Alter Ego #131 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Roy Thomas’ Gerry-mandered Comics Fanzine

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No.131 March 2015

GERRY CONWAY FIRST TIME AROUND AT MARVEL (AND DC )!

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

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

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

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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!

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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1940s WILL EISNER/”BUSY” ARNOLD letters between the creator of The Spirit and his Quality Comics partner, art and artifacts by FINE, CRANDALL, CUIDERA, CARDY, KOTZKY, BLUM, NORDLING, and others! Plus Golden Age MLJ artist JOHN BULTHIUS, more of AMY KISTE NYBERG’s History of the Comics Code, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, cover by DANIEL JAMES COX and JASON PAULOS!

CAROL L. TILLEY on Dr. Fredric Wertham’s falsification of his research in the 1950s, featuring art by EVERETT, SHUSTER, PETER, BECK, COSTANZA, WEBB, FELDSTEIN, WILLIAMSON, WOOD, BIRO, and BOB KANE! Plus AMY KISTE NYBERG on the evolution of the Comics Code, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLEY, and a new cover by JASON PAULOS and DANIEL JAMES COX!

Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure heroes in comics! With art by FOSTER, HOGARTH, MANNING, KANE, KUBERT, MORROW, GRELL, THORNE, WEISS, ANDERSON, KALUTA, AMENDOLA, BUSCEMA, MARSH, and YEATES—with analysis by foremost ERB experts! Plus, the 1970s ERB comics company that nearly was, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover by TOM GRINDBERG!

CAPTAIN MARVEL headlines a Christmas FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) Fantasmagoria starring C.C. BECK, OTTO BINDER, MARC SWAYZE—and the FAWCETT FAMILY (presented by P.C. HAMERLINCK)! Plus: Comic book/strip star artist DAN BARRY profiled, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom history, and more! Cover by C.C. BECK!

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Vol. 3, No. 131 / March 2015 Editor

Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout

Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor

Paul C. Hamerlinck J.T. Go (Assoc. Editor)

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

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

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Cover Artists

Shane Foley, Gene Colan, Gil Kane, Gray Morrow, John Buscema, & Michael Ploog (plus inkers)

Cover Colorist

Tom Ziuko & original Marvel colorists

With Special Thanks to: Heidi Amash Pedro Angosto Richard J. Arndt Mark Arnold Bob Bailey Jean Bails Mike W. Barr Alberto Becattini John Benson June Swayze Blackman Christopher Boyko Mark Staff Brandl Mike Britt Larry Byrd Nick Caputo Dewey Cassell Shaun Clancy Gerry Conway Jon B. Cooke Chet Cox Brian Cremins Vince Davis Tina DeZuniga John Fahey Justin Fairfax Ed Fields Janet Gilbert

Grand Comics Database Sean Howe Dr. M. Thomas Inge “jgbook2007” Jim Kealy Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal Stan Lee Mark Lewis Jim Ludwig Ribert Menzies Barry Pearl Jay Piscopo Warren Reece Gene Reed Randy Sargent Jim Shooter Marc Svensson Desha Swayze June Swayze Dann Thomas Chester Thompson Mike Tiefenbacher Jiro Tomiyama Ted White Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1929-1999 Mike Zeck

Contents

Writer/Editorial: Should Auld Acquaintance, And All That Good Stuff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 “We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Gerry Conway talks to Richard Arndt about his early years at DC, Marvel, & elsewhere.

Dan Barry & Flash Gordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Part II of Alberto Becattini’s look at the life and career of a controversial comics talent.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!: The Mystery Of The Missing Comic! – Part 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Michael T. Gilbert on Bob Powell’s Man in Black Called Fate (among other things).

Comic Fandom Archive: The 20-Cent Plague . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Bill Schelly chats with Jiro Tomiyama, editor of a little-known January 1961 fanzine.

re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 68 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #191 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 P.C. Hamerlinck, Otto Binder, Brian Cremins—and Captain Marvel co-creator Bill Parker!

On Our Cover: Gerry Conway tells us he’s never been overly fond of the circa-1970 photo (see p. 3) that I asked Shane Foley to use as the basis of the portrait of GC that he drew for this issue’s cover. Only thing is—it’s the only photo we had of him from that period. (And besides, which of us does like all the pics taken of us at various stages of our lives?) Be that as it may, we hedged our bets by surrounding it with awesome art by Gil Kane (of The Punisher, Spider-Man, and Gwen Stacy, as inked by John Romita, Tony Mortellaro, Frank Giacoia, & Dave Hunt)—Michael Ploog (Werewolf by Night)—John Buscema (Thor, as inked by Vince Colletta)—Gray Morrow (Man-Thing)—and Gene Colan (Daredevil and The Black Widow, as inked by Tom Palmer). Ye Olde Editor suspects that Gerry’ll admit he’s rarely been in better company! [Marvel art © Marvel Characters, Inc.; portrait art © Shane Foley.] Above: Ye Ed would also be willing to bet a few old comics from his “Go-Go Checks” pile that this panel from The Phantom Stranger #11 (Jan.-Feb. 1971) represents one of the first times that mysterious mover-and-shaker ever just out-and-out slugged anybody. The blow was drawn by Jim Aparo—but neo-writer Gerry Conway evidently enjoyed writing that punch so much that he had the haunted hero throw another one on the very next page. Gerry’d go on to script not a few fearsome free-for-alls, for DC, Marvel, and others, over the next few decades. Thanks to Bob Bailey and Michael T. Gilbert for the scan. [© DC Comics.]

Alter EgoTM is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: 32 Bluebird Trail, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Eight-issue subscriptions: $67 US, $85 Canada, $104 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © Roy Thomas. Alter Ego is a TM of Roy & Dann Thomas. FCA is a TM of P.C. Hamerlinck. Printed in China. ISSN: 1932-6890 FIRST PRINTING.

writer/editorial

Should Auld Acquaintance, And All That Good Stuff

othing is so unfamiliar as one’s own actions, seen through another’s eyes.

I don’t know if that’s a garbling of a famous quotation; but if it isn’t, it ought to be. Because, while this issue’s chief artifact is Richard Arndt’s insightful interview with my old friend Gerry Conway, I’m the guy who commissioned it and who eventually edited it, and decided what artwork, photos, and captions would accompany it. And that inevitably meant dredging up and examining many of my own memories, in a way I never had to do when the interview subject was, say, Will Eisner or Dick Sprang. For, from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, Gerry and I were both colleagues and close friends. In ’81, a period well outside the scope of AE’s general franchise, he was best man at Dann’s and my wedding, and I’m godfather to his oldest daughter, Cara. For the first half of the ’80s, we were even writing partners, co-scripting and selling more than half a dozen screenplays, before we went our separate ways—not on the greatest of terms, a fact known by enough people to make me feel I needed to mention it up front. In 1985, I for the most part returned to writing comics, and he soon transitioned into a successful and well-deserved career as a TV writer and producer. And, to paraphrase a catchphrase of another old colleague, writer/artist Russ Jones, nobody’s throwing any benefits for either of us. Gerry and I have long since buried our differences; so, from a personal viewpoint, reading his memories of the first half-decade or so of his career is a bit like reading the autobiography of someone you once knew well but haven’t often run into in recent years. Inescapably, Gerry and I view various events of our thenoverlapping lives somewhat differently, but I was pleased to find our perspectives not nearly so much at odds as they might’ve been, given the discrepancy in our ages and relative positions at the time (editor and editee, for much of it). Gerry, on the one hand,

knew he was free to state any judgments he felt concerning those days. If I disagreed sufficiently with something he said, I was free to say so in a caption, perhaps even on the same page. That’s the way I handle this magazine, and I’ve never made any apologies for it.

As it happened, I did take issue with a very few of his statements, but only to correct what I believed to be minor errors of fact (like the length of time he wrote Fantastic Four) or, once, to give an alternate POV (as in a caption related to Howard the Duck). Otherwise, I figured I’d save any comments for the letters section dealing with this issue—which is a year and more away. There aren’t many such disagreements, in any event. For the most part, as with most other talks that have appeared in A/E, I was just one more enraptured reader, delighted that Gerry consented to be interviewed and was so forthcoming to Richard. And I chuckled to myself more than once, as I edited the manuscript in a Word document, moving freely between the two PCs on which I work, and between digital documents and artwork scans. The reason? If not for Gerry pushing me in the early 1980s— in a friendly fashion, but mercilessly—to learn to use what was then usually referred to as a “word processor” in our screenplay work together, it would’ve taken me years to become even as moderately comfortable with personal computers and the digital age as I now am. For that—and for all the good comics stories and good friendship he’s provided over the years—I stand in Gerry’s debt. Even if he did kill Gwen Stacy. Hey, I “killed off” Howard the Duck, or at least made poor Steve Gerber do so. Really—it’s all just comic books, after all. Words and pictures on paper. And Gerry has consistently delivered some of the best of those words. Bestest,

CROSSOVER WITH BACK ISSUE!

132

CELEBRATING THE FIRST 75 YEARS OF THE FLASH & GREEN LANTERN (AND LET’S NOT FORGET HAWKMAN!)

Art © DC Comics

• Cacophonous cover by ARTHUR PEDDY & BERNARD SACHS—or is it by IRWIN HASEN? Shot from the original 1949 “JSA” cover art of All-Star Comics #49! • KURT MITCHELL on the first three decades (1940-1970) of Flash, GL, & Hawkman— with our TwoMorrows sister mag Back Issue #80 picking up the story from there! Featuring vats of vintage art (some of it never before printed) by INFANTINO • KANE • ELIAS • LAMPERT • HIBBARD • NAYDEL • SHARP • NODELL • HASEN • REINMAN • TOTH • NEVILLE • MOLDOFF • KUBERT • SEKOWSKY • ANDRU • ANDERSON, et al.! • Golden Age Justice Society & Dr. Mid-Nite artist ARTHUR PEDDY, as remembered by his son-in-law DR. MICHAEL POSNER to RICHARD ARNDT! • Plus—DAN BARRY, Part 3… more of AMY K. NYBERG’s Seal of Approval (squeezed out of this issue, alas!)… PAUL C. HAMERLINCK’s FCA… MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s Comic Crypt… BILL SCHELLY interviews Kubert fan supreme AL DELLINGES—& MORE!!

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“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity” GERRY CONWAY On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Richard J. Arndt

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Gerry Conway launched his writing career in comic books while still a teenager. He began writing mystery (i.e. horror) stories for first DC, then Marvel, before scoring his first ongoing series work on “Ka-Zar” in 1970. Within a year he was writing four monthly series and was one of Marvel’s top writers. He was involved in the creation of “Man-Thing,” “Werewolf by Night,” and Marvel’s rendition of Dracula, and followed Stan Lee as the regular

writer of The Amazing Spider-Man. In 1976 he was briefly the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. Over the past 4½ decades, he has written almost every major character in the DC and Marvel Universes. This interview took place by phone in July 2011, with a follow-up call in September 2013.

Gerry Conway, in an early-1970s photo from Marvel’s fan-club magazine F.O.O.M. (top), and a recent pic (directly above).

Phantoms From The Past (Left:) The splash page of Gerry’s first story featuring a continuing hero, from DC’s The Phantom Stranger #10 (Nov.-Dec. 1970)—and the final page of his most famous comics story ever, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died!,” from The Amazing Spider-Man #121 (June 1973). The credits for Gerry and artist Jim Aparo on the DC yarn came on its third page; the Marvel issue, whose story title was only announced on its last page, was penciled by Gil Kane and inked by John Romita & Tony Mortellaro. Thanks to Bob Bailey and Barry Pearl, respectively. [PS page © DC Comics; ASM page © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

“I Just Kept Banging My Head Against That Wall” RICHARD ARNDT: Can you tell us a little of your background? GERRY CONWAY: I grew up in New York City, born in Brooklyn in 1952. I lived there for ten years, then the family moved to Queens. That’s where I lived and grew up until I was about 18. My parents were middle-class, lower middle-class. I went to Catholic school. I got what I consider a fairly good education. I developed, I’m sure, a few personality quirks from [Catholic school]. [chuckles] RA: What got you interested in comics? CONWAY: When I was a kid, fairly early on, I fell in love with comics. Sometime in my early teens I found out that DC had a summer tour program where, every Thursday during the summer, you could go to the DC offices and they would take whoever had showed up on a tour of the insides. Once I started doing that on a regular basis, I drew up this ambition to be an artist. But I was encouraged to become a writer by the editors who saw my artwork. I was a kid. I kept pursuing it because I didn’t know any better. [laughs] I just kept banging my head against that wall. RA: You also wrote a lot of science-fiction short stories and novels in your early writing career. Did that start at the same time? CONWAY: I don’t know that I wrote a lot of science-fiction. That was the other area of interest that I had, science-fiction and short stories, but again that was based on the general notion of what was possible. I saw that there were these digest magazines that were buying stories, so I started writing them and sold some to Ted White at Amazing Science Fiction and Fantastic. Fantastic was fantasy-oriented. This was actually a few years after I’d started writing comics. I may have met White at one of the comic book hangouts—the comic folk used to have these gatherings Fridays, after work, once a month. It would be at various peoples’ homes in New York City. RA: That would be the “First Friday” gatherings? CONWAY: The gathering would go from people like Roy Thomas

one month to Archie Goodwin to… I think Bernie Wrightson hosted them at one point. It was just whoever’s apartment would be available. People would show up from all different areas of comics. Jeff Jones was a regular. Ted White, who edited the SF/fantasy digests I mentioned, came once or twice. I met Ted at one of the Friday gatherings. I said, “Gee, I’d like to send you some stories.” and he said sure. So he knew who I was when he got the stories. It was very nice. He was very encourFantastic Foray aging. I sold some prose The cover of a 1970 issue of the fantasy stories to him. He introduced pulp magazine Fantastic, which me to Terry Carr. Terry heralded one of Conway’s early sales to actually bought my first novel editor Ted White. Art by Michael J. for the Ace Science Fiction line. Kaluta. Retrieved from the sinceI wrote another couple of renamed Golden Age Comic Book novels after that. Still, I Stories website. [© the respective basically dropped writing copyright holders.] science-fiction sometime in the early to mid-1970s. I was just too busy writing comics and, later, films. RA: Your first stories that I’m aware of were at DC. How did you break in, since you were still a teenager when that happened? The editor would probably have been Dick Giordano. CONWAY: Yes, it was Giordano. There was this strange period…. As I was saying, I was going on these Thursday tours at DC and I basically went around [while on the tours] and introduced myself to a lot of the different editors. At one point, and I would have still been a freshman in high school, maybe even earlier, I asked the guy who was running the tour if there was any kind of free work I could do there. This was before they had interns, but I was asking if I could do the job that an intern would have today. I didn’t even know what an intern was. So, for a couple of weeks that summer, I worked for free at the DC offices. I was just cutting up old artwork, which is kind of horrible, I guess, but that’s what they had me do. RA: Would this have been for Sol Harrison?

Booked! Two early paperback SF novels by Conway: The Midnight Dancers (1971) and Mindship (1974). Cover art by Davis Meltzer & Kelly Freas, respectively. Thanks to Gene Reed. [© the respective copyright holders.]

CONWAY: No, this was for a guy named Walter Hurlachek. Sol was, I think, the guy who was in charge, but Walter was sort of like his assistant at the time. He led the office tours. He was a very nice gentleman, in his fifties at the time I was doing this. I guess he retired sometime after that. He brought me in to do just the art stuff. So, because I was there, I went around to the different editors and asked if I could submit stories to them. I just went from one editor to another. I started with people like Julie Schwartz because I was obviously a huge Julie Schwartz fan, as anybody who read DC Comics was. Julie wasn’t really very encouraging. Mort Weisinger actually asked me for some story ideas. He didn’t like anything I came up with. [laughs] I came up with some spec scripts for him. The first person who ever actually asked me to write something was Robert Kanigher. He was still an editor at DC at the time. He asked me to write a Metal Men script because he had gotten way behind on some assignments or whatever. He rejected it, though, when I’d finished it. He said it was no good, that he didn’t like it.

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

Sidebar:

group-member Jeff Jones. It also featured Mike Hinge’s first cover for any SF magazine. And Gerry’s second-published story, also illustrated by Jones, appeared in the December 1970 Fantastic, which had Mike Kaluta’s first SF magazine cover. I met Mike in that same group, and he became a regular contributor to my magazines.

by Ted White

But Gerry’s third SF story didn’t appear in Amazing until the November 1972 issue—two years later—with “Star Walk.” As I explained in that issue, “When we introduced Gerry Conway to the SF field in our November 1970 issue, we said, ‘You’ll be seeing more of him, here and soon.’ Gerry was then a young, teenaged comic book writer working on his first novel, and soon after his first story saw print we bought his ‘Star Walk.’ In the ensuing months he sold his novel, The Midnight Dancer, to the Ace Specials line, accelerated his comic scripting, and asked us to hold his story until he could do some revisions on it. Time passed, and Gerry assumed the chore of writing four comic books a month for Marvel, graduating high school as a successful full-time professional writer. Somewhere along the line, the revisions on his story got lost in the shuffle. Now, after emerging for a gulp of air from the frenetic world of monthly deadlines, Gerry has sent us ‘what amounts to a new story’ and tells us that he’s eager to do more— one of which will be an upcoming cover story, written around a Mike Hinge painting.”

Gerry Conway’s Science Fiction

n the mid-’60s I was a member of an unnamed group of comics fans and professionals who met once a month—for a time in Roy Thomas’ Manhattan apartment. Through that group I formed many friendships, which I exploited when in late 1968 I became the editor of two SF magazines, Amazing Stories and Fantastic. I’m not sure if Gerry Conway was a member of that group, but I’m sure he was aware of my comics connections when he visited me one day in 1970, both to meet me and to sell me his stories. In my editorial in the November 1970 issue of Amazing I said, in discussing the contributors to that issue, “If [Bob] Shaw has taken the slow and deliberate route through fandom and fanzine writing to professional science fiction, Gerard Conway has made a quantum leap, feet first. Still in his teens and with a couple of years of comics scripting under his belt, Gerry made his first SF sales to me with ‘Through the Dark Glass’ and ‘Walk of the Midnight Demon’ (the latter story will be in next month’s Fantastic). Subsequently he has sold a novel to the Ace Science Fiction Specials line and I’ve purchased two more of his stories.” The November 1970 issue of Amazing was notable for more than Gerry’s first published SF story—which was illustrated by

That story, “The Once And Always War,” appeared in the August 1973 Amazing. It was also Gerry’s last sale to me, although I would have happily bought more stories from him. What happened? I don’t know. Maybe the low payment rates my magazines offered dissuaded him. More likely his career had taken another turn. I was too busy getting out two bimonthly magazines to find out. But I remember Gerry as an energetic young man, brimming with talent and eager to make his mark on the world. And for a brief time he was a bright new star in the SF firmament.

Amazing—But True! (Left:) The title spread of the first short story Conway sold to Ted White for Amazing (Nov. 1970), a latter-day incarnation of the first science-fiction pulp magazine. Illustrator Jeffrey Jones was later noted for his work in The National Lampoon and elsewhere, including comics. Gerry originally wrote prose fiction—and sometimes comics—under his fuller name of “Gerard F. Conway.” [© the respective copyright holders.] (Above:) Ted White blowin’ sax not long ago at the Orion Soundstage, a jazz club in Baltimore; the band is called Conduit. Back in the day, Ted was a SF editor—and writer, to boot. Photo by Chester Thompson. Thanks to TW.

I made my way down the various editors until I finally was talking to George Kashdan, who was one of the second- or thirdtier editors at DC at the time. He was, I think, under Murray Boltinoff. I think he was Murray’s assistant at one point or maybe both Murray and he were assistants to Jack Schiff. I don’t remember. George was given the Hawkman title when, I guess, Julie

took over some other book and he couldn’t handle the additional work. For a while, George was the editor of Hawkman and I was pitching ideas to him. He was very receptive and was very encouraging to some of my notions. I called him up one day to pitch another story to him because he’d been receptive enough to tell me that he’d take my next story, and he said, “I’m not going to be

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

working here anymore. They’ve got a new publisher here, and the guy taking over from me is named Dick Giordano. You should talk to him.” I called up Dick, and because I was the kind of kid who was very ambitious and probably prone to exaggerate things, I told him I worked with George Kashdan “and he said I should talk to you.” [laughs] Dick had me come in and pitch some ideas to him. He was sort of encouraging, but at the same time he wasn’t jumping up and down at the prospect of me writing for him. He would ask me to do different story ideas and would work with me on them. I would come in almost every week during this period for four or five months, sitting at Dick’s desk and talking to him. I would get his coffee and such. He was really sweet about working with me. Later, he told me that he actually didn’t think I had any talent at all, but I was so persistent that he encouraged me just to see if, on the off chance, I’d develop into something. He didn’t see much promise in me, though, at that point. At this particular time, Dick, Murray Boltinoff, and Joe Orlando were all sharing an office. Murray, who I think was feeling a little anxious for his job, what with the new publisher—who was

Carmine Infantino—bringing in these two new editors, Dick and Joe, and firing George Kashdan and Jack Schiff, who’d been around forever at DC. So here was this kid coming in every week, talking to one of the new editors, and I think that Murray thought, “I’ve got to show Carmine that I’m a hot editor. I can take risks and discover young talent, too.” So he came up to me and said, “I see you’re working with Dick.” I said, [laughs] “Yeah, I’m working with Dick!” He asked if I wanted to write a story for him. I spent an entire summer working on a three-page story, with Murray Boltinoff giving me notes and having me rewrite it and so on and so on. Finally, Murray said we were done with this and that he would buy it. He asked me what my page rate was. Your page rate was what you were paid per page for writing scripts. I told him I didn’t know, that I’d never sold anything before. Murray went, “Oh my God! I just bought this guy’s first story! Oh my God!” So Murray ended up buying my first story, and from there I started selling stories to Dick, who I guess felt that if Murray thought I could write, then I could write. That’s pretty much how that happened.

“There Was No Sense… That Comics Had Any Value—To Anybody” RA: What did Murray pay you? CONWAY: Murray paid me $10 a page, which was the going rate for new writers at that point. I got $30 for spending the entire summer writing the three pages, over and over again. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I’d always wanted to sell a comic script, and now I had. It never saw print until years and years later. Paul Levitz discovered it in an old pile of unpublished material. It had been drawn by Jerry Grandenetti. Paul decided to embarrass me [laughs] and finally published it in one of the fifty- or sixty-cent 80-page comics. Unexpected or something like that. [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: This is probably “Wake Me before I Die!” in Unexpected #161 (Feb. 1975), which is the only 3-page Grandenetti-drawn strip for the time period mentioned.] By that point, the mid-1970s, I was writing for Marvel. Believe me, there was no reason to publish George Kashdan. this story! [laughs] Nobody had ever wanted to publish it. But it did lead to me writing for Dick, and that was my first real foothold in the business.

Dick Giordano.

RA: It struck me, when you mentioned making the rounds of the various editors, that there seemed to be an influx of young, often extremely young, talent being hired by DC, both as artists and writers. Jim Shooter started there in the mid1960s as a 13-year-old kid writing “The Legion of Super-Heroes.” During 1968-1969, not only did artists like Bernie Wrightson and Michael Kaluta get some of their first jobs, but writers such as

George To Dick to Murray! Forget “Tinkers to Evers to Chance”—if you ever knew that old baseball quote! Teenager Gerry Conway bounced among DC editors from George Kashdan to Dick Giordano (with brief stops at Julius Schwartz and Robert Kanigher)—finally making a fluke sale to Murray Boltinoff circa 1969. For some reason, though, that story didn’t appear in print until The Unexpected #161 (Feb. 1975), and even then had no writer credit! Art by Jerry Grandenetti. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert & Gene Reed. [© DC Comics.]

I worked for Dick a year or two, writing for Witching Hour and House of Secrets. I wrote a lot of the intro material, featuring Abel or the Three Witches, in each issue on my own. Basically learning my craft. I consider Dick to be instrumental in teaching me in what I needed to do to tell a story visually. How to provide emotional moments to it.

Murray Boltinoff.

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

Jose Delbo.

yourself, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Mike Friedrich, and others started their careers there, as well. CONWAY: Shooter was my inspiration for thinking it was possible to become a writer at my age. RA: The editor of the “Legion” at that time would have been Mort Weisinger. Is it possible he encouraged you because of his success with Jim Shooter? CONWAY: I don’t know. To be honest, I could never understand why Mort would have taken that risk [with Shooter]. The [editors at DC] were very risk-adverse guys. Very conservative. Very set in their ways. Even though most of them were only in their midfifties or so at this particular period, they were not guys who were eager to try new things. I think the only reason that Mort did it— well, maybe there were a couple of reasons—one, that Mort saw talent in Shooter, obviously, and two, Marvel was doing something that DC didn’t understand and it was getting kids excited. Perhaps there was some sense, in Mort anyway, that DC needed to have some young talent that understood how to tap that excitement. I think the biggest reason that Mort did it, however, was that Shooter was turning in fully drawn layouts with the script on the page. Mort realized that he could get, for $10 a page, layouts and script that he could then give to an artist and pay the artist a little less and it would make for a cheaper book. I think that’s why Mort did it. [laughs] Still, it was a real opportunity for young people to see that there was hope to get into the business. People like me, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, who were certainly my seniors in all this, and later, Mike Friedrich—we were looking at Jim Shooter’s

Stop Your Witching! Gerry wrote several stories for the Giordano-edited The Witching Hour, including (clockwise) a tale in #4 (Sept.-Oct. 1969) drawn by Jose Delbo… one in #6 (Dec. ’69-Jan. ’70) with art by Mike Roy & Mike Peppe… and a text story in the latter. Only the prose effort rated a byline, in those days before DC began crediting writers in its mystery mags! Conway also had a second story in WH #4. Thanks to Nick Caputo & Jim Kealy for pages from the respective issues. [© DC Comics.]

success. If he could do it, obviously there was no reason we couldn’t do it, too. It went from one thing to the next. Roy Thomas was starting out over at Marvel, although Roy was certainly older than the rest of us. He was in his twenties at the time. Even that, though, was more

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

I Was A Teenage Comic Book Writer Jim Shooter, who’d sold his first comics story to DC “Superman” line editor Mort Weisinger at age 13 in 1965, was an early inspiration to Gerry Conway. An interview with Shooter, who like GC was destined to be a future Marvel editor-in-chief, will appear in A/E #136. This photo of JS was at one time put up on his blog, and wound up in the Internet Sargasso.

impressive than what had been going on for years before that. A lot of the DC writers had been there since the 1940s, some pretty much since the beginning of comics. Roy brought in Denny O’Neil. Dick Giordano, at Charlton, brought in Steve Skeates. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Of course, Steve Skeates had started out working on staff for Stan Lee at Marvel.] It was like this renaissance of young talent, if you want to call it that. We were new blood, anyway. RA: I notice that Dick had already stuck his toe into the young comic writer field, because he’d not only hired O’Neil and Skeates to work at Charlton, but also Willi Frantz, who was only a teenager when he wrote some very strong stories for Charlton’s war comics. CONWAY: I didn’t really follow what Charlton was doing, just some of their super-hero titles like Captain Atom, so I have no knowledge of what Charlton was doing with the rest of their titles. I followed mostly Steve Ditko’s work on “Blue Beetle,” Captain Atom, and like that.

RA: It may have made Giordano more susceptible to hiring teenagers like yourself, however, since he’d had success in doing that before you and he met at DC. CONWAY: Yeah, I think so, but I also think it was also the times. There weren’t a lot of middle-aged guys who wanted to start a career writing comics. [DC] knew they needed a new approach to the material, and where were these people going to come from? They weren’t going to come from some other business, since comic books weren’t paying writers all that great. The new approach had to come from young people for whom the grind that comics took to write and become established in didn’t matter. It was banging your head, banging your head, banging your head…. We were also young enough and such fans of the material that it didn’t seem to us to be a step down, as it would have to more established writers. Comic book writing was a ghetto field, a sign of failure, for established writers to step down into. RA: You were also all fans of the field. The early writers of comics weren’t fans because they had nothing to be fans of. They were probably fans of the much more prestigious comic strips. CONWAY: Oh, yeah! Exactly. Outside of teenagers and young people in college, there was no sense in 1965, 1966, that comics had any value—to anybody! It was the graveyard of failed commercial artists. That’s what it was perceived as. There was a huge inferiority complex among artists and writers in the field, from the

This Old House Under editor Giordano, Gerry also scripted “The House of Endless Years” in House of Secrets #83 (Jan. 1970), penciled by Bill Draut (with Giordano probably inking, uncredited)—and a prose story in #86 (June-July ’70) that featured illustrations by Gray Morrow. Thanks to Nick Caputo. [© DC Comics.]

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

generation of people preceding the one that I was part of. They wanted to do newspaper strips! It was all about the notion that they would eventually get out of comics and do a newspaper strip. Even Jack Kirby did a newspaper strip. Moving into a daily or Sunday strip was a big deal. Part of that was that there was this organization of illustrators that people like Jerry Robinson belonged to. Jerry got out of comics, and other comic folks thought, “Jerry got out of comics! We can do it, too!” The organization had this mansion over on the East Side, and it was so clear that they were the cool guys. Comic books were where you made a buck, dropped the artwork off, and forgot about it. You never even thought about getting it back. You had no pride in doing this material. Well, some of these guys, it was something they cared about, but that wasn’t most of them. If you were going to get passion in the business, you were going to get it from people who were new. So when Marvel sort of shook things up and created this environment where comics were not just perceived as something for twelve-year-olds but potentially for a older audience—well, a slightly older audience, teenagers, what have you—DC felt they had to compete. And that the only people who were going to bring in anything new in terms of ideas were comic book readers and fans who were teenagers. Or at least, quite young—early twenties. I think that was the only recourse they had. Everybody else in the art and writing business perceived it as a step down. You weren’t going to get new ideas and new energies out of people who felt that they were failures to be doing this stuff in the first place. They were going to get it from people like me, who thought it was the coolest thing in the world to be writing comics.

“[Carmine Infantino’s] Mandate Was To Shake Things Up” RA: I was talking to Denny O’Neil a few days ago, and he said he believed that his big break at DC came about because DC fired a large part of their writing staff over issues with health insurance. He wasn’t aware of it until years later, because he’d been working at Charlton and doing some work for Marvel, but when DC hired Giordano away from Charlton they gave him the opportunity to bring five of the people he’d been working with at Charlton with him. Two of those were O’Neil and Steve Skeates. O’Neil felt that the reason the writers were allowed to come over was that DC needed writers fast! CONWAY: That may have been one of the reasons that new writers got into DC, but it’s only one reason, not the only reason. I’ve heard that same story, and I think it’s true that the need for new writers was possibly based on that, but DC had also hired Carmine Infantino as the editorial director and his mandate was to shake things up. I think what you’re talking about, the firing of Gardner Fox, John Broome, Bill Finger, and what Carmine was hired to do were occurring at the same time. The writers we’re talking about were getting older. They wanted and needed health insurance. It was a reasonable thing for them to be demanding, but they were, most of them, on books that weren’t doing that great. Most of them were people working for Julie. Those titles—Green Lantern, Atom, Hawkman, Metal Men, even Batman after the upsurge from the TV show subsided—weren’t doing that great. There wasn’t a sense that these guys needed to be pandered to. Remember, at the same time these guys got fired, Robert Kanigher’s writing contract was renewed. Bob Haney’s contract was renewed. It wasn’t just that they were getting rid of the older writers because they were demanding this stuff. It was also that DC and Carmine were trying to shake things up.

Dick came over from Charlton, in part, because DC also wanted new editors. They fired Jack Schiff, George Kashdan, Jack Miller. That basically eliminated Arnold Drake. He was a wonderful writer, but he got kicked to curbside. People who were working for Schiff or Kashdan went to work for Murray Boltinoff. Haney went to work for Murray. Or they just went away.

Julie, Julie, Julie One of the relatively few photos taken of Julius Schwartz during the 1960s is this one of the DC editor (seated), conferring with artist Sid Greene; it first appeared in Alter Ego [Vol. 1] #9 in 1965, snapped by a fan named John Fahey on a visit to the National/ DC offices.

RA: I think there was a writer named Dave Wood who did a lot of work for the fired editors, too. Possibly Otto Binder, as well. CONWAY: Yeah. I think that the idea that this was a coldly calculated financial thing is probably overrated. I think it was, in part, but as much as anything else, it was a perceived need for new blood. That the model of how DC was run, which was in use for a long, long time, was in danger of being superseded by Marvel, and DC did not want that. So they saw that things were shaken up. In fact, John Broome may not have been fired with the rest of them. I think he was living in Paris at the time, and comic book writing was like a side business for him. It wasn’t his main job. He was an art dealer in Paris. He didn’t have that much pressure to remain. Bill Finger certainly wanted to remain but he was getting old. So was Gardner. Their writing was no longer in step with what was going on. They weren’t what DC really needed. To be honest, I think Julie Schwartz was a far more ruthless person than most people are now willing to admit, looking back. He received so much love as an editor for what he did and contributed to the field. But he could cut people dead. I remember actually overhearing a conversation between him and Bob Kanigher. Kanigher and he had shared an office as editors for some twenty years. Kanigher wanted to write something for Julie. This was at a stage where Kanigher’s career had started to peter out a bit and he was looking for assignments. He had a contract but it depended on him getting assignments. He asked Julie for an assignment and Julie said, “No! I don’t have anything for you.” Kanigher got upset. He said “Julie, you’re my friend. We shared an office for twenty years.“ And Julie said to him, in one of the coldest and hardest ways I’ve ever heard anybody speak, “We shared an office for twenty years. We were never friends.” And that was it. [laughs] Julie was quite willing to cut people off. If they didn’t, or he thought they couldn’t, do what he needed, then he was going to move on. RA: Kanigher didn’t always have the greatest reputation, either. He was still furious decades after the fact, and willing to demean Bernie Krigstein in the harshest terms about Krigstein finishing an Atlas assignment in 1953 before he turned in a DC assignment and then lying about the reason for the lateness.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

CONWAY: Oh, no. Kanigher was a total prick. Absolutely. I’m not saying that Bob Kanigher should be held with much sympathy here, but, you know, it’s also still true that he and Julie had a longterm relationship and Kanigher was instrumental in helping Julie revive “The Flash.” He wrote the first “Flash” story for Showcase. We’ll never know exactly how that first “Flash” story came about— whether Julie was told to do it or he wanted to do it or whatever. However it worked out, that single issue started a new direction for Julie’s career. RA: For comics in general. CONWAY: Under those circumstances, payback may have been appropriate, I don’t know. [laughs] Be that as it may, Julie certainly didn’t feel any obligation to Kanigher. Anyway, I think the advent of so many young writers arriving at much the same time was far more complex than the older writers simply demanding health insurance. Probably more so than any of us at the time, or even looking back, can really comprehend. It would have been nice to get both sides of the story then. Some kind of a comic book history magazine in operation then to get the comic pros’ side and also the business side. Nobody ever talked to Irwin Donenfeld or Jack Liebowitz. We know that both Liebowitz and Harry Donenfeld [Irwin’s dad] were real cutthroat business guys. We know they came out of the pulp field. Harry Donenfeld, in particular, came from the spicy pulps. These were not guys with high moral standards but, by the same token, it was a business. So who knows what was going on there? They were certainly very protective of some people. Murray Boltinoff kept his job for decades. So did his brother. Then they got fired just before their

retirement, so who knows? The business is filled with jerks. I’ve hated most of the people I’ve ever worked with at an executive level. I think they are ruthless sons of bitches. But so are creators. Creators stab people in the back, too. There are many stories of creative partners who start out together and one has a success with something and the other partner is forgotten or his contribution ignored. Even though they started out their career together, helped create a legend together, particularly a legend of each other. It’s just the nature of life. Things don’t always work out. That’s a long-winded version of how I got into the comics field.

“I Thought Of Myself As A DC Writer” RA: Interesting, though. Now, when you started, it was within only a couple of months that you were also working for Marvel, on the same type of stories—the mystery stories. CONWAY: I don’t think it was months. It was probably a year or more. RA: Your first story for DC was cover-dated August 1969, and your first Marvel work was February 1970. CONWAY: Oh, maybe in print, but I worked for DC for at least a year, starting in 1968 with regular assignments, before Marvel bought anything from me. It didn’t seem to me that my getting into print was happening all that fast. I know that it took a long time for my first story to appear in a DC title, and it may be that it’s one of those situations where Marvel found out that DC was having some success with these kinds of books and they wanted to be in competition with them in that area. The easiest way to do that was to get some of the stories of that type from people who were already doing them. RA: That’s probably true, because not only you but Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Denny O’Neil, and Steve Skeates all did stories for the two Marvel mystery books [Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness], and none of them were Marvel regulars at the time, but all of them worked on the DC mystery titles. CONWAY: Marvel’s titles didn’t last long.

Toth For Two One of Conway’s early scripts was illustrated by Alex Toth, for The Witching Hour #10 (Aug.-Sept. 1970). Thanks to Jim Kealy & Michael T. Gilbert. [© DC Comics.]

RA: Eight or nine issues, and then there was a title change and a format change to reprints.

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

CONWAY: I remember doing a writing test for Roy, and I don’t know if that preceded or followed writing those mystery stories. The Marvel Comics Writing Test or something like that, where I had to dialogue a couple of “Captain America” pages. Roy told me later that Stan’s reaction to it was lukewarm, at best. The story of my life, I guess! I kept ending up at The Sword Is Mightier Than The Typewriter places where I A pulsating page from a Conway sword-and-sorcery was a fairly story in House of Secrets #85 (April-May 1970), penciled regular fixture, by Gil Kane and inked by Neal Adams. Thanks to Jim but the initial Kealy. [© DC Comics.] reaction to my work was basically “Ehhh…..” and a shrug of the shoulders. [laughs] Then somehow, within a year, I’m writing everything for the company.

Finish” [House of Secrets #81 (Sept. 1969)], which was illustrated by Jack Sparling, of all people. That was a terrific thing. I was writing these semi-psychological horror stories where what I was trying to do was interior horror, rather than monsters jumping out at your throat. That was part of where I was as a kid. I think I’ve always been an introspective writer, at my best, where the emotions that I was writing about were internalized. People dealing with their own personal hang-ups. “Spider-Man” stuff. The best writing I think I did during that period of time was with Peter [Parker]’s internal struggles. Writing those initial horror stories in that way also came about because of the way the Comics Code was structured at the time. You weren’t usually allowed to do monster stories, particularly traditional monsters like vampires or werewolves, so you had to tell the story by implication and suspense. That was certainly Dick’s taste as well. RA: Something that just occurred to me was that a lot of the DC books,

Anyhow, I did do the test material for Marvel, but I’m not sure if that led to my doing those mystery stories. It may have led to my doing the other work that appeared a little later—the Sgt. Furys, the Astonishing Tales stuff. It was all—well, it was forty years ago and, to be honest with you, it’s all a bit of a blur. Probably a good thing, too! RA: Clearly, most of your first year’s work in print appeared at DC.

Jack Sparling.

CONWAY: I thought of myself as primarily a DC writer. RA: One of those early stories that I’ve heard a number of people speak highly of was an Alex Toth-illustrated tale called “Hold Softly, Hand of Death!” [Witching Hour #10 (Aug-Sept. 1970)]. It was one of your longer stories up to that point, at eleven pages. It really is quite a nice story. A very Gothic tale. You could see it appearing as a backup tale in one of those DC Gothic titles that appeared about a year or so after its appearance. CONWAY: That’s also ironic, since I ended up writing a number of Gothic romance stories for Dick, too, in the summer of 1969, for the romance titles. Maybe that was where my sensibilities were lying at the time. For some reason, Dick seemed to think I had a good ear for romantic dialogue, which is pretty weird, considering I was only 16 or 17 at the time! But… I did that, too. I was very fortunate in that I ended up working with a number of fine artists who made my work seem a lot better than it probably was. I did a story that I was really happy with called “Second Choice” with Gil Kane & Neal Adams [House of Secrets #85 (April-May 1970)]. The first story that I did that appeared in print at DC was “Aaron Phillips’ Photo

Abel Was I… The splash page of the Conway story that, while not the first he scripted for DC, was the first one to appear in print—in House of Secrets #81 (Aug.-Sept. 1969), the initial issue when the series was revived after a two-year hiatus. Art by Jack Sparling. Some of GC’s earliest assignments from editor Giordano were to write brief framing sequences narrated by Abel (the brother of House of Mystery narrator Cain), a character visually based on fan and later DC editorial assistant Mark Hanerfeld. Thanks to Jim Kealy for the scan & Michael T. Gilbert for the Sparling self-caricature from ACG’s Unknown World #3 (Oct.-Nov. 1960). [© DC Comics & the respective copyright holders.]

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

Shadowed Tower Of A Darkened Chamber Gerry’s first scripts for Marvel were done for short stories in its new mystery titles. (Left:) “The Warlock Tree” for Chamber of Darkness #3 (Feb. 1970); art by Barry Smith & Syd Shores. (Right:) “Time Out!” for Tower of Shadows #5 (May ’70); art by veteran Shores, who (as per Gerry’s script) depicted himself drawing the tale. Thanks to Barry Pearl for both scans. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Barry Smith, later Barry WindsorSmith.

and their mystery titles in particular, seemed to be aimed directly at the younger kid market. Neal Adams, who drew most of the covers for them at the time, always had a kid or two being menaced on the cover, whether or not that scene appeared in the book.

CONWAY: Oh, yeah. That was also the general philosophy of DC during this period. DC, and to a lesser extent Marvel—because I don’t think Stan thought this, though, and he was being asked to speak at a number of colleges, which may have led him to believe that his audience was a little older, whether or not that was true— thought their audience was 10-13 years old. Julie Schwartz told me at one point that the average reader of comics read them for three years, so you really only had to have three years’ worth of stories and then you could recycle yourself. He wasn’t serious, you know. [laughs] But the turnover was probably pretty close to that, about three years. A kid started picking up, actually buying them, getting invested in them, at about age ten and by age thirteen dropping them and moving on to other kinds of books or materials, maybe moving on to girls. That was true for many, many years. RA: A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, though, if you don’t publish anything that would appeal to an older reader. CONWAY: Perhaps. Now, for some of us, the young fan-turnedwriter, that wasn’t true. We were writing for ourselves. I don’t

think the artists even considered who their audience was or what age they were. But, from a publishing point of view, DC very much thought that their permanent audience was 10-13 years old. That may have changed as the 1970s progressed. They may have seen their audience growing older, but that’s one of the reasons, I think, that DC always seemed culturally behind. They genuinely thought that their audience was what would be considered the “tween” market, and there was no point trying to grow the market by aiming books at an older audience.

“It Had Always Been My Desire To Work For Marvel” RA: Your first full-length stories were a pair of Phantom Stranger fillins [Phantom Stranger #10 & 11 (Dec. 1970/Feb. 1971)]. Then, right after those two Phantom Stranger issues, you moved full-time to Marvel. Your first series effort was “Ka-Zar” in Astonishing Tales, then you quickly took over Iron Man from Archie Goodwin and Daredevil from Roy Thomas, and continued with “Dr. Doom” and “The Inhumans” in Amazing Adventures and “The Black Widow,” also in Astonishing Tales. CONWAY: To be perfectly fair, it had always been my desire to work for Marvel, although I really liked writing for DC. I was a Marvel fan. I think I wrote Marvelesque-style stories when I was at DC in the sense that my stories were very emotional and dramatic.

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

Changing Sabretooths In Mid-Stream GC’s story for The Phantom Stranger #11 (Jan.-Feb. 1971), whose final Aparo-drawn page is seen at left, was his last series work for DC for several years. By the time it saw print, the young New Yorker was already the scripter of Marvel’s “Ka-Zar” series, beginning with Astonishing Tales #3 (Dec. 1970), in tandem with penciler Barry Smith & inker Sam Grainger. Thanks to Jim Kealy and Barry Pearl, respectively, for the scans. [“Phantom Stranger” page © DC Comics; “Ka-Zar” splash © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The two “Phantom Stranger” stories that I did for Joe Orlando were the first recurring character I wrote, outside of the wraparound pages for Abel in House of Secrets. I had been trying to get work from Roy and Marvel since those mystery stories in 1969. There was a sense, though, at Marvel that they didn’t need new writers. They had Stan and Roy. They had Gary Friedrich as a backup guy, basically. But Marvel had started to expand. Stan was in the middle of re-negotiating his contract. He wanted to do less writing. Roy was being elevated to more and more authority. With more titles coming out, somebody had to pick up the slack. I think they realized they needed another fulltime writer on their staff. I was in the right place at the right time. “Ka-Zar” was, in a way, my tryout series. Mind you, I wasn’t the only writer Marvel was trying out. They had a fellow there named Alan Gold… Alan Gold? Is that right? RA: There was an Allyn Brodsky who wrote some stories for Marvel around that time. CONWAY: That may have been Sol’s son or nephew. Just the same last name. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: I basically hired Allyn, and to the best of my knowledge he was not related to Sol Brodsky.] Mimi Gold!

That was the Gold! Mimi Gold did a Jim Aparo. couple of stories for Stan Lee, Thanks to Ed Fields them, too. She was an 1968. & Jim Amash. assistant editor or a secretary or something. They were floundering about trying to find someone to do this stuff for them on a regular basis. For whatever reasons, Roy thought I had the potential to be that guy. After I’d done a few of the stories—the “Ka-Zars”—he asked me to come over and work for them exclusively. They would give me two books to do if I would do that. It wasn’t like they had to argue me into it. I wanted to work for Marvel. At the same time, though, DC had given me all these chances, so I went back to DC and told them Marvel wanted me to work exclusively for them. At that point, DC offered me Batman. They thought that would trump the Marvel offer, and it would have done that except Marvel was going to give me two books and I really did want to work for them. Also, at that point, Dick Giordano had been removed as an editor. He had been the guy I wanted to work with exclusively there, so I did end up taking the job at Marvel. RA: You worked with some of Marvel’s best artists, right off the bat.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

“Social Leopards” A Gene Colan-drawn splash and an emotional page featuring Matt Murdock, both from Daredevil #72 (Jan. 1971), Conway’s first issue of that title. Inks by Syd Shores. Thanks to Barry Pearl. The quote above, incidentally, is one of Ye Olde A/E Editor’s favorite puns from Walt Kelly’s great comic strip Pogo. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

CONWAY: Yeah, I did “Ka-Zar” with Barry Smith. That was really because Roy had been working with Barry and decided to have Barry do the Conan book. Conan was bimonthly, though, so Barry had time to do Gene Colan, from those ten pages of “Ka-Zar” every two the 1969 Fantastic months, too. When Conan went monthly, that Four Annual. was as much as Barry could do. The biggest thing for me was to get to work on Sub-Mariner and Daredevil with Gene Colan. That was very cool. He was kind of my hero. RA: He worked on just about every issue you did on those two titles, didn’t he? CONWAY: Yeah. There were some fill-in issues here and there by other artists, but he was the main artist on both titles as long as I wrote the books. RA: Earlier you mentioned that your stories or characters tended toward internal conflict. Did having an emotive artist like Gene push you further that way? CONWAY: Oh, yeah! The great thing about Gene was that while he could do the big, spectacular action poses combined with very dramatic storytelling, there was a sense of realism to his art that,

for me as a writer, inspired me to write as emotionally as I could. It was the same thing with people like Gil Kane and Ross Andru, to a different degree. They were also doing very emotional storytelling when I was working on [The Amazing] Spider-Man with them. Somebody like John Buscema, who was a very talented draftsman and storyteller, to me, didn’t inspire emotional storytelling. There was a coolness to what he was doing that was very different from what Gene was doing. Gene was raw! It was extremely emotional on the page. RA: When Gene drew somebody as angry, you knew he was angry! CONWAY: Not just with anger, but he got the subtle emotions across. Wistfulness. Sadness. Without it being in your face. You could tell that Matt Murdock was troubled or upset without having to see his face. It was there in the posture, the way he stood. He was a really fine artist. He was a tremendous storyteller and a fine artist. RA: At one point, fairly early in your career, you were writing four monthly books! You wrote Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, Daredevil and Thor, as well as fill-ins on various titles. How did you manage the workload on that many titles? That seems like a fairly large task. CONWAY: Eventually it got up to six monthly titles! I was very

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

Gerry-Mandering In addition to Daredevil, Gerry also became the regular writer of three more Marvel titles during 1971, with these debut issues: Iron Man #35 (March 1971) sported art by Don Heck & Mike Esposito… Sub-Mariner #40 (Aug. ’71) boasted Gene Colan (him again!) & Sam Grainger… and Thor #193 (Nov. ’71), featuring The Silver Surfer on the splash page, was drawn by the Brothers Buscema. On those titles, Conway succeeded, respectively, Allyn Brodsky, Roy Thomas, and Stan Lee. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scans. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

fast. Honestly, I don’t think that was atypical for writers at that time. Stan was writing seven or eight titles a month at one point. Roy was doing at least three or so. It was a different era. We were probably less polished and thought things through less than writers do today. I’m always stunned when I hear somebody like Joe Straczynski say he’s got story arcs plotted for a two-year stretch. I’m like… Whoa! That’s pretty impressive! For me, it’s like “What am I doing next month? I don’t know.” I’m writing this issue here. I’m plotting or setting up plot ideas that may take place in the upcoming months, but it was mostly writing by the seat-ofmy-pants. There was a lot of energy and primitive power to that for me and other writers who were doing similar work, but as far as an in-depth working out of where things were going to go, there were only a handful of writers who were doing that, if that many. Honestly, I doubt a lot of people who say they were plotting things out that long, because unless they were doing just one book a month, nobody had the time to think things through seven months or ten months in advance. You couldn’t make a living writing comic books unless you were doing three to four titles a month. It was physically impos-

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

than the opportunity to have some stories in Creepy. But you could only do that, as an established writer, if you really wanted to be in the magazine. You weren’t going to make any money at it. I could be completely off on this, but I think there was another editor besides Archie working on the book who also wrote a number of the stories [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Probably Bill Parente.], so that would be one way to write and survive working for Warren. When Archie was editing and writing the book, they were paying a little bit better than when I wrote my stories for them. Not much better, but a little bit better. By the early 1970s Warren’s magazines were in a lot of trouble. He was paying some of the lowest rates in the business. I think Skywald was a little better, at least early on. I wrote that stuff, though, mostly because I was nostalgic for getting those kind of books and stories. People would ask me to do them and I would. They weren’t really in conflict with Marvel at that point, because Marvel really didn’t have a black-&-white book at that time. Or, if they did, it wasn’t something to be concerned about. Later, of course, Marvel entered the black-&-white field with a lot of titles. RA: Marvel was trying to edge their way into that field. They’d done a black-&-white Spectacular Spider-Man issue in 1968, and they tried out Savage Tales in 1971. CONWAY: Right. They were trying to find a different market. There was no real market for that at that time. RA: Savage Tales featured the first main Marvel character that you had a hand in creating…. CONWAY: Man-Thing. I also worked on the debut of “Werewolf by Night,” but I think “Man-Thing” came first. Both of those were co-created.

Skywald’s The Limit! Rich Buckler penciled and inked the story Conway scripted for Skywald’s black-&-white horror comic Nightmare #3 (April 1971). Gerry and Rich would later be teamed at Marvel, as well. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. Note the credit for “Gerald F. Conway.” [© the respective copyright holders.]

sible to earn a living. You were being paid something like $12 a page. If you wanted to make $25,000 a year, do the math! You had to write three to four titles a month to do that. Eighty pages a month to make a salary to pay your bills.

“[My] Bunch Of Stories For Warren… Amounted To Fanboy Work” RA: I’d like to take a little side-step to discuss the work you did for the Skywald, Warren, and Marvel black-&-white titles around this time. There wasn’t a whole lot, but there were some significant ones there. One of the stories that you did for Warren was originally intended for the short-lived Web of Horror. It was a Frank Brunner story that he told me he’d written for Web and sold to Warren when Web went belly-up. CONWAY: He may well have done that. I did a bunch of stories for Warren that amounted to fanboy work. I’d been a big fan of Warren back when Archie Goodwin was the editor and the main writer for those books. When I found out that they were open to people writing stories for them, I was interested until I found out that they were only paying $25 a script! For a full script! Which is, like, you know… nothin’! It was ridiculous! But I did like the idea of writing some Creepy and Eerie stories, so I did, I think, three or four stories for them. I don’t know if they all got published. It was for the fun of it, though. For the fanboy in me. No other reason

RA: Re-reading the stories… you were roommates with Len Wein at the time? CONWAY: Yes, I was. RA: His origin tale for Swamp Thing #1 (Oct. 1972), which came out about a year after your first “Man-Thing” tale [laughter from Gerry] closely parallels the plotline of that first “Man-Thing.” CONWAY: Yes, it kind of did. [laughs] There was a bit of a controversy at the time about that. I don’t know that Len was deliberately copying that material. I think, because we were roommates, it was there. I’m sure I showed it to him. I’m also sure he forgot that he’d seen it. When the time came to plot the first up-to-date version of Swamp Thing [the very first “Swamp Thing” story, earlier, had been set in the 19th century], it was most likely—“Oh, here would be a good idea.” It happens to every writer. You think you’ve come up with a brainstorm, and actually what you’re doing is echoing something you’ve read somewhere else. A lot of stuff passes between us—books we’ve read, movies we’ve seen, all the sources can blend together. I know there was a legal challenge—Marvel went after DC about it. Unfortunately, Marvel had their own things that they had ripped off. [laughs] They had stuff that looked like stuff that DC had, so the two companies said, “Let’s just not go there.” I think their concern was over things like Wonder Man [in The Avengers #9], which was something like Wonder Woman, so they changed it to Power Man. Then I went over to DC [later on] and created Power Girl! It’s just back-and-forth stuff. RA: Particularly when it’s the same writers working at one point or another for both companies.

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

Warren Remembrance A trio of Conway yarns for Warren Publishing’s b&w horror mags, which the writer recalls as “fanboy” efforts. (Clockwise from above left:) Eerie #32 (March 1971), with art by Rich Corben… and non-Vampy tales in Vampirella #10 (March ’71) and #13 (Sept. ’71), with art by Frank Brunner and Steve Hickman, respectively. Note again GC’s credit as “Gerald Conway”! Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [Eerie art © New Comic Company; Vampirella art © DFI.]

CONWAY: Even more so now. There’s a constant back-and-forth flow of talent. Certainly, back in the early 1970s, it was very incestuous. Everybody knew everybody. If you were sleeping with somebody, everybody knew it. You were all part of the same group. You talked about ideas. You showed each other what you were doing. There are pages of published artwork from the 1970s that are credited to one artist that are actually drawn by five or six different artists. That’s what we did. You’d help each other out. You had to make the deadlines. Once, when Len Wein, I think it was, was doing Star Trek for Gold Key and he got really behind on a deadline and it was kind of a desperate situation for him, he and I sat up one night and did a round-robin script, a 24-page script where each of us would write a page, write into each other’s pages, [laughs] and just brainstorm on this thing. We ended up with a script that was pretty good, you know? I don’t remember anything about it, other than that we did it. RA: I’ve been pondering the notion of an article on the influence that Theodore Sturgeon has had on the comics field. He only wrote a couple of comic books himself, but one story that he wrote in 1940 has, I think, been enormously influential on comic books. It was called “It,” and it was the very first swamp-monster story.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

Swampmen Things (Above left & right:) For the “Man-Thing” debut in Marvel’s black-&-white comic Savage Tales #1 (May 1971), associate editor Roy Thomas wrote a synopsis (see A/E #81), based on a concept of editor Stan Lee’s that the two of them had then kicked around. Conway was assigned to write the script, with artist Gray Morrow bringing the story to life visually. Incidentally, the sharp-eyed reader will note that the yarn’s final caption has been totally relettered (and rewritten, probably by Lee) from what GC originally wrote and Morrow lettered. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Right:) More or less meanwhile, across town at DC: After a stand-alone 19th-century-set story titled “Swamp Thing” in House of Secrets #92 (June-July 1971), writer Len Wein and artist Bernie Wrightson were directed by editor Joe Orlando to develop a modern-day series starring the creature. Cover of Swamp Thing #1 (Oct. 1972) by Wrightson. For an extended look at the relationship between the “Man-Thing” and “Swamp Thing” series—and their ties both to the Golden Age comic book monster “The Heap” and to SF writer Theodore Sturgeon’s 1940 prose horror story “It,” see Jon B. Cooke’s recent tome Swampmen, published by TwoMorrows. [© DC Comics.]

Roy Thomas, 1971. Thanks to Mike Zeck and Pedro Angosto.

Gray Morrow. 1970s or ’80s.

Len Wein, 1971. Thanks to Sean Howe.

Bernie Wrightson, 1977. Thanks to Bob Bailey.

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

CONWAY: Wasn’t “The Heap” the first one? RA: “The Heap” showed up about two years after Sturgeon’s short story. Alfred Bester, who was also a science-fiction writer, admitted that he based the creation of Solomon Grundy on that story of Sturgeon’s. Sturgeon received an Inkpot Award back in 1975, even though he hadn’t done much in the field, because that single story had given rise in some fashion to The Heap, Grundy, The Glob, Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, and more. I was just wondering if you were aware of that story when you wrote that first “Man-Thing” tale. Sturgeon’s story itself was adapted later by Roy Thomas and Marie Severin for Marvel. CONWAY: Well, it’s important to note that I didn’t really plot that first story. It was plotted by Roy Thomas. I worked on some backstory and wrote the dialogue for it. I was the co-creator, but I didn’t come up with the name or the main storyline. I didn’t actually create my own characters as such until The Punisher. I was mostly helping out Roy, who was coming up with the concepts.

“I’d Like To Think [Thor] Was A Good Title” RA: Did you enjoy writing “The Black Widow”? I noticed that you wrote the last of her solo run in Amazing Adventures and then moved her over into Daredevil. CONWAY: Oh, yeah. The Black Widow is one of the few characters I’ve ever asked an artist to do an illustration of for me. I asked Gene to do one for me, which he did. I always loved her. Not when she was being drawn by Don Heck in The Avengers. It was when she got her own little series and Gene Colan took over the artwork. Specifically the scene in one story that made me fall in love with the character was one that Roy and Gene did. It was a Modesty Blaise kind of a story. The bit was she was in the back seat of her limo. Ivan, her chauffeur, was in the front and she said, “Eyes front, Ivan.” I liked that! You know, there was a sense of sexuality about her, a sense of female empowerment. She takes no crap. She’s independent. She’s red-headed. [laughs] One of my on-going fantasies. RA: I’m not sure who designed that all-black costume for her, but it was probably the best idea for a costume that I’ve ever seen for a female character. CONWAY: Yes! I think that costume was directly influenced by Modesty Blaise.

Sects Appeal (Clockwise on this page, from above:) Detective/adventurer Modesty Blaise often sported the “sexy black jumpsuit” look in her comic strip, which debuted in 1963 with script by Peter O’Donnell and art by Jim Holdaway; Enrique Badía Romero, whose display drawing is seen above, handled the art after Holdaway’s death in 1970. [© King Features Syndicate, Inc.] In the early 1960s, Diana Rigg had worn similar gear—sometimes with peekaboo cutouts—in the British TV series The Avengers, which had begun in the UK in 1961 and later become a cult hit in the U.S. after it began showing there in 1966. [© the respective copyright holders.] And, in The Amazing Spider-Man #86 (July 1970), penciler John Romita had (at the “suggestion” of writer/editor Stan Lee) given The Black Widow her own rendition of same. When she’d been introduced to Iron Man in Tales of Suspense #52 (April 1964), she’d worn a glamorous dress, hat, and veil. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RA: Or possibly Diana Rigg [of the 1960s TV show The Avengers]. CONWAY: Yeah, the both of them. It goes back and forth. Modesty precedes Rigg’s run in The Avengers. The idea of a woman in a tight black jumpsuit. It’s a lightbulb! That’s a sale! I think we all agree on that—it looked great. The design might have been by John Buscema or John Romita. Whoever drew the first story [in Amazing Adventures] probably designed the costume. [A/E EDITOR’s NOTE: See the caption that accompanies the art on this page.] I think, though, that the costume was perfected by Gene. He made it look like there was a real woman inside that suit. She had hips. She had a body structure that was female, as opposed to a super-hero female figure. I could wax eloquently on the subject of The Black Widow. I wish Emily Blunt had been The Black Widow in the Iron Man movie instead of Scarlett Johannson, but there you go. Emily was up for the part. She was supposed to do it, but she ended up in Gulliver’s Travels with Jack Black. The scheduling didn’t work out. I saw her in The Adjustment Bureau, doing the dance numbers. She would have been great! Much better choice than the soft Scarlett. RA: What led you to use the pseudonym “Francis X. Bushmaster” for some of your work? CONWAY: I don’t know. [laughs] I don’t remember why I wanted to use a pseudonym, but Francis Bushmaster was actually a name that Joe Orlando came up with. Francis X. Bushman was apparently a famous silent film actor. RA: He was the main bad guy in the first, silent version of Ben-Hur.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

Always A Widow, Never A Bride (Clockwise from above left:) Thanks to writer Conway, Natasha Romanoff, aka The Black Widow, made her Daredevil debut in issue #81 (Nov. 1971), saving Horn-head’s life… not that he knew she was his rescuer till story’s end. Pencils by Gene Colan; inks by Jack Abel. In #83 (Jan. ’72), Barry Smith stepped in to do layouts for a vacationing Colan, Alan Weiss burnished his pencils, and Bill Everett inked—as DD got increasingly involved with Natasha, who’d been framed for murder. Thanks to Barry Pearl for this and the previous scan. From #81 on, she appeared in every issue up through #92 (Oct. ’72), at which point Gerry convinced new editorin-chief Roy Thomas and neo-publisher Stan Lee to add her name to the cover logo. To mark the occasion, Colan penciled the cover—an increasing rarity—with Tom Palmer inking, and John Romita doing some redrawing of the villain. Thanks to the Grand Comics Database website. [Marvel Characters, Inc.]

CONWAY: I don’t know. I didn’t know about him one way or the other. For whatever reason, I needed to use a pseudonym. Joe suggested that. That’s where that came from. RA: It didn’t get used a whole lot, but it was eye-catching. CONWAY: I may not have been the only one who used it, either. There may have been another guy, also. RA: Before you actually took over The [Incredible] Hulk, you filled in on a number of issues, and I noticed that all of the fill-ins are sciencefiction-oriented. None of them were earth-bound. You did a takeoff on Moby-Dick…. Was that your idea, since you were somewhat of a SF writer at the time, or was that at Roy’s direction? CONWAY: That was something that Roy was also doing. Roy brought me the book for fill-ins and for my regular run. He’d been the writer and he was moving on to other titles. He actually had

Harlan Ellison, who is a major SF writer, plot an Avengers/Hulk crossover. Harlan did the Hulk meeting the girl, “The Girl in the Green Atom,” or something like that. Roy was always looking for ways to get other people to make that character interesting. I don’t think he thought the Hulk was that interesting. He had a really good sense of how to write the character, but I know that he had difficulty in figuring out how to make the character work well. There was always that inevitable “Hulk” story that was done at that time—it would be set in America, General Ross would try to capture the Hulk, they’d catch him, the Hulk would escape, he would meet a small child, he befriends the

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

Absorb This! (Left:) By the second splash page he scripted for Thor (#194, Dec. 1971), Gerry was already deep into Asgardian myth and derring-do. Pencils by John Buscema; inks by Sal Buscema. (Right:) It took him a year, though, to find a good excuse to bring back The Absorbing Man—who battled Thor nearly to a standstill in issue #206 (Dec. ’72). At story’s end, a defeated Crusher Creel encounters a mysterious figure who is obviously Loki, and you just know he’ll soon be back! Longtime regular Vince Colletta inked this issue—but Gerry soon insisted that “Vinnie” be taken off the title. Thanks to Barry Pearl for both scans. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

child… bump-bada-bump-bump! Putting the Hulk in a sciencefiction setting gave you the opportunity to do something a little different from “The Leader strikes again!” or whatever. We didn’t have a lot of imagination about that character. It wasn’t until Peter David came along and gave him a much more interesting set of adventures that he really came alive. RA: When I was interviewing Marv Wolfman, he made a point of saying that each one of the important Marvel writers of the 1970s had a signature title—Roy on Conan, Wolfman’s own Tomb of Dracula, and so on. He mentioned that yours was Thor. Do you agree with him? CONWAY: I’d like to think it was a good title. I certainly enjoyed working on it. Thor was the first mainline Marvel character I got to write. All the rest of them—Daredevil, Iron Man, the Hulk, good as they may have been—were second-tier. I think my taking on that title [Thor] was the first time anybody had taken over directly from Stan on one of his last remaining books. He was still writing the big three—Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and Thor. He might have been writing The Silver Surfer, too. At that point, Thor was the first one he was absolutely going to be giving up. Everybody else who had done stories on those titles was doing fill-in stories… but this was going to be a complete changeover, so taking that over was a

huge deal for me. I loved that character. The “Thor” stories I remember most vividly, before my own run, were the original Thor-Hercules team-up. That was when it was Journey into Mystery and the “Thor” stories ran 14 or 16 pages. Those were so good! That sense of cosmic grandeur was overwhelming. Thor was striding between worlds, going from Norse to Greek mythology. Wow! That was awesome! So when I came on to the book, that type of storytelling was on my mind. I don’t think I was that familiar with what Stan had been doing for the previous several years. I hadn’t really liked most of it. I didn’t feel his heart was in it, so when I took the book over I took the view that I was taking it over from 1965. That was my thought. RA: I have to admit that I thought a lot of the heart of Thor left when Kirby left. CONWAY: Yeah, Kirby had the vision for that character, even more so than for the Fantastic Four. That’s why when he went to DC [in 1970], he didn’t create a new super-family, he created another mythology. That was the landscape he wanted to operate in. Stan, on the other hand—his favorite book at the end was The Silver Surfer. I think the reason he liked that book the most was because

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

he liked to write the poetic language that characterized the Surfer and, I think, was the major thing that he brought to Thor. In Thor’s case, that poetic, faux-Shakespearean language. I tried to continue that, because I really enjoyed writing it, too. I tried to bring the book back to the mythological concept that Kirby had been doing. That was really my goal. I wanted to bring back my favorite Thor villains—The Crusher… not The Crusher… RA: The Wrecker? CONWAY: No, the guy who had the iron ball and chain. RA: Oh, that was Crusher Creel! The Absorbing Man. CONWAY: Crusher Creel, that’s right. He was just the silliest thing in the world—this guy with a black ball and chain, which nobody

A Werewolf At The Door (Clockwise from above:) Page 1 of the first “Werewolf by Night” story, in Marvel Spotlight #2 (Feb. 1972). The credits on p. 2 would note that Gerry Conway scripted and Mike Ploog handled the full art, in a story “conceived and plotted by Roy & Jeanie Thomas.” [© Marvel Characters, Inc.] Roy & Jean Thomas, vacation-driving from San Francisco to San Diego (and to the third SD Comic-Con) in the summer of 1972, stopped off at the Goleta, California, home of Carl & Garé Barks to pick up the Uncle Scrooge painting that “the Duck Man” had done especially for RT. The price? A fast $250. Photo by Carl or Garé Barks. Thanks to Christopher Boyko. Michael Ploog, a few years after his early Bullpen outings on “Werewolf by Night,” “Man-Thing,” “Ghost Rider,” et al. A later Werewolf sketch by the irrepressible Ploog. [© 2015 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

ever used in real life! He was a great character! RA: He also wore the black-and-white-striped prison pants everywhere. Years after prisons had stopped using them for prisoners. He looked like a 1930s cartoon character. CONWAY: Yet there was something so… perfect about that visual image. I really enjoyed that. I also tried to update and create some strong supporting cast members, to replace Jane Foster. I think that’s also where Stan fell down, a bit. RA: Don Blake [Thor’s alter ego] only interacted with Jane Foster. Other than her, he apparently didn’t know anybody at all, at least while Stan was writing the book. When Foster was written out of the book, the Don Blake connection became a lot less important than the supporting cast of Asgardians Thor had—Balder, Sif, the Warriors Three. CONWAY: In some ways Thor’s supporting cast was a dead weight. There just wasn’t much to them, at least not at the time I took the book over. Again, it was 40 years ago. I don’t remember exactly all the details or problems the book had.

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

I Left My Heart (And 20¢) In San Francisco… Gene Colan (aided and abetted by Tom Palmer’s iridescent inking) went all out to capture the sights and spirit of San Francisco in Daredevil #87 (Nov. 1972), the first issue set in the City by the Bay: the hilly streets… the Golden Gate Bridge… Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower. But a reader or two took Gerry to task for having a local bus driver refer to the city as “Frisco.” Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scans. [Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Felt There Was Too Much New York Stuff” RA: “Werewolf by Night” [at first in Marvel Spotlight] was initially, like a number of comic titles you did or started in 1972-1973, plotted by Roy Thomas and dialogued by you. Then you wrote a number of the early issues before handing the book off to other writers. That first issue was a long story—it came in at 27 pages—so it must have been intended for a 25¢ title. Who decided to call the Werewolf, in his human life, Jack Russell? CONWAY: Oh, God, I don’t know. RA: It’s kind of a snarky name, for a werewolf, since Jack Russells are a dog breed.

CONWAY: To be honest, if we called him that to be a sort of joke, I wasn’t thinking of it that way. Not consciously, perhaps subconsciously. You’ll have to ask Roy about that, if that was the name of the character in his original plot outline. I don’t recall. I know that “Frank Drake,” in Tomb of Dracula, was an attempt to link the character to Dracula. But if I named Jack Russell, it was not a conscious thing. It was “Oh, Jack Russell sounds like a good name!” [laughs] That would have been it. He was a terrier, he was! [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: The “Jack Russell” name was Gerry’s idea. At the time, I must admit that I was unaware that it was also the name of a breed of dog, or I probably would’ve insisted it be changed.] RA: Yes, and when Don Perlin drew him, he actually looked a bit like a terrier.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

The Old Thomas-Conway One-Two (Above:) Roy Thomas anonymously plotted (from a Stan Lee concept) the first issue of Tomb of Dracula (April 1972)—with Gerry Conway scripting and Gene Colan providing full art. Here, the undead Count makes his grand entrance—from his tomb, where else? Gene would stay with the series for its entire 70-issue run! (Top right:) Despite the mildly confusing credits, the “War of the Worlds” debut in Amazing Adventures #18 (May ’73) was co-plotted by Roy T. and Neal Adams, with Gerry brought in to script. Neal penciled the first eleven pages (including this confrontation between hero Killraven and a Martianinduced “mutant”), Howard Chaykin the last nine. Frank Chiaramonte inked. (Right:) Also seen is the house ad RT wrote for the series’ launch, with its Romita-penciled art taken from the cover. Thanks to Barry Pearl for all scans in this art spot. [Marvel Characters, Inc.]

CONWAY: [laughs] Probably. RA: But the artist you worked with was Mike Ploog. CONWAY: Mike was wonderful. He was tremendous and was a great storyteller, too. [His art] had a really nice feeling to it. I think the only real contribution I made to that book was wanting it to be set in Los Angeles and have a first-person narration. That’s probably my main… [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: The L.A. setting was undoubtedly Gerry’s contribution; however, Gerry probably doesn’t remember that my original title for the series, which Stan Lee changed, was I, Werewolf, so the notion of first-person narration was there from the conception.]

RA: It was unusual at the time, since almost all Marvel characters lived in or around New York City. CONWAY: I just felt that—and remember that I moved Daredevil and The Black Widow to San Francisco, too—I felt there was too much New York stuff. These characters were all bumping into each other. They would have to be. You couldn’t really do any ongoing story that didn’t deal with the fact that these guys would have

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

been running into Spider-Man, for example. I mean, we did do a “Werewolf by Night/Spider-Man” cross-over eventually, but had [Jack Russell] lived in New York it would have taken the reader out of his world that we were creating, to have him cheek to cheek with super-heroes. RA: If you were reading the Marvel comics sequentially, it often brought up questions of where were The Avengers when Galactus was threatening New York? Where were all the heroes? It shouldn’t have been just the Fantastic Four. As you said, putting all the heroes in New York should have had them stumbling all over each other. CONWAY: Right. And besides that aspect, I had taken a trip to Los Angeles in 1971 and fell in love with the West Coast. I eventually moved out here. I just wanted to set things in this sort of area, just to have that different environment. Largely because I really liked that environment. RA: Besides “Werewolf by Night” and “Man-Thing,” there were a number of other titles that Roy plotted the first issue to and you wrote the dialogue. Tomb of Dracula and Killraven/War of the Worlds both started this way, also. You didn’t stay for long on any of those titles, however. Why was that? CONWAY: Because, for the most part, Marvel was expanding. They were trying to reach into other markets—monster books,

more super-hero books, different kinds of anthology books, the black-&-white magazines—and basically Roy would get an idea. He would write the original story or outline with the notion that he would write the final script, but then the reality would pop that he was already doing a lot of work, both editing and writing, and so he would pass the title on to me, because I was the next in line. But, for the most part, I didn’t necessarily have a personal stake in doing these books, either. They needed to be done and I was the guy who could do that. Roy trusted me to get the book set up firmly. I would do the title until we found somebody else to take over the book. I think I liked Werewolf by Night more than some of the others because I got to do this personal kind of writing for it, which worked well for me. But there were a lot of cases where I’d start something and pass it on to the next new writer to arrive at Marvel. RA: That appeared to be the case when you wrote the first issue of the Beast in Amazing Adventures, then it was passed along to Steve Englehart as his first series with the second issue. CONWAY: Also Ms. Marvel. I think it was a comfort level thing [with Roy], that he was comfortable with me. He thought I could do these things. It was methodology that worked for us. RA: It might also have been a marketing tool of sorts. The kid who picked

Wham, Bam… Gerry plotted and scripted the first solo exploits of “The Beast” in Amazing Adventures #11 (March 1972) and Ms. Marvel in her first issue several years later (Jan. 1977), but quickly moved on to other series, leaving these two in the capable hands of Steve Englehart and Chris Claremont, respectively. But Roy had nothing to do with Ms. Marvel—although he had co-created Carol Danvers (her alter ego) in the second “Captain Marvel” story in 1968. The “Carla Conway” credited in the latter with “aid and abetment” was Gerry’s first wife, aka Carla Joseph. AA art by Tom Sutton; MM art by John Buscema, Joe Sinnott, & Dave Hunt. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

up that first issue would look inside at the credits and might recognize the names there.

RA: You may have given it up to write Captain America or SpiderMan, since you were already the regular writer on Thor.

CONWAY: I don’t think it was that conscious. With the exception of people like Jack Kirby and Neal Adams, Stan and Roy, you didn’t have market value for a lot of these creators or their names. I was still fairly new. I was still in the first two or three years of working there. I was ubiquitous, [laughs] but it wasn’t like I was a selling point to anybody.

CONWAY: Well, like I said, it’s all a blur! [laughs]

RA: I brought that selling point up only because that’s how I decided to purchase many of the first issues of my comics. [much laughter] I’d look inside and if I liked the writer or the artist I’d give the book a chance. If it was someone who didn’t thrill me, the book would go back on the rack. CONWAY: It’s like Stan having his name on the first “Thor” story, even though Larry Lieber wrote it. You do it because maybe there’s some truth to it. I think Roy had a lot of ideas for different types of titles. When the time came to create these titles, he either didn’t have enough time or enough interest in actually doing them. So he would hand that part over to someone he felt comfortable with, which was me. But, again, I didn’t have a lot of interest in some of those titles, either. When other things came along that I was more interested in, those titles would be the ones I’d give up. I think I gave up Werewolf by Night so I could write Thor. I’m not sure of the exact sequence, but it would have been something like that.

RA: You didn’t stay long on Captain America, though. I think you turned that over to Steve Englehart. CONWAY: Steve was the next guy in line by that time. There were other writers coming up—Steve Gerber and more. Englehart took over from me on “The Beast,” and that was his first series. Steve Gerber took over on Man-Thing. Englehart took over on Cap and turned it into a really unique book. On a lot of occasions I was sort of the utility fielder who could play a lot of positions, a comics’ version of Manny Rodriguez, you know! [laughs] The guy you could throw into the game who might get you on base, which is what you wanted. You were also looking for other people who could take the next swing at the bat and keep the game going.

“It Was Kind Of A Chaotic Situation” RA: One thing I noticed about Marvel Comics in the 1970s is that they tended to be writer-oriented. Englehart would be writing The Avengers and Captain America and those titles would have a very distinct stamp on them compared to, say, Don McGregor on Killraven and Black Panther, which would also be very distinct. You wouldn’t mistake either of those two writing styles for each other. You’d be doing Thor or Spider-Man, and those titles would be very different from Gerber’s Man-Thing or Moench’s Master of Kung Fu. CONWAY: The reason that that was the case, and Roy will tell you this, too, was because he was the editor of sixty titles a month. There were no other editors. His approach was to take Stan’s approach and sort of expand it out to all the titles. Stan basically edited his own writing. When he brought Sal Buscema. From the 1969 Roy in and edited Roy’s books, he basically Fantastic Four Annual. allowed Roy to edit his own writing. So when Roy brought me in, he basically let me edit my own books, and so on and on. So it wasn’t so much writeroriented but that the writers were also the de facto editors of their books. It worked on almost every aspect of the books except for the covers. And, in some cases, there, too. It was kind of a chaotic situation, too, because while we might have had the responsibility to do this, we didn’t always have the authority. We would do things and later be asked, “Why did you do that?” Sometimes we’d do something horrible, like erase a panel that some artist had drawn and put in our own little rough sketch for the inker— something really obnoxious like that—but there was nobody to tell us not to do it. We were basically on our own. That’s why there are such distinctive voices on all those books—because, for the most part, nobody was telling what we could or couldn’t do. RA: Nowadays it’s gone 100% the opposite direction.

The Stranger In A Strange Land Splash page of Captain America #150 (June 1972), one of four issues (#149152) that Conway wrote before relinquishing the series to Steve Englehart. Pencils by Sal Buscema, inks by John Verpoorten. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the art scan. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

CONWAY: Yes, but that’s the usual way these things happen. There’s always a correction and the whole thing moves in the opposite direction from wherever it was. When Jim Shooter came in as head editor and instilled the editor system at Marvel that he’d been working with at DC, that’s when that whole approach changed. You can really see the difference between the books done in the early 1970s and the books done in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Howard the Duck, for example, would never have existed under Shooter or today. Too weird, too experimental. RA: I don’t think a lot of titles that appeared in the 1970s would have

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

appeared or even been considered today. Omega or Deathlok probably wouldn’t have gotten the nod, either. CONWAY: Probably not. Killraven would be another one. To go in the direction that [Marvel] went cut down on the personal writing. Not all of it, of course. Some of that 1970s stuff was very mainstream. Chris Claremont’s X-Men is a perfect example of an extremely mainstream comic book that also was very personal. It was the way Chris wanted to do it. Chris and John Byrne. RA: One of the problems with the writer acting as his own editor was that there were a lot of fill-in, reprinted issues, simply because if the writers or artists weren’t able to make the monthly or bimonthly deadlines there was nothing to fall back on. There were things that didn’t work so well with the looser system, and things that didn’t work with the stricter system. You gained something with each, and you lost something with each. CONWAY: Probably so. RA: You also took over the adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s Kull from Roy. People sometimes seem to think of that title as a copy of Conan, but, although they tend to look a lot alike, they’re really quite different characters and, initially at least, the subject matter of the books was quite different, too.

for a very long time. I was on Spider-Man for most of the time I wrote for Marvel. I stayed on Fantastic Four for two or three years. Those were titles I really wanted to write. The titles I was on and off on were assignments that I was doing because Marvel needed a writer. In some cases, I really enjoyed it. I had fun with it and wanted to do it but, I didn’t feel a passionate commitment to it. Daredevil I cared about. I did that for several years when I could have left it earlier. I guess I operated on two different levels in my career as a comic writer. There were the books that I really wanted to write as a fanboy and I really wanted to do them. Then there were the books I wrote to pay my rent or to fulfill obligations to people who were employing me. Sometimes those second types of books rose to the level of the first where I got as passionate about them and the level of the work as the books I was a fanboy about; and sometimes they didn’t. They were just assignments. There are things that take priority. If I left Werewolf by Night for Spider-Man, it was a case of fanboy passion, not because I didn’t like Werewolf by Night. RA: Was it intimidating at all to be taking over these titles from either Stan or Roy?

CONWAY: Kull [the Conqueror] was an interesting book. You were dealing with this incredible hierarchical society where everything is about political back-stabbing and control. It was like being in the middle of the Roman Empire. Kull’s the outsider who has to ride the tiger, as it were. I’d like to point out that I was working with Marie Severin on that book, and she was a really smart plotter. She and I plotted those things together and she could break the stories down and give you such density of incidence in each panel that it just makes you want to think at multiple levels. It was a really cool book. RA: It also benefited from having her brother John as the inker. It gave the book a very different look from Barry Smith’s Conan. John is a very overpowering inker. CONWAY: Yeah, at the end of the day, it looked like a John Severin page, but the storytelling is totally Marie. That was what was crucial, because John would have simplified things if he’d done the artwork himself and it would have been much more methodical; but Marie, because she was such an instinctual and primitive artist—I consider myself a primitive writer so I don’t mean this in a derogatory way—she was visceral. She had a lot of ideas that she put into each panel. She put a lot of thought into it. All of that shines through. That’s why a John Severin-inked “Kull” story looks so different from a John Severin inkedDick Ayers penciled Sgt. Fury. There was a conceptual difference.

Marie & John Severin, the sibling artists of Kull the Conqueror. From the 1969 Fantastic Four Annual.

Kull Or Be Kulled!

RA: Why did you leave some of the books that you did end up leaving? Was it just for a different writing assignment? CONWAY: Yeah, sometimes. In many cases the books that I wrote for a long time were the books that I wanted to write. I stayed on Thor

John Jakes, author of historical novels— and comic books.

Conway’s first assignment on Marvel’s Kull the Conqueror was to dialogue a synopsis written about the Robert E. Howard hero by prose author John Jakes for issue #4 (Sept. 1972), a couple of years before Jakes became famous for his “Bicentennial”/Kent Family Chronicles series of novels set during the American Revolution. Jakes had been commissioned by editor Thomas to plot several sword-and-sorcery tales because he’d created the Howardesque pulp-and-paperback hero Brak the Barbarian. Pencils by Marie Severin, inks by John Severin. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Kull Properties, LTD.]

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

Fantastic Voyage Actually, Gerry wrote Marvel’s flagship title Fantastic Four for a year and a half, rather than two or three years as he recalls; but it was still an impressive run. Time flies when you’re having fun! (Clockwise from top left:) It commenced with his dialoguing #133 (April 1973), an issue plotted by Roy Thomas for longtime DC “Aquaman”/“Metamorpho” artist Ramona Fradon, wherein the Thing battled Thundra all over New York City… in #134, GC assumed the plotting, as well, working with penciler John Buscema… and he stuck around through #151 (Oct. ’74), penciled by Rich Buckler. The one constant in these three issues, and in virtually all of those between? Inker Joltin’ Joe Sinnott! Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Left:) Ramona Fradon, 2008. Photo by either Dann Thomas or Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal.

(Above:) John Buscema, from his Famous Cartoonists card of the 1980s. Thanks to Dewey Cassell. [© the respective copyright holders.] (Left:) Joe Sinnott.

(Above:)

Rich Buckler, circa 1969-70. Thanks to Jerry & Jean Bails.

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

CONWAY: God, yes! But at the same time, I was still a kid. I started writing Spider-Man when I was twenty. I’d been in the business for four years, but my ignorance and my arrogance were my shield. I had the ignorance and arrogance of youth on my side. The ignorance because I didn’t know what I didn’t know and the arrogance because I thought I could do basically anything. I had a great deal of confidence at that time. Some of it deserved and some of it not. I know a lot more as a writer today than when I was twenty, but, at the same time, there was a lot more instinctual, primitive talent that was occurring in my twenties than some of the stuff that I did in my forties as a writer in television. Just because, in addition to the fact that there were structural differences, the stakes were different. Nobody back in 1972 thought that what we were doing mattered. I mean, it mattered to us, but it wasn’t like writing something that could be turned into a 300-million-dollar movie.

characters but more “This is a difficult book because I don’t know what to do.” I think I felt that way about the Hulk to some extent because I really didn’t have any strong ideas for that book. The fun part about working on the Hulk was working with Herb [Trimpe]! But not the character. That’s how that went. Coming up with stories for it was painful because I just didn’t have any idea what to do. Which was probably reflected in the material I did.

RA: So does it appall you today to see all those books out there reprinting those stories?

“I Think Her Death Is What Makes Gwen [Stacy] An Iconic Figure In Comics”

CONWAY: [laughs] Only if I don’t get paid royalties! I do get royalties on some of this stuff. What’s amazing to me is that some of this stuff that I did back then is still in peoples’ minds today. We were just trying, many of us, to tell an entertaining story. We fully expected that anything we wrote would be forgotten a year later, except for some crazy guys like us. So when the first Spider-Man movie used major elements of my Spider-Man run, I was like “Man, that’s cool!” But if you’d told me in 1972 that that was going to happen, I would have been floored. We couldn’t even get these things on TV! There didn’t seem to be any importance to this material except the importance we gave it ourselves. Which I think is a pretty pure position to be in as a writer and artist. We were working to impress ourselves and some fans. That was pretty much it. RA: Were any of the titles you worked on more difficult to write than others? CONWAY: I think the ones I was less interested in were. So Captain America was harder to write than Spider-Man. Partly because SpiderMan was a more important book and partly because I didn’t have the feel for writing Captain America that I did for Spider-Man. It wasn’t anything like difficulties with the history of the book or the

RA: In a certain point in 1972-1973 Marvel acquired the rights to a lot of old science-fiction and horror stories. You were the adapter of quite a lot of these—Harlan Ellison, August Derleth, Frederick Pohl, among others. CONWAY: There were a couple of science-fiction-style magazines that Roy wanted to do just adaptations in. So each of the various writers had favorite stories that we wanted to do, and that’s how we ended up divvying that up.

RA: So… did you get a lot of feedback when you killed Gwen Stacy ? CONWAY: Oh, please! [much laughter] Nobody said anything about it at all. It was like it never happened. Nobody cared. [laughs] RA: I thought she was one of the better characters in the book. CONWAY: Really!?! I thought she was a complete nonentity. She did nothing for me as a character. I didn’t feel any connection to the material Stan wrote after Ditko left. Well, maybe some of it, but from about 1967 until I started writing the character most of that stuff didn’t matter to me. It’s not that I didn’t read it or like it or whatever, but it’s that the really important material, particularly for Spider-Man, was concluded at the time that Mary Jane Watson showed up and introduced herself by saying “Face it, Tiger, you just hit the jackpot!” There’s nothing Gwen Stacy ever did that equaled that to me. RA: That’s true. CONWAY: As soon as I got on the book, I wanted to see more of Mary Jane. When the opportunity came to kill off a character and we were trying to figure out a character to kill, I felt that Gwen was the one to go. The thing about

Which One Was Betty, And Which One Was Veronica?

, in a late-’70s the the plotting conference for to courtesy of JR. Man newspaper strip. Pho

ita Stan Lee (left) & John Rom n-new Spider-

Editor/writer Stan Lee and artist/co-plotter John Romita strove, at the former’s behest, to equate Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy in the “groovy” department— but to reader Gerry Conway, Gwen remained a stick-inthe-mud. Panels from Amazing Spider-Man #47 (April 1967) by Romita. Thanks to Bary Pearl. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Stan Lee, his wife Joan (sta nding), and daughter Joan Cecilia in their Hewlett Harbor home, 1970s. Photo courtes y of SL.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

Marvel UK Is A-OK (Left & right:) From Marvel UK’s black-&-white weekly Super Spider-Man #171, a staff redrawing of the splash page of the U.S. Amazing Spider-Man #122 (July 1973)—while the original is pictured at right. (Below right:) The color cover of Marvel UK’s Super Spider-Man #196 (“for the week ending Nov. 10, 1976”), recycled and adjusted from ASM #147 (Aug. ’75). Art by John Romita. Thanks to Robert Menzies for both Marvel UK scans. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

her was, she has been dead for far longer than she was alive. Far, far longer. The memory of her makes her feel like a much more important character than she actually was. In fact, the death of her made her, as a character. Her death made her an important character. If she’d stayed around, what could she have brought to the strip? She had no personality. She was just a nice girl. A very nice girl, but no edge at all. RA: I guess it was like the first girlfriend that Peter Parker had, Betty Brant. She was just a nice girl, nothing particularly special except that Peter liked her. CONWAY: Yeah, his first love was Betty Brant, then he had a crush on Liz Allen, then Mary Jane was being held up as this girl that Aunt May was trying to get him set up with. Then Gwen came along and she was the first person that he actually had an ongoing relationship with, but it wasn’t based on chemistry, as far as I could tell. Lois Lane and Clark Kent have chemistry. It was a kind of Rosalind Russell/Clark Gable chemistry, or Cary Grant chemistry, but it was chemistry. There was no chemistry with Gwen Stacy, who was a pretty blonde girl, who kind of looked like Joannie Lee [Stan Lee’s wife], which is why Stan had her in the book. RA: I’ve seen pictures of Stan Lee’s daughter and she looks remarkably like Gwen Stacy. CONWAY: I think Johnny Romita drew Gwen to look more and more like Joannie. That was Stan’s type. That statuesque, blonde type. That was what he wanted in a woman. So that was what attracted him and who he thought would be the perfect girl for Peter. I thought that Mary Jane would be the perfect girl for Peter, because she would challenge him. She wouldn’t let him get away with stuff. She was more like he was, a street kid.

RA: She was more rough-and-tumble than Gwen. CONWAY: Yeah. When I backtold the story and revealed that they’d known each other basically since they were teenagers, without even knowing each other, that connected them even more together. At the time, while we knew [Gwen’s death] would get a reaction, I don’t think any of us realized that it would get anything like the reaction that it did get. Because characters had died in

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

Marvel comics before. We’d killed off lots of characters. I think it was the method of how we killed her was really what set the fans on edge. If she’d died heroically saving a child…. [laughs] RA: That might have made a difference. In the story itself, it’s over almost before it starts. CONWAY: Yeah, she died because Peter, Spider-Man, makes a mistake, fails to save her. He might even have been directly responsible for her death. RA: He certainly didn’t take into account the laws of physics—every action has an equal and opposite reaction. CONWAY: Yep. It’s one of those things where the manner of her death—what’s the Shakespearian quote? “Nothing became her in life so much as the leaving of it.” I think her death is what makes Gwen an iconic figure in comics. It’s not Gwen, it’s the way in which she left the book. It’s sort of interesting. I recently read an interview with [the actress] Emma Stone and she was taking about her role as Gwen Stacy in the new movie that they’re doing and she said, “Well, she’s really nothing like the girl in the book,” because she knows the girl in the book has got nothing going for her! They’ve got to do something different. RA: I thought it was rather odd that they picked Emma Stone, a feisty, streetwise redhead, who would have been a natural to play Mary Jane, and have her play Gwen Stacy. CONWAY: Yeah! Still, if I was doing this movie and I knew SpiderMan, as they clearly do, [and I knew] that I would be doing a

couple of movies where I have this great romance, then I’d do a third movie where I would kill her off. Then everybody would say, “Oh, they just took that from Batman!” From The Dark Knight. [laughs]

“[Haunt Of Horror] Almost Had A Stephen King Story In It” RA: You also took over another Roy Thomas creation—“Satana”—for a few stories. CONWAY: Satana? I don’t even remember that. RA: Yeah, there was a problem with Esteban Maroto, the artist, being late, and you quickly wrote a prose story and Pablo Marcos drew illustrations for it over something like a weekend. CONWAY: I don’t recall. It was so long ago. I felt very comfortable with prose stories and I was fast, so that was probably why. I wrote a prose story for Firestorm at one point, too. It was illustrated by Pat Broderick. RA: You were the editor on the original Haunt of Horror, not the later black-&-white comic magazine, but an earlier prose digest that had a lot of artwork by Marvel artists in it. CONWAY: It was a digest horror magazine. I edited it and wrote a story for one issue. I had stories by Harlan Ellison… Denny O’Neil wrote a story for it. George Effinger. I almost had a Stephen King story in it, which would have been one of his first sales, and that would have been interesting. RA: Alan Brennert, who has written for the revived versions of The

Satana Lies A-Waitin’ Gerry scripted numerous stories, in both comics and prose form, for Marvel’s 1970s black-&-white mags. Seen here is the eleventh-hour short story he wrote for the comics incarnation of The Haunt of Horror (#2, July 1974), and for which Pablo Marcos did illustrations over a weekend, when an emergency loomed. [Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

should never have been done. Kind of sad. I would have liked to have gone further. RA: I think a number of the stories intended for the digest actually appeared in the black-&-white magazines, including one in the comics version of Haunt of Horror. CONWAY: Yeah. It was a way to burn off inventory. Some of the authors got their stories back. Some resold them and some didn’t. The longer ones we tried to print because it would take space in a black-&-white magazine. RA: Yes, Marvel used a lot of text articles and stories to fill up space in the black-&-whites. For much of the early issues there weren’t much more than 32 pages of comics per issue, compared to 50-60 pages for Warren or Skywald. CONWAY: Right. Titles like Tales of the Zombie used a lot of preCode reprints, as well. It was an attempt to have a presence on a different part of the newsstand. It was relatively successful experiment for a number of years. RA: Savage Sword of Conan went on for quite a while—more than twenty years. CONWAY: Ten or twelve issues for most of them. Some went longer. If you go into double digits, I think you can consider it fairly successful. The Kung Fu book went on for a couple of years. Same with Planet of the Apes. It all kind of blurs together.

“The Punisher Was Originally Intended To Be A Secondary Villain” RA: Was your work on Fantastic Four mostly with John Buscema? CONWAY: Buscema at first, then with Rich Buckler. RA: They were both inked by Joe Sinnott, right?

A-Haunting We Will Go! Gray Morrow’s cover for the digest-sized prose mag Haunt of Horror, edited by Gerry Conway in 1973. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, almost had a story in it, too. The ad for the never-published third issue lists a story by him in it. He’s also written a number of comic scripts that are quite highly regarded, although there are not a lot of them. CONWAY: That was his first sale, I believe. Haunt of Horror was a concept that we sort of created out of thin air. Stan wanted to reach into other markets, and I suggested we do a horror digest. He came up with the title and we put the book together. I don’t think at any point that we calculated the cost/benefit ratio—how many copies would we have to sell to make a profit?—until we actually published the book. Then the business people realized that there was no way we could make a profit on a digest. We died before we got a third issue out.

CONWAY: Yes. In my mind, Joe is one of the reasons that the Fantastic Four was so good for so long. He gave it a consistent look. RA: A very solid look. Also, a very friendly, warm look which certainly helped the family aspect of the book. CONWAY: Yes. He also had a technique that made artwork look like real metal, real bricks. A very solid, down-to-earth look. Fantastic Four was a title that I really, really wanted to do, but when I got onto it I didn’t really know what to do with it, you know? I took it over when Roy had just done a handful of issues and had just taken The Thing out of the book and put Crystal or Thundra or one of those in to replace him, and it just became a very weird book. It wasn’t the primal book I wanted to do. It was a strange period for the book. I finally got it to a point where it was a little better. I don’t remember it that well. Today I’m actually writing the introduction to the first Marvel Masterworks collection of that run so I have to re-read those issues. See what I actually think about them.

RA: Probably before you got the first issue’s sales figures.

RA: You also created a character who became one of Marvel’s most popular—The Punisher, in Amazing Spider-Man #129 (Feb. 1974).

CONWAY: Yeah. The original budget for the first issue was $2000, and I managed to come in on that by buying covers that had been rejected by other publishers. I got a Gray Morrow cover and one done by Kelly Freas. Kelly did it as a favor and actually based it on the story that Denny wrote for that issue. I still have the painting, too. The problem with Haunt of Horror was that Marvel didn’t have any leverage with the newsstands to put that issue out as a digest. They didn’t know how to promote, how to sell it, and it probably

CONWAY: The Punisher was originally intended to be a secondary villain, in an issue that was intended to introduce the primary villain, a character called The Jackal. I’d always been a fan of the way that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had developed stories the first couple of years in Spider-Man, where they’d introduced characters and gradually you’d discover that there was a brain, a master planner, behind the scenes controlling things. So that the villain you thought was the bad guy was actually working for the real bad

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

guy. I liked that layered sort of approach. So I wanted to introduce this new character, The Jackal, and his importance in a longer-running storyline by showing him to be a manipulator. He would be a guy who wasn’t himself physically prepossessing but was powerful because he could influence other characters. So I wanted to create a secondary character who would be a one-shot villain whom The Jackal would manipulate into attacking Spider-Man on The Jackal’s behalf. At that time there was a kind of zeitgeist in the air about violent vigilantes taking the law into their own hands. The movie Death Wish had come out and been a big hit. There was a real sense of lawlessness, a paranoia of living in New York City at that time that led to the belief that violence could

Crime And Punisher

Ross Andru, in a photo from The Amazing World of DC Comics #15 (Aug. 1977). [© DC Comics.]

Corporal Punishment (Right:) Gray Morrow’s painted cover for the b&w magazine Marvel Preview #2 (1975)—The Punisher’s first solo-star appearance. (Above:) Tony DeZuniga illustrated Gerry’s tale inside. Here, on the second story page, The Punisher makes a hit. The targeted crook was only wounded—but not because Castle wasn’t trying for a kill! [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

(Top center:) The first glimpse the world got of The Punisher was the cover of The Amazing SpiderMan #129 (Feb. 1974), penciled by Gil Kane and inked by John Romita. (Above:) Inside, Gerry and penciler Ross Andru started right off with another shot of The Punisher—as well as The Jackal, who was supposed to be the story’s star villain but got upstaged by Frank Castle. Inks by Frank Giacoia and Dave Hunt. Thanks to the GCD for the cover scan, and to Barry Pearl for the splash scan. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The late Tony DeZuniga, a few years back, at the world premiere of the Jonah Hex film, featuring the DC anti-hero he had co-created. Thanks to Tony & Tina DeZuniga. [Photo © Pacific Rim Photo Press.]

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

attack you at any time from any quarter. A sense that the government and the police were really kind of helpless against it. That isn’t to say that that paranoia justifies any kind of anti-social behavior, but that was the context of this henchman, The Jackal’s henchman’s character. I kind of played him off as a combination of Dirty Harry, the Clint Eastwood rogue cop, and a paperback pulp character, you could call him a hero or a villain or an anti-hero, called The Executioner, who was written by Don Pendleton. I did a sketch of the character which I gave to John Romita. My version of it was a guy in an all-black catsuit with a tiny little skull on his chest. Villains back then had to have symbols on their chests! [laughs] That was a rule! Romita turned it into this awesome skull that filled the chest—that was actually the chest design itself, the full figure design of the character. We were sort of casting about for a name. I was calling him The Assassin, but I wasn’t really happy with that, so we talked with Stan Lee, and Stan came up with the actual name—The Punisher. That’s pretty much how the character came about. In the course of writing that story and seeing the artwork from Ross Andru, I realized that The Punisher was a much cooler character than The Jackal! He was too good an idea to use as a oneshot character. I planned on bringing him back in a few months, and the reader response was just tremendous! The rest, as they say,

is history. Within a year he had a one-shot tryout of his own in Marvel Premiere. RA: I have to admit that I never read The Punisher’s stories in sequence. Back in those days, distribution wasn’t exactly wondrous, and you could easily have part one and part three of a story but never be able to locate part two at the newsstands, because the book in the middle wouldn’t be in the store or in any store in your area. I think I had the second issue that he appeared in but didn’t see the first issue for many years. CONWAY: And that second story would have come out three or four months later. RA: It was a good story, but I found that I liked the character a whole lot more when he wasn’t appearing in super-hero books and was in his own crime-oriented stories in the b&w magazines. I think he fit better in that showcase than guest-starring in Spider-Man or who have you…. CONWAY: The inherent thing about The Punisher is that he is completely outside the law. He takes the Batman/vigilante thing to its logical conclusion, which is that if you really were Batman, you would be killing people. You wouldn’t be putting them in handcuffs and dangling them in front of police stations. [laughs] Seriously, that sort of vigilante—the Batman type—is a comic book truth. Not a real-world thing. In the real world, if you’re so driven by a sense of outraged injustice that you want to take the law into your own hands, then I think a person in that mindset would become a killer themselves. I mean, we’ve seen that. When people think that they have a right to act outside the law, they very quickly lose any sense of boundaries, because they’ve already broken the major taboo—you’re operating outside the law! After that it just becomes a question of degree! In the comic book world, the super-hero world, a vigilante becomes Batman. But The Punisher would have challenged that logic, because he was originally conceived to be a villain and didn’t have to operate by the super-hero rule book. That rule book says you don’t kill people. You take them prisoner and turn them over to the authorities. Since Frank Castle—that was his real name—was conceived as a villain, he wasn’t hampered by that mindset. In the color books, he was hampered by the Comics Code, by the tropes of conventional comic book storytelling, but in the black-&-white books and later when he came back in the color books in the 1980s but without the Comics Code, he could be more authentic to the logic of his character. RA: That’s true enough. CONWAY: Yes! Maybe? Who knows? It sounds good! [laughs]

“I Was Basically Given My Own Little Fiefdom At DC” RA: At the start of 1975 you were working on quite a number of books for Marvel, but at some point you left, either to go to Atlas—Martin Goodman’s new startup company—or back to DC. I’m not sure how exactly the sequence of events happened….

We’re On The Eve Of Destructor! Gerry Conway, unhappy with his treatment at Marvel, decided to do some writing for Martin Goodman’s start-up rival Atlas/Seaboard—and wound up working with an earlier Marvel defector, namely Spider-Man/Dr. Strange co-creator Steve Ditko! Splash page of The Destructor #4 (Aug. 1975); inks by Al Milgrom. [© Atlas/Seaboard or its successors in interest.]

Steve Ditko.

CONWAY: I did a little bit of work for Atlas. That was while I was still at Marvel, though. I was acting out some of my anger at the way that Stan had handled the transition from Roy’s editor-in-chief position, which ended up going to Len Wein. I felt that I was the person who was supposed to be the next in line. This was the attitude of a 22-, 23-yearold at the time. In fact, though, I’d been told by Stan that if Roy ever left, then he would

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

Fabled Figures (Above left:) On moving to DC around the turn of 1975, Gerry launched and wrote the series Hercules Unbound, with art in issue #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1975) by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez (pencils) and Wally Wood (inks). Thanks to Nick Caputo. (Above right:) Gerry was also assigned by publisher Carmine Infantino to write the Jack Kirby-originated title Kamandi, beginning with #38. Seen here is the splash page from Kirby’s final issue penciling the mag, #40 (April 1976). Inks by Mike Royer, who was seen in A/E #129. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [© DC Comics.]

put me in charge, which I think was Jose Luis GarciaWally Wood, 1974— just him trying to Lopez. in a photo printed in deal with the fact the New York Comic that whenever Roy Art Convention went on vacation Stan would ask me to fill program book, 1975. in for him on the editorial desk, looking over the books. But he didn’t want to have to, like, pay me for it! [laughs] I guess I don’t know what his reasoning was, but he did lead me to believe that I was the heir apparent to Roy. But when Roy did leave, I was actually away from New York on my own vacation. I think, in a panic, Stan wanted somebody to replace Roy right that moment and looked around at the editorial assistants and brought in Len, who was working as Roy’s assistant at the time. I don’t believe that Len was conniving or doing anything to make this happen, but I felt really betrayed by Marvel. I had really wanted that acknowledgement. Not necessarily the job, because I really had no idea what the job would entail, to be perfectly honest. [laughs] The job was very different from the job that Roy had stepped into when he became editor-in-chief. While Roy was in charge, Marvel had expanded phenomenally! There were an enormous number of titles, about 50 or 60 titles, and it was ridiculous for one person to be in charge of all that, without a

really substantial editorial staff to back him up. I think the pressure of that and the general unhappiness with the politics at Marvel is probably what led Roy to leave. I, however, was not conversant with that or thinking about that. I was reacting from an emotional point of view, feeling dissed by the company that I had committed myself to. I did the Atlas work to kind of like poke a finger at Stan, and then, finally, I went over to DC, Jack Kirby (on right) and DC editorial director and because I publisher Carmine Infantino. This early-’70s photo thought they appeared in TwoMorrows’ 2010 book Carmine Infantino: were going to Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur, by Jim Amash with Eric treat me the Nolen-Weathington. Thanks to the authors and John Morrow.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

way that I thought Marvel should have treated me. Like I said, this is the behavior of a 22-, 23-year-old. It doesn’t come from a wellthought-out, mature response but from the attitude that I’m going to take my marbles and go home! [laughs] That kind of thinking! RA: Did you go to DC with an editorial job in hand? CONWAY: Yeah, I was to be an editor and writer. RA: So the DC gig would have been a promotion. CONWAY: Yeah, that was exactly why I did it. I was basically given my own little fiefdom at DC. I was made to feel like I was an important contributor to the company and my presence there was valued, which I did not believe was the case at Marvel. This is kind of bizarre, because I was writing Marvel’s top books and could really write anything that I wanted to write. But I didn’t have the sense of authority or autonomy that I felt was my due. I’m not arguing that this was a legitimate attitude to have but simply me and my emotional reaction at the time. RA: When you went to DC, you took over some of Jack Kirby’s titles— Kamandi, I believe. You started Hercules Unbound, which you eventually tied in to the world of Kamandi, did you not? CONWAY: It was a tie-in in the sense that they were all linked

together in that post-apocalyptic world or universe that Kirby was operating in. But it was probably set in place, at least on my part, by The Atomic Knights, who had appeared ten or fifteen years before, in DC’s Strange Adventures. I put them into the mix as well. It’s not an unusual or unique idea, though the attempt to make all of those different approaches seem unified was probably unique, in some small way. I was handed the Kirby stuff because he had made it clear that he was leaving and Carmine Infantino figured that if one Marvel guy was leaving he’d have the other Marvel guy do these books and nobody will notice. [laughs] It was kind of silly. I had no real interest in Kamandi. I thought it was the weakest of Jack’s books…. RA: And oddly the most popular. I’ve never really understood that. CONWAY: I don’t know that it was the most popular. The thing is, Carmine’s decision-making about what books he kept on and what books he cancelled had relatively little to do with sales. This, I think, is what infuriated Kirby, because Kirby’s books wouldn’t be selling badly when Carmine cancelled them. He’d cancel them because they weren’t selling at the numbers Carmine thought they should be. Carmine also wanted creators to do ideas that he himself could understand more clearly. He thought that New Gods was a mess. He didn’t like it, so he got rid of it and told Jack to do Kamandi, which was visually very much like the Strange Adventures covers Carmine had done for Julie Schwartz back in the day. Carmine liked that kind of thing. The cover of the first Kamandi is a direct ripoff of one of the old Ace Double science-fiction titles from the 1950s. That Statue of Library piece also reminded you of the movie Planet of the Apes. The Demon was handed to Jack by Carmine, who was a Prince Valiant fan, and The Demon himself is based on a mask in a Prince Valiant storyline. So you’ve got Carmine, who’s acting in a very bizarre way as a publisher, because he’s not basing decisions on actual sales but on the sales that he thinks they should be doing. He kept Kamandi because he was convinced that Kamandi was going to sell at the level he thought it should. But it didn’t sell better than anything else. Carmine could just relate to it better than to The New Gods or The Forever People. Jack, at that time at least, was just “fine, OK.” His lack of engagement was so obvious by the end that it was actually kind of sad. He even let me dialogue the last few issues he did, because he just didn’t care. That was a pity. I think, a huge pity for DC. RA: Especially since, in time, they came to base nearly half their entire universe on characters and concepts from The New Gods. CONWAY: That’s because there’s such a rich vein of potential mythology in what Jack brought to the DC Universe. Between Jack’s work and the Green Lantern/Guardians concepts, you’ve got all the cosmic stuff that one could want for the mythology of a comic book company. And including The Legion of Super-Heroes, of course. Carmine was just a really limited thinker. He was a simple, visual thinker. The simpler the idea was visually, the more it made sense to him, because he was primarily a cover artist. And how do you boil down The New Gods into a simple cover idea? With Kamandi you could do it because you could do a giant mutant rat or a talking tiger, and that was relatively easy to display on a cover. Carmine could understand Kamandi better than he could understand The New Gods and, based purely on that, kept Kamandi alive. It had nothing to do with sales. Practically none of Carmine’s decisions had anything to do with sales.

Cornering The Market A “Conway’s Corner” ad from Superman #291 (Sept. 1975), promoting the new Man-Bat comic by Gerry and Steve Ditko. [© DC Comics.]

I think both companies horribly misused Jack in the 1970s and 1980s.

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

RA: I think in some ways Kirby was constrained by the 17-page stories of that time period. I think he had a hard time getting his ideas across in that number of pages. CONWAY: He was also constrained because he was not really a very good writer. To someone like Mark Evanier, that would be heresy. But the fact was that Jack could not write. He could plot, but no matter how good his ideas were, he couldn’t express them clearly and make them into a dramatic, sustained story arc. That’s my opinion. There are a lot of people who might disagree with that, obviously. But what Stan was able to do for Jack was to constrain him in a way that actually made Jack’s ideas more cohesive and sensible. So you ended up with stories that resonated with readers. Jack had wonderful set pieces and character ideas and mythological notions that he wanted to express, but he had no notion of how to tell them in stories. He knew how to tell sequences. When people talk about Jack and they’re honest, they will talk about his working methods and they will express this kind of awe regarding those working methods. But if you actually examine that method, you realize that his method was not a good way to work. Jack would do scenes and sequences that he was interested in. He would do them out of sequence—for example, he’d do a threepage run of some spectacular notion he had for a scene, then he’d do another sequence, then another, and then he’d try to figure out a way to tie all these sequences together as a story and he’d do the intervening panels or pages. People would say “Oh, isn’t that amazing? Jack can just pick up his pencil and start doing a scene from the middle of the story.” Well, no, not really. That’s not how you plan or plot a story! [laughs] That’s pretty chaotic! And the results, all too often, were pretty chaotic. Jack needed a writer, but his ego would never let him admit it. That’s why I think his career divides into these three areas—the Simon/Kirby era, where he was successful, the Lee/Kirby era, where he was also successful, and the Jack Kirby solo era where he wasn’t really very successful. And if we’re honest, that’s the truth. RA: You worked on the first official Marvel/DC crossover….

When Titans Crash! The splash page of the tabloid-sized Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man (1976), the first super-hero crossover between DC and Marvel. Script by Gerry Conway, pencils by Ross Andru, inks by Dick Giordano. [© DC Comics & Marvel Characters, Inc.]

CONWAY: I worked on both the first unofficial crossover and the first official one. The unofficial one was in 1972 and featured the Justice League, The Avengers [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Actually, I believe it involved The Beast, in Amazing Adventures.], and Thor, the one I wrote, which featured crossover back stories and subplots between three writers. The first official one was the Superman/Spider-Man crossover, which I also wrote. Ross Andru penciled that one, with inking by Dick Giordano and some figure work by Neal Adams. The way the official one came about was when a young man by the name of David Obst, who’d been the agent for Woodward and Bernstein for All the President’s Men, approached Stan Lee to see if Stan wanted to do any book projects. In the course of their lunch, Obst, who was kind of a semi-comics fan, asked why DC and Marvel had never done a book together teaming up Superman and Spider-Man. Stan kind of gladhanded it off by telling him it would be impossible to put it together, but if Obst wanted to try, to go ahead. So Obst went ahead and made it happen because he wanted to see if he could. [chuckles] So the guy directly responsible for that book coming into play was the agent for one of the 1970s all-time best sellers—All the Presidents’ Men. His ex-wife, Lynda Obst, became a fairly well-known producer and writer of books about

Hollywood. She was a producer of movies like Flashdance, Sleepless in Seattle, and many others over the years. David himself worked in movies to some degree until the 1980s. I don’t know where he is today. RA: The unofficial crossover was all based around the Rutland, Vermont, Halloween parades and parties that took place annually in the late 1960s and early 1970s? CONWAY: Yes. The first story that was Rutland-centered was actually a Denny O’Neil story that appeared in Batman. I don’t remember if it was just the one, or if he did two of them. I think the first comics person who was invited to those parties was Roy Thomas. It all took place during this big Halloween weekend up in Rutland that was put together by a fellow named Tom Fagan. As a footnote, the house that Tom used to [live in] and was the locale for the party and where many of us would hang out and sleep over in is now a bed-and-breakfast. They actually talk about the Halloween parade and their B&B’s tie-in to comics on their website about the house. You could do a Google search of “Halloween,” “comics,” and “parade” and it will probably pop up. That they remember the history of the house is an interesting footnote, I think.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

RA: How long did those parades and parties last? CONWAY: I think for three or four years. The first, I believe, was in 1968 or 1969. I remember going to the first one when I was still in high school and getting horribly drunk in the car on the way up. Denny O’Neil kept me from getting into a fight with some Vermont hunters. It was a bizarre weekend! The next year, or the following year, the story by Denny came out in the comics, and the year after we all went again and had more adventures. We came up with the notion, the three writers who did the stories—Len Wein, Steve Englehart, and I—we hung out together at that particular party and came up with the story ideas. We had no intention of telling Roy Thomas or Julie Schwartz that we were doing it. We snuck it

behind their backs! [laughs] With the excuse that it was just another Rutland story! RA: You worked on a lot of titles for “Superman” in the year before you accepted the job at Marvel to be editor-in-chief. You also wrote “Batman” for a bit. CONWAY: The way that Julie did things was that he didn’t give you a regular book. He just gave you issues to fill or stories to do, because there was no ongoing story continuity taking place at DC at the time. It was easy for you to be plunked into an issue of any title at any time. So I did a handful of Supermans and Batmans at the time. Some Justice League. The only ongoing title I was doing was for Hercules Unbound and on the books I was editing. RA: Didn’t you revive the Justice Society in its own book? CONWAY: I didn’t revive them as the Justice Society. I created the “All-Star Squad,” which was a sort of subset of the Justice Society. One of my assignments from Carmine was to create new titles, and I wanted to do a group of younger heroes but tie it into the DC universe. Aside from the annual JLA/JSA crossovers, there was no “Justice Society” title. Roy Thomas suggested, “Why don’t you bring back the ‘Justice Society’ book?” And I thought, no, because most of them were old at that point, in their fifties or over. While reviving the original team may have been interesting to Roy, it wasn’t to me. So I came up with what I thought was a smart solution, which was to create a group within the group—still the Justice Society, but focusing on younger members. People who were part of the Earth-Two universe whom we could have as the focal point but still have the older members around as mentors or a support staff. The older heroes legitimized the younger players but preserved the wider mythology of Earth-Two’s universe. RA: I recall that book having a pretty decent art team on it. CONWAY: Yeah. The main thing on that book was having Wally Wood as the inker. Ric Estrada penciled, but Ric wasn’t really a super-hero artist per se, although he had a great visual style. His art had a terrific look to it, but I wanted to overlay his work with some traditional super-hero solidity. So I was lucky enough to get Wally Wood to sign on the book. Wally really enhanced the art—gave it a super-hero shine.

Moonlighting In Vermont (Above:) Comics writers Steve Englehart, Gerry Conway, and Len Wein, along with colorist Glynis Wein, were drawn (clockwise) by Marvel staffer Marie Severin in the lower right corner of the splash page of Thor #207 (Jan. 1973). The story was written by GC and otherwise penciled by John Buscema, with inks by Vince Colletta. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scan. [Marvel Characters, Inc.] A necessary addendum from A/E editor Roy Thomas: “The first Rutland Halloween parade attended by comics pros—Dave Kaler and myself—was actually the one held in 1965. And, contrary to Gerry’s recollection, the first so-called ‘Rutland story’ was scripted by yours truly for The Avengers #83 (Dec. 1970). The next year, Denny O’Neil and I each scripted one—he a ‘Batman’ tale for Detective Comics, I the second ‘Defenders’ yarn for Marvel Spotlight #2. The triple-play Gerry describes was actually the third round, though certainly the first attempt to use those stories as an inter-company cross-over!”

“Marvel ‘Made Me An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse’” RA: It wasn’t too long after this that you returned to Marvel to take on the editor-in-chief role. CONWAY: Yeah, I was only at DC for a year, year and a quarter. To quote Don Corleone, Marvel “made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” Len had left the editor position and been replaced by Marv Wolfman. They had both realized, I guess, that this was a job they really didn’t enjoy doing. Trying to put out fifty books a month with one editor in charge, along with a handful of assistant editors who really had no authority over the books and the writers who were working on them, was an impossible

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

as an editor-in-chief running everything goes flying out the window. So I came in when Marv left, under a complete misapprehension of the situation. I did not realize that Marvel had changed since the days when I’d first started working there and there was just a handful of books. At that time we were always a small-knit group working together with the same basic Ric Estrada, first understanding of material. But Marvel had penciler of the 1970s expanded into a company publishing fifty or All-Star Comics. Photo more titles, and on top of that Marvel had taken at San Diego created these little fiefdoms where individual Comic-Con, 2000; writers not only didn’t feel they had any courtesy of Mike Britt. reason to listen to an editor but they actually felt offended if an editor would try to exert any authority over them. It wasn’t anarchy but more simple defiance. Part of that, of course, was partially cultural, a sign of the times. It was the 1970s. There was a total breakdown in cultural authority. There was no sense that authority meant anything. You were supposed to be rebelling against authority. So anybody coming into the position of an editor-in-chief at Marvel at that point was going to be hamstrung from the get-go.

The Boys Are Back In Town! (Above:) Splash page of All-Star Comics #58, by penciler Ric Estrada and inker Wally Wood; script by Gerry Conway. [© DC Comics.]

situation. Roy, when he was editor, had moral authority over the writers because he’d been there at Marvel long before anybody else and he was a great surrogate for Stan. If Roy said something, you felt that Stan was saying it. People would defer to Roy and he could express his opinions, make his desires known, and writers would try to follow what he said. But the people following Roy didn’t have that same in-built, designated authority that Roy had. RA: Particularly if you’re in your early twenties. CONWAY: Well, I’m thinking particularly of Len, who was the guy who’d taken over from Roy. Len’s main work up to that point was that up, until six or eight months before he got the job, he was a writer for DC. While he was certainly one of the most talented guys in the business, he didn’t have that connection and true lineage to Stan that Roy had. Len’s personality was also one of a go-along, get-along type of guy. He definitely wasn’t a whipcracker. So the writers would sort of go off in their own direction. Len didn’t really rein them in. He just didn’t have the ability to rein them in. There were just too many books being published. I think he quickly felt burned out. You know, “I’m not going to do this!” [laughs] So he made a deal with Stan, similar to what Roy had done—that he would become the editor of his own books. That type of structure was the beginning of the end for that single editor doing everything that had prevailed with Stan and Roy. When Len, and later Marv, were able to say, “We want to be the editors of our own books,” the precedent was set for later writers/editors to say the same thing. So whatever potential for authority and direction

I came into the position with several strikes against me, starting with my age. I was 24, younger than many of the writers and artists. I was not really very mature. There were the structural problems with the writer fiefdoms who felt they were in charge of their own books, whether they really were or not. They were challenging central authority and were not willing to be under any sort of control. In some cases, with Len and Roy and Marv, they actually were in charge of their own books. In other cases, they were people who had no logical reason to have any say over their own material, because they were newcomers and just didn’t know what they were doing. They’d be concerned with their scripts to the point of ignoring the reality of a deadline. In some cases they were just incompetent. But they all felt that they, too, were entitled to be in charge of their own books. Then, on top of that, there was the sheer technical problem of trying to get fifty books out a month with an editorial staff of about four. BOOM! [laughs] There was a system in place that had no balance to it. It’s one thing if a Len Wein or Roy Thomas becomes a writer/editor of their own books, because they’ve had the experience of actual editing. There’s a certain kind of logic to that, although I don’t really know that it makes sense from a practical point of view. But there’s a logic to it. There’s absolutely no logical sense to a writer who’s written only one title for the company, and doing a terrible job on it, to feel like he shouldn’t have any oversight. There’s no sense to that at all! But because there were no controlling mechanisms and the editorial staff was so slim, you in effect had to let that person do what they wanted to do because you, on a practical level, could not exercise any authority over him. In about a month and a half I was a complete wreck. It was not the world I wanted or the life I wanted to be leading. I left the position almost as soon as I’d been hired. I was succeeded by Archie Goodwin, who had a much calmer demeanor and, probably, a much more fatalistic approach to the whole thing. I think Archie recognized the impossibility of his job just as much as I did. The difference was that Archie, I think, thought, “What the heck. They’ll pay me. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. I’ll do the best job I can and not worry about it.” RA: There may have been more deferment to him because he was a decade older than most of the writers.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

RA: I suspect that much of the situation that you describe came about because of a very rapid expansion from a very small company to a very large one without the opportunity to hire and structure the people needed to run the bigger company. CONWAY: There was a saying that Steve Mitchell used to say, and he was just quoting somebody else, but he said, “The fish stinks from the head.” This isn’t meant Gerry Conway in the 1970s. to be critical of Stan, but Stan was not a manager. He’d never been a manager. He’d been an editor for many years, but the circumstances under which he was an editor were very different than what Marvel became in the 1970s. He didn’t have a managerial style to speak of. Roy wasn’t a manager, by any stretch of the imagination. He was a wonderful writer and knew how to work very well with artists, but he was not a manager, per se. It’s a particular skill set that is very different from working creatively.

Ready… Aim… Splash page of the “Punisher” lead story in Marvel Preview #2 (1975). Script by Gerry Conway, art by Tony DeZuniga. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

CONWAY: He was also an accomplished editor at both Warren and DC and a well-respected writer. Still, I don’t think there was any more deferment to him than to anybody else. I think that he slowly started to expand his editorial staff a little bit, and he was also presented with the fact that there were four writer/editors at Marvel who were writing a fair number of the better-selling titles. That left only about 16 original titles for Archie to be in charge of! The rest would have been reprint titles. And Archie wrote three or four titles himself, so he was in fact the writer/editor of those titles. So there really wasn’t an editor in charge of most of the Marvel books at that time. RA: So one could assume that you were quite happy to get out of the editor-in-chief position? CONWAY: I was happy but I was sad. I was happy because it became obvious very quickly that it was going to be a no-win situation for me. I was going to lose friends. I was going to be miserable. Getting out of that was a certain sense of relief. But there was also a great sense of sadness. I had the fantasy I’d had, the dream that I’d had, of being able to oversee these books and influence this world, the Marvel Universe, that I loved, and that fantasy or dream was gone. I wasn’t going to be able to achieve that.

So you went from this situation where you didn’t need a manager, which was when Marvel was publishing eighteen titles a month or so with a total of three writers working on all the titles. Each one has, more or less, your confidence. It’s a small family-run shop. Then you move to a situation where there’s 5060 titles, and now you’ve got all these technical issues. How do you proportion an artist’s time? How do you know that when artist “A” is done with the pencils that artist “B” is available to start inking those pencils? What if writer “A” is late with the plot? There’s a whole spread sheet of issues and problems that requires an understanding and philosophy of management, and Marvel didn’t have any of that. That didn’t happen until Shooter came in. Whatever you want to say about Shooter from a creative point of view, as a manager the guy really, really fixed that company. That was what Marvel needed. Between the end of the Martin Goodman era and the time when Shooter took charge, there was a really chaotic period when nobody really knew what was going on from one week to the next. It’s amazing that anything came out of that situation—that anything good came out of that. It speaks to the talent of the creators involved that there were a great many examples of good work that did come out of it.

“[Creativity] Happens Through The Cracks” RA: There were many high-quality books to appear during that time period and, honestly, they appeared in the only period of publishing where those books could have appeared. Shooter wouldn’t have allowed something like Howard the Duck, for example. CONWAY: Absolutely true. But, by the same token, Roy wouldn’t have allowed it, either! What ended up happening was that that title came about due to a lack of oversight. There was, indeed, some great stuff that came out, but there was a tremendous amount of crap! It really depended on the individual which type of story occurred. Who knows how good the work might have been if their work had been better supported by management or editorial? Writers whose careers never took off? Talents never developed? What if you had the wrong inker on the right artist? That makes a huge difference in a book’s appeal. You end up with books where the art just looks terrible or where the writer is working at the top of his ability but is teamed up with an artist who just can’t visualize that stuff for the writer. Sometimes a writer needs help with his ideas and the artist is just the wrong guy. Really, really talented guys manage to shine. But how many of the second tier

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

who might have developed into top-notch writers or artists never got that shot? There are a lot of people whose careers were not well-served by that period. Some of them at the start of their careers, and others longtime professionals. The debate is always anarchy versus creativity. Creativity versus control. Control versus support. The best systems are those that manage to provide you with support and at the same time encourage a certain amount of creative anarchy. I think there was a certain amount of that in the 1980s and 1990s at Marvel and DC, but not consistently. At something like Vertigo, you might get that support and anarchy. At Marvel there may have been an individual editor who encouraged it. There was no corporate support at either company, however, at any stage in the last forty years to encourage real creativity. It happens through the cracks. RA: I can’t think of anything that hampers or stamps out creativity more than having, every single year, an inter-company crossover. You can’t write an ongoing storyline of your own because sooner or later you’re going to be stuck in the middle of this thing that neither you or the character have any real connection with.

Steve Gerber, in a photo from F.O.O.M. Magazine #19 (Fall 1977).

Frank Brunner, as per the 1975 Marvel Con program book.

CONWAY: The big advantage that we had in the 1970s that people don’t have today is that we were given the gift of serendipity. The Punisher is a good example. The Punisher was not conceived to be the hero or anti-hero that he became. That was serendipity. Because I was free to play around with that character and write him a little differently than if I’d just been following an outline that had been approved by my editor and my editor’s boss and everybody in internal affairs. Because I wasn’t being vetted every second, I was able to go with it. Develop a story and character that took on a life of its own. That serendipity existed in part because of the chaos. Today, because everything is directed from the top down, by definition you can’t have those kinds of events. Which is why, in part, that there hasn’t been a single major new character created in either company in the last twenty years that has any lasting cultural impact. RA: That’s true, too, sadly enough. CONWAY: Name me a character created in the last twenty years that will be around twenty years from now. I can’t think of a single one. DC just rebooted their entire line and didn’t create a single new character. They went back and grabbed a host of old ones, but not a single new one. To be fair to the companies, they’re kind of in a terrible bind which is that, if you’re a creator and you have a terrific idea for a character, you’re not going to sell it to Marvel or DC. You’d be crazy to do it. But you’re also not able to do it because even if you came up with a great idea you wouldn’t have the freedom to play around with it creatively in the structure that exists today. Everything has to be approved, and that means you can’t have a great idea and run with it. I did a mini-series for them and I had to go through an outline that described everything that was going to happen in every single issue, including beginnings, middles, and ends. A full-bore outline. I never wrote a full-bore outline for any story I ever did in the 1970s. I would write the outline as I was working with the artist on the story. The two of us would outline the story as we were talking. If I’d had to get every-

“[Howard The Duck] Came About Due To A Lack Of Oversight” Gerry feels that under neither Jim Shooter nor Roy Thomas as editor-in-chief would a comic book like Howard the Duck, as concocted by writer Steve Gerber and artist Frank Brunner, have been “allowed.” But the record, perhaps, isn’t crystal clear on that. Case in point: Howard was still being published when Shooter took charge at Marvel at the end of 1977, yet he made no hurried move to cancel it, despite slumping sales; it lasted till early ’79. And, though RT has never denied that he made Steve G. “kill off” Howard at the end of his “Man-Thing” debut because he (wrongly) feared an adverse fan reaction to the character, around the turn of ’75 Roy invited Steve to revive Howard in a story for the monster/parody title Arrgh! that he was editing. By then, however, unknown to Roy, Steve and Frank were already preparing the first “Howard” solo tale (above) for Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 (May ’75). [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

thing approved and reassure my editor that I knew exactly how this storyline was going to end, I could never have written any of the good stories that I wrote. RA: It seems to be a damned if you do and damned if you don’t system at present. Well, it’s getting late, and I know you’ve got to go. I want to thank you for your participation. CONWAY: All righty then. I was happy to do it. Richard J. Arndt is a librarian/writer from Nevada. He recently published the comics-related books Horror Comics in Black and White and The Star*Reach Companion.

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

GERRY CONWAY Checklist [This Checklist is adapted from information found in the online edition of The Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, which includes material introduced there up through Nov. 2006, when founder Jerry G. Bails passed away. Names of features that appeared both in comics books with that title and in other magazines, as well, are generally not italicized. Key: (w) = writer; (e) = editor; (d) daily newspaper comic strip; (S) Sunday newspaper comic strip. Unless where otherwise indicated, all entries below are as writer.] Name: Gerry Conway; full name Gerard Francis Conway (b. 1952) - writer, editor Pen Names: Francis X. Bushmaster; Wallace Moore [the latter in sciencefiction] Family in Arts: Carla (Joseph) Conway, ex-wife Member: Academy of Comic Book Arts (served as a director); Science Fiction Writers of America Print Media (Non-Comics): Editor: Haunt of Horror (magazine); writer, Midnight Dancers (novel, 1971), Mindship (novel, 1974), short stories 1971-73 (science-fiction magazines) Animation: Fire and Ice (co-writer with Roy Thomas, feature film, dir. Ralph Bakshi, 1983); Marvel-Sunbow; Warner (Batman, 1993) Performing Arts: Co-writer (story credit with Roy Thomas) Conan

Swords, Sorcery, & Cinema Point of editorial privilege: Since he and then-partner Gerry Conway co-wrote scripts for two produced films in the early 1980s (along with several sold but unproduced ones), Ye Editor (i.e., Roy Thomas) decided to spotlight scenes from them, even though they fall well outside Alter Ego’s general “up through 1975” franchise: (Top left:) A dramatic cel of heroes Darkwolf and Llarn from the 1983 Ralph Bakshi/Frank Frazetta rotoscoped/animated film Fire and Ice, a 20th Century Fox release whose screenplay was co-written by Thomas & Conway. Rumors of a live-action remake surfaced in 2010. (Left:) Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan, and Grace Jones as Zula, in a scene from 1984’s Conan the Destroyer, directed by Richard Fleischer. Roy and Gerry received full “story” credit for the movie, after writing the first several drafts of the script, with veteran Stanley Mann getting “screenwriter” credit. Gerry and Roy are proudest of having suggested the casting of Grace Jones in the role of what they called their “black Amazon.” [© the respective copyright holders.]

the Destroyer (film, 1984); various TV series as both writer & producer, incl. Matlock, Prescription: Murder, Law and Order, et al. Commercial Art & Design: Co-developer (with Roy Thomas) of video game “Swordquest” for Atari (1982) Syndication: Star Trek (d)(S) 1983-84; World’s Greatest Super-Heroes (d)(S) 1981 for Tribune Media Services Comics in Other Media: Gag cartoons for National Lampoon (1972) Creator or Co-Creator: Atari Force, Captain Carrot & His Amazing Zoo Crew!, Cinder and Ashe; Firestorm; Steel; Ms. Marvel; The Punisher; Swordquest Editor-in-Chief: Marvel Comics, 1976 COMIC BOOK CREDITS (U.S. Mainstream Publications):

Atlas/Seaboard Comics: The Destructor 1975; John Targitt 1975; Tiger-Man 1975 DC Comics: Abel (framing sequence) 1970; All-Star Comics (w)(e) 1976; All-Star Squadron 1982; All-Star Super Squad (e)(w)1976; AllStar Western 1970; Aquaman 1976-77; Arak, Son of Thunder 1982; Atari Force 1982-85 (premium with Atari game); Atari Force – Code Name: Liberator 1983 (premium with Atari game); Batman (1976, 1978-83); Black Canary 1977-79; Blackhawk (ed) 1976; Challengers of the Unknown 1977-78; Cinder and Ashe 1988; Codename: Assassin

Hold That Tiger, Man! (Left:) Oddly, the largest credit on this Conway/Ditko splash page from Tiger-Man #2 (June 1975) is that of editor Larry Lieber… most likely a lettering glitch, as LL wouldn’t have wanted such a thing. Thanks to Marc Svensson. Incidentally, the name of the mag is spelled “Tigerman” in the indicia. [© the respective copyright holders.]

“We Were Given The Gift Of Serendipity”

Kane Is Able (Left:) The intro page of the otherwise sword-and-sorcery tale a page of which was seen back on p. 11. Script by Conway, pencils by Gil Kane, inks by Neal Adams. Thanks to Jim Kealy & Michael T. Gilbert. [© DC Comics.]

Justice League of America 1976-76, 1978-86; Justice Society of America (e)(w)(also plotter) 1976; Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth (e)(w) 1975-76; Kobra (e)(w) 1976; Kong the Untamed 1975-76; Legion of Super-Heroes (w, some plot) 1977-81; Lightray 1978; Lois Lane 1976-81, Man-Bat (e)(w); Metal Men 1976-78; Metal Men (e) 1976; Mr. and Mrs. Superman 1980; Mystery in Space 1980; The New Gods 1976-79; Patchwork Man 1976; The Phantom Stranger 197071, 1978; Plastic Man (e) 1976-77; Private Life of Clark Kent 1980; Red Tornado (plot) 1981; Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter (3) 1976; Robin 1981-82; Scalphunter 1978-81; Secret Hearts 1970-71; Secret Origins 1986-87; Secret Society of Super-Villains (e) 1976, (w) 1976-78; Starman [2nd version] 1976; Steel 1978; Sun Devils (e)(w) 1984-85; Super-Team Family (e)(w) 1975-78; Superboy 1977; Supergirl 1978-80, Superman 1976-82, 1984-85; Superman and Batman 1978, 1981; Superman vs. Shazam! 1978, (plot) 1981; Superman vs. Wonder Woman 1978; Superman: The Movie 1981; Superman vs. The Amazing SpiderMan (joint DC/Marvel publishing effort) 1976; Superwoman 1980; Swamp Thing 1975-76; Swordquest 1982; Tales of the Great Disaster 1976; Tarzan 1976; text features 1970, 1986; The Unexpected 1982; Unknown Soldier 1975; The Witching Hour 1969-71, 1974; Wonder Woman 1977-81, 1986; Young Love 1970; Zatanna 1981-82; 1987; Zatara and Zatanna 1980 First Publishing: Hawkmoon 1986-87

1976; The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love 1972; DC Challenge 1986; Deadman 1979; The Deserter 1978; Doorway to Nightmare 1978; filler 1984; Firestorm 197886, 1990; The Flash 1977, 1981; Freedom Fighters (e)(plotter) 1976; The Fury of Firestorm (e) 1982-85; The Fury of Firestorm Annual (ed) 1983, 1986; Green Arrow 1977-80; Green Arrow and Black Canary 1977-78, 1980; Hawkman 1979; Hercules Unbound 1976-76; Heroes against Hunger 1986; House of Mystery 1969, 1971-72, 1974, 1981-82; House of Secrets 1969-71, 1973, 1976; Jimmy Olsen 1977-81,

With This Ring, I Thee Web— Or Maybe Tentacle…! (Right:) One of GC’s more memorable moments on The Amazing SpiderMan: the near-marriage of Aunt May Parker and Dr. Otto Octavius, aka Dr. Octopus. Seen here is the final panel of issue #130 (March 1974); the arc was completed in the following issue. Pencils by Ross Andru, inks by Frank Giacoia & Dave Hunt. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Marvel Comics: Aunt May 1989; The Avengers 1976-77; Dracula Lives! (backup feature) 1973-75; The Beast 1972; Black Widow 1971; Captain America 1972; Captain Marvel 1972, 1976-77; Chamber of Chills 1972; Chamber of Darkness 1970-71; Conan 1989-90; Crazy Magazine 1973, 1975; Daredevil 1971-73, 1975, 1977; The Defenders 1976-77; Dr. Doom 1971; Dracula 1972-75; Fantastic Four 1973-74, 1977; Ghost Rider 1976-77; Gullivar Jones 1972; Haunt of Horror 1974; The Incredible Hulk 1971-72, 1974; Human Torch 1970, 1975; The

Gerry Conway On His First Half Decade-Plus At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere

Ralph Reese at 1966 comics convention hosted by John Benson, who sent us this photo. It was reprinted in full in A/E #124.

Creepy 1971-72, 1978; Eerie 1971; horror 1970

Gerry Conway in a recent photo with daughters Rachel (on our left) and Cara, outside the Brooklyn apartment building where he grew up. Courtesy of GC.

The Day Before The Day The Sales Reports Came In Gerry Conway scripted the lead-off story in the first issue of a (short-lived) dream project of editor Roy Thomas’: Worlds Unknown (cover-dated May 1973), which featured adaptations of stories by major science-fiction writers. In the case of “The Day after the Day the Martians Came,” the original author was Frederik Pohl. Masterfully moody art by Ralph Reese. Turns out, though, that Marvel’s readers weren’t particularly interested in straight SF with no super-heroes. [Story © 1967 by Harlan Ellison for Dangerous Visions, but reprinted with the permission of the author, Frederick Pohl. Art & adaptation © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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

Inhumans 1971-72; Iron Man 1971-72, 1976-77; Justice 1987; Ka-Zar 1970-72, 1974-75; Killraven/War of the Worlds (1973); Kull 1972-73, 1975; Legion of Monsters 1975; Logan’s Run 1976-77; Luke Cage, Power Man 1973; Man-Thing 1971-72; Mary Jane Watson 1989; Master of Kung Fu 1974; Monsters Unleashed 1973-75; Ms. Marvel 1977; The Punisher 1975, 1991; Satana 1974; Savage Tales 1973; Sgt. Fury 1971, 1974; Shanna (asst.) 1975; Sons of the Tiger 1974-75, 1994; Spider-Man 1970, 1972-77, 1989-92; Spitfire [2nd version] 1986-87; Sub-Mariner 1971-72; Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man (joint Marvel/DC publishing effort) 1976; Supernatural Thrillers 1973; support (e) 1976-77; Tales of the Zombie 1974-75; Thor 1971-75; Thundercats 1986; Tomb of Dracula 1972; Tower of Shadows 1970; Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction 1975; Vampire Tales 1974-75; Werewolf by Night 1972-73; Worlds Unknown 1973; Young Gods 1988, 1992 Skywald Publishing Co.: Nightmare (w)(p) 1971 Topps Comics: Nightglider 1993 Warren Publications: Vampirella (backup story) 1971;

Gerry Conway’s first script for a solo “Black Widow” story—in Amazing Adventures #7 (July 1971)—accompanied pencils by Don Heck and inking by Bill Everett. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

DAN BARRY & Flash Gordon

Continuing Our Look At A Controversial Comics Talent

A/E

By Alberto Becattini

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Last issue saw the first part of this artistic biography of Dan Barry (1923-1997), who in his day was both a leading comic book illustrator and the longrunning force behind the iconic Flash Gordon newspaper comic strip that had been created in 1934 by Alex Raymond. The previous installment dealt with Barry’s comic book career at DC, Lev Gleason, and elsewhere, his relatively brief stint on the Tarzan comic strip, a side foray into advertising, and his and King Features’ re-launching of the daily Flash Gordon comic strip in 1951, after a seven-year hiatus, while he was still drawing a few comic book stories for Ziff-Davis. This time around, Alberto Becattini covers the tempestuous

Flashes Of Two Worlds Dan Barry at the easel, in the early 1950s, pursuing his interest in painting—a photo flanked by his “Johnny Quick” splash page from Adventure Comics #145 (Oct. 1949), starring DC’s very own authorized imitation of super-speedster “The Flash” (scripted by Otto Binder)—and the artist’s vision of Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov sailing the seas of the planet Mongo in the Flash Gordon daily strip for July 21, 1956. The “JQ” scan was sent by Jim Kealy & Michael T. Gilbert; the latter is reproduced from a scan of the original art. Unless otherwise noted, all art & photos accompanying this article were provided by Alberto Becattini. [Adventure page © DC Comics; Flash Gordon daily © King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

Continuing Our Look At A Controversial Comics Talent

Flash Gordon years....

Characters Created, Assistants Wanted During the 39 years Barry worked on Flash Gordon, he came up with several interesting characters. In 1953 he created the Space Kids, which included Ray Carson, Percival “Boom Boom” Dunn, Worriless Willie Casey (a simpleton endowed with psychic powers), and Michael Roberts, better known as “Microbe.” The Space Kids were obviously inspired by The Little Wise Guys, whom Barry had drawn for Daredevil Comics back in 1947 (Microbe, in particular, looked very much like Peewee—hairstyle included). Later on, Barry introduced the mad musician Egon Blant (1955); Dr. Zarkov’s long-lost daughter Zara (1956); con-men Kozy and Scurvy (1956); racketeer Eye McFry and sex bomb Vicki (1961); Brad Masters, a dolphin-tamer on the Venusian seas (1962); another Egon, this one a mild-mannered time traveler from the XXVth century (1963); and the Abyssinian prince and Special Services agent Kenoma (1972), who was the first black character to co-star in Flash Gordon. Since 1948 Barry had also been painting—a passion he would successfully cultivate until the early 1980s. (He had 81 one-man shows in the U.S., France, Denmark, Germany, and Austria, as well as over 60 invitational group exhibitions.) Consequently, he always made large use of assistants on Flash Gordon. Jan Sand lent a hand story-wise for the 1954 “Lost Continent” sequence, which was mostly drawn by Paul Norris, Carmine Infantino, Fred Kida, and Sy Barry. As Sand recalled:

I met Mr. Barry when he had a temporary run at teaching my class at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, substituting for Jerry Robinson for a short period. I graduated from the course shortly afterward and Dan asked me to try out as his assistant. I worked for him for only a short time, in an office in a building, now gone, opposite Cooper The Sand of Time Union. I never got into doing much Born in Brooklyn, NY, actual art assistance for him, but he did and currently residing use me as an idea man and a writer. The in Helsinki, Finland, Flash Gordon strip at the time writer and poet Jan concerned an underwater civilization in Sand was 27 when he the depths off the southern Atlantic coast helped Dan Barry on the Flash Gordon strip. of the USA, and my design for a depth meter for the diving sphere made it into the strip. I also wrote a Sunday sequence involving an asteroid miner named Pebbles living in a hollowed-out asteroid. Dan was very kind to me, but it was obvious our relationship was not very productive. I can only say that Dan was a very generous and kind and hugely talented person.9 In early 1954 Barry had to resign himself to taking over the scripts on the weekly Flash Gordon, too. To speed up things, he would buy plots from such expert story-men as Bob Kanigher and Bill Finger. British-born artist Ralph Mayo regularly assisted on the dailies during 1954-55.

Barry’s Lucky Starr In 1955, Barry left his apartment at the Hotel des Artistes to set up a studio with Leonard Starr and John Prentice. The three of them worked and lived in a large apartment, located at Central Park West and 92nd Street. As Starr recalled:

The Dan Barry Art Gallery (Left:) Barry with his paintings at the Hotel Des Artistes, circa 1954. (Right:) Dan Barry with Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom creator Lee Falk at Barry’s 20th Century West Gallery Collection, circa mid-1950s.

We met when John Prentice and I were both in the middle of a divorce. Our wives had practically wiped us out financially, so our working and living space was pretty primitive. We knew about Dan’s reputation as a difficult guy to get along with, but at our first meeting he was very engaging and fun to be with, so Johnny and I figured what the hell, we’d give it a shot. I would occasionally help Dan out when he was pressed for time for one reason or another. The best it gets in this business is sharing a studio with other cartoonists. With Dan, there was a lot of friction, casting a pall on the place. Over a fairly short period of time, the charming facade he had at the beginning of our relationship crumbled, and he more than justified the reputation we’d ignored. One day, Johnny and I found another place we shared as a studio. Dan Barry was a charismatic, very talented man who, on the basis of our evidence, seemed to seek relationships for the kick of destroying them.10 The first sequence Starr contributed to was “Starling” (1955), [Continued on p. 50]

Dan Barry & Flash Gordon

Some Barry Interesting Characters [All art © King Features, Inc.]

Artists Al Williamson (1931-2010) (above) and Roy G. Krenkel (1918-1983), who’s seen at right, assisted Barry on the Flash Gordon strip during June 1953, drawing backgrounds for the “Space Kids on Zoran” sequence.

(Above:) Major DC Comics writers Robert Kanigher (on left) (1915-2002) and Bill Finger (1914-1974) helped Dan Barry out on plots for both the daily and Sunday Flash Gordon strips. [Photo of RK © Estate of Robert Kanigher.]

Dan Barry-Ralph Mayo art for the April 12, 1955, strip featuring Mike “Microbe” and the Vulke.

Mad musician Egon Blant with Dale Arden in the May 31, 1955, daily. Inks by Joe Giella.

Continuing Our Look At A Controversial Comics Talent

Flash Gordon Inspiration Gallery [on this and facing page] [All art © King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

(Above & right:) Actor Louis Calhern portrayed by Barry as J.B. Pennington in the May 4, 1952, daily strip. Inks by Sam Burlockoff.

(Above:) Artists Leonard Starr (on left) and Dan Barry posing for the Nov. 28, 1955, daily, drawn by Starr, in which Zarkov is holding his dead wife Lisa. Starr would soon graduate to his own hit comic strip, On Stage.

(Left & above:) Actors John Carradine (top) and Charles Laughton become Kozy and Scurvy in the July 8, 1956, daily.

(Above & below:) Veteran comics artist John Giunta posing as Karam for the May 30, 1957, daily.

Dan Barry & Flash Gordon

(Left & below:) Actor Peter Graves serves as a model for Vultzkofski in the April 5, 1958, strip.

(Above & right:) Barry uses actor Ward Bond in the 1953 movie Blowing Wild as a model for Samson Post in the “Colony on Mars” continuity. This panel is from the Aug. 21, 1958, strip.

(Above & right:) Comics/SF writer and sometime artist Harry Harrison on Capri in late 1957, posing as Andy Pace for the Oct. 31, 1958, strip.

(Above & right:) Actor Anthony Quinn becomes Kravnik in the June 30, 1958, daily strip. (Above right & right:) Dan Barry’s 12-yearold son Steven served as a model for the psychic boy Piney Lester, here in the Sept. 19, 1960, daily.

Continuing Our Look At A Controversial Comics Talent

Apartment 4-B—Right Next To Apartment 3-G, Right? Flash, Barin, Dale,and Zara on Mongo in the June 16, 1956, strip drawn by Dan Barry and Leonard Starr. Reproduced from original art. [© the respective copyright holder.]

[Continued from p. 46] which was written by Sid Jacobson, an assistant editor at Harvey Comics at the time, who would later recall:

[NOTE: Aldo Giunta, who wrote “Space Circus” (1955) for Barry before becoming a playwright. —Alberto.]

I met Dan Barry through John Giunta, More Assistants who worked for me long years. I After the Barry-Prentice-Starr studio remember the studio was on Central dissolved in mid-1956, Barry got an Park West, somewhere in the low apartment at a fancy hotel between 57th seventies. I met Dan there either after and 59th Street. For work or during lunch “Cybernia” (1957), Barry hours. Besides Dan, there left the bulk of the Artist John Prentice; photo was John Prentice, Novelist, songwriter, and artwork to the great Wally by Jim Keefe. Leonard Starr, Leonard Starr, and Howie comics editor Sid Jacobson the other comics creator who Wood, who also posed as Post. It seems to me I first was 26 when he wrote one shared an apartment for a Flash Gordon for the gave Dan a synopsis daily sequence for Dan Barry time with Dan Barry, was reference photos Barry in 1955. which he would then go pictured on p. 48. took with his Polaroid over. Then I proceeded to camera. As for the plot, he write it panel by panel, and probably gave it to asked science-fiction writer/editor Larry Shaw for him to edit in weekly pieces. I do remember that help. As Shaw later recalled: the changes and corrections were enormous and it became tedious for me. The only sequence I did One Saturday morning in 1957 when I was still in was the “Starling” story. After I finished it, he bed in my apartment on Greenwich Street, New wanted me to continue. But I had started to write York City, the telephone rang. A cheerful and Artist Tom Sawyer (nee Tom songs at that time and didn’t want this distraction Scheuer) was interviewed by disgustingly wide-awake voice announced that the to my “blazing career.” Somehow I recall that a Jim Amash for A/E #77. caller was Dan Barry, the man who drew the Flash 11 nephew of John Giunta’s came after me. Photo courtesy of Tom.

Done And Dusted April 1, 1957, daily strip by Dan Barry and Tom Sawyer; the latter penciled the “Dust Devil” sequence for Barry. Reproduced from the original art. [© King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

Dan Barry & Flash Gordon

Gordon daily strip. He had also “The Time Pendulum” started, which been writing it… but he had was penciled by André LeBlanc, who written himself into a corner, was later recalled: in trouble, and needed a good I had not seen Dan since working science-fiction writer to help him with him at Binder’s, and I got a out. I went out and had breakfast call from him in 1957, when he with him and he hired me. To make was planning to return to Europe. it more interesting for himself, Dan He knocked himself out on Flash was trying to do a satirical story set Gordon. He really worked on the in an extra-terrestrial city-state the strip with love, dedication, and government of which was designed hard work. So at that time, he chiefly to give Dan the opportudiscovered you could Science-fiction The incomparable nities for poking fun at save a lot of money on writer/editor Larry T. Shaw Wally Wood (1927-1981) bureaucracy. My (1924-1985) provided plots lent Barry a hand on taxes... if you could go to solution was to get for both the daily and Flash Gordon in 1957. Europe and spend 18 Flash to take the alien Sunday Flash Gordon strips months there and then ruler on a hunting trip during 1957-58. come back, you got a in the surrounding jungle, thus doing a quick break on your American switch to slam-bang action-adventure without taxes. Among other things, he said, “André, I’ve got losing the characters or the entire original plot a deal for you, come with me to Europe, and we’ll idea. I continued writing the daily for a while have a great time, we’ll turn out the strip”… and he and eventually wrote three complete Sunday offered me a salary which was good in those days… sequences with very little direct supervision from $250 a week. And I said, “Dan, I’m a married man.” Dan. Dan Barry was first and foremost a true He said, “Take your wife along.” He was going to craftsman, and I learned valuable things from 12 live in Kitzbühel in the Austrian Alps. I said, Dan, him. André LeBlanc (1921-1998), I’ve got friends here; I’ve got work here, my wife.” a longtime friend of Barry’s, In September 1957, a Mongo storyline entitled So he asked Ric Estrada, and Ric went with him.13 often contributed to the Flash Gordon strip between 1957 and 1986.

The Pic And The Pendulum Though signed by Dan Barry, this Jan. 6, 1957, strip was actually drawn by André LeBlanc and inked by Dan’s brother, Sy Barry. [©King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

Continuing Our Look At A Controversial Comics Talent

Back To The Future Past (Left to right in photo:) Gary Davis, Harry Harrison, and Dan Barry in Europe, circa 1957. The opening captions in the March 17, 1957, and May 5, 1957, strips inform the readers that the Flash Gordon strip is set ten years in the future. [© King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

the daily scripts as well as the Sunday for Mac Raboy. I worked for Dan for cash; as far as I knew, [King Features editor Sylvan] Byck never heard of my existence. Nor did Mac Raboy, whom I never met. I rarely saw the final artwork.14 With Sy Barry acting as a kind of supervisor on the strip during most of Dan’s stay in Europe, Dan and Harry Harrison came up with some great characters and stories for the daily Flash Gordon. In October 1958 they introduced the Skorpi, which Harrison described as follows:

Barry In Europe As a teacher/lecturer for the School of Visual Arts, in 1957 Barry was invited to tour U.S. bases in Europe for the USO. Barry eventually moved there in August 1957. At different times he lived in the South of France, England, Italy, and Austria. Through Gary Davis, an intellectual who promoted World Government, Barry got in touch with SF writer Harry Harrison. Harrison moved to Italy with his wife Joan Marian and their three-year-old son Todd in January 1958. He was drawn to the island of Capri as Gary Davis was planning to go there to escape from the Italian police. It was in Capri that Harrison started to write plotlines for Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon strip. As he later recalled: I wrote the first script in late 1957 or early 1958. I wrote all

The size of a man, roughly humanoid in shape and appearance, nevertheless they are descended from insects, as man is descended from mammals. This is how they really look, but they are masters of disguise. They can mold artificial flesh and disguise themselves as any human or alien of the same size. They communicate by projecting their thoughts. When duplicating an individual they place him in a special machine that enables them to read and absorb all his thoughts.15 The Skorpi also appeared in the Sundays as of February 15, 1959, and they were first visualized as overgrown grasshoppers. Later on they looked definitely more human, wearing uniforms, helmets, and dark goggles. Dan Barry joined Harry Harrison on Capri after leaving France in the late summer of 1958. By late 1958 Barry had settled in Italy,

Skorpi Diem! An alien Skorpi undergoes an underwater transformation in the May 28, 1959, strip drawn by Frank Giacoia. [© King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

Dan Barry & Flash Gordon

whereas the Harrisons were in New York, where Harry’s daughter Moira was born and where his first novel, Deathworld, was completed. In the space of two months, Harrison and Barry planned Flash and Dale’s wedding—and then their break-up. As written by Harrison: But of course the marriage first. In fact the marriage under the pressure of the immediate attack on the Skorpi will be for the best. Won’t need all the build-up and ballyhoo on TV and such. How about a military type wedding at the Space Academy—Flash in uniform, Dale in the usual bride bit? It should be a wedding in space, in space suits and such. Real people get married all the time on TV shows, jumping in parachutes, skin-diving etc. Why can’t we do the same for two comic characters? And shortly after: It’s a whole new world you suggest for Flash—and I’m for it. We see eye to eye on the break-up with Dale. Good! Bomb the reader and keep him jumping. Having Steve an engineer works in, let’s make it a civil engineer. Roads, bridges and such. This means we don’t have to lose him and Dale. Retire them from the strip awhile, then when Flash is on a job on another planet—who gets called in but Steve & wife! Emotional conflict. Trying to work with a nice guy who he should like for all reasons but hates for stealing Dale.16 The “Steve” referred to in Harrison’s notes was Steve Benton,

who was introduced to Flash by Dale as her new fiancée in one of the most dramatic sequences Barry drew for the strip.

Footnotes For This Issues Segment: 9

Jan Sand, e-mail interview with Alberto Becattini, 29 and 30 April, 2011.

Leonard Starr, e-mail interview with Alberto Becattini, 10 June 2011.

Excerpted from Sid Jacobson, letter to Arthur Lortie, in The Comics! newsletter, date unknown.

Harry Harrison, e-mail to Arthur Lortie, 26 June 2000.

Harry Harrison, memorandum to Dan Barry dated 29 October 1958.

Harry Harrison, Memorandums to Dan Barry dated 2 February 1959 and 12 April 1959.

Alberto Becattini’s artistic biography of Dan Barry will be continued next issue.

Modern Romance? No—Future Romance! Two crucial moments from the 1959 Flash Gordon strip: Flash’s proposal to Dale on February 27, and their break-up on July 8. Inks by Frank Giacoia. [© King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

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(Right:) Bob Powell’s rejected intro page for Harvey’s Man In Black. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions, from the Joe Simon collection. [© Harvey Comics or the respective copyright holders.]

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

The Mystery Of The Missing Comic! - Part 1 by Michael T. Gilbert

very collector dreams of someday finding a “lost” comic. Who hasn’t fantasized about plunking down a buck for a coverless Action Comics #1 at a flea market? Or discovering a forgotten Marvel Comics #1 “ashcan” in Aunt Petunia’s closet? Or maybe even stumbling on a hitherto unknown issue of a ‘50s comic— one not even listed in Overstreet? I recently found a “lost” comic myself: the fifth issue of Harvey Comics’ Man in Black, a series that officially ended with #4! But before I get into that story, let’s first discuss Mr. Black’s checkered history.

Strange Ad-venture!

I was a lad of fourteen when I first stumbled onto “The Man in Black Called Fate” in the back of Harvey’s Green Hornet #31 (Dec. 1946). The year was 1965, and it was love at first sight.

This early Man in Black ad is from Harvey’s Stuntman #1 (April 1946). [© Harvey Comics or the respective copyright holders.]

Though his origin was never officially stated, the Man in Black was clearly someone to be taken seriously. Draped in a blue-black cloak, his face hidden in shadows, Fate made a most imposing figure. To my eye, Bob Powell’s baby completely blew away the lead feature.

Bob Powell. With thanks to son Seth Powell; sent in conjunction with the cover article on the artist in Alter Ego #67, still available from TwoMorrows Publishing.

He Gets Around!

Powell had actually drawn a similar character in 1940, when he created The Shadowman as a foil to Mr. Mystic, the supernatural backup-series hero in Will Eisner’s Spirit Section.

Powell revisited the concept in November 1945, when he drew the premier “Man in Black” stories for All-New Comics #11 and Front Page #1. From then on, Fate became Powell’s signature character. In a letter to Jerry DeFuccio dated July 10, 1966 (published in Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #10), Powell talked about his dark hero:

Like the Man in Black, The Shadowman was also a reaper of souls. He was also a fairly sympathetic character, performing a necessary but sometimes unpleasant job.

“Man in Black was my favorite, of course, and my baby exclusively (though Harvey owns, natch).” Powell remained virtually the only artist to draw

The Shadowman Knows! Powell’s Shadowman was a precursor to the Man in Black. From the Dec. 22, 1940, Spirit Section. [© Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

The Mystery Of The Missing Comic – Part 1

him from his 1945 debut to his final exit in 1966. The Man in Black was less a star in his stories than an instigator. If someone was about to embark on a trip on the Titanic, Fate might save him by misplacing the person’s ticket. In other stories he simply sat back and observed man’s folly. The Man in Black was also called (at various times) Mr. Twilight, Kismet, Luck, Fate, or even Death. As Fate would have it, he’d turn up in the most unexpected places. One month you might find a “Man in Black” story in anthologies like Front Page, All-New, or Strange Story Comics. The next you’d find him working his magic in a Terry and the Pirates backup tale. His longest Golden Age run was in four issues of Harvey’s Green Hornet (#31-34) in the late ’40s. In 1957, the Man of Mystery finally earned his own title, as part of Harvey’s Joe Simon-edited “Thrill Adventure” line, sharing rack space with Race to the Moon, Alarming Tales, and similar titles.

Coming Soon! (Above:) Another Man in Black ad, this one from Black Cat Mystic #59 (Sept. 1957). Note the differences between the girl in the painting here, the ad on the previous page, and the published cover. [© 2014 Harvey Comics or the respective copyright holders.]

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Back From The Dead! Sadly, the experiment only lasted a few months, though Powell managed to get four exquisite issues of Man in Black in print before Harvey pulled the plug on the Thrill Adventure line. Afterwards, Harvey played it safe with Casper the Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich, and other kiddie fare. The lone exceptions were three issues of Alarming Adventures in 1962 and a trio of 25¢ Black Cat specials in ’62 and ’63, reprinting stories of Harvey’s venerable super-heroine. But in 1965, in the wake of the success of TV’s Batman show, Harvey launched their Thriller line aimed at older readers. One of these titles, Thrill-ORama, featured unseen Powell “Man in Black” stories. Fate was cover-featured in the first issue, but another hero, Pirana, took over for the final two. Once again the Man in Black was kicked to the back of the bus. Such was Fate’s unkind fate. Powell’s final published “Man in Black” story appeared in ThrillO-Rama #3, cover-dated December 1966. Less than a year later, Bob Powell lost a battle with intestinal cancer, passing away on October 1, 1967, at age 51. After that, I resigned myself to the fact that I’d never again have the pleasure of reading a new Powell “Man in Black” story. But Fate, it seems, had other ideas.

A Fate-ful Encounter! In April 2014, I came across some original art scans posted on the Heritage website. Heritage, one of the leading auction houses specializing in comics and comic art, also maintains a remarkable scanned archive of their past sales. When I looked up Powell, I discovered an entire 5-page “Man in Black” story they had auctioned off a couple of years earlier. But something confused me.

Hiroshima! Art on this and the following pages are from a Powell-drawn “Man in Black” story intended for the unpublished Man in Black #5. From the Joe Simon collection, courtesy of Heritage Auctions. [© 2014 Harvey Comics or the respective copyright holders.]

My collection contained all the “Man in Black” stories, but I’d never seen this particular one. How was that possible? Notes on the Heritage website revealed that the story had been

part of Joe Simon’s personal art collection, auctioned after his death in 2011. Other items included original art saved during Joe’s tenure editing Harvey’s Thrill Adventure series in the late ’50s, as well as their Harvey Thriller line in the 60s. And then I learned why I didn’t recognize the “Man in Black”

The Mystery Of The Missing Comic – Part 1

story. It turned out to be an unpublished 1958 tale focusing on the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. Heritage suggested it was scrapped because the subject matter was too tough to print in the tame post-Comics Code era. But I was curious to know if it was dropped from issue #4, or originally intended for a different book? I kept searching the Heritage website hoping for a clue, and was rewarded with another surprise: an unfinished Powell “Man in Black” intro page. You can see it at the beginning of this article. Harvey’s adventure comics always led off with a preview page featuring teaser-panels from each story in the book. Powell’s art, fully inked but unlettered, provided valuable clues about the history of the Hiroshima story. The page shows a number of vignettes. One features a scene from the unpublished Hiroshima story, while another depicts a “debonair jewel thief.” A third tells the tale of a marble statue in ancient Persia. The final story concerns an Italian peasant, robbed by “unscrupulous world travellers.” None of the stories on the splash page appear in issue #4, so I quickly dismissed a theory that the unfinished page had been planned for that issue, and scrapped at the last minute when the Hiroshima story was rejected. Instead, it seemed almost certain that both the splash and the unpublished story were intended for an aborted fifth issue. But what happened to the other stories previewed on the splash? We’ll look into that and more next issue. We’ll also conclude this “Man in Black” story, printed here for the first time. As an added treat, we’ll bring you another unpublished tale featuring our Fateful hero, drawn in 1966. It’s the only “Man in Black” story Bob Powell didn’t do. See you then! Till next time…

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

The Man In Black Called... Death! (Left & fart left:) Bob Powell and Marty Epp introduce Fate in All-New Comics #11 (Nov. 1945). Another “Man in Black” story was published the same month in Front Page #1. [© 2014 Harvey Comics or the respective copyright holders.]

Comic Fandom Archive

The 20-Cent Plague A Chat With JIRO TOMIYAMA, Editor Of A Little-Known Comics Fanzine From January 1961! by Bill Schelly

Introduction

t has long been established that there were fanzines either partially or fully dedicated to comic strips and comic books as early as the 1930s. At first, most were published by members of science-fiction fandom, and later by those in the EC fandom that arose in 1953 with the publication of Bhob Stewart’s EC Fan Bulletin #1. After the demise of EC Comics and Picto-Fiction, some of the EC fanzines continued, most notably Ron Parker’s Hoohah. Then came fanzines that followed the work of the EC artists in other publications, or that imitated Mad, or that published a mix of SF and comics material, such as Larry Ivie’s Concept. In addition, a group of fantasy and comics fans in California united to form the West Coast Zines (WCZ) group, putting out a number of publications devoted to fantastic films and literature. One such fanzine was Jiro Tomiyama’s Plague (1961), a virtually all-comics fanzine that only had one issue. Seemingly forgotten, the Comic Fandom Archives is dedicated to giving this obscure amateur magazine the recognition it deserves. After all, it came before both Alter Ego #1 and

Comic Art #1, and it was a high-quality publication. When I contacted its editor, Jiro Tomiyama was amendable to an interview but requested that we do it through e-mail. It was completed in October 2013. BILL SCHELLY: When and where were you born? JIRO TOMIYAMA: I was born in the Boyle Heights district on the Eastside of Los Angeles, several months after the start of World War II. April 3, 1942, to be exact. Not long after, our family was moved with others to the relocation camp of Manzanar, California (now a national monument) till sometime in 1944. BS: Could you describe how your interest in cartoons and in doing your own artwork evolved before you got involved in fandom? TOMIYAMA: Like a lot of kids, I liked to draw from a very early age. One of the first lickings I ever got from my father was the time I drew a mural with crayons on the wall above my bed. I had to be six or seven at the

A Plague On Both Your Houses! Jiro Tomiyama in the late 1950s (left), and in November 2013 (right)—and the cover of Plague #1, printed partly via photo offset and partly (the red areas) via silk screen. Art by Jiro Tomiyama. [© Jiro Tomiyama.]

Comic Fandom Archive

time. It was a battle scene from a movie I had recently seen, and I tried as best I could to be faithful to the number of soldiers and explosions that I could remember from it. Getting a licking didn’t stop me from liking to draw, but I never used the walls as a medium again. From there it was an easy jump to enjoying comic books and the artwork in them. BS: How did you find out about fandom? TOMIYAMA: I only got involved in fandom through my association with Ron Haydock and Larry Byrd. I knew Larry from high school. But they are the ones that got me interested in it, and introduced me to it after high school. BS: Please specify your personal interests beyond comic strips and animation. Were you also into fantasy films, comic books, science-fiction, ERB, or what? TOMIYAMA: I enjoyed reading the stories from all the various comic titles of EC and admired the artwork of several illustrators there: Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Joe Orlando, Russ Heath, and Harvey Kurtzman. My older brother was an avid collector of EC comics as well and made a point of hard-binding his purchases. EC comics were a source of inspiration for many kids my age. They were the reason many of us went into the art business. I also enjoyed science-fiction and horror movies like many other kids of my age, but I wasn’t into fandom for those areas. BS: Were you aware of Dick and Pat Lupoff’s fanzine Xero at the time you did Plague? TOMIYAMA: If I was aware of Xero at the time, I no longer have any memory of it or the publishers. The truth is, I had very little awareness of what else was going on in comic fandom. If I had, I think Plague would probably been a different product. But it was a very early time, so it’s not really so surprising that I had no knowledge of the Lupoffs or Xero.

TOMIYAMA: During high school, Jack Davis (at EC) was my model as a drawer/illustrator. I liked his cross-hatched style of rendering and tried to emulate his work. And so, afterwards, while going to junior college, I illustrated the cover for Plague as a penand-ink drawing and cross-hatched it... not Jack Davis quality, but I did my best. I think there was some effort to imitate some of the stuff I’d seen in Mad, when it was edited by Harvey Kurtzman. Larry encouraged me to do something in fanzines along those lines, and I thought, sure, why not? BS: How did you come up with the title Plague? It’s rather off-beat. TOMIYAMA: I wanted to suggest that its popularity could catch and infect others. I had a promotion for it with such a theme in mind at one time. Obviously, a forlorn notion, in view of its single issue. BS: You were obviously a talented artist. Did you study art? Did you want a career in cartooning or art? If so, briefly, how did that pan out? TOMIYAMA: I was always interested in art. I thought it would be best to put my effort in the thing that came the easiest for me. I’d gotten a small scholarship while I was in high school and got grants and won another scholarship while I was in college. Although drawing was my first interest, I got involved in graphic design, as well, and that was what I decided to concentrate on in college and night classes at the local art school. I did fine in the art and graphics business. Although I didn’t follow through on the drawing/illustrating side of things, I got back to some of it after retiring. I paint plein-aire landscapes now on a pretty regular basis. [NOTE: “Plein-aire” means “painting in the open air,” i.e., outdoors. — Bill.] BS: What printing process was used for Plague’s striking 2-color cover?

BS: What was the West Coast Zine group? Can you give a quick rundown of the fanzines and their publishers? TOMIYAMA: Ron Haydock had already been doing Ape before coming to California, and Larry was already doing Terror. That’s why they started to correspond. After meeting, Ron and his wife settled in Los Angeles. He and Larry [Byrd] were in contact a lot and became close friends. In the course of all that, they thought it would be fun to start their own little fanzine publishing “empire.” So, to go beyond the two titles, they talked me, Charlie Scarborough, and Charlie and Stan Walters into doing our own titles. We all had a mutual obsession for the EC titles, and Larry thought it would be a great idea to build a stable of fanzines much like EC had done with their professional titles. BS: Which of the fanzines did you contribute to? Describe your involvement leading up to Plague itself. TOMIYAMA: I contributed some art to Beyond #2, which was never published. I really can’t recall contributing anything else, although that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But not on a large scale if it did happen. I was 19 or 20 at the time.... I was pretty callow, like a lot of folks at that age. Doing Plague was my first involvement and introduction with any kind of comic art fandom. Prior to that, there were only meetings with Ron Haydock and Larry Byrd with a lot of talk about how we would use our talents to pull together. BS: Please tell the story of the “origin” of Plague. Were you in high school at the time?

Know Your WCZ’s (Top row:) Ron Haydock (Ape, Skybird), Larry Byrd (Terror). (Bottom row:) Charlie Scarborough (Beyond), Jiro Tomiyama (Plague). Together they formed the West Coast Zines group. Photos courtesy of Larry Byrd.

The 20-Cent Plague

writing, and I liked Walt Kelly’s inking style. BS: There are several items in Plague that are simply labeled “reviews,” articles on The Flintstones, Mister Magoo, and Dondi. The Dondi piece was written by Stanford Abrahams. Who was he? And who wrote the other two reviews? TOMIYAMA: Stanford Abrahams... hmmmmm. I’m sorry to say I don’t recollect how I came in contact with him. The other material, I believe, was stuff gleaned from the publicity departments of the companies that owned the brands. BS: Who wrote the piece on political cartoons? TOMIYAMA: That piece was written by the editor of the Belmont High School newspaper at the time, who was a work colleague of mine named Art Yamamoto. BS: Although the cartoon strip and animation characters (Pogo, Dondi, Mister Magoo, The Flintstones) appeared in comic books, they were biggest in their original form. The only article in the issue about comic books as a medium was “Downfall of Comics” by Mike Deckinger, and the attached “Comic Art Hall of Fame,” which included 5 or 6 comicbook artists. Were you a fan of comic books, and if so, which ones? Would there have been articles on comic books in future issues of Plague, if it had continued?

Funny, Those Animals! (Above:) Jiro’s artwork accompanying a syndicate-provided bio of Pogo writerartist Walt Kelly. [Pogo TM & © Estate of Walt Kelly.] (Below right:) Although swiped from a Life magazine image, Tomiyama’s Flintstones drawing shows how skilled he was at working on ditto masters. The Flintstones’ animated prime-time TV series had debuted on Sept. 30, 1960, three months before Plague #1 was published. [Flintstones TM & © Time-Warner.]

TOMIYAMA: Larry Byrd knew a lithography printer that he had connections with, and so the cover was done in litho in combination with silk screen (the red border). BS: One of the notable aspects of Plague was the quality of its ditto printing, and your expertise in drawing on ditto masters. How did you acquire that skill? Did you have your own ditto machine? TOMIYAMA: Nearly all of the fanzines at the time were mimeographed, but Larry had no access to a mimeograph machine. A little research on Larry’s part introduced him to the ditto process, and then he discovered that his church had one and that there were different-colored ditto masters one could use. After that, we figured some things out, and were off and running. BS: When you say “straight from the Hall Syndicate,” am I correct in understanding that the Walt Kelly bio was a reprint from their publicity material for Pogo? Were you a big Pogo fan? TOMIYAMA: You are quite right about that. I just wrote for the information from their publicity department and they were happy to send it along to me. I loved Pogo. I liked the

TOMIYAMA: I have to confess that the platform of a fanzine would have been better served if it had focused on comic art and related themes more. So, looking back after all these years, it seems as though, at the time, I was trying to put humor into the thing wherever I could, rather than concentrating on what comic fans might want to read about. I didn’t have a clear idea of a target audience with regard to providing material. If I’d stayed with it, I think I would’ve done better, what with responses from folks who were interested in comics and comic art. As I’ve indicated before, I was a big EC fan (I liked all the titles) and of others, such as Tarzan, Captain Marvel, Donald Duck, Plastic Man, etc. I liked to draw and I was hoping to connect with folks who were attracted to the same things. BS: Just curious, how did you get hold of the Deckinger piece? Did you know him? Did you request it? Or did another editor send it to you? Of course, he wrote for Xero and was one of the better fan writers of the

Comic Fandom Archive

Disney Daze (Left:) “The Downfall of Comics” was a screed against Dr. Fredric Wertham (here, “Dr. Frederic Worthless”) by talented fan writer Mike Deckinger. The excellent illustration is by “Jeets” (Jiro Tomiyama). [Characters TM & © Walt Disney Studios.]

BS: What kind of feedback did you get on Plague?

time. TOMIYAMA: I can’t help you there. You know more about Mike Deckinger than I do. I suspect the contact came from Larry Byrd or Ron Haydock. If we corresponded, I don’t recall. I never met Mike. And I don’t recall the circumstances on how I was able to acquire the piece. I’m sorry I can’t give you more information, but it’s been over 50 years.

TOMIYAMA: Not bad. I sent a copy of Plague to Harvey Kurtzman at EC, and his assistant, Chuck Alverson, wrote me a real nice letter, saying how much he enjoyed it and how funny he thought it was. [NOTE: Kurtzman was editing Help! magazine for Warren Publishing at the time. —Bill.] I heard back from some other folks and the tone was pretty positive. I wish I’d saved the letters. I traded fanzines with Robert Crumb and his brother Charles. But don’t ask me anything more about that exchange. Robert Crumb I have to give a world of credit to. He stayed with the drawing and then became a superstar of underground comics. Who would’ve known in those days? My guess would be that not even Robert had an inkling. BS: How would you summarize the experience of publishing Plague? When you think back on it, what did it mean to you?

BS: Did you have meetings of the WCZ guys? What sort of fannish activities happened apart from fanzine publishing? Were you big into correspondence with others? TOMIYAMA: We had informal meetings. We were an enthusiastic bunch of young guys with ideas and little experience. In hindsight, a mentor would’ve been good. Larry and Ron were more active than Charlie and I were, and did a lot of schmoozing with other fans and fan groups. We would tag along sometimes. I met Forrest Ackerman and Jim Harmon that way. I wasn’t into correspondence with others because I didn’t really know anyone at the time. I was a beginner. I did get to know Jim Harmon a little, because he always seemed to hang out at Ron Haydock’s house. Jim was a good and generous man. BS: Why didn’t Plague continue? TOMIYAMA: The truth of the matter is, I was 20, and had just got a regular job through the help of Charlie Scarborough at the Beverly Hills Post Office. I bought a car, and like most guys my age, started to chase women on a serious basis. With that and my studies in college, the fanzine thing fizzled out. BS: How many copies of Plague were printed? TOMIYAMA: Ditto runs weren’t especially long, which you probably know. But mimeograph, the other choice, was a poor medium to draw for. I can’t say exactly what the number was. My best guess would be well under one hundred copies.

What, No Alex Raymond? Editor Tomiyama’s self-selected “Comic Art Hall of Fame” for 1961, each caricature drawn in the artist’s style. (Top row:) Frank Frazetta, George Evans, Milton Caniff. (Second row:) Jack Davis, Al Williamson. (Third row:) Hal Foster, Wally Wood, Reed Crandall. All EC alums except Caniff and Foster. [Art © Jiro Tomiyama.]

The 20-Cent Plague

The Tell-Tale Horror Imaginative artwork from Plague by Jiro Tomiyama, titled “The Horror Story Teller.” [© Jiro Tomiyama.]

TOMIYAMA: You’re talking about a one-shot project. I had fun, for sure. My enthusiasm overtook other sensibilities at the time. I never regretted my involvement in it for one minute, but practical living issues became paramount. If circumstances were otherwise, I believe I would’ve enjoyed developing the fanzine into something a lot more focused and substantial. BS: How did you make your living over the years since 1961? Are you still a fan of comics, animation, and such? TOMIYAMA: I worked at various art studios, advertising agencies, and publications, and wound up with a solid job at Mattel Toys. I spent a good many years there as an art director/designer. After I left the company, I freelanced for perhaps 15 years before retiring. I’m not much of a comic fan anymore. My connection to comics and comic art nowadays comes from folks I knew in the business who became friends and who are still great fans. There was a comic art exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles years ago that blew me away, but not enough for me to get back into the scene. I have a friend who was a professional cartoonist, Errol McCarthy, who is writing and illustrating a 3-D comic book in his retirement. It’s a funny, imaginative piece of work. I believe he wants to make it into a series. BS: Are you still in touch with any of the WCZ guys or other contributors to Plague? Which ones, if any? TOMIYAMA: A couple of folks from that group have passed away.

The Elephants In The Room A recent drawing by the very talented Mr. Tomiyama. [© Jiro Tomiyama.]

Ron Haydock published a horror magazine, not a fanzine, which I worked on (not very well, I’m afraid), but I don’t recall it went very far. [NOTE: It was called Fantastic Monsters of the Films. — Bill.] He later started working with Ray Steckler in Hollywood, who made B-movies with mostly horror themes. Ron was killed in an accident outside Las Vegas on his way back to Los Angeles.

Comic Fandom Archive

I also stayed in touch with Val Klishevich, who was a contributor to Charlie Scarborough’s Beyond. He wrote and illustrated a story in the first issue before joining the Army. He died about 7 or 8 years ago. Larry Byrd is still very much a fan and alive and well in Texas, although I don’t know if he is involved with other areas of fandom. Charlie Scarborough is no longer involved in comic art and no longer draws. And he hasn’t since those very early days. BS: Was “Jeets” your fanzine nickname, an art pseudonym, a nickname your “real-life” friends used for you, or what? TOMIYAMA: “Jeets” was a nickname I picked up in high school (short for “Jiro,” which everyone had problems with). But no one has used that moniker since then except Charlie Scarborough and Larry Byrd. Why would anyone care? Oh, there was one fellow that called me that in my recent 50th high school reunion. It’s amazing what people remember after five decades. I guess that’s a way of saying that it’s amazing they can remember anything after five decades. BS: Thanks for sharing your memories with us. Next time, we visit with Al Dellinges, Kubert fan extraordinaire and a publisher in his own right. Then, it’ll be on to our multi-issue tribute to Gordon Love and RBCC. If you wish to get in touch with Bill Schelly, his email address is: hamstrpres@aol.com.

Byrd’s-Eye View Plague #1 devoted several pages to sketches by WCZ members, including those of Larry Byrd, reproduced here. [Art © the respective artists.]

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graduate in Education. But she started having babies—five in all. Her musical interest changed from classical to the type of Daddy’s avocation—popular music, a sort of parlor jazz—popular songs of the day… and her voice range from high soprano to the more popular ‘contralto’ – (lower).” [Plus this note, soon after the issue came out] Received copies of A/E just a little while ago. Mother and I are reading and crying. It’s beautiful. Thank you so much. Desha and June

Marc was and remains a part of FCA and of Alter Ego, Desha and June… in many ways, as much as our original angels from our 1960s edition, Julius Schwartz, Gardner Fox, and Otto Binder… and we’ll continue to feature his art and information about him whenever the opportunity presents itself. Last issue, as you know, we printed a transcript of an appearance of his on Louisiana TV.

Many others remarked on Marc’s importance to comics, among them Chet Cox, who helps A/E enormously by overseeing the Alter-Ego-Fans chat list. He posted this on the site:

incerest thanks to Shane Foley for rendering a great “maskot” illo to accompany the “Gerry Conway issue” of A/E—and to Randy Sargent for coloring it! The Alter Ego super-hero Dann and I (that’s Roy, in first person singular rather than any royal/editorial “we”) created with artist Ron Harris back in 1986 has probably appeared in more drawings in the pages of this magazine than he has in the five issues—so far—of his own color comic book series (which is still available from Heroic Publishing). And our A/E art-and-color team do a great job with him! [Alter Ego hero TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas; hero designed by Ron Harris.]

Alter Ego #119 was a bittersweet issue for all of us connected with the magazine. It had originally been planned to celebrate the 100th birthday of Marc Swayze, the Golden Age Fawcett artist whose work on “Captain Marvel,” “Mary Marvel,” “Phantom Eagle,” and numerous romance stories had been covered in the first “century” or so of its FCA [Fawcett Collectors of America] segments. Alas, Marc passed away at the age of 99+. Even so, in July 2013, which would have been the month he hit the century mark, we celebrated those 99½ years. The outpouring from A/E’s readers was voluminous and heartwarming. And, shortly before we went to press, we received this e-mail from his daughter Desha Swayze, underscoring the strong bond between her father and mother, June Swayze, who had a singing career of her own for a time: Hi Roy—

The following is a note from Daddy:

“While still a music student, June sang with the Milton Coverdale Orchestra and the Collie Fontana Orchestra, both ‘technical bands’ of this region… as opposed to ‘on the road’ traveling orchestras. A particularly outstanding performance was in Shreveport, Louisiana, with the ‘Debonnaires’ of Louisiana Tech, where even the members of the band stood and applauded her vocal rendition. Her capabilities at the piano were of particular importance.”

He also wrote the following, although he made it sound like I wrote it:

“June was still in school when she married Daddy. She was studying music. She was a soprano studying voice and was to

In A/E #119, my favorite section was FCA. I never met Marc Swayze, never corresponded with Marc Swayze, but I miss him. The tribute was as filled as it could and should be, because Marc had already shared so much of his life with us for the past mumblemumble years. (Where does the time go?)

When I turned to page 55, I cried. God bless Mark Lewis for that drawing. God bless Roy, Bill, and Jim for ensuring that Marc and our other heroes are not lost to memory and unwritten history. Chet Cox

The honor was ours, Chet, as you know. By the way, if anyone has any trouble joining the Alter-Ego-Fans list at group.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans, they can contact Chet at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll give them all the help they need to sign up! Mark Lewis drew the internal cover of the FCA portion of A/E #119—the one that drew sincere tears from Chet Cox above—and he had this to say about the entire issue: Hi Roy—

This was a particularly good issue. The lead-off interview with Mel Keefer caught my attention for a reason beyond that of general interest: it happens that a few of my friends and colleagues in animation actually worked with Mel. Michael T. Gilbert’s article on “The Men Who Would Be Kurtzman” was especially neat for the revelation of Charles Stern. You could’ve told me that his work there was actual Kurtzman, and I’d have totally believed you! It’s a stunner. Kurtzman! It’s not an easy thing to pull off. I can already tell I’m going to enjoy reading Otto Binder’s stream-of-consciousness ramblings (Memoirs of a Nobody). But that shouldn’t be too surprising, as I’ve been enjoying reading his “Captain Marvel” stories for years.

I really enjoyed the interview with June Swayze, too. While you get the most comics-related info out of interviews directly with comic book creators, there’s a lot of value in getting the perspectives of family members, as well. Here, we get a slightly different angle on Marc, his wife, and his family. And their common interest in music, too. It gives us a fuller picture of who he was. Their long and loving relationship is something to be greatly admired and

re:

aspired to.

The 100th Birthday Tribute Section, in my opinion? Spot on! You captured exactly the right tone. Not maudlin, but celebrating the life of someone who was not just a comics artist who did his work well, but a man who lived his life well.

I loved touches such as that photo of him in 7th grade with the black eye and broken arm, still smiling! That’s almost the makings of a Norman Rockwell painting there. You know there’s a great story behind that image. And it was fascinating to see his color versions of Mary Marvel, how he gave her black hair. I’d never considered it (due to her hair always being colored brown in the comics), but it makes perfect sense that he intended her to have black hair, given that Mary and Billy were twins. A really great job. I tend to think Mr. Swayze would’ve been pleased. Mark Lewis

We hope so, Mark! FCA editor Paul C. Hamerlinck, who forwarded the above e-mail which Mark had sent via him, also sent us the actual story behind Marc Swayze’s black-eye childhood photo that Mark cites—

in Marc’s own words, as transcribed a few years back by his oldest daughter, Judy Swayze Blackman:

“I had nothing against Ferguson. I hardly knew him. I don’t know why we were fighting and probably didn’t know then. A couple of older boys had brought him from up the street where he lived to our block, presumably, from the way they were cheering for him, to beat me up. So there we were, slugging it out… for their entertainment. Between blows, some issued, some taken, I glimpsed a face… at the top of our high board back fence. Someone was quietly watching from the yard. My brother! I have never known why… but I began to cry. My pals, O.H. and T-Bone, insisted I was ahead, but it was too late… the fight was over. And I didn’t even have a bloody nose. Ferguson had a bloody nose. But I was crying. My brother, the world’s greatest guy… except for Papa… was mad. Not at the other kids… mad at me! And disgusted! Kept calling me a snottynosed crybaby all the way to the house!” Thanks, Paul!

Here’s another artist-to-artist tribute, this one from Mark Staff Brandl: Hi Roy!

I am loving the glossy colorful A/E look, and the issue on Marc Swayze was wonderful. I was so taken with his wild, sketchy sketchbook drawings of Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel from A/E a couple of years ago that I used them as inspiration for the newest painting I was doing for my huge painting-illustration (since I was headed in that way anyway, especially due to my influence from Gene Colan and Jackson Pollock—if you like, see www.markstaffbrandl.com/jedlitschka%20panorama.html). In particular, the John Lennon/Shuster Superman painting I did (www.markstaffbrandl.com/dripped_double_portrait.html). I sent Marc images of the stuff and a sketch that I did in that style of him, based on a photo in A/E. Later I called him up and we had a great talk. He said he really liked and appreciated my art and my contacting him, that he had wanted to write back but was getting too weak. He sounded great on the phone, though. I am happy I had the chance to tell him of all my (and many people’s) appreciation of him, something that came due to your mag. Mark Staff Brandl

Glad you and Marc had a chance to talk, Mark… especially since you live in Germany, right?

Because FCA is traditionally placed at the back of A/E, the lead-off article in #119 was Alberto Becattini’s in-depth interview with veteran comic book/strip artist Mel Keefer. It, too, clearly scored a hit with readers, but one—longtime comics writer Mike W. Barr, originator of the much-acclaimed 1980s DC maxi-series Camelot 3000—reports that he had a particular reason to sit up and take notice of that piece: Dear Roy:

For me, the most fascinating point of A/E #119 was the Mel Keefer interview. Not just for the amount of work he did and the variety of styles he did it in, but because of the Camelot 3000 art on page 28, done as concept art for a proposed Hanna-Barbera series.

Ramar-Damma-Ding-Dong After Fawcett folded its comic book tents in 1953, Marc Swayze worked for a time for Charlton Comics, during which he drew, among other things, a back-up story in its Ramar of the Jungle #3 (Jan. 1956) which didn’t feature the jungle hunter portrayed on TV by actor Jon Hall. Scripter unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

I had not known Keefer had done any such work. However, I was well aware of a proposal done for a proposed H-B C-3000 show. On a trip to L.A. back in the ’80s, I met two young, starryeyed animation writers who had written a proposal for the series. (I think I even have a copy of it somewhere.) I asked them, of course, about the plot point of the knight whose gender was altered via reincarnation. They assured me this concept would be in the series, along with many of the other more mature aspects of the series. Yeah, okay. Mercifully, given the quality of the majority of H-B’s output,

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

nothing ever came of this, save a check for the option. Oh, and our mutual colleague Marv Wolfman had ’way too much fun teasing me that one of the knights would be reincarnated as a comedyrelief dog, “Sir Fluffy”—since, after all, it was a Hanna-Barbera show.

Regarding A/E #118, by the way, I fully agree with your emendations to Arlen Schumer’s rather histrionic article on the alleged origins of The Black Panther. You’re quite right to point out that it’s not known whose idea it was, Stan Lee’s or Jack Kirby’s, to bring a black super-hero into the Marvel books, and to claim it was Kirby’s simply because of the existence of the “Coal Tiger” study proves nothing, except, once again, Kirby’s absolute hamhandedness with the English language. For the record, I also dislike the format of this and Schumer’s earlier Mort Weisinger article. Too many visuals, not enough content. Mike W. Barr

I (Roy, as editor) kinda liked the Schumer pieces myself, Mike, as a change of pace… despite my skepticism about some aspects of his Black Panther premise. However, due to—let’s call them personal differences, rather than creative ones, ’cause that’s what they are—it seems highly unlikely that any more of Arlen’s work will be appearing in Alter Ego. Keep your eyes peeled for it elsewhere, though!

One poster to the aforementioned Alter-Ego-Fans online list, who didn’t sign his full name, took issue with one statement in Jim Amash’s tribute to the late artist Fran Matera:

Jim was inaccurate when, in his obit for Fran Matera, he stated that Fran took over the writing chores in the [Steve Roper] strip’s final months post-John Saunders’ demise. In fact, three different ghost scripters (all listed, the last I looked, in the Wikipedia article regarding the strip), and one (Disclosure!) Facebook friend of mine worked on the strip during those last months. Perhaps Jim just took the credits literally. Saunders pere et fils were, indeed, the only two scripters credited on the strip during its 68-year run, and Fran only one of three drawin’ men! “jgbook2007”

Not that I’m knowledgeable myself about the situation, “jgbook2007,” but I appreciate your note. This next missive is from Warren Reece, the 1970s Bullpenner and inveterate collector whose article on his experience as a collector and Marvel staffer was the main feature of A/E #108—and thus was dealt with in the “re:” section of #119. Dear Roy and Friends,

First, to Chris Green: the caption box at the end of page 8 of the first “Sub-Mariner” story indicates little except that the chapter was to have ended there. Bill Everett was the art director for Funnies, Inc. Sub-Mariner was produced for a color mag, as indicated by Bill’s classic interview with Roy in earlier issues of A/E. There was probably some remaining space for the first issue. What could have been more natural than for editor Lloyd Jacquet to have said something like, “Bill, we have some room left. Why don’t you do four more pages of your feature?”

Then, think of the length. “Sub-Mariner” went from eight pages, previously prepared, to twelve. Soon, it became a monthly feature of ten pages. The feature had not been prepared in advance for several issues in eight-page increments. The Craft Tint was not continued beyond Marvel Mystery #2, much as Bill wanted to use it to give “a feeling of being underwater,” as indicated in the aforementioned interview. Even without the complexity of Craft Tint to slow Bill down, does anyone believe he could have written, penciled, inked, and lettered that amazing feature in three or four days, allowing for editing, printing, and distributing?

As for Ed Lahmann’s account of how he got his Marvel Comics #1 specimens and his Motion Picture Funnies Weekly #1, the implications are compelling, if not conclusive. His two specimens of MC #1 were coverless returns held by Mr. Ringer, a distributor. They were months old, and Ed still got them quite some time before the movie premium [MPFW #1]. Also, keep in mind that, except for his copy, all known specimens came from the publisher’s estate. None were in the hands of members of the public. Think about that.

MPFW #1 was a solicitation; a sample; an “ashcan.” Funnies, Inc., put a cheap black-&-white reprint together, with a color cover, the back of which was a solicitation to theatre managers, to learn whether they would buy such a premium. It was obviously not produced for the theatre patrons with such a back cover, and it was never copyrighted with the Library of Congress, apparently because most, if not all, of its contents were already under copyright by clients (like Martin Goodman) of Funnies, Inc.

Never A Doll Moment! In his later years, Fran Matera executed a number of sketches of Doll Man, a Quality Comics hero whose adventures he had drawn in the Golden Age, as commission art. Here’s one of them—and we hope that whoever owns it appreciates it! [Doll Man TM & © DC Comics.]

Phineas Taylor Barnum is frequently quoted as having said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” If you have a compulsive need to be one of that legion, buy a copy of MPFW #1 under the delusion that it contains the first appearance of Sub-Mariner and/or is the first “Marvel comic.” Roy has a mountain of documents that I provided on this subject, as do Marvel’s Special Projects Editor (Jeff Youngquist) and David Tosh of Heritage Auctions, because I sent info packets to all of them.

re:

Next, responding to Nick Caputo: I regret that you were annoyed [in A/E #108] by my references to professional conspiracies; but I assure you beyond all reasonable doubt that there was nothing theoretical about them. They were verified by members of the Marvel company, who told me about them. I provided more detail in “Among the Giants of ‘Tomorrow’” [a piece that will appear one of these days in either A/E or Back Issue.]

[An additional piece of information related to items in the “re:” section:] Ruby Auerbach’s assistant was Dottie (Dorothy?) Chalfin.

I was sad to read of Paul Laikin’s death. He was my second editor, and a very nice, good-humored gentleman. I called him, a few years ago, after someone in my lecture audience put him in touch with me.

them remember me, with all the legions of collectors and conventioneers they encountered. I’m flattered and touched. Warren Reece

Lastly, Tom Ziuko, the pro comics colorist who does many of A/E’s covers, points out that the coloring of that of #119, which is incorrectly credited to him on its contents page, was actually the original Fawcett coloring for the cover of Captain Marvel Adventures #18 (Dec. 1942), done by a sadly never-acknowledged artisan. Send those e-mails and snail-mails to: Roy Thomas 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135 e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com

In closing: major publisher Taschen Books has released the humongous volume titled 75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to I was very pleased to read the the Silver Screen, which I was honored to response from Nick Cuti. His first letter to be invited to write. It came out a month or so me, decades ago, opened: “Dear Warren, before Christmas of this past year (2014), How nice to have a fan!” From that, I and is still as good a present as any to buy [Marvel art © Marvel Characters, Inc.; inferred that I must’ve been his first fan. I for a comic book reader on your birthday or other material © Taschen Books.] remember visiting his house once, when I other gift list who’s worth spending a couple was a kid. of hundred bucks on. The book’s cover—whose Jack Kirby artwork will probably look somewhat Let the Seulings—Carol, Heather, and Gwen—know that familiar to most A/Eficionados—is printed above! they’re missed. I must tell you that I’m a little surprised that any of

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words, usually adjectives. For instance, take the sentence: “The tree stood lonely in the wind.”

By the use of a few adjectives and interpolative phrases, you can build it up as follows: “The lonely tree, looking forlorn against the wintry sky with its low scudding clouds, whipped in the bitter gale, all its branches creaking and groaning and twisting like supplicating hands, as though it were begging the gods of storm to have pity.”

Part XII

Abridged & Edited by Paul 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 12th excerpt, titled “From the Ridiculous to the Inane,” Otto battles writer’s block and discloses old tricks of the trade. —Paul C. Hamerlinck.

oday I don’t know what to write.

On a day like this I shouldn’t write at all, to tell the truth. Some books on writing will tell you to write every day, without fail, no matter how much gibberish is written. Just write and exercise your brain because it builds up a good habit pattern. Just like when you get in the habit of taking days off, those sage experts tell you, you will find yourself inventing all sorts of flimsy excuses and get nowhere. So I am following their advice and, with my mind a complete blank, I’m just going to discipline myself and make myself write.

Let’s see. Can’t I think of something to write about? Anything at all. I look outside my window, to see if the weather can furnish inspiration. Gad, it’s raining! I look around the room. Gad! I thumb through a magazine. Gad! I look at a newspaper. Gad! I look in a mirror. Gad! I look at this blank sheet of paper. Gad! You see, there is absolutely nothing that starts off a train of thought. It’s horrible. Assuming this chapter would be 1000 words long, I would have to fill it up with three or more pages of typewritten material. Gad! Of course, I can use the old trick of “padding.” This lets you in on a writer’s secret. Padding is when you stretch out something like a rubber band, by the use of superfluous

There you have it. Instead of seven simple words, you expand it to forty-two, six times its original length. And, at a penny a word, instead of seven cents you get forty-two cents. Sound business, isn’t it? Ah, but beware, if you are an aspiring writer. Padding usually displays a paucity of ideas in the writer’s mind. Instead of moving the story along, he is delaying it. Editors are quite conscious of padding, and it only makes the story “wordy.” You know, one of the main things an amateur writer must learn is not what to put in a story, but what to leave out. Most embryo writers are far too verbose… their characters are “talky,” all blabbermouths. Their stories need blue-penciling to half or less of the original length. The true secret of writing is to use bold strokes, and let the rest to the reader’s imagination.

Memoirs Of A Nobody—Part XII

Whiz Writer (On this & facing page:) Otto Binder had over ten years’ experience as a pulp magazine writer (much of it in collaboration with his brother Earl) before arriving at Fawcett Publications in 1941 to become one of the main writers for their comics line. Even as prolific and inventive as he was, Otto indubitably encountered “writer’s block” on occasion—such as he did in this issue’s Memoirs of a Nobody chapter. Prior to crafting over half of the Captain Marvel/Marvel Family saga (986 stories), in addition to writing other characters for various publishers, Otto’s early scripts for Fawcett included tales of additional Bill Parker-created Whiz Comics heroes. On the previous page, Binder put sea adventurer Lance O’Casey through pearl-diving peril in Whiz Comics #30 (May 1942); art by Harry Anderson. Above left, in “Ibis the Invincible and the Black Witch” (Whiz #36, Oct. 1942), Otto tried to give Prince Ibis and Taia a carefree Halloween night out—which, of course, resulted in the Prince once again combating the evil forces of sorcery and black magic; art by Bob Hebberd. And, above right, in “Spy Smasher and the New Year’s Eve Plot!” (Whiz #39, Jan. 1943), Binder situated the wartime hero against America Smasher, the antagonistic Nazi who failed to strike a crushing blow against democracy with his dreaded “mailed fist”; illustrated by the Jack Binder shop artists. [Spy Smasher, Lance O’Casey, Ibis the Invincible TM & © the respective copyright holders.]

I seem to be giving a lecture on how to write. Gad! Enough of that. I’m still trying to fill out this chapter. My goal is 1000 words or bust. Gad! If I put in enough “Gads,” I’ll get there yet. Next: PEEPHOLES INTO THE PAST

“A Leader Of Men” Bill Parker

BILL PARKER On King Arthur & The Origin Of Captain Marvel Excerpts From Parker’s 1948 Testimony with notes and commentary by Brian Cremins Edited by Paul C. Hamerlinck

ast summer I had the opportunity to visit the National Archives in New York City to read through the National Comics Publications, Inc., v. Fawcett Publications, Inc., case files. I was not sure what I would find. I’d read short excerpts from the trial transcripts in C.C. Beck’s “The World’s Mightiest Waste of Time and Money” (reprinted in TwoMorrows’ Fawcett Companion: The Best of FCA, pages 14-15). Chip Kidd also includes copies of a few of the court documents in his book Shazam! The Golden Age of the World’s Mightiest Mortal (Abrams ComicArt, 2010). But I was curious to know how many of the trial records still existed. I asked my dad to act as my research assistant on the trip. He’s a Superior Court judge in Connecticut and worked as a corporate attorney for almost 30 years before he was appointed to the bench. I knew that

if I had any questions, he’d be able to answer them. The research is for a chapter about the lawsuit in my upcoming Captain Marvel book. I suspect that by writing about the legal squabbles between National and Fawcett, I’m also writing for my dad, who once hoped I’d go to law school. When I was a kid, I read Frank Miller’s Daredevil and decided that, like Matt Murdock, I might one day study law. I ended up studying comic books instead, but my dad, as always, has remained supportive (and is now helping me edit my lawsuit chapter, even though I suspect he likes Batman more than he likes Captain Marvel). The National Archives has nine boxes full of paperwork from the case, including depositions and courtroom transcripts. I was only able to read and copy a small fraction of the material during our visit in June 2014. I made photocopies of Beck’s deposition from 1944 and his testimony from 1948. I also managed to copy sections of Bill Parker’s direct testimony, also from the spring of 1948. I should mention that my academic research focuses on theories of memory and nostalgia. Although I devote very little of

Bill And Billy’s Trials & Triumphs Captain Marvel writer/co-creator Bill Parker (top left) and DC lawyer Louis Nizer (above) surround the first “CM” page from Whiz Comics #2 (real #1; cover-date Feb. 1940) that started it all: the beginning of the red-suited character’s success… and the start of Fawcett’s tribulations with publishing competitor DC/National. The Parker portrait, drawn by CM’s artist/co-creator C.C. Beck, first appeared within a special one-page strip for Steranko’s History of Comics 2 (1972)—later reprinted by Bill Harper in a late-’80s FCA newsletter. The Nizer cartoon, also by Beck, appeared in the Beck-edited FCA/SOB #8/19 (June/July ’81) to accompany the first part of the artist's article on DC's lawsuit against Fawcett, which he entitled “The World’s Mightiest Waste of Time and Money.” [Shazam hero & Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics; Nizer cartoon © Estate of C.C. Beck.]

“A Leader Of Men”

my work to Parker—largely because my writing is more theoretical than specifically historical—I find his memories of the creation of the character fascinating. I’ve selected and transcribed a few excerpts from Parker’s testimony delivered on March 18, 1948. In doing so, I’ve followed the original format of the court records, including the placement of periods outside of quotation marks—nor has the name of a newspaper been italicized. You can read this testimony for yourself if you visit the National Archives in lower Manhattan. I’ve included page numbers for easy reference. If you visit New York, however, be sure to contact the archivists in advance, as the nine boxes of material are stored off-site. I’d like to thank Archivists Greg Plunges and Trina Yeckley for their kind assistance, as well as Archives Technician Kevin Reilly. I’d also, of course, like to thank my dad, the Honorable William T. Cremins, for accompanying me on another comic book adventure. On the morning of March 18, Fawcett’s attorney, Wallace H. Martin, asked William Parker to provide some biographical information. The following exchange will provide readers with a miniature portrait of William Lee Parker and how he came to work at Fawcett. For more biographical information on Captain Marvel’s co-creator, see also Paul C. Hamerlinck’s “Major Parker: The Life of Bill Parker … and His Mightiest Creation” from Alter Ego #23/FCA #82 (April 2003) and Dick Hanser’s “Bill Parker” on page 115 of Fawcett Companion. For now, however, here is Bill Parker in his own words:

Q: Mr. Parker, I believe you are employed by the defendant Fawcett, are you not? A: Yes, I am. Q: Will you state the nature of your present employment? A: I am the feature editor of the magazine Today’s Woman, a magazine for young housewives. Q: How long have you held that position with the defendant Fawcett? A: Since December 1945. Q: And prior to that I believe you were in the Army? A: That is right, I was. Q: How long were you in the Army? A: I went in the Federal Service on October 15, 1940, and was in continuously until December, 1945, when I went to work with the Fawcett company. Q: Prior to your Army service were you employed by the defendant Fawcett? A: Yes, I was. Q: When did you first start working for the defendant Fawcett? A: In September 1937. Q: Will you please state where you were educated, the schools that you were educated in. A: I graduated from Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and Princeton University. Q: When from Lawrenceville, what year? A: 1929. Q: And from Princeton? A: 1933. I graduated with the Bachelor of Arts Degree, and I majored in English Literature. Q: After you left college where were you first employed?

The Power of an Acronym In Whiz Comics #4 (May 1940), an amnesiac Billy Batson remembered what “SHAZAM” stood for, as Captain Marvel writer/co-creator Bill Parker later elucidated the meaning of the word during his March 1948 testimony. In the early stages of Captain Thunder’s development, Parker and Fawcett’s Ralph Daigh settled on the concept of the hero not being a leader of a group of men, but rather a singular hero with the attributes of others. At right is a UPI photo of Daigh (courtesy of Shaun Clancy) taken on 5-11-59 in Washington, DC. UPI’s caption: “Ralph Daigh, Editorial Director of Fawcett Publications (right), with Lloyd Mallan, Fawcett’s True Magazine science writer, compare notes as they wait to testify before the House Space Committee. The committee is holding hearings on the authenticity of the Soviet ‘Lunik.’ Mallan, who went to Moscow to talk to Russian scientists, claims the moon-shot last half was nothing but a ‘Big Red Lie.’” [Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

Fawcett Collectors of America

A: I was first employed by the New York Herald-Tribune. Q: That was beginning in 1933? A: Yes. In the fall, following my graduation from college. Q: What job did you have there at the New York Herald-Tribune? A: I was a copyreader on the sports staff. Q: How long did you hold that position? A: I worked as copyreader there for about three or four months, and then I transferred into what was called the education department of the circulation department. Q: While you were in the education department of the circulation department what did you do in that work?

The Wisdom Of Parker During the creation of Captain Thunder, Bill Parker admitted in his testimony that he “was mixing my metaphors” by including Solomon alongside mythological gods to form the name “SHAZAM,” with the new super-hero having each of the half dozen icons’ foremost characteristic. During the last year of Captain Marvel’s life, writer Otto Binder was still proving how imperative the hero’s “Wisdom of Solomon” trait was in “The Stolen Shazam Powers!” from Captain Marvel Adventures #144 (May 1953); art by C.C. Beck. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

A: My job was to promote an interest and to increase the sale of the New York Herald-Tribune, in the elementary, junior and senior high schools in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Q: What did you do in this work? A: Well, most of my time was occupied in giving short lectures in the schools, to the school children, on the subject of making a newspaper. I illustrated those with actual exhibits from the Herald-Tribune. I would take along pieces of the original copy— The Court: Is it necessary to go into all of this detail? Mr. Martin: This shows— The Court: Haven’t we had enough? You just wanted to qualify him as an expert, I suppose. Mr. Martin: I will make it just as short as I can, if your Honor please. Q: In this work did you have anything to do with comic strips? A: The New York Herald-Tribune had a Sunday comics section, and the children were interested in comics more than in any other part of the magazine, so I generally took along an exhibit showing how the comics section of the Herald-Tribune was prepared and published. [From pages 681-683 of the trial transcripts from March 18, 1948, 10:30 am] Over the next couple of pages, Parker discusses his work at Literary Digest, where, he explains, he also worked as a sports editor. When Parker began working at Fawcett in 1937, he first served as “an associate editor of the crime and detective magazines,” he explains on pages 684 to 685. After he edited one of Fawcett’s movie magazines, Ralph Daigh approached Parker with another opportunity within the company. Would Parker be interested in editing comics? The following exchange is from pages 685 and 686 of Parker’s direct testimony.

Q: Who conferred with you first with reference to this comics group of Fawcett? A: Ralph Daigh, the editorial director of Fawcett. Q: Do you remember about when he spoke to you about that work? A: It was late in the summer, either the last part of August or the early part of September, of 1939. Q: Had you had any previous preparation for this type of work? A: Well, as I say, I was familiar with comics. In the course of giving lectures to school children for about two years, the comics section of the newspaper. Q: That was the New York Herald-Tribune? A: The New York Herald-Tribune; that is right. I read the comics casually. I was not an ardent reader of any comic strip. Later in his testimony, Parker explained his relationship with Daigh and the creation of a character named Captain Thunder. Martin asks Parker to explain the character’s origin: Q: Now I believe you stated that one of your suggestions to Mr. Daigh was that Captain Thunder be a leader of men? As Parker is about to answer, the legendary Louis Nizer, attorney for Detective Comics, Inc., objects to Martin’s line of questioning. Martin persists, however: Q: Where did you get the idea of someone being a leader of men? Mr. Nizer: Objection, sir. The Court: I guess he could get it from anywhere. Mr. Martin: But he got it from a very specific place. The Court: All right. A: Specifically I got it from the stories of King Arthur and the

“A Leader Of Men”

Q: What was the story which you portrayed in this synopsis? A: Well, the story was of a New York City newsboy who suddenly acquires under very peculiar circumstances the ability to transform himself into a—a human being who possesses superhuman qualities, at the same time that he receives his power to become—to transform himself into a mighty man, he receives a commission to perform these things. Q: Did the synopsis set out how he or where he received these powers—from where he received these powers? A: Yes, it did. Q: Explain briefly just the source of the powers.

Arthur! Arthur! Brian Cremins notes Bill Parker’s reference of King Arthur, and Beck’s approach to drawing stories as “illustrated boy’s adventures,” and ponders what might have happened if Ralph Daigh had given Parker the green light to develop Fawcett’s new hero in the direction of the author’s beloved old King Arthur books. (Above:) A 1902 Howard Pyle illustration from The Story of King Arthur and his Knights (Chapter III: “How King Arthur Encountered Four Knights and What Befell Thereby).” (Right:) Cremins also suggests that you’ll find the personas of both King Arthur and Captain Marvel within Matt Wagner’s Mage stories from the mid-’80s. [Mage art © Matt Wagner.]

Knights of the Round Table, stories with which I had been familiar and had read as a child. Q: Did you prepare any suggestions for a story revolving around this character of yours? A: I didn’t prepare any suggestions for a story revolving around the character as I envisioned him as a leader of a group of men. We decided earlier in conversation that that would cause too many difficulties, if we had a group of men, so we combined all the characteristics of the individual men into just one man, and when we were in agreement generally on what lines he would follow, I then prepared a synopsis of the proposed story in which that character would appear. Q: You used the word “we”. To whom do you refer when you said “we” had conferences? A: Ralph Daigh. Q: Yourself and Ralph Daigh? A: That is right. Q: You say you prepared a synopsis and submitted it to Mr. Daigh. Did you?

A: Well, he followed a mysterious stranger in the subway, and this subway stranger came along with a fantastic car. He was just a stranger, and they got into the car and they were transported into a subterranean cavern, where the mysterious stranger immediately drops out of the picture and the newsboy is confronted with an old man, along the lines of Solomon, or a magician, or a character of that kind, who tells him that he has been devoting his whole life to fighting injustice, helping the poor and downtrodden, and that his time is running out and he wants to hand over his power to this boy, who I called Billy Batson. So he tells him that he will give him this power, that he can acquire at any time he needs it by using the word “Shazam”, which is created out of the initial letters of names of individuals in mythology who had the characteristics that I wished this character to have—Solomon for wisdom, Hercules for strength, Atlas for courage, Zeus for power, Achilles for courage—I believe that was the attribute he had, and invulnerability—and Mercury for speed. Q: You mentioned Solomon. You do not classify him as a mythological character, I take it? A: Well, no, that is so. But it wouldn’t make any difference. I was mixing my metaphors, I guess. Mr. Nizer: Will you repeat what you just said?

Q: Have you been able to find that original synopsis or a copy of it?

The Witness: I don’t remember the exact words, but I think I said I didn’t think it would make a difference to the children who would read the magazine, or notice that Solomon was not in the same class with the other characters of mythology that I drew.

A: No, I have not.

Q: Why did you combine these characters?

A: Yes, I did.

Q: Have you searched for it? A: I have looked for it, yes.

Mr. Nizer: Objection, sir.

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The Court: I will allow it. A: I combined the characters because, as I explained before, each one of them represented a virtue I wanted the main character of this magazine to have—superlative wisdom, strength, speed, and courage—rather than have a group of men that would be unwieldy, hard to draw, hard for the reader to distinguish one from the other. We put all of these into one character. [From pages 692-695 of the trial transcripts from March 18, 1948, 10:30 am] A few pages later, Parker also explains how he wrote the scripts for these early issues of Whiz Comics. Mr. Martin asks him to describe this process to the Court. The following excerpts are from pages 712 and 713 of Parker’s direct testimony on the afternoon of March 18: Q: Will you explain to his Honor the nature of the script and how the script is used in preparing the art work which the artists prepare for the final magazine? A: Well, the script, your Honor, tells the story through the medium of a very short descriptive paragraph for each picture, and the dialogue which takes place, of the people appearing in the picture, plus any additional word matter that may be included in a box or panel underneath the picture. I used the movie technique, that is the movie script, I think, to present it to the artist, because I thought it was a simple way to do it. For example, scene 1, a long shot, in the distance. Under “long shot” I would describe generally what the picture was to represent and the individuals who appeared in the picture or panel, and then the conversation that each one of those had was typed out.

The Once And Future Marvel? King Arthur himself appeared in William Woolfolk’s script for “Captain Marvel Meets Sir Marvel” (Captain Marvel Adventures #59, April 1946); art by C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza … a story which embodies the pinnacle post-World War II era of consistently exceptional “CM” tales. Perhaps Brian Cremin’s hero in his “What If” scenario would’ve looked something like Sir Marvel? [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

After I returned to Chicago and had a chance to read the portions of Bill Parker’s testimony that I’d copied, I remembered one of C.C. Beck’s comments: “I never read comic books because most of them were tasteless. I considered my magazines to be illustrated boy’s adventures and handled the art accordingly” (see page 11 of the second volume of Jim Steranko’s The Steranko History of Comics). As I thought about Parker’s discussion of King Arthur and Beck’s decision to draw the stories as “illustrated boy’s adventures,” I remembered my old paperback edition of Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights. My imagination started to work. What if Ralph Daigh had encouraged Parker to develop these ideas? What would that first (well, technically, second) issue of Whiz Comics have looked like? As my dad and I took the MetroNorth train back to Connecticut, I started to daydream: Captain Thunder as “a leader of men,” drawn in the style of Howard Pyle, just like the books I’d cherished when I was in grade school. If I had a chance to write a contemporary version of Billy Batson and Captain Marvel, I think I’d follow Parker’s original plan: a diverse team of heroes, all working together to save the world. Unlike the story of King Arthur, however, I’d try to come up with a less tragic ending. And, of course, I’d also have to find a role for Mr. Tawny. It’s possible, of course, to find allusions to both King Arthur and Captain Marvel in Matt Wagner’s classic series Mage: The Hero Discovered in which the protagonist, Kevin Matchstick, who wears a black-and-white t-shirt with a white lightning bolt, slowly discovers his true identity. If you’ve never read Mage—which features some of the best American comic book art of the 1980s, courtesy of Wagner and inker Sam Keith—I won’t give away any

more of the plot than I already have. I’ll continue speculating instead, but I’ll have to rewrite history to do so: if Parker had written Captain Thunder as a version of King Arthur, would Detective still have sued? Would they have had a basis to do so? Then again, would Parker’s original idea for Captain Thunder have been as popular as Billy Batson and Captain Marvel? At this point, you can probably tell that, when I was a kid, one of my favorite comic book series was Marvel’s What If. So, if one day I discover an abandoned subway tunnel here in Chicago and an ancient wizard grants me a few wishes, I know what I’ll do: I’ll ask to plot a comic book called “What If… Bill Parker Had Written Captain Marvel as King Arthur?” And I’ll outline different chapters for a few of my favorite comic book artists—from Ramona Fradon and Trina Robbins to John Porcellino and Marnie Galloway. I think I’ll leave Solomon in there, too, even though, as Parker himself admitted, King David’s son doesn’t fit too well with Zeus and Achilles and Mercury and all the rest. “I was mixing my metaphors, I guess,” Parker admitted. But isn’t a little mixing of metaphors necessary when telling a good story? I realize now that it’s probably best that I studied English and not law when I went to grad school. After all, I’m reading trial transcripts as blueprints for comic book plots. Best to leave the law—and the dreaming—to the professionals. Brian Cremins is an Associate Professor of English at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. He is working on a book about Captain Marvel and nostalgia for the UP of Mississippi. He lives in Chicago and blogs about comics at brianwcremins.wordpress.com.

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“Flash and Green Lantern in the Bronze Age” (crossover with ALTER EGO #132)! In-depth spotlights of their 1970s and 1980s adventures, MARK WAID’s look at the Flash/GL team, and PAUL KUPPERBERG’s Lost GL Fillins. Bonus: DC’s New York Office Memories, and Green Lantern: Ganthet’s Tale by LARRY NIVEN and JOHN BYRNE. With BARR, BATES, GIBBONS, GRELL, INFANTINO, WEIN, and more. Cover by GEORGE PÉREZ.

“DC Bronze Age Giants and Reprints!” An indepth exploration of DC’s 100-PAGE SUPER SPECTACULARS, plus: a history of comics giants, DC indexes galore, and a salute to “human encyclopedia” E. NELSON BRIDWELL. Featuring the work of PAT BRODERICK, RICH BUCKLER, FRANK FRAZETTA, JOE KUBERT, BOB ROZAKIS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and more. Super Spec tribute cover featuring classic art by NICK CARDY.

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ANYTHING GOES (AGAIN)! Another potpourri issue with a comparison of Jack Kirby’s work vs. the design genius of ALEX TOTH, a lengthy Kirby interview, a look at Kirby’s work with WALLY WOOD, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, unseen and unused Kirby art from JIMMY OLSEN, KAMANDI, MARVELMANIA, Jack’s COMIC STRIP & ANIMATION WORK, and more!

DOUBLE-TAKES ISSUE! Features oddities, coincidences, and reworkings by both Jack and Stan Lee: the Galactus Origin you didn’t see, Ditko’s vs. Kirby’s Spider-Man, how Lee and Kirby viewed “writing” differently, plus a rare KIRBY radio interview with Stan, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, unseen and unused pencil art from FANTASTIC FOUR, 2001, CAPTAIN VICTORY, BRUCE LEE, & more!

75 YEARS of THE FLASH and GREEN LANTERN (a crossover with BACK ISSUE #80)! INFANTINO, KANE, KUBERT, ELIAS, LAMPERT, HIBBARD, NODELL, HASEN, TOTH, REINMAN, SEKOWSKY, Golden Age JSA and Dr. Mid-Nite artist ARTHUR PEDDY’s stepson interviewed, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom history, and more!

Gentleman JIM MOONEY gets a featurelength spotlight, in an in-depth interview conducted by DR. JEFF McLAUGHLIN— never before published! Featuring plenty of rare and unseen MOONEY ART from Batman & Robin, Supergirl, Spider-Man, Legion of Super-Heroes, Tommy Tomorrow, and others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Celebrates SOL BRODSKY—Fantastic Four #3-4 inker, logo designer, and early Marvel production manager! With tributes by daughter JANA PARKER and son GARY BRODSKY, STAN LEE, HERB TRIMPE, STAN GOLDBERG, DAVID ANTHONY KRAFT, TONY ISABELLA, ROY THOMAS, and others! Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Cover portrait by JOHN ROMITA!

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SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up Swamp Thing, ManThing, Heap, and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou! Features interviews with WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, BRUNNER, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, CONWAY, MAYERIK, ORLANDO, PASKO, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, YEATES, BERGER, SANTOS, USLAN, KALUTA, THOMAS, and others. FRANK CHO cover!

BERNIE WRIGHTSON interview on Swamp Thing, Warren, The Studio, Frankenstein, Stephen King, and designs for movies like Heavy Metal and Ghostbusters, and a gallery of Wrightson artwork! Plus writer/editor BRUCE JONES; 20th anniversary of Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror with BILL MORRISON; and interview Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre’s BATTON LASH, and more!

MIKE ALLRED and BOB BURDEN cover and interviews, “Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman” cartoonist DAVID BOSWELL interviewed, a chat with RICH BUCKLER, SR. about everything from Deathlok to a new career as surrealistic painter; Tales of the Zombie artist PABLO MARCOS speaks; Israeli cartoonist RUTU MODAN; plus an extensive essay on European Humor Comics!

DAVE DORMAN demonstrates his painting techniques for sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book cover, LeSEAN THOMAS (character designer and co-director of The Boondocks and Black Dynamite: The Animated Series) gives advice on today’s animation industry, new columnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his working process, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

We focus the radar on Daredevil artist CHRIS SAMNEE (Agents of Atlas, Batman, Avengers, Captain America) with a how-to interview, comics veteran JACKSON GUICE (Captain America, Superman, Ruse, Thor) talks about his creative process and his new series Winter World, columnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his working process, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

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