Alter Ego #123 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Roy Thomas’ Ever-Relevant Comics Fanzine

DENNIS O’NEIL & THE SILVER AGE

OF COMICS WRITING

8.95

In the USA

No.123

ALSO, BEGINNING:

AMY KISTE NYBERG’S

SEAL OF APPROVAL THE HISTORY OF CENSORSHIP & THE COMICS CODE!

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Characters TM & © DC Comics, except The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

March 2014

Edited by ROY THOMAS The first and greatest “hero-zine”—ALL-NEW, focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA [Fawcett Collectors of America], MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY’S Comic Fandom Archive, and more!

EISNER AWARD Winner Best Comics-Related Periodical

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

ALTER EGO #112

ALTER EGO #113

DIEDGITIIOTANSL E

BL AVAILA

ALTER EGO #109

ALTER EGO #110

ALTER EGO #111

Spectre/Hour-Man creator BERNARD BAILY, ‘40s super-groups that might have been, art by ORDWAY, INFANTINO, KUBERT, HASEN, ROBINSON, and BURNLEY, conclusion of the TONY TALLARICO 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!

SHAZAM!/FAWCETT issue! The 1940s “CAPTAIN MARVEL” RADIO SHOW, interview with radio’s “Billy Batson” BURT BOYAR, P.C. HAMERLINCK and C.C. BECK on the origin of Captain Marvel, ROY THOMAS and JERRY BINGHAM on their Secret Origins “Shazam!”, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, LEONARD STARR interview, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

GOLDEN AGE NEDOR super-heroes are spotlighted, with MIKE NOLAN’s Nedor Index, and art by MORT MESKIN, JERRY ROBINSON, GEORGE TUSKA, RUBEN MOIRERA, ALEX SHOMBURG, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and part II of JIM AMASH’s interview with Golden Age artist LEONARD STARR! Cover by SHANE FOLEY!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

ALTER EGO #114

ALTER EGO #115

ALTER EGO #116

SUPERMAN issue! PAUL CASSIDY (early Superman artist), Italian Nembo Kid, and ARLEN SCHUMER’s look at the MORT WEISINGER era, plus an interview with son HANK WEISINGER! Art by SHUSTER, BORING, ANDERSON, PLASTINO, and others! LEONARD STARR interview Part III—FCA—Mr. Monster—more 2011 Fandom Celebration, and a MURPHY ANDERSON/ARLEN SCHUMER cover!

MARV WOLFMAN talks to RICHARD ARNDT about his first decade in comics on Tomb of Dracula, Teen Titans, Captain Marvel, John Carter, Daredevil, Nova, Batman, etc., behind a GENE COLAN cover! Art by COLAN, ANDERSON, CARDY, BORING, MOONEY, and more! Plus: the conclusion of our LEONARD STARR interview by JIM AMASH, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

MARVEL ISSUE on Captain America and Fantastic Four! MARTIN GOODMAN’s Broadway debut, speculations about Fantastic Four #1, interview with Golden Age writer/artist DON RICO, art by KIRBY, AVISON, SHORES, ROMITA, SEVERIN, TUSKA, ALLEN BELLMAN, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by BELLMAN and MITCH BREITWEISER!

3-D COMICS OF THE 1950S! In-depth feature by RAY (3-D) ZONE, actual red and green 1950s 3-D art (includes free glasses!) by SIMON & KIRBY, KUBERT, MESKIN, POWELL, MAURER, NOSTRAND, SWAN, BORING, SCHWARTZ, MOONEY, SHORES, TUSKA and many others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover by JOE SIMON and JACK KIRBY!

JOE KUBERT TRIBUTE! Four Kubert interviews, art by RUSS HEATH, NEAL ADAMS, MURPHY ANDERSON, MICHAEL KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, and others, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY’s Comic Fandom Archive, FCA’s Captain Video conclusion by GEORGE EVANS that inspired Avengers foe Ultron, cover by KUBERT, with a portrait by DANIEL JAMES COX!

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ALTER EGO #117

ALTER EGO #118

ALTER EGO #119

ALTER EGO #120

ALTER EGO #121

GOLDEN AGE ARTISTS L.B. COLE AND JAY DISBROW! DISBROW’s memoir of COLE and his work on CAT-MAN, art by BOB FUJITANI, CHARLES QUINLAN, IRWIN HASEN, FCA (Fawcett Collector’s of America) on the two-media career of Captain Video, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom history, Cat-Man cover by L.B. COLE!

AVENGERS 50th ANNIVERSARY! WILL MURRAY on the group’s behind-thescenes origin, a look at its first decade with ROY THOMAS, STAN LEE, JACK KIRBY, THE BROTHERS BUSCEMA, TUSKA, ADAMS, COLAN, BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, MERRY MARVEL MARCHING SOCIETY, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, FCA, Golden Age Blue Beetle artist E.C. STONER, unused Avengers cover by DON HECK!

MARC SWAYZE TRIBUTE ISSUE, spotlighting FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America)! Salutes from Fawcett alumnus C.C. BECK and OTTO BINDER, interview with wife JUNE SWAYZE, a full Phantom Eagle story from Wow Comics, plus interview with 1950s Dell/Western artist MEL KEEFER, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and a SWAYZE Marvel Family cover art from the 1940s!

X-MEN SALUTE! 1963-69 secrets, rare ‘60s BRAZILIAN X-MEN stories, lost ‘60s XMen “character sheet” by STAN LEE, ROY THOMAS on the 1970s revival, art and artifacts by KIRBY, ROTH, ADAMS, HECK, FRIEDRICH, and BUSCEMA—plus the MMMS fan club story, interview with Golden Age writer ED SILVERMAN, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, and JACK KIRBY’s unused X-Men #10 cover!

GOLDEN AGE JUSTICE SOCIETY ISSUE! Features on JOHN B. WENTWORTH (Johnny Thunder), LEN SANSONE (The Atom), and BERNARD SACHS (All-Star Comics inker), art by CARMINE INFANTINO, BOB OKSNER, HOWARD PURCELL, STAN ASCHMEIER, BEN FLINTON, and H.G. PETER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more! Cover homage by SHANE FOLEY to a vintage All-Star image by IRWIN HASEN!

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Vol. 3, No. 123 / March 2014 Editor

Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout

Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor

P.C. Hamerlinck

If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

Comic Crypt Editor

PLEASE READ THIS:

Michael T. Gilbert

Editorial Honor Roll

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

Proofreaders

Rob Smentek William J. Dowlding

Cover Artists

Neal Adams, Pat Boyette, Michael W. Kaluta, & Mike Sekowsky

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With Special Thanks to: Kris Adams Neal Adams Heidi Amash Pedro Angosto Richard J. Arndt David Bachman Rodrigo Baeza Bob Bailey Robert Barrett Alberto Becattini Rod Beck William Biggins Jerry K. Boyd Bernie Bubnis Nick Caputo Dewey Cassell Chet Cox Brian Cremins Dillin Family Jeff Dreischer Joey Eacobacci Mark Evanier Shane Foley Stephan Friedt Janet Gilbert Glenn ---Jennifer Go Stan Goldberg Keith Hammond R.C. Harvey Mel Higgins Chuck Hines (website) Allan Holtz Sean Howe Bob Hughes M. Thomas Inge Will Jarvis Joyce Kaffel Jim Kealy Richard Kyle

Batton Lash Mark Lewis Jim Ludwig Doug Martin Kim Metzger Brian K. Morris Mark Muller Ken Nadle Amy Kiste Nyberg Dennis & Marifran O’Neil Jake Oster Denis Parry Barry Pearl Jennifer Pederson Gary Perlman Jay Piscopo Robert Policastro Dave Reeder Jenny Reibenspies Trina Robbins Al Rodriguez Steven Rowe Randy Sargent Pat Sekowsky Randy Scott Mitchell Senft Vijah Shah David Siegel Neal Slowick Jeff Taylor Dann Thomas Mark Trost Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Michael Vance Dr. Michael J. Vassallo Lynn Walker Mike Zeck Eddy Zeno

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Lee Ames & George Gladir

Contents

Writer/Editorial: The Missouri Breaks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 “I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Dennis O’Neil talks to Richard J. Arndt about his first decade in comics as a writer & editor.

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code. . . . . . 53 Beginning our lushly illustrated serialization of the 1998 book by Amy Kiste Nyberg.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt: Now That’s A Fan! (Part 2) . . . 59 More nutty fans—both inside & outside comics—studied & prodded by Michael J. Gilbert.

Tributes To Lee Ames & George Gladir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 68 FCA (Fawcett Collectors Of America] #182 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 An Otto Binder special hosted by P.C. Hamerlinck and featuring Brian Cremins.

On Our Cover: It’s not that writer and editor Dennis O’Neil didn’t turn out a lot of quality work that wasn’t done in collaboration with artist Neal Adams… but when we began to ponder which heroes to feature on this issue’s cover, the first three who came to mind were, of course, Batman, Green Lantern, and Green Arrow—and we tossed in Black Canary for good measure, all drawn by Neal. Add to the mix a Mike Sekowsky Wonder Woman, a Michael W. Kaluta Shadow, and a panel from the Charlton classic “Children of Doom” by Pat Boyette, and all we needed as the icing on the cake was a good photo or drawing of this issue’s interview subject. And no photo could possibly be as iconic for Denny’s first ten years in comics as the portrait Neal Adams (him again!) drew in 1971 on the occasion of O’Neil and himself winning ACBA Awards for their groundbreaking “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” comic. Thanks to layout supervisor Chris Day for putting it all together! [The Shadow TM Conde Nast; other art elements © DC Comics.] Above: In the final “Doctor Strange” episode drawn and plotted by Steve Ditko—in Strange Tales #146 (July 1966)—near-neophyte scripter Denny O’Neil got the opportunity to give a moniker to a mysterious and beautiful woman who’d been involved in Doc’s other-dimensional adventures off and on for the past year or more, but whom neither Steve nor scripter/editor Stan Lee ever got around to giving a name! Denny chose “Clea,” the title character in one of the celebrated Alexandria Quartet of novels written by Lawrence Durrell. She’s more than made a name for herself in the years since! [© Marvel Characters, Inc.] 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 China. ISSN: 1932-6890 FIRST PRINTING.

writer/editorial

The Missouri Breaks

rom a personal standpoint: if I had been responsible for nothing else in my professional life other than bringing into the field the trio of writers whom some used to call (with myself making # 4) the “Missouri Mafia,” I feel I’d have made a lasting contribution to the comic book field. Denny O’Neil. Gary Friedrich. Steve Gerber.

Steve, whom I met in the early 1960s when he was a teenager in the St. Louis suburbs and I wasn’t all that much older, is remembered today as the primary creator of Howard the Duck, as well as for his individualistic writing of “Man-Thing” and other series, mostly for Marvel. (He also contributed Thundarr the Barbarian, among other things, to television animation.) Gary, my best friend ever since we worked together as teenagers at the Palace Theatre in Jackson, Missouri, joined me in Manhattan only a few months after I’d moved there in mid-1965, and went on to co-create the motorcycle-riding Ghost Rider and to script a memorable sequence of Sgt. Fury issues, as well as other notable Marvel stories. And Denny, the first person I cajoled into the comics industry once I myself was safely ensconced therein, has had a distinguished career writing and editing for both DC and Marvel. In the late 1960s, he and artist Neal Adams teamed up to make Batman an exciting, innovative comics concept for the first time since the ’40s—then crafted, almost immediately, a remarkable early-’70s run of Green Lantern (aka “Green Lantern/Green Arrow”) which, while not quite staving off the mag’s cancellation, has been justly celebrated ever since as one of the high-water marks of late Silver Age super-hero material. Add to that his long tenure later as editor of the “Batman” titles, plus his other scripting and editing for the “big two,” and you have a body of work with few parallels in the decades since first Julius Schwartz, then Stan Lee, revitalized the comics field.

Of course, lest I risk breaking my arm in patting myself on the back, I should state up front that all I really did in the fall of ’65, when Stan Lee asked me to help him find a new editorial assistant and scripter, was to send Denny the fabled “Marvel writer’s test” and get out of the way. (And even then, I hedged my bets by sending it to two talented acquaintances, the other being fan-writer Tom Fagan—who lost out to Denny that time, though he got an outright offer of a Marvel job from me a few years later.) It wasn’t that Denny and I were pals, exactly, the way Gary and I were. But we got along, we were of a similar age (Denny’s about a year older), and in 1965 I felt his articles for the major newspaper published in my home county (see pp. 5-7) were some of the best I’d seen on comics up to that point. In the end, I suppose we never had enough in common to really become close chums… and over the decades we even had a fairly serious altercation or two, which I’m happy to say we’ve both gotten way beyond… but now we find ourselves a couple of elder statesmen in a field not known for being particularly kind to those who are unlucky enough to age (i.e., pretty much everybody but Stan Lee). To give Denny something resembling his due in this issue, alas, I had to slightly shortchange the debut this issue of another near and dear project—the serialization of Amy Kiste Nyberg’s 1998 book Seal of Approval —so that it won’t really go into high gear till next issue. But it’s good to know there are creators (like Denny O’Neil) and subjects (like the history of comic book censorship) about which there’s still something new and intriguing to reveal, as comics move steadily and assuredly into their second century. To me, that’s always been one of the things that keeps history one of my primary interests: Every year, there’s a little bit more of it! Bestest,

COMING IN APRIL HERB TRIMPE

124

& The Marvel Age Of Comics! The Early Career Of One Of Ol’ Greenskin’s Essential Artists!

Hulk & Wolverine TM & ©

• New, previously unpublished Hulk/Wolverine cover by TRIMPE! • HERB TRIMPE fills in interviewer RICHARD ARNDT about guys like The Hulk, Phantom Eagle, Iron Man, Kid Colt Outlaw, Nick Fury – Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Fantastic Four, Killraven, Son of Satan, and the origins of Wolverine—not to mention LEE, KIRBY, ROMITA, THE SEVERIN SIBLINGS, EVERETT, FRIEDRICH, THOMAS, WEIN, MOENCH, McGREGOR, BUSCEMA, GRAINGER, & others! • Continuing our rhapsodic re-presentation of SEAL OF APPROVAL: THE HISTORY OF THE COMICS CODE by AMY KISTE NYBERG—lavishly illustrated with all sorts of lurid (and other) visuals! The early anti-comics crusades—and the industry’s response! • FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America)—MICHAEL T. GILBERT presents DR. M. THOMAS INGE on Communists and American comic books—BILL SCHELLY—& MORE!! racters, Inc.

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“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Award-Winning Writer & Editor DENNIS O’NEIL On His First Decade In Comics

Interview Conducted by Richard J. Arndt

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Denny O’Neil began his career in comics in 1965 as a scripter for Marvel Comics. However, he was soon doing most of his early work for Charlton, under the name “Sergius O’Shaugnessy.” In 1968 Charlton editor Dick Giordano moved to DC Comics, taking with him a number of writers and artists, including O’Neil, who soon found himself writing the likes of Beware The Creeper, Wonder Woman, Justice League of America, and, by 1969, “Batman” stories with artist Neal Adams. Their five-year collaboration on Batman and Detective Comics (with Adams spelled by artists such as Irv Novick and Bob Brown) and their simultaneous run on “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” were revolutionary in terms of how all three characters were perceived. O’Neil also revamped Superman for the 1970s, reducing his powers and making him more human. Following these ventures, he worked as an editor/writer at various times for both DC and Marvel, scripting dozens of both companies’ most important characters and contributing such landmarks as the 1970s adaptations of The Shadow with artist Michael Kaluta and Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, again with Neal Adams. O’Neil was the editor of Daredevil during Frank Miller’s tenure on the character. In addition to his comics work, O’Neil scripted several episodes of the highly acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series on TV and has written a number of novels, including one about Richard Dragon, a martial arts master, which also appeared as a comic novel at DC. This interview took place by phone during July of 2011.

Denny’s Ditko Daze Denny O’Neil in 1969 (top of page), and with his charming wife Marifran (right) in a photo taken specifically for the interview at 4:36 p.m. on Aug. 13, 2013. Thanks, guys! On p. 24 of this interview, Denny opines as how “It’s been my fate to rain on Steve Ditko’s parade time and again.” As Exhibits 1-3 of same, below we present the splash pages from three stories scripted by O’Neil (twice as “Sergius O’Shaugnessy”) and drawn by Ditko (two of which the artist also plotted) at the three color comic book companies for which Denny worked during his first decade in the field: “Doctor Strange” for Marvel’s Strange Tales #145 (June 1966)… the middle splash of a three-part tale illustrated by a trio of artists for Charlton’s Space Adventures #2 (July 1968)… and DC’s Beware The Creeper #3 (Sept.-Oct. 1968). Thanks for the scans to Barry Pearl and Jim Ludwig. [“Dr. Strange” page © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Space Adventures #2 page © the respective copyright holders; Beware The Creeper page © DC Comics.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

“I Did A Couple of [Newspaper] Stories On [Comics’ Big Resurgence]” RICHARD ARNDT: Can you tell us about your early life? DENNIS O’NEIL: I feel like my career has gone full circle. My first entry into the comics field came with Alter Ego back in the 1960s, and now here I am 50 years later talking with one of Roy’s reporters. About three years ago he and I went to a convention in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and I had the weird experience of being interviewed by the paper I worked for when Roy re-introduced me to comics. RA: What [news]paper was that? O’NEIL: It was, and still is, called the Southeast Missourian. It was a conservative paper when I worked for it and is, I think, today, very conservative. But that’s okay. I didn’t see the article, if any, that they wrote. They also interviewed Roy and Gary Friedrich. We were the big cheeses that weekend. But, getting back to your question, I grew up in North St. Louis, a blue-collar neighborhood. I went to a military high school, [laughs] which has been the bane of my life. People who now know me can’t believe that I ever went to a military high school. I’m not sure that I can believe it, but I have pictures. I actually did. I went to St. Louis University, majoring in English and minoring in creative writing and philosophy. I went into the Navy, participated in the Cuban blockade [in 1962]—my little sliver of history—and just moved around for a period of about a year. I did some substitute teaching, picked up a load of groceries for my father once a week. I lived with a bunch of people in a big old house near Forest Park in St. Louis. Then I decided I wanted to write again. I’d been a journalist in the Navy. I’d been the editor of my Junior Achievement newspaper—a paper boy—that’s a good point on your résumé. [laughter] I answered an Editor & Publisher [magazine] ad for a beat reporter in Cape Girardeau. One afternoon my father drove me the 120 miles and I talked with the editor for a bit and he decided to hire me. Almost immediately I alienated almost everybody that I depended on to do my job. I made a joke—this was a very racially turbulent time. My girlfriend was a Catholic Worker and I’d become involved in the peace movement and the civil rights movement [which were very intertwined at the time]. I was never a major player but I attended some of the demonstrations, and the people, my friends I hung out with, [were involved]. Cape Girardeau was a mixed place when it came to stuff like that, soooo, one day I made up a phony AP story: “Martin Luther King is coming to Cape Girardeau to stage a rally.” I slipped it onto the clipboard that all of the cops had to read before going on duty and the s*** really hit the fan. I finished my beat—I had to go around to the firehouses and the hospitals –and I got back to the office and a radio reporter called me and said, “I don’t know if you put that

Sketch 22 A talented young artist did this color sketch of Dennis O’Neil (on right) and Roy Thomas at a small comics convention held in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, circa 2007-2008. Another major con guest was fellow writer Gary Friedrich, who’d set up shop across the aisle from where Denny and Roy signed comics and collected money for the comics industry’s Hero Initiative charity, on whose Dispersement Board they’ve both sat since its inception. All three writers had lived in “Cape” at one time or another; both Gary and Roy grew up in nearby Jackson, the county seat. The artist got Denny and Roy to autograph the original sketch—but alas, though he gave RT his verbal okay to use it in Alter Ego, he neglected to sign it… so we can’t give him proper credit till he contacts us! [© 2014 the respective copyright holder.]

Martin Luther King story on the clipboard. I don’t want to know, but if you did, don’t admit it under any circumstances.” So I went through my day and was going to my apartment that night and saw one of the two police detectives that I got reports from leaving my apartment. He’d been evidently been searching for drugs or evidence of God knows what. I don’t know why I made up the joke. I don’t know what I hoped to gain. I made instant enemies of everybody that I depended on to do my job. So… the next day I was no longer on the police beat, no longer the cop reporter. I was a district news editor. RA: I guess you were lucky to keep a job. How did Roy get you reacquainted with comics? O’NEIL: One of my jobs was, twice a month, to fill a children’s page, which ran on Saturdays. This was during the summer, and there was very little in the way of school or children’s activities to write about. But… I was beginning to see comic books again. I was commuting back and forth to St. Louis a lot, spending some time in bus stations, and, because I knew practically no one in Cape Girardeau, it was pretty lonely. I was standing around looking at newsstands a lot. On impulse, I bought some comic books and read them. I thought that they were way different and way better than the books I remembered reading when I was a kid. Comics were a major part of my life when I was a little kid. Once a week my father bought me a comic book after Sunday mass when he stopped to pick up milk for the family. I traded them with the other kids. I really loved reading them, but they just went out of my life totally when I was about ten years old. I was dealing with high school and girls, and I thought maybe I wanted to be an actor, so I was doing a lot of amateur theatre stuff and just had no reason to think about comic books. Suddenly, here they were again. I did some very rudimentary reporting and found out that my hunch was right. Comics were in the middle of a big resurgence. I did a couple of stories on that and Roy Thomas got in touch with me. His parents were subscribers to the paper. They lived in Jackson, Missouri… eight miles away. So, one Sunday, coming back from my weekly visit to St. Louis, I stopped off in Arnold, Missouri, and interviewed Roy. I was just captivated. For two hours he opened up this whole sub-culture I had no inkling had ever existed and that I was really responding to. My girlfriend was not responding similarly, [laughs] but I was just knocked out by the whole bit. Roy [Continued on p. 8]

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

3-PAGE INTERLUDE:

A St. Louisan In The Southeast Missourian

Saturday, May 15, 1965 This is the first of the three articles related to comics that Denny O’Neil wrote in 1965, while a reporter for the Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian (though his last name got misspelled in his byline). It and the two that follow it have been reprinted by special arrangement with the newspaper. The newsstand photo that originally accompanied the piece did not reproduce well on the photocopy supplied by the paper, so we’ve covered it with the Curt Swan/George Klein cover of Superman #179 (Aug. 1965), an issue on sale around the time the articles were printed. [Article © Southeast Missourian or successors in interest; Superman cover © DC Comics.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Saturday, May 22, 1965 (Above:) Clearly, either Roy Thomas’ mother mailed him Denny’s first comics piece right away—or else he happened to be visiting Jackson, Missouri, that weekend—because this second article quotes from a letter he wrote to the newspaper. Denny must’ve phoned Stan Lee in New York City for the article, since The Man is quoted in this piece—meaning that Denny spoke with Lee nearly two months before Roy did. The illustration accompanying this article was the cover scene of Timely/Marvel’s Venus #10 (July 1950), by an unidentified artist; seen at left is a better image of that cover. [Article © Southeast Missourian or successors in interest; Venus cover © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Mrs. Leona Thomas. Roy’s Mom, circa 1968.

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Saturday, May 29, 1965 (Above:) Obviously, Denny’s drop-by at Roy’s St. Louis County apartment (though Roy taught in nearby Arnold, MO) occurred between publication of the second and third articles—’cause Denny elected to center the latter around RT as a comics fan/publisher and budding professional writer (two Charlton stories sold, though not yet published, despite the statement in the text). Off the record, Roy told Denny about his upcoming job as assistant to “Superman” editor Mort Weisinger; but, because Roy felt Weisinger didn’t want it publicized in advance, Denny could only hint at that information in the piece. Amusing to see Roy’s evaluation of Stan Lee’s scripting; at the time, he had no idea that, in little more than a month, he’d be working for him. In fact, only a bit over five months later, so would Denny! [Article © Southeast Missourian or successors in interest.]

That Lucky Old Son (Left:) The Bill Fraccio/Tony Tallarico cover of Son of Vulcan #50 (Jan. 1966), scripted by Roy Thomas (his earliest pro sale), would actually go on sale after Modeling with Millie #44, his first dialogue job for Marvel. In the article, “Charlton” got rendered as “Carlton”—a reflection of how little-known the Derby, Connecticut, comics company was, despite more than a decade in the field. [Son of Vulcan TM & © DC Comics.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

[Continued from p. 4] at that point in his life was transitioning from being an English teacher at Fox High School to the comic industry. He’d sold, I think, a couple of comic book stories. He was the editor of Alter Ego and was preparing to move to New York to take a job with Mort Weisinger [editor of DC’s “Superman” titles]. He’s told that story a lot, and much better than I could. I did an article on him and then we started hanging out. I had Tuesday afternoons off, but didn’t have the time to really go anywhere, so we hung out with another reporter who’d joined the paper by that time. Well, Roy went off to work for Mort Weisinger. I went on with my journalism, or whatever the hell I was doing back then. One day an envelope arrived from New York. It seemed that Roy had quit working for Mort after a couple of weeks and had taken a job with Stan Lee at Marvel Comics. This was at the point where Marvel Comics were really starting to happen. Stan had virtually run the entire outfit by himself for a number of years. Wrote, edited, the whole bit. Comics were beginning to explode, and he was expanding his company. He’d hired Roy and needed another editorial assistant, so Roy sent me the Marvel Comics writer’s test, which were photocopies of four pages of Jack Kirby’s artwork, without copy. My job, if I wanted to do it, was to add words to the pages. Well, who wouldn’t do that? I mean, Jack Kirby pictures! A month later, a lot had happened. My girlfriend had accepted a scholarship to Boston University. She’d come from a very poor family, and when she got there, there was a snafu, and her money wasn’t there. She was in Boston with empty pockets and eating what she could scrounge. I got a call from her and, at almost the same time, information from Roy saying I’d passed the Marvel Comics writer’s test and I was hired as an editorial assistant for Stan Lee.

“Who Wouldn’t Be Excited By [Being Hired By Stan Lee In 1965]? RA: You must have been pretty excited by that. O’NEIL: Who wouldn’t be excited by that? Who wouldn’t take that job? I was in a pretty dead-end journalism job in a small, very conservative town in southeast Missouri. My life was really not going anywhere and suddenly someone says, “Come to New York and work on comic books!” It was just too goofy not to do it. I also felt I had to go rescue Anne, my girlfriend, who was semi-starving in Boston. So, in the middle of the night, I left Cape Girardeau. I contacted Arline, who was the other reporter that we’d become friendly with. She was a wonderful person and I don’t know whatever happened to her, but she gave me a pint of whiskey, sat me down and said, “Wait,” and forty minutes later she was back with my car, which she had packed. I was pretty much living out of a suitcase at the time. I wrote a note to John Blue, my editor at the paper, and, in the middle of the night, left Cape Girardeau and started driving east, without much of a clear plan other than to hook up with Anne in Boston. It was really

one of the rattiest things I’ve ever done, although it didn’t seem so at the time. Poor John Blue was not a bad guy at all, and when he arrived at work the next morning he was short a reporter. But, everything was saying [to me], “Leave now! Make a break. Go be somebody else.” Somewhere in Ohio the car spewed transmission fluid onto the highway and I hitchhiked to Boston. Got into my girlfriend’s room and her landlady burst in and said, “No men allowed! I told you that!” Anne was evicted on the spot and there we were, in a rainstorm, in Boston, knowing nobody in the city and no idea what to do next. We figured that the bus station probably would be open all night, so we decided to go to the bus station, sleep there, and figure out a plan in the morning. A guy picked us up, listened to our story, and gave us a place to stay for the night. He was a real Good Samaritan. No quid pro quo, he wanted nothing. So Anne decided she would stay at Boston University until her money came through and stay long enough so that she wouldn’t have to give any of it back. I moved on to New York. I went to work the next day at Marvel Comics and found that Marvel Comics wasn’t open and neither was anything else on Madison Avenue. This was a Monday, in September! Why wasn’t anything open? This was New York City—the city that never sleeps! The only name I knew from Marvel, from Stan’s letters pages, was Flo Steinberg—and she was in the phone book. I called Flo, and she explained it was a Jewish holiday. We had nothing like that in Cape Girardeau! I killed some time, and hooked up with Roy and Dave Kaler, who were roommates, and became their third roommate for a time in a little tenement on East 2nd Street, and, the next day, went to work for Stan. I thought that maybe I’ll do this for a year. It was a chance to live in New York, a chance to have some experiences. That was almost fifty years ago. RA: Was Dave Kaler the same fellow who wrote some stories for Charlton? O’NEIL: He was a fan, primarily. I don’t know how Roy hooked up with him. He wrote a few stories for Charlton. I think he died very young. [A/EDITOR’S NOTE: See photo & caption below.]

The Company He Kept Three of the first people Denny O’Neil met after debarking in New York City in early November 1965—plus one guy he’d met back in Missouri. (Above:) Stan Lee (at podium) speaks at the 1966 or 1967 (probably the former) comics convention hosted by David Kaler, standing at right. Neither Roy nor comics fandom archivist Bill Schelly nor anyone else we know has been in touch with Dave since the mid-1990s, but we cannot verify that he has passed on, as Denny suspects in the interview. We’d appreciate any information anyone has on this point. Photo probably by Mark Hanerfeld. (Left:) Roy and Flo Steinberg, Stan Lee’s corresponding secretary, in a Marvel office photo probably taken in late 1965. With thanks to Fabulous Flo.

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Muddling With Millie Denny’s first comics scripting was for Modeling with Millie #46 (April 1966). As related in A/E #50, Roy had dialogued approximately the first half of the story he and penciler Stan Goldberg had co-plotted before a huge power blackout hit New York City and environs at 5:27 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 9, 1965. He couldn’t finish the script that night at Dave Kaler’s digs (no juice for his electric typewriter), and the next morning Stan decided Denny would finish it, with Roy re-assigned to dialogue Sgt. Fury #29. The inking is credited by the Grand Comic Database to production manager Sol Brodsky. Because recent credits on the “Millie” titles had referred to “Stan Lee” and “Stan G.,” Roy had signed his contributions “Roy T.”—and that rhyming scheme was kept going by adding a byline for “O’Neil, D.” to the splash, edited in by RT. Also seen is #46’s final story page, one of those scripted by Denny. Thanks to Dr. Michael J. Vassallo. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

My situation was still in flux. I didn’t stay with Roy and Dave very long, although they were perfectly good roommates. I rented an apartment next door, and by that time Anne didn’t need to give any money back to Boston and she moved in with me and we got married. We got hooked up with the peace movement. Anne’s parents had been very active as pacifists back when the organization they were affiliated with was protesting World War II, which was a very risky thing, at that time. But they were very brave people. I was going to work at Marvel Comics but spending a lot of time with the Lower East Side radicals. I was living an oddly marginalized existence.

“I Had Zero Self-Esteem And No Career Plans” RA: The first credits I have of you are from 1966 when you were working on Millie the Model and Patsy Walker. O’NEIL: Actually, I think it was Modeling with Millie, which was a companion title. The “Patsy Walker” title was Patsy and Hedy. Millie and Clicker and Chili and Toni. Patsy and Hedy were “girls on the go-go.” Career girls.

Stan Goldberg

My son, cleaning out his mother’s Poorly-printed photo apartment, came across a big cardboard box from Marvel Tales containing some of my “Millie the Model” Annual #2, 1965. work which I’d thought was lost forever. It’s now in the lower part of this house. Someday when I’m feeling really masochistic and want to self-lacerate myself I will pull those out and look at them. [laughter] It was, I now realize, the best thing that could have happened to me if I wanted to learn to write comics, because it was a chance to really learn the ABCs, the basics. Comic Book Writing 101 with very little to lose. At the time we didn’t know who was reading those titles, if anybody, but nobody [in the business] was paying much attention to them, so it was a chance to really be bad while learning the mechanics of the business. It is an opportunity that I don’t think young writers have as much anymore. Certainly not if they want to write for Marvel or DC. I wrote the “Millie” and “Patsy” stories and some Westerns— not usually the lead Western characters but mostly backup stories—and the first super-hero I wrote was dialogue for Steve Ditko’s last couple “Doctor Strange” stories. I stayed on the feature for [a few issues] after that with Bill Everett.

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Millie The Marvel Denny kept up the continuity between the two Millie titles, writing his credit as “Denny O.” or “Denny-O.” Probably his first full script for the character was Millie the Model #138 (June 1966), near right. In “England Swings!” in issue #141 (Sept ’66), he had our heroine, fellow models Chili and Toni, their boss Mr. Hanover, Millie’s photographer boyfriend Clicker, and even The Gears (the American Beatles-type group developed by Roy and Stan G.) all embark for London. Thanks to Glenn (no last name) in Australia and Michael T. Gilbert for these two scans.

In issue #142 (Oct. ’66), Toni gets engaged while abroad—and in Modeling with Millie #50 (Dec. ’66), the Hanover gals (with or without Toni) were back to their go-go ways. All four stories on this page scripted by O’Neil and penciled by Goldberg, with unidentified inkers. All told, Denny’s scripting would appear in MTM #138-150 and MWM #46-52. Thanks to Stephan Friedt for these scans. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

RA: Although it’s generally known that Ditko plotted many of his “Doctor Strange” stories, the Grand Comics Database [GCD] lists Everett as the plotter for the stories you did with him, as well. Did you actually supply the plots for those stories? O’NEIL: Too long ago… I really don’t know. There was no reason at the time to pay attention as to who was doing what. It was a job. You did your work and got paid for it. There were good days and bad days. I don’t think any of us could have anticipated that we’d be interviewed fifty years later about the work we were doing back then. Roy Thomas has a phenomenal memory for that sort of thing. He ought to be declared a national treasure just for the details he remembers. He can do this sort of thing much better than I. If I was writing a history on comics, he and Mark Waid would be the people I would go to for information. I probably plotted the Everett stuff. I co-plotted with Stan and Roy one “Nick Fury [Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.]” story—“The End of A.I.M.,” or something like that, which appeared in the front of Strange Tales, where “Doc Strange” was appearing. At that time, though, and for many years afterwards, writers were not officially assigned to a book or characters. You got assignments from an editor and, if there was no reason not to accept the assignment, then you wrote whatever character you happened to get.

As I said, I got the chance to really ease into it with “Millie the Model” and the Westerns and even “Doc Strange,” which was one of the things I’d been reading back in Missouri. I liked the character. I liked the whole idea of it. He was a resident of Greenwich Village. I was in the East Village, but it was all the same turf. It was all pretty neat, but I don’t remember exactly who did what anymore. I’d look at the credits if I needed to refresh my memory. RA: The credits aren’t always that clear from those days, although Marvel did a better job there than DC. O’NEIL: It was a disreputable business. A couple of years ago Mike Uslan made a movie about us old comic book farts [2007’s The Legends behind the Comic Books], and he interviewed a bunch of us. By the way, you haven’t lived until you see yourself twenty feet tall on a screen. It is a horrifying experience. [chuckles] Even Stan admitted that in his early days he was reluctant to admit he did comics. People in the business would say, “I work in New York publishing, in the magazine business.” In that movie, Stan said that he’d only reveal his real job at a party if he was cornered or forced into it, and that then immediately terminated the conversation. RA: Was that because of the huge negative publicity from the 1950s? While researching an article on the Comics Code, I came across dozens of interviews with comics professionals from the 1950s and early 1960s who said basically the same thing—you didn’t reveal that you were a comic book writer or artist, that you were involved in the comics industry, because in the eyes of many in the public and the press you were considered next door to a child molester. You were writing those “horrible” comic books that were maiming our children. O’NEIL: Yeah, exactly. RA: It was quite embarrassing to admit that you were one of those people perverting the youth of America. O’NEIL: It was like being a pornographer, in the public estimation. People either thought that comics were pernicious or that they were amusement for the ignorant. “Ya need the pic’ures ‘cause yez can’t understand the woids.” A comic book was synonymous with unintelligence, oafish. For me, though, it was a pretty good fit. As a rebel and a hippie and a guy who had been in various forms of trouble with authority figures—I never met an authority figure that I got along with for more than ten seconds—comics were very appealing to me! It was also, though, an ultrarespectable job. The first thing that Stan made me do was to go to Macy’s with Roy and buy a suit. It was very much a suit-and-tie type of business in the mid-1960s. I remember talking to Jack Kirby and kind of bitching about having to wear the tie when I came into the office and nobody [from the public] saw me from 9 to 5. It seemed sort of silly to me to dress up, but Jack said, “No, this is Madison Avenue. Of course you have to dress up.” Those guys wanted to be respectable. Pretty remarkable in light of the disreputable light they were seen in.

Jill—Not Jillie! By Millie the Model #148 (April ’67), Jill Jerold, an African-American model, has joined Millie and Chili at the Hanover Agency, in a belated nod to changing times, under writer O’Neil. Stan G. thinks that artist Bill Williams may have spelled him for several stories around that time because Goldberg was drawing humor comics for DC. A year or so later, Stan would become a long-time mainstay at Archie. Thanks to Stephen Friedt. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

It was a great business for me to be in, though. By that time I had zero self-esteem and no career plans. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing on the Earth. Even in college, I’d had to make the decision to either major in drama or in English with the creative writing minor. I liked acting a lot, but I did one professional show and decided I did not like the lifestyle. It was pretty dumb to judge an entire culture on one experience, but that kind of tipped the scale towards focusing on writing. When I left college I thought that I would probably never write another short story. I didn’t understand exactly what [those teachers] were trying to teach us. All three years of that minor were really just the same class, over

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Don’t Be A Patsy! Though the Patsy Walker title had recently been discontinued, Patsy and Hedy soldiered on, with pencils by Stan Goldberg or Al Hartley. After two issues scripted by Roy T., Denny took over with P&H #106 (June 1966), above, in which inking is credited by the GCD to “Sub-Mariner” creator Bill Everett. O’Neil wrote the stories through #110 (Feb. 1967), top right, after which the mag was discontinued. Oddly, the pinup page at right from #110 mentions “the American Academy of Comic Book Art and Science”—a ficticious name very close to that of the actual comics fan organization existing at that time—with the awards it gives out being called the “Stanleys” (instead of the Alleys). Roy is pretty certain, though, that Denny scripted this page, and Al Hartley drew it. Thanks to Nick Caputo and Michael J. Vassallo for these three scans. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

and over again. You wrote a thousand words, brought them in on Fridays, brought it into class, and the other students critiqued it. There was nothing outside of short stories. No attempts to involve us in writing novels or plays, much less screenplays. Still, I kind of knew my fate lay with writing. Comics were a way to do that, use and develop those skills, and nobody was talking about quality or standards. You had to please an editor. That wasn’t all that hard to do. I felt I wasn’t being judged. I was just being expected to hit a deadline. And… I could write fiction. It was, in many ways, a great deal for me.

Al Hartley From Fantastic Four Annual #9.

[Continued on p. 15]

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Steve Ditko

Bill Everett. From Fantastic Four Annual #7, 1969.

Stranger In A Strange Tale As fate would have it, Denny O’Neil added dialogue to the final two “Doctor Strange” episodes plotted and drawn by Steve Ditko—for Strange Tales #145 (June 1966, seen on p. 3) and #146 (July ’66), above left, the latter a climactic free-for-all co-starring the Dread Dormammu and Eternity. When Bill Everett became Ditko’s artistic replacement on the feature with #147 (Aug. ’66), Stan Lee wrote the first half of his initial effort, then relinquished the scripting to Denny for pp. 6-10; the final page is repro’d above right. Pictured below, left to right, are the splash pages of Denny’s other two Everettdrawn “Doctor Strange” entries, from ST #148 & 149 (Sept. & Oct. ’66). He returned to the Mystic Master for two last stories in 1968, in ST #167 & 168. Thanks to Barry Pearl for all four scans. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Herb Trimpe From Fantastic Four Annual #7, 1969.

Dick Ayers From Marvel Tales Annual #2, 1965.

I Love My Westerns, But Oh You Kids! Though Denny did indeed write some non-title-hero filler stories for Marvel’s Westerns, it would appear that he scripted more yarns of “Kid Colt Outlaw” than any other cowpoke. Seen here are splashes from Kid Colt Outlaw #134 (May 1967) with pencils by new staffer Herb Trimpe… from KCO #136 (Sept. ’67), art by Dick Ayers & Vince Colletta… and in #139 (March ’68) the filler tale “Targo” drawn Don Heck & “Jay Noel” (Jim Mooney, moonlighting from DC). Then, after the title went on hiatus for a year, it returned with a final inventoried O’Neil “Kid Colt” in #140 (Nov. ’69), with art by Werner Roth & Vince Colletta. (Denny also wrote a story with Herb Trimpe for Kid Colt #135, whose splash will be seen in conjunction with next issue’s Trimpe interview.) Meanwhile, in Two-Gun Kid #90 (Nov. ’67), below left, he had scripted a title-hero adventure in tandem with artist Ogden Whitney. Thanks to Nick Caputo for all scans in this montage. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Ogden Whitney Self-portrait from ACG’s Unknown Worlds #4 (1960). [© the respective copyright holders.]

Don Heck From Fantastic Four Annual #7, 1969.

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Daredevil May Care Stan Lee asked Denny to dialogue the final 13 pages of Daredevil #18 (July 1966) before he himself took off for a brief vacation in Florida. The Denster picked up in the middle of a DD action sequence—then got to script a DDisguised Foggy Nelson against the grim Gladiator. Story by Stan Lee, pencils by John Romita, & inks by Frank Giacoia. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

[Continued from p. 12]

John Romita From Fantastic Four Annual #7, 1969.

Still, comics were nothing that you would go into if you were thinking of a career. I don’t consider myself as having had a career. I’ve walked into a number of jobs, some of which were very, very good jobs, but I didn’t ever think much in terms of a career. I never took a job with the idea that I’d know where I’d be in twenty years. It’s OK not to have done that, because all the people I know who did that didn’t do as well as I did, making it up as I went along.

“Charlton Was A Hallelujah Gig” RA: About a year after you began working for Marvel, you started scripting stories for Charlton under the pseudonym “Sergius O’Shaughnessey.” You started with a backup series, “The Sentinels,” in Thunderbolt #58 (July 1967). O’NEIL: By that time I was doing some magazine journalism, in

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Take A Letter! One of Denny’s duties as an editorial assistant was answering fan mail—sometimes at length, if Stan (or the assistant himself) thought it worthwhile. Reproduced above is a remarkable two-page letter Denny sent in 1966 to reader Jay DeNatale, who posted it on tumblr a couple of years back, along with a scan of the photocopy of a page of Kirby pencils from Fantastic Four #47 (Feb. 1966) that Denny sent with the letter. Thanks to Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, for forwarding this material to us. If anybody knows where we can reach Jay D., please let us know—we owe him a copy of this issue! [Art © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

particular a magazine, now long gone, named Newsfront. One of the most interesting days I ever had in my life was for Pageant magazine, interviewing LBJ’s [President Lyndon B. Johnson’s] Chief of Protocol. [I figured that Pageant] would not appreciate my name appearing at Charlton. With Stan, it would be working for the competition. I now think it wouldn’t have made any difference to any of them, but that was the reason for the pseudonym. RA: You also worked on a title called Go-Go. O’NEIL: Go-Go? I have no idea what that title would have been! [laughs] RA: Looks to be a title similar to Millie the Model and Patsy. O’NEIL: I’ve no idea! [more laughter] I’d heard from Steve Skeates that there was this guy named Giordano who worked for this little publisher in Connecticut. Giordano was in town to talk to freelancers one morning a week. Charlton rented one room in a 5th Avenue office building. Acting on that information from Skeates, I went up there and talked to Dick. I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me. The money was less than half the beginning page rate that I was making at Marvel, but I was going to do it under a

pseudonym and who cares? If you say I wrote something called GoGo, I will go to my grave believing it, but I don’t remember it at all. At Charlton, you wrote a little bit of everything. I’m actually grateful for that. I’m kind of making fun of it, but I got to write super-heroes, Westerns, cops, teen-ager stuff, science-fiction, mystery stories. Anything, really, you had time for. It was a chance to see what kind of muscles you had. An opportunity to stretch. You learned by doing while getting paid for it and not having much at stake. Not much money maybe, but still getting paid. Nobody in the business knew who was reading Charlton comics. You realize now that they did have a following, but, at the time, who knew? RA: That’s one of the things I hear a lot from former Charlton writers and artists. That they didn’t get much money, but they got a lot of freedom, because the higher-ups in the publishing branch didn’t take a lot of time supervising the comics. O’NEIL: I think that’s exactly right. I don’t remember many comments from Dick, or even the kind of editing I did later myself, where the story was talked out between the editor and writer before the writer went home and wrote it. I think Dick and I would

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

normal guy who becomes involved in an alien invasion. It was an interesting story that holds together pretty well, even with a different artist on every chapter. It also was a storyline totally unlike anything Marvel, or for that matter DC, would have given you in those years. O’NEIL: Charlton was a Hallelujah gig, because there were no rules. Yes, it had to be reputable, had to be able to pass the Comics Code, etc, etc. We wouldn’t have been able to get away with half the stuff that nowadays is routinely appearing in super-hero comics. But Dick didn’t have a template for the “right” way to do comics. I’d had that template, to some degree, at Marvel. I’m not criticizing, mind you. My job [at Marvel] was to imitate Stan Lee. Everybody starts off imitating someone, so I really was being asked to imitate the guy who was arguably the best comic book writer in the world at that time. It was a great way to learn the business. But, as far as I was able, I was doing the Marvel house style. At Charlton, there was no house style. I might have wished the money was a little better, because by that time I had an infant son and a non-working wife and bucks were not in great supply; but, having said that, it was in many ways a great next step for me. “OK, I’ve done Stan, now let’s see what I can do on my own.” During my run at Charlton, I did stories that, occasionally, make people’s best lists. “Children of Doom,” for example.

Don’t Yield—Write “S.H.I.E.L.D.”! Denny recalls Stan and Roy as having co-plotted the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” story he dialogued over Jack Kirby breakdowns for Strange Tales #149—the same issue which contained his final “Doctor Strange.” Roy doesn’t remember having any part in the plotting of that tale—though he was directed later by Stan to do a bit of rewriting on the finished yarn. RT has no idea of how much (let alone precisely what) he added to it. Finished art (over the Kirby layouts) by Ogden Whitney. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

agree on characters, say for a filler story, and the only real restriction was that the story be eight pages long to go in the back of a Western. I’d go home and do the script. Maybe it would be twelve pages for a super-hero title. Same thing. Dick was a great Zen editor. He was very non-directive and, at Charlton, he was able to pay us laughably little but he always got good work off the people who worked for him. I don’t know how he did that. Weezie Simonson can do that, too. Totally non-directive, and yet you did some of your best stuff for them.

“Grass” Green.

RA: Bob Toomey, a DC and Warren writer, told me Photo courtesy of something similar about Weezie, when she was Louise Bill Schelly. Jones at Warren. If you brought in a story she liked, she’d be so cheerful and happy while telling you how much she liked it (and getting your check cut) that you worked double-hard so that she’d like the next one the same way. Now, the first Charlton job I think you really shone on was a six-part science-fiction series, with each part illustrated by a different artist, that appeared in Space Adventures Presents U.F.O. #60 (Oct. 1967) and Space Adventures #2 (July 1968). It was an intriguing yarn about a

Go-Go—And Hold The Checks! One of Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s (i.e., Denny O’Neil’s) few straight humor assignments for Charlton or elsewhere was this parody of famed disc jockey “Murray the K” Kaufman in Go-Go #9 (Oct. 1967). Pencils by Richard “Grass” Green; inker uncertain. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

“I Think The Assignment Was To Do An 8-Page Story” RA: Another title you worked on for Charlton was Hercules, with art by Sam Glanzman.

Doin’ The Charlton (Left to right:) Writers Dennis O’Neil and Steve Skeates and editor Dick Giordano on a panel spotlighting Charlton Comics at a (probably) 1967 comics convention. In early 2010, when Ye Editor solicited tributes to the late Dick G. for A/E #106, Denny sent the following comments, which were inadvertently and regrettably left out of that issue: “I owed Dick more than I could ever repay. After my boozy meltdown, he defied his superiors and hired me to edit Batman. I’m not sure I would have done the same in his position. He was also one of the most decent men I’ve ever met.”

RA: Yes, that was the next story I wanted to discuss. That actually is a pretty impressive story. O’NEIL: And totally ad-libbed. Apparently, Charlton was going to license some kind of psychedelic book to publish in comic form, and somehow the deal fell through at the last moment. Dick called me and said, “I need a script this weekend, in two days, so write what you want.” So, I was kind of active in the peace movement by then and I loved science-fiction—I was beginning to be aware of the science-fiction sub-culture, as well; I joined the Science Fiction Writers of America at that time—so it was a chance to write an anti-war themed story. That was really all I had to go on. I wrote it in a hurry and it went to the artist, who did a very unusual art job, but it really worked for the narrative. RA: The artist was Pat Boyette. O’NEIL: Pat Boyette, yep! RA: It’s interesting to look at the art, because Charlton was quite willing to put black-&-white pages or panels right in the middle of a color story… something DC or Marvel would never have done at the time. O’NEIL: Yeah, we got told why, too, boy, I’ll tell ya! [laughter] Frank Miller has done a lot of black-&-white stuff in his later work, but one story that we worked on together he wanted to put just one dot of red in the middle of a black-&-white page, and the answer from the business guys was that if you put one dot of red on a page we’ll have to pay for a whole color page, so you’re damn well not going to waste that money on one blob of ink! [laughter] RA: OK! Frank actually has done that in recent years... put a single color, red or yellow, on black-&-white pages for his Sin City series. O’NEIL: Yeah. I don’t know how the “Children of Doom” story was edited or how Dick and Pat decided on which pages or panels should be in monochrome, but whatever they did, it worked. RA: That story is one of Pat Boyette’s best art jobs, also. It’s really quite innovative for the time, and rumor has it that his artwork may have come about nearly as rapidly as your script. Boyette was a very fast artist and sometimes that showed. There are stories of his that looked as if they were done in a day, but “Children of Doom” is really quite elegant. O’NEIL: I was knocked out by the finished pages, too. It was one of the real highlights of that period in my life.

O’NEIL: Yeah. I vaguely remember that. Marifran, my childhood sweetheart that I married after not seeing her for 30 years, has made it her business to make a complete set of my work. I hadn’t saved it, and I’ve moved a lot, so it hasn’t been easy. Things get lost. So Mari has tried to reassemble all that stuff. She’s found an old issue of Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine [a prose digest that ran from the 1950s to the 1980s] that had a story of mine and had it bound. I’ll remind her of Hercules because, until this second, I’d totally forgotten I’d ever worked on it. [NOTE: The series itself was covered in A/E #92.] RA: Well, maybe this will jog your memory. Sam changed the character’s appearance midway through your run as the writer. Hercules in the early issues was just a big burly guy, and Sam changed him in #3 so that he appeared more like the characters on a Grecian urn. When I asked him how that came about, he said he did it on his own. Nobody at Charlton, neither you nor the editors, had any input on that. He just did it because he wanted to. Most comic companies would have coronaries over something like that happening. O’NEIL: Probably smart marketing to do that. More Kevin Sorbo than, say, Steve Reeves. [NOTE: Both actors have portrayed Hercules in movies or on television.] RA: One thing I really liked about the series was the excellent scripts, both from you and Joe Gill. They’re really quite funny, without actually turning the strip into a humor comic. Hercules isn’t portrayed as very smart. In fact, he’s described in the book as “brawny between the ears.” There was a lot of relatively sly humor occurring in both the script and the artwork. O’NEIL: Well, in both mythology and popular culture, Hercules has never been the sharpest fellow. Kevin Sorbo’s version made him kind of bright, but generally, yeah, his main claim to fame was that he was real strong. Having a god for a father doesn’t always help out the brain matter, I guess. RA: Another Charlton strip you did that had a great deal of humor was “Wander.” That one was an SF/Western backup series that appeared in Cheyenne Kid. It didn’t last all that long, but it was one that I really enjoyed reading. They’re quite amusing. The artwork on that one was mostly done by Jim Aparo. O’NEIL: Yeah, Aparo was one of the great comic artists. Again, I think the assignment was to do an 8-page story—a filler for the back of the book. I don’t know how I came up with the idea. [NOTE: Wander was a shipwrecked alien who found himself trapped in the Old West. Since he’d previously visited our planet during Elizabethan times, he spoke Shakespearean English.] It was fun to write, though, because I got to screw around with some pseudo-Shakespearean locutions and contrast that against the cowboy palaver of the lonesome plains and what have you. Aparo hit exactly the right note with his artwork. Visually, he put it right between cartoony and realistic Western settings and action. I couldn’t dream of a better artistic approach for those scripts to get. He was absolutely the best artist for that strip. RA: When Jim left the strip, you wrote one more episode that was drawn by Fred Himes, and then you were replaced by Joe Gill, who tried, but the humor was much more forced and obvious. The strip didn’t last too long after that.

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Pat Boyette Thanks to Jim Amash.

O’NEIL: I think I was starting to get buried with work from DC at that point. I think I read some of that stuff that came out after Jim’s and my stint on it, but… I’m very interested in seeing the upcoming movie Cowboys and Aliens, because from what I’ve seen in the previews, it taps into some of that same idea—the Old West versus alien technology. I think now that “Wander” would make a pretty good TV show. I have no idea who may have the rights. DC bought all, or most, of the Charlton super-heroes, but stuff like “Wander” or Hercules or any of their Western stuff, they didn’t buy those. I don’t know who would have the rights. RA: A Canadian fellow named Roger Broughton said he bought much of those titles and reprinted a number of them in black-&white in the 1990s and early 2000s, but I haven’t seen anything from him in about a decade, and some of the stories are now appearing in reprint volumes as though they were out of copyright. I

Children Of Necessity The cover and two exemplary pages from the Dennis O’Neil/Pat Boyette triumph “Children of Doom,” from Charlton Premiere #2 (Nov. 1967). Lucky you—nowadays you can read the entire story (minus the cover), printed on paper you can’t see through when the art is left black-&white, in Dan Nadel’s acclaimed hardcover collection Art in Time (Abrams ComicArts, 2010). It’s intriguing that (probably) editor Dick Giordano rather than writer “Sergius O’Shaugnessy” emblazoned the splash page with the phrase “A Charlton Classic”; Dick obviously knew one when he saw one. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Like A Thunderbolt From The Blue (Above:) One of Denny’s first assignments at Charlton was to take over writing chores on “The Sensational Sentinels,” created by original writer Gary Friedrich and artist Sam Grainger as a back-up series in Thunderbolt, a comic otherwise handled by artist/writer Pete A. Morisi. If policeman Morisi could moonlight under the pseudonym “PAM,” Denny, who figured Stan Lee might not take favorably to his also scripting for low-rent Charlton, would assume the pen name “Sergius O’Shaugnessy,” after a character in a Norman Mailer novel. These splashes appeared in Thunderbolt #58 & 59 (July & Sept. 1966). (Facing page, top left:) In Thunderbolt #60 (Nov. ’66), “Sergius” spelled “PAM” as writer for one issue, in a tale drawn by Pat Boyette. Thanks to Jim Ludwig for all scans in this montage. [Sentinels pages © the respective copyright holders; Thunderbolt © Estate of Pete Morisi.] (Also on facing page:) Also in Thunderbolt #60, replacing “Sentinels,” was the first installment of a new series written by “Sergius” and drawn by Jim Aparo. “The Prankster” perhaps owed a bit in terms of inspiration to Harlan Ellison’s short story “‘Repent Harlequin’ Said the Ticktockman,” but it had its own virtues, and it would’ve been interesting to see the follow-up to the first 7-page chapter. Alas, however, Thunderbolt was canceled with #60. Thanks to Rodrigo Baeza for the scans. [© the respective copyright holders.]

don’t know for sure that they are, though. O’NEIL: He reprinted some of my other cowboy stuff. I created a shillelagh-swinging Irishman in the Old West and another character called “A Man Called Loco.” He reprinted some of those. I’ve got a set of them somewhere. There are thousands and thousands of comics in this house. I’ll probably never see most of them again. “Wander” is fondly remembered by people who remember him at all, but he’s very much in limbo. RA: You’re right in that it would make an interesting TV series. I don’t think people realize how many Western stories you wrote early in your career. You wrote a lot for Charlton and, at much the same time, wrote a lot of backup stories and, occasionally, the lead story for Marvel’s Kid Colt and Rawhide Kid.

Sam Grainger

O’NEIL: Not so many Rawhides—that was mostly Larry Lieber. Probably backup stories for that title. I remember doing a number of those. I wrote a “Lone Ranger” short story for a book publisher about a month ago, and it was nice to rediscover how fun it is to do Westerns. It’s pretty much a dead genre [in comics], and every time people try to revive it they fail. RA: Unfortunately, that’s probably true. The only one running currently in this country is “Jonah Hex.” O’NEIL: It was marketed as more of a supernatural/Western comic, even in its early days. Wasn’t it originally called Weird Western Tales or something? RA: Yeah, but it actually is more of a Clint Eastwood/spaghetti Western take. The movie, I hear, shoehorned in a supernatural plot or trappings,

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

but the actual comic is pretty straight Western. Bloody as hell but not particularly supernatural. O’NEIL: I still love Westerns. I suspect Wander may have had his origins in my love for the old TV series Have Gun—Will Travel, Jim Aparo Photo courtesy of which starred Richard Boone. Boone’s Jim Amash. Paladin was a gunman who didn’t dress like a cowboy, had a sense of humor, and spouted Shakespeare on a regular basis. In fact, at the end of the day, I often sit back and relax by watching old episodes on DVD here at home. RA: I do the same thing! Only the old Western shows I watch are Steve McQueen’s Wanted—Dead or Alive or Sam Peckinpah’s The Westerner. O’NEIL: Oh, Peckinpah did episodes of The Rifleman, too. I see his name every so often on the credits. I had a makeup man who worked for a movie company back in the day that was making a film called The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery. He told us about this wild-man actor from Hollywood named Steve McQueen, who was the star of the picture. He came off the airplane when he arrived carrying a gun! I’ve pieced together the fact that McQueen had probably already signed to do Wanted—Dead or Alive and was probably getting used to having that odd, sawed-off carbine on his

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Watch This Space! On this page are four of the six splash pages from the science-fiction series written by Denny O’Neil for Space Adventures Presents U.F.O. #60 (Oct. 1967) and Space Adventures #2 (July 1968), featuring a protagonist named Paul Mann. (Above:) In the first of the two comics, “Healers from Nowhere” was drawn by an unknown artist who signed himself “Melonius Thonk,” and “The Secret of the Saucer” by Jim Aparo—with a chapter in between done by Pat Boyette. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. (Below:) In the second comic, after an unfortunately long hiatus between issues, the first chapter was illustrated by Jim Aparo, the third by Boyette. The splash page of the middle chapter, drawn by Steve Ditko, was seen on p. 3 of this issue. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [© the respective copyright holders.]

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Another Charlton Classic The Sam Glanzman/Sergius O’Shaugnessy splash page from Charlton’s Hercules #5 (July 1968). [© the respective copyright holders.]

Sam Glanzman

hip that he used in the show. One of my brushes with greatness. Steve McQueen and I had the same makeup man! Wheee! [laughter]

“DC Needed Writers” RA: At about this time Dick Giordano went over to DC to edit some of DC’s new mystery titles, The Witching Hour and House of Secrets, as well as some other titles. O’NEIL: Some of the stuff that my kid discovered in my ex-wife’s apartment was, I think, my copies of Bomba the Jungle Boy. I think I only did two or three of them. That [move by Giordano] was one of the most interesting stories in the great comic book saga. It touches upon Steve Skeates and myself. We were scabs. And we didn’t know it. I’m really glad I didn’t know it. One day I walked in to see Dick for the Charlton freelance stuff and he said, “How would you like to do the same thing you’re doing now but for three times the money?” Well,

Peter A. Morisi

Cowboys And Aliens, Vintage 1968 Denny O’Neil and Jim Aparo’s then-unique take on a Western, from Cheyenne Kid #67 (July ’68). Of course, that series fit right in with the company that in the 1950s had pioneered the final frontier with “Spurs” Jackson in Space Western! It’d be good to see someone reprint both series! Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [© the respective copyright holders.]

“Loco” Motion Pete Morisi’s splash page for “A Man Called Loco” in Charlton’s Texas Rangers in Action #65 (March 1968). “Sergius” carried over Marvel-style alliteration into the credits. Stan Lee would have been quietly proud. Thanks to Jim Ludwig & Michael T. Gilbert. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

that was a pretty compelling argument. Dick could be very eloquent. The deal he had with DC was that he was being hired to edit some of their books and he could bring over five of his Charlton writers or artists with him. Ditko, Pat Boyette, Skeates, myself… I don’t remember the last one. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Actually, despite the common legend, it was apparently former Amazing Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko who made the move to DC Comics first, and who then recommended that that company hire Giordano as an editor, with DG then bringing several creators with him.] RA: It had to be Jim Aparo, because he started doing Aquaman with Steve Skeates for Giordano. O’NEIL: Yes, of course. I’m forgetting the obvious one. I thought that these people at DC had seen the good work that we’d done at Charlton and wanted to get us into their fold. I now think that people in the big offices at DC had no idea who we were beyond being carbon-based life forms who could type. Many, many years later, [then DC publisher] Paul Levitz told me the whole story, and it was that the stable of writers who’d really created the DC Universe had asked the company for some health insurance. The DC response was that they all got fired. Or most of them got fired. DC needed writers, and there we were, available. I was writing a piece on Superman’s 50th anniversary and I told Paul, “You know, I’m writing this as a reporter and this makes the company look bad.” He said, “It doesn’t, really, because it will tell everybody how far we’ve come.” Even then, and it’s been twenty years since I wrote that piece, to fire the entire writing staff would have been unthinkable. Now, although I’m not entirely satisfied with the freelance situation in the comic book world, no company would ever, even for a nanosecond, consider doing something like that. Even back when I did this piece, it was totally unthinkable.

O’NEIL: I have reason to believe…. Steve and I have never exchanged a harsh word, but I cannot imagine that he could have possibly liked it. I have great respect for Steve, but he is probably one of the people on this earth that I most disagree with, philosophically speaking. Which doesn’t mean that I’m right and he’s wrong; it’s just disagreement. I played The Creeper kind of tongue in cheek, and I don’t think Steve could have possibly liked that. I did, what, six or seven issues? It was not a long-term thing. RA: It didn’t last all that long. A few Showcase issues and, I think, then six in his own title. O’NEIL: Less than a year, certainly. RA: You also worked on fill-in issues for Green Lantern and Justice League [of America] in your early days at DC. O’NEIL: DC was very territorial, and it tended to work like this: if you worked as a Murray Boltinoff writer, you were not a Jack Schiff writer. If you were a Mort Weisinger guy, you weren’t a Julie Schwartz guy. Those artificial barriers began to dissolve about that time. The whole comic book business, without anybody realizing

It was unknown to us at the time, but that’s why we came to DC from Charlton. RA: It’s possible that DC got away with it because there wasn’t much of a fan press at the time or much in the way of a professional press that would have been interested. Nowadays, with the Internet, such a thing would be all over the media in about ten seconds. O’NEIL: Yes. To the mainstream press, comics and the people who made them were absolutely invisible back then. Hell, today something like that would make The New York Times! Some of those guys wandered back, either at Marvel or even back to DC, and did a little work, but people lost their jobs and for no reason. Some of them never got to work in the field again. Gardner Fox, to my knowledge, never did anything for DC again. Arnold Drake did some sporadic freelance work for DC, but I think the relationship [that had existed prior to 1969] between freelancer and management was essentially broken beyond repair. Because, although there were no contracts or anything like that, even when we started for DC, there was an unspoken understanding that a writer would get this much work from, say, Julie Schwartz and this much work from Murray Boltinoff and occasional jobs from other people. It was a kind of trust that enabled you to work together and to collaborate successfully, and I think that trust was probably gone forever after the brouhahah over the health insurance. RA: You mentioned working on Bomba, but you also worked on Steve Ditko’s [Beware] The Creeper. O’NEIL: Yeah, it’s been my fate to rain on Steve Ditko’s parade time and again. RA: He wasn’t fond of your scripting?

Bombas Away! Denny wrote Bomba the Jungle Boy #6-7 (July-August & Sept.-Oct. 1968) for DC Comics. Neither issue depicted the 1920s+ juvenile Tarzan wannabe on its first page, so we’ve repro’d the page 4 splash of the latter. Art by Jack Sparling. The GCD tells us that the first episode was told without any dialogue balloons—and the second has drug references. Denny wasn’t wasting any time breaking loose at DC! Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [© the respective copyright holders.]

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Jewels With Julie Examples of two of Denny’s early assignments for editor Julius Schwartz: Justice League of America #74 (Sept. 1969), with art by Dick Dillin & Sid Greene—in this case, the Missourian’s contribution to the annual JLA/JSA crossovers. He also brought Earth-Two’s Black Canary into Earth-One’s JLA and instigated her romance with Green Arrow, but he’s always said he never felt comfortable scripting JLA. Thanks to Jim Ludwig.

Dick Dillin Courtesy of the Dillin family, as seen in A/E #30.

Green Lantern #72 (Oct. 1969) teamed O’Neil with the Silver Age GL’s co-creator, penciler Gil Kane, for a fill-in issue on the cleverly titled “Phantom of the Space-Opera”—but the writer was destined to make a far greater mark on that series beginning just a few issues later. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [© DC Comics.]

it, was reinventing itself. Responding to a lot of economic and social pressures. It will be a fascinating story for someone to tell someday. RA: People have made numerous comments in print, including myself, about the advent of the Young Turks—the new artists who began appearing in 1969-1970, including Bernie Wrightson, Barry WindsorSmith, Michael Kaluta, and more—that began a sea change in the way comics were drawn and appeared. O’NEIL: Neal Adams appeared a little before that time. RA: Yeah, Neal has gone on record that he was probably the first new artist that DC hired since 1954-1955 and the advent of the Comics Code. It’s not generally noted, but there was also an influx of new writers appearing in comics at much the same time. O’NEIL: Yeah, Roy and Steve Skeates and I were the first new writers to work steadily in all that time. RA: Gary Friedrich and Mike Friedrich should probably be included, as

Gil Kane

well. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: The two Friedrichs, who are not related to each other, came along circa 1966, while Skeates, Thomas, and O’Neil all started at Marvel in 1965. E. Nelson Bridwell had been on staff at DC since the turn of 1964, but in 1965 he was as yet doing virtually no writing except for letters-pages.] O’NEIL: And then Len Wein and Marv Wolfman, not too long after that. But at first, it was just us three out there, all lonesome by ourselves. Then the business began to change. One of the changes was that Dick Giordano felt comfortable walking me down the hall to meet Julie Schwartz. I am now bald as a billiard ball, but back then I was a hippie with long, unkempt hair. I had given up wearing the suits and ties by that point in my life. Never gotten back to it, somehow. I think I wore a tie the day I was married—the second time. Julie and I kind of… he was not the Julie of later years. He was very much a suit-and-tie guy and very regular. Called his wife at precisely the same time every morning. Ate bean soup for lunch every day. So I think there was initially a bit of wariness on both our parts. I didn’t look like a comic book writer, and he was an authority figure. And boy, did I have a baaad set of

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

experiences with authority figures. I haven’t told you any of my problems with Navy authority figures and I probably won’t, but hrrrr! Still, Julie gave me an assignment—Green Lantern # 64 [Oct. 1968]—and, as was customary in those days, I talked out the plot with him. They don’t do that much anymore, and it’s a loss. I was still wet behind the ears, so I went home and did the script. While doing the script, which was a time travel story, I had Green Lantern back in the very earliest years of the planet Earth. There was another planetoid floating nearby, so Green Lantern captures it with his ring and puts it in orbit around the Earth, giving the Earth its moon. It was basically a half-page throwaway bit, but I had not discussed it with Julie. I hadn’t yet realized that if you change what you say you’re going to deliver, it’s a good idea to run that by the person you’re delivering to. I just went ahead and wrote it, and he really liked that touch. Shortly thereafter Dick left DC and I settled into a long, comfortable, and productive relationship with Julie. RA: You were also responsible for the Diana Rigg-styled version of Wonder Woman, where she gave up her powers and costume and appeared as a white cat-suited judo-master. O’NEIL: I did the changeover. It was a point at which I was still

Three (Relatively) New Kids On The Block (L. to r.:) Steve Skeates, Denny O’Neil, and Mike Friedrich at the DC offices, 1969. Mike succeeded Denny as scripter of Justice League of America. Of course, by ’69 all three were hardened comic book veterans, Denny and Steve since ’65 and Mike since ’68. Photo courtesy of the late Jerry G. Bails, who may have taken it on one of his trips to New York comics conventions.

one of the flavors of the week. I changed all three of DC’s major characters—Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but the only successful one, in my opinion, was Batman. [The Wonder Woman changeover] was Denny’s Folly! RA: Actually, I liked those stories. O’NEIL: They have their fans, and DC reprinted them all, to my great surprise. I thought I was being a feminist. I thought I was serving the cause of feminism, but Gloria Steinem wrote a piece in the first issue of Ms. [magazine] setting the world straight on that. Gloria, as far as I know, is still a very nice lady. She didn’t do a hatchet job. She didn’t mention my name, but I think she did find a sympathetic ear with Jenette Kahn later. Anyway, I now see exactly what Gloria was complaining about. I just didn’t see it at the time. I was just absolutely, utterly blind. I did Wonder Woman for a while, both at the start and the end of that changeover, and towards the end I enlisted SF writer Samuel R. Delany’s help. By that time, I knew Chip [Delaney’s nickname] well, and once I became aware of him as a writer, I somehow found out he lived just a block or two from me. We kind of became friends, and he became interested in comics. He’d come over, read through my collection of comics, and became interested in it as an art form. I gave him a shot at writing a couple of the Wonder Woman issues. I think he was interested in the character. One of the best science-fiction writers of the 20th century making a brief foray into the comics field. Working on super-hero stuff. I found out I wasn’t doing Wonder Woman anymore the way you often found out you weren’t doing something in those days. I saw an artist working on a script that I hadn’t written. They sometimes didn’t bother to tell you that you didn’t have a given assignment anymore. RA: One of the books that you worked on in 1968-1969 that I personally liked was Bat Lash.

Jeepers, Creepers! On this page from Beware The Creeper #2 (July-Aug. 1968), Jack Ryder changes to his eldritch alter ego. Thanks to Lynn Walker. With #4, Denny would finally leave behind his “Sergius O’Shaugnessy” pseudonym—at least for the most part. [© DC Comics.]

O’NEIL: Twenty years ahead of its time. I wondered if they would ever get around to reprinting it, and they finally did, a couple of years ago. It was such a natural title. It’s something I feel absolutely no hesitation in bragging about, because I had very little

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Princess Diana Gets “Rigged”! (Above:) Two key pages from Wonder Woman #179 (Nov.-Dec. 1968), in which Princess Diana gives up her Amazon heritage and trains in martial arts with the sensei I-Ching. By this time, the British Avengers series, co-starring Diana Rigg, had become a modest hit on American TV. Script by Dennis O’Neil, art by Mike Sekowsky & Dick Giordano. Thanks to Mark Muller. (Below:) In this publicity photo, Sekowsky eyes model Joyce Miller—presumably for sketching purposes. After a few issues of the “New Wonder Woman,” he would usurp the writing, as well. Thanks to Pat Sekowsky for the pic. (Bottom right:) By #199 (March-April 1972), Denny was again scribing the mag—and now editing it, to boot. Art by Don Heck & Dick Giordano. Editor O’Neil also hired science-fiction writer Samuel R. (Chip) Delaney to write an issue or two. Thanks to Dave Reeder. [WW pages © DC Comics.]

Author Topline

that Sergio would have wanted to write dialogue. I’d had a lot of experience with Westerns at that point. Maybe I’m talking out of my hat here, though. I don’t know if Sergio wanted to write the dialogue. I just never asked him.

Nick Cardy,

RA: I noticed that Nick Cardy occasionally drew Sergio as one of the characters in the book. Did he ever draw you in as a character?

O’NEIL: Not that I can remember. Bat Lash would have made a great movie. Actually, they have made a great movie with him. Mel Gibson’s version of Maverick looks a lot more like Bat Lash than [it does like] the old James Garner/Jack Kelly Maverick characters from TV. 1998. Photo by David Siegel.

RA: Yeah, it does, when you think about it. You also worked on Challengers of the Unknown. That must have been very close to the end of the original run. O’NEIL: It was a Murray Boltinoff project. I guess Murray must have sought me out and asked if I wanted to do it. I had no reason not to say yes. I think I added a new character and changed the continuity a little bit. I remember it as a pleasant enough job. I don’t think I did anything there that was earth-shaking. It was a solid, professional comic book. Probably delivered what people paid for. RA: You also wrote DC’s first sword-and-sorcery comic; in fact, that story was the first effort by either of the major comic companies to do sword-and-sorcery, as it appeared more than a year before the first issue of Conan the Barbarian. It was called “Nightmaster”—which was an odd mix of a warrior with an enchanted sword but wearing a type of superhero suit. It was mostly drawn by a very young Bernie Wrightson and friends, but the first issue was by Jerry Grandenetti.

A Cardy-Carrying Western Hero A moment of high drama from the often light-hearted Bat Lash—namely, #4 (April-May 1969). Denny wrote the dialogue; the plot and full art are attributed to Nick Cardy. Thanks to Lynn Walker. Sadly, Cardy passed away as this issue of A/E was in final preparation. [© DC Comics.]

to do with it, really. The plots were by Sergio Aragonés. In his own unique way, he would deliver 22 pages of Aragonés sketches, like the ones he did for Mad magazine, telling the story visually and with absolute clarity and coherence. Those went to Nick Cardy, who did, I thought, unbelievably good work. RA: In my opinion, it’s some of the finest work he ever did in comics. O’NEIL: Yeah. It was like every panel was a painting. At the very last part of the process, I came in and did the words, when the story was really already told. I thought, and still think, it was a brilliant book. I keep the collected copy next to my bed. I’ve heard that Carmine Infantino may have had something to do with plotting that book. RA: I thought Carmine was credited in the collection with co-plotting some of the earliest issues with Sergio, but he’s not. There’s some confusion over who worked on the first story, the Showcase pilot. O’NEIL: I don’t know exactly who wrote that very first issue, the Showcase one. [NOTE: The Grand Comics Database credits Aragonés and Nick Cardy for that story’s script.] I came on with # 1, in the regular run of the book. I don’t think, at that point in his career,

O’NEIL: Yeah, Bernie actually bailed pretty early [on the first issue] and Jerry took over. I didn’t have any idea who Jerry was at the time. I got to know him a little bit later. “Nightmaster” was my attempt at doing that kind of thing—the sword-and-sorcery stuff. It was originally to be a six-issue series. Then, after we got started, I was told I had to wrap it up in three. So the story got attenuated. I don’t know why the order came to cut it short. They could not possibly have had sales figures, at least reliable sales figures, that early. That type of thing happened all the time. You never knew. I guess somebody up the line thought it was not a good idea. RA: Well, it was pretty much out there on its own. Except for Charlton’s Hercules, there weren’t any real sword-and-sorcery comics around. Who would know if one would be a hit for comics? O’NEIL: Yeah. I named the characters in “Nightmaster” after friends of mine and tried to do something that was not [a copy of] Robert E. Howard. I think Roy Thomas had a profound understanding, even early on, of what makes sword-and-sorcery stories work, and I didn’t. Still, to have the rug pulled out from under you for no reasons that I was even given…. That was one of the irksome realities in those days. You didn’t know why decisions were made. Even if you were an editor, you didn’t see sales figures. RA: I would think it would be hard to tell how effective you were if you had no knowledge of how the books you were doing were selling. O’NEIL: Later, that changed. Sales figures became my Bible. The reality of New York publishing is that you can get a lot of freedom for yourself as long as somebody along the line is making a lot of profit. If they stop making a profit, then all of a sudden you have people looking over your shoulders. It’s like the old saying, “If you

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

witch-hunting years, so genuine crime comics were not really able to be done. The agenda of most of the creators for a long time was not to offend anybody: don’t do anything to upset or damage the apple cart.

Jack Sparling. A self-portrait drawn for Martin Sheridan’s classic 1944 tome Comics and their Creators, at a time when the artist was drawing the adventure comic strip Hap Hopper. Thanks to Rod Beck. [© the respective copyright holders.]

RA: Batman was essentially a crime-fighter in an era when crime comics couldn’t be published, at least not rough-and-tumble crime comics. Neither Two-Face (whom you and Neal brought back) nor Catwoman appeared for years after the advent of the Code. The Joker was turned from a fairly scary character into a clown, although he’d been heading in that direction for years. O’NEIL: Well, “Batman” had gone through a number of phases. Anthony Tollin, who reprints The Shadow and Doc Savage, did some really good research, and he sent me a story that Walter Gibson had written for The Shadow that was very like “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” [the very first “Batman” story, in 1939]. Of course, one was a novel, probably 45 to 50 thousand

Consider It A Challenge! The splash panel of Challengers of the Unknown #69 (Aug.-Sept. 1969). Art by Jack Sparling, script by O’Neil. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [© DC Comics.]

want to paint the big ceiling, you’ve gotta deal.” If you want to work in comics or television or film you have to accept that, for a whole lot of people involved, it’s a business. That’s how they think of it and all they care about. You can use that. There’s a great quote from Raymond Chandler: “The trick is to give them what they want and get what you want in, too.” That’s always been one of my touchstones. It’s about making a profit. It’s not about creating deathless art. If that happens, it’s an incidental or a happenstance. So, yes, I paid lots of attention to sales figures, once I was in a position to see them.

“‘Batman’ Was Floundering” RA: You wrote your first “Batman” story in late 1969—“The Secret of the Waiting Graves.” Neal Adams had already been drawing “Batman” for about a year, year and a half, but not in the main “Batman” titles. He was working in the team-up book, The Brave and the Bold. He’d apparently also been regularly rewriting the scripts he’d been handed, making them darker, having events take place at night instead of in the daylight… which probably ticked off a number of people at DC. But the book was certainly an improvement over the stories that immediately preceded Neal’s. Batman’s character in 1968 was, well, frankly godawful. [laughter] O’NEIL: Yeah, Neal certainly improved it. “Batman” was floundering. In the 1950s [after the Comics Code], Batman got involved in a lot of SF-lite stories. There were time travel stories and space aliens and whatever. I don’t think anybody had a grasp of what the character should be like, how to do the character, what this character was about. Of course, the 1950s were the height of the

Full Court Press The splash page of The Atom and Hawkman #42 (April-May 1969), as drawn by Dick Dillin & Sid Greene and written by Dennis O’Neil. With thanks to Jim Ludwig and Bill Bailey. [© DC Comics.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Nightmaster Of His Fate

Jerry Grandenetti Photo by daughter Jennifer Pederson.

“Nightmaster” became the first out-and-out sword-and-sorcery hero-feature in modern comics—with DC beating Marvel to the punch by a year, thanks to Dennis O’Neil. Seen above are the page in Showcase #82 (May 1969) in which young singer Jimmy Rook learns the legend of the otherworld Nightmaster, whose persona he’ll shortly assume—with pencils by Jerry Grandenetti & inks by Dick Giordano—as well as the splash page of #83 (June ’69), illustrated by Bernie (then Berni) Wrightson. Issue #84 contained the final O’Neil/Wrightson “Nightmaster.” [© DC Comics.]

words, and the “Batman” tale was six pages long. Bill Finger always acknowledged that The Shadow and Gibson were inspirations for The Batman. The dark, obsessed, vengeance-ridden loner version of Batman just absolutely went away in the 1950s. Yet it never really became much of anything else. It’s not like someone said, “I have a new way to do this character, so we will re-invent it.” It’s just that, if aliens were working in Superman, then they might work in Batman. If you could build an entire story around Lois trying to find out Superman’s identity, then something similar should work in Batman. Also, I don’t know that anyone was taking comics seriously, as a job, by then. The few people who were surviving though the various implosions of the 1950s were probably shell-shocked, wanting to keep their jobs, and listening to the overwhelming credo of not offending anyone. I think I’ve gotten off the path here—what was the question? RA: We started off talking about “The Secret of the Waiting Graves.” One of the things that interested me was that it was not a typical “Batman” story at all. It’s more of a “Zorro” tale, set in the Great Southwest, more supernatural than either crime- or detective-oriented.

Bernie Wrightson Photo from Monsters and Heroes #3 (March 1968); thanks to Bob Bailey.

O’NEIL: Actually, I did a “Batman“ story before that one—the first time Julie offered me a “Batman” shot, it was during the camp craze. The comics were, in a very half-hearted way, trying to… see, the TV show was really a comedy show. It actually boosted the circulation of the comics, which doesn’t always happen, but it did then. I don’t think many of the comic book guys “got” camp. I didn’t like it, the TV show. I saw one of the early shows and talked about it to Stan Lee the next morning, and he told me the only thing he liked about it was the animated opening sequence. But for various reasons during this time, and with varying success, the comics at this time were trying to be campy. I just knew that wasn’t my thing. I’m not judging it, but I don’t respond to the campy stories very well. So I did a story for Julie, who loved New Orleans jazz, and I kinda like it myself, not to the extent that Julie did, though. But we did a story about an old trumpet player and it ran as a fill-in. It was not campy. We played it totally straight. Then Batman fell off my radar until after the Adam West show had bitten the dust. It was a huge hit for one season, kind of a

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

The Secret Of The Waiting Carnival (Above:) Apparently, the first “Batman” story Denny O’Neil wrote was “Carnival of the Cursed,” which was penciled by Irv Novick and inked by Dick Giordano—and appeared in Batman #224 (Aug. 1970)—seven months after his second one was published. David Bachman tracked “Carnival” down from a mention in an old O’Neil interview in the magazine Amazing Heroes #50. When asked recently by Richard Arndt for the title of the first “Batman” tale he’d scripted, O’Neil didn’t recall: “To the best of my knowledge there isn’t any list of my stuff by title and the universe knows that I don’t have one. I may or may not have the story somewhere; there are thousands of comics in the attic in no particular order.” Interestingly, although he remembers his first “Batman” effort as being scribed during “the camp craze” in the wake of the 1966-68 Batman TV series, Bachman writes: “While it’s not necessarily O’Neil’s finest work, I would never have placed this story in Batman’s ‘camp’ period. Robin is absent, and the tone is quite sober.” Thanks to Jim Ludwig. (Bottom right:) The earliest-published O’Neil “Batman” story is the oft-reprinted “The Secret of the Waiting Graves,” from Detective Comics #395 (Jan. 1970)— his first collaboration on the hero with penciler Neal Adams. They, with the aid of inker Dick Giordano, would dramatically jump-start the Caped Crusader/Darknight Detective in the direction of his current Dark Knight incarnation. Thanks to Jim Kealy. [© DC Comics.]

(Above:) Irv Novick (on right) with “Batman” editor Julius Schwartz at a comics convention; date unknown. Photo by David Siegel.

(Above:) Neal Adams (on our left) and Denny O’Neil on a comics convention panel, circa early ’70s. Thanks to Robert Policastro.

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Batman Flies Again Two dramatic pages from issues of Batman—written by O’Neil, penciled by Adams, & inked by Giordano: #232 (June 1971) and #234 (Aug. ’71). What can we say? You can’t improve on perfection. [© DC Comics.]

qualified hit for its second year, and for the third year it was like somebody turned off the light. Its audience just… went away. RA: I think its target audience just grew up. I remember as a kid watching Gilligan’s Island religiously for its first season, every episode, then not watching it for the long summer re-run season, and never really watching it again. I’d just outgrown it. Its audience was where I was then, not where I was now. O’NEIL: I was living in Greenwich Village at the time, and the really hip literary bars had it on. It was being watched by college professors and journalists and novelists, etc. The joke [the show] was telling was basically “Ha-ha. I loved this stuff when I was seven years old. Look how stupid it is now.” It’s a one-line joke. And not a great one-line joke. But yes, I can see where the novelty of it wore off. It could carry a TV show for a while, and it did, but when it was over, it was over. DC wasn’t going to stop publishing Batman because the show was over, so Neal and I, who were very much flavors-of-the-week at that point, got our tool kit together. We’d both been doing comic books long enough to know how to do them, and we had 16 pages of Detective Comics to fill with “Batman”—“Do something!” I wrote “Secret of the Waiting Graves” and people have been generous enough to say that that story was a turning point in the history of… whatever. I lucked into [having] Neal, who did a wonderful art job. Which he usually did.

RA: From that point on until late 1972, you and Neal did a story almost every month, or every other month, in either Batman or Detective. Never in any steady title, just back and forth, although you were also writing “Batman” stories for Irv Norvick or Bob Brown [to draw]. O’NEIL: Julie Schwartz was probably trying to fulfill his editorial obligations. I mean, comic book editing was relatively easy, and the old-timers, if there are any older than me nowadays, [chuckles] will tell you that. There were no expectations. There were no advertising or public relations to fulfill. Nowadays, if Mark Waid is promised as a writer on a story and then the story is written by someone else, there’s a big fuss. But back then, there was no advance advertising. Nobody was paying any attention to any of it. So if it was a “Batman” story and it was of the right length, it could go into either Batman or Detective, whichever needed a “Batman” story. I imagine that’s how Julie operated. I might have been aware of [the needs of Detective] only in that the stories had to be shorter, but it made no difference to me as a writer which story appeared in which title. As an editor, I did try to make a distinction between the various “Batman” titles, but back then, it was just writing stories. Some I liked, some I’ve forgotten. RA: You, Neal, and, I suppose, Dick Giordano, because he inked most of those stories, are credited with turning Batman back into the Dark Knight, a role he hadn’t really inhabited since the first year of his adventures, but I think that people forget that a lot of those stories, far more

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Ra’s To Judgment (Above left:) Ultimate Batman villain Ra’s Al Ghul and his daughter Talia in Batman #244 (Sept. 1972). Script by O’Neil; pencils by Adams; inks by Giordano. (Above right:) A rare O’Neil/Adams story inked by Adams—not for Julie Schwartz, but for editor Murray Boltinoff’s Batman team-up mag, The Brave and the Bold #93 (Dec. 1970-Jan. 1971). Thanks to Bob Bailey for both these scans. [© DC Comics.]

The Neal Adams Batman (Left:) Black-&-white images of Batman drawn by Neal Adams, perhaps as a style guide. (Below:) An Adams illo that first appeared in the 1973 New York Comic Art Convention program book; thanks to Richard Arndt. [© DC Comics.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Pages Of Power A pulse-pounding potpourri of O’Neil/Adams/Giordano pages from issues of Batman. (Clockwise, from top left, on this and facing page:) #232 (June 1971) – the capture of Robin, an episode that Bob Bailey (who sent all the scans in this montage) informs us was utilized—minus Robin!—for the plot of the 1992 film Batman Returns. #234 (Aug. ’71) – the return of Two-Face, a classic villain then unseen in comics for years due to the squeamishness of the Comics Code. #243 (Aug ’72) – a cinematic sequence, well realized in both script and art. #244 (Sept. ’72) – a celebrated kiss between Batman and Talia, daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul. #245 (Oct. ’72) – showing that a good stiff elbow can be as visually interesting as any punch-throwing free-for-all. #251 (Sept. ’73) – one of Adams’ most famous full-page action shots. You may recognize it from this issue’s cover. [© DC Comics.]

than the ones Neal illustrated, were done by Irv Novick. O’NEIL: Yeah, a bunch of people worked on those turning-point stories. Irv did a lot of them. He did the first prequel, the first Talia story, before Neal and I debuted Ra’s Al Ghul. Neal took it from there. Remember, I wasn’t the official “Batman” writer—Frank Robbins was doing a lot of them, Mike Friedrich wrote some—nor was Neal Adams the official “Batman” artist. We were a couple of freelancers, who knew each other from parties and poker games. I don’t think Neal played poker, but we saw each other around, and we reported to the same editors and we got assignments together. I was beginning to be aware of [the value] of a continuity for a character or a title. To use a fancy word, to develop the mythos around a character.

“Green Lantern Is Floundering” RA: It was only a couple of months after that initial “Batman” story that you and Neal started on “Green Lantern/Green Arrow.” O’NEIL: Again, that was Julie coming to me and saying, “Green Lantern is floundering, but we want to continue publishing the title.” He asked me what I had to save it. By that time, I worked on the Justice League with him and had done a socially relevant story about that river in Ohio that was so polluted that it burst into flames. That was the springboard. I’d also done “Children of Doom” for Charlton. I was still very much involved and interested in civil rights and peace and beginning to be worried about the environment. So I thought it over for a while. I realized that I was always going to be concerned about this stuff and I was never going to be the fiery leader who could galvanize the masses into

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Novick-Kane Not all of O’Neil’s acclaimed work on the hero whose creation is credited to Bob Kane was done in concert with Adams. He also did influential work with veteran artist Irv Novick. This splash page from Batman #242 (June 1972) begins a thrilling four-issue story arc… and also on view are the splash and an action page from Batman #253 (Nov. ’73), the first-ever encounter between the Gotham crimefighter and the pulp-magazine hero who was a major inspiration for him, The Shadow. Inks by Dick Giordano. Scans sent by Bob Bailey. [© DC Comics.]

righting the wrongs. But I had access to comic books. With “Batman,” by this time, Neal and I had our tool kit together. We knew where we were going. I went home assuming that Gil Kane, who’d been the regular Green Lantern artist since he’d been revived ten years earlier, would be doing that first story. So I didn’t write it with Neal in mind. I didn’t know who the artist would be. I turned in the script and Julie liked it. He commissioned another one. When I saw the make-ready for the first issue, I was knocked out. Neal had drawn, particularly in the last three panels of the first chapter, some of the best comic book art ever done. Some Democratic politician down in Florida a couple of weeks ago used those panels. He re-wrote the copy a little. I guess I’m very flattered. That issue got a lot of attention, almost immediately, and then Neal and I were tied to the book. RA: I remember the massive media attention given to that title, so much so that the term “relevant comics” became a mini-culture shock throughout the industry. I don’t think comics had gotten so much mainstream attention since the dark days of 1954. The difference being, of course, that this attention was mostly positive. It was a little surprising to me to see that a comic with that much media attention only lasted about two years before it was cancelled.

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

The Relevant In The Room The cover, splash, and most famous panels from Green Lantern #76 (April 1970), by the team supreme of O’Neil, Adams, & Giordano. Denny signed the splash for Mark Trost, who supplied us with scans of the two interior pages; the cover was scanned by Bob Bailey. Fans have always referred to the GL title, starting with this issue, as “Green Lantern/Green Arrow,” but the mag’s official title was never altered. [© DC Comics.]

O’NEIL: 13-14 issues. One of those was a fill-in or reprint issue. I don’t know what went on. The first article I remember was in The Village Voice, a hip weekly that Norman Mailer co-founded, and The Voice helped get the media flood started. Neither Neal nor Julie nor myself were mentioned in that article. It was kind of vague. My guess is that The Voice called somebody at DC, I’m going to carefully omit proper nouns here, and that person maybe didn’t know what the reporter was talking about. He was trying to bluff his way through his end of the interview. In those days, I don’t think I had to get permission to do things. I once asked Julie about the Justice League/Justice Society crossovers happening at a time when nobody at DC was allowed to do continued stories. The assumption for DC, and many comics publishers, was that distribution was so erratic that people couldn’t be

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Did They Sell These Issues At The Local Drugstore? Neal Adams’ powerful covers for “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” #85 & 86 (Aug.-Sept. & Oct.-Nov. 1971) are the most commonly reprinted artifacts from the so-called “drug issues,” and that’s certainly understandable. But it was the story and art inside those comics that really delivered the goods. Here are the two final pages from #85. Script by O’Neil, pencils by Adams, inks by Giordano. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [© DC Comics.]

sure of getting two issues in a row. He told me he just didn’t bother to ask if doing the continued stories was OK. And that nobody ever said anything. I think initially that “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” was like that. I don’t think there was any point in him asking permission. We weren’t breaking any laws. We weren’t showing naked ladies. No excessive gore. We were really doing the standard comic book, in most ways, as that term was understood at the time. So, he did it, and we got a lot of media attention. In those days, comic companies did not have a public relations department. I think they would have considered such a thing a colossal waste of money, and they may have been right. So we kind of blundered through. I did some television and Neal and I went on the radio. We found ourselves going places that comic book people were not normally invited to. I don’t remember details at all any more, just that there was a big flurry of attention. We continued doing the stories with very little, if any, input from the company—the corporation. It was mostly my going in to talk to Julie Schwartz once a month, agreeing on a story, and sending the script to Neal. The exception was the drug stories, where Neal and I went around Manhattan, talking to the folks involved in the drug rehabilitation business. Don’t remember if we used anything specific from that in the story, but in that sense it was a collaboration. The rest of it was my scripts and Neal’s art. We had a sense

that we were pushing the envelope. The average comic book is forgotten in about a year. Those stories might last a little bit longer than that. We had no idea that somebody was going to print them in hardcover, slipcase editions 45 years later for 75 bucks! RA: Well, those issues have been reprinted a lot and in a lot of different formats—Baxter paper, black-&-white trade paperbacks, the hardcovers. I think a new edition of color paperbacks is coming out… O’NEIL: Yeah, there’s a new softcover edition on its way. I was surprised that the hardcover edition sold out, because I thought that anyone who wanted to read the stories has read them by now. It’s not like they haven’t been available. RA: You must be cultivating a new audience of readers, not just nostalgia readers for new editions to keep coming out. O’NEIL: Yeah. It’s always a pleasant surprise when I get the royalty checks. [laughter] In the bad old days, there wouldn’t have been a royalty check. The first reprint of those was by Warner Books, a standard paperback format, cheap little paperbacks. Chip Delany wrote the introduction to one, and I think I wrote the introduction to the other. I think that Neal and I got 250 bucks apiece

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

Black Is The New Green Two more memorable pages from the “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” period: A quote from author Norman Mailer (also the source of O’Neil’s “Sergius O’Shaugnessy” pen name) closes out issue #79 (Sept. 1970)—while Jon Stewart becomes Earth’s second Green Lantern in #87 (Dec. 1971-Jan. 1972). Fans and pros alike informally referred to this character—with no disrespect intended—as “Black Lantern.” Pages by O’Neil, Adams, & Giordano. Thanks to Jim Kealy and Bob Bailey, respectively. [© DC Comics.]

for those per book. DC didn’t have to give us that. We had no contract for something like that. It was just the company being generous. I got something for writing the introduction. I don’t know what anymore.

EDITOR’S NOTE: See A/E #93.]

“Julie Schwartz Asked Me To Do ‘Superman’”

O’NEIL: No, it was for Julie. My first wife pointed out that if I’d only done that revision ten years later, we would have made a mint, because it would have been picked up by the papers, there would have been royalties, and it would have been noticed all over the place but… it was a job. Julie Schwartz asked me to do “Superman.” I had reservations about it, because I don’t do well with demi-gods. It would be easy to argue that Superman was beyond even the demi-god stage at that point [1970]. So I took it on condition that I could revise it into something I could be comfortable writing.

RA: You wrote the script for Steve Englehart’s first comic story. He was an artist at the time, not a writer, and he was teamed up with Neal Adams. It was a story for Vampirella. Do you remember doing that? O’NEIL: Yeah, that was for Jim Warren. Warren Publishing. The comic business was super loosey-goosey at that point. Steve was in the Army, but had somehow gotten a connection with Neal and was traveling to New York to work with him. Somebody, maybe Neal, had asked me to write a story for him, and there was no reason for me not to do it. At that point, I either knew Jim Warren or had done some work for him or maybe both. It was a very simple job, with total freedom in how I approached or wrote the story. I got no editorial direction of any kind, apart from a page limit. I gave them the script, it left my radar, and it came out in Vampirella, a black-&-white magazine, months later. [A/E

RA: Besides revamping Wonder Woman and Batman, you also did a revision of Superman. That would have been for Julie Schwartz, would it not? If not him, then for Mort Weisinger.

I can usually get a laugh when I’m teaching or lecturing by saying that Superman once blew out a sun like a birthday candle. Somebody did summaries of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman stories and, reading through that, I came across a story where Supes blows out a sun. Yeah, he was pretty damn godlike. I just knew that the essence of comic book stories is conflict. The

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

problems I had writing Justice League, and the reason I quit that, was how a writer could contrive ways to get these enormously powered people in trouble. If they were not going to be in trouble, what is the story going to be about? The Weisinger answer to that in the 1950s was sometimes to ignore the super-powers altogether. A story would be about Lois trying to find out Clark’s secret identity. There were also “Batman” stories based around secret identities. Donald Westlake, in the introduction to one of his short story collections, pointed out those were the ultimate in self-referential stories, because what the bad guys were doing was trying to find out the good guys’ secret identities. If the good guy didn’t have a secret identity, the bad guys wouldn’t be criminals. RA: By that token, Lois was a villain. O’NEIL: Yes, and, to put it charitably, those stories were trivial. I think I knew and know enough that, for stories to matter to the reader, you had to have some way to get the good guy in trouble for this kind of heroic fiction. It being comic books, you can’t blow off lots of pages explaining that notion. It has to be something that can be grasped in a couple of panels. So the deal I made with Julie was that I would modify Superman. Not take him all the way back to how he was with Siegel and Shuster, but… my Superman was still going to be able to fly, for example. He was not going to be capable of blowing out stars by taking a deep breath. Where he got the breath from in deep space was never gone into, by the way. I don’t really care. That was the revision we made. Julie also had some ideas about updating Clark Kent. One of the weirdest assignments I ever had was to write an article for Gentlemen’s Quarterly on Clark Kent’s new wardrobe. So

Green Jobs (Above:) The 1983 display ad for the launching of a boxed reprinting of the O’Neil/Adams “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” utilized a new GL-GA drawing by the artist, and the heads of Denny and Neal the latter had drawn for DC’s announcement of its near-sweep of the comics industry’s first Shazam Awards in 1970. [© DC Comics.] (At right:) A pair of Adams sketches—of erstwhile comrades GL and GA—done at a 2013 comics convention. Thanks to Jerry K. Boyd—and to Kris Adams (and ultimately her dad, Neal) for permission to print them here. [Green Lantern & Green Arrow TM & © 2014 DC Comics.]

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

blue jeans, t-shirt, shaggy-haired me wrote a story for a fashion magazine, once upon a time. I stuck with Superman for about a year, 13 or so issues. Then, for some reason, it was starting to be really difficult for me to write. I guess I must have been confident enough at that point to realize that I wasn’t stuck with any given assignment. Apparently, in that era, there was a pecking order for writers. For example, the SpiderMan writer had more clout than the writer for, say, Power Man. I was never aware of that, and I often wanted to go to characters who were not high profile. The assumption being that, with Batman at the time or Green Lantern, both of whom were on shaky ground, I would have more freedom. If something is working well, then people notice that you know how to do it and that will be what they want from you. If something isn’t working well, it gives a new writer some elbow room to experiment. I did those issues and then politely begged off. I forgot about it until one day I was on Amazon’s website a couple of years ago, and saw my name. I found out I’d written a book that was coming out, and it was the collection of those “Superman” stories. I didn’t know about it until that point. I guess on Amazon’s database I’m connected with comic books. DC sent me a copy, but I haven’t reread the stuff, but I guess it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Certainly a number of intelligent people have told me that they like it.

obligations. I couldn’t write six or seven stories a month like I used to. So how else, knowing what I know about comic books, could I make a living? The answer was to edit.

“I Had A Fair Amount To Do With The Batman [Animated] Series” RA: This was the same time you began tying the Deadman mythos into “Batman” by taking his Society of Assassins, renaming them the League of Assassins, and creating Talia, and then Ra’s Al Ghul. Clearly those two characters, Al Ghul and his daughter Talia, have become iconic members of Batman’s Rogues’ Gallery. In fact, one of the problems that Superman

RA: I don’t know that I’m so intelligent, but I enjoyed it. I re-read it prior to putting it in my school library. One of the things I found quite amusing was that, while I’d forgotten a lot of the storyline, I still had a vivid memory of the panel where Superman chomps on the green Kryptonite. I think it must have become a bit of an iconic image. There’s a very comical expression on Superman’s face, and it’s possible that this may be one of the first times a reader could see that this demi-god, who’d been around for over 30 years at that point, had a rather sly sense of humor. [NOTE: See p. 50.] O’NEIL: It’s just a three-panel sequence, but it really worked. Curt did a great job. One of our better moments. RA: At this point you’re writing “Superman,” “Green Lantern/Green Arrow,” and “Batman”… O’NEIL: I was a busy little freelancer! RA: You might have been writing Wonder Woman, or at least the tail end of your run on that title, at this time too! O’NEIL: If that’s true, and it well may be, that load may have been right about to the top of my capacity. One of the reasons I eventually became an editor was that I had financial obligations and that I didn’t think I could write enough stuff to meet those

Kryptonite No More! Neal Adams’ iconic cover for Superman #233 (Jan. 1971), with its reinterpretation of a classic late-’30s/early-’40s image of the Man of Steel— and #233’s splash page, scripted by O’Neil with art by Curt Swan & Murphy Anderson. This page, scanned by Bob Bailey from his collection, has been autographed by Anderson and editor Julius Schwartz. The most famous scene in the issue, undoubtedly, is the sequence in which a retrofitted Superman chews up a piece of kryptonite, now that the substance has been deprived of its ability to harm him. The cure, however, proved as impermanent as most things in comic book series. Still, this multi-issue O’Neil/Schwartz “re-launch” of Superman following the retirement of longtime Man of Steel editor Mort Weisinger has recently been collected between hard covers. [© DC Comics.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Those Who Can, Write—But They Also Edit O’Neil’s first crack at editing “Batman” stories was done for Detective Comics #569 (Dec. 1986); written by Mike W. Barr, drawn by Alan Davis & Paul Neary. Also shown from that memorable, long-running stint is the Frank Miller/David Mazzucchelli “Batman: Year One” storyline that began in Batman #404 (Feb. 1987). Thanks to Bob Bailey. For Denny’s editing career, you’ll mostly have to see our TwoMorrows companion magazine Back Issue—and you should! [© DC Comics.]

had, and which may have made it a difficult strip to write, was that his Rogues’ Gallery was not exactly threatening. You had Luthor and Brainiac, and after that, really nothing. It was lousy. Batman had an impressive Rogues’ Gallery. O’NEIL: Batman was a great storytelling tool, in the same way that Will Eisner’s Spirit fostered great storytelling. Superman, maybe not so much. I think, with Supes, you have to be careful about logical inconsistencies. I mean if you establish in one story that Superman can visit every room in Metropolis in a second, how’s anyone ever going to get away from him? And to hell with having a lead roof, he could just go in the door. In the first days of comics, they probably saw that as a solution to a plot problem. Superman could go that fast. He could not only look through walls, but into the past. It was often a pretty neat solution, too. Hey! Not realizing that a reader might remember that story and wonder why he could do that then and why he wasn’t doing that now. If Superman can look into the past, how is there ever any mystery for him? If you’re going to be consistent within the limits of the fantasy world that you’ve created, then you have to pay attention to stuff like that. Believe me, if you don’t, the reader will! Even if the reader isn’t conscious that something is wrong, if they’ve seen or read the earlier story, something will nag at them and it will throw them out of the

current story. RA: That’s one of the things I was impressed with in the two DC animated cartoon series in the 1990s. Both Superman and Batman really tried to be consistent with the rules they’d set up. Earlier stories weren’t forgotten. Plus, they actually followed and adapted some of the better stories that the comics published and used good ideas where they found them and dumped the bad stuff. O’NEIL: I had a fair amount to do with the Batman series. There was a false start. Jenette Kahn and I went out and talked to the first people who were assigned to the show, doing the stories. The person I talked to was an absolutely gorgeous woman, whose name you might recognize, who was on staff, but she just did not get Batman. The background of almost everybody assigned to the show was from humor cartoons. RA: I think a lot of them came from Warner Bros.’ Animaniacs show. O’NEIL: Yeah, then they hired this guy who came to New York with Marty Pasko and spent three days in DC’s library. He sent [back to Hollywood] piles and piles of Xeroxes. They did a lot of adaptations from the comics. They were under no legal or ethical obligations to give the comic book creators anything. Everyone had signed work-for-hire contracts [or their rights had been bought

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

out]. The company owned that stuff. No doubt about it. But they did credit them! They gave us the money we would have gotten if we were TV writers who’d supplied the stories. They did a lot of adaptations. I think their taste was pretty good in what they chose to adapt. As you said, the things that were not topnotch generally did not get on screen.

RA: They also picked up some of comics’ neat ideas and incorporated them into the show, such as having all the street names be based on former “Batman” artists and writers, which either Steve Englehart or you started in the comics. O’NEIL: That sort of thing is a little inside joke. If you are aware of DC’s history, it gives you a little moment of amusement. If you’re not aware of DC’s history, it doesn’t get in the way of the story for a second. And that’s the way to do inside jokes. They can’t be part of the plot. If they’re incidental or throw-away gags, they might, for a second, pull someone out of the story, but I don’t think this does any real damage and it is kind of amusing.

I was asked to write one of the Ra’s Al Ghul stories that was adapted from a comic story of mine, and my experience of television had been, “Ah, we Oh My, Batman—How Animated You Look Tonight! need it by Thursday. We’ll put in Also outside A/E’s general purview, but discussed by O’Neil and Arndt, is a shot of a honeybee in a bikini.” Denny’s part in TV’s Batman: The Animated Series, which ran on the Fox So you’d know the first scene network from 1992-95, with the visuals strongly influenced by would be in a swimming pool. I artist/producer Bruce Timm and the writing by Paul Dini. The art style, often referred to as “Dark Deco,” owed much to the early-1940s went out there thinking…. well, Fleischer/Paramount Superman theatrical cartoons. [© DC Comics.] the thing I just mocked was a live-action show and this was RA: On occasion they did use something like that as a plot piece. When cartoons… but this guy and I talked for hours about the villain. He they did a show where someone’s describing an encounter with Batman, was taking it absolutely seriously. they often used an old DC artist’s art as a template for that story-withinRA: Would this have been Alan Burnett? a-story, possibly to set it off from the main show’s artwork. There’d be a segment where it would look like four or five minutes of a Dick Sprang O’NEIL: That’s who it is. Alan Burnett! Wow, what a pleasant Joker story or Frank Miller “Batman” tale. experience, after the previous experiences I’d had with television. I think it showed [in the final product]. I wrote the liner notes for the O’NEIL: I think, if you were a kid in the Midwest enjoying that video collections for the first several years of that series and I show, you would not have to know that that segment was an looked at all of them. Almost all of those shows are very solid. In homage to Dick Sprang. If you knew it was an homage to Dick addition to that, Paul Dini, one of the writers, understood… now, Sprang, you thought, “Wow! That’s neat!” It didn’t get in the way Dini was the writer and the artist was… of the story. I’m fairly firm on story structure and how it should go, but you’ve got to leave yourself open for that “Wow! That’s really RA: Bruce Timm. Eric Radowski had a big part in the Batman show in neat!” moment. It maybe doesn’t contribute to the plot, but it’s the early years. really cool in and of itself. That’s maybe enough of a reason for putting it in. O’NEIL: Bruce Timm! They overcame a lot of the problems with

TV animation by working in large blocks or shapes of color. A lot of times, I think animated super-heroes, particularly TV animation—four cels for movement—look like moving paper dolls. But their Gotham City and their renderings of the main characters overcame the limitations of TV animation. They made everything work for them. There was a deliberate mixing of visual styles. So the car looks like something from the 1930s but it’s got radar and radio. The police regularly use blimps, flying over Gotham City. The result was to telegraph, maybe subconsciously, that this world is one of magic realism. It’s not realism. This is a world in which a Batman could exist. As realistic as Batman is, he could not exist in our world, here on Earth-Prime. RA: They also provided televisions that only showed black-&-white pictures, although it had video tapes and DVDs, also.

O’NEIL: Yeah, that’s a good example. Not a big noise made about it, but it was there, and it was one of the quirks of that world’s Batman. They paid a lot of attention to the writing, which I don’t think always is the case. Wait, wait, I almost said something stupid. Writing in television is generally better than film-writing is today. In any event, Alan did not slight the fact that this show was drama. Melodrama. And the artists did not ignore the fact that, in a way, Gotham City is one huge gothic mansion. It is full of dark corners and it’s gloomy. That’s all right there on the screen.

“There’s Something Scary About Clowns” RA: OK. Now a question for the ages. I’ve heard Ra’s Al Ghul’s name pronounced several different ways. Is it Raisch (rhymes with pace), Raz (rhymes with saws), or Rasch (rhymes with Oshkosh begosh!)? O’NEIL: Ha! My daughter Beth went to UCLA’s language department about twenty years ago, and I think they said Rasch (rhymes with pace). I’ve heard it pronounced six ways from Friday. I don’t know how much to believe in UCLA’s language department, but that’s the way I say it. RA: Good enough for me! It just cuts down on the communication problem and embarrassment when you don’t know how to pronounce a character’s name such as “Sub-Marin-er” and “Sub-Marine-er” (it’s the first one, folks!). When I was a kid, that was an endless problem. Besides the Al Ghul story, two more of your classic tales from 1971-1973 were adapted on the TV show. One was “A Vow from the Grave” from Detective Comics #410 (Apr. 1971), which was fairly radically changed, from a hidden group of circus freaks to super-villains…. O’NEIL: That was one of my very favorite “Batman” stories. It was also one of the very few times I wrote a detective story for Batman, in the classic sense. I think Julie had me put in a footnote calling attention to that fact. It was in the style of the old Ellery Queen novels and short stories. “You now know everything you need to

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

O’NEIL: Was that the last one Neal and I did? I didn’t realize that. RA: Yes, at least in the 1970s. It was also the story that brought The Joker back for the first time since 1968. He hadn’t been seen in quite a while at that point. O’NEIL: Yes, The Joker was a goldmine, waiting there to be exploited. RA: He’s never taken a breather since then, either. He’s been used constantly ever since. O’NEIL: Over-used, really. There’s something scary about clowns, and a clown who is a maniacal serial killer is also a perfect protagonist for Batman. But, of course, over the years he got watered down to practically a real clown. No actual menace, not really threatening. So, when given a chance to write a Joker story, the obvious way to go [for me] was to take him back to what he really is. He is, in mythological terms, a trickster character. Only, trickster characters in mythology often have benevolent aspects, and The Joker doesn’t. He’s an entity you can’t ever predict. You can’t figure him out. He makes no sense at all. In one of the novels I wrote, the reader thinks he’s going to push an old lady in front of a bus and he gives her a $100 bill instead, than goes on his merry way. You just don’t know. He’s a fascinating character. I think he’s the best trickster character in all of popular culture. Great kudos to the people who invented him. The inside joke in that story, the “Five-Way Revenge” story, is that the character Bigger Melvin was a friend of ours, Steve Mitchell. RA: The artist?

The Joker Is Wild—Again!

O’NEIL: Yeah, the inker. I think he’s been a filmmaker for a few years now. Steve is a multi-talented guy.

If any clown-face had ever looked any scarier up to this point, we don’t wanna see it! The Neal Adams/Dick Giordano splash page of Batman #251 (Sept. 1973); script by O’Neil. The trio redefined The Joker for a new generation of comics readers—and for everyone who’s come since. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [© DC Comics.]

RA: Now, Batman’s look was partly based on The Shadow, and his detective skills and gadgets seem inspired to some degree by Doc Savage, but I’ve noticed that Batman’s Rogues’ Gallery seem to have a lot more in common with Dick Tracy’s Rogues’ Gallery than anything in the pulp field.

know to solve this blah, blah, blah.” It was a classic detective story in that the hero was given a problem, there was a small setting—I mean they didn’t cover much territory geographically—and you could get to the identity of the murderer before Batman did if you were really paying attention. That was the only time I really thought I brought that off.

O’NEIL: Well, it’s really basic theatre. This is something I learned from Eric Van Lustbader—you look at medieval paintings and the devil is often a bat. You can always tell the demons and devils in miracle plays. They look like demons and devils. There’s no masquerade. Comics are, among many other things, an iconic medium. I think it’s a mistake, once you’ve established an icon, to violate it. You mentioned Dick Tracy, always with the hat and trenchcoat with the very sharp features. The villains in both Tracy and “Batman” don’t necessarily wear their villain ways on their sleeves but on their faces. For an iconic medium, it’s a good way to go. With Two-Face, a lot of us—Andy Helfer and the guys who worked on the last Batman movie—found a way to make him a tragic figure, without making the disfigurement an emblem of evil but an emblem of tragedy. That’s a perfectly legitimate way to go.

There wasn’t enough material in the actual comic story to fill a television show, so when I wrote my adaptation, I thought [it would be easier because] it was a 22-page script for an approximately 20-minute television show. I thought it would be found money, easy as pie to write. I found out, though, that I had to add a lot. Comic books are a very compressed narrative form, and I didn’t fully realize that until I started working with comics and television simultaneously. The trick, of course, was not to just pad the story but to add incidents that were a tight part of the plot. I think I managed that. I don’t know—it’s the viewer who’s the final judge. There were other changes made by the editor that I didn’t understand the need or reason for, but that’s working in television. Everybody who’s ever worked in television has stories like that. Alan was not the editor for that episode, by the way. RA: Another episode was adapted from the Joker story you did with Neal—“The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge!” from Batman #251 (Sept. 1973). It was also the last “Batman” story you and Neal worked on together.

RA: But wasn’t Two-Face originally a tragic figure, back in the 1940s? Two-Face actually didn’t appear all that often in the early days. The Harvey Dent version of Two-Face only appeared four times prior to the Comics Code outlawing him for almost twenty years. The original threepart story in 1942-1943 and his revival in 1954. O’NEIL: As Harvey Dent or as Two-Face? RA: As Harvey Dent. He appeared a number of times after the initial stories just as Harvey Dent—actually in the early appearances he was Harvey Kent, which was changed to avoid readers thinking he was related to Clark Kent—but as Two-Face, he just had the four appearances. O’NEIL: Really?

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

From Beyond The Batman We already showed you the O’Neil/Adams redefining of Two-Face back on p. 34— but that’s not all Denny was up to at the time. (Top of page:) With art by the inestimable Murphy Anderson, here are a two-page spread from Strange Adventures #227 (Nov.-Dec. 1970) illustrating a text story written by Denny—and a splash from another DC science-fiction title, From beyond the Unknown (#8, Dec. 1970-Jan. 1971). Thanks to Bob Bailey. (Bottom of page:) The erstwhile “Denny-O” also scripted stories for Julie Schwartz’s offbeat Strange Sports Stories #2 (Nov.-Dec. 1973) & #4 (March-April ’74), with art by Novick & Giordano. Thanks to Jim Ludwig.

Murphy Anderson Photo by Dewey Cassell.

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Sword, Sorcery, And Satire Fritz Leiber’s irreverent take on sword-and-sorcery (a term he coined in 1961) was the team of Fafhrd the Barbarian and The Gray Mouser, who were brought to comics by Denny O’Neil, writer, and Howard Chaykin, artist, in Sword of Sorcery #1 (Feb.-March 1973), with inking by The Crusty Bunkers, which consisted of artists hanging around the Continuity Studios of Neal Adams and Dick Giordano. Also seen is the splash of #2 (April-May ’73). The series lasted five issues. [© DC Comics.]

RA: The first run was a three-parter, spread out over a year where he becomes Two-Face, battles Batman and Robin, and in the third tale he’s captured and cured by plastic surgery. After that, there were several fake Two-Faces, members of his gang or copycat crooks who tried to take on the character, but when you and Neal revived the Two-Face/Harvey Dent character in 1971, it was only the original character’s fifth appearance.

Fritz Leiber,

author of the original prose tales of Fafhrd and the Mouser.

O’NEIL: That’s not a good narrative strategy. RA: I think folks have pointed out that the DC editors got to the end of the initial three-issue story arc, cured him, and then went “Ooops.” It was one of Finger’s best stories, and perhaps they didn’t want to mess with the happy ending that Dent got in the third segment. None of the copycat versions worked, though. O’NEIL: I’m sure the copycat stories were more gimmick stories. Those types of stories were a mainstay of comics for a long time. They’re OK. But it’s not as strong dramatically as the original idea, that of a man horribly mutilated and going over to the dark side. Though in Andy [Helfer]’s stories and certainly in the movies they indicated that really Two-Face was in Harvey Dent before the accident. What the accident did was make manifest stuff that was always there, kind of sub-rosa. There’s an idea in Buddhist psychology that we all have a lot of seeds, and the way we turn out depends on the seeds that get nurtured. It doesn’t violate anything in the canon to say that the guy was an able and dedicated district attorney with the capacity for murder inside him.

“I Loved Those [‘Fafhrd And The Gray Mouser’] Stories”

Howard Chaykin, in recent years.

But he looked RA: Inside all of us, I suspect, to a greater or lesser pretty much the degree. Paul Dini did much the same thing in the same back in ’73. animated series—made it clear that it was Harvey Dent who was having mental problems long before Two-Face appeared. Two-Face was the result of his madness, not the cause of it.

I also wanted to talk about your adaptations of Fritz Leiber—the “Fafrhd and The Gray Mouser” stories that appeared in Sword of Sorcery. O’NEIL: Fafhrd and the Mouser. I loved those stories. Howard Chaykin, who was very young at the time, really found himself as an artist on that series. Walt Simonson and Jim Starlin also did work on that series. That was my idea, and Carmine liked it. I was working as a freelance editor at the time. I was not on staff, but I had a number of books I was charged with editing and writing. That is almost never a good idea—to have the editor and the writer be the same guy. But a lot of companies try it. I liked Leiber’s stories, sword-and-sorcery was being successful over at Marvel with Conan, and so they put Steve Skeates in my office for a week and I got on a plane and went to San Francisco to talk to Fritz Leiber. I knew where Fritz lived and I thought I’d made an appointment with him, so I showed up but he didn’t. I had a good time in San Francisco visiting friends, but I never did talk with Fritz.

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

RA: So how did you get the contract? O’NEIL: I don’t know—did they have a contract? [laughs] I never knew about stuff like that. I don’t know that they wanted me to know about stuff like that. With that and The Shadow, The Avenger, all the adapted stuff, I never got near anybody with the name of lawyer in their résumé. Later, as the “Batman” editor, I talked with the lawyer a lot, because something that high-profile can be a minefield, with people looking for reasons to sue or to get pissed off about. I spent a lot of time with Lillian Laserson, who is a wonderful lady. Back then, though, nobody ever said the word “contract” to me. I was never given to believe that I had to worry about any of that stuff. I have no idea what happened there. My concern was getting the stories written. RA: Those Fafhrd and Mouser stories were good stories, too. I think you only did a couple of actual adaptations. The rest were original scripts, and they are good fantasy yarns that are quite true to the characters as Fritz wrote them. O’NEIL: I don’t know how much of Fritz’s stuff would have been visual enough for comics. If we’d worked at it we probably could have adapted more. I probably felt like doing some original stories. Probably nothing more complicated than that. I loved Fritz’s

tongue-and-cheek approach to the stuff. He wasn’t taking it too seriously. They were witty stories. RA: The original stories were almost a counterpoint off Robert Howard’s Conan. Conan was big, tough, and didn’t always appear to be the smartest man in the room. He was not a big talker. He used gods’ names in vain all the time but didn’t really believe in any of them. The gods never made an appearance in a Conan story. Whereas Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser talked all the time—neither one could shut up—and the gods in their world often talked directly to them, made personal appearances. The two of them were smart, and the stories were smartly written. O’NEIL: Yeah, they were not the iconic, sweaty, sword-swinging guys. Fritz isn’t someone you could say was an unrecognized writer, but I think he was undervalued. RA: He still is. He was a writer who had a huge range. Beside swordand-sorcery, he wrote hard science-fiction as well as the psychological version. He wrote great ghost stories. He was a pretty good actionadventure writer and wrote a lot of great stories centering around cats. He doesn’t get nearly the recognition that he deserves. O’NEIL: I completely agree. There’s nothing he wrote that I didn’t enjoy.

It’s A Weird World, After All! While writing sword-and-sorcery, Denny was also wading into the related elements of science-fiction/space opera with two quite different formats in the mag titled Weird Worlds. First came his scripting of the “Pellucidar” series when the title was dedicated to the concepts of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, as in WW #4 (Feb.-March 1973), with art by Michael W. Kaluta—later, the short-lived “Iron-Wolf” series he launched with artist/co-creator Howard Chaykin, as per WW #8 (Nov.-Dec. ’73). The latter became the primary reason that, in 1977, film director George Lucas would want Chaykin to draw Marvel’s Star Wars adaptation. Thanks to Jim Ludwig and Bob Bailey for sending scans of the former. [Pellucidar page © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.; Iron-Wolf page © DC Comics.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Shadows On The Wall Two startlingly different yet effective renditions of the pulp-magazine-spawned hero The Shadow: from The Shadow #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1973), with art by Michael W. Kaluta—and #5 (June-July ’74), with art by Frank Robbins. The writer in both cases was Dennis O’Neil.

“The Shadow” Michael W. Kaluta in the early ’70s. Thanks to Sean Howe.

RA: Of course, you also worked on DC’s adaptation of The Shadow. Do you have any knowledge of the art problems DC had trying to get an artist for the book? O’NEIL: Do I!

RA: I’ve heard that Jim Steranko was the first artist approached. O’NEIL: Yeah, he was the logical guy to go to, both because of his art style and because of his identification with the character. He’d been painting the paperback covers for some time at that point. I think Jim would have done a fine job, but I could not, as an editor, meet his conditions. It was nothing more complicated than that. I couldn’t give him the freedom he felt he needed. At least, that was my perception. He wanted me to go a little further than I felt comfortable going as an editor. RA: Did he want to write the scripts as well as drawing them? O’NEIL: Yeah, he wanted to essentially deliver a package. RA: At that time, the early 1970s, having a single person as the writer/artist on a book was almost unheard of at either of the two main comic companies. There was Jack Kirby on the Fourth World stuff and that would have been it.

O’NEIL: It would have been a huge violation of procedure. Nowadays, it probably would have Frank been fine, and I have no doubt that Jim would have Robbins, done a terrific job. I’ve a little regret to this day that a few years we couldn’t find a way to make that work. The next earlier. artist I approached was another household name, and time passed and along comes a story, complete art, inked, lettered, that had nothing to do with the script that I sent him. He had decided that he could do a better job. I heard he gave it to his next-door neighbor to write. That may or may not be true. Anyway, it was not the job I assigned him. RA: Was this [name of artist]? O’NEIL: I’m not going to mention names. I’m not an uncharitable fellow. Anyway, I couldn’t cede that much editorial prerogative to a freelance artist whom I’d never met. I think he probably did, and this won’t surprise you, a terrific job, but it’s not the way we did comics back then. RA: It also seems like much the same reason you didn’t use Jim Steranko, because he wanted to deliver a package. O’NEIL: Yeah. Whether or not my script was any good—I don’t think it was bad—that just was not the way business was done. So then I guess I went to Bernie [Wrightson]. He was, and I suppose still is, very devoted to the character and would have done a good

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

If Ever A Whiz [Comics] There Was…

C.C. Beck. From a panel at the 1976 MidAmerica College Art Conference held at the University of Nebraska. Thanks to P.C. Hamerlinck.

(Above left:) Another high-profile DC acquisition that Denny O’Neil was asked to script was its revival of the original, Fawcett-born, and recently licensed Captain Marvel, beginning with the lead story in Shazam #1 (Feb. 1973), drawn by the hero’s 1939 co-creator, C.C. Beck. (Above right:) The DC interpretation of the World’s Mightiest Mortal had changed considerably by the time he encountered Lex Luthor (and of course Superman) as well as old CM foe Mr. Mind in Shazam! #15 (Nov.-Dec. ’74), with art by Bob Oksner & Tex Blaisell. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [© DC Comics.]

job on it. There was a problem, however, because he was drawing Swamp Thing at the time. Then we got Mike Kaluta. Not only was I happy with his stuff, but the other editors were saying that the art on The Shadow was the best thing that had come out of DC in a long time.

RA: Bernie did ink—I think it was the third issue— and also did uncredited inks on #4 along with Howard Chaykin and Steve Harper. If you look at the splash page on that issue, the license plates on the truck tell you who inked what pages.

O’NEIL: Mike got some really classy help. I don’t know what happened to Steve. Howard I see every once in a while. He was my son’s first employer. I will be grateful to him forever for teaching Larry what it means to be a professional. He’s a great storyteller, visual storyteller and raconteur. Kaluta and company did five issues. Frank Robbins did a fill-in somewhere during that. That deadline issue was pretty hairy. What freelance artists—freelancers in general—don’t realize is that the editor is responsible for hitting those deadlines. There are printers and engraving people and a whole line of individuals who are waiting on you to do your job. Sometimes an editor’s career is waiting on you not screwing up too much. It just wasn’t feasible for Mike to continue the strip after a while. I had to, reluctantly, see what my other options were. RA: So Frank Robbins stepped in?

Bob Oksner. Thanks to Ken Nadle.

O’NEIL: Yeah. I didn’t know Frank. I guess I was dimly acquainted with him because of his “Batman” stuff. I was reading just about everything I could get my hands on back then. He was an absolute dream to work with. Pleasant, good conversationalist, and an absolute pearl. If he said it was going to be Thursday, it wouldn’t be Friday. RA: I remember as a kid hating some artists’ styles, simply because they were so out of the ordinary from what I’d been accustomed to, and then, as years went on, I realized that these guys were really pretty good. Frank Robbins was one of those guys. His style was nothing like any other artist I’d come across. O’NEIL: Yes, his work was similar to Milton Caniff’s. RA: Who wasn’t a major influence on the comic artists who were in the mainstream in the early 1970s. Things like art influence come around, though. I notice that Darwyn Cooke, who’s one of the biggest artists out there today, has a strong Robbins/Caniff influence.

O’NEIL: That’s really interesting. I met Darwyn for the first time a few months ago down in Florida and I was very impressed by him. He’s a very smart guy. I’m not that familiar with his work, though. DC still sends me lots of comic books, so I’m sure I’ve got some Darwyn Cooke material here. RA: I think you’d like his Ego and Other Tails and his The New Frontier (which was also adapted by the DC Animation Unit). They’re

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

RA: And not just once in a while but most of the time. O’NEIL: These are fellas who can do a unified vision, by doing it all. It frosts my bowels to have to admit that, because I’m a writer only. [laughter] What’s true is true. RA: Still, I notice when you have a good writer and a good artist together that sometimes the result is greater than either one of them could achieve alone. You and Neal Adams, for example. Together you were a little better than, perhaps, either of you would have been with a different partner. O’NEIL: If you know you can trust that artist, and he feels the same about you…. That was one of the benefits of working with Jim Aparo. No matter what ridiculous request a dunderhead writer made, Jim would figure out a way to do it. RA: A few months ago, I was reading through the Brave and Bold issues that he’d drawn back then and was struck by how many awful stories that title had, but also how beautiful Aparo’s artwork was. It could be an awful story, but God, it was beautifully drawn! O’NEIL: Norm Breyfogle is like that, too. It’s all about serving the story with him. I would love to work with him again. RA: I think we’ve gotten pretty close to the end of the time period we agree to cover. Is there anything we’ve skipped that you’d like to comment on?

From Justice League To Justice, Inc. Justice, Inc. #2 (July-Aug. ’75), based on the 1930s-40s pulp magazine The Avenger, was a slightly later DC collaboration between O’Neil and the talent who’d been the artistic face of Marvel Comics when Denny had worked there ten years earlier: Jack “King” Kirby. By the time the DC comic came out, Kirby had returned to Marvel, as per the photo above that appeared in its self-produced fan-mag FOOM #11 (Sept. 1975). Thanks to Bob Bailey for the page scan. [Page © DC Comics.]

top-notch stuff. There’s touches there of Alex Toth and Robbins and Bruce Timm, but it’s melded together into a very pleasing visual approach that’s influenced but unique at the same time. It’s a nice, fresh approach. O’NEIL: Interesting. I’ll make a point to look for that. RA: He’s a good writer, too. That’s not always the case with a writer/artist. Not everybody is a Will Eisner. Sometimes the artwork conceals the fact that the story is subpar.

O’NEIL: Just how well the universe has treated me. I stumbled into a form of publishing that has given me an interesting and productive life—I can’t imagine, given my plusses and minuses, that any other job would have been as satisfying.

The WHO’S WHO of American Comic Books 1928-1999 Online Edition Created by Jerry G. Bails

FREE – online searchable database – FREE www.bailsprojects.com – No password required

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

O’NEIL: I think sometimes they don’t realize that. Here, we will be very careful not to use actual names. [laughter] RA: Yes, there are some truly phenomenal artists out there who are mediocre writers, but there are also some writer/artists who are simply at the top of the field, and Cooke is certainly one of those.

“Just How Well The Universe Has Treated Me” O’NEIL: Writing and art are separate disciplines, and they both really are disciplines. I think that the really great comic guys were gifted with both the ability to write and the ability to draw. It’s the purest approach you can take to comics. The ability to draw Krazy Kat, for example, or Walt Kelly or Milt Caniff. Walt Simonson is very good at both. Chaykin we mentioned before. These are guys who can really do it all.

Man Bites Kryptonite! Memorable panels from Superman #233 (Jan. 1971). Dennis O’Neil, writer; Curt Swan & Murphy Anderson, artists. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [© DC Comics.]

“I Feel Like My Career Has Gone Full Circle”

DENNIS O’NEIL Checklist [The following Checklist is adapted from information found in the online edition of The Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, which includes material produced through 2006, when founder Jerry G. Bails passed away. Some additional information supplied by Dennis O’Neil. Names of features that appeared both in comic books with that title and in other magazines are generally not italicized. Key: (w) = writer; (e) = editor; (a) = art. Unless indicated, all entries below are as writer.] Name: Dennis Joseph O’Neil (b. 1939) writer, editor, artist

Live-Action TV: Superboy c. 1988-90

Pen Names: Denny-O, Jeff Mundo, Jim Dennis, Sergius O’Shaugnessy (also Wan Chang and James Dennis, in other media)

Honors: Comics Buyer’s Guide Award – Favorite Editor 1986, ’88, ’89, ’96; comic fandom’s Alley Award – Best Writer 1970; comic fandom’s Goethe – Favorite Pro Writer 1970; Harvey Award – Best Domestic Reprint Project 1997; Haxtur Award (Spain) – To the Author We Love 1998; Inkpot Award - San Diego Comic-Con 1981

Education: B.S., St. Louis University Family in Arts: son, Larry O’Neil Print Media (Non-comics): Magazines (articles and/or reviews; dates mostly uncertain): Amazing Stories; Coronet; Esquire; Gentleman’s Quarterly; High Times; Newsfront c. 1966-68, including one-year stint as editor; Ono; Penthouse; Publisher’s Weekly (1975-76); Southeast Missourian (newspaper) 1965; Viva Year; and Village Voice (newspaper) Non-fiction Books: Contest for Power 1968 (written for Newsfront); Origins of the Superheroes 1978; The Super Comics 1981 Novels: The Bite of Monsters 1970; Kung Fu Master: Richard Dragon; Pity This Busy Monster

Promotional Comics: Batman 1980 & Justice League of America 1980 – both for General Foods Underground Comix: Foreword for Big Apple Comix 1975; The Spirit Jam (Kitchen Sink Press) 1981 Fan & Trade Zines: Comics Journal # 38, 46, 48, 63, 105, 106, 109 – 1977, ’79, ’81, ’86 COMIC BOOK CREDITS (U.S. Mainstream Publications):

Charlton Comics: Bounty Hunter 1968-69; Children of Doom (in

Short Stories: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; Amazing Stories; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; Fantastic; Generation One; Fantasy and Science Fiction; Haunt of Horror; Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine Animation: Terrytoons, Ruby-Spears - dates uncertain; G.I. Joe 1985; Batman: The Animated Series (various episodes) c. 1992-1995

No Wonder Readers Referred To Them As “Denny O’Neal Adams”! Here are a pair of outstanding pages from the outstanding O’Neil & Adams body of work: the final page of a “Batman” tale co-starring the Kanigher/ Kubert feature “Enemy Ace” from Detective Comics #404 (Oct. 1970)—and the splash of “Green Lantern-Green Arrow” #86 (Oct.-Nov. 1971), a follow-up to #85’s final panel, in which Green Arrow learned that his ward Roy Harper (aka Speedy) had become addicted to drugs. Inks by Dick Giordano. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [© DC Comics.]

Award-Winning Writer & Editor Dennis O’Neil On His First Decade In Comics

Charlton Premiere # 2) 1967; Farthest-Out Fairy Tales 1967-68; Ghostly Tales 1968; Go-Go c. 1966-67; Hercules 1967-68; The Man Called Lobo 1968; The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves 1960s; Paul Mann (SF series) 1967-68; The Prankster 1967; The Sentinels 1967; Space Adventures 1967-68; Strange Suspense Stories 1967; Thunderbolt 1960s; Wander (in Cheyenne Kid) 1968-69 DC Comics: Adam Strange 1970; All-Star Western 1971; Armageddon 2001 1991; The Atom 1969; The Atom and Hawkman 1969; Azrael 1995-97; Bat Lash 1968-69, 1978; Batgirl 1970; Batman 1970-80, 19881997; Batman and Robin 1970; Batman and Green Arrow: Poison Tomorrow 1992 graphic album; Batman: A DC Movie Special 1989; Beyond the Farthest Star mid-1970s; Beware The Creeper 1968-69; Black Canary 1972; Black Lightning 1978-80; Bomba the Jungle Boy 1968; Catwoman 1997; Challengers of the Unknown 1969-70; The Creeper & Wildcat 1975; Doc Savage 1987-89; Fabulous World of Krypton 1971; Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser 1973; From Beyond the Unknown 1970-71; Glenn Merritt 1970; Gotham City 1979-80; Green Arrow 1977, 1979, 1988-89; Green Lantern 1968-69, 1971, 1973-80, 1998; Green Lantern and Green Arrow 1971-73, 1976-79; House of Mystery 1977; Iron-Wolf 1973-74; Isis 1976; The Joker 1976-76; Justice League of America 1968-70, 1975; Justice League Task Force 1993; Justice, Inc. 1975; Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth 1976-77; Madame Xanadu 1980; Martian Manhunter J’Onn J’Onzz 1977; Mr. Mxyzptlk 1980; The New Gods 1976; Nightmaster 1969; Nightwing 1995; Pellucidar 1973; The Phantom Stranger 1970; The Private Life of Clark Kent 1972; The Question 1987-92, 1997; Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter 1976-77; Robin 1991; Scooter (uncertain); Secret Origin: Batman 1989; Secret Origin: Robin 1990; The Shadow 197375; Shazam! 1973-76 (Captain Marvel) & 1975 (The Marvel Family); Sherlock Holmes 1975; The Spectre 1969; Strange Adventures 1970;

From Strange Tales To Space Adventures To Strange Adventures Denny at Phil Seuling’s 1971 New York Comic Art Convention—and the lead splash page of Strange Adventures #222 (Jan.-Feb. 1970), with art by Gil Kane & Murphy Anderson. Thanks to Mike Zeck, Pedro Angosto, & Sean Howe for the photo, and to Bob Bailey for the art scan. “Adam Strange,” of course, had for years been a feature written by Gardner Fox, penciled by Carmine Infantino, and inked by Anderson. [Page © DC Comics.]

Strange Sports Stories 1973-74; Super Friends 1979; Superman 197172, 1980; Superman & Batman 1970-72, 1979-80; Superman vs. Muhammed Ali 1978; Superman (various team-ups) 1971-72, 197980; Tales of Gotham City 1980; Tarzan 1976-77; text 1974; Three Musketeers 1976; Tim Trench 1976; Time Warp 1979-80; The Unexpected 1980; Who’s Who in the DC Universe (entries) 1985-86; The Witching Hour 1969; Wonder Woman 1968-72, 1977; Young Fafhrd the Barbarian 1973 Eclipse Enterprises: Real War Stories 1987 Marvel Comics: Bizarre Adventures 1982; Doctor Strange 1966, 1968; Dominic Fortune 1980; Epic Illustrated 1980-81; Indiana Jones 1983; Iron Man 1982-86; Kid Colt Outlaw 1967-69; Last of the Dragons 1982-83; Luke Cage and Iron Fist 1981-82; Millie the Model 1965-67; Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. 1966; Patsy and Hedy 1966; Rawhide Kid 1966-68; Savage Tales (w) 1971; (a) 1986; The Shadow 1988; Spider-Man 1980-81; text 1974, 1980, 1982-83; Two-Gun Kid 1967-68; Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction 1975; The X-Men 1970; X-Men: Heroes for Hope 1985 Warren Publications: Vampirella (non-lead features) 1971-72

In And Out Of Africa Denny O’Neil used his “Sergius O’Shaugnessy” nom de plume for what may have been the last time on this occasion, because by now he was working primarily for DC Comics—when Roy T. got him and editor Stan Lee together so Denny could write a feature with artist Gene Colan for Marvel’s black-&-white Savage Tales #1 (May 1971). [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Seal Of Approval The History Of The Comics Code

A/E

by Amy Kiste Nyberg

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: With this issue, after a decade of attempting to acquire the rights to do so, we begin at last our serialization of Dr. Amy Nyberg’s 1998 book Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. This groundbreaking study was originally published by University Press of Mississippi as part of its Studies in Popular Culture series, under the general editorship of M. Thomas Inge. Amy, since 1993 a professor in the Department of Communication at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, has a prior background as a professional journalist. She is married to comic book artist John Nyberg… who, by sheer coincidence, was the inker of an Elric of Melniboné series or two I scripted for First Comics circa 1990.

Ever since I first read Seal of Approval, I’ve wanted to make it available to Alter Ego’s audience in an illustrated format—since there were very few reproductions of comic art and no photos whatsoever in the original edition. I wish to thank Tom Inge for his considerable help in arranging for this book to be reprinted over the course of several issues of A/E. The text is © 1998 University Press of Mississippi; the book is still

Signed, Sealed, & Delivered (Clockwise from top center:) Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg—the Comics Code seal—and the cover of the University Press of Mississippi edition of her 1998 book Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. The cover illustration is by John Nyberg; photo courtesy of AKN. [Art © 1998 University Press of Mississippi.]

available through them at www.upress.state.ms.us. My thanks to William Biggins and Vijah Shah, the University Press’ past and present acquisitions editors, for their help, as well. Seal of Approval, being an academic work, is heavily “footnoted”— though in the MLA style that, instead of placing small raised numbers after pieces of text, lists book or article titles or author names and page numbers between parentheses: e.g., “(Hart 154-156),” which refers to pp. 154-156 of whichever book by an author or editor named Hart is listed in the bibliography. When the parentheses contain only page numbers, it is because the name of the author, editor, or work is given in the main text almost immediately preceding the note. Nyberg’s bibliography will be printed at the conclusion of our serialization, some months from now. In addition, there are a handful of notes in the book that are treated as footnotes in the more traditional sense. Those are reprinted in this serialization with the footnoted text at the bottom of the page on which the number appears. One final note: We have, by and large, left the author’s spellings of terms and names just as they appear in the University Press of Mississippi edition—e.g., “superhero” rather than the “super-hero” ordinarily used in this magazine; the non-capitalization of the term “comics code” (though we did capitalize that term in our captions); and “E.C.” instead of the period-less “EC” we ordinarily use (though we’ve kept them in our captions). Seal of Approval refers to “DC” Comics without the use of periods, so we’ve left that spelling, as well. Where we’ve felt a need to point out a possible error of fact or two in the book (though we certainly didn’t find many!), we have done so in accompanying art captions, leaving the original text intact. Not so incidentally, a thank-you to Brian K. Morris for retyping the entire book specifically for Alter Ego. And now we turn the floor over, as indeed we should, to Amy Kiste Nyberg, who begins with an introductory overview, which will then be greatly expanded and illuminated in the ensuing chapters in future issues….

The History Of The Comics Code

Introduction The comics code seal of approval bears the message “Approved by the comics code authority” and first appeared on the covers of comic books in the mid-1950s. The comics code is a set of regulatory guidelines primarily concerned with sex, violence, and language drawn up by publishers and enforced by the “code authority,” a euphemism for the censor employed by the publishers. Comic books passing the pre-publication review process are entitled to carry the seal of approval. This study of the origins and history of the comics code examines how and why such a code came into being and the code’s significance both historically and to comic book publishing today [1998]. The code was originally implemented in response to a public outcry over comic books in postwar America when comic book content was linked to a rise in juvenile delinquency, and this book begins with a chronology of the controversy that provided the impetus for industry self-regulation. The chronology is followed by a detailed account of how the code was implemented, enforced, and modified. Along the way, this examination of the comics code also explores the evolution of a medium and the public’s attitude toward comic books since the introduction of the modern comic in the mid-1930s. The perception of comic books and their audience is central to understanding the comics code both in postwar America and today. What this book does not do, quite intentionally, is provide a detailed analysis of the comics themselves. While some examples of crime and horror comics are discussed in relation to the criticism they generated, the histories of the characters, their creators, and their stories have been told elsewhere. Rather, I approach the history of the comic book code from the perspective

of the industry, identifying the events that led to the creation of the code, examining ways in which it was formulated and implemented, and analyzing the impact it had on comic book publishing. To begin, it is important to recognize that the postwar comic book controversy has its roots in earlier attitudes toward comic books and toward popular culture more generally. Most of the investigations of the comics code to date have focused on criticisms of comic books in the postwar period, specifically 1948 to 1954, but by limiting their study to this time frame, researchers have failed to recognize important links between the campaign against comic books and previous efforts to control children’s culture. Far from being an isolated instance of Cold War hysteria, the debate over comic books fits into a broad pattern of efforts to control children’s culture. As film, radio, and comic books each were introduced and became part of children’s leisure activities, guardians of children’s morality renewed their attacks on the mass media. From the outset, symbols of social authority over childhood and children’s reading, particularly teachers and librarians, defined comic book reading as a problem. They expressed fears that the comic book was leading children away from better literature and creating a generation of semi-literates. When academic researchers began to test some of the assumptions educators were making about comic books, however, their findings demonstrated that comic book reading made little difference in the acquisition of reading skills, in academic achievement, or in social adjustment. Despite these research findings, the criticism of comic books persisted because the fears about comic books, rather than being based on empirical evidence, were rooted in adult beliefs and attitudes about children’s leisure time activities. Adults’ concern

The Guys Who Came In With The Code (Across bottom of this page and the next two:) The first Comics Code-approved issues of ten comics, from ten of the surviving publishers, all but two dated March or April of 1955 and going on sale at the turn of the year:

National/DC’s Superman #96 (March ’55), art by Al Plastino [© DC Comics]…

Standard/Pines’ Supermouse #33 (March ’55), artist unknown [© the respective copyright holders]…

Timely’s (the future Marvel’s) Strange Tales #35 (April ’55), art by Carl Burgos & Sol Brodsky [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]…

Seal Of Approval—Introduction

stemmed in large part from fears that children’s culture, especially the control of leisure reading, had escaped traditional authority. Adults believed that children’s free time should be spent in constructive activities that would improve their mental and physical well-being, failing to understand the appeal of comic books, which they perceived as simplistic, crude, and lacking artistic or literary merit. Reading comic books was, plain and simple, a waste of time and money. The struggle between children’s taste and adult authority was presented as a “challenge” to be faced and a “battle” to be won; adults sought to substitute their own choices for the comic books favored by children. Alarm over this contamination of children’s culture failed to produce a sustained public reaction. Evidence suggests that the “problem” of comic books entered public discourse only after those seeking to control children’s culture, allied with church and civic groups that traditionally forced standards of public morality, were able to gain the attention of the popular press. The major factor in the success of the campaign against comics was the linkage of comic book reading to juvenile delinquency, a problem representing the ultimate loss of social control over children. When the antecedents of the postwar campaign against comics are understood, it becomes clear that while the debate shifted from an emphasis on education and morality to one of law and order, the fundamental concern—social control of children—remained the same. The impetus for the shift in the debate was the emergence of experts such as psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, whose crusade against comics was a significant factor in focusing public attention on the medium and in legitimating the views of those who saw comic books as a threat to children. In this book, I investigate the ways in which the attack on comics was carried out. At the local level, civic and religious groups acted to impose standards on comic books and brought pressure to bear on the retailers in their communities. These groups, which had no legal power, used the economic threat of

Archie Comic Publications’ Archie Comics #73 (March-April ’55), artist uncertain [© Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]…

boycotts to force retailers to remove from their shelves comic books deemed unsuitable. Such decency crusades were aided by ratings lists published by the Catholic Church’s National Office of Decent Literature and by the Cincinnati Committee for the Evaluation of Comics, whose lists were published in Parents’ Magazine. These efforts attracted the attention of lawmakers at the state and national level. In the years following World War II, several states appointed legislative committees to study the The Doctor Is In problem and recommend laws aimed at Dr. Fredric Wertham. You’ll curbing undesirable comic books. At the read a bit more about him national level, the investigation of comic before this serialization is books was carried out by the Senate finished. Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, which undertook a study of the relationship of the mass media to the problem of delinquency. The key witness at the Senate hearings and the leader of the crusade against comics was Wertham. He took the position that comic books were harmful, and he pressed for legislation restricting the sale of comic books to children under age sixteen. But Wertham’s argument was much more complex than the idea he was often accused of perpetrating: that there was a direct causal link between comic book reading and juvenile delinquency. The problem of juvenile delinquency, he believed, stemmed from the fact that society was trapped in a “cult of violence” of which comic books were simply a manifestation. While he acknowledged that eliminating harmful comic books would not solve the problem of juvenile delinquency, he was convinced that such action would be a step in the right direction.

Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay #143 (March ’55), art by Joe Kubert (until a change a few issues before, in anticipation of a crackdown, the word “Crime” had been much larger than “Does Not Pay” on covers) [© the respective copyright holders]…

American Comics Group’s Adventures into the Unknown #62 (March-April ’55), art by Ogden Whitney [© the respective copyright holders]…

The History Of The Comics Code

Many media scholars have dismissed Wertham’s work as an example of early, unsophisticated social science research into media effects, and contemporary social scientists criticized Wertham for his lack of scientific methodology and his failure to present quantitative evidence to support his findings. I argue, however, that the image of Wertham as a misguided pioneer in media effects research is erroneous. In fact, Wertham attacked the emerging social science approach to media effects research, calling instead for a multidisciplinary study of mass media. He believed his approach, which he called the clinical method, with its detailed case histories, observation, and follow-up, was the only valid way to study long-term media effects. Despite Wertham’s efforts, the Senate subcommittee failed to recommend any legislative remedy for the problem of comic books, instead calling on the industry to police itself. The passage of the comics code in October 1954 pacified many of the groups calling for censorship and put to rest any fears that the industry would be regulated by the government. The models for self-regulation of the comic book industry were the codes adopted by other mass media. Since many of the criticisms of film were repeated almost verbatim about comic books, the film industry provided a compatible model for comics publishers, and the comics code is nothing more than a rewrite of the Film Production Code of the 1930s. The bulk of the comics code dealt with crime and horror, the two topics that had brought public ire down on the heads of publishers. The code continued to allow publication of crime comics within new, strict guidelines but banned publication of horror comics. But publishers went beyond the criticisms voiced against comics to address the complaints of groups more concerned with morality than delinquency, adding provisions dealing with language, costume, and the portrayal of family values, following the lead of the Film Production Code in these areas. There is a persistent belief among the fan-historians that the comic book industry was nearly destroyed by the comics code, a view accepted by academic researchers. Such a view ignores other, more important influences. While the years following the adoption of the code were a period of upheaval in the industry, the imple-

Charlton’s This Is Suspense #24 (April ’55), art by Dick Giordano & Vince Alascia [© the respective copyright holders]…

Harvey Publications’ Black Cat Western #55 (May ’55), art by Lee Elias—but the stories inside this replacement for the Black Cat Mystery horror comic were all reprints from 1946 super-heroine issues [© Lorne-Harvey or successors in interest]…

mentation of the comics code was only part of the explanation for the industry’s difficulties. First, the distribution problems the industry experienced in the mid-1950s were due not to retailers’ resistance to carrying the “controversial” comics but rather to the decision by American News Company, which distributed more than half of all comic books published at the time, to pull out of magazine distribution following federal antitrust action. The demise of American News Company left many publishers without a way to distribute their titles. Second, many of the companies that went out of business were simply victims of a more general economic hardship brought about by the drop in sales of comic books. This decrease was attributable to two factors. One was negative publicity about comic books, but a second factor was the increasing competition from television for children’s leisure time. James Baughman, in his analysis of the impact of television on mass media industries in postwar America, has suggested that the introduction of television marginalized other mass media, forcing them increasingly to compete for a share of the audience’s time that was not being spent watching television. Although Baughman does not address comic books specifically, it is clear from his analysis that the failure of comic books to regain their status as a mass medium can be linked to much broader trends in all media industries. The scramble by comic book publishers to re-establish themselves in the marketplace was mirrored by similar efforts among newspaper publishers, magazine publishers, film companies, and radio networks. It is true that some companies, such as William Gaines’ E.C. Comics, were casualties of the new standards; in fact, most fanhistorians focus on the demise of E.C. Comics as an example of the impact of the code. But what happened to Gaines was the exception rather than the rule. Many publishers continued to add new titles, and by the end of the decade, with the re-introduction of the superheroes who would launch the “Silver Age” of comics, the comic book industry regained some of the ground it had lost a few years earlier. Gaines’ comic books from that period have been reprinted for new generations of fans, and today E.C. Comics are recognized as a significant contribution both for their artwork and their storytelling. If there is a “canon” of comic books, E.C. Comics

Quality’s Plastic Man #54 (June ’55), art by Charles Nicholas (publisher “Busy” Arnold obviously dragged his feet about joining the new Comic Magazine Association of America and subscribing to its equally new Code) [Plastic Man TM & © DC Comics]…

…and Entertaining Comics’ Piracy #5 (June-July ’55), art by Bernard Krigstein (EC’s Bill Gaines had been in no hurry to sign up, either) [© William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.].

Seal Of Approval—Introduction

EC Come, EC Go William M. Gaines lived long enough to wear an EC t-shirt to the 1972 New York Comic Art Convention with pride and a smile (below)—but he hadn’t been feeling nearly as cheerful at the turn of 1954-55. Also seen below are the covers of the final issue of Mad the color comic book (#23, May 1955) and the first issue of Mad magazine (#24, July ’55)... plus the last issue of the “New Trend” comic Tales from the Crypt (#46, May ’55) alongside the premiere of the “New Direction” title Valor (March-April ’55), which Gaines hoped would sell as well as EC’s dying horror comics. It didn’t, of course. [Mad covers © EC Publications, Inc.; other two covers © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.]

may be found at the head of the list. This reverence for E.C. Comics of the 1950s helps to explain why the demise of Gaines’ company is equated to the destruction of an entire industry in that period. It is important to separate the impact of the code on the creative output of the industry from its impact on comic book publishing. While one may argue that the comics code harmed the creative development of comic books, it is much more difficult to support the argument that the comics code almost destroyed the comic book publishing industry. Gaines was not the only publisher unhappy with the code. Those who sat on the executive board of the Comics Magazine Association of America, the trade organization formed and supported by the publishers to administer the code, would debate the provisions and the very need for a code at almost every meeting. Changes were made to the code in 1971 and again in 1989. In 1971, changing social values, the emergence of underground “comix,” and a depressed market combined to force the publishers into relaxing some of the restrictions on comic book content to allow publishers to bring their comics more in line with contemporary standards. Regulations on both the depiction of sex and violence were rewritten, and a section on how to show drug use and abuse was added. But the four publishers who remained active in the Comics Magazine Association of America during the late 1970s and the 1980s—Archie, Marvel, Harvey, and DC— continued to challenge the need for a code. The next change to the code, enacted in 1989, was due in large part to changes in comic book distribution and audience demographics and to competition from a new group of “independent” comic book publishers. Instead of selling comics only through the magazine distribution system, publishers began, in the 1970s, to market comic books through a new network of distributors and retailers developed exclusively for comic books. In addition, the audience for comic books, rather than being the preteens of the 1940s and 1950s, was more likely to be older teens or young adults. And finally, a number of upstart companies began to publish comics that were more experimental and adult in their themes. The 1989 code eliminated the detailed lists of what was forbidden, instead offering a more general set of “principles” in various categories. A second portion of the code, not intended for public distribution, gave more specific editorial guidelines to publishers, editors, and artists. Despite the seeming flexibility built into the 1989 version of the code, it is still clearly the intention of the comic book publishing industry that comic books carrying the code seal of approval be appropriate for children of all ages. Much of the narrative history of the comics code that follows will be familiar to students of the medium, although the discussion of the implementation and enforcement of the comics code is the first such discussion to draw on the archives of the Comics Magazine Association of America. But in two important ways, this study of the comics code challenges the way in which this period

of comic book history has been understood. First, I argue that Wertham’s role in the crusade against comics has been largely misinterpreted by fans and scholars alike, who dismiss his findings as naive social science, failing to understand how his work on comic books fits into the larger context of his beliefs about violence, psychiatry, and social reform. Second, I reject the view that the comics code nearly destroyed the comic book industry, suggesting that this is far too simplistic a conclusion to draw about the impact and significance of the code. Few books are a solo effort. I would like to thank those who helped along the way: Robert McChesney, who made it possible for me to write the dissertation that became this book; Julie Ratliff, who provided valuable advice on cutting a six-hundred-page manuscript down to size; M. Thomas Inge, whose critical reading was enormously helpful; my colleagues in the Comic Art and Comics Area of the Popular Culture Association, who heard many of the chapters in the form of conference papers and offered muchappreciated feedback; my grandmother, Macy Snyder, who instilled in me a love of reading; my parents, Bruce and Eleanor “Petey” Kiste, for all their support; and finally my husband, John, whose love makes all things possible, including this book. To be continued next issue...

THE GREATEST ADVENTURE HERO OF ALL— NOW IN TWO FABULOUS ONLINE COMIC STRIPS!

by ROY THOMAS & TOM GRINDBERG

by ROY THOMAS & PABLO MARCOS Official Website:

http://edgarriceburroughs.com/comics/

Website now also features S weekly comic strips of NEW SEQU ENCE G IN BE Carson of Venus, Cave Girl, LY NT TA NS CO Pellucidar, et al.—$1.99/month! ADDED! Tarzan is a trademark of, and Tarzan artwork ©2013 by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

Please Note: Volumes 1 & 2 have been temporarily delayed and will be available in the near future.

ALL-NEW FULL-COLOR ADVENTURES —NOW PLAYING ON AN INTERNET NEAR YOU!

Devil-Doggone Funny! John Severin drew this amusing cover for Devil-Dog Dugan #2 (Sept. 1956). [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Now That’s A Fan! by Michael T. Gilbert Comic book readers are an obsessive lot. You’ll find us slabbing dog-eared Big Boy giveaways, buying 40 variant covers of the latest Superman reboot, and braving tornadoes on new comics day. But that’s nothing compared to the fanatics you’ll find in the comics themselves!

Cookie An’ The Commies! Take for example the Dave Berg-illustrated “Cookie an’ the Commies!” from Combat Kelly # 16. This joker’s so busy reading the latest issue of his brother-inarms, Combat Casey, that Cookie barely notices a bloodthirsty Red about to shishkabob him! No worries, though. Cookie not only massacres his attacker, he also slaughters about six-dozen buck-toothed Commies. He probably thought they were trying to steal his comics! By story’s end, Cookie’s resting with a copy of his beloved Combat Casey comic. “He ain’t afraid of nothin’!” sighs Cookie. “I wish I was like him!” I’m guessing that, over in his own book, Combat Casey’s thinking the same thing about Cookie! Now that’s a fan!

This’ll Kill Ya! Mad Magazine’s Dave Berg drew “Cookie an’ the Commies” for Combat Kelly #16 (Oct. 1953). Seen here are its splash and final two panels. [© Marvel Characters, Inc].

Now That’s A Fan! (Part 2)

The Raving Maniac! Kids love comics. But parents? Not always so much. Such was the case with “The Raving Maniac” in Marvel’s Suspense # 29. Stan Lee’s four-pager was a spirited defense of comics back when Fredric Wertham and his crew were blaming them for everything from juvenile delinquency to the heartbreak of psoriasis. The story begins with every editor’s worst nightmare: an angry dad bursting into his office! “Are you the editor of these miserable magazines?!!” screams the guy. “You’re lucky I don’t break your head!” He accuses our boy of ruining his kid. Stan counterattacks, peppering him with lame Millie the Model-style jokes. Bam! Pow! When that fails to diffuse the situation, Lee tries to reason with the guy, explaining that kids’ literature has always been violent. “At least our readers know our stories aren’t true,” says Stan. “But you can scare yourself to death reading newspaper nowadays!!” The guy still refuses to listen. But before they come to blows, two men in white coats come to take the raving maniac back to the funny farm from which he escaped! Afterward, Stan snuggles with his own baby daughter and tells her a funny bedtime story about a nut that hated comics. Little Joanie Lee was one lucky little girl! But the maniac’s kid was the real lucky one. With his dad safely locked up in the loony bin, he can read all the comics he wants. Now that’s a fan!

The Unknown Comic! Here’s one that maybe you comic experts can help me out with. I recently found a few torn panels from some unknown Marvel comic. I haven’t a clue what title it was—probably some long forgotten Lee-scripted monster comic. If you know where this story originally appeared, please tell us. Talk about obscure! Even Roy is stumped on this one. Regardless, you have to admire the down-onhis-luck teenager featured here who finds a rare Golden Age Sub-Mariner comic in a dingy flophouse. Instead of selling it and getting a decent room, the plucky lad reads it! All I can say is...“Now that’s a fan!”

Dissatisfied Customer! (Above:) Stan Lee’s worst nightmare, from Suspense #29 (March 1953). Joe Maneely illustrated Lee’s story “The Raving Maniac.” [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Bowery Boy! (Right:) This lucky but unidentified lad finds a rare Sub-Mariner comic in a flophouse. Artist and title unknown. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Elvis… Comic Book Nut! (Above:) Elvis liked studying curvy Betty and Veronica, as seen in Arf Forum, Vol. 3, but he collected Captain Marvel Jr. comics. (Below:) A re-creation of his teenage bedroom, located in Lauderdale Court in Memphis, Tennessee. A copy of Captain Marvel Jr. #51, (July 1947), is on the desk. Elvis was twelve when this issue came out. It’s even been claimed that Jr.’s sideburns may have inspired Elvis’ own! [Photos © 2013 Estate of Elvis Presley or the respective copyright holders.]

Freddy’s Newsstand! (Above:) Freddy Freeman knows where his bread is buttered! Bud Thompson drew this great Captain Marvel Jr. #37 cover (April 1946)— though we kinda suspect the comic book covers thereon were repro’d from Photostats. [Shazam hero © DC Comics.]

Hey, Newsy!

Heavy Reading!

Newsstands don’t just sell comics—sometimes they star in them, too! Every Fawcett fan knows that young paper-peddler Freddy Freeman had magic words that turned him into Captain Marvel Jr.! But who knew the kid was sneaky enough to stock his newsstand exclusively with Fawcett comics? No wonder DC sued the Marvel Family out of existence!

One of Freddy’s customers might have been the King himself, who was quite a comic book aficionado. But instead of studying Archie and Veronica (above), Elvis the Pelvis would more likely be reading his favorite super-hero, Captain Marvel Jr.!

But even they might grudgingly admit... “Now that’s a fan!”

Pamela Clarke Keogh’s Elvis Presley: The Man. The Life. The Legend. states, “Like a lot of kids with a chaotic home life, Elvis created his own world inside his head. He read comic books and was drawn to Superman, Batman, and, most of all, Captain Marvel Jr. Around the age of 12, Elvis discovered Captain Marvel Jr. and quickly became almost obsessed with him.” All I can say is, “Now that’s a fan!” Indeed, this re-creation of Elvis’ childhood room includes a pristine copy of the King’s favorite super-hero. For more on the subject, check out Kirk Kimball’s superb Dial B For Blog website for an in-depth exploration of “The Secret Origins of Elvis and Captain Marvel Jr.” You’ll find it at: www.dialbforblog.com/archives/85/

Now That’s A Fan! (Part 2)

Make Mine… Master? Mickey Rooney (young Andy Hardy himself!) was another Fawcett fan. A 1940 publicity shot has him saying “Make Mine Master!” Of course if he were holding a copy of Captain Marvel Adventures rather than Master Comics, he’d be screaming “Make Mine Marvel!” a quarter-century before Stan Lee! Now that’s a fan!

Hey, Buddy! Can You Spare A Comic? Fawcett didn’t have a lock on newsstand monopolies, judging from this classic Batman cover. After crushing Fawcett’s comic line, one may assume that DC’s distributors made sure America’s newsstands exclusively stocked their own product! Not cool, guys! This cover proves that, if Batman’s life depended on buying a copy of Spider-Man, we’d be visiting his grave now. The sneering, cigar-chompin’ slob on the cover would’ve said, “Sorry, kid. We don’t stock Marvels!” It’s a terrific cover. Unfortunately, Gardner Fox’s story, “Peril of the Poison Rings,” didn’t live up to it. The twisted tale features crooked cartoonist Rembrandt Dickens (subtle, guys!), who scores a gig writing and drawing Batman comics. As the story progresses, his gang injects Batman with a slow-acting poison. Since Fox had to shoehorn in a story scene to match the cover, he made ol’ Rembrandt leave a clue to the antidote in one of his comic book stories. The Caped Crusader must find a copy of the comic—or die! “Now that’s a fan?” Of course, the real crime was the contrived script and bland interior art, which failed to live up to the striking Infantino/Anderson cover! Holy “Bait and switch,” Batman!

Batman’s Gotta Have It! (Above:) Batman sounds like me on new comics day! A classic Carmine Infantino/Murphy Anderson cover from Batman #199 (Feb. 1968). (Below:) A panel from Gardner Fox’s “Peril of the Poison Rings,” with art by Sheldon Moldoff & Joe Giella. Thanks to Doug Martin, Stephan Fiedt, & Jim Ludwig for the Batman #199 scans. [©DC Comics.]

Master Of His Domain! Young movie super-star Mickey Rooney hawks Fawcett comics in this ad for Nickel Comics #2 (May, 1940). [© Fawcett Publications.]

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

The Creature From Strange Adventures! And how about this one? “The Creature from Strange Adventures” featured an equally ridiculous story. Eric Craig, vacationing in a small fishing village, stumbles onto a kill-crazy monster. Luckily, he spots a copy of Strange Adventures # 170 depicting the same creature trying to kill him in the comic, and in exactly the same way. What were the odds? And why does this backwater village have a newsstand fully stocked with the latest DC comics? Best not to ask! Quick-witted Craig reads the comic hoping to find out how his comic book twin survived—then copies him. Later, after discovering the monster was actually sent by sub-surface aliens, he foils their plans. But two questions remained. Who printed the comic? And how did they know precisely what was going to happen to him beforehand? Alas, despite their provocative cover, the creative geniuses at DC couldn’t quite come up with an answer. Instead, the perplexed hero invited the suckers… er, readers, that is… to send in their own solutions as part of a contest. Yeah, that’s why I plunked down 12¢… so I could come up with my own ending for their story. Way to screw your readers, DC! To be fair, DC promised the top contest winners original art from the story, and a few issues later editor Jack Schiff delivered. Still, loyal DC readers who didn’t burn their entire Strange Adventures collection in protest deserve credit. To each of those poor fools I say… “Now that’s a fan!” Till next time…

A True Fan! (Above:) This guy just plain doesn’t care if a monster’s trying to kill him—he’s reading a comic book! Next he’ll be asking the creature to autograph his copy. Now that’s a fan! Art by Sheldon Moldoff & Dick Dillin, from Strange Adventures #170 (Nov. 1964). [© DC Comics.]

“Hey Kid, Dis Ain’t A Library!” Mort Meskin drew “The Creature from Strange Adventures” in Strange Adventures #170, from a script by an unnamed writer. But I won’t hold it against them! [©DC Comics.]

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In Memoriam

Lee Ames (1921-2011)

“The Family Of Cartoonists Is My Family”

by Jim Amash

orn Leon Abramowitz to a lower middle-class family in Manhattan, there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that he would become an artist. His first job was as a “go-fer” at an ad agency in 1938, soon as a sign painter for the Ross Sign Company—then as an in-betweener for Disney in California, working on Fantasia and Pinocchio and a few animated short films. After three months, he got homesick and returned to New York, where he became an inker at Terrytoons Studios from late 1939 through early 1941. After that, he got a job as a background artist for the Jerry Iger comics shop and worked his way up to drawing figures and then pencils (and inks at times) on such features as Quality’s “Firebrand” and “Kid Patrol” and Fiction House’s “Dusty Rhodes,” “Captain Fight,” and “Stuart Taylor.” His work also appeared at Fox Publications, MLJ, Parents’ Magazine Press (“Red Feather Kid”, etc.), and Hillman Publications (“Bomber Burns” ). Lee served stateside in the Army during his military stint in World War II as a 2nd Lieutenant until 1944; upon his discharge he worked in a defense plant until the end of the war. At some point during this time, he did unspecified work for the Bernard Baily Shop, though historian Jerry G. Bails believed some of that work appeared in Rural Home Publishing’s Variety Comics.

After the war, Lee returned to the Iger Shop for a while before embarking on a freelance career. For EC, he drew “The Chessmen” and a few Pre-Trend crime stories. He drew “Kewpies” for Will Eisner’s studio and several features for Timely, as well as illustrating many stories and painted covers for the Magazine Management division of publisher Martin Goodman’s company. He also drew for Lev Gleason’s Crime and Punishment and Tops magazine. He illustrated features for Avon and Ziff-Davis; later in the 1950s, he did some work for Gilberton. His most infamous

He Ames High! Lee Ames, juxtaposed with one of his popular Draw 50 how-to books (in a montage courtesy of Mark Evanier)… and (below) the artist’s notorious cover for Spectacular Features Magazine #11 (April 1950)—a definitely unauthorized traveling companion to the then-current Cecil B. DeMille film Samson and Delilah. Publisher Victor Fox had noticed that the Bible is in the public domain. [Covers © the respective copyright holders.]

artwork was the cover for Fox Publications’ Samson and Delilah in 1950. Art director Hy Vigoda told him that publisher Victor Fox “wanted something on the cover that would suggest a part of a nude woman’s body”—so Lee drew Delilah’s folded left leg so that the inner lines resembled a woman’s rear end, a subliminal suggestion that would have helped give credence to the later charges by Dr. Fredric Wertham.

Lee legally changed his name in 1948. By that time he was teaching art at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later known as the School of Visual Arts). In the late 1940s, he worked decreasingly in comics and turned to book illustration for several companies, including Random House, Julian Messner Publishing, and Doubleday, for whom he spent years as an in-house artist. In 1974, he began his best-known work: the Draw 50 series, comprised of approximately 26 books artistically presenting how to draw various subjects (animals, boats, athletes, aliens, etc.) step-by-step. Lee did have a number of ghost pencilers draw them, including his dear friend Andre Le Blanc. Lee guesstimated that he illustrated 150 books in his career. Lee was a very nice man who enjoyed talking about his career and the people he knew in the business. He was a long-time member of the Berndt Toast Gang chapter of the National Cartoonists Society, and started a small “get together” group of fellow cartoonists while he lived in California. He was a life-long liberal Democrat and an atheist. I only mention his lack of religion because of the following story. One year, I received a holiday card at Christmas time, and on the front of the card were symbols of several faiths. I asked him about it and he said, “No matter what faith someone has, I want them to celebrate and enjoy their holiday, so I cover all the bases.” Though Lee did not believe in God, he respected the beliefs of others, no matter what their faith was. He was a true Humanist. Of all the many things Lee and I talked about, I think the most telling thing about his love of the art of cartooning and illustration was summed up when he told me, “The family of cartoonists is my family.” He was a gentleman and a gentle man, and is greatly missed by his friends and family. Jim Amash, a longtime comics artist for Archie and Marvel, has conducted interviews for approximately 100 issues of this third volume of Alter Ego. His full-length talk with Lee Ames, which was titled with the same quotation as this tribute, appeared in A/E #28. We regret that this tribute has not appeared sooner.

In Memoriam

George Gladir

(1925-2013) “His Humor Ran From The Gentle To The Zany” by Batton Lash

[The following tribute has been edited from the author’s essay on Facebook, with his permission.]

t was with great sorrow that I learned that longtime comics writer George Gladir passed away. George is known to fans around the world for the countless scripts he wrote for Archie Comics, Cracked, and recently, Bart Simpson for Bongo Comics and The Three Stooges for Paperkutz. George was the first American creator to be invited by a Japanese publisher to write for manga. With his feature for Comic Morning, “Is That True?” George wrote about misconceptions of Japan through a foreigner’s eyes.

His prolific output notwithstanding, George secured his place in comics history (and pop culture) for creating (with artist Dan DeCarlo) “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.” Since her first appearance in Archie’s Madhouse # 22 (Oct. 1962), Sabrina, along with her Aunt Hilda, Aunt Zelda, and Salem the Cat, entered the public consciousness through comics, animation, and a long-running network television show. And there are plans for the eternal teen to appear on the silver screen. No small feat for a comic book character. It is a testament to George’s creativity that Sabrina has endured for over fifty years. George had a fertile imagination, and his humor ran from the gentle to the zany. As a kid, before I even knew his name, I would seek out the Archie’s Madhouse comics, because the stories and characters were hilarious and pun-filled. Years later, I met George through our mutual association with Archie Comics. I was thrilled to learn he was that uncredited author of those Madhouse comics I loved! When I relocated from New York to San Diego, I learned he was a resident, himself a transplanted New Yorker, and we became friends. George and I would go to many lunches downtown, in the Gaslamp District, where I had a studio. George was an avid movie buff and we’d spend hours discussing classic and independent

films. And, of course, we engaged in plenty of comics shoptalk, ranging from industry gossip to the art of creating comics.

A Sabrina Thought George Gladir in 2002—and the first-ever splash panel of “Sabrina the Witch,” drawn by artist/co-creator Dan DeCarlo, from Archie’s Madhouse #22 (Oct. 1962). [Page © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

I once had an opportunity to watch him craft a 6-page script for a Betty & Veronica digest. I saw him do the rough layouts for the artist to follow; George had the story structure in place when he proceeded to dialogue. He jotted down brief copy and then cut that to the bone. It was an education in comics writing to see how George used an economy of words; there wasn’t an unnecessary line in the script. And to top it off, the story was funny as hell!

George began writing comics almost as an afterthought. He got an early start in the Eisner-Iger studio as a teen, and his goal was to be a gag cartoonist. But even by the mid-’50s, George could sense that the market for one-panel cartoons was drying up. An opportunity came to him from Archie Comics to write cover gags. He eventually moved on to write full scripts featuring the Riverdale gang. In time, he was the go-to movie/TV parody guy for Cracked magazine, where he wrote over 2000 pages, many with frequent collaborator John Severin. George was a huge rock ’n’ roll fan and would incorporate his love of rock music into his humor pieces, some being quite prescient. George predicted a rock ’n’ roll museum, and, in a sadly accurate piece written in 1965, John Lennon’s assassination by the hand of a fan on the streets of New York. There’s so much to the life and career of George Gladir, I’ve barely scratched the surface. He was a Korean War vet (at one point a P.O.W) and a military intelligence agent. Even though he was in his eighties, he was as lively and active and forward thinking as someone half his age. At an age when many comics industry workhorses would either retire or bask in earlier glory, George’s creativity was on, 24/7. He was always interested in current events and the culture; just about anything that might spark a story idea or concept. He was constantly coming up with new characters and series, with the intention of owning the copyright. One such feature was Cindy and Her Obasan, a delightful twist on the fairy godmother concept with a Japanese spin, illustrated by fellow Archie Comics alumni Stan Goldberg. I believe George was well aware and proud of his accomplishments, but he was also modest and unassuming, always interested to learn about new markets and outlets for comics, and what was on the horizon. I write this and I can’t wrap my head around the idea that such a vibrant person is gone. George was a true stand-up guy. He was a gentleman, but would speak out when necessary. Most of all, he was a devoted family man. My condolences to his wonderful wife Mary, his beloved daughter Nina, and her husband John. I was very privileged to have known George Gladir. Goodbye, my friend. Batton Lash is a comics creator who since 1979 has written the strip Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre, and was Eisner-nominated in 2002 for his scripting of Bongo Comics’ Radioactive Man.

it adds a whole new ‘appearing out of the past’ aspect more fitting to his name. “I do, however, disagree with a couple of your caption comments. I happen to love Brad Spencer’s colorful Wonderman costume. When you get right down to it, it’s all a matter of personal taste. (At least that’s what I tell people when I go out wearing my boot upon my head.) “I would also like to defend Pyroman’s name. Sure, his powers are electrical rather than fire-based, but as I recall, the crime he was falsely accused of and sent to the electric chair for was murder by arson, and a guy can only hear the word ‘pyromaniac’ thrown at him at his trial so many times before he wants to throw it back at the world in defiance.

udos and congrats to Shane Foley for adapting a John Romita figure from Daredevil #18 (July 1966), the issue a young Denny O’Neil co-scripted while on staff at Marvel at the turn of the year. Randy Sargent added the clarion colors. [Alter Ego hero TM & © 2014 Roy & Dann Thomas—costume designed by Ron Harris; other art elements © 2014 Shane Foley.] Because our letters section got crowded out last issue, we’re playing catch-up this time, dealing with Alter Ego #111-112. (Of course, that still leaves us at least a year behind where we’d like to be, and still putting my own—that’s Roy’s—comments in italics.) Beginning our sprint with #111, which spotlighted the 1968 Nedor Comic Index, we lead off with a missive from a longtime reader and commenter.

“As to why Nedor had a super-hero called Captain Future who was not based on the pulp hero of the same name—well, that’s because they had for reasons unknown already taken the red-headed space adventurer with the robot sidekick and redubbed him Major Mars and cover-featured him for his own and only appearance in Exciting Comics # 1, as can be seen on page 7.” Thanks for the reminder, Jeff. Ye Editor still thinks the color scheme of Wonderman’s costume is godawful—but what does he know? He’s the guy who garbed the 1980s Hourman in purple and red—and Marvel’s 1967 Captain Marvel in green and white! Steve Rowe, whose e-address is sangorshop@gmail.com, no less, sends this info: “A few brief comments on Alter Ego # 11. Nice to see the Nedor Comic Index in color. Like all the Nolan indexes, it’s a good and useful tool, still. Ned Pines’ comic books ran from 1939 to 1956. The first decade had no brands on the covers. Standard Comics was the brand from June 1949 to February 1956, with the brand of Pines Comics from March 1956 to August 1959.

“Ben Sangor and Richard Hughes produced most of the comics material from apparently 1939 to around 1947. As Jeff Taylor writes: “Love all the stuff on the Nedor heroes (another mentioned, Sangor owned a shop that produced material for both great index from Michelle Nolan!) with tons of great color artwork. Ned Pines and his own comics line, ACG, as Especially appreciated the newly well as for DC and other revealed background on some of their more obscure characters like The Ghost. Many considered the comic book version of the character inferior to the original pulp version, stage magician George Chance, who used the tricks of his trade combined with Phantom of the Opera-style makeup (complete, after he later changed his name to The Green Ghost, with a light-up emerald in his tie pin to give his face a ghastly greenish glow) to convince the underworld he was Memories Of A Couple Of Nedor-Do-Wells some sinister specter out to wreak eerie vengeance for their evil (Above:) Covers for two pulp-mag incarnations of a Nedor hero—The Ghost Super-Detective (Spring 1941) and deeds, while the [comics version] The Green Ghost Detective (Spring ’41)—whose wateredseemed to be just another crimedown comic book version was seen in A/E #111. fighting mystic with poor fashion (Right:) In his letter, Jeff Taylor also thanked us for the sense. The panel you printed on “small but welcome appearance by The Scarab” in that page 45, however, revealed [the issue: “After having seen him for years reprinted only in comics version’s] hitherto unmenblack-&-white, I’m impressed with how cool his simple tioned 18th-century origins, and costume looks in color.” To underscore his point, Jeff while he was summoned to the provided us with the splash page of the “Scarab” story present via time machine rather from Exciting Comics #43 (Jan. 1946). Art attributed to than by any supernatural means, Ken Battefield; writer unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

re:

companies. Sangor’s daughter, Jacqueline, was married to Ned Pines during this time. The Nedor division was named after the coowners, Ned and Dora, Dora Pines being Ned’s mother. There seem to be a couple of other shops doing work for Pines, as well, but Sangor did most of it during that time period. “The house ad on page 48 is the work of Dan Gordon. “Glancing at the names of the folks who helped Michelle Nolan back in the day, I see the name of Clay Kimball. Clay was a pretty active fan then, and had a column in Robert Jennings’ Comic World in the mid-1980s. Clay died just a couple of years back. I bought my first Nedor-Better-Standard-Pines comic from him, back around 1971.” Always happy to print more information about the subjects of our issues, Steven. Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.: “Couple of corrections/thoughts on # 111, Roy. Page 10: ‘Black Terror’—entire story is inked/reworked by Frazetta. I don’t know who the other artist(s) are, or even if there is anyone other than FF. It’s almost as if he did it all and then someone retouched the main characters to keep them more on style. I’m sure Frazetta wanted to do more than those funnyanimal text illustrations for Standard. This appears to be one of those efforts. Page 11: I believe ‘The Cavalier’ was always done by Al Camy and Chu Hing. Sam Cooper doesn’t seem likely [as the feature’s artist], despite the Who’s Who credit. Page 12: ‘Don Davis’ is more likely by Ray Thayer (and Chu Hing). It’s not by Moritz. ‘Lady in Red’ is by W.B. Smith, not Thayer.” Sounds like art attributions in Nedor comics are as problematical as ever, Jim. Glad there are people like you (but not very many of them, alas!) around to set the record straight!

The Mary Marvel Marching Society Keith Hammond writes: “Thanks for the article on the Nedor heroes. I very much enjoyed the chance to learn about some heroes I knew next to nothing about. [Also,] Fawcett fan that I am, I very much enjoyed the material on Mary Marvel. The variety of opinions on her was fascinating. I did want to mention Jack Binder’s preliminary sketch for a Mary Marvel cover on page 75: it’s shown with the actual cover to Mary Marvel #2. I wonder, however, if the sketch wasn’t done for the cover of Mary Marvel #4 instead. It’s not an exact match, but the positioning of the lightning bolt matches MM #4 better.” Thanks, Keith! You’re doubtless dead right on this, which is why we’ve printed Binder’s cover for Mary Marvel #4 (Aug. 1946) above, for comparison with the rough and the cover of MM #2 seen in A/E #111. [Shazam heroine TM & © DC Comics.]

Jeff Dreischer: “American Eagle is left off the Exciting roster in Section I, despite being mentioned in the ‘cover features.’ And why is Section II so small? Where (for example) is Thesson? He may not have had a costume (usually only going shirtless), but he had superpowers. And what about the mystical characters? Section II seems to be half as long as it should have been, with no explanation for the oversights. Only super-powers? Nope, The Cavalier is there. Only costumes? Nope, Hale of the Herald is there. Did some pages get left out, or what?” Don’t think so, Jeff.

Perhaps a few of M. Nolan’s 1968 decisions were a bit arbitrary, but you have to put yourself in shoes that are nearly half a century old to grasp the priorities of a super-hero fan back in the late ’60s. To us, the Nedor Comic Index is still what Jeff Taylor called it above, “a good and useful tool.” How many comics reference works still are, after 4½ decades? Jake Oster noticed that we typo’d “Ben O’Connor” instead of “Bill O’Connor” on p. 36 of A/E #111… and wonders if the “Richard E. Decker” with whom Leonard Starr dealt at St. John is the same one who edited Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Anybody out there know one way or the other? Al Rodriguez points out that Joe Simon, whose obit/tribute appeared in #111, “was born in 1913, not 1915.” Sorry… the typo must’ve slipped in while I was editing Jim Amash’s piece. Bernie Bubnis comments on the third part of the Leonard Starr interview, which appeared in #111: “Jim Amash makes it looks easy, and Mr. Starr seems to really be a great interview. It would seem the only way to conduct an interview should be in person. A facial expression or a sideways glance, and a pro like Jim can ‘pick up’ the body language and craft his next question.” A good point, Bernie—yet virtually all of Jim’s many interviews for A/E were conducted over the phone, and you don’t seem to have minded much. We ourselves have a preference for interviews being either in person or via phone, but Richard Arndt and others have done some good interviews for us (e.g., the one with Marv Wolfman in #113) via e-mail. We suspect it depends on the interviewer and interviewee, not the method used. Now, on to some commentary re A/E #112, which spotlighted several features on Superman:

Kim Metzger: “I enjoyed the stuff about Mort Weisinger in Alter Ego # 112. I knew, by the late ’60s, how much of my comics reading had been influenced by Weisinger—partly due to Marvel’s Not Brand Echh parodies mentioning ‘Mort Wienie-burger.’ I can remember in 1970, when Weisinger left and Julie Schwartz took over, how I felt the Superman titles would be sure to improve and move away from all the silliness that had popped up during the Weisinger era. But, after a few years, I found myself missing that silliness.” Denis Parry: “I’ve always felt that Curt Swan’s been criminally underrated over recent years. Yes, Kirby and Ditko are brilliant, but to me Swan’s artwork is the best. He defined the look of Superman for a generation. Curt Swan has a realism, especially in the way that he drew facial expressions, and a clarity of line that few can match. Many thanks for the chance to see his artwork again.” An excerpt from a Facebook review of A/E #112, from KB Chuck Hines’ CLOBBERIN’ TIME’S BAXTER BUILDING BASEMENT!: “An open and unabashed fan letter to Mr. Arlen Schumer: the article on the Weisinger era of the Superman books is not only a tremendous overview, but as this publication [Alter Ego] has gone slick paper, squarebound, and full color, this is the first article/pictorial that makes use of the things we pay extra for. It is a sight to behold! This is the best-looking presentation this magazine (that I own every issue of, as well as copies from Vol. 1 and 2) has ever given us! Damn Fine Work, my friend!! Incredible!!!” Clearly, longtime reader Chuck Hines has in mind a slightly different look for A/E than Ye Editor does, and I believe (as do most others, thankfully) that the addition of full color a year-plus ago, in and of itself, justifies the increase in price. Still, we share his view on Arlen’s pictorial essay, and there’ll probably be more from Arlen in the future… as there was in #118. Eddy Zeno: “Hank [Weisinger]’s ‘requiem’ for his father is insightful, matter-of-fact, and extremely well done. I will always feel a kinship to the sentiments expressed by both Hank and Arlen

corrections & correspondence

when I focused on the positives of Mort’s career in the TwoMorrows book Krypton Companion a few years back. Hank generously helped with that project, as well.” Matter of fact, Eddy, Hank W. also wrote a long letter to us about his father, expanding on what he and Arlen Schumer covered in A/E #112… but, alas, it’s far too lengthy to fit into this section, and will have to become an article all its own, as soon as we can find room for it!

“My favorite piece in this issue was the ‘Spaghetti’ Superman article by Alberto Becattini. I’m wondering what the chances are of DC or some publisher printing these Italian stories in English. As for Batman’s costume being colored red, perhaps the Italians simply like red for their super-heroes. If I’m not mistaken, The Phantom’s costume is also red in the Italian comics. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing another article on the foreign versions of other U.S. characters.” You did, Will, in A/E #120—and others are in the works!

Richard Kyle: “Probably the best example of Joe Shuster’s more finished work is the Sunday Mel Higgins, who wrote the study of Funnyman [comic strip]. Joe once Paul Cassidy’s career for #112, wrote the told me that, because so many following when I asked him to elaborate on artists were in the military, he had why he felt that Cassidy, rather than to do it by himself. I remember Wayne Boring, was Joe Shuster’s first those Sunday strips with great “ghost,” either on “Superman” or pleasure—the art, not the story. otherwise: “Unfortunately, I wrote the Incidentally, Jerry [Siegel] told me piece a while ago and am having a that he was the one who suggested hard time remembering exactly why I the cape for Superman, to create wrote that Cassidy was the first ghost greater illusion of flying. (I think artist. But I seem to think that my they were already doing that in ‘Dr. reasoning was the following: Although Occult.’) And that in the early days [the book collection] Superman: The the two of them worked side by Dailies 1939-1942 notes that both side, and so the profile of the early Wayne Boring and Cassidy responded Superman was his. Also, there’s to the same advertisement, and Wayne some confusion in my remarks [on Boring arrived a few weeks before Kryptonite—Italian Style the 2011 comics fandom panel] in Cassidy in Cleveland in 1939 for fullAlberto Becattini’s report on new “Superman” stories written and the second paragraph of page 66. time work, Paul Cassidy worked in drawn years ago for Italy’s Nembo Kid title garnered a lot of Usually, such stuff is my fault 1938-1939 from home on ‘Federal Men,’ interest—so we prevailed upon our Italian correspondent to send (alas), but this is A/E’s.” Apparently ‘Slam Bradley,’ ‘Spy,’ ‘Radio Squad,’ us the splash page of yet another of that batch. Here, the “S”the transcribed phrase about your and Superman dailies. So Cassidy was less Man of Steel is threatened by kryptonite-wielding dwarves living as a child in 1934 in “northwest actually drawing Superman dailies in “Evil Invader”—a tale drawn by Enzo Magni for Albi del Falconorthern California” was a goof that before he arrived in Cleveland for the Nembo Kid #330 (Aug. 12, 1962). Scripter unknown. sneaked past us, Richard. You go on to full-time position. [© DC Comics.] say how you noticed, in a mom-&-pop “In an interview with Boring that store on that long-ago evening, “two piles of this strange-looking ran in Amazing Heroes # 41 (Feb. 15, 1984), Richard Pachter notes magazine. There was something instantly transforming in the that when Boring saw the Shuster advertisement in Writer’s Digest, experience. Somehow I knew they were new—that they hadn’t he didn’t answer the ad for a few weeks. When he did, Shuster existed before. Apparently I was looking at either Funnies on asked for samples of his work. Jerry eventually asked him to meet Parade—a look-alike promotional item from Famous Funnies—or the in person. After the meeting, Joe and Jerry invited Wayne to work first issue of Famous Funnies itself, the first regularly published with them in Cleveland, which he did. So there was a fair amount comic book.” The rest of the quotation in #112, we’re glad to see, is of time lag…. So I feel fairly certain that Paul Cassidy was drawing apparently more accurate. Superman dailies before Boring ever arrived in Cleveland and

Will Jarvis: “Excellent coverage of Paul Cassidy’s career. It was especially heartwarming to read that he learned how much his work on ‘Superman’ was appreciated by fans, and what an important contribution he made to the Man of Steel. Thanks to you and the various folks who’ve contributed to Alter Ego, the work of so many of the early comics pioneers who toiled in obscurity has now been brought to light. These men and women deserve recognition for what they did. I’m wondering about the financial structure of the Shuster shop with regard to Cassidy and other Superman ‘ghosts.’ Did the payment to the ‘ghosts’ come out of Shuster’s pocket, or did he ask DC for more money to pay for the assistants he needed?” We’re pretty certain, Will, that, as the popularity of Superman grew, National/DC made accommodations for Joe’s growing number of assistants. The company was certainly aware of his shop.

started to work for Shuster there.”

“Here is the response to your questions from Paul Cassidy’s other son: ‘Paul and Inez did not live in Shorewood until they returned from NYC in the later 1960s, at which time he resumed at whatever it is now called—[it] was a vocational arts high school in the 1940s, now a JC [junior college] or trade/industrial arts school. He taught industrial art in the 1940s, and I believe he returned to head up that department in the late 1960s. BTW, when they returned to Milwaukee, they barely lived in Shorewood, buying a duplex on the NW corner of Downer and Edgewood. They sold that when they went into the Milwaukee Protestant Home for retirement.’” Jeff Taylor, back again: “The article on the Weisinger era Superman was wonderful. The word from it that keeps sticking in my head,

re:

inks: 2 Jan. 1956 to 4 Feb. 1956; pencils: 6 Feb. 1956 to 24 March 1956; pencils: 11 June 1936 to 16 June 1956; pencils & inks: 18 June 1956 to 21 July 1956.”

Sing, You Sangors Neal Slowik, who sent us a letter from cartoonist Milt Gross that we displayed in A/E #112’s article on Richard E. Hughes, saw the photo therein of three men, one of whom is presumably ACG publisher B.W. Sangor, and had this to say about that: “I am confident [that Sangor] is the man at center. I have a washed-out and grainy image of him from 1925. The facial features aren’t in perfect focus, but that image shows that he had a distinctive way of parting his hair. The man at center in the article’s photo is the only possible match.” On the other hand, oft-A/E-interviewer Shaun Clancy sent us this: “Right now the man in the middle is credited as being Ben Sangor, according to Mike Vance; but in my talks with [Nedor/Standard publisher] Ned Pines’ daughter (who is also Ben’s granddaughter), she has mentioned the man on the far right as being Ben…. Ned’s daughter just mailed me an original photo of her grandfather on which Ben also wrote a message to his daughter (Ned’s wife), and the image on the photo is in line with the man on the right [being Sangor].” Us, we don’t know the truth of the matter… but we’d been puzzled by the fact that three men’s names are listed on the back of the photo—“CaesarLogan-Sangor”—which led us to assume that Sangor is probably one of the guys on either end. Any other info out there? The photo, by the way, is from the Joey Eacobacci collection.

however, is ‘whimsy.’ I really miss whimsy in comic books. Somewhere along the line, when we started wanting comics to be taken seriously, it got pushed aside and forgotten and now it sometimes seems we see nothing but row after humorless row of graphic violence and despair up on the shelves. Thank God for reprints! Also enjoyed the stuff on Paul Cassidy, Leonard Starr, and Richard E. Hughes (now there’s a man who knew whimsy!), but the article I really went wild over was the one on Italy’s Nembo Kid. Fascinating look at how an American icon could be adapted to fit into another cultural milieu in those days…. Did some research online and discovered this great website called ‘Cronologia Albi del Falco Nembo Kid’ (www.glamazonia.it/old/articoli/albifalco/ crono.htm). Sure, it’s all in Italian, but that’s what the good ol’ Google translator is for, and besides, the site is nice enough to have the original American names in parentheses beside the Italian ones, so I was able to find out that in Italy Supergirl was known as Nembo Star (I like the sound of ‘Cloudstar’… it has a princess feel to it), the Joker was called Jolly (good clown name), and Bizarro was redubbed Duplex (I hear they’re cheaper to rent)….” Alberto Becattini himself sent these additions and corrections: “[In the] Paul Cassidy Checklist, p. 27—I have double-checked re Cassidy’s contribution to the Red Ryder newspaper strip. Apparently he ghosted on writing, not art, for six weeks, circa 1940. [As for the] Leonard Starr interview, p. 41—Frank Riley’s name is mentioned several times in the interview, but Starr’s actual instructor at the Art Students League was Frank Joseph Reilly (1906-1967), who taught there for over 29 years. P. 43—As far as I know, besides the assistants on On Stage mentioned by Starr, there were others. Frank Bolle (background pencils) 1957-1961; Werner Roth (assistant pencils) 1961-1963; Bill Kresse (background pencils) c. 1964-1966; Tom Scheuer [aka Sawyer] (ghost art) 1 month, 1970; John Sprang (assistant pencils) c. 1972; Jack Sparling (assistant pencils) c. 1975. “P. 44—On the Flash Gordon daily strip, Starr did the following ghosting: pencils & inks: 31 Oct. 1955 to 31 Dec. 1955; pencils, some

Steven Rowe informs us: “Richard Hughes shows up in the 1940 census as ‘Richard Hughes,’ so he’d already apparently made that his legal name by that time. He lists himself as a writer for a publishing house, and his wife as a secretary for a magazine distributor. They were living at W. 183rd Street then and had been for the past five years (the year they were married). He was still living with his parents as Leon Rosebaum in 1930. The ‘Story of Tolerance’ is most likely from an early issue of Real Life Comics (lettering by Ed Hamilton). The art on the ‘Natch’ story is by Bob Wickersham. Benjamin Sangor died in 1953. TNT [magazine] lasted around 5 issues (I have several of them), popular tabloid format on very cheap paper.” Gary Perlman adds these notes on the recent renditions drawn by Shane Foley and Larry Guidry of splash panels from “Herbie” stories written in the 1960s by ACG editor Richard E. Hughes which have never seen print: “It was a treat for me to see splash pages for three unpublished ‘Herbie’ stories. As you may know, Herbie’s appearance evolved from Forbidden Worlds to Herbie comics, becoming shorter and rounder and following a strict color scheme. Remarkably, within the first Herbie comic, our hero is taller and thinner in the first story than in the second. Shane Foley’s Fat Fury in ‘Bughouse Blues!’ is more spherical than traditional. Larry Guidry’s Herbie in the other two stories is a short, thin Herbie with Forbidden Worlds-style shaggy hair. Randy Sargent’s light blue pants and matching shoes in ‘Cute Li’l Tiddlewumpus!’ and Larry Guidry’s purple pants in ‘Humperdink Ray!’ both broke new ground. In just two early ‘Herbie’ stories in FW did Herbie’s pants deviate from the classic blue: gray blue ‘Herbie’s Quiet Saturday Afternoon!’ in FW # 73, and brown ‘Herbie and the Spirits!’ in # 94. When these two stories were reprinted, ‘Spirits’ in Herbie # 17 and ‘Afternoon’ in # 23, the pants were classic blue. To me, this implied an intent. Herbie, the most interesting super-hero ever, always wore exactly the same clothes. You can learn more about Herbie’s evolution at herbiepopnecker.com/examples/evolution, along with many annotated examples in many categories. Keep up the great work with ACG history!” SPECIAL SILVERMAN NOTICE: Veteran reporter and announcer (and comic book scribe) Ed Silverman was interviewed by Shaun Clancy in A/E # 122… and mention was made of his e-book Brief Encounters with the Famous, the Near Famous, and the Not So Famous. Ed adds this information about acquiring this fascinating memoir of his wide-ranging multi-media career: “It’s available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and most e-book vendors. It is also available at the website for which I write—www.voiceofnc.com.” Try it—you’ll like it! Send all those comments and corrections, whether electronically or by shoe leather, to: Roy Thomas 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135

e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com

And don’t forget—you can connect up with the Alter-Ego-Fans online list at group.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans. If you have trouble getting on board at first, simply contact Web overseer Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll walk you through it. AlterEgo-Fans is where the Golden and Silver Ages still live—and as it grows, it can become ever more of a forum for thoughts on the early decades of comics, as well as comments on and potential ideas for this magazine. Give it a look!

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#182 March 2014

In This Edition—

OTTO BINDER & Friends!

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7th BURGLAR: Owwwww! 8th BURGLAR: We’re licked! Take us to jail! WATCHER: Look! It’s the great Captain Cruncher in action! Gee whiz! Oh boy! Yayyyyy!

Part IV

Abridged & Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck FCA EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1974), the prolific science-fiction and comic book writer renowned for authoring over half of the Marvel Family saga for Fawcett Publications, wrote Memoirs of a Nobody in 1948 at the age of 37, during what was arguably the most imaginative period within the repertoire of “Captain Marvel” stories. Aside from intermittent details about himself, Binder’s capricious chronicle resembles very little in the way of anything that is indeed autobiographical. Unearthed several years ago from Binder’s file materials at Texas A&M University, Memoirs is self-described by its author as “ramblings through the untracked wilderness of my mind.” Binder’s potpourri of stray philosophical beliefs, pet peeves, theories, and anecdotes was written in freewheeling fashion and devoid of any charted course— other than allowing his mind to flow with no restricting parameters. The abridged manuscript—serialized here within the pages of FCA—will nonetheless provide glimpses into the idiosyncratic and fanciful mind of Otto O. Binder. In his fourth excerpt, Otto concludes “The Modern Pied Piper”—a chapter pertaining to his four-colored profession. —P.C. Hamerlinck.

As I was saying, you give an artist a neat, simple scene like that and he blows his top. Insists it will make the panel too crowded, and there’s too much wording. So the artist cuts it down to a close-up of the crook’s face, showing pain, as hero’s fist smacks him on chin. Crook says, “Ug!” Hero says, “All eight of you will get the same!” But actually, that’s a good device sometimes used by artists simplifying a scene down to its essentials. It’s not that they’re lazy—no more than you or I. But scenes that take in too big a scope come out a mess. A good example is where a writer may ask for a mob scene of a crook’s car mowing down people at a busy intersection. The artist can simply show two people talking, one pointing offstage excitedly and saying: “Holy smoke! Look! That crook’s car is mowing down all those people!” The reader’s imagination supplies the rest. Tricks of the trade. Another trick the writer uses quite often, to save time and needless repetition, is to shorten words and names down to a sort of code. For instance, your hero, Captain Cruncher, becomes just “CC” in the script. The villain, who may be Snatcher Snyde, becomes “SS.” And all superfluous words are left out. A typical description for a scene may then reduce to this: “CC leaps from bg to st where SS guns RT and VB, while inv misfires, flames to offstage. Don’t fgt SS’s R.K.T.G. & CC clk.” All as clear as day, but the artist comes to me and says he can’t

ow let me tell you about artists. Queer fellows, those artists. Temperamental? A writer gives them a perfectly simple scene to illustrate, such as …

SCENE: Show front and back view of a big mansion. Burglars rushing out with swag, eight of them, armed with pistols, rifles, bombs and machine-guns. But hero comes leaping from airplane, felling them all with one mighty blow. Also show fire on the roof, and mob scene in distance. Fill up rest of space with tenement background, wash hanging on the line, and two women gossiping while their lazy husbands sit on the fire escape, and a gang of kids play baseball in the street. BURGLAR: We’ve got the swag, which consists of a complete set of Rogers silverware, plenty of jewelry, and a sack of gold! Let’s lam now before Captain Cruncher shows up — Ulps! He’s already here! HERO: Hello, gents! Think you’re going to get away, eh? All your bullets and bombs are missing me, as usual. And now, take this! SOUND: POW! BAM! WHACK! THUD! WHAM! SOK! 2nd BURGLAR: Aghhhh! 3rd BURGLAR: Ghaaaa!

Tokyo TKO In the WWII-archived tale “Tokyo Takeoff” (Wow Comics #40, Jan. 1946), scripter Otto Binder exercised the fine art of the fist-on-chin sound-bite as The Phantom Eagle and his Phoenix Squadron disembarked in the Land of the Rising Sun. The story was skillfully illustrated by our late comrade/ FCA columnist, Marc Swayze. [Phantom Eagle TM & © 2014 the respective copyright holders.]

FCA (Fawcett Collectors Of America)

on paper, the inked drawings go to the engraver and printer, which is a vast new story in itself. Visit an engraver’s plant sometime and watch this fascinating process, a triumph of modern technology. That reminds me, I must go myself sometime.

UGHs & ULPs Binder also explores in Memoirs the gamut of sounds released by various hooligans when thumped, whether it was Minute-Man hitting Hitler in Binder’s “One Minute With Minute-Man” (Master Comics #46, Jan. ’44; art by Phil Bard) or Spy Smasher bashing Dr. Blizzard in Binder’s “The Blizzard Blitzkrieg” (Spy Smasher #9, Dec. ’42; art by Alex Blum). Both scripts by OOB. [Minute-Man, Spy Smasher TM & © 2014 DC Comics.]

understand a word of it, the stupid fellow. I took one look at it and said, “Why, it’s simple. It means …” I stopped. You know, I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, either. I don’t know to this day what it means. I must give you the lexicon of sound-symbols we use for crooks, when socked by the hero. Now this set of sound-symbols takes great study and care, and must not be misused by the writer. First, as the hero approaches, the villain always says “Ulps!” or for variation “Gulp!” Also “G-G-Gulp!” Notice the delicate added drama in that last variation. “G-G-G-G-Gulp!” Doesn’t that just make it all come alive, how the villain is quaking in his boots as the dauntless hero comes dashing? The impact sounds of fist on chin are legion but these samples will suffice: POW! SOK! BAM! WHAM! WHACK! WHACKO! KABAM! BOP! REBOP! THUD! KERSMASH! Oh, there are endless variations. But note, they must also be used with discrimination and a sense of drama. For a weak sock you would use POW! For a harder blow: BAM! (WHAM! is harder than BAM!, then. Didn’t you know?) And, of course, for an all-out Sunday punch you must use something terrific like KABOOM! I’m telling you, it takes deep study and care. A WHAM! in the wrong place can just ruin your story, when WHACKO! is called for. Also, the noises emitted by thugs when struck are a whole new research in themselves. Where do you use “YIIIIII!”? At what point is “GHAAAAAA!” infinitely better than “AGHHHHHHH!”? Does “ERKKKKK!” denote more or less discomfiture than “AWRKKKK!”? See if you can figure it out for yourselves. And the writer is never an expert until he knows at what crucial crisis in his story it should be “GHAAA!” or “GHAAAAAA!” or “GHAAAAAAAAAAA!” A couple of letters too few or too many and the story is hopeless, just hopeless. Anyway, there you have some of the inside story of how comics are made. After the writer and artist have poured out their genius

Now, let’s say a final word about the comics. Good or bad, I think they are here to stay, like rain and taxes. They are estimated to have a sold monthly circulation of fifty million, and a total reader audience—counting exchanged copies—of at least double that. Best-selling books sometimes hit a million copies. There are comics magazines that sell a million every month of the year. I’m still trying to think of a final word to say about the comics. Oh well, let’s just say “GHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Next: WHITHER! WHITHER! WHO’S GOT THE WHITHER?

Otto Binder’s Magic Words

The Writer’s Plan to Save Captain Marvel Adventures

by Brian Cremins Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

ver the course of their illustrious crime-fighting career, Billy Batson and Captain Marvel saved the world—and often the universe—from countless villains: the terrible Ibac, the devious Mr. Mind, the diabolical Black Adam. Once they even saved Dr. Sivana and the lovely Beautia from Attila the Hun and his awful table manners (in Captain Marvel Adventures # 20, Jan. ‘43). By 1952, however, Billy and the Captain were struggling. No magic word or talking tiger could save them from the crime, horror, and romance comics that had been growing in popularity since the war. And while Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent would not appear until 1954, The Marvel Family and Fawcett Publications had another, more immediate threat to face: the ongoing legal battle with DC Comics and its allegations of copyright infringement.

Deadly Times By the time “Captain Marvel Battles King Kull and the Seven Sins” appeared in print (Captain Marvel Adventures #137, Oct. 1952; art by C.C. Beck) the tale’s writer, Otto O. Binder, was already contemplating the course of the Captain’s continuing exploits… but the hero’s journey was destined for an ill-fated end. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

With the help of a magic word, Billy and his alter ego managed to solve even the most complex problems. But who would rescue Billy, and Mary Marvel, and Captain Marvel Jr., and Mr. Tawny? Would Fawcett’s writers and artists bring new life, energy, and momentum to The Marvel Family? While the boy reporter and the World’s Mightiest Mortal were busy with King Kull and the Seven Sins in the October 1952 issue of Captain Marvel Adventures (# 137), Otto Binder set out to answer those questions. How might he, C.C. Beck, and editors Wendell Crowley and Will Lieberson save the fantastic world they’d created for Fawcett Publications? Binder didn’t speak a magic word, but he did the next best thing: he sat down at his typewriter. While Binder may not have succeeded in reviving Captain Marvel’s fortunes, he did leave behind a list of ideas for Beck and

Literature Out Of This World In the early 1950s, Sam Moskowitz, editor for Hugo Gernsback’s magazine ScienceFiction Plus, hired Otto Binder to write new stories under his “Eando Binder” byline. A Binder tale appears in the \March 1953 issue of SFP, which features a painted cover by another comic book legend, Alex Schomburg. [TM & © the respective copyright holders.]

for the Fawcett editors. That typewritten list of ideas, stapled to a copy of a letter Binder had written to a science-fiction editor, survives in the Otto Binder Collection at Texas A&M University’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. It has never before been published. This past summer, I requested and read copies of several Binder items of correspondence and manuscripts from Cushing Library… the Memoirs of a Nobody text, various postcards and letters to family and friends, and query letters to magazine publishers. I’d also asked to see Binder’s letters to science-fiction fan and historian Sam Moskowitz. In the early 1950s Moskowitz served as the editor for Science Fiction Plus and asked Binder to contribute new stories under the “Eando Binder” byline, the joint pseudonym Otto and his brother Earl had invented in the 1930s. Moskowitz, according to Bill Schelly’s Words of Wonder, “specifically wanted stories that harkened back to the ‘good old stuff’ like the Eando tales of the 1930s.” Binder and Moskowitz’s friendship was more lasting than the short-lived magazine. As Schelly points out, Binder left most of his papers, notably those concerning his brief career with Otis Adelbert Kline’s literary agency and his work as a science-fiction writer, to Moskowitz. Binder’s letters to Moskowitz offer fascinating insights into the Captain Marvel writer’s creative process. These letters also reveal his pragmatic approach to the comic book and science-fiction markets. As I finished reading the digital scan of Binder’s October 15, 1952, letter to Moskowitz, I found a typewritten list of seven items. Someone, maybe Binder himself, had taken a pencil and

FCA (Fawcett Collectors Of America)

According to Binder, the comics of the 1950s continued to sell because of the loyalty of their young readers, who were hungry for tales of delight and adventure. “Of course,” Binder admits, “the comics have one basic factor on their side over pulps—they contain pictures.” The writer had confidence that this new kind of sciencefiction magazine would be a success despite the limitations of the pulp format: “But discounting […] [a pulp magazine’s lack of pictures or cartoons] and other factors, one thing stands out—that kids are a terrific and never-ending market for things they like.” What evidence does Binder have that such a huge market of loyal readers exists? He provides Moskowitz with examples from a market study conducted by Fawcett Publications: A certain number of letters come in from the kids to the comics editors. Fawcetts [sic] made a statistical tabulation and found their ages ranged from 6 to 18, but the group from 9 to 14 far outweighed them all. In short, that 9-14 agegroup of kids is a big pit into which you can pour endless comics and never fill it up.

Kiss-Off In Binder’s “The Terror Out of the Past” (CMA #20, Jan. ’43; art by C.C. Beck & staff), Billy/Captain Marvel’s chief concern wasn’t with antagonists Attila the Hun or Dr. Sivana—but with the doc’s dazzling daughter, Beautia! Such mirthful story sequences, however, had faded considerably towards the end of Captain Marvel’s career. The CMA team endeavored to have more of Billy Batson in the stories; Beck had always viewed Billy as the true hero of the tales, but claimed that at one point Fawcett management sent down an order for less Billy and more CM, even suggesting killing off Billy. By the end of 1953, the death of Billy and his alter ego happened anyway. [Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

written a large black ‘X’ on the page. I realized I’d stumbled across something unexpected. This wasn’t a list of ideas and suggestions for Moskowitz’s new magazine. I’d found Binder’s ideas for reviving Captain Marvel’s sales and popularity. We have no way of knowing when Binder typed these suggestions. His letter to Moskowitz, however, provides us with some context. I suspect Binder composed his ideas on how to return Captain Marvel Adventures to its former glory after writing the October 15th letter to Moskowitz, a note filled with advice on how to market science-fiction stories and magazines to younger readers. “Sometimes the zaniest ideas come out of a clear blue sky,” Binder writes in the opening paragraph of the October 15th letter. Then he offers Moskowitz a suggestion: develop a science-fiction magazine for younger readers, those same readers who read and enjoy the comics. If Science Fiction Plus is a success, “why not aim [a magazine] directly at the juvenile market?” asks Binder. “By this I mean deliberately tailoring a magazine and its stories for the younger set, say from 9 to 14.” Binder then compares comic book and pulp magazine sales figures: Why do comics-mags sell far more copies each month than pulps? How can close to 500 comics mags keep selling (despite periodic ups and downs) in the neighborhood of 200,000 minimum to one million a month? Why is it that the total national comics sales is 60 million a month? As compared to what for the pulps? Far less, I know. And even in their hey-dey [sic] some years back, all the pulps combined never reached that amazing total.

Binder admits that his suggestion “is frankly a purely ‘mercenary’ angle.” Then again, he adds, it might prove to be an interesting challenge to produce well-written, quality sciencefiction for younger readers. Binder insists that even stories of “juvenile ‘blood-and-thunder’” should be created with grace and intelligence, not “‘written down’ or corned-up… no more than Heinlein’s juvenile books which sell I’ve heard to many an adult as well as [to] kid[s].” Anyway, he adds, “what’s wrong with entertaining kids? (And also thereby ‘training’ them to buy ‘adult-type’ [science fiction] as they grow older?)” Perhaps this letter of advice inspired Binder to imagine ways to increase sales of Captain Marvel Adventures. As any reader of Binder’s letters will tell you, he, like Beck, enjoyed corresponding with friends and, later, with fans. Like other writers and artists of their generation, Binder and Beck used their letters as a laboratory for ideas. Towards the end of his life, for example, Beck shared drafts of essays and short stories with his Critical Circle, a group of correspondents that included artist and comics historian Trina Robbins, science-fiction writer and fanzine editor Dick Lupoff, and current FCA editor P.C. Hamerlinck. I imagine Binder finishing his letter to Moskowitz, sitting at his desk, and daydreaming: what next? He’d been imagining the future since the late 1930s when he and Earl began publishing the adventures of Adam Link in Amazing Stories. Now he had to think of his own future and the future of his family. Would Captain Marvel continue to play a significant role in his professional life? And, with a decade of comic book writing behind him, what had he and his colleagues, especially Beck, accomplished? Maybe when he sat down again at the typewriter Binder decided to take his own advice. If it works for Moskowitz, it might work for us, too. What had made Captain Marvel so successful in the first place? Binder did what he’d always done, what he did best. He sat down and he began to write. Here are his ideas for Captain Marvel Adventures, tucked away for the last sixty years with a copy of his letter to Moskowitz: Questions—on what to do about CMA from now on ….. 1) Keep abreast of times and present market with Korean war and horror stories. 2) Keep ads out of CMA, or keep the number of CM story pages as high as possible, so the kid gets his money’s worth and can’t compare CMA with Superman and find he gets much more there. (Publishers, please note.)

Otto Binder’s Magic Words

3) Note to Beck—-why not go “hog-wild” on action in the war stories, and hog-wild on the shocker scenes in the horror stories—-and then settle back to his usual unique form in the other two stories? Thus giving a balanced book of variety.

or switch in editorial policy can be engineered by the editors if they work up something more tangible to go by. […] Any writer welcomes this black-and-white clear-cut interpretation or presentation of “new policy.”

4) Note to editors—-It may be redundant to say it, but writers and artists, if they have any pride, want to give their best work. I believe Beck and I have always had pride in CMA. I suggest to the editors, when “violent criticism” of story and art are out of proportion, it has the wrong effect.

Binder’s notes raise a number of interesting questions for readers and for comic book scholars. First, he provides us with historical evidence of how comic book companies produced their titles at the close of the Golden Age. In the past few years, critics have begun to explore the nature of collaboration in comic books produced from the late 1930s to the dawn of the underground comix movement of the 1960s. While some writers, such as Hillary Chute at the University of Chicago, focus their attention on comics produced by a single writer/artist, other scholars, notably Charles Hatfield at California State University, Northridge, have begun to study the nature of collaboration and comics.

I think what we all need here is not to place “blame,” not [sic] yet to establish who is “right” or “wrong”—but to achieve a sensible meeting of minds as to what is best for CMA. And that means “compromise” from all of us. 5) Since the entire market dropped recently with a dull thud, I think it obvious that CMA did not “deteriorate” all alone as to art-and-story. Other factors entered strongly. But I do suggest or agree that rather than sitting back and twiddling our thumbs, we attempt to “jack up” CMA according to modern trends. 6) I think on this point we can all agree—-the stories should have more of Billy Batson and his doings and problems. I’m trying to get more BB in. 7) Suggest that the editors at times jot down story-ideas or plots, indicating what new trends or approaches they would like to see. The writer, for instance, is sometimes told to whip up something “new” and “unique” but with no real guidance as to what the editors mean, unless they themselves work up a “framework” or “blueprint.” I think that a smoother change

Second, Binder’s list provides details of his working relationship with Beck. While names like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and, more recently, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples are counted among the most innovative creative teams in the history of comics, Binder and Beck’s significant contributions to the art of the American comic book have been overlooked. What would Beck have thought of Binder’s desire for the artist to “go ‘hog-wild’ on action in the war stories”? Later in their careers, Binder and Beck had a somewhat contentious professional relationship, even as their friendship remained strong. We know, for example, that, as much as Beck admired Binder’s talent as a writer, the two disagreed on the direction comics began to take in the 1950s and 1960s. In his essay “Name Calling and Verbal Abuse in the Comic World,” published in The Comics Journal # 131 (Sept. ‘89), Beck describes his disagreements with Binder when the two worked on Fatman, the Human Flying Saucer in 1967. Beck first shared the article with his Critical Circle in a letter dated March 15, 1989. He asked the members of the Circle if the essay would “offend some readers who will be up in arms at my statements? Will I be shouted down and forced into retirement for writing it?” Beck explains the breakdown in his working relationship with Binder as an example of how two artists found a way to disagree without sabotaging their friendship or their continued admiration for each other’s work. After Beck agreed to draw the Fatman series, he learned that Binder had a new approach to writing comic book scripts based on his experiences in the field following the demise of Fawcett’s comic book line. While Beck had left the comic field to work as a commercial artist, Binder continued to write for different publishers—particularly for DC Comics—up to and throughout the 1960s. According to Beck, Binder gave him a lesson in the demands of the new comic book marketplace of the ’60s: “The big thing today is to have no plot or character development in comic stories but only panel after action-packed panel showing people calling each other rotten names and insulting each other at the tops of their voices,” [Binder] declared.

War Is Hell—And Horror In the 1950s, for Captain Marvel to remain in the game, Binder felt it was imperative for Fawcett to “[k]eep abreast of times and present market with Korean war and horror stories.” The writer applied both horror and war genres in his less-than-whimsical “Captain Marvel Fights the Mongol BloodDrinkers” (CMA #140, Jan. ’53), incompatibly illustrated by C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza. Back in Alter Ego V3#6 (Fall 2000), Golden Age comic book writer extraordinaire William Woolfolk described Fawcett’s brief flirtation with horror themes in “Captain Marvel” stories to FCA readers as “a grotesque and futile joining.” [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

Beck explains that he “was not at all ready to agree with Otto’s new view of comic stories as nothing but name-calling contests and told him so.” These disagreements, however, did not diminish Beck’s respect for the work the two had produced in the 1940s and early 1950s: “Our difference of opinion didn’t result in a nasty fight between us but it was apparent that our old cooperative way of working that had served us so well in the ‘40s was no longer possible. We did three issues [of Fatman] together before things came to an impasse.”

FCA (Fawcett Collectors Of America)

All In The Family Author Brian Cremins notes that, by 1952, with the popularity surge of romance, crime, and horror comics, Captain Marvel was “struggling.” But Fawcett Publications’ Circulation Manager and VP Roscoe K. Fawcett proudly maintained to P.C. Hamerlinck during their 1997 meeting that Captain Marvel Adventures was “still one of the top-selling comic books” when the company folded their comics line in 1953. Like almost all super-hero books during that period, Roscoe admitted CMA’s circulation “had gone down some” but said it was still “very healthy and profitable.” In a move to stay competitive during the ’50s, the horror genre continued to creep its way into other Fawcett titles. Otto Binder’s “The Hissing Horror” appeared in The Marvel Family #74 (Aug. ’52), with art by Beck. (The story was later used as inspiration by Filmation Studios for the 1981 Shazam! animated cartoon episode “Best Seller.”) [Shazam heroes TM & © DC Comics.]

In the Feb./Mar. ‘82 issue of FCA/SOB, C.C. Beck published an appreciation of his friend and creative partner. Beck, always the minimalist, selected a simple, direct title for his essay: “Fiction.” He begins with a quotation from Binder who, by 1982, had been dead for almost a decade. The essay reads like one last collaboration between the two men, or perhaps an attempt on Beck’s part to conjure the spirit of the writer with whom he’d produced his best and most lasting work as a comic book artist. “Fiction is not life,” according to Binder. “Fiction shows things the way they ought to be, not the way they are.” Beck elaborates on his old friend’s philosophy of fiction when he explains, “Otto Binder’s fictional characters, from the robot Adam Link to Mr. Tawny the talking tiger and Mr. Mind the talking worm, were never meant to be accepted as real. Otto treated Captain Marvel and his offshoots Mary and Junior as people only living within the fictional world of the comic book, where anything could happen.” In the early 1950s, however, as Binder’s ideas for CMA make clear, the writer was looking for ways to introduce more realistic themes and ideas into Captain Marvel’s “fictional world” while at the same time preserving the sometimes bizarre, often humorous touches that distinguished his and Beck’s work from the competition. Despite making his living as a writer who imagined the future, Binder in the fall of 1952 could not have foreseen that he and his colleagues at Fawcett had only a year left in which to tell Billy Batson’s adventures. Given the large ‘X’ on this list of suggestions, it appears unlikely that he shared these ideas, at least in this form, with his fellow writers and artists. But what might have happened if he’d succeeded in implementing these changes? Would Captain Marvel Adventures have survived the 1950s? What kinds of stories would Binder and Beck have created in the early 1960s if Fawcett had continued to publish its line of comics? Lastly, would fans of Marvel

Comics, with heroes like Peter Parker and Bruce Banner, have enjoyed stories focused on Billy Batson and his “doings and problems”? Fatman was a mere shadow of Binder and Beck’s earlier work and, as Beck himself soon realized, DC’s early-’70s revival of Shazam! would never return readers to the imaginative landscapes of the Golden Age. Unlike Billy, who saved his friends from King Kull’s “sin bombs” in that October 1952 issue of Captain Marvel Adventures, Otto Binder was not able to rescue The Marvel Family. But, as Binder himself said, there is a difference between fiction and reality: while one allows us to imagine what we might become, the other insists on reminding us of what we are. By the fall of 1952, Captain Marvel’s story was nearing its conclusion as the real-world demands of the comic book marketplace posed a greater threat than any ever imagined by Dr. Sivana or Mr. Mind. Meanwhile, Otto Binder, back at his typewriter, kept working, catching glimpses now and then of that other, sometimes better world in his fiction and in his daydreams. [For additional reading on Binder’s relationship with Sam Moskowitz, see Bill Schelly’s Words of Wonder: The Life and Times of Otto Binder. Thanks to Jenny Reibenspies at Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Randy Scott at Michigan State University’s comics archive, Trina Robbins, and P.C. Hamerlinck for providing research materials for this article.] Brian Cremins is an Associate Professor of English at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. He has written about comics for publications that include Alter Ego, The Jack Kirby Collector, the International Journal of Comic Art, and Studies in American Humor. His current project is a book-length study of the cultural impact of the original Captain Marvel. He lives in Chicago and blogs about comics at www.brianwcremins.wordpress.com

Fat Lotta Good It Did Them! C.C. Beck’s cover for Fatman The Human Flying Saucer #2. In 1967, it was apparent to Beck that his old way of working with Otto Binder—a collaboration that had served them very well during the Golden Age—was no longer possible. [Fatman cover TM & © the respective copyright holders.]

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TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans!

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

PRINTED IN CHINA

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n