Alter Ego #103

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ALTER EGO #102

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!

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Celebrates the 50th anniversary of FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and the birth of Marvel Comics! New, never-beforepublished 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!

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Vol. 3, No. 103 / July 2011 Editor Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

NOW WITH 16 PAG ES OF COLOR!

FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck

Comic Crypt Editor Michael T. Gilbert

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

Proofreader Rob Smentek

Writer/Editorial: A Long Day’s Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 “I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Writer Steve Englehart talks to Richard Arndt about his career through the mid-’70s.

Cover Artists Gil Kane, Sal Buscema, Jim Starlin, & Frank Brunner (plus inkers)

Cover Colorist

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background” . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Early comics artist (and Beat novelist) George Mandel interviewed by Jim Amash.

Jim Miele – A Gentle Giant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 An artist’s life among castles, ogres, and fair princesses—by Golden Age editor Herb Rogoff.

Tom Ziuko

With Special Thanks to: Rob Allen Heidi Amash Sal Amendola Richard Arndt Mark Arnold David Bachman Rodrigo Baeza Bob Bailey Robert R. Barrett John Benson Jerry K. Boyd Chris Boyko Frank Brunner Ken Bruzenak Ed Buchan Nick Caputo Jeff Clem Mickey Coalwell Jon B. Cooke Chet Cox Michaël Dewally Steve Englehart Shane Foley Janet Gilbert Goldengraphics.net Grand Comics Database David Hajdu Jennifer Hamerlinck John Haufe, Jr. William Henley David J. Hogan Brandon Huigens Sid Jacobson Eric Jansen

Contents

Todd Klein David Anthony Kraft Alan Kupperberg Marv Levy Mark Luebker Jim Ludwig Pat Mason Jim McLauchlin Brian K. Morris Frank Motler Charles Novinskie Kevin Nowlan Tom Orzechowski Barry Pearl George Pérez Rita Perlman John G. Pierce Gene Reed Charlie Roberts Herb Rogoff Don Rosick Eric Schumacher Ken Selig Steven Smith Robin Snyder Desha Swayze Marc Swayze Dann Thomas Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Michael Vance Dr. Michael J. Vassallo Lynn Walker Hames Ware Eddy Zeno

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Joanne Siegel, Louise Altson, Joe Vucenic, & Ed Lahmann

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! “The Mystery Of The Missing Letterer!” – Part 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Michael T. Gilbert presents Spirit letterer Abe Kanegson in his own words.

Comic Fandom Archive: Last Salute To A Pair Of Prominent Early Fans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Bill Schelly presents tributes to Joe Vucenic and Ed Lahmann.

Tributes To Louise Altson & Joanne Siegel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 “Everyone Deserves A Golden Age” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 The inspiring story of The Hero Initiative (née ACTOR).

re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 68 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #162 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 P.C. Hamerlinck hosts Marc Swayze and the thunder gods of Fawcett Publications.

On Our Cover: Thanks to Christopher Day, our layout wizard, for assembling this montage of Marvel heroes who were scripted by Steve Englehart in the early ’70s so skillfully that it’s hard to tell they came from a half dozen or more different comics. And thanks to John Morrow for providing the photo of Steve, which may be of a slightly later vintage than the art. No matter. Steve, like the four-color super-stars, is timeless, right? The figures were penciled, at various times and places, by Gil Kane, Sal Buscema, Jim Starlin, and Frank Brunner, and were inked by myriad hands.

[Art of Beast, Mantis, Falcon, Captain America, Shang-Chi, Valkyrie, Hulk, Silver Surfer, & Dr. Strange ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Above: The Woman in Red, as noted in the interview with her premier artist, George Mandel, is probably the first masked female in comic books, preceding a certain Amazon by a good year and a half! Of course, the Better/Nedor heroine had no super-powers, let alone a magic lasso or invisible plane, and it must’ve been hot in that robe—but being first has to count for something. Mandel says that Black Terror/Fighting Yank-creating writer Richard Hughes originated the character; but the issue of Thrilling Comics from which this panel is taken is, alas, unknown. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

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.

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writer/editorial

2

A Long Day’s Journey W

e’re proud as a puffed-up peacock, this time around, to present the first part of a two-tiered interview with lateSilver Age/Bronze-and-beyond scripter Steve Englehart, conducted by Richard Arndt. (The second installment will appear in our sister mag Back Issue #51, dated September.)

The Golden Age, too, is, well represented herein—by Jim Amash’s conversation with early-’40s artist George Mandel, who after World War II became first a comic book writer, then the author of a number of wellreceived novels… as well as by 1950s Ziff-Davis editor Herb Rogoff ’s piece on writer/artist/editor Jim Miele…

Michael T. Gilbert and Mr. Monster scaring up the Spirit of vintage letterer Abe Kanegson for a third time… and tributes to Joanne Siegel and Louise Altson.

deadline.

I know that I, for one, have come to take him too much for granted… ’cause that’s what tends to happen when somebody is so good at what he does, makes it look so easy to come through like a champ time after time.

We sang his praises briefly back in A/E #50, but he deserves more. As Arthur Miller wrote, “Attention must be paid.” Even if only for the inadequate space of a half-page editorial.

Recently, Chris informed publisher John Morrow and me that, after ten years at the layout helm, he was stepping aside so he’d have more time to pursue other, more personal life goals. Typically, thoughtfully, he gave us several issues’ advance notice of his departure. And, naturally, John and I did exactly what you’d expect us to do in such a situation: namely, we tried to bribe him into staying by offering him a few more bucks.

But what I want to talk about just this minute, right up here at the front of the magazine, is a guy named Chris Day.

But we knew even as we did so (to no avail) that Chris was right to go, and we bear him nothing but good will.

Christopher Day (to use his full appellation, as we do on our contents page) has been in charge of “design & layout” on Alter Ego since issue #8 way back in the spring of 2001.

Oh, yeah, and we’re also giving him a lifetime subscription to Alter Ego.

He came aboard a decade ago to put the magazine together from the text files and art scans and photocopies that I sent him… on a tricky issue in which he had to squeeze an obscene number of Wally Wood drawings into far too little space. He managed it, and he’s been working wonders on A/E ever since, even as he occasionally changed residences from Chicago to Rhode Island and back to Chicago… without ever missing a beat, or a

Because that’s the kind of guys we are.

Best of luck to you always, Chris—or, as Jerry Bails and I tended to put it, Bestest,

COMING IN AUGUST

#

104

STAN LEE ON 50 YEARS OF MARVEL COMICS! THE LANDMARK LEGACY OF FANTASTIC FOUR #1—1961 TO 2011!

• Great brand-new JACK KIRBY homage cover by RON FRENZ & JOE SINNOTT! • Never-before-published in-depth interview with STAN THE MAN about the Marvel Age of Comics—and about working with the likes of JACK KIRBY, STEVE DITKO, JOHN ROMITA, JOHN BUSCEMA, GENE COLAN, GIL KANE, JIM STERANKO, JIM STARLIN, FRANK BRUNNER, DICK AYERS, MIKE PLOOG, ROY THOMAS, & other top talents—with never-previously-revealed art & anecdotes!

• JIM AMASH interviews 1940s Timely/Marvel editor (and Blonde Phantom co-creator/writer) AL SULMAN! Art by JOESEPH SULMAN, SYD SHORES, et at.!

• FCA with MARC SWAYZE & an interview with Fawcett editor ROY ALD— MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s Comic Crypt—& MORE! Edited by ROY THOMAS

SUBSCRIBE NOW! Eight issues in the US: $60 Standard, $80 First Class (Canada: $85, Elsewhere: $107 Surface, $155 Airmail).

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3

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics” Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer STEVE ENGLEHART Conducted & Transcribed by Richard J. Arndt

I

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Steve Englehart (b. 1947) is one of the best-known and most influential comics writers to come out of the 1970s. But, though this fact is not as well-known, Steve actually began his career as an artist, drawing horror stories for Warren and Skywald and a few romance tales for DC and Marvel. He soon focused exclusively on writing, however, beginning with the adventures of the just-turned-blue-and-furry Beast in Marvel’s Amazing Adventures. He quickly earned credits on such Marvel titles as The Avengers, The Defenders, Hero for Hire, Doctor Strange, Master of Kung Fu (which he cocreated), and, probably most notably, Captain America, which he took from being a modest seller to one of Marvel’s top titles.

He also created the cult hero “Star-Lord” for Marvel’s black-&white magazines.

This first part of the interview, which was conducted in May and June of 2010, covers Steve’s work through the mid’70s; the conversation will be concluded in Back Issue #51 (Sept.

2011).

Drawn To Writing Steve Englehart, according to Jon B. Cooke (to whom “Stainless Steve” had provided the above photo several years back for JBC’s mag Comic Book Artist), is seen here “hanging off a bridge… about the time when the writer was hitting his stride as a scripter at Marvel Comics in the mid-1970s. Steve told us to dig the funky glass frames!” Below are images of his early work as first artist, then writer: (Left:) The p. 2 splash of “Demona” in Skywald Publications’ black-&white comic Psycho #7 (July 1972), penciled by Englehart from a Gardner Fox script. Inks by Vince Colletta. Thanks to Rob Allen. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

(Right:) The moody splash page of Steve’s very first outing on Captain America (#153, Sept. 1972). Art by Sal Buscema & Jim Mooney. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

All In Color For A Crime A trio of Steve’s favorite early memories of comic books (clockwise from above left): Dick Sprang’s “Batman” of the 1940s & ’50s is, for many, the definitive artistic rendition, as per this splash from Detective Comics #165 (Nov. 1950).

Inks by Stan Kaye; script by Edmund Hamilton. Reproduced from the hardcover DC Comics Classic Library: The Batman Annuals Volume One (2009). Just imagine—along with the original comics, they’re even reprinting Annuals now! [©2011 DC Comics.]

A “Mickey Mouse” mystery splash panel drawn by Paul Murry for Dell/Western’s Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories #236 (May 1960). Script attributed to Carl Fallberg. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [©2011 Disney.]

As Steve reports, Harvey’s reprints of Chester Gould’s comic strip Dick Tracy often ran afoul of the Comics Code Authority. In these panels from issue #112 (June 1957), the nice folks at the Code apparently “asked” the company to delete black line art, and even some color, depicting a woman’s corpse in the first panel (as can be seen in the printed comic by an empty white shape against the purple background of the street), yet let the body remain in the second. That reprint title was a treasure trove of censored artwork, more of which will be seen in our special Halloween feature “Tales from the Code,” coming in A/E #105! Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. [©2011 Tribune Media Services or successors in interest.]

“I Wanted To Be An Artist” RICHARD ARNDT: We’re here with Steve Englehart, whose fourdecade-long career has endeared him to comics readers. First, thank you for agreeing to this interview, Mr. Englehart. Second, can you tell us something about your early life and where you encountered comics for the first time?

STEVE ENGLEHART: I read comics as a kid, of course. There were three titles that I remember now as liking particularly. One was Batman. Dick Sprang was the main artist in those days. I thought his art was amazing to look at.

Another was Dick Tracy, which really was a reprint of the newspaper strip. I first read Dick Tracy in the comic books. I liked that world, Chester Gould’s world. The interesting thing about those comics, though, was that they had first been reprinted by Harvey during an earlier comics era, and the version I was reading was the second or third reprinting. The Comics Code had come into existence between these editions, so whenever something came up that would offend the Code, such as a gun or a hand being crushed in a door, they would take the offensive image out of the black printing plate. However, they didn’t touch the red, blue, or yellow plates. Even as a child, I understood the concept of how comics were done—and here you could see the blue shape where a gun would be and a red streak where the bullet was flying, but there was no black outline around it. Or you could see the flesh-colored spot where the hand would be crushed in the door, but there’d be no outline of the hand. It didn’t confuse me, but it sort of sensitized me, maybe not directly at the time but later, how cool stuff could be taken away or censored from you.

The third comic was the “Mickey Mouse Mysteries” by Paul Murry that ran in the back of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. I loved Carl Barks’ “Donald Duck,” which was up front, but, in fact, the “Mickey” stories were actual mysteries—three-part serials—and the art was really nice to look at.

I think what attracted me to those three titles was that they had a particularly juicy ink line to them. I always like black-&-white art, and [noticing] the missing black lines in the Dick Tracy thing make it clear that that’s what I was focusing on.

RA: How did you get involved in comics to begin with? You started off as an artist…

ENGLEHART: Right. I wanted to be an artist, and when I was going to college in Middletown, Connecticut, at Wesleyan, Dick Giordano was the editor at Charlton Comics in Derby, Connecticut, which was some

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

5

“Kiss” And Tell Pages 1-3 & 10 of the very first story on which Steve Englehart assisted artist Neal Adams, for Vampirella #10 (March 1971)—and got his first credit!

Thanks to Kevin Nowlan. [©2011 DFI.]

Neal Adams, from the 1975 Marvel Con program book.

6

Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

distance away. Once I got interested in comics as something to do, I hitchhiked over to Derby on a Friday afternoon and got there about 3:00. It was raining. As you can imagine, Charlton was not a hotbed of activity.

Dick was sitting around, I think, with Rocco Mastroserio and some other guys, and I approached him. He was totally welcoming. He was friendly and interested in what I had to show him. Nothing came from that first meeting, but thereafter, because he lived in Connecticut and so did I, I would go see him every four to six months and show him what I was working on. He was gracious about letting me do that.

Because I was next to New York, I also went down to DC Comics. I went to Marvel once, but they basically said, “Naw, we’re too small. We don’t have any time to show you around.” However, at DC they said, “You should talk to Julie Schwartz.” I went in, and Julie sat and talked to me for at least a half hour. When we finished our talk, he said, “I’ve got some original art stacked behind you if you like to take a page.” That was original Brave and Bold and Justice League artwork. This was back in the day when fandom didn’t really exist to any great extent. Certainly not like it does today. There was Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego thing and other fanzines, but the readership was small and they weren’t in New York. I don’t know how many fans were in the actual New York area.

Anyway, I got to know that the people doing comics were good people.

They weren’t demi-gods or beyond my ability to grasp what they were

about. That helped me understand that I could get into that world. It was possible. I thought at the time that my entry was going to be art, and I was progressing. I was not a great artist by any means, but I was progressing.

“Gary [Friedrich] Asked Me… To Fill For Him On Staff At Marvel” RA: This would have been in the mid- to late 1960s, yes?

ENGLEHART: Late 1960s. When I graduated from college in the summer of 1969, I was accepted into law school, so I called up my draft board— which, if you don’t remember it, you’re probably better off—and asked if I could get at least a semester in before they drafted me. The draft board said no, we’re going to get you in about six weeks. So I went into the Army and eventually ended up as a journalist stationed in Maryland.

One weekend when I got off duty early, for no particular reason, I hopped on the train and rode up to New York to visit DC Comics. I showed up at the DC offices and I ended up talking to Neal Adams. Neal used to like working in the DC offices. I told him I was trying to be an artist, and when I finished talking, he said, “Why don’t you come work for me?” I told him one reason I couldn’t was that I was in the Army, and he

Art Or Scripting—Steven Ponders Witch Way To Go During this period, Steve also penciled at least three “Do’s and Dont’s of Dating with Page Peterson” pages for DC romances, such as this one from Young Romances #177 (Dec. 1971), which may (or may not) have been inked by Vince Colletta—and this “filler” page for The Witching Hour #21 (June-July 1972).

Scripters unknown. Thanks to Jeff Clem and Mickey Coalwell for the former, and to Michael T. Gilbert for the latter. [©2011 DC Comics.]

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

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Black-&-White And Read All Over The first pages of two early stories penciled and inked by Steve Englehart: (Left:) “Retribution,” from Warren’s Eerie #35 (Sept. 1971), was originally scribed by Gardner Fox, but Steve apparently did some rewriting—probably his first published scripting. Thanks to Gene Reed & Jerry K. Boyd. [©2011 DFI.] (Right:) Page 1 of the “Demona” story from Skywald’s Psycho #7 whose splash (p. 2) was seen at the beginning of this interview. Script by Fox, inks by Colletta. Thanks to Rob Allen. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

replied that I could come up on weekends, just like I was doing right then.

It was a three-hour ride, but I could come up on the Friday and we could work together, and I’d go back when the weekend was done. He said that he stayed at DC until one in the morning on Friday night working, and then he worked at home on Saturday. I said I could do that. So, as amazing as that was, that’s what I did for the next six months. I came up every weekend, worked with Neal, and slept on a couch at Columbia University.

The very first job I did, Neal insisted on putting my name on the credits with his, which nobody ever did. Nobody gave his assistant credit, let alone an apprentice. But he wanted me to have a published credit so I could get more work. That was the kind of guy Neal was.

RA: That would be the Denny O’Neil-scripted story “The Soft, Sweet Lips of Hell,” right? It appeared in Warren Publications’ Vampirella.

ENGLEHART: Yes. Afterward, when I got out of the Army, I had a few other jobs. I did a story for another Warren book, Eerie, and I did a story for [Skywald’s] Psycho, which was a rip off b&w magazine that modeled itself after the Warren books. I illustrated some “Do’s & Dont’s [sic] of Dating”—little one-page romance things for Murray Boltinoff. I was doing entry-level kind of stuff. I did backgrounds for Dick Giordano on

some “Batman” stories. I worked with Dick’s brother-in-law Sal Trapani. I did backgrounds for Bob Oskner for “Supergirl” and “Jimmy Olsen” for a while. I was in New York, I was working in comics, at an entry level, and that was good enough for me.

Now, the great thing about New York was, in those days, [that] to work in comics you had to go to New York. It was before the Internet. Before fax. Before anything, really. You had to go physically to the offices. There were people who weren’t New Yorkers. John Severin was out in Denver, I believe. Sal Buscema was down in Washington, DC. But 99% of the writers and artists were in New York or the New York area. As soon as you were connected into that group, you were in that universe. You were basically a social equal. I hung out with Wally Wood. I hung out with Gil Kane. Nobody said, “Who are you? You’re just some new punk kid.” It was, “Now you’re part of the comics world.” It was wonderful.

One of the people that I hung out with was Gary Friedrich, who wrote Sgt. Fury and was an assistant editor at Marvel Comics. I showed up in the fall, and in the summer of the following year there was a stewardess who lived in the apartment above Gary who was murdered. I never heard how that investigation went, but Gary’s wife said she’d rather go spend the summer in Missouri, where Gary was from, than stay in the apartment right below where someone had been killed. So Gary called me up and

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Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

Gary On, Scripter Gary Friedrich (seen here from 1969’s Fantastic Four Annual) furnished Steve’s entry into Marvel, first as a staffer and later, inadvertently, as a scripter, as related in the interview. Steve received no credit when he was assigned to rewrite a bit of Gary’s dialogue in the Ayers-penciled Sgt. Fury #94 (Jan. 1972)… nor did erstwhile staffer Al Hewitson when Gary opted not to dialogue the Hewitson-plotted story “Terror of the Pterodactyl” in Monsters on the Prowl #15 (Feb. ’72) and it was handed to new staffer Steve instead. Plotting a story as opposed to dialoguing it, in those days, frankly didn’t generally receive the respect (and credit) it deserved. Art by Syd Shores; thanks to Barry Pearl for the art scans. Steve reports that he also did some “additional dialogue” in 1972’s Sgt. Fury #97, Iron Man #45, and Incredible Hulk #152. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

My Love Does It Good (Far left:) This story in My Love #16 (March 1972) was co-written by Steve and Marvel production assistant Holli Resnicoff, who’s seen at near left with production manager John Verpoorten in a photo from Marvel’s fan club publication FOOM Magazine (#2, Summer 1973)—but only she received a byline. Well, assuming this wasn’t just another rewrite job: During this era, Stan wasn’t wild about male names appearing as scripters of romance stories, since those tales tended to be written in the first person (as if they were being related by the tearful heroine), which led to the “as told to” phrase; and the latter worked even better if the scribe was a woman. Art by Mike Sekowsky & Jack Abel. Steve says he and Holli also teamed up on a tale in Our Love Story #16 (April 1972). Holli was later married for several years to artist Mike Ploog. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the art scan. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

Sentiment And Six-Guns (Above left:) Before he decided to concentrate on being a writer, Steve penciled a few stories for Marvel, as well, starting with a Gerry Conway-scribed tale in Our Love Story #15 (Feb. 1972).

(Above right:) He also penciled a Gary Friedrich-scripted story in the aforementioned My Love #16—which was inked by none other than Jazzy Johnny Romita himself.

(Right:) Meanwhile, Steve strapped on his spurs and did some rewriting on the lead story in Two-Gun Kid #103 (March 1972), working with veteran artist and credited writer Ogden Whitney, of “Skyman” and American Comics Group fame.

Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

asked me if I’d like to fill in for him on staff at Marvel for the summer. He was probably just looking for someone who didn’t have anything else going on. I almost said no, because, at the time, I was living two hours out of the city up in Milford, Connecticut, which was a suburb of New Haven. I was a freelancer. I didn’t have to be close, so it was two hours in and two hours back out by train. I remember going in to interview for the job and thinking that I wasn’t really going to take this job, but that it was kind of cool to be considered. With that attitude I remember that I told Roy—it was Roy Thomas, who was either editor or de facto editor under Stan who interviewed me—that I could only do the job four days a week because of the train travel. For whatever reason, he said that was OK, so I went on staff at Marvel.

I worked Monday through Thursday. Then, one day, in the midst of all that, Gary Friedrich was supposed to dialogue a six- or eight-page monster story for one of the anthology titles. He was in Missouri and didn’t want to do it, so he sent it back and said that somebody else should do it. Roy looked around, saw me, and said, “Well, you’re sitting in a chair.

Here, why don’t you dialogue it?” I had a good time doing it. I really liked

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Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

it, and I guess it caught people’s eyes, so I wrote some more stuff. Suddenly I wasn’t just an assistant editor. I was a comic book writer.

RA: One of the first Marvel credits that you had was in a Sgt. Fury issue. A fill-in issue, I’d suspect.

ENGLEHART: I didn’t actually write that one. I went over it. I don’t actually know for sure the complete circumstances, but Gary was still in Missouri. He was out of the pressure cooker of New York. He was the regular writer on Sgt. Fury, but for some reason, Roy wasn’t totally happy with that issue. He asked me if I could go back over it and tighten up the writing on it. I did a couple of those things. Not just over Gary’s scripts but other people’s, as well. Stuff would come in. Roy would say, “Why don’t you see if you could touch it up?” None of that stuff was ever planned and probably came as a surprise to the guys who thought they had written it.

RA: Who was Holli Resnicoff? She’s credited as your co-writer on several of your early stories.

ENGLEHART: She was Stan’s secretary. I really liked Holli a lot. She was not only Stan’s secretary but also the general secretary for the bullpen workers when they needed one. Marvel—maybe all the comic companies of that time, but certainly Marvel—paid you a salary for being on staff, but they threw freelance work at you, as well. Something you could work on in your free time to earn extra money. At that time, they still had romance books. In fact, they were trying to revive them. Romance, Westerns, and monster stories—short pieces—were the non-super-hero stories where they could train people. You could write short romance or monster or Western stories to learn the craft of comic book writing. At same time, you weren’t destroying an entire issue of Iron Man in the process. I don’t remember if Holli wrote those stories and I got involved or… I tend to think that we got the assignment together. I haven’t thought about that in a long time, but that romance work was a way to break in at Marvel. You got a number of chances to show them what you could do. If they decided at the end of it that you actually could do something, then you got more work.

“The X-Men Weren’t Like They Are Today” RA: I think your first regular book was a rebooting of The Beast, who’d been an X-Man. ENGLEHART: Yes, that’s correct.

RA: Did you completely do the first story there, or was that plotted by someone else?

ENGLEHART: The first issue was written by Gerry Conway. I think he co-plotted it with Roy. They set it up that The Beast was going to change from human-looking to looking like a werewolf. That was typical of Marvel at that time. Quite often an established person would do the first issue of a new title, and then they’d hand it off to somebody else.

RA: Yes, that happened with “Werewolf by Night,” “Killraven,” “ManThing,” and [Tomb of] Dracula, just to name a few.

ENGLEHART: Most of the time, the writers had their own series. But, kicking off a new series, if Roy or Gerry couldn’t write it full-time, then they would write the first episode and hand it off to somebody like me or Steve Gerber or whoever. I started with the second issue of “The Beast,” which was running in the title Amazing Adventures. They’d set everything up, and I proceeded to continue it.

Bringing Out “The Beast” In Steve Englehart Steve’s first writing credit on a super-hero title was the second “Beast” solo story, in Amazing Adventures #12 (May 1972). The photo of artist Tom Sutton is from FOOM Magazine #19 (Fall 1977). For the short sweet run of that “Beast” series, pick up a copy of the hardcover Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men, Vol. 7, in which Cory Sedlmeier and his kookie crewmates in Marvel’s reprint department have assembled half the stories which (along with reprints) kept the young mutants front if not center between The X-Men’s cancellation in 1969 and 1975’s Giant-Size X-Men #1. Vol. 8 of that hardcover series reprints the other half!

Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RA: I actually liked the art teams on that book quite a lot, although it was usually a rather an odd combo—Tom Sutton did the penciling and he got inkers like Syd Shores or Mike Ploog. The artist combos would seem to be a match of two completely wrong artists to put together, but the final product actually seemed to come out rather nicely.

ENGLEHART: Not sure I was that crazy about the art. I’ve always wanted to sort of put across the realism of the fantasy, and Tom Sutton’s stuff was always kind of cartoony for my taste. But, for the first several years of writing comics, you have no clout. In those days, you just didn’t go to the editor and say, “I’ve got an artist that I want to work with.” That would never come up. All the books were done by assignment. They said “You’re writing ‘The Beast.’ Tom Sutton’s drawing it.” You didn’t discuss it. I certainly didn’t think of what kind of alternative artist I could possibly get. That was just the way it was. I wasn’t totally crazy about Tom’s artwork, although, to be fair, there was a lot of charm to it, but his approach wasn’t what I was seeing in my mind when I plotted the story.

Having been an artist—and I won’t claim that I was a great artist at all, but I could visualize things; I knew how I would draw it—I think that

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

gave me an edge as a writer of comics. I could always visualize how a story could be drawn. Mind you, I never thought it should be drawn exactly the way I saw it, because that’s not how it works. Every artist is going to have his own take on it. Still, the story’s art was in my mind’s eye before it got on the paper. So whether it was Tom Sutton or someone else drawing the story, I was happy to have a job. I was happy to be writing any Marvel comic, let alone one with an X-Man in it.

The X-Men weren’t like they are today, mind you. Their title had failed. My version, Roy’s version, of “The Beast” was an attempt to resurrect the title, or parts of the title, for the 1970s. He was totally revamped. It was still several years in the future before Len Wein and Dave Cockrum came up with the new X-Men. Still, I got to use the original X-Men in the book, which was pretty cool for where I was.

RA: You got regular assignments very quickly thereafter. You took over The Defenders from Roy Thomas. Took over Captain America. I think it was unofficially Captain America & The Falcon at that time. Then you had The Avengers, all by the end of your first year as a scripter.

ENGLEHART: Comics, you know, were produced quickly. They were a periodical, so there was, and needed to be, a new one every month. Gotta have a story, beginning, middle, and end, every month. If you wanted to write, you had to go to New York. When you got there, if you could show them what you could do, within a month or two they would call you up and ask you to do a fill-in on this thing, whatever it was. Marvel was expanding into black-&-white magazines and almost doubling their slate of color comics. There were so many books. Somebody was going to get sick, somewhere, or have a car accident or a family emergency or whatever. Sooner or later they were going to need somebody to fill in, so if you could show them your stuff and if they thought there was something to that, then they would use you fairly quickly. Just because of

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the nature of the business. Everything I did up to “The Beast”—romance, war, monster, whatever—got me “The Beast.” Then, as things opened up, they plugged me into the openings.

It was a good situation in that Roy was the editor and, at least in the beginning, I was his next in command. Stan may have still officially been the editor, but Roy was really the editor. Stan was looking beyond to the larger picture. [NOTE: Stan Lee became Marvel’s president and publisher in mid-1972.] As Roy started to have more and more on his plate, he began having problems making the schedules on some of the books he was writing. I was right there. I was getting more work because I’d earned the chance for more work. He had to give up some series, and he gave them to me.

The next book I got was The Defenders, which was quite new at the time. There’d been some tryout stories in Sub-Mariner and The [Incredible] Hulk and two or three issues in a comic called Marvel Feature. “The Defenders” consisted originally of the Hulk, The SubMariner, and Dr. Strange. I loved the Marvel Universe. I loved the characters, and the byplay, and the way they interacted with each other. I was very happy to get the chance to add to that. Getting the Defenders book and getting Captain America was pretty much simultaneous, I think…

“Captain America… Was A Failing Book” RA: Yes, there was a one-month difference in your taking over the books.

ENGLEHART: I think, when Roy gave me those two books—and this is a story I think I’ve told 5000 times now—he said, “If you can make these books sell… if you can bring them in on time every month and keep doing that, then that’s great, but if you can’t we’ll fire you and get somebody who can, because we don’t have time to edit.” That was the beginning of what I considered to be a wonderful environment. You were basically given those books and told, “Here you go. Jump into the deep end of the pool. See if you can swim.” You had a great deal of freedom.

Roy tells the story of how he came into Marvel, and he did not have a great deal of freedom. Stan worked him over pretty hard, trying to get him to write and sound like Stan. In retrospect, I didn’t notice it at the time, but I’m very grateful that Roy had the sensibility to realize that comics work better if the writers and the artists get to put into a story what they want to do. At least, if it worked. If they produced a disaster, then fire them and get someone else. That, of course, was always in the background, but Roy gave you the chance to succeed. It was always up to you to do it.

It was a great system. If I thought something was interesting, then I could do it. I could try it out. I liked that. I liked the freedom, the sense of accomplishment when something worked out. Mind you, these weren’t huge-selling books at the time. The Defenders was new. Roy had only done the three issues of the tryout stories. It didn’t have a big history. It was still in the stage where I could make up the guidelines as I went along. I tried to go along with what Roy had set up, but there was no lengthy history to the book.

Moonlight In Vermont Hank McCoy (a.k.a. The Beast) encounters Steve Englehart—and vice versa—in Amazing Adventures #16 (Jan. 1973), in one of the so-called “Rutland stories” which proliferated in both Marvel and DC comics during the first half of the ’70s.

These tales made use of major Halloween parades held each year in Rutland, Vermont, which were attended by a number of young comics professionals.

For more, scrounge up a copy of TwoMorrows’ out-of-print trade paperback Alter Ego: The Comic Book Artist Collection. Art by Bob Brown & Frank McLaughlin. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scan. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Captain America had a long history, but at the time it was a failing book. Nobody knew what to do with Captain America. It was in danger of being cancelled. We were still in Vietnam, and here was this guy with a star on his chest and nobody had figured out what to do with him in the 1970s. I was fortunate enough to figure it out. Six months after I’d taken on the book, it was Marvel’s best-selling title. That firmed up everything for me. The folks at Marvel said, ”OK, this guy has somehow figured out what the readers want.”

RA: When you started on Captain America, you wrote a story about the 1950s Captain America, who’d been left out of Marvel heroes’ history. You wrote him as a rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth insane

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Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

Commie-hater. To be honest, at that point the only “Captain America” stories I’d read had been from 1964 on, so I had no knowledge that there’s been a revival of “Captain America” in the 1950s. I was a little lost at first, but I got hold of the story fairly quickly. It wasn’t that difficult.

ENGLEHART: Captain America had not been around much in the 1950s. Timely had tried to bring him, and The Human Torch and SubMariner, back around 1954, and that revival went down in flames. I think there were only three or four Captain America issues printed.

The Sub-Mariner ran longer. But there had been a Captain America in the 1950s. However, the Marvel Universe History had Cap being encased and frozen in that iceberg in 1945 and not being revived by The Avengers until 1964. That whole storyline was Roy’s suggestion.

When I got that book, he said, “Here’s an idea that you might want to run with.” It was a pretty good idea. He gave me a stack of those ’50s comics and made me come up with an explanation for it. Roy was trying to ease the way into writing Cap for a guy who was still fairly new to writing comics.

I said thank you very much and made up a story to explain the 1950s Cap and Bucky. The Marvel Universe was supposed to be the real world or a reflection of the real world. You could have ignored the 1950s stories, but that wasn’t the Marvel way. We’d paid attention to the 1940s stories, and not recognizing the 1950s stories wouldn’t have been logical.

RA: I really liked the contrast between the two Captain Americas. The 1940s Captain America, as he was originally written, would have been appalled at the things the 1950s Captain America was doing.

ENGLEHART: This guy, the 1950s Cap, was a reflection of what was going on in the 1950s. He wouldn’t have been a Roosevelt, New Deal liberal (for the times) type young man. The 1950s Captain America was older than Steve Rogers would have been in 1940, very antiCommunist, and I’m sure that the writers of those 1950s comics were pitching to that type of an audience. That’s what was out there. Twenty years later, an older, more seasoned Captain America of the 1970s was appalled by that stuff. Using those contrasts in men was an easy way to shape that story.

RA: The 1950s Bucky was noticeable as a racist, as well.

ENGLEHART: The 1970s Captain America’s partner was The Falcon, a black man. Again, it was using the contrasts. How would a 1950s Captain America and Bucky, both of whom had been driven insane by the imperfect super-soldier drug they been given, react to a black partner?

RA: It proved to be a popular and well-done start-off to your tenure as writer of the book.

ENGLEHART: It also showed the editors and, even more importantly, the readers that I knew what to do with Cap. The writers just before me really hadn’t come up with something. I felt that a 1970s Captain America should stand for the America that we were all taught about in school. It didn’t really matter that America was waging a war in Vietnam. Well, it did matter in that it wasn’t being waged in the manner that we’d been taught about in school. It didn’t rise to the level that Captain America would be opposed to the war, but Cap, to me, was a New Deal liberal. He was formed by the Roosevelt government as the patriotic symbol of the 1940s. That’s where his psychology would come from. That [style of belief] had nothing to do with much of what was going on in the 1950s. I looked at this guy and said, “I don’t care

Cap-And-Trade Over the course of Captain America #153-156, the Cap who’d been thawed out of two decades’ worth of iceberg in 1964’s Avengers #4 had to defend his title (literally!) from a renegade Cap who’d slung a mean shield during the 1950s. In this full-page panel from #156 (Dec. ’72), “our” Cap is the one getting clobbered! Pencils by Sal Buscema; inks by Frank McLaughlin. The story arc was a smash—and writer/editor Roy Thomas and artist Frank Robbins had fun in 1977 tying up a few loose ends in the canonical What If #4, covering two different heroes who became “Captain America” in the last half of the ’40s, before Steve & Sal’s version took over the role. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scan—and the photo of Sal Buscema at left is from the 1975 Marvel Con program book. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.] An aside from A/E’s editor: Steve’s statement that by early ’73 Captain America had become “Marvel’s best-selling title” needs a bit of clarification. Roy, who was editor-in-chief from 1972-74, doesn’t recall specific sales figures, but if he and/or others then in the know told Steve that Cap had begun to outsell all other Marvel mags, they were surely speaking in terms of sales percentages, not in total numbers. By then, the Cap comic having gradually declined in popularity, its print run (never as high as those of Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man, and a few other titles) would’ve been lowered; thus, even if Cap abruptly began to outpace, say, Spider-Man in terms of the percentage of printed copies that were actually sold, Spidey would still have sold more actual copies. (The same thing had happened, as we’ve noted before, during the brief 1965-66 period when John Romita was drawing Daredevil.) None of the above, of course, is meant to detract in any way from Steve’s considerable achievement in restoring Captain America to the top ranks of Marvel titles—and in a remarkably short time, to boot!

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

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ENGLEHART: No, there was not. I’d taken Captain America from the edge of cancellation to being the number #1 book at Marvel, so I had a lot of leeway. Watergate was mesmerizing the nation. The idea that a President would order a burglary and try to cover it up was a big deal.

Since then, we’ve had guys start wars using lies as excuses, and nobody seems to do anything about that. Back then, though, everybody was focused on Watergate and I was writing Captain America, a book that was supposed to be in the real world. I could not see any way that a character named Captain America could not react to something like Watergate.

Foto Opportunity The only photos we’ve ever seen of Steve Englehart and then Marvel editorin-chief Roy Thomas together were those taken (probably by Vinnie Colletta) for four “Foto Funkies” pages in Crazy Magazine #1 & #3. This panel/pic from #1 (Oct. 1973) showcases, from left to right, Roy, his thenwife Jean, and Steve, in a parody of satire mag The National Lampoon’s “Foto Funnies” feature. (A few months earlier, Roy & Jeanie had appeared in an actual NatLamp “Foto Funnies” along with that mag’s co-editor/cofounder Doug Kenney, whose place Steve took in the Crazy shoot.) Writers: Roy & Jean Thomas. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

I created an analogue to Watergate. I had The X-Men in it. There was a major corporation named Roxxon (after Exxon—an oil company, of course) that was involved. There was an organization called The Secret Empire. Captain America had to react to what was going on. That fact that the story never names or shows Richard Nixon was my own selfcensorship. With great freedom comes great responsibility, or something like that, and I could do whatever I wanted to, but I wasn’t in the business of screwing things up for Marvel. Nobody at Marvel nor I myself thought that going there and doing that sort of story was going to create a problem. I just thought, I’m not going to say this villain at the bottom of all the lies and secret deals was actually Richard Nixon. I’ve never met anybody who didn’t get it, who didn’t realize that’s who it was. It was

what flag he has on his chest. Who is he? If he were walking around today, who would this guy be?” That turned out to be the touchstone for every character I’ve ever done. If they were real, how would life as we know it affect them? In turn, how would they affect life?

I had to figure that out, and I think I had a good take on it, for Captain America, at least. Besides having my Cap fight the 1950s Captain in a big battle, that story would also showcase my thoughts on what my Captain America was about. That he was somebody who actually did believe in something, even if what he believed in wasn’t necessarily in vogue with the times. You can see it, because you can see that he doesn’t believe in this other thing. I treated The Falcon as an actual partner, not just some sidekick or hanger-on. Cap had a girlfriend. The Falcon had a girlfriend.

There were bad guys and a police force. I had to build that whole world, because Cap really hadn’t had much of any of that before. Facing the 1950s Captain America was an excellent jumping-off point to begin to show all of that. To get it all set up. It was an effort to make Captain America more of a real person, with a real point of view.

RA: One thing I noticed, and I remember that it was somewhat shocking me at the time, was that I met Stan Lee at a college lecture in February 1975 and I asked him about your “Captain America” story which featured the finale in the Oval Office with a villain who was not identified but was clearly Richard Nixon. Stan had no idea what I was talking about.

ENGLEHART: By 1975 Stan was probably living in Hollywood. Stan and I had overlapped at Marvel as office workers for about six months, and then he was gone to California. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Actually, Stan didn’t move to Los Angeles until the very end of the 1970s, although he did make an increasing number of trips there on Marvel business.] For years afterwards the books all said “Stan Lee Presents,” which was true because Stan earned everything that he got and is still getting. But he had moved on, beyond comics, to try to put together animation deals. It’s not surprising to me that by 1975 he didn’t actually read the books or didn’t know what was going on in them. That wasn’t really his world anymore.

RA: Was there any heat from the Marvel offices or from distributors about the “two Captain Americas” storyline?

Falcon Fulminations During his run on Captain America, Steve Englehart deepened the characterization of The Falcon, Cap’s long-running partner. This page by Sal Buscema & Frank McLaughlin is from C.A. #160 (April 1973). Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

“I Am Not A Crook!”

(Left:) Captain America #174 (June 1974) ends with the violent suicide of the unmasked head of The Secret Empire—who was clearly intended to be thenPresident Richard M. Nixon, who would not actually resign until August 9th of that year. As editor, Roy T. gritted his teeth and took a chance that publisher Stan Lee wouldn’t see red when he learned about the sequence. RT hoped that he and Steve could both hide behind the “ambiguity” of the ending (since, after all, Nixon would still be alive and President when #175 went on sale)— though, in truth, everybody in the office understood what was meant. Today, Roy isn’t 100% certain he would make the same decision a second time… but he’s got to admit, it was one helluva climax! Pencils by Sal Buscema, inks by Frank McLaughlin.

(Above:) A few months earlier, however, RT had made one change in Cap #169 (Jan. ’74), in order to avoid rousing the wrath of Stan and/or the Comics Code Authority. In the final panel of this TV sequence, scripter Steve had had the name of the “Committee to Regain America’s Principles” lettered on four lines in such a way that they vertically spelled out the word “CRAP.” Public sensibilities in 1974 being a bit different from today’s, Roy had a production person alter the lines to break up the offending acronym. He felt, even then, that Steve’s group-name was a clever twist on the real-life 1972 “Committee to Re-Elect the President,” which was often abbreviated (somehow) as “CREEP.” “But sometimes,” Roy says, “an editor’s just gotta do what an editor’s gotta do.” Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scans of the Sal Buscema/Vince Colletta art. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.] The Englehart Captain America run has been reprinted in Vol. 3-5 of the black&-white Essential Captain America series of trade paperbacks; happily, two key story arcs can be found in the color trade paperbacks Captain America and The Falcon: Secret Empire and Captain America and The Falcon: Nomad.

When The Frank-Frank-Robbins Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along (Left:) Interviewer Richard Arndt admits to being momentarily thrown for a loss when he picked up a copy of Captain America #182 (Feb. 1975) and discovered that penciler Sal Buscema had been replaced by someone with a radically different style. Inks by Joe Giella. Thanks to Barry Pearl. The caricature of longtime newspaper comic strip artist Frank (Johnny Hazard) Robbins, probably by Marie Severin, is from The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #3 (Aug. 1974). [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

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totally clear who it was, but it was my decision, not Marvel’s, not to use his name. The editorial people, whoever that was at the time, just said, “Great comic. Keep going.”

I followed the Watergate analogue with the “Nomad” storyline, where Cap continued to be a hero but not Captain America, because he had a hard time believing in an America that included a Secret Empire. Other people tried to fill in, to be Captain America. Once, as a writer, you make a decision, then it starts to open up other avenues, other doors. Soon there’s not just one door, there’s another door. I let the story take me where it would go.

RA: I did enjoy the “Nomad” storyline. I do remember being somewhat shocked by the art change that came right in the middle of that story.

ENGLEHART: That’s the nature of comics. I loved working with Sal Buscema, who drew almost all of my Cap stories up to the “Nomad” tale.

I was also a big fan of Frank Robbins over the years, but I didn’t think….

Their styles were very opposite approaches to a story. Having myself, and the readers who’d had Sal Buscema artwork to look at for years, have to switch to Frank Robbins was kind of tough. It took getting used to.

In the same vein, I’m a big Don Heck fan. I like Don Heck, and I’ve never understood why he came in for so much of the flack that he did.

When we got to the end of the “Mantis” saga in The Avengers, the artist was supposed to be Dave Cockrum, but he couldn’t do it. Editorial turned to Don and basically said, “Here’s the climax of a story you know nothing about, full of characters you’ve never seen. It’s 34 pages long. Knock it out as fast as you can.” Under those circumstances I think Don did the best that you could expect anybody to do. Still, I’m unhappy that the final chapter was drawn by somebody who wasn’t a part of the story up to that point. Same thing with Captain America and the “Nomad” story—I like Frank Robbins, but I wish that Sal had been able to complete that story and have Frank start an entirely new storyline. But that’s just the way comics are. That’s the kind of thing that can happen.

“I Was Better Off Writing Steve Englehart [Avengers] Stories” RA: That gives us a good opportunity to discuss your work on The Avengers.

ENGLEHART: One point I’d like to make is that the next book I got after Captain America was The Avengers, and that was an important book, unlike Cap at the time. It was coming off a run of great stories by Roy Thomas. Roy had done that [book] for a long time. It had been excellent the whole time. When he gave me The Avengers, it was a wonderful vote of confidence. It’s true that for the first eight or nine months of my time on the title I tried to write Roy Thomas stories. It took me a while to figure out that I was better off writing Steve Englehart stories. Roy gave me a great vote of confidence, and I certainly felt the need to not screw that title up.

RA: You seemed to start writing those “Steve Englehart stories” just about the time you had the Avengers/Defenders crossover issues. That’s something I don’t remember anybody ever doing before in comics, although it’s certainly done a lot now, linking two separate titles into a single storyline.

ENGLEHART: Well, before I became a professional, I read the Marvel books, and I’d always bought as many books as I could. It wasn’t that hard then, because the titles only cost 12 or 15 cents, so you could buy a lot of them. That buying all the Marvel titles led me to doing the same with DC and Gold Key and Charlton. I was a total comic book fan. I had a broad knowledge of what people were doing. One of the things that I really liked was that Marvel did original double-sized summer annuals. The annuals were big events that tied in with the regular title. It would have an extra-

Third Valkyrie From The Left Somehow, except for the “Avengers/Defenders” storyline, Richard and Steve never got around to talking much about The Defenders, a comic Steve scripted from the first issue of its own series. His second greatest achievement on that title, perhaps, was to establish a third (and enduring) identity for The Valkyrie, as seen above in Defenders #4 (Feb. 1973). His greatest achievement in the title? Talking Smilin’ Stan Lee into letting him bring The Silver Surfer into the group, even for a few issues! At that stage, The Man wasn’t wild about having anyone but himself script Surfy. Pencils

by Sal Buscema; inks by Frank McLaughlin. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, inc.]

long story and usually a reprint that was cool because it filled in back stories.

My first summer with those titles, Marvel said that they weren’t going to do annuals that year. I don’t remember why. Probably something to do with budget. They just weren’t going to do them. I liked, as a reader, having something really special in the summertime. I’d buy the books at the drugstore, riding around town on my bike, sitting down under a tree in the summertime heat reading these things. There were a lot of memories involved in this. So I thought that if there weren’t going to be annuals than maybe I could do this thing with The Avengers and Defenders, now that I was writing both of them.

I went to Roy and told him my idea. He said, “Fine, but don’t screw it up. If you fall behind on deadlines, you’re going to screw up both books.” I told him I wouldn’t do that, and I didn’t. I’ve got The Defenders and The Avengers, which is pretty much all the heavy hitters in the Marvel Universe except the Fantastic Four. Wouldn’t it be fun to have them all

16

Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

Every Witch-a-way (Above left:) Steve got off to a dramatic start on The Avengers with the splash page of his very first issue, #105 (Nov. 1972). He was only the third person to script the series, following Stan Lee (#1-34) and Roy Thomas (#35-104). Art by John Buscema & Jim Mooney.

(Above right:) With #108 (Feb. 1973), Dashin’ Don Heck returned to begin a several-issue run on the title he had drawn from #9 through #40—aided in this instance by embellishers Dave Cockrum and Joe Sinnott. Thanks to Barry Pearl for this and the previous scan.

(Below:) The 12th issue of FOOM Magazine (Dec. 1975) spotlighted The Vision as easily the most popular Avenger not starring in his own mag. One feature therein was an interview with Steve Englehart, conducted by staffer Duffy Vohland. Because these folks were all mentioned therein, Marie Severin drew one of her usual dead-on cartoons, depicting (left to right) production artist Paty Greer (later Paty Cockrum—and “Paty” rhymes with “Katy”), major Avengers artist John Buscema, former Avengers writer Roy Thomas, Vizh himself, DV, Steve (at the typewriter), and deadline-conscious production manager John Verpoorten. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Incidentally, the first three dozen or so Englehart-scripted issues of The Avengers are currently on display in Vol. 5 & 6 of the b&w trade paperback Essential Avengers series—and his run will begin to be reprinted in hardcover/color in the imminent Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers, Vol. 11.

meet and fight each other? It was great fun for me to use those guys and come up with all the individual stories. Figure out who would fight who for the 10 or 12 pages or whatever it was that we spent time with them. I think it had a feel of the old Tales to Astonish or Tales of Suspense titles where you had two different super-hero stories in a book. It was fun to think of a way to hold it all together for this big, climatic story. I loved that kind of thing. The funny thing is—they’re about to reprint it again! I got asked to write an introduction for an upcoming Marvel Masterworks collection. I was talking to the editor about that and mentioned that for a long time I’d thought that my 1977-1978 “Batman” run was the most reprinted material of my career, but someone had told me that my “Doctor Strange” material with Frank Brunner was the most reprinted. But now it seems to me that the Avengers/Defenders crossover issues are the most reprinted.

There seems to be a reprint of the “Avengers/Defenders” story every year! Who knew? At the time, it just seemed like a really cool thing to do.

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gasping. I never went quite that far, but I thought it was very cool that if that’s what Kang was, a time traveler, and he could do that, then doing it that way would be second nature to him. It did strike some people as odd that the same guy would keep coming back, but that’s what I was trying to do with him. To indicate that, same as everything, that if he really existed, that this is how he’d work. He was a Master of Time, so he would beat you with time. If he couldn’t beat you any other way, then he’d beat you with time.

I made sure that each time he showed up he had a good plan and had interesting things to do. It wasn’t just “here he is again, doing the same stuff over and over.” At the time—I don’t know if it’s still true, but it was at the time—Kang was supposed to be The Scarlet Centurion, he was supposed to be Doctor Doom, as well as Immortus and the Pharaoh Rama-Tut. All these villains throughout history. I didn’t nail it down really hard, but he was a powerful guy. To be a super-villain in different eras with different names, I loved that idea.

“I Thought Starting The Same Character Up At Two Different Companies Could Be Interesting” RA: You had the same character appearing for two different companies’ major super-hero group, who was called Mantis in The Avengers and Willow in Justice League. Can you tell us why?

ENGLEHART: Well, I had created Mantis, had nurtured her though some 18 months during my time on The Avengers, as she went from being a Saigon street slut to being the Celestial Madonna. Then I was gone. I left Marvel and went over to DC and was writing Justice League. It was at the San Diego Comic-Con that a guy came up to me and asked if my

Call It “Clash,” “War,” Or “Clambake”—The Thing Sold!

The “Avengers/Defenders Clash” (as Steve E. called it) or “Avengers/Defenders War” (as editor Roy T. thought of it) began with an epilogue titled “Prologue” at the end of The Avengers #115 (Sept. 1973), then bounced back and forth between The Defenders #7-10 and The Avengers #116-117—to finally climax in The Avengers #118 (Dec. ’73), seen above.

That made it a real “first” of sorts—and in spite of Roy’s nail-biting over potential deadline problems, none materialized—while the series became a sales and critical hit, as well. A real triple play for scripter Steve and his awesome artists—including Avengers penciler Bob Brown and Defenders penciler Sal Buscema (now where have we heard that name before?).

Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, inc.]

The early-1970s photo of artist Bob Brown was provided by Sal Amendola.

RA: I recall numerous comments in the letters columns of the period about the number of times you had Kang the Conqueror appear as an Avengers villain in 1974, ’75, ’76. Some people seemed to be quite upset with that. I always thought that was an interesting approach—that you would keep coming back to the same villain. Certainly, other writers would do that—bring back The Red Skull, bring back Doctor Doom for the Fantastic Four, bring back The Joker for Batman—but your stories during that time period indicated that, for Kang, this was all one long battle, not a series of them.

ENGLEHART: I did it faster. Usually, there was a time frame where Doctor Doom didn’t show up. He was off licking his wounds or making up a new battle plan. But the thing that really struck me about Kang was that the guy traveled through time, so time didn’t mean anything to him.

He didn’t need time to recover or work out a new plan. He could fight The Avengers tooth and nail until they were all on their last leg, then run away, take six months to rest up, make up a new plan, then return thirty seconds after he left and start over while they’re still lying on the ground

How “This One” Became “That One” The mysterious female called Mantis (“This One”) made her debut in The Avengers #112. By #114 (Sept. 1973), she proved herself a force that not only Thor had to reckon with—but also DC Comics, when, a couple of years later, Steve Englehart re-conceived her as “Willow” in Justice League of America. Art by Bob Brown & Mike Esposito.

Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

Horsemen And Hellcats Late 1975 and early ’76 are really a little beyond our franchise period. Still, Steve and Richard converse about The Avengers during that era, so… these dramatic pages depict The Avengers facing a lineup of Marvel’s Western heroes (#142, Dec. 1975) and discovering that 1940s-60s teen star Patsy Walker has become a super-powered Hellcat (#144, Feb. 1976). Pencils by George Pérez; inks by Vince Colletta and Mike Esposito, respectively. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scans. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

changing companies meant that we’d never see Mantis again. I said maybe not. I thought starting the same character up at two different companies could be interesting. Nobody’d done that before. Let’s put her in the Justice League and see. Fortunately, I’d given her a very distinctive speech pattern and she was green, so let’s see, if I put a green woman with that speech pattern in the Justice League, what would happen? People didn’t seem to have too much trouble figuring out who she was. I got to write some stuff in there where she talks to the Justice League and says, “I come from someplace I can’t tell you about where I was and where I was doing stuff I can‘t tell you about, but here I am.” That’s where total freedom as a writer will get you. There’s nobody to tell you that doing something like that isn’t possible. “Maybe we can do that story. Let’s see.”

It wasn’t totally unique, though. Roy had introduced the Squadron Supreme, who were analogs of the Justice League. I used them, too, just before I left The Avengers, but I never really considered The Avengers’ battle with them to be a quasi-Justice League/Avengers battle. I think by the time that I used the Squadron they’d developed their own identity in the Marvel Universe. It might be interesting in retrospect that not long after those issues I ended up writing Justice League, but there was no foreshadowing on my part. The cosmos may have been looking on longterm, but I certainly wasn’t.

RA: During your time on The Avengers, you reintroduced The Beast,

whose series had been cancelled. You also brought in Patsy Walker, who’d been a supporting character in The Beast’s series and had had her own series through the mid-1960s in a romance/humor comic. She appeared as Hellcat. I thought it was interesting that you picked the least likely Marvel character one could think of to introduce as a new super-hero.

ENGLEHART: When I was doing “The Beast,” I was new and was trying to do things that had never been done. Patsy Walker had appeared in a crowd scene in the Fantastic Four Annual #3 that Reed and Sue were married in. By doing that, Stan had said that she’s part of the Marvel Universe, even if her character in her own book had no other connection at all. Nothing had been done with that since, but I thought it was a cool idea to sell “The Beast” if Patsy Walker came into it. She only appeared in The Beast’s series as part of a soap opera. The Beast had a girlfriend, but she was a double agent—Gerry Conway set that up. Patsy Walker and her husband Buzz Baxter showed up in the book to expand the possibilities and set up an interesting vibe. But I didn’t get the chance to do much because the book was cancelled. “The Beast” only lasted six issues or so.

When the Mantis thing came to an end in The Avengers and it was time to come up with a new team as we are wont to do with The Avengers, I started thinking about who was going to go, who did I want to keep, who was going to make an interesting team that will support good stories. The Beast was still sitting around. The original X-Men was still a

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

failed book and only featured reprints. The new X-Men hadn’t started yet.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but it’s been pointed out to me since that I was the only writer trying to use The X-Men to any great extent between the failure of the original team and the revival of an almost totally new team in the mid-1970s. Even I wasn’t trying to push them that hard. I just thought they were good characters. They deserved a better fate than they’d got, so I used them in pretty much every series that I had, one way or another. They were good characters that just couldn’t seem to carry a book. I still liked The Beast. He wasn’t being used. I could put him in, and if he was in, then what about Patsy Walker?

It’s just an example of how one idea leads to another. If Patsy was going to be in The Avengers, she was going to have to be a super-hero. I didn’t have a whole lot of time for random soap opera in a team book like The Avengers. So I thought, if she was in the Marvel Universe, then she would have been a fan of the original 1960s heroes. That’s why she was at Reed and Sue’s wedding, after all. So if she was a fan and clearly a romantic dreamer then, wouldn’t it be cool if she secretly wanted to be a superhero? In The Beast’s series she made an agreement with The Beast that he would do something for her if she helped him out of a jam. The book was cancelled before we got into exactly what. Here was a chance to finish that plotline.

prototype super-villains. That had already been established. It made sense to me, in this Marvel context, that if The Avengers went back in time, these guys could be there. They were often masked. All of them had a certain uniform or clothing that basically was a uniform. There may have flying guys and death rays, but the heroes were still basically recognizably Western characters.

When the Avengers time travel story was over, I brought the Two-Gun Kid to the present. What I wanted to do was to have this guy who, in his time, was a lawyer, he was smart, he fought proto super-villains back in his day—but he’s still an 1870s man. Drop him down into the 1970s with Doctor Doom as the bad guy—another guy in armor plating, but much more advanced armor plating. I didn’t really have the time to fully develop that idea. I had so much else on my plate that I could never actually trigger it, so to speak. Then I left The Avengers so I never got to finish that notion. I liked that concept, though.

RA: I notice that every time a character, whether he’s from Marvel or DC, and particularly in the Justice League cartoon, has a time travel story, they make a point of meeting the DC or Marvel Western heroes.

That particular story of yours may have been a prototype of for any

I brought The Beast and Patsy Walker into The Avengers and established that what she’d gotten The Beast to do was to help her become a super-hero. Everything just kind of fell together from that. By putting The Beast, who was medium strong, into The Avengers as well as Hellcat, who had Hellcat powers, then I needed to come up with Moondragon, who been in the Thanos War in Captain Marvel’s book and was somewhat of a god-like figure. You like to have a nice mix of people in the team. That’s basically why Moondragon showed up. We needed a balance to Patsy Walker. A god-like woman and a novice super-hero. I’m a huge Patsy Walker fan, though. I got to do the Hellcat three-issue miniseries earlier this century, and I really like her. I think the whole concept of a plucky young girl is a good concept. She would always say, “I’m just a girl,” but then she’d fighting the devil or whatever. She’s a romance heroine with a core of steel. She’s a fun character to play with.

RA: You also took The Avengers back in time to team up with Marvel’s Western characters, most of whom were also in cancelled books or only appearing in reprints at the time: Two-Gun Kid and Kid Colt and the Rawhide Kid and probably another Kid or two.

ENGLEHART: The Phantom Rider was the fourth one. If the romance world was part of the Marvel Universe, then the Western heroes could be, as well. Marvel had published Western characters for many years, and then the genre faded and the Western heroes went completely away except for the Rawhide Kid, who was written and penciled by Larry Leiber, who was Stan Lee’s brother. But, in theory, they were part of the Marvel Universe, so when I was doing the time travel storylines and sent The Avengers back in time, I thought, “Where are you going to go?” If you’re going back in Marvel time, there aren’t a whole lot of places where you could have an adventure where they could meet other major characters. I guess you had the original Black Knight in King Arthur’s time, but other than that, what?

The Western heroes, in that context, were naturals. I like the idea that, in their own books, when the super-heroes were starting to go big-time and the Western books were still being done, those characters met Western versions of super-villains—just like James West did later in the TV show Wild, Wild West. There would be guys wearing armor plate, so they looked like robots. Guys had wings, so they could fly. It was kept, sometimes just barely, in the realm of believability. These were sort of

19

The Monster And The Mutants Editor (and former X-Men writer) Roy was determined to keep his former charges in the readers’ minds—and faces—during this period, and Steve Englehart happily became the guy who between 1969 and 1974 scripted more stories featuring the merry mutants than anybody else! Case in point: In The Incredible Hulk #161 (March 1973), Steve squared off the hairy Beast, his first super-hero writing assignment, not only against Ol’ Greenskin but with the menacing Mimic from early issues of X-Men. Pencils by Herb Trimpe (seen here in a photo from FOOM Magazine #10, June ’75); inks by Sal Trapani. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

number of time travel stories that have come about since. I suspect that notion comes from your Avengers story.

ENGLEHART: In comics, if it’s been done somewhere else, then when you do something like a time travel story in the DC Universe, who are you going to see? Where are you going to go? You’re going to visit other DC characters who lived in different times. They’ll see the Justice Society or Viking Prince or The Demon or, in particular, the Western characters.

Going back and meeting Western characters is, I think, fairly straightforward.

“I’ve Often Thought That The 1960s Were A Real Super-Hero Time” RA: You also took on the licensed title Doc Savage for a while.

ENGLEHART: Which is now being reprinted by DC Comics. [laughs] It’s really weird, because they didn’t change a thing. It looks precisely like… because it is… 1970s Marvel Comics. Except that it says DC on the front

of the cover. DC currently has the rights to “Doc Savage” and, in the same way that Dark Horse is reprinting the Conan material that Marvel produced for some 25 years, DC is reprinting those older “Doc Savage” stories.

But as to my involvement with Doc Savage: at the time I wasn’t only reading comics. In the late 1960s somebody, Bantam or Lancer or somebody, was reprinting in paperback all the 1930s and 1940s Smith & Street pulp novels of The Shadow and The Avenger and Doc Savage.

They had a real early super-hero feel to them.

I’ve often thought that the 1960s were a real super-hero time. You had a young, handsome guy like John Kennedy as the President. You had the Russians, who were a perfect evil empire of super-villains. With the advent of the Beatles and the increase in drug use, people started dressing in costumes. Fancy bellbottoms, paisley shirts, very colorful. If you thought about the parts of a super-hero, they were all in display in real life. You had the youth movement, the Beatles, and Motown, and you had Marvel Comics, too. Marvel’s books were much more in tune with the times than DC or the other comics companies’ product. Stan took a chance and came up with anti-heroes: Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and all that. They are what they are, but, at the same time, he did it at the right time. It was a time when the youth of America, if not the whole world, was totally primed to get into pop art and bright colors, fantasy and myths. Things that were out there beyond the horizon but also related to their lives. I think it was easy for people to get into super-heroes then.

RA: You also worked on The Incredible Hulk, taking that one over from Archie Goodwin.

ENGLEHART: The Marvel offices at that time were small. When I was there, I had become the designated guy who would talk to a fan if a fan showed up—Marvel had been too small a company to have someone do that for me when I’d showed up as a fan. You couldn’t really take them on a tour, though, because there wasn’t a lot of room in the place. The offices weren’t crammed. They were comfortable, but they had no extra space.

There was no little alcove that wasn’t being used there. They did have two artists on staff there, though, to do whatever needed to be done. That was Johnny Romita and Herb Trimpe. We were all friends in the office. What I said earlier about the comic book community was absolutely true in the Marvel offices. That stuff that they talked about—the friendliness of the Marvel bullpen, how everybody got along, was pretty much true. I was friends with both Johnny and Herb, and Herb drew The Hulk. When I got The Hulk it was pretty cool, because we were both right there and could talk on a daily basis about what we wanted to do, which wasn’t possible with other artists that you didn’t see as often.

What’s Up, Doc? Quick! Was this page published by Marvel Comics or by DC Comics? The answer is—yes! Above is the splash page of Marvel’s Doc Savage #1 (Oct. 1972), which led off an eight-issue series (plus a giant-size ish or two) before sales torpedoed it. In 2010 DC Comics gained the Doc Savage license—and with it, apparently, rights to the Marvel comics—so that same page now leads off the DC trade paperback Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze.

The plot of issue #1 is by Roy Thomas (adapted from the first Doc Savage pulp magazine story). When he got too busy to dialogue it, he entrusted that task to Steve Englehart, who went on to solo-script the next several issues. Art by Ross Andru (pencils) & Jim Mooney (inks). [©2011 Advance Magazine Publishers, Inc. d/b/a Condé Nast Publications.]

Getting The Hulk from Archie wasn’t quite as big a deal as getting The Avengers from Roy, but Archie had been doing a great job. A typically great Archie Goodwin job. I just didn’t feel the weight of taking over that book as much, because Roy was right over me and Archie was over to the right of me in some sort of hierarchal scale. I don’t mean that Archie and I were on the same level, but he was working at Marvel and I was working at Marvel. Roy was the editor, though. Keep in mind that I didn’t want my era on The Hulk to suck. [chuckles] It was a fun book to write, and I wish I’d been able to do it longer. I really enjoyed The Hulk. Especially working with Herb.

RA: I particularly liked the one story that you did together about the mad scientist who’d built a huge submarine and had genetically altered his people, including his own son, to survive at the deepest depths of the ocean. They wanted to see the world their father and leader had kept them physically from. When they revolt against him with the aid of the Hulk, they get to the surface and explode because their bodies aren’t designed to work in the lesser pressure of the surface world.

ENGLEHART: Well, with the Hulk, you had to have villains who were his equals in some way. They had to be big and impressive. You also had to

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

21

The Warren Report, Revisited Even as his writing career at Marvel was heating up, Steve did a bit of renewed scripting for Warren’s b&w comic mags, as well: (Left:) This lead story in Vampirella #21 (Dec. 1972) was followed by the “Vampy” entries in #22-23. Art by Jose Gonzales. On his website, Steve explains that his pseudonym “Chad Archer” meant that he was “shadowing Archie Goodwin.” Thanks to Rodrigo Baeza. [©2011 DFI.] (Right:) He also wrote an English-language script to go with Spanish artist/plotter Esteban Maroto’s “Dax the Warrior” sword-and-sorcery adventure in Eerie #46 (March 1973). Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [©2011 New Comic Company.]

make them different from each other so you’re not doing the same story over and over again. I liked to do stories about people who had problems that human beings might face. The costumes were just what the people wore. It wasn’t what the books were about, at least, not to me. I was looking for psychological hooks to hang stories on, because a big tough guy beating up on the Hulk gets old and what else is left?

RA: Were you still working as the assistant editor when you were doing all this writing?

ENGLEHART: That’s right, but it was only for a short time. I’d always liked the Warren books. I got into the industry working for them with the Neal Adams story that appeared in Vampirella. It wasn’t a “Vampirella” story, but it appeared in her magazine. I had a connection and a couple of published credits at Warren. Jim Warren was a cool guy. He was a sort of entrepreneur, living the Playboy lifestyle perhaps. I don’t know exactly if that’s how it was, but he was a young guy, dressed casually but well. He had a cool apartment and he was a publisher. I liked him and he liked me.

ENGLEHART: Somewhere in there I stopped doing that. It got to the point where my workload just wouldn’t let me do both. During that time I also moved from two hours away to 43 minutes away in Stamford, Connecticut. I just couldn’t spend eight hours a day in the office and two hours on the train and keep writing so many books. At some point I gave up the office job and became a fulltime freelancer. By the time I took over The Hulk I was writing four or five books, most of them monthly, so it had to have happened by that time, but I really don’t remember exactly when or how long I was on staff. It certainly went past the summer that I filled in for Gary.

Again, I followed Archie on the “Vampirella” strip. Archie left “Vampirella” to spend more time doing the Marvel stuff, and I found some time to work on it. I don’t remember who came to me and asked me to write it, but I ended up with the job. It was a ball of fun. I liked doing that kind of story, with that nice Spanish art. Unfortunately I was only able to work on it for a short time. I think I did four issues, and the fourth script got lost in the mail. It was my young writer’s wake-up call. Always make a Xerox! The editor, Bill DuBay, ended up writing a new script using my title. After that story, though, I’d run out of time to do non-Marvel work. I had to leave. I would have stayed with “Vampirella” a lot longer if my Marvel workload hadn’t increased. It was a fun strip.

“I’d Always Liked The Warren Books”

RA: You also wrote the script for a “Dax” story that originally appeared as a series written in Spanish and illustrated by Esteban Maroto.

RA: At this same time you also took some assignments outside of Marvel. You did some writing for Warren Publications on Vampirella.

ENGLEHART: I don’t know who wrote the original, but Warren had

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Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

bought a package of twelve stories about this sword & sorcery character called Dax. They’d been translated into an English script, but the translation was horrible! Warren handed the twelve stories to various scripters, and said, “Here’s the artwork, here’s the bad script. See what you can do.” I met Maroto at a convention in Madrid later on. I’ve always loved his work. Working on that story was a treat.

RA: You also worked on Luke Cage, although I don’t remember if he was still a Hero for Hire or was Power Man. I think he was still a Hero for Hire.

ENGLEHART: He was. I took that over from Archie, too. I liked that book. I got to work with Billy Graham, who was one of the very few black artists working in comics at that time. Of course, that’s why they put him on that book. He penciled some of the time, but I think he was the inker most of the time. George Tuska was usually the pencil artist on the book. I was a twenty-something white guy who grew up in Indiana. I’d gone to college in Connecticut and been in the Army. I wasn’t completely fresh off the boat, but I didn’t know a whole lot about black life in New York City, and Billy was kind enough to help me out in that regard.

It was a ’70s Marvel comic that I tried to do right by. Luke Cage was somewhat of a unique character for comics at the time. In the middle of my run, I had Cage go up against Doctor Doom, which some people liked and some hated but I’m still quite fond of.

RA: True, it’s not quite the storyline that you’d expect from a born-and-bred streetwise Harlem crime-fighter.

ENGLEHART: Well, you never know. I mean, this is the Marvel version of New York, which Doctor Doom regularly traveled to. I thought it made total sense, and I’ve never changed my mind on that.

You might quibble about why Doom might hire him, even through surrogates, but once he got hired, Luke Cage, by God, was going to get paid. Doom was basically blowing him off. Luke Cage was a character who would not stand for that.

The great thing about Cage was that he would just go. Put it in forward gear and go. If he had to go to Laveria and do something about his payment, then that’s what he’d do. I thought the contrast between those two characters, both in powers and psychologically, was fun. I was always looking for a characterdriven story that could go where the character hadn’t gone before. What can I do that people won’t expect the ending before I get to it? That story was one of them.

“Okay, If [Dr. Strange] Really Existed, Who Would He Be?” RA: In 1973 you took over “Dr. Strange,” who had just been revived from a 1960s cancellation and seemed to be floundering, as well. He was stuck in an H.P. Lovecraft-style storyline that had started out well but, by the time you took over, seemed to be heading nowhere.

ENGLEHART: I don’t know too much about what happened before I got that book. At Marvel, if a book failed, they’d try to bring it back, one way or another, after a certain amount of time. One reason was a copyright

“I Want My $200!”

Dr. Doom just couldn’t believe that “a crazy black man” had invaded Latveria and stormed his castle just to collect the $200 for which Doom had stiffed him!

For some reason, the sum of $200 has figured in some nice scenes over the years—such as Brigid O’Shaughnessy paying Sam Spade and his partner that then-too-generous sum to help her at the outset of both the book and film versions of The Maltese Falcon—while, in the 1973 hit movie Paper Moon, little Tatum O’Neal kept dogging her dad Ryan, wailing, “I want my $200!” And Steve (as aided and abetted by artists George Tuska, seen above left, and Billy Graham, left) makes three! Photos from the 1975 Marvel Con program book.

Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scan from Hero for Hire #9 (May 1973)—and, just for the record, Steve’s editor thought that having Luke Cage chase down Victor Von Doom as a deadbeat was a great idea. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

issue, but, I think, at Marvel at that time they really cared about the characters, too. People liked Dr. Strange in-house and they wanted to figure out a way to make that character work. But there’s certainly a publishing aspect to it, too. You lose the rights to the name if you don’t publish characters in a certain amount of time, so characters always come back if their book fails. In that particular “Dr. Strange” sequence the leadoff story was actually the last comic that Stan wrote in his original run at Marvel. It was over Barry [Windsor-]Smith art and, after that, Archie Goodwin wrote an issue, then they handed it off to Gardner Fox. Frank Brunner had done some work for the character before I got to it.

RA: Yes, he’d inked Windsor-Smith’s last issue and penciled one of Fox’s stories.

ENGLEHART: Gardner Fox had been a comics mainstay for decades, and

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

23

When I actually got the book, I got together with Frank Brunner, the artist, and said “Okay, if this guy really existed, who would he be?” Who he should be was the Sorcerer Supreme, which title had been occupied by Strange’s mentor, the Ancient One. I thought it was incumbent on me to learn what that title might mean. I started reading books on magic and pagan concepts and whatnot. I started throwing that stuff into the book. I wanted each character I worked on to be fairly unique. You should be able to see where Captain America or Dr. Strange or Luke Cage was coming from, where they got their ideals and beliefs from. Each character should have his own reason for existence.

RA: Dr. Strange seemed like a much more spiritual book than the books you’d previously been doing.

ENGLEHART: That seemed like the right approach to him. He wasn’t a super-hero who just happened to have magical powers. He was the Sorcerer Supreme. He probably had some esoteric thoughts behind what he was doing. He opened and visited other dimensions. He lived in other realities. How does that affect his mind and his attitudes?

I’m going to leap sideways for a minute to a book series I’m currently writing. I wrote the first book, The Point Man, in 1980. The second, The Long Man, just came out recently. That series also stars a guy who has some magical abilities. He’s not the same as Dr. Strange, but it’s the

Strange As It Seems Steve and his new artistic collaborator Frank Brunner came on strong on the splash page of Marvel Premiere #9 (July 1973)—but over the ensuing issues, they more than lived up to their own (well, Steve’s) advance publicity! Their joint sojourn on “Dr. Strange,” both in MP and then in his own revived title, is a highlight of the Mystic Master’s career—and probably the time when that mag was the most successful from a commercial point of view. (Maybe even from an aesthetic one.) [Page ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.] To this day, Frank (seen here from the 1975 Marvel Con program book) is often asked to draw images of the Sorcerer Supreme. Of the 2007 sketch at right, he says: “This was just a little quickie sketch that reveals one of Doc’s secret weapons! His amulet holds the Eye of Agamotto! The Eye that reveals all truth! The Eye that forced Silver Dagger to see his own misguided action… and his sins! And when I left him, he was in the neverland that is the Orb of Agamotto… taking consult from a certain caterpillar!” [Dr. Strange TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.] By the way, Frank Brunner is currently accepting art commissions for covers, splash panels, or pin-up re-creations, or for new compositions; art can be pencil only, inked, or full color (minimum order is $150). Contact him through his website at www.frankbrunner.net.

he actually wasn’t a bad choice if you were going to do a Lovecraft-themed story, but he didn’t really know the Dr. Strange character or his mythology, so the book didn’t have much direction. There didn’t seem to be much of Dr. Strange in it. That was another one where editorial said, “We’re taking Gardner off and we’re putting you on. Starting next issue it’s all yours.” I’d written Dr. Strange in the Defenders book, but he was primarily a super-hero there, whose powers were magical.

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Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

Point Well Taken!

Steve Englehart’s novel The Point Man, introducing his occult hero Max August, was first published by Dell in 1980 with a cover by Richard Corben. Thanks to Richard Arndt. For the 2009 covers of The Long Man and the second edition of Point Man, see Back Issue #51. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

same concept in that he has become an alchemist who is immortal and, therefore, doesn’t probably think like you or me.

In both cases, I’ve had to say, “If he doesn’t think like me, then I have to think not like me.” He’s a character that’s not like me, but I’ve got to write him. It’s the same deal, whether it’s Dr. Strange or my novel’s character, Max August, to be that edgy. To write a character who is far more cosmic than you are. There’s a real possibility that you’ll come out sounding lame, like some burnt-out hippy. You’ve got to wrap your mind around something somewhat foreign and try to convey it to readers.

some of its luster twenty or thirty years down the line. The Avengers material and Captain America and, especially, the “Dr. Strange” material still read very well.

RA: You and Frank Brunner made a good team on those early issues. His art style was strikingly different from much of what was appearing in comics at the time.

ENGLEHART: Yes, I wrote five issues of the comic and two stories that appeared in the black-&-white magazine The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu.

ENGLEHART: You didn’t know it was your Golden Age, or whatever it says in Alter Ego. We didn’t know it would be called the Bronze Age, but we knew it was the age that we were in. There were a whole bunch of us who were trying to do cool and unusual stuff. If enough people do that, in comics it’s called an Age. I never bought into the idea that comics were basically trash or that comics could only be so good. I followed Stan’s train of thought, which was they were great and were only going to get better. When I came into the field, I thought I was part of the guys who were supposed to make it better. There was no limit that said we could only go so far, so we tried to go far.

“The Fu Manchu/Shang-Chi Conflict Did Set Up A Nice Dynamic” RA: You and Jim Starlin also created “Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu” at this time.

ENGLEHART: Absolutely. Frank was great, and that was a book that we did sort of together in that he lived in New York while I lived up in Connecticut, but every two months, because it was a bimonthly book, either I‘d go down to his place or he’d come up to mine, and we’d have dinner, kick back, and discuss what we’d needed to come up with for the new issue. In the interim, I’d come with I wanted to write about and he’d come up with stuff that he wanted to draw and explore.

We’d throw ideas back and forth, and it was my job as the writer to put them in some kind of coherent plot, but it was definitely two parts coming up with something that was more than the sum of two parts. It was always two people building something together. It was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, Frank was painstaking with his art, and the book got so popular that Marvel wanted it to go monthly and Frank just couldn’t stay with it.

Everybody knows the Englehart/Brunner run on Dr. Strange, but when Frank left, I got Gene Colan as the penciller, and Gene Colan is not someone to be sneezed at. The Englehart/Colan team went on and kept that book monthly and we did a lot more stories. I’ve got no problems at all with all the acclaim that the Brunner art era has received, but I do think that the Colan era tends to get overlooked, and it shouldn’t be. I don’t think it’s been reprinted yet, but I suppose it will be gotten to eventually.

RA: It’s been reprinted in the Essential Doctor Strange series. I think it’s in Volume Three.

ENGLEHART: Oh, so it has come back into print. But it needs a Masterworks edition.

RA: Yeah. It was fun to re-read those stories. They still hold up pretty well, which is nice because sometimes you re-read something that you liked a lot when it came out and it loses

Masters Of Kung Fu (Left:) David “Grasshopper” Carradine battles Master Po (Keye Luke) in the 1972-75 TV series Kung Fu, which, along with movies that came along during this period, inspired a “kung fu craze” in the United States—one aspect of which was Marvel’s “Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu.” Thanks to Bob Bailey. [©2011 Time-Warner or successors in interest.]

(Above:) The splash page of Special Marvel Edition #15 (Dec. 1973), the comic that launched the “Shang-Chi” series, as co-created by writer Steve Englehart and penciler Jim Starlin. Inks by Al Milgrom. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

25

Steve Harper said “I’m going to stick around here and watch a TV show.” We all asked him if he was nuts, but he said it was a really cool show, so we stuck around and watched Kung Fu. I think it was the second episode. We really liked it. I mean we really liked it, the whole concept, the way it was set up. Starlin and I were particularly into it.

Starlin lived in the city and I didn’t, but when the third episode aired, somehow or another, we ended up at Roy Thomas’ apartment. We told Roy that we really wanted to watch this TV show, and he did not. He went into the other room and did something else.

[A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: I hope Steve won’t mind my interrupting his narrative at this point to note that actually, on that night in fall of 1972, being separated from my wife Jean, I was out on a dinner date with a comely young lady, and I’m not sure I’d ever seen an episode of Kung Fu… though perhaps I’d tried watching one and it just hadn’t taken. At any rate, I told Steve and the guys they could watch the show at my place on E. 86th Street, but they had to clear out right afterward, in case my date and I came back to my apartment after dinner. They did, and we did. Now, back to Steve….]

The Fu Manchurian Candidate On this Englehart/Starlin/Milgrom page from Special Marvel Edition #15, Sir Denis Nayland Smith (one of the heroes of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels) explains to Shang-Chi that his mustachioed father is not quite the paragon of virtue that his son believes him to be. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Once again, Ye Editor must offer his own addendum to one point in Steve’s narration. When he and Jim Starlin approached Roy with the concept for “Master of Kung Fu,” Marvel did not own a license to Fu Manchu, let alone his supporting characters. Rather, Roy just thought it might be a fun idea to make that famous literary villain the series’ main antagonist. (As for precisely why he wanted to do so, see his interview in A/E #70; it’d take up way too much space to explain it again here.) That acquisition may not have been RT’s smartest notion ever, though. For Marvel was never able to let “Shang-Chi” be printed in France because of a particular licensing situation there—and today, sadly, Fu Manchu’s presence may indeed be the main stumbling-block to seeing the series reprinted in Marvel Masterworks or Essentials volumes. Sorry about that.

From that show—and there’s no mystery about it—we decided we wanted to do a Kung Fu comic ourselves. We created Shang-Chi together. Like I said, Roy had not been captivated by the show, and when we went to him he was just not sure. Like I mentioned earlier, writers and artists never went together to propose series. It was usually just one or the other. Roy said he didn’t know if the idea was good, but that Marvel did have the rights to use Sax Rohmer’s character Fu Manchu. He suggested we put him in there, too. [NOTE: See caption at left.]

Now, I liked Fu Manchu. You could say that he was a racist stereotype. You might be right. On the other hand, it was written at a time when the notion of being racist wasn’t at the forefront of anybody’s consciousness. Rohmer didn’t set out to write a stereotype.

He set out to write a great villain. I knew that I could write that character and not make him the racial stereotype that he’d become over the years. When you look at Doctor Doom, your first impression isn’t The photo at right, taken at a Halloween party at Steve’s California abode in he’s a Latverian stereotype. He’s just Doctor Doom. That’s how I 1974, shows (l. to r.) artist Jim Starlin, letterer Tom Orzechowski, Heather Devitte approached Fu Manchu. He’s not the embodiment of the Yellow Peril— (Jim’s then-girlfriend), and Steve. Thanks to Steve & Jon B. Cooke. he’s a criminal mastermind who happens to be Chinese. Not everybody will accept that explanation, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I RA: That was a book that also relied on a heavy level of spirituality, didn’t have a problem with Rohmer’s stories. I’d read Doc Savage and although it was a different kind of spirituality than what appeared in other pulp series. They were what they were.

Dr. Strange.

ENGLEHART: The Kung Fu television program had appeared and was a huge hit. Jim Starlin and I were pals. Alan Weiss, Steve Harper, and various other people—young people in the creative community—were up to my place on a Saturday night and we were about to go out to dinner.

Out of all that we evolved the initial story. We wanted to make ShangChi completely Chinese. I always thought that was the flaw in the TV show, that David Carradine’s character had to be half-white. If Shang-Chi was going to be the son of Fu Manchu, he should have been Chinese, but

26

Part I Of An Incredible Interview With Star Writer Steve Englehart

wanted to go, do what I wanted to do with the book once it became so popular so quickly. So I dropped off after the fifth issue. Doug Moench took over and went on an amazing run. I still consider the first issue as one of my favorite stories that I ever did, but, having cocreated it, I couldn’t stay with it.

RA: That’s one of the 1970s books that I really wish they would come out with an Essentials volume of. I understand why they can’t. Marvel doesn’t have the rights to Fu Manchu anymore. There’s a good chance that it will never be reprinted but it was one of the great series of the 1970s. Great art and great stories.

ENGLEHART: You could go back to my Dick Tracy comments. You could take Fu Manchu out of all the black plates and just leave a hole where he appeared. [chuckles] RA: That would leave a hell of a lot of holes in the pages. There would be a lot of empty panels.

ENGLEHART: Just word balloons! [laughter] RA: That, I believe, was one of the problems with filming Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The movie producers found out they didn’t have the rights to Fu Manchu, who was the main villain in the graphic novel. I think that Shang-Chi really needed someone with the weight of Fu Manchu as a counterpoint.

ENGLEHART: The Fu Manchu/Shang-Chi conflict did set up a nice dynamic. Fu Manchu was an ancient evil.

Nobody really knows him or completely understands his motives. You, as a reader, could be offended by him, but people don’t really know what he stands for, what he represents. Scorpions of the night, coming down out of the shower curtains, is a dynamic image, but there’s got to be something more important behind all that.

RA: In his own mind, Fu Manchu doesn’t believe he’s a villain. He believes that he is the savior of a China corrupted by foreign influences.

More Than Love Is Just Around The Corner Newcomer Alan Weiss ably filled in as guest penciler on the “Shang-Chi” lead story in the 2nd issue of The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (June 1974). Inks by Al Milgrom. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

somebody decided that they needed a white hook for the audience. That was the thinking. In any event, we had to make Shang-Chi half-white, half-Chinese. Why Fu Manchu, the ultimate Chinese mastermind, would have a white concubine, I don’t really know. But we did that.

I looked forward to this series as being a counterpart to Dr. Strange.

Dr. Strange was Western magic and now I could do something with Eastern philosophy. Starlin and I did the first three issues of the color comic, then he ran out of time to work on the art. I was going to continue without him with a new artist who’d done a bit of work on “Morbius, the Living Vampire”—Paul Gulacy. But the book took off like a rocket. Jim and I weren’t the only ones who were fascinated by Kung Fu. Apparently the readers were, as well. The book went from bi-monthly to monthly very quickly. They added the black-&-white magazine as well as the companion book in the giant-size format, and I could not get where I

ENGLEHART: Exactly. There were plenty of ways that you could treat him as a real character with real reasons for the things he did. He didn’t just do evil things. He did things he believed were necessary to achieve his personal goals. There are a lot of cool things to do with a character like that. If you’re going to set a character up in opposition to a totally evil force, then Fu Manchu is a pretty good character to use as a counterpoint.

The mix of the Eastern philosophy and the Western reality that ShangChi found himself in was a good setup for future stories. Fu Manchu had his own Eastern philosophy that was quite different from the philosophy that Shang-Chi was taught. I would have been happy to have worked on “Shang-Chi” on a bi-monthly basic for a long time. It just didn’t work out that way.

RA: There’s no question that Doug Moench did a great job on the character after you left.

ENGLEHART: Absolutely. The book also created a lot of imitation books.

DC had the Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter book. Charlton had The House of Yang. Marvel created “Iron Fist” after Master of Kung Fu took off. With all due respect to “Iron Fist,” though, that character didn’t have a lot of depth. Under Doug and under me, Shang-Chi had a lot of depth.

“I Think [Having Been An Artist] Gave Me An Edge In Writing Comics”

27

“The People I Measured Myself To” RA: You also worked on Captain Marvel just before you left Marvel for DC. ENGLEHART: Jim Starlin had started off working with a writer, then decided he wanted to write it himself. Everything in the book at the time I took it over had been brought in by Jim Starlin, except for the lead character himself. Jim wanted to write it, and Jim and I were good friends. We were young creative guys together in New York and we liked each other. We hung out together. At some point—and I’ve always admired Jim for this; he was writing the book and the book was doing well—but he didn’t feel that he was doing as good a job of writing it as he might. So he came to me and said, “You’re my friend.

You’re a writer. Would you write the dialogue for this book and let me step back and see what you’re doing?” I said sure. A little later on, he started thinking about Warlock and dropped off the team for Captain Marvel. I became the full writer and Al Milgrom, who’s been a good friend of mine, became the artist. It was an easy handoff to send it over to Al, because he’d worked with Jim a lot. Al and I did Captain Marvel after that.

RA: If I remember right, Jim Starlin killed Captain Marvel in his final issue of the title, and you had to find a way to revive him.

ENGLEHART: Well, he didn’t actually kill him then. He irradiated him, and that final scene was what led to Captain Marvel’s cancer and eventual death in his own graphic novel, but the actual death was years later. He wasn’t dead when I got him, although he’d been damaged. But, being an alien and all that, he seemed to recover.

RA: You also worked on Kull, the Robert E. Howard character, after Roy dethroned him in the adaptation of “By This Axe I Rule!”

ENGLEHART: Right, that was another assignment. I’d read all the original Conan stories as well as the Kull material and I liked the character. I was happy to do it. That was essentially another assignment, though. I wasn’t on it all that long. Just four or five issues and a black-&-white story in Savage Sword [of Conan]. I was following Roy’s version of the character as much as I was following Howard’s original take, while still trying to make it an Englehart version, as well.

RA: Well, we’re coming to the end of this section of the interview. Is there anybody in the industry you’d like to point to as a prime example of the type of writer or artist that had a major influence on you?

ENGLEHART: Oh, well—Dick Giordano, Neal Adams, Stan Lee, and Roy Thomas. Neal and Dick were both very helpful to me as a struggling newcomer. As a writer, Stan and Roy are the guys I looked up to and go back to as a reader. Their work was what was resonating with me. I tried to take what I learned and use it in my own approach to storytelling, but both of those guys were, at various times, the foundation that I built stories on.

They were the writers I thought were doing the best work in the field. They were the people I measured myself to.

RA: Thanks!

Thanos-Topsis What better way to close out this first half of TwoMorrows’ Englehart interview than with the above cosmic page from those two most cosmic fellows—scripter Steve Englehart and penciler/plotter Jim Starlin (though Klaus Janson’s inks didn’t hurt any)! Thanos, introduced by Starlin in Iron Man #55 (Feb. 1973), became so popular a Marvel villain, as Jim writes in his new autobiographical tome The Art of Jim Starlin: A Life in Words and Pictures, that it was a case of “my first time up at bat and I hit a home run.” On the Starlin-penciled-and-plotted Captain Marvel to which Thanos had soon migrated, Steve was content just to write dialogue; when Jim left CM to concentrate on Warlock, Steve became the full writer, working with artist Al Milgrom. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Richard Arndt’s interview with Steve Englehart continues in Back Issue #51 (Sept.) sale in a few short weeks. He writes that he is “a librarian by day and a wearer of way too many hats by night. Father of four, comic book historian, film festival volunteer (www.rubymountainfilmfestival.org), and art auction director (an auction in July will have both original art and fine art prints from Al Feldstein, Sam Glanzman, Tim Truman, and Mike Vosburg, among others).

His articles and interviews have appeared in Alter Ego, From the Tomb, and Back Issue.

(Left:) Richard Arndt.

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29

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background” An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist GEORGE MANDEL Conducted by Jim Amash

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

I

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: I’ve interviewed a lot of colorful people in the pages of Alter Ego, but few as fascinating as George Mandel. The late Dan Barry once described George as a real individualist (as was Dan himself), and credited him as being very helpful in Dan’s early days in comics. While George worked for several companies such as Cinema Comics (later known as Better/Standard publications) and for Lloyd Jacquet’s Funnies, Inc., shop, the truth of the matter is that George’s life and career outside of comics is a much more fascinating story. While we do talk about George’s time in comics and some of the people he knew (Mickey Spillane, Ray Gill, Richard Hughes, etc.), this interview focuses at least equally on other aspects of his life, including George’s friendship with Joseph Heller, the celebrated author of Catch-22. Special thanks goes to my friend David Hajdu (the exceptional writer of books like Positively 4th Street and The Ten-Cent Plague) for giving me George’s contact info. —Jim.

“All My Life, I’ve Been Drawing” JIM AMASH: I’m going to ask you the hardest question anyone’s ever asked you.

When and where were you born?

GEORGE MANDEL: That’s a real hard one, but don’t worry: I may not remember.

I was born in New York City, February 11th, 1920. And I’ll tell you who else was born that day: Thomas Edison, the fighter Max Baer—but on my very day: King Farouk, the big fat king of Egypt.

JA: What got you interested in writing and drawing?

Slug The Angry Stranger!

George Mandel circa 1952—flanked by covers that trumpet his accomplishments first as artist, then as writer. The photo is from the dust jacket of his first novel, Flee the Angry Strangers (published by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, ‘52). [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

(Left:) The cover of Harvey’s Champ Comics #13 (May 1941) is signed with his pen name “Geo. [for George] Van Dell.” The pictured hero is “Duke O’Dowd,” a.k.a. “The Human Meteor.” Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [©2011 Harvey Publications or successors in interest.]

(Right:) The cover of the 1953 Bantam paperback edition of Flee the Angry Strangers, which sports an applauding blurb from Norman Mailer, then celebrated as the author of The Naked and the Dead. It has been called the first “Beat” novel (referring to the so-called Beat Generation). Cover artist unknown.

Thanks for both this cover and the photo to Don Rosick & Pat Mason of Five Points Bookshop in Columbia, South Carolina. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

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An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist George Mandel

MANDEL: Listen, I come from a very primitive background, and nobody there knew about fine art. As a child, I was always gifted, always able to draw. In fact, I used to have a lot of fun with my friends. I could draw Mickey Mouse with a water gun on the sidewalk when I was ten years old.

I belonged to a club in Coney Island. That’s where Joe Heller shines in.

And I had one very close friend, Danny “the Count” Rosoff, that I used to cartoon [caricature] in a very funny way. And there was another guy we called Midge that I used to bust up; he’d get out of control. I reached a point where all I had to do was pull the pencil at a board of wood and Midge would go apart. [mutual laughter] In other words, all my life, I’ve been drawing.

In fact, my oldest sister.… I was drawing a flower at the windowsill, and then I cut it out, and I couldn’t find the stem. And she taught me my first lesson in life: in order to cut out [a drawing], you need a double line. [mutual laughter] I cut out the flower and the leaves and the stem, but it only had one line. It goes that far back.

JA: It sounds like you came from Damon Runyan territory.

MANDEL: Ah, listen, Joe Heller and Beansy Winkler were brought up in the same baby carriage. During the Depression, the mother of one would take both kids out shopping to allow the other to do her chores, and vice versa. Each kid was the other’s first image of life.

Joe Heller became an Oxford scholar, and Beansy Winkler became an echo of Damon Runyan. Now it’s interesting that you mentioned that name, because many people in Coney Island fit that bill. But Beansy was an especially interesting guy, and very close to Joe all their lives.

JA: How did he get the nickname “Beansy”?

MANDEL: Number one, he started out in life as a career failure. Nothing ever worked for him. Once, he saw a sign in the drug store that said, “Guess how many beans are in the jar and win this beautiful bike.” That night, Beansy got up on the roof, climbed down, and spent the night

counting beans. It took him all night. And then, at dawn, he successfully got out of the place, right into Hurricane Alberton, and almost got washed out to sea. The best part of it is, he didn’t win the bike.

JA: Wasn’t Mario Puzo [author of The Godfather] a childhood friend of yours, too?

MANDEL: Mario Puzo I regarded as my more recent friend; I didn’t meet him until 1946. [chuckles] My old friends were from before the war; my new friends are from after the war. Mario and I met at the New School for Social Research, where we took writing courses. I also took a sculpting course. Mario and I took each other for gangsters. Smart gangsters. We were very leery of each other. And then I came up with a riddle that nobody could resolve. I’ll tell you the riddle, and I doubt that you can solve it. “What was the ethnicity of the noblest Europeans in World War II?” JA: I’m not going to be able to answer that.

MANDEL: The answer is German. You know, the Germans who hid Jews at their own peril. Not only their peril, but peril of their children. That impressed Mario so much that he slipped me a news item. This was the first exchange we had. The news item was this: castration is a sure cure for dandruff, but it’s regarded as an improvement cure. From then on, we were buddies.

JA: What do you remember about Joe Heller as a youngster?

MANDEL: I’ll tell you exactly what I remember. Everyone in Coney Island knew better than to call his name from behind, because there was a danger that Joe would jump out into the middle of the road and get hit by a truck. He was the most nervous kid you ever saw, and this guy flew sixty missions as a bombardier. It wasn’t the deal they made at first when they made him a bombardier with like ten, fifteen missions. They kept jacking it up, and much of this goes into Catch-22, of course. But I want you to know that I never knew Joe to lack courage until a week before he died— to my surprise.

From Coney Island To Hollywood Two of George Mandel’s literary buddies.

(Left:) Joseph Heller, as portrayed on the cover of his 1998 memoir Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. The 1944 photo was taken on the island of Corsica, while Heller was in the U.S. Army Air Forces, inadvertently gathering material he would utilize in his monumental novel Catch-22.

(Above:) Mario Puzo accepts his Oscar for his and Francis Ford Coppolla’s screenplay for the film The Godfather - Part II, based in part on Puzo’s bestselling 1969 novel The Godfather.

Puzo and Coppolla had won the screenplay Oscar for the first Godfather movie, too—but Puzo hadn’t been present to accept that one. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Here’s what it was: as you know, we had what was called a Gourmand Club. Mel Brooks was a member; Carl Reiner was a guest, but Mel was steady. Joe brought me into it, I brought Mario Puzo in. Joe knew these guys from Fire Island: Mel Brooks; Speed Vogel, who worked with Joe later on; and the funniest of them all, Julie Green.

He couldn’t say “Pass the sugar” without Mel Brooks folding up in laughter. He’d say, “My kit is missing.” You know what his kit was? It was his plate, bowl, and chopsticks. [mutual laughter] Here’s a typical Julie story: we’re in a car, a guy comes over and said, “Give me some change. I gotta get a drink.” So we gave him some change and as he walks away toward the corner, at which there was a beautiful diner. Julie said, “That faker! He’s going in for a doughnut and coffee!” [chuckles] That’s typical of Julie. By the way, I lost track of your question.

JA: We were talking about Joe Heller and his courage.

MANDEL: I never saw him without courage until his last week. We had not been seen each other for maybe a year.

When we went out, it was customary for

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Like Two Bolts Out Of The Blue (Left:) George Mandel, as artist, worked himself (or at least his drawing hand) into an action page in the “Blue Bolt” story in Novelty Press’ Blue Bolt, Vol. 2, #12 (May 1942). Thus, Ye Editor suspects this may be one of the stories written by George, as well. Thanks to Jim Ludwig.

(Right:) When George was drafted, his big brother Alan took over, as per this splash from Blue Bolt, Vol. 3, #3 (Aug. 1942). By this time, the hero appeared in costume only on the splash page—and features like “Edison Bell” and “Dick Cole” had taken over the most prominent spots in the comic. All art retrieved by Jim Ludwig. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Julie Green to pay the bill. Now, all of us were walking down the street to catch a taxi. This particular night, Joe took me away. Now, my wife always said that Joe regarded me as his father, but that’s not true. He regarded me as a stepfather. We had this big boulevard to cross, and he got scared. It was so unlike him to be afraid of anything that I stopped in the middle of the street and said, “What’s the matter?” Joe said, “These cars... I don’t think we can make the light.” I said, “Hey, Joe. We’re going to make the light, and besides, there are people in those cars. They’re not going to hit us.” On the way across, he said, “I get short of breath.” And I have not forgiven myself since then for not knowing that shortness of breath is a specific symptom. A few days later, he was dead.

me. And I got him to be my inker... he did okay. And then, Danny the Count recommended Dan Barry for me. Dan was a remarkable guy. He used to read two books at a time. Dan stood by me after the war when I was really a basket case. I was really wiped out by that head wound.

At the graveside, I saw a young man shouting at Mel Brooks. He was in a state of absolute fury. I got there toward the end, and I walked off with Mel, and I said, “Who’s that guy?” And Mel said, “That’s Joe’s doctor. He’s furious that no one told him that Joe was short of breath.” And here’s the worst part of it: Joe’s wife was a trained nurse.

JA: Right. Now when you were a kid and you’re drawing all the time, I’m assuming...

“A Job At Cinema Comics” JA: I understand why you feel as you do. Well, let me get back to your earlier days. Your brother Alan worked in comics...

MANDEL: He was a first-rate big brother who was seven years older than

So Dan worked for me, and when he talked about having done “Blue Bolt,” he did it for me. I had the “Blue Bolt” account. When I was drafted, my brother Alan took over—which is a natural thing—but to Dan Barry’s justifiable resentment, because he was an artist and my brother was an inker, you see. Dan, as you know, went on from there and did very well for himself.

MANDEL: I drew all the time. I was influenced by newspaper strips. I came from a very primitive background, and all I had was newspapers.

And Milton Caniff was the guy; he was my inspiration.

JA: When did you get the feeling that you were going to do this for a living?

MANDEL: The Depression was the bottom line of our lives. Everything was based on the Depression. My father would get me a job here and there, and on one job I got pushed around by a fat guy, and I punched

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An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist George Mandel

him out. I was maybe sixteen and I got in big trouble. My father had to bail me out. I hated the bastards that gave us jobs. And then I saw an ad for a lettering man. This is where Richard Hughes comes in. He gave me a job at Cinema Comics as a lettering man. I met the guys there... you know, it was a small, dingy office. There was a lot of talk going on, and I mentioned my brother a lot because, as I say, he was my big brother.

Well, after two weeks, they fired me because I was the world’s worst letterer, and I got pissed off. I said, “You’re wasting me. I’d like to be a cartoonist. I’m as good as these guys.” So Richard Hughes said, “Bring me a sample,” which I did. He said, “Aah, your brother did this.” I said, “Sit me down and give me a script and I’ll show you who did it.” So I got the job, at fifteen bucks a week; same thing they paid me for lettering.

But every week afterwards, I went into the office of Mr. Sangor [the owner of Cinema Comics], who was an older man; a fat guy with glasses, white hair, who did nothing but read the stock pages. I told him, “I want a raise,” and he gave me a $5 raise. I did it every week until I made $35 a week and I was the talk of Coney Island. No one made anything like that in those days. I was a hero, and I’ll tell you something: no one ever put the arm on me, ever. Anyway, by then, visitors were coming through the office and looking and inviting me to go up and see them. I did, and I got new accounts, so I quit Cinema Comics.

JA: You went to the Art Students League and Pratt Institute. I take it that Art Students League and Pratt were after you had started in comics.

MANDEL: No. See, this primitive background that I came from was very high on education, though they were ignorant about high art. They saw my talent, and my parents sent me to these schools while I was going to high school.

JA: What else do you remember about Richard Hughes?

MANDEL: He was a very intelligent guy, more or less the first intellectual I met. For instance, one of the guys couldn’t draw his characters straight;

Strange But True Richard Hughes, early editor of Better/Nedor/Standard (and later longtime editor of the American Comics Group)—and George Mandel’s splash page for the “Dr. Strange” story in Nedor’s Thrilling Comics #8 (Sept. 1940). The series sported that more formal title in issues #1-11, then became “Doc Strange” beginning in #12; but the hero was mostly referred to as “Doc” from the start, owing more to pulp magazine hero Doc Savage than to standard (you should excuse the expression) super-heroes. Thanks to Jim Ludwig for the page scan, and to Michael Vance for the photo. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

they were always leaning to the right. Richard Hughes said, “He can draw nothing well but Conservatives.” [laughter] That’s typical of him, if you can picture him with a meerschaum pipe. He was a young man with a chubby face, glasses... very well-spoken, and he was a nice guy.

Cinema Comics had a little office, maybe 15 by 10, where all our drafting tables were. Hughes had a little office on one side. That was the entry to the whole suite.

Sangor had a little office in the back. Except for raises, I had nothing to do with him. He left everything up to Richard Hughes, who did all of the editorial work; he had no assistant.

Institutions Of Hire Learning New York’s Art Student League and Pratt Institute have been mentioned so often in the pages of Alter Ego that we felt it was high time we showed you photos of those two venerable institutions through whose doors so much Golden and Silver Age artistic talent passed. Above is the ASL, at right the façade of Pratt.

JA: Do you remember who else worked in the office besides you? I’m assuming you were staff.

MANDEL: I was. John Daly did the Westerns; he was an older man. You know what I mean by “older,” don’t you?

He could have been a good 32. A loveable guy, as nice a guy as you ever want to know. He had a great wife and two boys. Something happened to him. He began to see dead people. He began to see, [shouts] “Aunt Bea! Uncle

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background”

John!,” as you’d walk along with him. He began to see dead people. And then he died. It was a terrible blow to us.

He loved to fool around at work; we all did. John wrote one panel where the horse said to the cowboy, “You say you love me. How come you never kiss me?” [mutual laughter] And we’d hand the stories in to Richard Hughes, who had to be on his toes to catch it.

“Slim” Ward: a tall, wonderful guy. I’ll never forget him. Then there’s Lenny Sansone, who did the “Wolf ” cartoon for Stars and Stripes during the war. One of the things I remembered: every payday, they went right to the check-cashing service. They spent everything they earned.

JA: But you had a car. You were one of the first in your neighborhood to have a car, weren’t you?

MANDEL: Ahhh, a lot of guys had cars. I had a beauty. I had a brand new Oldsmobile convertible coupe. You know, people don’t know that we had hydromatic drive that early. 1940 was the year of my car.

JA: In Joseph Heller’s memoir Now and Then, he wrote: “George Mandel, a cub RTO senior while I was still a junior, was called up early; meaning the Selective Service Act of 1940.”

MANDEL: He’s already wrong. You know why? Jacquet got me a year’s deferment.

JA: Okay. He said, “And his gorgeous wheels”—meaning the car—“disap-

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peared with him. As an illustrator, originator, and writer in the burgeoning field of comic books, he had been earning very good money while still very young and he began to show up in the latest blue model convertible with automatic top and hydromatic transmission—the first we’d seen and the niftiest car we had ever been permitted to caress with our fingertips.”

MANDEL: Yeah, I used to kick them out. [Jim laughs] He and Beansy were always sitting in my car, and I’d say, “Get the hell out of my car!” [mutual laughter] Joe and I didn’t become friends until after the war. He was just a kid I used to kick out of my car. That was my whole relationship with him. But after the war, he was grown up and so was I, and we took to each other immediately, and all three of us became close friends.

JA: In 1940, I have you listed as drawing covers for Cinema Comics.

MANDEL: I did maybe one cover and it was lousy. I overdid it. I remember drawing some “Doc Strange” stories. Richard Hughes wrote most of the stories. Kermit Jaediker wrote stories, too; I didn’t care much for him. Irv Werstein was my favorite writer. We were great buddies.

Jaediker was no friend of mine. I didn’t even like the writers. I only liked the cartoonists, Irv Werstein, and Mickey Spillane.

Werstein used to give me strips with laughs in it. He was a very good writer. He wrote thugs that were very funny. One of them was always eating a sandwich while he was shooting it out with the cops. Irv always

Two Splashes Are Better Than One George drew no fewer than two stories for Better/Nedor’s Exciting Comics #4 (July 1940)— the super-hero feature “Son of the Gods” and the adventure series “Ted Crane.” Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

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An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist George Mandel

had a funny stick-in here and there in every story.

He and his wife both got sick and didn’t get along. They just attacked each other ‘til the day they died of cancer. But he never took it out on anyone else. And Irv... he wrote for the upper magazines at the same time, as I did later on. You know, when you start writing for a living, you take work where you can get it, so Irv always worked.

I’ll tell you something: I did better with the smaller magazines than with the larger ones. I’d get fifteen hundred bucks from True magazine, but that was few and far between. I got three hundred bucks from Male and Stag, but week after week after week after week, and I did their so-called “book bonuses” for five hundred bucks that took me two days. And when I was writing The Breakwater, I was putting half a week on my book and half a week on that stuff. And I was taking down about five bills a week. And you know what kind of money that was back then.

“[Frank Torpey] Was The One Who Went Out To Look For Bill Everett” JA: Were you working for Funnies, Inc., while you were working for Cinema, or was that right afterwards?

MANDEL: Afterwards. I took my work from Cinema as a freelancer and continued on there. I had all these invitations for freelance work and I could turn stuff out quickly.

JA: Okay. Now, how did you get to Lloyd Jacquet?

MANDEL: It’s hard to remember, because I doubt that he ever came up to Cinema. I may have heard about Funnies [Inc.] and gone up there and connected.

JA: Lloyd Jacquet and his wife Grace ran the shop.

MANDEL: I never laid eyes on her. I didn’t even know she existed. It was run mainly by his editor, Jim Fitzsimmons, and another wonderful guy whose name I don’t remember. Jim was the main editor up there. They had a very small office, with just a couple of guys working there. Frank Torpey was there, too. He was the man who talked Martin Goodman into publishing comics. You know, I never knew Martin Goodman was involved until I worked for him on those magazines I mentioned, like Stag. He never even told me that he knew me from there. I knew Martin.

Now here’s the thing, I’m waiting for you to tell me who Frank Torpey was. What was his position at Funnies?

JA: Well, he was sort of like a road man.

MANDEL: No, I’m going to tell you exactly who he was. He was the one who went out to look for Bill Everett. [Jim laughs] That was his job. You can quote me. Do you know about Bill’s history?

JA: I know he was an alcoholic.

MANDEL: Listen, he got me drunk. Remember: I was a kid, he was an older guy. I came in with a dreadful hangover. Well, maybe I was there all night—who remembers? You know how he cured me? He grabbed me by the head and pumped a shot of booze into my mouth. [Jim laughs] And I was cured. I wasn’t drunk any more, but that cured me. I was fine and went back to work. [mutual laughter] Bill was a great guy to be with. He was a straight-out guy and his alcoholism, I want you to know, was under his control. When Frank Torpey couldn’t find him—he was looking all over town for him—Bill called me from the hotel next door and asked me to send up stuff. But that’s who Frank Torpey was. That was his only job, as I remember: “Just

Funnies Ink Lloyd Jacquet, head of Funnies, Inc., eyes Mandel’s “Blue Bolt” splash page for Blue Bolt, Vol. 2, #12 (May 1942). The splash features mentions of characters called “Frank the Torp” and “Fitzy Jim”—clearly references to Frank Torpey and Jim Fitzsimmons, both of whom George mentions in the interview. (As for “Joey the Fink”—your guess is as good as ours!) The pic of Jacquet, who in essence was both National/DC’s first editor and the first editor of Timely/Marvel, is taken from an early-’40s newspaper photo reprinted in earlier issues of A/E. Thanks to Jim Ludwig for the art scan. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

find Bill Everett.” But Jim Fitzsimmons was the main guy up there. Jacquet didn’t do anything with us. Maybe he did with the staff, but all he did with me was that paternal stuff, you know—and not overbearing, don’t get me wrong. He was never a pest. He was just a nice older man; a very fine guy.

JA: Spillane said that Jacquet used to lecture you about how to save money.

MANDEL: Yeah. He didn’t like me spending money. I was noted for my “sartorial splendor.” I got that phrase from one of the books that they wrote about me at Funnies. As a kid, I spent all my money on clothes and nightclubs and cars: the things that counted in life. Jacquet worried about my future, and that’s all he ever did—I repeat, without ever being overbearing.

JA: Spillane also said that people thought that Jacquet was trying to convert you to Catholicism.

MANDEL: That’s Spillane horsing around. I think the source of that is Mickey’s own fondness for Jacquet.

I started out as an artist for Jacquet, and then I talked him into letting me write. I’d write right on the boards, in longhand. I would submit a

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background”

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MANDEL: Yes. I went in in 1941, right after Pearl Harbor. Jacquet got me a deferment before Pearl Harbor, and I was drafted after Pearl Harbor.

“‘The Woman In Red’ Predates ‘Wonder Woman’” JA: Now, going through this list, I have you as doing some work for Fawcett Publications in ’42 and ’43, but you were...

MANDEL: No, I was gone. In ’43, I was already a casualty.

JA: That’s what I thought. [Mandel laughs] So you never did “Captain Midnight” or “Commando Yank “ or “Phantom Eagle.”

MANDEL: Never.

JA: I have you as doing “Voodoo Man” for Fox Publications. [Mandel doesn’t recall this feature] Also, Hillman Publications, on “The Crusader,” “Nightmare,” and “Boy King.”

MANDEL: “The Crusader,” possibly, but not “Boy King” or “Nightmare.”

Now, when I say “no,” maybe I just don’t remember. I did “13 and Jinx” for Charlie Biro.

JA: I was getting to that. Now, at Holyoke, you did “Flag Man” and “The Hood.”

MANDEL: I didn’t do those features. I did do “Young Robin Hood” for

“Crusader” Habit For Hillman, George drew (and got a byline on) this “Crusader” tale from Victory Comics #3 (Nov. 1941), which was scripted by one “Robert Jaediker”—who was probably the “Kermit Jaediker” who later became a mystery writer and was listed in the Who’s Who of Who Dunnits. Victory Comics itself, however, went down in defeat, being canceled after its fourth Issue. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

synopsis and Jim would okay it, and I’d go home and I’d do the pages, writing and drawing. Once I got an okay on the synopsis, I had a clear field from Jim. I’d rule the panel borders, and do the drawings and the writing right on the page. I’d ink the pages after they were lettered.

Essentially, when a synopsis was approved, I wrote the story as I drew it. I inked my own stuff early on, but as I said, I put my brother on and I put Harry Sahle on. I worked at home. I didn’t spend much time in the office, except for the amount of time it took to deliver, and discuss, and argue.

Sometimes there were disagreements, you know.

Basically, the only disagreement I remember was when I got Jim Fitzsimmons angry, talking about Purgatory. He thought he knew more about it than I did. It became a religious thing. Maybe that’s where Mickey got the idea that they were trying to convert me, because Jim got pissed off when I had a script where the characters go to Purgatory. Jim got mad because I didn’t depict Purgatory correctly. But you know, you gotta bear in mind that it was also a friendly argument. You know how a friend gets pissed off at a friend? It’s not the friend he’s pissed off at, it’s the argument, and that’s all it amounted to. Jim was never a bully by any means.

JA: You worked for Jacquet up until you went into the service, right?

Boy Oh Boy Mandel’s (signed) “Young Robin Hood” splash from Lev Gleason Publications’ Boy Comics #4 (June 1942)—actually only the title’s second issue. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

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An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist George Mandel

Lucky “Thirteen” George Mandel states, “I created ‘13 and Jinx’”—but perhaps he meant merely that he developed the Batman-and-Robin-style twosome who shared the action in the “13” feature beginning with Lev Gleason’s Daredevil #5, since other hands are credited with the earliest stories. (Clockwise on this and facing page, from top left:) Artist Bernie Klein, who was fated to be killed in action in Italy during World War II, got a byline on the first “13” story (with no kid sidekick) in Daredevil Comics #3 (Sept. 1941), along with writer Dick Wood…

“Hamilton Kaye,” who drew the “Thirteen” story in Daredevil #4 (Oct. ‘41), is, according to the online Who’s Who of American Comic Books (1928-1999), a pseudonym for none other than Bernie Klein…

The “13 and Jinx” tale in Daredevil #10 (May ‘42) may well have been drawn by George Mandel, though it is the only one of the five on these two pages that is unsigned…

Daredevil #12’s “13 and Jinx” entry, from the issue dated Aug. ‘42. is signed by Alan Mandel… …while the splash below from Daredevil #15 (Jan. ‘43) is signed “Mandel & Barry,” no doubt meaning Alan and Dan. Jim Ludwig provided all five scans, though a couple of them are a bit less than clear the others, having been picked up from microfiche copies. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background”

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An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist George Mandel

between. Well, I’d have them trap a bad guy in the frames, the eight-pin frames, using them as bars around the guy’s neck. I did things like that constantly in “Blue Bolt.” I was pretty good, but not on a level with Jack Kirby. He was a natural.

JA: What did Dan Barry do for you?

MANDEL: He inked for me. I maybe gave him some penciling assignments, too. I don’t remember, because I know he was good, so chances are I did give him something to pencil. I never read anything that Dan wrote without crediting me for getting him into the business. He never, never left that out. Dan was never a thankless person, and I didn’t do all that much for him. I just gave the kid a job because he was good.

JA: He sure was. I believe“The Woman in Red” predates “Wonder Woman” and is actually one of the very first features starring a woman.

MANDEL: I think it is the first one.

JA: You weren’t conscious of that at the time, were you?

MANDEL: No, but I’ll tell you, I was an early feminist. I was always fighting for women’s rights. I didn’t think of it as a fight, though. But I have two sisters that I love very much, and I resent how women are treated just by being around. So when it came to “The Woman in Red,” I wasn’t conscious of it as a feminist strike. It was just unique. It was interesting because we didn’t have women battlers in the comics, and Richard Hughes deserves the credit for it.

JA: Was Hughes an enlightened person by your standards?

MANDEL: Oh, yeah, he was a very sophisticated guy.

JA: Tell me a little more about Mickey Spillane.

MANDEL: Mickey and I were very close. Mickey and Ray Gill, you know—we were sort of an old gang. We drank together, but we didn’t carry on or anything like that. All our carrying on was done in private.

Mandel’s Marvel The splash page of the George Mandel-drawn “Black Marvel” story from Mystic Comics #5 (March 1940). Repro’d from Photostats of the original silver plates, courtesy of Robert Wiener. This yarn was reprinted (in mediocre fashion) in Marvel Super-Heroes #15 (July 1968), at a time when publisher Martin Goodman and his attorney had given Stan Lee the dictate to “reprint anything we ever had that had the word ‘Marvel’ in the title”—hence this tale, some early-’50s “Marvel Boy” re-treads, and soon the birth of a brand new, space-born “Captain Marvel.” [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

[Lev Gleason], but I didn’t create the feature. I created “13 and Jinx.” “13 and Jinx” was probably based on “Batman and Robin.”

JA: Okay. Your work for Timely came from the Jacquet shop, because they were supplying Timely Comics. I have you listed as drawing “The Angel,” “Miss Fury,” “The Patriot,” and “The Black Marvel”...

MANDEL: “Black Marvel” and “The Patriot” I may have done. The features I remember are “Blue Bolt,” “Doc Strange,” and “The Woman in Red.” These are major strips that I did for a long time, and I did them for Cinema Comics. I took “Blue Bolt” over from Simon and Kirby. Jack Kirby was a great draftsman, much better than me. You see, what Dan Barry said about me was based on what I used to do with “Blue Bolt.” He said I was the most creative guy in the business. Did you ever read that?

JA: No, but Dan once said something like that to me.

MANDEL: Okay. What he was referring to was some of the tricks I used to pull; like I’d have Blue Bolt plunge through the page. And you’d turn the page, he’s coming through on that side, and a lot happened in

JA: Tell me the stick-up story, since we didn’t record that [when we talked earlier].

MANDEL: Mickey and Ray Gill went into a diner, and there was a stickup. It was me! [Jim chuckles] The guy looked like me and they’re saying, [softly] “It’s George—George Mandel!” And then they decided, “Hey, wait a minute. I heard he was drafted a couple of weeks ago.” So they called up my brother. My brother laughed and, “What are you talking about Michael? The kid wouldn’t stick up a diner. He couldn’t, because he’s in South Carolina. I just spoke to him there.” So that relieved them, and they gave the cops a description of me, and the police grabbed the guy. Now that’s how I heard the story.

JA: What was the young Mickey Spillane like, because we have a certain image of him today?

MANDEL: Just exactly the image you have. He was a sharp, good-looking, hip guy, and an outstanding young man. Ray Gill was, too. I don’t know how much you know about Ray, but he’s one of the warmest guys you could know; a very cheerful guy.

JA: Tell me a little more about your brother Alan.

MANDEL: He was very close to Charlie Biro. In fact, after the war, a strange thing happened. They had a party at Lev Gleason’s offices, and were giving out watches. They were almost rude to me. I had just come back from war, Purple Heart and all kinds of stars on my—ETO and four campaigns—and they treated me like an intruder. I never got over it. I didn’t even mention it to my brother, who was buddy-buddy with them.

I’ll tell you one thing: it’s been my experience, on the basis of specific events and incidents, to detect resentment of combat soldiers by people

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background”

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Angels And Patriots Lynn Walker, co-host of the Alter-Ego-Fans website, informs us that, back in 2005, comic art-ID expert Craig Delich revised a few of the art credits in the Grand Comics Database to show that George Mandel had drawn the “Patriot” story in The Human Torch #4 (Spring 1941) and “The Angel” in Sub-Mariner #2 (Summer 1941). The “Whizzer” yarn in All Winners Comics #9 (Summer 1943) has also been suggested as having GM art—but unless it had lain on the shelf for a year or two, that seems unlikely, since George was called into uniform right after Pearl Harbor in December of ‘41. These splashes are repro’d from the hardcover Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Human Torch, Vol. 1 & Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Sub-Mariner, Vol. 1. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Spooked!

Comic writer (and later bestselling novelist) Mickey Spillane— and, at left, the splash panel of the “Sergeant Spook” story from Blue Bolt, Vol. 3, #3 (Aug. 1942). Art is by John Jordan— but scripter Spillane got top billing on this one! [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

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An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist George Mandel

Little Red Riding-Hood She Ain’t!

Three Mandel pages from “The Woman in Red,” excerpted from Better/Nedor’s Thrilling Comics #10 (Nov. 1940). Script probably by Richard Hughes. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

who were not. Now let me tell you, the key insight was a neighbor of mine who lasted just a couple of months in the Army before he was discharged on a sick basis, and he always resented his brother, a guy in Chicago who was a combat man. I saw his resentment of his brother, and the only thing I could put my finger on was that he was nothing of a soldier and his brother was a combat man. And from that insight, I began to look, and I saw it here and I saw it there, a sense that I’d developed that there’s often a resentment by men of that period who are not combat men. I’ve known several that fit that description who were perfectly fine people. But here and there, I would get that intense impact of being resented because I was a combat man.

Now you can kick that around as you wish. I have tracked it to that scene I’m describing with Charlie Biro and Bob Wood and the whole crowd—buddy-buddy with my brother, who was not the sharpest eye in the world. He was a wonderful brother, but he could be obtuse in many respects. He didn’t notice it and I didn’t tell him. I felt out of place, but I couldn’t care less. It was just an observation. All I cared about were the people that were positive.

JA: Mike Roy was in the group with you, Spillane, and Gill. Tell me about him.

MANDEL: He was 21 years old; he had a little black mustache, wore a black Chesterfield coat with a white silk muffler, and a Homburg. Mike was a jolly guy. Harry Sahle was a fine gentleman, a good guy to have around, smart and nice as they come.

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background”

JA: By the way, I have you in 1941 as doing “Doc Strong” for MLJ. MANDEL: MLJ rings a bell. I definitely I worked for them, but I don’t remember anything about them.

JA: Okay, that’s most of the comic book work. I have a note to ask you about the last time you saw Will Eisner.

MANDEL: Here’s what happened: At Pearl’s, I was buying some pandas, [NOTE: probably stuffed panda toys] and the kid behind the counter and I got into a conversation, during which I let him know that I was an old comic book artist. He got very excited and asked, “Do you know Will Eisner?” I said, “I sure do.” He gave me directions to a hotel gathering where Will Eisner was signing books. I walked up to him and said, “Hey, Will. You remember me?” And he didn’t, until I reminded him that he sent for me to hire me. He recalled that, and asked, “What are you doing these days?” I said, “I became a novelist.” He asked me what books I’d written, and he said, “Well, we both lucked out.”

JA: Why didn’t you take the job with him?

MANDEL: I just didn’t need it. Same reason I didn’t take that job with Bob Kane. I had people working for me.

“I Became A Member Of A Terrific Cadre” JA: Tell me about your time in the service.

MANDEL: I was an instructor in Hong Kong. I became a member of a terrific cadre. Each and every guy in the cadre was an ace of a human being; all of them were witty, and we were the best soldiers. Bill Hensley was in this group. He was a guitar player, and a songwriter, and a hillbilly who was sickened by any touch of bigotry. No one in that outfit had a touch of it. And from him I learned that bigotry is simply a matter of stupidity.

Bill Hensley was like the nucleus of a great crowd of people. Even the officers that came and went were, I’d say, 90% first-rate guys, and I never was partial to officers. But in that outfit, they were fantastic. And then I was called away on overseas duty and I was wounded in action. Incidentally, I had an infantry background, but landed up in the armored cavalry. I ran a section of an armored car and two jeeps, and our mission was to find the enemy. We found them and they shot us up. During the war, the newspapers had a black line down running through north to south over the map of Europe, showing where the Allied troops had advanced to. We were always in front of that, seeking the enemy. Then we became a task force and began to attack.

And my first wound was in an attack. Are you interested in hearing this?

41

that we had, and that’s a whole other story. You ought to read my novel, The Wax Boom. It was called the best book that has been written about World War II by The Village Voice. You know why? When your best friend gets killed next to you—a guy you know like you know your own hand—he turns to wax. And this was “the wax boom,” like “the oil boom.”

JA: Let me read to you what Joe Heller said about you in Now and Then: “George Mandel went into Europe with the infantry, succumbing to the action when he had the option of remaining stateside as a member of a permanent party unit in an instructional capacity. He will not disagree when I say he should have known better. In Holland, he was shot in the leg in an ambush. Recuperating in a hospital, when hearing of the Battle of the Bulge, he checked himself out [George laughs] to rejoin his unit and shortly afterward, was hit in the head by a sniper. This is a wound whose numerous distressing effects have never entirely left him. General George C. Patton would have been proud of him. My George will not be pleased to hear me say that.”

MANDEL: Now you know all I remember about all that? “My George,” that’s all I remember about it. Why is that? Because it was cuckoo. [laughs] Here’s the real story: I was sent overseas. I found myself in combat; not in the infantry, but in the armored cavalry. My first wound resulted from a slate roof explosion. We had trouped a canal, came up out of it, and were being shelled from the other side. A shell hit the slate roof of a shed and peppered my chin and hands with chips of slate and powder and whatnot. And I was bleeding. That was a legitimate wound.

Now we had a German hedgerow, not to be confused with a French hedgerow. Are you familiar with that structure? It’s a very deep channel, very low from the surface, and you could drive jeeps through it. We used to cut into the wall and make shelter. And the German hedgerow that I’m referring to is very sparse and up on the surface. Now we were going to assault through the hedgerow. I got hit as described and kept going. Now, over the years, there were three possibilities as to why I kept running and breaking through that hedgerow when I got the leg wound. Okay, now here’s the thing, the three possibilities were— [NOTE: At this point, there was apparently a problem with the tape for a few seconds, and the first possibility didn’t get recorded. —Jim.] MANDEL: …I commanded a section.

JA: What was your rank?

JA: I sure am. Now the first wound: you were shot in the leg, right?

MANDEL: No, that was my second wound.

In fact, the same day, we forded a canal in Germany. We had fought through the low ends, Holland mostly. I don’t remember anything about Belgium. I remember France, moving up into Holland somehow.

I was through Saint Lo, but we pronounced it “Sann Low.” It was a major breakthrough

The Whole Ball Of Wax Here, repro’d at an angle from an eBay image, is the paperback cover of George Mandel’s 1963 novel of World War II, The Wax Boom. Ironically, on this cover of the paperback edition, it is compared with Catch-22, another WWII novel— written by Joe Heller, the friend of George’s youth. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

MANDEL: Sergeant. That’s the second possibility: responsibility. The third was that I was a dumb kid. [Jim laughs] And that’s my final conclusion. Now, this could be the source of Joe’s sense of all this, that I didn’t know what I was doing. Having heard me say that, that the reason I kept going was that I was a dumb kid. I could have turned back and said, “Look, I’m bleeding.” But I broke through the hedgerow with the whole platoon. It wasn’t just my section, it was the entire platoon, and they ambushed us. That’s where they caught us. And a shell—you know the Tree Busters? [NOTE: Jim says he doesn’t.]

It’s a shell that hits a tree above and the fragmentation goes down.

Incidentally, I never heard the word “shrapnel” until after the war. It’s a World War I word. We always called it

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An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist George Mandel

“fragmentation” and nothing else. Now that’s where the Tree Busters—I got a tree burst—get this: a fragment hit my leg and threw me up in the air. If you want to know what kind of force is behind these things: it hit my leg from above and threw me up in the air. I landed, and Hank Wyman, our lieutenant, was up on all fours, howling, “Bring the bazooka,” and then he died. Up on all fours—the responsibility to lead got him killed. They peppered the hell out of us, and a shell landed in front of me, just after I said, “Sucker,” to myself. I called myself a “sucker” for being there. I remember this clearly as if it was yesterday. Lying there, finding myself about to die—no way out—they were shelling the hell out of us.

Swede Keller starts to howl, “Get it off me! Get it off me, pretty please!”

And I see the shell land right in front of me and creep up toward me like a puppy dog, eating up the turf, and I figure I’m dead, but it was a dud. I had already been wounded in the leg. My face and hands were bleeding and I got this leg wound when I said, “Sucker,” and this thing came up, and I got up, and ran, leaped into a goose trap—a pit that keeps geese.

And they flew away and I flew with them.

Remember, I had been an infantry instructor for a good while before I went overseas. I had taught men, if you’re in tall grass, and you see the birds fly away, fly away with them because a shell is going to land there.

And I left with the geese, and the shell hit right in the goose trap and blew up, but I was in flight. And I lay... I left out one thing: I did pump off a lot of shots at the low windows of housing across the grassland. Not at smoke, because the bastards had smokeless powder by then. But I saw windows that I pumped shots in, and then the shell got me. And I flew away with the geese and landed on my belly again right near Swede Keller.

Nothing was on his back. His back was busted open. That’s all in The Wax Boom, I believe. Anyway, I got back into the canal and I made my way... I had this leg wound, but I looked at it and you know what it looked like? A very puffed-up area, right on the left side of my right knee, a really deep flesh wound. In other words, it was swelling with little chicken veins hanging out, little black veins hanging out.

And I kept going up to a branch of the canal and I stopped and leapt across it, just ahead of machine gun fire. I was so trained as a former instructor that I knew every move to make, and I leaped across this opening of a branch, and sure enough, machine gun fire came down.

They had this place all laid out for them. And I got up on an area where there was a jeep with men on it. And on that jeep was something that I forgot to tell you: while we were pinned down, when Hank Wyman got killed, the officer that was leading us grabbed his arm and screamed, and ran, and disappeared. He ran. I thought he panicked. And I thought, “Jesus Christ, he got hit in the arm and he screamed.” Well, when I reached that jeep, he was on the litter with his whole body bandaged. He thought he was hit in the arm, but the severe pain he felt was in his body.

The bullet—or bullets—went through his arm into his body. That was why he was screaming. I got on the jeep with a few other guys. Well, I don’t know how the hell we managed, including the litter with the lieutenant, and they drove us into Millen, Germany. And I remember them packing my wound with sulfur right under a window where a young woman was looking down and watching me with tears running down her eyes; a German girl. In other words, the people were caught in the middle.

And as I told Bruce Jay Friedman years later... he asked me, “Ever kill someone?” I told a few scenes and I did tell him this, “I thought they were Nazis. It took me years to figure out they were just kids like us.” I had bad dreams about that for many years: the kids I killed with joy, thinking I’m killing a Nazi. I wiped out a whole platoon once. You oughta see these guys marching like they owned the world and I’m sitting up on the hill with two machine guns. And I told this kid, Ray something, “Don’t open fire until I do.” And I cut loose at the rear of the column, and he cut loose at the beginning, and we wiped them out. And I thought I wiped out a platoon of Nazis, and I had dreams about it for years when I figured out that they were just kids like us. Anyway, that was my two wounds on October 3rd, 1944. Then on March the 8th of 1945, I got it in the head.

You know, it was the day we attacked the Rhine. That’s where I got it.

I had two jeeps and an armored car. I was brushing out my breech when a sniper got me. After the war, M.I.T. and Belgium got together to investigate what happens to a head wound, and I was invited to participate. I met the head of the experiment, Dr. Teuber, and we became friends immediately because I was able to write a perfect description of the seizures. Head injury people are subject to seizures. Well, I have them in spades, and I was able to write what happens. And Teuber looked at it and said, “This is déjà vu, this is jamais vu, and this is presque vu.” You know French?

JA: [chuckles] Only pastry and kissing.

Maybe We Should Call Them “Mag Men” Another of George’s literary friends—Bruce Jay Friedman, author of Stern, Steambath, et al.—and in the 1960s the editor of men’s magazines at Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management, at the same time Mario Puzo worked in its Madison Avenue offices, as detailed in A/E #66. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

MANDEL: All right, let me tell you. You know déjà vu. Well, it’s nothing like the kind that is ordinarily experienced. It’s a very deeper kind of déjà vu. It’s hard to describe, but it’s quite different from thinking that you were there before. It’s a precise seizure definition.

Jamais vu means “never seeing.” And I could look at my wife and children; I know it’s my wife, and I know each child, but they don’t look a bit like them. Their faces are entirely different. It’s called jamais vu.

Now get a load of presque vu, almost seeing. [whispers] Terrifying.

Terrifying. [normal voice] A terrifying experience. You almost see something. Now when I tell people about it, they’d ask, “What did you almost see?” And I’d say, “A wire fence or a rooster. It could be anything.

If I could tell you what it was, it wouldn’t have been presque vu.” You just come to the edge of knowing what it is, but you do not ever reach it and it’s terrifying. Now listen to this; the way I used to handle it—the other two—I learned to wait until they passed.

Presque vu is too terrifying, and I devised a means of overcoming it. I told you I’m an artist, that my house is full of my work. I live in a very large apartment. All the walls are full of my work and the work of others.

I would go over to one of my paintings... I’m blind on the left side. I see from the center to the right. I’m sighted from the center to the right now, but for many years, the upper quadrant on the left as well, past the center point. Just to the left of center is blindness, a finger of it into the lower left quadrant, which is blind; and a little track going down into the lower right quadrant. But you know, we don’t look at things with a fixed stare. Our eyes move about. Therefore, by now, it’s like a hole in my vision. One small hole, and I’m not conscious of it most of the time. I never dream—I used to live in horror because every waking moment was full of blindness, see? But by now, it’s like one hole in the lower left quadrant that I overcome automatically by moving my eyes around. Do you follow that?

[Jim says he does] All right. Now I devised this means: I’d look to the right of a painting of mine, keep putting it in my blind area, right? In other words, when I look to the right of it, fix my eyes on the right, on a point to the right, I

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background”

43

don’t see it. But I know it so intimately that I concentrate on what that painting is, line by line, color by color, and I defeated presque vu. Now when it happened outside, I did it with my wife’s face. I stood her by a building wall, I looked to the right of her and I know that beautiful face so well. You know I’m married to the most beautiful woman that ever lived.

I’d look to the right of her and take every feature of her face into my mind and I’d defeat presque vu. I told all this to Dr. Teuber. The day after President Kennedy was shot, he called me up and said that Kennedy was shot exactly where I was, from a greater height. I was struck by a sniper about two stories up at the Rhine. That’s the city from which we were going to strike the Rhine. He got me, he picked me out. He could tell that I was the leader of that section. I forget how, but there was a way that he could tell. Maybe my position in that jeep, I don’t know. And he hit me.

exactly where I did, but from a greater height. I asked the natural question: “How come he’s dead and I’m alive?” And these are the exact words of Dr. Teuber: “The President forgot to bring his steel helmet to Dallas.” In other words, that steel helmet did it. The bullet only entered a small distance into my brain. It hit the optic nerve, destroyed part of it, and injured the rest so that I was stone blind and began to recover vision in the hospital in England, little by little over the years as the injured part recovered. And now I’m sighted, and I think I just have a hole in my vision.

JA: You were struck in the helmet before it hit your head, right?

JA: So you came home, and you obviously couldn’t draw comics.

MANDEL: Yeah. Now let me finish about Dr. Teuber. First, I’ll tell you it threw me out of the jeep over the front. I’m sitting behind a 30-caliber machine gun, brushing out the breech. The bullet hits me and throws me out of the top of the jeep so that I landed in front of it, stone blind by the light. Now Teuber called me up one day, told me that Kennedy got it

MANDEL: Well, I tried, and Hillman Publications comes into this. That was the first company to refuse me. I tried to draw, but my brother got stuck with the job. Everything I drew was distorted, and Alan had to try to correct it. I couldn’t make it. I did some work, and I guess some people were going along with me. But Hillman... the editor looked me in the eye and said no. That’s where it ended for me.

“If [A Story I Wrote] Didn’t Put Me To Sleep, I Didn’t Think It Was Valid”

JA: Okay, now here’s what I have on that: I have “Miscellaneous ’47 to 1948” for Hillman. In other words, no one’s been able to identify what you did at Hillman. There are two other credits that you have in the post-war period besides the Hillman thing—one of them in 1946, working for Charlton Comics, but doing non-fiction. That’s all it says, “Non-fiction art.” Is this correct?

MANDEL: I can’t remember. But don’t forget, in those years, I was out of it.

JA: Right. There’s one other credit: in 1958, I have you doing some writing for Mad magazine.

MANDEL: Jerry DeFuccio asked if I would do something for them. I didn’t do the drawings; I just wrote a couple of pieces. I think that’s where I met Gloria Steinem. She did interview me later for Glamour magazine.

JA: Before we get on to some other things, I want to ask just a little bit more about your brother Alan, because we know virtually nothing about him.

MANDEL: Well, here’s what he did. You have his career detailed up to ’43?

JA: I have him to ’46.

MANDEL: 1946... that’s when I came home and he was working with me again. That’s all. But he initiated nothing, and that’s why it surprised me with that Charlie Biro gang, you know? Well, you know my brother was a very likable guy. He could be funny as hell, too, and he was a guy that attracted friends. Dan Barry resented him, very justifiably. But outside of that, my brother was a great guy, and his daughter always said, “My father is in this Peter Max world.” He was a very optimistic man, and I can see why they were friendly toward him. I just couldn’t get the idea why they were so aloof to me. These guys were my friends before the war.

JA: Did you like working for Charlie Biro?

Charlton Daze Jim Amash reports George Mandel as writing “non-fiction” for Charlton Publications in the latter 1940s, though GM says he doesn’t remember as much about those years as he could, because of his severe war wound… but his brother Alan was definitely drawing for Frank Communale Pub., the direct ancestor of that company, in Yellowjacket Comics #8 (Feb. 1946), where he drew an ancestor of the EC Ghoul-lunatics. (Another witch-hosted story of his had appeared in YJ #7.) [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

MANDEL: I liked working for everyone I worked for. I didn’t have trouble with the people I worked for until, as I say, Hillman shut the door on me.

JA: Okay, so after Hillman shut the door on you, what did you do?

MANDEL: Well, I went along with what I had been doing, which was writing and trying to recover my life as an artist. And I think I mentioned that I’d developed an art form for all over my house. I call it “humble peck.” It includes collage, construction, and painting. I have one piece that

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An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist George Mandel

I’m looking at that’s huge. It covers the whole window that I didn’t want to open. [Jim laughs] You know, I’m sitting here in the living room that’s 17 by 24, and it looks out on the Hudson River. That one window faces an apartment house, so I covered it with a huge work. And I’d been doing it ever since, writing and doing artwork. I’ve made pieces as recently as a month ago.

JA: Did you have any trouble breaking into pulp magazines like Male and Stag?

MANDEL: This brings up a guy named Alex Austin. He’s the kind of guy that I’ve described. In fact, I think I told you about reading this about him: “The kind of writer that lesser writers call a writer.” He was a driven writer who’s published several books, and he was a fellow student of Joe Heller’s. That’s how I met him. Joe told me about this cuckoo kid that writes and writes and writes and comes up with stories like “I Gotta Get Me an Eagle.” I met Alex through him, and we became friends. He is the one who brought me into Martin Goodman’s outfit as a freelancer. He also brought Mario Puzo there, and that’s how Mario and Bruce Jay Friedman became friends. This was in the late 1950s, I believe.

Another Of The “Mag Men” Noah Sarlat, George’s editor at Magazine Management. See this entire photo in A/E #66.

My editor was Noah Sarlat. I met Bruce going through. You know, just passing through, hanging out. And we became friends.

You know that Bruce is a really funny guy; his work is funny. These editors worked in a little stall. On the way to see Noah, who worked in a big office, I passed Bruce’s stall, and Alex Austin was in there. On the way back, I noticed that Alex was gone and I said to Bruce, “Hey, you notice Alex is getting a little heavy under the chin?” And here’s what Bruce said to me, “Oh, is that what it was? I thought he was wearing a toupee.” [Jim laughs] And that’s typical of Bruce Friedman.

I’ll tell you of my whole relationship with Noah Sarlat. Before I would turn in a manuscript that he had contracted on the basis of a synopsis, I would read it, sitting on the bed. And if I didn’t find myself waking up from a sleep, I didn’t turn it in that day. I worked on it and turned it in the next day. [mutual laughter] If it didn’t put me to sleep, I didn’t think it was valid. And I’d bring it in, and Noah never rejected any of the stories I brought him.

Every day that I saw Noah, he would throw initials of jazz musicians at me. He’d say, “J.L.” and I had to say, “Jimmy Lunsworth”. One after another, one after another, and he could never get me to miss until he said, “R.Z.” I said, “R.Z.? Who in the hell is R.Z.?” And mind you, you think of a jazz man’s initials, and throw it at me, and I’ll tell you who it was. I couldn’t get “R.Z.” He says, “Ruby Zwby. Get out of here.” You know who Ruby Zwby is? When you went to the Lowe’s State Theatre on Broadway, in the intermission, you heard all the music and saw a little plaque that said, “Ruby Zwby.” I had good years working there [at Magazine Management], and it helped me while writing The Breakwater.

“This Is Yossarian In Catch-22!”

JA: When we first talked, you told me that you were Yossarian.

MANDEL: Well, I’ll tell you... I was on the Joe Franklin [radio] show once, I think, for [my novel] Scapegoats. [sarcastically] You know he’s a real bright guy, right? He had me on with a black guy. Scapegoats has a black guy who is very central to the book. This black guy had written a book, and I had written Scapegoats, and Franklin knew that there was a black guy very prominent in my book. So he turns to this black guy and

said, “When did you write your book, Mr. Mandel?” [mutual laughter] I had to tap him on the shoulder and say, “I’m Mr. Mandel.”

Franklin’s assistant smacks himself on the forehead there on the show and says, “Wait a Just A Guy Called Joe minute! This is Popular radio and TV host and celebrityYossarian in Catch-22!” interviewer Joe Franklin, long a fixture in New I got very embarrassed, York City. and said the only similarity between Yossarian and me was the surgery. That’s all I said, because I didn’t want it to go on from there for the simple reason that Joe never owned up to it. The main thing, he has me choosing to go back after I got hit twice.

Now I’ll tell you how that came about. Christmastime [1944], I’m sitting with Eddie Moran and a whole bunch of other guys. There’s a whole other story there that I’m not going to tell you about, my days in recuperation after the leg wound. But we were drunk on Christmas Eve when we heard about the Battle of the Bulge. And Eddie goes into a crying jag... the last guy in the world you would have expected to do that.

One of his steadiest remarks was, “I detest G.I.s.” [chuckles] He couldn’t stand them. Anyway, we were all drunk, and when we heard about the German counterattack, Eddie went into a crying jag and it infected us all.

That’s when we volunteered. We turned ourselves in, and get this, the worst part of Joe’s version of it: one of the first things Eddie did when he met me is tell me that, every week, we go to an examination and the doctor examines you, and puts you in a group from A to F. [whispers] The mission is to get into F, because you can’t get sent back until you go through E and D and C and then to A and go back. Eddie said to Eddie Hagan, “Eddie, show him your wound.” Eddie rolled up his pants, and said, “Move that hair away.” One hair was in the way of his wound, a little peck. He says, “Every day in combat, Eddie hung his flag out of the window, or the foxhole, or the slip trench, and prayed, “God, give me a little wound.” And he got his wound, so Eddie joined Group F with me and the other guys. And the way you got into Group F was, when the doctor reached for your wound, you scream. [mutual laughter] I got into Group E; maybe I didn’t scream loud enough. [more laughter] That’s where I was when the Battle of the Bulge started, and the next day, we all went into Group A because we didn’t sober up. Had we sobered up, it’s doubtful we’d have been in that group. But we got shipped back.

JA: Okay, because I was going to say Yossarian would not have gone back.

MANDEL: No, and neither would I have, if not for this incident. The reason that Eddie broke down into tears was because these kids were green. They didn’t know what to do! They weren’t combat men. And us, with all our experience, hanging back and letting those kids get killed?

That’s when I “volunteered,” according to Joe Heller. Now get a load of this: it wasn’t until the year Joe died that I disabused him of the idea that I was fearless in combat. At our table in Chinatown, he said, “Well, you were fearless in combat.” And I said, “What?” He said, “Yeah, you weren’t scared.” I said, “I was scared every minute I was up there. What do you mean I wasn’t scared?” And he was startled to hear it. He felt I liked war!

And you know, he must have thought I was crazy for all these years, because Joe was a combat man. He was there! Sixty missions, my God! JA: That’s hard to imagine. But in what way were you Yossarian?

MANDEL: All right, I can tell you. Not much of the material in the book

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background”

45

to be a story titled “The Day the Time Changed.” Now, if you’d asked me then, “Did that come from a comic book?”— those days, I’d have to say, “Well, I didn’t write stories.” But I kept writing stories.

JA: Well, that’s what I was getting at, because you didn’t describe yourself as a storyteller in your youth, so that made me wonder.

MANDEL: No, I was known as a storyteller. Do you know this club I belonged to We’ll confess to being a bit confused about this one. George Mandel mentions actor Dane Clark (left) that I told you about: ALTEO? I used to as playing Yossarian, the anti-hero of Catch-22, in a short-lived TV series based on the novel. However, decorate our club room walls. One of them to the best of our knowledge, it was a young Richard Dreyfuss (center) who played Yossarian on what was, consisted of very large-sized characters. I we believe, a lone TV pilot for a Catch-22 series (though we couldn’t find a still or production shot from it). no longer remember what they were doing, Of course, Alan Arkin (right) was Yossarian in the 1970 Paramount film based on the novel; but despite having but where their clothes were, it was cut out Mike Nichols as the director, the movie failed to fully capture the book’s manic drive and mad sanity. and real material was put behind it. In that Maybe it couldn’t be done. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.] club, I was often the president and often came from me. The Man in White? Happened when I stole some clothes the vice-president. We ran parliamentary procedure. The vice-president that stank like hell. They brought a guy in from the field, flew him into was always the head of the committees, and when we ran a dance, the England for surgery, and wrapped his clothes up in the storeroom. And I vice-president headed it. gimped over on my crutches, with my leg tied up to my ass, and I stole the So we’re in the midst of a dance at the Casa D’amor in Coney Island clothes. I put them on, and sneaked out on my crutches, and gimped my when one of the guys came over and said, “Hey, there’s some fat guy down way down toward the wire fence that everyone knew about, and I passed there who says he’s a comedian.” I said, “Bring him up.” And they brought one guy with both arms up in casts with black pipes holding his arms up him up and put him up, and he knocked them dead. It was Stubby Kaye and a buddy feeding him a cigarette for a puff or two. “Where you going?” with orange hair. His hair was orange—natural, not dyed. He fell in love I said, gimping along. He said, “To the dance,” with his arms up. I passed a with us and was in the club every night, kicking it back and forth with guy entirely in a cast. Horizontal, four guys running with him, he had a Danny the Count. They were terrific together. Stubby Kaye went on, as hole for his face and he had a hole for his genitals. I asked the guy who you know, and then Joe and I stuck my friend Curly in Sex and the Single was horizontal, “Where you going?” “To the dance,” he said. That’s The Girl, or I wrote the ending of it. I wrote the chase scene. If you ever see Man in White.” [NOTE: In the novel, the character is called “the Soldier [that movie], turn it off. I’m not even going to tell you why. There’s a in White.”] bromide in the industry: they tell young editors, “If you have to cut to Listen to this: Sammy Skodecek had a kidney stone, and they gave him save space, cut what doesn’t move the story along.” And what they forget a bad time with it until the day they kicked him out of the Army with a is to say, “Except in comedy.” Because all you want in comedy is comedy. bottle in his hip pocket and a pipe up his penis. But early on, when they You don’t want the story; it’s started to give him a bad time, he got all undressed and sat down on the secondary. They cut the best parts rail of the barracks and nobody could get him off. That became Yossarian out of the chase scene in Sex and sitting naked on a tree bough. After the war, I used to tell Joe stories like the Single Girl. If you see that that. I have a letter from him that I’ve mislaid. I don’t know where it is, picture, that isn’t the original. Turn but he said, “Watch Channel Such-and-such on Sunday and you’ll see it off. But if it’s the original, it’s a Dane Clark pretending to be George Mandel pretending to be Yossarian.” gas. And I wrote that ending.

[Jim laughs] You remember Dane Clark? I was said to resemble him. And Brendan Gill in The New Yorker it was very remarkable that he played Yossarian on that TV show. They said, “If you can avoid everything say I resemble him, but I’m much better-looking. [mutual laughter] No, but the last ten minutes, do so.”

Beansy said I look like a potato knish. [laughs] [Jim laughs] It wasn’t Joe’s fault. He A considerable amount of me is like Yossarian, but I’ll tell you what I wrote very delicate comedy that told Joe Heller’s daughter. She said I come as close as any to being a was really ruined by the director. veritable prototype of Yossarian. And I told her, “Someone worse than me He didn’t get it. He didn’t get the came much closer... your father.” Yossarian is based mostly on Joe Heller, subtleties. But my stuff was mostly and together we did a good pose for Yossarian. But, of course, it’s all sight gags and they worked, except created. You know, you take incidents and apply them. And I have dozens when they were cut off. And we of them from everyone, from Joe to Curly, in my books, but they are iron stuck Curly in it. When Curly told prototypes for the characters. So that’s about it, you know. And she’s going Stubby Kaye—whose name is to make a case if she tries to use me; I’m going to insist on a pseudonym.

“Speed Vogel” in the movie— Unsafe At Any Speed [mutual laughter] [mutual laughter] I wrote that in.

Joseph Heller and his friend Speed In one scene, Stubby says, “They Vogel. Together they wrote the 1986 JA: Do you think your comics work prepared you for being a magazine don’t call me ‘Speed Vogel’ for book No Laughing Matter about writer and novelist? nothing.” Now Stubby flipped when Heller’s struggle with the Curly told him that I wrote that paralyzing illness known as MANDEL: People don’t prepare as they go along. But obviously, if I was part, because of the old days when Guillain-Barré syndrome. Earlier, going to sit and write stories—which every one of them was; it was a he was one of our gang.

Heller had named a character in his story—I progressed as I went along. I had a story in The Saturday screenplay for the 1964 film Sex and Evening Post that was not much after those years. But it was just JA: What are you doing these the Single Girl “Speed Vogel.” something that I put together from a current experience, and it turned out days?

Yossarian Times Three—Or Probably Just Two

46

An All-Encompassing Interview With Golden Age Artist & 1950s Novelist George Mandel

MANDEL: I’m in the midst of writing two novels, and I work on them all the time. I am also an investor. Every dime that I ever made, I invested—and I became an investor, trying to save Mario Puzo. Mario was, by his own definition, a degenerate gambler; I’ve been to Vegas with him.

But the thing is, I learned about Wall Street and investigated it to get Mario into it. One day, I said, “Hey, Mario. Why do we waste all this time? Let’s get in a limo with a lot of money and throw a bushel into Caesar’s Palace, and a bushel into the next casino, and go home and have some supper?” You know, it has to be on the minute. It isn’t the money.

In fact, I did this profile on him for Life magazine some years ago, and I told how the photographer set up a fake crap game. Everyone was glad to participate in the casino and even in that fake crap game. Mario managed to lose five hundred bucks. [chuckles] Well, you know we were very close buddies. And as I must have told you before, he is the greatest of people. Mario. Yeah, there was no one better.

The WHO’S WHO of American Comic Books (1928-1999) Online Edition Created by Jerry G. Bails FREE – online searchable database – FREE www.bailsprojects.com – No password required

A quarter of a million records, covering the careers of people who have contributed to original comic books in the US.

George Mandel “Dr. Strange” panel from Thrilling Comics #8 (Sept. 1940). Don’t worry—he survives!

Thanks to Eric Schumacher & goldengraphics.net. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

George Mandel—A Man Who Really Did Battle Hitler (Clockwise from near left:) A more recent photo of George Mandel—the cover of his 1961 Avon paperback book of gag cartoons (Beatville U.S.A.)—and a specimen of what some feel may be more of George’s early work. Comics researcher Eric Schumacher, who provided this scan from Daredevil Comics #1 (June 1941—a.k.a. Daredevil Battles Hitler), feels that GM penciled it. “Faces, poses, and wide torsos give it away,” Eric wrote in a 6-3-10 post to the Timely-Atlas-Comics website. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

He wouldn’t get into investing, but I did. I’ve made a lot of money on Wall Street, and that’s what I do. And meanwhile, I’m very intense in my artwork. And I take care of my family. In fact, one of my grandsons is living with us now, because he’s doing New York City. He just graduated from Vassar and he is a star. He’s a hip-hop dancer and choreographer at Vassar. His name is Peterson. You might run into him.

“I Come From A Very Primitive Background”

47

GEORGE MANDEL Checklist [NOTE: The following Checklist is adapted from information contained in the online Who’s Who of American Comic Books (1928-1999), established by Jerry G. Bails; see ad on preceding page. Names of features below which appeared both in comics with that title and also in other comics are generally not italicized. Some corrections were made to the Who’s Who in 2005 by George Mandel, via Jim Amash. Key: (w) = writer; (a) = artist; (p) = penciler only; (i) = inker only.]

Name: George Mandel (b. 1920) (artist, writer) Pen Names: George Van Dell; Neil Pritchie (latter in books) Education: Art Students League; Pratt Institute Family in Arts: Alan Mandel, brother Influences: Burne Hogarth; Milton Caniff Print Media (Non-Comics): Editor of book From the Horse’s Mouth (history). Writer of novels Into the Woods of the World; The Savage Kick; Scapegoats; The Wax Boom; The Breakwater; Flee the Angry Strangers; Great Hoaxes of All Time. Writer of paperback One-Man Armies (collection of articles), and of various short stories and articles Performing Arts: film Syndication: Miss Fury (ghost p) c. 1941 for Bell syndicate Comics in Other Media: gag cartoons (w)(a) for books Beatville, U.S.A. and Borderline Cases Comics Studios/Shops: Funnies, Inc. (p, some i) 1939-41, worked from home; Sangor Studio (letterer) 1939, later freelance COMIC BOOK CREDITS (Mainstream U.S. Publications): Ace Periodicals: Mr. Risk (a) 1942 Archie Publications/MLJ: Doc Strong (a) 1941 Better/Nedor: American Crusader (a) 1941; covers (a) 1940; Doc Strange (a.k.a. Dr. Strange) (a) 1940-42; Don Davis (a) 1940; Larry North, U.S.N. (a) 1941; Scoop Langdon (a) 1940; Sergeant Bill King (a) 1941; Son of the Gods (w)(a) 1940-41; Ted Crane (w)(a) 1940; Woman in Red (a) 1940-41 Charlton Comics: non-fiction (a) 1946 EC Comics: Mad (magazine) (w) 1958 Fawcett Publications: Captain Midnight (w)(a) 1942 (GM denies doing this or the other two Fawcett strips listed here; perhaps this was Dan Barry, since GM was in the service after Dec. 1941); Commando Yank (i) 1943 (ditto); Phantom Eagle (i) 1943 (ditto)

Cover Story George Mandel’s cover for Novelty Press’ Blue Bolt #10 (March 1941), signed with his “Geo. Van Dell” pseudonym. The cover-featured hero, however, is Dick Cole. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Fox Comics: Voodoo Man (a) 1942 Harvey Comics: covers (a) 1941 for Champ Comics

1942

Hillman Periodicals: Boy King (a) c. 1942 (GM feels this was probably actually his brother Alan); The Crusader (a) 1941; Nightmare (a) 1942-43 (probably Alan Mandel); various features (w) c. 1947-48

Marvel/Timely Comics: The Angel (a) 1941; Black Marvel (a) 1941; Miss Fury (a) c. 1942 (reprint of newspaper strip); The Patriot (a) 1941

Holyoke Publications: Flag-Man (a) 1942 (previous attribution—GM says this, too, was his brother Alan); The Hood (a) 1942 (ditto) Lev Gleason Publications: 13 and Jinx (a) 1942; Young Robin Hood (a)

Novelty Comics: Blue Bolt (p) 1941-42; covers (a) early 1940s

48

JIM MIELE— A Gentle Giant An Artist’s Life Among Castles, Ogres, And Fair Princesses

by Herb Rogoff A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Herb Rogoff, who was a comics editor at Hillman Periodicals from 1949 to 1952 and at Ziff-Davis from 1952 to 1956, was interviewed by Jim Amash in Alter Ego #42 about his career… in the course of which he mentioned his relationship with editor/writer/artist Jim Miele at the latter company. In A/E #75, interviewed artist Marv Levy also mentioned Miele. Recently, Herb sent this expanded reminiscence of Jim Miele and related matters, which we’re delighted to print as an insight into comics of the late Golden Age.

I

learned from Alter Ego (#89, Oct. 2009) that artist Jim Miele had dropped dead at his desk some years ago. This bit of sad news came as a complete surprise to me, because from the time I left Ziff-Davis in 1956, I was unaware of anything that had happened to the industry.

Early in 2004, Jim Amash called to interview me for a magazine I had never heard of. It was called Alter Ego. After many hours (I think the number was nine), Jim had the material for an article. He turned out a superlative Q&A piece that subsequently appeared in issue #42 (Nov. 2004).

When I read of Jim Miele’s demise and where it took place, it reminded me of my dear friend, illustrator-cartoonist Lou Priscilla. Lou was an anatomy whiz who supplemented his teaching income with sales of cartoons to the leading journals of the day; Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post were two of them. He eventually realized the culmination of a lifelong dream: his own art school, which he ran right up to the day he died in 1957.

At an art exhibition on 57th Street, a good six months later, I found out that Lou had not hit any sidewalk with a mighty thud. In truth, he cashed in his chips, so to speak, in the sack of his girl friend and art student, a lovely young thing who was incredibly talented as an artist. She told me of Lou’s last minutes, and when she did, I beamed with delight.

Of course, it did not make it any easier for me to reconcile with Lou’s death. I merely glowed upon learning about the change in venue.

Jim Miele’s death at his desk was a bitter-sweet incident, because his entire life was wrapped up in his work. What was more fitting than for him to breathe his last while in the rapture of another fairy tale where he was among imaginary friends who had nourished his mind and exhilarated his soul for years and years?

A good story always raced through his mind. Jim had a vivid imagination; his stories were fanciful, designed to delight readers of all ages. But he was an awful writer. His manuscripts were replete with clumsy sentences, horrible grammar, and wretched spelling. His art was equally atrocious; his drawings were too awful to even be called “primitive.” But he loved every day he spent working on

Two For The Road (Left:) Writer/artist Jim Miele at the typewriter, probably in the 1950s; photo courtesy of Marv Levy.

(Right:) Ziff-Davis comics editor Herb Rogoff, circa the 1960s. Photo courtesy of Herb.

comic books. Jim was a kid who never grew up. I thought his death at his desk was a fitting end to this man who would, with cigarette in one hand, drink in the other, fervently relate his latest tale of castles, ogres, and princesses to one and all in a circle of interested listeners.

Paradoxically, he would, every once in a while, casually boast that he was half Indian and half Italian. When asked from what tribe he was descended, he would answer that he was a Chippe-Wop. Today, in our politically correct environment, we wince at this, but we must remember that he voiced this joke back in the ’50s. In view of this, I have to mention that, as far as I knew, this was Jim’s only indiscretion. I’d never heard any other remark from him about anyone’s background and heritage.

Actually, Jim Miele was an uncommonly fair person. The following incident illustrates this character trait. Louis Zara, who was a vice president at Ziff-Davis, ran the comics division during this time. He had been hired to take charge of the company’s book-publishing division when they were still in Chicago. Zara was a published novelist (This Land Is Ours, Rebel Run, and Ruth Middleton were three of his titles that I remember), and Ziff hired him because he must have thought that Zara’s experience as a novelist, one constantly dealing with his editor, would make him ideal as executive editor of the book division at Z-D.

Back To Basics The cover of a recent edition of Louis Priscilla’s 1953 book Basic Drawing. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Jim Miele—A Gentle Giant

49

Fairy Tales Can Come True—But, Alas, Not For Long!

The five “kiddie comics” edited by Jim Miele had gorgeously painted covers—a Ziff-Davis specialty. Their artists, alas, are unknown. (Clockwise from top left:) Fairy Tales #11 (June-July 1951)… Nursery Rhymes #1 (JulyAug. ’51)… Alice #10 (July-Aug. ’51)… Dolly #10 (ditto)… and Kiddie Karnival (1952, no number). The first three titles lasted only two issues each, the latter pair just one… but spring of 1951 must’ve been a real Pied Piper of a time up at ol’ Z-D! Thanks to the Grand Comics Database; see ad on p. 76. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

“Jim,” says Herb Rogoff, “was an idea man. He would come up with very good plots for kiddie comics. He wrote and drew very few of them. Those he did were published because he was the editor and he had final say.

He assigned most of the work to his stable of writers and artists to work on his ideas. He saved ‘The Snowman’s First Christmas’ for himself. I think it ran in Kiddie Karnival.”

When I joined the company, the book division was already gone; it bit the dust while they were still in Chicago. Zara was kept on, however, as vice president, and he was put in charge of the rapidly growing, and increasingly important, comics division. He was my boss and, furthermore, was a very nice guy. Everyone in the division worked well with him.

Not long after this, Jim Miele joined the company. While with Harvey Comics, he had worked on Casper the Friendly Ghost, which made him a natural to edit the “kiddie” books we were publishing: Nursery Rhymes, Fairy Tales, Alice, and Dolly. He was tailor-made for the position.

We had two other editors on hand to help us prepare the 25-plus titles we had at the time. They were Ben Martin and Harry Stein. Ben came to us from the New York Herald Tribune, where he had served as comics editor until the newspaper folded its Sunday comics section. Harry’s reputation, and quite a checkered one, I heard, was made at Quality Comics, where, according to Harry, he buddied with publisher “Busy” Arnold.

The books I edited were G.I. Joe, Z-D’s best-selling comic, along with Wild Boy, Crime Clinic, Bob Feller’s Baseball Thrills, Red Grange’s Football Thrills, Bill Stern’s Sports Book, and a few others whose titles escape me. The way I worked with writers was to have them write synopses, which I would then approve or turn down. Of those I approved, I would ask the writer to give me the number of pages I thought the story merited. All the other Ziff-Davis editors worked the same way.

One morning, Lou Zara came to my desk with a large manila envelope.

“Herb,” he said, “here’s a script for G.I. Joe. It’s from a neighbor of mine.

She’s a housewife-writer.” With this he shrugged, as if to say, “What can I do? She’s a neighbor.” Then, tossing the envelope onto my desk, he added,

“I’ve already read the story and it looks okay. See what you think. If it’s all right, let me know. I’ll put it through for payment.” And he walked away. I fished out the stapled script. There was, at the top of page one, a typewritten name: “Bertha Robbins.” But no address. No phone number. I was a bit miffed, because I was presented by a finished script rather than a one-page synopsis such as I was accustomed to work with.

I read the story. It was awful. The most terribly-written script I’d ever seen, either at Hillman or with Ziff-Davis. Since it was getting on to five, I cleaned up my desk and motioned to Jim Miele, giving him the internationally recognized sign for a drink by forming my fingers to make a cup, then bringing it to my lips. Some minutes later, at the bar of our favorite restaurant, I told him about Zara and the script.

He listened intently, and then said, “Put the story through.” I couldn’t believe my ears.

“Didn’t you hear me?” I asked.

“I heard every word. Now, put the story through.”

“For what reason?” I asked.

“I can’t say any more,” Jim answered.

I didn’t take Jim’s advice. The following morning, I walked into Zara’s office and handed him the story. “Mr. Zara, this is positively the worst story I have ever read. I can’t okay it.”

Zara didn’t say a word. He just nodded, lifted his attaché case onto his

50

An Artist’s Life Among Castles, Ogres, And Fair Princesses

to Jim until I told him about the “housewifeneighbor.” Now, knowing the true identity of this writer, Jim was trying to protect me from getting into the serious trouble he thought I would get into by rejecting the boss’ wife’s script.

Simultaneously, he didn’t want to betray the trust he had brought upon himself by unearthing information about our boss that no one else in our corps of editors was aware of.

Well, the second script was just as awful as the first, and I repeated my first visit to Zara’s office to announce that I was rejecting it. As I mentioned earlier, Lou Zara was a nice guy, and I never heard any more about Bertha Robbins wanting to be a comic book writer for Ziff-Davis.

Zara Firma (Left:) A true “editorial cartoon” done by Herb Rogoff for a 1952 issue of the Ziff-Davis News, a house organ for the publishing company. Thanks to Michaël Dewally. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

(Right:) When Roy T. e-mailed Herb asking if he had a photo of his old boss Lou Zara, Mr. R. quickly responded with this drawing and the following note: “Lou was a bookish kind of guy. He had a bulbous nose, frizzy hair, as professors are always shown, and of course he wore glasses. He was short and a bit heavy, with an ample waistline. I’ve just made a fast sketch of him from what I remember after all these years. It’s close but no cigar. I guess you can reproduce this, if you want to.” We want to, Herb! Thanks. [©2011 Herb Rogoff.]

desk, opened it, and withdrew another manila envelope. Handing it to me, he said, “Try this one.”

I left his office and saw Jim waiting for me at my desk. “What happened?” he asked.

“He gave me another script by Bertha Robbins.”

“Put it through, Herb,” Jim said.

“Can’t you tell me why you’re so insistent?” I asked him.

“All I can tell you is ‘who’s who.’” And he walked away.

I was puzzled. All day, I tried to figure out what Jim had meant and why he would not tell me why. I tried him again later that day at our cocktail lounge.

“Look,” he said, “all I can is who’s who, the book.”

The next morning, after an agonizing night of attempting to decipher Jim’s terse remark, it hit me. Could he be talking about Who’s Who in America? I found a copy of Who’s Who in America among our reference books. I looked at the entry for Louis Zara, and there it was, after his name and occupation. “Married: Bertha Robbins.”

Jim had known this as soon as he had met Zara. Having heard that he was a novelist, he had turned to the Who’s Who volume to learn more about his new boss. At that time, who Zara was married to meant nothing

Jim Miele was a strange, lonely man. I knew him a long time, but I never really knew anything about him. He never mentioned his family. Nothing about his mother and father. Zero, too, about siblings. He did mention a couple of wives, but that was all. We were together a lot, going out for coffee at break hours. The first time we were at a lunch counter for coffee and pie, he specifically pointed to a piece of apple pie that was firm and plastic-looking and definitely stale. It was midafternoon, and the pie had survived the many customers who had passed that way. It was easy to see why. Right next to it was a blueberry pie oozing with luscious berries. I ordered a piece and asked him why he chose the stale-looking pie. “It looks better,” he said. “Yours is too messy, too runny.” He then went on to explain that, due to the number of cigarettes he’d smoked, had had lost his senses of smell and taste. In order to enjoy his food, he had to rely on how it looked to him. This got him into trouble, he further explained. Women he had dated and women he had married would spray on perfume and toilet water before dates with him, but would wonder why he never commented on those fragrances. It appears he never told them about losing these important senses and ended up bearing the brunt for what they considered to be his crude affront to their efforts to please him.

At this point, I have to tell you of a friend who visited me regularly at Z-D. (I have been punishing my mind because of its failure to come up with a name for this man. For the sake of the account, I will call him “Len,” because that name fits him perfectly.) Len was in his sixties and was retired from King Features Syndicate, where he had sold comic strips to newspapers. His stories about his career regaled me at lunches and after-work drinks. At lunch one day, Len casually mentioned that the syndicates were always looking for features to fill the gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, a hiatus of about 28 days. Of course, the feature had to be about Christmas. If I had a Christmas story that could be run over that period, it wouldn’t be hard to sell it to a syndicate.

Jim had written a story for one of Z-D’s holiday books. It was a charming little gem called “The Snowman’s First Christmas.” Jim not only wrote it but also did the art. The story was a delight, but the actual writing and drawing were dreadful. I spoke with Jim about the necessity of having it rewritten. He agreed to this, and also to having his story completely redrawn. Once I had his permission, I called Marv Levy, who had drawn some marvelous stories for Hans Christian Anderson, the comic I edited for Z-D, and asked him if he would be interested in doing the strip. He

Jim Miele—A Gentle Giant

51

Snowman Is An Island Artist Marv Levy, drawing The Snowman’s First Christmas newspaper feature, no doubt in 1953—and examples of the strip itself: what seems to be a display drawing (at right), and two of the actual dailies, including the first one.

According to Herb Rogoff, the fourweek feature was serialized between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1953, 1954, and 1955; clearly, he took no formal credit on the enterprise.

Thanks to Marv Levy for the photo and display drawing, and to Mark Luebker for the dailies (images picked up at some point, most likely, from the strips as printed in a newspaper—hence the less-thanperfect reproduction). [Strips ©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

said he would. I then started to completely rewrite “The Snowman’s First Christmas.”

Snowman’s First Christmas ran for three years. We split the take three ways.

At any rate, we were in the late spring of the year and had plenty of time to get everything done. I broke down the story into 24 strips, which amounted to four weeks of six daily strips. Marv’s drawings were superb.

We then sold the series to The George Matthew Adams Service. I don’t remember how we came up with this syndicate, but they loved it. The

I was happy, certainly, for this extra income, but I was happy, too, for Jim, who now had a beautifully drawn and competently written rendition of his beautiful Christmas story, which had sprung from the fertile imagination of this gentle giant who never grew up.

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(Above:) Back cover photo of Abe’s 1969 album. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

(Right:) “Sound!” Sept. 24, 1950, Spirit splash page. [©2011 Will Eisner Estate.]

54

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

The Mystery of the Missing Letterer! - Part 3 “Remember he had a guitar in the shop? In the afternoon he played.

It was a wonderful shop, wonderful. He played the guitar in the afternoon and we talked.”

—Will Eisner, from a 1982 Chicago-Con panel discussion

A

be Kanegson was Will Eisner’s letterer from 1947 to 1951, assisting him on The Spirit and other projects. He was also Eisner’s friend and a dependable sounding board. Kanegson proofread and edited Eisner’s text, and even pitched in with inking when deadlines got tight.

But, soon after Kanegson quit comics in the early ’50s, Eisner and Jules Feiffer, a fellow Spirit ghost, lost touch with him. Despite searching for decades, neither Eisner nor Feiffer ever found out what became of their old friend.

In our previous issue, I told about how I finally solved the 60-year mystery last September, when I happened upon a record album on eBay which featured Abe’s name and photo. Further investigation revealed that Kanegson had pursued a career as a respected square dance caller and folk singer.

Little Letters!

Sadly, Abe passed away in 1965. His only record album came out four years after his death. But I still wanted to know more about his life before and after comics, and hoped the liner notes might provide some answers.

Luckily, I was not disappointed. As you’ll see, while hardly complete, there are details of Abe’s life that have never before been revealed to fans of his Spirit work. Here’s the text in its entirety. (The actual back of the album was depicted last issue, but may have been difficult to read in that format, so….)

“The Strange Case of Mrs. Paraffin,” March 7, 1948. Art by Eisner & Grandenetti. [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

1969 Kanegson Record Text “Abe Kanegson was born in Eastern Europe of RussianJewish parents and immigrated with them to America as a small child in the early 20’s. He grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in the Bronx during the midst of the depression. He held many jobs during his life—on farms and in factories, for trucking firms and design studios; he was even a cartoonist for a time. At other times, he had no job at all; so he studied music and painting, he wrote and roamed the countryside. Gradually he developed a career as a folksinger, folk-dance camp teacher, and square dance caller. He always returned, eventually, to New York City. He died there of leukemia in 1965, leaving a wife, two sons, and countless friends scattered all over the nation. They all will remember him less for his short and difficult life than for the courage, love, humor, and good faith he showed in the living of it.

“Abe was many things: singer, musician, artist, poet, linguist, teacher, humorist, philosopher; his many talents were both his delight and his burden. One of the many challenges he had to meet was a persistent stammer, which he eventually lessened simply by ignoring it and not letting it interfere with any of his interests, least of all his music. He was a man who managed to be himself as completely as any man could hope to be. One might wonder why he never became famous, but he never sought fame as a goal and the lightning of commercial success never happened to strike him.

Prisoners of Deadlines!

(Left to right:) Caricatures of Jerry Grandenetti, Will Eisner, and Abe Kanegson as convicts from the “Slippery Eall” Spirit story for Nov. 30, 1947. Eisner once joked that, if he and his studio were stuck in jail, their lives wouldn’t be all that much different. Those boys should’ve gotten out more! Art by Eisner & Grandenetti. [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

“His singing here gives us only one view of Abe Kanegson, but since he put all of himself into everything he did, it is a long view in a short space. The range and resonance of his baritone voice, the excellence of arrange-

The Mystery Of The Missing Letterer—Part 3

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ments for the guitar, his flawless feeling for rhythm: all are immediately apparent. He never sang a song unless it meant something to him; once a song attracted him, invariably he made it uniquely his own, and in so doing showed to all who listened that there was a spirit, a greatness in him not given to many men. There is a note of eternity in everything that is truly beautiful and perfectly done: as Abe Kanegson sings them, these songs are ageless.”

And there you have it. I especially like the quote: “he was even a cartoonist for a time.” Abe was possibly the finest letterer of all time, but to his music fans, his comic book career was just an afterthought. The reverse is undoubtedly true with most of his Spirit fans. The text also mentions Kanegson’s work in design studios, presumably where he honed his extraordinary skills. It also revealed the cause of his death in 1965: leukemia.

Another quote caught my eye: “One might wonder why he never became famous, but he never sought fame as a goal and the lightning of commercial success never happened to strike him.” That comment struck me as applying equally well to Abe’s short-but-brilliant comic career. A letterer generally works in the background, making others look good. It’s a rare fan that notices who writes the words in the balloons.

But let’s go back to the LP, which included notes on every song and information about the genesis of the album. There were no credits for the album commentary, but the project coordinator was Doris J. Weller. Here, the text continues: “His friends often asked Abe when he was going to make a record; his answer was always, ‘I’m not ready yet.’

He was waiting for the perfect moment when his voice and style were fully developed, when his friends were gathered ‘round, when the audience was in the right mood, when the surroundings were just so—a firelit room with perfect acoustics.

“While Abe waited, some of those friends, notably Norman Epstein, made informal tapes of his progress. It is from this ‘unauthorized legacy’ that this record has been created, mostly of songs for the late 1950s and early 1960s. They have richness, and variety and background noises.

Read This!

Another Kanegson lettering tour-de-force, from “The Story of Rat-Tat The Toy Machine Gun,” Sept. 4, 1949. [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

“The result is an eminently satisfying reproduction of Abe Kanegson’s style and of the songs he loved to share with his friends. It has a genuine, spontaneous flavor which no amount of polishing could achieve. It is a record showing not only an artist at work, but a man involved with his music and with his friends and so with life itself. Whether or not you ever heard Abe sing in person, this recording will help you understand his particular magic, for it will include you among his wide circle of friends as you listen.”

Kanegson In His Own Words!

Abe’s album is a little gem. On it, he sings classic folk songs like “Black Is the Color (of My True Love’s Hair),” “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?,” and “The Battle of Jericho.” The tone Abe took with each song varied according to the subject matter, an approach Eisner had taken with The Spirit years earlier.

I particularly enjoyed Abe’s version of “One Fish Ball”—a send-up of an old vaudeville joke about a guy who goes to a restaurant and orders one meatball. Abe gives the tale a Yiddish spin, singing about a poor shmoe with only 15¢ to his name who goes to a restaurant and orders a

single fish ball. But the waiter’s no fool, and tells the cheapskate, “You don’t get no bread with one fish ball!”

Kanegson had a lovely baritone voice, and could really tell a story. One would expect no less from the man who made the characters in The Spirit sing so expressively on the page.

But for me, the real treat was hearing Abe introduce some of his songs in his slight stutter. It was if a curtain to the past had briefly opened.

These brief commentaries are the only known examples of Abe in his own words. While they don’t refer to comics, they do give some insights into his life, childhood, and early introduction to music. Take it away, Abe...

“When I was a kid my parents used to take me to the Yiddish plays.

You’d take a subway Lexington Avenue to Bleecker St. and walk three blocks and (ahhh!) that’s the Broadway of lower Manhattan. But there was a star on the stage at that time. [Yiddish composer Aaron] Lebedoff. I don’t know if you remember him, but we used to have a Victrola, and the records that I would put in my ear close to the Victrola for, was always a Lebedoff. I don’t know how come. He had the thing I liked, and this is one of the brilliant pieces, these things. He has recorded it, and he wrote the words and the music; it really has a folk atmosphere and flavor.”

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Abe then reminisces about the hard times he and his family lived through: “That was a cheerful note from my childhood. And this is an uncheerful one. When I was a kid, other things were going on and I wasn’t always aware of it. When I asked my father for a nickel, I wondered why he got that look on his face. Y’know, when I was a kid back in the twenties, early thirties (yeah, I was still a kid, yeah), and I wondered ‘how come?’ Y’know, how come he’d wake up every hour when he was supposed to be sleeping at night and scratch his head and go back to sleep, you know.

“When I grew up a little and looked for a job, I found out. And this was a song that went around at the time and seemed to express the big problem of the day. You know, the veterans from the first war were out on the streets. Some of them had jobs and some of them had apples. I don’t know if you remember. I do. A nickel an apple and, uh, things like that.”

Kanegson then sings “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” And then there was this: “I was wandering and in my travels I found myself in New York.

And broke.”

When I hear that, I picture Abe knocking on Eisner’s door, looking for work.

“The Curse!”

(Above:) Ol’ Pete Bog sang this song in this Oct. 16, 1949, Spirit tale— and ol’ Abe lettered it! [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

Not For The Birds!

(Left:) Kanegson’s delicate calligraphy for “The Fallen Sparrow,” January 11, 1948. Art by Will Eisner. [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

The Mystery Of The Missing Letterer—Part 3

57

Selected Liner Notes Some of the song commentaries on the album give glimpses into Abe’s personality. Here’s a small sampling.

“A-Wandering”: “Abe considered himself a wanderer, and this was one of his special songs which he like to share during a relaxed moment.”

“Two Hoboes”: “Abe empathized with the wanderer who had ‘no home, babes to return to’; he knew what it meant when one’s ‘shoes are all wore out.’”

“Water Boy”: “During his own travels, Abe once saw some of his fellow men sweating it out in a chain gang; he never forgot the sight.

Perhaps that explains the poignancy which he puts into his presentation.”

“Ah, Si Mon Moine”: “Those who attended Abe’s ‘Village Square Dance School,’ which flourished for a brief, happy period in Greenwich Village, will remember the times when Abe and his wife, Betty, sang together. This French-Canadian ditty gives them an opportunity for a delightful duet.”

That’s it for Abe’s album, except to hope it will be reissued someday.

I’m happy to report that, after completing these articles, I was able to interview Abe’s brother Lou, his sister Rita, son Ben, and wife Elizabeth.

Those pieces will appear sometime in the future. But for now we’d like to thank Rita Perlin, Tom Orzechowski, Todd Klein, and Ken Bruzenak for their assistance. And a very special thanks to my wife, Janet Gilbert, for her invaluable detective work on this project!

Stop Her! (Above:) Evocative Kanegson lettering on this “Dr. Drew” panel from Fiction House‘s Rangers Comics #47 (June 1948). Art by Jerry Grandenetti, script by Marilyn Mercer. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Next issue: Ever wonder how to break into comics? Mike Friedrich found out the hard way. You’ll see his blow-by blow-description on his first “Batman” script next month. And it ain’t pretty, folks!

Till next time,

Slippery Crew!

(Above, left to right:) More caricatures of Will Eisner (left), Jerry Grandenetti (middle), and Abe Kanegson (right) as convicts from the “Slippery Eall” Spirit story. [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

Goople!

(Left:) Kanegson ad parody from “The Torch,” April 25, 1948. Abe most likely wrote, drew, and lettered the ad. [©2011 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

POSTSCRIPT:

In Praise of Kanegson Let’s end this column with some final thoughts about Kanegson and lettering in general. I recently came across a quote from Michael Thomas on the CBR website that gets to the heart of the matter: “Lettering is to comic books what back-up singers are to music: often overlooked, but if done wrong, it’s noticed in a bad way. It’s as critical an element to the overall look and feel of a story just as much as the dialogue, the art, or the colors.”

Lettering is the hidden art, and letterers among the most under-appreciated of comic book professionals. Sadly, in recent years computer fonts have largely replaced handcrafted lettering. Regardless, the comic book field still has many craftsmen capable of superb hand lettering.

I asked three of the top letterers in the field to share their thoughts on Abe Kanegson and his influence on their own work. Ironically, since The Spirit credited only Eisner in its original run, even Kanegson’s greatest admirers didn’t always realize whom they were admiring! Case in point: Mr. Monster’s own lettering genius, Ken Bruzenak, who wrote: “Concerning Kanegson—I have to admit I was heavily influenced, even

though I didn’t know who he was until now. The thing about the Spirit work was that it was really an omnibus adventure series that could go in any direction, any genre. Modern comics are locked into specific styles and attitudes—I didn’t get to do a script font love story in the middle of a “Batman” run, or off-beat, sound-effects-driven stories (except for Mr. Monster, of course). When storylines are ten-issue gritty epics, there’s not much call for humor or divergent storylines. —Best, Ken.” When it comes to identifying Kanegson, award-winning letterer, Todd Klein had a similar problem: “If I was influenced by Kanegson, I didn’t know it. I enjoyed and tried to learn from the lettering on The Spirit starting when it was reprinted by Denis Kitchen and then Warren, but thought it was all by Eisner himself.

To this day I can’t differentiate between what Eisner did and what Kanegson did, and never even heard the name until much later than that, so I look forward to your articles.”

Todd’s confusion isn’t surprising. Eisner invented the expressive style used so effectively on The Spirit, and all of Eisner’s letterers followed his lead. But it was Abe who perfected the style and made it his own, though he labored in obscurity until Eisner sang his praises in the ’70s. And, thanks to Eisner, some lettering artists belatedly discovered Abe Kanegson’s place in comic book history. Case in point, X-Men and Spawn letterer supreme Tom Orzechowski: “Abe’s work was incredibly gutsy. It was the soundtrack of The Spirit: savvy, and a bit gangly. Abrupt, dynamic and BIG!...and just a touch offkilter. I took it all in with disbelief and envy. The introduction to the U.S. of manga, always hyperventilating, and then the Spawn comic, with its bravura and wide-open page layouts, gave me my own chance to make the characters, and machines and cities, shout, and moan, and sigh. Abe showed me the life to be found in the hand-drawn word, and taught me to hear its voice.”

Mr. Monster!

(Above:) Ken Bruzenak’s Mr. Monster logo. [©2011 Michael T. Gilbert.]

Dr. Strange!

(Above:) Todd Klein’s Dr. Strange logo. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Spawn!

(Above:) Tom Orzechowski’s Spawn logo. [©2011 Todd McFarlane.]

I couldn’t have said it better myself, Tom. And now, let’s give the last word to Will Eisner himself—by way of Michael Schumacher’s excellent 2010 book Will Eisner, A Dreamer’s Life in Comics: “Eisner maintained that of all the letterers he employed over the years, Kanegson was one the few who understood the nuances of lettering and who treated lettering as more than a job. ‘Kanegson was brilliant,’ Eisner said. ‘He added a dimension of quality that typesetting could never get. His lettering is clear and legible, and in addition it lends warmth to the visuals.’

Eisner used lettering to set tone or establish mood, and Kanegson’s range allowed him to use types of lettering not often seen in comics, like blackletter, to great effect. ‘To me, lettering contributes as much in the storytelling as the art itself,’ he explained. ‘To my mind there is no real border between lettering and the artwork.’”

And there you have it, readers—sincere praise from Will Eisner, Michael Schumacher, and three of comics’ greatest letterers. I’m sure Abe would have appreciated it!

Where There’s A Will… …There’s a biography! [Cover art ©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

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Comic Fandom Archive

Last Salute To A Pair Of Prominent Early Fans Tributes To JOE VUCENIC And ED LAHMANN

by Bill Schelly CFA EDITOR’S NOTE: This issue’s Comic Fandom Archive is devoted to memorials to prominent fans in two slightly different but related fandoms. Although both men collected numerous things besides comic books, Joe Vucenic was an inveterate EC fan whose enthusiasms grew out of the 1950s—while Ed Lahmann signed aboard for the more general comic (or, as it was in the beginning, “super-hero”) fandom in the early 1960s.

A Farewell To “E.C. JOE” VUCENIC (1938-2010)

by Chris Boyko

J

oseph Alex Vucenic, one of the early “activists” promoting the recognition of EC comics, passed away on February 14, 2010, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he had resided since 1953.

Born October 15, 1938, in St. Louis, Missouri, he became a world-class collector of comic books, pulp magazines, Big Little Books, and sciencefiction magazines (to say nothing of his collections of Playboy magazines, pinball games, etc., etc.). He was also one of the first people to collect rare beer cans in the 1960s.

His collection of “darn near anything that doesn’t move of its own accord” was so massive that he estimated it to weigh some 20 tons at the height of his collecting. He was not given a middle name by his parents, but his love of comic media later inspired him to adopt the middle name of “Alex” in honor of Alex Raymond. In his spare time (when not collecting), he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and, for a period in the 1970s, ran The Book Exchange, a used bookstore in Los Alamos.

Joe was a member of EC “first

On EC Street (Above:) Joe Vucenic and his EC collection in 1969. This photo is from the session that produced the one printed in Jerry Weist’s Squa Tront #3. Yes, those are all EC comics stacked up on the top shelf behind him—and check out that stack of annuals! All photos & art accompanying Vucenic tribute courtesy of Chris Boyko.

(Left:) The cover of Joe Vucenic’s and Fred von Bernewitz’s 1974 (now scarce) EC “blue book,” The Full Edition of the Complete EC Checklist.

Art by Jack Davis. [Character TM & ©2011 William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.]

fandom” of the 1950s, as the first EC he read was the second issue of Weird Science (#14, using Bill Gaines’ esoteric numbering system) in 1950, and he started buying ECs from the newsstands with Weird Fantasy #8 in 1951. During the 1960s, he had articles published in several comic fanzines; in 1969, he was featured as “The EC Fan of the Issue” in the 3rd issue of Jerry Weist’s legendary fanzine Squa Tront. In 1970, Joe produced The Complete EC Checklist (yellow cover) with Fred von Bernewitz, which updated the 1955 original and included much new information. In 1974, Joe published the 200-page “big 2nd printing” (blue cover),

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Comic Fandom Archive

which was not really a second printing at all, as it was revised from the 1970 edition and included a reprint of “Zombie Terror” from Moon Girl #5. This became the new (and blue) Bible for EC collectors in the 1970s.

Amazingly, Joe collected a huge stack of EC annuals in order to catalog the diversity in content combinations (each annual was bound from dealer-returned issues from the prior year that had had their covers stripped off, making many different combinations possible). In the 1974 EC Checklist, Joe listed 64 combinations he had identified up to that date.

That’s a lot of EC annuals!

Although not as well known to comic fans today as long-time EC Fan-Addicts like John Benson, Roger Hill, Bhob Stewart, and Jerry Weist, Joe left his mark on EC fandom with his Checklist that served as a bridge from 1950s fandom to the modern day, where beautiful books like Grant Geissman’s EC books (Tales of Terror! and Foul Play!) and Russ Cochran’s elaborate reprint series serve to keep the EC experience alive and to pass the torch on to a new generation of Fan-Addicts. To (slightly) paraphrase Joe himself: “You can’t go wrong with EC!”

EC Does It! (Left:) Two of Joe’s original Kodak film boxes, which he used to store his EC collection, as shown in the 1969 photo on the preceding page. Not exactly acid-free, but they still kept those comics in great shape!

(Above:) Joe Vucenic (in center) flanked by fellow EC FanAddicts Jerry Weist (on left) and Chris Boyko in January 2006, on the occasion of a visit to Joe’s home. The crutches signify how author Chris almost gave his right foot (literally) in moving boxes to search for buried treasure in Joe’s basement. Vucenicrelated photos courtesy of Chris Boyko. Sadly, Jerry Weist, too, passed away only about a year ago.

Comic Fandom Founder ED LAHMANN (1930-2011)

by Bill Schelly

R

ecently I received a letter from Ed Lahmann’s daughter, Maryanne Ellison, informing me that her father passed away on Sunday March 27th, 2011. Ed was a longtime collector of comic books, Big Little Books, pulp magazines, and similar items, as well as of the books about them which have proliferated in the past two decades, and was prominent in the early days of 1960s comic fandom.

Ed was born and lived all his life in Indianapolis, Indiana. I interviewed him for the Comic Fandom Archive in Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #24 (May 2003), about his youth as a comic book collector in the late 1930s and 1940s. In the early 1950s, he had subscribed to all the EC comics when he was serving in the armed forces in Korea, and he had discovered fandom when Jerry Bails sent him a free copy of Alter-Ego in 1961.

Ed was probably best known in fandom for two pieces he wrote for the original run of the Alter-Ego fanzine: “Maximo, the Superman before SUPERMAN’S Time” in A/E #4 (Oct. 1962) and “So—You Want to Collect Comics?” in A/E #5 (March 1963). He was also one of the 20 founding members of the Academy of Comic Book Fans and Collectors, which gave out fandom’s Alley Awards. He had a full-page “Creepy’s Loathsome Lore” published in Creepy #10, and

Ed-Ifying Artifacts A photo and a self-portrait of Ed Lahmann.

Thanks to Bill Schelly.

Last Salute To A Pair Of Prominent Early Fans

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Quality Work These three color images, drawn with color pencils, were Ed Lahmann’s idea of “Quality Comics That Never Were.” Quality was his favorite publisher of the Golden Age. [Plastic Man, Midnight, & The Ray TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

contributed an amateur character called Cyclops to the Texas Trio’s StarStudded Comics in the 1960s.

After my book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom was published in 1995, I began receiving phone calls from him; these continued up till the time he went into a nursing home in 2008. I found that Ed had an intelligent, original perspective on classic comic strips and books, for he had an uncanny way of finding ways they related to their antecedents in other media. He gloried in the DC Archives series, which brought so many of his favorites back to him, and frequently wrote letters to Paul Levitz with his ideas for future Archive volumes.

Over the years, Ed sent me numerous portfolios of his original drawings, most of them in colored pencil. He spent many hours on these, and the thought put into them was always evident. He developed a great deal of subtlety in his use of color, and did some truly interesting work.

In her letter to me, Maryanne included an unsent missive Ed had written to me shortly before he passed away, which said in part: “They treat me well here.... My breathing is bad, I’m in a wheelchair and I’m in pain of some sort most of the time. I don’t care, though; I’ve got my library to keep me going. I get most of my books from Bud Plant. The day I die, I’ll probably have an order in the mail for some books on comics. I truly love them. I learned how to read with them, they gave me comfort in Korea, when I could find time to look at them. I’m in good spirits and the Lord is with me. This place takes great care of me so I can see no reason why I can’t live some more years. I’m 80 years old now and hoping for a hundred.”

We wish you could have made it to a hundred, too, Ed. Comics fandom is poorer without you, and you are missed.

In Memoriam

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Louise Altson (1910-2010) “A Wonderful Talent”

by Dr. Michael J. Vassallo

T

he world of fine art and Golden Age Timely comic books lost a wonderful talent recently when artist Louis Altson passed on March 9, 2010, at Abbey Delray South, in Delray Beach, Florida.

Most of the non-comics personal biographical data that follows comes from her obituary in the Palm Beach Post, which refers to her as “a renowned portrait artist” and relates that she was born on July 4, 1910, in Antwerp, Belgium… while her parents, according to another source, were Alphonse and Louise VandenBergh. (Altson appears to have been married, but nothing about her husband or date of marriage was noted in the obituaries seen.)

“She began her professional schooling at the age of 12,” according to the Post, “with the well-known Leon Brunin, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. She later studied at the Polytechnic School of Art in London, specializing in portrait painting and figure composition, winning several scholarships and the gold medal of merit. She was accepted to exhibit for several consecutive years at the Royal Academy in London, before coming to the United States with her family and settling in New York.”

She commenced her American career by illustrating children’s books and magazines. By 1944 she showed up at Timely Comic in the Bessie Littleedited young girls’ magazine Miss America, where she illustrated text stories and feature splashes (and the Dec. 1944 cover) in a beautiful realistic style. She continued contributing to Miss America into 1947, then branched out as a prolific cover painter on teen and romance comics

Misses By Mrs. Altson Sadly, we were unable to obtain a photo of Louise Altson—but these specimens speak for her quasi-comics-related work in Timely mags like Miss America, which was a mix of comics, text, and illustrations. (Clockwise from above left:) Two text illos with decidedly different flavors from Miss America, Vol. 4, #1 (May 1946) and Vol. 5, #3 (Jan. 1947)… and her painted cover for Junior Miss #37 (Dec. 1949). Note that all her work here is signed, unlike that of many comic book artists of the period. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

such as Junior Miss, Cindy Smith, Mitzi’s Romances, and four consecutive issues of Patsy Walker (#s 25-28) in late 1949 and early 1950. From here she vanished from comic books for good.

In 1948 Louise Altson began an association with Portraits, Inc., during which time she depicted such people as President George W. and Laura Bush, Tommy Dorsey, and the Dupont and Woolworth families. It was said that she possessed an uncanny ability to capture affectionate likenesses of her subjects in her portraits.

Mrs. Altson is survived by sons John and George, daughter Jean Knight Truax, eight grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

A fuller accounting of the comics career of Louise Altson, including all art she did for Timely Comics, is available for viewing at Timely-Atlas-Comics.blogspot.com, courtesy of Dr. Michael J. Vassallo.

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In Memoriam

Joanne Siegel (1917-2011) “[She And Jerry] Were Made For Each Other”

by Eddy Zeno

J

olan Kovacs, daughter of Hungarian immigrants, lived from Dec. 1, 1917, until Feb. 14, 2011. She died at age 93 on Valentine’s Day. A fitting irony, because she was part of a great love story— a union of three. That included Jolan, who became Joanne Siegel, wife of Jerome “Jerry” Siegel, the writing half of the originators of Superman. The third team member was Joseph “Joe” Shuster, Superman’s artist-half. Joanne and Jerry were practically joined at the hip with Joe through both good and bad events. They even followed each other from East Coast to West, not too far apart in time.

As a teenager looking for a few Depression dollars, circa 1935, Joanne placed a modeling ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, to which Joe responded. Posing for Joe for the character of Lois Lane, she developed a budding friendship with Jerry when he showed up to chat with them. Many who knew Joanne called her spunky and tenacious in that investigative-reporter sort of way.

Joanne Of Archetype A youthful photo of Joanne Siegel—and Joe Shuster’s archetypal drawing of Lois Lane, based in part on Joanne as model. [Lois Lane TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

It didn’t matter that she and Jerry came from previous marriages before they were reunited and wed in 1948. They were made for each other, he being the nerd, and she a fighter and his champion. A decade after Jerry and Joe had been cut from National (DC Comics) for their unsuccessful lawsuit to regain ownership of the Man of Steel, Joanne contacted publisher Jack Liebowitz. Asking how it would look if the cocreator of Superman died from starvation after filling DC’s coffers with millions of dollars, she landed Jerry a job chronicling new “Superman” tales. The gig lasted from 1959 until 1965, when Jerry sought to regain ownership of the Man of Steel yet again.

As a young man, Jerry admired Edmond Hamilton, a noted sciencefiction author who, ironically, would himself write many “Superman” tales, beginning in the late 1940s. Hamilton admitted that, after marrying fellow sf writer Leigh Brackett in 1946, his writing flourished as he developed richer personalities for the characters who inhabited his stories.

While Joanne herself was not an author, it can be argued that her influence had a similar effect on her husband. Certainly, a different Jerry Siegel appeared (sans byline) on the “Superman” stories of the Silver Age. He’d always been a punster who maintained a sense of whimsy; now he was equally adept at injecting pathos and romance into his tales. This is when he earned the title of “the most competent” “Superman” scripter, given by editor Mort Weisinger in a lettercol response to a fan.

Jerry and Joanne had a daughter, who grew up calling Jerry’s old partner “Uncle Joe” until Shuster’s death in 1992. After her father’s passing in 1996, Laura Siegel Larson helped her tenacious mother

continue to press for a share of the Superman copyright. In their eyes, seeking “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” resumed with a new lawsuit in 1997 which, due to appeals and such, continues to this day.

Recalling the good times for National Public Radio, one recent report stated that “the then-91-year-old Joanne recalled attending a Superman convention with her husband in Sweden. ‘We met people from China and Germany and Australia and New Zealand—all over. It was amazing,’ Siegel said in 2009. ‘Superman is known everywhere.’”

Also in 2009, Michael San Giacomo reported for Comic Book Resources website how best-selling author Brad Meltzer helped an organized Siegel and Shuster Society raise enough money to restore Jerry’s boyhood home.

Local and out-of-town family members of the late writer and artist congregated in Cleveland’s old Glenville neighborhood with hundreds of fans to celebrate. It was the last time Joanne would visit her hometown.

Speaking to the crowd before cutting the celebratory ribbon, she joked, “If Jerry’s mother were here today, she would poke her head out this door, look at all you people, and say, ‘Oy vey, Jerome! What have you done?’”

In 1986, Jerry Siegel wrote a letter in response to a query of mine.

Confirming that he had, indeed, written two of my favorite 1960s “Superman” “3-part novels,” he asked his wife to include her own autograph, as the model for Lois Lane. This collector didn’t know at the time how important it was to me to have her signature, in addition to Jerry and Joe’s. Thank goodness Jerry knew!

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“Everyone Deserves A Golden Age” The Inspiring Story Of The Hero Initiative (Née ACTOR)

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by Brandon Huigens

ays of comic book yore brought riches to readers and made heroes of men like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—two teenage, first-generation Jewish immigrants and comic book creators who would define a medium and an entire American era with their character Superman.

The catch? In 1938, the year Superman was sold to the company that would one day be DC Comics, and for many years that followed, there were very few creator-owned deals offered like those at many comics companies today—agreements that now allow comics creators to keep at least some rights to their characters while still being published by a major concern. In earlier days, there were next to zero permanent positions for creators; it was mostly, if not quite solely, work-for-hire.

This sort of business made for big, big bucks for the comics companies in the Golden and Silver Ages, but not for the creators. Keeping in mind that the Superman case is one of, if not the, highest profile cases ever to be made public, there are a perplexing myriad of similar stories about wildly inventive men and women who received little initial compensation for their work, had no effective pension or retirement programs, and even remain uncredited for creating legendary icons.

started. “And when I was a sportswriter, Major League Baseball had a program called BAT—the Baseball Assistance Team—and it was really the same kind of premise as The Hero Initiative. We all live in the day where the utility middle infielder gets $2.7 million a year, but you don’t have to go too far back in MLB history—just to the early 1970s—to find players making literally $10,000 a year. That was it. So the MLB did something to help out some of the older players, and even some of the scouts and coaches. I was always very enamored of that organization, and whenever they would have their typical $300a-plate rubber chicken dinner, I would go there and do whatever I could to support BAT. When I got into the comic business, it seemed to me that a similar organization should exist in comics. There was honestly no single comic book situation that precipitated it; it was simply a similar idea in baseball.”

Since 2000, through fund-raising opportunities such as art auctions, exclusive collectibles, and charity events, ACTOR/Hero Initiative has disbursed several hundred thousand dollars to comics creators in need through grants and non-interest loans and has often helped pave the way for creators to re-enter the field and continue working.

Eleven years ago, under the twin aegis of Jim McLauchlin and CrossGen publisher Mark Alessi, a small group of comic publishers and industry veterans banded together and decided to take action on behalf of unfairly compensated comics creators like Siegel and Shuster.

ACTOR—standing for “A Commitment To Our Roots”—was born. Since its original title sounded confusingly like an amalgamation of stage or screen actors, the organization’s name would be changed, in 2006, to The Hero Initiative.

“I used to be a sportswriter,” says founding member (and now president) Jim McLauchlin about how it all got

Crisis On Earth-Prime One of the most active elements in The Hero Initiative has been its chairman, artist/writer George Pérez. This fabulous drawing is one of no less than four pieces he drew related to 2003’s long-awaited JLA/Avengers series. The previously-unpublished drawing above depicts the "second tier" DC and Marvel heroes—although that's some second tier that includes Plastic Man, Hawkman, The Vision, et al.! It was auctioned off for a considerable sum—all of which was donated

by George to The Hero Initiative—to aid veterans of the comic book industry who could use a helping hand. [Art ©2011 George Pérez; JLA TM & ©2011 DC Comics; Avengers TM & ©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Charlie Novinskie joined the group nine years ago as Secretary to the Disbursement Committee and has been on the Board of Disbursement for over eight years.

As sales and promotions manager for Topps Comics during most of the 1990s, Novinskie had plenty of firsthand experiences with comics professionals struggling to make ends meet, even after putting in years of hard work: “I saw a lot of the Golden Age and Silver Age guys when we were doing the ‘Kirbyverse’ books—and there were people we were working with that weren’t getting by too well at the time. When Jim McLauchlin said there was going to be an organization to help out, I thought any way I could help would be great.”

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“Everyone Deserves A Golden Age”

Novinskie’s primary responsibilities include taking claims for creators in need of assistance. The creators themselves, most of whom choose to remain anonymous, do not often personally contact The Hero Initiative. The bulk of the queries come from phone calls, letters, and emails from concerned friends, families, store owners, and even comic book readers and fans. Luckily, that concern is put to rest quickly, and Hero chips in wherever possible.

And where might that be? He says:

home. I can hear in their voice that The Hero Initiative has made a difference.”

The unfortunate circumstances that inspired the 501(c)(3) charity’s inception and current crusade lead one to ask: Why? Why didn’t the comics companies take care of their meal tickets? And what are companies doing now to prevent this from continuing to happen?

“We are in a position to help people that are in their golden years and start to have medical problems. If they’ve worked in the industry for a long time, they might not have any benefits to fall back on as far as health care. In some instances, we’ve helped out with medical expenses and hospital bills, and unfortunately over the last two years we’ve had to help out with flat-out funeral expenses.”

Annually, the claims and queries The Hero Initiative takes in vary from month to month. Novinskie says he may not see a claim for a month or two, then have four or five pop up all at the same time, adding up to a hundred-plus requests per year: “Sometimes there are a dozen or so requests in regards to the same person from a variety of different sources. If you’re talking individual people, I’d say there are probably two or three dozen people in a year that really need the group’s assistance.”

Heroine Addicts We were gonna showcase art drawn and/or donated by two different artists in conjunction with Brandon’s article—but in the end, we couldn’t resist also printing this Pérez illo of the Marvel and DC super-heroines who shared the spotlight in JLA/Avengers. This was originally 1/3 of a promotional poster which featured the gathered heroes from both teams.

George tells us that animation/comics writer Paul Dini purchased the original art to this one, because of his love for the character Zatanna—and thereby he and George worked a bit of magic for a worthy cause!

[Art ©2011 DC Comics & Marvel Characters, Inc., respectively.]

Another way The Hero Initiative assists is by providing an opportunity for creators to get back into paying work. With a board of directors of comics legends such as John Romita, Sr., George Pérez, Dennis O’Neil, Jim Valentino, Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, and Roy Thomas, among others (Joe Kubert was a board member for the first few years), the name of the game is networking. The work isn’t always steady—sometimes it’s simply a pin-up or a fill-in story—but it paves the road, and often that’s the hardest part. Novinskie himself stays passionately involved with Hero in part because of many of the creators on the board of directors. He enjoys being able to give back to a medium that’s offered him so much inspiration:

“I’m 53 years old, so I am a product of Marvel Silver Age stuff. I just always felt, when I worked at Topps and when I’ve worked in the industry, and I think we’re all like this—we phase in and out—I thought, if there was some way I could pay these guys back... I learned to read on comics, and I got so much enjoyment out of all these things growing up in the ’60s and ’70s. Now some of these guys need help, and I can’t help financially but I can be a part of an organization like The Hero Initiative, where I can give back and help these people out. It makes me feel really good, because it’s heartbreaking sometimes when I get the phone calls and I deal with people who have gone through a loss or a family that’s about to lose their

McLauchlin explains: “If you go back to the earliest, earliest days of comics, it was largely like many American industries at the time.

They were hiring the most recent waves of immigrants right off the boat. It was largely a business that grew up in and around New York City. At the time, there were huge waves of Jewish and Italian immigrants coming to the United States, and a lot of those people were the people who founded the comic book business. It was, for want of a better, term, cheap labor. It was a company deciding to start a business and start it as cheaply as they could, and literally just taking the most recent wave of immigrants and putting them into jobs that were, at the time, relatively low salaries. It was not like today, where a creator can get royalties off his work based on sales; where a creator actually can, in some instances, have an equity share and an ownership stake in a character.

That just plain old didn’t exist, because those ideas were alien. If they were brought up at the time, they were considered absolutely revolutionary. Royalties only came around in the comic business in the early and mid-1980s.”

Novinskie says the climate is better these days, but that working in comics isn’t, and probably won’t ever be, like working a steady, 40-hour-aweek job for many creators.

“The comic industry is like any other industry,” he explains. “If you look at the sports industry, you have your super-stars, and they’re making $30 million a year. Then you have people that are coming into sports— football, baseball—that are making a minimum salary. Comics are pretty much the same way. People come in and make a lot of money as superstars of the industry... others come in, and they’re plugging along, paying their bills, and they’re getting by. Some places now, like DC and Marvel, are offering exclusive contracts, so people are getting health benefits and things like that, but that’s not true for everybody. The situation now is that people are smart about it—they know, if they’re not getting benefits, they need to save and put that money aside. You talk about Golden Age people, they were coming out of a war and a recession and things like that—they were going from hand to hand, day to day. They weren’t able to save. Still, we don’t just get people from the Golden and Silver Age—we get people that are active today that need help, as well.”

The Story Of The Hero Initiative (Née ACTOR)

McLauchlin, who was formerly editor-in-chief of Image’s Top Cow Productions, sees firsthand what it’s like walk the path of a comics creator.

Happily, he says, things are looking up.

“I think that the curve over the long haul is rather obviously getting better. If you go back to 1979—32 years ago—nobody was getting paid royalties. Precious few people had any creator ownership in their characters. 1979—what existed as a creator-owned book? There was Elfquest, there was Cerebus, there were a couple of other things floating around, maybe, and that was it. That’s only 32 years ago, so in a general sense, I’d say the curve has been coming upward for creators. Generally speaking, things are definitely getting better.”

As things get better, does the organization ultimately hope that it doesn’t have to exist?

“Absolutely,” says McLauchlin. “If you were to ask anybody at the American Cancer Society what their ideal situation would be, it would be for the American Cancer Society to not have to exist. In The Hero Initiative’s terms, I would say that would be very far down the line. Things

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are gradually getting better, and you would hope for a better place and a better world and a shining city on the top of the hill and so on and so forth. But absolutely—the greatest thing for this organization would be for it to dissolve because it wasn’t needed anymore.”

With no all-encompassing solution readily had, The Hero Initiative continues to move forward, looking ahead to providing even more for comics industry veterans and newcomers.

“Personally speaking,” McLauchlin states, “I’m a big believer that a stitch in time saves nine. I also believe if you give a man a fish, he eats today, but if you teach him how to fish he eats forever. Because I believe that, I think a certain amount of that philosophy is going to permeate the organization. One thing I’d like to do, and I’m still working out the logistics on this, is to have The Hero Initiative provide free seminars for comic creators—maybe around a major convention like the San Diego or Chicago Comic-Cons, where we bring in financial service professionals who can help you plan a retirement, give you some tips on what you should be doing in terms of your income taxes. Obviously the safety net aspect is an important aspect, and that’s largely what The Hero Initiative has done: putting a big bandage on some big wounds. I’d like the organization to get into a mode where it’s more proactive looking down the line, and teaching a man to fish as opposed to giving him one.”

Unbelievably, by the time 25 years had passed since Superman’s debut, both Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had long since been fired from the strip they’d created together in high school. Shuster would go on to quit comics entirely, and Siegel had trouble finding any sort of work. Thankfully, in later years, the company awarded both men a pension, and though the families of both men continue negotiations to gain the rights to Superman, one can make the argument that, at the time, the deal struck by company and creators in this case was indeed “business as usual.”

Fortunately for the newest generation of creators and those to come, The Hero Initiative will try to see to it that life in comics will be a little fairer to those with the ability and desire to express themselves through this unique medium.

“Without getting too hokey or too Disneyland, it’s people helping people,” finishes McLauchlin.

Brandon Huigens is a minimalist cartoonist, writer, and “Sequential Art as Communication” teacher living in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. The author and illustrator of more than 40 mini-comics, a graphic novel, and a full-length novel entitled Fade to Green, Brandon's comics work has been shown in several art galleries in Arizona and California.

He has proudly been involved with The Hero Initiative for over half a decade.

For more information on The Hero Initiative, and how to get involved, see ad at left.

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Dear Roy, Thanks for all your work on Alter Ego #89, finding further visuals beyond those I had sent you. I was particularly impressed that you tried to find the panel from Targitt with the gun colored the same as the pants! You even caught a goof in my transcript, where I identified Ray Bailey as Bernard Baily.

The caption on page 3, however, erroneously credits me with doing the Nostrand interview, when I merely scanned and edited it. Also, though you were able to find two photos of Warren Kremer, neither was actually from Comic Book Artist #19 as the caption on p. 55 indicates, though they may indeed have come from [CBA editor] Jon B. Cooke.

Your caption re the cover of Thrills of Tomorrow #17 (Oct. 1954) notes that that issue’s interior reprinted the contents of Witches Tales #7.

The blurb on that cover plugged a story titled “The World of Mr. Chatt.”

That sounded familiar. Sure enough, there’s a story with that title in Black Cat Mystery #57 (Jan-March 1956), an issue I had identified in my checklist as being made up of unused 1954 inventory material modified to fit the Code. Looking again at BCM #57, I still feel it’s obvious that it’s made up of 1954 inventory material. In fact, the cover of TOT #17 proves that the “Mr. Chatt” story was done in 1954. It seems likely that the rest of the material in the later BCM was intended for the early Thrills of Tomorrow one.

What’s fascinating here is that the stories are all very mild ones that ought to have been able to pass the Code—although the Code did, in the event, require a few silly changes in the text and maybe one or two panels of art. That means that actually Harvey had completed a “mild” issue in 1954 but had decided to use the plates for an earlier issue instead, even though that reprint was somewhat stronger. The only possible reason I can think of for doing this is that they thought the issue might not be distributed well or at all, and they were sending it out as a test to see if the title could survive. It was cheaper to use existing plates than to pay for the coloring and the making of new plates for an issue that might lose money anyway. How bizarre! Wish I’d realized that in time to include it in my little essay (or to ask Sid Jacobson about in 1984).

At one point in his interview, Kremer says that a blond guy named Walter Danks worked for Bob Powell. There’s no “Danks” on the Who’s Who website. Looking at the photo on p. 11, I see that Marty Epp was blond. I wonder if Kremer was thinking of Epp. But then who is Walter Danks? Or is his name really Walt Erdangs?

By the way, in a caption on p. 30, you quote Bob Burr as guessing that Nostrand’s car as shown in his art is an MG TD of approximately 1951-52 vintage. Looking through other Nostrand material in Graphic Story Magazine and The Comics Journal, I find that Nostrand says the car is a 1948 MG TC, which he bought in 1950. But then, who’s to say that Nostrand drew it in sufficient detail to make an exact ID?

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hane Foley came through again—this time with a heading illo that salutes Sal Buscema’s cover for Marvel’s The Defenders #1 (Aug. 1972), with a caricature of this issue’s interviewee Steve Englehart menacing our miraculous “maskot,” Captain Ego—as we swan-dive headfirst into missives and meanderings concerning Alter Ego #89, which cover-featured Harvey Comics’ horror titles of the first half of the 1950s.

[Captain Ego TM & ©2011 Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly—created by Biljo White; other art elements ©2011 Shane Foley.]

The Harvey coverage was mostly provided by John Benson, editor of the EC fanzine Squa Tront, so we were happy to receive not only his voice of approval for our handling of the material he gave us, but a few welcome tidbits of additional information, to boot… spread out over several e-mails, which have been combined here….

[Re an e-mail we forwarded to John from someone who observed that artists Frank Bolle and Warren Kremer both relate anecdotes, in their A/E interviews in different issues, of having had the odd experience at doing work indirectly for Fawcett through a man neither of them ever met in person and whose identity they never knew:] I pointed out to you the very same similarity when I read the Bolle interview. The writer also asks, “But who the hell is Nadine French?” A fair question, since she never did any creative work in comics. But she did work as a “gal Friday” at St. John from 1948 off and on until the late ’50s. You’ll see her name in house ads for clothing there. As you note, I did an interesting interview with her for my book Confessions, Romances, Secrets, and Temptations. She married [artist] Warren King in the early ’50s and was named Nadine French King for the rest of her life. When Kremer tells that long story about her first marriage and so on, I was on tenterhooks because I had just written a letter to her asking for the interview, addressed to Nadine King, and here Kremer was telling me she was married to someone else.

When he finally got to the end of the story, I breathed a sigh of relief.

[comments & corrections]

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I’m glad these interviews have finally appeared, and Alter Ego is the perfect place for them.

John Benson We’re happy to have your kudos, John. After all, the landmark Gil Kane interview you provided me (and even laid out) for Alter Ego [Vol. 1] #10 circa 1969 has proven one of the milestones of comics historicism. Weird to think that we’re both still at it, four decades later… but a passion is a passion is a passion, I guess.

One of John’s interviewees in #89 was 1950s Harvey editor Sid Jacobson, and we were delighted to hear from him, as well: Roy— I am so thankful to you and to John Benson for this wonderful issue devoted to the Harvey horror comics. I am personally thrilled by those books being appreciated. Especially since I was 23-24 years old at the time and only months in the industry. It was fascinating for me to see the interviews with Nostrand and Ken Selig. (Please don’t ask me why.)

Sid Jacobson Maybe it’s because they’re worthwhile additions to the cause of comics history, Sid? Still, some of the most valuable and information-laden interviews this magazine has printed have been with editors, since they’re at the center of things and can comment on writing, art, production, and often even the business side of the comic book industry.

Pick You Up In My 88 While preparing this issue, Ye Editor ran across two bits of unfinished business left over from last issue’s “re:” pages that dealt with A/E #88 and its spotlight on Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, founder of the company that eventually became DC Comics—and, as it happened, one of those items involved the writer of the first letter we’ve printed in this section: (Above:) John Benson writes: “I was going to skip the Malcolm WheelerNicholson issue of A/E. A tangential appendage to DC, a company I have little interest in. But I found the life story of this Victorian fascinating. I always felt that I grew up in the Victorian era, and when his granddaughter quoted the Goops I was hooked. She didn’t get it exactly right; I can quote the opening lines [of the “Goops” poem] from memory… but as it happens, I have a copy of it, given me by “Aunt Margaret” (whoever that was) in 1945, unopened by me in 50 years, I’m sure. The relevant page is attached.

(The book first appeared in 1900.)” [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

(Right:) Charlie Roberts says, “My grandfather Charles H. Smith was a Colonel in the Army in WWI, stationed at Camp Mills, Long Island, as Company Quartermaster. He went fishing with Teddy Roosevelt at Oyster bay a few times, and must surely have run into the Major (note: we called my Grandfather ‘Colonel,’ not ‘Granpa’).” He also sent the scan of the above “Fun Club” button, which “was issued [by the early New Fun] with a membership certificate (not a card).” In addition, Charlie advises us that the artist of the “Ivanhoe” and “Treasure Island” pages shown in A/E #88 was “Charles Flanders, who would take over the Lone Ranger comic strip from Ed Kresse in 1939 and become the longest-running artist on the strip.” [©2011 DC Comics.]

Charlie, who works for the famed auction house Hake’s Americana, sent the scan of the button by special courtesy of Hake’s. You can find their “Sales Lists & Auctions” on the website www.hakes.com—and you should. Not everything is happening on eBay, folks!

Mark Arnold is editor of The Harveyville Fun Times, a fanzine devoted to Harvey’s humor features—but he maintains an interest in the non-humorous side of the company’s output, as well: Hi Roy, I believe the group photo from page 63 is from June 2001, when all these great Harvey artists got together for the final time before Kremer’s death in 2003, to celebrate Kremer’s 80th birthday.

Ernie Colón informed me they would get together at Kremer’s house every year or so to reminisce, and I seem to recall that he said the last time all of them were together was in June 2001. Oh, to have been invited to those reunions!!

A Biegeleisen By Any Other Name…

Veteran comics artist Alan Kupperberg sent his own “small bit of info to add to the Warren Kremer interview. On p. 50, Kremer mentions a teacher of his that John Benson, in transcribing the tape, made out as ‘Eagleisen.’ The name is actually ‘Jacob Biegeleisen.’ When I went to the High School of Art & Design, he was the chairman of the Art Department. His specialty, I believe, was as a designer of typefaces, and he authored several important books of fonts. He also wrote several tomes on silkscreening. I’m a bottomless well of useless information.”

Gracias for the photo, Alan!

Also—although Warren Kremer did a remarkable amount of covers, he never did all of them as Sid Jacobson claims. It is safe to say that Kremer did virtually all of them from the late ’50s on, but even then there was an occasional cover by Howard Post or Ernie Colón, and of course Sad Sack covers were usually done by George Baker or later Fred Rhoads, and Bunny covers were done by either Hy Eisman or Hy Rosen.

I don’t know if you know this, but Alfred and Leon Harvey were twins. There was also older brother Robert, who was the business manager.

Mark Arnold Fun Ideas Productions P.O. Box 2616 Saratoga, CA 95070

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re:

All welcome info, Mark, even if we already knew a bit about the Brothers Harvey. And here is still more information re the subject and contents of A/E #89, sent by Robert R. Barrett:

tions from Fredric Wertham’s 1954 anti-comics book Seduction of the Innocent brought two intriguing e-mails. First, that of Steven Smith:

Dear Roy,

Michael Gilbert’s issue #89 “Mr. Monster” feature on notorious psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, author of the scathing anti-comic book screed Seduction of the Innocent, in my opinion seriously dis-serves the imperative case against the loose desk gun Wertham with its purposely “snarky” humor. Wertham was, in the teeth of my long-standing opinion of him as a model of rectitude with an overload of misplaced good intent, a ruthless anti-individualist and anti-capitalist of the sort we would now call communitarian, who bared his soul to any discerning reader in his 1966 book A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence, wherein he basically blamed the explosion of Western post-Second World War violence on successful Western practices, institutions, and ideologies— essentially, capitalism.

I thought you might be interested in the following information. John Benson, in his article “Silver Threads among the Mold,” comments about Sid Check and his art for “Here Today…” in Black Cat Mystery #50, remarking that the story was “well-drawn,” etc. Possibly the reason for the excellence of Check’s art on this particular story is that the great Frank Frazetta gave him an assist, inking several panels. (See the DVD Frank Frazetta: Playing with Fire, in which, in the section showing various examples of Frazetta’s work, the splash page of “Here Today…” is seen.)

Robert R. Barrett I passed your e-mail on long since to John Benson, Robert, and he told me that, in his original article, he had written: “Incidentally, it appears that Frank Frazetta may have worked on a few panels of this story.” He feels he later omitted that line because he had no proof, but accepts that Frazetta probably had some input. Still, he writes today: “Looking at that story, my eyes tell me that the essence of the story comes from Check… I feel he’s kind of forgotten, maybe because his best-known work at EC isn’t his best; and also, to be fair, he really wasn’t very prolific.”

Mister Thomas:

As likely the A/E reader-correspondent most influenced by Ayn Rand’s realist philosophy objectivism and Steve Ditko’s brilliant efforts to dramatize it in comic book form, I cannot overstate the disdain I now cherish for Wertham and the anxiety wherewith I regard blithe attempts to take the air from his sails humorously. Refuting statism, collectivism, communitarianism, crypto-communism, and what ex-Communist

SPECIAL A/E NOTE: For advance news and informed discussion concerning features in Alter Ego, check out the Alter-Ego-Fans chat list at group.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans/. Or, if you have problems getting on board there, simply contact web co-overseer 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! Now, back to our regularly scheduled “re:” section….

John Benson introduced the Howard Nostrand interview in #89 by giving an account of a poorly attended comics convention at which he met the artist. Turns out that then-DC editor Robin Snyder was there, too: Dear Roy, Re “Silver Threads among the Mold” in A/E #89: I haven’t re-read my own small contribution to that convention’s program booklet in years, but I believe it was a stinker. Not so John Benson’s overview. The fellow knows his stuff.

But… Benson and I have conflicting memories of the Pleasure Dome Convention, and after all these years I am not certain which is the more accurate. I remember a cold autumn weekend in the excellent Pierre Radisson Hotel in Wilmington (and quite a bit of history of the legendary adventurer himself), but don’t recall why I received an invitation to attend (perhaps as a substitute for Dick Giordano, who had thrown in the towel weeks earlier?). I did have a gay old time, though most of the guests had bowed out. The affair was small and informal, and I was able to visit briefly with most of those in attendance. Tom Watkins was one of the hosts, a comics shop owner. Howard Nostrand was there, wasn’t he? I am certain that big Joe Simon couldn’t make it. Dick Ayers, Denny O’Neil, and I sat on a little panel of conversation with the audience, and several of us judged the costume parade that was won by an adorable little Patricia who was disguised as a Tribble. Dick and I repaired to the hotel bar that evening to reminisce about the good old days, and afterwards we went out to dinner with John Benson. Dick and I spent the following day in and around Wilmington and traveled back to New York on the train. I have a piece of corroborating evidence for this adventure in the form of a convention drawing given me by Dick—but where is it? I can’t remember.

Robin Snyder Of course, Harvey’s horror spree of 60 years ago wasn’t the only subject of A/E #89. Michael T. Gilbert’s showcasing of (and commenting on) quota-

The Eye-Eyes Have It! In conjunction with A/E #91’s coverage of 1950s parody comics, John Benson sent us a page from a Sid Check-drawn detective lampoon titled “Eye Eye, Sir” from Harvey’s Witches Tales #24 (April 1954). We only had room there to print one panel from it—but here’s the whole page, with its definite Wally Wood flavor. [©2011 Harvey Publications or successors in interest.]

[comments & corrections]

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existence refuted one of his claims from Seduction.

As proof positive of the versatility of the late Howard Nostrand, here are two art specimens he did less than a decade apart:

As for the “hypocritical” part, I noticed that Wertham was going to great lengths to differentiate comic books from newspaper comic strips. Comic strips were OK, he said; it was just those nasty comic books that rotted kids’ minds. But why this distinction? I saw two reasons, both hypocritical. One was that he was promoting his book, and his anti-comic book crusade, through the press. If he suggested that newspaper strips as well as comic books were bad, the papers would be less likely to give him good publicity or favorable book reviews. The other reason was that newspaper strips were much older than comic books—and so his target readership of people who were adults in the 1950s would have been familiar with them.

If Wertham had condemned the strips, some of the readers would have said to themselves, “Hey, I grew up with Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers and the rest, and I turned out fine. I wasn’t an illiterate juvenile delinquent.

Maybe this Wertham guy doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.”

(Above left:) Jack Davis-influenced panels from the story “Inside Man” in Harvey Comics’ Chamber of Chills #21 (Jan. 1954), courtesy of John Benson. [©2011 Harvey Publications or successors in interest.]

In a similar vein, Wertham complained about a particular comic book which supposedly had Tarzan on the cover but inside featured gross

Take It Off—Or Maybe Cover It Up!

(Above right:) Collector David J. Hogan writes: “Readers may enjoy this slick 1962 art piece by one of the Harvey mainstays, the very talented Howard Nostrand. Famed stripper Ann Corio had entered her sui generis phase by ’62, and this LP assignment (Roulette SR-25186) gave Nostrand an opportunity to work in a smart commercial style, with a color palette of understated lavenders and lavender-blues. The guy was good! (For the record, the repro comes from Vixens of Vinyl by Benjamin Darling, Chronicle Books, 2001.)” Thanks, David! [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Kenneth Goff called psycho-politics, the gramscian justification of the communistic mental health racket, is deadly serious business, and far more than the public perception of our favorite form of mass amusement is at stake. Rightful detractors of Wertham, please take heed.

Steven Smith Dayton, OH Your comments are welcome, Steven—but we have to admit that there are few if any subjects relating to comic books that we mind seeing treated with humor, whether sarcastic or otherwise. Of course, that doesn’t prevent you and others from tackling those same topics in all seriousness, from another angle. And here’s another take, by your fellow reader William Henley: Dear Roy— Enjoyed Alter Ego #89, as usual, especially Michael Gilbert’s commentary on Dr. Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent. Mike asks how many comics fans have actually read his book. I have! It was a long time ago, but I still vividly recall some of the elements that led me to conclude that Wertham was not only clueless but deeply hypocritical.

The “clueless” part was epitomized by his comment, which Mike notes, to the effect that no adult who used to read comic books ever saved them or retained any “sentimental” love for them. Maybe there was an excuse for Wertham’s writing that in 1954. But in the 1960s he wrote a whole book about comic book fans and collectors and fanzines, and viewed the fans kindly—but avoiding acknowledging that their very

Tomb Be Or Not Tomb Be Our coverage of Harvey’s 1950s terror tales led John Haufe, Jr., who is closely involved with the current reprinting by Jack Lake Productions of vintage issues of the Classics Illustrated series, to e-mail us: “I just finished your splendid Halloween issue on the Harvey ‘horror’ comic books from the early ’50s. Thought you might be interested to see a photo of my brother and me circa March ’53, with myself holding a copy of Tomb of Terror #8. For years I had only a copy of a photo that didn’t show the cover clearly, and I had assumed it was Classics Illustrated #78 (Joan of Arc, likewise issued that year and the first Classic in my collection). Actually, I only bought the one horror comic, then went on a collecting frenzy with CI.” And that obsession has done very well by you to date, John—and you by it, come to that. Since 2003, Jack Lake Productions has reprinted over 70 original Gilberton issues!

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re:

will be no “30” for comics print so long as you and crew are out there.

Thank you and good luck.

Ken Selig It’s we who should be grateful to you and to guys like you, Ken—first for doing such fine work in the first place, and then for allowing yourself to be interviewed so that a later age can gain from your historical perspective!

Till next issue, send those e-mails and snail mails to: Roy Thomas e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135 August 2011 will mark almost precisely fifty years since The Fantastic Four #1 went on sale with its Oct. 1961 cover date. And are we gonna celebrate in A/E #104!

Terrifying Tales—Well, At Least They Scared Dr. Wertham!

Could this perhaps be the comic that 1950s comics-basher Dr. Fredric Wertham had in mind when he referred to a comic which had what William Henley refers to as “Tarzan on the cover but inside… gross crime and horror stories”? This L.B. Cole cover for Star Publications’ Terrifying Tales #14 (1953—no month) fronted for reprints of stories of Fox Comics’ “Rulah, Jungle Goddess” from only a couple of years earlier—but surely the good Doctor could tell Rulah from Lord Greystoke! There were no “terrors” of the Crypt-related variety inside, but it did have a derivative of that awful word “Terror” right up there on the cover, which the 1954-enacted Comics Code would outlaw. [©2011 the respective copyright holders.]

crime and horror stories. “Who could object to the adventures of Tarzan?” he wrote, but the sinister comic book publisher was using the Ape Man’s innocent image to lure kids into depravity. I don’t know what comic book Wertham was referring to (if indeed it actually existed). But it made no sense that Wertham would refer to Tarzan as harmless. Regardless of what medium he appeared in, the Ape Man’s adventures were chock full of the kind of violence and racial stereotyping that Wertham found unacceptable elsewhere. Why would he contrast “good” Tarzan with “bad” crime/horror comics? Because, again, he knew his readers had grown up with Tarzan— without being corrupted—and would not accept a description of the beloved jungle lord as dangerous trash.

William Henley We’ll let our readers weigh your arguments, Williams. They sound fairly valid to us. Now, here’s a brief note from Harvey/Archie artist Ken Selig, whom Jim Amash interviewed for A/E #89.

Roy— Will you please accept a huge thanks due yourself, Mr. Morrow, Jim, Don, Brian, and Theresa for what is a nice look back at Harvey Comicdom—and the gracious nod to my small part played in it. There

Is A Puzzlement!

The FCA section of A/E #89 featured a page from a 1956 Charlton sciencefiction title that was clearly an altered version of a C.C. Beck-drawn puzzle page meant for Fawcett’s defunct Marvel Family comic. Actually, as collector Ed Buchan pointed out, that page had been printed, in MF #72 (1952); so he (and we) figured you’d like to see the original version.

Contrast it with the Charlton rendition and you’ll see that the retouch artists worked especially hard to disguise Captain Marvel, putting him in a space helmet over a pilot’s helmet. But then, it had been the World’s Mightiest Mortal who’d drawn National/DC’s legal wrath a few years earlier, so the boys in Derby, Connecticut, probably weren’t taking any chances! Can’t say we blame ’em. [Marvel Family TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

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MARC: No. But I’m sure they were drawn in [C.C.] Beck’s studio, which was supplying all the CM art at the time. Incidentally, Beck’s shop was created while I was in the service. When I left Fawcett, Beck and I both worked at the editorial and executive offices located in the Paramount Building at Times Square. Despite some of the published stories to the contrary, I never worked for Beck. He was my friend, but never my superior.

By [Art & logo ©2011 Marc Swayze; Captain Marvel © & TM 2011 DC Comics]

[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 #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 the beginning of John G. Pierce’s discussion with Marc from Comics Interview #122 (1993), which covered Marc’s initial work at Fawcett on Captain Marvel. We pick up with part two of Marc’s recollections, including his post-WWII Fawcett work. (Thanks to David Anthony Kraft – comicsinterview.com) —P.C. Hamerlink.]

JOHN: Did any of your fellow GIs ever catch on to what you were doing in your spare time and make any comments to you about it?

MARC: It wasn’t a secret. And I don’t recall anything ever being made out of it. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, I wonder if the readers, or anybody, ever gave a thought to comics being written. Or drawn!

JOHN: Well, I wasn’t born until 1947, but I recall that when I was reading comics as a child in the 1950s, I had this vague idea that someone had to be writing them, but had no notion at all that artists existed. I thought the whole thing was done mechanically somehow!

Well, anyway, did you ever see any servicemen reading comics, especially Captain Marvel or any other Fawcetts?

MARC: Not often, if at all. I spent several months in an army hospital and a little of that time in the recreation rooms maintained by the Red Cross.

There were usually a few servicemen lounging around reading. May have been comics. I believe there were statistics to the effect that comics were the major form of literature read by the military.

JOHN: That’s what I’d always heard, which is why I was wondering.

Well, here’s a question which may be just a bit out of order, but also

JOHN G. PIERCE: Okay, so you went into the armed forces in 1942, but continued to write for Fawcett as a freelancer. During that period of time—before you went into the service, that is—how often did you go to the Fawcett offices to take in or pick up assignments?

MARC SWAYZE: Before I went into the service I was a 9-to-5 employee on the art staff. As I was not freelancing, I did not pick up and deliver assignments, but received them from the editorial office down the hall.

This was during the period when all offices were in the Paramount Building. All of the writing, to my knowledge, was freelanced from outside, the only exception being the new Captain Marvel stories that I wrote. Later, when I returned to New York in ’44, I did freelance for a couple of months while working out arrangements to come back south, and I went into the offices once or twice a week. I wasn’t particular about what the editors gave me, and I doubt if they were. I remember doing a Mr. Scarlet and a Prince Ibis and a one-pager featuring Mary Marvel promoting the paper conservation program at the time. Funny—I drew Mary just as I had in the beginning, and I’ll bet she didn’t look anything like she did in the stories of that period.

JOHN: I’m kind of curious about your service days, at least as they relate to your Fawcett work. Do you know who drew the Captain Marvel stories which you wrote while you were in the armed forces?

Paper Doll After returning to New York from military service in 1944, Marc Swayze recalls that one of his first jobs back as a civilian was illustrating a wartime paper conservation one-pager starring Mary Marvel—a panel from which is extracted here from the opening page of Wow Comics #28, Aug. 1944.

[Shazam heroine TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

We Didn’t Know... It Was The Golden Age!

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In the outfield, we had Al Jetter, letterer, and Mac Raboy sometimes, and I need help recalling the outfield, too … maybe Angelo Grasso, letterer, or Chic Stone, artist? I don’t recall Beck or [Pete] Costanza on the ball field, but they were at the parties that followed, so maybe they were in the outfield.

Devilishness In “Ibis the Invincible Makes a Pact with the Devil” (Whiz Comics #59, Oct. ’44), the prince briefly fell under the spell of old Lucifer himself in another Swayze job from 1944. Marc was also given a one-time opportunity to illustrate another Fawcett hero, Mr. Scarlet (Wow Comics #29) before heading back home to Louisiana with the Phantom Eagle assignment. [Ibis the Invincible & Taia TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

deals with an area that has kind of fascinated me. Now, I’m no sports fan, but I’ve always been intrigued by the stories, such as those related by various Fawcett folks and recorded in such places as Steranko’s History of Comics, about the ballgames between the various studios. I gather that this was a regular thing, at least during the summer. Can you tell us more about these contests—who organized them, umpired them, etc.? And what did you guys do for recreation in the winters?

MARC: Those ball games! There were not that many, but the intense rivalry and tremendously funny events that occurred during the games and the beer parties that always followed could never have been forgotten by anyone. I will try to be brief.

Remember now, the Fawcett offices were all located on the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th floors of the Paramount Building at the time. Whereas the art department numbered about 30, only about half a dozen were in comics, the majority being layout artists, working on numerous non-comics magazines of Fawcett’s. So in talking about the Fawcett gang, whether bowling in the winter or playing ball in the summer, we’re including members of the comics editorial staff, freelance comics writers, noncomics layout artists, mainly people who enjoyed doing those things and were pretty good at them.

On the other hand, the Binder group, always our baseball opponents, were 100% comics people—Jack and Otto, Wendell Crowley, Ken Bald, Charlie Tomsey, Pete Riss, and I wish I had time to recall them all.

Whatever I might have done in those days, the thing I recall fondly and am most proud of is that Rod Reed and I came up with the idea of the ball team. And the two of us set about recruiting a team and arranging the first game with the Binder studio, to be played on a Saturday in Englewood—or was it Edgewater, New Jersey?—where the Binder studio was located. [FCA EDITOR’S NOTE: The Binder shop was in Englewood, NJ.] Our team had Vic Cappalupo, layout artist, at shortstop, Stanley Kauffman, writer, at second base, Tom Naughton, comics editor, at third and—who was at first … Eddie Ricshak? Help me remember, someone!

Anyway, it was a terrific infield!

Rod pitched and I caught—and wives had to be called on to umpire. Not having any protective equipment for them, we suggested they call the balls and strikes from a position back of the pitcher. Now, I thought I was pretty good at snatching questionable pitches over into the strike zone, but my little trick got nowhere with the wife in that first game. I made a few trips out to the mound to plead with her about it, and she broke up with laughter when I explained in detail where the strike zone was, and so on.

Rod was laughing harder than the ump was! When he came in for our turn at bat, I told him, “That woman out there is going to lose this game for us, so what are you laughing at?!!” As you must have guessed, the umpire was Rod’s wife, Edith “Kentuck” Reed, a devout Dodger fan who never attended a game without her scoring book wherein she recorded every play in detail. She knew the game as well as we did.

Rod and Kentuck Reed became my close, lifelong friends, exchanging visits with us a number of times over the years. Jess Benton may have been on our ball team, and Al Liederman and Fernando Martinez.

JOHN: Thanks for taking the time to answer that oddball question of mine—no pun intended! As I said, I’m not a sports fan, but I’ve long been fascinated by the stories of what comics pros, especially the Fawcett folks, did in their off hours. I think too many of today’s pros eat, sleep, and breathe comics, and never get away from a comics-oriented environment. But now I’m starting to editorialize and not interview, so let’s get back to interviewing. Okay, it’s now 1944, and you’ve been discharged from the army. Take us on from there.

MARC: I returned to New York and freelanced for Fawcett doing various features for a few months, when we reached an agreement enabling me to return to my home in Louisiana and produce the art for the Phantom Eagle in Wow Comics. And during this time I also signed a contract with Bell [Syndicate] to do the art on the Flyin’ Jenny Sunday page.

JOHN: And when did the romance comics come in?

MARC: The romances were offered to me after Phantom Eagle and Wow Comics folded. From the art standpoint they provided several challenges, such as more emphasis on character development and emotional expression, more realistic art style, and more female characters. I enjoyed doing the romances. I drew them easily and fast, and the editors kept me comfortably supplied with scripts.

I am especially proud of the volume of romantic comics I produced.

One issue, for example, Life Story #21 (Dec. 1950), contains my art throughout—all three stories. [NOTE: See next page.] In Cowboy Love #2 (Aug. 1949), two of the three stories were drawn by me. All in all, my work appeared in ten different Fawcett romance comic book titles, a total of 69 stories, and was featured as the lead story in 45 of the issues I have on hand. And, as I’ve said, the work was all mine, with the exception of the lettering, which was done by my sister [Daisy Swayze]. We took pride in the fact that, when we mailed each story to New York, it was cameraready.

Join us for the conclusion of this interview next issue.

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Rendezvous With Romance When Fawcett cancelled Wow Comics, Swayze moved over to illustrating their romance comics. His work appeared in ten of their romance titles for a grand total of 69 stories. The two opening pages above come from Life Story #21 (Dec. 1950), for which Marc drew all three stories.

[Life Story art TM & ©2011 respective copyright holders.]

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Art ©2011 AC Comics.

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Sons Of Thunder Fawcett And Thor

by P.C. Hamerlinck

B

ooooom! The mighty Mjöllnir of Thor had hammered its way into Golden Age comic books long before the thunder god of Norse legend flourished in the imminent epoch of Marveldom. These early manifestations included: Thor himself having bestowed his mystical powers upon an ordinary man to combat world strife within the pages of Fox’s Weird Comics; later on, Kid Eternity summoning Thor to come to his aid in Quality’s Hit Comics; and, in the next decade, in Charlton’s Out of This World, Steve Ditko epitomizing Thor as a weak Scandinavian Viking boy who stumbled upon a cave (what is it about those caves?) and absorbed its interior luminous beams, which bequeathed him super-strength and a hammer-like weapon with magic lightning.

Fawcett Publications had likewise incorporated the god of thunder into an array of their comic book stories, including a bout between Captain Marvel and Thor—transpiring long before two stalwarts with those names would face off some 45 years later.

Warlock The Wizard Vs. Baron Gath Nickel Comics #1 (May 1940) Warlock the Wizard raised the power of Thor to defeat vampire Baron Gath in the hero’s 1940 debut. “Warlock” was drawn in the puerile yet delightfully enigmatic, anatomicallyincorrect style of Alfred Newton—the same artist who left his mark on Fawcett’s most disreputably prosaic and derivative super-hero: Master Man. Actually, Warlock himself was somewhat imitative of Fawcett’s very own Ibis the Invincible, who had premiered just three months earlier in the first issue of Whiz Comics.

Whereas Ibis battled evil with a wave of his “Ibistick,” Warlock the Wizard instead displayed his “Golden Hand” (basically a fist-ona-stick) and cried out a magic word (no, not “Shazam!” but “Abraxas!”), enabling the “last of the white magicians” to usher forth

Shazam!—The Norse Beginning Artist Eric Jansen rendered this homage to Tom Mandrake’s cover for Shazam: The New Beginning #1 (April-May 1987)—with a unique twist especially for this article. [Shazam hero TM & ©2011 DC Comics; Mighty Thor TM & ©2011 Marvel Comics.]

supernatural forces for crushing all the wickedness in the world. And, whereas Ibis had been accompanied by his partner, the exquisite Princess Taia, Warlock instead collaborated with an intelligent, talking, and telepathically-communicating pet raven named “Hugin.” (Incidentally, the same name as of one of Odin’s pair of information-gathering ravens.)

Hugin led the Wizard to a huge fortress where a damsel struggled to escape the wrath of Baron Gath. When Warlock displayed his Golden Hand and shouted his magic word, the fist opened up, enlarged, split (analogous to M.F. Enterprises’ disembodied “Captain Marvel” from ’66), and plucked the distressed woman from the vampire’s grasp right before the giant hand slugged the blood-sucker in the jaw.

But Gath still held his former captive’s father hostage in a castle imported straight from Transylvania. In the interim, Warlock and his Golden Hand stopped a werewolf and prevented two gargoyles from the castle’s tower from coming to life (transforming one of them into a festive balloon!), while his reliable raven gobbled up gigantic spiders.

Warlock The Wizard Vs. Baron Gath [Warlock the Wizard TM & ©2011 respective copyright holder.]

When his Golden Hand was stolen by a lizard, Warlock sent Hugin to fly over to his house and grab the “Lamp of the Gods.” (Don’t leave home without it!) The raven

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returned with the mystic appliance, which Warlock used to call up Thor: “Lord of the thunderbolt! Give me your hammer!” The Wizard launched Thor’s mighty mallet at the Baron (“Let’s see you dodge the thunderbolt!”); it struck and effectively slew the vampire. Hugin retrieved the Golden Hand and returned it to his master, who went forth “on his eternal battle against evil!” But the battle would only endure for a few more months, for Warlock the Wizard cast his final spell in Nickel Comics #7 (Aug. 1940).

come and save them before perishing from their enemy’s cruelty. Marvel assured them that the Dragon-Men would be over-thrown, and went onward to live up to his promise.

With the iniquitous beasts defeated and the slaves freed, Marvel bade a fond adieu and flew off in his spaceship. (Uh, wasn’t that thing—which he didn’t need in the first place—completely destroyed earlier?) One of the liberated inhabitants looked skyward to watch Marvel fly away and wistfully asserted that “Not even the thunder-god could have been so great!”

Of course, Captain Marvel’s original name was intended to be Captain Thunder… and twenty years later, Jack Kirby, the same artist who drew the “Dragon-Men” tale, would go on to draw the origin and early chronicles of Marvel Comics’ thunder god: The Mighty Thor.

Captain Marvel & the Dragon-Men/ The Monsters of Saturn [Shazam Hero TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

Captain Marvel & The Dragon-Men/ The Monsters Of Saturn Captain Marvel Adventures #1 (1941) Unable to tap the talents of C.C. Beck and other occupied Captain Marvel artists—but eager to further expand their most popular franchise—Fawcett selected the team of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby to manufacture the entire contents of the first “CM” solo book. Captain Marvel Adventures #1, for March ’41, paradoxically features the same date as S&K’s debut issue of their celebrated creation Captain America; thus, before they justly made a name for themselves, Fawcett editor France “Eddie” Herron had secured the duo’s services. S&K produced Captain America Comics during the daytime—then, late into the evening hours, holed themselves up for two weeks in a hotel room near the Timely offices and raced through CMA #1: Simon wrote, Kirby penciled, and various inkers (most notably Dick Briefer) stopped by to help out.

The makeshift tales obviously lacked the solid charm of Beck’s work, yet contained the pair’s tailored technique of unfettered raw power.

Coincidently, the Marvel Thor likewise encountered some Saturnians (the Stone Men) in his very first outing (Journey into Mystery #83, Aug. ’62). As most of us know, during a vacation in Norway, Dr. Donald Blake hid from the aliens inside a cave where he discovered a wooden cane (the disguised Mjöllnir, also spelled Mjolnir—the “j” somehow vanished in one of the Fawcett panels repro’d on the cover of this edition of FCA), and when the good doctor frustratedly struck it to the ground he was instantaneously altered into the Norse god of thunder, complete with hammer. In addition to the lightning-like transformation parallel, the partiallydisabled Blake may have been involuntarily inspired by the crutchsupported Freddy Freeman… a.k.a. Captain Marvel Jr. Speaking of which…

Captain Marvel Jr. Battles Hitler’s Dream-Soldier Master Comics #42 (September 1942) Perhaps it was the influential drollness of editor Rod Reed—or a simple conveyance of the general mood that swept the country during that time—which had artist Mac Raboy depict images on the Master #42 cover of Adolf Hitler associate Hermann Goering getting a gold boot to the seat… and Joseph Goebbels draped over Captain Marvel Jr.’s lap while being spanked by the World’s Mightiest Boy. Whatever the case may have been, they were metaphorically perfect preambles to the off-the-wall story that awaited readers beyond the book’s covers. And, while this particular

In the third story in CMA #1, Billy Batson picked up a broadcast from Saturn petitioning “A champion to free us from slavery….” Billy, thinking the whole thing is pretty “rotten,” immediately transformed into Captain Marvel—and blasted off towards the planet inside a spaceship that happened to be lying around. (As to why CM didn’t just fly to Saturn under his own power… well, those are the sort of inconsistencies that happen when you have a 68-page book to slap together in two weeks.)

The Dragon-Men welcomed Captain Marvel to Saturn by discharging their death ray upon him. Marvel’s spaceship was blown to bits, resulting in a battle between the World’s Mightiest Mortal and the monsters. But Marvel decided to change back to Billy in order to more effectively locate the enslaved humans. After he found them, he changed back to his alter ego right in front of them, much to their astonishment.

“Handsome stranger!” called out one of the captives. “Are you the thunder-god?”

“No, I am Captain Marvel, at your service!”

The imprisoned people’s legend foretold that a “thunder-god” would

Captain Marvel Jr. Battles Hitler’s Dream-Soldier [Shazam Hero TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

Sons Of Thunder

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story—of how the Führer’s dream-soldier came to life courtesy of a device called the “Ambition Animator” (hooked up to Hitler during his nap time)—had nothing to do directly with the god of thunder, it deserves a mention herein … for the monstrous and mindless soldier (“Woton,” actually one of the spellings of the name of Odin/Wotan, Thor’s father) formed from Hitler’s perverse dreams held a rather conspicuous visual similitude to the thunder god.

Raboy had judiciously integrated into his design for the Nazi “dreamsoldier” the real-world reality of Hitler and his minions having inflicted their spurious brand of Nordic and Germanic mythology as an attempt to unite the German people under a new faith and to replace Christianity in their social order, as part of building their “master race.”

Captain Marvel Jr. easily took care of “Woton” before flying over to Berchtesgaden to destroy the Nazis’ dream machine. So why didn’t our super-hero take Goering and Goebbels into custody and initiate an end to World War II right then and there?

“I cannot stay here and destroy these rats!” Junior grimly said to himself as he flew back to America. “The world must work out its own destiny!”

Ibis The Invincible Battles Loki, The Terrible

Captain Marvel And The Hammer Of Thor

Whiz Comics #50 (Jan. 1944)

[Shazam Hero TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

Ibis the Invincible once summoned Thor to help him defeat the god of thunder’s iniquitous brother, Loki—in a story by an unidentified artist, from a script attributed to Otto Binder.

Captain Marvel And The Hammer Of Thor

Cast out of Valhalla by Thor and Wodin (yet another spelling of Wotan/Odin), the nefarious Loki had lain imprisoned for centuries in the far north… until an old prospector discovered him frozen in ice. Months after the fact, Prince Ibis alerted Princess Taia that a “terrible evil” was among them. And sure enough, Loki—still preserved in ice—was on display at a nearby circus sideshow. Through telekinetic means, Loki ordered a bystander to bust him out of his ice prison—just as Ibis arrived on the scene. But, in the resultant fracas, Loki broke free and vanished, with the Princess in tow.

The World’s Mightiest Mortal encountered a genuine descendant of the god of thunder in one 1948 Otto Binder-C.C. Beck-Pete Costanza production.

With the aid of his Ibistick, the invincible one was led to Loki inside his Tower of Evil, as the rascal warned Ibis that he couldn’t destroy him.

“True,” Ibis agreed, “I cannot defeat you—but there is one who can…

Mighty Thor, ancient god of thunder.” Ibis then summoned Thor with his Ibistick: “Hear me—you defeated Loki once! Come and destroy his evil power forever!” Thor instantly materialized, wielded his mighty Mjöllnir, and drove Loki back to a “magic prison”—all within the course of four walloping panels. Taia, back in her partner’s arms, looked on in amazement, noting that “The whole earth rocks at the mighty force of Thor’s hammer!”

The Marvel Family #23 (May 1948)

Since the 1920s, tucked away on the edge of the city had been a blacksmith shop. But the rush of mechanical civilization had left the onceprosperous business in despair. Inside its walls, its muscular proprietor, A.H. Thor, sought revenge on the contemporary world by creating a hammer… but it was no ordinary hand tool: “The secret of this hammer has been handed down in my family for ages.”

Hence, a mighty weapon was forged on the infuriated man’s anvil: “This is the hammer of Thor, the great Norse god! It will smash anything, in a crash of lightning, and it will always return to the owner’s hand …!”

The blacksmith tested his weapon out on an automobile parked outside in front of his shop: “Like the legendary hammer of mighty Thor, it smashed its target in a burst of magic lightning and thunder!” After the demolition, the weapon returned to its owner’s hands, per the legend.

“It works!” exclaimed the blacksmith. “I have the hammer of Thor, my first ancestor! With this I can seek revenge against modern civilization!”

Meanwhile, at a nearby car show, Billy Batson was perusing the latest models when the crazed blacksmith appeared and began smashing vehicles with his hammer.

Captain Marvel soon appeared and his adversary introduced himself: “I’m Thor… and this is the hammer of Thor!” Then, in archetypal super-villain manner, Thor proceeded to explain his big scheme of smashing all the automobiles which had ultimately ruined his business.

Marvel had heard enough and planted a punch to Thor’s jaw—but the blacksmith was still standing.

Ibis The Invincible Battles Loki, the Terrible [Ibis the Invincible TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

Then it was Thor’s turn to strike a blow to Captain Marvel, as his hammer upon impact released a bolt of magic lightning and changed CM back to Billy! Thor quickly fled to an auto factory to cause more

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destruction, but he was met there by Marvel for another match. Thor whipped his hammer at CM, but instead of it changing the hero back to Billy, this time around Marvel caught it by its handle.

“Now I’ve got your hammer, Thor!” Captain Marvel told his foe, who began to run away. Of course, Marvel knew all too well he could just fly after Thor and easily nab him, but instead he decided to “give him a taste of his own medicine!” He flung the hammer and it conked Thor on the head… but Marvel carelessly overlooked that fact that the hammer always returned to the one who threw it. Consequently, CM was smacked on the head, magic lightning struck, and he was again changed back to Billy.

Thor bound and gagged the boy and carried him back to his shop to murder him. “This is your end, kid!” Thor said tauntingly. “When Thor’s hammer meets the anvil, you’ll be in between!”

Thor dealt Billy the lethal blow—but not to worry, because when the hammer struck the boy, its blast of magic lightning simply changed him back to Captain Marvel yet again! The World’s Mightiest Mortal finally knocked out Thor and vowed that the blacksmith would either end up in “jail or a mental institution”—then proceeded to melt down and destroy Thor’s once-powerful hammer in a flaming oven.

Captain Marvel And The Olympic Games Of The Gods

“Captain Marvel And The Olympic Games Of The Gods” Whiz Comics #125 (September 1950) Writer Otto Binder had Captain Marvel defeat Thor again two years later—although this time it was the original god of thunder.

The story, drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger, took place on Mount Olympus, where a contest held every thousand years was taking place. Its participators were Shazam’s team, appropriately named the Shazamers (and logically consisting of Solomon and Graeco-Roman deities Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury) and the Neitherites team (Vulcan, Centaur, Mars, Ajax, Neptune … and Thor!).

The grand prize for the winning team was a rather crucial one: complete control over Earth for the next thousand years. (Shazam’s team had mercifully remained undefeated over all these centuries.)

Unfortunately, the Shazamers were losing miserably to the Neitherites who, being a substantially less compassionate group than the Shazamers, were practically assured to soon hold a dominion over Earth—a deal which also included Captain Marvel’s deportation from the planet.

Shazam administered a pep talk in an attempt to fire up his crestfallen crew, but to no avail. The ancient wizard was ready to forfeit the games when his champion Captain Marvel stepped in to join the Shazamers— after all, he had all the combined powers of his teammates, so what did they have to lose?

Marvel went on to defeat Centaur in a foot race by taking a shortcut through a mountain; he then trounced Neptune in a sailboat race by creating his own “wind”—a power that would raise the eyebrows of a certain Man of Steel. (And, holy moley, for such high stakes, the rules for these games were relatively loose.)

[Shazam hero TM & ©2011 DC Comics.]

boulder to the next star beyond that planet and thereby capably carried out a one-panel victory over the thunder god.

After Captain Marvel next beat Vulcan by drinking molten metal concocted by the fire god himself, the final and deciding event—the gladiator match—was about to commence. The Neitherites gathered to combine all their powers to assist Mars. Thus, when the god of war shouted the magic word “Vctman” (comprised of his teammates first initial of their names … easy for him to say!), a flash of black lightning struck down and transformed Mars into an intimidating giant version of himself. In addition to the significant amount of cheating that had taken place during the games, Mars “borrowed” one of Zeus’s lightning bolts and used it to change Marvel back into Billy Batson. But the courageous lad grabbed a club which Mars had previously broken over Marvel’s head and stabbed him in the foot with it, allowing Zeus time to toss a bolt in Billy’s direction, which transformed him back into CM. The World’s Mightiest Mortal took down his last opponent and, in doing so, ensured that the Earth would be safe and sound for the next thousand years.

Dare to dream.

Captain Marvel’s next bout was against Thor (strangely portrayed here to look more like a ominously portentous Roman than a great Norse god), who boasted that he would hurl his hammer “all the way to the planet Venus.” But an unimpressed Marvel responded by simply tossing a huge

War Of The Gods Marvel Comics’ Mar-Vell and Thor crossed paths several times, as in Captain Marvel #57 (July ’78 issue; cover art by Pat Broderick and Bob Wiacek). Later on, the Big Red Cheese/CM and Thor faced off in the 1996 inter-company series DC Versus Marvel—the outcome of their skirmish rather differing from their first encounter at Fawcett. [©2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Special double-size book examines the first decade of the FANTASTIC FOUR, and the events that put into motion the Marvel Age of Comics! New interviews with STAN LEE, FLO STEINBERG, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, and others, with a wealth of historical information and Kirby artwork!

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Bronze Age Mystery Comics! Interviews with BERNIE WRIGHTSON, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GERRY TALAOC, DC mystery writer LORE SHOBERG, MARK EVANIER and DAN SPIEGLE discuss Scooby-Doo, Charlton chiller anthologies, Black Orchid, Madame Xanadu art and commentary by TONY DeZUNIGA, MIKE KALUTA, VAL MAYERIK, DAVID MICHELINIE, MATT WAGNER, and a rare cover painting by WRIGHTSON!

“GODS!” In-depth look at WALTER SIMONSON’s Thor, the Thunder God in the Bronze Age, “Pro2Pro” interview with TOM DeFALCO and RON FRENZ, Hercules: Prince of Power, Moondragon, Three Ways to End the New Gods Saga, exclusive interview with fantasy writer MICHAEL MOORCOCK, art and commentary by GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, BOB LAYTON, and more, with a swingin’ Thor cover by SIMONSON!

“Liberated Ladies” eyeing female characters that broke barriers in the Bronze Age: Big Barda, Valkyrie, Ms. Marvel, Phoenix, Savage She-Hulk, and the sword-wielding Starfire. Plus a “Pro2Pro” interview with JILL THOMPSON, GAIL SIMONE, and BARBARA KESEL, art and commentary by JOHN BYRNE, GEORGE PEREZ, JACK KIRBY, MIKE VOSBURG, and more, with a new cover by BRUCE TIMM!

SPACE WAR issue! A STARFIGHTER BUILDING LESSON by Peter Reid, WHY SPACE MARINES ARE SO POPULAR by Mark Stafford, a trip behind the scenes of LEGO’S NEW ALIEN CONQUEST SETS that hit store shelves earlier this year, plus Jared K. Burks’ regular column on MINIFIGURE CUSTOMIZATION, building tips, event reports, our step-by-step “YOU CAN BUILD IT” INSTRUCTIONS, and more!

Go to Japan with articles on two JAPANESE LEGO FAN EVENTS, plus take a look at JAPAN’S SACRED LEGO LAND, Nasu Highland Park—the site of the BrickFan events and a pilgrimage site for many Japanese LEGO fans. Also, a feature on JAPAN’S TV CHAMPIONSHIP OF LEGO, a look at the CLICKBRICK LEGO SHOPS in Japan, plus how to get into TECHNIC BUILDING, LEGO EDUCATION, and more!

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by SIMON & KIRBY, DITKO, BUSCEMA, SINNOTT, GOULD, COLE, STERANKO, KRIGSTEIN, O’NEIL, GLANZMAN, ORLANDO, WILLIAMSON, HEATH, and others! Plus: FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, JIM AMASH interviews Timely/Atlas artist CAL MASSEY, and a new cover by JOSH MEDORS!

DICK GIORDANO through the 1960s—from freelance years and Charlton “Action-Heroes” to his first stint at DC! Art by DITKO, APARO, BOYETTE, MORISI, McLAUGHLIN, GIL KANE, and others, DICK’s final convention panel with STEVE SKEATES and ROY THOMAS, JIM AMASH interviews Charlton artist TONY TALLARICO, FCA with MARC SWAYZE and ROY ALD, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, GIORDANO cover, and more!

Big BATMAN issue, with an unused Golden Age cover by DICK SPRANG! SHEL DORF interviews SPRANG and JIM MOONEY, with rare and unseen Batman art by BOB KANE, JERRY ROBINSON, WIN MORTIMER, SHELLY MOLDOFF, CHARLES PARIS, and others! Part II of the TONY TALLARICO interview by JIM AMASH! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

1970s Bullpenner WARREN REECE talks about Marvel Comics and working with EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, STAN LEE, MARIE SEVERIN, ADAMS, FRIEDRICH, ROY THOMAS, and others, with rare art!

DEWEY CASSELL spotlights Golden Age artist MIKE PEPPE, with art by TOTH, ANDRU, TUSKA, CELARDO, & LUBBERS, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, cover by EVERETT & BURGOS, and more!

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