Alter Ego #146

Roy Thomas’ Iron-Fisted Comics Fanzine

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GEORGE BRENNER & A NEVERPUBLISHED

GOLDEN AGE STORY BY

MARV LEVY

Art © & TM & Marvel Characters, Inc.

May 2017

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82658 00093 6

Vol. 3, No. 146 / May 2017 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 Paul Gulacy

With Special Thanks to: Alarm Clock William Lampkin (website) Barbara Levy Rob Allen Mark Lewis Aluir Amancio Art Lortie Heidi Amash Jim Ludwig Michael Ambrose Ralph Macchio Richard J. Arndt Pablo Marcos Jean Bails Sam Maronie Josh Baker Mike Mikulovsky Terry Beatty Dusty Miller Christopher Boyko Doug & Debbie John Brenner Moench Eliot Brown Brian K. Morris Bernie & Lucille Mark Muller Bubnis Jim Murtagh Nick Caputo Skye Ott Mike Chomko Pappy’s Golden Age Shaun Clancy Comics Blogzine Jon B. Cooke Barry Pearl Chet Cox John G. Pierce Comic Vine (website) The Quality Companion Pierre Comtois Companion Leonardo de Sà (website) Jay Disbrow Gene Reed Shane Foley Four-Color Shadows Max Roberts Robotplastic (website) Apocalypse Stephan Friedt (website) Martin Gately Randy Sargent Janet Gilbert Cory Sedlmeier Anthony Gillies Keif Simon Don Glut Jeff Taylor Grand Comics Database (website) Dann Thomas Rhett Thomas Great American Steven Thompson Comic Book Anthony Tollin Stories (website) Toni Torres Arnie Grieves Dr. Michael J. Paul Gulacy Vassallo Gary Henderson Ted White Sean Howe Jonny Quest Cartoon Who’s Who in DC Comics (website) History (website) Steven G. Willis Jim Kealy Bill Wray Mike Kooiman

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Ken Barr, George Brenner, Daniel Keyes, Ethan Roberts, & Paul Ryan

Contents Writer/Editorial: Golden Threads Among The Silver . . . . . . . 2 The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Doug Moench talks to Richard Arndt about his early-’70s career in comics.

The Clock Strikes! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 A son’s remembrance of creator George Brenner, as related to Mike Kooiman.

The Golden Age Super-Hero That Never Was! . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Marvin Levy’s 1942 “Bill of Rights”—never before published!

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! The EC Variants?. . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Michael T. Gilbert asks—did EC publisher Bill Gaines authorize gruesome alternate covers?

Comic Fandom Archive: Ted White On Comics – Part 1 . . 68 The beginning of Bill Schelly’s interview with one of the early true comic book fans.

Tributes to Daniel Keyes, Paul Ryan, Ken Barr, & Ethan Roberts . . 75 re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 80 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #205 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 P.C. Hamerlinck presents John G. Pierce’s parade of South American Marvel Family covers.

On Our Cover: When we asked celebrated longtime Master of Kung Fu artist Paul Gulacy to suggest an illustration by himself for this issue centered around the early work of Doug Moench, he sent us scans of a number of wonderful commission pieces he’s done in recent years. This was the pick of a lusciously-drawn and -painted litter. Thanks, Paul! And thanks to photographer Eliot Brown for the photo of Doug Moench. [Shang-Chi, Nick Fury, & Black Widow TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Fu Manchu TM & © Estate of Sax Rohmer; other art © Paul Gulacy.]

Above: Writer/artist George Brenner’s “The Clock” was the first masked-hero feature created for comic books, appearing in such titles as Comics Magazine Company’s Funny Picture Stories, Vol. 1, #2 (Dec. 1936). Courtesy of Mike Kooiman’s blog “The Quality Companion Companion.”

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

Alter EgoTM is published 6 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.

Six-issue subscriptions: $65 US, $102 Elsewhere, $29.70 Digital Only. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © Roy Thomas. Alter Ego is a TM of Roy & Dann Thomas. FCA is a TM of P.C. Hamerlinck. Printed in China. ISSN: 1932-6890.

FIRST PRINTING.

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writer/editorial

Golden Threads Among The Silver A

Yeesh… I didn’t mean for this writer/editorial to get so gloomy.

I just wanted to point out, in the course of these few hundred words, that I’m devoted—and I think A/E’s contributing editors will join me in this—to finding creative and worthwhile ways to keep the Golden Age traditions of this magazine alive and strong, even while those we interview will perforce be either Silver Agers—or the surviving spouses or kids of those who formed comics’ Golden Age.

s many folks reading these words will be aware, Alter Ego, Vol. 3, was launched in 1999 to celebrate the so-called Golden and Silver Ages of comic books.

That means from the latter half of the 1930s (and particularly since the 1938 debut of Superman) through some harder-to-pindown date between 1970 and maybe 1975.

Despite my own personal close connection to the Silver Age—or perhaps because of it—I’ve tended to stress the Golden Age, preComics Code era, which remains my major area of historical interest. And I’ve had co-conspirators: Jim Amash, who’s conducted more A/E interviews than anyone else to date, was primarily interested in artists who’d come of age in the ’40s, even if their careers sometimes stretched into the 21st century… Michael T. Gilbert, keeper of the Comic Crypt, had similar inclinations… and P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), by virtue of its very title, deals largely with a company that published nearly all its comics between 1939 and 1954. Of A/E’s regular departments, only Bill Schelly's Comic Fandom Archive has generally been concerned with occurrences in the 1960s and after.

Nowadays, as the number of surviving comics creators from the ’40s and even the ’50s has dwindled down to a precious few, I (as well as A/E’s current interviewer-in-residence, Richard Arndt, and a handful of more occasional contributors) find myself adjusting to a world in which even those who entered the comics field in the 1960s, at the height of the ostensible Silver Age, are ageing, with some disappearing from our midst. E. Nelson Bridwell, perhaps the first fan-turned-pro of that era, passed away in 1987… Archie Goodwin, who by 1965 was editing Warren Publishing’s Creepy, left us in ’98… and that number can only grow as we move everfurther from thinking of ourselves as living at “the turn of” the 21st century.

This issue is a case in point. Our lead feature is Richard's dynamic interview with major writer Doug Moench, whose comics career only began circa 1970, roughly the time some people say the Silver Age was turning Bronze… yet we’ve backstopped it with two Golden Age pieces we think equally important: Mike Kooiman's talk with John Brenner, the son of artist/writer George Brenner, creator of comic books’ very first masked avenger… and the first-time publication of a story scripted and drawn in 1942 (yes!) by the late Marvin Levy, who was interviewed in A/E #75. Add to that the 1950s-related matter of this issue’s “Comic Crypt” and the 1940splus South American art and adventures of The Marvel Family covered in FCA—and you’ll see why the Golden Age, no less than the Silver, is still very much alive here in Alter Ego. And why not? After all, academic historians still study the Peloponnesian Wars as ardently as they do the Korean police action… and if I’d been a young man of independent (or even dependent) means back in 1964, today I’d probably be poring away over Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and pondering Osiris, Isis, and Horus instead of the six gods and heroes whose initials make up the 1939-vintage word “Shazam.”

Everything old is new again… even as it gets older… and older….

Bestest,

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147

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EACH ISSUE NOW 100 PAGES! THE SENSATIONAL SCRIPT RECORDS of C.C. Comics; other art © Estate Shazam hero TM & © DC

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Presented & annotated by P.C. HAMERLINCK, BILL SCHELLY, & ROY THOMAS! • Primo vintage Binder-related art by BECK, SIMON & KIRBY, SWAN, AVISON, BORING, SCHAFFENBERGER, (JACK) BINDER, MOONEY, PLASTINO, ANDERSON, PFEUFER, SHORES, ORLANDO, THORNE, RABOY, & the super-stars of two comics eras!

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

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DOUG MOENCH Talks About His Early Years In Comics Conducted & Transcribed by Richard J. Arndt

D

oug Moench began his comics career in 1970, writing horror and mystery stories for Warren, Skywald, and DC Comics. In 1973 he began working for Marvel Comics, writing first for their various black-&-white magazines and then for such color comics as Master of Kung Fu, Astonishing Tales (“Ka-Zar” and “Deathlok”), Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein, and others. He co-created Moon Knight with artist Don Perlin and wrote two superior original series for the Planet of the Apes franchise—“Terror on the Planet of the Apes” and “Future History Chronicles”—with artists

Mike Ploog and Tom Sutton. With Ploog he also created Weirdworld. In addition, while at Marvel he worked on licensed characters such as Kull the Destroyer and Doc Savage. After leaving Marvel, Moench worked for many years on “Batman,” creating several new villains for the Dark Knight’s mythos, including The Black Mask. With frequent collaborator Paul Gulacy, he has worked on such acclaimed titles as Master of Kung Fu, Batman, Six from Sirius, and Slash Maraud. This interview was conducted by phone on October 3, 2015.

Doug Moench presides over pages he wrote for the two comics companies for whom he did the most work during the first half of the 1970s: Warren Publishing’s Creepy #54 (July 1973), with art by Rich Corben—and Marvel Comics’ Master of Kung Fu #25 (Feb. 1975); pencils by Paul Gulacy, inks by Sal Trapani. Thanks to Nick Caputo & Shane Foley for the scans. [Creepy page TM & © New Comic Company, LLC; MoKF page TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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“What The Hell Is That?”

RICHARD ARNDT: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. Could we start out by learning something about your early life?

DOUG MOENCH: Born in Chicago. My mother was born and raised in Scotland. She met my father when he was stationed there in World War II. He brought her home after the war.

RA: What memories do you have of your early comic book reading?

MOENCH: My earliest memories are of reading the “Uncle Scrooge” and “Donald Duck” stories by Carl Barks. Those stories remain some of my favorites of all time. I don’t know if I actually have a memory of the EC Comics or have just convinced myself after the fact. I would have been very, very young to have read them when they were first published. However, I seem to remember being fascinated by the EC books.

I didn’t really buy comics at that time because I was too young.

Didn’t have any money, but I used to sit on the floor in the corner store and read them all. I also liked Tomahawk. I remember a Bugs Bunny Annual that really held me spellbound. The annuals, I guess from Dell, were really long at the time.

RA: Yeah, they didn’t run any ads in their books. Even their regular-size comics were a full 52 pages when you started reading.

MOENCH: Lots of pages. The annuals were square-bound, nice and fat. I don’t remember when Atomic Mouse was being published, but that would have been a favorite, too. What year would that have been? Would you know?

RA: It certainly was the 1950s or early 1960s. [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Atomic Mouse was published by Charlton from 1953-1964.]

MOENCH: If it was the early 1960s, that’s what I remember reading around age twelve or so. Yeah, good book.

comics were kid stuff and it was time to grow up. I just went cold turkey. That period of not reading comics lasted only a couple of months, because one day I went to a different mom-and-pop store than my usual one. This one was where I used to get a Coke and French fries all the time. I’d slather ketchup all over the fries. It was a great time.

I remember doing this one day and I glanced around at the magazine racks, which was where the comics were also kept.

Remember, I no longer had any interest in comics but something caught my eye. It was a logo where the words seemed to talk about an adventure comic but the style of the logo suggested a humor comic. I thought “What the hell is that?” It was The Fantastic Four.

It looked like it should have been a funny comic, but Fantastic Four sounded like something totally different. I went and picked it out and it was Fantastic Four #1. I read it while I was eating my fries, and I bought it to take home. I was hooked all over again on comics. In fact, more than ever!

After that book, I don’t know what came next—“Thor” in Journey into Mystery or maybe “Iron Man” in Tales of Suspense.

There was a whole bunch of things coming, it seemed, very fast— “Spider-Man” and on and on. I got really, really into comics then.

“There Was This Guy Named Don Glut…”

RA: How did you get your start as a writer? I know you were writing before you began to write comics…

MOENCH: Well, early on, I wrote for the school newspaper, but I was into comics way before I started writing for publication. I wrote a letter to [Amazing] Spider-Man and it was published in the letters page. This was when they still published your address with your letter. There was this guy named Don Glut, who became one of my good friends. He saw this letter in SpiderMan, and whenever he saw anyone with a Chicago address on the Marvel letter pages he would look them up in the phone book and call them.

I don’t remember exactly when, but at one point, I started reading Superman and Batman. I remember I was tutoring a kid who lived down the block and his mother would, at the end of the tutoring session, take me into a room in their house that had magazine racks—wood ones, they were furniture. The racks had all these great comics in them. I don’t know if they were her husband’s stash or the kid I was tutoring’s older brother’s comics, but she would let me pick out comics on top of paying me money That Toddlin’ Town for the actual tutoring. I (Above:) Don Glut, 1960s. The Chicago writer provided the remember taking the Batman photo to accompany an in-depth interview in A/E #143. and Detective Comics all the (Right:) A 1964 snapshot of a quartet of Windy City time. Some of those comics comics fans. (L. to r.:) Doug Moench, unknown, Billy were pretty old. I knew they Placzek, & Alex Almarez. In a notation by the late Jerry were different from the Bails, the “unknown” person is listed as “dftric,” but that Batman comics I could buy at abbreviation hasn’t helped us ID him thus far. Thanks to the corner store.

Jean Bails for the pic, of which Doug writes: “[The ‘Nov. I read everything! I read Herbie… you know, the fat guy who wore a toilet plunger on his head. To make a long story short, there came a point when I was twelve or thirteen and decided that

1964’ date] on the border makes me 16. Which means the Beatles and Ed Sullivan took months longer than I remember to work their radical transformation of me.

Must’ve begun minutes after this photo was taken, however, because it took me three months to lose 70 pounds, and 1965 was my senior year in high school (graduated in January ’66, having started school a halfyear early back when that was still possible), and I know I was fully transformed for my senior year.”

I got this call out of the blue—“Is this Douglas Moench?” I go, “Yeah.” “My name is Don Glut, and Saturday I’m showing all fifteen chapters of The Adventures of Captain Marvel serial in my basement.

And if you’ll pitch in a dollar, my mother will make popcorn! There’s six other people coming, and they’re helping to pay for the rental of the serial!”

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

5

time. Later people called us hippies, but I never thought of myself as a hippie. I was a long-haired guy who loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and what have you.

I’d begun drifting away from comics again but was still reading them. I’d begun spending more of my money on records and chasing girls.

However, Don’s news renewed my interest in comics once again. I sat down and wrote five stories—one a day, Monday through Friday.

I put them all together in an envelope and sent them blind to Warren Publications. Then I forgot about the whole thing. I went back to my long-hair lifestyle, where I was having a great time in Chicago, except when idiots would want to pick a fight. [laughs] But, other than that… a great time!

Warren Pieces (Clockwise from above left:) Three of Moench’s earliest-published stories for Warren Publishing, which probably includes some of the five tales he sold the company on initial contact: Eerie #29 (Sept. 1970)—art by Jack Sparling.

Eerie #30 (Oct. 1970)—art by Carlos Garzon.

Creepy #37 (Jan. 1971). The art for this one is credited to “Don Brown,” which may be a pseudonym; that artist has only a couple of credits, both in black-&white horror comics of this period. Note the writing credit for “Douglass Moench.” Thanks to Gene Reed. [TM & © New Comic Company, LLC.]

This was when you had to rent the actual film reels and, I guess, a projector to see a movie at home. I said “OK.” I’d never seen The Adventures of Captain Marvel serial and I’d always wanted to. So I rode over to his house on my bike. Turned out that he was three years older than me or so. Enough to seem like a real pal but almost like an older brother as well.

I remember he was old enough to drive at one point, and he called me up and said, “I’m going to pick you up in my mother’s car and we’re going to see this wonderful movie called Dr. No! It’s going to be amazing!” He was right. It was.

He called me one day and told me that he’d sold a story to Warren Publishing, who published horror magazines—black-&white ones—called Creepy and Eerie. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding!” He goes, “No, no, no! They actually paid me and everything, and it’s going to be published.” I thought that was crazy.

One of the things we did was sit around and read comics when the new batches came out and then, just for the hell of it, write little stories and show them to each other. Don was putting out a fanzine—a great fanzine—called Shazam! He was writing articles for that. So when he told me that he’d sold a story to Warren [chuckles]… well, I was so cocky at the time that I thought that, if Don could do it, then I could do it. I thought my writing was so much better. [much laughter] Mind you, the Beatles had changed everything at that time. I was by now this long-haired… we called ourselves “heads”… there were very few of us in Chicago at the

I get the mail one day and there’s an envelope from Warren Publications. All that’s inside of it is a check. I go “Wow!” It was a check for $125, and this was in 1968. I was over the moon. That

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

was a lot of money in 1968! I thought, “They bought one of my stories! I wonder if they’ve read the other four!” Then I opened the check stub at the bottom and it listed all five stories! They only paid $25 bucks apiece! Crap! But then I thought, “Wait a minute. It just took me a few hours to write each one. $25 bucks a day was huge money in 1968! At least for the way I was living. My rent was only $80 a month.

“Coming Down The Hall Toward Me Was Roger Ebert…”

RA: You know, comics used to run that ad that read “Earn $60 a week!”

That would be base pay for a starting job. You could live, just starting out, or with a roommate maybe, and be self-sufficient on $240 a month.”

MOENCH: There you go! I figured if I could write a story a day and sell it, you could live the way I was living—and I wasn’t living at poverty level—it was lower middle-class. If you were on your own, or with a girlfriend, which I was at the time, you could do fine on $125 a week. I could actually buy porterhouse steaks and not have to think twice about it. It was amazing! So I thought I should write some more and I did. Warren kept buying them.

Then I got a job at the Chicago Sun-Times. This job gets misrepresented all the time. I was never, ever a reporter there. Never went out and covered any news story. I was just the flunky who was in what they called the communications room.

You saw my job in the movies all the time. I was in a room with the AP and UPI teletype machines, the wire machines, which were clacking away. At this time the Chicago SunTimes and the Chicago Daily News were in the same building. They shared the communicaRoger Ebert tions room. So there were twins of the in the days when he was “merely” a print reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, rather than machines on each side a celebrated TV film reviewer—plus a of the room, with specimen of the type of black-&-white horror windows where you set comics stories about which he’d written a the new stuff out on story for the newspaper, this one from both sides. I was hired Warren’s Eerie #39 (Feb. 1972), with art by for the graveyard shift, Dave Cockrum. Thanks to Nick Caputo for the which was 1:00 in the scan. [TM & © New Comic Company, LLC.] morning until 9:00 in the morning. I would check all the machines at 1:00 and make sure they had plenty of rolls of paper—enough to last until morning. If they didn’t, I’d put in a new roll. Then I could sit down and not do a thing until 8:30 in the morning. From roughly 1:15 in the morning until 8:30 I was getting paid hourly—and it was pretty good pay—to do pretty much nothing. So I sat there and wrote comic book stories for Warren. I was getting paid by the hour by the paper and Dave Cockrum getting paid by Warren, who were buying a lot Photo of the future of my stories, and that’s how I could afford X-Men artist found porterhouse steaks. on the Internet.

Eventually, at the end of one shift, the new edition of the Chicago Sun-Times came up from the print room, which was on the ground floor of the building. There was an article in it by Roger Ebert, who was the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. The article was about this phenomenon—the new black-&-white horror comics! So I’m sitting there with my coffee, waiting until it was time for me to clock out and get on the subway, reading this article. When I got to the end of it, I put it down and left the communications room, and coming down the hall towards me was Roger Ebert. I’d seen him around but I’d never spoken to this guy. But for some reason I stopped him as he was getting ready to pass me and I said, “Hey, you know that article on the black-&-white horror comics you wrote?” He said, “Yessss?” I said, “It’s full of s***!” He goes, “What?!? Who are you?” [laughs] I told him I was the guy who wrote those black-&-white horror comics.

He didn’t believe me at first. It took a long time, maybe three full minutes, before he was convinced that I really was who I claimed to be. Then he said, “Come with me,” and he took me to the back where Midwest Magazine was done. Midwest was the Chicago Sun-Times‘ Sunday supplement. Ebert introduced me to the editor, a guy named Richard Takeuchi, who actually knew Will Eisner and loved his work. The Sun-Times had included the 16page The Spirit section in their Sunday edition during the 1940s and 1950s. He thought The Spirit was different from other comics, in that it was sophisticated. Which was absolutely right!

So I talked to this editor for five or ten minutes, and then he said that he wanted me to write an article on what it’s like to write

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

these horror comics. So I did. Now, I was friends with another guy in Chicago by the name of Russ Heath. Great guy. Beautiful artist.

He was stuck in Chicago because Hugh Hefner had the Playboy Mansion in Chicago at the time. Hefner had hired Harvey Kurtzman to do “Little Annie Fanny,” a colored comic strip that appeared in Playboy. So Kurtzman and Will Elder and Russ Heath had a meeting at the Playboy Mansion to work through a deadline on “Little Annie Fanny.” When Harvey Kurtzman went back to New York, Russ just stayed in the Playboy mansion! He was taking steam baths every day with Mort Sahl and Shel Silverstein! It took months before Hefner asked who that guy was and why he was staying there. [laughs] Truth was, Russ didn’t have any money to get back to New York, so he stayed in Chicago. He’d met some girls, I guess, some Playboy Bunnies.

So I became friends with Russ. We were a very odd couple. He was in his forties, very straight. I was this long-haired twentysomething guy, but we were, and still are, friends.

So I thought I could get Russ Heath to do some work for the Chicago Sun-Times/Midwest Magazine thing. So I did, and the editor wanted a full page thing, so I wrote it that way. The magazine was an over-sized magazine, better even than Warren’s black-&-white titles. So getting a full page comic strip there was a big deal. Russ water-colored it by hand. It was beautiful! Anyway, they loved the article. After the article came out, Roger Ebert claimed he discovered me and wanted a finder’s fee! He never got it. [laughs] He was a good guy, though, Ebert was. He was very in tune with my taste in movies.

I got paid $500 for the article, which was a fortune. It only took maybe four hours to write! Then Takeuchi called me and said the article was all well and good, but he sensed that maybe I could write something for him that he was having a hard time getting from his other writers. He wanted an article that featured a different kind of writing—not normal, not stiff. I asked if he was taking about stream-of-consciousness or something like that. He said, “Well, maybe.” I told him that I thought I could do that.

7

Being on the graveyard shift, I thought I could write an article on the violence on the Chicago “L” train and subway that I’d been seeing almost every night while riding to work. I used the streamof-consciousness technique. I don’t remember exactly who was doing something similar that I was reading at the time—perhaps Harlan Ellison in science-fiction and maybe someone else in more literary journals or whatnot—I can’t remember.

“It Was Marv Wolfman, Who Was Standing Next To Roy” RA: Maybe William Burroughs?

MOENCH: Well, Burroughs was really extreme. I did mine so you could actually follow it. It still made perfect sense. They were over the moon over that article. The day after that article came out… it was a Sunday magazine, so this would have been a Monday… I was walking through the huge Sun-Times newsroom with some stuff for someone near the back when Bob Greene, who became a pretty famous journalist and columnist, stood up and said something to the effect of “Good job” to me. He must have talked to Roger Ebert. All of a sudden people were going, “Who’s that?

Why’s Greene talking to the hippie kid from the communications room?” Then Bob Greene told them that I was the writer on the violence on the subway article. They couldn’t believe it. I swear to God, eventually everyone in the city room stood up and gave me a standing ovation! It was unreal! The article was nominated for a Chicago Newspaper Guild Award. I never found out if I won, because later that same week, the phone rang and it was Roy Thomas calling from New York!

I did four articles, I think, in all for Midwest Magazine. One was on stop-motion animation. I forget what they all were. But Roy’s call came the same week as the violence in the subway article appeared—just a few days later, and literally the day after I received a contract for a coffee table book from A.F. Barnes, a publisher. I’d sent them the proposal to do this gigantic encyclopedia on horror novels, movies, comic books, radio, just everything on horror. They sent me a contract with a lousy advance—I think a thousand bucks or something—but with the standard royalty thing. I was all set to sign the contract and send it back, knowing this book would be a tremendous undertaking.

Russ Heath befriended Doug Moench during the time Heath was staying at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago.

Seen at left is a “Little Annie Fanny” page from an unidentified issue of Playboy, reputedly drawn by the tag team of Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, & Heath. Kurtzman, of course, wrote the story. The photo of Heath is from the 1976 New York Comic Art Convention program book, courtesy of the website formerly known as Great American Comic Book Stories. [Art TM & © Playboy Enterprises or successors in interest.]

Then the phone rang and it was Roy Thomas— well, actually it was Marv Wolfman, who was standing next to Roy. He said, “Doug, this is Marv.”

I knew Marv Wolfman because he’d been an editor at Warren for a while, a year maybe. I went through five or six editors at Warren. They all kept buying my stuff, luckily. Marv was the only one ever who sent me a letter discussing the stories. Everybody else either bought them or sent them back. If they sent them back, I sent those on to Skywald and Skywald bought them. I was actually selling everything I wrote.

Anyway, Marv told me he was at Marvel now and that he was in Roy Thomas’ office and that Roy would like to speak to me about coming to New York and working for Marvel. Well, holy God! I’d just met this new girl and that relationship was going hot and heavy. I had this contract in hand and I was writing all these articles for Midwest Magazine at 500 bucks a shot. People think they’re good. So

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

to have to do—come back after the two weeks and close up my apartment, rent a truck to drive my furniture to New York, all kinds of stuff. He just said, “Okay, but don’t turn it down, whatever you do.”

That’s how I started working for Marvel. After the two weeks, I went back to Chicago and I was worrying how I was going to tell this girl, but she made it real easy for me. She said, “We just met each other but how about I come with you and live with you in New York. If it works out, I’ll stay with you, and if it doesn’t then I’ll just come back to Chicago.” I thought, “Cool, if you’re up for that, I’m up for it.” We’ve now been married 42 years.

RA: Congratulations!

Marv Wolfman & Roy Thomas in the mid-1970s. Marv’s photo is from the 1975 Marvel Con program book, Roy’s from a 1970s issue of FOOM, Marvel’s self-published fan-mag; thanks to Cory Sedlmeier for the latter. Ye A/E Editor recalls Marv and himself, keenly aware that Marvel had quick need of a prolific writer, as both coming up with Doug’s name independently at virtually the same time; they quickly got together and made the phone call Doug remembers.

what do I do? Roy gets on the phone and tells me that I’d have to move to New York because they want me to be an editor as well as a writer.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave Chicago. I don’t think Roy could believe I was hesitating. [laughs] I was cocky, very cocky, and I said, “Well, why don’t I come to New York for two weeks and try you out.” Instead of them trying me out, I was going to try Marvel out.

I didn’t mean it that way, though. I just meant to see if I could be happy living in New York. That’s what I was talking about. Of course, I wanted to work for Marvel. At that time they were doing the best stuff. Not that DC wasn’t doing anything good, because they were, but, in general, Marvel was where I wanted to be.

Roy actually said all right to that. They paid for the plane ticket. That night I took my new girlfriend over to Russ Heath’s place and told him about this. Boy, did he try to rip me a new one! He said, “You gotta go!

Are you crazy? You can’t even think twice about this! This is your big chance! The one-in-a-lifetime chance that people get. You can’t even think about not doing it!” I told him I was going, but only for two weeks to see if I liked it or not. He said, “No, no, you gotta go for it!” I started telling him all the things I was going

MOENCH: There you go. That’s how it started. Now, I’d actually sold some stuff to DC before that call from Marvel. Just sending spec scripts through the mail. Maybe five or six little creepy stories for House of Mystery or House of Secrets, as well as a couple of antiwar war stories for Archie Goodwin at whatever war comics he was doing at the time. One of my stories was illustrated by Ken Barr and it was just beautiful.

“I Thought I Had Just Quit Warren” RA: Before we get too much further, you mentioned Skywald a bit earlier.

How did you get your contact with them?

MOENCH: Skywald? Actually, Sol Brodsky called me out of the blue. This was actually long before I got any kind of call from Warren. It seemed like I’d been doing stories forever for Warren,

Doug Moench Is In The House!

The splash pages of two stories Moench sold to DC Comics before he got the call from Marvel: (Left:) House of Mystery #216 (Aug. 1973); art by Abe Ocampo.

Thanks to Jim Ludwig.

(Right:) House of Secrets #113 (Nov. 1973); art by Nick Cardy & Mike Sekowsky. Thanks to Jim Kealy & Jim Ludwig.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

9

Sol Brodsky As editor & co-publisher of Skywald Comics, he purchased several stories written by Doug Moench—though Brodsky may well have been back at Marvel by the time they came out! Photo from 1975 Marvel Con program book.

(Left:) From Psycho #5 (Nov. 1971); art by Doug Wildey.

(Right:) From Psycho #6 (May 1972); art by Pablo Marcos. [Both pages TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

but it may have only been one or two years. It seemed like ten years. Back then, so much was happening. The times were jam-packed, as they say. But I’d never had any kind of contact with Warren outside of sending the stories in and getting the checks. Or getting stuff returned with notes saying, “You’re going to have seven stories in the next issue as it is. We can’t possibly take any more.”

They would send some back without even reading them. I thought that was unfair.

So the phone rang and it was Sol Brodsky—I think he wanted me to write for this new magazine called Hell-Rider, a motorcycle magazine of some kind.

RA: Yeah, Gary Friedrich wrote the title character.

MOENCH: I said, “You know, I really don’t have the time for that now. I’m working at the Chicago Sun-Times, writing articles.” I’d started writing prose fiction stories for men’s magazines—Man to Man, Swingle, Knight, Dude—and they were buying every story I was sending to them as well. They were paying $400 a story.

Again, for the same three or four hours it was taking me to write the comic scripts. How could I write Hell-Rider when I could make so much more money on this other stuff? My time was so filled up and I really wanted to spend time with girls, too! It was just impossible. I wasn’t getting any sleep at the time. So I said I could send

him some horror stories for his Nightmare and Psycho black-&-white horror magazines. He said OK to that, and that’s how I started with Skywald.

RA: How did Warren get hold of the horror story you did for the Chicago Sun-Times?

Warren reprinted the story, in black-&-white naturally, along with your accompanying article.

Doug Wildey

Pablo Marcos

With thanks to the Jonny Quest Cartoon History website.

A fairly recent photo of the artist; courtesy of PM.

MOENCH: That was a nightmare! By then, I was communicating with whoever the editor was, probably John Cochran. Every once in a while he would communicate with me on the phone. I told him I was writing this article about what it was like to write stories for Creepy, Vampirella, Eerie, and whatnot. He told Jim Warren. I got a call from Jim Warren and he wanted a hundred copies of this article. I don’t know if he wanted to reprint it at that point, but

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

not like they were wretched stories. The editors admitted that they just had too many with my name on them.

RA: To be honest, I never saw any difference in quality for the stories you wrote for either Warren or Skywald.

MOENCH: No, because there wasn’t any! I never knew where my stories were going to end up. I didn’t know which Warren magazine they were going to appear in, let alone what Skywald book. They were just written as my latest brainstorm and there James Warren you go. So Warren got all pissed off and he Original publisher of didn’t really have any answer for it. He kept the Warren Publishing arguing with me, and after the phone call material. ended without the matter resolved, Warren sent me this letter. I sent him a letter back, again explaining my viewpoint.

Then he sent me another letter, and I thought this letter was really beyond the pale, just crazy. So my next letter back to him read simply, “Dear Jim. Okay.

F*** you!” and I signed my name to it. That was the whole letter.

Tom Sutton

From Eerie, Dearie!

Splash page of a story scripted by Moench and drawn by Tom Sutton for Warren Publishing’s Eerie #36 (Nov. 1971). Thanks to Jim Kealy.

[TM & © New Comic Company, LLC.]

that’s what it turned into.

So my Midwest Magazine editor Richard Takeurchi asked me to tell him about this Jim Warren guy. He asked me what the deal was with Warren. Warren wanted, at one point, to sue the Chicago SunTimes. I think it started amiably, with Warren getting his hundred copies and being able to mention it in Creepy or where ever it showed up, but then he got nasty and lawyers were saying that the Sun-Times owed him money and if they didn’t pay up he was going to sue them. I had some of my own problems with Warren.

When I started selling stories to Skywald, he got kind of pissed off.

RA: Yeah, he had this edict, started when Web of Horror came out in 1969, but he continued it when Skywald appeared, that if you worked for him you couldn’t work for his direct competitors on the newsstands.

MOENCH: That’s right! I explained to him that if he wanted me to be exclusive to him, then he had to be exclusive to me. He couldn’t buy stories from any other writer. If I can’t sell all of my stories to you, then you can’t buy stories from any other writer. He had to at least buy everything that I wrote. If you want everything I write to go to you, then you have to take everything I write! If you don’t want it, of course I’m going to send it somewhere else. His editors were sending me back stories without even reading them! So it’s

This Just In? Although Doug mostly stopped sending comics scripts to Warren Publishing in mid-1973, illustrated versions of his yarns continued to come out for several years—as witness this tale drawn by Leopold Sanchez, from a color section in Eerie #72 (Feb. 1976). Thanks to Nick Caputo. [TM & © New Comic Company, LLC.]

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

I thought I had just quit Warren. It was a good thing I had all those non-comic gigs to fall back on. I figured I was still OK. Then, two days later, at midnight, my doorbell rings. This was back when the post office really meant it when you sent a letter Special Delivery. Special Delivery meant that as soon as a Special Delivery letter got to the post office, there was a guy who was immediately sent to deliver that letter right away, up through midnight. So the doorbell rings and it’s Special Delivery from Warren Publications.

It was an enormous box. If you’ve seen the Warren books, there were a lot of ad pages featuring stuff by the Warren-owned Captain Company. The Captain Company ads would sell back issues, horror paperbacks, puzzles, posters of Vampirella, creepy toys, board games, just anything they could find that had something to do with horror. The box was filled with this crap!

There was a little note along with the box, telling me how valuable I was as their top writer. Something like that. And the note was signed by Jim Warren.

If I’d known that the magic key was to say “F*** you” to Jim Warren and then you got anything you wanted from him, well, WOW! Plus I was being given a raise. Instead of $25 dollars a story—well, actually I’d been making $35 dollars a story from them for a while. It was now $20 a page or some ungodly number. It was a crazy raise! I couldn’t believe it! It was nuts! So I just kept working for him.

So back to Takeuchi—I told him that I didn’t see how Warren could sue Midwest Magazine. Takeuchi said, “Well, no, he can’t. All we did was reprint a few of the panels from one of the stories as examples and we have permission from him to do that! And now he wants to sue us!” I told him not to worry about it, but I never did find out how it was resolved.

11

have been when Louise Jones was editor.

MOENCH: I did go back to Warren for a brief time when Louise was editor there. Paul Gulacy and I did a serial called “Blood on Black Satin.“ Paul did beautiful artwork on that story.

RA: That was a great story. It was like reading an illustrated screenplay for a Hammer Films horror movie.

MOENCH: That’s what Paul asked me to do.

RA: Then it worked out perfectly, because when I first read it I thought, “Geez, this is like a Christopher Lee movie!” It kind of reminded me of The Wicker Man. There was one thing I wanted to ask about the Warren stories you did, and that was the circumstances or controversy behind “The Spook,” a serial character that appeared in Eerie. I think Bill DuBay either created or handed off an African-American character to you that was called “The Spook.”

MOENCH: Yeah, that one. Whoo boy. DuBay asked me to do a series for Eerie. In fact, I did three series for DuBay—there was one called “Schreck,” which means terror in German [illustrated by Vicente Alcazar] and another called “Freaks” [illustrated by Leopold Sanchez], I think. But, “The Spook”—you probably won’t believe this—but DuBay pulled a whammie on me with that one. I had no idea that “Spook” had any racial connotation whatsoever.

The first time I met Jim Warren in person—I was in New York on a business matter—this was long before I moved there—and Warren said I had to come up to his office and visit him. I went up and John Cochran told me I had to wait until I could meet the old man, or whatever the name they were using for Warren, so I said I could wait for fifteen minutes because I’ve got to go after that—I think I had a meeting with Joe Orlando and I don’t remember who-all else. Warren made me wait the full fifteen minutes and then the door bangs open and he comes out walking out of his office very fast—very, very fast. He comes right out to me and I stand up to shake his hand. Instead of shaking my hand he stopped right in front of me and says, “Good to meet you, Doug Moench. You’re our very best writer and I want to punch you in the mouth.”

I said, “Well, I wouldn’t advise that.” Something like that. It just took me aback. I don’t really remember the ending of that meeting, except I was thinking, “There’s something wrong with this guy.” [chuckles] I was still working for him, though. I worked for Warren all the way up to the time I went to work for Marvel. I had sold so many stories to him that they continued appearing way after I started at Marvel. I had stories at Warren up to early 1975, although I’d stopped doing any stories for them after mid-1973. I think Warren went out of business [in 1982] with some of my stories still unpublished. They bought so many. Bill DuBay once told me it would take them fifteen years to commission all of my stories because there were so many in the inventory drawer. I never kept track, but I’m pretty sure not all of them saw print.

“I Had No Idea That ‘Spook’ Had Any Racial Connotation Whatsoever” RA: There was a Jim Warren-ordered freeze on buying new stories in late 1979 because they had so many inventory stories at the time. This would

Blood On Black Backgrounds Paul Gulacy-drawn splash page for Eerie #110 (April 1980)—the second of the three parts of “Blood on Black Satin” done when Moench returned to do a bit of scripting for Warren editor Louise Jones. Thanks to Jim Kealy.

[TM & © New Comic Company, LLC.]

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

MOENCH: There were a lot of other terms in Chicago that I knew! But maybe nobody in Chicago knew “spook” that way.

Maybe I wasn’t as naïve as I sometimes think.

RA: DuBay seemed to land on both sides of in a recent pic found on at a New York City the racial issue. He the Internet. comics convention, wrote an awardearly 1970s. Thanks to winning anti-racist Mike Mikulovsky. story, a really excellent story called “Freedom’s Just Another Word,” that I quite liked. It was as strong and good a story as you could ask for. He was one of the few writers of that time period who routinely used black men as lead characters in stories and series, but he also wrote a black character for a serial in the Warren book 1994 called “Spearchucker Spade.”

Vicente Alcazar

Neal Adams

MOENCH: Wow! I mean…wow! When he asked me to do “The Spook,” it was another of those rare phone call things. He was

A “Schreck” In The Night Splash page of the first “Schreck” story written by Moench, for Eerie #53 (Jan. 1974). Art by Vicente Alcazar & Neal Adams. And yes, it’s “Vicente,” not “Vincente” as in the original credits. Thanks to Nick Caputo.

[TM & © New Comic Company, LLC.]

People have told me DuBay had this warped sense of humor. So he stipulated to me that this first serial should deal with voodoo, with a black character, and that a great name for a horror character would be The Spook. The other two characters were completely me, although DuBay may have wanted to call the Freaks “The Circus Freaks.”

And “The Spook” was all mine except for DuBay’s suggestions on the voodoo and the character’s name. Only later did I find out that ‘spook” was a bad term. I felt like an idiot. I grew up in Chicago, went to what I think was, at the time, the only integrated high school in the whole city. Chicago was the most segregated city I’ve ever lived in, and the only reason the high school I went to was integrated was that it was a special high school that you had to take an entrance exam to get in. It offered all kinds of special classes, like college-entrance classes and auto shop with actual cars you could take apart and put back together. Drafting and metal shop. All the things that regular high school didn’t have. It was designed to allow you to earn a good living with just a high school diploma. So kids from all over the city went there. I was one of the few white guys in Chicago who had friends who were black, and I never heard the word “spook” used in a derogatory way.

RA: A lot of times racist terms are regional racist terms. They’re used in one section of the country but often unheard of in another part.

Off To The Eerie Canal The final page of the second Moench-Sanchez “Spook” story (of two that appeared in Eerie #58). Thanks to Jim Kealy.

[TM & © New Comic Company, LLC.]

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

13

“Spook” When “Spooken” To (Above & right:) The first two “Spook” stories appeared in Eerie #57 & #58 (June & July 1974), with art by Esteban Maroto & Leopold Sanchez, respectively. Thanks to Jim Kealy & Mark Muller. [TM & © New Comic Company, LLC.]

Bill Dubay (Left:) Warren’s long-time editor, who, for reasons known only to himself, assigned Doug Moench to write the “Spook” series. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert & Jon B. Cooke.

nothing but non-racist on the phone. “It’s about time Warren had a black lead character. We want to do right by this character and make sure he’s heroic.

We’ll call him The Spook.” In retrospect I can see that he was probably laughing at me inside. I fell for it. There was no indication that he wanted me to do this series and call it, oh, “Cottonpicker” or something like that. No indication whatsoever. I had no inkling that he had anything but honorable motives.

Esteban Maroto

RA: The possibility exists that he may not have realized it was racially insensitive, either. I’ll admit that notion is weakened quite a bit by the stories that he deliberately wrote for 1984, though.

MOENCH: Oh, he must have! It made sense to me to use “Spook” as a name for the character because the guy was dead and had come back to life.

RA: He actually was a spook or a ghost.

Leopold Sanchez

MOENCH: Yes! I may have actually said let’s call him “The Ghost,” but that had been used a lot—Ghost Rider, etc., so it wouldn’t have been unique enough. DuBay wanted a catchier name. I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember that there was no hint of anything untoward from him and… I fell for it.

RA: So how did you find out the racial connotation?

MOENCH: Years later, I heard someone call a black guy a spook. I asked him what he was talking about. He said black guys are spooks. I asked if that was a racial term or something. He replied it’s not real bad, about the same as spade…

RA: Oh, God… MOENCH: …but you don’t really mean anything bad by that,

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

RA: …”Webtread’s Powercut” and “Knucklebones to Fever Twitch,” all in 1974.

Then the character continued for several more issues under another writer.

Oh, one other tidbit that I wanted to ask from the same time period. The Grand Comics Database lists a story from you, although it’s listed as a prose story, called “How I Beat the Draft,” that appeared in Weird Trips Magazine #1 (March 1974).

Jim Mooney

MOENCH: No, that wasn’t a comic script.

It was a prose article. Denis Kitchen, of Kitchen Sink Comics, started out in underground comix. He came up with the idea of an underground magazine that was not comix but had actual stories in it. I’d become friends with another Chicago guy named Jay Lynch, who did “Nard n’ Pat” for Bijou Funnies. Jay called me and told me that Kitchen was doing this magazine and reminded me of a story I’d told him on how I’d had to go for my physical at the draft board. He said that anecdote would be a perfect little article for Kitchen’s magazine, so I wrote it up and sold it to Kitchen.

RA: You know Jay Lynch’s wife wrote some stories for Skywald, also?

MOENCH: Did she? I knew her. She was a lawyer and was welleducated.

“Fill Out A Voucher With Story Titles…”

RA: Now, at Marvel, your first couple of credits were text articles for Dracula Lives!

Who You Gonna Call? Ghost Rider!

Doug reports that his first script for a color Marvel comic was for Ghost Rider #5 (April 1974), dialoging a story plotted by Marv Wolfman. Art by Jim Mooney & Sal Trapani. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

either. Then I thought of the series. Well, oh my God! Someone had to educate me… to tell me “spook” had two very different meanings.

RA: I always assumed that you found out while writing the series, because you only wrote the first two or three and then another writer took over from you.

MOENCH: I didn’t even know that. I was gone from Warren when the first story went into print. Once I moved to New York, I stopped reading the Warren things. I just didn’t have the time to do that.

RA: Esteban Maroto drew the first story. You wrote the first two or three stories, then another writer continued it for a bit.

MOENCH: Those weren’t the first things I wrote. It’s a lot quicker to typeset something than to get something drawn and lettered. I was hired for the black-&-white magazines because I’d been writing the stuff for Warren’s black-&-white titles. That’s why Marv Wolfman thought of me when Roy Thomas said they needed another writer for all those new black-&-white horror books they were putting out. Marv said he had the perfect guy—he was fast and good and blah, blah, blah. He told Roy who it was and Roy said he’d read some of my stuff and he thought it was good so they gave me a call. Roy did tell me that if I worked out on the black-&-white stuff that they would probably want me to do color comics. They were promising me a lot of work, so I said OK. I got my first color work during the two-week tryout period. It was an issue of Ghost Rider, the flaming-skull guy. I scripted it over someone else’s plot [NOTE: Marv Wolfman’s]. That was fun. At the end of the two weeks, I went to Roy and said I guessed I’d continue with this. He asked me what I needed to make that happen and I told him I had to go back to Chicago, rent a truck, and fill it with my furniture. I’ll need money for a security deposit on an apartment in Manhattan and the first month’s rent.

RA: I’ve got three “Spook” stories credited to you—“Stridespider Sponge-Rot”…

He said, “How much will that be?” I said I’d have to figure it out. He said, “I’ll tell you what to do. You figure it all out. Here’s a stack of vouchers. Fill out a stack of vouchers with story titles— 7-page story, a 9-page story. Do as many pages as you need to do this. We’ll pay you for these made-up titles, but when you get back here, you’re gonna have to eventually write all these stories with the titles you made up.” I said “OK.” So I made up bunch of goofy titles and fake page numbers and eventually wrote every single one of them.

MOENCH: Ye Gods! [laughs]

RA: Do you remember which of your stories those were?

MOENCH: I thought I wrote five stories, but maybe it was only three. It’s been a long time. I’m pretty sure they published all the serial episodes that I wrote for them, including “Schreck” and “The Freaks.” Pretty sure.

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

15

MOENCH: That one was because I was listening to a song by the band Traffic. I don’t exactly remember the original—“The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” maybe?

I don’t know. Now that I’ve corrupted the title I can’t remember the original! But I loved Traffic and their lead singer Steve Winwood. I would play that album over and over while I was writing these stories.

I wrote a story for Master of Kung Fu about a heavyweight champion named Enrique Badía Midnight Carter. The name of the story Romero was “Carter’s Super Midnight” [Master of Kung Fu #96 (Jan. 1981)], and the title described how he won the bout at midnight and became the new champion. But the title came about because I picked up the carbon paper—I was still using carbon paper for the second copy back then—and I noticed the carbon paper’s brand name was actually called “Carter’s Super Midnight,” so I used that as the title for that story. I would pick up on stuff like that and use them for titles, not even knowing sometimes where the words came from. I was using that title, thinking it probably came from a song, and then realized I’d gotten it from the carbon paper!

RA: After writing a fairly large number of stand-alone stories for the black-&-white magazines, you did gradually move into the color books.

MOENCH: Like I said, during that initial two-week tryout, I did

A Zombie By Any Other Name…

One of the story-titles Doug made up on the spot so that Roy Thomas would have an excuse to okay a bunch of advance vouchers for him was “Jilimbi’s World,” which popped up some months later in Tales of the Zombie #3 (Jan. 1974). Art by Enrique Badía (aka Enrique Badía Romero), noted artist of Axa and Modesty Blaise. Thanks to Mark Muller. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

MOENCH: I think one was called “Jilimbi’s Word’ [Tales of the Zombie #3 (Jan. 1974)]. Probably “Nightfilth Rising”…

RA: That one sounds like a Skywald title, although it appeared in a Marvel book [Tales of the Zombie #4 (Mar. 1975)].

MOENCH: Again, I never earmarked anything specifically for Skywald. I went through a phase where I was trying to do really weird titles. Those “Spook” titles were a part of that. I don’t like most of the titles, but I did like one called “The Slipped Mickey Click Flip” [Creepy #54 (July 1973)].

RA: That was a great story, though, too.

Beautiful Richard Corben art.

MOENCH: Most of them were good stories, but they had ridiculous, outrageous titles!

RA: Perhaps, but in the case of “The Slipped Mickey Click Flip” the outrageous title accurately fit the story. You had another good Corben story called “The Low Spark of High Heeled Noise.”

A Divine “Spark” Rich Corben

Splash page of the full-color, long-titled Doug Moench/Rich Corben story from Creepy #57 (Nov. 1973). Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © New Comic Company, LLC.]

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

that needed to be fixed. Otherwise, you had to send the page to the bullpen and that was a pain in the ass because it could take forever to get the page finalized.

So I was always sitting there making sure there’s the right number of stripes on Captain America’s shield or whatnot. But I was talking about my first proofing effort, which was Spider-Man. I’m so lost in the minutiae that I get to the end of the story and I’m thinking, “Wow! What the hell happened to Gerry Conway? That sucked!” [laughs] I just hated it! The process of proofreading something just kills the flavor of a story. I realized that I had no idea of whether it sucked or not. I couldn’t remember what happened on page 1 by the time I got to page 17! Every little letter was perfect, but I had no idea what the story was about.

Marvel hired me to do this for eight hours a day—sometimes it was nine hours. Then I’d go home to my new girlfriend and I’d have to sit at home and write! Because Marvel was also expecting me to write all these stories! I’d be up to two or three in the morning. I’d get a couple hours of sleep, then head to Marvel to do my proofreading. I think I had the shortest tenure on proofreading at Marvel ever. After two or maybe three months Roy called me into his office. I thought to myself I must not be working out or whatever. He was so serious! So Roy looks at me and says, “We’re going to need more writing from you.” I go, “What! You’ve got to be kidding. I’m already writing way more than any other writer here, plus I’m working in the office full-time! Forty hours a week!”

Roy goes, “Yeah, I know.” I told Roy that I was barely sleeping as it was, and if he wanted any more writing from me, then I was going to have to stay home. Roy goes, “I was afraid you were going to say that. OK, stay long enough to train your replacement and then stay home and do more writing.”

What About Its Sequel—“Carter’s Little Liver Pills”?

It’s years outside A/E’s usual franchise era, but since Doug related the story behind the title “Carter’s Super Midnight,” we figured we might as well print the tale’s splash, from Master of Kung Fu #96 (Jan. 1981). Art by Mike Zeck & Gene Day, whose photos will be seen a few pages from now. Thanks to Jim Kealy & Leonardo de Sá. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

my first work on the color books, but it was just the one issue. It was because the regular writer couldn’t do it for whatever reason.

So they gave it to me because I was churning this stuff out.

I was actually hired to be an assistant editor, and at that time an assistant editor was nothing more than a glorified proofreader.

There were two of us—me and Don McGregor, who became one of my best friends.

I hated it. I just hated it. When I was in Chicago, I was reading these comic books and having a great time. My favorite stuff was the Neal Adams-Denny O’Neil Batman stuff and Roy doing The Avengers. Len Wein’s Swamp Thing and, for a lighter break, Gerry Conway’s Spider-Man. Gerry became a friend, too. He lived right around the corner from me in New York. Anyway, I read the stories one right after the other and enjoyed reading them. Now, at Marvel, I had to proofread some of these same books, and the first one I did was Spider-Man by Gerry Conway. So I started proofreading this story and it became that thing where you can’t see the forest for the trees. You get so wrapped up in the minutiae that you can’t enjoy the story! The way Don and I did this was, we had our own white-out and X-Acto-blades. We would actually scrape off where the inker went across the panel border or white it out. We would fix real easy writing errors if there was just one word there

At that point I finally realized that I was going to be doing a lot of color books. Not just the black-&-white stories. I think they had already given me “Man-Wolf,” in Creatures on the Loose, and Master of Kung Fu. Then they offered me Werewolf by Night. I said “C’mon!

You’re already got me doing ‘Man-Wolf.’ Two werewolf books?

Give me a break!” So I dropped the “Man-Wolf” book and took Werewolf by Night, because I liked that book more. Soon I was doing enormous amounts of writing. People didn’t realize it, I think. I was writing the monthly Planet of the Apes black-&-white book, which was 60-some pages every month.

RA: Yeah, there were two or three serials per issue.

MOENCH: Yeah! That wasn’t a 17page title! I was doing the Doc Savage black-&-white, which was another 60-odd-page length. All those little black-&-white stories and some very long ones as well. I remember doing a 30-odd-page “Morbius” story for Vampire Tales.

There were also some long sciencefiction adaptations for Marvel Preview and Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction.

So, as it turned out, I hadn’t had to move to New York after all! Now I was there, though, so, you know… it all worked out.

Don McGregor Marvel writer and friend of Doug Moench—as depicted in a photo spread in Creem magazine for April 1973.

Thanks to Sean Howe. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

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The Boy Who Cried “Werewolf”— Twice!

Over the course of just a few weeks, editor-in-chief Roy Thomas assigned Doug Moench to write both of Marvel’s “werewolf” books. Well, to be fair: George Tuska “Man-Wolf” was actually astronaut From the 1975 Marvel Con John Jameson, transmuted by a lunar Program Book. rock (what else?), and thus not a true werewolf. But RT and publisher Stan Lee (who, Roy seems to recall, was the one who’d decreed there should a feature called “Man-Wolf” in the first place) didn’t think it wise to stress Jameson’s ersatz status to the Comics Code Authority, since technically only werewolves in the so-called “literary tradition” were allowed under its recently altered rules.

The “Man-Wolf” story (one of two DM scripted) is from Creatures on the Loose #30 (July 1974), with pencils by George Tuska—while the first Werewolf by Night issue scripted by Moench (#20, dated Aug. ’74) was penciled by Don Perlin. Both tales were inked by Vince Colletta… and both scans were provided by Barry Pearl. Roy recalls insisting on a title change on the former yarn; Doug’s original title was “Gut-Wrench!” At this late date, however, RT figures he might as well have left well enough alone, since oddball titles were part of his new writer’s stock in trade.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Don Perlin Still feisty as in his Werewolf by Night days, at a recent Ancient City Con in Jacksonville, Florida—photo picked up from the Roboplastic Apocalypse website.

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

Doug Moench from the 1975 Marvel Con program book.

Alex Nino Seeing Things In Black-&-White Moench kept busy on Marvel’s b&w magazines, as with this clockwise threesome: For Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #3 (May 1975), he and Vicente Alcazar adapted Larry’s Niven’s anti-swordand-sorcery tale “Not Long before the End.” For UWSF #6 (Nov. ’75) he and Alex Nino tackled Michael Moorcock’s award-winning short story “Behold the Man!” Marvel garnered a bit of hate mail re the latter, in which a 20th-century psychologist goes back in time to try to learn the “truth” about the historical Jesus—but don’t blame Doug; it was editor Roy’s decision to adapt both the above prose tales. Thanks to Barry Pearl & Gene Reed for these scans.

In Marvel Preview #1 (1975), Moench & Nino beautifully fleshed out a notion of Roy’s for what was intended to be the first of a series inspired by the then-popularity of books claiming that mankind’s ancestors had come to Earth from outer space, in “Man-Gods from beyond the Stars.” [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; the original prose stories on which the UWSF entries are based are © Larry Niven and Michael Moorcock, respectively.]

as a guest at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con.

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

“Englehart’s Giving Up Master Of Kung Fu. Do You Want It?” RA: Can you tell us a little about how you got involved with Master of Kung Fu? Because you were on that book for a long time… you clearly pretty much defined the character.

MOENCH: Yeah. I was on that book for ten years. Over a hundred monthly issues, five giant-sized issues, and lots of stories in the black-&-white The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. It was unbelievable how much kung fu stuff I was writing.

You know, I just got the fabulous news that Marvel has finally worked out the details with the Sax Rohmer estate, and they are going to be reprinting the entirety of Master of Kung Fu in a series of hardcover, or possibly softcover, volumes.

RA: I’m so excited about that! That’s one of the great Marvel books I thought would never get reprinted because of the problems with having Fu Manchu, a non-Marvel character, all the way throughout the series.

MOENCH: I think this was maybe the fifth time Marvel tried to free up the rights. About a year and a half ago, Marvel told me that they were real close to a deal. I was so sky-high! Then the rug got pulled out from that effort. At the last minute the deal just went south. This time they told me, “I know we’ve said this before, but it looks like it’s really going to happen this time.”

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read it. Steve Englehart wrote three or four of the first issues, I don’t really remember….

RA: He wrote the first three color books and the first two black-&-white stories.

MOENCH: I think I got the book because Roy overheard me saying that I liked it. Englehart was going to start some other book, I think a new title, but I have no idea what it was. Something had to give and he, I thought, like an idiot, gave up Master of Kung Fu to do this new book. Still, who am I to say, if he’s having a better time writing everything else? Still, he gave up the book. I really don’t know the reasons why he gave up the book.

But Roy said, “Englehart’s giving up Master of Kung Fu. Do you want it?” I said, “You betcha.” After I did several issues, I thought, “Oh, I bet this is why Englehart gave up the book!” It was the realization that the realities of the stories were a real dead end. You had this pacifist who’s a real good fighter and he never wants to fight but he really has to fight all the time. It boiled down to: every issue, he’d be walking down the street and a bunch of assassins would come out of manholes or off the fire escapes and he’s forced to fight. It’s OK if that happens for a three-issue arc or something like that. It’s what I did for the first batch of stories I wrote, but, in the long run, this was untenable. You couldn’t write a serialized book for very long that way.

RA: I understand the upcoming books are going to be Omnibus volumes.

All the color stories appearing in four volumes. An Omnibus is a big, fat book that collects a lot of stories. The Jack Kirby Thor volumes I have contained between 30 and 40 issues in each book. More than 700 pages per book.

MOENCH: How many pages? Are you kidding me? I was talking to my wife and I thought it would be along the lines of ten hardcovers, especially if they included all the black-&-white stories. The Moon Knight books are fat books, but nothing like that! Still, every single page of my Moon Knight is in print, no matter whether it was color or black-&-white.

RA: I’m hearing four volumes for Master of Kung Fu plus two separate Deadly Hands of Kung Fu books, which will collect the complete black-&-white magazines. The material in the Thor Omnibuses, of course, has been reprinted many times in much smaller trade paperbacks and in the Marvel Masterworks hardcover series as well. Maybe down the road, that will happen with Master of Kung Fu as well.

Paul Gulacy and his wife Nanci, in a light moment at a comics convention. Photo by Keif Simon & Jim Murtagh.

I’d would like to talk about the artists you had on Master of Kung Fu, because you had a series of really great artists on that book.

MOENCH: It was one of the books I wrote that I really liked. I personally would make the point of handing the proofreading of the book to Don McGregor so it wasn’t ruined and I could actually

Changing Horses In Mid-Kick Doug Moench began his tenure on Master of Kung Fu by scripting the latter half of issue #20 (Sept. 1974). Gerry Conway had written the first half.

Thanks to Mark Muller. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

A Couple Of Young Masters Another early Master of Kung Fu splash from the Moench/Gulacy team, in this case #22 (Nov. ’74), inked by Dan Adkins—and juxtaposed with Gulacy’s recent re-creation of a scene from a later issue, #51. Thanks to Shane Foley & Shaun Clancy, respectively. [MoKF #22 page TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Shang-Chi TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

I really liked the tension of a pacifist who has to fight. That’s great, but I needed a better reason for why he has to fight. That need became him sort of working for the British intelligence agency, MI6. This was still during the period when the British government was still denying that MI6 even existed.

RA: They might have been denying it, but Ian Fleming’s James Bond series was making ample use of the unit.

MOENCH: No, they never actually called it MI6 in the James Bond books or movies. It was “Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” The Bond series used it later, when it was officially recognized as a reality.

Anyway, that’s how I finally got a handle on how to continue the character’s battles. Sir Denis Nayland Smith, from the Rohmer books, took Shang-Chi to a clinic where there were a bunch of heroin junkies who were going cold turkey. This was how he convinced Shang-Chi that something had to be done to stop this guy who was smuggling heroin. It was a rocky relationship, but at least there was now a reason for the pacifist hero to be involved in this stuff, instead of peacefully minding his own business and being attacked by various assassins.

RA: It also solved the problem of him always having to philosophize to himself, since he now would have people he could talk to. You gradually

One Giant-Size Kick For Mankind…

As if the lads’ hands weren’t full enough with Master of Kung Fu and Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, for a while there was also Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu (#1, Sept. 1974). Script by Moench; art by Gulacy & Adkins. Thanks to Shane Foley. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

built up a whole group of spies and secret agents that he could work alongside of: Clive Reston, Black Jack Tarr, and Leiko Wu, among others.

Man, just being able to remember all those names from decades ago tells you I really read and liked those books!

MOENCH: Those characters are my buddies.

RA: They were really good characters; and, of course, you had the characters from Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series, as well.

MOENCH: Mostly, Fu Manchu and his daughter. And Denis Nayland Smith and his old buddy Petrie, whom Englehart killed but I brought back. The Rohmer people forced us to bring back Petrie. They had a fit over Marvel killing Petrie, so he didn’t stay dead for long.

Here’s a little story about those characters. I remember calling Paul Gulacy once and asking him, “You know we’ve created Clive Reston and Leiko Wu and Mrs. Haversham (another original character) and whatnot? Well, what do you think about creating a new character? We’re going to put in a lot of attention to detail and characterization. We’ll build him up as a new, important character who will be a major part of the book but, and don’t tell anyone,

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we’ll be doing this solely so that we can kill him off.” Paul asked if I was crazy. I said no, and that the guy’s name was going to be Larner.

So we did introduce the character and spent a fair amount of space building him up into a character that readers cared about. He was a drunk, who was trying to get sober, and he had a troubled history with Reston. Maybe with Leiko as well, I’m not sure. Paul drew him to look just like Marlon Brando, circa 1973. Just when everybody loved this character, it was time to kill him off. By this time, I felt guilty. Who was I to play God? The character, as they will sometimes, had taken on a life of his own. Still, I pulled the trigger. I just made sure that his death would be a really big deal. It seemed to work.

“[Mike Zeck & Gene Day Were] Both Great Guys” RA: This is going past the time period we’re supposed to be stopping at, but can you tell me something about your work with Mike Zeck and Gene Day on the title?

A Slow Larner Two great Moench/Gulacy pages from Master of Kung Fu #49 (Feb. 1977)—depicting the dramatic and long-planned death of Marlon Brando— er, we mean, Larner. See the interview for that character’s startling genesis. Inks by Pablo Marcos. Thanks to Mark Muller & Nick Caputo for the scans.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

MOENCH: Both great guys. Mike, I knew, was going to be a shocking change for readers from Paul’s storytelling style. If you think of Gulacy as an Orson Welles type of storyteller, then Mike Zeck is John Ford.

Just straight ahead, clear storytelling.

Which I love! I like both kinds of storytelling! At the time I really didn’t know if it was going to work out. I actually wrote Mike Zeck Mike Zeck’s first story as a professional.

[NOTE: This is probably not correct, as Zeck had done quite a number of stories for Charlton before his Marvel days, but it’s entirely possible that Doug wrote Zeck’s first Marvel story. —RA.] But it wasn’t my decision to have Mike come on the book as a replacement for Paul.

Their styles were just so different! I loved working with Mike Zeck, but I just wasn’t sure about him on Master of Kung Fu. Still, he wanted to do the book, and it was the editor’s decision.

There was no way I was going to say no, because he was a great artist. I was afraid that the book would just change in character too much. I don’t really know if it did or didn’t, but the combination of the two of us worked somehow.

RA: Well, Mike didn’t directly follow Paul, as there was about a year between the two where Jim Craig was the penciler.

MOENCH: The Canadian? I don’t remember him doing that many issues. He tried to do Gulacy-type storytelling. I don’t think it was

A Zeck Of A Penciler (Above:) Splash page of the Mike Zeck-penciled Master of Kung Fu #59 (Dec. 1977). Inks by John Tartaglione; script by Doug Moench. Thanks to Mark Muller. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Jim Craig with some young fans—and a page of original art from the “3-D Man” feature he and Roy Thomas originated in the mid-’70s.

Canadian Sunrise Splash page of Master of Kung Fu #54 (July 1977) by penciler Jim Craig; inks by Tartaglione; script by Doug Moench. Thanks to Mark Muller.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

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Gene’s death [in 1982] was a real shock. He was only thirty or thirty-one, somewhere in there. So young. He did a tremendous amount of work in the five or six years he was drawing professionally.

Gene Day From the Internet.

RA: That’s true. He must have been glued to his drawing table.

MOENCH: I’ve spoken to his widow and she’s firmly convinced that the amount of work, combined with stress, is what killed him.

There were fights with Marvel editorial going on—but the fact that he had chained himself to the drawing board for 16, 18 hours a day with nothing but coffee and cigarettes to sustain him…. Still, look who’s talking, I’m the same way. [sighs] According to his widow, though, he was totally sedentary. One day they decided to go out and he was walking across the street and just collapsed.

Gene wasn’t even sick, you know! It was a shock because he was so young, but even more so because there was no warning. Just a bolt out of the blue! That was horrible.

He was gearing up to draw Batman when he died. He only drew a cover, which was published, but he was having so many troubles with Jim Shooter at Marvel that he was going to follow me to DC. Then he passed away.

“Deathlok Was [Rich Buckler’s] Baby…”

A New Day—A New Master!

Gene Day’s splash for Master of Kung Fu #100 (May 1981). Day drew the first half of this special issue, Mike Zeck the latter part. Doug, of course, wrote the whole thing. Thanks to Mark Muller. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

natural to him. In addition, there was just no way he could meet a monthly deadline for a full book. I thought he only did three or four issues.

RA: Actually, he did seven or eight issues between #51 and #66.

However, there were numerous fill-in artists, including Mike Zeck for four issues during that sixteen-issue span, as well as a reprint issue of a Moench-Gulacy story. Zeck actually replaced Craig in the middle of #66’s art, which was inked by “Diverse Hands,” a pretty good indication there was a deadline problem with that issue.

MOENCH: Wow! I didn’t think it was that long. He was another nice guy, but it just wasn’t going to work.

RA: I was really pleased when Mike Zeck and Gene Day were put together as the art team. I knew Gene’s work from Star*Reach, and the combo of Zeck and Day was certainly a case of putting two very different art styles together. Zeck was, as you mentioned, John Ford, and Day was a Gothic set designer. All those statues and columns and what have you…

MOENCH: Oh, yeah. Statues everywhere! But it worked beautifully. I liked working with both of those guys. Both, again, completely differently from Paul, but the book worked with Zeck and Day together and, later, with Gene alone. Shang-Chi’s credo was “the rising and advancing of the spirit,” and I figured the changing of the artists and in the style of the book that was demanded by those changes was simply an artistic reflection of that credo.

RA: Well, back to the time period we’re supposed to be talking about.

What can you tell us about “Deathlok”? I recently interviewed Rich Buckler about it, and he was very enthused about that character.

MOENCH: “Deathlok” was his baby, his creation. I think I got involved shortly after I moved to New York, when Rich came up to me and said he wanted to get a book that he’d created started and Roy had told him to come to me. I didn’t even know who he was by sight. I asked who he was, and he told me Rich Buckler.

Well, I knew the name. He was doing “The Black Panther” in Jungle Tales with Don McGregor. I thought he was doing a great job on that.

He told me he wanted to do this new character, and I was startled. I was new enough at Marvel that I didn’t know that we were allowed to create new characters. For some reason, I thought only Stan Lee, or Roy Thomas maybe, could say “Here’s a new character.” Buckler said he didn’t know of any rules like that and that he’d just shown his idea to Roy. Roy said maybe, but that Buckler needed a writer: “Go meet with Doug Moench and we’ll discuss this.” So Buckler invited me to dinner at his apartment in the Bronx. Buckler had done six, or maybe only three, penciled pages of the first “Deathlok” story. Those pages had been done without any writer. But it was, I think, an action scene in a subway station or something, and he really didn’t know what was going to happen next. He said that Deathlok was going to be a cyborg and I said, “Oh, like The Six Million Dollar Man?” He goes “No, no, no, no, no! It’s not going to be like that!” So we batted ideas back and forth.

I’ve always said that Buckler was the one who came up with the idea of the design and the character originally. When people ask “Did you co-create it?” ...well, I was there. A lot of the ideas were mine. That three-way narration thing is all me. The name is me,

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

Till “Deathlok” Do Us Part From the debut of the offbeat “Deathlok” feature in Astonishing Tales #25 (Aug. 1974): the splash, plus the finale of the early sequence that, Doug Moench relates, was probably drawn as part of an action episode by artist Rich Buckler before Doug himself was piped aboard. The story, the credits say, was “conceived, plotted, and drawn” by Buckler, and scripted by Moench. Thanks to Barry Pearl.

For Rich Buckler’s take on the character’s creation, see his interview in A/E #141. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Rich Buckler A recent photo.

but the design and character were already there before I had anything to do with it, so Rich Buckler’s name comes first in any credits. No doubt about that.

Now I’ve heard that he got quite angry at one point over that credit and then he gave an interview, which someone sent me, where he basically said, “Well, I’ve been a real a**hole. The truth is, Doug Moench did co-create Deathlok, and I was really nasty to him.” So when Marvel called and asked me if I’d created Deathlok, I told them the whole story about Rich already having the three or six pages drawn and that he’d had the character but that I contributed a lot of ideas to the concept. At that point, it became a co-creation in Marvel’s eyes, but he’d already had the pages drawn and designed. So Marvel said, “OK, you cocreated it.” Then I heard he got really angry all over again. None of this was me running around claiming or declaring I co-created Deathlok. If somebody asks me, I tell them exactly what happened.

Then they decide what to call that.

When he got real mad the last time, I asked David Bogart at Marvel if Buckler was angry because I was taking half of his money or something like that. I was told that reimbursements for

the use of creator characters didn’t work that way. If someone cocreated a character, then each creator got the same money. So I don’t know exactly why he gets so angry over this. I do know that I was at a convention once signing autographs and seated next to me was Rich Buckler’s son. He told me, “You know, Dad feels real bad about what he did to you and he would like to work with you again.”

I had to tell Rich’s son that would never happen. The reason actually had nothing to do with creator credits and everything to do with the end of my run on “Deathlok.” I had become close friends with John Verpoorten, who was the deadline wrangler at Marvel, in charge of trafficking all the material, and who was tearing his hair out over “Deathlok” being constantly late. I told John there was nothing I could do, since I was already delivering each plot on time and then scripting the pages as soon as I received them. John said he understood, but the latest issue was going to miss shipping and Marvel would have to pay the printer late fees.

Could I please do him a personal favor? After staying up all night to write something else, would I come down to the Marvel office at 9:30 in the morning to script the pages right in the office as soon as Buckler came in with them? That way they could be lettered immediately. I wasn’t thrilled, but I said all right.

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

So I go there and Verpooten was there and he didn’t even want to look at me. I said “John, what’s going on? Where’s the pages?”

He finally goes, “Buckler’s been here and gone.” “Then where’s the pages?” He said “He took them with him. He’s decided he’s going to write the book himself now.” I went, “That’s it! That’s it! Never again Rich Buckler!” That’s why I’ve been and remain a jerk to Rich Buckler to this day.

I think that “Deathlok” was a beautifully done thing, but I just can’t tolerate that kind of treatment. Except for that thing, I’d say Rich Buckler was a great guy! But what he did was the opposite of being a great guy.

“The Funny Part Was, I’d Only Seen The First Two [Planet Of The Apes] Movies” RA: Oh, I’m sorry to hear all that. Moving to another story or stories you did a great job on… what do you remember about Planet of the Apes?

In addition to doing the movie adaptations, you wrote two original serials for that title that were top notch.

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Corben, Bernie Wrightson, and a few others. Those three guys couldn’t be more different in their style, but they all fit in that school of cartoony but realistic. That’s where Will Eisner fit, too.

He’s the granddaddy of the bunch. All of them, cartoony as hell, but they could scare you. I don’t know how that worked but it did!

Those four guys—Kaluta can do it, too, when he wants to.

It’s dynamic art. What people think of as dynamic art today is not… I think comics started making the wrong turn when the page started to just look like pin-up shots. The storytelling was totally lost. Sometimes somebody’d tell me to look at this hot new stuff and I couldn’t understand why it was the hot new stuff. I couldn’t even tell where the hell I was in regards to the story, where this thing was taking place. There were no backgrounds! You couldn’t even tell if you were indoors or outdoors.

RA: I know that at one point a couple of years ago, the folks who currently have the Planet of the Apes license were planning on reprinting your serial with Mike Ploog, but it was cancelled. It was advertised but never came out. I hope to see that stuff reappear someday.

MOENCH: I loved that book. I did all five of the movie adaptations. The funny part was, I’d only seen the first two movies! [laughs] I just used the screenplays for the final three. My doing it that way explains all the letters on the letters page bitching that I’d changed the movies.

RA: That’s happened more than once... like with Thomas and Chaykin on Star Wars. And I remember reading Alien: the Illustrated Story, the film adaptation of the first movie, which Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson did. There’s a scene in the book that doesn’t appear in the actual film—at least not when it debuted. It showed the Tom Skerritt character, after he’s disappeared and been presumed killed by the alien, hanging in some kind of alien goo in the ship’s cables. Ripley comes upon him and realizes that he’s had one of those alien eggs planted in his body, which is being used as an incubator. Skerritt’s character begs Ripley to kill him and she does. That scene didn’t appear in the original theatrical release, although I guess it could be on the DVD. MOENCH: That’s right. They probably, and I certainly, worked off what the studios give us. People would come up to me and say, “Well, in the fourth movie, this is what happened, not what you have there.” But I did my version according to the screenplay, and it makes much more sense than what folks were telling me was in the actual movie. When they, probably the director, rewrite the script on set, it nearly always is worse than that original screenplay.

RA: You did two original long stories in Planet of the Apes, which I really liked. The first was with Mike Ploog and the second one was with Tom Sutton.

MOENCH: There’s a Mike Ploog artbook coming out…

RA: Yes, I donated to the Kickstarter campaign to get my copy.

MOENCH: I just wrote a Mike Ploog reminiscence for it. That was fun. It brought back a lot of memories. Mike is a super-great guy! Man—larger than life, funny as hell—just a swell guy. It was great working with him. I have a minischool of artists that I love, and I call them the cartoony but realistic guys. In this category I put Mike Ploog, Richard

Nobody Could “Ape” Mike Ploog!

Mike Ploog in the 1970s. Thanks to Mike Mikulovsky.

One of many great pages drawn by Mike Ploog for the lead story in Marvel’s black-&-white Planet of the Apes #1 (Aug. 1974), which related a brand new adventure. The first part of an adaptation of the 1968 20th Century Fox film brought up the rear of the ish, delineated (as seen in A/E #145) by George Tuska & Mike Esposito. Both were scripted by Moench.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc., by arrangement with 20th Century Fox or successors in interest.]

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

MOENCH: I don’t know if he was just saying this to me to be nice, but he told me that the “Future History Chronicles” pages were his favorite stuff of all time. Those two-page spreads of his! Let me tell you, you’ve got to see the original art pages to really grasp how much work he put into those. Most original pages were 1½ times up, but those pages were 2½ times up. They were gigantic things! I could not fit them on my desk when I was getting ready to script them. I had to prop up a stack of eight books or something like that just to get the page to lie flat so I could see it all. It was crazy! Just gigantic stuff! He did it like that, so big, so that he could put that incredible amount of detail into the art.

RA: I got those issues, and it didn’t even matter to me if the story sucked because the art was so impressive. But the story didn’t suck! It was just as good as the art. Just truly impressive work all around. I really loved that story, so thank you!

MOENCH: Good.

“I Started Getting Weird, Freaky Mail” RA: We touched just a bit on Werewolf by Night, but didn’t really get into your tenure on the book. Don Perlin was the artist, for the most part, on your run, correct?

Sutton’s Place Later Planet of the Apes artist Tom Sutton (seen on p. 10) had his own way with a story, as per this page from issue #15 (Dec. 1975)—even if there’s nary a simian in sight! Script by Doug Moench. Thanks to Barry Pearl.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc., by arrangement with 20th Century Fox or successors in interest.]

The Sutton story, as well, although that one in particular needs to come out in the black-&-white version as it originally did. My God, what a wealth of detail he put into that!

MOENCH: Tom’s approach to that story was completely different from what Ploog was doing on “Terror on the Planet of the Apes,” but man! I wrote them as totally different approaches to the movie versions and those two artists certainly delivered! Ploog’s story was closer to the original stories, although I threw in the riverboats and the Davy Crockett hats. They were coming out of the faces on Mount Rushmore’s noses! But it was still kind of like the movies.

So I thought that “Future History Chronicles,” which Sutton drew, should be totally different from the Ploog story. That story just had humans and apes from the movies but, otherwise, it didn’t look or sound like an ape movie.

RA: One of the things that I liked about “Future History Chronicles” was that Sutton could be a very different artist depending on what you were reading of his. He could look like a Will Eisner clone on some stories, but then his Werewolf by Night art would look nothing like the Eisner-style work. He would do another story with the art looking like Graham Ingels or perhaps in a European style. He really excelled on stories that had an H.P. Lovecraft vibe.

MOENCH: Yeah. I thought I was going to have Mike Ploog, because he’d been doing the book when it was offered to me. That was why I jumped all over it. Also, the other werewolf strip, “ManWolf,” was a pain in the ass. I got this edict from editorial. See, Man-Wolf was J. Jonah Jameson’s son. So editorial said J. Jonah Jameson had to be put into every issue. I didn’t think he fit naturally into the storylines, but they said I had to make him fit and in every issue. But you weren’t allowed to have anything happen that will upset J. Jonah Jameson to the point where, if you’re reading Spider-Man, you couldn’t see him be all upset over the fact that his son was a werewolf! His son is turning into a damned werewolf and he can’t get upset? But that’s what I had to do. [laughs] Wow! So when they offered me Werewolf by Night, I told them I wasn’t going to do two werewolf books. I jumped on Werewolf by Night because I loved Ploog so much and because I liked that it was written in the first person. I think Roy came up with the idea for that and the Werewolf. It was originally going to be called I, Werewolf.

I remember going over to Gerry Conway’s house [the writer who scripted the series from the start] and telling him I was taking over the book. I said, “You’re leaving right in the middle of a storyline here. Where’s it supposed to go? What happens after this?” Gerry said, “I don’t know. I have no idea.” I went, “But you started this thing!” He said, “When the deadline for the next issue comes around I just sit down and write it, but I don’t know what’s coming.” Ohhhhh! [laughs] Still, I loved the idea that it was written in first person, in a very conversational way with down-home language. So when I submitted the first plot and I was told it was going to be a different artist, I was kind of crushed. But then I got to know Don Perlin, who was also a really great, great guy.

RA: Also an underrated guy, I think.

MOENCH: Very underrated! His storytelling is, again, like John Ford. It is just so solid! You always know where you are. You know exactly what’s going on. Just by glancing at the sequence of panels.

It’s so much easier for a writer if the visual storytelling is there on the page. I hate having to write captions just to explain what the art should be showing you but isn’t. I just hate that! I didn’t have to do that with Don Perlin. I don’t think ever.

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

27

Where, Wolf?

Two pulse-pounding Perlin splashes—from Werewolf by Night #20 (Aug. 1974) & #24 (Dec. ’74). Both inked by Colletta, & both scripted, natch, by Moench.

Thanks to Barry Pearl and Gene Reed, respectively. Don Perlin’s photo was seen on p. 17. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

He’ll probably be remembered most for Werewolf by Night, but he was also the first guy to draw “Moon Knight.” So he should be known for that as well. We had long phone calls on the work. Talk about a guy who was into it… I mean, he was so into drawing Werewolf by Night that every time he got the next plot, he would call me up and talk about it for two hours! That was fun! I’m a kid from Chicago and I got to talk to this guy with a Brooklyn accent!

For two hours! It was really good!

RA: Now we’re going to talk about a book that I should tell you that I’ve mentioned in print that I really disliked it. Every book we’ve talked about up to this point, I’ve liked to one degree or another, but I just did not feel that way towards The Monster of Frankenstein.

MOENCH: Well, it’s a free country.

RA: I liked the first six issues, when Ploog was drawing it and Gary Friedrich was adapting the original novel, but my opinion in print and even now was that what the book became after that was not to my taste. I thought you ought to know that up front, in case you came across some of those prior remarks. I’m not trying to be confrontational or anything here.

Just giving you a heads-up.

MOENCH: Listen, when you take over a book, you’re always trying to make sense out of what’s come before and sometimes you just can’t do it. I do remember not being able to do Frankenstein the way I wanted to, the way I would have done it if it was up to me.

That’s all I’ll say. I’m not going to slam anybody here.

I would have wanted to do Frankenstein more like the Universal movies. The historical stuff with a middle-European feel to it. I was told that I couldn’t do that. They wanted to have him in the modern day. They wanted Spider-Man in there. I resisted that, I remember. Frankenstein could work in the 20th century, but we just, I guess, didn’t figure out completely how to do that. I wasn’t on it that long before they told me it was going to be ending anyhow. So there was no point in trying to kill yourself coming up with some great new way to do it. Not when the book was going to get cancelled.

RA: One of the black-&-white serials you wrote, which I quite liked, was “Gabriel, Devil-Hunter,” which appeared in The Haunt of Horror. It was somewhat grisly, especially for the times, and clearly influenced by the film The Exorcist.

MOENCH: It was either Marv or Roy who asked me to come up with a new series for Haunt of Horror based on The Exorcist. That movie was a huge sensation at the time. “Gabriel” was what I came up with. At the time, there were a lot of stories about weird things happening on the set of The Exorcist. I swear to God, the same damn things happened to me and the first artist, Billy Graham, on that strip. I don’t even believe that this is possible, so in my mind, I’m just chalking it up to weird circumstances. But really weird stuff happened to both of us while we were working on “Gabriel.”

I remember one night my girlfriend took another girlfriend, who was visiting from Chicago, to actually see The Exorcist. I was

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

RA: Was that when the pages to the second story went missing? The story has about 10 or 11 pages penciled and inked by Billy Graham, and the rest was rapidly-drawn art by Pablo Marcos, with inking by Frank Giacoia and Mike Esposito. I was told the Marcos-GiacoiaEsposito art, which is seven or more pages, was drawn over a weekend.

MOENCH: I remember something about that, but it couldn’t have been connected with the coffee-stained page, because I remember seeing that one and scripting from it. That story Val Mayerik you’re talking about, however, I do remember that. What a nightmare! Billy’s pages just went missing.

And I started getting weird, freaky mail! I got this package from a witch, and in the package was a creepy medallion and some candles… little packets of colored powders. She gave me instructions to go into the bathroom and turn out all the lights. Pour these powders in the bathwater. Light the candles, get into the bathtub, holding the medallion and repeat this chant over and over… God, it got weird! [laughter] She was actually offering to come to New York and stay with me until I got through this. Well, I suspect my girlfriend wouldn’t have been too thrilled with that.

“Have They Ever Turned Down Anything You’ve Done?”

RA: You took over “Morbius, the Living Vampire,” in the black-&-white books, at least, from Don McGregor.

MOENCH: Did I really? How many issues did I work on that?

Moench & Mayerik Meet Frankenstein Moody splash page penciled by Val Mayerik and inked by Vince Colletta— with script by DM—for Frankenstein #12 (Sept. 1974). Although at first the cover logo read The Monster of Frankenstein (as interviewer Richard Arndt refers to it), then switched in mid-stream to The Frankenstein Monster (by decree of publisher Stan Lee, if then-editor Roy T. remembers a-right), the comic’s actual indicia title from first to last was simply… Frankenstein.

This was Doug’s first issue as writer. Thanks to Mark Muller.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

writing “Gabriel, Devil-Hunter” that day, and then we had to take her to see the movie. The first thing that happened was that the cab got in an accident. Then we got to the theatre and went inside, only to find that my wallet was gone. It was still in the cab. Then we watch the movie and the girl we took to see it got sick. Mind you, it was her idea to see it. So we go back to the apartment and the door closes, but the doorknob falls off, on the inside! [laughs] Now there’s no way to get out of the apartment, even with the door unlocked! We can’t get the door open. We’re trapped in there. That kind of thing just went on and on.

Billy Graham had all kinds of weird stories. He was living up in Harlem. There were weird scratchings at his window and howling outside. One night, he heard a skreek from outside and it startled him so much he spilled coffee all over the “Gabriel” art pages. You could see the coffee all over the page. It looked awful! [both laughing] He told me that he thought he had to quit the book because it was too scary. Especially since he worked at night, all alone, in his little apartment. I have to admit, there was some weird stuff going on around that series.

RA: Well, probably not that many. Two or three? Vampire Tales was cancelled very shortly after you started writing the strip.

MOENCH: OK, that’s why I really didn’t take it over. I think they would have come to me and said, “We’re cancelling Vampire Tales.

Can you do the last few ‘Morbius’ stories for us?” Again, it was one of those things where you don’t try to put your distinctive mark on it, because you know it’s going away in a month or two.

You just try to do the best you can for the last few issues that the company’s committed to. I do remember now a long “Morbius” story I did for the black-&-whites. It was set on a cruise ship. There was a costume party on the ship. [NOTE: “Death Kiss” from Vampire Tales #11 (June 1975). —RA.] Sonny Trinidad was the artist on that one. I remember that one because I got a really, really good compliment from Archie Goodwin. Archie was a guy I really respected as an editor. When he told you that you did something special, you go “Wow!” Archie was the original great guy.

But I don’t remember doing the color “Morbius” issues at all.

RA: You did a few. You took over from Steve Gerber on the color book for four issues [Fear #25-28, Dec. 1974-June 1975], working with artist Frank Robbins. Bill Mantlo took over for the rest of the run.

MOENCH: Oh, OK. Sounds right.

RA: I wanted to mention that I really liked that little five-page story you did for one of the black-&-white vampire titles—“Blood Lunge,” with Russ Heath doing the art. It was a real simple story but I liked it a lot. It was the one where the vampire flies down thinking he’s going to attack a man but he lands on top of a scarecrow and stakes himself.

MOENCH: Yeah. Russ came over to our apartment and said, “Let’s

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

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Blow, Gabriel, Blow!

Two horrific pages from the “Gabriel – Devil Hunter” in Haunt of Horror #2 (July 1974), with script by Doug Moench & art by Billy Graham. Whether it was editor-in-chief Roy Thomas or associate editor (read: the guy who did most of the b&w editorial work) Marv Wolfman who assigned Moench to launch the series, the obvious reason was the smash box office success of the 1973 film The Exorcist. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

go out to dinner.” So we did and he said, “I’ve got no work. I need something to do tomorrow.’ [laughs] So while we were eating this delicious rack of lamb—which is something I refuse to eat anymore. I won’t eat veal or lamb because I want the animals to live a while! But back when I ate lamb, that meal was the best lamb I ever tasted. So while we were eating, I came up with that silly thing. Russ said, “OK! When we get back to the apartment, write it up right away and I’ll get on it.” ‘Wait,” I said, “I’ve got to hand it in to editorial first.” He said, “C’mon, have they ever turned down anything you’ve done?” I said, “No, but you’re still supposed to follow protocol.” Then he said, “Look, they want me to do something for them. They’re not going to turn me down and they’ve never turned you down. I’ll just start drawing it and you turn it in.

Give me a copy. It’ll be done by the time they say OK.” So that’s what we did, and it worked out OK. In fact, I think I called Marv Wolfman and let him know what was going on. I think Marv just said, “Sure, that’s fine.”

Billy Graham From the 1975 Marvel Con Program Book.

Doug & Debbie Moench circa 1976. Hopefully, the dog isn’t haunted! Thanks to the Moenches for the photo.

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

“Artists… At Least They’re Truthful” RA: You also wrote Ka-Zar for a while.

MOENCH: Yeah, my run on Ka-Zar got me an Eagle Award. John Buscema and I were having a fight over who was the better boxer— Rocky Graziano or Muhammad Ali. He was the Graziano guy. I was of the opinion that Ali would nail him because Ali’s reach was three inches longer than Graziano’s. Graziano wouldn’t even get close to Ali, c’mon! We had a big fight about that. Then we were talking about some other stuff and he mentioned that

The Morbius, The Merrier!

Sonny Trinidad Thanks to Comic Vine website.

(Right:) Both the “Morbius” series and Vampire Tales were on their last varicose-veined legs in #11 (June 1975), the final issue… but Moench and Trinidad sent both on their way with a whimper and a bang. By now, Marv Wolfman was Marvel’s editor-in-chief, and Archie Goodwin was handling most of the black-&-whites under him. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

It Gets In Your Blood!

(Above & right:) Doug Moench and artist Russ Heath took a chance and produced the story “Blood Lunge” without checking with an editor first, but— like Russ told Doug—what were the odds that the editors were gonna turn down a story that looked (and read) like this? It wound up in Vampire Tales #9 (Feb. 1975). Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

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his idea of a dream job would be drawing “Ka-Zar,” nothing but “Ka-Zar.” I said, “’Ka-Zar’? Why ‘Ka-Zar’?” He says, “’Cause it’s easy.” I said, “Why not ‘Conan’?” He goes, “No! ‘Conan’ is a nightmare! It’s got buildings in it. It’s got cities. You’ve got to use a straight edge and all that stuff. ‘Ka-Zar’ is all free hand. You draw some leaves in the background and you’re done.” [laughs] Wow! That’s like when Mike Zeck finally dropped off from Master of Kung Fu. He called me up and told me that he knew that he was never going to be getting better writing on anything else he’d ever do. He thought the book was wonderful but he was just tired!

Doing that book was just really hard work. He just wanted to draw four panels a page of Spider-Man bouncing off blank walls. [laughs] You know? Artists… at least they’re truthful.

RA: I guess that’s true enough, though. I remember looking recently at some Buscema Conan pages and—my God, there’s a lot of crowd scenes.

And John drew every character with different clothing and different expressions on their faces. He put a lot of work into some of those pages.

MOENCH: And there’s buildings! [laughs] When they rode into the city, he’d have to draw the gate and the walls and the buildings and… it was all too much for him! [chuckles] When John and I did the Weirdworld thing—Warriors of the Shadow Realm—he did a spectacular job on the city in that book. He wasn’t really lazy. He just liked to pretend he was lazy.

RA: I also wanted to touch on Weirdworld a little, as that first little story just barely comes in under our time-period cutoff. Mike Ploog drew

It’s A “Weirdworld,” After All! The Doug Moench/Mike Ploog series “Weirdworld” made its debut in the black&-white Marvel Super Action #1 (Jan. 1976). This page of elvish action is courtesy of Leonardo de Sá. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

that first story, which was just delightful. It was totally out of character in the black-&-white book it appeared in [the one and only issue of Marvel Super Action #1 (Jan. 1976)].

MOENCH: Boy, it sure was.

RA: I think “The Punisher,” “The Huntress,” and “Dominic Fortune” were the other stories there. All of them crime stories of one sort or another. Then there was this delicate little fantasy story.

MOENCH: Yeah, I don’t know why I wrote that first story. I took it in and gave it to Marv Wolfman. An hour later, Marv came running up to me in the hall and told me he’d just read the script.

He said, “It’s great! I’ve got the perfect artist to do it. You’ll see!” I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then Ploog did it, and Marv was absolutely right. Ploog was the perfect artist for that story.

Maybe The Flesh Was “Forgotten,” But The Series Wasn’t Moench and Heath teamed up again on Ka-Zar #12 (Nov. 1975). Doug won an award for his run on the title. Thanks to Mark Muller.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RA: I wish he was still actively drawing comics. The last thing I remember seeing from him was this great three issue mini-series from an outfit I’d never heard of before. It was this cool werewolf/vampire book called Thicker Than Blood [NOTE: From First Circle in 2007—and actually, Ploog drew several issues of DC’s The Spirit in 2009 as well].

MOENCH: I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of that one.

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The Rising & Advancing Of A Spirit

You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hell-Hound Moench & Mayerik teamed up anew for the adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” novella The Hound of the Baskervilles. From Marvel Preview #6 (Spring 1976). Thanks to Martin Gately. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RA: You also did a nice adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles for Marvel Preview.

MOENCH: There’s a story behind that, too. I came up with the bright idea of doing Sherlock Holmes in comics, and I don’t remember if it was Roy or Marv or Len Wein or whoever was editor at the time, but I was told I had to run it by Stan. So I went to Stan and I told him I had these brilliant ideas for new stories for Sherlock Holmes. All these clues that Holmes could deduce from.

All that great stuff that you love from Sherlock Holmes! Stan said he’d think about it. The next time I saw him he told me to go for it.

Do it in black-&-white because the pages would be bigger. I said, “Great!” Because that meant we could do real long stories. Then he said, “There’s only one condition. It has to be The Hound of the Baskervilles!” I went, “Noooo!” I wanted to do original Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve got all these great ideas for new stories.” Stan goes, “Nope, nope. The only way you can do it is if it’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

You know, The Hound of the Baskervilles has the best idea of any of the original Holmes pieces, but it’s actually the worst story, particularly to adapt, because Sherlock Holmes doesn’t even appear in over two-thirds of it. He’s in the very beginning and at the very end, but there’s a long, long stretch where he’s not even there! He’s out in the countryside in disguise making secret observations. It’s the worst story to pick to kick off a Holmes series. But

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

Stan was firm. If I wanted to do Holmes, I had to do that story. He told me if it did well, then I could do my own stories—but there was no “after that.”

RA: That’s too bad, because the two issues you guys did put out were topnotch.

MOENCH: The adaptation was utterly faithful. Once I knew I had to do it, I tried to do it the best I could. But it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to do my own stories. But the original Sherlock Holmes stories were in public domain, so we could adapt anything we wanted to and it wouldn’t cost Marvel anything. I thought I had this brilliant idea and it became just the adaptation. Oh, well.

“I Don’t Think [Super-Heroes Are] My Inclination As A Writer” RA: You didn’t do that many full-out super-heroes for quite a while.

MOENCH: No, I didn’t. I love super-heroes as a reader, but I don’t think it’s my inclination as a writer. Denny O’Neil has this great saying: “Superman is the only super-hero who can destroy the universe by listening hard.” That’s exactly it. After 9-11 they wanted to do a super-hero for a 9-11 book or something. But the real heroes of that story are the cops and firemen. The guys who know they can get killed and rush in there anyway. Superman knows nothing’s going to happen to him. I love the Superman

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character, but when I’m writing… that’s why Moon Knight is completely mortal. He’s completely vulnerable. He has no superpowers. That’s also why I like Batman. Batman’s my favorite alltime character because he’s a normal guy who can get killed anytime he goes out there.

RA: You wrote both of those characters—Batman and Moon Knight—at one time or another. There are people who say that Moon Knight is just a Marvel version of Batman, but I never really saw it that way.

MOENCH: Moon Knight’s not a Batman clone and I can prove it.

He started as a villain in Werewolf by Night.

They say he’s a Batman clone because they’re both nighttime characters. Well, Moon Knight had to fight the Werewolf.

The Werewolf could only come out at night.

So naturally Moon Knight’s got to appear at night. Then he’s got the cape and the club and this and that. Every single thing I can explain. Those crescent darts he uses were made of silver to fight the Werewolf. They are not miniature batarangs, for God’s sake.

I wasn’t thinking of Batman at all.

Nobody ever brought up that Moon Knight/Batman stuff until Bill Sienkiewicz, in his Neal Adams period, started drawing

Bill Sienkiewicz

A Moon-lit Knight (Left:) One of Don Perlin’s earliest splash pages featuring Moon Knight, from Marvel Spotlight #28 (June 1976). Thanks to Barry Pearl.

(Right:) Bill Sienkiewicz’ interpretation for Moon Knight #1 (Nov. ’80). Both scripts by Doug Moench. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Never The Twain Shall Meet?

In the first half of the 1970s, the main two places to find Doug Moench scripting were in Warren and Marvel mags—so we’ll close with this Rich Corben-drawn page from Creepy #54 (July 1973), and the splash of Master of Kung Fu #23 (Dec. 1974), penciled by Al Milgrom & inked by Klaus Janson. Thanks to Jim Kealy and Shane Foley, respectively. [TM & © New Comic Company, LLC, & Marvel Characters, Inc.—also respectively.]

Moon Knight and making him look like Batman.

RA: Well, he certainly made it look like Neal Adams’ Batman.

MOENCH: Exactly. That’s why, to this day, people say it’s a ripoff of Batman. I did not have Batman in mind. Ask Don Perlin. We never mentioned Batman to each other when we were doing the original stories.

The stories I was writing for “Moon Knight” were not the typical “Batman” stories.

Particularly at the time.

RA: When you did write “Batman,” you didn’t approach the character in the same way that you approached “Moon Knight.”

MOENCH: No! Bill was actually swiping poses from Neal Adams’ “Batman” panels.

It looked exactly like Neal Adams’ Batman but dressed in the Moon Knight outfit. I don’t know if you remember, but Don Perlin and I came up with

the glider cape, which was attached to Moon Knight’s ankles and wrist so he could just spread eagle and fly. When Bill took over the back in the day. art, he asked if he could get rid of the attachments and just draw a cape. Moon Knight would just hold the cape. Well, little did I know it was going to look just like Batman’s cape! That’s how it became a supposedly Batman ripoff. But it’s not, not at all.

Al Milgrom

I’ve also heard that his civilian identity is like Bruce Wayne, but Moon Knight has three civilian identities. One’s a cab driver, one’s a mercenary, and the last is a rich guy, because he needs all that money to fund what he does. But there are a lot of rich guys in comics who are secretly superheroes. I wasn’t thinking of Bruce Wayne when I created his alter egos. I was very clear that, in his own head, Moon Knight was three different characters. Split personalities.

They all spoke differently from each other as well. But they were all him. They weren’t disguises, like Batman’s Doug & Deb & Derek Matches Malone. in the late 1980s at Ringing Rocks (which Doug swears “really do ring”). He reports that son Derek is now “married to Swedish cellist Helena Espvall (called ‘the Jimi Hendrix of the cello’ in a review of one album).” They live in Lisbon, Portugal, where Derek teaches English and does audio recording and mixing. How time flies! Thanks to Doug and Deb for the pic.

RA: Well, it’s getting late. I want to thank you for this interview. It was very nice of you to take the time to do this.

MOENCH: Sure, it’s been fun.

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

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DOUG MOENCH Checklist [This checklist is adapted from the online edition of the Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, established by Dr. Jerry G. Bails and viewable at www.bailsprojects.com. Last entries to site made October 2006; checklist covers work through 1999. Names of features that appeared both in comic books of that title and in other magazines, as well, are generally not italicized. All credits are for category “writer” unless otherwise noted.]

Name: Doug Moench (b. 1948) writer Family in Arts: Debbie James (wife) Print media (non-comics): writer: short stories, novels, articles Animation: Writer, Mighty Mouse 1987 – for Bakshi Animation Honors: Inkpot Award (San Diego Comic-Con) 1981 Syndication: Conan the Barbarian (Sunday) 1981 for Register & Tribune Syndicate

Zar, 1975-77, King Arthur (adaptation), 1980; Kull, 1981, 1983; The Last of the Mohicans (adaptation), 1976; Man-Gods from beyond the Stars, 1975; Man-Wolf, 1974; Marvel Preview, 1977; Master of Kung Fu, 1974-83, 1988, 1994; Moon Knight, 1978-83, 1992; Morbius, 1975; Planet of the Apes, 1974-77; Red Sonja, 1975; Robinson Crusoe (adaptation), 1977; Seeker 3000, 1978; Shadow Hunter, 1981; Sherlock Holmes, 1976; Shogun Warriors, 1979-80, Six from Sirius II, 1985-86, Solomon Kane (writer, also pencil & ink) 1976; StarLord, 1979-80; Thor, 1981-83, Toxic Avenger, 1991; Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, 1975; Warriors of the Shadow Realm, 1979;

Co-creator: Moon Knight, Weirdworld, The Spook Acme Press (UK): James Bond 007: Serpent’s Tooth 1992-93 Diamond Press (Canada): various features c. 1992 Rip Off Press: Grim Wit 1973 COMIC BOOKS (Mainstream U.S. Publication): Continuity Comics: Shadow Hunter, 1985 Dark Horse Comics: James Bond 007: Serpent’s Tooth 199293 DC Comics: A Fable, 1992; Arion, Lord of Atlantis, 1983; Batman, 1983-86, 1990-99; Batman and Dracula: Red Rain, 1991 graphic novel; Batman from the Year 85,271, 1998; Batman vs. Predator, 1994-95 graphic novel (w/Dark Horse); Batman, Black Canary, and Green Arrow, 1986; The Big Book of Conspiracies, 1995 graphic album (imprint: Paradox); Blackhawk, 1990; Catwoman, 1994-95, 1997-99; Cops, 1988-89; Crusher Kimmie, 1988; DC Challenge, 1986; Electric Warrior, 1986-87; G.I. Combat, 1973; Green Lantern Corps, 1992; Heroes against Hunger, 1986; House of Mystery, 1973-74, 1976-77; House of Secrets, 1973; Lords of the Ultra-Realm, 1986-87; Mr. Miracle, 1990-91; The Omega Men, 1984-85; Sandkings (adaptation) 1987 graphic album; Sgt. Rock, date uncertain; Slash Maraud, Wild Blue, 1987-88; The Spectre, 1987-89; Superman and Batman, 1983; Teen Titans, 1986; text 1986; Wonder Girl, 1987; Xenobrood, 1994-95 Eclipse Enterprises: Alien Encounters, 1986; Aztec Ace, 1985; Nightmares, 1985; Nuclear Spring, 1987 Heavy Metal: More Than Human (adaptation) by Theodore Sturgeon, 1978 Marvel Comics: Blade, 1976; Brak the Barbarian, 1974-75; Brother Voodoo, 1974-75; Captain Marvel, 1978-80; Coldblood, 1989; Conan, 1982-83, 1989; Crazy Magazine, c.

1975; Deathlok, 1974-75; The Deep (movie adaptation), 1977; Doc Savage, 1976-77; Dracula, 1974-75; Dracula Lives!, 1974; Fantastic Four, 1980-81; Frankenstein, 197475; Gabriel, 1974-75; Ghost Rider, 1973; Giant-Size Chillers, 1975; Godzilla, 1977-79; Hulk, 1977-80; Inhumans, 197577, Invisible Man, 1977; Iron Fist, 1975, 1994; Island of Dr. Moreau (adaptation), 1977; Ivanhoe (adaptation), 1977; Ka-

I’ve Got A Secret—But It’s Not What You Think!

The second page of the story “Not So Loud—I’m Blind!” from DC’s House of Secrets #113 (Nov. 1973). Script by Doug Moench; art by Nick Cardy & Mike Sekowsky. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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A Triptych In Terror Doug Moench scripts for a trio of Marvel’s black-&-whites, done with some top Filipino artists (clockwise from above left:) An adaptation of a John Jakes “Brak the Barbarian” prose story for Savage Tales #8 (Jan. 1975), featuring art by Steve Gan. Around this time, Jakes was poised to become a best-selling novelist with his Bicentennial series.

Thanks to Mark Muller.

A “Ka-Zar” prehistoric action page from Savage Tales #11 (July ’75—the final issue), with art by Steve Gan & Rico Rival. Thanks to Martin Gatefly.

A vampire tale from—where else?—Vampire Tales #6 (Aug. ’74), illustrated by the amazing Alfredo Alcala. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [All pages TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Brak is a trademark of John Jakes.]

Steve Gan Alfredo Alcala at a late-1970s con. Photo courtesy of Bill Wray.

Doug Moench Talks About His Early Years In Comics

Shouldn’t That Have Been The Deadly Feet Of Kung Fu? (Left:) Splash page of a story from the black-&-white Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #8 (Jan. 1975). Art by Mike Vosburg & Dan Adkins; script

by Moench. Thanks to Mark Muller.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Weirdworld, 1976-77, 1980-82; Werewolf by Night, 1974-75; What If Master of Kung Fu…, 1979; Zombie, 1982 Skywald Publishing Co.: horror, 1971-72; Nightmare Yearbook, 1974 (reprint); Psycho, 1971, 1973 Warren Publications: Blood on Black Satin, 1980; Creepy, 1971-77, 1980; Eerie, 1972-74, 1976-77; fillers, 1974; The Freaks, 1976; Satanna, Daughter of Satan, 1973; Schreck, 1974; The Spook, 1974; Vampi’s Feary Tales, 1972 filler; Vampirella backup features, 1970-75, 1982

Mike Vosburg in a recent photo.

Doug Moench Thanks to Rodrigo Baeza & Stephan Friedt for sending this photo taken by Marvel staffer Elliot Brown.

Tarzan TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.; other art © 2016 Benito Gallego. Coloring by Arnie Grieves.

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The Clock Strikes!

39

A Son’s Remembrance of GEORGE BRENNER, Creator Of Comic Books’ First Masked Hero Conducted & Transcribed by Mike Kooiman

G

Interviewer’s Introduction

eorge Edward Brenner was one of the earliest comic book creators. His obscurity belies the notable fact that he created the first original masked hero for a comic book. This radar blip was called “The Clock,” a hero who, like his radio and pulp-mag predecessors The Shadow and The Green Hornet, wore a suit and hat and covered his face with a sheet-like mask. The Clock’s first two appearances were in two magazines that appeared in the same month: Funny Pages #6 and Funny Picture Stories #1 (Nov. 1936), both published by Comics Magazine Company.

Comics Magazine was started by two defectors from National (DC), Bill Cook and John Mahon. (After a series of acquisitions, Comics Magazine Co.’s titles were eventually published by the Centaur group.) Jim Steranko’s History of the Comics, Vol. 2, noted that Everett “Busy” Arnold, founder of Quality Comics, had advised Cook and Mahon, and this is probably how George Brenner first met Arnold as well. Comics Magazine Co. began to fail just as Arnold was establishing the company that became known as “Quality.” A year later, Quality took on Brenner and “The Clock,” beginning in Feature Funnies #3 (Dec. 1937).

Brenner also created Quality Comics’ first masked hero, The Hawk (T. James Harrington II, a former football star and wealthy heir). “The Hawk” appeared in Feature Funnies #2, but when “The Clock” moved to Quality with issue #3, “The Hawk” disappeared after that lone adventure. Even the finale of The Hawk’s story heralded The Clock’s arrival next month. [For the record, comics’ first (externally) superpowered super-hero was Dr. Occult (New Fun Comics #6, Oct. 1935), and the first real super-powered hero was, of course, Superman (Action Comics #1, June 1938).

Both these heroes were created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster—but neither of them wore masks, which soon became an equally important comic book tradition.]

“The Clock” was Brenner’s first signed comic strip, though he had started out doing production work. He was an untrained storyteller, so it was his first foray. Brenner was a sports enthusiast who had briefly studied dentistry in college, but the Great Depression forced him, like so many comics pioneers, to take the job to help his family.

George Brenner in a “pre-1937” photo supplied by his son, John Brenner.

This photo was taken during a card game with his friend Gerard Kane.

Setting “The Clock” Brenner’s feature “The Clock” debuted in two comics in the same month, both from Comics Magazine Company: Funny Pages, Vol. 1, #6, and Funny Picture Stories, Vol. 1, #1 (both Nov. 1936). The cover of the former is by Ellis Edwards; Brenner penciled (and perhaps inked) the latter. “The Clock” ran in 2-page installments in Funny Pages, Vol. 1, #6-11… and in 7-page stories in FPP, Vol. 1, #1, 3, & 5, before the latter title was changed, first to Detective Picture Stories, then to Keen Detective Funnies. Yeesh… only one caption into the interview, and we’re already exhausted trying to keep everything straight!

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

Most would agree that he was a stronger storyteller than an artist, but Brenner’s work frequently showed flashes of brilliance.

He presented novel characters and often delivered the unexpected. His creative

40

A Son’s Remembrance Of George Brenner

contributions were largely over by 1943, when he graduated to editor-inchief at Quality, a position which he held through 1949. After that, he wrote freelance Westerns for about a year, and in 1951 he was recruited

by Helen Meyer to be an editor at Dell.

While researching The Quality Companion (TwoMorrows Publishing, 2012), I failed to uncover any significant information about George Brenner. My profile was pieced together with anecdotes from various Alter Ego interviews conducted by Jim Amash. After publication, I continued to dig and found some Brenner family information on Ancestry.com, including Brenner’s obituary: GEORGE EDWARD BRENNER, age 43, died on September 13, 1952, at his home in Greenwich, Fairfield County, Connecticut. He was born on September 28, 1908, in Brooklyn, Kings County, New York, the son of Walter Brenner, Sr. and Catherine Sheridan. His parents were natives of New York City, NY, and Ireland, respectively.

He was a magazine editor and was survived by his wife, Grace Kane Brenner. Burial on September 16, 1952, at Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY. Informant - Mrs. Brenner.

I happily blogged about this on “The Quality Companion Companion,” but abandoned hope of learning anything more. Brenner

“The Clock” Ticks On Two more Brenner “Clock” panels—precise comics (and companies) unknown.

The one on the left appeared on Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine; the other was found on the Internet. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

had died early, and by that time he was estranged from everyone at Quality Comics. (He had been fired in 1949.) I read no mentions of any children and assumed that, if any existed, they might have been very young at the time of his death. Then, one day, I received an unbelievable call from Brenner’s only child, John. To my surprise, John Brenner had been fifteen when his father passed away—which meant that he’d known his father very well. Our talks have helped complete the portrait of George Brenner, a Golden Age mystery-man in his own right. Thanks to John, we can share the colorful life and tragic fate of a notable comics figure—plus a rare piece of Quality Comics history!

MIKE KOOIMAN: I was surprised to learn that you were fifteen when your father passed away. I’d read no mention of George Brenner having any children.

JOHN BRENNER: I was born on August 15, 1937, in Brooklyn.

Shortly after, maybe five years afterwards, we moved up to Greenwich, Connecticut, and that’s where we were up until the time my father died. And he died in my arms; he had a heart attack. He went in for a gallstone operation and it put a lot of stress on his heart. One morning, a couple weeks after surgery, he woke up and he was in distress. My mother went to get a neighbor because he was starting to flail and I sat down on the bed next to him and I held him, and that was it. He just sort of died in my arms.

MK: When he got ill, was it prolonged?

BRENNER: No, he had a sudden attack of gallstones. While he was in surgery, he had an asthma attack, and the clamps came off a couple of the vessels and created some additional problems for the surgeon. Afterwards, I can remember visiting him in the Greenwich hospital. He looked like death. He was in an oxygen tent, and then he pulled out of it, and they sent him home.

“Hawk”-ing His Wares A Brenner page of “The Hawk” from Quality’s Feature Funnies #2 (Nov. 1937). The character was clearly a doppelgänger of “The Clock,” who displaced him in the very next issue of FF. Perhaps there was some question at first of whether Quality could take over publishing “The Clock”—a query which, if it happened, was soon answered in the affirmative. Thanks to the Who’s Whose in DC Comics site. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

I remember it was a hot summer night in September and he was sleeping upstairs. We had a screened-in porch in the front of the house. And it was so hot he said to my mother, “I’m going to go downstairs and sleep on the porch where it’s cooler.” There’s a bit of confusion about whether it was a heart attack or a blood clot that broke loose. He went down to the porch and about five in the morning went back up to bed, and that’s when all the problems started. He wasn’t able to make it to the hospital.

MK: Can you tell me what you remember of his younger days?

BRENNER: I remember him going down for his physical

The Clock Strikes!

During FDR’s First Term (Above, left to right:) George Brenner, c. 1934-35. John B. remembers his father as “ever-dapper,” “always a smartly dressed man.”

George and Grace (Kane) Brenner in 1936, the year they were married. Photo probably taken in Brooklyn. Both photos courtesy of John Brenner.

The only surviving piece of original artwork by his father that John owns is this pencil drawing of George’s best friend and brother-in-law, Gerard Kane. Kane was killed in an auto accident in 1937, so this is among GB’s earliest drawings.

Based on photos of Kane he’s seen, John swears the portrait is “a dead ringer for him.” Thanks to JB for all three of these scans. [© Estate of George Brenner.]

because he was going to be inducted into the Army, conscripted.

He failed the physical exam because he had asthma.

You alluded [in The Quality Companion] to him going to Villanova but that they have no record of it. He actually went to Georgetown for his freshman year. He was dedicating himself to dentistry, but he realized he didn’t like it, so he switched to Villanova. That’s where he did play football. My father was a pragmatist, but I don’t think he was academically oriented.

The effects of the Depression set in and he had to go home to help his mother and contribute to the economics of the family. He had two younger brothers [Allan, who lived to age 85, and Walter (“Buddy”), who died of a heart attack at 50]. He went to work for the New York Daily News as a cub reporter, for which he went back and forth between New York and Chicago for a certain time.

He told me several times that, while he was at Villanova, one of his friends was Matt Capone, Al Capone’s brother. Matt Capone wanted my father to help him with bootlegging activities on summer break, but my father wouldn’t do it. The joke of that is

Grammar School Grad John Brenner with his mother and father upon the occasion of his grammar school graduation in 1951. Thanks to JB.

41

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A Son’s Remembrance Of George Brenner

University, and my father ended up as the football scout in Brooklyn for Brown. I used to go to all the games with him on Saturday. One Saturday he said he had to go and see the parents of this one player because he wanted to get him into Brown. The player was a senior, and that boy turned out to be [future athlete] Joe Paterno. I think it’s a matter of record that Busy Arnold paid for Paterno’s entire living expenses and tuition at Brown University.

So we went to all the high school games and he worked for Arnold. He started as a cartoonist and ended up as editorin-chief. As you know, he created “The Clock.” I had tons of comics. When I was five or six, my father would bring comic books home every night. They were all different; they weren’t all Quality. He brought the comic books home by the ton. I had them stacked up in the corner of my bedroom, and if I said they were three feet high it would not be an exaggeration. We moved to Greenwich when I was five and then we moved back to Bay Ridge Brooklyn for a year, then back to Greenwich again. And that’s where we stayed until he died.

MK: What factors influenced the moves? Do you remember him commuting to different offices, in Connecticut and in New York?

Gallo Humor

that he said, if he’d done it, they’d have been millionaires.

MK: So he was unable to finish at Villanova?

New York Daily News sport cartoonist Bill Gallo (1922-2011) and one of his many cartoons depicting Muhammad Ali. Gallo was prominently featured in A/E #140’s coverage of his friend Irwin Hasen.

[Cartoon © the respective copyright holders.]

BRENNER: Yes, he was unable to finish. He wasn’t an alumnus. When he was with the Daily News, he worked with Bill Gallo, who did sports cartoons. We had some of Gallo’s original works because my father had gotten them from him. They were lost in my many relocations and moves. I don’t believe he got into any cartooning for the Daily News; I just think he did some reporting. His work in comics came after that; then he went to work for Busy Arnold.

MK: Do you have any insight about how it was that he made the jump into being an artist without any training?

BRENNER: I don’t believe he had any training. Whatever he had was a natural talent.

MK: Do you think it was the connection of Gallo that brought him into the comic book world?

BRENNER: I don’t know how he made the connection to comics, but I don’t think it was from Gallo. When he first started in comic books, he was doing the pen-and-ink and the coloring for the proofs, before they went to publication… which would have been the bottom rung of the ladder.

As a sideline, you know my father was a real football fan, and I know he pushed Villanova football with Jimmy Powers, who wrote a daily column in the Daily News. When he got into the comic book business with Busy Arnold, Arnold was a graduate of Brown

BRENNER: They really liked Greenwich and really wanted to live there. I don’t remember the Connecticut office very clearly, but I do remember him commuting into New York City. I can almost remember that office building that he worked in right off Lexington Avenue. I do have one of his business cards. “George E. Brenner, Editor,” and it lists the comics. “Quality Comics Group, America’s leading comic magazines. Average circulation over three million monthly. 25 West 45th Street”—that’s where the office was. I do remember going into that office a couple of times.

MK: What do you remember seeing at the office?

BRENNER: Of course, Busy Arnold was there.

Occasionally, we would go to Busy and Claire Arnold’s house for dinner.

They had two kids, Dick… and I can’t remember his daughter’s name.

They lived in Old Greenwich, right on the sound, a beautiful house. I can remember [artist] Paul Gustavson, and going to his house for dinner on a Saturday or Sunday. They lived in New Jersey at the time.

MK: Any other impressions of the Quality office?

Everett “Busy” Arnold and Quality editor Gwen Hansen, circa 1941. This photo was first printed in Jay Disbrow’s 1985 book The Iger Comics Kingdom… which itself was totally reprinted in A/E #21. See also A/E #34, in particular, for coverage of the Quality Comics Group—and an interview with Arnold’s son Dick, who ran Quality for a time. Oh yeah, and Mike Kooiman & Jim Amash’s 200-page volume The Quality Companion is still available from TwoMorrows Publishing!

The Clock Strikes!

43

Brenner Meant Business!

George Brenner’s business card from Quality Comics—which dates, judging by the titles listed on it, to around 1947 (when the comic book Candy began).

Interestingly, the card also lists titles that never quite saw it to market. “Giddy Goose” and “Rasputin” were funny-animal features from All Humor Comics and Blackhawk, respectively, but neither was ever published in its own solo comic book. Thanks to John Brenner for image and information.

BRENNER: I don’t think it was because of drinking. It’s just that he was a very independent person, and very fixed in his ways. It could be, but if so, it’s beyond my knowledge.

Taking A Crack At Crack Comics When Quality launched the anthology title Crack Comics, “The Clock” migrated there from Feature—and the masked hero alternated with “Black Condor” on that mag’s covers, with GB’s creation appearing on all oddnumbered covers through #19. However, Brenner seems not to have been tapped to draw any of them. The artist of this cover for Crack #1 (May 1940) is unidentified. Incidentally, the “Jane Arden” whom The Clock is rescuing is the star of another continuing feature in the comic. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

He wasn’t at Dell too long before he got sick, and following the sickness with the gallstones, he died. He liked it there a lot. It’s funny thinking about it now. When I was consulting about ten years ago, one of my clients was Bertelsmann, and one of their divisions was Doubleday, and I asked their people in Doubleday if they would do a search on my father to see if they could identify some of his works, but they couldn’t find anything. [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: George T. Delacorte sold Dell to Doubleday & Company in 1976.]

BRENNER: I didn’t think it was too big, I’d say on the small side, an awful lot of people in a small space. A lot of drawing boards, the smell of ink. Every once in a while, considering my age, they would take a pen-andink proof and they’d give it to me and say, “Sit down and color.” It was just for fun.

MK: Did your dad talk specifically about the comic strips that he was working on?

BRENNER: No, I can’t remember any conversation about the comic strips. When he left Quality—and my recollection is that he was fired, but I’m not positive on that—he became a freelance writer. That was the time between Quality and Dell. He did short stories, mostly Westerns. He sold a couple of them. I don’t know if he did that under a pen name or not. I remember him going over to Helen Meyer’s house for his interview with Dell Comics. She had a place in Old Greenwich, on the water, also. They hired him as the editor-in-chief at Dell, and he would also have to go out to Racine, Wisconsin, because that’s where the printing plant was.

MK: Some have stated that he was fired from Quality because of drinking. How do you respond to that?

The Spirit Of Quality Comic book legend Will Eisner in his later years—and the cover of DC’s Will Eisner’s The Spirit Archives, Vol. 4, which reprinted the weekly Spirit comic strips from the first half of 1942. Photo courtesy of Sam Maronie.

[TM & © Will Eisner Estate.]

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A Son’s Remembrance Of George Brenner

Over the years, I’ve been MK: How would you describe collecting things from the your father’s personality or dispoInternet, and I have a book sition? that’s probably an inch thick BRENNER: Certainly he was a with various articles written by “hail fellow well met.” He was different people in the comics a very social guy. He really industry. I decided one day to “The Clock” Keeps On Ticking! enjoyed a party, let’s put it that get a little more aggressive, and (Above, left to right:) Gill Fox’s “Clock” cover for Crack Comics #3 (July 1940)— way. Never at a loss for words.

I contacted Will Eisner by eGeorge Brenner’s splash page from that issue—and the cover of Crack #19 He truly enjoyed being the mail. I have a copy of the e(Dec. ’41), the final one spotlighting The Clock; artist unknown. center of the party. When there [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.] mail. I asked him what he were Christmas parties at remembered about my father.

Quality, as there were every He said he couldn’t remember too much. He sort of sloughed it off. year, he was always the emcee.

I can’t remember my father being But you know, maybe my bias was that Eisner took the masked pessimistic or down in the mouth. Maybe a couple occasions like character of The Clock and put it to good use with The Spirit. when he left Quality, when there was bad blood between him and I wrote him an e-mail and said, “I’ve recently been looking for Busy Arnold. After he left Quality, I have no recollection of a reference material about George Brenner, who worked for Busy relationship between them at all. Otherwise he was very upbeat. I Arnold at Quality and eventually went to Dell. The primary thought he was intelligent and had a phenomenal work ethic. He purpose of this is to develop a history about my father for my was committed to his profession and worked at it for sometimes children. Any information you can direct me to would be greatly long, arduous hours. Football really did occupy an awful lot of his appreciated.” On July 14, 2003, Eisner wrote back: time. He was also a boxing fan, and we used to go to the Golden Gloves in Madison Square Garden every year and had ringside JOHN: Nice to hear from you. I’m afraid I can’t give you seats. Physically, he was a good five-ten, five-eleven. very much except for a foggy memory about our business relationship. I didn’t have a social relationship with George I have one photo of my father in this book… he’s playing cards. because he was in Stamford and I was in New York. We He was with his brothers-in-law at the time. It’s one of the few talked often on the phone... he was Busy’s editor when I pictures I have. When I sold my house after my wife died, I gave hooked up and our conversations centered around alterall of my photos to one of my daughters. ations of the comics. I found him easy to work with and I MK: How many of his comics have you read? cannot remember any incidents that could be called “outstanding.” George seemed professional enough to me BRENNER: I have one comic that I bought in Los Angeles and while we did not share the same philosophy about probably thirty years ago, when I saw it in a comic book store, and comics his judgment about practical matters appeared I think I paid $19 for it. The reason I bought it is because it has him sound as I remember. You might try Gil Fox he was local listed in the credits as the editor of Quality Comics. I’ve got the there and I believe might have spent some time with him business card and that comic book and that’s really about what it socially. GOOD LUCK, WILL EISNER boils down to. I used to have some original comic book covers, the MK: What else have you found?

BRENNER: I guess I’d call it public information, because everything I found was on the Internet. So I just kept making copies of things I found that were different and put it all into a binder. As I said, I wanted my kids to have a better appreciation of their grandfather.

artwork that was done, particularly from Dell. They were doing it in oil on board. He would bring them home—Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse—God only knows what happened to that stuff. It’s all gone.

MK: Do you remember him bringing any art home from Quality?

BRENNER: He did one thing from Quality that I kept—and once

The Clock Strikes!

45

In The Spirit Of—The Spirit A splash and an action page, both probably by Brenner, but at a slightly late date, when The Clock had changed to a Spirit-style, Eisner-influenced type of mask. Busy Arnold may have encouraged this, since he had earlier commissioned artist/writer Jack Cole to create yet another Spirit clone, “Midnight.” This was apparently Arnold’s oblique way of ensuring that Eisner didn’t stray from the Quality reservation: if Eisner left, there’d still be several Spirit-style heroes at the company. Thanks to Alarm Clock blog and Four-Color Shadows blog, respectively. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Brenner was not above an in-joke about his higher-profile colleague. In Crack Comics #25 (Sept. 1942), his young sidekick Butch wryly says she should’ve teamed up with The Spirit instead of The Clock. The Clock’s response: “The Spirit—BAH!”

again I don’t know where the heck I lost this—he did a Christmas card and it must have been maybe a foot, foot-and-a-half wide.

Maybe six or eight inches tall. And he drew it. It had all the characters: Lady Luck, Plastic Man, Blackhawk, all of them strung across it. At the top it said “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” and I believe it said “from Busy Arnold,” and Busy Arnold gave that out.

MK: [Artist] Vernon Henkel said [in A/E #48], “This guy could draw like that?”… meaning it seemed like he was nervous or had a shake. Does that ring with you in any way?

BRENNER: No, not at all. My father had a drawing board at home and he would work at night. I can remember him sitting there and I never saw anything like that.

MK: What did your mother do after your father’s death?

BRENNER: My mother sold the house in Greenwich and we moved back with her family in Brooklyn. My father met my mother through a mutual friend. I think she went to Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. I knew she went to St. John’s University. She

was an art teacher at St. Anthony’s Grammar School in Brooklyn.

She taught art, and when she got married and had me, she stopped teaching. She went back to work after my father died. She had to. I know she worked for Westclox for a while. My mother lived very comfortably. She moved in with her sister and they moved back to Long Island. She must be dead ten or twelve years now.

When I was going to high school, I had part-time jobs: I worked for a dog groomer, and at Bonds, a men’s clothing store in Manhattan. I got a job at Al Paul Lefton Advertising and I thought maybe I’d go into the art world. I had a scholarship to Pratt, but when I was with Al Paul Lefton there was a guy by the name of Carson, a great guy, the art director, and he dropped dead at his desk in the middle of the day. That left such an impression that I thought, “I never want to go into this business.”

I was in Greenwich High School when my father passed and was on the football team. One day when my father was in the hospital I said to the coach, “I’m not going to practice today; I’m going to go up and see my father.” I was carrying my cleats and went up to the hospital to his oxygen tent and he looked at me and said, “Why aren’t you playing football?”

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A Son’s Remembrance Of George Brenner

When we got back to Brooklyn, I finished high school at Saint Francis Prep and the family moved from Brooklyn to Babylon, Long Island. We lived out on the Island for many years. I went to Providence College and graduated in 1959. I got married in 1961 and was married 49 years until five years ago when my wife died.

We had five children; the oldest is now 52 and lives in Boston. My youngest son has his own business and works in pharmaceutical, doing clinical studies and audits. I have one daughter who’s in medical sales, another daughter in Austin, Texas, and a daughter in North Jersey who works in insurance.

I started my career in pharmaceuticals and went from there to automotive, then out on my own for fifteen years as a consultant, which I loved. I moved around a little bit, New York, New Jersey, lived in Florida for about a year-and-a-half/two years. I didn’t like it, so we came back to New

Running Out “The Clock” (Left:) A “Clock” splash page from Crack Comics #20 (Jan. 1942) and (above) a Spirit-masked “Clock” panel from Crack #30 (Sept. 1942). Although his style matured somewhat, Brenner drew the feature from first to nearly last… though Fran Matera did illustrate at least the final one, in Crack #35 (Fall 1944).

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

…And Who, Disguised As “Wayne Reid”…

Among other Quality features drawn (and often written) by George Brenner—under the pen name “Wayne Reid”—were “Bozo the Robot” and “The Ghost of Flanders,” a Captain America type. The “Bozo” splash is from Smash Comics #25 (Aug. 1941), courtesy of the “Quality Companion Companion” blog, while the “Ghost of Flanders” art is from an unidentified issue of Hit Comics, as salvaged by Steven Thompson’s Four-Color Shadows site. “Ghost” ran from Hit #18 (Dec. ’41) through #25 (Dec. ’42). [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The Clock Strikes!

711’s Destiny A half-century before killing super-heroes became fashionable, the masked avenger known as “711” bit the dust on the last page of his feature story in Police Comics #15 (Jan. 1943)—and what’s more, Brenner replaced him in the next issue with the super-powered “Destiny,” who eventually brought 711’s killer to justice in Police #17! Scans courtesy of John Brenner.

Also seen is Brenner’s splash page for the first “Destiny” story in Police #16 (Feb. ’43). His unique “super-power” was occult trances that “whisked him to the scene of the crime.” [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Jersey. The whole time I was a professional student, and eventually I got my Ph.D., which helped me a lot when I started my own business. That was the primary reason for getting the Ph.D. So how much of the art found its way into my DNA? I did it a lot. In grammar school I was very active in drawing. Less so by college. I laid out some yearbooks and did artwork. Now it’s onand-off. I do watercolors; I’m very traditional in my approach. I moved into a new house and I built a room specifically to help conjure the motivation for me to sit down and get serious about drawing. I can’t just do it, I have to be in the mood, so I’m waiting for that mood to come along.

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A Son’s Remembrance Of George Brenner

GEORGE BRENNER Checklist [Prepared by John Brenner] George Edward Brenner (Sept. 28, 1908–Sept. 13, 1952) (writer, artist) It’s generally assumed that Brenner both wrote and drew all of his earliest work. Artist Fran Matera revealed in Alter Ego #59 that Brenner had once hired him to ghost “The Clock.” The change was apparent in the strip, beginning about the time of the introduction of The Clock’s kid sidekick, Butch (Crack Comics #21, Feb. 1942). This probably also coincided with an increase in Brenner’s editorial duties at Quality Comics. The art in the feature shifts perceptibly from Brenner’s static, mimeographed style to one where characters’ features have more volume and plasticity. Also, the humor and style of Will Eisner’s Spirit crept in, including clever splash pages and a domino mask for The Clock.

When “The Clock” Strikes Twelve…

(Above left:) George Brenner. His son John says that this oddly clipped candid shot might have been taken at a Quality Comics Christmas party.

(Top of page:) Brenner’s “Ghost of Flanders” splash panel from an issue of Hit Comics. Thanks to Four-Color Shadows website.

(Above right:) The final page of Brenner’s “Clock” story from Quality’s Feature Funnies #9 (June 1938) recycled the artwork from the hero’s first appearance, in Comic Magazine Co.’s Funny Picture Stories #1 (Nov. 1936). Additional text and art were added to flesh the story out. Thanks to John B. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The Clock Strikes!

Brenner’s pen name, “Wayne Reid,” was inspired by his paternal grandmother, Jane Reid (from his father’s obituary). Also, his pen name “Scott Sheridan” was inspired by his own mother’s maiden name.

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Hugh Hazzard and Bozo the Robot: Smash Comics #1-41 (Aug. 1939–March 1943) Abdul the Arab: Smash Comics #4-10 (Nov. 1939–May 1940) Lone Star Rider: Smash Comics #2 (Sept. 1939)

COMICOGRAPHY:

711: Police Comics #1–15 (Aug. 1941–Jan. 1943)

Comics Magazine Company:

Ghost of Flanders: Hit Comics #18–25 (Dec. 1941–Dec. 1942)

The Clock: Funny Pages, Vol. 1, #6–11 (Nov. 1936–June 1937); Funny Picture Stories #1–2 (Nov. 1936–Dec. 1936)

Just ‘n’ Right: Doll Man Quarterly #1 (Winter 1941) Destiny: Police Comics #15–36 (Jan. 1943–Nov. 1944)

Quality Comics: The Clock: Feature Funnies #3–20 (Dec. 1937–May 1939); Feature Comics #21-31 (June 1939–April 1940); Crack Comics #1-35 (May 1940–Autumn 1944)

Unknown Westerns Publisher: Writer (1949–50) Dell Comics:

The Hawk: Feature Funnies #2 (Nov. 1937) Clip Chance: Feature Funnies #7–16, Smash Comics #1–15 (April 1938–Oct. 1940)

Editor (1951-52) [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Brenner probably scripted most of the stories he drew.]

Quality Was A “Clip” Joint (Left:) In the pseudonymously credited “Clip Chance,” Brenner created a character that allowed him the vicarious pleasure of playing an all-American sports star. From Smash Comics #7 (Feb. 1940); thanks to John B. (Right:) Was Brenner just having a private joke with the fact that, in this story, Bozo was the name of the robot, not the clown? And note the reference to him as “Iron Man” at story’s end. Brenner probably wrote as well as drew this tale, as he did most of his work. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

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The Golden Age Super-Hero That Never Was! MARVIN LEVY & The 1942 “BILL OF RIGHTS”

O

Introduction by Roy Thomas

ne ambition of most fledgling comic book artists is, and probably always was, to “catch lightning in a bottle” by creating a feature that garners fame and at least a slight taste of fortune—like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster with “Superman” in 1938—Bob Kane (albeit shortchanging Bill Finger) with “Batman” in 1939—and so on.

Comics artist Marvin Levy (1925-2012) is remembered primarily for his humor work for Feature, Spark, Frank, Promotional Publishing, Pines, etc. (See his interview by Jim Amash in Alter Ego #75, and his tribute/obituary in #110.) Still, when he entered the field in the early 1940s, super-heroes were the name of the game; so he wrote and drew several such stories and submitted them as samples to comics shops like Funnies, Inc., and Harry “A” Chesler.

Marvin Levy in uniform in 1943, age 18½, while in training as a rifleman at Fort McClellan, Alabama.

illos for our letters section, for adding vintage-style tones to it. In fact, Sarge got so enthusiastic that he even composed and colored a sort of “cover” for what could’ve been an entire issue of Bill of Rights & Liberty Belle Comics, as seen below. After you peruse that—turn the page for the 75-years-late four-color debut of “Bill of Rights”…!

One such, done in 1942, was the ten-page origin tale of a patriotically garbed mystery-man with the clever masked monicker “Bill of Rights.” The name of his equally colorful ladyfriend, introduced in that same yarn, would turn out to have considerably more mileage: “Liberty Belle.” If a publisher had rushed 17-yearold Marv’s story into print, the DC heroine of that name, who’d debut in Joe Simon & Jack Kirby’s Boy Commandos #1 (Winter 1943) and who’s had a second life since her 1981 induction into the All-Star Squadron, might well have been forced to adopt a different secret identity!

Back in 2007, Marv gave me his enthusiastic blessing to publish that story; but alas, I didn’t get around to it before he passed away.

His widow, Mrs. Barbara Levy, has renewed that permission; and we’re pleased and honored to present the complete adventure here for the first time ever in print, as a tribute to the memory of a talented cartoonist.

Oh, and since, like nearly all comic book tales of that era, “Bill of Rights” was meant to be printed in color, we’re thankful to Randy Sargent, who’s colored many of Shane Foley’s “maskot”

Marv & Barbara Levy in a cartoon (by Marv) that they sent Ye Editor some years back.

Mock-up cover of a Bill of Rights comic, done by Randy Sargent, utilizing the art of Marvin Levy. Colors by Sarge. [Art on this and succeeding nine pages © Mrs. Barbara Levy.]

The Golden Age Super-Hero That Never Was

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Marvin Levy & The 1942 “Bill of Rights”

The Golden Age Super-Hero That Never Was

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Marvin Levy & The 1942 “Bill of Rights”

The Golden Age Super-Hero That Never Was

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Marvin Levy & The 1942 “Bill of Rights”

The Golden Age Super-Hero That Never Was

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Marvin Levy & The 1942 “Bill of Rights”

The Golden Age Super-Hero That Never Was

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Marvin Levy & The 1942 “Bill of Rights”

P.S.: In 1941, for Lloyd Jacquet’s Funnies, Inc., shop, Marv Levy had also created a prospective (but likewise never-published) feature starring a hero called “Mann Mountain.” Who knows—maybe one of these days, we’ll toss that Golden Age goodie at you, to boot!

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Hot Chicks (Above:) This unpublished EC cover was painted in the 1950s by renowned Italian illustrator and comic book artist Walter Molino. Was it too horrifying even for EC? [Image © Estate of Walter Molino; CSS logo TM & © William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

The EC Variants?

by Michael T. Gilbert

I

magine you’re a fan of EC comics—Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt, and all the rest. You love the stories and each cover is burned into your brain. And then imagine that one day you wind up accidentally stumbling onto a cache of forgotten EC covers, created in the 1950s during the company’s golden era.

Unpublished covers! Well, no need to imagine. According to one collector, that’s exactly what happened!

The gentleman (who prefers to remain anonymous for legal reasons) states that he purchased them in 1993, little more than a year after EC publisher Bill Gaines passed away.

The man put down a bid of $335 at a blind auction, and won the contents of an abandoned storage locker. The items were sold to pay off back storage fees. When the shed was unlocked, it was empty except for a single overstuffed recliner, a lamp, and a large art flat file. Printed covers and original paintings, untouched for almost 60 years, lay hidden inside the file.

The owner, a comic collector, tried to find where the art had been printed, but failed. By then he knew he’d found something extraordinary, but kept his discovery under wraps for two more decades, fearing possible legal complications. Recently he decided to share these images with Alter Ego. Though unable to personally verify his story, I will suggest that the covers themselves speak volumes!

Crime Time!

Unlike any of EC’s published covers, this Molino Crime SuspenStories #6 cover (above) featured graphic depictions of children being harmed. More typical is the Crime SuspenStories #22 image (at left) of a loving husband and wife planning matrimonial mayhem! [Art © Estate of Walter Molino; CSS logo TM & © William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.]

Unanswered Questions!

Even so, everything that follows should be taken with a grain of salt. Even assuming one takes the owner at his word, there remain a number of puzzling questions, foremost of which is why Gaines would commission the unpublished covers in the first place?

One noted Gaines biographer recently offered his theory “off the record”: “By the time of the Kefauver hearings and the institution of the Comics Code, Bill was incredibly frustrated. No matter how tame he made the books, it was never enough. He truly thought they were out to get him. This, of course, was more than mere paranoia on his part. I theorize that Gaines commissioned the covers as a release of sorts, a form of therapy.”

“Once Mad took off, Gaines had the money to indulge his whims. Bill was a wonderfully eccentric guy. He loved gourmet food, exotic travel, fine wines… the works! And if he felt like commissioning covers he loved without any interference from the bluenoses, well, why not? It was a fun hobby, and a chance to

The EC Variants?

Wonderful Weirdness Molino was equally adept at science-fiction, as seen by the two Weird Science covers depicted above. And does anyone know which Ray Bradbury stories the cover illustrations for Weird Science #19 and Shock SuspenStories #6 referred to? As for the Tales from the Crypt #40 re-do—well, she’s not the first bride who really got burned up at hubby! [Art © Estate of Walter Molino; WS, SSS, & TFTC logos TM & © William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

quietly thumb his nose at [Dr. Fredric] Wertham and the hated Comics Code.”

If that’s the case, Gaines picked the perfect artist to collaborate with. Walter Molino (Nov. 5, 1915 - Dec. 8, 1997) was a brilliant artist, one whose extreme sense of drama influenced the great EC artist Frank Frazetta. Molino began his career as an illustrator and caricaturist in 1935 for the Italian newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, as well as various children’s magazines. By the 1940s his covers graced many popular magazines. He also drew comics, including stories for the woman’s magazine, Grand Hotel.

It’s unknown how Gaines and Molino met, but it’s obvious that something clicked, as the covers they produced were EC masterworks. Once the art was shot, stats of old logos were added, with the original numbering intact. Since these were for Gaines’ personal use, there was no need to redo the numbering.

Many of the covers are shocking, even more extreme than the original published versions. This may have been a case of Gaines overcompensating for the Comics Code censorship he was forced to endure. Take, for instance, the truly horrific image of burning baby chicks on the cover of Crime SuspenStories #5 (see p. 61). What a scene!

Or the cover to issue #6 (p. 62) depicting a half dozen kids getting crushed by a car. I can’t recall any printed EC cover depicting graphic images of cruelty to children. Gaines and Feldstein liked pushing the limits of bad taste, but even they would never risk scarring their younger readership. But since these covers weren’t for publication, anything went—and did!

Making An Impact Walter Molino’s art certainly had Impact, as seen by the art on this page. And even EC’s staid medical comic, M.D., gets a bit of excitement in this new Molino cover. As for Aces High #3, well, the sky’s the limit! [Art © Estate of Walter Molino; Impact, M.D., & AH logos TM & © William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.]

The EC Variants?

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A New Direction!

Looking at the covers, we find a surprising amount of “New Direction” titles represented. This suggests the possibility that some of these were commissioned around 1955, when Bill was still publishing EC’s last-ditch New Direction titles (a short-lived line of watered-down titles that they hoped would get past the Comics Code censors). Titles like Impact, M.D., and Aces High doled out well-crafted, but tame versions of their earlier crime and horror titles.

The original Impact covers featured uninspired Jack Davis images. One depicted a lighthouse keeper searching for a lost child, while another pictured a little girl selling lemonade. Seriously, guys? Lemonade!? By contrast, the reworked Impact covers show what Gaines and Feldstein might have done freed from the Code restrictions. Molino’s covers all live up the title as they gleefully depict cars crushed by killer horses, speeding trolleys demolishing autos, and so on!

Molino also revisited older “New Trend” titles. Classic titles like Weird Science and Tales from the Crypt were re-imagined to great effect. One can almost picture Gaines sitting on his overstuffed recliner and chuckling at the gruesome painting of the burning bride from the new Tales from the Crypt #40 (p. 63). Pow! Take that, Comics Code!

However, not all the new covers were so grim. Molino channeled EC’s black humor for his Crime SuspenStories #22 re-do (p. 62). This crime comic depicts the classic EC cliché of a man and his gorgeous wife planning mutual murder. Only here, Molino adds one more element: the family dog intently reading a book about exotic poisons. You can almost picture an EC shock ending with Fido poisoning both humans in the end!

Surprise!

Molino’s image of a man landing on a goose on Impact #4’s cover must’ve caught both by surprise! But not as surprising as the chilling image of a little girl clinging to a car in issue #3—or the surprise to both horse and driver on the cover above! [Art © Estate of Walter Molino; Impact logo TM & © William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Or how about the equally amusing image from Crime SuspenStories #2, depicting a hunting dog hunting its master?

“Man’s best friend”? Not at EC! The way Molino drew the faces of the shooting victim and his companion is priceless!

Judging from the files, Gaines had only one cover of each printed for his personal use, stored in manila envelopes in the top drawer of the flat file. Molino’s original paintings were carefully wrapped in brown paper and placed in separate drawers below.

So why did Gaines keep these alternate covers a secret? In later years Bill may have felt slightly embarrassed by his indulgence.

This could explain why the paintings weren’t in a vault with the other EC artwork, surfacing only after Bill died and his storage payments stopped.

Or there’s one more possible theory: that the whole “unpublished art” story was merely an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by some wag with a vivid imagination and access to Photoshop. If it is, I think Mr. Gaines might’ve approved.

After all, Mad’s maddest publisher always loved a good joke!

Till next time…

Fido’s Packing Heat!

Not every Molino painting was as amusing as his Crime SuspenStories #2 cover, seen above right. His Crime SuspenStories #9 cover (featuring a bank clerk throwing burning coffee in a robber’s face) was atypical for EC. And his Shock SuspenStories #16 re-do is truly shocking, with art reminiscent of EC’s later painted PictoFiction covers. [Art © Estate of Walter Molino; CSS logo TM & © William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.]

The EC Variants?

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I’m Forever Blowing (Up) Bubbles (Above:) This poor gal’s about to get her romantic bubble burst... literally! [© 2017 Grand Hotel.] You can see more of Molino’s amazing art at: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152924521672066&set=oa.9 31102893602685&type=3&theater

People… People Who Need People…

(Top center:) Molino by Molino—a self-caricature.

(Above:) His takes on Paul Newman and Dean Martin. Source and dates uncertain. [Art © Estate of Walter Molino or successors in interest.]

Egyptian, Die Nasty!

Some Like It Even Hotter!

(Left:) Molino’s drew comic book stories for magazines like Grand Hotel.

This page from 1952 features Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis! [© Grand Hotel or successors in interest.]

(Above:) Molino illustrated dramatic comic book stories, too, such as this one featuring a reincarnated Egyptian! Source and date uncertain. [© Estate of Walter Molino or successors in interest.]

April Fool!

Rascally Roy here! We hope you got a kick out of Michael’s little April Fool’s joke. But, just to be clear, we were joking! To the best of our knowledge, Bill Gaines never actually hired anyone to paint any phony EC covers… though Michael found it fun to imagine what might have happened if he had!

However, everything Michael wrote about Walter Molini (aside from his imaginary EC work!) is absolutely true. Too bad ol’ Walter wasn’t on Bill Gaines’ Rolodex back in the ’50s.

EC history might have been very different…!

Comic Fandom Archive

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TED WHITE On Comics Part 1 “The Boy With 10,000 Comic Books!”

Introduction

by Bill Schelly

B

orn in 1938, Ted White was a central figure in science-fiction fandom and fanzine-publishing since he was a teenager, ultimately winning a Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1968. Beginning in the 1960s, he wrote or co-wrote over a dozen SF novels, such as The Jewels of Elsewhen (1967), No Time Like Tomorrow (1969) and Trouble on Project Ceres (1971).

As a youth, however, Ted was a fervent comic book fan, and has done a lot of interesting things in comics fandom, much of it in the 1950s and 1960s.

Since comics are our bailiwick at A/E, I asked Ted if he would agree to an interview focusing exclusively on his comics-related interests and achievements. Happily, he agreed, and we had two long interview sessions by telephone in November of 2014. (Apologies to Ted for the time it has taken to get this into print!)

Among the topics we discussed for this multipart series were the story about him in the Washington Daily News in the early 1950s, titled “The Boy with 10,000 Comic Books!,” his writing “The Spawn of M. C. Gaines” (the second installment of the “All in Color for a Dime” series in the fanzine Xero), his involvement with EC fandom, interviewing Stan Lee for Castle of Frankenstein magazine, writing the 1968 paperback book Captain America: The Great American Gold Steal, and editing Heavy Metal magazine in 1979 and 1980. We begin, however, with a discussion of Ted White’s boyhood as a comic book reader and collector.

This interview was transcribed by Brian K. Morris, and was checked by Ted before publication.

BILL SCHELLY: I see that you and Superman were thrust into an unsuspecting world in the same year, 1938.

TED WHITE: Yeah, I don’t know when in 1938 “Superman” was first published. Do you know?

BS: Yeah, I believe it came out in April of 1938. Action Comics #1 is dated June. What day were you actually born?

WHITE: I preceded it by a couple months. I was born on February 4, 1938.

BS: Okay, so what that means to me is that you started becoming conscious of comics and things like that toward the end of the World War II. WHITE: I tried to remember exactly when I first became aware of comic books. I was aware of other kids having comics, and we kids

“Men Of Tomorrow” – 1938 Edition Ted White was Guest of Honor at the 2016 PulpFest in Columbus, Ohio. Photograph: William Lampkin. Special thanks to Mike Chomko of PulpFest.

Ted and Action Comics #1 debuted within a couple of months of each other, in February and April of 1938, respectively, although Action #1 is dated June. [Cover TM & © DC Comics.]

traded them around among each other. There was no real sense of ownership. You just got it, you read it, and then you passed it on.

BS: How about if we get a little family background before we get into the comics, just to “set the scene,” as they say?

WHITE: Sure. What would you like to know?

BS: Where did you grow up?

WHITE: I grew up in Falls Church, Virginia. I was born in Washington, DC, but lived my entire childhood in Falls Church. It was a very small town, semi-rural. The street in front of my house in my earliest memories was two dirt ruts with grass growing between them. My family bought 50 acres of land with two other families and split it in thirds. We had the middle third. And up the hill, there was a family that had the upper third, and then down the hill there was a family that had the bottom third, and theirs was a farm, complete with cattle. When I was little, one of the first things I learned to do as a toddler was to climb a tree if a cow got too close to me, because I didn’t want to get stepped on.

BS: What did your father do for a living?

WHITE: At the time I was born, he worked at the general store in Falls Church, which subsequently became a hardware store and still exists. But somewhere around 1940 or thereabouts, right before World War II, he went to work for the Navy Yard in their photo

Comics Fandom Archive

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The Once & Future Mickey (Left:) The “Mickey Mouse in the World of Tomorrow” storyline to which Ted White refers originally ran in the newspaper Sunday comic strip from July 31 to Nov. 11, 1944 (as generous supplier Art Lortie informs us), and was later reprinted in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories from Dell, where Ted read it.

(Below:) Seen here is a page from a later chapter, in WDC&S Vol. 6, #11 (aka #71), Aug. 1946. Script by Bill Walsh; art by Floyd Gottfredson; inks by Dick Moores.

Apparently this is the first storyline in which Mickey gave up wearing his original trademark short pants.

One minor correction to Ted’s memory bank: It was an invisible cloak, not a jacket, that Mickey donned to go into the future. [TM & © Disney Productions.]

lab. He was a photographer. Once in a while, he’d bring me home photographs of torpedoes or bombs or things like that, just for me to look at.

BS: And what about siblings?

WHITE: None. I was an only child and, frankly, I was always kind of happy about that.

BS: Where would you have gotten your hands on comics, in terms of buying them from a store around there?

WHITE: Of course, the first ones I got my hands on were from neighborhood kids. But we had a center of town where the general store was. There was a drug store and a movie theatre and a fiveand-dime and other stuff like that. And both the drug store and the five-and-dime had good comic racks. And the grade school that I went to is just up the street from all of that. So when I would get out of school in the afternoon, I would just walk down a block to the drug store and maybe get myself a five-cent Coke or something and browse the comic books.

BS: Very convenient.

WHITE: I remember one time, I was parked in front of the comic book rack in the five-and-dime, sitting on the floor, reading them, and I became aware that someone was standing over me. I looked up and it was my mother, who was very angry that I had not come home from school.

BS: Well, the comics were just too compelling. What were the first comics that you remember reading?

WHITE: I know that some of the earliest comics that made a strong impression on me were from the early ’40s. I was probably a few years old when I saw them. They were Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories with the “Mickey Mouse” serials. There was a “Mickey Mouse” serial where he puts on this jacket, and it puts him in the

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The U.S. Government Had A Justice Department, And DC Had… Ted says he first encountered “The Justice Society of America” around the time of two 1947 issues of All-Star Comics: #36 (Aug.-Sept.), depicted above, and #37 (Oct.-Nov). Cover art probably by Irwin Hasen. At other times, though, Ted has stated that his earliest encounter with the JSA was All-Star #33 (Feb.-March 1947), wherein the heroes battled Solomon Grundy. No matter… they were all primo 1947 issues! [TM & © DC Comics.]

Ted White On Comics—Part 1

future. I thought that was incredibly neat. And there were other serials that were also sort of fantastical or sciencefictional. The first time I encountered sciencefiction, I recognized it as something that I was already in tune with. I have no idea why or where it starts, but somewhere near the beginning, it’s got to be those “Mickey Mouse” serials, which I think dated from like 1941, ’42, something like that.

BS: Because there was time travel and maybe some other— WHITE: I think there was invisibility in one. Serials were really interesting to me at the time. I don’t know what I’d think of them if I read them now, but I think I’d probably still like them.

BS: Of course, there’s science-fiction in “Superman,” although, as you once said, it’s very bad science-fiction. But nevertheless, Superman is a science-fictional concept.

WHITE: It was created by two science-fiction fans. What can you expect? [mutual chuckling] I never thought of “Superman” as being real science-fiction. I always thought of it as being part of—oh, what to call it? Pop cult science-fiction. Not quite like Buck Rogers, but in that—I mean, all of the early super-hero comic books, the ones starting with “Superman” and for the next three-to-five years, they were all sort of science-fiction on one level or another, because they were about things that weren’t possible. But at the same time, they didn’t have any of science-fiction’s rigor. They weren’t even necessarily self-consistent, so they never struck me as being quite the same as real science-fiction, which, when I encountered it, I recognized immediately for what it was.

week in the summertime between first and second grade. They thought I might have rheumatic fever, but I didn’t. They had me in the hospital for observation because I was sick with something that turned out to be less serious. For the first part of that week, I was in a private room and I was terribly homesick. A woman came around with a tray of maybe a half dozen or a dozen comic books.

I got to select a bunch of those and keep them and read them, and that helped. One of them was Batman. I don’t think I’d seen Batman before that. Before then, I hadn’t seen the—what can I call them?—the more serious, the darker comics. I’d only seen the funny animal and the generally humorous comics. So I can date that to that.

BS: Hm, let’s see. That would be the summer of 1945. That’s a good touchstone.

WHITE: I discovered “The Justice Society,” or All-Star Comics, when I was nine. I was sent to a summer camp called Camp Goodwill in south-central Virginia and spent two weeks there. And I was homesick. Every day, I’d send a postcard to my parents, saying, “Please come and get me.” [mutual chuckling] One of the things we did at camp every day was board a bus to a nearby lake, where we would have swimming lessons. At that time, I did not know how to swim, and I got pretty frustrated with their attempts to teach me. (I learned to swim a year later.) Once we got to the lake, I’d go off by myself and explore the woods around the lake, anything to avoid the swimming. One time, somebody else left a comic book with their towel. While they were off swimming, I read it. That comic book was a “Justice Society of America.” And it was All-Star Comics somewhere in the middle-30s, like maybe #35 or #36, something like that, around the time that they had the Injustice Society. It was the one that had both Superman and Batman in it as guests. [NOTE: That was All-Star #36. —Bill.]

BS: What it was about the JSA that you particularly loved? Why was it a favorite?

WHITE: I think it was just the whole concept of matching up all these different, separate super-heroes and putting them in one team. I thought that was a really keen idea at the time. In the ’40s I was a big fan of the DC super-hero titles, but I was more a fan of the All-American line than the DC line; that is to say “Flash,” “Wonder Woman,” and “Green Lantern,” all those in Comic Cavalcade rather than World’s Finest.

BS: Why “The Flash” and “Green Lantern”?

WHITE: I was a fan of the artists. I noticed the artists—Paul Reinman and people like that—Al Toth doing “The Atom,” Kubert doing “Hawkman,” Lee Elias doing “The Flash.” In some cases, I actually knew their names, anywhere where they signed their names, but I was a style detective. I recognized the styles pretty easily. The only thing that threw me off was that, in the late ’40s, DC would have different pencillers and inkers, and that would throw me off because I would see elements of two different artists and have trouble figuring out which was which.

BS: [chuckles] Yeah, they started doing that more in the postwar era.

WHITE: I like Wayne Boring’s art, but I was not fond of the other “Superman” artists. On “Batman,” I was a fan of Dick Sprang’s work, particularly his earlier work, which is much more detailed than it was later.

BS: Right. Well, as you were getting a little bit older and so forth, I know that you became interested in “The Justice Society of America.” But before “JSA,” were you getting into some of the other super-heroes?

BS: Mm-mm, I think he was the best “Bob Kane” to ever come along. [chuckles]

WHITE: When I was seven years old, I was in the hospital for a

WHITE: Yeah, although Jerry Robinson really kind of set the tone, created all the important artistic memes, the things like the circle

Comics Fandom Archive

with the black frame around it. You know, you put a circle in the middle of a square panel and surround it with black so that it becomes a spotlight on something.

BS: Right, all those “Batman” comics had circle panels at that time.

WHITE: Yeah. Well, that was Jerry Robinson. He’s the one who created that. I have a very, very low opinion of Bob Kane. I don’t think Bob Kane was responsible for anything that was good in “Batman.” He was a terrible artist.

BS: I have a note to myself to ask you about the childhood trauma when your mother burned your comic books. You’ve told it elsewhere, but could you recount it for us?

WHITE: Okay. This would have been around the time I was seven, I think. I believe it was also during the summer between first and second grade. I was part of a summer swimming program through my school that involved us going to the school and then being picked up by a bus and taken into Washington, DC, to a hotel that had a basement swimming pool where we did our splashing around. I couldn’t swim, and one particular day—this is a middle of the day thing—I think we were like picked up around ten in the morning and brought back maybe around noon or one o’clock in the afternoon and then left off at the school and I was supposed to come home. In those days, I walked everywhere, so the school was about a mile from my house. Instead of walking straight home from the school, I went down the street that went from the school heading north on that street a bit. I’m no longer aware of why I was headed in that direction.

Midway along that route, I encountered a friend of mine coming the other way. In his bicycle basket, he had several comic books. I talked him out of at least one and maybe all of them, I can’t remember now. One of them was the first Wonder Woman comic book I’d ever seen. I started reading it as I was walking back towards my house, and I walked slower and slower as I got more into the comic.

The comic just struck me as bizarre. I knew even then that there was some strangeness, some kinkiness here, even I couldn’t put my finger on it at that age as to what it was. But there was all of this bondage and other stuff. Even though he was a psychiatrist, [Charles] Moulton must have been semicrazy. I had the feeling that, basically, he was kinky.

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BS: Yeah, yeah.

WHITE: He probably liked to be tied up and whipped by a woman or something, hard to know. Anyway, aspects of that came through. The first story in that first issue of Wonder Woman was all about Mars, the God of War. It was this little dwarf-like guy. So I’m walking down the street that would eventually take me to my house, moving very slowly and probably about somewhere around two-thirds of the way through the comic when I look up and there’s my mother coming towards me. And she’s not happy because I am at least an hour late.

BS: Uh-oh.

WHITE: And she saw my problem as being comic books. At that time, I had—I wouldn’t even call it a collection. I had a little stash of maybe a dozen comics; most of them didn’t even have covers.

But she was so mad at me that she took the Wonder Woman comic, and any others that I had with me, and the ones that I had saved up at home, took them out back and burned them all in our incinerator.

BS: Oh, God. WHITE: This really, profoundly upset me. It upset me on the level that the sanctity of my ownership of something had been messed with, you know? And I vowed then and there that she, or any other person, would never take anything away from me again like that.

BS: It’s almost like a scene from a comic book where young Bruce Wayne vows that someday, he’ll fight crime.

A Cavalcade Of Comics!

Ted was a particular fan of the All-American line of characters, as seen in Comic Cavalcade. Two covers shown: #16 (Aug.-Sept. 1946), with art by E. E. Hibbard, and #26 (April-May 1948) with art by Bob Oksner. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Ted White On Comics—Part 1

WHITE: Persistence. [mutual laughter] As soon as I had the money to do it—and sometimes I would skip milk at school lunch just so I could save a nickel up towards buying a comic book. I was primarily into the DC super-hero comics, but I have to say I was also into most of the other DC comics. You know, Real Fact Comics and all of those comics that were devoted to Western movie stars, you know, all of that.

I would say I bought the vast majority of the DC comics. I also bought the “Captain Marvel” stuff: Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., The Marvel Family, and all that, Whiz Comics. Initially, those were most of what I had. But as time went on, as I got older—you know, I was ten in 1948, so by 1948, I was starting to pay attention to other comic books as well. But I didn’t get into ECs until 1950 or ’51 and I’d almost stopped buying comic books at the point that I got into ECs. The reason I didn’t discover ECs earlier than I did was they were not distributed in Falls Church. I had to go about four or five miles away to a place called Rosslyn to find them. By then, I was a maven of newsstands. I knew every newsstand in Northern Virginia, a number in Washington, DC, and some in nearby Maryland. All of this depended on my being able to get around, so as soon as I had a car, I was able to go more widely. But even earlier, though, bicycling and using a motor scooter, I got all over Northern Virginia.

BS: You were also looking for old comics, right?

Mars Ain’t The Kind Of Guy To Raise Your Kids…

With apologies to Bernie Taupin & Elton John. We couldn’t find any mid1940s issues of Wonder Woman (or Sensation Comics) whose lead story starred Mars, God of War, as Ted recalls reading—but maybe the kid he encountered was carrying an “old” comic book, like, say, WW #2 (Fall 1942). Repro’d from the hardcover Wonder Woman Archives, Vol. 2—and we sure wish DC would renew its one-time commitment to the landmark Archives series! Script by William Moulton Marston; art by H.G. Peter.| [TM & © DC Comics.]

WHITE: [chuckles] Yeah, you could see it that way. It’s definitely the beginning of my being a collector of comics, because from that point on, I didn’t have any more coverless comics. I only had new comics that I had bought myself.

BS: The die was cast!

WHITE: I’ll always remember one occasion: I probably had between ten and twenty comics in my new collection. I laid them all out on my bed side-by-side, consecutive issues of the same title next to each other. I looked at them…. and I noticed how the logos were the same, but had different colors, and saw all the consistencies and differences. I really got into it. And I date that as the moment when I started caring about collecting things.

BS: Your mother must have relented on the comic book front.

WHITE: Well, she never tried to do it again. She saw how burning those comics affected me, and respected me enough that she never did that again. There were other punishments in the future, but none that involved taking anything of mine away.

BS: How do we get from that point to “The Boy with 10,000 Comic Books!”?

WHITE: For the old comics, I started out querying friends. Did they have any stashes of comics in their attics or basements?

Sometimes they did, although most of the time there wouldn’t be anything I was interested in. But once in a while, I would find something. When I was in eighth grade, which was 1951, an older kid asked me if I wanted to buy some comic books from him. He sold them to me at the outrageous price of a dollar a copy, which I really had to scrounge for. But he sold me—it wasn’t Superman #1, but I think it was number Superman #2-6, something like that.

BS: Wow. WHITE: I mean, really earlier than anything else I had my hands on at that time. And then, a girl in my seventh grade class had two older brothers who both collected comics, and one of them had a really complete set of All-Star Comics. He allowed me to borrow and read them. And I have to say I was really disappointed.

And I realized I had obviously come in on All-Star Comics at its peak, from #36 on.

BS: Yeah, a lot of people feel the later issues are the best of the All-Stars, especially art-wise. How did you ever get to the point where you had 10,000 comic books, as reported in that Washington Daily News?

All In The Family When Ted White was a fan of the various Fawcett Marvels, he could’ve gotten a dose of all three of them in the likes of The Marvel Family #9 (Feb. 1947), behind this cover by C.C. Beck. Thanks to the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Comics Fandom Archive

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Superman Brings The House Down!

Ted’s search for back issues turned up early issues of Superman, among them #2 (Fall 1939). According to the Grand Comics Database, the cover of #2 is penciled by Joe Shuster and inked by Paul Cassidy.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

WHITE: All right. Well, now see, I have to also say there’s a lot to fill in here. I started building my collection by finding back issues in friends’ basements and stuff like that. But 1951 was a watershed year for me. It was the year I started reading science-fiction magazines, started buying them off the newsstands. This gave me another reason to hit all the local newsstands, because the magazines were not uniformly distributed and you never knew what you’d find when you went into a new newsstand. You might find titles you’d never seen before. This took me into Washington, DC, where there was then a block of Ninth Street which is now completely gone. They built a convention center there, tore the whole block down. There used to be two stores on it, one in the middle and one on the end, owned by two brothers, George and Jake Friend. Jake ran Central Books and that was down at the corner, and George had George Friend’s Book Shop: “Science Fiction Our Specialty.” I initially found these places because I was looking for science-fiction magazines, old science-fiction magazines which I bought in vast quantities as well. I built a complete collection of old science-fiction magazines that way.

Also, when I was in eighth grade, a friend bought me a pulp magazine he thought I might be interested in, which was one of the last issues of The Shadow. It was then about a year or two old. And that turned me on to The Shadow and then subsequently Doc Savage. So I’m looking for Shadow and Doc Savage magazines in these old book stores, the used magazine stores really. And Jake Friend’s Central also carried comic books.

They were six for a quarter, the pulp magazines were three for a quarter. I would go to these stores with my motor scooter once or twice a week, every week, and buy five or ten dollars’ worth, whatever amount of money I had saved up.

BS: You must have had a job.

WHITE: I did. I worked at a stationery store on weekends during the school year, and full weeks in the summer.

BS: So you had extra spending money.

WHITE: I had some. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to do this. And you could find anything in the comic books they had there. I found a whole bunch of comic books from the late ’30s that were all stamped “Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress had dumped them. They were in immaculate condition except for these big rubber stamps across the cover. [chuckles as Bill groans] I saw comics that I didn’t buy because I didn’t recognize their value at the time. In the late ’30s, DC had a movie comic that was illustrated with stills. Every panel was a still. [NOTE: That was Movie Comics. —Bill.] I thumbed through those, but I never bought any of them because they didn’t interest me at the time. Now I’m sorry I didn’t, because I’ve never seen them since. One of the other people who were going in to that store at the same time I was, but from Maryland, was a fellow who became a good friend of mine.

That was Fred von Bernewitz.

Next: Rub two fans together, and you get a fandom! Ted White’s friendship with Fred von Bernewitz, best known for publishing his seminal Complete EC Checklist, leads to further contacts, i.e., EC fandom. Stay tuned!

Bill Schelly’s latest book is John Stanley: Giving Life to Little Lulu (Fantagraphics Books). It includes both Bill’s full biography of the talented Mr. Stanley, and a cornucopia of over 300 illustrations, nearly all in color. Also, his biographies of Otto Binder, Joe Kubert, and Harvey Kurtzman are likewise still in print. Own them all!

A Shadow Of His Former Self Ted also enjoyed reading some of the later pulp adventures of “The Shadow,” when a friend gave him one of the last issues of The Shadow pulp magazine. Shown here are the covers of the penultimate (Vol. 54, #6, Spring 1949) and final (Vol. 55, #1, July 1949) issues, painted by George Rozen. Thanks to Anthony Tollin for the artist ID. [TM and © Advance Magazine Publishers, Inc., d/b/a Condé Nast.]

In Memoriam

Daniel Keyes

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(August 9, 1927–June 15, 2014)

A

by Stephan Friedt

uthor Daniel Keyes passed away from complications of pneumonia at his home in Boca Raton, Florida, on June 15th, 2014. He was best known for his award-winning novel Flowers for Algernon, the story of a young man whose low IQ is temporarily increased to genius after an operation. The book was the basis for the film Charly, starring Cliff Robertson.

The idea for the story came to him while he was commuting on the train in Brooklyn in 1945. He wrote in his 1999 memoir, Algernon, Charly, and I: A Writer’s Journey: “I thought: My education is driving a wedge between me and the people I love. And then I wondered: What would happen if you could increase a person’s intelligence?” Fifteen years later, in 1959, the novella Flowers for Algernon was published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 1960 it was awarded the Hugo award for best short fiction. In 1966 Keyes expanded the novella into a full-fledged novel, and it tied for the Nebula (science-fiction) award for best novel. The movie adaptation, released in 1968, earned Cliff Robertson an Oscar for best actor. The story was also made into a stage play and a dramatic musical and was performed around the world. In 1995 it was released as an audio book narrated by the author.

line, and when Goodman dropped his pulp line and devoted his efforts to paperbacks and men’s magazines, Keyes became an associate editor for Atlas Comics under Stan Lee. To supplement his income, he also wrote scripts for Journey into Unknown Worlds and other Atlas titles. One that he wrote but didn’t submit was a story he’d written called “Brainstorm”—a script that later became the basis for Flowers for Algernon.

In 1955 and 1956 he moonlighted at EC Comics, writing stories for Shock Illustrated and Confessions Illustrated under his own name and the pen names Kris Daniels and A. D. Locke.

Soon afterward, Keyes left editing to try his hand at fashion photography. He also received his license to teach and taught weekdays and wrote on weekends. He continued his education and received his M.A. He added to his works with four more novels and four non-fiction books. He taught creative writing at Wayne State University and in 1966 became an English and Creative Writing Professor at Ohio University. In 1988 he was awarded the “Distinguished Alumnus Medal of Honor.” He was honored with Professor Emeritus status at Ohio University in 2000.

In 1950, a month after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Brooklyn College, he got a job at Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management. He soon became the editor of the pulp Marvel Science Stories. He also did some writing for Goodman’s Timely/Atlas comic book

For additional info visit the site: http://www.danielkeyesauthor.com/dksbio.html Will Murray’s interview with Daniel Keyes appeared in Alter Ego #13.

Daniel Keyes flanked by two samples of his comics-format work: a splash drawn by Basil Wolverton for Timely/Atlas’ Journey into Unknown Worlds #15 (Feb. 1953), and a Reed Crandall-illustrated page from EC’s black-&-white “Picto-Fiction” publication Shock Illustrated #2 (Feb. 1956). The format of the latter was not unlike a comic book, consisting entirely of pictures and lengthy captions. Thanks to Dr. Michael J. Vassallo for the color comics page.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc., & William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc., respectively.]

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In Memoriam

Paul Ryan

(Sept. 23, 1949–March 7, 2016) “Praised By Colleagues Throughout His Career For His Professional Approach To Work”

by Stephan Friedt

P

aul was born and raised in Somerville, Massachusetts. In 1971 he achieved a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Graphic Design from the Massachusetts College of Art. Upon graduation he joined the United States National Guard and attended Massachusetts Military Academy for officer training. He accepted a job in the Graphics Department of Metcalf & Eddy Engineering in Boston and stayed with them for 11 years.

Paul got his break in comics through an “open audition” for Charlton Comics in 1983 with a story he titled “Breed,” which, unfortunately, never saw print with Charlton, but did surface later among other Bullseye stories purchased by Bill Black for Americomics. It was included in AC’s Starmaster #1 (March 1984).

From there, Paul went on to become the assistant to Bob Layton for a year, doing backgrounds.

Paul Ryan and (below left) art representing two of his key contributions to comics: his first splash page for Fantastic Four (#356, Sept. 1991, below left)—and on our next page... Thanks to Stephan Friedt for the photo, and to Barry Pearl for the FF page. [FF splash TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

That led to Paul getting his own assignments at Marvel Comics; his first was inking The Thing #27 (Sept 1985). Paul got to exercise his artistic talents as an illustrator on several Marvel titles, including a Thor graphic novel and the beloved The Amazing SpiderMan Annual #27 (1987), which brought us the wedding of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. Several more titles followed, included his co-creation of D.P. 7 with Mark Gruenwald for Jim Shooter’s New Universe imprint, and later Avengers West Coast.

But Paul is most fondly remembered at Marvel for his long run on Fantastic Four from issue #356 (Sept. 1991) through #414 (July 1996). Altogether, Paul spent 11 exclusive years with Marvel, and also penciled the Spider-Man Sunday strip during this period.

Moving over to DC, he penciled stories for a variety of titles, including contributing to the one-shot Superman: The Wedding Album. Paul and writer David Michelinie are the only professionals to have contributed to both the Spider-Man and Superman wedding books. Later, he returned to Marvel to draw Fantastic Five, and he contributed as a fill-in artist for CrossGen’s titles Ruse and Crux.

After submitting samples to Egmont on a lark (at the suggestion of a fan) for their long running Fantomen (The Phantom) title, Paul soon joined the international cast of artists that made up Team Fantomen. That led to his best-remembered accomplishment, drawing The Phantom newspaper strip. When Phantom artist George Olesen retired in 2005, Jay Kennedy at King Features Syndicate asked Paul to take over the daily strip. When Sunday Phantom artist Graham Nolan left in 2006, Paul added that to his workload. He handled all seven days a week of The Phantom from 2007 until 2011 (July 31), when he decided to cut back and turned the Sunday strip over to Eduardo Barreto. With Barreto’s unexpected death later in 2011, Paul returned to doing both until artist Terry Beatty was brought in to handle the Sunday strip.

Paul died unexpectedly on March 7, 2016, at his home in Hudson, Massachusetts. He has been praised by colleagues throughout his career for his professional approach to his work.

Terry Beatty posted on the Comics Kingdom: Phantom page: Today marks the final Paul Ryan Phantom daily. When I was

In Memoriam

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hired to draw the Sunday strip, Paul had already been drawing the dailies (and for a while, the Sunday, as well) for a good many years. Despite Paul advising me to look at classic Sy Barry Phantom strips for my inspiration, it was Paul’s version I tried to emulate. Though our drawing styles differ to some extent, it seemed to me his Phantom was the current “legit” version, and I tried to emulate the look of the characters he had established. I even switched the way I was coloring Mr. Walker’s hair when Paul informed me it should be brown, not black!

We worked separately—only contacting each other once in a while when we needed to share reference material—and looking back at my comic book convention days, I think we may have just met in passing once or twice. I had liked his comic book work (Fantastic Four, for one example) and had been following his Phantom long before there was any glimmer of a notion that I might be involved with the strip. I regret that I never got to know him better.

Comics Phantom The Phantom comic strip for July 15, 2007. Thanks to Stephan Friedt for the Phantom scan.

[Phantom strip TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

As I was brought in when Eduardo Barreto passed, so my friend Mike Manley will step in for Paul. While we cartoonists are mortal, The Ghost Who Walks must continue to fight piracy and evil—and the adventure must carry on. You’ll like Mike’s work—I’ve seen advance strips and he’s doing a bang-up job—but as Eduardo will always be missed, so we will always miss Paul.

(Thanks to Terry Beatty for permission to reprint his post.)

As Pogo said, “Life ain’t nohow permanent.” Leave it to a comic character to tell us the truth.

http://www.deepwoods.org/paul_ryan.html

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For additional insight into Paul’s world, check out these sites: http://web.archive.org/web/20070405134155/http://www.ffplaza. com/commcenter/interview/ryan.shtml https://www.lambiek.net/artists/r/ryan_paul.htm

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In Memoriam

Ken Barr

(March 17, 1933–March 25, 2016)

K

by Stephan Friedt

enneth (Ken) Barr passed away at the age of 83 in his native country of Scotland. He was best known for his realistic cover images, done in a style similar to James Bama. He got his start in the UK when he moved to London in the 1950s to pursue a career as a commercial artist and began drawing covers and interior illustrations for Nebula Science Fiction magazine. He soon added to his catalog with covers (which included the first 14 issues) for the British digest comic book, D.C. Thomson’s Commando: War Stories in Pictures.

Ken moved to the United States in 1968 and immediately made a name for himself with work for DC Comics, Marvel, and Warren.

At DC he not only did covers, but wrote, drew, and inked a number of stories for titles in DC’s Joe Kubert-edited war line: G.I. Combat, Our Army at War, and Our Fighting Forces. Ken drew the very first story of DC’s “Losers” series, written by Bob Kanigher.

During this same period, he provided covers for Warren Publishing’s Vampirella and Eerie and for Marvel’s black-&-white magazine line, including Doc Savage, Rampaging Hulk, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, and Planet of the Apes.

In 1974 Ken sold his first book cover, for Roger Zelazny’s Guns of Avalon. During the 1970s he produced many additional book covers, including several for the Tom Swift series. The 1980s found him chosen to do the covers for a series of reissues of Andre Norton’s novels, the cover for the 1981 edition of Philip José Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, and several reissues of Robert E. Howard books. During this period he also branched out

into movie posters, providing the art for The Wind and the Lion, Terminal Man, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and a number of horror and fantasy films.

Ken retired in 1987 and returned to Scotland. He was inactive through the 1990s, but produced several covers in the early 2000s, including one for the 2002 edition of Jack Williamson’s Dragon’s Island and Other Stories.

In 1994, a trading card set, The Beast Within, was issued of some of Ken’s best horror and fantasy artwork. The Beast Within: The Art of Ken Barr, a book highlighting Ken’s work, was published in 2007.

For additional info and examples of his artwork check out these sites: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/barr_ken http://downthetubes.net/?p=30181 http://www.comicartfans.com/comicartists/ken_barr.asp

Ken Barr (above right) and two examples of his comic book work: Interior work for DC’s Our Fighting Forces #123 (Jan.-Feb. 1970), with script by Robert Kanigher—and the cover of Marvel’s Rampaging Hulk #6 (Dec. 1977). Thanks to Stephan Friedt & the Grand Comics Database. The sketch of Barr, from the Internet, is signed by an artist named “Livingston.” [“Losers” art TM & © DC Comics; Hulk art TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Ken Barr portrait © the respective copyright holders.]

In Memoriam

Ethan Roberts (1946-2016)

“[He] Helped Organize The Very First Comic Book Convention”

by Bernie Bubnis (Introducing Max Roberts)

E

than Roberts helped organize the very first comic book convention, in 1964.

Forty-seven years later, he started to plan a 50thanniversary panel for the original attendees, which he would host at the 2014 New York Comic Con. It was a great success.

In between those years, he remained a loving husband, father, and true comic book fan. His son Max shares a few memories: Dictionary.com defines “avid collector” as “(N) a person or thing that (a) shows great enthusiasm for or interest in (collecting).”

This definition could easily and accurately be placed by a picture of my father. For as long as I can remember anything he did, he did it with a passion. He couldn’t take a mild interest in anything. He grew up in an era that frowned upon comic books, and reveled in the fact that he could be a scholar and a teacher, and love comic books, comic art, comic strips, cartoons based on comics, movies based on comics, TV shows based on comics, toys of comic book characters, clothing with comic book characters on it, TV shows with characters who loved comic books (e.g., The Big Bang)… I’m running out of things having to do with comic books, but you get the idea.

To give you an idea of how much he loved collecting, with original comic art being his primary collecting passion: over the course of approximately 15 years that I lived in my parents’ house in Cleveland, every one of the three different rooms I lived in eventually became storage for a collection. Original art and related hard- or softbound books in one room; toys, cards, and oversized art in another; and first edition hardbound novels in the other.

Not a week went by that he didn’t purchase and read comic books.

He was very much at home at conventions. The size of the

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convention made no difference. He thoroughly enjoyed being around kindred collectors of all kinds. Not matter how fledgling or extensive their collections were, and whether it was art, comic books, toys, cards, etc. He was a Ph.D. zoologist, but at heart he was a scientist with the sense of wonder that most of us lose sometime between childhood and having to pay bills. We would travel to local conventions, small conventions, out-of-state and larger conventions. I remember, as a small child, combing through quarter and eventually dollar comic book boxes under dealers’ tables as he would meticulously work his way through stacks of original art. He would look for examples of artists he loved and ask me if I thought a family friend or loved one would like one piece or another that reminded him of them. His passion for original art extended beyond his desire to collect it. He wanted to share his enjoyment and wonder with others, and was always willing to teach others, or to lend an expert opinion in dealers’ and collectors’ debates on various pieces.

His enjoyment in collecting was never more evident than in his ability to create collections. As an example, he wanted to track down and collect a piece of art depicting each of the characters of the Justice Society of America, by the original artist to draw them. He knew it was an essentially impossible goal, his own “Great White Whale,” so to speak. Nevertheless, his fellow collectors and art dealers or “Usual Suspects” all knew about it and discussed it regularly with him.

My father was one of a kind. He collected because he loved it.

His collections fed his sense of wonder and desire to explore. They provided him with an avenue to share. Sharing or teaching was another one of his loves. Every convention he could attend, every fanzine, book, or show he could contribute to, every person (family or friends) he could gift with a piece of original art or comic books to kept his wonder and imagination alive and thriving.

Five “Survivors Of The First Comicon” This 2014 photo appeared in Alter Ego #138, the second part of Bill Schelly’s series on the above-named phenomenon. (Standing, left to right:) Bernie Bubnis, Art Tripp, Rick Bierman, Ethan Roberts.

Seated because of a minor injury: comics writer/editor Len Wein.

Photo by Lucille Bubnis.

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Actually, Chris, in late 2016 Dann and I attended cons in Providence, Rhode Island, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida—where I spent my time signing comics, talking with fans, and collecting dollar bills for comics’ own Hero Initiative charity; Dann prefers to go schlepping about town with friends or sometimes just to read in our hotel room. So I hardly feel forgotten these days.

But I’d never want to denigrate the contributions to comics of guys like Robert Bernstein (on the Charles Biro/Lev Gleason comics of the 1940s-50s), Don Rico (in early Timely), and most of all Jerry Siegel, without whose co-creation of a certain Man of Steel we’d all still be reading reprints of Mutt and Jeff. If those gents didn’t fit quite as well into the early Marvel mythos—well, each of us has his strengths and weaknesses.

Me, I wouldn’t want to compete with the late great Carl Barks (or for that matter, with Don Rosa) writing “Uncle Scrooge”!

Still, your words are greatly appreciated.

S

ince this issue’s star interviewee Doug Moench doesn’t draw much (last time we looked), Shane Foley used as the inspiration for this issue’s “maskot” illo a Werewolf by Night panel Doug scripted in conjunction with penciler Don Perlin and inker Vince Colletta. Maybe Doug can write a story around it sometime? Thanks, Shane! [Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly; created by Biljo White; other art © Shane Foley.]

Alter Ego #136 saw the first half of the interview that Jim Amash did with yours truly (Roy Thomas), which generated the following missives, among others, beginning with one from frequent A/E contributor Christopher Boyko: Dear Roy, Enjoyed very much your overview of your 1990s work in A/E #136, primarily because I mostly stopped paying attention to comics from about 1984-1991 (went to college, decided comics were for kids… silly me—I recovered from that lapse in judgment mostly due to sitting in on the first Sotheby’s auction and realized my error!) and missed a lot of your 1990s stories. Now I can play catch-up!

However, I take issue with your repeated downplaying of your own drawing power for the fans, scattered through the issue!

Many a Mighty Marvel fan (and a few DC devotees as well) would surely stand in line to get your John Hancock on their treasured tomes! (Not sure if they would pay Stan Lee-level fees for it, though….) Seriously, while I admire your humility, you must be forced into hearing that you were one of the key reasons Marvel stayed successful. Imagine a world where Robert Bernstein (“R. Berns”) and Don Rico (“N. Korok”) and (heaven forbid) Jerry Siegel (“Joe Carter”) were the writing “powerhouses” in the postStan era. Would we be standing in line for Marvel films today? I have my doubts. Sure, Stan (and Jack and Steve and Don and…) created the Marvel Universe, but you took the ball and ran with it.

And ran with it. And ran with it. And are running still!

Gosh darn it, Roy, keep running! You are just getting your second wind! Now go to a convention and watch the people line up to shake your hand (as long as you don’t charge for it…ha ha).

Chris Boyko

One note I was especially pleased to receive came from a guy who often reminds me that his first assignment in the field was to interview me about Conan for Marvelmania magazine back in the 1970s, and who graciously employed me to write Dr. Strange in the 1990s and to adapt a number of literary classics in the early 21st century—none other than Marvel editor emeritus Ralph Macchio: Hi Roy, I finally got to that Roy Thomas issue, and loved it! You have truly made monumental contributions to this field, and your commitment to excellence over the decades is just unmatched.

Seeing some of your creations up on the big screen in Marvel films must be a real kick for you. Despite all of my screw-ups during the ’70s run of our association, I learned a tremendous amount from you and wouldn’t have traded that experience for anything.

(Although I’m sure you would’ve.)

I was so flattered to hear you speak so positively about your experience on Dr. Strange working with me. I remember how Jackson (good as he was) would throw these nutty curves at you every issue, such as the time he showed that Doc had a pool in his Bleecker Street pad and had everybody swimming around down there. But you handled it beautifully, as if it’d been a part of the plot from the start. I, too, had a wonderful time working with you on that book, and later on all the Marvel Illustrated titles you beautifully executed despite some of the artistic challenges. I only wish we could’ve continued that line, because it was a blast to do. And I remember how much I loved teaming you and Big John up for a sequel to the Typhon story in Avengers (#50). Loved that one!

Fifty years in the business and you’re still at the top of your game. It’s something for us stragglers to shoot for.

Ralph Macchio Working with you and various artists (and none more so than Jackson “Butch” Guice) on those titles gave me some of the most rewarding experiences of my second time around at Marvel, Ralph. You were a supportive editor, and a good one. And who knows—maybe we’ll get together again yet!

Next, this in from Pierre Comtois, author of several books for TwoMorrows Publishing:

re:

81

treated in an earlier time—and just about as ill-intentioned.

A minor but intriguing point now from Anthony Gillies: Dear Roy, My (now retired) English teacher wife (who you have met) tut-tuttered when she saw the splash to “Millie the Model” on page 81 of A/E #136. The title should be “To Whom Can I Turn?” Surely the editor overruled you on this one.

Anthony Gillies Nope. Editor Stan Lee knew an Anthony Newley song title when he read one. And here’s another piece of info, courtesy of Chet Cox, who ably presides over the AlterEgo-Fans chat group, of which more at the end of this letters section: Hi Roy, Really enjoying the current-est issue of A/E, especially Punster Jim’s interview with Master Roy. Been a while since one of Jim’s interviews, and he hasn’t lost his touch.

Tracy Hickman would probably like posterity to know, however, that he is a he—Dragonlance not being created by two ladies, but by Tracy & Laura Hickman as they drove to his new job at TSR these many years ago.

Everybody Into The Pool!

Frankly, till longtime Marvel editor Ralph Macchio mentioned it, Roy had forgotten all about the time that he received photocopies of Jackson Guice’s exquisite pencils for Dr. Strange #20 (Aug. 1990)—and discovered that pages 2 & 3 were a spread that showed Stephen, his occasionally vampiric brother Vic, the always vampiric Morbius, author Morgana Blessing, and Rintrah lounging about in an indoor pool. But Roy enjoyed such challenges; and besides, compared to the fact that two vampires and an alien apprentice who looked like a minotaur were there with Doc, the existence of an indoor swimming pool at 177A Bleecker Street was a snap. The good doctor was a sorcerer of some skill, after all! Inks by Tony DeZuniga. Thanks to Dusty Miller. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roy, For some reason, I was under the impression that you hadn’t been kept busy in the ’90s and had forgotten about all the things you did do, especially your fairly long stay at Marvel. With comics today being pretty much unappealing to me, I find myself going back to prior years to find stuff that I overlooked for “new” material to read. Such were your Saga of the Original Human Torch, the Black Knight mini-series, and especially Avengers Annual #23!

John Buscema pencils and inks? How could I have missed that one the first time around?

And your comments on the way history is taught in school these days, as well as how “conservative” characters got written in the ’80s and ’90s, were a couple of revealing statements that don’t usually make it into interviews. The latter was appreciated, as I was beginning to think maybe it was just me who noticed that particular double standard!

Pierre Comtois My own feeling is that one would have to be willfully ignorant not to notice it, Pierre. Both ends of the political spectrum deserve to be treated with respect, and comics haven’t been very good at that in recent decades.

It’s really not that much different from the way racial matters were

When they (the Hickmans) agreed to the tie-in novels to appear at roughly the same time as the adventure modules, TSR assigned a more experienced writer or editor to work with him. That’s where Margaret Weis came in. She is the other author, with Tracy, of the two trilogies.

Dang if I remember who wrote all the adventure modules.

“Granpa Chet” Cox

Me, neither, Chet. It’s probably a good thing my reputation rests mainly on the comics I wrote and not on the occasionally careless statements I make in captions, as witnessed by Nick Caputo: Hi Roy,

I wanted to congratulate you on 50 years of working in the comic book field. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I rushed to the newsstand on Tuesdays to pick up the latest editions of X-Men, Daredevil, The Incredible Hulk, Sub-Mariner, Avengers, Captain Marvel, Conan, and so many more that you authored. Your work continues to rank high in the pantheon of material published by Marvel in that definitive period, and it has been a real pleasure to correspond, assist, and work with you all these years later.

I want to thank you for the kind words you printed in the opening piece about the Taschen book [75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen] about me, Barry, and Mike. One minor correction, as I know you’re a stickler for accuracy. The “Yancy Street Gang” caption says the photo was taken at the New York Taschen store. It was actually taken at the Taschen booth at the November [2014] New York Comic Con. A handful of copies arrived just in time for the con, and we were all thrilled to see the book for the first time there.

Nick Caputo

82

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

Beverly Hills Photo-Op Roy T. writes: “After A/E #136 came out, I apologized by e-mail to Rhett Thomas (no relation), who did a considerable amount of the caption-writing in Taschen’s big 2014 book 75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen, for scribing a caption-line in A/E that seemed to suggest that the modern-day Yancy Street Gang (Dr. Michael J. Vassallo, Barry Pearl, and Nick Caputo) had written the first draft of all the captions in that thick volume. In addition, in the photo on p. 6 of that issue, Rhett’s face was hidden behind that of someone else in the particular pic that I chose (out of several possibilities) to print there.

“As it happened, he was later hired to do some editing work on the Stan Lee book I was also writing for Taschen, and he took no offense—but mentioned he wouldn’t mind if A/E gave a plug to his then-new book The Marvel Legacy of Jack Kirby.

“Consider it done, Rhett! And, just as a bonus, here’s an alternate photo taken on Dec. 5, 2014, at the Taschen Books store in Beverly Hills, California. (Left to right:) Jessica Trujillo, Maurene Goo, Roy Thomas, Andy Lewis (he’s the poor schlub whose face gets hidden this time!), Josh Baker, Rhett Thomas, Jess Harold, Stan Lee, Joey Heller, and Nina Wiener. Thanks to editor Josh Baker for the pic. (And the reason they’ve set the book down on that tabletop is that nobody there could lift the blessed thing!)”

Funny thing is, Nick—I don’t even know if there is a “New York Taschen [book] store.” I guess I was just extrapolating from the one in Beverly Hills, California, where in December 2014 Stan Lee and I signed numerous copies of the then-new 17-pound tome 75 Years of Marvel. With any luck, maybe we’ll be doing it again for the similarly sized book on Stan which I’ve just finished for Taschen—and which, though it’s due to come out this year, still has not been given a precise title. I suggested Excelsior!—but I was informed that that one had already been taken!

In A/E #136, Michael T. Gilbert did a minor celebration of yours truly and of several other fellow comics pros, and one aspect of said tribute got Jeff Taylor all stirred up: Hi Roy,

What really annoys me is how Son of Vulcan, one of my favorite Charlton super-heroes, is always dismissed as a rip-off of Thor, when people forget what a highly derivative character Marvel’s God of Thunder started out as. Never mind the whole stolen-from-Norse-mythology thing; in the beginning, Thor was little more than a vaguely Viking clone of Captain Marvel and the Shazam Family, right down to the cave-set origin, the lightning-based transformations, and even the fact that Dr. Don Blake had to walk with a cane just like Freddy Freeman (Captain Marvel Jr.) did with a crutch! In fact, Thor was so close to being the Big Red Cheese reborn that it’s a wonder DC didn’t sue (I guess a hammer, a helmet, and a blond wig were enough to make their lawyers overlook the blue suit and red cape, eh?).

While I loved the picture Michael I think, aside from certain T. Gilbert drew of Son of Vulcan (I undeniable similarities between the want this as a poster or T-shirt!) for two characters, Son of Vulcan had his “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt” enough unique aspects of his own to segment in A/E #136, there is be more than viable as his own supersomething that I have to say in no hero. There’s his Roman-style armor uncertain terms: The ancient Romans for one (still cool did not drink mead after 2000 years!), (that’s more of a The Son Also Rises! and then there’s the medieval thing); Because Jeff T. and Roy T. are both fond of Charlton’s Silver Age hero Son of Vulcan, what can it hurt to whole eternal family they drank wine! close with the Bill Fraccio/Tony Tallarico splash page of his very first adventure, in Charlton’s Mysteries in-fighting amongst of Unexplored Worlds #46 (May 1965). Script by Pat Masulli. [Son of Vulcan TM & © DC Comics.]

re:

the gods that the hero always had to cautiously tiptoe through in just about every issue, a mythological mother lode that Wonder Woman herself has been mining for the past several years.

Jeff Taylor It’s gratifying to hear that a relatively minor character like Son of Vulcan (the creation of writer/editor Pat Masulli and artists Bill Fraccio and Tony Tallarico) can still arouse such passions after so many years, Jeff. And you know what? I wouldn’t mind writing a second (or even third) story about him myself, more than fifty years after I got my first shot at him, at $4 a page!

Got a compliment or a complaint about this issue? Send your thoughts to: Roy Thomas e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135 The Alter-Ego-Fans online group is cleverly hidden at group.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans. Yahoo Groups has eradicated its “Add Member” tool for moderators, so if you want to join this magazine’s online chat group and find that it won’t let you in, please contact Chet Cox at good ol’ mormonyoyoman@gmail.com with your name and a little bit about yourself. On the A/E list, we discuss the Silver Age, the Golden Age, and Alter Ego itself, and Roy T. himself is often there with advance news, requests for help re keeping A/E a repository of Silver and Golden Age knowledge., etc., etc. It’s fun, educational, and non-fattening!

83

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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!

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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, 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!

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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!

MARK CARLSON documents 1940s-50s ACE COMICS (with super-heroes Magno & Davey, Lash Lightning, The Raven, Unknown Soldier, Captain Courageous, Vulcan, and others)! Art by KURTZMAN, MOONEY, BERG, L.B. COLE, PALAIS, and more. Plus: RICHARD ARNDT’s interview with BILL HARRIS (1960s-70s editor of Gold Key and King Comics), FCA, Comic Crypt, and Comic Fandom Archive.

40 years after the debut of Marvel’s STAR WARS #1, its writer/editor ROY THOMAS tells RICHARD ARNDT the story behind that landmark comic, plus interviews with artists HOWARD CHAYKIN, RICK HOBERG, and BILL WRAY. Also: MR. MONSTER looks at “Jazz in Comics” with MICHAEL T. GILBERT—the finale of BILL SCHELLY’s salute to G.B. LOVE—FCA— and more! CHAYKIN cover.

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87

The Marvel Family’s South American Adventures A Brazil & Argentina Comic Book Cover Gallery

by John G. Pierce with P.C. Hamerlinck

A

lthough the original Captain Marvel was the best-selling comic book super-hero in the United States (and thus in the world) for a while in the mid-1940s, it could be argued that the country where he enjoyed even greater popularity was Brazil.

I speak not in terms of sales figures, to which I am not privy, but rather simply to his longevity there, a lifespan which considerably exceeded what he had enjoyed in his native land. Our Brazilian gallery herein represents comics published from the ’40s to the ’90s. The Marvel Family saga in Brazil began not with the appearance of Captain Marvel, or even of Captain Marvel Jr.—but of Mary Marvel—in a comic book entitled O Guri (which, ironically, means “The Boy”), dated September 1, 1943 (as seen in Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #1). Her brother made his debut the following month in Gibi Mensal #34. The popularity of this 100-pager was so great that even today the word “gibi” is used as a synonym for comic books.

Captain Marvel Jr. and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny (Capitão Joca Marvel) followed later.

While comics starring the various members of The Marvel Family ceased publication in the USA and Great Britain in 1953, following the settling of the DC v. Fawcett lawsuit, they simply kept going in Brazil. Stories already reprinted there were sometimes offered again, this time redrawn by local artists; but these were supplemented by original stories both written and drawn by Brazilians. One of the most intriguing of these was a team-up between Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and Timely’s original Human Torch, in 1963, long after both characters had ceased being published in the USA! This team-up predated the Superman/Spider-Man crossover by many years. (For more on The Marvel Family’s appearances in Brazil, and the Captain Marvel/Human Torch tale, see “When Marvels Clashed!” in Alter Ego V3, #1. The CM-HT story was later translated and serialized in Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #52-60.)

In addition to stories of the members of The Marvel Family themselves, Brazilian publications also featured translated tales of their British counterparts/successors, The Marvelman Family, who were known there as “Jack Marvel” and “Jack Marvel, Jr.”, i.e, Marvelman and Young Marvelman, respectively. Their stories not only shared space in the same comics as the U.S. Marvel Family, but oftentimes their adventures outnumbered those of the originals and even supplanted them on the covers. Brazilian readers could be forgiven for thinking that these interlopers were possibly just extensions of the Family, particularly when some stories even showed Jack Marvel, Jr., as using “Shazam” as his magic word.

The Marvel Family saga endured in Brazil until the latter half of 1968, but Brazilian readers didn’t have to wait long for their return, courtesy of reprints of the DC revival in early 1973. As contrasted

Holy Moley—Holy Grail!

Considered by many Brazilian comic collectors to be their “Holy Grail,” Gibi Mensal #34 from 1943 marked the first appearance of Captain Marvel in Brazil—published (and mis-colored) by O Globo Publications, Brazil. Special thanks to Brazilian collector Skye Ott for this and the following art scan.

All other art in this FCA section appears courtesy of John G. Pierce and P.C. Hamerlinck. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

to the roughly 20-year absence in the USA, in Brazil the Marvels held forth for 25 years and were gone a mere five!

Other magazines featuring Fawcett characters included Shazam (long before DC used the magic word as a title) and Biriba Marvel Magazine, a 64-page black-&-white comic, started with a date of Jan. 1953, not too long before the Marvels would cease publication in the USA. Although Marvel Magazine itself ceased publication with #61, in 1963, another title, Capitao Marvel Magazine, began in January/February of 1955, in the same format (64 pages, and initially black-&-white).

Very little is known about the writers who scribed original

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Brazilian stories of the Marvels, but the following artists have been identified: Edmundo Rodriguez and Walmir Amaral de Oliveira on “Captain Marvel Jr.”; the same two, plus another artist known as Zelis on “The Marvel Family”; and de Oliveira on “Captain Marvel” himself.

Gedeone Malagola also worked on the features, as did other, unidentified, artists. “Mary Marvel,” as a solo feature, was not drawn by Brazilian artists.

“Hoppy the Marvel Bunny” had ceased publication in the 1950s, though he did return for one last outing as O Coelho Valente—“The Brave Bunny”— from another publisher.

With #95, Capitao Marvel Magazine changed its name to Capitao Marvel Magazine—Edicao Colorida. Color was added to the story pages in an effort to boost a circulation which had begun to drop. However, the effort came a little too late, as the publication ceased with #103, dated Aug. 1967.

The last appearance of the Marvels in Brazil, prior to the DC revival, was in Almanaque Do Gibi, in the second half of 1968.

To close our article, we’ve also included a gallery of 1950s comic book covers from Argentina painted by Carlos Freixas, further confirmation of the Marvel Family’s vast popularity in South America.

There follows a gallery of Brazilian and Argentinian comics cover featuring the Marvels….

Something For Everybody Showcased previously in AE/FCA, here’s the cover (now seen in color) by artist Gutenbero of the 1964 issue of Almanaque Do O Globo (“Kids’ World Annual/Kids’ World Special”), the 100-page anthology comic wherein the original Captain Marvel met the original Human Torch. As you can see, there were plenty of other features in the comic as well. Thanks to Skye Ott. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics; other heroes TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

A Gallery Of The Marvel Family In BRAZIL

When Fawcett Met DC Met Timely Met Archie Met…

Gibi Mensal Natal (Gibi Christmas Monthly). “Gibi” was the name of an early Brazilian comic book (in which Fawcett characters appeared) whose name became virtually synonymous with “comics.” Notice anything unique about this 1947 edition? What we have here is a multiplecompany crossover, with Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Spy Smasher, [a green] SubMariner, the original Human Torch, Superman, The Shield (strumming a guitar, no less!), and several other characters raising their glasses and sharing a festive Christmas party scene! The book’s actual contents contain reprints of “Captain Marvel,” “Captain Marvel Jr.,” “The Marvel Family,” “Ibis the Invincible,” “The Human Torch,” “The Triple Terror” (from Tip Top Comics), and “Nick Carter, Master Detective” (backup feature from Street & Smith’s The Shadow Comics).

[Shazam heroes, Spy Smasher, The Guardian, & Superman TM & © DC Comics; Human Torch & Sub-Mariner TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Shield TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.; other heroes TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The Marvel Family’s South American Adventures

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When Captains Combine!

(Left:) Almanaque Do Capitáo Marvel, an “annual” from 1956, painted by an unknown cover artist who based his layout on C.C. Beck’s X-Mas Comics #7 cover. Note the “Captain Tootsie” logo on Captain Marvel’s shirt!

Since, in the U.S., C.C. Beck was the original artist of both heroes, it seems somehow fitting.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

Flying Down To—And Over—Rio Captain Marvel flies over Brazil on the magnificent cover of Almanaque Do Capitáo Marvel from 1964. Artist unknown. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

Parachuting In! Capitáo Marvel #93, Brazil. Cover art by Rimaggio.

[Shazam hero & Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

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The Marvel Family Through The Looking Glass Capitáo Marvel #103, Brazil. Cover art by Rimaggio, based on C.C. Beck’s cover for The Marvel Family #33 (March 1949). But the cover was flopped, to become the mirror image of the U.S. version—and nobody got around to correcting the direction of the lightning bolts on the Marvels’ chests! [Shazam heroes TM & © DC Comics.]

Code-Approved… Sort Of! (Above:) Capitáo Marvel Edicao Extra (“Extra Special Edition”) - 1963.

Cover art by Oliveira. The small text below Capitao reads: “For Those Over 13.” In the U.S., back in ’63, relatively few people over 13 read comic books.

Wonder what those self-appointed Brazilian censors thought they were protecting the kids from—especially in a comic that sports that country’s “code seal”!!? [Shazam hero & Dr. Sivana TM & © DC Comics.]

A Face In The Crowd (Left:) Capitáo Marvel Edicao Extra (“Extra Special Edition”) 1962. Cover art by Gutenbero. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

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A Super Six-Pack (Left:) Almanaque O Herói - 1976.

This compilation’s emblematic cover, drawn by A. Ellzebio, reveals what Brazilians believe to be the true super-hero “trinity.” Back in the 1940s, they wouldn’t have been far off!

[Shazam heroes, Superman, Batman, & Robin TM & © DC Comics.]

Shades Of Mr. Mind’s Sea Serpents!

(Above:) Novo Gibi (“New Comics”) #1748 (!), date and cover artist unknown. Features “Captain Marvel and the Sea Invasion”—based on the cover of the U.S. Whiz Comics #115 (Nov. 1949), which was seen in A/E #137. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

All He Needs Is A Pet Bunny Named “Hoppy”!

Cebolinha (“Little Onion”) #5 from 1984, a kid-friendly, digestsized comic drawn by Mauricio. In this particular issue the titular kid character takes on the powers of Captain Marvel.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

Shazam!—With Swayze Thrown In! An unknown Brazilian artist masterfully recaptured C.C. Beck’s Whiz Comics #22 cover layout for this 1995 Shazam! digestsized comic from Brazil containing Golden Age reprints—plus an article on our old friend, Fawcett artist Marc Swayze, who in the early 1940s had been the first artist to draw Mary Marvel! [Shazam hero & Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

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A Gallery Of The Marvel Family In ARGENTINA (Featuring the artwork of Carlos Freixas, of Universal Publications – Argentina) scans courtesy of Toni Torres

The Big Red Chief Capitán Jefe Marvel #1 (Aug. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina.

“Jefe” literally means “chief” in Spanish, so apparently it’s a way of saying “Captain Marvel Senior” as contrasted to “Captain Marvel Jr.” [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

We Didn’t Even Know Cap Was Mad At Billy!

Capitán Jefe Marvel #2 (Sept. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina.

[Shazam hero & Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

The Marvel Family’s South American Adventures

Keep On Trucking!

He’s Got A Train To Catch!

Capitán Jefe Marvel #3 (Oct. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

Capitán Jefe Marvel #4 (Nov. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

Flying High Capitán Jefe Marvel #5 (Dec. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina. Carlos Freixas’s cover for this issue was also used in Argentina as a movie poster for the re-release of the 1941 Republic Pictures’ serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

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94

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Guess He Didn’t See That Car Coming Capitán Jefe Marvel #6 (Jan. 1954), Universal Publications, Argentina. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

The Elephant In The Room—Minus The Room

Packing A Punch!

Capitán Marvel Jr. #8 (July 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina.

This title also included “Mary Marvel” stories. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

Capitán Marvel Jr. #9 (Aug. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

The Marvel Family’s South American Adventures

Don’t You Know There’s No War On?

Toga, Toga, Toga

Capitán Marvel Jr. #10 (Sept. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

Capitán Marvel Jr. #11 (Oct. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

A Shadow Of His Former Self Capitán Marvel Jr. #12 (Nov. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

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Winning By A Landslide

Gator Aid

(Above:) Capitán Marvel Jr. #14 (Jan. 1954), Universal Publications, Argentina. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

(√ Above:) Capitán Marvel Jr. #15 (Feb. 1954), Universal Publications, Argentina. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

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

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Fangs For The Memories!

Capitán Marvel Jr. #13 (Dec. 1953), Universal Publications, Argentina.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

URGENT WARNING FOR OUR READERS! DON’T MISS YOUR FAVORITE MAGS! We are experiencing huge demand for our recent magazines. Case in point: Back Issue #88 & #89 and Alter Ego #141 are already completely SOLD OUT, with other issues about to run out.

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Giant-size Fawcett Collectors of America special with Golden/Silver Age writer OTTO BINDER’s personal script records and illos from his greatest series! Intros by P.C. HAMERLINCK and BILL SCHELLY, art by BECK, SIMON & KIRBY, SWAN, SCHAFFENBERGER, AVISON, BORING, MOONEY, PLASTINO, and others! Plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and an unpublished C.C. BECK cover!

Relive JOE PETRILAK’s All-Time Classic NY Comic Book Convention—the greatest Golden & Silver Age con ever assembled!

Panels, art and photos featuring INFANTINO, KUBERT, 3 SCHWARTZES, NODELL, HASEN, GIELLA, CUIDERA, BOLTINOFF, BUSCEMA, AYERS, SINNOTT, [MARIE] SEVERIN, GOULART, THOMAS, and a host of others!

Plus FCA, GILBERT, SCHELLY, and RUSS RAINBOLT’s amazing 60-foot comics mural!

Showcases GIL KANE, with an incisive and free-wheeling interview conducted in the 1990s by DANIEL HERMAN for his 2001 book Gil Kane: The Art of the Comics— plus other surprise features centered around the artistic co-creator of the Silver Age Green Lantern and The Atom! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and BILL SCHELLY! Green Lantern cover by KANE and GIELLA!

FEMALE LEGO BUILDERS! US Architectural builder ANURADHA PEHRSON, British Microscale builder FERNANDA RIMINI, US Bionicle builder BREANN SLEDGE, and Norwegian Town builder BRIGITTE JONSGARD discuss their work and inspirations!

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“Creatures of the Night!” Moon Knight’s DOUG MOENCH and BILL SIENKIEWICZ in a Pro2Pro interview, Ghost Rider, Night Nurse, Eclipso in the Bronze Age, I…Vampire, interviews with Batman writer MIKE W. BARR and Marvel’s Nightcat, JACQUELINE TAVAREZ. Featuring work by BOB BUDIANSKY, J. M. DeMATTEIS, DAVE SIMONS, ROGER STERN, TOM SUTTON, JEAN THOMAS, and more.

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“Marvel Fanfare Issue!” Behind the scenes of the ‘80s anthology series with AL MILGROM, interviews and art by ARTHUR ADAMS, CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAVE COCKRUM, STEVE ENGLEHART, MICHAEL GOLDEN, ROGER McKENZIE, FRANK MILLER, DOUG MOENCH, ANN NOCENTI, GEORGE PÉREZ, MARSHALL ROGERS, PAUL SMITH, KEN STEACY, CHARLES VESS, and more! Cover by SANDY PLUNKETT and GLENN WHITMORE.

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“DC in the ‘80s!” From the experimental to the fan faves: Behind-the-scenes looks at SECRET ORIGINS, ACTION COMICS WEEKLY, DC CHALLENGE, THRILLER, ELECTRIC WARRIOR, and SUN DEVILS. Featuring JIM BAIKIE, MARK EVANIER, DAN JURGENS, DOUG MOENCH, MARTIN PASKO, TREVOR VON EEDEN, and others!

Featuring a mind-numbing Nightwing cover

by ROMEO TANGHAL!

“BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES’ 25th ANNIVERSARY!” Looks back at the influential cartoon series. Plus: episode guide, Harley Quinn history, DC’s Batman Adventures and Animated Universe comic books, and tribute to artist MIKE PAROBECK. Featuring KEVIN ALTIERI, RICK BURCHETT, PAUL DINI, GERARD JONES, MARTIN PASKO, DAN RIBA, TY TEMPLETON, BRUCE TIMM, and others! BRUCE TIMM cover!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #15 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #16

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #70

KIRBY COLLECTOR #71

Celebrating 30 years of artist’s artist MARK SCHULTZ, creator of the CADILLACS AND DINOSAURS franchise, with a featurelength, career-spanning interview conducted in Mark’s Pennsylvanian home, examining the early years of struggle, success with Kitchen Sink Press, and hitting it big with a Saturday morning cartoon series. Includes rarely-seen art and fascinating photos from Mark’s amazing and award-winning career.

A look at 75 years of Archie Comics’ characters and titles, from Archie and his pals ‘n gals to the mighty MLJ heroes of yesteryear and today’s “Dark Circle”! Also: Careerspanning interviews with The Fox’s DEAN HASPIEL and Kevin Keller’s cartoonist DAN PARENT, who both jam on our exclusive cover depicting a face-off between humor and heroes. Plus our usual features, including the hilarious FRED HEMBECK!

Interview and demo by Electra: Assassin and Stray Toasters superstar BILL SIENKIEWICZ, a look at THE WATTS ATELIER OF THE ARTS (one of the best training grounds for students to gain the skills they need to get the jobs they want), JERRY ORDWAY shows the Ord-Way of drawing, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY take you to Comic Art Bootcamp.

KIRBY: ALPHA! Looks at the beginnings of Kirby’s greatest concepts, and how he looked back in time and to the future for the origins of ideas like DEVIL DINOSAUR, FOREVER PEOPLE, 2001, ETERNALS, KAMANDI, OMAC, and more! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 WonderCon Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more!

Cover inked by MIKE ROYER!

KIRBY: OMEGA! Looks at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by WALTER SIMONSON!

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REED CRANDALL Illustrator of the Comics

From the 1940s to the ’70s, REED CRANDALL brought a unique and masterful style to American comic art. Using an illustrator’s approach on everything he touched, Crandall gained a reputation as the “artist’s artist” through his skillful interpretations of Golden Age super-heroes DOLL MAN, THE RAY, and BLACKHAWK (his signature character); horror and sci-fi for the legendary EC COMICS line; Warren Publishing’s CREEPY, EERIE, and BLAZING COMBAT; the THUNDER AGENTS and EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS characters; and even FLASH GORDON for King Features. Comic art historian ROGER HILL has compiled a complete and extensive history of Crandall’s life and career, from his early years and major successes, through his tragic decline and passing in 1982. This FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER includes NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOS, a wealth of RARE AND UNPUBLISHED ARTWORK, and over EIGHTY THOUSAND WORDS of insight into one of the true illustrators of the comics.

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Celebrate JACK KIRBY’s 100th birthday!

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TWOMORROWS and the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine celebrate JACK KIRBY’S 100th BIRTHDAY in style with the release of KIRBY100, a full-color visual holiday for the King of comics! It features an all-star line-up of 100 COMICS PROS who critique key images from Kirby’s 50-year career, admiring his page layouts, dramatics, and storytelling skills, and lovingly reminiscing about their favorite characters and stories. Featured are BRUCE TIMM, ALEX ROSS, WALTER SIMONSON, JOHN BYRNE, JOE SINNOTT, STEVE RUDE, ADAM HUGHES, WENDY PINI, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE GIBBONS, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and dozens more of the top names in comics. Their essays serve to honor Jack’s place in comics history, and prove (as if there’s any doubt) that KIRBY IS KING! This double-length book is edited by JOHN MORROW and JON B. COOKE, with a Kirby cover inked by MIKE ROYER. (The Limited Hardcover Edition includes 16 bonus color pages of Kirby’s 1960s Deities concept drawings) PRINTED IN CHINA

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