Alter Ego #136

Roy Thomas’ Monumental Comics Fanzine

•1965–2015• STILL RASCALLY AFTER ALL THESE (FIFTY) YEARS!

ROY THOMAS

TALKS ABOUT THE NUTTY ’90s AT MIGHTY MARVEL (& ELSEWHERE)!

Characters TM & ©2015 Marvel Characters, Inc. RT cartoon © Marie Severin

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BONUS!

STAN LEE & KEVIN SMITH Join ROY at a 2014 confab!

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In the USA

No.136

November 2015

Vol. 3, No. 136 / November 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

Cover Artists

Marie Severin, Andre Coates, Jackson Guice, Dave Hoover, David Ross, Lou Harrison, & an inker or three

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With Special Thanks to: Sean Howe Heidi Amash Dr. M. Thomas Inge Pedro Angosto Danny Kaminsky Ger Apeldoorn Darin Klein Marcus Antritter David Anthony Bob Bailey Kraft Michael Bair Stan Lee Josh Baker Mark Lewis John Benson Alan Light Claudia Bestor Jean-Marc & Randy William Biggins Lofficier Jackson Bostwick Richard A. Lupoff Eliot R. Brown Dennis Mallonee Rich Buckler Boyd Magers Nick Caputo Doug Martin Comic Vine Mike Mikulovsky (website) Brian K. Morris Tim & JoAnn Clayton Moore Conrad Frank Motler Jon B. Cooke Mark Muller Brian Cremins Hoy Murphy Teresa Davidson Dr. Amy K. Nyberg Diversions of the Barry Pearl Groovy Kind John G. Pierce (website) Jay Piscopo Sean Dulaney Rubén Procopio Jennie-Lynn Falk Mike Rockwitz George Ferriss David & Judi Ross Danny Fingeroth Randy Sargent Shane Foley Vija Shah Stephan Friedt Kevin Smith Janet Gilbert Jason Strangis Mike Gold Dann Thomas Grand Comics Database (website) Clayton Thorp guttertrash (website) Michael Uslan George Hagenauer Dr. Michael J. Vassallo Bill Hall Joss Whedon The Hammer Nina Wiener Museum, Los Angeles, CA Mike Zeck Ron & Jan Harris

Contents Writer/Editorial: 50—Count ’Em—50! . . . . . . . . 2 The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Stan, Roy, & Kevin on 75 Years of Marvel—the book & the phenomenon!

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Roy Thomas talks to Jim Amash about his life as a freelance comics writer, 1986-1999.

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comic Code . . . . . . . 71 Concluding Amy K. Nyberg’s study of comics censorship.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! – Kid Stuff! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Michael T. Gilbert on Roy T.’s 75th birthday—and other “boy wonders”!

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #195 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 P.C. Hamerlinck introduces fans and pros who congratulate Captain Marvel on his 75th!

On Our Cover: Around the turn of 1965-66, Roy Thomas and pal Gary Friedrich moved into an apartment in the heart of bohemian Greenwich Village, across Bleecker Street from the studio of a sculptor who taught a beginning class on Saturdays. Roy took one early-morning lesson and, the following Monday, told his fellow Marvel staffer Marie Severin about it. Before he’d even fully decided to quit the class (which he did), Marie had drawn a devastatingly perceptive office cartoon she titled “Roy’s First Day at Sculpting Class.” Ten years ago, at his pleading, she drew a more detailed version of it, since he had misplaced the original over the decades, and that re-do serves as the ironic centerpiece to a montage featuring published art from some Marvel series that Roy wrote during the 1990s: The Invaders by Dave Hoover—Dr. Strange by Jackson Guice & inker José Marzan—The Secret Defenders by Andre Coates & inker Don Hudson—Avengers West Coast & Ultron by David Ross & inker Tim Dzon—and Thor, a figure from a cover painted by Lou Harrison. Oh, and thanks to Shane Foley for the cover idea—you’ll understand why when you see A/E #139. [Cartoon © Marie Severin; Marvel art TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] Above: Stan Lee (on left) and Roy Thomas are interviewed by Kevin Smith (not seen here, but director/writer of the films Clerks, Mallrats, et al.) onstage at L.A.’s Hammer Museum on December 6, 2014. The official occasion was the publication of Taschen’s gigantic volume 75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen. Kevin seized the opportunity to query Roy, as well as Stan, about their early lives and careers, thereby making a transcription of the entire proceedings perfect for inclusion in this issue timed to celebrate Roy’s 50th year in the comic book industry, dating from late June 1965 (or a few months earlier, if you count two freelance stories RT wrote for Charlton). See pp. 3-28. Projected overhead are images from the mid-1950s revival of Captain America. Thanks to Darin Klein of the Hammer Museum for providing the photo.

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

F

ifty years!

50—Count ’Em—50!

Well, I guess it was inevitable. After all, at the time of Alter Ego #100 in 2011, it had been exactly half a century since Jerry Bails and I had put out the #1 spirit-duplicator issue of A/E as the first super-hero comic book fanzine. Since it was little more than four years after that that I wound up entering the comics field, I suppose that minor landmark, too, was bound to roll around: the 50th anniversary of the year I worked first for Charlton, then briefly for DC, and soon for Stan Lee at resurging Marvel Comics.

Some may not believe it, but I really did have reservations about doing a fourth issue of A/E devoted largely to my own work.

In my defense: in the case of other Silver Age pros, we’re usually discussing their careers only up to the time when I stepped down as Marvel’s editor-in-chief (late 1974). From the outset, A/E has also had a mandate to deal with any period of my own career— and that gives it an additional four decades to play around with.

That, rather than any misguided belief that my own work is four times as worthy of coverage as other people’s, is the rationale behind this issue’s interview—which was conducted, I’m happy to say, by longtime A/E interviewer Jim Amash.

Not that it shows (we hope), but the six hours’ or more worth of conversation that commences between pp. 30-69 was, by far, the hardest of the four Roy Thomas interviews to finalize in print.

When we began, Jim’s ancient tape recorder had long since given up the ghost. So veteran transcriber Brian K. Morris generously mailed Jim his own machine, and Jim and I got down to it by phone. But alas, the many hours’ worth of tapes then went lost somewhere between Jim and Brian; the P.O. says they were delivered, but if so, apparently not to Brian’s address. And Jim hadn’t had the facilities to make backup copies. Thankfully, at least Brian’s borrowed tape recorder, sent back another day, made it safely home.

Second attempt: Jim’s good friend and erstwhile comic book letterer Teresa Davidson set up a system to record our phone conversation directly onto the hard drive of Jim’s PC, so it could be transmitted electronically rather than via mail… and we did the whole thing over again, probably another six hours or more, although, naturally, the actual back-and-forth talk inevitably varied. But then, due to some minor glitch, those hours’ worth of talk somehow didn’t record!

Jim, however, persevered, and we went through the whole process a third time—which, fortunately, proved the charm.

Then Brian himself, who’d originally begged off transcribing this interview, took pity on us because of our looming deadline and stepped in to handle this one, as well—with its middle third being transcribed by his associate, Sean Dulaney. A heartfelt thanks to both guys for coming through in a pinch!

As it turned out, however, the interview was quite long—and I’d already scheduled for this issue a transcript of the panel, held in Los Angeles last December, in which Kevin Smith interviewed Stan Lee and myself about Taschen Publishing’s massive book 75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen. That panel had dealt in part with my 50 years in comics (which, after all, was the ostensible reason for spotlighting me in this issue)—so the second half of Jim’s interview, which deals with Marvel’s Conan and abortive Excelsior titles and with other companies such as Topps, Cross Plains, DC, et al., has been unavoidably delayed till A/E #139, six short months from now. That issue will also feature the piece originally scheduled for this issue about the history of Dr. Strange’s habitation at 177A Bleecker Street in Manhattan.

Bestest,

P.S.: Special thanks to Michael T. Gilbert (see p. 79) for wishing me a happy 75th birthday this November 22nd. Where does the time go?

# COMING IN DECEMBER 137 JIM SHOOTER’S FIRST DECADE IN COMICS! • Time-bending cover by CURT SWAN & GEORGE KLEIN!

• JIM SHOOTER talks to RICHARD ARNDT about being a teenage comic book writer in 1965—and becoming a major force on DC’s Superman and The Legion of SuperHeroes! And yes, they discuss his days at Marvel, as well! Featuring art & artifacts related to CURT SWAN • NEAL ADAMS • MORT WEISINGER • CARMINE INFANTINO • JOHN ROMITA • STAN LEE • WIN MORTIMER • JIM MOONEY • GEORGE PAPP • E. NELSON BRIDWELL • GEORGE ROUSSOS • SHELDON MOLDOFF, et al.!

• Sourcing AMY KISTE NYBERG’s book Seal of Approval—and more of ALBERTO BECATTINI on amazing artist DAN BARRY, if there’s room!

[Art TM & © DC Comics.]

• Also: A special tribute to HERB TRIMPE—FCA presents Fawcett’s heroes in UK comics—MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s Comic Crypt—BILL SCHELLY showcases a panel on the “survivors” of the very first comic convention—& MORE!

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! SAVE $4 PER ISSUE!

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The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

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STAN LEE, ROY THOMAS, & KEVIN SMITH On 75 Years Of Marvel—The Book & The Phenomenon Dec. 6, 2014, Panel at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA — Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

Part I – By The Book Introduction by Roy Thomas

S

ometime around the middle or so of 2013, I was asked by Taschen Publishing editors Josh Baker and Nina Wiener to temporarily halt my writing of what is to be a humongous book about the career of Marvel Comics editor, writer, and publisher Stan Lee, which I’d begun a few months earlier—and to switch over to writing an, if anything, even more humongous volume about the first “75 years of Marvel”—from 1939 to 2014.

By contract with Marvel, this new tome had to be on sale in time for Christmas of ’14, giving it scheduling priority over the Lee book.

Heavy Promotion For Heavy Reading (Left:) Barry Pearl sent us this composition he calls “Heavy Reading”: the cover of the 17-pound Taschen Publishing book 75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen (with its Jack Kirby/George Roussos image from the cover of The Avengers #4, March 1964) being hefted Atlas-like by the Hulk, as rendered by Jim Steranko for the cover of The Incredible Hulk [“King-Size Special”] #1, dated Oct. 1968. The latter was actually the first Hulk annual. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] (Above:) The Taschen book’s bylined author, longtime Marvel writer and editor Roy Thomas (at center of photo), and film director Kevin Smith (on right) are clearly enthralled as Marvel writer/editor/publisher/super-legend Stan Lee (on left) relates an anecdote—or maybe he was actually singing “The Merry Marvel Marching Society Song,” as he kept threatening to do during the panel, and somehow the Hammer Museum folks neglected to record it! Thanks to Darin Klein, public programs associate of the museum, for sending all photos from the panel and from the book-signing afterward that appear with this transcription. And thanks to Stan Lee, Kevin Smith, and Claudia Bestor for their kind permission to print this transcription.

I happily agreed to author the first half of the book, which I suggested deal with events through late 1974, when I stepped down after two-plus years as Marvel’s editor-in-chief in favor of a writer/editor contract… but I requested that someone else pick up the story from that point, since I hadn’t followed current comics closely since then. Taschen reluctantly agreed, and I set to work, with a January 1, 2014, deadline for my portion of the work. A talented journalist on the West Coast was swiftly contracted to do the latter half of the book.

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Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

Come January 2, the first workday of the new year, I duly delivered my text via e-mail and prepared to return to the Lee book, among my other pursuits. A couple of weeks later, however, the two Taschen editors got back to me and said that, although he’d delivered a fine outline, my prospective co-author, due to illness, had been unable to scribe his half of the main text. So Josh and Nina asked me to write the 1974-2014 segment of the work, as well. Reluctant to do so, I suggested several other names to them… but, in the end, I was persuaded to agree to finish the book, as long as my colleague Danny Fingeroth (co-editor with me and major producer of the 2011 TwoMorrows study The Stan Lee Universe, and himself a former Marvel writer and editor) was commissioned to help me with research on the 1980s and beyond. That alone would make it possible for me to finish the text by spring, balancing it with work on Alter Ego and other projects; obviously, we would be several months late by the original schedule, while the looming on-sale date (tied to Yuletide sales) never altered by one millisecond.

In addition, several other people were being hired, some at least partly at my recommendation, to assist the editors in assembling the monumental amount of artwork and photos—as well as to write related captions—needed for the book. This included my “It’s Very Fancy On Old Yancy Street, You Know…” longtime comics history colleagues, the self-styled “Yancy Street The self-styled (and who’s gonna argue with ’em?) modern-day Yancy Street Gang at Gang” (in alphabetical order: Nick Caputo, Barry Pearl, and Dr. Taschen’s New York bookstore upon the release of 75 Years of Marvel, for which they Michael J. Vassallo). John Rhett Thomas (no relation) acted as wrote the basic captions, in addition to doing other invaluable research. When the Taschen editors asked Roy for suggestions concerning researchers on the Golden and Marvel contact and fact-checker, besides writing mini-biographies Silver Ages of Timely/Atlas/Marvel, the first three names that came to mind were (left to for the back of the book; and several other skilled artisans worked right): Nick Caputo, Barry Pearl, and Dr. Michael J. Vassallo. Photo courtesy of Barry. on other aspects of it. Josh Baker, a knowledgeable comic book enthusiast whose special project this book was—as had been the While it was not my job either to choose the art and photos or to write equally massive 2010 volume 75 Years of DC Comics—was the book’s the captions related to either, I spent considerable time going over both official editor and guiding light, and deservedly wound up with a titleafter they were assembled, effecting the replacement of a picture here, page “Edited and designed by” credit; the book would be far more his than rewriting a line of copy there. I cast a particular eye on the credits related mine, whatever the authorial byline. Nina Wiener coordinated and to the 1960s/70s comics material, since there’s an ongoing dispute over oversaw the day-to-day aspects of the editing, later ably aided and abetted precisely who did what in some of the stories, particularly in the 1960s.

by Maurene Goo. Although Taschen is a German publishing company, it To me, the only thing that made sense was to give the credits as printed in has major offices in New York and Los Angeles, and Josh and Nina (in the comics themselves (and/or as generally understoond at the time), varying degrees) divide their time between the two coasts. Since we were rather than try to parse exactly what Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, et al., so far behind the eight-ball timewise, there was, alas, no time to finalize contributed to the yarns (besides mind-bending art, of course) at any one an index such as the DC-related volume had had; but otherwise everypoint. Still, in the book’s text, I tried to make it clear that no attempt was thing made it into the book that was supposed to make it into the book— being made to ignore or denigrate the co-plotting work of the artists; it’s including a thorough-going fold-out timeline sheet (primarily by Andy just that the 75 Years of Marvel book wasn’t the place to establish a Lewis) that was inserted in—but not physically attached to—the volume. battleground over creative credits.

Marvel, of course, had overall approval of every word in the book and of the precise images used—but, all in all, things went reasonably smoothly In retrospect, I have to admit, I’m extremely thankful that Josh and between Marvel, Taschen, and Nina cajoled me into writing the entirety of the book’s main text. I myself, and I was pleased (as, probably should have agreed to do it from the get-go, back in 2013. As this apparently, were the former two issue of A/E goes to press, the volume’s sizable index can now be accessed entities) with the mammoth online at www.taschen.com/marvel. tome that went on sale circa November of last year.

While the book was

Josh Baker.

Nina Wiener.

Maurene Goo.

The three editors Roy T. worked with on the big Taschen book. To Josh Baker’s left is the Fred Ray cover of the 2010 Taschen volume 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Myth-Making, written by Paul Levitz and likewise edited/shepherded by Baker. Photos courtesy of Josh and Nina Wiener.

being printed, Taschen made arrangements with me (and Dann, of course) to fly to Los Angeles for the major publicity push, over the first weekend in December. That included several print and TV interviews, a major signing of copies (by Stan Lee and myself) at Taschen’s own bookstore there—and a Saturday,

The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

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…Where Credit Is Due (Above Left:) Beginning with The Amazing Spider-Man #26 (June 1965), Steve Ditko was given splash-page credit for plots as well as artwork, with Stan Lee listed as scripter (but not in his equally important capacity as editor). This issue, on sale in March or April, was the first to formalize the fact that the two men had recently ceased talking to each other about plots (or anything else) because plotting sessions had become contentious. The exact division of labor between them before #26 can’t be definitively delineated, so text-author Thomas felt it best that, prior to that issue, the captions credit Lee as scripter, Ditko as artist—the functions for which each man was doubtless paid. Of course, at Marvel during this era, being a strip’s “artist” included breaking down the story from a synopsis or after a plot conference, and this was emphasized at various points in the main text.

Steve Ditko.

Relaxing, in a 1960s photo sent to us

by Ger Apeldoorn.

(Above right:) Even less clearcut was the division of labor between Stan Lee (originally credited as “writer” or “scripter”) and Jack Kirby (identified as “penciler,” since his work was nearly always inked by others, but a co-plotter virtually from the beginning). However, to accommodate a restive Kirby, Lee began with Fantastic Four #56 (Nov. 1966) to credit them both as undifferentiated co-producers of the material, as per the “Produced by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby” byline therein. The inker was Joe Sinnott. Thanks to Barry Pearl for both scans. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Dec. 6th, afternoon program at L.A.’s Hammer Museum that would feature Stan and myself, moderated by film director (and frequent Stan Lee on-stage interviewer) Kevin Smith.

Naturally, Dann and I had built in a bit of time (though not nearly enough) to spend with L.A. friends; but Friday, Dec. 5, was largely devoted to publicity for the book, including my doing a video interview with Don Kaye for online Blastr (I hope I’ve got that right) and another with the personable and attractive Mandalit del Barco, who plies her trade for National Public Radio. The former was already fairly familiar with the history of comics; and I was duly impressed by the fact that, though not a “comic book person,” Ms. del Barco had clearly read the entire main text

Jack Kirby.

A vintage pic from the Internet, complete with pipe.

of the book in preparation for our hour-long taping. Unfortunately, when the radio piece aired days later over NPR at a respectable four-minute length, both Taschen and I were chagrined that, though the segment featured sound bites by both Stan and myself (from separate interviews), it barely managed to mention the book’s title—and didn’t name the publisher at all, even though the talk had been conducted on a back landing of Taschen’s

Mandalit Del Barco Arts correspondent for National Public Radio West.

Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

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Roy & Dann Thomas in L.A., Dec. 4, 2014. Selfies do strange things to people's heads, don't they?

bookstore! I suspect that some NPR underling (or overling), rather than the amiable Ms. del Barco, was to blame for the unprofessional omissions.

Somewhere over the course of that Friday, I snuck in a chance to speak with Stan and with his partner Gill Champion at the offices of POW Entertainment, in conjunction with the upcoming Lee/Taschen book, and to share with editor Josh what sadly was my only Mexican meal during that L.A. sojourn.

That evening, Stan and I signed Crom-only-knows-how-many copies of 75 Years of Marvel—most if not all of which were purchased for its $200 retail price—for what seemed an unending but orderly line that snaked through the shotgun-style Taschen Bookstore in Beverly Hills. I was well aware that many buyers, especially the younger ones or those who came to Marvel through the past decade or so of blockbuster movies, had little or no idea of what I’d ever done besides write the new book, but I didn’t much mind. I’ve spent so much time in Stan’s ample shadow over the past half-century that I find myself blinded by the glare when I do get a bit of sun… and as far as I’m concerned, that’s basically as it should be.

I’m not falsely modest about such “value added” as I may have given to Marvel over the years, from The Banshee (my first X-Men villain) and Havok through The Vision and Ultron and Yellowjacket to Conan and Red Sonja to Iron Fist to Warlock to Wolverine to the Kree-Skrull War and Star Wars to vampiric Vic Strange and Mephista, daughter of Mephisto… but I’m hardly self-unaware enough to imagine that they begin to rival Stan’s contributions to the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man, The Avengers, The X-Men, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, et al. I’m just always happy to appear anywhere in his company, playing Bucky to his Captain America.

Next day came the program held in the Billy Wilder Theatre at the Hammer Museum at 10899 Wilshire Boulevard. Stan and his associates, as well as Dann and I and a number of other people, milled around backstage for a half hour or so prior to showtime. Unfortunately, Kevin Smith—whom I hadn’t met previously—was delayed, but in the end the program started only ten minutes late.

Meanwhile, backstage, Claudia Bestor, the museum’s director of public programs, asked me to take one of the end chairs when I was called out, and I nodded assent. I assumed Kevin would sit in the middle, as moderator—or else Stan would, because he’s Stan.

And, with that, Ms. Bestor stepped onstage and up to a podium, near which rested a sizable stack of 17pound copies of 75 Years of Marvel….

Give Me A Sign!

(Above:) The long (and seemingly inexhaustible) line at Taschen’s own bookstore in Beverly Hills, as Stan and Roy (in foreground, with backs to us) sign copies of The Book on the evening of Friday, Dec. 5, 2014. Roy was under no illusion that the majority of patrons were there to see him or get his autograph—or even because the new work was on sale there.

(Right:) A sizable contingent of the talented crew that put 75 Years of Marvel together was on hand, at the end of the signing, for a group photo. (L. to r.:) Charlotte Taschen, Jessica Trujillo, Maurene Goo, Roy Thomas, Andy Lewis, Josh Baker, Rhett Thomas (barely seen, alas), Stan Lee, Jess Harold, Nina Wiener, Joey Heller. Thanks to Josh B. for both photos.

The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

Part II The Panel – December 6, 2014 CLAUDIA BESTOR: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Hammer Museum…. I’m Claudia Bestor… Director of Public Programs….

I’m very, very pleased to welcome you to today’s celebration of 75 Years of Marvel Comics….

I’m going to start with an origin story, like so many great comic books. 1939 was a particularly important year in history. The Spanish Civil War ended that year, World War II began, Billie Holliday recorded “Strange Fruit” about lynchings in the South, John Steinbeck published Grapes of Wrath about migrant farm workers in the Depression, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind both had their world premieres, while Al Capone was in prison in Alcatraz, nuclear fission was achieved for the first time, and the Manhattan Project was in its earliest stages. The New York World Fair was going on strong, and the world’s first-ever science-fiction convention was held. And in 1939, at 330 West 42nd Street in New York City, the company we all know as Marvel Comics began.

Seventy-five years ago, Martin Goodman formed the company and hired his wife’s 17-year-old cousin to be his office assistant. That young man was Stan Lee. [audience cheers] Yeah, chalk one up for nepotism! [audience laughs] In the 75 years since then, Marvel created many of the bestknown characters in comic book history, including Spider-Man, Wolverine, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Silver Surfer, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and X-Men, as well as some of the scariest villains like The Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, Kingpin, Magneto, Dr. Doom, and The Red Skull.

Good, Better, Bestor Claudia Bestor, director of public programs at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, at the podium introducing the panel. The museum was originally built to display the collection of businessman Armand Hammer. Note the stacks of copies of Taschen’s titanic tome to Ms. Bestor’s right in the photo, which was provided by her associate, Darin Klein.

To our right, courtesy of Alter Ego and the invaluable Grand Comics Database, are the two most important covers in Marvel’s three-quarters-ofa-century history: Frank R. Paul’s for Marvel Comics #1 (Oct. 1939) and Jack Kirby’s for The Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961), the latter probably inked by George Klein. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Most of Marvel’s fictional characters operate in a single reality known as the Marvel Universe, with locations that mirror real-life cities.

In 1961, Marvel had a huge resurgence, starting with a superhero team, The Fantastic Four. That same year, a young high school teacher in St. Louis, Missouri, named Roy Thomas started a superhero fanzine called Alter-Ego. His editorial letters… led to his recruitment by DC Comics, where he worked for a grand total of eight days before he was poached by Stan Lee to be an editor for Marvel. At Marvel, he helped push forward the modern incarnation of Marvel Comics as we know it today. He’s perhaps best known for writing and editing The Avengers, X-Men, and Conan the Barbarian, and for persuading Marvel to publish Star Wars as a comic book series.

Nine years after Roy Thomas started at Marvel, a baby boy was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, who grew up to be one of the most influential directors of my generation. While working in a convenience store, Kevin Smith managed to write, direct, and star in a feature film called Clerks, made for $24,000, which won major awards at Sundance and Cannes. His subsequent films include Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jersey Girl, Clerks 2, and Red State. His most recent film is Tusk. He’s also a prolific writer and actor, but perhaps most relevant to today’s program, Kevin Smith is a lifelong comic book fan who has written many, many comic books based on characters he created. He also wrote several comic book series for Marvel with the characters Daredevil, Spider-Man, and The Black Cat, as well as “Batman” and “Green Hornet” storylines….

Smith is also the owner of his own comic book store in Red Bank, New Jersey, and he podcasts weekly on SModcast International Internet Radio. So he’s the perfect person to act as the moderator here as we celebrate 75 years of comic book history with the legendary Stan Lee and Roy Thomas…. [At this point, Ms. Bestor gives information related to the signing of copies of 75 Years of Marvel Comics by Stan and Roy directly after the panel ends.] So, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Kevin Smith, who will introduce Stan and Roy. [audience applauds] KEVIN SMITH: Hey, hey, thank you! I’m just going to stand here for a second while we intro and stuff before we get going. There’s an intro, and then another intro. This is a cool event, ladies and gentlemen. I never thought I’d live so long as to be standing in a museum talking about comic books, but that’s the world we live in now. But everybody in this room here, of course, naturally must be a Marvel fan. Maybe there’s a few Distinguished Competitor fans out there, as well. But we’re in this room because we

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Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

little boy—or really a little boy at heart, but who is an adult by the time he got his journey started—who was a big fan, as big a fan as the people in this room, probably.

And the difference is, he took his fandom to the next level and kept going and took it beyond simply like, “I love what they do,” and then added spokes to the great wheel of Marvel. If you’re very lucky, you get to meet the people that you look up to.

And if you’re extremely lucky, they don’t disappoint you.

They’re stellar human beings.

This guy was brought into this industry by somebody he looked up to and we’ve got them both here on the stage tonight.

Hey, Kevin—How ’Bout Makin’ A Movie Called Clerk Kent?

Stan and Roy being introduced by moderator Kevin Smith, in his trademark hockey jersey—his first film, Clerks, established him as an important writer/director of independent movies—juxtaposed with a poster for that 1994 moving picture. Smith, an inveterate comics fan, also hosts the TV series Comic Book Men on AMC (American Movie Classics). While the trio were talking onstage at the Hammer Museum, continually shifting images from the Taschen book were projected onto a screen behind them; this one,

by Alex Schomburg, is from the cover of Marvel Mystery Comics #4 (Feb. 1940). [Poster TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

love these stories, we love the idea of a simple story about the whole world running away from the worst thing that ever happened and a couple people in very colorful costumes running right toward it, man. That’s what always brings us together.

Now, fandom has multiple levels to it. Some people are just happy to read comics and be into them and like, “Oh, it was a great adventure.” I have a friend named Jason Mewes. He is a dude who will constantly talk about comic books, but not aspiratively like, “One day, I want to work in them.” He’s the guy that’s just like, “Who could beat who? The Hawk or The Thing?” [audience chuckles] And you’re like, “What do you mean, ‘The Hawk?’ You mean The Hulk?” He can’t pronounce it right. So that’s a level of fandom that’s absolutely valid. We’ve all been there.

But then there comes a point where you read so many of these stories that you find yourself going, “Well, what about me? What’s the difference between the persons who make these stories and maybe me having ideas for my stories?” And today’s event is—it’s that story. It’s that story of a

So as we sit here and talk about that 75 Years of Marvel, the thick-ass book that you saw that could kill a cat [audience laughs]—and will when I get home—[audience laughs and applauds] remember, remember there was a time—you know, don’t feel bad for me, but when I was young, if you wanted to know information about these characters, these stories, you had to have the comics. This was before the graphic novels or anything like that, but Marvel did publish something called The Handbook to the Marvel Universe, which was one of my favorite books because it didn’t have an adventure in it—it was just an encyclopedia, an overview of every character, their powers, their abilities, some of their adventures. In that spirit, when the Internet was invented and suddenly you could find any piece of information at the tip of your fingers just by tapping—in fact, you could go beyond information to look up—you’re like you can enter “I want to see someone dressed like The Vision having sex with someone dressed like Ultron” and you’ll find it, man. [audience chuckles] So the Internet changed everything.

But this book, the book that we’re talking about today, is the Internet for Marvel in book form. This is the book that I dreamed about as a child, something that massive that would legitimize my passion, something that like that as you told friends like, “No, no, this guy, he’s cool even though he’s wearing a very colorful outfit and carrying a shield. I swear he’s cool.” This book absolutely answers the question for those outside this room because everyone in this room would know this question: are comic books legitimate? Oh my God, f*** yes. And so here we are, talking about them here at the Hammer and we’re going to talk to two people who dug the trench, ladies and gentlemen. Like when we talk about these characters, and now the movies that we see them in, and as fans of the books who watch them become movies and our hearts soar as we see these concepts that were once two-dimensional become three-dimensional, we’re going to be sitting here, talking to two people who put some of those characters into the world.

Can you imagine? Could you imagine sitting down and talking to like Arthur Conan Doyle or… some other author? [laughs along with audience] It’s the only one I could really pull. Isn’t that weird? Today, we’re going to do that. Today, we’re going to sit here and talk to them and first, I want to introduce—and bring them both out, of course—but first, I want to introduce the little boy without whom we don’t have this adventure today. He’s grown up considerably, but that little fan from Missouri who loved comic books enough to get to New York to start working in the comic book industry and go on to create some of this company’s biggest characters, man. Give it up for the absolute legend, the

The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

9

original comics fanboy, Roy Thomas. [audience applauds] ROY THOMAS: [to Smith, indicating audience] And they said I wouldn’t draw, right?

[Smith whispers to Thomas to take the center seat; Thomas obliges, figuring the seating arrangements are ultimately the moderator’s domain] SMITH: This is the man you have to thank when we’re all sitting there at two minutes before midnight, or whenever they open Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ultron’s baby daddy right there. [audience cheers] Now, the baby daddy of almost everybody else is right backstage, man, and you could say a Hammered! million things about him.

Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and Kevin Smith before a standing-room-only crowd at the Hammer Museum. Photo courtesy of Darin Klein.

He’s a modern-day Mark Twain, as far as I’m THOMAS: I don’t know. Probably a Superman or a Batman. I was concerned. I could go on, list all his achievements, but I’ll just go right about four years old, my mother says—I saw these colorful things straight to the top: this man was in Mallrats, ladies and gentlemen. on the stands and I said, “I want one.” And she got them for me, [audience laughs] Without him, we don’t have the Marvel Universe we and she read them to me. I thought Batman and Robin were know, man. This was a guy who at one point said, “You know, I’m not Badman and Robber, because they wore these masks. [Smith going to do this anymore.” And his wife said to him, “You know what? chuckles] Eventually— Write the one story you want to write, write it any way you want. And that way, if you quit after this job, it doesn’t matter. At least you did it LEE: Did I hear someone say “Batman and Robin”? the way you wanted to do it.” And that birthed the Marvel Universe.

And yesterday, he was married—he just celebrated an anniversary, THOMAS: Yes. [Lee stands up, starts to leave stage; laughter] Sorry, married to that very same woman—without whom you wouldn’t have the Stan.

Marvel Universe as we know it. He’s been married to her for 67 years LEE: [returns to seat] Watch your language! yesterday. Isn’t that amazing? Give it up for Stan Lee! [audience cheers as Lee takes his seat, and Smith follows] THOMAS: And then I got around to The Human Torch and SubMariner and Captain America. I just loved comic books. And other STAN LEE: Jeez, you guys sure are long-winded. [to audience] people quit [reading them] when they were 10, 12 years old. You Thank you, culture-lovers. [to Thomas and Smith] I thought you know, they discovered girls. I never discovered girls, you know. guys would never stop talking. I was sitting out there, waiting. [audience laughs] I just kept reading them. When super-heroes left THOMAS: Is this when we sign the books? me for a few years, I read Archie, I read Mad, I read Pogo, I’d read anything in comics form, along with other things.

SMITH: This is it. Bring out the table and start signing.

LEE: We sign the books while we’re talking?

SMITH: You got better things to do? Ladies and gentlemen, these cats right here have been friends for a long, long time, but there was a point where they didn’t know each other and I want to take you back to that moment. We’re going to chit-chat for a little while, then never mind me, we’re going to find out what you guys [indicates audience] want to ask.

But just to give you a brief overview history as we talk to them. And then we’re going to turn to you. We know the Marvel story and we’ll get to that. [to Thomas] We’ve got to start with you because that’s where the book emanates from. You’re a kid in Missouri— what’s your first comic book?

SMITH: What was it like at that point when you were reading books?

Like, when I was growing up, at a certain point in high school, you had to abandon comic books because “real men or women don’t read comic books,” and that’s obviously untrue. But in comic books in high school, I did put comic books aside because there was no community for it. It’s one or two people. You had to tap your foot under a bathroom stall to find the comic book people [audience laughs] like in the school and stuff. What was it like when you were a kid? You mentioned like other kids fell away from it. What kept you into it?

LEE: I’ll show you why I’m such a good interview guest. It was awful. [puts microphone down, audience laughs; to Thomas] Sorry, I didn’t mean to step on your line. [audience laughs] I thought he’d

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Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

[Art & Story © DC Comics.]

To Roy, a fan/historian of Golden Age comics, original art such as this from the never-published mid-1940s “Justice Society of America” story “The Will of William Wilson,” written by Gardner Fox, is a Holy Grail. For more on this “Green Lantern” chapter art by Paul Reinman, see TwoMorrows’ four-volume The All-Star Companion and/or A/E #132. Specially colored by Larry Guidry. Great job, Lar! [TM & © DC Comics.]

Last “Will” & Tentacles

The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

never get around to me, that’s all. I can’t hear what he says anyway because [indicates breath guard on his microphone] this muffles your voice. [to Kevin] So when you talk to me, put the mic down. They don’t have to hear. I’ll hear you.

SMITH: Done and done. So awkward, getting chastised by Stan Lee. [audience laughs] THOMAS: Get used to it. It’s happened to me a few times over the years. [audience laughs] SMITH: He does it to me on-set all the time. Okay, so what was it like?

What was it like being a comic book fan?

THOMAS: Well, I didn’t think people in high school knew I was a comics fan, because I wasn’t bringing them to school… but everybody knew about it, evidently. But nobody else that I knew except for one guy read comic books, and I traded a few with him and that’s about it. I read them on my own, but I didn’t think much about them for a few years and I figured they were part of my past, just something I’d look at now and then. And then all of a sudden, when I’m in high school and college, they suddenly bring back—close your ears, Stan, in case you accidentally hear something—they brought back “The Flash” and “Green Lantern,” then they started the “Justice League”….

THOMAS: Well, you know, you see the pictures first, and then you get inside and you read it and you discover this isn’t just another comic. These people are much more real, they don’t like each other.

The Justice League never did that. They never slugged each other and called each other names.

LEE: It was easy for me to write. I didn’t like most people. [audience laughs] THOMAS: So anyway, that’s basically it. But enough about me.

Let’s talk about Stan.

SMITH: So while this is going on, we’ll jump back to you. [indicates Lee] LEE: If you’re talking to me, put the damn mic down. You see, when he talks into the mic, it sounds to me like— [deep-toned gibberish] SMITH: I’ll try this, the other side of my mouth. [moves microphone] THOMAS: I’ll translate.

SMITH: [to Lee] While this is going on, while he’s reading the books [indicates Thomas] that you wrote, man, let’s take one step back. You’ve told this story a zillion times, tell the story—

LEE: [inaudible complaining about plug for DC characters; Smith laughs]

LEE: What did he just say?

THOMAS: Sorry. And then one day, about the time I graduated from college, I walked into this store and I see this Fantastic Four #1. [to Stan] About time, right? [Thomas laughs, audience cheers] Finally. I recognized that Jack Kirby art because he had been doing all those monsters, none of which I’d ever bought. I never bought “Fin Fang Foom” or any of that stuff, but I knew them and I loved this. And then so I thought, “Well, this looks good. Hey, it’s a new version of The Human Torch, and here’s this monster hero, and this guy looks like Plastic Man.”

THOMAS: He wants you to tell the story of how you created The Fantastic Four.

LEE: And didn’t it say, “The World’s Greatest Comic Book” on the cover?

LEE: How much time do we have?

THOMAS: Not on issue one. I think you waited an issue or two to— LEE: It wasn’t on issue one?

THOMAS: You modestly waited a whole two issues before you put that on there. [audience laughs] So I bought two copies because I said, “This might be worth something,” and it was. You know, that was the greatest investment I ever made. When the price went up to 50 cents, I sold that second copy. [audience laughs]

11

SMITH: The Joan story, yes.

LEE: Really?

SMITH: Yeah, yeah.

THOMAS: [to Smith] You can go now.

SMITH: We’ve got enough time for you to tell that story. It’s adorable.

LEE: Well, I had been in the business for a million years and I was ready to quit because I didn’t like the stuff we were publishing. I didn’t like the stories I was writing because my boss, the publisher, said to me, “Stan, just give me a lot of action and a lot of fight scenes, that’s all the readers want.” And I said, “How about concentrating on story?” “Forget the story, put a lot of fight scenes

LEE: I went into the office and said, “Somebody bought two copies. We’re in!” [audience laughs] THOMAS: [to Stan] You can hear better than you say you can. But that was it. From that time on, I recognized right away that, as much as I loved those DC characters—I had a good relationship with Julie Schwartz, the editor of some of the DC comics—but I recognized real quickly that the [Marvel] drawing was more exciting and the writing was so much better and aimed at older fans like me.

LEE: You could have said the writing first and then gotten into the drawing.

…And Justice [League] For All! Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter answer The Flash’s summons in the first-ever “Justice League of America” adventure, in The Brave and the Bold #28 (March 1960). Script by Gardner Fox, pencils by Mike Sekowsky, inks by Bernard Sachs—and all-important editing by Julius Schwartz. Thanks to Bob Bailey for the scan. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

on every page.” Well, I wanted to get paid, so I did it, but after a while, I got sick of it and I said to my wife, “I’m going to quit.” And she said to me the wisest words since the Ten Commandments. She said, “Why don’t you write one the way you want to write it? You’re going to quit anyway, so if he fires you, who cares? But get it out of your system.” And that’s when we did— [points to Smith] what?

SMITH: The Fantastic Four.

LEE: The Fantastic Four. [to audience] See? I wanted to make sure he was paying attention. [audience laughs] This man, he tends to fall asleep when I talk. We have that relationship. So that’s how The Fantastic Four was born. And I didn’t get fired because the book sold well. [to Roy] You mentioned you bought two copies. That helped a lot. And then the publisher came to me, after he saw the sales figures, and he said, “Let’s do a lot more books like that.” So that had us on a roll and we did—I don’t remember the order—The Hulk, The XMen, and all of them, and we were having a lot of fun. Can I go home now? [audience laughs] SMITH: Let me ask you this question….

LEE: When do we sign those things?

SMITH: That will be soon.

LEE: We have like a thousand books to sign, and he’s sitting here like nothing’s going on. [audience laughs] SMITH: I didn’t write the book, so I don’t have to sign.

THOMAS: [to Stan] He’s not going to sign, so he doesn’t care.

When we start signing, he goes home.

SMITH: Yeah, goodbye, everybody.

THOMAS: Or back to the hockey game or wherever. [audience laughs and applauds] SMITH: You sound like my mother. [audience laughs] Let me ask you this, Stan, and this is reaching very far back, but when you came up with a character—this is just a writer question—did you see something in your head, or did you just pass it to the artist and say, “You come up with it”?

LEE: No, I really pretty much just passed it to the artist. I knew what I wanted the characters to be like. I’ll give you one example, with Spider-Man. [Stan pauses, audience applauds] SMITH: Did you see that? He left a gap for the applause. [audience laughs] LEE: Don’t interrupt me until the very last chair has [applauded].

SMITH: My bad. Sorry, sir.

LEE: I wanted Spider-Man/Peter Parker to be just an ordinary, nerdy kind of guy. I didn’t want him to look like a hero, not overly good-looking, women didn’t fall for him. Just a guy, you know, like everybody in this audience. [audience laughs] And me.

Present At The Creation (Above left:) Joan (Mrs. Stan) Lee in 1961, in a photo taken for an English newspaper. Stan’s always said that, if there’s a camera within a mile of her, she’ll manage to come off beautifully in any picture they take—and he’s right. Thanks to Danny Fingeroth & John Morrow.

(Above right:) The first page of the comic book she helped midwife: The Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961), with script by Stan, pencils by Jack Kirby, and inking (probably) by George Klein. We could’ve spotlighted the issue’s cover, but that’s been reprinted even more often—and besides, the story came first! Thanks to Doug Martin. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

SMITH: You see what it feels like?

LEE: Don’t step on my lines.

SMITH: My bad. Sorry, sir.

LEE: So I gave it to Jack Kirby to do and I said, “Jack—” I told him what I told you. “Just an ordinary guy, kind of a shlub.” Well, Jack was so used to doing these great super-heroes. He did a few pages based on the outline I gave him, and Peter Parker looked like Captain America. So I said, “Forget it, Jack.” And I looked around, and there was Steve Ditko, who couldn’t draw a handsome man if his life depended on it. [audience laughs] I’m only kidding, but I thought Steve Ditko’s style would be better. So I gave it to Steve, and he really drew the right kind of a Peter Parker, and that’s how it happened. Jack didn’t care, because he was doing the Fantastic Four and The Hulk and The X-Men, and whatever else he was doing.

So we had Jack on this side, and we had Steve Ditko on this side, and nothing could stop us. [audience applauds] Thank you.

SMITH: [to Roy] Now, in Reader World, you’re about in your twenties

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Go on, Roy. [audience laughs] SMITH: I’m still stuck on the “sex appeal” of “Make Mine Marvel.” It suddenly puts that 67-years-married into perspective.

LEE: I’ll sing you, later, the Marvel Marching Song.

SMITH: Oh, I remember that. [to Thomas] Okay, so you don’t go to work for him [indicates Lee] right away. First, you go to work for DC. THOMAS: As assistant editor of the Superman [titles]—I mean, he was in Superman, he was in Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen…. I think the dog had his own comic book at that time. But after two weeks, I was really miserable. I didn’t like the editor and I was going to stick it out, but I wanted to meet Stan Lee because he was writing the great comics. So of course, being in New York, the same city—I wrote him a letter.

LEE: And I was adorable, too.

THOMAS: And I wanted to take him out for a drink. You know, just say hello because we had exchanged maybe one or two letters.

LEE: You didn’t pay for that drink.

THOMAS: You wouldn’t meet me. You said, “I don’t socialize with peons, [audience laughs]… but we have a little writer’s test. Why don’t you come up?” So I sneak off during my lunch hour one day for Marvel. It’s about a ten-minute walk and I go up, I think, [excitedly] “I’m going to meet Stan Lee and he’s going to give me the writer’s test!” Well, out comes this secretary, Flo Steinberg. She gives me the test. “Where’s Stan?” “Well, he’s busy.” So I go off, so I finish the test overnight, I bring it back the next day… “I’m going to meet Stan Lee! I’m going to turn in the test to him!” This time, the production manager, Sol Brodsky, comes out. “Here it is.

Where’s Stan?” “Oh, he’s busy.” [chuckles] So I go away. I figure well, that’s the end of that.

“Look Out—Here Comes The Spider-Man!” The splash page from the very first “Spider-Man” story, in Amazing Fantasy #15 (Sept. 1962). Written by Stan Lee, drawn by Steve Ditko… but no doubt both men contributed to the story’s plot. Thanks to Bob Bailey, [Page TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

and you go to New York, to work not for Marvel first but to work for DC, is that correct?

THOMAS: Yeah. Assistant editor of the Superman— LEE: You keep using that name. [audience chuckles] Do you have to?

SMITH: It’s just like trying to tell the Bible story without the Devil, Stan. You need to say “DC.” [audience laughs] LEE: I’ve got to tell you something. I’ve got to tell you something about DC, then he’ll answer. We used to be called Atlas and then we changed our name to Marvel because I felt, damn it, we’ve got these great books and we need a name that’s got some sex appeal, Marvel, because you can say things like, “Make Mine Marvel!”

“Welcome to the Marvel Age of Comics,” and so forth. Well, when we changed our name to Marvel, DC was called National and they tended to copy us a little bit. So somebody there decided they would change their name. So I want to give you an example of the thinking that went on here; we called ourselves Marvel because it was a name you could really play with, and they went from National to … [sadly] D…C… [audience laughs] And that was a little story I thought I’d tell you. And I’m kind of sorry I mentioned it.

And [the next morning], I get a call while I’m editing a “Supergirl” story: “Stan would like to have you come see him at lunch hour.” About ten minutes after we met—he may deny this, but it was pretty important to me—he just looked out the window onto Madison Avenue where he usually looked down to see how many girls were walking along the street, you know. [audience laughs] He’d been married a while by this time. And he said, “Well, what do we have to do to hire you away from National?” He still called it National. And I said, “Just offer me a job. I hate it there.”

So that was it.

So I went back to DC and I told my editor, “I quit. I’m going to work for Stan Lee at Marvel. I’m sorry it just didn’t work out, but I’ll work for you as long as you want me to until you find an assistant. I won’t leave you in the lurch.” And the guy, [Mort] Weisinger, said, “Get out! You’re a spy for Stan Lee.” [audience laughs] So I went back, and that weekend I wrote a whole issue of Millie the Model for Stan. So it worked out pretty well for me, and it saved my life, really. I could still be in that cubicle, getting Pavlovian sweats every time the editor rang my bell. Stan was a little better boss than that.

SMITH: Now this is something that’s kind of relevant to this audience, too, and we skipped over it. In order to get the job at DC, which eventually got you to Stan and Marvel, you were writing for Alter Ego at the time… Alter Ego the fan mag?

THOMAS: What we call a “fanzine.” Somebody else started it, but we would write articles. Of course it was mostly about DC, because—[to Stan] I’m sorry, but they had all those characters earlier. And when we started it, there wasn’t a Fantastic Four yet.

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Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

But as soon as Fantastic Four came in, we were broadening to discuss that, too.

SMITH: But essentially, was it like what they do now on the Internet, where a fan will just get into a forum and start talking about, “Oh, I love this issue. This is what I thought about it.”

THOMAS: Well, we always tried to do history, too. Of course, I was so talented, I used to draw cartoons, just wretched cartoons, [laughs] sort of trying to be a Mad magazine kind of thing. And I wrote articles about the old comics and about the new comics. And I never really dealt with Marvel too much, but somehow that’s what came to the attention of the DC people, and I got to New York; and once I got to New York, I got to Marvel. I would never have written Stan a letter, saying, “Can I come to New York and work for you, Stan?” because Stan was writing eight or ten comics a month. I figured, “He probably wants to do that forever.” It turned out he didn’t. Lucky for me.

SMITH: [to Stan] Is there a certain point where you’re like, “I don’t want to write a single—another script, “Let me hire somebody else to do it like I’ve done it?”

You went through an insane, probably one of the most public and insane periods of prolificacy in all of the arts when you think about it.

Think about the amount of characters that you generated. Just sit in a room and go, “Oh, Spider-Man,” and then suddenly, there was a SpiderMan. Did you get to a point where you were like, “I’m done writing.

Somebody else can do this.” Is that what it was?

LEE: No. SMITH: No? What happened? What was it?

LEE: I liked writing them and I liked working with the artists and with Roy and the other editors. And why would I want to stop? I had to stop after a while. They got rid of the publisher, and I became the publisher. And then it was my job to travel around and do whatever publishers do. I can’t even remember. And I never really went back to writing all the books again. I just took the blame for things after that. [Smith chuckles] That was a pretty dull answer, but I don’t really remember what the question was. [audience laughs] SMITH: [laughs] No, it was predicated on a dull question. I’m sorry.

LEE: [to Thomas] What’s he saying? [to the audience] See, I may look like the most perfect physical specimen you have ever seen, [audience laughs] but I just don’t hear well and this guy [indicates Smith] has a voice that’s on a range that’s totally out of the way. [speaks thickly into his microphone] And then he talks into this thing. [to Thomas] Roy, what did he say?

THOMAS: It’s been so long ago, I’ve forgotten.

LEE: All right, it couldn’t have been important.

SMITH: I was talking about how handsome you were and stuff.

LEE: That I heard.

SMITH: You were talking about going out there into the world and stopping writing and being the publisher. That’s where you first came up on my radar. The first Stan Lee I ever knew was not Stan Lee writing scripts for a comic book, it was Stan’s Soapbox. It was your very definitive voice talking about how important and fun all this was beyond the stories.

LEE: Do you know they had all the Soapboxes put into a booklet and you could buy it? I don’t know if it’s still for sale, but if it is, I

From Out Of The Past…

At a Houston comics convention in 2014, Roy was startled to be confronted with something he didn’t recall had ever existed: twice-up size original penciled-and-inked art by himself for the drawing he later re-did for the cover of Alter-Ego [Vol. 1] #1, which was mailed out by editor/founder Jerry G. Bails in March of 1961. Roy thought he’d only drawn that scene on 8½” x 11” typing paper. It’s currently owned by collector Clayton Thorp, seen on left in this photo. True to Roy’s memory that the early A/E “was mostly about DC, because… there wasn’t a Fantastic Four yet,” the drawing shows the Bestest League of America, his parody of the Justice League, in a lampoon of the cover of The Brave and the Bold #29 (May 1960).

don’t know if I get a royalty. If I do, buy a lot of them. [audience laughs] If I don’t, forget it.

THOMAS: I’m sorry to tell you this, Stan… it was for charity.

LEE: It was? Charity?

THOMAS: Yeah. I know charity begins at home, but—[laughs] LEE: It’s very unlike me.

THOMAS: [laughs] I know, I know. [audience laughs] They talked you into it.

LEE: But anyway, I loved doing those Soapboxes because it gave me a chance to talk to the reader. You know, kid around with the reader and get the reader to know who we were. I’d write about Roy, I’d write about John Buscema, I’d write about Sol Brodsky, I’d write about all the guys in the office. And I think the guys enjoyed it, they weren’t anonymous any more. I enjoyed it and the readers seemed to like it and we felt we were like a little family. We were all enjoying the same thing. And the competition—they were just selling stories, right?

SMITH: But that was so ahead of its time, like what you guys were doing in the Soapbox, what you were doing by being like “Hey, this guy.

He’s this guy. Hey, this person, they’re this person.” You were sitting there, creating your own stable of people, doing what the Internet does on

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Irma, and his name was real big [in them] and I loved My Friend Irma, this “dumb blonde” comic based on a radio show.

LEE: And we also did other books besides super-heroes. We had these funny books about pretty girls: Millie the Model, My Friend Irma, Nellie the Nurse. We had romance—I’ve got to tell you a funny thing about the romance books. All the romance stories were supposed to be confessions, that is, they were confessions that the girl was writing: “This is what happened to me.” Now, I Stan-ding Room Only wrote most of them.

Remember we mentioned earlier that it was “SRO” at the Hammer Museum event? Well, actually, the museum folks had thought [audience laughs] And I ahead, so that there was an “overflow room” where people could sit and view the program on closed-circuit TV. Here they was used to putting my watch Stan spin a yarn. Thanks to Darin Klein. name on everything I wrote. But how could I a regular basis, shining the light on people that might not get the chance, put my name on a story that was supposed to be written by a girl, man. Like it was way ahead of its time. [to Thomas] That draws you into confessing something? And to show you how incredibly brilliant I it as well, I would imagine, right? Like just reading—? am, I came up with this idea. I put my name on the front page, but I wrote, “As told to Stan Lee,” as if this girl caught me at an THOMAS: Well, I was an original MMMS member. I bought that emotional moment and confided the whole thing. [audience laughs; record— then to Smith] What was the question?

LEE: That stands for the Merry Marvel Marching Society, I want you to know.

THOMAS: Is that what it was? I forget.

LEE: Yeah. I’ll sing you the song later.

THOMAS: And I bought all the comics and there was a little merchandise. Just about the time I got to New York, they were starting out with the T-shirts. There was a comic convention and I wore one of the first Fantastic Four and X-Men T-shirts on different days….

SMITH: What was that like? That must have been so amazing, somebody walking up and seeing that on your chest. Like now, it’s commonplace.

You can see a shirt for anything.

THOMAS: Yeah, it was just a shame it was so late. It would have been great when I was six years old. The problem is, I was now twenty-four. [audience laughs] And I’m wearing that X-Men T-shirt, you know? That can’t be good.

SMITH: [indicates Lee] He threw around a bunch of famous names. [to Thomas] Were you there at the same time? Like, did you see him interacting with the other legends? Did you ever see him in a room with Jack?

THOMAS: Yes, and I was awed, because I’d known Stan Lee’s name since My Friend Irma comics. He used to write My Friend

Young At Heart—And In The Head Roy at age 24 (but somehow managing to look like a gawky kid) in his brand-new, just released Fantastic Four T-shirt at the 1965 New York comics convention, roughly a month after he arrived in the city (and the comic book biz). He wore the X-Men T-shirt on the other day of the con.

Thanks to Bill Schelly.

THOMAS: I don’t think there was one.

SMITH: Is that the letter—?

LEE: Do you want me to sing the Marvel song yet?

SMITH: We’ll get there, we’ll get there. [to Thomas] Is that the letter you wrote to Stan—a confessional letter, like, “I never believed it would happen to me, but—”? [audience laughs] THOMAS: No, I didn’t.

16

Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

“How To Make Two Lovers Of Friends” (Left:) Splash page from an early-1950s issue of My Friend Irma, which displays Stan Lee’s standard Photostatted byline. Some stories also credited artist Dan De Carlo. The comic was licensed from the radio and early-TV series. Thanks to Dr. Michael J. Vassallo.

(Right:) Roy’s mention of Irma led Stan to remember the romance stories he wrote when Marvel briefly tried a revival of romance comics—as witness this splash page from Our Love Story #2 (Dec. 1969) penciled by John Buscema and inked by John Romita—“as told to Stan Lee.” Thanks to Nick Caputo.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] Oh, and this caption’s heading is from the lyrics of Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart’s classic song “I Could Write a Book.”

SMITH: So the first comic you said you wrote was which one?

LEE: He was like my human wastepaper basket. [audience laughs]

THOMAS: Well, I told a lie. I said Millie the Model, but actually it wasn’t. Millie the Model was then still popular enough she was actually in two comic books, and this one was called Modeling with Millie. [chuckles] So I started off on the B-title and I had to work my way up to Millie the Model.

THOMAS: Pretty close, pretty close. And the proudest moment I finally had, after I was doing books like Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, was—Stan would still be changing stuff a lot – you know, rewriting, and I certainly needed it – and the production manager was going crazy because Stan would wait to do this until it was all inked and lettered. You know, it’s a lot harder to change inked and lettered stuff. You’ve gotta white it all out. The production manager complained so much that one day, finally, Stan said to me, “From now on, Roy, any comic story you write, show me the first page and show me the last page, and if they’re okay, I’ll figure everything else in between is okay.” [audience laughs] And after that time, we had a great relationship for the next thirty or forty years.

SMITH: What was the first super-hero gig you got?

THOMAS: Oh, that was wonderful. Gene Colan had drawn his first “Iron Man” story and Stan gave me this beautiful artwork by this guy. [Gene] was drawing it under the name “Adam Austin” then…. and I wrote this story. I stayed late in the office writing it and I was so proud of it. I brought it in and Stan said, “Well, we’ve got to change this and this.” It ended up it was about 50% him [indicates Stan] and 50% me and it has no credits at all. It says, “Everybody in the office worked on this one.” [audience laughs] I think my name is in there with the secretary and the colorist. And then I was lucky, I got to do dialogue for a couple of Steve Ditko “Doctor Strange” stories. Stan had to get rid of a few things here and there, so he would try me out.

LEE: I can’t really answer that because I couldn’t make out most of it, but I’ll bet it was a very funny story.

THOMAS: It was brilliant. [audience chuckles] SMITH: We know a lot of characters Stan created, but give everyone here a list of characters for Marvel that you’re personally responsible for.

The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

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Ironing Things Out (Left:) Gene Colan’s first-ever “Iron Man” story, from Tales of Suspense #73 (Jan. 1966) is generally listed—correctly, in his view—as Roy Thomas’ first Marvel super-hero scripting credit; but Stan rewrote much of his dialogue and then added the undifferentiated credits seen at its bottom left. Roy always felt the credit should’ve been “Plotted and edited by Stan Lee – written by Roy Thomas”—but in the late summer/early fall of 1965, just a couple of months after he started working for Stan, he didn’t think it politic to push that view. It’s taken him fifty years to work up the nerve!

Pencils by Gene Colan (as “Adam Austin”), inks by Jack Abel (as “Gary Michaels”). As for the other cattle-call credits: Sol Brodsky was Marvel’s production manager, Flo Steinberg the corresponding secretary, and Marie Severin the story’s colorist. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scan.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

THOMAS: Well, of course, somebody else drew all of them, but I tried to avoid creating characters, because I knew I wouldn’t own them. Stan didn’t own Spider-Man; I didn’t own any.

Martin Goodman owned everything. So I knew I was going on board a pirate ship—and I don’t mean Stan, [chuckles] I mean the publisher—when I went to work and I didn’t want to create anything more than I had to in terms of heroes, because I knew I’d get mad sometime if they ever made a movie or a TV show out of them—I knew myself—so I avoided it. But you can’t avoid making up some heroes and a lot of villains. And luckily, one of the ones I made up was Ultron, this robot, and bless their hearts, they’re going to put him in a movie. And then I made up The Vision. He was sort of based on an old Jack Kirby character, but he was also new because Stan came to me one day and he said, “We need a new Avenger.” And I was always trying to bring back Thor and Iron Man. He had kicked them out—even Captain America got kicked out of The Avengers for a couple of years. And I’m left with all these—I got Hawkeye, I got The Black Widow, I got a couple others. I said, “I can’t do this

Marvel’s Avengers: Age Of Thomas & Buscema (Left:) You can imagine how pleased Roy T. was when his and John Buscema’s 1968 co-creation Ultron shared cover space with Captain America and Iron Man (read: Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr.) on the cover of an issue of Entertainment Weekly shortly before Joss Whedon’s blockbuster film opened in the U.S. on May 1, 2015. Thanks to Mike Mukulovsky for sending this and the following art spot. [© the respective copyright holders.]

(Right:) An early artist’s “sketch” of The Vision as slightly re-imagined for the film. The ol’ synthezoid proved a definite hit with movie audiences. At present, he’s set to reappear in Captain America: Civil War—and naturally Roy hopes he’ll also be in the two Avengers: Infinity War pics. The android’s original artist/co-creator, in The Avengers #57 in 1968, was John Buscema. [The Vision TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] Roy says that, if he’d known in the 1960s and ’70s that Marvel was eventually going to retroactively alter its policies re creation of characters, he’d have made up a whole lot more of them!

Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

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An Iron Fist In A Paper Glove (Above:) Roy T. (left) and Kevin Smith onstage. Thanks to Darin Klein.

(Below center:) Roy with a young fan garbed as Iron Fist at a con a year or two back. The boy and photographer are, alas, both unidentified.

(Right:) From Marvel Premiere #15 (May 1974): the splash page of the one and only “Iron Fist” story which co-creators Roy Thomas (writer) and Gil Kane (penciler) ever did: the first one. As Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Roy went to publisher Stan Lee with the name and the concept of a kung-fu superhero comic book the morning after he saw his first “kung fu” movie—and, immediately given Stan’s blessing, offered Gil the assignment as artist.

Kane, enamored of Bill Everett’s 1939 “Amazing-Man” feature for Centaur, suggested adapting certain Shangi-La-style elements of that early series.

Roy, for his part, wanted Iron Fist to have a dragon symbol branded onto his chest, in homage to Joe Simon & Jack Kirby’s great Western hero “Bulls-Eye.” Dick Giordano was tapped to ink. By the second issue, however, Roy and Gil both decided they didn’t have time to continue on the feature, so turned it over to other hands… and it’s endured these past 40-plus years. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scan. [Marvel Characters, Inc.]

book with these guys. They’re no fun.”

LEE: Hey, didn’t you do Conan?

THOMAS: Well, eventually.

LEE: You were like our Conan specialist, weren’t you?

THOMAS: Yeah, well, I had to get something that you didn’t know anything about.

android and I got my Vision.

LEE: I knew nothing.

Now Netflix is going to start a series about a Gil Kane character I invented, at the 1971 New York Comic Art Convention.

Iron Fist. [audience Photo courtesy of Mike Zeck via Pedro cheers] I’m pleased with Angosto. that. I made up Iron Fist with the great artist Gil Kane. [audience applauds] And we designed this wonderful character, and together Gil and I did exactly one “Iron Fist” story. In my whole life, I wrote one “Iron Fist” story—but it was the first one—and I never touched the character again in these last 40 years. [chuckles]

THOMAS: [chuckles] And that way, you’d leave me alone and see—[audience laughs] By that time, you’d taught me so much that I was on my own there.

LEE: I created a Frankenstein.

THOMAS: [laughs] But anyway, all that happened was that Stan came to me one day and he said, “We need a new Avenger.” I said, “Let’s bring back Captain America and Thor and Iron Man.” He says, “No, no, no. Make up a new one.” And I said I was going to bring in the old Vision, who was an old character who lived in another dimension. And Stan said, “Nah, that guy’s no good. I want you to do an android. The next Avenger has to be an android.” He never told me why. Is it to investigate the human condition? I don’t know. I guess he figured I’d know what to do with it. He says, “He’s got to be an android.” “Does he have to have any particular name?” So he said, “No, no, just an android.”

So I made up an android called The Vision. [chuckles] I swiped the name and altered the costume and we’d both won. He got his

SMITH: Really?

THOMAS: That was it.

SMITH: You were just—you dropped the mic after the first one? [audience laughs] It’d be like, “Look at that headpiece. It’ll never get better than this.” Bang.

THOMAS: I’m not going to go into great detail, but it was the

The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

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“I’ll Be Back!”

(Above left:) An action page from Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian #4 (April 1971), as flawlessly delineated by penciler Barry Smith (later Barry Windsor-Smith) and inker Sal Buscema—and scripted by Roy Thomas, who provided Barry with both a copy of Robert E. Howard’s 1933 short story and a typed synopsis. When Stan Lee read the issue and pronounced it fine but “not [his] thing,” or words to that effect, it was in a printed-and-stapled but still-coverless copy called a “make-ready”; these usually reached the offices a couple of weeks ahead of the comic going on sale. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Conan Properties International, LTD.] (Above right:] As early as Conan the Barbarian #6 (June ’71)—even earlier than the “1973 or ‘74” Roy mentions in the panel—Arnold Schwarzengger was featured in a full-page Joe Weider body-building ad that was printed in all the Marvel comics for a two-month period. At that time, Arnold had never heard of Conan—or vice versa. The first movie was still more than a decade away. [© the respective copyright holders.]

equivalent of a one-night stand. [audience laughs]

THOMAS: I wrote a lot.

SMITH: [in a fey voice] That sounds Marvel-ous. [in normal voice] As Stan mentioned, you were, and will always be, the Conan Guy. I mean, Conan existed—who was the guy that created him?

LEE: I couldn’t stand them, but I was not the public. [Smith laughs]

THOMAS: Robert E. Howard, who happily killed himself four years before I was born, so he couldn’t get mad about what I did with his character. His estate just collected the money and they were happy.

LEE: He killed himself? I think it was probably after reading your script. [audience laughs] THOMAS: Probably. If he hadn’t, he probably would have. But it was the readers who told us—Stan and me—[to do a Conan comic].

I’d bought some of the books for the covers by Frank Frazetta, but I never read them.

LEE: No, but I think you absolutely had a lot to making the character popular. You wrote so many Conans and people loved those stories.

Robert E. Howard Creator of Conan the Cimmerian, et al.

THOMAS: Stan always said, “I don’t understand this sword-and-sorcery stuff. If you ever write an issue of Conan you really think is right, one that I should read that’s good, drop it in my inbox.” You know, this was a great, amazing thing— Stan’s going to read a Marvel comic that he didn’t write! So I waited until issue #4, which was “Tower of the Elephant,” my favorite Robert E. Howard story, which I adapted with the brilliant young British artist, Barry Smith, later Barry Windsor-Smith….

And I put it in his inbox, Stan picks it up, he takes it in, he brings it back out a few minutes later, plops it down on my desk, and says, “Well, I guess it’s okay. It’s not my thing.” And that’s the only comment I ever had from Stan [about Conan] until now.

LEE: Well, he didn’t really have a super-power. He was just strong, you know.

THOMAS: He could lift Arnold Schwarzenegger… that was all he

Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

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Love At First Sight—Marvel Style (Above & right center:) Stan may have said onstage, as he has at other times, that he names Spider-Man as his “favorite character” that he cocreated mainly because people expect him to say that—but Roy recalls Marvel production manager Sol Brodsky telling him in 1965 that Stan had a “special feeling” about Spidey from the beginning, even when publisher Martin Goodman cancelled Amazing Fantasy before issue #15 went on sale.

The splash page of The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (March 1963), written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko. And, before the “show,” Spidey and Wolverine showed up outside. One created by Stan (with Steve), one cocreated by Roy (with Len Wein, et al.). Coincidence? We print; you decide.

(Thanks again to Darin Klein.)

(Top right:) If there’s a single page from The Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961) that turned Ben Grimm instantly and forever into Roy’s favorite Marvel hero, it might well be this one. Writer: Stan Lee; artist: Jack Kirby. Thanks to Barry Pearl for both page scans. [(Marvel Characters, Inc.]

could do.

[audience laughs]

LEE: Yeah, and he was Arnold Schwarzenegger. So how much Arnold Schwarzenegger can you take?

LEE: Nobody does. [audience laughs again]

THOMAS: You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger is in those early Conan comics, because the comics had Mr. America-type ads with a photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a young man in 1973 or ‘74. We never dreamed the two of them would ever get together.

THOMAS: I’ll get there.

SMITH: Favorite character over the entire spectrum of your career, the favorite character that you created.

LEE: The most amazing thing about you is that you can remember years like 1973 or ‘4. How do you that? I can’t remember one year from another.

LEE: [without hesitation] Spider-Man. [audience applauds, Lee smiles and shrugs] I say that because I’m expected to say that. Everybody expects to hear that. I love them all, though. It’s like asking a mother, “Who’s your favorite child?” I love them all.

THOMAS: Well, I don’t have as many as you do, you know.

SMITH: [to Thomas] You?

The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

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guys. [indicates the audience] You guys probably have a zillion bazillion questions—and then we’ve got books to sign. These two guys want to get to the books.

THOMAS: I was going to say a zillion books to sign.

SMITH: How are we gonna do it? Hands up… somebody’s got a microphone. They’ll run a microphone up to you. [points] There’s one right there. Go right ahead, we’ll start right here with this gentleman in the corner. How are you, sir?

MALE QUESTIONER: Fine, thank you. Fantastic Four vs. Superman, who wins?

LEE: [without hesitation] Fantastic Four! [audience applauds] THOMAS: [quickly, to Stan] Millie the Model vs. Superman, who wins?

LEE: [without hesitation] Millie the Model! [audience laughs] Superman—the one thing about him that I really admired [was] because it was so realistic, such great writing. Whenever he took off his glasses, people said, “Superman, what happened to Clark Kent?” [audience laughs] SMITH: Isn’t that amazing? Decades later, he’s still kicking them in the balls. [audience laughs] LEE: [to Smith] Hey, tell me something. Does it give you a great feeling of power to be the one to select the person with the questions?

SMITH: [laughs] Yes, yes.

LEE: You know, you sit here, [points to random members of the audience] “Not you. Not You. You over there! You over there!” [audience laughs] SMITH: They’re like my Silver Surfers. I’m like Galactus coming to eat ‘em. [audience laughs]

Look, Up In The Sky—Again!

In 2001, Stan wrote a series of comics for DC—of all companies!—in which he reimagined that firm’s major heroes, working with major artists. Here’s a powerful full-page shot from Just Imagine Stan Lee with John Buscema Creating Superman. [TM & © DC Comics.]

THOMAS: I don’t like the characters I created so much. I like The Thing. [to Lee] The Thing, remember him? The Thing? Big, lumpy, orange, social problems? [audience chuckles] LEE: Oh, I love The Thing. “It’s Clobberin’ Time!” [audience laughs, then applauds]

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, two quick questions. [to Roy] Is it true that Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories are now in the public domain because he’s been dead more than 60 years? And a second question, about the old pulpy Marvel comics like the confessions and the doctors and all the romance stuff—is there a possibility that that may be made into some kind of TV series? Because I like the old Marvel stuff that’s not superhero-oriented.

LEE: I would love it, [to Smith] but is he allowed to ask two questions? What are the rules here? [audience chuckles; Lee turns to questioner] You may have violated some incredible rule here. You may be in big trouble. What was the first question? I forgot.

SMITH: Is Conan public domain now? [to Thomas] Do you know?

THOMAS: Since the day, the moment I saw him, he became my favorite [Marvel] character. And all the other characters that I made up or anybody else ever made up, they’ve never meant anything to me as much as The Thing.

THOMAS: I don’t know about the particular stories, but they would have trademarked the name and I’m not going to help anybody swipe Conan. They’re doing all right with him and just let him go, let him go. Make up your own character. [audience chuckles]

SMITH: The Thing was so successful, they were like, “Do something like The Thing,” and that’s where The Hulk came from as well, correct?

LEE: [to Smith] When are you doing to give me another role like you did in that movie of ours? [audience laughs, then Lee turns to the audience] I try to be nice to him and I invite him on panels— nothing!

THOMAS: [to Lee] It didn’t do quite as well, though, The [Incredible] Hulk, did it? The Hulk, the first time around, it only lasted six issues. Why do you think that is?

LEE: No, it needed the television series to really make it. That TV series was great. [audience applauds] SMITH: I could sit here and do this all night, but let’s open it up to these

SMITH: [laughs] You know what I like about you? That character you created, what was his name again? Oh, yeah, Spider-something. [audience laughs] Stan and I just recently worked together in another movie for the first time in 20 years. We worked together in Mallrats, and then recently, we shot a movie together called Yoga Hosers. He says the

Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

22

to terms so that Spidey is now slated to appear in Captain America: Civil War.]

“Mallrat? Wasn’t He One Of The Sinister Six?” (Left:) A bearded Stan Lee gives life advice to fellow actor Jason Lee in a scene from Kevin Smith’s 1995 film Mallrats.

(Right:) Mallrats theatrical poster, in the guise of a comic book cover. Art by Drew Struzan. [© the respective copyright holders.]

name of the movie, it’s pretty awesome—he’s the one that says it out loud. But having him on-set was an absolute delight, because like usually, you’re on the set, you’re the director and everyone like looks at you like, “Hey, he’s in charge.” Then he [indicates Lee] comes over and goes, “What do you want, idiot?” And you look, [droops head] “All right.” [audience laughs, Lee shakes head and smiles] Next! Here we go. Microphone—grab one of those cats somewhere up there. Grab a lady.

I know there must be ladies out there.

LADY AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, Stan Lee. What is your most memorable cameo in all of the movies?

SMITH: [to Lee] Most memorable cameo in all of the Marvel movies.

LEE: Oh, it’s a very good question, and it’s something that Marvel is very concerned about.

It’s very difficult to get them all together, because these characters are so successful and make so much money that the studios that have the rights to any of them don’t want to let them go. So that’s something that all the lawyers and all the production companies have to work out. Whether they’ll ever get it worked out, I don’t know. But it is a shame that Marvel can’t distribute every one of them, because then we could put them all together and you could put The Avengers, The Guardians of the Galaxy, and every other group together in a movie that would make a hundred trillion dollars. [audience cheers] THOMAS: Isn’t that the next movie—Avengers 3: The Lawyers? [audience laughs] SMITH: [nods and grins] The real winners.

LEE: Oh, by the way, I do have a cameo in a new show coming out, a TV show called Agent Carter. [audience cheers] Watch for the

LEE: Oh, I loved every one of them. Each one seems to be better and more fulfilling than the last. [audience laughs] They have a dramatic quality that just sets them apart. But actually, I cannot tell you. I’m not allowed to tell you my favorite one because it’s the last one I made in the Avengers movie which didn’t come out yet.

But you must see The Avengers because when you see that cameo, it really—it’s Oscar time for that. [audience laughs] It gives me a chance to show my acting chops, you know. So don’t miss The Avengers. [NOTE: Stan is referring, of course, to Avengers: Age of Ultron, which would debut five months later.]

SMITH: I’m so glad somebody’s doing something for that little independent movie. [audience laughs] Gettin’ the word out. Yes, let’s go to this side. [indicates to his left] There, in the two hands with the Captain America. He’s very excited.

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Stan, I just want to say thank you for the Marvel Universe, for the characters that I grew up on, that my children grew up on, and that people have grew up on forever, long after you’re gone.

LEE: You’re welcome. [audience applauds] Thank you.

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: The question I have is, will the Marvel Universe ever be brought back together? I know that Spider-Man belongs to Sony and X-Men to Fox. Is there ever a plan to kind of bring them all back to Marvel, back home?

SMITH: [to Lee] How the characters are spread across a bunch of different movies….

LEE: Get the mic away and talk like a person.

SMITH: My bad. Sony has Spider-Man and Fox has the Fantastic Four—will they ever all come together [in a movie]? [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: This, of course, was before Marvel Studios and Sony came

“Fly Me To The Moon And Let Me Play Among The Stars…”

(Left:) In April 2015, a few months after the book-related trip, Roy and Dann were back in L.A.—this time to attend the world premiere of Avengers: Age of Ultron in Hollywood. Seen above is Roy with the theatre marquee in the distance—since no personal cameras were allowed once you walked that red carpet. Roy was happy, though, to run into fellow attendees Gerry Conway, Len Wein, and Jim Starlin—and to meet Clark Gregg, star of TV’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., who turned out to be a real Starlin fan! So is Marvel Studios, thanks to the likes of Thanos and Drax the Destroyer!

(Right:) Before the movie, Roy took a few moments to seek out a star that’s been added fairly recently to the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.

Some guy named Stan Lee. Photos by Dann Thomas.

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Who’da Thunk It…?

(Above:) That a Marvel movie titled Guardians of the Galaxy would be one of the top-grossing films of 2014? Seen here is a studio shot with Chris Platt, Dave Bautista, Zoe Seldana, and a couple of CGI constructs. [TM & © Marvel Studios or successors in interest.]

(Top right:) Or that one day Roy Thomas and Stan Lee, autographing a bunch of oversize books after the Hammer Museum panel, would sign one for a kid in a Groot costume? Thanks to Darin Klein.

(Right:) The original, giant-economy-size Groot made his debut in Tales to Astonish #13 (Nov. 1960), behind a Jack Kirby cover inked by Steve Ditko. The Kirby-penciled yarn inside was probably plotted by Stan Lee and scripted by Larry Lieber. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

fourth one. I think my cameo is in the fourth episode. They oughta be ashamed of themselves that they didn’t give me three others before that, but what the hell? [audience laughs] But it’s kind of a good cameo.

SMITH: This is the one thing that I can say, though, about the companies, the characters being split up over a bunch of different companies. If Disney and Marvel had Spider-Man, it’d be all top-tier. The fact that they had to go like, “Okay, let’s see what we could do with Guardians of the Galaxy”—suddenly, they create something that’s—like, nobody ever saw that one coming. Like, you expect them to make a great Spider-Man movie, or at least a watchable one, no matter who has the character. [smiles mischievously; audience laughs] But nobody expected anything of The Guardians of the Galaxy except for the brass at Marvel, who were like, “I think this will be the one.” So like I’m actually kind of happy that they are split apart, because you see them trying. Like there’s going to be an Inhumans movie. That never would have happened if they had Spider-Man. [audience applauds] LEE: We were doing that to make you happy because you said it makes you happy. Your happiness is very important to the studios, I want to tell you. [audience laughs] They talk to me about that all the time. I meet an executive at a studio. “Hi, how are you?” “Hi, how are you. Is Kevin happy?” [audience laughs] SMITH: I want you to come tuck me in bed at night [audience laughs] and say those positive things. “Everyone cares what you think.” [to audience] There’s a lady right there… hoodie.

LADY AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. Okay, so obviously, we all go see Marvel movies to see Stan’s cameo, but when will Roy have a cameo? [Smith gives a thumbs-up]

LEE: He’s making a cameo right now. [audience applauds] THOMAS: Yeah, I got in touch through Stan with Joss Whedon who’s, of course, [directing] the Avengers movies, and he says there’s something about me in that movie, but it’s not a cameo. My job in Avengers 2 is to cash the check that they will send me for Ultron and The Vision. [audience chuckles] And I’m quite happy. I got no complaint with Marvel or the movies, don’t worry. But thank you very much, and I’d like to do [a cameo], too. I’m not as big a ham as Stan is, but I’m okay on my own. [audience chuckles; indicates Lee] We could play father and son, you know.

SMITH: [points to member of audience] Way up top, here it comes.

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Stan—unbelievable. Kevin, big fan, you know, since you started. I don’t know how you know about places like New Kensington, Pennsylvania, or Monroeville, but it’s where I’m from, but such a tiny, little place. And Stan, just to say anything to you is a privilege and an honor.

SMITH: We love you. [audience chuckles] MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: I want to know when you, Kevin, and Stan are going to get together in the sense of like your movies are amazing. The comedy, the funny—[Kevin shakes head, audience chuckles] I want to see a super-hero movie that you make. One that you guys—maybe he has a character that he’s in his back pocket, how about that?

SMITH: [waves the idea away] No. No.

THOMAS: Now that’s a very good question. [audience applauds]

LEE: How about that?

LEE: What was that?

SMITH: They want those movies to make money. So they let Stan be involved, and me, they’re like, “You could watch.” [audience laughs] And when it comes to those, I mean believe me, nobody loves a comic book movie more than me. I’m not even being facetious. When I say the fact

THOMAS: When will I have a cameo? When he [indicates Lee] lets me.

24

Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

Joss Whedon.

And The Band Played On… A screen capture of the “Roy Thomas Players” shot in the Joss Whedon-written/directed 2015 film Avengers: Age of Ultron. Whedon sent a framed version of this scene to Roy some months before the film came out, swearing him to secrecy. The image, which stays on the screen probably for less than a second, introduces Captain America’s Scarlet-Witch-induced “dream” sequence. But this establishing shot could easily have wound up on the cutting-room floor, so Roy is grateful to the director for seeing to it that it stayed in. Thanks to Joss and his assistant, Danny Kaminsky, for e-mailing us this scan of the scene. [© Marvel Studios or successors in interest.]

that we’re living in an age where I could see a Marvel movie—the fact that I’m going to be able to see an Ant-Man movie any minute, [audience cheers] the fact that like they’re making Justice League movies, Avengers movies—that makes me excited. I’ve always been that person, even when I went and made my movies, I talked about other people’s movies and characters that I loved. That doesn’t mean you necessarily want to make them. Those are movies that are far too hard. It takes talent to make those. I like to make movies where people turn other people into walruses…. [audience laughs] But no, from now until the end of time, I’ll be waving the flag for every one of these movies, but no interest in making them.

LEE: Well, we’ll have one you can wave a flag for and it’ll be your movie, because I’m going to tell you a secret. I haven’t told this to Kevin yet, but you know his movie Mallrats?

MALE VOICE IN AUDIENCE: Yeah!

LEE: I wanted him to do a sequel—starring me, of course— [audience laughs] and what we’re going to do—I haven’t told him yet—we’re going to give one of the mallrats a super power. So we’re going to work that out and all of a sudden, it’ll be right up there with Spider-Man and so forth. [to Smith] And you better show your gratitude financially. [audience applauds]

SMITH: Man-Thing II, oh my Lord!.... All right, where are we? This side? [indicates to his right] Or are we this side? I see a dude waving his hand right there, Hulk shirt.

DUDE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hey, a big fan of all you three, a big fan. For Mr. Thomas—I love The Invaders and I wanted to know what made you start that in the mid-’70s? You know, was it a risk to kind of do stories that were back in the Timely era, and what passion led you to do it?

THOMAS: For those of you who don’t know—which is 93%, I think I can tell from here—The Invaders was the World War II-time adventures of Captain America, The Human Torch, and SubMariner. And it had to do with my interest in history and my desire to avoid writing anything else except that and Conan. I had loved the Marvel Universe, since before the phrase existed… and I’d helped pull it together with a little thing called “The KreeSkrull War” [audience applauds] which brought a couple of things together—I loved to take the things Stan did with Jack Kirby and Ditko and help with the continuity a little bit. But after nine years

SMITH: The really funny thing is, I betcha like if I was to pitch a Mallrats 2, I would have to bring the most successful member of the cast back—and it would be you. [audience laughs] I’d be like, “This guy’s in movies that make hundreds of millions of dollars.”

LEE: The thing I don’t understand, you’re such a big comic book fan, a super-hero fan, right? And you do movies. When the hell are you going to do a super-hero movie? And I’ll help you with it. [audience cheers] SMITH: Thank you. No. LEE: Only if I star in it, of course.

THOMAS: How about Man-Thing II?

Just One Of Those Man-Things Man-Thing was a 2005 Sci-Fi Channel movie based loosely (way too loosely for Ye Ed’s tastes) on the Marvel monster created in 1971 by Stan, Roy, Gerry Conway, and Gray Morrow. [© the respective copyright holders.]

The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

25

chuckles] SMITH: [gestures to his left] Okay, over on this side…. Two hands in the air.

FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, I just wanted to say it’s a great honor to be speaking with all three of you. My favorite Marvel character is Deadpool, and besides— SMITH: [to Lee] Deadpool.

THOMAS: [to Lee] Deadpool. You never heard of that one.

FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Deadpool! [chuckles] Fine, he might not remember it. But besides the teasers, are there any concrete plans to create a movie that is accurate on his history and storyline coming up?

SMITH: I was going to say “yes” until you said “accurate.” And then … [audience laughs] They’re making a movie right now, from what I understand. I just saw something online like yesterday about Ryan Reynolds. There’s that teaser thing, but they’re actually moving forward with a Deadpool movie. I don’t know if it’s going to be any good… I can’t predict that.

FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: We’ll see.

SMITH: I could barely make a decent movie myself, let alone predict how others will do. [audience laughs; indicates Thomas and Lee] These cats—you guys don’t know anything about Deadpool, right? [Lee and Thomas mutter something inaudible—but basically adding up to “No.”] SMITH: You want to get to the last one, okay.

LEE: We’ve got a hundred books to sign!

“Invaders Become Avengers” The above line, spoken by Ultron in the 2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron, is probably Roy’s favorite line of dialogue from the film—largely because it really makes no sense (why should lower-case “invaders” become lowercase “avengers”?) except perhaps as a Joss Whedon nod-and-wink to the fact that RT’s latter-1970s comics series The Invaders was in many ways a “prequel” to the Avengers series, since Captain America played a prominent part in both.

Roy freely admits it, and not just on this panel: Despite his love of The Avengers, the Marvel mag he’d most like to write again is The Invaders, with its World War II-era setting and Timely’s “big three” heroes as the stars. The above splash page, penciled by Frank Robbins and inked by Vince Colletta, is from Giant-Size Invaders #1 (June 1975), which introduced the series. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

THOMAS: Oh, we’ve got a lot more than that! [audience laughs; Lee buries his face in his hands] SMITH: So we’re looking for the last question. [gestures to audience] You got two hands there, you look very excited, so you sure this is a finale question? You’re feeling it? All right….

THOMAS: Who’s stronger—The Thing or The Hulk? [audience laughs]

or so, when I stepped down as editor-in-chief, I just wanted to do Conan, who was off in his own universe…. And there was a Red Sonja comic… a character I had co-created….

So I said, “What can I do that’ll use some of the popular heroes, but I won’t have to have them meet Spider-Man or the Hulk, and I won’t have to get together with other writers to know what they’re going to do next month?” So I took Captain America and The Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner, but I put them back in World War II when they were created—and that way it was my own little world. It was not the most commercial idea I ever had, but, as much as I loved The Avengers, it’s probably my favorite Marvel super-hero book to write, ever. If anybody would say, “What Marvel book do you want to do and write?” I’d say I’d want to do The Invaders for about the next 30 or 40 years.

SMITH: Oh my Lord, how sweet, man!

THOMAS: We might even get up to 1943, eventually. [audience

Deadpool Hall Wraparound cover of Deadpool #1 (Jan. 1997). Pencils by Ed McGuinness, inks by Nathan Massengill. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

26

Peng! Go The Strings Of My Heart As this issue of A/E was in preparation, Taschen editor Josh Baker informed Roy T. that 75 Years of Marvel was awarded a prestigious German prize, the Peng! (seen above), at the Comicfestival in Munich, Germany, as “Best Secondary Literature”—meaning, material about comics, as opposed to comics material itself.

The award speech by Igor Barkan referred to both “the perfectly edited content” (a sentiment with which Roy totally concurs—take a bow, Josh, Nina, and Maurene!) and singled Roy out for congratulations for the text. Roy was just happy to be a part of such a Marvel-ous project. Only problem is—looking at the two photos received of presenters at the festival (see right), we’re not sure if Barkan is the gent seen at the podium, or the one in Lederhosen in the presentation… so we’re throwing ’em both in. Thanks to Josh for sending the pics. [Both presentation photos © photographer Marcus Antritter.]

The book was nominated for an Eisner, as well.

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Every generation kind of has something that defines the way they see comics. And I won’t use the “DC” word, I promise. I don’t want to offend. [audience laughs] But one thing that is really big right now, for example, is Image. And the reason I bring that up is because you have a lot of creators at Image who also work at Marvel and who alternate back and forth on projects, because they feel that kind of getting their own creative desires out brings the best in their super-hero work. So you have a She-Hulk comic that’s about her really being a lawyer, you have Hawkeye about rooftop barbecues and helping his dog, you know, things like that. And so my question is, what do you think about writers and artists and creators kind of getting that out so they can bring something new and fresh to super-hero books like the ones you work on now?

THOMAS: [to Lee] It’s directed to you.

SMITH: I think to both of you. Do you want to go first, Roy? THOMAS: I have no opinion, because I don’t read those comic books, so I don’t really know. But I wouldn’t be interested in seeing Hawkeye at a barbecue. A little of it, yeah. But when you spend a whole issue standing around doing something like that—I can see why you’d do it, I can see why somebody would like it, but I myself wouldn’t like it. I want to see an explosion… things like that.

LEE: [asks Roy to explain].

THOMAS: Have Hawkeye at a barbecue for a whole issue. I’ll explain it to you later. [Thomas and audience laugh]

SMITH: It’s Avengers 3. [audience laughs again] THOMAS: Ask Stan. He’s working for about ten different companies besides Marvel now. [Smith laughs; to Lee] Do you feel like, after working at other places and on other projects that are not Marvel, then can you bring something fresh if you do something with Marvel?

LEE: Oh, absolutely. We have a company—I’m still with Marvel, but I’m lucky. I’m allowed to do other stuff, so I have a company called POW Entertainment. I’m sure you’ve all figured out by now— THOMAS: Prisoner Of War, right? [audience laughs] LEE: —that it stands for Purveyors Of Wonder. We’re doing a movie now with a Chinese hero called The Annihilator, and we’re doing a movie in India called Chakra. And we have some American things—we’re doing a television series in England that’ll be here soon, and a number of other projects. So we keep busy, and the nice thing is I don’t have to write complete scripts any more. I just have to come up with ideas for television shows or movies. Then we get other people to write them—and I get the credit, of course.

THOMAS: And how is this different from 1965? [audience laughs, applauds] LEE: I think I did a little more writing in ‘65. So anyway, that’s what I’m doing, and it’s a lot of fun and I feel like I’m back in the ‘50s and ’60s, but I’m working now for movies and television, rather than for comics. I can’t really do comics because my eyesight has gotten bad, and I can’t read them anymore, which I really miss.

Even this great book that Roy just finished—what’s the name of it?

The Lee-Thomas-Smith Show

27

Stan Keeps The World Safe Stan, Roy, and Kevin—and two of the non-U.S. super-heroes being developed by Stan’s company POW Entertainment, such as the Chinese Annihilator (top right) and the Indian Chakra the Invincible (right).

Thanks to Darin Klein for the photo. [Art TM & © POW Entertainment.]

The big book!

THOMAS: 75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen.

LEE: Yeah. I look at the pictures, and all that small type drives me crazy, so I’ve got a big magnifying glass at home.

THOMAS: But you already know everything that’s in it, probably.

LEE: Oh, I have no memory. I read these things and, “Wow! Did I do that?” [audience laughs] “Wow! Did Kirby do that? Was Roy really there at that time?” I don’t remember it….

SMITH: The Taschen book, aside from being heavy as hell, is packed with as much information as you could possibly want about the Marvel Universe, the creation of it, the birth of it, the growth of it, where it is today. There was something that I love. [to Thomas] The good writing just pops off the page, and there was something you wrote about back then in the beginning of Timely, how the writers and artists would use different names, pen names, because they were like, “Well, this is fine. I’ll use this name for the comic books, but I’m going to save my name for the great work that’s coming that I’ll do.” And none of them realized the great work that they were doing was right there in the moment. Thank God Stan Lieber became Stan Lee.

tional thing. By that era, I had respect for the comics, but I admit I never thought the general public was going to have [any], because the girls I went out with, the people I met at parties—when they found out I did comic books, they weren’t that terribly thrilled.

LEE: Yeah, but you were younger. By the time you got into comics, they were a little more respectable.

THOMAS: Not much! [chuckles] LEE: When I did comics, I’ll tell you what would happen. I’d be at a party somewhere years ago, and somebody would say, “Hi, what do you do?” And I knew what was coming so I’d say, “I’m a writer,” and I’d start to walk away. [audience laughs] The guy would follow me and say, “What do you write?” Well, I still kept trying.

LEE: That happened to me, yeah. I had a real name years ago, Stanley Martin Lieber. A real legitimate name. And in the beginning, I was so ashamed of writing comics because nobody had any respect for comics, that I changed my name to “Stan Lee” just so that nobody would know. Later on, when the comics got a little more respectable, I was stuck with the name “Stan Lee” and I decided to keep it. What the hell? When I do autographs, it goes faster. [audience laughs] THOMAS: And people like me—when I got in the field, if somebody had tried to tell me, “You can’t have a credit” or “You have to come up with a fake name,” I’d have wanted to go for their throat, because my whole thing was just wanting to be in comics, and I wanted my name on the comics. So it was a genera-

“Excelsior!”

Stan ends the panel by shouting out his trademark slogan. Thanks to Darin Klein.

28

Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, & Kevin Smith On 75 Years Of Marvel

Give Me A Sign!

Stan Lee and Roy Thomas autograph copies of the big Taschen book 75 Years of Marvel at L.A.’s Hammer Museum on Dec. 6, 2014. Photos courtesy of Darin Klein. (Clockwise from top left:) (a) Roy signed first, then Stan. Since Stan tended to sign on the right side of the page, Roy opted for the left. After all, hadn’t Stan said back in the 1960s that Roy was his “good left arm”? (b) Stan and Roy take a moment to share a joke—or something. (c) Ye Editor particularly recalls this spunky lad whose mother toted the book so that he could get the guys to sign it. (d) The Man is definitely “Smilin’ Stan” in this picture. Maybe it’s because the autograph session was over? But, trooper that he was and has always been, he had a kind word and a grin for everybody who passed by.

I’d say, “Oh, it’s adventure stories,” and I’d walk further. The guy would follow me. “For what?” I had to say “comic books.” The guy would turn on his heel and run away like I was contagious. But now, now I go to a party and I hear somebody say, “Excuse me, President Obama—I see Stan Lee just walked in.” [audience cheers] It’s changed a lot. [to Smith] I think we can go now. Thank them for being a great audience.

SMITH: Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, I can’t thank you enough for coming out, seeing two legends sit down, talk about that which we love most in life, our mythology that they created. The book is put out by Taschen… save your pennies and get it. If you’re a comic book fan of any

sort, this is a must-have in your house. You put it on a coffee table—s***, it is a coffee table. [audience laughs] Give it up for two legends without whom you have no childhood—Stan Lee and Roy Thomas! [audience rises in a standing ovation] LEE: [shouts out, with fist in the air] Excelsior! [audience cheers] Special thanks to Jason Strangis for an early transcript of the panel.

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30

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel” ROY THOMAS Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999 Conducted by Jim Amash

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris & Sean Dulaney

I

NTERVIEWEE’S INTRODUCTION: Yes, you read it right: this preface is being written by interview subject Roy Thomas, rather than by ace interviewer Jim Amash. Jim, who mostly retired from doing interviews three years ago (though he remains a consultant and associate editor for Alter Ego), was kind enough to return to active service long enough to do this one, which covers my comics writing from 1986 through 1999. However, a combination of his pro workload (inking for Archie Comics) and various personal considerations kept him from scribbling this intro. Jim has valiantly conducted previous talks with me concerning my career in the latter 1960s (A/E #50), the 1970s (#70), and the 1980s (#100).

This confab is a bit different from the aforementioned trio. The first two dealt almost entirely with my writing and editing for Marvel Comics from 1965 through 1980—the third with the 1980-86 period when I was under contract as a writer for DC Comics and with my post-contract late’80s work for the Superman company. Since ’86, I’ve been a freelancer; so this installment (and I guess that’s what it is—a fourth installment chronicling my checkered life in the industry) deals with my comics writing over roughly a decade and a half, and, this time, for a number of different companies: Marvel, of course (the largest section by far), but also Pacific, First, Dark Horse, Heroic, TSR, Topps, Cross Plains, Millennium, DC, and even Tekno (for which I never actually did anything)—and, since we still accidentally skipped a company or two while we rocketed along under the gun, I’ve tossed in art spots regarding a couple more as they seemed to fit, just to keep the record straight.

And, with all that, the interview was still so long that I’ve had little choice but to save a decade’s worth of Marvel Conan titles and the Excelsior line (a sadly aborted Stan Lee West Coast imprint of the mid’90s) for A/E #139—those, plus the last five companies listed in the preceding paragraph. I was loath to break the conversation into two parts, with several months between them, but it was either that or jettison the December 2014 Hammer Museum panel featuring Stan Lee, movie

“Nine For Mortal Men…” — No, Make That Ten! Roy Thomas (left) and Jim Amash reunited at the 2015 Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC, courtesy of a pic taken by spouse Heidi Amash—beneath covers from each of the main companies for which Roy wrote from the mid-’80s through the ’90s—roughly half of which will be discussed in this issue, with the rest saved for A/E #139. (Clockwise from top left:) Marvel’s Avengers West Coast #90 (Jan. 1993) – art by David Ross & Tim Dzon… Pacific’s Elric #1 (April 1983) – art by P. Craig Russell & Michael T. Gilbert… First’s Alter Ego #4 (Nov. 1986) – art by Ron Harris… Heroic’s Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt #1 (Sept. 1987) – art by Dell Barras… TSR’s Warhawks Comics Module #1 (1990) – art by “KAA”…

Dark Horse’s Cormac Mac Art #1 (1990) – art by John Bolton... Topps’ Cadillacs and Dinosaurs #1 (Feb. 1993) – art by William Stout… Cross Plains’ Red Sonja: A Death in Scarlet (1999) – art by Steve Lightle… DC’s graphic novel Superman: War of the Worlds (1999) – art by Michael Lark… Millennium’s H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu: The Festival, Book One (1993) – art by Kelley Jones. [TM & © respectively by Marvel Characters, Inc.; Michael & Linda Moorcock; Roy & Dann Thomas & Ron Harris; Roy & Dann Thomas; TSR, Inc.; Robert E. Howard Properties, Inc.; Mark Schultz; Red Sonja Properties, Inc.; DC Comics; Millennium Publications.]

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

director Kevin Smith, and myself that precedes this long piece… and that I didn’t want to do.

So, onward: Jim and I began talking not quite about the mid-’80s, let alone the ’90s, but about a closely related anomaly of the year 1983, when I was just signing the second of my three-year contracts with DC Comics, which would cover me through ’86…

Pacific Comics & First Comics JIM AMASH: You did Elric in Epic Illustrated for Marvel, and then you did Elric at Pacific Comics. I was wondering, didn’t that interfere with your exclusive at DC? ROY THOMAS: I had a clause in my contract at DC that allowed me to do a couple of outside things. Elric was probably one of them, because I started that with Pacific in 1983, during my DC contract period. The Conan the Barbarian newspaper strip had been another exception, but Jim Shooter wouldn’t allow me to do that— and, because Crom is just, the strip died a couple of months later.

JA: Who contacted you about doing Elric for Pacific?

THOMAS: I had an agent for comics work—Mike Friedrich, who’d been a comic book writer for over a decade by that point, though he wasn’t doing much writing anymore. He’d founded the Star*Reach Agency, named after the “ground-level” comic he did.

Mike had contacts with [Elric creator] Michael Moorcock and put together the package, with me as the writer; I think he also lined up the artists. Michael T. Gilbert was involved with Elric from near the beginning of the Pacific stint, because Craig Russell wanted some help with the layouts. Michael had done production work on Alter Ego #11 in the first series, back around 1978, the issue Mike Friedrich published. So we had this incestuous little group, and Mike [Friedrich] was kind of the ringmaster. He knew I already had an interest in Elric, since I’d stuck him years earlier into Conan the Barbarian. We made a nice team, Russell and Gilbert and me… then Michael and me after Craig departed.

After the end of the Russell/Gilbert period, Elric bounced around between artists in several-issue series. The Elric series had switched companies, too—from Marvel to Pacific, a new company owned by the Schanes brothers, for a single six-issue series—and then in 1986 to First Comics in Chicago, which had been launched with Mike Gold as co-founder. He and I had known each other for a few years, from when he was associated with the Chicago convention.

31

The only sour note on Elric came a few years later, when they got to the very last series, Stormbringer… the death of Elric. At that stage, Craig Russell aced me out and wrote the thing himself as well as drawing it. He may have done a fine job… I wouldn’t know. I’ve never read it or looked at it, and never will.

JA: On Elric, you had a timeline you followed from the original stories, right?

THOMAS: Yes, they were adapted pretty much in order, except for maybe the story for Epic Illustrated. I thought Moorcock’s early Elric tales were the strongest. In one or two later ones, I feel they relied a bit too much on deus ex machina. Elric would get in a problem and suddenly he’d remember some millennia-old spell. But I’m sure I did stuff like that with Dr. Strange in the late ’60s, too. Not every story can work out perfectly.

JA: Did Moorcock like how you interpreted Elric?

THOMAS: Well, he’s never said much for it or against it—except for understandably disliking the “dunce cap” Barry and I put on Elric’s head in Conan the Barbarian. But that was a mistake made because he was depicted that way on the covers of the first American paperbacks. I’m happy that Titan Comics is now reprinting our Pacific and First adaptations in hardcover. Some of those have never been collected before.

JA: When you did the series for Pacific, I’m assuming you got a page rate.

Did it make any royalties for you?

32

Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Michael Moorcock.

Mike Friedrich.

Author/creator of Elric of Melniboné.

Agent & wrangler. 1982 San Diego Comic-Con photo courtesy of Alan Light.

P. Craig Russell.

Michael T. Gilbert

Layout artist, inker, and colorist.

Pencil artist, circa 1985.

Courtesy of the artist.

Swords And Sorcery (Above:) A relatively rare action (as opposed to occult fantasy) page from Pacific Comics’ Elric #2 (Aug. 1983), by the tag team of Thomas, Russell, & Gilbert—and of course Moorcock! Reproduced from the 2015 Titan Comics hardcover volume Elric of Melniboné, which collects all six issues of the series. [TM & © Michael & Linda Moorcock.]

George Freeman.

Thanks to Comic Vine.

We Are The Champions (Left:) This symbolic page from First’s Elric: Sailor on the Seas of Fate #1 (June 1985) depicts four of Moorcock’s “Eternal Champions,” about whom the English author wrote in interconnected series. Script by Thomas; layouts & rough pencils by Michael T. Gilbert; finished art & coloring

by George Freeman. Titan Comics is currently collecting this 7-issue series and all other Elric series in hardcover. First also published several issues of a Hawkmoon series. Thanks to Stephen Friedt & Steven G. Willis.

[TM © Michael & Linda Moorcock.]

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

33

First's Second, Third, And Fourth The covers of the first issues of First’s next three Elric series, all scripted by Thomas: Elric: Weird of the White Wolf #1 (Oct. 1986); art by Michael T. Gilbert & George Freeman… Elric: The Vanishing Tower #1 (Aug. 1987); art by Jan Duursema… Elric: The Bane of the Black Sword #1 (Aug. 1988); art by Mark Pacella. [TM © Michael & Linda Moorcock.]

THOMAS: I don’t think there was any provision for royalties, but there may have been and the comics just never reached that point.

Jan Duursema at the 1982 San Diego Comic-Con. Courtesy of Alan Light.

JA: How did Russell and Gilbert work together on the Pacific series?

THOMAS: Craig did the layouts, inking, and coloring, with Michael doing the pencils. I sent the artists my plot notes, and they had the Moorcock prose, as well. Later, I wrote the dialogue. When First took over, Craig dropped out and the Canadian artist George Freeman inked Michael.

JA: How come you didn’t do anything else for First Comics?

THOMAS: Well, I also did Alter Ego. That plus Elric was two series, and I guess that was enough. Elric faded out after several series, and Alter Ego was a four-issue series, and perhaps it didn’t sell well enough that they wanted to continue it. Besides writing two series for First, I was still working on Young All-Stars and a couple of other things for DC, I was starting new projects like Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt—so I don’t recall pushing for more work from First. Especially not with Mike [Gold] gone.

JA: Tell us about the Alter Ego mini-series.

THOMAS: When Mike [Gold] suggested I write a series for First, I suggested turning Alter Ego, the title of my old comics-history fanzine, into a super-hero. I thought that’d be a fun thing to do.

After all, I knew I was never going to do the fanzine again! I was a professional writer now! [mutual laughter] That would make a nice name for a super-hero, and it was a way to keep my hand in with that name, even though it was made up by Jerry Bails, not by me.

So I broached that concept to Mike—Mike Gold. I have to keep

using last names because there are so many Mikes—Michael Moorcock, Michael T. Gilbert, Mike Friedrich, Mike Gold—a Legion of Mikes! Anyway, Mike Gold sparked to the idea.

Mark Pacella.

One little publicity thing: A number of fans had sent me money for future Alter Ego fanzine issues years before. I kept those names on index cards for years, dragging them from the East Coast to the West, planning to publish again. So Mike announced in the fan press that anybody who had an issue of the fanzine coming should contact First and they’d get Alter Ego #1, the comic book, free. I think there were a few takers.

I think Mike Friedrich suggested Ron Harris as artist. Ron had drawn and written the recent Marvel mini-series Crash Ryan. Mike Gold had us work up a sample illustration and text. It showed Rob Lindsay changing into Alter Ego as he entered another dimension.

Mike got copies of that distributed in interstate commerce and thus trademark-protected, so we were off to a good start. Rather than doing a straight Billy-Batson-into-Captain-Marvel kind of thing, I wanted to have this teenager turn into a super-hero only when he’s in a dimension that’s basically a comic book world—an alternate universe. The premise was that we see the shadows of that world in our comics, but it really existed as another world.

The first series involved the 1940s heroic comics with their mix of super-heroes, aviation heroes like Airboy, even jungle characters.

I had intended to use the old public-domain characters’ real names, but Mike [Gold] suggested, and it seemed to make a lot of sense, that I make up new names for them. The Black Terror became Holy Terror [chuckles], and Daredevil—we couldn’t have used that name anyway—became Double-Dare, which represented the split nature of his costume, and Airboy became Skyboy. The Heap became Uriah Heap, named after a character in Dickens, Iron Jaw became

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

The Altered Ego

Ron Harris and son Joey—who’s now nearly thirty! Time flies. Photo by Jan Harris.

Copies of this first-ever Ron Harris illustration of Alter Ego (with a costume somewhat different from the final version) and young Rob Lindsay, with text by Roy Thomas, were sold in interstate commerce

by First editor Mike Gold in 1985 to secure copyright, etc. According to a May 28, 1985, letter from Mike Gold Media Services, copies of this poster were sold to comics stores in Illinois, Indiana, and Texas. The “25 years” phrase refers to the fact that it had been nearly 2½ decades since the first fanzine issue of Alter-Ego had been published in March 1961 by Jerry G. Bails, with Roy as official “co-editor.” [TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas and Ron Harris.]

Mike Gold Co-founder of First Comics, Inc.

Rockjaw, and Blue Bolt became Vic Volt. In the end, I liked that better.

changed and all of a sudden super-heroes were very vulnerable.

We called it Alter Ego Fights Crime.

I had long had this idea of a Limbo Legion, based on pages someone did for a 1960s fanzine in which a bunch of Golden Age heroes sat around in Limbo. I don’t recall if they were specifically called the Limbo Legion. It was the world where super-heroes went when they were canceled: Captain Marvel and Black Terror and Skyman sat around playing cards, etc. Later, I’d done something like that in Not Brand Echh. So I made the Limbo Legion the group Alter Ego became the leader of. The Claw from the old Biro “Daredevil” became The Crimson Claw, the main villain. The series was a lot of fun to do, and it’s had its fans over the years.

There’s even been some interest in turning it into a movie or TV show, at various times.

Dann had been very much a part of the original 1986 team in terms of plotting, maybe even a first draft of some of the dialogue.

Ron Harris came up with the Highland Park setting. This time, with Alter Ego Fights Crime, it was just me and Ron. After the ‘80s, Dann decided to curtail her comics-writing experience.

Ron and I did a fifth issue of the Alter Ego comic for Heroic Publishing a couple of years back, carrying the story forward into the postwar era of “true crime” comics... a Crime Does Not Pay world, which Ron pulled off beautifully. But in that one, we had the 1940s super-heroes dying realistically, because their world had

JA: Would you describe your situation at First as a good one, while it lasted?

THOMAS: Yes and no. One of the main problems had to do with Mike Gold—or rather, with the absence of Mike Gold. Before we really got into the first issue of Alter Ego, Mike came to a parting of the ways with his financial partners and left First. He soon surfaced at DC, where a couple of years later, as an editor, he decided Gil Kane and I should do the Ring of the Nibelung series, adapting Wagner—and then he quit that job before it really got started, so I got handed over to another editor. [laughs] In both cases I wound up working with somebody else that I was much less simpatico with.

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35

His successor at First was Rick Oliver. I had no big arguments with Rick; it’s just that Mike and I had a nice way of relating, and then suddenly somebody else waltzes in and he decided he’s going to be the editor.

Alter Ego was totally my concept, so I wasn’t interested in bending to an editor’s will, but I suddenly found I couldn’t control the inking and wasn’t even consulted on the costume or covers.

Having been one myself for years, I can appreciate the difficulty of being an editor with a cantankerous writer. [chuckles] On the other hand, I felt that for years I’d had some success working for and with the most important editor of that era, Stan Lee. So I wasn’t about to knuckle under to editors who weren’t Stan Lee. My new editors wanted to be editors, and I sort of didn’t want them to be, so there was a problem.

JA: That might be a reason why you didn’t do more for First.

THOMAS: I wouldn’t be surprised. I’d have loved to continue Alter Ego, but they never brought the subject up. Actually, Mike Friedrich recently told me something I hadn’t known: that, after Mike Gold left, he [Friedrich] got, as my agent, a frantic phone call from First publisher Rick Obadiah. It seems Obadiah was totally unaware that Mike [Gold] had committed the company to doing Alter Ego. But they went through with it. I just don’t think that, from the start, there was any real enthusiasm there for doing it.

Out On A Limbo (Above:) Both Rockjaw and Rob Lindsay wonder who’s taken over Alter Ego’s super-charged body in First’s Alter Ego #4 (Nov. 1986).

(SPOILER: It was Rob’s grandfather!) Also seen in this full-page panel are Holy Terror, Yankee Doodle, Scarlet Streak, Major Triumph, Cat-Eye, Kitty, and Double-Dare. You figure out what Golden Age heroes these Limbo Legionnaires are based on! Script by Roy Thomas (co-plotted by Dann); pencils by Ron Harris; inks by Rick Burchett. Though Roy objected to being frozen out of the selection of the inker by First, that in no way implies he was unhappy with Rick Burchett’s fine embellishment! [TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas and Ron Harris.]

First And Foremost (Right:) First Comics sent its own 4-page red-&-white newssheet, First Edition, to comics retailers. The front page of this one heralded Alter Ego and two other series. [Alter Ego art TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas and Ron Harris; other art TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

[Alter Ego TM & © Dann & Roy Thomas; art © Ron Harris.]

Collected for the first time as a trade paperback!

Roy Thomas and Ron Harris present their classic 1986 tribute to the Golden Age of Comics!

Full-color - 128 pages - $17.95 ISBN 0-929729-02-1 Can’t find it? Order it from: 7841 Nancy Circle La Palma, CA 90623 Visit Our Website At: www.heroicpub.com

Heroic Publishing JA: Okay, let’s move on to Heroic Publishing.

THOMAS: That was just a little later than Alter Ego, though we probably got started on it very late in ‘86, right after my second three-year contract with DC ended. DC wasn’t interested in renewing it, but they continued to give me work. So, for the first time in the two decades-plus I’d been in comics, I became a freelancer. I didn’t like it much. [Jim chuckles] It allowed me to create a couple of comics properties I could own, but I’d have preferred the contractual security of not having to go around looking for work. Luckily, my agent, Mike Friedrich, was beating the bushes and turned up several interesting projects. I think I already knew [Heroic publisher] Dennis Mallonee, but Mike had a lot to do with putting that deal together, too.

JA: So your Heroic set-up came from Mike and Dennis.

THOMAS: I recall Dann and Mike and Dennis and me getting together at our place in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. I don’t recall if the artist, Dell Barras, was there. I forget if it was Mike or Dennis who lined up Dell. Dennis wanted me to do a series for Heroic—I’d already written two adaptations of Robert E. Howard stories for him, which hadn’t been published—so Dann and I came up with this concept I christened Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt. The Captain Thunder name, of course, came from the original name for Captain Marvel—and Blue Bolt had been the name of a hero created by Joe Simon. I’d already appropriated the look of Blue Bolt—and of his nemesis, the Green Sorceress—for the Alter Ego comic. So I swiped that character at two different places—the name in one place, the look of the character in another.

JA: Waste not, want not.

THOMAS: Right. Well, you know I’ve always had a great interest in old comic book characters. Dann and I worked on Captain Thunder together. It may even have been her initial suggestion, I don’t recall—but the idea was a father and son super-hero team.

The father was a super-hero who’d made a tragic mistake for which he was hounded into hiding for years. The teenage son goes out to find him and ends up becoming a super-hero himself in the same way and place his father had, so it made sense. We had fun with the interaction between the two. That hadn’t been done to death in 1986.

Dan Ostroff, who’s now a producer but then was my agent for movies and TV, said that of all the things he’d read that I’d written, for DC or Marvel or whomever, Captain Thunder was his favorite.

So I told him, “Good. Then you should take on Dann as a client, because it’s as much her writing as mine.” Not that Dann was looking for a film career.

Joe Wizan was the producer of Jeremiah Johnson with Robert Redford and Tough Guys with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster— both good movies. At some time in the ’90s, he offered Dann and me a ten-grand option for Captain Thunder, but there was a catch.

We had to get everybody who ever drew the book, plus Dennis as publisher and Mike Friedrich as agent, to sign a paper saying Dann and I totally owned the feature. And I had nothing to offer them up front in return. I wasn’t going to pay out money for just the chance to get a bit of money. Dell Barras had drawn the first issue, then left for another project. E.R. Cruz, another Filipino artist, took it over and did a nice job with it. Rick Stasi of Kansas City penciled one issue, and two or three other people did at least a cover or inking on the ten or so issues. One artist was even living in the Caribbean and I had to track him down. [mutual chuckling]

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

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Roy & Dann Thomas

E.R. Cruz

Circa 1985, in a photo-shoot arranged by their friend Jennie-Lynn Falk. Dann must be standing in a hole for this one; if anything, she’s a little taller than Roy.

Artist of most issues of CT&BB, beginning with #2.

Dell Barras

Thunder And Lightning

Dennis Mallonee

(Above:) Covers of Heroic’s Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt #2 & 3 (Oct. & Nov. 1987).

Art by E.R. Cruz. [TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas.]

Publisher of Heroic Publishing.

Artist of CT&BB #1.

I wrote them all a letter to the effect, “We can’t give you anything to do this. If you don’t sign this paper, there’ll be no money for anybody, and that’s your right. But if you sign it and there turns out to be money in it, we guarantee that, on a prorated basis, you’ll all be paid something. The same is true if we ever reprint anything and there’s any money in it beyond the publisher just being able to keep it in print for copyright purposes.” And that was true then and it’ll be true as long as I live, or Dann lives.

Roy & Dann Thomas' classic father-and-son superhero team —in a re-presentation of their very first appearance, from 1986! $4.99 U.S.

Cover & interior art

by Dell Barras Fans, order from www.heroicmultiverse.com/heroicpub Retailers, order from www.heroicmultiverse.com/heroicdist [Captain Thunder & Blue Bolt TM & © Dann & Roy Thomas.]

Amazingly, they all signed it, and I felt good that those folks all figured I’d treat them fairly—because any one of them could’ve snafued the whole thing for everybody. So the papers were all in order, and we got the option money. Between Dan Ostroff, my Hollywood agent, and Dennis Mallonee and the various artists, half of the option money went to people besides Dann and me.

Dennis keeps the material in print now, with even some new stories, as he’s done with Alter Ego, and I very much appreciate that.

The problem was that Joe Wizan, bless him, had this notion there was something else there besides the father-and-son generational thing, that there was some secret subtext he just hadn’t decoded yet that would really make a film work. But he never found it, I guess. To me, it was just a comic book series with a good premise. Eventually, the option lapsed, but Wizan gave it a real try.

Those were the three main things I was working on outside of DC at the time: Elric, Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt, and Alter Ego. I had no ownership stake in Elric, of course, but it’s interesting that there’s been other-media interest in both Captain Thunder and Alter Ego. Made me feel that maybe I had something to offer besides continuing characters made up by Marvel and DC, y’know?

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

TSR, Inc. JA: Your involvement with TSR’s comics line came a bit later, right? [NOTE: TSR [Tactical Studies Rules], Inc., was the company that owned the popular Dungeons & Dragons game.]

THOMAS: The latter ‘80s. One of the companies that contacted Mike Friedrich in search of comic talent was TSR, a role-playing game company. They had a new game—I don’t think it was called Warhawks, but it dealt with war set in different time periods—and they wanted to publish a comic book related to it, one that would use time travel to take part in wars across the ages… an excuse to replay different wars.

That appealed to me, because I’ve always been interested in wars, at least from a literary standpoint.

The War of the Tarim in Conan… the Kree-Skrull War… even the Oz-Wonderland War at DC. The Iliad is my favorite work of literature, so I sparked to the idea of the Warhawks comic, even though I had zero interest in role-playing games. By coincidence, I had even done a villain named Warhawk in The Avengers.

“V” Is For “Valhalla” (Above:) Nestor Redondo’s moody splash page for the adaptation he and Roy Thomas did of Robert E. Howard’s short story “Marchers of Valhalla” in the mid1980s. Redondo utilized a full-length photo of REH… and Thomas lifted the text in the first four captions on this page from one of Howard’s numerous letters to his friends and fellow pulp-mag writers. The 37-page adaptation, completed by Redondo’s colleague Rey Garcia when Nestor passed away, was done for Dennis Mallonee’s Fantasy Book but has never been published. See p. 19 for a photo of Robert E. Howard. [Art © Estate of Nestor Redondo; Text © Estate of Robert E. Howard or its successors in interest.]

Nestor Redondo.

Another Secret Origin Captain Thunder relates his origin to his long-estranged son in CT&BB #3 (Nov. 1987). Script by Roy & Dann Thomas; art by E.R. Cruz.

[TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas.]

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39

Go, Greeks! Go, Trojans!

This double-spread from Warhawks #4, penciled by Ron Harris and inked by “Ovi,” showcases the scene of a time-traveling female soldier parachuting into the middle of the Fall of Troy, which traditionally took place in 1184 B.C. (give or take a century or three). Thanks to George Ferriss.

These four issues were followed by a two-issue mini-series titled Warhawks 2050, to which RT also contributed. [TM & © TSR, Inc.]

My deal with TSR was this: I never wanted to be the editor of any of these freelance projects, though I was occasionally offered that job. I was still working for DC… I was even still sort of a story editor for them… and I didn’t want DC to say, “You can’t be an editor here because you’re an editor at another company,” so I eschewed that. I told the new companies, “What I really want is not to be edited much, especially without my consent.” [chuckles] And so at TSR, I was told—through Mike—that although I wouldn’t be the editor, I’d have freedom to do things almost as if I were.

So what I came up with for Warhawks was within the parameters they gave me, and they were happy with it. The head of the comics company was a young guy, Flint Dille, the grandson of the John Dille who’d put the Buck Rogers newspaper strip together in 1929 as one of the first real adventure comic strips. Flint was carrying on that tradition. I remember that, when we met, he kept talking to me, and to his staff, about my Secret Origins #5, the [DC] comic that had integrated Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast into the origin of The Crimson Avenger.

One of the first things they gave me, though, was a sheet on how to write the TSR comics stories, a list that read as if it came from a Saturday-morning animation studio. It required there be a couple of actions, and then what they called a “bump,” then more action, and another “bump,” which I guess was a bigger action or a

turn-around of some kind. I looked at this and said, “I don’t write stories that way. [mutual chuckling] I’ll have action wherever I have action.” I reminded them that I’d written Marvel and DC comics for years, so I wasn’t going to pay slavish attention to some formula that laid out what I had to do every fourth page. So they gave up on that and I just wrote the stories.

On the first issue, I worked with a young artist named Peter Ledger, who’d come over from Australia. He married another comics person, Christie Marx, and unfortunately he died way too young. We were supposed to do a three-issue storyline, with each issue set in a different war and a different era. I figured the wars should occur in the same place, just at different times. When a timehopper changes the period he’s in, he shouldn’t change space, as well. He should stay at the same spot on Earth; he just arrives years earlier or years later. And wars do have a habit of occurring at the same spot over and over again. You know, like the Balkans.

So I set the first three Warhawks stories in the region where the Trojan War had taken place in the mythic time of several thousand years ago, where Turkey meets Europe. I used a title I really liked: “Don’t Take Any Wooden Horses!” Actually, the Trojan War tale was the third locale. The second set-piece was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A.D. The first one—issue #1-2, really—was the Gallipoli campaign of World War I. Each of these took a lot of research for one comic book. Peter left after #1 and another artist

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Watching ’Em Like A Warhawk

Peter Ledger.

(Right:) This Peter Ledger-drawn-andpainted page from what was officially titled Warhawks Comics Module #1 depicts the 2050 Zetan War that led to attempts to alter the outcomes of battles in the First World War, 15th-century Constantinople, and ancient Troy. Script by Roy Thomas. The futuristic backstory was the creation of publisher/editor Flint Dille, whose 1989 “concept notes” for Warhawks were subtitled “Simon Wiesenthal in the Future,” after the famed post-WWII Nazi-hunter. Thanks to Steven G. Willis.

[TM & © TSR, Inc.]

Flint Dille Head of TSR’s comics division, among other things.

You Can’t “Beat” The Comics (Above:) The cover of Warhawks Comics Module #1 (dated only 1990) was depicted on p. 31. Here’s a pin-up by issue #2’s artist, E.R. Cruz, referring to issue #3’s story, “Back to Byzantium.” That one would be penciled by Ron Harris. Script by Roy Thomas. Thanks to Steven G. Willis. [TM & © TSR, Inc.] (Right:) TSR’s “Comic Beat Chart” attempted to totally formulize the stories, but Roy just tossed it into a bottom drawer—where some creature in Roy’s basement office (perhaps an escaped chinchilla?) ate the lower right part, including the words “not know” at the end of one line.

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

41

Better Lance That Dragon!

(Left & right:) Pages drawn by Thomas Yeates (with Mark Johnson) and by Tony DeZuniga from TSR’s 70-plus-page graphic novels Dragonlance, Book One (1987) and Book Three (1988). [TM & © TSR, Inc.]

Thomas Yeates.

Since 2012, the artist of the Prince Valiant Sunday comic strip.

did the last two issues. An artist had to be willing to draw different eras from the research I sent him. Over and above that, Warhawks, much as I personally liked the concept, was an idea that I didn’t think was designed to sell a lot of comic books.

JA: That’s what I thought. I was running a comic book shop at the time, and I just thought it was strange—and unfortunately, I really couldn’t sell them, either. They were all meant to be tie-ins with the game.

I don’t think the customer base was ready for that at the time. Also for TSR, you did that series that DC ended up finishing off, right?

THOMAS: Oh, sure—Dragonlance. That series of five graphic novels was based on a role-playing game obviously inspired by Tolkien, and by Dungeons & Dragons. I did that for TSR with first Tom Yeates, then Tony DeZuniga; later, when DC took it over, Ron Randall and DeZuniga did those two books. I’d worked with Tony and Ron at DC in the ’80s on Arak, Son of Thunder, and earlier with Tony on Savage Sword of Conan at Marvel. Two women wrote the Dragonlance novels I was adapting, and I heard indirectly from one of them that she liked the comic book. The material I wrote was published as graphic novels… the term then was “prestige books.”

There were all kinds of interim terms before “graphic novels” totally took over.

I enjoyed doing those books; but there was one problem with the novels I was adapting. Since they evolved from a roleplaying game, sometimes they seemed like Tony DeZuniga actual role-playing situations we were just turning into stories. The novels often had displays his art in 2011.

Alas, he passed away ten, twelve characters wandering around the following year. together. When you get that many major characters tramping around in a group, it becomes a mob scene, and you can’t really emphasize individuals.

Of course, I should talk about “mob scenes,” after the cast I had in All-Star Squadron! But I didn’t usually have a dozen people going on an adventure together.

When TSR got out of the comic book business, the project was lateraled over to DC, and I finished up the last two books for DC, which wasn’t much of a change. It was all done with me writing notes to tell what pages to adapt and if there was anything special the artist needed to know, that kind of thing.

Dark Horse Comics JA: Now on to Dark Horse. How did the idea of doing Cormac Mac Art and Ironhand of Almuric happen?

THOMAS: They were my idea. Earlier, I’d written and edited three Conan titles very successfully for Marvel. In 1980, before Dann and

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

I came up with Arak, Son of Thunder for DC, I had briefly wanted to ask DC to license the rights to Cormac Mac Art to see if we could make that into a Conan-like property—take another Robert E. Howard character and build it up as a rival to Marvel’s. But Dann convinced me it was better if we made up something new, something we had more of a financial stake in.

Later, when Dark Horse invited me to write something for them, I thought, “Marvel controls Conan and Kull and Solomon Kane, but only Conan ever really amounted to much in comics. Still, I might be able to do something good with other Howard heroes at Dark Horse.” My screenwriter friend Clair Noto, who’d cowritten Red Sonja with me, said, “Maybe all the gold’s been mined out of Howard.”

And I said, “Well, maybe all the gold, but what about silver?” [Jim chuckles] My idea was to strip-mine Howard, hopefully to our mutual benefit.

Mike Richardson Publisher of Dark Horse Comics.

I had a good relationship with Glenn Lord, the literary agent for the Howard estate, with whom I’d made the Marvel deal for Conan in 1970. So I licensed several series from him. For Marvel and Epic Illustrated, I had adapted the novel Almuric, which was Howard’s answer to John Carter of Mars, only with a more Conanesque hero, and I figured it’d be fun to continue that world and its hero, Esau Cairn.

I also thought, “We can finally do Cormac.” Talking with publisher Mike Richardson—another in the Legion of Mikes—a third idea emerged. Somehow, Dark Horse got the rights to adapt “Kings in the Night,” a Bran Mak Morn story in which King Kull is a strong supporting character.

Nothing quite worked out, though. Cormac Mac Art fared the best, because the artist was E.R. Cruz, who’d done some Conan work. I based that several-issue series on the handful of Cormac prose stories, lifting episodes from two or three of them. Those stories took place around 500 A.D. There weren’t all the shining cities and civilizations we have in Conan, and that was a handicap, but I think that series reads pretty well and looks pretty good. The other two didn’t fare as well.

Dark Horse chose the artist for a two-issue adaptation of “Kings of the Night.” Unfortunately, it took that artist six months or more to finish the first issue. They finally had to go to a totally different artist for the second, and that didn’t help any.

I screwed up the Almuric thing. I’d met a young artist in L.A. who did some very nice fantasy and science-fiction drawings, and I

Cormac On The Tarmac (Above center:) The cover of Dark Horse’s Cormac Mac Art #2 (1990—no month), featuring the hero created by Conan author Robert E. Howard, was painted by John Bolton, as were the other three of the series.

(Above:) The black-&-white interiors of all four issues, including this page from #4 (same date), were drawn by E.R. Cruz, with script by Roy T. and co-plotting by Dann Thomas. [Cover © Dark Horse Comics, Inc., or successors in interest; script © Roy Thomas; Cormac Mac Art is a TM of Robert E. Howard Properties, Inc.; art © Estate of E.R. Cruz.]

pushed Dark Horse to hire him. But when he started drawing Ironhand of Almuric, he froze up. Some panels would be good, some not so much. He was talented; he just wasn’t ready to do a comic book yet. After two issues, Dark Horse insisted somebody else ink him, and that worked out even less well.

So, after those three series, due to a combination of faults on both my part and Dark Horse’s, including the fact that Cormac and Ironhand were announced as color comics and then published in black-&-white, they called a halt. Dark Horse had to wait another decade before they could get the rights to Conan himself.

JA: Who was your editor at Dark Horse?

THOMAS: Damned if I remember! But there wasn’t much real friction… well, maybe once in a while, just a little. Also, once again I wasn’t involved in covers, which are usually the most important page of any comic book, so I felt a bit distanced. These were

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

43

Ruling With An Ironhand (Left:) The covers of all four issues of Ironhand of Almuric were painted by Tim Conrad, who’d illustrated the adaptation of REH’s short Almuric novel that Dark Horse had reprinted from Marvel’s Epic Illustrated. This is his cover for issue #1 (Aug. 1991). [© Dark Horse Comics, Inc., or successors in interest; Almuric & Esau Cairn are trademarks of Robert E. Howard Properties, Inc.] (Above:) Double-page spread from Ironhand #1 by artist Mark Winchell. Alas, we have no photos of Winchell. [Script © Roy Thomas; art © Mark Winchell; Almuric & Esau Cairn are trademarks of Robert E. Howard Properties, Inc.]

properties, after all, that I’d brought to them; but their way of doing things and mine just didn’t mesh.

Still, I think that some of that material, especially Cormac Mac Art and my basic idea for continuing Almuric by standing the concept on its head, was fine.

One thing Mike Richardson did that I really appreciated was gathering the four parts of the Almuric adaptation that [artist] Tim Conrad and I had done for Epic Illustrated and turning it into an oversized graphic novel. I wish they’d reprint it.

Somewhere around this time—actually, I think, a bit earlier, before Gerry Conway and I ended our screenwriting partnership in ’85—I, or maybe it was he and I, optioned the film rights to Almuric, and [agent] Dan Ostroff sent copies of the Dark Horse collection to prospective producers. The weird thing is that, even

Tim Conrad. though this was for a live-action film, Dan told me that at least one studio turned the Thanks to wife JoAnn project down because they didn’t think Tim Conrad, and to Stephan Friedt.

Conrad’s women looked attractive enough!

Like the art in the graphic novel—even assuming they were right—had anything to do with the way a movie would’ve looked! All that did was remind me of a truism of both the movie and comics industries: If people want to say no, they’ll come up with a reason to do so, no matter how wacky it is!

Marvel (Super-Heroes) JA: What was Archie [Goodwin, Epic Illustrated’s editor] like to work with?

THOMAS: I didn’t have much contact with him on Epic. Archie and I were roughly the same age; he was a couple of years older.

We respected each other and always got along. We even shot pool once with our wives. But on Epic he mostly served as traffic manager, as far as my contributions were concerned. Almuric had been planned as a four-issue comic book series, which just happened to wind up in Epic instead.

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Comic-Con, at his suggestion. Dann was there because she was going to be my informal cowriter. She was tired of writing actual scripts, and she felt I knew Marvel a lot better than she did, so she just intended to work with me verbally on plots.

Some Of Earth’s (And Marvel’s) Mightiest—1982 (Left, l. to r.:) Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, writer Steve Englehart, and Epic Illustrated editor Archie Goodwin on a panel at the 1982 San Diego Comic-Con. Photo by Alan Light. Jim Shooter will be interviewed in the next A/E about the first decade of his own 50-year comics career.

(Right:) Tom DeFalco, #2 editorial man under Shooter, and his successor as editor-in-chief in 1987.

When the three of us got together, Tom explained to us about the perceptions I mentioned and said Shooter was open to my coming back. And I said, “Great.” I assured Tom I’d be as loyal to Marvel as before. I wasn’t planning to be inside the tent and then badmouthing Shooter or Marvel. I don’t do that kind of thing. If I’m in the tent, I’m in the tent.

The past was what it was, but it didn’t have to intrude unduly on the future.

JA: Then we’ll move to Marvel proper. How did you come to work for Marvel again, considering the way you had left in 1980? [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: See A/E #70.]

THOMAS: I’m not clear about all the details. I’d forgotten totally until recently that, at some stage in the second half of the ’80s— someone sent me a copy of it not long ago—I wrote a two-page letter to [Marvel editor-in-chief] Jim Shooter because I’d decided things weren’t going that well at DC, and Shooter and I had certainly had our differences and each of us had said things the other didn’t like… but I felt maybe enough time had gone by. I’d actually been perfectly willing to work under him at Marvel back in 1980, prior to our final disagreement. I felt I belonged at Marvel, so I wrote this note saying I’d be happy to work for him if it suited his purposes—and left it in his hands. I didn’t apologize for anything I’d said, nor did I ask for any apology from him. Now, what if anything that letter has to do with what follows, I frankly have no idea.

I’m not sure about the time sequence; but at some stage, Tom DeFalco, who was Marvel’s #2 editorial guy, convinced Jim— at least that’s what I understood at the time—that he should hire me back.

Marvel was apparently getting some bad fan press at that time, in the later ‘80s.

Tom was concerned that fans were thinking of Marvel as not having a good relationship with its talent pool. That was the essence of it, as I understood it.

JA: Yeah, that’s because John Byrne left, Frank Miller left, Archie was going to leave later, I think. But it was a real perception, yes.

Gerry Conway From Marvel’s FOOM Magazine #7 (Fall 1974).

THOMAS: So maybe I just lucked into the right time, because I was one who wanted to go the other way… you know, come back to Marvel. Jack Kirby had returned in the mid-’70s, right? Even Ditko came back eventually to do some stories. So I’d give it a try. If it didn’t work out, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Shooter proved amenable. Now, whether Tom talked him into it or whatever, I really don’t know. Anyway, Dann and I met with Tom at a San Diego

Spitfire And Save The Matches!

Todd McFarlane Wonder what ever happened to that guy?

The self-note scribbled on the first page of Spitfire and the Troubleshooters #4 (Jan. 1987) in Roy Thomas’ bound volume of his 1987 Marvel work says he “dialogued pp. 6 ff.” (see p. 6 above). His ex-screenwriting partner Gerry Conway must’ve asked him to help out anonymously. Roy also dialogued “pp. 8 ff.” in #5, but the credit for that one reads “Gerry Conway & Roy Thomas.” Since Roy definitely recalls that Michael Higgins was the first Marvel editor to offer him work in the latter ’80s, chances are that Gerry asked Spitfire editor Bob Harras to credit Roy at some late stage. Roy must’ve done this scripting by late summer of ’86, around the time his DC contract was breathing its last. Pencils by Todd McFarlane, with whom Roy had worked at DC on Infinity, Inc. and All-Star Squadron; inks by Bob McLeod. Thanks to Steven G. Willis. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Michael Higgins at Marvel. Photo courtesy of & © Eliot R. Brown.

Night Has A Thousand Masks (Above:) You could’ve knocked Roy over with one of The Angel’s feathers recently when he realized the writing credit on Marvel’s Nightmask #6 (April 1987), his first issue for editor Mike Higgins, was for “Roy & Dann Thomas.” How’d Roy get the nerve to even try to credit co-plotter Dann on his first new story? Pencils by Javier Saltares, inks by José Marzan. Thanks to Steven G. Willis for the scan.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Javier Saltares Thanks to Comic Vine.

“To Sleep… Perchance To Dream”

Michael Bair Photo courtesy of the artist.

(Right:) A frankly phantasmagorical page penciled by Michael Bair and inked by Pablo Marcos for Nightmask #7 (May 1987).

Script by Roy & Dann Thomas.

Thanks to Steven G. Willis.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

concept, an interesting way for Marvel to go. Maybe it didn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a worthwhile experiment.

One strange thing happened. Jim Shooter had plotted an issue of his signature New Universe series, Star Brand, for John Romita, Jr., to draw. That’s the only time I’ve ever worked with Romita, Jr. He tells me his first job at Marvel was as my liaison on Savage Sword in the ’70s, since I was in California. Now, here he was—the son of one of my favorite artists since the 1950s Captain America—and he was already, you could see, turning into a singular talent. I was given this already-penciled Star Brand issue to dialogue. And I did it. I tried to dialogue it in the style of the Shooter issues I read.

John Romita, Jr. Rising son.

Jim liked it. In fact, not long afterward, I unexpectedly received a bonus check equal to either 50% or 100% of what I’d already gotten

Branded Splash page of the “New Universe” comic Star Brand #6 (May ’87).

Plot by Jim Shooter; script by RT; pencils by John Romita, Jr.; inks by Art Nichols. That same month, in the promotional magazine Marvel Age #50 (May ’87), Stan Lee wrote a special Soapbox welcoming Roy back to the House of Ideas. Talk about being on Cloud Nine!

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

After that—well, I don’t think editors at Marvel were told to give me work. But I guess it was let to be known around Marvel that it was okay to hire me. I got my first assignment from an editor I hadn’t known before: Mike Higgins. Another Mike! It was for one of the New Universe books.

I think the first book I did this time around was probably— well, I did a dialogue job or two for Spitfire and the Troubleshooters.

But my main New Universe connection was Nightmask. He was a Sandman, Dr. Strange kind of character who enters people’s dreams. That was a good way to go, because the New Universe was supposed to be this world that exists with super-heroes and -villains, only the real world doesn’t know anything about them, unlike Superman flying over Metropolis or the Marvel Universe heroes zooming around New York.

Dann and I set at least one Nightmask story in Haiti, because voodoo interested us. One or two issues of that comic were drawn by Michael Bair, a.k.a. Mike Hernandez, who’d done some Infinity, Inc. and Secret Origins with me at DC. At first, my main assignments seemed to be New Universe comics. Maybe it was my way of being punished. [chuckles] “The good news is that you can work for Marvel again; the bad news is you have to write the New Universe.” I think it was already being perceived that that imprint wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire; maybe that’s why I was put on it. Actually, I thought the New Universe was a solid

“Gorilla My Dreams” Roy & Dann scripted five issues of Nightmask (#6-7, #10-12), with four different pencilers. The series ended with the twelfth issue. Seen above is a penciled page by a fifth penciler, Grant Miehm, from the never-published #14. Besides having Nightmask enter the dreams of a gorilla (hence the proposed above title), the story featured the world’s cutest puppy. See what you missed? [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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with Tom, but I dealt with a number of editors, Mike Rockwitz and Ralph Macchio being the main ones.

JA: After you did the New Universe stuff, do you remember what you did next?

John Buscema & Roy Thomas pose for what would turn out to be their last photo together, at the big con held in White Plains, NY, in 2000. Pic taken by Dann Thomas.

THOMAS: Not really. There was a Fantastic Four fill-in with Thundra, pretty early on. I did a couple of SubMariner fill-ins, and a Captain America set in 1940 or ‘41, relating the untold story of the first time he encountered Namor. I think the only series I ever did that I would just as soon have turned down was “Code Blue.”

JA: Oh gee, I forgot about that one!

THOMAS: It was a cop squad involved with super-villains. I didn’t have any interest in that one except the money, so I called up my friend Jean-Marc L’officier, who read everything, and we worked on it together. “Code Blue” was half of a comic, a “flip comic” with “Thunderstrike”—printed upside down from it— Thunderstrike being what everybody at that stage at Marvel had: a doppelgänger: Thor had Thunderstrike, Iron Man had War Machine, and Captain America had USAgent.

It’s Always Fair Weather…

Roy was delighted that not only did he get to work again with longtime collaborator John Buscema on the fill-in story in Fantastic Four #303 (June 1987)—and not only was he able to feature their 1970s co-creation Thundra—but several top Avengers made the wedding scene, as well!

Pencils by John Buscema, inks by Romeo Tanghal, script by RT. Thanks to Steven G. Willis. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

for doing the dialogue! I cashed the check and was properly grateful. Meanwhile, I was scheduled to fly to New York. I’d meet with Shooter and hopefully we’d straighten out things between us.

And I was both looking forward to and apprehensive about it.

Then, all of a sudden, [laughs] Jim’s gone. He’d been let go by Marvel. Ironically, Jim’s firing is something that cost me money.

JA: How so?

THOMAS: In L.A., I ran into Mark Evanier, who was writing comics and TV. He knew I was going back to Marvel and he says to me, “Jim Shooter’s going to be gone in the next few months.” I don’t recall if he said two months, three months, whatever, but it was a fairly short time. I said, “Oh, come on, Mark! He’s been editor for going on ten years. Whatever bad blood there may be between us, his Secret Wars made lots of money for the company.”

Mark just says, “Well, he’s going to be gone soon.” So we made a bet, pinned on some future date. I figured it was easy money. But I lost that bet, so Dann and I took Mark out to a Ruth’s Chris Steak House and paid off my debt that way. [Jim laughs] But I was shocked that Mark had been right.

Now DeFalco was editor-in-chief of Marvel. I never dealt much

JA: Right, [laughs] which was a strange, strange thing unless you were really up on the Marvel comics. The Sub-Mariner story you mentioned was ‘93, and the “Thunderstrike” and “Code Blue” features were in a comic titled Marvel Double Feature; that was in a bit later, in ‘94-’95.

You did a four-issue Black Knight series. You were well-acquainted with that character, since you were the one who’d brought him back in the late ‘60s.

THOMAS: Dane Whitman, the modern-day Black Knight Avenger, was the one I made up. That was during that rather fecund 1967-69 period wherein I conceived The Vision, Ultron, Yellowjacket, and Havok that they’re sticking in all the movies now. [laughs] That Black Knight was my answer to DC’s Shining Knight. As a teenager, I loved the 1950s Black Knight comics Stan and [artist Joe] Maneely did. And I even wrote dialogue for the 1965 “Iron Man” story where the modern Black Knight super-villain died—so I guess it was a natural for me to be given a Black Knight mini-series.

Tony DeZuniga drew the first two issues; Rich Buckler penciled the last two.

I worked in a mention of the Irish “troubles.” Just a couple of lines about how a kid had been killed in a crossfire. It was germane to the plot, which took place in England and Ireland; it wasn’t extraneous.

The editor felt it was too controversial. I said, “How so? A kid got killed, years ago. I don’t say it was the British fault, the Irish fault.” The whole idea was the futility of war, and how people get caught in the crossfire. The editor just said, “Oh, okay.”

And when the story came out, those balloons were missing.

Mark Evanier 1982 photo by Alan Light.

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Williamson-ish kind of job, with just enough Kirby-style action, celebrating 50 years of the Sub-Mariner from 1939 through 1989. I got to do all the World War II stuff and to re-tell some of the 1950s stories and add interstitial material that tied everything together.

For instance, Prince Byrrah was a character Bill Everett had introduced in the ’50s, but I extrapolated him back into the ‘40s. I think it was a beautiful-looking series, well-inked by Bob McLeod.

It sold well enough that Marvel then let me to do four issues of Human Torch. I would’ve liked to have six. I naturally assumed we’d then do a Captain America series in the same vein. But they weren’t receptive to that idea. I finally realized it wasn’t going to happen and I gave up on it.

JA: Well, considering they recently reprinted The Saga of the SubMariner and The Human Torch, they could’ve had Captain America portrayed, too.

THOMAS: I didn’t say it wasn’t a mistake, did I? [Jim laughs] Still, it was good to be back at Marvel. Everybody makes mistakes. I was surprised when that recent trade paperback [of the SubMariner and Torch series] came out. They weren’t the kind of avantgarde material some were producing by the ‘90s, but they were the kind of comic I like to write—and the kind I like to read. I’m inter-

I’ve Got A Right To Sing The Blue Code Blue battles a robot that thinks it’s Dr. Doom—or some such thing.

Actually, the comics series looks to Roy like a bit more fun now than it did back in the day. He’s credited as “writer,” Jean-Marc Lofficier as “co-plotter,” of this “Code Blue” yarn from Marvel Double Feature #13 (Oct. 1994). Pencils by Larry Alexander; inks by Charles Barnett. A photo of Jean-Marc can be seen on p. 56. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: I wouldn’t be happy about it, either.

THOMAS: Well, I’ve done editorial things people didn’t like, too, so I can’t complain about being on the receiving end—except I should’ve been told up front that the balloons were still going to be deleted, not find out when the comic came out. I disagreed with both the actual decision, and the way it was handled.

Otherwise, the only real change in my stories that I remember from those times was much more amicable, in a Dr. Strange issue.

This shape-changing alien named Rintrah was a buddy of Dr. Strange’s. Once, he morphs into Alf, the alien from the TV show, about which Marvel’s kiddie line was publishing a comic about then. But there was some kind of legal glitch, so we had to change Alf to Howard the Duck. That at least made sense.

JA: You did The Saga of the Sub-Mariner, which was a 12-issue miniseries, and The Saga of the Original Human Torch. The Sub-Mariner came first.

THOMAS: Yeah. I suspect that series was my idea. It’s hard for me imagine somebody else suggesting it. Rich did a very illustrative Al

A Couple Of Dark And Stormy Knights Sir Justin, the original Black Knight from the days of King Arthur, takes over the body of his descendant Dane Whitman, the modern-day Black Knight, in the first issue of the Black Knight mini-series. Script by Roy & Dann Thomas; art by Tony DeZuniga. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

Timely Comics’ “Big Three”—Minus Captain America (Left:) In The Saga of The Sub-Mariner #2 (Dec. 1988), young Prince Namor kills two American deep-sea divers, thinking them robots, in an expansion of a great Bill Everett scene from the 1939 Marvel Comics #1. Script by Roy Thomas; pencils by Rich Buckler; inks by Bob McLeod.

(Right:) The 1940s Human Torch is freed from suspended animation in 1953, courtesy of an atomic bomb test, in The Saga of the Original Human Torch #4 (July 1990)—a sequence originally depicted in Young Men #24 (Dec. ’53).

Script by RT; pencils by Buckler; inks by Romeo Tanghal. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Rich Buckler at a New York con in 2012. Thanks to Rich and to the Diversions of the Groovy Kind website.

ested in the history of characters, and of the medium itself.

And The Rest, As They Say, Is History (Right:) The cover art (by John Romita) of

One of the very best Les Daniel’s landmark history Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Marvel-related publications, Comics, published by Abrams. [Cover art Les Daniels’ big history of TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] Marvel for Abrams, also came out in the early ’90s. I recall being on a bus with a bunch of other Marvel writers and editors, headed for some mini-retreat to discuss the Operation Galactic Storm series for which I wrote two or three issues, and they were all really down on Daniels’ book because it exposed a bit of dirty linen—like the reasons Marv Wolfman and I split around 1980. I was the only one who defended it, which probably didn’t win me any friends that day. Les’ book had become an honest if mostly celebratory history, I felt, precisely because Marvel hadn’t paid much attention to it until it was published. But, a year or two later, DC was constantly looking over Les’ shoulder when he wrote his DC history, and as a result it’s a much lesser book. Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Les Daniels.

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Greatest Comics was probably the first and last officially sanctioned history of any comics company in which the author was allowed to record the history as it had happened, without much interference. It’s only natural that every company wants to control its image. But it’s a shame, too.

partly-completed L.A. subway, we tossed in the Rose Parade. Paul Ryan was the artist when I came on the book, followed by Dave Ross; both were excellent artists who’d take the reference and ideas you gave them and run with them.

JA: Did you have much contact with those two artists?

JA: You did three issues of Avengers Spotlight with Dann.

THOMAS: A fair amount. Marvel’s editors didn’t want to be ganged up on by the writer and artist, but they didn’t discourage me from talking to artists. I didn’t know either of them before, but I got to know them a bit via phone calls, especially Dave Ross. I’m a firm believer that the artist and the writer should communicate. It worked for Siegel and Shuster… Kane and Finger…

Simon and Kirby…. Lee and Kirby…

THOMAS: I remember we did “Dr. Druid.”

Dr. Druid was Dr. Droom with a costume they came up with in the ’70s so Marvel could reprint the 1960s stories. The “Dr. Druid” story gave me a chance to make sense out of the fact that the origin story of Dr. Droom, which was now the origin story of Dr. Druid, was so close in many ways to the later origin of Dr. Strange as Stan and Steve did it. It’s odd, because the only person who was involved in both those stories was Stan… yet people tend to assume that the “Dr. Strange” origin was all Steve’s plot.

JA: You had a long run on Avengers West Coast—or West Coast Avengers, whichever title you care to use.

JA: I have you down as doing issues 60 through 101. Forty-two issues.

Druid Yourself!

Steve Lightle’s cover for the “Dr. Druid” origin in Avengers Spotlight #37 (Oct. 1990). Roy & Dann wrote the story inside. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

THOMAS: They’d changed the title to Avengers West Coast by then, which I liked much better. I wrote West Coast for 3-4 years.

Before I wrote it, though, I’d rarely read it. I liked the concept, but the art, while often good, always looked to me like New York with palm trees. It didn’t have much Los Angeles feel. New York was a very important part of Avengers and the other Marvel books, so I felt L.A. should be more of a character in Avengers West Coast. Dann’s a native, and by then I’d lived there for over a decade. We took photos of landmarks, we researched an old

THOMAS: Not as long as I had on The Avengers, but a fairly long run—especially in those days when things were already getting to the point where, if people did a year’s worth of a comic, they thought they had run a marathon.

JA: These days, even more so.

THOMAS: If I like a strip, I’ll stay on it for a long time. That’s what I did with Avengers and Conan and some others. I liked Avengers West Coast because some of the same Avengers were in it, and it had the same structure. It was almost like doing The Avengers again. In the end, I don’t suppose it was totally successful, since it eventually got canceled. That’s a shame, because I think it was a betterthan-average Marvel book. I even got a chance to do stories with The Vision—and two storylines with

Go West, Young Avenger!

Roy & Dann couldn’t have been more thrilled they were than with the two artists who penciled the great majority of their 42 Avengers West Coast outings: (Left:) Paul Ryan, among numerous other covers, penciled (with Danny Bulanadi inking) the Ultron offering for AWC #66 (Jan. 1991), which reunited Roy and his 1968 co-creation Ultron.

Paul Ryan.

(Right:) Canadian-born David Ross’ penciling prowess is exemplified by his sizzling cover for AWC #81 (April 1992), as ably inked by Tim Dzon. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

David Ross.

Thanks to Judi Ross.

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Ultron, which I was kinda proud of. Dann had a big part in the plotting of those… although nowadays she remembers virtually nothing about doing them.

After we moved to rural South Carolina in late ’91, I worried that leaving L.A. might make me less viable as the writer of Avengers West Coast, but happily that didn’t happen. In fact, after that “Great Lakes Avengers” nonsense, I started pushing an idea for a new comic called Avengers South, whose heroes would be headquartered in Atlanta, the rising metropolis of the South. I don’t recall exactly who I proposed be in it, but it was a

The Lightning And The Lady Another puissant pairing—this time of characters Roy and Dann especially enjoyed handling during their 3½ years on Avengers West Coast: (Above left:) Miguel Santos, aka The Living Lightning, was one of Marvel’s first Mexican-American super-heroes, as dreamed up by Roy, Dann, and Dave Ross.

This page from AWC #80 (March 1992) was inked by Tim Dzon. Miguel harked back to the brashness of The Human Torch in the early Fantastic Four; Roy glommed the “Living Lightning” name from an evil cartel in a 1960s Stan Lee/Marie Severin “Incredible Hulk” storyline.

(Above right:) The second Spider-Woman was separated from her husband, and a mother, to boot. This Thomases-Ross-Dzon page from AWC #85 (Aug. ’92) did put little Rachel in more peril than usual, from the spider-themed group Death-Web, which Roy, Dann, and Dave had co-concocted.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

combination of pre-existing Marvel characters whose roots hadn’t been firmly established and thus could’ve been retroactively treated as Southerners—plus a few new characters Dann and I would’ve invented. But I never got any traction with that concept.

Near the end, the editors forced me to kill Mockingbird, Hawkeye’s wife, which I didn’t want to get the blame for, but I did it. And now, suddenly, I find out they’re going to cancel the book and replace it with a new one I won’t be writing, basically the same group with a new name, Force Works. I wasn’t under the illusion this was all the idea of [editor] Nel Yomtov, but I’ll admit I mentally lit a candle when the new book was canceled a very short time later. Maybe I should regret my vindictiveness years later, but no, dammit, I’m still glad Force Works was canceled. [Jim laughs uproariously]

When Bad’uns Clash (Left:) Two of Roy’s favorite villainous co-creations for The Avengers back in the late 1960s (both with artist John Buscema) had been Ultron and The Grim Reaper. Here, the two of them mix it up in Avengers West Coast #67 (Feb. 1991).

Script by Roy & Dann Thomas; pencils by Paul Ryan; inks by Danny Bulanadi.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Roy & Dann –Coast To Coast (Top half of page:) Roy in the latter ’80s, reading a vintage Action Comics issue in the hammock strung above his and Dann’s round bed in their Rancho Palos Verdes, California, home—and a much-appreciated farewell drawing that comics fan/friend/artist Clayton Moore (no relation to The Lone Ranger) gave Roy at his 51st birthday party, roughly two weeks before the couple left Los Angeles for South Carolina in December 1991. Clayton’s cartoon catches the spirit of the big living/bedroom, with its 15-foot floorto-ceiling bookshelves, that made up over half the Thomases’ house!

“Bunnies” refers to the fact that, from 1983-91, the pair owned “house rabbits” that ran around on the brick floors, mixing with dogs, cats, guinea pigs, and toco toucans. [Hawkeye TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics; Conan TM & © Conan Properties International LLD.] (Bottom half of page:) A triptych of Roy & Dann in their South Carolina living room a couple of years back, standing before several paintings by their artist friend Edward Wimberly—Roy feeding Peaches, one of the couple’s first llamas—and trying to make friends with Patty and Selma, the young capybaras they picked up in ’97 (and named after Marge Simpson’s sisters). Ere long, the aquatic critters—the world’s largest rodents—got to be 100-150 pounds each. After 13-14 years, the sisters shuffled off this mortal coil on their webbed feet, and have been succeeded by Florence and Gertrude (named for two women who swam the English Channel). All photos

by Dann—who, despite being considerably more photogenic than Roy, would much rather take a photo than be in one.

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

Best Of The West Three views of a David Ross drawing used as the frontispiece of Avengers West Coast Annual, Vol. 2, #7 (1992)—with thanks to Dave & Judi Ross. [Clockwise from top left:] Dave’s pencils, which he sent as a scan labeled “Av WC poster #1.” Was the illo perhaps also published by Marvel as a poster in the ’90s?

The same drawing, as “re-inked” by Ross, according to his scan—perhaps different inking from that in the comic?

The frontispiece as printed in color in the above-mentioned AWC Annual.

Inking either by Dave or by regular embellisher Tim Dzon. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] “David H. Ross” recently authored (and of course illustrated) a book for Watson-Guptill Publications entitled Freehand Figure Drawing for Illustrators: Mastering the Art of Drawing from Memory. As I wrote to begin my brief preface therein: “Boy, have you got the right book—by the right author/artist!”

JA: What was so important about killing off Mockingbird? Just to have a death to get sales?

THOMAS: Maybe. I don’t know. Nobody told me. They just wanted her dead.

There was another comic title—I won’t say what comic it was, or who the editor was—on which I knew the artist only slightly, by phone. One day, this artist calls and asks me: “Where’s the plot for the next issue?” I said, “I sent the plot in a week or so ago. Ask the editor.” He said, “He told me he sent it back to you for some rewriting.” Well, I knew that wasn’t true, so I said, “Let me get back to you.” I called the editor: “What happened?” He says, “I’m taking him off the book.” I said, “Well, okay, but he doesn’t know it. He’s expecting a plot and he says you told him I’m doing rewrites.” The editor says, “Well, he phoned and asked where the next plot was—and that was just the first thing I thought of to tell him.”

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

THOMAS: Well, maybe it made me a little more viable. I got Avengers West Coast because of a dispute between the editors and John Byrne, about which I know zero. I was informed Byrne was leaving the book, and they wanted me to wind up his storyline, but they didn’t tell me what he’d had in mind or even what they thought he might have had in mind. I don’t think they wanted me to know! So I figured, “Okay, where is this thing going and what can I do with it?” To start off with a bang, I began with a splashpage close-up of JFK, followed by an alternate-world version of his assassination, which, since it happened on my 23rd birthday, is an event seared into my brain. Later, I had to use some characters I wasn’t wild about. I never cared much for Wonder Man, for instance.

JA: I always thought he was kind of a cipher.

THOMAS: At least he gave me an excuse to bring back his brother, The Grim Reaper, whom I’d invented with John Buscema. USAgent was fun to write, except he’d been created in the same mold that lots of liberal-minded writers in comics write any “right-wing” character—to make him look like a total nut. Because, as far as they’re concerned, conservatives are all nuts anyway or else they’d be liberals. [Jim laughs] As you know, I’ve been on both sides politically at one time or another in my life. USAgent was a jerk, regardless of his political persuasion.

JA: You also did several Avengers West Coast Annuals. Those were stand-alone stories, weren’t they?

THOMAS: Yeah, usually somebody else’s idea. I wrote one whole series of annuals with Terminus, who kept growing in size over the course of the books. That was one where the editor made up the concept. The annuals I enjoyed were ones where they let me do my own thing. In one pair of annuals—Avengers and Thor—I riffed on the Hitchcock movie Strangers on a Train, where two guys meet and decide to exchange crimes, with each murdering someone the other hates. They figure nobody will suspect them, since the guy who actually commits the murder has no real motive, and the other guy has an alibi. Brilliant device. I called my story “Strangers on an Astral Plane,” and the “strangers” were the gods Loki and Pluto. John Buscema penciled and inked that Avengers Annual.

Mostly, though, the annuals were just something I did when asked.

Don’t Mock A Mockingbird The definitely non-PC Avenger called USAgent was mostly fun to write— as per this scene, spread over two pages, with the (sadly doomed) Mockingbird from AWC #81 (April 1992). By the Thomases, Ross, & Dzon.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: Oh, jeez.

THOMAS: I have to admit I was flabbergasted. At that stage, anything I said was gonna get me in trouble with that editor, because that was obviously unprofessional behavior and he didn’t even seem to know it. He was more like, “It’s the guy’s own fault for putting me on the spot.” As if you were doing anything by lying but stalling.

JA: The only time I was replaced on a book, it was the same way. They didn’t tell me. I had to figure it out.

THOMAS: Yeah, that’s really bad. Anybody you see do that to somebody else, you’re never again going to trust anything he says.

Even though I liked this particular editor.

JA: Do you think living in California was the reason they asked you to do Avengers West Coast?

JA: Well, you did a lot of them. You did three different Thor Annuals.

You did a couple of Iron Man Annuals, Captain America….

THOMAS: I remember doing a Captain America Annual where I was able to use that Romita villain Electro from the 1950s Captain America. I got to spread Cap over three or four decades in different chapters. That was fun.

But I’ve always been very much acclimated to the notion of a series. From time to time, I guess I’ve done some reasonably memorable stand-alone stories, but to me each story in a series is like a chapter in an ongoing longer story. I picked that up from Stan. If I’m doing a ten-page or even a 30-page story and then that’s it for another year or two till maybe they ask me to do another one, I have trouble getting enthused about that.

JA: [laughs] But you did quite a few of them, including in Marvel Super-Heroes with Dann and Jean-Marc. You did a number of What If?s, which you’d created in the ‘70s and they brought back in the late ‘80s. You wrote several of those with Jean-Marc, too.

THOMAS: They even had me write the first issue of the second What If? series, which was nice of them. Most of “my” 1990s What Ifs happened because Jean-Marc L’officier, a good friend of mine, would come up with an idea for a story. At one point, he and I co-

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

The Captain And The Kids Usually, Roy had little interest in scripting Captain America minus his fellow Avengers or Invaders. One exception was Captain America Annual #13 (1994), wherein he and his 1980s All-Star Squadron collaborator Arvell Jones joined forces for a full-lengther wherein the Star-Spangled Avenger got to clobber The Red Skull (in the present), a bunch of Nazis (in the waning days of World War II—alongside The Patriot, The Spirit of ’76, and the Soviet hero The Red Guardian), and Electro (in the 1950s, from 1954’s Captain America #78). The Spirit of ’76 and The Patriot— unknown to themselves in 1945—were each destined ere long to stand-in for Cap after he kept his rendezvous with an iceberg. Brothers David and Dan Day inked.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

wrote several issues in a row where there was actually continuity in What If? JA: You did four What If?s and then that running storyline in issues 35 through 39.

THOMAS: That was Jean-Marc’s idea. I wouldn’t have known enough about the basic “what if” premises of those issues without doing research, to suggest what kind of What If? we should do. I hadn’t read many new comics Arvell Jones. regularly since ‘74, when I stepped down as editor-in-chief. I kept buying comics, but I read less and less of them, even though I was—and remain—a big enthusiast of the comics format.

JA: This would be a good place to discuss how you and Jean-Marc became

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Planes, Trains, & Annuals The gods Loki and Pluto meet and will soon agree that each of them will kill the other’s worst enemy (that’s Thor and Hercules, to you!), thereby giving each other an alibi, to protect them from the vengeance of papas Odin and Zeus. The 1950 Hitchcock film classic Strangers on a Train, from which the theme of “Strangers on an Astral Plane” was borrowed, had been adapted from a novel by one-time Timely Comics writer Pat Highsmith! Script by Roy Thomas; full art by John Buscema—for Avengers Annual #23 (1994). The story was concluded in that year’s Thor Annual. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

writing partners and to talk about the division of labor and pay.

THOMAS: Dann and I met Jean-Marc and his wife and collaborator Randy in L.A. He’s French, she’s American.

They live in France now, in the Carcasonne region. We met them around 1980 through the LASFAS, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.

Bradbury and Larry Niven have Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier belonged to it; it was a bunch of Jean-Marc co-plotted numerous yarns science-fiction fans who held meetings with Roy—while he and Randy and gave parties. [mutual laughter] We together brought the collected works started hanging around together. Jeanof Moebius (Jean Giraud) to Marvel!

Marc and Randy became the people Photo courtesy of the Lofficiers. we saw the most of, even though we lived an hour apart—them up in the San Fernando Valley, us down south in the San Pedro area.

Jean-Marc was very interested in comics. Eventually he and Randy became partners with the artist Moebius when he moved to America for a while. They arranged for the landmark reprinting of virtually all of Moebius’ work by Marvel. Because I was looking for work but hated trolling around to editors, Jean-Marc would come up with an idea, and I’d say, “Let’s see if we can make something out of this and split the money.” He and Randy also wrote some comic stories on their own, including a few for DC.

What If—Roy Thomas & Jean-Marc Lofficier Collaborated On A Story?

Well, one result—out of a grand total of eight—would’ve been the story in What If…?, Vol. 2, #24 (April 1991). Art by Tom Morgan. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Nikola Tesla, a very real scientist, who actually did die at an advanced age in 1943 in his New York hotel room. I just turned it into a murder. A couple of years before his death, he claimed he could build a wall of “teleforce” around the United States to protect it from enemy bombers… things like that… so it seemed logical that the Nazis would want to lay their hands on Tesla’s secrets. He’s popped up in a lot of comics since, but I don’t think you’ll find him in many earlier than The Medusa Effect.

Rich Buckler drew a more realistic, illustrative approach to Captain America… and then everything fell apart. Rich left the book, and another artist—M.C. Wyman—was put on it; he was good, but he did a straighter comics approach. At the same time, or maybe just before, the editors decided it would just be an extrathick one-shot comic book, not a prestige book. So I’d lost a lot of my enthusiasm for it by the time I was plotting the second half.

Incidentally, I never felt at Marvel, like I occasionally did at DC, that sometimes there was actual sabotage involved in things that went wrong. At Marvel, I just always felt, hey, it’s just Marvel screwing up in the way we always did. [Jim laughs] The Herod Factor, the Eternals thing, was done in eight-page chapters for that biweekly Marvel comic.

JA: Marvel Comics Presents.

When “Tesla” Meant More Than An Electric Automobile The death of master inventor Nikola Tesla in Captain America: The Medusa Effect. Script by Roy Thomas; pencils by Rich Buckler; inks by Jim Sanders.

It started out to be a graphic novel… and Roy feels it should’ve remained one. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

On most of our projects, he’d be the plotter, basically. I’d work with him on the shaping of it, especially for front-of-the-book features. Jean-Marc’s area of expertise was a real knowledge of minutiae and an ability to bring all these things together and solve other continuity problems. In a way, it was a permutation of the same kind of thing I did in other areas. We did a series for Dr. Strange about the Book of the Vishanti, things of that sort. I hated to turn down any freelance work. When you’re a freelancer, if you turn something down, you don’t know if the person who offered it to you may never offer you anything else, because he feels he’d be turned down again.

THOMAS: Marvel Comics Presents. Actually, I was scheduled to do two series for that title. The first was a revival of The Invaders using an alternate history. We’d pick up in 1942 where the 1970s Invaders left off, and all of a sudden, Roosevelt would get killed. That would help us emphasize that, when you interject super-heroes and super-villains into a war, things aren’t going to stay the same as in the history you read in school—back in the days when they taught history in school, and not just feel-good politically correct narrative. “The Invaders” was all set to be a series. Then, at the last minute, Mark Gruenwald, who was a top editor and had approved the concept, sunk the series. I never could get any kind of answer as to why.

They also wanted me to write “The Eternals” and bring them into the Marvel Universe, since Jack [Kirby] had kept them

JA: I know what you mean. As long as we’re talking about stand-alone comics, let me go ahead and knock these out. You did Captain America: The Medusa Effect in 1994, and you also did The Eternals: The Herod Factor in the same year.

THOMAS: The Medusa Effect was supposed to be what they called then a “prestige format book.” It was supposed to be printed on good paper, and they wanted a “Captain America” story with a slightly more adult feel. Not “adult” in the sense of sex and violence, for a change, but in the sense of being a bit more realismbased than the usual comic. So, in the first half, I brought in elements like News on the March, that takeoff on the March of Time documentary series that Welles used in Citizen Kane. I brought in

Ikaris Dikaris Dock!

Mark Texeira at the Big Apple Comics Convention, 2010.

Mark Texeira’s bold cover for the 64-page Eternals: The Herod Factor #1-and-only (March 1994). He penciled the interior art; script

by Roy & Dann Thomas. Note that the indicia title doesn’t appear on the cover.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Impossible Man. [mutual chuckling] Luckily, at just that time, George Pérez became the artist of Fantastic Four. At the beginning of his long career, but already able to draw up a storm, to not just throw mindless details into the panels, but to make everything mean something.

We had part of that story take place in the Marvel offices, and George did wonderful scenes of the people there, the stuff hanging on the walls. The issue’s been reprinted several times, even though it ends on a cliffhanger.

Maybe that’s why, in the early ’90s, when they Greg Capullo. did the first Impossible Man special, they asked me to do a story. I wasn’t primarily a humor writer, though I’d written for Not Brand Echh and Spoof. But I think that “Impossible Man” story held its own with the others in the book.

JA: You also had a nice run on Dr. Strange.

THOMAS: Lord, yes! If there’s anything I liked even better than doing Avengers West Coast, it was that year or so with Jackson Guice on Dr. Strange. [Editor] Ralph Macchio put us together.

JA: How much interaction did you have with Macchio on Dr. Strange?

And how much interaction with Butch Guice?

THOMAS: I never knew him as “Butch.” To me, he was always “Jackson.” He told me later—or maybe he told Ralph and Ralph told me—that he’d resisted going onto Dr. Strange when it had been offered, but that if he’d “known it was going to be so much fun,” he’d have accepted more readily. The combination of the two of us, I think, turned out a fairly unique Dr. Strange.

For my part, I was expecting to do something similar to what I’d done with Gene Colan in the late ’60s. Gene’s and my “Dr. Strange” then was a lot less like Ditko’s than Everett’s and Marie Severin’s had been. With Colan as artist, I’d found myself writing Dr. Strange more realistically.

Impossible, Man! Dr. Strange, his other-dimensional guest Rintrah—and The Impossible Man, in a page from Roy’s segment in The Impossible Man Summer Vacation Spectacular #1 (Aug. 1990). He can’t recall if the Escher-esque artwork in the final panel was his idea or that of penciler Greg Capullo. Roy & Dann Thomas, writers; Chris Ivy, inker. Thanks to Steven G. Willis.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

out of it. I’d already done that, really, when writing Thor at the end of the ’70s. The artist was Mark Texiera, who had a sort of Neal Adams approach. But after we’d done all the 8-page chapters, they decided not to serialize it in Marvel Comics Presents. Maybe that was when they cancelled that comic. So Eternals: The Herod Factor became an extra-thick special, much like Medusa Effect had. Still, it was a fairly good comic.

JA: One more stand-alone to ask you about: The Impossible Man Summer Vacation Spectacular, which Dann helped you write.

THOMAS: I was always proud, still am, of being the guy who talked Stan into letting Impy come back at all, because the reader reaction to the original Impossible Man story in Fantastic Four #11 had been so negative. As a fan, I’d loved that story by Stan and Jack. Already back in the ’60s I’d wanted to use him, but Stan wouldn’t let anyone use him because, he said, the readers hated him. In fact, knowing that is part of the reason I made Steve Gerber write Howard the Duck out of the “Man-Thing” series in the ’70s.

It took till ‘75, ‘76, before I could get Stan’s okay to use The

This time around, I—or maybe it was Dann, I don’t specifically remember—came up with a good idea to start the new run. One of the great classical themes is selling your soul to the Devil. And there are a lot of Devil stand-ins in Dr. Strange, two in particular: Mephisto, who appeared in “Dr. Strange” stories on occasion—and Satannish, who has the word “Satan” in his very name. I figured Baron Mordo’s the kind of guy devious enough to have sold his soul to two different demons in order to get paid twice for it.

Eventually, both devils come looking for him for repayment; he’s only got one soul to give them and he’s begs Doc to protect him. I guess being torn apart by two devils is even worse than being torn apart by one. Ralph liked the idea, so I plunged into it, and Jackson drew the issues wonderfully.

Jackson’s a little like Colan in a way. But his Dr. Strange world looked and felt so real that I found myself writing even Doc himself in a different way even from how I’d written him with Colan. I began to think: “Doc’s a guy who already in his origin story had to be at least 30-something, to have become a top surgeon, have a whole career.” I figured that, before he had his mystical experience—which admittedly changed him a lot—he’d had three-plus decades of being a normal human being. And during that time, I wondered, is there any chance at all he could have had a sense of humor? [Jim laughs] Because there was humor in Dr. Strange from time to time, but it wasn’t that Doc himself ever cracked a joke. Or if he did, I missed it.

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JA: I never saw it.

THOMAS: So I decided it might be interesting, even saleable, to make Dr. Strange a bit more human, because his comic was never a tremendous sales success. Well, the Englehart-Brunner version did well, and maybe a couple of others did, I don’t know. And once Dr. Strange started acting more human, a bit more light-hearted, I had just a tremendously good time writing that series with Jackson. It reportedly sold well, too.

But Jackson put so much into each issue that it was hard for him to do a monthly book. So Jean-Marc Lofficier and I started the “Book of the Vishanti” series as a back-up. But soon, Ralph wanted me to do one issue where we’d still have some Guice art, but we didn’t need as much of it. I had Morgana Blessing write a tell-all about Doc, so we could make her article in Now magazine the majority of the Doc issue, using a lot of straight typeset prose and relatively few illustrations. The only problem was, Jackson liked that concept so much he spent nearly as much time on those few illustrations

Ralph Macchio No relation to film’s Karate Kid.

Strange As It May Seem…

Jackson Guice.

(Top center:) Jackson “Butch” Guice’s cover for the 5th issue (July 1989) of the comic whose indicia title was Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme— although the “abbreviated” cover logo was the one Roy had talked Stan Lee into using back in the late ’60s, and the latter two italicized words didn’t always make it onto the covers! Doc’s eyepatch was a holdover from the previous regime… but it kinda worked. If there was ever a more iconic Dr. Strange cover drawing than this one, Ye Ed doesn’t recall seeing it!

(Above:) For some reason, Roy elected to open his first issue-length “Dr. Strange” story in two decades (issue #5) with Stephen about to shave in front of his bathroom mirror. When Jackson’s pencils came back, they inspired the writer to take a somewhat lighter approach (more in terms of dialogue than story content) to the series—and editor Ralph Macchio was happy with the result. The result was a year of a Thomas/Guice Dr. Strange that remains one of Roy’s favorite experiences in his fifty years in comics. Inks by José Marzan, Jr. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“The So-Called ‘Amy Grant Cover’” (Left:) Dr. Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #15 (March 1990). You’ll have to read the interview to find out why some folks call it that.

Incidentally, that’s Stephen’s vampiric brother Vic at right. Art by Jackson Guice. [© Marvel Characters, Inc., & any other claimants.]

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

If Three’s A Crowd—Bring On The Crowd!

(Clockwise from top left:) Guice pages, inked by Marzan, from Dr. Strange #7, 8, & 14 (Sept. & Oct. 1989 and Feb. 1990). Doc faces Agamotto the All-Seeing in mutated caterpillar form—Satannish and Mephisto have a puking contest—and Jackson proves he can draw the best-looking women this side of… anybody.

Script by Roy & Dann Thomas. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

as he did on a regular issue! [mutual laughter] I worked five times harder on it than I did on a regular comic, but maybe Jackson picked up a little time.

We had a lot of fun with The Executioner and The Enchantress— Arkon the Magnificent—I don’t remember them all. There was Stephen’s brother, Vic Strange—we made him a vampire. Morbius came in—a character I’d co-created with Gil Kane in 1971 and hadn’t written since. The only sour note was the so-called “Amy Grant cover,” but I had nothing to do with that.

JA: Yeah, she threatened to sue. You said Butch actually based her face on a couple of sources….

THOMAS: In a phone conversation we had at that time, he told me it wasn’t just Amy Grant; it was Amy and his wife and one or two other women. I guess when he did the cover, nobody at the office recognized Amy Grant. Why should they? There probably aren’t a lot of Christian music fans at Marvel. I certainly didn’t know who she was. I can see why a lawsuit was threatened, though. After all, not only was this Christian singer’s face used on a comic book cover, but on one that has satanic entities in it.

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We got past that, but eventually, Jackson moved on. And I found that, even though other good people like Jim Valentino came in to draw Dr. Strange, we just weren’t able to get the same effect. I feel like the book went back to being just another comic. But for a year or so, I think it was a little more than that.

JA: Geof Isherwood did it for a while, too.

THOMAS: Geof Isherwood did some very nice art. He had a romantic feel, like old illustrations, more like Kaluta than like Jackson Guice.

JA: It seems to me, judging by our conversations in the past, that you were more affected by who the artist was on this book than on many of the books that you did.

THOMAS: Actually, I’ve always been powerfully affected by the artist. Working Marvel-style, when I had a better artist, I did better work. I always felt that, at my best, I became part of a symbiosis.

Our Dr. Strange wasn’t a Roy Thomas book and it wasn’t a Jackson Guice book—it was a book by some third entity. That’s as close to mysticism as I get, so you’re stuck with it.

JA: [laughs] Okay. You did four issues of Spider-Woman.

THOMAS: Yeah. I didn’t like that first Spider-Woman, in the redand-yellow costume… but I loved the second one, who wore the black costume, based on the alien Spidey suit, and had a little daughter she had to drag around with her when she couldn’t find a babysitter. [laughs] SpiderWoman gave me one of the several hooks in Avengers West Coast to build on. You need a few characters you

Now—And Then (Top center:) Guice’s cover for Dr. Strange #9 (Nov. 1989) doubled for that of an issue of Now, a magazine published by J. Jonah Jameson in the early days of The Amazing Spider-Man. Roy contributed to the cover text—but he’s sure that either Jackson, editor Macchio, or assistant editor Mike Rockwitz added that “Keep Your Hands Off My Man, Princess!” tag. Roy wishes he had written that line. Happily, the entire story was reprinted in the 2006 hardcover Marvel Visionaries: Roy Thomas.

(Above:) “Noted fantasy artist Moebius” (real name: Jean Giraud) is pictured with Doc in a black-&-white “photo” because, at that time, Roy and artist Marshall Rogers were collaborating on a graphic novel in which Strange encountered the magnificent creations of the French cartoonist [Arzach, Lt. Blueberry, et al.]. Photocopies of the pencils of its early pages survive, but have never been published. Script: Roy Thomas; art: Jackson Guice. [Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Battleship Galactus Geoff Isherwood’s impressive cover for Dr. Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #42 (June 1992). While Jim Starlin’s various Infinity series weren’t his cup of tea, Roy was/is a big fan of Starlin’s—and of the extra revenue that doing a companywide crossover could generate.

Comics is a commercial art form, after all! [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

can play around with, and one of them became SpiderWoman as a single mother with a kid.

She garnered enough interest that Marvel scheduled a four-issue mini-series of her, and Dann and I wrote it together. We set it down in the Amazon rain forest, because, in February of ’93, we’d spent a week with several other Carolinians on the Peruvian

Geoff Isherwood.

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

THOMAS: That’s the thing—if you don’t talk to collaborators, you don’t even learn how to say their names. It was a whole different feeling from what I’d had in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Now there was a yawning gap between me and the other people, because we were all spread out all over the country, all over the world. Things change.

JA: Well, you’re older, too… older than most of the people that you work with.

Along Came A Spider-Woman (Clockwise from above:) The splash page of Spider-Woman, Vol. 2, #3 (Jan. 1994) utilized the Peruvian city of Iquitos and the Amazon River, where Roy and Dann had spent a week the previous year. Pencils by Steven Ellis; inks by Fred Fredericks. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] Roy and Dann Thomas at the Explorama Lodge, February 1993. They sure didn’t waste much time turning that trip into “research”!

Dr. Linnea Smith—the “Doctora” of the Amazon Medical Project whose nickname was used for the villainess in the four-issue Spider-Woman series.

Amazon River and on a tributary of it, in camps without running water or electricity. I am as un-outdoorsy a person as you’d ever want to see—I believe with Fran Liebowitz that “outdoors is where you go to hail a cab”—but I was always determined to see the Amazon and Africa and Australia, with their animal life. Probably the result of reading too many Tarzan, Bomba, and Frank Buck books when I was a kid. [Jim chuckles] We went to Kenya in ’94.

In the Amazon camp where we’d been, we’d met this young woman they called the Doctora—an American physician who’d come down there on vacation and had stuck around. Two decades later, she’s still down there half of each year; Dann and I still contribute money to her selfless work with the Indians. So naturally, in the comic, we made her a villainess, [mutual laughter] “the Doctora.” The real Doctora got a kick out of it. Fred Fredericks, the Mandrake the Magician artist, inked that series. Tim D-Z-O-N was the penciler of the regular Avengers West Coast. I never could figure out how to pronounce his name.

JA: Me, either.

THOMAS: Once in a while I’d work with Buscema or Colan or whomever, but if I worked with someone I hadn’t worked with before, he was almost invariably younger than me. Not that that bothered me.

Steven Ellis.

JA: I’m going to ask about this next series for two reasons. Number one, your prior history with Thor, and also because it’s the only time you and I ever did a comic book together.

THOMAS: Oh, yeah? I must’ve missed that one.

JA: I inked the last third of one Thor issue. I’d have to go look up the number.

THOMAS: That was when I did the Godpack. M.C. Wyman was the main penciler. My second Thor stint is an example of the way things had changed. They asked me to do Thor, but instead of asking me what I wanted to do with the book, they—was the editor Mike Rockwitz?

JA: Yes, it was Rockwitz.

THOMAS: I liked Mike Rockwitz. But he and whoever else decided such matters wanted a bunch of young gods to hang out with Thor. They even had the group named already. At least I got to make up the specific characters. But maybe I would’ve come up with something different to do. I felt like I was becoming, not exactly the puppet, but maybe the trained monkey [mutual laughter] to somebody else’s organ-grinding.

JA: Well, you were just being a hired hand.

THOMAS: I’d always been a hired hand. I didn’t object to that. But I like to have a say in what I do with that hand. I did, to some extent—but not enough, by my lights.

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whatever… and I was just bearing the brunt of it. That happens to all of us, from time to time.

JA: Maybe it was also the fact that Marvel was going through a lot of changes because they’d decided to become their own distributor, which had hurt sales.

M.C. Wyman.

THOMAS: Maybe. With the ’90s Invaders series, Mike said one of the proudest things of his editorship—and he didn’t sound like he was kidding—was being able to have me do another Invaders series. I don’t know why that should be a high point of anybody’s life, [chuckles] but I certainly appreciated the thought.

JA: I tried to get that inking job, [laughs] because I was working for Mike.

THOMAS: I didn’t do anything to keep you off it!

JA: I know you didn’t. [laughs] THOMAS: Dave Hoover was the penciler. I remember I bought the original art for two of the four covers of that Invaders series from him. I was really sorry when he passed away so young.

I Was A Teenage Godling M.C. Wyman’s dramatic cover for Thor #472 (March 1994) introduced the Godlings—aka the Godpack—aka, informally, the “God Squad.”

Inks by Mike DeCarlo. While Roy wasn’t wild about having to make up this group of teenage deities, he must admit he enjoyed writing them.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: The fill-in issue I worked on was penciled

by Sandu Florea. I think the High Evolutionary was in it. That’s about all I remember offhand, because it was just a three-day job. Did you find Mike Rockwitz to be more of an accommodating editor than the others you worked with at that time?

Mike Rockwitz Ralph Macchio’s assistant editor, who later graduated to full editor. (Above center:) Vintage caricature of Mike, White Castle hamburger enthusiast; artist unknown. (Directly above:) Mike today; photo courtesy of MR. [© the respective copyright holders.]

THOMAS: Generally speaking, we got along quite well. He kept coming back to me for projects. And he wouldn’t demand to know every plot twist of a story in advance, which I’d have found boring and off-putting. I know that’s what editors tend to want now. I don’t think that produces the best comics, but when you start running things in a corporate way, you tend to move in that direction. It becomes like a studio movie, where there’s so much money and so many people involved that you have to know exactly where you’re going in advance. In a comic, I don’t think you need to. I think they just do it, and they’ve now convinced themselves that they need to do it. [Jim laughs] But Mike and I got along. Once, I did something he didn’t like in some plot, and whatever it was, for some reason it punched his buttons. I got a fax back saying that I wasn’t really trying and that if I didn’t improve, I’d be kicked off that book.

I fixed the synopsis a little and the crisis passed. I got this feeling, after I stopped grinding my teeth, that something else was bothering Mike… business, personal, or

“We’ve Got To Stop Meeting Like This!”

Sandu Florea.

Of the May 1994 issue of Thor, which Roy wrote and on which Jim Amash did some uncredited inking, the latter says: “The GCD [Grand Comics Database] does not list me in issue #474, but I inked pages 17-22. I looked it up in my records.” The fill-in penciler was Romanian-born artist Sandu Florea.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

World War II Forever!

Dave Hoover drew four exceptional covers for the 1993 Invaders series, including #3 & 4 (July & Aug.). The former, of course, is an homage to John Buscema’s classic cover for the 1968 Avengers #57, which had introduced the Silver Age Vision; in the 1993 Invaders, Roy and Dave brought back the original 1940s Vision—as Roy had originally wanted to do back in ’68. The Blazing Skull, from Timely’s 1941-42 Mystic Comics, was added to the Invaders’ ranks this time around—while their Nazified opponents on #4’s cover are actual Golden Age super-heroes from long-defunct companies, dragooned into Marvel service as villains! The complete run of RT’s 19970s-1990s Invaders has recently been reprinted in the 2-volume trade paperbacks Invaders Classic: The Complete Collection.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Dave Hoover Alas, Dave passed away in his mid-fifties, in 2011.

JA: Yeah, I thought he did a good job on the series, even though you had a modern art look to a retro series. That looked kind of odd.

THOMAS: I didn’t mind it. I thought, “Well, if it makes it sell…!” The main thing to me was that the clothes and the machinery and the cars and everything be right, and of course that the storytelling and action be strong. There are a lot of possible approaches to doing a book.

Dave captured the time period as well as he needed to.

JA: And you picked up from where the 1970s series had left off, right?

THOMAS: Yeah, it starts out just a couple of weeks later.

Whenever any actual historical events were mentioned in an Invaders series I wrote, they were always consistent with what was really going on in the world. When they had me do Giant-Size Invaders #2 about five or ten years after that, it picked up only a week or so after the four-issue mid-’90s series, still set in 1942.

JA: [laughs] Another series you did, and you told me you had the best

“royalties” you ever had, was The Secret Defenders.

THOMAS: That was an odd book. I wasn’t the first choice to write it, and the artist who drew it wasn’t the first choice to draw it. In the original 1971 “Defenders” stories I wrote, Dr. Strange was the guy who got the Hulk and Sub-Mariner together. So the idea of Secret Defenders was to have Doc gather a different group of heroes each time for a two- or three-issue story arc; then, for the next one, he’d cobble together several different heroes. To me, it just meant I had to bone up on a bunch of different characters every few issues—and about the time I got the hang of them, they’d be gone.

But that was the job, so I got to it.

They gave me Wolverine as one of the heroes in #1—one of the relatively few times I ever wrote that character I’d conceived in 1974. [chuckles] And I got to add the Spider-Woman I liked. The rest I didn’t care about one way or the other. Andre Coates was the artist; he was a new guy in town, but he did a creditable job.

The speculative boom was at its absurdist heights, and that comic, on a non-returnable basis, sold three-quarters of a million

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

copies, which was pretty good even for that period. Dann and I returned home from a trip, and there was this check for $43,000 waiting for us. At first we thought the decimal point was in the wrong place! I hadn’t got any fivefigure checks since I’d stopped writing movies, and not many of them then! [Jim laughs] Out of that sum, $38,000 was for Secret Defenders #1.

The rest was for Fantastic Four Unlimited #1 and a couple of other issues.

I said to Dann, “If I’m getting a check like this, Todd McFarlane’s making I’ve Got A Secret! real money!” So, Read the interview to find out why The Secret when people hand Defenders #1 (March 1993) is one of Roy Thomas’ me a copy of that all-time favorite comics! Pencils by Andre Coates; inks by Don Hudson. Unfortunately, issue to sign, I tell we’ve never located a photo of Andre—but we’ll them, “This is my print one in a future issue if one turns up! [TM & favorite comic book © Marvel Characters, Inc.] ever!” I used to be reluctant to mention the exact sums involved when I’d tell that story, but without real numbers, it’s too abstract. And, of course, it’s ludicrous that, out of all the comics I ever wrote and characters I helped create, from Ultron to Wolverine, this is the one I made the most money from!

[Jim laughs] Secret Defenders #1 was a good enough comic, I guess. I enjoyed doing that first story arc, and I did eight issues before they replaced me for whatever reason.

65

I was off a series by the editor suddenly just not asking me for the next script. The second storyline of Secret Defenders I really liked. I made up Roadkill, a murderous Hulk type that went around killing people in the different towns mentioned in the lyrics of the famous song “Route 66.” You know: Joplin, Missouri, and Gallup, New Mexico, and Amarillo, Texas, and all these places Nat “King” Cole sang about. [laughs] Of course, since that’s a copyrighted song, we never mentioned the connection. I just did it. The editors didn’t care or maybe even notice; and when two panels mentioning two of the cities got drawn in the wrong order, they wouldn’t bother to change them when I asked, because it was too much work. Other than that, I was happy with that storyline. Dann made up Roadkill’s pet, Splatt the Cat, who’d been run over and flattened in the road and now accompanied him.

JA: Let’s talk about Fantastic Four Unlimited, a series I remember was quarterly and extra-sized.

JA: You don’t know why they replaced you?

THOMAS: No, they didn’t tell me. They just did it. The comic died not too long afterwards, which serves them right. [chuckles] If it stopped selling once speculation was no longer a factor, I don’t think it was my fault, or Andre’s.

JA: How’d you find out you were off the book? Did they call and tell you?

THOMAS: I think so. I don’t think I ever had to find out

“In Xandu Did Kublai Khan…”

(Left:) In 1992, Roy and Gerry Conway co-plotted (and Roy dialogued) a graphic novel titled Spider-Man/Dr. Strange: The Way to Dusty Death, illustrated by Michael Bair and featuring the Lee/Ditko sorcerer-villain Xandu from the 1965 Amazing Spider-Man Annual that had guest-starred Doc. (Above:) A year later, in Secret Defenders #8 (Oct. 1993), Roy scripted the concluding part of a two-issue sequel to the graphic novel. Doc again squared off against Xandu, this time allied with Captain America and The Scarlet Witch— though Spidey made an appearance, as well. Pencils by Andre Coates; inks by Don Hudson. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

66

Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Howard Mackie.

it a few minutes and said, “Another Liefeld clone.” [chuckles] He chuckled, and says, “It’s someone you know.” And finally, a couple of the faces were looking familiar and I recognized those expressions. I looked at Mike, and I know I must’ve looked really puzzled when I asked, “Is this Herb Trimpe?” He started chuckling and said, “Yes, it’s Herb Trimpe.” I asked what happened. And Mike was quite proud of this.

He said, “Well, I talked with Herb and I told him that if he wanted to stay in the business he needed to make his work look more contemporary. Since Image is hot, he should look at that.” And Herb started doing the Liefeld-clone work, and Mike was real happy about that, I think. Not just because he got Herb to do what he wanted, but I think he was happy to have Herb working at the company. Especially after Herb’s long career, which was close to 30 years at that point.

THOMAS: Well, it did extend it by some years. I never heard Herb say a word against Mike. I never discussed the art Herb Trimpe. with Herb, because I disliked that look so much it would’ve been hard to keep from sounding like I was criticizing him for doing what he felt he needed to do. I can put up with excessive musculature in Kirby, Buscema, etc. But, to me, this art—like Liefeld’s own work—had reached the point of just looking like over-muscled balloons. More like Wonder Wart-Hog than a Marvel hero.

Another Revoltin’ (?) Development The lead splash page from Fantastic Four Unlimited #1 (March 1993), penciled by Herb Trimpe and inked by Mike DeCarlo—with editing by the omnipresent team of Mike Rockwitz, Ralph Macchio, and chief Tom DeFalco.

Howard Mackie plotted the story, then left in a dispute with the editor(s) and reportedly wanted his credit removed, for reasons unknown—so that Roy wound up credited as “scripter” with whatever that implied. Roy went on to write all or part of issues #2-7 & 9-12 of the series before it was cancelled. The issues were 64 pages thick, plus covers. Thanks to Stephen G. Willis and Bill Hall for the scan. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

THOMAS: Yeah. They had several of those Unlimited series. Mike Rockwitz asked me to write the dialogue for the lead story in the first issue after it had already been drawn. I didn’t know Howard Mackie, who’d plotted it, but he and Mike must’ve had some disagreement. Mike just said Howard had left the book and didn’t want his name on the story. I wasn’t wild about taking full credit in the printed book, but I wasn’t gonna make up an “Alan Smithee” kind of name, like they do in the movies. I assume Howard got paid the plotting “incentive payment.” I did fully write the backup origin of The Black Panther, though.

With #2, I became the regular writer. There were a couple of fill-in stories, without my knowing about them in advance, and I hated that. But I figured, “It’s a living.” [mutual laughter] The artist was Herb Trimpe, with whom I’d done The Incredible Hulk two decades earlier. But now he was using this Rob Liefeld-influenced style.

JA: I was working with Mike Rockwitz at that time. I was in his office one day and he hands me some color proofs of an issue of FFU and says, “See if you can guess who the artist is.” I looked at

I don’t mean to badmouth Liefeld. His sales record at that time in a commercial-art field speaks for itself. I just personally couldn’t relate to that kind of art, any more than I can now to manga or anime or the Bruce Timm approach. It’s just a matter of taste, I suppose. Still, if I squinted a bit, I could sort of enjoy Herb’s art on that book. It was good super-hero art, but it just went too far for me and at some point it just fell over a cliff. Herb told a good story—that was always his strong point—so I learned to live with the art, because both Herb and I were, at this stage, holding on in the business by our fingernails. The field had changed. Neither of us was a hot young star, and if I was going to keep on working myself, I had to adjust to some extent, too. Luckily, the Thing didn’t look quite as bad, simply because he was grotesque in the first place. [mutual chuckling]

Youngblood: The Source For Herb Trimpe’s New Blood An alternative cover drawn by Rob Liefeld for his Image comic Youngblood #1 (April 1992), after he had first become a super-star at Marvel. Another cover for that issue was seen in A/E #135. [TM & © Rob Liefeld.]

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

67

“Pax Atlantica” Herb Trimpe’s double-spread splash for Fantastic Four Unlimited #6 (June 1994), as inked by at least one of the listed embellishers “LaRosa, Montano, & Imperato.” The F.F. (minus Mr. Fantastic but plus a normal-sized Ant-Man) arrive in a New York City that’s been conquered by The Sub-Mariner’s Atlanteans on an alternate Earth—a reworking of 1963’s classic Fantastic Four Annual. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: We talked earlier about your preference for doing continuing stories vs. stand-alone stories, but when you have 30 or 40 pages to work with rather than 22 or 24, did you find that easier to handle?

THOMAS: Yes. But though the stories might be longer, I wasn’t really able to get any real continuity going, because there’d be regular issues of Fantastic Four coming out in between.

JA: Were you reading the main Fantastic Four title at the time to see what was being done there?

THOMAS: Enough to get by. Maybe Tom DeFalco was still writing it then; he did a much better job than most.

JA: How do you feel this version, in terms of your writing, compared to your FF writing in the past?

THOMAS: I liked doing the series better in the ’70s, because I liked the art more then, and because I was writer/editor and could do what I wanted. Still, I never felt my 1970s Fantastic Four work was all it should’ve been, even though the FF was in many ways my favorite Marvel series as a reader.

JA: When you were doing an extra-length story, how long were the plots you submitted?

THOMAS: I suspect they ran 8 or 10 pages. I wasn’t doing pageby-page, but it was the next thing to it. Which I didn’t like doing. I didn’t feel it was necessary with an artist like Herb, but it was what Marvel wanted, so I did it.

JA: Did you deal with editor’s assistants some of the time or was it almost always the editor himself?

THOMAS: Both, depending on the situation. I didn’t have a problem dealing with editorial assistants. We’ve all been them. If I needed to talk to Mike or Ralph or whoever, there was no problem getting to them. I don’t really remember that much about the Fantastic Four Unlimited stories. I know we brought in different guest stars… The Inhumans, whoever. Sometimes the situations or villains were Mike’s suggestion, sometimes mine. It did bother me that, whenever there was a fill-in story, it wouldn’t have Liefeldstyle art like I was working with… and I kept wishing Herb would be allowed to do things his own way. But I didn’t say that out loud.

JA: Around that time, I was often asked by Marvel to do Image-style inking. Scott Williams may have been the best at it, and he was very good, but it wasn’t my personal style. Sometimes they’d say, “Can you do 10-12 pages over the weekend?” so I’d have to go grab some Image books and try to figure out what the inkers were doing and try to emulate it. Sometimes

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Roy Thomas Talks About His Life As A Comics Freelancer From 1986-1999

Who You Gonna Call? Time Busters!

Dick Giordano’s concept drawing for the Thomas-proposed (and Marvel-optioned) series Time Busters. Roy and Dick hoped that Dick, who until recently had been managing editor of DC Comics, would become the series’ artist. See the interview for a scorecard on the cast. [Heroes TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] This illo first appeared in A/E V3#9, in conjunction with an article on RT’s “lost projects”—but this time, we’ve indulged ourselves by having the image colored by Larry Guidry. Thanks again, buddy!

I was more successful than others, but that’s the way it was at the time.

THOMAS: I remember in the early ’90s, when I was already in South Carolina, the big announcement even hit the newspapers and not just the comics fan press about how several artists, some of whom like Todd McFarlane I knew, had broken away from Marvel to form Image. At the time, I figured that Marvel—as it had when Kirby and Ditko and others had left in the past, including myself, Marv, and others—would take a deep breath and move on and not be affected much. But Image actually made more of a difference than the previous defections, because Image became a major competitor and began to influence the way comics were done.

Kirby didn’t do that when he moved to DC, because Marvel already had his style. Ditko, even less so. But Image really bit into Marvel’s market share for a while. Marvel was no longer all that concerned with DC as a competitor, but they were concerned for a while with Image as a competitor.

JA: Well, they had a good reason to. In fact, I think that ended up

affecting things that happened later to Marvel’s detriment. Think in terms of distribution and things like that. But Marvel always seemed to bounce back, no matter what happened.

THOMAS: Yeah. Even when they went through bankruptcy, they bounced back eventually.

Dick Giordano from a 1980s issue of Comics Interview magazine. Courtesy of David Anthony Kraft.

JA: Right. I lost all my Marvel work when that happened. I went up there, and I had never seen a group of more dispirited people in one place.

THOMAS: I wasn’t up there during that period, so maybe I’m lucky. But I lost my own work there by the end of the ’90s.

Things might’ve worked out differently if I could’ve sold them on one of the many concepts I pushed during that decade. Besides Avengers South, there was—let’s see, I’ve got a stack of them here— there was The Crusaders, which was basically the “1950s Avengers” grouping that I’d conceived, and Don Glut had written, in What If…? [first series] #9… different permutations of my alternate-war Invaders—a science-fiction-oriented revival of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, with more death rays and the like… Untold Tales of the Kree-Skrull War… The World on Fire, aka Marvel: The War Years, a sort of expanded sequel to The Saga of The Sub-Mariner and the Torch follow-up… The Mighty Marvel Monsters, which was a lot like what later came out as that Agents of Atlas series… and a few

“I Felt I Belonged At Marvel!”

things that Jean-Marc Lofficier and I proposed together, such as The Anachronauts, and Dr. Weird, who was to Dr. Strange as War Machine was to Iron Man, and Phalanx, an international group that contained characters like Sunfire, Banshee, American Eagle, Peregrine, Talisman, Darkstar, and a new Spitfire, a descendant of the one from The Invaders. But none of these ever materialized.

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

Near the end, in 1998, when Chris Claremont came back to FREE – online searchable database – FREE Marvel in a high editorial position, I sold Marvel, through him, a www.bailsprojects.com – No password required series called Time Busters, a time-travel group that I proposed to star the original Black Knight, Phantom Eagle, Venus, Kid Colt, and a couple of others, led by Sgt. Nick Fury, all of them snatched from perilous moments in Earth’s past for a role in saving Earth’s future. Chris had me No letters section in this issue, alas—and the substitute Captain Savage for Fury, and we ended up “re:” illo drawn by with a team composed of Savage, Thundra, the Shane Foley shows who Rawhide Kid, Venus, Phantom Eagle, Black Knight, and took up all the room— a new female character, The Black Panthress, aka and we don’t mean Pantha. I was paid for developing a proposal for a 12Captain Ego or Alter Ego! Shane has adapted issue limited series to start out—but then suddenly Marie Severin’s cover Chris was gone and nobody else wanted to hear from cartoon, and added our Time Busters. I was always wild about the name, which merry “maskots” on his had been inspired by the old Ziff-Davis comic Space own, while Randy Busters.

Sargent has added the Jim Amash’s interview—with its discussion of Roy Thomas’ Marvel Conan and Marvel/Excelsior work in the 1990s, as well as his scripting in that decade for DC, Topps, Cross Plains, Millennium, Tekno (almost), and one or two others—will be concluded six months from now, in Alter Ego #139.

cavortin’ colors.

Thanks, both! [Alter Ego hero TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas – costume designed by Ron Harris; Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly – created by Biljo White.]

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Dr. Amy K. Nyberg

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

71

The Concluding Chapter Of The 1998 Study On Comics Censorship

By DR. AMY KISTE NYBERG

A/E

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: This issue brings to a close the reprinting of the main text of her landmark history of comic book censorship, whose chapters have previously appeared in Alter Ego #123-128, 130, & 133-135. As we’ve noted before: Seal of Approval is “footnoted” in the MLA (Modern Library Association] style which lists book, article, or author name, plus page numbers, between parentheses in the main text: e.g., “(Hart 134-156)” refers to pp. 154-156 of whichever work by an author or editor named Hart is listed in Seal’s bibliography (which will be printed in an issue or two, to encourage further reading). When the parentheses contain only page numbers, it’s because the other pertinent information is printed in the text almost immediately preceding the note.

young minds. Protection of children made a strong case for both community and political action. In cities across the United States, decency campaigns organized by church groups, civic organizations, and women’s groups targeted local retailers. Threats of a boycott were usually enough to encourage shop owners to remove materials deemed offensive. Politicians, too, found the comic book crusade a worthy cause and launched investigations at the state and federal level, threatening to pass legislation censoring comic books. These investigations accomplished little in the way of legislation, but they quite effectively generated enough negative publicity to force the comic book publishers into action.

Once again, we have retained nearly all usages and spellings and capitalizations from the original work, which can still be obtained from its publisher, the University Press of Mississippi, at www.upress.sate.ms.us. Our thanks again to Dr. M. Thomas Inge, under whose general editorship the volume was originally published in 1998—and who aided us greatly in obtaining permission for our reprinting—and to William Biggins and Vijah Shah, acquisitions editors past and present of the UPM. In our own captions, which may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Dr. Nyberg or of the UPM, we have reverted to our own house style. Thanks to Brian K. Morris for a retyping assist.

Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham played a pivotal role in focusing national attention on comic books and juvenile delinquency.

Wertham brought to the crusade a lifelong interest in social influences on violent behavior, suggesting that intervention at the social, not the individual, level was the most effective way to deal with problems such as juvenile delinquency. Far from being a naive social scientist with a simplistic causeand-effect model of media

The previous chapter brought the history of comics censorship and the Comics Code Authority up through the institution of a new and less restrictive Code in 1989, plus a general survey of the field through the latter 1990s, just before the book was published. There follows [1998] Dr. Nyberg’s observations concerning the relevance of the Code as of 1998...

Conclusion

The Significance Of The Code Today [1998]

F

rom the beginning, the comic book controversy was constructed around children. For educators and librarians, the comic book was a threat to adult authority over children’s reading and their leisure time; after the war, the comic book became a threat to adult authority in maintaining law and order. In both instances, the child audience was justification for taking action against comic books, as well as other mass media.

Even with a lack of evidence proving that mass media sex and violence had harmful effects on children, common sense dictated that a steady diet of such material simply could not be good for

“Little Lulu, I Love You-Lu Just The Same!”

In the wake of the United States’ action, some other countries enacted their own codes—as per the above Brazilian Little Lulu reprint, whose code seal was distinctly modeled after the American one. Thanks to George Hagenauer. [© the respective copyright holders.]

72

The 1998 Study On Comic Censorship By Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg

For What It’s Wertham (Left:) An ad/plug for the ACMP (Association of Comic Magazine Publishers) group’s Comics Code and its seal, of 1948; it appeared in various comic books of the period. This group was discussed in the chapter of Nyberg’s book reprinted in A/E #125. Thanks to Frank Motler.

(Above:) No concluding summary of a book about comics censorship would be complete without an image of Dr. Frederic Wertham, whose late1940s/early-’50s articles, 1954 Senate subcommittee appearance, and book Seduction of the Innocent (also 1954) played a monumental part in the events that led to the founding of the Comics Magazine Association of America and the Comics Code Authority. This caricature is from the guttertrash website. [© the respective copyright holders.]

effects, Wertham fits more into the tradition of the Frankfurt School and its critique of mass culture. In fact, Wertham dismissed social science methodology, instead developing the “clinical method” of taking detailed case histories, which he believed was the only way of truly understanding the longitudinal impact of media effects.

Because his medical colleagues rejected his call for the development of social psychiatry, he took his campaign for social reform to the public, capitalizing on the comic book controversy as a way of furthering his agenda for addressing issues of violence in society.

This revisionist history of Wertham should not be misinterpreted as an attempt to glorify his actions. Despite his efforts to frame the debate over comic books as a mental health issue, the legislation he pushed for was clearly censorship. In addition, he used comic books as a way to advance his social agenda, recognizing that a medium perceived by the public as catering to children—one that had little legitimacy as a literary or artistic form—would make an easy target. Most of the arguments he made about comic books and violence could have been applied to film or television, but those media were much less vulnerable to attack. By the time he wrote Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham made no attempt at neutrality. His loathing of the comic book medium and the industry that produced it was evident in his writing, and he skillfully manipulated public opinion with carefully selected anecdotal material and examples. But it is important to recognize that much of the condemnation of Wertham has been based on erroneous assumptions about his views and his methodology.

The adoption of a comics code and the appointment of a “czar” to oversee its implementation and enforcement was, in Wertham’s eyes, a victory for the comic book industry. He was right. The code proved to be an effective public relations move, silencing most of the critics without substantially changing the structure of the industry. Modeled after the film code, the comics code targeted all material that could possibly be considered offensive, going beyond the regulation of crime and horror comics to mandate that comics should reflect dominant American values. The main impact of the code, beyond restricting the type of material that could be published, was that it forced the reorganization of the industry.

Publishers of the crime and horror comics restricted or outlawed under the new code either had to adapt or to go out of business, and many did fold. The major problem faced by the survivors had less to do with the code and more to do with increasing competition for children’s leisure time from television and with a crisis brought about by antitrust action against the industry’s major distributor. Many scholars have argued that the code nearly destroyed the comic book industry. This simply is not true. The comics code, along with changing business conditions, resulted in a number of established companies, along with the more marginal publishers, closing their doors, but there was never any real danger that comic books would cease to exist.

Had the industry chosen to ride out the controversy over content, it is possible that much of the fervor over comics would have died down as the public turned its attention to other matters.

But such defiance would have been difficult under the circum-

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

73

stances. William Gaines’ proposal to hire researchers in an effort to prove scientifically that there were no ill effects from reading comic books seems logical, but unfortunately, such evidence most likely would have been dismissed by the public in much the same way that educators and parents rejected earlier academic research that demonstrated comic books had little effect on reading development in children.

Further, comic book distribution depended on the goodwill of retailers. While publishers might have been able to insulate themselves from their critics and continue to publish what they wished, the retailers were on the front lines. They were the targets of boycotts and were subject to arrest under any laws that were passed making the sale of objectionable comics to minors illegal, even if such arrests were eventually thrown out on constitutional grounds. Publishers were justified in pursuing self-regulation as a solution to the comic book controversy.

However, the code could have acknowlDoom, Gloom, & Goom edged that not all comics should be (Left:) The Quality line’s Web of Evil was a horror comic book that featured the work of Reed Crandall, Jack suitable for children. Had the Motion Cole, and numerous other talented artists. This is the cover of the first issue, cover-dated Nov. 1952. The Picture Association of America code been entire run is currently being reprinted by PS Artbooks; check out their website for information. Artist in place in the 1950s, rather than the uncertain. [© the respective copyright holders.] earlier Film Production Code, the comics (Right:) In the Comic Code’s wake, there were still monsters, but they owed more to King Kong and the code might have been much different. The recent Godzilla movie than to Dracula and Frankenstein. The cover of the Timely (future Marvel) group’s code was literally thrown together almost Tales of Suspense #15 (March 1959) was penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Dick Ayers. Incidentally, two overnight, with little thought about the issues later, Goom would have a son… name of Googam. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.] long-range impact such a document would have. A more thoughtful, less became a thing of the past under the new code regulations hurried approach to the problem might have resulted in a more (Williams 66). Instead, the genre shifted to detective mysteries or visionary structure for the code based on the idea there should be focused on police stories patterned after popular television series different rating categories depending on the intended audience.

(Sabin 166).

Such a code would have paved the way for the comic book It is difficult to say what would have happened to crime and industry to cater to its child audience while at the same time horror comics if there had never been a comics code. By the time considering ways it could expand its market to encompass older the code went into effect, sales of crime comics had already begun adolescents and young adults to help stem the loss of its audience to decline. It is possible that horror comics, then at their peak, to television. would have decreased in popularity as well, to be replaced by Instead, the code represented a tacit agreement with the critics. other genres—a pattern typical in popular culture in general, as The lasting legacy of the comics code has been the comic book evidenced by the rise and fall of the western in film and on industry’s acquiescence to defining the comic book as a form of television, for example. In fact, horror comics enjoyed a brief resurentertainment solely for children and the reinforcement of that gence during the 1970s after the first revision of the code, but this perception in the minds of the public. Such limitations, many have resurgence was short lived. While the Silver Age heroes stepped argued, were a major setback in the development of the comic into the vacuum left by the departure of the horror comics, their book. This argument that the comics code had a negative effect on rebirth was due as much to the rise of a new generation of artists the creative growth of the medium is more difficult to assess than raised on the Golden Age superheroes and their desire to re-create the code’s influence on the industry. While the focus of this study the characters of their youth as it was to the demise of the horror has been the code’s impact on publishing, no discussion of the genre. It is likely that the coming of the new superhero titles would code would be complete without an attempt to address the issue of have displaced many of the surviving horror and crime comics. the comics code’s effect on the comic book itself. Even without a The biggest impact that the code has had on the content of systematic study of pre-code and post-code comic books, it is comic books was the maintenance of the superhero comic as the obvious that adoption of a self-regulatory code changed comic dominant genre in the years following the code’s adoption. The book content. Gone were the gruesome horror comics. In their code discourages experimentation with its strict prohibitions on place, historians note, were stories featuring the supernatural, subject matter; as a result, the superhero comic, the staple of the emphasizing suspense over terror (Benton, Horror Comics 53-55; industry, is reworked in endless variations that seldom pose a Sabin 165). With vampires and werewolves banned under the code, challenge to the code or to public perception of the medium writers and artists began to borrow the giant monsters of the (Williams 66). Another factor, of course, is that the superhero has movies, such as Godzilla and The Blob (Benton, Horror Comics 57). been a successful (and profitable) formula, and established While the code did not forbid crime comics, the urban crime story

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The 1998 Study On Comic Censorship By Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg

Three To Get Ready…

Three of the early successes in the super-hero revival, from three different companies: (Left:) The Flash #105 (Feb-March 1959), with art by Carmine Infantino & Joe Giella, was really the first issue of the revived series, picking up the numbering of the Flash Comics title that had been canceled in 1949. The new Flash had previously appeared in four issues of Showcase between 1956 and 1958, as DC made a slow and uncertain re-entry into a field that it had abandoned years before except for comics related to Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. [TM & © DC Comics.]

(Center:) The cover of The Adventures of The Fly #1 (Aug. 1959) is credited to the team of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby—which had actually disbanded a few years earlier. But when Archie Comics turned to Simon to create and edit two new super-hero series, he naturally brought in Kirby as the primary penciler. The slightly earlier Secret Life of Private Strong, a revival of The Shield, lasted only two issues, but The Fly caught on… although first Jack, then Joe, quickly bailed on the series. [TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.] (Right:) The rump of Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics brought out the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby brainchild Fantastic Four in mid-1961. Issue #4 (May 1962) reintroduced The Sub-Mariner, from the 1939-55 period—as if to signal that the company was going to make a serious run in the new super-hero sweepstakes.

Pencils by Jack Kirby; inks by Sol Brodsky. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

companies prefer to remain with the tried-and-true rather than take risks with more innovative material. This fact is typical of media producers in general, not just comic book publishers.

view, because individual publishers—as well as writers—are fearful of departing from the accepted norm lest they be held up to scorn or attack and suffer economic loss” (7).

Much more damaging to the creative development of the comic book than the restrictions on crime and horror comics was the code’s insistence that all comics published adhere to a rigid value structure that forbid any challenge to authority. Under the 1954 comics code, there was a unified view in the world of comic books, one in which social institutions and authority figures were always benign in their concern with upholding traditional values and in which rebellion against the “establishment” was nearly impossible.

Without the freedom to question the status quo, comic book content remained for the most part quite innocuous. This innocuousness was not an issue with most critics, who rejected the notion that comic books could contribute to any meaningful exchange of ideas. One of the few groups to speak out for the potential of comic books was the American Civil Liberties Union. They actually favored legislation over industry regulation (ACLU 6-8). The group argued in a pamphlet published in 1955 that postpublication punishment based on laws at least allowed for the due process of law and a jury that reflected a community’s taste. Prior censorship, in the form of a prepublication review process, concentrated power in the hands of the few with no legal recourse. Industry codes, the ACLU argued, inevitably have the effect of inhibiting the free expression of ideas: “Collective adherence to a single set of principles in a code has the effect of limiting different points of

But publishers in the 1950s had little interest in protecting comic books as a medium of self-expression. Their motivations were primarily economic. Since the beginning, comic book publishing had focused on production, not creation. In the early days of comic books, companies did not hire their own writers and artists.

Instead, they contracted with a number of shops set up to provide creative services to the publishers. Writers and artists churned out pages of material in a factory system in which each task, from drawing the figures and the backgrounds to inking to lettering the word balloons, was carried out by someone different. There was no creator controlling the product. The goal was quantity, not quality (McAllister 59). Even after comic book companies dispensed with the services of such “shops” and began to assemble in-house staffs and later to contract the work out to free-lance artists, the collaborative nature of production precluded any recognition of the individual roles in the creative process. The publishers owned the rights to the characters and kept the finished artwork. Much as the film industry had resisted the star system, the comic book industry wanted its creative talent to be largely interchangeable. As a result, there was no creative “voice” to speak up against the adoption of a comics code in the mid-1950s.

This situation began to change with the advent of the direct distribution system, supported by an increasingly influential fan

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

market. In fact, the rise of the direct market has had far more impact on both the creative development of comic books and on industry practices than the code has ever had. As Roger Sabin notes, the institution of direct sales changed relationships between the industry and the creators and between the industry and the fans (66-68). Independent publishers, in order to lure popular artists and writers away from the larger companies, began to offer royalties and copyright control. This, in turn, allowed top-selling creators to break free of the work-for-hire system, using their new bargaining power to push for greater flexibility in their choice and presentation of subject matter and to experiment with new techniques, such as painting rather than drawing both the cover and interior artwork. The fans, who had been able to build collections of comics through the purchase of the unsold “back copies” that became part of the inventory of the specialty shops, began to parlay their hobby into an investment. They searched for old comics in top condition to complete their collections and began to speculate on which newer comics would increase in value, buying multiple copies of comic books. The industry responded to what Sabin terms this new “fan capitalism” by producing limited editions of comics with special covers and other gimmicks to encourage multiple-copy buying. These fan-collectors became the driving force behind comic book publishing, creating a boom in the 1980s.

75

such an agreement with DC Comics. Capital City Distribution sued both Marvel and DC under the Wisconsin Fair Dealership law, settling out of court for an undisclosed amount, but eventually bowed to the inevitable and closed its doors. In 1997, Marvel shut down Heroes World, leaving Diamond Distribution with a nearmonopoly in direct-market distribution. There are both economic and creative ramifications from this arrangement. The discounts offered by Diamond are not nearly as large now that there is less competition for business, and many have predicted that a number of specialty stores operating on an already slim profit margin will eventually be driven out of business. Perhaps less obvious is the impact on the creative growth of the medium. There are, operating in the margins of the industry, individuals who self-publish. Until now, these individuals could sometimes persuade a distributor to offer their titles through the direct market, even though sales would be insignificant compared to the titles published by the larger companies. One example is Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a title that began as a small self-published comic but went on to become one of the industry’s best known success stories. While one could argue that Eastman and Laird’s success had little impact on the creative

As noted in the last chapter, these changes led the major publishers to revamp the comics code in 1989 and for the first time to acknowledge that there was a place in the market for the noncode comic. The major publishers still supported the code and submitted most of their titles for prepublication review, so much of the output of the industry was still governed by the code. Shifting sales of comics from newsstand distribution to specialty shops significantly weakened the enforcement mechanism of the code, however, since distribution and sales were no longer tied to compliance with the code standards. The result is that today, the industry’s output is divided into two distinct categories: on the one hand, code-approved comics that adhere to strict regulations concerning the use of language, nudity, sexual situations, and excessive violence, designed for an audience that fits with the public perception of what a comic book is; and on the other, noncode comic books, many produced by small, independent publishers, that seek to challenge the way in which the medium has been defined.

While the direct market may have been good for the aesthetic development of comic books, allowing them to escape the constraints of the code, encouraging experimentation with new techniques and subject matter, and giving the creators more control over content and form, the benefits for the industry are less clear, for two reasons. First, in 1995 the distribution system that had served the market so well in the 1970s and 1980s went through a major reorganization that sent shock waves through the industry; and second, there was a backlash by fans against what were increasingly perceived as manipulative marketing techniques.

The direct market was served by a number of distributors, including the two major companies, Diamond Distributors, based in Maryland, and Capital City Comics, located in Wisconsin. In December 1994, Marvel announced it was acquiring the thirdlargest distributor, Heroes World Distribution Company, and shortly after that, decided that Heroes World would distribute Marvel products exclusively. Since the distribution of Marvel comics made up a significant portion of the business for distributors, there was an immediate scramble among the remaining distributors to sign other publishers to exclusive contracts.

Diamond Distributors announced in April 1995 that it had reached

“Hey Kids! Look, No Code!”

Amy Nyberg’s book was published in 1998, but the same 1989 version of the Code was in effect when Marvel publisher Bill Jemas decided to issue X-Force #116 (cover date May 2001) without going through the Code Authority. Cover art by Mike Allred. Thanks to Sean Howe.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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The 1998 Study On Comic Censorship By Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg

growth of the medium, it does demonstrate the possibilities when non-mainstream material is allowed access to an audience. But Diamond has little incentive to offer such marginal titles to its retail outlets, effectively shutting out the smaller creator from the distribution system. While comic book conventions and mail-order distribution are alternatives for these publishers, wider dissemination of their work is nearly impossible without support from the distributors.

The second factor, the fan backlash, has resulted in a decease in sales on titles whose circulation numbers were artificially inflated by the marketing gimmicks employed by publishers. This downturn has renewed the industry’s interest in opening up new markets for comic books. One attempt to market outside fandom was the “creation” of the graphic novel (Sabin 86). In the late 1980s, the publication of three titles—Maus, The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen—caught the fancy of the mainstream press, and journalists unfamiliar with the industry heralded them “as constituting a new and historically unique trend” (93).

Publishers capitalized on this notion of a “new breed” of Last But Not Least comics to cultivate a new outlet for comics: bookstores (94).

The last issues of Amazing Spider-Man and Batman to sport the Comics Code seal, nearly But as comics attempted to make the transition from a decade apart were: “comics culture” to “book culture,” the “graphic” element (Left) The Amazing Spider-Man #35 (1999 series) (Aug. 2001), with cover art by J. Scott of the graphic novel was left behind. As Sabin notes, Campbell & Tim Townsend. This issue was also referred to as “#473” as a continuation of graphic novels were reviewed in book sections, writers the original 1963 series. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.] were profiled rather than artists, and the quality of writing (Right:) Batman #705 (Feb. 2011), with cover art by Tony S. Daniel. Its Code seal was was held in higher esteem than the quality of artwork. In rendered in negative. The title was discontinued after #713, when the “New 52” relaunch short, the co-option of comic books by literary interests was begun. [© DC Comics.] was doomed to failure because, as Sabin writes, “it served to remake comics in prose literature’s image” (247). The find a way to make the comic book more “mainstream.” The comic bookstores’ interest waned and graphic novels began to disappear book will never again be a “mass” medium in the truest sense of from shelves. the word, but enhancing its visibility outside of the limited audience that now exists is necessary if new readers are to be introIf the graphic novel is not the solution, what is? And what does duced to the medium. There are risks involved, however, in all this have to do with the comics code? The answer to these two moving beyond the specialized audience and reaching out to new questions is related. Many of the outlets for comics in the 1950s, readers. For example, in 1989, Joe Queenan wrote an article for the such as the corner drug store or grocery store, are gone, replaced New York Times Magazine titled “Drawing on the Dark Side.” In his by chain stores that have little interest in handling a large volume article, Queenan noted that while journalists have written reams of comic book about the new “avant-garde” maturity of comic books, “what business. Many seems to have escaped attention is that over the last decade, comics involved in have forsaken campy repartee and outlandishly byzantine plots for comic book a steady diet of remorseless violence” (32). He wrote that a host of publishing and superhero titles that are generally unknown to the public but “are sales agree, far more popular within the comic book subculture” offer heavy however, that doses of sex and violence (34). He suggested: “In many ways, the the comic book comics industry seems to be playing with the same fire that nearly industry must destroyed it in the early 1950s” (79). expand beyond its core fan audience. There has been a lot of debate about the best way to achieve this goal, but whatever method is used, the industry must

If the comic book becomes more visible, it also will be more vulnerable to such outside criticism. The adoption of a new television rating system by that industry in 1997 after government pressure, stemming from protests about violence and sex on television, demonstrates that the issue of media content is an enduring one. The comics code, while it has helped perpetuate the idea that comics are a children’s medium, also protects the industry from a public that perceives comics as strictly juvenile fare by continuing to designate certain titles as appropriate for readers of all ages. Retaining the comics code, in some form, is a defensive

The Voice Of The Turtles The black-&-white independent comic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 (1984) was the start of a series that became a true phenomenon—but Amy Nyberg questions whether it could have existed in the wake of one company having a near-monopoly of distribution after 1997. Art by Kevin Eastman. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code

mechanism that publishers cannot yet afford to abandon; until the comic book is able to re-create itself as a legitimate art form and change the public perception of it as juvenile entertainment, the seal of approval will remain a necessity.

This concludes the text proper of Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code by Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg. The illustrated index and bibliography will run in near-future issues.

ADDENDUM: THE COMICS CODE POST-1998: The online Wikipedia entry on the “Comics Code Authority” seems fact-based, so we quote from it here to bring the story of the Code full circle, albeit in brief: “Most new publishers to emerge [during the 2000s] did not join the CCA, regardless of whether their content confirmed to its standards. DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and other CCA sponsors began publishing comics intended for adult audiences, without the CCA seal, and comics labeled “for mature readers” under imprints such as DC’s Vertigo and Marvel’s Epic Comics, and DC Comics imprints Helix and WildStorm, were not submitted to the CCA. In the 1990s, Milestone Media (published through DC Comics) submitted all its books to the CCA, but published them regardless of the ruling, placing the seal only on issues that received Code approval.

“In 2001, Marvel Comics withdrew from the CCA in favor of its own ratings system designating appropriate age groups; in 2010 Bongo Comics [created primarily to publish comics related to the TV series The Simpsons] discontinued using the Code without any announcements regarding its abandonment.

“The CMAA [Comics Magazine Association of America], at some

77

point in the 2000s, was managed by the trade-organization management firm the Kellen Company, which ceased its involvement in 2009. In 2010, some publishers, including Archie, placed the seal on [their] comics without submitting them to the CMAA. Archie Comics President Mike Pellerito stated that the code did not affect his company the way it did the others as ‘we aren’t about to start stuffing bodies into refrigerators.’

“In January 2011, DC Comics announced that it would discontinue participation, adopting a rating system similar to Marvel’s. The company noted that it submitted comics for approval through December 2010, but would not say to whom they were submitted. A day later, Archie Comics, the only other publisher still participating in the Code, announced it was also discontinuing it, rendering the Code defunct.

A Baby Seal As of 2011, the Comics Code was officially “defunct.” But—perhaps under arrangement with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which is reported to have acquired the “intellectual property rights to the Comics Code seal”—you can now wear a T-shirt sporting the seal! [© the respective copyright holders.]

“The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund acquired from the defunct CMAA the intellectual property rights to the Comics Code seal.”

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79

80

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Kid Stuff!

by Michael T. Gilbert

O me!

ur esteemed editor, Roy William Thomas, Jr., was born on November 22, 1940. Amazingly, that means that Roy the Boy turns 75 next month. Well, he still looks like a kid to

Regular readers are no doubt aware that Roy began his remarkable comic book career writing and editing (and even illustrating!) fanzines—most notably for Jerry Bails’ original 1961 AlterEgo. When he became Alter Ego’s editor, Roy kept up a lively correspondence with several comics pros, most notably writers Gardner Fox and Otto Binder and DC editor Julie Schwartz. His contacts with Charlton led to selling his first scripts to that company, “The Second Trojan War” in Son of Vulcan #50 (Jan. 1966), and “The Eye of Horus” in Blue Beetle, Vol. 3, #54 (Feb. 1966). Both stories sat around for a bit, so Roy’s first published story, “Whom Can I Turn To?,” appeared in Modeling With Millie #44 with a cover date of December 1965. But the two Charlton stories were his first professional sales.

Back in the early 1960s, it was extremely rare for a fan to break into the pro ranks. For the most part, mainstream companies just weren’t hiring. But Charlton was a bit more fan-friendly than the norm. At one point, they even challenged fandom to see if they could do better than their regular writers. Roy responded—and caught the brass ring. The cover of Son of Vulcan #50 proclaimed this young tyro’s victory: “ATTENTION FANZINE READERS!!! Charlton’s challenge has been answered... The story in this issue was by one of YOU!!!

DON’T MISS IT! “One of YOU!!!” makes is sound like Charlton thought comic fans were some weird species, doesn’t it?

No Contest!

(Above:) The blurb on Son of Vulcan #50 announced Roy’s winning entry of the Charlton Challenge contest—only Charlton had never actually announced the “contest” in any of their comics!

Pencils by Bill Fraccio, inks by Tony Tallarico. [Son of Vulcan TM & © DC Comics.]

A One-Two Punch—Of Sorts (Left:) Roy’s first two pro script sales appeared in Charlton’s Son of Vulcan #50 (Jan. 1966; titled Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds until issue #49), and Blue Beetle, Vol. 3, #54 (Feb. 1966). Art by Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico. As it happened, both were the final issues of those series. Was Charlton trying to tell Roy something? [Son of Vulcan & Blue Beetle TM & © DC Comics.]

Kid Stuff!

81

Oddly enough, I could find no Charlton challenge actually printed in any of their comics. Perplexed, I went straight to the source, and asked Roy about the mysterious Charlton contest. He explained that: “Editor Pat Masulli sent out letters to me and a few other fanzine editors saying Charlton would be interested in seeing if any fandom scripts could measure up for Blue Beetle or Son of Vulcan. We were supposed to publicize the thing, which I suppose was a ‘challenge’ of a sort... but of course A/E was only published a time or two a year, and wasn’t a newszine anyway... so I just wrote a Son of Vulcan script myself, I think over the very next weekend, and sent it in... and Masulli bought it, for $4 a page, and requested me to try my hand at a Blue Beetle... which I duly did, and he bought.

“Tom Fagan and maybe Dave Kaler also sent scripts, and at least one of them was drawn up, but too late, because my issues turned out to be the last of each series. I was 24 when I wrote the stories in the spring of 1965... and just turning 25 about the time Son of Vulcan #50 came out. Dick Giordano had become editor by the time the issue was published, but he wasn’t the editor when I sold the stories.”

And that’s how Roy snagged his first comics job at the tender age of 24. And how typical of Charlton to proudly announce a winner to a contest they never informed their readership about!

Of course, Roy wasn’t comics’ only boy wonder. The field often attracted young talent, some not even out of their teens. Talent like....

Anthony Newley, Please Note!

(Above:) The splash to Roy’s first story in terms of publication, from Modeling With Millie #44 (Dec. 1965). His title took that of a popular song of the day by Anthony Newley—and corrected the grammar. Well, Roy had till recently been an English teacher. Pencils by Stan Goldberg; inks by Frank Giacoia. [TM & © 2015 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Old Pro (Above:) Roy the Boy at the 1966 Academy Con in New York City.

[Photo © 2015 Maggie Thompson.]

I’ve Got My Eye On You! (Left:) And here’s the splash to Roy’s Blue Beetle debut (V3#54), drawn by Bill Fraccio & Tony Tallarico. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Gray Morrow Cartoonist Gray Morrow (March 7 1934 - Nov. 6, 2001) enjoyed a stellar career in the field, most notably his exceptional work for Warren’s Creepy and Eerie, as well as top-notch art for DC, Archie, and Marvel. But everyone has to start somewhere. In Morrow’s case, it was an art contest that he won in 1950, at age sixteen. As you can see by the Rex-Striker page on the right, even then Morrow was a remarkably accomplished artist.

Gray’s newspaper strip seems inspired by adventure strip icons like Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon) and George Wunder (who took over Terry from Caniff).

In keeping with the syndicated tradition, Gray himself drew a number of famous newspaper strips at one time or another, including Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby, Prince Valiant, and Secret Agent Corrigan. At the time of his death in 2001, he had also drawn the Tarzan strip for almost 20 years. Next up is...

Imperious “Rex” (Above:) Eleventh-grader Gray Morrow, age 16, won an art contest with this, er... striking Rex-Striker page, circa 1950. (Left:) We’ve even got the documentation to prove it! [© Estate of Gray Morrow.]

Gray Morrow at age 15 or 16, from the 1949 North Side High, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Yearbook.

Kid Stuff!

83

Neal Adams Neal Adams (born June 6, 1941) was another kid who made good. Even as a teenager, Neal seemed driven to perfection, learning his craft by drawing hundreds of pages of comics in his spare time. Late-’50s DC comics particularly inspired him. Adams’ amateur pages reflect his admiration for the company that produced Mystery in Space and G.I. Combat. The talented teen drew sample war stories in which he channeled Bob Kanigher, Joe Kubert, and Mort Drucker. Neal’s science-fiction influences were equally diverse, as seen by the Adam Strange page on the right, featuring art inspired by Wood, Kane, Infantino, Heath, and Anderson. It’s hard to believe this highly sophisticated page was drawn when Neal was only sixteen years old.

Indeed, despite some awkward drawing in spots, Adams’ early art eclipsed the work of many professional DC artists.

Unfortunately, the industry was in a slump and they weren’t hiring. But Neal persisted, and years later editor Bob Kanigher finally gave Adams the green light to illustrate his first DC story in Our Army at War #182 (July 1967). By then Neal was already a seasoned pro, having drawn stories for Archie and Warren publications, not to mention illustrating the Ben Casey newspaper comic strip, beginning when he was 21.

At DC, Neal soon became one of their most acclaimed artists.

Better yet, Neal finally got to draw “Adam Strange” professionally on the superb Strange Adventures cover below. How cool is that?

And, last but not least, we have that talented youngster...

Strange Ventures (Above:) “Adam Strange” sample page drawn by 16-year-old Neal Adams, circa 1959. He drew the feature professionally a decade later. (Below left:) Neal’s cover for Strange Adventures #218 (May 1969). [Adam Strange & SA cover TM & © DC Comics; other art elements © Neal Adams.]

Neal Adams in 1966, from The Cartoonist Cookbook. [© The Newspaper Council, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Tom Sutton Tom Sutton (April 15, 1937-May 1, 2002) took a different route to comic stardom.

After graduating from high school in 1955 at age 17, Tom joined the U.S. Air Force. Shortly afterward, he began drawing a syndicated comic strip, F.E.A.F. Dragon (Far East Air Force Dragon) for a Looks To Us More Like Ghastly Graham Ingels! military audience.

A spooky Tom Sutton Johnny Craig strip for April 28,1958. The series, partly inspired by Frank Robbins’ comic strip Johnny Hazard, Later, while stationed appeared in the Stars and Stripes armed-services newspaper. [© Estate of Tom Sutton.] in Japan, Tom wrote and drew a new story). He also drew a wide variety of stories for DC, Marvel, and adventure strip, Johnny Craig (its name inspired by the famous EC Charlton until his death in 2002. artist), for the military paper Stars and Stripes. He continued And that’s it for now. Next issue: We continue our theme as we drawing Craig until leaving the military in 1959—though not reprint your humble scribe’s first published comic book story from before killing off his hero in the final strips! Tom’s first pro comic 1971, when he was a mere lad of nineteen. book work appeared in Warren’s Eerie #11 and Marvel’s Kid Colt Outlaw #137, both dated September 1967.

Till next time...

Tom soon became a cult favorite, drawing numerous stories for Warren’s Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella (including the first “Vampy”

Just Sutton Around The newspaper article at left claims that, as a Drury High School student, “Sutton was earning soft drink and frappe money by illustrating comics for Weird Science Fiction, Vault of Terror, and Starman at $45 for an eight-page story....” Huh?! Who fact-checked this story, the Rolling Stone? From the Oct. 30th, 1958, Massachusetts North Adams Transcript newspaper. [© North Adams Transcript.]

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The World’s Mightiest Kudos To The World’s Mightiest Mortal Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

H

oly Moley! It’s been 75 years since Bill Parker and C.C. Beck’s Captain Marvel first appeared in Fawcett’s funny-books, taking the comics industry—and the hearts and fancy of millions—by thunderstorm. The amiable hero’s faithful followers during the Golden Age had been struck by lightning, and all that was needed was to summon one single wish-fulfilling, call-to-action word to bolt them into a remarkable realm where practically everything was possible. Shazam!

To help celebrate the World’s Mightiest Mortal’s Big-75, I called together my fellow Captain Marvel Club members and presented them with a seemingly impossible task: put on paper (keyboard) one specific Fawcett-era “Captain Marvel” story that left a lasting impression on them… one that exemplifies the very things they feel made the original CM unique, exceptional, and memorable.

The review of lesser-known “CM” stories was encouraged, but not mandatory. There was only one ground rule: no one would take on Mr. Mind and the Monster Society of Evil. It was agreed that we all loved the unprecedented 25-chapter serial, and that what had already been said about it previously in Alter Ego was sufficient.

And now, let’s wander down to the abandoned subway station where it all began…. —PCH.

The Great Comic Book Hero It was 1965.

President Kennedy was gone. The Beatles were here. The Cuban invasion had failed. The British invasion had taken over the American rock ’n’ roll charts.

The second New York comics convention was taking place, with over 200 attendees expected. Fanzines, largely the only way to learn about comic books and their superheroes, found their printed mimeographed circulations reaching as high as 500 in some cases. (The photo-offset Alter Ego had hit the 1000 mark.) “Internet” was a term that could only have been used in doubles tennis, if anywhere.

The history of comics was like a buried treasure to us comic book readers of the Silver Age… lost and irretrievable without a key.

But suddenly, everything changed! The mystical key to the glorious past of our beloved super-heroes appeared within the grasp of every fan. It was a book. It was written by a man named Jules Feiffer. And it was called The Great Comic Book Heroes. And it was good.

Under The “J”—75! Bingo!

Frequent FCA contributor artist Jay Piscopo helps us commemorate 75 years of Captain Marvel with this thunderous tribute piece. [Shazam hero & Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics; other art © 2015 Jay Piscopo.]

At last, the vault swung open, and we fans not only were treated to an anecdotal history of our favorite pastime (or, in my case, “full-time”), we were also presented with full-color reprints of vintage comic book stories featuring the great first generation of super-heroes!

We learned to our abject astonishment that Superman looked

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nothing like the way the character was being drawn in 1965. And there was a super-hero who made bad guys drop dead! And before there was The Human Torch in Fantastic Four, there was The Human Torch who wasn’t in any “Fantastic Four” and wasn’t even “Human.” And there was this guy called “The Spirit,” whose comic book tales were completely unlike any super-hero stories we were reading in 1965.

And it was within these sacred, hallowed pages that, at age 14, I first met Captain Marvel. This is the specific Captain Marvel story that therefore left a lasting impression on me… and it was only one page!

As Jules Feiffer explained in so many words: once upon a time, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman. And Harry Donenfeld, brand new publisher of DC Comics, said it was good. A year and a half later, rival publisher Fawcett Publications published Bill Parker and C.C. Beck’s Captain Marvel, and Harry Donenfeld said it was not good. He deemed it too close to Superman and launched what would become a 13-year-long lawsuit to stop Captain Marvel from ever being published again.

The case was finally settled out of court and Fawcett agreed to cease publication of Captain Marvel and his family—forever.

And so, fans in 1965 heard of Captain Marvel, and read in fanzines that he was the only super-hero to have outsold Superman, but we never read his stories, as they had simply disappeared, the way Cuban cigars had in America circa 1962.

Only the pleading of a man of the esteemed stature of social cartoonist Jules Feiffer could get DC Comics to “unsettle the settlement” sufficiently to allow him to reprint a “Captain Marvel” adventure in his book purely for historical and educational purposes. And he did it… with the legal caveat that he could only reprint one page out of the 13-year run of “The Big Red Cheese,” who had appeared in such comic book titles as Whiz Comics, Captain Marvel Adventures, Special Edition Comics, The Marvel Family, Captain Marvel Jr., Master Comics, Wow Comics, Xmas Comics, Gift Comics, America’s Greatest Comics, Fawcett’s Funny Animals, and even George Pal’s Puppetoons.

But that one page was more than just an eye-opener. It was the tease that set me on a quest to read every Captain Marvel comic book ever made, to learn the entire history of this character and Fawcett Publications, and to meet the people who were responsible for it all. And I did. But that’s another, longer story.

On this one page in 1965, I learned Cap first appeared in a comic book called Whiz Comics… that Captain Marvel was just a plain young boy like me who was granted magic super-powers by a guy who looked like I thought Moses looked like, who had a magic word “Shazam!,” and who seemed to get his powers from a lightning bolt, and who transform into an adult super-hero!

My first thought: “This guy’s nothing like Superman!”

He had a flap on his chest like Blackhawk. He looked sort of like Fred MacMurray, the actor who starred in The Absent-Minded Professor and Son of Flubber for Walt Disney and was on TV every week in My Three Sons. He had a lightning bolt insignia like The Flash. He had boots like Captain America’s. His uniform was colored red like Ant-Man’s. He was connected to a lightning bolt like Johnny Thunder. And he had a cape like… like… the guy in the marching band at one of those military colleges. I saw connections everywhere, but none to Superman. And then I learned he came before all the above… except for Fred MacMurray, Superman, and maybe that tuba player.

A Flash Of Flash This single “Captain Marvel” page from the origin story in Whiz Comics #2 (Jan. 1940), as reprinted in Jules Feiffer’s seminal and influential 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes, was all that was needed to pique the interests of young fans like Michael Uslan, who until then had been unfamiliar with CM’s success from 1940-53. For one brief moment, the title of the comic had been intended as Flash Comics—but DC beat Fawcett to that one! [Shazam heroes TM & © DC Comics.]

The true magic that day for me was not in the word “Shazam!”

It was in my first look at Captain Marvel on that one-page pedestal in the holy place known as The Great Comic Book Heroes.

In the words of Fawcett’s Mary Marvel: “Wow!” —Michael Uslan

“The Giant Earth Dreamer” I was approaching my eleventh birthday, and found myself wandering through a “five-and-ten” in Jamaica, New York. I had a couple of dollars in my pocket, including a counterfeit dollar bill that someone had passed to me, and I decided to risk time in a federal prison by spending the phony dollar instead of turning it in at the nearest FBI office. Oh, and I got away with it! I “purchased” Captain Marvel Adventures #52 (dated Jan. 1946).

The cover illustration showed Captain Marvel delivering a punch to a startled (giant) individual with pop eyes, shaggy hair,

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guaranteed another 10,000 years. Cap then wishes himself back to Professor Thinkler’s laboratory.

The Professor explains that he has improved on his theory. He tells Captain Marvel that he—Thinkler—had dreamed up the giant, who in turn had dreamed up our universe.

And in the end, Billy Batson wakes up in his own bed, having dreamed up Professor Thinkler. Oh, it was enough to make a tenyear-old’s mind spin. I still love it! —Richard A. Lupoff

“The Return Of Mr. Tawny” I have a strong sentimental attachment to Captain Marvel Adventures #91 (Dec. 1948), with “Captain Marvel and the Chameleon Stone” on the cover, because it was the first Golden Age comic book that I owned. After reading Roy [Thomas]’s “One Man’s Family” article in Alter Ego #7 (1964), I was eager to see what an actual comic book starring Captain Marvel was like. Somehow, I managed to scrape together $3.00 to buy CMA #91 from a dealer in RBCC, no easy feat given my minuscule allowance. I read and reread that issue, loving every bit of it. I wrote a review of the issue for my fledgling fanzine Super-Heroes Anonymous #2 (1965).

Dream On!

At the time, I didn’t realize that the post-war “CM” stories were generally superior to those published during WWII, due to poor quality printing (with awful color registration) and often mediocre art. Also, chief CM scribe Otto Binder’s scripts improved steadily after his first story in CMA #9 (April 1942), “Captain Marvel Saves the King.” The whimsical quality that made his stories unique really came to the fore after the end of the war, never more so than in Binder’s stories of Mr. Tawny, the talking tiger. Mr. Tawny’s first appearance in CMA #79 (Dec. 1947) explained how the anthropomorphic tiger made his way from the jungles of Africa to America, and was befriended by Captain Marvel. But it’s the follow-up to that story that I consider the more memorable.

Virtually anything was possible in “Captain Marvel” tales, and sometimes things were even downright trippy, enough to make 10-year-old Richard Lupoff’s mind spin—such as when he first read Otto Binder’s “Captain Marvel and the Earth Dreamer” in Captain Marvel Adventures #52 (Jan.-Feb. 1946); art by C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

and a scraggly beard. This was long before the hippie era; such hirsute adornment in those days was generally attributed to hermits or farmers, and the individual on the receiving end of Captain Marvel’s sock was clearly the latter.

Inside the comic book was the cover and lead story, “Captain Marvel Battles the Giant Earth Dreamer,” written by the great Otto Oscar Binder and illustrated by C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza.

The tale opens with Billy Batson reading a news story about a Professor Plato Q. Thinkler, who believes that our entire universe is the product of a dream by a giant dozing in a fourth dimensional mega-universe. Just as the scale of the mega-universe is far larger than ours, so is its time-dimension, and the giant’s nap of a few hours has lasted for 10,000 years of “our” time.

Captain Marvel visits Professor Thinkler, who warns him that the giant earth-dreamer may wake up at any moment, which event would spell the end of our universe. It would be painless, Thinkler warns Captain Marvel. Just—poof!—and we’ll be gone.

In order to save the universe, Captain Marvel tries to wish himself into the mega-universe. And since this is all a dream, anything can happen—and it does! Captain Marvel tries various methods of getting the giant dreamer to sleep soundly, and when he succeeds (by knocking a tree onto him) our universe is

You’ll Believe a Tiger Can Talk Learning Mr. Tawny’s backstory helped Bill Schelly believe that a tiger could talk in “The Return of Mr. Tawny” (Captain Marvel Adventures #82, March 1948) by Otto Binder, C.C. Beck, and Pete Costanza—the second of the beloved 26-episode series-within-a-series. [Shazam hero & Tawny Tiger TM & © DC Comics.]

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In “The Return of Mr. Tawny,” Binder dealt head-on with the question of the talking tiger’s credibility. Even in the fanciful world of Captain Marvel, Otto knew readers required some sort of explanation for Mr. Tawny’s speaking ability. The story begins with Billy Batson asking his anthropomorphic friend to explain. Tawny relates how his mother was killed by a hunter when he was a cub.

When Tawny became a full-grown tiger, he was accused of murdering a man. In order to allow the tiger to clear his name, a hermit fed Tawny a serum “that will energize his brain and enable him to use his vocal cords for speech!” Soon after ingesting the chemicals, Tawny pipes up with: “Say, it sure is swell to talk like you humans!” After clearing his name and stowing away on a ship to America, Tawny demonstrates his most notable personality trait: the desire to live like a typical post-war man. He gains the first name “Tawky” (in a CMA readers’ contest), and embarks on a series of stories as a “tiger in a strange land.”

Ultimately, Tawky Tawny became a sort of everyman, as he dealt with the trends, pressures, and fads of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The success of the entire 26-episode “series within a series” hinged on making the stories’ central premise work. In “The Return of Mr. Tawny,” Otto Binder and C. C. Beck made us believe a tiger could talk. —Bill Schelly

“The Curse Of The Endless Wishes” Since I had become a comic book collector (as opposed to a simple reader) in the early 1970s, the Big Red Cheese was a mythical figure to this pre-teen, albeit a fascinating unknown, and I was utterly mesmerized by the nostalgic description of Billy Batson and his alter ego shared by Dick Lupoff in All in Color for a Dime and in the Steranko History of Comics’ “Shazam!” chapter. Finally context was revealed for “Superduperman” nemesis Captain Marbles, which I encountered in The Ridiculously Expensive MAD, a 1969 hardcover collection. While it would be years before I understood the real subtext of Harvey Kurtzman’s super-hero parody from that 1953 story—the legal battle between DC Comics and Fawcett—I had now become, upon being enthralled by Lupoff and Steranko’s summaries, once and for all captivated by the good Captain.

Everything I admire about the character is present in the sevenpage fable “Captain Marvel and the Curse of the Endless Wishes” (Captain Marvel Adventures #114, Nov. 1950), most especially the always refreshing fairytale prose of Otto Binder and deliriously straightforward and satisfying C.C. Beck art. It’s a silly ditty, a cute morality tale that basically amounts to that old chestnut of wisdom, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Billy is trotting through the woods and, in the guise of the Big Guy, frees the last of the forest gnomes from being imprisoned inside a giant boulder. The appreciative wee fella magically grants upon our unknowing hero the ability to have all wishes come true.

Making his way back to town, Captain Marvel is inundated by autograph hounds and, natch, wishes no one had ever heard of him. Wish granted, the World’s Mightiest Mortal ends up in the slammer as a public nuisance, and the enchanted imp appears to explain CM’s newest power. Our hero wishes for public recognition, is released, delights in beating the beejeezus out of some jewel thieves, and stupidly wishes he could spend full-time battling wrong-doers “without having to change back to Billy Batson.” Wish granted, Cap distresses that “Never again will Billy broadcast over the air! I murdered him! Groan!” The elfin rascal appears and prods the Big Red Cheese to say, “I hereby wish all the endless wishes to be cancelled and leave me.” Problem solved. All is back to normal. The End.

Which Wish?

A place where unexplainable events simply occur and are accepted at face value is what Jon B. Cooke feels was the true magic of Captain Marvel, and clearly evident in “The Curse of the Endless Wishes” (CMA #114, Nov. 1950), perfectly presented by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck. [Shazam hero & Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

Everything that works about Captain Marvel returns to one simple word: magic. As children, we are enchanted by stories where unexplainable occurrences simply happen and are accepted at face value. Reluctant dragons, shy stegosauruses, mice siblings driving tiny sports cars, talking pigs and maternal spiders… these bewitching yarns filled my childhood with wonder and awe. Yes, my later self yearned for context, connection, and continuity with the “real world,” but the magic of those early years when first starting to read for oneself is what formed me, and that child-like appreciation always serves as the wellspring of my creativity.

Much as I wished I had, I didn’t share my childhood with the good Captain, but I did eventually discover his magical realm and Captain Marvel will forever nurture my child within. —Jon B. Cooke

“Captain Marvel Battles The World” A staple of super-hero stories is the protagonist’s opposite number, the super-villain. Or, if not a super-villain, then at least some menace or difficulty to keep the hero occupied for the length of the tale. Captain Marvel had quite a number of stories in which there was really no villain at all, but rather just some problem to be

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withdrawing all clouds over land surfaces, bringing a drought.

But the angry planet has not reckoned with Captain Marvel, who is forced to use all his great power to combat the increasingly deadly efforts of the Earth to subdue humans. Typically, the World’s Mightiest Mortal used his great powers sparingly (a part of his appeal back then), but this particular menace required far more of the hero than usual. For instance, in one sequence, Cap flies the entire continent of South America back into place (and glues it in place with lava, even!).

Before a “boiling mad” Earth can start another assault, the Moon warns him of the approach of a giant comet. The Earth fears that he will be smashed to bits, but Cap intervenes by flinging a piece of plutonium into the comet, causing it to explode— prompting the Moon to shame the Earth into repentance. So finally all is right with Mother Earth, although “that name always makes me boil!” To which the obviously wiser Moon admonishes, “Be glad that Captain Marvel is around to protect and mother you!”

Clever narration transformed what could have been an ordinary story of fighting natural disasters into something unforgettable— one of many from Captain Marvel’s original run. It was a powerful story, masterfully told by a master of the craft, Otto Binder, and expertly conveyed in art by C.C. Beck. Their names are already recorded in comics history, but they should loom even larger, taking on the status of legends, and corporately worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Will Eisner, Carl Barks, Jack Kirby, and others. —John G. Pierce

“The Dawning Of Dr. Sivana”

Angry Blue Planet No super-villains in this one, but definitely the largest foe Captain Marvel ever faced, in “Captain Marvel Battles the World” (CMA #148, Sept. 1953), a story that John Pierce feels could have been ordinary but was transformed

by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck into something “unforgettable.” [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

A lot of things happened in the “Captain Marvel” story from Whiz Comics #15 (Mar. 1941). Billy receives a radio award, then (as Captain Marvel) goes out on a date with Dr. Sivana’s aptly named daughter, Beautia. Billy gets abducted by Sivana, encounters the Glompers (large frog-like creatures from Venus), and has two

solved.

“Captain Marvel Battles the World” (CMA #148, Sept. 1953)— “perhaps the strangest story ever told of Captain Marvel”—feature a super-villain of sorts, and quite possibly the largest one Cap ever faced, viz., the planet Earth!

The Earth is not just the antagonist in the tale, but the narrator, as well (and not the only time in the CM canon when narration was used in clever, witty fashion). The Earth introduces himself and gives some background information. He mentions blowing off steam when angry (molten lava), and cooling himself with a breeze. And a “hiccup” produces fissures.

But Earth has annoyances, too, including huge meteors which strike. But most annoying of all are the efforts by humans to dig into his “skin,” in particular an effort which turns out to be an oil well, “the deepest hole ever dug into the Earth.”

So, tired of those “little two-legged pests,” the Earth plans to “teach those little tormentors a good lesson!” Nearby, the Moon observes and comments that “Brother Earth is plenty sore! Watch the fireworks now!”

The Earth, having decided that the usual earthquakes, hurricanes. and floods are “too tame,” launches his offensive by

Glop To It! From the large frog-like Glompers to the unveiling of Dr. Sivana’s origin, the entire “Captain Marvel” episode from Whiz Comics #15 (April 1941)—script by Bill Parker, art by C.C. Beck—seemed like one big dream to artist Mark Lewis.

[Shazam hero & Sivana TM & © DC Comics.]

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encounters with a giant rococo rocketship (coming out much better from his second encounter, as Captain Marvel). Then, still as Cap, he has a titanic battle with Sivana’s super-strong son, Magnificus, bringing down the mountainside all around them. Finally, the origin of Dr. Sivana is revealed and we learn about the time he and his family spent living on Venus.

That’s a whole lot packed into one eleven-page story! It could’ve been a big mess, with all of that going on. But it wasn’t. Instead, Bill Parker and C.C. Beck gave us a dream-like story where almost anything could happen. While I liked reading other super-hero comics, there was something very different about this story when I first read it years ago… something almost… magical.

In retrospect, I realize the story was a primer for all the things that made Captain Marvel unique: that magical sense of possibilities, that sense of fun and adventure. No other super-hero is quite like him. I have no trouble understanding how he captured the imaginations of readers back when he came on the scene. Or why he caught the interest of later fans like me. —Mark Lewis

“Captain Marvel’s Feud With Mr. Tawny” I’ve been in Chicago for 10 years, so when I visit my family in Middlebury, Connecticut, I always make time to drive north to Torrington on Route 8 to visit Jack Delaney at My Mother Threw Mine Away. If you haven’t visited Jack’s shop, which has been around since the early 1980s, maybe you’ve read about it, either in the Litchfield County Times or, more likely, in Harlan Ellison’s “Did Your Mother Throw Yours Out?,” his summary of the American comics scene in the 80s, first published in Playboy in 1988 (under the title “This Ain’t Toontown”) or in his 1990 collection Harlan Ellison’s Hornbook.

I first read about Jack’s shop in the “Directory of Comic and Nostalgia Shops” section of the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide.

When I was a kid, I prepared for family vacations by reading the Directory and circling the names of important destinations like Oceans of Books by the Sea (also known at the Bookstore Restaurant) in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and That’s Entertainment in Worcester. Each of those shops was like magic, filled with old, cheap comics, yellow and brittle, in dusty cardboard boxes or in wooden storage bins. I haven’t been to Oceans of Books by the Sea in almost thirty years, but I visit Jack in Torrington every time I’m home, and I come back to Chicago with my bags filled with Fawcett comics. Last summer, Jack sold me the comic that includes my favorite story from the Golden Age, “Captain Marvel and his Feud with Mr. Tawny,” from Captain Marvel Adventures #113 (Oct. 1950).

If you’ve read my other essays for FCA, you’ll know that I’m a Tawny fan. I’ll say it again: Otto Binder and C.C. Beck’s (and Pete Costanza’s) tales of the Marvelous Talking Tiger are classics of American comic book art. I have a short list of beloved, lifechanging comics—ones I’ve literally carried with me in my messenger bag because I think they have magical powers, and I want to share that magic with friends and acquaintances. Have you read this? What about this one? Matt Wagner’s Mage, Alan Moore’s Miracleman, James Sturm’s The Revival, and, more recently, Edie Fake’s Gaylord Phoenix and Carol Swain’s Gast. If I were the editor of a title like Marvel Team-Up, I’d invite Alan Moore to write a story in which Fake’s Gaylord meets Mr. Tawny and the two join forces with Walt Kelly’s Peter Wheat. In this dream story, Richard “Grass” Green assists Beck on pencils. Wendy Pini and Alex Raymond finish the pages before Samuel R. Delany writes the dialogue, Marvel style. Covers by Jack Kirby, Isabella Rotman, Wally Wood, Hugo Pratt, and John Porcellino. I’d give my magic word back to

Feud For Thought Even the best of friends don’t see eye to eye sometimes, as was the case with “Captain Marvel and His Feud with Mr. Tawny” (CMA #113, Oct. 1950, by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck), which Brian Cremins believes is one of the most poignant of all the Tawny tales. [Shazam hero & Tawny Tiger TM & © DC Comics.]

Shazam to buy that comic. For now, though, I’m happy to read Captain Marvel Adventures #113, which includes one of the most poignant of all the Tawny stories.

In his 1964 letter to Alter Ego (see issue #7 [of first volume]), Otto Binder explained Mr. Tawny’s appeal: “The only other CMA serial that approached Mr. Mind—and quite closely, as a matter of fact— was the Tawky Tawny Tiger non-serial succession of sequels.

Response was also overpowering for him, and, because he lent himself to more orthodox concepts, it was Tawny that Beck and I chose as a possible syndicate newspaper strip.” (For the full letter, see Alter Ego: The Best of the Legendary Comics Fanzine, edited by Roy Thomas and Bill Schelly, pp. 110-112.) The “orthodox concept” Binder and Beck explore in “Captain Marvel and His Feud with Mr. Tawny” is friendship, this time between a boy (a man? a superman?) and his cat (well, his tiger… his talking, dissertationwriting, museum-curating tiger. With a nice house in the suburbs).

Like all the other Tawny stories, the plot is simple: press agent Hal Hooey overhears Mr. Tawny singing in the shower. Hooey convinces the gullible tiger to sign a contract. The agent knows Mr. Tawny has a terrible voice, but it’s a voice so bad that, like Ed Wood’s movies, or like licorice, it’s actually pretty good—for laughs, anyway. Billy Batson doesn’t want his friend ridiculed, and tries to stop Mr. Tawny from signing the contract. If you know Mr. Tawny, then you’ll guess what happens next: he signs the contract

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or looking at the pictures, since I wasn’t much of a reader until first grade—I skimmed or ignored the fight scenes. I wanted to get to know the characters, their inner lives. I love comics, like this one, that tell stories about people, with all their mistakes and their flaws intact. In his essay on Mr. Tawny (p. 31 of The Fawcett Companion from 2001), John G. Pierce argues that the Talking Tiger is “more fully human, more fully realized, than many of the ‘human’ characters in other comics,” and compares Captain Marvel’s friend to other funny animals like Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge. But, as much as I admire the Carl Barks stories I’ve read, I don’t find them as enchanting as Mr. Tawny’s adventures, especially as told by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck. While he may not be as famous as Pogo or Snoopy, Mr. Tawny is just as loveable, and usually much better dressed. — Brian Cremins

“The Plot Against The Universe”

Elementary, My Dear Captain!

The centennial issue of Captain Marvel Adventures (Sept. 1949) contained one of the World’s Mightiest Mortal’s most renowned stories and, as acknowledged by actor Jackson Bostwick, the tale divulges a wealth of details behind the Captain Marvel mythos. “The Plot against the Universe” (by Otto Binder, C.C. Beck, and Pete Costanza) was reprinted for the first time in the “Shazam!” Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-35 (May 1975), which featured Bostwick on its cover in his iconic role as Captain Marvel from the 1970s CBS-TV live-action series Shazam! [Shazam hero & Sivana TM & © DC Comics.]

anyway, against the advice of both Billy and Captain Marvel. Then Hooey gets another idea—why not get Mr. Tawny’s name in the papers? The tiger won’t get there with his singing talent, but maybe the gossip columnists will write about the breakdown of Tawny’s friendship with Captain Marvel: “I want their friendship to break up!” thinks the devious agent. “I’m going to build up a big ‘feud’ between Tawny and Captain Marvel! The publicity will be terrific for Mr. Tawny’s singing career!”

Over the next two pages, Captain Marvel and Mr. Tawny stop speaking. The reason? Captain Marvel doesn’t get invited to Mr. Tawny’s party. When Captain Marvel fails to show up, Tawny feels rejected (neither of them knows that Hooey tossed the invitation meant for Captain Marvel into the trash bin). At the party, Mr. Tawny, with a forlorn expression on his face, believes he’s lost his best friend: “Captain Marvel didn’t show up! He ignored my invitation! He snubbed me!”

I won’t tell you how the story ends. I’ll leave it for you to read and enjoy. But I will say this—it has an almost Shakespearean conclusion. The final text box in the story’s last panel reads, “But all’s well that ends well!” Captain Marvel is shaking hands with Mr. Tawny, who’s dressed for his debut performance in a play called The Singing Cavalier. Why is this story my favorite? I like its simplicity, its directness, of both the words and the pictures. I also like that it’s about community and friendship. “What are the greatest friendships of history and literature? Damon and Pythias?

David and Jonathan? Caesar and Brutus?” asks the text box that opens the story. When I first started reading comic books as a kid—

Fawcett’s fanciful adventures of Captain Marvel are reminiscent of the mythological magic and primordial imagination found in a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. For me, these two factors encapsulate the reason that the Big Red Cheese has out-performed all super-heroes, including Krypton’s much-touted alien Man of Steel. With Captain Marvel, the child, as well as the adult, can subliminally appreciate the pure simplicity of this uncomplicated, straightforward, superhero who represents the alter ego of a “pure of heart” WHIZ reporter—the young and innocent—Billy Batson.

One of my favorite stories, “Captain Marvel Battles the Plot against the Universe” (Captain Marvel Adventures #100, Sept. 1949), reveals a jackpot of information about the Captain Marvel myth. This 4-part tale by Otto Binder—with my favorite rendering of Captain Marvel, done by C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza—pits the Good Captain (the World’s Mightiest Mortal) against his arch-nemesis, and no greater evil genius, Dr. Sivana (The World’s Maddest Scientist). In this telling tale, Billy Batson relates to his friend Mr. Talky Tawny (a talking tiger), the origin of Captain Marvel and how his (Billy’s) magical transformation from a ragged newsboy originated by him saying the name of the ancient Egyptian wizard, Shazam. We see statues of The Seven Deadly Enemies of Man, as young Billy passes them through a forgotten, mysterious subway tunnel (located behind the old warehouse at the corner of Slumm Street and Ninth), on his way to find an aged sorcerer sitting under a 2000-lb. stone block suspended by what only appears to be a mere thread. (There’s imagination for you.) The story also unveils to the reader the powers of six of the mightiest heroes of all time that make up the magic word Shazam!, and which Elder Hero represents each power found in its six-letter acronym (Solomon—wisdom, Hercules — strength, Atlas—stamina, Zeus—power, Achilles—courage, Mercury—speed). That’s five Greek gods and a Jewish king. Talk about covering your bases!? And, furthermore, this adventure involves not only the fight for the very existence of the Good Captain himself, but what greater prize than, Holy Moley!, the integrity of the entire Universe. Wow! What more could a youthful comic aficionado, such as myself, hope for? And only at a mere cost of one thin Mercury dime?

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

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Yes, Captain Marvel was, during my formative years—and still is—my all-time favorite comic character. As a young lad, I could readily identify with a blameless waif who could magically change into the World’s Mightiest Mortal simply by uttering one catchy word, “Shazam!,” and defeat all conniving, evil bad guys (read, bullies)—and even for a patriotic wartime boost, a Nazi Captain.

From out of a cloud comes a magic lightning bolt that with a large BOOM! strikes young Billy and changes him into the mighty Captain Marvel. And let’s not forget the spirited buccaneer boots and the great cape and colorful costume with a formidable lightning bolt on its chest.

Finally, in “The Plot against the Universe” adventure, the reader is taken into outer space, out to the Rock of Eternity and the sanctuary of the wizard Shazam. Here, the evil Dr. Sivana endeavors to destroy the ancient Egyptian and his Shazamium bracelet, thus dooming the existence of Captain Marvel. However, in his diabolical attempt to conquer Shazam and thereby rule the Universe, the evil doctor soon finds himself to be the one soundly vanquished by the Good Captain. This good-over-evil motif, along with the marvelously fanciful characters (e.g., Mr. Tawny, Mr. Mind, King Kull, etc.) and romping imaginative plots found in the Golden Age comics of Captain Marvel—and subsequently, The Marvel Family and Republic Pictures’ The Adventures of Captain Marvel movie serial—are what hooked me as a lifetime fan of the Big Red Cheese. Happy 75th, Cap! —Jackson Bostwick

“The Stolen Shazam Powers” One “Captain Marvel” story that became a particular favorite of mine occurred very late in the run of Captain Marvel Adventures— not many months before Fawcett discontinued that title and its entire comics line. CMA #144 (May 1953) cover-featured a wonderful C.C. Beck drawing of Cap staked out in a wasteland, with Sivana dancing gleefully on his chest. Inside, “The Stolen Shazam Powers” was a perfect vehicle for deconstructing the World’s Mightiest Mortal to see what made him tick—by taking away his six god/hero-given powers, one at a time, until he was left as nothing but a big lummox in long red underwear, tied to the ground.

The tale begins with Cap defeating Sivana’s latest schemes, by using each of his super-powers in turn. This gives the World’s Wickedest Scientist the idea to rob him of those powers by taking the wizard Shazam hostage and threatening to stab him in the heart unless Solomon and the five Graeco-Roman gods withdraw their special abilities from Captain Marvel, one after another. At first, it didn’t seem right to me that, even while sleeping, Shazam would let Sivana get the drop on him… but by one page later, Shazam made it clear (to the clever young reader, if not to Solomon and the Graeco-Romans) that everything was going to turn out all right… even as he said it was “written” that “Sivana will win out against Captain Marvel.”

It was instructive, as well as sad, to see Cap lose his powers in acronymical order… first stripped of the “wisdom of Solomon,” so that he can’t crack a set of coded clues with which Sivana taunts him. Then, over the ensuing few pages, he is bereft of the strength of Hercules… the stamina of Atlas… the power (which, in Cap’s case, had come to mean invulnerability) of Zeus… the courage of Achilles… then finally the speed (which had gradually come to include the power of flight) of Mercury. In the end, however, victory is achieved when Captain Marvel cries out his magic word and changes back to Billy Batson, whose smaller hands easily slip out of the ropes holding him down. Shazam’s prophecy came true… and it proves to be the salvation of Captain Marvel. After

V Is For (Pyrrhic) Victory One of Roy Thomas’ favorite “Captain Marvel” stories saw the deconstruction of the hero’s powers, one acronym-letter at a time, in “The Stolen Shazam Powers” (CMA #144, May 1953; written by Otto Binder, art by C.C. Beck). In the end, Cap survived the ordeal… but only to exist for another six issues. [Shazam hero & Sivana TM & © DC Comics.]

Billy takes out Sivana and frees Shazam, he then becomes Captain Marvel again and proceeds to use each of his six special powers— in order—to destroy Sivana’s great fortress.

The story is a sterling example of an adventure that is both thoroughly stylized and formula-ized… and yet, in the end, is structured so well that it is completely fulfilling. Captain Marvel might have been only a few short months away from two decades in limbo… but he, artist Beck, and writer Otto Binder were going out at the top. —Roy Thomas

“The Street Of Forgotten Men” The appreciable appeal of the original Captain Marvel that kept his millions of devotees delighted and hungry for more was the fact that the stories were set in an assuredly different world from the readers’ own ordinary, logical reality—a world where possibilities, as well as the imaginations of both creators and audience, could soar limitlessly. Additionally, Captain Marvel’s innocuously ebullient exploits were multi-faceted: during the World’s Mightiest Mortal’s initial 13-year existence, you could be treated to straightup adventure, science fiction, humor and mirthful whimsy, thought-provoking head-scratchers, or inspiring and positive morality tales.

Captain Marvel: A 75-Year Anniversary Tribute

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Skid Row Kids’ Show Among his many commendable qualities, Captain Marvel believed in humanity and that each of us was meant for so much more. See it for yourself in Binder, Beck, and Costanza’s “The Street of Forgotten Men” (CMA #78, Nov. 1947)—the same issue that includes another of the FCA editor’s favorites: the debut of Mr. Atom). [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

the neighborhood and learns from a police officer about some of the street’s once-productive and successful inhabitants who have all somehow fallen from grace.

Shortly thereafter, when the policeman can’t bring himself to stop a thief on the block, the officer himself soon becomes one of the streets’ dispirited and demoralized casualties.

The thief eventually escapes custody, returns to the neighborhood again, and a dire incident takes place on the street. Even with all the mighty powers and abilities he possesses, it is Captain Marvel’s optimistic faith in three of the “forgotten men” that paves the way for each of them to confront and conquer the grim circumstances before them, which in turn restores their confidence to reclaim their lives again. The three men were saved not by Captain Marvel but by themselves because they finally believed in themselves again.

The closing exquisite panel—and its caption—remains one of my favorites in the entire series. The solitary figure of Captain Marvel casts a long shadow down the middle of the quiet street as he saunters past the tale’s insentient chronicler: “Well, that is my story! There are three less forgotten men now in the Street of Forgotten Men. And it was all due to the efforts of that man nobody will ever forget… Captain Marvel!” —P.C. Hamerlinck

One such timeless and virtuous unfolding of events of the latter category was Otto Binder’s “The Street of Forgotten Men” (Captain Marvel Adventures #78, Nov. 1947). The narrative is effectively and emotionally delivered by one of the forsaken, dilapidated buildings on the street— the dwelling beguilingly illustrated by C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza—and not the first time that an inanimate object was wonderfully put to use as a Captain Marvel storytelling centerpiece.

Residing on the Forgotten Street are broken and disheartened souls who have lost their way, their reputations, their honor, and all faith in themselves. Billy Batson passes through

Age Before Booty (Left:) C.C. Beck’s 1972 Shazam! “audition” drawing to Carmine Infantino after Beck was asked to send samples of his work. P.S.: He got the job. Originally published in Jim Steranko’s Comixscene #2 (Jan./Feb. 1973). [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

(Above:) This quick 1981 sketch by C.C. Beck has a middle-aged Billy Batson still working at Station WHIZ. [Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

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