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FIRST COMICS C
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RETURNS AT IDW
Ted grew up reading the comics published by First
Comics in the mid-’80s, and their approach to publishing would impact the company he would later
co-found. When the opportunity arose to publish new
stories and collect the original adventures of GrimJack
and Sable, he jumped at it. In this interview with Mike Gold, a 30-year veteran of the comic-book industry and founder and editorial director of First Comics, IDW’s Chris Ryall discusses the relaunch of Badger, GrimJack, Jon Sable, and Mars. CR: When I started at IDW in 2004, the new GrimJack and Jon Sable series were about to begin. At the time, were you actively looking to get these titles back in print on your own or did we reach out to you out of the blue? ______________________ GrimJack by Tim Truman.
MG: It was both, actually. I had been working for about three years on trying to clean up the rights situation with both of those properties. To a lesser extent with some other properties, I was asked to help out on the legal stuff. That became a little difficult because the two sides were at such polar opposites in terms of what everybody wanted as opposed to what everybody needed. On one hand, everybody wants to be able to control their babies and that’s terrific and that’s the right thing. On the other hand, there’s 141
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10
FIRST COMICS C
H
A
P
T
E
R
RETURNS AT IDW
Ted grew up reading the comics published by First
Comics in the mid-’80s, and their approach to publishing would impact the company he would later
co-found. When the opportunity arose to publish new
stories and collect the original adventures of GrimJack
and Sable, he jumped at it. In this interview with Mike Gold, a 30-year veteran of the comic-book industry and founder and editorial director of First Comics, IDW’s Chris Ryall discusses the relaunch of Badger, GrimJack, Jon Sable, and Mars. CR: When I started at IDW in 2004, the new GrimJack and Jon Sable series were about to begin. At the time, were you actively looking to get these titles back in print on your own or did we reach out to you out of the blue? ______________________ GrimJack by Tim Truman.
MG: It was both, actually. I had been working for about three years on trying to clean up the rights situation with both of those properties. To a lesser extent with some other properties, I was asked to help out on the legal stuff. That became a little difficult because the two sides were at such polar opposites in terms of what everybody wanted as opposed to what everybody needed. On one hand, everybody wants to be able to control their babies and that’s terrific and that’s the right thing. On the other hand, there’s 141
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a bankruptcy court and certain things have to be paid attention to, but then again, since I’m really on the side of the creators here, I have to make sure that I know that that’s honest and on the up and up. And then there’s just the legal technicalities and your basic negotiation, what you need to do to clean up all of the stuff. No two contracts were the same, although I either wrote most of them or co-wrote it with Ken Levin, so I was familiar with those contracts. I was familiar with the differences. I had to reacquaint myself but that wasn’t really so hard. It took us a good two years, I think, to actually get to the point where we were able to liberate both GrimJack and Jon Sable from the quagmire and that put me in a position of being able to do something with them. Obviously there’s still paperwork and there’re all kinds of negotiations but this is America, that stuff lasts forever. We were talking with a number of different publishers and then all of a sudden we heard from IDW. CR: This was probably late ’03, maybe early 2004– IDW had been publishing comics for only about two years at the time. MG: For a bit, yeah. Not long. I was really impressed with the stuff that IDW had done. Now you know, there’s that Smothers Brothers song, the takeoff on the Lerner and Loewe song from Paint Your Wagon about the cowboy outfit: “You see by my outfit that I am a cowboy, I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy too, we see by our outfits that we are both cowboys, if you get an outfit you can be a cowboy too.” That’s comic-book publishing. You can go publish comic books. And that’s great and there’s some really creative and innovative stuff going on there, you know. Places like APE and MOCCA and stuff, I love the enthusiasm in those rooms, that’s great stuff. On the other hand, there is sort of the, I don’t want to say more traditional because that’s too confining, but somewhat more usual way of storytelling. A lusher style perhaps, and a style that needs to be heavily financially subsidized. But you can apply that style to more than just superheroes as everybody else in the whole world knows except for 142
____________________________ GrimJack Sketch by Tim Truman.
those of us in America. That’s always interested me– not that I don’t like superheroes, they can be great. CR: But there’s room for more, certainly. MG: But there’s room for a hell of a lot more. I don’t like segregation and this is cultural segregation. And you guys in the beginning had a real commitment to a very commercial genre that wasn’t in comics, that being horror. You found some good people to do some good stuff, understood a little bit about licensing that I think hardly anybody ever understood in comics, because the history of most licensed projects I think is fairly dismal. There are exceptions. But those are always talent-driven exceptions, not company-driven exceptions. You know Marvel did Conan right in the beginning because Roy [Thomas, Conan’s writer/editor] loved the stuff and because they had a great artist and they replaced him with another great artist. But those are the exceptions and you guys had an idea. You had– I’m not sucking up to you here, because you called me–you guys had an idea and you had a sense of professionalism. You wanted to do real comic books. CR: I think that Ted and the other owners of the company had between them a good couple decades of comics experience, but they didn’t let that cloud their business plan. Ted’s a good businessman before he’s a comic fan and yet he’s also a fan of this stuff, GrimJack and Jon Sable. So you put all those types together and you can really do something special. MG: And it showed. But even beyond whatever interest they may have had in GrimJack and Jon Sable, it showed with the material that you guys have been doing from pretty much the get-go, from pretty much day one. And yes, there was the experience there, you guys have roots that go back all the way to the beginning of the West Coast comics publishing days and that’s good. It shows a certain amount of education. And again, I have to say there’s nothing wrong with the exact opposite end of kids putting together hand-stapled little eight-pagers. That’s great, that’s wonderful. But there’s so much more to do in the mainstream approach to comics that hadn’t 143
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a bankruptcy court and certain things have to be paid attention to, but then again, since I’m really on the side of the creators here, I have to make sure that I know that that’s honest and on the up and up. And then there’s just the legal technicalities and your basic negotiation, what you need to do to clean up all of the stuff. No two contracts were the same, although I either wrote most of them or co-wrote it with Ken Levin, so I was familiar with those contracts. I was familiar with the differences. I had to reacquaint myself but that wasn’t really so hard. It took us a good two years, I think, to actually get to the point where we were able to liberate both GrimJack and Jon Sable from the quagmire and that put me in a position of being able to do something with them. Obviously there’s still paperwork and there’re all kinds of negotiations but this is America, that stuff lasts forever. We were talking with a number of different publishers and then all of a sudden we heard from IDW. CR: This was probably late ’03, maybe early 2004– IDW had been publishing comics for only about two years at the time. MG: For a bit, yeah. Not long. I was really impressed with the stuff that IDW had done. Now you know, there’s that Smothers Brothers song, the takeoff on the Lerner and Loewe song from Paint Your Wagon about the cowboy outfit: “You see by my outfit that I am a cowboy, I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy too, we see by our outfits that we are both cowboys, if you get an outfit you can be a cowboy too.” That’s comic-book publishing. You can go publish comic books. And that’s great and there’s some really creative and innovative stuff going on there, you know. Places like APE and MOCCA and stuff, I love the enthusiasm in those rooms, that’s great stuff. On the other hand, there is sort of the, I don’t want to say more traditional because that’s too confining, but somewhat more usual way of storytelling. A lusher style perhaps, and a style that needs to be heavily financially subsidized. But you can apply that style to more than just superheroes as everybody else in the whole world knows except for 142
____________________________ GrimJack Sketch by Tim Truman.
those of us in America. That’s always interested me– not that I don’t like superheroes, they can be great. CR: But there’s room for more, certainly. MG: But there’s room for a hell of a lot more. I don’t like segregation and this is cultural segregation. And you guys in the beginning had a real commitment to a very commercial genre that wasn’t in comics, that being horror. You found some good people to do some good stuff, understood a little bit about licensing that I think hardly anybody ever understood in comics, because the history of most licensed projects I think is fairly dismal. There are exceptions. But those are always talent-driven exceptions, not company-driven exceptions. You know Marvel did Conan right in the beginning because Roy [Thomas, Conan’s writer/editor] loved the stuff and because they had a great artist and they replaced him with another great artist. But those are the exceptions and you guys had an idea. You had– I’m not sucking up to you here, because you called me–you guys had an idea and you had a sense of professionalism. You wanted to do real comic books. CR: I think that Ted and the other owners of the company had between them a good couple decades of comics experience, but they didn’t let that cloud their business plan. Ted’s a good businessman before he’s a comic fan and yet he’s also a fan of this stuff, GrimJack and Jon Sable. So you put all those types together and you can really do something special. MG: And it showed. But even beyond whatever interest they may have had in GrimJack and Jon Sable, it showed with the material that you guys have been doing from pretty much the get-go, from pretty much day one. And yes, there was the experience there, you guys have roots that go back all the way to the beginning of the West Coast comics publishing days and that’s good. It shows a certain amount of education. And again, I have to say there’s nothing wrong with the exact opposite end of kids putting together hand-stapled little eight-pagers. That’s great, that’s wonderful. But there’s so much more to do in the mainstream approach to comics that hadn’t 143
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just a fan, that was important to me. So you influenced me even in ways you weren’t aware. MG: I’ll be arrested for that some day. I miss the letter columns and they are less relevant because of the Internet. And that’s okay, the Internet stuff is great. It’s more immediate and readers who choose to do so can have a more immediate effect on creators, because we read what they have to say instantly when the book comes out which may be only two months after we did the book, as opposed to four months after. We’re further down the road and we can think about other things. That’s a good thing, but I love those letter columns and I love getting thoughts to kick back and forth between the readers on a monthly basis. I mean there’s about as much continuity in some of those letter columns as there were in the books.
Orten and T.M. Maple and some of the others. There’s the immediacy of the Internet but there’s not the tempered, kind of measured and considered response that you get from guys who sit down and really compose a letter. But if we go down that road, we’re just going to sound like two old grumps. So, back to the discussion at hand. MG: By the way, welcome to the dark side, Chris, you’re now an old grump. CR: When there was talk of doing new material with these old characters, were Mike
CR: Yeah, we’ve talked at length before about some of the old letterhacks like Uncle Elvis
been done and you guys had a real dedicated effort to do that. I’ve been dedicated to that, too. I took First Comics and had a master plan. When we started First Comics, I wanted to start off with stuff that looked just like it was a professional comic because there were no so-called independent publishers other than Eclipse, and Pacific was doing just one or two titles in those days, so it had to look and feel like a comic book. But I rapidly wanted to move it a little bit further off center. We had this strip science fiction superhero thing but we quickly evolved into Sable and GrimJack and American Flagg and then all kinds of weird stuff. And then I tried to do some of that at DC and I’m very grateful that I was given the opportunity to do as much of it as I did, and I also did my share of straightforward superheroes, trying to give something of a different bend to them. You know, The Question clearly was not your average superhero, but The Flash during my tenure was, and I’m just as proud of that, too. But we were doing things like Breathtaker and stuff that was way far away from the DC superhero norm. And there weren’t a lot of 144
_________________________________ More GrimJack by Tim Truman.
people who had the professional attitude and the capability of doing that with a variety of projects before IDW stepped in. So obviously I’m going to be attracted to that and you’re going to pull me in in a heartbeat because it’s attractive to me. You see the world more broadly. Well, you’re not that good but what the hell, it’s your tenth anniversary [laughs]. CR: When I was a kid that’s kind of how I saw First Comics. You guys were kind of the next step beyond–once you outgrow the traditional superhero books and you want something that feels similar but is a bit more mature and a bit more sophisticated. That’s what you guys were doing and that’s what I know IDW set out to do from the start. So I think that also helped to forge a nice partnership when we brought your titles back over here. MG: Absolutely, absolutely. It was a very comfortable fit. CR: I mean, hell, I started doing letters columns in our books again just because I wanted to try to invoke the same sort of feeling your letters columns in First’s comics gave me when I read those. If I could do at all what you did for readers back when I was _____________________ Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
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just a fan, that was important to me. So you influenced me even in ways you weren’t aware. MG: I’ll be arrested for that some day. I miss the letter columns and they are less relevant because of the Internet. And that’s okay, the Internet stuff is great. It’s more immediate and readers who choose to do so can have a more immediate effect on creators, because we read what they have to say instantly when the book comes out which may be only two months after we did the book, as opposed to four months after. We’re further down the road and we can think about other things. That’s a good thing, but I love those letter columns and I love getting thoughts to kick back and forth between the readers on a monthly basis. I mean there’s about as much continuity in some of those letter columns as there were in the books.
Orten and T.M. Maple and some of the others. There’s the immediacy of the Internet but there’s not the tempered, kind of measured and considered response that you get from guys who sit down and really compose a letter. But if we go down that road, we’re just going to sound like two old grumps. So, back to the discussion at hand. MG: By the way, welcome to the dark side, Chris, you’re now an old grump. CR: When there was talk of doing new material with these old characters, were Mike
CR: Yeah, we’ve talked at length before about some of the old letterhacks like Uncle Elvis
been done and you guys had a real dedicated effort to do that. I’ve been dedicated to that, too. I took First Comics and had a master plan. When we started First Comics, I wanted to start off with stuff that looked just like it was a professional comic because there were no so-called independent publishers other than Eclipse, and Pacific was doing just one or two titles in those days, so it had to look and feel like a comic book. But I rapidly wanted to move it a little bit further off center. We had this strip science fiction superhero thing but we quickly evolved into Sable and GrimJack and American Flagg and then all kinds of weird stuff. And then I tried to do some of that at DC and I’m very grateful that I was given the opportunity to do as much of it as I did, and I also did my share of straightforward superheroes, trying to give something of a different bend to them. You know, The Question clearly was not your average superhero, but The Flash during my tenure was, and I’m just as proud of that, too. But we were doing things like Breathtaker and stuff that was way far away from the DC superhero norm. And there weren’t a lot of 144
_________________________________ More GrimJack by Tim Truman.
people who had the professional attitude and the capability of doing that with a variety of projects before IDW stepped in. So obviously I’m going to be attracted to that and you’re going to pull me in in a heartbeat because it’s attractive to me. You see the world more broadly. Well, you’re not that good but what the hell, it’s your tenth anniversary [laughs]. CR: When I was a kid that’s kind of how I saw First Comics. You guys were kind of the next step beyond–once you outgrow the traditional superhero books and you want something that feels similar but is a bit more mature and a bit more sophisticated. That’s what you guys were doing and that’s what I know IDW set out to do from the start. So I think that also helped to forge a nice partnership when we brought your titles back over here. MG: Absolutely, absolutely. It was a very comfortable fit. CR: I mean, hell, I started doing letters columns in our books again just because I wanted to try to invoke the same sort of feeling your letters columns in First’s comics gave me when I read those. If I could do at all what you did for readers back when I was _____________________ Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
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Grell [Jon Sable’s creator], and [GrimJack co-creators] John Ostrander and Tim Truman always on board from the start, or did they just want to collect what they’d done before in new trade paperbacks? MG: No, it’s their babies. Tim and John will always want to do a GrimJack story. A nice little six-part story, 132-pager, whatever–whatever the format is. If they had their druthers, which is more on Tim than John because writers can write more than artists can draw, they’d be doing a GrimJack graphic novel every 18 months or so. But they won’t live long enough to deal with all the ideas that the three of us have kicked around, let alone that each of them have had on their own. At that rate, these guys are going to have to live to be 200 in order to do just what we’ve already talked about because we’re having way too much fun. I think it shows in the book that we are having way too much fun. One of these days I’m going to just publish a book of our e-mails going back and forth. We may get arrested for that, too. CR: That’s actually a nice segue because I was going to ask you, what level of input do you have when you guys are planning out these new stories, like GrimJack: Killer Instinct and Jon Sable: Bloodtrail? How much of that is a collaborative thing, how does the process work? MG: Every book is different. You know that as an editor yourself. And every creative team is different and, in a lot of cases, I will work really hard on the plot and make sure that the pacing is right and then let them go and let them do what they want and just sort of backstop, be there in case there’s some trouble and also act as the reader’s advocate–reading the stuff as it comes in from the perspective of the reader who wasn’t part of the process. Other cases like GrimJack, for example, the three of us just have an enormous amount of fun. John will usually, but not always, come up with a springboard and Tim will add to that and then I’ll do about 50 different what-if scenarios. And through an endless series of e-mails, some of which are actually in English, we refine everything to a certain specific point. And then Tim declares “Okay, I got it,”–which means he doesn’t want to do this anymore, he wants to actually do the story. So John will come up with the first chunk of plot. If we’re doing a miniseries, it’ll be the first 22 or 24 pages. The way we’re doing the graphic novels now is sort 146
______________________________________________ Opposite Page: A page from Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
of framed by the scene. We may be doing two or three scenes as opposed to a certain number of pages. And then we repeat the process. I take the plot and I make notes, like an actor’s notes which John appreciates because he’s an actor, and then Tim will be commenting on that and then John will comment on that. And then at a certain point Tim will say, “Okay, I got it.” And then he’ll go back and draw whatever the hell he wanted to in the first place and then John will dialogue it and I’ll edit it as a meatand-potatoes editor. CR: And you hope it’s somewhere close to where you started, but know it’s going to be different. MG: Yeah, we allow it to grow. We leave it some room to breathe. If we’re locked into this 22- or 24page format, obviously there are certain restrictions. The Internet is nicer [GrimJack and Jon Sable, along with some other great comics, are currently being published online at www.comicmix.com] because we’re a little bit more open. John came up with this really great scene and he said we’re going to have to drop something in order to do this because the three of us just loved it. And I said why? Why do we have to drop anything? Just add it. It’s a graphic novel, a graphic novel runs another six or eight pages or whatever and it’s a great scene. Which was the first, and pretty much the only time in my life, I’ve been able to do that as an editor–to green light something without having to pay for it. Without having to pay for it in terms of losing something else that you like. The editorial process for Jon Sable is different. When we were doing Green Arrow, for example, or Sable back in the First days, Mike and I would sit down and plot six months worth of stories. We’d kick it back and forth. And then Mike would usually be writing twoparters so there would be 48-page stories and he would deliver the scripts. We’d go over the scripts a little bit but they would pretty much stick straight to whatever it was that we discussed. Sometimes when he was writing it he’d get into a jam, he’d call me up and we’d just bullshit it out and have fun. That was fairly rare. I would guess that would happen maybe four times a year. Maybe. And he would deliver the story right on the money. Exactly the way we had discussed and he would draw it exactly the same way. That’s the type of guy that Mike is. When we did the latest Sable as a graphic novel, we had a couple of 147
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Grell [Jon Sable’s creator], and [GrimJack co-creators] John Ostrander and Tim Truman always on board from the start, or did they just want to collect what they’d done before in new trade paperbacks? MG: No, it’s their babies. Tim and John will always want to do a GrimJack story. A nice little six-part story, 132-pager, whatever–whatever the format is. If they had their druthers, which is more on Tim than John because writers can write more than artists can draw, they’d be doing a GrimJack graphic novel every 18 months or so. But they won’t live long enough to deal with all the ideas that the three of us have kicked around, let alone that each of them have had on their own. At that rate, these guys are going to have to live to be 200 in order to do just what we’ve already talked about because we’re having way too much fun. I think it shows in the book that we are having way too much fun. One of these days I’m going to just publish a book of our e-mails going back and forth. We may get arrested for that, too. CR: That’s actually a nice segue because I was going to ask you, what level of input do you have when you guys are planning out these new stories, like GrimJack: Killer Instinct and Jon Sable: Bloodtrail? How much of that is a collaborative thing, how does the process work? MG: Every book is different. You know that as an editor yourself. And every creative team is different and, in a lot of cases, I will work really hard on the plot and make sure that the pacing is right and then let them go and let them do what they want and just sort of backstop, be there in case there’s some trouble and also act as the reader’s advocate–reading the stuff as it comes in from the perspective of the reader who wasn’t part of the process. Other cases like GrimJack, for example, the three of us just have an enormous amount of fun. John will usually, but not always, come up with a springboard and Tim will add to that and then I’ll do about 50 different what-if scenarios. And through an endless series of e-mails, some of which are actually in English, we refine everything to a certain specific point. And then Tim declares “Okay, I got it,”–which means he doesn’t want to do this anymore, he wants to actually do the story. So John will come up with the first chunk of plot. If we’re doing a miniseries, it’ll be the first 22 or 24 pages. The way we’re doing the graphic novels now is sort 146
______________________________________________ Opposite Page: A page from Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
of framed by the scene. We may be doing two or three scenes as opposed to a certain number of pages. And then we repeat the process. I take the plot and I make notes, like an actor’s notes which John appreciates because he’s an actor, and then Tim will be commenting on that and then John will comment on that. And then at a certain point Tim will say, “Okay, I got it.” And then he’ll go back and draw whatever the hell he wanted to in the first place and then John will dialogue it and I’ll edit it as a meatand-potatoes editor. CR: And you hope it’s somewhere close to where you started, but know it’s going to be different. MG: Yeah, we allow it to grow. We leave it some room to breathe. If we’re locked into this 22- or 24page format, obviously there are certain restrictions. The Internet is nicer [GrimJack and Jon Sable, along with some other great comics, are currently being published online at www.comicmix.com] because we’re a little bit more open. John came up with this really great scene and he said we’re going to have to drop something in order to do this because the three of us just loved it. And I said why? Why do we have to drop anything? Just add it. It’s a graphic novel, a graphic novel runs another six or eight pages or whatever and it’s a great scene. Which was the first, and pretty much the only time in my life, I’ve been able to do that as an editor–to green light something without having to pay for it. Without having to pay for it in terms of losing something else that you like. The editorial process for Jon Sable is different. When we were doing Green Arrow, for example, or Sable back in the First days, Mike and I would sit down and plot six months worth of stories. We’d kick it back and forth. And then Mike would usually be writing twoparters so there would be 48-page stories and he would deliver the scripts. We’d go over the scripts a little bit but they would pretty much stick straight to whatever it was that we discussed. Sometimes when he was writing it he’d get into a jam, he’d call me up and we’d just bullshit it out and have fun. That was fairly rare. I would guess that would happen maybe four times a year. Maybe. And he would deliver the story right on the money. Exactly the way we had discussed and he would draw it exactly the same way. That’s the type of guy that Mike is. When we did the latest Sable as a graphic novel, we had a couple of 147
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different plots and the basis of this plot was something that we had come up with before. Actually we were considering doing it for you guys. No, I guess it was right before that because 9/11 interfered and this whole thing was based around a terrorist act at Rockefeller Center during the Christmas tree lighting ceremony and obviously that became a place where we just didn’t want to go in 2002 or 2003.
commercial comments here and there, like we haven’t seen Maggie the Cat for a long time. She’s a very popular character– really important to the Sable mythos–and she looks gorgeous. So, here’s a good spot for Maggie. And then Mike would say, “Oh, you’re right. We should use Maggie but let’s use her over here.” Oh, great, fine, you’re the storyteller, that’s fine. So my input would come in there after we came up with the basic plot. But Mike just delivers, naturally.
CR: Yeah, even fictional New York needed a break. MG: It was a good story, and all that stuff, but at that moment in time, we couldn’t do it without feeling kind of prickly about it. So if you’re going to be reserved about it as a storyteller, that’s going to come across to the reader, even if the reader can handle it perfectly fine. And, arguably, by the time it would come out the reader probably could’ve handled it perfectly fine, some couldn’t, some could. It’s a little different in that I lived in the New York metropolitan area and the destroyer boats were being staged a mile from me out in Long Island Sound so that was a little creepy. So my perspective on that was a little skewed but that just illustrates the point. Mike had that thought, he had that concept, he had that plot and he held on to the basics of it. We updated it quite a bit and there were some elements that I want to say wound up in a James Bond movie. That may or may not be true but it’s a good guess. It’s probably James Bond and we didn’t want to look like we were ripping them off even though we’d come up with it a couple years earlier. So we changed that sort of a thing and then I would make a couple of
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__________________________ More Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
CR: The Jon Sable book you produced for IDW came together pretty smoothly, from what I remember.
MG: It was basically pretty smooth. We had a lot of unfortunate situations in terms of there was sort of a period there where each person involved–not you guys but on my end, including me–was either sick or there was a family situation. I had this flu that I still remember, that’s how horrible it was. It was actually getting to be uncannily depressing, just bizarre... It was just one bad thing after another but I think we produced a couple of damn good graphic novels.
CR: You absolutely did. Sure, life intrudes on these things but as far as everybody getting along with each other and producing good work, that was all very smooth. MG: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the reason why I’m sitting here talking to you. If this was just one of those regular work things I would have just given you a statement and that would’ve been cool and we
____________________________________________________________________ Opposite Page: Badger covers from the Capital Comics and First Comics runs.
all would have been happy. There is a similarity in vision for what to do with the comics business, with the comics medium. We can’t do anything about the comics business but what we can do with the comic medium is all that matters. There are a lot of people who feel that way but not a lot of people who are in the same frequency range, and the Sable and GrimJack stuff was a great fit. I would have loved to, and maybe someday still will be able to, do something else together, even something original. That would be fun. CR: Let’s talk about the other First Comics properties we brought over–Mars and Badger.
MG: Badger started over at Capital Comics. I knew Mike Baron because he would come down from Madison, Wisconsin for these little one-day comic-book conventions and he would come down for the annual Chicago Comic Con and I was really intrigued by Nexus. Then one day, he showed up at one of these things dressed up as the Badger–this was before the first issue came out. That’s when I began to know more about Mike
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different plots and the basis of this plot was something that we had come up with before. Actually we were considering doing it for you guys. No, I guess it was right before that because 9/11 interfered and this whole thing was based around a terrorist act at Rockefeller Center during the Christmas tree lighting ceremony and obviously that became a place where we just didn’t want to go in 2002 or 2003.
commercial comments here and there, like we haven’t seen Maggie the Cat for a long time. She’s a very popular character– really important to the Sable mythos–and she looks gorgeous. So, here’s a good spot for Maggie. And then Mike would say, “Oh, you’re right. We should use Maggie but let’s use her over here.” Oh, great, fine, you’re the storyteller, that’s fine. So my input would come in there after we came up with the basic plot. But Mike just delivers, naturally.
CR: Yeah, even fictional New York needed a break. MG: It was a good story, and all that stuff, but at that moment in time, we couldn’t do it without feeling kind of prickly about it. So if you’re going to be reserved about it as a storyteller, that’s going to come across to the reader, even if the reader can handle it perfectly fine. And, arguably, by the time it would come out the reader probably could’ve handled it perfectly fine, some couldn’t, some could. It’s a little different in that I lived in the New York metropolitan area and the destroyer boats were being staged a mile from me out in Long Island Sound so that was a little creepy. So my perspective on that was a little skewed but that just illustrates the point. Mike had that thought, he had that concept, he had that plot and he held on to the basics of it. We updated it quite a bit and there were some elements that I want to say wound up in a James Bond movie. That may or may not be true but it’s a good guess. It’s probably James Bond and we didn’t want to look like we were ripping them off even though we’d come up with it a couple years earlier. So we changed that sort of a thing and then I would make a couple of
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__________________________ More Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
CR: The Jon Sable book you produced for IDW came together pretty smoothly, from what I remember.
MG: It was basically pretty smooth. We had a lot of unfortunate situations in terms of there was sort of a period there where each person involved–not you guys but on my end, including me–was either sick or there was a family situation. I had this flu that I still remember, that’s how horrible it was. It was actually getting to be uncannily depressing, just bizarre... It was just one bad thing after another but I think we produced a couple of damn good graphic novels.
CR: You absolutely did. Sure, life intrudes on these things but as far as everybody getting along with each other and producing good work, that was all very smooth. MG: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the reason why I’m sitting here talking to you. If this was just one of those regular work things I would have just given you a statement and that would’ve been cool and we
____________________________________________________________________ Opposite Page: Badger covers from the Capital Comics and First Comics runs.
all would have been happy. There is a similarity in vision for what to do with the comics business, with the comics medium. We can’t do anything about the comics business but what we can do with the comic medium is all that matters. There are a lot of people who feel that way but not a lot of people who are in the same frequency range, and the Sable and GrimJack stuff was a great fit. I would have loved to, and maybe someday still will be able to, do something else together, even something original. That would be fun. CR: Let’s talk about the other First Comics properties we brought over–Mars and Badger.
MG: Badger started over at Capital Comics. I knew Mike Baron because he would come down from Madison, Wisconsin for these little one-day comic-book conventions and he would come down for the annual Chicago Comic Con and I was really intrigued by Nexus. Then one day, he showed up at one of these things dressed up as the Badger–this was before the first issue came out. That’s when I began to know more about Mike
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Baron than I wanted to know. He’s a creative windstorm. He’ll just knock you over. He’s one of the most frightfully intelligent people around, one of the most frightfully creative people. I wanted The Badger in the worst way. I loved Nexus but I didn’t think there was as much for me to personally get involved in. I didn’t edit the First Comics’ Nexus books, Rick Oliver did. Rick is a good hands-on guy and he’s a great idea guy. It’s not likely he’ll ever come back to comics but he’s a great idea guy. He loved Nexus and he really loved it for what it was and he wanted to keep it on that path while letting creators flourish and expand upon their vision. Whereas, with Badger, I wanted to get in and get dirty.
CR: Everybody uses the phrase “ahead of its time”– kind of to an annoying degree–but Mars really is a book that was ahead of its time. To the point where you read it now and it feels exactly in line with other things that we are doing, the kind of thing the marketplace was now ready to accept.
I had to advocate for it at First. It filled the slot that I had on my schedule for an original superhero, noncostumed property that nobody had ever heard of by people nobody had ever heard of. We’d done original stuff that people had never heard of and we put people that nobody had ever heard of on projects that people had heard of, now it was time to go way out there and Mars was a great way to do that. It was one of those cult classics, which at the time I think I defined as a book whose comp list exceeds the paid circulation. It didn’t make First Comics an enormous amount of money. I think that first issue only sold about 75,000 copies, which means that if it were published today and sold 75,000 copies, you’d have a hit.
MG: Absolutely. I wasn’t the one who found Mars, but I jumped on it. Joe Staton and Bruce Patterson were approached or they approached Marc [Hempel] and Mark [Wheatley] at a San Diego show and they told me about it. I’d look at anything that Joe and
CR: I think what you were looking for back then is a lot of what we’re looking for today, which is good, non-superhero comics that nevertheless feel like they can sit alongside those kind of books and reach the same kind of audience.
CR: And how about Mars? MG: I respected you guys for going for Mars because it was mistakenly labeled as the book that brought down First Comics, which was ridiculous. The book ran through that 12-part story and ended years and years before First Comics bit the big one.
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_______________________________________________________ This Page and Next: Mars by Marc Hempel and Mark Wheatley.
Bruce would recommend, not just because they were on staff but because they are very, very talented guys. Joe is a guy that I’ve worked with a great many years and I truly admire and respect him. So he says this is really good stuff and it’s really different and you guys are geniuses and you should be able to sell this. Well, he was right about most of that but not quite all. I read the presentation and it was one of those things where two or three pages into the presentation you know you’re going to go for it, you just want to read it from that point forward just because you want to find out what’s in it, how cool it is. It was really cool! And that started a working relationship with both those guys, particularly Mark Wheatley, that runs to this day.
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Baron than I wanted to know. He’s a creative windstorm. He’ll just knock you over. He’s one of the most frightfully intelligent people around, one of the most frightfully creative people. I wanted The Badger in the worst way. I loved Nexus but I didn’t think there was as much for me to personally get involved in. I didn’t edit the First Comics’ Nexus books, Rick Oliver did. Rick is a good hands-on guy and he’s a great idea guy. It’s not likely he’ll ever come back to comics but he’s a great idea guy. He loved Nexus and he really loved it for what it was and he wanted to keep it on that path while letting creators flourish and expand upon their vision. Whereas, with Badger, I wanted to get in and get dirty.
CR: Everybody uses the phrase “ahead of its time”– kind of to an annoying degree–but Mars really is a book that was ahead of its time. To the point where you read it now and it feels exactly in line with other things that we are doing, the kind of thing the marketplace was now ready to accept.
I had to advocate for it at First. It filled the slot that I had on my schedule for an original superhero, noncostumed property that nobody had ever heard of by people nobody had ever heard of. We’d done original stuff that people had never heard of and we put people that nobody had ever heard of on projects that people had heard of, now it was time to go way out there and Mars was a great way to do that. It was one of those cult classics, which at the time I think I defined as a book whose comp list exceeds the paid circulation. It didn’t make First Comics an enormous amount of money. I think that first issue only sold about 75,000 copies, which means that if it were published today and sold 75,000 copies, you’d have a hit.
MG: Absolutely. I wasn’t the one who found Mars, but I jumped on it. Joe Staton and Bruce Patterson were approached or they approached Marc [Hempel] and Mark [Wheatley] at a San Diego show and they told me about it. I’d look at anything that Joe and
CR: I think what you were looking for back then is a lot of what we’re looking for today, which is good, non-superhero comics that nevertheless feel like they can sit alongside those kind of books and reach the same kind of audience.
CR: And how about Mars? MG: I respected you guys for going for Mars because it was mistakenly labeled as the book that brought down First Comics, which was ridiculous. The book ran through that 12-part story and ended years and years before First Comics bit the big one.
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_______________________________________________________ This Page and Next: Mars by Marc Hempel and Mark Wheatley.
Bruce would recommend, not just because they were on staff but because they are very, very talented guys. Joe is a guy that I’ve worked with a great many years and I truly admire and respect him. So he says this is really good stuff and it’s really different and you guys are geniuses and you should be able to sell this. Well, he was right about most of that but not quite all. I read the presentation and it was one of those things where two or three pages into the presentation you know you’re going to go for it, you just want to read it from that point forward just because you want to find out what’s in it, how cool it is. It was really cool! And that started a working relationship with both those guys, particularly Mark Wheatley, that runs to this day.
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MG: Again, we share that frequency. So Mars, I think, really deserved to get out to that broader audience. In fact, I think people needed to be reminded of it. We did well with Breathtaker over at DC. DC hated Breathtaker because it didn’t have Batman in it. As far as the marketing department was concerned anything that didn’t have Batman in it was a waste of their time. And the publisher thought somehow from looking at the covers that Wheatley and Hempel were making fun of concentration camp victims, which had nothing to do with the story. It was one of the more surreal projects and I thought about all that–and Mars, and the uphill struggle it was to market Mars–about a year and a half ago when I was at the Norman Rockwell Museum at their first big exhibit of graphic novels. They had done a whole thing about the history of graphic novels and all this other stuff. They’d honored 12 graphic novels. Gave each one a wall. So here there were these 20 walls full of great illustrators’ work and another 20 walls full of Norman Rockwell’s original paintings and then there’s this wall for Sara Bissen, there’s this wall for Breathtaker. And I’m thinking wow, how cool, DC let this one slip through their fingers. I have the same feelings towards Breathtaker as I do about Mars except for the fact that I think that Mark and Marc were more proficient then. They knew how to tell a story a little more slickly, a little bit better and they were a little bit more adventurous. But Mars was, as the title suggests, more unworldly. So you had no idea what to expect there. By the time Breathtaker came around, both these guys had done stuff together, and separately, including Mars and some mainstream stuff and people had an idea what to expect, but Mars just came out of the blue. CR: I think that’s why we wanted to do it, because it was so different. You know, in doing these, one of the joys of doing new Sable and GrimJack, was you see where these guys were 20 years ago and you see their new material now and, I mean, they’d progressed as storytellers and artists. But you could still see the same level of acumen that they had back then, what originally attracted us to it in the first place. MG: Comics are like the rest of show business. You spend years and years getting up to the level of being a good amateur and then you get your shots. And 152
then you spend years and years becoming a good professional. And somewhere along the line either you become brilliant or you don’t. I’ve really been honored to be able to work with a lot of people who made that leap and became brilliant. But then there’s this other syndrome where you work with people who are ahead of their time. You use the phrase but it’s true. CR: Yeah, but they had it right from the start. MG: Yeah, sure, they’re ahead of their time. Of course, we’re talking about storytelling here. You’re going to be either telling stories about the past, which is behind the time but you can still tell them in a way that’s new and original. Truman Capote did that. Or you could tell stories of a more speculative nature and therefore almost by definition be ahead of the time. The problem is that some people who started out ahead of the time, wind up being behind the time because they don’t grow. There’s that magic moment when you’re right in time. But then you don’t grow. And part of the role, I think, of a good editor–and it’s hard to do this with superheroes that are part of the big universe, although I guess it’s just a different type of challenge–but the role of a good editor in that relationship is to be an agent provocateur and to keep on needling the talent, whomever they may be, so that they’re always ahead of the time. Ahead of their own time. I think that GrimJack really showed that. Mars certainly showed that. Sable showed that but in a completely different way. It’s really easy to be ahead of the time, to be an hour and a half ahead of the time if you’re dealing with political issues or sociopolitical issues, which is what Sable does. That’s not so hard. But Mike was known as a superhero and a fantasy artist. He was known for Warlord, he was known for Legion of Superheroes, and for Starslayer when we did Jon Sable. That was really perceived as a hell of a risk. Mike Grell is doing what? He’s doing some sort of James Bond stuff ? That’s cool. I’ll check it out. And it sold through the roof. That agent provocateur aspect is fun, it’s really great. Particularly if you’re a prick like me. It doesn’t work with everybody. Sometimes you come up with some stuff that just really doesn’t work. When I was at DC I
_____________________ Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
was lucky. Dick Giordano encouraged that in me. And he said, “You know, if every once in a while we don’t wind up printing a series we wish we never started then we’re not doing our jobs right.” I loved that philosophy and we had a few things that I wish we didn’t do. Then again I was given the opportunity to do Wasteland. CR: If the things you’re happy you did outweigh the things you wish you hadn’t done, I think you’ve done okay. MG: Yeah, yeah. And if these guys will still speak to you 10 years later that’s even better. There are always newcomers and there are people I’m very excited about and there’s never enough opportunity to work with all of them and there’s never enough time. But there’s also the guys that you’ve worked with forever and you know how they think, they know how you think. You know exactly when you’re supposed to spin the plate and when you’re supposed to just leave the plate on the stick. CR: Yeah, I’d be happy if in 10 years from now we’re talking about what we’ve done over the last 10 years for our twentieth anniversary book. MG: You bet. That’d be great. That’d be awesome. And one way or another, we’ll be talking about it if I’m around 10 years from now.
CR: One way or another we’ll still be griping about the business. MG: Yeah, everybody gripes about their business. Everybody. If you look at the history of comics, it’s always been a shoestring business. It’s always been a business where the creators have been abused, much more so than now although there’s still too much of that now. The difference is that back in the old days when creators were being abused, they were getting shit. Comics were selling a million copies and the owners had boats. Today the owners have movie deals, the creators are better compensated, and some guys who knock one out of the park can do quite well. There’s at least the opportunity to do quite well and that’s some sort of progress. A lot of people had to pay their dues for us. And a lot of us who’ve been at it for however many years, we’re paying dues for the next generation. It does keep on getting better. You go to MOCCA and APE and you see these 16year-olds who are stapling comics together or putting it all up online. And some of the stuff is just godawful horrible, some of the stuff you just don’t understand and some of the stuff is, “Wow, you’re really brilliant.” And they’ve never heard of SpiderMan. Spider-Man’s a movie to them. They don’t dislike it, it’s just not them. And then again you get a guy like Bendis who does this beautiful indie stuff, 153
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MG: Again, we share that frequency. So Mars, I think, really deserved to get out to that broader audience. In fact, I think people needed to be reminded of it. We did well with Breathtaker over at DC. DC hated Breathtaker because it didn’t have Batman in it. As far as the marketing department was concerned anything that didn’t have Batman in it was a waste of their time. And the publisher thought somehow from looking at the covers that Wheatley and Hempel were making fun of concentration camp victims, which had nothing to do with the story. It was one of the more surreal projects and I thought about all that–and Mars, and the uphill struggle it was to market Mars–about a year and a half ago when I was at the Norman Rockwell Museum at their first big exhibit of graphic novels. They had done a whole thing about the history of graphic novels and all this other stuff. They’d honored 12 graphic novels. Gave each one a wall. So here there were these 20 walls full of great illustrators’ work and another 20 walls full of Norman Rockwell’s original paintings and then there’s this wall for Sara Bissen, there’s this wall for Breathtaker. And I’m thinking wow, how cool, DC let this one slip through their fingers. I have the same feelings towards Breathtaker as I do about Mars except for the fact that I think that Mark and Marc were more proficient then. They knew how to tell a story a little more slickly, a little bit better and they were a little bit more adventurous. But Mars was, as the title suggests, more unworldly. So you had no idea what to expect there. By the time Breathtaker came around, both these guys had done stuff together, and separately, including Mars and some mainstream stuff and people had an idea what to expect, but Mars just came out of the blue. CR: I think that’s why we wanted to do it, because it was so different. You know, in doing these, one of the joys of doing new Sable and GrimJack, was you see where these guys were 20 years ago and you see their new material now and, I mean, they’d progressed as storytellers and artists. But you could still see the same level of acumen that they had back then, what originally attracted us to it in the first place. MG: Comics are like the rest of show business. You spend years and years getting up to the level of being a good amateur and then you get your shots. And 152
then you spend years and years becoming a good professional. And somewhere along the line either you become brilliant or you don’t. I’ve really been honored to be able to work with a lot of people who made that leap and became brilliant. But then there’s this other syndrome where you work with people who are ahead of their time. You use the phrase but it’s true. CR: Yeah, but they had it right from the start. MG: Yeah, sure, they’re ahead of their time. Of course, we’re talking about storytelling here. You’re going to be either telling stories about the past, which is behind the time but you can still tell them in a way that’s new and original. Truman Capote did that. Or you could tell stories of a more speculative nature and therefore almost by definition be ahead of the time. The problem is that some people who started out ahead of the time, wind up being behind the time because they don’t grow. There’s that magic moment when you’re right in time. But then you don’t grow. And part of the role, I think, of a good editor–and it’s hard to do this with superheroes that are part of the big universe, although I guess it’s just a different type of challenge–but the role of a good editor in that relationship is to be an agent provocateur and to keep on needling the talent, whomever they may be, so that they’re always ahead of the time. Ahead of their own time. I think that GrimJack really showed that. Mars certainly showed that. Sable showed that but in a completely different way. It’s really easy to be ahead of the time, to be an hour and a half ahead of the time if you’re dealing with political issues or sociopolitical issues, which is what Sable does. That’s not so hard. But Mike was known as a superhero and a fantasy artist. He was known for Warlord, he was known for Legion of Superheroes, and for Starslayer when we did Jon Sable. That was really perceived as a hell of a risk. Mike Grell is doing what? He’s doing some sort of James Bond stuff ? That’s cool. I’ll check it out. And it sold through the roof. That agent provocateur aspect is fun, it’s really great. Particularly if you’re a prick like me. It doesn’t work with everybody. Sometimes you come up with some stuff that just really doesn’t work. When I was at DC I
_____________________ Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
was lucky. Dick Giordano encouraged that in me. And he said, “You know, if every once in a while we don’t wind up printing a series we wish we never started then we’re not doing our jobs right.” I loved that philosophy and we had a few things that I wish we didn’t do. Then again I was given the opportunity to do Wasteland. CR: If the things you’re happy you did outweigh the things you wish you hadn’t done, I think you’ve done okay. MG: Yeah, yeah. And if these guys will still speak to you 10 years later that’s even better. There are always newcomers and there are people I’m very excited about and there’s never enough opportunity to work with all of them and there’s never enough time. But there’s also the guys that you’ve worked with forever and you know how they think, they know how you think. You know exactly when you’re supposed to spin the plate and when you’re supposed to just leave the plate on the stick. CR: Yeah, I’d be happy if in 10 years from now we’re talking about what we’ve done over the last 10 years for our twentieth anniversary book. MG: You bet. That’d be great. That’d be awesome. And one way or another, we’ll be talking about it if I’m around 10 years from now.
CR: One way or another we’ll still be griping about the business. MG: Yeah, everybody gripes about their business. Everybody. If you look at the history of comics, it’s always been a shoestring business. It’s always been a business where the creators have been abused, much more so than now although there’s still too much of that now. The difference is that back in the old days when creators were being abused, they were getting shit. Comics were selling a million copies and the owners had boats. Today the owners have movie deals, the creators are better compensated, and some guys who knock one out of the park can do quite well. There’s at least the opportunity to do quite well and that’s some sort of progress. A lot of people had to pay their dues for us. And a lot of us who’ve been at it for however many years, we’re paying dues for the next generation. It does keep on getting better. You go to MOCCA and APE and you see these 16year-olds who are stapling comics together or putting it all up online. And some of the stuff is just godawful horrible, some of the stuff you just don’t understand and some of the stuff is, “Wow, you’re really brilliant.” And they’ve never heard of SpiderMan. Spider-Man’s a movie to them. They don’t dislike it, it’s just not them. And then again you get a guy like Bendis who does this beautiful indie stuff, 153
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drop-dead gorgeous indie stuff and it turns out what he always really wanted to do is write Spider-Man and The Avengers. He’s been a worthy writer over at Marvel and has helped recreate Marvel for the 21st century. It’s important that someone does that, too. We’re always going to be a superhero medium. We’re always going to be a heroic fantasy medium. I have a couple of superhero concepts and constructs that I’ve been working on with people off and on over the years that I think are really different and really revolutionary. CR: Yeah, I know we’ve stayed away from that for our 10 years. But on one hand we stay away and on the other, we do Badger. So we find ways to avoid superheroes even while still publishing a variation on them. 154
___________________________________ Opposite Page: Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
MG: You’re not going to beat Marvel and DC at their own game. Nobody does Marvel comics better than Marvel Comics. Nobody does DC comics better than DC Comics. That’s it. You want to do Batman, you’re going to be doing it at DC. And you’re going to do it DC’s way. But that’s Batman and that’s part of what Batman’s about. Same thing is true with Spider-Man. So how do you create a superhero for the less defined market, for the less defined platform? That’s an interesting question, there’s lots of ways of doing it. Badger started out doing that 30 years ago, 25 years ago in Madison, Wisconsin for Milton Griepp, for crying out loud. And that’s an interesting take. CR: Perhaps we’ll talk more about that in our second 10... IDW _________________________________ Badger by Bill Reinhold and Jeff Dee.
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drop-dead gorgeous indie stuff and it turns out what he always really wanted to do is write Spider-Man and The Avengers. He’s been a worthy writer over at Marvel and has helped recreate Marvel for the 21st century. It’s important that someone does that, too. We’re always going to be a superhero medium. We’re always going to be a heroic fantasy medium. I have a couple of superhero concepts and constructs that I’ve been working on with people off and on over the years that I think are really different and really revolutionary. CR: Yeah, I know we’ve stayed away from that for our 10 years. But on one hand we stay away and on the other, we do Badger. So we find ways to avoid superheroes even while still publishing a variation on them. 154
___________________________________ Opposite Page: Jon Sable by Mike Grell.
MG: You’re not going to beat Marvel and DC at their own game. Nobody does Marvel comics better than Marvel Comics. Nobody does DC comics better than DC Comics. That’s it. You want to do Batman, you’re going to be doing it at DC. And you’re going to do it DC’s way. But that’s Batman and that’s part of what Batman’s about. Same thing is true with Spider-Man. So how do you create a superhero for the less defined market, for the less defined platform? That’s an interesting question, there’s lots of ways of doing it. Badger started out doing that 30 years ago, 25 years ago in Madison, Wisconsin for Milton Griepp, for crying out loud. And that’s an interesting take. CR: Perhaps we’ll talk more about that in our second 10... IDW _________________________________ Badger by Bill Reinhold and Jeff Dee.
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