Alter Ego #139

Roy Thomas’ Hard-charging Comics Fanzine

WOULD YOU BELIEVE...

ll sti re mo

ROY THOMAS IN THE ’90s!

$

9.95

In the USA

No.139 May 2016

MARVEL’S

CONAN & EXCELSIOR– PLUS:

1

82658 00050

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Art © 2015 Rafael Kayanan. Excelsior ™ the respective owner

CROSS PLAINS, TOPPS, DC, & MORE!

Vol. 3, No. 139 / May 2016 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 Artist & Colorist Rafael Kayanan

With Special Thanks to: Heidi Amash Richard Ashford Jon Berk Rick Beyer Dominic Bongo Roberto L. Brazziell Eliot R. Brown Frank & Kisara Brunner Rich Buckler John Caputo Shaun Clancy Carla Conway Pete Crowther Tina DeZuniga Sean Dulaney Michael Dunne Shane Foley Ira Friedman Stephan Friedt Nate Furman Janet Gilbert Enrico Guevara Larry Guidry Jay Harford Steve Harford Fred Harper Janis Hendler Jane & Freeman Henry Heritage Comics Auctions

Ed Jaster Rafael Kayanan Jim Kealy Stan Lee Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier Jim Ludwig Fredrik Malmberg Mark Marderosian Ron Marz Pat Mason Brian K. Morris Mark Muller Hoy Murphy Barry Pearl Joe Petrilak David Roach Mike Rockwitz Francis A. Rodriguez Don Rosick Randy Sargent Elizabeth Sayles William Sayles Stanley Taffet Dann Thomas Leona Thomas Maggie Thompson Carol L. Tilley David Tosh Steven G. Willis Jay Zetterberg

Contents Writer/Editorial: On Not Going Gentle Into That Good Night . . 3 Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs . . . . 4 Roy Thomas talks to Jim Amash about freelancing in the 1990s – Part 2.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Stanley Taffet Interview . . . . . . 75 Michael T. Gilbert presents Shaun Clancy—and a 1940s comics fan’s nightmare!

Comic Fandom Archive: A Finger In Every Plot!. . . . . . . . . . 81 Bill Schelly & Roy T. showcase Jerry Bails’ 1965 unveiling of Batman co-creator Bill Finger.

re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 85 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #198 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 P.C. Hamerlinck shines an eerie spotlight on Golden Age artist Ray Harford & the Ghost Army.

On Our Cover: Since some of the most significant artwork on display this time around was done by the incomparable Rafael Kayanan, artist of Marvel’s Conan the Adventurer and art director of the late1990s Cross Plains Comics, we were doubly delighted that we were able to use a beautiful barbarian illustration by him as our cover. It wasn’t specifically drawn to represent Conan the Cimmerian, but it captures the essence of the sword-and-sorcery that is such a major part of this issue of Alter Ego. Thanks for sharing it with us, Raf! [Art © 2016 Rafael Kayanan.]

Above: Writer RoyThomas was fortunate to work on some great projects, and with some excellent artists, during the several years he wrote for Topps Comics—but nothing was more sheer fun than Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, adding adventures to the Xenozoic Tales world created by Mark Schultz.

And Roy was especially fond of the three-issue “Man-Eater!” series illustrated by Claude St. Aubin & Allen Nunis. These climactic panels are from C&D Vol. 2, #6 (Aug. 1994), as Jack Tenrec desperately tries to save his young pet allosaur, Hermes, from a mutant tyrannosaur. [TM & © Mark Schultz.]

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.

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

EISNER AWARD Winner Best Comics-Related Periodical

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

ALTER EGO #129

ALTER EGO #130

DIEDGITIIOTANSL E

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ALTER EGO #126

ALTER EGO #127

ALTER EGO #128

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

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

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

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

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ALTER EGO #131

ALTER EGO #132

ALTER EGO #133

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

Cover by TOM GRINDBERG!

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

GERRY CONWAY interviewed about his work as star Marvel/DC writer in the early ‘70s (from the creation of The Punisher to the death of Gwen Stacy) with art by ROMITA, COLAN, KANE, PLOOG, BUSCEMA, MORROW, TUSKA, ADAMS, SEKOWSKY, the SEVERINS, and others!

Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom history, and more!

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

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

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

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ALTER EGO #134

ALTER EGO #135

ALTER EGO #136

ALTER EGO #137

ALTER EGO #138

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

LEN WEIN (writer/co-creator of Swamp Thing, Human Target, and Wolverine) talks about his early days in comics at DC and Marvel! Art by WRIGHTSON, INFANTINO, TRIMPE, DILLON, CARDY, APARO, THORNE, MOONEY, and others! Plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MR. MONSTER’s Comic Crypt, the Comics Code, and DAN BARRY! Cover by DICK GIORDANO with BERNIE WRIGHTSON!

BONUS 100-PAGE issue as ROY THOMAS talks to JIM AMASH about celebrating his 50th year in comics—and especially about the ‘90s at Marvel! Art by TRIMPE, GUICE, RYAN, ROSS, BUCKLER, HOOVER, KAYANAN, BUSCEMA, CHAN, VALENTINO, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’s Comic Crypt, AMY KISTE NYBERG on the Comics Code, and a cover caricature of Roy by MARIE SEVERIN!

Incredible interview with JIM SHOOTER, which chronicles the first decade of his career (Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman, Supergirl, Captain Action) with art by CURT SWAN, WALLY WOOD, GIL KANE, GEORGE PAPP, JIM MOONEY, PETE COSTANZA, WIN MORTIMER, WAYNE BORING, AL PLASTINO, et al.! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Cover art by CURT SWAN!

Science-fiction great (and erstwhile comics writer) HARLAN ELLISON talks about Captain Marvel and The Monster Society of Evil! Also, Captain Marvel artist/ co-creator C.C. BECK writes about the infamous Superman-Captain Marvel lawsuit of the 1940s and ‘50s in a double-size FCA section! Plus two titanic tributes to Golden Age artist FRED KIDA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

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Article Title Topline writer/editorial

On Not Going Gentle Into That Good Night

N

ot really a lot I can say re this second half of Jim Amash’s interview with me on my 1990s comics writing—except to observe that, looking back, I feel I’d gotten better at my craft… but that turned out not to be the point.

I’m well aware that my 1960s-70s work at Marvel—however secondary to Stan Lee’s accomplishments—is better remembered than my ’80s DC work on All-Star Squadron, etc., which in turn had more impact than my ’90s Marvel scripting on Conan, Avengers West Coast, et al., at a time when Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and a few other very talented guys had sent comics careening off in directions where I wouldn’t have cared to follow even if I could’ve.

I suppose that’s inevitable. When I entered the field in 1965, there were just a few super-hero writers of importance—Stan, Gardner Fox, John Broome, maybe Arnold Drake and a couple of “Superman” scribes. By 1990, the field was more crowded, both with newcomers and with the rest of the aging Bronze Age crowd.

Besides which, I admit, by the late ’70s I’d lost much of my interest in writing comics for commercial purposes, even if I still loved the genre and the subject matter. My work had to read as if aimed at readers younger than my own nigh-40 years… but it really wasn’t. After my first stint on Conan had opened me up to new possibilities, The Invaders had become my first stab at doing a comic purely because I wanted to, not because I foresaw huge sales. By then, I just wanted to write what I wanted to write; I wanted readers to follow my interests, not vice versa. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. In the end, that contributed to my becoming more marginalized. All-Star Squadron was never a huge hit after the first year or so; Arak, Son of Thunder, with its mix of sword-&-sorcery and history, was pre-destined not to be as big as Conan.

When I returned to Marvel in the late ’80s, I became a utility outfielder, given Dr. Strange when another team ran out of steam… offered Avengers West Coast when John Byrne split… plugged into F.F. Unlimited when the original writer walked. Much

3

of that work is, I feel, in terms of pure writing, heads and shoulders above what I did the first time around… but in the ’90s I was no longer leading the majority of 20-something readers in a direction they wanted to go… nor had I any real interest in the roads they were taking… so I consider myself just lucky to have stayed fully employed in the field through age 60, with decreased forays since then.

If I had it all to do over again, I’m not sure I’d do it differently.

If I don’t care to read the so-called “dark” comics that’ve trended since the 1980s, why (except for money—always an acceptable motive, I’ll admit) would I want to write them, even if I could get my mind around it?

So I veered off into a second incarnation of Alter Ego, which plays to my mutual loves of comics and history… I was fortunate to drop a line to Stan just when he was looking for someone to work with him on the Spider-Man newspaper strip… and my earlier key position in the field made me viable for being offered the opportunity to write the occasional book about comics.

Would I love to write a monthly comic again? Sure, long as I could do it my way, with just a nod to changed tastes. Invaders…

All-Star Squadron… Conan… even some modern-day hero, if the editor and I were in synch (meaning: doing it not just his/her way, but our way). Meanwhile, I’ve got a few new series ideas on my plate, just awaiting the time to develop and market them.

But, failing that… well, for me, Alter Ego and the historical books are their own reward… my own equivalent of a once-bestselling author teaching writing at a university in his later years. There’ve been enough career high points along the way… maybe not a multitude of them, but a few, anyway… that I don’t feel the need to apologize for not catering to the needs and tastes of 21st-century readers any more than they feel like catering to mine.

Now, if they happen to like what I want to do… that’s something else entirely.

Bestest,

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• Plus FCA [Fawcett Collectors of America] with RAY HARFORD & the WWII Ghost Army, Part 2—MICHAEL T. GILBERT presents SHAUN CLANCY tracking down the origins of MLJ’s Black Jack—BILL SCHELLY on G.B. LOVE, cont’d—& MORE!!

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4

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs (Or, “You’ve Got To Play All The Cards You’re Dealt!”)

ROY THOMAS On Freelancing In The 1990s – Part 2 Interview Conducted by Jim Amash Transcribed by Brian K. Morris & Sean Dulaney

High Five Roy Thomas and his 1990s muse, Gonzo the aracari (smaller kin to a toucan—photo by Dann Thomas)—floating above pages RT scripted for the five comics referred to in the title above. (Left to right, onto bottom row of facing page:) Marvel Comics’ Conan the Adventurer #13 (June 1995)—pencils by Rafael Kayanan; inks by John Floyd. This Robert E. Howard-based series took place before and during events chronicled in early-’70s issues of Conan the Barbarian. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.] Millennium Publications’ H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu: The Festival, Book One (1993, no month)—art by Brian Bendis; co-scripting by Jean-Marc Lofficier as “R.J.M. Lofficier.” This final page introduces an HPL protagonist made notorious by Stuart Gordon’s 1985 cult film Re-Animator. [© Millennium Publications.]

Cross Plains Comics’ Red Sonja: A Death in Scarlet (1999, no month or number)—art by Steve Lightle. Set early in the career of the swordwoman developed

by Roy and others from a one-shot Howard heroine. [TM & © Red Sonja Properties, Inc.] [continued on facing page]

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I

NTERVIEWEE’S INTRO: Once again, Ye Ever-Ebullient Editor welcomes you, on behalf of interrogator Jim Amash and myself, to the second half of our (admittedly somewhat one-sided) conversation recorded in 2015, picking up here where A/E #136 left off. In Part I, the talk centered around my late-1980s and 1990s freelance writing for Pacific, First, Heroic, TSR, Dark Horse, and Marvel’s superhero titles. That left, for this issue, the various Conan comics published by Marvel during the ’90s before it relinquished its licenses on Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, and Red Sonja—plus Stan Lee’s neverrealized Excelsior line for Marvel—as well as Cross Plains Comics, the new company that picked up Sonja and some “lesser” Robert E. Howard characters; Topps, the bubble-gum and trading-card giant that took a nigh-decade-long fling in the four-color field; DC Comics, for whom I wrote a handful of graphic novels starring major heroes; Millennium, with its H.P. Lovecraft connection—and a couple of other small companies for which I did one or two things.

Continuing from the talk about Marvel superheroes in Part I, we begin this time with…

The Foley Follies A pair of on-target Shane Foley cartoons to get things rolling: (Left:) Interviewer Jim Amash as Shamash-Shum-Ukin at the Well at the Center of Time, from Savage Sword of Conan #7 (Aug. 1975).

(Right:) Shane sent this sketch as a cover idea for A/E #136. Roy and layout guru Chris Day ran with the idea—though minus Conan, since he’d be covered in this issue.

[Conan ® & © Conan Properties International LLC.; other art © 2016 Shane Foley.]

(Above left:) DC Comics’ 1999 graphic novel Superman: War of the Worlds – art by Michael Lark. An Elseworlds adventure pitting the Man of Tomorrow against H.G. Wells’ malevolent Martians. [TM & © DC Comics.]

(Above right:) Topps Comics’ Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Vol. 2, #2 (March 1994)—art by Dick Giordano. Roy christened this dino a “gaberlunzie” (it means “wandering beggar”), named for a group of teenage slackers—Roy, fellow future comics scribe Gary Friedrich, and several others—who tooled around together in Jackson, Missouri, in the late ’50s. Circa 1962, it became the name of Gary’s rock ’n’ roll band, in which Roy was vocalist. [TM & © Mark Schultz.]

6

Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Marvel Comics (Conan) JIM AMASH: In 1990, you finally got to come back to Conan the Barbarian, and you had an interesting experience with your first story….

ROY THOMAS: Marvel had been running this “Young Conan” series for about a year. I never thought the stories squared either with what I’d done in the ’70s, or, more importantly, with Robert E. Howard’s Conan. [Editor] Mike Rockwitz eventually realized it wasn’t working and asked me to return to Conan the Barbarian. By then, I’d been writing again for Marvel for two or three years.

Then, while I was still gearing up, he asked me to first write a final “Young Conan” issue, to wind it up.

Why he didn’t have the other writer do it, he didn’t say. I said okay, but I wanted the first new story my name appeared on to be the one that returned to regular continuity. So I signed that one “Justin Arthur”… “Just an author.” It’s the only Marvel story— maybe the only story period—I ever wrote under a pen name. [EDITOR’S

Home Sweet Hyboria (Above:) Splash panel of Conan the Barbarian #241 (Feb. 1991), the first official “Roy Thomas – round two” issue, as penciled by Gary Hartle and inked by Mike DeCarlo. Todd McFarlane and his cover for #241 were seen in AE #136.

(Above left:) Jim Lee drew the cover of CTB #242 (March ’91). [Conan & covers ® & © Conan Properties International LLC; Red Sonja TM & © Red Sonja Properties, Inc.]

Jim Lee.

NOTE: By coincidence, as this A/E issue was in preparation, Dark Horse reprinted the “Justin Arthur” yarn at the end of its trade paperback Chronicles of Conan: Vol. 30, with no indication it was a pseudonym. Serves me right for being so devious!]

Just In Time: Justin Arthur (Above:) Splash page of Conan the Barbarian #240 (Jan. 1991), probably the only comic Roy ever wrote under a pen name. Pencils by Gary Hartle, inks

by Ricardo Villagran. Thanks to Steven G. Willis. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

Mike, Crom bless ’im, went all out to welcome me back. He got Todd McFarlane to pencil the cover for the first Conan the Barbarian with my byline; in the 2000s, Todd would do the cover for the prose Conan biography I wrote for DAK Publishing. Jim Lee drew the second new Conan cover. This wasn’t really “my” Conan the way the ’70s one had been, because I wasn’t the editor; but, as with the super-heroes, I didn’t Gary Hartle Mike Rockwitz really have problems with Later, the artist A recent pic of the various editors, or became an Conan’s 1990s them with me. Of course, animation producer.

editor. Courtesy of MR.

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

virtually all my relating with editors was by phone or fax from L.A., then South Carolina… no e-mail in those days.

For me, the main fly in the ointment was the ten years of continuity since I’d left. Since 1980, I hadn’t read any of a decade’s worth of Conan comics—not even since I’d started writing for Marvel again. I didn’t even own copies of them. Now I had to schlep out to a comics store and buy all those back issues: Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword, even Conan the King. I was glad they weren’t expensive! Looking them over, I saw some good artwork in there—Gary Kwapisz, for instance. There were a couple of interesting villains like Imhotep and The Devourer of Souls who might be worth using, but otherwise—well, I didn’t want to negate all continuity that had happened between 1980 and 1990… I just wanted, for the most part, to ignore it.

In the 1970s, I’d advanced Conan’s life one year for every year of the color comic, using the chronology mapped out by Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and others. I didn’t plan to do that this time, and the intervening writers had made it easy for me by paying so little attention to that chronology. Between ’80 and ’90 in the color comic, Conan mostly just wandered around to this kingdom and that kingdom. There was even one country that suddenly grew a seashore when Howard had created it as landlocked. I felt, “How am I going to get rid of all this baggage I don’t want?”

So Dann and I were out with our friends Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier at one of our weekly dinners, and I mentioned to JeanMarc my dilemma concerning the color comic. He said, “Why don’t you just have Conan say he feels like he’s been dreaming for ten years?” And I said, “Hey, I like that!” [mutual laughter] Not to diss the other writers; I just didn’t want to be bound by what they’d done.

So there’s a line in my first official new issue, Conan #241, where he does indeed say he feels like he’s been wandering around in a dream ever since he walked out of Zukala’s cave—in other words, since the end of Conan #115, my last issue in 1980. I threw in a flashback to those events, then I blissfully ignored everything that’d happened since, as if Conan #115 had been just a few weeks before. Maybe that’s good or maybe that’s bad, but that’s what I did. I didn’t outright tell the editor what I was doing, but I figured he read the stories, and he didn’t object.

How Dark Was My Valley REH, as painted by Kevin Eugene Johnson for the cover of the 1983 biography Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard, by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp, & Jane Whittington Griffin. [© Bluejay Books or the respective copyright holders.]

JA: You wanted to pursue your own vision, and the vision set forth by Conan’s creator.

THOMAS: Yeah. I felt, well, I’d basically brought Conan to Marvel and, working

7

first with Barry Smith and then John Buscema, I’d played a major part in developing him into one of the company’s bestselling characters by the mid-’70s.

Since then, I’d also written Conan for movies, comic strips, even dramatic-radio format—and during the ’90s and after, I’d also write Conan for TV animation and Hyborian Homecoming, Continued a live TV series As per Jean-Marc Lofficier’s timely suggestion: and even a prose in this panel from CTB #241, the Cimmerian blithely “biography.” So I dismisses pretty much everything that’s happened wouldn’t have in the comic since #115 (Oct. 1980). Art by Hartle had any patience & DeCarlo. Jean-Marc will be seen on p. 61. for any comics [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.] editor telling me how to do Conan.

I didn’t just come out and say that, of course, but I’m sure they knew that’s how I felt. Actually, while I had to get approval for the stories in a general way, nobody ever did try to tell me how to write the character: “Conan wouldn’t do this or that.”

JA: So, when you were doing the color comic, you went back to a timeline?

THOMAS: Yes. In the earliest 1970s issues, though he looked older, Conan was only 16-17. That means that, by the time I left, he was 26-27. I counted all the stories written from ’81 to ’90 as occurring over a year or so at most, if they happened at all. So I figured, when I came back, he was pushing thirty.

I worked with good artists in the color comic, at first Gary Hartle and soon Mike Docherty and a few others, even if not with Buscema this time. One immediate looming problem was that we’d soon reach the point in Conan’s life where the color-comics continuity caught up with the first of the Howard Conan stories I’d adapted in Savage Sword back in the ’70s. That was “Black Colossus,” in Savage Sword #2, the very first story where Alfredo Alcala inked Buscema. I felt I needed to cover those events in the color comic, at the proper time and place, but neither the editor nor I wanted to do a straight adaptation of that story a second time.

So I adapted “Black Colossus” in a way that also included things that happened in between the previously related events. In addition to dreaming up a few new action bits for Conan, I brought in Red Sonja and Zula to take some of the weight off him by getting involved in situations not shown in the previous telling.

Zula was the black warrior Buscema and I had made up in the ’70s—the male hero after whom Gerry Conway and I’d named our “black Amazon” played by Grace Jones in [the movie] Conan the Destroyer. By having the three of them arrive in Khoraja together, I was able to shift some of the focus to Sonja and Zula by weaving a new subplot into “Black Colossus” for several issues. We didn’t negate anything Howard had written. We merely added events that could’ve been happening offstage, so to speak. And once that was over, we went our own way again. No harm, no foul.

8

Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

or even her—to remember what she contributed to a given story.

But Dann’s a great researcher, and also contributed to background I needed related to geography, history, you name it… just as she’d done on Arak, Son of Thunder at DC. JA: The continuity of Savage Sword was different from the color comic in what ways?

THOMAS: In the ’70s and ’80s, the black-&-white title had jumped backward and forward in Conan’s life just as Howard had when writing the original stories.

But when I came back, since I’d long since adapted all the Howard Conan stories, I wanted to start a new continuity in Savage Sword. The editors agreed, since a continuity was more likely to induce a reader to buy every issue rather than just some of them.

The Second Time Around (Above:) A climactic scene from the first adaptation of REH’s story “Black Colossus,” in the black-&-white Savage Sword of Conan #2 (Oct. 1974): Conan vs. the undead Thugra Khotan, above the terrified Princess Yasmela. Script by Roy T.; art by John Buscema & Alfredo Alcala.

(Above right:) This Arthur Adams split cover for Conan The Barbarian #249 (Oct. ’91) epitomizes the second adaptation of “Black Colossus,” this time in color.

Its right half echoes the final face-off in Savage Sword #2; on the left, Red Sonja and Zula accost the “black, brutish, manlike” thing and the “black camel” that left “cloven tracks,” both from REH’s 1933 short story for Weird Tales pulp magazine.

(Right:) On the last page of CTB #249, Sonja and Zula come upon Conan and Yasmela a short time after the latter pair’s passionate embrace at the end of “Black Colossus.” Zula’s final dialogue is adapted from the last paragraph of Howard’s tale. Script by RT; pencils by Mike Docherty; inks by Ernie Chan. Thanks to Shane Foley & Steven G. Willis for this scan. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC; Red Sonja TM & © Red Sonja Properties, Inc.]

Later in the color comic, I particularly enjoyed writing a Falstaffian sidekick named Hobbs. I brought him in when we adapted Howard’s Crusader-era story “Gates of Empire” from the old Magic Carpet pulp, and I kept him around. I even adapted one of the imitation-Conan yarns that had been printed in [the pulp magazine] Weird Tales after Howard committed suicide in 1936 and the magazine was frantically casting around for more sword-andsorcery writers like him. But of course there weren’t any.

JA: Now, when you wrote the color Conan comic book—that was all yours. There’s no Dann or Jean-Marc in there, right?

THOMAS: I conferred with Dann on some of the plotting, but she didn’t do any dialogue. I don’t think Jean-Marc ever worked with me on a “Conan” story. If he did, there’s a credit for him.

JA: I asked because, soon afterward, you also returned to Savage Sword, and Dann did contribute there.

THOMAS: Yes… but again, co-plotting, not dialogue. I valued her input. She’d suggest possibilities that might or might not work out in a given “Conan” story. My job was to pick and choose and shape. At this late date, though, it’s generally impossible for me—

Working with Dann, the first story I came up with involved pirates and two

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Devour And Conquer!

(Left:) Virtually the only characters introduced in 1980s Conan comics that were utilized by Roy in the ’90s were the villains The Devourer of Souls and Imhotep. Here, the Devourer returns in CTB #271 (Aug. 1993). Pencils by Mike Docherty; inks by Ricardo Villagran.

(Right:) Conan leads his comrades Red Sonja, Zula, and Fafnir Hellhand into battle in Savage Sword of Conan #233 (May ’95) in the continuity carried on after CTB was discontinued. A number of other established warriors would soon follow Conan, hetman of the kozaks! Art by Mike Docherty & Geoff Isherwood; script by RT. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

major antagonists: Thoth-Amon and Thulsa Doom. We sent Conan off to the Hyborian Age equivalents of China and Japan and Mike Docherty.

Australia, then back by magic to the Barachan pirates’ stronghold. By coincidence, the first Dark Horse trade-paperback volume that is composed entirely of my second run on the magazine [Savage Sword of Conan, Vol. 20] recently showcased that whole storyline except for the first chapter, which had been in the preceding volume. We had a strong continuity for a while; those issues read like a Conan pastiche novel.

After that, for reasons I don’t recall, we went back to nonsequential stories for a while… and, still later, we picked up the reins of the continuity Mike Docherty and I had been doing for Conan the Barbarian when it was cancelled. That storyline involved Conan leading a bunch of kozaks—a combination of characters from previous stories I’d done, guys made up for the comics or taken from the Howard non-Conan stories and the de Camp pastiches that we’d adapted. I liked that better than having him lead an all-new crew. We brought in Fafnir from stories drawn by Barry Smith and Gil Kane… Red Sonja… Zula… Juma the Black, a creation of de Camp and Lin Carter… Turgohl, a mute warrior

from the first “Conan” story John Buscema ever penciled…

Isparana of Zamboula, from a novel by Andrew Offutt… maybe a couple of other stringers. Sort of an informal “Hyborian Legion.”

At one point, we did another novel-length serial, set in Howard’s Kheshatta, City of Magicians, in Stygia; it utilized Imhotep and The Devourer of Souls from the ’80s comics. I even persuaded the editors to let me adapt a couple of the Conan paperback novels coming out like clockwork by various authors from Tor Books—a sequel to “Black Colossus” in Barbarian, and a sequel to “Red Nails” in Savage Sword.

Just as I came back to Savage Sword, Buscema decided to return as penciler, or at least layout artist, because he loved drawing Conan. He asked for Tony DeZuniga as inker again, because he liked Tony’s illustrative embellishment. So did I. Rockwitz put Tony on it, but something went wrong. I don’t know if Tony had some health problems or what it was, but the inking of the first issue he did was pretty flat. John was even unhappier with it than I was, so a few pages into our second issue Tony was replaced by Ernie Chan, who’d inked the Conan color comic in the ’70s. John always hated Ernie’s inking over his pencils, just as he did Alfredo’s; but the editor liked it and I liked it, so John just threw

10

Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Skulls, Snakes, & Sword-And-Sorcery (Above left:) The splash of Savage Sword of Conan #190 (Oct. 1991) brought writer Roy Thomas, penciler John Buscema, and inker Tony DeZuniga back together after a decade, though DeZuniga was replaced partway through #191. Note that, from the outset in this reboot, Roy’s wife Dann sometimes receives co-plotter credit. Actually, from first to last (1974-1995), the official indicia title of magazine was The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian.

(Above right:) A climactic page from Savage Sword #193 (Jan. 1992), with Buscema embellished by Ernie Chan, shows Thulsa Doom and Thoth-Amon locked in sorcerous combat while Conan handles the “sword” part of the sword-and-sorcery equation.

Script by RT. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

John Buscema (Left:) Earl Norem’s cover for Savage Sword #193; Norem’s photo appeared in A/E #138. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

A Cast Of Conan Characters (Left to right:) Tony DeZuniga, Roy Thomas, Ernie Chan, and Dann Thomas share some smiles on Feb. 28, 2007. Both Filipino-born artists passed away in 2012; each had contributed considerably to the U.S. comics scene. Photo taken by Tina DeZuniga.

in 2000. Photo courtesy of Joe Petrilak.

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up his hands. He was mostly just doing breakdowns anyway. I felt Ernie and Alfredo both added a lot, throwing in a ton of detail and adding to the time-lost feel of the work.

JA: Do you think your being back on the book was part of why John wanted to come back to Conan?

THOMAS: If it wasn’t, his timing in returning was an amazing coincidence. He liked my approach to Conan; he’d told me as much in the ’70s. His only complaint then was that he hated the de Camp novels we adapted. At the same time, in his latter days, he was given to talking about nearly everyone he worked with, me included, as “idiots,” so it’s hard to know what John was thinking. I believe he was always kind of torn, because he enjoyed drawing and wanted to do good work, but at the same time he was laboring in a field he refused to respect. That kind of dichotomy couldn’t have helped but fill him with a certain amount of ill-deserved self-loathing.

JA: It’s funny, because right around this time I talked to him on the phone, and he told me he was doing five pages a day before noon. I asked him how, and he said, “Well, I don’t pay attention to the plot.” [mutual laughter]

Conan’s “Cantina Sequence”!

The three interwoven plots of Savage Sword #200 (Aug. 1992). [Counterclockwise from above left:] Robert E. Howard on the 1932 bus trip to Rio Grande City on which he conceived Conan (or, at least, so he said in letters to fellow authors)… the start of a fantasy-REH adventure, as the young Texan walks into a cantina frequented by Mexicans derived from his active imagination… and, when readers turned the page, they saw the Cimmerian striding into a Hyborian Age tavern. Script by Thomas, pencils by Buscema, inks/finishes by Chan. The first of these pages contains a reference to a pulp called Flight Stories… not a bad title, but Roy had actually typed “Fight Stories,” the name of the Fiction House magazine in which Howard’s boxing tales appeared. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

THOMAS: But you can’t give that any real credence, because of course he paid attention to the plots. I was writing dialogue over his layouts, and the plots I gave him were always followed to the letter. Always! In fact, in the ’90s, he didn’t even have to add as much “in-betweener” details and choreography as in the ’70s, because I was giving him more detail. That was the way Marvel insisted plots be written by then. Not every precise action and who stabbed who in which vital organ, but he was following the plots and never really deviating from them.

JA: When I asked him how he could not follow the plot, he said, “You know. You just stick a sword in Conan’s hand and have him kill people.” [mutual laughter] THOMAS: He could say that, but it wasn’t true. It was just gruff but good-natured posturing. John was too smart to really believe that. Conan was always a lot more than swordplay, whether in Howard’s stories or in the comics. You can look at almost any Savage Sword story he ever drew and see how far off-target John’s statement to you was.

JA: Did you feel John was more or less invested in Conan than he’d been when you worked together before?

THOMAS: Less. I felt he was very disconnected and, most of the

time, just giving the art minimal attention. But his “minimal attention” was better than most artists’ rapt attention. I tried to give him stories he’d enjoy drawing, when I could. His job was just to illustrate that story and maybe flesh it out a bit. His storytelling was as good as ever—I could always tell what was going on and where the setting was, even in layouts. Sometimes he would just kind of phone it in, sure… but the guy was simply too good not to deliver a competent job, and usually a lot more than that.

JA: I take it your contact with him was minimal during this time.

THOMAS: Yeah, but we did talk from time to time. I was particularly happy with a few of the stories. One I especially liked was Savage Sword #200, a story that Mike Friedrich, as my comics agent, had tried to get Marvel to do as a graphic novel. It mixed events in the real Robert E. Howard’s life with a fictitious adventure starring Robert E. Howard—plus an archetypical Conan adventure—three separate, interrelated plots in one tale. When we couldn’t sell that as a graphic novel, I turned it into Savage Sword #200, which documented a number of events that had actually happened to Howard—or at least that Howard said had happened to him; he was known to embellish a bit—as to how and when and where he came up with Conan. He once wrote that he’d dreamed Conan up while traveling alone in a certain Texas town, so we showed him

Conan For The Ages Colin MacNeil Popular British comics artist.

(Left:) A time-tossed Conan and Solomon Kane prepare to go into action together for the first time in any medium, in Savage Sword #220 (April 1994). Art by Colin MacNeil. [Solomon Kane is ® & © Solomon Kane Inc.] (Right:) In Savage Sword #228 (Dec. ’94), Alex Niño did his own highly individualistic interpretation of the Hyborian Age, as he and RT adapted one of REH’s so-called “Crusader” stories into a “Conan” exploit. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

Alex Niño at the 2009 SuperCon in Florida.

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going there in 1932; and we had that supposedly “factual” stuff lead into his getting involved in a smuggling caper on the Mexican border that was clearly fantasy. And that, in turn, tied in to the Conan adventure, which was occurring in the Hyborian Age but was a kind of parallel to Bob’s fictitious adventure.

I’m real proud of that story. John did a wonderful job, using the few photos I could send him to make the Howard and Texas part of it look real—and Ernie Chan followed through on it. You could really see what Howard must’ve looked like, walking around these places. There was a horrible typo near the end, when the real Bob Howard types out that first, famous “Nemedian Chronicles” quotation, and instead of the correct “the oceans drank Atlantis,” the typesetter set “the oceans drawn Atlantis.” Nobody at Marvel noticed, and they didn’t bother to show me the set type, so it got into print that way. But otherwise I was very happy with that issue—and with quite a few others in the ’90s run.

For instance, there was a great two-parter drawn by Colin MacNeil that teamed up Conan and Solomon Kane… and one story exquisitely drawn by Alex Niño… and Rafael Kayanan drawing that sequel to “Red Nails,” even though his rate of delivery meant it got spread over too many issues… and John Buscema doing full art on a prequel to “Red Nails.”

John also did full art on his own rendition of the synopsis I’d written back in 1970

The Coming Of Buscema From 1970 & 1994—with a quarter of a century between some of the pieces—comes this triptych related to the splash of Marvel’s very first “Conan” story, the first two courtesy of David Tosh & Ed Jaster of Heritage Comics Auctions (clockwise from above): The first page of Roy Thomas’ 3½-page synopsis for Conan the Barbarian #1 (Oct. 1970)—which, until recently, Roy had no suspicion still existed.

The handwritten notes are likely those of original penciler Barry (Windsor-)Smith. The synopsis gives Barry the choice of drawing either a “symbolic” or “start of battle scene” splash-page scene. Barry chose to draw the latter, but Stan Lee later decided he wanted a symbolic splash, so Barry penciled the one that was ultimately published.

Roy’s own crude sketch of the symbolic splash (done in 1970 and sent to Barry), along with the writer’s notes, with the title already decided upon. RT’s handwriting at the bottom of the Marvel stationery reads: “Scene of Conan in triumphant/savage pose, a colossus astride fallen warriors. (A girl on knee?)

Symbolic!!”

Working in 1994 from Roy’s 1970 synopsis (or an approximation of it), John Buscema drew his own version of that splash page and story for Savage Sword #222 (June ’94). Thanks to Stephan Friedt for this scan. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

And Also Starring…

(Above left:) Many early-’90s issues of Savage Sword carried a back-up “Kull of Atlantis” series illustrated by E.R. Cruz and scripted by Roy, which related the exploits of Conan’s precursor before he became king of Valusia. Cruz’s photo appeared in A/E #136. [® & © Kull Productions Inc.] (Above right:) Red Sonja also appeared in backup features in Savage Sword—some of them drawn by Spanish illustrator Esteban Maroto, who also limned a “Conan” epic or two—but one of Maroto’s most memorable REH moments, sampled here, was his art for Roy & Dann Thomas’ origin of Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, in Savage Sword #225 (Sept. 1994). [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

for Conan the Barbarian #1, which he’d originally been scheduled to pencil. I guess I, or someone, still had a copy of my original synopsis back in ’94, so I had John draw the story from it without looking at Barry Smith’s art for #1, which wouldn’t have been to his taste anyway. Well, actually, Stan had insisted that Barry’s original splash page for #1, that showed Conan on a ridge turning as he hears the sounds of battle nearby, be replaced with a symbolic splash—so I had John draw his own version of that—but otherwise he was drawing the story just as if he’d done it in 1970 like originally planned, except that it was a quarter of a century later!

For a time, we divided Savage Sword up into Docherty-drawn “Conan” stories, “Red Sonja” adventures illustrated by Esteban Maroto, and stories of a young “Kull of Atlantis” drawn by E.R. Cruz. That was fun. I also turned stories by a few world-class authors into “Conan” adventures: Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” which I’ve always been convinced was the template for the Predator movies, and a story done for Weird Tales by a very young Tennessee Williams. I adapted “The Mark of the Beast,” a wereleopard story by Kipling, too, but the art for that one was still on the shelf when Savage Sword was cancelled. H.P. Lovecraft had written this long essay on “Supernatural Horror in Literature,”

Esteban Maroto

which Barnes & Noble had turned into a hardcover that includes stories by virtually all the authors Lovecraft mentioned—and I decided it would be fun to turn some of those into “Conan” stories.

Kipling’s story was one of those; so was the one by Bierce.

Another Savage Sword tale in the works was one I thought of as “Conan vs. Alien.” It wasn’t exactly the “Alien” of the Ridley Scott film, but the story would’ve looked not unlike what an encounter between those two would’ve entailed.

Another offbeat adaptation that was drawn but never published was “The Challenge from Beyond.” That’s the round-robin story written in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, C.L. Moore, A. Merritt, and Frank Belknap Long, each doing alternate sections. That was a weirdie, since it involves a mind-transfer between a human being (Conan, in our version) and a truly nonhumanoid, Lovecraftian alien on its own distant world. In fact, in prepping for this interview, I ran across a list of a dozen or more non-Conan stories by Robert E. Howard that, with Marvel’s blessing, I’d made an agreement to adapt in Savage Sword or Barbarian, with Glenn Lord, the agent for the Howard estate. A few of those got at least partly drawn; one or two may have made it into print.

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

During this same period, Buscema beautifully penciled and inked a story based on a Howard tale set in India. As fate would have it, that two-parter got split between the last two issues of Savage Sword, in ’95… when, after 235 issues, the magazine finally ended. Still, that’s not a bad run for a “Marvel” character who wasn’t a super-hero and didn’t wear a costume.

JA: Did you have any more or less leeway on Savage Sword than in the regular comic book?

THOMAS: Probably a bit more. There was no real nudity in the ’90s, as there’d been for a time in the ’70s. But no one ever suggested a particular story I should tell or characters I should use… well, maybe an editor suggested the Solomon Kane crossover—I don’t remember—but that was something I was happy to do in any event. I’d have to tell the editor where the adventures were headed, and of course they had the right to say no, but I was allowed to pretty much handle things as I saw fit.

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counting those mini-series at the end, a precisely 30-year period following Conan the Barbarian #1—I think that says a lot.

JA: Do you think you were given that extra leeway on Conan because of your connection to the character?

THOMAS: Probably, but then I’ve no idea what leeway the other writers had had—talented guys like Bruce Jones and Michael Fleisher. I like to think the editors felt that, if they were putting me back on Conan, they might as well let me do it my way. They did have one or two fill-in stories by other writers left over when I started again, and those had to be worked in, but I convinced them not to do new fill-ins. At one point near the end, I managed to squelch a novice writer’s attempt to do a story that related Conan’s

Oh, once in a while there’d be a minor problem. I remember once getting annoyed with Richard Ashford, after he became editor, because he insisted on truncating a fight between Conan and this fierce stallion made out of metal—in a story that utilized some de Camp concepts. I thought such an extended battle would be interesting, since Buscema could draw horses well. But, except for that incident, things went pretty well, and certainly Richard and I generally got along.

We never managed to recover the popularity the Conan comics had had through the early ’80s, though. By the time I’d left in late 1980, Conan, who was starring in three comics after the recent launch of King Conan, was one of Marvel’s most profitable characters. The fact that Savage Sword was in black-&-white except for the covers, and thus less expensive to produce than a color comic, helped that along. But somewhere around that time, the Conan Properties people negotiated a new contract, so that Marvel could no longer merchandise Conan; that made him less valuable to Marvel, so he gradually got de-emphasized and increasingly left to his own devices, sink or swim. Perhaps partly because of this, once the two Schwarzenegger movies were history with no new ones in the offing, the Conan comics went into a sales decline.

Whether things would’ve been any different if I’d remained on the title straight through is something I can’t know, and neither does anyone else.

While they’re not totally reliable, the circulation figures printed annually in the color comics tell the story: over 200,000 per issue for Conan the Barbarian in 1980, then dipping a bit for a year or two right after I left, then getting back up to 1980 levels in 1983 and ’84, probably because of the movies—and, after that, a steady decline to under 100,000 per issue by 1989.

My second go-round, we tried but we weren’t able to reverse that decline.

Still, the fact that Conan survived in two, for a while three, Marvel titles between 1970 and 2000,

Antediluvian Antecedents (Above:) In a free-wheeling adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s classic story “The Damned Thing”—under the whimsical title “Horror of a Different Color”—Conan reasons that the best way to fight a quasi-invisible foe is underwater, where you can at least see the water it displaces. Script by RT, art by Ernie Chan, from Savage Sword #227 (Dec. 1974).

(Left:) The very first fiction by a teenage Tennessee Williams—under his birthname Thomas Lanier Williams—saw print in a 1928 issue of Weird Tales, the same pulp magazine that published stories by Robert E. Howard. Williams’ vignette, set in ancient Egypt, was adapted in Savage Sword #216 (transposed to Stygia), with art by Alfredo Alcala, as the prelude to a new “Conan” adventure drawn by E.R. Cruz. In the latter, Rascally Roy tossed in references to Williams’ celebrated stage dramas, including “no-neck monsters” (from lines in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), a closing quip about having to “depend upon the kindness of strangers” (A Streetcar Named Desire), and a “Glass Menagerie” of jackal-headed monstrosities like those on Toni Taylor’s painted cover. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

The Challenge From Five Authors Had Savage Sword lasted a bit longer, one of the strangest “Conan” stories ever— both in plot and artwork—would have graced its pages: a never-published adaptation of “The Challenge from Beyond,” a round-robin story by H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and three other noted fantasy authors, into a “Conan” yarn. Therein, the Cimmerian discovers a weird artifact that causes a mind exchange between himself and a Lovecraftian alien on a far-off planet, as per the first page depicted here (clockwise). In the segment adapted from REH’s chapter, the Conan-possessed alien becomes a weapon-wielding usurper (what else?) on that world—while, on Earth, the alien-dominated body of Conan attacks and kills a ravening wolf with his bare hands! In the end, Roy had the barbarian’s mind restored just as two brigands are trying to rob the boots from what they think is his corpse. They don’t survive the experience. The singular art is by Fred Harper, who also drew one Savage Sword story that was published. A photo of Lovecraft appears on p. 69. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

death, and I’ve no apologies for that. I don’t think such a story has any place in the canon, either prose or comics. Besides, as far as I was concerned, either I was the Conan writer or I wasn’t. Let ambitious young writers find something else to scribble.

Fred Harper Artist from Eerie, PA, who did work for Marvel and DC before crashing The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy. Photo from his website.

One idea I pushed during this period was the concept of a post-Apocalyptic version of Conan wandering around in a future world in which the sorcery of the original series had been totally replaced by the mutations and aberrations of a lost science on an Earth that had fallen back into a new dark age, with modern technology forgotten. But I could never get

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anywhere with it, either with Marvel or later with Conan Properties or even Dark Horse. I think they all made a mistake in not having me do it, but that’s their business. In recent years I’ve worked with an artist to turn that concept, which wasn’t really based on Howard’s Conan anyway, into a new series we hope to market as soon as I can get a chance to actually script the issue or so that’s been drawn.

Anyway, as a replacement for Savage Sword, Marvel soon started a new black-&white magazine, Conan the Savage, and originally they deliberately excluded me from the first issue. Tim Conrad, who’d drawn a couple of “Conan” stories for me in the ’70s, both drew and scripted one of the two stories for that first issue; but at the last minute, the editor asked me to re-write its dialogue and captions from the ground up, so I wound up in the first issue anyway, sharing credit with Tim. After that, I was teamed with artist Mike Docherty doing backup “untold tales” from Conan’s days with Bêlit, and with Geoff Isherwood turning a Howard non-Conan story into a “Conan”

Rath Of The Gods (Above:) Writer Roy Thomas and artist Nate Furman have turned the concept that RT had originally conceived for a possible “Conan 3000” feature into Rath 3000, a series set in a post-Apocalypse future—a sword-and-“sorcery” saga in which there is no actual sorcery, only perverted science that seems magical to Earth’s regressed inhabitants. The two of them are currently developing it for comics publication with their agent, David Bernstein (granddesignagent@gmail.com). Seen above are a prototype cover painting and an undialogued interior page from the projected first issue, both by Furman.

[TM & © Roy Thomas & Nate Furman; Rath is a trademark of Roy Thomas & Nate Furman.]

Nate Furman has been, among other things, a conceptual artist for several gaming companies.

two-parter set in the Hyborian Age version of the Middle East. In the Bêlit storyline, I spliced in concepts from H.P. Lovecraft’s novel At the Mountains of Madness. My work appeared in the first six issues of Conan the Savage, then not again till #10, which as it happened would be the mag’s swan song. Ironically, the story among those that worked out the least well was that very last one—which, strangely, John Buscema drew.

At that stage I’d decided it was time to do “Old Man Conan,” with the Cimmerian 70-plus years old. In one of his Conan pastiche novels, de Camp had taken a cue from a letter Howard had written to some fans and had had the septuagenarian Cimmerian sail off into the Western Ocean with the clear implication that he’d

This Savage Page (Left:) Tim Conrad plotted and drew this lead story for the first issue of Marvel’s black-&-white magazine Conan the Savage (Aug. 1995), the short-lived replacement for Savage Sword. Dialogue by Roy Thomas. Tim’s photo appeared in A/E #136. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Jeff Butler

Not A Creature Was Stirring… Except For A Spider!

(Above:) Alter Ego extra!—The first and last pages of an 8-page “Spider-Man” story done for the Christmas 1991 one-shot Within Our Reach, published by Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach company. All proceeds were divided between an AIDS charity and a fund for the preservation of Redwoods; all creative personnel (as well as Marvel) gave their services gratis. Art by Jeff Butler; script by Roy & Dann Thomas (from a plot idea by David Ross). Thanks to Hoy Murphy, Barry Pearl, & Stephan Friedt.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

eventually end up in the Americas as they were during the Hyborian Age. I had adapted that de Camp book, Conan of the Isles, in what was eventually published as a Marvel graphic novel. So I wondered, “What’s the best way to carry on from there?”

The previous year, for [the comic] Conan the Adventurer, I’d hit on the idea of adapting stories by the third great writer from Weird Tales, after Howard and Lovecraft: Clark Ashton Smith. Smith had created his own ancient worlds in several different series. Strange worlds with names like Xothique, amid a kind of treacly prose that read a bit like slogging through molasses… but still interesting and inventive. But his stories never featured a hero of the Conan stripe. Smith’s “heroes” were little men who got overwhelmed by events and eaten by monsters. Rafael Kayanan and I adapted several of those for Conan the Adventurer. For Savage, I took a map of Xothique and transposed it to America with Conan plopped down into it—but for some technical reason I decided to create a mirror image of it: Smith’s east became west, and vice versa. I wrote a synopsis based on a Smith story for Conan the Savage #10. It wasn’t one of my most inspired efforts, and it wasn’t one of John’s best art jobs, but it would’ve been okay, and would’ve led to better things.

The World Is Na’at Enough (Right:) John Buscema was officially both penciler and inker of this adaptation of Clark Ashton Smith’s Weird Tales story “The Necromancers of Naat” in Conan the Savage #10 (May 1996); but in actuality the page was inked by a family member.

Roy added the apostrophe in the comics version of the name “Naat.” [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961)

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Savage Is As Savage Does!

(Above:) Conan encounters another Lovecraftian entity—a Shoggoth—this one in Conan the Savage #4 (Nov. 1995), in a tale based on HPL’s longest work of weird fiction, drawn by Mike Docherty and Rudy Nebres. Script by Roy T. (Left:) In Conan the Savage #5 (Dec. ’95), Roy teamed with artist Geoff Isherwood to adapt a modern-day (1930s) REH tale of Middle-Eastern intrigue into a Conan epic. Isherwood’s photo was seen in A/E #136. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

And then, for some reason, John had somebody in his family—was it his daughter? granddaughter? I’ve forgotten—ink that story. He’s credited with the inking in the issue, but I learned that he’d actually turned it over to someone who may have had talent but was just starting out, and the end result looked like a bad coloring book with a bit of Zip-a-tone added. It was not as good as the inking DeZuniga had done that had led to John getting him removed from Savage Sword. If John or the editors had been paying attention, or if they’d heeded my objections when I first saw the finished art, that story would’ve never been printed that way. But maybe, at that stage, the editors knew #10 was going to be the last issue of Conan the Savage so they just let it go. I doubt if John knew it was going to be the last issue when he had it inked, though. So it just became a sub-par issue. The storyline was the best thing about it, and I’m not particularly proud of that.

JA: Relative or no relative, I’m surprised John would have allowed that.

THOMAS: I don’t know what happened. Maybe this is the period when he had cancer. That could have made a lot of difference. When you’re very ill, the last thing in the world you worry about is a Conan comic. This was [continued on p. 22]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

It’s In The Cards!

Alter Ego #136, in which the first half of this Amash/Thomas interview saw print, also dealt with Roy’s first half-century in comics (1965-2015) and with his 75th birthday last November 22—so Ye Editor thought it not inappropriate to print a pair of hand-drawn birthday greetings he received from a couple of A/E regulars and friends.

(On this page:) Artist Frank Brunner and his lovely wife Kisara sent Roy a card emblazoned with original, colored cover art by Frank of Dr. Strange (whose exploits he chronicled with writer Steve Englehart under editor RT in the early ’70s)—plus inside art of Red Sonja, whom Frank has drawn on covers. The photo was taken at Sea World in San Diego in 2013. [Dr. Strange TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Red Sonja TM & © Red Sonja Properties, Inc.] Frank’s now accepting art commission for covers, splash panels, or pin-up recreations; minimum order $150. Visit his website at www.frankbrunner.net

Kisara & Frank Brunner

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

(On this page:) Shane Foley of Australia, who so ably does “maskot” and other illos for A/E, created a birthday card with art on all four sides. [Hawkman, Atom, Arak, Flying Fox, & Valda TM & © DC Comics; Scarlet Witch, Union Jack, & Ultron TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Conan ® & © Conan Properties International LLC; Alter Ego hero TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas & Ron Harris; Red Sonja TM & © Red Sonja Properties, Inc.; Captain Thunder TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas.]

It’s impossible for Roy to thank Frank and Shane enough for all the effort they put into these wonderful cards! He and Dann would love to frame them—but that would mean that one or more drawings would always be facing a wall!

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Shane Foley

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Scroll Call With a bit of help from a hundred or so of their friends, Comic Book Creator editor Jon B. Cooke and TwoMorrows co-publisher John Morrow secretly put together a six-issue “super-hero mural” that ran through A/E #136-137, Back Issue #85, CBC #10, Brick Journal #37, and Draw! #31, in order to wish Roy a surprise Happy 75th Birthday—by depicting a fair percentage of the comics characters he’s written, co-created, and/or edited. To say that surprise was achieved would be an understatement! Privately, Roy has expressed to them, and to all the various artists, his equal portions of shock and gratitude—and he and Dann wanted A/E’s readers to see what the whole megillah looks like when printed out on an 8-foot scroll! (A copy of all those issues went out from TwoMorrows to everyone who contributed.) Thanks to Pat Mason & Don Rosick for the photo—and to Jane & Freeman Henry, at whose home the above photo was taken this past Thanksgiving.

Roy decided not to wait a whole year to print this one in a “re:” section! (See Jon and John on p. 71.)

[continued from p. 19] the late ’90s and he died in early 2002, when a cancer that had been in remission suddenly returned, so maybe that’s the explanation.

I’m just sorry that became our last black-&-white “Conan” story together. Still, in the end, it was just one poor art job after many, many good ones… no big deal. I’m glad John and I had a chance to a “Conan” storyline after that, so we could go out together on a higher note.

JA: Speaking of artists, didn’t Rafael Kayanan do some “Conan” work around then? I thought he was one of the best “Conan” artists you had in the ’90s.

THOMAS: He sure was! His art looked at first glance like he was channeling Barry [Windsor-Smith]—but he wasn’t, not really. His work in Conan the Adventurer and earlier in Savage Sword in that novel-length sequel to “Red Nails” bore a superficial resemblance to Barry, but once Raf got in that zone, he had his own thing going for him.

What had happened was: editor Richard Ashford phoned to tell me Conan the Barbarian was being cancelled after 275 issues; then, before that could really sink in, he informed me it was being replaced by two new color titles. One was Conan Classic, which would reprint Barbarian from #1 on, and I was to write a page or so of background text for each one. We did ten issues of that before it was discontinued.

For the all-new Conan the Adventurer, Richard had a direction in mind: we’d go back to the days of Conan’s earliest adventures, weaving story arcs in between exploits I’d chronicled in the early ’70s. He’d be wandering around with some companions we’d make up. It wasn’t an approach I preferred, but I saw why Marvel was doing it. And, with Rafael as the artist, I thought it might possibly work. I think we did some nice work together on the more than a dozen issues of it, and apparently it sold fairly well.

But when Rafael had to skip a few issues in the middle, Richard did something to which I strenuously objected at the time. He replaced Rafael with a fill-in artist—John Watkiss, a very talented artist, but one whose work had virtually nothing in common with

’Snow Joke!

A Kayanan vista from CTA #2 (July 1994), depicting the Cimmerian’s home village. Script by RT. The flesh-eating snow in this issue, incidentally, was inspired by Richard Holden’s 1955 novel Snow Fury—which had been adapted by Roy and Gerry Conway in the early ’80s for the first screenplay they co-wrote and sold, though the film was never made. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Rafael Kayanan Photo from on-line interview conducted by comics writer Ron Marz.

Forget The Pre-Rafaelites!

(Left:) Rafael Kayanan’s splash page for Savage Sword of Conan #211 (Oct. 1993), which began an adaptation of a Tor paperback sequel to the REH novella “Red Nails,” which Roy and Barry (Windsor-)Smith had adapted in Savage Tales two decades earlier.

(Above:) Rafael’s cover art for Conan the Adventurer #1 (June 1994) had been drawn as the splash page, but editor Richard Ashford wisely decided to make it the cover, instead.

See p. 53 for a photo of Richard.

(Below:) This two-page Kayanan spread from CTA #1 depicts the Battle of Venarium, the first time Conan took part in a battle against the forces of civilization. Roy feels that the fourteen issues of Conan the Adventurer comprise some of the best prose he ever contributed to the saga of Howard’s hero. Thanks to John Caputo & Barry Pearl. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Rafael’s. It almost looked as if it had been put in the comic to be a contrast to Rafael’s, though I’m sure that wasn’t the case.

Later, Richard told me that, when these fill-in issues came out, sales dipped, and, in retrospect, he felt they might’ve derailed the series. Still, Rafael came back after a few issues, and the series still didn’t make it in the end… but the series may well have been canceled based on the sales of those middle issues, I don’t know.

JA: I guess it was hard to find someone else who was doing what Rafael was doing.

THOMAS: Impossible, really. But maybe Conan in comics was an idea whose time had kind of gone away for a while. I mean, Dark Horse has certainly sold some comics with him over the past decade, but Conan’s never again been the super-hit he was at Marvel from the mid-’70s through the early ’80s, mostly before there was a movie to help sell books.

After Conan the Adventurer was discontinued in ’95, Marvel started doing those three-issue miniseries, at first without me as the writer. After they got that out of their system, I guess, the editors came back to me to do what unfortunately became the final four series.

John Watkiss has worked both in comics and in film, often as a storyboard artist.

JA: How did you feel about writing those Conan miniseries, compared to having regular continuity?

THOMAS: Well, they were the best deal I could get, and at least I got to write three-issue arcs. One of them—Scarlet Sword—was just a story I came up with because I had to come up with something; but the other three I really enjoyed. One of those was Flame and the Fiend, drawn by Geoff Isherwood, whose work I’ve always admired.

The other two mini-series I had a special interest in, starting with the first of the four, Lord of the Spiders. A bit earlier in Savage Sword, E.R. Cruz and I had adapted a de Camp novel set in Yezud, the City of the Spider God; and, two decades before that, I’d had John Jakes plot for me the first story ever set in Yezud, a city mentioned in Howard’s stories.

In the new mini-series, the villain was a Yezud priest from the de Camp novel, but I combined him with—you know I swipe everything from old comics anyway—the title character in a oneshot 1950 Victor Fox comic called The Black Tarantula. [mutual laughter] The Fox baddie was basically a Dracula type, somewhere in Europe centuries ago—only, instead of turning into a bat, he turned into a big spider to bite people in the neck. When I was a kid, horror comics gave me the creeps, and I only bought that one because it had a title character, as opposed to being an anthology like most horror comics were. Ever since I first wrote Conan in 1970, I’d wanted to do a story with a guy who turned into a spider.

“Tower of the Elephant,” my favorite Conan story, has a spider the size of a pig in it. So, finally, I concocted that Lord of the Spiders arc.

I don’t know why it took me so long.

“Choosers Of The Slain” (Top left:) To promote Conan the Adventurer, Kayanan had drawn a cover for Marvel Age #135 (April 1994)—and when time came for a fill-in issue (CTA #7, Dec. ’94), Roy suggested using it there, as well, to keep a Kayanan presence in the comic. He made up a story to go with the cover, the way editor Julius Schwartz used to do at DC. Raf’s illo had been an homage to 1971’s Conan the Barbarian #3, and CTA #7 became that comic’s sequel. In it, a Hyborian Age “valkyrie” wants to remain on Earth when the “grim grey god” Borri decides to cut all ties with mankind and to take all his shield-maidens with him, whether they want to go or not.

(Above:) A John Watkiss-drawn page from CTA #7. Though Watkiss’ style was worlds distant from Kayanan’s, it had its own validity. Script by RT. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC]

The other mini-series was the one I did with John Buscema, who even inked it, and inked it very well in this case. It was called Death Covered in Gold. I was looking to do a story in a different setting, so I set one in the Hyborian Age equivalent of the California gold rush. I even brought back Jenna, a character Barry [Smith] and I had created way back in Conan the Barbarian #6. John did a great job on it. His drawing abilities weren’t at all diminished, right up to his death. I’m glad this story arc was our “Conan” swan song together, rather than Conan the Savage #10!

Actually, though, in my eyes, John’s all-time greatest Conan work was the graphic novel Conan the Rogue, back in ’91. He’d decided he wanted to write and draw and even color a Conan graphic novel… he may even have done the lettering, with its rectangular balloons. He was going to do it all! Then, at the last minute, he phoned and asked me to write the dialogue. I had a

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wonderful time doing that. The plot’s a bit disjointed, because the first half is one story and then the second half is almost another story, with very little connection to the first half except that Conan’s on the run from what happened there. Still, it was a delightful piece of work—John’s best, in my opinion. John gave me two pages of original artwork from it. But then his wife told him she really wanted him to keep that whole job together because she loved it so much, so he phoned me, a bit sheepish, to ask for those pages back. Naturally, I gave them back… but boy, did I hate to part with them!

Sadly, Marvel just tossed the Rogue graphic novel out onto the market with zero publicity and a cover by a different artist. It was almost impossible to find, and I’ve heard it’s one of the rarest Marvel publications of the ’90s. I have one copy in English—and a Spanish edition with a different cover. I hope Dark Horse reprints it one of these days; it deserves it. I keep wondering when and if Dark Horse will reprint the Marvel Conan graphic novels, both mine and others’. Maybe when they’re done reprinting the

Conan The Counterclockwise (From Above) Editor Richard Ashford’s concept for Conan the Adventurer called for the barbarian to gradually form a team with the four fellow rogues depicted on the right side of this panel from #10 (March ’95), in adventures taking place before those in Robert E. Howard’s short story “The Tower of the Elephant.” All story & pencil art in this grouping by Thomas & Kayanan, with inks by John Floyd, who was working at Barry Windsor-Smith’s studio at that time.

In the 14th and, sadly, final issue of the series, dated July ’95, Conan fought a climactic battle with Tolometh, the titular entity of a Clark Ashton Smith poem.

On that tale’s final page, the Cimmerian—with his new comrades all dead if not buried—heads off toward the City of Thieves and the events of Conan the Barbarian #4 (April 1971). If the series had gone on, it might’ve segued to post-“Elephant” action; but if it had to end so soon, this was as good a place as any.

Hopefully, Dark Horse Comics will reprint the run of Conan the Adventurer ere long. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Spider, Spider, Shining Bright…

(Left & right:) The “Black Tarantula” cover of Fox’s A Feature Presentation #5 (April 1950)—and an interior page that made a strong impression on 9-year-old Roy Thomas. This Count Dracula type was named Zoroaster Rorret (“Terror” spelled backwards). The cover tried to make it look like the comic was a $1 novel marked down to a dime. Writer & artist unknown. [© the respective copyright holders.]

(Below:) The splash page of Conan: The Lord of the Spiders #1 (March 1998) takes place in the City of Thieves, ten years after the events of REH’s story “Tower of the Elephant,” which featured a pig-sized arachnid—while in #3 (May ’98), the priest Harpagus of Yezud transforms into an even larger spider and does battle with the barbarian. Guess who wins. Script by RT; art by Stefano Raffaele & Ralph Cabrera. Thanks to Ernesto Guevara. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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complete run of Savage Sword, in a couple more volumes. Sure hope so. They’ve never reprinted the four color chapters Gil Kane and I did adapting the first half of Conan the Conqueror, either; those fell through the cracks because they were in Giant-Size Conan. It’d be great to see those chapters combined with the Buscema-drawn final ones from Savage Sword as a trade paperback, all rendered in color.

JA: Do you think Buscema asked you to do the dialogue because he was insecure in his ability?

THOMAS: I think he must have been. He didn’t mind plotting, because he’d often been co-plotting anyway on the stories. But I don’t think he’d ever tried writing dialogue before, and when he got to that point, I suspect he got a little insecure about it. I’m flattered that he came to me to do it instead of somebody else, because it came from out of the blue as far as I was concerned. [continued on p. 31]

Conan’s Still Hanging Around!

(Left:) Stefano Raffaele’s pencils (with word balloons indicated by RT) for a page in Conan: Scarlet Sword #2 (Jan. 1999). Now that’s a sword! The villain of the piece was called Thun’da, after the 1950s jungle-comics hero drawn by 1960s Conan cover artist Frank Frazetta.

(Below:) The Cimmerian discovers a far more sinister use of the term “Hanging Gardens” than a future Babylon will ever imagine! From Conan: Flame and the Fiend #3 (Oct. 2000). This may well have been Marvel’s last comic book ever starring Conan—and picked up the continuity that had run from late issues of Conan the Barbarian through issues of Savage Sword of Conan. Script by RT; art

by Geoff Isherwood & Sandu Florea. Thanks to Maggie Thompson and Barry Pearl. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Death Covered In—Nothing!

(Above, left & right:) Roy writes: “John Buscema’s excellent scenesetting splash page for the first issue of Conan: Death Covered in Gold (Sept. 1999) was undercut somewhat when the Marvel staff ignored my margin notes, made on black-&-white photocopies, so that the city’s streets would have a ‘gilden/golden’ cast.

The captions also make clear how they should be colored!

Didn’t anybody up there read the #@$% story?” [® & © Conan Properties International LLC]

“Oh, If I Had The Wings Of A Demon...”

(Left:) The 1990 graphic novel Conan: The Horn of Azoth was adapted by Roy and Gerry Conway from their first-draft screenplay for what had become the 1984 film Conan the Destroyer. That script was considerably different from the finished film—nearly 100% in terms of dialogue—but the basic plot was similar, having evolved over the course of the five drafts they wrote. In the end, they received full-screen “story by” credit on the movie, with veteran Stanley Mann, who wrote the last several drafts, credited for “screenplay.” By decree of producer Dino DeLaurentiis, the Satanic stand-in that Conan fought in the pic’s climax had no wings; but in the first draft, and thus in the version drawn by Mike Docherty and Tony Dezuniga, it flew! In the g.n., most of the names were changed: Dagoth became Azoth, Zula became Shamballah, etc.

Gerry adapted the script for the first half of the 62-pager, Roy the second half. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Rogue In The House Pages from the 1991 Marvel graphic novel Conan the Rogue, with dialogue & captions by Roy T.—and pretty much everything else, maybe even lettering, by John Buscema. (One page is reprinted from the Spanish edition, titled Conan el Picaro.) On the page seen at bottom in two versions, note that the artist totally changed the layouts in its lower half—before scripting, since the printed dialogue doesn’t track with these roughs. Roy and several other Buscema enthusiasts consider the 62-page Rogue Big John’s finest work ever; it may also be his rarest. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Conan On TV —And We Don’t Mean O’Brien!

Christy Marx Also the writer/creator of the graphic novel Sisterhood of Steel. She currently works in the video-games industry.

Carla Conway The ex-wife of comics writer (and Roy’s early-’80s screenwriting partner) Gerry Conway, Carla also wrote a bit for Marvel and scripted other TV animation.

In the 1990s, Roy also worked on two different Conan TV series: (Above left:) Under story editor Christy Marx (who’d plotted a couple of Howard-related Marvel stories for him in the ’70s), Roy and his friend Carla Conway co-wrote several episodes of the 1992-93 animated series Conan the Adventurer, co-produced by Jetlag & Sunbow. For legal reasons, their scripts had to be bylined as “translations” from the French. One of those pictured with Conan is the series’ version of Zula, the black warrior Roy and John Buscema had co-created in the ’70s.

(Below:) In 1997-98, Roy and another friend, Janis Hendler, did a short stint co-writing and co-producing on a couple of early episodes of the live-action Conan (a.k.a. Conan the Adventurer) TV series produced by Keller Entertainment; but their credits don’t survive on all listings, which is maybe just as well. The Cimmerian was ably portrayed by the massive 6'5" Rolf Muller (left)—while Angelica Bridges (below left) guest-starred in one episode as Red Sonja, to groom the She-Devil with a Sword (it was hoped) for a spin-off series. But this Conan series failed to catch fire. [Conan ® & © Conan Properties International LLC; Red Sonja TM & © Red Sonja Properties, Inc.; other copyrights on the TV material may apply to specific material.]

Janis Hendler had earlier co-written and co-produced several popular TV series; she and Roy also collaborated on an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess.

See p. 51.

Arthur Lieberman One of the original mid1970s co-founders, with Glenn Lord, of Conan Properties, Inc., he later sold his interest in it in favor of sole ownership of Red Sonja Properties, Inc. Sadly, Arthur passed away in 2012.

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[continued from p. 27]

Marvel (Excelsior) JA: Since there’s a connection, why don’t we go ahead and discuss the Excelsior line? That happens around this time.

THOMAS: And it’s still Marvel.

JA: Right. How did you find out about Stan Lee wanting to do his own line?

THOMAS: “Find out about it”? Before Excelsior got started, I’d spent more than a decade urging Stan to start up his own comics line as a separate Marvel West Coast imprint! Back in the ’80s, when I wasn’t working for Marvel but he and I both lived in L.A., I’d bring it up when we talked on the phone or had lunch. But he was busy with animation, etc., then. I actually felt a bit frustrated that finally, in 1994, he decides to do a line of comics—years after I’ve moved to South Carolina! Maybe he was trying to tell me something. [mutual laughter] I couldn’t be as intimately involved with the line anymore as we had discussed earlier. Now I became just one of the writers, but I’m glad he at least had me do that. I’ve got to admit, I’d have been very upset to be left out!

I don’t recall offhand who the other writers were, except that I think Tom DeFalco was one. There were four writers and four mostly young artists—although Sal Buscema was the one I worked with. Stan’s assistant at the time was Rob Tokar. Rob, I think, had moved out West to work with Stan on these things.

JA: He left Marvel right before all the firings started happening.

THOMAS: Sometimes you just get lucky, y’know? I don’t recall if I ever met Rob in person, but I talked to him on the phone.

What happened was, Stan came up with the concept for the world of the Excelsior line. It would start out with four heroes, in four titles. Their powers and backstories would complement each other. I have copies of a lot of the material that was done for the line, and I’ve long planned to contact Marvel to see if they’d let me do an issue of Alter Ego about it. But Jon B. Cooke has recently talked to me about his own notion of doing a big study of the Excelsior line for Comic Book Creator [magazine], and I’d actually prefer to see him handle it rather than do it myself.

Like I said, Stan made up this world. The setting was originally going to be, like, ten years in the future. We writers were asked to help come up with ways that the future might be different ten years from then—in other words, in that far-future period around 2005. We probably weren’t any better at prognosticating than anyone else, but the bad thing was that each of us was bound to suggest different things from what the others did, and there’d be inevitable contradictions. It would’ve been a coordination nightmare!

Rob Tokar would later work with Crossgen, Tokyopop, et al.

Maybe that’s why, before we really wrote any scripts, but after we’d all spent time coming up with our various ideas of what the world would be like ten years down the road—a little different but not terribly different—Stan suddenly abandoned the whole “future” angle and it just became another “New Universe” kind of thing, set in the present, with no particular connection to the rest of the Marvel Universe. Maybe it could’ve been integrated into it later; it wasn’t necessarily set in its own separate universe.

“Excelsior!”

(Left:) The symbol for Stan Lee’s and Marvel’s projected mid-’90s Excelsior line.

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

(Right:) Stan with friends/admirers/roasters at the truly marvelous Stan Lee Roast at the 1995 Chicago Comics Convention. (L. to r.:) Peter David, Chris Claremont, Roy Thomas, Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, Sal Buscema, John Romita, Julius Schwartz. If you’ve got to ask who any of these people are, you’re probably reading the wrong magazine. A transcript of the entire Roast was printed in 1999 in Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #1.

I wrote the comic called Zarlok, about a guy from another planet. I don’t know where Stan got the name, but I was happy to work with Sal on it. Some part of me was probably thinking, “Gee, the other guys are working with these young artists with new styles, and Sal’s and my book will look like a 1970s Marvel comic”—but hey, Sal and I had both been good at that, so what the hell. I enjoyed working with Sal, and I hope he didn’t feel stuck with me, either. He and I were the only team to finish two issues of our series—I’ve even got colored Photostats of the first issue.

Everybody else was still finishing up their first issue. When Sal and I got rolling, we took no prisoners.

JA: I was in contact with Rob Tokar then. He had given me my first break at Marvel, and I was trying to get to ink one of those Excelsior books, but he said Stan really wanted to use people who were either on the West Coast or whom he’d worked with before. Apparently he wanted Herb Trimpe to draw a book. Rob was trying to get a pitch in for me to ink one of them. Of course, I wanted to ink either Sal Buscema or Herb Trimpe— who at one time was discussed as being one of the artists—because they were artists from my childhood. But that didn’t happen.

THOMAS: Well, the whole Excelsior series didn’t happen anyway.

I don’t quite know why. The official story was that Marvel felt it wasn’t a good time to launch a new line. Was that not too long before the bankruptcy?

JA: That’s right. 1994-95.

THOMAS: So Marvel may have been a bit shaky, and that may have had something to do with it. At the time I wondered, and I still wonder, if there was anything else in play—whether someone back East maybe felt that they didn’t need Stan Lee, who wasn’t under their thumb, editing his own separate comics line out on the West Coast. I know Stan was unhappy when it was suddenly canceled, because he’d invested time and energy into it. We all had. On the other hand, he quickly picked up the slack with something else, and now I wonder how much he’d even remember of what we did on it.

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A Couple Of Characters Artist Sal Buscema’s 1994 model sheets for the hero and the villainess Virull for the Excelsior title Zarlok. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: How much contact did you have with Stan at the time?

THOMAS: Stan would call me up and go over everything I wrote. Actually, it didn’t go as smoothly as probably either of us would’ve wished. While of course I’m tremendously influenced by Stan, one of the most important super-hero writers and editors ever, over the years my own style had naturally veered off a bit from what I’d written for Marvel under him in the ‘60s and ’70s… first from working on the Conan books, which I had deliberately written a bit differently from the usual Marvel fare, then writing for DC in the ’80s and elsewhere since then… so I kind of dreaded these phone calls, because I didn’t like to have to defend my writing to Stan or to disagree with my mentor

Stranger In A Stranger Land (Below left:) Stan’s margin notes on this Sal B. page-in-progress from Zarlok #2 show that he was a hands-on editor of this projected series. Incidentally, Stan’s earlier names for Zarlok had been Kinja: Trapped on Planet Earth and Zodiax.

(Below right:) Two more characters—definitely not good-guys—were to have been piped aboard in #3, as per this penciled page.

[TM & © 2016 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Sal Buscema John B.’s “baby brother” had been drawing for Marvel since 1969. Photo from the 1975 Marvel Con program book.

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

Less-Than-Total Recall The double-page splash (pp. 2-3) from Zarlok #1, which would’ve had a 1995 cover date, introduces the reader to the amnesiac alien. A few pages later, he begins to remember his past, including belonging to a ruthless fighting force serving the Troggian Empire and known as The Matrix—no relation, obviously, to the later film. Script by RT (characters & concept created by Stan Lee); art by Sal Buscema & Tom Palmer. [TM & © 2016 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

about this line of dialogue or that caption. And I wanted to keep the gig.

Not that I was ever threatened with losing it. But I don’t think he was as happy with what I did as he would’ve liked to be, and I wasn’t as happy with his reaction to my writing as I’d have liked to be. Some of his changes I strongly disagreed with, but he was the editor, and my mentor, and I made a conscious decision that I wasn’t going to argue about anything. Overall, it worked out pretty well, and I was overjoyed to be working with Stan again.

Sal and I had finished work on the second issue when the axe fell.

Matter of fact, I’d already plotted through issue #4, and Sal had started to pencil #3. There’s no reason to believe Zarlok would’ve been any more or less successful than the other three titles. I sure would’ve liked to see the Excelsior line get off the ground!

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Tekno Comics

a big room doing comics production work on computers. They had all this high-tech equipment… which fit the JA: Some other publishers were starting in the Tekno name, right? But, after just a early ’90s. Both Topps and Tekno Comix…. few minutes of conversation with the THOMAS: There was a similarity between husband and wife, it became obvious Topps and Tekno, in that both might’ve to me that they weren’t really interrequired me to relocate. I’ll get Tekno out of ested in seriously considering me for the way fast, because I never actually did any the job. The interview was very work for them… yet, as you know, I did have perfunctory. I realized they’d spent a brief “close encounter” with them. the money for my flight just to placate Shukin Play At That Game!

Ed. Well, I was set to fly back to South Dann and I had been living in South Tekno Comix’s (and earlier Marvel’s) circulation Carolina later that same day anyway.

Carolina for a few years—it was probably director Ed Shukin, on right, talking with DC publisher No big deal. I hadn’t said so to Ed, of Paul Levitz in an undated photo. Thanks to Jim Kealy, 1995—when I got a phone call from Ed course, but I’d known before I came who retrieved it from the web.

Shukin, who’d been Marvel’s well-respected that I almost certainly wasn’t going to circulation director. He and I had never had take the job if it was offered to me, much interface, except that he was the guy who kept trying to kill since it would’ve meant having to spend several days a week in the Star Wars comic before it came out in ’77, [mutual laughter] or at urban Florida… and I preferred being with Dann in rural South least to get me to adapt the movie in one or two issues, which, as it Carolina. They’d have had to pay me a lot more money to do that turned out, would’ve made a lot of difference to Marvel’s bottom kind of commute, even for a little while, than they were likely to line and maybe even survival. But Ed cheerfully admitted to me have paid anybody. later that was one of his great mistakes. I guess, because of that, plus the success of the Conan comics in the ’70s, he developed a respect for my tastes and abilities.

So what happened is: I think he was already living in Florida, and the Tekno Comix people had lured him out of retirement to be their start-up circulation director there. Was it Boca Raton?

Anyway, he phoned to tell me they were looking for a new main editor. Tekno had already launched four titles, based on concepts developed by well-known writers: Mickey Spillane, John Jakes, Gene Roddenberry, and Neil Gaiman. They had scripters and artists developing comic stories that fleshed out those concepts. An interesting approach. It was my understanding at the time that Tekno was founded by a husband and wife, attorneys or something, who’d earlier started the Sci-Fi Channel and then sold it for good money when it caught on. A lot of people suspected they were trying to repeat that success with Tekno Comix.

So, just a few issues in, they were looking for a new editor, and Ed got them to fly me down to Florida to be interviewed for the job. Once I got there, I was intrigued to see lots of young people in

At the same time, with my prospects at Marvel (and maybe Marvel itself) going downhill, and not being in that much demand at DC, and with a lot of other comics companies downsizing, it wasn’t a good time to sneeze at a company that might offer me work. Even so, I was really there on false pretenses. Really, the only reason I came to Florida was to see if I could position myself to do some writing for Tekno. I met the guy whom the owners would soon promote to editor from within, and he was hot for the job. I told him, “Great. I hope you get it. If you do, I’d love to do some writing for you.” Of course, Tekno didn’t last much longer. I still have the T-shirt they gave me.

JA: I remember seeing Mickey Spillane in San Diego, and he was talking about how happy he was to be back in comics. Of course he wasn’t writing the comics. They were just using his character, Mike Danger, forerunner of Mike Hammer. I asked him, “Do you really think this is going to last?” He kind of laughed and said, “No, but I’m not going to say that out loud.”

THOMAS: I think I met Spillane at the same convention. We just

A Tekno-cality Tekno Comix’s initial four titles: Gene Roddenberry’s The Lost Universe #1 (April 1995), cover painted by Bill Sienkiewicz… Neil Gaiman’s Lady Justice #1 (Sept. ’95), cover by Dan Brereton… John Jakes’ Mullkon Empire #1 (Sept. ’95), cover by John Watkiss… and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Danger #1 (Sept. ’95), cover by Frank Miller. [TM & © Big Entertainment, Inc.]

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

talked a little about Bill Everett and a couple of other people we both knew. It was the only time I ever met him, though I did interview him by phone once. Tekno was an interesting experiment that didn’t seem ideally suited for comics, but who ever really knows in advance what’s going to catch on?

Topps Comics Mickey Spillane Bestselling author of the Mike Hammer novels. Hammer was a permutation of “Mike Danger,” who’d appeared in a postWWII comics story or two, decades before the Tekno title. In the early ’40s, Spillane had written comics for Timely, et al.

JA: It was the only chance I ever got to ink George Pérez, so I was happy to work for them. [mutual chuckling] Let’s talk about Topps.

How did your involvement start there?

THOMAS: This was earlier, in late ’91. Dann and I were still living in L.A., but that summer we’d already bought the place in South Carolina where we now live, after seeing it for maybe half an hour, and we’d arranged to move cross-country in early December. While our furniture was en route by truck, Dann and I would drive coast to coast in slightly under 48 hours, in her dad’s mini-van, which was loaded up with two dogs, a cat, two toco toucans, Gonzo the aracari, a bunch of guinea pigs and rabbits, four ducks in trashcans, and my PC so I could start working as soon as we arrived.

A few weeks before the move, I got a phone call from my good friend Len Brown. Len was one of the first people I’d met in New York in ’65, though we’d exchanged a letter or two earlier. He’s just a year or so younger than me, and we have several interests in common, like comics, movies, and Elvis. Len had been working for Topps as an executive since the early ’60s and was a co-creator of the “Mars Attacks” and “Wacky Packs” trading-cards, among others. Back in ’65, he’d also scripted the first two “Dynamo” stories in Tower’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and Wally Wood named Dynamo’s civilian ID after him. In 1967-68, we’d shared an apartment in Brooklyn, where he’s from. He and his wife Abby would move to Austin, Texas, when he retired, because he loves country music. Boy, does he love country music! I don’t share that love; but he also has one of the largest collections around of vintage rockabilly records, and I do have a fondness for rockabilly. So you can see why we hit it off. In 1966 or so, he even produced and paid for the recording session Gary Friedrich and I did on our song “Look Out! Here Comes the Spider-Man!” Anyway, Len had long been nudging Topps to get into the comic book business, and that day in ’91 he called to tell me they were finally taking the plunge. He had too many other duties at Topps to become the day-to-day editor once it got started, but he’d be the official editor-in-chief. A gent named Ira Friedman would be the publisher. Len said they were looking for a line editor, and would I like to be interviewed? I figured I had a good shot at the job, but it would require moving back to New York. So I told him, “Actually, I am moving—to South Carolina.” I couldn’t see returning to New York to become the editor of a comics company that might or might not last—and I didn’t want to move back there anyway. I was looking forward to moving to the South Carolina countryside, where Dann and I would own two furnished houses, plus “40 acres and a pool.” Why give that up for an apartment in

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Manhattan or a fraction of an acre in L.A.?

So then Len asked if I could suggest anyone else they should interview for the job. I gave him a couple of names. The first—and I Jim Salicrup don’t know (on left) and Roy Thomas at a New York Comics why, because I Convention, probably sometime in the 2000s. didn’t really Photo by Dann Thomas. know him that well—was Jim Salicrup. Jim had been hired at Marvel back in ’74 after he wrote a letter saying he loved Marvel so much he’d work for us for nothing. As editor-in-chief, I showed that letter to [executive] Sol Brodsky, who liked the idea. [mutual laughter] Anyway, Jim got hired—though of course not for nothing—and eventually became a major editor on Spider-Man and the like. To this day, I’ve no idea why I thought he might be ripe to make a move at that particular moment. But it turned out he was getting antsy and looking for a change. I also gave Len the name of one other Marvel editor, who I actually thought was far more likely to jump ship than Jim was. Topps interviewed both of them and hired Jim. Naturally, I liked the idea of helping fellow pros, but I won’t deny I also figured that either man, as editor, would probably give me work. As with Tekno later, all I really wanted to do was write for Topps. You’ve got to play all the cards you’re dealt!

The first thing I was offered by Topps—I think, by Len, even before Jim was on board—was either Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga—or maybe both. On the Kirby project, Topps had made arrangements with Jack to tie some concepts of his together. Jack had written this Secret City proposal that I wasn’t all that wild about, nor did I care for the name. I thought they should title the comic after a

You’re The Topps!

The 1990s Topps Comics logo floats next to photos of: (Left:) Len Brown, enjoying his retirement in the Austin, Texas, area. He went to work for Topps Chewing Gum in the early 1960s. Pic by Roberto L. Brazziell for a newspaper article. [Photo © the respective copyright holders.]

(Right:) Ira Friedman, Topps Comics publisher in the ’90s, and still a Topps executive. [Logo TM & © Topps Comics, Inc.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

The Starting Lineup The cover art for Captain Glory #1, Bombast #1, and Night Glider #1 (all April 1993), the trio of lead-ins to Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga from Topps Comics, utilized the original concept drawings by Kirby—the only art of his that appeared in the series. But the eternal Kirby dynamism was at the heart of it all! [TM & © Estate of Jack Kirby.]

character or characters, like the “Ninth Men” name I made up for them. But still, Jack was Jack! I was glad to be working with his concepts again, and they certainly had possibilities.

When Jim became editor, he had this interesting idea of getting Silver Age Marvel people to write and draw the initial series. Since I was a “Silver Age Marvel People,” I was all for it! Gary Friedrich and Gerry Conway and I—Gerry just barely qualified as “Silver Age,” but Jim’s choices in that area were limited—dialogued the introductory single issues starring the three main heroes—Bombast, Night Glider, and Captain Glory—who finally came face to face in the final panel of each of their individual solo issues, each plotted by yours truly. Then I would write the main several-issue series, Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga. The artists of the three solo issues were Dick Ayers, Don Heck, and Steve Ditko. To me, though, the one story that really came off looking right was the “#0” lead-in story I did with Walt Simonson, which preceded even the solo-hero issues.

he was this thoroughbred, and that a bunch of mediocre jockeys had saddled him up and ridden him to glory once too often in the past, and he wasn’t Jack Kirby going to give back one atom What can we say?

He was the King! Still is. more than they handed him on a piece of paper. When you do that, though, you actually end up giving less than you were given, because a Marvel-style plot, or even a full script for that matter, is really just the blueprint for an artist to work his wonders with. If the artist willfully decides he’s not going to work any wonders, he’ll just do a prosaic job. Ditko is capable of much, much more… but as far as I’m concerned, we didn’t get that at Topps, and everybody was the loser for it. Steve may well have a different perspective on that, and I’d be glad to print it… but that’s my honest view. It was then, and it is now.

JA: How could you go wrong with Walt Simonson?

JA: So everything at Topps was Marvel-style then?

THOMAS: Right… though of course Walt was only borderline Silver Age, at best. After Ditko, Ayers, and Heck had drawn the lead-in solo issues, Gil Kane was scheduled to draw the Secret City mini-series. But Gil—and I don’t know if it was because of illness or cold feet or whatever—withdrew at the last minute, and Ditko inherited the series.

THOMAS: In that series, yes. The only thing I nixed in the main Secret City series was—this was early ’93, and Bill Clinton was the new President and was showing up in lots of comic books, and someone high up at Topps wanted a major plot point of Secret City to involve kidnapping and menacing Clinton. Maybe it’s partly because JFK was assassinated on my 23rd birthday, but I really resisted putting the President in great peril in a comic book, and Len backed me up, because he opposed that idea, too. As finally done, there was relatively little menace to Clinton.

Now, Ditko’s a great talent. I’d been a fan of his Captain Atom in the late ’50s, even before Spider-Man, and I feel privileged to have dialogued two of his “Dr. Strange” stories in ’65. But, in working with him on that Topps series, I discovered that—well, it’s not that Steve wasn’t interested in adding anything to whatever plot was given to him—it’s that I feel he was absolutely interested in not adding anything to that plot, or in giving back one iota more than the plot required him to. Maybe he felt, as I suspect Kirby did, that

JA: But you’d had President Nixon show up in Fantastic Four in the ’70s.

THOMAS: That was different… just a cameo. And in “3-D Man,” Jim Craig and I had revealed that Nixon was actually a Skrull.

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

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Ten Degrees Cooler Inside!

(Clockwise:) Interior pages from the three solo-hero issues by seven Silver-Agers: Captain Glory #1-and-only was the work of Roy Thomas (writer) and Steve Ditko (artist). Thanks to John Caputo & Barry Pearl.

In Bombast #1, Topps editors Dwight Jon Zimmerman and Jim Salicrup hedged their bets by arranging a cameo featuring Image Comics’ hot new hero The Savage Dragon, created by Erik Larsen. Credits: RT (plot), Gary Friedrich (dialogue), Dick Ayers (pencils), and John Severin (inks).

Night Glider #1 saw Don Heck penciling and inking, with Gerry Conway dialoguing from Roy’s plot. Thanks to Maggie Thompson. [All art & story except Savage Dragon TM & © Estate of Jack Kirby; Savage Dragon TM & © Erik Larsen.]

Steve Ditko A photo from the web, probably taken in the 1970s.

Gerry Conway

Gary Friedrich Don Heck Photo courtesy of Jim Fern.

Dick Ayers in 1997, at San Diego; courtesy of Jon Berk.

Best known for his art on the Western Ghost Rider (at two companies) and Sgt. Fury.

John Severin in the 1950s, when he was drawing for Timely.

2009. Photo by Leona Thomas.

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

[mutual laughter] But that was just in fun.

Actually, I did something a bit like that with Clinton in Secret City, too, at one point.

Walter Simonson His groundbreaking work, of course, was his “Manhunter” series for DC and his Thor rejuvenation for Marvel.

I still admired Ditko’s artwork, of course, and I wrote him, trying to purchase an original page of Secret City. I just got back a short note, saying, “I’m not interested in getting into that market,” and that was the end of my contact with Ditko on that project. I’m still a fan of his work, though, in spite of everything. He couldn’t treat me badly enough to change that… any more than Kirby had been able to with that “Houseroy” bit. I can mentally separate people from their art.

JA: So you didn’t have any discussion with Ditko as far as plots or anything?

THOMAS: No, no. Actually, I think the thing

The Power And The Glory Captain Glory steps up to the plate in Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga #0 (April 1993)—as the Ninth Men’s civilization nears its end. Script by RT, art by Walt Simonson. Thanks to John Caputo & Barry Pearl.

[TM & © Estate of Jack Kirby.]

It’s No Secret (Left:) Steve Ditko’s cover for Jack Kirby’s Secret City Saga #2 (June 1993), on which the heroes guard new President Bill Clinton.

(Above:) Captain Glory, Night Glider, and Bombast encounter each other for the first time in 15,000 years at the end of Captain Glory #1—only they’re wearing masks, so it takes them a second to recognize each other.

Script by Thomas; art by Ditko. [TM & © Estate of Jack Kirby.]

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

that really doomed Topps’ comics from the start was that they decided to plastic-bag the comics and put trading cards in with them—understandable, since trading cards are one of Topps’ main things. They’re the makers, after all, of Bazooka Bubble Gum and all those baseball and other sports cards over the years.

Unfortunately, that meant that, because the comics arrived at the comics stores in sealed if transparent bags, people couldn’t open them and page through the comics to decide if they really wanted to buy them.

JA: Yeah, I thought it was a bad idea. Did you have any contact with Kirby at this time?

THOMAS: I don’t think so. Topps just sent me drawings of characters I either had to use or had the option of using. Captain Glory was a Captain America type… Bombast and Night Glider, a little weaker. I don’t think they were Kirby’s best concepts, but even second- or third-tier Kirby still has some value, and maybe I could have done a bit better by the concept. But I did try.

JA: When you did Cadillacs and Dinosaurs for Topps, did you have much conversation with Mark Schultz about it?

THOMAS: Once or twice by phone, I think. And he obligingly wrote several pages for us about his concept, the Xenozoic world, so that Topps would be on the same page he was. I followed that guide slavishly, because this was Mark’s world. I was just hired to add to it.

The main problem we had to solve was how to handle the Topps series while Mark was still creating new stories about that world, more Xenozoic Tales that would be published elsewhere.

You can’t do stories set after the last one that’s been printed without risking that the next new Schultz story may contradict them. So I decided to find one moment, late in Mark’s published stories, when the main characters were all in place and before something irretrievably changed that mix. Well, I found that moment, which probably didn’t exist for more than a few seconds, really—just after Wilhelmina Scharnhorst took over the City by the Sea, in case anybody’s tracking—and I set every one of the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs stories I wrote in what I think of as “the hour that stretches” right after that. I borrowed that phrase from a science-fiction talk-radio show in L.A. that came on late-nights on Saturdays in the ’70s and ’80s; it was called Hour 25.

skeletons, it would look cool. And it did.

Another thing I liked in the series: for some reason, the people in Mark’s stories had totally forgotten the old names for dinosaurs, so they’d made up new ones. Instead of “tyrannosaurus” or whatever, they had descriptive names like “slithers” or “cutters” or “honkers”—no, wait, that last one’s from Turok, Son of Stone, but they were in that vein. The dinosaurs were sometimes named after a person or thing, like a “wonmug” named after the time-travel doc in Alley Oop; so, in our first issue, I had a previously unnamed species of dinosaur chasing after the hero’s Caddy, and I christened it a “krenkel,” [Jim laughs] which I thought was a nice name for a dinosaur. I wish that series could’ve gone on forever.

We did four three-issue series. Three of them were published— and there’s a fourth one that exists almost totally complete in photocopy form, with the lead stories totally drawn and written, but not lettered. Its main artist was a talented young Englishman named David Roach.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs was a tremendously pleasurable project, even though the basic concept has gaps in logic and credibility you could drive a Mack truck—or a krenkel—through. You just have to wink at a few minor details like being able to drive 1950s cars through a primeval jungle.

JA: Especially when the fossil fuel was still alive!

THOMAS: Yes. [laughs] Well, Mark came up with explanations to try to make things plausible, like finding this whole cache of vintage cars. All that’s needed is the willing suspension of disbelief, and you can have tremendous fun with that series.

Each Topps issue for the first two story arcs had two different covers in different editions, in that tail-end of the spec era. A highprofile artist would do an artsy cover, and the regular artist—

Our Cadillacs and Dinosaurs series was great fun—and, as far as I’m concerned, of considerable quality, though naturally not with the kind of auteur intensity Mark brought to the original series. The first of Topps’ three-issue series was drawn by Dick Giordano. We made it a sequel to the earliest of the “Xenozoic Tales,” done for an underground comic, in which Mark had created these mutated, malevolent brains running around via tentacles. I figured that if they used those tentacles to animate human and dinosaur

Other Possible Titles: Cars (Or Chrome) & Carnosaurs

Mark Schultz

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Although the original title of Mark Schultz’s series for Kitchen Sink Press was Xenozoic Tales (“Xenozoic” means “strange life”), it was the contrast between giant primordial reptiles and vintage Detroit automobiles that gave the series its special cachet, as evidenced by the cover of #2 (April 1987). For the series’ later and better-known title, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs—used on reprints, a TV series, and Topps’ comics series—Schultz had to get special permission from General Motors. [TM & © Mark Schultz.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

A Good Case Can Be Made For Xenozoic-phobia (Above:) Mark Schultz’s cover for the underground comic Death Rattle #8 (Dec. 1986), which featured his story “Xenozoic!,” the first entry in the series. Thanks to Jim Kealy, Mark Muller, & Ernesto Guevara. The original Schultz material is currently available in hardcover volumes from Dark Horse.

(Above right:) Mark did these drawings to explain to Roy, editor Len Brown, and readers about the mutated Professor Fessenden and his associates from Death Rattle #8. They were printed in Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Vol. 2, #3. [TM & © Mark Schultz.]

Dick Giordano (seen on right) with Roy T. at the Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC, in June 2009. Despite unavoidable sparring when Roy worked under Dick, who became DC’s managing editor in the ’80s, the two formed a mutual admiration society and worked together whenever possible. Roy still misses him.

Photo courtesy of Michael Dunne.

Cover Me! Dick Giordano’s covers for Topps’ Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Vol. 1, #1-3 (Feb.-April 1994). There were also alternate covers by William Stout for all three issues; the one for V1#1 was seen in A/E #136.

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

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Giordano, in the first series—would do an alternate cover.

The second series was drawn by a young Quebec artist, Claude St. Aubin, and involved a man-eating carnosaur with extra abilities like camouflage, foreshadowing the one in the new Jurassic World movie. The third was drawn by Esteban Maroto and featured both a Don Quixote type and a sexy motorcycle villainess called Big Red. One of Moebius’ assistants did a backup story in one issue; it looked good, but I objected when he deviated somewhat from my plot. Those backup features were the equivalent of the stories Mark Schultz wrote and Steve Stiles drew in the original series. In fact, we got Steve to do a couple of stories for the Topps series, too.

JA: You did all your work at Topps with Salicrup, is that right?

THOMAS: Not really. Len was the initial editor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, though he soon became more of an editorial consultant. Then Jim was in dayto-day charge, under Ira Friedman… but I also worked with Renee Witterstatter and Dwight Jon Zimmerman on some things. I’m not entirely sure how the chain of command went, and anyway I went around it whenever I could.

I really enjoyed working for Topps. When the comics

Snap, Krenkel, & Pop! (Left:) In Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Vol. 2, #1 (April 1994), in an opening-sequence homage to Ray Bradbury’s famous short story “The Foghorn” (aka “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”), writer RT & artist Dick Giordano introduced a Ceratosaurus—which Roy christened a “krenkel” after noted fantasy artist Roy G. Krenkel. [TM & © Mark Schultz.]

For the original Xenozoic Tales, Mark Schultz had concocted colorful dinosaur names like “zekes,” “shivats,” “tritons,” “macks” (from Mack trucks), et al. For Topps’ series, with Mark’s blessing, RT added “skeezix” (from Uncle Wiggly stories), “dunbars” (from DC’s “The Dodo and the Frog”), “toophers,” “goombahs,” “mugwumps,” “britomarts,” etc.

Claude St. Aubin In 1994 Topps hailed him in ads as their “new discovery.”

Man-Eater Of Cadillac-Land Claude St. Aubin’s wonderfully dramatic covers for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Vol. 2, #4-6 (May-July 1994). In this series, Jack Tenrec’s pet cutter (allosaur) Hermes is believed to have become a “man-eater,” and tracker Ryder Corbett is brought in to slay him. But the culprit turns out to be a mutated shivat (tyrannosaur). Corbett was named after King Solomon’s Mines author H. Rider Haggard and Jim Corbett, the tiger-hunter author of the 1944 autobiographical Man-Eaters of Kumaon. [TM & © Mark Schultz.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

division was first starting up, they flew me to New York—or maybe I was coming in anyway for some reason, I forget. Topps still had their offices in a creaking old warehouse in Brooklyn, though they’d soon relocate to swanker digs in the Manhattan financial district. Len and Ira asked where I’d like to have lunch when I came out to Brooklyn. I said, “I’d really love to eat where I ate almost every Friday night for years right before I went to Phil Seuling’s apartment to play poker. I’d have a lobster roll and a hot dog at Nathan’s in Coney Island!” So when I showed up, Ira had hired a limo to take us all to Coney Island. [Jim laughs] Good times!

Joseph Michael Linsner

Now that I think of it, chances are that the earliest Topps project I was put on, even before the Kirby one, was that adaptation of the upcoming Francis Ford Coppola film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They’d hired Mike Mignola to draw it. It’s the only time I ever worked with him, and of course he was excellent. When that was finished, he was asked to draw the adaptation of [the film] Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, too, but at that stage he was starting up Hellboy. Jim Salicrup tried to talk Mignola into delaying Hellboy long enough to draw Frankenstein, but he couldn’t. So that series was given to Rafael Kayanan, who did a wonderful job with it.

Donkyu Very Much!

The Joseph Michael Linsner cover, plus two interior pages drawn by Esteban Maroto, for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Vol. 2, #7 (Sept. 1994); script by RT. In panel 2 of the first inside page shown, motorcycle brigand Big Red echoes a famous Marlon Brando line from the 1953 film The Wild One—in response to a totally different question. The other page shows Donkyu, a deluded old man who quotes Cervantes’ Don Quixote, attacking a windmill; only it turns out there was a “krenkel” behind it, so maybe he isn’t quite so mad, after all! The early mammal he’s riding, by the way, is a “gloot” (Macrauchenia), named after Roy’s pal Don Glut, author of the 1972 Dinosaur Dictionary. [TM & © Mark Schultz.]

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

Why Doesn’t This Sport Have Its Own Cable Channel?

David Roach

(Clockwise from top left:) Years ago, while perusing a book on old pulps, Roy was knocked out by the cover of the Dec. 15, 1913, issue of Top Notch Magazine and a caption about “the now-forgotten sport of automobile polo”—which actually existed at the time, believe it or not! Sounded to him like a good pastime for the Xenozoic Age—hence this splash and story page featuring Jack Tenrec and Hannah Dundee from the never-published Topps Cadillacs and Dinosaurs #10-12 drawn

by British artist David Roach. Of course, the slithers (dinosaurs) showed up before long, as well; but the main storyline dealt with a Blob-like alien monstrosity that emerges from a fallen meteorite. Thanks to Dave for sending scans made directly from the original art, which he still has. Too bad this tale’s never seen print—yet!

[C&D elements TM & © Mark Schultz; other art © 2016 David Roach.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

It Could Turn Red, Too! Splash page of C&D V2#5. The mutant T-Rex had used its chameleon powers to hide unseen amid rubble—until it could pounce. Script by RT, pencils by Claude St. Aubin, inks by Allen Nunis, sometime assistant to Al Williamson. The celebrated 1950s EC artist recommended Nunis to his longtime friend, editor Len Brown. [TM & © Mark Schultz.]

Of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t really Bram Stoker’s Dracula—it was Coppola’s Dracula, and I had reservations about a lot of the story elements, though it had a basically good feel. I met Coppola at a press conference I was invited to. I remember we were chatting about his movie The Conversation when I got elbowed aside so the photographers could get shots of him with Bob Kane. Dracula and Batman together—who could resist that photo-op?

When I adapted the upcoming Frankenstein film months later, I happened by coincidence to be going to England at that time. Topps arranged for me to take a short train ride from London up to the film studio where they’d been shooting it. The execs there gave me a lukewarm hello, then totally ignored me, and I just wandered around the movie’s Arctic set for an hour. It was no big thrill just to be on another movie set. Gerry Conway and I had spent much of the first half of the ’80s finding excuses to crawl all over the old sets at 20th and Warner and Paramount and even what had once been the Republic lot. Boy, had I loved that! I’ve still got my photos of the old Republic Western town set.

The worst thing about the Frankenstein movie was Robert DeNiro as the Monster. He wasn’t nearly as scary as he had been as Travis Bickle. Maybe his worst movie-choice ever.

“Enter Freely And Of Your Own Will…”

Dracula meets Mina Harker—then prepares to take a bite out of Lucy Westenra—in issue #2 (Nov. 1992) of Topps’ adaptation of the Francis Ford Coppola film Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Script by RT; wonderfully moody and exquisitely designed art by Mike Mignola. The four issues were soon collected into a graphic novel. [TM & © Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., or successors in interest.]

Mike Mignola In 1992, he was poised to become the auteur of Hellboy.

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

Bridezilla Of Frankenstein A trio of “monstrous” pages from Topps’ adaptation of the 1994 Kenneth Branagh film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, wherein penciler Rafael Kayanan & inker Rick Magyar capture the essence of Robert DeNiro as the Monster and Helena Bonham Carter as its “bride,” Victor Frankenstein’s recently deceased (and even more recently resuscitated) fiancée Elizabeth. Script by RT; pages from issues #2 & 4 (Nov. ’94 & Jan. ’95). The “bride” page is repro’d from the Spanish graphic novel version; there was no g.n. in America, alas. [TM & © Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., or successors in interest.]

JA: You also did Dracula: Vlad the Impaler, three issues.

THOMAS: Yeah. Topps was so happy with the Dracula adaptation that they wanted to do more Dracula, so Jim asked me, “How’d you like to do the story of the historical Vlad?” Coppola had used a little of Vlad’s real life in the film, even though there’s no “Impaler” aspect to Stoker’s novel at all. So Maroto and I collaborated on a biography of Vlad, except that I turned him into a vampire at the end! I did a lot of historical research, and, except for the vampire bit, it’s a very accurate biography, much more so than you’d have gotten, say, if Francis Ford Coppola had made a movie of it. I was real pleased with it. And Topps liked it. They reprinted it later.

When both movie adaptations and the Impaler series were finished, I had my own idea for a series. You know I like to write comics about wars.

Well, I wanted to do The Frankenstein/Dracula War. I set it in the early 19th century, decades before the beginning of Stoker’s novel. At the end of Shelley’s novel, in that same period, the Monster was in the Arctic, but there was no reason for him to stay there forever, so he wanders south into the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. Jean-Marc Lofficier had a hand

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Vlad Tidings The historical Vlad Dracul does what he did best, impaling his enemies and being prince of Wallachia (not Transylvania)—and, after death, is brought back by spilled blood as Dracula, lord of vampires! Guess which of these three pages from Topps’ Dracula: Vlad the Impaler #2 & 3 (March & April 1993) you won’t find in Romanian history books! Script by RT, art by Esteban Maroto. All three issues were reprinted a few months later with new covers and a new title: The Dracula Chronicles. Guess Topps wanted to be sure everybody knew that Vlad the Impaler was Dracula! [TM & © Topps Comics, Inc.]

in that aspect, I believe, because of his interest in French history. I had a lot of fun with the idea of a war between Dracula and Frankenstein. I forget who won, [Jim laughs] but the thing I was proudest of was that, just as in Young All-Stars at DC a bit earlier, we got the Monster to look like he should look: eight feet tall, and gaunt…and he can move fast, not just lumber like Karloff.

JA: How come there wasn’t more of Frankenstein on his own?

Didn’t that sell as well as Dracula?

THOMAS: Dracula came first, so that’s why we had more Dracula. But, by this stage, I think Topps was beginning to run out of steam. So I don’t know how The Frankenstein/Dracula War sold, or whether it made any difference. I know I submitted a proposal for a Dracula vs. the Blood Countess series, co-starring Elizabeth Bathory, but I guess it was too late for that one.

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“This Means War!” (Left:) Topps editor Jim Salicrup managed to talk Bram Stoker’s Dracula artist Mike Mignola into drawing the covers for all three issues of The Frankenstein/Dracula War, including this one for #1.

(Above left & right:) See what we mean about the Frankenstein Monster being tall in this Topps series? From #1 & #2 (Feb.-March 1995). Script by Roy Thomas; co-plotted by Jean-Marc Lofficier; pencils by Claude St. Aubin; inks by Alex Nunis. [TM & © Topps Comics, Inc.]

As a kid in the ’50s, I’d almost never bought a horror comic, but I did write some in later years at Marvel, Topps, and elsewhere. In 1993, JeanMarc and I discussed with Topps the idea of a comics series based on the world of Stephen King’s novels. Jean-Marc’s idea was to use The Shop, a CIA-type group that pops up in Firestarter and Tommyknockers, as the series’ anchor. The heroine of Firestarter was alive and well and sixteen years old at the end of that novel, so she’d have been a part of it.

But that didn’t work out for us… though there’ve been plenty of King comics series since. We were ahead of our time.

JA: You did two Space: Above and Beyond series: the initial one, and then Space: Above and Beyond – The Gauntlet, which was two issues.

THOMAS: Yeah, Space: Above and Beyond was a Fox TV series. It was a science-fiction show, which basically took the feel of World War II movies, especially the war in the Pacific, and applied it to a war with aliens from another galaxy. Like in a lot of the vintage WWII movies, you never got to know any of the aliens. They were no more humanized than, say, the Japanese in World War II movies with John Wayne. The soldiers called the slightly insectoid aliens “chigs.” I always figured that was short for “chiggers,” those little bugs in your yard that bite. In some ways, I suppose “chigs” was a stand-in for the racial epithets of World War II. For some reason, the show made a big deal out of in-vitro fertilization, and how some humans of the future were prejudiced against people born that way. I couldn’t see the big deal; to me, it just seemed an artificial attempt to inject tension between some of the principals. The series had been created by a couple of guys who’d written for The X-Files. It only lasted one season. Some of what I did was adaptations of TV scripts, some of it was new stories. My Topps work on X-Files was both more fun and more profitable.

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Yanick Paquette In Space No One Can Hear You Draw!

Yanick Paquette-penciled pages from “Out of the Silent Space” in Space: Above and Beyond #1 & #3 (Jan. & March 1996). Inks by Armando Gill; script by RT. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.]

JA: Tell me about that series. Both it and Space: Above and Beyond start in ‘96.

THOMAS: A year or so earlier, another writer had talked Topps into doing an X-Files comic, with new stories. It was fairly successful. Then, for some reason, Topps asked me rather than him to script a series that adapted the X-Files episodes in chronological order. Well, I’m the Super-Adaptoid, as John Byrne used to say.

[Jim chuckles] I’ve always been proud of that. I like to do new stories, I like to do adaptations, I like to do both. I have my own theories about adaptations. With some things, I like to take liberties. With others, I like to be very, very literal and get everything just right.

In this case, the TV people clearly wanted very faithful adaptations of the X-Files episodes. Not counting Secret Defenders #1 for Marvel, that was probably the most lucrative few months of my comic book life, because they sent me videotapes of the episodes and copies of the scripts… and I was to adapt them in what were mostly 44-page comics stories. It’s one of the few times in my comics career where I wrote full scripts. It had to be done that way, and it was fine by me. The story was already there.

I developed an efficient process. I’d watch the show, then I’d read the script, and then I’d type the script out word-for-word on my PC, except for abridging some of the descriptions. I’d type out every word of dialogue unless I saw something I already knew I wasn’t going to use. I even typed out most of the descriptions, because those told the artist what to draw. Then I’d go through the

typed script and basically edit it down. I learned very quickly that, to get it to come out to the right number of pages, I had to cut out a certain amount out of each script—maybe 20%. That usually wasn’t hard to do.

For the rest of the week, I honed things. I must’ve been a masochist—even though I got to like the X-Files show and still watch episodes from time to time—because I played those videotapes over and over as I worked, running them backward and forward in brief snatches. The reason was that, when the scripts were filmed, they’d generally deviate a bit from the exact dialogue in the screenplay… drop or add words or whole lines. I decided I was going to make the published comic’s dialogue as close to the broadcast show as possible. The result was about as faithful an adaptation as you could get, allowing for considerations of length.

You can check ’em out for yourself—IDW just reprinted all nine published Topps X-Files: Season One issues in two hardcover volumes.

I particularly remember the early episode titled “Squeeze,” about this mutant named Tooms who can fit through almost any opening. He enters places through air vents and the like, to kill people and do unspeakable things to the corpses. It was a really creepy episode—the only one, I believe, whose villain was used again in a later episode. And, during the week I was adapting it, I remember suddenly sitting up in bed one night and noticing, really noticing for the first time, that there was an air vent over our heads in our bedroom. Just looking at that vent suddenly made me uneasy. That’s how much X-Files could get to you!

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decided that every single panel drawing of Scully and Mulder had to look exactly like the actors playing the parts. Now, you and I are bright enough to know that, if you see photos of people you know from different angles, with different lighting, etc., sometimes you ain’t gonna recognize them! There’ll be a weird angle or they’ll have their mouths open in an odd way, and you just won’t know it’s them. Well, the TV minions didn’t know from this. On many an individual panel, they would berate Topps: “This doesn’t look like Scully,” “This doesn’t John Van Fleet look like Mulder.” So they were driving the comic editors, as well as the artists who had to do all the re-drawing, crazy. It was torpedoing the schedule and making the books ship late, which cost money and sales.

So, by the time when 14 issues should have come out, Topps had only been able to get out nine of them. At some stage, Topps let the

When Mulder Met Scully An early page from X-Files: Season One #0 (1997), in which scripter Roy Thomas and artist John Van Fleet adapted the pilot episode of the 1993-2002 TV series The X-Files. Note the partly-seen “I Want to Believe” poster on the wall. John generously gifted Roy with the original art to this page. All nine of the published Topps adaptations are currently available in two hardbound volumes from IDW. [TM & © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.]

We started with “#0” for the pilot, and I wrote a total of fourteen scripts and was paid for them all. But Topps published only nine of them. The problem apparently was not the creator of the show, Chris Carter—but rather, the people on his team (or maybe it was Fox’s people—I forget) who were assigned to supervise the network’s end of the comics adaptations and to liaise with Topps. Those folks never gave me any problem. I got nothing but kind words from them—because why not, right? I’m taking their scripts and feeding them back to them almost exactly as they appear on TV! But I pitied the poor editors and artists at Topps, because the TV minions had to prove they were earning their keep, so they

Val Mayerick is also the guy who first drew Howard the Duck at Marvel.

“X” Marks The File One of the most notorious episodes of The X-Files was “Squeeze,” the first of two installments featuring the mutant John Tooms. He could get in anywhere—and then he ripped out your liver and ate it. To paraphrase a Mulder line from the pilot episode: “You gotta love this show. It’s Halloween every week.” Topps adaptation by RT and artists Val Mayerick & Rick Magyar.

[TM & © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

contract lapse, even though sales were good. They just couldn’t deal with it any more. And the interesting thing is that I don’t think any other comics company picked up the license after Topps dropped it, despite the show being a hit of sorts. The word must’ve got around. [mutual laughter] I’ve still got the other five scripts, all of which I was paid for, sitting in a drawer somewhere.

Show-biz types could be nuts about likenesses. My favorite story, actually, is one Len Wein tells about when he was editor of Disney’s comics and they were adapting Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy movie. They were having trouble getting Beatty to sign off on the third cover, I think it was, because he didn’t like the way his face was drawn there. So, after trying various things unsuccessfully, Len had an idea. There was an earlier cover whose likeness Beatty had loved… so Len figured all they had to do was “flop” that face, turn it into a mirror image, and it was bound to be approved, right? So they did that and sent it on. And Beatty looked at it and said… “That’s not my best side.” [mutual laughter] JA: When I did Star Trek: The Next Generation, Patrick Stewart and Whoopi Goldberg had control and say-so over their likenesses. Whoopi

decided we didn’t make her as pretty as she thought she was.

And when I did Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Dark Horse, I was asked to fix a drawing of Sarah Michelle Geller’s nose because she said it didn’t have that big bulb at the end that the artist drew, which of course it did. I was supposed to make the bulb smaller when I inked her. I asked, “Did she ever look in the mirror?” They laughed. [mutual chuckling] THOMAS: I want to stress, it wasn’t the X-Files actors who were causing the problem, probably not even Chris Carter himself. I really liked the show. It just didn’t make sense for the TV people to exercise such microscopic control. They knew TV—but they didn’t know from comics, and they didn’t want to know. Ultimately, they made it impossible for Topps to do the comic book profitably. I was really sorry about it, because I was making the best per-week take-home of my life when I worked on the X-Files comic. Plus I enjoyed doing it.

JA: Was Topps paying better than Marvel?

THOMAS: About the same, if I recall rightly. I didn’t know how long this gig would last, so I cajoled my dear old mother back in Missouri, who was then about the same age I am now, to get home from Bingo in time to tape X-Files episodes and mail them to me.

[Jim laughs] She was also taping another TV thing I did at Topps— Xena. I’ve still got all those X-Files tapes, though I eventually taped over the Xena ones.

One thing about X-Files that drove me nuts was that Scully remained skeptical about the supernatural, week after week after week. You’d think that by about the third or fourth week, she’d figure out, “Hey, maybe there really is something to this ‘supernatural’ business!” [Jim chuckles] But I really liked working on the comic, even though I never had any burning desire to write new X-Files stories. Actually, at one late stage, at Topps’ request, I worked with Dann on a synopsis for a story titled “Singapore Sling” for what was to be the first issue of a comic called The XFiles Black-and-White. I don’t think anything with that title ever came out, though. Xena was fun to write new stories for, but with X-Files, I was happy just doing the adaptations.

JA: Before we get to Xena—you first did five issues of the Hercules TV series. I assume Topps came to you for that? Were those original stories or adaptations?

THOMAS: They must’ve come to me, because I wasn’t familiar with the shows previously. I don’t think anything I did in Hercules: The Incredible Journeys or Xena: Warrior Princess was an adaptation.

If I recall a-right, they were all new stories. They sent me scripts of some shows, including of the first couple of TV movies of Hercules—I’m not sure they sent any videotapes. Of course, Hercules spawned Xena, which became even more popular. When I started on Xena, they only had a handful of scripts, no tapes, because the show hadn’t yet aired.

When Hercules Met Xena Though Xena’s debut in the 1990s Hercules TV series wasn’t adapted, here’s the first comic book page that features the two of them, with Herc framed for kidnapping her mother. Xena had encountered a Hercules imposter earlier, but that doesn’t count, does it? Script by RT; pencils by Jeff Butler; inks by Steve Montano. From Topps’ Hercules: The Legendary Journeys #3 (Aug. 1996). [TM & © Universal Television Enterprises, Inc.]

Like Hercules, Xena made good use of the old Greek myths, but treated them with a modern and irreverent sensibility. Even the dialogue had a modern cast. It was a very offbeat take, at a time when that was far more unusual. I had the option of treating the myths fairly traditionally, or I could take liberties. I got a chance to use a lot of things I never thought I’d be able to use in comics, like the Gilgamesh legend—well, come to think of it, Dann and I had already used Gilgamesh in Arak, Son of Thunder. But there were other things, like The Seven against Thebes… and I still have a onepage proposal for a Xena and Hercules Special: Atlas Shrugs, a riff on the ancient myth in which Hercules was tricked into taking Atlas’ place holding up the heavens. Xena got him out of that gig, of course. I don’t think we ever got around to doing that one. There

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Joyce Chin Fringe Benefits (Above:) Roy T. at a London comics convention in February 2013, flanked by cosplay lovelies portraying Red Sonja and Xena, Warrior Princess. He and Dann attended the con courtesy of Pete Crowther, Paul Stephenson, and PS Artbooks, publishers of quality hardcover books reprinting preCode comics, including the Roy Thomas Presents series. See ads scattered through this and other issues of Alter Ego. Photo by Pete Crowther.

dropped by only briefly, but was very complimentary about my Conan work. Later, he directed the first three Spider-Man movies, of course. It’s well known he and Tappert did Hercules because the TV rights to Conan weren’t available; so, in a sense, Xena subbed for what might otherwise have been a Red Sonja series.

Well, This Is Another Fine Gilgamesh You’ve Gotten Us Into!

Xena and the Mesopotamian man-god Gilgamesh—perhaps the first epic hero in all of world literature—side by side in Topps’ Xena: Warrior Princess #2 (Sept. 1997). Script by Roy Thomas; pencils by Joyce Chin; inks by Andy Lanning. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © Universal Television Enterprises, Inc.]

was another proposal for a story I titled Xena’s New York Adventure—you can guess what that one was about. There was a Pegasus proposal… several others. I’d have to check through all my back issues to see which ones became comics and which didn’t.

Meanwhile, my agent, Dan Ostroff, parlayed the comic book assignment into a chance for me to co-write a TV episode of Xena in its first season. It didn’t work out entirely well, as my co-writer and I ended up getting totally rewritten, and I don’t think for the better. I didn’t care for what aired, but the producers generously left our names in the screen credits with those of the re-writers, so I still get an occasional small check for it, two decades later. But there’s not much in the filmed episode that my friend Janis Hendler and I actually wrote. Janis had written and produced on the original Knight Rider, Fall Guy, and other shows out in Hollywood, where she lived. I’d written an episode or two of Super Force, a syndicated TV show she and her then-husband Larry Brody had created.

During a trip I took back to L.A., Janis and I met with producers Sam Raimi and Bob Tappert and their Xena showrunner. Raimi

For our TV episode, Janis and I wanted to do a story set in the Trojan War—and, as it turned out, the Xena folks wanted one, too.

Janis and I had an approach we loved for Helen of Troy. She’d be this airhead who had run away with Paris ten years before, and now she just sits around in Troy being vain and spoiled. When Xena shows up, all Helen wants to know is, “What are the latest styles back in Greece?” and things like that. [Jim chuckles] But when the script got rewritten, Helen became an early women’s-libber.

When the city falls and Paris is killed, she won’t go back to Greece with her husband Menelaus. Instead, she strikes out on her own to “find herself.” I kept a paper bag close at hand while watching it.

[Jim laughs] They didn’t like our approach and we didn’t like theirs on this particular episode, but I did like the show in general. I didn’t write nearly all the Topps Xena, but I got to write a lot of it.

JA: You’ve got several mini-series here, including Xena: Warrior Princess: Year One. THOMAS: If you say so. [laughs] JA: Don’t remember that one, huh?

THOMAS: Not by name.

JA: Because I was going to ask if there were any guidelines.

THOMAS: Well, mostly I just remember having the early scripts to work from. One comics story I was hoping to write recently, when Dynamite had the rights to Xena, was to take Janis’ and my original teleplay for the Xena Trojan War episode and adapt it into a comic. It’s so different from what was on TV that it would make a fun comic book on its own. Janis gave me her blessing to do it.

But that’s never quite worked out… yet.

It’s funny—these Topps series like the various Dracula and Frankenstein things, X-Files, Xena, and especially Cadillacs and Dinosaurs were some of my favorite assignments in the ’90s; but most of them weren’t things I’d ever have thought I’d want to do.

But, of course, I’d been only vaguely familiar with Conan before I

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Being Xena In All The Right Places

Robert Teranishi

started that comic, too. The only problem with the various Topps series was that they didn’t last long. Just about the time I really settled into them, they’d be cancelled for one reason or another.

We discussed a Phantom of the Opera adaptation, too, and adapting Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant novels; but neither of those ever came to fruition. Fairly late in the game, in 1997, Len Brown and I discussed a projected series called Topps Tribute—I forget if any of them by anyone else ever saw print—they were to tell the life stories of famous people in comics form. I remember the two of us particularly discussing Frank Sinatra, who’s been my favorite pop singer ever since the ’50s; Len was thrilled when his daughter Nancy paid a visit to the Topps offices in conjunction with that or some other project. He and I also batted around doing Topps Tributes to the likes of Ronald Reagan, JFK, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Bob Hope… but nothing solid ever came of it, and soon Topps was out of the comic book business.

Xena goes into action in defense of an aged, selfblinded Oedipus, in Xena: Warrior Princess/The Dragon’s Teeth #1 (Dec. 1997), a riff on the Greek tragedy The Seven against Thebes by Aeschylus. Script

by RT; pencils by Robert Teranishi; inks by Steve Montano. Roy was happy that that issue’s cover (above) was painted by Zina Saunders, daughter of famed pulpmagazine (and sometimes comics) cover artist Norman Saunders. As on other comics in this series, there was also an alternate photo-cover, featuring Lucy Lawless as Xena and Renée O’Connor as her sidekick Gabrielle.

[TM & © Universal Television Enterprises, Inc.]

THOMAS: Nah, it still gives me nightmares. [mutual laughter] You think The X-Files was scary, try dealing with seventh- and eighthgraders. I hadn’t liked being a teacher during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and I didn’t like it any better at the end of the Bill Clinton era. I have a great respect for teachers; I just didn’t like being one. I just had no idea of a better way to make a living, until I lucked into that foreign-relations fellowship to George Washington U. in ’65—and then, only a few weeks later, out of the blue, I got the offer from Mort Weisinger to become his assistant editor on the “Superman” comics. After that, one thing’s led to another… and another and another… for fifty years.

THOMAS: Yeah, we were all lucky if we survived it at all.

Apparently, to rephrase John Lennon, life is what happens to me while I’m avoiding making other plans. I tend to just respond to what comes along, and so far it’s worked out pretty well for me.

Paul Levitz [comics writer and former publisher of DC Comics] once told me that he’d noticed that at various stages of my life I’ve made sudden, major changes… and it looked to him as if they’d usually been the right ones for me. I thought about it and decided he was probably right. But I didn’t notice while I was doing it. The idea of having a “five-year plan”… of having some notion of what I want to be doing several years from a given date… has always been pretty much alien to me.

JA: I agree with that. [chuckles] I survived by going to Archie.

JA: By the way, did Topps pay royalties, or did you just get a page rate?

THOMAS: I ended up going back to, God forbid, teaching for a year.

THOMAS: You know, I don’t remember. I don’t think I ever got anything extra, but I don’t recall if there was a royalty structure and it’s just that the profits never rose to that level or if there wasn’t any such agreement. Probably the latter.

JA: Besides any other factors, it was a bad time in comics.

JA: Yeah, you want to talk about that?

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Cross Plains Comics JA: You also, around that time, did some work for Richard Ashford at Cross Plains Comics.

THOMAS: Yeah. Actually, I was sort of an unindicted coconspirator or partner in that company, or something like that. The company was Richard’s brainchild. In some Richard Ashford ways, his notion was a Editor, publisher, and primary founder of Cross mutation of what I’d done a Plains Comics—and earlier an editor at Marvel few years earlier when I’d Comics. Thanks to Eliot R. Brown. licensed the rights to a couple of Howard properties and taken If These Walls Could Talk… them to Dark Horse. But Richard went a lot further. He arranged to be able to utilize just about everything of Howard’s except Roy Thomas in front of the restored Robert E. Howard house in Conan and a few other major characters like Solomon Kane—I Cross Plains, Texas, in June 2006, when he was guest of honor at a celebration in honor of the centenary of REH’s birth. think he was even working on getting Kull at one point. Richard Photo by Dann Thomas. even got hold of the rights to Red Sonja, which Marvel had just relinquished.

Rafael was already aboard, even before I came on. His contriI was supposed to a minor partner in Cross Plains Comics, and I bution was to design the look of the Howard heroes—not just the think Rafael Kayanan was, too. As I scripted the stories, I guess I ones people might’ve heard of, but even minor characters, like, for was gaining equity or something, because I don’t believe I ever got example, a boxer from Fight Stories [pulp magazine]. Howard cash money for anything I wrote for Cross Plains, and I wrote wrote a prizefighting story or two that involved a ghost or nearly all the stories. One of my agreements up front with Richard apparition. Rafael designed new renditions of Bran Mak Morn, was: “I’ll come aboard if I can write all the stories, or at least have Cormac, the Crusader heroes, Dark Agnes, El Borak, Skull-face…. the option of writing all I can handle.” I didn’t want to have to he did wonderful character designs! Not only is he an exceedingly defend that situation later. That part basically worked out okay, talented artist, but he actually knows a lot about swords and though we did have one problem in that area near the end. weaponry. He’s even designed and cast some real swords.

One of Rafael’s and my—and I suspect Richard’s—dream projects during that period was to be find a way to adapt the Howard story “Shadow of the Vulture,” whose story and character Red Sonya of Rogatino I’d adapted in the early ’70s for an issue of Conan the Barbarian—naturally, the one that introduced Red Sonja of Hyrkania. Raf laid out a few pages of the more authentic adaptation, but by then Red Sonja was owned by one company and the rest of the Howard canon by another, so it proved impossible to get the rights situation straightened out. Maybe some day….

Unfortunately, Cross Plains Comics never had adequate capitalization. Our comics were well-received by those who got to see them. One month we even won some kind of retailer award for Best New Company. But it was a bad time to start a new company.

Maybe the time for Howard’s characters was mostly past, and we didn’t make any real inroads, but I think we produced some nice material. I got a chance to work with Richard Corben—that’s something—and I worked with Tim Sale on another story. [continued on p. 57]

Shadow Over “The Shadow” Rafael Kayanan’s late-’90s pencil layouts for the splash page of his and Roy Thomas’ planned adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s story “The Shadow of the Vulture,” from the Jan. 1934 issue of Magic Carpet pulp magazine. (The plural “Shadows” would’ve been changed.) The tale took place circa 1529, during the siege of Vienna by the Turks. Because RT and Barry (Windsor-)Smith had adapted it in Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian #23 (Feb. 1973), changing the supporting character Red Sonya of Rogatino into Red Sonja of Hyrkania, the rights situation with regard to the original story had become too confused for the Cross Plains adaptation to be completed and published. So far. [Art © 2016 Rafael Kayanan.]

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The Cross Plains Cast Cross Plains Comics published a booklet showcasing Rafael Kayanan illustrations plus text outlines for a number of the Robert E. Howard heroes (and villains) about whom Richard Ashford and associates hoped to create comics. Besides the ones shown and ID’d on these two facing pages, also spotlighted were James Allison (a man who remembered heroic past lives), Cormac Fitzgeoffrey (an Irish Crusader), Wolfshead (see following pages), Amra 3000 (a middle version of Roy Thomas’ “Conan 3000” concept now in the works as “Rath 3000”; see p. 17)—and that was far from the entire list of REH possibilities! [Art on these two pages © Rafael Kayanan; the characters themselves are registered trademarks of Robert E. Howard Properties Inc.; Cross Plains Comics is a trademark of Richard Ashford.]

Bran Mak Morn Skull-Face & Others An Atlantean answer to Fu Manchu, alive and well in the late 1920s.

Many of REH’s contemporaries considered the king of the Picts one of his finest creations.

Dark Agnes Swordwoman.

El Borak One of REH’s earliest heroes— real name, Francis X. Gordon, who had adventures amongst the Turks, Afghans, et al.

The Sonora Kid An early Western hero “straight out of Howard’s Texas heritage.”

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Wild Bill Clanton Red-headed seaman/adventurer from many an REH pulp story.

Black Vulmea REH’s pirate hero.

Steve Harrison “Two-fisted private eye” with “a knack for getting involved with cases that seem supernatural”—“Philip Marlowe with a touch of the macabre—Sam Spade attending an exorcism.”

Ironhand Of Almuric REH’s “John Carter of Mars” homage with a more Conanesque hero, Esau Cairn, a.k.a.

Ironhand—though the beings shown here are his batwinged enemies on the planet Almuric. Roy hoped to continue the series he’d begun at Dark Horse a few years earlier (which was covered in A/E #136).

Ace Jessup “Black Iron” in the booklet’s description—a bare-knuckled African-American boxer who even managed to have a supernatural run-in or two, courtesy of REH.

Rafael Kayanan at the Oct. 2011 New York Comics Convention.

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Vulture’s Brood Kayanan pencil studies of four of the principals from “The Shadow of the Vulture,” done in preparation for the comics adaptation.

(Clockwise from top left:) Red Sonya of Rogatino— Gottfried von Kalmbach (the tale’s hero, a German knight)—Roxelana, mistress of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and an actual historical personage (in the REH story, Sonya is her sister)—and the merciless Turkish soldier Mikhal Oglu, a.k.a. “The Vulture.” [Art © 2016 Rafael Kayanan.]

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pretty good. We got started on a second one, but we never got very far with it.

JA: I’m getting the impression that you had less creative leeway here than you did other places.

Rich Corben Legendary underground (and later Warren, et al.) artist.

THOMAS: Depends on which aspect you’re talking about. Richard, of course, was the publisher, and he made the real decisions as to which books to put out. I was fine with that. I was given considerable input on which stories to adapt when we were doing horror or the like, so it was a pretty amicable arrangement. The only problem was that the company was undercapitalized. If it had survived, I’d have been writing a Howard-related comic book or three a month, and I’d have been happy to go on doing that for the rest of my life, both adaptations and new stories, but it just wasn’t in the cards.

Cross Plains picked up the rights to a couple of Howard stories I’d adapted a few years earlier for Heroic, Dennis Mallonee’s company. They’d been done for Heroic’s Fantasy Book, a magazine

Eating Cro? A gruesome life-and-death struggle between a Cro-Magnon and a Neanderthal, in the adaptation of Howard’s early tale “Spear and Fang,” with art credited to Richard Corben & Eric Hope. In the late 1920s when it was written, REH and many others believed Neanderthals to have been as much beast as man, incapable even of speech. From Robert E. Howard’s Myth Maker #1-and-only (June 1999), published by Cross Plains Comics.

Script by RT. [® & © Robert E. Howard Properties Inc.]

[continued from p. 53] JA: What was working with Corben like?

THOMAS: It was great. We worked Marvel-style, of course. We adapted the very first story Howard ever sold, “Spear and Fang,” about Cro-Magnons vs. Neanderthals. A minor tale, but Rich drew the hell out of it. Everybody at Cross Plains was encouraged to do stories in their own styles.

JA: I know Corben is a quiet type of person. I was curious what it was like to work with him.

THOMAS: Well, if we talked on the phone, it was just “glad to be working with you” type of stuff. Which I was. Mostly, I think it was done through Richard.

Steve Lightle did some nice artwork for Cross Plains. We did a Red Sonja issue together. He and Richard had their ideas about how Sonja should go, which weren’t the way I’d have gone, but I think the one Sonja issue that came out was

A Well-Red Swordwoman?

Steve Lightle

An action page from Red Sonja: A Death in Scarlet (1999—no date or issue number), drawn by Steve Lightle. Writer: Roy Thomas. For some reason, Sonja’s hair was colored a reddish-brown—and more brown than red—in the comic. The issue’s cover was seen in A/E #136.

[TM & © Red Sonja Properties, LLD.]

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Myth Steps (Left:) A powerful page from the RT/Kelley Jones adaptation of the REH tale “Dermod’s Bane” for Robert E. Howard’s Myth Maker #1. Inks by Laurie Smith and George Freeman.

Kelley Jones

(Right:) For the same issue, Tim Sale penciled both the adaptation of the yarn “Dream Snake” and the framing sequence featuring what Roy’s dialogue referred to as “The Men of the Shadows.” These were characters from REH’s fiction and poetry, mysteriously brought together in a “great black tower” by an unknown force for some unknown purpose: James Allison, Professor Kirowan, the Moon Woman, and the Mad Minstrel. This next-to-last story page in the issue shows Robert E. Howard at his desk, typing out one of his several poems about suicide (though some of the poetic lines weren’t divided correctly)—suggesting that it was he who brought these people to the “silent city of the night.” He did indeed end his life by shooting himself in June 1936. Inks by Mark Hollingsworth. [TM & © Robert E. Howard Properties Inc.]

Tim Sale

Myth Maker #1 also featured art by John Bolton, Michael W. Kaluta, Steve Lightle, Mark Schultz, Colin MacNeil, and Rafael Kayanan.

that featured a mix of prose and comics. Those two adaptations had never been published. One, which was begun with artist Nestor Redondo, was “Marchers of Valhalla,” one of Howard’s ancient-races epics. Rey Garcia, a friend of Nestor’s, finished drawing it after Nestor unexpectedly died, but because Cross Plains Comics didn’t last long enough, it’s still unpublished. A real pity.

Also for Dennis, I’d adapted “Wolfshead” with [artist] Tony DeZuniga. “Wolfshead” was one of the first short stories Howard sold to Weird Tales magazine, back in the ’20s. It’s a werewolf yarn set in Portuguese Angola, or somewhere in Africa like that, several hundred years ago. It’s not a great story, but it has a lot of atmosphere and a wonderful first sentence, an Edgar Allen Poe kind of beginning. I’d long felt “Wolfshead” would make the basis of a great comics series, with the character living right up to the

present. The hero’s a man who’s inhabited by the spirit of a wolf, and he actually wants to die, but he can’t—so we could’ve done an endless succession of new stories set in different periods, from then to modern day. For the Cross Plains version, we did a nice, long modern-day framing-sequence story around the adaptation of “Wolfshead” that I’d done earlier with DeZuniga; the Howard yarn was the middle two-thirds of the issue. But, in the end, Wolfshead became just a nice graphic novel one-shot.

Very late in the game, artist Steve Lightle talked Richard into letting him write and draw a story with a Howard character— seems like it was Wolfshead—and I was furious about that, because it was a violation of the agreement made when I came aboard… and the use of “Wolfshead” had been all my idea. But then Steve decided he wanted to copyright the story himself, so he changed the characters’ names and it was no longer related to

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Little Cthulhu, I Love You-Lu Just The Same!

(Above) Second-from-last page of Esteban Maroto’s beautiful 64-page black-&-white adaptation of the stories “The Nameless City,” “The Festival,” and “The Call of Cthulhu” in Cross Plains’ H.P. Lovecraft’s The Return of Cthulhu (July 2000)—although the word “Call” rather than “Return” is lettered on the cover. Roy provided the text adaptation of HPL’s prose after the fact. [Art © Esteban Maroto.]

Robert E. Howard in any way. Still, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Actually, that’s the only bad experience I had at Cross Plains, despite the fact that I don’t recall ever making a dime from my work there.

Every comic was a new adventure at Cross Plains. I don’t know if we ever had two issues of anything! [Jim laughs] We also reprinted a few Howard stories adapted at Marvel that Frank Brunner and others had drawn—as well as the adaptation Barry Smith, Tim Conrad, and I had done for Marvel of the Bran Mak Morn story “Worms of the Earth.”

Marvel accepted that it no longer owned any rights to them.

JA: You did something in ‘99 called Robert E. Howard’s Myth Maker.

Wolfshead Revisited (Right side of page:) From Robert E. Howard’s Wolfshead #1 (Aug. 1999).

The Tony DeZuniga-drawn adaptation of the combined stories “In the Forest of Villefere” and “Wolfshead” (top right) was bookended by a tale of that werewolf protagonist in modern-day New York City, seen (right) battling a pair of very surprised vampires, as illustrated by Steve Lightle. The DeZuniga portion of the issue was rendered entirely in sepia tones. Script by Roy Thomas. [TM & © Robert E. Howard Properties Inc.]

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Bran Awareness (Left:) Barry (Windsor-)Smith provided full art on the early pages of an adaptation of REH’s story “Worms of the Earth”; Tim Conrad, whose photo was seen in A/E #136, finished several pages of Barry’s pencils and then (right) did complete art for the majority of the piece. Roy was scripter and editor when the story first appeared in the black-&-white Savage Sword of Conan #16 (Dec. 1976). In 2000, Cross Plains Comics and Wandering Star joined forces to publish a square-bound version as Robert E. Howard’s Worms of the Earth, with colors by George Freeman and Laurie E. Smith. [TM & © Robert E. Howard Properties Inc.]

Barry WindsorSmith As Barry Smith, he drew Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comic from 1970-73.

THOMAS: That’s the comic we discussed earlier, where I worked with Corben, Tim Sale, and Kelley Jones. We adapted several Howard stories and even poems, and I tied them together by having major characters from various tales mysteriously find themselves in some kind of tower in Limbo, not knowing how or why they got there.

Neither did I. If we’d had a few issues, we might’ve all found out what was behind it.

Even more fun was the one non-Howard thing I did for Cross Plains—a total dialogue-and-captions re-write on a visually wonderful Esteban Maroto adaptation of three H.P. Lovecraft stories, including “The Call of Cthulhu,” into what amounted to a graphic novel. Maroto had drawn and written it in Spanish and done a translation, but I was asked by Richard to do a new English-language adaptation of Lovecraft’s prose. All I did, really, was adapt Lovecraft’s prose to go with a pre-existing comics adaptation.

At one point in the story, to illustrate an undescribed ritual, Esteban suddenly has this shapely, nude woman go into this sexy

dance for two or three pages, and then this guy with horns on his head starts whipping her bloody, then tosses her off a cliff. I didn’t put a word of dialogue or caption in those pages. Then, as soon as that’s over, I went back to Lovecraft’s prose. It was sort of like a musical interlude, except we couldn’t hear the music. [Jim laughs] Maroto is a wonderful artist.

JA: Agreed! So all your contact with Richard Ashford—was it by phone?

Fax? How was that working out?

THOMAS: Phone and fax, in that day. He was in New York, and of course I was in South Carolina. I always found fax a frustrating way to communicate. Loading a roll of fax paper was a hellish trial for me—like working with an adding machine, only worse.

JA: Well, I don’t feel a hell of a lot different about e-mail.

THOMAS: I love e-mail, compared to fax!

JA: Personal contact is best.

THOMAS: Yeah. Sometimes I prefer to avoid personal contact and just sit at home and work… but you have to have it.

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Look! Up In The Projection Booth…

In the above pair of pages from DC’s 1996 graphic novel Superman’s Metropolis, The Superman (real name: Clarc Kent-son) discovers that his lover Lois has been surreptitiously replaced by a robot that serves Lutor (the g.n.’s stand-in for the evil Rotwang of Fritz Lang’s 1927 German film masterpiece Metropolis). The inside front cover listed film-style credits for the artist and writers: “Cinematography – Ted McKeever; screenplay – R.J.M. Lofficier and Roy Thomas.”

[TM & © DC Comics.]

Jean-Marc Lofficier with one of his and wife Randy’s pet dogs, in their home in France.

Photo by Randy L.

DC Comics JA: Even though you worked for all these other companies, you still managed to do a little work for DC in the ‘90s.

THOMAS: A bit, here and there. The two Dragonlance graphic novels we talked about already, after DC just picked up the series from TSR. [NOTE: See A/E #136.]

JA: You also did Superman’s Metropolis in ‘96, Superman: War of the Worlds in ‘99….

THOMAS: Oh, those! Right! Jean-Marc [Lofficier] had this idea for the two of us to turn the world of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis into a Batman graphic novel. I don’t know why a “Batman” story. In retrospect, it seems like it should’ve been a “Superman” story from the beginning, but I didn’t worry about that then. Somewhere along the line, DC decided we should use Superman instead—less, I believe, because of the “Metropolis” name than because they felt Batman was overexposed in the Elseworld books at the time. There

were probably only, like, five comics out that week starring Batman. [Jim laughs] So we used Ted McKeever Superman, which worked out much better. It was nicely drawn, and I’m happy with the story we came up with, and with the deliberately non-heroic art by Ted McKeever.

The only problem I had with the finished product was that Superman didn’t look like Superman to me. I felt that, if Kal-El came to this alternate Earth, he should still look about the same… not necessarily the same costume or hairstyle, but he’d have grown up with the same face and body. And in that graphic novel he’s drawn without Superman’s look or physique. Other than that, I think things worked out pretty well.

JA: Who was your editor on that book?

THOMAS: Damned if I recall. Jean-Marc handled most of the back-and-forth with DC. Which was just great by me, at that stage.

[Jim laughs] He used the name “R.J.M. Lofficier,” which combined his name and that of his wife and often collaborator, Randy.

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Michael Lark

War And Pieces Superman makes his 1938 debut defending the Earth against the all-destroying tripods of the invading Martians in Superman: War of the Worlds (1999), a mash-up of the universes of Siegel & Shuster and H.G. Wells. In the end (SPOILER ALERT!) the Kryptonian pays the ultimate price to protect his adopted planet… leaving Lois Lane and a reformed Lex Luthor to pick up the shards of a shattered civilization. Script by Roy Thomas; art & colors by Michael Lark. The latter’s cover for this graphic novel was seen in A/E #136. [TM & © DC Comics.]

JA: What about Superman: War of the Worlds?

THOMAS: After Superman’s Metropolis, Jean-Marc and I were at first planning to try to do a Superman: War of the Worlds prestige book together—my idea, this time—but then he decided he’d rather move on to write a trilogy of graphic novels based on vintage film classics. The other two were Wonder Woman: Blue Angel and Batman: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Eventually, both those books got done.

Me, I wanted to do a trilogy of Elseworlds books with DC superheroes shoehorned into the plots of H.G. Wells’ classic sciencefiction novels. In the ’70s, of course, I’d conceived the Marvel “War of the Worlds” series. So I told DC, “Superman began in comics in 1938—and you know what else happened that year? The Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast!” So I figured we could combine them to mutual benefit.

Only it turned out we couldn’t, because Howard Koch owned the copyright on the radio script, whether or not he wrote it all.

And his people wanted $40,000 or some such outrageous sum for us to use it as the basis of a Superman graphic novel. And what would DC have gotten for its money, really? We’d have had to deviate greatly from the radio show, the moment Superman

appeared on the scene! So we decided we should go ahead with no connection to the Mercury Theatre of the Air radio broadcast. We’d still set it in 1938, since that’s when Superman debuted on Earth.

One thing we avoided: much of Welles’ radio dramatization features radio crews broadcasting while the Martians are invading Earth. That was the thing that had made it seem so real to people in 1938, since it was beaming into their homes over the radio. So we didn’t have a radio crew on the scene. I made up a new story that assumed Superman was just about to “come out” on Earth— he’d just applied as Clark Kent for a job at the Daily Star—not the Daily Planet—and suddenly, these other alien life forms attack. So you have the good alien and the bad aliens, and at one stage people are as afraid of Superman as they are of the Martians.

Michael Lark did the art. At first, I was a little uncertain about Michael’s less heroic, more prosaic approach to Superman. But, as soon as I began to work with it, I realized it was absolutely right, unlike the way I’d felt about the Superman figures in Metropolis.

Lark’s art captured the feel of the late ‘30s. He did a great job of catching the spirit of Superman and of the Martian machines clashing near the end of the Great Depression. A bit later, when I was asked by my scholar friend, the late Dr. Matthew Bruccoli, to write an entry on “graphic novels” for his publishing company’s

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No Justice—No Pieces (Left:) In the graphic novel JLA: The Island of Dr. Moreau, the good doctor introduces his “Justifiers” to young Lucas Carr, who may or may not one day acquire the nickname “Snapper.” This DC adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel was written by RT and drawn by Steve Pugh.

Steve Pugh

(Right:) Jack the Ripper is revealed to be an early orang-utan experiment of Moreau’s, now loose in London and performing his own sinister surgeries. A touch, perhaps, of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

[TM & © DC Comics.]

prestigious Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, I used art samples from Superman: War of the Worlds to illustrate it. So some of that work is in university libraries around the world.

I do recall that Michael would’ve preferred to eliminate the “handling machines” the Martians have. Those devices were just big enough for one or two Martians to climb inside and use them to go around doing little tasks despite Earth’s greater gravity. But they were in Wells’ novel, so I wanted to use them. Of course, Lois and Luthor are all in there, too, and Luthor eventually emerges kind of a hero to the populace.

We had a nice montage page where the text made it very clear that the Martians had eaten Britain’s Royal Family: I wrote that the Martians had had a “royal feast.” Then, at the end, after the Martians are defeated in a way that’s a bit of a switch on Wells’ ending, I related the history of the Earth as it proceeded after the 1938 invasion. There was a different President, because Roosevelt had been killed and succeeded by his very real Vice-President, “Cactus Jack” Garner. I had the U.S.A. moving in the direction of a fascist dictatorship, as it rose from the ruins of war, even while

fascist dictatorships were being overthrown in Europe. And, at the end, I wrote, as the omniscient narrator, that all this postwar history had a certain sense of “inevitability” about it. Because history may seem inevitable in retrospect—but only in retrospect.

Joey Cavalieri See the text for why this pic of the graphic novel’s editor is here!

I’ve never had much respect for the theory that human beings and leaders don’t matter and that it’s all down to political or social movements—that everything will turn out basically the same, no matter who the leaders are or what they do—that it’s all “forces of history,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Some people insist that, even if someone had assassinated Hitler in 1933 or ’39 or whenever, there’s no doubt there’d still have been a Holocaust… or that, minus Churchill, Britain would’ve still stood up to Nazi Germany the way it did. I don’t believe any of that was inevitable at all. So, even though this was just a frivolous little Superman comic, I was also imposing my own views of history on it, if only in a playful way.

Next I proposed an Elseworlds book that was a Justice League

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John Orlando Photo by wife Jill, taken especially for this issue of Alter Ego, displaying the color cover and another page.

A Pair of Alter Ego Extras!

“Doc Behemoth Is In!” Just for a lark, Roy accepted artist John Orlando’s invite to cocreate an homage to the circa-1960 Lee-Kirby monsters—with a touch of Doc Savage thrown in. Seen is a page from Doc Behemoth #1-and-only (1998). [TM & © Roy Thomas & John Orlando.]

approach to H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau. And this is an instance where I want to go on the record to say that I definitely got some positive input from an editor! The editor was Joey Cavalieri. After I’d submitted the plot for JLA/Moreau, Joey felt there was one spot in the middle, after I’d brought the JLA characters to England in order to open up the story, where he thought a little something more was needed, though he left it up to me as to what to do about it. I liked that. He didn’t try to impose anything on me. I gave it some thought and came up with an idea: it had been established—by Wells—that, early on, an ape that had been made more human by Moreau had tried to flee the island and was believed to have drowned at sea. But I decided, what if that ape had actually wound up in England? So we wound up with the half-animal Justice League, Dr. Moreau’s mutated beasts with superior powers, battling this ape who’d become Jack the Ripper, and that added a nice little twist.

If you read the story, you’d probably think that must’ve been part of the story all along, but it was actually an eleventh-hour addition.

Rich Buckler JA: So what happened to the third graphic novel in the H.G. Wells trilogy?

at the 2014 New York Comics Convention.

“If They’re Invincibles, How Come We Can See ’Em?” (Above:) In 1997, veteran Marvel/DC artist Rich Buckler invited his old colleague Roy Thomas to work with him on the black-&-white comic The Invincibles, of which one issue was published. Seen above is Rich’s half-inked splash page. [TM & © Rich Buckler.]

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

THOMAS: After doing this pair, I wanted to complete it by inserting Batman into The Time Machine, tying it in with the earlier Gotham by Gaslight/Elseworlds stuff. Batman would eventually bring both Eloi and Morlocks back to Gotham City, where havoc would inevitably ensue. But I couldn’t get that one off the ground. I think, around that time, DC decided they’d been doing too many Elseworlds, so Batman/Time Machine never got any more traction than did, around that same time, the Elseworlds mini-series I was working on with John Buscema that became his last-ever penciled work, the first issue of what was supposed to be a six-part series.

My idea for that one was, what if Superman had come to Earth during the Hyborian Age? Of course, it wasn’t really Howard’s Hyborian Age, just a generic equivalent. But DC forced me to use the entire Justice League rather than just Superman. I didn’t like that as much; still, I did get to do ancient versions of Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman. The villain was going to be a proto-Captain Marvel! John Buscema penciled a beautiful first issue. It looked like Conan doing Superman stunts for 20 pages.

Wonderful stuff—and then that was the end of it. When John died in 2002, DC published this editorial about how great he was—and then, as far as I’m concerned, disrespected him by refusing to publish his final work. For fifteen years, they’ve been sitting on it. I pleaded with them at the time, “His brother Sal could finish it, which John would’ve wanted—or you could get different artists to finish it, or whatever—but use this first issue. Get somebody to ink it, and let’s finish the series.” It was layouts, but semi-finished pencils, really.

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Also, I submitted an Elseworlds idea in which an 18th-century Batman fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War. The equivalent of The Joker therein was a British aristocrat called Lord Macaronie… as in the line from “Yankee Doodle.” The story even featured Ben Franklin in a submarine. But the aspect I was proudest of was that the Colonial Bruce Wayne’s man-servant Alfred turned out to be a Loyalist—who betrayed Batman to the British! Made a lot of sense—after all, even in the modern-day stories, Alfred was impeccably English!

And here’s where it gets weird.

Because DC had this odd system in place whereby Denny, even though he was the Batman editor, couldn’t approve a graphic novel on his own. It had to go through a three-editor committee, which didn’t include him, all of whom had to read the proposal and leave

I don’t understand the mindset that makes a big deal out of trumpeting respect and admiration for someone, then actually treats them with disrespect. It just drives me up the wall.

JA: [chuckles] Well, I’ve been through that, and so have you.

THOMAS: Yeah, I guess if some people didn’t have hypocrisy to fall back on, they wouldn’t have any personality at all. [mutual laughter] JA: And you just weren’t ever given a reason it wasn’t published in any form?

THOMAS: No, just stonewalling. Wouldn’t you think that somebody in charge up there now—someone who really does respect John Buscema’s work, not just writes a few glib words about respect, which anybody can do—would want to see the story published? Why not? John Buscema’s last story!

JA: I agree. How many ideas were you pitching to DC? THOMAS: A fair number. Several years earlier, I’d pitched a “Batman” concept or two to [Batman group editor] Denny O’Neil.

As you know, I’d played a part in Denny getting into the field back in ’65… but these ideas were good ones… no charity involved, far as I’m concerned.

My first proposal was an Elseworlds: Gotham by Gaslight sequel in which Batman battled Dracula back in the time of Stoker’s novel.

But nothing ever happened with that notion except encouraging words and some discouraging waiting. Then, months later, DC suddenly announced a forthcoming Doug Moench-written modernday Batman/Dracula graphic novel that was almost certainly suggested after mine. When I complained—not about Doug or his story per se, but about the way I’d been stalled, and now this happened—I was assured the two books weren’t mutually exclusive, which was true enough, and that my project could be done, too. But, even after that, I encountered nothing but inertia… and finally I gave it up.

Who’re You Callin’ “Barbarian”?!

Kal-El the Super-Barbarian surprises his foes on the 3rd page of pencil breakdowns from John Buscema’s never-published last work. He and writer Roy Thomas were collaborating on a JLA/Elseworlds limited series placing Superman and other DC heroes in the context of a mock Hyborian Age when he passed away. Other pages from the work, including concept sketches of the “barbarian” versions of the JLA and Captain Marvel, have appeared from time to time in Alter Ego. [© 2016 DC Comics.]

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Flashing In the 1990s as before and after, Roy maintained his interest in preserving art from the never-published mid-’40s “Justice Society of America” story “The Will of William Wilson,” written by Gardner F. Fox. Especially for Alter Ego, Larry Guidry has colored page 3 of its “Flash” chapter, wherein that Golden Age hero time-travels to retrieve the sword of Genghis Khan. Art by Martin Naydel.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

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All This And World War, Too! In the mid-’70s, Roy had inaugurated Marvel’s Invaders comic—and in 1980 he’d conceived the All-Star Squadron for DC—both assemblages of super-heroes in action set during the Second World War. Keith Wilson (penciler) and Sam de la Rosa (inker) juxtaposed those two groups on the back and front covers of the news-fanzine Comic Informer #4 (March 4, 1982). Thanks to J.R. Riley for sending this scan. [Invaders heroes TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; All-Star Squadron heroes TM & © DC Comics.]

their chicken-scratchings on it. I was reminded of the old saw about a camel being a horse created by a committee… except that a camel is actually a quite efficient animal, while the committee system at DC was just ludicrous.

Later, I got to read—as if it was supposed to help me in some way—the comments of the committee. One of them didn’t mention the Alfred-as-Loyalist thing… the second thought that was a great idea and the best thing in the proposal… and the third said it was a horrible idea and the worst thing in the proposal. I called up Denny and I said, “What the hell am I supposed to take out of that?” It was a stupid process, whether at DC, Marvel, or wherever.

Anyway, that graphic novel—The Bat and the Lion—never happened, either. I really got disgusted having that turned down on top of the Dracula.

I also tried to interest DC, through Denny, in getting the rights to The Black Bat, the old Batman-like hero who’d debuted in the pulp-mag Black Book Detective very shortly before Detective Comics #27, and who later influenced Dr. Mid-Nite. It would’ve been a fun way around the lack of a 1940s Batman in DC’s post-Crisis world.

But no one sparked to that—or to my notion of a Batman Elseworlds set during World War I, where he was involved in the so-called “Black Tom” affair, where a whole island loaded with armaments in the harbor off New York City was blown up by German sabotage.

Naturally, I submitted some non-Batman, non-Superman proposals, too. One early one was a sort of “what-if” series that assumed All-Star Comics wasn’t cancelled in 1951 after #57, but continued on through the ’50s with stories set in that Cold War, rock’n’roll decade. DC did something a bit similar not long afterward as a limited series.

And there was a proposal for a one-shot special, a “prestigeformat” book—i.e., a graphic novel—that I called The Night Justice Was Born. It would’ve revealed, and tied together, what DC’s other late-1940 heroes were up to the night the Justice Society of America was enjoying its first big dinner in All-Star Comics #3… guys like Superman, Batman and Robin, Crimson Avenger, Mr. America, Dr. Occult, Hop Harrigan, and Red Tornado, who only appears on one page of All-Star #3. I got a brusque brush-off on that one. I think the concept and the execution were mildly ingenious, and worth doing. The editor to whom I had to submit it just sent me a short note saying there were currently several Golden Age projects in the works and he saw no likelihood of any more being scheduled for some time. Period, end of story. I forget the name of the editor who wrote that note, but I like to imagine he’s long since gone from the field, while I’m still working on the Spider-Man newspaper strip and writing books about comics, and even the occasional comic book. Far as I’m concerned, that’d be yet another “night when justice was born.”

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

history of Krypton, and I did a lot of research on what had been done with it to date and wrote up a concept carrying that forward… but I might as well have stuffed my proposal into a bottle rocket and launched it into the ether.

I also tried to get DC to turn Gil’s and my late-’80s Ring of the Nibelung for DC into a trilogy (if you count Ring as just one book, which it ultimately was) by doing a modern-day sequel in which Wotan tries creating a late-20th-century equivalent of Siegfried to stave off the Twilight of the Gods… and the third series would’ve been set a thousand years in the future. Each of the three graphic novels, in other words, would’ve have been set a millennium after the previous one.

Veering off from DC for a moment: During that same period, and a time or two since, I sent Marvel the concept of Untold Tales of the KreeSkrull War. It answered the musical question: What were the other Marvel heroes doing while The Avengers were involved in that war? We know there were other Kree and Skrulls on Earth, like Senator Craddock, who was actually the fourth Skrull from Fantastic Four #2. But what if Spider-Man and Daredevil had got involved in the war’s Earth aspect? What were Kevin Sharpe the real Fantastic Four up to at that time? What about The X-Men, who didn’t have their own series then but were still around? It would be fun to see how the other Marvel heroes played previously unrevealed parts in the war. Marvel actually did do a set of trading cards with a similar title and theme a few years later, though on a very limited scale.

“Thunderstruck!”

With the editor’s blessing, Roy added The Shining Knight and his own cocreation, Firebrand, to the cast of Green Lantern and Dr. Fate in a 10-pager in the 1999 All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant. The villain was a Hitler-sent Donar (a.k.a. Thunar or Thor). Pencils by Kevin Sharpe; inks by J. Baumgartner.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

All the while, of course, I hoped to do a new run of All-Star Squadron. And I tried during the ’90s at both DC and Marvel to do All-Star Squadron or Invaders series set in my alternate version of World War II, where events branched off differently historically, so that you no longer knew how the war would come out—or even which side might win. But, zero interest, except for briefly that one near-miss with Marvel Comics Presents that I mentioned before.

[NOTE: See A/E #136.]

Another limited-series DC proposal from that period was The Daily Planet, which would’ve told the story of that great Metropolitan newspaper from its founding in 1775 up to the present. My favorite part of that proposal was an 1890s precursor of Mr. Mxtyztplk—none other than The Yellow Kid, who in this incarnation (though he’d be physically identical to the Outcault character) would be a very real entity from another planet or dimension whose dialogue would, like in the Yellow Kid we know, be printed on his yellow nightshirt. Gil Kane and I also got some early encouragement to do a series that would’ve related the

I wrote an outline for my projected Untold Tales comic series— not every story, just the kinds of things that could happen. I added that I’d love to see Neal Adams, who’d been so important to the original Kree-Skrull War stories in The Avengers, draw any of it that he wanted to—along with the Buscemas, of course. This was during the time when Neal was refusing to work for Marvel over work-for-hire concerns, but I hoped he might change his mind. In recent years, he’s said in print that he’s lobbied Marvel to let him do his version of the Kree-Skrull War, but somehow, mysteriously, even though that war was entirely my concept, I never seem to be mentioned in his plans.

JA: Are you surprised at that?

THOMAS: Not really, but I’d think well of him if it were otherwise. Anyway, Neal’s still a great artist. [laughs] And I’m not being sarcastic when I say that.

JA: I know you’re not. One other DC story you wrote appeared in an AllStar Comics 80-Page Giant in ‘99….

THOMAS: That was the last time I got a chance to work with any of those characters. They had me do a ten-page story. I tried to get enthusiastic about it, despite the length. It was suggested that I use Green Lantern and Dr. Fate, since nobody’d put them in the other stories in that special, and I obliged, adding Firebrand and Shining Knight on my own, with their blessing. But, in their mind, it was just throwing me a bone.

Well, actually, a few years later, in the 2000s, I was offered a shot at writing a Justice Society mini-series. But, after I got a curt kiss-off from the head honcho because I politely resisted wholesale changes to my plot—in other words, doing a story they wanted me to do rather than one I wanted to do [NOTE: See A/E #69.]—I finally accepted that DC and I were just—well, I don’t know how best to put it. Things have just never worked out well between DC and me

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

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Arkham Is A Summer Festival (Left:) The one character Roy particularly wanted in the HPL-related group of heroes for Millennium’s 1993 series H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu: The Festival was ultimately derived from the story “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Ph’ragn’ Thtul, the character he and co-writer Jean-Marc Lofficier devised, is half Deep One, half human—and clearly all-woman, as per this full-page panel from Book Two. (The cover of Book One was seen in A/E #136.)

Brian Bendis Now a major comics writer, as Brian Michael Bendis.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Probably the most important figure in horror literature between Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King.

(Right:) At the end of Book Three, a “merry band of [HPL] brothers” stand poised to move on to the next phase of their Cthulhu-baiting. From left to right in panel 2: Michele le Sourcier (descendant of a wizard in HPL’s story “The Alchemist”), Raymond Carter (as in “The Statement of…”), Detective Thomas Malone (from “The Horror at Red Hook”), Herbert West (as in “…Reanimator”), and folklorist Prof. Albert N. Wilmarth of Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts (from “The Whisperer in Darkness”)—while Ph’ragn’ Thtul joins the party in the final panel. Pencils by Brian Bendis; inks by David Mack. Thanks to Jean-Marc Lofficier for both scans. [TM & © Millennium Publications.]

over the long haul. I had that staff job under Weisinger for two weeks in 1965 and felt I had to jump ship. I came back in 1980, but within a few years, that went sour on both sides. DC and I have just never seemed to be on the same wavelength. It’s a company whose characters I’ve loved since childhood, but the company itself and I have never seemed a good fit for each other.

JA: It is strange, isn’t it?

THOMAS: It’s a little weird, but it’s not a case of they’re right or they’re wrong, or that I am. It’s just the way they are, and the way I am. Luckily, we can both survive without each other. I’ve been happy to see them reprint a bit of my ’80s stuff in the past few years, anyway… and they’ve even used Deathbolt from The Young All-Stars on TV, a few other things, too. But I’ve always been sorry that some of those ’90s projects didn’t come to fruition, because I think they’d have led to some worthwhile work.

Millennium Comics JA: Before I get to the last two major topics, I want to ask you about a three-issue series, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu: The Festival, published by Millennium Comics….

THOMAS: This was in 1993. Jean-Marc and I saw that that small company was doing some comics with Lovecraft’s horror concepts, and I’d long wanted to make a heroic series out of Lovecraft material. Not super-heroes, but continuing characters. Jean-Marc and I both liked that notion. Back in the early ’70s, when I first discovered Lovecraft, I’d read a pair of books by his disciple August Derleth—The Mask of Cthulhu and The Trail of Cthulhu— which involved a group of continuing human protagonists involved in the Lovecraft universe. That was long before any HPLstyle role-playing games.

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Strip For Success!

The first three Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strips on which Roy worked were the dailies for July 1719, 2000—and don’t worry, there’s plenty of Stan Lee in there, too! Pencils by Larry Lieber; inks by John Tartaglione. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Larry Lieber has written and/or drawn for Marvel, in one capacity or another, since the late 1950s.

One of my main contributions to JeanMarc’s and my Millennium series was a person—was it a woman?—who was half human and half one of those frog-like things from “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” You know, the ones that Lovecraft kept referring to as having a “batrachian aspect”? We made up a group of several characters and put them in situations that were a combination of

Marvel/DC style and Lovecraft. But the series never really got off the ground. I’d love for us to get another crack at it.

I did correspond later with Chaosium, Inc., when it had launched its Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, about licensing a comic coordinated with their game, but ultimately it came to nothing. That would’ve been a lot of fun.

John Tartaglione

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

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An All-Star Cast—In Fact, Two Of Them!

(Above:) A TwoMorrows “summit” luncheon at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2013. (L. to r.:) Jon B. Cooke (editor of Comic Book Creator), Roy T. (editor of Alter Ego), Lisa & Rand Hoppe (webmaster of TwoMorrows’ website), and co-publisher John Morrow. Photo by Dann Thomas.

(Right:) Irwin Hasen’s flip cover for Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #1 (Summer 1999), less often reprinted than Jerry Ordway’s, utilized a late-1980s re-creation Irwin did for Roy Thomas of the iconic cover for All-Star Comics #36 (Aug.-Sept.

1947). Golden Age artistic great Hasen will be the star attraction in our very next issue! [JSA heroes TM & © DC Comics.]

JA: So that’s most of the ’90s, except for… well, at the very end of the ’90s, you started working on the Spider-Man newspaper strip with Stan.

Or was that the 2000s?

THOMAS: I started doing that in 2000... so why don’t we save the comic strip work for some future time?

Alter Ego JA: Then we ought to, at least, cover Alter Ego itself, since you restarted the magazine at the end of the ‘90s.

THOMAS: 1998. Most of what I can say I’ve already written somewhere—about how an ad flyer for Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Artist, which was slated to come out from TwoMorrows, said that, starting with #2, that magazine would cover some of the “forgotten” pros of the Silver Age, and two prominent names on that list were Gil Kane’s and mine. I didn’t feel, at that stage, that Gil and I were really “forgotten.” Like, we were both still working.

So I dropped a letter to [publisher] John Morrow, whom I’d met at a Charlotte [North Carolina] con, saying that maybe sometime I could have my own little department somewhere, if he wanted.

Some time earlier, John had suggested I do something sometime for TwoMorrows, so now he turned my letter over to Jon Cooke, who promptly offered me the flip side of each issue of CBA, originally set to be a section of 14 pages, with its own cover. That was kind of appealing.

By the third issue of CBA, with a couple of those “flip issues” under our belt, Jon asked me to make Alter Ego, Vol. 2, into a 30page section, because he was so busy putting together a Neal Adams interview for that issue. I accommodated him, but I still wasn’t thinking about doing anything more. Then he and John ganged up on me at a convention and said, “Hey, we think you should do your own magazine!” I have this theory—not that I’d blame him—that Jon decided he wanted his whole magazine back.

JA: Maybe, but also, John Morrow was looking for additional income for his company.

THOMAS: Yeah, it was probably a combination of both. I wasn’t sure I had the time or inclination or could even find the material to fill a regular magazine, but I thought we could do a couple of special issues. So that’s how we edged into it. It’s not that I didn’t realize there was enough information and material around, people to interview, even though the oldsters were dying off already by then—I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to get involved with that. So I tried to make it easy on myself by making it a modular publication from the start. First I got Michael T. Gilbert, who’d already done a thing or two for the Alter Ego sections in Comic Book Artist, to do a regular six pages.

And P.C. Hamerlinck had been publishing his own fine FCA magazine for several issues. I didn’t know it, but he told me later he’d been on the verge of calling a halt to FCA because he was tired of handling the publishing end, but when I offered him a chance to just produce his material and turn it over to me and have a magazine-within-a-magazine, he figured he could keep going.

Bill Schelly and I had been associated on various fan-related projects since ’95, so I thought, “Well, Alter Ego was the first superhero comic book fanzine; maybe we should have a regular section on the early years of comics fandom.” Paul and Michael have been in every issue since Volume 3 started in 1999, and Bill could’ve been, had he wished to be. As it is, he’s in the great majority of issues.

Alter Ego has turned out to be a fairly nice little magazine. But I sure never thought it was going to be something that would run to triple-digit issues! [continued on p. 74]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Roy & Dann Thomas The notation on the back of the photo reads: “Roy & Dann feverishly signing Conan hardcovers for fans at a convention in Gijon, Spain, in 1996.”

A Cosmic Quintet

Five favorite pages scripted by Roy Thomas in the 1990s.

(On this and facing page:)

Conan the Adventurer #12 (May 1995) – Rafael Kayanan, pencils; John Floyd, inks. [® & © Conan Properties International LLC.]

H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu: The Festival, Book Three (1993) – Brian Bendis, pencils; David Mack, inks; R.J.M. Lofficier, co-writer. [© Millennium Publications, Inc.]

Conan, Cthulhu, Cross Plains, Kryptonians, & Cadillacs

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Vol. 2, #5 (July 1994) Claude St. Aubin, pencils; Allen Nunis, inks.

[TM & © Mark Schultz.]

Superman: War of the Worlds (1999) – Michael Lark, artist. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Robert E. Howard’s Myth Maker #1 (June 1999) – Rich Corben & Eric Hope, artists.

[TM & © Robert E. Howard Properties Inc.]

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Roy Thomas On Freelancing In The 1990s—Part 2

Michael T. Gilbert

P.C. Hamerlinck

Bill Schelly

Christopher Day

Jim Amash

Editors We Got! A/E’s five main editorial/production helpmeets.

(Clockwise from above left:) Michael T. Gilbert, P.C. Hamerlinck, and Bill Schelly, who’ve been on board since Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #1… Jim Amash, who began doing interviews in V3#9… and Christopher Day, who’s been design & layout supervisor of most issues since V3#8. Thanks to the folks themselves for their photos.

[continued from p. 71] JA: You always gave me complete leeway….

THOMAS: Yeah, well, what else was I gonna do with you? [mutual laughter] I’ve always been a relatively non-directive editor anyway.

I like to get good people and let them do their thing. My main job is choosing the people, and Stan always used to say I wasn’t too shabby at that. I quickly saw that you were a good interviewer who’d bring out the best in people at a fair length, and I liked reading long interviews. [Jim chuckles] So I figured, give you your head, and I’d just try to put interesting pictures with it.

JA: That was the nice thing. You never asked me, “Why did you interview this person?” And I often didn’t even tell you I was interviewing somebody until I did it and sent it to you and you were always happy. [chuckles] THOMAS: Well, even if it was somebody I’d never heard of—and once in a while, it was—the main thing was, was it a good interview? Some of those folks might not justify a cover feature in a commercial sense; but I figured, if you could get interesting facts or insights out of them, things we felt comic readers should know, then I wanted to print it. I really get angry at the very occasional reader who writes in: “I never heard of this guy! Why’d you bother interviewing him?” My feeling is—well, I always quote Harry Truman: “The only thing new under the sun is the history we don’t know yet.”

Comic books had been around for years. Sure, some of the history is the same stories being told over and over, but from new angles. In those retellings, we often learn things we didn’t know before. The best way to treat comics history is to document every-

thing we can. Maybe somebody else later on can pull it all together into some great history that utilizes all this material. The rest of us are doing rough drafts of that history—and if those pieces are never pulled together, well, they can stand on their own.

JA: I always figured the interview with a so-called “lesser light” was where we got some of our best history. Imagine my surprise when I found out Sam Burlockoff had inked Jack Cole on “Plastic Man” and Reed Crandall on “Blackhawk” at the same time.

THOMAS: You don’t know until you ask. These lesser-known talents may have had more connection with the major writers and artists and editors than you know about. Even if they didn’t, they may still have something interesting to say, and they usually do.

JA: Right. In the case of Sam, he was friends with Mickey Spillane and he drew that “Mike Danger” story, a precursor to Mike Hammer.

THOMAS: And more recently, for example, I learned that Len Sansone, who inked the early “Atom” stories by O’Connor and Flinton, was also the creator of The Wolf, the second-most-popular strip in the armed services newspapers during World War II, beat out only by Caniff’s Male Call. The best way to give context to the history of comics is to start off with what you know you want, which is something about comics—then let it lead you wherever it needs to lead you, while you enjoy the journey.

JA: That’s exactly what happened to me. [chuckles] This is probably a good place to close, isn’t it?

THOMAS: Why not? [mutual laughter]

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The Winnah!

Readers’ page from Top-Notch Laugh Comics #35 (April 1943).

[TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Introduction

by Michael T. Gilbert

S

ometimes I’d find a name on an old Golden Age comic’s letters page and think, “Wonder what ever happened to that kid?” Or I’d spot some young contest-winner’s photo from decades past and wonder what was it like to be published in a comic book way back when.

Well, Shaun Clancy did more than wonder. He tracked down one of the kids seventy years later and asked him. Stanley Taffet was that boy, and his story includes an EC-style shock ending you won’t want to miss! And now, without further ado, we present...

Stanley Taffet Interview

by Shaun Clancy (2/4/11) SHAUN CLANCY: This is gonna be a weird phone call for you, but I found your name in an “Archie” comic book from 1943. Did you collect comics as a child?

STANLEY TAFFET: Yes. SC: The reason I bring that up is you supposedly won the Top Notch Laugh #36 contest. In it, they drew your picture.

TAFFET: Right.

A Top Notch Entry!

Top Notch Laugh Comics #36 (May 1943) printed Stan Taffet’s portrait (see next page). Art by Don Dean. The hyphen in “Top-Notch,” incidentally, never appeared in the comic’s indicia. [TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

SC: So, you do remember this?

TAFFET: I was eleven years old at the time.

SC: I’m writing a book on Archie comics and I wanted to see if the people they mention inside here are real people or not. You’re the first person on my list to call, and the only Stanley Taffet in the phone book.

TAFFET: Taffet is an unusual name. When I was a kid, I used to read comic books avidly.

SC: You remember this particular comic book after all these years because…

TAFFET: Yes, because I won the contest. I remember I entered the contest and sent a little postage-stamp-sized photo, and I ran with my mother to the newsstand to pick up this comic book. It was called the Readers Page, if I recall. I went to that page and I’m looking down at the bottom of the page and said, “Ma, it’s not here. My picture’s not here.” And she said, “Of course not. It’s on top of the page. You won it.” [mutual laughter] SC: Did you see the picture they drew of you?

Picture Perfect!

A more recent Stanley Taffet photo. Hey, he still looks good! [© 2016 Stanley Taffet].

TAFFET: Now wait a minute. That picture was a photo, but enlarged rather than the postage stamp and my essay.

Stanley Taffet Interview

Hey, Ma! I’m Famous!

Stan believes that, after he won the MLJ contest, he used the original art from this “Red” Holmdale portrait as a dartboard! From Top Notch Laugh Comics #36 (May 1943). [TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

SC: Okay… then I think you are thinking of a different issue, because this issue here, the artist drew your picture on the page. Do you remember this?

TAFFET: Yes. It was opposite the Readers Page; the following month’s issue showed me in color. Beautifully done, and I loved it. You wanna know something? I got nothing to show for it today.

SC: Did they send the drawing to you?

TAFFET: They sent me a drawing of myself.

A hand drawing, like a pencil sketch.

SC: Do you have it now?

TAFFET: No. I don’t have anything. I was eleven years old and I think I used the artwork as a dartboard. [laughs] My mother didn’t keep any of this stuff.

SC: Were your friends impressed?

TAFFET: Impressed? I remember the following day, with the comic book, I went into school. I was eleven years old in the 4th grade, I think. I came in and I sat down at my desk, which was right up front, and all the kids were around me. They saw the picture and the photo and my essay. Then the teacher comes in and she was a real battleaxe. She comes in and says, “What’s happening?” and the kids replied, “Stanley won a contest.” Which she replied, “Won what?” She sees the comic book and grabs it out of my hands and shouted, “You read this garbage? You’re a horrible English student!

Your grammar’s horrible and you entered this garbage in a contest?”

SC: And won!

TAFFET: And won. Wait a minute… I’m not finished yet. With that, she takes me by the ear, drags me down the hallway to the principal’s office. The principal was a little shocked by it, and so she took the comic book and she threw it across the principal’s desk.

No Wonder Gus Is Gloomy!

The principal didn’t know what the hell was The poor guy keeps dying every issue! But he was Stanley Taffet’s favorite! This is the episode happening, and then she says, “He entered a from Top Notch Laugh Comics #33, (Feb. 1943). And check out the inside gag in panel 3, featuring contest with this piece of garbage.” And the MLJ editor Harry Shorten and original “Archie” artist Bob Montana! Written by Gerald Kean, and principal, who was Mrs. Kennedy, I drawn by “Red” Holmdale and Ed Goggin. [TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.] remember—she was wealthy, she came in with a stretch limousine to work every day— to give you more attention? Oh… I’ll give you more attention!” and then she looks at me and says…. but wait… the tears were [mutual laughter] That was the worst year of school in my life. coming down my eyes and I was crying like crazy. Here I am, I win a contest, and I do something well, and it’s not good. It was SC: That’s a great story… now. something bad. The principal said, “Go back to class.” That teacher TAFFET: She left me back. I used it in college where my name left me back. The bitch left me back that year. appears in print. I wrote a story about that.

SC: Wow! What did your parents think?

SC: Was this the only contest you entered?

TAFFET: Well, that’s another story. My father was gone by this TAFFET: Yes. time but my mother wrote to Mrs. Sorg, my teacher, “Maybe you should spend more time with my son so he’ll do better in English,” SC: Did you stop reading comics after that incident? and so forth. I said, “Ma, don’t write that letter, ’cause she’ll kill me.” [mutual laughter] Mrs. Sorg says, “So your mother wants me TAFFET: [laughs] Yeah.

Stanley Taffet Interview

79

SC: Did you follow the Archie characters, or was it just the super-hero stuff?

TAFFET: I followed the Archie character. I liked Archie, but I wrote about Gloomy Gus. SC: I see. I didn’t look at issue #35, which is where you actually won the contest. I have issue #36 in front of me, which has your hand-drawn photo.

TAFFET: One of the characters in the comic book, whom you were supposed to write about—your favorite character in the comic book—and I wrote it about Gloomy Gus, who died, went to heaven and St. Peter says, “We have no record and go back down into another body.” And he did that each month.

He’d go into a body and then that body would die, also.

SC: I’m impressed that you can remember so much off the top of your head.

TAFFET: Hey, I’m going back some 60 years.

Something like this you just don’t forget. I was eleven years old and it was a wonderful feeling, but then my teacher knocks me down! [mutual laughter] SC: Do you remember what happened to your comics?

TAFFET: No. I wish I would have saved them, but no. They were thrown out.

SC: Did you ever know anyone else that won a contest like this?

TAFFET: No. SC: When Archie sent you the picture, did it come in an envelope folded?

TAFFET: It was a big drawing. It was like two feet by three feet.

SC: Was it signed by the artist?

TAFFET: I don’t remember.

SC: It was drawn by “Red” Holmdale, and not much artwork of his has survived. What possessed you to write in to the comic?

All The Way With MLJ! This contest was hosted by none other than The Black Hood! Who could have resisted? But did he need to ruin a good Golden Age comic? This page is from Top Notch Laugh Comics #28 (July 1942), the first issue with the word “Laugh” added to the title. Artist & writer uncertain.

[TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

TAFFET: I was a very poor student, obviously, since she left me back. I didn’t concentrate. I didn’t do my homework. I copied work from next to me in class. When she left me back, that was a wake-up call for me, and so I started to study, started to get good grades. I went into high school and then college and did very well.

SC: You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of yourself from 1943, would you?

TAFFET: I wish I did. I got nothing to show for it. I did get fan mail from all over the world. As a matter of fact, the funny thing is, before I picked up the copy of the comic book, about a week before, I was getting letters from all over the world saying, “I want to be your pen pal,” “I like your picture,” “I like what you wrote.”

And my mother and I were asking ourselves, “What the hell is this?” That was before I knew I won.

SC: So you bought the comic that showed you won off the newsstand, and it wasn’t mailed to you?

TAFFET: It wasn’t mailed. I got fan mail from England and all over the United States. I was asking myself, “Why are they sending me letters?” and I’d get letters saying, “You look good.”

SC: Did you respond to any of it?

TAFFET: I really got letters in the hundreds and I responded to about nine.

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

SC: Did girls send you their pictures?

TAFFET: About 95% were girls, because I was eleven years old at the time, but the picture showed I had a jacket on with the collar up. I looked like I was seventeen. The ones I wrote to, I said, “I’m not as old as I look. I’m eleven years old.” I never heard from them again. [mutual laughter] SC: How long after the comic came out did the picture show up in the mail?

TAFFET: Maybe months later.

SC: And you never wrote to them again, right?

TAFFET: No. SC: Did your friends also submit ones and not win?

TAFFET: No.

Winners Galore!

(Above:) Here’s another contest winner, Carl Oscar Graves, as drawn by Paul Reinman for Top Notch Laugh Comics #34 (March.1943). I don’t know which character he voted for, but it was Archie Andrews who eventually won the company’s popularity contest… surprise, surprise!

[TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

[E-mail follow-up:] SC: Here’s the drawing of you in the following issue! Here’s where you actually won the contest.

TAFFET: I can’t thank you enough for the Top Notch photos and drawing of me. Please keep in touch… I want to read that book.

SC: Here’s the comic book cover to help identify it.

TAFFET: Thank you for this beautiful piece of nostalgia.

The End

Ch-Ch-Changes!

Top Notch Comics #1 (Dec. 1939) featured an Edd Ashe cover that showcased The Wizard. By issue #28 (July 1942) the mag had morphed into Top Notch Laugh Comics, featuring mainly humor strips (with The Black Hood tagging along for the ride!). From issue #46 to #48 (Summer to Winter 1944), it changed into Laugh Comix (yes, with an “x”), starring Archie’s also-ran predecessor, Wilbur Wilkin. Then Archie himself took over when the title became Laugh Comics in Fall 1946—with Laugh Comics #20 (not #49!) becoming the first issue in the new series, since the company chose to continue the numbering not from the previous series but from Black Hood comics! See why these things drive collectors crazy?

[TM & © Archie Comic Publications.]

Our thanks to Mr. Stanley Taffet for sharing his memories, and to Mr. Shaun Clancy for some... er... Top Notch detective work. Mr. Taffet went on to an acting career. And while it’s sad that the Archie contest ended so badly for young Stanley, getting left back inspired the boy to take school a lot more seriously. Darned if it doesn’t sound like a typical “Archie” plot!

Till next time...

A Comic Fandom Archive Special

81

A FINGER In Every Plot!

The 1965 JERRY G. BAILS Article That First Pointed A Finger At The Co-Creator Of Batman Guest Introduction by Roy Thomas – Presented by Bill Schelly

I

n the September 15, 2015, edition of The Hollywood Reporter, DC Entertainment stunned any comics fans who read that entertainment-industry trade paper by announcing that, beginning with the Warner Bros. TV series Gotham and the forthcoming film Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Bill Finger would receive credit for his “contributions” to Batman, whom DC has long heralded as having been created solely by artist Bob Kane.

referred to him as “the unindicted co-conspirator in the 1939 creation of Batman, working with originator/artist Bob Kane”; but even if that’s true, it was at most a minor milestone along the way… the amazing thing being, perhaps, that that phrase made it into print! Probably just slipped by.)

dunno—that the first time Finger was acknowledged in anything like that role in a publication from DC Comics itself was in my introduction to the 2005 hardcover The Robin Archives, Vol. 1, where I

Recently, however, CFA editor Bill Schelly and I realized that, although Bill had quoted from Jerry’s article when spotlighting Kane’s letter, Alter Ego itself had never reprinted Jerry’s simple two-page piece that started the ball rolling for the eventual recognition of Bill Finger’s rightful place as the co-creator of Batman.

Happily, some of those same sources that tipped the hat to Nobleman and Barr That announcement have also pointed out left in limbo, however, that this “movement” the question of when— really began in 1965, or if—Finger, who died when Jerry G. Bails, the on January 18, 1974, original editor/ would receive similar publisher of Alter Ego, credit on DC’s Batmanprinted his article “If related comic books. the Truth Be Known, or, ‘A Finger in Every Happily, not many Plot!’” It appeared in weeks afterward, though the 12th issue of his accompanied by no spirit-duplicator apa fanfare whatsoever, (amateur press alliance) Finger was given a “cofanzine CAPA-alpha, creator” byline in the soon after the night comic books Batman and Jerry, Dave Kaler, and I Robin Eternal #3 and visited Bill in his Batman: Arkham Knight Greenwich Village Genesis #3, with more to apartment at the time of follow. Hurrah! the 1965 New York You Can’t Draw Drawing! comics convention— While not in any way claiming that Bob Kane wasn’t the co-creator of Batman, we’re overjoyed Various sources have and instantly aroused to see Bill Finger finally receiving his overdue credit.

If not for Finger, Kane wouldn’t have had rightly given some of the the wrath of Bob Kane. anything to draw in this undated Batman and Robin sketch, which was sold several years ago credit for this dramatic

by Heritage Comics Auctions. Thanks to Dominic Bongo. [Batman & Robin TM & © DC Comics.]

Kane wrote a seething turnabout (I’m tempted 6-page letter that Biljo to call it a “dawn of White felt obliged to print later in ’65 in his own fanzine, Batmania. justice”) to Marc Tyler Nobleman’s recent and excellent book Bill In the winter of 1999, Kane’s vitriolic letter was reprinted in full in the Boy Wonder, as well as to veteran comics writer (and then DC Alter Ego, Vol. 2, #3 (which was a flip section of Comic Book Artist staffer) Mike W. Barr, who back in the 1980s aroused the wrath of V1#3), then later in the TwoMorrows trade paperback Alter Ego: his so-called superiors by championing the cause of recognizing The Comic Book Artist Collection. In A/E V2#5, also reprinted in that Finger as Batman’s co-creator. (Someone told me—rightly or Collection, we featured Jerry’s lengthy rebuttal to Kane’s screed. wrongly, I

Bob Kane

Bill Finger

We hereby remedy that situation on the following two pages, by reproducing that article from scans of the actual pages of CAPAalpha [k-a] #12. Jerry made a couple of errors in his recounting, but the appeal nonetheless stands as a landmark in the history of comic books….

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The 1965 Jerry G. Bails Article That First Pointed A Finger At The Co-Creator Of Batman

A Finger In Every Plot

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And, most importantly, those patients of his deserved better from him. They were ill-served, to say the least.

Mark Marderosian Like in all of us, Mark, we feel there was both good and bad in Fredric Wertham. As far as his effect on the comics industry of the time, and the livelihoods and reputations of a number of talented individuals, I myself—that’s Roy, speaking for himself and nobody else in particular—see mostly the bad. But if I were a young minority person at the Lafargue Clinic back in the day, I’ll admit that I might see him a bit differently… despite his apparent misuse that some of his published work made of their testimony.

In her article, Carol L. Tilley makes the claim that the writer Gershon Legman was a ghost writer, or something very close to it, for Fredric Wertham back in the ’50s, a charge made originally by EC publisher William M. Gaines in his famous “Red Dupe” editorial in Haunt of Fear #26 (July 1954), and I asked her how she arrived at that conclusion. It was a minor point, but I appreciate the fact that she took the trouble to make a detailed reply: Hi Roy, My claim that [the “ghosting” charge is ”somewhat accurate”] comes from my general impression of Legman’s contributions to Wertham’s ideas. I haven’t documented it in an especially thoughtful way, but here’s what I had to say at the New York Comic Con last fall [2013]:

A

nother stellar “maskot” drawing by Shane Foley leads us into this issue’s correspondence section. (We used to call ’em “LPs,” but younger fans no longer know that abbreviation, either for “letters page”—or for “long-playing.”) Thanks to Shane, and to Randy Sargent for the cavortin’ colors! We don’t ever wanna take these guys for granted, because they do consistently good work, issue after issue, in exchange for all the fanzines they can eat. [Alter Ego hero TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas – costume designed by Ron Harris; other art © Shane Foley.]

This issue features a truncated “re:” section (guess why!), with comments on A/E #128, which headlined Carol L. Tilley’s “Seducing the Innocent,” examining the 1940s-50s methods of preeminent comic critic Dr. Fredric Wertham….

Dear Mr. Thomas,

Thank you for reprinting Carol Tilley’s article about Wertham’s book, and especially for finding the corresponding comic books that are mentioned in the piece. It brought a sense of finality. It took over sixty years, but his book and his slipshod methods have finally been refuted through proof of his own notes and handwriting. Imagine! Using one child case study and pretending what the child said came from five different people, simply to bolster his case with phony volume. Even when I was a younger lad in the 1970s reading his tome, I knew it was overly simplistic and the research seemed suspect.

Wertham was smart enough to know that many factors contributed to these patients’ issues. He knew that their environment, their parenting, the schools, and more, were contributing, but he chose to focus on just one thing, with a tenuous connection at best.

He may have done good working with the poor and with those free clinics but ruining people’s lives and careers was pretty brutal and was unnecessary. There were many more constructive ways to deal with the issues raised. He ignored them all. If anyone was seduced, it was him. By the klieg lights.

“Throughout late 1947 and 1948, Wertham began compiling massive amounts of intelligence against the comics industry. Much of his early understanding was shaped by information funneled to him by Gershon Legman, a selfdescribed folklorist and publisher considered with—among many things—humor and sex.

“Legman fed Wertham’s appetites for inside information, sending him lists of ‘crime’ comics, explaining how comics changed titles but retained issue numbering and outlining suspicious business connections, and sharing reports of New York University professor Harvey Zorbaugh’s workshop on comics.

“Zorbaugh, an early advocate for comics in education, hosted several worships at NYU in the 1940s focused on how to use the comics medium to support learning.

“Legman wrote to Wertham in December 1947, ‘I wonder if you know of the fake seminar being run by Harvey Zorbaugh… presumably an examination of the comics…. Of the first 17 speakers, 15 were paid agents of the comic book companies themselves…. Why don’t you drop in and break up the party with a few facts?’

“This germ of an idea—that there were paid apologists for comics—planted by Legman in this letter took hold of Wertham.

He began seeking even more information about people employed in an advisory capacity by DC/National Comics, Fawcett, Hillman, and more. Over time his ire focused on DC/National and its slate of advisors, including Lauretta Bender and Josette Frank.”

Carol L. Tilley As you documented in the article reprinted in A/E #128, Carol, even some of Wertham’s fellow professionals, both at the time and later, criticized his dismissive “treatment of contrary evidence and, in fact, anyone who disagrees [with him].” Personally, we’ve long thought that his statement that “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry” pretty much says it all about the objectivity of his method. A photo of Harvey Zorbaugh, incidentally, had appeared in a previous installment of Dr. Amy K. Nyberg’s book Seal of Approval.

Also: Francis A. Rodriguez pointed out a typo on p. 42, where I accidentally wrote that the scheduled fourth EC horror comic was going

86

re:

to be titled Tales from the Crypt. That mag had already existed for several years, of course; the new comic was to be called The Crypt of Terror, which had been the original title of Crypt. Thanks for keeping us honest, Francis.

A final note: P.C. Hamerlinck points out that, alas, the wrong month and year were printed on the FCA interior cover in A/E #129. Luckily for us all, the Fawcett-related contents were the right ones!

Send all comments, corrections, and critiques to: Roy Thomas e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135 Meanwhile, if you find yourself on the Internet, why not head on down to the Alter-Ego-Fans online chat group to learn more about upcoming features in this mag—to get a chance to unselfishly help us out with needed art and photo scans (thereby winning yourself a free copy of an issue of A/E)—and to discuss Alter Ego, the Golden and Silver Ages of Comics, and anything else that might be on your mind? You’ll find it at group.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans. If you run into any problems signing up, just contact our genial overseer Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll walk you through them. You’ll be glad you signed up—and so will we!

Dr. Jean A. Thompson Sadly, we’ve misplaced the name of the person who sent us the above photo (to whom we definitely owe a free copy of this issue of A/E), but we’re happy to finally have a pic of Dr. Jean A. Thompson, the psychiatrist who served as advisor and editorial consultant for Timely/Marvel for nearly two years in the late 1940s, as per the house ad reprinted in A/E #128. The above photo appears with the following information on the Facebook entry for the Albany [NY] Medical College Alumni Association: “Dr. Jean A. Thompson, a native of Cohoes, NY, spent her medical career dedicated to Child Psychiatry, and became a nationally recognized expert on the subject. Her interest in the medical profession came from her father’s (John Archibold, MD, AMC 1988) role as a general practitioner and Health Officer in Cohoes. She attended Smith College before entering Albany Medical College and spent time as a resident psychiatrist at Albany Hospital and the Pennsylvania Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Philadelphia. She spend several years working in Boston, Chicago, and New York after receiving a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in Child Psychiatry. This work led to her appointment by the New York City Board of Education as Director of the Bureau of Child Guidance. She was also involved with numerous professional organizations, such as the American Psychiatric Association and the Medical Hygiene Section of the N.Y. Society for the Experimental Study of Education.”

Thus, as you can see, Dr. Thompson’s bona fides were well established… not that a little detail like that ever prevented Dr. Wertham and his ilk from portraying any fellow professionals who disagreed with his views as being merely “bought off” by the comic book industry. To verify that we had the “right” Jean A. Thompson, I sent a scan to Stan Lee, who responded that, while he couldn’t swear by it after nearly sixty years, it did look like the Jean Thompson he had “met once or twice” back in the day. It’s good to be able to add another face to the gallery of those who both supported and opposed comics censorship in the 20th century, as we tried to do in conjunction with our reprinting of Tilley’s article and Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s book Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code.

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SPRING 2016 UPDATE

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GEORGE KHOURY (author of The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore and Kimota: The Miracleman Companion) presents a “love letter” to his personal golden age of comics, 1976-1986, covering all the things that made those comics great—the top artists, the coolest stories, and even the best ads! Remember the days when every comic book captured your imagination, and took you to new and exciting places? When you didn’t apologize for loving the comic books and creators that gave you bliss?

COMIC BOOK FEVER captures that era, when comics offered all different genres to any kid with a pocketful of coins, at local establishments from 7-Elevens to your local drug store. Inside this full-color hardcover are new articles, interviews, and images about the people, places, characters, titles, moments, and good times that inspired and thrilled us in the Bronze Age: NEAL ADAMS, JOHN ROMITA, GEORGE PÉREZ, MARV WOLFMAN, ALAN MOORE, DENNY O’NEIL, JIM STARLIN, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, THE HERNANDEZ BROTHERS, THE BUSCEMA BROTHERS, STAN LEE, JACK DAVIS, JACK KIRBY, KEVIN EASTMAN, CHRIS CLAREMONT, GERRY CONWAY, FRANK MILLER—and that’s just for starters. It covers the phenoms that delighted Baby Boomers, Generation X, and beyond: UNCANNY X-MEN, NEW TEEN TITANS, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, LOVE AND ROCKETS, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, SUPERMAN VS. SPIDER-MAN, ARCHIE COMICS, HARVEY COMICS, KISS, STAR WARS, ROM, HOSTESS CAKE ADS, GRIT(!), and other milestones! So take a trip back in time to re-experience those epic stories, and feel the heat of COMIC BOOK FEVER once again! With cover art and introduction by ALEX ROSS. (240-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-063-2 • SHIPS JUNE 2016!

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With a comics career dating back to 1941, including inking early issues of Captain America, AL PLASTINO was one of the last surviving penciler/inkers of his era. Laboring uncredited on SUPERMAN for two decades (1948-1968), he co-created SUPERGIRL, BRAINIAC, and the LEGION OF SUPERHEROES, drawing those characters’ first appearances, and illustrating the initial comics story to feature KRYPTONITE. He was called upon to help maintain the DC Comics house-style by redrawing other artists’ Superman heads, most notoriously on JACK KIRBY’S JIMMY OLSEN series, much to his chagrin. His career even included working on classic daily and Sunday newspaper strips like NANCY, JOE PALOOKA, BATMAN, and others. With a Foreword by PAUL LEVITZ, this book (by EDDY ZENO, author of CURT SWAN: A LIFE IN COMICS) was completed just weeks before Al’s recent passing. In these pages, the artist remembers both his struggles and triumphs in the world of comics, cartooning and beyond. A near-century of insights shared by Al, his family, and contemporaries ALLEN BELLMAN, NICK CARDY, JOE GIELLA, and CARMINE INFANTINO—along with successors JON BOGDANOVE, JERRY ORDWAY, AND MARK WAID—paint a layered portrait of Plastino’s life and career. And a wealth of illustrations show just how influential a figure he is in the history of comics.

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Fawcett Artist RAY HARFORD & The Ghost Army Part I – From Binder Barn To Battle

by P.C. Hamerlinck

C.C.

Beck called him the closest of any of the Fawcett artists to matching his art style.

Ray Harford was one of the integral Fawcett comic book artists who had a hand in pre-war “Captain Marvel” artwork, and later he went on to use those same artistic abilities to dupe the enemy in a top-secret Army unit during World War II.

Pratt Pals Raymond Dell Harford was born on July 21, 1920, in the Paramus, New Jersey, area.

He enrolled at Pratt Institute, located in Brooklyn, New York, to study illustration, beginning in the autumn of 1938. It was there that Harford met friends Bob Boyajian, Vic Dowd, and Ken Bald. Harford’s new classmates were also studying illustration. They would soon refer to themselves as “The Four Musketeers.”

Rays Of Hope Ray Harford in 1942, with his ever-present pipe, working at Fawcett Publications illustrating a “Captain Marvel” story (specifically, page 24 from America’s Greatest Comics #3, for which see p. 94).

Seen at left are Harford’s cover for America’s Greatest Comics #4, (Aug.-Nov. 1942), along with a scan of his original black-&-white art.

[Shazam hero, Spy Smasher, & Bulletman TM & © DC Comics.]

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #198

92

Out of the Four Musketeers, Ray Harford was the quiet one, according to Vic Dowd: “He smoked a pipe… looked very English. He came from a nice, refined family. We visited each other’s homes and got to know each other’s parents.”

Harford married Edith Taylor while he was still attending Pratt. Bob Boyajian was Ray Harford’s best man at the wedding. The newlyweds resided in Teaneck, New Jersey. (Edith later moved to Rochester, New York, with her parents after Ray enlisted in the Army.)

The Binder Barn

Illustrate This!

Pratt Institute’s 1940 Illustration II class had several students who would soon make their way over to Jack Binder’s comic shop: Ray Harford is in the third row—he’s the 3rd one in from left. To Ray’s left is Bob Boyajian, then Kurt Schaffenberger. In row 2 (counting from the top), the 4th one in from left is Vic Dowd; the second guy over to his left is Ken Bald. Bottom row: first from left is Vincent Costello, and Al Duca is the fourth guy in. If you can identify Jimmy Potter, Dick Rylands, John Westlake, and Bob Butts, you get to go to the head of the class—and get a free copy of Alter Ego! Fawcett should’ve sent a recruiter to this class and saved themselves a lot of time! Thanks to Shaun Clancy.

The four young men (sometimes along with another future professional comic book artist, Kurt Schaffenberger) spent a lot of their free time together. Ken Bald later recalled that they all socialized with each other over the weekends and “would all go out together with their girlfriends.” (Harford, Schaffenberger, and Bald actually all married the girls that they dated at Pratt.)

Harford, Boyajian, Dowd, Bald, and several other 1941 Pratt graduates (including Kurt Schaffenberger, Nat Champlin, Al Duca, Bob Butts, John Westlake, Vin Costello, Dick Rylands, and Jimmy Potter) went straight over to Jack Binder’s “shop” located in his backyard barn in Englewood, New Jersey. Binder produced comic book art pages for several publishers in an assembly-line process. It was Bill Ward, a year ahead of Pratt Class of ‘41, who told the guys about the opportunity at Binder’s.

Upstairs in the Binder barn, he helped pencil and ink comic book artwork primarily for the shop’s largest account, Fawcett Publications (“Bulletman,” “Ibis the Invincible,” “Spy Smasher,” “Mr. Scarlet,” “Golden Arrow,” “The Hunchback,” and early “Mary Marvel” stories), as well as artwork for Better Publications (“Fighting Yank,” “Doc Strange,” “The Champ,” “Davey Dragon”); Feature Comics (“Black Owl”); Lev Gleason

Ray Harford Class Act of ’41 A close-up of Ray Harford’s photo from the Pratt Class of ’41 Agora Inter-fraternity yearbook—juxtaposed with photos taken from another page in that same book that spotlight his friends Bob Boyajian, Vic Dowd, and Ken Bald. Jimmy Potter, another artist that headed over to the Jack Binder shop after graduation, is also featured on the page—as is Al Duca, who also would draw for Fawcett. Thanks to Shaun Clancy. As it would happen, Boyajian, Dowd, and Bald were all interviewed by Jim Amash for Alter Ego #55—still available from TwoMorrows.

Fawcett Artist Ray Harford & The Ghost Army—Part I

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approach, the specific tales I discovered had depicted a huskier, barrel-chested Captain Marvel, plus additional elements that were more akin to Marc’s rendition of the character. Billy Batson was drawn with slightly larger eyes (bigger dots) and with a larger shirt collar… again, all traits of Marc’s version.

Additionally, there was a little more rendering done on the pages, more illustrative elements to them… effective stippling techniques, more emphasis on lighting and dramatic shadowing.

I was convinced more than ever that it had to be Swayze’s work.

I photocopied some of the pages in question for Marc and awaited his response. I was so sure that I had dug up more old “Captain Marvel” stories that he could write about in his FCA column, “We Didn’t Know… It Was the Golden Age!” And then I heard back from him:

Glad Those Guys Got Jobs After Graduation!

Comic book assembly-line action at the Binder shop, Englewood, New Jersey, 1941. (Clockwise from top left:) Jack Binder (standing), Ken Bald, Samuel Hamilton Brooks (in background, right), Vic Dowd (suspenders), Ray Harford (pipe), Bob Boyajian. This photo has been previously published in A/E.

(“Captain Battle”); and Street & Smith (“Doc Savage,” “The Avenger,” “Blackstone,” “Rex King,” “Ajax the Sun Man”).

But a bigger character was waiting for Ray Harford.

Fawcett Publications & Captain Marvel By 1942, after Fawcett Publications had experienced some missteps with freelancers, all “Captain Marvel” artwork was produced in-house at the company’s own art department. No artists had ever worked on any “Captain Marvel” stories while working at Binder’s, but Ray Harford and his buddy Bob Boyajian would soon get their chance with the World’s Mightiest Mortal.

“Nope. Sorry. Not my work.

Probably Ray Harford.”

And, sure enough, Marc was right. When FCA came across a photo of Ray Harford working on a “Captain Marvel” page at Fawcett, the page on Ray’s drawing board in the photo matched one of pages I had sent to Marc to identify!

The “Captain Marvel” story drawn by Harford that was identified by Marc and confirmed by the photograph is “The Magno-Ray” from America’s Greatest Comics #3 (May-Aug ’42). The tale of another clash between Captain Marvel and Dr. Sivana also features the doc’s daughter Beautia, whose headshots were drawn

by C.C. Beck, as the Harford photo also revealed stats of Beck-

Giving them his blessing (since he didn’t want to unsettle his biggest account), Jack Binder released Harford and Boyajian from their duties to go over and work in Fawcett’s art department. The publisher needed extra hands to help keep up with the demand for more “Captain Marvel” pages.

Bob Boyajian recalled in his later years the “big art department” and its section specifically devoted to producing “Captain Marvel”: “Ray Harford, Irwin Weill, Chic Stone, Marc Swayze, Pete Costanza, me, and of course [C.C.] Beck were among those who worked there. It was the Captain Marvel team.”

The artists at Fawcett were on a salary. Ray Harford, who specialized primarily on main characters, pulled in an amazing (for 1942) $50 a week.

In 1999, I studied some 1942 “Captain Marvel” stories which I was almost certain were the work of my good friend Marc Swayze.

Differing somewhat from Beck’s pure, solid-lined cartooning

With One Magic Word & Two Magic Pencils…

Two of the great “Captain Marvel” artists: co-creator C.C. Beck (1942 photo) and Marc Swayze (1940 photo).

94

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #198

America’s Greatest SuperHero Ever, Maybe!

Double-page splash, and two interior pages, of the “Captain Marvel” story from America’s Greatest Comics #3 (May-Aug. 1942); art by Ray Harford.

The page at near left is the one Harford is shown drawing back on p. 91. [Shazam hero, Billy Batson, Dr. Sivana, Beautia Sivana, & the wizard Shazam TM & © DC Comics.]

Fawcett Artist Ray Harford & The Ghost Army—Part I

95

World’s Finest? Definitely Fawcett’s Finest!

The double-paged splash, and an interior panel, from the Captain Marvel-Spy Smasher team-up in Whiz Comics #33 (Aug. 1942) drawn by Ray Harford.

[Shazam hero & Spy Smasher TM & © DC Comics.]

drawn Beautia faces on his drawing table waiting to be affixed to the page.

Other stories identified by Marc Swayze as done by Ray Harford as the primary illustrator are “The Marvel Exterminator” (Whiz Comics #31, June ’42); “To Crush America’s Phantom Foe,” a Captain Marvel-Spy Smasher team-up (Whiz Comics #33, Aug. ’42); and “The Haunted Halloween Hotel” (Whiz Comics #36, Oct. ’42).

During his tenure at Fawcett, Ray Harford had drawn at least three comic book covers featuring Captain Marvel; the original artwork on illustration board in pen and ink (with two of them later water-colored by Ray) was discovered inside Harford’s old art portfolio by Harford’s two sons. The three original Harford covers are of Whiz Comics #31 (June ’42, with Captain Marvel saluting General Douglas MacArthur); Whiz Comics #34 (Sept ’42, depicting Captain Marvel and the Lieutenant Marvels soaring in the sky); and America’s Greatest Comics #4 (Aug-Nov ’42, with Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher, and Bulletman). [EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re saving the MacArthur art to show you next issue!]

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #198

96

What? No Major Marvel?

Ray Harford’s original art (with added watercoloring), and (above right) the printed cover, of Whiz Comics #34 (Sept. ’42) featuring Captain Marvel with the post-JSA early super-team, the Lt. Marvels. The FCA editor was certain it was the work of Marc Swayze, but his friend was quick to direct him on the right path. [Shazam heroes TM & © DC Comics.]

Harford and Boyajian’s friendship became even tighter after Binder sent them over to Fawcett Publications. But they would soon re-join their friend Vic Dowd in the U.S. Army, with all three serving in the same outfit during World War II….

The finale of “Ray Harford and the Ghost Army” will appear in the next issues of FCA and Alter Ego. This article would have been impossible to put together without the work and kind cooperation of Jay and Steve Harford, Shaun Clancy, Jim Amash, Rick Beyer, Elizabeth If you’re viewing a Digital Sayles, and William Sayles.

Edition of this publication, For more information on the PLEASE READ THIS: Ghost Army, visit www.ghostarmy.org or pick This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our up a copy of the book The Ghost website or Apps. If you downloaded it from Army of World War II by Rick another website or torrent, go ahead and read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal downpublished by Princeton load, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOT Architectural Press, 2015, SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT to which P.C. ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, please pay for Hamerlinck them so we can keep producing ones like provided advice and this. Our digital editions should ONLY be several photographs. downloaded within our Apps and at

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DON’T MISS YOUR FAVORITE MAGS!

Starting this month, all our new magazines will be listed in the COMICS section (ie. front half) of Diamond Comic Distributors’ PREVIEWS catalog with our books (instead of in the “Magazine” section as in the past). Look for the TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING section, alphabetically under the letter “T”—now with everything in one place, for easy ordering through your local comics shop.

BACK ISSUE #89

ALTER EGO #140

ALTER EGO #141

ALTER EGO #142

ALTER EGO #143

Golden Age great IRWIN HASEN spotlight, adapted from DAN MAKARA’s film documentary on Hasen, the 1940s artist of the Justice Society, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Wildcat, Holyoke’s Cat-Man, and numerous other classic heroes—and, for 30 years, the artist of the famous DONDI newspaper strip! Bonus art by his buddies JOE KUBERT, ALEX TOTH, CARMINE INFANTINO, and SHELLY MAYER!

From Detroit to Deathlok, we cover the career of artist RICH BUCKLER: Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Black Panther, Ka-Zar, Dracula, Morbius, a zillion Marvel covers— Batman, Hawkman, and other DC stars— Creepy and Eerie horror—and that’s just in the first half of the 1970s! Plus Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, FCA, and comics expert HAMES WARE on fabulous Golden Age artist RAFAEL ASTARITA!

DAVID SIEGEL talks to RICHARD ARNDT about how, from 1991-2005, he brought the greatest artists of the Golden Age to the San Diego Comic-Con! With art and artifacts by FRADON, GIELLA, MOLDOFF, LAMPERT, CUIDERA, FLESSEL, NORRIS, SULLIVAN, NOVICK, SCHAFFENBERGER, GROTHKOPF, and others! Plus how writer JOHN BROOME got to the Con, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, FCA, and more!

DON GLUT discusses his early years as comic book writer for Marvel, Warren, and Gold Key, with art by SANTOS, MAROTO, CHAN, NEBRES, KUPPERBERG, TUSKA, TRIMPE, SAL BUSCEMA, and others! Also, SAL AMENDOLA and ROY THOMAS on the 1970s professional Academy of Comic Book Arts, founded by STAN LEE and CARMINE INFANTINO! Plus Mr. Monster, FCA, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

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BACK ISSUE #90

BACK ISSUE #91

BACK ISSUE #92

BRICKJOURNAL #39

“Bronze Age Adaptations!” The Shadow, Korak: Son of Tarzan, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Worlds Unknown, and Marvel’s 1980s movie adaptations. Plus: PAUL KUPPERBERG surveys prose adaptations of comics! With work by JACK KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL, FRANK ROBBINS, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, FRANK THORNE, MICHAEL USLAN, and sporting an alternate Kaluta cover produced for DC’s Shadow series!

“Eighties Ladies!” MILLER & SIENKIEWICZ’s Elektra: Assassin, Dazzler, Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau), Lady Quark, DAN MISHKIN’s Wonder Woman, WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS and ADAM KUBERT’s Jezebel Jade, Somerset Holmes, and a look back at Marvel’s Dakota North! Featuring the work of BRUCE JONES, JOHN ROMITA JR., ROGER STERN, and many more, plus a previously unpublished cover by SIENKIEWICZ.

“All-Jerks Issue!” Guy Gardner, Namor in the Bronze Age, J. Jonah Jameson, Flash Thompson, DC’s Biggest Blowhards, the Heckler, Obnoxio the Clown, and Archie’s “pal” Reggie Mantle! Featuring the work of (non-jerks) RICH BUCKLER, KURT BUSIEK, JOHN BYRNE, STEVE ENGLEHART, KEITH GIFFEN, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and many more. Cover-featuring KEVIN MAGUIRE’s iconic Batman/Guy Gardner “One Punch”!

“Bronze Age Halloween!” The Swamp Thing revival of 1982, Swamp Thing in Hollywood, Phantom Stranger team-ups, KUPPERBERG & MIGNOLA’s Phantom Stranger miniseries, DC’s The Witching Hour, the Living Mummy, and an index of Marvel’s 1970s’ horror anthologies! Featuring the work of RICH BUCKLER, ANDY MANGELS, VAL MAYERIK, MARTIN PASKO, MICHAEL USLAN, TOM YEATES, and many more. Cover by YEATES.

LEGO DINOSAURS! Builder WILLIAM PUGH discusses building prehistoric creatures, a LEGO Jurassic World by DIEGO MAXIMINO PRIETO ALVAREZ, and dino bones by MATT SAILORS! Plus: Minifigure Customization by JARED K. BURKS, stepby-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, DIY Fan Art by BrickNerd TOMMY WILLIAMSON, MINDSTORMS robotics lessons, and more!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #12 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #13

DRAW! #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #67

KIRBY COLLECTOR #68

JACK KIRBY’s mid-life work examined, from Fantastic Four and Thor at Marvel in the middle ’60s to the Fourth World at DC (including the real-life background drama that unfolded during that tumultuous era)!

Plus a career-spanning interview with underground comix pioneer HOWARD CRUSE, the extraordinary cartoonist and graphic novelist of the award-winning Stuck Rubber Baby! Cover by STEVE RUDE!

MICHAEL W. KALUTA feature interview covering his early fans days THE SHADOW, STARSTRUCK, the STUDIO, and Vertigo cover work! Plus RAMONA FRADON talks about her 65+ years in the comic book business on AQUAMAN, METAMORPHO, SUPER-FRIENDS, and SPONGEBOB! Also JAY LYNCH reveals the WACKY PACK MEN who created the Topps trading cards that influenced an entire generation!

Super-star DC penciler HOWARD PORTER demos his creative process, and JAMAL IGLE discusses everything from storyboarding to penciling as he gives a breakdown of his working methods. Plus there’s Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviewing art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY showing the Ord-Way of doing comics, and Comic Art Bootcamp lessons with BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

UP-CLOSE & PERSONAL! Kirby interviews you weren’t aware of, photos and recollections from fans who saw him in person, personal anecdotes from Jack’s fellow pros, LEE and KIRBY cameos in comics, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and more! Don’t let the photo cover fool you; this issue is chockfull of rare Kirby pencil art, from Roz Kirby’s private sketchbook, and Jack’s most personal comics stories!

KEY KIRBY CHARACTERS! We go decadeby-decade to examine pivotal characters Jack created throughout his career (including some that might surprise you)! Plus there’s a look at what would’ve happened if Kirby had never left Marvel Comics for DC, how Jack’s work has been repackaged over the decades, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and galleries of unseen Kirby pencil art!

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(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Summer 2016

MONSTER MASH

Time-trip back to the frightening era of 1957-1972, when monsters stomped into the American mainstream! Once Frankenstein and fiends infiltrated TV in 1957, an avalanche of monster magazines, toys, games, trading cards, and comic books crashed upon an unsuspecting public. This profusely illustrated full-color hardcover covers that creepy, kooky Monster Craze through features on Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, the #1 hit “Monster Mash,” Aurora’s model kits, TV shows (Shock Theatre, The Addams Family, The Munsters, and Dark Shadows), “Mars Attacks” trading cards, Eerie Publications, Planet of the Apes, and more! It features interviews with JAMES WARREN (Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella magazines), FORREST J ACKERMAN (Famous Monsters of Filmland), JOHN ASTIN (The Addams Family), AL LEWIS (The Munsters), JONATHAN FRID (Dark Shadows), GEORGE BARRIS (monster car customizer), ED “BIG DADDY” ROTH (Rat Fink), BOBBY (BORIS) PICKETT (Monster Mash singer/songwriter) and others, with a Foreword by TV horror host ZACHERLEY, the “Cool Ghoul.” Written by MARK VOGER (author of “The Dark Age”).

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $13.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-064-9

DON’T MISS YOUR FAVORITE MAGS!

Starting immediately, all our new magazines will be listed in the COMICS section (ie. front half) of Diamond Comic Distributors’ PREVIEWS catalog with our books (instead of in the “Magazine” section as in the past). Look for the TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING section, alphabetically under the letter “T”—now with everything in one place, for easy ordering through your local comics shop.

MLJ COMPANION

THE MLJ COMPANION documents the complete history of Archie Comics’ super-hero characters known as the “Mighty Crusaders”—THE SHIELD, BLACK HOOD, STEEL STERLING, HANGMAN, MR. JUSTICE, THE FLY, and many others.

It features in-depth examinations of each era of the characters’ extensive history: THE GOLDEN AGE (beginning with the Shield, the first patriotic super-hero, who pre-dated Captain America by a full year), THE SILVER AGE (spotlighting those offbeat, campy Mighty Comics issues, and The Fly and Jaguar), THE BRONZE AGE (with the Red Circle line, and the !mpact imprint published by DC Comics), up to THE MODERN AGE, with its Dark Circle imprint (featuring such fanfavorites series as “The Fox” by MARK WAID and DEAN HASPIEL). Plus: Learn what “MLJ” stands for! Uncover such rarities as the Mighty Crusaders board game, and the Shadow’s short-lived career as a spandex-clad superhero! Discover the ill-fated Spectrum line of comics, that was abruptly halted due to its violent content! See where the super-heroes crossed over into Archie, Betty, and Veronica’s world! And read interviews with IRV NOVICK, DICK AYERS, RICH BUCKLER, BILL DuBAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, JIM VALENTINO, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, KELLEY JONES, MICHAEL USLAN, and others who chronicled the Mighty Crusaders’ exploits from the 1940s to today! By RIK OFFENBERGER and PAUL CASTIGLIA, with a cover by IRV NOVICK and JOE RUBINSTEIN. INCLUDES 64 FULL-COLOR PAGES OF KEY MLJ STORIES! (288-page trade paperback with COLOR) $31.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-067-0 • SHIPS AUGUST 2016!

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The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze In America, 1957-1972