Alter Ego #127

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No.127 August 2014

WILL EISNER & “BUSY” ARNOLD LETTERS OF QUALITY!

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Heroes TM & © DC Comics; other art © 2014 Jason Paulos & Daniel James Cox.


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!

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ALTER EGO #115

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ALTER EGO #117

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!

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!

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ALTER EGO #120

ALTER EGO #121

ALTER EGO #122

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!

Farewell salute to the COMICS BUYER’S GUIDE! TBG/CBG history and remembrances from ALAN LIGHT, MURRAY BISHOFF, MAGGIE THOMPSON, BRENT FRANKENHOFF, “final” CBG columns by MARK EVANIER, TONY ISABELLA, PETER DAVID, FRED HEMBECK, JOHN LUSTIG, classic art by DON NEWTON, MIKE VOSBURG, JACK KIRBY, MIKE NASSER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

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ALTER EGO #123

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ALTER EGO #126

DENNY O’NEIL’s Silver Age career at Marvel, Charlton, and DC—aided and abetted by ADAMS, KALUTA, SEKOWSKY, LEE, GIORDANO, THOMAS, SCHWARTZ, APARO, BOYETTE, DILLIN, SWAN, DITKO, et al. Plus, we begin serializing AMY KISTE NYBERG’s groundbreaking book on the history of the Comics Code, FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY and more!

We spotlight HERB TRIMPE’s work on Hulk, Iron Man, S.H.I.E.L.D., Ghost Rider, Ant-Man, Silver Surfer, War of the Worlds, Ka-Zar, even Phantom Eagle, and featuring THE SEVERIN SIBLINGS, LEE, FRIEDRICH, THOMAS, GRAINGER, BUSCEMA, and others, plus more of AMY KISTE NYBERG’s Comics Code history, M. THOMAS INGE on Communism and 1950s comic books, FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

Golden Age “Air Wave” artist LEE HARRIS discussed by his son JONATHAN LEVEY to interviewer RICHARD J. ARNDT, with rarely-seen 1940s art treasures (including mysterious, never-published art of an alternate version of DC’s Tarantula)! Plus more of AMY KISTE NYBERG’s exposé on the Comics Code, artist SAL AMENDOLA tells the story of the Academy of Comic Book Arts, FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

Second big issue on 3-D COMICS OF THE 1950s! KEN QUATTRO looks at the controversy involving JOE KUBERT, NORMAN MAURER, BILL GAINES, and AL FELDSTEIN! Plus more fabulous Captain 3-D by SIMON & KIRBY and MORT MESKIN— 3-D thrills from BOB POWELL, HOWARD NOSTRAND, JAY DISBROW and others— the career of Treasure Chest artist VEE QUINTAL, FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

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Vol. 3, No. 127 / August 2014 Editor

Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout

Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor

P.C. Hamerlinck

Comic Crypt Editor Michael T. Gilbert

Editorial Honor Roll

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

Proofreaders

Rob Smentek William J. Dowlding

Cover Art & Colors

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Contents

Writer/Editorial: The Doctor Is In! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 “Sincerely Yours, Busy” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Ken Quattro on Golden Age letters from Quality publisher “Busy” Arnold to Will Eisner & Jerry Iger.

“My Comic Mom!!” – Part 2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 More remembrances by Robyn Dean McHattie of artist and mother Vee Quintal Pearson.

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code . . . . . . 42 Chapter 4 of Amy Kiste Nyberg’s 1998 work on comic censorship. Enter—Dr. Wertham!

“The Will of William Wilson”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Still more of the long-lost 1940s “JSA” story—first time in color.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Now That’s A Fan! (Part 3) . . . 59 Michael T. Gilbert showcases more fans who are nuttier than you are!

Comic Fandom Archive: He Remembered Comic Books . . 65 Bill Schelly introduces Jim Harmon's seminal comics nostalgia piece—from 1957!

re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 71 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #187 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 P.C. Hamerlinck presents Otto Binder, Brian Cremins, C.C. Beck—and Pete Costanza.

On Our Cover: It’s pretty “busy,” isn’t it—as befits a cover that spotlights some of the most colorful characters of the 1940s Quality Comics Group owned and operated by Everett “Busy” Arnold. But the man towering over the super-heroes and lowlifes is Will (“Bill”) Eisner, as rendered by artists Jason Paulos and Daniel James Cox, the latter being the gent who provided the lush portrait of Joe Kubert for A/E #116 a couple of years ago. For more about this cover, see pp. 24. [Black Condor, The Ray, Midnight, Doll Man, The Sniper, Plastic Man, The Human Bomb, Firebrand, Blackhawk, Stormy Foster/The Great Defender, Phantom Lady, & Miss America TM & © DC Comics; other art elements © 2014 Jason Paulos & Daniel James Cox.] Above: One of the other features in this issue is the chapter in Amy Kiste Nyberg’s book on the history of the Comics Code that deals with that “scourge of the comics,” Dr. Fredric Wertham. This effective little caricature, done by Rob Donnelly, can be found on his art website RobDraw.com. Check it out, why dontcha? [© Rob Donnelly.] 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.


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writer/editorial

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The Doctor Is In!

ell, Alter Ego is finally doing an issue devoted in large part to the famous/infamous Dr. Fredric Wertham, who in the late 1940s and first half of the 1950s was the “scourge of comics.” Two issues, in fact.

years. Like many another fan-critic or fan-historian at the time, I accepted the received wisdom that comic books, despite their stylistic similarities to newspaper comics strips often read by adults, had become and would henceforth forever be a medium produced for and aimed totally at children—and at those relatively few grownups who were willing and able to enjoy unsophisticated stories and concepts that might (or might not) be accompanied and enhanced by reasonably sophisticated art.

This time around, we’re reprinting—with beaucoup photos and art examples—the chapter of Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s 1998 book Today, of course, that child-centric comic book world that we Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code that deals with inhabited in the early 1960s is long gone, with the average reader Wertham’s life and career, including—but not limited to—his nowadays two or three times the age of the typical buyer of fifty indelible interface with comic books. Over the past two months, years ago. In my unabashed view, writer and editor Stan Lee, we’ve been made familiar, if we weren’t previously, with some of considerably aided but not simply carried by the artistic and story his early anti-comics articles, talents of Jack Kirby and Steve culminating in his 1954 book Ditko in particular, began that Seduction of the Innocent… then transition slowly and not too surely with his star-witness testimony at in 1961-62, with Fantastic Four and the spring ‘54 hearings of the The Amazing Spider-Man. Others Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile contributed in significant ways by Delinquency. And this issue, that the end of the decade, including Jim televised high point (or low point) Steranko, Neal Adams, Denny of what some have called his O’Neil, et al. Some seem to feel that “crusade against comic books” will I myself contributed in some slight be put in perspective by an degree to the “maturing” (in some overview of his life’s work. One ways, actually the re-maturing) of enterprising soul, Hans Kiesl, even comics; if so, I hasten to assure one did some fishing around in his and all that it was without any native Germany and came up with conscious aim on my part, except to Dr. Wertham’s birth certificate, sell comic books to whoever would which delighted us no end. Amy buy them and to keep Stan Lee Nyberg’s book does such an able happy and myself amused and job of relating the story of the employed at the same time. forces that led to the 1954-55 Probably the three other “youngadoption of the Comics Code that sters” mentioned two sentences we’re overjoyed when we can add back had not dissimilar motivato her research and analysis tions, whether working for Marvel, anything of which future comics DC, Warren, Charlton, or historians can make use. The Good, The Bat, And The Ugly whomever. A signal contribution by fan and cartoonist Steve Stiles to Don & And in A/E #128, we’ll not only Fredric Wertham wrote in his Maggie Thompson’s seminal comics fanzine Comic Art (#4, Dec. 1962). see AKN launch in earnest into the [© Steve Stiles.] follow-up 1966 treatise A Sign for tale of the early days of the Comics Cain: Explorations of Human Violence Magazine Association of America that comics books were “cheap, shoddy, anonymous.” and its Comics Code Authority, but we’ll also be presenting a piece of recent research into the good Doctor’s methodology, based in We—and many others who came after us—were determined large part on his own papers, which have only been accessible for that, whatever the cover price might be (“cheap” or rather less so), the past few years. For a bit more detail, and a sneak peak at a comics would not be “shoddy.” They would be as good as we brand new cover that features a new drawing of him and his could make them… and they would showcase, to the best of our chosen subject matter, see the next-issue ad on the facing page. abilities, material that we felt that open-minded adults, as well as wide-eyed kids, could enjoy. Increasingly, that seems to have come For my own part, over the years I’ve grown a bit more to pass, even if the “kids” part of that equation has been pretty ambivalent toward Fredric Wertham than I once was… but only a much discounted in recent years. bit. As a comics fan-writer and -editor in the first half of the 1960s, I was wholeheartedly antagonistic toward both Wertham and the As for that third Wertham charge: “anonymous”? Stan and DC Code to which his efforts had led. (When I learned that the psychieditor Julius Schwartz and publisher Jim Warren, among others, atrist himself was far from being an admirer of the CMAA’s Code, helped bring the writers and artists who produced the stories out that fact only made me think more of the latter.) of the deep shadows of anonymity by putting credits on the stories again, in greater profusion and with greater honesty than had At the same time, as I often said or wrote during that period, I generally been the case earlier. felt that many of the horror and crime comics of the early 1950s were examples of “wretched excess” that, however great the Numerous professionals of the 1940s and especially the ’50s artistic qualities of some of them, basically asked for the fate have related how they often avoided telling fellow adults what decreed for them in late 1954: total oblivion, at least for some they did for a living, fearful of their scorn. Perhaps because I


writer/editorial

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didn’t live through the dark days that Dr. Wertham helped to bring down upon the comics, I never felt that way even in the ’60s, let alone afterward—and I don’t think Jim, Neal, Denny, or our fellow “first wave” of new pros in the field did, either. I was never ashamed to read a comic book in public or on the subway… or to tell someone (including prospective girlfriends) what I did for a living. If they didn’t like it, they could lump it. I was in it for the long haul… or as long as I could hang on, anyway. Talents like Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta, Frank Brunner, Jim Starlin, and others who came along a few years later are (and were, even in the late ’60s and early ‘70s) often referred to as “the young Turks,” and true it is that they pushed comics even further, and more power to them. But, not to take anything away from them, they didn’t step into quite the same comic book milieu that had existed in 1960. The years 1955-60 were perhaps as close as the Werthams of the world would ever come to remaking comic books in their own limited and limiting image. By the end of the 1960s, that mold would be cracked, soon to be broken—and nobody was ever going put it back together again. But, simply to say that is to acknowledge that Dr. Fredric Wertham was, for a time, a formidable force. And in this issue and the next, we’ll try to give him his due, for better and for worse. Me, I still think it was mostly for the worse.

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle is a registered trademark of Galaxy Publishing, Inc. & Val D'Oro Entertainment, Inc.

Bestest,

P.S.: As for Ken Quattro’s astute, even enthralling annotation of letters exchanged between key Golden Age creators—just turn the page and read all about them!

COMING IN AUGUST

128

#

“Seducing The Innocent” With

DR. FREDERIC WERTHAM! • Seductive new cover by JASON PAULOS & DANIEL JAMES CRAIG!

• CAROL L. TILLEY’s 2012 exposé of DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM’s falsification of research in the 1950s—and the destruction it wrought on the comics industry! Featuring relevant art by EVERETT, SHUSTER, BIRO, WOOD, WILLIAMSON, BECK, COSTANZA, PETER, POWELL, BALD, COLE, DAVIS, DOOLIN, FAWCETTE, SCHOMBURG, FELDSTEIN, & of course BOB KANE! • AMY KISTE NYBERG’s Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, continued! The early days of the Code—and JUDGE CHARLES MURPHY! © DC Comics; in, Wonder Woman TM & Superman, Batman & Rob 4 Jason Paulos & Daniel James Craig. other art © 201

• Plus—FCA starring DENNY O'NEIL & OTTO BINDER—MICHAEL T. GILBERT visits the “Superboy of 1940”—& MORE!!

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“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

Letters From Quality Publisher “BUSY” ARNOLD, 1940-42, To WILL EISNER & JERRY IGER

A/E

by Ken Quattro

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: This fascinating look at first-hand documents—letters sent by Quality Comics publisher Everett M. “Busy” Arnold to artist/writer/entrepreneur Will (aka Bill) Eisner and comics shop head S.M. Iger in the first years of their relationship was originally written by comics historian Ken Quattro for his blog thecomicdetective. The source for the correspondence contained in this piece is the Will Eisner Collection at Ohio State University, in Columbus, OH; Ken is particularly grateful to Susan Liberator for her help in obtaining these documents. The article is rich in information on events and judgments that went on behind the scenes in the early days of both Quality Comics and what would become The Spirit Comic Section; in the latter, done for newspapers rather than as newsstand comic books, Arnold and Eisner were essentially partners. Except for minor textual changes in the nonletter portions of the piece made in the interests of A/E’s “house style,” or occasional inserted information contained between brackets, we have preferred to limit any comments or additional information to our accompanying captions, and let Ken relate the story in his own way, italicized quotations and all….

The Spirit Of Quality A gag photo taken Oct. 13, 1941, showing (left to right) publisher Everett “Busy” Arnold, the comics feature editor of the Philadelphia Record newspaper (whose nickname was “Gap”), and artist/writer Will Eisner. This pic appeared in the 1983 Kitchen Sink volume The Art of Will Eisner. The official name of Arnold’s company was Comic Favorites, Inc.; but its cover colophon read “Quality Comic Group,” so that’s how it was known to readers. Eisner was interviewed for A/E #48, which came out shortly after his passing—while in A/E #34, an issue centered around Quality Comics, “Busy’s” son Dick Arnold, later a Quality editor, was likewise interviewed in depth by Jim Amash. [© the respective copyright holders.] The photo is accompanied by the first “Uncle Sam” splash page, from National Comics #1 (July 1940), apparently written and laid out by Eisner and finished by future Mad magazine artist Dave Berg… and by the very first Spirit page done by Eisner for the Arnold/Eisner partnership’s Weekly Comic Book newspaper supplement, which was only technically renamed The Spirit Section at a much later date. Thanks to the ComicBookPlus website for the former; the latter is reproduced from the 2000 hardcover Will Eisner’s Spirit Archives, Vol. 1, published by DC Comics. [Uncle Sam art © the respective copyright holders; Spirit page © Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

B

efore e-mail, before texting, when only birds tweeted, people wrote letters. Letter-writing was a craft, an art form in deft hands, wherein thoughts could be expressed with nuance not limited to 140 character bursts. For some, though, letters were a cudgel to prod the recipient down a certain path. Business letters were often of this type, and when it came to writing them, “Busy” Arnold was all business: Dear Bill, As I told you over the telephone today, Lou [Fine] has been changing his costumes from month to month especially on The Ray. In the first installment of this feature, he had The Ray wearing a peaked headpiece but in the second installment he left off the peak on this, later it was restored. In some installments The Ray wore slippers and in others he did not have any. Also the stars around the neck of The Ray were omitted in some instances, although Ed Cronin usually added these. I am enclosing a memorandum with some tear sheets and

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would appreciate having you tell Lou to make the costumes of both The Ray and The Black Condor the same each month. Everett Munyan “Busy” Arnold was both Will Eisner’s business partner (in The Spirit comic section) and client of his comic shop. It was in that role as owner of Comic Favorites, Inc., that Arnold wrote (more accurately, dictated) this October 1, 1940, missive. They would always come typed and on company letterhead. This was a business, after all, and Arnold’s concern was for the product he was selling. The elegance of the artwork and the future status of Lou Fine as a Comic Book Legend wasn’t even a consideration. Try and build up the characters in both of these features so that they are more human and likeable. The Ray is in reality Happy Terrill, a reporter who works on The Morning Telegraph. His boss, the city editor, should have a definite name and other characters might be introduced from time to time. While Happy Terrill leads a normal life at most times, he has the power to change to The Ray when he goes in a beam of light and then can perform his wonderful deeds. As The Ray he can also bring people to him by means of the ray forces which he has in his hands. The same sort of build up should be given to The Black Condor and he should be a definite personality who operates as The Black Condor only in times of necessity. Originally you had The Black Condor brought up by birds when his parents (British) were killed by outlaws. I don’t believe that he should be British and in any “build up,” you should naturally assume that he is an American. I assume that you will finish the next HIT and NATIONAL covers within the next few days so that Lou can start working on The Ray for the February issue of SMASH COMICS. Sincerely yours, Busy Eisner once told interviewer Jim Amash, “Busy Arnold and I had a very interesting relationship. I regarded him as a partner and he thought of me as an employee” [Alter Ego #48, May 2005]. When it came to the content of the comic books, it appears there was little doubt as to who was the calling the shots. By the next issue of Smash, Happy Terrill was in more panels than The Ray, and not long after, his boss finally was given the first name of “Steve.” For his part, The Black Condor had soon forgotten his rarely mentioned British origins and apparently his name (Dick Grey), becoming instead an American named Tom Wright. A U.S. Senator, no less.

Ray Of Sunshine (Above:) The splash page of one of the exploits of “The Ray” in which artist Lou Fine drew him wearing his “slippers,” which apparently he sometimes neglected to do. The “stars around [his] neck” (meaning the star-like design) are evident here, too. Clearly, “Busy” Arnold was a stickler for detail—understandably figuring that, if a hero’s costume changed from issue to issue, it would undercut the realism of the stories. Thanks to the since-renamed Golden Age Comic Book Stories website for this image from Smash Comics #22 (May 1941). Lou Fine was covered in depth in A/E #17. Scripter unknown. (Incidentally, Ed Cronin, whom Arnold mentions as doing touchups on art, was one of his early editors at Quality, before he moved on to helm Hillman’s comics line.) [Art © the respective copyright holders; The Ray is now a trademark of DC Comics.]

Lou Fine, in a photo taken circa 1942 in Stamford, Connecticut, by his friend and fellow artist Gill Fox; it first appeared in A/E #17, through the good offices of interviewer Jim Amash.

Within a few months, the business arrangement of Arnold and Eisner had evolved even further. On January 20, 1941, the pair agreed to a joint publishing venture. On that day they signed contracts specifying their coownership of two new properties: Uncle Sam Quarterly and Army and Navy Comics, soon to be retitled Military Comics. While Arnold agreed to pay the artists for their work, Eisner was to receive no money for his editing. Both shared any profits equally. Despite the parity suggested by this new arrangement, however, the hierarchy seemingly didn’t change.


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Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

It’s Good To Be The King! (Left:) By Smash Comics #30 (Jan.1942), Fine was collaborating on “The Ray” with newer artist Bob Fujitani, who’d go on to be a top talent in his own right (and to be interviewed in A/E #23). This action page, also from the GACBS site, doesn’t show the hero’s alter ego, reporter “Happy” Terrill, or his editor—but surely, a year after Arnold’s letter of complaint, the latter had been given his first name of “Steve.” Writers of both comics pages above unknown.

Bob Fujitani,1941. Courtesy of Tony DiPreta.

(Right:) Fine’s splash from Crack Comics #14 (July 1941)—with two Black Condors for the price of one. Writer unknown. The Condor had gotten the American roots that “Busy” wanted him to have in Crack Comics #11 (March ’41), when he turned out to be the spitting image of U.S. Senator Thomas Wright and serendipitously took over the latter’s identity after his assassination. Considering the comics’ severalmonths’ lead-time in those days and the fact that Arnold’s “request” was made in October of ’40, it looks as if, when “Busy” said “Jump!” Eisner & company didn’t bother to ask “How high?” [Art © the respective copyright holders; Ray & Black Condor are now trademarks of DC Comics.]

Dear Bill, The issue of MILITARY COMICS which Julian delivered here yesterday was handled in a very sloppy manner. So for the fifteenth time will you please ask your gang to go over things more closely so that we don’t have so much work on this end of the line. The ears which your boys put on page one and page 33 are very sloppy and you should have new ears made for these pages. Also, you should have whoever puts them on do a better job than they have done in the past. Not only are the ears always dirty and partly torn, but whoever drew the originals looks like they had the palsy. They have to be retouched here by Tony and this work could be eliminated if your office didn’t do such a careless job. Sincerely yours, Busy

But he wasn’t done yet. As he would many times, Arnold added a postscript in his own handwriting. P.S. Please don’t supply any more art work for Military by the artists who did Miss America and The Sniper. They are awful so put Jerry Robinson on these two features—he [is] to do everything except the lettering. Sniper is a good idea but this artist is impossible—also [the] Miss America artist. The “ears” referenced by Arnold that needed retouching by inhouse artist Tony DiPreta were likely paste-over corrections to the artwork. Arnold got his wish as Robinson briefly filled in on “The Sniper.” Eisner must have agreed with the assessment of Maurice Kashuba’s artwork on “Miss America,” as she disappeared from the pages of Military soon after Arnold’s September 17, 1941, letter. Arnold’s comments weren’t restricted to just the comic books.


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

7

Put ’Er There, Partner! The covers of the two comics which were the first thing Arnold and Eisner produced together as partners. The artist of that of Uncle Sam Quarterly #1 (Autumn 1941) is uncertain, though Eisner may have done the layout. The pair may have intended to call their other joint venture Army and Navy Comics, but rival publisher Street & Smith beat them to the newsstands with it, with a title cover-dated May ’41—so they settled for using that phrase in a topline and rechristening the magazine Military Comics, with its first issue cover-dated August ’41. The art for this cover spotlighting the debut of “Blackhawk”—destined to be Quality’s most popular feature ever—is credited to Eisner. Quality’s comic far outlasted Street & Smith’s. [© the respective copyright holders; Blackhawk is now a trademark of DC Comics.]

Sniping At Miss America (Above left:) According to the Grand Comics Database, Maurice Kashuba drew only one “Miss America” story—the final one, in Military Comics #7 (Feb. 1942)—so if it was his artwork Arnold was complaining about, it spelled the death knoll of this pre-“Wonder Woman” super-heroine strip. Elmer Wexler had drawn the first two “Miss America” tales, Tom Hickey the next four. Writer unknown. All art in this montage from the excellent ComicBookPlus website of public-domain comics.

Jerry Robinson, circa 1940-41. Photo courtesy of the artist.

(Above right:) “Busy” wanted Jerry Robinson to take over “The Sniper,” and indeed there’s an artist change starting with Military #8 (March ’42), with credit given by the GCD to Bernard Klein, who was Robinson’s best friend, according to the latter’s interview in A/E #39. Maybe Jerry was moonlighting from Bob Kane’s “Batman” feature and Bernie served as his “beard”—or perhaps the two of them worked on it together? In any event, Vern Henkel, who’d drawn #7, was back on the feature a few issues later. Script by Ted Udall, future story editor at All-American/DC. [© the respective copyright holders; Miss America & The Sniper are now trademarks of DC Comics.]

Bernie Klein, c. 1940-41. Photo courtesy of Jerry Robinson & Bill Cain.


8

Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

etc., and eliminate some of these far shots you have been running. Sincerely yours, Busy This one probably hurt. It can be supposed that Eisner was used to Arnold’s criticisms by now, but they usually were directed at the work of the artists he employed. This hit closer to home. Eisner was the principal artist on The Spirit at this point and probably plotted this story (“The Oldest Man in the World”), as well. Surprisingly, given the revered status that The Spirit enjoys today, Arnold wasn’t alone in criticizing the strip. On September 3rd, Arnold had received a letter from Henry Martin, the sales executive from the Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate which carried The Spirit comic section. Martin had just received the first of the new daily Spirit strip, and after assuring Arnold that “…the whole thing looks grand,” Martin had some words of caution for Eisner. “Some of his well-drawn character faces are still pretty horrible to look at and will probably cause some objections. We still have to be more careful with the daily strips than with the book

“Busy” Signals Arnold didn’t much care for the Spirit story dated Oct. 19, 1941—of which we’re showing the second page (which, in a sense, is also the first page). All art on the actual page 1 was color-held pink and blue (except for the lettering), as per the top panels on this one; that may have been, at least in part, what turned “Busy” off. Repro’d from DC’s Will Eisner’s Spirit Archives, Vol. 3. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

Just a couple of weeks later, on October 3rd, he had something to say about The Spirit, too. Dear Bill, I was able to correct the text on page three of The Spirit in the October 19 issue. It certainly was a good thing this happened on a number 1 issue of the weekly comic book since if it had happened on a number 2 issue, it would have been too late to change it. I think that the October 19 issue of The Spirit was absolutely the worst you have done to date and I don’t think you should run any stories in this groove. This particular episode was altogether too heavy and profound. It is on the philosophical side and will not interest most readers. I think you should make The Spirit more along the usual lines with a good interesting story and plenty of sustained rapid fire action. And the art work could certainly be much better than the October 19 issue which was pretty sad. I think that you might try and get more close-ups of The Spirit, Ebony, Ellen, Commissioner Dolan,

Like Ugly On An Ape If it was “faces… pretty horrible to look at” that worried a sales exec from the newspaper syndicate that distributed what was now titled the Comic Book Section, maybe he had in mind this splash for the Spirit strip for Sept. 1, 1940. From Will Eisner’s Spirit Archives, Vol. 1. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

9

hurry the engraving along….” Lounsbury also forwarded letters to Arnold, Eisner, and Martin detailing complaints from editors from papers in Atlanta and New Orleans. Lounsbury agreed with their complaints that “…the continuity to date is too heavy.” “This is a good criticism, as by now I realize we need a lot of humor and romance as well as high adventure.” Other critics weren’t as delicate with their objections. One that was particularly persistent was Philip H. Love, Assistant Sunday Editor of the Dallas Evening Star: Dear Mr. Martin, Can’t you do something to cause the producers of the Sunday comic book—especially “The Spirit,” daily as well as Sunday— to keep their material within limits that will be more nearly in line with The Star’s character? As you know, I have had occasion to criticize “The Spirit” on several occasions. The worst faux pas of all, as you will recall, was a sequence involving an attempted assassination of the President of the United States. Almost as bad was the recent desecration of the U.S. flag in “Lady Luck.”

Military Bearing (Above:) Maybe “Busy” had the issue number wrong, ’cause he refers to Jerry Robinson as drawing “The Sniper” in Military #7, when the artist is apparently Vern Henkel. But if Arnold thought Henkel’s work was substandard, we must respectfully beg to disagree. That late artist was interviewed in A/E #48. Writer unknown.

Vern Henkel, 1950. Courtesy of the artist, via interviewer Jim Amash.

(Top right:) Chuck Cuidera’s (signed) cover for Military #8 (March 1942). What “Busy” wanted, “Busy” got! And why not? He was paying the bills! For an interview with Charles “Chuck” Cuidera, see A/E #34. [© the respective copyright holders; Sniper & Blackhawk are now trademarks of DC Comics.]

itself, as the strips will be seen by all readers and identified with the other comics, more than the features in the [Sunday] Comic Book itself.”

I have also been mildly irritated by Will Eisner’s handling of the Charles Nicholas “Devils’ Shoes” Cuidera, as a episode in “The student at the Pratt Institute, 1937. Spirit,” for Found on the Tenth February 1 [1942], Letter of the and by what I Alphabet website regard as the unnecby Mark Muller. essary voluptuousness of some of the women in the release for February 15....”

Shortly thereafter, in a letter dated September 22, the Register and Tribune’s Managing Editor, Charles Lounsbury, had similar praise tempered with cautionary advice. “[W]e all like [it] very much with one exception,” wrote Lounsbury, “In strip #14, ‘The Spirit’ socks a cop and exchanges clothing. Actually the striking of a representative of the law really isn’t in keeping with ‘The Spirit’s’ high ideals and all-round cleverness in effecting a means to an end.” He goes on to suggest another scenario, one in which The Spirit politely asks the officer to exchange clothing with him. “If you will, therefore, draw a panel two and a half inches wide, substituting the above suggestion, we will paste it up and

After ripping Eisner for using Adolf Hitler as a character in a recent continuity, Love writes, “We don’t want Hitler in our comic strips. Our strips are fictional, and we don’t want to get them mixed up with real people. A true comic is one thing, but a fictional comic that drags in real people is something else again. It is a hybrid, and we don’t want it.” Even less diplomatic and threatening was a letter from a

Sounds Like A Penalty In Football “Unnecessary voluptuousness of some of the women in the release for February 15 [1942].” So complained a Dallas newspaper editor—so, in the public interest, we thought we’d show you what all the fuss was about. From Will Eisner’s Spirit Archives, Vol. 4. [© Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]


10

Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

reader received by the cartoon editor of the Detroit News and forwarded to Eisner. Dear Sir, This is both a criticism and a request. Clean up your filthy cartoons (referring to the attached clipping), so the kids will have something wholesome to look at. Much pressure can be brought to bear on this sort of thing, you know, so let’s see some improvement within a week’s time. From a father of three In comparison, the complaints Eisner received from Arnold were tame. Even when he made it clear that no detail was too small to escape his notice. On October 31st, Arnold sent a letter to Eisner critiquing the work of a letterer. Dear Bill, Will you please get after Sam [Rosen], your lettering man, and instruct him to make his commas properly in both the weekly comic book and the daily Spirit strips? He uses a straight line with no loop for a comma and this is very bad. Have him use regular commas in the future. Not content with this admonition, Arnold demonstrated in his own hand the punctuation that was causing him so much grief.

I am enclosing [a] check for $730.45 covering the material for issue No. 7 of MILITARY COMICS as per your statement dated October 17. However, there was no Diary Of A Draftee in this issue so I deducted the $15 charge for this. You had four pages of Inferior Man listed whereas this was cut to three pages. However, I imagine the cost of $40 was still the same. You also listed Death Patrol as being six pages whereas it was only five pages but the price of $75 was correct. The Sniper which was done by Jerry Robinson was only five pages in length and I believe you were a bit off on the figure of $104 for this feature. I hope you have the material pretty well in hand for the next issue of MILITARY COMICS. If Jerry Robinson isn’t going to handle X Of The Underground, you had better get Borth or some other artist started on this right away so we can get out a complete book in another week or 10 days. Please have Chuck Cuidera do the next MILITARY cover and also make up a full page of promotion for MILITARY COMICS. In other words, you can make up the page of promotion on everything except the reproduction of the cover and I will have this stripped in by the engraver. I expect to have some covers available next month and will run a promotion on MILITARY COMICS in everything except FEATURE COMICS. Sincerely yours, Busy And he couldn’t help adding a handwritten postscript: P.S. Is Cuidera getting ahead on Blackhawk? If he only takes about 12 days for each 11 pages of Blackhawk in Military Comics, he should be able to turn out some work for the Quarterly now. The first inkling that events in the outside world were affecting their product was mentioned in Arnold’s letter of December 12, 1941, just days after the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor. After reprimanding Eisner for a continuity mistake in the Spirit daily, Arnold has some thoughts about the direction of the comic books. In view of present war conditions, don’t you think it would be best to have the Blackhawks get a new base and operate from the Pacific? Also, have the Hero Stamps about Americans rather than Britishers. A good subject for the first American Hero Stamp is Captain Kelly who was killed sinking the Japanese battleship yesterday.

Play It concerns Again, George! Usually, though, Arnold’s were not so trivial. Money Tuska, who illustrated the cover and all “Uncle Sam” material wasGeorge the main subject of his November 6 letter. Along with a few in Uncle Sam Quarterly #3 (Summer 1942), did this re-creation of the suggestions, of course.

former in later years. Courtesy of Dewey Cassell. [© the respective copyright holders.] Dear Bill,

George Tuska, around the time he did the re-creation. Photo courtesy of Dorothy Tuska and Dewey Cassell; the latter celebrated the artist’s life and work in A/E #99. [© Estate of George Tuska.]

I think this same applies to the material for UNCLE SAM QUARTERLY No. 3. I don’t believe you should let Ed Cronin go through with the original plans on this magazine but should have new up to the minute stories written for the third issue. In UNCLE SAM QUARTERLY No. 3, I think that you should eliminate the four pages of illustrated poetry since this doesn’t “ring the bell” with kids. Sincerely yours, Busy Arnold once again got what he wanted. Uncle Sam #3 quickly took on a more sobering tone. No longer was the titular character circumspect in his choice of foes. The George Tuska-drawn cover depicted a resolute Uncle


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

Cry “Uncle”! Three of the five “Uncle Sam” stories in Uncle Sam Quarterly #3 (Summer ’42), the first issue prepared after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, spotlighted the Japanese—but Nazis still made an appearance in at least two of them. Even in the second yarn (spoiler alert!), a “Native American” agitator would turn out to be a Nazi in disguise. In the third, both Germany’s Führer and Italy’s Duce got the business from Unc. Scripts credited to Will Eisner; art by George Tuska. From the ComicBookPlus website. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Sam swatting down readily identifiable Japanese Zeroes. Over in Military, soon gone was the Anglocentric Hero Stamp, replaced by a new United States Hero Stamp, with the first being the Arnoldnominated Captain Kelly. It took the Blackhawks a bit longer to follow his orders, as they had to finish up an ongoing continuity in Europe. But eventually they relocated to the Pacific Theater per Arnold’s request. However, not all of Arnold’s correspondence was directed at Eisner. One particularly blunt and detailed letter was sent to Eisner’s former partner, Jerry Iger, on December 26, 1941. And Arnold had plenty to say to him. Dear Jerry, The total combined loss on HIT COMICS and NATIONAL COMICS for the June 1941 to the November 1941 issues (six issues of each magazine) was $10,704.87. During this period we were operating under our agreement dated January 13, 1941. Starting with the December issues of HIT COMICS and NATIONAL COMICS, we worked under the terms of a second agreement dated July 21, 1941. The loss on the December issue

11


12

Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

Quality Takes A Hit It’s difficult if not impossible to know precisely which issues of the faltering Hit Comics and National Comics “Busy” Arnold means when (on p. 11) he talks about, e.g., “the November 1941 issues”—he’s probably referring to the cover date, but that’s not a 100% certainty. Even so, above are the cover for Hit and National #17, both dated Nov. 1941… while below are those of Hit and National #18, dated Dec. ’41. All but the one for Hit #17 (which is by Lou Fine) were drawn by Reed Crandall. Since Arnold was reducing the frequency of both mags to bimonthly, “Uncle Sam” was clearly not doing the job for National, while over the past year and a half neither “The Red Bee,” “Neon the Unknown,” or “Hercules” had been a solid hit in Hit… nor would “The Great Defender,” aka “Stormy Foster.” With #25, Hit would spotlight a new strip, “Kid Eternity,” a young hero who’d eventually have his own title. National would stick with Uncle Sam covers until #42 (May 1944), when Jack Cole’s circus-centered strip “The Barker” would displace it; Sam would be dropped after #45. And by early 1943, Uncle Sam Quarterly would be transformed into Blackhawk. [© the respective copyright holders.]


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

13

Welcome To Quality! These two photos of the Quality Comics offices (possibly the outer one/reception area, and an inner chamber) were sent to us some time back—by whom, alas, we don’t know. Based on the copy of Police Comics #66 (May ’47) on display in the first, at least one of them was probably taken early that year— and can you see the photo of “Busy” Arnold on the wall above the desk in the second?

of HIT COMICS was $1,261.99 and the loss on the December issue of NATIONAL COMICS was $1,506.51—a total of $2,768.50. While I haven’t as yet any exact figures on the January and February issues of HIT COMICS and NATIONAL COMICS, they will be even worse than the results on the December issues. So for the period from June 1941 to February 1942 we will lose a total of nearly $20,000.00 on HIT COMICS and NATIONAL COMICS. You must realize that we cannot operate any longer under the terms of our agreement dated July 21, 1941, and this letter is to officially cancel all past deals on HIT COMICS and NATIONAL COMICS effective with the April issues of each magazine. By then we will probably be in the red for a total of almost $25,000.00 and, if we are going to buy any material from you in the future for these magazines, it must be on an entirely new setup. Incidentally, HIT COMICS is now on a permanent bi-monthly basis and I plan to drop the May and July issues of NATIONAL COMICS so that temporarily this book will also be on a bi-monthly basis. In the first place, the 20 per cent profit arrangement up to a total of $5,000.00 covered in our agreement of January 13, 1941, and the 30 per cent profit arrangement on HIT COMICS covered in our agreement dated July 21, 1941, are both cancelled by this letter. If we ever recover our losses on these two magazines we will be very lucky. The present features obviously will not sell HIT COMICS or NATIONAL COMICS well enough to enable us to make a profit on either magazine, so in order to try to get “out of the red” in the near future on HIT COMICS and NATIONAL COMICS, I must add the best available material which I can buy independently to each book and kill several of your features which apparently do not sell comic magazines. Busy Arnold’s methodically precise recounting of the losses he was incurring are a painful reminder that the contents of comic books were driven by more than editorial whim. It’s likely Iger

read the above dense paragraphs with growing anger over the cancellation of his ongoing contracts with Arnold and trepidation at what was to come: Strictly on a month by month basis, I will buy the following material from you for these two magazines in the future: NATIONAL COMICS 6 pages

Sally O’Neil (by Bryant) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -$90.00

5

Prop Powers (by Williams) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -75.00

5

Wonder Boy (by Bryant) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -75.00

5

Kid Patrol (by artist who did April job) - - - - - - - -75.00

5

Kid Dixon (by Nordling) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -60.00

HIT COMICS 6 pages

Betty Bates (by Bryant) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -$90.00

6

The Red Bee (by Williams) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -90.00

5

The Strange Twins (by Blum) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -75.00

7

Don Glory (by Peddy) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -105.00

5

Bob and Swab (by Nordling) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -60.00

All of the above features (except those done by Nordling) are at the rate of $15 per page which is a fair price with conditions in the comic magazine field as they are at the present time. You are only paying Nordling $10 per page for his work and since he completes everything and writes his own stories, $12 per page is a fair price for Kid Dixon, and Bob and Swab. If you prefer, I will buy these two features direct from Nordling and pay him per page. This last line was surely included to tweak Iger. In no way did he want to lose his $3 per page cut by letting Arnold deal directly with an artist. [Continued on p. 16]


14

Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

The Wonder Years (Above:) According to his 12-26-41 letter to comics shop head Jerry Iger, “Busy” Arnold wanted future “Wonder Boy” stories to be drawn by artist Al Bryant, as per the top left splash from National Comics #15 (Sept. 1941)—but what he got, starting in #16 (Oct. ’41), was some of Nick Cardy’s less stellar work (above right). Just to show how good Cardy could be, however, we’re also displaying his “Quicksilver” splash from #15. Writers unknown; “Jerry Maxwell” was an Iger shop house name, utilizing Samuel Maxwell “Jerry” Iger’s middle name. Thanks to ComicBookPlus. [Art © the respective copyright holders; Quicksilver character now trademarked by DC Comics as Max Mercury.]

(Above:) Jerry Iger, circa 1942. Same source as Arnold/Hansen photo. (Above:) “Busy Arnold” and Quality editor Gwen Hansen, c. 1941. Photo from Jay Disbrow’s 1985 book The Iger Comics Kingdom, which was reprinted in its entirety in A/E #21. Thanks to Jay—and to Dick Arnold for the Hansen ID. (Right, from left to right:) Will Eisner, Bob Powell (artist of “Mr. Mystic” feature in the Weekly Comic Book), and Nick Cardy, nee Nick Viscardi (artist of “Lady Luck” therein)—photo taken at Eisner’s Tudor City studio, 1941. Thanks to John Coates.


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

It’s A Smash! Arnold wrote about Smash Comics strips “Rookie Rankin” and “The Purple Trio,” but that mag’s more colorful features were in good shape. For example, behind Gill Fox’s cover for Smash #29 (Dec. 1941) were a Crandall-drawn “Ray” adventure, “Midnight” by Jack Cole, and “The Jester” by Paul Gustavson. “Midnight” was created (written and illustrated) by Cole because “Busy” wanted a second masked crime-fighter wearing a blue suit, hat, and gloves just in case something happened to Will Eisner. It was probably Cole’s impish sense of humor that gave Midnight a talking monkey for a buddy. [© the respective copyright holders; Ray, Midnight, & Jester are now trademarks of DC Comics.]

(Above:) Paul Gustavson, in a photo repro’d from Jud Hurd’s Cartoonist PRO-files magazine #36, back in the ’70s. Thanks to Shaun Clancy.

15


16

Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

[Continued from p. 13] I may have Lou Fine or Chuck Cuidera handle Stormy Foster starting with the June issue of HIT COMICS. However, this feature is very second rate and it hasn’t any character. So unless Lou or another top notch artist can do a first class job on it right away, I will get another lead feature for HIT COMICS. Once again, Arnold casually tossed in a possibility meant to get Iger’s goat. Iger knew very well that both Fine and Cuidera were in the employ of his former partner Eisner, and losing work to his shop would be particularly galling for Iger. So much for the material for HIT COMICS and NATIONAL COMICS. I am also losing money at present on SMASH COMICS and POLICE COMICS and I can only afford to pay you the following rates for your material in these two magazines in the future: SMASH COMICS 6 pages

Rookie Rankin (by Peddy) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -$90.00

5

The Purple Trio (by Blum) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -75.00

POLICE COMICS 6 pages

Phantom Lady (by Peddy) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -$90.00

5

Eagle Evans (by Williams) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -75.00

5

Steele Kerrigan (by Bryant) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -75.00

Although FEATURE COMICS is still operating at a profit, it has dropped considerably in recent months and we can only afford to pay the following prices for your material in this book in the future: 5 pages

Zoro, Ghost Detective (by Bryant) - - - - - - - - - - -$75.00

5

Samar (by artist who did April Kid Patrol) - - - - - -75.00

5

Spin Shaw (by Williams) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -75.00

I will continue to pay you $20 per page for Crandall’s features on a month by month basis. However, I am not sure whether I will keep The Firebrand in POLICE COMICS much longer as a six page feature after I jump Plastic Man into the lead position in this magazine. Like Stormy Foster, The Firebrand is very second rate even with Reed handling the art work in it. It is understood that you will supply better and more timely stories for all of the above features in the future and will give first class art work on all of this material. Arnold’s reconsideration of “The Firebrand” became a reality, as it soon dwindled to a 5page feature before exiting Police within the next year. With the bulk of the financial business completed, Arnold’s letter takes a different tone and gets personal:

Peddy Cash Arthur Peddy, whose 1941 page rate is discussed, was the original “Phantom Lady” artist for Police Comics; the scripter is unidentified. This splash from issue #3 (Oct. 1941) is, like that feature’s entire Quality run, reprinted in the PS Artbooks hardcover Roy Thomas Presents Phantom Lady, Vol. 1—along with the beginning of Fox Comics’ latter-’40s revamping of that strip into a full-fledged “headlights” comic. (There’s also a softcover, or “softie,” version of the entire series; see PS’ website and/or ad on p. 74.) [© the respective copyright holders; Phantom Lady is now a trademark of DC Comics.]

Fred Fiore even though you were supposed to be concentrating on producing extra good work for E.M. Arnold and Thurman Scott? Don’t make me laugh, Jerry. Arthur Peddy in the U.S. Army, 1944. His stepson Michael Posner will be interviewed about Peddy’s career in A/E #132.

In closing may I take a crack at the statement in your letter of December 4th where you say “Maybe I’m a fool, but I’ve turned down considerable business so that I may better serve you in your books. What do I get in return?” Are you trying to be funny or do you think I am a bit simple? You never turned down any business because of me and grabbed off all of the accounts you could get from such magazines as Pocket Comics, Champ Comics and Speed Comics. And aren’t you the same Jerry Iger who started Great Comics and Choice Comics with

Arnold was just getting warmed up. As much as this paragraph probably irked Iger, it was the next one that was pointedly crafted to infuriate: And please don’t tell me again that you personally developed every top-notcher in this business including Bill Eisner. He was largely responsible for the success of Eisner & Iger as you well know. Bill always was a swell artist with a flair for writing interesting plots and nobody helped develop him except Wm. E. Eisner, a lot of natural ability and plenty of good hard work. Arnold knew this was the sorest of Iger’s sore spots. The split between Iger and Eisner had left the older partner with a lingering grudge toward his departing junior. A grudge that lasted his lifetime. Even in his later years, Iger would downplay Eisner’s role in the creation of characters and contend that he was no more than a freelancer in his shop who worked on an “as-needed” basis. That [Continued on p. 20]


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

It’s All About Money (Above:) Feature Comics might have “dropped considerably” in sales around the end of 1941, as Arnold writes—but its “Doll Man” lead feature, illustrated by Reed Crandall, still put it in the profit column, as well as on anybody’s list of best-drawn Golden Age comics series. The Doll Man had been Quality’s very first super-hero. Seen here, from the GACBS site, are two pages from the original Mighty Mite’s story in Feature #51 (Dec. ’41). [© the respective copyright holders; Doll Man is now a trademark of DC Comics.] (Right:) Even with Crandall art, though, the bland feature “Firebrand” wasn’t selling Police Comics, and he would soon be displaced as the cover hero by Jack Cole’s “Plastic Man,” a rising star when each appeared in Police #3 (Oct. ’41). It should be pointed out that Gill Fox, not Crandall, was drawing the mag’s covers. Writers of the three pages on this page unidentified. [Art © the respective copyright holders; Firebrand & Plastic Man are now trademarks of DC Comics.]

(Left:) A very young Reed Crandall, in a photo from the 1935 Scholastic Art Exhibition catalog showing winners of its high school talent content. Thanks to Shaun Clancy.

17


18

Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

He’s A Living Doll!

We couldn’t resist! Reed Crandall’s work on “The Doll Man” was indisputably one of the highlights of the Golden Age of Comics. So, on these two facing pages, we’re presenting—courtesy of the GACBS website—a half-dozen gorgeous pages of the Mighty Mite. The writers are, alas, unidentified. [All © the respective copyright holders; Doll Man is now a trademark of DC Comics.]

(Above:) The splash and a matchless action page from Feature Comics #47 (Aug. 1941). Crandall managed to remind readers of Doll Man’s diminutive size in virtually every panel. And dig that curvaceous librarian! The “William Erwin Maxwell” house name came from a combination of Eisner’s and Iger’s monikers.

(Right:) The splash panel of Feature #57 (June ’42). The sentiments in the caption are the product of wartime hostility based on the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor—which, by the time this story was published, had led to the disgrace of the Japanese (and Japanese-American!) internment centers in the American West.


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

(Right:) Feature #58 (July ’42) spotlighted a bunch of Ku Klux Klan lookalikes—although we wouldn’t be too shocked to learn that, in this tale, they turned out to be Nazis in disguise.

(Above:) Feature #60 (Sept. ’42) made use of the scientist/inventor father of Darrel (Doll Man) Dane’s fiancée… who would, in the strip’s final year or so, become his partner as Doll Girl. Martha, we mean… not her dad.

(Right:) Feature #61 (Oct. ’42) saw Doll Man hitching a ride on a frog. In later days, he’d fight crime for a while (before Doll Girl showed up) astride a Great Dane named Elmo. Just a coincidence that the hero’s own last name was Dane?

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Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

[Continued from p. 16] Arnold took special glee in writing this paragraph is evident in his handwritten notation at the top of the copy of this letter he forwarded to Eisner: Bill / Maybe you better send Jerry some smelling salts and flowers. Is paragraph #5 on page 3 okay or did Jerry really develop W. Eisner? But he didn’t stop there. He made sure to get in a few more jabs as long as he had Iger on the ropes: As regards the $10,000 you paid Bill for his share of the business, may I remind you that I had nothing to do with this and it was a matter entirely between Wm. E. Eisner and S.M. Iger. We paid you several thousand dollars as a split on the first ten issues of HIT COMICS and NATIONAL COMICS after Bill sold out to you and you got plenty more from Scottie about the same time. So I guess the deal you made with Bill was pretty fair to you both. And then back to business: Don’t think there is anything personal in anything I had done, Jerry. It is strictly a matter of good business and you can readily see why I cannot afford to pay $18 and $20 per page for material any longer. And please don’t get me together with Sid Klinghofer as I don’t care to waste a lot of time talking about something that will have to stand as outlined above. Incidentally, in addition to dropping the May and July issues of NATIONAL COMICS, I am also dropping the April and June issues of SMASH COMICS and POLICE COMICS. So during the weak selling spring months (March, April, May and June issues), FEATURE COMICS will be our only magazine published on a monthly basis. If business improves by next summer, I will put NATIONAL COMICS, SMASH COMICS and POLICE COMICS back on a monthly basis, otherwise I will leave them all bi-monthly magazines. Business must have improved, as all three titles were back on a monthly schedule by the following summer. I hate to take so much work away from Nordling and, if you wish me to do so, I will drop a five-page feature from CRACK COMICS and put Pen Miller in this magazine (five pages instead of four pages). But I can’t afford to give you an agent’s fee of more than $2 per page for Nordling’s features so the price for five pages of Pen Miller will be Sixty Dollars ($60). In closing may I ask you to deliver the balance of the material for issue No. 2 of THE DOLL MAN QUARTERLY just as soon as possible. You are nearly three months late in delivering this book with the result that we have to call issue No. 2 Spring instead of Winter. Follow up with 11 pages of Doll Man for April FEATURE COMICS (we need this just as soon as possible), then have Crandall do six pages of The Firebrand.

Help Police! Even after only a few issues of Police Comics, keen-eyed “Busy” Arnold had already realized that Jack Cole’s innovative feature “Plastic Man,” not “Firebrand” or “Phantom Lady” or “Human Bomb,” was destined to be the mag’s star. Today, Cole’s strip is considered perhaps the highlight of the entire Quality Comics run— but let’s not forget that it was Arnold who changed the title to “Plastic Man” from Cole’s original “Rubber Man”! The cover date of Police #3 was Oct. 1941. Thanks to ComicBookPlus. The photo of Cole first appeared in a 1999 issue of The New Yorker magazine, accompanying an article on Cole written by Maus auteur Art Spiegleman. [© the respective copyright holders; Plastic Man is now a trademark of DC Comics.]

Sincerely yours, Busy His business (and evisceration) of Iger completed, Arnold recommenced his correspondence with Eisner on January 5, 1942. Dear Bill, Will you please send me the script for the next eight pages of Secret War News and one page of The Atlantic Patrol. Alden McWilliams is about ready to start working on these pages and I would like to turn over the script to him just as soon as possible. Sincerely yours, Busy P.S. For very apparent reasons I would like to get Alden ahead on his comic magazine pages.


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

Arnold’s handwritten postscript reveals a concern then facing all publishers. The United States’ entry into the ongoing World War posed the real possibility of losing many of their artists and writers to the mandatory conscription. It made good business sense to stockpile some inventory as a buffer against the lack of artists to provide material for their comics. While that eventuality loomed, Arnold still had more to say about the work coming out of Eisner’s shop, as in this short letter from January 13, 1942. Dear Bill,

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Klaus Nordling, circa 1950. Courtesy of Ron Frantz.

Will you please have Nick [Viscardi] spend more time on his backgrounds and eliminate the free-hand sloppy type of stuff. On the last set of Lady Luck which we sent to the engraver today, many of the backgrounds had doorways, windows, etc. done in free-hand which were pretty awful. Sincerely yours, Busy P.S. Lady Luck for the past couple of months has been awful—not even comic book quality. A similar letter dated January 26th critiqued Eisner’s handling of a Spirit story-line before launching into yet another scolding, this time about the work of Alex Kotzky.

A Christmas Present—From “Santa Claus” To “Klaus” (Above:) On the heels of Arnold’s letter to Iger on the day after Christmas, 1941, the “Pen Miller” feature, starring a “cartoonist-detective” and regularly drawn by Klaus Nordling (who signed it “Klaus”), jumped from National Comics to Crack Comics as of issue #23 of the latter (May 1942). In the process, it picked up a page in length. Clearly, this change was made immediately after Arnold broached the idea to Iger. Note that Miller’s Oriental sidekick is called “Chop”—maybe he was related to Chop Chop over in the “Blackhawk” stories? Scripter unknown. Image from ComicBookPlus website. [© the respective copyright holders.] (Left:) Nordling would later succeed Nick Cardy on the “Lady Luck” feature in The Spirit Section. Episodes starring that green-clad heroine were reprinted in Smash Comics—in this case, #48 (Oct. 1943). Thanks to GACBS website. [© Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

The six pages of Espionage for SMASH COMICS which I picked up last week weren’t completed. We have to do the lettering, heading and general clean up here. This was an awful set of Espionage so try to have Kotzky do a better job next month. By February, there was a sense of urgency to Arnold’s correspondence. His letter dated February 10th covered a lot of ground. After reminding Eisner to keep Tuska working on Uncle Sam and to get a script to McWilliams as soon as possible, Arnold once again confronts the inevitable loss of talent. You now have Cuidera about two episodes ahead on Blackhawk as well as an extra cover for MILITARY COMICS. Better have Cuidera do a couple more covers right away, then start him on another 11 pages of Blackhawk. Try to get him as far ahead on everything as possible.


22

Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

Alex Kotzky

Sabotage At Quality Comics! (Right:) Alex Kotzky drew the “Espionage” story in Smash Comics #33 (May 1942)—and perhaps the pages of this or some other submission did indeed require Quality to do a bit of extra work (“lettering, heading and general clean up”) that the Iger shop should’ve done—but there’s no doubt that the artist put a lot of work into this splash. The “Will Erwin” name is an Eisner pseudonym from the days when he created the strip as “Espionage, Starring The Black X,” but we have no idea who actually scripted this tale. Thanks to the ComicBookPlus site. [© the respective copyright holders.]

“Luck, Let A Gentleman See…” (Left:) Half of this Nick Cardy (Viscardi) “Lady Luck” page from Arnold & Eisner’s Comic Book Section for April 20, 1941, was printed in A/E #85—but only in black-&-white. This was done before the heroine gained her light green, transparent “surgeon’s mask,” which must’ve helped her preserve her secret identity. The bricks in the final panel may be an example of the “free-hand sloppy type” of backgrounds about which “Busy” was complaining, although certainly no one could ever fault Cardy for lack of talent! He usually scripted the “Lady Luck” mini-epics, as well. Thanks to Bruce Mason. Scripter uncertain. [© Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

23

Get “Busy”! Arnold ended his late-December 1941 letter to Iger with admonitions to deliver the remainder of The Doll Man Quarterly #2 (Spring 1942) to go with this Gill Fox cover (top left)—then get artist Reed Crandall to work on the above “Doll Man” tale for Feature Comics #55 (April ’42) and a “Firebrand” story—perhaps this one for Police Comics #9 (May ’42), since there was no April issue. Sorry we didn’t have access to good scans of interior pages from DMQ #2. Writers unidentified. Thanks to the GCD for the cover, and to ComicBookPlus for the splashes. [© the respective copyright holders; Doll Man & Firebrand are now trademarks of DC Comics.]

Again on February 27, Arnold requests that Nordling (who was now working as a freelancer) get ahead on all of his features. Then, in a paragraph midway through his letter, Arnold indirectly refers to a coming editorial change. What do you plan to do for issue No. 4 of UNCLE SAM QUARTERLY? Will you figure out the make-up of this book and have [Nathaniel?] Nitkin and Bob Powell write the stories? Or should I plan to handle this? At any rate, you might have George work on the cover for the No. 4 issue (Autumn) now so it is done under your capable supervision. In those few lines, Arnold seems to be contemplating taking over the editorial reins from Eisner on Uncle Sam. But why? His closing comments make the picture a bit clearer. See you on Thursday. Hope Lou is working on them so we can get quite a distance ahead on everything before you leave.


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Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

Art For Artists' Sake A few words about our colorful cover artists, who are too unassuming to send photos of themselves: Daniel James Cox is an avid comic book fan who contributed both the cover and an article on Joe Kubert's work on “Enemy Ace” to Alter Ego #116. He works in film and television and dabbles in comics. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his two children and his two cats. You can see samples of his work at www.danieljamescox.com. Jason Paulos has been writing, drawing, and publishing comics since 1989, with professional credits including Green Lantern, the Australian edition of Mad, and Judge Dredd Magazine. He's the creator of “Hairbutt the Hippo and The Harlequin,” and his new horror book entitled EEEK! is on sale now via Comixology. He's spent the last five years with www.drawingbook.com.au as a freelance storyboard artist and lives and works in Blackheath, NSW, with his partner, two boys, and three children. His blog is www.jasonpaulosart.blogspot.com.au.

A (Not Quite) Cover Story (Left:) Ye Editor’s original idea for the cover of this issue was based on the chess-game scene on that of Dynamic Comics #12 (Nov. 1944), which was drawn by Gus Ricca and is believed by many researchers to be a caricature of its publisher/editor, comics shop owner Harry “A” Chesler. [© the respective copyright holders.] (Bottom left:) Roy T.’s notion was that the A/E cover would show Eisner playing chess (using a set composed of Quality Comics heroes) against an undepicted “Busy” Arnold. Daniel James Cox and his associate Jason Paulos had done quite a bit of work on that version, including even partly coloring it, when RT realized they had pictured an older Will—and we needed to see him as he was circa 1940-42. Otherwise, though, Ye Editor was delighted with what they’d done. (Below:) The two artists then adjusted the Eisner face and figure based on younger photos of him— with no cover overlays here—and Ye Ed was looking forward to the finished product. But they themselves professed to be unhappy with the way it was turning out and proposed an alternative— the cover which actually graces this issue. Roy went along with them, since Daniel and Jason were doing the cover at our standard (not overly high) rate. He must confess that he retains his preference for the chess-game scene… but only in terms of concept, not of execution. And hey—lucky us, and lucky you—we get to see both versions! Thanks, guys—you’re both champs from where we stand! [Two incomplete A/E covers © 2014 Daniel James Cox & Jason Paulos; characters TM & © DC Comics.]


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

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“Secret” Origins

Alden McWilliams.

Alden McWilliams drew the unusual feature “Secret War News,” which turned actual news stories of early World War II into comic book tales—and “Busy” Arnold wanted him to get right onto the next one! Writer unknown. Thanks to the ComicBookPlus website. [© the respective copyright holders.]

What both Arnold and Eisner knew: the reason Lou Fine was apparently overseeing Eisner’s comic shop was that Eisner wasn’t going to be around to run it himself. Eisner and Arnold had fought vigorously in the summer of 1941 to keep Eisner from being conscripted. Eisner wrote a lengthy affidavit detailing how he was solely responsible for the employment of “sixteen artists, some of whom are married” [Affidavit of William E. Eisner to Local Board No. 121, Bronx, New York]. But even the inclusion of supporting affidavits from several of these artists as well as Arnold and the top executive of The Spirit’s newspaper syndicate failed to convince his local draft board. With his shop and his strips now in the hands of others, Eisner entered the Army in May 1942.

The relationship of “Busy” Arnold and Will Eisner wasn’t easy to explain. They were business partners, though never quite equals. The publisher was the artist’s biggest fan, though not really his friend. Arnold was a demanding client who would critically scrutinize the minutest details and also the generous patron who funded their joint publishing ventures and shared ownership of various properties. The complexity of their relationship seemingly mystified even Eisner, who simply told Jim Amash: “We had a different view of each other.”


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Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

Gill Fox at age 19, not long before he went to work fo “Busy” Arnold.

Uncle Sam’s Cabin (Above:) Whether “Bill” Eisner wound up handling the editorial chores at his Tudor City studios, or “Busy” Arnold did at the NYC Quality offices, Uncle Sam Quarterly #4 would come out in the summer of 1942 with an “Autumn” cover date. Gill Fox drew the cover, and George Tuska most of the interior contents. Thanks to the ComicBookPlus website. [© the respective copyright holders.]

War and Remembrance (Right & above:) Chief Warrant Officer Eisner in 1943. After the war, he would return to The Spirit and make the strip better than ever for the rest of its run through the early 1950s, as evidenced by this splash page for Oct. 6, 1946, repro’d from Will Eisner’s Spirit Archives, Vol. 13. In the 1960s and ’70s, and even afterward, The Spirit would be reprinted to new popularity… but beginning in 1978 Eisner moved on to the new field of graphic novels, beginning with A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories in 1978 (depicted at far right is the 1996 DC reprint edition). It was a career with few equals in the world of comics and graphic art. [Spirit page & book cover art © Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]


“Sincerely Yours, Busy”

Eisner-Blum Addendum by Ken Quattro In light of his impending conscription, Eisner apparently went about tying up loose ends and securing talent to handle The Spirit while he was away. It was this need that led Eisner in his role as studio boss to have one particularly contentious exchange of letters between himself and writer Toni Blum in April 1942. Dear Toni, After you left Saturday, I discussed the matter of price with Busy. And after we figured our costs which include Lou’s salary, the lettering man’s salary and an assistant for Lou (who as you know is not very fast), we found that the request of $75 you made was more than we could meet at this time. All we could manage to pay for The Spirit stories is $30 per script. Please understand that the latter figure is not an evaluation of your ability but merely a mathematical calculation and if you cannot see your way clear to do stuff for The Spirit with equal interest at that figure, we shall have to get along without your work—a situation which would leave me very, very unhappy. While this is not a counter offer, I sincerely hope that you can figure some way of doing The Spirit at the $30 rate. I, on my part, would be willing to cooperate in any way you may think

Spirit Of Contention Eisner (above, in a 1941 photo) and writer Toni Blum (right) were at odds over page rates in April 1942, just before Will went into uniform. If they’d reached a happier resolution, Blum might have been the writer of such wartime Spirit episodes as this one for June 27, 1943, drawn by Lou Fine and others; scripter uncertain. The splash and Eisner photo are repro’d from DC’s Will Eisner’s Spirit Archives, Vol. 6, while the Blum snapshot is courtesy of Bill & Ulla Bossert. [Page © Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

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Letters From Quality Publisher “Busy” Arnold, 1940-42, To Will Eisner & Jerry Iger

eight weekly pages because not only you have to be pleased, an impossibility, but all your editors on all your papers. Perhaps a fairer price would be $50. Or $45 with a guarantee of a couple of short features a month to supplement the difference. I think I could get along on that.

P’Gell, Move Over! (Left:) Toni Blum strikes a dramatic pose— perhaps for her comic book artist father, Alex Blum, or some other lucky male. She’d have made a good Eisner heroine! Thanks to Bill & Ulla Bossert. (Above:) Pulp and comics writer Manly Wade Wellman, who inherited the job of scripting many of the wartime Spirit stories after Blum’s defection. Thanks to P.C. Hamerlinck.

If you cannot see your way clear to pay this, I would rather continue my comic work for Mr. Arnold as previously without the additional responsibility of the Spirit. Apparently Eisner and Blum couldn’t come to an agreement. The scripting chores on The Spirit in Eisner’s absence are generally credited to Jack Cole and Manly Wade Wellman. Toni Blum never worked on The Spirit again.

Ken Quattro is a comic historian and author who has written past Alter Ego articles on Golden Age artists Bernard Baily and E.C. Stoner, an overview of St. John comics and a detailed look at the DC vs. Victor Fox copyright infringement lawsuit. Ken maintains a blog entitled The Comics Detective, which can be seen at: http://thecomicsdetective.blogspot.com

of; such as additional comic book work or anything else that I could reasonably do. If you decide to work with me on this basis, I would appreciate hearing from you before Wednesday morning and we will get together with our contemplated rendevous [sic]. To which Blum replied… Dear Bill, Alright, so I was a little “high” when I asked $75. You can’t blame me. But I do think you should have arranged your budget to allow for more funds for the story, which you have repeatedly admitted is important. You see, Bill, it isn’t that I’m such a mercenary wench, but to me, my time is worth precious dollars. I had expected to devote at least four or five days to the Spirit, or more, to do research, to rehash, to work up breakdowns etc. etc. At thirty dollars it’s hardly worth it as I can make that in two or three days on a nine page feature. It isn’t that I want time to work on other comic features, I am trying desperately to do some “good work” and I’ll sacrifice money to it. If I were only paid thirty for the Spirit I would have to do more comic strips to make it pay, and still put a lot of work on the


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“My Comic Mom!!” – Part II Continuing A Daughter’s Memoir Of Her Artist Mother, VEE QUINTAL PEARSON by Robyn Dean McHattie Heroes All! (Clockwise from left:) Vee Quintal Pearson, 1944. A self-portrait of sorts, as she drew herself as a character in the modernday story titled “The Band Needs Flavoring” in one of the Catholic magazines for which she worked.

A/E

Two Vee Quintal splash pages for the first issue of Catholic Publications Company’s four-color comic book Heroes All – Catholic Action Illustrated: the stories of “St. Ignatius,” an early martyr in the Roman arena, and of Ferdinand de Lesseps, “the father of the Suez Canal.” Father Francis E. Benz, founder and head of CPC, had previously written a biography of de Lesseps. Robyn Dean McHattie says that Vee herself was “an avid horsewoman.” Photo courtesy of RDM. [Art © the respective copyright holders.]

EDITOR’S INTRO: Last issue, we began Robyn Dean McHattie’s look at the career of her mother, Vee Quintal Pearson (1918-1998), who, after some by-mail art instruction, found work in the early 1940s as a comic book artist at The Catholic Publications Company in North Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her first work was on comics material in the mostly-non-comics The Catholic Boy magazine, Mine Magazine, The Catholic Student, and The Catholic Miss of

America Magazine. The company was founded by Father Francis E. Benz, and its publications were distributed to Catholic grade schools in the U.S. In 1941 she briefly worked on a never-completed Paul Bunyan animated film short at the University of Minnesota. For a Sept. 1943 release date, Virginia “Vee Quintal,” who was not yet married, became the lead artist of a new four-color, monthly, all-comics magazine from CPC titled Heroes All – Catholic Action Illustrated….


“My Comic Mom!!” – Part II

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Heroes All – Catholic Action Illustrated First Issue: September 1943

F

rom “Charlemagne” to “St. Olaf, King of Norway,” from “The Pony Express” to “The Al Smith Story,” Vee’s comic book settings spanned history on two entire continents. In her first comics for The Catholic Boy, The Catholic Miss, and The Catholic Student, the earliest characters all had a certain canned, squinty-eyed smile, but by the time she began the new title Heroes All – Catholic Action Illustrated—which was an all-comics format, not a magazine—her work had grown distinctive and versatile. Developing pencil layouts across four or more pages each issue, as well as inking and lettering multiple stories each month—that kind of workout would definitely lend mastery to anyone’s style. The increased weekly schedule for Heroes All beginning with Volume IV, Jan. 1946, also built a massive portfolio and promised a prolific career. In Vee’s collection of multipagers, there are 76 titles that represent more than 534 pages of work dated Sept. 1942 to April 1948.

Good Fencing Makes Good Neighbors (Above:) Vee may have had some influence on the writer of the story of St. Francis of Assisi in the March 1944 issue of Heroes All… turning him into a fencing master in his youth. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Vee was uniquely suited to the comic book task. From the beginning, her drawings took swashbuckling to new heights, as if pulled on fly wires by stuntmen. Vee would have made a fine stuntman, herself; she was an avid horsewoman and first-class gymnast at North High. She had seen Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro (1940) about twenty times, not to mention everything starring Errol Flynn. You don’t even need to ask why she named one of her kids “Robyn.” My mother contended, if Padre Filipe or Friar Tuck—both played by Eugene Pallette—could be a fencing master, why couldn’t Francis of Assisi? That particular script-embellishment appears in Heroes All, Volume II, Number 3, for March 1944. Within her first few narrative comics in Catholic Miss, Boy, and Student, the beatific lives of Saints expanded with new energies, as Vee added cinematic swordplay to even the deadly dull “Song of Bernadette.” If you can add in swords and shields, or horses and spurs, my mom could turn any Christianity legend into something spectacular, worthy of the big screen and Technicolor. She directed the classic “cast of thousands” from the moment Hernando de Soto lined up in the panorama from here in town, down to the docks, in Catholic Boy, Sept 1943. Now in the pages of Heroes All, her layouts would challenge the limits of the page. Action

Don’t You Know There’s A War On? Vee also drew “war news” pages for both Catholic Boy (on left) and Catholic Miss (on right). [© the respective copyright holders.]


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Continuing A Daughter’s Memoir Of Her Artist Mother, Vee Quintal Pearson

Heroes All Goes To War! Heroes All also contained a number of stories oriented toward the action of the Second World War—and Vee was right there in those four-color front lines, as well. She drew the heroism of a member of the Women’s Army Corps—and the story of an orphaned little Chinese girl caught up in the horror of war but adopted by U.S. troops. The former onepager is from the March 1944 issue—A/E is less certain about “Precious Cargo: The Story of Patsy Li,” which was spread over several issues but may have come out after the war ended. [© the respective copyright holders.]

would bleed from one panel to the next, as she broke free of the regimentation of orderly rectangles. Vee wrote to Catherine Yronwode in 1982: “I enjoyed making my characters more exciting, like muscular super-heroes, though it wasn’t kosher for me to draw St. Peter quite that way.” Vee nonetheless stretched the precedents. Some weightlifter must have modeled for Vee’s St. Ignatius, bare-chested and manacled to the wall, while the text to his left states: “His body weakened by torture and hunger…” Yeah, right! One advantage for Vee: unlike any other super-hero artists, Vee was never told by the art editor to redraw anyone’s breasts larger. Early Christians in Rome, thrown to the lions! That was Vee’s Volume I, Number 1, Heroes All cover story assignment, “St. Ignatius.” She added most details with enthusiasm, but particularly if gladiators were involved. Perhaps this is why: You probably don’t care that Vee looked like Claudette Colbert. But I nearly flipped when I saw Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934). There was my mom’s look-alike on the throne of Egypt! And also so much grisly action in that other Colbert film set in Ancient Rome, The Sign of the Cross (1932). Crocodiles imported to chew up the extras; Louis B. Mayer’s own lion puts a paw on everyone. My mom lived on movies like that— especially imagining that she was the star, I’m sure! As comic artist, she did


“My Comic Mom!!” – Part II

33

serve as a sort of casting agent. Vee conjured Fred MacMurray, the same issue, to play Louis Napoleon, Emperor of France, in the de Lesseps story, “On to Suez” (Heroes All, Vol. I, Number 1). Stars make cameo appearances, yes— but by adding blood and gore, she got her big chance to maul a few martyrs of her own, on paper. And so, Heroes All began as a monthly: September 1943. Each issue had a total of 16 pages and continued that page count when it became a weekly beginning January 1946. With the issue March 10, 1947, the page count increased to 32 pages. With Benz’s apologies, the 32-pagers cut back frequency to twice monthly, beginning Sept. 1947. As for distribution, Heroes All was sold only by subscriptions into classrooms. This limited exposure and smaller press runs resulted in relatively few copies surviving.

The Sugar Report A “letter” that Vee wrote to her sailor boyfriend (and future husband) in the form of a newspaper. She drew herself, and perhaps him, as well, into the illustration at top right. [© Estate of Vee Quintal Pearson.]

A second Catholic four-color, allcomic book, started as a rival just across the river in Saint Paul. The Catechetical Guild put together Topix Comics, beginning in 1942. It became well known as the place Roman Baltes became art director and hired the young art student Charles Schulz for lettering. In addition, Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact, which started up in Dayton, Ohio, in March 1946, circulated only by subscription into classrooms, as well. According to the collectors/dealers I’ve spoken with, the Heroes All comics have nearly disappeared. Though the original art boards stayed—and then disappeared, as usual—at the printer, I am lucky enough to have extensive stacks of Vee’s idea sketches and research drawings from the era. The existence of the 25 Groveland Terrace comic publisher remained unknown even locally, until the release of my Vee biography in October 2012. Anyway, by 1946, there were even more Catholic comic books competing for the nickels and dimes of Catholic students. Heroes All subscriptions: 60¢ per school year in 1944, and then $1.80 per school year as it increased to weekly.

Military Comic Page Features Besides Vee’s favored niche—swashbucklers—she was assigned other heroes, pre-made ones, the minute the U.S. entered World War II. Everyone was breathless for info on courageous brothers (and sisters) and neighbors. Heroes All had a one- or a two-page illustrated feature each issue on a current enlisted person, like “Private Margaret Maloney, WAC” (March 1944) or “Capt. Don Gentile, Ace” (Sept. 1944). Vee often illustrated the comic scripts for these feature pages. As the War unfolded, miraculous tales began circulating. Heroes All snapped them up, featuring for instance a three-part story of the Chinese waif separated from her parents, fleeing for two years and over 4000 miles: “Precious Cargo, The Story of Patsy Li” (undated, 1946?). All told, it covered six pages when concluded. All Vee’s. Not only soldier profiles, but also general War news appeared in “News on Parade” for The Catholic Miss, during 1943 and ’44, and the identical page under the banner “O’er the Ramparts We Watch” for The Catholic Boy issues.

And In Her Spare Time... Every school kid, young gal, and aunty had Pen Pals back then. Two of Vee’s creative art-letters she preserved in a scrapbook. The rebus letter, Deer-ly Beloved, dated February 6, 1943, on a large sheet (12½ x 18 inches) used the same form as the “Susan Says” poem pages she illustrated for The Catholic Student. More than 40 color drawings are woven through the text, including one of Tyrone Power in a red cape à la The Black Swan that she had just seen. The other, The Sugar Report, dated August 1-15, 1944, is a 14x17-inch tour de force. She hand-inked this letter as a newspaper page, chock-full of personal news, announcements, interviews, ads, and every clever thing her sailor guy might be interested in. In October 1944, Vee married Chief Petty Officer Bernie Pearson and went to live on the naval base in Fort Lauderdale. Groveland Terrace sent her scripts. She mailed back the completed art boards from Florida, still signing her work: Vee Quintal. His pay rate: $151.80 a month. Vee’s: steady at $1,000 per month. The couple returned to Minneapolis around October 1945 following Bernie’s September discharge. They moved in with her in-laws, where Vee continued drawing Heroes All comics. With the big assault on producing weekly Heroes All issues, Vee stuck close to her drawing board.

Heroes All, Now Weekly! Beginning with Volume IV starting January 1946, Heroes All became the first comic book published on a weekly basis. So, quadruple the story assignments. And Vee most often had the cover story. Could she keep up? No problem! And for April 1946, we see her first signature: Vee Quintal Pearson—probably the result of her mother-in-law hanging over her shoulder as she was drawing. Vee’s work definitely developed from that point, which is easy to follow through her printed work. Generic expressions—gone!


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Continuing A Daughter’s Memoir Of Her Artist Mother, Vee Quintal Pearson

Horsing Around Vee got a chance to draw plenty of horses in postwar editions of Heroes All, such as the ongoing story of Brian of Munster in the issue for May 17, 1946, and a tale of the Pony Express (date unknown). The word “Chieftain” got misspelled in the title of the former, however—or perhaps they were using an old spelling and simply didn’t tell anybody? [© the respective copyright holders.]

Action figures increased. Even crowd scenes “from up here in town to all the way down there at the harbor” now seemed drawn from life. Not much chance of that, here on the Great Plains. The play of perspective also grew increasingly daring. Perspective is where my mother’s work exploded off the page. Vee didn’t shy away from adding splashy shadows everywhere possible. She was a wiz. Then, too, she brought in the cheesiest and most dramatic perspectives she could invent. She developed her skills at foreshortening; that’s the raking perspective that turns a punching fist on the end of an arm into a punch-packing wallop to the viewer. Vee’s fanatical movie-going paid off. Plus, here’s where she put to use all of her figure-drawing class studies, while working over at the University, that had given her confidence with more action poses than a reading or napping relative had provided. Horses Vee had already mastered, as she and her Saint Paul girlfriends all rode nearly every weekend. Her drawings of horses featured countless fiery steeds. From the first issue (Sept. 1943), Heroes All welcomed de Lesseps’ equestrian fence-jumping, then grew to include Charlemagne and his mount (Feb. 1,1946), Brian of Munster, Chieftain of Ireland, astride (May 17, 1946), and Louis Montcalm upon rampant horse (Nov. 29, 1946). Horse-drawn tales from the American West such as the origins of the Pony Express featured the young Buffalo Bill Cody (undated, after April 1946, based on the Pearson signature). No wonder, therefore, that Vee got

to draw the biography of painter Rosa Bonheur, master of wild horses, in The Catholic Miss (April 1947). All this action is actually an ironic development for Heroes All. Not quite what the originators had envisioned, perhaps. Superfeats? Blood and gore? There had always been plenty of that, if you’re going to fight off pirates on your way to the New World. Along with the triumphant, lusty laughs while running your enemies through! All seen in Vee’s comic of “The Hernando De Soto Story,” from The Catholic Boy, back in September 1943. And that was Vee just getting warmed up. According to Father Benz’s editorials in Catholic Boy as early as the May 1936 issue, along with the photo on page 15 showing the 60,000 pledges for the Clean Reading Crusade received at the offices, appropriate stories for youth were definitely under scrutiny. What to do about it? The Catholic Boy launched its firstever full comic section, eight pages each issue, beautifully brought to life by Roman Baltes’ brushwork, beginning in September 1941. Benz expressed his concerns and the reasoning behind the decision: “... millions of copies of these [newsstand] comic magazines are purchased by our boys and girls monthly. Some of them certainly are not healthy specimens of the printing art and really do more harm than give enjoyment. So your editor decided to do something about the situation. You will enjoy the comic section of The Catholic Boy magazine just as much as any comic magazine. You’ll read


“My Comic Mom!!” – Part II

Heroes On Parade (Clockwise from top left:) A page from Quintal’s rendition of the story of the Spanish national hero, El Cid (aka “The Cid”), from a 1946 issue. Robyn says the spirit of St. Lazarus in the latter was almost certainly patterned after the visage of film star Robert Taylor. Her dramatic cover for the 4-10-47 edition of Heroes All—in which she drew the story of the vanadium-mining Flannery Brothers. Robyn has some interesting insights about this work! The story of the life of sports and war hero “Lt. Stan Krivik” gave Vee a chance to draw action of various kinds; precise issue unknown. Her work for Heroes All during this period would have been right at home in True Comics or Real Life Comics or Heroic Comics. [© the respective copyright holders.]

about daring adventure... So once again The Catholic Boy is leading the field, for we are the first publication in Catholic journalism to publish an entire section of comics. We hope that these will not only provide enjoyment but that they will be educational as well” (page 7). A closer look at many of Vee’s hearty illustrations certainly shows that she wasn’t exactly cooperating with Benz’s intentions. Vee wrote in her interview notes to Cat Yronwode that she created her comic images with every intention of being an offshoot of the exciting super-hero comic books. Vee’s spectacular action panels shaped Heroes All and were appearing in print with the OK from the Catholic priest art editor. She later spoke to me of occasional layouts Father Benz rejected in the initial pencil stages, which she then redrew and resubmitted. Approval was required. It seems fascinating, then, that Vee’s drawings ever made it into print the way they are.

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Continuing A Daughter’s Memoir Of Her Artist Mother, Vee Quintal Pearson

Vee’s creative work was a natural outgrowth of an imaginative mind and exciting personality raised on Hollywood films. The medium indulged her fascination with earlier eras of history. Perhaps she augmented the gleeful verve in the characters, in part, as a countermeasure to the grim face of Look and Life magazines’ war coverage of the time? That would be very like her characteristic focus on powerful, positive thoughts, paired with her belief in people’s ability to triumph over all obstacles. She’d show her readers how to go out into life! With courage and leading a crew of friends! Thus, Vee’s mastery of drama in action, including gritty blood-spilling, earned her more cover stories, as well. In fact, the early covers for Heroes All began as half-page splash panels then eventually expanded to full-page covers in March 1947 to hold Vee’s Crimes By Quintal rearing steeds and sword-playing Vee Quintal also did some sketches of material not so likely to wind up even in the pages of Heroes All, Conquistadors. Often the new art-only involving prize-fighting, roughhousing, and crime. It would be easy to picture these pages in early issues covers were flashy action openings for the of Gleason & Biro’s Crime Does Not Pay or the like. Her daughter Robyn feels these were done sometime page 3 (lead) story inside. That was between 1948 and 1952, when she was keeping in practice while looking for more comics work after the something new. Vee also overrode the use of Catholic Publications work dried up. [© Estate of Vee Quintal Pearson.] the traditional Heroes All banner, using instead her own lettering designs. This On top of guts and blood, closer analysis of what might also be shows (and I love it!) that she could use her persuasive powers considered “trash” in the hands of youth might include Vee’s when necessary. treatment of “The Cid” (pre-April 1946, signed Quintal). Besides her characteristic style of using Hollywood stars for cameo roles— tell me that is not Robert Taylor appearing as the raised St. Lazarus!—check out the rest of page 3! Five panels of the sequence show The Cid, in bed, bare-chested and clearly on a bodybuilding program. He awakens to a dream/vision of Lazarus, throws aside his covers and... well. That is one luscious hunk of man. Did Vee perhaps have a hand in future troubles for the publisher? And one aside: for the April 10, 1947, cover, something even more notable. Lurking behind Vee’s cowboy in the Andes Mountains, stand some historically unique pack-llamas. This is the cover art for the 7-page story “Pioneers of Industry, the Story of the Flannery Brothers.” Known for their steel alloy made from chemically processed vanadium, a rare ore mined in Peru, the Flannery Brothers’ bit of scientific history also gave Ayn Rand her back-story for Atlas Shrugged. Rand published her world-shaking novel in 1957, ten years after the comic, and I love it when people say that Rand made it all up. Reminder: Vee did not write the story; she drew the comic illustrations for the Flannery Brothers’ history in Heroes All. Personally, recognizing something very familiar in this comic, then putting two-and-two together stunned me; yet there it is. I admit I feel pretty cool getting to say, “Oh sure. And I knew the comic artist.”

“Future Champs” A Vee Quintal sketch for a never-realized cover of The Catholic Boy. To the end, she preferred drawing action and adventure to more “womanly” scenes. [© Estate of Vee Quintal Pearson.]

January through June, school year 1947, Heroes All continued its weekly schedule. Beginning September 1948, however, Heroes All scaled back to twice monthly. Not as many subscriptions as anticipated? I found no notes on the change; however, the now twicemonthly issues did double in page count. From September, 32-page issues became the norm, most likely a decision to save handling, labeling, and mailing costs, or save costs for press time at the printer? In any case, subscribers who had already paid the yearly subscription rate for the weekly comic books still received an equivalent number of pages.


“My Comic Mom!!” – Part II

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The Surprise Ending In April 1948, Vee and Bernie moved into a classic WWII veteran option: a lovely trailer home. Twenty-seven feet, and it was all theirs! Vee continued her Heroes All drawing duties on the kitchen table there. My dad actually did some of her lettering for a while. You can easily recognize the better vertical consistency—Vee’s lettering usually slanted slightly left—and a nice little swash on his “S” shapes. At about the same time, the Catholic Publications Company stopped to rethink and regroup. Vee’s notes to Cat Yronwode in 1982 reveal the inside scoop on the end of The Catholic Boy and the entire studio at Groveland Terrace. “The magazine folded because of a lawsuit concerning another artist’s portrayal of a certain ethnic group. The magazine was sold to the Fathers of Notre Dame, Indiana,” Vee wrote. Heroes All was finished. The Catholic Boy would continue from Indiana through 1969, then reform again in 1970, and it continues in print today. Digging through the issues, I found perhaps another angle on the regroup. There really aren’t many work-related art pieces that Vee kept. Therefore, five penciled cover layouts for Heroes All by Vee look quite out of place. These cover idea sketches she kept are a complete departure from all previous covers. Instead of swashbuckling historic name-brand Catholics, these cover ideas feature young contemporary white American boys training—I guess you might call it—to become Heroes, All (of them). The images include a Boy Scout bottle-feeding a baby deer, marked for Feb. 10, 1948, issue, noting “Boy Scouts founded Feb. 8, 1910.” Action on third plate of a little league game marked “Spring issue?” The boy in a charming get-up on a lakeside dock showing his big stringer of fish, marked “June 10, 1948.” A crowd of boys surging toward the diving board, the main figure taking the big leap, “June 25, 1948.” And my personal favorite marked with the caption “Future Champs.” Very Vee: two skinny eight-year-olds in the ring, big boxing glove delivering a left to the jaw of his boyish opponent (not dated). Let us consider. Maybe the editors felt they had mined all the history stories possible for use? Maybe. And thus, the shift of focus to modern boys, with a new highlight on today’s “Catholic Action Illustrated.” The cover ideas also included the word in capital letters “COMICS,” which is not on any of the previous Heroes All covers. Or perhaps Vee’s cinematic blood-and-guts illustrations did draw concerns as being too similar to the comics that parents were beginning to fear in the hands of youths? Maybe the editorial offices therefore entertained a complete shift of focus? Father Benz may have called for the new idea that he hoped might save the ship? Dunno for sure. For Vee, one thing was clear: good-bye, art job.

History Looks Down Some of VQP’s later work, done for her own (and her family’s) enjoyment: a bust of Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and an heraldic shield mounted on their wall.

“Autumn Madness” A fine post-1950 color drawing. [© Estate of Vee Quintal Pearson.]

Perfect timing, my dad said. Now Vee could stop working— which he always felt upstaged by—and raise a family, the first child already on the way. My mother had little intention of that. As her Heroes All job wound to a halt, Vee pursued the next relentlessly: George A. Pflaum, publisher of Treasure Chest, where the editor felt “certain that you will hear from us when we begin laying out the plans for the 1948-49 school year.” Nothing. A second contact in early 1952, this time with a new editor, began with a sharp chastisement. “I hate people with out-of-the-ordinary names who do not give a clue as to whether they are Mr., Miss, or Mrs. Which is it? I guess, Mr.,” associate editor George H. Weldon wrote July 18, 1952. Her continued correspondence with Treasure Chest produced two illustration assignments for short stories in 1952. When she wheedled Weldon for a comic strip assignment, he finally told her on October 5, 1953: “Right now, regular jobs are out of the question.” There ended her published art career.

Life After Comics My mom did a few line drawings for handy items people wanted to market, but generally, Vee set aside her commercial ink, brush, and pens for decades. Unsettled as a suburban mom, Vee often ditched daily coffee with the neighbors. In her blue jeans, she cut a singular figure among the other ladies in their housedress uniforms. She filled the walls of her home with gangbuster images of runaway stagecoaches, akin to her Heroes All assignments. Vee’s drawing skills translated easily for her into three dimensions. She began working in clay, employing themes she knew intimately. Ours was the only house on the block with life-sized Roman soldier busts. Later in the ’60s, Vee transformed the house into a stage set for Man of La Mancha. A rugged stone fireplace filled in the back wall of the family room; then she covered the dark mahogany paneling with heraldic shields and Medieval weaponry. Racks of fencing swords and battle-axes, all of her own making, filled every inch of wall space. Using her curvy little Volkswagen Beetle, Vee


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Continuing A Daughter’s Memoir Of Her Artist Mother, Vee Quintal Pearson

When In Rome… Or Maybe Minneapolis… Vee did first thumbnails, then fuller sketches of a gladiator defeating a Christian in the Roman arena, then turned those designs into high-relief carvings on the doors of an 8-foot-tall china cabinet that she built and stained. “Roman soldiers,” Robyn adds, “stood guard on the corner posts.” Seen here are a photo of the “breakfront” china cabinet/bookcase… the gladiator-vs.-Christian carvings… and her sketches done for same. Note the closeup detail of the carved gladiator and Christian in the bottom-most photo. [Art © Estate of Vee Quintal Pearson.]

By the time I finished high school, it seemed we were living on the MGM back lot. A succession of my theatre friends visited. In 1977, Penn Jillette—now the Las Vegas magician, who had not yet begun his famous collection of torture implements—felt right at home at Vee’s the day he dropped by with his first strait-jackets from a nearby prison. Penn casually leaned his elbow on the top of our refrigerator and surveyed the adjoining dark, Medieval chamber, walls covered with battle axes, broadswords, heraldic shields, all made by my swashbuckling mother. “I’m going to love it here,” he grinned.

frequently drove home from the lumberyard, lengths of board sticking out the windows—something like a jousting pony—ropes and red cargo flags fluttering. Her swashbuckling comics sat in an old suitcase in the basement; the action skills she had honed on her comic pages, however, she began incorporating into her new furniture designs. Battling gladiators, for instance, sported in high-relief on the doors of the massive china cabinet. Roman soldiers stood guard on the corner posts. China cabinet? No such tame term can adequately describe the eight-foot-tall and six-foot-wide solid mahogany and basswood shelving-unit that Vee built, then stained black.

In 1978, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, who arrived for dinner and nearly set the back yard on fire while juggling torches, kept their thoughts to themselves as they piled back onto their De Stijlcolored school bus. All viewed Vee’s home with a mixture of laughter and awe. I, too, felt alternately proud and squirmy about it. A newspaper article on Vee’s furniture carving hobby appeared in the Edina Sun, May 1978. Soon after, Vee took photos of her current work to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. They offered to book a show for her in their new Minnesota Gallery sometime in 1986, but she didn’t want to wait seven years for the next show opening. From there she branched out into portrait busts of Native Americans, crease-faced wise men, wind-worn old sailors, and stylized women, exploring an expressionistic style all her own.


“My Comic Mom!!” – Part II

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Dragon Her Back Into Comics (Left:) This 1980s ad for a comics retailer was penciled by Quintal, and inked by future pro artist Billy Fugate. [© Estate of Vee Quintal Pearson & Billy Fugate.] (Above:) Drawings from circa 1974, when Quintal was, Robyn says, “warming up, trying to get back in the swing to try some new stuff.” [© Estate of Vee Quintal Pearson.]

“Stratosphere John” (Above & right:) The nearest Vee came to drawing a super-hero was her work on the character Stratosphere John, a “crime-fighting steeplejack.” Seen here are her original 1940s concept sketches for that stalwart (as well as for some pirates)—a full figure drawing—and the first page of a projected (origin?) story, done in 1985. [© Estate of Vee Quintal Pearson.]

Comic Collectors Vee never collected comics herself. Through the ’50s and ’60s, while raising her kids, she showed little interest in any comics my brothers or I brought home. Maybe once, out of curiosity, I looked through her battered suitcase filled with comics that sat in the basement. When I moved to uptown in 1980, some artist friends at Comic City—the first comic book specialty store in the Twin Cities—wanted to meet my mom. Then we both had another look at her work.

Billy Fugate—who was just placing his first fanzine work, but would eventually work for Disney Comics at Marvel—convinced Vee to pencil an ad for Comic City that he would then ink. Thus, Vee’s return to comic work. Bill also connected Vee with Catherine Yronwode, who, with Trina Robbins, was then compiling Women and the Comics (Eclipse Books, 1985). For an example of her comics, Vee sent the cover of


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Continuing A Daughter’s Memoir Of Her Artist Mother, Vee Quintal Pearson

Vee Quintal Pearson: A Life In Art Vee Quintal Pearson in later years, with some of her superb carvings— flanked by the comics-style work of her younger days: a pirate/exploration page from an uncertain issue of The Catholic Boy, and the life of Charlemagne from the Heroes All issue for Feb. 1, 1946. [Art © the respective copyright holders.]

Heroes All, Nov 25, 1947. The young student sits in an overstuffed chair, while miniature Pilgrims and Indians crawl out of a history book at his feet, bringing to life the Thanksgiving story. What was she thinking?! She should have sent them what made her stand out from all the other comic artist gals. Action! The “Vasco da Gama: Passage to India” splash panel from Heroes All, Feb 15, 1946, (Vol. IV, Number 13)—that would have dazzled them! Or Crusaders charging, broadswords thwacking! Scores to choose from! But, no. A modern boy. In a chair. That passive submission choice also puzzled Trina Robbins, when I caught up with her along with some of my mom’s more dynamic comics at Twin Cities’ SpringCon in 2013. Vee picked up a few commercial gigs for magazines where I designed pages. First, Fins & Feathers Magazine (1984) featured Vee Quintal Pearson art, including the hilarious mugging victims of second-degree sunburn and heatstroke. Then, in 1988, Vee illustrated two tall-tale hunting stories in comic book-style for Archery World Magazine. This ink work jogged her memory of several strip ideas she had squelched.

New Comics! My mom illustrated comic book heroes for years, but due to the focus of the company she worked for, she never got the opportunity to draw super-hero strips. A 1940s notebook page shows


“My Comic Mom!!” – Part II

Author, Author! A self-portrait of author Robyn Dean McHattie—and the cover of her e-book My Comic Mom!! The first edition of the latter (with its Vee Quintal art from an issue of Heroes All – Catholic Action Illustrated was published October 2012; upgraded August 2013… ePublished worldwide by ZYXALON PRESS, Minneapolis. For permissions, contact rdmchattie@returningtodenver.com. [Above art © 2014 Robyn Dean McHattie; book cover art © 2012 Estate of Vee Quintal Pearson.]

Vee’s original full cast of characters for a super-hero of her own creation: Stratosphere John. She based the lead on those astonishing, now historic, Lewis Hine photos of men walking—or eating lunch—along the open-air girders of the Empire State Building in 1930. In 1985, Stratosphere John, Vee’s crime-fighting steeplejack came to life. She inked four Bristol boards. Vee concocted her own script; her characteristic visual action drove the storytelling. Unfortunately, that comic remains unpublished. Looking at the art today, it may not have suited Marvel or DC in the ’40s, but would easily have been acceptable to one of the other comic companies. She also penciled more than seven boards for another unpublished original comic. Death of an Assassin (which I translated for you from her own title: Assassin’s Quietus) would have made a gritty film noir movie, with all its throat-clutching plot complications. Shortly after these new comics, Vee tried her hand at writing and illustrating a children’s fantasy book. The fifteen full-color illustrations on illustration board are spectacular, considering she had worked in black-&-white almost exclusively during her career. Those storyboards all sat in their big envelopes leaning against a wall as she next set out on a writing spree. She focused on short story and novel manuscripts until her death in April 1998, following emergency heart surgery. She was 79. When I picture Vee in her late seventies, I see her ignoring the phone, letting the answering-machine take calls, video-recording

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Star Trek Voyager—her favorite show—totally focused on her nonstop creative work that already filled every inch of wall, shelf, and tabletop space in her suburban cottage.

Biographical articles on Vee Pearson: “My Comic Mom,” by Britt Aamodt, The Old Times Newspaper, Vol. 23, No. 8. August 2013. Cover and continued on p. 3, 6-7, 10-11, 12-13, and 15. R.D. McHattie, interviewed by Britt Aamodt, KFAI radio, April 2013. Archived: www.ampers.org/pieces/rd-mchatties-comicmom Robbins, Trina and Catherine Yronwode, Women and the Comics. Eclipse Books: Forestville, CA, 1985, pp. 62, 64. “Why Pay for Woodcarving When She Can Do It Herself?” by Carla Baranauckas, Edina Sun. Vol. 6, No. 38. May 12, 1978. Cover and continued on p. A5. “Pearson. V.” Entry in Bails, Jerry and Hames Ware, The Who’s Who of American Comic Books, Detroit: 1973-1976. p. 204.

About the Author Robyn Dean McHattie (nee Pearson), a Minneapolis native, has spent thirty years as an actor, artist, graphic illustrator, writer, and teacher. She holds art degrees from Smith College and the University of Minnesota, and has also studied literature at Trinity College, Oxford University. Robyn started Zyxalon Press in 1992. Her second novel was named “one of four notable alumni books of 2011-12” by Trinity College, Oxford. You can see more art of and learn more about Vee Quintal Pearson at www.VeeQuintalComicArt.com.


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Seal Of Approval:

Dr. Amy K. Nyberg

The History Of The Comics Code Chapter 4 Of DR. AMY KISTE NYBERG's 1998 Work On Comic Book Censorship

A/E

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: We continue our presentation of the full text (with added art and photos) of the book Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code by Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg, Associate Professor of Communications in the Department of Communication and the Arts at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey.

the book—the original print edition of which can still be obtained from UPM at www.upress.sate.ms.us. Our thanks to Dr. M. Thomas Inge, under those general editorship the volume was originally published as part of its Studies in Popular Culture series… to William Biggins and Vijah Shah, acquisitions editors past and present at the U. Press of Mississippi… and to Brian K. Morris for retyping the text on a Word document for Ye Editor to edit.

As we’ve said before: Seal of Approval is extensively “footnoted,” in the MLA style which lists book, article, or author name, plus page numbers, between parentheses in the actual text; e.g., “(Hart 154-156)” refers to pp. 154-156 of whichever work by an author or editor named Hart appears in the bibliography… which will be printed at the conclusion of our serialization, a few issues from now. When the parentheses contain only page numbers, it is because the other information is printed in the main text almost immediately preceding the note. (In addition, there are a bare handful of footnotes treated in the more traditional sense.)

Chapter 3, last issue, covered the Spring 1954 hearings held in New York City by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which centered on comic books, mostly presided over by Sen. Estes Kefauver, and the testimony in particular of comics critic Dr. Fredric Wertham and EC Comics publisher William M. Gaines—the latter turning into a self-inflicted public-relations disaster for the industry. By the time the subcommittee issued its interim report in March 1955, a majority of the frightened comic book publishers had founded a new organization, the Comic Magazine Association of America, which would set up its own Comics Code Authority to promulgate and enforce stricter standards on comic books, which were deemed to be, de facto, aimed at children. This, they hoped, would keep Congress and state legislatures from enacting their own, even more severe, and possibly industrydestroying restrictions. But before we examine the first days of the new Code, it’s time to take a closer look at the most influential voice against comics during the 1950s….

We have retained such usages and spellings from the book as “superhero,” an uncapitalized “comics code,” “E.C.” and “DC,” etc.; in the captions we have added, however, we have reverted to our own style. Those captions, naturally, do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Dr. Nyberg or the University Press of Mississippi, the original publisher of

Seductive Covers? Dr. Fredric Wertham, holding up some scurrilous reading matter, bookended by the U.S. (on left) and British covers of his signature work, Seduction of the Innocent. It was published in America in 1954, and by Museum Press in the UK in ’55. Wertham had originally wanted his book to have a less inflammatory title, but his U.S. publisher (Rinehart) insisted on Seduction. (Re the photo: the Seduction of the Innocent website informs us that the cover of Ed Brubaker’s comic Criminal, published some time after Wertham’s death in 1981, has been Photoshopped in. But otherwise it’s an authentic vintage pic of the good Doctor. He probably wouldn’t have liked Criminal, anyway.) [Covers © the respective copyright holders.]


Seal of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

Chapter 4

Frederic Wertham And The Comics Crusade

F

redric Wertham is given the credit—or the blame—for “cleaning up the comics” in the 1950s, but he was not pleased with the outcome of the Senate hearings. The establishment of a self-regulatory code administered by the comic book publishers fell far short of the legislation he had pushed for since the end of World War II. To understand his role in the comic book crusade and his dissatisfaction with the effect he had on the outcome, one must place Wertham’s attack on comics in the larger theoretical framework of his ideas about violence and society.

Wertham’s work, especially his book Seduction of the Innocent, is often cited as an early example of media effects research, and social scientists today criticize Wertham for his lack of scientific methodology and for his failure to offer quantitative evidence to support his findings. For example, Lowery and DeFleur describe his project as a qualitative content analysis supported by clinical case studies and psychological testing. They suggest that Wertham was claiming that comic books had relatively uniform effects, which was “clearly a version of the old magic bullet theory.” They add that the major weakness of Wertham’s position is that it was not supported by scientifically gathered research data and that Wertham presented no systematic inventory of comic book content. They write, “Without such an inventory, the conjectures are biased, unreliable, and useless.” They conclude that Wertham’s book proposed a simplistic model of “direct and immediate relation between cause and effect” (262, 264). Patrick Parsons suggests that Wertham’s criticism was a “crude social learning theory model which either implicitly or explicitly assumed unmediated modeling effects, often accompanied by an equally simple Freudian interpretation of comic content” (82). Other detractors echo some, if not all, of these criticisms. Moreover, even Wertham’s motives are sometimes questioned, with some implying that he acted more out a desire for personal recognition and gain than any genuine concern for children. These critics, however, misinterpret Wertham’s work. Despite the fact that Wertham singled out comic books as a factor in juvenile delinquency, he was very careful to point out that there was no direct, linear relationship between reading comic books and delinquent behavior; comic books did not “cause” juvenile delinquency (although many of Wertham’s critics and his followers clearly believed he meant just that). His argument was much more complex. His project was to explore the relationship between culture and individuals, and his belief was that the social and cultural matrix in which individuals existed had been largely ignored by psychiatry in its efforts to understand individual behavior. Wertham’s goal was to establish a social psychiatry in which an understanding of the role of culture necessarily played a prominent part. When Wertham wrote of the “mass conditioning” of children by comic books, he never suggested that the medium had uniform effects. “A child is not a simple unit which exists outside of its living social ties,” he wrote (Seduction 118). Comic book reading was just one of a number of factors that needed to be considered when studying children’s behavior. His point was that comic books were part of the social world of children and should not be dismissed as harmless entertainment. He stressed that children did not learn only in school, but from play, from their entertainment, and from their social interaction with adults and with other children. He wrote: “A great deal of learning comes in

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the form of entertainment, and a great deal of entertainment painlessly teaches important things” (Seduction 89). Wertham was not interested in a social science approach, with its emphasis on individual effects, in his study of comics. Rather, his aim was to understand the ways in which mass media shaped society. He maintained that psychiatry’s goal should be to understand social influences affecting individual behavior. Historian James Gilbert has argued, quite rightly, that Wertham’s views were consistent with the theories of mass culture and mass society that preoccupied American intellectuals during the 1950s (111). Wertham shared many of the concerns of the scholars of the Frankfurt School who settled in the United States in the 1930s and whose critique of American mass culture was quite influential in the intellectual community. Wertham was no stranger to their ideas and philosophy; he knew Theodor Adorno well and was familiar with the work of other critics in the same tradition, such as Arno Mayer and Siegfried Kracauer, and Gilbert argues the assumptions Wertham put forth are better understood from this perspective (234). A close reading of Seduction of the Innocent, coupled with an understanding of where this book fits into Wertham’s larger body of work, supports this position. Comic books presented Wertham with an ideal vehicle for his work on children, violence, and society, and his credentials as a leading psychiatrist enabled him to publicize his work in the popular media and thereby influence public opinion. He proved very effective in generating public outrage over the content of comic books and capitalizing on it to further his own agenda of social reform. A brief review of his career reveals why Wertham was quickly embraced by the media and the public as an expert in the controversy. Frederic I. Wertheimer was born in Germany March 20, 1895. Wertheimer earned his medical degree in Germany and did postgraduate work in Paris and in London. In 1921 and 1922, he served as an assistant to Emile Kraepelin, a distinguished psychiatrist. Wertheimer emigrated to the United States in 1922 when he was invited by Dr. Adolf Meyer, director of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, to take a

Four-Armed Is Forewarned! One of the comics cited by Richard Clenenden, executive director of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, in the hearings held in spring of 1954 had been Black Magic #29 (March-April 1954), though it wasn’t singled out in Nyberg’s text. Clenenden particularly noticed that one of the people on the cover had two faces and four arms. Well, wouldn’t you? Art, of course, by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby—with maybe a bit of help from their two-armed friends. You can read the story in the recent Titan Books hardcover The Simon Kirby Library: Horror, edited by Steve Saffel. [© Estates of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby.]


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Chapter 4 of Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s 1998 Work On Comic Book Censorship

position at the clinic (Reibman 13; Rothe 634). He changed his name to Wertham after becoming a U.S. citizen in 1927, and in 1948, he changed the spelling of his first name to Fredric (Nisbet 29). Wertham served for eight years as director of the Phipps Clinic, where he was chief resident in psychiatry and assistant in charge of outpatients of the Mental Hygiene Clinic. He also taught psychotherapy and brain anatomy at Johns Hopkins Medical School. During this time, he met and married Florence Hesketh, an artist doing biological research. Together they wrote a monograph, “The Significance of the Physical Constitution in Mental Disease,” published in 1926 under the name Wertheimer. In 1929, he became the first psychiatrist in the United States to receive a fellowship from the National Research Council. He used his funding to begin research that he eventually used as the basis for his first book, The Brain as an Organ. It was published in 1934 and became a standard medical textbook (Reibman 12; Rothe 634). Also while at Johns Hopkins, Wertham developed the mosaic test, where patients assembled colored pieces of wood into a freely chosen design that could then be evaluated by psychiatrists. It became an important diagnostic tool in his later work in forensic psychiatry (Reibman 13). He was greatly influenced by Meyer, who developed the first standardized method of taking case histories of

A German Export Reader Han Kiesl of Germany says he “somewhat lost interest in comic books [for some time, years ago] when he studied mathematics at university,” but the first Marvel Essentials volumes brought him back; he became an A/E reader with #33, particularly enjoying Jim Amash’s interviews with “Golden Age comic writers and artists whose names were often totally unknown to me and whose works have probably never seen print in Germany.” In one edition of “re:” he read a letter “about Fredric Wertham being born in Nuremberg, my hometown. Checking with the Internet and a couple of books, I found two different birthplaces mentioned, Nuremberg and Munich.” He went to the Nuremberg city archive “to check the birth registers of 1895” and found it there: “Friedrich Ignatz Werthheimer, born on March 20, 1895. So Wikipedia is wrong, Alter Ego was right.” Hans kindly sent a scan of the birth register entry; but he writes that it is “probably unreadable for most readers (even for most young people in Germany, since it is handwritten in an old German writing style which has not been taught in school for decades).” The section on Wertham’s mother, as translated by Hans, reads: “Mathilde Werthheimer, née Lust, wife of merchant Sigmund Wertheimer, both of Jewish religion.” Thanks, mein Freund! This adds even to the considerable information about Wertham given in Dr. Nyberg’s book. Also seen on this page are the cover of an early printing of Essential Avengers, Vol. 1 (2001), with cover art by Stewart Immonen & Wade von Grawbadger, which reprinted The Avengers #1-24 in black-&-white—and Al Avison’s cover for Captain America Comics #17 (Aug. 1942), which almost certainly never made it to Germany during the Second World War. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]


Seal of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

mental patients (Campbell 716). Meyer emphasized that mental disorders needed to be understood in relation to the patient’s environment, and his detailed case studies led to a study of the home and of the organization of a patient’s social life (Campbell 723). Wertham left the Phipps Clinic to take a position as senior psychiatrist in the Department of Hospitals of New York City in 1932. He also became an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at New York University. That same year, he organized and became What A Belle View! director of the psychiatric Outside the gate at Bellevue Hospital, clinic connected with the New New York City. One blogger referred York Court of General to it as “the creepiest hospital in Sessions (later the Supreme Manhattan” and said it reminded him Court of New York) (Rothe of the Arkham Sanatorium in H.P. 634). It was the first clinic of Lovecraft’s tales set in fictitious its kind, providing psychiatric Arkham, Massachusetts—the namesake, of course, of Arkham evaluations of every convicted Asylum in today’s “Batman” mythos. felon (Hitzig 10). Between 1933 and 1936, he was successively the psychiatrist in charge of the alcoholic, children’s, and prison wards of Bellevue Hospital. From 1936 to 1939, he served as the director of the Mental Hygiene Clinic at Bellevue. In 1940, he became director of psychiatric services at Queens Hospital (Reibman 13; Rothe 634). During the 1930s, Wertham’s interests shifted from brain physiology to forensic psychiatry. He was frequently called upon to testify in cases involving violent crimes, and his experiences led him to develop what would be a lifelong interest in the causes of violence. He was involved as an expert witness in several sensational murder cases in the 1930s; they provided material for three books, Dark Legend (1941), The Show of Violence (1948), and A Circle of Guilt (1956). In 1938, Wertham published an article that set the tone for much of his later research. It appeared in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology and dealt with the relationship of the legal system to psychiatry, suggesting that the two must work more closely together in order to prevent crime rather than just punish the criminal. He also discussed the role of the mass media in educating the public for crime prevention, suggesting that a self-censorship of newspapers could “instruct the public instead of alarming it.” He urged newspapers to use restraint in covering sensational crime stories: “Is it so impossible for the majority of decent people and the newspapers to arrive at a mutual agreement so that readers, especially immature ones, will not see day after day the lurid details of a murder illustrated by countless photographs of a beautiful nude model?” lmmature readers, especially children, needed to be protected from society, Wertham argued. That, not psychiatric treatment, was the first step in crime prevention. He concluded his article: “Let us not begin by dissecting and delving into

the minds of children. Let us first correct and improve the circumstances under which they grow up” (Wertham, “Psychiatry” 852-53). This article is important because it reflects Wertham’s early concern with children, violence, and the effects of the mass media. Peter Nisbet, in his study of Wertham’s writings, noted: “For the next thirty years, Wertham returned again and again to this fundamental topic: the importance of social factors in the study of violence, whether that violence be a murder, juvenile delinquency, or Nazi genocide” (25).

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The Company He Kept Famed attorney Clarence Darrow. In the late 1920s or early ’30s, he and Wertham apparently became friends for good reasons, elaborated in Nyberg’s text.

Also in the 1930s, Wertham began his fight against a system that denied minorities proper access to psychiatric care. While still at Johns Hopkins, he became friends with Clarence Darrow because Wertham was one of the only psychiatrists who would agree to testify on behalf of indigent blacks (Rothe 635). When he moved to New York in 1932, he began to search for a way in which to provide needed psychiatric services to blacks and low-income people. He proposed setting up a free clinic in Harlem, but he was unable to interest city officials, foundations, or private charities in the project. Some accused him of political motives rather than humanitarian ones, while others accused him of trying to establish a segregated institution (Ellison 302). It was not until March 8, 1946, that the Harlem-based clinic opened its doors in a church basement (Hitzig 10). By the end of 1947, its staff consisted of fourteen psychiatrists, twelve social workers, and other specialists and clerical workers, all volunteers. The suggested fee for services, if the patient could afford it, was twenty-five cents (“Psychiatry in Harlem” 50). The Lafargue Clinic was named after Dr. Paul Lafargue, a Cuban-born black French physician, politician, social reformer, and philosopher (Reibman 15). It was the only psychiatric clinic in Harlem and the only center in the city where both blacks and whites could receive treatment (Ellison 295). It survived until 1957, when the retirement of Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the pastor at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church

Take Three Books And Call Me In The Morning! The covers of three of Fredric Wertham’s earlier books: Dark Legend (1941), The Show of Violence (1948), and The Circle of Guilt (1956), referred to in Seal of Approval by the title A Circle of Guilt. Stan Lee has stated that, prior to Wertham’s encounter with comic books, he himself had read Dark Legend: A Study in Murder, a psychoanalytical examination in quasifictional form, and greatly enjoyed it. The Show of Violence, as per the SOTI website, “detailed [Wertham’s] involvement in a number of murder trials,” while The Circle of Guilt likewise dealt with a murder case. [Cover art © the respective copyright holders.]


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Chapter 4 of Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s 1998 Work On Comic Book Censorship

where the clinic was based, along with implementation of complex new government regulations, persuaded Wertham to close the clinic (Gilbert 96). The treatment of children was emphasized at the Lafargue Clinic because more than half of the delinquent children to enter New York City’s juvenile justice system were from Harlem. Wertham estimated about one-fifth of his patients were children (“Psychiatry in Harlem” 50). One Lafargue social worker explained that the goal of the staff was to find children who were maladjusted before they became delinquent, noting, that the courts usually didn’t bother much with the “Negro kids, sending them to institutions such as the State Institution for Mental Defectives, which made hardened criminals of them (R. Martin 800). It was Wertham’s work with the children at the Lafargue Clinic that stimulated his interest in comic books. He first became aware of comic books while director of the Bellevue Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic. He noted: “My assistants and I studied children very carefully and off and on we made the observation that children who got into some special trouble were especially steeped in comic-book reading. But at first we did not put these observations together” (“Curse” 394). It was at the Lafargue Clinic that the psychiatrist, working with Dr. Hilde Mosse and other associates, first began a systematic study of the effects of comic books on children with a technique Wertham would come to call the “clinical method,” using detailed case histories to draw general conclusions (Gilbert 27). His subjects were a cross-section of children he saw at his clinics, children referred to him from public and private childcare agencies and by the courts, and children he saw in his private practice. Wertham integrated his study of comic books into his routine work on children and their mental hygiene. He was disturbed by the harsh treatment given delinquent children, whom he saw as victims of a system that did nothing to protect children from a harmful environment and influences but then found fault with the children, rather than examining “the invasion of that child’s mind from the outside” (Seduction 244). The “invasion” about which Wertham wrote was the result of the commercialization of children’s leisure time, and he argued children were vulnerable to influences from the comic book industry, an industry that had apparently supplanted the family as a means of transmitting values and beliefs.

curbing the excesses of the industry, Wertham turned his attention for a while to other projects, situating his battle against comic books in the larger context of his study of violence with the publication of The Show of Violence in 1949. Drawing on a number of the sensational murder cases with which he had been involved, Wertham explored the relationship between psychiatry and the legal system, laying out in detail for the first time his case for the development of what he called social psychiatry (8). His position, which essentially called for psychiatrists to take a more active role in social reform, set him outside the mainstream of his profession. Most psychiatrists focused on individual rather than social causes in their search for explanations of juvenile delinquency. This pattern was established by the child guidance movement of the 1920s, which created clinics for treatment of juvenile delinquency and other childhood problems and created programs for training child psychiatrists (Levine and Levine 143). The professional functioned as “an agent of deviancy control,” and there was rarely a discussion of environmental factors as they related to mental health. The nuclear family was presumed to be the socializing agent, and the theories and clinical methods developed focused on the problems of individuals (245). In his synthesis of work done on children and juvenile delinquency in the 1940s and 1950s published by the American Orthopsychiatric Association in its journal, Dr. Benjamin Karpman said: “[Psychiatrists are] practicing therapists engaged in treating individual delinquents. They are not in a position to prescribe what shall be done in order to prevent delinquency. The therapist cannot remedy, except in a few individual instances, unsatisfactory familial situations; and there is little or nothing he can do about deplorable social and economic conditions” (338). It was precisely this attitude among his colleagues that Wertham attacked in his book The Show of Violence. It was not a new argument for him. In a two-part review of current books about psychiatry written in 1945 for The New Republic, Wertham wrote: “It is not the individual but the social which is the distinctly human. If we do not realize that, we do not deserve to be called psychiatrists. We remain merely veterinaries of the mind” (“Who Will Guard” 580). In writing The Show of Violence, Wertham hoped that “the courageous and practical psychiatric study of criminal cases will have a healthy

After a two-year study, Wertham concluded: “So far we have determined that the effect is definitely and completely harmful.” That remark was published in the article on his research, written by Judith Clinically Speaking… Crist, titled “Horror in the (Clockwise from above left:) Nursery,” which appeared in Collier’s, March 27, 1948 (22) The Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, which was established in a church basement by Dr. (see chap. 2). That article, along Wertham in 1946… a free psychiatric clinic that with a symposium organized took both black and white patients. the same month for his profesIt was named for Paul Lafargue (1842-1911), sional colleagues, marked a journalist (among other things) who was Wertham’s entry into the Karl Marx’s son-in-law. campaign against comic books. In this undated photo, Wertham is shown As noted in chapter 2, his working at the Clinic. This is a side of the attacks prompted the industry comics’ sternest critic that sometimes gets lost in to adopt a six-point selfthe furor over his attacks on the four-color regulatory code that year. medium… and it shouldn’t. But neither, of Although the 1948 comics code course, does it necessarily validate his views on was relatively ineffective in other matters, including comic books.


Seal of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

The Company He Kept, Cont’d Dr. Hilde Mosse, a respected associate of Dr. Wertham’s at the Lafargue Clinic—and a fierce defender, even in later years, of his views on both racial equality and comic books. A portrait photo of Dr. Mosse was seen in A/E #125.

reverberation on psychiatry itself for the development of a longoverdue social psychiatry” (Wertham, Show 25). He criticized psychiatrists for being too concerned with the inner conflicts in man. He wrote, “They have not yet learned sufficiently how closely these are connected with the outer conflicts in society,” arguing that individual and social factors are not mutually exclusive opposites (243-44).

In addition to attacking psychiatry for its individualistic focus, Wertham also argued against the predominant theories about the innate aggressiveness of mankind as a cause of violence, asserting, “People like to be non-violent.” He looked instead to the “social medium” where personal growth takes place as the source for violent acts (253). He believed that civilization could progress to a point where crime and violence would be eliminated. He added, “It is easy to laugh at that as a Utopia; but there is no proof that hostility and violence are an ineradicable part of human nature. To accept that as a dogma would mean being unscientific about the present and nihilistic about the future” (Circle of Guilt 59). It was this theory about human personality and violence that led Wertham to reject arguments made by other psychiatrists that comic books had a cathartic function, allowing children to release their hostilities in harmless fantasy. He felt comic books created a callousness to violence: “The lack of respect for human life can begin in childhood in the comparative indifference to torture, mutilation, and death so rife in comic books. The comic books are obscene glorifications of violence and crime, of sadistic and masochistic social attitudes” (“Wertham on Murder” 52). Wertham was also highly critical of the popularization of psychiatry after World War II, which he felt contributed to the growing feeling that individual, not social, action was the solution to all problems. He labeled the myriad self-help books written by both laymen and psychiatrists “peace-of-mind literature.” The attraction of such books, he noted, was that they offered simple, pat answers to complex problems. The approach taken by the authors suggested that the capacity for happiness exists within each individual. He wrote: “The influence of the environment in producing worry, tension or

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anxiety is either completely disregarded or accepted as inevitable. There are no social forces, no social history, no social interaction, no social responsibility. . .The lesson is, clearly, that it is not the social scene but its isolated inhabitant that needs to be analyzed” (Wertham, “Air-Conditioned Conscience” 27). This type of “escape literature” meant that individuals could “escape from social responsibility.” He concluded, “One can extract from these books a new concept, never before so fully elaborated—the concept of an air-conditioned conscience” (27). He felt that psychoanalysis was being abused and used “at random for almost everything.” He argued, “Social problems are social problems, and you cannot psychoanalyze them out of existence” (Wertham, “What to Do” 206). The Lafargue Clinic was one example of the way in which Wertham put his own beliefs about social psychiatry into action. Another was his work on the psychological effects of school segregation. At the request of the NAACP, the Lafargue Clinic undertook a study of black and white Delaware school children and concluded that segregated school systems were psychologically harmful (Wertham, “Nine Men” 497). Wertham’s testimony in 1951 was a major factor in the decision to outlaw school segregation in Delaware, and his research and testimony in the Delaware cases became part of the legal argument used in the landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Reibman 15). Although his next major attack on comic books in the popular press did not come until 1953, Wertham remained active in the battle against comic books. The 1948 articles had stimulated an

Crime After Crime The above photo that accompanied Dr. Wertham’s article on comics in The Ladies’ Home Journal (Nov. 1953) shows a little girl reading a crime or horror comic. Now, we’re not saying the LSJ’s photographer gave her the comic, and maybe even posed her with it, but—nah, we’re just bein’ paranoid again! In the line drawing at right, also from that piece, Wertham seems to be overseeing the whole operation… or, at the very least, we suspect he wouldn’t have disapproved of the shutterbug’s methods. Don’t believe us? Read Carol L. Tilley’s article “Seducing the Innocent” next issue—along with Amy Nyberg’s story of the coming of the Comics Code, as Seal of Approval continues. Wertham caricature by William Auerbach-Levy. [© Ladies Home Journal or successors in interest.]


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case studies were intentionally provocative. For example, chapter 7, subtitled “Comic Books and the Psychosexual Development of Children,” is called “I Want to Be a Sex Maniac!” The illustrations included were several panels emphasizing the sex and violence found in the pages of comics. Wertham even reproduced the cover from the July/August 1949 issue of Crime Detective Comics showing a psychiatrist bound and gagged as his office is being robbed. Wertham’s caption: “Caricature of the author in a position comic-book publishers wish he were in permanently.” And the narrative is supplemented with the kinds of anecdotal evidence drawn from his case studies and other reports that had proved so effective in earlier magazine articles.

Four Out Of Five Doctors Say… We also showcased this art by an unidentified artist (bigger) in A/E #125, but: In response to Wertham’s charge that the bound and gagged psychiatrist on the cover of Hillman Periodicals’ Crime Detective Comics #9 (July-Aug. 1949) was a caricature of himself, Herb Rogoff, who was an editorial assistant at that company at the time, told Jim Amash in an interview in A/E #41: “We had no such thought! I worked on that cover…. We had a laugh about it.” But, a few years later, the comics book publishers and their editors definitely weren’t laughing. [© the respective copyright holders.] Also seen above is a portrait of Herb Rogoff, painted by his wife, artist Helen Van Wyk, in 1971. Courtesy of HR. [© 2014 Herb Rogoff.]

interest in legislation against comic books at the state, local, and national levels, and Wertham was called upon to give expert testimony. He spoke several times before the New York Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics, formed in March 1949 to make recommendations about legislation (see chap. 2). Wertham also convinced Sen. Estes Kefauver, head of the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime, to investigate the comic book industry. The results failed to provide strong evidence of a relationship between comic books and delinquency, and the Kefauver committee dropped its inquiry into comic books (see chap. 3). Wertham denounced the “KefauverDewey charter” that he felt had granted the comic book industry the right to print whatever it wanted without regulation or control (Seduction 389). Discouraged by this lack of action on the part of state and federal lawmakers, Wertham again turned to the popular press as a forum for his views about comic books. He collected his articles and lectures describing his research on the effects of comic book violence into a book-length study and Rinehart and Company agreed to publish it. Seduction of the Innocent was released in 1954. Wertham’s book, while it drew on his research, was not intended to be a scholarly presentation of his ideas. He used his book as a vehicle to make his case against comics in hopes he could once again mobilize public opinion in support of his proposed ban on the sale of comic books to children. The book was not an objective overview of the comic book industry but a deliberately sensationalized portrait of the worst that comic books had to offer. The chapter titles, the illustrations, and the stories drawn from his

Wertham’s first goal was to alert parents to the fact that crime and horror comics existed and were read by children. He began his book by noting that the comic book industry gained a hold with its crime and horror comics before parents and others were aware of the shift in content. By the time the issue of harm was raised, Wertham suggested, “the conquest of American childhood by the industry was already an accomplished fact” (Seduction 220). He argued that the problem of crime comics was too wide-spread to be handled on an individual basis. The problem was a social one and children needed help, not at the family level, but on a larger scale. Such reasoning supported Wertham’s call for legislation. Wertham also shared some of the cultural elitism of the Frankfurt School in his rejection of the suggestion that comic books were a form of children’s culture that could be likened to fairy tales or figures from folklore. “Comic books have nothing to do with drama, with art or literature,” Wertham wrote. In fact, echoing earlier

It’s A Jungle Comic Out There! Fiction House illustrated Dr. Wertham’s point about “blond Nordic supermen” inhabiting the “‘jungle’ comic books”—in this case, the final issue of the genreembracing Jungle Comics (#163, Summer 1954). But of course the “native” on this cover, though physically inferior to Kaänga, is hardly apelike, nor were most blacks in the title—and it ignores not only the jungle gals like Sheena, Rulah, and the rest, but even Tarzan, who was definitely not a blond. Artist unknown— perhaps Maurice Whitman. [© the respective copyright holders.]


Seal of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

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tuted “the majority of mankind” (100). Children, he argued, were presented with two kinds of people: one is the tall, blond, regular-featured man or pretty young blonde girl, and the others fall into the broad category of inferior people. The social meaning attached to such representations becomes clear, according to Wertham, when children are asked to identify the villain in a story and invariably choose the character who is nonwhite, of an identifiable ethnic background, or one who in some other way deviates from the norm. Children take for granted these standards about race; in other words, such representations become normalized. And where nudity was found in comics, it was generally nonwhite women who are portrayed this way. Noted Wertham: “It is probably one of the most sinister methods of suggesting that races are fundamentally different with regard to moral values, and that one is inferior to the other. This is where a psychiatric question becomes a social one” (105).

Seduction Of The Indolent (Above:) Elsewhere in Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham wrote that Robin the Boy Wonder “often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.” The Batman & Robin/Bruce Wayne & Dick Grayson “dynamic duo” was, to the Doctor, “like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” Hey, and they even celebrated Christmas together, in Batman #9 (Feb-March 1942)! Script by Bill Finger; pencils by Bob Kane; inks by George Roussos & Jerry Robinson. With thanks to Steve G. Willis. [© DC Comics.] (Above center:) Here and there, soon after its publication, the comics industry laughed at Seduction of the Innocent from the start—as witness this panel from Charlton’s From Here to Insanity #8 (Feb. 1955), probably from the Dick Ayers-drawn story “Executive Suit,” a parody of the TV special and later movie Executive Suite. But it was nervous laughter. Scripter unknown. With thanks to Michaël Dewally. [© the respective copyright holders.]

critics, Wertham believed that comic books prevented children from developing an appreciation for good literature. If fed a diet of stories in which the solution to all problems is “simple, direct, mechanical, and violent,” children will be unable to advance to more complex works that cannot be reduced to the elements of a comic book plot, he argued (Seduction 241). While Wertham’s main concern was violence, he also studied the way race and gender were depicted in comic books. In a discussion of the “jungle” comic books, Wertham wrote that while the white people in these comics were blond, athletic, and shapely, the natives were usually portrayed as subhuman or even ape-like. Such portrayals, where the heroes were always “blond Nordic supermen,” made a deep impression on children (Seduction 32). Wertham noted that such images acted to reinforce attitudes of prejudice at the individual level, but they also worked at the broader social level, labeling as “minorities” what really consti-

The issue of gender is linked to violence in Wertham’s study, since women are generally victims in comic books. Wertham believed the blending of sensuality with cruelty was a particularly disturbing aspect of comic book ideology that had a great deal of resonance with the disdain for the opposite sex that young male readers often had. In many comic books, women were portrayed as objects to be abused or to be used as decoys in crime settings. Women who did not fall into the role of victim were generally cast as villains, often with masculine or witchlike powers. These plots suggested that men had to present a united front And We Always Thought Hoppy against such women. Was One Of The Good Guys! Wertham commented, “In To Wertham, even Hopalong Cassidy, the these stories there are practicomic starring the cowboy played in cally no decent, attractive, films by William Boyd, was only about successful women” (191). “killing and socking people and twisting Wertham also objected to the their arms and cutting their throats.” genre known as romance or This is the photo cover of Fawcett love comics. Such comics Publications’ final issue, #85 (Nov. 1953), moved from the realm of before they deep-sixed their comic book line after settlement of the physical violence against Superman/Captain Marvel lawsuit and women to psychological DC acquired the license to Hoppy. [© the violence in which the main respective copyright holders.] female character is often


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Chapter 4 of Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s 1998 Work On Comic Book Censorship

conclusions about comic books, and the dialogue he quotes seems quite contrived. This type of audience study, where researchers analyze what readers or viewers say, introduces a different set of interpretive problems that Wertham never acknowledged and probably never recognized. Even so, his insistence that the effects of comic books could be best understood by analyzing how the readers themselves made sense of what they were reading suggests that on one level, Wertham rejected the theoretical perspective he is accused of perpetrating – that the readers were passive consumers. One assertion that Wertham made about his readers was that they did not remember entire stories, but only fragments, so the claims by publishers that the criminals always got caught and punished in the end was empty reassurance. Wertham offered this young boy’s summary of the stories he liked: “They have a lot of girls in them. There is a lot of fighting in them. There are men and women fighting. Sometimes they kill the girls, they strangle them, shoot them. Sometimes they poison them. In the magazine Jumbo, they often stab them. The girl doesn’t do the stabbing very often, she gets stabbed more often” (Seduction 55). In another example, Wertham cited a comic featuring Hopalong Cassidy in which a barber threatens another man with a razor and Hopalong Cassidy attacks the barber and saves the man. Comments Wertham: “I have talked to children about this book. They do not say this book is about the West, or Hopalong Cassidy, or about a barber. They say it is about killing and socking people and twisting their arms and cutting their throats” (Seduction 309).

…It’s Superman! To Wertham, as per the reference to him on this page, “Superman” was shorthand for the entire comic book industry… perhaps fitting, considering what the Man of Tomorrow had meant to the field when he debuted in 1938. The cover of Superman #98 (July 1955), the third issue to feature the Comics Code “seal of approval,” was the work of Al Plastino. (The cover of the first post-Code issue, #96, was seen in A/E #123, in conjunction with the introduction of Dr. Nyberg’s book.) [© DC Comics.]

humiliated or shown to be inadequate in some way. Wertham’s ideological analysis, while relatively unsophisticated, would not be out of place in the company of media scholarship today that addresses many of these same issues. Another area in which Wertham might be considered a pioneer is that of audience analysis. The “clinical” method of taking lengthy case histories based on interviews with subjects has parallels in the field of anthropology, where researchers investigating culture conduct extensive field interviews. The ethnographic methods of anthropology have been adopted by some modern media scholars as a way to study media audiences, and in many ways, Wertham was engaging in similar research. He was interested in talking with a large number of children in an effort to discover how they made meaning out of this cultural product and the way they used comic books in their everyday lives. Of course, as noted before, by the time Wertham wrote Seduction of the Innocent, his agenda was clearly defined and his book was meant to serve that agenda. Therefore, the material presented from conversations with children, rather than being analyzed in any systematic way, was carefully selected to support Wertham’s

One way in which Wertham asserted comic books did have a direct influence on children was the way in which children made use of comics in their everyday lives by imitating the criminal acts they saw in comic books. He wrote: “Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store” (25). He devoted a great deal of time to discussing examples of such acts of imitation. While this might seem to contradict his position that comic books in and of themselves did not cause juvenile delinquency, Wertham was using these examples as a way to articulate how children’s actions simply mirrored the violence of their environment. Children who were exposed to a steady diet of comic books and other violent material learned that such behavior was socially acceptable and put those lessons into practice. Wertham shifted the blame from the individual to the environment: comic books didn’t make children delinquent, but were part of a cultural matrix that normalized delinquent behavior in the minds of children. This is what Wertham meant when he spoke about the “moral disarmament” of children. He explained: “lt is an influence on character, on attitude, on the higher functions of social responsibility, on superego formation and on the intuitive feeling for right and wrong” (91). He concluded: “Inculcation of a distorted morality by endless repetition is not such an intangible factor if one studies its source in comic books and its effect in the lives of children” (95). Wertham’s generalized critique of mass culture focused on the way that mass culture mediated between the child and his environment. He identified the problem as a social one that extended far beyond the publication of comic books. He wrote of the “cult of violence” that originated in social life, of which comic books were one manifestation. Juvenile delinquency reflected the social values of society, and comic books were not a mirror of a child’s mind but “a mirror of the child’s environment.” He added: “The very fact that crime comics are socially tolerated shows how much expression of hostility we tolerate and even encourage” (Seduction 117). But these broad criticisms of society were expressed in a fragmentary way throughout Seduction of the Innocent, rather than being explicitly outlined. This may have been deliberate on


Seal of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

It’s Still Wertham! The issue of the Saturday Review for April 9, 1955, cover-featured Dr. Wertham’s comics-oriented article “It’s Still Murder!” Also seen are the first page of the article and (below) one of the black-&-white panels he lifted for its second page. (Also seen was the “Statue of Liberty” panel/caption that was depicted in A/E #125.) The article’s title references a 1949 article he had written for SR titled “It’s Murder!”—which, however, dealt with Americans’ alleged fascination with homicide, not with comic books. Thanks to Jim Kealy & Bob Hughes. [© Saturday Review or its successors in interest.]

Wertham’s part. As Gilbert points out, Wertham’s arguments were a popularization of “some of the most radical European criticisms of mass society.” However, those intellectuals were not willing “to confront the practical question of controlling the mass culture” (108, 121). Wertham, with his emphasis on social reform, deemphasized the intellectual roots of his argument in order to ally himself with the conservative groups who seemed to be most willing to take action against comic books. Wertham’s efforts to stir action against the comic book industry did not go unnoticed by the publishers, but Wertham painted a portrait of a powerful, wellorganized propaganda machine determined to silence him and other critics by any means possible. Comic book publishers, Wertham believed, deliberately set out to deceive the American public by employing psychiatrists as experts in defense of the industry. Comic books, he argued, would have been driven from the market without such propaganda efforts: “Were it not for the confusion spread so adroitly by the comics experts, the good sense of mothers would have swept away both the product and the pretense” (Seduction 268). He also contended that the affiliation of some comic book publishers with national magazines kept the magazines from publishing articles critical of comics (258). And, he argued, publishers used copyright laws to forbid reproduction of the drawings, further weakening the critics of comics (318). In the same way, Wertham saw arguments of freedom of expression as a smoke screen that “draw people’s attention away from the real issue and veils the business in an idealistic haze” (325).

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There is no evidence to support Wertham’s claim of an organized industry-wide attempt to generate public support for comic books and silence the critics. The defense of comics by the industry was scattered at best and largely ineffectual. Henry Schultz, during his tenure as director of the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers, made an effort to combat the negative publicity being generated about comic books as part of his responsibilities as the leader of the publisher’s trade association. But the organization was underfunded from the beginning and did not have wide support in the industry, so no organized public relations campaign was possible. Individual publishers took it upon themselves to counter some of the critics, in some cases employing psychiatrists and other experts on their editorial boards and testifying at legislative hearings. These publishers almost certainly singled out Wertham as a target in their efforts, since he was the best known and most influential of their critics, and that may be why he believed the industry was more organized in its defense than it actually was.

The publication of Seduction of the Innocent, along with the publicity generated by the Senate hearings, did prompt the comic book industry to take action. Following the conclusion of the hearings, the industry leaders began to meet to explore forming a new association to replace the defunct Association of Comics Magazine Publishers and to establish a new code. As will be discussed in detail in following chapters, in October 1954, the Comics Magazine Association of America was established, and it


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Chapter 4 of Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s 1998 Work On Comic Book Censorship

adopted a code to be administered by a comic-book “czar” who would oversee an operation similar to the film industry’s Hays Office. The publishers also launched a campaign to discredit Wertham. James Reibman notes: “To Wertham, a card-carrying member of the liberal intelligentsia, such animosity and misunderstanding were particularly painful. He did not believe in censorship but in protection of those whose extreme youth made them prey to manipulation and influence” (18). The adoption of self-regulation did not stop Wertham’s criticism of the comic book industry. He denounced the code: “Whenever people begin to show signs of doing something themselves about controlling crime comics, the publishers come out with a ‘code’ or something to divert attention and avert action.” He warned those concerned about children’s mental health that “it is the duty of anyone concerned with children to avoid falling for this latest stunt of Superman” (“Curse” 403-4). He argued that comic book czar Charles Murphy was not a censor but an employee of the comic book industry and had no real power to enforce a censorship code (404). Wertham read the comics that carried the new code “Seal of Approval” and observed that they contained the same harmful ingredients, including murders, race prejudice, torture, crimes, and pornographic sadism. He concluded, “That is why a law to protect children is necessary” (“Reading” 613).

A Circle of Guilt was a case history of Frank Santana, a New York Puerto Rican teenager accused of murder in a gang-related shooting. A Sign for Cain was a more scholarly effort and was Wertham’s attempt at a broader social history of violence. It relied less on anecdotal material and focused instead on the broader theoretical issues glossed over in earlier books. In A Circle of Guilt [sic], Wertham reproduced a conversation between himself and Santana where the youth talks about the “creeps,” his name for horror comics. Santana read about five “creeps” a day and at one time had between two hundred and three hundred in his collection (86). Wertham believed that Santana’s actions could be explained in part by the influence of these comic books. He wrote, “Reading creeps was part of Santana’s Americanization…. One lesson we instilled in him by way of comics and movies is that violence is not a problem but a solution. It is a method to be used” (93). When Wertham visited Santana’s home to talk to the boy’s mother, he asked if he could have Santana’s comic books. He was handed twenty-three comic books, nine in Spanish and fourteen in English. Of the latter, all but three had the seal of approval of the comic book industry. Wertham explained he took the comic books because “I intended to offer them all in evidence so the jury could judge for themselves what influence they had on the boy’s mind” (102). He never got the chance, because Santana agreed to a plea bargain in the case and was given a lengthy prison sentence. Disturbed by the outcome, Wertham said he wrote A Circle of Guilt in order to take Santana’s case before “a larger jury” (203).

When Saturday Review asked Wertham to write a follow-up to his 1948 article, “The Comics… Very Funny,” he wrote a scathing indictment of the comics code titled “It’s Still Murder: What In A Sign for Cain, Wertham devoted one chapter to the mass Parents Still Don’t Know about Comic Books.” In it, he condemned media and one to the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency for rejecting juvenile delinlegislation against the comic book publishers. He claimed that the quency. He began connection between crime comics and juvenile delinquency was the chapter on the now “well established,” and added, “It is easy to build up a strawmass media with man argument that comic books are the ‘sole factor’ and then this statement: demolish it. But nobody ever claimed that they are” (12). He “To discuss continued, “Of course there are other evil influences to which we violence without expose children. That does not mean we should take for granted, and do nothing about any one injurious factor. The comicbook pest, which we can isolate, is one of the worst and most far-reaching” (46). He provided several examples where material published in code-approved comics violated the provisions of the industry’s code, and argued, “Surely this is not a counter-measure, but a cover-up continuation of the cruelty-for-fun education of children” (48). He concluded his article by once again urging legislative action: “The comic-book publishers, racketeers of the spirit, have corrupted children in the past, they are corrupting them right now, and they will continue to corrupt them unless we legally prevent it. Of course there are larger issues in the world today, and mightier matters to be debated. But maybe we will lose the bigger things if we fail to defend the nursery” (48). The CMAA reacted to that article by threatening to Sticker Shock sue Wertham for libel (CMAA Files (Left:) In 1955 and after, Wertham had little use for the Comics Code or for many Code-approved comics—so [minutes, 26 April 1955]). Wertham continued to explore the connections between mass media and violence in society, publishing A Circle of Guilt in 1956 and A Sign for Cain in 1966.

we can’t imagine he would’ve enjoyed the black-&-white magazine-size Shock Illustrated #1, which Bill Gaines and EC Comics put out that year to try to skirt the Code. It didn’t work for Gaines, either.

(Right:) Comics were only a small part of Wertham’s 1966 book A Sign for Cain, but naturally were covered in the chapter titled “School for Violence: Mayhem in the Mass Media.” He had a way with phrases, did our Doc. The book’s title came from the Biblical quotation “And Jehovah appointed a sign for Cain, lest any finding him should smite him,” from Genesis 4:15. [Cover © the respective copyright holders.]


Seal of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

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Wertham Amid The “Vast Wasteland” Dr. Wertham may have been critical of TV, but he apparently held out hope for the new medium, at least in its early days. Here are shots from appearances he made on the political discussion series Firing Line and on The Mike Douglas Show, probably hawking a book like other guests.

referring to mass media is as impossible as to discuss modern mass media without referring to violence” (193). Of all the mass media, comic books were the worst, Wertham argued, because they had little aesthetic value and had their greatest impact on the youngest children (194). In this chapter, Wertham once again sought to refute the many arguments that had been offered in support of the mass media: that they affect only the abnormal child; that they provide a healthy outlet for aggression; that they teach that good triumphs over evil; and that it is impossible to gauge the harm done by mass media because it is one factor among many. In his chapter on juvenile delinquency, he repeated his now-familiar call for understanding delinquency as a social rather than an individual problem. He wrote that children needed a simple understanding of their problems as they see them, a clear and unmistakable condemnation of violence, an easing of social pressures not only on the family level but also on a wider sociological level, and protection against unhealthy environmental influences (297). In these two books, Wertham also argued that the emerging social scientific approach to studying media effects was misguided. He dismissed the argument about complex causes of juvenile delinquency as “convenient pluralism,” and noted that people got sidetracked by looking for “ultimate causes” while missing the problem at hand. He also attacked the theoretical position “that we must measure the intensity of every causal factor quantitatively and that it shall all be put in statistical form” He concluded, “So a large part of these scientific-sounding writings, speeches, and pronouncements have fundamentally the purpose of not finding causes but of denying them” (Circle of Guilt 77). He called for a multidisciplinary approach to studying media effects, involving sociology, psychiatry, psychology, economics, biology, and history, adding: “Not everything that is valid can be quantitatively measured and caught in the net of statistics” (81). Wertham was suspicious of much of the media effects research being done, arguing that many scholars interested in mass communication formulated research questions based on their interest in the mass media industry rather than an interest in children. Wertham felt that the media industry’s economic influence on society was so great that “investigators and writers are influenced, whether they realize it or not, to veer toward apologetic views” (Sign for Cain 204). He argued, “The contrast between the immensely powerful

mass media and the individual family and child is one of the most essential facts of our present social existence” (“Scientific Study” 307). Wertham critiqued the two most common methods used by media researchers, the questionnaire and the experimental method, claiming that such research methods gave only partial and often highly misleading results. He wrote, “From their results, the real, concrete child as he exists in our society does not emerge” (Sign for Cain 205). He argued that survey research, while it sounds objective, is very subjective, rigid, and based on arbitrary presuppositions. It assumes that what is not in the questions is irrelevant. Experimental methods are artificial and study only immediate effects while ignoring long-range consequences. He concluded, “The only method that permits us to arrive at carefully developed, valid results is the clinical method, which permits us to study the whole child and not just one facet” (206-7). He added that clinical study allowed for a thorough examination and observation, followup studies over a considerable period, analysis of early conditioning, and study of physique and of social situation. Such an approach “aims at a longitudinal view of his life, at an understanding of psychological processes.” He cautioned: “You cannot question or interview a child as if he were a job applicant. You must gain his confidence and show him that you are really interested” (207). Wertham continued to argue that studying long-term effects of the mass media should be of primary concern. He felt that the most significant effect of continued exposure to media violence was that people were conditioned to accept violence. In writing about the coverage of the Vietnam War on television, Wertham said: “The audience so conditioned from childhood on finds the Vietnam fighting pictures really tame stuff and is easily manipulated with regard to violence by the huge public relations establishment that has been constructed at the top of the military set-up…. [TV newscasts] really are war commercials (“Is TV Hardening Us” 51). He was highly critical of the 1972 Surgeon General’s report on the effects of television violence, accusing the government of suppressing and censoring the clinical evidence that demonstrated adverse effects of television violence, brutality, and sadism. Suggesting that such programming affects only children already


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Chapter 4 of Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s 1998 Work On Comic Book Censorship

What Goes Around… The cover of Fredric Wertham’s 1973 book The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication—William AuerbachLevy’s caricature of the author from its back cover (compare with his rendering of a younger Wertham on p. 47)—and the book’s title-pages spread. The art on the latter is a frame from what a blurb describes as “the first full-length film made with animated figures… The Adventures of Prince Achmed, by Lotte Reiniger.” The anonymous writer of the preceding caption calls this “a forerunner of heroic fantasy illustrations,” but surely by the time motion pictures existed, there had been many “heroic fantasy illustrations.” The illustration does work, though, as a picturization of Dr. Wertham’s relationship with comic book and comic fans—whichever one you view the monster as representing. [Title-spread drawing © Lotte Reniger; other art © Southern Illinois University Press or the respective copyright holders.]

predisposed to violence, he argued, put all the blame on the child and the audience. Media effects research that ignored established clinical research methods in favor of methodologies that examine behavior could not account for the influence on mental attitudes. Wertham concluded: “From a psychiatric as well as human point of view the Surgeon General’s Report and his statements are a betrayal of children and their parents, of responsible science, of public health, and of the people’s trust in their governmental medical leadership” (“Critique” 219). In the 1950s, Wertham had been more ambivalent about television. While he condemned the violence that he saw, even in children’s programming, he still believed that television would rise above its beginnings to become a medium of “entertainment, information and instruction” (Seduction 383). Wrote Wertham in 1953, “Television has a spotty past, a dubious present, and a glorious future” (Seduction 369). He embraced the technology as a “miracle of science” while dismissing comic books as “a debasement of the old institution of printing” (Seduction 381). What was wrong with television, he argued, was that comic books had set the tone for programming and had tainted children’s culture. He wrote: “If you want television to give uncorrupted programs to children, you must first be able to offer it audiences of uncorrupted children” (Seduction 383). By the 1970s, Wertham had concluded that there was little potential in any mass medium and he made a case for those forms of communication that existed outside of the mainstream media, articulated in his study of fan magazines (or “fanzines”) called The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication, published in 1973. He defined fanzines as uncom-

mercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines that had been ignored by scholars because they were so unconventional. The fanzine, he wrote, offered “genuine human voices outside of all mass manipulation” (Fanzines 35). He praised the content of the fanzines, which he felt offered action without violence, possible because they functioned outside the market and the profit motive: “Sensationalism for the sake of sales, which big mass media publications sometimes indulge in, is foreign to them” (Fanzines 74). The communication system in the United States, he wrote, was “influenced by the spirit of our consumer society” and stressed salesmanship and large circulation numbers, leaving what he called “communication gaps and empty spaces” for publications such as fanzines (Fanzines 129). Fanzines represented a way in which people could escape the commodification of culture.


Seal of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

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After The Fox Flees The Hen Coop By the time of the Senate Subcommittee investigations and Seduction of the Innocent, Victor Fox’s infamous little comic book company was no more— but there’s no doubt that the likes of Murder, Incorporated #1 (Jan. 1948) and Zoot Comics #14 (May ’48) with its “Rulah” stories were the kind of material that aroused Dr. Wertham’s wrath, beginning in the late ’40s. Thanks respectively to Michael T. Gilbert and Jim Ludwig. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Art ©2014 AC Comics.

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This survey and analysis of Wertham’s work and his lifelong concerns with children, media, and violence demonstrates that his crusade against comics was an example of the practice of social psychiatry that he so wholeheartedly believed should be the responsibility of his profession. His call for a ban on the sale of comic books to children was his way of trying to make a difference in a society that he saw as hostile to the healthy mental development of children. One does not have to agree with his conclusions about media, violence, and society to understand Wertham not as a naive social scientist but as a social reformer. But Wertham ultimately failed. Instead of comprehensive legislation restricting the sale of comic books, legislators and community groups embraced the idea of a comics code, rejecting Wertham’s argument that the solution to the problem of comic books was a social, not an individual, responsibility.

Next: The Coming Of The Comics Code.


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Special A/E Interlude—“The Will of William Wilson” These two pages from a “written-off” and never-published “Justice Society of America” story of the mid-1940s also illustrate a brush with the laws of inheritance (and feature a tied-up attorney). See A/E #121 for more. [Continued on next page]

57


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“The Will Of William Wilson,” Continued Written by Gardner F. Fox and drawn by Martin Naydel, these panels from what was once scheduled to be the 48-page story in All-Star Comics #31 are reproduced from various collections. They have been especially colored for A/E by Larry Guidry. [© DC Comics.]

See more color pages from “The Will of William Wilson” in future issues.


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All Good Comics #1, 1944 [© the respective copyright holders.]


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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Now That’s A Fan! (Part 3) by Michael T. Gilbert

O

h, I’ve got your number, buddy! You haven’t spoken to your mom since you were five and she threw away your comics. Yeah, I know you! You’re listed as “Dependent” on your comic shop owner’s 1040 tax forms. At home, your bookcase cracks under the weight of all those giant 500-pound IDW artist books. You swore you’d draw the line at the Myron Fass collection, but you didn’t, did you? Break up a run? Never!!

In short, you think you’re a pretty big comic fan. Well, let me tell you, you’re NOT. Compared to these guys, you’re a piker! Take a gander and see if you don’t say... ”Now THAT’S a fan!”

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

Every square inch of wall space is filled with Mart Nodell Green Lantern and Shelly Moldoff BatMite commissions, and your wife threatens divorce unless you toss out your precious Randy Bowen statues. But you don’t care, do you? “Get rid of my Mr. Monster mini-bust?” you proudly sneer. “As if!”

Our Navy! Ah! Check out the above Our Navy cover from April 1945 (reprinted from Craig Yoe’s Arf Forum #3). Meet Biff, the intelligent comic book fan you typically find in old Dragnet episodes. That Street & Smith Shadow Comics issue he’s drooling over (Vol. 4, #12, March 1945) is just an appetizer. Soon Biff’ll be diving into the main course, consisting of Timely’s Young Allies #15 (Sept. 1945), Nedor’s Startling Comics #36 (Nov. 1945), Spotlight’s Three-Ring Comics #1 (1945), Camera Publishing’s Camera Comics #2 (1944), and DC’s Picture Stories from the Bible New Testament #1 (1944). A grown man reading comics in public? Smart move, Biff! ”Now THAT’S A Fan!”

Heavy Reading! This 1946 ad features curvaceous actress Buff Cobb (ex-wife of journalist Mike Wallace!) studying Whiz Comics #77 (March 1946). She’s also perusing Fawcett’s Captain Midnight, Ace’s Hap Hazzard, Street & Smith’s Shadow Comics, and Fox’s All Your Comics. What a studious gal!

[© the respective copyright holders.]

[© Marvel Characters, Inc.]


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[© William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.]

[© the respective copyright holders.]

Now That’s A Fan! (Part 3)

[© the respective copyright holders.]

(Above:) Art by future “Casper the Friendly Ghost” artist Warren Kremer, from Ace Periodicals’ Lightning Comics, Vol. 2, #2 (Aug. 1941). [© the respective copyright holders.]

What, Me Worry?

Bad Habits!

And how about the idiot who tracked down that Our Navy comic cover on the preceding page? “Now THAT’S A Fan!”

Back in my day, Valium was “Mother’s Little Helper“! But apparently in the ‘40s Mom’s helpers were little kids who would do anything for their comic book fix! Scrub the dishes? Check! Plow the lower forty? Check! Get a colonoscopy? Check! Anything to score the latest lousy issue of Ace’s Super-Mystery Comics, populated by third-rate heroes Magno and Davey. Superman and Wonder Woman comics may have already sold out, but any crappy comic was good enough for these addicts. With standards like that, all I can say is... Now THAT’S a fan!


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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Skyman: The Inside Dope! Big Shot Comics #81 depicts a drugged Skyman revealing his identity to loyal gal-pal Fawn Carroll. But Betty, an inquisitive young fan reading the story is confused. “Fawn doesn’t know who Skyman really is?” she asks. Her pal, Jack, chides her for her ignorance. But a fellow sitting behind a drawing board (presumably Skyman artist Ogden Whitney) answers, “Now Jack, maybe Betty hasn’t followed Skyman as long as you!” He then cleverly segues into a flashback of Fawn and Skyman’s first meeting. Useful as that may be for newer readers, don’t you think Fawn could have saved herself a lot of trouble if she’d just bought Big Shot comics like Jack did? Not only would Fawn know all the dirt on her boyfriend, but her fellow readers would say... “Now THAT’S A Fan!”

(Above:) From Columbia’s Big Shot #81 (Sept. 1947); art by Ogden Whitney. Wonder if Gardner Fox was still writing “Skyman” by this point? [© the respective copyright holders.]

(Left:) Charles Quinlan’s splash page from Cat-Man Comics #26a (Nov. 1944), aka Vol. 3, #2, from Continental Magazines, Inc. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Filthy Rich! Cool Cat, Man! Holyoke’s Cat-Man and Kitten have the right idea! See how much fun they’re having reading their own comic? Oh, and don’t worry about the big guy in the background. He’s only trying to grab that copy of Holyoke’s Suspense under the round caption. “Now THAT’S A Fan!” (Right:) “Richie Rich” ad from Harvey Hits #85 (Oct. 1964). Artist and writer uncertain. [© Harvey Publications or successors in interest.]

Next we have the original one-percenter, Richie Rich, kvetching about being too rich. Donald Trump suffers from that, too. Boo-hoo! Next Richie’ll be pissing away his fortune publishing comic books? “Now THAT’S A Fan!” Or something.


Now That’s A Fan! (Part 3)

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Flyin’ High! Then we have that lovable lug, Greasemonkey Griffin, as drawn by Al Walker. Apparently this comic nerd is oblivious to everything on New Comics Day. Funny, that’s how I look when the latest issue of Alter Ego arrives! My poor wife just groans and says... ”Now THAT’S A Fan!”

(Left:) Splash page and cover from Fiction House’s Wings Comics #19 (March 1942). [© the respective copyright holders.]

Horrible Horror! I don’t know what’s sadder, the fact that the guy at right is so busy reading a comic book that he doesn’t see that ghastly monster creeping up behind him, or the fact that he’d rather read a comic book than make out with that sweet young thing next to him. Get it together, man! I mean, it’s a lousy Trojan comic, not an EC. All I can do is shake my head and mutter, ”Now THAT’S A Fan!”

(Above:) The cover of Trojan’s Beware, Vol. 2, #17 (Jan. 1954). [© the respective copyright holders.]


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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Art Berne’s “Professor Speedy” from Harvey’s Speed Comics #35 (Nov. 1944). [© Harvey Publications or successors in interest.]

Fanboy’s Dream Gal! Where was this cutie when I was single? This sexy siren’s a sucker for a swell comic book. She can peruse mine anytime! Indeed, any red-blooded comic collector would be proud to say, “Now THAT’S A Fan!”

And So.... That’s it for this ish, comic fans. But if you stop by next month, I’ll certainly say... ”Now THAT’S A Fan!” Till next time…


Comic Fandom Archive

65

He Remembered Comic Books Re-Presenting JIM HARMON’s “Harmony” Article From Peon #38 (Feb. 1957) That Anticipated “And All In Color For A Dime” CFA Editor’s Introduction

I

n 1957, it seemed as if no one was bothering to celebrate the comic books of comics’ Golden Age. Yes, there had been EC fandom beginning in 1953, but it concerned itself entirely with comics published by one William M. Gaines. From an historical standpoint, it can be said that “Harmony” (the actual title of his column, though this particular installment is often referred to by its first line, “I remember comic books”) pre-figured the seminal “And All in Color for a Dime” series of groundbreaking articles that would begin in late summer of 1960 in the first issue of Dick and Pat Lupoff’s science-fiction fanzine Xero. Indeed, by the end of that year, Jim Harmon had written “A Bunch of Swell Guys,” tackling the history of the Justice Society of America, for that important series. (His title came from a line of dialogue spoken by Johnny Thunder in an early “JSA” adventure.)

In Perfect “Harmony” Jim Harmon in his later years. He was a science-fiction writer for a time, and later the author and/or editor of various books on historical/nostalgic subjects, in particular the Golden Age of Radio in the 1930s-50s. In the early ’70s he edited Marvel’s black-&-white magazine Monsters of the Movies. His 1960 “Justice Society of America” article from Xero #3 was reprinted in The All-Star Companion, Vol. 4 (TwoMorrows Publishing, 2009). Jim passed away in 2010. Thanks to Barbara Harmon for the photo.

When writing his pioneering Peon column for another SF fanzine several years earlier, Jim inevitably made a few errors besides the unavoidable typo or three. He didn’t know that it was Mort Weisinger, not Julius Schwartz, who had edited the “Superman” titles of 1957, nor did he seem aware of the appearance of the new Flash in Showcase #4 (though it’s not impossible that he had turned in his column before Showcase #4 hit the stands in July of 1956). In any case, it’s interesting that “Harmony” appeared just as comics’ Silver Age was being born. For those of us who weren’t “there,” we have to imagine what it was like for Jim to be writing at a time when the wonders of the Golden Age seemed about to be forgotten forever.

When The Peon Was Mightier Than The Sword Fan-artist Al Hunter’s photo-offset cover for the otherwise mimeographed Peon #38 (Feb. 1957), the issue in which “I Remember Comic Books” ran. [© the respective copyright holders.]

We thank Jim’s wife Barbara for her kind permission to reprint Jim’s original article. On the following four pages, we’ve reproduced the actual pages of the “Harmony” piece just as they appeared in the mimeographed fanzine Peon, though we couldn’t resist adding a bit of color art to remind us all what Jim was “remembering.” [Article on following 4 pages © Barbara Harmon.] —Bill Schelly.


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Comic Fandom Archive

Superman. Art by Joe Shuster. [Art © DC Comics.]

Captain Marvel. Art by C.C. Beck. [Shazam hero now TM & © DC Comics.]


He Remembered Comic Books

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Artist uncertain. [Sheena is a registered trademark of Galaxy Publishing, Inc. & Val D’Oro Entertainment, Inc.]

The Flash. Art by Sheldon Moldoff. [Art © DC Comics.]

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Comic Fandom Archive

The Spectre. Art by Sheldon Moldoff. [Art © DC Comics.]

Green Lantern. Art by Sheldon Moldoff. [Art © DC Comics.]


He Remembered Comic Books

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Wonder Woman. Art by H.G. Peter. [Art © DC Comics.]

The Spirit. Art by Will Eisner. [Art © Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

Coming Next: Half a century after his original article appeared in Peon #38, Jim wrote a reminiscence on the writing of it, commenting on some of the things he said in it. The Comic Fandom Archive will be proud to present it an issue or two from now, as part of our ongoing effort to look behind the great fannish accomplishments of yesteryear. If you would like to get in touch with Bill Schelly, his e-mail address is: hamstrpres@aol.com. Or, you can contact him through Facebook.


Previously Unpublished Brunner Artwork!

ATTENTION: FRANK BRUNNER ART FANS! Frank is now accepting art commissions for covers, splash panels, or pin-up re-creations! Also, your ideas for NEW art are welcome! Art can be pencils only, inked or full-color (painted) creation! Contact Frank directly for details and prices. (Minimum order: $150)

Visit my website at: http://www.frankbrunner.net [Dr. Strange & Clea TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Frank Balkin: “I greatly enjoyed the Joe Kubert Tribute issue. A couple of notes/corrections: (1) On page 8, a caption says that DC began publication of Tarzan with #207 (April 1962). Nope, it was April 1972. (2) On page 36, the Joe Kubert Checklist omits some of my favorite work of his at DC—his covers for All-Star Squadron. (3) On page 70, in Jerry Ordway’s letter, he refers to a character in AllStar Squadron #5 as ‘Firestorm.’ Nope, it was Firebrand.” Could be a typo or slip on Jerry’s part in his e-mail, or mine in retyping it, Frank— while the “1962” date was definite a slip of the ol’ PC which I saw well before the issue was printed… and way too late to change it. Bernie Bubnis: “My daughter bought me Bill Schelly’s Kubert book for Christmas and I loved it. It’s great to have another chance to worship Mr. Kubert. I cannot even count the number of times I have seen the Kubert ‘Shadow-Thief’ cover since I enjoyed its first appearance, and I still marvel at its appeal…. Bittersweet to enjoy all that great art, without him. As always, you have assembled a great tribute, starting with your editorial. Part memory and part information and part love…. You and Schelly make a great team. I wish I could craft (just once) a paragraph that feels so perfect, as you two continually ‘speak.’” You have nothing to apologize for on that score, Bernie. Always pleased to read your comments on an issue, and of course everybody at Alter Ego concurs with your views on Kubert. I was a fool to sell that “Shadow-Thief” cover back in the 1980s, even for what (then) seemed a hefty sum… but c’est la vie. isner, Fine, or Crandall? While there were many noted and even brilliant artists who worked on “Busy” Arnold’s Quality Comic Group in the early days, these three stood out—along with Jack Cole, who’s not discussed directly in Arnold’s letters reprinted in this issue’s main article. So Shane Foley centered on a Lou Fine image of Black Condor as the basis of his drawing of our maskot Captain Ego this time around; coloring by Randy Sargent. [Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly; created by Biljo White.]

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Hames Ware: “I enjoyed [#116] as always and read Jim V[adeboncoeur]’s letter relating how confusing ownership of comic book publishing companies can be! He specifically mentions those myriad short-term publishing entities that seemed to pop up in the late ’40s on through the middle ’50s or so. As founding co-editor of the original Who’s Who, I was fascinated with the ownership of all the companies that published comics, and consequently began to fill a ledger with the data I extracted from the comics I got to see that happened to contain ownership statements.

Now, on to our correspondence re A/E #116. Surprising, our Joe Kubert tribute issue garnered fewer e-mails and letters than usual, other than plenty of kudos and thanks for the honor we did Joe. (As if the real honor wasn’t the art he gave us during a career that spanned more than 70 years!) But here are a few clippings:

“As for the period we are talking about, the Estrow brothers (via Trojan, Ribage, and Merit, though they are not the original owners or final owners in some cases) and the Morse brothers (publishing at seven different addresses from 1951-55), for example, both had the first names of Stanley and Michael!

Mike W. Barr: “I have only two quibbles with your otherwise swell and long-deserved ‘Kubert Tribute Issue’ (#116): (1) Almost no mention and literally no analysis of ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ the only DC war strip that Kubert created solely on his own. Granted, ‘U.S.’ did not have the longevity of ‘Sgt. Rock,’ but the feature has earned its share of revenue for DC over the years, and is periodically revived. (2) Richard J. Arndt, on page 28, says, ‘After a year or so under your [Kubert’s] direction, the war titles took a more… mature approach than they had previously.’ This statement is extremely insulting to previous editor Bob Kanigher, as it totally ignores the fact that it was Kanigher’s stewardship of Our Army at War that showcased such groundbreaking stories as ‘What’s the Color of Your Bood?’ and ‘A Penny for Jackie Johnson,’ as well as introducing the feature ‘Enemy Ace,’ one of the very few comics series that can be classified as capital-A Art. No comics titles, no matter what their genre, have ever had a more mature approach.” Have to agree with you that we could’ve done a bit more re “The Unknown Soldier,” Mike—but while you and/or I and/or others may disagree with an evaluation made by an interviewer, I don’t generally feel it’s my place to change or even challenge it. For instance, while conducting another interview, Richard voiced his opinion that he felt many stories of the Silver and Bronze Age, especially at Marvel, were overwritten. A defensible view, though one with which I don’t necessarily agree… but I feel that, unless there’s an error of fact, or an opinion just so far off base (in my opinion as editor, of course), it should stand. Interviewers aren’t required to be devoid of opinions.

“The third and arguably most important of the three entities that were behind many of the short-lived comic books of that period was, as Jim noted, William ‘Billy’ Friedman. Thanks to Jim’s generous sharing of his comic book collection and to artist for many of Friedman’s books (and friend for many years) Lou Cameron, I believe I am able to sort out for you the Friedman maze, as well as it can be understood: “Western/Pix Parade at 521 W. 5th and 33 W. 42nd published Gunsmoke, among other titles, 1949-1951… Youthful at 33 W. 42nd, many titles, many having the word ‘Youthful’ in them, Buffalo Bill, and others, 1950-51. In 1951 the address changes to 105 E. 35th, when three Friedmans and Lou Strickoff (remember that name!) are replaced in the ownership statements by perhaps the only Hispanic name I can recall in one: Adrian Lopez. George Ungar’s name remains in both sets of ownership statements. “Story at 7 E. 44th and 11 E. 44th in 1951-53 in tandem with Morton Myers Master at 11 E. 44th with… yes… Michael Estrow and Lou Strickoff (remember that name!), 1951-54… and, because of the Strickoff association mentioned above at Master, and Lou Cameron’s noting that ‘Billy was sometimes in the background of some of his publishing entities,’ it is possible that even Premier, also at 11 E. 44th, he had involvement with, since, though the ‘owner’ is the mysterious-sounding S.M. Wind, the business manager is… Lou Strickoff! “We’ll probably never know the whole story, but at least this is a start!”


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[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

Whew! Your erudition on the all-important but often overlooked esoterica of comics is a constant marvel to us, Hames. We wonder, though… with two sets of alleged siblings both named Stanley and Michael, is there any chance that the Estrow brothers and the Morse brothers were one and the same, and that the “Estrow” name was a pseudonym (since we know the Morse name was real—we only ran his obit/tribute in A/E #109)? By the way, you’ll find another reference to a comics address on Manhattan’s West 42nd Street in next issue’s ”re:” section, which deals with the work of artist L.B. Cole! J.C. Press, Jr.: “Just one comment about the ‘Captain Video’ story reprinted over the past three issues. Thanks for sharing that Makino was the inspiration for your Avengers villain, Ultron. But I noticed another possible parallel from the story’s end. CV defeats Makino by asking him a question his mechanical mind cannot fathom. In your celebrated 1960s X-Men run with Neal Adams, Cyclops defeats the Sentinels in much the same way, by asking them to attack the source of mutation in our universe. Makino destroys himself; the Sentinels do the same thing by flying into the sun. Do we have two Roy Thomas inspirations from the same 1950s ‘Captain Video’ story? I think so.” Possibly, J.C., although I hardly needed the intermediary X-Men issue to remember the Makino story. Of course, Neal Adams and Chris Claremont have both claimed credit for that “Sentinels flying into the sun” idea, while I’m at least equally sure that the concept was mine and mine alone—I feel that Neal internalized my suggestion and illustrated it so well that he doesn’t recall any outside source, while I believe Chris is confusing that four-color event with the synopsis he gave me later that became the starting basis of Avengers #102, in which the Sentinels fly back from the sun. To read the entire Makino story in one place, and a number of other fine sciencefiction-oriented tales as well, check out the ad for PS Artbooks’ Roy Thomas Presents Captain Video on p. 76. Do yourself a favor and order it, okay? Don Glut on the Captain Video overview in #117: “The Saturday morning show, like the Saturday Tom Corbett, Space Cadet show— did not have original stories. They were kinescope condensations of

the earlier-seen live weekday serialized episodes. After the show was cancelled, it became a local NYC series that not only showed cartoons but also serials. When The Lost City was deemed too horrific for kids, it was pulled around midway, with the explanation given that this time the bad guys won! It gets really weird when the future-based Captain Video show, in contacting their ‘Out West’ agents, show clips from a Buster Crabbe Billy the Kid movie. Must have been a descendant of Billy (or an Earth-Two version)? “[The film] Tobor the Great has no connection with Video. It was a stand-alone movie made by Republic Pictures that spun off the Here Comes Tobor pilot. The name ‘Tobor,’ being simply ‘robot’ spelled backward, could possibly predate CV in pulps, etc. On CV, and I remember this vividly, the makers of Tobor meant to stamp ‘Robot 1’ on his chest… and somehow it came out backward, which is why the story was called ‘I, Tobor,’ giving the name a regal sound. The girl in the photo you ran (presumably from the Life magazine spread) gains control of Tobor.” Thanks for the added info. Of course, since the Tobor movie came out well after the debut of the Captain Video character, the film folks could’ve just lifted the name… but we get your main point: other than the name, the two had nothing in common, and presumably the movie Tobor didn’t even look like the one from the earlier TV series, right? Send all correspondence (at least, that part of it that you want us to receive as opposed to somebody else) to: Roy Thomas 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135

e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com

And don’t forget to sign up with the Alter-Ego-Fans online chat list, to learn more about upcoming issues of A/E and the Golden and Silver Ages of Comics. You’ll find it at group.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans. If you have trouble getting on board, just contact overseer Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll walk you right through it. Check it out!


[ Shazam hero & Dr. Sivana TM & © DC Comics; other art © 2014 Jay Piscopo.]

#187 August 2014

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Maybe that’s the crux of the matter. Maybe my personal life is so quiet and routine and unadventurous that I’ve taken to writing as the “escape.” Just as others read for escape. Vicarious adventure, as it were. Art ©2014 Mark Lewis

On the third hand, a writer is supposedly a sort of sharp-eyed busy-body who sees all, hears all, and knows all. He sees all the little details of life that most people miss, and thus fills his brain with files of usable facts. Do you know that I can’t even remember my auto-license number at times?

Part VIII

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Abridged & Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

tto 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 were written in freewheeling fashion and devoid of any charted course— other than allowing his mind to flow with no restricting parameters. The abridged and edited manuscript—serialized here within the pages of FCA—will nonetheless provide glimpses into the idiosyncratic and fanciful mind of Otto O. Binder. In this 8th excerpt, Otto takes an honest look at himself as a writer as well as other types of authors in a chapter entitled “The Ego and I.” —P.C. Hamerlinck.

T

his will be a short chapter, I think. It’s sort of an offshoot of the previous one. I’m going to give you a deeper glimpse into the alleged mind of a writer, to see what makes him tick.

Every author is in every story they write, whether they admit it or not. Try as they may, they can’t help projecting themselves and their particular way of thinking into everything their characters say and do. Most authors strive consciously, I suppose, to eliminate themselves entirely. They strive to be purely “neutral” observers. But I don’t think it can be done. Every writer is there in the spirit, in their stories, leering from behind their characters and prodding them into what they say. There are arguments that go on in a writer’s mind as they unfurl their story. The writer has to decide what’s best for the story, even though it’s often punishment for their characters. And of course the characters, if they had a say, would ask for a better break. I shudder at the thought, sometimes, if my characters formed a union and demanded better conditions. Other writers will know what I mean when I say you’d be surprised how “strong” a character can suddenly become and then try to run away with the whole story. In fact, in cases like that, the character just about decides what the rest of the story will be, with the writer tagging along willy-nilly. I am still trying to pin down what the “typical” writer is. A writer is supposed to be a student of human nature, picking people apart with uncanny precision, like a mental vivisectionist. Well, I have often picked people apart with my mental scalpel, and get them all apart like a clock. And then I can never put the pieces together again, into anything resembling a human being. So I just leave the mess there.

In a way, being a writer gives you a devilish sense of power over your characters. You almost feel as if you’re playing god, moving human pawns about on the chessboard of fictional life. You put them through their paces like puppets on a string. You can get them into any frightful situation you dream up and sadistically let them squirm before you save the day. Maybe writers are frustrated dictators underneath. Dictators take living humans and shove them around. Writers take human phantoms and shove them around. What’s the difference? Now I scared myself. Am I another Hitler in disguise? If great power were thrust into my hands by fate, would I then shove flesh-and-blood people around as I do my prose pawns? Oh gosh, there is only the river for me. I’ll tell you a secret, however. In real life, I’m just about two jellybeans above a milquetoast. Along about the tenth highball, I have been known to emerge and display some of the symptoms of a devil-may-care hero. But truly, any hint of authority thrust into my hands would scare me silly. I loathe telling anyone else what to do or where to get off. By the same token, I hate someone else taking a swing at my ego. Live and let live is my motto—he said virtuously.

Poet Pulverizer In this issue’s slice from Memoirs, Otto Binder attempts to dissect the mindset of typical and atypical writers, himself included. Otto even sometimes used writers themselves as plot devices, as he did with his script for “The Mad Poet” from Mary Marvel #2 (June 1946]; artwork by his older brother, Jack Binder. [Shazam heroine TM © DC Comics.]


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Fawcett Collector’s Of America

Making Headlines The always-conniving Dr. Sivana even got into the act of writing by publishing and editing his own insidious tabloid into Otto Binder’s “Sivana’s Crime Newspaper” from Captain Marvel Adventures #50 (Dec. 1945); art by C.C. Beck & Pete Costanza. Stay tuned for another Binder-produced Sivana scheme in our article coming up next. [Shazam hero, Billy Batson, & Dr. Sivana TM & © DC Comics.]

There are any number of explanations of why writers are the way they are. And assuming there is one reader left who has unfortunately come this far with me, let me inform you that I am not a “typical” writer at all. Do you picture a writer as a free soul, who writes only when the mood (and a low bank account) seizes him? Who travels widely, gathering material for more stories? Who has a wide host of important friends in every walk of life? And who spurns money and spends it as lavishly as he makes it? Strangely enough, some of my writer friends are of that admirable caliber. They are perhaps typical. I’m not. I know one writer who, in the space of a few years, has had four different homes in three states and one foreign country. He writes pulps, comics, confessions, mysteries, everything. His life is wide and free. He’s really living, and tasting of all the many strange fruits of this earthly existence. Why not? And yet, I know other writers more like myself, who gravitate in only a slight orbit, and shun such wanderings and shifts of environment. I think there’s a large group of both such types. I don’t know which outnumbers which. I don’t know which is really “typical.” Anyhow, we can boil it all down to this… that the typical writer is one with two arms, ten toes, and is one of only two sexes. Next: INTRODUCING … YOU!


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The World’s Mightiest Mortal Gets Psychoanalyzed C.C. Beck at 1982 Minneapolis Comics Convention; photo by Alan Light. Beck was proud of the fact that the new Smithsonian book had reprinted the lead story from Captain Marvel Adventures #100.

“Captain Marvel Goes Crazy!” & John Huston’s Let There Be Light by Brian Cremins

I

n “Real Facts about an Unreal Character,” the fifth essay C.C. Beck mailed to his Critical Circle on July 14, 1988 [published in A/E #14/FCA #73, April 2002], Captain Marvel’s chief artist and co-creator explains the “real secret” of the character’s success. Like his colleague Otto Binder, Beck understood Billy Batson to be the true hero of Captain Marvel’s adventures. In fact, Beck writes, the world’s most celebrated boy news reporter told about Captain Marvel’s exploits over his radio and television programs. In the very first episode, written by Bill Parker, Billy never revealed anything about Captain Marvel to Sterling Morris and instead said, “Boy, oh boy! Here’s where we go to town! Me and—”

Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck “You and who else, son?” Mr. Morris asked. “—er, nobody, sir. Just me and the microphone. That’s all, sir—just me and ‘Mike,’” Billy said. As far as anyone ever knew, Billy may have made up every story he ever told over the air. Beck then pauses and reminds his Critical Circle colleagues that, of course, “Billy’s stories were all made up by Otto Binder and some other very talented writers” who understood “that children, and for that matter most adults, are far more interested in fantasy and magic and outrageous fiction than in facts, which are dull and stupid things.” But how does an “unreal character” behave when faced with an all-too-real set of circumstances? For example, how

Analyze This! Author Brian Cremins suggests that C.C. Beck’s cover for Captain Marvel Adventures #56 (March 1946) presents a presage towards the Kurtzman/Elder/Wood super-hero parodies launched the following decade in Mad, as evidenced by panels from Mad #4’s “Superduperman” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wally Wood. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics; Mad panel © EC Publications, Inc.]


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Fawcett Collector’s Of America

The cover of Captain Marvel Adventures #56 is comical, but, I would argue, it also foreshadows the super-hero parodies that Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, and Wally Wood would make famous in the early issues of Mad in the 1950s. As comics critic and Wonder Woman scholar Noah Berlatsky has argued on his website The Hooded Utilitarian, some of the most successful and lasting super-hero narratives are the parodies, including Kurtzman and Wood’s “Superduperman” (Mad #4, April-May 1953), which, for example, made a tremendous impact on Alan Moore and inspired his original idea for his Marvelman/Miracleman stories of the 1980s. (See Moore’s discussion of Mad in George Khoury’s Kimota! The Miracleman Companion.) But are the Binder and Beck stories parodies? Not entirely. Although Binder and Beck place Captain Marvel in realistic circumstances in “Captain Marvel Goes Crazy!,” the story tells us more about America’s views on mental illness, psychoanalysis, and psychiatric wards than it does about super-heroes. To return to Beck’s points from his Critical Circle essay, readers sometimes “are far more interested in fantasy and magic and outrageous fiction than in facts,” but I would like to qualify Beck’s argument. I’m not certain that readers are always interested in “fantasy Do You Take Blue Cross? and magic”; rather, I suspect that readers are often most interested in “outrageous fiction” when it reveals what Captain Marvel’s initial examination with “the doctor” doesn’t go too well … or does it? A series of panels from Otto Binder’s “Captain Marvel Goes Crazy!”; art by C.C. Beckotherwise has been hidden or concealed. Fiction is at its Pete Costanza. [Shazam hero & Dr. Sivana TM & © DC Comics.] best when it illuminates dark, anxious, and otherwise secret places. What would Captain Marvel look like in a does Captain Marvel react when, in the first story of Captain Marvel straitjacket? When I look at the cover of Captain Marvel Adventures Adventures #56 (dated March 15, 1946), the diabolical Dr. Sivana #56, I see a kind of mirror: if even Captain Marvel can go “crazy,” masquerades as Sigmund Freud (or, anyway, as one of Freud’s does that mean I can, too? First, I laugh at that image, but then I bearded followers)? experience a moment of concern. What would it mean to be “crazy”? As I tell my students when they write papers on literature “You’ve been measured inside and outside,” explains Sivana, and psychoanalysis, “crazy,” of course, is not a clinical term. But after the researchers at the Evolution Institute examine Captain the question still remains—why is Captain Marvel at the mercy of Marvel for an exhibit on the ascent of mankind. The scientists at these doctors? the Institute want a model of Captain Marvel because they believe he best represents “modern man.” Sivana, however, claims to be “a Binder and Beck’s story never fully answers this question. Its psychologist” who, as he explains to Captain Marvel, is “here to abrupt, rather pat ending doesn’t match the delight and absurdity examine your mind!” It’s all enough to drive Captain Marvel a at work in the rest of the narrative. But even this story’s failed little crazy. finale—in which Billy, having escaped from the ward, returns to the Institute and finally recognizes Sivana’s evil chuckle—might All the tests, all the observations, all the calculations, and all the reveal to us the working of the American imagination in 1946. questions lead our hero to a psychiatric ward in “Captain Marvel “No!” cries Sivana in the final panel of the story after Captain Goes Crazy!,” written by Otto Binder and drawn by C.C. Beck-Pete Marvel has clobbered him and left him hanging from the fossilized Costanza Studio. When an anthology of the best of Binder and jaws of one of the museum’s dinosaurs. “Don’t hit me again!” he Beck’s Fawcett work is finally published, this story will offer pleads. “I tricked Captain Marvel into the wrong answers, so that contemporary readers small insights into how American popular he’d be called crazy!” Relieved, Professor Goobl has the story’s last culture of the immediate post-war era imagined and understood word: “Fine! Wonderful! Now we can use that model of you after mental illness. In the dream logic of the story, the Evolution all, Capt. Marvel!” Institute’s researchers are curious and enthusiastic but intrusive. By the fourth page of the story, Captain Marvel has what we might But what about the Captain’s earlier outbursts? There’s a now describe as a mild panic attack when two workers from the curious silence at the end of the story. It feels incomplete. After all, Institute arrive to take a cast of the hero’s perfectly proportioned even before Sivana arrived in his disguise to trick Captain Marvel, body. “Stop!” shouts Captain Marvel. “I’m going crazy!” He is, our hero exhibited signs of nervousness and discomfort with the after all, a boy in a man’s body. And, anyway, who wants to be doctors. When I read this story again to write this essay, I began to pestered by a bunch of academics? The issue’s cover reveals consider its awkward ending, its sudden resolution, and its Captain Marvel’s fate: before the end of the story, he finds himself inability (or unwillingness) to explore its central conceit. Is Captain confined, at least briefly, to a hospital because of his nerves and Marvel a victim of anxiety? because of Sivana’s often silly trick questions. “Is it true that you We don’t know, and the silence at the end of the story, a cruel are now cured of being a maniac? Yes or no!” asks Sivana. Captain vacuum filled only by an advertisement for Captain Marvel Bunny Marvel, befuddled, responds, “No—I mean, yes—I mean—Holy that follows the last panel, is the same silence that greeted John Moley!”


The World’s Mightiest Mortal Gets Psychoanalyzed

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Huston’s documentary Let There Be Light, a powerful record of returning soldiers recovering from combat fatigue at Long Island’s Mason General Hospital. In an installment of his film column for The Nation dated May 11, 1946, James Agee calls that documentary “a fine, terrible, valuable non-fiction film about psychoneurotic soldiers” that “has been forbidden civilian circulation by the War Department.” For the full, fascinating story behind Huston’s documentary, read Scott Simmon’s excellent essay “Let There Be Light (1946) and Its Restoration” on the website www.filmpreservation.org. In his essay, Simmon offers a number of possible explanations as to why the Army tried to suppress the film after its completion. Although the Army’s official explaLet There Be—Separate But Equal nation was that Huston’s use of interviews with actual soldiers Director John Huston and a still from his WWII documentary Let There Be Light, with might raise privacy concerns, Simmon speculates that the its integrated audience for an officer’s lecture—at a time when America’s armed Army might have been uncomfortable in part with the services were rigidly segregated. documentary’s “confident and casual mix of races.” Simmon explains, “The U.S. military would remain largely segregated veterans. The film, which James Agee described as “intelligent, until President Truman’s executive order of 1948, but a few Army noble, [and] fiercely moving,” is now widely available on YouTube hospitals had begun integrating in 1943.” and on the Internet Archive (www.archive.org). Huston’s documentary is also a bonus feature on the Blu-ray and DVD The Army was so uncomfortable with Huston’s film that it release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s astonishing 2012 film The commissioned a remake, directed by Joseph Henabery and released Master, which stars Joaquin Phoenix and the late Philip Seymour under the title Shades of Gray in 1948. Henabery’s film uses actors Hoffman. Anderson includes references and even some dialogue instead of actual veterans, and, as Simmon points out, it also from Let There Be Light in The Master when Phoenix’s character carries a very different message than Huston’s film in its Freddie Quell begins treatment at a VA hospital after his service in suggestion that anxiety and other neuroses in the military are the the Navy. Let There Be Light, like Bill Maudlin’s Back Home, Jack result of social pressures and not the direct consequence of military Kerouac’s On the Road, and Paul Fussell’s Wartime: Understanding service or combat fatigue. In his article, Simmon also includes John and Behavior in the Second World War, is essential for those seeking Huston’s reflections on why the Army was so unhappy with the to understand the nuances and complexities of the post-World War original film. According to Huston, II America experienced by soldiers and their families. I think it boils down to the fact that they wanted to maintain The abrupt ending of “Captain Marvel Goes Crazy!,” as I the “warrior” myth, which said that our American soldiers suggested earlier, is more telling than it might at first appear. After went to war and came back all the stronger for the all, Beck himself felt uncomfortable placing Billy and Captain experience, standing tall and proud for having served their Marvel in “realistic” situations. In “What Really Killed Captain country well. Marvel?,” the first Critical Circle essay that Beck mailed to his The Army, however, failed to see the value in Let There Be Light friends in March 1988, he explained his aversion to mixing the real as a document of the strength and optimism of these returning with the fantastic. “While real-life characters,” Beck writes, “can appear in comic strips with more or less success, comic strip characters can’t appear in real life and be convincing. The contrast between a normal human and a cartoon character is too great; one or the other will always look phony. Captain Marvel looked phony.” Later in the essay, Beck even admits that he was especially unhappy with plots in which Captain Marvel confronted Hitler and the other Axis villains because, he explained, those stories made the hero “look silly, as readers knew perfectly well that neither he nor any of the other comic heroes of the time ever made any difference in the progress of the He’s A Maniac! war.” Sometimes the best moments from the gamut of “Captain Marvel” stories weren’t the unconventional, offbeat fantasies… but the instances that mirrored real-life pickles and predicaments. Yet, Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. Beck once told his 1980s Critical Circle discussion group that “…comic strip characters can’t appear in real life and be convincing.… The contrast between a normal human and a cartoon character is too great.…” Cartoonist/comics historian Trina Robbins kept all of her Critical Circle essays by Beck; so did the FCA editor. Other “CC” members included Richard Lupoff and Jim Amash! [Shazam hero & Dr. Sivana TM & © DC Comics.]

Despite Beck’s reservations, however, I’d like to suggest that placing a cartoon character like Captain Marvel in a psychiatric ward, or in combat with Hitler or


Fawcett Collector’s Of America

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stories once “expanded” a child’s imagination, they can now enlarge our historical imagination and recollection. In his 1989 book Wartime, Paul Fussell, an English professor, renowned scholar, and combat veteran of World War II who died in 2012, reflects on our limited understanding of what the War signified in late twentieth-century American culture: “The real war was tragic and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or philosophical analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible.” In the 25 years that have passed since Fussell published this book, I don’t know if our understanding of the war has deepened significantly, but it has begun to change, especially as we lose more veterans and civilians who experienced the war and its aftermath firsthand. But, while those of us born after the war may never fully understand what Fussell describes as the era’s “tragic and ironic” qualities, we have inherited a legacy of stories and narratives that demand our attention. “Captain Marvel Goes Crazy!” is one of those stories. While the story might appear to be nothing more than a footnote in the history of American comics, another of Billy Batson’s many adventures, it has the potential to delight and instruct us if we are open and sensitive to the issues it addresses. What happened to those hospitalized with “nervous disorders” in the 1940s and 1950s? What effect did those hospitalizations have on individuals, on families, on communities? Read “Captain Marvel Goes Crazy!” again. Read it for the first time. Then watch Let There Be Light with the same sense of wonder and compassion. Both are stories about America in 1946: what it had suffered and what it hoped it might become.

References James Agee, Agee on Film. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967.

He Drives Me Crazy! A befuddled Captain Marvel is finally hauled away. [Shazam hero & Dr. Sivana TM & © DC Comics.]

other Nazi soldiers, actually has the potential to focus our attention on complex historical forces. Seeing Captain Marvel in a straitjacket, or in conversation with a character who looks like Sigmund Freud (or Sivana disguised as Freud) remains startling because, as Beck suggests, such a scene cannot be true: it is a work of the imagination. But sometimes a work of the imagination, even an absurd one in which a brightly costumed character finds himself in an alltoo-real and possibly tragic situation, can reveal just as much as a documentary or other work of historical fact (and even a work of fact, of course, is another kind of narrative, also prey to distortions, inaccuracies, or speculation). Beck is right, of course, when, in “Real Facts about an Unreal Character,” he says that “facts” can be “dull and stupid things.” Maybe that’s why a cartoon character like Captain Marvel serves such a vital purpose: with Binder and Beck creating this colorful, alternative universe for us, we readers bear witness to concerns and anxieties that otherwise might be forgotten or concealed. In his recent interview with Stuart Kelly in The Guardian (Nov. 22, 2013), Alan Moore reminded his fans that super-heroes today “don’t mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently.” I would add that, because these early super-hero comics were designed to “expand the imagination” of young readers, they retain some of that power, and, as products of a specific time and place, they serve an important historical, even archaeological, purpose. Just as these

Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Stuart Kelly, “Alan Moore: ‘Why shouldn’t you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?” The Guardian. Friday, November 22, 2013. (Online at www.theguardian.com). George Khoury, “Revival and Revelation” in Kimota! The Miracleman Companion. Raleigh: TwoMorrows, 2001. 11-23. Scott Simmon, “Let There Be Light (1946) and Its Restoration.” National Film Preservation Foundation. Available online at www.filmpreservation.org/userfiles/images/PDFs/LetThereBeLig ht_programNote.pdf Thanks to Trina Robbins for sharing her copies of two C.C. Beck Critical Circle essays: “What Really Killed Captain Marvel?” (March 1988) and “Real Facts about an Unreal Character” (July 1988). Thanks also to P.C. Hamerlinck and Roy Thomas. 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.brian-wcremins.wordpress.com


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A WORK OF ART

DON HECK remains one of the legendary names in comics, considered an “artist’s artist,” respected by peers, and beloved by fans as the co-creator of IRON MAN, HAWKEYE, and BLACK WIDOW, and key artist on THE AVENGERS. Along with STAN LEE, JACK KIRBY, and STEVE DITKO, Heck was an integral player in “The Marvel Age of Comics”, and a top-tier 1970s DC Comics artist. He finally gets his due in this heavily illustrated, full-color hardcover biography, which features meticulously researched and chronicled information on Don’s 40-year career, with personal recollections from surviving family, long-time friends, and industry legends, and rare interviews with Heck himself. It also features an unbiased analysis of sales on Don’s DC Comics titles, an extensive art gallery (including published, unpublished, and pencil artwork), a Foreword by STAN LEE, and an Afterword by BEAU SMITH. Written by JOHN COATES.


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