Alter Ego #102 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Roy Thomas’ Mean & Green Comics Fanzine

GREEN GROW THE LANTERNS NODELL, KANE, & THE CREATION OF A LEGEND—TIMES TWO!

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No.102 June 2011

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Edited by ROY THOMAS The greatest ‘zine of the 1960s is back, ALL-NEW, and focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, and more!

2011 EISNER AWARD Nominee Best Comics-Related Journalism

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ALTER EGO #90

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DIEDGITIIOTANSL BL AVAILA

ALTER EGO #87

ALTER EGO #88

The sensational 1954-1963 saga of Great Britain’s MARVELMAN (decades before he metamorphosed into Miracleman), plus an interview with writer/artist/co-creator MICK ANGLO, and rare Marvelman/ Miracleman work by ALAN DAVIS, ALAN MOORE, a new RICK VEITCH cover, plus FRANK BOLLE, Part 2, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

First-ever in-depth look at National/DC’s founder MAJOR MALCOLM WHEELERNICHOLSON, and early editors WHITNEY ELLSWORTH, VIN SULLIVAN, and MORT WEISINGER, with rare art and artifacts by SIEGEL & SHUSTER, BOB KANE, CREIG FLESSEL, FRED GUARDINEER, GARDNER FOX, SHELDON MOLDOFF, and others, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

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ALTER EGO #92

ALTER EGO #93

ALTER EGO #89

HARVEY COMICS’ PRE-CODE HORROR MAGS OF THE 1950s! Interviews with SID JACOBSON, WARREN KREMER, and HOWARD NOSTRAND, plus Harvey artist KEN SELIG talks to JIM AMASH! MR. MONSTER presents the wit and wisdom (and worse) of DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM, plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) with C.C. BECK & MARC SWAYZE, & more! SIMON & KIRBY and NOSTRAND cover! (100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #94

BIG MARVEL ISSUE! Salutes to legends SINNOTT and AYERS—plus STAN LEE, TUSKA, EVERETT, MARTIN GOODMAN, and others! A look at the “Marvel SuperHeroes” TV animation of 1966! 1940s Timely writer and editor LEON LAZARUS interviewed by JIM AMASH! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, the 1960s fandom creations of STEVE GERBER, and more! JACK KIRBY holiday cover!

FAWCETT FESTIVAL! Big FCA section with Golden Age artists MARC SWAYZE & EMILIO SQUEGLIO, and interviews with the FAWCETT FAMILY! Plus Part II of “The MAD Four-Color Wannabes of the 1950s,” more on DR. LAURETTA BENDER and the teenage creations of STEVE GERBER, artist JACK KATZ spills Golden Age secrets to JIM AMASH, and more! New cover by ORDWAY and SQUEGLIO!

SWORD-AND-SORCERY, PART 3! DC’s Sword of Sorcery by O’NEIL, CHAYKIN, & SIMONSON and Claw by MICHELINIE & CHAN, Hercules by GLANZMAN, Dagar by GLUT & SANTOS, Marvel S&S art by BUSCEMA, KANE, KAYANAN, WRIGHTSON, et al., and JACK KATZ on his classic First Kingdom! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, STEVE GERBER’s fan-creations (part 3), and more! Cover by RAFAEL KAYANAN!

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “EarthTwo—1961 to 1985!” with rare art by INFANTINO, GIL KANE, ANDERSON, DELBO, ANDRU, BUCKLER, APARO, GRANDENETTI, and DILLIN, interview with Golden/Silver Age DC editor GEORGE KASHDAN, plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, STEVE GERBER, FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), and a new cover by INFANTINO and AMASH!

“Earth-Two Companion, Part II!” More on the 1963- 1985 series that changed comics forever! The Huntress, Power Girl, Dr. Fate, Freedom Fighters, and more, with art by ADAMS, APARO, AYERS, BUCKLER, GIFFEN, INFANTINO, KANE, NOVICK, SCHAFFENBERGER, SIMONSON, STATON, SWAN, TUSKA, our GEORGE KASHDAN interview Part 2, FCA, and more! STATON & GIORDANO cover!

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ALTER EGO #95

Marvel’s NOT BRAND ECHH madcap parody mag from 1967-69, examined with rare art & artifacts by ANDRU, COLAN, BUSCEMA, DRAKE, EVERETT, FRIEDRICH, KIRBY, LEE, JOHN and MARIE SEVERIN, SPRINGER, SUTTON, THOMAS, TRIMPE, and more, GEORGE KASHDAN interview conclusion, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, and more! Cover by MARIE SEVERIN! (84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #96

Focus on Archie’s 1960s MIGHTY CRUSADERS, with vintage art and artifacts by JERRY SIEGEL, PAUL REINMAN, SIMON & KIRBY, JOHN ROSENBERGER, tributes to the Crusaders by BOB FUJITANE, GEORGE TUSKA, BOB LAYTON, and others! Plus an interview with MELL LAZARUS, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, and more! Cover by MIKE MACHLAN! (84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #97

ALTER EGO #98

ALTER EGO #99

The non-EC Horror Comics of the 1950s! From Menace and House of Mystery to The Thing!, we present vintage art and artifacts by EVERETT, BRIEFER, DITKO, MANEELY, COLAN , MESKIN, MOLDOFF, HEATH, POWELL, COLE, SIMON & KIRBY, FUJITANI, and others, plus FCA , MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, and more, behind a creepy, eerie cover by BILL EVERETT!

Spotlight on Superman’s first editor WHITNEY ELLSWORTH, longtime Krypto-editor MORT WEISINGER remembered by his daughter, an interview with Superman writer ALVIN SCHWARTZ, art by JOE SHUSTER, WAYNE BORING, CURT SWAN, AL PLASTINO, and NEAL ADAMS, plus MR. MONSTER, FCA (FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA), and a new cover by JERRY ORDWAY!

GEORGE TUSKA showcase issue on his career at Lev Gleason, Marvel, and in comics strips through the early 1970s—CRIME DOES NOT PAY, BUCK ROGERS, IRON MAN, AVENGERS, HERO FOR HIRE, and more! Interview with 1950s Timely/Marvel editor AL SULMAN (“personal associate of STAN LEE!”), MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), and more!

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Vol. 3, No. 102 / June 2011 Editor Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck

Comic Crypt Editor Michael T. Gilbert

Editorial Honor Roll Jerry G. Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White Mike Friedrich

NOW WITH 16 PAG ES OF COLOR!

Proofreader Rob Smentek

Cover Artists Mart Nodell, Gil Kane, & Terry Austin

Cover Colorists Mart Nodell & Tom Ziuko

With Special Thanks to: Heidi Amash Henry Andrews Finn Andreen Ger Apeldoorn Terry Austin Bob Bailey Mike W. Barr Jim Beard John Benson Jared Bond Dominic Bongo Wendy Gaines Bucci Mike Burkey Glen Cadigan Mike Catron Shaun Clancy Richard Corben Chet Cox Simon Deitch Leonardo De Sá Don Markstein’s Toonopedia Michael Dunne Eda Edwards Mark Evanier Michael Feldman Jules Feiffer Shane Foley Nancy Ford Rudi Franke Todd Franklin Stephan Friedt Janet Gilbert Frank Giella Joe Giella Scott Goodell Grand Comics Database Gordon Green Larry P. Guidry George Hagenauer David Hajdu Jennifer Hamerlicnk Heritage Comics Orlan Hill

Bob Hughes Sean Howe Betty Tokar Jankovich Robert Kennedy David Anthony Kraft R. Gary Land Jim Ludwig Monroe Mayer Jack Mendelsohn Raymond Miller Ken Moldoff Shelly Moldoff Lynn Montana Brian K. Morris Frank Motler Will Murray Jacque Nodell Spencer Nodell Jake Oster Jennifer Pederson John G. Pierce Gene Reed Bob Rozakis Rich Rubenfeld Randy Sargent John Schwirian Darci Sharver Jay Slowineski Andy Smith David Sorochty Marc Svensson Desha Swayze Marc Swayze Barbara Lucey Tancredi Dann Thomas Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Dr. Michael J. Vassallo Lynn Walker Hames Ware Douglas WheelerNicholson Nicky WheelerNicholson & Jason Brown

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Mart & Carrie Nodell, Vic Dowd, & Jerry Grandenetti

Contents Writer/Editorial – “Caught In The Creative Act” . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Eternal Green Lantern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Will Murray’s overview of the Emerald Gladiators of two comic book Ages.

“Marty Created ‘The Green Lantern’!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Mart & Carrie Nodell interviewed about GL and other wonders by Shel Dorf.

“Life’s Not Over Yet!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Jack Mendelsohn on his comics and animation work (part 2), with Jim Amash.

Bob & Betty—& Archie & Betty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 An interview with the woman who probably inspired Betty Cooper—conducted by Shaun Clancy.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! — “The Missing Letterer!” Part 2 . . 51 Michael T. Gilbert tells how he and wife Janet tracked down Spirit letterer Abe Kanegson.

The Secret History Of All-American Comics, Inc. . . . . . . . . . 57 Bob Rozakis with the “Earth-22” story of the end of All-Star Comics.

Comic Fandom Archive: The Rudi Franke Interview—Part II. . 61 More scintillating talk with one of fandom’s finest earliest fan-artists.

Tributes To Jerry Grandenetti & Vic Dowd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 69 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #161 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 P.C. Hamerlinck presents Marc Swayze and the Golden Age giant All-Hero Comics! On Our Cover: For years, we’d wanted to find just the right Mart Nodell image of Green Lantern to run on a front cover of Alter Ego, and Dominic Bongo finally found it for us in the Heritage Comics Archives, bless ’em both! And for the Gil Kane half of the “two GLs” equation, Dom found one of the best Kane-GL pencil figures Ye Editor has seen, which we had inked by embellishing great Terry Austin. (You can see Gil’s unadorned original on p. 8.) All that, plus a marvelous background montage which layout man Chris Day assembled from published and unpublished art by the likes of Nodell and Kane, as well as Irwin Hasen, Carmine Infantino, Paul Reinman, Neal Adams, Mike Sekowsky, & Dick Dillin. Above: For the cover of the 1980 small-size reprint comic DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #4 (the title was almost bigger than the book itself!), Dick Giordano drew this classic pose of the two Green Lanterns who really matter. Thanks to Michael Dunne for a scan of the original art. Especially colored for A/E by Randy Sargent. [©2011 DC Comics.] Alter EgoTM is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: 32 Bluebird Trail, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Eight-issue subscriptions: $60 US, $85 Canada, $107 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. ISSN: 1932-6890 FIRST PRINTING.

writer/editorial

“Caught in The Creative Act”

he above phrasing is the name of a popular course taught at the University of South Carolina by novelist Janette Turner Hospital. But the temptation to apply it to this issue’s central theme of the original Green Lantern and his Silver Age revival doppelgänger was well nigh irresistible. For, as these words are written in April, the busiest year yet of superhero movies is hard upon us, with The Green Hornet already a fleeting memory, and with Thor and Captain America and Green Lantern queued up at the starting gate. I’ll let others ponder what this potential glut may say about the final triumph of the graphic art form and/or the ultimate decline of Western culture. I’m more concerned about credits. Comic book writers and artists have fought hard, and justifiably so, for recognition of their contributions to key characters. I can recall the thrill I felt, more than three decades ago, when I saw the full-screen credit for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster projected on a big screen in Hollywood (actually, Westwood, near UCLA) at the opening of the 1979 Superman movie—and much of the audience erupted in applause. Clearly, the message had gotten through, and to more than just die-hard comics fans, that the men who had conceived the Man of Steel deserved as much credit as Christopher Reeve or Richard Donner or, heaven help us, the Salkinds. This joy was tempered, a few years later, by the Batman movie’s solo credit for artist Bob Kane, who, despite his undeniable contribution to the Dark Knight, spent much of his life seeing to it that writer/co-creator Bill Finger was denied his rightful share of creative credit (and money). But at least, in those two cases, the situations were relatively uncomplicated. Few would add other names to the list of creators of Superman and Batman. Green Lantern, however, is a different kettle of fish. There can be little doubt that the late Mart Nodell came up with “Green Lantern” on his own, in sample pages drawn (and written) for AA editor Sheldon Mayer in 1940. Yet, the first published story had been so

substantially reworked and added to by scripter Bill Finger that the latter, in many minds, deserves co-creator status. (Mayer acted primarily as a keeneyed facilitator, though a case could be made for him, as well.) Things get truly complicated, though, when one turns to the Silver Age GL. I strongly suspect that, when the comic book credit flashes on the screen at the premiere of the Green Lantern movie, it will read: “Created by John Broome and Gil Kane.” And certainly those two gents deserve to have their names up there. I would argue, however, that, if justice were the ultimate aim, at least five names should be up there on the screen: One would be that of editor Julius Schwartz, because it was he who, on the heels of the success of the revived Flash, pushed for a reinterpretation of Green Lantern. Resuscitating the Emerald Gladiator was almost certainly his idea, not Broome’s or Kane’s. Also, I contend, the 1959-60 Green Lantern was, for all its original touches, basically just a retooling of an idea already previously created— in 1940—by Mart Nodell and Bill Finger. If “truth in advertising” were to prevail, the film credit would read: “Created by Mart Nodell, Bill Finger, Julius Schwartz, John Broome, and Gil Kane”—reflecting the order in which each man made his seminal contribution to the concept. But Hollywood—and the general public—prefer simple explanations. They want to believe that one person creates each work of art—at most, two. Hence the ludicrousness of the over-reaching “auteur” theory in film, as if the sole “creator” of each movie was the director. (My own possessory credit on this very magazine, of course, could be heralded as yet another example.) At most, a pair of names can be applauded as creators: Rodgers & Hammerstein, Gilbert & Sullivan, Gervais & Merchant. And they’re not too sure about that last one. But—five? Horrors! Next thing you know, comic books—even, Crom forbid, movies—might actually be looked on as a collaborative medium! Bestest,

COMING IN JULY

103

THE DAWN OF STEVE ENGLEHART! The Early Years—1971-75 • Writer STEVE ENGLEHART talks about his first half-decade in comics—with art by SAL BUSCEMA • NEAL ADAMS • BOB BROWN • JIM STARLIN • TOM SUTTON • DON HECK, et al.! (This interview will be completed in Back Issue! #51!) • JIM AMASH interviews 1940s artist GEORGE MANDEL about Blue Bolt, The Woman in Red, The Angel, The Patriot, Black Marvel, Dr. Strange (yes!), and other Golden Age goodies—and about being a best-selling novelist in the 1950s! • FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) with MARC SWAYZE & the (slightly delayed) Captain Marvel/Thor connection—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on ABE KANEGSON, Part 3— BILL SCHELLY presents tributes to ED LAHMANN & JOE VUCENIC—& MORE! Edited by ROY THOMAS rs, Inc. Art ©2011 Marvel Characte

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The Eternal Green Lantern An Overview Of The Emerald Gladiators Of Two Comic Book Ages by Will Murray

I. The Golden Age Green Lantern

he star-spanning exploits of Green Lantern began with a modest set of sketches that came close to being rejected.

Martin Nodell was the artist. He submitted drawings of a new hero he dubbed The Green Lantern to All-American Comics, Inc., editor Sheldon Mayer in 1940. He reported that the idea came to him on the subway ride home from Mayer’s New York offices after their first meeting. “While I was waiting around 34th Street, I noticed the train man inspecting his tracks and waving a red lantern,” Nodell remembered to Comics Scene magazine. “When he OKed the tracks, he got behind the pillar and waved a green lantern, and the train rushed in. I thought, ‘That’s interesting. A green lantern. I don’t know what it means or what I’m going to do,’ but I hoped to get something out of it. I put down the words ‘green lantern,’ and thought, ‘There have been ‘Super-man’ stories and ‘Bat-man’ stories. Maybe it won’t be ‘Green-man.’ Maybe I should change it completely. How about using it as a power source?” Weaving elements out of Chinese mythology and a meteorite strike, then designing a super-hero costume inspired by Greek theatre mixed with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as The Black Pirate from his 1926 film of that name, Nodell arrived at an opening situation. As he related to Kim Howard Johnson: “At first, I thought of seeking an honest man with the lantern, but it didn’t quite work. I was interested in Wagnerian operas, so the Ring Cycle made me think of rings. I felt I could do something with the ring, maybe have the lantern activate a ring. I wrote it up, along with a few drawings. In those days, you pencilled, inked, and lettered a job. I drew up the figure and the completed pages, a concept sheet, and my philosophy of it all.” When he took his concept sketch back to Mayer, the young editor was doubtful. Mayer recounted the genesis to Ron Goulart in Comics: The Golden Age: “Nodell’s drawing was crude. What he did have, crude as he was apt to be in his drawing, was an effective first page. He had taken the lead from the Superman motif and applied the Aladdin formula to that. I don’t know if he included the ring, but he did have the hero with the magic lantern. I didn’t want to take that. I thought, what the hell, this is the direction we’re already going in, and Nodell didn’t seem good enough to handle the feature. And yet he had walked in with the idea. I wasn’t going to use Green Lantern and do it with somebody else. So Bill Finger and I fleshed out the concept….” “Batman”’s Bill Finger was one of the hottest comic scripters of that time. He has been credited as an equal in the creation of “Green Lantern,” but Nodell never saw it that way.

Going For The Green This commissioned drawing of the Golden and Silver Age Green Lanterns was done a couple of years back by Andy Smith, known for his work on Crossgen’s The First, DC’s Green Lantern, et al.; it has been colored especially for Alter Ego by Randy Sargent. Thanks to dealer Anthony Snyder (see ad on p. 68) for providing us with a copy of this art—and to Andy himself for then sending us a hi-res scan, as well as for his permission to print it. [Green Lanterns TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

“After I had done three pages—which they used, along with a few other pages that I worked on, as the introduction—they brought in a writer,” Nodell told Comics Scene. “I didn’t know one writer from another. They brought in Bill Finger, who had been doing ‘Batman’ with Bob Kane. He was the first writer with me on it. Apparently, DC, in claiming him to be co-creator, had something else in mind—I don’t know. They have me down as co-creator, but what I gave them was the beginning of ‘Green Lantern.’” Finger recalled his input for the Steranko History of Comics: “We needed a name for his alter ego, so naturally I thought of Aladdin and his magic lamp. I suggested the name Alan Ladd and Shelly said, ‘That’s ridiculous. Who’d believe that?’ So we substituted the name Alan Scott. A little while later Alan Ladd turned up as a movie star. Shelly could have kicked himself every time he thought of the publicity we might have had.” The origin story was steeped in quasi-scientific mysticism. Construction engineer Scott pulls a weirdly-glowing green signalman’s lantern from a train wreck—and it speaks to him! Fashioned from a green meteor, it had already been remade many times. Forging a ring from the

An Overview Of The Emerald Gladiators Of Two Comic Book Ages

something because of the extra power from the lantern that came from a meteor thousands of years ago. He would wish himself, or think himself, to fly or go through a wall, as long as the ring was activated. Bill would write great stories around that.” Gradually, that power was mutated—until soon GL was using his ring to form shapes of anything he could think of, such as giant hands or walls or hammers. But always subject to that wooden weakness. lantern’s metal, Scott obeys the voice and becomes The Green Lantern. Working as a radio announcer, Scott operated out of Gotham City—a Bill Finger touch, without question. The new hero’s costume— undoubtedly one of the most garish of the Golden Age—was modified before publication. “About the only thing that Mayer changed was, believe it or not, to make the costume a little more elaborate, and have a little more color!” Nodell explained to Comics Scene. “I don’t remember whether he added purple to the cape. But he did do something like that. And that was the beginning.” Mayer also decided to give GL an Achilles’ heel: the ring would not work against anything made of common wood.

In The Beginning… Photos of young “GL” artist Mart Nodell (top left) and writer Bill Finger (bottom left), fuzzy as they were, appeared in Green Lantern #1 (Fall 1941)—while Sheldon Mayer (right, from a 1976 issue of The Amazing World of DC Comics) was the editor who helped shape the package. Only in the past few years has one of the trio of “Green Lantern” sample pages written and drawn by Nodell turned up and been viewed on the Internet; thanks to Michael Feldman. More about that landmark art and about Marty Nodell on pp. 15-30. For the published version of GL’s origin in All-American Comics #16 (July 1940), see the hardcover Golden Age Green Lantern Archives, Vol. 1 (1999). Thanks to Marc Svensson, Jim Ludwig, and Gordon Green for sending as good copies as we’re ever likely to get of the Nodell and Finger pics! [Nodell & Finger photos ©2011 DC Comics; Green Lantern TM & ©2011 DC Comics; sample page (never published by DC or showing GL) ©2011 the respective copyright holders.] Various differences from not only the art but even the Finger-shaped story in the published version are apparent on this try-out page. The young man who will soon become The Green Lantern is not blond “Alan Scott” but dark-haired “Willard Mason, professor at Pueblo University”—while the magic lantern comes to him while he sleeps. The train crash that figures so prominently in the published origin here occurs in Scotland, nor is the future GL involved in it…but it gave Nodell a chance to utilize the “green-lantern-as-railroad-signal” image that, as he always related, inspired the hero’s name and motif. And wouldn’t we all dearly love to see those other two, still-missing sample pages!

The Green Lantern debuted in All-American Comics #16 (July 1940). Within months, he joined the Justice Society of America in their inaugural adventure in All-Star Comics #3 (Winter 1940). The following year, the magical name was blazing across the cover of his own comic book.

Nodell—who initially signed the strip “Mart Dellon”—found Finger an enjoyable collaborator. They often worked out story ideas by phone, after which Finger produced a full script. “I had thought of the character and his stories as being fantasy,” he explained to Comics Scene. “By Green Lantern’s thinking, he could do

Both Nodell and Finger fell away from their creation after six or seven years. In 1944, Sheldon Mayer hired Julius Schwartz, who as the head of the Solar Sales Service literary agency represented sciencefiction writer Alfred Bester, as editor. Bester was then scripting “Green Lantern” for Mayer. Bester credited Finger with teaching him the craft of comic book scripting. As he told Guy Lillian III: “Bill took me in hand and said, ‘I’m going to teach you how to write comic books.’ He paced up and down in an office with the rain beating against the panes telling me—and I absorbed every word—about comic books and comic book writing. I still regard that as a high point in the generosity of one colleague to another.” Bester created the final version of the famous Green

Lantern oath, which went: “In brightest day, in blackest night, No evil shall escape my sight! Let those who worship evil’s might Beware my power—Green Lantern’s light!” “When Shelly gave me complete control,” Bester later admitted to Comics Interview, “I dumped it. I dumped Doiby Dickles… with that cockamanie derby hat, driving his cockamamie cab.” Dickles was a comic-

The Eternal Green Lantern

“[Kuttner] wrote it [‘Green Lantern’] for about a year,” Schwartz recalled in Amazing World of DC Comics. “He loved every minute of it. His wife, C.L. Moore [also a fantasy and sf writer], was wild about Doiby Dickles.” After a year, Kuttner left. Schwartz asked Dave Vern, but in declining Vern recommended his friend, pulp writer John Broome. “I worked on a kind of philosophy of comics,” Broome admitted in “POV Online.” “I said that ‘The essential of comics is a gimmick that works!’ And Shelly Mayer, who was my editor before Julie… said he never came across a writer who, when he hit it—that is, when the gimmick was operating—hit it as hard as I did. I would work up a kind of a curve of an idea. It would start off low and finally, all of a sudden — POW! That’s what I prided myself on when writing the story.”

Good, Better, Bester A young Alfred Bester eyes the first encounter of Green Lantern and Solomon Grundy, as he scripted it and Paul Reinman drew it in All-American Comics #61 (Oct. 1944). Bester went on to become one of the most respected science-fiction writers in the history of the field—which he eventually left to scribe for such venues as Holiday magazine. Incidentally, the “GL” page is reproduced from Ye Ed’s copy of the actual comic, not from a reprinting. [©2011 DC Comics.]

relief sidekick introduced by Finger in 1941. Among Bester’s most enduring contributions was the creation of the monstrous Solomon Grundy, who came about in 1944 as the result of an emergency phone call from Sheldon Mayer. As Bester related to Comics Interview: “He called me and said, ‘Alf, we’re thirteen pages short for the so-and-so issue, and I’ve got to get a script to the artist by tomorrow morning. For God’s sake, can you come up with something?’ And I went home… and sat and thought. Actually, do you know what the inspiration for it is? It was a story by Ted Sturgeon called ‘It.’” When Bester moved on, Schwartz asked another sf legend, Henry Kuttner, to take over. At first Kuttner refused. But his wife prevailed on him to reconsider.

A Doiby Is Also A Hat—In Brooklyn Above left, a young Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore, who after their marriage would usually write together under a series of pseudonyms, have reason to gaze at this 1992 re-creation by second regular “GL” artist Irwin Hasen of the latter’s cover for All-American Comics #46 (Jan. 1943). After all, it was reportedly Moore’s affection for GL’s sidekick Doiby Dickles, whom Hasen designed (based, Hasen reports, on character actor Edward Brophy), that led her to convince Kuttner to take the “Green Lantern” assignment! So said, at least, Kuttner’s one-time science-fiction agent Julius Schwartz, who in early 1944 became story editor of the All-American line. [Green Lantern & Doiby Dickles TM & ©2011 DC Comics.] At left, Irwin Hasen (seen on far right in photo) shares a moment at a recent event at New York City’s MoCCA (the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) with late-’60s Green Lantern/Green Arrow artist Neal Adams (center) and early “Batman” artist Jerry Robinson, who never drew the Emerald Gladiator—but should have!

An Overview Of The Emerald Gladiators Of Two Comic Book Ages

“No Evil Shall Escape My Sight” “Green Lantern” original Silver Age editor Julius Schwartz and writer/co-creator John Broome (in sweater) at top right—and a photo of artist/co-creator Gil Kane (below)—juxtaposed with a 1/3-page DC house ad for Showcase #22 (Sept.-Oct. 1959), the issue that introduced the Silver Age GL to a fandom that was ready and eager for new super-heroes—and a full-page ad for Showcase #23 (Nov.Dec. ’59). Pencils by Gil Kane; we used the ads because the covers themselves have been reprinted so often. As Ye Editor opined in this issue’s writer/editorial, in a very real sense Julie was every bit as much a creator of the second GL as were Broome and Kane—and so, in a logical sense, were Mart Nodell and Bill Finger, and arguably even Shelly Mayer. They were six of the greats! The photo of Schwartz and Broome at the 1998 San Diego Comic-Con is from the Julius Schwartz Collection, with thanks to Bob Greenberger; the Kane photo was taken at the 1976 “Seuling-con” in New York City, and was retrieved from the “Great American Comic Book Stories” website. Thanks to Bob Bailey for the scans of the ads; he says that, despite his considerable collection of Silver Age DC comics, he’s never run across an ad for the third “GL” tryout, Showcase #24. And Ye Editor recalls buying #22 one night in 1959 before he ever saw an ad for it. [Ad ©2011 DC Comics.] Since so many comics starring the Silver Age Green Lantern are available in the hardcover Green Lantern Archives and trade paperback Showcase Presents volumes and/or elsewhere, we’ve printed few actual pages from that incarnation in this issue. [Ads ©2011 DC Comics.]

The feature continued until 1949, when Green Lantern was canceled. His one-story-per-issue series in All-American and the omnibus Comic Cavalcade had ended in 1948. The character continued as one of the Justice Society, until it too expired in late 1950. All that is by way of prologue. A solid decade passed during which Earth had no Green Lantern.

II. The Silver Age Green Lantern Just as the Golden Age Flash in Flash Comics had preceded GL’s debut in the pages of All-American Comics, he blazed the trail for a new incarnation of the Emerald Gladiator. Around the turn of 1956, editor Julie Schwartz was tasked to bring back “The Flash” in a tryout title called Showcase. “We decided not to revive the old Flash from the ’40s but to modernize him,” Schwartz explained in The Amazing World of DC Comics. “We got the idea of a new origin, a new costume… a hero who got his inspiration, strangely enough, from reading an old Flash comic!” After a quartet of Showcase appearances, the dormant Flash comic book was resuscitated. It continued to sell, opening the curtain on a super-hero revival that today is called the Silver Age of Comics.

“When the returns started coming in on The Flash and we saw that we had a hit, the natural instinct was to do something similar,” Schwartz related in Comics Interview. “That’s how we decided to go ahead with ‘Green Lantern,’ and I worked out the same theory of giving him a new personality, a new costume, a new everything. I have a theory that, when you revive a hero, you can base it on the original but go off on a different track. We decided to come up with a new type of Green Lantern, where he could expand his activities. With John Broome, I worked out the idea of a whole universe full of Green Lanterns.” For Schwartz, selecting a second hero to revitalize was not a difficult decision. “Well, I always liked Green Lantern,” he admitted to Les Daniels. “I decided to use more of a science-fiction angle.” Nor was John Broome an illogical choice. They had grown close in the intervening decade. Besides, Schwartz’s other star writer, Gardner Fox,

The Eternal Green Lantern

was busy with “Adam Strange” and other science-fiction features. Gil Kane was chosen to design the 1959 incarnation and draw his adventures. A lesser artist back in the Golden Age, he had begun to develop a distinctive style of his own, toiling for Schwartz’s sf and Western titles. The latter were now being phased out, and Kane was hungry for a regular feature of his own. “By the end of the ’50s,” he told Jon B. Cooke, “everything began to collapse and, little by little, I lost all of my work. I lost Rex the Wonder Dog and all the Westerns. I lost everything and had nothing going. I would occasionally get a science-fiction story from Julie. I went over to Western/Gold Key and worked with Russ Heath as a partner for a while; I penciled and he inked. So I picked up work wherever I could. ‘Green Lantern’ filled in a lot, but not completely; it was every six weeks and not a monthly book.”

Man of Two Worlds. “John and I didn’t have much of an idea about who the Guardians really were, and we basically took their names from an old ‘Captain Comet’ story that John had previously scripted (Strange Adventures #22, “The Guardians of the Clockwork Universe”). Putting our heads together for an alien switch, we decided that all of the Guardians should look alike, because basically in comics all aliens look alike. Gil Kane then based their general appearance on the prime minister of Israel at the time, David Ben-Gurion.” Behind a cover inked as well as penciled by Kane, Showcase #22 (Nov.Dec. 1959) led off with the tale called “SOS Green Lantern!” Test pilot Hal Jordan finds himself whisked into the desert where a spaceship has crashlanded. At the controls lies dying the scarlet-skinned Abin Sur, a Green Lantern. With his last words, he tells Jordan that his power battery has chosen him as a worthy successor. Bequeathing it, a power ring that must be recharged every 24 hours, and his black-and-emerald uniform, Abin Sur expires.

The new character was already developed when Kane came on board. “Julie and John Broome figured out the essential qualities for the character, and I figured out a costume for him, and so on,” Kane recalled in Les Daniels’ DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. “I started to use the lines of the body as a basis for the costume, not just putting on a pair of tights and an initial on the chest.” Just as Carmine Infantino had designed a streamlined modern outfit for the new Flash, Kane threw out everything that had made the Golden Age Green Lantern so recognizable—except his mask and power ring. Kane dispensed with all extraneous details, even a belt, which he felt would break up the lines of the uniform. Editor Schwartz thought a cape would be a good touch, but Kane saw it otherwise. “What I did with Green Lantern’s uniform,” Kane explained in Comics Scene Spectacular, “was to make it an hourglass shape that started at the point of the shoulders and worked to a very narrow point at mid-chest and went out again at the waistline. I was trying for a balance between power and lyricism. A cape would have gotten in the way of the figure.” Kane won that round. As he explained in his introduction to the hardcover Green Lantern Archives, Vol. 1, he had loaded the dice in his favor. “I went to work on the look of the character while the script was being written. Julie had given me some rough indications of what he wanted and, coupled with some ideas I’d had, the drawing began to develop. I submitted them to Julie, taking care to color the one I favored. That was the one he chose.” But Kane lost another battle. His color concept sketch called for a green-and-blue motif. “I wanted green the way the way they have it,” he revealed to Mark Voger, “but I wanted blue in the black portion, not grey. They insisted on using grey or light purple on the theory that, if they withheld the blue, it gave them the option to use blue as a background color. Which is ridiculous, because Superman, God knows, has blue, red, and yellow in his costume. He has all the primaries. And somehow or other, they managed to find colors use as background for him.” The result was Space Age sleek. “That lyrical look sort of caught on, before super-heroes started bristling with weaponry and all sorts of mechanization,” Kane told Les Daniels. For the man under the green mask, Kane drew from life. His former next door neighbor had once been actor Paul Newman, then emerging as a hot Hollywood star in films such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Exodus. Newman’s face became the model for the new hero’s unmasked countenance. According to Schwartz, it was a complete overhaul. “On Green Lantern we moved his ring hand from the left to the right, changed his point of vulnerability, and eventually added an oversight committee of the cosmos called ‘the Guardians of the Universe,’” he recounted his in autobiography,

Strange—But True! DC’s original “Guardians of the Universe,” who looked totally different from the later Green Lantern version, first appeared in the “Captain Comet” tale in Strange Adventures #22 (July 1952)—a coincidence of sorts, since the second GL, though not his Guardians, made his debut in the 22nd issue of another DC comic, Showcase. Captain Comet was a science-fictional superhero who’d premiered just as All-Star Comics, last bastion for the Golden Age Green Lantern and his JSA comrades, was fading away in 1951. Script by John Broome; art by Murphy Anderson. For GL’s Guardians of the Universe, see the art spots on pp. 11 & 14. Repro’d from the 1980 Fireside trade paperback Mysteries in Space (which added a GL-related footnote), edited by Michael Uslan, who’s gone on to produce a few Batman movies since. [©2011 DC Comics.]

An Overview Of The Emerald Gladiators Of Two Comic Book Ages

Donning the outfit and adding a mask, Hal Jordan becomes the new Green Lantern. Subject only to his will, his power ring enables him to fly, shoot powerful beams of energy, and perform virtually any wonder he can imagine. The only flaw is that it cannot act upon anything that is yellow. (Schwartz chose yellow as this new GL’s weakness because, he said, it was the color of fear. As a test pilot, Hal Jordan was supposed to be fearless.) In his first mission, Green Lantern has to defeat a conveniently yellow missile and deal with his girlfriend (and employer) Carol Ferris, the new head of Ferris Aircraft. Since Carol has fallen in love with Green Lantern, the missile proves far easier to handle! In the next issue, GL was up against an alien yellow pterodactyl. Pretty quickly, Schwartz and Broome had to brainstorm less obvious challenges, lest they fall into an easy golden rut. And so they did. History again repeated itself. Within months of the new updated Green Lantern’s debut, the Emerald Gladiator became a founding member of the reconstituted Justice League of America, along with the new version of the original GL’s compatriot, The Flash. Joining Schwarz and Broome was another Golden Age “Green Lantern” veteran, Joe Giella, who had inked the character in various solo stories and over the pencils of Irwin Hasen in a 1950 “Justice Society” chapter.

You’ve Seen “After”! Now Here’s “Before”! Gil Kane’s beautifully rendered original pencil drawing of Green Lantern that, as inked by Terry Austin, became an integral part of this issue’s cover. Retrieved from the Heritage Comics Archives by Dominic Bongo. [Green Lantern TM & ©2010 DC Comics.]

“I enjoyed working with Gil Kane,” Giella told Alter Ego. “He was penciling the Green Lantern at the time the changes were made. When we were at DC getting our work, the editors made sure we were aware that the costumes had changed; they really emphasized this to us.” On the other hand, Kane was not as happy. “I was not allowed to ink Green Lantern,” he told Comic Book Marketplace. “They only let me ink the stuff that wasn’t making a lot of money…. Julie Schwartz just didn’t like my inking. He preferred slick inking by guys like Joe Giella, Bernie Sachs, and Frank Giacoia. I wasn’t as crazy about Joe’s inking as Julie was…. I thought there was a certain loss of the pencils…. I always felt my stuff was changed drastically by Joe Giella.” In the inking stage, the subliminal hourglass costume design meant to symbolize the ring’s limited 24-hour charge was lost. “[T]he inkers didn’t understand how I was accenting the costume with a kind of diamond shape, and they always made it look like a sleeveless sweater, which annoyed me no end,” Kane complained to Comics Scene Spectacular. After three-in-a-row Showcase appearances, the first issue of Green Lantern bore a July-Aug. 1960 cover date. Unlike in The Flash, the old numbering from the 1940s issues was not continued. In fact, that issue lacked any number at all on its cover, because assistant publisher Irwin Donenfeld felt that the solitary digit was a sales impediment.

By issue #3, GL was outpolling Superman as DC’s most popular superhero.

with a disgraced Green Lantern who was exiled to Qward, and is now reaching into our reality with conquest on his mind. With his yellow power ring, Sinestro was the natural foil for Earth’s Green Lantern. Two issues later, he was back in “Duel of the Power Rings.” The two have been locking ringrays ever since. Due to the intergalactic nature of many of his adventures, Green Lantern’s Rogues Gallery was slow in forming. Over time, Hector Hammond, Sonar, The Shark, Evil Eye, and others made their debuts. One was plucked from an odd source. The Golden Age Flash had had a recurring female nemesis, the other-dimensional Star Sapphire. Schwartz and Broome developed a modern counterpart also called Star Sapphire. She was actually Carol Ferris, fallen under the spell of an all-woman alien race which compelled her to defeat GL in order to prove her worthiness to become their queen.

Were These Letters Mailed With Green Stamps? From the very beginning, Silver Age “GL” editor Julius Schwartz found himself in receipt of letters not only from kids but from adults young and older who remembered the Golden Age comic. Seen above are two of the five missives printed in the series’ very first letters section, in Green Lantern #1 (July-Aug. 1960), following the three Showcase issues; it should really have been “Vol. 2, #1,” of course. Bob Saxon of MidWest City, Oklahoma, specifically asked for the return of Doiby Dickles—and so did college student Roy Thomas of Jackson, Missouri. In his first-ever printed letter, Roy also wanted to see a new Harlequin “or someone like her”—a request soon answered, after a fashion, by the Silver Age Star Sapphire, named after a villainess who had battled the Golden Age Flash. But how’d the word “affect” get typo’d as “effect” in the letter’s last line? Gil Kane penciled the masthead art, of course. Thanks to Bob Bailey for the scans. [Art ©2011 DC Comics.]

During the inevitable origin recap in the lead story, “The Planet of Doomed Men,” the Guardians of the Universe are introduced. They teleport Jordan’s astral self to their homeworld of Oa, judge him worthy of his power ring, and send him back, his memory wiped clean of their existence. Issue #6, Hal makes contact with the first alien Green Lantern since his origin, when the bird-headed Tomar-Re reaches out to him to warn of a menace on “The World of Living Phantoms” that the bird-headed offworlder cannot handle because his own planet is under siege by monsters. After they team up, the new cast member fills in Hal on the nature of the Guardians.

“We also gave the new Green Lantern a second identity in the far future of 5700 A.D.,” Schwartz revealed in Man of Two Worlds. “We chose that date at random by just looking at the telephone in my office; at the time DC’s number was PLaza 9-5700.” That innovation began in Green Lantern #8, coverdated Sept.-Oct. 1961. While “The Challenge from 5700 A. D.!” spawned several sequels, it also foreshadowed Kane’s later artistic direction—for it contained two Jack Kirby swipes. Kane’s depiction of Star City was classic techno-Kirby. A giant sea monster incidental to the story was clearly copied from two similar Kirby creatures, Goliath and Gargantus, who had appeared in Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales (from Martin Goodman’s small remnant of Timely Comics, soon to become Marvel) over the previous several months. Back in “The Duel of the Power Rings,” Hal met several other Green Lanterns. In “The Strange Trial of Green Lantern” (GL #11, March 1962), they put him on trial for misuse of his power ring. One of them, a robot GL from the planet Grenda, was another Kirby swipe. He wore an uncanny resemblance to the villainous Kra from Kirby’s run on DC’s title Challengers of the Unknown. Kane, one of whose first jobs had been as a Kirby assistant, was watching his former mentor’s early Marvel work with great interest. “Jack’s work was so dynamic, that every issue was like a new world,” he praised to Gary Groth. “I used to open those ‘Thor’ books, and I would just stagger. I’d figure, ‘It’s too much.’ The guy was so inventive that each issue he would do drawing that would just knock my brains out.”

Following the lead of The Flash, a Rogues’ Gallery began coalescing around the Emerald Gladiator, beginning with the evil Weaponers of Qward, an antimatter universe adjacent to our own. GL battled them over three consecutive issues, beginning with #2.

Kirby’s approach was also a departure from the artistic restrictions under which Kane was expected work. “Up at DC,” Kane related to The Comics Journal, “they liked a figure that was very slim; it was the house style. And when Jack came along, he galvanized the field so that you needed a more aggressive, angular figure, and, ultimately, I managed assimilate that style.”

He encounters his first significant adversary, the renegade Green Lantern Sinestro, in issue #7’s “The Day 100,000 People Vanished!” Here, the Guardians summon Hal to Oa once more to task him with dealing

Before the decade was out, Kirbyesque dynamism would transform Kane’s Green Lantern. For the artist was undergoing a process of artistic self-examination.

An Overview Of The Emerald Gladiators Of Two Comic Book Ages

guys I had grown up with! So by the time I got to Marvel, I was on the trail—I wasn’t there yet. but I was on the trail.” All that lay in the near future. But it was transpiring in the pages of Green Lantern. “The artist I felt most analogous to was Reed Crandall—in the early days when he did ‘The Ray’ and all that stuff for Quality before he went into the Army,” Kane recalled to “FA Online.” “His work had its focus on classic figure drawing— right out of Bridgeman— and at the same time he had a great sense of movement—his figures were so powerful…. He did figures in ‘The Ray’ which influenced my entire approach to Green Lantern.” One Crandall-influenced innovation was the so-called Swan Dive. “I started this on Green Lantern, to get away from characters who looked like they were running through the air rather than flying,” Kane revealed in Comics Scene. “I wanted the figure to leap out of the page, like he was doing a swan dive. I was always interested in the look of gymnastics, and was quite an athlete as a kid.”

Well, I Swan! Gil Kane often spoke of the influence the art of Jack Kirby had on him, but Reed Crandall was of almost equal importance to him—especially in the early years of his Green Lantern sojourn. Seen above are a 1941 Crandall “Ray” splash page from an issue of the Quality Comics Group’s Smash Comics—and Crandall’s cover for Quality’s Blackhawk #44 (Sept. 1951) which sports a variation of the artist’s “swan dive” pose—while at bottom right are a couple of Kane adaptations of same from Green Lantern #5 (MarchApril 1961), as inked by Joe Giella, with script by John Broome. To Ye Editor, the early Silver Age GL looked as if he were sky-diving without a parachute—but then, he didn’t need one! The “Ray” art is from the partial-color reprint Special Edition Series 2: The Ray & Black Condor published by Alan Light in 1974; the Blackhawk cover is taken from the Grand Comics Database; and the “GL” panels are lifted from The Green Lantern Archives, Vol. 1 (1993). “Ray” scripter unknown. [GL art ©2011 DC Comics; The Ray and Blackhawk are now trademarks of DC Comics.]

As he told The Jack Kirby Collector: “When I got to be thirty, I was really unhappy about my work; I thought I stunk and was at the bottom of a list of artists. So many of the guys were, at thirty, already achieving a kind of professional identity that was good. I was still swirling around, still looking for something, still copying. So I figured to hell with it and started to teach myself perspective, because I noticed a thing called deep space for the first time. Once I saw deep space, it took me to perspective, and I learned how deep space worked. That took a lot of time. Then I learned negative and positive space, and then I came to the figure. I tried [anatomy-book artist/author George] Bridgeman a half dozen times, but I just couldn’t break the combination. Finally I was looking at [the work of artist] Reed Crandall, and through him I broke the combination. So I got into Bridgeman, and that began to solve a lot of problems. Each doorway opened up into a bigger room, so ultimately into my late thirties and early forties, rooms were opening up for me. I was at last achieving a kind of professional status that I was comfortable with. But, geez, that was 25 years past the

In issue #13 (June 1962) came the first of several occasional team-ups between GL and The Flash. Although they worked together in the Justice League, those stories of a multi-member group were too busy to allow for much interaction. Since John Broome was also scripting The Flash, this was a natural pairing, and no doubt helped to set the stage for the annual two-part Justice League stories wherein the JLA teamed up with the revived Golden Age Justice Society of America, and in which the two Green Lanterns met. It was not exactly a memorable moment: the two just wordlessly compared power rings. It all derived from a classic Flash tale Gardner Fox had penned for Schwartz—“Flash of Two Worlds!”—at the same time John Broome was scripting the new Green Lantern #1. That story established the concept of an “Earth-Two,” an adjoining reality in which the Golden Age versions of DC’s updated heroes dwelled.

The Eternal Green Lantern

In Robin Snyder’s The Comics!, Fox explained its origin: “The Earth 1 and 2 bit came into being because we had to explain the fact that we had two Flashes, two Hawkmen: it’s an old science-fiction gimmick, and both Julie and I were aficionados of that genre, so it just sprang into our minds.” “In science fiction,” Schwartz told Comics Scene Spectacular, “they have concepts that are called alternate Earths. I said, ‘Why don’t we create an alternate Earth, and we’ll call that one the other Earth. We’ll call it Earth-Two.’ Which was a horrible mistake on my part, because it should have been called Earth-One. It was the first Earth.” As the years passed, the annual GL-Flash team-ups were dropped in favor of stories combining the two Green Lanterns. The first of these appeared in issue #60 (Oct. 1965). The tale was “The Secret Origin of the Guardians.” Gardner Fox was scripting the majority of “GL” episodes by this time. “Broome wrote most of the Green Lantern,” Kane told The Comics Journal, “and what he didn’t write, Gardner wrote…. But it was Julie essentially who wrote everything, because Julie was such a stickler for plotting. He used to dominate the plotting. Then when they would come in, he would go through, with a red pen, and edit the stuff so heavily that barely 30% of the original script survived. And that was on everything!” Gardner Fox explained Schwartz’s rationale this way in The Comics!: “It was the practice at DC and also at [publisher William] Gaines’ outfit [EC Comics], to work almost hand in glove with editors. Story lines were always plotted with the editors with whom one worked. The idea behind this, I am certain, was that we would avoid any lawsuits for stealing stories already published. They didn’t want any legal troubles.” Fox’s namesake, Guy Gardner, came along in 1968. John Broome created him, naming him after Fox and fan Guy H. Lillian III. “Earth’s Other Green Lantern!” ran in GL #59 (March 1968). Periodically, Schwartz felt the need to revisit GL’s origins, as he did in issue #16’s “Earth’s First Green Lantern,” there explaining the backstory of how and why Abin Sur happened to be piloting a spacecraft when he crashed to Earth. In that introductory Guy Gardner story, Hal Jordan becomes curious about the reasons he was chosen and is surprised to learn that he was actually Abin Sur’s second choice! It just happened that

“I See Everything Twice!” That manic line of dialogue from Joseph Heller’s novel masterpiece Catch-22 could even be doubled in this case. At left is Gil Kane’s “two GLs” cover for Green Lantern #40 (Oct. 1965), inked by the favored Murphy Anderson—and above, a color commission version he did of it some years later. When Gil drew such commissions, he invariably made changes in the layout, seeking to make the new renditions more dramatic than he felt he’d been allowed to be at DC in the 1960s. The published cover is from the Grand Comics Database website; the revamp is courtesy of collector Marc Svensson. Note that, in the re-do, besides deemphasizing the Guardians and making the Earth-One GL considerably more dynamic than the 1965 figure, he gave the Golden Age GL the “laced-up” boots of the early Nodell version—perhaps at the buyer’s request. [©2011 DC Comics.]

he was closer to the crash site than choice #1, Guy Gardner. The story is an excursion into what might have transpired had Guy Gardner been presented with the power battery and ring of Abin Sur. Clearly created as a one-shot character, Guy Gardner later rose to prominence in the Green Lantern Corps during the post-Gil Kane era. As the Green Lantern series progressed, some readers noticed the series’ strong resemblance to E.E. “Doc” Smith’s famed Lensmen series

An Overview Of The Emerald Gladiators Of Two Comic Book Ages

from 1930s science-fiction pulp magazines, which were then being reprinted in paperback. Despite his pulp background, Schwartz denied pillaging Smith’s classic novels like Gray Lensman. “During the time I worked with him as Green Lantern colorist,” recalls Anthony Tollin, “Julie asked me if I had read the Lensmen novels and if the concept really was similar to the Green Lanterns, as he had been told. Julie asked if there Friends, Romans, Countrymen… were alien Lens Me Your Ears! Lensmen like the When editor Julius Schwartz asked colorist Anthony other-world GLs, Tollin if he felt that the Silver Age “Green Lantern” and I explained resembled E.E. “Doc” Smith’s series of “Lensmen” that the Lensmen novels (most of which were serialized in the magazine Astounding Science-Fiction in the 1930s and early ’40s), came from many Julie may have been responding to an article which races and life A/E’s editor had asked fellow fan Shel Kagan to write forms across the for Alter Ego [Vol. 1] #9 (1965) comparing the Lensmen galaxy, and [I] and the Green Lanterns. Nor were those three the only noted some of the folks to notice the similarities. “If the Lensmen didn’t similarities influence Schwartz and Broome, at least between them— subconsciously,” says Roy, “then maybe Siegel & for example, the Shuster weren’t affected by Philip Wylie’s novel Dragon Lensman Gladiator, either!” and the reptilian Seen above is Hubert Rogers’ cover for the Oct. 1939 Green Lantern. issue of Astounding, which spotlighted Smith’s novelJulie wasn’t length yarn Grey Lensman. The “Ph.D.”-sporting author is referred to on that cover as “‘Skylark’ Smith” because denying that they his earlier novel, Skylark of Space, had virtually created were remarkably intergalactic science-fiction, a sub-genre which the similar, but rather Lensmen series—and later the Silver Age Green was honestly Lantern—continued dramatically. The thread continues curious and interright on through George Lucas’ Jedi Knights! [©2011 the ested in learning respective copyright holders.] more about the similarities between the two series. Julie assumed the Lensmen similarities had probably been introduced by John Broome, who of course had been an sf fan and pulp writer during the 1940s.”

lines that tamed the action. As he told Mark Voger, “Julie would write an entire ‘Green Lantern’ story with one punch…. That was the only panel of violent action. And I would try to extend it and strengthen it, but it was so rigid.” As Kane complained to Roy Thomas, “Everything had to be done by that damned ring.” The truth was that DC specialized in puzzle stories, often based on a cover idea that artists like Kane had been instructed to conceptualize. “We had a provocative cover, and it was a challenge to us to look at the cover and figure out how a thing like that happened,” Schwartz explained in “POV Online.” “The cover sometimes provided the story in a sketchy kind of way,” Broome clarified to Mark Evanier. “Then I’d work out some kind of understanding or explanation of the cover. The cover usually presented some kind of mystery. Something was happening, someone was getting poisoned or frozen or killed or something like that.”

Reportedly, Broome also denied the influence. If true, it was not the only strange GL coincidence. “John Broome was a very nice guy,” Kane related to The Comics Journal. “Looked a lot like me. Many people thought we were twins. Sort of kiddingly, I’d be stopped in the hallway and someone would say, ‘John! I haven’t seen you in a while!’ The difference was that he was a blond. I was 23 or 24, and at this point John must have been 35. But we looked alike: He was 6’ 3”; we weighed the same…” No matter who scripted the series, Kane fretted under editorial guide-

He’s An Icon! This Gil Kane pencil done around 1968-69, when inked, was the prototype of the icon art that was repro’d small at the top of every Green Lantern cover circa 1969-70… ironically including a number of issues produced while Kane had temporarily left the comic to try his luck at Marvel. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [©2011 DC Comics.]

The Eternal Green Lantern

Kane told The Comics Journal. “I felt Greene was the most consistent and best inker of my DC material.” “Gil Kane was very easy to ink over,” Anderson told Comic Book Marketplace. “There wasn’t very much for you to do other than just kind of trace it.” After a brief break, Kane returned to Green Lantern for a last handful of issues. It did no good. Sales in tatters, the title was converted with #76 (April 1970) to a team-up book which, on the covers if not in the indicia, was retitled Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams electrified comics fandom during their relevance-driven run. But the magazine’s sales actually softened further. After two years, it was cancelled. Kane read all the O’Neil/Adams issues.

Wonder What Color This Guy’s Costume Was?

“I think that it was totally superhero material,” Kane told The Comics Journal, “but they decided to extend the range and to introduce more subtle values. They tried to introduce nuance into (Below:) An undated sheet of anatomy sketches which Kane did, in a never-ending effort to keep honing his skills. material that is essentially free of From the Heritage Comics Archives, retrieved by Dominic Bongo. [©2011 Estate of Gil Kane.] nuance, and I think to the extent that they succeeded is the extent Kane penciled every issue of Green Lantern through #61 in 1968. Near that showed the possibility of development.” the end of his original run, he had jumped over to Marvel Comics, eager to join in the creative explosion going on there, where the artist’s vision Schwartz edited the title to the bitter end. “Green Lantern/Green predominated. He had a brief run rendering another emerald hero, “The Incredible Hulk.” (Above:) This “presentation piece” penciled and inked by Kane for an unknown prospective TV animated series, probably in the 1980s when he was working in that field after moving to Los Angeles, demonstrates that, while Gil may have acknowledged scant affection or nostalgia for his Green Lantern work, his conception of that character continued to bubble up in his later work. Repro’d from a scan of the original art, courtesy of dealer Mike Burkey at www.romitaman.com. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

But years of toiling under the DC restrictions had stunted Kane’s artistic growth. Of his early ’60s work, he frankly told The Comics Journal, “I thought it was tenth rate, and I also had the disadvantage of having inkers who were incompetent. So I didn’t have an identity. A guy who had an identity was somebody like Kirby, who was like an outcropping of rock that, no matter who inked him, he’d come right up through the goddamn inks!” Despite his enthusiasm for the Kirby approach, Kane felt he fell far short. Marvel editor and often writer Stan Lee complained that Kane’s Hulk was too ugly, while Kane retorted that he was simply emulating the Kirby Hulk. “Stan used to say that my stuff looked like David Niven in a super-hero suit,” he lamented to Gary Groth. Ironically, Schwartz simultaneously expressed displeasure with the Kane’s more emotionally expressive rendering of Green Lantern. But as his work grew, Kane began to getting inkers he liked. “I preferred Murphy Anderson; and beyond Murphy, I preferred Sid Greene when he finally got to it,”

An Overview Of The Emerald Gladiators Of Two Comic Book Ages

Arrow gained us a lot of swell publicity and didn’t lose any money,” he noted in Amazing World of DC Comics. “But the younger readers didn’t want relevance. They wanted entertainment, and for them the two didn’t match. We gave it a hearing and that’s all we could do.” This was not the end of Green Lantern, of course. Other revivals followed, and Kane returned numerous times to the character he had co-created. Before his death in 2000, one of his final efforts was a “Green Lantern” story for Legends of the DC Universe. It co-starred his other Silver Age super-hero, The Atom. Kane once admitted to “Space.com”: “It was during the run of Green Lantern that I first began to apply myself to the idea of craft. The strips became a basis for self-development and the beginning of a mature professional identity.” As for the continuing parade of Green Lanterns, now reaching deep into the 21st century, perhaps the last word belongs to the editor who had first seen the concept’s potential back in 1940. “It’s a talisman,” Sheldon Mayer once told Ron Goulart. “A St. Christopher medal. The kids could actually visualize themselves owning the ring.”

Bibliography: Amash, Jim. “Joe Giella Is like Fine Wine—He Gets Better with Age.” Alter Ego #52, Sept. 2005. Benton, Mike. Superhero Comics of the Golden Age. Taylor Publishing Company, 1992. Benton, Mike. Superhero Comics of the Silver Age. Taylor Publishing Company, 1991. Carter, Gary M. “From Hawkman to the Atomic Knights.” Comic Book Marketplace #32, Feb. 1996. Cooke, Jon B. “Gil Kane on Jack Kirby.” Jack Kirby Collector #21. Daniels, Les. DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. Little, Brown and Company, 1995. Evanier, Mark. “John Broome interview.” “POV Online,” April 16 & 29, 1999. Fallon, Robert M. “A Conversation with Gil Kane.” Comic Book Marketplace #74, Dec. 1999. Fox, Gardner. “Letter.” Robin Snyder’s History of the Comics, Vol. 2, #2, Feb. 1991. Gafford, Carl and Anthony Tollin. “Julie Schwartz Leads the Way.” The Amazing World of DC Comics #3, November 1973. Goulart, Ron. “The All American Branch.” Comics: The Golden Age, 1987.

Johnson, Kim Howard. “Emerald Origins.” Comics Scene #45, Aug. 1994. Kane, Gil. “Foreword.” Green Lantern Archives, Vol. 1, 1993. Lillian III, Guy. “What It All About, Alfie?” Challenger #25, Winter 2007. Mougin, Lou. “Alfred Bester.” Comics Interview #32, 1983. Sullivan, Darcy. “Dynamic in Action.” Comics Scene #38, Oct. 1993. Voger, Mark. “Julius Schwartz.” Comics Scene Spectacular #6, July 1992.

Groth, Gary. “Gil Kane & Denny O’Neil on Comics Writing.” The Comics Journal #64, July 1981. Groth, Gary. “Interview with Gil Kane, Part 1.” The Comics Journal #186, April 1996. Groth, Gary. “The Amazing Gil Kane!” The Comics Journal #226, Aug. 2000. Janulewicz, Tom. “Gil Kane, Space-Age Comic Book Artist, Dies.” “Space.com,” Feb. 1, 2000.

Voger, Mark. “Gil Kane.” Comics Scene Spectacular #7, Sept. 1992. Thomas, Roy. “Remembering Gil.” Alter Ego, Vol 3, #4. Spring 2000. Schwartz, Julius, with Brian M. Thomsen. Man of Two Worlds: My Life in Comics and Science Fiction. Harper Entertainment, 2000. Steranko, James. The Steranko History of Comics, Supergraphics, 1970. Whitaker, Steve. “Gil Kane.” “FA Online.” Retrieved March 8, 2011.

“Marty Created ‘The Green Lantern’!” A Conversation With MART & CARRIE NODELL Conducted by Shel Dorf (Year & City Unknown)

A/E

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

EDITOR’S NOTE: Roughly ten years ago, the late Shel Dorf, who among other things was the co-founder of both the 1964 Detroit Triple FanFair and, in 1970, of the San Diego Comic-Con, sold TwoMorrows and me several taped interviews, of which this is one. He says at a couple of points on the (undated, probably 1980s or ’90s) tape that it was being done for David Anthony Kraft’s late lamented Comics Interview magazine… but it was never published there, or anywhere else. Now, alas, Shel is gone and we can’t ask him to clarify these things. The tape naturally deals to a considerable extent with Mart Nodell’s comics career, particularly his work on the “Green Lantern” feature he originated… but large portions, with no apology, also deal with the lifelong love affair between Mart and his wife Carrie. They were an engaging couple, whom I—along with, I suspect, hundreds of other people—greatly enjoyed conversing with at conventions over the years in San Diego, in Florida, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and elsewhere. So just pull up a seat and listen, as Shel, his own fannish enthusiasm very evident, eggs on first Carrie, then later Marty, to talk about their personal lives as well as about Marty’s career. Here and there, the conversation may get a bit tough to follow for a few lines… but bear with it—you’ll be able to hop back aboard the train of thought in a moment! Those of us who reveled in the pleasure of their

company still miss them, half a decade and more after their passing, a couple of years apart. The tapes, which have had to be considerably edited and abridged, begin in mid-conversation. With Marty in the room but saying little, Shel abruptly turned on his tape recorder while Carrie was relating some history not of her own family, but of Marty’s….

“He Said, ‘I Just Did That’—And It Was All-American #16” CARRIE NODELL: [Marty’s father] left Russia when he was about four years old, with the circus. He didn’t leave Russia—he left home, with his family. Four years old, playing the piano—a great pianist, but his fame was for the mandolin. And he traveled with the circus; he went to school a little bit. Somehow, he got to the Philippines. He traveled through the country; he picked up a Filipino [sic] there and brought them to the U.S. Marty would be able to give you more detail on it. SD: Oh, no. This is great. Keep going. CARRIE: And they got to the U.S., that plane from the Philippines, across Europe, and called a rich uncle, the one who was the leather merchant. And he said, “Get me a room… the best hotel… the Ritz in New York”… and “Get me this” and “Get me that.” He set himself up, and I think it was about 20-some odd years— SD: I’ll bet that was good vaudeville.

Call Me Marty! (Or Just Mart!) (Top of page:) Carrie & Marty Nodell and their fan Roy Thomas at a comics convention—probably Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the 1990s or early 2000s. Marty, incidentally, told Ye Editor on more than one occasion that he disliked being called “Martin,” so we’ve mostly used just “Mart” or “Marty” in this issue. Photo probably by Dann Thomas. Back in 2000, Roy interviewed Marty for A/E, Vol. 3, #5; that issue is out of print, but still available from TwoMorrows in a digital version. And of course Marty and Roy teamed up on a three-page “Green Lantern” sequence in All-Star Squadron Annual #3 (1984). (Left:) A commission drawing done some years back by MN for collector John Schwirian, who also edits and publishes The Aquaman Chronicles. Guess you couldn’t persuade Marty to draw the Sea King, huh, John? [Green Lantern TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

A Conversation With Mart & Carrie Nodell

CARRIE: All those years, he played three, four shows a day. He discovered Señor Wences. SD: Did he discover the Three Stooges? Because I know Moe Howard’s daughter…

Dorf Tracy Interviewer Shel Dorf with part of his collection of Dick Tracy artifacts. In the 1980s Shel was editor of Blackthorne Publishing’s Dick Tracy reprint title. Sadly, Shel passed away in 2009.

CARRIE: Marty will be able to tell you. He did discover a group of three who are very famous, and Marty had certainly said that he,

Dad, wasn’t very business-oriented.

moved to Huntington, Long Island, just about that time, and I thought I’d never see him again. SD: You were both hurting. You had lost your father. CARRIE: I had just lost my father; he had lost his father maybe a year before. My mother had died that fall. And anyway, it was really Marty’s mother who introduced me to Marty. She met me and she said, “I’d take my ring off for this gal.” [laughs] And there it is. SD: That’s a wonderful story. CARRIE: And this friend—my mother was her friend and that’s how I met Marty.

“They Had ‘Superman,” And They Had ‘Batman’”

SD: The Ritz Brothers? The Marx Brothers?

SD: What were the early days like? Were you like Roz Kirby? Did you help fill in blacks or letter or do anything with the book?

CARRIE: Not Marx. One group of comedians—I’m not sure. Marty would know.

CARRIE: Marty says I did letter a little. I don’t remember that much, because we had our oldest son a year after we’d married. It was wartime.

SD: Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo? CARRIE: Yes. [laughs] But anyway, talking about Marty’s uncle, Ray Bathelon [sp?])—he was the greatest mandolin player in the world. SD: Let me get back to Coney Island, where you first met Marty. You said he impressed you by showing you a spinner of comic books— CARRIE: He showed me a wire rack at a candy store. In those days, comics were sold in candy stores. And he said, “I just did that”—and it was All-American #16, the first time Green Lantern appeared in a comic book, or any book, as a matter of fact. And I sort of looked at him quizzically… and we started to date. And we walked the entire length of the Boardwalk back to where I lived. It was about two miles. And then he

Playing “Musical Lanterns” (Left:) The Green Lantern cover for All-American Comics #16 (July 1940) has often been reprinted—and besides, it was drawn by Sheldon (“Shelly”) Moldoff, not Mart Nodell—so we thought we’d substitute a “re-painting” done by Marty of the cover of Green Lantern #1 (Fall 1941) in the style of its artist, Howard Purcell. Nodell never claimed he drew either published cover, however. By the way, Carrie’s memory to the contrary, the stories Marty drew were almost invariably either 12 or 13 pages, not 18. Art retrieved from the Heritage Comics Archives by Dominic Bongo. (Above:) Just to balance things out a bit, here’s a more recent Moldoff drawing of GL. For more of same, visit the website www.shelly-moldoff.com. [Green Lantern TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

“Marty Created ‘The Green Lantern’!”

The fear of being drafted was always hanging over your head. But I did deliver the work, because when Marty did 18 pages, I wouldn’t let him go on the subway to deliver it because he had been up the night before, all night, doing the deadlines. So I would go to the DC [NOTE: Actually the AA, or AllAmerican] offices. Sheldon Mayer was the editor and Max Gaines was the publisher, and that was a fine gentleman. He was a sweetheart. And before I left the office, I would pick up Marty’s check and a new script. In those days, it was 18 pages. They got paid $10 a page, and that was good money. He lettered, inked, penciled, did the balloons, did everything.

One If By Lantern, Two If By… Another Lantern Irwin Hasen’s cover for Green Lantern #24 (Feb.-March 1947)—and Mart Nodell’s splash page illustrating the matching scene inside, which led off the issue’s second story, whose script is credited by the Grand Comics Database to Alfred Bester. Hasen was the second person to draw “Green Lantern” on a regular basis, although one earlier yarn had been illustrated by “Flash” artist E.E. Hibbard. In 1941 Irwin took over drawing the “GL” lead in All-American Comics to free Marty to draw all four stories in the new quarterly Green Lantern title. Nodell’s last Golden Age “GL” work would appear in issue #25. [©2011 DC Comics.]

Marty created it. He wrote the first story. Then they brought in Bill Finger a couple of stories after that. When Marty went up to the DC offices looking for work—he was a young artist—he was told that the comic book publishers had work. And we had just come from Chicago and he needed a job. He showed Sheldon Mayer his samples, and Sheldon liked them, and he said, “We have room on the presses for another super-hero.” At that time, they had “Batman” and they had “Superman.”

And Marty left the offices to go down the steps to the New York subway, and he’s waiting on the platform for a train to take him into Brooklyn, and he saw a train man swinging a lantern on the subway track. Now this is before I met him. He saw the train man swinging the lantern. Green to come in to the platform—and red, danger. In those days, they didn’t have computers. Today, it’s all done by computers. SD: Tell me about the length of his career. How long did he do “Green Lantern”?

Most of my friends were in efficiencies, one bedroom, so comic books were good to us. But you’ve got to remember, a loaf of bread was 5¢, a pound of potatoes was 2¢, the New York Daily News was 2¢. The cost of living wasn’t that high, and this gorgeous apartment was $65 a month. SD: Did he do any other books besides Green Lantern? CARRIE: After he left Green Lantern, he went into advertising, and they weren’t ready for him in advertising yet. He was too young, television was young, and he wanted to be in the advertising business. So in order to make a living, he went over to Timely, which is now Marvel, and he worked in the Bullpen. Stan Lee was the editor, and he [Marty] worked with Gene Colan, Johnny Buscema, so many very well-known artists of today. SD: How long did he work for Timely?

SD: It really didn’t pay that well in those days. A married man and children and so on.

CARRIE: Not too long. About a year, a year and a half, and then he got a job with a nice advertising agency and he was on his way. He loved advertising. He was an art director; he loved the accounts. People would say to him, “Yeah, that’s an ulcer business.” He’d say, “No, I don’t get an ulcer. I give ulcers.” [laughs] That was his famous phrase.

CARRIE: He had two kids, yeah. Well, the pay was good. He was making more, maybe because he did 18 pages of the “Green Lantern.” He was fast.

SD: He’s a dynamic guy. I was just impressed with his energy level yesterday. Whew!

SD: It was the only way you could make money.

CARRIE: He’s a sweetheart. And he didn’t come back to comics until he was working on special newspaper inserts for a Chicago newspaper. He worked in the northern suburbs, Lipppinville, Illinois, and the paper had offices in the western suburbs—Arlington Heights, Hasterd Park, and things like that.

CARRIE: Up until about ’47.

CARRIE: We lived very nicely. All our young friends didn’t live as well. In fact, when Marty’s uncle came to visit us the first time, he was shocked. We had a full house of furniture—fine carpeting, four-room apartment.

A Conversation With Mart & Carrie Nodell

More Marvel Mysteries— Collect Them All! (Above:) After he left National/DC, Nodell worked for a time on staff at Timely Comics (later Marvel). Here, courtesy of artist Joe Giella and his son Frank, is a photo of some of the Timely bullpen in June 1948, on which not everyone has been positively ID’d. From left to right: two unknowns… artist Rudy LaPick… unknown… letterers Mario Aquaviva & Fred Eng… Joe Giella… unknown… Mart Nodell… unknown. Thanks, Giellas—and to Dr. Michael J. Vassallo for IDing Fred Eng. (Oh, and Doc V. informs us that the photo was taken by artist Pete Tumlinson.) (Top right:) During this period, many super-hero stories and covers were drawn as the work of diverse hands. Marty quite possibly contributed to that of Marvel Mystery Comics #81 (March 1947), since his granddaughter Jacque Nodell sent us a scan of a Photostat of the original art of that cover, which he gave her some years ago. Interestingly, that issue’s cover date is basically the same as that of Green Lantern #24, seen on the preceding page, indicating that perhaps the Marty’s “GL” stories in the latter may have been sitting on the DC shelf for some months. But then, GL editor Shelly Mayer was notorious for always being three issues ahead on every title he handled. Great to have this Timely cover in black-&-white to examine its art a bit more closely than the color version allows! [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Right:) Nodell even signed this two-page spread from Miss America, Vol. 7, #43 (April 1950), for its regular “Charm Corner” feature. Thanks to Dr. Michael J. Vassallo— and to Darci Sharver for yet another signed “Charm Corner” art spot, which we hope to run in a future issue. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Marty Created ‘The Green Lantern’!”

I love to read small print. I’m reading the house organ that the newspaper puts out, called The Inkspot. And it said, “Gary Colabuono, comic book buff.” So I said to Marty—oh, by the way, Marty did not let anyone in advertising know that he had ever done comics. That’s one of the reasons we don’t have any of the comic books. He destroyed them before our move to Chicago, gave them away and whatnot. SD: Well, we know the prejudice against comic book artists in advertising. Gil Kane talked about that once. If you couldn’t do advertising, the bottom of the barrel was comic books. And Marty told me he changed his name. What was his name when he was doing comic books? CARRIE: Mart Dellon. [chuckles] He took “Nodell” and he reversed it. And that’s when he showed me All-American #16. I said, “That’s not you, it’s Mart Dellon!”

“[Gary Colabuono] Taped Marty For Four Hours” SD: So what year did you move to Chicago?

Colabuono, The Gem Of Devotion (Left:) Fan/collector Gary Colabuono with Nodell’s surviving “Green Lantern” tryout page.” Gary was instrumental in Marty’s going to his very first comics convention, in 1975. Thanks to Michael Feldman for the photo from the Internet; see the tryout page more clearly on p. 4. Incidentally, Roy Thomas recalls being given the pleasant assignment of interviewing Marty on a special two-man panel at the first San Diego Comic-Con the artist ever attended—and recalls his (Roy’s) fury and angry denouncements to the staff when he realized that panel had carelessly been scheduled at the same time as some super-mega-event that drew most away of Nodell’s potential audience. But the pair (and their small but enthusiastic audience) then settled down, and a good time was had by all. [Art ©2011 the respective copyright holders.] (Right:) Gary Colabuono was later one of the Nodells’ hosts at the 1995 Chicago Con. This photo of Marty and Carrie with Marty’s one-time boss Stan Lee was taken at the cocktail party that followed its Stan Lee Roast. Thank to Nancy Ford—and does anybody know where we can reach Nancy to send her a copy of this issue? See more about the Stan Lee Roast— including another photo of the Nodells—in the still-available Alter Ego Collection, Vol. 1.

CARRIE: 1960.

Moondog’s. And now he’s just combined with Dreams.

SD: 1960. And Gary Colabuono was collecting comic books?

So Gary called around and called DC and said “He’s alive!” [laughs] Nobody knew Marty was alive, even. The only friend [from comics] that we did see occasionally when he was still in comics was Syd Shores. Syd was a personal friend. He’d come to the house, we’d go to his home.

CARRIE: As a kid. He was selling them out of his basement. That was before we left Chicago, 1975, that I saw this little blurb. And so I said to Marty, “You’re going in to the office to say goodbye to your managers, your bosses.” He was very friendly with the publisher. I said, “Why don’t you look up Gary and tell him who you were?” Of course, Marty had left the advertising agency. He had a job waiting at the newspaper. But we didn’t move for that. We moved because we couldn’t take the snow. When it was 38 degrees below Celsius. When we came home one night from the paper: “What are we doing here? We have a place in Florida, if we’re lucky.” I gave up my job. I’d worked for Marshall Field. Marty went in and resigned from the paper. But anyway, he called up Gary and he said, “I’m going to be in the office, and I’m Marty—” [in excited voice] “You’re what? Marty Nodell?” Gary ran out and bought a tape recorder; he told me that last year. He taped Marty for four hours. He wanted to know all about the Golden Age, about Max Gaines, about Sheldon Mayer—you know, the whole story. Gary was in his early twenties. SD: He’s certainly made history in the business, hasn’t he? And he’s a great guy, a really nice person. CARRIE: Gary’s the nicest guy you’d want to meet. And not only that, he had a small comic book store. He was working as a space salesman on the paper, probably made his thirty thou already at that time. But comic books were his first love, and he had this little, tiny store, and he had a kid working for him, and he would oversee it whenever he had the time. And of course, everybody knows, from one store, he now has about seven:

SD: I can’t see advertising people getting this stuff. CARRIE: Now, they want comic book artists. Did you know that Marty worked on Pillsbury Doughboy? SD: No, that I didn’t know. CARRIE: Marty’s team. When you’re an art director, you don’t get credit for what you do. You work as a team. But that was one of his accounts, Pillsbury. He worked on Folger’s Coffee, Sara Lee… all the big accounts. Crest Toothpaste, Secret… he had some wonderful accounts. SD: Those are all products that I bought. Marty told me yesterday that I had influenced his life without knowing it; now [I see that] he influenced mine, too. CARRIE: What goes around, you know. But he liked advertising. [After a garbled bit of tape during which there seem to be at least two conversations going on, Carrie continues, speaking of her physical condition.] CARRIE: [laughs] I’ll tell you one good thing. [Going to these conventions] is keeping me alive. But I was very ill last winter and they took a liter of blood out of me.

A Conversation With Mart & Carrie Nodell

“I Was Going To Be An Actor [In New York]” [The next day, the three meet again; this time, Marty carries the conversation.] SD: This is Shel Dorf reporting for Comics Interview magazine, Saturday, March 26th, and we’re talking to—what’s your name, kid? Martin Nodell. MART NODELL: Yeah, and I like to be called “Mart” because it’s easier. If I were to sign the whole thing, “Martin,” I’d lose a lot of time. And think of the extra two letters when you sign 2000 extra letters. Therefore, to sign “Mart” makes it a lot easier, faster, and helps the folks next in line. [laughs] SD: Mart, where were you born? NODELL: I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. SD: Last night, you told me that you’d come from a circus background, and that quite fascinates me. NODELL: Well, it really wasn’t my circus background, but my folks back in my old country in Russia were amongst the circus families. So part of it was, in a sense, of the early days. But my uncle, and a cousin, too, were in vaudeville in this country, so that’s where the theatrical aspect came in. SD: What was the earliest that you decided you wanted to draw for a living? NODELL: Oh, I was six years old. I loved to draw. And I grew up enjoying what I saw in the vaudeville theatres, so until I was a teenager, I drew what was on the stage, the backgrounds of the theatres, the theatre. In pencil. SD: And your folks encouraged you, I’d imagine.

Give Me All Your Dough, Boy! Nodell drew this Pillsbury Doughboy sketch for the wife of a fan some years back; it was retrieved from Flickr/Photo-Sharing, but we didn’t see the name of the collector, alas. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Nascent Nodell Mart Nodell’s preDC comics work is tricky to spot, and was never signed (at least, not with his name). Seen here are a “Buck Steele” splash from Novelty’s Sure-Fire Comics #1 and “Dr. Doom” from Fox’s Science Comics #5 (both cover-dated June 1940). But did he draw these particular yarns? Jim Ludwig sent these splashes— plus four more of “Dr. Doom” from different issues. “You will need an art spotter to identify Nodell,” he writes. “[The ‘Dr. Doom’ stories have] wildly different artists.” [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

NODELL: Yes. They didn’t know that I’d want to go on to be an artist. But when I had finished high school, the teachers thought I should further my art education, and I liked that. My folks were in the food business in those days, so I thought it a good idea to go to art school. That’s where the art education really started. By that time, the folks had traveled around to New York City, we had traveled to Coral Gables, Florida, in the ’20s, into Newark, New Jersey, and then to Chicago, and that’s where I’d gone through high school and art school… at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

“Marty Created ‘The Green Lantern’!”

SD: Isn’t that where Hal Foster studied? NODELL: I don’t know about Hal Foster, but Walt Disney went to school there, Harry Hirschfeld went to school there, and I forget the gal’s name who sat on the piano and sang… SD: Helen Morgan? NODELL: Helen Morgan, of course. She worked in the theatres, but she was an artist. She drew pictures. SD: You took Life Drawings and what else? Commercial Art? NODELL: It was all about commercial art, and we enjoyed it from the standpoint of thinking that a really good artist can go right into advertising agencies and do commercial art. But I also, at night, would, while in high school and after high school, joined theatre groups, little theatre groups in Chicago. So I now did a little designing for the sets. I also did some work behind the scenes and up on stage, and I wrote some theatre, and I did some acting in plays that did exist. And from there I got some nice letters and went on to New York City after my dad died in Chicago. I went to art school and went to Pratt there. A real good school. SD: You must have been damned good, because Pratt just doesn’t accept [just] anybody. NODELL: Now he tells me! [laughs] I’m glad to hear that. Wonderful teachers I had. But the big guy was, of course, the fellow who did a lot of calendars, Norman Rockwell. But this was when he was realistic without working from photos. He had a mind, and there was a huge painting the size of a big wall in the entry of Pratt & Norman. Rockwell’s signature was on that painting. It was a beauty, but it was not photographic. This is before the [Saturday Evening] Post covers. SD: I worked with his nephew, Richard Rockwell, who was an assistant to Milton Caniff. He was Milton’s penciler. Dick once told me he went to his uncle with his drawings because he wanted an opinion, and his uncle peeled off a thousand bucks and he said, “Buy a camera.” Dick had always drawn from life, and Rockwell felt that he should use a camera to help him. [laughs] How long were you in New York at Pratt?

Bio-Diversity Back on p. 4, we printed the photos from this bio page in 1940’s Green Lantern #1—but it occurred to us that you might like to read that page, as well. Thanks to Marc Svensson. Note that even this piece, quite likely written by editor Shelly Mayer, credits Nodell with “dream[ing] up the idea of the ‘Green Lantern.’” [©2011 DC Comics.]

NODELL: Well, actually, I went to Pratt for a couple of years in the early to mid-’30s, and I also was burdened with the letters that I was to show to the people in the theatre business in New York. I was going to be an actor there and never got to it, because they told me it would be a good idea if you would go to people in the art business and show them your artwork. And the art people thought I should go to people in the theatre business, and maybe if you’re not happy on the stage, you’ll work behind the scenes and do publicity and promotion, which I did. I didn’t get on the stage.

By 1937, ’38, in New York, I needed to make a buck. And I saw these things that were put together for mom-and-pop candy stores, and that’s where they sold magazines and pulps. And you could turn these things—I don’t know what they called them [spinner racks], but I picked these things off them, and they looked like they were stories being told in pictures. So I drew some, looked up a publisher or two. There were publishers who would do one book and go off to Poughkeepskie. Fortunately, I was paid for each story that I did. Not very much, but I was paid for it. But once I was paid for the story that I finished—and by the way, you did everything on it, including the lettering and cleaning it up—I would then have to go off to look for more work.

SD: This was a time when they had a lot of fly-by-night publishers. NODELL: Exactly. Well, I had no problem, because I would get paid.

“I Showed [Sheldon Mayer] My Samples” SD: You were you working for DC at this time? NODELL: No, no. I worked some for Fawcett, and there were some others. I don’t recall who most of them were. I’d have to look up the printout that Jerry Bails prepared for me. And I still wanted to get into advertising and promotion. I tried that. By 1939, as I told you, I’d evolved and was making a living a little, or adequately. And by 1940— SD: You had to support yourself in New York. NODELL: Yeah, myself and my mother. SD: Let me break in for a minute. Your dad was in the food business. Could you talk a little bit about that?

A Conversation With Mart & Carrie Nodell

Panning The Art-Burners Artwork from an unpublished mid-’40s “Green Lantern” adventure drawn by Nodell and featuring the god Pan as the villain has surfaced over the years. Here from an Internet scan are two tiers/rows of that tale (which may not have strictly followed each other), from pages which were doubtless cut into thirds by comics writer and editor Marv Wolfman circa 1967-68 when, as a young intern at DC, he was ordered to burn old artwork in the company incinerator. Wolfman was allowed to keep some of the artwork, provided he first sliced each page up into three pieces—which he did by sneakily cutting the pages between panel rows, to preserve the integrity of the art, as first related in A/E V3#2. The “GL” tale was part of the cache that had been “written off” for tax purposes in 1949, soon after the cancellation of Flash Comics and Green Lantern and the transformation of AllAmerican Comics into All-American Western. [Green Lantern TM & ©2011DC Comics.]

Lantern. And he would wave it at people; that would be something good. Maybe with a Red Lantern to get at people who’d be doing things that were bad. If that’s the case, maybe I could have a story out of this. By the time I got home, I had a general working plan, “The Green Lantern.” That was it, “The Green Lantern.”

NODELL: He owned a grocery store. SD: Oh, a grocery store. And then he died in Chicago, and you and your mother went to New York? NODELL: Right, with my younger brother. And some of the other family in New York were in the theatre business, actors and so on. But, to get ahead, to make some money, I looked up what I thought was a stronger company, J.R. Publications, and they were publishing something called “Superman,” and in 1939 they were publishing something called “Batman,” so I thought, “My gosh, I’ve got to get into something of that sort, where I could possibly work more than just for a week or two.” It would be a little more continuous. So I showed them my samples. I went to see [AA editor] Sheldon Mayer, and he looked at what I had and he said, “Well, if you come up with a good idea, I think we could possibly give it some attention.” What sort of idea would they like? “Some super-hero character, because superheroes are selling.” “Okay, I’ll see you with a super-hero character as soon as I can, okay?” I leave his office. As he’s telling this to me, he’s telling this to anybody who walks in through the door. He’s also surely telling it to his buddies, he’s telling it to friends, I had better hurry! If he’s still telling it to them at that point, they’d been thinking about it for a while. So on my way home, I was jotting down notes, a few things that I was most interested in, mostly just thinking of Greek mythology, and [I was] interested in Chinese folklore. I tried to get together as many ideas as I could. I walked down to the subway and waited for a train to come in, and it didn’t. And here there’s a train man down in a truck and he’s waving a red lantern. That meant, dammit, the train isn’t going to come in for a while. And you see the lights of the train. And pretty soon, he checks the tracks. There was a green lantern right behind a pillar. A train pulls in; I’m pushed into a seat. I had to push an old lady aside a little bit—not very much, but I was able to sit down. So, with my pad and pencil, I made notes, and I think the points I got out of this was maybe a character that would carry a lantern, The Green

But, by the time I started to scribble things out, just the early bit about a green lantern and a red one wouldn’t be enough, because it’d be cumbersome. They’d have to be using some other element, so I thought of Wagnerian operas. They are heavy, but they have the good guys and their bad guys, and there was a Ring Cycle of operas, and there was a ring involved. It would go from a young good guy—and he had a girlfriend—and go through a lot of bad guys, and different sets of ideas. And eventually, it would get back to the good guy and the girl…. Okay, so far, so good… and I thought about a ring... have the lantern be something that he’d work with, a battery, say. And I designed the character after Greek mythology. Chinese folklore came in by use of a meteor coming down and crashing. And then I developed a character, did three finished pages. I did the philosophy of the idea, the characters, and the future of it; I did some character designs. Mayer said, “Leave it.” I didn’t think that he thought all that much of it. But a few days later, I called again. I was getting anxious. And he said, “The publisher wants to see you.” I came in to see M.C. Gaines, and Mayer ushered me into his office, I remember. He closed the door behind him and he looked at the pages again for a moment, I recall this, and he said after a pause: “We like it.” And after another pause, he said, “Get to work.” That was it. That was all. SD: Wow. NODELL: And this is all in the matter of a couple of weeks, and “Green Lantern” was off and running. And here we are, 54 years later, and here I is in Detroit. SD: It’s a great story.

“I Should Have Known Better” NODELL: Well, this is really the beginning of the story, because by 1946 I wanted to get into advertising. I was anxious. By 1948, I got back into comics. The economy was lousy; I could not get into advertising to any extent. By the way, people were getting about 35 bucks a week at that time. And the best automobile available was $4000. Who had that kind of money? And I was getting about ten bucks a page. I was doing everything

“Marty Created ‘The Green Lantern’!”

again: pencilling, inking. I didn’t have to show anything at all except the finished job, and so that was good, saving time. And I was earning well over a hundred bucks a week. SD: Marty, did it ever come up as to the ownership of the character or anything like that? NODELL: Not at all. SD: In those days, you sold your ideas. NODELL: That’s right. Well, it wasn’t a matter of selling the ideas; I was selling this character. I was getting a good buck and I was enjoying it. I should have known better. I was about 24, 25. But on the reverse side of the check, there was something I didn’t quite understand, and maybe I should have known better, as I say, about a three-inch legalese paragraph which gave over ownership of everything I’d darned well done on that story.

that for Overstreet [Price Guide]. A lot less details. And I did four drawings in that particular book. And that sold pretty well.

“Why Was I Using ‘Mart Dellon’?” SD: You had also had a very long career in commercial art. NODELL: And in advertising. I was an art director for about five huge ad agencies in New York and Chicago. My accounts were Procter and Gamble, Kellogg’s, Stauffer’s, some Nestle’s, a whole slew of other big accounts. Of course, I had nice accounts like Maidenform Bra. They were a joy. SD: “Cross your heart,” that was them. Tell me, did you meet Carrie in

SD: Same as Siegel and Shuster did. When they endorsed that check, they signed over all of those future rights. NODELL: Precisely, precisely. SD: Terrible, terrible. But so far, they haven’t made a movie of “Green Lantern.” NODELL: They haven’t. They were talking about it. SD: They would have made millions from the property. Is that yet to come? NODELL: I don’t know. SD: When I was a kid, I bought those off the newsstand. I remember that great ring. In fact, I think I had a ring there as some kind of a premium, or something. I had a green ring. NODELL: And you’ve seen Carrie’s gold ring? You haven’t? You’ll have to look at it. She’s been wearing it. It’s a ring that I designed and a jeweler made. Of course, we can’t reproduce it for the general public, but people have wanted it. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Various acquaintances say Marty had made Carrie a gold replica of GL’s ring.] SD: To a kid, a magical ring—with that beam that spread for miles—it was a wonderful, wonderful gimmick, very unique. NODELL: And today, it can be done, using laser beams. SD: You can say that was the first laser beam that a super-hero used. All from that trip on the subway. NODELL: [chuckles] That’s where it all came from. I’ve written a story on

“So Far, They Haven’t Made A Movie Of ‘Green Lantern’” (Left:) So spoke Marty in this undated interview. And, when this issue of Alter Ego went to press, release of the multi-million-dollar Green Lantern movie from De Line Pictures was still a month or three away—but we’re presuming this shot picked up from the Internet by A/E layout ace Chris Day is indeed Ryan Reynolds in the title role. (Personally, Ye Editor wouldn’t recognize that actor if he stumbled over him on the site of a downed alien spacecraft, but he looks pretty good in the role, despite the artificial abs which the 1980s Batman films seem to have forever bequeathed us. We only wish Gil Kane—and Marty & Carrie Nodell— were around to attend the movie’s premiere!) [©2011 De Line Pictures, Inc.] (Inset:) Re the GL-type ring that Marty made for Carrie, collector Gordon Green writes: “As I recall seeing the ring, it looked just like this [green] one that belongs to [sf writer] Harlan Ellison.” Except, of course, Carrie's was gold. And Marc Svensson adds: “What was great about it was the center stone set in the lantern. An emerald!” (Right:) A 1990 Nodell drawing of the original Green Lantern and three of his “successors”—Hal Jordan, John Stewart, and Guy Gardner. In a certain sense, Marty was the co-creator of all four. [Green Lanterns TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

A Conversation With Mart & Carrie Nodell

Jacque-Oh! The Nodells’ granddaughter Jacque Nodell—pronounced “Jackie,” full name Jacqueline—sent several of the art spots used in this issue… and we thank her most sincerely for them! Seen at top right are a photo of young Jacque with her grandparents in 1988, and (at bottom right) a recent pic of her at a comics convention. She is the daughter of Spence Nodell. Among the pieces of art with which Marty gifted Jacque are the art at right from the front page of what she calls “a sketchbook my grandparents made for me to take around so artists at convention in 1998 (I was 14 years old and too shy to actually get sketches, so the book remains empty)”—a late ’90s/early 2000s color drawing of Green Lantern—and Marty’s pencils for the Harlequin illo he did for DC’s 1980s Who’s Who series. Of course, Irwin Hasen had been the original artist of the GL/Harlequin encounters… but then, DC got someone besides Marty to draw the Golden Age GL for another issue, right? Fair is fair! [Harlequin art ©2011 DC Comics; Green Lantern TM & 2011 DC Comics.] “As for where I fall in the family,” Jacque writes, “Marty and Carrie have two sons, Mitchell and Spencer. I am Spencer’s youngest daughter… and I seem to be the one who caught the love for comics!” She sent us a CD containing these art scans and photos, saying: “Most of my belongings are packed up and in storage due to my impending move to Europe.” Bon voyage, Jacque—and merci, gracias, and/or danke!

“Marty Created ‘The Green Lantern’!”

New York or in Chicago? I want to hear the story from you. You’re such a popular couple. When you think of Marty, you think of Carrie. Can you start it from the beginning? NODELL: From the beginning? SD: Where she picked you up in a bar or something? Was that it? NODELL: I picked her up at her dad’s. The end of story, I guess it was, [unintelligible] a confectionery store in the area of Coney Island, and my mother liked her immediately. She wanted me to meet her, so I met Carrie. We took a walk around the Boardwalk on a beautiful spring day and she asked me what did I do? “I bum around, I don’t do very much.” We walked into a stationery store, a candy store in those days, and on one of these revolving stands was an All-American #17 or #18 that I had worked on. And she said she didn’t believe me, because the name was “Mart Dellon” on it. Why was I using “Mart Dellon”? Because in advertising in those days, which was what I wanted to get into, you couldn’t use your own name. It was a dangerous thing, because it was a low degree of culture. SD: Because comics were a lower art form in the minds of advertising, yeah. Generally, if you couldn’t get anything else, you did comic books. So you changed your name to protect the innocent. NODELL: Yeah. [laughs] That’s a good line, very good. That was true, very true. SD: So you went to the Boardwalk and you showed her your work. NODELL: Yeah, so I finally got her to believe me, and we went out a few times, and I married her about a year and a half later. And it was all very nice until I left comics in 1950. We lived, part of the time, up on Long Island… Huntington, Long Island… and then part of the time in Brooklyn. And during the ad agency time, I lived in Brooklyn on [sounds like “Bushman Coupling”], if you know the area. And then I was transferred from an ad agency in New York to Chicago, and I went with a couple of agencies there. I did very nicely, but there was more money on the outside, so I freelanced for Sears Roebuck, doing television commercials. SD: Back up a little bit. How many children do you have? NODELL: Oh, we have two sons, one whom you know, the other chap in Florida. Okay. Spencer is the younger fellow, and my oldest was Mitchell. My oldest son was born in ’43, and Spencer was born in ’46. SD: And have you been made a grandfather yet? NODELL: Oh, sure. We have one in [sounds like “Mack-vere”]. Tiffany is 15, and we have one 18. And we have three more in his family, so there are five, and three more in Mitch’s family; that’s eight. SD: Eight grandchildren, that’s wonderful. Any of them artists? NODELL: No. They’re interested in various things

Indestructible Marty The splash of the third story in 1947’s Green Lantern #24—and a photo of Nodell from the May 2005 Motor City Con—“one of his last,” says granddaughter Jacque, who provided it. Script attributed to Alfred Bester. [Page ©2011 DC Comics.]

“From 1950 Until 1975, I Didn’t Look At A Comic Book” SD: Well, getting back to your career in comic books, did you do any other [DC] work after you’ve [started] “Green Lantern”? Any other comics characters? NODELL: No, not really. SD: Did you do many “Green Lantern” stories before you went back into advertising? NODELL: I don’t remember exactly how many. SD: You weren’t making big bucks off of doing comics. NODELL: For those days, it was good earnings, but no big bucks. SD: But you didn’t stay in the comic book business, is what I’m getting at. NODELL: No, I didn’t stay. From 1950 until 1975, I didn’t look at a comic book. [pause] Don’t say that. [Shel laughs] By 1975, however—oh, backing up to about 1970, I was working a lot for Sears. I worked for special sections of newspapers on their promotions for going back to school, motor news, various other informational sections, health sections, and so on. I was planning and designing the projects. I did some

A Conversation With Mart & Carrie Nodell

Got Milk? Splash and page 1 of Meet the Meadow Golds, a promotional comic drawn by Nodell circa 1950. Jacque says she has only this single two-sided page, “torn out of book and glued with rubber to a piece of paper.” [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

copywriting, but that wasn’t especially important. SD: But you worked on what, layout paper with pencils, a black-andwhite layout? NODELL: Yeah. And there were colored drawings that I would do, too. I’d work on them for, say, covers of these special sections—also for particular malls and that sort of thing. I was coming down to Florida, so I gave up the newspaper work, excepting that Carrie saw an issue of what the newspapers put out for inside. It was for the people to read, like Inkpots or Inkspots, whatever you want to call it. Every newspaper would have the internal newspaper just for the staff. And this particular issue had something about a young chap who was a space salesman. His name was Gary Colabuono, and Carrie said, “Why don’t you look him up? It says here he’s interested in comic books. You’re going to be at other offices, but go over to the main office and say hello to this fellow.” SD: You were still in Chicago? NODELL: That’s right. SD: But you were moving to Florida. NODELL: So I met Gary and I just told him what I could discuss with

almost anybody at that time. I knew very little about what was going on in comics, but he said, “Well, tell me about M.C. Gaines.” So he recorded about three hours of discussion about M.C. Gaines, whatever I could remember, and he was enthralled. We struck up a real friendship. And then he said, “You know, there are such things as shows [= comic conventions] in the business.” And I did go to one or two local shows down in Florida. And he said, “Go to the local shows in your area and see how people are interested in you. If they are really interested, maybe you’ll come up to Chicago for a big show.” That started things rolling. I went to a big show—well, a regional show, anyway—you know, Orlando, and then the big show in Chicago, and that started things going, and people were very much interested. SD: So all of a sudden, this stuff that you did so many years ago came to the forefront— NODELL: Right. The second time around. SD: And you were acknowledged as the creator of— NODELL: Green Lantern. People were very much interested. I did a lot of autographs and a lot of sketching, as I do today. I also do a lot of large pieces that people buy, like large paintings.

“Marty Created ‘The Green Lantern’!”

SD: Joe Shuster did that towards the end of his life. He started making a little money doing private drawings. And these guys are classic. They’re the originators. NODELL: I’ve been making a good buck on the paintings, especially. SD: That’s wonderful. We always felt that fandom has tried to right some of the early wrongs, because you guys were really abused in the early days. And so it’s kind of nice that you’re around. NODELL: Right, right. So now, the publishers, maybe some of them are beginning to scratch their heads. I’m getting offers to do things other than “Green Lantern,” and I’m working on them now. SD: With all your creative juices still flowing, have you thought of creating new characters? NODELL: Well, there’s— SD: Can you look out the window and see some inanimate object and create a super-hero around that like you did with Green Lantern? NODELL: Of course. Why not? There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to create something. But I’ve been so darned busy, doing what I’m doing. And not only the shows around the country, but I’ve been pencilling jobs now for various other publishers, and my lips are buttoned until later, if there’s something I could mention. They are large companies. But they don’t happen to be DC. SD: Listen, I don’t know what your diet is, but you’ve got more energy than guys half your age. You want to tell us what your diet is? You eat a special kind of high protein diet?

A Conversation With Mart & Carrie Nodell

SD: When you met her, she was in retail sales, so that’s a natural. It’s a wonderful profession. They say nothing moves in this country until something is sold. My dad was a candy salesman. NODELL: Really? Carrie’s brother is now. SD: That’s my background. And in the Great Depression, he was a sign painter. He went around painting signs on windows. He opened up a Baby Ruth territory for the Curtis Candy Company. He was a single man, then he got married and wanted to settle down, so he became a candy manufacturer. He was a very happy guy. Dave, my brother, and [unintelligible] used to take us to the art museum in Detroit. So I can identify with Carrie and her family. My dad also taught me lettering when he bought the old Landon [sp?] course he found in a used book store and brought it home. On Sunday mornings, he used to sit at the table and give me lettering lessons. This’ll all be cut out of the interview, but I just wanted to relate it. But I feel guilty taking you away from your table. NODELL: Don’t feel guilty, because it’s a bit of a rest for me. [Taping pauses for a while, then resumes.]

NODELL: No, no. I don’t even know what a diet is. SD: You take Centrum Silver? NODELL: No, no. I just eat what I think I’ll like and that’s it. SD: [laughs] That’s like the guy sitting on a front porch and a man comes and says “You live here all your life?” And the guy says, “Not yet.” NODELL: [laughs] Right, right. I would like to do a few more things in the business. SD: Do you have any chance to read? Are you still interested in, like, Greek mythology or the Chinese culture? NODELL: Oh, a little of Chinese cultures, yes. I haven’t had all that much time to do as much of that as I wanted. First of all, insofar as the shows are concerned, I do the planning with Carrie, and from there on, it’s her job. I’m at the drawing board and she does the calling and prepares what we should be selling and not selling. Well, she’s been in merchandising her whole life. She’s worked for Macy’s.

A Familiar Trio Of Faces This photo of Spencer Nodell (standing) and his parents was taken by Marc Svensson at a Philadelphia comics convention in 2002; the man seated behind Marty and Carrie is unidentified. Spence usually accompanied Mart and Carrie to cons, and was as welcome as his folks were. Carrie once told Ye Editor that she encouraged Marty to attend the cons because she felt it was good for him, that it “keeps him alive.” And so jovial and full of life was she that, to most who knew them both, it was startling when she passed away in 2004, more than two years before Marty himself. He continued to attend some conventions, however, and it always seemed to well-wishers that Carrie was there in spirit with him. They are sadly missed, even today. [Photo ©2011 Marc Svensson.]

Article Title Topline

“Marty Says I Sort Of Committed Him” SD: The Nodell interview, part 2: “The Woman behind the Man”…. It’s Sunday, March 27th, we’re sitting in the Pearl Room with Carrie Nodell. Good morning, Carrie. CARRIE: Good morning, Shel. SD: What do you want to ask me, Carrie? CARRIE: You ask me the questions. SD: Oh, is that the way it works? CARRIE: That’s the way it’s going to work. [laughs] I’ll fill in whatever I can do. SD: Okay. Well, we’ve got a long-time romance. I understand that Marty met you in Coney Island. What were you doing in Coney Island? Tell me the year first. CARRIE: 1940. I lived there. My dad had a restaurant, and my mother had recently passed away. SD: Kind of rough to lose your mother at such an early age. CARRIE: Yes, she was 47. I have a younger sister. SD: Then you became like the mother of the family? That’s where you get all those nurturing qualities. CARRIE: I guess so. [laughs] My dad was a very supportive father, extremely supportive. SD: Do you want to talk a little bit about your father? CARRIE: I don’t think so. [chuckles] He was a businessman. He’d had a lot of fine arts. He worked at the famous Carnegie Deli. The old Carnegie—there was a Carnegie before [legendary owner] Max Asnas came into it, and my dad and fellow co-worker—his partner, really—got into the Carnegie. They didn’t stay too long. They went over to what they called The States, which was a block away from the Carnegie. That was at 55th and Seventh Avenue. And I think the Carnegie was 56th .

What’s Black-&-White—And Green All Over?

SD: These are the war years, right? The Second World War. So you had a lot of business?

A drawing Nodell did especially for a 1996 comics convention—in Pittsburgh, natch! Thanks to Dominic Bongo for retrieving this one from the Heritage Comics Archives. [Green Lantern TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

CARRIE: Yes, but one of the problems, unfortunately, was a black market butcher. And after a year or two, he wanted out. And so my dad and his partner remained… and they had to pay all of the taxes, because the IRS said, “We have you, we don’t have him.” I’m still looking for him! [laughs]

“Love.” And Marty said I sort of committed him. [laughs] That is what he says to this day.

SD: Listen, he’s probably in the foundation of some bridge in New York. CARRIE: Oh, God, yes. SD: When you live in that world, you don’t get out of it easy. CARRIE: So my dad went over after about a year—in fact, while I was dating Marty, my dad was looking for business. And he’d rush home every night, and Marty would come into New York. By that time, Marty had moved to Long Island. And I thought I’d never see Marty again. You know, he was far away.

SD: You mean you owe your romance to an unknown telegraph operator? CARRIE: I must have said, “Regards to your mom and your brother.” Marty had a lot of hard knocks, too. Marty’s dad died when he was 17, and his uncle, who was a leather merchant, told my mother-in-law, “Come to New York and I’ll help you raise the boys.” But when my mother-in-law got to New York, her sister-in-law—all she wanted was what my motherin-law possessed. And my mother-in-law said, “No, the money that we had was to raise my boys.” Marty was 17, his brother was 14. But Marty had a very famous uncle. I don’t know if you knew Dave Apollon…. SD: And what did Dave Apollon do?

For Thanksgiving, he invited me out to Long Island, and he didn’t have a phone. The war years, you couldn’t get a phone. So the only way I could contact him when the party who was going to take me up to the Island said they couldn’t make it, was the telegram. So I sent him a telegram: “Sorry, so-and-so can’t take me to Huntington. I won’t be able to see you.” His mother had invited me that weekend.

CARRIE: He was the greatest mandolin player in the world. He played the Russian mandolin. He opened Radio City, he played at the Palladium—the man was great. But my mother-in-law was very independent. She didn’t want to go to her brother. Marty used to go to the Russian Tea Room with his uncle.

“Love.” I didn’t say “Love” on the telegram. Well, the telegram read

Marty’s mother came from Kiev. Jews were not allowed to live in Kiev.

A Conversation With Mart & Carrie Nodell

Pros And Cons (Above:) Comics fan and Alter Ego benefactor Gene Reed talks with Marty and Carrie Nodell at a Mid-Ohio Con in ’97 or ’98. The Nodells were a welcome fixture at comicons for a number of years. Thanks, Gene. (Right:) Another of Marty's colorful GL sketches, done in 1994. Thanks to Heritage Comics Archives and Dominic Bongo. See yet another Nodell GL sketch on p. 77. [TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

And her family was very wealthy. They lived behind an iron gate with a dispensation from the Czar. Marty’s grandfather, or great-grandfather, was a lackey of the Czar. And when his tenure was up, or whatever it was, the Czar said to him, “Go out, take a horse and ride. And as much land as you cover, that will be yours.” The man was so greedy, he covered quite a bit of land, and the horse collapsed and he went under it. [laughs] We can laugh about it now. SD: What a story! CARRIE: The land remained in the family with special permission, with this big house. In fact, during the Pogroms, my mother-in-law told me they would save the Catholics, because the Pogroms were against the Catholics, also. SD: Oh, I didn’t know that. CARRIE: Yes. And so my mother-in-law would go out and bring the nuns through our back gates, and her family would shelter them until the Cossacks left. So anyway, the land remained in the family [unintelligible conversation mentioning “Communists”]… and the later years, just before Uncle Dave passed away, he was trying to get papers, and we don’t know what happened to them. The government was going to pay the Apollon family—and that would have meant Marty—for the land. The papers were never found. There’s a niece living in Siberia. I don’t know if she’s done anything about it. But I thought there was somebody in Israel whom Marty has not connected to, [who was] contacted. But that was the story.

“Life’s Not Over Yet!” The Conclusion Of Our Interview With Comics And Animation Writer JACK MENDELSOHN Conducted by Jim Amash

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

ack Mendelsohn has certainly had a variety of jobs in his professional career as a writer/artist. From the ’40s through the ’60s, he wrote humor comics at Archie, DC, Dell, EC [Panic and later Mad magazine], Quality, Tower, Standard, and Ziff-Davis. Among the many things he did for which he is rarely credited is writing comic book stories for his close friend and former studio mate, the late Howard Post (whose own interview will appear in an upcoming issue of A/E). His newspaper credits include Felix the Cat and the fondly remembered Jackys Diary. His animation writing includes The Beatles, The Impossibles, Milton the Monster, Wacky Races, “Fearless Fly,” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; and he co-wrote the movie Yellow Submarine, among other cartoon features. On live TV he wrote for The Carol Burnett Show, Laugh-In, Three’s Company, Chico and the Man, and Carter Country, and many other series.

As is our wont, we focused on Jack’s comic book days and the people with whom he worked. But we did not neglect the other parts of Jack’s career, and judging by the quality of the stories he told me, you’ll be glad we didn’t. Special thanks to David Hajdu (author of The Ten-Cent Plague) for giving me Jack’s phone number a few years back. And thanks to Jack for his patience in granting such a long interview, and for waiting for us to get this into your hands! —Jim.

“I Sort Of Adopted Jerry [Siegel]” JA: For Ziff-Davis, you wrote “Dolly in Dreamland” and Nursery Rhymes. MENDELSOHN: Yes, I remember that. I would write an entire issue in rhyme.

South Of The Border Jack Mendelsohn at work in his Mexico City studio in 1956—and (below) a birthday card with a Mexican theme that he wrote and drew for his father, most likely during the period when he was living in that country. Thanks to JM for the art, and for all photos accompanying this interview unless stated otherwise. [©2011 Jack Mendelsohn.]

JA: What was it like to work for Jerry Siegel? I assume that’s where you met him. MENDELSOHN: That’s right. I was living with my parents in Great Neck, New York, and he was living in Great Neck. I remember reading a big front-page story in the local paper one day where he went on a hunger strike. He had a wife and baby, and he felt that he was being treated very unfairly by DC, so he went public with it, literally going on a hunger strike. How that was resolved, I don’t know, but three years later, he was with Ziff-Davis as an editor. He was a strange guy. Later, in the late ’60s, I was working at Hanna-Barbera when I got a call from Joe Barbera—“Come into my office. There’s an old buddy of yours here”—and I couldn’t figure out who he was talking about. It was Jerry Siegel, who I never considered “an old buddy.” But Jerry must have mentioned my name somehow, and Joe made that connection. I was a staff writer, and the next thing I knew, Barbera put Jerry in my office as a writer. I guess Joe thought we were old pals, and that Jerry would feel at home. When I spoke to Joe about it, he said, “I don’t know. The guy seems to have just one idea, and he doesn’t understand film at all. He’s still writing comic books, and I don’t want comic filmic ideas.” Jerry had created a character that was a rip-off of The Joker, called “The Gagster,” or something like that. He kept trying to sell Joe on it, and he spent weeks rewriting and

Comics And Animation Writer Jack Mendelsohn—Part Two

rewriting. Joe said to me, “I don’t know what to do with this guy. I felt sorry for him, but I don’t think he’s going to work out.” And eventually, he didn’t. Joe let him go, but in that period, I got to know Jerry quite well, and heard all of his stories, and saw all of his craziness. Jerry was in the Army during World War II, and when he got out, he started this lawsuit against DC based on a lot of things. For one thing, DC had him signing contracts; he signed away all of his rights to “Superman.” Here’s the story that Jerry told me, so I have to believe it’s true. He was a civilian, and was on his way to see this high-powered lawyer. You know, Jerry had a gazillion-dollar case, and he bumps into a guy [Albert Zugsmith] in the street. They were talking under an awning, and he said to Jerry, “Hey, how’re you doing? I haven’t seen you, blah, blah. Where’re you going?” Jerry said, “Well, I’m going to see So-and-so, my lawyer,” and he told him a little about it. And the guy said, “Hey, you don’t want a guy like that, so high-priced. I’m a lawyer. I’ll take the case.” He was so bad that Jerry and Joe Shuster, his partner, not only ended up losing their case, but having to pay the court fees, too. [NOTE: Actually, Siegel and Shuster won the case pertaining to “Superboy,” but they did indeed lose the “Superman” rights suit. —Jim.] Can you believe that? It was a lock! How could you lose something like that? So that was 25 years previously, and a copyright lasts 27 years. Then you have to renew it. So 27 years was just about to go by, and Jerry was preparing with a new lawyer—hopefully, a new lawyer—to go back into court, and reclaim the copyright. And that’s the period at which I met him. We’re talking 1964, ’65. And that came to nothing, too. I sort of adopted Jerry, because he was like an orphan out here. He was so innocent and he was so ingenuous. He reminded me of Truman Capote, because when he talked, [imitates Truman Capote’s gentle lisp] he talked like this. He was so timid about everything. I mean you could see why he would invent “Superman.” He had a perfect outlet for what he’d like to be. I took him home to my family. My wife made chicken soup for him as kind of a comfort food. We tried to talk him out of suing, and every night he would listen to a bunch of self-improvement tapes some guy had made, and sort of brainwash himself. He’d put them under his pillow and listen all night. The basic theme of it was, “Every day, in every way, you’re getting better and better.” So that was his mantra. Sometimes, when he was upset, he’d sit in the corner and stand on his head to kind of center himself. Whatever philosophy it was, he was into it. It was so sad to be with this guy. And then he was waiting and waiting for his new trial to come up. Finally, it came up, and guess what? [Siegel and Shuster] lost again. So now it’s going to be another 27 years. Finally, at the third goaround, there was so much public awareness of what was happening to him that DC made a settlement with both Jerry and Joe Shuster. JA: They got their names restored as creators on “Superman” stories, and a pension of $20,000 a year, which was upped over time. MENDELSOHN: Yes, but that’s still not a lot of money. We’re talking multi-millions of dollars, and “Superman” is still going strong. JA: What was Jerry like as an editor? MENDELSOHN: He didn’t change a word of anything I did, so I don’t know. Everything I wrote was published word-for-word the way I wrote it. JA: Did you have any story conferences? MENDELSOHN: No. I’m sure I had an initial meeting with him. I remember being in his office, and he told me the kind of things he was interested in doing. Whether I wrote a premise first or just went out on a limb and wrote the whole thing, I don’t remember. It went very smoothly, but the books didn’t sell. Ziff-Davis quit publishing comics after a while. JA: He was always described to me in the later years, and even around

Jack Be Nimble… Jerry Be Quick… (Above left:) Jerry Siegel, co-creator of “Superman” and early-’50s editor of Ziff-Davis’ comics division. Photo retrieved from the Internet. (Above right:) A page, probably scripted by Jack Mendelsohn under Siegel, for Ziff-Davis’ Nursery Rhymes #10 (July-Aug. 1951—actually the first of the two published issues). The artist is Howard Post; Jack recalls scribing most of the stories his artist friend drew for DC in the ’40s and Ziff-Davis in the ’50s. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. For a photo of Howie Post, see previous issue. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

the time you knew him at Hanna-Barbera, as being rather disheveledlooking, a lost soul. MENDELSOHN: He looked like a real loser, and when he opened his mouth, he sort of gave it away. He was just so soft-spoken and shy about everything. I do know that in his worst times, and at Christmas time, he was working at the Post Office. That’s how bad it got, that he had to take a job at the Post Office for two or three weeks. That was probably after he lost the second lawsuit, because I lost touch with him. Joe Barbera let him go after about two months, and that was the end of it. You know who used to date his daughter, his little girl that was on the front page when he was going on his hunger strike? Mell Lazarus. I don’t think it was like a long-term affair or anything.

“[Mell Lazarus] Suggested That Toby Press Hire Me” JA: Speaking of Mell, he was an editor at Al Capp’s Toby Press. [NOTE: For details about Toby Press, see my interview with Lazarus in A/E #96. —Jim.] Didn’t you work for Mell there?

“Life’s Not Over Yet!”

MENDELSOHN: Well, when Mell left to do his comic strip [Miss Peach], he suggested that Toby Press hire me. I worked for them for probably a year or less. I did a lot of Toby Press stories, too. I was editor of a couple little magazines. One was designed to be a competitor with TV Guide. I edited three or four issues of a magazine called The Most. What I would do is buy rejected gag cartoons from the freelance cartoonists. I think my budget was like five bucks apiece or something like that. And in half the cases, I’d rewrite the captions because they weren’t as good as they could be. That was my editor’s blood coming up. I did other stuff around there, too. JA: Did you work on the comic books? MENDELSOHN: No, those were strictly reprints of Li’l Abner. But I bought filler pages, and I also wrote filler pages, because there was a law that a certain amount of pages had to be text. I wrote some silly stuff to satisfy the postal regulations. I remember buying from Harvey Kurtzman a three-pager that he did in wash. It was so incredible. It wasn’t line, it was wash, and it was about some gangsters. That was the only fun part of the job. The rest of it was just a job. JA: Did you get to spend much time with company co-owner Elliot Caplin? MENDELSOHN: Yes. I liked Elliot a lot. In fact, when he moved out here to Palm Springs, he used to come out for the winters. He’d contact me and I’d come out, we’d have dinner together. But it was worth your life to drive with him, because in World War II his knee was injured in a kind of a shipboard accident. He had no control over the lower half of his body, and yet he’d insist on driving 80 miles an hour. It was like a Disney ride. I couldn’t believe that we were still alive after that ride, but he was a nice man. He co-owned the comic strip Broom Hilda. He came up with the title, he found the artist, Russ Myers, and sold the strip. The next thing you know, they’re partners. Through my connections with Tribune Media, TMS, I had the rights to Annie. I was working on that, and then they offered me the rights to any other strip I wanted, and I said, “Broom Hilda.” I started to pitch Broom Hilda to the networks as a cartoon series. Suddenly Elliot started calling me, and luckily for both of us, he had nothing bad to say about it. He just loved what I was doing, so it was not a question of his saying, “Change this,” or “Fix that,” or “This is what I want to do.” JA: What time period are you talking about here? MENDELSOHN: Broom Hilda was maybe thirty years ago. Elliot was a colorful guy; I always liked him. The one who was hard to take was his brother Al [Capp], but I didn’t see much of him because he would only breeze in once a month. But when he would come in, you sort of sensed his presence when he was still in the elevator. You just sort of knew he was there. He filled a room when he entered it. His personality was very loud. He reminded me of an Orson Welles character: big, a little on the plump side, a deep resonant voice. Everyone was very intimidated by him. So Al and Elliot opened Toby Press, named after Al’s

grandson. Al stocked the company the way you’d stock a lake with fish. He stocked it with all of his relatives, and Elliot ran it because Al was never there. Al lived in Massachusetts, and Elliot was there in New York. He had a brother-in-law and a nephew running his merchandising division, where they sold the rights for things like kids pajamas. His sister was the PR person. He had a brother called Jerry, a little short guy, and Jerry was really his pimp. When Al was coming into town, Al would call and say, “I’ve got this editor and a publisher from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch coming in for the weekend.” Al kept an apartment off Columbus Circle all year round. In fact, he had a husband and wife who were there all the time, just waiting for his call. They lived there and he’d send over a dinner menu, and Jerry would hook them up with hookers. Jerry had a black book like you wouldn’t believe. And Al had a niece who was the receptionist to answer the phone in the hall or outer lobby. And me! JA: The only non-relative. MENDELSOHN: That’s right! Originally, it was Mell, of course. I don’t have anything bad to say about any of those people, except Al came across as a real bully to me. Not personally to me, though. He was really kind of boisterous and loud. JA: How did he get along with Elliot? MENDELSOHN: I assume they got along fine. I never heard Elliot complain about him, and I wasn’t that close to Elliot at that time. He was my boss. It was only until later years when I was doing the Broom Hilda series that I got to have long conversations and meetings with Elliot.

“When I Quit [Panic], They Folded The Magazine” JA: So you left Toby Press and, comic book-wise, you wrote for Dell Publications and for EC, for whom you wrote several issues of Panic. MENDELSOHN: Did you see that two-volume Panic collection? Throughout the pages, there are enough references to me, but what nobody says is that when I quit—because it was just too much work— that’s when I moved to Mexico. When I quit, they folded the magazine, because they couldn’t find another guy, a poor schmuck like me, [chuckles] who would write it cover-to-cover. I did everything. I was responsible for every page except the cover ideas. That I didn’t do. JA: What was it like to work for Feldstein? MENDELSOHN: Feldstein was okay. I didn’t think he was the funniest guy in the world. I think he was maybe one of the luckiest people, because I didn’t see great editing talent in him. Everything I wrote was probably edited by Nick Meglin. I don’t think Al was very hands-on. He certainly never wrote anything himself that I knew of. [NOTE: Most of Feldstein’s writing was in the horror and science-fiction books that he edited. — Jim.] But I’ve got to tell you, he astounded me, because when I was on a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con, and I hadn’t seen Al for about 40 years, he invited me to a panel that he was having in another room after our meeting with his paintings. He’s a marvelous painter. It’s like photorealism. It sort of changed my perspective of him. He’s more talented than I initially thought. I always got along with him. We didn’t have any dramatic conflicts. I’d send my stories in, they’d change them a little, maybe, and publish them. That was a simple operation. Panic was something else. I was lucky. I was given the choice of the top talent—Wally Wood and Bill Elder and Jack

A New Broom Hilda Sweeps Clean Russell Meyers’ comic strip heroine appeared in TV cartoons in 1971 and again in segments of NBC’s Fabulous Funnies series in 1978-79.[Broom Hilda ©2011 Tribune Media or successors in interest.]

Comics And Animation Writer Jack Mendelsohn—Part Two

The Panic Room (Left:) EC publisher William M. Gaines (on the left) and his editor & chief writer Al Feldstein, during the vintage 1950s days at EC Comics. Thanks to Wendy Gaines Bucci, via Michael Feldman. (Below:) Among the numerous stories scripted by Jack Mendelsohn for EC’s Feldsteinedited “authorized imitation” of its four-color Mad comic, Panic, were “Mel Padooka” (#7, Feb-March 1955) and “Irving Oops” (#8, April-May ’55). Both feature art by regular Mad-man Will Elder. Thanks to John Benson. [©2011 William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.] (Bottom:) After Panic’s final six issues, however, Jack M. preferred to move to Mexico for some time. Here he is in 1955, waiting for his studio near Mexico City to be completed.

Davis. Sometimes I’d even suggest who I felt would be best for my stories. When I knew that Bill Elder was going to do a particular story... you know how he used to fill the panels with little jokes on the wall and signs and stuff? I felt compelled to do that myself. I thought that was my job. I didn’t realize that he was going to do that. I had enough to write a story with a continuity, and keep the thing flowing without having to stop at each panel and put stuff up on the wall. But I was doing it. It was just killing me, and I was getting $10 a page for that, believe it or not. Ten bucks a page. So I went to Feldstein and I said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m leaving.” JA: You started with issue #7, and Panic went to #12, so you did six issues. MENDELSOHN: Yes. Al said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you my editorial fee if you’ll continue to do it.” I said, “How much is that?” He said, “A dollar a page more.” [chuckles] I said, “Al, forget it.” That’s when I moved

to Mexico. But I still would, occasionally from Mexico, come up with an idea for an article, and I’d send it to him. Half the time, I’d sell it to him. That was for Mad magazine. I continued to write for Mad magazine. It was a fun thing to do, and I always had a good relationship with Nick Meglin. JA: Same question for the other companies: did you have to

“Life’s Not Over Yet!”

discuss what you’re going to write about first? MENDELSOHN: I think I would just go and do it. It’s easier to do it than explain it because I’d draw rough drawings, and three-quarters of the things I sent sold. What I didn’t like was that they started to get a little less generous with their pay. I think they were up to about twenty-five bucks a page for the writing. I would send in a six-page idea and they’d buy it, but they’d only buy like three pages of it. [chuckles] They’d cut it in half, and that would kill me because I had put all that work into six pages, and I didn’t get paid for the other three pages, so it seemed it was hardly worthwhile. JA: Did you talk to Bill Gaines very much? MENDELSOHN: Sure. I liked Bill a lot. Bill, when I first met him, was violently opposed to anyone smoking. He was going through a “Quit Smoking” phase, and you didn’t dare smoke anywhere near him. He had signs posted all over, “No smoking. No smoking.” This was the days before it became popular to have a No Smoking section. His office was definitely a non-smoking area. They had these cruises where they’d take the whole staff, including the writers, though I never went on them. Bill was very generous that way. He would take them to Africa, the Virgin Islands... they’d fly all over the world. Every year, they’d go somewhere else. At Christmas time, they’d give you a bonus of twice what you earned for them that year freelancing, which I thought was very, very generous. And yet Bill was a very tight guy in regard to money. He had a reputation for being a penny-pincher. It’s just so hard to figure people. We’re all a mixture of so many things. JA: Did you interact with any of the Mad artists? MENDELSOHN: Oh, sure. Sergio Aragonés was my long-time friend from Mexico. When I lived in Mexico, that’s where I first met him. Actually, his family is Spanish. They migrated to Mexico, and when I first met him, he was studying to be an architect, but at the same time, like a hobbyist, he was a cartoonist. He was selling little cartoon drawings here and there. When we were friends in Mexico, he got me into the Newspapermen’s Society there. And then years later, he showed up in New York, and I was somewhat helpful in getting him started at Mad, same way I was sent to Panic by Al Jaffee, who I knew from the National Cartoonists Society. Al Jaffee recommended me because they were looking for a writer for Panic. JA: Bill Gaines said they had a lot of problems getting stories through the Comics Code. Do you remember any of that? MENDELSOHN: They only dealt with the Comics Code when they were producing comic books. I don’t remember any problems with my stories. I know with his horror magazines, which Al Feldstein was very involved with, they had all sorts of problems. JA: In the Panic days, did you ever deal with Elder or Davis or Wood or Joe Orlando? MENDELSOHN: No, the only person I ever dealt with on a personal level was Wally Wood, and the poor guy suffered from migraine headaches constantly. He said to me once that he didn’t have a minute of his life that he didn’t have a blinding headache. I don’t know how the guy concentrated on his work with that. I liked him, but of the whole group, I liked Al Jaffee best. Al was very, very close to Bill Elder. They were brought up together in the Bronx, and he used to tell me Bill Elder stories that were just hysterical. Every artist should have someone standing behind them to say, “Okay, it’s finished now.” Bill Elder was a prime example. Al Jaffee would go up to Bill’s apartment, and Elder would have a painting on an easel of a deer in the forest. Al would say, “Gee, it looks good.” And Bill said, “No, I’m not finished. There’s a few things I want to do with it.” Okay, and the next time Al’d come up, he says, “It looks the same to me.” Bill said, “No, don’t

Guess He Groo On Jack! Jack M. and his Mad buddy Sergio Aragonés, 2005.

you see it’s springtime? I put little buds on the trees, the twigs that have grown?” “Oh, okay.” [chuckles] The next time Al’d come up, there’d be snow on the scene. [Jim laughs] And the next time, the snow would be clearing away, little flowers would be popping up. Bill never finished it. It was about two inches thick from oil, layer after layer of paint. He’d just keep changing it with the seasons. Another story that Al told me about him: for years, Elder’s family lived in the Bronx in a five-story apartment house, because the rent was cheaper. No elevators. They used to walk up; the less you’d pay, the higher you’re willing to walk. So it’s a poor family, but finally, the father couldn’t take it. His heart was starting to go, so they moved down to the first floor. One day, his mother came in, and Bill was sleeping in late. She says, “You bum, why don’t you get up and get a job? Every day, all you do is sleep in.” So he says, “That’s it! I’ve had it! And he rushes to the window, he opens it, and he jumps out. The mother fainted because of all those years of conditioning that they had been living on the fifth floor; she forgot that they were now living on the first. He didn’t hurt himself at all. He jumped down into the alley, but his mother… [mutual chuckling] JA: Did you know Harvey very well? MENDELSOHN: I knew Harvey, not intimately. I was sort of the enemy, because when he left Gaines, there were ill feelings between them, and it’s kind of like I crossed over to the other side. But no, I knew him well enough. When I was in the National Cartoonists Society in New York... I was active in all branches of it and I used to run the Shop Talk sessions every month. It was my job to line up cartoonists, and have them talk on a subject and record it. One session, I decided to have Harvey Kurtzman as a guest. I felt he was so powerful a figure that I didn’t need three other cartoonists alongside him. He was very bright and very sharp and somewhere I have the recordings. I was in charge of this for about a year and a half.

“I Always Considered [Dell] A Quality Place” JA: We’ve finished with EC, and now let’s get into Dell. Oscar Lebeck was your editor. In the ’50s, I have you writing Angel, Beetle Bailey, Captain and the Kids, Francis the Talking Mule, Fritzi Ritz, Hi and Lois, and Nancy. In the ’60s: Alley Oop, Bullwinkle, miscellaneous HannaBarbera strips. MENDELSOHN: Right. I never did any Hanna-Barbera comic books. But I did ghost-write a Flintstones Sunday page for artist Gene Hazelton. JA: What do you remember about working for Dell?

Comics And Animation Writer Jack Mendelsohn—Part Two

Lazarus on Miss Peach. I wrote and drew it because Mell was too busy. In that case, I had no one editing me. I just wrote it and drew it, and turned it in, and it was published. I have a couple of issues of it here. JA: Dell is known as a company that was kind of restrictive in the sense that everything had to be neat and orderly, and not the slightest hint of any impropriety with the characters. MENDELSOHN: That’s true, yes. JA: Did you ever have any problems in that particular vein? MENDELSOHN: Well, it’s interesting that you mention that. I don’t remember if it was Dell or another company, but I remember Howie Post, as a joke, did a kind of a Bill Elder thing in some comic book page. He had a headline, like someone in the background reading a newspaper. And if you look closely, the headline said something about—it wasn’t even that shocking—about a love nest—the language wasn’t really that bad. He just put it in as a joke, and that got a lot of static. They had to rip out the page, and put in a new one, and he got chewed out for that. That wasn’t something I did, but it was something he did. I just don’t remember the exact wording. In those days, that was considered a no-no.

“Wilburrrr!” Er, we mean… “Peterrrr!” For Dell’s long-running Four Color series, Mendelsohn wrote the adaptation of David Stern’s novel Francis the Talking Mule (#355, 1951). In 1950 Universal had filmed a movie adaptation starring Donald O’Connor as Lt. Peter Stirling and the voice of Chill Wills as you-know-who. Seven Francis movies were made in the ’50s; they were basically ripped off by the 1960s Mister Ed TV series. Artist unknown. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

MENDELSOHN: Not much. I always considered them a quality place, and was very proud to have been associated with Dell. Howie Post and I did a little work for Dell. Walt Kelly was doing “Albert the Alligator,” which eventually—when he left to do the Pogo newspaper strip, it was too much work, and he gave up doing comic books. Dell brought in Howie, who could ghost him so perfectly, to take over. Not to do “Albert,” but to do other Kelly-like stories, and I was part of the package. I was writing for Howie, or with Howie. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: In a 2011 e-mail to Roy Thomas, Jack expanded on this: “When [Walt Kelly’s comic strip] Pogo went syndicated and Kelly became too busy to continue the comic books, the people at Dell were eager to sign Howie to take over the Kelly features, but were offering him slave wages to do it, so Howie politely declined.” If we can parse these two statements, it would seem that Post may have briefly picked up the slack left by Kelly’s departure, then moved on to more lucrative areas.] JA: By the way, did you do DC work with Howie in the ’50s? MENDELSOHN: Yeah, and Larry Nadel was the editor. Again, don’t hold me to what I might have done, because after a while, it’s just a swirl of books and you don’t remember exactly when you did this or when you did that. But I know I did a tremendous amount of work for Dell, and I did my own comic book for Dell [Jackys Diary]. I did a book for Mell

Talking about the restrictions of comic book in general, I remember that you couldn’t do anything that was even halfway Biblical like Noah’s Ark or Adam and Eve references. You just didn’t mention them in any context. I also remember when I was doing my comic strip, Jackys Diary, I got a call from King Features editor Sylvan Byck. He called and invited me for lunch. So we had lunch and I kept wondering, “What do you want to talk to me about?” And he was such a gentleman, very diplomatic. He said, “Jack, I want to talk to you about something. You know, sometimes, you have a tendency in your strip to use the classic symbols for curse words. We’d rather you didn’t do that.” I said, “What’s the problem?” He said, “Maggie and Jiggs [in Bringing Up Father] had a parrot. Every time he opened his mouth, out would come these curse words.” But of course, they did it with the exclamation points and the stars and stuff. And he said, “A lady wrote a letter to the newspaper and said, ‘My 12-year-old boy is starting to use the foulest language, terrible curse words and stuff. And I know there’s only one place he could have been learning them, and it’s from your comic strip.’” She sent a clip of the balloon where the parrot was cursing. [mutual laughter] And Byck said, “I know it’s stupid, but let’s not do that. It upsets the newspaper editors. We don’t want to upset the editors and our business.” Isn’t that incredible? One letter. That’s all it takes, is one letter. JA: Since you were working with licensed characters at Dell, do you remember what kind of resource material you were given? I know you could have obviously looked in the newspaper for Alley Oop or Beetle Bailey. MENDELSOHN: No, I was familiar with it all. You just do it, that’s all. JA: Did you like writing for comic books? MENDELSOHN: Yes, it was very easy. It was not a lot of money, but I was living in Mexico at that time, so it translated to a lot more money there than it would have here. I mean, I was paying like $16 a month rent for my apartment, and everything was in ratio to that, so it was a lot of money. It was a comfortable way to live.

“We’ve Made A Deal With Dell, And Want You To Do Jackys Diary” JA: You owned Jackys Diary, correct? You had to license it to Dell? MENDELSOHN: Oh, at that time, I didn’t own it. King Features owned it then. We were 50-50 partners, which is how contracts were written in those days. I didn’t even arrange the deal with Dell, by the way. One day, I

“Life’s Not Over Yet!”

Dear Diary… The Jacky’s Diary comic book cover at left is usually listed on Internet sites as a reprint of the Jackys Diary strip (with Dell’s overly sensitive editors adding the apostrophe to make the title grammatically correct). The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide lists the comic book one-shot as having an “April-June 1960” cover date. The invaluable website Don Markstein’s Toonopedia says: “Today, Jackys Diary is one of a small class of comics, such as King Aroo and Sam’s Strip, that are almost completely forgotten by the general public—but vividly remembered by those who really know comics.” Too true! The early days of King Aroo and the entirety of Sam’s Strip have recently been reprinted by IDW and Fantagraphics, respectively— so here’s hoping someone makes it a triple play! [©2011 Jack Mendelsohn.]

got a call and was told, “We’ve made a deal with Dell, and want you to do Jackys Diary?” I said, “Sure.” JA: For the Alter Ego readers who might not be familiar with Jackys Diary, tell us about it. MENDELSOHN: It was a Sunday page, never a daily, and it was supposedly written and drawn by and about a nine-year old kid who was very innocent about what was going on in the world. He would misinterpret everything that he saw, but he would keep a diary and tell about a visit to the circus, and he didn’t really understand what he was seeing. He misinterpreted what he was seeing. He’d go visit his father’s office, and make observations about that, or things he learned in school that he’d get all screwed up. It was just sort of misinformation, and I’d draw in a very purposely-childish way, and write in a childish way. It enjoyed a lot of success.

were in Europe. The syndicate had to go to great expense to put it out in three different formats. They have what they call “half page,” and they had a third of a page, and they had “tabloid” size. It had to go out in all three sizes to different papers, and each one requires a steel engraving. The syndicate bullpen would have to realign the drawings to fit. They’d have to stretch a panel, or cut a panel, or move dialogue. Added to that was the fact that it was in so many different languages. King Features had to not only supply the translation, i.e., into Swedish, but they had to send metal plates to Sweden to replace the dialogue. It became very, very expensive for the syndicate to do this.

With me, it was gravy, because we had a 50-50 split on the gross, and I didn’t have to deal with Xeroxing or changing dialogue, or engravings or handling... the syndicate was absorbing all of those costs and in the end, they didn’t make any money on the strip. I was doing all right, but they weren’t. Had I known, had I to do it over again, I would have done a daily version because dailies cost nothing. They’re done on like wet cardboard, and sent out in batches, along with a hundred other strips, every day and that’s it. It’s gravy for the syndicate, but I wasn’t smart enough to do that arithmetic. I stubbornly said, “No, no, no, it’ll find its audience,” and it did have an audience. I’d see the fan mail, and people today still talk about it. It’s not enough to cover the expense that they had to meet, but it ran three years. JA: By the way, did you ghost-write the Felix the Cat newspaper strip?

MENDELSOHN: Yes, and I also wrote a lot of Felix comic books. I worked with Joe Oriolo, who eventually became the owner of the

The problem with it was—I didn’t realize at the time—that because it was a Sunday page, it was very, very expensive to produce. Had it had a listing like, say, Prince Valiant with 400 papers, they could afford to do it. But I only had 60, 65 papers, half of which

A Pair of Jacks Jack Mendelsohn as depicted in the Oct. 25, 1958, issue of the trade magazine Editor & Publisher—and a vintage Sunday of Jackys Diary, depicting a child’s-eye view of driver’s tests. Although the strip ran from 1959 to 1962, it’s difficult to date the strips Jack M. sent us on a CD, since most have a “2007” copyright, indicating they are reprintings—but the cleverness of the writing and art is timeless. [©2011 Jack Mendelsohn.]

Comics And Animation Writer Jack Mendelsohn—Part Two

Double Felix Cover of Dell’s Felix the Cat #1 (Feb./March 1948), which was probably scripted by jack M.; he reports that he drew that character for Dell, as well. Of course, the once super-popular Felix had appeared in numerous comics prior to that date. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

property. In fact, when I wanted to move to Mexico, he offered me a deal. If I stayed, he’d make me a director and I could direct their animated cartoons because I used to write their animated shorts. I said, “No,” I was still set on going, and I never took advantage of that. JA: I have you as writing the strip from ’48 to ’52. Toby Press did three issues of Felix the Cat. MENDELSOHN: They did? Maybe they were reprints, because Toby Press didn’t do original material. JA: Actually, they did a lot of original stuff, but before you got there, apparently. When Mell was the editor, they did a lot of books. MENDELSOHN: Well, I didn’t do any comic books [for Toby] except the filler pages, as I told you earlier. JA: Did you write and draw the Felix the Cat comic books? MENDELSOHN: Yes. On Felix, there wasn’t too much dialogue, because it was essentially a pantomime. JA: What was Joe Oriolo like? MENDELSOHN: He was okay. I don’t know too much about him. I know that the real

Tippy Teen And Go Go, Too! The splashes of two so-called “teen” titles from Tower Comics (and editor Harry Shorten) probably scripted by Jack Mendelsohn: from Tippy Teen #6 (Aug. [?] 1966) and the spin-off Go Go and Animal #6 (Oct. ’66). Thanks to Stephan Friedt. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

“Life’s Not Over Yet!”

creator was Pat Sullivan, and somehow in the corridors of history Pat Sullivan got lost, and Joe Oriolo took credit for creating it. I never met Sullivan. I just knew Oriolo, who, if I’m not mistaken, was an animator at Famous Studios. That’s where I first met him, but I was not on his level. He was an animator. My God, that’s like being a king there, and I, a lowly opaquer, was like a flunky. JA: I have one more comic book company to ask you about and that, of course, is Tower Comics with editor Harry Shorten. You were out of comics for a while, then you came back. MENDELSOHN: I was here in California, writing on Laugh-In at the time. Shorten called me from New York and offered me $15 a page, or something, to write for them. I had a lot of free time, even though I was writing television, I had that New York state of mind where I had to be working all the time so you just say “yes” to everything. If you freelance long enough, you just say “yes.” So I wrote all these teenage books for him, the Tippy Teen and then there was Go-Go and Animal. They were just ideas stolen from Archie, you know. It was teenage gang stuff, and it was really easy money because Harry never edited anything. Harry was also doing a syndicated comic strip, and he hired me to ghost-write gags for There Oughta Be a Law, which was a rip-off of Jimmy Hatlo’s They’ll Do It Every Time. I remember he wanted me to write a nightclub act. He became very friendly with this singing comedy duo. I can’t think of their names—they were Canadians—and he thought they were just brilliant. But that was not something I wanted to do. I want to talk about two cartoonists of my era that I admire. Dan Gordon, to me, was the genius of all times: storytelling, drawing, I mean it was orgasmic to look at his stuff, and read his stories. He was such a good storyteller. I knew him very briefly because he worked for Joe Barbera. He created The Flintstones, but Joe Barbera would never admit it. I still have all of Dan Gordon’s old comic books. That’s one thing I never threw away. The other guy I most admire is John Stanley. What a storyteller. He was a genius. Stanley’s work on Little Lulu is a lesson in how to write. I never met him, but I ghost-wrote Little Lulu at one time, and I had to read all of his stuff.

“Do You Think You Can Write Animated Cartoons?” JA: What got you into writing for animation? Felix the Cat? MENDELSOHN: Yes. I did Felix and a lot of animated stuff; I did some features for Terrytoons, but the main thing was Jackys Diary, which was

distributed by King Features. King Features had set up an animation department under Al Brodax, who was an admirer of Jackys Diary, and he called me. “Do you think you can write animated cartoons?” I said, “Sure, why not?” So I started writing tons of stuff. I wrote The Beatles Saturday morning cartoon series. I wrote practically 80% of the scripts. I also wrote Krazy Kat and Beetle Bailey. When The Beatles was the #1 cartoon on Saturday morning on ABC, and Joe Barbera on the West Coast—I was in New York—he contacted me and he offered me a job to come out and work on animation there. It sounded good, so I went on a test cruise out there, and it was working out nicely. I had a nice arrangement with them, and about a year or so into it, I got a call from Al Brodax saying that he’d sold the Yellow Submarine as a feature film, and was having trouble with the script. “Do you want to take a shot at it?” I said, “Sure.” So I got a leave of absence from Joe Barbera for two or three weeks—I forget exactly how long—and I wrote Yellow Submarine. It got rewritten considerably by other people later. But nevertheless, I’m one of the credited writers, and that’s how my animation career started. I was with Hanna-Barbera about a year and a half, and I asked for a new contract. They hemmed and hawed, and finally fired me for daring to do it. I was stuck. I was here with my wife and my five-year old son, didn’t know a soul here, didn’t know anyone, but I remembered that I had written some Bullwinkle comic books for Jay Ward, so I contacted Jay Ward, sent him a couple of issues, and said, “I wrote these. Could you use me?” He invited me over, and the next thing I know, I’m working for Jay Ward, and loving it. I love Jay Ward. He was such a mensch, such a gentleman. For him, I wrote “Super Chicken” and George of the Jungle. And I wrote the Captain Crunch commercials for him. Jay was doing cereal commercials. JA: You didn’t write Dudley Do-Right, did you? MENDELSOHN: I did it as a comic book, but not for television. I didn’t write “Tom Slick,” either. Hanna-Barbera had a cartoon show called the Wacky Races. It was so complicated and I said, “This is the hardest writing to do, because you don’t have dialogue.” The hardest writing in animation is Tom and Jerry, for example. There’s not a word of dialogue, and you’ve got to fill page after page after page with one gag after another. At least at the dialogue, you can pad it to take a rest. And when I saw this “Tom Slick,” although I certainly could have written anything I wanted as far as Jay was concerned, I said, “No, thank you. I’ll just stick with George and ‘Super Chicken,’” because they were fun. I wrote Milton the Monster for Hal Seeger. That was fun, and I did other series for him. One was about a bratty little girl, a female Dennis the Menace. And then there was another about a hobo who travelled on trains. I probably wrote some “Fearless Fly” episodes. See, when you’re on staff, you end up doing everything there. You work on all the shows, and you become a utility ballplayer, come off the bench, and you work on that show. JA: When you were writing for animation, did you deal with artists very much? MENDELSOHN: Never. We dealt with Joe Barbera, who was in charge of the writing, and he very rarely had complaints, at least with me. He didn’t have major problems with me, but sometimes... what is the genius of Joe Barbera, and I really do think that word is not an exaggeration—when he was reading a script, he could spot a story weakness in a minute. And not only that, he could help you fix it. It was so invigorating to work with Joe on scripts. Not that it happened often because as I say, luckily, I sort of sailed through on all my assignments. But every once in a while, when I knew I had a weak spot, I’d think, “Well, maybe no one will notice.” But Barbera noticed. They needed writers who could write half-hour shows, and most of them couldn’t draw storyboards, and there was a lot of drawing to do. It took a lot of drawing to draw a half-hour storyboard—and then to have to

Comics And Animation Writer Jack Mendelsohn—Part Two

living cartoon.” He said, “Let me send you over to my agent.” He had an agent who handled a lot of his business, Mace Neufeld, who’s now one of the biggest movie producers in the world. When I told him what I wanted to do, he said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m going to a barbeque tonight with my neighbor, George Schlatter. He’s the producer of Laugh-In. I’ll talk to him about you.” And the next thing I knew, he arranged a meeting with me, and I was signed to the show. But you see, remember, I said before, “everything is geography”? If he hadn’t lived next door to Schlatter, who knows what would have happened? I’d still be doing cartoons. It’s so funny the way things work. You’ve got to leave yourself open for all these things, and see what happens.

Always Leave ’Em Laugh-In! (Right:) The original cast of Laugh-In, a.k.a. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, with the headlining comedy team seated in front. Mendelson wrote for this top-rated, influential TV series’ 1969-70 season. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.] (Above:) Jack M. in the 1970s.

change it? That’s only a first draft, and I’d have to change it. It’s so much easier to change a first draft on a typewriter than it is when you’ve gone to the problem of laying it out, and drawing camera angles, etc. So Barbera realized it was impractical for the writers to draw the scripts, and he had to start learning to appreciate the written word on a piece of paper, and it changed the industry a lot. A lot of the guys who, like myself, were former cartoonists who turned to writing—they were few and far between—but I find they’re the best cartoon writers, because they think visually, and they know what works. JA: When you were working with Jay Ward, you just dealt with him in particular, didn’t you? MENDELSOHN: Him and Bill Scott. Bill Scott was, I guess, his producer, but Bill was also the voice of Bullwinkle. Bill was a nice guy who really created these shows. Jay Ward had nothing to do with the creation of them. He just appreciated them, responded. [Jim laughs] No, it’s true. In the recordings, Bill did all the Bullwinkle, and God knows what other voices. Jay Ward was such a generous guy. Once, we’d finished our commitment to ABC on our shows. He developed another show, and when the network people came around and tried to give him notes, he literally threw them out of the place. That was the end of that show, and we were all out of work for a while. You know, Jay never laid anyone off. He kept all the staff on, and I felt funny about it. I used to say, “Jay, you know I’m really not doing any work. I feel funny.” He said, “No, don’t worry. I’ll find something for you to do.” And week after week, I’d come in, pick up my check, go across the street to Frascati’s with the directors and animators, and we’d go out drinking. One of the guys said, “Don’t worry. Look, that guy’s got so much money, his family owns half of San Francisco’s downtown real estate. He owns like six square miles of it, so don’t worry about the money. This is like a hobby for him.” That’s why he could throw out people from the network, and say, “Get the hell out of here. I don’t want to listen to you.” I really liked him very much. And he was such a good audience. Whatever you said, he just broke up, like it was the funniest thing anyone ever said. It’s hard to dislike someone like that. Finally, I said, “Jay, you’re a wonderful person. I really love working for you, but I feel guilty. I’m picking up a check every week for doing nothing.” He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I’d like to do prime time television, and get out of this cartoon rathole.” And he said, “Give me an example.” I said, “Well, there’s this new show called Laugh-In, it’s been on now like six weeks as a summer replacement. It’s a big hit. It’s like a

“[Laugh-In] Was Competitive, A Wonderful Challenge” JA: When you wrote for Laugh-In, did you write jokes, or were you writing the segments like when Arte Johnson would go, “Verrry interesting.” ? MENDELSOHN: Well, that you didn’t have to write; Arte would throw in himself. But no, again, I felt like a utility player. They assigned me a partner, and we worked together. We did everything: monologues, sketches, blackouts, we did “News of the Week,” we did whatever you could think of. Song parodies... whatever they needed, we delivered, and it was exciting. We had six two-man writing teams and each week, one of the teams was responsible for the entire script. Now those scripts ran, even in little ol’ bits and pieces, they ran about 250 pages, and this team was responsible for every page of it. If a joke didn’t work, you’d have to rewrite it, cut it, replace it with something else. It was up to you. You

“I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together” This Carol Burnett Show DVD features some of the best sketches from the celebrated 1967-78 TV variety show. Chances are that some were scripted by Jack Mendelsohn. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

“Life’s Not Over Yet!”

JA: How long were you on Laugh-In? MENDELSOHN: One season, ’69/’70. JA: And how long were you on Carol Burnett? MENDELSOHN: One season, ’72. Before that, I did The Jim Nabors Variety Show. My partner and I did a sketch about The Lone Ranger, and Carol played his wife because her first opening show of each season always had Jim Nabors as the guest. So now that Jim had his own show, Carol was sweet enough to do his show as a guest on his premiere show. And she was so impressed with this sketch that she hired us to do her show.

“Carol Burnett Is So Nice She Doesn’t Belong In Show Business” Impossibles—But True! The Impossibles—namely, Fluid Man, Coil Man, and Multi Man—appeared in the 1969 animated series Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles. [©2011 Hannah-Barbera, Inc., or successors in interest.]

became sort-of the head writer/producer of that week’s episode, and there was so much pride involved. It was competitive, a wonderful challenge. You felt proud if your show was better than last week’s show, had an outstanding sketch in it. But you were responsible for every page, and I thought that was such a wonderful idea. I think you get the best out of people. I’ve never seen that done before or since, on any show I’ve ever been on, where you rotate teams and then they were responsible. You’d be surprised how, if you’re not responsible for it, there’s a tendency to just coast. JA: Did you deal with the actors very much? MENDELSOHN: Not really. You weren’t encouraged to do that. By the way, on any show, you’re not encouraged to mix. The reason is, when you go to rehearsal and you see someone muff a line, or maybe you find a better way to say things, you approach the actors, but they’re getting input from so many people that it gets confusing. There’s a pecking order. If you have a suggestion to make, you make it to the head writer. If he approves, he tells the director, and the director tells the actor. You don’t break that chain of command, because it just leads to anarchy.

JA: I forgot to mention that, back in the mid-’60s, you also worked on The Impossibles cartoon. MENDELSOHN: You know what’s so funny? When Joe Barbera hired me, paid my way out here, moved my family out here—which, by the way, I insisted on; I wasn’t about to make that coast-to-coast move without someone paying for it—The Impossibles was my first assignment for him, because he knew I wrote The Beatles, and he wanted to do a knock-off of The Beatles, but add an element of undercover agents stuff. Then I did many other shows, like the Great Grape Ape, and Posse Impossible. Some of those lasted like one season. I wrote almost all of the Hong Kong Phooeys, and then I did a live-action show. I liked that because I got residuals. It was a take-off of the Disney Love Bug. It was a car and it was called The Love—something. It was a Jeep, and it could talk and make noises, which were done by Mel Blanc. Mel used to do a lot of voices. I would sit in on the recording sessions. JA: Didn’t you write some Spider-Man? MENDELSOHN: I wrote one episode sometime in the 1970s, reluctantly. I did it because my friend was the story editor, and he was desperate for scripts. They did Spider-Man for a season, maybe more. It was done by a lot of places at a lot of times, but this was for Marvel. Part of the connection was because Stan Lee was a VP there at Marvel at that time, so he squeezed that one through. I ended up working for all of the cartoon studios, except Disney. Well, in recent years I wrote a Bible and presentation for a projected series called Toontown Tots for Disney.

JA: Was it the same way on The Carol Burnett Show? MENDELSOHN: Yes. On The Carol Burnett Show, we’d tape on Friday, and so you had the weekend off. On Monday morning, we’d all meet in the Producer’s office. We had maybe eight writers on that show, and we’d discuss ideas. One might say, “You know what would be a funny idea? Carol works as a short-order cook, and complications set in.” They’d say, “Yeah, that’s not bad, okay.” And another guy says, “I was thinking about Harvey Korman doing this,” and, “Yeah, that’s good, okay.” Then we’d kick it around and people would throw in jokes. About an hour later, when they got the show sketches locked in, they’d say, “Okay, who wants to take the ‘short-order cook’ sketch?” And a guy raises his hand, “I’ll do that one.” Another guy, “I’ll do that one,” and then we’d drift off, and have a week in which to write our sketches and, of course, rewrite them because the Head Writer would change them or you’d go to a run-through, a rehearsal, and you’d see some stuff doesn’t work. Then it’s up to the original writers to change it. But then, if it still doesn’t work by the end of the day, the Head Writer fixes it. I liked writing variety shows because they were like vaudeville sketches, whereas with situation comedy—which I’ve certainly written my share of, too—it’s different. It’s a little closer to reality. Not that much, but closer.

Good-bye, Larry Jack feels that the TV series Hello, Larry, which starred McLean Stevenson after his career-making role on M*A*S*H, got career-ending treatment from Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show barbs. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Comics And Animation Writer Jack Mendelsohn—Part Two

Mendelsohn Milestones (Left:) Jack M. being presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Writers Guild of America West in 2005. (Right:) Another ingenious Jackys Diary scripted and drawn in 1961 by Jack… or, as he might sign it now, “Jack Mendelsohn, Age 84½.” Another Sunday was seen last issue. [©2011 Jack Mendelsohn.]

JA: My list of your animation work and TV work is very, very incomplete. MENDELSOHN: When I send out my credits, I rarely put in stuff that I see as sort of minor league. For example, I was story editor on Hello, Larry, and not that it was such a bad show, but every night Johnny Carson would do a Hello, Larry joke, and it killed the show. Ratings-wise, we were doing okay, but Fred Silverman at ABC never renewed it because he said, “People would laugh at us for doing it.” JA: McLean Stevenson was fun to watch. I don’t know what he was like in real life. MENDELSOHN: He was a strange guy and, like all actors, he loved to have fits. I remember, one day, he was sitting around a table, reading a script, and he said, “This piece of [expletive], I’m not going to do it,” and he threw it up in the air, and the pages fluttered all over the place. He stormed off the set, and people went chasing after him, shouting, “Mac, come back!” “No, no, no, no, no!” Five minutes later, he came back and they said, “Okay, you happy now?” Mac had changed one word of the script. Now he was very happy with it. But that is typical of some performers. JA: A show of star power? MENDELSOHN: Yes, they like to show it off. But I thought Mac was a nice guy. I bumped into him once after the show was over, in a luncheonette, and we had lunch together. A very bright guy. I’ll close this off with a Carol Burnett story. Carol Burnett is so nice that she doesn’t belong in show business. She knows it, and she made sure to marry a really tough guy to do her dirty work and be her hatchet man. My partner Paul Wayne and I wrote a sketch. We were having these little forest fires up in the Canyons where we lived. It was making all the newspapers, so I decided it would be a funny sketch if you open with this couple in a house, and they’re very loving, and they’re kissing each other. They’re sort of honeymooners, so in love with each other. Then all of a sudden, a fireman knocks on the door and he says, “Folks, I hate to upset

you, but there’s a brush fire down the hill. Nothing serious, we think we can control it, but you never know, so just take your most precious possessions and get out of the house.” Of course, that leads to a fight over what each of them considers precious. The man wants his bowling trophy or the big fish over the fireplace, [mutual chuckling] and she wants pictures of her mother and stuff like that, so they get into a huge fight over it, and they’re just about on the verge of divorce. Then the fireman knocks on the door again, he says, “Okay, the fire’s out. Forget it.,” and they go back to loving and hugging and kissing. It’s kind of a sweet little sketch. Everyone loved it. The head writer loved it, the producer loved it. Carol said, “I don’t want to do this sketch.” I said, “Why not?” And she said, “You know, there’s a real problem here. People are having brush fires, and losing their property. I’m just afraid that it’ll offend some people,” so that was the end of that sketch. My other story about Carol: they decided one day to do a couple of shows in New York, because Carol was going to star in a revival of Once upon a Mattress in New York City. When I found out that they were going, I arranged for my parents who lived in New York to go to the taping, and they got all excited. So it was arranged and sure enough, a messenger came to my parents’ apartment and dropped off the tickets. They couldn’t get over it! They went to the taping and when it was over, my mother went backstage, and said, “Carol? I just want you to know Jack Mendelsohn, who works for you, is my son.” Carol said, “Oh, you lucky woman!” and she threw her arms around my mother and kissed her. My mother lived on that for the next ten years, [Jim laughs] because Carol is so—she is so sweet. She says the right things to the right people at the right time. She’s a very caring person. There’s nobody else in show business I’ve known who would even think of saying that. She’s a great woman, and I’m thrilled that I was even connected in any way with her. You know, there were many important people who were meaningful in my life, and I hope I was meaningful in theirs. Anyway, life’s not over yet!

“Life’s Not Over Yet!”

JACK MENDELSOHN Checklist [NOTE: The following Checklist is adapted from information—some of it a bit less accurate than usual—contained in the online Who’s Who of American Comic Books (1928-1999), established by Jerry G. Bails; see ad on p. 77. Names of features below which appeared both in comics with that title and in other comics, as well, are generally not italicized. Jack Mendelsohn and Jim Amash were the sources of some of this information. Key: (w) = writer; (a) = artist; (ed) = editor.] Name: Jack Mendelsohn (b. 1926) (artist, writer) Animation: (Al Brodax) The Beatles (w) 1965-67; Broom Hilda (dates & other info uncertain); (D.I.C.) Camp Candy (w)(story ed) 1989-90, Dennis the Menace 1986; (Ed Graham) Linus the Lionhearted (w) 1964; (Famous Studios) Koko the Clown (w)(director) 1965; (Hal Seeger) “Fearless Fly” 1964-65; Milton the Monster (w) c. 1965; (Hanna-Barbera) Great Grape Ape Show 1975-78; Hong Kong Phooey 1974-75; The Impossibles 1975-78; Posse Impossible 1977; Wacky Races (w) 1968-69; (Jay Ward) George of the Jungle, “Super Chicken” (w) 1967-68; (King

Features) Beetle Bailey 1963; Krazy Kat 1962-64; Yellow Submarine (w) 1968; (Murikami-Wolf-Swenson Films) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (w) 1989-93; also Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (one episode) 1983; et al. Live TV: writer - Carol Burnett Show 1972; Carter Country 1978; Chico and the Man 1975-76; Hello, Larry 1979-80; Jim Nabors Variety Show 1969-71; Laugh-In 1969-70; Shazam! 1974; Three’s Company 197879; et al. Member: Writers Guild of America West; National Cartoonists Society Magazine Cartoons: 1000 Jokes (w, a) c. 1950; numerous other magazines & publishers, 1940s & ’50s Syndication: King Features Syndicate - Felix the Cat (ghost writer) 1948-52 & Jackys Diary (w & a) 1959-62 Awards: Writers Guild of America – Lifetime Achievement Award, 2005 Comics Studio (Shop): Iger Studio (w, a) summer intern c. 1942 COMIC BOOK CREDITS (Mainstream U.S. Publications): Archie Comic Publications: Archie (w) c. 1948-49; Cubby (w) c. 1948-49; Super Duck (?) (w) c. 1948-49 Better/Standard Publications: Little Angel (w) c. 195459; Supermouse (w) c. 1948-58 DC Comics: Animal Antics (w) c. 1946-48; Jimminy and the Magic Book (w) 1946-47, (from inventory) 1954; Presto Pete (w) c. 1946-48 Dell/Western Publications: Alley Oop (w) c. 1962-63; Angel (w) c. 1954-59; Beetle Bailey (w) 1950s; Bullwinkle (w) 1950s; The Captain and the Kids (w) c. 1958; Dudley Do-Right (1950s); Francis the Talking Mule (w) 1951 (& other?); Fritzi Ritz (w) 1950s; Hi and Lois (w) 1950s; Miss Peach (a?) 1950s; Nancy (w) 1950s EC Comics: Mad [magazine] (w) 1961-62; Panic (w) 1954-56 Prize Comics/Feature Publishing: Alex in Wonderland [in Wonderland Comics] c. 1945-47 Quality Comics: Buster Bear (w) c. 1953-55; Candy (w) late 1940s to mid-1950s Tower Comics: Go-Go and Animal (w) late 1960s; Tippy Teen (w) late 1960s

Lunatickle My Fancy A classic Mendelsohn page, illustrated by Lee Elias, from “The Horrible Comic Story behind the Horror Comic Books!” in Whitestone’s Lunatickle #2 (circle 1957). Lunatickle was one of the earliest of the mostly short-lived imitators of the black-&-white Mad, whose magazine re-launch had taken off like a rocket in 1956. This 10-pager, which lampoons the censorship of horror comics, deserves to be reprinted in its entirety. Thanks to Ger Apeldoorn for bringing it to light. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Whitestone Publications: Cockeyed (w) 1957; Lunatickle (w) 1956 Ziff-Davis: Dolly in Dreamland (w) [in Dolly] 1951; Nursery Rhymes (w) c. 1950-51

Bob & Betty —& Archie & Betty The Betty (Cooper) Tokar Interview, 11-16-10 by Shaun Clancy AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION: On a May 2010 trip with my brother Mike from Bellevue, Washington, to my home town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, we were reunited with our dad after 35 years. Our talks took us down memory lane and, before long, the discussion of Haverhill High School led to its connection to the Archie comic book and comic strip, and its creator, Bob Montana. The thought finally occurred to me that perhaps this story should be researched, and thus began my year-long project of factfinding. Who better to tackle this project than myself, who grew up in the area? Never did I suspect how involved this task would be, nor how much information had been previously provided about the origins of Archie Andrews. In one of the many interviews I did, Eda Edwards suggested I talk with a fellow by the name of Rich Rubenfeld, who had written a few interviews with and articles on artists Harry Lucey and Joe Edwards (Eda’s late husband) that had yet to be published. Rich and I immediately hit it off, and in fact I arranged for those interviews to be included in my upcoming book. He soon put me in contact with Barbara Lucey Tancredi, Harry’s daughter; she in turn relayed a story in passing about her aunt Betty having once dated Bob Montana. From my research to date on the subject of who inspired which characters in the Archie world, I immediately believed, from Barbara’s description of Betty’s life, that I had found the woman whom both Bob and Peg Montana had mentioned in earlier interviews as the inspiration for Betty Cooper. The following is a very slightly abridged version of the interview I had with Mrs. Betty Tokar Jankovich; I hope you will find it as entertaining as I did, and will wish to read the rest. For more on the people and places that Bob Montana utilized to help created the “Archie” world, I would suggest you keep an eye out for my book, forthcoming in December of 2011, which will be the 70th anniversary of Archie’s debut in comic books…and it is not 1941’s Pep Comics #22, as everyone believes! The book will also feature interviews with the families of Montana, Harry Shorten, and others… as well as key interviews with current and former employees of MLJ and Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

Everything’s Archie—And Betty! (Above:) The oft-reprinted first page of the first “Archie” story, from Pep Comics #22 (Dec. 1941), as per the 1991 trade paperback Archie Americana Series: Best of the Forties, Vol. 1. Written and drawn by Bob Montana, with Vic Bloom. [©2011 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.] (Left:) Bob Montana and Betty Tokar at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, in 1942. Courtesy of Barbara Lucey Tancredi, via Shaun Clancy.

n the spring of 1941 to the fall of 1942, original “Archie” writer and artist Bob Montana and Harry Lucey, a great “Archie” artist in his own right, became good friends while working at MLJ (the company that before long would change its very name to Archie Publications) and even shared a studio together. They remained in contact all their lives, with Harry even helping occasionally on the Archie daily newspaper strip (launched in 1946) when Bob needed immediate help. As you’ll see below, Mrs. Elizabeth (Betty) Tokar Jankovich—who is referred to for convenience in this piece by her maiden name of “Tokar,” since that was her name when she knew Bob Montana—did not step forward with her story earlier because her late husband was not aware of her past relationship with Montana. For the first month of the courtship, Betty, Helen (Betty’s sister), Bob, and Harry would meet in the lobby to chat; they would then have lunch as a group but were still unsure of who was really “dating” whom. If one stretches his/her imagination, this can be seen as yet another example of the potential Betty/Archie/Veronica romantic triangle which became the essence of the “Archie” feature. At last, it was Harry Lucey who made the first move, asking Helen out on a date, which then led to Bob and Betty dating for 6 to 9 months. During the beginning stages of the relationship, they would double-date with Harry and Helen. Harry and Helen eventually married, but the romance between Betty and Bob ended in the summer of 1942. One can only

Bob & Betty—& Archie & Betty

Harry liked my sister more than he liked me, and then Bob and I were paired. We liked each other, also. SC: I recall a Gil Kane interview stating that, when he worked at MLJ, he saw Charles Biro pointing out to the other people that you could peek into the next-door locker room by looking through the transom above the connecting door. Was this true? TOKAR: I don’t recall that, but I know you could hear sounds and conversations from next door, but that was as far as it went. Our office was on the same floor as theirs. This was on 60 Hudson Street in New York. SC: Were you working there long before you met Bob? TOKAR: I started there at about the time war broke out in Germany, so about 1937 or ’38. SC: Are you older than your sister Helen?

High School Comicfidential

TOKAR: I’m younger by a year and a half…. I got her a job there.

Two specimens of Bob Montana’s youthful hometown writings: (Above:) An illustrated 1937 “note home,” later printed in a 1939 issue of the local Brown and Gold high school magazine. (Right:) Cartoon done for the Haverhill High School newspaper, Jan. 27, 1939. Thanks to Shaun Clancy for these items. [©2011 Estate of Bob Montana.]

SC: This place you worked at, what did they do?

speculate as to what might have been, if they had stayed together. Maybe the “Archie” world we know today might have been totally different. We will never know, but it’s definitely fun to speculate….

TOKAR: It was a 23-story Western Union building, so it was the telegraph business…. I [worked for] the Nestlé Company, which was new back then, and they had their own private dining room, so I used to wait on the men there. They were all men….no women at all.

SHAUN CLANCY: I was in your area last weekend, and your niece, Barbara Lucey Tancredi, tells me that you just celebrated your 90th birthday last Saturday?

SC: Do you remember how long you and Bob were seeing each other?

BETTY TOKAR: She should have invited you to it. There were lots of people there, but mostly family. There’s nothing nicer than family.

TOKAR: It was a nice relationship, but somehow we drifted apart… let’s put it that way. He was a very, very nice young man, and slender. I think he, his sister, and his mother lived together.

SC: She did mention it, but unfortunately I was involved in taping a TV Show for PBS called The History Detectives…. I am writing a book on the creation of “Archie” comics and its characters, and a majority of the book will be about Bob Montana. Bob went to high school in Haverhill, Massachusetts, from 1936 to 1939, before graduating in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1940. I grew up in the Haverhill area, plus both my parents and both sets of grandparents also went to Haverhill High School, so I’m very familiar with the influences and inspirations Bob Montana used in his “Archie” work…. I’ve interviewed many of his former classmates from both schools. I’ve also interviewed many people who were involved in MLJ and Archie Comics, and recently talked with Rich Rubenfeld, who was a very close friend of Harry Lucey. In addition, I’ve talked with your niece Barbara Lucey. Both have highly recommended that I talk with you next about a little-known fact—that, in addition to being related to the Lucey family, you also dated Bob Montana in 1941-42.

SC: That’s right. It was his sister Ruth. His mother, Roberta, had another child who would have been maybe three at the time, named Georgie. I heard that Georgie passed away as a child, so that might have happened before you met them. Did you ever meet Bob’s mother?

TOKAR: I believe I met Bob when the book was already well established.

TOKAR: Very few people had cars at that time. We traveled by subway and by trolley and such…. I know [Harry’s] mother and father had a car.

SC: “Archie”’s first appearance had the cover date of December 1941, so do you recall if you met Bob before or after Pearl Harbor? TOKAR: I believe Pearl Harbor happened after [I met Bob], but I’m not sure. Our work locker room was next to the MLJ offices, and my sister and I met Harry and Bob in the lobby of the building we all worked at.

TOKAR: I visited the apartment once. I think he wanted to introduce me to his mother. It was somewhere uptown in Manhattan, because I lived in lower Manhattan near Delancy Street and Houston Street. SC: Did you and your sister live with your mother then? TOKAR: Yes, we did. SC: Did Bob meet your mother? TOKAR: Yes, he probably did. SC: Did Bob have a car?

SC: When you went to Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire with Bob, how did you get there? TOKAR: He and his mother had a cabin up there, and I took a bus from New York. When I got off the bus he was waiting there with a rowboat, and he rowed me across the lake to the cabin.

The Betty (Cooper) Tokar Interview, 11-16-10

TOKAR: The name is familiar, but I don’t recall anything at all about him. SC: Were there any artists you recall also working there? TOKAR: Yes…there was one. He eventually committed a murder. SC: That would have been Bob Wood, but that would have been years later. TOKAR: Bob Wood, that’s right; but I was very shocked to hear that…. SC: “Archie”’s first appearance was in fall of 1941, but Bob Montana would have drawn that story months prior to that date. Do you recall anything about Archie, Jughead, or Betty?

I Love Lucey (Above:) Artist Harry Lucey in uniform, in New Hampshire— “1942ish,” writes Shaun Clancy. At MLJ from 1940-42, he drew such features as “The Hangman” (which he co-originated), “Madame Satan,” and “Fireball,” and he later became a top artist on the various “Archie” features, as well. He also drew at one time or another for DC, Ace, Parents, Fox, and Lev Gleason. Thanks to Barbara Lucey Tancredi.

TOKAR: I remember when Bob and I were dating that he drew one of my dresses on one of his Betty type characters. It was a dress with flowers on it…. It was not too short, and it was a striped skirt with a dark jacket.

At right is Harry Lucey’s cover for Special Comics #1 (Winter 1942), which introduced “The Hangman” as a masked hero seeking vengeance for the murder of his super-hero brother, The Comet. With issue #2, the comic’s title was changed to The Hangman. Writer uncertain. [©2011 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

SC: Have you ever seen the Archie comic strip or comic book?

SC: Was it just the two of you?

TOKAR: Oh yes.

TOKAR: No, no. His mother was with us.

SC: But not at that time?

SC: I mean, you went to Lake Winnipesaukee by yourself to meet them?

TOKAR: No.

TOKAR: Yes and it was Meredith, New Hampshire, I believe. That was the only time I ever went to New Hampshire. SC: Did you see the pictures I sent to Barbara? TOKAR: I sure did, and they stirred up a lot of good memories. I have very fond memories of Bob, because he was a wonderful young man. SC: When I was interviewing his fellow classmates, they mentioned that Bob was very generous with giving away sketches and drawings to his friends. Did he ever give you a drawing? TOKAR: No, never. SC: Did he ever talk about work? TOKAR: Just that they were commercial artists doing comic books. SC: Do you think he was embarrassed to be working on comics? TOKAR: No. I think they were very proud of their work. SC: You stayed in touch with Harry Lucey, since your sister eventually married him? TOKAR: Oh yes…we were very close. I thought very highly of Harry. Harry was a wonderful, wonderful human being. I can’t say enough about him. SC: I’m going to mention to you the names of a few people who worked with Bob and Harry and see if any of them stir up any memories. Bob and Harry’s immediate boss at MLJ was a man by the name of Harry Shorten.

SC: When did you first realize that “Archie” and Bob Montana were linked together? TOKAR: Right after I met him, as he was working on the comics then…. SC: He also drew other strip [= comic book feature] at that time. TOKAR: Barbara recently brought me a page that you sent us from “Wilbur” [NOTE: See art on facing page], and I was very much surprised when “Betty Tokar” received 100% in Algebra. [laughs] Wasn’t that nice of him to give me such a high grade? SC: Unfortunately, Wilbur himself only received a 22.5% in that same test. [after mentions of

Priming The Pump Bob Montana at the lake, 1942. Courtesy of Barbara Lucey Tancredi.

Bob & Betty—& Archie & Betty

TOKAR: I was very flattered when I saw that. SC: I’m surprised he never told you he did that. Did Barbara show you the other “Archie” comic page I sent her to show you that has Mr. Weatherbee’s secretary’s name as Tokar? [when Tokar responds affirmatively:] Does that female in that comic panel look like you at one time, or maybe she’s wearing something you might have worn at one time? TOKAR: I’ll have to look a little closer. [pause] I think that dress he copied was a green and white striped skirt with a brown gabardine jacket. SC: Did you ever wear your hair in ponytails? TOKAR: No. At that time I had long hair, and I would braid it and wear it around my head and connected to the top of my head. SC: Do you have any pictures of you with Bob Montana? TOKAR: Yes. It was taken around my house, I think, up on the roof. I’m pretty sure I still have it, but my husband passed away in August of 2010, and my stuff is all over the place, as I moved out of the house. I remember seeing that picture and it brought back such nice memories. SC: I would greatly appreciate a copy of that picture when you find it. The Montana family was very excited to hear that I had located you and would be thrilled to see any such photos. You happen to be the only

Where There’s A Wilbur… High school student Betty Tokar easily outscored not only Wilbur Wilkin but also “Joseph Kubert” and “Abie Colman“ in Zip Comics 31 (Nov. 1942). The real Joe Kubert, of course, became a major comic book artist, editor, and even writer—and while the precise identity of “Abie Colman” remains unknown, Shaun Clancy reveals that Bob Montana’s real last name was “Coleman,” with an “e,” so Abe may have been a relative of Bob’s. But Shaun writes that Bob “never used family in his strips in the 1941 & ’42 days.” But then again, maybe he did—just that once. As for the “Wilbur” yarn—it sure had an “Archie” look, didn’t it! Except that “Wilbur” debuted in Zip Comics 18 (Sept. 1941)—three months before “Archie” made the scene in Pep Comics 22! Thanks to Shaun. [©2011 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

Montana professional colleagues Abner Sundell and Joe Kubert, and one Abe Colman [sic], draw no recognition from Mr. Tokar:] Did you know Bob Montana’s real last name was originally Coleman?…. His family changed their last names to Montana when Bob was 13 or 14. It had been Bob’s father’s stage name in vaudeville. Did Bob ever talk about the days he worked in vaudeville with his dad? TOKAR: No. Not at all. He never told me anything about his personal life…. SC: What types of places did you go to when you saw Bob? TOKAR: We went down to Broadway to a movie and to dinner. SC: The reason I am asking you is because I know that, when Bob had a connection to an activity or experience that he had done, he would then transpose that into the “Archie” comic strip [= feature]. An example would be those grades we just mentioned from the “Wilbur” comic.

A Tokar Of His Affections Must’ve been a lot of Tokars around in the early ’40s! Betty Tokar was a student in a “Wilbur” story, and a “Miss Tokar”—first name unknown—had been Mr. Weatherbee’s secretary in the even earlier “Archie” tale in Jackpot Comics 5 (Spring 1942). See text for comparisons with the real thing. Thanks to Shaun Clancy. [©2011 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

The Betty (Cooper) Tokar Interview, 11-16-10

Bob while you were married to your husband? TOKAR: I had heard that he had married Peggy and that later on that they had four children. Then later on in life I heard that he had died while crosscountry skiing. He had a heart attack, and I was devastated when I heard that. SC: Bob’s dad had heart issues, too, and also died young…. Do you recall any other dates? TOKAR: We went on a picnic and we went to some island in New York and you had to go by boat. We took our lunch with us; we sat by the lake and had a nice picnic. SC: Looking at the characters like Jughead, Veronica, etc., in the “Archie” world, do you see any of those characters related to people you knew in real life?

Camouflage Or Not—Who Is Who? Shaun labeled this 1942 photo “Camouflage Class”—a course that some guys may have been taking “in anticipation of being drafted… thus not going into combat but rather inducted into that type of department in the military. This is conjecture on my part, and no one from that class is alive to verify. The pictures on the wall I would assume to be camouflage-related.” Harry Lucey is seated in the back row (in center of pic, nearest the window)… with fellow cartoonist Warren King on his left, then Bob Montana. Shaun adds, “I’m sure there are more comic book talents there, but I don’t recognize them.” Thanks to Barbara Lucey Tancredi & Rich Rubenfeld.

other important woman that was in Bob’s life. He met and married Peg while he was in the service. In an April 10th, 1988, Boston Globe article by Gerald Peary on the Archie-Haverhill connection, he talks with Bob Montana’s widow, Peg Bertholet, about who Betty was modeled after. In it, Peg stated, “Betty was a girlfriend of Bob’s in New York who ended up marrying the police chief of Perth Amboy, New Jersey,” but she couldn’t remember her last name. Was that your husband? TOKAR: Later on in life he became a police chief…. SC: That is interesting. When did you marry your husband? TOKAR: 1943. SC: That must mean that Bob and Harry Lucey must have still been talking while he was in the service. TOKAR: My husband enlisted in the Army because he figured in 1941 that he would get his service over with and go at his time and not when the government would call him. He got stuck in the service because then the war broke out, so he had to stay in it until 1945. I’d known him way before that—probably when I was 16 years old or so. I knew him when I knew Bob Montana. SC: Then he went into the military, and then that’s when you met Bob? TOKAR: Yes…that’s true. SC: Then Bob went into the service, and that’s when you were re-introduced to your husband. TOKAR: Yes. Bob married someone else, and I married someone else. SC: Was Bob leaving into the military some of the reason you drifted apart? TOKAR: No….I never heard any inclination of that. SC: Bob went into the military the fall of 1942. Did you hear stories of

TOKAR: No. I didn’t know any of his friends. I only met his mother and sister.

SC: People are going to come to the conclusion that Betty was created from you and that sprouted from the relationship you had with Bob. What are your thoughts on that? TOKAR: She might have been created before he met me. I don’t know.

SC: Just from the people I’ve talked with and the interviews I’ve read, I’m inclined to say that, in my opinion, Bob used you as his influence for creating the character Betty… and I’ve talked with many people who think they were the inspiration. Bob meeting you in 1941 around the time he helped create the series is too much a coincidence, and the fact that he used your real name wherever he could just proves to me you were in his mind a lot. TOKAR: Well, I’m very flattered. SC: From the people I’ve talked with, Bob having the buck teeth as a teen, wearing the bow tie and button shoes, leads one to believe that Archie was created from Bob himself. Would you believe this to also be true, that Bob was Archie? TOKAR: I couldn’t say one way or the other. SC: Did you read comic books as a child or during that time? TOKAR: Not really. I know they were creating comic books then, but I wasn’t really into that type of stuff. SC: Did your husband know you dated Bob Montana, the creator of “Archie“? TOKAR: No… he never knew it because I knew my husband earlier and then we broke up. I was only 16 when I met him, and we drifted apart, and I was in New York and my husband was in Birch Amwood, and then I met Bob. Bob and I dated for awhile and there again we drifted apart. SC: From what I’ve heard through the grapevine, and please don’t take any offense from this, Bob Montana’s mother interfered with your relationship. Do you think that might have happened?

Bob & Betty—& Archie & Betty

Montana In New Hampshire (Top left— & left to right:) Betty Tokar, Harry Lucey, and Harry’s future wife Helen Tokar, in a 1942 photo taken by Bob Montana. (Top right:) Bob at the lake, 1942. Soon, he and Betty would go their separate ways… but they’d always have their memories. Thanks to Barbara Lucey Tancredi & Rich Rubenfeld. And, to close things out: directly above is a Bob Montana Archie daily strip from Jan. 6, 1964, courtesy of Comic Link. What? You didn’t think Veronica Lodge was gonna demand equal time??

TOKAR: I had a feeling that she wasn’t really approving of me. SC: Was that by the way she addressed you? TOKAR: You get that feeling around a person. It was Bob’s mother, and if it got serious… and it could have happened. I liked Bob. He was nice and he liked me, so when you get the feeling that you don’t get that approval…. I thought it best we drift apart.

TOKAR: No. Never saw each other again. Bob went into the Army, and then I married my husband and he went overseas and came back in 1945. Two years after that, he went into the police force, and that same year I had a little baby, and I only had that one child. He died later on in 1982 of an accident. SC: Did you have more than one sister?

SC: Did you drift apart immediately after seeing his mother?

TOKAR: I had two other sisters, and they were in Europe. I was born in Europe. I’m the only one left in my family.

TOKAR: No. I think we saw each other even after that.

SC: I know about Helen. Who were your other siblings?

SC: After you two split up, did you ever run into each other again?

TOKAR: There was Margaret and Julia. One stayed in Europe and the other one came to America, and she died. I had four brothers, and two of

The Betty (Cooper) Tokar Interview, 11-16-10

Lazin’ By The Lake (Above:) Archie and Betty—whoops, we mean Bob and Betty—at Lake Winnipesaukee in 1942. With the whole world going to war, you had to take your fun where you could find it. Thanks to Barbara Lucey Tancredi & Rich Rubenfeld. (Right:) Bob Montana and Betty Tokar may not have had easy access to a car in ’42, but Betty Cooper “enjoyed” a cruise in Archie’s jalopy in Zip Comics #25 (March 1942). Repro’d from Archie Americana Series: Best of the Forties. [©2011 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

them were Franciscan monks. There were a total of eight of us in our family. My sister Helen died about 3 or 4 years ago. SC: What was Harry Lucey’s opinion of Archie [the comics company]? Did he ever express it? TOKAR: I think he really liked working there.

Lynn Montana’s Response to the Betty Tokar Interview, 1-7-2011: Hello Shaun, I read it and am grateful to you for sharing it with me. It seems she is being extremely polite and discreet and appears to be a very lovely woman. Sounds like nothing happened much between her and my Dad, nor is she too impressed that she might have been the poster girl for Betty in the strip. You know as much as we do. After all, this all took place before any of us kids were born and Dad only revealed that Betty was partly derived from a former girlfriend, so maybe we can speculate that Ms. Tokar may have been that person. To be honest with you, I think our family always thought the mystery of where any cartoon character comes from, is fine just as that—a mystery. Is anyone going around trying to figure out where “Superman” came from, or “Charlie Brown,” or even “Scarlett O’Hara,” “Oliver Twist,“ or “Forest Gump”? Where does any character come from—the mind of its creator and from their personal life interactions with other people. Enough said. In Dad’s case, there are several people who claim that they are the prototype for a particular character. As I said before, we and they have no proof of this and one can only guess. Their claims do not make it so. But the family of Bob Montana will not rain on their parade, so to speak. We take all this as a compliment to our father. Lynn Montana

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

The Mystery of the Missing Letterer! - Part 2 “I started off, as most cartoonists do, hating lettering, feeling that it wasn’t worthy of my time. I hired people to do it. Then I hired a fellow named Abe Kanegson, who I’ve lost touch with over the years. He was one of the most brilliant letterers I have ever met in all my life. He could write in Old English…or in any font. It enabled me to attempt weird things, not weird, but highly imaginative things.” —Will Eisner, quoted in Durwin S. Talon’s Panel Discussions: Designs in Sequential Art Storytelling

here was Abe Kanegson? For decades, Spirit fans wondered about the fate of Eisner’s master letterer after he quit comics forever in 1951. Though his career barely lasted five years, Kanegson made an indelible mark on the comic book field. His subsequent life and career remained a mystery even to Eisner, who tried for years to find his old friend. Now, 60 years later, the mystery is finally solved. That story is nearly as interesting as the discovery itself. In September 2010 I started the research for a proposed book on “The Secret Files of Dr. Drew,” a feature the Eisner studios produced for Fiction House in the late ’40s. The series was written and drawn by three of Eisner’s most talented ghosts, writer Marilyn Mercer, artist Jerry Grandenetti, and letterer Abe Kanegson. My first order of business was to find out more about them. While there was ample information on Grandenetti and a little about Mercer, almost nothing was known about Kanegson. Will Eisner, Jerry Grandenetti, and Jules Feiffer had shared some brief personal

Lurid Lettering! (Above:) Abe parodied love comics lettering in this pre-Mad edition of The Spirit from Sept. 18, 1949. Art by Will Eisner, script by Jules Feiffer. Eisner had fun having parodies of comic book ads and radio commercials interrupt his stories. [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

anecdotes, but I found nothing about Kanegson’s early life or his postcomics career. Even the indispensable Who’s Who of American Comics (1928-1999) came up blank on that score, aside from mentioning Abe’s interest in folk music. But that fact, plus an article in which Jules Feiffer mentioned Abe’s pronounced stutter, eventually provided the key that unlocked the mystery. That, and dumb luck. As part of my research I entered the name “Abe Kanegson” on eBay, curious what might pop up. And something sure did—a 1969 folk record called Abe Kanegson, with the photo of a fortyish dark-haired man on the cover! Could it possibly be the same man? The photo jibed perfectly with caricatures of Abe that had appeared in an old Spirit story, but I needed solid proof. Working on the assumption that both Abes were the same man, my wife Janet volunteered to investigate. She scoured the Internet, and within hours discovered that album. Abe was a respected professional square dance caller, folk singer, and songwriter, credited for “Abe’s Donegal” and “Abe’s Skirt Swisher.” Further research showed ads for Abe Kanegson in New York square dance clubs as early as 1953. He also performed at the

Hair Apparent (Left:) Phony ad from “The Torch” Spirit story from April 25, 1948. Jules Feiffer believes that Abe wrote, drew, and lettered the faux ads scattered throughout this and the “Lurid Love” Spirit story. [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

The Mystery Of The Missing Letterer—Part 2

prestigious Indian Neck Folk Festival in the early ’60s, a folk venue attended by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan early in their careers. But one nagging thought remained: Was this Abe Kanegson our Abe Kanegson? If Feiffer’s description of Kanegson’s terrible stutter was true, how could Abe possibly have performed as a singer? And then Janet found the following excerpt from a Nov. 11, 1997, interview posted on the Square Dance Foundation of New England website. Here interviewer Bob Brundage mentions Abe while talking with a square and contra dance caller Tony Parkes. Brundage: I was gonna ask you if you remember Abe Kanegson. Parkes: I never knew him. He died before I had the chance to meet him. Brundage: He was one of those… he was the Mel Tillis stutterer. But he sang beautifully. [NOTE: Here, Brundage is obviously comparing Kanegson to the great country and Western singer Mel Tillis, whose terrible stutter disappeared whenever he sang.]

The odds of there being two different Abe Kanegsons—both stutterers and folk singers—were slim to none. Clearly, we were on the right track. Following that lead, Janet checked out the LDS Family Search database, looking for New York death certificates with the name Abe Kanegson. Only one showed up. This Abe Kanegson was born on September 1, 1921. Sadly, he died at age 44 in May 1965. In a bit of irony worthy of The Spirit, Kanegson had died mere months before the New York Herald Tribune invited Eisner to draw his first new Spirit story since 1952. The Spirit lived again just as his greatest letterer passed on. No cause of death was listed, but further research brought us to the Ralph Page Manuscript collection at the University of New Hampshire. There we discovered three letters from Kanegson to Page, a fellow dance caller.

The letters, dated from 1962 to August 1964, provided some clues to his cause of death. Abe’s comments suggest a serious ongoing illness. The first reads: 2950 Bouek Ave. Bronx 69 N.Y. January 10, 1962 Dear Ralph–– “Well, it’s about time,” a New Englander might say, and no doubt it is, time for some sort of work from hereabouts. Still need rest, still need quiet, more than most people get along with, and presently have no plans to do anything in the recreation field. The spirit of Christmas Camps Past visited this old imagination several weeks ago, and memories sometimes gives New England flavor to the Bronx air. Note the new Mailing address; feel free to use it. Best wishes, And warmest regards to yourself, Ada, and Laura. Abe Kanegson

A Slippery Bunch! Caricatures of Kanegson (left), Grandenetti (middle), and Eisner (right) in the Eisner-scripted “Slippery Eall” Spirit story for Nov. 30, 1947. Art by Will Eisner & Jerry Grandenetti. [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

Results of LDS Family Search database.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

The camp referred to is a folk music camp where Kanegson sometimes taught. A letter from the same address, dated Dec. 29, 1963, continues the thread. Dear Ralph— I don’t write many letters, but thoughts and feelings still run strong. Camp just now, if I am to follow a prudent course, is a little beyond my capacities; but the atmosphere, the sounds, the color, the smells (good food, varnished wood, and candlewax, pine boughs and snow) are as clear and present as if I were there right now. If this gets there in time, I’d like to extend greetings to the many wonderful people met in Year-End Camps past, and to submit my offering to the camp fund of fellowship and warmth. With best regards to yourself and your family. From us. Abe P.S. Remember me to Rod Linnell, Dick Cuim, and the Taylors.

Abe’s final letter was dated Aug. 10, 1964, nine months before his death. It was sent from Box 241, Mountaindale, NY, where he likely went to recuperate from his unnamed illness. Dear Ralph— If I wrote to you as often as I thought about you, I’d be writing a lot of letters. As it is, the Northern Junket and your occasional correspondence are the link

between the folklore-recreation field and this quiet existence. After numerous ups and downs, it appears I am now able to do folk-song leading (if I keep out of prolonged, animated conversations, avoid excessively strenuous or stimulating activities, and generally mind my business and keep a straight course). I’ve sent a letter to the Hermans telling them I’m available for the last camp in August, should they care to take me on. Naturally, I’m likewise available for N.H. camp if needed. Please note: should you consider the camp staff to be already well filled, I will not take this amiss in any way. In general, I’ve been leading a quiet existence, in the course of which I’ve found that, while I need to take things easy, it can be just as bad to take things too easy as to overdo in the other direction. With best and warmest regards to yourself, Ada, and Laura— Abe Kanegson

Abe’s letters are particularly poignant, since we know—as he did not— that he had only months to live.

But what did he die from? And was this folk singer truly the legendary Spirit letterer, as circumstantial evidence suggests? I needed hard evidence to nail this down once and for all. With Will Eisner and Jerry Grandenetti gone, there was only one man left to contact. Jules Feiffer.

The Mystery Of The Missing Letterer—Part 2

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

On Sept. 20 I sent Mr. Feiffer my query and included scans of the album with Kanegson’s photo. A few days later, the following e-mail arrived in my mailbox. September 23, 2010 Dear Michael, Yes indeed, that is Abe, and I am grateful to you for the photo. I have recently learned that he went into square dance calling in his post Eisner years. He had no stutter when he sang, as he often did in the office. Many thanks, JF

Bam! Nailed it. All that remained was to find out exactly why Kanegson died so young. I returned to the eBay record listing that had started all this. The listing included scans of the back cover, but they weren’t clear enough to read online. Luckily the bidding was still open, so I bid and won. Afterwards I spent anxious days waiting for the 1969 memorial record to arrive. What would the liner notes reveal? Quite a bit, as it turned out. Next issue: Abe Kanegson—in his own words. Till next time...

A Worthy Note

This 1964 letter, written a year before Abe’s death, is a rare example of Kanegson’s cursive writing. It comes courtesy of the University of New Hampshire’s special collections.

hat if, instead of selling his half-ownership of All-American Publications to National/DC co-publishers Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz in 1945, as happened in The World We Know, AA co-publisher Max Charles Gaines had instead purchased DC from them?

Just imagine: a comic book industry in which (due to legal problems involving Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Bob Kane which resulted in there being two competing versions of Superman and Batman on the nation’s newsstands in the late 1940s, with both renditions eventually being cancelled) the AA characters Green Lantern, The Flash, and Wonder Woman had instead become the surviving Golden Age super-heroes— stars of comic books, radio, movie serials, and early TV?

That was the premise of Bob Rozakis’ series of articles which appeared in eight issues of Alter Ego in 2008-2009, as well as in a number of issues of our sister TwoMorrows mag Back Issue! However, after the final A/E installment had appeared, Ye Editor asked author Bob Rozakis if he’d be interested in clearing up a few questions left unanswered to date. This piece is the result: not a dream (precisely)… not a hoax (because we’re telling you about it up front)… just an imaginary tale of an alternate universe we call Earth-22… even though, in Our World, all art on the next four pages features characters which are TM & ©2011 by DC Comics. So, enjoy with us now the ultimate A/E segment of…

The Secret History Of AllAmerican Comics, Inc. by Bob Rozakis

Book One – Bonus Chapter: “Ask The Answer Man!”

Under Western (All-) Stars The published cover of All-American’s All-Star Comics #58—the final issue—with its Wild, Wild West theme and villains. Art (perhaps) by Arthur Peddy & Bernard Sachs; repro’d from the original art, from the joint collection of Larry Guidry & Shane Foley. Flanking the printed cover are a couple of gems from Larry’s solo collection: the original not-positively-ID’d pencil sketches for the “monster” and “crime” covers which were considered for #58, if the decision had been made to go in one of those directions as far as content.

Book One — Bonus Chapter: “Ask The Answer Man!”

n the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bob Rozakis built a reputation as “The AA Answer Man,” replying to readers’ questions about the history of All-American Comics, Inc., and its characters in a column regularly included in the company’s various titles. The following are a sampling of questions he answered, with new information and relevant artwork added.

Q: In early 1951, All-Star Comics changed its title to All-Star Western and began featuring cowboys like The Trigger Twins and Johnny Thunder. What happened? Long before Bob Dylan sang that “the times they are a-changing,” the comic book industry saw a significant drop in reader interest in superheroes. Publishers were looking for new types of books and, in concert with the rise of the popularity of cowboys on television, found a market for Western heroes. They also found audiences for comics featuring war stories, crime and detectives, romance stories, and horror and sciencefiction tales. In some cases, the changeover of a title from one genre to another was abrupt. Action Comics, for example, which starred the original Superman, became Action Western after cowboy stars Johnny Thunder, The Vigilante, and Tex Thomson pushed the Man of Steel first off the cover and then out of the magazine entirely. Two years later, however, it became Action Men of War, with nary a Western hero in sight. (See A/E #78.) In the case of AllStar, the change began in #58, with the Justice Society being transported back in time to the Old West. There they were confronted by The Wizard’s new Injustice Gang, a team that included Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Belle Starr. During this adventure, the super-heroes met up with The Trigger Twins and together they defeated The Wizard and his outlaws. The Twins, along with Strong Bow, The Roving Ranger, and the cowboy Johnny Thunder, took center stage in the following issue in separate stories, with Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Batman, and The Atom appearing only in the splash panels to introduce the tales. What readers (and, until recently, most of the AA staff) did not know is that All-Star Comics almost went in different directions. Found among editor Julie Schwartz’s old files were other, unused cover sketches for AllStar #58. One of them showed the JSA members battling Dracula, a witch, the hunchback, and Frankenstein’s monster. Notes scribbled on the sketch indicate that AA was considering changing the name of the comic to AllStar Horror, All-Star Monsters, or even All-Scare Comics. Another discarded sketch pictured the JSA members facing off against

Stand-Ins For The (All-) Stars (Above:) The published cover of All-Star Comics #42, by Irwin Hasen, repro’d from a scan of the original art. From the collection of Shane Foley. (Left:) This alternate version of that cover, with The Atom and Black Canary pictured instead of Superman and Batman, accidentally got printed in house ads that appeared in a handful of AA comics.

Al Capone, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Machine-Gun Kelly. Indications were that the name “Justice Society” would have been played up on this version, along with “Crime Syndicate,” and suggests that the magazine’s title might eventually have been changed to Justice vs. Crime. The basic premise for each of the two unused versions seems to have been the same as for the one that was published: The Wizard recruits a new team, be they monsters or gangsters, and brings them into battle with the JSA. New heroes, current to the time period or genre, would have been introduced and would’ve taken over the comic in succeeding issues. While there are no indications which heroes might have been introduced in the “crime” version, it seems likely that Doctor Thirteen, who debuted not long afterward in Sensation Comics #106, might have been slated to appear in the “monster” version. Q: What is the relation between the Johnny Thunder who was in the Justice Society in the 1940s and the cowboy who appeared in the ’50s? Originally, the only thing the two had in common was their name. However, in 1982, editor E. Nelson Bridwell, who loved to connect all the pieces of the AA Universe together, wrote “Whatever Happened to Johnny Thunder?” for AA Comics Presents #48. In the story, he showed the

The Secret History Of All-American Comics, Inc.

original Johnny sitting in JSA headquarters, listening to the heroes tell of their adventure battling Jesse James and Billy the Kid (as shown in AllStar Comics #58). In typical fashion, Johnny summoned his Thunderbolt and then wished he could be a cowboy in the Old West. His wish was granted, but it left him living decades earlier, no longer able to summon the Thunderbolt. That is where he remained for the rest of his life, and Nelson hinted, but did not confirm, that Johnny was his own great-grandfather. Q: An advertisement in Flash Comics #98 shows the cover for All-Star Comics #42 (“The Man Who Hated Science”), but it shows The Atom and a dark-garbed, blonde super-heroine instead of JSAers Superman and Batman, who appeared on the cover of the published issue. What happened? According to Ted Skimmer, who worked in the AA Production Department at the time, the cover art was drawn well in advance of the rest of the book. This often happened: an intriguing cover was done, and then writer Gardner Fox and editor Julie Schwartz would come up with a story that fit it. “All-Star #42’s cover was drawn by Irwin Hasen around the time AA bought out DC Comics,” says Ted. “Soon afterward, Charlie [Gaines] and Shelly [Mayer] decided to capitalize on the residual popularity of Superman and Batman by adding them to the Justice Society, beginning with #36 and continuing on from there. The “Man Who Hated Science” story had the two of them in it, but the cover, which had already been finished, showed The Atom and Black Canary, a new heroine they were thinking of introducing. Publication of that issue was delayed for a year, and, as it happened, Black Canary never did join the JSA. When the issue was published, someone—perhaps Hasen himself, or maybe one of the production artists—drew figures of Supes and Bats that were pasted over the other two. Somehow, though, the original version ended up in that house ad and no one caught it in time.” Ted adds that this wasn’t the only cover on which JSA members were switched, but “This appears to be the only one where the original version made it into print in any form.” Q: I know that Flash and Hawkman starred in Flash Comics, Green Lantern was the lead feature in All-American Comics, and Wonder Woman headlined Sensation Comics. Can you tell me what other features appeared in those books? Rather than name every character that appeared in each of the magazines, here is a list of those three magazines’ features at five-year intervals, emphasizing just the super-heroes and similar characters after the first listing:

1946: Flash Comics Flash Hawkman Johnny Thunder Ghost Patrol Picture Stories from History

All-American Comics Sensation Comics Green Lantern Wonder Woman Dr. Mid-Nite Wildcat Hop Harrigan Mr. Terrific Winky, Blinky & Noddy Sargon Mutt & Jeff Little Boy Blue

1951: Flash Comics Flash Hawkman The Atom Black Canary

Around The World In 80 Bullets As a bonus, here’s the cover of All-Star Comics #57, the penultimate issue, in which the JSAers battled a mysterious master villain known as The Key. It was a rarity in the mag’s last two years for all seven members to be depicted on a cover, as here. Artists uncertain; may or may not be Peddy & Sachs. From the joint collection of Larry Guidry & Shane Foley.

1956: Flash Comics Flash Hawkman The Atom

All-American Comics Green Lantern Tommy Tomorrow Johnny Peril

Sensation Comics Wonder Woman Wildcat Tomahawk

All-American Comics Green Lantern Girl Lantern Tommy Tomorrow

Sensation Comics Kid Lantern Wildcat Hawkman

All-American Comics Green Lantern Girl Lantern

Sensation Comics Lantern Legion Kid Lantern

1961: Flash Comics Flash The Atom Tomahawk

1966: All-American Comics Green Lantern Dr. Mid-Nite Black Pirate Johnny Thunder (Western)

Sensation Comics Wonder Woman Wildcat Tomahawk Dr. Thirteen

Flash Comics Flash Stretch Bando

Q: When he was choosing the members of the Justice League, why did Julie Schwartz stop with seven? And why did he choose The Atom instead of Black Canary or Dr. Mid-Nite?

Book One — Bonus Chapter: “Ask The Answer Man!”

success of the new versions of Green Arrow and Aquaman later made them the logical choices for membership when Schwartz and Fox were looking to expand the team. As for Black Canary and Dr. Mid-Nite, neither had appeared in a number of years when the JLA debuted in 1959. Both made comebacks in the mid-’60s when the success of the Flash TV show resulted in an explosion of super-heroes, new and old, though Mid-Nite’s revival was shortlived. Canary, on the other hand, proved to be by far the more popular of the two; she joined the Justice League in 1969 and costarred with The Atom in the ’70s and Green Arrow in the ’80s. Q: One of my favorite comics from the 1960s was the one-shot issue starring the original Red Tornado. Was that intended to be a single appearance, or was Ma Hunkel slated for a regular title? Red Tornado #1 was published as the super-hero surge of the late ’60s was winding down and did not enjoy the sales success of titles that had debuted before it. Though the plug was pulled on it after only a single issue, at least one more was in the works. Editor Julie Schwartz’s files contained a pencil sketch of a splash page that would have teamed Ma with her latter-day namesake, the android Red Tornado. There is no record of a script ever having been written, however, so it is likely that the sketch was as far as the plans went.

The Brave And The Bold—And The Even Bolder! (Above:) Mike Sekowsky & Murphy Anderson’s cover for The Brave and the Bold #28. This issue, of course, introduced the Justice League of America to take the place of the decade-gone JSA; its initial members were Hawkman, Wonder Woman, The Atom, and the Silver Age Superman and Batman. Green Lantern and The Flash were officially JLA charter members, but made only cameo appearances (at most) in the early JLA comics, due to internal AA politics. From the collection of Shane Foley. (Above center:) In 1985, another artist—some reports say Jack Kirby laid out the drawing to help out a young pro—drew this version of the same scene for a reprint issue. The original art is now in the collection of Shane Foley.

A look at All-Star Comics #57, which some fans consider the last “real” adventure of the Justice Society before the book began the transition into All-Star Western, shows the seven core members of the team to be Green Lantern, The Flash, Wonder Woman, The Atom, Hawkman, and the original Superman and Batman. Not so surprising then that, in recreating the team, Julie would pick the same line-up, albeit with his Silver Age versions of Superman and Batman. Since only five of the seven were active in the early adventures (because editors Mort Weisinger and Jack Schiff balked at Julie using Green Lantern and The Flash in major roles, and especially on the covers, in Justice League of America), it is also not surprising that Julie added Wildcat in JLA #4. As has been recounted many times, Julie’s reason for leaving the only other “active” hero (as in, one who appeared in a regular solo feature elsewhere) out of the JLA at first was that he and Gardner Fox simply forgot about Wildcat! (Clearly, neither of them was reading the back-up features in the Weisinger-edited Sensation Comics, but fans who were wrote and asked for the Fightin’ Feline to join the team.) The subsequent

The Tomato And The Tornado Pencil roughs, by an unidentified artist (but probably not creator Shelly Mayer), for the splash of the unpublished Red Tornado #2. Looks like, even as adults, The Cyclone Twins were still getting into trouble and depending on Ma Hunkel to bail them out—only this time she had the android Red Tornado to lend a hand! From the collection of Larry Guidry.

Comic Fandom Archive

The Rudi Franke Interview – Part II More Scintillating Talk With One Of Fandom’s Finest Early Fan-Artists Conducted by Bill Schelly, CFA Editor

OTE: The first half of this conversation with Rudi Franke, one of the bright lights of the early-’60s San Francisco area fan-group known as Golden Gate Features (the other members being Barry Bauman, Bill DuBay, and Marty Arbunich) appeared in Alter Ego #99. Unfortunately, the special 100th issue and then an overcrowded #101 prevented the publication of the second half till now. BILL SCHELLY: The only time you collaborated with Bill DuBay, according to my notes, was on that strip “The Invincibles” in Fantasy Heroes’ Hangout. Do you remember that ditto strip? RUDI FRANKE: Yes, I do. I was looking at it recently. I can’t tell you how we decided to do what, but I think he probably inked a lot of it, or rather, transferred my art to the ditto master. BS: What was the first comics convention you attended? FRANKE: The 1965 New York comicon. I was stationed over there in the Navy at the time. I could only stay for a couple of hours, because I had other commitments. That same summer, I visited Larry Ivie in the city, which was interesting. Like Roger Brand, he had scrapbooks with pages and panels cut from comic books that he had pasted into them. BS: Okay, let’s skip ahead a bit, after you finished your time in the Navy and were back in Oakland. I have a photo—which I think you sent to me a number of years ago—of a fan gathering in your garage in Oakland. That was the beginning of California fandom, of fans wanting to come together in those preComic-Con days. I presume it was, like, for a few hours one afternoon. FRANKE: We called our group “Northern California Comic Collectors.” The meeting you are referring to was our second meeting, and that was Mike Friedrich’s garage, not mine. 25 or so fans showed up, on a Saturday or something like that. I recall that Mike had some contacts at DC, because he had gotten some artwork from Julius Schwartz for the occasion. It was given out as prizes.

Franke Turns On The Fawcett Rudi Franke in the late 1960s or early ’70s—juxtaposed with two of his takes on Fawcett heroes: Spy Smasher from Voice of Comicdom #15 (May 1969) and an undated drawing of Captain Marvel with a trio of his friends and foes. [Shazam characters & Spy Smasher TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

BS: It was the usual thing then, right? Trading? Selling? FRANKE: Trading. I seem to recall that Bill DuBay invited somebody in comics who lived in the Bay Area. He wasn’t a big name, but he was there. Maybe he worked for Treasure Comics [i.e., Treasure Chest] or Catholic Comics. I only remember two such meetings. One was at my house; that could have been the same year. Let’s see, I’m just trying to think when we had that. Yeah, one was at my house and two was at Mike’s house, I’m sure. [After consulting some

Comic Fandom Archive

giving up Voice of Comicdom because he was about to go into the military. I was interested in continuing it, so he gave me or sent me some pages before he went into the Army. BS: So you inherited some things that Bill had been preparing for future issues, and that helped you get started on Voice of Comicdom. You had quite a run on that zine. As I recall, one of the central pieces of it was the work by Richard Corben. Was he a friend? FRANKE: Yeah. I met him through a fanzine publisher in San Jose by the name of Dennis Cunningham. Dennis published [the fanzine] Weirdom, and he did The Plague. I don’t remember how we met. Dennis said, “Look at this artist I have.” It was Richard Corben. I asked if it would be okay to write to him. Richard and I struck up a friendship, and he did a strip for me right away. I published it in Voice of Comicdom. I think it beat out Dennis Cunningham’s zine, so I believe Richard’s work appeared in Voice of Comicdom before it did in anything else. It was called “Monsters Rule.” BS: The George Metzger strip wasn’t through Dennis, was it? FRANKE: No, it wasn’t. George was down by San Jose State. I had seen his work and contacted him. It was in like an underground, maybe. Could it have been Bill Spicer? BS: Yeah, Spicer was publishing Metzger in Graphic Story Magazine. FRANKE: Mm-mm, so I’m not sure about the time, but it had to be that or when San Jose was publishing a newspaper called Red Eye or something with Metzger’s work.

A Monstrous Talent (Above:) This page from Rudi Franke’s Voice of Comidom #12 (1968) features Richard Corben’s first published comics work, “Monsters Rule.” Thanks to Rudi. Rich Corben e-mailed Ye Editor: “‘Monsters Rule’ was a story consisting of eight one-page chapters, like a serial.” [©2011 Richard Corben.] (Right:) Rich Corben in 1969. Photo courtesy of the artist and photographer Orlan Hill.

notes:] Okay, January 8th, 1966—that’s what I have for the one at my house. We had rented a projector, and I think we watched the Captain America serial. We had people from, I think, Sacramento to San Jose, because I know my dentist, Dr. Pierce, who was a collector, talked about meeting at my house. Barry and Marty and Bill had set up tables there for trading and stuff. And I think we had a box lunch for everybody. I had a pretty big backyard. We had some tables set up, and we had some chairs set up in the garage for the movie. The weather in Oakland is always pretty nice, pretty even-going. BS: By then, you were kind of “between fanzines,” weren’t you? FRANKE: Well, in 1967 I started Heroes’ Hangout again, picking up with #4. Now it was all photo offset, a little half-size format, 5 ½" by 8 ½". I charged 20¢ apiece for them. Like the earlier ones, they had work by Roger Brand. BS: How did it happen that you took over publishing Voice of Comicdom from Bill DuBay? That happened around this time, didn’t it? FRANKE: Yes. I think what happened was, Marty contacted me because he wanted the Steve Ditko cover illustration that we had used on AllStars. So I went over there, and I think that was when I learned Bill was

BS: I feel the Metzger influence is very noticeable in your strip for StarStudded Comics, the “Doctor Weird” strip. FRANKE: Oh, really? [laughs] BS: If you look at it, it looks like this guy has seen Metzger. It fits with “Dr. Weird.” FRANKE: You know, I was really into the poster art and the lettering at that time in San Francisco, and I got a lot of the ideas from them. A psychedelic approach, and it’s more unconscious if it’s from George Metzger. I just really loved his work. BS: With Voice of Comicdom, you were really into pretty big-time fanzine publishing. You did a number of issues, and they’re some of the very best fanzines of the late ’60s and early ’70s, and quite different from the issues DuBay had done. FRANKE: I enjoyed it, and the zine grew into a different type of thing. I changed the format and probably shouldn’t have kept the name. The real difference from Bill DuBay’s issues came with #16, with the wrap-around cover by Richard Corben. He had done the [color] separations on plastic…. Somehow he knew how all this was going to come together, so I had to find one of these big presses in downtown San Jose. We were going by the seat of our pants doing it, but it turned out very well. It’s gorgeous. The printer did a good job. BS: Voice of Comicdom had become, basically, a strip fanzine with very few articles. There were interviews….

The Rudi Franke Interview — Part II

FRANKE: Yeah, #16 had an article about Frank Frazetta. BS: And there was a Dick Giordano interview in one. What was the last issue of Voice of Comicdom? FRANKE: Number 17, and that had more of a reddish cover. That basically finished off Richard Corben’s strip. The fanzine was costing too much money and I wasn’t making anything from it—I mean, not enough to keep it going. And at that time, I got into contributing to a lot of other fanzines. BS: So you didn’t need to publish VoC. Someone else could publish your stuff. FRANKE: Right, so I just kind of let it die. In fact, my last two issues, Bud Plant bought most of them out. BS: The summer of 1971 saw the last issue of Voice of Comicdom. Was that the last fanzine you published?

Weird Influences? (Above:) A Metzger page from Voice of Comicdom #14 (Dec. 1968). [©2011 George Metzger.] (Right:) The Franke “Dr. Weird” splash page from the Texas Trio’s Star-Studded Comics #16 (Nov. 1969), which Bill—but not necessarily Rudi—feels might’ve been influenced by Metzger’s idiosyncratic work. Script by Larry Herndon, one of the Trio. [©2011 Rudi Franke & Estate of Larry Herndon.]

Index Finger (Left:) Rudi’s cover for Mike Nolan’s Nedor Comic Index (1968), featuring Black Terror and The Fighting Yank. A reprinting of this survey, with tons of accompanying Pines/Nedor/Better/Standard art, is scheduled for a 2012 issue of Alter Ego. Franke’s cover for Nolan’s Timely Comic Index was seen in A/E #57, and that of the MLJ Comic Index in #82. [Art ©2011 Rudi Franke.]

Comic Fandom Archive

those, about maybe 25 or 30. I also did Joe the Crow. BS: You had branched out into doing more humorous stuff by that time. FRANKE: That’s right. Let’s see, I did lots for Buyer’s Guide, like little illustrations for “The Media Report.” BS: Did you ever do anything for underground comix? FRANKE: No, never have. BS: Closest thing would be The Aquarian newspaper, eh? Somehow, I thought maybe you had done something like that. Any other fanzine things? FRANKE: Sure, I did something called Fandom Directory. Do you remember that? They came out around the ’80s. They had a contest, so it was part of a contest. There’s a fanzine called Future Gold; I did that. And then there was a publisher by the name of Steve Johnson from San Jose, and in the late 1980s I did a lot of illustrations for him. He has since passed away. I also did a lot of work for The Comics Journal. I just found a few of the issues I contributed to. They’re #56, 58, and 75… about 1980, ’82. Sometimes they’d request a certain kind of illustration. Or I’d do the logos a lot of times, with lettering and characters. Amazing Heroes had some of my logos. BS: So you’ve kept your hand in with this and that all through the years. What about comics themselves? Have you followed them over the years? FRANKE: I have. But in recent years, I’ve gotten kind of tired of the comics. I just don’t like how they’re being produced. I don’t know, something’s not right. I guess maybe the computer bothers me, and it just doesn’t have the old feel and I haven’t grown with it. I guess I’m an old dinosaur.

From Hare To A Galaxy Far, Far Away Rudi contributed a number of covers for The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom (now Comics Buyer’s Guide), such as this light-hearted twist on Star Wars, which graced TBG’s Oct. 24, 1980, edition. Bill’s comment: “Hey, if you believe in Wookiees, why not rabbits?” To which Roy T. replies: “That’s exactly what I told George Lucas in 1977, when Howard Chaykin and I created Jaxxon the Green Rabbit—but he didn’t see it that way!” [Princess Leia TM & ©2011 Lucasfilm, Inc.; other art ©2011 Rudi Franke.]

FRANKE: Yes. I did one in 1967, called Impulse, kind of like a newsletter, under a hundred copies. Basically, it reprinted a lot of the Heroes’ Hangout news from #3. And then I found out about the CAPA-alpha in 1968, and so I did some contributing there. BS: What other fanzines that you remember contributing to? FRANKE: Let’s see, I’ll go down through here. Bill DuBay got me into strips. I did a strip called Weird Harold in a Sacramento newspaper called Aquarian Times. That was between 1970 and ’71. It was a gag strip. It kind of looked like Jack Davis illustrations, and it was just a weekly thing because it was a weekly newspaper. And then I did a cover for Nolan’s Nedor Index. Also for the MLJ Comic Index. Then came Star-Studded #16, as you said, and then I did something for Weirdom #12, and then a lot of things for The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom—lots of covers for them. This was mostly around 1980, 1981… and then I did a lot of small illustrations. I did a strip called Pat the Rat for TBG—quite a few of

The reprint books I love. I mean, you can get all kinds of wonderful things—like they had a Mac Raboy Green Lama, and all the DC Archives. You can get the Jack Cole things. Yeah, so I do buy some of them, but the new comics just don’t interest me too much. BS: These days, when you do artwork, what would you do? FRANKE: I’m doing realistic pen-and-ink drawings. They’re not so much with super-hero type things; they’re more illustrative. Maybe it could fit in a Conan book, that sort of thing.

BS: To wrap up, when you look back at your time in fandom in the 1960s, how do you remember that? FRANKE: I think the joy of seeing the work—just enjoying comic books! But also making the contacts with people…. So many people visited me, and I enjoyed the talking and trading. I met a lot of really neat people. Some of them are here still and some aren’t, but they made good memories. BS: Have you had any contacts with Marty or Bill in the subsequent years? FRANKE: No, I haven’t. But you know, if I could get their number, I would love to write them again. [NOTE: This was before Bill DuBay passed away.] BS: You know that Barry Bauman passed away, right?

The Rudi Franke Interview — Part II

BS: Is there anything you’d like to add? FRANKE: I wish I could remember more. That was a long time ago. BS: Thanks for talking to me, Rudi. It was fun. FRANKE: Well, thank you for talking to me, too.

Wings And Things (Above:) Rudi in 1985. (Right:) In more recent years, his art is expressed in beautiful, elaborately crafted portfolios and prints, such as this gorgeous “Wings” illustration. [©2011 Rudi Franke.]

FRANKE: My sister was one year ahead of him in high school, and so she knew Barry. She works for the County of Alameda, and across her desk came a death certificate for Barry Baumann. He died in a car crash. I heard a rumor that he had refurbished a car and had been taking it out for a spin. My sister said that she thought that there was somebody else involved in the crash, but they didn’t get hurt. But I think Barry wrapped around a tree or something like that. It must have been about 1997 or ’98 when he got killed.

Rudi is one of some 80 fans (and 10 pros) who are profiled in my latest book, Founders of Comic Fandom, now available—see ad below. I have to say that writing this book was a very special experience, because I had the chance to finally interview a large number of fans for the first time, and many others in greater depth than before. And I’m hoping to meet many more this summer at Comic-Con International in San Diego, which will be celebrating fandom’s 50th anniversary. See you there! —Bill.

In Memoriam

Vic Dowd (1920-2010) V

by Jim Amash

ic Dowd was a Pratt Institute graduate. There he studied art and met his life-long friend Ken Bald (who married Vic’s sister Kaye), as well as other soon-to-be Jack Binder shop freelancers Ray Harford, Al Duca, Kurt Schaffenberger, and Bob Boyajian. They were recruited for the Binder shop by Pratt alumnus and fellow Alpha Pi Alpha fraternity brother Bill Ward, and all continued their respective friendships for decades.

During his time at Binder’s shop (1941-42), Vic graduated from being a background artist to penciling and inking on a number of features that were packaged for various publishers. For Street & Smith, he drew “Blackstone the Magician,” “Ajax the Sun Man,” and various fillers (in conjunction with studio mates). His Fawcett work was usually done with assists of various kinds from his fellow shoppers (sometimes he was the assistant, too): “Golden Arrow,” “Spy Smasher (full art),” “Minute Man,” Bulletman (full art), Captain Midnight, and “Mr. Scarlet.” He worked on the “Fighting Yank” series for Nedor, “Captain Battle” for Lev Gleason, and “The Black Owl” for Crestwood Publications. His comics career interrupted by World War

Dowd – At War And “At The Cannon” Vic Dowd as a soldier “somewhere in Europe – 1943” and with his painting “At the Cannons,” on display at the Westport [Connecticut] Arts Center in 2003. The figure of Timely comedy heroine Hedy Devine appeared with accreditation in Stan Lee’s 1947 book Secrets behind the Comics—and was one of the relatively few pieces of comic art that was definitely identified as his work. [Comic art ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

II, Vic was a member of the now-famous “Ghost Army,” also known as “The Secret Soldiers,” which was the subject of several books once the information was declassified decades later. The “Ghost Army” was officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, practiced in camouflage and illusion to deceive German Armies into thinking American outfits were in places that they actually were not. They used sound trucks for audio effects, inflatable tanks, and phony radio transmissions, successfully fooling the Axis troops in more than twenty encounters. A number of drawings Vic did during this time have been published in various places, including our interview in Alter Ego #55. In the post-war period, Vic resumed his art career as a commercial illustrator for ad agencies and magazines such as McClain’s (a Canadian publication), and painted covers for various Magazine Management titles in the early to mid-1950s, as well as for several commercial comics for Scholastic. He also worked for the fabled Johnstone and Cushing art service from 1949-51 and did commercial comics for other publishers. Vic also returned to regular comics, drawing romance stories for Fawcett’s Sweethearts and a few features for Timely (Hedy Devine, Nellie the Nurse, “The Witness,” and various fillers from 1947 to the early 1950s). In later years, Vic worked as a fashion illustrator and book illustrator, in addition to being a staff member of the Famous Artists School (196672). He became a successful painter, retiring at the age of 80, though he continued to paint for pleasure until illness forced him to stop. Vic was a loyal Democrat, a well-read, thoughtful, compassionate man, and a good friend to all. He was a joy to know.

In Memoriam

Jerry (1927-2010) Grandenetti by Mark Evanier

erry Grandenetti died in February 2010, though his death wasn’t publicly mentioned until September. Various sources list his birth year as 1925, but Grandenetti himself gave the year as 1927. A believer in education, he went to the High School of Industrial Arts in New York City, the Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, the Art Students League, and Queen College.

Grandenetti started out working on Will Eisner’s Spirit stories in 1947, and he matured as an artist rather quickly during this time, branching out to other companies such as Fiction House (“Señorita Rio” and the memorable “Secret Files of Dr. Drew”). After leaving Eisner’s employ, he worked for ACG, Standard (Adventures into Darkness, Gang World, Out of the Shadows, and war stories), Prize (Black Magic), Ace Periodicals, Lev Gleason (Black Diamond, “Crimebuster,” romance stories), St. John, Stanmor (Mr. Universe), Tower (Fight the Enemy), Western Publishing (mystery stories), the 1970s Atlas company (Morlock 2000, Tales of Evil, Western Action), Marvel, Charlton, and an impressive run of wash-tone stories for Warren Publications in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The bulk of his work, however, was for DC Comics from the 1950s until the 1980s. He’s best remembered for his long tenure on war books like Star Spangled War, All-American Men of War, Our Fighting Forces, G.I. Combat, and Our Army at War, where he did some amazing wash-tone covers, in addition to great interior work on features like “Gunner and Sarge,” “Mlle. Marie,” et al. His work also appeared in many other DC titles over the

years, from The Spectre (with Murphy Anderson inks) to Gang Busters and various romance, science-fiction, and horror titles. Joe Simon used Grandenetti on Prez (a vastly underrated, short-lived comic book series of the ’70s) as well as on “The Green Team” and “Outsiders” one-shots in First Issue Special, the four-issue Championship Sports comic, Sick magazine, and The National Crumb. Joe admired Grandenetti’s storytelling and individualistic style; and though he later admitted that style wasn’t always popular with the readers, Joe was certainly fond of Grandenetti professionally and personally. When talking recently about his passing, Joe said, “I thought he was a genius akin to Jack Kirby, but unfortunately the fans did not…. His work was inventive; he was never afraid of a challenge.” Jerry lived in a nearby town and worked at Joe’s house every day during the time they worked together. Joe added that, a few years ago, he received a phone call from Grandenetti, who offered to give Joe $50 for his share of the original art from a Sick magazine cover he had sold. Joe told him to keep the money, and though they never had occasion to talk to each other afterward, Joe was saddened by his old friend’s passing. Grandenetti also worked for several ad agencies, storyboarded TV commercials, and drew the syndicated newspaper strip Rip Tide from 1959 to 1972. While some fans may not have appreciated his later work, it’s doubtful he worried much about whether or not his work became “uncommercial.” Not many artists have the courage to change styles, but he did, and I, for one, found that refreshing. Grandenetti was an experimental artist, unafraid to push the boundaries of storytelling and page composition, and will be remembered for an impressive body of work. The above piece has been slightly edited from its original appearance in Mark Evanier’s blog www.newsfromme.com. Mark is a comic book scripting veteran who has also written a considerable amount of TV over the past few decades.

Grandenetti Opera (From top to bottom:) A recent photo of JG, courtesy of his daughter, Jennifer Pederson… a panel from Jerry Grandenetti’s Eisner-influenced “The Secret Files of Dr. Drew” story in Fiction House’s Rangers Comics #56 (Dec. 1950)… and a Warren Publishing panel and self-portrait of Grandenetti that appeared in Vampirella #16 (Aoril 1972). The Rangers panels were crowded out of last issue’s chapter 1 of Michael T. Gilbert’s “Comic Crypt” coverage of letterer Abe Kanegson. [“Dr. Drew” art ©2011 the respective copyright holders; Vampirella art ©2011 DFI.]

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Don and Maggie Thompson’ Comic Art #1. After all, without the Major’s work, we’d all probably be attending a Dime Novel convention or a reunion of Allan “Rocky” Lane fans!

re:

A/E associate editor Jim Amash, who conducted most of the interviews in #88, informs me he was contacted by the aforementioned Douglas Wheeler-Nicholson and asked about reaction to the issue. To which Jim replied: Dear Douglas—

One response I got was from Carmine Infantino, who was DC publisher for a number of years. He said he wasn’t surprised at how your father was treated, and had quite a bit of sympathy for the Major. DC President and Publisher Paul Levitz [who has recently stepped down to write comics for the company] told me in his office that he was glad to finally know the Major’s background in detail, so I gather that DC’s reaction was positive overall. Roy and I are proud to have been the ones to present the Major’s story to the public, and we appreciate everything you and Nicky did to make the issue a reality. Jim Amash

I second that motion, Jim. We also heard from a close kinsman of yet another player in the early days of DC: Monroe (“Monte”) Mayer, brother of cartoonist and All-American/DC editor Sheldon Mayer—who has a slightly different point of view, which also merits a hearing: Hi Roy—

he best-laid plans of mice and Superman…! After covering the communications re three issues in A/E #100, we couldn’t manage to fit any letters section at all into #101. Three steps forward, and one step back. It would’ve been welcome, therefore, to have covered two issues this time around, but issue #88—devoted primarily to Major Malcolm WheelerNicholson, the de facto founder of what is today DC Comics—was probably one of the most important issues of this magazine published to date, if Jim Amash and I do say so ourselves. Not that we’re the only ones who say it— read on—soon as you’ve savored Shane Foley’s awesome homage to Gil Kane’s Green Lantern, featuring our “maskot” Alter Ego! [Alter Ego hero TM & ©2011 Roy & Dann Thomas; costume designed by Ron Harris.] Now let’s get started—with a welcome letter from Nicky WheelerNicholson Brown, granddaughter of “the Major,” as the family affectionately refers to him even today. She and her uncle Douglas WheelerNicholson and two other members of the clan, as well as pioneer National Allied/DC artist Creig Flessel, were absolutely crucial to A/E #88, which couldn’t have existed without them. So naturally we’re glad to have their approval, and to direct readers to them and their continuing researches: Hi Roy, Many thanks to John Morrow, Roy Thomas, and Jim Amash for the outstanding work on Alter Ego #88. It is so much appreciated. It is hoped that the Major’s story will encourage further scholarship into the very early days of comic book history, not only about him but about the other writers, artists, and publishers. As with any ongoing project—research for a biography of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson—new facts are always coming to light. For the latest information or queries about the Major, please visit the website and blog and the Major’s fan page on Facebook or at http://majormalcolmwheelernicholson.com/wordpress/ Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson Brown We heartily recommend that A/E readers check out these sources, Nicky! Hope to see you at the San Diego Comic-Con this July 21-24, which in part will celebrate the birth of the new comics fandom that began fifty years ago, in spring of 1961, with Jerry Bails’ and my Alter-Ego [Vol. 1] #1—and with

Jim Beard suggested I forward this to you. I am Shelly Mayer’s brother and was around [at the time “Superman” was published in Action Comics #1], and remember the incident below quite well. Bill Gaines, a little older than I, and I were the test subjects for all these JSA figures when Bob Kane, Irwin Hasen, Shelly Moldoff, and Gardner Fox were struggling…. I have been reading [A/E #88] about Wheeler-Nicholson, and all I can say is that [Jerry] Siegel and [Joe] Shuster, young kids out of Cleveland, were peddling their Superman strip from publisher to publisher. It was in the middle of the Great Depression, and they couldn’t interest anyone. They wound up down on Lafayette Street in NYC, where Max Gaines and Shelly were located. [It’s] because they were publishing newly created stuff, and this was different, that the two became interested in it. It was brought home to me to look at (I was 9), I liked it… They liked it… Wheeler-Nicholson was never mentioned as far as I could remember…. Shelly had my mother have them for dinner one night. Max Gaines and Donenfeld-Liebowitz had an arrangement, and it [“Superman”] became the lead story line for Action Comics. Vin Sullivan [editor of Action #1] tells it as I remember it on the bottom of page 29. And why were Siegel and Shuster going around trying to sell Superman, if they were working for Wheeler-Nicholson???? W-N’s son writes on page 30 that Jerry and Joe were “leery about… his finances.” They were so desperate to sell their strip; they knew nothing about finances. That’s how they got screwed years later, by giving up ownership of Superman. Monroe Mayer Jim and I don’t pretend to be able to sort out precisely who did what at which stage in the pre-publication career of the Man of Tomorrow, Monte. At the very least, however, history-minded aficionados are well aware that your ultra-talented late brother seems likely to have played a crucial part in Superman’s meteoric career. As if creating Scribbly and Sugar and Spike and spearheading all those issues of Flash, All-American, Sensation, AllStar, et al., from 1939 to 1948 wasn’t enough! Next, the reaction of longtime comics writer and editor Mike W. Barr, co-creator of Batman and The Outsiders and Camelot 3000:

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

The Major’s Musketeers (Left:) Major Wheeler-Nicholson relaxing. Photo sent by Nicky & Jason Brown. [©2011 Finn Andreen.] (Above:) In A/E #88, pp. 16-17, we reproduced the first ten of eleven comic strips of the Major’s adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, as drawn by Nicholas Afonsky and slated for distribution by the Wheeler-Nicholson Syndicate—circa 1926! Here’s the final strip, which we didn’t have room for in #88. We wouldn’t want you to miss the Musketeers and their new best friend D’Artagnan taking on the Cardinal’s guards! Thanks to Mike Catron for the scans—and to Leonardo De Sá for a bit of added info. [Photo & strip ©2011 Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson Family.]

Dear Roy:

I have to admit, when I saw the WheelerNicholson clan at the 2008 Inkpot Awards [at the San Diego Comic-Con], I thought they had a lot of nerve, having believed all the stories I’d heard about Malcolm WheelerNicholson over the years. That why A/E #88 was very nearly a public service, and was a definite service to the much-neglected cause of comics history, which most modern comics pros couldn’t give a damn about. Congratulations! Speaking of comics history, an update on the Winslow Mortimer Checklist: the 1981 Marvel job listed simply as “Aunt May” was a fivepage story entitled “The Nursing Home Caper” published in Amazing Spider-Man #220, 9/81. I was the lucky writer of record, and if you think it wasn’t an honor for me to work with a guy who had been such a large part of DC in the ’40s and ’50s, then you don’t know me as well as you think you do. (And you know me pretty well.) Mike W. Barr I felt the same way, Mike, when working with Win in the early ’70s. His work was a bit quiet for Marvel, yet he worked out well on Night Nurse and Spidey Super Stories. And even if he hadn’t—he was still Winslow Mortimer, artist of all that wonderful “Superman” and “Batman” material! How many great things does a guy have to do to earn a secure place in comics history? Whatever the quota is—Win had done it! To a query to the Grand Comics Database’s Main List online from David Sorochty asking whether Harry Donenfeld’s printing company printed “the entire comic book or just the covers” of Wheeler-Nicholson’s comics circa 1937-38, Leonardo de Sá gave this answer, with a copy sent to Alter Ego: In 1923, Harry Donenfeld shamelessly bought his brothers out of the collective family members’ Martin Press and renamed it Donny Press. Gerard Jones’ [book] Men of Tomorrow has details about the whole sleazy operation, but I don’t remember him mentioning what type of stuff they printed for Wheeler-Nicholson…. In the very end of 1937, Donny Press, Photochrome, and World Color Printing Co. filed suit against Nicholson Publishing Co., undoubtedly one of the most famous bankruptcy proceedings in comics lore. Leonardo De Sá Thanks, Leonardo, for sending the pair of clippings from The New York Times that appear on this very page, to become another chunk of the comics history that Alter Ego is

committed to publish and perpetuate. You also sent us a sidebar on the Wheeler-Nicholson comic strip syndicate, which we hope to print in the future! Next, a couple of letters from gents who seem to have some additional facts (if not outright corrections) on nearly every issue of A/E—and, as the old saw goes, we wouldn’t have it any other way. First, from Hames Ware, co-editor of the print version of Who’s Who of American Comic Books: Dear Roy and Jim, I consider #88 one of the landmark issues A/E has ever produced. I am proud of you both for finally giving “the other side of the story”; and though, to be sure, the Major had his problems, it’s heartening to see his family rallying around finally getting the history of early comics rightfully before the general public. Since Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., and I are currently in the thick of scrutinizing both the pre-DC era features and artists, along with Cook and Mahon’s precursor to Centaur and Uncle Joe [Hardie]’s actual Centaur line, this article is both timely and very helpful to our ongoing overview. Still, this wouldn’t be a letter from me if it didn’t also send along some additions to the beautiful art examples:

Bankruptcies And Obituaries And Other Happy Events (Left:) Due notice of the purchase of Nicholson Publishing Co., Inc., by Donny Press [Harry Donenfeld] and his allies appeared in The New York Times for Dec. 30, 1937; it’s the second entry in the column at left on the “Business Records” page. Leonardo De Sá, who sent this document, says that his (and our) correspondent Frank Motler spotted another entry that he had missed, “further down on the same column, under ‘Receivers Appointed,’ which has Abraham I. Menin appointed as receiver for Nicholson Publ. ($2,000 deposit), with a total of assets $4,700, debts $50,000. Menin was an accountant often associated with Asa S. Herzog (a few joint tomes written), specializing in solvency or opposite.” (Right:) Part of the New York Times obituary (with accompanying photo) for the aforesaid Abraham I. Menin on Sept. 22, 1956. Leonardo De Sá, who also forwarded this to us, quoted fellow comics researcher Bob Hughes as stating that “Menin was one of the owners of World’s Best Comics, Inc., publishers of World’s Finest, Leading, and Boy Commandos. He was also one of the trustees for Irwin and Sonia Donenfeld.” [©2011 The New York Times, Inc.]

re:

The “Ivanhoe” spot on p. 26 says the GCD attributes the art to Raymond Perry. Perry was one of the longest-tenured DC employees, from the Nicholson era on up through the early ’60s or thereabouts, though by then relegated to text illos (always beautifully drawn)—but that “Ivanhoe” is not by Perry. If you look closely, you will see what appears to be the name “Fox” in the corner of the last panel. Now go to p. 10 and the text illos for “Spook Ranch,” where again, if you look even more closely (and you may need a magnifying glass for this), you’ll see what appears to be identical rendering of “Fox.” I figure this has gotta be Craig Fox, the artist who drew “Abdullah” in similar fashion for the aforementioned Cook-Mahon, reprinted by Uncle Joe in the true Centaur era. I once asked [comic artist] Gill Fox if he’d known of another Fox who worked in comics, but other than his sister Lorraine, he did not. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Then the late Gill Fox must’ve forgotten publisher Victor Fox, writer Gardner Fox, and artist Matt Fox. But nobody’s perfect.] Jim V. will have to tell you exactly where, but Henry C. Kiefer used the “deKorosett” name on several pieces he drew for various other early comics, and it is of course his work on the “Wing Brady” art on p. 45. [NOTE: Jim V. says it was used primarily for Fiction House.] About the artist for the “Thor” feature on the right side of p. 79: the ones at the top are by Dan Gormley, an artist Jim and I are finding all over the place circa 1939… so if all the panels on the right side are from the same story, they are probably also by Gormley. Gormley would finish out his career as a funny-animal artist at Dell, and, oddly, so would the artist of one of the pulp covers you picture on p. 31: At Dell, H.V.L. Parkhurst drew many Western features, including “The Kiyotee Kids,” and since he occasionally signed himself there as “Harry Parks,” I would assume his first name to be Harry rather than Howard. Hames Ware We appreciate all the added info, Hames. Now on to Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., your pal and partner in the “Great Unknowns” series, which has been too long absent from A/E’s pages: Roy & Jim— A/E #88 is a fascinating read, and I’m glad to see such wonderful scholarship on comic books. There is so much more we have to learn about those early days, and I think we’ve been operating with preconditioned binders for far too long. I hope that Hames’ and my sojourn into Centaur will lead to a discovery or two. One thing I found rather oversimplified was the vastly inadequate shrift given to Lloyd Jacquet, whose tenure with Nicholson needs to be better documented. And, he certainly did something between his 1935 credit in New Fun and his 1939 founding of Funnies, Inc. By the way in the New Fun contents page, “Fun” is clearly the name of the character depicted (“FUN speaking!” “I, FUN, known as…”), so the reference on the coupon to “FUN” is meant in the sense of “write a letter to [the character] FUN”—not to the comic book titled “Fun.” On page 20, Creig Flessel’s drawing doesn’t depict a “fedora,” which looks like this: but rather the straw hat that the Major is also mentioned as favoring. On page 31, all three of the pulp covers appear to be signed by H.J. Ward. Clearly the Spicy Detective Stories cover you credit to Parkhurst sports a Ward sig. On a personal preference note, I found page 48 to be both depressing and intrusive in the contest. Other than Superman, none of the characters and features on page 48 has any direct connection with WheelerNicholson and serve only to highlight (in my opinion) the extent of the perfidy that was perpetrated upon the man. It felt like salt being rubbed into the wounds: “Here, look what the crooks got away with!” What’s the point of it? We already knew all this stuff. Perhaps I’m overreacting, but I really don’t think it serves any purpose as an illustration to the

interview/article. Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. We were misinformed (or else we misinterpreted info) concerning the artist of two of those three pulp covers, Jim—but we’re afraid we must disagree with you re drawings of Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Green Arrow not belonging in the issue… just as we never contemplated removing Batman and Robin from the 1950 public service page we used as the basis of #88’s cover. To some extent it was our point that a “perfidy” was “perpetrated” on Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson in 1938 by Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz—although quite probably a perfectly legal perfidy. (Which doesn’t excuse things, by my way of thinking.) At the same time, those later super-heroes shown on p. 48 of A/E #88—as well as the Justice Society of America, The Boy Commandos, Sugar and Spike, the Silver Age heroes, the Neil Gaiman version of Sandman, and everything DC in between—are all a part of the Major’s legacy, just as much as they are of Harry Donenfeld’s, and Jack Liebowitz’s, and Vin Sullivan’s, and probably M.C. Gaines’ and Shelly Mayer’s, to boot. Maybe it takes a village to raise a comic book company, as well as a child. A few observances from regular reader (and letter-writer) Jake Oster: Roy, That Major Wheeler-Nicholson wrote the first six Bill Barnes pulp stories under the “George L. Eaton” alias was news to me. One can learn something new every day. Oh, and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s wife Claudia (caricatured on p. 62 by Winslow Mortimer) was nicknamed Lady Bird Johnson. Lynda Bird was one of their two daughters. But you probably knew that. All in all, from Superman to Fatman, Alter Ego #88 was a delectable smorgasbord of comic book history. Jake Oster Thanks for correcting my typo of “Lynda Bird” when I had meant to write “Lady Bird,” Jake. Back to the Matter of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson: It would seem that that the debut of New Fun in 1935 wasn’t entirely unheralded outside of the candy stores and drugstores of America. Sean Howe quoted to us an item in the show-biz newspaper Variety for Jan. 15, 1935: Hi, Roy— Thought this might interest you: “New Fun Man— “First issue of Fun is on the stands, is long tab size, with 32 pages and colored cover. Mostly strip cartoons, chiefly semi-adult and leaning to the adventure angle. A few brief departments handled by the McCall distribution system. Maj. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, of Nat. Allied Pubs., is heading, with Lloyd Jacquet as editor and Sheldon Stark handling the cartoon end. Dick Loederer, formerly of Van Beuren-RKO, is art editor.” Sean Howe Thanks, Sean. The fact that the item refers to the magazine as “Fun” rather than as “New Fun” underscores the fact that the former was often treated by DC as if it were the name of the magazine, even after it was changed to More Fun Comics. For instance, an early-’40s notice from DC to retailers that we reprinted in our hardcover All-Star Companion, Vol. 2 listed the company’s comics as: “Superman * Batman * Flash * Action * Fun * All-Star and other popular titles.” On a related note: In May of 2009 I e-mailed comics researcher Henry Andrews: “One of the Wheeler-Nicholson heirs refers to the company name as New Fun Comics. Was that ever its name, do you know? I just know about National Allied and then Detective Comics, Inc.” Henry graciously did a bit of looking, and replied:

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

In The Beginning… (Right:) Glen Cadigan sent us a scan of something he found on eBay a couple of years back. He says it was described as “a letter sent along with a copy of New Fun to dealers to get them to order copies…. It nails down a date when the comic went on sale, plus where it was printed. It’s also a nice reminder that Lloyd Jacquet wasn’t just there at the dawn of Marvel, but at the dawn of DC first. You need to get Jim Amash to hunt down his descendants!” The 1-11-35 note (which is ©2011 the respective copyright holders) reads: “New FUN – hot off the Daily Eagle press – goes on sale today from coast to coast. Take this copy home – try it on the youngsters from 2 to 90 – and see them go through this live, modern idea of a kid’s mag, filled with original comics and features! “Lloyd Jacquet Editor. “P.S.: How do you like it?”

Roy— From various scans, I believe it goes something like this: National Allied Publications, Inc. (in New Fun up through at least #5 and probably #6?). More Fun Magazines, Inc. (in More Fun #8, possibly #7?). More Fun, Inc. (in More Fun #9 to at least #13). Nicholson Publishing Co., Inc. (no later than #16 through A.I. Menin taking over as bankruptcy trustee for a month or two, after which it went to Detective Comics, Inc.). So I’m betting that they’re thinking of “More Fun, Inc.” To my knowledge, the name of the company was never printed as “New Fun, Inc.,” unless it was in issues #1 or #6. Interestingly, the word “Comics” does not appear in the indicia until long after it appears on the covers— either with issue #20 or #21. New [Adventure] Comics has a more complete record on microfiche: National Allied Newspaper Syndicate, Inc. (in New Comics #1-9). Nicholson Publishing Co., Inc. (in New Comics #10 through A.I. Mein taking over, then Detective Comics, Inc.). Henry Andrews Thanks for wading through all that for us, Henry! It appears the names “Fun,” “New Fun,” and “More Fun” had a checkered history—legal or otherwise— in the early days of DC. And, as if that weren’t enough—the precise lineage and identity of the elves “Bubby and Beevil” from New Fun #1,

as well as of the one of them shown on the issue’s copyright/contents page, was the subject of a welcome letter from 1960s70s underground cartoonist Simon Deitch: To Roy and All the Alter Ego Folk— I enjoyed #88’s M.W. Nicholson tribute. However, there’s one thing I think I can help clear up. As to “Bubby and Beevil” on page 4 and Christina Blakeney’s recollections, let me add this: I don’t know about any “Swedish fairy tales with elf-like figures” or “goops,” but I do know that those character were cold-swiped from the previous year’s animated cartoon produced by Ven Beuran Studios called Sunshine Makers (a cult favorite). The cartoon was created by producer and director Burt Gillett and Ted Eshbaugh and concerned an ongoing battle between the “Joy” elves and the “Gloom” elves. The elves bottle sunshine in milk bottles which they use to brighten dark villains’ lives, for, as one of them proclaims, “I don’t wanna be happy, I wanna be sad!” But the elves’ persistence finally causes the Gloomy guys to glow brightly and dance about with the elves by the cartoon’s end. A disarmingly looney tale, for sure, and one that I and many of my contemporaries grew up watching on TV cartoon shows in the b&w early ’50s. We enjoyed it very much (and still do), despite its cutesy gooeyness. Enclosed is one of the model sheets, clearly dated 1934, which should prove the point. Simon Deitch Readers can see that model sheet elsewhere on this page, Simon. Thanks! (Seems like we’re always thanking our readers—and that they always deserve it!) It sometimes appears that early comics creators were as nearly free and loose with copyrighted materials as are some users of today’s Internet! And finally: Jared Bond, who in August of 2008 restored the Russ Keaton Superman strip tryout art that he sent us for A/E #88 (see pp. 2123 of that issue), would like it known that his friend Jay Slowineski wrote the accompanying text. We apologize that Jay’s name was left out of the issue. Till next, send those e- (for “ether”) mails or letters to:

The Sunshine Boys Cartoonist Simon Deitch sent us this 1934 model sheet from the theatrical animated short titled Sunshine Makers. See Simon’s letter for details. [Sunshine Makers art ©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Roy Thomas e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135 A reminder: For advance news and critical discussion of Alter Ego, as well as other comics-related matters, check out the AlterEgo-Fans chat list at group.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans/ —or, if you have problems getting on board, simply contact co-weboverseer Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll lead you to it. “Alter-Ego-Fans” is where the Golden and Silver Ages still live! (Alas, last time, we left a hyphen out of the first e-mail address above, which probably didn’t help anybody.) Next issue: the 1970s and Sterling Steve Englehart!

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written others, illustrated several covers, and drawn the original Mary Marvel character and the first MM tales. He is also remembered as artist on the Flyin’ Jenny newspaper strip for Bell Syndicate.

[FCA EDITORS NOTE: From 1941-53, Marcus D. Swayze was a top artist for Fawcett Publications. The very first Mary Marvel character sketches came from Marc’s drawing table, and he illustrated her earliest adventures, including the classic origin story, “Captain Marvel Introduces Mary Marvel (Captain Marvel Adventures No. 18, Dec. ’42); but he was primarily hired by Fawcett Publications to illustrate Captain Marvel stories and covers for Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel Adventures. He also wrote many Captain Marvel scripts, and continued to do so while in the military. After leaving the service in 1944, he made an arrangement with Fawcett to produce art and stories for them on a freelance basis out of his Louisiana home. There he created both art and stories for The Phantom Eagle in Wow Comics, in addition to drawing the Flyin’ Jenny newspaper strip for Bell Syndicate (created by his friend and mentor Russell Keaton). After the cancellation of Wow, Swayze produced artwork for Fawcett’s top-selling line of romance comics, including Sweethearts and Life Story. After the company ceased publishing comics, Marc moved over to Charlton Publications, where he ended his comics career in the mid-’50s. Marc’s ongoing professional memoirs have been a vital part of FCA since his first column appeared in FCA #54 (1996). Last time we re-presented for the first time in the pages of Alter Ego Marc’s wife, June Swayze’s heartwarming essay about her man. Beginning in this issue, we reprint John Pierce’s discussion with Marc from Comics Interview #122 (1993)… with special thanks to publisher David Anthony Kraft [comicsinterview.com]. —P.C. Hamerlinck.]

Of Swayze’s work and person, two of his nowdeceased former Fawcett colleagues had the following to say. First, the late C.C. Beck: “Swayze is a remarkable person, a fine Southern gentleman, a great, great artist, and a beautiful guitarist, pianist, and violinist. In addition, he has a beautiful wife and family, a fine old Southern home, and a marvelous sense of humor.” And from the late Rod Reed, Fawcett editor and later writer: “Although Jack Binder is acclaimed for his work on Mary Marvel, Marc Swayze did the first portraits. I have before me the number one issue of her very own magazine and her garb is amazingly mod with short skirts and boots almost to the knees. Swayze, of course, wanted to do the whole Mary series himself, and it was my distasteful job to convince him that he couldn’t be spared from the Captain Marvel team….” JOHN G. PIERCE: Okay, so how did you get the job with [Russell] Keaton [on Flyin’ Jenny]? MARC SWAYZE: A relative of Keaton’s who was a member of the art faculty at Louisiana Tech advised of his need for help. Russell Keaton was a truly great professional and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him, and particularly at that time in my career. From him I got the conviction that a good comic strip man could “do it all” … layout, pencil, ink, letter, even write. I never heard of the assembly-line system until I got to New York, to work for Fawcett. JOHN: Tell us, then, how you got to New York — to work for Fawcett, I mean. MARC: I returned to Louisiana after leaving Keaton and contacted several publishers and newspaper syndicates. I was called to New York by France E. (Eddie) Herron, Fawcett’s comics editor. This must have been early ’41. JOHN: Let’s concentrate on your Fawcett period for a while. You were there from …

RIGINAL 1993 INTRODUCTION: Marcus D. Swayze stands as one of the most amazing, if little known, comics creators of the 1940s. Not only was he an artist who could draw in both the cartoony style associated with Fawcett’s original Captain Marvel, but also in the other, more realistic style, as well as having been a writer (in those days when Golden Age Great writers and artists were usually separate entities in Marc doubts if any other artist produced comic books), plus a musician and an athlete. more Captain Marvel art than he did In 1956, Marc left the comics field to establish and become director for an art department with the Olin Matheson Chemical Corporation in Monroe, Louisiana, where he remained until 1980. He received his Master’s degree in art from Northeast Louisiana University in 1973, and later served as an adjunct professor of art at NLU. As a musician, Marc plays guitar, piano, and several other instruments. More recently he has been playing in a Dixieland band made up chiefly of NLU professors. Among comics collectors, Swayze is mainly known as one of the early artists of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, having drawn a number of stories,

before joining the armed forces in 1942. Fawcett allowed him not to be part of their “assembly-line” for producing comics, letting him generally illustrate stories all the way through, from layout through penciling and inking. As the visual originator of Mary Marvel, one of his most prominent and beloved works was illustrating the first tale of the “World’s Mightiest Girl” for Captain Marvel Adventures #18 (Dec. 1942), from which all three panels accompanying this first part of the interview are taken. The original Mary Marvel concept sketch he mentions on p. 76 (and which was printed in A/E V3 #1) was the basis of the panel at right. [Shazam heroine TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

were some highly qualified, dedicated people on the comics editorial staff at Fawcett. Of course, the stories that I most enjoyed drawing were those little “masterpieces” which I wrote myself. JOHN: When Fawcett hired you, were you shown a sample of artwork and told, “This is what we want”? MARC: Well, yes. Eddie Herron, comics editor, had sent me some drawings of Captain Marvel to duplicate as samples of my work. Then, when I joined the staff, Herron, or perhaps C.C. Beck or art director Al Allard, said they had been unable to tell mine from Beck’s. When I did the one-shots on features such as “Ibis” or “Mr. Scarlet” in 1944, I simply used the preceding issue as a style guide. As far as style goes, however, I used the style that fitted the need. JOHN: When drawing from another writer’s script, did you have any special approach to laying out a page?

MARC: Must have been from about March of ’41 until late ’42, until I went into the service, which was ’42-’44. But even there, I continued to write Captain Marvel stories as a freelancer. Upon returning to civilian life, I was with Fawcett on regular assignment basis, working in Louisiana, until they got completely out of comics, about 1954. JOHN: And you worked mainly on Captain Marvel at first? MARC: I was hired specifically to work on Captain Marvel. Except for the time it took to do the original drawings for the Mary Marvel character and drawing the first one or two stories for that feature, plus an occasional illustration for the non-comics magazines. Captain Marvel was all I did until I left for the armed forces in 1942. JOHN: And what about the volume of work you did for Cap? MARC: I doubt if anyone produced more CM art than I did while I was there. And as I look back over the books that were published at the time, I am convinced that I contributed more CM scripts than any other artist, and more than some of the writers, plus several covers. It may be of interest that the stories I illustrated were generally mine all the way, layout, penciling and inking. They apparently respected my wishes to stay out of assemblyline work. JOHN: Were stories submitted to you with each panel blocked out, with ample descriptions of what should be shown, or were you just given a general idea and told to take it from there? MARC: Fawcett stories all followed the formal format of description plus dialogue for every panel. I believe it was strict policy that stories be submitted first in outline for approval, the completed script to follow. That was my procedure for writing them. The writers varied in style and detail in the matter of descriptions. Naturally, some stories afforded more graphic challenge than others. Remember, though, a story had passed an editor before it reached the artist, and there

MARC: I don‘t think so. My objective was to try to tell a pictorial story, as independent of the dialogue and captions as possible. This was a rather remote possibility with the romances I later did, but was a pretty good approach, I thought, with the action-adventure material. One writer, according to Wendell Crowley, when he knew his script was going to me, simply wrote “continue action” for most panels, knowing I was going to do it my own way anyhow. JOHN: And what about when the script was yours? Did you have to have the complete script approved before you could start drawing it? MARC: I submitted finished scripts for editorial approval always. I believe the checks for scripts and art came down different pipelines, which may have had something to do with it. In doing CM scripts in the service, I kept in mind the fact that a percentage of his stories were to be of the light, humorous type. I tried to fill that need. Usually. Wendell Crowley, who had come over to Fawcett from Binder’s, was my editor. Later he told me that during that time I had only one story rejected, and that was one in which I featured Steamboat, not knowing that the character was being phased out. JOHN: You are, in essence, the artistic creator of Mary Marvel, as some would use the term. Your original design for her shows some differences in the outfit from the actual first appearances in Captain Marvel Adventures #18 and #19. For example, she had a belt rather than the standard sash, and her boots look a little different. Do you recall who made the changes? Which I assume were done to bring her outfit more in line with Captain Marvel’s. There were, of course, later changes such as the fuller skirt, etc., but those were done by other artists. MARC: You are a keen observer. The reproduction you have is from the original sketch, which I still have. I imagine the belt buckle, done hastily at the time, presented a decision which had to be resolved … either developed so that it was functional, or do away with it. It escapes me now. Same with the boots. Whatever, I’m to blame. [Join us next issue for part II of this interview.]

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All For One The Story Of The Fawcett One-Shot All Hero Comics by P.C. Hamerlinck

“T

he Fawcetts could do it as well, or better, than anybody,” remarked the former Fawcett Publications vice-president, Roscoe K. Fawcett, in a 1997 FCA interview.

Indeed, one such paradigm was the publishers’ America’s Greatest Comics—Fawcett’s unabashed response to its DC Comics predecessor, World’s Finest Comics. Both anthologies came with a 15¢ price tag, heavier paper stock for covers, and a hefty 100 pages of strips. But even with WFC’s inclusion of superlative heroes Superman and Batman, Fawcett’s AGC still made for a more appealing and “greater” product than its newsstand rivals in a number of ways. Where DC used a variety of genres in World’s Finest (costumed

heroes, humor features, straightforward adventure), Fawcett situated within America’s Greatest predominately nothing but the crest of their super-heroes for the duration of its eight-issue run. Additionally, AGC encompassed lengthier and therefore more fully developed tales of its heroes exploits than those within WFC. It must have been difficult for youngsters, even with its increased cost from a standard comic, to resist such a compelling package containing not only the imaginative tales of the well-liked Captain Marvel, but of his Axis-fighting comrades, as well. America’s Greatest Comics #1 (Fall 1941), which went on sale at approximately the same time as DC’s World’s Finest Comics #3, is regularly measured as one of Fawcett’s most revered early comic book releases. Roscoe Fawcett also made the observation that his company was always going into competition with itself. One case in point was when they endeavored to replicate the success of America’s Greatest with their second 15-cent, 100-pager: All Hero Comics, dated March 1943, appeared between America’s Greatest #6 (Feb. ’43) and #7 (May ’43). All Hero, however, was “all finished” shortly after its debut—an ill-timed casualty of stringent wartime paper restrictions. (America’s Greatest Comics itself was already dead by the summer of that same year.) The one-shot release of All Hero Comics was, in essence, an expanded issue of Whiz Comics, featuring Spy Smasher, Lance O’Casey, Golden Arrow, and Ibis the Invincible … with the only differences being the inclusion of Captain Marvel Jr. instead of Captain Marvel (although Cap senior did appear with Jr. on the front cover, as Fawcett’s top star routinely did to help jumpstart a new title), as well as the addition of licensed radio hero Captain Midnight.

“Captain Marvel Jr. Smashes The Helicopter Blitz”

Join The Fun … Momentarily Hot on the heels of America’s Greatest Comics was Fawcett’s second 100-page comic book anthology, All Hero Comics, appearing at the turn of 1943 with a March cover date. Intended as an ongoing series, the title was hastily cancelled after its debut issue, due to wartime paper conservation. The publisher discontinued a number of its comics that same year, and as the war raged on, Fawcett thinned out the page count of their surviving books. Special thanks to Raymond Miller. [Shazam heroes TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

Freddy Freeman/Captain Marvel Jr. learns of a Nazi espionage plot involving stationed telescopes doubling as searchlights and bombs set to be dropped from helicopters over New York City by a secret militia headquartered out at sea. (The Germans actually did employ helicopters for a brief period during WWII. And Junior's locale was generally New York City, before writer Otto Binder moved the strip to a more suburban setting.) But the impending invasion is halted by the World’s Mightiest Boy, who takes down the helicopters, demolishes the ships from which they came from, and delivers the perpetrators to the Navy. (The story’s unknown author made the recurrent error of having Captain Marvel Jr. speak his name without a transformation taking place …while the [Shazam hero TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

All For One

uncredited illustrator did his best to emulate Mac Raboy’s venerable work with the usage of artist swipes and paste-ups.) The story closes with Freddy writing a somewhat cryptic entry into his diary: “In your next number of All Hero Comics I’m scheduled to meet a menace that I cannot write of … now. It’s too secret, too dangerous, too important. But watch for the next issue of this magazine—and you’ll see what I mean!” While the bewildering teaser ultimately left young readers high and dry, it does substantiate that All-Hero was indeed intended to continue beyond its first issue.

“Lance O’Casey And The Pirate Who Hated Blood” Artist Harry Anderson depicts the account of sea adventurer Lance O’Casey and his sailing buddy Mike Bellew shanghaied by Blackbeard the Pirate’s crew in the South Pacific and brought before the swashbuckling scourge to undoubtedly meet certain death. Soon thereafter, Blackbeard privately confides to his two captives that, before becoming a pirate, he was a wandering beachcomber with an affinity for “little birds and flowers,” but he had always been ridiculed by others. Then one day he stumbled upon an abandoned ship, assembled a crew of outcasts like himself, and began a murderous reign of terror on the high seas. But he could never quite pull it off. “You see, I cannot stand the sight of blood or the thought of hurting anyone!” He then describes how, when someone was made to walk the plank, he would toss the victim a life preserver when his crew weren’t looking. But some of the crew have overheard Blackbeard’s testimony and tie him up to the muzzle of the ship’s cannon. Lance and Mike decide to help Blackbeard out of his jam as the two men skirmish with the crew—until [Lance O’Casey TM & ©2011 respective the ship is copyright holders.] attacked by a Japanese submarine. With the fracas on the ship brought to an abrupt end, Lance and Mike form a team with the motley crew to go onboard and stop the submarine. “Lead on, Red-head!” says one of the pirates to Lance. “My knife, she love Jap meat!” Lance leads the counter attack underwater and takes the enemy by surprise on the other side of the sub, imprisoning its occupants. However, back on the ship, where one from Blackbeard’s crew had stayed behind because he refused to fight against the Japanese, the benevolent Blackbeard again just couldn’t help himself: when everyone else was off fighting the Japanese, he had supplied the detainee with provisions and sent him on his merry way with a small getaway boat.

“Spy Smasher Battles Hitler’s Headsman” In a story perfectly illustrated by Emil Gershwin, one of the oftenneglected artists from the Golden Age, Spy Smasher himself provides the narrative about the time he took on, all at once, three of his old Nazi adversaries: The Headsman, The Man in the Iron Mask, and America Smasher. Adolf Hitler had given the merciless executioner, The Headsman, a hit-

list of enemies that the dictator wanted eliminated. Augmented by The Man in the Iron Mask and America Smasher, the terrible trio violently begin making their way down the list. Spy Smasher arrives a little too late as a German chemist/ American ally becomes the first victim to be beheaded. Admiral Corby, Chief of Naval Intelligence (and father of Spy Smasher/Alan Armstrong’s fiancée, Eve Corby) is next on the list, but SS prevents him from being murdered. The champion of democracy also halts a third person from being axed, but when he goes to rescue the next man on the list, both are apprehended and taken to a Nazi HQ located somewhere in the American countryside to await trial and execution. Spy Smasher is thrown into a cell with Carl Berg, a remorseful Bundist still in uniform. Before the Nazi guards arrive to take SS away to his death, Berg knocks the hero unconscious. Later, the Nazi guards escort Spy Smasher to The Headsman, where he is decapitated. Only it was Berg—who had swapped clothes with the goggled hero back in the cell— who was executed. Thus he had hoped to atone for his sins. Spy Smasher, now in Bundist uniform, strolls unnoticed from the cell and outside to his nearby Gyrosub, where he slips into a spare costume and returns to obliterate the Nazi hideout and take into custody the three super-villains. But SS would rather “deliver them to a junkyard!” instead of to the FBI. Readers are then encouraged to “Watch Spy Smasher crack the Axis every month” and “take a whack yourself by buying war bonds and stamps!”

“Ibis The Invincible In The Mystery Of The Modern Monster” In an attempt to benefit from popular trends and provide Ibis the Invincible with a child sidekick for young readers to identify with, Banshee O’Brien, Boy Enchanter, made his debut and briefly pooled resources with the Egyptian prince. (Apparently neither Wow Comics’ Atom Blake, Boy Magician, or Master Comics’ Balbo the Boy Magician was up to the task). In a tale drawn by Alex Blum, Ibis’ ancient magic was challenged by modern-day black magic in the form of a multi-headed Hydra. The mystical monster, who had already killed innocent citizens, is confronted by Ibis, who uses his Ibistick to exterminate the beast, but to no avail. Ibis construes that his wand works best only with ancient black magic, and the monster is obviously a contemporary creation, “born of the foulness and disease of modern great cities!” A young boy steps up and informs the Hydra that “I’m gonna woik a charm!” The lad shouts a few magical incantations and the beast waddles away into the ocean. Over a piece of pie and a glass of milk (served by Ibis’ lovely partner, Taia—her sole task in the story), Banshee O’Brien relays his origin to Ibis, telling how he received from a dying old man a book that revealed the secrets behind the newer forms of magic. After hearing the boy’s account, Ibis promptly requests that O’Brien become his apprentice: “You’re just the one I need for a partner!” (Poor Taia!) When they encounter the Hydra for a second time, O’Brien doesn’t have the same success combating the malevolent creature as before, so Ibis—with a wave of the Ibistick—endows himself and the kid with power-plastic suits of armor and, with swords made of the same material,

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

begin cutting the heads off the Hydra. Unsurprisingly, however, the heads immediately all grow back and continue to multiply. Later, at a shipyard, the heroes attempt to electrocute the Hydra, but that only makes it grow larger. Realizing that the beast had only attacked at nighttime and therefore must fear light, Ibis commands the sun to rise that evening, causing the Hydra to reduce into nothing. Thus, the new team of Ibis and Banshee was born—but (redolent of Bulletman’s twice-appearing Bulletboy), it was to be a momentary association. Banshee O’Brien had just one more outing—in Whiz Comics #46 (Sept. 1943), in a story intended for the aborted All Hero Comics #2, where the boy (now co-billed with Ibis as the “Merchants of Magic”; the pair have formed their own “Magic, Inc.”—a sort of paranormal version of Uncle Marvel’s Shazam, Inc.) informs Ibis, “I can’t stand dames! … Whyn’t ya get rid of dat tootsie …?” (referring to Taia), and “Wimmen! I can’t stand ’em! Dey should all be put in concentration camps!” While the “Ibis” feature had drifted into mediocrity and momentarily gone astray from the foundation set three years earlier by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck, it rapidly recovered and was soon back on course as an unswerving, long-running back-up feature. The overall consensus, in all probability, was that Ibis already had a admirable partner: Princess Taia (a character that some readers would have unquestionably favored to see take on a more active role in the saga) … and that the addition of an obnoxious kid was not necessary.

“Golden Arrow: Movie Star” The preponderance of Golden Arrow’s adventures were straight-faced, undemanding, formulaic Western tales, as were most of Fawcett’s cowboy comics. When the strip was originally conceived, it was unmistakably set in the Old West—but later stories, such as the one in All Hero Comics, plainly planted the character in present-day 1940s. This particular GA outing wasn’t even up to par with the feature’s usual level of blandness, with its slapdash script and even shoddier artwork, making it seem more like a prolonged guffaw-filler than a second-banana adventure back-up feature. Basically, Golden Arrow stars in a movie and becomes at odds with two troublemaking crooks who are trying to sabotage the film—all told within sixteen painful pages. The readers are told at the very end to watch for “Another gay, galloping Golden Arrow yarn in your very next number of All Hero Comics!”—but instead he and his horse White Wind scratched gravel back to Whiz Comics. [Golden Arrow TM & ©2011 respective copyright holders.]

“Captain Midnight Battles The World’s Cruellest Ghost” Fawcett’s red-clad, quasi-super-hero rendition of Captain Midnight may have received criticism from radio show purists, but Cap’s comic book nonetheless flew high with its own devoted following for 67 issues between 1942-48 . Writers of the Fawcett stories were Otto Binder, Joe Millard, Rod Reed, and Bill Woolfolk; illustrators included the Jack Binder shop, Leonard Frank, Charlie Tomsey, Sheldon Moldoff, and Dan Barry. The scriptwriters portrayed James Albright/Captain Midnight as “the modern Thomas Edison”—inventor of a full arsenal of unique fighting gear such as the Blackout Bombs, the Doomsbeam, the Swing Spring, and the remarkable Glider Chute, all aiding him in his battles with Ivan Shark, assorted Nazis, Axis spies, Communists, and a broad-spectrum of lawbreakers. During the post-war years, the Fawcett writers transformed the Captain into a rocket-cruising interplanetary adventurer clashing with creatures from other worlds. Captain Midnight’s other appearances found him in a rare crossover episode with Spy Smasher (America’s Greatest Comics #8) and another World War II-era tale in All Hero Comics during the peak of the character’s Fawcett tenure. In the early days of WWII, notorious Gestapo leader Reinhard Heydrich had invaded and annihi[Captain Midnight TM & ©2011 respective lated the town of copyright holders.] Lidice, Czechoslovakia, and murdered all of its citizens. The memory of the tragedy lived on when a small town in Illinois paid tribute to the fallen townspeople by re-naming their town Lidice … but, in All Hero #1, the ghost of Heydrich threatens to unleash his wrath again. Captain Albright, along with associates Joyce, Chuck Ramsey, and “Ikky” Mudd, happens to be flying over Lidice, Illinois, one day when they spot a sky-written threat directed at the town. Albright throws on his Captain Midnight costume and, with his Gliderchute extended, soars over to the enemy plane near them, which carries Nazi Gestapo officers. Midnight flings one of his Blackout Bombs to dispose of them, all except for the pilot: Reinard Heydrich himself, who swiftly vanishes before Cap’s eyes. Captain Midnight and his companions are later captured by the Nazis and detained inside an electrified fence, but they soon escape. Cap’s crew join the townspeople in driving all of the Nazis out of town, while Midnight goes after Heydrich, and during their “face-off ” learns that the leader of the operation is only wearing a mask and a vanishing contraption. The fake Heydrich had been sent by Hitler to destroy the small U.S. town. “Lidice lives again,” Captain Midnight pledges with a salute, “ … as will all other cities and nations now under the iron heel of the Nazis!” And the flames of freedom continued to burn up the Axis.

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(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “1970s Time Capsule”! Examines relevance in comics, Planet of the Apes, DC Salutes the Bicentennial, Richard Dragon–Kung-Fu Fighter, FOOM, Amazing World of DC, Fast Willie Jackson, Marvel Comics calendars, art and commentary from ADAMS, BRUNNER, GIORDANO, LARKIN, LEVITZ, MAGGIN, MOENCH, O’NEIL, PLOOG, STERANKO, cover by BUCKLER and BEATTY!

Special 50th Anniversary FULL-COLOR issue ($8.95 price) on “Batman in the Bronze Age!” O’NEIL, ADAMS, and LEVITZ roundtable, praise for “unsung” Batman creators JIM APARO, DAVID V. REED, BOB BROWN, ERNIE CHAN, and JOHN CALNAN, Joker’s Daughter, Batman Family, Nocturna, Dark Knight, art and commentary from BYRNE, COLAN, CONWAY, MOENCH, MILLER, NEWTON, WEIN, and more. APARO cover!

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “AllInterview Issue”! Part 2 of an exclusive STEVE ENGLEHART interview (continued from ALTER EGO #103)! “Pro2Pro” interviews between SIMONSON & LARSEN, MOENCH & WEIN, and comics letterers KLEIN & CHIANG. Plus JOHN OSTRANDER, MICHAEL USLAN, and longtime DC color artist ADRIENNE ROY! Cover by Englehart collaborator MARSHALL ROGERS!

Urban Barbarian DAN PANOSIAN talks shop with editor MIKE MANLEY about his gritty, design-inspired work, DANNY FINGEROTH interviews “Billy Dogma” writer/artist DEAN HASPIEL, plus more of MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, product and art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Looks at the LEGO MECHA genre of building, especially in Japan! Feature editor NATHAN BRYAN spotlights mecha builders such as SAITO YOSHIKAZU, TAKAYUKI TORII, SUKYU and others! Also, a talk with Brian Cooper and Mark Neumann about their mecha creations. Plus mecha building instructions by SAITO YOSHIKAZU, and our regular columns on minifigure customization, building, event reports, and more!

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TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. (& LEGO! ) ®

ALTER EGO: CENTENNIAL (AE #100)

ALTER EGO #101

ALTER EGO #103

ALTER EGO #104

A/E celebrates 100 issues, and 50 years, of ALTER EGO magazine in a double-size BOOK! ROY THOMAS interviewed by JIM AMASH about ALL-STAR SQUADRON, INFINITY, INC., ARAK, other DC work, and more! Art by PÉREZ, McFARLANE, BUCKLER, ORDWAY, MACHLAN, GIL KANE, COLAN, GIORDANO, and more, plus Mr. Monster, FCA, BUCKLER/ORDWAY cover!

Fox Comics of the 1940s with art by BAKER, FINE, SIMON, KIRBY, TUSKA, FLETCHER HANKS, ALEX BLUM, and others! “Superman vs. Wonder Man” starring EISNER, IGER, MAYER, SIEGEL, and DONENFELD! Part I of an interview with JACK MENDELSOHN, plus FCA, Comic Fandom Archive, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and new cover by SpiderMan artist DAVE WILLIAMS!

The early career of comics writer STEVE ENGLEHART: Defenders, Captain America, Master of Kung Fu, The Beast, Mantis, and more, with rare art and artifacts by SAL BUSCEMA, STARLIN, SUTTON, HECK, BROWN, and others. Plus, JIM AMASH interviews early artist GEORGE MANDEL (Captain Midnight, The Woman in Red, Blue Bolt, Black Marvel, etc.), FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and more!

Celebrates the 50th anniversary of FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and the birth of Marvel Comics! New, never-before-published STAN LEE interview, art and artifacts by KIRBY, DITKO, SINNOTT, AYERS, THOMAS, and secrets behind the Marvel Mythos! Also: JIM AMASH interviews 1940s Timely editor AL SULMAN, FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and a new cover by FRENZ and SINNOTT!

(160-page trade paperback with COLOR) $19.95 US • Now shipping!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95 • Now shipping!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95 • Ships July 2011

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95 • Ships August 2011

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com www.twomorrows.com

• Back Issue! now 8x per year! • BrickJournal now 6x per year! • Back Issue! & Alter Ego now with color! • New lower international shipping rates!

O N S A L E J U L Y

Since 1970, the Bible of serious collectors! Cover by Walter Simonson (Thor, Orion)! Hardcover $35 • So Cover $29.95 www.gemstonepub.com Thor ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc. Supergirl and Batgirl ©2011 DC Comics. Overstreet® is a Registered Trademark of Gemstone Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

2 0 Supergirl/Batgirl Cover by Amanda Conner