Alter Ego #106 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Roy Roy T Thomas homas’ Action-Hero Action-Hero Comics Comics F Fanzine anzine

No.106 Dec. 2011

7.95

In the USA

DICK GIORDANO

AT CHARLTON & DC 1952 TO 1970!

EXTRA!

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TONY TALLARICO & ROY ALD

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

2011 EISNER AWARD Nominee Best Comics-Related Journalism

Other issues available, & an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all issues at HALF-PRICE!

ALTER EGO #96

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

ALTER EGO #101

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

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

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

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ALTER EGO #99

ALTER EGO: CENTENNIAL (AE #100)

ALTER EGO #98

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

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

GEORGE TUSKA showcase issue on his career at Lev Gleason, Marvel, and in comics strips through the early 1970s—CRIME DOES NOT PAY, BUCK ROGERS, IRON MAN, AVENGERS, TEEN TITANS, HERO FOR HIRE, and more! PLUS: JIM AMASH’s interview with Golden Age Fiction House artist BILL BOSSERT, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), and more!

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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ALTER EGO #102

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ALTER EGO #105

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

Spotlight on Green Lantern creators MART NODELL and BILL FINGER in the 1940s, and JOHN BROOME, GIL KANE, and JULIUS SCHWARTZ in 1959! Rare GL artwork by INFANTINO, REINMAN, HASEN, NEAL ADAMS, and others! Plus JACK MENDELSOHN Part II, FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and new cover by GIL KANE & TERRY AUSTIN, and MART NODELL!

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

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

See comic art and script BEFORE and AFTER the Comics Code changes, with art 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!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

Vol. 3, No. 106 / December 2011 Editor Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout Jon B. Cooke

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck

Comic Crypt Editor Michael T. Gilbert

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

NOW WITH 16 PAG ES OF COLOR!

Proofreader Rob Smentek

Cover Artists Jim Aparo, Steve Ditko, Dick Giordano, Pete Morisi

Cover Colorist Tom Ziuko

With Special Thanks to: Roy Ald Heidi Amash Michael Ambrose Brent Anderson Richard Arndt Bob Bailey Tim Barnes Robert Barrett Pat Bastienne Robert Beerbohm John Benson Lee Boyette Chris Boyko Alan Brennert Mike Burkey Bob & Mary Lou Burr Glen Cadigan R. Dewey Cassell Shaun Clancy John L. Coker III Mark DiFruscio Michael Dunne Jerry Edwards Don Ensign Mark Evanier Jon R. Evans Ed Fields Mike Feldman Shane Foley Gary Friedrich Janet Gilbert Stan Goldberg Arnie Grieves Walt Grogan Gary Groth George Hagenauer Jennifer Hamerlinck Neil A. Hansen Roger Hill Tony Isabella Eric Jansen

Rob Jones Lou Kanegson Jim Kealy David Anthony Kraft Kelly Langston-Smith Bob Layton Paul Levitz Steve Lipsky Jim Ludwig Mark Luebker John Lustig Mike Lynch Tim Marion Bruce Mason Jim McLauchlin Brian K. Morris Mark Muller Michael Netzer Mike Nielsen Rik Offenberger Rita Perlin Donnie Pitchford Gene Reed Joe Rubinstein John Schwirian Bill Sienkiewicz Jeff Singh Steve Skeates Joe Staton Scott Stewart Patrick Sun Desha Swayze Marc Swayze Tony Tallarico Jeff Taylor Dann Thomas Leona Thomas Steve Thompson Dr. Michael J. Vassallo Gary Watson Robert Wiener

Contents Editorial: One Of The Greats—And One Of The Good Guys 2 The Silver Age Of Charlton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, and Roy Thomas at Heroes Con, Charlotte, NC, 2009.

“This Is Really Our Last Chance To Talk About Dick”. . . . . . 23 Mark Evanier’s “Remembering Dick Giordano” panel from the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con.

“I Liked The Area Of Comics In General”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Part I of Jim Amash’s career-spanning interview with veteran cartoonist Tony Tallarico.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Abe Kanegson, Part 5. . . . . . . . . 51 Michael T. Gilbert’s continuing quest to solve “The Mystery of the Missing Letterer!”

Comic Fandom Archive: In Memoriam – Marshall Lanz . . . . 60 Bill Schelly pays tribute to a fandom friend—and Alter Ego Vol. 1 contributor.

Tributes to Tony DiPreta, Jon D’Agostino, Vern Henkel, & Lew Sayre Schwartz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 67 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #165 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 P.C. Hamerlinck presents Golden Age Fawcett pros Marc Swayze & Roy Ald. On Our Cover: Our thanks to Gary Groth and Fantagraphics for permission to reprint the photo of artist/editor Dick Giordano from an issue of Comics Journal—and to Michael Ambrose, Neil A. Hansen, Michael Dunne, and Bob Bailey (hope we didn’t we leave anybody out!) for the late-1960s art scans from Charlton and DC mags depicting work by Dick himself (Sarge Steel), Steve Ditko (Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, The Question, and The Hawk and The Dove), Pete Morisi (Thunderbolt), and Jim Aparo (Aquaman). Oh yeah, and to layout guru Jon B. Cooke for putting the whole marvelous mishmash together! [Art © 2011 DC Comics.] Above: A decade or so back, Dick Giordano contributed this Sarge Steel illustration to a “Charlton Portfolio”—and since he always said Sarge was his personal favorite among the heroes he’d drawn, it seemed the perfect lead-in for this issue of A/E. Thanks to Neil A. Hansen. [Art © 2011 DC Comics.]

This issue dedicated to the memory of:

Dick Giordano, Tony DiPreta, Jon D’Agostino, Vern Henkel, Lew Sayre Schwartz, & Marshall Lanz Alter EgoTM is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: 32 Bluebird Trail, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Eight-issue subscriptions: $60 US, $85 Canada, $107 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © Roy Thomas. Alter Ego is a TM of Roy & Dann Thomas. FCA is a TM of P.C. Hamerlinck. Printed in Canada. ISSN: 1932-6890 FIRST PRINTING.

writer/editorial

One Of The Greats—And One Of The Good Guys

aybe I went about it all wrong.

Perhaps the thing to have done this issue would’ve been to locate a rare, maybe even never-printed interview with the late Dick Giordano and make it the centerpiece of Alter Ego #106.

would turn out to be the last of maybe two dozen panels we’d shared over the past forty-plus years, whereon we had answered questions and volunteered anecdotes for an audience appreciative of the behind-the-scenes activities of the comics industry. That Steve Skeates, a major scripter for editor Dick at two companies, joined us this time was the cherry on the sundae.

However, I was aware that many, many interviews with Dick had been published over the years, particularly after he became DC’s managing editor. Oh, if an interview had popped up that had seemed an ideal fit for this magazine, I’d have been happy to print it… but none did, and I didn’t really go looking for one. If one does show up, I hardly feel I’m forever precluded from running a Giordano interview in A/E.

Thirteen months later, in July of 2010, with Dick having passed away on March 27th of that year, five of his friends and colleagues celebrated his life and achievements on a “Remembering Dick Giordano” panel at the San Diego Comic-Con—and several more fellow professionals rose up out of the audience to add their own vocal tributes to the chorus.

Or perhaps I could’ve talked someone into writing a retrospective of Dick’s career, at least through 1970 or the mid-1970s, the somewhat elastic area of A/E’s chronological franchise.

This latter panel was an homage to a towering and beloved talent… while the earlier one was just three guys sitting around in a room swapping yarns about the comic book biz, mostly about the last half of the 1960s.

However, I felt Michael Eury, editor of A/E’s sister mag Back Issue, had already done a good job of that in his 2003 book Dick Giordano: Changing Comics, One Day at a Time. That volume may have officially gone out of print, but recently TwoMorrows publisher John Morrow announced that a few remaining copies of the book had turned up, so technically it’s even still available without one’s having to troll for it on eBay. So I settled for a couple of discussion panels at notable comics conventions on different coasts, held only a little more than a year apart—but with vastly different purposes and feels. In June of 2009, as the introduction to the next piece will expand upon, Dick and I sat together in Charlotte, North Carolina, on what sadly

Between those extremes—yet embodying them, embracing them—lies the essence of who Dick was, and why all of us cared—and still care—so much about him. No, I don’t think this issue will provide the last word you’ll read about Dick Giordano in the pages of Alter Ego. For as long as we live, and hopefully afterward, people will fondly remember Dick and what he did in and for comic books. Like I say in the above title: he was one of the greats—and he was also one of the good guys. Those two things aren’t always encompassed by the same man—but they definitely were in the case of Dick Giordano. Bestest,

COMING IN FEBRUARY

(INSTEAD OF JANUARY THIS YEAR!)

107

BATMAN ARTISTS OF THE ’40s & ’50s!

FULL-COLOR! With Golden Age Greats DICK SPRANG & JIM MOONEY!

• Unused vintage Batman cover by DICK SPRANG—never before printed in color!

• Previously-unseen DICK SPRANG & JIM MOONEY interviews on the Darknight Detective and other aspects of their stellar careers—with rare and unglimpsed art! • Part II of JIM AMASH’s interview with TONY TALLARICO, covering the Dell and Charlton years—with art by MASTROSERIO, FRACCIO, BARREAUX, HOLLINGSWORTH, NODEL, GRANDENETTI, et al. Art ©2011 DC Comics.

• FCA with MARC SWAYZE & ROY ALD—MICHAEL T. GILBERT still on the trail of the “mystery letterer”—BILL SCHELLY presents early comics fandom in color—& MORE!

Edited by ROY THOMAS • SUBSCRIBE NOW! Eight issues in the US: $60 Standard, $80 First Class (Canada: $85, Elsewhere: $107 Surface, $155 Airmail, $23.60 Digital). • DESPITE GOING TO FULL-COLOR, THE SUBSCRIPTION PRICE STAYS THE SAME!

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The Silver Age Of Charlton DICK GIORDANO, STEVE SKEATES, & ROY THOMAS At Heroes Con 2009 Recorded by Bob & Mary Lou Burr Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

A Hero Sandwich (Left to right in photo:) Erstwhile Charlton writers Steve Skeates and Roy Thomas and artist/editor Dick Giordano composed the Charlton Silver Age panel at the 2009 Heroes Con, Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by Patrick Sun, used with his permission. Each panelist is represented by art related to his Charlton work:

A/ E

Steve Skeates scribed for Charlton during and after Giordano’s editorial tenure; he created the back-up feature “Thane of Bagarth” with artist Jim Aparo. Above him is the splash from Thane of Bagarth #25 (Dec. 1985), as reprinted from Hercules #4 (June 1968). Thanks to Jim Ludwig.

EDITOR’S PERSONAL NOTE: I saw and spoke with Dick Giordano for the final time, of many, on June 20, 2009, at the Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina. Of course, on that day, despite what I knew of Dick’s declining health, I refused to consider the possibility that this might be the last of a chain of get-togethers which had begun in the latter half of 1965.

Roy Thomas’ very first professional comics sale was the script for Son of Vulcan #50 (Jan. 1966), as per panel at left, as penciled by Bill Fraccio and inked by Tony Tallarico. Skimming the dialogue when Roy showed him a just-out copy in late ’65, Marvel editor Stan Lee quipped words to the effect: “You’re lucky I hired you before I saw this!”

In Charlotte, for some years, I (often in tandem with A/E associate editor Jim Amash) moderated a Golden Age panel. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, however, the relatively few surviving 1930s-40s creators came to fewer and fewer cons—and even the

Dick Giordano was the original artist of Sarge Steel, the metal-fisted private eye. His cover above for issue #4 (July 1965) was done not long before Dick succeeded Sarge’s official creator, Pat Masulli, as Charlton’s comics editor. [All three art spots © 2011 DC Comics—and ain’t that a kick in the head!]

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

The Missouri Breaks (Top left:) Now it can be told—like anybody’s interested! Roy T. plotted the origin of the Plastic Man-style alien hero he called “The Shape” for his fandombuddy Richard “Grass” Green to draw (and, as it turned out, dialogue), under Dick Giordano at Charlton. It became the lead feature in Charlton Premiere, Vol. 2, #1 (Sept. 1967). Thanks to Michael Ambrose for the scan; Michael is editor/publisher of the excellent magazine Charlton Spotlight (see ad on p. 21). (Center:) Circa 1966, Roy’s fellow Missourian, Gary Friedrich, scripted numerous love stories for Charlton, with titles like “Please Don’t Play B-11” and “Truck Drivin’ Man”—but perhaps his greatest achievement in that genre was talking Dick into letting him launch a private eye series about his Modesty Blaise-style heroine Tiffany Sinn in the pages of Career Girl Romances #38 (Feb. 1967)! Artists uncertain. (Right:) Gary’s sole super-hero work at Charlton, aside from dialoguing Steve Ditko’s first few “Blue Beetle” outings, was “The Sentinels,” starring Helio, Mentalia, and The Brute. This back-up series for Thunderbolt #54-59 was the first professional comic book work of Sam Grainger, who would later ink for Marvel. Sam had been recommended to Gary and Dick by Roy, who’d collaborated with him on a comics fandom project a year or two earlier. This splash, sent by Michael Ambrose, is from #55 (Dec. ’66). [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.] The photo shows Gary (on left in pic) and Roy in April 2009, just a month before the Charlotte event, as special guests at a small comic-con in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in the county where both of them grew up. Photo by Roy’s mother, Mrs. Leona Thomas.

Silver Age wasn’t as well represented at such gatherings as it once had been. So, knowing that Dick, Gary Friedrich, Steve Skeates, and I were all going to be at this Heroes Con (Steve being a last-minute addition, having been spurred to attend partly by the considerable interest in his lengthy interview in the then-recent Alter Ego #84), I suggested to host Shelton Drum that for 2009 we schedule a special “Charlton panel,” since all four of us had labored for that company in the ’60s, and in some cases before or after. Dick agreed to participate, as long as I’d relay questions, since his longstanding deafness had become ever more severe. But, when the time came, Gary (whose hearing, despite his younger age, was no better than Dick’s) ran into a conflict related below. As Dick, Steve, and I gathered in a meeting room upstairs from the dealer’s area (and whose microphone apparently wasn’t working), I don’t recall if Dick’s assistant and friend Pat Bastienne was present or was watching their art table during this period. My friends Bob & Mary Lou Burr, two more South Carolina transplants who live only a couple of country miles away from Dann and me as the crow (or Captain Atom) flies, thankfully recorded the event on a DVD. As the appointed starting time neared, I asked the reasonably sizable audience if anyone objected to my starting a minute or two early. “No, no, go for it,” came back the answer, so… ROY THOMAS: I hope you can hear us without the mics. I want to apologize before I get started: Gary Friedrich is supposed to be here, but he’s downstairs. He forgot to remind his wife to come and watch his table

there, and he can’t walk off from it. So I hope she remembers and he shows up in the middle of this panel. Anyway, I’ll start with the people here. I’ll start with the editors, because I’m very political myself, and you’ve got to treat the editors right. This is Dick Giordano. Of course, this is the Charlton Silver Age Panel, and of course, he was the editor of Charlton from about 1965 to 1967, ’68? DICK GIORDANO: Yeah, about 1965. I left in ’69, I think. The years all fuzz together when you get my age. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Actually, DG left Charlton in 1967, as he notes later on the panel.] THOMAS: You worked as an artist for many years at Charlton. [to audience] And then, of course, he went on to another little place called DC Comics, which he ran for a few years, so you may have seen his name there. So can we hear it for Dick, please? [audience applauds] A late addition to the panel, but an early addition to Charlton, here on my right is Steve Skeates, who was working for Marvel when I came there in ’65. He beat me into the comics field by a couple of weeks, and then he was off, working at Charlton, Tower, DC; later, he even worked for Marvel [again] and has had quite an interesting career—some of the best of it being his work with Jim Aparo on Aquaman and other books, but also with Gil Kane and others. [audience applauds] And my name is Roy Thomas, [applause] and for Charlton I wrote exactly two and two-halves stories, starting with the last issue of Son of Vulcan.

The Silver Age of Charlton

The “Fight” Club GIORDANO: Just before I came in.

On the panel, Roy tells the story of the sole Thomas/Friedrich collaboration at Charlton, for Romantic Story #87 (March 1967). Seen at top are: the splash and a few key panels from p. 4—then, in the two panels shown from p. 6, the teenage hero took up self-defense training—but on the final page, he still refused to fight at his girlfriend’s urging. They don’t write ’em like that anymore. Artist unknown. Thanks to Michael Ambrose. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

THOMAS: Right, just before. I’m still back in St. Louis. I wrote the last issue of that series and of the pre-Ditko series of Blue Beetle. As soon as I wrote an issue of anything, they cancelled it. [audience goes “Awww”] And I wrote [half of] two other stories for Charlton. One of them I ghosted… about a character called “The Shape”— [to Dick] remember “The Shape”?—for my artist friend Grass Green. [Giordano nods] But he ended up dialoguing it, because I couldn’t take the credit anyway. I was working for Marvel, and Stan would’ve given me holy hell had he known I was writing anything for Charlton at that stage.

I was going to tell this when Gary got here: [to Giordano] I also started a Charlton romance story under you. When Gary was off on one of his many honeymoons [Giordano and audience chuckle]—he’s had five, and this was #2, I think—I agreed to write an eight-page romance story to help him out, and I started it. It was called “If You Love Me, Fight for

Me!” [audience titters] I wrote the first half of it, in which the guy gets beat up, and he won’t stand up for himself, so his girl leaves him. And then I had, for one of the rare times in my life—I hated doing that romance story so much that I had writer’s block and I just couldn’t finish it. So when Gary got done with his honeymoon, he came in and wrote the last few pages. In his very first panel, the guy takes karate lessons and goes out in the next couple of pages and beats the hell out of the other guy…. [audience chuckles; speaks to Giordano] I don’t know if you even knew I was associated with it, that one-half of a story. I don’t even have a copy of it.

GIORDANO: Yeah, one-half of one. I don’t have a copy of it, either. I don’t have a copy of almost everything I did at Charlton. I’m working off of— [points to skull to indicate his memory] THOMAS: Would you like to talk about Charlton for a couple of minutes?

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

they didn’t like him wandering around, so he became “Sergius O’Shaugnessy” when he worked for me. If you find any of the old Charlton books, “Sergius O’Shaugnessy” is Denny O’Neil. And Denny, I think, recommended Steve [Skeates]. I was desperate for talent…. Whoever walked in the door got a job to do, and I was trying to do comic books with Charlton better than they had been. THOMAS: [to Skeates] That was us. We walked in the door. GIORDANO: I found some people—amazingly, Jim Aparo was in a filing cabinet. Not him, but his work. [audience laughs] He sent in samples, and everybody ignored them. And the first day I got there, I’m going through the filing cabinet and I’m picking talent out that had been totally ignored. So he [indicates Thomas] helped me with Denny, Denny helped me with Steve, I found Jim on my own, and later on, I think you [indicates Thomas again] helped me with Gary [Friedrich], too. Didn’t you put Gary in touch with me? [Thomas affirms] So we had our incestuous, but happy, team. We were all intergrouped together.

It Was Forty Years Ago Today… Roy and Dick together on another panel—nearly four decades earlier, in 1971, probably at a New York comics convention. Thanks to Mike Feldman.

GIORDANO: Well, Roy was probably feeling guilty, so he recommended Denny O’Neil to me. They were… pals? THOMAS: Denny and I met back in Missouri, right before I came to New York. He was writing for the local daily newspaper in my home county of Cape Girardeau. It’s the biggest town between St. Louis and Memphis, on the Mississippi River. That’s where I went to college; it’s near the little town of Jackson, where Gary and I grew up. And Denny was in Cape, living behind the police station, which was currently housed in what had been a church. My mother saw a couple of articles he wrote about comics in the Southeast Missourian to fill in for the summer, and she sent them to me. I contacted him, and next time he was coming back through St. Louis, where he’d gone to college and where I was teaching, he interviewed me. And so later, when I moved to New York, I sent him the Marvel writer’s test, and he went on to … I don’t know. Whatever happened to Denny? I don’t know whatever became of him. [audience groans] Yeah, some obscure little career, only writing some of the best “Batman” stories ever. GIORDANO: Denny, of course, had enough to do at Marvel, and

Abbott And Costello Meet Steve Skeates On the 2009 panel, Steve gets agitated while making a point—maybe about the Charlton Abbott & Costello series he scripted for Giordano with artist Henry Scarpelli, based on the Hanna-Barbera TV-cartoon starring the famed comedy team. Thanks to Jim Ludwig for retrieving this page from issue #5 (Nov. 1968)—and to Donnie Pitchford for the “screen capture” from Bob & Mary Lou Burr’s DVD recording of the panel, as forwarded by Michael Ambrose. [A&C panels © 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

And Roy and I always—even though he was working for Marvel and I worked for Charlton—we would find ways to get together in places where we were unlikely to meet up with anybody from our respective companies, and it was a fun time, actually, until I found out who I was working for. [chuckles] They posed as publishers, but they were really junk dealers. Not the kind of junk you might think. I remember, one time, during the course of my employment there—if you’re not familiar with this, the editorial offices and the printing plant were in the same building. THOMAS: Up in Derby, Connecticut. GIORDANO: Yeah. We had some artists on staff, names you may have seen…. Charlie Nicholas was on staff… Vince Alascia, Jon D’Agostino.

The Silver Age of Charlton

“You Will Find Me A Grave Man…” For nearly two years, Steve Skeates scripted all the stories in every issue of Charlton’s “mystery” title The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, including the Pat Boyette-drawn yarn in #6 (May 1968). Dick G. was left to add text to the covers, such as on Pat’s for #1 (May ’67). Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Later on, Steve Ditko joined the staff — we’ll be talking about him later. [laughs] And I was walking through the plant towards the back for something. My responsibilities not only included editorial, but scheduling material to the plant…. The engravers were in the same plant, the printing was in the same plant, the binding was in the same plant. So I’m walking towards the back, and as I’m walking, I find dozens of skids filled with engraving plates, so I’m walking this way [indicates weaving around the skids]— THOMAS: Can you explain what you mean by “plates”?

GIORDANO: Engraving plates. Before computers, we did everything with a piece of metal. It raised images in the metal, put a curved plate over it, and put it on the press that would print it. I go back up front and check with one of the executives and say, “Hey, when are you going to get those plates out of the way? I can’t get to the back.” You know what he told me? “We’re waiting for the price of scrap metal to go up”—because they were going to sell the plates. In the meantime, it didn’t make any difference that we were all inconvenienced because you didn’t move around because you were waiting for the price of scrap metal to go up. That turned me around a little bit, and I said, “Why am I working here?” It took me another year and a half to figure it out. And in a year and seven months, then, I was out of there and working for DC. Steve Ditko helped me get the job with DC; strange thing we’ll talk about later. But Charlton was a fun place to work, and everything I did editorially was strictly with no oversight. I could do just about anything I wanted, editorially. I had a budget to keep and I managed to do

that, but I had a totally free hand. Nobody looked over my shoulder. I don’t think anybody in the editorial offices could read. [audience chuckles] They left me totally alone, and that helped in the thing that you [indicating Skeates] did that I enjoyed the most, the Abbott & Costello book, because they let me pick which TV show I wanted—I could have gotten The Flying Nun, which was far more popular than Abbott & Costello. I saw some fun in Abbott & Costello, and Steve did a great job. I’m sorry I didn’t print from his roughs. He used to storyboard Abbott & Costello, and he had a better handle on drawing those characters than the artist I finally settled on. [to Steve] Do you feel that way? I think you mentioned that in an interview recently that I thought about—

THOMAS: He’s so modest, though, he can’t tell you. GIORDANO: Yeah, he’s modest, all right, yes, yes. STEVE SKEATES: Yes, yes. It was fun, yeah. I very much enjoyed doing the Abbott & Costello. GIORDANO: All of the stuff we did was fun, because we were winging it with no money. I mean, I love flying upside down! I did try it at DC… it was a little harder at DC… but at Charlton I was in my glory because whatever I wanted to do, I did. Nobody bothered me and I got a paycheck every week. THOMAS: Steve, what thoughts do you have about Charlton? It wasn’t your first place and it wasn’t your last, but you did some kind of nice work there for a couple years or so.

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

Dick Giordano At Charlton A full-color quartet of covers and splashes of variant genres by Dick Giordano, all © 2011 the respective copyright holders. Frank Merriwell at Yale #3 (1955)—cover inks by Vince Alascia. Thanks to Frank Motler. Speed Demons #10 (March 1958). Thanks to Gene Reed for this scan and the next two. Space War #3 (Feb. 1960). Splash page of Texas Rangers in Action #7 (April 1957). GR says the inking is probably by Alascia. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

The Silver Age of Charlton

SKEATES: I mainly went to work for Charlton because Tower went out of business. I was doing a lot of “NoMan” and “Lightning” stories over there. As a matter of fact, I did all of the “Lightning” stories except for two. But they overextended themselves, went out of business, and I was looking around for something to do. So I called up Dick, and I don’t know if he had already been talked to by Denny or what—

give more money to people like Steve Ditko and the people who were really producing stuff for me. It was very complicated to run, because I had to keep budgets on 34 books. I was the editor of 34 titles. They were bimonthly, but I think even now, 17 books a month to edit would blow most people off the map. I had [artist] Sam Glanzman’s brother as an assistant. Sam talked me into hiring him. [chuckles]

GIORDANO: Yeah.

THOMAS: But that wasn’t Lou. That was another brother, right?

SKEATES: So I started work there, and I very much enjoyed it. I was afraid, when we moved to DC, I was going to make less money, because the amount of work I got at Charlton was amazing, and even though I was getting paid less than half of what DC was offering, I figured I’d take a cut in pay, so that was one of my fears about moving to DC. I just enjoyed the volume of work and the fact that I would be doing full books like the [Many Ghosts of] Dr. Graves book. From the 3rd issue up to something like the 12th issue, everything in there was written by me, and I quite enjoyed having control of the book, not just the stories. GIORDANO: That’s what was fun about Charlton... being able to control it. In case you didn’t get the idea from what we were saying, Charlton’s page rates were abysmal. THOMAS: Oh, they weren’t that good! [audience laughs] Even when I was in Missouri and I was teaching high school in early 1965— I’m not accounting here for inflation, but still, I was making like $5000-plus a year—and I remember how disappointed I was when I sold them that first 20-page Son of Vulcan, and I thought I’m going to get decent money, and it turned out it was $4 a page. Even though that $80 practically doubled my income for the week for that day I spent writing it, I was still disappointed. So when I started at DC and they were paying like $10, that was like, “Now finally, now somebody who appreciates writers!” GIORDANO: The Charlton page rates were, as we’ve been saying, very, very low— unexpectedly low for some people just getting in the door. But eventually, after I had an editorial crew that I was comfortable with and, more, I think, were comfortable with me, I started trying to find ways I could spend more money on certain people. And what I came up with, which I think was very clever at the time: I started buying artwork from a company in Brazil who produced artwork like Funnies, Inc., or Jerry Iger, things of that sort, at very inexpensive rates. Then I talked to my boss and said, “Look, I’ll spend the same money I am now, just let me decide who gets what.” So by getting the cheaper artwork, but having a budget to stay within which was based on the crummy rates that we had, I was able to

GIORDANO: No, no, it wasn’t Lou. Lou was a famous illustrator. The Glanzman brothers are all over the place. I don’t know even if any of them are still alive. Sam is, but is Lou, too? THOMAS: Yeah.

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young[er] Man In the decade before Giordano became Charlton’s editor, he was one of its most prolific and dependable artists. His cover pencils for the 6th issue of Masked Raider (Feb. 1957; in two issues it would be officially retitled Billy the Kid) were inked by Vince Alascia, who in the early ’40s had inked Captain America for Timely/Marvel… while Dick soloed on the movie-spinoff cover of Konga #2 (Aug. 1961). Years later, he was happy to sketch the long-running Charlton hero The Cheyenne Kid for a collector. Thanks to Gene Reed & Richard Arndt & Steve Lipsky, respectively. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

GIORDANO: Anyway, I worked out that arrangement. But after a while, my boss—being oriented towards saving money—wanted to kill the whole thing and go back to paying the same page rate to everybody. And that’s when I finally made up my mind that I’ve gotta get out of here. They were not on the same page that I was. I admit that they were running a business and that’s what they wanted to do, was make money. I was having fun, but I didn’t want somebody to take my fun away from me, so we all went over to DC. I started at DC in late ’69, early ’70. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Dick mispoke. In actuality, it was late 1967.] THOMAS: You went through two different stints at DC. GIORDANO: Yeah. You and I would get together for lunch every once in a while. Sometimes we’d go to the Playboy Club, sometimes the Motor Pub. Was that what it was called? THOMAS: Yeah. The Motor Pub had these realistic cars you sat in to eat, like a Model-T. [to Steve] It was in the General Motors Building, right across the street from one of the many addresses that Marvel moved to up and down Madison Avenue during that period, and I loved it because they served a real good hamburger. I used to take people across there, and I also had the Playboy key—that was my idea of status in those days—I’d take people to the Playboy Club. GIORDANO: Which was also almost right

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

Lights! Camera! Action Heroes! (Left:) Dick probably composed this early-1966 house ad for Charlton’s “Action Hero” line right after he became editor, because Son of Vulcan (which Dick never edited) is still ballyhooed, and Ditko’s Captain Atom cover depicts the hero still in his original costume, which Dick would soon have changed—or else it was vacating comics editor Pat Masulli who coined the term “action hero,” which seems less likely. “Blue Beetle,” Judomaster, Thunderbolt, and “The Question” were still just around the corner at this point in time. (Right:) In 2000 Dick drew this spendid cover for Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Artist vol. 1 #9. The latter is a major reference work for the history of Charlton’s Silver Age. [Heroes TM & © 2011 DC Comics.]

across the street from Marvel. Fifty-ninth Street. THOMAS: My own experience working for Charlton was a little weird, because you [indicating Steve] were in New York, at least [when] working for Charlton, and of course, [indicates Giordano] you’d been doing this for years. In my case, I was still teaching high school [in St. Louis] and running the first incarnation of Alter Ego as this little magazine I had just taken over, and suddenly I got the letter from your predecessor [to Giordano] as editor of all the various Charlton things, Pat Masulli. He had previously sent me a couple of letters that I could print, but I couldn’t use his name, and he now said he wanted to try to get some new writing blood into the Charlton books. So he sent this letter to several fanzines and said, “Can you put it in your magazines that we’re looking for people to write maybe a Son of Vulcan or a Blue Beetle?” Well, I didn’t put out more than one or two issues a year, and I’m not going to tell anybody else and create my own competition. So I never published any information about that; I figured I’d leave that to the other fanzines. I just wrote a story myself! [audience laughs] I did a Son of Vulcan about filming a Trojan War movie and sent it in. And then Pat Masulli asked me to write a Blue Beetle, in which I used a lot of Egyptian mythology, because, a couple of years earlier, I’d been accepted by the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute to study Egyptology, but I didn’t have the money to support myself while studying,

so I couldn’t go there. If I could’ve got by without eating for several years, maybe I’d have become an Egyptologist, and I’m not sure that would have been anybody’s gain. About that time, [“Superman” editor] Mort Weisinger offered me a job at DC. And as soon as he found out I’d done those scripts for Charlton, he said, “Well, that has to stop immediately. You can’t be working for DC and work for that crummy little outfit at the same time.” But the funny thing is, as soon as I got to New York, I discovered I hated working for Weisinger, so I just lasted two weeks. Does anybody else on the panel have anything they want to say? Otherwise, we’ll turn it over to questions from the audience. [when neither Skeates nor Giordano speaks up:] Of course, the most famous thing Charlton did was to publish the characters that became the springboard for the Watchmen, right? They were sort of mutated by Alan Moore, because he had wanted to kill them off and turn them into monsters and so forth. DC had just bought them; they weren’t going to let him do that, so he ended up making them into the Watchmen, which worked out better for all concerned. GIORDANO: Absolutely. THOMAS: So the Charlton-born characters still live on, and DC has

The Silver Age of Charlton

A Ferrous Fist (Left:) A nicely collaborative action page from Sarge Steel #4 by the team of Joe Gill (writer) and Dick Giordano (artist). But we can’t help wondering: Is the metal fist that’s slugging the bad-guy not shown in panel 3 by artistic choice, or by edict of the Comics Code, ’cause it’d be liable to break the crook’s jaw? (Right:) Secret Agent #10 (Oct. 1967) was the second of two issues published by Charlton after the TV series Secret Agent made a bit of a splash—but it starred Sarge Steel, with a slight upgrade in occupation. Repro’d from a scan of the original art, courtesy of Neil A. Hansen. [© 2011 DC Comics.]

done hardcover Archives volumes reprinting Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, and “The Question.” GIORDANO: Yeah. I called our [Charlton] line the “Action Hero” line, because I was never really a fan of super-heroes. And I’m still not. [audience chuckles] Capes and spandex groups, as a rule, don’t appeal to me. I liked Batman because he didn’t have super-powers. So, starting with that as a background, I tried to establish a line of action heroes—that’s why I called them that—that weren’t particularly super-powered, but had something interesting to help them along the way. Another new Blue

Beetle… we depowered Captain Atom just a little bit. You can’t say a guy with that name had atomic powers but he doesn’t have them anymore, because there’s only so much you can do with them. So we concentrated on people who had reverence of some sort for The Fightin’ 5 and Sarge Steel. THOMAS: I forget who did Sarge Steel.

GIORDANO: I loved that character. When I moved to DC, Paul bought up a bunch of the Charlton characters for me to play with, which I never got around to doing. I put up with the Alan Moore thing that you A Ditko Machine mentioned a little while ago. But I After he left Marvel at the turn of felt that he should create new 1966, artist/plotter Steve Ditko characters sort of loosely based on became virtually a one-man the Charlton characters, and then comics company for cut-rate he could have ownership of them, Charlton—drawing both a which worked out, as you said, sartorially-redesigned “Captain Atom” and a second 1960s “Blue better for everybody.

Beetle” starting with Captain Atom #84 (Jan. 1967). The Beetle was soon spun off into his own title, whose first issue (dated June ’67) also inaugurated Ditko’s offbeat series “The Question.” Sure, Rocke Mastroserio inked “Captain Atom” and Gary Friedrich dialogued the first four “Blue Beetle” outings—but it was mostly a Ditko tour de force. And the whole star-studded smorgasbord can be found these days behind the hard covers of a single hardcover book: The Action Heroes Archives, Vol. 2 (2007)! [© 2011 DC Comics.]

THOMAS: And the interesting thing is that, because you had Captain Atom as the only real super-hero at Charlton, that’s why in the Watchmen book and the movie, a lot of the structure is based on the fact that there’s really only one super-hero—Dr. Manhattan—and everybody else is just guys in masks…. GIORDANO: With Ditko’s help, we took the scarab away from the Blue Beetle and gave him a “Bug” [vehicle] to fly with. In my mind, it looked a lot like Spider-Man, his

flying down with his handle on it off the Bug. But, of course, Ditko had just come off of Spider-Man. You can’t help but be influenced by what you just did, with everybody raving about it. And then “The Question” came along. I think that’s the first time we saw Steve’s being interested in the Ayn Rand philosophy. It didn’t mean anything to me, but he left two people dying in the sewer. He didn’t kill them; he let them die. What a wave of mail [audience chuckles] I got, because at the time, that was unheard of! THOMAS: The Question, of course, was the basis of the Rorschach character [in Watchmen]. GIORDANO: [to Skeates] Did you write “The Question”? SKEATES: I dialogued it, yeah. GIORDANO: I know Steve [Ditko] didn’t like to take credit for writing, and he often gave credit lines away, including one to “D. Glanzman,” I think. I forget what book that was, but that was my assistant. Dick could barely write his own name, much less write a comic book. [audience laughs] THOMAS: So are there any questions anybody has about Charlton?... Yes, in the back first? MALE FAN #1: Charlton had those very weird covers. They were printed on inferior cover stock, and I’ve heard they were printed with machines that were used to print cereal boxes…. [Thomas repeats and reinterprets the fan’s question to Giordano] GIORDANO: Oh, the Charlton cover stock? Everything that Charlton printed was done for the cheapest amount of money they could spend. And yes, all of the stock looked bad. The interior stock was not as good as our competitors’. THOMAS: I’ve got a question… about Charlton’s really awful lettering. [to Skeates] You had it, too. SKEATES: Oh, yeah. “A. Machine.”

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

The “I’s” Have It! (Right:) Dick’s description below of the workings of the lettering device which sometimes received a byline as “A. Machine” must be read to be believed! This panel from Son of Vulcan #50 illustrates his point about the problems posed by the contraption’s rendering of the letter “I,” which, because it lacked horizontal bars at top and bottom, left way too much “air” before and after it, as per the spacing in the words “it” and “time.” And yet—“A. Machine” definitely did possess a “barred I,” which Son of Vulcan uses as a personal pronoun; in fact, that version was sometime employed when a word beginning with an “I” led off a sentence, as with the word “It’ll” in the lady’s tirade. So why didn’t “A. Machine” simply use that “I” character all the time? Alas, we can only guess at that minor mystery…. [© 2011 DC Comics.]

THOMAS: Yeah, it was a machine. [to Giordano] What was “A. Machine”? GIORDANO: That was somebody else’s idea, but my wife [Marie] was “A. Machine.” What it was—it was a big typewriter with a big head so that you could put a 12-inch page into it, because in those days, the pages were twelve-by-eighteen. What I did—actually, in a way, they’re doing it now, but [we did it] very clumsily—Charlton had somebody who had a metal font, and they made metal pieces for the typewriter. And what happened, really, was that I got the typewriter in my house, Charlton had paid for it, and my wife sat there, typing the balloons and the captions. THOMAS: Oh, so she did that! GIORDANO: And sometimes, yeah, we’d get a little extra income, too. MALE FAN #2: So you actually put the original pages through this thing? [Thomas relays the question to Giordano] GIORDANO: Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! [audience laughs] This is all before computers. THOMAS: Did they curl through, or did they go straight? GIORDANO: They curled up, just like on a typewriter. The board was fed in this way. [mimics feeding a sheet of paper into a typewriter]

Blessed Are The Peacemakers (Above:) The Peacemaker gets downright warlike in issue #2 (May 1967), drawn by artist/co-creator Pat Boyette! Script by Joe Gill. Thanks to Mike Nielsen. [© 2011 DC Comics.] The photo of Boyette (left) appeared, along with a brief bio, in The Peacemaker, Vol. 3, #1 (March 1967)—while the pic of ubiquitous Charlton scripter Gill was originally spotlighted in Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Artist [Vol. 1] #9 back in 2000. Thanks to Michael Ambrose for the Boyette photo scan.

The Silver Age of Charlton

THOMAS: That’s even weirder than I thought! GIORDANO: The biggest problem that you had with the typewriter thing was with spacing. They had a half-space, but nobody wanted to bother with it. If you typed “H-IT,” there is a lot of space between the letters. If you find the books and go back—

GIORDANO: Pat Boyette. Yeah, a lot of good people. Pat Boyette was one of my— “Children of Doom,” I think, was his breakaway story. [someone in the audience shouts, “It was a good

THOMAS: Because “A. Machine” didn’t have the horizontal lines at the top and bottom of the “I,” it looked almost like three words: “H I T.” GIORDANO: We couldn’t get any typist to use the halfbackspace to try to close up the gap between an “H” and the “I.” Today, you can run anything you want on a computer and it looks good. Even the balloons can get done on a computer and it looks great. But in those days, it looked pretty shabby. MALE FAN #3: What about Peacemaker? Did you or Steve or Mr. Giordano have any plans for him? THOMAS: [to Skeates] Did you ever write Peacemaker? SKEATES: No, I never did. Denny, I think, might have done one. THOMAS: [to Giordano] You remember Peacemaker… “The Man Who Loves Peace So Much, He’ll Fight for It”? [audience laughs] GIORDANO: Okay, that was a pretty dumb line that I never should have let go through. [audience groans] THOMAS: But we still remember it, decades later! GIORDANO: Joe Gill was our staff writer, and we had a commitment to Joe from the time he came on board to have him do—you ready for this?—a hundred pages a week. [audience whistles and chuckles] There was no plotting; he would stare at his typewriter and his foot would be going like this. [taps right leg swiftly] At that point, he was an alcoholic, and he was writing a hundred pages a week at $4 a page. Nobody in the place was making $400 a week except Joe Gill. It really is amazing. You can complain about the quality level of the work, but without a plot, nothing written down ahead of time, he would sit down, put a piece of paper in his typewriter, his foot would start shaking, and he would type. At the end of the day, there were 30 pages. THOMAS: A lot of his writing was okay. SKEATES: Yeah, it was. GIORDANO: Amazing… and he did that for probably 30 years from the time he was on staff. He was working there when they closed up maybe fifteen years ago, something like that.

story!”] It was printed in black-&-white, which I should have realized in advance, on Charlton paper, was a disaster, because we had show-through. THOMAS: You could read both pages at once! [audience chuckles] GIORDANO: Boyette was a really great guy to work with. He’s an actor, a voice actor. [deepens voice] He had this wonderful deep voice. Talking to him was a lot of fun. He had all kinds of talent. I was lucky that I managed to get a lot of people working for some of the rates that we were doing; they made me look good. Remember, when I Like A Bolt From The Blue—And Red walked into Charlton on The late Pete Morisi a few years ago in that job, I had never had “retirement”—and a figure of his beloved an editorial job in my life. creation Thunderbolt. He always freely admitted that he borrowed much of his style I was an artist. I didn’t from George Tuska—and Peter Cannon’s know how to do it. I color scheme from the original Lev Gleason made it up as I went Daredevil. Thanks to Jon B. Cooke for the along, and I was lucky photo from Comic Book Artist #9. that nobody bothered me [Thunderbolt © 2011 the respective [chuckles] and I was able copyright holders.] to do the kind of things I wanted and collect enough people. THOMAS: I liked Peacemaker’s color scheme—brown and white. That’s a great scheme for a super-hero. [audience chuckles] MALE FAN #4: [obviously someone who’s done pro work] Can you say something about Pete Morisi? He was always one of my favorites. I talked to him once when I was up at Heavy Metal. They wanted me to do this thing for National Lampoon, and I thought, “This is perfect for Pete Morisi.” I called him up, we had a nice talk, and he agreed to do it. But when he got the script, it was a little too risqué for him. He was a policeman, actually. GIORDANO: That’s right; he signed it “P.A.M.” He wasn’t allowed to moonlight. Policemen in New York City weren’t allowed to have another job of any kind. THOMAS: So he was breaking the law, basically.

THOMAS: How did Peacemaker come about under your regime? Joe Gill wrote it. Who was the artist again?

GIORDANO: Yeah. But he really labored over those scripts. The art was fairly simple, and he knew how to do that. But one time we had a discussion on the phone because he just couldn’t get off the ground. And that was “I can, I will, I must,” it was that three-part thing that he had that Peter Cannon would go into to get himself fired up.

SKEATES: Boyette.

THOMAS: To become Thunderbolt.

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

GIORDANO: And he labored over that so badly. And nobody ever knew who he was. They kept asking us, “Who’s P.A.M.?” because he didn’t call himself, “PAM”—it was Pperiod, A-period, M-period.” It could have gotten him in trouble.

A Treasure Chest Triptych A trio of images of Dick Giordano. (L. to r.:) A photo from the inside front cover of Treasure Chest, Vol. 19, #11 (Jan. 31, 1963), taken 2-3 years before Dick became Charlton’s editor, at a time when he was doing a bit of drawing for that long-running Catholic comic book series… Artistic great Reed Crandall’s caricature of Dick (one among several other artists) as a member of an orchestra, done for the cover of that selfsame issue… …and an expressive “screen capture” from the Burrs’ DVD of the 2009 Charlton panel;

courtesy of Donnie Pitchford & Michael Ambrose. [Art © 2011 the respective copyright holders.] SKEATES: Well, I worked with him on his Western stuff, and so at least each other. [audience laughs] Oh, yeah, there’s no question about it. Pete he didn’t have to write that, because I was scripting that. He would make was a junior version of Tuska… but I think he enjoyed the work. He had a changes in my scripts to make it a little more—what?—acceptable, I really dull job in the Police Department. He was in Communications— guess… a little less dark. talking to people on the radio. As a matter of fact, he must have been sitting there for 20 years, but he kept getting wider and wider as he went GIORDANO: I loved all the stuff he did before Thunderbolt. Not that I along. It didn’t affect his work, though. didn’t like Thunderbolt; it’s just that it was such a heart-wrenching thing for him. But he did Johnny Dynamite before that, a private eye with an THOMAS: What’s really strange is that DC owns the 20-page origin of eyepatch. And he did a ton of Westerns, and he did all kinds of things. I Thunderbolt that Morisi wrote and drew a couple of decades ago. They was delighted to have him on board. And I felt bad for him because it paid for it but never published it. Even when I was doing things in Alter bothered him so much, emotionally. It worked out, I guess. He’s gone now. Ego about the Secret Origins series, they wouldn’t give me permission to print any of it. It’d be kind of nice to see it—maybe they’ll put it in some THOMAS: Yeah, just in the last few years. But he’s the person, isn’t he, future collection. who called up George Tuska and asked, “Is it okay if I borrow your style?”

GIORDANO: George Tuska and I are both deaf. We have fun talking to

GIORDANO: I kind of lost Pete’s friendship. If any of you were following DC’s version, we did a Thunderbolt at DC after we had purchased the properties from Charlton. I talked to everyone in my marketing department, and they said, “We’ll never be able to sell Thunderbolt by Pete Morisi.” I’m not sure why they felt that way, but they did. So we came up with a brand new concept, had somebody else write it and draw it. We convinced Pete to go along with it. He got paid substantially for giving us the go-ahead, but it was a failure. He was very unhappy with what we did with the property, and it was a failure financially. Anyway, the idea that we had evidently wasn’t any more appealing than Thunderbolt by Pete Morisi. That was probably the last time I talked to him. We made the deal, which said that Thunderbolt would revert to him if we didn’t go ahead and continue publishing it, so he got the property back. I don’t know if he ever did anything with it, but it belonged to him at the end. THOMAS: Where were you when Charlton was flooded back in the 1950s? Were you up there?

The Parting Of The Waters When this photo of the aftermath of the flood that devastated the Derby, Connecticut, area in the aftermath of Hurricane Diane in 1955 was run in Comic Book Artist #9, editor Jon B. Cooke quoted the publication Newsdealer about the damage done to Charlton Press: “Plant is wrecked as receding waters leaves presses and equipment covered with mud, slime, debris. Paper rolls were total loss.” [Photo © 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

GIORDANO: Oh, yeah. I was in the flood. I walked out in water up to here. [indicates his chest] The parking lot was below street level. That was ’55, ’56, something like that. The last people who got out of the building were up on the roof, and a helicopter brought them out. What it was, Derby [Connecticut] was part of three towns, I think, that was called “the Valley.” Naugatuck County? FEMALE FAN: Yeah, the “Lower.” GIORDANO: Yeah, the river was right next to Charlton, a hundred yards

The Silver Age of Charlton

Do Do That Judo That You Do To Me! Frank McLaughlin, writer/artist/cocreator of Judomaster—flanked by a page from Judomaster #97 (Oct. 1967), and the cover of White Viper #1 (1997), which he inked over Dick Giordano pencils. The former art was supplied by Charlton Spotlight editor/publisher Michael Ambrose, who believes it may have been inked by Giordano; the World War II hero is shown boxing rather than utilizing his trademarked skills. The McLaughlin photo and White Viper image were sent by Michael Dunne, courtesy of the First Comics News website. [Judomaster page © 2011 DC Comics; White Viper cover © 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

away, maybe, and a dam broke upstream in heavy rain and it came down and flooded Charlton to the degree that there was a watermark in the factory 17 feet high. And, like dummies, we went back there to try to clean up the mess. We had to get a shot, first, before we were allowed to go in, because of the possibility of getting sick. And I was wearing hip boots. Try and envision a factory with that 17-foot wall of water, and the factory contains tons of paper. It was like papîer-maché. [imitates walking through sludge] We cleaned out the place, went back to work two months later without pay. Funny how it is. I was pretty stupid. Found out a couple of years later that John Santangelo, the owner, was insured and it didn’t cost him a penny. [audience groans] I never got paid for it. I did it for two days, and I said, “What am I? Crazy?” I was coming from New York to go to Connecticut on my own nickel to do the work. THOMAS: Jack Cole wasn’t working there any more by that time, was he? [to audience] The creator of “Plastic Man” worked briefly at Charlton in the ’50s. GIORDANO: “Plastic Man”? Not while I was there. THOMAS: Maybe it was a couple years earlier. The thing I remember with Charlton is that, if the place hadn’t gotten flooded, we’d have had an awful lot more left-over 1950s Fawcett artwork printed by Charlton. Unfortunately, it all got ruined in the flood. So all of a sudden, all the stuff they were printing of Lash LaRue and Nyoka the Jungle Girl, all those comics—they no longer had all this artwork Fawcett had sold to them. So those books all stopped. GIORDANO: What happened after the [Superman/Captain Marvel] court case—at the end of it, Fawcett closed up shop, and most of the properties—the not very good properties— The Golden Age Of Comic Phantom were absorbed by Even after Aparo began working for DC, he held on to one assignment at Charlton: Don Winslow Charlton, perhaps because it starred a seminal costumed hero. This splash of the Navy, and a from The Phantom #31 (April 1969) was edited by Sal Gentile, and scripted couple other things that by veteran Dick Wood. [© 2011 King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

they had, including a few romance books. Sweethearts, I think, was one of them. So Charlton got, along with the rights to those titles, stacks of artwork, and put me out of business for a while because they had enough artwork….

Nothing Will Ever Be The “Thane” After “Thane of Bagarth” artist Jim Aparo began doing work for Dick Giordano at DC, new Charlton editor Sal Gentile gave the assignment to Sanho Kim. Writer/co-creator Steve Skeates didn’t feel Kim’s work was appropriate to the strip, whatever its artistic worth. Thanks to Michael Ambrose. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

THOMAS: That’s why you blew up the dam! [audience laughs] Another question? MALE FAN #5: The second part of the question is why, a year later, there was a Mysterious Suspense with “The Question” and a final issue of Blue Beetle. I’m assuming that was inventory.

would have cost $10,000? They weren’t going to pay $10,000 on 30-40 titles, so I’m not even sure those were copyrighted at all or not. Paul [Levitz, publisher of DC] got them for a very, very low rate moneywise. And right up until the time they were closing the doors, we were sending royalty checks out to Charlton. Every time we used one of the characters in a book of a certain length, or if the book was titled after the character, we figured at a higher rate. We kept sending out checks, but they were very, very low compared to what we were paying for new stuff.

GIORDANO: Stupid. Stupidity had a role in that. [audience titters] THOMAS: Not in finally printing the stories. MALE FAN #5: When I was a kid in high school, I loved the books. And all of a sudden, they disappeared. GIORDANO: What happened was, because our marketing department at Charlton was not active in promoting the Action Hero line, the sales were low, and that was my real main reason for leaving there. I felt like I had worked very hard on that line and it wasn’t being backed up by anything. When I left, I don’t think they cared much, so after I left in ’67, something like that, they just cancelled the whole line. Sal Gentile [pronounced “genTILL-ee”] was the editor, my replacement at the time, and Sal was a very sweet guy but wasn’t very aggressive, and I guess he didn’t work hard enough to keep things going. But they finally sold those properties to DC. You know, I found out later—and this may have applied to the Action Hero line as well—they did not copyright most of their stuff or trademark most of the properties that they were publishing. They didn’t bother; it cost too much money. Did you know that, at that time, a trademark, worldwide,

THOMAS: [to Skeates] You worked for Sal Gentile for a while. I was going to see how the transition from working for Dick Giordano was from him. Would you have continued working for Charlton after you started working for Dick at DC? SKEATES: Yeah, yeah. I didn’t want to give up “Thane of Bagarth” or the Abbott and Costello stuff, so I kept doing those books and, I think, Dr. Graves, and things like that. I liked Sal Gentile and found him to be a very friendly and nice human being, but I disagreed with just about all of his editorial decisions, so it put me in a strange place. Ultimately, I just stopped working for Charlton and concentrated on DC. But for a while there, I was still enjoying a lot of what I had been doing and wanted to continue doing it, until certain editorial decisions made me change my mind. But yeah, I liked the guy. THOMAS: Wasn’t he the

All You Need Is Dove (Left:) Steve Ditko (seen in 1960s photo taken by studio-mate Eric Stanton) was credited as giving “plot suggestions” to writer Steve Skeates for the debut of “The Hawk and the Dove” in Showcase #75 (June 1968), but took over the scripting himself as the series got its own title. (Right:) Ditko was succeeded on The Hawk and The Dove by Gil Kane (photo), who also wrote and drew an issue or two—before the scripting reins were returned to Skeates with #4 (Feb.-March 1969). The Kane photo was used in material to promote his Star Hawks newspaper comic strip. [H&D © 2011 DC Comics.]

The Silver Age of Charlton

one that put the Japanese artist on your swordand-sorcery hero, “Thane”? SKEATES: Yeah, Sanho Kim.

S.A.G. Under The Sea Artist Jim Aparo and writer Steve Skeates caricature themselves as sea-bottom working stiffs in these panels from Aquaman #50 (MayJune 1970). Note mention of their slave-driving boss, “Dikk”! Thanks to Jon B. Cooke. [© 2011 DC Comics.]

THOMAS: All of a sudden, there was a “slight” switch in art style from Jim Aparo, even though Kim was a good artist. SKEATES: Yeah, yeah, that was one of the decisions that I didn’t like. But Jim could no longer do it. He had a lot of stuff he was doing over at DC by then, and I just didn’t like that choice. Kim’s art just didn’t seem to fit the character much, so that’s one of the things I started losing faith in continuing there. Also, a change in artist in Abbott and Costello and a different letterer on Abbott and Costello who’d often do the punchline first and then the setup line. [audience chuckles] Boom! THOMAS: They’d gotten away by that time from “A. Machine” at least, slowly. SKEATES: Yeah, right, yeah. THOMAS: [to Giordano] But how did you get rid of “A. Machine?” Because your Action Hero books didn’t use “A. Machine” much. You got away from that. GIORDANO: Oh, yeah, we did. Not all of a sudden. All of the books had backup stories. THOMAS: But in the lead stories, you were getting away from it. GIORDANO: I remember we were using it on “The Question,” mostly because Steve was doing nine-panel pages, and we had to try to fit things into a very narrow area. That was easier to do on a machine than real lettering. Jon D’Agostino was the staff letterer. He stutters very badly, but he’s a great letterer. He was our Gaspar Saladino when you wanted it done, and a lot of the hand lettering he did. Well, he couldn’t do 17 books a month; nobody could. Turning a moment to Aquaman, [indicates Steve] that was his shining

moment, in my humble opinion, at DC. We never worked really hard at it. We got together once every three or four months. Jim Aparo didn’t like to come into the city. He lived in Connecticut. We’d get together and talk over a couple of ideas, [indicates Steve] he’d go ahead and write them, I’d send them to Jim; he’d go over them. I think Steve used to get a little nervous because I’d just stare at the copy. Of course Steve likes to write this much [holds his hands wide apart] when he only has space for this much. [moves hands closely together; audience chuckles again] Steve pointed out I’d made a serious blunder one time. I don’t remember what it was— SKEATES: Me, neither, actually. GIORDANO: But basically, all I was doing was cutting. I wasn’t rewriting; I was just cutting out some of his stuff. But I thought those books did very well. I was not told that they did very well until Paul Levitz came across [retired DC copublisher] Jack Liebowitz’s handwritten notes. We found out that the sales on Aquaman were skyhigh. They were much better than we were told at that time. There was no glory, because you wouldn’t have gotten any royalties, but it was a relief for me to find

When More Than Mortgages Were Underwater… Jim Aparo and two panels of his from Aquaman #50 (March-April 1970), as written by Steve Skeates and edited by Dick Giordano. Photo courtesy of Ed Fields; thanks to Bob Bailey for the art scan. [Aquaman panels © 2011 DC Comics.]

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

out that people took after that book and enjoyed it.

morning and found out he didn’t have a job any more. [audience chuckles and groans] He only had 48% and Liebowitz had 52. Liebowitz sold the company out from under him, and all of a sudden, he’s gone. That’s when I started working for Carmine [Infantino]. They made Carmine president because they didn’t know who else could do it. Carmine was just the art director, but he was the executive of rank at that time. [pause] That’s when he and I started having trouble. [laughs]

SKEATES: Yeah, that was nice to know. GIORDANO: The best work that you guys did there. [Dick and audience applaud] SKEATES: Thank you. THOMAS: [grins at Skeates] You waited forty years for that. SKEATES: [grins] Yeah!

THOMAS: We got a little off Charlton, but that’s all right, because somehow there was a direct line, I think, running from Charlton to Aquaman and the work you did at DC, because it was the same editor and writer and even artist in some of these books, and Denny worked for both companies, and so did Ditko. [to Steve] I keep forgetting whether it was you or Denny that stomped out of a meeting with Ditko once— because Ditko, the artist of The Hawk and The Dove, said something about the March on Washington and—

THOMAS: Any other questions, in the ten or so minutes we have? MALE FAN #6: Why would they not let them know that the books were selling well? [Roy relays the question to Giordano] GIORDANO: Well, I don’t want to get into the full story behind it because it involves personalities, but someone in charge wasn’t really enamored of all of the things that I did and didn’t want to encourage me to do anything they didn’t like. It had nothing to do with the reader. Look, we didn’t get sales reports at DC. We had a piece of corkboard in front of our desks, and they would put the covers on there. And somebody deep in the nighttime would come in, turn the cover over, and give you a percentage of sales. Okay, 43%, but 43% of a 500 to-print order is different than 43% of a 100 to-print order, so we didn’t know how many copies sold; we just knew what percentage of the print order sold. I never got the full report the whole time I was at DC, until I went back in 1980 and Paul showed me the personal books of Jack Liebowitz with the real numbers and what the books sold. That’s when I found out that Aquaman sold very well.

SKEATES: It was Denny.

Children Of Charlton Denny O’Neil (as “Sergius O’Shaughnessy”) wrote the critically acclaimed post-Apocalypse story “Children of Doom” for Charlton Premiere, Vol. 2, #1 (Nov. 1967); art by Pat Boyette. The photo shows three major sharks from Charlton’s talent pool together on a panel at a 1966 or ’67 New York comics convention. (L. to r.:) Denny O’Neil, Steve Skeates, and Dick Giordano. When Dick moved over to DC, he gave work there to both writers. Thanks to John Schwirian. [CP page © 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

THOMAS: And if there’s one thing to be sure of, it was that Jack Liebowitz knew how well those books sold, because that’s the one thing he lived for, those numbers. He was an accountant by trade. GIORDANO: Oh, yes. Jack Liebowitz was an amazing man. He died recently at 101 or something like that, and he kept his fingers in it until Kinney National bought us out and Jack Liebowitz went on the board and we never saw him again. [looks at Roy] Harry’s son— THOMAS: Irwin Donenfeld? GIORDANO: —Irwin Donenfeld, who was kind of a partygoer, sold a percentage of his stock to Jack Liebowitz. Then he came in Monday

THOMAS: Yeah. The way I heard it, Ditko said they all should have been shot. [audience chuckles] And Denny said, “Well, I was in that march,” and he walked out. But it was the same team, and it was a bunch of wild and crazy guys, but they produced a lot of good work, first at Charlton, then at DC. And at DC, they reached a lot more people with The Hawk and The Dove and Aquaman. I liked those books. [to Steve] That’s why I had you do a Sub-Mariner later, so you could wind up any old Aquaman storylines. [audience laughs] Never throw anything away. I think you used Aquaman stories in about five companies, didn’t you, and everything else? For Warren— SKEATES: Yes, Warren [Publishing]. MALE FAN #7: [unintelligible question about the one-shot

“Children of Doom”] THOMAS: Dick, he’s saying “Children of Doom”—wasn’t that Denny? SKEATES: That was Denny. THOMAS: As “Sergius O’Shaugnessy,” “The Children of Doom”—who was the artist? MALE FAN #7: Pat Boyette.

The Silver Age of Charlton

The Gift That Keeps On Giving Dick Giordano says DC publisher Paul Levitz (photo on p. 28) purchased Charlton’s Action Heroes as a “gift” for Dick to play with when he was the company’s managing editor in the 1980s. One significant outcome was the work Giordano mentions by writer Denny O’Neil and artists Denys Cowan & Malcolm Jones III on The Question, as per this scan of original art from #30 (Sept. ’89), sent by Kelly Langston-Smith— And it was writer Alan Moore’s offbeat notion for an approach to utilizing the newly acquired Charlton heroes that metamorphosed, in concert with artist Dave Gibbons and under Dick as managing editor, into Watchmen, one of the premier comics publishing events of the 1980s. [© 2011 DC Comics.]

GIORDANO: “Children of Doom”? We talked about it being in black-&white before the art started, so Pat Boyette did the artwork so that it would have some substance in black-&-white. Very often, you put a coloring book line around it, put the color on it to fix it. But I don’t remember anything else. I think that was one of Denny’s stand-out stories, a breakout story for him. He got a lot of attention after that, as well as Pat, and it was fun. THOMAS: Did Denny get any attention when he “swiped” Harlan Ellison in one Charlton book? He was clearly inspired in one story by Ellison’s short story “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Tick-Tock Man.” I was wondering if Harlan complained about that. The hero was some jester character. GIORDANO: I hadn’t read “Tick-Tock Man” before that, but I’ve read it since. I didn’t feel any similarities.

the Charlton characters. [Thomas relays the question to Giordano] GIORDANO: Actually, it was bought as a gift for me. I was in a conference room one day; I don’t remember who I was talking to or what about. Paul Levitz opens the door and says, “I just bought you the Charlton characters. Have fun.” [imitates a door closing; audience laughs] At the time, I didn’t continue with the conference, obviously flabbergasted, and then I started thinking about what could we do. And later, as they pointed out, Alan Moore came up with something. I said, “Don’t do that.” He killed off the Peter Cannon character in this plot in the first five pages. [We’re told it was actually the Peacemaker equivalent who was murdered at the start of Watchmen.] THOMAS: The Comedian, yeah.

GIORDANO: Yeah. And Paul Levitz said nothing to me while he was negotiating with Charlton, so I had no idea it THOMAS: [to audience] Does anybody know where the was in the works until he opened the door and said to me, “By the way….” But it was fun. I never got to do anything name “Sergius O’Shaugnessy” came from? Some of you with them, really. I think Denny O’Neil did a nice Question probably do. series for a while. There were a few things that came out of it SKEATES: Norman Mailer. that were good, yeah, but it was all not inspired by me. Somebody else came up with the ideas. I had a lot of good THOMAS: Norman Mailer, in his novel Deer Park. That was editors; I was lucky. I didn’t have to work anywhere nearly as [© 2011 DC Comics.] one of his characters, so Denny used that in order to disguise hard at DC as I did at Charlton. And you may not know that his name. this is important, but I had so much support at DC. I had a production department that knew what they were working with, I had a marketing SKEATES: Yeah. According to Denny, he was going for some other department that pretty much knew what they were doing, so I didn’t have Mailer character and got it confused. And so it’s not the one he wanted. through all of those things. I went to Chief Cook and Bottle Washer at The Sergius O’Shaugnessy character in Mailer was a little bit seedy, where Charlton. At DC, I just had another desk and did editing work. [audience the one he was shooting for was more heroic. chuckles] FEMALE FAN #2: If you could, talk a little bit about when DC acquired

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

MALE FAN #8: There’s been some allegations that some people who had been at Charlton had been in prison. Is that true? [Thomas relays the question to Giordano] GIORDANO: Well, Charlton [cofounder] John Santangelo was an Italian. A lot of people that there were connected, I think. Well, the funny thing there is, because of all of those rumors, Denny started one that I was Mafia. [audience laughs uproariously] It was a joke, but people believed it. THOMAS: But didn’t the two guys that started it actually meet in prison? I don’t know if it’s true…. GIORDANO: Well, there were some illegal activities, but not the kind that you’d normally associate with Mafia activities. John Santangelo spent some time in jail because he was lifting copyrighted lyrics. He got his start with the music line, and his wife—at that time, his fiancée— complained that in order to get the lyrics to the newest songs, you had to buy the whole sheet music. So he said, “Well, simple—we’ll just take the lyrics, put the sheet music aside, and publish those.” It was called Hit Parader. He made a fortune on it, but he went to jail. [audience chuckles] And when he came back, he sort of started expanding the line, but all of the things he did were a little off-color. For example, we had crossword magazines that were done by prisoners. [audience chuckles] He made a deal with the prison system to get them to work for $5 a crossword puzzle. THOMAS: I guess they had enough license plates, so they put them on the crossword puzzles or something like that. [audience chuckles] GIORDANO: And the name “Charlton” comes either from one of two things— that John and his partner, Ed Levy, had children called “Charles.” Charles Santangelo eventually took over the company. The other story is that they had their original publishing venture on Charlton Street in New York. I don’t know which one was true.

Still Active After All These Years At top is a great Charlton “Action Heroes” house ad, doubtless written in typically self-deprecating style by Giordano himself. (Hey, they were a lot better than half good, kids!) At right is repro of the DC Archive Edition (sporting Ditko-drawn caharacters) reprinting several of the fondly-recalled titles. [© 2011 DC Comics.]

THOMAS: One of the things I heard is that—well, when DC brought back Captain Marvel and some of the Fawcett characters, they called it “Fawcett City.” It was the equivalent of Gotham City and Metropolis. And somebody, at one stage, wanted to call the city with all the Charlton characters “Charlton City,” and supposedly DC wouldn’t let them. And I was wondering if it was because of those unsavory connotations. GIORDANO: If you’re his age and of Italian descent with an accent in this country, the rumor is bound to start, one way or another. It can’t be avoided. I know he did no evil thing, but I don’t know if he was really connected in that way. He used to make trips to Italy regularly and come back with people who spoke no English and put them to work for three cents an hour or something like that. [audience chuckles] I don’t know if that was legal or not. It’s certainly not legal today, but it wasn’t illegal back then. He was a bricklayer by trade, and he added a building to the Charlton factory. Guess who was out there laying bricks out with the laborers. John Santangelo. That was the Capitol Building, remember? And he was out there laying bricks like everybody else. So he had lots of colorful stories. He was a gambler, Joe Gill was a gambler, and he used to try to win Joe’s salary back. He didn’t like paying him $400. [audience laughs] So Friday afternoon, they’d go down to the cafeteria and start playing cards, and they played until Joe lost his salary. [Dick laughs, audience sighs with sympathy] MALE FAN #9: When DC acquired the Charlton characters, like you said, the Denny O’Neil Question run was wonderful. How do you think they handled the rest of the characters? Good? Bad? [Thomas relays the question to Giordano] GIORDANO: I think they were largely ignored. I mean, they took my character, Sarge Steel, and turned him into, I don’t know, the head of an agency like the CIA. And he’s still there, as far as I know. Editors of the sort that we have at DC are a strange breed, in that, if it isn’t their idea, they don’t want to hear about it. They basically would ignore orders sometimes: “I want this kind of book.” [audience chuckles] They didn’t say no to me; they just wouldn’t do it. Len Wein sat on The Killing Joke for two years because he said, “This isn’t Batman.” [audience chuckles] That was my daily battle, trying to get all the editors

The Silver Age of Charlton

The Hit Man of Derby, Connecticut Charlton Press founder John Santangelo made his early fortune by publishing Hit Parader, a magazine that featured lyrics of popular songs of the day, though initially publishing them without the permission of the copyright holders, a brazen act landing Santangelo in the pokey for a spell. Charlton was always whispered to be mob-connected, well into its comics-publishing years, and rumors that its presses ran off early editions of the semi-porn magazine Hustler back in the ’70s didn’t help matters! Here’s a triptych of ’40s and ’50s Hit Parader covers. [© 2011 the respective copyright holder.]

walking in the same direction so we could meet whatever goals we had. I set the goals; they were never accomplished. MALE FAN #9: I thought they were such great characters, and that’s the way I kind of felt, that they really didn’t make the most [of them] that they could have. GIORDANO: [to Thomas] I didn’t get all of that. Did you? THOMAS: No, he’s just saying nice things about you. You don’t need to know this. [audience laughs] MALE FAN #10: I was kind of curious as to whether or not there was any effort made to get Ditko on board when you brought back Blue Beetle and Captain Atom [at DC]. [Thomas relays the question] GIORDANO: Well, he was already on board. But he wasn’t working on staff when we did those books at Charlton. He was back in New York by then. Steve came up when he was working on staff, he would come home on Monday, work for a week, stay in a hotel, and then go home on Friday. We started working on “Blue Beetle,” and most of the ideas were his; “The Question,” likewise, was his idea. He was trying to come up with things that hadn’t been done before—like The Question’s mask, which couldn’t be taken off. Batman’s mask can be taken off; The Question’s mask can’t be taken off. He came up with all those ideas and he made those things work, and from that point on he worked out of his studio in New York, which is about the size of this table. [audience chuckles] MALE FAN #10: I’m wondering if he had a reluctance to return to the characters as he did with the Marvel characters, where he’d never do “Spider-Man” or “Doctor Strange” again. When the Charlton characters came to DC, did he say, “No, I’m not going to do ‘Blue Beetle,’ I don’t want to do ‘Captain Atom’”? [after Thomas relays the question:] GIORDANO: We were negotiating with Steve to do something else for us, and I think it was one of those—to come back after he had left—and the negotiations fell apart because he wanted a specific writer who I believe shared his philosophical views, and we said, “We’re sorry, we can’t

do that. We’d like to hire [unintelligible] and we don’t want to hire that writer.” And then somebody told me that he was ready to talk again, and

Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, & Roy Thomas At Heroes Con 2009

Three For The Road We’ll end this panel transcription with a “screen capture” from the Burrs’ DVD of that 2009 panel, with thanks again to Donnie Pitchford and Michael Ambrose— and with examples of the featured threesome’s Silver Age Charlton work: Steve Skeates: Before their watery reign on Aquaman at DC, he and artist Jim Aparo teamed up under editor Giordano for numerous moody tales in The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves—including this one from #7 (July 1968). [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.] Roy Thomas: An Egyptological panel from his second-ever script sale, for Blue Beetle #54 (Feb.-March 1966). Pencils by Bill Fraccio; inks by Tony Tallarico. [© 2011 DC Comics.] Dick Giordano: Another “action hero” panel from Sarge Steel #4 (July 1965), with Sarge’s iron grip coming into play. Script by Joe Gill. [© 2011 DC Comics.]

he came back in. And after going through all of the preliminaries, he still thought we were going to use that writer, and that blew it apart. That’s the last time I really saw Steve on a business standpoint. I’ve seen him personally since then. I won’t mention the writer’s name, because you’ll probably know who it is.

when I moved over to DC. [audience chuckles]

THOMAS: Steve, we haven’t heard as much from you as we could. Is there anything you’d like to say about Charlton and your experience in working for Charlton before we dismiss? You worked there as a writer for a number of years, off and on.

And so it was just the freedom to be really creative. But as you were talking about Joe Gill sitting down without a plot—I did sort of the same thing. I’d have sort of a plot idea in my head, and then quite often the story would take a turn as I was typing. And often, I’d suddenly find myself writing an entirely different story and think it was much better and just keep going with it, and it was an exciting creative process, which I missed at the other companies. I think that’s why I look back so fondly on Charlton, because they allowed me to really be creative.

SKEATES: I liked the freedom they gave me, and we’ve been talking about the freedom that Dick gave me—that I never wrote a plot outline, I don’t think, when I was at Charlton, where I had to learn how to do that

THOMAS: [to audience] Thank you very much for your attention. [audience applauds] Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Dick.

“This Is Really Our Last Chance To Talk About Dick” The San Diego 2010 “Remembering DICK GIORDANO” Tribute Panel Conducted by Mark Evanier • Recorded, Transcribed, & Annotated by Mark DiFruscio

RANSCRIBER’S INTRODUCTION: Over the course of his 50-year career, artist and editor Dick Giordano stood as one of the great cornerstones of the comic book industry, and remained so until the time of his passing at age 77 on March 27, 2010. Widely regarded as the quintessential consummate professional, and loved by many of his colleagues for being both friend and mentor, Giordano’s legacy remains one of the more unique in the annals of comic book history. Spanning the better part of a half-century, that legacy encompassed a multitude of professional roles and creative partnerships at numerous comic book companies, including Charlton, Warren, DC, Continuity, Marvel, Valiant, and Future Comics. Indeed, a listing of Giordano’s various collaborators over the years reads like a veritable Who’s Who of legendary artists, from Adams, Andru, and Aparo to Buscema, Ditko, Infantino, and Rogers—and far too many more to be listed here.

Evanier to await the arrival of the other panelists, and chatted affably with some of the audience members as they filed into their seats. “There’s already been several of these things,” Layton said of the tribute panel to come, “so this is really our last chance to talk about Dick.” When an audience member then playfully called out, “Bring back Future Comics!” Layton responded, “Working on it, actually.” He went on to explain: “There’s that little thing called the iPad now, which is kind of like the new version of Future Comics. It gets rid of distributors and things. I’ve been approached. So I’m optimistic. That would be a fitting tribute for Dicky, as well.”

And, In This Corner… (Top:) The San Diego tribute panelists, left to right: writer Mark Evanier (moderator)—artists Joe Rubinstein & Bob Layton – Dick’s associate/assistant (and 1980s DC talent coordinator) Pat Bastienne— and writer Paul Levitz. Photo taken by and courtesy of Mark DiFruscio.

Once everyone took his/her seat, Evanier began with some opening remarks and then invited his fellow panelists to express their thoughts and appreciation for Giordano. Eventually Evanier welcomed audience members to share their reminiscences as well, prompting fellow professionals Anthony Tollin, John Lustig, Brent Anderson, and Bill Sienkiewicz to offer their heartfelt recollections of Dick Giordano.

In the months since Giordano’s death, numerous memorials have emerged in different forms, prominent among them the tribute panel “Remembering Dick (Above:) Dick Giordano himself, in a Giordano” at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con. The “What’s To Say? If You Knew photo published in the 1980s in program notes described it thus in advance: “A panel of Comics Interview magazine. Photo Him, You Loved Him” comic luminaries and friends… pay tribute to the man courtesy of editor/publisher David who left a huge impact on the world of comics.” TV and MARK EVANIER: How many people here in this Anthony Kraft. comics writer Mark Evanier skillfully presided over the room feel they owe a large chunk of their career to proceedings, joined by writer-editor Paul Levitz, writerDick Giordano? [A number of hands go up around the artist Bob Layton, artist Joe Rubinstein, and Giordano’s longtime assistant room] That’s a lot of people. I’m gonna ask everybody to just talk about Pat Bastienne. what Dick meant to them. I was trying to think of a way to describe what Before the panel began, Layton took his place on the podium with

Dick meant to the industry… and I think I came up with something that I might want to throw out here:

The San Diego 2010 “Remembering Dick Giordano” Tribute Panel

There was a change in how comic books were edited around 1970 in this business. Prior to that, there was this tendency to kind of keep the freelancers as peons. To keep them thinking they were expendable, to think they were always about to be fired. Even the editors that we now look back with a certain amount of respect at were not that nice to the freelancers sometimes. I remember I interviewed George Kashdan, who was the editor that Dick replaced at DC, more or less. And one of the reasons he gave for why he was let go at DC was they felt he was too nice to the freelancers, and that he kept encouraging them to ask for more money by making them feel they had value. Well, there are exceptions to this, obviously—we can all name many—but typically, today editors work with the talent more. And it always struck me that Dick was kind of the bridge between the old way of doing comics and the new way of doing comics. The first time he went to DC, he didn’t quite fit in there because they weren’t yet fully ready to turn loose of that old way of [doing things]. And he also had some clashes with the management there…. By the time that he came back to DC, there was a transition that had gone on in the business. And the business had kind of found its way towards Dick’s way of looking at comics, and Dick’s way of treating new talent, Dick’s way of encouraging new talent and embracing it, and not looking at new people as a threat. I think that Dick may have the world record for having encouraged more new talent and more people to get into the business. Especially early on, at a time when it was kind of like, “Wait a minute, this isn’t your industry, this is our industry.” He was a guy who loved comics his whole life. I think he always identified with readers more than he did with the publishers. The first time I met him, he was so gracious, he was so encouraging to everyone. He talked to everybody that I could see as an equal, even if they were a lowly person who had done nothing in comics. Obviously, at that point, he had been an established editor and a very talented artist. And I also found that he was a very, very nice man. You could go to him, and say to him, “You know, I think your company has screwed up.” And he’d say, “You know, you’re probably right. We have.” A lot of people don’t want to say that in this business. I’d like to just ask each person to stand anywhere they like and tell us what Dick meant to you. And what you think people who didn’t know him should know about him. Joe, I’ll start with you… JOE RUBINSTEIN: What’s to say? If you knew him, you loved him. If you didn’t know him, you’re probably sad you didn’t get to know him. By the way, especially since you were talking about “encouraging” as a world record, I was thinking that if you put all of Dick Giordano’s and Wally Wood’s assistants together, you’d have to have a coliseum for all of them. BOB LAYTON: You’d need bigger than this room. RUBINSTEIN: Oh yeah. Because you were Woody’s assistant, and I was. And you were Dick’s assistant, and I was. He was adorable. When you’re in your teens, it never occurs to you that your parents were anything but your parents. Like, that’s where they started. [Later] you realize that they had a life and a history. And once Dick passed away, I started to think about things… especially when I started to read all of the recollections and obits. When I was 13 years old, I became Dick’s assistant. [And] it suddenly hit me, he was never Mr. Giordano. He was Dick. He never went, “I’m the grown-up, you’re the kid.” I was trying to learn how to be an artist. I was learning how to be an inker. I’d say, “Dick, how do you do this?” And he would stop, on a deadline, and show me. I won’t do that if I’m busy. But Dick would go, “I’m gonna show you how to do this.”

Next Stop—Mount Rushmore! Although, as Mark Evanier notes, Dick Giordano was a well-respected and influential editor—indeed, Michael Eury’s 2003 book about his career, published by TwoMorrows, was subtitled Changing Comics, One Day at a Time—his heart always lay, clearly, with his art. Giordano’s crisp, clean style loaned itself to producing definitive images of many of DC’s major heroes, as indicated by this 2007 commission illo done for collector Arnie Grieves. [Superman & Wonder Woman TM & © 2011 DC Comics.]

He was sweet, he was adorable, he never got mad. He got righteously mad. He didn’t like when people were screwed over…. You never once saw him yell at anybody. I saw him get frustrated once with a writer, who will remain nameless. I walked into Dick’s office when he was editor in chief at DC. I go, “What’s the matter?” He says, “I just talked to [the aforementioned writer]. I have to take a minute. Okay…” So it’s not like he would ever badmouth anybody. It’s not like he would ever say anything to put anybody down. He was just the nicest man you ever met. As I said at his memorial in New York, whenever I saw him, I would usually plant a kiss right on his mouth. And he would fight me— LAYTON: Who wouldn’t? [laughter] RUBINSTEIN: And you’ll never have that experience. [laughter] Because that’s what you do with your father, you know? You hug a fat guy. And he would laugh and he would let me do it. And he just knew that I loved him. Definitely. And I realized you and I loved him. I realized that Klaus [Janson] loved him, Terry [Austin] and Bob Wiacek loved him. I just

“This Is Really Our Last Chance To Talk About Dick”

RUBINSTEIN: That’s it. The philosophy that Dick developed that everybody talks about is, he found good people and he let them do their thing. And that made them do their best. So my first job, I think it was Sol Harrison who said [to Dick], “All right, I’ll give him the job, but you have to watch him.” So I did the job, and I showed it to Dick, and he went, “Yeah it’s fine.” And it’s not that he didn’t care. It’s like, “Yeah, I knew you could do it. There it is. Go hand it in.” [Or] I would be late on a job, and the great Dick Giordano would be there to help me with it: “Yeah, I’ll take five pages.” Most of you probably don’t know the stress of meeting deadlines in comic books. But it’s a lot. It’s homework every night. It never stops. If you’re lucky, it never stops. And then it piles up on you. And you can turn to somebody, a legend, your mentor, and say, “Can you help me?” “Yeah, I’ll take five pages.” LAYTON: You know, one of my proudest days [was] when he asked me to help him out on a deadline. Those two or three pages I had drawn, I was so proud. I mean, oh my God. RUBINSTEIN: Or there was this Conan black-&-white that got late that Dick was inking… and he got all of us, “The Legion of Super-Assistants,” to help him out.

“It Was Dick’s Idea To Do Future Comics”

Mark Of The Professional Mark Evanier has been working in comics since 1970; his scripting credits include Groo the Wanderer, The DNAgents, Crossfire, Scooby Doo, Blackhawk, and lots of characters covered in fur or feathers; he also writes TV animation, live-action TV, books on comic book history (such as Kirby: King of Comics), and a much-read blog at www.newsfromme.com. In the mid-1980s, during the editorial regime of Dick Giordano, he and veteran artist Dan Spiegle produced a critically acclaimed run of Blackhawk, set during the Second World War—as exemplified above by their splash page from issue #267 (Feb. 1984). Photo courtesy of Mark. [© 2011 DC Comics.]

didn’t realize that everybody loved him. Because I didn’t realize that this wonderful, warm way of dealing with the world was the way he dealt with the world. And not just us…. LAYTON: I’ve heard so many fans come to me and talk about, “Dick looked at my paintings. At one time I wanted to be an artist, and he took the time to look at my stuff, even though it was awful. And he’d tell me it was awful. And he would tell me why it was awful.” You know, he would go to the trouble of doing that. That’s one of Dick’s really wonderful qualities. Continue….

LAYTON: It’s gonna be really hard for me. These guys have all done these things before. This is the first time I’ve really appeared in public before to talk about Dick. Like Joe, I knew him when I was a teenager. I met him and Patty [Pat Bastienne] when I was like 19. And I didn’t start out working for Dicky. But what happened was, I was working for Wally Wood. And we lived nearby, and I would ride in on the train. Patty would take me to the train station. And I would deliver pages for Wally Wood and I would catch the train with Dicky. And while I had him, like, captive prisoner for two hours on the way in, I would always be pulling out my stuff and forcing him to give me art lessons, you know. So that’s kind of where our relationship began. But we—Pat and Dick and I—have always been kind of close. I don’t know that I can add to what Joe said in terms of him like as a mentor. He was terrific. He didn’t heap a lot of praise on people. That’s one of the things I kind of liked about Dicky. He wouldn’t sit there and gush when you did a good job. Because you were supposed to do a good job, you know? He didn’t say, “Oh man, you really knocked that one out of the park,” or anything like that. He was just kind of like—if he didn’t look at a page and, you know, say, “That head really sucks,” you know you did okay. I kind of liked that…. One of the things he stressed to me very early in my career was that I should learn every aspect of the business. Not just being an inker, or being a penciler, or being a writer, but, you know, learn how the books are made. Learn how accounting works. You know, talk to those people in accounting. Because you wouldn’t believe how many times I had a check problem. But if you actually know the people in accounting— [Layton points to an audience member] Remember Billy? How many times did Billy save my butt at Marvel, dude? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Every time. LAYTON: Yeah, exactly. I was a screw-up… [laughter] And that was something that he inculcated in me, because he also said the guy who knew how to do everything was a guy that kept working. And so, 35 years later, I’m still working. So I guess he was right. And those lessons were very, very valuable to me when I wound up running Valiant [Comics]. I

The San Diego 2010 “Remembering Dick Giordano” Tribute Panel

think he was very proud of me then. What people don’t know is, we used to secretly meet. When he was running DC, we used to secretly meet in Midtown, when I was running Valiant. We didn’t talk about it because it smelled like collusion. But we used to sit around and compare notes and talk about what each company was doing. It was kind of like a “funtime.” But we kept it on the down-low for the most part. So Dicky prepared me to approach my career as a business and not just as an artist or a writer. And I have a lot of respect for that. Because a lot of guys who have been working in the business a long time still don’t understand how it works. You know, you talk “unit cost” to somebody out there in Artist Alley, and they’re going like, “What?” PAUL LEVITZ: Never heard the phrase. LAYTON: Yeah, never heard the phrase. Exactly. And Dicky was very proud of that. He was a damn good businessman. He was a good negotiator. He understood things. It was Dick’s idea to do Future Comics. Future Comics was an interesting thing for us, because we decided to go independent. But

The Sum Of Its Parts Portraits by artist/inker Joe Rubinstein of himself and Dick Giordano— plus a 1975 Tarzan sketch that Joe penciled and Dick inked. Joe drew the portrait of Dick especially for this issue of Alter Ego, and it is much appreciated. [Tarzan TM & © 2011 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.; other art © 2011 Joe Rubinstein.] Joe emigrated to the U.S. from Israel when he was five and learned to read and draw from comics. In 1971-72 he became assistant to Neal Adams and Dick Giordano at their studio Continuity Associates. He has worked for every major comics company and holds the Guinness world record for having inked more pencilers than any other inker—because of his embellishment, off and on for twenty years, of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

Dicky looked at the numbers, [and] he said, “There’s no way in the world [this] company can really function with Diamond’s cut and the art and editorial costs. If we’re going to start a company, we’re three old farts. How are we going to come off like rebels? We’re gonna come off on the business side. Because, artistically, we’re going to be doing very traditional mainstream comics.” So Dicky actually is the one who came up with the radical approach of bypassing Diamond and doing it direct from the Internet. The unfortunate thing—the reason it didn’t work at the time—we found out that only 50% of retailers in America were actually hooked up to the Internet. I thought you guys were all geeks, you know. But it’s like, they were still operating out of a shoebox for a cash register. That was the one unfortunate aspect. If we did it now, it would probably work. I think I benefited tremendously from Dick’s business acumen, as well as his artistic tutelage. I think that’s something that we don’t hear

“This Is Really Our Last Chance To Talk About Dick”

We Have Seen The Future… Bob Layton at the premiere of the film Iron Man 2—juxtaposed with the Giordano/Layton variant cover of Freemind #1 (Oct. 2002) from Future Comics, the company he and Dick co-founded. Thanks to Bob for the photo. [Future Comics material © 2011 Future Comics.] With writer David Michelinie, artist Bob Layton transformed Marvel’s Invincible Iron Man into a bestselling title in the 1980s; a number of their concepts were utilized in the two Iron Man films. In the 1990s he was editor-in-chief of Valiant Comics. At present he works in Hollywood, developing new properties for movies and television. He has written the graphic novel Colony, which features Dick Giordano’s last comic book work; it will be published in the coming months.

enough about. Because he developed practices—with Paul [Levitz]—developed practices, I think, that the entire industry accepted. I was just commenting to Paul… it’s like from early times you two always had, I think, very liberal and generous creator royalty plans in place. It kind of forced Marvel to follow suit. LEVITZ: Decent. The idea was—it wasn’t generous. It wasn’t liberal. It was decent and right. And yes, it did force everybody else to follow suit. But it just—it was good for everybody. LAYTON: It was good for everybody.

“When The Hell Does A Human Being Ever Do Something Like That?” EVANIER: Pat [Bastienne] was, like, ubiquitous in Dick’s career. I mean, she did everything. Even to the extent— people don’t know she painted backgrounds and did artwork. I don’t know how to describe what Pat did. She was his sidekick, business manager—

were things that happened that he didn’t like…. LAYTON: Didn’t he leave DC Comics originally because he just didn’t like the way people were being treated? BASTIENNE: When he was there the first time, there was somebody else in charge. And it didn’t work out for Dick because, like you say, he didn’t like the way the people in charge treated the artists and writers. And he left. And went out on his own. And then, years later, things changed around, and he went back.

RUBINSTEIN: She was Robin to his Batman. LAYTON: [to Pat] You mentioned you knew Dick since junior high school, right? PAT BASTIENNE: Yeah. I got a job when I was 16 for [what] was then Charlton Publications. A summer job. And Dick lived up the street with his wife and kids from where I lived with my parents. I used to walk to work because I wasn’t old enough to have a car. And Dick used to drive. And after a while, he saw me walking and he stopped to offer me a ride. And that’s how I knew him. He was always there when people needed him. EVANIER: Did you ever see Dick really mad? BASTIENNE: Well… I can’t really say why… EVANIER: In general, what kind of thing would make him mad? BASTIENNE: Injustice. If he saw something that wasn’t right, he knew it wasn’t right, he would get upset, and he would try to make it right. And a couple of times there

LEVITZ: Let me tell a story about when he came back, because I think it’s illustrative. You have Dick the editor. You saw the work product, [without which] we wouldn’t be in this room. What Mark said, I think, is absolutely true. He was a turning-point guy in the way editors should work. A kind of role model of behavior. Not uniquely. But probably as the exemplary one. And certainly the first—the first guy of age, who was wearing a suit—to behave like that. As opposed to someone who was a [burgeoning] rebel. You had Dick the artist, whose commitment to the work was waking up early in the morning so he could do pages before coming in to work. Just because he had to draw every day. If he didn’t draw every day, it wasn’t a

The San Diego 2010 “Remembering Dick Giordano” Tribute Panel

Pat Pending In recent years, Pat Bastienne attended numerous comics conventions with Dick as both assistant and friend. She relates some autobiographical details on the panel. Photo courtesy of John L. Coker III.

day. It didn’t count. But I think an enormous amount about Dick was “Dick the mensch.” He was an extraordinarily decent human being. We’ve talked a little bit already about the fact that he treated everybody as if they were an adult. A lot of my first friendship with Dick began at the comic conventions in Boston when I would drive up there with friends like Marty Pasko and Steve Mitchell. And Dick would walk around in Boston with us for the day. And we were friends, walking around, bull*****ing about comics and what the state of the industry was and what could happen. And if you were reading the written dialogue you’d say, “Oh, you know, this is a bunch of four or five young people wandering around, talking about this stuff that they care about passionately.” But if you turned on the video, all of sudden there’s a guy who’s 45? Maybe at the time 48? Wandering around with a bunch of 18-,19-, 20-year-olds. Treating them as his buddies and equals and peers. And kind of helping us become grownups in the process, in how we looked at it all. And I don’t think I realized as that was going on how ridiculously rare it was. But it was an extraordinarily powerful life-lesson that I’ve tried to live up to. But don’t always.

But the story I want to share, because it’s a rarity: So Dick had left DC in ’70? I guess 1970. Gone freelance. Set up Continuity [Studios] with Neal [Adams]. Done really some exceptional work in terms of becoming the first comic book guys to be seriously accepted in advertising. That was a fairly amazing thing at the time. The comic book look was not considered to be a hot style look. And then he left Continuity for a whole complex set of reasons. Started to set up his own studio, just mostly to ink again. With Patty, Frank McLaughlin, other people, in-and-out, working with him during this period. Did a lot of freelance for me as editorial coordinator when I was trafficking in DC books. Periodically I would call and demand the book be delivered the next day or I would blow up his studio. [chuckles] That wonderful relationship... And then I was getting promoted out of the editorial department to the business side of the company. Because this was when Jenette [Kahn] was starting to have some optimistic plans for what comics could become. And I’m a snotty little 24-year-old or something. And she’s talked the company into spending the money to hire a real editor to take my place on the Batman books. And she knew Dick for years. She’s gonna get Dick [continued on p. 30]

Continuity Counts Paul Levitz (photo, left) speaks of Dick’s leaving his editorial position at DC circa 1969-70 and soon cofounding Continuity Associates with fellow artist Neal Adams. At right we see Dick hard at work at Continuity, in a 1974 photo courtesy of collector Robert Wiener. Starting out as a fan-writer and then becoming one of the famed DC “Junior Woodchucks” of the 1970s, Paul went on to a highly successful writing career which included, especially, a lengthy run on The Legion of SuperHeroes. Besides also serving at times as an editor, he was the company’s publisher for a number of years, and has recently made a triumphant return to scripting Legion. His recent humongous (and very successful) Taschen book 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Myth-Making represents his first major foray as a comics historian.

“This Is Really Our Last Chance To Talk About Dick”

I N T E R L U D E

# 1

Dick Giordano: An Appreciation by Alan Brennert n 1967 I discovered Charlton Comics, and Dick Giordano, in the comics racks of a candy store/soda fountain in North Haledon, New Jersey. Charlton? Who were these guys? I’d never heard of the company, probably because the only place I could find their comics was literally in the next town. But the comic I bought, Blue Beetle #2, had artwork by Steve Ditko, whom I recognized from his work on Spider-Man, and I quickly became a fan of these “action heroes”: Captain Atom, Judomaster, The Peacemaker, Peter Cannon – Thunderbolt, and Blue Beetle. The art had clean lines, the dialog was not copy-heavy— sharper than DC’s, if not as hip as Marvel’s—and there was a quirkiness to both characters and art that appealed to me. I even read Sarge Steel, though my interest in private detective books was almost nil, and that was entirely due to the finely detailed, gritty artwork of Dick Giordano (who also drew very sensuous ladies, also not lost on me as a thirteen-year-old boy).

What’s more, this Giordano guy also appeared to be the editor of the line, and his letter columns were refreshingly candid in admitting his books’ flaws and in actually naming the competition in an honest and respectful way, instead of with the silly names— “Brand X” and “Brand Echh”—that DC and Marvel used to refer to each other. And that signature phrase of his—“Thank you and good afternoon”—just made him seem like a classy guy. Which, I would soon learn firsthand, he was.

and turning Teen Titans into something actually capable of being read by a 1960s teenager. I became a semi-regular letter writer to his DC books and was always thrilled to find my name in his letter columns. And when Martin Pasko and I started our own fanzine, Fantazine, I interviewed Dick for the fourth and final issue. The man was articulate, thoughtful, and discreetly demurred from telling tales on anyone he worked with—truly, a classy guy. Fade out, fade in ten years later, when I’m informed by my old friend Paul Levitz that my first comics script (for Detective Comics #500) would be illustrated by Dick Giordano. Pretty heady to have the guy who drew “No Hope in Crime Alley,” one of the modern classic “Batman” stories, illustrate my first time out, and Dick did a superb job. But I considered that script a oneoff, something of a lark in between my television assignments... until, not long after, I got a call from Dick, who’d just become editor of The Brave and the Bold and wanted to know if I’d like to write some stories for him.

I wrote three issues of B&B for Dick, and it was no coincidence that the first two Batman team-ups Going Batty—One Day At A Time I did were with The Creeper and Though Dick was noted for his inking of Neal Adams and Irv Novick on The Hawk and The Dove. Working “Batman” yarns, he could also wield a mean and moody pencil—as with Dick and artist Jim Aparo on witness this page of all-Giordano art from the story “To Kill a Legend” two Ditko-created features was the in the giant-size Detective Comics #500 (March 1981). Script by Alan closest I could come to working for Brennert, one of Dick’s favorite comics writers. Thanks to Alan for the Charlton in its all-too-brief heyday. scan of the original art. [Page © 2011 DC Comics.] Dick did not object when I aged Alan writes: “This page really highlights what was so great about Dick’s The Hawk and Dove out of synch work—it features a Phantom Stranger faithful to, yet distinct from, Jim with the rest of the DC universe in Aparo’s definitive version of the character; panel 4 gives us Dick’s order to tell a better story; he let me perfect yet subtly updated take on Bob Kane’s cover to Detective #27; do as I saw fit. Much has been and the cameo of the Earth-One Batman in the same panel looks Not everything Dick did at written of Dick’s knowing when to as if it might have been inspired by the classic Carmine Infantino/ Charlton was an artistic success, leave his artists and writers alone to Murphy Anderson pose of the ‘New Look’ Batman…. In one third-of-a-page panel he evokes the two most iconic Golden but an astonishing amount of it do their best (while still gently and Silver Age Batman artists, and does it effortlessly.” stands up today, notably Ditko’s guiding them), but there’s more to “Question” stories and the brilliant it than that. Dick inspired the best science-fiction piece “Children of Doom,” written by Denny O’Neil and from the people who worked for him simply by virtue of who he was drawn by the especially quirky (and masterful) Pat Boyette. and the work he’d done, both as editor and artist. We all wanted to live up to the standard he set. I know I did. But Charlton’s Action Heroes were over, it seemed, almost before they began, and next thing I knew Giordano was at DC, editing equally I never worked with Dick as an editor again, at least not directly, but distinctive titles like Beware The Creeper and The Hawk and The Dove, I did have the good fortune to have him illustrate one more of my

The San Diego 2010 “Remembering Dick Giordano” Tribute Panel

scripts. In 1989 I wrote an eight-page story for Mark Waid, then an editor at DC, for Christmas with the Superheroes #2. This was a fairly seditious little tale, ostensibly a “Deadman” story, into which I sneaked the spirit of the recently deceased (and retconned out of existence) Kara Zor-El, a.k.a Supegirl. As editor-in-chief Dick had to approve the script, so Mark brought it to him and, according to Mark, Dick read it, then clutched it to his breast and announced, “Mine”—assigning himself the art job. It was another shrewd editorial

decision: his Deadman came as close to Neal Adams’ as any I’d seen, and his rendering of Kara brought out all the warmth, nobility, and humanity that I tried to write into the character. Thank you, Dick—I’ll refrain from using the rest of your signature signoff—for the pleasure I got from those comic books I discovered when I was thirteen, and for the privilege of having known and worked with you.

[continued from p. 28] to come back. [Terry] Austin pitches it to him, persuades him. Dick walks down to me and says, “Look, Jenette wants me to come on board, come back to the company as editor. I think that would be fine. This is a good and exciting time. But she’s offering me more money than you’re making to take your old job. And I don’t want to do that if it bothers you in the slightest.” When the hell does a human being ever do something like that?

Life’s A Beach: Brennert Style Since receiving a B.A. in English from California State University at Long Beach and doing graduate work in screenwriting at UCLA, Alan Brennert has written novels, short stories, teleplays, screenplays, and the libretto of a stage musical, Weird Romance. He earned an Emmy for his work as a writer-producer on the TV series L.A. Law. His novel Moloka’i, about the forced segregation of leprosy patients to the settlement of Kalaupapa in Hawaii, became a national bestseller in paperback. In the photo he provided, he’s seen with Waikiki Beach in the background.

LAYTON: I wouldn’t. [laughter] RUBINSTEIN: He said human. [laughter] LEVITZ: Maybe he wasn’t. And I just turned around and said, “Listen, you’re one of the grand pros. You have forgotten more than I know about this. You deserve every cent of it. And don’t worry about me. It will sort of work out.” BASTIENNE: It did. LEVITZ: It certainly did. But that kind of courtesy, that kind of respect for other people, in a society where everybody’s afraid to tell anybody else what they make, for fear that it’ll be embarrassing for a minute, or you’ll start using it as weaponry. But just, you know, “This is what I’ve been offered. I know it’s that much more than what you’re making. Does it bother you?” Not

even, “Would it make it hard for us to work together?” Just, “Would it bother you?” That’s the kind of guy he was....

“Dick Said, ‘I Am Not a Pin-Up Artist. I’m A Storyteller’”

RUBINSTEIN: Can I tell a story about Dick? It’ll never get in the history books because it’s less about Dick. But it sort of talks about his personality, because he told it to me laughing. Dick’s late wife Marie was Sal Trapani’s sister. I guess Dick met Marie because he was in school with Sal—? BASTIENNE: No, they had a studio together. Sal and Dick. LAYTON: [to audience] Sal was another comic artist and illustrator. RUBINSTEIN: So they used to drive home from Manhattan to Connecticut together, Sal driving. And one day they got into this hellacious traffic jam, and they sat, and they sat, and they sat. And finally Dick said, “I’m just gonna find out what’s going on.” And he got out of the car and he started to walk up. And the traffic cleared. And Sal drove off. [laughter] About an hour or something later, Marie called up Sal and said, “Do you know where Dick is?” And it turned out that some freelancer was driving home to Connecticut and spotted Dick walking along the road. I’m sure Dick talked to Sal after that, but it was like, “What are you gonna do? It’s Sal!” [shrugs]

Color Me Green Longtime DC colorist Anthony Tollin speaks at the Giordano tribute panel—but alas, only those who subscribe to the digital edition of A/E will be able to see that the agonizin’ aerialists on Dick’s cover for Charlton’s Strange Suspense Stories #16 (Jan.-Feb. 1954) are both colored green, for some reason! Thanks to Mark DeFruscio for the photo, and to Gene Reed for the art scan. [Cover © 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

“This Is Really Our Last Chance To Talk About Dick”

drawn. And Dick would look at it, and say, “This is 180 degrees different from how I had imagined it when I drew it. This is totally different from what I had in mind. But it’s just as good as what I had in mind, and maybe better, so go for it.” And Dick could let go of his preconceived notions. And there are so many— We all have met editors over the years who feel as if, just like a Hollywood producer, they have to ask for changes for no reason. Just for the sake of putting their input and having a change in it. And I think Dick, because he worked so many years at Charlton, where writers were getting four or five dollars a page, and finished art was getting $20 a page, knew that you didn’t give a creative person $50 worth of grief for a $20 page. Dick always respected us, and our creativity. And Dick encouraged you to not be a carbon copy of him. And if you did a good job, if he liked it, he could look at it and say, “That’s not what I had in mind, but it’s perfectly fine.” And that’s, I think, a very special palliative quality. And as we all say, he was just a wonderful person, who, perhaps more than any other editor, encouraged the creativity of the people he worked with. [Tollin hands the mic back to Evanier and retakes his seat.] LAYTON: That’s funny, because what you said, it reminded me of one of his best lines. What he said about [Joe] and I— [that] we got good when we stopped trying to be him. [Layton and Rubinstein then take a moment to recognize Giordano’s last assistant, artist Rob Jones, who is sitting in the audience; applause]

Nukla Energy As Mark Evanier says, Dick’s work “turned up in all those Dell comics” of the 1960s—including Nukla, which starred a nuclear-powered super-hero. This unpublished cover for the series was retrieved for us by Jeff Singh. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

EVANIER: Okay, what I’m gonna do now is, I’m gonna give some other people a chance to say something. How many people here would like to speak a little about Dick? [Colorist Anthony Tollin raises his hand] This is Anthony Tollin, who worked for DC for years as a colorist in production. ANTHONY TOLLIN: I think my favorite memories of Dick are when I would bring a cover—I was coloring about half the covers at DC at that time. And I would bring a cover in to him, on occasion, that he had

RUBINSTEIN: When I look at jobs over the years that needed penciling, any time I could, I would get Dick to draw it. And you know, it’s like, it’s Dick and it’s terrifying. But of course I wanted to work with him. I would try my best Dick Giordano imitation every time. And every time it was not the best Dick Giordano. And then one day I went, “You know, I can’t take it anymore. I’m just gonna ink it the way it feels right.” And he went, “That’s the best ink job you ever did on me.” And it was the last one I ever did. But I just want to point out one more thing. Dick said, “I am not a pin-up artist. I’m a storyteller. I want to tell stories.” And he didn’t get enough jobs at the end of his life telling stories. And write your local editor, and say, “Where are the old guys? We still want them!” Just as a tribute to him. EVANIER: I was always very impressed with the fact that Dick kept turning up in other people’s work. You’d be going along, in somebody else’s story, and then all of sudden there’s Dick for five pages. And I asked him one time to point to a job that Sal Trapani actually drew by himself. And he said, “I’m not sure there is one.” [laughter] I said to him, “You know, Trapani was allegedly the [only] penciler of Metamorpho in the ’60s. Who penciled those?” And Dick said, “I don’t know. I might have done it. I don’t It Rhymes With Lustig remember.” And, you John Lustig at the tribute know, he turned up in panel, juxtaposed with all those Dell comics. key panels from the As the editor of original story “Widow Miss Charlton he was Muffet” which he scribed and Dick Giordano drew penciling—he especially for the eightpenciled a Brave and issue run of a Last Kiss Bold “Flash/Doom comic book. “For Dick,” Patrol” team-up. I John writes, “it was a thought, when I was a chance to have fun, kid, I’d be like, how returning to his romance can they let the guy comics roots.” who edits one Photo courtesy of Mark company draw for DeFruscio. [“Muffet” panel another company? © 2011 John Lustig & estate of Dick Giordano.]

The San Diego 2010 “Remembering Dick Giordano” Tribute Panel

Post-Modern Love Some years back, John Lustig purchased the rights to a mountain of art from Charlton’s defunct romance comics (especially one titled First Kiss) as the company was going out of business. Since then, he’s been writing humorous new dialogue to mercifully replace the original balloons. The resultant comic strip Last Kiss can be viewed daily on his website www.lastkisscomic.com; some of his gag cartoons, such as the one upper right, have appeared in The Comics Buyer’s Guide. He has also written for Disney, Marvel, Viz, and other companies. [© 2011 John Lustig.]

LAYTON: Joe was so right about that. All he wanted to do was tell stories. That’s all he wanted to do.

[Writer John Lustig steps forward as Evanier hands him the microphone.]

And I get into this, and I’m going, I love Dick, but I didn’t know him nearly as well as anybody up here [on the panel]. I don’t have enough to say in 15 installments.” And I get Michael Eury—who wrote the book about Dick, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful book [Dick Giordano: Changing Comics, One Day at a Time]—relayed to me quotes from him. And I have quotes and things about Dick, too.

JOHN LUSTIG: My name is John Lustig [and] I do something called Last Kiss, which—I bought the rights to an old Charlton romance series [and I re-script the art panels]. And somebody put me in touch with Dick at one point because people started asking, “Well, who drew this panel or that?” And Dick was extraordinarily kind. I mailed all 40 copies of the series to him and he went through every issue and tried to identify—after all these decades—who had drawn this one or that one. Because I didn’t know anybody.

But my point is, I started going on the web and reading about Dick, and it was really—it turned out to be this huge project, all these installments. But what I found was, it was so inspiring, reading all these anecdotes about Dick. Because my experience—I thought he was just kind to me. And I knew he was a nice guy. But reading about how much he had helped so many people. He was more than just an editor. He really helped people in their lives. And I’m really glad I took the time with that, because I learned a lot about Dick, but I also learned some things about life.

And then, after that, he was just really encouraging. And the second issue of my comic book series, he offered to draw a new story for me. And I couldn’t pay him anything like what he could get anywhere else, I’m sure. And it was one of the great thrills of my life. I remember, one time somebody was questioning the ethics of what I was doing. Another pro was questioning the ethics of what I was doing [in re-scripting old comics]. And Dick, I remember talking to him and he said, “[You’re] not doing anything wrong.” It was just really good hearing that from Dick.

[As Lustig returns to his seat, artist Brent Anderson stands to take the mic.]

“Dick Giordano Was My Champion”

And after Dick died—I do a web version of Last Kiss, and I was thinking about running some of the stories from the comic book series [online] so I didn’t have to write so much. And after Dick died, I decided I was gonna run Widow Miss Muffet, the story that we did together. And I told my editor at GoComics, and he said, “Well, this is kind of a tribute to Dick Giordano.” And I go, “Yeah, yeah it is.” And he went, “Well, we gotta make a big deal out of this.” “Okay, well then, I better do a dedication, you know, something about Dick, every time I run one of these strips.” And it’s like 15 episodes.

BRENT ANDERSON: My name is Brent Anderson. LAYTON: How you doing, buddy? ANDERSON: Long time since I’ve seen you guys. I just want to start out by saying, I got into the business in 1976. And it was all the rage at the time to go to New York City and go up to Continuity Studios. Because Neal Adams was bringing people in. And we got there… [takes a drink of water.] Dick Giordano was my champion. I didn’t know Dick was my champion at the time. Because when I went up to Continuity, we went in at midnight. LAYTON: Oh, he didn’t know what went on up there at midnight. Not for a long time. [laughter] [continued on p. 34]

“This Is Really Our Last Chance To Talk About Dick”

I N T E R L U D E

# 2

Dick Giordano An Appreciation by Tony Isabella first “crossed paths” with Dick when, as 13-year-old kid in Cleveland, Ohio, I was waiting my haircut turn at a barber shop and started reading Sarge Steel #1, a Charlton comic dated December 1964. It wasn’t the kind of comic book I would buy for myself—no superheroes or monsters—but it caught my eye with its realistic look and surefire storytelling. Dick Giordano was the artist, working from a Joe Gill script.

When, midway through reading the comic, it became my turn to sit in the barber’s chair, I hid it under newspapers that no other kid would have disturbed. After getting my Ace Morgan crewcut— by the way, not a good look for me—I swept the shop for the barber and, as he usually did, he told me to take a couple comic books in payment. I took Sarge Steel. I couldn’t tell you what other comic I took that day was if my life depended on it. I don’t remember if Dick’s name was on Sarge Steel #1; but I would definitely learn his name soon thereafter, when he became the editor of Charlton Comics. Dick called them “action heroes,” because, with the exception of Captain Atom, most of them weren’t super-powered: Blue Beetle, Thunderbolt, Judomaster, Peacemaker, and others. He staffed these comics with an amazing array of veteran and rookie talents: Steve Ditko, Jim Aparo, Pete Morisi, Frank McLaughlin, Pat Boyette, Joe Gill, Sam Grainger, Gary Friedrich, Denny O’Neil, and many others. Most importantly, he used his letters columns to establish a real communication with his readers.

others. And his Witching Hour was as good as any of the Charlton mystery books he had edited with amusing hosts and surprising theme issues. I wrote to Dick’s letters pages, spoke to him on the phone when I was writing a news column for a fanzine, and, impertinent as ever, sent him a plot for a “Teen Titans” story and full scripts for an entire issue of Witching Hour. Because I figured if anyone was going to give a young writer a chance, it would be Dick. It was during Dick’s first stint at DC that I finally met him, at one of those grand old New York City comics conventions that Phil Seuling used to hold. Dick invited me to join him at breakfast one morning. Frank McLaughlin joined us, increasing my nervousness. Dick put me right at ease. He didn’t buy my plot or scripts, but he taught me a lot about comics and how to pitch ideas in a short time. I actually sold one of the Witching Hour scripts later that year to a tabloid newspaper called The Monster Times.

I kept writing to Dick and was sad when he left his editor’s gig. I knew the DC gig hadn’t gone as he’d hoped, but the comics industry and the fans were the winners there. For my money, no one has ever inked Neal Adams better than Dick, and that includes Neal himself; their work on Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow, teamed with writer Denny O’Neil and editor Julius Schwartz, At Least The Barber Didn’t Have A Metal Hand! has to be on everyone’s list for the Tony Isabella, in a recent photo—and Dick Giordano’s cover for Sarge best comic books of the 1970s.

Steel #1 (Dec. 1964), the comic youngster Tony discovered in a barber shop. Tony entered the comics field in the early 1970s, recruited by Roy Thomas when Stan Lee needed someone to do some specialty writing, and soon became a scripter and editor, as well, working over the years for Marvel, DC, and numerous other comics companies. He is, among other things, the co-creator of the DC hero series Black Lightning and author of 1,000 Comic Books You Must Read. [Cover © 2011 DC Comics.]

Hype and all, I loved and respected Stan Lee at Marvel. I respected DC Comics editors Julius Schwartz and Murray Boltinoff. But, Dick—I liked him, respected him, and knew he was playing it straight with readers, even when he told me something I didn’t want to hear. Like that my beloved “action heroes” weren’t selling as well as Charlton’s horror, war, romance, and Western titles. I was thrilled when Dick moved over to DC, to edit some of my favorite DC titles of the late 1960s: Aquaman, Teen Titans, Secret Six, Strange Adventures with Deadman, and

After Neal and Dick founded their comic art agency Continuity Associates, I rented an office there for a few months during my second and final stay in New York City.

Quick digression. If there’s a better “Batman” story than the legendary “There’s No Hope in Crime Alley!” [Detective Comics #457; March, 1976], a Denny O’Neil script that was pencilled and inked by Dick, it would be “To Kill a Legend” [Detective Comics #500; March, 1981], an Alan Brennert script penciled and inked by Dick. Small wonder Dick is one of my four or five favorite “Batman” artists. Few artists ever mastered both the tragedy and underlying hope of the Batman’s world the way Dick did.

The San Diego 2010 “Remembering Dick Giordano” Tribute Panel

Dick and I kept in touch. He returned to DC Comics as an editor; I bought a comic book store in Cleveland and was also working for Capital City Distribution. We saw each other at comics conventions and I was always pleased to hear he’d moved up another rung or two at DC Comics. Publisher Jenette Kahn, a wonder woman in so many ways, knew talent when she saw it.

to balance the two as best he or anyone else could have. When Dick left DC the second time, I told friends the company was losing its heart. That’s not to say no one there ever again had and acted on their generous impulses or ever again strove to be fair to their freelancers. But that kind of behavior never again seemed to me to be a core value of the company.

It was at one of those conventions that Dick asked me if I’d like to write for DC again. He suggested I pitch something for “Hawkman” and a few weeks later okayed The Shadow War of Hawkman mini-series. He teamed me with Alan Gold, one of the finest, most organized, and most supportive editors I have ever worked with, in or outside of comics, and agreed to my first choice to draw the new series: Richard Howell. Okay, Joe Kubert and Murphy Anderson were actually my first choices, but Dick and Alan lived in the real world most of the time. I think I did some good work there, and I think Richard did some outstanding work that never got the notice it should have. But I digress... again.

He was a good guy because he was a good guy. He wasn’t a good guy because it was a smart way to do business, although it surely was a smart way to do business. He wasn’t a good guy because the company mandated that persona. He loved comics and he loved comics people. If I kept a “regrets” list, passing up an offer to become promotions director of the short-lived Future Comics company founded by Dick and Bob Layton would be way the Hell up on it. My memories of Dick Giordano are only a very small part of the grand tapestry that was his life and career. Every one of us who holds their own small part of that tapestry close to their hearts, even if they never met or worked with him, is surely blessed to have known him and his work.

This was my first extended period working with Dick, and the one where I figured out some of his secrets, the most notable one being that he always tried to be fair to freelancers and that he did this for the simple and uncomplicated reason that it was the right thing to do. I didn’t The Shadow Nose—Or Should We Say, Beak! always agree with him, but I never felt Richard Howell’s dramatic cover for the first issue, cover-dated May he made any decision out of the 1985, of the four-issue The Shadow War of Hawkman, the miniarrogance and the just-because-I-can series Tony Isabella was inspired to write by Dick G. Thanks to the attitude of so many comics editors Grand Comics Database. [© 2011 DC Comics.] and executives. He was an executive with a freelancer’s soul, and he tried

Go with God, my friend, and with my thanks for your life and for being part of mine.

[continued from p. 32] BASTIENNE: He wasn’t there at midnight. ANDERSON: I know he wasn’t. LAYTON: Oh, if he knew at the time what was going up there at midnight, he would’ve shut the whole place down. [laughter] ANDERSON: I drove across country in 1976. Just after my 21st birthday. We went into Manhattan. And from a phone booth on the corner of East

Going Dutch Artist Brent Anderson at the 2010 tribute panel—and four of his covers for Spinworld, the comic book that had originally been conceived as The Spacing Dutchman and championed by DC editor Dick Giordano. It was eventually published by Slave Labor Graphics. Photo courtesy of Mark DiFruscio. [© 2010 the respective copyright holders.] Brent’s pro career began in 1976, drawing Ka-Zar the Savage for Marvel and, ere long, the X-Men graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills. He has cocreated several notable series, including Somerset Holmes and Strikeforce Morituri, and is currently working on a new cycle of the series Astro City with Kurt Busiek, as well as other projects with his wife, writer Shirley Johnston.

“This Is Really Our Last Chance To Talk About Dick”

Sequential Camraderie The Neal Adams comic strip at left (with a Gray Morrow panel) was produced to promote the pair’s advertising comics shop in the early 1970s, Continuity Associates, featuring caricatures of Adams and Dick Giordano (who’s the fellow with the ’stache). Continuity Studios still flourishes today, run by Adams & family, with both East Coast and West Coast offices. [©2011 Continuity.]

THE OTHER PANELISTS [in unison]: Third floor! ANDERSON: The third floor. And I went in with the guys. And all of this was after hours. The first time I went in to Continuity during business hours, the first person I met getting off the elevator— BASTIENNE: Was me and Dick.

48th street, we call the studios. We had the number. We had been given the number. And Joe Barney [sic] was there, and Rube might have been there. And there was a bunch of guys up there. And we called up there, and we said, “We’re a bunch of guys from California.” And they kind of questioned us, looked out the window. We could see them looking out at us in the phone booth. And they let us in. LAYTON: That’s because they were all stoned, man. [laughter] ANDERSON: Yes, it was quite a place. For a kid from California, it was quite a place. We went in, we went up to that grubby little elevator that went up to the Continuity floor.

ANDERSON: Was Pat. I don’t think Dick was actually there that day. I think it was just you. But the first time I met Dick, I felt that he was in support of me. He championed me in this business. And years went by—there was a project I was working on called Spacing Dutchman, which went through a whole lot of ups and downs, and he tried to get it through. And partly through a weird series of events, it wound up going to DC Comics when Dick was there. Dick championed that project for me. It’s probably some of the best work I’ve ever drawn that nobody’s seen. Because ultimately it was published in black-&-white by Slave Labor Graphics years later. Sold maybe a thousand copies. Nobody’s ever seen it. But Dick championed that. And when he would review artwork from artists like me, he did exactly what Bob and Joe were saying. He wouldn’t praise you, gush all over your work. He’d point out what you needed to work on and then accepted what you did. And championed you with the companies that he was working for. And Dick is still my champion. And I will carry that for the rest of my life, the rest of my career. EVANIER: Thank you, Brent.

“And On That Note, Let Us Adjourn” LAYTON: Billy, did you ever work with Dicky? BILL SIENKIEWICZ: Yeah, actually I did. LAYTON: [introducing] Bill Sienkiewicz. [applause; Sienkiewicz steps

Moon Knight Sonata Eisner-winning artist (and writer) Bill Sienkiewicz, seen at left at the 2010 Giordano tribute panel, entered the comics field in the late 1970s, drawing such Marvel series as Moon Knight, New Mutants, and Elektra: Assassin. Seen at left is his cover for Moon Knight #1 (Dec. 1980). As Wikipedia so eloquently puts it, he “often utilizes oil painting, collage, mimeograph, and other forms generally uncommon in comic books,” and has done work in various media besides comics. Photo courtesy of Mark DiFruscio. [Cover © 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The San Diego 2010 “Remembering Dick Giordano” Tribute Panel

forward from the back of the room] Somebody who has had a “small” impact in the industry. SIENKIEWICZ: Hi, everybody. It always—I feel like we lost so many people recently. It’s always—these are always—they suck. Yeah. When I started, it’s probably no secret that my stuff looked a lot like Neal Adams. And Neal is a very generous man. Very mercurial man. Very idiosyncratic man. And my experiences with Neal have been interesting. My experiences with Dick, as an editor, and as a human being, and as a friend, and as a mentor—I think every interaction that I ever had with Dick, he would talk to me about how I was— He did gush to me. He actually did gush. But he didn’t gush about my work. He gushed about how well I was handling the pressure of the Neal Adams stuff. In a way, because he knew Neal, and he knew the business, and he knew that I was some hick. I mean, I first showed up at Continuity— LAYTON: You used to have overalls, I think? Remember that? [laughter] SIENKIEWICZ: No, actually worse. I had a polyester brown jacket on, with pants that you could play chess on. [laughter] But, the thing is that— I can understand more about the dynamic, about what made Continuity

work. And my main feeling about Dick, and my main sense of Dick throughout all of my interactions with him, throughout everything that I have done, throughout any project that I was even aware of that I had nothing really to do with—similar to what Brent was saying about being a champion—is that Dick could be there for you in whatever capacity you needed him to be there. In a way he was a prefect editor as a human being, as opposed to simply something about the work. But I also know that whenever Dick was involved in any project, in any capacity, there was always—there’s always a sense of tension and you know, anxiety, about doing some work. Or having things work out. Especially if you’re a freelancer. There’s the “Will I ever work again?” anxiety. And, you know, so many of us take on extra work and miss deadlines. And hence you have the definition of a freelancer. But with Dick, any job that came up, any project that came up, from the financial background, to contractual things—We all want to have someone who is a pillar, who is the sense of equilibrium. Who is the fulcrum on which both sides [are balanced] no matter where the weight is distributed. Dick was the fulcrum to me. BASTIENNE: Yeah, he was. SIENKIEWICZ: And he always—anything that I would see, if Dick’s name was on it, there was a solidity. He was a wonderful inker. He wasn’t flashy. But he was like a bass player in a band who knew just what notes to play. He knew how to drum, and he would like, he’d hit the right beat. He was so—pardon my French—he was so f***ing reliable. And that, in human terms, that is so—it sounds like a dismissal, but I swear to God, the older I get, it is more of a priceless gem and jewel than all the praise you can get, from anybody, for your work you do. To just know that there is one person in the entire project that you can look at and go, “It’s gonna be okay, Dick’s involved.” It’s like the worry would evaporate. The anxiety would evaporate. You’d walk in and see Dick and it’d be like— There are

A Classic, Illustrated One of Dick’s favorite freelance projects of the last decade was rendering the art for the Lew Sayre Schwartz adaptation of Herman Melville’s renowned novel Moby-Dick. Lew, primary Batman ghost artist of the late 1940s and early ’50s, and longtime Giordano friend, is memorialized on page 65 of this issue. [© 2011 the respective copyright holder.]

“This Is Really Our Last Chance To Talk About Dick”

Smile! A pair of grins to go out on: The Joker, in a 2007 commission drawing done by DG for Arnie Grieves… and Dick himself, in a pic from a mid-1980s newspaper, taken by Wendy J. Riling. Thanks to Pat Bastienne, and to Dick’s assistant Rob Jones, who cleaned up the photo for best repro. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.] In August 2010 the Dick Giordano Humanitarian of the Year Award made its debut at the Harvey Awards banquet at the Baltimore Comicon. Dick’s legacy, said a release from Hero Initiative, the comic book industry’s own charitable organization, which inaugurated the award, “epitomizes caring and commitment,” and the award “will recognize one person in comics each year who has demonstrated the generosity and integrity Dick brought to the charity and to the comic book community at large.” From its inception circa 2000 until his death in 2009, Dick Giordano was a member of the disbursement board of Hero Initiative.

people in the world that—I’m sure we all know them—they walk into the room, the lights dim, okay. We have environments for each other. People are environments. Some are really brilliant and wonderful environments. Others are the toxic ones that we write tell-all books about, you know? And then there are the people who are the day-breakers. Who are the ones that [make you] go, “F***, I’m glad I’m a human being!” Because I know this guy. I know this person. And this person is an honorable person and makes me proud to be in a business that has been so maligned, and so bastardized and second-guessed and tertiary, and has been so pushed aside and torn asunder. It’s like this man, just by being, in terms of his work and his demeanor, raised the game of humanity and artwork and just everybody. But just by the fact that he was there. And that to me is like—I don’t have any specific Dick story, but it’s like a cumulative thing with Dick. It’s like a full breath of air after like being underwater. And that to me is like—I can’t think of anything more to say about Dick except that, you know—I think “champion.” And he’s an idol. I emulated a lot of different people. But in terms of how to be as a person, he’s it. He’s like the pinnacle. [applause]

Thank You and Good Afternoon A lovely portrait by the supremely talented comic book artist Michael (Nasser) Netzer, who graciously offers this work to any and all at the Wikipedia entry for our dear and departed friend, Richard Joseph Giordano. [Art © 2011 Michael Nasser.]

[Evanier takes the microphone to announce that the panel is drawing to an end.] EVANIER: I don’t know how many of you went to the Eisner Awards last night? By the way, they’re over, I heard. [laughter] It was worth sitting through all of that for a couple of nice moments. One was when Steve Gerber was voted into the Hall of Fame. And Mary Skrenes gave a lovely acceptance speech. And also when Dick got voted in. That lovely little applause. Bittersweet because you wish this had been done a couple of years ago, when he could’ve been there to accept himself, and such. But, you know, it’s like, you kind of went, “Wait a minute, wasn’t Dick already in the Hall of Fame?” I think this was surprising to people, that he wasn’t voted in a long time ago. And I always end these things by reminding everybody that, although this is probably the last memorial service that is going to be done, we’re not going to stop talking about Dick for a long time. Nor should we. Because there’s a lot of people who are just getting into comics now, who need to hear about this man. And what he did and what he contributed to us. And I think that I can count on everybody here to keep doing that. And on that note, let us adjourn.

“ I Liked The Area Of Comics In General ” Part I Of A Career-Spanning Interview With Veteran Comic Artist TONY TALLARICO Conducted by Jim Amash • Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: The first time I called Tony Tallarico to discuss doing an interview, he chuckled and said, “I was wondering when you were going to get to me.” I said, “Tony, I had to put the youngsters at the end of the line!” He replied, “Flattery will get you an interview.” All kidding aside, I’d always planned on talking to Tony, who has had a fascinatingly diverse career in illustration. He started out as an assistant to Frank Carin, Burne Hogarth, and Al Scaduto, later working for Avon, Youthful, Dell, Warren Publications, Harvey, Feature, Gilberton, Story, Trojan, Treasure Chest, and Charlton. His Charlton work is probably what he’s best remembered for, a fair amount of it done with his friend Bill Fraccio. As packager or solo artist, Tony has drawn stories in every genre in comics, and I imagine nearly everyone reading this has some of Tony’s work in his/her collection. But Tony’s comic book career is eclipsed by his work in children’s books, of which he’s done over a thousand at last count. And Tony’s still working, which makes me wonder if he now has the record for drawing the most published books outside the comic book arena. If not, he soon will have, because Tony claims he’s just getting started! Special thanks go to our mutual friend Stan Goldberg for giving me Tony’s phone number. –Jim.

“[I Went To] The School Of Industrial Arts” JIM AMASH: Guess what, Tony? I’m going to ask when and where were you born. TONY TALLARICO: [laughs] Brooklyn, New York, September 20, 1933. JA: I was looking at your list of artistic influences: Frank Robbins, Ken Bald, Roy Doty, Stan Drake, and Milton Caniff. Obviously, you started reading newspaper strips at an early age. TALLARICO: Yes. We had several big newspapers in the New York area. The Daily News had great comics at the time. The New York Journal-American had fantastic comics and great, great Sunday comics. I still remember the Prince Valiant page that they ran in full color on Sundays. Oh, it was beautiful! I used to clip them and save them. I didn’t know why, but I did that. [mutual chuckling] Strips were the thing, and eventually the comic books became interesting, too. JA: You would have been about five years old when “Superman” came out. So you probably didn’t see him at the very beginning. TALLARICO: No, but I was a comic book collector.

Eyes On The Prize On May 20, 2005, Tony Tallarico received the Pioneer Award, given for his co-creation of the first African-American comic book hero, Lobo, a post-Civil War cowboy who appeared in two issues of his own Dell/Western title. The honor was given at a ceremony held at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Flanking photo from left:) Tallarico’s cover for Lobo #1 (Dec. 1965)—the cover of the phenomenal polico-satiric bestseller The Great Society Comic Book (1966), which was written by D.J. Arneson and illustrated by Tallarico (reportedly with a helping hand on the pencils from Bill Fraccio)—super-heroics by artists Fraccio & Tallarico (and writer Joe Gill) for Charlton’s Blue Beetle, Vol. 2, #2 (Sept. 1964). [Blue Beetle TM & © 2011 DC Comics; other material © 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

“I Liked The Area Of Comics In General”

Alma Matrix (Left:) In the 1951 high school yearbook of The School of Industrial Arts, the photos of Tony Tallarico and fellow future artist Angelo Torres were on the same page.

I read just about all of them from Archie to Marvel to DC, and a lot of others in between. I liked to see the different types of comics.

(Right:) In 2002, Tony’s old high school held a reunion. (L. to r.:) Angelo Torres, Tony Tallarico, and Al Gallo, who Tony informs us was the scenic designer on Perry Como’s TV show. Thanks to Tony for these photos.

JA: Did you draw your own characters and your own stories as a kid? TALLARICO: Oh, sure. In fact, I have a book out called How to Draw Comics, and that’s one of the things I emphasize. You should do your own. Even if you think it’s terrible, it’s terrible because nobody else has seen it, that’s all. JA: Did you go to one of the art high schools in New York City? TALLARICO: Yes, The School of Industrial Arts. Emilio Squeglio went to the same school before I had. But Dick Giordano was in my class, as was Angelo Torres—and Murray Tinkleman, who is an illustrator. He and Dick worked for Jerry Iger.

JA: Did the three of you hang around together outside of classes? TALLARICO: We were both in the Illustration class together, but it was very difficult to be friends outside of school there, because the school was in Manhattan, and hardly anybody lived in Manhattan. Angelo lived in the Bronx, and Dick lived further out in the Bronx. Murray lived in a different area of Brooklyn than I did. So after 3:30, that was it. I’d see them again the next morning, and of course we’d be great friends during the day. It wasn’t like going to a neighborhood school. JA: I knew that, but I know there were some guys who lived distances, but still got together after school sometimes.

It was a small class, about 150 kids in each grade. The classic thing about it was that we had an annex and a main building. The first two years we were in the annex; second two years we were in the main building. But the interesting thing was that they were both hospitals during the Civil War. JA: Did you get to be friends with Dick or any others? Obviously you did with Murray Tinkleman. TALLARICO: Yes, and with Angelo and Dick, too. [Dick and I] were good friends. His first real job after Iger’s was at Charlton, and he gave me a lot of work there. Dick did not start in my grade. Dick was out of school for a year because of illness, so when he came back, they put him back one year, and that’s when I met him. I knew him one year in the annex, and then two years in the main building. He was a very nice guy. I remember him coming over to my house in Brooklyn. He lived in the Bronx, so that was a long trek, about two hours. He wanted me to show him how to ink, and was very grateful for that. To me, at that same time,

Cartoonist Class Cohorts Seen at right is a signature page from Tallarico’s 1951 high school yearbook, signed by four fellow students of once andfuture importance to him. In Tony’s words (referring to entries clockwise from top of page): “(1) Frank Eliscu – sculptor/modeling instructor. He made several bronze bas-relief doors for Rockefeller Plaza—also did the ‘Heisman Trophy.’ “(2) Bob Dunn – cartoonist and writer of They’ll Do it Every Time newspaper feature. “(3) Al Scaduto – cartoonist of Little Iodine comic books and They’ll Do It Every Time daily and Sunday feature.“ (4) Mike Fafaniello – comic book/strip letterer.” [Art & text © 2011 the artists.]

it seemed silly. “Don’t thank me for that.” [Jim chuckles] I didn’t mind helping him. You would do the same thing.

Part I Of A Career-Spanning Interview With Veteran Comic Artist Tony Tallarico

Scaduto Didn’t Do It Every Time, But Did For Quite A Spell! Tony’s early employer, the late cartoonist Al Scaduto (1938-2007), at his drawing board a few years back—juxtaposed with a 1971 daily of They’ll Do It Every Time, the newspaper gag panel inaugurated by Jimmy Hatlo. When this sample was repro’d in Jerry Robinson’s 1974 book The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, the accompanying caption read: “Bob Dunn adds his own flourish to Hatlo’s creation with the aid of Al Scaduto.” The photo appeared in the Connecticut Post newspaper; it was taken by Whitney Kidder-Alvarez, and was retrieved from the alwayswonderful Mike Lynch Cartoons website. [Panel © 2011 King Features Syndicate, Inc.; photo & other art © 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

TALLARICO: Occasionally, but it was more so in the summer that we would get together during the day. JA: When did you decide you wanted to be a comic book artist? TALLARICO: I liked the area of comics in general: comic books and newspaper strips. When it was time to pick out a school, everybody was going to the local school, which was the Erasmus Hall School. A teacher

told me about The School of Industrial Arts. My parents were thrilled about it. “Oh, sure. By all means.” But you had to take an exam and show samples, which I did. There was another kid in my grammar school class that wanted to go, but he didn’t make it. I don’t know why. He was quite good, but who knows? JA: Were any of the teachers professional artists? TALLARICO: Yes, there was one teacher whose name was Kagan. He taught cartooning, and one day he put up a whole bunch of political cartoons that he [said he] had done. And we looked at them and then somebody, for some strange reason, turned them over, and on the back there was a big rubber

A Titan In The Making The great Alex Toth in the 1970s—and panels from a “Green Lantern” story he drew around the time Tony T. first knew him, for Comic Cavalcade #26 (April-May 1948). Scripter unknown, but probably Robert Kanigher or John Broome. The photo appeared in DC’s house fanzine Amazing World of DC Comics #5 in 1975. [Green Lantern panels © 2011 DC Comics.]

“I Liked The Area Of Comics In General”

stamp, “Lee Juddon.” Oh, boy! You know, if you couldn’t cut it in the real world, you became a teacher, except for one guy that I had later on, Burne Hogarth.

JA: How helpful was he? Did he give you any drawing advice?

“I Went To DC Comics… [But] Al Scaduto Was The Guy”

TALLARICO: Oh, sure, because what I had to letter was his pencils, and I could see different things in them. When I brought a job in, he would go over the pencils with me. “I did it this way because of this,” or, “I hate drawing bicycles. That’s why I drew all this dust.” [mutual laughter]

JA: Some of the people who were at the School have told me how the students could get tips on what companies were hiring, and you did the same thing, too. Did you go and visit any of the comic book companies?

I started when I finished school, which was January ’51. A year later, I started going to The School of Visual Arts, and I did that until the book really folded. Towards the end, I did some inking for him.

TALLARICO: Oh, yes. I went to DC Comics. They were only about three blocks from the school. They were on 480 Lexington Avenue. I went up there with samples, really just to break the barrier, and that’s the first and only time I met Alex Toth, who gave me an original page of art. I don’t know what he saw in me, because the work was pretty bad. [laughs]

“[Frank Carin] Needed An Assistant”

JA: Do you remember what he said to you then? TALLARICO: Not really. He was sitting there, drawing, doing a page of pencils for something or other. And there was another fellow there with him who soon became a very good inker, Frank Giacoia. They were both SIA grads also, so that gave me a teeny tinge of “Hey, this kid is trying.” I don’t recall their advice any more than, “Hey, draw this, this way.” I had somebody in a sport jacket and Alex said, “The collar’s completely wrong. A single-breasted jacket is like this, and a double-breasted is like that,” which was great. [laughs] I mean, I would never even think of that at the time. JA: Nobody does at that age. We’re too busy drawing to observe. Did you talk to anybody at other companies? TALLARICO: No, I just went up to DC. The others, they were frightening to me. I don’t know why. DC was close by the school and it was more like somebody from Brooklyn who’d lived in Brooklyn all their life and then all of a sudden, at the age of twelve, thirteen, he has to go into the city now. That is one hell of a trip; a frightening thought. So I was not a wanderer through the city. One teacher, Stanley Rose, taught illustration. He said, “You should really look up this other guy. I had him in my class, and he was a terrific guy. He’s up at King Features now. Just go up and see him and show him your work,” so I did. I went up there on a Winter day. Al Scaduto was the guy, and he loved what I did. He gave me some work. He was doing They’ll Do It Every Time at the time, but he was also doing Little Iodine for Western Publishing, which was another King Features Syndicate series. He gave me the comic book to letter, which I did at home. That was the first time I really made a little money at it. I’ll never forget him for that. It was a monthly comic book. I was the regular letterer. Wow! It wasn’t a heck of a lot of money, but $2 a page, thirty pages, it was about $60 a month of pay.

Clowning Around (Above right:) Circa 1950-51, artist Frank Carin apparently packaged these “pocket-sized comic books” for a supermarket chain. He himself drew Do-Do, starring a clown; and a very young Jack Davis, not long before his EC debut, drew the 7th issue shown of a Western mini called Lucky Star. Tallarico lettered some of this material—and may well have drawn Lucky Star #2, seen at bottom. Thanks to Scott Stewart & Gary Watson. [© 2011 the respective copyright owners.]

JA: Around that time, you were an assistant to Frank Carin. That’s about the same time you were lettering for Scaduto…. TALLARICO: No, I worked for Scaduto in ’51, ’52. Frank Carin was while I was still going to high school. A neighbor of mine in Brooklyn lived right across the street from us, and she had a job at Avon, and Frank Carin was doing some work for them. He was looking for an assistant, and she said, “I know just the guy.” Of course, I jumped at it.

Part I Of A Career-Spanning Interview With Veteran Comic Artist Tony Tallarico

Carin was basically into animation; he couldn’t draw realistically, and he said he needed an assistant. He worked out a deal with Acme Supermarkets—a big chain of supermarkets around the country then—to do a series of pocket-sized comic books. Now, Jack Davis did a thing called Lucky Star. That was the first work that Jack Davis ever did. He came up from Georgia, and Frank gave him the book to do. These were little books, maybe 7" high by 3" wide, 32 pages. They were very small digest books. And Frank did a thing called Do-Do, which was about a clown. I lettered that and a few other things. Once in a while, he’d let me do a story of Do-Do that he would ink, so it didn’t look like what I penciled anyway. JA: Before you did that penciling, what were you doing for him? TALLARICO: Everything from getting coffee to doing layouts, erasing pages, making corrections... whatever he needed. Frank was married, and his wife was related to a publisher. I don’t remember which publisher. He did comics and animation. He was fast enough, and good enough, to do both jobs. He was really a workaholic. He had a studio in an ad agency on Park Avenue, and I worked there with him. After school was over for the day, I would go over to Frank’s studio instead of going home. I would get home, seven o’clock, eight o’clock, whenever I finished. Frank was quiet, but talkative; not a joke teller. He was a serious guy. If you were with him one-to-one, he would be talkative. If there was a bunch of people, he would be very quiet. He was a good guy, patient and very generous. Around Christmastime, he said, “Get that envelope over there.” So I took it and I said, “What do I do with it, Frank?” He said, “Put

it in your pocket.” I said, “What?” He said, “Merry Christmas.” I was just happy working or just hanging around there. You know, I wasn’t getting any kind of money. It was twenty bucks in the envelope. That was a tremendous amount of money back then. JA: How long did you work for him? TALLARICO: I’d say maybe two years, because his volume of work slowed, and not that he was paying me that much, but he couldn’t afford it and there was nothing for me to do. So the same woman who told me about Frank told me that Avon was looking for somebody to be an assistant, so I went there, too. JA: Let me ask you one more question about Frank Carin. Did you keep in touch with him? TALLARICO: I’d call him on occasion or he would call me, just to see how everything was. And like I said, he was not doing comics. He was doing single cel animation that he called “telops,” and he was doing storyboards. He was out of the comic book area. JA: So that’s what he did for the rest of his career? TALLARICO: Yes, I think so. I only found out that he passed away a few years ago... we just lost track. JA: I heard a story about him. Dave Gantz told me that... TALLARICO: Dave Gantz! That’s the ad agency we had space with: Brown and Gantz. Frank Carin had space with them at 270 Park Avenue. JA: What was Ben Brown like? TALLARICO: I thought he was a fairly nice guy. He was not an artist. He was really more of an advertising guy. He came up with the ideas for how to pitch for an account, and things like that. The agency never really got off the ground. JA: Dave Gantz told me that he [Gantz] would lay out the stories, Brown would finish pencils, and Dave would ink them. TALLARICO: Oh, in doing comics? I

Kith And Kinstler (Above:) Everett Raymond Kinstler was another future comics artist (and well-known painter) who drew something special for Tony’s 1951 high school yearbook. Clearly, Kinstler’s style was already well-developed. Thanks for sharing it with us, Tony. [Art © 2011 Everett Raymond Kinstler.] (Right:) Kinstler drew numerous comics for Avon Periodicals, especially Westerns. This splash from Jesse James #25 (Dec. 1955-Jan. 1956) is actually a reprint of one he’d drawn a few years earlier—as is evident from the changes dictated by the Comics Code Authority, which had excised dialogue from the page’s final balloon; even the splash panel caption looks as if it may have been totally rewritten/relettered to avoid giving offense to somebody, somewhere. Scripter unknown. Another example of Kinstler’s censored work was seen in last issue’s extensive “Tales from the Code” coverage. Thanks to George Hagenauer. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

“I Liked The Area Of Comics In General”

Ape Men And Patriarchs Legendary artist and teacher Burne Hogarth—and a dynamic Tarzan panel of his from the Sunday page for May 26, 1940—juxtaposed with three of the numerous Biblical “telops” (single cel animation drawings) that Tony Tallarico inked circa 1953 over Hogarth’s pencils. Thanks to Tony for these. [Tarzan panel © 2011 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.; other art © the respective copyright holders.]

didn’t know that. As far as I knew, Brown strictly went out to get accounts. He had a fairly decent storm window account as well as industrial accounts. JA: Dave told me that Carin’s last name was really Carino, and his wife made him drop the “o” because she thought “Carino” was too ethnic.

won the Superman/DC Award, which was a drawing table. I got two drawing tables. I still have them! One of them I gave to my daughter because she took art in college. About three years ago, she gave it back to me because my wife started doing water colors. [chuckles again] So that thing made a round trip.

TALLARICO: Yes. She was Jewish, and at that time I guess ethnicity was a concern of hers. I don’t know how they met, but she was [very controlling of] him.

JA: Under what conditions did you win these awards? Were they contests?

There was another guy who had the same name as Frank who also did comics, Al Carreno. And this friend of mine, Al Scaduto’s boss, Bob Dunn... one time I mentioned to him that I was doing some things for Frank Carin, and he mistook it as I was doing it for Al Carreno. Bob said, “You know the guy’s a Communist.” I said, “He is? Beats me. I didn’t know that.” And that was the end of that. I never met Al Carreno.

TALLARICO: No, you excelled in one particular thing in school, and with me it was illustration and cartooning.

JA: When you and Carin made conversation, would you talk politics or was it mostly business?

JA: Were these two companies sponsoring awards at your school?

TALLARICO: We did a lot of small talk, and of course we’d talk some politics, but mostly it was about the comic business, because he had worked for Timely Comics. JA: I believe he’d worked for Terrytoons before. TALLARICO: Oh, yes. He worked for Terrytoons out of New Rochelle, New York. That was another thing! When I graduated high school, I won the Paul Terry Award, which was a drawing table. And then I also

The Rabbit Habit

Frank Carin had also worked for Paul Terry’s Terrytoons animation company—and later drew issues of The Adventures of Peter Rabbit for Avon Periodicals. Seen here is his cover for #25 (Nov.-Dec. 1954), with thanks to Scott Stewart. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Part I Of A Career-Spanning Interview With Veteran Comic Artist Tony Tallarico

TALLARICO: Yes, especially DC. Mr. Raymond Perry was in charge of that. He always wore a smock, and every time you’d go up there, he would come out and talk to you. You could never get through. I was so surprised the first time I went there that I got through, and met Alex and a few others there. JA: Were there any other companies sponsoring awards at SIA? TALLARICO: Murray Tinkleman received something from Seventeen magazine.

“Avon Was Not Just Comic Books” JA: You started to talk about Avon…. TALLARICO: I was hired part time, which was fine because I was going to Visual Arts at that time. I worked on staff, and did whatever was needed: cleaning pages, corrections (“change this face”)... etc. At that point, the Comics Code was coming around, so one of my duties was to de-enlarge women’s breasts. JA: The Comics Code didn’t come out until 1954. TALLARICO: Yes, but there was a lot of talk about it. They knew it was coming. JA: De-emphasize breasts, huh? So you were a production man. TALLARICO: Not really production. No, Production is getting art ready

A Heroic Effort? Although he doesn’t mention the Famous Funnies comics publishing company in this interview, and we haven’t turned up anything specific that he drew for Avon, Tony sent us a photocopy of the above original artwork, which he says was his “first comic book art,” done in 1952 for Famous Funnies’ pioneering editor, Steve Douglas. Among FF’s comics were Famous Funnies itself and Heroic Comics; the artwork above would seem to fit the latter title, which related true episodes of heroism. Scripter, of course, unknown. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

to be shipped and dealing with schedules. I didn’t do that. JA: What was your job description? TALLARICO: I didn’t have one. There was another fellow there who worked full time. His name was Mike Rafaniello; he was a lettering guy. He was very good and I remember overhearing Sol Cohen saying, “What do we need him for? We pay him $5 an hour. We have those kids for 75 cents.” Mike was Italian; a very nice guy. He helped me a lot and was a very heavy smoker. One day, he’s doing a paste-up. He has a pot of rubber cement, and he sticks the brush in there. He pulls it out and there’s a really thin strand of rubber cement coming across his cigarette. It caught on fire and for three seconds, we panicked. [Jim laughs] We threw it into a metal garbage pail that was there, and let the thing burn. I never smoked, but that was even more encouraging not to smoke. [chuckles] JA: How many people were working at Avon?

TALLARICO: Of course, there was Sol Cohen, and his secretary, Beverly Soff. She was the woman who lived across the street from me in Brooklyn. And Mike Rafaniello, and myself. That was it. The production was done by the other divisions of Avon. Avon was not just comic books. Comic

“I Liked The Area Of Comics In General”

books were just a sideline. Paperbacks, magazines... they had a lot of other publications, and that group took care of the production. I worked for Sol no more than six months. He was a terrible person. He delighted in torturing people. Now you have to remember I’m 18, 19 at the time... I don’t think I was twenty… and I expected to get paid every week like everybody else. And he would say, “Oh, I can’t do it this week. I’m too busy.” “What do you mean too busy? All you have to do is put in the amount of hours I spent there.” It was never more than four or five hours a day at a buck an hour, 75 cents an hour probably. I don’t even remember how much it was, but you’re talking about nothing, but I depended on that money. I was being supported by just my father because my mother had passed away by then. So finally, Sol pulled that on me another time. I said, “Sol, take this job, and do whatever you want with it. I quit. You owe me for half a week’s pay. Keep it. You need it more than I do.” And then I walked out, and that was it. He was such a miserable guy, I could have slugged him, I really could have, but I didn’t. JA: He was like that with everyone, I understand. Any clues as to why? TALLARICO: He just had power all of a sudden. He never had power in his life. He was a shoe salesman in a store and a relative of his was somebody at Avon. That’s how he got the job there, and it went to his head. Frank used to work for Cohen, and he would give Frank a hard time, also. Absolutely ridiculous. He crucified the artists and the writers, yes, and he was always yelling. JA: There’s only one person I’ve interviewed who liked him: Everett Raymond Kinstler.

Atom’s Ribbed Steve Ditko had little to worry about when Nation-Wide, packager Frank Carin, and (reportedly) artist Louis Ravielli launched their 1950 Captain Atom as part of the pocket-size comics line that included Do-Do, Lucky Star, and Mazie (about a teenage girl). We’re not sure who “approved” these “adventure stories”—but it probably wasn’t the thrill-starved kids who were expected to buy and read ’em! Scripter unknown. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

TALLARICO: Everett was there at the time, sure. Cohen loved Everett’s work. He gave Everett everything to do: Westerns, science-fiction, romance... everything. I remember going to Everett’s studio to bring him some things, and Everett kept talking about him.

and Illustrators School [later renamed The School of Visual Arts], and I probably was the star at that time. He didn’t do that out of courtesy or anything. It was a matter of he could do this work [to make money], and he could do it quickly, and he could do it without me having to go over it, and [without my changing anything or messing up his work]. I went to the school in ’53, ’54, and part of ’55.

JA: Did you see everybody that came in the offices?

JA: I also have you going to the Brooklyn Museum of Art School.

TALLARICO: Yes. Norman Nodel was another guy that came in, a good guy.

TALLARICO: I did that while I was going to high school, but that was a Saturday morning figure drawing class. I also took Saturday morning classes at Pratt, around the same time.

“Once A Week, [Burne] Hogarth Would Give A Demonstration” JA: You assisted Burne Hogarth on the Old and New Testament in doing telops. What year was this? TALLARICO: Probably ’53. I inked Hogarth’s pencil work. JA: He could have picked a lot of people. Why did he pick you? TALLARICO: I guess he looked at the cartooning class at the Cartoonists

JA: Who, besides Hogarth, were your teachers? TALLARICO: A guy named Jim Boyle, who was a wannabe Burne Hogarth. The big thing was, once a week, Hogarth would give a demonstration, and the classroom was packed. He didn’t really teach. He just gave these sermons, you know. [Jim laughs] He was very impressive. Of course we all knew his background, and he was the type that, if he goofed on something, he admitted it. After Tarzan, he did a Western strip named Drago, and he had a page that he would exhibit once in a while as teachers were exhibiting stuff, and it was hysterical because he had drawn a horse

Part I Of A Career-Spanning Interview With Veteran Comic Artist Tony Tallarico

with three legs. It was a goof, but he wasn’t afraid of it because you do things fast in comics, and that can happen. JA: So he wouldn’t come around and correct your drawings. TALLARICO: No, he wasn’t that type. JA: But he picked you when there were other people there, so he saw something in you that he apparently didn’t see in the others. TALLARICO: Yes, probably so. I was reliable. Besides doing the job, he knew that I would do it on time. It was the only thing I did for Hogarth. It paid for school. JA: Did he ever have non-serious moments? I never hear that he did. TALLARICO: If you were one-on-one, there would be some humorous talk. I don’t recall what was said, but I remember him laughing and making me laugh. JA: Were there any other students that you were in classes with that we would know of today? Don Heck, Steve Ditko.... TALLARICO: They probably went to night classes. Ditko was there before I was. Most of the students were going at night for two reasons: G.I. Bill of Rights, and/or they were working.

“I Thought [Avon’s Comic Books] Were Selling” JA: Let me get back to Avon here. Did you know anything about how the comic books were selling? What would you hear? TALLARICO: I remember one particular thing: Sol [Cohen] decided to save money on the covers, and he was using some paperback art for the comics, and the stuff was not appropriate. I didn’t think it was at all. What was the name of that book that came out, and killed comics? Seduction of the Innocent... that was nothing but trouble for the comics. JA: Did you think the comic books were selling very well?

What’s The Story, Lou? (Above:) A Lou Cameron-drawn splash from Story/Youthful’s Pawnee Bill #3 (July 1951). Writer unknown. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.] (Below:) Photo of Lou Cameron (on right) with Jim Amash, who interviewed Lou in A/E #79-80—and recently did the same with Tony Tallarico. Tony and Lou knew each other back in the days when each worked for Ace and Youthful. Photo by Joe Staton.

TALLARICO: I thought they were selling. I remember the print order was always around two-fifty, 300,000, and they were selling about 50%, which was pretty good. JA: In those days, yes. Did you ever have any proofreading duties? TALLARICO: No, because the secretary took care of the proofreading. JA: Let me get back to Kinstler. You met him a couple of times, you said? TALLARICO: I met him every time he came up to Avon. Everett was up there at least once a week. More than once—whether it was a script that had to be brought to him or one of his pencil jobs that were lettered for him to ink—I would go down to his studio on 20th Street and Lexington Avenue. JA: I take it he was the one guy that didn’t get criticized and yelled at by Sol Cohen. TALLARICO: No way. He wouldn’t have taken it if Sol had yelled at him. First of all, he was very, very good and very, very fast. But this is what Sol liked, because he would hold onto a script until the last minute, and then give it to somebody to work overnight. It was a favorite ploy of his. JA: But the work he got back wouldn’t have been as good when he did that. TALLARICO: Yes, but he liked to torture people. JA: He was more interested in power than the quality of the product? TALLARICO: Yes. There was an artist who had work in the Kit Carson

“I Liked The Area Of Comics In General”

book named Howard Larsen. It was the worst stuff I ever saw in my life. He was awful. He was like a very bad pulp illustrator. Larsen and Sol, for some reason, hit it off real well. Sol liked to use pulp artists or anybody whose work looked like it could have been in the pulps. JA: Did you ever meet any of Cohen’s bosses? TALLARICO: Yes, but I don’t remember names. JA: Was Kinstler the only person that he treated nicely? TALLARICO: He treated Wally Wood well, and Joe Orlando, because they worked together at the time. But Kinstler was always #1. because Kinstler could do everything! Romance, science-fiction, Westerns... you name it, he could do it. Woody was strictly science-fiction. I remember Sol tried him out on some romance stuff, and it was not good. JA: What do you remember about Wally Wood from this time period? TALLARICO: Very moody, very quiet guy, smoked like hell. And he drank a lot. JA: Was he dependable? TALLARICO: No. At one point, living in Valley Stream, Wally Wood had a studio on the main avenue—Rockaway Avenue—above a store. I met him in the street, and then went up there a couple of times, and the last time I visited, Joe Orlando was there by himself. Joe said, “Oh, he really had a bad session. Look at this.” He took me into the room where Woody was working, and there was a big hole in the wall. He had punched the wall out. JA: So he had a little violence with his drinking. TALLARICO: Oh, yes. JA: Did you talk to him much during the Avon days? TALLARICO: No, he was not a person you could talk to, unlike Joe Orlando. JA: Avon gave Wood a lot of prestigious stuff like Captain Science. TALLARICO: Oh, yes, he did a lot of things for them, but strictly in the science-fiction area. JA: He did The Mask of Fu Manchu, also. TALLARICO: Again, it’s that same genre. JA: Sol must have considered him, along with Kinstler, to be one of his more important artists. TALLARICO: Yes, I would think so. JA: Do you think he handled Wood with kid gloves? TALLARICO: Yes. He had to, because Woody would blow up over nothing. If [Sol] ever treated him the way he treated some of the others... wow! JA: Did you ever meet Harry Harrison, who worked with Wood for some time? TALLARICO: Yes. They also did stuff for Avon together. I knew them because they came in and dropped off stuff. And then I would get to go over it and change this and change that. They’d bring the work to Sol, he would look at it, and he would hand it to me several days later, with a list of things to be changed. JA: What do you remember about Joe Orlando from this time? TALLARICO: He was a happy-go-lucky guy, a nice person. I didn’t know

Weird [Captain] Science This splash page from Avon’s Captain Science #1 (June 1951) represents an early teaming of artists Joe Orlando and Wally Wood—and yes, in that order—at least, that’s the way their byline has it, with Joe’s name bigger than Wally’s. Soon they would go their separate ways, to develop into a pair of star artists. We featured a photo of Orlando last issue, and Wood was seen in the one prior to that. Scripter unknown. Thanks to Jim Kealy. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

what he did with Woody. I didn’t know how the heck the two of them worked together, because they were opposites. Joe was a funny, kind of refined guy, and Woody was very sour. He was tolerated because he was very good, and he had the name at that point because he had already been working for EC.

“A Lot Of Different Artists” JA: Did you know a man named Louis Ravielli? TALLARICO: Of course. He was one of the guys that did one of those small comic books for Frank Carin. He did a thing called Captain Atom. Lou also worked for Avon, and his brother Mike was quite an illustrator. He was a sports illustrator for, I think it was Sports Illustrated. I was amazed to discover him at Avon after knowing him with Frank. I guess that’s how Frank got him. In fact, that’s how I met Bill Fraccio. He worked for Frank. JA: Did you know Gerald McCann? TALLARICO: No, except that when Lenny Cole left Classics Illustrated, and went over to Dell, he called two people to do two books for him. He called me to do Danger Man, and he called Gerald McCann to do the

Part I Of A Career-Spanning Interview With Veteran Comic Artist Tony Tallarico

TALLARICO: An hour, just dropping in, saying hello, looking around. They’d show me different things they were working on, and that’s it. Sy was a very nice, helpful guy who would show me the pencils that he had, and how he was inking them. In fact, one time, this letterer that was there had a story that he had to get over to Sy, and I happened to be in the studio, dropping in. He knew I lived in Brooklyn, and asked could I drop it off with Sy? I said, “Well, I don’t know where he is.” So he called Sy up and it turned out that from where I lived in Brooklyn, I could just hop on a trolley that was on the corner, go to the last stop, and that’s where Sy was. [chuckles] So he met me at the station at the last stop, I gave him the work, we had a cup of coffee, and that was it. I never worked for Sy. JA: Lou Cameron had a lot to say about Norm Nodel. I’d like to hear what you have to say. TALLARICO: I thought he was a very nice guy. In fact, later on, I was packaging books for Charlton, strictly out in a godforsaken place [Derby] in Connecticut, and it was hard for them to work with a lot of different artists. So I got the assignment to do this packaging and it was great because it was just a part time thing, it didn’t involve any kind of time. The first guy I called was Norman, who penciled for me during the three or four years that I had the assignment. He penciled his own assignments for them, too. Norm hated Sol, too, but he had to take it because he had two kids, he had just bought a house... I mean he really had to swallow a lot of stuff. [NOTE: See Lou Cameron’s interview in A/E #79 & #80 for more on the subject of Nodel (whose name has only one “l,” unlike that of “Green Lantern” co-creator Mart Nodell) and Sol Cohen. —Jim.] Norm was born in Missouri, and his father was a rabbi. He had a brother who was a fantastic calligrapher. He had another brother who was a rabbi in Hawaii.

“I Think Your Hopes Are Fantastic!” Youthful [a.k.a. Story] was the comics company run by “good ol’ Billy Friedman.” This Tallarico-drawn story appeared in its Mysterious Adventures #6 (Feb. 1952). Scripter unknown, as per usual—which, given the line of dialogue quoted above, may well be a Good Thing. Thanks to Jim Kealy [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

Norm was a quiet guy. He had very bad arthritis. He wouldn’t deliver stuff to me—the Charlton stuff I’m talking about—in the city because he couldn’t get in, but he would come here to my place. He lived in Queens, and it was only like 25 minutes at most to get from his house to me. He would drop the stuff off, but he would hardly ever come in. I would see his car and go outside because he couldn’t walk. It just got progressively worse. He also had gout. He continually complained about it, but that’s part of the arthritis, too. He was a very serious man. He did whatever you asked him to do. I mean, sometimes there was no time for Charlton work, but he would make time. He penciled and Vince Alascia inked them so his pencils were one type of art, and Alascia was Rip Kirby-ish. Not a good mix. JA: You knew Lou Cameron.

cover. I remember Lenny saying, “You two guys worked at Classics, and you were dependable,” and blah blah blah, “and I’m going to give you work first.” That was nice, but I didn’t expect it. JA: Did you meet Lee Ames at that time? TALLARICO: No, I met him long before that. In fact, I was going to high school with a friend of mine, Syd Kurland. Syd was a friend of his, and one day he brought me to Lee’s studio. The studio had Sy Barry, and a lettering guy. A very heavy guy, a nice man; I don’t remember his name. JA: I know Sy, at one point, had a studio with Pete Morisi and Al Gordon.

TALLARICO: Oh, yes. We worked for good ol’ Billy Friedman [at Youthful magazines]. Lou would always be there when everybody brought their stuff in at one time. Friedman was an attorney, and at that time there were several attorneys who moonlighted as comic book publishers. I would bring a job there, and I would meet different guys like Lou, and Jonny D’Agostino. Billy Friedman was a bit of a kook also, but he wasn’t a bad guy like Cohen. He was a strange man. One day, I was in his office. I said hello and showed him my things. “Fine,” and then he said nothing for a long time, just sat there. He looked at his watch finally; he says, “Boy, it’s hot.” JA: What’s that got to do with anything?

TALLARICO: That was later. This was on Astor Place in New York. And Syd Kurland would go there and do some things for Lee, because Lee also did advertising. They were just sharing space. Sy was inking for DC, and I don’t remember Lee doing comic books [at that point], except he did a page a month for the Boy’s Life, and he was doing stuff at Landmark Books, which was a subsidiary for one of the major publishers. He was doing a history of frontiersmen.

TALLARICO: [laughs uproariously] That’s it! Did he have a thermometer watch or something? Another time, for some reason he was giving Jonny D’Agostino a hard time, and Jonny stutters. And when Jon came out of his office, I was in the waiting room. He said, “That-that-that-that B-b-billy Ffriedman, he’s a son of a bitch.” “Son of a bitch” came out so clear, [laughter] it was like two different people talking. I remember that to this day.

JA: How much time were you spending in the studio?

JA: The other lawyers were Nat Rothstein and Frank Unger.

“I Liked The Area Of Comics In General”

Post-Camelot Caped Crusaders Next issue we’ll be hearing of Tony’s success with The Great Society Comic Book, which led to a sequel, Bobman and Teddy, pictured here. A buck a comic in 1966 was quite the investment in those days! [© 2011 the respective copyright holder.]

TALLARICO: Unger, right. Bill Fraccio worked for Unger, too. I only dealt with Friedman. They weren’t in the same place. Unger was in another office. JA: In the same building? TALLARICO: I don’t know. I was never there. JA: What do you remember about Lou? TALLARICO: At one point, Friedman was no longer using letterers. We were going to Bob McLeod’s studio. He was doing LeRoy lettering and Lou hung out there. That’s where I usually saw him. We had to go to McLeod’s to pick up our work after he lettered it. I was doing some advertising work, too, and McLeod did paste-up lettering for me. I don’t remember much about my conversations with Lou, but I remember he was going out with a very young girl. I don’t know what happened, but McLeod, I think, was very upset about this. [NOTE: Lou married this woman, and subsequently divorced her, though they had children together. —Jim.] Lou was a very funny guy, but I really had very little to do with him because we didn’t spend much time together. Bob McLeod was a straight guy. He and his wife were very nice people. She was a singer at Radio City Music Hall. I was really just in and out of there. The “in” was one thing, but getting out was something else, because he was a talker. Part II of Jim Amash’s interview with Tony Tallarico will appear in our next issue, with more remembrances of Avon Comics and its panoply of artists… as Tony’s own career gathers steam.

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

The Mystery of the Missing Letterer—Part 5

by Michael T. Gilbert

ast issue we discussed Will Eisner’s lettering genius, Abe Kanegson, with son Ben and Abe’s sister, Rita Perlin. Now we have a fascinating interview with Abe’s younger brother, Lou Kanegson, a comic book fan since the late ’30s!

MICHAEL T. GILBERT: It’s a pleasure to talk to you. I’m a long-time admirer of your brother’s work, his comic book lettering especially. And for many years, Abe has been kind of a mystery, because nobody really knew what happened to him after he left comics around ’51 or so. So let me ask you a few questions... LOU KANEGSON: What purpose is this information that’s being obtained? What are you going to do with it? MTG: I’m a cartoonist and a comic book historian. I write a column for a magazine called Alter Ego that studies the history of Golden Age comic books in the ‘40s and the ‘50s, primarily. KANEGSON: Well, I was a reader of those [comic] books…. I believe I was reading from the [start] of Superman and Batman, or close to it. Walt Disney and the [Human] Torch; I think that was Marvel Comics. Also Captain America or Sub-Mariner. All kinds of stuff, basically. Even though I was a little bit older and I was reading novels and stuff, I occasionally kept my eye on the comic book situation. Including the— what was it?—was it EC publications, that came out with the horror...? MTG: Right. Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science. KANEGSON: I read that. I was [a big fan of that stuff] for many years. Because I was kind of into that and science-fiction and all that. They sort of complemented each other.

they slimmed him down. So you have a good memory for that stuff. Was Abe a comic book fan too? KANEGSON: I don’t recall that he was. He worked in the field because, as you said, his lettering was very unusual. But he was actually an artist, in the sense that he drew, not too many big pictures like canvases and watercolors, though he had a few—but basically, he sketched with a charcoal and pencil, and he made up all kinds of dream scenes and dramatic sketches. He was into art. He could sketch you a portrait in say five, ten minutes and it would be a very intense picture of you. Not like Atlantic City ”Here Comes Alfred!” boardwalk, but he First appearance of Batman’s butler, Alfred would capture Pennyworth, from Batman #16 (April 1943). something. So he was [© 2012 DC Comics.] an artist in addition to being a letterer. MTG: Right. And I know, when he was working with Will Eisner on The Spirit, he actually helped him do some of the plotting, also. They were talking about stories and such. KANEGSON: It may have been. By the way, one of the guys that worked with him at that early stage was Jules Feiffer. MTG: Right, I know. As a matter of fact, Jules Feiffer just this year came out with an autobiography about his work career and such, and spoke highly of Abe.

MTG: How old would you have been when EC was coming out? Let’s say in 1954 or so, for Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror… KANEGSON: I was in my early 20s. I read quite a number of those magazines, so there was a lot of continuity. When I was younger, Archie Comics and stuff of that nature—I read just about everything that was around in those days… [starting when I was about] seven years old, around 1939, 1940. MTG: Wow. So you were really there, right from the start. KANEGSON: Yeah, but I wasn’t a collector, because I was little. I didn’t have the hindsight—I should say the future sight of what was going to happen with comic books. I just kind of enjoyed them. MTG: Well, if everybody had foresight of everything, the comics would be worthless today, because everyone would have them. [laughs] KANEGSON: Right. I still remember when in “Batman”—I could be mistaken, but I believe that originally his valet Alfred was a fat guy. MTG: Yeah, he was, for the first year or so. Then

The Kanegson Krew! (Left to right:) Back row: Abe’s father and mother, Dave and Ester Kanegson; Abe; nephew Bert (son of brother Mack and Sylvia); Mack; and Sylvia. Front row: Rita and Lou, probably around 1940. [© 2012 Rita Perlin.]

The Mystery of the Missing Letterer—Part 5

MTG: When did he marry his wife? Do you think it was after he got out of comics? KANEGSON: Yeah, I believe it was afterwards, but I’m not positive. I remember that he was involved in a number of other things. He actually at one point, probably around ’57, ’58—one thing doesn’t exclude the other—he opened a square dance room in the Village. And that’s probably prior to getting married. I believe that’s where he met his wife. MTG: Do you know when he started doing music professionally? Would that have been in the ’50s or the ’40s? KANEGSON: I’d say professionally, it would be the later date, in the ’50s, and then the ’60s. Because he developed a reputation, both as a folk singer and a square dance caller. And he worked at one or two of the hotels in the Catskills, which were thriving in those days. He had a regular assignment during the summer over there. I can’t really recall [the name], but he did work exclusively for [one] hotel. There were a number of places where people would see him, and they’d ask him to work at their place or do a thing for them. That was something separate from his art; there was no crossover on that. MTG: Right. I have his album, and he’s a very good singer. I like his work a lot. KANEGSON: Yeah, he was very good, very natural. And on his way, he crossed paths with celebrities, people like Burl Ives and all that. They didn’t do much for him, but they gave him suggestions. And there was a famous guy, Oscar something, who was very well known in the folk and the creative music field of those days, who had a radio program. He had Abe on his program. Abe was involved in a number of things. Once, he was the artist on a quiz show that really didn’t make it, on

KANEGSON: I know they were friendly. And [Jules Feiffer] had a young assistant… I think her name was Ellen, and I went to high school with her. They lived in the neighborhood. It was strange. In those days, who thought about any of these relationships? But, I would see Jules Feiffer’s strip in The Village Voice… MTG: Right. Originally it was called Sick, Sick, Sick. How much older was Abe than you? KANEGSON: He was about nine years older than me, approximately. MTG: And do you have any idea of how Abe got into comic books, into the comic book field? KANEGSON: No. He was a very versatile individual. He sang folk songs, called square dances. How he met up with the creator of The Spirit— [there’s] a big chunk of his life that I don’t really know about. We were very friendly, but we had separate lives. In fact, part of it was just that I was too young. MTG: I think your sister might have made reference that you were roommates at a point. KANEGSON: No, we weren’t roommates, but we were very close. MTG: Was Abe living at home at that point with your parents? KANEGSON: He lived at home, and he also lived separately. I think he had a room in the village. And then of course, later in his life, he got married. And about five years later, shortly after he got married, he was stricken with leukemia. And then he had a remission as a result of medication he was taking. And he fathered two children with his wife.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

one of the major networks. They put together a game show, hired an artist. He would come out and do some quick artwork. MTG: Do you know what year that would be? I think your sister mentioned it, and I think she said it was about 1959, 1960, thereabouts.

KANEGSON: He did. I kind of missed [it], until afterwards. And then I found some comic books with that going on, and I looked at it and said, “This is strange stuff, but it’s interesting.” It was different than most comic books. Because that stuff was probably ahead of its time. MTG: Getting back to your parents for a second, did they come from Russia?

KANEGSON: She has a better memory than I do. MTG: Do you know the name of the TV show, by any chance? KANEGSON: No. It’s one of those things that I glanced at once, because he was on it. I think they called him something like Pierre [Michael laughs], and he came out and did some sketches. It didn’t have any great importance [to me at the time], but I was interested because it was my brother. It was a national show, out of New York. It was about the time when Johnny Carson had a game show too, at that point— roughly the late ’50s. Abe was a regular on the show for as long as it lasted. There was an M.C.—he wasn’t a famous guy—and they had some format so they could call it a quiz show. And Abe was part of that in some sense. I’m sure, it’s like 60 years ago or so. I probably remember some of the plots from the comic books better than [I remember that show].

KANEGSON: Yeah, they came from that part of Russia that was disputed. Poland, Russia. I believe they ended up, I think they consider it a part of Poland. But my father was actually drafted; he was in the Russian Army during World War I. And then they immigrated to the United States. I think that, when Abe came here, he was basically less than one year old or something. MTG: What was your family life like? KANEGSON: My family was a little bit strange in structure, because I had two older brothers. And another brother besides Abe, who was considerably older than Abe. They were the older group. Then, late in life, my parents had two children, Rita and myself, when they were probably about 40, 41, late in life. And they had mellowed quite a bit. When they had come to this country, they were kind of on the rough side with discipline. But we didn’t get too much of that. We were much younger, and by then they had become Americanized to a large extent. They were speaking English and Yiddish, and they went to night school and all that stuff. But basically they were nice parents. They weren’t modern, but they weren’t oldfashioned.

MTG: [laughs] Me, too. I’ve read a lot of the ones you’ve read. Were you reading The Spirit when it came out? KANEGSON: No. Believe it or not, I didn’t know about The Spirit. When he was working on it, I wasn’t aware of it. MTG: [surprised] Really?

My father was—in the old days they used to call it a seltzer man. He had a route and he would do home delivery of seltzer, soda, and beer.

KANEGSON: It was only afterwards that I learned about The Spirit. It was not that popular a comic book in its day. I got all kinds of books. But by coincidence, I wasn’t very involved in reading it. It’s only afterwards that I read a few of the, you know, the big Sunday supplements, a special section they had in comic books.

MTG: Oh, Two Cents Plain, huh? [NOTE: “Plain seltzer.”] KANEGSON: Yeah, Two Cents Plain. The candy store sold some of their syrup along with the seltzer. Fox’s UBet, that was a chocolate syrup...

MTG: I don’t know if you were aware, but DC Comics has actually put out hardcover Archive editions of every Spirit story.

That Old Gang Of Mine! KANEGSON: No, I wasn’t aware of that. That’s interesting.

KANEGSON: Some of my mother’s brothers came to this country; most of the family, unfortunately, stayed in Europe. But a number of relatives did come to the United States, so they were saved from the Holocaust. And most of them, about four or five people including my father, were in that business of home delivery, where he drove his truck. Rather than just selling seltzer—for which you had to go every day to a seltzer shop, because they refilled bottles and all that stuff; I don’t think it exists anymore, I don’t think it’s allowed—well, he had had seltzer, soda, beer,

MTG: Yeah, and they’re beautiful editions, preserving the work. And Abe’s lettering looks just wonderful on those.

KANEGSON: He was very reticent at discussing his work. MTG: That’s funny, because knowing what a comic book fan you are, I would have thought he would have shown you and said, “Look at this!”

MTG: Yeah, I remember that from New York.

The Mystery of the Missing Letterer—Part 5

syrup. And he had a route—he delivered; that’s how he made his living. Long hours. MTG: So, Abe got along well with your family, your parents? KANEGSON: Yeah, he got along OK with them. At a very early age, for some reason, they threw him out of high school and they sent him to City College [of New York]. I think he was about fourteen. I don’t know what he was doing [at City College], but he did work on their college magazine, called Mercury. He did some cartoons for them… and that might be in their archives. That was a long time ago. But I think he was too young to go to college at fourteen. Whatever the reason was, he didn’t stay there very long. A year or two, something like that. He didn’t like it. Even there, he displayed some of his art. Rough, rough art talent, let’s put it that way… he was a kid.

MTG: How did his wife and children do after he passed away? KANEGSON: They basically proceeded on their own. His wife went to work; I think she was a secretary or something. She’s still around. And his children found their own professions. One of his sons, Andras, I think is a magazine editor and lives in California. She had two sons. Ben’s the oldest. And Ben is very involved in TV and the movies. I forget what his specific job is, but movies and TV; I guess he told me more than once, but it really didn’t stick with me. I know he’s worked on a number of wellknown TV series and things of that nature. [NOTE: Ben works as a “key grip” and a “dolly grip.”] MTG: How would you describe your brother’s personality in general?

KANEGSON: He was a little bit unique. I would describe him as a very nice guy, easy to get along 2¢ Plain! MTG: I’ve seen the stuff he did later on on The with. But he had an unusual sense of humor—like, Spirit. He helped with some of the inking on that, every once in a while, for the fun of it, he would do Ebony enjoys a fizzy drink in The Spirit for so he did some of the artwork on that as well as some pantomime. Instead of telling a joke or Feb., 6, 1949. Maybe Abe’s dad delivered it? [© 2012 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.] the lettering. something, he would do some pantomime. And in the comic strips, one of his favorite characters was KANEGSON: You know more about than I do, Li’l Abner. So once in a while he would change because I was not involved in that at all. himself into Li’l Abner. And at that time when he was younger, he was capable of doing that; he had the physique and everything. When he’d MTG: Then of course you wouldn’t know why he quit the comic book change his expression, you’d swear, here’s Li’l Abner. He was familiar with industry? all that stuff. KANEGSON: I don’t know if this is accurate; but it probably was between MTG: It’s such a shame that he died so early. him and Will Eisner. Or maybe he felt that that work was not his thing that he wanted to do day after day. But I’m only guessing. He never KANEGSON: Yeah, it was a shame. He had sort of a charismatic persondiscussed it with me. He really kept his life more or less private unless I ality, but while he was doing his public stuff he had a lot of fans, people was involved directly. Which is, at times, what happened later on in life. who would chase after him and want to be friendly and all that. I don’t MTG: Did he do a lot of other commercial art jobs? Your sister mentioned he did some record album covers…. KANEGSON: I know he did some other commercial art jobs. I know there was one big layout he did with a union—I don’t know what particular union it was—at a big annual convention and in their newspaper, an allied newspaper. Abe did all the artwork, which was a lot of portraiture and sketches that were worked on at the convention. Even when I was a kid I thought, “Hey, look at this!” He did very strong portraits of people and the layout of the auditorium and the speeches. It was probably a vanity newspaper for the union, because of this convention. MTG: Do you have any of his artwork in your own collection? KANEGSON: No, I don’t. I have some sketches that he did later in life. Before he passed away, he was sick. He did quite a number of charcoal one-page sketches of imaginary things, like horses and people. And I have some of those.

Pinhead! Could Kanegson have been the inspiration for the good-hearted monster appearing in The Spirit for April 6, 1947? Once arrested, the lucky fellow becomes a successful comic book artist! [© 2012 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

really know the details, as I said. But people who knew him, like friends of mine, friends of the family, they always found him to be very likable. He wasn’t a standoffish guy or anything of that nature. He was the kind of guy who would worry about other people. MTG: Well I know that both Jules Feiffer and Will Eisner spoke very highly of him, and for years and years Will Eisner was asking if anybody knew where he had gone to. He wanted to get together with him again and say “Hi” to him or whatever. KANEGSON: Yeah, well, he basically didn’t lead that much of a public life, except for his square dance calling. He did drop out of that comic book, comic strip field. MTG: The story I heard, and I’m not sure if it’s true or not, was that he

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

had asked Eisner for a raise, Eisner refused, and he quit as a result of that. But that may or may not be the case. KANEGSON: It could be something like that—because, I don’t know if it coincided with him getting married or what, but he probably realized at one time that his income [laughs] had to be increased. MTG: Yeah, and the problem with working with The Spirit—he probably asked around 1950 or ’51, and The Spirit’s circulation was going down at that point and there was less money coming in, so of course Eisner would have said “No.” By 1952, Eisner had stopped The Spirit completely, so, unless Abe had gone to some other publisher and tried to get work, he wouldn’t have had anything to do in the comic field.

KANEGSON: PM, yeah. [NOTE: PM was a left-leaning New York City newspaper from 1940-48.] So it’s possible that he brought that around the house, but he himself was never really involved, as far as I know, any of that heavy political stuff. Unfortunately, as I said, even though I was very close to my brother, especially in his later years, I didn’t really interact with him too much in his younger or even mid-life. He had his own things going and he was very busy with it. MTG: I still have to laugh thinking that you were this hardcore comic book fan, and you didn’t realize that your brother was working on one of the greatest comics of all time.

KANEGSON: I didn’t find out until much, much later—probably after the whole deal Dick Crazy! was finished. I found some comic books a Kanegson lettered Eisner’s Dick Tracy Spirit parody of KANEGSON: In general, as an individual, little later. But, as I said, he didn’t come July 20, 1947. [© 2012 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.] he was well thought of. He wasn’t a prima home and talk about his stuff. I know donna or any of that stuff. about the Smokey Stover comic strip! He was in basically the Sunday papers. I knew more about them than The MTG: Yes, he was just so amazingly talented. Someone said that when Spirit, strangely enough. But I wasn’t too plugged in. he would do some of his lettering, he wouldn’t even use guidelines. I don’t know if that was true or not. KANEGSON: I don’t know, because one thing about him, he always had a pencil and a pad in his hand. Some people read all the time, some people doodle—his was more than a doodle. He would just pick up the pen or a pencil or whatever he was using, and all of a sudden there would be something there. He would transform things with sketches. That’s what made him happy. The piano and things like that; he was a very versatile guy. But he didn’t make a living playing the piano, he did that and guitar just for the fun of it, you know. MTG: Right. One thing I haven’t asked about—but he was described a number of times as being kind of leftist, and I was wondering if he got into any trouble in the ’50s because of that. KANEGSON: I’m not aware of him ever getting into any trouble. I mean, I’ve never heard that he was subpoenaed or someone wanted to speak to him, like a committee or anything. I don’t think anything like that ever happened, because in our narrow family unit, we would have known. So as far as I know, he never got in any kind of difficulty. He—you know, that made me think of that other artist, the guy that ended up drawing children’s books. He used to draw for that—what was his name? Geisel, or… MTG: Oh, Ted Geisel. You mean Dr. Seuss. KANEGSON: Yes, he became Dr. Seuss. I actually remember seeing some of his drawing in papers. I forget the name of the newspaper but I saw it a number of times. MTG: “PM,” or…?

MTG: Well, The Spirit only appeared in a handful of newspapers. That’s still a large circulation, but just a handful of newspapers. I don’t even

The Mystery of the Missing Letterer—Part 5

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Smile For The Birdie! (Left to right:) Abe’s older brother Mack, niece Ruth, nephew Bert, younger brother Lou, Abe, three relatives, and Mack’s wife Sylvia. This photo from sister Rita’s wedding in August 1955. [© 2012 Rita Perlin.]

think there was even anything in New York, not that I know of offhand. Well, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. But it was certainly a pleasure talking to you. We’ve gotten just a ton of new information, so this is great! Thank you so much, Lou. And so, with the help of the Kanegson family and my wife, Janet, I was finally able to put to rest “The Mystery of the Missing Letterer!” Shortly after the interview I sent Lou one of my Mr. Monster

comics, as well as a copy of DC’s The Best of The Spirit collection. I was curious to see what this old comic fan would think of The Spirit after 60 years. In a letter dated 12/4/10, Lou thanked me and said that he “became lost in the Spirit collection. Its tales, which reminded me of stories by Saki and O. Henry, were very enjoyable—not to mention the unique layouts. I found some of the same irony and humor in Mr. Monster Attacks—but was amazed by its startling colors, complex artwork, and 3-D effects— hardly like the old days!” Indeed! But before we go, I have to tell you about a conversation I had with Abe’s sister, Rita Perlin. We spoke about a month after I first interviewed her in October 2010, and what she said brought things full circle. Rita had just returned from a play in which her granddaughter Jillian, then a second-year Theater Arts student at SUNY New York at Purchase, was involved. In an ironic coda, the play turned out to be A Family Matter—by Kanegson’s old boss, Will Eisner! Abe would have had a good laugh at that! Till next time...

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significant events in comics history, the exact details ar Leonard Maurer, Norm’s older brother, remembered in a later intervie was in the car when Kubert floated this idea. Other accounts suggest Leonar Maurer was brought in afterward to deal with the technical issues of the printing process, since he had experience in that area. In any produce 3-D comics, and it took all three of them to mak The first step was to sell Archer St. John on the pr was solving the many technical and practical issues inv quickly worked up a sample “Abbott “Abbott and Costello” page using clear acetate to create different laay yers. K Kubert ubert did a single-panel s character Tor the Hunter. He dated his sample Mar The 3-D process works because human eyes ar about two-and-a-half inches apart, each seeing objects fr angle, allowing us to perceive objects in depth. When one looks at a 3-D comic book without the glasses, one sees off-register red and gr glasses with one red and one green lens, a monochr illusion of multiple laay yers at different depths is achie St. John was thrilled with the effect and committed to publishing a 3-D comic book to both test their ability to produce it and find out if it w

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Comic Fandom Archive – In Memoriam

Marshall Lanz Fanzine Publisher & Alter Ego Contributor Dies At 59 by Bill Schelly

ormer fanzine publisher and fandom prankster Marshall Lanz passed away on the morning of August 10th, 2011, after an unspecified extended illness.

Born August 15, 1951, in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, of Joseph and Kathryn Lanz, Marshall grew up in Penn Hills, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Marshall and I made contact through the mail in the spring of 1966, when he saw an ad for my fanzine Incognito in the Rocket’s BlastComicollector. Because we lived in suburbs on opposing sides of downtown Pittsburgh, we often met at my father’s office (the local branch of the Northern Pacific Railway, later the Burlington Northern). Having free rein on Saturdays, we used the NP typewriters to create our fanzines, and scoured used bookstores for old comic books and hot rod magazines. Then I would spend the night at Marshall’s house on Lindberg Avenue in Penn Hills, where we traded comics and did more work on fanzines. Marshall Lanz was my best friend in fandom, or, indeed, anywhere, from 1966 to 1968. After The Forbush Gazette, which was Marshall’s best-known fanzine (there were just two issues), he continued with the Panel Art Examiner and the Graphic Art Collector, always continuing the numbering from one to the next. Fans who ordered something would often end up with something else, though in truth the contents were interchangable. He published work by Raymond Miller, Larry Herndon, Doug Potter, Dave Herring, Jeff Gelb, and other well-known fans of the day.

Hawking His Wares (Right:) Marshall Lanz and a feline friend, circa 1990. (Above:) After seeing Biljo White’s Blackhawk cover for Alter Ego [Vol. 1] #8 at the turn of 1965, Marshall created this gag cartoon and submitted it as a possible entry in a series of “Famous Blast Words” being written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Jay Lynch. Marhall’s cartoon was printed in A/E V1#9, which was published late that year. [Blackhawk TM & © 2011 DC Comics.]

Practically Joking (Right:) Marshall Lanz, safecracker. “Taken in my father’s office in 1967,” Bill Schelly writes, “it reveals Lanz’s prankster persona. This same year, he published The Forbush Gazette #1, his best-known single fanzine, though he churned out several more.” (Below:) Alan Hutchinson’s superb Fantastic Four drawing graced the cover of The Forbush Gazette #1, of which Lanz claimed he printed and sold more than 300 copies. [Fantastic Four TM & © 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Marshall Lanz

Lanz was a prankster with a wicked sense of humor, and enjoyed playing practical jokes on fans like Dave Esser (The D.C. Trade Center), Tony Rutherford (Bombshell), and others. When I moved to Idaho in late 1967, our friendship continued, and I visited him in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1972, the last time we met. (I wrote about our friendship at some length in my book Sense of Wonder: A Life in Comic Fandom.) Marshall Lanz was an artist of considerable ability, and a graduate of Ivy School of Art in Pittsburgh. In later years, “he was a Pontiac buff, enjoyed old cars, and was an avid Pittsburgh Steeler fan,” according to the obit in a Clarion, Pennsylvania, newspaper. He was especially fond of his pet cats. He had his own cottage industry creating and selling custompainted ceramics and other kinds of artwork, and had a real flair for it. Lanz married Jeanne M. Russell in Spring Hill, Florida, in 1982, and is survived by her and his sister Betty Freund of Glendale, Arizona. From a personal standpoint, Marshall was a barrel of fun, and we talked on the phone almost every day. We held the first fan get-together at his house in the summer of 1967, which we called “the Mini-Pitt Con,” probably the first such gathering in the history of fandom in Pittsburgh. (It was attended by Jim Shooter, Bill G. Wilson, Larry Watczak, Chuck Rogers, Dennis Palumbo, and perhaps one or two others.) Even though we had only been in touch sporadically over the years, I am profoundly saddened by Marshall’s passing. He was only 59, and that’s too young to lose him. For those who knew him, he was a very special person, and I’ll always cherish my memories of the great times we had together. [Bill Schelly’s email address is: hamstrpres@aol.com]

Marshall Lanz This recent photo of Marshall shows some of his work as a ceramics designer.

In Memoriam

Tony DiPreta (1927-2010) “A Fine, Prolific Talent” by Mark Evanier

eteran comic book and strip artist Tony DiPreta died on June 2, 2010, at the age of 88. He was born on July 9, 1921. An obituary in a Connecticut newspaper noted that he grew up in Stamford, CT, and got into comic art while still in junior high school, which would have been around 1939… about when the comic book industry had its first boom.

His first job was working in color separation and engraving for one of the many companies that then prepped comic book art for publication. He also picked up lettering work on Lyman Young’s newspaper strip Tim Tyler’s Luck. The engraving work was mainly on material for Quality Comics, and this led to a string of jobs for that company— lettering at first, then inking, then drawing. His first published solo work was probably a onepage gag in National Comics #8, published in 1941. The obituary states: “Eventually, DiPreta made his way to New York City, where he met legendary comic book writer and editor Stan Lee, who gave him Porky Pig to ink.” Actually, it was Ziggy Pig, and from there, DiPreta segued to Hillman Publications, where, beginning around 1942, he was one of that company’s most valuable artists, working on all their comics but most notably Airboy. He also worked exclusively for Lev Gleason on that publisher’s character called Daredevil and on the firm’s popular crime comics. Around

1950, he returned to Timely Comics and Stan Lee, where he was put to work on mystery comics and Westerns. At this time, he had also assisted Lank Leonard on the Mickey Finn newspaper strip, at times drawing more of it than Leonard. In 1959 he got the job of producing Joe Palooka, and he handled that strip for 25 years until it ended in 1984. DiPreta promptly took over drawing Rex Morgan, M.D., on which he worked until 2000. Though continuously involved in newspaper strips for more than forty years, he also found time to assist his neighbor Mort Walker with some Beetle Bailey projects and to draw occasional comics for Charlton Press, mainly on their early-’70s Hanna-Barbera comics.

It’s Delightful, It’s Delicious, It’s DiPreta Tony DiPreta, in a photo from Mark Evanier’s website—apparently drawing a comic book page. He’s in the vicinity of an undated daily (below) from the Joe Palooka comic strip he inherited from creator Ham Fisher—plus (at right) a page from Magazine Enterprises’ American Air Forces #3 (Feb. 1945). The latter was published from black-&-white Photostats in Ron Frantz’s/ACE Comics’ Fantastic Adventures #3 in 1987. [Joe Palooka strip © 2011 McNaught Syndicate or successors in interest; ME page © 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

The comic art community mourns the passing of such a fine, prolific talent. This column has been slightly edited from its original form on Mark Evanier’s website www.newsfromme.com.

In Memoriam

Jon D’Agostino (1929-2010) “[His] Style Made Betty And Veronica Cute And Human” by Mark Evanier

ongtime comic book artist John “Jon” D’Agostino died on November 29, 2010, at his home in Ansonia, California. Jon was born in Italy on June 13, 1929, but his family moved to America when he was a lad, and Jon attended the Industrial School of Art in Los Angeles.

He broke into comics as a colorist for Timely Comics, which is now known as Marvel, and soon became head of their coloring department for several years. He was skilled in a wide range of crafts and worked over the years as a penciler, a letterer, and an inker, primarily on humor material. The bulk of his pencil and ink work was done for Charlton Comics in the 1950s and ’60s, and for Archie Comics in the years since. He also worked intermittently for Marvel on their Star (children’s) line of comics but occasionally on superhero and adventure titles, including G.I. Joe and Marvel Two-in-One. He also did many uncredited assists of other artists. He and his friend Joe Sinnott, for example, often assisted each other. One of Jon’s most notable credits was the lettering for The Amazing Spider-Man #1 in 1963, and he lettered several other stories for Stan Lee during this period, some of which were credited to “Johnny Dee.” At the same time, a letterer named John Duffy lettered a few stories for Marvel, which has led many to assume that John Duffy was another pseudonym for Jon D’Agostino. This is not so. Jon D’Agostino was not John Duffy. He was also not Tony D’Agostino, a prominent Italian cartoonist who was no relation.

Dear Jon Jon D’Agostino and examples of his humor work from the two companies for which he did the most work: the cover of Charlton’s Go-Go #6 (Oct. 1966), starring “Bikini Luv”—and the original art for that of Tales from Riverdale #30 (2008), which Jon inked over pencils by Fernando Ruiz. Thanks to Mark Evanier for the photo, and to Rik Offenberger, Steve Oswald, and Archie Comics for the latter art spot. [Go-Go cover © 2011 the respective copyright holders; Riverdale cover © 2011 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

As mentioned above, the bulk of Jon’s work in recent years was for Archie Comics, primarily as an inker. He had a slick, organic style that made Betty and Veronica cute and human. I only knew Jon via an occasional phone call, but I followed decades of diligent hard work that went too often unnoticed. He was a quiet, dedicated professional who did fine work for well over half a century. The above is a slightly edited version of Mark’s original obit/tribute to Jon D’Agostino, which appeared on his popular multi-media website www.newsfromme.com.

In Memoriam

Vern Henkel (1917-2009) “[He Drew] Nearly Every Crime And War Title Timely Published” by Dr. Michael J. Vassallo

’m sad to report the death of artist Vern Henkel, who passed away at the age of 91 on October 21, 2009, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Henkel was born in that city on November 27, 1917, and spent his early years in the comic book business with Quality, from 1939 through 1946. Much of the Quality information below comes from Jim Amash’s interview with Henkel that ran in Alter Ego #48 (May 2005). Henkel broke in at Quality with his feature “Gallant Knight,” which he created in 1937 while still in high school. He further created for that company “Abdul the Arab,” “Captain Fortune,” “Comet Kelly,” “Chic Carter,” “Wing Wendall,” and a slew of adventure features through the 1940s, including “Don Q.,” “Dusty Dane,” “Space Legion,” “Whistler,” and “Yankee Eagle.” He next showed up at Timely in 1947, working on staff, primarily on crime stories, until the staff was dissolved at the end of 1949. The highlight from this period was the four-issue 1949 Vern Of The Century run of Casey Crime Photographer, a crime comic based on the Vern Henkel in 1950 and circa 2000—seen here with his splash page for Quality’s CBS radio series that ran from 1943-50, from 1954-55, and on National Comics #34 (Aug. 1943) and the cover of Timely’s Marvel Tales #100 (April television from 1951-52, also known as Flashgun Casey for part of 1951). Thanks to Steve Thompson for the “Chic Carter” scan. [National art © 2011 the its run. Henkel drew three stories per issue and occasionally even respective copyright holders; Marvel Tales cover © 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc.] the filler. It was also in 1950 that Henkel met fellow artist Joe Maneely, recalling to Jim Amash that Maneely introduced himself in 1951. Other crime titles included while both were on staff, with Maneely telling Henkel how much he All True Crime, Crime Cases, Crime admired the work he had done at Quality. Henkel and Maneely became Exposed, Justice Comics, Spy Cases, neighbors in Bayside, New York, frequently socializing with their families and Spy Fighters. In the Atlas war (their children played together) and Maneely’s Hussian School colleague titles he drew 40 stories from 1950 George Ward, and working out of a studio together in the early 1950s through 1953, in titles including with Al Lockwood and Al Battle, Battle Action, Battlefield, Ulmer, former Timely staff Combat, Kent Blake, Man artists. When I spoke to Comics, Men in Action, Men’s Henkel in 2008, he told me Adventures, War Action, War Maneely was the fastest Adventures, War Combat, War artist he ever saw, outproComics, and Young Men, delinducing him at the studio by eating often graphically violent more than two-to-one and portrayals of human misery churning out more story and war suffering those preart in a given period than Comics Code Korean anyone he had ever seen. War/Cold War-era tales. One of my favorite Henkel stories When the staff was was a biography of baseball let go, Henkel continued slugger Ralph Kiner in to freelance for Stan Lee Atlas’ Sports Action #8 on nearly every crime (Aug. 1951). and war title Timely published under its Henkel left comics by 1954 and spent the rest of his art career in “Atlas” logo. He took advertising and the like. A rabid baseball fan, he was ecstatic when his over the “Rocky Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series in 2008 and, ironically, passed Jordan – Private Eye” away the very day they defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers to feature from George clinch the 2009 National League pennant, en route to a Tuska and drew five World Series loss to the hated New York Yankees. consecutive issues

In Memoriam

Lew Sayre Schwartz (1926-2011) “[To Be] One Of The Golden Age Guys… Is Just A Hoot” by Jon B. Cooke

ew Sayre Schwartz, multi-talented cartoonist, filmmaker, historian and creative dynamo, perhaps remembered foremost as Bob Kane’s “ghost” artist on some 120 “Batman” comic book stories of the late ’40s and early ’50s, died on June 18, due to complications from a fall. Born in New Bedord, Massachusetts, on July 24, 1926, Schwartz was an early afficionado of comic books—particularly Batman—and, especially, the adventure comic strips of Milton Caniff, Roy Crane, Hal Foster, and Alex Raymond. With the encouragement of Caniff (with whom Schwartz developed a longstanding personal correspondence), he moved to New York in 1946 to pursue a career as a cartoonist, becoming involved in the National Cartoonists Society (beginning a life-long association) and landing a lucrative position as Bob Kane’s main “ghost” artist in 1947. Simultaneously, Schwartz worked for King Features Syndicate as inhouse artist (correcting and altering comic strip art as needed). Fed up with working for Kane (where he toiled anonymously while the Batman creator signed Schwartz’s work, as was Kane’s modus operandi for his ever-rotating stable of “ghosts”), Schwartz left comic books in 1953 and, in a couple of years, he landed at the prestigious agency J. Walter Thompson, the beginning of a long-running—and awardwinning—career in advertising. By 1961 the ever-ambitious and perpetually energized artist—now a writer, producer, and director for film and television—Schwartz joined up with two partners to create a film production company with the unlikely name of Ferro, Mogubgub and Schwartz, which would go on to win numerous awards, including four Emmys. While his Batman work would garner him the most attention, albeit many years after working for Kane, it was at FM&S where Schwartz worked on a piece of cinematic history: the startingly original opening credits for Stanley Kubrick’s darkly comic film satire, Dr. Stangelove.

Schwartz would never stray too far from his first love, comic strips, personally producing a full-length documentary on his mentor and friend entitled Milton Caniff: A 75th Birthday Tribute (1992), featuring an introduction by world-renowned newsman Walter Cronkite. He also notably lensed another documentary, 1986’s Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post. Even upon retirement from his remarkable advertising career, Schwartz was burning with energy, constantly working on new projects (such as an illustrated adaptation of Moby-Dick, drawn by Dick Giordano and published in 2001) and, upon discovery by comics fandom, he became a frequent presence on the comics convention circuit. In 2002, Comic-Con International: San Diego honored Schwartz with an Inkpot Award.

The Schwartz Was With Us (Above:) Lew Sayre Schwartz posed in his Massachusetts studio in the Fall of 2003. Photo by Jon B. Cooke. (Below:) Perhaps Lew's most iconic comic book art would be his work on "The Gorilla Boss of Gotham City" in Batman #75 (Feb.March 1953). Seen here are his initial thumbnail layouts and finished pencils for that tale's splash. Jon B. Cooke's in-depth interview with Schwartz appeared in Alter Ego #51. [© 2012 DC Comics.]

When asked by this writer if he saw irony in that, after a long and lauded professional life outside the form, he would receive his greatest recognition as a “Golden Age” comic book artist in his own golden years, Schwartz chuckled. “I laugh about it,” he said. “You gotta remember I have had a pretty decent career as a filmmaker, receiving a lot of recognition. I got all of the acknowledgement out of the film and television businesses which I never got out of the comics.

“Strangely enough, everything’s turned around. By the mid-’60s, I was very well-known in the television business, nationally and internationally. So for me, I can only feel lucky about my career taking me to where I’ve been. I’ve had that kind of creative experience that, combined, was able to amount to something. Comics, in a way, taught me how to make film. So I nursed on that, didn’t feel any depression in terms of not having made it in the comic business. And for this thing to come back and swing around and make me one of the Golden Age guys, if you will, is just a hoot. It’s funny!” Schwartz leaves his wife of 63 years, Barbara, and four grown children. He was 84.

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oy here. After getting caught short for pages to devote to your missives last issue,this time we’re printing letters and e-mails (usually excerpts of same) on A/E #91 & 92 (Jan. & March 2010). Thanks to the ever-reliable Shane Foley for providing this issue’s “maskot” illo of Captain Ego and Alter Ego in the style of this issue’s tribute subject, the late great Dick Giordano. Thanks, Shane! [Alter Ego TM & © 2011 Roy & Dann Thomas; costume designed by Ron Harris; Captain Ego TM & © 2011 Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly.]

Now, on to #91: That issue saw the first installment of Jim Amash’s interview with Jack Katz, Golden/Silver Age artist who later created, wrote, and drew The First Kingdom, one of the earliest multi-chapter graphic novels, which began publication in 1978. Comics researcher/historian Robert Beerbohm filled us in on additional background on TFK: Hi Roy— Kind of bummed out that Jack Katz did not mention me as the prime reason First Kingdom was printed in the first place. I nurtured the project; I cajoled Bud Plant, Jon Campbell, and John Barrett, then my partners in Comics & Comix [retail outlet], that this was something we had to do. This project was important. With TFK, Comics & Comix became a publisher in the early days, when I was there with big plans. By trading TFK with other local UG [underground] publishers in the Bay Area, we became a distributor. Kim Deitch designed our first wholesale catalog of listings. Our early vision was to take over the Bay Area by publishing our own stuff, distributed on our own, with portions going into our retails outsets. I saw the first three pages in Jack and Carolyn’s Dwight Way apartment up from our C&C HQ at 2512 Telegraph Ave in Berkeley around December 1973. He had a story all framed out; he verbalized it in his unique, articulating way. Once I saw where he wanted to take it into outer space, I knew this had to be backed. All the Bay Area underground comix publishers had turned him down. None of them knew how to think in terms of still being in publishing 12 years hence; the lawsuits from various states’ attorneysgeneral because of Zap Comics #4 being busted in 1969 did not lend for those types of thought patterns. The Air Pirates trial with Disney did not help matters much, either. By mid-June 1973 the Supreme Court turned down a Zap appeal; the mainly Bay Area alternative comix industry was pretty dismally-minded for good cause. Print Mint, Rip Off Press, Last Gasp, Krupp Comic Works, etc., all put their publishing on a short-termlet’s-see-what’s-up hold.

Kingdom Come Reader Mark Muller sent us scans of a number of pages of Jack Katz’s The First Kingdom, some of which were utilized in A/E #91-92. This one is listed as being from “Book 21, p. 698.” Boy, that’s some novel—graphic or otherwise! [© 2011 Jack Katz.]

Along comes this Golden Age old-timer [Jack Katz] from back East with an enthusiasm I found contagious and got my C&C partners behind on. Jack was the first of the old-timers to try to enter the nascent alternative comix field of the Bay Area inside what was slowly becoming known as the Direct Market. Mike Friedrich with his Star*Reach crew of what was then known as Marvel Bullpen West comes a little bit after TFK. Both #1s were printed the same month. Had all the printing negs and color seps done at Gary Howard’s studio in San Francisco. All the original art as well as all the negs were in one large Kodak film box Gary gave me. The next day, with all that in my Alameda house, six houses along my street were burglarized. Strange guys came onto the street with a semi-truck, simply emptied our houses. There went the art and such for the comic books we were going to do. Police were baffled; took them a couple of years to break up this ring. The art has never turned up. Vanished. Jack Katz [like fellow artist John Pound] was fortunate to have gone home with his original art to TFK #1. We were able to get it re-shot, published, and on it went, two issues a year, for the next twelve years. This is a Reader’s Digest thin slice of some of what went on back when many of us were helping grow the world of comics. It was

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

Now Here’s A Real “Family Circus”! (Above:) From the Mike Lynch Cartoons website comes this multi-character, many-ballooned Sunday edition of Dudley Fisher’s panel/strip Right around Home, which had debuted in 1937—and this isn’t even quite the whole panel! (Right:) As John Benson points out on page 70, the “What a Family!” pages in issues of Ajax/Farrell’s two mid-1950s color parody comics, copyrighted by King Features from its original Sundays, show that strip’s derivation from Right around Home. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

fun, and an honor, to have worked with Jack during the birthing of his First Kingdom project. The First Kingdom became a Comics & Comix asset. Jack said we would publish together. I had been working with him closely on almost a daily basis when I was the partner inside C&C working the creators’ need to accomplish their goals. I talked the partners into advancing Jack and Carolyn perceived royalties in cash so they could live while Jack engulfed himself in completing the book. Some of those panels, one needs a microscope to ascertain all the intense detail. When I sold out from C&C, I stopped most all fanac mercantilism except San Diego Comic-Con for about a year while I went back to college. Summer 1976 saw me re-enter the comics business, opening a store in San Fran’s Haight-Ashbury, but by that time Jack was ensconced with C&C and Bud had take over its publishing arm. I have a lot of respect for Jack Katz—and one of the things I regret is our not have really spoken now in decades. Robert Beerbohm Thanks for filling us in on so much history, Bob—and we’re sure Jack remembers and appreciates the part you played in getting his opus published. We wish we’d been able to run all the info you sent us, but that would’ve taken an entire article—and one that would fit more readily into

our TwoMorrows sister mag Back Issue than in A/E. Still, because Jack discussed The First Kingdom in such detail in A/E #91-92, we wanted to include your e-mail. Next up is John Benson, longtime science-fiction and EC fan and current publisher of the legendary EC fanzine Squa Tront—in two communiqués we’ve cobbled together that clarified a number of points about Harvey Kurtzman and the 1950s color Mad imitations which were covered in A/E #86 & 91…. Dear Roy, A while back you asked what I knew about Harvey Kurtzman’s apparent ownership of Hey Look! [the one-page gag strip he originally wrote and drew for Timely and other comics companies, and which was later reprinted in EC’s early color Mad]. I’m currently revisiting the complete transcripts of the interviews I did with Kurtzman for the Russ Cochran books and found the 1985 exchange below, which is probably the only time Kurtzman and I talked about it. These interviews will be appearing in a book of HK interviews that Chris Couch is editing for the University Press of Mississippi. But this exchange wasn’t in the Cochran volumes, and I’m not going to include it in the UMiss book… BENSON: How did you get…. In those old days, you could just call up and say, “Hey, do you mind if I reprint this?”

re:

Night Hawks On The Way To The Diner? Chris Boyko writes that, besides enjoying the “Kurtzman-spawn” and Squeglio pieces in A/E #91, he “noticed those ‘Airman’ and ‘Owl’ pages in the Centaur piece…. We know that ‘Hawkman’ and ‘The Owl’ [by Martin Filchock] are the earliest comic book winged heroes (from Jan. 1940), and of course the concept of winged men goes back to Icarus…. But who, exactly, was the first person in literature to put on wings for the express purpose of fighting crime? I am the first to admit I don’t know the real answer, but am sending along a scan of a couple of covers of The Boys’ Friend Library from 1932 & 1933. These are the only two issues I have seen, but The Night Hawk was clearly an on-going saga. The insides were mostly text (with a few spot illustrations). And as for his secret identity of Thurston Kyle… what does that remind me of? Oh, yes, Kyle Richmond, the other Nighthawk. Coincidence? Well, yes, but how likely is it that two crime-fighters with the same name both have ‘Kyle’ in their alter egos?! If anyone has a line on an earlier winged crime-buster, I hope they will chime in.” [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.] So do we, Chris—though Roy, as you apparently know, made up the name “Kyle Richmond” as a switch on the name of his fan-friend Richard Kyle, who’d pulled off a minor fandom hoax not long before concerning a “pulp magazine” he made up and claimed to remember called Nighthawk (or maybe it was actually Night Hawk, and Richard was thinking of the early-’30s publication when he conceived of his little joke).

KURTZMAN: I asked Stan Lee for permission, and it was a sloppy permission that he gave me, but I just took it. BENSON: …and ran with it. KURTZMAN: Yeah, I just… you know, screw it. Martin Goodman wanted us to pay for it, and we did. I had a big argument with [short unintelligible syllable]. I don’t even want to go into it. BENSON: Well, I won’t run this anyhow. KURTZMAN: But I asked Stan Lee for permission and he said OK, and then many years later he said, “Do whatever you want with them,” so I’ve been printing them ever since. BENSON: And the same with Toby [Press], I guess. Toby was Elliott Kaplan, so…. KURTZMAN: Yeah, that’s right. Oh, did I print them with him? BENSON: No, you reprinted “Pot-Shot Pete” in Mad. KURTZMAN: Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, Elliott Kaplan was pretty cool. I

wonder whatever happened to him. He must be an old man by now. I tried hard with my new, excellent Walkman to figure out what that “short unintelligible syllable” was. It wasn’t “Gaines.” I’m not even sure it’s a name; if it is, I wonder if it was someone at EC or at Atlas, or what…. [The following paragraphs of John’s are from a later letter, after he’d reminded me that, had we asked, he could’ve provided art from Ajax/Farrell’s Madhouse #2-3 or issues of Bughouse, which A/E #86 & 91 lacked, a fact I forgot till too late.] Madhouse #2 was the first and possibly only Ajax title that I bought on the stands. I remember that I’d heard the title “Birth of a Nation” before but had no idea what it referred to. The “Uncle Featherby” story [in Madhouse #3] is a rather obscure reference that only New Yorkers would get. Tex Antoine was a mousey guy who did the weather locally, and he had a little puppet or stick figure named Uncle Weatherbee that was part of his routine. He was still on when you were in NYC, actually; I saw him from time to time. At one time he was big, but he made moves to less prestigious channels and finally, after a news story of a rape, he said [on camera], “In the words of Confucius, ‘If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.’” He’d been suspended before for on-air problems, and that ended his career. I

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

remember that incident well. [NOTE: So do I, John—though I didn’t see it firsthand. –Roy.]

Roy— I came across the name of Dr. Lauretta Bender in a fascinating book by anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker called Unstrange Minds: Rempapping the World of Autism. Turns out that, back in the ’50s, after trying out electroshock therapy, she began administering LSD to her young patients suffering from what was then called “childhood schizophrenia.”

“What a Family” [which appeared in both Madhouse and Bughouse] is very similar to Right around Home. But it wasn’t a parody. “What a Family” was a reprint of an actual newspaper strip that was basically a ripoff of Right around Home. In the Ajax comic books, each page is an unrelated strip, a reprint of a Sunday page. It’s odd that the strips bear a King Features copyright; there’s probably an interesting story behind that one. [Underground cartoonist] Jay Lynch says he saw the What a Family strip in the Newark [NJ] Evening News as a kid, and that [its artist] Colin Allen taught Art Spiegelman [creator of Maus] in high school. (Of course, the “Dopey Duck” story in Super Funnies #2 is just an inventory “Dopey Duck” story, not a parody.) Some of the stuff in those Ajax books is really bizarre, as for example the werewolf story in Bughouse #2. It seems in Bughouse #2 & 3 there was some attempt to do actual parodies. “Smellbound,” for example, is about a psychiatrist and a murder. Too bad you didn’t run the “Trans-Continental” splash beside the Kurtzman version [in Mad #14]. This version uses the old gag about a lover who is all artificial parts: wig, shoulder pads, etc. At least the story has a plot, more than some other Ajax stories!

Now, before you get all shocked with this, first of all it turns out she was actually starting to get good results with this treatment with the autistic children in question, with them starting to respond positively to the world around them with paradoxically none of the usual hallucinations. Unfortunately, the public backlash against the drug removed it from the use of legal pharmacology. Secondly, it has to be understood that the main recommended treatment back then for the autistic (other than isolating them from society) was a lobotomy to sever the connection they had with the interior fantasy world they supposedly were trapped in, to literally cut out their imagination so they would be forced to live in the real world like the rest of us.

Sordid Sorcery Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser fight their way to freedom in a page from Sword of Sorcery #4 (Sept.-Oct. 1973). The story’s official artists were “Chaykin, Inc.”—which included Howard Chaykin and two artist friends. For more, check the comment by reader Tim Barnes on the next page! [© 2011 DC Comics.]

Unsane was another book I picked up on the stands. The fact that it had the words “flip,” “riot,” and “crazy” (well, “crazier”) on the cover was not lost on me. Also, I noted that it was issue #15 and did the math and said, son of a gun, Unsane must have started up before Mad. Unsane contained the gag, “They said Edison was crazy, they said Fulton was crazy, they said Munsky was crazy.” “Who’s Munsky?” “He’s my uncle, he was crazy.” This is a gag I picked up from this book and have been using ever since, always with the name Munsky. John Benson We’re always appreciative of the information you share with us, John— including the material on the parodic humor features in Harvey’s 1950s horror comics that ran in A/E #91! We look forward to your soon-forthcoming book The Sincerest Form of Parody, which promises to shed still further light on the color Mad comics imitations of the mid-’50s. Frequent correspondent Jeff Taylor, for his part, had some light to shed on Dr. Lauretta Bender, a longtime member of DC’s Editorial Advisory Board, who was covered by Michael T. Gilbert’s “Comic Crypt” in A/E #8992:

Jeff Taylor Our thanks, Jeff. And here are a few excerpts from other mail (eand snail) that we received on issue #91:

Jerry Edwards loved the first part of the Jack Katz interview, to which he had contributed notes about his “lively correspondence” with the artist; but he informs us that the period of that correspondence was 1992-1995 (as mentioned on p. 7), not 1979-1982 (as misstated on p. 4). Jon R. Evans, e-mailing on behalf of his friend, Lee Boyette, author of our several-part Centaur Comics coverage, sent these corrections: On p. 53 of #91, it’s Amazing Mystery Funnies, Vol. 2, #10—not Vol. 3, #10… and on p. 54, the cover of AMF V2#4 is by Max Neill, who was also left off the personnel list. In addition, on p. 56, under the features of Martin Filchock, we somehow re-typed just “Headless” instead of “Headless Horseman”… and on p. 57, under the entry for Harry Taylor, the name should be “H.F. [not H.E.] Campbell.” Also, added to the Centaur personnel list should be three names: John F. Kolb (artist, 1939-41), on “Mini-Midget,” “Dan Savage of the Mounties,” & “The Sparkler”—Max Neill (artist, 1938-40)—and Ed Colton (no dates provided), who did text art, covers, fillers, and “Soapy Suggs.” Robert Barrett pointed out that, contrary to a caption on p. 4 in the Jack Katz interview, Hal Foster never wrote the Tarzan strip, and that the panel depicted was from the “Tarzan and the Vikings” sequence: “No matter how often I correct the fallacy that Foster wrote the Tarzan strip, it seems that

re:

Beyond Fantastic George Hagenauer sent these two scans: the original art to Lou Cameron’s cover for Beyond #20 (May 1953), which Lou described to Jim Amash in his interview in A/E #79… and Ed Emsh’s painting for the origin of The Gray Mouser in an issue of the sf pulp-mag Fantastic. Nice to see ’em both, George! [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

this myth will continue to be quoted as fact. All the script writers for the Tarzan newspaper strip are identified in my book Tarzan of the Funnies, Mad Kings Publishing, 2002. The book is a history of the Tarzan newspaper strip from its inception in 1929 through 1950, when Edgar Rice Burroughs passed away. I had the complete cooperation of Danton Burroughs, grandson of ERB, and was allowed total access to the correspondence files between ERB, Inc., and Metropolitan and United Features Syndicate.” Don Ensign especially enjoyed the FCA section with its “excellent article by Emilio Squeglio. His very positive stance on his time at Fawcett and the good things he said about his co-workers were very refreshing. I also enjoyed [P.C. Hamerlinck’s] article on the ‘Black’ villains. Fawcett did develop quite a rogues’ gallery for their various heroes back in the ’40s. I think you have hit on a rich mine of research that hasn’t been worked on before. Good show.” Now, on to a handful of missives re A/E #92, starting with this one from Tim Marion: Dear Roy, It was a treat to read the March 2010 issue of Alter Ego. I appreciate your “sword-and-sorcery” issues and love Rafael Kayanan’s painted covers. I feel I must make a couple of corrections on Richard Arndt’s articles, however. I very much enjoyed his overview of Charlton’s Hercules comic, but he begins with an erroneous correction when he states that “Mars” [is] a technical error, as the Greek god of war was named Ares— Mars was his Roman equivalent.” But the name “Hercules” itself is the roman version of the Greek demi-god Herakles. What the comic script is actually guilty of is mixing and matching names from the Greek and Roman pantheons…. [Re] DC Comics’ adaptation of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stores [in Sword of Sorcery], he continually refers to Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes as “gods.” I cannot recall a

single instance where they were referred to as such before this article. Always before they have been referred to as “patron wizards”…. I was disappointed with how brief Arndt’s article was on this subject. I feel these particular adaptations of classic sword-and-sorcery stories (both at DC and Marvel) deserve more attention. And of course any article on DC’s adaptations should include the “dry run” of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser guest-starring in the previous month’s Wonder Woman #202 (Sept.-Oct. 1972)…. I wish DC would reprint their sword-and-sorcery comics in quality editions, not just Sword of Sorcery but also Berni Wrightson’s “Nightmaster,” Ditko & Wood’s Stalker, etc. Tim Marion I’m sure Richard Arndt appreciates your augmentating info as much as your fellow readers and I do, Tim. We didn’t give him any particular word count on the piece, but perhaps we gave him the idea that it shouldn’t be too long—so he went into less detail about Fritz Leiber’s creation than was given to the pieces on Hercules and Claw the Unconquered. As for the Wonder Woman #202 (Sept.-Oct. 1972) DC debut of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in Sword of Sorcery, John Wells did mention it in his overview of sword-andsorcery comics in A/E #80, but somehow that appearance got neglected in #91. George Hagenauer, who over the years has sent Ye Editor a mountain of photocopies of comic book and comic strip material for reprinting (mostly, he says, just to get them out of his closet!), had this to say about matters covered in #92, including its letters section: Hi Roy, Jim Gray said you asked him for the Cameron “bell” cover from Beyond. Since I own the original, I thought I would sent it on. Also attached is the Ed Emsh painting for the Gray Mouser origin story in Fantastic [pulp magazine]—“The Unholy Grail”—a recent acquisition. Loved that series, though I was not as fond of the comic book.

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

I was glad to see the piece by Don Glut. I saw him occasionally when I lived in Chicago. He is one of the most incredible dinosaur collectors on the planet, owning major pieces of art as well as real skeletons. Back at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, the Sinclair exhibit had a number of lifesize moving animatrons of prehistoric animals. While the rest of us might own one of the vacuum-formed Sinclair dinos made while you watched at the Fair, Don owns to of the life-size critters—a cave bear and I think a pteranodon. Always wanted to see a photo of of them; I think the ptero hangs over his dining room table! Great issue, as always. One thing Tony Tollin missed in the Edd Cartier obit is that Edd did the illustrations for the King Features newspaper serial mystery for I think 1948 and 1949; they are the easiest way to get originals by him, as all of them surfaced years ago in New York. They look like pulp illos, but aren’t. George Hagenauer Don Glut says: “Actually, I have two cave bears, two Pteranodons, one “prehistoric gorilla,” one mosasaur, and one Archaeopteryx from the 1933 World’s Fair. All except the Archaeopteryx are mechanical, and most still work. All are featured at http://www.collectorsquest.com; then search ‘Don Glut’s Dinosaurs.’” Just space for a few short notes on #92: Tim Barnes writes that the lead story in DC’s Sword of Sorcery #4, credited to “Chaykin, Inc.,” was, according to a conversation he had with artist Walt Simonson in 1984, “him [Simonson] and [Howard] Chaykin splitting the pencils 6 and 8 pages [respectively], except for the top of a splash page, which was penciled by Sal Amendola, who inked the story.”

SPECIAL NOTE: At the August 2010 Harvey Awards Banquet at the Baltimore Comicon, Hero Initiative, the charitable organization dedicated to helping veteran comics creators in medical or financial need, debuted the Dick Giordano Humanitarian of the Year Award. Each year it will recognize one person in the comics industry who has demonstrated the generosity and integrity that Dick brought to both the charity (of whose disbursement board he was a member for the ten years preceding his passing) and to the comic book community at large. The earliest recipients were Tim Sale and Jerry Robinson (2010) and Mike Gold (2011). Congratulations to one and all! Two current books we wanted to clue you in about: Think there’s only one way to read a comic story? Think again—when nine of the comic industry’s noted talents come together in THE WRITER’S BLOCK: Writing Comics for Love and Money. In this recently reissued 128-page trade collection, Mike Baron, Peter David, Jo Duffy, Fabian Nicieza, Gail Simone, Jim Shooter, Roger Stern, Roy Thomas, & Mark Waid are given the same continuity artwork to script— without knowing anything about the plot or being allowed to speak to each other. The authors let their muses take them (and you) on a unique comics reading experience; and each chapter is accompanied by an interview with the author discussing how they approach their work. Collects the first two Writer’s Blocks, plus new features! Illustrated & edited by David Neal Miller. Now available on the print-on-demand service www.createspace.com/ 3676520 for $19.99 US.

Also: Alter Ego #84 spotlighted Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal’s piece “Esalen and The XMen.” The research done at two creative seminars in 2008-2009 at that legendary Big Jeff Taylor returned to tell us that his Sur retreat, as well as much additional favorite part of #92 was the FCA section: Capes and The Cosmic research, forms a crucial component of his “This is the first article I’ve seen on all [DC’s] Ye Ed has called Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal’s new book, new University of Chicago Press book attempts to mine the mythology of the Big Red Mutants and Mystics, “bridges the gap between Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, spirituality and its sometimes seedy outcroppings in Cheese, and frankly you can’t get more mythoSuperhero Comics, and the Paranormal. This pop culture, and forges—or rather, reveals—a synthesis logical than Zha-Vam! I must admit I had tour de force as described by featured that was really there all along...” Buy it! never even heard of the original Captain artist/writer Barry Windsor-Smith: “Kripal Marvel when I first encountered him, so of has gathered the silver threads of grand mythologies, sacred texts, and course back then I thought he was the most original super-character I had mystical creeds, binding them to the visionary super-ego at the heart of ever seen.” Jeff also says: “For some reason I always thought that DC’s modern literature’s bastard sons—comic books and science fiction.” How Sword of Sorcery came out before Marvel’s Conan, perhaps because, due could you not pick this one up? Price is $29; ISBN # 978-0-226-45383-5. to the vagaries of foreign-based comics distribution, it apparently showed up in the small, isolated Canadian town where I grew up before the four-colour adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s classic creation ever did.” (Ye Ed knows what you mean, Jeff. When it was first revived in the early 1950s, I thought King Kong must be a copy of Mighty Joe Young, which I’d seen new in theatres a few years before—and some film reviews a few years ago gave the movie-going public the impression that Fantastic Four was a copy of The X-Men, rather than vice versa.) Mark Luebker answered a question P.C. Hamerlinck and I had been asking for several years, when he informed us that it was he who had Photoshopped that Wayne Boring Action Comics cover of Superman vs. Zha-Vam which appeared on p. 84 of A/E #92 to put Captain Marvel in the place of the Man of Steel. Nice work, Mark! Glen Cadigan says the photo of Keith Giffen on p. 30, which was attributed to Glen, actually appeared in David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview magazine: “I would have been in elementary school at the time— and in a different country, to boot!”

Send those e-mails and other epistles to: Roy Thomas e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135 And don’t miss next issue’s Batman special, spotlighting Dick Sprang and Jim Mooney! 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 cooverseer Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he'll lead you right to it. Alter-Ego-Fans is where the Golden and Silver Ages still live!

ack in the Golden Age of Comics, it was common practice for writers and artists never to have their names appear on the comic book features on which they worked. Artist C.C. Beck once elucidated that one of the reasons for this was because—as explained to him by Fawcett Publications—the readers believed that the stories in comic books were true, and displaying creators’ names in the strips would have been an admission that the accounts told in the books were fictional, and in so doing would alienate readers. Beck later observed that Golden Age artists were better off anyway working anonymously or under pseudonyms, adding that “Good writing and good pictures are still good, no matter who made them”… and that the later-day practice of multiple bylines found at the beginning a comic book tale only helped “spread the blame around” when a story was lousy. By mid-1943, Fawcett had eased their policy to some extent when they designated Beck as “Chief Artist” on the contents pages of certain Captain Marvel-related books—but only after he had threatened to leave the company.

[FCA EDITORS NOTE: From 1941-53, Marcus D. Swayze was a top artist for Fawcett Publications. The very first Mary Marvel character sketches came from Marc’s drawing table, and he illustrated her earliest adventures, including the classic origin story, “Captain Marvel Introduces Mary Marvel (Captain Marvel Adventures No. 18, Dec. ’42); but he was primarily hired by Fawcett Publications to illustrate Captain Moreover, there was a brief period in 1943 when Fawcett allowed Marvel stories and covers for Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel their illogical rationalizations regarding bylines to subside when they Adventures. He also wrote many Captain Marvel scripts, and continued tolerated the names of artists Mac Raboy, Jack Binder, Phil Bard, and to do so while in the military. After leaving the service in 1944, he made H.V.L. Parkhurst to appear (albeit quite small) beneath the splash pages of an arrangement with Fawcett to produce art and stories for them on a their respective strips within a a small number of Master Comics issues 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, I discussed with Marc the very first illustration depicting all three members of the Marvel Family together that had been majestically drawn by the artist. In this issue, Marc sheds a little light on the bylines he Airway Acknowledgments received for a time in Wow Above are two examples of credited Marc Swayze “Phantom Eagle” pages from Wow Comics #50 (Dec. ’46) and Comics, as well as his thoughts on the #57 (Aug. ’47). Initiated in the August ’44 issue of Wow and appearing sporadically over the next few years, the Man of Steel. miniature typeset (or hand-lettered) “Drawn by…” artist bylines were found situated at the bottom center —P.C. Hamerlinck.] margin of the first pages of stories. The uncommon practice, which occurred for only a brief time in just a couple of Fawcett’s books, went against the grain of the company’s original policies and mindset, and against those of most other publishers from that time period. [Phantom Eagle TM & © the respective copyright holders.]

“We Didn’t Know… It Was the Golden Age!”

during the editorial reign of Rod Reed (who also received a credit line at the beginning of the book). The diminutive bylines wouldn’t regain momentum until August of 1944. Inserted at irregular intervals over the following four years, the names of artists Jack Binder, Charlie Tomsey, Ed Ashe… and Marc Swayze… materialized on the bottom center margin of the first page of stories within Wow Comics. But Swayze remembered no trumpet blasts over the tiny printed anomalies: MARC SWAYZE: Credit for artists was not unusual when I got back to New York City in 1944 after serving in the military—although such credit from Fawcett was unheard of before. I later learned that executive comics editor Will Lieberson was the one who pursued the idea again with the Fawcett management—and succeeded. As it continued, in the process of printing the credit line, with it being beyond the lower panel borders, they were often either partly or completely cut off. Whatever … the little lines continued … and eventually the “credit” ceased. And when they did, I didn’t raise any objection … and I never heard of anyone else who did, either. As Marc returned to his Louisiana home in 1944 with the “Phantom Eagle” assignment in tow, the interminable legal entanglements between National and Fawcett carried on back in NYC. I once asked Marc what he thought of Superman, and of the prolonged infringement case:

Legal Action Comics The Man of Steel’s attorneys may have howled “Red Shirt! I Kill!” to themselves during the National vs. Fawcett court case… just as the equally-antagonistic robot-of-steel Klang did during his battle with the World’s Mightiest Mortal in Captain Marvel Adventures #15 (Sept. 1942). Artwork by Marc Swayze, who never had the desire or the need to give even a moment’s thought to Superman. [Shazam hero TM & © 2011 DC Comics.]

SWAYZE: When I was working on Captain Marvel—or even before that or after—I gave no thought to Superman. During the heat of the lawsuit, had I been called to testify, I could have sworn that neither words nor pictures relating to Superman were ever experienced before or during my association with Fawcett. [Marc Swayze’s reminiscences continue next issue!]

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“ Is This What I Want To Do For The Rest Of My Life? ” The ROY ALD Interview, Part 3 by Shaun Clancy Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

oy Ald was an editor and writer for Fawcett Publications’ comic books from 1946 to 1953, applying his talents to such titles as Wow Comics (featuring Mary Marvel, The Phantom Eagle, Commando Yank, Mr. Scarlet, and his own comical creation, Ozzie and Babs), Captain Midnight, Don Winslow of the Navy, This Magazine Is Haunted, Captain Video, Life Story, Strange Suspense Stories, Worlds of Fear, Beware! Terror Tales, Negro Romance, and others, as well developing Fawcett’s early graphic novel experiment Mansion of Evil before editing various Fawcett magazines after the publisher terminated its comics line. Ald later moved on to other noteworthy publishing ventures with various companies and also authored dozens of books—predominately in the health and fitness fields.

Fawcett, Will [Lieberson] immediately offered me a job as editor. SC: When FCA interviewed Lieberson in the ’70s, he stated that “Roy Ald was one of the most important Fawcett comic editors, who handled many comics. Out of all the editors, Roy was number one when it came to fresh ideas on comic book ideas and stories.” I understand Fawcett had a policy in place where comic book editors couldn’t be paid to write scripts on the side. So, besides editing, would you also supply story plots to your writers?

Last issue, the 90-year-old Mr. Ald had relayed his reminisces about creating the groundbreaking Negro Romance comic book and working with one of the book’s artists, Alvin Hollingsworth, as well as briefly commenting on the National vs. Fawcett lawsuit, artist C.C. Beck, and Fawcett’s editorial procedures. In this installment, interviewer Shaun Clancy guides Ald to talk about how he went about writing comic book scripts, meeting a popular pulp cover artist, and more memories of the many people he worked with at Fawcett Publications. —PCH. SHAUN CLANCY: What was your education and background for writing? ROY ALD: When I got out of the Army in 1944 I started taking all kinds of courses at various universities, but never pursued a degree. I would take the most esoteric courses they offered … Latin … Greek … Anemology … stuff like that. While never formally taught in it, I was born to write. I have written everything that you can think of, from books and magazines to greeting cards and fortune cookies. [both laugh] When I was first looking around the city trying to find where I could peddle some stories, I stopped by Fawcett because I had once noticed my kids reading their comics, and in the middle of them were two-page text stories. After my first submission to

Post-War Writer From 1946-48 Roy Ald (see photo above) was the editor of Fawcett’s Wow Comics and, as he did with several other comic books he edited, he also frequently wrote stories for the title, as well… including the post-WWII adventures of Commando Yank, as seen in this splash page drawn by Carl Pfeufer for Wow #58 (Sept. 1947). Ald praises Pfeufer’s artistic abilities in this issue’s installment of his interview. [Commando Yank TM & © 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

ALD: No. I had written some of the stories under my sister’s name, Shirley Lee. I’m sure Will [Lieberson] knew what I was doing, because I believe he was doing the same thing with writing those two-page text fillers! I’d write a synopsis, get approval from Will to have it written, then I’d go home and write it, and then have my sister mail in the script to Fawcett. She would get paid by them and then give me the money. I did this with several comic books each month right up until Fawcett quit publishing them. It was better income than my actual job! [both laugh] SC: But did you still assist other writers? ALD: Yes, of course. As an editor, I

The Roy Ald Interview: “Is This What I Want to Do for the Rest of My Life?”—Part 3

Modest Pulp Fiction

was always helping my writers, and they never had a problem with anything ever being rejected or having to be re-written. SC: Were you aware of any of your writers also doing stories for other publishers? ALD: No … and I wasn’t interested in working with any of them who were doing that. SC: Were the circulation numbers discussed with the editors? ALD: No, that information went straight upstairs to the Fawcetts, and they kept it to themselves. SC: On Wow Comics, you worked on stories featuring Commando Yank, and one of the artists who drew the character was Carl Pfeufer. Do you remember him? ALD: Yes, he was a great artist and a superb watercolorist… a fine artist who was just trying to make a few dollars from comics. Here’s an interesting story: I was also put in charge of hiring artists, and there was an agent who used to come by the Fawcett offices all the time trying to sell works from different artists who were available to do comics. He would bring with him all sorts of samples, and one day he pulled out an extraordinary painting that just knocked me over, so I asked him for the name of the artist who did it. He said, “I’m not at liberty to tell you.” I came back with: “I always look through your portfolio when you bring it in, so until I get to meet this artist, I’m just going to stop looking at all these others!” A few days later I get a phone call from a man identifying himself as Modest Stein. SC: The fine artist who painted many of the pulp covers!

In his later years, renowned pulp magazine cover artist (and former anarchist) Modest Stein may not have received any assignments from Fawcett Publications, but he did leave editor Roy Ald awestruck when he met the illustrator in the early 1950s. The above snapshot of Stein (seated at table) and his live model collaborators—from a ’40s issue of Parade magazine—was taken in the artist’s Greenwich Village studio while he created a cover for Street & Smith’s Love Story magazine. Stein painted numerous covers during his long association with the publisher, including the unsettling scene at left for the February 1945 issue of Doc Savage. Ald himself also wrote some pulp stories for Street & Smith. [Doc Savage TM & © 2011 The Condé Nast Publications, Inc..]

ALD: I remember the day I met him. He was an elderly man, small in stature but elegant-appearing. He was in his 80s and suffered from poor eyesight, but considered neither thing an issue and was still going around New York looking for work. He was respectful, down-to-earth, and I was in awe of him. He used to call me up just to chat, and one time he called and told me, “I fell asleep last night and I had no clothes on!” [laughs] I visited him once at his studio and witnessed him working. He would stare at a blank wall and begin painting figures and things that came directly from his mind. Of course, he never did any comics for us, as he wasn’t a comic book artist. SC: Of the four Fawcett brothers—Roger, Roscoe, Buzz, and Gordon—which ones did you have the most communication with? ALD: Roger and Roscoe. They were the two principal Fawcetts that were involved on the comic book side of things; I never saw any of the others. They were the ones I used to send up memos to with my ideas … and they never used any of them! [laughs] I remember talking to Roger after I had left Fawcett, and he mentioned that my memos were the things that kept their meetings running so long! [both laugh] SC: Do you recall writer Jon Messman? ALD: He was a nice, pleasant fellow whose parents forced him to play the violin while growing up. He would come to the Fawcett Christmas parties

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

playing the violin all by himself and no one paid any attention to him. [laughs] He had a good sense of humor.

Wendell [Crowley], and that was about it. SC: What do you recall about the Binder brothers, Otto and Jack?

SC: What about editor Dick Kraus?

ALD: Jack was a mild-mannered man and very quiet. I knew Otto had written science-fiction stories for the pulps. I wrote some pulp stories myself, for Street & Smith, under a pseudonym.

ALD: Dick was the youngest of all of us. I think when he first arrived at Fawcett they also made him an editor right away … and he was only 18 years old!

SC: Did radio, film, or other media provide any inspiration for your writing?

SC: Do you remember staff production artist Len Leone? I learned recently that he is practically blind now.

ALD: I never looked for inspiration when it came to my stories. If it had been possible, I would’ve just formed a business that sold ideas for others to use.

ALD: I recall back then that he had a great personal interest in sight without glasses, and he liked to draw without wearing his glasses. He was literally ashamed of his comic book background. When he became the art director at Bantam Books, he didn’t want anyone to know he had been associated with comic books. At Fawcett, he’d do minor art corrections on the pages that came in.

SC: Were any of your stories ever rejected or censored by Fawcett?

SC: Emilio Squeglio did the same kind of work at Fawcett. ALD: I remember I once hypnotized Emilio at one of the Fawcett office parties! I had him drink water and made him believe it was gin and that he was drunk off of it. [both laugh] I remember [editorial director] Ralph Daigh watching in awe what was going on.

High Art Trash Roy Ald created Fawcett’s Photography Handbook (1954 issue, above)… basically a “girlie magazine” disguised as a “high art” periodical. Well, at least the mag contained some “Darkroom Tips” and a “How-To Section.” [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

ALD: Never! I had some trouble with censors while doing girlie magazines, but got around that by calling one of them Photography Handbook. I needed some excuse to sell girlie stuff to Fawcett, so I started putting some high art in it, and made it appear like I was doing a higher-class magazine. I simply geared towards the guy who’d justify buying it for the high art… but who in fact just wanted to look at naked girls. SC: Were there any pranksters in the Fawcett offices?

SC: When C.C. Beck came into the office, who would he meet with?

ALD: I was the only one! I remember, one time, Will Lieberson was interviewing for a new secretary. Wendell Crowley often handled things with the Fawcett photo studio located on a different floor of our building from the comics, so Wendell saw women models around there all the time. So I put Wendell up to something. I said to him, “Will is interviewing a secretary applicant right now, so I want you to send me twenty pretty girls right away. When they arrived, I had all of them walk into Will’s office and sit in there with their legs crossed, skirts up high, and breasts showing as much as possible. I never saw the girl Will was interviewing ever again! [laughs]

ALD: Beck, and sometimes Pete Costanza, would come in and visit with

SC: Did you ever help prepare Fawcett’s case for the National lawsuit?

SC: Did you hypnotize any one else at the party? ALD: No, it was Christmas time and I tried not to make a big deal out of it. I had befriended a famous celebrity hypnotist and he taught me a few things, but my wife didn’t like me doing it at all. When we were at parties, I was often asked to hypnotize people and, because of that, she stopped going to parties with me.

ALD: The lawyers were too stupid to even show up to our offices and talk to us. I never heard of anyone from the comics that directly talked to the lawyers. Any material that had to do with the lawsuit was eventually removed from Fawcett and transferred to the attorneys’ offices.

Love Never Fails The romance comics were immensely popular and profitable for Fawcett, right up to the untimely demise of their comic book line, and Roy Ald made every effort to make them as dissimilar and diverse as possible when he both wrote and edited them. At left is a shot of Rudy Palais-drawn interior pages from Negro Romance (#2, Aug. ’50)—the innovative, Ald-created comic that was covered last issue in the second part of this interview; Palais was one of several artists who worked on the book. (Thanks to Roger Hill for this scan and artist ID.) On the opposite page, bottom left, is the opening page of Sweethearts #86 (April 1950), edited—as well as possibly written—by Roy Ald, and illustrated by our very own Marc Swayze. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

The Roy Ald Interview: “Is This What I Want to Do for the Rest of My Life?”—Part 3

Saucers And Shock (Right:) Roy Ald wrote and edited the 1950 science-fiction one-shot adventure Vic Torry and His Flying Saucer, illustrated by the eminent Bob Powell, an artist with whom Ald worked frequently while producing comic books for Fawcett. The tale was later reprinted in the ’86 Eclipse series Mr. Monster's Super Duper Special #5, sensibly selected by Mr. M’s Comic Crypt-Keeper himself, Michael T. Gilbert. (Bottom right:) Likewise, Ald was the editor of several Fawcett horror titles, including the early issues of their most prominent one, This Magazine Is Haunted; its first issue cover (from Oct. ’51), featuring its host, Dr. Death, was illustrated by Sheldon Moldoff, the artist who sold Fawcett on the idea of releasing bloodcurdling comics upon their unsuspecting readership (with the end result that even Captain Marvel was soon pushed awkwardly into the genre). TMIH #1 interior art was done by Moldoff, George Evans, and Bernard Baily; Ald will speak of the latter in a later installment of this in-depth interview. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

SC: Were there any meetings at Fawcett discussing the possibility of shutting down the comics? ALD: There were none, since the comics (particularly the romances, many of which I wrote) were doing fine at the time. The only time I ever communicated with the Fawcetts was through those memos I’d send up to them—even though we weren’t supposed to directly contact them, but have everything screened by Ralph Daigh beforehand … but I managed to get them up there anyway. SC: Would you and the rest of the editors have meetings with Daigh? ALD: No, he would only have one-on-one meetings with editors from the different magazines. The only contact I had with the comics was Lieberson. SC: Did you get along with Ralph Daigh? ALD: Not really. I don’t think he liked me because he knew I was always going around him with my memos to the Fawcetts. I believe that they

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

never responded to me because they didn’t want to offend Ralph.

Buffoonery Break In answer to Fawcett executive comics editor Will Lieberson’s desire for a humor feature to headline Wow Comics for its super-hero-weary audience, Roy Ald took a break from more serious endeavors to create the two teenagers from Winkleville: Ozzie and Babs! The comical couple took over the Wow cover spot from #59 (Oct. ’47) to its concluding issue, #69 (Aug. ’48). The kids were also awarded their own comic book series, Ozzie and Babs, under Ald’s supervision. The book lasted 13 issues; the final one, from Fall of ’49, is shown at left; art by Warren Kremer. When “Ozzie and Babs” later popped up in Charlton’s TV Teens, the feature was drawn by former Fawcett “Captain Marvel” artist Chic Stone. [© 2011 the respective copyright holders.]

SC: Would Daigh have the final say on cancelling a title? ALD: Yes, that was it. No discussion. Whenever new titles appeared, they were usually mine. I did a lot of stuff. When I did the romance stories, I always tried to put a twist to them. They were very popular, and the audience for them was increasing each month. I also remember writing books like Vic Torry and His Flying Saucer, drawn by Bob Powell. I got a lot of stuff done by his shop. I had visited him once at his place in Oyster Bay on Long Island. Powell was a fan of old cars, and he would race them, too. He seemed like a regular guy and was well-organized. SC: You also made your mark on Fawcett’s horror comics, including This Magazine Is Haunted. Do you recall working with artist Sheldon Moldoff on that title? ALD: No, but I remember he and Lieberson had some sort of an arrangement regarding it. You’ll be able to spot my stories in the comics because I used a lot more captions in them than the other writers. I was trying to create stories in a more novelistic way and with more substance. The only time I didn’t use that approach was when I’d do a comedy strip like “Ozzie and Babs.” SC: They later put horror-themed stories in Captain Marvel. ALD: Wendell Crowley couldn’t stand it. He wanted a charming, bumbling Captain Marvel. He wanted it amusing. Wendell was another person who suspected that I was doing some writing for Fawcett on the

side. The scripts I did were so far above most anything else that was showing up on my desk. Wendell respected my talent and abilities and never asked if I was doing any writing. SC: How long did it usually take you to write a comic book script? ALD: This might be hard for you to believe, but it would only take me about an hour. One of the reasons for that is that I used to come into the office as if I had an outline from someone else. Since I already had the story worked out in my mind, it was easy for me to quickly knock it out after Will approved it … and I really was the only one who made any use out of the captions at the tops of the panels! [Continued next issue!]

The Storyteller’s Story Official Selection in over 25 film festivals worldwide “A great companion to the book ‘Kavalier and Clay.’” Alison Bailes, NBC’s Reel Talk “An essential doc for comics fans, ‘Portrait’ will also enlighten the curious.” John DeFore, Austin American-Statesman “Entertaining and insightful. A great film about a visionary artist!” Jeffrey Katzenberg Arguably the most influential person in American comics, Will Eisner, as artist, entrepreneur, innovator, and visual storyteller, enjoyed a career that encompassed comic books from their early beginnings in the 1930s to their development as graphic novels in the 1990s. During his sixty-year-plus career, Eisner introduced the now-traditional mode of comic book production; championed mature, sophisticated storytelling; was an early advocate for using the medium as a tool for education; pioneered the now-popular graphic novel; and served as inspiration for generations of artists. Without a doubt, Will Eisner was the godfather of the American comic book. The award-winning full-length feature film documentary includes interviews with Eisner and many of the foremost creative talents in the U.S., including Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Chabon, Jules Feiffer, Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Stan Lee, Gil Kane, and others.

Available Now on DVD & BLU-RAY • www.twomorrows.com

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“Licensed Comics”! Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Man from Atlantis, DC’s Edgar Rice Burroughs backups (John Carter, Pellucidar, Carson of Venus), Marvel’s Warlord of Mars, and an interview with CAROL SERLING, wife of ROD SERLING. With art and commentary from ANDERSON, BYRNE, CLAREMONT, DORMAN, DUURSEMA, KALUTA, MILLER, OSTRANDER, and more. Cover by BRIAN KOSCHACK.

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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!

Spectre/Hour-Man creator BERNARD BAILY & Johnny Thunder’s JOHN B. WENTWORTH, ‘40s super-groups that might have been, art by ORDWAY, INFANTINO, KUBERT, HASEN, ROBINSON, and BURNLEY, LEONARD STARR interview by JIM AMASH, MIKE PEPPE interview by DEWEY CASSELL, BILL SCHELLY on “50 Years of Fandom” at San Diego 2011, FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, PÉREZ cover, and more!

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Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, FRANK MILLER interview, plus MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

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LEE & KIRBY: THE WONDER YEARS (KIRBY COLLECTOR #58)

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LEGO 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’ column on MINIFIGURE CUSTOMIZATION, building tips, event reports, our step-by-step “YOU CAN BUILD IT” INSTRUCTIONS, and more!

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