and he found them.

Rustler's Blood (1984) paperback cover art by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: Just sniffed ‘em out, huh?

Theakston: Oh, yeah. He was a real munchie fan.

At some point Mike Nasser had…I don’t know whether to call it a breakdown or a revelation, but he found Jesus. He thought he was Jesus. Let’s just call a spade a spade. He thought he was the second coming. I’ve met a couple of people that have had afflictions that felt the same way. I don’t know what it is. And Mike rationalized it. He would explain to you how he was the second coming of Jesus. It got to the point that the amount of work he was doing petered out to the point that he didn’t have an apartment any more. I had known Mike since high school. I introduced him to Neal. I said, “Look, you can come and sleep on my couch and it will be a little island of security. Save up some money and get your own apartment. I’ll let you hang here until you get on your feet.” So, he was working not only out of my place, but out of Continuity as well.

One afternoon, Kristine calls up and says, “Is Mike there?” I said, “No, Mike’s not here.” She said there was a brownie on Mike’s desk. “Well, Daddy ate it, and he’s feeling really strange.” “It’s a marijuana-laced brownie! Mike Nasser’s eating them and they’re filled with marijuana. And tell your father to stop eating other people’s treats.”

So, at the end of two months I ask, “Mike, how much have you saved up?” He dips into his pocket and he says, “Thirty-seven cents.” I said, “Mike, you’ve got to go.” So, on the roof of 9 East 48th was this decorative façade, which had a really nice circular window, but it was basically a small room, so Mike took his stuff and he moved up there. If he had to use the toilet, he had a key to Continuity, so he’d just go downstairs, use the facilities and then go back up to his perch on the roof.

It was kind of a moment when his life went into shambles. Cross-country trips to California. Several. Kind of an Easy Rider self-discovery sort of thing. And it came to this point where I was kind of losing track of him. He finally shows up and I said, “What happened? What have you been doing?” He says, “Well, you know I went to the airport and I boarded an empty plane and I got into the pilot’s seat and that’s when security caught up with me.” “What were you going to do, fly a plane back to Lebanon?” I didn’t see Mike for a long time after that.

Tease Magazine (1994) interior illustration by Greg Theakston.

But, my favorite part of Continuity, aside from the good money that I made there, was Fridays. Because everybody who didn’t live in the city, who had a job to deliver in the city, showed up. It was an unbelievable line of celebrities. You could always count on Gray Morrow coming in. We had Sergio Aragones visiting. You never knew who was going to show up on Friday, but you always knew somebody would. “My God, Wally Wood!”

Stroud: Good night!

Theakston: Yeah. And you could interact with these guys on a reasonably professional level. Everybody was working. Fridays were always my favorite. Gray Morrow, what a dry sense of humor. Gray would not say anything for fifteen minutes and then he’d just lay something on you, like oh, my God! He was just waiting for the moment to actually say this.

Denys Cowan got his start up there. Carl Potts. Another one of those angry guys. And he despised smoking. And a client would come up, or the agent would come up with a new job and be talking to Neal and the guy would light up a cigarette and Potts would go into a huff and he would pry open one of these gigantic front windows and leave the room. Now Gray Morrow tended to smoke a pipe. But Potts was not going to give any guff to Gray Morrow. So whenever Gray came in with his pipe, Carl got into a huff and just left. Again, I was not equipped to deal with people with issues. I really kinda didn’t have any. I came from a happy home. I felt like the freak.

On Friday afternoons, Marvel had started a volleyball league.

Stroud: Volleyball?

Theakston: In Central Park. Every Friday afternoon at about 5 o’clock during warm weather we’d all get together and play volleyball. So once all the Continuity guys figured it out, we were there. Eighteen people. And it came to this point where there were so many people, we had to rotate people out and rotate people in. So, there would be four people on the sidelines watching the game and when that round was over, somebody would rotate out and somebody would rotate in. It was super cool, because in the heat of the game, you got to see what these people were really like.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) The façade comes down.

Planet of the Apes (1974) #9, cover by Greg Theakston.

Theakston: Absolutely. No more of that. Guys that you thought…well, they might have been, but under the heat of the moment they became somebody else. And look, tell you what: If you’re that nice guy all the time and you’re that kind of prick at the volleyball games it sort of counteracts the notion that you’re a nice guy.

And the list of guys who played in those games. It was the Who’s Who of comic books at the time. Jim Shooter was always one of the captains. Steve Mitchell, Bob McLeod…in fact Bob was part of Continuity for a long time. He was Neal’s left-hand man. Alan Weiss. Anyway, at any given moment if a comic fan happened by and somebody started pointing out who all these people were, he’d orgasm in his pants.

I remember we set up a Saturday game once and 27 people showed up. We had a whole third team that had to be rotated in and out. Unbelievable. I’m not a very big guy, but I’ve got a tall leap. The ball would be headed over the net and I’d jump up and just put my hand out and the ball would just fall and there was no way to field it. I could have smashed it down on somebody’s face, but…it was all very subtle. It became known as the “Theakston dink shot.” Dink…

Stroud: Un-returnable.

Theakston: If it’s just going to drop in front of you, yeah, what can you do? In my first game Steve Mitchell’s in the front row to my far right and I’m serving and the ball comes back to me and I punch it up to the far right and I say, “Steve.” And everybody’s like, “What? My God. We’re working like a team here.” “Yeah. The tall guy in the front row. I’ll set him up. We’ll make the point. It won’t come back.”

So that was part of the Continuity experience.

Mike Hinge, from New Zealand eventually ended up living in the back. He had very esoteric tastes in music. There was a really nice stereo up front and he would come in at one in the morning and he’d be playing something and it was, “What the f*** is this? You’ve got money for records, but you don’t have money for rent?” But it became obvious very quickly why he didn’t have money for rent. He’d say, (faux accent) “Aht Directors are all whores! They’re all whores!” Well, if you let that seep through during your interview, you’re not going to get a job. He’d be wearing a waffle long-john top and raggedy jeans and dirty work boots and go to interviews dressed like that.

Stroud: Great first impression…

Theakston: I always got out a nice suit for my first interview. I said, “Mike, why do you do that?” “So, they’ll think I’m poor and give me work.” “So, they’ll think you’re a failure and can’t get work anywhere else, so they’ll give you work?” Terrific…

He worked in rapidograph and “Gehman Mahkers.” Which were very brilliant at the time, but 10 to 15 years later, the markers faded. It became a completely different piece of artwork 10 or 15 years later. Not permanent whatsoever. You’d see him walking down the street and he had this scowl on his face. He looked like a leprechaun on a bad day. He had grayish hair and a beard, but with no mustache. And he always had this scowl on his face as he’s walking down the street. It finally came to the point I asked, “Hey, every time I see you on the street you’ve got this scowl. What’s the deal with that?” “I don’t want to walk around looking like a grinning fool.” “You don’t have to grin, but you don’t have to scowl either.” That was ultimately one of the reasons he wasn’t successful: this terrible attitude.

Jack Abel. Everybody loved Jack. Old workhorse. Probably the senior member of the entire office. He’d be plugging away, drawing and inking Mighty Samson for Dell and he would pin his artwork to his board with a pushpin. Everybody’s got their own work technique, but the top of his desk was chopped to pieces by 30,000 pushpin holes.

Greg Theakston art for a 1984 issue of The TV Guide about “The Fall Guy”. — Greg Theakston art for a 1984 issue of The TV Guide about “***The Fall Guy***”.

Stroud: Ouch!

Theakston: I was very, very interested in ‘30’s and ‘40’s popular culture at the time. I had some common ground with this guy because he’d lived through it. Every once in awhile he’d say, “How do you know that?” “It’s my thing.”

Stroud: It sounds like things were happening around the clock.

Theakston: Oh, yeah. At any given moment something was going on. I’d go there in the afternoon and take a nap and I would then get up at six and come back in at midnight when all these guys were at their very dead end and it was like, “The Cavalry is here! What have you got?”

I met Lynn Varley when she was 16. She’s from Detroit as well. She was dating my best friend who was 18, which I thought was a little bit odd, but on the other hand she was f***ing gorgeous. And she eventually moved to New York City and was going to the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was friends with me and my first wife even after she broke up with Tony. We kind of maintained the relationship. So, she calls me up out of the blue and she says, “I’m miserable at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Is there any way you can help me get out of here?” I said, “Yeah, of course. Come on up to Continuity. There’s always work here.” So, she came up on a Saturday afternoon and we were doing some corn-chip storyboards. Some Frito Bandito rip-off, which you just knew was never going to make it to air. So, I gave her her first coloring lessons that afternoon and she became a regular member of the staff. And she eventually met her future husband, Frank Miller around there.

I’m having dinner when Julie Schwartz, Harlan Ellison and his wife, Lynn and Frank, and a science fiction writer from Hollywood. I can’t remember his name. And the guy who co-founded Dragon Con. And at the end of the meal, this is about 1991, the crowd presses ahead and she turns back and motions for me to sit down and she says, “I never got to thank you for changing my life.” And I just thought, “How sweet.”

Super Powers (1985) #5, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: Yeah.

Theakston: I don’t think Trevor Von Eeden was part of the studio. I do know he visited there often.

Stroud: He was kind of a wunderkind as I recall.

Theakston: Yeah. And Denys Cowan got his start there. Denys used to come in and sit with me. I had a record player in my room and a lot of records and I remember playing Chorus Line for him and somewhere during the first half of the record he said, “Hey, do you have Chorus Line?” (Mutual laughter.) “What did you think we were listening to?”

And Potts was in the office up near the front and he comes in all steamed because he thinks I’m playing my music too loud. He makes this fist at me. “What? You’re gonna beat me up?”

There was this thing with the air-conditioner. If it was left on all night it would freeze up the coils. It would literally turn it into a block of ice. This thing was so efficient that it froze the condensation and as studio manager, at 11:00 in the morning when it’s starting to get warm, my job was take care of it. So, I figured out that if you took a blow dryer and just set it in front of it in half and hour to 45 minutes, you’d get the A/C working again.

Stroud: Necessity is the mother of invention.

Theakston: There was also a latrine in the hallway. They weren’t really bathrooms because there was no bath in them. But the one in the hallway had a drain in the center of the floor and I said, “Hey, Neal. You know it would be really inexpensive, maybe $150.00 and we could put a shower in that room.” He said, “I don’t want this place seeming too much like home to these guys.” And it was an unwritten rule that you were not allowed to have TV’s. Certainly not in the front room. So, I was painting paperback covers and wanted to be amused, so I had a little TV back in my room. I know Neal disapproved, but he never said anything about it.

Stroud: What an experience, Greg.

The Fireclown (or The Winds of Limbo), cover art by Greg Theakston.

Theakston: So…I’m sure none of these guys give a damn. Somebody comes in and says, “I know you smoke pot.” “Yeah.” He says, “I’m going to buy a pound. How much are you in for?” I said, “What does it work out to an ounce?” “$28.00.” “Give me two.” Nasser and I smoked a lot of pot together. We were getting ounces all the time. Marshall Rogers also smoked pot. He was there at the time. So anyway, I cough up the dough and the guy comes in and says, “Here.” Big brick in his hand. So, we go back, not quite as far back as Mike Hinge’s work area, but Neal had this very large room in the back. There was this lesbian martial artist who needed the room to practice her martial arts. She didn’t stay very long.

So, at some point Neal decides to put three more desks in here in an extension. There goes the couch that I used to sleep on, but I didn’t any more. So, Nasser and Rogers and (I can’t remember the third person) are set up. This is shortly after the “Russ Heath does not like his desk written on” episode and Nasser’s got this immaculately clean board. So, we upend it so it’s horizontal and my dealer starts cutting this pound of pot. And it was more than a pound because everybody got a really good count. So, there are four or five guys in the back room, all with an ounce or two and everybody starts pulling out papers to roll their own.

I said, “Hang on. Put your papers away. I’ve got an idea.” I take a credit card out of my pocket and I scrape the surface of Mike’s desk and there’s this really fat little pile of pollen which the wood had held onto. “Let’s make the first one out of this.” It was a fatty about the size of your thumb. And as we start to pass it Neal shows up.

Stroud: Of course.

Theakston: He’s not mad, but he’s letting us know he’s the boss and he says, “Are you guys doing drug deals in my studio?” “Yeah. But it’s the back room. Nobody will know.” Neal sits down in one of the chairs, an easy chair somehow got in there, and he says, “Pass that thing this way.” Neal was not all that much of a tight ass. So, we pass him this gigantic doob. I mean this thing was really a big fatty. He’s like, “Give me that,” like it’s some kind of challenge. He takes this gigantic pull and he holds it and he passes the jay to somebody else. Then he exhales. He said something like, “It’s no big deal.” He puts his hands on the rests of the chair and he stands up and he falls back into the chair in a daze. A man’s got to know his limitations.

Radon (1999) movie concept art by Greg Theakston.

We’re in Toronto in 1972 at a big convention at a university, and all my friends are there. Weiss, Neal, everybody. Apparently, I’d come in a little late because they’re all tripping on LSD.

Stroud: Oh, geez.

Theakston: So, there’s an open staircase leading to the second floor and Alan Weiss has a pack of cards and he’s balls-to-the-walls tripping. Look, if you don’t want it reported, don’t do it in front of me. He says, “You want to see something cool?” He stands up and goes to the rail and he peels all the cards over the rail and everybody who’s tripping on the floor is like, “Oh-h-h-h beautiful!” I said, “You want me to go down there and collect ‘em so you can do it again?” He said, “Nah. Kaluta’s down there and he’s a Virgo and he won’t be able to put up with the chaos.” I look over the rail and there’s Kaluta on his hands and knees collecting these cards.

Neal was perhaps the most gracious artist I’ve ever known when giving a critique. There was this thing where you were the big fish in the little pond. You were the best artist in your high school. And you would hit New York and you would ask Neal and you’d be expecting Neal to say something like, “Oh, this is the most terrific stuff I’ve ever seen,” and Neal would give you the real deal. I learned as much from watching him critique other people’s portfolios…even more than him critiquing mine. I remember watching Ken Steacy getting his portfolio reviewed at this convention and I’m wearing this long-sleeved polo shirt that’s tight at the wrists and real loose and ballooney sleeves, and Neal points to me and says, “Look at the way Greg’s shirt moves. See where it touches his body and where it just floats over it. You have to remember as you’re drawing something that there’s this moment where the cloth obeys the structure underneath it and sometimes it’s just free falling.” And at the end of the critique, Ken’s lower lip was trembling. This is the last thing he wanted to hear. But absolutely the most important thing that he should have.

Stroud: I can see that.

Pure Images (1992) #3, interior Horror Hosts by Greg Theakston.

Theakston: Here was the real truth. And it was never done with malice. I do this to this day. The coolest thing anybody ever said to me when I underwent Neal’s critique. He would say, “Look, what I’m about to tell you works for me. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t discard it. Put it on the back burner. Because it will make sense in two years.” So, you get, “This is what works for me. If I can convince you of any of it, it’s great, but if I can’t, don’t throw it away. It really works for me and you may find it works for you.” There were these moments, too, when I’d slap my forehead and say, “NOW I know what he’s talking about! Of course! I can see it now.”

Stroud: It falls into place.

Theakston: He never said no. Anybody that wanted a critique, he’d always give it. And really, as a Mecca for comic-book artists, I must have watched Neal do these critiques twenty or thirty times. It got to the point where I’m nodding my head. “Yep. I know that one. Yep, he’s right about that one, too.” I distinctly remember Neal saying the Solar Plexus is like a Roman shield. And he draws this Roman shield over my terrible drawing and it’s absolutely right.

At this point, I’m painting paperback covers while working at Continuity. Most of these guys haven’t done their first comic book job yet. So, I’m kind of the high man on the totem pole. “This guy is doing oil paintings. Good Lord.” So, I’m there on one of my occasional visits and I’d brought my paints with me. I had another set at home. So, in a taboret to the left of Neal’s table, top drawer, I leave all my oil paints. I was like, “Neal, if you want, feel free. Experiment with some oil paints. It’s all here.” I came by about two months later and they’d not been touched. They were still sitting exactly the same way that I’d left them. So, in some respects I had Neal’s respect.

Although unless you were somebody like Gray Morrow, he wasn’t one to really show it to you. There was a closeness that Neal and I appreciated that all of the new crop of guys didn’t get to enjoy. But there was a flip side to that, too. Because he’s a very competitive guy. I remember I had a really nice record collection and I’d bring them up to the front room to play them and Neal and I would sing along to these crazy old songs that nobody else knew. And he says, “Is there any period of music that you’re not really good with?” “I’d say 1948 to 1952 is my weak suit.” Then he got this smile on his face like, “Ha ha ha ha, well, I’ve topped you on that.” And there was a competition between Neal and I that no one else had to endure or enjoy, which is probably one of the reasons why we crashed and burned at the end.

Stroud: Just a little too close

Tease Magazine (1994) #8, cover by Greg Theakston.

Theakston: Yeah, though I wouldn’t say close. A little too competitive. Part of the whole psychology of Continuity was that Neal was on the top. He’s the guru. And here is somebody who can do something that he can’t. He never mentioned it, but I think it was a sticking point with him.

Jim Sherman came into the studio and at this point Lynn Varley is still working there and I’m kind of courting Lynn Varley - and Jim Sherman, who is blonde and pretty and very talented become part of the scene. And Neal knows that I’m interested in Lynn and starts being Cupid for Lynn and Jim.

Stroud: Hmmm.

Theakston: Now in the summer of I think 1980 Neal took a beach house on Fire Island and around late July I said, “Hey, you know, you keep inviting people out to your beach house. When are you going to invite me?” He says, “Oh, you can come whenever you want.” I said, “Cool.” So, I show up on a Saturday afternoon and Lynn’s there visiting. At this point the only way to get out of Fire Island is by ferry. The last one was at about 10:30 at night. So, I said, “Lynn, walk me to the ferry.” So, we’re walking to the ferry and having kind of a heart to heart and suddenly Neal comes charging down the boardwalk and says, believe it or not, “I’m not breaking up anything, I hope, I hope, I hope.” “Get out of my romance!” That was that moment where it’s like not only is Neal feeling competitive with me, but he’s getting in the middle of my shit. So very shortly after that I said, “Look, Neal, I think I’m going to just start working from home.” I’d come in once in awhile. I said, “I know I owe you a few hours as the office manager. I’ll come in on Fridays because that’s the best day and I’ll catch up on my last 15 hours or whatever it is I owe you.”

He says, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You misunderstand. You owe me another 84 hours.” “What?” “You rented a room that is fitted for two tables, not one.” “We never discussed this.” From the start I thought this was a one-table room and believe me, I could put my hand on my table and turn around and put my hand on the wall. That’s how big it was.

Mad Sports Special 1987, cover art by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: Reminds me of a Japanese hotel room I once occupied.

Theakston: It was like 6 phone booths. So, he said, “That’s a two-table room. You’ve been racking up that rent and now you owe me 84 hours.” (Heavy sigh.) What do I do? I want to keep on good terms with Neal, but on the other hand, geez. I feel like I’m being raped. So, I call up the New York City Workman’s Rights Something to try and figure it out and it’s “Oh, no. Only one person can work in a room that size. It’s not a two-person room.” So, I tell him that and he says, “Well, Bob Wiacek and Terry Austin share studio space in the same amount of room.” So, it comes to this point where, all right, I’m still coming in on Fridays, putting in 3 or 4 hours each Friday in an effort to maintain peace between Neal and I. And part of the deal was I said, “Look, I don’t want to pay any money for this. I’ll work for it, but if I’ve got to pay money for it I might as well work at home.”

So after about two months of coming in every Friday and putting hours in he says, “This isn’t going fast enough. I want doors on all the cupboards in the front room and you pay for the wood.” I said, “That was not our deal.” “Yeah, but you’re not working this thing off fast enough.” Okay, so now it’s dueling personalities.

Stroud: The classic battle of wills.

Theakston: Yeah. I said, “No, that was not our deal. I tell you what, this two-table thing was not our deal either.” He says, “Well, buy the cabinet fronts or that’s it.” I said, “Well, that’s it.” That’s how Neal and I ended.

I never heard back from him ever again. We see each other at conventions and we don’t even nod. On the other hand, he doesn’t shout at me. There’s something to be said for that.

Stroud: Take the good with the bad.

Theakston: Also, very interesting, Neal had a 10-year lease on that space and developers wanted to come in and knock down the building on the right and on the left and the building Continuity was in and build a gigantic skyscraper, which they eventually did. But Neal was a hold out. He wanted money before he was going to be bounced from this space. So, it came to loggerheads.

Michael Golden worked for Neal at this period. They came up with Bucky O’Hare. A brilliant idea that went nowhere. Golden and Neal sat down and constructed this idea and all of the toy pieces that would go with it in an effort to sell it to a toy manufacturer. The gun was detachable from Bucky O’Hare’s hand and so forth.

Anyway, I won’t say the mafia word, but somehow, they got all the other tenants out of the building. Except Neal. Neal won’t budge. He’s got a 10-year lease or at least a long-term lease. They tried to burn the building down.

Stroud: Wow!

Theakston: They started a fire on the ground level and the last time I snuck in (wicked laughter) to Continuity because I was persona non grata, it stank like charred wood. Ultimately, I think he got 2.5 million to get out.

Silver Surfer, drawn by Greg Theakston (in the style of Jack Kirby)

Stroud: That’s a tidy sum.

Theakston: Yeah, he was dealing in futures at the time. Sugar. That’s where he was putting his money. And every once in awhile the kids would come up and you’d meet the family. The Adams family, as we called them. And I won’t even go into that. It’s far too personal.

On the other hand…I’m a firm believer…and I know this from the very start. Not only am I an artist, but I’m a reporter, who is always interested in the journalistic aspect of life as well as being an artist, so when people did things in front of me, they didn’t realize there was a reporter on hand.

So, I’m up at Continuity and Neal’s not there. Kristine shows up and she’s still in high school and she says, “Oh, Daddy’s not here. I’m all out of money. I need some money.” Mike Nasser says, “I’ll give you $20.00. Don’t worry about it.” So, he gives Kristine a twenty-dollar bill. Later on, in the evening I hear this tussle in the hallway. Up in the reception area. I stick my head out the door to see what’s going on. And it’s Neal and Mike having a confrontation and Mike will confirm this, Neal will probably deny it up and down. He picks up this cripple and smashes him by the lapels against the elevator doors. This is clearly about Mike giving Kristine twenty bucks. I mean really. Mike’s a victim of polio. He walks with a limp. And Neal just manhandled a cripple?

Dave Spurlock of Vanguard productions is doing a documentary on Jim Sterankno and I was his first assistant and I said, “Dave…come on. I was his first assistant. I’ve got a lot of stories. Are you ever going to interview me? He said, “Well, Jim might not like what you say about him.” I said, “Look, are you a documentarian, or are you a suck-up? If he doesn’t like it, don’t include it. But really it should be recorded for posterity.”

Stroud: Precisely.

Theakston: On the other hand, my newborn son needed an operation. Not a very serious operation, but it was $400 I didn’t have and Neal sat down and wrote me a check, Boom! Like that as soon as I told him. So he’s a complex personality.

A fan poster for the James Cagney film Blonde Crazy done by Greg Theakston. — A fan poster for the James Cagney film **Blonde Crazy** done by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: Complicated.

Theakston: Yeah. He was an Army brat.

Stroud: That I didn’t know.

Theakston: Yeah, apparently, he was dragged all over the United States. That’s tough on a kid. And fascinating, same thing with Kirby, when they don’t talk about a particular topic you know that’s a hot-button issue. I knew Kirby for years and first started talking to him in ’69 or ’68 and knew him until he died in ’93. I think he only spoke about his father maybe four times. And I can’t remember Neal ever speaking about his father other than that he was an Army brat and his father dragged him around. Vaughn Bode had no problem telling me his issues about his father. It made Vaughn Bode what he was. He hated his father and made no bones about it. And the only way to escape his father was to go into a fantasy world and create a new world where his father wasn’t there. Which is one of the reasons he was such a brilliant creator.

I’m talking to Larry Todd and I said, “What happened to Wrightson? I thought he was going to be one of the most brilliant artists of the 20th century and suddenly it just fell apart.” And Todd says, “Well, his father died. He can’t kill him any more.” Ouch! And you know, you’re right. So, with the artistic temperament, it’s one of the reasons I’ll never be a great artist. I’ll be a functional, good, solid artist, but I won’t be a great artist, because I don’t hate my father. I don’t hate my mother. And I landed smack dab in the middle of all these guys with mommy and daddy issues. And I was completely unable to relate with them. “I had a happy childhood. Why are you so pissed-off all the time?”

Part of the point is that I lived through it to report it. Believe me the unrelated Continuity stories are just as horrifying…and funny.

Stroud: I have no doubt.

The Vision, drawn by Greg Theakston in 2014.

Theakston: Let’s see, what else can I tell you about Continuity? Oh. The missing Tarzan covers. Neal was hired by Ballantine to illustrate the Tarzan series they had just picked up. And he’s working on at least six paintings. You’d have to look it up. Six or eight paintings at the same time. And they’re pretty good. There’s just no getting around it. But Neal had this idea that people would wait for him to do his thing. When he did his contract with DC for Superman vs. Muhammad Ali there was a time schedule. And if he did not have the project completed by this particular time, money would be deducted from his check. DC had figured this out. By this point, Neal’s ego is so big he thinks that everybody will just wait for him. And I am pretty sure there is a contract clause for press time he’ll be penalized on if it’s not used. So, he’s working on these Tarzan paintings for Ballantine and the art director calls him up. He says, “These are all due next week. It’s now or never.” So, Neal I guess decides to finish his eight paintings and they’re all pretty much complete, but not done. And he starts looking around the studio. Can’t find them.

Stroud: Uh-oh.

Theakston: He said, “Greg, you’re my studio manager. See if you can find these.” So, seriously. I’m the studio manager and I know where these will be? Not likely. So, I proceed to go through every square inch of ground in that entire place. This is a pretty big place. It’s the whole floor of the building. And they’re gone. Neal’s thinking, “Who stole my paintings?” And I would think that, too. “Which one of my so-called friends is a thief?” So, I’m sitting to his right and I’m thinking, “I’ve covered every square foot of the floor of this place. I’ve looked in all the shelves, I’ve looked in all the portfolios, I’ve looked in all the drawers.” And these are pretty big pieces. These are not easy to miss. And then it comes to me: I said, “Neal, I know where your paintings are.” And I drag a chair into the stat room, which doubles as the art-o-graph room, which is a dark room, stand on the chair and they’re on top of the stat camera. How they got there, who knows? But it’s the only place above the top of my head that I haven’t looked yet. And sure enough there they all were. I saved his ass on that one.

Stroud: Oh, I guess.

Theakston: You want to talk about saving ass? Gray Morrow comes up on a Friday. He says he’s got the assignment to do Space 1999. So, Gray comes up and he says, “I’ve got this job to do on Space 1999 for Charlton and I’m farming out the work.” The downside? He only has five stills. One is costume. One is the ship. One is a villain from episode three or whatever and so on. So Gray heads to the back of the studio. Everybody around here is going to get one story. Neal says, “Xerox these stills.” I made five Xeroxes of each of the stills. So, I turn one of the stills over and its ITC and the address is two blocks up on Madison Avenue. And we’re talking 4:30 in the afternoon on Friday. So, I call up the head of publicity at ITC and I say, “Look, we’re working at a handicap here. We’re supposed to do this thing for Charlton and we only have five photos.” The guy says, “Come on over.” So, I get there and he pulls out this two feet by 18 inches and 6-inch deep box. He opens it up and it’s got the plot synopsis for the first 13 episodes, proof sheets for the first 13 episodes and probably an additional 30 stills and a 16mm trailer. I said, “Wait a minute. You keep everything else, just give me the trailer.”

Stroud: Jackpot!

Theakston: There was a beautiful presentation booklet, 18 x 12 laminated. Twelve pages. So, I come back to the studio and say, “Gray, Neal. Come into the front room. It’s the mother lode.” I said, “Gray, can I do one of these stories?” “Oh, sorry. While you were away, I gave them all out to the other guys.” “You’re welcome.”

Stroud: No joke.

Theakston: It was that kind of thing that separated me from the rest of the pack at Continuity. The young guys. It doesn’t take too much to figure this out. And sure enough everybody else in the studio that got in on Space 1999 got paid for it after I saved the studio’s ass. No good deed goes unpunished. It was all just kind of comical. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to ITC, two blocks away on the 15th floor and get some material that might help.” It had not even occurred to Gray Morrow to look at the back of the still, get the address and go get some extra material. Really it was not a brain-buster.

Promo art for the film Mogombo (1984), done by Greg Theakston.

I contributed to Continuity in a way that none of the other young bucks ever did. And in some respects, it put me at odds with Neal.

Stroud: It sounds like you were perceived as a threat.

Theakston: Yeah. How ridiculous is that? Me and Neal Adams? What kind of a threat am I? Good Lord.

Now there was the Animation House at 50 East 48th, one building over, and we tended to do a fair amount of work with them. After I left, Neal did this highly erotic thing and they got together and said, “If we could just run this thing one time on television it would make such a stir.” So, they did this highly erotic animated spot. A lot of work. And WPIX Channel 11 wouldn’t run it because it was so sexual.

There used to be this corkboard to the right of Joe Brosowski’s table and there was always interesting stuff being pinned up there. Neal got a hold of a picture of Barry Windsor Smith with his Barry Windsor shirt in gigantic circular signature. “Who are you?” “I’m Barry Smith.”

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

Theakston: “Yeah, I read your shirt.” And Neal meticulously, for nothing, re-lettered it, “Barely Christ.” In the same lettering! Ha! And Barry never visited the studio, so he never tore it off the wall, but everybody got a laugh out of it who did see it. Dear dead days…

Once or twice a month I’d straighten up Neal’s desk. All the correspondence in the upper left-hand corner of the desk, hot projects are in the middle, and stuff that I can’t figure out what’s supposed to be done is on the right. “I changed out the matte board on your table.” That was over and above the call of duty and…(laughter.) Neal is sitting there inking something and he says, “I’m the best inker in the business,” in a very self-satisfied tone. (Chuckle.) I kind of give him a fish eye to my left, and I go (hidden in a cough) “Niño” And everybody’s back in the room stiffens. “Did you really say that to Neal? My God!” And there’s a beat…beat…beat, and Neal says, “I’m the second-best inker in the comic book business.” (Mutual laughter.)

Wonderama (1993) #1, cover art by Greg Theakston.

And that kind of sums up the situation with Neal and I. The guys would never, ever go up against Neal.

And he’d do these long, long jokes and the payout was like, “Oh, my God…” Now I admired his creativity in coming up with this thing and trying to sell it and he says, “In Japan, the land where they make all of the toys out of plastic, they have these gigantic cooling towers and the plastic particles that float up are collected in these cooling towers.” I take a piece of paper out and I write, “This is another one of Neal’s bullshit stories.” I pass it to Lynn Varley. She looks at it and laughs. He continues, “They’re trying to figure out what to do with all the plastic in these cooling towers and it’s really durable plastic. The best of the plastic, for some reason. So, they decided to use it to make cars. And that’s how Toy-oter, came to be.” Really? “Toy-oter?”

Ultimately Continuity was a lovely place to springboard into the business. Working with the master, complex as he was. I don’t have any bad feelings about Neal. He did me good turns. I did him good turns. It ended up in a loggerhead of ego.

One last memory: When they were trying to form A.C.B.A., he called a meeting up at Continuity and I swear there were 30 people in the front room who were trying to figure out how to set up A.C.B.A. Is it going to be a union? They finally decided it was going to be a loose organization that represented, slightly, the rights of comic book artists.

Marty Pasko was there and said, “I think this whole thing is a terrible idea.” Then why are you here? Just creating chaos? Oh, that’s right. You had a terrible childhood.

And in the crowd was Steve Ditko.

Betty Pages (1990) #6, cover art by Greg Theakston.

Stroud: Really?

Theakston: Yeah, the man of recluse. He actually came out for it. And ultimately, they chose Stan Lee as the figurehead. Great. I wouldn’t call it a radical situation, but it was a moment where all of the creators felt like, “It can’t go on like this. We shouldn’t be working like the artists in the 1950’s and early 1960’s did.” Everybody was behind it, but it never delivered. All of the artists were behind it. The A.C.B.A. portfolio kept things going. It was just some sort of symbolic thing that didn’t do anything. It’s sad.

I guess for a moment there were 30 of the…I guess I won’t say top artists, because a number of them couldn’t make it into the city, but a number of the young artists and a good smattering of the older artists who would like to see some change. I think very shortly after that the companies began giving artwork back.

Stroud: So, something good came of it.

Theakston: Yeah, well the fact that thirty artists could get off their asses and meet at some predetermined location was a sign.

And I was there for the Siegel and Shuster battle. Where Neal came to bat for Siegel and Shuster. This is another one of those moments. There were moments when the guy could be magnificent. And there were moments when you just wondered. “How can you do this and then do that?” But people said that about Sinatra, too.

Neal was just a contradiction in terms. In some respects, he likes publicity, but he’s not very good at generating it.

Now Neal would go to bat for you. I was doing a painting for Atlas, Goodman’s last company and I said, “Neal, I did a good painting of Frankenstein and Jeff Rovin keeps rejecting it. I keep changing it to his demands and he’s rejecting it.” And Neal got on the phone and called Rovin up and said, “You know Theakston’s here and he’s very upset. He’s done his very best to fix this to your liking and you keep rejecting it.” There’s kind of a pause and “Well, all right.” So, he stepped up for me. And I don’t think he would have done that if he’d looked at the piece and said, “This is crap. No wonder he doesn’t want it.”

Interior from a 1988 Mad Magazine, Behind the Scenes at a Slasher Studio. Art by Greg Theakston. — Interior from a 1988 Mad Magazine, ***Behind the Scenes at a Slasher Studio***. Art by Greg Theakston.

Darkseid Vs. Superman Pin-Up, penciled by Carmine Infantino & inked by Greg Theakston.

December 05, 2018

An Interview With Larry Hama - A Short Glimpse Into the Crusty Bunkers

December 05, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Larry Hama (born June 7, 1949) is an American comic-book writer, artist, actor, and musician who has worked in the fields of entertainment and publishing since the 1960s.

Mr. Hama is best known to comic book readers as a writer and editor for Marvel Comics, where he created the universe behind the G.I. Joe comic book series, based on the Hasbro toy line. He also co-created the character Bucky O'Hare, which was developed into a comic book, a toy line, and a cartoon series.

But before that, in 1971 - with the help of contacts he had acquired while working with Wally Wood, Larry was able to find work at Neal Adams' Continuity Studios. While there, he worked with the inking crew known as the Crusty Bunkers.

The Crusty Bunker quest continues with a short exchange courtesy of Larry Hama. Even though I'd have loved if he'd gone into greater detail, each tidbit was another piece in the story of the days at Continuity Associates, and I'm grateful for all inputs.

This interview originally took place via email on September 29, 2010.

Bucky O’Hare (1991) #3, by Larry Hama & Michael Golden.

Bryan Stroud: How did you end up at Continuity?

Larry Hama: My friend Ralph Reese was working there and told me that desk space was available for 50 bucks a month. This was in 1973 or thereabouts. Neal Adams was still in partnership with Dick Giordano then.

Stroud: What did you do there?

Hama: I worked on freelance jobs with Ralph and picked up advertising storyboard, comp and animatic work from Neal on the side, as well as Crusty Bunker stuff.

Stroud: Who did you meet there?

Hama: Sergio Aragones, Russ Heath, Carl Potts, Klaus Janson, Jay Scott Pike, Bob McLeod, Pat Broderick, Joe Rubinstein, Joe D’esposito, Mike Nasser (Netzer), Marshal Rodgers, Terry Austin, Jack Abel, Mike Hinge, LynnVarley, Jim Sherman, Bruce Patterson, Frank Miller, Eric Burden, CaryBates, Vicente Alcazar, Sal Amendola, Greg Theakston, Bob Wiaceck, BobSmith, Cathy-Ann Thomas, and probably hundreds of others. I already knew Kaluta, Wrightson, Jones, Vaughn Bode, et all from Gothic Blimp Works and First Fridays.

Stroud: How long did you spend time there?

Hama: I kept my desk space there for something like five years. In the beginning, I had the drawing table in the front room next to Neal.

Stroud: What did you learn?

A Crusty Bunkers t-shirt design done by Larry Hama & Neal Adams.

Hama: Everything. I was at the font. The single most important thing I ever learned about drawing was from Neal: “Stop settling.”

Stroud: Was there any payment for your work?

Hama: Absolutely. There was a per-panel rate for storyboards and a complex system of divvying up the Crusty Bunkers money. Advertising paid way better than comics in those days!

Stroud: Legend has it you were the first to coin the term "Crusty Bunker." True?

Hama: Not true. I designed the t-shirt- actually, I think I penciled it and Neal inked it. It was Kris, Neal’s daughter who came up with the name.

Stroud: Any particularly fond memories?

Hama: Too many to recount here. I spent 12 to 14 hours a day there, seven days a week for years.

Stroud: Did the gathering at Continuity start informally or through renting of space by other artists?

Hama: Neal encouraged people to stop by. (All the bad coffee you could drink - it put me off Cremora for life.) The original Continuity @ 8 E. 48th St. (the building no longer exists) was only three blocks from DC and nine blocks from Marvel at the time, so it was easy to make the side trip if you were coming into town to go to either. National Lampoon was close by, too. Warren was only two subway stops away as well.

G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1982) #1, written by Larry Hama.

Stroud: Was it pretty much a 24-hour operation?

Hama: Pretty much. Most advertising jobs came in with a deadline of “yesterday.”

Stroud: Did you interact much with Neal?

Hama: If you sit next to somebody all day, every day, you end up talking about a lot of stuff. I owe Neal a lot. If he called me at 3:00 AM and said I had to come help him get rid of the body, I’d have to show up.

Stroud: What, if any, benefit was your association there to future work?

Hama: Everything. Neal got me my first DC pencil job by promising to ink it. Working at Continuity got my foot in the door throughout the entire comics biz. Neal’s influence on comics goes way beyond his drawing skills. It’s largely because of his efforts that incentive payments and other artist’s rights that we take for granted exist. Neal also spearheaded the fight for (Jerry) Siegel and (Joe) Shuster.

November 28, 2018

An Interview With Carl Potts - On His Time With the Crusty Bunkers

November 28, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

*UPDATE* - An earlier version of this interview listed an incorrect attribution for the creation of a Crusty Bunkers t-shirt. The article has been updated to credit the correct artist.*

Alien Legion (1984) #1 by Carl Potts, Alan Zelenetz, & Frank Cirocco.

Carl Potts (born November 12, 1952) is an American comics artist, writer, teacher, and editor best known for creating the series Alien Legion for Epic Comics. After contributing to such comics fanzines as the anthology Venture, Potts began his comics career in 1975. Relocating to New York City, he freelanced briefly until joining Neal Adams' commercial-art company and comic book packager Continuity Studios - and was a member of the Crusty Bunkers crew of inkers. While at Continuity, Carl worked with storyboard and comp art for some major New York ad agencies and also produced finished-illustrations for magazines and books for several years. In 1983 he joined Marvel's editorial staff. In his time at Marvel, Potts oversaw the development of the Punisher from guest star to franchise character and edited such titles as The Incredible Hulk, Doctor Strange, The Defenders, The Thing, Alpha Flight, and Moon Knight. In 1983, Potts teamed with Alan Zelenetz and Frank Cirocco to co-create the series Alien Legion, conceived as "the French Foreign Legion in space." In 1989, Potts was named executive editor in charge of the Epic imprint, and about a third of the mainstream Marvel titles. Five years later, he became editor-in-chief of the "General Entertainment" and Epic Comics divisions.

In my continuing effort to document the stories and remembrances of the "Crusty Bunkers" and their time at Neal Adams' Continuity Associates back in the day, I managed to track down Carl Potts and get a few of his recollections. He was another creator I had the privilege to meet during my San Diego Con sojourn in 2015 and in addition to a nice chat, I purchased a copy of his book, "The DC Guide to Creating Comics," which is a good primer of the process that I can recommend to those interested in learning about it from a first-hand point of view.

This interview originally took place via email on September 22, 2010.

Adventure Comics (1938) #454, interior panel penciled by Carl Potts & inked by Dick Giordano.

Bryan Stroud: How did you end up at Continuity?

Carl Potts: I met Neal Adams at a San Diego Con and asked him to review my comics art portfolio. He gave a pretty brutal review but, eventually said, "If you work real hard for 18 months, I might be willing to look at your work again."

Two years later I moved from CA to NY to try and break into comics. After I picked up a few pin-up assignments from Marvel, I visited Continuity and showed Neal my work again. He asked me to join the crew he had assembled to work on the Charlton B&W comics magazines that Continuity was packaging - 6 Million Dollar Man, Emergency! and Space: 1999. So, I was assigned a table in the front room, to the left of Neal's desk. Directly behind me was Russ Heath and on the other side of Neal, Joe Barney and Joe Brozowski had desks.

Batman Family (1975) #11, interior page penciled by Carl Potts & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

Stroud: What did you do there?

Potts: Initially I did pencils for 6 Million Dollar Man and Emergency! My work was being inked by the likes of Dick Giordano, Russ Heath, Neal Adams, Terry Austin, Bob Wiacek - it was like a dream.

Eventually I also worked on the storyboards and animatics that Neal produced for NYC ad agencies. I started out coloring the commercial work and then did some penciling that Neal would ink, making it look like his own work as he fixed the drawing.

Stroud: Who did you meet there?

Potts: In addition to Neal, Dick, Russ, Joe Barney, Joe Browzowski, Terry and Bob, working up there at the time were Pat Bastienne, Jack Abel, Larry Hama, Ralph Reese, Mark Rice, John Fuller, Cary Bates and Mike Hinge. Over time, people came and went. Among those who arrived a bit later were Marshall Rogers, Jim Sherman, Mike Nasser, Val Mayerik, Lynn Varley, Christine Adams, Bruce Patterson, Frank Cirocco and Gary Winnick.

Continuity was sort of a neutral ground between the Marvel and DC offices. Many freelancers would often stop by to visit including Wally Wood, Alan Weiss, Jim Starlin, Allen Milgrom, Walter Simonson, Howard Chaykin, Bernie Wrightson, Sergio Aragones, Archie Goodwin, Joe Rubinstein, Vicente Alcazar, Joe D'Esposito, Klaus Janson, Michael Kaluta, Paul Kirchner, Denys Cowan, Frank Miller, Brent Anderson, Joe Chiodo and so on.

There were two (at least) Crusty Bunkers t-shirts – one by Sergio Aragones and one by Larry Hama. I believe the one Larry worked on was produced before my time at the studio. The Sergio design was done around 1977. Sergio echoed the style of Neal’s signature when creating the Crusty Bunkers logo.

The Crusty Bunkers t-shirts: Larry Hama’s design on the left, Sergio Aragones on the right — The Crusty Bunkers t-shirts: **Larry Hama**’s design on the left, **Sergio Aragones** on the right

(Larry Hama adds about his design, "I cobbled the figure together out of images from the Yellow Pages, penciled it, and Neal inked it. The lettering was done with Press Type.” )

For years, during good weather, Continuity sort of "hosted" (provided the net and ball) for day-long Sunday volley ball tournaments in Central Park for the comics community. That is where I met Tom DeFalco, Jim Shooter and many others. Neal and Dick did not participate in those games.

Power Man and Iron Fist (1978) #84, cover by Denys Cowan & Carl Potts.

At his apartment, Neal would often host "First Friday" parties for the comics community every month. Many comics pros would attend. That is where I first met Steve Ditko (I think that may have been the only comics social event Steve attended).

Separate from Continuity but related were the occasional comics community poker parties. For a while, they were held in a downtown apartment that Paul Levitz shared with Marty Pasko.

Stroud: How long did you spend time there?

Potts: I worked in the Continuity studios for about 5 years starting in the summer of '75. I took a staff job as a storyboard and ad comp artist at an Interpublic ad agency in '80 and left Continuity.

Stroud: What did you learn?

Potts: There was very little in the way of "this is how you do it" type instruction from Neal. It was pretty much learn on the run as you produced work for paying jobs. I got the impression that Dick was a bit more hands on with those artists specializing in inking.

For the Charlton B&W comics, the young artists would do small pencil layouts for each page on paper about 4 1/4" X 5 1/2" (8 1/2" X 11" paper folded into quarters). Neal would then take a Flair pen and draw over the layouts. Often, he would ignore what we had drawn and he would turn out totally new layouts on top of the pencils we young artists had produced. Sometimes he'd just strengthen the drawing we had produced instead of totally ignoring it!

We would then put the layouts into an Art-O-Graph and project the image onto the full-size comics board, trace off the layout and then tighten up the drawing in pencil. Neal would sometimes tighten up the pencils on the full-sized art boards before Dick and the other inkers would begin working on the pages.

We (the young artists) primarily learned by comparing what our original small pencil layouts looked like with how they evolved through the process and became completed full-sized inked art.

Punisher War Journal (1988) #1, cover by Carl Potts & Scott Williams.

Stroud: Was there any payment for your work?

Potts: My experience was that Continuity was pretty good at making sure all of the artists got paid for their work. Who should get paid what could be hard to figure out on the jobs where many different people contributed to the work. It was not unusual for six artists to contribute to a particular page of comic book art. Most of the young artists were living check-to-check so as soon as a client paid Continuity for a job, Continuity would issue us checks.

Stroud: Any particularly fond memories?

Potts: I got to meet a lot of comics creators, veterans whose work I'd grown up with, and new guys like myself.

Neal would often include the young guys on the weekend trips he'd take his kids on, including to the houses he'd rent in the Hampton's during the summer.

There was also some practical joking going on. Here are two examples:

There was a running gag that was pulled on those new to the studio. The newbie would approach his desk where the page he'd been laboring on was sitting. The page was there but with an upturned bottle of India ink sitting on it on it along with a page-long dried ink blob obliterating the page's art. After much angst, closer inspection revealed that the ink blob was on clear piece of acetate, cut to perfectly match the outline of the ink blob.

Neal knew this trick well - so finding a way to pull it off so that it would fool him was a big challenge. When Mike Nasser (now Mike Netzer) began working at the studio, his style so closely mimicked Neal's that we found a way. Neal had done a very tight pencil drawing, fairly large, for a movie poster he was working on. Nasser light boxed Neal's original and copied it beautifully. Neal's original art was hidden away and Nasser's was left in its place - with the fake ink stain lying on it. When Neal walked in, he saw the very familiar toppled ink bottle with flowing ink stain and chuckled knowingly. He reached to lift up the fake acetate-backed ink stain and found that, under the acetate ink stain, a real ink stain had ruined the original art! Nasser had also light boxed the fake ink stain's contours onto his fake Neal art and filled it in with solid black. Neal was momentarily stunned, thinking his art had indeed been ruined by a bad practical joke. In short order, Neal's pristine original was retrieved and all had a good laugh.

Who's Who of the DC Universe (1985) #7, interior Enchantress by Carl Potts & Dick Giordano.

One veteran artist had a habit of lighting up large cigars while he worked, filling the room with foul smoke that the 4 other artists who worked in that room had to breathe. I had the idea of packing a bunch of match heads in the middle of one of the cigars so it would flare up when the cigar's fire reached the match heads. However, I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. That didn't stop another artist who shared that room from implementing the idea. I remember trying not to chuckle and give the stunt away as I watched the smoking artist puff away on that cigar. Then, his head was surrounded by a cloud of sulfur fumes as his cigar momentarily flared up. Everyone in the room thought it was hilarious - eventually the smoker laughed about it too. I fessed up to coming up with the idea. Not sure if the guy who actually booby-trapped the cigar ever did fess up.

Stroud: Did the gathering at Continuity start informally or through renting of space by other artists?

Potts: I was not there at the beginning of the studio. I assume that both Neal and Dick had credibility in the broader comics community. That, combined with the lack of old-fashioned comics studios at the time, attracted some comics pros to rent space there. As Continuity ramped up to package comics jobs, they added more young artists.

Stroud: Was it pretty much a 24-hour operation?

Potts: At times! I remember putting in some all-night work sessions. We all had keys and could come and go at any time of night or day. Occasionally, artists who were between apartments would live at the studio. My commuter train stopped running after 1:30 AM so if I was stuck in the city after that, I sleep in the studio. One artist lived in the back room for years. I think Neal and Dick were okay with that because that guy served as a live-in security guard against thieves.

Stroud: Did you interact much with Neal?

Potts: Yes, my desk was next to his for the first few years I was there. I enjoyed the occasions when we were the only ones in that room and could engage in real conversation instead of the normal chaotic studio banter. I later moved to a room half way down the hall. I shared that room with Terry Austin and Bob Wiacek.

Stroud: What, if any, benefit was your association there to future work?

Potts: In addition to making improvements in my work, I certainly made a number of contacts while at Continuity. I also got into advertising work though the studio.

Defenders (1972) #125, cover by Carl Potts & Bill Sienkiewicz.

Last of the Dragons (1988) #1 by Carl Potts.

Strange Tales (1987) #1, cover by Carl Potts & Bret Blevins.

Punisher and Wolverine: African Saga (1990) #1, cover by Carl Potts & Jim Lee.

Carl’s introduction to the Marvel editorial team.

November 21, 2018

An Interview With Jack C. Harris - Cartographer of Rann, Editor of Comics

November 21, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Jack C. Harris (born August 30, 1947) is an American comic book writer and editor known mainly for his work in the 1970s and 1980s at DC Comics. He was hired by DC Comics as part of the company's "Junior Woodchuck" program and became the assistant to editor Murray Boltinoff before being promoted to the position of editor himself. Harris wrote text articles and letters columns for various series and his first published comics story was "Political Rally Panic" in Isis (1976) #3. In his time as a writer for DC, Jack contributed to characters like Kamandi, Batman, and Sgt. Rock. As writer of the Wonder Woman comic, he returned the series to a contemporary setting to reflect the timeframe change made from the World War II era to the present day in the television series.

As an editor, Harris edited the first appearances of several new characters in their own eponymous series including Black Lightning; Shade, the Changing Man; and Firestorm. Among the new talent Harris helped to enter the comics industry was the writing team of Dan Mishkin & Gary Cohn and artists Trevor Von Eeden, John Workman, and Bob Smith. On the advice of artist Joe Staton, Harris gave British artist Brian Bolland his first assignment for a U.S. comics publisher, the cover for Green Lantern (1960) #127.

Jack is an absolute treasure trove of memories with a sharp memory and some terrific anecdotes. Did you ever wonder who came up with Arkham Asylum or the number of members of the Green Lantern Corps? Look no further.

This interview originally took place over the phone on September 5, 2010.

From Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #4 pg.8. — From **Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #4** pg.8.

Bryan Stroud: It looks like you started your DC career as a “Woodchuck.”

Jack C. Harris: (Chuckle.) That’s what they called us.

Stroud: In Amazing World of DC Comics #4 it says, “Our newest Woodchuck comes to us from Wilmington, Delaware via the Philadelphia College of Art where he earned a BFA and also taught a course on the History of Comics and the U.S. Army Signal Corps which he served in Germany. Mr. Harris lists as his hobbies comics (Adam Strange and Green Lantern especially), creative Make-Up, Amateur Theater and movies.”

Harris: I think I wrote that myself.

Stroud: Do you remember who did the little illustration of you that accompanied it?

Harris: I did. I actually graduated with a degree in illustration, I just never used it, but it was very helpful when I was an editor being able to direct artists and to talk in their language.

Stroud: That sounds exactly like what Len Wein told me.

Harris: Yeah, Len had that art background.

Stroud: He said it was very helpful when an artist wasn’t sure what he meant about how to do a shot and he would sketch it out for them.

Harris: Exactly. I could do the same thing.

Stroud: Your interest in comics history must have served you well as a member of the staff at DC.

Superman: The Arctic Giant (1942) Fleischer Cartoon.

Harris: Right. Just to briefly give you a history of how it started, I was into comics at a very young age. But my favorites before I discovered superheroes were Little Lulu and anything that Donald Duck was in. Those are the two that I was really into. Then I discovered Superman on television first. Some local kiddie show was showing the Max Fleischer cartoons and I remember watching those. The first one I remember seeing was an episode called “The Arctic Giant,” about a giant dinosaur ravaging Metropolis, and I’d heard of Superman, but that was the first time I’d ever seen him. Then some months later I saw the first television show that I remember seeing. George Reeves in black and white, and I was dumbfounded because it was live action. I thought, “He’s not just a cartoon, he’s real!” Then I think it was that summer I was on vacation with my parents and we stopped in at some store along the way and my mother said I could buy a comic book. She gave me a dime; remember when comics were a dime?

Stroud: Weren’t those the days?

Harris: I walked over and began looking for Little Lulu and Donald Duck and then I looked down and saw an issue of Action Comics and it had Superman on the cover and surprisingly that was the very first time I knew the colors of his costume. Because I had seen nothing but black and white television. So, all of a sudden, I found that Superman had a red and blue costume. Very cool. So, I picked it up, and while the Superman story was okay, what really got me in that issue was a Tommy Tomorrow story, which was drawn, I remember, by Jim Mooney and that was my introduction to Science Fiction. I’d never seen anything like that before in my life. And it just blew me away.

DC Comics Presents (1978) #3, written by David Michelinie & Jack C Harris.

I remember there were house ads in that edition of Action Comics, including Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space and so that’s when I started looking for those. And while I was in there and got Superman I also got World’s Finest and got into that. The science fiction titles were my real love. Mystery in Space, Strange Adventures and things like that. I really, really loved those. Those were my favorites hands down. If I had a dime and said, “Well, I can buy one comic. There’s a Superman and there’s a Mystery in Space.” I would always go for the Mystery in Space. No contest.

And then of course when fandom started, I was there. What I remember was Julie Schwartz’s letter columns in Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures and the Flash and things like that and they were very oriented toward the reader. He wanted us all to get involved. I really got sucked into that. He would publish everybody’s full address and created the network, which later became fandom. So, I wrote a letter at one point and won some original artwork from Adam Strange and that got me on mailing lists for Jerry Bails’ Alter Ego. Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas. I started reading that and I realized there were other people in the world that loved comics as much as I did. Then I got very much involved with buying all the fanzines and kept up with that kind of stuff, too. I wanted to be an artist. That was my goal. I started a correspondence with Sid Greene who did the Star Rovers in Mystery in Space. I corresponded with Sid for quite some time and in fact right now, hanging on the wall in my den is the original artwork, one of the splash panels to a Star Rovers story, which Sid gave me during our correspondence. Oddly enough he was one of the few artists I wasn’t able to work with because he passed away before I ever got to work at DC, which is really too bad.

Then when I got into college…actually I went into the Army first and the Army paid for my college, for which I am extremely grateful, so when I got out of the Army I went back to college and I met some other comics fans. One of my friends pointed out this article by a kid in Indiana who created a course on comic books that he was teaching in his college and I thought that was amazing. So, we proposed the same thing at the Philadelphia College of Art and they accepted it and we had a course that we created and taught for two years at the University of the Arts, which is now called the Philadelphia College of Art. In doing that we also had guest speakers from DC Comics to come and speak at our course. Along the way we had Len Wein and Denny O’Neil and Dick Giordano. They all came down to Philadelphia to talk to our course, so I got to know them, which was very good. Then when I got out of college and started to apply for jobs, I applied at DC and dropped a lot of names like Len Wein and Denny O’Neil and Dick Giordano. Of course, I’d met Julie Schwartz at a couple of conventions and had visited at DC comics, so they knew me up there.

Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #4, cover by Jerry Robinson.

Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #4 pg.12

Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #4 pg.13

So, I got a job as Murray Boltinoff’s assistant, which I did for a couple of years and then became an editor myself and worked there for seven years or so working for DC until I went completely freelance after that. I’ve been doing that ever since, so along with teaching at the School of Visual Art and I’ve written a whole lot of stuff along the way. As a little aside, by the way, the guy who was doing that course in Indiana that inspired us to do it, too, was Michael Uslan - who later became the Executive Co-Producer of all the Batman movies.

Stroud: Wow! The seven degrees of separation strike again.

Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #7, cover by Curt Swan.

Harris: And of course, he also was an assistant editor at DC for a while, too. Mike and I became good friends and remain good friends to this day.

Stroud: Outstanding. I’ve managed over the last year or so to assemble the complete set of the Amazing World of DC Comics prozines and what a treasure trove of stuff they contain. From issue #4 on you were very heavily involved.

Harris: Absolutely. That was our little pet project that I think Sol Harrison created as a training ground for all the assistant editors. That was our project. We did that completely on our own. The editors would help us if we asked. Otherwise, it was ours. We did that whole thing.

Stroud: You got to interview a lot of your heroes during the course of it all.

Harris: Yes, in fact the cover of #7 with that really nice Curt Swan drawing of Superman is another of the pieces that hangs on the wall of my den. He gave me that, as a gift, which I thought was very nice.

Stroud: Wonderful. I wish I could have got to know Curt.

Harris: Curt was terrific. When they started giving the artwork back to the artists, we had a foot-high stack of Curt Swan artwork and so when Curt came in the first time after that was okayed, we said, “Curt, here’s all your artwork back.” He looked at it and he said, “Oh, my God, I can’t carry all that home. You guys can have it. Divide it up.” (Laughter.) Everyone just dove in. One of the pieces I got was a splash panel from World’s Finest he’d drawn that was inked by Al Milgrom. So, years later I’m talking to Al via e-mail and he said, “You know, you have a piece of my artwork.” I said, “Which one is that?” He said, “The World’s Finest page, which was the only time I inked Curt Swan.” “Oh, yeah, I remember that piece. I have it tucked away somewhere.” So, I said, “You know, Al, I really think you should have this piece of artwork, but I would not have any idea what to charge you for it, so instead what I want you to do is to draw me the best drawing of Hawkman you’ve ever done and I’ll trade you.” So that’s what I did and I have this really nice Al Milgrom Hawkman drawing that no one in the world has seen except me as a trade for the World’s Finest page. I thought that was an equitable and unique sort of trade to do with Al.

Isis (1976) #4, written by Jack C Harris.

Stroud: And everyone’s happy.

Harris: We both got what we wanted. (Chuckle.) It was a very good deal for both of us.

Stroud: I don’t suppose there was such a thing as a typical day in the production department, but can you try to describe it?

Harris: Well, the production department was different from the editorial department. The editorial department was mainly us sitting in our offices thinking. (Chuckle.) We were just sitting there sort of staring off into space. “What are we going to do next?” But no, it was never the same twice. It was always different. We’d be plotting the stories or going over the artwork or coordinating something with somebody else, or making sure that you weren’t doing something that somebody else was doing or that your artist was available and other scheduling things. I think my favorite part of it all was sitting and plotting stories with the writers. Sometimes we’d get the artists involved, too. We’d just get together and throw ideas around. “What would be cool?” A lot of times we’d start with an idea for a cover. “Okay, this would make a good cover. Now, how do we build a story around it?” Sometimes we’d plot maybe three or four issues at a time. Sometimes we’d just try to do one good story. We’d want to use a particular villain. We’d want to do something unique. It was always just throwing ideas around. That was probably the best part of the whole experience.

Then the second thing was when the artwork would come in and the artist would come in and show me the art and my first thought was, “I’m seeing this before anyone else in the world. No one else has seen these drawings and this story before except me. Then the rest of the world will get to see it, but right now I get to see it.” Then of course some of the people I got to work with, like Steve Ditko. Nobody gets to work with Steve Ditko. (Laughter.) There are only like ten of us in the whole world who have worked with Steve Ditko. That was unique. And then meeting people that I’d always admired and then working with them. I mean Julie Schwartz was my hero, and now here I was his colleague and later his friend. That was fantastic. And again, Curt Swan and Joe Kubert and Dick Giordano and I can’t even think of all the names. Joe Giella, Murphy Anderson and people like that. I had known them by their names before that and now I was not only working with them, but in some cases telling them what to do or what to draw. (Chuckle.) I mean, telling Steve, “Don’t draw it that way, draw it this way.” “Okay,” and he’s making these changes. “My God, I’m telling Steve Ditko what to draw. And he’s agreeing with me!” That was an experience that was just unique.

Daughters Of Time (1991) #1, cover by Steve Ditko & Kurt Schaffenberger - written by Jack C Harris.

Stroud: Everyone is just fascinated with Steve, too. That aura of mystery he’s surrounded himself with has only fanned the flames, I think.

Harris: It’s terrific. I used to help it along. I remember one thing we did. It was a series for a while called DC Profiles. It was a little half page profile of all the people that were involved. It was just a little quick interview with somebody and you’d run a piece of their artwork or their picture on the page with it and Mike Gold, who was working on it at the time and he was coordinating all these and he came to me and said, “Do you think we could get Steve to do one of these profiles?” I said, “No way. There is no way you could get Steve to do it.” Then I said, “You know, I have an idea, though.” So, the next time Steve came in I said, “I know you don’t want to do one of these profiles, but here’s the thing. You always said that you should let your artwork speak for you. So, what I’d like to do is a half page of all the characters you’ve done for DC in a group shot and we’ll run that as your profile.” He said, “That’s a good idea.” So, we did it. (Chuckle.) So, for that profile it just said something like, “Steve Ditko lets his work speak for him,” and there’s this big drawing of all his characters and I thought that was just really cool.

Stroud: Brilliant.

Harris: It also helped continue the mystique that Steve has built up around himself. The thing that I like about Steve, and it parallels some of his characters; remember Mr. A and he never compromises. Something is either all good or it’s all bad. There’s no gray area. That’s Steve. That’s the way he feels. Either it’s all good or it’s all bad. If you accept any part of any of those then you’ve compromised your own feeling toward those things, and you really shouldn’t do that. I always respected that.

Stroud: He’s a man of firm convictions. We corresponded for a while and I’ll always be grateful for his giving me his impressions of being Jerry Robinson’s student. What was it like to work with Jack Adler?

Moon Knight (1980) #16, written by Jack C Harris.

Harris: He was a very creative guy and Jack had very specific ideas for coloring things. He was a very good trainer for the people coming in and he loved teaching people how to color and what would work and what wouldn’t. He always had these wonderful, creative ideas. Whenever I wanted to do a special cover, I’d ask Jack. I’d say, “Jack, can this be done? And if it can be done, what does the artist have to do in order to make it easier or to make it work?” And he was always there with the idea of how to work things. I liked working with Jack a lot. He was creative in a whole different way. Not as an artist, but more as how to present the art in a new and unique way. That’s what I liked about working with him. The last time I saw him, and it was a long time ago, was at a memorial for Julie Schwartz when he’d passed away.

Stroud: He’s still very sharp and frustrated at his physical limitations, but he is in his 90’s after all.

Harris: I used to love all his wash covers when I was a kid. I was just fascinated, but I could never figure out how they were done. They looked like photographs. How in the world do they get this effect? I remember a Green Lantern cover that was done that way and I remember a Detective or Batman cover in the wash cover technique and it was fantastic. “How is that done?” It was a really great thing when he showed me. “How do you do that?” “Let me show you.” He pulled out some old original art and he said, “We do this ink wash and then we half tone it.” It was fantastic. I loved it. He was always very happy to tell you about his “secrets,” because he wanted everyone to learn how to do it. That’s true in the industry as a whole, by the way. Everyone I ever met was always leaning over backwards to tell you how they were doing things and how it was done, from the writing to the artwork. Joe Kubert made a whole second career out of that. He created a whole school to teach people how to do it.

Stroud: You worked with some legendary editors. You mentioned Murray Boltinoff already and of course Joe Orlando…

Harris: Julie Schwartz.

The Ray (1992) #1, written by Jack C Harris.

Stroud: Of course. Do you remember anything significant you learned from them?

Harris: I always thought Julie was the best editor in the world. Julie was always good about sparking the idea. You had to come in with an original idea. He inspired me to do that. Whenever I came in to see Julie with an idea, I always had like twenty of them written down. I’d just throw them at him. “How about this? How about this? How about this?” Usually there was at least one out of the twenty that he liked. We could then build on it from there.

Joe Orlando was also a good teacher. One of the best things I ever heard Orlando tell was when he was talking to an inker. He said, “Every time you do a job, you get better. You improve. Here’s what you do if you have a twenty-page story. You work from the middle. You work so that the first page and the last page are the last two that you do. So, they’re going to be your best. So, when someone opens the book, they’re going to see one of your best pages and when they’re finished with the book, they’re going to see one of your best pages. So, the first and last pages should be the last two pages that you do. I thought that was brilliant advice. What a good idea. That way you’re going to leave them with that. You’ve showcased your best two pages when they open the book and when they close the book. You’ve put your best foot forward and left that impression also at the end. That kind of thing would come from the artists and the editors all the time. Very clever.

Stroud: Utterly brilliant. I’m reminded of something I read by a music producer that said your first couple of tracks on an album should be the ones that grab the listener because that’s what they’ll hear first. Very similar.

Harris: Right.

Stroud: Did the Comics Code give you any grief?

Spider-Man Web of Doom (1994) #1, written by Jack C Harris.

Harris: I never had any trouble with the Code at all. We were pretty well versed on it by then. I do remember trying to get things over on them occasionally. I recall an issue of Challengers of the Unknown that had Swamp Thing guest starring in it. Just for fun I had Bernie Wrightson ink the one panel that showed the Swamp Thing in it. Bernie inked that one panel just as sort of a tribute thing. In black and white it looked like Swamp Thing was showing his ass off. The Code objected to that and we said, “It’s green. He’s a plant, for heaven’s sake. Imagine the whole thing as green and it won’t look like he has a naked butt.” “Okay, all right. We’ll let it go through.” We had to explain it to them.

Stroud: (Laughter.) I always enjoy the stories of battling the code. Russ Heath sure had no love for it.

Harris: That was another thing. I got to work with so many people who drew my stuff. Russ did a chapter once in one of my Wonder Woman stories and it was so amazing to have him do that. Then to have Joe Kubert doing covers to books that I wrote: Hawkman and mystery stories, just the little throwaway stuff with this great Kubert illustration on the cover. My jaw would drop. It was like, “My God, here’s Kubert doing MY story.” That was probably the best thing about it. To get the story drawn by the people that you really admired as a kid.

Stroud: I can only guess. You lived the dream of many fans.

Harris: Oh, gosh, I got to write Adam Strange. I got to edit Green Lantern. Those are my favorite two characters. And right now, with the Green Lantern movie about to come out, I am so excited. I mean this is what I envisioned years ago. This is one of the characters that I helped. There are elements of that storyline that I created, that I made up, that are still being used.

Stroud: Which ones, Jack?

Harris: Well for instance I figured out how many Green Lanterns there really are. There are 3,600 of them. I figured that out and it’s all based on the circle. The galaxy is a circle and every degree is a space sector. That’s how we came up with that. It’s 360 degrees, so there are 10 per degree, so that makes 3,600 Green Lanterns to cover the entire galaxy. That’s how it works. That was my theory. I have to put this claim out, too. I’ve put this claim out before and people say it’s a claim, but I can prove it. I created Arkham Asylum.

Batman (1940) #258 pg.4, featuring General John Harris.

The story goes like this: Of course, Arkham Asylum was not created by anyone at DC, it was created by H.P. Lovecraft. Arkham Asylum is where all the nuts who were driven crazy by the elder gods. They went to Arkham Asylum which is in Massachusetts in the Lovecraft stories. It’s nothing that anybody at DC came up with. But during one of those times that Denny O’Neil came to visit and talk at my college course, I remember we were at dinner. We always took our guests to dinner. So, I was talking to Denny and I said, “Denny, you know criminals like Two-Face and the Joker shouldn’t be just jailed. They’re nuts. They should be in an insane asylum. And what better one than Arkham Asylum from the Lovecraft stories?” He thought that was a great idea. So, he used it. And if you look, it was in Batman #258 from September of 1974. That’s the first mention of Arkham Asylum in DC comics history.

It’s been reported elsewhere, but that’s incorrect. If you check it, this is the first time it’s ever been mentioned, in this story. If you look at it, if you read it, the story involves Two-Face being brought in out of Arkham Asylum. The guy who breaks him out is a military man named John Harris. And that’s Denny O’Neil’s tip of the hat to me for the Arkham idea. Now I think it was Len Wein who picked up on that idea and later expanded the whole history of Arkham. But Denny did it first in that issue of Batman and I’m the one who gave him the idea for it. Every time I see Arkham Asylum I go nuts.

Stroud: What a great story. Thanks for sharing that.

Harris: I think in the Arkham Asylum intro they mistakenly try to determine where the first appearance was and they are mistaken. They got I much later than when it really was. I have a page of artwork from that that Dick Giordano gave me from that story and it’s where John Harris appears. I have that page.

Stroud: Rightfully so.

Harris: And if you have any questions about that story, ask Denny O’Neil. He will confirm it.

Stroud: It looks like you were right in the thick of things during the infamous DC Implosion. Several of your titles succumbed.

Kamandi (1975) #53, written by Jack C Harris.

Harris: Oh, yes. The most tragic one was Kamandi, because that was the cutoff. Kamandi just missed the sales quota. A little more and he would have made it. But it was just the cutoff. That was a very sad thing. It was nobody’s fault. It was actually upstairs. DC was expanding and the corporate people upstairs said, “No, you can’t keep expanding. That was all last year.” If I remember right, we had a bad winter with a lot of snow and a lot of people didn’t buy things. A number of factors were in play that made it so we couldn’t really afford to expand the way we wanted to expand, so it just all collapsed and it was really bad because it impacted lots of people. We had all these work plans and all of a sudden, we had to let a lot of artists and writers know, hey, we don’t have any work for you. It only lasted about three months, but we had material for six months. There were tons of stories that ended up as backup features and stuff like that. I think most of the stuff we produced later on was published, but not in the formats originally planned.

Stroud: More inventory than you knew what to do with.

Harris: Exactly, so there were people not getting regular work. “We have a monthly book, but we have three months worth of work already, so we’re not going to talk to you for three months while we publish this stuff.” It was upsetting.

Stroud: Did any careers end over that to your knowledge?

Harris: I don’t know that any out and out ended, but a lot of them were altered. Most people went off and did other things for other people. There were other companies and other things they could do.

Stroud: I don’t know that it was the same timeframe, but I recall hearing about people like Mike Sekowsky and Alex Toth taking off for California to do animation work.

Harris: Yeah, but overall, I think it was more career altering than career ending.

Stroud: One of the titles you were editing was rather groundbreaking: Black Lightning.

Black Lightning (1977) #1, cover by Rich Buckler & Frank Springer. Edited by Jack C Harris.

Harris: Did that one die in the implosion? I can’t remember.

Stroud: I think so. I seem to recall seeing it on the cover of one of the Canceled Comics Cavalcade issues. Not to mention Firestorm and Shade the Changing Man.

Harris: You’re right. Black Lightning was fun. I liked working on Black Lightning. I liked working with Trevor (Von Eeden). Trevor was actually my discovery. As a kid of maybe 13 or 14 years old he sent in some drawings done in ballpoint pen and they were like the best thing we’d ever seen. (Chuckle.) He came in with his father, I think it was, and we gave him work almost right away. When Black Lightning came out, we said, “Hey, let’s have Trevor do it.”

Stroud: What was the response to the book at the time?

Harris: It was popular. People liked it. I got a lot of good mail on it and people thought it was great. It was not quite as edgy as I wanted it to be, but I think it was the times. We were trying to tread very carefully because I didn’t want the racial thing to be the main point of the story. I wanted it to be incorporated into it, but not to be the main focus of the story. For instance, when we were first discussing it, we had the name first, and I asked the question: “Do we really want “Black” to be referring to his race? Couldn’t it be something else that’s black? Maybe he shoots black lightning out of his hands or something?” It didn’t work out that way, so it does look like the name “Black Lightning” was because he was black and I didn’t necessarily think that was the best idea in the world. But the best part about that was introducing Trevor to everybody. I thought he was terrific and that it was a great beginning to his career. Later on, he did some Green Arrow work for me and he really did a great Green Arrow, too.

Stroud: I note that you’ve done work on humor, horror, superheroes and adventure. Any preferences?

Kamandi (1975) #59, written by Jack C Harris.

Harris: The thing I had the most fun with, strangely enough, was Kamandi because it was unique. He wasn’t a superhero and it was sort of science fiction, but it was sort of this primitive thing, too. It was weird. Almost unclassifiable. So, I could do just about anything I wanted to, and what I did, based on a lot of what (Jack) Kirby had already done... I remember in one of the early issues he had drawn a map of Earth after the disaster and noted a number of different things along it and I picked up on all of those. I said, “As Kamandi moves across this world, we’re going to talk about every one of those things on that map that Kirby mentioned.”

The one that sticks in my mind was in Africa and it was called The Valley of the Screamers. I said, “What the heck is that? What could he have been thinking about?” I had no idea what he was thinking about, but here’s what it’s going to be…we never got to write this story, but this is what it was going to be: It was going to be evolved elephants. Evolved elephants that had gained human intelligence, but the problem was that they didn’t evolve physically. They never developed opposing thumbs and so they couldn’t pick anything up. They still had the flat elephant feet. So, they could think of all these great ideas and use their trunks, but it wasn’t enough. They didn’t have enough articulation to create the things they were thinking about, so they all went mad and they would scream a lot. (Mutual laughter.) Something like that. Just something bizarre and out there. I had a lot of fun with that book because those are the sorts of things you could do with that format. The most outrageous stuff you could think of would not be out of the realm. Kirby had such a wealth of stuff going that I had that ammunition along with my own wacky sense of adventure and I could get anything I wanted.

Stroud: I was kind of impressed, speaking of maps, that you produced a map of Rann in one of the issues of AWODCC.

Map of Rann by Jack C Harris, appearing in Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #8 pg.24-25. — Map of Rann by Jack C Harris, appearing in **Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #8** pg.24-25.

Harris: Oh, yeah. I did that back in college. We were doing the science fiction issue and I said, “Hey, I’ve got a map of Rann.” “Really?” “Yeah, let me show you.” I redid it for that issue of Amazing World. I’d done it for fun on my own. I think I’d actually gone back and gone through the stories where there were segments of maps in Adam Strange. It seems like in one of the Showcase issues you could find one and I incorporated that exactly into the map that I drew. That little segment of the map is accurately reproduced into the Rann map. I drew that and pasted the whole thing up. That whole two-page thing I did all by myself. I got the artwork out of the library and did up some stats and got the lettering and everything. It was great. I think John Workman did the lettering, but the rest of it was mine. I’ve still got that paste-up somewhere in my storage unit.

Stroud: When you were picking up on a long running series like Wonder Woman, how did you go about tackling something with such a long history? Did you pay much attention?

Harris: Yeah, I was very interested in that. Strangely enough, I went back and thought; “Now when did I start buying Wonder Woman?” Because when I was a kid that was a “girl’s comic.” Why did I start buying it? So, I tracked it back and found the first issue I’d bought. What else was going on at the time? Well, the Justice League had just come out, and of course Wonder Woman was in the Justice League. So that had to have been the reason I started buying it. Because of the affiliation with the Justice League. So, I remembered reading it and I thought, “This is the strangest book I’ve ever read.” Because it was Bob Kanigher doing some really bizarre stuff. If you read some of those early issues, he was doing stories that were coinciding with the Justice League’s debut. That year Wonder Woman was full of just really, really bizarre stuff. Crazy stuff. I just thought it was a little too much. (Chuckle.)

Wonder Woman (1942) #250, written by Jack C Harris.

But what I liked about it for instance was, and I know some later editors sort of disagreed with this, but I liked the fact that the Amazons were technically advanced along with everything else. They had great advanced science. They had time machines and all kinds of advanced weapons and I really liked that technological aspect. My other things was that, since if you remember at the time it was the Woman’s Movement, Wonder Woman had sort of been tapped as a spokeswoman for the feminist movement, which I thought was a great idea. My take on it was this. Let’s treat it like this: Let’s treat it that she’s already totally accepted in everything she does. Which basically is part of the fantasy. But that’s how I worked it. She never really ran into any problems because she’s a woman. Everything was just accepted. And it worked out very well. Then I wanted to play around with the Amazon legend. My favorite time was when she was challenged in her role of Wonder Woman. To give it up. I think it was in issue #250 when they had a big tournament and she lost the right to be Wonder Woman. That was one of my favorite stories. The other one came from the notion that she never teams up with anybody. She never had any guest stars. So, I had a story where she met Hawkgirl. A Hawkgirl team-up with Wonder Woman. So those are my two favorite Wonder Woman stories that I wrote. One where she loses the right to be Wonder Woman and then the one where she teams up with Hawkgirl.

Stroud: Julie would be proud. Those were original ideas.

Wonder Woman (1942) #249, written by Jack C Harris.

Harris: I think the cover of the one where she’s with Wonder Woman was by Rich Buckler and Dick Giordano where they did this really nice full-figured shot of Wonder Woman which I think has been used innumerable times for different licensing things, that particular drawing. I think maybe in Les Daniel’s book one of the end papers is that picture of Wonder Woman.

Stroud: So, an iconic image was created.

Harris: Exactly. I was very proud of the fact that that cover has seen a lot of action after the fact. I loved the fact that I was able to do that story with the tournament. It was just pure fantasy. It all takes place on Paradise Island and the gods are involved. Neptune is involved and then it gets technological when they actually go into space for the final part of it. And then Hawkgirl, which was cool because at the time the only two female members of the Justice League were getting together in an adventure of their own.

Stroud: You served as editor for the Legion for a while and based on the popularity of that book and the passion of their fans did that set you back at all?

Harris: A couple of times. I got people hating me and people loving me. (Mutual laughter.) For instance, I had Ditko do a couple of issues, and boy, did they hate those. They didn’t like those at all. But the real reason I did it was that Steve worked so fast. So, in a deadline pinch if I had him do a story, he could do it really quickly. I kind of liked his take on the Legion. I thought he had a nice feel for the characters and everything, but a lot of fans really had a problem with it. It was funny. It was the opposite ends of the spectrum. Some of the fans loved it and some hated it. Nobody was lukewarm about it. It was a very Ditko type of feeling. You hated it or you loved it and there was nothing in between.

So, it was kind of tough on me. The Legion fans were kind of tough on me, but I don’t blame them. When I was growing up, one of the things that I noticed, and you had to experience this for yourself, was that there was a generation gap when the Justice League was out. The older fans, and I’m talking about the ones in high school or older were Justice League fans, but the kids just getting into comics were Legion fans. I think there was a big difference in the complexity of the stories. The Justice League stories were very complex and you had to sort of be up on all the characters in their own books in order to properly follow the Justice League. You had to know what Green Lantern was all about, for example, because they didn’t go into a whole lot of characterization and background on the characters in the Justice League. They just assumed you, as a reader knew the characters.

Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes (1981) #3, cover by Jim Janes & Dick Giordano. Edited by Jack C Harris.

But in the Legion, everything was in the Legion. Anything you wanted to know about the characters was in that story. You didn’t need to read three other books to know what those characters were all about and the stories were rather straightforward and easy to follow compared to the more complex Justice League. So, you had this generation gap and I, of course, was in the Justice League camp and I just sort of looked down on the Legion. I just didn’t read the Legion a lot when I was into comics. It was only later that I started reading it. When I became the editor of it I had that thing where, “Oh, what do I know about this? I don’t know that much about it.” Even though I was the assistant editor on it when I was working with Murray. So, in going back, if I had to do it over again, I remember Gerry Conway was writing it for me and Gerry knew about as much about it as I did, so we had this sort of feel our way along going on and I don’t think we quite hit on what the fans wanted as often as we should have. If I had to do it over again, I’d have had Paul Levitz write it from the beginning. I would have said, “Paul, you write this.” Then we’d have been okay, because no one knows the Legion better than Paul.

Stroud: Well, he is at the helm again.

Harris: As a matter of fact, I’m sitting here looking at this Legion #1 that Paul autographed for me, which I’m happy to have. Anyway, that was kind of a tough period for me. I think of all the Legions I did I think the only one I was really happy with was when we did a mini-series called Secrets of the Legion and that’s where we established that R.J. Brand was Chameleon Boy’s father. I thought that was a wonderful surprise and that, I think was the best moment I did in the Legion. Otherwise I wasn’t too happy with what I did with it. Although some of the covers I thought were kind of nice.

Stroud: Yes, in fact, it looks like you worked with Mike Grell not only there but on his Warlord series, too.

Warlord (1976) #35 pg.16 - featuring Jack, Mike, & Joe.

Harris: Yes. Warlord and he did some Green Lantern covers for me, too. Grell and I had a great relationship. We had a wonderful time. I enjoyed the Warlord. It was just so different. We gave him sort of carte blanche on that. The only time I ever did anything with that was we did a story once where the Warlord goes into a sort of parallel world where it’s like a Dungeons & Dragons game and at the end of the story we pull back and the two guys playing Dungeons & Dragons are me and Grell. Which I thought was great and as we’re playing the game this other guy comes in to scold us for not doing our work and it’s Joe Orlando. That part of the story idea came from me and I remember that I actually dreamed it and I called Grell up and told him about the dream and he wrote that story based on my dream and then wrote that part in at the end of the story. I forget what issue it was, but the Warlord is on the cover fighting (I think) with Tweedledum who has a chainsaw. It was just a really wacky story.

Stroud: I used to get the biggest kick out of Gardner Fox’s stories where he’d incorporate himself or Julie into them.

Harris: Remember when I said I used to correspond with Sid Greene? When Sid Greene did his pencils and inks, he had Julie in every story he ever drew. I used to have fun going through the old Star Rovers stories trying to find Julie. He’s in every one of them. He always characterized Julie somewhere in the story. Therefore, I knew Julie years before I knew who he was. “This guy always appears in every one of these stories. This guy is always there. Who the hell is he?”

Stroud: It sounds like you were kind of the go-to guy for TV series adaptations. You did Shazam and Isis at least.

Harris: Isis was my first assignment. Actually, it was the first series that I had. I remember that Steve Skeates had plotted a story that I then dialogued and the other book I did myself. That was the first assignment they gave me, was Isis. That was a lot of fun. At one point, and I don’t know why this happened, I was doing every DC super heroine at the time. I was writing Isis, I was writing Batgirl, I was writing Supergirl, I was writing Wonder Woman and I was editing Starfire. Those five female characters I was doing. Plus Hawkgirl and Hawkman that I was writing. All at the same time. For some reason I was the guy who writes the female characters. I don’t know how it happened. I thought it was kind of cool.

Stroud: Between your two primary assignments is it safe to say you got the most satisfaction out of being a writer?

Harris: Yeah. When you’re totally in control of something like that it is more satisfying. When editing you had to let people do their own thing. You didn’t want to get too heavy handed on them. So, they came up with the ideas and they presented them to you. Writing was a lot more completely satisfying, and the best surprise was when you wrote something and you envisioned it in your mind’s eye and then the art comes back and it’s either exactly what you envisioned or better than what you’d visualized. That was always the greatest thrill. The one guy that used to do that with me most was when Dick Ayers was drawing Kamandi. I would think up something and I would write it and then he’d come back and the artwork would be better than I had envisioned. That just blew me away. It was amazing. He would do that all the time. I would go, “My god, that’s better than I imagined.”

Stroud: Someone had told me that Dick Giordano was a beloved editor because sometimes things would come back not exactly as he’d expected, but he liked it as much or more than what he’d had in mind.

Batman: Castle of the Bat (1994), by Jack C Harris & Bo Hampton.

Harris: He did one or two of my Batgirl stories and no one could draw women better than Dick Giordano. So, I’d have these scenes and Dick would turn in his artwork and it was always just astounding. The other one was when I did a series of Robin stories that Kurt Schaffenberger drew. I was a big Kurt Schaffenberger fan and when he turned artwork in it was like, “Holy Moses!” Although the best one might have been when I did the Batman graphic novel, “Castle of the Bat” that Bo Hampton painted. He took a sabbatical from his teaching job to paint that book. I remember at the time I was laid up with a broken leg. I’m sitting there in my living room and my kids are bringing the mail in to me and what Bo would do is that he would color Xerox the pages for me and send me the pages that way. As he’d finish them, I’d get two or three of the pages to see what they’d look like.

So, I remember sitting there one day with my leg up in a cast and I got a package from Bo and it had a few pages in it and I pulled them out and looked at them and I thought, “These are great. Hey, wait a minute. I think he already sent me this one. This looks really familiar.” I looked at the pile I had and he hadn’t sent it to me. It was my mind’s eye vision of the page. He had nailed it so exactly, that I actually thought I’d seen the page before. Either he was really good about painting the pictures or I was really good at describing it, but it was exactly what I’d envisioned. It was truly amazing.

Stroud: I was a little surprised to see you’ve done a little bit of work for Marvel.

Harris: Oh, yeah. I did a couple of things for them. I created the Annex character for one of the Spider-Man annuals. It was Spider-Man Annual #27 from 1993. During that year they decided they were going to introduce a new character in all the annuals. Either a villain or a superhero in every one of the annuals, and of all the ones that they did, Annex was the only one that got his own mini-series later. I did a four-issue mini-series of Annex as well. So, I was very happy with that. Plus, I did a Spider-Man mini-series called Spider-Man: Web of Doom. Then I did a couple of other short stories. I did a Cat story that was published and I also did a couple of stories that weren’t published. I did a Marvel Team-Up that Ditko drew that was The Hulk and Human Torch team-up that never saw the light of day. I also did another story where the guy who drew it murdered his girlfriend or something and of course that particular story was never published.

Amazing Spider-Man Annual (1964) #27, featuring the first appearance of Annex. — Amazing Spider-Man Annual (1964) #27, featuring the first appearance of **Annex**.

Stroud: Oh, boy. Did you use the Marvel Method on those stories?

Harris: Yeah, that’s how I did them all. I like doing full scripts, though, because you have more control. I like to write in such a way that I describe the scene and sometimes also explain what not to do. “This, by the way, is the most important thing on the page.” I felt like I had to emphasize things or invariably they’d pick the wrong thing. I tell my students that any mistake you make as a writer will be accentuated by the artist’s mistake. And they’ll always pick up on that one thing that you don’t want them to pick up on. You have to be very specific and tell them exactly what to do, otherwise…well, here’s my worst experience: It wasn’t a comic book, so I can tell the story. It was a children’s book. In fact, it was a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe story. The scene is that this character, a bad guy, is trying to convince He-Man and his friends that he’s a good guy. So, they’re walking through the jungle and suddenly these two jungle cats run out. I’m envisioning a tiger and a lion. While they don’t exist in the same jungle, in the fantasy world, they do. So, the scene was that the hero was holding these two jungle cats by the scruff of their necks, holding them back so that the heroes can go by without being attacked, which I think is a very exciting, dramatic scene. You can picture it in your mind, can’t you?

Stroud: Easily.

Harris: The hero holding the lion and the tiger back. So that’s what I wrote and I remember what I described. I said, “Jungle cats.” Now the guy who painted this was an awful, awful artist. Just dreadful. And the editor was just as bad because he’d let him get away with it. The scene depicted in the book ended up being the character holding two house cats.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Harris: And that’s how it went through! They’re in the middle of the jungle being attacked by two housecats. The guy’s holding them by the scruff of their necks.

Masters of the Universe: New Champions of Eternia (1985) pg.15, written by Jack C Harris.

Stroud: What a disaster.

Harris: It was a total disaster. And the whole artwork in the entire story is awful. The story opens after a battle and they’re all supposed to be bandaging their wounds and recovering and this scene of carnage after the battle. The way it was drawn the scene looks more like a cocktail party. They’re all standing around and one guy has a bandage on his arm. That’s it. The rest of them look like they’re having a cocktail party. It was the most awful, worst piece of crap I’ve ever seen in my life. And of course, my name is attached to it.

Stroud: The last thing I wanted to mention before I let you go is that one of the reasons I was particularly interested in talking with you is that you unknowingly brought some joy into my childhood. Our Comics Club back in grade school, (membership: three) once wrote a letter to DC and we were thrilled beyond all words to get a reply in the form of a postcard that showed Superman flying with a mail sack and it was signed by Jack C. Harris. So, it’s something we’ve treasured ever since.

Harris: Good.

Masters of the Universe: New Champions of Eternia (1985) pg.1-2, written by Jack C Harris.

Incredible Hulk & Human Torch: From the Marvel Vault (2011) #1 - written by Jack C Harris, penciled by Steve Ditko.

Jack Harris, Christopher Reeve, & Todd Klein in the DC offices - 1978.

November 14, 2018

An Interview With Jay Scott Pike - Penciler, Painter, Pin-Up Maker

November 14, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Jay Scott Pike, standing with an oil painting of his creation - Dolphin. — **Jay Scott Pike**, standing with an oil painting of his creation - **Dolphin**.

Jay Scott Pike (born September 6, 1924) was an American comic book artist and commercial illustrator known for his work with Marvel and DC through the 1950s & '60s as well as his advertising and "good girl" art. He co-created the Marvel character Jann of the Jungle with author Don Rico and created the DC character Dolphin. As an advertising artist, he worked on campaigns for clients including Borden, Ford Motor Company, General Mills, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, and Trans World Airlines.

After a long hiatus from comic books, Pike returned in 1993 to draw layouts and some pencils for Scarlett (1993) #12–#14 from DC Comics. He also penciled the 58-page story "All Good Things" in DC's one-shot comic Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Series Finale (1994).

Mr. Pike passed away on September 13, 2015 - one week after his 91st birthday.

Scott Pike's comic book work wasn't the be-all and end-all of his career, but he sure did some wonderful stuff while he pursued it. A very nice, humble guy who had a true mastery of the female form, Scott was an enjoyable interview and I wish he were still with us.

This interview originally took place over the phone on August 20, 2010.

The Bride Almost Wore White, a painting by Jay Scott Pike.

Bryan Stroud: You must have had a very early interest in art. I understand you enrolled in the Art Student’s League at the age of 16. Is that correct?

Jay Scott Pike: Yeah, it is. I was 15 or 16. I know I was partway into high school. I wasn’t a junior or senior yet.

Stroud: What spurred your interest?

JSP: I always liked to draw, and when I was a kid the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves movie was out in the theaters and I used to draw the dwarves and even tried to draw Snow White. I don’t know that I was any good at drawing her, but I can remember doing that and I just really liked to draw.

Stroud: I think probably Walt Disney started some careers whether he knew it or not.

JSP: Probably so.

Stroud: Apparently you also had other training at the Parsons School of Design and the Ringling School of Art?

JSP: That’s right. I went into the Marine Corps in ’42 and I got out in ’46 and I went to Parsons I guess in ’46 on the GI Bill for one year. I wanted mainly to do illustration and Parsons didn’t seem to give me what I wanted, although Parsons is a good school. So, I took a semester at Syracuse and didn’t like them much better, and then heard about Ringling and the idea of being down in the sunshine seemed good to me. So anyway we were married in ’48 and we came down here to Florida - where we live now - and I went to Ringling for a year and a half.

When I got out, we went back up to northern New Jersey, near enough to New York so I could get in and out every day. I was hoping…really expecting to find that New York would have been just waiting for me to get there. (Mutual laughter.) But by golly, they weren’t. In fact, I couldn’t get any work at all. I wanted to get work without actually working in a studio in New York. I wanted to work at home where we lived in New Jersey.

Black Rider (1950) #12, interior story “Hot Lead Reunion” - penciled by Al Hartley & Jay Scott Pike.

Somebody said, “You ought to go talk to Al Hartley. He’s a comic book artist.” I thought, “Gee, that’s probably the bottom of the barrel,” but anyway I did and met Al and Al was doing very well. He had a beautiful home and a brand-new car in his circular driveway with a private pond in the back, and a pretty good-sized pond at that. He was obviously making plenty of money. So, I went into drawing comics with Al, but we just didn’t get along - so by the time we decided to split I’d gotten to know Stan Lee and Stan said that he would give me work of my own. So, I got started with what was then Timely Comics and then drew comics for the next 7 or 8 years. The bulk of my comic career was in the 50’s.

Stroud: The earliest credit I could find for you was in 1951 on a western comic book.

JSP: That sounds right.

Stroud: Since you started at that point and also did some a little bit later it sounds like you did work both before and after the Comics Code was instituted. Did that have any effect on your work, Scott?

JSP: Yes, it did, because at that time, when I first came out, I was drawing jungle girl comics. Jann of the Jungle and Lorna the Jungle Queen, and it seems like another one, too. And I can remember I got a whole book back and had to make the bosoms smaller on the jungle girl, whichever one it was, and when she was flying through the trees on a vine or something her skirt couldn’t go above her knees. I can remember having to go over the whole book and having to fix those things.

Stroud: Censoring to meet the standard. I remember when I spoke to Russ Heath about it he was kind of cussing the Code, saying that if you showed someone sweating it was too violent.

JSP: (Chuckle.) Well, it did get ridiculous. When did you last speak with Russ?

Stroud: About a week ago, in fact.

Showcase (1956) #79, cover by Jay Scott Pike.

JSP: I haven’t seen him for about 50 years, I guess, but his Dad was actually a neighbor of ours when we lived in Montclair, New Jersey. That was how I got acquainted with Russ.

Stroud: He’s a great talent and still knocking out work, like yourself.

JSP: Well, I haven’t done any comic work in decades, but I have done recent paintings of Dolphin, a comic book character that I created. It was an oil painting of her.

Stroud: I’m glad you brought that up, as I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Dolphin. It looks like that was a one-man show. You scripted it and illustrated it all in one.

JSP: Yeah, it was all me. I did that and I decided that if I was going to keep doing it I wanted part of the copyright, so I went in to talk to [Irwin] Donenfeld about it and he didn’t even give the idea a glance. It just wasn’t done at that time. So, I said, “Hell, I’m not going to write this thing and draw it, too.” It was too much work. So that was really the end of Dolphin as far as I was concerned.

Stroud: I was curious about that very thing. Showcase, of course, was used to preview potential new characters for a series tryout and Dolphin was just a one shot and I thought it was odd and wondered what happened. I guess now I know.

JSP: I felt that the people and talent that worked on the books should at least have the right to work out some kind of a copyright deal.

Stroud: Absolutely. At least that’s been one positive development (at DC at least) where they make certain to compensate the creators for reprint royalties when the old stories are reproduced.

JSP: Good.

Adventures Into Terror (1951) #3, interior story “The Living Dead” - penciled & inked by Jay Scott Pike.

Tales of the Unexpected (1956) #97, cover by Jay Scott Pike.

Journey Into Mystery (1952) #2, interior story “Don't Look”- penciled & inked by Jay Scott Pike.

Stroud: It looks like you never really did any superhero work. Was that by choice?

JSP: No. (Chuckle.) I’m really sorry I missed out on that. I think I started out doing Westerns and then I did a general collection of Weird stuff and I did a few war books - and then I realized that I’m very much against war and I told them I wasn’t going to do any more war stuff. So I didn’t do any more from that point on.

Battleground (1954) #18, interior story “Platoon Trapped” - penciled & inked by Jay Scott Pike.

Stroud: I appreciate where you’re coming from, but the couple of examples I’ve seen of your war work was simply stunning.

JSP: Really? I don’t know about that.

Stroud: The one example I’m thinking of sure looked like it was on a par with Russ Heath or Joe Kubert.

JSP: That’s quite a compliment. I really don’t remember it that way, but those are certainly kind words.

Stroud: Between your jungle books, pinups and romance books you’re a great friend of the female form.

JSP: It’s my favorite subject. (Mutual laughter.) I did pinup calendars back in the end of the 50’s and Marianne O. Phillips got a hold of me - I guess about 15 years ago - and asked if I wanted to do any more. Ever since then I’ve done…well I haven’t done a lot, but every once in awhile I’ll do one and send it to her and she sells them.

Stroud: I can see why. It’s beautiful stuff. Did you use models?

JSP: I did do some nudes that Playboy had in their resorts and those were sold for me for a while. It didn’t last too long because it came down from Playboy headquarters in Chicago that they didn’t want any more artwork. Only photographs of the Playmates. Anyway, I had a bunch of photographs from those days and now of course it’s so easy to get photographs off the Internet. Most of it is absolute garbage, but once in awhile you get some shots that are well lighted and are useable and I swipe them.

Stroud: When you worked on the romance books at DC comics you worked with the only female editor at the time, Dorothy Woolfolk. Do you remember anything about her?

Heart Throbs (1949) #102, cover by Jay Scott Pike.

JSP: You know I remember the name, but can’t even put a face to it. I'm sure I did, but I’m sorry, I just can’t remember her.

Stroud: When you’d pencil a story, did you prefer the full scripts at DC or the Marvel synopses to work off?

JSP: To me they weren’t that different. I would get a script and I’d pencil it and send it back to them and they’d letter it and put lines around the panels and send it back and I would ink it and then return it to them. It worked that way with both publishers. I always did my own inking.

Stroud: That must have been satisfying to finish it off yourself.

JSP: It was, in that I could make the pencils pretty rough. I know the guys who later on would do just the penciling would do these beautiful pencils - and they’d really bone them out, but I was able to make a fairly rough pencil drawing and then ink it myself knowing pretty much what I meant with a pencil line; what I had in mind when I penciled it. So, it sped things up for me. I went to romance comics mainly because of the speed at which I could do them. You know a lot of times you could get away with things like a close-up of an eye with a tear coming out, whereas if you do a western you have a posse of guys riding around on horses and it would take me maybe twice as long to do a book other than a romance.

Stroud: Of course. All the backgrounds and details.

JSP: I had trouble with horses to begin with. (Chuckle.) I really think horses are beautiful, but I really don’t know that anatomy of them very well.

Stroud: What was your typical production rate?

JSP: The way I remember it was that I figured I had to make $500.00 a week and I think most of the time I was getting $35.00 a page. Rarely it would be $40.00. So, whatever that works out to. I know I’d keep working through the weekend until I figured I’d made 500 bucks and then I’d relax until Monday morning.

Stroud: The freelancer’s life is not an easy one. You did pull off what many in the industry would call the brass ring when you went into advertising work and what an impressive list of clients: Ford, General Mills, Pepsi, Procter and Gamble. Was that an enjoyable time in your career?

JSP: When the comics began to go down the tubes in the mid to late 50’s, Timely had quit buying and DC wasn’t doing anything. I got associated with Charlie Biro, but he couldn’t pay anything. At that time we had 5 kids and I couldn’t support the family and somehow I’d got in contact with a friend in New York who was getting illustration jobs - but there again it wasn’t enough to keep going. So we had to come up to the New York area and I went to work for an ad agency in New York as a T.V. art director, which really was a snap for me, because going from doing comics into doing storyboards was really the same old thing. It was like a continuation of the comics almost.

Stroud: Better pay, though, I guess.

JSP: Well, it didn’t start out that way, but it got better. I think I was making $12,500.00 a year when I first started with them. I stayed a year and went to another one and they paid something like $16,000.00. I was there a little less than a year and then I went to a third agency and got up to $20,000.00 and was also a producer there. By then I realized I could probably make a heck of a lot more money freelancing, which is what I did after about a year at the third agency. I did work for all those companies, - sometimes when I was working for an agency - but more often than not I would get freelance work, mostly doing storyboards for the agencies.

Young Love (1949) #55, cover by Jay Scott Pike.

Stroud: It seems like a lot of people don’t realize the demand for that kind of work, although of course you’ve got examples like Neal Adams’ Continuity Studios pursuing storyboard work among other things. Your fellow romance artist Ric Estrada did different types of assignments, too. He even worked for animation studios for a while. It always fascinates me to realize how flexible a good artist can be if you look around a little bit.

JSP: That’s true. Sometimes you’ve got to do different things. I actually knew Neal Adams. I was in a movie he made. I never saw it. I played a bad guy. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: I have a hard time featuring that, Scott.

JSP: I made a good bad guy. (Chuckle.) I haven’t talked to Neal for years. I essentially retired in ’83 and have been pretty much out of touch with these folks since then.

Stroud: You do some teaching?

JSP: I do. It’s enjoyable.

Stroud: I’ve appreciated your time.

JSP: Well, it’s pretty easy to talk about yourself. (Chuckle.)

Girls' Romances (1950) #125, cover by Jay Scott Pike.

Jungle Tales (1954) #1, interior story “Rampage” - penciled & inked by Jay Scott Pike.

Weight For Me, a painting by Jay Scott Pike.

November 07, 2018

An Interview With Paul Levitz - A Name Synonymous With DC Comics

November 07, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Paul Levitz in 2010 at a Midtown Comics signing.

Paul Levitz (born October 21, 1956) is an American comic book writer, editor and executive. The president of DC Comics from 2002–2009, he has worked for the company for over 35 years in a wide variety of roles. Along with publisher Jenette Kahn and managing editor Dick Giordano, Levitz was responsible for hiring such writers as Marv Wolfman and Alan Moore, artists such as George Pérez, Keith Giffen, and John Byrne.

During the course of his research for his fanzine (The Comic Reader), Levitz became well known at the offices of DC Comics. In December 1972, editor Joe Orlando gave him his first freelance work - initially writing text pages and letter pages, and later working as a per diem assistant editor before moving on to writing stories.

Levitz eventually became an editor for DC Comics and served as vice president and executive vice president, before assuming the role of president in 2002. In 2006, Levitz returned to writing the Justice Society with issue #82 of JSA, completing that volume before writer Geoff Johns' relaunch.

On September 9, 2009, it was announced that Levitz would step down as president and publisher of DC Comics to serve as the Contributing Editor and Overall Consultant for the newly formed DC Entertainment, and become the writer of both Adventure Comics vol. 2 and Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 6.

Levitz received an Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2002 and the "Dick Giordano Hero Initiative Humanitarian of the Year Award" in September 2013 at the Baltimore Comic-Con.

From fan to fanzine writer to Woodchuck working on DC's prozine to writer, editor and ultimately president of DC Comics, Paul Levitz's career has had some amazing turns. Through it all, he never lost sight of how fortunate he'd been. See for yourself.

This interview originally took place over the phone on July 9, 2010.

The Comic Reader (1962) #100. This September 1973 issue featured a cover by Jack Kirby.

Bryan Stroud: You’ve arguably had the ultimate internship over the years, going back to when you published one of the first widely read fanzines until Joe Orlando gave you your break. It was Joe, wasn’t it?

Paul Levitz: Joe was definitely the one who gave me my first assignment and was a wonderful mentor in many, many ways.

Stroud: I’ve heard so many great stories about him. It made me sad when I actually began this little odyssey about 3 years ago when I realized he and a handful of others are forever out of my reach. How did it feel to work with Joe and others?

PL: I’ve had a great deal of luck and as I once joked with Mark Evanier when we were bemoaning someone’s death, it’s very rare in life that you get to make friends of your parents or your grandparent’s generation. Just by the nature of life if you know folks that old it’s almost inevitably family members who you know mostly with sort of a specific, formal relationship: an uncle or whatever. Mark and I and a handful of others of us, the fans of a certain generation, really got to know some fascinating people who became friends across the generational barrier, aside from our love of their work. The joy we took from that, merely getting to know people whose life experience of a whole other era has been one of the fascinating journeys.

Stroud: Well said. I know some of the follow up conversations I’ve enjoyed with my interviewees have taught me so much. Learning from what I fondly refer to as the Old Guard has been particularly instructive and enjoyable. I could talk to Jack Adler for hours…

PL: That’s the only way to talk to Jack. (Mutual laughter.)

Stroud: He’s still very sharp.

PL: Good man.

Stroud: Lew Sayre Schwartz, who has good things to say about you, by the way, Joe Giella, Gaspar Saladino…

Adventure Comics (1938) #462, cover story written by Paul Levitz.

PL: Gaspar. I haven’t heard much of him in a long, long time.

Stroud: Gaspar seems very content in his semi-retired state and seems baffled as to why anyone makes a fuss over him.

PL: (Laughter.)

Stroud: A very unassuming man. You mentioned Joe (Orlando) being a mentor. What sort of things do you recall learning from him?

PL: It’s way too long a list for an interview, but let me mention lots of editorial tools and tricks that I still use; using what I call editing art for the art blind. In working with some of the newer artists that I’ve worked with for the last six or seven months that I’ve been back writing, I’ve had occasion to pull those back out of the Fuller Brush case and suggest things like, “How about this?” It’s wonderful to be able to do that, and just fundamentals about how to approach creative work, how to approach plotting, how to work with creative people. Stuff I’ve used my whole life.

Stroud: Tony DeZuniga in particular said that Joe taught him a great deal from an artistic standpoint and said something to the effect that Joe always had time to teach. A born teacher.

PL: Absolutely.

Stroud: I can’t imagine you expected to go as high as you managed. What was your goal when you started at DC?

PL: To pay my way through college, basically. Get a real job. One that would be around for a while. I was in a five-year Bachelor’s/Master’s program that NYU offered in Business and I figured that I could pay for it by working at DC a couple of days a week and taking my classes for a couple of days and put my skills to work probably in something in the business side of the technology world. I was a science geek as a kid and I thought that was an interesting part of the world. But I knew about as much about what my future would be like as the average 16-year old…nothing.

Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #6, featuring an interview with Joe Orlando given by Paul Levitz.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Some of us are still trying to figure it out.

PL: It’s okay. The journey’s part of the fun.

Stroud: You got to be part of that gang of “Woodchucks.” What was that like when you were helping to produce The Amazing World of DC Comics?

PL: It was wonderful fun to be surrounded by young people who were basically at the same stage of life. We were all kids. Some of the guys were a little older, married, but everyone was really starting out. We were all passionately interested in comics, so in those days it was a physically fairly tight community because in the business everyone was pretty much in New York. If you worked in comics you could really count the exceptions on a couple of hands. We were the new kids, and it was, “Who did you meet?” “What’s going on?” You’d find this old stuff that had never been thought about before. What can you learn from that? It was a great series of discussions and people were paying us for learning which just seemed ridiculous. Not paying us well…but certainly paying us as much or more than we were worth.

Stroud: Did you work most closely with Sol (Harrison) or Jack (Adler) or…

PL: It was a small place. There were 35 guys on staff at DC, so you worked with everybody to one extent or another. Sol and Jack were both energetic teachers of the art forms. Amazing World was Sol’s pet project, certainly. Jack would be stoving your head in teaching you how to do something whether you wanted to know it or not, or if you were ready for a discussion of how to best wire a stereo, he’d give you an education on that subject.

Stroud: As I looked at some of the articles you’d written in Amazing World it almost seemed like you were being groomed for the production process whereas you had guys like Guy Lillian doing the interviews. Were you fast-tracking that direction?

Showcase (1956) #99, written by Paul Levitz.

PL: I don’t know that it was fast-tracking. It’s just that the business side of the field interested me more than most of my peers. I wrote hideously simplistic articles on things called “Comic Economics” for somebody else’s fanzine at some point: Joe Brancatelli’s when I was just a kid. All sorts of foolish little analyses of how many pages you got for how many cents and what type of effect that had. It was a time when the comic business was waking up and perhaps considering coming back to life and most of the New York kids who were interested in comics got a chance to play in the game and if you had any skills to offer or were willing to work hard there was a reasonable chance you’d get to play for awhile. They’d see what it is you were good at and maybe get a chance to do some more of that.

Stroud: I realize the world has changed, in some ways quite radically, but it almost seems sad to me in retrospect that there’s no longer some of the opportunities that there were when some of your peers went to the weekly open houses at DC or the opportunity to interact through the lettercols. Do you think there are opportunities like that any longer?

PL: It’s a different world. You can’t separate the good and evil of a time. It’s a wonderful thing to live in the 21st Century and to have modern medicine keeping us alive for so many years and to be sitting here comfortably in air-conditioning doing my work this afternoon despite the fact that it’s 900 bazillion degrees on the streets of New York…

Stroud: With the humidity.

PL: With the humidity. But the air smells of hydrocarbons rather than smelling of horseshit, and I don’t know which of those two things is better. There’s a wonderful book by William Manchester called “A World Lit Only by Fire.” Manchester is just a great historian looking at the world as it existed in the early Medieval Period, I guess. If I remember correctly about the year 1,000 or 1,100, and he very vividly captured not the lives of the Kings and Queens, but what the world was and there was some wonderful, simple things in all of that, and there was the simple fact that you really weren’t going to stay up long after dark because candles cost money, and each time and each period has its glories and its challenges.

Legion of Super-Heroes (2010) #1, written by Paul Levitz.

Overall, I think most of us would rather be born in this time with the life expectancies and the sciences that exist now than we would a thousand years ago. I think that applies to all the little micro areas, too. It’s a delightful thing to be working with an artist in Istanbul and to pop open my e-mail in the morning and there’s the latest page Yildiray (Cinar) has done the day before that he’s scanned and sent to me. That was an un-dreamable possibility in the industry that I came into. And if the tradeoff for that is that we’re not all sitting around at the Brew Burger on Friday night shooting the breeze about which editor is an idiot to work for, or how we’re going to figure out how to make this a better industry in some fashion or another, those are just the tradeoffs of life. Now, do the internet use groups and message boards provide an adequate replacement for the letters page? In a lot of ways, yeah. In others, you give up some stuff, but the world is what the world is at any given time.

Stroud: You certainly can’t turn back the clock, and while I appreciate nostalgia as much as the next person, I don’t want my high-speed internet taken away. (Chuckle.)

PL: Yeah. And I don’t think you want your measles shot taken away either.

Stroud: I’ll have to check out that book. It sounds interesting and seems to be reminiscent of a book I read by Michael Crichton along those lines set in Medieval France. He did a great job of researching the era.

PL: Crichton did a great job on that stuff.

Stroud: He made you understand just what it was they were dealing with in traveling back through time to that era. Doublets because there was no elastic, for example. Little things you don’t think about.

PL: Exactly. You don’t walk out and think that 150 years ago the dominant smell in any city was excrement. That was just it. End of the day. There wasn’t any place to get rid of it fast enough. I think it’s probably a significant improvement. A wild guess on my part…

Stroud: (Laughter.) I certainly wouldn’t disagree. As I was looking over your voluminous credits at the Grand Comic Database I see you did quite a few jobs of answering letters in the columns.

Phantom Stranger (1969) #40, cover story written by Paul Levitz.

PL: I think I did more of that than anybody alive in the business.

Stroud: Was it at all tedious?

PL: I generally enjoyed the forum. If you were writing one that got mail. The mystery titles tended to not get much mail. If you didn’t get much discursive mail it tended to get a little more tedious than a superhero book that got lively and intelligent letters. I got a couple of lifelong friends out of people who were just regular letter writers on books I did, so there’s always that.

Stroud: As a kid I dismissed the horror books. They didn’t interest me, but as I’ve gone back and looked at House of Secrets and House of Mystery it’s remarkable how much great talent worked on them. I think they got overlooked unjustly sometimes.

PL: Well, I’m not sure that most of the guys look back on what we did in those books as shining moments in our career, but it was a learning thing. As an editor on those titles I bought the first work in the business for people from Marc DeMatteis to Michael Golden to Mark Bright. The first work for DC from people like Frank Miller. He’d done one or maybe two stories for Gold Key before that. I don’t know that if you piled up all those stories or my first handful of stories that appeared in those kinds of books as well that there’s anything that’s in danger of winning the “This is the moment of your career; you’re going to look back on it with pride” prize, but we learned how to do our craft. And that was pretty cool. It paid dividends in the long run.

Stroud: Absolutely. And I don’t know who to thank, maybe you, but these Showcase Presents reprint editions have been just a treasure trove in my opinion.

PL: Whoever at Marvel came up with the Marvel Essentials line gets the credit because we basically just knocked that format off from what Marvel had done. It was a very cool format and George Brewer and his team figured out how we could modify that so that we could do it within DC’s standards of paying royalties or percentages or whatever. It’s a lovely book.

Tales of Ghost Castle (1975) #1 pg5, written by Paul Levitz. (featuring Rover & Lucian)

Stroud: I’ve enjoyed them no end and it’s a very cost-effective way to get my hands on stories that I probably couldn’t have managed any other way. Also, I know first hand from speaking to several of the older generation of creators that they’ve been more than grateful for the policy that they got the reprint fees.

PL: It’s a lovely thing when you get a note back on that from somebody whose work you enjoyed when you were a kid. The first generation of creators in this business got very little economic reward and got very little recognition and to the extent that I and others were able to reach back and help them through programs like that were very good for the soul.

Stroud: Again, I can speak with some authority that it’s appreciated. Your name has come up more than once in my conversations with a great deal of gratitude, and when Neal Adams goes as far as to post a photo of he and you shaking hands on his website that says something as well, I think.

PL: That was a fun moment.

Stroud: I recently discovered that in addition to Stalker you came up with the Huntress. Are there other characters that I don’t know of that you’ve produced?

PL: In terms of my “enduring contributions” to the DC Universe probably reduces itself to Lucian (the librarian who runs around in the Sandman mythology) and I created a very simple version of him as mystery host for Tales of Ghost Castle. Neil (Gaiman) really made him into a real character when he adopted him for the Sandman universe. He added so much dimension to him. And I guess the third of the many Starmen of the DC Universe that I did with Steve Ditko for a couple of years for Adventure.

Stroud: You’ve had a number of well-known artists interpret your scripts. Was there anyone in particular you felt really got the way that you envision things?

Stalker (1975) #1, written by Paul Levitz.

PL: Bowing to the public judgment, clearly the most successful collaboration over the years has to be the one with Keith Giffen on the Legion. That’s the one people point to. I’ve had enormous fun with a range of other people I’ve worked with over the years. Guys who were either my generation that I enjoyed working with such as Joe Staton or the fun of having seen my scripts brought to life by a collection of people as amazing as practically a you-name-it of the first generation of guys: Ditko, Kirby, (Joe) Kubert, Gil Kane, Curt Swan, Irv Novick, Dick Dillin, Bob Oksner. So many of DC’s best. I got Joe Orlando to do one of my stories once as a Legion fill-in.

Stroud: That’s certainly a who’s who of talent…

PL: Jim Aparo. I’m doing any number of people a disservice because there literally are too many to name.

Stroud: Sure. Even though you began after the Silver Age ended, nearly all those guys were still there. I always looked with particular fondness on Stalker because I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to have the team of Ditko and Wood work on a story for you.

PL: At 17 years old it’s just outrageous.

Stroud: It’s kind of funny. Jim Shooter made an interesting comment to me that the advantage to being a writer over an artist is that over time you tend to get better whereas an artist runs the risk of losing motor skills or eyesight or other physical drawbacks.

PL: That’s an interesting argument. I don’t know if it’s entirely fair to the artists. I think it is probably an accurate assessment for someone working exclusively or primarily in the idiom of comics. I think that writers have a couple of advantages that Jim is folding together there. One is because it is not a very physical profession. You don’t have nature working against you in the sense that your hand gets less steady or something like that. There are certainly enough guys like Al Jaffee who, at 85 or 86 or whatever the heck he is now, defies all laws of probability as he still does those MAD fold-ins and other beautiful, incredible kinds of work where, in his personal life his hand feels his age, but when he goes to the drawing board it just turns into magic.

All-Star Comics (1940) #62, written by Gerry Conway & Paul Levitz.

But the other thing that’s conflated in there is writers can do more kinds of work, generally. When you set out to be a professional writer, you can go on a journey where you do comics, and you do prose and maybe do some animation or a guy gets to go on to film or you do kid’s books or trade magazines or other sorts of arguably less creative writing, but things that can help you make a living. I think as an artist, many more artists become an artist of a very specific thing, and that may also account for a type of a wear-down effect after doing 10,000 pages of comics or some frightening number like that. But there were artists who kept learning and kept thinking and growing all along. You look at Joe Kubert and you look at Will Eisner, both of them doing amazing and interestingly different kinds of creative work in their 80’s and there are writers who ran out of ideas in their 40’s, or their 30’s. Jim may be absolutely right statistically, but I don’t know that it’s a law of nature so much as how it’s worked out for a lot of people.

Stroud: Well, I’m not the sort who looks on the world as having a lot of total absolutes, but I thought it was an interesting observation.

PL: Jim’s a very smart guy.

Stroud: As I think about it, Len Wein has been doing a lot of work in the animated arena and it didn’t even occur to me until he mentioned he was doing work on video games and I’d have never considered needing a writer for that.

PL: He and a couple of the other guys of that generation made that as a very successful transition to something that didn’t exist when they were writing comics.

Stroud: As a matter of fact, Len was another who commented about your role in his collecting a tidy sum for his Lucius Fox character after you insisted he get a creator’s equity.

PL: He’s very kind to share that story a number of times now.

Stroud: Was anyone a particular influence to you to become a writer or was it something you aspired to on your own?

Worlds' Finest (2012) #1, written by Paul Levitz.

PL: I didn’t really expect to be a writer. Going back to that first conversation with Joe (Orlando) when he called me and asked me to work on his letter columns, I very vividly remember that the remark was, “Me? I’m not a writer.” He replied, “I’ve read your fanzines. You write well enough to do letter columns.” If I expected to be anything in the business, I would have expected it to be much more likely that I would have been in an editorial role or something like that along in the process. So, a lot of the credit for that really goes to when I was working with Joe. He was teaching me by my doing rewrite work on scripts that were in other kinds of editorial work and just learning the ropes that way. You rip apart something that has problems; learn what’s right or wrong with it and take it from there. “Oh, I could do this, I think,” or sometimes, “I could do it better than this.”

Stroud: And obviously you made that transition to editor. Was that a natural ascension?

PL: You know, when you’re that young you don’t have a really great sense of how outrageously lucky you are, I think. Its kind of like, “Oh, you want me to do that? Okay.” That’s why they send 18-year olds out to war. They believe they’re invulnerable. You probably haven’t realized yet that it’s great that you woke up in the morning breathing.

Stroud: It appears over the last several years that the business has become more about licensing than anything else and it is, of course, first and foremost a business and obviously you do the sorts of things that generate revenue most efficiently. Is the publishing aspect getting short shrift or is it one of those normal cyclical things?

PL: Well, if you look back over the history of the business there have very rarely been any moments when publishing was profitable collectively for people in the business as it has been for the last 5 or 6 years, so I think a lot of that is the fairly short-term point of view. It’s rather reminiscent of the moment in Casablanca when he walks into the casino and says, “Gambling?! You mean there’s gambling in here?” Probably from 1940 onward, maybe without a break unless I’m forgetting some year in there, but I don’t think so, the net profits for the industry were more from licensing than they were from publishing.

Legion of Super-Heroes (1980) #294, written by Paul Levitz.

So, it’s not either a new development or a surprising development if that’s going on. It has happened most of the time. There have been occasional moments when nobody was making any money in publishing and the only thing keeping the industry alive was licensing revenue. When I came into the field in the early 1970’s that was a fair description of the circumstance. By the mid-1970’s at least. So, the fact that in the last handful of years publishing has been a reasonable profit center of its own is really delightful and impressive. In terms of my career it was one of the things that was a goal for me to try to get the publishing side of the company I was working with to be a significant contributor. It’s something I’m very proud of. But it wasn’t ever going to be in danger of beating the licensing end on any regular basis. I think licensing is a lovely business. You stand there with a bucket and money comes into it because of something that has previously existed that you have connected to the public. There are costs attached to that, both money that has to be paid to the original creators of the properties, legal costs, certainly, to a very significant degree, some marketing costs, but you’re not bringing a product to market and taking a risk with it the way you are publishing. So you ought to get into that racket.

Stroud: What with all the popularity of the movies it seems to be a major trend lately.

PL: It’s a good one. It helps pay the rent.

Stroud: When you see a credit for plotting vs. actual scripting, what is the exact distinction?

PL: There are a wide variety of possibilities. I would occasionally give a plotting credit or a co-plotter credit to artists I was collaborating with who had offered a lot of ideas into the process. Keith Giffen is a good example, I think. I credited Keith as a co-plotter on a lot of the Legion work that we did together because Keith would pop up with an idea. There might be a series of issues that he didn’t, but there would be other issues he’d add an idea to. When you see it in a more rigorous fashion, such as when there are two separate writers and one is credited with plot while the other is credited with script, most often that will represent that the first writer has developed the idea for the story, possibly outlined it for an artist to draw and the second writer has come in and done the final dialogue. But in every variation, there were periods on the mystery stories where you’d sell a one paragraph plot for fifteen bucks and it would be given to another writer to do completely from there.

Legion of Super-Heroes (1980) #294 interior splash, featuring co-plotter credit for Paul Levitz & Keith Giffen.

Stroud: Have you done any writing outside the comic field?

PL: Not a lot. Little bits and pieces early on in my career. Hopefully now I’ve got a little more time and freedom to do so.

Stroud: I noticed that you’ve been exclusive to DC but did contribute to Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach for a while. Was it a chance to do something a little different?

PL: It was a different time. It wasn’t perceived to be particularly competitive to the mainstream comics of the period. What Mike was doing was in many ways the precursor to the independent comics as they exist today, but in a time when there were very, very few comic shops and the major publishers didn’t perceive this as a part of their business model even. So there wasn’t a problem in doing that while you were working at a larger house. Mike was an old buddy of many years and had a lot of fun doing it. We played around with an original character and did things you couldn’t have possibly done at DC at the time.

Stroud: When you worked with some of the other editors, I noticed you listed as assisting Gerry Conway, Murray Boltinoff, Ross Andru…

PL: Not Ross. By the time he was an editor I was long since doing my own books. I may have even moved out of the editorial department. I did work on Murray’s reprint books for a bunch of years, the reprint material in the backs of his books and worked with Gerry pretty much the whole time he was a freelance editor for DC. He was a good teacher and a good guy.

Stroud: What do you think is a good, concise description for what make a successful editor?

PL: Someone who makes their creative people do their best work.

Adventure Comics (1938) #443, cover story written by Paul Levitz & David Michelinie.

Stroud: So, kind of an inspirer, perhaps?

PL: Everybody’s done it differently. I got in a long discussion once over a hamburger with Stan (Lee) about that late one night. What a great editor did. I had a good laugh with him convincing him he was one.

Stroud: What does the term “editorial consultant” mean?

PL: Any time they’ve got a question they can pick up the phone and call me. Whatever they want it to be.

Stroud: Do you think fandom is still a viable force after all these years?

PL: Define fandom.

Stroud: There are still a few fanzines out there, but they seem to be darned few.

PL: Well, there are 4 million websites. What’s a website besides a digital fanzine?

Stroud: You wrote the introduction to Darwyn Cooke’s excellent book “The New Frontier,” and you mentioned with regard to characters, “A wise man taught me that the reader can tell which are placed in the mosaic with sincerity and only those can endure.” Would you care to reveal who that wise man was?

PL: That’s one of Joe Orlando’s old lines. Joe always said that the reader can smell sincerity. They’ll forgive sincere bad work, but they won’t forgive insincere mediocrity.

Stroud: Lew Schwartz told me once that one of the reasons he loved drawing Bill Finger’s scripts was that he wrote very visually. Do you feel you have that ability?

PL: If I write very visually, I don’t know that I’d dare compare myself to Bill because he was really one of the guys who had a great gift for it. I’m confident based on the reactions I’ve had from artists over the years that I write scripts that artists find comfortable to draw. My learning to write comics from an artist had something to do with the fact that I communicate well with them and give them tools to work with. There are wonderfully talented writers in this business whose material is just a bitch for an artist to draw because their communication process with the artist is not necessarily as good as their internal creative process. And thankfully I’ve never had that as a problem.

Stroud: Do you provide much in the way of reference or is that a good tool?

PL: It depends on the situation. These days it’s a lot easier than it was years ago because you have the internet to pull stuff from. Now all you’re doing is giving them a URL.

Stroud: You’re one of the most renowned of the Legion writers and are back on the gig again. Based on some of the postings I’ve seen you make you’re having an absolute ball at it. Any comments?

PL: It’s fun to be back in the game and to have people enjoying what I do.

Stroud: Is it difficult to write for a group that large? How does it compare to writing for say an Aquaman title?

PL: It’s different. There are different sets of skills you have to exercise in order to keep track of everything. But on the other hand, you have in many ways much more potential available to you because you can screw around with so many more character’s lives. I probably have to do a little more work on the “where is everybody this issue” keeping track process than I would have to do writing Aquaman, but on the other hand with Aquaman, as with any other single superhero character, a big piece of the challenge is just finding something new that you can do to them within the strictures of keeping the characters alive and happy and available for product licensing and whatever other means of exploitation are necessary. All tradeoffs.

Stroud: Deadlines, friend or foe?

PL: Not a problem. Just not a big deal.

DC Special Series (1977) #10, cover story written by Paul Levitz.

Immortal Doctor Fate (1985) #1, main story written by Paul Levitz.

Doctor Fate (2015) #1, written by Paul Levitz.

October 31, 2018

An Interview With Tom Palmer - 50 Years of Inking Heroes & Horror

October 31, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Tom Palmer on the Dare2Draw podcast, 2016.

Tom Palmer Sr. (born July 13, 1942) is an American comic book artist best known as an inker for Marvel Comics. Although he has done a small amount of penciling work (as well as some cover art and some coloring), the vast majority of Tom's artistic output since the 1960s has been as a comic book inker. Particularly noteworthy in Palmer's extensive work for Marvel Comics are well-remembered runs paired with pencilers like Neal Adams on The Avengers and Uncanny X-Men; Gene Colan, on Doctor Strange, Daredevil, and Tomb of Dracula; and John Buscema, on The Avengers. He also inked the entire run of John Byrne's X-Men: The Hidden Years. Palmer's brushy, detailed, and illustrative inking style hearkens back to vintage newspaper comic strips, and has influenced later generations of inkers for years.

When you learn that an inker is held in high regard by no less than Mike Esposito and, Gena Colan and that Neal Adams lists him as his favorite (after himself) on his work at Marvel, it tends to pique your interest. I'm glad I sought out and got to speak with the great Tom Palmer, whose career is still going strong.

This interview originally took place over the phone on November 8, 2009.

Avengers (1963) #384, cover by Tom Palmer.

Bryan Stroud: How's your day?

Tom Palmer: Busy, but it's always fun.

Stroud: In the life of a freelancer, busy is always good.

Palmer: True. I've been freelancing for quite a while, since I was a teenager, and keeping busy is always satisfying.

Stroud: I think I understand. Tom Orzechowski was telling me that he was happiest when he had a full load and maybe just a bit more than he could handle.

Palmer: Yeah. If I have a project and it's nearing completion and there's nothing waiting I tend to slow down. It's a mental thing and I try to overcome that, if I have deadlines and there's something behind it waiting, I speed up.

Stroud: It's interesting how that works. I think it was Len Wein who told me that deadlines are crucial to his work or he'd just never get a script done.

Palmer: It's true. I had a couple of commissions to paint, and I love to paint, there are no deadlines on commissioned work when it's a side venture, and I tend to work on the projects with deadlines when they come in. I will take on projects without deadlines but it's tough finding those moments to work on them and moments to finish them. Guess it's the nature of the beast.

Stroud: I'm not artistic at all, but I'm reminded of years gone by when I'd have to do year end overtime for my job and after a while, I found I could easily squeeze 8 hours of work into a 10-hour day.

Palmer: I've never had an office job but I did work in a hectic advertising art studio early on and found a similar experience. We would stay as late as we had to for finishing up a deadline project and it was amazing how much work we got done in one long day. I got an hourly rate but the studio made some nice money when a job went out the door that fast.

War is Hell (1973) #12, cover penciled by Gil Kane & inked by Tom Palmer.

I was out of high school and decided I wanted to become an artist. I wound up in art school and working in an art studio as a “gopher”, go for lunch, go to pick up work, etc. That first studio job didn't last long and I found a freelance position in an advertising art studio at 40th and Madison Avenue in New York City. I've been freelancing ever since.

I had a job or two in high school but not art related, I've gone to enough advertising agencies to pick up work to see how people react to a 9 to 5 job and I never was drawn to that kind of life. Freelancing, weekends and holidays mean little to you. On the big holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas you do celebrate them, but if I have work to get done, I'll find time later in the day to do it.

Stroud: You do what must be done.

Palmer: Yeah. I've met artistic people deep into a career outside the art field with responsibilities like family, and mortgages, who dreamed of becoming an artist but leaving that secure job and flying that freelance trapeze without a net can be scary. Guess I was lucky, I started young and foolish, without fear and responsibilities.

Looking back, if I had a salaried position somewhere with all the perks like medical coverage, paid vacations and sick days, and a pension, it would be difficult to leave all that for a freelance career in a competitive field that you may not be successful in. I wonder if the passion I seem to have to be an artist would have been strong enough to take that leap if I was faced with that decision. My guess is that we're destined to be what we will be, artists or firemen, and if we're lucky making some of life's early choices events just fall into place. I never look back wishing I made different choices, I've had a wonderful life doing what I love to do and you can't beat that in the end.

Stroud: Spoken like a true artist.

Palmer: You have to enjoy what you're doing and I did from early on. It's good that I went to art school, though. Art school doesn't make you an artist, it does open up another world to your eyes and allows you to begin developing skills to become an artist.

Young Justice (1998) #42, cover penciled by Todd Nauck & inked by Tom Palmer.

Joe Jusko put me onto a blog site that has a “Daily Inspiration” filing on illustrators from the 1950's and 60's and examples of their work. Many are gone now from the pages of magazines where they did editorial and advertising illustrations due to changing times, but their craft endures and some of them, like Howard Terpning, have gone on to even greater success in the fine art field. Once bitten, you can't just stop doing art work, no matter what form, it provides a lifetime quest of improving your craft that is never ending. If you love your work and work hard at it and don't get too complacent, you can survive in an ever-changing field.

Stroud: Unquestionably, and I can't help but wonder at the fact that just shortly after announcing he wasn't going to be doing any more commission work George Tuska passed away. 93 years and still going nearly to the end.

Palmer: Wow, funny you should mention that. This is going off the beaten path a bit, comic art is something I always loved to do along with painted illustrations that I've done for editorial and advertising clients. I enjoy and collect the work of many past illustrators like Tom Lovell.

Tom Lovell started his career in the 1930's doing art work for the pulp magazines, interior black and whites first and then painted covers. He was doing art for the slick magazines by the 1940's, leaving for a few years to serve as a Marine in WWII. He returned and continued to paint illustrations for the magazines, rising to be one of the top talents in the field. Tremendous artist, fantastic painter. When the market for magazine illustrations started to dry up in the early 60's he went out to the southwest to paint for the fine art western market. I followed his work still, picking up catalogs of his work along with a huge hardcover of his illustrations published by the Greenwich Workshop in 1993.

Tom Lovell built a whole new career and following, he was now in his 90's living in Arizona and continued to paint, having exhibitions of his work. He had his daughter drive him to Texas for a gallery showing of his new paintings, I even got an early catalog, when they had a head on collision on route and both were killed. It took a horrible accident to snuff out Tom Lovell's creativity at age 94. He had a great life and absolutely loved what he was doing.

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

Stroud: The fruits show that. It was the same with Creig Flessel who was at it right up to the end and I believe he was 96.

Palmer: That is a full life. Many people reach that age to retire and their working life is usually over. What do you do? Golf? I played golf twice in my life and I was bored. Guess I have nothing to retire to!

Stroud: Oh, exactly. I read a comment by Arnold Drake where he said, “Work is life.”

Palmer: I'm reminded of the old saying if you do something you love you'll never work a day in your life. It's simple but true. And it doesn't mean you have to be an artist, do anything that requires passion to pursue.

Stroud: Whatever your passion may be.

Palmer: Exactly. I think that's the true elixir of life, is having a reason to live. I've put in a lot of long days and nights in my studio keeping things going and helping to raise a family. Not just in comic books but doing advertising and editorial illustrations. The comic book industry changed in the 90's and allowed you to make a better living. I always continued to work in comics because they were a great source of enjoyment and satisfaction, I found them to be an oasis when the stressful demands of advertising work got to you.

I grew up with comic books, learned to read with them, even did some of my own when I was a kid, but I wanted to be an illustrator and paint covers for the Saturday Evening Post like Norman Rockwell. I did find a terrific art school with one teacher, Frank Reilly, where I took evening classes as I freelanced in a studio during the day. The studio's resident illustrator was Jack Kamen who was one of the artists working for EC Comics years earlier along with Wally Wood, Al Williamson, and Jack Davis. They all worked on those comic books that got the industry in trouble with the Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency in the 1950's.

Doctor Strange (1968) #171, cover by Dan Adkins. Tom Palmer penciled the interior.

Stroud: The Kefauver hearings.

Palmer: Yes. This was now in the 60's and Jack Kamen had been out of comic books for at least a dozen years and was making his way in the studio doing all sorts of artwork from line spots to full color advertising illustrations. A very versatile and good artist. Believe he took art classes with Harvey Dunn back in the late 30's. I walked into the studio as a very idealistic young man and we immediately bonded. I sat a few feet away from Jack with my drawing board and I was getting an education equal or even exceeding the one I was getting in art school.

I was trying to make more money but Jack was reluctant to help me if it meant my getting into comics. He said that if I start doing comic books I'll stop going to art school and he didn't want me to do that. Frank Reilly died unexpectedly from a brain tumor and the school disbanded leaving Jack with no other choice than give me a little boost into comics to help my income. He called up Wally Wood and I went to see Woody with my portfolio. I spent some time in his studio helping out and he gave my name to someone else, Mike Esposito, who was working with Ross Andru at the time. I did some background work for Mike and he mentioned my name to Sol Brodsky at Marvel and I went up there for an interview.

My first assignment was penciling a 22-page Doctor Strange book and I was clearly out of my league. I had never penciled a comic book before and to top it off, Stan Lee acted out the plot in his office while I stood dumbfounded. Luckily, his assistant, Flo Steinberg, took notes while Stan performed the plot which she slipped to me after as I left the offices. Flo still works for Marvel by the way. Stan did that kind of story plotting for Jack Kirby and John Buscema but I didn't know what he was doing or saying being awestruck by it all.

I went back home and penciled the 22 pages. Looking back, it was what it was at that point, but certainly not up to speed with anything that was being done at the time. Roy Thomas then wrote the story and dialogue over my pencils, I doubt little of what Stan performed made it into my penciled version. It was lettered and given to Dan Adkins to ink and he really saved my butt with his professional inks.

Doctor Strange (1968) #171 pg12-13, penciled by Tom Palmer & inked by Dan Adkins.

I went back to Marvel the next month for another issue of Doctor Strange and was told they had another artist to pencil it but would I like to ink it? I said, “Sure.” They handed me 22 pages of incredible pencils by Gene Colan. This was Gene's first issue of Doctor Strange, #172, and my first inking assignment for Marvel. Gene's pencils were absolutely beautiful rendered in gray tones and little if any line work. I used whatever I knew at the time to ink the pages and Marvel seemed to like it because I was asked to continue inking the following issues.

You worked three months in advance then, and when issue #172 came out I didn't like the coloring and asked Marvel if I could color the next one. They gave you reduced photostats of the pages and you used Dr. Martin's Dyes to color them approximating what colors were on the guide sheet. Not too many colors to work from but you could create a mood and do a reasonable job. I was told that colorists could do a book in a day but I wound up spending three days on the coloring.

Nightstalkers (1992) #1, cover penciled by Ron Garney & inked by Tom Palmer.

Stroud: Oh, no.

Palmer: Well, I was doing little watercolor paintings, stuff that would never get into print with the process back then but it was a thrill finally seeing that issue in print.

Today, coloring is done on a computer and digital scans are generated that really have become an important part of the final printed version.

Stroud: They are much more sophisticated.

Palmer: Well, the big reason is that they are magazines now. Also, the venues for illustrators have shrunk so very talented people have migrated into the comics and the quality has become very high.

Stroud: It's true. I was going to ask your opinion, too, Tom about digitally produced comic books. Over the course of your career you've seen a lot of changes in how they're produced, so how does a digital product stand up in your opinion?

Palmer: I've had a computer for over ten years and use it in all my work in one way or the other. It's only a tool but a very valuable one. Without it you really can't compete in the business. You're able to do so much more with the artwork now and use different mediums to render with, things you couldn't do before when the art was just line. The coloring has become limitless also, far beyond what was possible just ten years ago.

Stroud: It's the way the world has gone.

Palmer: Right. The printing end dictates what you have to supply to get on their presses and they've been digital for close to 20 years or more. Not everyone has embraced the computer but you can still function well without it, I just enjoy having some control over what I do when it gets to the printed page.

Stroud: I think I understand. I have friends who haven't fully embraced the technology and I don't know whether it's due to discomfort or what.

Superman Monster (1999) #1, cover penciled by Anthony Williams & inked by Tom Palmer.

Palmer: I think it's the fear of the unknown. You look back about 10 years or so, comic book sales had dropped after that speculation boom, Marvel had declared bankruptcy and I went up to DC Comics for a few years. Someone there mentioned that the business had been reviving itself every decade since it's beginning just before WWII, when sales were probably the greatest they have ever been. Sales waned in the 50's after their content attracted criticism and then outright banning of some titles. The industry established a comic code to survive but that only reduced the comic books to pablum. Stan Lee, along with Jack Kirby, revived the industry with their brand of superheroes in the 60's which is still going strong today with some bumps along the way. Who would have thought that the movies, and more importantly, the CGI advancement, would raise comic books and superheroes to a whole new level today. I suppose this is the new revival.

Stroud: Right. And after all, this uniquely American creation of the comic book is still relatively young with DC coming up on it's 75th anniversary. It will be interesting to see how far this run goes.

Palmer: Well, it has to evolve and we'll have to see how it evolves before we can predict the future. I think a big key for the publishers will be in letting creative people be creative. If writers and artists find creative freedom in comic books they will instinctively be drawn to them.

Stroud: That's logical. You've got to find new ways to breathe new life into scenarios or characters to keep it from going stale.

Palmer: True. Comic books don't have to follow what's in the movies. Iron Man was not a high-profile Marvel character but it shows how a well made creative and entertaining movie can instill new life into an old Marvel superhero.

Stroud: Sure. Ghost Rider wasn't exactly a household name before the movie came out.

Palmer: I really enjoyed that movie. A lot of critics didn't like it but it had a certain charm that made it work. It may have been Nick Cage in the lead role. I enjoy Nicolas Cage in just about every movie he does, same with Robert Downey, Jr., they have a presence on the screen that draws you in.

Marvel Preview (1975) #22 pg49, penciled by John Buscema & inked by Tom Palmer.

Silver Surfer (1982) #1, cover penciled by John Byrne & inked by Tom Palmer.

Punisher (2004) #2 pg8, penciled by Lewis LaRosa & inked by Tom Palmer.

Stroud: Which is what you need.

Palmer: Exactly. Robert Downey, Jr. was just perfect as Iron Man, he pretty much played himself but captured the Tony Stark character perfectly. I understand that he does his best work when he has the freedom to have input into the character's development and the director, Jon Favreau, did just that. That really made a difference in the movie's huge success.

This goes back to what I was saying earlier, don't confine creators, give them the freedom to soar to new heights.

Chamber of Chills (1972) #1, cover penciled by Gil Kane & inked by Tom Palmer.

Stroud: Your point of being stifled reminds me of a comment Bernie Wrightson made when I asked if he did commissions and he said, “Not really. It's not that I don't like doing them, but I don't like being art directed.”

Palmer: I do commissions but have fun doing them. I treat them like the commercial assignments I did for years and expect the same mutual respect between client and artist. I provide sketches for approval, and with a painted commission, color sketches, so the client can see what they're getting and it also helps me with the finish. I've had changes in the sketches but don't really mind them, better than in the finish, which I won't do unless the client pays for it.

I think Bernie is speaking of people who want some crazy composition with Frankenstein fighting Captain America or something, and that I would also avoid. You have to enjoy doing a commission to do your best work and not have arbitrary changes or direction.

Stroud: Right. Second and third guessing.

Palmer: Accepting a commission doesn't mean you're being paid to do what the client dreamed up one night and is almost impossible to duplicate on board or canvas. Let the artist have some input and suggest a composition that will make them both happy. Again, you get the best work from the artist if he's enjoying the work.

I've heard the comment, “I don't know what I want but I'll know when I see it.” I've learned to close up shop and leave when I hear that, the only way you can keep your sanity.

I was invited to attend a party Roy Thomas was having right after I started at Marvel. The apartment was packed with well known comic book artists and writers but I was unaware who they were because that world was so new to me. I met both Bernie Wrightson and Neal Adams that night and enjoyed pleasant conversations with both of them. That relaxed friendship endures to this day. Haven't seen Bernie for a few years but Neal and I keep meeting in assorted places it seems and it's always good fun. They're both good guys as well as most of the people I've met in the business.

Detective Comics (1937) #711, cover penciled by Graham Nolan & inked by Tom Palmer.

Stroud: To quote Shelly Moldoff, comic book people are usually good people.

Palmer: I agree. I suppose we're all kindred spirits in some way and that that helps to bond.

Stroud: At the risk of embarrassing you I thought I'd share the comments a couple of other professionals have made about your work. Mike Esposito said this:

Some inkers were so frustrated; they felt they had to make it look like their stuff. Well, I was trained by Ross to make it look like his stuff. You get a guy like Tom Palmer, who is very good. Tom Palmer I always thought was a genius. I got him his first job up at Marvel. He was just a background man. When I saw his stuff when he was working for me a couple of times, I said, “You're too good for this.” I called up Sol Brodsky up at Marvel Comics and I said, “I've got a guy that shouldn't be doing backgrounds. He should be doing features.” So, I sent him to him and he got the job and he did some great stuff in the black and white magazines. The vampire stuff, you know? And he did a great job inking. The only guy I thought could ink Gene Colan the right way was Tom Palmer. Gene Colan used to pencil like a photograph. He'd use an outline of it. But he knew how to take that photographic look and make it unbelievably crisp. Whereas Frank Giacoia and I would ink him and we'd do it as an outline, because he didn't work in lines. So, you'd destroy his soft pencil sketches by putting a hard outline. And the only guy that really knew how to do him was Tom Palmer. You look up the stuff and you'll see how beautiful those black and white vampire books and Dracula books turned out.

Palmer: You know, that's very nice of Mike, he was one of those great people who really impacted my life and career and he just did it out of the kindness of his heart. Another great guy.

Stroud: Gene said the very same thing. He said a lot of inkers had trouble with his work, not being able to see what was in there and he told me that you were his favorite inker and then said this:

Tomb of Dracula (1972) #70, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Tom Palmer.

Stroud: You mentioned your preference for penciling. Did you have a favorite inker on your work?
Gene Colan: Tom Palmer. Eventually I got to meet him and he did all the Dracula work. 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.

Palmer: Wow. That's very nice of Gene, he is always the kind gentleman and his flattering words are very heart warming. I always enjoyed working with Gene, he loved what I did and was a constant support. No one in the field penciled like Gene did, he loved the cinema and film noir and brought all that to his work. Comic books were printed in line and his penciling was way beyond that, as Mike Esposito said, “Like a photograph.” Gene's pencils on that first Doctor Strange were my test to get work from Marvel and I worked hard trying to capture the look of the pencils. It took some time, probably when I was working on Dracula with him, to finally realize that you had to work into the shadows and bring out the nuances and drawing that Gene did. Back then your options were limited but with a little dry brush, zip-a-tone, and some cross-hatching you had a variety of gray tones to work with.

Doctor Strange (1974) #13, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Tom Palmer.

I worked with Neal Adams right after I started with Gene and that was a whole different experience. I was impressed with Neal's pencils, they had an illustrative look to them and he used a pencil with a chisel side so he had broad strokes and a thin line in one tool. Something you learn in art school and find hard to retain. His pencil lines went thick and thin around a form and showed how mature an artist he was. Working with Neal opened up a new chapter in my learning process.

That lead into working with John Buscema, one of the finest artists I've met. I didn't recognize how talented he was until he started doing breakdowns for me to work over. This was on the Avengers. He used a minimal amount of lines but everything you needed was there, all you had to do was build on them and then add light and shade. One of the most rewarding collaborations I have ever had. John spent years in an illustration studio and his talent ran deep, deeper than what the comic book pages he did showed.

Getting to know the man was the most rewarding. He was your dad, big brother and best friend all rolled up into one. Loyal, generous, and another great guy. Still miss him.

Stroud: I read somewhere that your work has the mark of maybe being influenced by the old dailies by Foster and Caniff and so forth. Any truth to that?

Palmer: I did know of Hal Foster and Prince Valiant when I was young and studied his work closely. Never saw Milton Caniff's work though, he wasn't in the newspapers my family bought. Never knew who Alex Raymond was until I met Wally Wood who had this big book of his Flash Gordon Sundays in black and white. I was struck by Raymond's work at the time since it was all new to me. Both he and Foster have influenced just about everybody in comic books and probably beyond.

I always felt that the first 18 years of my life were some sort of prelude to the new world that opened to me when I simultaneously entered art school and the art field. I grew up in New York but I was the one who hung out with the guys and liked to draw.

Any of my influences after came at me in a torrent of images from every medium, illustration, comic books, and even fine artists like John Singer Sargent. It was overwhelming at times trying to sort it all out. It may have helped me see all of art expression as one and not try to categorize one from the other. An artist can paint an advertising illustration and a piece of fine art. An artist who can do both can also work in comic books; it's just another artistic expression.

Where Monsters Dwell (1970) #4, cover penciled by Marie Severin & inked by Tom Palmer.

Fallen Angels (1987) #1, cover penciled by Kerry Gammill & inked by Tom Palmer.

X-Men (1963) #65, cover penciled by Neal Adams & inked by Tom Palmer.

Thor (1966) #274, cover penciled by John Buscema & inked by Tom Palmer.

Tomb of Dracula (1972) #50, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Tom Palmer.

Avengers (1963) #273, cover penciled by John Buscema & inked by Tom Palmer.

Daredevil (1964) #93, cover penciled by Gil Kane & inked by Tom Palmer.

Avengers (1963) #293, cover penciled by Neal Adams & inked by Tom Palmer.

Star Wars (1977) #1, cover penciled by Howard Chaykin & inked by Tom Palmer.

October 24, 2018

An Interview With John Workman - The Letterer Behind Morrison's Doom Patrol & Simonson's Thor

October 24, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

John Workman (born June 20, 1950) is an editor, writer, artist, designer, colorist and letterer in the comic book industry. He is known for his frequent partnerships with writer/artist Walter Simonson and also for lettering the entire run of Grant Morrison & Rachel Pollack's Doom Patrol for DC Comics. Workman did his first comic work in the late '60s as an adman - often drawing his ads in comic form. After receiving encouragement from the legendary Basil Wolverton, John tried his hand at comics and by 1974 he had written, penciled, inked, and lettered various stories for Mike Friedrich's Star*Reach. His work for Star*Reach caught the eye of DC editors, and it was not long before he had steady jobs flowing in from First Comics, Marvel, Topps, and Image. Workman was also the art director for Heavy Metal magazine from 1977 to 1984.

Well, by now you know I've got a soft spot for letterers and I got to enjoy a nice, long conversations with one of the premiere guys, the wonderful John Workman. Not only does he have a long and impressive resume, but he continues to do stellar work and as recently as the new 80-year tribute to Superman in the flagship Action Comics, John has some of his wares on display. He's also a tremendously nice guy, very approachable and friendly and he's helped me out on a couple of BACK ISSUE articles. I just love the guy!

This interview originally took place over the phone on May 5, 2010.

A profile on John Workman written during his time at Heavy Metal magazine.

Bryan Stroud: It looks like you’ve done a little bit of everything. I’ve found listings for you as an editor, writer, artist, designer, colorist and of course letterer. You’ve probably done more lettering than anything else. Is that how you’d label yourself primarily?

John Workman: No, not at all. I settled into lettering because it was easy to do. I almost feel ashamed that I haven’t done more writing and artwork. When I was still out in Washington State years ago and had been doing comics material for several years, I got some good advice from Basil Wolverton. This was when I was going to school in Vancouver at Clark College. He told me to learn to do everything. My worst stuff at the time was my lettering. It just really stunk, and I took calligraphy courses and that didn’t really help an awful lot, so finally I just sort of started stealing. I would look at what Ben Oda and John Costanza and Gaspar Saladino and other guys had done and try to emulate them. I remember taking a 1946 issue of Comic Calvacade and going through it and just copying the letterforms. There’s one thing that I’ve always loved to do that I felt helped the look of the page and the individual panels and that was breaking the border of the panel with the word balloon. There’s no actual border there. The border line comes along and then it sort of becomes the word balloon. I stole that from Al Williamson and Carmine Infantino and different people who were doing that sort of stuff.

Stroud: That is a unique touch, and speaking of Carmine, that reminds me of his little “helping hands” gimmick that he used to do on some of his caption boxes. I think he told me he actually did that portion, because I was uncertain where the artist left off and the letterer took over.

Workman: I remember him doing that. It was always sort of a visual extra that helped move the narration along. Carmine was great. He had a wonderful sense of design. I used to like when he inked his own pencils. I liked Murphy Anderson inking him too, but Carmine when he did his own stuff on the Elongated Man or some of the science fiction things that he did or Detective Chimp ... it was just wonderful.

Stroud: It sounded to me like he enjoyed doing that, but Julie, for whatever reason, didn’t typically allow it. Probably for purposes of increased production.

DC Super-Stars (1976) #5, cover by Dick Giordano, lettered by John Workman.

Workman: It surprised me back in’64 when the early Elongated Man stories in Detective featured him penciling and inking those. I was real happy with it. There was a story that Julie commented on, called “Yes, Virginia, there is a Martian.” It was in Strange Adventures. Carmine did both pencils and inks on it. I seem to remember a later letter column wherein Julie said something about how he had allowed Carmine to do the whole art job. I loved the combination of Carmine and Murphy and I liked Joe Giella and even Sid Greene on Carmine, but Murphy I thought was the best inker for Carmine.

Stroud: I fully agree. You can’t beat those old Adam Strange stories, for example, although interestingly enough when I asked Carmine who his preferred inker was he said Frank Giacoia.

Workman: Yeah, I’ve got several old things from the 50’s that Giacoia had inked over Carmine and there was a Western comic I have that Carmine and Joe Kubert collaborated on and, of course, Joe Kubert also inked the first Showcase Flash stuff that Carmine did.

Stroud: He sure did.

Workman: I wanted to specialize in inking at one time and, I’ve inked various people. One of my favorite inkers for John Buscema was Alfredo Alcala. He did this beautiful stuff on some of the early issues of Savage Sword of Conan and he added so much to the look of it. It was as if Joseph Clement Cole had returned to life and suddenly started drawing comics. But he didn’t take away from the dynamism of Buscema’s artwork. It was just gorgeous, and I found out later on that Buscema hated it. He thought it was way too busy, and he preferred the inks that Ernie Chan did a little later on.

Stroud: Isn’t that funny? He didn’t come right out and say so, but Carmine left the impression with me that Murphy was not his favorite inker.

Workman: It’s amazing. Sometimes the artist is terrible as far as commenting on his own stuff and how things progress in comics from the penciling to the inking. One thing I’ve noticed about my own stuff is I’m rarely happy, whether it’s lettering or artwork or anything that I’ve done. Then time will pass and I’ll look at this stuff and it’s almost as if someone else had done it. I can look at it more objectively and think, “Well, that’s pretty good,” or “Boy, that stinks.

The Flash (1959) #241, cover by Ernie Chan, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) We do tend to be our own worst critic and to a very, very minor extent I think I know what you’re talking about. I obviously try to dabble as an amateur writer and I’ve looked at some of my older stuff sometimes and thought, “Gosh, did I write that? That ain’t half bad.” (Laughter.) As I look back a little bit it looks as if you got started in advertising work, is that right?

Workman: Yes, when I was still living out in Aberdeen, Washington. I lived there from 1958 until 1975 when Bob Smith and I came back here to New York. I guess I was 17 when I first did some outside-of-the-area fanzine work. There was a fanzine out of California called “Voice of Comicdom” and a lot of interesting people were popping up in it. Bill DuBay, Rudy Franke, and … I think, Marv Wolfman and Len Wein, and all kinds of other guys, and they would do interviews with Al Williamson and other big-time pros, and it was amazing for me to be doing these things with those guys when I was 17. I look back on it now and the stuff I did was pretty lousy, but they were nice enough to print it anyway. On a local level, I also started doing advertising work. I went around to various printers in the area and the first thing they told me was, “Well, we’ve got these clip art books that we use.” I would say, “Well, yeah, but in those books is there a drawing of this local restaurant here or the guy who runs the restaurant or anything like that?” I always tried to personalize it, and so I did okay. I wasn’t making a fortune, but I was making something of a living doing artwork on a local level and learning all the time. But I kept trying to get into regular comics. In 1965 I remember my Dad helping me and giving advice and even wrapping up the package when I sent a two-page Blue Beetle story to Charlton Comics. Then I began to collect a series of rejection slips from the various companies, but I got good comments from people such as Richard Hughes at ACG who was very nice. And when Carmine became editorial director at DC, I sent him a 28-page story about a group of characters that I’d created called “The Futurians.” I actually sent the original artwork to him. (Chuckle.) It was terrible, wretched stuff, of course, but he sent it back to me and said to keep at it. Over the years Joe Kubert and various other people were very encouraging. Paul Levitz was very kind to me. Their comments kept me going.

Stroud: I think that’s one of the things lacking on the modern scene. It seems like there were opportunities in the 60’s that are just long since gone like the weekly tours of the DC offices and the lettercol people writing in and getting a foothold in the industry just by virtue of getting acquainted with the editors.

Secret Wars II (UK, 1986) #44, cover by John Byrne & Al Gordon, lettered by John Workman.

Workman: I almost hesitate to compare the time periods because there are good and bad in every time period, but here’s a story that sort of illustrates what you said. When I was working at Heavy Metal I would sometimes pop into the DC offices just to say hello or sometimes just to use the bathroom. I’d be walking up 5th Avenue and realize, “Oh, geez, I’ve got to go.” There was DC, so I’d go over there to use their bathroom. You can’t even get into DC now. You have to call up and arrange a meeting and somebody has to come down to the lobby to escort you up to the offices. It’s so very different than it used to be.

Stroud: I seem to be getting to that stage in life when I wax nostalgic for the good old days and maybe they were or weren’t, but when I’ve talked to people like Len Wein or Mike Friedrich for example and heard about their starts it just doesn’t seem like that can ever happen again.

Workman: Yeah, it’s sad. The way Bob Smith and I got started in our jobs at DC was kind of a comedy of errors that could never be repeated. We talked to Neal Adams and Dick Giordano when they were running Continuity Associates and our champion was Mike Friedrich. I can’t say enough good stuff about Mike. In many ways we owe our careers to Mike. He liked what I was doing and published stuff by me and by Bob Smith in Star*Reach and he put us in contact with Dick, and Dick said, “Well, why don’t you guys come back here. We’ve got work for you.” So, in the summer of ’75 we drove across the country to New York. I remember that Monday after we got in to town, we met Mike and Neal and Dick and Larry Hama and the whole crew there at Continuity. We went to lunch with them, and then Larry took us to Marvel where we met Archie Goodwin and Marie Severin, two of the most wonderful people ever. At first, they didn’t really have any work for us, but we hung around and talked to them for awhile and we managed to get some work from Marvel. Then Larry took us on down to DC and we talked to Sol Harrison and Joe Orlando and neither of them really had anything to offer us, but I made an appointment to come back and see Gerry Conway who was editing Plastic Man at the time. I’d started writing a Plastic Man story, and Bob had started drawing the story, and we thought we’d show it to him and see what might happen. So we came back on the day of the appointment and the receptionist told us that Gerry was in with a writer and asked if we could wait awhile, and we said, “Okay.”

Thor (1966) #357, cover by Walt Simonson, lettered by John Workman.

We were sitting there, and Bob Rozakis came around, and he and Jack Harris had also seen our stuff the week before when we’d come in, and they liked our work and thought we might have possibilities. Bob said, “Oh, you guys are back again. Who are you here to see?” I have a tendency to mumble sometimes, so I said, “Uh, Conway.” Bob said, “Oh, he’s not doing anything. Come on.” So, we followed him down the hallway right past Gerry Conway, who was in with a writer as the receptionist had said, and I wondered what was going on and I looked down to where Bob was leading us. There was an office door that read, “Carmine Infantino, Publisher.” Then it dawned on me … when I said, “Conway,” Bob thought I’d said, “Carmine.” And I stopped in the middle of the hall and Bob said, “Aw, he’s not doing anything, come on in.”

So, we went on in and were introduced to Carmine and we sat down and started showing him our stuff. Carmine had been one of my heroes since I saw the first Adam Strange stuff by him. I just felt that he was THE artist for me in many ways, and here I was sitting across from one of my heroes and he was looking over our artwork. At first, I thought he was just going to dismiss us and send us on our way, but he started looking closer at our artwork, and he told us that we reminded him of he and Frank Giacoia when they used to go around in the 40’s from place to place trying to find work. I don’t know exactly what happened. Looking back on our stuff at the time I can’t imagine he’d been that impressed, but suddenly he started calling Sol Harrison and Jack Adler and Joe into look at our stuff, and he hired us on the spot. Bob as an inker and me for the production department. It was just incredible, but it couldn’t happen now.

Stroud: Not at all, and what a great story. Talk about being in a surreal position. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like.

Workman: It was strange. We knew, of course, that he was there, but we never expected to just go in and see Carmine.

Doom Patrol (1987) #26 pg8, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: I had a slightly similar experience when I first worked up the nerve to call him on the phone. This is CARMINE INFANTINO and he’s answering the phone! (Laughter.) Still a wonderful gentleman, too, if you’ve not talked to him recently.

Workman: I talked to him last year in New York. I hadn’t talked to him in awhile before that and it’s always great talking to Carmine.

Stroud: The best. So, you got started in the production department and I presume someone must have been mentoring you along. Who did you work most closely with?

Workman: Jack Adler for the most part. Although the guy who had the most effect on the lettering I was doing was Sol Harrison. My regular lettering…I never thought it was all that great. I really learned a lot later on from Moebius when I was at Heavy Metal. Not really trying to emulate him, but trying to get a feel of the lettering that he was doing. But Sol showed me something about display lettering. He had gone to a school called Franklin K. Lane High School. I think both he and Jack had gone there, and he said one of the projects that they had to do … and this was back in the 30’s … was to do a logo of Franklin K. Lane and he showed me how if you do the thing mechanically the space between the “L” and the “A” is enormous as opposed to the space between the “A” and the “N” or the “N” and the “E,” and he told me, “Stop being so mechanical and mathematical about things. Just eyeball it. If it looks right, it is right.” And it was incredible. It really opened up a lot for me.

Stroud: It sounds like it would be quite an epiphany and sometimes the obvious is so easily missed. It kind of caught me off guard when you said Sol, because I don’t think of him in any sort of context with regard to lettering.

Workman: Well both Sol and Jack and everybody I met through the years who really…sometimes they may seem like “the men in the background,” but they had the ability to do all this other stuff. Sol had actually inked and so had Jack on DC stuff. Jack had worked over Murphy Anderson and Gil Kane on some covers. He’d done them in wash tones.

Detective Comics (1937) #475, cover by Marshall Rogers & Terry Austin, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: Yeah, I think Jack actually developed that process.

Workman: It was something that originated when he and Sol were working on the coloring of Prince Valiant in the 40’s. They tried to get painterly effects by using all kinds of different things. Pencil effects, air brush, and so forth, but yeah, Jack did all that and Sol did, too. Sol was a decent water colorist and he did a lot of coloring. Jack, of course, was a masterful colorist. There were times up there at DC when if you were really under the gun and something had to be off to the printers by the end of the day…well, I remember one issue of Warlord where Vinnie Colletta and Joe Orlando and Bob Smith were inking away and Paul Levitz was filling in blacks and (chuckle) anyone who could lend a hand on it was getting stuff done. But the ones that I admired, as I said, were the people who had a working knowledge of everything. Again, going back to what Basil Wolverton had told me to do.

Stroud: That would give you a broad enough perspective to be able to function and do those critical things that fly under the radar. Did you work much with Julie Schwartz?

Workman: A little bit. I remember the first time I actually saw Julie. He was another one of my heroes, someone I really had a lot of respect for. He printed several letters of mine over a period of years. I remember one in Green Lantern and Batman and various other titles, and when he first saw me up at DC he made a little pun of my name … Workman… something similar to what he’d done in this one Green Lantern letter column. I really liked Julie. And I really admired him. Years later, at the memorial service for Jerry Siegel, I got up and sort of nervously gave a speech there where I gently castigated DC for moving away from where I thought Superman ought to be, and almost treating it in sort of a fanzine way rather than aiming it at a mass audience. When I got down off the podium, Julie walked up to me and shook my hand and said, “How did you ever find the guts to say that?” It surprised me. I never got to know Julie as well as I would have liked, but whenever I saw him, we always had a little talk. A funny thing happened one time. Nelson Bridwell, who was a wonderful person, was Julie’s assistant when Marshall Rogers and Steve Englehart and Terry Austin were doing Batman in Detective and Nelson came into the Production Department with one of the recent Detective pages, and he said, “You see this cape on Robin? He’s just been in a fight, and the cape is torn. The cape really should be torn off, so I want you to white it out and draw in Robin’s costume there.”

Mister E (1991) #1 pg9, lettered by John Workman.

And I thought, “Oh, man, that’s a beautiful panel. Why would we want to get rid of that cape? It’s so nicely done.” And Nelson and I weren’t really arguing, but we were sort of bantering back and forth when Julie came in and he said, “What are you guys up to?” And we explained what was going on. Julie looked at the panel and he said, ‘Nelson, that cape is hanging by a single thread. See it? It’s right there.” And Nelson said, “Oh. Okay.” So, I didn’t have to take the cape off. I left it as Marshall had drawn it. (chuckle) It was Julie’s way of solving a problem.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Masterful. I imagine Nelson enjoyed much more being Julie’s assistant. Jim Shooter was telling me some horror stories about witnessing the abuse Nelson endured at the hands of Mort Weisinger.

Workman: I was kind of lucky. I met Weisinger only once, just to say “Hi.” He popped into the office one day and that was it. He was another guy that I actually admired, although I’ve heard so many terrible stories about him. But I liked what he did with Superman in the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Stroud: You can’t argue with his track record, just his methods, although I’ve heard people make mention that at that point in time to be an effective editor you had to rule with an iron fist and make those deadlines or they weren’t going to happen. But I wasn’t there.

Workman: It’s the same with me. I can only go by what people have told me. I was at a convention one time and I was talking to Kurt Schaffenberger and Murphy Anderson. Somehow, they got onto the subject of Mort Weisinger. Now, Kurt, was one of the nicest people I ever met, and he couldn’t stand Weisinger. But Murphy couldn’t bring himself to say anything bad against him. He felt that anybody who was as big a fan of science fiction as Weisinger was couldn’t be all bad. (Mutual laughter.)

Stroud: Did you work very closely with Joe Orlando?

Tiger Ingwe (1975) #1, lettered by John Workman.

Workman: Quite a bit. I worked closer with Joe than I did with anybody else at DC. I really liked Joe. He was a wonderful person. Joe worked all the time. He freelanced constantly, and when Bob and I first showed him our stuff, he appeared to be half asleep. He really was at the time he was looking at our artwork, but I got to know him pretty well. He and John Albano made some sort of a deal with a publisher from South Africa and they were, on the side, producing comics aimed primarily at a black audience there. One of them was sort of a Tarzan character called Tiger Ingwe, set in the 1700’s or 1800’s. The other one was a modern-day superhero character. Maybe three or four times a month, I would meet Joe up at his mother-in-law’s place, along with John after a full day of working on-staff at DC, and we would put together these books. John and Joe wrote the stories and there were at least a couple of them where I did the layouts, and then they were sent to the Philippines where a lot of the artists who were also working for DC would do the art. Then they would send the finished pages back and Joe and I would do the art corrections on them and any lettering corrections that had to be done before they were sent off to the publisher in South Africa.

I remember one time when John got a little bit miffed at me and Joe because we got to talking about the old EC days, and John was trying to re-write a line of dialogue and make it better than it was. But every time he would toss out a line of dialogue to us, we’d say, “Oh, no, no, no, that doesn’t really work.” Then we’d go back to talking about Bill Gaines and EC and all that. Finally, John got so miffed with us that he uttered this expletive-not-deleted line of dialogue and it just cracked all of us up, and Joe laughed and laughed, and we actually got worried about him because he was turning red and laughing and he had heart problems and we thought, “Great Scott, he’s going to have a heart attack right here!” He finally calmed down, but the whole thing really caught him off guard, John coming out with this totally unusable line of dialogue. But it was really funny. Joe also worked, on the side, for National Lampoon during its early years. Jack Adler did, too and a lot of other DC people were involved with Lampoon. With Joe, there was one thing that was kind of sad. I think he was making…this would have been in the late ‘60s or early ‘70’s … he was making something like $16,000.00 or $18,000.00 on staff at DC as an editor, and then he made more money, of course, as a freelancer. But the Lampoon guys liked what he was doing so much that they offered him a share in the company if he would stay there. But because he had that definite money coming in from DC, he turned them down. Five years later what would have been Joe’s share was worth a million dollars, and he’d turned them down on it.

Mother Panic Gotham A.D. (2018) #1 pg18, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: Wow!

Workman: I’d once done this thing that really impressed Joe. It was an attempt to fill in on a strip that Jeff Jones had been doing for the Lampoon. He and Matty Simmons had had an argument. Matty was the head of Lampoon, so this strip that Jeff was doing for Lampoon, this one-pager, wasn’t in there any more. I thought, “Well, they need something to replace that with.” So, I created this little character and did a page as a sample, and I showed it to Joe and he loved it, and he immediately gave me an 8-page story to ink that was drawn by Romeo Tanghal. It ultimately appeared in Unexpected. I enjoyed inking it, and I still had some thought at that time of being an inker. I had inked two weeks’ worth of dailies and a couple of Sunday strips that were for a proposed syndicated comic strip that Bob Kane was doing, so I lettered and inked that. And there was a book published by The Culver Company. I don’t know if you remember those. There were given out in schools. Books on banking and electricity…

Stroud: Yeah, I think I do. In fact, I was wracking my brain recently trying to remember one from when I was a kid about the specter of inflation and supply and demand and I thought, “I wonder where those came from?”

Workman: A fellow named Mac Culver and his son Brennan did them. Mac was the one that started the company way back when. They used Chic Stone and Kurt Shaffenberger, and I inked one of those books that Kurt had drawn and it was great fun. Kurt was the first guy whose original artwork I’d seen. Back in 1962, my friend Jack Adams had written to Weisinger, asking for a drawing of Lois Lane. He really liked Lois, and I did, too and to his surprise they sent him a whole page of artwork from an upcoming issue and it was drawn and inked by Kurt. But here I was inking Kurt and it was easy, because Kurt had put in everything. All I had to do was actually ink it and try to give it something of a feeling of Kurt’s own inks.

Stroud: Real tight pencil work, then.

Detective Comics (1937) #463, cover by Ernie Chan, lettered by John Workman.

Workman: Yeah. One strange thing, though. There was one panel with a figure with no hand, so I tried to be Kurt and draw in that missing hand. Those things happen. I remember a story about Neal bragging to Julie Schwartz that everything he ever drew was artistically correct and anatomically right and all, and the timing must have been wonderful. According to the story I heard, Julie said, “Oh, what about this?” And he showed Neal this page that he had just turned in where Neal had six fingers on a guy’s hand.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Workman: So … things like that do happen.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. When you’re battling a deadline it’s amazing to me that anything comes out coherent at all. When you were doing lettering, I’m still trying to figure out the exact process or sequence of events. At what point is the lettering done on a page?

Workman: After the penciling. This is another thing that’s changed quite a bit. Traditionally the story was written as a script, almost in play form. The only company that does things a little different is Archie. Those stories are actually drawn. Even though the writer maybe cannot draw, they’ll use stick figures and they’re actually drawn out on 8.5x11 bond paper, and they’re handed over to the artist who translates the sketches to the actual final artwork. It’s a method that Harvey Kurtzman used a lot, and so did Archie Goodwin. I always did my stuff that way, too, just in figuring out the story that I wanted to tell. I would draw it up in these little sketchy sort of things on typing paper first and then I knew where everything had to go. It’s a great way of working. But for most comics it’s usually a full script … except for those done in the "Marvel method"; where there is a short premise rather than a formal script …and then it’s handed over to the penciler who goes through the script and translates it into a series of pictures. The script might say, “Panel 1: Superman is flying over Metropolis,” and you draw Superman flying over Metropolis and because the dialogue and the narration are in the script, the penciler…and this is going back a little ways… had the ability to incorporate that lettering into the overall design of the panel and the page, whether it meant actually roughly lettering the stuff in or putting in a box or a circle indicating that a balloon goes there. They had some measure of control over how the final page would look.

Detective Comics (1937) #482 cover by Rich Buckler & Dick Giordano, lettered by John Workman.

I was always happy about this. It meant that the guy had allowed space for the lettering, and if he’d maybe bungled a little bit on the positioning of the ballooning … maybe it would be better to move it over a little bit, that type of thing … at least there was something there to kind of go by. Nowadays, if there’s any spotting of balloons at all, it’s usually handled by an assistant editor. A lot of the balloon positioning is not very well done. I’ve seen them put stuff right over an important character or over the hands of the character or something like that when there’s a perfectly big blank space that the lettering could go into.

Stroud: I wonder if this gives credibility to make editors out of artists due to the visual aesthetic and understanding of the whole medium.

Workman: I always thought that way, too. I thought that DC really had something going when Dick Giordano and all these people who really understood art were given editorial positions. People like Mike Sekowsky, who also became an editor and Joe, too, obviously. And this takes us into something that is kind of a sad thing. When Bob and I got our jobs at DC in 1975 we were in our 20’s, and here are all these guys mostly twice our age who’d lived most of their lives in the New York area, but I don’t really think they understood the rest of the country. And there were changes taking place that were really affecting comics and comic sales throughout the rest of the country. A lot of little Mom and Pop stores that were the backbone of the comics and magazine distribution were disappearing. It wasn’t quite as bad as it became later where Wal-Mart came in and 40 little businesses went out, but you could see the writing on the wall and I don’t think they’d really comprehended this. They were doing things sometimes…well, Batman was still relatively big. The sales had dropped on Batman and every other comic after the TV show had run its course in 1968, but if an editor wanted to jazz up sales a little bit, they’d toss Batman into a comic. But that wasn’t working as well as it had. and they really didn’t understand what was going on in the rest of the country.

Stroud: That would certainly handicap things.

Doom Patrol (1987) #26 pg12, lettered by John Workman.

Workman: Not only that, they were moving toward what became the direct market. I remember Phil Seuling coming up to DC, and Phil was a wonderful guy. I really miss him. He understood what a good secondary market the comic shops could be, and it’s become the direct market now, which is really the only market in many ways. I am happy that they’re getting graphic novels out to bookstores and all that, but the regular monthly comics are still pretty much only found in comic shops, and they used to be everywhere. They realized that the newsstand market, where you went into a drugstore and there would be a spinner rack of comics and a whole bunch of magazines and all and that was going through a lot of changes with stores beginning to disappear. I’m sure that there are still 100,000 outlets for magazines around the country. Down by quite a bit, but still way up and beyond the direct market. But they decided to turn inward to the fans and sort of forget about everyone else. I remember out in Aberdeen where I grew up, I’ll bet you could find fifty outlets for comics within easy walking distance at the time. Now, or at least the last time I was out there, they were all gone. If you want comics you have to do some real traveling in order to get to where you might find a comic shop.

Stroud: Yeah. It certainly requires a determined effort now. As you mentioned, there used to be opportunities for an impulse buy, but that’s certainly no longer the case. I know I certainly patronized a lot of spinner racks. Speaking of such, I saw one on eBay awhile back and it was going for quite a tidy sum. It’s become that much of a fondly remembered relic. (Chuckle)

Workman: I remember when Jack talked some guy in some drugstore into giving him one of those little plastic things that they had attached to the spinner rack that said DC Comics on it. He got one for him and one for me and I ran across mine just the other day.

Stroud: It’s probably got a lot higher value than it did when it was handed to you. (Mutual laughter.) I was digging through my collection and you mentioned Kurt Shaffenberger earlier and I don’t know whether to mention him or C.C. Beck, but you did a pretty nice homage to one or both of them with that back-cover Captain Marvel thing you did on the back of The Amazing World of DC Comics No. 17.

Amazing World of DC Comics #17, back cover by John Workman.

Workman: I’d forgotten about that. I was real happy with that. Captain Marvel is my favorite superhero character. I’ve got about a third of the Captain Marvel issues and a batch of Whiz Comics and Marvel Family and all, but I always loved the post-war Captain Marvel stuff. Same with the Spirit. I thought that was the best time period for the character too. When Eisner got back from World War Two and you saw what he’d learned really being put into the strip and the same with the Captain Marvel stuff around 1946, 1947 and 1948 it was just incredibly good. and I wanted to do something along that line. I knew at the time, too, that they were changing Captain Marvel, trying to do something a little more realistic. I think Alan Weiss was doing the artwork on it, and it just didn’t seem to be Captain Marvel to me. That’s why I wanted to do a sort of last hurrah there with what I thought of as the actual Captain Marvel.

Stroud: It turned out beautifully and if you hadn’t actually signed the thing, I would have suspected that it was something C.C. Beck had done. It was very, very true to the character.

Workman: Well, the original to that is in the living room in the house here. I’ve got a few originals hanging around. There’s a Frank Thorne one that I wrote and he drew for Playboy and a few others. Somebody saw the Captain Marvel at a party we had a couple of years ago, and they thought it was a Beck original.

Stroud: What higher compliment could there be?

Workman: (Chuckle.) It made me feel good. I think Bob Smith told me about this. I can’t remember who was looking at it, but he said, “No, look down in the corner there.” The guy saw my little signature and that was that.

Stroud: Was it specifically meant to be the back cover here or was that just luck of the draw?

Thor (1966) #354, cover by Walt Simonson, lettered by John Workman.

Workman: I can’t remember who was overseeing Amazing World of DC then, but he asked if I wanted to do a Captain Marvel back cover, and I said, “Sure.” At first, I thought about just doing a drawing, but I’ve never been very good at that. I always liked multiple images. They’re really much easier for me to do than one single image, so I decided to do a little story rather than just a picture of Captain Marvel jumping or something.

Stroud: Yeah, just a straight pin up or something. It seemed like back in the day that was sort of an artists’ trick, if you will to do maybe a full-size image to maximize the page rate for the day or something. I notice you’ve been a frequent collaborator with Walt Simonson. Was that by luck or design?

Workman: I was still out in Washington when Walt was doing Manhunter with Archie Goodwin, and I thought that was just fantastic. It had a dynamic quality to it and the artwork was very personal and of course no one else draws quite the way that Walt does. When I came back here and started working at DC, he was one of the first guys I met, and I think I did the production work…I don’t believe I lettered it… but there was a Metal Men that he had done and I thought, “Oh, wow! This is just fantastic!” I still have it. Gerry Conway, I think, had written it and there was an appearance in there of Tina (Platinum) several pages in, and there she is sitting and looking really cute, and she said something that the Comics Code Authority would not allow. I can’t remember the exact line, but I Xeroxed that panel before re-lettering it. (Laughter.) It was something that would make the Authority a little happier. And I loved the way that Walt did Doc Magnus’s suit. The coat of his suit had a lot of cross-hatching. It was not in perspective at all. But it worked. It was an unrealistic way of drawing, but it gave it a sense of design that really worked beautifully. I lettered Walt on a Captain Fear story in a backup in one of the war books. I can’t even remember which book it was in. That was about the time I went over to Heavy Metal. For that one, Walt did the balloons himself. He’s a really good letterer. He lettered different things back then, including a Howard Chaykin Iron Wolf. I’d forgotten about this Captain Fear thing, and somebody from DC called up and said, “You haven’t billed us for this yet.” So, I billed them, and the time had passed since I’d lettered it, and they’d raised the rate by a dollar. So, I made a dollar more per page by waiting a year or so. (Mutual laughter.)

Alien: The Illustrated Story (1979) by Archie Goodwin & Walt Simonson, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: Not bad.

Workman: Thinking all the time.

Stroud: Foresight.

Workman: When Carmine was out at DC, he went over to Warren and did a ton of artwork over there, being inked by everybody. Dick Giordano inked him over there, and I think Alex Nino inked one of the Carmine pencil jobs. So, did a lot of different people, including Walt, and I was really impressed with what Walt had done over Carmine. Later, I was given the assignment at Heavy Metal of putting together a team to do a comics version of Alien, the movie. I read the script to Alien and thought, “Oh, wow! This is great! It’s going to go over huge!” My first thought for an artist was Carmine. I thought Carmine penciling and Walt Simonson inking would be perfect. Walt would give it that rough look and everything and Carmine would have that sense of design. Oh, man! I thought I might write it myself, just using the script to go by and I called up Carmine. His phone was busy. So, I thought, “Well, while I’m waiting for Carmine to get off the phone, I’ll give Walt a call and see what he thinks about inking Carmine.” So, I talked to Walt and he said, “Well, I don’t know if I’d want to ink Carmine for 64 pages. How about if I do both pencils and inks?” We wound up with Walt handling the complete art job, and Walt brought in Archie Goodwin to handle the writing, and I just stood back and let ‘em go. They did a fantastic job. Now I’m so proud of that book and of them because it was, as far as I know, the first comic, the first graphic novel, to be on the New York Times bestseller list. It stayed there for seven weeks.

Stroud: Outstanding. I guess when you bring that kind of talent together, as you say, just get out of the way and let them do what they do.

Workman: Archie brought so many other things to it. I really disliked the Alien movie poster. It made me think of a bunch of eggs sitting around at a supermarket and it really didn’t tell you anything. I wanted to have this big word “Alien” there and I’d already worked up a star field as a background for an ad that I’d done. I showed it to Archie and after thinking for about two seconds, Archie said, “Why don’t we drop some tentacles down from the word “Alien” and have them encircle the ship?” I thought, “That’s wonderful! It tells the story visually, and it works really well.” So, Walt went home that night and drew the tentacles dropping down and we put it all together, and some of the people at 20th Century-Fox were unhappy about it because Archie had outdone all their creation-by-committee concepts. His idea told the story better than their poster did.

An interior page from Alien: The Illustrated Story, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Oh, boy. What’s the old saying? No statues have ever been erected to a committee? That’s another great story I’ve heard about Archie. It sounds like he was a brilliant and beloved man.

Workman: He was a wonderful guy. After I was out at Heavy Metal, he called up and I had lunch with him, and he asked me to bring my portfolio along. So I did, and he saw a 3-page story that I was working on. It was something I’d come up with on my own without having any idea who I might sell it to, and he said, “I like this. Do you think you could do it for Epic?” I said, “Sure, why not?” He didn’t give me a deadline, which was a mistake right there (chuckle) and the months passed.

Fantastic Four (1961) #285, cover by John Byrne, lettered by John Workman.

We used to have these summer parties and Cathy, my wife, really enjoyed putting them on. Attending them were lots of comics creators, along with policemen and ministers and all sorts of other ordinary people. She always said, “We should have had people sign their autographs over the years and we should have taken more photographs.” Anyway, Archie and his wife, Ann came out for one of the parties, and Archie had this hangdog look on his face when he came in. I asked what was wrong, and he said, “They just canceled Epic.” I thought, “Oh, Geez, I like Epic. That’s too bad.” But he was thinking of the 3-page story because that meant that there was really no place for it. I said, “Oh, that’s okay.” Just the idea that Archie Goodwin would think some of my stuff was worth printing was enough for me. It would have been nice to have had it printed, but still…

Stroud: A high compliment for certain. I notice that both you and Tom Orzechowski had pretty long runs on the Savage Dragon book. Did you enjoy that assignment?

Workman: Yeah. That was great fun. Erik Larsen. He’s still a fan after all these years, and he and I often talked about Captain Marvel. He loves Captain Marvel, too. I was brought in on Savage Dragon when Tom had other things to do, or something. I worked on it for awhile there, and then it got to the point where I had too much work and something had to give. That’s what gave. But I really enjoyed it, and Erik’s a great guy. We had the most wonderful discussions about comic characters and about the business, and I still see him occasionally. I saw him either last year or the year before in North Carolina at the Heroes Convention. Just a great guy.

Stroud: When you approach special effects, how do you go about that?

Workman: I used to do it very mechanically and I still do some things like that, but Walt called up one time when we were both working on Thor and he said, “I want you to try something.” I said, “Okay.” Walt said, “Go look at Johnny Hart’s sound effects.” And I did, and they seemed totally inappropriate for most comic books. Walt said, “Try it on a couple of things on Thor.” So I did and I couldn’t believe how it worked. So there I was stealing from Johnny Hart. I’ve been doing it ever since. (Chuckle.) Sometimes I do the more mechanical, almost over-intellectualized sound effects and other times I go for a Johnny Hart bit.

Mister E (1991) #1 pg10, lettered by John Workman.

I’ve also done things with markers, where I will just rough in with the marker and kind of translate that to the page. I actually put it on a light table and trace it off and that’s made for some interesting looks to sound effects. Especially if it’s something real organic. It works very well. If it’s a “Ping!” …metal hitting metal, I’ll go a little more mechanical with that sort of thing. If it’s a “Baroom!” sound effect or “Blam!” … something like that, I’ll go with Johnny Hart. There are a million ways to approach all this. None of them is really right and none of them is really wrong, but I do have a lot of fun working on Walt’s stuff.

Stroud: I suppose that’s one of the beauties of what you do. Maybe no two things are ever quite the same and it gives you a chance to continue to be creative with something that, at least on the surface, would appear to be kind of mundane.

Workman: Well, I’ve been doing a lot of what I call my hybrid lettering where I will letter a book or a story by hand and then I’ll scan it in and place that stuff on scans of the artwork. It works pretty well because you get this freehand look with the lettering, but I’ve been going a little bit nuts over the past year or so. I couldn’t help myself. After scanning in the lettering and enlarging it on the screen, I’d think, “Oh, that “L” is leaning a little bit. I’d better fix it.” I’d be going through it letter by letter on the computer with the letters nine inches high and of course it was ridiculous, and most of it didn’t really matter, but it was eating up a lot of time. Cliff Chang and a couple of the guys at a website called “Comic Geek Speak” …where they do these wonderful interviews…wondered if it was possible to actually letter directly on the computer. I’d done a few minor things where I’d need a word that I’d left out of the original lettering, so I’d letter it directly into the computer, and everything worked out fine, So I began to think, “Maybe I should try this lettering on the computer.” Well, I did the directly-on- computer lettering on a story for Titan over in England. I’ve been working for them lately. And it worked out perfectly. It’s hand lettering, but it’s done on the computer, and it looks like hand lettering and it’s much more interesting because of that. It looks better than straight computer-generated lettering. And that allows me to just letter it in the same way I would if I were lettering right on the art boards. I don’t have to worry about second-guessing myself and playing around with all this lettering. And corrections are easy to do. I do it, and it’s done.

Young Justice: Our Worlds At War (2001) #1 pg14, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: With the popularity of computer-based fonts, is the lettering profession dying?

Workman: Only in that it’s left a lot of people out in the cold. DC and Marvel have both gone one step further than what I thought would happen. They aren’t just using computer lettering … they’re doing in-house computer lettering. So, they have a bunch of people there who do the lettering for them. It’s economically good for them in one way. They were spending a huge amount of money sending artwork by way of FedEx to the letterer, and then from there to the inker. Now some of it is done where it’s scanned in and sent to the inker by way of the computer. The inker can then print it out as non-repro blue and ink it and then send it on to the company either in the form of the original art or as a scanned image. In either case, the lettering is done at the company and ultimately added to a scan of the black-line art. There are advantages and disadvantages to it, but the big disadvantage is that the lettering has a bland look to it. There is one guy up at DC … Jared Fletcher … who worked on The Spirit, and he really went above and beyond the call of duty with what he was doing. It looked not exactly hand-lettered, but it was more individual than other lettering. The guy really knows what he’s doing. I admire what he’s doing with computer lettering. But it is still type, really, when you think about it.

I became aware of the limitation of type years ago. There are things you can do with it, but … well, I remember that at Heavy Metal I was very proud of an interview with Francis Ford Coppola. When we printed it, I set things up so that the first part of it was hand-done, and then it went into type, and I played with type throughout the whole thing, but still it’s so limited … what you can do with that. I know there was a thing that Dell Comics did back in the early 60’s, when they gave some thought to getting rid of letterers and just setting everything in their comics in type. They had in-house typesetting for their paperbacks and things like that, so they thought they might as well take advantage of that and set type for the comics. They did a six-month test wherein they took a handful of comics and typeset those rather than hand lettering them. And, you know, the sales on every one of them went down. Because it really affected the look of the whole thing.

Thor (1966) #396, cover by Ron Frenz & Brett Breeding, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: Yes. I’m sure you’ve seen the same examples that I have, but back on Steve Ditko’s early Blue Beetle run at Charlton they were using a mechanical method to letter with something called the Typositer machine and they literally at various points had to do a dash and finish the word on the next line and it was a dramatic example of how important good lettering is to the visual experience of a comic book.

Workman: Harvey Kurtzman hated the Leroy-lettering at EC. There were this guy and his wife who had worked for Bill Gaines’s father and did all the Wonder Woman lettering. It was all Leroy-lettered. It’s a type of mechanical lettering that’s done with a sort of a stylus, and all the letters have no difference between them. It was used a lot in drafting. But here it was in comics. I actually kind of liked it. I thought it gave the EC’s a unique look, but part of that was the fact that this fellow and his wife would do only the lettering itself. The titles, the sound effects, and the balloons were done by the individual artists, so you’d get these beautiful brush balloons done by Wally Wood where he didn’t ink it with a pen. He used a brush. Then there’d be a big, drippy Graham Ingels balloon and the sort of free-floating wonderful things that Al Williamson did. That uniform lettering actually helped to magnify the individuality of the artist’s style. But Kurtzman hated it. When he got a little say in things up there, he brought in Ben Oda to hand letter the stuff that he worked on.

Stroud: Frank Springer told me a great story about Ben. He said that Ben must not have slept and he had the keys to the places of a lot of the artists and he’d show up at all hours of the day to knock out a few things and Frank said, “Perhaps it’s a good thing Ben’s not with us any more because he probably could have written a tell-all that would have had all of us heading for the hills.” (Mutual laughter.)

Workman: You’ll have to talk to Irwin Hasen. He’s got a great story about that exact thing with Ben. Bob LeRose told me a story about the time when Bob used to work for Johnstone & Cushing and an 18-year-old Neal Adams was there doing wonderful stuff. Ben lettered a lot for them, and Bob was once awakened by a phone ringing at 3 in the morning. It was Ben, who’d been locked in the building. He’d stayed in there and was working, and he couldn’t get out. So Bob drove into town and rescued Ben. (Laughter.) Ben was also an incredible athlete. He was, I guess, almost a professional level bowler. His sons made part of their college tuition by bowling, they did so well. He was also very good at basketball. He was about my height, 5’6” or 5’7” and I remember one time the DC guys were in Central Park and we were playing a warm-up baseball game. It was Steve Mitchell, me and Bob Rozakis and Jack Harris and all these guys in their 20’s, but the two best athletes on the team were Ben Oda and Bob LeRose, both of whom were in their 50’s. It was really something to see.

Silver Surfer (1987) #1 pg10, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: That’s the first I’d ever heard of that. Wonderful. Speaking of legendary letterers, did you know Gaspar at all?

Workman: Just to say hello to him. He’s my all-time favorite letterer. I’m in awe, looking at his stuff. It’s got such personality and bounce to it. I’d see him up at the office and we’d say hello. I didn’t know him well, but I always admired him.

Stroud: It seems that when you were hand lettering, and perhaps still do to a certain extent, if it wasn’t too terribly copy heavy how long did it usually take to crank out a page?

Workman: The average is close to an hour. There are 15-minute pages and half hour pages and there are two-hour pages. I remember working on a Vertigo book a few years ago and it averaged 500 words per page, which is something like twice or just over twice the normal average and I decided to letter it in italic because I could go a little faster that way. I’d also found out…I don’t know who had done these, but a lot of the Justice League’s from back in the 60’s, were lettered in italic. And I thought, “Who did that? Why did they do that? It works.” So, I went back and took a look at them, and I found that the lettering moved the story along faster. It made it work better somehow. I would never have thought of that, but when these Vertigo ones came along with 500 words to a page I went ahead and did them in italic, and I thought it worked well.

Stroud: You’d need any kind of advantage on something like that.

Workman: I’m working on a thing right now with Tommy Lee Edwards and Jonathon Ross. Jonathan has been a critic and a TV host and all that, but he’d never written a comic before. He loves comics and he put together that “In Search of Steve Ditko” documentary for the BBC.

Stroud: I saw that.

Marvel 1985 (2008) #1 pg6, lettered by John Workman.

Workman: I really enjoyed that. And Tommy, with the artwork that he does, is a big believer in having the lettering. in place. Walt has said this, too. When I would send artwork back to Walt that I’d lettered, he’d get it and he’d say, “Ah. Now it looks like comics.” Because before the lettering was added, the art was a group of individual illustrations. Both Walt and Tommy really feel that the balloons and the placements of them are very important and that the lettering should be there when it‘s time to ink the penciled art. The situation shouldn’t exist that after the artwork is all done, the balloons are just sort of tossed on top. I certainly agree with that. Back to the thing that we’re working on right now … as I said before, Jonathan had never written a comic before, and he got, not really verbose, because everything that’s there in terms of the dialogue and the narration needs to be there. But there’s a lot of it. But it’s good, solid writing and when people buy the book, they’re not going to sit there for five minutes and blow through the book. It’s going to take some time to read, and they’re going to get their money’s worth just for the amount of reading material alone. It’s been interesting trying to make it all work well and not look squeezed. I found myself having fun with it. It’s really a joy doing the stuff. It’s well written and not redundant and overwritten. Everything that’s there should be there; there’s just plenty of it. I wasn’t sitting there grousing while I was lettering it, because it’s just been so enjoyable to do, even though it did take longer than most comic pages do.

Stroud: I see where you were honored with a Harvey recently. Congratulations on that achievement. Was it for a specific project?

Workman: That was for another Tommy Lee Edwards thing. He and Mark Millar, a wonderful guy and a really good writer did a book for Marvel called 1985. It was set in 1985, but on a real world where the Marvel characters were comic book characters, and the Marvel world and this real world overlapped in the story. I’m not really describing it as well as it should be described. It was a wonderful book, and Tommy did this fantastic artwork, and the writing was good and solid, and … anyway, I got the Harvey award for the lettering on it. I knew I was nominated, but I didn’t expect to win. Cathy and I thought about going down to Baltimore for that convention, and then we changed our minds. Then the convention people called us and said, “Can you come?” By then we’d set up other things. I didn’t think there was a chance of winning the award, but it was nice to get it. It’s a thing where other people in the business are voting on it and there’s something wonderful about that.

Swamp Thing (1972) #24, cover by Joe Orlando, logo by John Workman.

Stroud: I’m sure it would carry a lot more weight to be recognized by your peers. At the risk of re-plowing the ground, I know Todd Klein recently covered some of your logo designs on his blog, but I wondered if you’d describe the process just a little bit.

Workman: I remember that the first logo I did for DC was a re-working of the Action Comics logo and I thought, “Great Scott! I’m destroying something iconic here.” But I kept as much of the feel of the old one as I could. Generally, what happened back then was Sol Harrison or Joe Orlando or someone would come to me and say, “We want you to do a logo for this or that,” and they usually had a rough version of their logo idea, and they would hand me that rough and I would kind of stick with what they had, but try to add my own style to it. Some of the logos that I did, and I think it’s mentioned on Todd’s blog, I considered to be “holding logos.” They were something we’d use maybe for just an ad, but they wouldn’t really be on the final book. There were several of them that I did that they’d say, “Oh, yeah, this is fine,” and those logos wound up on the final book. Then there were a few that I did that I just thought were horrible. I’ll have to partially blame Joe Orlando for this one, but there was a Swamp Thing logo. On Swamp Thing the sales were dropping and Joe figured, “Well, a new logo will jazz things up a bit.” What he came up with … and I followed his rough on that … was something like a 1950’s flying saucer comic, and it was just totally inappropriate for Swamp Thing, I remember hoping that when Joe saw my finished version, he’d throw it in the trash. Then they used it and I always felt bad about that. I didn’t think it served the character well.

Stroud: Well, how could you ever improve upon that original one that Gaspar did? I sure wouldn’t have wanted to try it. (Chuckle.)

Workman: I don’t think there’s ever been a logo that really, to such a degree, told the story of the character the way that one did. It was wonderful. I felt so bad about being the guy who displaced that one.

Stroud: Well, I don’t think they’re using it any more and up until recently I doubt very many knew who got the credit. (Mutual laughter.)

Wild Dog (1987) #1, lettered by John Workman.

Workman: A wise move to ditch it.

Stroud: Do you have particular tools you prefer to use for your trade, John?

Workman: I’ve always liked Castell pens. I used to use rapidographs. I’ve tried everything. Speedball pens and all that sort of stuff. By the time I got back here, I was using different types of rapidographs to do most of my lettering. One day, I was walking near the Museum of Modern Art and there used to be an art store there, and in the window, there was a sign that said, “New, Castell PG Pens! Four dollars!” So I figured, “Well, that sounds interesting,” and I went in and bought a few. Well, that night I was lettering something. I would take work home with me when I was working at DC. Actually, most of the guys did that and made more money doing freelance work than they did on staff. So that night I was lettering a story, and the rapidograph that I was using literally fell apart in my hand. They had a tendency to do that, I’d noticed. I thought, “Well, let’s try one of those new Castell pens that I picked up today.” I did that, and it worked beautifully. With the rapidographs, you had to sort of hold the pen in one position while the Castells could be moved around, and I really liked them. Of course, they aren’t being made any more.

Stroud: Naturally.

Workman: I think it’s been at least 10 years now since the last one was made. I’m still finding them around here and there, and I’ve got a ton of them. Maybe enough to last me until I keel over one of these days. (Mutual laughter.) Todd bought a whole bunch of them out of Germany. He’s been using them, too, for a long time. So, we’ve got enough for a while. But that brings up another sad story about things happening over the years. The ink, the paper, the brushes, they’re not what they used to be. I think the best example of this involves Al Williamson. A few years back, he drew and I lettered a Flash Gordon mini-series for Marvel, and it was beautiful. He had penciled it and inked it, and he had sent it to me with the balloon areas open. He’s got such a good knowledge of that sort of thing that it was perfectly exact. It was amazing. I lettered the stuff, and I didn’t have to white out anything. He’d left exactly the amount of space needed, but he’d drawn it on some paper he’d bought 25 years before. When he’d gotten the paper, he’d thought, “Well, this paper isn’t all that hot,” and he had just set it aside. But 25 years went by and all the paper was so bad and any other paper that he could get a hold of was just useless, so he went and used this 25-year-old paper. Think about that …stuff that he didn’t like very much, by the time those years had gone by was so much better than anything he could have gotten.

Thor (1966) #363, cover by Walt Simonson, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: I’m reminded of Russ Heath, I think it was, who had one of the same laments when I spoke with him. He said something to the effect that, “If I could get a decent brush that would hold a little ink, I’d be so much happier.”

Workman: I used to go into art stores and they’d have the little cup of water there and you’d get your Windsor-Newton brush and dip it in and see if it would come to a sharp point and Windsor-Newton was always a bit expensive, but worth it. You’d find maybe one out of 20 that wasn’t any good and now, the last time I checked anyway, unless they’ve improved things, it was down to about half of them that were not up to snuff. It’s true of ink, too. I’ve had shared problems with Tom Orzechowski and others when it comes to trying to get ink that works well. It’s changed so much. I heard this story that someone had told me about ink. I don’t know if it’s true. Let me make that clear up front. But someone told me that they changed the formula for Pelican Ink, which I’d been using for over 30 years, because kids were carving into their own arms these designs, and they would pour in Pelican Ink. And I guess … at least at that time … there was a certain toxicity to it. So, in order to not become victims of a lawsuit, Pelican changed their ink formula. Again, I can’t swear that’s true. I actually sent an e-mail to Pelican to inquire about it and they said, “Oh, its got to be the paper that you’re using.” But the last two big bottles of Pelican I got were unusable, they were so bad. They were like gray water.

Stroud: Bad paper. That sounds like a cop-out. I was going to run this by you: If you were to take over one of the current mainstream books and you had your choice, which one would it be?

Workman: Well, Captain Marvel has always been my favorite. I wouldn’t mind doing some Captain Marvel stuff. There is that one kind of oddball one out there. Billy Batson and the Power of Shazam or something like that. I’ve always wanted to draw a Batman story. This is another thing with me: I really like short stuff. One page, two pages. Up to 8 pages, maybe. Anything longer than that, and I start to get really antsy and I want to move on to something else. I don’t even know if I’d even be capable of doing a full 22 or 24-page comic each month. I’d be able to write and ink one, but I don’t know if I’d be able to actually sit there and pencil something like that. The longest thing that I did … back in the 70’s there was a fellow named Ed Goldstein who used to work for Archie Comics years ago. He’d gone off to California, and he’d bought up several men’s magazines.

An ad for “The Adventures of Roma” by John Workman. — An ad for “***The Adventures of Roma***” by John Workman.

Topper, I think was one of them and I can’t recall the others. They were all mostly started in the 50’s when it became evident that Playboy was really raking in a lot of money, and so they were sort of Playboy rip-offs. I did some comics stuff for Ed Goldstein. A strip called “Sindy.” It was a science fiction one, and another one called “The Fallen Angels,” which was a humor one about these two twin sisters. I enjoyed working on those. They were four pages in each issue. Most of the Fallen Angel ones were individual 4-page stories. I did do a 3-parter with 12 pages all told. Sindy was a continuing series. I guess I did maybe 50 or 60 pages of Sindy stuff, but by the end of it I was going from one style to another just trying to find something interesting. This goes back to what we were saying about an artist not really knowing what’s good or bad or what people like or what they don’t. One time, I put off doing one of the Fallen Angel things, and I got to the point where I had to get it done. I had something like 24 hours to do it. So, in one night I sat down and wrote and penciled and lettered and inked four pages and sent them off the next day, and I thought they stunk. I thought it was the worst drivel I’d ever done, and I expected the editor to kill me. He called me up when he got them, and to my surprise, he said, “This is wonderful! This is the sort of thing I’d been hoping for!” And I thought, “What?” Because I’d thought it was just wretched. I don’t know if he’d wanted an underground look to it or what, but I’d churned the stuff out and thought I’d done a lousy job, but the guy loved it. But on a regular series, I really don’t think I’d be able to do that. Maybe if I really plowed in and it was the only thing I was doing. Just with the lettering, being able to jump from one thing to another and back to the first one and changing styles as more pages come in and all, it’s a constant bouncing around from one thing to another, but the artwork…. I did do a thing for Dark Horse back in the late 80’s or early 90’s that I always kind of liked. It was 41 pages spread out over 4 issues, so it was usually 10 pages an issue. I really enjoyed it until about the third part of it, and I was also badly affected by the reaction to it. People seemed to like it, but there was this one reader who just hated it. It wasn’t that they hated the artwork or anything. They hated the character. It sort of affected me badly, and I thought parts of the last episode weren’t up to what they could have been. I always admired Jack Kirby. I was flown out to Los Angeles to see Outland, which was kind of a minor science fiction movie starring Sean Connery and we were doing the comics version at Heavy Metal. The Ladd Company produced it, and they were really pushing Jack Kirby to do the artwork on the adaptation for the comics version of the film. So, I got to meet Jack and Roz Kirby and he was a wonderful, wonderful guy. I expected somebody 8 feet tall based on his characters and all.

Thor (1966) #395, cover by Ron Frenz & Brett Breeding, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Workman: I knew that wasn’t actually the case, but in person we saw eye-to-eye. We were about the same height. We talked about a lot of stuff, and to my great surprise he started talking about something he called “knock letters.” I didn’t know what he meant at first, and he explained that it’s people knocking your efforts in the letters that they write. I didn’t say it, but I thought, “But you’re Jack Kirby! You shouldn’t be paying attention to what some 13-year old kid has to say about the way you draw fingers or something.” It really surprised me that, at that point in his career, he could still be affected by something derogatory that somebody had said about his stuff.

Stroud: He certainly had nothing to prove at that point. Wow!

Workman: It was a big surprise. But, what a wonderful guy! And Roz was so nice. It was just a great experience, being able to spend a little time with them. We went in then and saw the first half of the movie in color, pretty much finished, and then we were shuttled in a car to another screening room and were shown the last half of the movie in black-and-white with none of the special effects finished. It was just a great time.

Stroud: It sounds terrific. I saw an interesting notation on your Wikipedia entry. You’ve done a little acting, have you?

Workman: Oh, that was just a hokey little thing, really. My brother was looking around for some work at one point. He’s actually a more than decent actor, and he signed on with this group that did crowd scenes and that sort of thing for movies, and he got a call one Saturday and he then called me up and said, “I’ve got to be in Brooklyn at 9 o’clock.” So, I went into New York … to Staten Island … and gave him a ride to Brooklyn. He was to appear in a movie called, “Went to Coney Island on a Mission from God. Back by 5.” Way too long a title. It’s actually a very good movie. I saw the whole thing later on, and I have it on VHS and DVD. It was interesting to see the machinations that go on in movie-making. We saw them film one sequence 27 times before they were happy with it.

Movie poster for Went to Coney Island on a Mission from God. Back by 5. — Movie poster for ***Went to Coney Island on a Mission from God. Back by 5.***

Stroud: Oh, gosh.

Workman: The scene we were in was just one quick little bit, and we were there from 9 o’clock at night until 5 in the morning, just getting things set up for that. They hauled me into it, too. They needed some more people, and I was there, so they put me in it for this one bit. I’m in it for all of 5 seconds. My brother, though, got a close-up. The camera pans across, and there he is. It was fun. I’ve always meant to write an article about it, spotlighting the class system or maybe you’d call it the caste system. The big actors had this table set out there with everything imaginable as far as food on it, and one of our little group went over there and was chased away. Then some production assistants hauled us all down to this kitchen where we had pizza. (Chuckle.) It was kind of a “You are here!” sort of thing. John Cryer was very nice. He thanked us. We didn’t get paid a penny for it. One girl got up and left. She was there for the money. Lots of the extras were there to add to their resumes so that they could get their Screen Actors Guild card, I guess.

One guy told me how he had brought his whole family together to see his debut as a TV actor. He was in a scene in some TV show, and he didn’t have any dialogue, but he would be seen right there with the main actors. Well, the scene came up, and they showed his feet. The camera went by and that was it. (Mutual laughter.) They all told me stories like that, and about people they’d met and who was nice and who wasn’t. It’s not something I would want to do on an ongoing basis. My brother went on vacation up in Washington one time, and I got a call at my Heavy Metal office asking for him, and I explained that he was on vacation and the caller said, “Well, do you look like your brother?” “Well, we’re brothers.” “How tall are you?” I told him I’m 5’6”. My brother is 5’ even. “Would you like to do a photo shoot with Brooke Shields?” (Chuckle.) So, I did this photo shoot with Brooke Shields, but I felt sorry for her. She had to keep changing dresses, and they put me in this silly shirt with fish all over it, and I was supposed to be her boyfriend. She was very nice. Her mother was, too. But I felt sorry for her, because she’s doing this thing and she has to spend all this time getting her hair changed around and all these different things she was wearing, and she had to wait for them while they did the lighting setup. All this stuff. I know Groucho Marx, when he was in a similar situation during the time he and his brothers were making movies, he read. Dick Cavett once said the most highly-educated person he ever met was Groucho Marx. It was because Groucho was a voracious reader, even though I think he’d only gone through the third or fourth grade. He read constantly. Cavett said that Groucho was more knowledgeable than any college professor he’d ever run into.

Legion of the Night (1991) #1 pg30, lettered by John Workman.

Stroud: Just taking advantage of the dead time. Good for him. So much for the glamour aspect of Hollywood. That was one thing Gerry Conway passed along to me. He said he’d pretty much retired from doing anything for Hollywood anymore and “I couldn’t be happier.”

Workman: Well, when I went out to Hollywood to see Outland and to meet with Jack Kirby, I traveled with Julie Simmons. Her father Matty had made a fortune off of the “Animal House” movie, and he lived next door to Tony Bennett. So we stayed with Matty and his wife while we were out there. Well, we all went out to a restaurant, and I felt like a jerk because I hadn’t brought a suit or anything like that to wear. But Matty said, “Aw, it’s okay.” So we went to this restaurant and there were Rolls Royce’s out front, and I went in wearing a ratty old coat that my Uncle Bob had given to me years earlier. But Matty was so successful at that time that if we’d all come in naked, they would have seated us.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Workman: But Matty was talking and he said, “You know, if I were your age, John, I wouldn’t even bother with publishing. I’d go straight into Hollywood.” Economically, he was certainly right, but I’ve always been glad that I’ve done what I’ve done, rather than gone off in a different direction. A lot of what I’ve believed in, what I enjoy, it’s kind of a thing of the past. But I think there are still possibilities with comics, and it’s such a wonderful, unique art form. You see a Steven Spielberg movie and it’s Steven Spielberg and a thousand other people working on a movie. But one guy with a bottle of ink … even a bottle of lousy ink … can sit down and come up with great stuff.

Stroud: Absolutely true. It’s one of the uniquely American forms of entertainment, too, as far as origin. Jazz music and comic books are all that leap to mind. Now at the risk of embarrassing you I thought I’d share a comment about you from Clem Robins:

Twenty-two years ago I got a project to do from an artist named, I think, Tim Sale. It was for Malibu. He sent me a letter in advance of the book, explaining to me how much he loved John Workman’s lettering and why. He gave me specifics of the qualities John had, and which he wanted me to emulate. I did my best, but only John is John.

Workman: (Chuckle.) That makes me feel so good. I’m still this kid out in Washington in many ways, growing up there in Aberdeen and buying used comics for five cents. Sometimes everyone feels a little sorry for themselves, and when I get to feeling like that, I think about whom I’ve gotten to know over the years and the people that I’ve run into, and it’s just incredible to me. I’m still a fan, too.

Weird War Tales (1971) #66 pg2-3, lettered by John Workman.

October 17, 2018

An Interview With Don Perlin - Co-Creator of Moon Knight, Bloodshot, and The Bad Eggs

October 17, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Don Perlin holding up some of his original comic pages.

Don Perlin (born August 27, 1929) is an American comic book artist and occasional writer best known for Marvel Comics' Werewolf by Night, Moon Knight, The Defenders, and Ghost Rider. Beginning his career as a comic artist in the 1940's, Don worked for several different publishers - including Harvey Comics, Ziff-Davis, Atlas, and PS Magazine. In 1962 Perlin started an 11 year stint at Charlton Comics, drawing stories across a variety of genres. In 1974 Don began his long association with Marvel Comics, where he would go on to co-create the Moon Knight character. In the 1990s, he worked for Valiant Comics as artist and editor - but left the company shortly after it was purchased by Acclaim.

Don is another of those tremendously reliable and talented artists who probably don't get the recognition they deserve. He recently had his 89th birthday and is still a wonderful elder statesman with lots of experience and some great stories, as you'll soon read for yourself.

This interview originally took place over the phone on February 25, 2010.

Strange Terrors (1952) #1, cover by Don Perlin.

Bryan Stroud: How did you get your start?

Don Perlin: I always wanted to draw and I always like to draw cartoons. While I was in high school, Burne Hogarth had put an ad in some of the high school papers about a class he’d be having on Saturday mornings in Manhattan. I showed it to my Dad and he called Hogarth. We went to his apartment and showed him some of the things I’d done and he accepted me into to the class. There I started learning about comic books and comic strips and the “how-to” part of things. From there on I started trying to get into the business and slowly I managed to. My first job was after I graduated high school, for Fox Features Syndicate. I worked for them for a little while and then they went belly-up. They owed a lot of artists a lot of money.

Stroud: Oh, no.

Perlin: They had a policy of paying in 90 days and there were artists running up big bills with them. I kept pestering them for money so they didn’t give me a lot of work; I only lost a hundred and some odd dollars. There were artists that lost thousands of dollars. At that time the companies did not buy penciling and inking separately. People were either doing their own inking or teaming up with somebody they knew.

Stroud: Like (Ross) Andru and Mike Esposito.

Perlin: Right. At one point I teamed up with a fellow named Abe Simon who was a letterer.

Stroud: So he was doing the inking?

Perlin: Yes, he was doing the inking. I was penciling. We worked together for quite awhile until the Kefauver Commission hearings. They were trying to blame all juvenile delinquency on comic books. The comic book business slowed down, work was hard to find, Abe and I split up. I started inking my own work. I penciled three issues of the weekly Spirit comic book for Will Eisner and then we parted company. I had an uncle that sent me to camp. What I mean by that is that I was drafted into the Army in ’53. When I came out I found it difficult getting back into comics.

Captain Midnight Action Book (1977) #1, cover by Don Perlin.

Stroud: Was there a lack of work or too much competition?

Perlin: I don’t know. At first, I got some work from Stan Lee. I delivered a job and his secretary called me after I got home.

“Hey, Stan wants me to tell you that was a great job.”

“Well, do you have another one for me?”

“We’ll be in touch.”

That was the last I heard from him for eleven years.

Stroud: That’s a pretty long dry spell.

Perlin: Yeah, in the interim I worked as a technical illustrator. Taking blueprints and converting them to three-dimensional exploded views. I worked for a company that did the parts catalog for Boeing airliners. These were the books that the mechanics kept in the hangars so that they could order the parts. We drew every screw, washer, bolt and everything else in the planes. I got to the point where I thought I could go in there and take the plane apart with a screwdriver.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Sounds a little bit tedious.

Perlin: I don’t know. I kind of enjoyed it. It was different. After that I went to work as a package designer for a manufacturer of paper boxes. I would do dummy artwork for the boxes and after they were approved I did the camera-ready art so that it could be printed. I worked there until one of the partners did some tricks with the books and the place went out of business.

Werewolf by Night (1972) #36, cover by Don Perlin.

I was going for a job interview with another company to do paste-ups and mechanicals. This was before computers. I was going in on Monday morning and Sunday morning I got a call from Roy Thomas. I’d been doing some comic book work in the evenings when I got home from working at the different day jobs that I had. Roy had seen some of the horror stories that I had done for DC. He told me about two books that they were looking for artists for and asked if would I be interested? One of them was Werewolf by Night and the other was Morbius, the Living Vampire. When I went to Marvel and spoke to them I was told that Werewolf was a monthly and Morbius was a bi-monthly so I took the monthly book deciding that would be a great job.

Stroud: Steady work.

Perlin: Right. So, from then on, I worked for Marvel and didn’t miss a day. I went from the Werewolf to Ghost Rider and Defenders and Transformers. I worked on most of the characters that Marvel had while I was there. Then I went to Valiant.

Stroud: Weren’t you one of the very first editors for Valiant?

Perlin: I wore more than one cap. When I went to Valiant they had a tie-in with Nintendo. They were going to do comic books with Super Mario and some of the other Nintendo characters. I drew some of those Super Mario books. I edited them. Nintendo had their own magazine that was selling millions of copies and they thought all those people were going to buy the comic books, but they weren’t interested in the comic book stories, they were interested in the gaming, how to win strategies for the games.

When we went to doing our own comic books, I did the Solar comic. I edited a number of books. I was the originating artist on Solar, Bloodshot, Timewalker and the Bad Eggs. I went through eleven or twelve issues on Solar and then we decided we were going to do the Bloodshot book. So, I started that and did it for about seventeen issues. Then they needed somebody to do the beginning of Timewalker, so I did that. That’s when the comic book industry started to cave in on itself.

Bloodshot (1993) #14, cover penciled by Don Perlin & inked by Ralph Reese.

The Bad Eggs (1996) #1, cover penciled by Don Perlin & inked by Gonzalo Mayo.

Timewalker (1994) #4, cover penciled by Don Perlin & inked by Gonzalo Mayo.

Stroud: It does seem to have its cycles.

Perlin: Well, they were doing things they shouldn’t have been doing. The people that were buying them were investing. Comic books were created as a dime item for kids’ entertainment. The kids would read them and trade them until they fell apart and then discard them. When the collectors came along these books were scarce, so the prices on them were high and people were amazed that Superman #1 is worth thousands of dollars. Suddenly there was the perception that comic books were worth so much money that people began to treat them as if they were an investment. But it didn’t work that way because there were a finite number of collectors, say 400,000 and now when they printed books they’d print enough to cover everybody that wanted one and more. People thought they were collecting something that would be of value. The thing that had originally made them valuable was that they were scarce. The new comics were not!

“Flight of the Lost Phantom” from Ghosts (1971) #28. Art by Don Perlin. — “*Flight of the Lost Phantom*” from **Ghosts (1971) #28**. Art by Don Perlin.

Now comic books also had competition from electronic games. Then the publishers started getting cute by taking the same issue of a comic book and making 10 different covers for it and telling you that you weren’t a real collector unless you had all 10 covers with the same book in it… You can do that maybe once or twice, but as Lincoln said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.” I guess they didn’t study their history. People weren’t buying books because they weren’t the great investment they thought they were. The “investments” were in big trouble.

Stroud: The market wasn’t really there after all.

Perlin: I remember one telling incident. I used do store appearances and sign comic books. Collectors would come to see me and get their books signed. This happened when Bloodshot #1 came out. The book was selling for $3.50. If you bought the book in the store, I would sign it for the cover price. You just bought it and I’d sign it. If you had a copy that you’d bought somewhere else they would charge $3.50 to have me sign it. A young fellow came in with 15 copies he’d bought somewhere else and he wanted them all signed. So, while I was signing them I asked him, “How did you like the book? What did you think of the story?” He said, “Oh, I didn’t read it. I didn’t open any of them. They’re all going in bags and I’m putting them away. I’ll take them out in a year and they’ll be worth a lot of money.” But there were 850,000 copies of that book printed. And there are only 400,000 collectors, so everybody had at least two if they wanted it, right? Now you can get it for a dollar, with my signature and a certificate of authenticity. So that’s what helped bring comics down.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Perlin: I don’t read comic books now. They’re different. Am I going to get myself in trouble here?

Stroud: Not at all. There’s not much out there that interests me these days, either.

Ghost Rider (1973) #34, cover by Don Perlin.

Perlin: To me they all look the same. They’re all colored with the computer, which is good because you can get a lot of great effects with it, but for the most part they all look the same. I remember the last few times that I looked at comics I said you could take pages out of 5 or 6 books and shuffle them like a deck of cards and then put them together and it would take awhile before you figured out it was from different books. (Chuckle.)

Back in the day when we would do the book we never thought about getting the artwork back. You gave it to the company and you never saw it again. The only thing it was good for was feeding your printing press. Nobody was going to see this artwork again. So, if you patched it or used white paint it didn’t make any difference. When the publishers started returning the work artists started doing things that looked great on the wall so that they could sell their pieces when they got them back. With that in mind they’d do a lot of stuff that wasn’t good story telling, it was a lot of fancy pictures. I now see they’re reprinting stuff I did 30 years ago into these graphic novels. Essentials of this and that in black and white and selling them for $16.00 or $17.00

Stroud: It certainly has changed a lot over the years. I think it speaks well to your work and that of your peers that there’s obviously a market for reprinting the older work.

Perlin: When I get calls or interest from someone like you it makes me feel good. I get Google alerts sometimes where my name comes up out there. Sometimes it’s someone critiquing a book I did 30 years ago and if they liked it I say, “There’s a smart fella.” If they don’t I wonder why they’re bothering to talk about a 30-year-old book and taking the time to say it was no good. (Chuckle.) I started reading through some of the Essentials volumes that they sent. I even got one from DC. House of Secrets or something like that. There was one story that I did for them in there.

Stroud: Do you do commissions these days?

Perlin: I do. I have a gallery at comicartfans.com, so if you go there and go under “P” for Perlin you’ll see examples of the stuff I’ve been doing.

Simonson's Ragnarok Thor commission drawn by Don Perlin in 2018.

Stroud: Amongst all the different duties you had as penciler, inker and editor, which did you prefer?

Perlin: I like to draw, so the penciling was my primary enjoyment. I liked that. Editing helped me get some of my bossiness out of me. (Chuckle.) When I was an editor at Valiant I had some darn good people working on those books and I didn’t really have to take a heavy hand to anything.

Stroud: I noticed in your credits you worked on Iron Man for a while and you already mentioned Ghost Rider.

Perlin: I did a few issues of Iron Man and I believe I penciled a few and then inked a few that George Tuska did. I also inked some Captain America stories that Sal Buscema did and I think I penciled some Caps. Lots of things I can’t even remember any more. I worked for Harvey Comics in the early days when their horror stuff first came out. I did some work for Charlton.

Stroud: I’ll ask you what I asked Frank McLaughlin: How did you survive on Charlton’s rates?

Perlin: Well, that was when I had another job. It wasn’t my main source of income. Charlton was a cheap company. I hate to say that. I worked for two nice editors there. Three actually, I worked for Dick Giordano for a little while. Then Sal Gentilli took over and after him George Wildman. They were all great guys to work for. A couple of times I was offered a job in Connecticut to be an editor but they wouldn’t budge on the salary or even give me assistance to move from New York to Connecticut, so I let that pass.

Stroud: I can’t blame you. That would be a major commitment for no additional reward.

Perlin: And then of course they eventually went belly-up. People were getting low rates and they were actually hacking out most of the stuff, but now, from what I see on the internet, collectors seem to be nostalgic and think Charlton was so great.

The Bad Eggs (1996) #1 pg3. Written by Bob Layton, penciled by Don Perlin, inked by Gonzalo Mayo.

Stroud: Well, obviously Steve Ditko’s work has always had a following, but other than a few things here and there, in my opinion Charlton didn’t do anything all that outstanding.

Perlin: There was some stuff that came out of there that was nice. I remember Pete Morisi did some stuff for them. He went under the name of PAM. He did a character called Johnny Danger, I believe. I forget the names, but I remember they looked good. A lot of us in the cartoonist field followed the path to get any kind of work you could and keep the money coming in. They had enough respect for themselves to try to do a decent job no matter who it was for. So as a result, you’d get some interesting things even at the low budget places like Charlton.

Stroud: Sure. When you were penciling did you have a favorite inker?

Perlin: There were a number of them that I thought were very good. At Marvel I liked Kim DeMulder, Joe Sinnott and Jack Abel. At Valiant I had Stan Drake inking my stuff on Solar. Are you familiar with Stan Drake?

Stroud: A little bit.

Perlin: He had this strip called The Heart of Juliet Jones and he inked my Solar stuff. Then there was John Dixon who came from Australia and he had done a comic strip there for 28 years called Airhawk and he inked a lot of my work on Bloodshot. Then on Timewalker and the Bad Eggs, Gonzalo Mayo did a great job. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Bad Eggs?

Stroud: Not really.

Perlin: It was a raunchy funny strip about these two raptor dinosaurs and their adventures in prehistoric times. One had a goatee and wore sunglasses and the other one wore a baseball cap backward and a t-shirt that said, “Bite me!” It was a lot of fun to do.

Stroud: You did some work for DC, but not a great deal.

“Bet Your Life” from Witching Hour (1969) #45. Art by Don Perlin. — “*Bet Your Life*” from **Witching Hour (1969) #45**. Art by Don Perlin.

Perlin: I was doing horror stories. Neal Adams took me up to see Joe Orlando to get me some work at DC. Joe Orlando put me onto that magazine…National Lampoon. I did a number of stories for them and then one time they called me up and wanted to give me a story called “The Kennedy They Couldn’t Kill.” It was a spoof of the Kennedy family and I figured it would be okay. Politicians are supposed to have thick skins. So I went down there and I got the script and I took it home and read it and I discovered it wasn’t about any of the Kennedy politicians. It was about the sister that was retarded. They wanted to portray her with the hanging down stockings and all, and I couldn’t get into it. I said, “No”. I thought this story would be poking fun at politicians, but this was a woman with problems and not a very happy life. I turned it back in and told them I couldn’t do it. They took it back and never spoke to me again.

Stroud: I couldn’t blame you. That doesn’t sound like it was in very good taste even for a parody.

Perlin: It wasn’t and I wouldn’t be proud to have my name on it. I guess in the long run it didn’t do me too much harm. Then I did some horror comics for DC working for Murray Boltinoff and that sort of led to the call I told you about earlier from Roy Thomas to do the Werewolf book. So, I was doing both the DC horror books and the Werewolf book for Marvel. Everything was fine until one day I walked into Boltinoff’s office and he found out that I was doing the book for Marvel and he got totally upset and said, “Who are you working for, them or us?” The people at Marvel knew I was doing work for DC and they didn’t care. Marvel would get would calls from firms outside comics asking for any artists that can do a kind of superhero illustration that they needed. Lots of times they’d give them my name. So, they didn’t care. All they cared about was if you got your work in on time. So, I parted company with DC. Then later on, after I moved to Florida, I got to do something really different, some Scooby-Doo stories. I’m a bit on the versatile side. I can do cartoony stuff or horror stuff or whatever you want to pay me for. (Laughter.)

Stroud: I noticed you’d done a little of everything from war books to superhero to love stories and jungle adventures and westerns.

Conan the Barbarian (1970) #222, cover by Don Perlin.

Perlin: Anything and everything.

Stroud: Even some Conan.

Perlin: I inked some Conan the Barbarian stuff for Marvel and then I did some black and white books for King Kull I think it was. I did Conan #222 where I penciled, inked and wrote the story. I’m not sure it was all that great, but I did it. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: That’s no small feat.

Perlin: I was working for a while as managing art director. I worked with John Romita who was the Executive Art Director. I liked to draw and I didn’t get much chance to do it while I was serving as Art Director, so it was getting boring. Right around then Jim Shooter started Valiant and offered me a job, I’d never been in a start up company and it looked like it might be fun and if it didn’t work…but it worked, so (chuckle) I had a good experience and I enjoyed it.

Stroud: Good for you. When you’ve seen characters that you’ve worked on up on the big screen, do you think comic characters are good in the movie house?

Perlin: It depends on how you do it. If they took the essence of what made the comic character good and interesting enough in the comic book to get to the point where you would want to put them on the big screen and interpreted it for the big screen, then you would have a successful picture. Like they did with Spider-Man, for example. The first movie was tremendous and everybody liked it. Tobey Maguire was an excellent choice in casting. He was even interesting when he was Peter Parker, but by the time they got to the third one it was getting a little repetitive. When they did the Hulk, they seemed to forget about the Hulk comic book. Everything was different. They seemed to ignore everything that made the Hulk what he was except that he was big and green. He was too big in the movie. He was like 15 feet tall unlike in the comic book where he was big but not that big. His origin was ignored and stuff was put in so the actors could emote with the father and all. Then the second half seemed to go to the animators so they could do the Hulk bouncing around. I thought they did a pretty decent job on the Ghost Rider, but that wasn’t received too well.

Stroud: As you look back over so many decades of your career, what was your greatest satisfaction?

Perlin: Living this long, I guess. (Chuckle.) And to tell you the truth if it wasn’t for my wife I wouldn’t have. There was many a time she caught things that needed to be taken care of or I would have been taken care of if you know what I mean. So, I’m still alive and kicking. I also feel that if you get the blessing to do something that you love and can make a living doing it and every once in awhile someone pats you on the back it makes you feel good. I lucked out.

“Non-Stop Journey Into Fear” from Unexpected (1968) #155. Art by Don Perlin. — “*Non-Stop Journey Into Fear*” from **Unexpected (1968) #155**. Art by Don Perlin.

Strange Terrors (1952) #1 Cover Recreation commission done by Don Perlin in 2014. — **Strange Terrors (1952) #1** Cover Recreation commission done by Don Perlin in 2014.

Chamber of Chills (1972) #25, cover by Don Perlin.

Marvel Spotlight (1971) #28, cover by Don Perlin.

Werewolf by Night (1972) #38, cover by Don Perlin.

Transformers (1984) #13, cover by Don Perlin.

Werewolf By Night (1972) #40 pg7, penciled & inked by Don Perlin.

Defenders (1972) #108, cover penciled by Don Perlin & inked by Al Milgrom.

Ghost Rider (1973) #31 pg10, penciled by Don Perlin & inked by Bob Layton.

Bloodshot (1993) #6, cover penciled by Don Perlin & inked by John Dixon.

Dino Riders (1989) #1, cover penciled by Don Perlin & inked by Danny Bulanadi.

October 10, 2018

An Interview With Irene Vartanoff - A Different Take On the Fan-Turned-Pro Story

October 10, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

“Impish” Irene Vartanoff, at work in the Marvel offices - mid-1970’s.

Irene Vartanoff is an author, editor, and colorist who worked for both Marvel and DC Comics through the 1970's and later moved into writing romance novels. Irene was first published as a letter column contributor in the mid-1960's, with over 100 letters written by her appearing in the backs of various DC comic books while she was still a student. She was even given the nickname Poison Ivy by editor Julius Schwartz - "Poison" for the caustic things she said, and "Ivy" after her initials. When Ms. Vartanoff finished high school, she went to New York to try her hand at working in comics. After a short stint writing and editing for DC, Irene began a career in coloring for Marvel. She eventually left the comics industry for other work, but in more recent years she has returned to writing with several published novels.

Irene got her start as a lettercol contributor and went on to do some writing and editing. A writer of continuing projects and talents, she was a joy to interview.

This interview originally took place via email on March 12, 2010.

One of the earliest letters written by Irene Vartanoff to DC Comics (from 1965)….

Bryan Stroud: Someone more eloquent than I suggested that the prolific lettercol writers of the 60’s made the Julie Schwartz columns more fun than the comics themselves. What made you decide to participate?

Irene Vartanoff: It was a challenge. I’d been writing all my comments on postcards, mostly to the Superman line. To write something longer required a different kind of approach, more critical than fannish. The intellectual exercise of composing a coherent letter of criticism appealed. I had written letters of comment to other publications in the past and they had been published. In the Washington Star newspaper, for instance. I knew I could succeed at this, but writing the in-depth criticism Julie obviously preferred was different from writing the congratulatory notes Mort Weisinger and the other editors liked. I made a conscious effort to write the kind of letter Julie printed. The opinions were all my own.

Stroud: I never knew any girls cool enough to read superhero comics back in the day. Did you feel you were in a minority?

Vartanoff: I first read comics at a girlfriend’s house when I was ten or eleven, so no, I didn’t. I only realized girls were a minority of comic book fans once I noticed that all the fans who wrote serious letters to the letter columns were boys. The Superman letter column pages were not highbrow intellectual circles. But Julie’s letter columns were a cut above, and mostly letters from boys.

As far as comics-reading itself, I grew up in a very highbrow milieu, one in which parents did not bring trashy comic books into the house, only quality hardcover children’s books. My mother endlessly took us to cultural events; I have the distinction of having seen the opera “Don Giovanni” performed by puppets, for instance. I hate puppets. Parents also expected high achievement from their children. The intelligent kids put away childish things at puberty, and ironically, that’s when I became a comic book fan. My parents objected strongly to me bringing them into the house as a teenager. I’ll probably blog about that battle some day. My high school friends read serious modern literature like Salinger, but I was reading Tarzan, Doc Savage, historical novels, murder mysteries, romance novels, Gothics, and science fiction. I knew nobody who read comics until I became acquainted with other comics fans through the letter columns. And it was not until many years later than I met anyone who read romance novels. Not even in college.

Stroud: When you wrote The Letter, published in Hawkman #18, were you surprised it saw print?

Vartanoff: Very surprised. And proud. I had not written it expecting it to get published. I’d simply been moved to write it. My father had me read him the letter, and he praised it, saying it was well written. This was a peak moment in my life. He died only a few years later, so I was very glad that he and I had that. (I’m posting about it on my Wordpress blog, on the anniversary of his death.) I guess because of the connection with my father, all other considerations about the letter have faded in my memory. Did I expect to be famous from then on? Perhaps. Was I? Kind of. Comic book fans from the Silver Age still contact me to talk about my letters. I received a very moving tribute just recently from one fan whose mother finally allowed him to read comics because he showed her one of my letters with my college address attached. But although I treasure every one of those contacts, I have come to realize that what made my letters special was that they epitomized feelings that other comic book fans had, but did not have the ability, or the time, or the whatever to express. So, I was speaking for my generation. As proud as I am of my personal accomplishment in writing those letters, I recognize that being a representative of many other fans played a key part in it.

NOTE: I have a copy of Hawkman #18 and for those of you who have not seen "The Letter," I thought I'd reproduce it for you here:

Hawkman (1964) #18, featuring the full-page letter written by Irene Vartanoff. — Hawkman (1964) #18, featuring the full-page letter written by **Irene Vartanoff**.

The full page letter written by Irene that appears in Hawkman #18. You can read the transcription below. — The full page letter written by **Irene** that appears in **Hawkman #18**. You can read the transcription below.

Hawkman (1964) #16, the issue that earned Ms. Vartanoff’s ire. — Hawkman (1964) #16, the issue that earned **Ms. Vartanoff**’s ire.

“Dear Editor: I seldom write letters that condemn a magazine from cover to cover, but Hawkman 16 certainly warrants one. This is unfortunate, considering the fact that the previous issues deserved (and got) the same treatment…
The cover was, on the whole, the best part of the issue, but that is about all I can say for it. Even Murphy Anderson's high level of craftsmanship cannot reconcile me to such an uninventive cover. Hawkman, in his short career, has been half-throttled by a plethora of monstrocities, [sic] so the spectacle of a gorilla (winged) wrestling a man (also winged) has lost its punch, to say the least. (By the way, how about getting Hawkgirl back on the covers again? I'd rather see her anytime over a winged gorilla!)
Now for the story. I really must say that "Lord of the Flying Gorillas" should never have been written. It was just plain awful! Lost civilization…evil, power-mad high priest…good queen in danger of losing throne…hero to the rescue…where have we heard that one before? More to the point, where haven't we heard it before? You may contend that Gardner Fox gave the old story a new twist when he inserted the scenes in Illoral, but that is untrue. The weary old story turned up even more battered and boring when Hawkman "gambled that these moth-men would have the same characteristic traits as the moths on Earth." We've heard that one before also, and who wants to hear it again? Even if Hawkman has to go back to fighting "ordinary" criminals, it would be a vast improvement over these science-fiction rehashes.
Also, we could do without those typical Gardner Fox re-doings of ancient Earth myths and legends. Moses as an Illoralan, leading his winged people from the enslavement of the moth-men to the promised land, is not only a bit sickening, but totally unnecessary to the story. It should have, at least, been more subtle. To dress the Illoralan leader in full Biblical regalia, beard and all, is not what I call clever, even if it did give a big hint to the eight-year olds.
Lastly, when Gardner Fox portrays the emotion, love, he should "shut up"! To quote—"She whirls—hurls herself into the strong arms that mean her happiness! She clings quivering, helplessly…"—terrible! It is false; it is cloying; it is unnecessary. Mr. Fox doesn't have to say "Hawkman loves Hawkgirl"—we know that! A little less silly verbiage would be in better taste all around.
All right. I have now (I hope) completely demolished Hawkman 16. I haven't bombed the artwork because I can't really blame Mr. Anderson for his unimaginative drawing…there is a limit to what an artist can do to make a poor plot tolerable. There is also a limit to what a fan will take in the way of poor stories…and I've reached it. I'll explain…
When I first became enamoured of Hawkman, it was for a strange little scene in one of the tryout issues. Hawkman and Hawkgirl sat in a darkened room and probed their memories for an important answer to a puzzle. They sat (as I recall) for hours until suddenly the clue was found. And it struck me then with full force that Katar and Shayera Hol were "different". They were not the run-of-the-mill Earthmen with an assumed power, who took the pledge to fight evil…they were members of another race, inhabitants of another planet, products of a totally different culture. There were certain similarities, of course, but basically, the fact remained that Hawkman and Hawkgirl are not, and never were, committed to Earth. They are here to learn our crime-fighting techniques; that is all. And, it can also be said, they are here to learn about the ordinary happenings of this works, the petty crooks, the arch-crooks, the prisons, the courtrooms, the police stations. So they have "secret identities" of normal Earth-people, and they fit into our patterns of life. Fine. One could wish a little less stolidity, but generally, things are looking up.
Then, issue after issue, their adventures have less and less to do with life at the museum, or life in the city…soon they are concerned totally with monsters on Earth, monsters on other planets in different dimensions, on space-wars, on (ugh!) lost civilizations, and mystic secrets, and super-super-evil organizations. This is Earth? This is the study of Earth-methods of crime-fighting? Hawkman and Hawkgirl are fully competent to fight and conquer super-menaces…their civilization brought them up to an acceptance of what Earth people consider fantastic…but what are they doing fighting them? They are here for another reason. Or have they completed their mission? Have the Hawks learned all we can teach them? Is it, in fact, time for them to be moving on? And where do they go from here? There are two alternatives…one, return to Thanagar and battle crime there…or, two, go on to another planet and study its anti-crime methods. Either course gives them plenty of leeway for pure science-fiction, which seems to be the main factor in their popularity.
Anyway, it is obvious that Hawkman needs (desperately) a change. He must either be firmly rooted in Earth-reality, or be completely transplanted to a more naturally and believably exotic locale. Otherwise, I am afraid that his adventures will continue to be divided in purpose and disastrous in result."

A panel from Metal Men (1963) #21. One of Irene’s letters was read by the characters in this issue. — A panel from **Metal Men (1963) #21**. One of **Irene**’s letters was read by the characters in this issue.

Stroud: Your name came up in a couple of books like that Metal Men (what issue number is that, anyway?) on your blog and the splash page of Flash #195. Where else?

Vartanoff: It was Metal Men # 21. A fun story. I liked the surreal quality of Robert Kanigher’s Metal Men.

A splash page from Flash (1959) #195, featuring another reference to Ms. Vartanoff. — A splash page from **Flash (1959) #195**, featuring another reference to **Ms. Vartanoff**.

I might have been in the background in the Avengers story that took place at the Rutland, Vermont, Halloween superhero parade that the late, great Tom Fagan organized for years. I was part of the parade several times. A batch of us from New York drove up to Rutland and garbed ourselves as comic book characters and climbed on floats that paraded around this small town in Vermont. I usually dressed as a witch, because that kind of costume covered me—it was cold! The first year, when I was Tala, a witch character, I made the mistake of attaching fake long fingernails with glue. Ouch. The memory of that icy glue is with me still. Another year I was some other witch called Karnilla. I also went as Heimdall’s sister. At least, according to my own sister, Ellen Vartanoff, who was there in costume as the Enchantress. Anyway, I was a Viking, and the blond wig and fake fur I used for the costume were very effective in keeping me warm. Was I in the comic book about the parade? Maybe. It hardly mattered, since I was in the parade itself.

Other mentions: Gerry Conway used my first name and Michele Wolfman’s in passing as lovelorn gals in some story or other. I forget which. Probably a weird mystery tale.

I think there was a DC Comics version of the Rutland story, but memory is vague on this, and I doubt that I was in it. Although I was part of a large amorphous gang of young people hanging around comics in the early 1970s, I was more an observer than a star.

Stroud: Did you ever imagine that one day you’d end up writing comics?

Vartanoff: Of course. I sent Mort Weisinger a complete Lois Lane story while still in high school. He didn’t buy it. This was in 1965. Mort had already invited me up to New York to get a VIP tour of the office and have lunch. My mother and I took the train up. She went to various museums, and I was treated like royalty at National Periodical Publications, including a fancy lunch out. Mort Weisinger introduced me to everyone and treated me in a fatherly way. At the end of the day, the editors gave me a huge armload of original artwork. It was probably the best day of my life to that point. Adult life has surpassed it, but what a moment!

Stroud: When did you finally get to meet Julie?

Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane (1958) #120, featuring a story co-written by Irene Vartanoff & Cary Bates.

Vartanoff: I must have met Julie Schwartz during the tour Mort Weisinger gave me. And I sometimes received written replies to my letters from editors, including from Julie. I met everyone. I also took other tours, and went to conventions and spoke to or saw about everybody active in the business.

Stroud: Was he a mentor for you?

Vartanoff: Julie was never a mentor, although by publishing my letters and saying nice things about them, he did encourage me substantially, as had Mort Weisinger. But when I came looking for a job after college, Julie told me to go home and get married. That was a blow from which it took me years to recover. You can read the stories of other fans going up to the DC offices looking for work and getting offers. I got the advice to go home. Mort Weisinger was gone by then. I wonder if he would have given me the same advice? I didn’t go home, of course. But still.

Julie never asked me to write anything for him except more letters. Which I didn’t do. I was on the path to adulthood and my letter column days were over. I also did not want to hear his sexist advice, even though it may have been kindly meant and the same thing he told his own children. The big shock to me was that Julie’s words represented a complete aboutface from the encouragement he’d given me all along as a letter writer. It suggested that what he had done in the comics was a lie, something he did not believe in. In the comics he edited, he actively encouraged women as professionals and major actors in his stories (think Jean Loring, for instance), and yet in real life he apparently didn’t. That was my take on it. I was a brave young woman to come to New York from my sheltered suburb and sheltered college hundreds of miles away. The path I wanted to tread was not more of being a child or of fitting in with the old patterns of adult female subservience and nonentity in the workplace. I was pretty insecure and emotional about it, though, and far too much of a perfectionist. Comics meant so much to me. It was a recipe for disaster. I was teetering on a precipice, and the two men I had trusted the most had abandoned me, one (Mort) by being gone and the other (Julie) by telling me to go home and get married and, by implication, give up any dreams I had of achieving anything as a person.

Black Panther (1977) #5, interior colored by Irene Vartanoff.

[But] Julie wasn’t the only game in town. I wrote a weird mystery story for Joe Orlando, a Lois Lane story for Nelson Bridwell, and several romance stories for Dorothy Woolfolk. All at the same time. Plus others that were supposedly romance/Gothic suspense stories. But I did not find a mentor in any of those fine editors, and when I needed writing help, I did not know where to turn or even how to ask. Youth and arrogance and insecurity.

Stroud: What was your first published script?

Vartanoff: The only one of the half-dozen stories I wrote for DC Comics that I know was published intact was “The Price is Right.” It appeared in Young Romance #182, cover date May, 1972. Guy Lillian told me that when he worked for DC as an editorial assistant, he was tasked with writing off some unusable stories and mine were among them. He was probably right about their quality. That period of writing comics sent me into writers’ block. I was a perfectionist, and I got hung up on a rewriting issue that since then I have helped other writers through. Unfortunately, my college writing courses and textbooks were of no use. Despite having friends from fandom who were themselves working as comic book writers, I was too foolish and proud to ask them how to solve my artistic problem. Instead, I shut down into writers’ block.

Pause to shake head at youthful folly.

After a gap of many years, when I was story editor for MyRomanceStory.com, which publishes internet graphic romance novellas, I got the important writing training I never had previously. And by then I had a much thicker skin. I had analyzed romance novel manuscripts for decades, and helped other writers overcome their problems. I knew how to fix stuff. Now I was working directly with plot proposals and rewriting romance comic book stories, or nudging writers to do so. I found that I still knew exactly what I was doing about dialogue and pacing. And with the strong input of managing editor Tom King, I got a handle on plotting at last. This was a pivotal experience. I rewrote so many stories by other people that I finally pushed through my 35-years-long writers’ block and wrote my own stories. When the company stopped buying new material, I started writing novels. And this time around, I finished them.

A splash page from The Egyptian’s Texas Spitfire - Written by Irene Vartanoff, art by Enzo Pertile. From MyRomanceStory.com. — A splash page from **The Egyptian’s Texas Spitfire** - Written by **Irene Vartanoff**, art by **Enzo Pertile**. From **MyRomanceStory.com**.

A splash page from Breaking All The Rules - Written by Irene Vartanoff, art by John & Jason Waltrip. From MyRomanceStory.com. — A splash page from **Breaking All The Rules** - Written by **Irene Vartanoff**, art by **John & Jason Waltrip**. From **MyRomanceStory.com**.

Stroud: You made an interesting observation in one of your writings about how you and the other “new blood” were kind of resented by the earlier generation. Care to elaborate?

Vartanoff: I think I covered that well in Jacque Nodell’s blog, and in the MyRomanceStory.com blog, which I write as Poison Ivy.

Stroud: Which writers did you admire at the time?

Defenders (1972) #26, interior colored by Irene Vartanoff.

Vartanoff: I was quite the Gardner Fox fan, searching out all his paperback originals and loving Warrior of Llarn in particular. I loved all the science Julie’s writers put in the comics. Lasers and quasars and such. I was even inspired by comic books to read the Scientific American article detailing how lasers worked. Something I would never have done without comics.

Stroud: Which artists did you particularly enjoy?

Vartanoff: I absolutely adore Kurt Schaffenberger’s work. Jim Mooney was a favorite. I read so many stories by Curt Swan that to me his is the definitive Superman. Ramona Fradon’s work on Metamorpho was glamorous. I love Murphy Anderson and Sid Greene when they do both pencils and inks. Bruno Premiani’s Doom Patrol was exciting. Many others called to me, each in their own way. But the truth is, art without content is nothing. That’s why Kurt Schaffenberger’s Lois Lane stories speak to me more than anyone else’s. That’s why a certain run of the FF was so fine, and various issues of Spider-Man, and why Agent of SHIELD was so utterly marvelous at a specific time when Jim Steranko was drawing it. The melding of story and art in comics can be wonderful. It’s the mix of talents that produces the best work.

Stroud: Who did you like to draw your stories?

Vartanoff: In an ideal world, Leonard Starr would do every story I wrote. He draws attractive, glamorous people - but they look real, too. And he can draw action but also is sensitive to fashion and makes the effort to differentiate how people look. No stock blondes in red dresses for him. Kurt Schaffenberger of course is no longer available, but Ramon Fradon and Jim Mooney would be high on my list too, for the same reasons. And if Marie Severin weren’t fully retired, I’d be begging her to draw anything she liked, and racking my brains to write funny copy for whatever she came up with. She’s the best ever for humor.

Stroud: You’ve been writing for decades now. Is it still enjoyable?

Savage Sword of Conan (1974) #3, edited by Irene Vartanoff.

Vartanoff: If I didn’t love writing I wouldn’t be doing three blogs, plus novels, plus interviews and letters and whatnot. If anything, writing is more enjoyable for me now, because when I have an idea I can consider a multitude of formats and venues for it. And you’re right, although I have not been continuously published for decades, I have been writing the whole time. Eventually, I hope to get every story idea I ever had into print. Or “print” as it will in the future be construed.

Stroud: As a writer, do you feel it’s something you must do?

Vartanoff: Writing is communicating, something that is necessary for humans. Even the religious hermits of yore were in a long-term conversation with god through their prayers. Talking is communicating, too; Dorothy Parker certainly said more funny things than were ever written down. If it wasn’t an even more difficult profession than writing, I might have been a stand-up comedian. That requires similar skills to writing: pacing, timing, word choice, delivery, etc. And an audience. We write to be heard.

Stroud: Any tips for the aspiring writer?

Vartanoff: The most important thing aspiring writers should do is value themselves. Writers can get taken advantage of very easily. They should never sign away their rights or give away their work. Life is long; living to see your creations making other people a fortune can make life feel even longer. Once I understood what had been done to the majority of comic book creators, I had great pity for them. Still do. It does the world no good to see the corporate owners of DC Comics or Marvel Comics get rich on the ideas of disenfranchised creators.

Stroud: Your entry into the industry can likely never be duplicated again. Any feelings on that?

Super-Villain Team-Up (1975) #1, interior colored by Irene Vartanoff.

Vartanoff: That’s true of my whole generation of comic book fans who became pros. We came in as a baby boomer cohort - the military term is apt here - and we swept the business, changing everything. That was then, and now things are different all over again; Paul Levitz’ “retirement” makes that clear. Our time came and went, and the lesson is that every person or group’s time comes and goes. The how isn’t that important. Everything has a life cycle. When we are young, we don’t see the cycle yet, which is probably just as well because our job then is to forge ahead. It’s nice that a particular era can be invested with glamor—the Silver Age, for instance—but it was only a moment in the long timeline of our individual lives. We can’t stay eighteen forever.

Stroud: What is your fondest memory of your time as a comic book writer?

Vartanoff: When I was young and it was summer and I was sitting on a blanket in Central Park writing dialogue for a comic book story and getting it right. And absolutely knowing I had. For a writer, that’s the most wonderful feeling. You got what was inside outside. You did it.

Much later, a different kind of pleasure writing internet romance novellas and finally completing a story I’d started as a novel a decade before. And seeing it in print. A rush, I admit it. I hope to have many such in the future.

Stroud: What made you decide to move on?

Vartanoff: Since I had pretty much closed myself off from the creative aspects of comics while working in the business, it eventually became just a job. I had progressed to a logical stepping-off point, where I had developed great employee skills but wanted to be connected to the work in a more heartfelt manner again. So I left comics because I was drawn to romance novel publishing as it developed into something cutting edge, in line with my interests as an adult. It allowed me to use my analytical abilities. Later, I loved doing romance comics for MyRomanceStory.com, fusing my different knowledge and skill sets.

I would write more comics in a minute, but I am only interested in telling stories from a woman’s point of view. The comic books published by Americans today are very male-centric. So, I imagine I’ll stick to writing novels from now on.

Temporary Superheroine, a novel written by Irene Vartanoff.

Stroud: Why did the romance comic die?

Vartanoff: I’ve covered this on Jacque Nodell’s excellent blog and I don’t have much more to say about it. Why didn’t you buy those comics? That’s your answer right there: They didn’t interest you. You and the rest of the world.

Stroud: Recently Archie has been drawn in a more realistic style that seems to hearken back to the romance comic. Do you think it could work today?

Vartanoff: I’ve never liked Archie Comics. I think they are a tired and empty form of entertainment, boring sitcoms on an endless loop. When I worked for a distributor, I noticed that only young children read them.

If you’re asking if I think romance comics could work today, my answer is that adult American women believe comics are for kids. And adult women are the largest bump of the romance market. (I’ve written about the limitations of manga on the blog at MyRoamnceStotry.com.) American comics with an American sensibility might be something the generation of young women raised reading manga as girls would like. But these romance comics would still have to be from a female point of view. I was just looking at the Spider-Man newspaper strip, and MJ is taking off her sweater and revealing her bra. Women do not like this. Aside from the inappropriateness of this sleazy display in a family newspaper, there’s the reality that we women want to see pictures of us in cool outfits and beautiful gowns or toting Uzis and showing tramp stamps, not casually exposed in our underwear. Until a publisher comes along who gets this, you will not have true American romance comics.

Stroud: Is there anything you didn’t get a chance to do at National or Marvel for that matter that you wish you could have?

Captive of the Cattle Baron, a novel written by Irene Vartanoff.

Vartanoff: I had my chances and I did not take full advantage of all of them, although I did learn plenty on staff and performed a wide range of tasks, including doing lots of freelance coloring. And don’t get me wrong. Even though Marvel was consistently sexist in rejecting story ideas from women, I was offered opportunities to write comics. And Jenette Kahn would have handed me Wonder Woman. She offered. After my initial comic book writing efforts did not meet my own super high standards of perfection, I declined all offers. And that made my position in the field not much better than that of any young woman trying to make her way in a male-dominated business full of rampant egos in which the creators were the stars. I wish I had not had writers’ block for 35 years, but at least I don’t anymore.

Stroud: You do some blogging on finance and practical matters. Is it an enjoyable endeavor?

Vartanoff: I love it. I am very interested in personal finance and in the whole area of decluttering, which is related to financial issues. I’m constantly trying to keep on the right side of the vast, ever-changing financial edifice that rules our lives, and urging others to do the same. I volunteer as an income tax preparer each year. If I had been raised by people interested in finance, I might have become an accountant and enjoyed it. (Pause to let you shudder.) As it was, I was raised by people interested in literature and history, and here I am, writing stories about ghosts haunting the opera and young women who discover they have superpowers and must save the world. Or multiple worlds.

Stroud: Any new projects?

Vartanoff: I’m writing novels now. Women’s fiction, superheroine adventure, paranormal, romance, whatever. Collecting rejections, which so far have been rather encouraging. I’m writing fast, to make up for lost time. It’s fun again, and that is what matters most to me.

Crisis At Comicon, a novel written by Irene Vartanoff.

Second Chance Reunion, a novel written by Irene Vartanoff.

October 03, 2018

An Interview With Al Milgrom - Inking, Editing, & Creating Comics in the Bronze Age!

October 03, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Al Milgrom (wearing his Marvel Comics shirt) playing paddleball in the Marvel offices, 1982.

Allen L. Milgrom (born March 6, 1950) is an American comic book writer, penciler, inker and editor for both DC & Marvel Comics. He is best known for his 10-year run as editor of Marvel Fanfare; his long involvement as writer, penciler, and inker on Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man; his four-year tenure as West Coast Avengers penciler; and his long stint as the inker of X-Factor. In 2017, he was awarded a Inkwell Awards Special Recognition Award.

You'd have to go far and wide to find someone with more experience and talent than the great Allen Milgrom. From his extensive inking work to his editorial runs and the many, many wonderful artists he's collaborated with, the man is a walking, talking encyclopedia of Bronze Age comics knowledge and a great guy to boot.

This interview originally took place over the phone on January 8, 2010.

Adventure Comics (1938) #457, cover by Al Milgrom.

Bryan Stroud: How did you get your start?

Allen Milgrom: My first year in the business I worked for Murphy Anderson as a background inker. That was my first paying job in the industry. I came out to New York from Michigan with samples. My childhood buddy Jim Starlin had come out a year earlier. He was in the Navy and after his discharge, this was the early 70’s, he came out to New York and started getting some work and I was in college and came out here after I’d graduated.

Jim was doing stuff for Marvel and DC and doing breakdowns or layouts for John Romita on some of the Spider-Man material and when I came out I wasn’t quite ready to get work on my own, but I was good enough to start doing some background work for Murphy. I showed my samples up at DC and either Joe Orlando or maybe it was Carmine Infantino called Murphy in and asked, “Murph, could you use help from this guy?” “Yeah.” So shortly afterward I started working for him.

I had actually done one inking job prior for Charlton and that was while I was still living back in Michigan and I got that through Rich Buckler. He was already out here and he was starting to get some work and a friend of his here named Jim Janes had penciled a job for Charlton and he wasn’t a good inker or didn’t feel he was a good inker, so they needed one for the job and Rich told them about me and the next thing I know I was inking a short 5 or 6 page Charlton job for maybe ten bucks a page. I remember my mother was horrified at how little money it was. And frankly I did not do the best job in the world, and I wasn’t really ready yet, either, but Charlton, God bless ‘em, (chuckle) they couldn’t afford to be very choosy about the work even though they had some very good people working for them.

So that was my first experience. Jim Janes was an interesting guy. He lived on Staten Island and he did some comics. I know he did some Legion of Super-Heroes at one point for DC and I believe he must have moved to California, because I’ve seen his name on the credits of some of the DC animated shows. I don’t remember which ones off hand, but I know he’s done stuff for them. So he’s one of these guys who was a good solid artist, but he didn’t seem to have a distinctive enough style to stay in comics, so he ended up getting probably a much better paying gig on the West Coast doing the animation for a lot of these characters. Storyboards and so forth.

Incredible Hulk (1968) #250, cover by Al Milgrom.

Stroud: Sort of following in the footsteps of Mike Sekowsky and Alex Toth.

AM: Yeah and Kirby did that for a while, too. Gil Kane may have, too. A lot of guys who either got fed up with comics or could do better doing storyboard work or whatever ended up doing that. My good buddy from Michigan, Mike Vosburg did some storyboard/animation stuff for a while and now he’s doing stuff for motion pictures including the Narnia films. And Brett Blevins, who is a very good artist and did comics for a while who was…well, not exactly my protégé, but when he was 13 he started sending samples to me when I was an editor at DC. I thought he had a lot of potential and when I went back to work as an editor for Marvel I told him to stay in touch and send me more samples and I would sort of go over his stuff and send him critiques and tell him how I thought he could correct the work. He’s very good and I believe he’s doing storyboard work for the Batman cartoon show and I think he makes a lot more money doing that than he ever did doing comic book work.

Stroud: Now weren’t you considered to be one of the Crusty Bunkers at Continuity Associates?

AM: Anybody who did any work to help out on a Continuity job was considered a Crusty Bunker, so I did some work under that banner, I guess. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Was it by design or something you just fell into?

AM: Anybody who happened by the studio…we’d go there to hang out. We’d talk to Neal (Adams), to watch and see what he was doing. Jack Abel rented space there. Jack was a good friend of mine and again one of the old-timers, as it were and also a fellow background guy for Murphy Anderson at one point, unfortunately. Unfortunately, because Jack had actually been inking Superman for DC and at some point, they told him that look, that slick house look that DC had used for many years, the stuff that Bernie Sachs and the Barry Brothers and J o e Giella and Frank Giacoia, all those kind of guys, he had a look sort of in that ballpark. I’m not saying it looked exactly the same, but in any case, at some point Carmine told him, “Look, we’re not using the style any more and we want everybody to ink like Dick Girodano.” Jack at the time said, “Well who else inks like Dick Giordano?” Which was a valid question. And at the time Carmine said, “Well…Vinnie Colletta.” And Vinnie…I can kind of see where Carmine made that judgment. There was a very slight surface resemblance between Vinnie and Dick’s, but Dick’s was so far superior.

DC Special (1968) #28, cover by Al Milgrom.

Stroud: Oh, yeah.

AM: Jack was just flabbergasted. He got very discouraged and for a while there just was doing backgrounds for Murphy and I used to ask him why he hadn’t gone back to Marvel (this was all before my time, mind you). He’d been inking Iron Man over Gene Colan at Marvel and apparently, they loved his stuff because one thing Marvel lacked in the early days was good inkers. They had Dick Ayers, who was not too slick and they had few others. They had Joe Sinnott who did a little work early on and so forth, but they really lacked polished inkers for a long time. But Jack said he felt that since he left Iron Man to go back to DC that Marvel wouldn’t give him any work. The truth is they would have been happy to have him back.

Stroud: I’m sure you’re right. They had so few standout inkers at that point I would imagine they’d have snapped him up.

AM: Now (Steve) Ditko inked his own stuff and that was terrific. There were some other guys. Don Heck would pencil and ink his own stuff and other people’s stuff. George Roussous inked a lot of Kirby and some Ditko and so on but I think Abel, being an old-school guy and taking into account that the industry had been so vindictive in the past to the old guys in some ways. If you went to the competition they wouldn’t necessarily take you back. I think that was especially true of DC in those days. Less so for Marvel, but I don’t think Abel realized that. I used to yell at him after the fact: “Jack, what would it have cost you to try to go back to Marvel?” He said: “Well, I should have…” So anyway, he was actually doing backgrounds for Murphy for a while and Dave Cockrum had also done backgrounds for Murph and at some point, Wayne Howard (the Wally Wood imitator). He did a lot of work for Charlton on his own and he was also doing backgrounds for Murphy which was good because Wayne was a very solid guy who did good brushwork and of course being a Wood impressionist and Wood being heavily influenced by Hal Foster and Murph being heavily influenced by Hal Foster - it was a good mesh.

Stroud: You mentioned Vinnie Colletta earlier and he had kind of a reputation as a hack inker.

Defenders (1972) #17, cover penciled by Ron Wilson & inked by Al Milgrom.

AM: I wasn’t really a friend of Vinnie’s and I didn’t like his work, but I did like it when I was a kid and he was inking Kirby on Thor. You can’t hurt Kirby. You can help him, but you can’t hurt him. The stuff is so powerful and the stories are so well told. It’s such exciting, dynamic stuff and as a kid I would look at that stuff Vinnie inked and thought: “Oh, yeah, it looks like Hal Foster,” which of course was highly inaccurate. Just the fact that it was a lot of hatchy pen work and of course that was not true of Foster at all. Foster inked virtually everything with a brush.

Vinnie’s stuff had a different look to it and I just thought, “Oh, that looks good.” And I liked it as a contrast to the stuff Sinnott was inking on FF or Giacoia was inking on Captain America, so as a kid I certainly liked Vinnie’s stuff well enough. But as I got older and I could see a lot of the rendering he did was just sort of meaningless hash marks and lines for the sake of lines. They didn’t really give you a tone, they didn’t give you a texture, they didn’t define muscle mass or anything like that and of course years later when I saw that he would wholesale erase backgrounds rather than ink them, or (chuckle) I know one penciler told me, “You know I did this whole sequence and there was a crowd and there was backgrounds and Vinnie drew in a brick wall and inked it in black.” He covered up all the extra stuff but the main figures were there, but everything else, he just put a brick wall in front of them. That will save you some time, I guess.

You know as fast as Vinnie was, I’m not sure how much time he really saved doing that, but I guess he must have figured he was saving some and Kirby used to draw these sort of ornate 1930’s and 40’s style buildings; Manhattan style buildings but having that kind of brick work and filigree and all kinds of stuff going on and Vinnie a lot of times would just take the shape and ink a skyscraper. Make it a skyscraper with glass windows and not make it with any detail. Just drop everything out. When I found that out it tended to lessen my (chuckle) regard for Vinnie as an inker.

Stroud: (Laughter.) I think you’re in good company based on some stories I’ve heard before. He didn’t have much of a fan club.

All-Star Comics (1940) #67, cover by Al Milgrom.

AM: One time he was inking a job of mine and I wasn’t too thrilled about that, either. By the way, as far as inkers, when I went to work for Murphy, he had two sayings. Murphy, as you probably know, is a funny guy and likes to make puns, but also would pass along things like this: “Allen, you know the first two rules of inking that you should know?” “What’s that, Murphy?” “When in doubt, black it out; and we’re paid to ink, not think.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

AM: And of course, he was being facetious because of course nobody thought more about the work he did on stuff than Murphy. He certainly never just inked what was there because he would always add that Murphy Anderson polish to it, that finish. In some ways it was great and admirable and in some ways, it probably disguised the identity of the penciler. I know that at least one time a penciler mentioned to me that he wished Murphy would just stay a little closer to his pencils and not turn it into Murphy Anderson every time, but he also said, “Look, Murphy is a great talent and I love his work, I just don’t want my work to look like his work necessarily.” That was Irv Novick, I believe.

Stroud: Yeah, I got the impression when I talked to Carmine Infantino…he didn’t come right out and say so, but I got the idea that he wasn’t real happy sometimes with Murph’s inking over his pencils.

AM: I can understand that on one level because if you see Carmine’s pencils, if you see it when he inked his own stuff it had a very different look to it. Carmine’s stuff in the 50’s and 60’s, the Detective Chimp stuff and probably even when he was inking those Elongated Man stories for DC he had a very graphic, modern-looking approach and I think I read one time…I don’t know Carmine well in that I never sat down and had any long conversations with him, which I regret, but he said he had trimmed down a fountain pen and used that to ink with and you look at some of the line work that he did and you can sort of see it. It’s got kind of a dead line sort of look to it and you get that little hook at the end of the line sometimes when you’re using that kind of a pen.

What If? (1989) #4, cover by Al Milgrom.

Murphy inked his work with a lot of brush and a lot of rendering and a lot of good, solid, Murphy Anderson-ish and Hal Foster-ish kind of rendering of form and Carmine’s stuff was sort of sleek and angular and Murphy’s stuff was very round. Now having said that, I loved the combination. I thought it almost didn’t make sense, but sometimes loving the stuff you grew up with reading, with the Flash and Adam Strange stuff that they did together was great. It had Carmine’s story telling and graphic design layout sense and it had Murphy’s beautiful rendering and I just loved the combination.

Stroud: Unbeatable.

AM: Yeah. Terrific. So, I can see why Carmine might not have loved it, but at the same time the end results were great and the same is true when Murphy inked Gil Kane. It was something of a mismatch also but again the finished product was quite good when Murphy inked him on Green Lantern or the Atom or whatever. I wonder who Carmine did like as an inker? I wonder if he liked Joe Kubert? Then again, Joe Kubert took it over and made it look a lot like Joe Kubert.

Stroud: As a matter of fact, I asked him and he told me his favorite inker was Frank Giacoia.

AM: Okay, I can see that. I was going to guess possibly Dick Giordano also because Dick has that sort of angular, 50’s and 60’s sort of commercial/graphic look and I liked it when he inked Carmine. I don’t remember what all they did together, but I know they did some of that Human Target stuff and that was a nice look. Slick and crisp blacks and so forth, so that was a nice look, but Giacoia, yeah, I could see that. And you know what, I actually own an original page of Carmine’s from the first Deadman story.

Stroud: Goodness!

Richard Dragon Kung-Fu Fighter (1975) #2, cover penciled by Alan Weiss & inked by Al Milgrom.

AM: Yeah. It’s a real nice page and I bought it somewhere at a convention or something and it was inked by George Roussous and George, who was a very sweet guy…he was a little rough in the inks. He was from that Morton Meskin school and his stuff, I thought really worked on Carmine and again because it was more graphic. It was angular and it had real juicy blacks. Not quite as polished as the pen work, but that page that I have is very nice. I like that whole origin story that he did. I don’t think he inked Carmine a lot, and maybe that’s because Carmine didn’t like his work. I don’t know for sure, but at least on that one story he made it look good at least to me. Do you remember the story? Actually, it’s the page where Deadman is still alive and he’s talking to the girl in the circus and they’re standing in front of a mirror and it’s a 2/3-page sort of a splash page. It’s quite a nice page. He’s putting his hand to her head or something and she’s upset.

Stroud: Yeah, I’ve got the reprint volume, The Deadman Collection, so I think I know exactly the one you’re talking about. Boston Brand is talking to Lorna or whatever her name was, the circus owner.

AM: Yeah.

Stroud: That is an outstanding page and probably worth a mint, too.

AM: It probably didn’t cost me an arm and a leg, either, back in the day.

Stroud: That’s just it. I don’t know if you keep up at all, but those old pages are just skyrocketing in value it seems or at least what they go for. Value can be kind of subjective, but they’re commanding some impressive prices.

AM: I know that to be the case and (chuckle) in one way I guess it’s good because it means if I ever get desperate enough for funds, which I may…I’m not getting a lot of work these days, and Archie Comics, although I enjoy working for Archie, the rates are very low, relatively. The work is a lot easier, relatively, but there’s also not an unlimited amount of work available. And since I’m not getting any work from DC or Marvel at present, selling some of the pages might end up being a necessity.

Stroud: Do you think the way the industry has been going that inkers will become altogether obsolete?

Captain America (1968) #231, cover penciled by Keith Pollard & inked by Al Milgrom.

AM: I’m sure the companies would be happy to eliminate inkers if the quality they can get from computer scans was there, because it’s a business. They’ve already done it to letterers, but I tip my hat to Archie Comics because they still use letterers. They still letter on the boards. And according to Victor Gorelick, they’ve looked into computer lettering and really it doesn’t save that much money. Maybe it doesn’t save them any money by using a computerized font. I’m not sure why that’s true. DC and Marvel have done it. I’m glad, though, because my friend Jack Morelli, who was a staple at Marvel and then when they went the computer route the next thing you know he was doing work for DC and then they went the computer route and the next thing you know he was working odd jobs; driving a tow truck, working for the school system up where he lives and basically when I started working for Archie I said, “Do you need any letterers?” They said, “We could use one or two to help out our main guy and I hooked Jack up and he started doing some work for them and Bill Yoshida who did the vast majority of Archie’s lettering, who I think was in his 80’s passed away a couple of years back and then suddenly Jack became their primary letterer. Maybe even Clem Robins is doing work for them.

Stroud: I’m not sure. I know he was working with Mike Mignola on Hellboy at Dark Horse recently. I do know that Clem, Todd Klein and Tom Orzechowski all do both methods but will still hand letter.

AM: Maybe it’s Todd who is doing some work for Archie. I haven’t talked to Tom in a long time, but he was another old Detroit guy.

Stroud: Tom’s been busy with a few things, primarily Savage Dragon last I knew.

AM: John Workman still does a lot of hand lettering, too. In fact, he’s working for Archie right now and other places. I’m working with him now on some of that new look Archie stuff if you’re familiar with it.

Stroud: Yeah, wasn’t Breyfogle doing some of that?

Batman (1940) #296, cover penciled by Sal Amendola & inked by Al Milgrom.

AM: Yeah, Norm, who I don’t know well, though I published some of his work in Fanfare back in the day, he just did one. I’ve inked several of them. One over Steven Butler, one over Joe Staton and a couple over Tod Smith and I’m working on one right now by Rod Whigham, however I think this may be the last one they do. They weren’t as popular as they’d hoped so that experiment is going away.

Stroud: That’s unfortunate. I didn’t pick up any of the books myself, but it looked intriguing.

AM: I guess they thought they’d do some slightly less funny, slightly more controversial stories and use a more straight, serious cartooning style, almost like a romance comic, I suppose. At least some of the stories are adaptations of prose novels that Archie did in conjunction with Walt Disney. I guess Disney published them, using the Archie characters and Archie adapted them back to comic book form. That was sort of an unusual chain of events.

First, they were written and now they’re written and drawn and they started out under Disney’s auspices and now they’re back under Archie’s. Archie is an interesting company that way. They have all those superhero characters and they’ve leased those back to DC some years back and DC was doing The Fly and The Shield and all that stuff and now they’ve done it again. I don’t know what DC is doing with them. Maybe they’re just putting together a line. I’d like to find out, because the one character that I’ve always wanted to do, professionally, and never have is The Fly. That was a comic I really loved when I was a kid when it first came out. I don’t think I even knew it was Kirby at the time, or Joe Simon and/or Kirby at the time. But I remember getting that first issue and just thinking it was the greatest thing ever and finding out later that it was Kirby. I liked the character. I liked the mood of it, the whole premise, the orphaned kid and all. I just loved it, and I’d love to work on that character.

Stroud: Hopefully the opportunity will present itself.

Spider-Man (1990) #25, cover penciled by Mark Bagley & inked by Al Milgrom.

AM: I’ve got to try and track down who at DC is doing it. Certainly, at this point nobody wants to give me any penciling work, but they might be willing to let me ink something. I’ve done some inking for DC recently.

Stroud: Which projects?

AM: A lot of stuff with Starlin the last couple of years and also last year I just inked a six-issue Ambush Bug series by Keith Giffen. Basically (chuckle) they’ll only let me ink other really old guys.

Stroud: There does seem to be a little age bias out there.

AM: I don’t know. It may or may not be true. They may just not think my work is current enough to look good over the current new crop of pencilers. They never say that. They always say, “Oh, yeah, we’ll keep you in mind,” but really what that means is they’re trying to forget you. It’s how they get rid of you when you call or write. It’s hurtful, and the difference is when my generation of guys got into the industry we were excited to work with guys whose work we’d always read. Working with Murphy, one of the last things I did, the last thing I penciled probably for DC was a 3-issue team-up of Hawkman and Adam Strange and I penciled it and Murphy inked it.

That was a big thrill for me because I liked those characters from when I was a kid, but again, not only had I worked for Murph, but I grew up really enjoying his work and it was a treat to get him to ink me. I’ve been inked by Jim Mooney and Giacoia and Joe Sinnott…a lot of Joe Sinnott, and we were glad to work with those guys and we made sure they always got plenty of work and we kept them busy and so on and so forth and the current crop is sort of coming in where the pencilers have their own inkers or the inkers have their own pencilers depending on which way you want to look at it and they don’t seem to want to keep the old guys employed, which is kind of a shame.

Stroud: Very much so. By the way, speaking of thrills, I notice that over the course of your career you got to ink both Kirby and Ditko at various points.

Avengers (1963) #154, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Al Milgrom.

AM: Yeah, in fact, since you bring it up, I’ve inked Kirby and I’ve done cover sketches for Kirby. When Gerry Conway was Editor-in-Chief at Marvel, he liked my cover layouts and Kirby was working for Marvel again, but he was living on the West Coast and didn’t want to have to sift through copies of pencils again to figure out what cover scene to do. Gerry told me: “Here. Figure out the cover scene for this issue and then do a sketch and Kirby will draw the pencils.” I said, “Okay, but on one condition: I want to ink Kirby’s pencils on it.” I always described it as a Kirby sandwich. I was the bread and Kirby was the meat. I would do a sketch, he would do the pencils and I would do the inks. I didn’t get to do all the ones that I did sketches for, but a fair number.

I did a bunch of Avengers covers, Iron Man, Defenders and Ghost Rider. Some time after that, I was at a San Diego convention and they were selling some Kirby artwork. I think it was Jack’s son, maybe or at least some relative of his. They were selling some of the covers that I’d inked and I guess Kirby had a deal with Marvel at the time where he got all his originals back. I don’t know if anybody told me that at the time, but there they were selling off a bunch of covers that I’d inked and I said, “Oh, I inked these, I’d really like to buy some of them.” And they gave me a very, very cheap price. Certainly, by today’s standards. At the time it was probably just a little inexpensive, but now it’s absurdly inexpensive and I brought back as many as I could afford at the time. I’ve got a nice little handful of Kirby covers.

Stroud: Fantastic. It doesn’t seem like anything with Jack’s name on it goes for less than four or five figures these days.

AM: Yeah, it’s astonishing and you know maybe even more astonishing because he did so much work. If there’s anybody out there where there’s no shortage of their work, it’s Jack Kirby. But on the other hand, I think it’s a testament to just how good he was and what an impression he made on several generations of both fans and artists.

Stroud: Yeah, and obviously continues to inspire. In fact, it appeared to me that the cover to Firestorm #1 looks reminiscent of Jack’s work. Am I off base on that?

Firestorm (1978) #1, cover by Al Milgrom.

AM: No, not at all. I was very much going for a Kirby sort of powerful look…in fact, I’ve told this before; at the time when I was doing those covers for DC, what happened was that I was doing cover sketches for Kirby and a fair number of covers for Marvel on my own. I was up at Continuity and I was showing off the stuff to Neal, because that’s what we did. (Chuckle.) “Oh, look, Neal. Look what I got to do. I did these sketches for Kirby and I did these other covers,” and at the time I think Neal was dating Jenette Kahn.

So, he said, “Let me borrow these a minute.” Jenette was apparently hanging out in one of the other rooms at Continuity at the time. I didn’t know it and he went and showed them to her, and the next thing I knew I got a call from Joe Orlando saying, “Yeah, Jenette really likes the covers you’ve been doing and wants you to do some for us.” At the time I was working primarily, if not exclusively, for Marvel. So, I said, “Okay, sure,” and I started doing some work for DC, but the funny thing is I went in and talked to Joe, and he said, “Well, Jenette likes your covers, but we don’t want you to do those covers that look like Marvel covers.” And I said, “Oh?” It didn’t really make sense to me because I was too young and stupid and ignorant to question it, so I tried to alter my style to look more like what I thought of as DC stuff which was, of course, exactly what Jenette did not want. I worked for Marvel and she wanted me to do stuff that was in that vein.

So, I started doing these covers for Orlando and after awhile he called me into the office and he said, “Yeah, Jenette’s not happy with the stuff you’re doing because it’s not like the stuff you’re doing at Marvel,” and I said, “Joe. You told me not to do stuff that looked like Marvel,” and he replied, “Yeah, I know, I know.” No apology, no “Gosh, I made a mistake.”

I don’t know if he resented Jenette telling him who to use, or I don’t know if he was trying to sabotage me or if he was just resenting Jenette telling him what to do. I have no idea. I don’t think it was necessarily malicious. If I’d have been a little older and a little more confident I’d have probably told him, “Look, I either do it the way I do it or there’s no point in me doing the work for you,” and maybe then Jenette would have been happier. Maybe what she really wanted was for Jack Kirby to do covers for DC (Laughter.) Certainly that (Firestorm) cover had a Kirby flair to it. By then I’d been hired as an editor at DC, as well as freelance. On Firestorm I definitely wanted a Kirby feel to that first cover.

Incredible Hulk (1968) #271, cover by Al Milgrom.

Stroud: Well, you certainly pulled it off and you mentioned in an e-mail that you felt that was one of your few characters that had some legs. I found it fascinating that Firestorm and Killer Frost had a fairly juicy role in Crisis on Infinite Earths.

AM: I didn’t even know that. I never read that series. By the time that was coming out I was so busy working every day and every night and weekends and holidays (chuckle) that I hardly read any of the comics. I should probably get the reprinted edition and read it over. Is that the one George Perez did, and inked by Jerry Ordway?

Stroud: Yes.

AM: Artistically I thought that was a great, great combination and I really liked the way it looked, but I never actually read it to see what was going on.

Stroud: I think you’d enjoy it and as I said it should be somewhat gratifying to see your characters, not necessarily in a pivotal role, but they are spotlighted in a couple of places and I thought that was a nice tribute to you and Gerry’s work.

AM: Well, Gerry certainly. Firestorm, when I did it, lasted all of five issues. That, of course, was the time of the DC Implosion.

Stroud: It sounds like they had to chop off everything possible at the time, so I certainly wouldn’t call that a failure. That sounded like pretty dark days.

AM: It was a weird, weird situation. If I recollect things properly, and I’m not sure I do, apparently what happened was DC and Marvel got together and every couple of years they’d have to raise the price of the comics by about a nickel and they got together and said, “Look, it’s crazy to have to raise the price every couple of years, so why don’t we just double the price from a quarter to fifty cents, add a lot more content so that it’s actually a good value for the readers, and just jump up to fifty cents and not have to keep pussy-footing around every couple of years with these five cent increases every time the paper costs and printing costs go up.” So, they had a sort of gentleman’s agreement to do this.

Kamandi (1975) #53, cover by Al Milgrom.

So, what happened was DC was gearing up and they were promoting “The DC Explosion,” and they were doing a weird thing. Instead of actually doubling the page count, which would have made sense; comics are 32 pages, and they printed them on these giant sheets of newsprint called signatures, and what they would do is they would print 16 pages at a time. So, they’d do two of those for an entire issue and they would fold, fold, fold and then trim them and then you had your 32-page comic book. So, they were going to add a half a signature, so DC decided to go from 32 pages to 40 pages, which was only an additional 8 pages, so it was an additional half signature. So, it was a little more expensive to do that because now you had to get half that sheet of newsprint and fold it and cut it. It would have been more efficient to do an additional 16 pages, but they were afraid to jump up the page count that much.

So, they went through this whole process and they had the agreement with Marvel, that they were both going to do it and DC was creating all new material so they came out with a bunch of new titles and a bunch of new backup features. In that same month that they brought those out, Marvel did the lead features, but they used a lot of reprints with maybe some new material. And what happened was Marvel did it for one month and then they went back to the old format. Without telling DC. So, they basically pulled a bait and switch. They said, “Yeah, we’ll go along with that. We’ll both go so the whole industry will be suddenly pay twice as much with an increase of an 8-page count, blah, blah, blah,” and they basically reneged on the deal. They backed out and went back to the 32-page count.

So, DC’s out there with their now over-priced comics and Marvel maybe raised their price by the traditional nickel, but they were still thirty cents compared to fifty cents and they basically just slaughtered DC on the newsstand. DC was stuck there with an unwieldy, in terms of the expense, product. I suppose if you want to look at it from a cynical business aspect, Marvel was very smart to do it, but kind of dishonest. Then again, what’s the old term? A verbal agreement is worth the paper it’s written on.

Stroud: That’s it.

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #290, cover by Al Milgrom.

AM: Nobody had any legal duty to stay at that size, so they basically screwed DC. So DC, which had been expanding and had been promoting the DC Explosion now had to cancel 40% of the titles and they fired 40% of the staff, which sounds worse than it was because basically they fired several of their new hires, so it was me and Larry Hama and neither of us were really affected by that because we just ended up working for Marvel; both going right back there and working as editors. I don’t know who else they had to get rid of, but I don’t think they had to fire too many people on staff who had been there for long periods of time, if anybody. They kept Jack Harris and the other new editor was actually Ross Andru, who I always thought would have been better off remaining a penciler. Not to disparage his editorial abilities. I don’t even really remember what he edited, but I just thought Ross was a terrific artist and it was a shame for him not to be doing probably what he did best.

Stroud: Exactly. You see it in other professions quite often, too. Just because you’re a good journeyman or whatever at whatever you do doesn’t necessarily mean you should be thrust into an executive position.

AM: Yeah, it’s the Peter Principle.

Stroud: That’s it, although in your case it seems like the reports I’ve heard held you as a pretty beloved editor when you held that title.

AM: Well, gee, I’m glad to hear it. I don’t know who said it, but it’s very nice to hear. With me, it was kind of an experiment. I love comics and I just wanted to do comics and I’d only been in the business a handful of years, really. I started in ’72 working for Murph and one year later I’m doing some work on my own, so this was maybe ’77 when the DC Implosion happens. I’d only been in the business really 4 years, not counting my year as a background guy and I wanted to see how the other half lived. I knew how the freelancers lived. (Laughter.)

Iron Fist (1975) #14, cover penciled by Dave Cockrum & inked by Al Milgrom.

I wanted to learn the process of editing and I wanted to see what it was like trying to put together the right talent to make an interesting package and be involved in all the phases of it and frankly when I took the job at DC I don’t know that I really thought of it as a long-term gig. I just decided, “I’ll try this out for awhile.” And at the end of the year when they said, “Good-bye,” I said, “Okay, back to freelancing,” and I went over to Marvel and actually said, “Hey, DC fired me. Any chance of getting some freelance work?” And DC, by the way, at the time said, “Hey, you guys get first priority in terms of freelance.” But nobody offered me any work up there at the time. I didn’t really go actively looking for it, but nobody came down to my office and said, “Hey, Al, before you leave, you want to become the inker on this, or pencil this or that?” And probably the truth is, with the cutbacks, they may not have had work available and would have had to can somebody else to give us work. Can freelancers, that is.

So, I never really thought much about it. I went back to Marvel and said, “Hey, any chance of me getting some more work here?” And Jim Shooter said, “I think we might have something for you.” “Great.” That same day somebody gave me some Star Wars pages because it was in a deadline bind, and I thought, “Okay, back to work.” I thought they were going to offer me a book or two, but Jim, who was newly minted as the Editor-in-Chief, offered me an editorial position and I thought, “Well, I don’t think I really got the full impact of the editing job after only one year,” so he convinced me to take it. So, I proceeded to work as an editor for Marvel for five years. So, if the people liked me, or were happy with me as an editor, I’m glad to hear it. Or maybe that means I wasn’t doing my job. I don’t’ know. (Mutual laughter.)

Stroud: It’s interesting the different theories you hear as far as what does and does not make a good editor. It seems, especially in the era I like to roam, the Silver Age, so many of them were just tyrants and yet the product seemed to turn out well enough for all that.

AM: As a matter of fact, one of the things that was interesting is, since I worked for both Marvel and DC as an editor, which at the time was a little unusual, but I think has become a lot more commonplace in recent years, but working for DC, Joe Orlando had an interesting theory about it.

Weird Western Tales (1972) #44, cover penciled by Jim Starlin & inked by Al Milgrom.

In the old days, he said cartoonists would do the whole job themselves. They’d write, they’d pencil, they’d ink, and they’d probably letter, and sometimes color. Of course, those were the newspaper strip guys primarily. Joe said:

“But what happened was, as the demand for material grew, and they started having to come out with comics books with new material, not just newspaper strip reprints, there was just no way that a single guy could do the entire job. Not if he wanted to stay on deadline. So, people would tend to get pigeonholed in the job they did best and/or fastest. So, you’d get a writer, and a penciler, and an inker and a colorist, and the editor’s job was to take all those different and disparate people, and sometimes desperate people, and meld them into a cartoonist.”

So he felt his job as an editor was to do that and we used to discuss what made for a good story and what made for good story-telling and what with Joe being an artist he tended to be somewhat visually oriented, but he also had a good sense of story and drama and so on and so he was a real good guy to learn that from and then when I went to work at Marvel, Jim Shooter had many of his own ideas about it, and of course Jim had been one of the youngest, if not the youngest writer ever to work for DC Comics. In many ways he sort of espoused theories of editing that were very similar to DC’s. That was really where he got his basic training. He had very strong ideas of what made for a good story, and visually what made for good story-telling and I know Jim’s gotten some bad press over the years, but I think that his basic ideas, his theories of story-telling and drama, both in terms of visually and the story content, were very sound.

The problem was that it was hard to implement all those things exactly the way he saw them in his own head. And whenever you couldn’t do it the way Jim saw it in his mind’s eye, he felt like either you weren’t getting it, or you were sort of trying to undermine him. That became a problem ultimately with him, and some of the freelancers, but in terms of the way he said things and expressed things and illustrated them, I think he was very sound and he had very good, solid ideas about it. But I think in some ways, if Jim could have had the ability to clone himself, he would have written, drawn, and maybe inked everything (chuckle) that Marvel did. Maybe not inking. He never claimed to be an inker, but he did have theories about what inkers should do and what their work should bring out in the pencils and so forth. Anyway, it was interesting getting both his viewpoint and Joe Orlando’s and they both had really good ideas and I tried to implement some of them, but always your own personality sneaks in there, too.

X-Factor (1986) #92, cover penciled by Joe Quesada & inked by Al Milgrom.

Stroud: Oh, of course and it sounds like Joe was another popular editor back in the day.

AM: He was.

Stroud: Tony DeZuniga and a couple of others spoke very highly of his mentoring and coaching and the time he would take to help them develop their talents and ideas.

AM: I think the Filipino guys also used to get American comics or reprints in the Philippines and Joe, because he’d been a guy who had been an EC artist, and they really loved the EC stuff I’ve heard, so he was held in very high regard, so they would take what he said very much to heart.

Stroud: The story that Michael Golden and Bob Smith did for “Bat-Mite’s New York Adventure”. Do you think they depicted you very well in that?

AM: (Laughter.) Yeah, I thought it was a funny story. Bob Rozakis wrote it, I believe. He came into my office and I was editing Batman Family at the time, and he said, “Al, I’ve got an idea for a Bat-Mite story,” and I said, “Oh, really? Bat-Mite? In this day and age?” “Well, here. It features you.” So, I said, “Sold!” No, I don’t really remember the details, but it was probably something like that and I was flattered and of course amused, and I actually own that entire story.

Stroud: Really?

AM: Yeah, I bought that from Michael Golden. “Mike I’d like to own that.” I bought his share and Bob’s share.

Stroud: Oh, good deal. That’s a nice little thing to have sitting around, I’m sure.

AM: It’s cute.

Stroud: I’ve got to admit when I was looking through my volume of “The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told” and saw that one in there…

Rom (1979) #39, cover penciled by Al Milgrom & inked by Gene Day.

AM: Oh, really? It’s in there? (Laughter.)

Stroud: I thought, “What?”

AM: I’m not sure I’d have gone that far. “The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told.” I guess the fact that Golden drew it had something to do with it. He’s such a popular artist. A phenomenal talent. I don’t know what he’s doing these days.

Stroud: Beyond the commission work I don’t know myself. Do you do commissions, Al?

AM: I do. It’s funny. I don’t have a website and I’ve never advertised anywhere, but between word of mouth and also Spencer Beck, the art dealer, who puts some of my stuff up on his website. He’s gotten some inquiries and some guys who commission something will then mention it to their friends or they’ll post it on this comic art fans board where they’ll say, “Hey, I just got this great commission from somebody-or-other and people will then contact you and as a matter of fact I’ve got a handful of them lined up right now. My problem is if I have freelance work for one of the companies I tend to put the commission stuff aside.

Stroud: Sure. Priorities.

AM: Well, in some ways it makes sense, because you want to keep busy and keep your name out there so you’ll get work from DC or Marvel or whoever, but at the same time, in terms of the amount of time involved, you’d probably do a little better doing commissions. (Chuckle.) So, in some ways it would almost make more sense for me to do more commissions and less stuff for the companies. Well, right now I couldn’t do less stuff for the companies, other than Archie, which is keeping me supplied with semi-regular work. I had one commission where a guy wanted a fairly difficult recreation of an old cover that I’d done and there was no excuse for this, but I think it took me more than a year to get it finished. It wasn’t that hard a cover, it’s just that I kept getting busy with deadline work and kept putting it aside. Toward the end he was getting a little annoyed with me and rightfully so. But I did get it done and I did a very good job recreating the cover and when he saw it he said, “Well, it was worth the wait.”

Action Comics (1938) #862 Variant, cover penciled by Keith Giffen & inked by Al Milgrom.

Stroud: All’s well that ends well.

AM: And he proceeded immediately to ask me to do another commission for him. I actually want to try to get that going in the next week or so. I’ve got a couple things to finish up and then I’ll be working on that as well as a handful of others, so I’ve got stuff to keep me busy. I like the commission work. It’s fun and is usually less tedious than having to draw an entire story, which I’m so out of the loop and so out of practice that I don’t know if I could any more. I mean I haven’t drawn a story, let alone a complete issue of anything in a number of years and I like to think it would come back to me if I got an assignment, but I don’t know that for a fact. I’m most happy doing inking these days.

Stroud: It seems that might be your greatest forte, even though you are a multi-talented threat between writing and editing and penciling and inking. I think I even saw a stray lettering credit for you someplace.

AM: I don’t think I ever lettered anything. God help me if I did. I can’t letter and I make no pretense. I colored a job once. It was a humorous job that I did for I think Bizarre Adventures for Marvel. I did a story about Santa Claus trying to deliver presents in New York City and the problems he ran into there. I wrote it, I penciled it, I inked it and I colored it, but I think that was the only time I ever colored a job and it was like pulling teeth. (Chuckle.) It took far longer than it should have. I kept sticking my hand in the wet dyes. It was good, though, because I could really appreciate the work the colorists do, which in the old days they did fairly quickly. Now, of course, it’s a much more difficult and elaborate process. Another case of the computer making life harder rather than easier. You can get much more ornate coloring and more detailed coloring and stuff like that, but in the old days if a book was running late you might get it sent out like a week before it was supposed to go to press and you would still get it done. Now, if you get something in there less than 5 weeks ahead of the printing schedule, you incur all kinds of late fees and you can’t possibly make the deadline.

Stroud: This is progress.

Fantastic Four (1961) #204, cover penciled by Al Milgrom & inked by Joe Sinnott.

AM: It’s sort of like one step forward and four steps back, but again the kind of color you get nowadays on the computer…there’s just no comparison. And it’s not always necessarily a good thing. To a certain degree, the coloring is so ornate that sometimes it either gets very dark or there’s so much color it sort of drowns out the line work. As an inker that’s especially hurtful, but also in some ways I think they’re trying to take these black and white illustrations and turn them into Alex Ross. They can almost do that. They can really saturate it with so much color.

I remember there was a job I inked over Starlin a few years back for Marvel. He did an issue of Captain Marvel…why not? And this was when I think Peter David was writing it and Jim drew it and I inked it and he put in a lot of very nice, fine-lined detail, which I inked faithfully and then when the book came out I remember somebody called up and said, “Al, you really butchered Jim’s stuff.” I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?” They said, “Did you see the issue?” I said, “I haven’t really looked at it.” I dug it out and looked and sure enough everywhere that I did any rendering in pen, the colorist had decided, “Oh, look. He shaded this with a pen, so I’ll go him one better and shade it with a bunch of gray tones.”

So, there would be some rendering on Captain Marvel’s ribcage, say; nice crisp, visible lines, and it would be colored almost like an airbrush effect of fairly dark gray. So instead of having these crisp ink lines, it was just a mass of a sort of gray, amorphous shapes. And the guy who called me up thought I had done a bad job…thank you very much. I said, “I’m going to send you a photo-copy of the inked page, and you tell me what you think,” and when he got it he said, “My God, what did they do to the artwork?” I said, “They COLORED it.” And he said: “Oh, I had no idea.” “Well, maybe before you accuse somebody of doing a bad job, know whereof you speak.” Obviously, it was one of those ego things on my part, but I think I complained to the editor and he said, “Hey, Al, that’s the way we color these things these days.” I said, “Okay.” What can I do? To get any more work, just try to go along.

Stroud: As an inker I’ll bet you felt a certain degree of satisfaction doing your Warren work in black and white.

Weird War Tales (1971) #56, cover by Al Milgrom.

AM: I enjoyed it. I did very little for Warren. But what I did do was a couple of Carmine Infantino jobs. Of course, that was a bit of a treat because again it was one of my all-time favorites from when I was a kid growing up and I tried to mesh, as I always do try, to mesh my inking style to Carmine’s pencil style which was, again, a lot more angular and graphic than you might know when Murphy inked him, for instance. I had a good time with it. It’s funny, because I did, I believe, three Carmine jobs altogether. There’s actually a fourth job that I started and didn’t finish when Warren went under. So, I still have that job, partly inked, which I’m trying to figure out how to sell it and get some use out of it. It features this warthog character that Nick Cuti created called Cronk, I think it was.

Stroud: I’m not familiar with it.

AM: He was a humanoid warthog with the body of a man but the head of a warthog and it was an ongoing series and one of the three stories I’d previously inked for Warren was one of his. I also did one about some sort of sports story that maybe Bill Dubay had edited. It was a football story and I inked that and used a lot of Zipatone for tone and then I did another one about a black tennis player, probably loosely based on Arthur Ashe, I’m guessing, and I used marker and crayon to get tones on that one and I remember Jim Warren wrote me a note saying that he really liked the first story that I inked, but that he was less impressed with the second one because he just didn’t think the tones were as good as the line work in the Zipatone. I think I dropped him a line back saying, “I understand that, but I’m a relatively young artist and I’m trying to develop my vocabulary and I wanted to do this to stretch my muscles and trying other ways of getting tone on a story.” I never heard back from him, but he was right, I think the first story was stronger, but I didn’t think the second one was horrible. It helped me learn some stuff, which I think was important, too. But my run was three stories and I have this fourth story and I’m actually trying to see if I can sell it to Dark Horse because they’re doing Creepy and Eerie now I understand.

Stroud: That’s right.

Iron Man (1968) #80, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Al Milgrom.

AM: I contacted an editor up there and said, “Look, here’s this story and Cuti says that Jim Warren said it would be okay to use. The copyright was returned to the creators and therefore if you think it’s a viable story…” It’s an 8-pager and I think I’ve got 3 or 4 pages inked, so I figure I could finish inking it and get paid and divvy up any remaining money for the story, penciling and inking between the entire creative staff, which was Nick Cuti, Carmine, myself and whoever lettered it.

Stroud: That would be cool.

AM: It would be cool, but I don’t know if Dark Horse is going to go for it. In fact, I’ve got to remember to write back to them and see.

Stroud: It’s worth a shot. I hope something comes of it.

AM: By the way, at some point I went off on a ramble. We were talking about inking Kirby and Ditko and I started talking about doing cover layouts for Kirby, but I always had this thing in my head where I wanted to work in some capacity with all the original guys who I loved at Marvel. When I say that, I mean the original four guys who did most of the very early stuff and that was Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Dick Ayers and Don Heck. Those are the four artists and of course Stan Lee.

So, doing that stuff with Kirby was one of them. I’ve inked and been inked by Don Heck, so I got him, and I’ve inked and been inked by Steve Ditko. I think Steve only inked a cover of mine, but I’ve inked a number of his things over the years, and Dick Ayers, I had never worked with, either inking him or penciling something for him to ink, but a few years back now, I don’t know how many, five or six or seven, some little independent publisher…I think they were Mecca Comics or something like that, though they didn’t seem to have anything to do with Mecca or Islam or anything like that, but they had hired Dick to do some stuff for them. It was very weird.

1st Issue Special (1975) #7, cover penciled by Steve Ditko & inked by Al Milgrom.

They were posting stuff on the internet and they were really sort of trying to create the atmosphere of Marvel of the 60’s, I think, but they got Dick to draw a pinup of one of their characters and they offered me a chance to ink it. It was for a nominal fee, but I did actually finally get to ink Dick Ayers as well. I did also pencil one short story for Fantastic Four Annual or something that Stan wrote, so I actually got to work with all five of the original big five at Marvel. Actually, I should say I did work with Larry Lieber who worked with them back then, too. He didn’t work on any of the major characters, but he was doing Westerns and would fill in on stuff here and there. I’ve inked Larry and I think I maybe drew some Hulk strips for him. Newspaper strips back when they were doing newspaper strips of the Hulk briefly. I think I either laid them out or penciled them and Giacoia inked them. I have a vague recollection. So that’s where I was originally going with that story when I got sidetracked.

Stroud: That’s quite the accomplishment, especially when you consider how iconic those names are and what they mean in the history of the genre.

AM: I’ve been lucky that way. I’ve worked with many if not all of the guys I really admired when I was growing up as a kid. I’ve inked Carmine, I’ve inked Gil Kane, I’ve been inked by Murphy, of course and I’ve actually inked Joe Kubert on a couple of Sgt. Rock stories, so.

Stroud: That’s a rarity in and of itself.

AM: And I’ve been inked by Jack Abel and inked Jack Abel and he was a good friend as well. Yeah, but about the only guy I never did any real considerable work with, outside of helping on some Crusty Bunker stuff, I never inked Neal Adams. I don’t think Neal’s ever inked me. He’d probably run screaming from the room if he had to. (Mutual laughter.) I’ve actually been inked by Russ Heath, which is sort of unusual. It was on one Mister Miracle cover that I did. So, I’ve had a chance to really work in some capacity with almost all the guys whose work I grew up liking and admiring and that’s kind of a nice thing to have on your resume.

Stroud: Very much so. I noticed that you had a run there for awhile with the Legion and I wondered if that assignment was intimidating at all considering how fussy Legion of Super-Hero fans can be.

Secret Society of Super-Villains (1976) #10, cover penciled by Al Milgrom & inked by Jack Abel.

AM: I wasn’t intimidated until I got the job and I started getting letters from these guys and they had a lot of ideas and I think they sort of felt like you should listen to their ideas. But that’s not really what an editor does. I mean, look, if they’d sent in an idea and it was good I might have done it, but a lot of times the fans have ideas about what they’d like to see the characters do, but if you do that it’s like the death of the character.

I’ll give you the best example: At Marvel they used to get a lot of letters about Ben Grimm being The Thing. They would write in and say, “Poor Ben Grimm, the Torch can turn back into a regular looking guy and Reed Richards can return to normal after he stretches, but The Thing is a monster…” They wanted to give him the power to be able to become Ben Grimm at will and Stan had actually played around with that. Sometimes he would have him change to Ben Grimm at an inopportune moment or Reed would find him a cure and he’d have to give up the cure like in “This Man, This Monster,” where he’d have to become The Thing to save the world from some situation. Shooter said this, which was very insightful:

“The fact that they want him to be able to turn into Ben Grimm at will doesn’t mean you should do that. Because then the character is no longer empathetic. All that means is that it’s their way of saying, ‘I feel bad for him.’ They empathize with his situation. If you then give him the cure to the situation, then the empathy’s gone. The Thing is not a tragic, heroic figure if he can turn into a normal human at will.”

I thought that was a really brilliant observation and an example of what the fans would like you to do, but if you did it, it would ruin the character. So, I kept that in mind with the Legion and I would politely listen to some of their suggestions and then I’d go ahead and do whatever the hell I wanted.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1976) #64, cover penciled by Ed Hannigan & inked by Al Milgrom.

AM: I’d hire guys who were good writers and good artists and go from there. I was only at DC for one year. That was my editorial tenure almost to the day. We had problems with deadlines so I called in a bunch of my buddies and I remember Starlin did an issue or two of the Legion and I got Joe Staton to be inked by Jack Abel, which was kind of interesting and I remember Wiacek inked some and Howard Chaykin did an issue for me.

So, I got a bunch of guys who had never been associated with the Legion to do Legion stories for me and it kind of got things back on track. Jim Sherman did several issues of the Legion and he was a really good artist and I remember some fan writing in and saying, “You can’t fool me. This guy is really using a pseudonym and it’s so and so.” Which was totally wrong, Jim was an actual human being. But Sherman drew really cute girls and he shared space up at the studio where Walter and Chaykin and Starlin and Frank Miller all worked at one time. He did not have a long career in comics. He used to do a lot of commercial work in storyboarding and comps and things like that for advertising. He did some female American Indian character in a yellow costume.

Stroud: Dawnstar.

AM: Yeah, Dawnstar, thanks. This guy drew her really cute and sexy and I think I got him inked by Bob McLeod, and maybe Joe Rubinstein and it was nice stuff. Beautiful stuff. And the lucky bastard actually got to draw The Fly for Archie when they did that short revival under the Red Circle banner back in the early 80’s. Of course, I was exclusive to Marvel at the time and couldn’t have done The Fly even if they’d wanted me to.

Stroud: I always think of Mike Grell with DC at that time.

AM: Mike is one of the few artists I didn’t work with. I used to bug Marvel when I was working on staff for them to try and hire him. I said, “Look, this guy is popular, why don’t we hire him away from DC?” They said, “Well, maybe as an inker.” They were very snobby about his penciling. I thought, “Hey, the guy is popular and he’s developing.” He was very obviously a Neal Adams influenced guy in the early years, but I liked Mike and it turned out he was maybe even a better writer than he was an artist and I thought he would have been an asset. I also tried to hire Jim Aparo to come work at Marvel.

Avengers West & Avengers East, a poster penciled by Bob Hall & inked by Al Milgrom.

Stroud: Really?

AM: I thought with his Batman stuff and his urban drawing chops he’d be a good artist for Spider-Man. He said, “No, no, they keep me busy up here. I’m fine.” I offered him a very good rate. I think maybe it was better than the rate he was getting at DC and I think he felt like I must be lying to him. That’s just conjecture, of course. It was one of those things where on the phone I could sort of hear him hesitate when I offered him the rates for penciling and inking. He used to letter his own stuff, too.

Stroud: He thought it was just too good to be true.

AM: That was my sense because there was this hesitation on the line. I offered what was near our top rate to him and he hesitated and I thought he couldn’t believe the rates could be that high, but at the time Marvel was paying better rates than DC. But he declined, saying DC had been loyal to him all this time. I said, “I understand, but if you ever change your mind…” I’m sure he was thinking, “Who is this guy?” I don’t think he had any idea who I was or who I worked for or if it was legitimate. I never met Jim and I think that was the only time I ever talked to him. Maybe he thought it was some prank call and I was recording him to play it back to DC. I don’t know what he thought. I also once called Will Eisner to see if he’d do some work for Batman Family.

Werewolf by Night (1972) #32, cover penciled by Gil Kane & inked by Al Milgrom.

Stroud: Wow!

AM: It was the funniest thing, because Murphy had worked for him on the P.S. Magazine for the armed forces and after the one year I worked for Murphy he actually took over producing that magazine (Eisner had given it up). Murph put in a bid to the military and got that gig. He said, “Hey, why don’t you come work for me?” I said, “I’ve got to do comics,” and he said, “Okay, I understand.” Anyway, he gave me Will’s phone number and I called him up and said, “Hi, Mr. Eisner, my name is Allen Milgrom and I got your number from Murphy Anderson. I worked as his assistant and now I’m an editor at DC comics and there’s a book that I edit called Batman Family and I would love to have you do a cover for it if you’re willing.” He said, “Oh, no, no, no. I can’t.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “Well, I never draw Batman.” I said, “Well, yeah, that’s sort of the point. Everybody loves your Spirit stuff and you’re a great artist and we’d love to have you do it and it would be a real coup for us and we’d pay you the top rate.” He said, “Oh, I just don’t think I’d do the character justice.” I said: “No, no, you would, but I understand you don’t really want to do it.” “Well, maybe another time.”

As I hung up the phone, Mike Gold, who was an editor at the time also at DC, comes lurching into my office and he said, “Did I just hear that correctly?” I said, “What’s that?” “Did you just call up Will Eisner and ask him to do a Batman cover?” I said, “Yeah,” and he goes, “You’re my god.” I said, “But he turned me down.” “But you called Will Eisner!” “Well, what was the worst that was going to happen? He’d either say yes or he’d say no. It’s not like lightning was going to strike me dead.” Having the temerity to ask him, he said, “I don’t care. It takes balls to call up Will Eisner!” “I don’t see why, but okay, thanks.” (Chuckle.) I got a lot of mileage out of that story over the years.

Stroud: (Laughter.) I bet you have.

AM: I never got so much cachet as when I was turned down by an artist to do a cover for me. I also tried to get Steranko to do some stuff for me and he was funny, too. “I want the top rate. I mean the top rate. The Neal Adams rate!” “Yeah, I hear you.” Then we never were able to reach an agreement on that, either. Not getting Steranko is not as impressive as getting turned down by Will Eisner, I guess.

Captain Marvel (1968) #43, original cover art penciled by Al Milgrom & inked by Bernie Wrightson!

Note: As we were wrapping up, we got to talking a little about Bernie Wrightson and Al shared this terrific remembrance of his friend:

AM: I didn’t even tell you about the apartment building in Queens that we all lived at. At one point I was living there with Simonson and Chaykin and Wrightson were living in the same building and at some point, I think Bernie moved out, Kupperberg moved in, Kupperberg moved out and Roger Stern moved in. Not in the same apartment. There were two or three apartments in the same building that were occupied by comic folks. While Bernie was living there we were very friendly. He’s a really sweet guy and a super, super talent. Unbelievable. I felt like I was relatively adept at using a brush, but I’ve never seen anybody who can do with a brush what Bernie can. Pen, too. That’s drawing ability, but his use of brush…in fact; I’ve got a bunch of his artwork. I bought some stuff from him and also one day, (chuckle) he called Walt and me and we had our apartment upstairs and Bernie had his a couple of floors down and he says, “Look, you guys, I’m throwing out a bunch of art work that I don’t need any more and don’t want any more and do you want to come down and see if you want any of it?” We said, “Sure,” and we went down and basically, he was throwing out stuff that were roughs and there were some finished pieces that he didn’t have any use for and partly finished pieces and so on and so forth, but just such gorgeous stuff and so of course Walt and I traded off.

He would take a piece and I would take a piece and then anything left over that nobody was interested in I said, “Look, if you’re going to throw them out, I’ll take them.” So, I’ve got all kinds of fascinating little Bernie Wrightson sketches and finished drawings and half-finished drawings and a couple of pinup pieces that he did that I bought from him and also one entire story he did for Warren which was one of my favorites. I think maybe that one was written by Bill Dubay and it was like a riff on Little Nemo in Slumberland. These goblins or demons would come and push this kid’s bed like almost out the window. It was like Little Nemo waking up at the last minute and being on the floor outside his bed, but in this case, it turned out he wasn’t imagining it. It was a really cool story.

Stroud: Talk about a treasure trove. Holy cats.

AM: Like I say, if the work doesn’t pick up I may end up having to sell all this stuff, but what are you gonna do?

Stroud: Can I have first refusal? (Laughter.)

Super-Team Family (1975) #14, cover by Al Milgrom.

Speed Demon (1996) #1, cover penciled by Salvador Larroca & inked by Al Milgrom.

What The (1988) #1, cover penciled by Jon Bogdanove & inked by Al Milgrom.

September 26, 2018

An Interview With Frank McLaughlin - Inker, Author, Artist, & Jack of All Trades!

September 26, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Frank McLaughlin at a comic convention in 2015.

Frank McLaughlin (born March 18, 1935) is an American comics artist who co-created the comic book character JudoMaster, drew the comic strip Gil Thorp, and assisted on such strips as Brenda Starr, Reporter and The Heart of Juliet Jones. He also wrote and illustrated books about cartooning and comic art. McLaughlin began his comics career in 1961 at Charlton Comics, and was named the Art Director for the publisher the next year. Leaving Charlton in 1969, Frank soon had steady work flowing in from both Marvel and DC - becoming the regular series inker for penciler Dick Dillin's Justice League of America while also writing martial-arts articles for Marvel's black-and-white comics magazine The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. He put out two instructional books - How to Draw Those Bodacious Bad Babes of Comics (Renaissance Books, 2000) and How to Draw Monsters for Comics (Renaissance Books, 2001), both with Mike Gold.

I feel that Frank McLaughlin is one of those underappreciated talents, who has a pretty impressive body of work, from Charlton to DC and points in between, who has a lot to offer and certainly many wonderful stories to tell. He even went into what it was like to work with Steve Ditko and many other fascinating anecdotes that you're sure to enjoy.

This interview originally took place over the phone on February 19, 2010.

How to Draw Those Bodacious Bad Babes of Comics (2000) by Frank McLaughlin & Mike Gold.

Bryan Stroud: What sort of people did you know in the business?

Frank McLaughlin: I knew several of the cartoonists. I remember Frank Springer and I don’t know if you ever met him, but he always seemed youthful. Like he was perpetually in his 40’s. He kept his girlish figure, too.

Stroud: I’d seen photos, but never had the pleasure of meeting him. He was heavily involved in the Long Island branch of the Cartoonist’s Society and really wanted to get back there, but unfortunately didn’t make it.

McLaughlin: There were some terrific artists that used to meet there and I imagine they still do. I know when Creig Flessel was still alive he was involved and of course Bunny Hoest.

Stroud: Yeah, they’re still going strong. Joe Giella is a very active member. I have a standing invitation from him to go to one of the lunches if I ever get up there.

McLaughlin: I guess you never know who you might meet at one of them. I’ve never been, but my late friend Gil Fox was a regular there. He and Flessel went way back. Way back. And every chance he got, he’d go out there to these things and it’s a changing cast of characters, I guess. They have a few regulars, I’m sure.

Stroud: That’s what I’m told. I was able to talk very briefly with Creig shortly before he passed and he took credit for naming the chapter there after Walter Berndt when someone suggested a tribute to him and Creig said something like, “Yeah, a Berndt toast!”

McLaughlin: These things happen when you’re drinking.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Big Edsel Band (1987) #1, cover by Frank McLaughlin.

McLaughlin: That is some crew out there. I’m reminded of a cover recreation I did with Gil Fox. It was a Jack Cole Plastic Man piece and I can’t remember what year, but it was one he and Gil had done originally and Gil said, “Hey, this would be a good idea,” and when he died I just hung onto it. We did a couple of them and this collector bought them and had Joe (Giella) color it and he did a terrific job. I got a copy of it. Joe said, “Next time, Frank, see if you’d be interested in coming to one of the meetings out here on the island.” I’ve only seen Joe once or twice. We just never get together as cartoonists. I’m good friends with Joe Sinnott and other guys like that, but I get to see these guys maybe once a year.

Stroud: That’s the sad part.

McLaughlin: We all live far apart from each other.

Stroud: Yeah, and as a fan, I’d just assumed that all you guys hang out together all the time.

McLaughlin: It doesn’t happen. At conventions the seating arrangements are made and recently at the big New York one at the Javits Center I got to sit next to Joe Sinnott and Carmine (Infantino) so that when there wasn’t much going on there was at least someone to talk to and catch up with. Grandkids and other news. It’s pretty cool. Actually, I got to meet Al Plastino for the first time as he came in and sat between us.

Stroud: Isn’t Al great? He’s one of my favorite people.

McLaughlin: He’s terrific. (Chuckle.) He was all dressed up. A real gentleman. And all these other people are pretty casual, but this was his first convention, I assumed. His daughter was there and I got to talking with her and she said he wasn’t too happy that day. Some people at conventions can be rude and she told me about this woman who came up to Al and said, “Oh, are you having a good time today?” and he said, “NO!” (Chuckle.) I fell off the chair. I couldn’t believe it. He was serious. The woman didn’t know what the heck to do, but it was really funny. He did leave early I guess. We got to talking at one point and I said, “You know, we missed each other when I was at DC because you, apparently, were cutting way back on your work and I asked, “Who was the boss when you were there?” He said, “Yeah, I worked for Carmine, too.

Mighty Mouse (1987) #2, cover penciled by Curt Swan & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

Stroud: They have only the greatest respect for one another. Al said it was another story with Murray Boltinoff.

McLaughlin: I did one job for him. I knew his brother and they were like night and day, Henry and Murray. Most of the time, though, I worked for Julie Schwartz and I was very happy with that arrangement.

Stroud: I’ve heard wonderful stories about Julie. Len Wein called him a “wonderful curmudgeon.”

McLaughlin: Ah, Wein. He was one of the fanboys. He and (Paul) Levitz and (Marv) Wolfman and all those other guys and they ended up making them editors.

Stroud: I’d heard more than one suggest that the kids were being put in charge of the candy store.

McLaughlin: They really were, and I couldn’t understand it. What happened was, they brought along their friends to do the writing and the artwork and DC didn’t object to it because any time they brought in anybody new they had to start them at the bottom of the pay scale. Those of us that had been there a long time…I had a contract with Julie and Julie was great. Just the way you would expect a top editor to be. But some of the newer guys didn’t behave like editors, for one thing. Combine that with a colossal ego and you’ve got problems and look what’s happened now. You can’t sell a comic book. That’s industry wide, though.

Stroud: True. It does seem to be in a downward spiral and I wonder if they’ll be able to pull out of it this time.

McLaughlin: I agree.

Kobra (1976) #5, cover penciled by Rich Buckler & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

Stroud: For example, when I talk to Carmine we compare notes and I often suggest that the old stuff has legs. It’s still being successfully sold in reprint format, but I can’t see that happening with the modern stuff, at least on the same scale.

McLaughlin: Carmine and I were collaborating on some stuff and it was selling. He suggested getting together and he penciled some stuff and I inked it and the first couple sold very quickly. I thought, “Wow. There are still people out there who appreciate this kind of work.” The kids out there today don’t have the money that the people in their 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s do to buy up pieces of their youth. “Look here. This is some stuff I loved as a kid.” They have no trouble writing a check for that. And they make no bones about it. One guy just adored the series where the Flash went on trial for something and he said, “Whatever you’ve got.” I don’t have any of the original art any more, so Carmine and I were doing recreations of the stuff. It’s been fun to do. He’ll be the first one to tell you, I think, that he wasn’t cut out to be the boss at DC. But he took the job at the time. A couple of people complained about the way he did things, but I thought he did a great job and just to have the name alone to head up the company was something. For a while even Bill Gaines came over from Mad to be involved. I’m not sure if that was after Sol Harrison left or what. Gaines. Now there was a character.

Stroud: I’ve heard some stories.

McLaughlin: He’d take the whole staff someplace in the world for a week or a month or something. They’d just all pack up and go and pick a place somewhere.

Stroud: Russ Heath spoke very fondly of those days.

McLaughlin: I don’t know how Russ got along at Warren. A lot of the guys were pissed off at Warren because he wouldn’t return the artwork.

Stroud: That was some beautiful work, too. You did some for them, didn’t you?

Judomaster (1966) #89, cover by Frank McLaughlin.

McLaughlin: Yeah. I did a few stories. I was talking once with Al Williamson and he didn’t see eye to eye with Jim Warren. They didn’t get along well at all, for that reason and he’ll even downgrade what he did for Warren. I’d say, “That stuff you did was pretty nice,” and he’d say, “Ah, it was crappy. It was the worst stuff I ever did.” It’s all because he didn’t get it back and they worked for peanuts on that stuff, I guess. I’m not sure what the rate was at that time, but I don’t think it was much.

Stroud: I was going to ask you how on earth you survived on Charlton’s rates when you worked for them.

McLaughlin: Well, the thing is, you couldn’t. That was after the flood. They had a big flood up there in the river valley and it gave (John) Santangelo, who owned the place, a chance to say, “Geez, Uncle Sam, we’re broke here and we need money to rebuild.” They’re right next to the river, so the Government coughed up a lot of money to him and he in turn downgraded everybody’s salaries, crying poor mouth. Well, he cleaned up. This was before I went there. It was probably in the 50’s, I guess. Joe Gill, who was a very good friend of mine, I sat next to him for years, was making $400.00 a week as a writer, which was unheard of. He was writing pretty much everything that they published. He said, “Well, I’ll just have to work harder.” He was getting $4.00 a page and he was typing 100 pages a week. I can’t even write that fast.

Stroud: It’s astounding.

McLaughlin: He’d be able to talk to you while he was typing. I couldn’t believe it. He was a radio operator in the service. One of the best, I’m sure. He could just type and talk at the same time. I don’t know how the hell he did it.

Stroud: What was your production rate when you were working on deadline, Frank?

Justice League of America (1960) #144, cover penciled by Dick Dillin & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

McLaughlin: That’s another thing. I never missed a deadline. Editors really appreciate that. I’m not saying it was always pretty. I tried to keep the quality up. I just worked longer hours. When I was working with Sal Buscema at Marvel on Captain America or something, I was inking a book a week.

Stroud: That’s flying.

McLaughlin: That is flying, and I was doing other stuff besides. The DC stuff was a little slower. I worked with Dick Dillin for a long time on Justice League and boy; he put in everything but the kitchen sink. He even drew the logo that was a paste-up. He drew it, and shaded it in where all the blacks were. I said, “Dick, why do you do that?” He said, “I want to see what the page will look like when it’s done.” I said, “Well, you know you’re spending all this time drawing the logo.” It didn’t seem to bother him. You know I never met him. I worked with him for over 20 years and never once met him.

Stroud: The life of a freelancer.

McLaughlin: Same thing with Irv Novick. I worked with him for about 20 years and I didn’t meet him until a convention I think at Westchester. He showed up and I broke a leg trying to get to him to meet him and we talked for awhile and he was very, very nice and paid compliments and I mean he was a pleasure to work with. He’s the only guy I knew of that had a contract as an employee with DC. In other words, he was guaranteed something like five pages a week and they paid his benefits like insurance and whatever, the same as they would an editor. The only one I ever heard of like that.

Stroud: I think the only thing similar I ever heard was with Jim Mooney. I think he had a deal kind of like that with Marvel when he moved to Florida.

McLaughlin: Now there’s another guy I never met, but he was instrumental in getting me involved with Captain America when he was penciling it.

The Deadliest Hands Of Kung-Fu (1975) #1, featuring a story written by Frank McLaughlin.

Stroud: Really?

McLaughlin: Yeah, and not only that, but I was doing a job for IBM through John Martin down in Florida and I was recommended to him by Jim Mooney. They approached Jim Mooney to do a series of comic books explaining how they got started and a whole bunch of things for IBM, and he said, “I can’t do it, but you can call Frank McLaughlin up in Connecticut.” At the time I had a studio. And sure enough I got a call from this guy John Martin who I’d never heard of. He said, “How’d you like to come to Florida?” I said, “Who is this?” I thought somebody was yanking my chain. “Yeah, right, Florida.” He said, “No, I’ll send you a plane ticket and you come on down here and spend a week here in West Palm Beach.” “Two things: I don’t fly, and I’ve never been to Florida. If this is some kind of gag, forget it!” He said, “No, it’s not.”

So, I sent Joe Gill down to find out what the hell was going on. So, he went down and came back and said, “The guy’s legit.” He had a good time down there. (Laughter.) The guy had a couple of apartments down there and Joe got to stay in the apartment by himself and had access to a car and the whole thing. He came back and I asked, “Do we have a deal with this guy? He said, “Yeah.” These were comic books that were later to be converted to video games and it was called “Writing to Read,” teaching kids how to write stories on the computer when the IBM computer first came out. That was a great project and I went down to Florida later on. I took the train, and it turned out to be a pretty good situation for everybody all the way around. John was a wonderful guy.

Stroud: It seems those commercial jobs were usually heaven sent and often paid better than comic page rates. Sometimes they were more fun, too.

McLaughlin: This one was pretty fun. I was designing computer games and didn’t even know how to run a computer. I didn’t know anything about how to do it and I was working with a guy up here in Hartford who would call me on the phone and say, “Those drawings you did, I can’t use them. One thing gets in the way of another thing.” So, I had to redraw them. I learned a lot about what you can and can’t do drawing pictures for computer games. John Martin came up a few times to Connecticut, too.

Defenders (1972) #6, interior page penciled by Sal Buscema & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

Defenders (1972) #6, interior page penciled by Sal Buscema, inked by Frank McLaughlin, & colored by David Hunt.

Stroud: And all due to a referral from Jim Mooney.

McLaughlin: Who I never knew and had never met. I’m beholden to him.

Stroud: It sounds very like him. I don’t think Jim Mooney had an enemy in the world with the possible exception of Mort Weisinger, who didn’t seem to have a friend in the world. (Mutual laughter.)

Teen Titans (1966) #46, cover penciled by Rich Buckler & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

McLaughlin: Didn’t he play cards with Julie Schwartz every day? And then they stopped talking to each other?

Stroud: Probably. They went back a long way to the early days of science fiction.

McLaughlin: It seems to me they played cards every day over their lunch hour. Julie used to tell me he was a living legend. (Chuckle.) I said, “Really?” He’d say, “Yeah,” and then he’d show me pictures of himself with some of the old well-known science fiction writers. He was a big science fiction fan. Anyway, I’m sure he played cards with Mort each day over lunch and then one day they got into an argument at the card game and they never spoke to each other again. At least that’s how I heard it from Julie.

Stroud: I did hear a one-liner attributed to Julie referring to an appropriate epitaph for Mort: “Here lies Mort Weisinger…as usual.”

McLaughlin: Julie had a way with words sometimes. He used to spoon feed the writers sometimes and he’d sit there and bullshit with them and they’d throw ideas around and come up with a plot and so forth. One day, poor Cary Bates; all I could hear was Julie yelling at him through the office door: “You’re the genius. You write the goddamn thing!” (Laughter.)

Stroud: Now that was something Carmine told me. I’d mentioned to him how much I enjoyed Gardner Fox’s stories from back in the day and Carmine told me that his stories were very, very heavily edited by Julie.

McLaughlin: Julie had a way of knowing exactly what he wanted and he would steer the writer in the direction that he thought he should go. I mean, that’s what an editor is supposed to do after all.

Stroud: If they’re doing their job. Did you consider Julie your favorite editor?

How to Draw Monsters for Comics (2001) by Frank McLaughlin & Mike Gold.

McLaughlin: Absolutely. No doubt about it. He gave me this phony, gruff exterior kind of thing, but he was a softie at heart. He’d be the first guy to say, “Hey, are we taking care of you? Are you getting paid on time? Are you having any problems?” He was a real gentleman about the whole thing. We all miss him. For years after he retired he represented DC at conventions. I think that was a deal he cut with them. He liked going to those things and they’d get him a room and put him up. Everybody knew who he was.

Stroud: Kind of a goodwill ambassador.

McLaughlin: Exactly, and he felt useful about it, which he was.

Stroud: Not a bad “retirement.”

McLaughlin: Well, we don’t retire. What am I going to do? Go to the beach and paint watercolors all freaking day? No. That’s not what we do. I say “we.” Mike Gold was an editor of mine at DC and we’re friends and years ago we decided that comics as we know them today are on the downward slide and maybe we can work out putting them on the computer. He’s very computer smart and he said, “That’s where it’s going. Let’s put together a website and put comic books there.” I said, “How are we going to make any money doing that?” He said, “Let me worry about that.” That guy went out and got backers to create and put up ComicMix. I don’t know how many titles he put there. I know Wheatley was doing one. Five pages a week. So, Dick Giordano and I got together again after 100 years and we do a book called “White Viper.” My daughter writes it, I ink it over Dick’s pencils, and we did that for 100 pages. We got paid against the publishing end of it, which starts in June. IDW picked it up.

White Viper (2012) Trade paperback from IDW.

Note: I checked in with Frank’s daughter, Erin Holroyd, to get her impressions of working with her father on White Viper and she shared the following delightful observations:
Erin Holroyd: Working with my father, or as we call him, Fast and Fabulous, was interesting. I had been around comics my entire life but never read one. My brother and I used to wait for his shipment of books to come in and sell them instead of lemonade...oh, what we would do for those books now!! I have been working as a freelance writer for many years and White Viper was a great opportunity to try something new. I have been writing screenplays and for magazines so the structure for comics was completely different. I had a great time and there is nothing like a comic fan! Looking forward to book two!

Stroud: Excellent. I think I saw a couple of those installments now that I think about it. I remember Dick being involved in it, but I didn’t realize you were, too.

McLaughlin: Yeah. It’s actually a property I ran past DC years ago and they gave me money for it, but never published it because they were loaded on their pub schedule. They were very busy because they’d picked up some titles that they thought they were stealing. One was from England, I believe and it fizzled. In the mean time I got back burnered and I said, “Screw it,” and I got the okay to warm it up again and do it with ComicMix, which I certainly don’t regret at all.

Stroud: No, of course not. I think maybe Mike is onto something. The way distribution is done now it’s hard to get the books you’d like, especially if you’re in an isolated area.

McLaughlin: That’s part of the problem. It used to be that comic books were the driving force behind production because when you were selling maybe 120,000 copies of Spider-Man, for example, you knew you had a built-in movie audience. Now, comic books aren’t selling. You’re lucky if you sell, I don’t know, 5,000. The movies are driving what little bit of sales are being made in the comic books, so we now see the power shifting. And since DC and Marvel now do their own movies…more or less, now that Disney bought Marvel. I can’t wait to see Spider-Duck.

The Phantom (1969) #30, cover by Frank McLaughlin.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

McLaughlin: That marriage sounds like mine. (Laughter.) I’m only kidding. Time-Warner was also a puzzle to me and a lot of people really didn’t like it and a lot of people regret it now.

Stroud: And the changes continue with the recent announcement that Dan Didio and Jim Lee are the new co-publishers at DC.

McLaughlin: After Paul Levitz left. The way they do this is pretty interesting. When they want to cut costs they hire new kids out of the Kubert School and some of them are very good and they’ll work for peanuts, so, duh! Get rid of the old-timers and bring in some kids at a lower cost, and that’s terrific. What they do is kind of buy you off. They give you some money to make you a consultant, but you never get to consult. It’s kind of like a layoff, but it’s not a layoff. They give you a chunk of dough and make you a consultant. But at the time it didn’t bother me much because I’d just signed a contract with the Chicago Tribune to do the Gil Thorp strip. It was five days. No Sunday page.

It was a strip I’d always read growing up and it was a chance to actually do it. What they didn’t tell me was they (the Tribune) were about to go bankrupt. (Chuckle.) They had a guy over from the sports department who was trying to act as the comic editor and I guess it didn’t work out. There were all kinds of shenanigans going on there. His buddy was writing it. He was a feature writer with a big paper out west and he was friends with the editor here and he’d never really written a comic strip. He was a good writer, but not a good comic strip writer. It requires a certain talent that you don’t run into when you’re writing a newspaper column. Anyway, he caught on. He was pretty good. Better than the guy before him. The circulation kept dropping because newspapers kept going out of business. Many weren’t willing to pay for a comic strip every week when they were getting a free one. There were people out there giving away free comic strips. I can’t compete with that.

Stroud: Oh, of course not.

Gil Thorp comic strip for March 3, 2004 - drawn by Frank McLaughlin. — **Gil Thorp** comic strip for March 3, 2004 - drawn by Frank McLaughlin.

Gil Thorp comic strip for January 1, 2007 - drawn by Frank McLaughlin. — **Gil Thorp** comic strip for January 1, 2007 - drawn by Frank McLaughlin.

McLaughlin: So, when I first took the strip over there were maybe 100 papers, but it’s an old strip. 50 years old, and it’s a continuing strip. There’s only maybe half a dozen of those. I think Joe Giella might be working on one of them.

Stroud: He sure is. Mary Worth.

Red Tornado (1985) #1, cover penciled by Carmine Infantino & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

McLaughlin: Mary Worth. So, anyway, they’re the first to go. Gil Thorp in a lot of papers got moved to the sports page since it was a sports-oriented strip and that’s one foot out the door. We got down to about 35 papers and I said, “I can’t afford to do this any more. I have to crank out a set of five dailies in two days.” They wanted me to sign a five-year contract. Then I started doing this thing with Mike Gold at ComicMix and of course I’ve done a lot of teaching.

Stroud: It looks like you’ve been at it quite awhile. You must enjoy it.

McLaughlin: Yeah. Up at the Paier College of Art up here in Hamden. I’ve been up there 22 years.

Stroud: Holy cow!

McLaughlin: I say that every time I think of it. I like doing it. I really do. I learn a lot from the kids. More than they learn from me, I’ll bet.

Stroud: That sounds familiar. When I interviewed Dick Ayers, Irwin Hasen and Ric Estrada about their experiences when the Kubert School was starting up Ric in particular said he didn’t know what he was doing initially, but after awhile he discovered his rhythm and what the kids needed to know. One thing that stuck out to me when he said he was always telling them to “Move the camera, move the camera, move the camera.” Change the angles to make the story more interesting.

McLaughlin: I worked with Stan Drake for a while and he was a great teacher. He said, “What you’ve got to do is take the curse off it.” (Chuckle.) I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about at first, but Elliot Caplin, Al Capp’s brother, was writing The Heart of Juliet Jones and he would send a script to us and we’d read it and it would be two people talking to each other in a living room. So, he’d say, “We’ve got to take the curse off this.”

Special War Series (1964) #4, cover by Frank McLaughlin.

So, we’d put them in a zoo, going past animal cages, talking to each other while stuff was going on behind them; little subplots, and he was great at that. You didn’t mind that it was a boring conversation going on, and you learned to do that. He had great storytelling techniques, too. I learned a lot there and I tried to pass that on. Stan was the absolute best. He and John Prentice were two “uncles” in the business. John passed, too, as did Stan, and oddly enough John’s son, Whitney is a teacher at Paier. I’d not known him since he was a little kid and here he is teaching a painting class. A big, tall guy. I asked, “Are you related to John Prentice?” “Yeah, he’s my father.” So, we hit it off right away. I get to see him a couple of times a week. We teach classes at the same time. A very nice guy. Very mild-mannered. One thing I didn’t know. John was at Pearl Harbor in the Navy during the attack.

Stroud: How about that? My wife’s stepfather was a Pearl Harbor survivor. He’s been gone a number of years now.

McLaughlin: I was trying to recall when Prentice passed away. Maybe 10 years ago? He and Stan were around the same age, I think. All those guys like Red Wexler; they all lived near each other and had studios together. Stan and I worked in the same studio as Red Wexler and he was a good artist, too. Whew! A fine illustrator. He did a lot of magazine work and then he was doing advertising for a woman’s makeup line. It was a beautiful account. It was for older women and the promise was that it would make you look younger. And it was called “Second Debut.” (Mutual laughter.) I’d say, “Red, what are you doing today?” “I’m working on second daboo. Let’s go to lunch.” (More laughter.)

Now Red had a daughter who was a wonderful artist who never really did much with it, but she was terrific. The best family deal I know is Joe Sinnott. His son Mark runs his website. In fact, Joe and I did a book together on how to deliver a newspaper for the Washington Star and we used Mark, his son, who at the time was about 12 or 13 years old as the model of the delivery boy for the cover. Now he’s a great big guy with a couple of kids of his own. In fact, he has a daughter, Erin, same name as my daughter, who is a budding writer and she’s still in high school. Joe, for that matter is still prolific. He doesn’t like doing a lot of recreations, but boy, he gets all kinds of attention. He was famous for his work at Marvel. He does well at the conventions, but he sells existing artwork.

Batman (1940) #350, cover penciled by Gene Colan & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

Stroud: There seems to always be a market for it. I think sales may have slowed some, but the prices don’t seem to come down.

McLaughlin: No. When I was hooked up with Carmine doing these recreations they were going like gangbusters. His old Flash and Batman stuff remain very popular.

Stroud: I wanted to mention to you that I discovered amongst my collection one well-loved and well-read book that you may have forgotten about.

McLaughlin: I’m sure I did. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Do you remember when the Joker had his own magazine?

McLaughlin: Yes.

Stroud: It went for nine issues and I have all of them, and you inked after Irv Novick on issue #7, and I don’t know how many times I read that story, but for the first time I noticed that when the Joker was getting into this taxicab, down on the license plate it reads: “Frank.”

McLaughlin: Maybe it was my background man. I had this kid who was at the studio every day after his classes at the high school. “Let me help. I’ll fill in blacks. I’ll erase pages. Anything.” So, I let him do some stuff, just to get him off my back. He’d left some pages one day that I had to send in and he’d put his name on the side of a truck and buildings and everything else he could. “What the hell did you do?” He put his name on every goddamn space available. It felt like I was watching a hockey game live in an arena. Those signs did everything but spin.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

McLaughlin: He spent the whole day whiting them out. I said, “Don’t you ever come by here again or I’ll throw you down the goddamn stairs. And that wouldn’t hurt because you’re on the first floor.” Ah. I found what I was thinking about on some of Carmine’s early work: Danger Trail. The stuff looked really good! A lot of people had trouble inking Carmine, but this stuff is very good.

Captain Atom (1965) #88, pg.2 penciled by Steve Ditko & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

Stroud: I understand he wasn’t the tightest penciller.

McLaughlin: Well, he wasn’t always easy, but he was under the gun on a lot of these jobs. He was doing a lot of stuff, too. This Danger Trail really looks good, though. I’m surprised it wasn’t more popular.

Stroud: Well, that sounds like his old Pow Wow Smith work. That was nice, too. He could do good figures.

McLaughlin: Yeah. The only thing that bothered me were his ice cube tray buildings. He sometimes didn’t spend much time rendering his architecture, but you know Kirby did the same thing. He had his own buildings. Kirby buildings. It’s not the kind of thing that bothered the regular readers, though, obviously. It was part of his look. Ditko was the same way. He had his own look to stuff. You know when I first met him at Charlton he was terrific. He was funny. He was friendly. He was affable. He was best man at Billy Anderson’s wedding. But he would never allow his picture to be taken. And still doesn’t. He had his own look in his work.

Stroud: Very distinctive. I confess I’ve found a lot of his work to be an acquired taste.

McLaughlin: You’d be surprised how often I hear that. People are afraid to make waves. “Well, Joe thinks he’s a terrific artist, so I’d better say the same thing.” He did some terrific stuff at Charlton. Gorgo and Konga, the Japanese monsters and so forth. He does a great job on the horror and mysteries and that stuff. I thought it was as good as his Spider-Man work.

Stroud: I would agree.

McLaughlin: Doctor Strange.

Blue Beetle (1964) #1, cover by Frank McLaughlin.

Stroud: I think designing weird landscapes and monsters and stuff are really one of his great talents. There’s no one better.

McLaughlin: Blue Beetle was great. I thought he did a great job with Blue Beetle. He designed the costume and The Bug. IF he went to one convention, he could make himself 30 grand in a day just selling his old pages. Stan Lee has some of his old pages. He turned more than a dime at the auction houses with Steve’s stuff, which Steve believes that the publisher owns.

Stroud: He’s got some very different attitudes about things.

McLaughlin: From what I understand he moved out of the city and in with his sister’s family down in Pennsylvania again. At least that’s what I heard.

Stroud: I don’t know.

McLaughlin: He was always sickly. The funny thing is I had a million laughs with that guy at Charlton. He looks like Steve Allen and he’d laugh like him and everything. He was a fun guy, believe it or not.

Stroud: That’s the funny thing. I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times and it was like a different person, at least compared to the way he writes.

McLaughlin: In the summer he would dress in an overcoat when it was pretty hot out. I think he had TB when he was younger.

Stroud: I’d heard that. Dick Giordano was telling me that they’d play a lot of ping-pong at the Charlton offices and it was partly a way for Steve to build his system up.

McLaughlin: He changed completely. When Dick became editor at DC they were looking for somebody to take over on the Red Tornado. I said to him, “You know who would do great on this? Steve Ditko. As far as I know he’s not doing anything.” He says, “Ummm…I don’t think he’d want to do it.” I said, “Well did you ask him?” “No, but he’s turned down other things that I’d offered him.” “Well, let me call him.”

DC Comics Presents (1978) #15, cover penciled by Joe Staton & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

So, I called him up. “Hey, Steve,” I ran it by him. “They’re looking for somebody to do the Red Tornado.” He said, “Yeah.” So, we made a date to meet at the DC offices. Now Steve won’t go to lunch with anybody. Go figure. So, we met in the afternoon and Bob Greenberger was in the outside offices and Steve was actually excited about the prospects of doing it. And if Greenberger hadn’t been there, people would swear I was lying. So, we go into Dick’s office and Dick says, “Here’s what we want to do.” Ditko says, “Well, I don’t like it.” “Why?” He says, “Well, this is a superhero doing the work our military should be doing.” And he gets up and he walks out! Dick looks at me and he says, “I told you.” Who knew? “I swear to God, two minutes ago I was out in the other room there and Greenberger was there and we were talking together and you ask him what went on.” “I believe you.” What an excuse to not do a comic book.

Stroud: Jim Shooter told me a similar story about giving Steve an assignment and he came in one day and dropped it on his desk and said he couldn’t do it because it represented a sub stratum world or something and it went against his beliefs as an Aristotilian.

McLaughlin: Okay. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him directly since then. I still don’t know the point of it all. I just don’t know. The sad part is that’s not the old Steve Ditko we knew back when. Ping-pong games and card games and John Santangelo and Joe Gill played cards against each other all the time. John would cheat and Joe would roll over once in awhile because John was signing his paycheck.

I’ve got a story for you. As you mentioned we weren’t making the highest rates at Charlton, God forbid, so we all had to use a little subterfuge. We were working under different names. Somebody blew the whistle. Somebody I guess who wasn’t getting work under a different name and told about what was going on to John Santangelo and John had a rule that you could not do freelance work if you were an employee of Charlton. So, Joe Gill gets called in first. He was working under about five names. (Chuckle.) That was one of the ways he was able to pull down his $400.00 a week. Pat Masulli was the boss at the time and he was letting us get away with it because he was doing the same thing. So, Joe knocks on Santangelo’s door and John says, “Who is it?” “It’s Joe Gill.” He said, “Come on in, boys.” (Mutual laughter.) Joe said, “I knew the jig was up then.” One guy was having his brother pose as him and he couldn’t draw, so they called him down and John puts a pencil and a piece of paper in front of him and says to draw him a picture of some character. He draws the worst picture you ever saw. John looked at it and said, “Well, you’re okay.” (Laughter.) The guy came back laughing his ass off. “Well, I passed the test.”

Justice League of America (1960) #185, interior page penciled by George Perez & inked by Frank McLaughlin.

Stroud: Your story about Joe Gill and “Come in, boys,” makes me think of when I spoke to Jack Adler and somehow Bob Kane came up and he immediately asked, “Which one?”

McLaughlin: I used to kid around with Jack Adler all the time. Do you know who his nephew is?

Stroud: I do. Howard Stern.

McLaughlin: He came in as a kid to the offices. So, I asked Jack Adler, “What are you going to do when you get out of here?” He said, “I’m going to be a hypnotist.” “What?” “Yeah, I’m going to be a hypnotist.” So, every time I saw him I’d go, “Woo-ooo-ooo…”

Stroud: Jack is still hanging in there. I believe he’s 91 now. He’s always a joy to talk to. A very intelligent man.

McLaughlin: Yep. That’s Jack. He worked in the bullpen with Sol Harrison when Sol was there and that was a great arrangement. The work they did was terrific and they got it out on time and it was well run and then they made Sol the boss and I think it might have been around that time that Jack left. I’m not sure. I wasn’t in there very often. Anyway, Jack Adler was always a very entertaining guy.

Stroud: Such a genius, too, with the wash tones and such.

McLaughlin: Oh, yeah. The best. You know I hit a goldmine once. I was working for Eastern Color in Waterbury, Connecticut and unbeknownst to me they were the first publishers of comic books. I was doing commercial work at the newspaper. The Waterbury Republican. Anyway, I went up there and I was talking to a guy by the name of Sandy whose brother, Dick Pape was involved and he said, “Come on, I want to show you some of the stuff.” He takes me down into this crappy, dust-filled room with old beat up metal cabinets and he opens it up and I’m looking at this stuff. Comics On Parade, which was one of the first comic books, Daredevil vs. Hitler, just all the stuff that they’d ever printed. Stacks of it in there. Twelve copies of Comics On Parade. This was in the 60’s, but even at that time we’re talking value of a grand apiece.

Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu (1974) #1, featuring a story written by Frank McLaughlin.

The real reason he had me in there was to find out if I could give him an idea of what this stuff was worth. There were old copies of the pre-Batman Detective Comics and Frank Frazetta stuff. He said, “Here’s what you do. You go to these conventions and I’ll give you a stack of these things and see if you can sell them.” “Okay.” He said, “You can take your pick of whatever you want to sell.” “Okay.” I go down there and Phil Seuling, who ran the conventions, starts looking through the stuff and he about had a stroke. He said, “Where the hell did you get this stuff?” I said, “I’m not at liberty to tell you.” So, he grabbed most of it and I came back with a head of lettuce of money for Sandy and I said, “You’ve got a gold mine here whether you know it or not.” He said, “Holy cow!” Guess what? A month later, Sandy left the company. He retired. (Laughter.)

Stroud: How about that.

McLaughlin: What a surprise. I got a call from George Ward one day, who was helping Walt Kelly do Pogo. George is a real character and he collected the old Detective Comics. He was a character and he lived on the second floor and he had a stack of his comics in the corner of the room and his landlord, who lived downstairs, came up one day complaining in broken English, “My ceiling is-a falling down. What’s going on? What are you doing up there?” It was caving in from the stack of comics he had in the corner of the room. It was causing a crack in the ceiling of the apartment downstairs. (Chuckle.) What a pip that guy was.

So, I hooked him up with Sandy and he spent a lot of money up there. He was a retouch artist for the Daily News and moved to the Long Island newspaper and I’m talking to him on the phone one day and he said, “I can’t talk to you any more. I’ve got to put a shoulder on a general.” “Okay, Wardie.” He was in his late 50’s and he’d show up at comic conventions with a teenage hooker on either arm. I’d say, “Where the hell did you meet her?” “I met her on the subway coming up here.” (Laughter.) “How old is she, fifteen?” “She told me she was eighteen.” “She can’t even spell eighteen.” I’m reminded of a dinner we put together for Irwin Hasen. Mort Walker’s son arranged it through the NCS down in Westport. So, this dinner was honoring Irwin Hasen and he got up there and he had everybody on the floor. Talking about his war experiences and other things. A real beauty. Anyway, it’s a helluva business.

Stroud: Never a dull moment, it seems.

McLaughlin: No and it sure beats working for Westinghouse. (Laughter.) You won’t meet these kinds of people working in an office, I can tell you that. I can say without reservation that you’d never find a better bunch to work with. They’ve been my best friends for decades and while we don’t get to see one another as often as I’d like, there are relationships that take right up where they left off and I’m glad of that.

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.

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.)

Creator Conversations - Retro

Creator Conversations - Retro

A small gallery of Challenger fanzine covers

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!

Nerd Team 30