Alter Ego #6 Preview by TwoMorrows Publishing

Roy Thomas’ homas’ Legendary Legendary Comics anzine F anzine Comics F

5.95

In the USA

No. 6 AUTUMN 2000

It’s

Name-Dropping TIme!

STAN LEE--ROBERT KANIGHER DICK AYERS--JOHN SEVERIN GARY FRIEDRICH--MIKE W. BARR MICHAEL GILBERT--JOE KUBERT AND MORE!

Gene Colan in THE GOLDEN & SILVER AGES!

Gene Colan

Volume 3, No. 6 Autumn 2000

Stan Lee Section

™

Editor Roy Thomas

Associate Editor Bill Schelly

Design & Layout Jon B. Cooke GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS

Production Janet Riley Sanderson

Consulting Editors John Morrow Jon B. Cooke

Contents

FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck

Writer/Editorial: Marvels upon Marvels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Marvel Family at Fawcett & Gene Colan at Marvel.

Contributing Editor Michael T. Gilbert

Editors Emeritus

Jerry Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White, Mike Friedrich

Cover Artists Gene Colan & Tom Palmer Mac Raboy

Cover Color Tom Ziuko Mac Raboy

“So You Want a Job, Eh?”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Gene Colan talks about working with Stan Lee and others. When Those Who Can, Teach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Mike Barr on 1940s books by Stan Lee and Robert Kanigher. “Play It Again, Stan!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Sgt. Fury in Casablanca with Friedrich, Ayers, & Severin.

Mailing Crew

More (All-) Stars Than There Are in Heaven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Roy Thomas on All-Star Squadron and its Golden Age roots.

And Special Thanks to:

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Michael T. Gilbert on the Man of Steel in 1940s New Yorker and Coronet articles.

Russ Garwood, D. Hambone, Glen Musial, Ed Stelli, Pat Varker

Dick & Lindy Ayers Dave Berg Al Bigley Bill Black Jerry K. Boyd Rich Buckler Gene & Adrienne Colan Jerry de Fuccio Joe Desris Keif Fromm Gary Friedrich Jennifer T. Go David Hamilton Mark & Steph Heike Roger Hill Robert Kanigher David Anthony Kraft Mort Leav

Stan & Joan Lee Dan Makara Gene McDonald Eric NolenWeathington Jerry Ordway David Raboy Ethan Roberts Bob Rogers Arlen Schumer John Severin Joe Simon Robin Snyder Glenn Southwick Kevin Stawieray Marc Swayze Joel Thingvall Dann Thomas Bob Thoms Hank Weisinger Mark Wheatley

So—You Want to Collect Fanzines? (Part Two) . . . . . . . . . 47 Bill Schelly says don’t pay an arm and a leg (or a claw). Special Mac Raboy/FCA Section. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flip Us! About Our Cover: This stunning Colan/Palmer illo, supplied by David Hamilton, was intended for Dr. Strange #180 (May 1969), but a composite of previously-published Colan/Palmer and Ditko figures (plus a photo of the NYC skyline) was used instead. Mark Wheatley says he heard the cover got temporarily lost in the mails. And that’s the only excuse we can think of for its not being printed more than three decades ago! [Dr. Strange, Eternity, & Nightmare ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Above: The dreams of babes: This recent sketch by Gene Colan appears in his new book, The Gene Colan Annual: Painting with Pencil, edited by Tina & Matt Poslusny (the Comic Book Profiles folk), and is available at <www.GeneColan.com> or for $23.15 ppd. from As You Like It Publications, 5413 Virginia Ave., Charleston, WV 25304. [Characters ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Art ©2000 Gene Colan.] Alter EgoTM is published quarterly by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. Phone: (919) 833-8092. Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: Rt. 3, Box 468, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@oburg.net. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Single issues: $5.95 ($7.00 Canada, $9.00 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $20 US, $27 Canada, $37 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © Roy Thomas. Alter Ego is a TM of Roy & Dann Thomas. FCA is a TM of P.C. Hamerlinck. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

“So You Want A Job, Eh?”

The Gene Colan Interview A rambling conversation about Timely (and others), mostly from the 1940s to the early-’70s, with “The Dean” Interview conducted & edited by Roy Thomas • Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson [EDITOR’S NOTE: Gene Colan, as artist of “Sub-Mariner,” “Iron Man,” Daredevil, and other major features beginning in the mid-1960s, is one of the most-loved and best-remembered artists of Marvel’s Silver Age. Earlier this year saw the publication of The Gene Colan Annual: Painting with Pencil, a trade paperback of more than 100 pages of text and art by Gene. Having admired Gene’s work on “Sub-Mariner” in the months before I came to work for Marvel in mid-’65, I wanted to talk with him about this period—and of course about his even earlier work— and Gene was most obliging.—R.T.] ROY THOMAS: Gene, I wanted to start off by mentioning the subtitle of your annual: “Painting With Pencil.” Because that’s the way I and some other people always thought of your work. How did that title occur to you?

COLAN: No, I didn’t. RT: And yet, back in the ’40s and ’50s, you inked a lot of your stories. COLAN: I inked some of them. I inked a lot of westerns, a lot of war stories. I inked the ones that have my name on them. RT: There was a lot of black in those stories. COLAN: Oh, yeah. RT: I noticed in your annual you do a lot of writing, and you have a nice turn of phrase. Why didn’t you ever talk to Stan about doing any writing years ago? COLAN: It never occurred to me. It really never did. I was so steeped in the art of it, I never thought about writing. But I enjoy writing. As you get older, you begin to review things in your mind, and think you might give this a shot, and so I’ve enjoyed writing some of these articles in the book. They’re things that pop up in my mind, and I have no answers for them—[laughs]—except that I know certain things. Like when someone says, “Maybe,” that means “No.” “Maybe” is just another way of putting you off.

GENE COLAN: It was my wife Adrienne’s idea. Years ago they didn’t have a good method of reproducing for pencil. Today, of course, with the technology they have, it can be done. RT: I’ve tried to explain to people sometimes about the difficulty of even a very good inker catching everything about your work on paper, because you would pencil so many different shades of black and gray on the page… COLAN: Yeah, I did that, really, just to get into it and feel what I needed to feel to put it across. I figured if the inker could capture it, fine, and if he couldn’t, well, that will have to be fine, too.

Very recent photo of Gene and a couple of pals. [Courtesy of Gene & Adrienne Colan.]

RT: One of the things I most remember about working on your pages—since I worked with the original art in those days— is that I always ended up having to wash my hands several times an hour to get the graphite off! [laughs] I’m sure you did, too, and I’m sure Tom Palmer and others did.

RT: Quite often! [laughs] Now, to finally go back to the beginning—you were born in New York in the Bronx, right? How did you get interested in drawing? Was it at an early stage?

COLAN: Oh, I started at three. The first thing I ever drew was a lion. I must’ve absolutely copied it or something. But that’s what my folks tell me. And from then on, I just drew everything in sight. My grandfather was my favorite subject. He was very easy to do, and I loved him very much, so that helped a lot. But I tried my grandmother, it was too difficult. My mother, who looked so much like her, was also difficult… and my dad, I did my father once or twice, and he came across fairly well.

COLAN: [laughs] Oh, yeah. I think all artists should have their work reproduced from pencils, really I do, because once the inker gets in, you’ve got two styles. It’s never interpreted the same way the artist had meant. But I’m slow… and so, because of that, I get a little too nervous inking it. I’m more at home with pencils.

RT: So, at a very early stage, you were drawing from life. A lot of comic book artists nowadays never get to that stage.

RT: You did do some inking in the early days. But during the heyday of Marvel, when you were doing “Sub-Mariner,” “Iron Man,” etc., kind of thing, I don’t recall you often telling Stan, “Gee, I’d really like to ink my own work.”

COLAN: Oh, they’ve got to get around to it. Speed is important when you’re drawing from life—because whoever you’re drawing, often they don’t know you’re drawing them. If it’s somebody, say, in the park, you never know how long they’re going to sit there, so the idea is to get it in

Gene and Adrienne personally handed this brand new, never-published drawing to Roy T. at this year’s San Diego Comicon. All he had to do was stand in line at a photocopy stall in the convention center for half an hour to get a copy made! Some guy in line kept trying to buy it from him, even though Roy explained he only had it on loan! Daredevil versus The Jester. [Art ©2000 Gene Colan; Daredevil, The Jester ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

as quickly as you can. And then rely on your memory. RT: Did you go to the park and try to draw people without their knowing it? COLAN: Oh, yes. [laughs] Even on the commuter train, from when I lived in New Rochelle, I would come in with a pad and start to draw some of the people on the train. RT: When you were young, I take it you liked newspaper comic strips? COLAN: Yes, I would copy them, too. I was highly influenced by Milton Caniff, including Dickie Dare, that came before Terry and the Pirates. Coulton Waugh continued it. He loved ships. Many, many years later, when I became an adult, I saw some of Waugh’s pictures in a gallery. There were paintings of ships, and he signed his name exactly like he did on the comic strip. RT: I understand that you went to the Art Students’ League. Could you tell us a little about what that is? COLAN: It’s a school in which those who are into serious art can get good, solid background training. Usually famous people run it, or had run it in the past. I know Norman Rockwell had a finger in it, and

Hobie Whitmore. It’s in Manhattan on 57th Street. It’s one of the oldest schools around. There’s a modeling class, with live models, and then they have a sculpture class. They would start out at different levels. It was a great experience for me, and I got in on it through the G.I. Bill. Actually, I even went to the League a little bit before I entered the service. Of course, I tried to get work at DC Comics. When I was much younger, I thought if I worked for DC, it was like working for MGM Studios. RT: I think that was the feeling that a lot of people had—including DC! [laughs] COLAN: Well, it was “Batman,” and “Superman.” So I figured, “Gee, what better could I do?” They were very nice to me. I must’ve been about 13 or 14 when I first went up there. I met Bob Kane; he was in the bullpen, and he was drawing. I remember what he was drawing. He was drawing a hand. One of his characters was holding a .45, and I remember the beautiful way he drew it. For some reason, that stuck in my head, because all the anatomy was there, and I didn’t know it. RT: So you’re living proof that Bob Kane did draw, occasionally! COLAN: Oh, yeah! I got to know him better on a personal level many years later, but that was the first time. I was just a kid, and I was told I’d

“So You Want A Job, Eh?”

better go to art school. I had some ability but I needed training. So, I didn’t want to do it, but I figured I had to bite the bullet and go ahead and do it, and I did.

ly were an artist back in ’46, right? When you went to the Art Students’ League on the G.I. Bill after the war, the government sort of paid the way, right? COLAN: Yeah, they did. I don’t know for how long I went. A couple of years.

RT: Rather than being drafted, I guess you volunteered, because you went into the Air Force.

RT: That was probably one of the best things that the country ever did, giving young people a chance to go to college. They deserved something for serving.

COLAN: I enlisted. I tried to get into the Marine Corps, but my father came down and pulled me out because I was underage. [laughs] Shortly after that, I enlisted in the Air Force. By that time I was 18 or 19.

COLAN: Well, the country was a different place then, where they pulled together. That’s why we won the war, and that’s why we lost the war in Vietnam, because we weren’t pulling together. Anyway, it was a very romantic time, in the ’40s, during the War. I remember going back to the base and sleeping in the men’s room, because there was no room on the train anywhere else. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of people in wartime, sleeping in Grand Central Station… just lying on their duffel bags. It was a great time, a great time, so many marriages, it was a romantic time. Not that they all clicked!

RT: What did you do in the Air Force? COLAN: Everything but fly. [laughs] I was going to go to gunnery school, but they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and then everything was over. The War was over, the Boulder [Colorado] school shut down, and I was in the occupation forces that went over to the Philippines. RT: When General MacArthur was the king over there. COLAN: Yeah. We were stationed right outside Manila. I did some training in Kesel Field, Mississippi—which is right near Biloxi—and boy, what a hellhole that was! [laughs] Then, let’s see… I caught pneumonia in basic training, real bad. RT: Did you do any drawing while you were in there, for post papers and such?

A mid-’50s Colan page from War Comics #28— a Korean War tale. Note that half of Panel 4 is black, as if to emphasize what lies below as well as what floats on the surface. Panel 8’s “silhouette shot” is drawn from such an angle as to show, even in stark black-&-white, everything the reader needs to know. (We wish whoever faxed us this page would’ve scribbled his name on it somewhere— but thanks, anyway!) [©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

COLAN: Oh, yeah. I did drawing when we started to go overseas, on the troop ship. That’s when I really started. I kept a diary of drawings. There was an art contest at one station in the Philippines, and I won it. I think it was rigged, because I became so friendly with the Filipinos over there, that they wanted to see me win real bad, and they told me not to worry about it! [laughs]

RT: Hey, that may even have been Alfredo Alcala, and Tony DeZuniga, and all those guys, running around underfoot. They were all young guys back then. [laughs] Fans don’t usually think of you as a Golden Age artist. But, though you really came into full flower later, you actualAn early Colan attempt at Batman a la Bob Kane— well, actually, more à là Jerry Robinson. Not bad for a beginner, huh? [Art ©2000 Gene Colan, for The Gene Colan Annual; Batman ©2000 DC Comics.]

RT: [laughs] Well, they don’t now, either. You sound like an ad for Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation. Trying to impose a bit of chronological order on this conversation—I was looking at some of the things in your annual. You had this teenage strip called “Bill and Bud.” When did you do that? Because it’s very polished.

COLAN: I was trying to get my samples up, and trying to make a breakthrough somewhere. I didn’t know exactly how. I was 15, 16…

RT: That’s the time of that “Daredevil” page in there, too—the Charlie Biro “Daredevil,” the guy with the split red-and-blue costume. COLAN: It might’ve been. Just before going into the service, I worked for Fiction House. A very small outfit. The office was no bigger than a closet. I worked there just for the summer, and right after that I went into the service. RT: And when you came out, you went to Timely. Obviously, you’d been hanging around DC, you’d been to Fiction House…. Why did you try Timely first? COLAN: I might’ve tried the other places first. I can’t remember exactly, but I was determined to get a job. I was living with my parents. I worked very hard on a war story, about seven or eight pages long, and I did all the lettering myself, I inked it myself, I even had a wash effect over it. I did everything I could do, and I brought it over to Timely. What you had to do in those days was go to the candy store, pick up a comic book, and look in the back to see where it was published. Most of them were published in Manhattan, they would tell you the address, and you’d simply go down and make an appointment to go down and see the art director. I got a job right away… Al Sulman, I don’t know if the name rings a bell…. RT: It sure does! He was part of the poker crowd [Marvel production manager] Sol Brodsky belonged to—and so did I, by the late ’60s. It was Sol, and Al, and John Romita and Mike Esposito and Stan Gold-

When Those Who Can, Teach

When Those Who Can Teach Interviews Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Whoever said “Nothing succeeds like excess” was right—though not as right as the guy who said it fifteen or sixteen times in a row. Kanig Robert ©2000

While the world may beat a path to the door of the builder of a better mousetrap, history confirms that at least some of those beating feet—accompanied by cash-holding hands—will be diverted to the door of the man who figures out how to mass-produce said mousetrap. her.

The field of comic books is, of course, no different. When it was proven that people (mostly kids) would pay good American money for the four-color adventures of their favorite (or soon-to-be favorite) characters, it wasn’t long before the number of comic book publishers multiplied geometrically—or so it must have seemed to a kid with a lone dime, facing a newsstand in the 1940s. And since comic book publishers need comics to publish, they hire writers and artists. But where do the writers and artists come from?

Secrets behind the Comics begins with this typical example of that Stan Lee understatement we would come to known and love in the ’60s. [Georgie, Blonde Phantom, Powerhouse Pepper, Captain America & Bucky, and Millie the Model ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

In most fields, newcomers are young people who have grown up perusing the product of the field they wish to contribute to. The field of comics, however, was still fairly new in the early-to-middle 1940s, when the comics boom really took off. Most young writers and artists had read comic strips most of their lives; and while comic strips and comic books

share certain similarities, in many ways they’re more different than they are alike. Today, comic book writers are overwhelmingly former fans who had the “language” of comics imprinted on their cerebral cortexes in their formative years. But in the early days of comic books, talent had to be instructed in the new technique, the format of comic books.

by Mike W. Barr

Capitalism abhors a vacuum even more than nature does, so it wasn’t long before there were at least a handful of “how to” guides surfacing on the subjects of writing and drawing comics. Fortunately, at least some of them were by experienced hands, who could be trusted to share what worked for them. And two of them were by two of the best writers the medium of comic books has ever known: in democratic alphabetical order, Robert Kanigher and Stan Lee. (And if you need to have it explained to you who either of these guys are, back to the Beginners Slope for you!) In 1943 Robert Kanigher wrote the booklet How to Make Money Writing for Comics Magazines, published by Cambridge House of N.Y. Four years later, Stan Lee contributed Secrets behind the Comics, published by Famous Enterprises, Inc., Publishers of New York City. While many other comic book writers of the period wrote articles about the subject (and we’ve seen some of them here in Alter Ego), How to Make Money WritCan you find the Renaissance man in this picture? ing for Comics That’s a paint-splattered RK on the right, among Magazines and various of his abstract paintings and a whole Secrets behind the autumn’s worth of fallen leaves. [Photo courtesy of Comics are two of & ©2000 RK.] the only book-

Stan Lee & Robert Kanigher’s ’40s How-To Books

length contributions to the field. That alone would make a survey of their contents worthwhile, and the pedigrees of their authors in Stan and Joan Lee on a fact-finding trip in Norway a their chosen couple of years back. [Photo courtesy of & ©2000 field defiStan & Joan Lee.] nitely single them out for further analysis. The best place to begin is in the realm of the physical: How to Make Money Writing for Comics Magazines (hereafter referred to as HTMM) is a booklet measuring 8 inches by 51/2 inches. Its 96 interior pages are stapled together, with a textured tan cardboard cover glued around it, its interior text typeset, with no price marked on the cover. Secrets behind the Comics (hereafter referred to as Secrets) measures 59/16 inches by 85/8 inches, also with 96 interior pages, printed in two colors (black and red), its cover and interiors saddle-stitched (that is, sheets folded in half and stapled in the center, like a comic book); its text, save for a single typeset introductory page, is hand-lettered by M. (Mario) Acquaviva, a prolific comics letterer of that era. Secrets has a cover price of $1.00.

(Like, we’d doubt the word of the editor of All-True Crime!)

Stylistically, the books also differ greatly, each reflecting the personality of its author.

“The easiest way for a new writer to get his start is in the field of the comics… The experience gained by the writer in comics can be applied very well to the movies, since the comics script resembles the movie scenario in many ways. Working in the comics medium has proven an open door into the general writing field for many writers.

Kanigher comes across as sly and somewhat acerbic, as if testing the reader to see if he’s got what it takes, the twinkle in his eye just visible through a cloud of pipe smoke. Similarly, his book has a more serious approach, its chapters called “Lessons,” such as “Lesson 5—Important Tools of the Trade.” Each of these “Lessons” is further divided into subtopics: “How to Work with the Artist,” “Action Props,” “How to Use Props,” “Using Ingenuity,” “How to Use Scenes,” “Employing the Close-shot,” “The Medium-shot,” “The Longshot,” “The Montage-shot,” and “The Symbolic Shot.” Lee, in contrast, seems to be who he’s always been in print—ebullient, avuncular, face perpetually agrin with the fun we’re having, and are about to have. His book, written in a style that gives the reader the impression Lee is speaking to him and him alone, is divided into “Secrets,” such as “Secret #9—What Happens to a Script after It Is Written?” These differences will become even more apparent as we progress.

Who Were These Guys, Anyway? In an introductory column opposite the title page of HTMM, Kanigher is described as: “Radio Writer and Director; Winner of National Radio Contest; Playwright, Author of FAUSTUS, THY BROTHER, OUTBREAK, BLIND DATE, BORROWED LIGHTNING, Series of Books on WRITING FOR NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES, RADIO, MOVIES, STAGE, COMIC MAGAZINES, POPULAR BOOKS; Scripts and Stories in Anthology [sic], National Magazines.” Secrets begins with “Secret No. 1”—and, to let Stan Lee tell it himself, we’ve printed the top half of page 6 of his book above:

The Fundamental Things Apply… HTMM begins with a Preface which addresses the audience, whom Kanigher assumes would be either professional writers or aspiring professional writers, with a discussion of the medium:

“This does not mean that the comics are merely a stepping stone to other fields. Independent of the many writing opportunities it opens, the comics is a complete profession worthy of the best efforts of any writer.” The Preface is followed by a one-page analysis of “THE COMICS FORMULA,” which, in those days, referred almost exclusively to super-hero stories:

Right: Wah-hooo! A recent commission drawing of Nick Fury, penciled and inked by Darlin’ Dick Ayers. [Art ©2000 Dick Ayers; Sgt. Fury ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Far right: Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, looking a bit less heroic, in Casablanca.

PLAY IT AGAIN STAN! When Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos Went To Casablanca--And Got Detoured To Marrakesh!

A Long, Leisurely Article about a Very Singular Almost-Issue of Sgt. Fury by Roy Thomas (with the input of Gary Friedrich, Dick Ayers, & John Severin)

I. “Everybody Comes To Rick’s” At least, almost everybody. Sooner rather than later, nearly everyone in America sees the classic 1942 motion picture Casablanca, with its stellar cast headed by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Ever since its first release only weeks after the Allied invasion of North Africa (coincidentally near that Moroccan city), this black-&-

white Warner Bros. movie has captivated audiences. Despite stiff competition from The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and The African Queen and maybe one or two others, Casablanca is considered by many to be the quintessential Bogart film. In spite of its flag-waving Wartime ending—in which the hero gives up the girl out of patriotism and marches off to the tune of the (French!) national anthem—it’s generally considered one of the great romance flicks.

Play It Again, Stan! bugging me, telling me I had to see it. He damn near had it memorized! He used to play [audio] tapes of it and listen to it while he was inking pages at his apartment.” John considered it a sin that the three of us had never seen the movie. (This was before video tape, DVD, cable television, etc., etc., made so much vintage cinema easily accessible.)

We all loved the movie, of course. What’s not to love? And somehow, over the next few months, an idea was born—a beautiful, wonderful idea that was destined to be transmuted into misery for almost everybody associated with it: Gary decided to turn Casablanca into a Marvel comic.

II. “Round Up the Usual Suspects” You don’t hear a lot of nostalgia nowadays about Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos.

And, though its melodrama and sentiment betray its origins in an unproduced stage play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, Hollywood pros and popcorn-munchers alike have consistently voted it one of the best films of all time, right up there with Citizen Kane. So what’s Casablanca got to do with the price of comic books in Chinatown? So glad you asked.

The series came about because, by late 1962, despite the impending demise of The Incredible Hulk (whose place Fury would take on Marvel’s schedule), editor/writer Stan Lee was feeling his oats with the success of Fantastic Four and other titles. He boasted to publisher Martin Goodman that he could use his new approach to make other genres sell, not just super-heroes. Because the war comic seemed an endangered species, it was decided to launch a new title set in World War II. Thus was born Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos (May 1963)—a comic with such an embarrassing name that not even covers spotlighting Captain America and “The Death Ray of Dr. Zemo!” could keep an early Marvel maven like me from passing by an issue or two on the newsstands. Even “Commandos” was strictly a British military term; the mag should really have been called Sgt. Fury and His Howling Rangers—which doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it? Stan hailed Fury as “The War Comic for People Who Hate War Comics”—and he had a point. As such, it was a howling success for several years.

John Verpoorten was a mountain of a man, closer to seven feet tall than six and well over 300 pounds. Stan Lee liked to refer to Marvel’s production manager as “Jumbo John,” but most of us preferred “Big Bad John,” from the Jimmy Dean song.

For my part, despite all the comics I’ve written set during the WWII years (The Invaders, All-Star Squadron, Secret Origins, et al.), I almost never bought actual war comics—not even those drawn by Jack Kirby or Joe Kubert or Harvey Kurtzman and the EC gang.

Either way, when John V. said something in that quiet yet deeply rumbling voice—you listened.

So, naturally, the first full-book action series that Stan assigned me to write, on the morning after the Great New York City Blackout of November 1965, was—Oh, you guessed, huh?

So when in late 1968 he announced to Marvel writer/assistant editor Gary Friedrich, my new wife Jeanie, and me that we were all going to see Casablanca at the Bleecker Street Theatre in Greenwich Village, it never even crossed our minds to say no. Gary recalls: “I’d never seen it before, but John loved it and kept

I scripted Sgt. Fury for a year (#29-41 plus an annual), working with Dick Ayers, who had inked most issues from the start and who had penciled all but one since #8. Dick, like Kirby a WWII veteran, did a lot of the hard work, like getting uniform and weapon details basically right. I’d been a Dick Ayers fan ever since Magazine Enterprises’ Ghost

Our round-up of the usual suspects: (in no particular order, from left) Smilin’ Stan Lee, Rascally Roy Thomas, Jumbo John Verpoorten, Darling Dick Ayers [all taken from the 1975 Mighty Marvel Comic Convention souvenir book], Joltin’ John Severin (recent self-portrait), and Groovy Gary Friedrich [in a fuzzy pic from the 1969 Fantastic Four King-Size Special, #7]. [Photos ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Art courtesy of & ©2000 John Severin.]

Sgt. Fury’s Lost Casablanca Story

Rider and The Avenger and his 1954 Human Torch. Still am. Enter Gary Friedrich. Gary I’ve known ever since high school back in Jackson, Missouri. In Fall of ’65, firmly entrenched at Marvel, I invited him to join me in New York, where he wrote for Dick Giordano at Charlton until a staff vacancy arose at Marvel. Around the beginning of 1967, just as Stan had earlier handed Sgt. Fury over to me, I passed the three-striped baton to Gary. And boy, did he run with it! By late ’68 he had scripted such acclaimed Sgt. Fury tales as “The War-Lover!” and “They Also Serve!” (about medics). Both these issues were penciled and inked by John Severin, noted for his work on Kurtzman’s EC war comics; Dick had moved on to other assignments. However, John, whose bread and butter was the better-paying Cracked magazine, soon decided he could only spare time to ink for Marvel. Dick returned to penciling Sgt. Fury, and so was born the team of Ayers and Severin, which with Gary produced some of the best-looking war comics of the ’60s. Then came issue #72, Nov. 1969.

Nor do I recall precisely when I became aware of what Gary and the artists were up to. As associate editor, my vague duties included overseeing other scripters; but Marvel ran a pretty loose ship in those days, and once a writer had proven himself on a title, Stan (and thus I) tended to leave him alone, as almost a de facto editor, unless storm clouds developed. They were gathering in mid-’69. We just didn’t see them yet. Gary’s concept, I believe, was inspired, as comic books go: This Sgt. Fury story would take place in between the scenes of Casablanca. It would be a separate, parallel tale which, in effect, took place off-screen, using the stars of the Warner film as supporting characters in the comic. Dick Ayers would pencil likenesses of the principal actors, and John Severin—who drew movie parodies for Cracked—would be there at the finish to give them a near-photographic look. The reader need not be familiar with the motion picture in order to enjoy the comic. (Though if he/she was, so much the better!) For the benefit of the three people in the world who don’t know the story of Casablanca, here’s the gist of it, with the most famous quotes plus a bit of WWII history tossed in—since 1942-43 audiences would’ve known what “Vichy France” was, while surveys show that today most Americans couldn’t locate France on a world globe:

III. “You Must Remember This” At this late date Gary doesn’t remember quite why or when he decided to write an issue of Sgt. Fury which intersected with Casablanca. Woody Allen’s stage version of Play It Again, Sam, which utilized both a Bogart ghost and dialogue from the 1942 film’s final scene, opened in February 1969. Like me, Gary was already a fan of the comedian, so that may have been a partial catalyst. As for Casablanca itself, Gary opines: “It was on TV all the time in New York, so after I first saw it, I probably watched it again on TV before I wrote the story.”

In late 1941, following its 1940 conquest by Nazi Germany, the unoccupied portion of France (known as Vichy France for its capital) and its overseas possessions remain nominally independent, but in actuality must cowtow to Hitler. Casablanca, in French Morocco, has become a way-station on “a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail” of desperate Europeans trying to reach safety in the Americas. While some manage to obtain exit visas and escape by way of Lisbon (in neutral

The All-Star Chronicles

The

More AllStars Than There Are In Heaven

Chronicles

by Roy Thomas [NOTE: All-Star Squadron, the comic book series I created and developed in 1981 for DC, ran for 67 issues, an insert in Justice League of America #193, plus three annuals, from 1981-87; it was followed by 31 issues and one annual of its post-Crisis on Infinite Earths sequel series, The Young All-Stars, from 1987-89. And that’s not counting some three dozen related stories in Justice League and in the Secret Origins series I originated in 1985. [In answer to numerous requests over the past couple of years—not that I needed much prodding—this and future issues of A/E will feature an ongoing behind-the-scenes history of Squadron and its antecedents and tie-ins, from the late 1930s on up. I’ll be dealing with events mostly in chronological order—despite last issue’s leap-frog to the “Nuclear” connection between Squadron #16 and a 1950 Wonder Woman.

After all, I had first moved to New York in 1965 to become editorial assistant on National/DC’s seven Superman titles. There had been no thought in my mind before July 1965 about ever working for Marvel; I figured Stan Lee wanted to write the entire line forever—and besides, my main correspondents while I lived in Missouri had been with DC’s Julie Schwartz, Gardner Fox, and (now-Superman-scripter) Otto Binder. It had only been my lack of rapport—to put it politely—with Superman editor Mort Weisinger which had led me open to Stan’s timely offer of employment, two weeks after I arrived in the Big Apple. Still, I look on my exclusive “Marvel period” as a fortuitous circumstance. I was probably able to advance further and faster at Marvel, a company on the rise, than I might have at the older company. All the same, Steve Skeates and Denny O’Neil, two writers who’d worked first for Marvel, had done very well at DC, and I like to think I would have, too.

[Matter of fact, as you’ll see below, it’ll take an issue or two just to get to All-Star Squadron #1! But then, even thirty years ago it took some months to bring the concept to fruition. Hope you’ll stick around for the ride. But hey, even Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield spent several chapters getting himself born!

Matter of fact, even while a writer and associate editor for Marvel, from time to time I had let the “fan” side of me take the upper hand over the “pro.” I’d managed to have some slight back-door influence on DC, unknown to most folks there (and, thankfully, to my respected mentor Stan).

[Oh, one more thing: Along the way we’ll be featuring plenty of good-looking, sometimes previously unseen art, courtesy of Rich Buckler, Jerry Ordway, and some of the most generous fans you’d find in any art form.—R.T.]

I. Backstory In 1980 I reluctantly decided the time had finally come to cut the ties that bound me to Marvel Comics, where I’d been laboring (for the most part happily) for fifteen years.

This re-creation of the “1941 JSA” splash of JLA #193’s All-Star Squadron insert is slightly different from the printed one. The 1981 version had The Shining Knight behind The Atom—though Sir Justin was never a JSAer—and forgot Starman. Roy Thomas commissioned Rich Buckler (penciler) and Jerry Ordway (inker) to do a corrected rendition, which was later printed as a pinup. Repro’d from photocopy of original art, from collection of R.T. [©2000 DC Comics.]

I quickly found that, in some ways, moving to DC was less a leavetaking than a homecoming.

My ally in most of this crosscompany subterfuge was Gerry Conway, who over the late-’60s through the mid-’70s had gone from DC to Marvel and back again a couple of times. After leaving Marvel for the second time in 1976 to become a DC writer/editor, Gerry had enthusiastically convinced DC to let him launch a couple of projects I had suggested to him (along with several which were entirely his own idea, natch).

One of the notions I initiated was the first real confrontation between Superman and Captain Marvel, which Gerry did quite well in a giant tabloid drawn by Rich Buckler and Dick Giordano.

More (All-) Stars Than There Are In Heaven

II. Three For The Road

The other was the second coming, in 1977, of All-Star Comics.

Sometime in 1980, my wife Dann and I were flown to New York to meet with the ruling DC triumvirate of Jenette Kahn (publisher), Joe Orlando (editorial director), and Paul Levitz (coordinating editor). By then I’d signed a three-year contract with DC, to begin the day my Marvel contract ended, and we simply had to decide what three monthly comics I would write for DC.

Although an All-Star #58plus was initially my suggestion, after I made it I had virtually nothing to do with the project; Gerry carried the ball quite capably alone. (But, when he asked me to, I did cross company lines long enough to write a letter to be printed in #58.) Naturally, Gerry didn’t handle the revived comic exactly the way I would have— nor is there any reason he should have. I swiftly came to terms with the notion of a still-young StarSpangled Kid, an adult Robin, and a newly created Kryptonian named Power Girl all running around on Earth-Two, the parallel world to which Schwartz and Fox had consigned the original Justice Society of America.

It had been agreed, since virtually the day I’d phoned Paul to tell him I wouldn’t be signing the new contract Marvel had offered me, that I would be involved in some way with The Justice Society of America. In fact, written into my DC contract was what amounted to a “right of first refusal” at scripting stories featuring all DC’s Golden Age heroes. Even though not officially an editor, I was basically placed in charge of “EarthTwo,” that charming parallel world whereon dwelt the DC stalwarts I’d grown up reading about in the last half of the 1940s.

Oh, I winced a little at the name “Super-Squad,” even in its logo form as the “All Star Super Squad”; but it was none of my business. The mag got off to a bang-up start, with Wally Wood inking Rik Estrada, and a young Keith Giffen soon taking up the slack.

This made a certain amount of sense. After all, “Earth-Two” had worked well—very well—when My main regret was that, editor Julie Schwartz had been its when Gerry later offered me a combination Prime Mover and chance to ghost an issue or two of home-plate umpire. It was only All-Star, I felt I had to decline. when other editors, less in tune Not primarily because it would Three future JSAers meet for the first time, in DC Special #29 (“The Untold Oriwith that alternate universe, began have been a violation of my Margin of the Justice Society,” Sept. 1977); story by Paul Levitz. Repro’d to poach in it that you wound up vel contract (though it would), but from photocopies of the original Joe Staton-Bob Layton art; courtesy of with weirdnesses like a teenage because I was determined that, if Jerry G. Bails. [©2000 DC Comics.] Bruce Wayne playing tennis with and when I ever wrote a JSA story, his father. Julie had moved on to it would have my name on it, not someone else’s. Gerry understood. other venues, and I seemed, both to DC’s triumvirate and to myself Those issues are probably the ones dialogued by Paul Levitz, who soon (and, I hoped, to the venerable Julie, as well), his natural successor. made the 1970s All-Star his own over its remaining life. But the time, or something, was clearly out of joint. And, after 17 bimonthly issues of All-Star, a first-ever JSA origin in a DC Special, and half a dozen stories in the oversize Adventure Comics— —the second JSA series died when Adventure was canceled, as of #466 (Nov.-Dec. 1979). With my sands running out at Marvel, in some ways the timing of this cancellation could not have been much less propitious for me. In other ways, it couldn’t have been much better.

Jenette and the boys sure knew how to make a guy (and his wife) feel welcome on our first DC-related trip east. We checked into our hotel room in Manhattan to find it festooned with multi-hewed balloons. Sometimes there’s nothing more meaningful than a meaningless gesture. When I met with them the next day, “the triple pillar of the world” quickly downsized. Jenette, whom I’d known before moving west in ’76, excused herself after a few minutes,

Besides All-Star Squadron, also on Roy’s plate were Arak, Son of Thunder (pencils by Ernie Colón) and a very brief stint as Batman writer (art by Gene Colan & Adrian Gonzales). By his third and final Batman (#340, Oct. 1981), an homage to Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder’s wonderful “Mole!” tale in Mad #3, Roy relinquished the dialoguing to Gerry Conway. [©2000 DC Comics.]

Mr. Monsterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Comic Crypt

“Why I Don’t Believe In Superman”

Introduction

amusing “Why I Don’t Believe in Superman” has to be one of the earliest articles devoted to the Man of Steel. It’s so early, in fact, that Kahn refers to Superman and his Kryptonian parents as “Kal-l,” “Jor-l,” and “Lora”—not today’s vastly different “Kal-el,” “Jor-el,” and “Lara.”

by Michael T. Gilbert Superman! Faster than a delicate haiku! Superman! More powerful than a dangling participle! Superman! Able to split infinitives with a single adverb! Superman! …in the New Yorker? Hard to believe that such a rough-and-tumble character would ever be welcome in the rarified pages of the New Yorker magazine. More amazing, the article in question appeared on January 29, 1940, little more than a year after Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s wonder-child burst into immortality in June 1938. By any account, E.J. Kahn Jr.’s

Technically, the piece in question discusses the Superman newspaper strip, not the comic book—but that’s splitting hairs. Author Kahn’s observations about Superman the strip apply equally well to Superman the comic book. So why did Mr. Kahn focus on the strip? My guess is that, while the typical New Yorker reader might accidentally glance at the Sunday comics page, it would be highly unlikely that same reader would pick up a kiddie comic book. Or at least unlikely they’d admit it! But enough talk, old bean. The gauntlet is thrown. Mr. Kahn clearly doesn’t believe in Superman. And I, for one, am anxious to find out why….

Why I Don’t Believe in Superman Reprinted by permission; ©1940 E.J. Kahan, Jr. Originally published in The New Yorker. All rights reserved. When I read a while ago that a Nazi newspaper had protested against the activities of Superman, holding them to be offensively pacifistic, I decided to get acquainted with the fellow. After all, it isn’t every comic-strip character who is singled out for such personal attention. Little Orphan Annie was once attacked by the Daily Worker, but that isn’t very eventful and she had been around for years anyhow. Superman, on the other hand, is a comparative newcomer—just a year and a half old. In that short time he has been furiously active and, I found by collecting some old newspapers recently and leafing through them, undeniably pacifistic, though not in the ordinary, do-nothing sense of the word. If Superman disapproves of a war, he simply stops it. When, for example, Blitzen and Rutland went to war in his strip, he grabbed up Dictator Amork of Blitzen and General Gotha of Rutland. Tucking one under each arm, he flew to the trenches and there instructed them to fight it out on a man-to-man basis in full view of their assembled and hitherto embattled forces. You know what happened: they began to pull one another’s hair, the softies, and the soldiers threw down their arms in disgust, thus ending the war instantly for lack of participants. Superman can take wars in his stride, or flight, because he is impervious to attack. Bullets spin off his superskin like raindrops off a windshield, and once, when a rascal attempted to whack him over the head with a heavy club, the weapon bounded back so fast off Superman’s superskull that it knocked his assailant cold. At the start of Superman’s career it was hinted that he could leap an eighth of a mile, hurdle a twenty-store building, and outrun an express train. It has since developed that he can also outrun a bul-

let, swim an ocean without puffing, demolish an airliner by meeting it head on in mid-air, and change the course of a forest fire by breathing heavily on it. He can knock out burly pugilists in exactly one second, divert a flood by barehandedly digging a pit a mile long in a few minutes, and win a rather one-sided combat with a battleship by pushing it close to shore and then walking out of the water holding the ship up over his head. “Nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin,” his authors once crowed, and they have lived up to his word. Bayonets, when thrust at him, crumble into so much scrap steel, and the Princess Tania, one of several young ladies who have crossed his impressive path, ruined a perfectly good dagger by trying to drive it into his hide. Superman was momentarily dazed after a collision with a loaded torpedo, but when in form he can project himself right through the side of a ship, and destructive implements are generally his dish. Not long ago somebody fired a cannon at him from a distance of a few yards. He caught the cannon ball in one hand, remarking, “Nice curve on that ball. Wanta play catch, eh?,” and threw the ball back at the cannon, shattering it to bits.

As MTG relates, The New Yorker never mentions comic books, only the newspaper comic strip—but somehow, that guy with the big “S” on his chest in the above newspaper ad (reprinted in the 1998 hardcover book Superman: The Dailies) looks a lot like the comic book hero who was then making little kids’ hearts beat a bit faster. Oh, and incidentally—none of the following daily strips appeared with the New Yorker article, which was un-illustrated. [©2000 DC Comics.]

Superman has had three identities. Originally he was Kal-l, the infant son of Jor-l and Lora, a nice young couple living on the planet of Krypton. Kal-l arrived on earth by means of a rocket ship into which his parents had thoughtfully inserted him just before Krypton burst into fragments and disappeared. Kal-l matured into Superman and abandoned his given name forever, in one frame of a single comic strip. He decided almost immediately to become a newspaper reporter and, in his words, to dedicate himself “to helping the oppressed, and seeing that truth and right

Comic Fandom Archive Department

So-You Want To Collect

Comics Fanzines? by Bill Schelly [INTRODUCTION: Last issue, I began building a Want List for those who want to collect the wonderful comics fanzines published in the 1960s and early 1970s. Separating fan publications into categories for ease of discussion, Part 1 covered those dedicated mainly to general contents, advertisements, news, amateur comic strips, and special interests such as all-Marvel. Now let’s finish the menu for a complete fanzine smorgasbord….]

Part Two

Jerry Bails. For the first time, fans could look up any Golden Age hero by name and find a complete list of his appearances by issue number and date, plus extensive writer and artist credits. This was one of the key documents that made Bob Overstreet’s first Comic Book Price Guide possible, just a year later. While it would be nice to have a copy of the first two or three editions of that Guide, they sell for hundreds of dollars nowadays; and you may Rich Buckler drew this great wraparound cover for Collector’s Guide: The First Heroic Age just a feel (as I do) that you couple of years before he broke into professional comics. [Art ©2000 Jerry Bails; Spectre & Capt. would rather spread Marvel Jr. ©2000 DC Comics; Shield ©2000 Archie Publications; Destroyer ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Skyman ©2000 Columbia Publications.] your money around. If that’s the case, The Collector’s Guide would be a good alternative. Just look for the Rich Buckler cover printed on glossy green paper!

VI. One-Shots and Specialty Zines When pro comics like Fantastic Four and Justice League of America began occasionally plugging fanzines in their letter columns, the Academy of Comic Book Arts and Sciences (a strictly fan organization, despite its lofty title) decided to produce a “catch-all” publication to give newcomers an overview of fandom: a crash course in comic book collecting and grading, information about the history of fandom, and how to join the Academy. The first was Who’s Who in Comic Fandom (1964) produced by Larry Lattanzi from records provided by Jerry Bails. This one-shot ditto fanzine included Bails’ own mailing list of over 1500 comics fans known at the time. A year later, Bill Spicer (editor of Fantasy Illustrated) produced the photo-offset The Guidebook to Comics Fandom (1965) which laid out much of the same material in a more professional, eye-pleasing manner. Spicer’s digest-sized publication also included ads for prominent fanzines and dealers. Probably its single most important feature was the inclusion of a comics grading system. Add both the Who’s Who and the Guidebook to your want list for their historical importance. From an indexer’s point of view, there was no more important publication than The Collector’s Guide: The First Heroic Age (1969) by Underground cartoonist Vaughn Bodé drew the cover of Graphic Story Magazine #10. For full-color reproductions of the covers of GSM #12, 13, & 16, see Bill Schelly’s Eisner-nominated book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, available from Hamster Press. [Cover ©2000 Bill Spicer.]

When Bill Spicer changed the title of Fantasy Illustrated to Graphic Story Magazine with #8 (1967), it heralded a format change, as well. No longer would it emphasize amateur comic strips. Instead, this preeminent fanzine became essentially a series of specials, usually with one or two in-depth interviews per issue. GSM #10 features the first (and perhaps the best) long interview with Alex Toth, with many visuals to com-

Comic Fandom Archive Department

plement the points under discussion; #11 is devoted entirely to Will Gould’s Red Barry comic strip; #12 and #14 are Basil Wolverton specials. The last issue, GSM #16 (1974), offers a superb Howard Nostrand interview, the only one I have ever seen. These are all highly recommended, depending on your personal interest in the main attractions. Should you encounter any of the first twenty or thirty mailings of CAPA-Alpha, you would be wise to snap them up because of their rarity. That is, if you’re interested in informal chit-chat, news and opinions by folks like Don and Maggie Thompson, Jerry Bails, Roy Thomas, John McGeehan, and many other rabid fans of the day. This venerable apa (amateur press alliance) made its debut in October of 1964. It’s the only publication begun during fandom’s Golden Age to be continuously produced right up to the present.

by Dave. Unfortunately, Odd fell by the wayside when its star artist was compelled to spend the next two years in Vietnam. I also recommend Steve Gerber’s on-target send-up called Crudzine (1965), from a term that referred to a truly awful fanzine of any stripe. High school teacher Roy Thomas conceived the parody one-shot and talked high school student Gerber into producing it, with the aid of some talented St. Louis area buddies. Roy’s departure for prodom in New York torpedoed his scheduled “Interview with Stan Lee’s Third Cousin,” but Steve’s lampoon of amateur strips, “The Green Rabbit,” is hilarious.

VIII. Pro-Zines Before 1965, few professionals deigned to contribute to fanzines, though most fan-eds regularly sent them copies. A notable exception was the support provided to the original Alter Ego by Julius Schwartz, Gardner Fox, and later Otto Binder. Another was art (often inked) by Steve Ditko, which appeared not only in A/E but in The Comic Reader, Yancy Street Journal, Komik Heroez of the Future, and Sense of Wonder (among others).

VII. Humor Zines In the early 1960s, after most of the EC fanzines had petered out, those who loved Mad magazine (and its many imitators) published a number of satire fanzines that were precursors to the underground comix that were soon to appear on the scene. If you stumble across copies of titles such as Smudge, Enclave, Jack High, Nope, or Don Dohler’s Wild!—don’t let them get away from you! They’re chock full of work by artists like Jay Lynch, Skip Williamson, Jay Kinney, art spiegelman, and other soon-to-be-luminaries. Most were produced in numbers of one hundred copies or less, and have long disappeared into personal collections. The only long-running humor zine published by and for fans of costumed heroes was Odd, produced by the Brothers Herring, Steve and Dave. All issues featured attractive ditto art by Dave and clever scripts by Steve, and some had contributions by Marv Wolfman and Jay Kinney. The best issue is #12 (1967), the only one printed photo-offset. The “Rat-Man” parody by Calvin Castine, Dave Herring, and Jim Gardner is funnier than “Bats-Man” in Mad; “How To Get Lost In Space” by Wolfman and Dave Herring is another highlight of the issue. It’s a shame there weren’t more in this format, although #8 through 11 all have excellent offset covers

I believe it was the appearance of Wally Wood’s witzend (whose title was deliberately non-capitalized) in 1966 that changed the attitude of many professionals. Wood had the connections to fill witzend with all-pro work by the likes of Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Archie Goodwin, and Roy Krenkel. Steve Ditko introduced his Mr. A in the pages of Wood’s magazine. There are eight issues in the original format, and all are excellent. I certainly recommend adding witzend #1 and 2 to your want list. #6 was highlighted by John Benson’s seminal interview with Will Eisner. Most, of course, featured original work by Wood himself, though after he handed the magazine over to Bill Pearson with #5, he contributed fewer pages. In the wake of witzend, more and more zines offered the artwork of pro and near-pros, always printed via photo-offset. Indeed, some were almost entirely vehicles for this sort of material. The so-called “pro-zines” are not especially rare, since they were produced in relatively large numbers. These are the magazines that commonly turn up in fanzinesfor-sale boxes, all with highfalutin titles: Anomaly, Vanguard, Phase, This is Legend, Third Rail, et al.

Left: Steve Ditko’s cover for Bill Schelly’s Sense of Wonder (1968). [Art ©2000 Steve Ditko.] Right: Wally Wood’s cover to witzend #3 (1967), the hardest issue to find, due to a limited press run. [Art ©2000 Estate of Wally Wood.]

Plus:

Roy Thomas ’ Legendary Comics Fanzine

5.95

In the USA

No. 6 AUTUMN 2000

Fantastic Fawcett Foray! The Incomparable artwork of

Mac Raboy EXAMINED BY ROGER HILL

PLUS:

C.C. Beck Marc Swayze William Woolfolk Joe Simon AND RABOY ASSISTANT

Bob Rogers

Volume 3, No. 6 Autumn 2000

™

Mac Raboy

FCA Section

Editor Roy Thomas

Associate Editor Bill Schelly

Design & Layout Jon B. Cooke GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS

Production Janet Riley Sanderson

Consulting Editors John Morrow Jon B. Cooke

re: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 No time for letters—just for acknowledging screw-ups!

FCA Editor

Lightning Strikes Twice! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

P.C. Hamerlinck

Contributing Editor

Roger Hill focuses on Capt. Marvel Jr. artist Mac Raboy.

Michael T. Gilbert

Bob Rogers in the 20th Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Editors Emeritus

Jerry Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White, Mike Friedrich

R.H. never quits! Now he’s found Raboy’s background artist!

FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 P.C. Hamerlinck presents another fun-filled Fawcett lineup.

Cover Artists Mac Raboy Gene Colan & Tom Palmer

Cover Color

Fawcett-to-Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 An editorial potpourri assembled by Jennifer T. Go.

We Didn’t Know... It Was the Golden Age! . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Mac Raboy Tom Ziuko

Marc Swayze on Fawcett and comic strips in the 1940s.

Mailing Crew

Russ Garwood, D. Hambone, Glen Musial, Ed Stelli, Pat Varker

And Special Thanks to: Dick & Lindy Ayers Dave Berg Al Bigley Bill Black Jerry K. Boyd Rich Buckler Gene & Adrienne Colan Jerry de Fuccio Joe Desris Keif Fromm Gary Friedrich Jennifer T. Go David Hamilton Mark & Steph Heike Roger Hill Robert Kanigher David Anthony Kraft Mort Leav

Contents

Joe Simon: The FCA Interview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Mr. Scarlet & that first issue of Capt. Marvel Adventures.

Looking Backward... from My Upside-Down Point of View . . 32 William Woolfolk writes about writing in the Golden Age.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Comics Creators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 C.C. Beck draws verbal statues of these mortal sins.

For Gene Colan, Stan Lee, and More . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flip Us! About our cover: In the early 1970s Lulu Raboy consigned several pieces of original artwork by her late husband Mac to a comic art dealer in New York City—one of which was a bust portrait gouche painting of Captain Marvel Jr. The purpose for which it was intended in the early ’40s (“photo” premium, perhaps?) is not known. More about this painting in our next issue! Special thanks to Keif Fromm for making this never-before-printed Raboy art available to us. [Art ©Estate of Mac Raboy; Captain Marvel Jr. ©2000 DC Comics.] Above: An unidentified, almost-completed Mac Raboy panel of our cover subject and guest of honor, found by Bob Rogers in his files. Note the missing arm bands. [©2000 DC Comics.] Alter EgoTM is published quarterly by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. Phone: (919) 833-8092. Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: Rt. 3, Box 468, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@oburg.net. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Single issues: $5.95 ($7.00 Canada, $9.00 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $20 US, $27 Canada, $37 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © Roy Thomas. Alter Ego is a TM of Roy & Dann Thomas. FCA is a TM of P.C. Hamerlinck. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING

Lightning Strikes Twice!

Captain Marvel Jr., Flash Gordon, & the Incomparable Art of MAC RABOY! by Roger Hill [INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Mac Raboy’s artistic abilities and accomplishments in the four-color medium have been recognized and acknowledged in many of the books on comics history published over the past forty years. Two years ago, when I decided to write an article on Raboy for an issue of the CFA-APA (Comic and Fantasy Art Amateur Press Association), I quickly discovered that since around 1970 almost nothing new had been documented on this amazing artist. As popular as his work has always been among comic art aficionados, it stuck me as odd that no one had pursued further research on Mac Raboy. [Virtually everything written on Raboy after 1970 has relied primarily on Jim Steranko’s early-’70s The History of the Comics and the 1948 King Features Syndicate promotional booklet titled Famous Artists & Writers. Most readers of Alter Ego will be familiar with the two Steranko volumes, but the King Features Syndicate booklet is somewhat rare and not easily accessible to collectors or historians. This booklet is priceless, with its numerous biographies of writers and artists, accompanied

by photographs of each. It supplies some general information about Raboy up to 1948 and presents the first published photo of the man ever seen by the public. We will run that bio page next issue, along with an interview with Raboy’s son David. [Mac Raboy will always be most remembered for the “Captain Marvel Jr.” artwork he created for Fawcett Publications between 1941-44. While my own appreciation of Raboy’s “CMJr” art has grown steadily over the years, it was his Flash Gordon Sunday newspaper strip that initially caught my eye when I was sixteen years old. I liked Raboy’s Flash art immediately! I thought he drew beautiful “leggy” women, muscular “handsome” men, and rocketships that, while simple in design, were sleek and just “pulpish” enough to travel the galaxies with ease. The stories themselves… well, they left a lot to be desired. But Mac didn’t write the stories (well, actually, he wrote at least one of them); he just illustrated them. His tenure on the strip ran from August 1, 1948, until December 17, 1967, close to a thousand Sunday pages. That in itself is quite an accomplishment.

Lightning Strikes Twice!

[I was determined at the outset of this project not to do a rehash of what had previously been written about Mac Raboy. To add something new to comics history is now my goal on everything I write. In Raboy’s case, I knew it would be a difficult and lengthy quest for new information. I wanted to know more about him than just his involvement in the comics field. His personal feelings about art and influences, and a clearer perception of what drove him to do what he did, is the kind of knowledge I was seeking. Who was Mac Raboy and what made him tick? That was the goal. [Unfortunately, Mac Raboy died in 1967, before anyone had the chance to interview him. Not that he probably would have agreed to be interviewed since, during the course of my research, I’ve learned he was not exactly thrilled with the work he was doing on Flash Gordon, and wasn’t the most outgoing person. In fact, Raboy was an extremely quiet, sensitive artist, who kept to himself and just wanted to sit and draw for hours on end, without interruption. [Since Raboy was very meticulous about his art and one of the slowest artists to work for Fawcett, deadlines on the “Captain Marvel Jr.” work were constantly a problem for him. Therefore, a number of assistants were used during his tenure there to help out. I knew that the only hope I had of truly learning something new about Mac Raboy would have to come from talking with his co-workers and assistants who might still be around. The few of these folks who are still living are now in their late seventies or early eighties. These are the people I went searching for. I also went looking for Raboy’s family—and found them.

[Gene McDonald was the first artist and co-worker of Mac Raboy I found on my quest for information. Gene, originally a Midwestern gentleman himself, is today 82 years old and was one of the nicest fellows I ever talked with. The information he gave me was very helpful toward completion of this article. After I finished the interview with him, he asked me not to give him any credit for his work with Mac Raboy, or in the comics. He didn’t feel he contributed much. Well, my apologies to Gene, but I couldn’t leave him out of the picture even if I wanted to. The history is there, and he was a part of it. [Next I tracked down Mac Raboy’s son David, who at first was not at all anxious to talk to me. During my first phone conversation with him, David listened patiently as I explained I wanted to write an article about his father, then told me he really wasn’t interested in discussing him. After that short conversation, I wrote him a letter and prevailed upon him to help just a little bit on my research. Later, when I called him again, he agreed to answer a few questions, for which I am most grateful. [Through a chance meeting on the Internet I made contact with Bob Rogers (a.k.a. Rubin Zubofsky), an 82-year-old gentleman who was Raboy’s first assistant at Fawcett Publications, being hired there in 1942. Through Bob and his son-in-law Dan Johnson, I was able to get a better picture of those long-ago days when he and Raboy worked on “Captain Marvel Jr.” The first part of our interview with Bob on his career in the comics follows this article. —ROGER HILL.]

Previous page: Classic images from Flash Gordon and Master Comics flank a stark portrait of artist Mac Raboy. Author Roger Hill says a photo of Raboy “was put into Photoshop [a computer program] and had the ‘India ink’ filter applied. It gives one the impression of a mysterious person in the shadows, without definition, which is what Raboy was, before this article was written.” Above: Panel from Captain Marvel Jr. story in Master Comics #29. [CMJr ©2000 DC Comics; Flash Gordon ©1949, 2000 King Features Syndicate.]

I. Origins & Upbringing Manuel Raboy was born in New York City on April 9, 1914, to parents Isaac and Sarah Raboy. Isaac Raboy and two brothers had immigrated to the U.S. from Bessarabaka, Romania, in 1904, and settled temporarily in New York City. While passing through the receiving areas of Ellis Island, Isaac’s original last name—spelled “Raboi”—became “Anglofied” to “Raboy.” Isaac secured a job working in a hat factory and during his evening hours wrote poetry and political essays. He also attended the Jewish Agricultural School in Woodbine, New Jersey, and moved to North Dakota after graduation. On a horse ranch located just outside Gladstone, North Dakota, he became a horse-handler and ferrier. He eventually wrote several books. One of these, The Jewish Cowboy, detailed some of his experiences in North Dakota.

the same time he worked in New York City and continued writing books. After marrying, Issac and Sarah Raboy eventually moved into a home located at 3451 Giles Place in the Bronx section of New York. This is where young Manuel Raboy grew up and developed an intensive passion for drawing. Even as a child he would render with great detail just about anything he set his mind to.

Above and next page: Woodcut engravings done by Raboy for the WPA during the mid-to-late 1930s. This one is called “Family on a Barge.”

At his father’s request Isaac returned to the East Coast, where he took on the job of managing the family dairy farm in Connecticut. At

Manuel attended P.S. 44 in the city and De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx. De Witt Clinton was an all-boys school at that time, and students were mixed both ethnically and racially. It was here that Manuel—or “Mac,” as his family and friends referred to him—first took an interest in making art his career. Luckily he had an art teacher at De Witt who gave him some guidance and encouragement in the arts. This teacher also conducted WPA art classes which Mac attended regularly. Through them he became familiar with the art of wood engraving and print making, a slow and painstaking form of art.

Raboy, it appears, mastered this artistic process and upon gradua-

The Incomparable Art of Mac Raboy tion went to work for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s WPA and Federal Arts Project (FAP). At this time only people on relief could be recruited by the FAP for government-sponsored work. The project at its height employed about 5000 artists. Between December 1935 and August 1939, Raboy turned out a total of fourteen engraved prints for the FAP. He decided to make a visual interpretation and record of Americana; this fell under the heading of The Index of American Design. Raboy’s prints were quite striking, with a lush, fine-line approach to the depiction of Depression-Era America of the 1930s. Some of these show agricultural images of people at work. All were quite good.

7 More than likely, Chesler’s foreman, Jack Binder, also had a say in Raboy’s hiring. Binder had been hired by Chesler in early 1937 to take charge of a staff of artists that included Charlie Biro, Jack Cole, Lou Fine, Gill Fox, Fred Guardineer, Robert McCay, Jr., Mort Meskin, Guspano Ricca, Charlie Sultan, George Tuska, and many others who would eventually move on to greater fame in the comic book industry.

Mac Raboy was now surrounded by a team of talented artists, inkers, and writers who, under Binder’s supervision, would crank out completed comic art for some of the largest comic book publishing companies of the day. This included Centaur, National/DC, Fawcett, Quality, and Timely, all of whom were pioneers of a budding new industry. Raboy was fascinated by the storytelling aspects of comic books and was about to learn the business working from the bottom up.

“Fishing for Coins.”

Through this program, many artists were encouraged to do work at home rather than to concentrate on the art market in New York. The government also sponsored traveling exhibitions that would expose American artists’ work to culturally deprived areas of the country. Raboy’s prints were shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1937, then at the National Academy of Design in 1938. A few examples even found their way to exhibition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Since the demise of the Federal Art Project in 1943, the importance of governmental funding of the arts has been continually disputed. Even though critics say the FAP produced bad work, there can be no doubt that it saved a generation of American artists from almost total extinction. In the case of Mac Raboy and many other young artists, it proved to be the encouragement they needed to further their careers. Several of Raboy’s wood engravings from this era reside today in the permanent collection of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. During the time he worked for the FAP, Raboy also studied art at the New York School of Industrial Art, the Pratt Institute, and Cooper Union. In 1935 he married a young lady named Lulu Belle Morris. The two had met while summering in upstate New York in a little town called Golden’s Bridge. Lulu Belle had at one time been an accomplished dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. The Raboys set up housekeeping in a little apartment in the Bronx.

II. The Sidewalks—and Sweatshops—of New York After leaving the WPA, Raboy decided to try his hand working in the commercial art field. He secured a job with a small art company, where he became adept at lettering and paste-ups, among other chores. In his own words, his duties consisted of “all kinds of the usual dirty work.” In 1940, after seeing a newspaper ad, he applied for work and was hired at once as a staff artist with the Harry “A” Chesler comics shop in New York City. Chesler’s outfit, located at 23rd Street, just West of 8th Avenue, was one of the earliest “sweatshops” responsible for packaging comic books for publishers.

One of Mac’s first assignments was a back-up feature in Prize Comics called “The Green Lama.” This mysterious, green-hooded crimefighter originated deep in the wilds of Tibet. Well versed in the strange secrets of the Oriental holy men, he devoted his life to fighting criminals the law could not reach. “The Green Lama” was the brainchild of writer Ken Crossen and had originally debuted in the pulp magazine Double Detective in 1940. Within two years Crossen would go on to become an assistant editor at Fawcett Publications and would eventually start his own comic publishing company. Though Raboy couldn’t have known it at the time, he himself would be involved in Crossen’s later ventures, and once again with “The Green Lama.”

III. Early Days at Fawcett

“On Tenth Ave.”

While Mac’s early efforts on various back-up features produced in the Chesler shop were competent, his style had a way to go yet before he would become recognized as someone of special talents. The Chesler shop also provided Fawcett with a lot of their early art needs. Therefore, Raboy was kept very busy working on such notable back-ups as “Ibis the Invincible,” “Mr. Scarlet,” and “Zoro, the Mystery Man.”

Working with other Chesler shop personnel, Raboy began illustrating the adventures of “Dr. Voodoo” with Whiz Comics #9, cover-dated October 1940. This back-of-the-book adventure series, featuring a noncostumed, swashbuckling semi-super-hero, would eventually show Raboy’s transitional growth to a higher plateau of artistic excellence. Unlike most of the other Fawcett features, the “Dr. Voodoo” stories eventually came to utilize narrative captions rather than the standard word balloons, and Raboy’s style grew more mature—and more noticeable to the men in charge at Fawcett. By the end of 1940, Mac was drawing “Bulletman” covers for Master Comics; shortly after that, he became the chief artist of that hero’s

Bob Rogers—

Bob Rogers In The 20th Century! An interview with the artist a.k.a. Rubin Zubofsky about Mac Raboy, Lou Fine, et al.

Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Roger Hill [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Bob Rogers was born Rubin L. Zubofsky in Brooklyn, New York, on January 15, 1923. Raised in that borough, he attended the High School of Music and Art, graduating in 1941. His exposure to the comics field came quite by chance during the Summer of 1941, when he became the apprentice of a comic book artist who, as will be seen below, has not yet been positively identified. In 1945 Rubin changed his name to Robert (Bob) Rogers. [Bob was the first assistant to work with Mac Raboy at Fawcett. He drew backgrounds for Raboy through most of 1942; and, earlier, he had performed the same service for the great Lou Fine. This information came as a complete surprise to me. While I had known that other artists had inked Fine’s work during the early 1940s, I had never heard that a background man had been employed to help out. Oddly enough, Bob’s wages were paid by Everett M. “Busy” Arnold, publisher of Quality Comics, not by Lou Fine. [I had originally gone looking for Rubin Zubofsky two years ago, hoping to find him and include him in this issue’s article about Mac Raboy. At that time I had absolutely no luck in locating him. Little did I know, at the time, that Rubin had changed his name. As luck would have it, I ran across his son-in-law, Dan Johnson, who, as an agent for Bob, was auctioning off a few comic art originals on eBay. This included a couple of Mac Raboy & Bob Rogers “Captain Marvel Jr.” pages from the early 1940s. The Internet was buzzing with questions. [At the time I remember thinking: Who in the world is Bob Rogers?! I asked around and found that everybody else was asking the same question. No one had ever heard of him! After a few e-mails back and forth between Dan and me, and going back to re-read Jim Steranko’s History of the Comics, it became clear just who Mr. Rogers was, and how important his contribution was to the Golden Age of Comics. [Over the course of the next few months, with Dan and Bob’s help, I was able to learn much about Bob’s career working in the comics. Luckily, Dan Johnson is as inquisitive about his father-in-law’s career as I am. We have been corresponding on a regular basis, sharing information and working to develop a clearer picture of a chronology that Bob put together a few months ago on his life and work. Hopefully, by next issue, we can have all the holes filled in. [During the past seven months I’ve been able to interview Bob Rogers about many different aspects of his long career. This is the first part of my interview with him. Further segments will be presented in ensuing issues of Alter Ego. —ROGER HILL.]

Rubin Zubofsky (later Bob Rogers) working on the last page of the CMJr story “The Case of the Jolly Roger” for Master Comics #35 (cover-date Feb. 1943). The photo was taken in late 1942, just before Bob left for military service. [Photo courtesy of Bob Rogers; art ©2000 DC Comics.]

ROGER HILL: I can’t tell you just how surprised and happy I was to find out that you are, or were, the original Rubin Zubofsky. I was looking for you two years ago at the beginning of my research on this whole Raboy project, and couldn’t find any Zubofskys listed anywhere! After what I had read in Steranko’s History of the Comics about you, and from a letter from [Fawcett editor] Wendell Crowley [published in Alter Ego V1#8], I knew you were one of the key figures in the scheme of things. BOB ROGERS: Rubin Zubofsky… nicknamed Ruby! That is my real name. During the War, my parents “anglosized” it. At some point my mother wrote and told me they had changed the name to Rogers, and I thought, “Gee whiz, I’d like to go along with the family.” But I decided not to do it until after I got out of the service or I’d screw up my records. So I waited until after the War. RH: You were using the nickname “Ruby” at Fawcett, right? You know, it was originally believed that Mac Raboy had changed his name from Rabinowitz to Raboy. ROGERS: I guess a lot of erroneous data gets thrown around out there. It’s funny how little bits and pieces have come back into my recollection that I had forgotten about. I only recently remembered that I had shortened my name to “Zubof” for Fawcett! [laughs] I even went out and got myself a separate Social Security card which said “Rubin Zubof,” which was legal then. RH: We’ve been discussing by e-mail the “mystery artist” who helped you get started in the comic book business as his apprentice; but so far we haven’t been able to come up with a name, right? You seem to think it was someone called Myron. And your son-in-law Dan and I suggested to you that it might have been an artist by the name of Myron Strauss. ROGERS: I tell you, this has been the damnedest thing. My memory at this stage is not what it used to be—and unfortunately, during those years when I first started, and up until the time I came back from the ser-

—In The 20th Century!

vice, I never kept any records. That’s because I was on salary. It wasn’t until I started freelancing that I worked up a portfolio and actually started saving a bunch of this stuff which originally meant nothing to me. Matter of fact, the first thing I did after I came back from the War was, I found this huge pile of mint comic books that I had brought home in quantities when I worked at Fawcett—and I threw them the hell out! [laughter] RH: Don’t feel bad, Bob. A lot of the other guys who worked in comics back then did the same thing. ROGERS: You know, Roger, the only thing I have that this “mystery artist” and myself worked on is one comic. The comic was Stars and Stripes #5, dated December 1941. The feature inside that we did was called “Liberty Scouts.” RH: And you assisted him on this work? ROGERS: Oh yeah. I drew the backgrounds. We also did the cover. I saved a copy of it. Well, actually, I excerpted it. I destroyed it, and just saved the cover and the feature we did. I saved dozens of books—not the books, just the work that I did. I kept them in a portfolio so I could have samples of my work to show around. RH: How did you actually meet this “mystery artist”? ROGERS: Well, it’s a funny thing. I went to the High School of Music and Art, and that’s where I graduated from. I was dating a very lovely girl and she said a friend of hers was in the business of doing something called “comic books” and he was looking for an assistant. And I wanted to get into the field very, very badly, so I jumped at it. RH: You wanted to get into the comic book field? ROGERS: I wanted to get into the art field. Whatever aspect it was. So that opened the door for me. I became a combination background man, cleanup artist, and gofer. That was around 1941, so that date we’ve got for sure. RH: And how long after your graduation do you think it was before you started assisting this fellow? ROGERS: Don’t know. So now we have from January until the end of 1941, and around that time I went to Fawcett. Now, what transpired here was that this “mystery artist” got his draft notice. So he said that a friend of his also needed an assistant, and he thought I would be able to get a salary there. And that’s how I got hooked up with Lou Fine. RH: So you began working with Lou Fine on some of the Quality Comics features? ROGERS: Yes. I made the enormous salary of $20 a week. I worked on a whole series of pages and stories with Lou. This was before Pearl Harbor. RH: Was this at the time after Lou left Iger and Eisner [comics shop]?

This cover on which Bob Rogers worked is signed by “Myron Strauss,” so it seems highly likely he’s the “Myron” for whom Bob first worked in the comic book field. [©2000 the respective copyright holder.]

ROGERS: Yes. He was no longer with them. He was now set up in his own studio apartment in Tudor City, Manhattan. It’s a big complex, and there was just the two of us. That’s why I never met any of the other people. It was just a little studio room with a little kitchenette behind the door and a little sleeper couch. That was it. RH: Do you remember specific comic titles that you were working on with Lou? ROGERS: Hit Comics! RH: Right. And what about Crack Comics? ROGERS: Yes. I have lots of the “Black Condor” stories that I worked on. RH: Did you do the inking on these jobs with Lou? ROGERS: I did the drawing for all the backgrounds. In other words, that’s where the technique I developed started. The artist would draw the figures and then he would indicate to me with a few hen scratches what he wanted in the background. He might indicate something like a street scene behind this figure. Of course, the script might indicate a scene with a car coming, or Nazis coming down the road in a jeep. So he might show me where the jeep is supposed to be. I’d put in the jeep and he’d put in the Nazis. The main figure would be at the front of the panel, and I’d have to fill in the rest. RH: Now, what I’m curious about is the penciling and inking stages of

no. 65

Marc

Swayze C.C.

Beck William

Woolfolk Joe

Simon

C.C. Beckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1985 panel re-creations of the first Ibis the Invincible story from Whiz Comics #1 (#2) which he originally drew in 1940. Ibis ÂŠ2000 DC Comics.

Fawcett Collectors of America

Fawcett-To-Go Jennifer T. Go

FCA is pleased to remind all and sundry that C.C. Beck’s privately circulated and previously unpublished autobiography, “Preacher’s Son,” is among the features in TwoMorrows’ STREETWISE, a deluxe trade paperback compilation of autobiographical stories by the industry’s top artists, which was published in July. Edited by FCA’s P.C. Hamerlinck, Beck’s amazing story is accompanied therein by over thirty illustrations, some of them rarely seen before. A must for Beck and Fawcett fans! If you didn’t run across Streetwise at your local shop, see the ad elsewhere in this issue! C.C. Beck—“Preacher’s Son.” Also from TwoMorrows is Jon B. Cooke’s COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOLUME ONE, compiling the first three sold-out issues of Comic Book Artist plus fifty pages of new material and a special color section. Of special interest to FCA readers is P.C. Hamerlinck’s article from CBA #1, “Can Lightning Strike Twice?,” which revisits the return of Captain Marvel to comics in the 1970s and C.C. Beck’s debacle with DC that coincided with it. See ad elsewhere in this issue of Alter Ego! Fans of FCA and artist Marcus D. Swayze (our featured columnist who graces our pages each issue with his memoirs) will want to obtain a copy of MEN OF MYSTERY COMICS #21 from AC Comics. This issue, dedicated to the great work of Marc Swayze, contains excellent 1940s Fawcett comics reprints of Spy Smasher, Ibis the Invincible, Mr. Scarlet, Bulletman, and a Swayze-drawn Phantom Eagle story. Marc wrote a special preface and included a recent rendering of Mickey Malone, boy pilot. P.C. Captain Hamerlinck’s tribute portrait of Marc is reproMarvel by duced, and P.C. contributed a brief article on Alex Ross. the classic Fawcett title America’s Greatest [©2000 DC Comics. (Fawcett reprints have also appeared Comics.] in past issues of Men of Mystery and in other AC titles such as Golden Age Greats and Western Movie Hero, reviving the old Fawcett title Western Hero. AC has also published stories of Nyoka, Tom Mix, Don Winslow, Rocky Lane, Minute-Man, Bob Steele, Commando Yank, Lash LaRue, Captain Video,

Hopalong Cassidy, Gabby Hayes, and many more Fawcett stars. Send $1.50 for the current AC catalogue to: Paragon Publications, P.O. Box 521216, Longwood, FL 32752-1216 or visit AC’s website at http://members@aol.com/GAReprints/reprints.htm Television’s Captain Marvel, actor JACKSON BOSTWICK, has teamed up with FCA’s P.C. Hamerlinck on an exciting project— guaranteed to be treasured by all generations of Captain Marvel fans! Keep watching the pages of FCA for more information and updates! Comics legend WILL EISNER reports to FCA that his 1983 interview with C.C. Beck (originally published in Kitchen Sink’s Will Eisner’s Spirit Magazine #4) will be reprinted in Mr. Eisner’s upcoming book Shop Talk, to be published in 2001. BULLETMAN & BULLETGIRL, Fawcett’s classic characters from the Golden Age, are back again—on CD-ROM! Now you can read and enjoy those difficult-to-find issues of Bulletman, now available (both in PC- and Macintosh-compatible versions) on two different, reasonably-priced DC-ROM volumes. Each CD contains five complete issues of Bulletman—every page, including the covers and the ads. The high-resolution images are clear, crisp, and in their original full color. For more information write to: ComicsOnCDRom, P.O. Box 46454, Las Vegas, NV 89114, or visit http://www.comicsoncdrom.com G.B. Love, longtime comics fan and the former publisher of the well-known fanzine The Rocket’s Blast ComiCollector (RBCC) is selling several pieces of Don Newton artwork by the late DON NEWTON from the sketch of the RBCC and other publications. Newton began as good Captain. a popular fan artist who went on to illustrate The Courtesy of G.B. Marvel Family for DC Comics. Serious collectors Love. [©2000 DC Comics.] can contact Mr. Love at GBL39013@webtv.net Your number one source for the Marvel Family on the Internet is WALT GROGAN’S MARVEL FAMILY WEB (http://shazam.imgine.com/). Walt’s excellent site contains fun features, great information and artwork from the Golden Age to today, plus all the latest news—such as the new Captain Marvel/Billy Batson action-figure set, or where Captain Marvel will appear in an upcoming DC Comics title, and links to the Marvel Family Web’s sister sites: FCA (http://shazam.imgine.com/FCA) and Jerry Ordway (www.jerryordway.com). (Note: Watch for the forthcoming FCA Ordway interview.) There are also other links to various Marvel Familyrelated sites, such as Mark Luebker’s Captain Marvel Gallery (http://members.tripod.com~~~mluebker/cm gallery.html).

Fawcett Collectors of America were quick to let the local editor know how they felt… and the paper was just as hasty in passing the word on to the syndicate, and thus to the creator… especially if it was something somebody didn’t like. But comic books? There may have been some publishers who encouraged reader comments, but I don’t remember anything like that in the Fawcett works. I guess the policy was: “So you bought it, you must like it!” No… that shouldn’t be said. Surely the paper squeeze had something to do with it. In trying to prepare this material as accurately as possible, I have turned to the records and comic books I kept of the period.

[FCA EDITOR’S NOTE: From 1941-53 Marcus D. Swayze was an artist for Fawcett Publications, first drawing Captain Marvel and later designing Mary Marvel. Marc’s ongoing professional memoirs have been a feature of FCA since #54. Last issue he related how, with standing assignments to draw Phantom Eagle for Fawcett and the Flyin’ Jenny newspaper strip for the Bell Syndicate in his pocket, he returned home in the South. Immediately he began to think of ways to revise the comic book aviator, a regular feature in the monthly Wow Comics.—PCH.]

I wasn’t a stranger to Wow Comics, nor it to me. I had done a Mary Marvel story and cover or two back in ’42, and a one-pager featuring Mary in Wow #28. Wow #29 I don’t have, but am reasonably certain I did the art on a Mr. Scarlet story in that issue. I can’t find Wow #30, but a scribbled note here says I drew the “Black Mace” for that issue. I am not certain of that.

nly after I had come to terms with illustrious plans for The Phantom Eagle did work on the script at hand begin. It was pretty much like when I first stepped inside the Fawcett offices some years earlier… bursting with the “I’m gonna show ’em” attitude. I was bound and determined to have it known what a “real” artist could do for their number one comic book character, that big guy in the red suit… that… that Captain Marvel feller. I had gone so far as to sketch “improvements”… new angles, dramatic lighting, fancy shading… before good old country common sense came to the rescue. And a good thing! I might have “improved” my way back into the milk business. [ED. NOTE: Swayze was driving a milk wagon when he got his first job in comics.]

You see, I hadn’t been employed to make improvements, but to keep things going exactly as they had been. Now, here with The Phantom Eagle in 1944, once again straight thinking was struggling to overcome the tendency to overdo. I was having second thoughts about The Phoenix Squadron, the gang of young flying pals who supported The Phantom Eagle. The idea that they be phased out of the picture, or wiped out in a single stroke, like in a dogfight or enemy bombing, was only my personal opinion. What about the Wow Comics readers who might be fond of the Squadron? That was just it with those comic books! You never knew what the readers thought… or even if there were any readers! With a newspaper feature, people

Marc says the lettering on this Phantom Eagle story he drew for Wow Comics #32 (Jan. 1945) is his, indicating that the art was done before he left New York for the South. It was recently reprinted in AC Comics’ Men of Mystery #21. [Phantom Eagle ©2000 DC Comics.]

Wow Comics #31 contains “Hills of Araby,” the lettering, with the exception of the title panel, unquestionably that of my sister. The lettering of the Vikings story in Wow #32 is my own, indicating that the art was done before I left the city. Really no big deal, is it? Apparently the editors were maintaining a backlog of production-ready art so as to shuffle the stories to maintain variety within the books. I can see where that might have been of concern to a serious collector-historian, especially when the titles were occasionally changed after the art was completed and prior to publication. To get the show on the road I decided to shelve all thoughts of immediate changes to The Phantom Eagle and get some pictures on the paper. Consequently, it was at least a year before the Cometplane was fully redesigned… before the Squadron began to disappear. Not so with Jerry Sloan. I thought Mickey Malone’s little planedesigner friend, who spent most of her appearances waving “goodbye” in the early panels and “welcome back” in the last, was an important plus for the strip, and I could feature her more without upsetting any applecarts—or editors. So away we flew with The Phantom Eagle… for the time being! Toward the end of the year I received a call from Russell Keaton [creator of the Flyin’ Jenny newspaper comic strip]. He first expressed pleasure at the way I had been handling the Flyin’ Jenny Sunday page;

Joe Simon—The FCA Interview

Joe Simon The FCA INTERVIEW

by John R. Cochran [ED. NOTE: Joe Simon, comic book creator, artist, businessman— and one half of the legendary comic book art team of the ’40s and ’50s, Simon & Kirby—was interviewed in early 1998 in New York City. The interview was conducted by New York-based writer John R. Cochran, with questions supplied by FCA editor P.C. Hamerlinck.] JOHN R. COCHRAN: The Fawcett Simon & Kirby work consisted of the interior of Captain Marvel Adventures #1, 1941, and the first Mr. Scarlet story from Wow Comics #1, 1940. Did you do any other work for Fawcett? JOE SIMON: No. JC: How did your work for Fawcett come about? Did Fawcett approach you and Kirby, or did you go to them looking for freelance work? Do you remember to whom you talked at the Fawcett offices? SIMON: I knew John Beardsley before he became an editor at Fawcett. He was from Connecticut. We used to hang out together, and he had done some work for me. One day he called me up at Timely Comics (I was doing Captain America at the time), and told me he was now an editor at Fawcett Publications. He asked me to come down to his office and talk to him and Al Allard about doing a book for them. Their offices were in the Paramount Building on Broadway near 42nd Street—Timely was on 42nd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues—so I just walked over there and had a meeting with them. I met with art director Al Allard and editor Ed Herron. Allard reminded me of Beardsley, except Allard was more well-off and he had a Hollywood haircut and Hollywood personality. Herron had just been assigned as editor of a new book, Captain Marvel Adventures, featuring their successful character from Whiz Comics. Their problem was they had one week to get the first issue of Captain Marvel Adventures to the printers. Jack Kirby lived in Brooklyn and I lived in Elmhurst, Queens. Jack and I got a hotel room around the corner from where we were doing Captain America. We just stayed in that room and worked until we finished the book—which we finished within the week.

entirely different direction. So we just referred to copies of Whiz when drawing Captain Marvel. I never worked with a model sheet—they just weren’t available. JC: Did you ever meet or run into any of the Fawcett artists: C.C. Beck, Marc Swayze, Mac Raboy, Pete Costanza? SIMON: I didn’t know Beck during his Fawcett days. I knew him later on in the ’50s when he was out of comics after Fawcett Comics folded. I gave Beck the first “Silver Spider” story (which was originally called “Spiderman”) to pencil. It was those pages that Jack Kirby took to Stan Lee that became the seed for Lee’s Spider-Man. We used to call Beck “Charlie,” since that was how he introduced himself to us. Jack and I were doing Young Romance and Black Magic when he came over to do some work for us. Mac Raboy did a couple of things for me—I wanted to get him to do more. Otto Binder, brother of Jack Binder, wrote some stories for me—a very prolific writer. I don’t remember Swayze or Costanza. JC: Who were your artistic influences?

JC: Did you know Ed Herron prior to your meeting him at the Fawcett offices?

SIMON: I’d name Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, and Milton Caniff as artistic influences, as well as sports cartoonists Willard Mullins and Burris Kenkins, Jr.

SIMON: Yes. I started Herron in the comic business by hiring him at Fox. It was later alleged that he had not paid his taxes and he had to flee the country.

JC: What comic book accomplishments are you most proud of?

JC: Were you and Kirby already familiar with Captain Marvel and his C.C. Beck-drawn stories from Whiz Comics before you took the job with Fawcett? When drawing Captain Marvel #1, what was your reference material? Character model sheets, or just copies of Whiz Comics? SIMON: Kirby and I were aware of Captain Marvel, but we weren’t that familiar with his stories and artwork. It was different from our work—more of a cartoon—simplified drawing—very, very well done. It went off on a different track—the style was much more whimsical than what Jack and I were doing. We tried to make our villains very horrific, while Beck’s style was just more whimsical. Jack and I were going in an

SIMON: I’m probably most proud of Captain America. I’m also proud that Kirby and I were the only entity in comics who had created more than one financial hit. We had Captain America, Boy Commandos, Sandman, Manhunter, Black Magic, and, the biggest of all, the romance books. JC: Any final comments, looking back at the brief Simon & Kirby Fawcett output? SIMON: When I look at it now, the work we did on Captain Marvel seems to be very powerful but very unpolished. It looks like something people our age would be proud of. On the other hand, I think the stuff they put out today is nowhere near as exciting.

William Woolfolk

Looking Backward... From My Upside-Down Point of View

by William Woolfolk Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck [William Woolfolk, a multitalented comic book writer and successful novelist, reflects upon his career in comics—with particular emphasis on his writing for Captain Marvel and other characters at Fawcett Comics. This special essay, the behind-the-scenes saga of a major writer during the Golden Age of Comic Books, was written exclusively for FCA in early 2000. Special thanks to Shaun Clancy for assisting me in contacting Mr. Woolfolk.

write for the leading popular publications that then ruled the newsstands. However, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Redbook, et al., didn’t understand the sacrifice of artistic integrity I was making for them. They rejected my manuscripts with such dazzling consistency that I began to suspect a giant anti-intellectual wrecking crew was at work to defraud the reading public of me. (Paranoia is, after all, the handmaiden of rejected writers.)

—P.C. Hamerlinck.]

Chapter One Here I am, setting off on a memory voyage in a leaky boat with no paddle, no map and no foreseeable destination. I always promised myself not to revisit the past, knowing how little future there is in it, but P.C. Hamerlinck insisted.

Bill Woolfolk and his daughter Donna Woolfolk Cross, circa mid-1980s. Both have been on the bestseller lists—but in the 1940s Woolfolk also penned scripts for Captain Marvel Adventures, sharing writing duties with Otto Binder. [Photo courtesy of Wm. Woolfolk—with special thanks to David Anthony Kraft for giving us his blessing to reproduce it from Comic Book Interview #28 (1985); Below is C.C. Beck’s CMA #81 (Feb. 1948) cover ©2000 DC Comics.]

Along the way I did manage to sell a few stories and articles to what were known as “secondary slicks” such as Liberty, Toronto Star Weekly, True Confessions, and the like. These paid about ten times the onecent-a-word most pulp magazines paid, but still I didn’t sell enough to earn a living as a writer and felt that I was in imminent danger of having to get a job and earn an honest day’s wages. The horror of that prospect turned me toward comics.

At my age I no longer disclose my age, which is 82. I was born in Center Moriches, Long Island, New York, and left at the age of three months. I had to take my family with me since they didn’t trust me to travel alone. My family were all involved in show business and we often traveled around the country.

I was living in Brooklyn at the time with my father, who managed the Loew’s Coney Island Theater. We qualified as upper middle class in income because my father earned a magnificent $100 a week. But I wasn’t pulling my weight and the shame of that haunted my waking hours.

I never wanted to be anything but a writer… not an ordinary scribbler, mind you, but someone dwelling on the heights of Parnassus in the company of other writing immortals. I sustained this delusion through my high school and college years by excelling in English, journalism, and creative writing classes and through the esteem of various teachers who seemed to share in my delirium. In my dream world, fame and fortune awaited only the touch of my magic pen.

Seymour Reit (later the creator of Casper the Friendly Ghost) went to New York University and we shared a few classes together. His future seemed even more problematic than my own, for he majored in philosophy and I majored in English (although my real majors were horse racing, gambling, and dissolute behavior). Out there in the world beyond college there was scant demand for philosophers or for people who could understand English. Seymour and I made a solemn pact that if we didn’t start to make a living within six months of graduation we would both retreat to our respective beds, pull the sheets up over our heads, and never emerge again until the world ended.

Soon I met the harsh reality of the real world, where my incomparable gifts were not fully appreciated. In order to make a living, I condescended to

Looking Backward… From My Upside-Down Point of View

Woolfolk writes: “This is a recent photo of the senescent Four Musketeers. The combined years of our friendship total over 200 years. Reading from left to right: Reginald Ross, screenwriter of Twelve Angry Men and many others, also the producer and creator of the once-famous Defenders TV show on which I served as story editor and chief writer; myself; Miles Cahn, owner of Coach Leather, which he sold for 20 million dollars; and Seymour Reit, who created Casper the Friendly Ghost and wrote two bestselling novels. [Photo courtesy of Wm. Woolfolk.]

Graduation day came, and Seymour went to work for Fleischer Studios in Florida and became a real person with a real income. When he returned to New York he began to work for the Eisner and Iger studio. (Yes, that Will Eisner!) One day I saw Seymour’s work in a comic book and instantly called him up to denounce him for having sold out his talent. I then inquired how I could do the same. Seymour suggested I send some ideas to a comic book publisher named MLJ. I did, there was no reply, so I went down to their offices. MLJ publications were operating out of an unimpressive and nearly unfurnished loft space in lower Manhattan. They published pulp magazines and also several comic books about heroes called The Shield and Steel Sterling. Harry Shorten was the editor at MLJ. He was another NYU graduate. I found him to be a rather gruff, balding Neanderthal, and after I’d introduced myself he dug out my ideas from his forgetfile which he’d obviously never intended to look at again. Then he explained that my ideas were not what they were looking for. They wanted colorful new villains to confront their super-heroes. He suggested I go home and think of some. Having a real live editor in my clutches, I was in no mood to loosen my grasp. So I immediately improvised an idea about a villain called The Jingler, who left mocking notes behind at the scene of his crimes. A graybeard of an idea today, but comparatively fresh at the time. Shorten okayed it, I wrote it, they liked what I wrote, and a new career suddenly opened up for me. I came out from under my bed sheets.

Chapter Two Three weeks after I sold my first comic book story, an equally stupendous event occurred: Pearl Harbor was bombed, the United

States declared war on Japan, and World War II began. I assumed a new super-hero would be created: “Lieutenant Woolfolk in Tokyo!” I spent the majority of 1943 in the military before I was discharged because of an old injury. Meanwhile, I was writing about 40 pages a week of The Shield, The Wizard, The Hangman, and Steel Sterling adventures, plus a few short features, such as the Three Monkeyteers. I had become the leading writer at MLJ and got the choicest assignments. (Of course, their best comic book by far was Archie, written and drawn entirely by Bob Montana.) The name of the firm MLJ was an acronym for the three owners: Morris Coyne, the quiet treasurer; the ever-hyper Louis Silberkleit; and John Goldwater, who had the most contact with the editorial department. I liked John, partly because he was likable and mainly because he was a fan of my writing. Another in the editorial department I fondly remember was Scott Feldman, a quiet editorial assistant who admired my work. He later became a famous literary agent and novelist as Scott Meredith. Then there was Warren King, an artist who occasionally drew some of MLJ’s main features. He illustrated a story of mine that had to do with a phantom violinist or something of the sort; for the splash page I called for a symbolic battle between the hero and villain on a huge violin. One afternoon in MLJ’s office Warren King took me aside to tell me he had gone to Fawcett Publications looking for work and brought along my story as a sample. He said the editor unfortunately didn’t like his artwork but did like my story idea, so the editor asked Warren to inform me that Fawcett would be interested in having me as a writer. Thanks to Warren King (who went on to become the editorial cartoonist for the New York Daily News), I found my way to Captain Marvel. According to his 1985 interview in Dave Kraft’s Comic Book Interview, Woolfolk originated “The Black Hood”—who outlasted most other MLJ/Archie super-heroes, and even had his own radio show briefly. [©2000 Archie Publications; thanks to Michael T. Gilbert.]

The Seven Deadly Sins—

The Seven Deadly Sins of Comics Creators by C.C. Beck • Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck [EDITOR’S NOTE: FCA is proud to present another previously unpublished essay by C.C. Beck, the original chief artist of Captain Marvel. In the late 1980s, after Beck’s stint as editor of FCA (called during Beck’s tenure FCA/SOB—Some Opinionated Bastards) and prior to beginning his column “Crusty Curmudgeon” for The Comics Journal, Beck formed a roundtable discussion mailing group which included several friends, fans, and pros. The group was called The Critical Circle, and I was a regular member. Beck would frequently send out essays to us on various subjects (usually related to comic art) and we would reply with our comments. (This was years before Internet “chat rooms.”) More of these essays will appear in future issues of FCA.—P.C. Hamerlinck.] Theologians of the Middle Ages set up a list of seven deadly sins… the commitment of which, they said, would condemn their victims to eternal punishment in the hereafter. These sins were based on the discoveries of ancient pagan philosophers who had worked everything out hundreds or thousands of years before. In the world of literature and art, certain rules and principles have also been worked out over the past hundreds and thousands of years. While it is no sin to break one of these rules (they are not “laws”), those who disregard them or deliberately break them will suffer for their acts later—if not during their lifetimes, then in future ages when people will look back at their work and shudder as they condemn its perpetrators to oblivion. The seven deadly sins of writers and artists, especially those involved in the creation of comic books, are as follows.

Sin Number One: Not Staying within the Limits of the Medium Comic pictures are basically line art with color added. They are small, framed with panel outlines, and are presented in sequence. Each picture should not be complete in itself but should be only a part of the whole presentation. Comic drawings are printed; they are more like woodcuts and etchings than like paintings and murals. The artists who prepare the drawings should be aware of the limitations of printing. Art prepared with too much fine detail, too many gradations of tone

Left: C.C. Beck—a 1980 self-caricature—juxtaposed with a different seven deadly sins, above, from Captain Marvel Adventures #100, 1949, with artwork by Beck and Pete Costanza. [Caricature ©2000 Estate of C.C. Beck; CMA panel ©2000 DC Comics.]

and color, and with too much shading and technique will not reproduce properly. Comic pictures are small, only a few inches wide and high. They are viewed at a distance of a foot or so; readers will not back off to look at them as they might have to when viewing a large painting or a mural, and they will not examine them with a magnifying glass as they might when looking at a bit of jewelry or a miniature painting on a snuff box. The drawings should be simplified and easily understandable, as the reader will only glance at them out of the corner of his eye while reading the story they illustrate. As comic pictures are each only a part of a sequence of pictures, they should be separated from each other by being enclosed in panel outlines. Artists who use too many vignettes, too many montages, or who make their pictures of different sizes and shapes, are straying outside the limits of the medium and will lose their audiences (comic readers) without gaining other audiences (gallery goers, fine art collectors, readers of other kinds of printed material).

Sin Number Two: Revealing Presence of the Creators Comic stories are like plays. The actors in the panels should face each other, fight each other, and at all times stay within their panel outlines. Artists who show people bursting out of their

Beck’s “Billy Batson and Captain Marvel were drawn in cartoon-comic style because they appeared in comic books. They were never intended to be taken seriously, and for that reason were not drawn realistically (by me).” [Art ©2000 C.C. Beck Estate; Billy Batson and Captain Marvel ©2000 DC Comics.]