Alter Ego #135

Roy Thomas’ LENgthy Comics Fanzine

LEN WEIN

RE-LIVES THE LATE SILVER AGE AT DC & MARVEL!

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No.135 September 2015

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Characters TM & © DC Comics.

Hey—Maybe He Can get ME in!

P.S.: LEN WROTE A FEW OTHER THINGS, TOO!

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Vol. 3, No. 135 / September 2015 Editor

Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout

Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor

P.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

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Cover Artists

Dick Giordano & Bernie Wrightson

Cover Colorist

Unidentified DC personnel

With Special Thanks to: Neal Adams Douglas R. Kelly Heidi Amash David Anthony Pedro Angosto Kraft Richard J. Arndt Mark Lewis Rodrigo Baeza Jim Ludwig Bob Bailey Doug Martin Rod Beck Brian K. Morris William Biggins Mark Muller Robert Brown Chip Newton Nick Caputo Dr. Amy Kiste James Cassara Nyberg Shaun Clancy Barry Pearl Chet Cox John E. Petty John De Mocko Nik Poliwko The Dick Dillin Gene Reed Family Bob Rozakis John Ellis Randy Sargent Harlan Ellison Vijah Shah Shane Foley Jeff Taylor Stephan Friedt Dann Thomas Janet Gilbert Jim Van Hise Grand Comics Lynn Walker Database (website) George Warner Dan Hagen John Warren Hero Initiative Len Wein Sean Howe Marv Wolfman Dr. M. Thomas Inge Andy Yanchus Jim Kealy Mike Zeck

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Roger Slifer

Contents Writer/Editorial: Out With The Old…? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 “I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Writer & editor Len Wein tells Richard Arndt about his first decade in comics.

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code – Chapter 6, Concluded . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Our ongoing serialization of Dr. Amy K. Nyberg’s 1998 study of comics censorship.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt: Get A Clue – Part 2!!! . . . . . . . 51

Michael T. Gilbert examines more of the hilarious hoodlums on those Hillman crime covers.

Comic Fandom Archive: Chatting With Jim Van Hise . . . . . 57 Bill Schelly continues a multi-part tribute to G.B. Love and RBCC.

In Memoriam: Roger Slifer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 68 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #194 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 P.C. Hamerlinck presents two unseen essays by Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. Beck.

On Our Cover: Len Wein, this issue’s intrepid interviewee, has been known particularly for his scripting (and editing) of super-heroes and of his muck-monster co-creation Swamp Thing—so we’ve conspicuously combined Dick Giordano’s cover for Justice League of America #105 (April-May 1973) with a masterful early-’70s Swamp Thing figure drawn by that entity’s other co-creator, Bernie Wrightson. With due thanks to Sean Howe, Pedro Angosto, & Mike Zeck for the 1971 photo of Len himself. [Art TM & © DC Comics.]

Above: The villain in Len Wein’s first scripting assignment on Marvel Team-Up (#11, July 1973), carried over from the previous couple of issues, was none other than Kang the Conqueror—while Spider-Man was teamed in #11 with the incomparable Inhumans. Pencils by Jim Mooney; inks by Mike Esposito. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] Alter EgoTM is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344.

Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: 32 Bluebird Trail, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices.

Eight-issue subscriptions: $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.

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writer/editorial

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Out With The Old...?

he late 1960s and early 1970s were, as detailed in Richard Arndt’s interview this issue with writer Len Wein, a time of “Genesis and Exodus” in the comic book field.

Increasingly, the writers and artists (but especially the writers) who were holdovers from the 1940s were retiring or, less ceremoniously, being edged out of their long-running assignments to make room for a new generation. This was as inevitable as it was unfortunate for the likes of Gardner Fox, Otto Binder, Robert Kanigher, Bill Finger, and other top talents who’d been the mainstays of DC, Timely/Marvel, and other companies for the preceding two-plus decades. Readers’ tastes were changing, and the comics field had to adjust to the altered realities of the marketplace. It was ever thus.

The new names increasingly appearing in the credits at DC and Marvel are those that have graced the covers of issues of Alter Ego in the recent past (and will continue to do so in the future). Names like Gerry Conway, Denny O’Neil, Steve Skeates, Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman—Jim Shooter, who will be highlighted in upcoming issue #137—Archie Goodwin and Gary Friedrich (both of whom we plan to get around to soon)—and of course Len Wein.

None of these new writers particularly wanted to unseat the older talents named above. For the most part, the former venerated the latter, and have often said as much. They simply wanted their own places in the sun. The problem is, of course, that, at any given moment, there are only so many “places in the sun.” When those are grabbed by newer arrivals, others must sit in the shade.

Nor, naturally, did history stop with the late Silver Age comers.

Most of these remain in the field to one degree or another, but no longer writing several top titles per month as in the “old days”— when they were the “new days.”

Perhaps the oddest factor in the above scenario is the fact that the major moving force in the scripting upheaval that took place during the latter ’60s and beyond was not a “brave new” writer— but Stan Lee, who’d already been 38 years old when he’d written Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961) in a style utilizing more realistic motivations and dialogue than most super-hero comics had previously featured… thus setting off an explosion whose reverberations were being felt increasingly, not decreasingly, by decade’s end. Lee’s shadow is now extending into the third or fourth or even fifth generation… influencing writers to whom the changes he helped set in motion have been not world-shaking revelations but, rather, mother’s milk.

Interestingly, though, those who formed that first generation of Lee-influenced writers were, by and large, never interested only in emulating his scripting. As noted above, they were also fans of Fox, Binder, et al.—and usually sought to combine what was best in Lee’s approach with what they liked from those other giants’ earlier scripting methods. And to this was added a healthy respect for the 1950s EC scripts of Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman, perhaps even a nod to Charlie Biro’s Crime Does Not Pay and other Lev Gleason comics from the latter ’40s on—so that super-hero comic books, by the 1970s, were an amalgamation of several generations’ worth of scriptorial mutation. Stan Lee was a dominant, even perhaps deciding factor, yes… but his approach was leavened by appreciation for the virtues of other authorial voices, as well.

Everything is synthesis… the old and the new, meeting in either a merger or a head-on collision to form a new way forward.

Which is just as it should be. And as it will be, whether we want it to or not.

Bestest,

# COMING IN OCTOBER 136 RASCALLY ROY THOMAS Celebrates 50 YEARS IN COMICS

By Talking About The 1990s At Marvel & Elsewhere!

Marie Severin.

Characters, Inc.; cartoon © Marvel art TM & © Marvel

• Marvelous montage cover of RT’s ’90s work by MARIE SEVERIN, DAVE ROSS, JACKSON GUICE, ANDRE COATES, LOU HARRISON, & DAVE HOOVER! • ROY THOMAS talks to JIM AMASH about the late ’80s & the ’90s at Marvel— not to mention (which he does) DC, Dark Horse, First, Pacific, Topps, Heroic, Cross Plains, and a few other places—picking up where A/E #100 left off!

• Awe-inspiring art by the above cover artists plus BUSCEMA, RYAN, TRIMPE, MIGNOLA, VALENTINO, BUCKLER, WYMAN, TEXEIRA, KAYANAN, CORBEN, RUSSELL, GILBERT, GIORDANO, MAROTO, HARRIS, SALE, COLAN, et al!

• STAN LEE, ROY T., & film director KEVIN SMITH sparring on stage—in a museum, yet—last December! Plus—the final secrets of Dr. Strange’s Bleecker Street sanctum sanctorum!

• FCA on Captain Marvel’s 75th birthday—MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s Comic Crypt— & MORE!!

• And, oh yeah—16 EXTRA PAGES this issue, to get it all in!

Edited by ROY THOMAS • SUBSCRIBE NOW! Eight issues in the US: $67 Standard, $82 First Class • (Canada: $85, Elsewhere: $104 Surface, $242 Airmail). • NEW LOWER RATES FOR INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS!

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“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!” Award-Winning Writer & Editor LEN WEIN Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

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Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Richard J. Arndt

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Len Wein is one of the crew of teen-age writers who entered the comics field in the late 1960s. Over the past 45 years, he’s created or co-created “The New X-Men,” Wolverine, Swamp Thing, The Human Target, Dominic Fortune, and many more. He’s been the writer on The Teen Titans, Fantastic Four, Thor, The Phantom Stranger, The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man, Before Watchmen, “Supergirl,” and an incredible number of other titles. He’s been an editor at Marvel, DC, and Disney. He was the editor who hired Alan Moore to write Swamp Thing, as well as the editor on Moore & Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. He recently wrote the Ozymandias limited series for DC. This interview was conducted Aug. 21, 2012.

Len Wein in his photo card from Eclipse’s Famous Cartoonists trading card series of the 1980s. [© Eclipse or successors in interest.]

“Oh Boy, I’m Gonna Be A Comic Book Artist!”

RICHARD ARNDT: Let’s start things off with your background.

Where did you grow up?

LEN WEIN: I was born in the Bronx, New York. I had one kid brother. When I was 7½ years old, I stepped out between two trucks onto the street. My father grabbed me by the back of the collar just in time to pull me out of the way of another truck driving by.

He stood there for a second and said, “We’re going to the suburbs!” So I grew up in Levittown, New York. I wasn’t the only comic fan there. Even though I didn’t meet many of these fellows until I was grown, Michael Gilbert grew up there. Bob Schreck grew up there. Bill Griffith grew up there. So there was a small group of comics enthusiasts who grew up there, completely unaware of each other.

Swamped!

(Above:) When Len Wein began writing The Phantom Stranger with #14 (July-Aug. 1971), he started off with a monster-in-a-swamp scene, illustrated

by Jim Aparo. (Left:) A year later, he and artist Berni(e) Wrightson caused a minor sensation with Swamp Thing #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1972). Thanks to Jim Ludwig for the page from PS #14, and to the Grand Comics Database for the cover shot. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

Portrait Of The Writer As A Young Artist (Top left:) Len, like many another comic book writer, started out as a wannabe comic book artist, as witness the ad illo he drew for Dave Kaler’s third Academy Comics Convention. It was printed in the newszine On the Drawing Board, Vol. 2, #14 (June 1967). Thanks to Nick Caputo.

[Characters TM & © the respective TM & copyright holders.]

(Top right:) Wein’s first professionally published drawing was printed on a fan-page in Warren Publishing’s Eerie #22 (July 1969); thanks to George Warner and James Cassara.

[TM & © The New Company, including characters Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie.]

(Above:) Unlike many fans, however, Len penciled and even inked one story that made it into a four-color comic: “Walk the Plank” in Western’s Grimm’s Ghost Stories #9 (May 1973). And, of course, he had scripted it, as well. The first two pages of that four-pager appear courtesy of Stephan Friedt. [© the respective copyright holders.]

(Right:) More than a decade later, fate struck again, when he penciled the “Despero” illustration for DC’s Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #6 (Aug. 1985), which was inked

by Dick Giordano. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert and Nick Caputo. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

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today—I drew a picture of a shark. My art teacher looked at me and said, “That’s a very good picture. You actually have artistic talent. Enough to be an actual artist.” I looked back at him and said, “Oh, boy! I’m gonna be a comic book artist.” He said, “That’s not what I mean.” But I said, “Yeah, but that’s what I meant!” So I majored in art the rest of my high school and college career, to help me in becoming a comic book artist.

RA: I haven’t actually seen a lot of your comic art… but I do recall you did a fan illustration for one of Jim Warren’s fan pages back in the 1960s… in Eerie #22 (July 1969). It wasn’t too bad, as I recall.

WEIN: Thank you. Yep, there were a lot of aspiring artists who showed up on those fan pages. When I became a professional, I actually got to draw one four-page story for Gold Key. It was a story called “Walk the Plank” for Grimm’s Ghost Stories [#9 (May 1973)]. That’s the only actual story I’ve ever drawn.

RA: The Grand Comics Database lists three stories you illustrated, one apparently a ghost penciling job for Sal Trapani for

Masquerader Of The Lost Arcs (Above:) Len Wein was a fannish double-threat. First, as a writer: His brief interview with Jack Kirby in the 6th issue of future fellow pro Mike Vosburg’s fanzine Masquerader in the early 1960s was quite possibly the first conversation with “The King” ever published.

Thanks to Doug Martin. [© the respective copyright holders.]

(Right:) Secondly, as an artist: Besides being assistant editor of the fanzine Popular Heroes Illustrated, he drew this 1964 cover spotlighting Steve Ditko’s Marvel co-creations. Thanks to Nick Caputo. [Spider-Man & Dr. Strange TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Later that same year, I got very sick. I spent some time in the hospital and my father brought me a bunch of comic books to keep me occupied. As they say, “Done is done.” I was hooked. I was a comic book fan from that moment on.

RA: Do you remember any of the titles in that batch?

WEIN: They were mostly DC, I think. I remember Batman and Superman. There were no Marvels, because Marvel didn’t exist back then. They would almost have to have been DC comics.

RA: When did you first begin to make your move to becoming a professional in the comics field?

WEIN: Eighth-grade art class. In the 8th grade back then, when the arts were part of our curriculum—unlike

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

The Fandom Menace (Above:) Longtime friends and fans together: Marv Wolfman (on left) and Len Wein, at the 1967 Academy Con, not long before the two teenagers made their professional debut in the comics field. Photo courtesy of Andy Yanchus. An interview with Wolfman appeared in Alter Ego #113.

(Right:) Len’s “Prism” splash page from his fanzine Aurora #1 (Jan.-March 1963). Thanks to Gene Reed. [© Len Wein.]

(Below right:) Len, Marv, and numerous other early “cosplay” fans (before the term existed) attend a costume contest, probably at the one and only SCARP-Con, held in New York City in 1968. The event was captured for posterity in the late Larry Ivie’s semi-professional magazine Monsters & Heroes (July 1969). Thanks to Stephen Friedt. [© the respective copyright holders.]

(Below:) “The Conjurer and the Man Called Armageddon” was a story “conceived, written & drawn by: Len Wein & Marv Wolfman” for Calvin Beck’s black-&-white mag Castle of Frankenstein (issue #12, 1968). Thanks to Rod Beck. [© Len Wein & Marv Wolfman.]

Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery and the other a Twilight Zone story by Steve Skeates that you’re supposed to have drawn. Are these correct?

WEIN: The GCD is wrong. I drew only “Walk the Plank” for Grimm’s Ghost Stories, plus the “Despero” page for DC’s Who’s Who, which was inked by Dick Giordano. Nothing more.

I got into fanzines when I was in high school. One of my high school buddies and I were looking for comics fans to get involved with, so we searched Julie Schwartz’s letters pages and noticed a lot of letters from Marv Wolfman. I contacted Marv and he became a friend. He and I actually started doing fanzines together. We both wrote and drew for the fanzines.

My fanzines were Aurora and Trident, while Marv’s were SuperAdventures, What the—?, The Foob, and Stories of Suspense. We both worked on one another’s zines. I don’t recall, however, actually coediting any of them with Marv—although I could be wrong.

We became very familiar characters up at DC. Back in those

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

Going Nova (Below:) Marv Wolfman’s fanzine Super Adventures #7 (1967) was published as a photo-offset supplement to issue #6. Note that this centerspread—from a story written by Wein & Wolfman and drawn by the former—features the character Black Nova, who became Nova when Marv brought him to Marvel in the mid-’70s. Thanks to Gene Reed. [© Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, & any other respective copyright holders.]

days, DC used to do regular, weekly tours of the company on Thursday morning. So once a month—and remember, we lived on Long Island and DC was in Manhattan—we’d cut school and go to New York to do the DC tour. We both became very familiar to the folks at DC.

“Afraid We Couldn’t Sell A Book With A Black Super-Hero In The South”

RA: Your first professional credits were with you teamed up with Marv, beginning with Teen Titans #18 (Nov./Dec. 1968).

WEIN: Technically, we actually wrote two scripts, but only one saw print. If you asked, everybody involved would give you a different reason as to why that story was spiked.

RA: Yes, I’ve heard several different reasons, and none of them sounded particularly awful enough to ashcan a story that was already written, penciled, and lettered. I don’t know if it got to the inked stage.

WEIN: That was the “Jericho” story. It would have featured one of the first, if not the first black super-heroes in the DC universe. It’s

Teen Titans Doing Teen Titans (Right:) The lead splash page of the Wein-&-Wolfman-written Teen Titans #18 (Nov.-Dec. 1968), which introduced the young Russian hero Starfire, accompanied Richard Arndt’s interview with Marv Wolfman in A/E #113… so here’s that issue’s second splash page, reprinted from the recently released hardcover The Silver Age Teen Titans Archives, Vol. 2. Art by Bill Draut.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

sad, because I think the spiked story was maybe the best art job Nick Cardy ever did. It broke our hearts that it never saw print.

The way Nick drew it… he was trying a new style, almost like a woodcut style, and it was amazing artwork. One thing [people should] remember about Nick Cardy was that he could draw a girl.

Not a bad girl, but a great-looking, everyday girl. Hoo, boy, could he draw them!

The reason the “Titans” tale was scrapped was basically Carmine [Infantino]’s insecurity. The powers-that-be were afraid we couldn’t sell a book with a black super-hero in the South.

RA: Really? This was fairly late in the 1960s. They’d already had black characters in their books but not in the super-hero books, I guess.

WEIN: There was Jackie Johnson in Sgt. Rock. That was a war book, though.

RA: True. The war books were nearly the only DC or Marvel comic titles that featured an African-American character on a regular basis. I don’t think any of the super-hero titles featured one until 1966 or so. That was Marvel, with The Black Panther. Apparently DC hadn’t introduced one by 1968?

WEIN: It was decades before anyone learned that Black Manta was

actually black! With Jericho, it was just fear that he was a black character and that Southern readers wouldn’t accept that.

RA: It must have been around this same time that Marv and you wrote ”The House That Haunted Batman,” which wouldn’t appear for years.

WEIN: Yeah, it was about then. And for the same reason, editorial insecurity, it was rejected. Julie was worried that neither Marv nor I had written anything to see print, let alone letting us loose to write a “Batman”! So he rejected it out of hand. But Neal had read it and thought it was a good story, so he [drew] the story totally on spec.

Neal being Neal, he began drawing it in his spare time, believing that anything he drew, Julie would not dare to refuse to print. In Neal’s eyes, how could you dare to waste a Neal Adams story? So Neal drew it over a period of a year or two and brought it into Julie’s office. Julie looked at it and said, “Wait a minute—didn’t I reject this story?” Neal said, “Yes, you did. Want to try again?’ Julie said, “Oh, the hell with it!” and published it!

“Dick Giordano Bought A Lot Of My Stories”

RA: Cool! That “Batman” story, the first “Titans” story, and probably the “Jericho” one, as well, were done in 1968. You didn’t receive another credit for nearly two years.

WEIN: Wow! Was it that long? I love these interviews. You guys seem to know more about my career than I do! Was it really two years?

RA: Well, more like a year and a half, I guess. You next showed up writing a framing sequence for a DC Special reprint book—#6, the one with that great Neal Adams cover of a battle between a cowboy and Indians being interrupted by an alien spaceship.

WEIN: I remember that one, but didn’t I have anything in House of Secrets or House of Mystery before that?

RA: No. You had a lot of stories appearing in House of Secrets, some in The Witching Hour, and some over at Marvel in Tower of Shadows or Chamber of Darkness, but all of those came later. You probably wrote them earlier, though.

WEIN: Wow! I thought I had earlier stories than that. Maybe it’s because some of those mystery titles were more reprint than original books at the time, so they were buying them until they stockpiled enough stories to go all original. Dick Giordano bought a lot of my stories. I guess that would have been for House of Secrets. There were a bunch of Secrets stories and a few Witching Hour tales. The Marvel mystery stories didn’t last all that long.

Only a year or so before those titles went all reprint.

RA: The first story I read of yours was probably only considered a filler story, but I liked it. It was for Weird War Tales, I think—something about the end of the world…

The Tyro Team That Haunted Julie Schwartz In A/E #113’s coverage of Wolfman’s early career, we featured the Neal Adams/Dick Giordano splash page of the “Batman” tale from Detective Comics #408 (Feb. 1971), scripted by Wein & Wolfman and foisted upon editor Julius Schwartz when Adams undertook to pencil it on his own. But that splash for “The House That Haunted Batman” was actually the second page of the story; here’s the first, courtesy of Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

WEIN: “The Day after Doomsday.” I did a bunch of those. Jack Sparling, I think, drew that. He did a bunch of my early stories.

They were designed to be a kind of on-going filler series. They actually started in Witching Hour, though. They were intended to be take-offs on every last end-of-the-world cliché that you could think of. And then I started just writing little vignettes for it, which I thought was a lot of fun.

RA: I don’t know if you were aware of it—well, you probably were—but you seemed to get very good artists on your stories very early on. Nick Cardy for those Teen Titans tales, Gil Kane, Gene Colan, Gray Morrow, Neal Adams, Ralph Reese… well, Reese probably wasn’t considered a major talent at the time, but he was pretty good. Most young writers

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

9

Cowboys & Indians & Aliens—Minus The Aliens (Above & top left:) One of Len Wein & Marv Wolfman’s first writing assignments was the framing sequence for the extra-size DC Special #6 (Jan.-March 1970), with art by Gil Kane & Vince Colletta—behind a dramatic and superbly drawn but misleading cover by Neal Adams, possibly based on a concept by editorial director Carmine Infantino. Despite the cover’s post-Space Western, pre-Cowboys and Aliens nature, the comic’s interior consisted of 1950s-era reprints of “Daniel Boone,” “Tomahawk,” “Davy Crockett,” “Kit Carson,” “Buffalo Bill,” and “Pow-Wow Smith.”

But the issue did sport an un-bylined text story by the boys’ fellow neophyte, Gerry Conway, who was interviewed in A/E #131. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert & Nick Caputo. [TM & © DC Comics.]

starting out get either the second-tier artists or artists as inexperienced as they are.

WEIN: Yes, I was very fortunate in the artists picked to illustrate my stories. I was always told that my early scripts were very easy to draw from. A lot of artists like that. Nobody had to figure anything out. I was an artist originally. I saw everything visually. I was a good enough writer to be able to describe to the artist what I wanted and needed on the page.

A Weird War Tale (Above:) Splash page from the first Wein-scripted story that our intrepid interviewer recalls reading: “The Day after Doomsday,” from Weird War Tales #40 (Aug. 1975). Actually, Len wrote a number of stories with that title—a sort of “after-the-world-ends” series-that-wasn’t-a-series—most if not all of them two-pagers, starting with one by him and Rich Buckler in WWT #23. Art here by Howard Chaykin & Bill Draut. Thanks to Jim Kealy.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

RA: Now, you did do some romance work.

WEIN: Just a little bit. I wrote one actual story and a lot of little intro pieces.

“Why Do You Want To Work For Us?”

RA: Somewhere about 1970 you started to work at Skywald. I liked the

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

first story I read of yours there. It was called “The Deadly Mark of the Beast” [Nightmare #1 (Dec. 1970)] and had an odd art combo—Syd Shores on pencils and Tom Palmer on inks. It was an odd art mix, but they actually worked together fairly well.

WEIN: Sol Brodsky had, for years, been at Marvel. I had done a story for him on a title called Spoof, a humor title that Marvel tried briefly. He loved the story and remembered it. When he went over to Skywald, he said, “Write for me.” At that time, I’d have worked for anybody, so I said, “Sure, I’d love to.” Then I asked him why he was asking me. He said, “I love that humor story you did so much that I wanted to work with you.” I said, “Great! What do you want me to do for you?” He said “Westerns!” [laughs] I said, “OK, that makes sense.” I was shaking my head. I did a whole pile of Westerns for him.

RA: You did a few black-&-white stories and quite a number of the Westerns. The Westerns were the books they attempted to make a fourcolor entry into the field with. Weren’t a lot of those stories, regardless of the title of the book, take-offs on either Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid? WEIN: I wrote The Sundance Kid and one that I created on my own called The Bravados. There were four issues, I think, of both.

Not that many. The color books didn’t last very long. They were 25-centers that had a new lead story and then a lot of 1950s-era reprints. But I had fun doing them.

Come On-a My House…

House of Secrets #85 (May 1970) sported not one but two Wein-crafted yarns: “People Who Live in Glass Houses,” with art by Don Heck, and the particularly imaginative “Reggie Rabbit [et al.],” with art by newcomer Ralph Reese. Thanks to Nick Caputo. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

Skyward At Skywald (Above:) The Syd Shores/Tom Palmer splash page drawn for Wein’s story “The Deadly Mark of the Beast,” in Skywald’s black-&-white comic Nightmare #1 (Dec. 1970). Thanks to George Warner.

(Above right:) Serg Moren’s splash page for the writer’s entry in that company’s Psycho #4 (Sept. 1971). Thanks to George Warner & Nick Caputo. [© the respective copyright holders.]

It was an adventure working with Sol. He’s gone now, but he was a nice man. A very dear man. Still, he had very few editorial skills. He believed, for example, that in the Westerns the words “guns” and/or “death” should appear in every story title. So, no matter what I titled my stories, Sol would change them so they came out with “death” or “guns” in the title. The very last story that I wrote for him—I forget what it was called originally—but he just threw out the original title and called it “Guns of Death!” I said, “Well, we’re done!” [laughs] RA: There’s only so many combinations!

WEIN: Exactly!

RA: You mentioned that you worked for Gold Key early on, mostly on anthology titles like Boris Karloff or Twilight Zone. [continued on p. 15]

He Put The “Sky” In “Skywald” Sol Brodsky (editor/co-publisher of Skywald Comics, 1970-72), and the splash page of Wein’s story from the Marvel parody mag Spoof #1 (Oct. 1970) that Sol liked. Art by Marie Severin. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

11

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

Reach For the Skywald!

“The Bravados,” co-created by Len for Skywald, led off all three issues of Wild Western Action (March, May, & June 1971) before winding up with its own title for one issue (#1, Aug. 1971). Pencils by Syd Shores; inks by Mike Esposito. Many artists and writers who’d been doing work for Marvel showed up in Skywald’s pages. Scuttlebutt is that Marvel publisher Martin Goodman was not in favor of Sol Brodsky returning to the fold when Skywald’s comics line collapsed… but by 1972 Stan Lee had become publisher and Sol became a Marvel vice-president! For more on Brodsky’s life and career, see A/E #134. Skywald’s extralength comics also featured reprints of “Durango Kid,” “Red Mask,” “Billy Nevada,” and numerous other series from defunct 1950s companies. Thanks to Stephan Friedt & Douglas R. Kelly for the scans. [© the respective copyright holders.]

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Sundancing With The Stars The splash pages of the five Wein-written “Sundance Kid” lead stories in Skywald’s Blazing Six-Guns #1 & 2 (Feb. & April 1971) and The Sundance Kid #1-3 (June, July, & Sept. ’71), all with pencils by Dick Ayers and inks by John Tartaglione, formerly Marvel’s Sgt. Fury art team. See the interview for Len’s thoughts on Sol Brodsky’s approach to story-titling… though, contrary to his memory, “Guns of Death!” (in Sundance Kid #1) wasn’t the last story he scripted for the feature. The ultra-popular 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid inspired two series at Skywald; Gerry Conway wrote the other one. Thanks to Stephan Friedt. [© the respective copyright holders.]

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

Thar’s Gold In That Thar Key! Len enjoyed working on a variety of material for Gold Key, including (clockwise from top of page): Twilight Zone #36 (March 1971), with art by John Celardo… Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #33 (Feb. ’71), art by Tom Gill… Microbots #1-and-only (Dec. ’71), art perhaps by Jesse Santos (or maybe Jack Sparling?)… Mod Wheels #2 (May ’71), art by Jack Abel & Sal Trapani… and Star Trek #9 (Feb. ’71), art by Alberto Giolitti.

Thanks to Jim Ludwig, Michael T. Gilbert, Stephan Friedt, & Douglas R. Kelly for these deathless scans. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

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Hey, Kids—Comix!

(Left:) Writer Len Wein and artist Herb Trimpe created a horrific homage to underground comix in Marvel’s Creatures on the Loose #11 (May 1971)… in the person of an artist named “Roger Krass.” A tribute to Trimpe, who recently passed away, will appear in a near-future issue; a photo of him appears on p. 37.

(Right:) The legendary Reed Crandall drew Len’s story for Creatures on the Loose #13 (Sept. 1971). Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

[continued from p. 11] WEIN: I did a bunch of stories for Twilight Zone, a bunch for Boris Karloff. I wrote Star Trek for two years. I did The Microbots. I did Mod Wheels for a year or two. I had the best time at Gold Key. They were the nicest guys to work for.

Marv [Wolfman] and I had had a problem at DC. We’d gotten blackballed for something that we had not done. Artwork was disappearing, and we were the two young kids on the block, and it was assumed that we were taking it, which we had not. So Marv basically left the industry for a while and became an art teacher. I decided that I wasn’t quitting comics. There were other places to work besides DC. So I went literally down the block to the Gold Key offices one afternoon—made an appointment. I came in with samples of my work and told the two editors there—Wally Green and his assistant, Paul Kuen—that I wanted to work with them.

Those two were among the nicest guys I’ve ever met. Well, when I said I wanted to work for them, they hit me with the “Springtime for Hitler” face. You know the reference? [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Mel Brooks’ film/play The Producers had Jewish stage producers trying to make a light musical called Springtime for Hitler as a tax dodge, so it was a play that they never intended to succeed.] There are great shots in the films where the audience at opening night gets a look at what’s coming at them, and the expression is always “What the f—- are we watching?” Well, both Wally and Paul looked at me with that kind of expression and said, “In God’s name, why? Why do you want to work for us?”

I said, “I like your books. I’m a professional writer and I think we can help each other.” They agreed to go ahead and try. I became their top writer for 2½ years. I did a lot of work there. Most of my work was there, actually. Some appeared at Marvel at the same time. And at the end I got back with DC. Dick Giordano’s attitude towards my blacklisting was “Blackball, smackball!” He said, “I’ll use you.” With that, I started getting back to DC. They finally discovered the truth about the art thefts and the blackballing was lifted. I started making much more money at DC than at Gold Key. I finally had to ask Wally and Paul, “I know you can’t match this but I’ve got to ask… otherwise, I’ve got to go.” So they said “No, no. Go. Go. Thank you for everything you did. We loved everything you did. We loved working with you and we’d love to keep working with you, but we can’t afford you anymore. You should go where the money is.” So they sent me on my way. [laughs] It was very sweet, very paternal.

RA: That’s nice. One of the stories I recall as being very good during this time period was one you did for Marvel called “The Underground Gambit.” It was a spoof on underground comics and Robert Crumb. I don’t know if you remember that one or not…

WEIN: I do remember it. I don’t recall the artist—was it Sal Buscema or Marie Severin?

RA: Actually it was Herb Trimpe. It was a story about a guy who fakes

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

being a hip underground cartoonist and ends up in hell.

WEIN: Oh, yeah! Well, Herb would have been my next guess. I vaguely remember that. It certainly sounds like one of my titles.

RA: One of the reasons it sticks in my memories was that this was the first time (1972) I’d ever heard of underground comics. As a Midwestern boy who grew up in a rural area, the notion that there were these comics that were unheard of by most people—hidden even, secreted away—was fascinating to me. It was like a Steve Ditko curio-shop story come to life. It eventually led me to search out these books, and the creators like Robert Crumb, so thank you for that.

WEIN: [laughs] You’re welcome!

RA: Still, it was a pretty good little story. You probably sold it to Tower of Shadows or Chamber of Darkness, but it ended up in one of the retitled, mostly reprint-filled, monster titles—Creatures on the Loose #11 (May 1971).

You must have just gotten back into DC’s good graces when you wrote the first “Swamp Thing” story—the eight-pager that appeared in House of Secrets in 1972.

WEIN: Yeah, I’d been back at DC for a little while at that point.

“‘Swamp Thing’ Was One Of Those Weird Cases”

RA: Can you tell us how that story came about?

Just One Of Those [Swamp] Things The cover of DC’s House of Secrets #92 (June-July 1971), showcase for the first Len Wein/Berni Wrightson “Swamp Thing” story, which was originally intended as a stand-alone effort. Wrightson (the spelling of whose first name soon reverted to “Bernie”) is seen in a 1975 photo from a fanzine.

Thanks to Bob Bailey for the cover scan, and to Stephan Friedt for locating the photo.

[Page TM & © DC Comics.]

WEIN: “Swamp Thing” was one of those weird cases. I don’t really remember. I know that it came to me on the subway on the way to the office. I was still writing mystery stories by the dozens for Joe Orlando. I was on my way in and I had nothing really firm to give him. So I came up with the idea on the subway, but I don’t remember what sparked the notion. I do remember how it got titled. That’s one of my favorite stories. I kept talking about the untitled story as I worked on it. It was that “swamp thing” story that I’m doing. So when the story finally needed an actual title, I found it was actually already in place, just sitting there.

RA: Well, it did work out pretty good.

WEIN: Yeah, it worked out nice! [laughs]

RA: I’ve talked to Gerry Conway about his co-creation of Man-Thing.…

WEIN: Oh, I’m having lunch with Gerry tomorrow!

RA: Say hello for me. Now, at the time, he was your roommate?

WEIN: Gerry and I were sharing an apartment.

RA: He was working on the first “Man-Thing” story [for Marvel]. Both initial stories were published at nearly the same time. The first two stories didn’t really resemble each other plot-wise, but both were featuring swamp monsters.

WEIN: I know. It’s one of those bizarre coincidences that crop up from time to time.

RA: I should mention here that Roy Thomas had a big hand in creating “Man-Thing.”

WEIN: Yeah, I’m told he did. Roy was a fan of a character that I discovered later and became very fond of, which was the old “Heap,” the one published by Hillman Comics. A lot of people say that I just stole the idea of “Swamp Thing” from “The Heap.” But I had never heard of “The Heap” at the time.

RA: Well, “The Heap” was also “stolen,” if that’s the word you want to use. So it doesn’t really matter.

WEIN: Really?

RA: The Heap, DC’s Solomon Grundy [the Heap’s first appearance was in 1942, Grundy’s was in 1944], all the early undead swamp creatures in comics were “inspired,” either directly or indirectly, by the classic story “It” by Theodore Sturgeon, which was originally published in the magazine Unknown in 1940. Alfred Bester, who created Solomon Grundy, admitted in an interview that he’d gotten the idea for Grundy directly from Sturgeon’s story. In fact, Roy Thomas and Marie Severin did a great adaptation of “It” for Marvel in 1971 [Supernatural Thrillers #1 (Dec. 1971)], just a few months after both “Man-Thing” and “Swamp Thing” first appeared.

WEIN: I’m a big Solomon Grundy fan. I don’t like the new one, but I used to like the old one. At the time, though, I just wasn’t that knowledgeable about older comics. I just knew what I knew. I used to follow Kirby and stuff. It really comes down to “great minds thinking alike,” I think. I’ve made that point many times over the years, including one in court on a case where I was testifying as an expert witness. Every year, every single year, there are two movies about exactly the same thing. Same thing happens in stories, especially SF stories. Two or more writers will come out with similar stories at roughly the same time. Notions or ideas get

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

17

recycled at the same time by two very different writers or whatnot…

RA: It comes down to the notion that “When an idea’s time has come, it comes about.” Last year there were two “friends with benefits” movies.

WEIN: Yeah, it just kind of happens. One year it’s volcanoes erupting. Another year it’s two films about meteors striking the Earth. Another year you get Tombstone and Wyatt Earp or Antz and A Bug’s Life.

RA: This year we got two Snow White movies.

Things Aren’t Always What They Seem Gerry Conway (left) and Len Wein in photos taken at the 1974 Comic Art Convention in New York City and printed in Marvel’s club magazine FOOM #7 (Fall ’74). The pair were apartment-mates, Len notes, when Marvel’s “Man-Thing” and DC’s “Swamp Thing” were being written and drawn in 1971-72. Of course, re “Heap”-style characters, A/E’s editor is never shy about pointing out that his and Herb Trimpe’s Glob had appeared in a 1969 issue of The Incredible Hulk. [Photos © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

WEIN: My favorite, and the most surreal to me, was the year we got two movies on Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood. What are the odds? But this happens constantly, every year. It’s not stealing, although people sometimes think it is. There are always people who believe that ideas aren’t that cheap. They have to believe that somebody stole something. It doesn’t happen that way, though.

When an idea’s time has come, it will come and often to more than one person at a time. The basic idea is, when that sort of thing happens, it’s not theft if it’s coincidence.

I’ve Got A Secret!

The first two pages of the one-shot “Swamp Thing” tale from House of Secrets #92. The heroine is said to have been visually based on Louise Jones, now Louise Simonson (seen in photo on p. 29). Thanks to Bob Bailey for the scans. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

It was so odd that Gerry and I came up with swamp monsters, but there were big differences originally. His was designed to be a series right from the start. Mine was a one-shot. We’re living within feet of one another, and neither of us knew the other was working on a swamp monster story.

RA: Perhaps the oddest part was that when they did finally come out as full-fledged series, they again came out at nearly the same time.

WEIN: It took a year for Bernie [Wrightson] and I to agree to do a series. We loved doing the short story so much that we didn’t want to undermine it. For a year, Carmine Infantino, DC’s publisher at the time, went on about how good the sales were and how he wanted to do a series. Both Bernie and I said we didn’t want to ruin our original story. This went back-and-forth for a year. Then, one Sunday morning I’m walking around the apartment—Gerry was out, and a mental rock drops on me. Literally, it was like WHAM! We don’t have to continue the short story. We can just start over with the same premise. I called Joe Orlando and told him I’d solved the problem of continuing “Swamp Thing.” He said, “That’s great,” and to call Bernie to see if he was ready to do a series. I called Bernie and told him the notion and he agreed that would work. By the following Monday we were working on the book.

RA: True. He had no origin. He was mostly a host in the original stories.

Plus, he was saddled, at least in the early issues of the revival, with Dr. Thirteen.

WEIN: Yes. Inserting Dr. Thirteen into the “Phantom Stranger” stories was an idea that I thought was one of the stupidest notions ever.

RA: Dr. Thirteen was an enormously irritating character!

WEIN: Not just that. He would have and actually did work fine in his own series, where he could debunk false ghosts and whatnot.

In his world there were no actual ghosts. However, in the Phantom Stranger series, there were all kinds of actual supernatural occurrences and creatures. How could any rational person keep on claiming there were no actual ghosts when you were fighting them every Thursday? [laughs]

RA: It was the same idea that threatened to undermine the TV show The X-Files. How could Scully keep claiming to be a skeptic about the super-

“The Phantom Stranger Was One Of The Best Experiences I Had, But…”

RA: That wasn’t your first regular title for DC, was it?

WEIN: No, I think I was doing The Phantom Stranger first. The Phantom Stranger was one of the best experiences I had, but, initially, it was also quite frustrating. I collected old, cheap stuff from the 1950s, so I had a complete set of The Phantom Stranger’s original series. There were only six issues. In the early days, I went to Joe Orlando and told him, “Joe, this is a great book. We should bring it back!” Joe told me that I was right and that when he had an opening we would bring it back. Then, when he had an opening, he did bring it back, but he gave it to Mike Friedrich. I went in and said, “What the hell did you do? It was my idea! I handed it to you!” He told me, “Oh, I forgot.” I told him that I eventually wanted to write that book. He said, “Great!” Then when Mike left the book, he gave it to Bob Kanigher! I went in again and asked him, “What the hell did you do?” He said, “Oh, I forgot.” I said, “Stop forgetting!” After a few issues I took over the book.

Finally.

RA: The Phantom Stranger, early on, had a huge number of mood swings. The writers changed every two or three issues, and every writer seemed to move him in a different direction.

WEIN: Yeah, every writer had a different version of the character.

Every writer has always had a different version of that character!

He’s never been well defined, particularly early on, on what he could do and what he couldn’t do.

You May See A Stranger…

The lead tale from DC’s The Phantom Stranger #15 (Sept.-Oct. 1971) was a three-scooper: script by Len Wein, art by Jim Aparo, from a story idea from editor Joe Orlando. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert for the page scan; the photo of Aparo at far left (seen to the right of longtime A/E interviewer and comics inker Jim Amash at a 1990s con hosted by the latter) was taken by Ed Fields and is courtesy of Amash; the photo of Orlando is courtesy of DC writer and editor Bob Rozakis. [Page TM & © DC Comics.]

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WEIN: I had my own ideas of who he might be, which I will never tell. I have my own attitude about certain things that I tried to adhere to as I went along. One of those was that while people refer to him as the “Phantom Stranger,” he does not call himself that.

He’s simply a “Stranger,” because you’d have to be a moron to call yourself “The Phantom Stranger.” When he did refer to it, it was always “Men call me The Phantom Stranger.” He never did himself. He is merely a Stranger. I thought that was much more interesting.

RA: Years after your run, Secret Origins #10 (Jan. 1987) had four separate stories that gave four different origins for the Phantom Stranger.

Up to that point, and for over thirty years, he’d never had any origin story. The story that most folks remember is, of course, Alan Moore and Joe Orlando’s take where the Stranger is a fallen angel whose wings were stripped away because he would not take sides in the battle between God and Satan for control of Heaven. That seems to be the origin story that most of the later writers refer to when they write the character now (although I did kind of like Mike Barr’s take, where the Stranger was the Wandering Jew).

WEIN: I wasn’t a part of that, to my amazement. They didn’t ask me to write one. It seems very odd, considering. I’ve never quite figured out why. I actually disagree with Alan’s story since, of course, I have my own [unwritten] version.

“The DC-Files” (Above:) In typical proto-Mulder-and-Scully X-Files fashion, The Phantom Stranger and Dr. Terrence Thirteen argue about whether the supernatural is real or not. Somehow, we suspect Doc’s skepticism will manage to remain intact—even though the pair of them are about to have a head-on collision with the Frankenstein Monster! Script by Len Wein, art by Jim Aparo, from Phantom Stranger #26 (Aug.-Sept. 1973). Thanks to Doug Martin.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

natural when she was immersed in it every week?

WEIN: Exactly! Still, she eventually came around, and Dr. Thirteen never did. I was obliged to use him, but I always thought what a dummy he was! He worked fine in some short stories, but not in a series.

RA: He also limited the story possibilities, because he did the same thing in every issue. He swore he was going to expose The Phantom Stranger as a fraud, and, of course, he couldn’t, since the Stranger wasn’t a fraud. His contributions to the actual story were nil.

WEIN: That’s right. He contributed nothing. He was just there as an antagonist. Once he got his own strip in the back of the book, it worked much better for him.

I worked on Phantom Stranger for two years, probably the longest run of any scripter on the book. Arnold Drake followed me, and he had a long run, too.

RA: The Stranger started to make a lot more sense as a character during your run as well.

Swanderson Song (Above:) When Julius Schwartz took over editorship of the “Superman” titles in the 1970s editorial revamp that he and Murray Boltinoff did, he first chose Denny O’Neil to give Superman a new approach. After that ended, he brought in others, including most definitely Len Wein, who among other stories wrote this one for Superman #246 (Dec. 1971). Pencils by Curt Swan, inks by Murphy Anderson—the team often referred to as “Swanderson.”

Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

RA: Well, since the Moore/Orlando version’s not your version and you did write the character for quite a while, that’s understandable. Still, the book that put you on the map was Swamp Thing. The first issue of that one was pretty darn good. It certainly caught my attention when I first read it.

WEIN: Thank you.

“Doing A Horror Comic That Fit Within The [Comics] Code…”

RA: Mind you, that wasn’t the only issue that was pretty darn good…

[Len laughs] but it was just mysterious enough and creepy enough to work for me. And to work within the Comics Code, which wasn’t always the easiest thing in the world to do.

WEIN: Yes, doing a horror comic that fit within the Code made those a little tougher type of book to do than most. I had to make one change in that first issue because of the Code. In the original script, when the bomb goes off and he’s racing for the swamp, he was originally engulfed in flames. The Code said we couldn’t do that, so I rewrote it so that fumes from wherever the explosion was at were the flames that we saw, and they were fine with that. It changed nothing in the art but a little bit of the coloring. No real change in the copy except for one word. The Code was happy.

RA: You also worked on back-up features. You worked on “Zatanna” with Gray Morrow?

WEIN: On the first one. He was a very good artist.

RA: The first short of yours that really made me sit up and take notice was one you wrote with Marv Wolfman. It was called “The Pool” and appeared in Weird War Tales #3 (Jan.-Feb. 1972). It was illustrated by Russ Heath, so you really couldn’t go too far wrong. It was a good little story.

WEIN: Thank you. First, Russ was and is a really amazing artist.

That story got reprinted a time or two.

RA: And it’s going to be reprinted again in just a few months.

WEIN: Really?

RA: Yes, they’re doing a Showcase Presents volume of Weird War.

RA: There was a change in #3, as well. Dr. Arcane was originally stabbing the Patchwork Man with a hypodermic needle to knock him out, and the needle was whited out in the published version so that it looks like an 80-year-old man was sucker-punching a seven-foot-tall Frankenstein monster with the back of his fist. Arcane was a pretty tough little old man, but that was kind of going over the top.

WEIN: My favorite story regarding the Code and Swamp Thing came when #5 or #6 was up for review.

The Code suddenly called Joe Orlando in a panic and said, “Hey! We just noticed! Swamp Thing is naked!” [laughs] Joe said, “Yes… and your point is?” The Code said we had to put some trunks on him or something.

Joe said, “Why?” The Code said, “He’s naked!” Joe replied, “How do you know he’s naked?” They said, “He’s obviously not wearing any pants or trunks!” Joe: “Do you see anything where he’s not wearing anything?” Code: “No, it’s all black.” Joe: “Oh, really, it’s all black? Why don’t you go back six issues and see that it’s always all black!” Code: “Oh. Yeah. OK. Well… just keep it that way!”

RA: He was also totally foliage.

WEIN: Yeah! [laughs] But…that’s the Comics Code!

Months into its run and they get panic-stricken! It was so funny. I just couldn’t stop laughing when Joe told me the story. It was “You’re kidding, right?” They were panicking about what you could not see! This is good! I guess the folks at the Code office were just trying to earn their living. What was the reasoning behind some of their requests? Who knows? It was Thursday. It was an on-going adventure.

RA: You continued writing short pieces for a long time.

WEIN: They were fun and they were always a quick buck.

Rise And Shine—It’s Daylight In The Swamp!

The dramatic Wein/Wrightson splash page for Swamp Thing #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1972).

Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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revived the “G.I. Robot” and “The War That Time Forgot.” I loved the notion of “The War That Time Forgot.” What a great concept!

Darwyn Cooke later took that concept to the nth degree. Darwyn is great. I’m loving his work on Minutemen, for example. Darwyn’s top of the line.

RA: I also loved his twelve issues on The Spirit. He had a nearly impossible job there. As Mike Vosburg pointed out to me—nobody writing or drawing The Spirit can allow themselves to be as good as Eisner’s worst or even one of his mid-level “Spirit” stories. They always have to be as good as the best “Spirit” story, and those are all classics!

WEIN: Exactly! I was offered The Spirit at one point and I turned it down for almost exactly the same reason. I realized that even if I wrote the best stories of my career, I’m not Will Eisner and I’m not going to be able to do what Will did.

RA: Plus, Eisner had a rather unique way of writing that allowed him to write stories that had huge amounts of sentimentality in them yet were not sticky sweet. That’s a very difficult thing to pull off.

Swamp Fire The page in which a fiery blast contributes to the creation of Swamp Thing, from issue #1. It’s hard to tell precisely what the Comics Code Authority got changed in this violent sequence—but if they were happy, Len and Bernie were happy! Thanks to Bob Bailey. (Incidentally, the scene from Swamp Thing #3 with the Patchwork Man wielding a hypodermic needle, referred to by Len in the interview, was seen in A/E #105’s “Tales from the Code” feature.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

That means it will be in black-&-white. Russ Heath looks so great in black-&-white. [NOTE: The Showcase volume was indeed published in 2012.]

WEIN: Cool! I guess that means that they probably are going to reprint the story that I did with Walt Simonson. It was a story called “Cyrano’s Army.” It wasn’t a very good story, but I liked it.

RA: I remember that story. It was one of Walt’s first credits as a pro, if not his actual first. Weird War Tales was kind of an odd series… all the horror taking place within the context of war, which is a horror story in and of itself.

WEIN: Right. Years later, when I was editing Weird War Tales, we changed the book around and I brought back some of Kanigher’s weirder ideas. I was rotating leads for the book.

RA: Would that have been the days of “Creature Commandos”?

WEIN: Yes, although I created “Creature Commandos,” but I also

Naked Came The Swamp-Monster Len recalls the Comics Code suddenly noticing that the Swamp Thing was nude— around the 5th or 6th issue. Guess there was too much black to notice any nudity in this splash page from Swamp Thing #4 (April-May 19730! Repro’d from a scan of the original art, sent by Lynn Walker, courtesy of artist Nik Poliwko.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

Weird War Two The splash pages of two exceptionally drawn Weird War Tales written or co-written by Len Wein. (Left:) “The Pool” by Len (with Marv Wolfman in this case), art by Russ Heath. (Right:) “Cyrano’s Army,” an early art job by Walt Simonson. Thanks for both to Jim Ludwig & Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © DC Comics.]

WEIN: Yeah, it was one of Will’s trademarks. At the end of a story you’d go awww! and not feel embarrassed or manipulated. I just wasn’t willing to take on The Spirit.

I do like doing mystery stories. I worked on “The Elongated Man” for a time. I’m a mystery fan, so those who-done-it or howdone-it or what-done-it type stories were always fun to write.

“The Very First Character I Ever Came Up With Was The Human Target”

RA: There’s a backstory on The Human Target that you might like to tell us…

WEIN: The very first character I ever came up with was The Human Target, at the very beginning of my career. His name then was Jonny Double.

RA: That’s it! I think Marv Wolfman told me about that issue of Showcase [#78 (Nov. 1968)] and I picked it up. The story, though, is credited as plot by Marv and script by Joe Gill.

WEIN: Well, yes and no. I was very subtle back then, you’ll notice.

[laughs] I had a character who doubled as other people, and his name was Jonny Double. Oh, gee! I pitched the idea to Dick Giordano, who was a big detective buff and was looking for some kind of detective strip to run somewhere. Dick told me he liked the character. He liked where he lived. He just didn’t like the notion of him becoming other people. He thought it was too busy. So he said that if I wanted to do Jonny Double, than just do him as a straight detective. So Marv and I put together something. We never even got to write the book. Joe Gill wrote the script. That Showcase issue was it, though, for Jonny Double. I brought him back a few years later when I was doing the “Supergirl” strip. It was for a team-up set in San Francisco against Dr. Tzin-Tzin, who was an old Batman villain. That was sort of it for Jonny Double. He just didn’t go anywhere.

Years later, I’m in Julie Schwartz’s office. I was doing a lot of work for Julie at that time, and Julie tells me that he’s looking for a new strip for the back of Action Comics. But he was tired of superheroes and asked me if I had anything different for him. Instantly the Human Target concept popped back into my head and I told it to Julie—just the concept. He said “I’m going to go talk to Carmine. Give me a second.” He went down the hall and five minutes later he came back and told me the first script was due in

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

23

two weeks! That’s how I sold “The Human Target”! I basically just made Jonny Double into a new character.

he recognized me. All those visits to DC back in the day when I was a fan and so on. He yells, “You! What the hell are you doing there?”

RA: Did Dick Giordano do the first few stories?

WEIN: No! Carmine Infantino drew the first two “Human Target” stories. Dick inked them.

Dick was involved in nearly every “Human Target” story in some way or another for years while I was writing him. He drew and inked or just inked another artist on almost all the stories I wrote. But how Carmine got involved was interesting. Most of us at DC used to go out to a local pub after work on Friday nights. One Friday night, a week or two after I sold the “Human Target” story, Carmine and I were the only two guys left in the room. He said, “I’m tired of being this boss all the time. I’d love to draw something again.” I asked him what he wanted to do. He says “I don’t know. Some good old-fashioned detective stories. I used to love those.” I asked him, “What about the character you just OKed? What about ‘The Human Target’?” He thought about it and said, “Naw. I don’t think so.” It took me a half hour and a couple more drinks to talk him into penciling the first one.

RA: That’s pretty good. Carmine’s a great artist.

I was terrified, because Julie could be terrifying. I started to stammer and said I was just trying to sell some “Lois Lane” stories to Mr. Bridwell. He literally grabbed me by the back of my collar, pulled me out of Nelson’s guest chair, dumped me in his guest chair and said, “No, you’re not. You’re writing The Flash!” I said, “What?” He said, “You couldn’t possibly be any worse than the son of a bitch I just fired.” That’s how I got to write The Flash! [laughs] RA: I’m not going to ask then who was fired.

WEIN: I’m not going to tell you, either. [both laugh] RA: You also wrote at least one story for “El Diablo.” That would have been for Joe Orlando.

Target Practice The first “Human Target” splash page, from Action Comics #419 (Dec. 1972).

Script by Wein; pencils by Carmine Infantino; inks by Dick Giordano. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

RA: I guess because he spent all night out riding horses?

WEIN: Yep. It worked out pretty neatly.

“You’re Writing The Flash!”

RA: You also worked on The Flash. This would have been after Carmine’s days on that book, though…

WEIN: I only did the one. It was a four-pager that Gray Morrow drew. El Diablo had a very odd origin. He was struck by lightning and was in his civilian persona a quadriplegic! He became a version of Zorro at night! I always wondered if the people who were reading the strip wondered how this guy who couldn’t move kept such great muscle tone?

WEIN: Exactly! Fighting crime and using a whip! It was an odd strip.

Carmine Infantino

WEIN: Yes. I think the artist was Irv Novick.

Editorial director of Irv and Dick Giordano were illustrating my DC Comics from 196771, publisher 1971-76— stories there. That reminds me of one of my and, as the original favorite stories. Julie shared an office in artist of the Silver Age those days with the late, and much beloved, title The Flash, one of E. Nelson Bridwell. Nelson was editing Lois the most important Lane early in my career. I came in to pitch comic artists of the some ideas for a possible “Lois Lane” story, late 1950s and early because it would give me a chance to write ’60s.

Superman. While I was sitting in his guest chair, Nelson was called into a meeting. So I’m just sitting there waiting. The room was empty. Julie wasn’t there. Nelson wasn’t there. I’m just sitting there, as patiently as possible. Suddenly Julie comes storming into the room. Mind you,

Dick Giordano, who would serve as DC’s managing editor from 1983 into the 1990s, was an artist whose work (esp. his inking) adorned many a comic book over the years. Thanks to Pedro Angosto and Mike Zeck.

RA: You did a lot of fill-ins during this time period, for both DC and Marvel.

WEIN: Yeah. I was hungry. When I was hungry, I would write anything.

RA: Then you went with Joe Kubert on Korak, Son of Tarzan and “Carson of Venus”—both of them being Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations.

WEIN: Well, Joe Orlando edited the first three or four issues, and then Joe took the book over. I wrote three Burroughs adaptations—“Carson of Venus,” “Pellucidar,” and “Korak,” all for Joe Orlando and then Joe Kubert—God rest his soul [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: This interview took place only a week or so after Kubert’s death]—came in to take over.

That was interesting. I have a very peculiar, personal style of

24

Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

Flash Of Two Pages

Irv Novick, over the decades, drew everything from “The Shield” to “Batman” to—well, The Flash. From the Julius Schwartz Collection.

These pages from The Flash #215 (May 1972), penciled by Irv Novick and mostly inked

by Frank McLaughlin, showcased not the Silver Age Flash but the Golden Age speedster of 1940-51, whom editor Julius Schwartz (along with writer Gardner Fox and artist Carmine Infantino) had restored to the DC Universe in 1961 as a resident of “Earth-Two.” Still, we’ve a hunch Barry Allen wound up donning his own costume before long. Script by Len Wein. Thanks to Bob Bailey.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

Julius Schwartz in 1999, at the Charlotte, NC, Heroes Con. He was the DC editor who ushered in the Silver Age. Thanks to Bob Bailey.

It Means “The Devil,” You Know!

“El Diablo”—ably written by Len Wein, superbly drawn by Gray Morrow— from All-Star Western #11 (April-May 1972). With the next issue, the mag’s title was changed to Weird Western Tales. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

On, Inside, And Beyond This Planet Earth When DC signed an agreement in 1972 with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., to produce comic books featuring that great fantasy author’s creations, Len wrote no fewer than three of them (seen clockwise from above left, courtesy of Bob Bailey): Korak, Son of Tarzan gave Len a chance to work with artistic wizard Frank Thorne on the title feature—as per this splash page from #48 (May-June 1972).

Also for Korak, LW scripted the “Carson of Venus” series, starring one of ERB’s interplanetary adventurers, with artist Michael W. Kaluta—this splash page is from #48 (Sept.-Oct. ’72).

And, over in Weird Worlds came the serialization “Pellucidar,” based on the inner-world novels by Burroughs that commenced with At the Earth’s Core. Issue #2 (Oct.-Nov. 1972) spotlighted Alan Weiss artwork inked by “C. Bunker,” short for “Crusty Bunkers,” which generally meant Neal Adams and his gang of young artists from Continuity, Inc. [© Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.]

writing. Joe, on the other hand, was a minimalist. He preferred the art to tell the story. He liked very sparse copy. Those books, since they were taken from Burroughs’ novels, were all really copy-heavy from trying to sustain Burroughs’ style, trying to get as much of the story into those six- or eight- or ten-page stories.

So Joe edited my first issue. He called me into his office and gave me one of the oddest compliments that I’ve ever gotten. He said, “I’ve just finished editing your first issue.” I said, “Yes?” He says, “It doesn’t work anymore.” I asked why and he tells me that he trimmed what he thought was extraneous copy, and when he read what was left, the story didn’t work with what was left. He said, “It needs everything you put in there.” I said, “Thank you.” He told me, “I’m not happy about this! I don’t like that much copy in my books! But, if that’s how you write, then I’m going to leave them alone.”

25

26

Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

Len Wein Metes Out Justice!

Ulp! We utilized Justice League of America cover art as that of this issue of Alter Ego—only to realize later that Len and Richard Arndt never actually discussed the JLA as such in the interview, amid all the other things they covered in detail! So, just after you’ve read how Wein became the writer of The Flash seems a good place to showcase three primo “Justice League” splashes from the two-plus years when he was the group’s scribe.

(Clockwise from above:) By sheer coincidence, Len’s tenure on JLA began with issue #100 (Aug. 1972)—and he started out with a threepart epic in which the League and their Earth-Two counterparts, the Justice Society of America, journey to another dimension to rescue the Seven Soldiers of Victory, the DC entourage who from 1941-44 had starred in Leading Comics while the JSA was holding forth in All-Star Comics. Art by Dick Dillin & Joe Giella.

Dick Dillin

In #105 (April-May ’73), the splash page behind the cover that fronted this edition of A/E revealed who the mysterious new member of the JLA was: none other than The Flash’s old buddy, The Elongated Man, whose solo series Len had written earlier. Art by Dick Dillin & Dick Giordano.

Previously the longtime penciler (for two companies!) of Blackhawk, he became for the last decade of his life the eminently capable penciler of Justice League of America.

Thanks to the Dillin family.

Then, in #107 (Sept.-Oct. ’73), another JLA-JSA team-up brought into the DC Universe six heroes from the 1940s rival Quality Comics Group, characters DC had purchased years before. Uncle Sam, The Ray, Black Condor, Phantom Lady, Doll Man, and The Human Bomb had never so much as crossed each others’ paths back in the Golden Age; but that didn’t stop Wein from sculpting them into The Freedom Fighters on the parallel world Earth-X, where the Nazis had won the Second World War! Art by Dick Dillin & Dick Giordano. Thanks to Bob Bailey for all three page-scans. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

27

RA: Well, that was sort of a vote of confidence, anyways.

Alex Toth started off in the 1940s drawing features like “Green Lantern,” but over the next couple of decades streamlined his style to eliminate what he felt was superfluous detail, in favor of designoriented storytelling.

From an issue of the DC house fanzine Amazing World of DC Comics.

WEIN: It was! I was very flattered. It was the same kind of problem that I had with Julie, early on. When I brought one of my first scripts into Julie, he would edit it and tell me much the same thing: “I was editing your story and it doesn’t work anymore.” So I read what he’d done and said, “Aha! It’s simple. In this sentence here, you took out a four-syllable word and put in a three-syllable word.” He said, “What the hell difference does that make?”

I told him, “I write to the rhythm of the words. There’s a musicality to my writing.

If you take out a four-syllable world you’ve got to put in a four-syllable word or you screw up the rhythm of the line.”

He said, “What are you talking about?” So I showed him what I meant and he goes, “I’ll be damned!” From that point on, Julie went very easy on editing my scripts. He’d

Cool Panels In Hot Wheels (Above:) An Alex Toth-drawn, Wein-written page from Hot Wheels #6 (Oct. 1970). The story’s title was “Eye of the Storm.” Thanks to Nick Caputo.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

Marie & John Severin These sensationally talented siblings made up the supreme team on Kull in the 1970s. In the first half of the 1950s, he had drawn and she had colored (both beautifully) for EC Comics.

Kull-ed From A Classic (Above:) Editor-in-chief Roy Thomas was scheduled to script Marvel’s Kull the Conqueror #8 (May 1973) in between issues written by Gerry Conway, and had duly fashioned a plot adapting Robert E. Howard’s short story “Wolfshead” into a “Kull” exploit—only to find himself without time to do the final dialoguing. Enter Len Wein, who turned in an admirable job, as per usual. Art by Marie & John Severin. [TM & © Kull Properties, Inc.]

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

call me up so, if there was a word he didn’t like, I could change the word myself.

RA: You didn’t work very much with sword-and-sorcery tales during this period, but you did do a script fill-in on Kull the Conqueror.

WEIN: I did just the one Kull. I was very intimidated by that book!

I thought it was brilliant! The Severins, Marie and John, were working together. Roy Thomas was writing it. It was just a kickass, beautifully written title. When Roy asked me to do a fill-in, I was terrified because, frankly, I didn’t think I was good enough to do this book. It came out well, though!

RA: Yeah, it was a pretty good issue… the werewolf story. Those eight or nine issues with Roy, the Severins, and then Gerry Conway were just top-notch. They don’t get looked at near as much as the “Conan” stories from that time period, but in some ways, I think they hold up a bit better.

WEIN: I agree. I absolutely agree with you.

can get a story drawn by John Severin. I mean, John Severin was one of my favorite artists and drew one of my best stories—the World War I story [NOTE: “A Toast to No Man’s Memory” from Creepy #92 (Oct. 1977)]. It was just a great story.

RA: I remember that one! It was pretty good. John’s art also never wavered. He was rock solid from the late 1940s until his last story for Mike Mignola’s Witchhunter.

WEIN: He did this extraordinary art job on that WWI story, and then about a month after the story came out I got this phone call or maybe it was a letter from him apologizing for ruining my story. I wrote back and asked how he ruined my story. Everything I wanted in it was there and then some! It was spectacular! He wrote back and said, “Well, according to your story, it takes place in Sept. of 1917 [or something like that], and the plane that you described to me and that I drew, changed the corner of its wingtips the next month from square to rounded wingtips. I drew the rounded

“[Warren Publications’] Page Rate Was A Joke”

RA: You also did some stories for Warren Publications. I think most of them appeared in Vampirella, although there may have been a few in Creepy or Eerie over the years..

WEIN: Yes, there were. I did one or two “Vampirella” stories. This may have happened when Marv Wolfman was over there as the lead editor for a time. Their page rate was a joke. It was literally a joke. Twenty-five dollars for a story, no matter how long the story. But the artist on “Vampirella” was so wonderful—I don’t recall his name, though—that I just had to write a story for him.

RA: If it was for the “Vampirella” strip, it was probably Jose Gonzalez. I know that you did a translation script for Esteban Morato’s “Dax the Warrior” strip for Eerie.

WEIN: Maroto! That was the name! He was so good. I was so eager to work with him that I did the story for the crap money. Later, I did some stories for Louise Jones, who’d taken over as editor. She was probably the most adorable woman who ever walked the Earth!

There was never a straight man in comics—and maybe even a few not so straight—who wasn’t madly in love with Weezie! She was just the sweetest girl on Earth.

RA: I’ve heard similar comments from a lot of very different types of writers who worked for her. Once she thought you could write a story, she was very supportive.

WEIN: Yes! She was a great editor and a terrific human being. She remains, in my dotage, one of my dearest old friends. A wise-acre, though! She would call me up periodically and go, “Would you like to do a story for Creepy?” I’d say, “Have your page rates improved?” She’d go, “No, they still suck.” Me: “I love you, Honey, but why would you want me to do something like that? You know I’m not going to work for that page rate.” She’d go, “Oh, I was just hoping. I guess I’ll get someone else to do the John Severin story.” I’d go, “Excuse me?” Weezie: “Yeah, I’ve got John Severin scheduled in for a story.” I’d go, “S***.

When do you need it?” She’d call me up when she had some great artist available and very easily con me into writing these stories for next to nothing, just so I

Vampirella, Vampirella, Night And Day It’s Vampirella…

For Warren Publishing’s Vampirella #10 (March 1971), Len scripted and Billy Graham drew this back-up story. Thanks to Nick Caputo. [TM & © Dynamite.]

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

29

wingtips, which shouldn’t have been on the plane at the time of the story. I drew the wrong plane, so I f***ed up your story. I’m so sorry.”

I wrote back and said, “Are you out of your mind? Who cares about rounded versus square wingtips?”

RA: George Evans would have!

WEIN: Yeah, and George would have been the only other person who would have noticed! God bless him. John and George were probably the only two people on Earth who would have cared. It was so sweet of him to have written me, though.

Louise Jones had become Louise Simonson, Marvel editor, by the time this photo was taken… but she was and remain “Weezie” to her legions of friends and admirers.

RA: I interviewed Willi Franz, a writer and artist at Charlton, who told me a similar story. Willi was a teenager when this happened. He’d penciled a war story that Sam Glanzman was to ink. Sam said, “Wow! Where did you get these great references for the weapons? They’re right on the nose! I can use those references!” So Willi writes back and tells him, “I got them from your stories.” Sam goes, “Oh!” [much laughter] WEIN: I love that! Old pros. They know what they’re doing. We don’t have nearly enough of them anymore.

RA: No, they seem to be fading fast.

WEIN: We were talking about Joe Kubert earlier. He was very busy right up to the day he passed. He drew or inked two issues of Legacies for me last year and drew the last “Sgt. Rock” story he ever drew for a backup in Legacies #4. I knew Joe for fifty years, since I was doing those tours back in the 1960s. He was one of the last people on Earth I would allow to call me Lennie. It’s always Len. But Joe called me Lennie. Joe could have called me Smemo if he wanted to. I didn’t care. Until the day he died he could have benchpressed me. We’d shake hands every time we saw each other and I couldn’t use my hand for a half-hour afterwards.

RA: I interviewed him a couple of years back and he easily looked twenty years younger than his real age.

A Toast To Louise Jones John Severin-drawn splash page for Len Wein’s story for Warren’s Creepy #92 (Oct. 1977).

Thanks to George Warner. [TM & © New Comic Company.]

WEIN: Yes! A powerful man in every conceivable way. A sweet man and a gentleman. When I was doing Who’s Who for DC way back when, I was always trying to get the right artist for each character. Joe, of course, was the right artist for any number of DC characters. He was in the middle of an argument with Carmine or whoever and was not working for DC. I called him and carefully told him what I was doing… that I was up to Easy Company and wanted to know who he thought would be the best artist for their entries? He thought for a second, than told me he hated Carmine and ragged on him for ten minutes, then told me that I was a buddy of his and that he wouldn’t let me down. Finally he drew all the characters he should have drawn. He was very sweet. Like Severin, he never lost his talent, either. He was as good at the end as he was during what most people would have called his prime.

Some people just don’t lose it. Right now, I’m in my sixties and I’m writing some of the best work of my career!

“All Of Us… Have Great Respect For The Original [Watchmen] Stories”

RA: I’m reading your work on Before Watchmen on Ozymandias, and it holds up really well. I understand some of the controversy around those books, and, in some ways, I’m kind of leery about buying them, but I did anyway.

WEIN: [laughs] A lot of people feel that way.

RA: I’m not really going to get into whether DC is treating the original creators completely fairly. That all depends on a contract that I haven’t read, old grievances that I’m not privy to, and conversations that I’ve not been a part of; but I will say that the series of stories from Before Watchmen that I’ve read so far seem to done with respect toward the original story….

WEIN: All of us, every single person, working on Before Watchmen have great respect for the original stories. And as for whether DC

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

has been acting unfairly towards the Watchmen creators, I absolutely disagree with that idea. Certainly, we’re being paid well enough to do these stories. Alan was offered the same opportunities we were to write these stories for over a quarter of a century.

He turned them all down. As it is, he still makes an extraordinary amount of money off the Watchmen. The whole idea of “They were supposed to give it back to me once it stopped selling!” is… well, it’s not our fault that it never stopped selling!

RA: That’s true. And that’s kind of the reason I decided to buy at least the initial issues of the series. I kept buying them because they are wellwritten. I admire the man and his work. Moore is a great writer, but there are other great writers, some of whom I know, whose best-selling book is tied up with a publisher they no longer want to work with. As long as the book is in print and selling, that publisher will not give the book up.

That’s a standard book contract. In that respect, it’s just business.

WEIN: Exactly! In the year the Watchmen movie came out, the various trade editions of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen sold a million copies! That’s an extraordinary figure, especially for a 22-year-old book. Except for my best year, when money came in from the Dark Knight movie, I would trade any other year I’ve ever

“Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair…”

The splash page of Ozymandias in the Before Watchmen series. Jae Lee, artist.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

had in my career, with any one of Alan’s, just for the money on Watchmen. It’s really hard to complain when you’re making that much money.

And While We’re Talking Legacies…

The final page of DC Universe: Legacies #1, the 2010 salute to the Golden Age, by writer Len Wein and a pair of Kuberts: son Andy (pencils) and papa Joe (inks). [TM & © DC Comics.]

RA: Well, like I said, it’s hard for someone outside the situation to make those kinds of calls when I don’t know the whole story and haven’t seen or read the original contract and how it was all originally supposed to work out. From what I understand, it’s not like Jack Kirby, who never made the kind of money or got the kind of Joe Kubert recognition that he Len Wein A top artist in the should have for coat the 2010 Seattle Golden, Silver, creating all those Marvel comics convention.

Bronze—well, you Comics characters.

Thanks to Stephan name the Age, he There’s a contract in the Friedt. was a star in it!

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31

Watchmen situation that spells out the rights of the publisher and the creators. If the contract is still valid and the stipulations are still being upheld, then it’s just business. If the contract isn’t being upheld and you’re being screwed, you should be suing.

WEIN: Jack Kirby’s problems were with a different company. I don’t receive a dime for creating Wolverine or the New X-Men. It was considered work-for-hire. But, after my house burned down, I saw enough money just from Lucius Fox being featured in the Dark Knight film series to buy a new house.

RA: Oh, I hadn’t realized that you created Lucius Fox!

WEIN: Yes, in the first issue I wrote Batman solo.

With Lucius, I realized that here was a man, Bruce Wayne, who owns a multi-billion-dollar corporation and spends all his time swinging around the city in a Bat-suit. Who the hell is running the company? So I created Lucius to do that.

“When I Left [Swamp Thing], The Sales Went Right Into The Toilet”

RA: Well, to get back to some kind of chronological order, you worked for a bit on The Shadow.

WEIN: Only on a bit of a story, which broke my heart, because originally I was supposed to write the series, with Bernie Wrightson doing the artwork.

There’s even a house ad, drawn by Bernie, that mentions this.

RA: Denny O’Neil told me there was a long history of people who were supposed to have done that book and were dropped for various reasons. Jim Steranko, I think, was the first, based on his covers for the Shadow paperbacks, then Alex Toth, then you and Bernie, before Denny and Michael Kaluta got the job.

WEIN: I don’t remember what happened with me and Bernie, but we ended up not doing the book.

Perhaps we were too busy with Swamp Thing. The issue of The Shadow I actually worked on came about because Denny was running way behind. He called me one afternoon and said, “Help, help, oh, help.”

We plotted out a story together, split it down the middle, went home and wrote our two halves, figuring we’d do whatever fixing we’d need to do the next day to make the story coherent. Then, when we put the two halves together, we didn’t have to change one word.

Crazy Like A Fox The introduction of Lucius Fox in Batman #307 (Jan. 1979). Script by Len Wein; art by John Calnan (pencils) and Dick Giordano (inks). Thanks to Mark Muller & Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

RA: That’s pretty impressive.

WEIN: Yep.

RA: That would be the issue (#4) where Kaluta was having deadline problems, too, and Steve Hickman, Bernie Wrightson, and Howard Chaykin helped out with the inking. They weren’t officially credited, but their names appear on the license plate of the car on the splash page. The Shadow was a great book, but it had the problem that all the adapted stories of that time had. It was difficult to get in all the info needed when the page counts in the books kept shrinking.

WEIN: Very difficult. The pulp writers were penny-a-word guys.

Their styles were very wordy, partly because they would get paid more for being that way. The pulp guys weren’t alone in that, though. Look at A Tale of Two Cities—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” It was written that way because you were paid a penny a word.

RA: That era of writing is much like comics are today. Dickens, Verne, Hugo—all those guys—had their novels originally appear in serial form in the newspapers. A chapter appeared one day each week. When somebody nowadays goes, “There’s an awful lot of words here,” it’s because they don’t realize that those novels weren’t originally meant to be read in book form but as a weekly serial. Everybody was more wordy back then, but a part of that was due to the publishing needs. Same for the pulp magazines. The money wasn’t in writing full novels, it was in the

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Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

on, and he was a great artist, but he wasn’t Bernie.

Denny O’Neil

Michael W. Kaluta

Major writer and editor, primarily for DC—seen at a 1971 con. Thanks to Sean Howe, Pedro Angosto, & Mike Zeck.

Noted in the early 1970s for his art on The Shadow and “Carson of Venus” at DC Comics. 1971 photo courtesy of the artist.

RA: Nestor was a superb craftsman, but he had the problem, in my opinion, that many of the Filipino artists had, in that they occasionally had a certain stiffness in their story telling. Not in the art itself but with the storytelling. It wasn’t always fluid or flowing.

WEIN: Yes, they were slick but they were stiff. Nestor, however, did as good a job as one could do, if it wasn’t going to be done by Bernie Wrightson. One of the great things, that really flattered me, was that Bernie was such a good artist—even early on—that it was easy for me to decide that Bernie was the reason the book was selling so well, not me. I mean, look at his artwork! It was amazing! After both Bernie and I had left the

The Shadow Of His Smile Len tells the amusing backstory of the shared byline on DC’s The Shadow #4 (April-May 1974), with luscious art by Michael W. Kaluta. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [© DC Comics; The Shadow is a TM of Conde Nast.]

magazine appearances.

WEIN: Exactly. Publishing has not really changed all that much in the last 300 years.

RA: When Bernie Wrightson left Swamp Thing—I assume that it was just general fatigue? He’d been doing the book for a couple of years at that point.

Nestor Redondo in front of the original painting he did for the late-1970s cover of the 50th issue of Marvel’s The Savage Sword of Conan.

WEIN: That was mostly it.

There were a

couple of interpersonal problems at the moment, that I don’t want to discuss, that helped him decide to leave the book. After Bernie left, I only wrote the book for three more issues. Nestor Redondo came

Second-Hand Swamps Nestor Redondo took over as artist of Swamp Thing with #11 (July-Aug. 1974)— as exemplified by the issue’s cover and splash page, which captured much of the moody expressiveness of Wrightson’s work. And Len Wein remained as the writer. Sales remained high. Thanks to Bob Bailey for the splash, and to the Grand Comics Database for the cover image. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

33

book, Paul Levitz, bless him, who was in charge of the sales records at that time, came and told me that sales on Swamp Thing didn’t drop one copy when Bernie left.

When I left, the sales went right into the toilet. I told him, “Thank you! That does more for my ego than you have any idea!” The emphasis in comics is so dependent on the artist that it really helped knowing that people bought the book for my stories, too! Who knew?

“Roy Thomas And Gerry Conway Were Very Sly”

RA: Somewhere in the mid-1970s on, the majority of your books began to be from Marvel Comics. You did The Incredible Hulk…

WEIN: I did all four of the top titles: Amazing Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, Mighty Thor, and the Fantastic Four—all at the same time.

RA: Was your work on those titles why you ended up getting the editor-in-chief title?

WEIN: No, Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway were very sly. They decided early on that they wanted me working for Marvel. As I mentioned earlier, Gerry and I were roommates. Gerry would give up a book and, offhandedly, say to me that he was giving up that book— Werewolf by Night was the first one. He’d say, “You wanna take it over?” I’d say “The same pay rates? Yeah? Then why not?” So I took over Werewolf by Night. Then it was, “I’m leaving Marvel Team-Up. You wanna take it over?”

“Want to do Spider-Man?” Well, you bet! Sure! So I kept taking on titles that Gerry was leaving. So, and one-byone, my schedule filled and I had to give up books at DC to do the Marvel books. I left Phantom Stranger. I left… whatever. One morning I woke up and discovered that I was working for Marvel. It took me a while to realize how that happened!

Later, after I was fully at Marvel, Roy Thomas offered me a job as his assistant editor. At Marvel, there was only If The Hulk’s Hunting For The Missing Link— one editor and one assistant for all the books. So I took it, Has He Tried Looking In A Mirror? what the hell! Joe Orlando, before I left DC, spent a lot of While Len had stepped in to take a Roy Thomas “plotline” and turn it into a script for time trying to convince Carmine to make me an editor.

The Incredible Hulk #145 (Nov. 1971), that proved to be a one-issue stand… and he didn’t return as Ol’ Green-skin’s full writer till #179 (Sept. ’74), aided and Carmine, being old-school, wouldn’t do it. He said, “Give abetted by penciler Herb Trimpe and inker Jack Abel. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scan. him ten years. Let him get seasoned. We’ll talk about it [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] then.” But Roy, when he hired me, knew he was going to be leaving the editor-in-chief job and becoming a writer/editor in just a few months. He basically hired me was killing me, as it did every editor who followed me, until to replace him. He didn’t tell me this, though. Then, six months in, Shooter. There was no better editor who ever lived than Archie I was offered the job of editor-in-chief. I took it! What am I, an Goodwin, with the exception of maybe Julie Schwartz, and it even idiot? Over at DC, Joe Orlando’s going over to Carmine and burned him out after a year or two. saying, “See, Schmuck! I told you! Now he’s running the competition!”

I lasted about half a year before it completely burned me out. It was a rough job. Marv Wolfman followed me, than Gerry stepped in…. He lasted about three weeks and asked me how I could do this job. It was driving him crazy! There was only one editor and a huge amount of books! There were a half dozen or more DC editors, and none of them had more than ten books. No one editor could really do the body of work that Marvel expected. Eventually, under Jim Shooter, they split the books among a whole community of editors, like any normal publishing company. It was a lot easier to take care of eight books a month as opposed to 58 books a month! That’s how many I was doing, about 50 books a month! It

“Bat-Murderer!” And “Gideon Faust”

RA: We’re near the end of the time period we’re discussing, but I really wanted to talk about your “Batman” story “Bat-Murderer!,” which came out in Detective just after Archie Goodwin’s acclaimed run on that title.

In fact, the only reason I was reading Detective at that point was for Archie’s stories. Plus, he had great artists drawing those stories. Some were young and just starting out like Simonson or Chaykin. Others were at the top of their game, like Toth and Aparo.

WEIN: Archie was one of those guys that artists loved to draw for.

Look at those Creepy and Eerie stories he wrote. Artists fell over

34

Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

One If By Land… Two If By Sea… And Three If By Stealth…

The first splash pages he wrote for three series that Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas lured Len Wein into becoming the regular scripter of, as per Len’s account: Werewolf by Night #5 (May 1973), with art by the miraculous Mike Ploog.

Marvel Team-Up #11 (July 1973), penciled by Jim Mooney and inked by Mike Esposito.

The Amazing Spider-Man #151 (Dec. 1975), penciled by Ross Andru and inked by John Romita. Well, actually, by the time he took over this title, Len was his own editor, as Roy had moved on months before… but Gerry and Roy don’t mind if Len thinks they set him up for this one, too! He did succeed Gerry on the title. Thanks to Barry Pearl for this trio of scans. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roy Thomas We saw Gerry Conway back on p. 17. Here’s his 1970s partner in “crime,” Roy Thomas, who in the early ’70s worked hand in hand with Gerry to grease the way for Len Wein to write more and more for Marvel and less and less for DC—to the point where, when Roy left the editor-in-chief job in September 1974, publisher Stan Lee divided that position between Len and his buddy Marv Wolfman. Len had taken a job as assistant editor for the color comics a few months earlier, while Marv had been overseeing the black-&-white titles for some time. Contrary to Len’s belief, however: when he hired Len, Roy had no idea he’d soon be stepping down, even though he was becoming increasingly unhappy with the job. Thanks to P.C. Hamerlinck for this pic of Roy signing some comics at the 1974 San Diego Comic-Con, only a few weeks before he left Marvel’s top editorial spot for a writer/editor contract.

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

35

when they had a story that just didn’t work, he wouldn’t tell them how to make it work. He would just give them a suggestion, say, “What do you think about this?” He knew exactly what the problem was, but he let the writer work it out for themselves.

WEIN: Archie was a remarkable man. Not only a brilliant writer and editor, but one of the sweetest guys I ever knew. He was a good friend. Always a good friend. It broke my heart when he passed.

RA: What I was going to say about “Bat-Murderer!” was that it came right after Archie’s run and it didn’t drop the quality of the stories one bit.

WEIN: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

RA: You had a great artist, Jim Aparo, right off the bat.

Even though he only managed to do half the stories, his replacement, Ernie Chan, was no slouch. I was impressed.

I also wanted to mention “Dominic Fortune,” because I like that character so much. Howard Chaykin, the artist for “Dominic”, must have too, since he used the same character for three different series—The Scorpion for Atlas, “Fortune” for Marvel, and “Reuben Youngblood” for Warren.

WEIN: Howard claims to have created Dominic Fortune all by himself. It’s actually a co-creation. One of the things, for example, was that Fortune’s girlfriend was named after an old childhood acquaintance of mine. Sabbath Raven. It sounds totally madeup, but my old high school buddy dated a girl with that name. I told him, “I’ve got news for you, pal. I’m stealing it!” You can’t pass up a name like that!

Howard remembers it as his sole creation, and that’s not true, it’s actually a co-creation. He and I also did a character that only appeared in the Heavy Metal books.

RA: That would be Gideon Faust? There were three stories concerning him, but the first of them appeared in Star*Reach.

Bat-ting Practice The Jim Aparo splash page of the Wein-scripted “Bat-Murderer” story from Detective Comics #444 (Dec. 1974). This was the issue with which former Bateditor Julius Schwartz returned to editing the proto-Dark Knight. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

themselves to draw those. “A monster story by Archie Goodwin, you bet!” As good an editor as Archie was, he was just that good a writer, too. As good a writer as has ever been in this business.

Everybody has a style, in writing or art, except for Archie. None of us could ever figure out what his style was, but it was always right for the story. Archie’s stories were solid. Some writers are at the mercy of the artist. Others are stylists. I’ve gotten by on my style for fifty years now. But Archie, you could never spot his style… but, dear God, did you love his stories! As much as an artist can lift up a good but not great story by a writer, Archie could lift up a good artist to greatness, just by the strength of his story. And that was because nobody ever wanted to disappoint him. You just respected him so much!

RA: One of the things that writers who worked with him tell me is that

Archie Goodwin The greatly respected editor and writer (and artist) accepts his Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic-Con, 1982. While we’re uncertain of the presenter’s identity, that’s definitely Mad artist Sergio Aragonés drawing up a storm behind him. Archie, who passed away in 1998, was elected to the Eisner Hall of Fame at the San Diego con later that very same year.

36

Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

Fame And Fortune (Left:) Len makes a case for his having co-created “Dominic Fortune,” which he did indeed write (with Howard Chaykin art) in the black-&-white Marvel Preview (1975; no month). Of course, Chaykin had earlier done the similar character The Scorpion for Atlas/Seaboard, and Len is hardly trying to deny him due credit… but it’s hard to imagine Len Wein scripting a comic without contributing to it in some material way. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Right:) “Gideon Faust – Warlock at Large” first appeared in Mike Friedrich’s “ground-level” black-&-white comic Star*Reach #5 (1976).

Script by Len Wein; art by Howard Chaykin. [TM & © Len Wein & Howard Chaykin.]

Howard Chaykin

WEIN: Yes, that’s correct. “Gideon Faust: Warlock at Large.” They were fun to do. The Heavy Metal stories were in color. The Star*Reach story was in black-&white. I’d never watched Doctor Who, but I came up with the idea of that coach that was ten times bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Years later, I finally watched Doctor Who and realized that same idea was used throughout that series.

The artist/writer of American Flagg and numerous other groundbreaking graphic works, in a fairly recent photo at a comics convention.

comic book writer, and over fifty years later, I have been and still am. I’ve never had to get a real job! I’ve been very lucky with the one I’ve had. I’ve been an editor at three companies—DC, Marvel, and Disney. I actually prefer editing to writing, because it allows me to control the whole package. It’s been a great life.

Richard Arndt is a librarian and comic historian living in Nevada. He has published articles, interviews, and columns in Alter Ego, Comic Book Creator, Back Issue, Spooky, Richard J. Arndt. and From the Tomb, and has written two nonfiction books on comics (Horror Comics in Black and White: A RA: I want to thank you for taking your time on this History and Catalog, 1964-2004 and The Star*Reach Companion), as interview. It’s much appreciated. well as a number of forewords and afterwords for other books. He is WEIN: Well, I’m thrilled that I’m able to live the life that I dreamed currently working on a book with Steve Fears called American War of as a boy at seven years old. Doing exactly what I wanted to do Comics and the Real Big Five. with it. Not many people get to be that lucky. I dreamed of being a

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

Two Claims To Fame (Out of Several!)

(Above:) Perhaps the most famous splash page ever scripted by Len Wein is that of The Incredible Hulk #181 (Nov. 1974), as penciled by Herb Trimpe and inked

by Jack Abel. And somehow, we don’t think it’s because of the Wendigo! In this interview, Len and Richard Arndt never got around to discussing the creation of Wolverine—in which Len, Herb, Roy Thomas, and John Romita all unquestionably had a hand—but that process has been covered plenty of other places, including in Trimpe’s interview in A/E #124, and none of the parties denies that each made a significant contribution. Which is, of course, precisely what Marvel was paying them to do. Thanks to Barry Pearl for this scan and the one at top right.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Right & top right:) Herb Trimpe holding the original art for the last story page of The Incredible Hulk #180 (Oct. ’74), penciled by himself and written by Len Wein, whose final panel was the world’s very first glimpse of Wolverine. That page, as printed, is seen at top right. Herb had given the art to a fan years ago; a year or two back, the owner sold it via Heritage Comics Auctions for well over half a million dollars—and generously divided up some of the profits, including a six-figure gift to the Hero Initiative, the comics industry’s own charity. Thanks to Hero Initiative and Heritage Comics Auctions for the photo.

(Right:) Len at CONvergence Convention, 2005, in Minnesota, with a fan made up as Swamp Thing. We couldn’t close without a last glimpse of Swampy, could we? Source: the ever-lovin’ Internet.

37

38

Writer & Editor Len Wein Talks About Nearly Half A Century In Comics

LEN WEIN Checklist

[This checklist is adapted from information found in the online edition of The Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, established by Dr. Jerry G. Bails. Names of features that appeared both in comic books with that title and in other publications, as well, are generally not italicized. Some of this information came from Len Wein himself. Key: (w) = writer; (p) = pencils; (i) = inks; (e) = editor.]

Name: Len Wein (b. 1948) – writer, editor, artist, colorist Family in Arts: Glynis Wein (former wife), colorist

Print Media: co-editor: novels – for Marvel 1978-79, Spider-Man: Mayhem in Manhattan 1978; writer: novels [comics tie-in] Swamp Thing 1982 based on movie; writer: novels – Hulk [two titles] 1978, 1979; writer: novels – science-fiction and fantasy Animation: Marvel-Sunbow – writer: Transformers c. 1986; Warner Bros. – writer: Batman 1982

(1987); The Shadow (w) 1974; The Sinister House of Secret Love (w) 1971-72; Slam Bradley (w) 1981; Star Trek (w) 1986-87; Supergirl (w) 1972; Superman (w) 1971-73, 1978-85; Superman and Adam Strange (w) 1978; Superman and Aquaman (plot) 1979; Superman and Batman (w) 1971; Superman and Deadman (w) 1980; Superman and The Demon (w) 1984; Superman and Dr. Fate (w) 1971; Superman and Martian Manhunter (w) 1980; Superman and OMAC (w) 1983; Superman and Santa Claus (w) 1984; Superman and The Spectre (w) 1981; Superman and Supergirl (w) 1980; support (e) 1979-87; Swamp Thing (w) 1971-74, 1976; Teen Titans

Honors: Academy of Comic Book Arts – Best Dramatic Writer 1972; Comics Buyer’s Guide Award – Favorite Editor 1982; Fandom’s Favorite – Pro Writer 1973; Inkpot Award – San Diego Comic-Con 1978; Will Eisner Hall of Fame 2008

Comics in Other Media: adventure filler (w) 1992 in Disney Adventure Digest; comics (w) Amazing World of DC Comics 1970s, incl. 1976; comics (w) for Hulk, Aurora Models Co-creator: (w) Storm, Colossus, Thunderbird, Swamp Thing, Wolverine, Human Target, Brother Voodoo, et al.

COMIC BOOK CREDITS (Mainstream & Alternative U.S. Publications): Blackthorne Publishing: Star Wars (w) 1987

DC Comics: Amethyst (w) 1986; Aquaman (w) 1981; The Atom (w) 1981; Bat Lash (w) 1981-82; Batman (w) 1971, 1974-76, 1978-82, 1992; Batman and Incredible Hulk (w) 1981; Blue Beetle (w) 198688; Carson of Venus (w) 1972-73; Crisis on Infinite Earths (co-plot) 1985-86; DC Silver Age Classics (w) 1992 (reprint of Swamp Thing); Day after Doomsday (w) 1970; DC Challenge (w) 1985-86; Deadman (w) 1978-80; Deathstroke the Terminator (w) 1992; The Demon (w) 1979; Despero (pinup) (p) Who’s Who in the DC Universe 1985; Dial H for Hero (w) 1981; Dr. 13, the Ghost-Breaker (w) 1971-72; The Dreaming (w) 1998; Eclipso (w) 1978; El Diablo (w) 1972; Elongated Man (w) 1971-72, 1978; Fabulous World of Krypton (w) 1972; The Flash (w) 1971-72; The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (w) 1988 (graphic album reprint); Green Arrow (w) 1982; Green Lantern (w) 1980, 1983-85, 1996; Green Lantern Corps (w) 1981, 1984; Gunfire (w) 1994; Hawkman (w) 1978; Heroes against Hunger (w) 1986; Hot Wheels (w) 1970-71; House of Mystery (w) 1971-72, 1974, 1980-82; House of Secrets (w) 1970-72, 1975; The Human Target (w) 1972-74; 1978-80; Johnny Thunder (Western version) (w) 1986; Justice League International (w) 1990; Justice League of America (w) 1972-74, 1983; King Faraday (w) 1993; Korak, Son of Tarzan (w) 1972; Legends (w) 1986-87 (plus graphic album reprint 1993); Legion of Super-Heroes (w) 1978-79; Mr. Miracle (w) 1989-90; Mystery in Space (w) 1980; Pellucidar (w) 1972-73; The Phantom Stranger (w) 1969, 1971-73; Plastic Man (w) 1980; The Private Life of Clark Kent (w) 1972; Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter (w) 1981; Secret Hearts (w) 1970-71; Secret Origins (w) Blue Beetle 1986, Clayface (third version) 1989, Uncle Sam

“You Gotta Love This Town—It’s Halloween Every Day!” That line of Fox Mulder dialogue from TV’s first episode of The X-Files back in 1993 definitely fits this photo of Len Wein and his friend Mark Hanerfeld (who was for a time an editorial assistant at DC).

The pair served as the real-life models for Cain and Abel, the hosts of the DC mags House of Mystery and House of Secrets—so what more natural than that they should at some point masquerade as their comic book counterparts, possibly at one of the Halloween celebrations held from the mid-1960s through the mid-’70s in Rutland, Vermont!

Photographer unknown.

(Above:) Swamp Thing doesn’t say much—so when he talks, you’d better listen! A dramatic page from Swamp Thing #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1972), scripted by Len Wein and drawn by Bernie Wrightson. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“I’ve Never Had To Get A Real Job!”

39

From Frontier To Frightsville!

(Above left:) Among the earliest of the heroes Len Wein wrote for Marvel was the cowboy version of “Ghost Rider,” in Western Gunfighters #6 (Sept. 1971).

Art by Dick Ayers & Syd Shores. Thanks to Nick Caputo.

(Above right:) Among Len’s Marvel co-creations was “Brother Voodoo,” who debuted in Strange Tales #196 (Sept. 1973), graced by Gene Colan pencils & Dan Adkins inks. Stan Lee and Roy Thomas provided the name and a very sketchy concept—and John Romita designed the costume—but the rest was up to Wein and Colan, and they came through like champs… surprise, surprise! Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

(w) 1968-69; Weird War Tales (w) 1972-75, 1982; Whatever Happened to The Crimson Avenger? (w) 1981; Who’s Who in the DC Universe (w) 1985 entries; The Witching Hour (w) 1971; Wonder Woman (w) 1974, 1977, 1987-88, 1990; Young Love (w) 1970; Young Romance (w) 1971; Zatanna (w) 1971-73 Defiant Comics: Michael Alexander (w) 1993-94; Warriors of Plasm (w) 1993 graphic album

Disney Productions: Dick Tracy (w) 1990, adaptation of movie; support (columns) 1991; support (editor-in-chief) 1989-91

Eclipse Enterprises: Alien Encounters (w) 1986; The Heap (w) 1988

Heavy Metal: Gideon Faust: Warlock at Large (w) 1979, 1982; Heavy Metal Magazine (w) 1997 Kitchen Sink Press: The Spirit Jam (w) 1981

Marvel Comics: Ant-Man (w) 1989; Brother Voodoo (w) 1973-74; The Brothers Link (w) 1971; Captain America (w) 1990; Captain Marvel (w) 1977; Conan (w) 1980; Crazy Magazine (w) 1973-74; Creatures on the Loose (w) 1971; Daredevil (w) 1970; The Defenders (w) 1973-75; Dracula (w) 1974; Fantastic Four (w) 1977-78; The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (w) 1970s movie adaptation; The Golem (w) 1974; Human Torch and the Hulk (w) 1974; Human Torch and Iceman (w) 1974; Human Torch and Thor (w) 1974; Iron Fist (w) 1974; Ka-Zar (w) 1972; Kiss (w) 1978; Living Mummy (w) 1974; Luke Cage, Power Man (w) 1974; Man-Thing (w) 1975; Marok the Merciless (w) 1974; Savage Tales (w) c. 1974; Silver Surfer (w) 1991;

Spider-Man (w) 1975-79, 1991; Spider-Man 2099 (w) 1995; SpiderMan and Black Panther (w) 1974; Spider-Man and Brother Voodoo (w) 1974; Spider-Man and Captain America (w) 1973; Spider-Man and Captain Marvel (w) 1973; Spider-Man and Daredevil (w) 1974; Spider-Man and Dr. Strange (w) 1974; Spider-Man and Ghost Rider (w) 1973; Spider-Man and Hawkeye (w) 1974; Spider-Man and Hulk (w) 1974; Spider-Man and Inhumans (w) 1973; Spider-Man and Ka-Zar (w) 1974; Spider-Man and Mr. Fantastic (w) 1974; Spider-Man and Sub-Mariner (w) 1973; Spider-Man and Man-Wolf (w) 1973; Stingray (w) 1990; Sub-Mariner (w) 1990; support (editorin-chief) 1974-75; support (e) 1974, 1977-78; Thor (w) 1977-78; Warriors Three (w) 1976; Western features (w) 1970s; X-Men (w) 1970-79 Marvel U.K.: Captain Britain (w) 1977 Skywald Publishing Company: The Bravados (w) 1971; Sundance Kid (w) 1971 Star*Reach Productions: Star*Reach (w) 1976

Warren Publications: 1984 (w) 1979; Creepy (w) 1977-80; Dax the Warrior (w translation/adaptation ) 1973; Vampirella back-up features (w) 1971, 1973, 1975, 1979

Western Publishing: Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery (w) 1972; Grimm’s Ghost Stories (p)(i) 1973; The Microbots (w) 1971; Mod Wheels (w) 1971-72; Star Trek (w) 1970-72; Star Trek: Enterprise Logs (w) 1977 (graphic album reprint); Twilight Zone (w) 1969-71

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Dr. Amy K. Nyberg

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code Concluding Chapter 6 Of Our Serialization Of The 1998 Study

By DR. AMY KISTE NYBERG

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: We near the conclusion of our reprinting of Dr. Nyberg’s groundbreaking history of comic book censorship—a work we’ve felt honored to be able to re-present, with a wealth of added illustrations, for Alter Ego’s audience. Previous installments have appeared in A/E #123-128, 130, 133, & 134. As we’ve said before, Seal of Approval is “footnoted” in the MLA style which lists book, article, or author name, plus page numbers, between parentheses in the main text: e.g., “(Hart 154-156)” refers to pp. 154-156 of whichever work by an author or editor named Hart appears in the bibliography (which will be printed at the conclusion of our serialization, a few issues from now). When the parentheses contain only page numbers, it’s because the other pertinent information is printed in the text almost immediately preceding the note.

A/E

We’ve again retained such usages and spellings from Nyberg’s book as “superhero,” an uncapitalized “comics code,” “E.C.” and “DC,” etc. In the captions we ourselves have added, however, we have reverted to A/E house style and preference. These captions, of course, do not necessarily

reflect the opinion of Dr. Nyberg or of the University Press of Mississippi, the original publisher of the book—the original edition of which can still be obtained from UPM at www.upress.sate.ms.us. Our thanks once again to Dr. M. Thomas Inge, under whose general editorship the volume was originally published in 1998 as part of its Studies in Popular Culture series, and who was of great help to A/E in helping to arrange for its reprinting here… to William Biggins and Vijah Shah, acquisitions editors past and present at the U. Press of Mississippi… and to Brian K. Morris for retyping the text on a Word document for Ye Editor.

The preceding segment dealt with the alterations made to the code in 1971 in order to acknowledge changes in American society since 1954— which included allowing the use of “vampires, ghouls, and werewolves,” as long as they were handled in the “classic tradition” of “high caliber literary works… read in schools throughout the World.” In 1976, outsider Jenette Kahn became DC’s new publisher, and longtime comics writer Jim Shooter ascended at the beginning of 1977 to the post of Marvel’s editorin-chief….

T

he four publishers who remained active in the CMAA during the late 1970s and the 1980s—Archie, Marvel, Harvey, and DC—continued to challenge the need for a code. Marvel president James Galton, at a meeting of the board of directors in October 1976, questioned whether there was any need to continue the use of the seal. Others, however, felt that the seal remained “essential to the viability of the comics magazine industry” (CMAA Files [minutes, 19 Oct. 1976]). Galton’s question was spurred in part by changes in the comic book publishing industry that would enable new publishers to bypass the CMAA and its code administrator entirely. Beginning in the late 1970s, an innovation was under way in comic book distribution that was to have tremendous impact on the way comic books were marketed and sold. That innovation was direct market distribution.

Changes in distribution during this period were linked to an earlier change in the industry, the rise of independent publishers.

In the 1970s, there was a movement toward independent publishing, which initially served as an outlet for creator-owned properties. Until that time, all of the rights for characters were owned by companies, not by individual writers and artists. New publishing companies were started that allowed creators to retain the rights to their characters. At first, distribution was limited to mail order and a small number of specialty shops, and the profits

Publish Or Perish (Left:) Jenette Kahn, publisher of DC Comics from 1976-2002. Photo undated.

(Right:) Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, on left, and Marvel publisher Jim Galton, circa 1980. From Jim Shooter’s blog. An in-depth interview with Shooter will appear in Alter Ego #137. (Note: Galton’s last name is spelled “Galston” in Nyberg’s book. Typist Brian K. Morris corrected the spelling for this reprinting.)

were not high enough to lure top talent away from the major companies. But by the end of the decade, a proliferation of specialty shops and the emergence of direct market distribution created a market capable of sustaining these independent publishers (Jacobs and Jones 269).

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Concluding Chapter 6 Of Our Serialization Of The 1998 Study By Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg

The Declaration Of Independents Two early independent comics were writer/artist Dave Sim’s Cerebus (a.k.a.

Cerebus the Aardvark), published by the Canadian company Aardvark-Vanaheim, and Elfquest, published in the U.S. by Wendy & Richard Pini’s WaRP Graphics.

Wendy was the writer/artist, with coplotting by Richard. Earlier, in 1974, had come Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach #1, commonly considered the first true “independent” (as opposed to “underground”) comic book. [Cerebus cover TM & © Dave Sim; Elfquest cover TM & © Wendy & Richard Pini.]

Under the old system, which is still in place [in 1998] and accounts for about one-quarter of all comic book distribution, comic books are distributed by companies that also handle other periodicals and are sold in outlets that Dave Sim. carry a variety of magazines.

Retailers are able to return unsold copies to the publisher for credit. Under the direct market system, distributors who specialize in comic books and comicsrelated merchandise solicit orders for upcoming titles and sell comic books directly to retailers on a non-return basis. Their primary customers are comics specialty shops, which pay less for their comics through the direct market system but forfeit the right to return unsold copies. Store owners develop an inventory of back issues that then may be sold to fans and collectors at a later date.

The number of specialty stores in the United States increased from an estimated twenty-five in the mid-1970s to between 3,500 and 5,000 by 1990 (Thompson 58). The number of such stores is hard to estimate because many of these retail outlets were served by more than one distributor, and because distributors protected their customer lists.

As a result of this change in distribution, companies were able to eliminate some of the guesswork involved in production. Under the newsstand distribution system, as many as seven of every ten copies of a comic book were returned to the publisher. Because comic book orders for direct market sales are solicited before the comics are published, publishers know in advance how many copies of each title to print for distribution to specialty shops.

Often, companies will print more copies of a particular title than were ordered so they can fill back orders. In addition, distributors may speculate on how well a particular issue of a comic book will sell and purchase more copies than retailers order. Particularly successful comic books may have additional press runs (Salicrup 38).

The new distribution system, which eliminated some of the risk in publishing comics, led to a boom in independent publishing in the 1980s. Independent companies who were early leaders in this trend included Aardvark-Vanaheim, created in 1977 to publish a

Conan parody entitled Cerebus; and WaRP Graphics, started by Richard and Wendi Pini in 1978 to publish their comic, Elfquest. The first company to bring out regular-format comics among the independents was Pacific Comics, which published comics from 1981 to 1984. First Wendy & Richard Pini.

Comics, started in 1983 in Chicago, was a strong performer in the 1980s before folding. The leading independent company in the early 1990s has been Image Comics, started by a group of creators who capitalized on their popularity with the fan community to produce titles that have outsold many comics marketed by the larger companies. While Marvel and DC still dominate the comic book industry in terms of number of titles, sales figures on their titles have dropped as independents cut into their market. Although some of these independent publishers, like Image, produce professional quality four-color comic books on a monthly schedule and compete successfully with the major publishers, many independent companies publish only one or two books, often on a highly erratic schedule, and the number of such companies fluctuates almost daily as smaller companies are started, merge, or fold.

These independent companies distribute comics only through the direct market system. Bypassing the newsstand distribution system, the enforcement arm of the comics code, these independent publishers do not submit their titles for code approval nor are they members of the Comics Magazine Association of America. As a result, the CMAA and its code administrator have no say in the content of comic books which make up a significant part of the comic book industry today. It was inevitable that independent companies, freed from the constraints of the comics code, would produce adult-oriented material for the evolving market—which one study suggests has led the industry “once again—but this time not innocently—to confront the adult themes of violence, sexuality and obsession” (McCue and Bloom ix).

Unlike the underground comics, these new independently published comics did represent an economic challenge to the established publishers. And, more important, these comics demonstrated the possibilities of a distribution system that was more open to experimentation and to the expansion of the audience for

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

comics. This paved the way for even the mainstream publishers to opt out of their own prepublication review system to take advantage of new marketing opportunities.

The pressure brought to bear by the change in distribution and the modest success of the independent publishers in the 1980s led to another code revision at the end of the decade. The possibility of revising the code a second time was first raised at a meeting December 17, 1982, when association members were told that the copies of the 1971 code booklet were almost gone. It was suggested that a request for changes, additions, and deletions be circulated before the booklet was sent to the printers. Apparently the publishers felt the current code was adequate, because no changes were incorporated at that time (CMAA Files [minutes, 17 Dec. 1982]). Five years later, the publishers began what would result in a major overhaul of the 1971 comics code.

The association contracted with [former Western/Gold Key editor] Wally Green to draft a revised code for the association, to be submitted in April 1987. They provided him with a copy of the old code and the various rules of interpretation circulated to publishers and editors. He was instructed to meet with each publisher to determine what changes were desired. In addition, publishers agreed to provide Green with samples of comics being published (CMAA Files [letter to Wally Green, 9 Feb. 1987]). Green produced a lengthy, detailed revision of the code. The format of the revised code submitted by Green was somewhat different from the 1971 code, and the emphasis on what material would be prohibited reflected the changing nature of the content of comic books. The general preamble was replaced in Green’s draft with a statement explaining the need and purpose of a comics code. In it, Green suggested that the comic book had a strong appeal to very young readers and, with the advent of adult-oriented comic books, a code and seal were necessary to make sure objectionable material did not find its way into the hands of young children. It also noted that publishers recognized that the very young “do not yet have the protection of a fully-developed standard of ethical conduct or a well-formed set of moral values.” The purpose of the comics code was to inspire trust in the industry and to assure parents that comics bearing the seal contained nothing but “wholesome reading pleasure” and that readers would be provided content that is

43

“intellectually stimulating and morally sound.”

Green then listed the grounds for finding material objectionable, including unacceptable moral and ethical standards; unacceptable treatment of social and political issues; unacceptable references to religious and racial matters; and general “repugnance.” He noted that no categories of subject matter would be expressly forbidden, since such a move would be “dangerous as well as impractical.”

But, the introduction added, it was important that regulation of content be “clear and precise” so that editors and writers would find [regulations] “readily understandable and easy to follow.”

The first set of regulations spelled out in Green’s draft dealt with issues of sex, reflecting the maturing content of comic books.

While total nudity was prohibited, implied nudity in a scene with members of the same sex would be permitted. Partial nudity was permissible under certain circumstances, but genitals, breasts, and buttocks still could not be exposed. The code continued to specify that anatomy should not be emphasized or needlessly displayed.

Portrayal of the sex act would still be prohibited under the revised code, but it could be implied, as long as there was no gratuitous reference to the act and no provocative or tantalizing illustration.

Promiscuity, homosexuality, and explicit depiction of child molestation were prohibited. In addition, sexual assaults or sadistic attacks with sexual undertones showing women being victimized were not allowed.

The reduced emphasis on crime and horror in Green’s draft of the code demonstrates that this area was no longer the major concern of comic book publishers. Depictions of criminal acts would be allowed, so long as the wrongdoers were punished and a life of crime was not shown to be desirable. Public officials could be shown breaking the law as long as respect for the rule of law was upheld. The code still forbade the depiction of methods for committing crimes. Behavior that was reprehensible although not strictly criminal could not be shown to be acceptable. In addition, portraying drug use as pleasant was prohibited, and the code specified that the consequences of drug use must be clearly spelled out in the story. Under the section dealing with religion and prejudice, the code regulations suggested that no faith be shown as superior to another, that deformities and afflictions could not be

Image Is All! The first four Image Comics titles to be published in 1992 were Rob Liefield’s Youngblood #1, Erik Larsen’s The Savage Dragon #1, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn #1, and Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.s: Covert Action Teams #1. Within months, at least for a short time, the tremendous sales of the Image titles caused their then-distributor, Malibu, to corral nearly 10% of North American comics sales, briefly exceeding the market share held by DC. The WildC.A.T.s cover was penciled by Jim Lee and inked by Scott Williams; the other three covers were penciled and inked by their artistic creators (or, in some cases, co-creators). [TM & © the respective copyright holders.]

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Concluding Chapter 6 Of Our Serialization Of The 1998 Study By Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg

speech patterns was prohibited, and publishers were warned to stay abreast of “street language” since “new dirty words are quickly added to the lexicon.” Publishers were urged to show respect for the English language, using correct spelling and proper grammar when possible. A special section dealing with covers was added because Green believed that covers were a problem for the industry since they have high visibility and were often seen by readers for whom the comic book was not intended. Although covers should meet the code requirements, Green’s code also stressed that it was important that the cover not mislead the reader about the contents. There were few changes made to the guidelines governing advertising, since that was an area with which publishers had little difficulty.

The most radical innovation Green introduced in his draft of the code were provisions that would impose standards of political and social “fairness” on writers. His draft called for stories that treated controversial social issues to do so “without bias and give a fair picture of the various sides” in order to demonstrate “respect for the diversity of opinion.” In addition, stories were not allowed to “indulge in partisan politics.” Green’s draft also forbade treating criminal acts such as terrorist bombings or hostage-taking as social problems. Finally, this section forbade writers and artists to portray real people, even if disguised.

In the summary, the code stated that while it was impossible to apply the regulations uniformly due to the diversity of titles, the regulations did allow for the free expression of ideas and imagination. It also recommended that publishers print the following statement in each comic: “ _____ Comics pledges to readers and to the parents that the Comics Magazine Association of America Seal of Approval on the cover is your guarantee that no offensive material appears in this book.”

The Times, They Are A-Changin’?

Former Western/Gold Key editor Wally Green’s 1987 re-drafting of the Comics Code would have allowed “implied nudity in a scene with members of the same sex”—something this page by writer/penciler Mike Sekowsky and inker Dick Giordano had shown back in Wonder Woman #185 (Nov.-Dec. 1969). Thanks to Richard Arndt. [TM & © DC Comics.]

treated frivolously and ridiculed, and that stories could not suggest such afflictions were “punishment imposed by a divine power.”

The section dealing with depictions of violence was labeled “repugnance,” and sixteen regulations dealing with violent acts were listed. The draft of the code noted that objections to depictions of violence, death, torture, pain, putrefaction, or extreme ugliness were often a matter of degree, and a key recommendation was restraint. In knife wounds, the point of entry could not be shown. Depicting dismemberment, blows to the skull, or kicks to the genitals was not permitted. Scenes of explicit torture were not permitted, and showing decomposed bodies or parts of bodies was prohibited. A locale that was “loathsome” should not be rendered so as to “revolt or terrorize the reader.” Depictions of death were permitted, and blood could be shown; however, free-flowing blood and pools of blood were prohibited. In addition, characters could not be shown drinking blood. Cannibalism was prohibited, and it was not to be inferred that elderly persons, women, or children were fair game for robberies.

Under the language provisions, obscene or sacrilegious language was not permitted, and the Lord’s name could not be used as an expletive. The words hell and damn were not permitted except when used in the literal sense. Language belittling ethnic

Green’s new version of the code was much more detailed than what the publishers had in mind. Their response was varied, but none was happy with the changes Green proposed. Gladstone (publisher of the Disney comics) and Archie favored retaining the 1971 code. Although Marvel favored making a few minor changes in the 1971 code, they indicated a willingness to continue under that code. Harvey favored a new or revised code, but did not want to see a version liberalized “to the point of meaninglessness.” It also advocated a separate designation for children’s comics. DC indicated that it was considering eliminating the code seal from its books entirely and strongly advocated a revised code, calling the present code an embarrassment and a hindrance which restricted the creative talent of artists and writers. DC was pushing for a simple statement of key guidelines that were broad in scope.

Green’s version of the code, with its specific guidelines, was rejected by the publishers, who then set out to rewrite the code by appointing an editorial task force of industry insiders to the task.

The final version of the new code incorporated the suggestion made by DC to publish a general code as a “public document” and then issue a “working document” that would be circulated among editors, writers, and artists. In the two-part document, the first part was labeled “Principles of the Comics Code Authority” and was designed for dissemination to the general public. The second part, “Editorial Guidelines,” was meant as an internal working document for publishers. It was adopted in 1989 (CMAA Files [memorandum from J. Dudley Waldner, executive director, 12 Apr. 1988]).

The format of the 1989 code was much different from the 1971 version (see CMAA Code 1989). There was still a preamble, which acknowledged that comic book publishers were committed to providing “decent and wholesome comic books as entertainment

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

for children.” It also promised that comics carrying the seal would be titles “that a parent can purchase with confidence that the contents uphold basic American moral and cultural values.”

Following the preamble were seven sections providing general statements on institutions, language, violence, characterization, substance abuse, crime, and attire and sexuality. The “principles” of the code also outlined the administrative procedure followed by the code office. Some of the provisions of the 1971 code and the revision drafted by Green were incorporated into these general statements, but the specific lists of what was and was not allowed were eliminated.

The second part of the 1989 code was the unpublished editorial guidelines given to all publishers, editors, and artists. The CMAA has forbidden its members to distribute the contents of these editorial guidelines to “non-members of the Comics Magazine Association of America or to members of the press or general public.” For each of the seven sections listed in the “principles” section of the code, a corresponding “specific guidelines” section was issued. For example, the general statement concerning institutions and individuals specifies that “recognizable social, cultural, political, ethnic, racial and religious institutions, persuasions and authorities will be portrayed in a positive light.” Under the specific guidelines issued to artists, writers, and editors, these are defined as including government, law enforcement agencies, the military, known religious organizations, ethnic agencies such as the NAACP, and foreign leaders. In dealing with sex, the general statement adopted by the CMAA specifies that relationships will be presented with “good taste, sensitivity, and in a manner which will be generally considered to be acceptable by a mass audience.”

The specific guidelines suggest: “Writers and editors should ask themselves, ‘Is this story suitable for a seven-year-old whose parent is going to let the child select any comic with the Code Seal?’ and ‘Will the parent continue to let the child select any comic with the Code Seal?’ “

This definition of audience is central to the ongoing debate over the content of comic books. In order to compete with the independent publishers, Marvel and DC had developed their own lines of adult-oriented, non-code comics intended for distribution to comics specialty stores through direct-market sales. Although the first draft of the code prepared in late 1988 made a distinction between the requirements for code-approved comic books intended for adult consumption and those comics intended for children, the final version of the code rejected that distinction and specified that all code-approved books would have to meet standards acceptable for a mass audience. The publishers decided the code seal of approval would be used to indicate to parents that the content of any comic book carrying the seal would be acceptable to parents, much like the “G” rating of the film code.

Comic books targeted for the older audience would remain noncode approved (DMAA Files [memorandum from J. Dudley Waldner, 3 Feb. 1989]).

There was some concern over how to publicize the latest revision of the code. The association members agreed that the revision should be explained as a measure undertaken “to give the code a more contemporary wording and interpretation.” Rather than seeking simply to implement the code without any announcement, the publishers decided to announce the code but to be careful not to imply that it was “a major, or earthshaking, change” (DMAA Files [memorandum from J. Dudley Waldner, 12 Apr. 1988]). Their strategy worked: the implementation of the code received no attention outside of the fan press.

In the mid-1990s, Archie, DC, and Marvel Comics form the backbone of the CMAA. The companies voluntarily submit titles they wish to carry the code seal of approval to the CMAA’s Comics

45

Code Authority office. In addition, nonmembers are allowed to submit titles for prepublication review; the CMAA charges a $500 fee for each nonmember title reviewed. Each publisher pays a membership fee, based on the number of titles it releases per month. Since 1979, the CMAA has contracted with an organization that specializes in managing trade associations to oversee the programs of the CMAA, including the Comics Code Authority.

Such an arrangement allows the CMAA to draw on the expertise provided by specialists in trade association Take A Gander At This! management and also to One of Gladstone’s early comics was Disney’s share expenses with the Duck Tales #1 (Oct. 1988), with a cover by other clients of the Daan Jippes. Gladstone lasted as a company from 1985 till 1999. [TM & © Disney.] management company.

The firm charges a yearly “management fee” and the CMAA splits the cost of renting office space with other clients.

One person serves as both the CMAA executive secretary and code administrator. In 1994, Holly Munter was serving in that capacity (Munter interview). She reviewed between 125 and 150 comic books a month for members publishers. While Munter did most of the reviewing herself, occasionally other staff members at the management company were called upon to assist her. While neither Munter nor other staff members had a background in the comic book industry, she stressed that the most significant requirement for the job was to have a thorough understanding of the code guidelines and administrative procedures.

Major problems with code standards are rare, primarily because the editors are aware of the code provisions and screen the titles they edit at all stages of production to eliminate any problems. The review begins with the initial stage of production, the plotting and scripting of the comic book. When the script is sent to the penciller, editors make notes reminding the artist about restrictions on rendering certain scenes. Members of the creative team can also bring potential problems to the attention of the editor. In many cases, it is assumed that the creative team is familiar with the restrictions of the code and their own company’s policies (Cavalieri and Morra interview).

Different companies submit their titles for review at different stages in the production process, but the office always works with black-and-white photocopies of the original art. The code administrator is expected to read the comic book and examine the artwork to determine if anything on the cover, in the book itself, or in the advertising violates code standards. It may take longer to review some titles than others due to the amount of dialogue or the complexity of the artwork, but in general it takes the code authority office about a week to complete the review. If a particular title is running behind schedule, however, the process can be completed in a day (Munter interview). Publishers are on the

[continued on p. 48]

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Concluding Chapter 6 Of Our Serialization Of The 1998 Study By Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg

Code, Code Heart The 1989 Comics Code. With thanks to Barry Pearl. [© the respective copyright holders.]

3-D Jeebies Even before the CMAA contemplated a late-1980s round of changes, pre-Code horror material was being reprinted—minus the Code seal—and in retrofitted 3-D, yet! The title of Eclipse’s Seduction of the Innocent 3-D #1 (Oct. 1985), with a cover by Dave Stevens, was of course taken from Dr. Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book condemning the comics industry. [Art © Estate of Dave Stevens.]

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

Horror Ya Doin’?

The next month, Eclipse launched a non-3-D six-issue reprint series with totally different content. The cover of Seduction of the Innocent #1 (Nov. 1985) is credited to Reed Crandall (pencils) and Tom Yeates (inks)… no doubt a posthumous collaboration of sorts. [© the respective copyright holders.]

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[continued from p. 45]

Concluding Chapter 6 Of Our Serialization Of The 1998 Study By Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg

“honor system” concerning changes mandated by the Code Authority; artwork is not re-reviewed prior to publication. There is no formal penalty for comic book publishers who fail to make the changes recommended by the code office. The code office does monitor compliance by examining the completed comic books sent directly to the CMAA office by the members’ printers.

Changes mandated by the code office are open to negotiation, and the formal appeal process is never invoked, simply because there is not time for such a process. Usually, if a panel or a page is “bounced” and the editor disagrees with the code administrator, the situation is resolved with a telephone call. In most cases, the changes asked for by the code office are made. Sometimes the publisher will decide not to make the changes and elect to publish the book without the seal, withdrawing it from newsstand distribution, but that does not happen often (Munter interview). If changes are required, they are usually made in-house because of deadline concerns, rather than being made by the creative team.

Changes are generally done by putting a “patch” over the original artwork. That way, the artist can remove the change when the original artwork is returned to him or her (Cavalieri and Morra interview).

Perhaps one of the most significant changes in the industry is that not all comic books pass through this prepublication review process. In the 1989 code, the publishers acknowledged that even members of the CMAA have elected to publish non-code comics, including titles intended for adult readers. But the CMAA members agreed that such comics should not be distributed on the newsstand but only through direct distribution markets, since newsstand outlets “are serviced by individuals who are unaware of the content of specific publications before placing them on display.” As noted above, this gave mainstream publishers the option of bypassing the strict code regulations in order to publish comics for a broader audience.

However, it is important to recognize that such a system allows publishers to abdicate their responsibility and shift the burden of monitoring content to the retailer. While some publishers have included warnings about content with labels such as “For mature readers,” many adult comics carry no warning at all. This means the retailer ordering and displaying comics needs to be familiar with the content of all the comic books he or she carries and to make sure that inappropriate material does not fall into the wrong hands. It is a rather dangerous assumption to make that all retailers will be conscientious about reviewing and displaying the material they sell, and the strategy backfired on the industry when local officials began to investigate and arrest comic book retailers under obscenity statutes.

One case that generated a great deal of alarm was the arrest and conviction of a sales clerk at a comic book store in Lansing, Illinois.

He was found guilty of intent to disseminate obscene material under Illinois law in January 1988, although that decision was overturned on appeal in 1989. While most such cases eventually are decided in favor of the retailer, the time and expense involved in legal battles have a chilling effect on retailers who might otherwise support alternative comics.

One response to this problem has been the creation of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, started by Denis Kitchen of Kitchen Sink Press. The CBLDF is a nonprofit group that aids retailers in fighting obscenity charges. The group is supported by donations and fundraising events often held in conjunction with comic book conventions. Many retailers, however, are not willing to go to the time and expense of a court battle. Much as retailers in the 1950s bowed to pressure from the Catholic National Organization for

Decent Literature and from local law enforcement agencies, owners of comic book retail stores today, warned by police or challenged by irate parents, simply remove the offensive material from their shelves.

From this brief overview of the operation of the Comics Code Authority today, it is clear that the procedure put in place by the publishers in 1954 remains relatively intact. Revisions of the code in 1971 and again in 1989 reflected the Throw In The Kitchen Sink! changing nature of society, of the industry, and of the audience, and each new version Denis Kitchen, head of Kitchen Sink Press, helped of the code has loosened restrictions create the Comic Book placed on the content of comic books. The Legal Defense Fund after process of prepublication review remains some comics-store essentially the same. What has changed is owners were busted for the size of the staff, the number of titles allegedly selling “obscene reviewed, and the specific provisions of material”—i.e., comic the code. The most important change, books some prosecutor or however, is not in the code itself, but in city councilman didn’t the industry’s willingness to set aside the approve of. code. The underlying principle of the industry’s program of self-regulation is the idea that the seal of approval carried on the cover of a comic book means that it contains nothing offensive and is appropriate for readers of all ages. By sidestepping the code, publishers have acknowledged for the first time that comic books are not just for children.

Next: The Significance of the Comics Code—in 1998.

NOTE: This volume had been temporarily delayed, but has now been published out of order.

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After the splash, the first full-page shot of Swamp Thing in issue #1 of his (its) own comic, dated Oct.-Nov. 1972, was—a head shot!

Script by Len Wein, art by Bernie Wrightson.

Thanks to Bob Bailey.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

[©2015 Cracked Entertainment.]

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Bums On The Run! I don’t know who’s the bigger loser, the mug hot-footing it from the cops, or the clueless crook taking notes. From Real Clue Crime Stories Vol. 5, #1 (March 1950). Art by Dan Zolnerowich.

[Real Clue cover © the respective copyright holders.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Get A Clue (Part 2!)

by Michael T. Gilbert

L

ast issue we shared some amusing Hillman crime covers. This time we’ve unearthed more gems, many drawn by the talented Dan Zolnerowich. “Zolne” is perhaps best remembered for his classic Planet Comics covers for Fiction House. But his work for Hillman is equally striking.

And, speaking of Hillman....

Noted art collector, book, and magazine publisher Alex L. Hillman founded the company in 1938 with a line of True Confessions titles. These included Real Confessions, Real Romances, True Crime, Crime Detective, and Real Detective.

Hillman branched out into comics with the publication of Miracle Comics #1 and Rocket Comics #1. Both sported a February 1940 publication date.

Stupid Crook Tricks!

(Above:) Boy, leave it to those country hicks! First the store-owner sheriff makes a killing selling expensive bank-robbing gear to the city slickers—then he arrests them for the heist! Say, didn’t I see the same plot on an old Green Acres episode? From Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol. 4, #10 (Dec. 1949). Art by Dan “Zolne” Zolnerowich. [© the respective copyright holders.].

“I Get No Respect!”

(Left:) Rodney Dangerfield has nothing on this poor slob. He’s too broke to afford a decent hotel, thanks to a botched bank job (see cover above!). And even mean Mrs. O’Leary doesn’t want the bum in her cheap flophouse. From Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol. 4, #4 (June 1949). Art by Zolne. [© 2015 the respective copyright holders.]

Get A Clue—Part 2!!!

53

As their comic line grew, they added titles like Air Fighters (later Airboy), Dead-Eye Western, My Date, Pirate Comics, All-Sports, and Romantic Confessions. Many consider Hillman’s comics to be some of the best written of the Golden Age. Hillman’s crime comics were no exception.

While Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay or Fox’s Murder Incorporated tended to focus on the brutal antics of high-profile crooks like Al Capone and Pretty Boy Floyd, Hillman’s Real Clue Crime Stories, Crime Detective, and Crime Must Stop! were just as likely to explore the smaller moments.

Fun With Words!

(Left:) Double entendres were big with the Real Clue crowd. Here, a gun-toting ersatz janitor promises to “turn on the heat” for some stoolie. Hey, if it’s so cold, why’s that crook sweating like a stevedore? From Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol. 3, #7 (Sept. 1948). Art by Zolne. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Photo Finish!

(Below:) This crook hopes his photographer pal will get “a good shot.” Careful what you wish, buddy! From Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol.3, #1 (March 1948). Art by Zolne. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Another Planet Heard From!

(Left:) A classic Zolnerowich cover from Fiction House’s Planet Comics #16 (Jan 1942). [© the respective copyright holders.]

54

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Take for instance “Itchy’s Big Score!” in Real Clue, Vol. 3, #7 (Sept. 1948). Here small-time pickpocket Itchy Harris steals a briefcase—only to later discover it’s filled with a million dollars worth of U.S. Treasury notes!

Now you’d think any self-respecting crook would be doing cartwheels at this stroke of incredible good fortune. And Itchy is indeed one happy crook.

For about one panel.

Then the enormity of his heist hits him like a rock. He worries that the police will get him—or even his fellow crooks! Before long, he’s such a puddle of nerves that he actually surrenders to the cops.

Wakey-Wakey!

(Left:) A true public servant! The helpful cop on this Zolne cover from Crime Detective Comics, Vol. 2, #2 (May 1950), gives the crooks a friendly wake-up call. Could even Dr. Wertham complain? Artist unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Damned With Faint Praise!

(Below:) “Somehow he looks better dead than he did alive!” says a crook at a funeral in Crime Detective, Vol. 2, #6 (Jan. 1951).

“Ya never think of the racket’s windin’ up like this...” says another.

I guess you don’t read many crime comics, buddy! Artist unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

It’s Not Rocket Science!

(Above:) “Free-Wheeling Oscar!” adds a little sci-fi humor to the crime genre. From Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol. 5, #2 (April 1950).

Writer & artist unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Get A Clue—Part 2!!!

55

Safely in prison, he actually seems happier than he’s been since he stole the swag. “That’s the trouble with bein’ a dip...” he tells a pal. “It’s like all rackets—a guy gets used ta workin’ small—and a big “score” throws ‘im for a loss...it’s confusin’...”

To paraphrase Dirty Harry, “A man’s got to know his limitations, Itchy!”

Or take “The Little Corporal Must Go!” from Real Clue, Vol. 5, #2 (April 1950). This was a story “based on an actual case!” concerning a group of men in 19thcentury France plotting the death of Napoleon, and the greedy co-conspirator who betrays them. It’s a clever story, convincingly written and drawn. Stories like these made the Hillman books a cut or three above the rest.

On at least one occasion their crime books even veered into sci-fi. “Free-Wheeling Oscar!” in that same issue featured shlumpy Oscar Bloot, a taxi driver who talks like a character straight out of a Damon Runyon story (see facing page). Oscar gets space-napped by an intergalactic thug who mistakenly thinks Bloot’s a worldrenowned atomic scientist who can be used for their own evil ends. Oscar tries to set them straight: “My name is Oscar Bloot! I am a guy who is not a little allergic to education! In school I am graduating with a pension, not a diploma!”

“Get ’Im!!”

(Above:) Crime Detective, Vol. 3, #2 (May 1952), features a toy doll putting the finger on some hardened cons. The crooks don’t want the doll to alert the cops, so they start blasting. Good thinking, guys! Crime Detective Comics’ title was swiped from Hillman’s Crime Detective magazine. Artist unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

The Eyewitness!

(Left:) Next we have Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol. 6, #1 (March 1951). The John Prentice cover features a crook using an innocent babe as an alibi.

Sorry, pal, th’ kid ain’t talkin’! [© the respective copyright holders.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Alas, no one believes poor Oscar. He later meets a gorgeous space princess, who (of course!) falls for him like a ton of choice salami. Unfortunately, Oscar’s already married to a devoted battle-axe, and despite saving the world he gets more than a little beat up for his troubles. Such is life!

It’s a fun story that would have seemed more in place in one of those 1950s Mad knockoffs—especially placed next to stories of more realistic crimes past and present. But it was an amusing change of pace, and demonstrated editor Ed Cronin’s willingness to add humor to his tasty crime stew.

That lighter approach is well in evidence in the covers featured in this issue’s Comic Crypt. Dan Zolnerowich did the bulk, though John Prentice and others also contributed to the titles.

By the time Hillman killed their comic book line in 1953, they had published 87 issues of Clue/Real Clue, 32 of Crime Detective, plus the one-shot crime title Crime Must Stop! Not a bad run by any measure.

And some credit must be given to these wonderful, silly covers. Anything less would be a crime!

Till next time...

Blue Humor!

(Above:) Let’s hear it for Officer Mulrooney—law enforcement royalty!

From Crime Detective, Vol. 1, #12 (Jan. 1950). Art by Zolne. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Now We’re Just Being Silly!

(Left:) A bunch of safe-crackin’ gorillas meet a real one in this cover from Crime Detective, Vol.1, #6 (Jan. 1949).

Artist unknown. [© 2015 the respective copyright holders.]

Comic Fandom Archive

G.B. Love.

Alter Ego’s Multi-Part Tribute To G.B. Love & RBCC – Part 3

Photo by Robert Brown.

Chatting With JIM VAN HISE Introduction

omic fandom has a lot of reasons to thank the late Gordon Belljohn Love, publisher and editor of the adzine juggernaut, RBCC... or, to spell it out, Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector. Over time, it has become even clearer how much we owe G.B.

C

Certainly, Jim Van Hise would second that motion, for it was at Gordon’s side that he learned the writing and magazine business. I talked to Jim on October 8, 2012... and thanks to Brian K. Morris for transcribing our conversation. —Bill Schelly.

BILL SCHELLY: I thought we should start with just talking about you and your background first, like where you were born and where you grew up.

JIM VAN HISE: Okay, I was born in Tonawanda, New York, which is not far from Buffalo, in 1949.

SCHELLY: How did you end up in Florida?

VAN HISE: I had grandparents who lived in Florida because my grandfather worked at Cape Canaveral. We would go down there every summer. Sometimes, we’d stay as long as a month to visit, and we started doing that in the early 1960s. And so in 1970, when I decided I just wanted to go out on my own, I decided that where I would move is to Florida, because I always hated the winters in New York. Since I had been exposed to Florida and I knew what it was like, I decided to move there.

SCHELLY: I know that you are a fan of comics, but you also have other interests, maybe even stronger interests, in pulps and science-fiction and so on. Can you describe how your personal interests evolved as a kid?

A Dynamic Duo (Above:) Jim Van Hise (on left) and G.B. Love at Miami Con in 1971. Photo courtesy of John Ellis.

(Right:) Showcase #2 (Nov.-Dec. 1960), featuring the “Sea Devils,” was one of the first comics Jim remembers reading.

[Cover TM & © DC Comics.]

VAN HISE: When I was a kid, there was a package of movies going around, the horror and science-fiction movies that they started showing in the ’50s. I guess the package was called Shock Theatre, but in Buffalo they called it something else, like Super-Duper All-Night Theatre or something. So I became interested in those kinds of science-fiction movies. I picked up a science-fiction paperback around 1959 called Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster because it showed, like, a giant insect on the cover, and that’s how I started reading science-fiction. I didn’t discover pulps till the late ’60s, when I found a couple copies of Weird Tales in an old book store.

SCHELLY: So that came later. What about comics?

VAN HISE: I got interested in comics when I was probably around ten or so. My father brought home a comic book for me when I was sick. It was Showcase #29 with the “Sea Devils,” and I actually still have it. [NOTE: That was the Nov.-Dec. 1960 issue.

—Bill.] And when I started buying comics regularly around ’63, that’s when I started

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SCHELLY: Did you branch out into other fanzines, or were you mostly interested in the ads and stuff?

VAN HISE: There were fanzine ads in Rocket’s Blast, so I would buy some of those, looking for just things that had information about comics.

SCHELLY: Well, G.B.’s Rocket Blast Specials were very informative at that stage. The one about the Timely Heroes was reprinted a few times, the last one via photo offset. It must have sold like crazy.

VAN HISE: Yeah, I remember I got his special about EC Comics, and I think that’s when I started buying EC Comics. It had reproductions of EC stuff, plus it mentioned artists that I was familiar with like Wally Wood and Al Williamson, because Wally Wood had done some stuff for Marvel and for Creepy and Eerie.

SCHELLY: How would you describe, generally, your interest and involvement in fandom as the ’60s went on? You’re a publisher and a writer now. Were you writing and doing any fanzines or any of that kind of activity then?

VAN HISE: Not until I hooked up with G.B. Love in 1970. I got together with him at the first convention I ever went to, in Oklahoma City in the summer of 1970. But I’d met him before then, because I moved to Florida in January of 1970 and drove down to Miami to visit the Rocket’s Blast offices, which a lot of people did back in the ‘70s. Early in 1970 I lived in the Cape Canaveral area about 200 miles north of Miami. I didn’t move to Miami until around August of 1970.

Attaboy, Atoman!

(Above:) The Rocket’s Blast #24, with its excellent Atoman cover by Buddy Saunders, was probably the first issue of Love’s fanzine that Van Hise received.

This art was based on the original comics version drawn by Jerry Robinson for the two issues of the 1946 comics title. [© the respective copyright holders.]

collecting them. I got some back issues from a friend who had been buying comics before I did.

SCHELLY: What were your favorite comics in 1963?

VAN HISE: It was the Marvel comics. You know, the Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man; and then, when The Avengers and The X-Men started, I bought those, and I basically bought all of the Marvel super-hero comics.

SCHELLY: When I talked to you before, or at some early point, you had told me that you actually had gotten into fandom and were getting Rocket’s Blast in 1963?

VAN HISE: Yeah, because G.B. Love had put a classified ad in Marvel Comics, because Marvel offered those, whereas DC didn’t.

At DC, he was only able to, like, have letters in letter columns and things. So about the time I started buying comics, there was this ad for this fanzine that basically was, “You could get old comics.” And so I started getting Rocket’s Blast, I think, around #24. [NOTE: RB #24 was the Nov. 1963 issue. —Bill.]

SCHELLY: How did you feel about it as a collector at that point?

VAN HISE: Oh, I’d never seen anything like that, so to me, it was terrific. I said, “Wow—old comics!” because I couldn’t find any old comics in the area where I lived, but here I could get them through the mail, and I could get comics I had missed and things like that. I was able to buy old comics through the mail for like 15 or 20 cents.

SCHELLY: Does that mean you weren’t at that first Miami meet at the Fireman’s Hall—the one that took place on December 27, 1969?

VAN HISE: No, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even in Florida until January of 1970.

SCHELLY: But you met G.B. before the Oklahoma con, because you had already visited him at his home. Let’s talk about when you maybe first saw the Rocket’s Blast offices.

VAN HISE: Yeah. He lived with his parents, and his office was in a large room in the back of the house. It was in what must have been an extra bedroom. It was just a room filled with shelves. He had a desk with a typewriter on it. There was a lot of artwork on the walls from the covers on Rocket’s Blast. That was my first exposure to original art, because G.B. had these boxes full of original art— stuff that he had published or was going to publish by Don Newton and John Adkins Richardson and Richard Corben. I had never seen original art before, much less stacks of it.

SCHELLY: The cover of RBCC was sort of the premiere showcase for an artist, since the fanzine had such a great circulation.

VAN HISE: G.B.’s favorite artist in RBCC was Don Newton. He always loved getting artwork from Newton. He would give Don Newton ideas, and Don would do them… or Don would just get an idea of his own and send a painting to G.B. and G.B. would publish it.

SCHELLY: I think he said that Don was so reliable that he had a really kind of special relationship with him.

VAN HISE: Yeah, because this was before Don was professional and Don was sending samples to the companies. But at that time, they just would return it, saying “thanks but no thanks.” Then he started doing stuff for Charlton Comics, and then Marvel or DC noticed him.

SCHELLY: I spoke to G.B. on the phone once, and of course, that was

Chatting With Jim Van Hise—About G.B. Love & RBCC

59

difficult over the phone, because he was kind of hard to understand. When you met him initially, were you able to communicate with G.B., given his cerebral palsy? How was that for you?

VAN HISE: When I first met him, he had an assistant working at the office, Andy Warner, and Andy would be able to explain what G.B. was saying. But when I started to work for G.B. later in 1970, I worked for him six days a week and I came to be able to understand what he was saying. It was basically like learning how to understand what someone is saying who has a thick accent. He could talk over the phone, but unless you were used to talking to him, you probably wouldn’t be able to understand what he was saying.

SCHELLY: Fandom was a great place for people who weren’t in the mainstream and maybe who were shut-ins or maybe had various issues.

In a way, it was a saving grace, probably, for Gordon, wouldn’t you think?

VAN HISE: Well, it started out as a hobby. I mean, I think he only made like five copies of the first issues of Rocket’s Blast, using carbon paper in the typewriter. Then he had letters in some early DC comics in the early ’60s and people started writing to him from that. Then he began printing copies in mimeograph, and it was worthwhile to put ads in Marvel Comics to build up his circulation even more.

SCHELLY: He found a place where he was accepted and in fact could excel, really.

Warner Time Andy Warner (left) and G. B. Love at Multicon 1970, the occasion when Jim Van Hise cemented his relationship with Love. Photo courtesy of John Ellis.

The Rocket’s Blast Specials #1-2 Love’s Rocket’s Blast Special fanzine presented early attempts to chronicle the history of comics. RBS #1 (1963) presented “The Timely Story” by Raymond Miller, behind an illo of the Human Torch, Captain America, and Sub-Mariner (who else?). RBS #2 (1963) offered “I Remember This” by Margaret Gemignani, and numerous tracings of Golden Age comic book panels and covers, and sported a Human Torch cover. Cover art by Buddy Saunders. RBS #1 shown from the photo-offset re-issue in 1967.) [Human Torch, Captain America, & Sub-Mariner TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; other art elements © Buddy Saunders.]

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Comic Fandom Archive

Three by Newton Don Newton wins the title “RBCC’s most prolific cover artist.” Here are just three examples of his wonderful work: his C.C. Beck cover on RBCC #91 (1972), Spy Smasher on #99 (1973), and Starman on #104 (1973)—and a photo of Don below. [Shazam hero, Spy Smasher, & Starman TM & © DC Comics.]

Chatting With Jim Van Hise—About G.B. Love & RBCC

61

Two By Fantucchio By any measure, John Fantucchio created some of the most memorable, beautifully-designed covers for RBCC. His covers on RBCC #57 (1968) and #63 (1969) are two of his best. [Deadman TM & © DC Comics; Spider Spry © Archie Comics Publications, Inc.]

VAN HISE: Yeah, because it was just all done through the mail.

Most people didn’t call each other much, because long distance was a lot more expensive back in those days.

SCHELLY: When I got involved in fandom in late 1964, nobody knew about Gordon’s physical challenges. He was just another guy. It wasn’t even widely known until a little bit later.

VAN HISE: When he started being able to go to conventions in the late ’60s, probably this is when people realized that he had a disability.

SCHELLY: Yet here he was, publisher of one of the central fanzines, one that has this enormous circulation, which is just very cool. Comic fandom was a great thing for him. But one thing that set him apart among fanzine publishers is that he did them to make a profit. And he was unapologetic about it.

VAN HISE: You have to remember, he couldn’t have gotten a regular job. Even the most menial jobs would have required more physical effort than he was capable of. He could walk, he could pick things up… but to type, he had to hold the pencil and strike the keys with the eraser end, because he couldn’t control his fingers well enough.

SCHELLY: He got some flak over making money on RBCC, as I recall.

VAN HISE: In the early days of not just comic fandom, but even science-fiction fandom, there was a resentment if you made any money off what you were doing. You know, “You’re making

money off fans,” that type of thing.

SCHELLY: Exactly. The profit motive seemed to conflict with fannish ideas or with fannishness. For most fans, comics were their hobby, and fanzines were a way to share it with others. A fanzine publisher would charge enough to cover the cost of printing and postage, and the writers and artists weren’t paid for their contributions. But G.B.’s situation was unique.

VAN HISE: He would buy fanzines in bulk at a discount and then sell them for relatively high prices. He’d make maybe 50 or 75 cents a copy in profit, and some people thought that was scandalous.

SCHELLY: Teenagers can be extremely naïve, because they don’t have the experience to understand that a situation might be different, or that maybe they don’t know the whole picture. It was easy to think, “He’s trying to make money on fans,” rather than understand that he needed to make some money and was providing a service to earn it.

VAN HISE: A lot of fans would do fanzines, but after a few issues, they would get tired of it because it was a lot of work and they’d be lucky if they broke even. In order to keep doing it, year after year, of course you’d have to be able to make money from it to justify all the time.

SCHELLY: I agree. No one could have sustained the effort to do RBCC month after month, year after year, just out of sheer fannishness. That

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Cover Stories (On this & facing page:) Don Newton and John Fantucchio were two of the best, but many other outstanding artists contributed covers to Love’s fanzine.

They included Robert Kline (#69), Bernie Wrightson (#86), Gil Kane (#94), and C. C. Beck (#107). [Warlock TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Shazam hero & Sivana TM & © DC Comics, with other art in that illo © Estate of C.C. Beck; other art © Robert Kline & Bernie Wrightson, respectively.]

required a kind of professionalism and needed to be handled on that basis if it was going to sustain and survive. I was one of those naïve fans who didn’t get this, at the time.

SCHELLY: He was like a drawing card at a convention, for example. He never did any artwork for RBCC, did he?

SCHELLY: Let’s get back to your first meeting. How did that go and did you feel like anything would come of it? How did your relationship with G.B. progress?

SCHELLY: How did things progress with G.B. after those first couple of meetings?

VAN HISE: He never said it this way, but I think he didn’t want to live with his parents the rest of his life.

VAN HISE: I went down there to visit, to see his offices… plus, he had comics and things that he would sell. He was friendly, so I visited him again, and it went from there.

SCHELLY: What about his own interest in comics? I know he was a Captain Marvel fan.

VAN HISE: He was more interested in Golden Age comics because that is what he had grown up reading, although G.B. was only ten years older than me. [NOTE: Love was born in 1939. —Bill.] So I guess he started reading comics probably in the mid-’40s and into the ’50s. And those were the comics he was interested in. Those were the characters and that he liked.

SCHELLY: And I guess the Captain Marvel thing was tied in with the fact that C.C. Beck lived down there and attended, I think, the very first Con Fab in 1969.

VAN HISE: Yeah, he was kind of the local celebrity. We would go and visit him, and he was very open to meeting fans.

VAN HISE: I think he did one drawing for G.B. that he used in something. It was just a drawing of Captain Marvel. [NOTE: See p. 63]

VAN HISE: I went to Multi Con ’70 in Oklahoma City, which is actually where I spent a lot of time with him and Andy Warner.

That’s when I really got to know him. Until that convention, G.B. and Andy were the only people I’d met in fandom. At the con, I met other people, like Jerry Weist, whom I knew about because I bought Squa Tront.

SCHELLY: I understand Andy Warner is no longer alive.

VAN HISE: No, he died about seven years ago. I think he was only about a year younger than I am. He had contracted some kind of slow-moving cancer. I didn’t realize—I hadn’t seen him in years, but I talked to him on the phone fairly regularly—it had left him debilitated to the point that he had to use a wheelchair. I guess he had it for a couple of years before he succumbed to it. When I first met him, he was a very enthusiastic fan, interested in a lot of the same things that I was. You know, the current comic books and the current artists like Neal Adams and Jim Steranko and all that.

SCHELLY: What was Andy doing for G.B.?

Chatting With Jim Van Hise—About G.B. Love & RBCC

VAN HISE: He basically was helping G.B. at the office, helping to lay out the magazine, helping fill the orders. He would help when the Rocket’s Blasts were delivered from the printer. You know, he had like about 2,000 copies or something. These all had to be stuffed in envelopes and addressed and then taken down to the Post Office and mailed. And that was a major job that Andy did for G.B. SCHELLY: How did it develop that you became like an assistant, an editor, or an employee?

VAN HISE: Andy was really only working for G.B. part-time because Andy had his own life and stuff he was doing. I was available to work full-time, so G.B. hired me on that basis.

SCHELLY: Did your role differ from what Andy was doing, or did you both just kind of pick up the slack?

VAN HISE: We kind of overlapped on stuff we were doing, and eventually I wound up doing all of it because Andy had other things that he was interested in doing.

SCHELLY: Did you become involved in the editorial part of RBCC and his other zines right away, or were you mostly doing the clerical and other physical stuff at first?

VAN HISE: I was doing the physical stuff first. Then I started coming up with some ideas for articles. I would write them at home, and then we typed them up and put them in the magazine.

G.B. liked what I had written, so he started coming up with ideas for other things I could write for RBCC. SCHELLY: Had you been an aspiring writer before that? Or did you kind of become a writer at that time?

VAN HISE: Yes, I had been just writing things on my own. I hadn’t contributed to any other fanzines.

63

SCHELLY: I assume G.B.’s house had to be air-conditioned.

VAN HISE: Yeah, as I recall, he had it in the main room we worked in, but he had a back room which is where like we would stuff envelopes when the magazine came in from the printer, and I don’t think that room was air-conditioned. You only really needed it during the summer months, because during the winter in Florida, actually, it’s very mild. The weather is nice, but once you get into like about May through September, the heat in Florida is pretty intense. Not just the heat, it’s the humidity.

SCHELLY: Once you were working for G.B., were there other fans who dropped by to meet him, like you did?

VAN HISE: Yeah, there were fans who might have been in Florida on a vacation or something, and they would call up and ask if they could come over. That was fine with him. Maybe they’d stay for an hour or so and ask questions and probably buy some of the fanzines, because G.B. was selling a lot of fanzines through his Ye Old Fanzine Shop.

SCHELLY: You obviously got along well with him. How do you figure your personalities meshed?

VAN HISE: I think it was mostly over the mutual interest in comics and the artwork and things like that.

SCHELLY: Did you socialize with him when you weren’t working?

VAN HISE: No, it was mostly when I worked for him. About really the only times he ever went anywhere was when he would go with Andy Warner to a movie or something. I remember we did that a couple times.

SCHELLY: Mmm, but that’s not very much for four years of working together.

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VAN HISE: I went to movies a lot, but when I would tell G.B. about these movies, he just wasn’t interested in going out to theaters to see whatever the current movies were. He’d never even gone out to see a James Bond movie!

SCHELLY: A drive-in would seem to be a very logical way for him, and they must have had a lot of drive-ins down there.

VAN HISE: Yeah, but someone would have to take him, because he couldn’t drive a car.

SCHELLY: Were there any anecdotes or incidents that you want to add?

VAN HISE: Well… just that I think it was during the last year or so that he was there, his mother decided to buy a monkey. [Bill laughs] It was just the standard kind of little monkey you could get at a pet shop. Not a chimp or anything like that. They kept it in a big cage in a back room that we used for storage and for working on the Rocket’s Blast when it got back from the printer. Once in a while, I’d say, “I’ll let the monkey out,” and it would climb around.

SCHELLY: How did G.B. feel about the animal?

VAN HISE: I think he tolerated it. [Bill laughs]

To be continued ….

TheThid Rocket’s Blast Special Rocket’s Blast Special #3 (1964) featured “The History of All American Comics” by Paul Gambaccini, with Dr. Mid-Nite up front. Cover by Buddy Saunders. [Dr. Mid-Nite TM & © DC Comics; other art elements © Buddy Saunders.]

COMING NEXT: Another chapter in our multi-part tribute to G.B. Love and RBCC. Down the line, we’ll return for another segment with Jim Van Hise about the Last Great Days of RBCC, but first we’ll share a cornucopia of photographs from G.B.’s friends, and memories of Love in Houston fandom. Stay tuned!

Comments to Bill Schelly can be sent through Bill’s website: www.billschelly.net. Be sure to check out his new books Black Light: The World of L. B. Cole, and his mammoth biography Harvey Kurtzman, The Man Who Created MAD.

H Harvey arvey K Kurtzman: urtzman: The M Man an Who Crea Created ated t ted Mad da and nd Revolutionized Re volutionized Humor in A America merica A Bio Biogr Biography Bi aphy B By y Bill Schelly hardback color 642-page har dback book with c olor insert — $34.99 each onsidered Alfr “I alw always ays c considered Alfred ed E. Neuman as a br brother.” other.”

—Da —David vid L Lynch ynch “T “Those hose early is issues sues of Mad da attacked ttacked the h hypocrisies ypocrisies of a 19 1950s 50s society tha thatt perceived perceived itself tself as normal . . . and it w wasn’t asn’t afr afraid aid tto o mak make e fun of alc alcoholism oholism or se xism and rracism.” acism.” sexism —Matthew —Matthew W Weiner, einerr, cr creator eator of Mad Men “He w was as . . . a kind of unsung Mother T Theresa heresa ffor or American c comics omics artis artists, ts, c comedians, omedians, goofballs, outsiders, br brainiacs ainiacs and tr troublemakers.” oublemakers.” — —Terry Terry Gilliam

w www.fantagraphics.com ww.fantagraphics.com

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66

Roger Slifer

(1954-2015) “Lasting Contributions To Comics And Animation”

by David Anthony Kraft

R

oger Slifer and I started at Marvel the same day in 1974. It wasn’t a case of love at first sight—we didn’t like the looks of each other. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Brought onto staff as a letterer and production assistant, Roger soon rose through the ranks, helping Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Steve Gerber, and others with scripting or plotting during

Roger & Friend (Above:) Roger Slifer, with an Alex Horley illustration of Slifer’s character Lobo. Art from the Giffen-scripted Lobo Unbound #1 (Aug. 2003).

Thanks to comicbookresources website. (Below:) Splash page of Omega Men #10 (Jan. 1984), spotlighting a less disheveled version of Lobo. Script

by Slifer, art by Tod Smith & Mike DeCarlo. [TM & © DC Comics.]

deadline crises, which were all too common back then. In the process, he taught himself to become an accomplished writer, and went on to write and edit for Marvel and DC, later becoming the first Direct Sales distribution manager for DC (another example of his ability to rise to a challenge in virtually any area).

At Marvel, Rog wrote single-issue stories for many of the major characters, and co-wrote The Defenders with me until other obligations left him no time. He became adept as a colorist and saved many a deadline. At DC he wrote The Omega Men and co-created the breakout character Lobo. Later, he edited World’s Finest Comics and others for them. Still later, he became a writer, story editor, and producer in animation, playing a key role on Jem and the Holograms, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Conan the Adventurer, and many another, including Yu-Gi-Oh.

Those are his credits, the things that can be known from his work. But his other qualities need to be known.

The wit. Keen. The individualistic viewpoint and willingness to go his own way. Unique. The commitment and the unending character. Vexing sometimes, to be sure, but sincere.

We were young and, in terms of being willing to quit dream jobs at Marvel and DC at the drop of a hat over perceived injustices, maybe foolish. In latter days, we shared a joke between us that we often quit a job before we applied for it or were actually hired. Which is to say, Roger was a man of principles. Without either of us knowing what the other had done, we both turned down offers to take over the scripting of Howard the Duck when our friend Steve Gerber was rudely parted from his creation. That’s one behind-the-scenes example of so many that Roger’s friends and peers will remember about Roger taking a stand at personal cost to his career.

Much later, Roger called me about two story-editor positions open in animation that were ideal for him.

He worried that, if he applied for one, he might be turned down but would have been accepted for the other. Which one? he agonized. I kiddingly told him to apply for both and, when he got neither, he wouldn’t feel as bad. It should not have come as a

In Memoriam

67

surprise that he did exactly that… and got both jobs! But, as anyone who’s worked in television knows, overseeing a season’s worth of scripts in a couple of months is a miracle on one show. It’s impossible to do two separate shows at the same time. Yet, Roger wanted to do it, and talked me into joining him as his “secret weapon.” If things went well and the producers were pleased, he would reveal my participation and attempt to get me screen credit. After a grueling time of tag-team work, during which I’d write or re-write until I dropped, then wake him to take over where I left off— nights, weekends, and every waking moment—somehow scripts for all the episodes of G.I. Joe: Extreme and Street Fighter were finished. The point? Without my ever once reminding him or saying a word, Roger did not, like most, say what was convenient when he needed help and then later have a selective memory or forget. True to his word, when the shows aired, there it was onscreen, the credit he had promised to fight for on my behalf. He was like that.

It will be three years in July since Marv Wolfman called to share the terrible news that Roger had been struck down by a hit-andrun driver. We were all rooting for him, and he gave it his best, but Rog never really recovered. It was the one challenge he couldn’t surmount.

Roger & Friend – Part 2

Roger Slifer made lasting contributions to comics and animation for which he will be remembered. But there’s so much more. Roger was a good and lifelong friend. Those of us privileged to know him personally will always remember and miss him for his many other fine qualities. His passing leaves a big hole where a good friend used to be.

Roger (on left) and buddy Dave Kraft hitchhiking in the 1970s.

Photo by Dan Hagen; courtesy of David Anthony Kraft.

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hopelessly out-of-place in a comic book. It’s true that Kurtzman and Feldstein were direct precursors to this ambitious approach, but the EC team they were leading 15 years earlier disbanded at precisely the moment when they might have achieved the next breakthrough. (Krigstein even proposed a book adapting Fahrenheit 451. Of course, now we call these longer comics “graphic novels.”)

Neal was a source of comfort, encouragement, and inspiration, even for artists who hadn’t met him. He made it his business to educate the public about Golden Age creators who were scraping by without a pension from publishers, and in general to improve the reputation of comic artists. Inertia, preconceptions, and the overwhelming dominance of the super-hero kept comics out of regular bookstores in America for so long that graphic novels were regarded as inherently experimental, and they were usually published only at great risk by tiny publishers. Older readers started buying scarce French and Japanese imports whenever they needed a deeper literary experience. Progress was slow.

I’m still reading the Denny O’Neil interview Richard Arndt conducted for A/E #123, and so far I’m impressed. A comprehensive view of O’Neil’s contributions should clarify how it came to pass that progress (even in the 1970s) remained slow for so long.

oy here, in first person as usual for the “re:” section. I’ll be up front about it: What with one thing and another (including a trip to L.A. to attend the world premiere of Avengers: Age of Ultron [loved it, surprise, surprise], another to Des Moines to visit my mother, etc., etc., etc.), I find myself behind the eight-ball on getting this issue’s materials to our long-suffering layout guru, Chris Day... but not so frazzled, I hope, that I forget to thank artist Shane Foley and colorist Randy Sargent for putting together this issue’s fine “maskot” illo! There hasn’t been a loser in the bunch, guys! [Alter Ego hero TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas – costume designed by Ron Harris; Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly – created by Biljo White; other art © Shane Foley.]

R

Alter Ego #123 featured a lead-off interview with Dennis O’Neil, whom I was lucky enough to have met back in Missouri in 1965 before I ventured eastward to begin working in the comic book field, and we got a pulsating potpourri of responses to Richard Arndt’s excellent interview with him, starting with these comments by John Warren: Hello,

When I was twelve, and almost ready to “outgrow” comics, I had the good fortune to find a copy of Denny O’Neil’s most famous Green Lantern story at a garage sale (dropped unceremoniously among “Archie” and “Casper” titles). I didn’t know at the time how this would change the course of my life, and I had never paid much attention to the credits on comics’ splash pages, but because of this discovery many other avenues opened up. The cover art, by Neal Adams, was used on a United States postage stamp some years ago, and a PBS documentary recently included panels from the interior art. For me, O’Neil and Adams revealed the difference between Art and entertainment, and also intriguing areas where the two may overlap. I wasn’t familiar with comic shops, conventions, or fanzines, but I felt compelled to begin a search for other collaborations between them. (Along the way I also found a few of the Thomas/Adams Uncanny X-Men stories from 1969, a welcome surprise.)

O’Neil proved that topical scripts, philosophical undertones, naturalistic characterization, and even poetry were not, after all,

O’Neil and Adams expressed their faith in the art form by aspiring to a worthy standard, and made it possible for fans to imagine that someday the printing, the binding, and the paper quality would match the contents.

John Warren Grand Rapids, MI

What better to follow that letter from a reader to whom “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” was a true revelation than a missive from Neal Adams himself—although the latter mostly takes issue with a statement of interviewer Richard Arndt in #123. Neal, whom I run into at comics conventions from time to time, sent it to me via TwoMorrows Publishing… but I assume it is addressed, in fact, to Richard. To wit: Very nice interview with Denny O’Neil, my old buddy on “Batman” and “GL/GA.” And while there may be some parts that I disagree with, it’s a very salutary interview, and entertaining at the same time.

Your contribution, however, when you choose to make comments, in particular, the following quote—

“You wrote your first ‘Batman’ story in late 1969—‘The Secret of the Waiting Graves.’ Neal Adams had already been drawing ‘Batman’ for about a year, year and a half, but not in the main ‘Batman’ titles. He was working in the team-up book, The Brave and the Bold. He’s apparently also been rewriting the scripts he’d

“Never Again!”—Again & Again The stories of the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” series have been reprinted numerous times over the years. This cover for one of the collections utilizes Adams’ art for the premiere issue (#76, April 1970), with the word balloons— including the one quoted above—deleted. [© DC Comics.]

re:

69

been handed, making them darker, having events take place at night instead of in the daylight… which probably ticked off a number of people at DC. But the book was certainly an improvement over the stories that immediately preceded Neal’s.

Batman’s character in 1968 was, well, frankly godawful.”

—is, as usual, the result of fan gossip and rumor-mongering.

It’s the sort of thing that hurts one’s reputation because it gets repeated, once in print, over and over again. Or, to put it another way, ‘Fart in the elevator, and they call you Stinky the rest of your life.’ In this particular case, I did not fart in the elevator, you did it for me. And I would be pleased if you would attempt to undo it in some way or another. What is wrong with your quote? Besides everything.

I never changed one word, one single word, of Bob Haney’s scripts. In fact, my editor, Murray Boltinoff, when he had secured permission to use me on Brave and Bold, asked me if I wanted to change any of the scripts of Haney’s. I told him, “No, it was not my intention, but I would prefer to have the story to happen at night. And when Batman enters a room, I would rather he did not enter it through a door, but through a window, or from the shadows.” This did not change, in any way, Bob Haney’s scripts, and Murray was delighted for any suggestion that I made. Then we come to the word “delighted,” and we will contrast it with your phrase “probably ticked off a number of people at DC.” Why on earth would having Batman operate at night have ticked off anybody? Hell, the coloring at DC Comics was so bad that you could hardly tell day from night anyway. But if you could, why would anybody be upset with anything I did? Or, to be more clear, no one was upset, in any way. The book was popular, everybody was happy, Bob Haney loved it and hated to lose me as an artist on the book. I never changed any words, and I didn’t tick anybody off. Where do you guys get this trash? My style has always been to get my way with a smile. That’s how I was able to do anything and everything I did in the past, and even today. But you guys make it hard for me, because you make it seem that I was constantly battling with people. They used to call me “Smiley,” for God’s sake. And while they weren’t looking, things changed. Please find some way to undo, at least to some small degree, this blundering about through the halls of what can only be called minor history.

Best regards, Neal Adams

Richard Arndt’s response:

“Neal is indeed referring to my question and not to Denny’s answer, so let it be clear that Denny is blameless is any of this. I was indeed relating anecdotes that have been long repeated in the [fan] press. If those anecdotes are incorrect and Neal is finally getting the chance to correct the matter, then great! That’s exactly what should be happening. If that also means that I personally get sent to the proverbial woodshed by Neal Adams—well, not so great, but certainly understandable. I just might deserve it, although, in my defense, Bob Haney disputed Neal’s take on the matter. In American Comic Book Chronicles 1965-1969 (TwoMorrows Publishing, 2014, p. 247), Haney is quoted as stating that, with Brave and the Bold #86 (Oct.-Nov. 1969)—Adams’ last regular issue with Haney—‘[Neal Adams] had taken it upon himself to “improve” my script without consulting me or ye ed. […] Allow that Adams’ re-write had a certain flashy style, it had nothing to do with my script and I informed him never to change any more scripts.’ [Author John] Wells added that, ‘in support of the writer, Boltinoff removed Adams from the book.’ Haney had apparently written his quote for a Comics Journal interview in 1979. If my question was incorrect, I’m happy to stand corrected, but I did get the notion from Haney’s own recollections and Wells’ book. The only difference, and it’s not that small a one, is that Haney mentions one issue where [he says] that happened, and I,

The Dark Night Bob Haney-scripted, Neal Adams-drawn “Batman & Aquaman” nighttime splash page from The Brave and the Bold #82 (Feb.-March 1969), as reprinted in The Best of The Brave and the Bold #3 (Dec. 1988). This scene was probably written by Haney as occurring at night, both on its own merits—and because of the reference to “night” in the top caption. [© DC Comics.]

incorrectly, mentioned several. That’s certainly my fault.”

Thanks, Richard. And now—as in so many things in life and in art— we have two quite conflicting versions of what happened… each, as it happens, from what’s often called “the horse’s mouth.” Since there’s no way to reconcile the two, we won’t try—since neither Richard nor I have first-hand knowledge of the event. As often must be the case in history as in journalism, we leave the two competing recollections on the record, side by side. More, neither we nor any man else can really do.

Well, I could add that, though I can’t speak for Richard, I suspect that his observation that Neal’s changing the setting of stories from day to night might have “ticked off… people at DC” is based on the fact that it’s well known that some of the editors were very, very “territorial,” and didn’t much cotton to the notion that an artist might alter an aspect of a writer’s script without at least checking first with the mag’s editor.

Matter of fact, speaking as one who’s been both an editor and a writer at various times (and even at the same time), that’s not an unreasonable view for either editor or writer… still, I’m glad to hear that Murray Boltinoff saw Neal’s day-to-night changes as improvements. I suspect most readers, then and now, would agree with him.

Naturally, I personally would’ve been interested to hear what “parts” of Denny’s remarks Neal “disagrees” with—but he didn’t say, and I certainly won’t speculate.

Next, a short but equally welcome note from Harlan Ellison, who of course is one of the finest SF writers and (to my way of thinking) stylists of any kind of fiction of the second half of the 20th century—and since:

70

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

Dear Roy:

Alter Ego #123 scintillated into my purview last week and, pleasant for both of us, I started at the front and went to the back in one sitting, with a smile all the way. It was the good reading experience I get from far fewer and fewer sources these days. As I have simply no tolerance for the gibbering back&forthing of the electronic anti“social media”—playground of bullies, knownothings, and budding sociopaths—it is a condign sweetness to see my old playmate Roy still exercising his chops.

Would have added many paragraphs to your Denny O’Neil coverage if either of us had thought to comment. But… done is done; and it was excellent. Good’on’ya, kid.

Harlan Ellison

Thanks for the kind words, Harlan. We’re looking forward to shining a Shazamic spotlight on you in the FCA section of A/E #139, out next February! (He’ll be talking about Captain Marvel, Mr. Mind, and related matters, for those of you who need something more to look forward to!)

Next, reader John De Mocko has his own unique thoughts on Denny: Dear Roy,

I had the pleasure of meeting Dennis O’Neal at a Seattle comic book convention years ago. Sitting at a wooden table, his wife by his side, he looked ill at ease. He either wasn’t feeling well or perhaps didn’t like crowds. (Hey, who does?)

today and the current version of Batman swooped down to help out, I’d probably say, “No, thanks, I’d rather handle this myself!”

John De Mocko

Speaking of Denny O’Neil—and why shouldn’t we?—I was curious as to precisely which Jewish holiday it was when he arrived in New York City in 1965 to take his new job as a staffer for Marvel Comics. And what better way to find out—than to ask him?....

Roy—

Pretty sure it was Rosh Hashana. No biggie, in any case. As always, you did a righteous job and I thank you.

Denny O’Neil

“Rosh Hashana” (Jewish New Year) would make the date September 25, 1965… so thanks, Denny. Glad you liked the way the interview turned out. I’ll admit I spent extra time and trouble (and a little of our budget) to arrange to reprint the three 1965 articles you wrote about comics (and yours truly) for the Cape Girardeau, Missouri, newspaper The Southeast Missourian… because I’d long since lost my own copies and I feel that, being tied to the careers of not one but two Silver Age comics writers, the pieces were worth preserving.

There was a bit of confusion in the transcription of the interview about the precise pronunciation of “Ra’s Al Ghul,” the villain supreme whom

Initially I wasn’t sure what to say to him. I hated Green Lantern/Green Arrow. (Utterly shrill, brain-dead, left-wing socialist twaddle.) And even though O’Neil’s early “Batman” scripts were a marked improvement over regular Bat-scripter Frank Robbins’ campy, implausible, horribly-dialogued efforts, I didn’t care that much for “Batman.”

I ended up telling O’Neil that I liked his brief run on “Superman.” The “new, improved, post-kryptonite” version.

Teamed with the best illustrators in the business, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, this was great stuff! In fact, except for a few scripts written by a 13-year-old Jim Shooter, O’Neil’s version of the Man of Steel was the finest presentation of the character since the early days of the Golden Age of Comics!

He smiled, thanked me, and said he was glad I enjoyed his work on “Superman.” That was most gracious of him, as he apparently had a difficult time as “Superman” scripter and didn’t enjoy the experience.

Richard Arndt’s interview reveals O’Neil as a very thoughtful, knowledgeable participant in the Silver and Bronze Ages of Comics. Okay, so the liberal Mr. O’Neil found it necessary to remind us every few paragraphs that he “had a problem with authority figures.” These days, Mr. O’Neil, that’s something conservatives and libertarians might say!

There’s also a difference of opinion as to who came up with the idea of de-powering Wonder Woman. The late Carmine Infantino has said that was his idea, not O’Neil’s. It was all so long ago!

I do credit/blame Mr. O’Neil for the onslaught of the relevance era of comics. You know, stories that in essence said: pollution is bad, racism is bad, male chauvinism is bad, paisley-clad hippies is/are good! But at least it was different… until it became the same old thing month after month, year after year.

I wish Mr. Arndt had asked Mr. O’Neil to contrast and compare the Silver Age Batman with the current Batman. You know, the dysfunctional, nuts, dark, dank, dreary, dirty costumed version. If I found myself in trouble on the streets of Gotham City

Juvenile Nevermore!

The Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson splash page art for the story in Superman #233 (Jan. 1971) that heralded a new, less omnipotent, yet kryptonite-less Man of Steel, courtesy of editor Julius Schwartz and scripter Dennis O’Neil. This series of tales was collected in the 2009 hardcover DC Comics Library: Superman – Kryptonite Nevermore. Some of the elements of the new direction eventually didn’t “take,” but it was a worthwhile experiment that moved beyond the more juvenile approach of the Mort Weisinger years. [TM & © DC Comics.]

re:

71

Denny conceived for the “Batman” comics. I asked interviewer Richard Arndt about it, and he responded: Roy—

I went back to the transcription, and Denny pronounces it “Rasch” (rhymes with “pace”) and gives a reason for that pronunciation. I think that’s how you’ve got it in the printed version and also how they pronounce it on the Batman animated series (which they probably got from Denny).

Richard Arndt

Thanks, Richard. Now I’m only confused about why the pronunciation “Rasch” should rhyme with “pace”! So the name is pronounced “Race Al Gool”?

John E. Petty’s e-mail dealt with another prominent feature of A/E #123, the launching of our serialization (not yet quite completed, due to having to skip an issue or three to date) of Amy Kiste Nyberg’s 1998 book Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code….

Dear Mr. Thomas,

I’m so glad you’re serializing Amy Kiste Nyberg’s book Seal of Approval in Alter Ego. Her academic and insightful look into the history of the Comics Code is extremely welcome. I wasn’t aware of her book before this, but I’m looking forward to reading future installments.

I wonder if she discussed an official evaluation of comic books in America that predates Seduction of the Innocent. It was written by David McGuire, the City Director of Public Relations for the City of New Orleans, for Mayor deLesseps S. Morrison in 1948, and is quite a thorough study. In addition to his outside research on the subject, McGuire also observed the comic-reading habits of his own children and was able to analyze their likes and preferences firsthand, a resource Wertham did not have.

Interestingly, in such a climate as New Orleans, McGuire’s report is amazingly even-handed and fair-minded. He comes to the basic conclusion that there are good comics and bad comics, and it’s part of the parent’s job to sort out which is which. He regards comics as an important American art form and lauds the many benefits they offer, primarily that of inducing children to read. On the other hand, he does note that comics tend to be hyper-active and hyper-violent, which can have a deleterious effect on children, and that there is little mention of “traditional” values such as home and family [in comics]. Overall, however, he recommends voluntary efforts by parents, distributors, retailers, and publishers to make comics better, not to ban them.

It’s a fascinating look at a study that takes a very different stance from SOTI. I came across a copy of this report when I headed the Comic and Comic Art Division of Heritage Auction Galleries, and although I don’t believe the original was ever auctioned, I made a copy of the report and retained it for my own collection. It’s a rarely—if ever—seen piece of comics history, one that tells a different story from that which we’re used to. If Nyberg’s book does not contain a reference to this study and you think it’s worthwhile, I’d be happy to write a piece on it at a future date.

Oh, and I’d love to see a feature on Frank Robbins, as I’ve always felt he was one of the greatest, and most under-appreciated, artists of his time. I loved his run on The Invaders, a series I’ve had bound into hardcover and re-read frequently.

John E. Petty

We agree about Frank Robbins, John, and hope to print something on him soon. We have one appreciation (by a pro artist) on hand, and wanted to pair it up with additional coverage on the co-creator of Man-Bat and

The Fascist Men Alive The second page of the single “Prankster” episode by writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Jim Aparo—from Charlton’s Thunderbolt #60 (Nov. 1966)— introduces the “futuristic fascism” Jeff Taylor mentions in his e-mail.

Thanks to Rodrigo Baeza. [© the respective copyright holders.]

the writer/artist of the long-running newspaper comic strip Johnny Hazzard.

As for that 1948 article on comics, it sounds like something that we should either reprint—or else have you tell us about—in a future issue, after Seal of Approval has run its course. Thanks for the offer!

Here, a letter on several subjects from Jeff Taylor:

Roy—

After you sent me a copy of A/E #123 because of my letter printed in that issue, I now have to issue a correction for something in my letter. After doing a bit more research on the comic book version of the mystical Nedor hero “The Ghost,” I’ve discovered it was not, in fact, George Chance who came from the 18th century, but rather, his girlfriend Betty Morris, who had been kidnapped via time machine to the 20th century by The Ghost’s mad science archenemy, Professor Fenton. Sorry! This means The Ghost goes back to being just another generic funnybook magician….

The Denny O’Neil interview was great. I loved his early Charlton stuff. “The Sentinels,” thanks to its great old-fashionedly cartoony Sam Grainger art, had a wonderfully urban back-alley feel to it, without going the grim and gritty route most modern comics seem to go down. I also liked their simple but cool costumes, especially the neat little gimmicks they wore that gave

72

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

them each their individual powers. Their personalities weren’t all that unique (pretty much the Fantastic Four minus one), but hey, at least they had them, something pretty rare for non-Marvel comics of the time period.

And “The Prankster” is such a fantastic character, with his fun-vs.-futuristic-fascism theme, because, let’s face it, all these dictators, whether fictional or all too real (yeah, I’m talking about you, Putin), need a needle taken to their pompous posteriors to pop their undeserved dignity. If only DC would bring him back like they have so many Charlton characters… although, since they already have a longtime Superman villain called The Prankster, they might have to rename him…

Loved seeing the “Nightmaster” pages, too, because I’ve always been a fan of this Showcase character, although I must admit I much prefer the first-issue artwork by Jerry Grandenetti to the later ones by Bernie Wrightson. I’m a big fan of Wrightson, but Grandenetti brought a wonderfully bizarre and creepily atmospheric imagination to the character’s world that the early Wrightson seemed to lack, going as he did for a more generic sword-and-sorcery look.

Oh, and going to the end of the book, I have to disagree with everyone there who felt that Fatman the Human Flying Saucer was a failure as a character. I loved the plus-size protector and always thought he would make a good live-action super-hero, although unfortunately all the appropriately rotund comedic actors that I think would be perfect for the part (John Candy, Chris Farley, etc.) keep dying off.

Jeff Taylor

And, in closing, regular contributor Shaun Clancy has this infor-

mation for a letter-writer: Roy—

I read the letter in the letters page in which Jake Oster posed a question in reference to Richard Decker. Yes, Richard Decker worked at St. John while acquiring the rights to print the Alfred Hitchcock magazine, which I covered in my Roy Ald interview in the FCA section of Alter Ego some time back.

Shaun Clancy

Sheesh! (As someone used to say.) From these last couple of letters, it looks as if our “re:” sections are the gift that keeps on giving! Someone asks a query or makes a statement… a dozen issues later, someone responds to that… and the whole thing keeps going. But at least it’s a conversation, even if not quite as quick as e-mail or Twitter….

Got anything to add to any of the above? Send to:

Roy Thomas e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135

Meanwhile, if you find yourself on the Internet, why not head on down to the Alter-Ego-Fans online chat group to learn more about upcoming features in this mag—to get a chance to unselfishly help us out with needed art and photo scans (thereby winning yourself a free copy of an issue of A/E)—and to discuss Alter Ego, the Golden and Silver Ages of Comics, and anything else that might be on your mind? You’ll find it at group.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans. If you run into any problems signing up, just contact our genial overseer Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll walk you through them. You’ll be glad you signed up—and so will we!

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75

The Limitations Of Comics

by C.C. Beck Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck with J.T. Go From FCA’s C.C. Beck archives come two previously unpublished essays from the mid-1980s on the rudiments of comic art, dogmatically delineated by Captain Marvel’s co-creator and chief artist. The bonus second piece is a snippet from one of Beck’s several aborted book projects on comic art instruction. —PCH.

E

very form of art has its limitations. Drawing and painting are two-dimensional, sculpture is threedimensional. While such things as clouds, sunrises and sunsets, and pools or oceans of water can be put into pictures, they cannot be included in sculptures with any success. Strangely enough, although pictures have only two dimensions, the third dimension—or the illusion of the third dimension—can be included in pictures but not in sculptures, which are three-dimensional, because then it becomes real and reality is too cold and hard to create any illusions.

In spite of this obvious fact, some artists are always trying to put things which belong in sculpture into pictures and vice versa. Neither form of art can show motion, which involves the fourth dimension, at all. It can be suggested in pictures but not in sculptures without becoming ridiculous. Statues of figures with flying hair, floating draperies, and either running or flying are unconvincing and silly, although many ignorant people admire them. Pictures which are over-modeled so that they seem to

be coming out of their frames instead of staying flat and twodimensional are also unconvincing and silly, however much some people may admire them.

When any form of art exceeds its limitations it becomes bad art—even though the general public may love it. A human being is only five or six feet tall with a head about nine inches from chin to

Beck And Call (Above:) Charles Clarence Beck was always willing to impart his artistic wisdom and wizardry to aspiring artists everywhere, as he did with his one-page drawing lesson from the “Shazam!” issue of the tabloid-sized Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-21 (Summer 1973), published while he was still on board with DC during the Captain Marvel revival.

(Left:) Believing in the power of a young person’s imagination, Beck gladly accepted an invitation to be a special guest speaker at the Hillcrest Elementary School in Lake Wales, Florida, on February 24, 1979, where he delighted students with his knowledge of cartooning basics. Photo by Chip Newton. [Shazam heroes TM & © DC Comics.]

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be shown in a single picture. It must be made up of separate panels of art, each one somewhat resembling the preceding and the following panels in order to create the illusion that something is happening in the fourth dimension—time. In addition, comic art contains printed speeches and sound effects, which no other form of art can include.

When comics are drawn with panels of different sizes and shapes, they cease to be comics and become merely collections of pictures of no particular value. When, in addition, artists put the speeches outside the panels, they destroy the illusion that the characters are talking, and when the sound effects are eliminated as too “cartoony” the great appeal of comics is lost completely.

Some variation of the sizes and shapes of the panels of a comic is allowable, of course. Not every panel must contain speech balloons and sound effects, either; some sequences can be in pantomime and some panels can consist entirely of copy or sound effects. But comics in which every panel is a different size and shape and in which the copy has been separated from the pictures are not good comics, because their creators have forgotten—or perhaps didn’t know—that what distinguishes comic art from all other forms of art is its presentation of a series of pictures in sequence, each panel being only a small portion of the complete

Stoned Again!

Unlike what C.C. Beck must’ve thought about it, Captain Marvel seems quite pleased with the sculptor’s work in “Captain Marvel’s Great Stone Face” (Captain Marvel Adventures #33, March 1944; cover art by Beck and Pete Costanza)—a tale in which some highly enthusiastic Captain Marvel Club members (which, at the time this issue was published, tallied over 550,000 real-life card-carrying members!) pushed for the same kind of tribute for their hero that had been given the U.S. Presidents carved in the solid rock of Mt. Rushmore… a sculpture that Beck pronounced the worst piece of art ever created. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

crown. A statue of a human being fifty or a hundred feet tall is a monstrosity, no matter how much people may love such examples as the Statue of Liberty, which is actually a building in the shape of an ancient Greek goddess. The Mount Rushmore carving—four human heads enlarged to the size of small mountains—is perhaps the worst piece of sculpture ever created, especially so because it is too realistic. If it had been made more abstract it might have been better art, because then it would have looked like stone carved to resemble human beings instead of looking like four enormous human heads stuck on the side of a mountain for no apparent reason.

What has all this to do with comics? Plenty. Comic art has its limitations, too, although far too many people are not aware of what they are.

Panel Format The first limitation of comic art is that it consists of a series of pictures presented in sequence in order to show things that cannot

...But In CMA #3 The Tuska Loosa!

This page from Captain Marvel Adventures #3 (Aug.-Sept. 1941)—drawn by a 25-year-old rising star named George Tuska—might’ve been on Beck’s mind when he referred to comic book pages that feature different-size and -shaped panels disrupting the very thing which distinguishes comic art uniquely from all other art forms: presenting a series of sequential pictures, with each panel as a small embodiment of the complete subject. Scripter unknown. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

“The Limitations Of Comics” By C.C. Beck

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Insignificance The third limitation of comics is that they are only a small, not very important form of art. They are printed on cheap paper, not carved of granite or cast in gold or platinum. They are intended to be looked at for a brief moment, then thrown away after a smile, a chuckle, or perhaps a snort of derision. Those who regard comics as anything more than light entertainment are deluding themselves.

Comics are not suitable for teaching morals, religion, or how to build birdhouses. They are not suitable in advertisements unless they are drawn by master cartoonists who know the limits of the art. Advertising comics drawn by bad cartoonists are everywhere and are disgusting—as disgusting as political cartoons drawn by bad cartoonists who, instead of making readers laugh at the foolishness of politicians, try to make them cry, vomit, or cut their own throats in despair.

Imp-provisation This particular artist is having a tough time completing his piece in writer William Woolfolk’s mirthful mind-bender “Captain Marvel and the Surrealist Imp” (CMA #84, May 1948). C.C. Beck, who illustrated the playful story, never considered comics as anything more than light entertainment… an expendable art form to be briefly enjoyed before being tossed out. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

subject.

Timing When comic artists put too much or too little into their panels, they violate the second rule of comic production, which is that only as much time will be spent in looking at each panel as will be used in reading the copy. If there is no copy the reader will go on to the next panel or to wherever some copy again appears. Long sequences of pantomime, which some people regard as wonderful chances for an artist to show his mastery of the medium, are not effective at all in comics. The reader feels about as entertained as he would be if the sound went out when he was watching a TV show.

Packing a panel with too much material is also bad; the reader won’t stop to figure it all out. Expanding a panel to enormous size and filling it with hundreds of fighting, leaping, flying figures is as silly as carving a huge battle scene on the side of a mountain would be. Mount Rushmore is bad enough with only four presidents on it; how hideous would it be if all the presidents and all their assistants and followers were shown, too, in a huge battle scene? One Statue of Liberty is enough; putting up fifty more all around the New York harbor would be ridiculous.

Ad Hominem C.C. Beck—who had also drawn comic strip-style advertisements for Tootsie Rolls (“Capt. Tootsie”) and for strongman Joey Bonomo’s “Mini-Gyms” during the Golden Age—illustrated this 1946 Fawcett Publications house ad with Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny peddling subscriptions to Mechanix Illustrated magazine. Beck believed that comics were inapt for advertising usage unless handled by “master cartoonists” aware of the art form’s boundaries. Beck also contended that, when characters in comics turn and talk directly to the reader to push a product, the intrinsic value of the medium is ultimately destroyed.

[Shazam heroes TM & © DC Comics.]

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or harangue their readers, they lose all credibility.

In the old Captain Marvel stories Billy Batson was a radio and TV announcer. He could turn to the audience and talk to it, as could other characters who read from their diaries or who frankly admitted that they were storytellers. Captain Marvel, however, could not step out of a story and launch into a sales pitch without appearing uncomfortable and ill at ease, and I am sure the readers felt the same way. Nevertheless, publishers then and now insist on using their comic characters in this way, not realizing that they are destroying them out of context and making them appear silly and unbelievable.

Subject Matter The fifth limitation of comics is that they cannot deal with large, world-shaking matters which have no easy solutions. Murder, war, disease, and starvation are subjects that people have been arguing about for hundreds of years without coming to any conclusions about their causes or cures. Putting stories about juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, rape, abortion, or mental retardation into comic stories trivializes these subjects.

“We’re A Little Late, Folks, So G’Night!”

Without fail, boy broadcaster Billy Batson was in the studio and over the airwaves to wrap up “The Return of the Trolls” tale in Whiz Comics #37 (Nov. 1942)—written and illustrated by A/E-FCA’s late friend and colleague, Marc Swayze. In his “Limitations” essay, C.C. Beck points out that, since Billy was a radio (and later TV) announcer, he could turn towards the comics readers and talk to them… but Captain Marvel couldn’t get away with doing that without losing all credibility. [Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

Imaginative Quality Cartoon characters exist only in the imagination and should stay there. Making three-dimensional statues of them, or dressing live actors in false heads, funny gloves, and ridiculous shoes and making them sing, dance, and talk to fans is an awful thing. The only thing worse is having fans dress themselves in comic character costumes and parade around in public. If this activity is confined to comic conventions it does no harm, of course, but when professional actors are put into comic book character costumes and forced to act out comic stories the result is horrible.

The public is not aware that when imaginary characters become real they destroy themselves. Every comic character who was put into a play or a movie using live actors disappeared from the comic pages shortly thereafter, or at best lost his or her popularity from then on. Comic characters put into animated cartoons fared somewhat better, when they were properly handled, but some were destroyed by their film versions. Popeye and Little Orphan Annie were so badly handled in films that they have both disappeared forever from the comic pages.

The worst perversion of comics is making a comic character turn away from the other characters in the strip and talk to the reader.

When the comic character is shown selling products or plugging another comic character or advising the readers to brush their teeth or hang up their clothes, the whole illusion that the reader is watching an entertaining series of events is destroyed. One of the appeals of comic stories is the feeling the reader has that he is watching someone else do things that he, himself, could never do.

When comic characters step out of their stories and begin to lecture

It does this because in comic stories problems are solved in the course of a dozen or fewer pages. The real world is not like this; some real-life problems may have no solutions. Wars cannot be fought and won by single heroes or even by a squad of them, although some comic books are fond of showing us that they can. Criminals cannot be caught and done away with like so many rats or wild animals; accidents can’t be eliminated by the actions of inhumanly powerful costumed heroes; disease and death can’t be conquered by all-wise scientists or creatures from other planets or from other universes.

All through World War II we had comic book heroes involved in what was then called the “war effort.” The government even awarded banners with a big “E for Effort” on them to some comics publishers. Comic book heroes were shown leading our troops into battle, capturing or wiping out whole armies singlehanded, and even tweaking Hitler’s nose or knocking Hirohito’s buck teeth out with a powerful punch.

Such perversions of the fact had, I am sure, a great deal to do with the collapse of comic books after the war ended. They had become so silly and unbelievable that they were disgusting and a new generation of writers and artists decided that the only way to keep comics alive was to change them from the ground up and start all over again.

But they changed the wrong things. Instead of going back to the real comics of 1910 or 1920, which were produced by master cartoonists, they went back to the comics of the early ’40s and changed them.

The first change they made was the elimination of the panel format. The second change was in the timing. Instead of starting in panel one and proceeding step by step to the final panel, they scrambled everything together in a hodgepodge of flashbacks, weird angles, and other nonsequitors of copy and art.

Then they brought ponderous, world-shaking themes or outlandish mythologies into their stories, violating the limitations of significance, imagination, and subject matter which comics can handle. Some comic producers went in the opposite direction and introduced anti-heroes, wimps, and deformed characters instead.

“The Limitations Of Comics” By C.C. Beck

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Sidebar:

Comic Reader’s Imagination: Where The Action Is Excerpted from C.C. Beck’s So, You Want To Be a Comic Book Artist?

A

fact unknown to most people is that there is no action whatsoever in comic drawings. There can’t be, each panel in a comic story being frozen in time just as are the frames of a moving picture.

When a movie is run, twenty-four separate and different pictures are presented to the viewer’s eye each second. Each picture is held still, then the next one is shown. Between frames the screen is blank, but the viewer is not conscious of the moments between pictures. As there is no action in each frame, and nothing is seen between frames, where does the action take place? In the viewer’s mind. Comics stories work the same way. All the action takes place in the reader’s mind.

Thousands of frames go into the making of a movie, but a comic artist has only a few dozen panels, usually, to tell his story in. A comic story can present only the supreme moments of the action.

As many actions take place too swiftly for the human eye to follow, the artist should draw either the moment just before the action starts or the moment just after, when the result of the action can be seen. We have no “instant replay” to explain what happened in comics, but don’t worry, the reader’s imagination will fill in the gap.

and page. If any one of these elements is out of place anywhere in a story, the illusion of on-flowing time will be destroyed.

Only two sets of things move when a kid reads a comic: his eyes, and his fingers as he turns the pages. (And don’t add, “his lips, too,” as most comic readers are smart, and don’t move their lips when reading.) But in the reader’s imagination wonderful things are taking place. Heroes are flying and fighting, villains are being dealt their just desserts, buildings are being blown up, whole worlds are being destroyed or saved.

And all because a comic artist has put a few pictures and some lettering together in a way that makes time, which is quite invisible and really doesn’t exist at all, seem more visible and real than it ever is in the actual world around us!

Never underestimate the power of a young person’s imagination, as some producers of toys and games, movies and TV, and children’s books and comics do. A child’s imagination is active and unspoiled, not yet dulled and inactive like the imaginations of most adults.

Make your pictures properly, put them in sequence so that they mean something, then present them to readers and their minds will create the action.

There are four dimensions: width, depth, height, and time.

An artist works in just two dimensions, being able only to suggest depth and time in flat drawings. Time will seem to appear when a comic story is read if the story is properly drawn. The reader’s eye will move from line to line of the copy, then over the picture from speech to speech to copy block to sound effect if they’re properly placed, then on to the next panel

Noises Off In between the panels of a comic, where does the action take place? In your mind and imagination, that’s where! So, dear FCA reader, how did you imagine the violent impact of Captain Marvel and Mr. Atom’s final crushing blows against each other in the nefarious robot’s debut, “Captain Marvel Meets Mr. Atom” (CMA #78, Nov. 1947)? Script by William Woolfolk; art by Beck. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

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Full Of Sound And Führer Captain Marvel blasted Adolf Hitler with a decent dose of much-needed truth in “Captain Marvel and the Honesty Ray” (CMA #21, Feb. 1943)… and later the World’s Mightiest Mortal averted the entire world’s burning to a crisp in “The Atomic Fire” (CMA #122, July 1951); both stories by Otto Binder; both covers drawn by Beck. The artist surmised that putting real-world people such as Hitler into comic book stories only helped to further trivialize and pervert the art form and that such things contributed to the collapse of comic book industry in the post-World War II years. Beck also didn’t think heavy-handed subject matter or momentous events or issues with no easy solutions belonged in comics. There was definitely no easy solution to extinguishing an apocalyptic atomic blaze, but Captain Marvel still figured it out. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

This trivialized comics even more.

Today when a writer or a critic wants to label anything as completely beneath contempt he has only to call it “as bad as a comic book.”

What a sad fate that is! Comics, a quite legitimate form of art originally, are now regarded as examples of all that is silly, unbelievable, childish, and irrational, all because writers and artists who didn’t know their limitations exceeded them and turned them into monstrosities as bad as buildings in the shape of human beings or monstrous stone heads carved on the sides of mountains.

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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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!

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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!

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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!

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!

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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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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 and Marvel colorist JANNA PARKER, 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

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A TRIBUTE TO A COMICS LEGEND:

THE INCREDIBLE HERB TRIMPE

From running the first photostat machine at Marvel Comics to being the first to illustrate Wolverine, no other member of the Marvel Bullpen had such a varied and remarkable career as HERB TRIMPE. He drew licensed characters based on toys such as G.I. Joe, Godzilla, and Transformers, which went on to become blockbuster movies. He drew runs of super-heroes like Iron Man, Defenders, Captain Britain, and even Marvel’s flagship character Spider-Man. But he’s best known for his definitive eight-year stint drawing the INCREDIBLE HULK. This book, produced with Herb’s full cooperation just prior to his passing, chronicles the life and art of Trimpe through his own voice, as well as the voices of friends and colleagues like STAN LEE, TOM DEFALCO, ROY THOMAS, JOHN ROMITA, BILL PECKMANN, SAL BUSCEMA, JOE SINNOTT, LARRY HAMA, DOUG MOENCH, ELIOT BROWN, LEN WEIN, RON FRENZ, STEVE ENGLEHART, and his son ALEX TRIMPE. Their testimony to his talent and his legacy of artwork leave no wonder why he has been dubbed “The Incredible Herb Trimpe.” By DEWEY CASSELL and AARON SULTAN. NOW SHIPPING! (160-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $34.95 • (Digital Edition) $7.95 • ISBN: 9781605490625

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