Alter Ego #156 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Roy Thomas' Secret (Identity) Santa Comics Fanzine

COMING FOR CHRISTMAS!

PULSATING ALL-STAR PANELS FROM 2000’s

ALL TIME CLASSIC $9.95 NEW YORK COMIC In the USA BOOK CONVENTION! No. 156

All characters except Santa Claus TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Featuring MARVEL, DC, GOLD KEY, et al.!

82658 00153

January 2019

Vol. 3, No. 156 / Jan. 2019 Editor

Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout

Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor

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

Comic Crypt Editor

Michael T. Gilbert

Editorial Honor Roll

Jerry G. Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White Mike Friedrich

Proofreaders

Rob Smentek William J. Dowlding

Cover Artists

Writer/Editorial: Classic Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Introducing the All Time Classic New York Comic Book Convention – Parts 6-8

“The Golden Age Of Comics” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Ron Goulart hosts Golden Age talents Cuidera, Hasen, Boltinoff—& two Schwartzes!

“Bronze To Present Age Marvel Comics” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Craig Shutt talks Silver/Bronze Age to Severin, Simonson, Shooter, Wolfman, & Thomas.

Will Meugniot & Chris Ivy

Cover Colorist

“The Gold Key Comics Chat” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Ken Gale rides herd on Wally Green, Arnold Drake, Frank Bolle, & Tom Gill.

Chris Ivy

With Special Thanks to: Doug Abramson Heidi Amash Richard J. Arndt Bob Bailey Frank Bolle John Brenner Ricky Terry Brisacque Bill Broomall Bernie Bubnis Wendy Gaines Bucci Nick Caputo James Cassara John Cimino Fraendy Clervaud Mike Colter Comic Book Plus (website) Chet Cox Diversions of a Groovy Kind (website) Michael Dunne Scott Edelman Mark Evanier Michael Feldman Jean-Michel Ferragatti John Firehammer Patricia Floss Shane Foley Mark Gaddy Ken Gale Paul Gambaccini Janet Gilbert Ron Goulart Grand Comics Database (website) Glenn Greenberg

Contents

Larry Guidry Sean Howe Bob Hughes Chris Ivy Jim Kealy Todd Klein Anthony Koch Mark Lewis Art Lortie Jim Ludwig Richard A. Lupoff Doug Martin Will Meugniot Mike Mikulovsky Bill Mitchell Brian K. Morris Mark Muller Hoy Murphy Audrey Parente Barry Pearl Joe Petrilak Sandy Plunkett Russell Rainbolt Gene Reed Steven Roman Randy Sargent Mitchell Senft Craig Shutt David Siegel Chris Smith Marc Svensson Jeff Taylor Dann Thomas Steven Tice Dr. Michael J. Vassallo Rick Weingroff Rick West Nicky WheelerNicholson

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Jay Disbrow & Nick Meglin

Cat Tales From A Comicbook Master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Part VII of Golden/Silver Age writer John Broome’s 1998 memoir.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!: Larry’s Leftovers . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Michael T. Gilbert & Roy Thomas present Larry Ivie’s 1959 take on a JSA revival.

Comic Fandom Archive: The Fan P.O.V. Of The JLA—In 1962! 69

Bill Schelly & Nick Caputo introduce a vintage “Big Name Fan” roundtable discussion.

re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 77 Tributes To Jay Disbrow & Nick Meglin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #215 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

P.C. Hamerlinck presents Richard Arndt’s talk with SF pro/Fawcett fan Richard Lupoff.

On Our Cover: We don’t go around looking for excuses to feature a Christmas cover on Alter Ego, but when an opportunity this juicy pops up, how could we resist? Collector Michael Dunne sent us a scan of one of his recent Yuletide cards—executed by artist Chris Ivy over a layout from the Internet that turned out to have been drawn by fellow pro Will Meugniot. Will informs us that the blue-pencil version (see p. 23) was done some years ago at the behest of Stan Lee, who wanted to use a finished version to pitch the idea of a TV special starring most of the major Marvel heroes. The concept went nowhere, though—possibly because the rights to so many of those heroes were then tied up at various networks, movie studios, and production companies—and the layout wound up as an orphan image that was eventually re-purposed into simple Christmas greetings. Still, it’s nice to be able to share it, at last, with the world. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] Above: One of the looming presences of the All Time Classic New York Comic Book Convention in June 2000 was the 60’ x 20’ hero mural painted by Russell Rainbolt [seen in photo] especially for that event. It still exists, and was, for instance, prominently displayed at the TerrifiCon at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut in August 2017. And, since Timely/Marvel heroes were depicted thereon along with those of DC and just about every other comic under the Golden/Silver Age sun, that gave us an excuse to run this photo of Russ and just a fraction of the mural, taken at the White Plains, NY, confab. For the entire mural, turned into a four-page spread, see Alter Ego #148. Photo courtesy of Russell Rainbolt. [Characters TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.] Alter Ego TM 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, $99 Elsewhere, $30 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.

writer/editorial

Classic Comics

he writer/editorial for Alter Ego #148, the first issue to showcase panels and photos from the All Time Classic New York Comic Book Convention held on June 9-11, 2000, in White Plains, NY, was titled “A Classic—Illustrated.” A nod, of course, to the fabled Classics Illustrated line of the 1940s-60s. This time, I decided to follow it up with one titled “Classic Comics”—the original moniker of the masterpiece-adapting comicbook series now better known as Classics Illustrated.

with several creators from the 1940s… a “Marvel Bronze Age” (and de facto Silver Age) one… and a “Gold Key Comics Chat” (that’s what Joe called it) that actually covered the whole of Western Publishing’s history from the 1940s (when its comics line was known to the public as “Dell”) through the Gold Key era that began in 1962. They are Parts 6 to 8 of the ATCNYCBC series... even if in #148 “Part 5” was accidentally mislabeled as “Part 6.” We think these three panels are more than worth the space; but we do regret that a few other panels from that con seem not to have been recorded. At least, no film or transcription has yet turned up of panels on the topics “Silver Age Marvel Comics,” “Silver Age DC Comics,” or “Bronze to Present Age DC Comics.”

In other words, these two issues of A/E (#148 & #156) are really two sides of the same coin.

Eight issues ago, we first toasted Joe Petrilak’s Golden/Silver/Bronze Age con with an overview by Joe himself, which I heartily Still, at least three other panels from the recommend you re-read. The meat of #148 2000 con do exist in transcribed form: “Today’s was three panel transcriptions: one apiece Comics with Yesterday’s Heroes,” “The Paul Roy T. (left) & con Host Joe Petrilak, for the 60th anniversaries of the concepts of S. Newman Awards,” and “Bernie Wrightson June 2000. “The Flash” and “Green Lantern,” and another Speaks.” Let us know if you’d like to see yet a starring what Joe termed his “Big Three”: Julius third issue of this magazine dedicated to that Schwartz, Carmine Infantino, and Joe Kubert, last and perhaps greatest of all the conventions that celebrated stillthe editor and artists of 1956’s Showcase #4, which had launched living talents of the Golden and Silver Ages. the Silver Age by introducing the second Flash. We topped it off Meanwhile, get set to enjoy yourself as a bunch of old pros with a four-page spread that reproduced artist Russell Rainbolt’s (many of whom are no longer with us, alas) sit around reminiscing humongous 60’ x 20’ mural that featured literally dozens of Golden about how it all went down circa the middle or so of the 20th and Silver Age comics heroes. (An “X-Men” panel from the con had century…. already seen print in A/E #24.) The panels this time around are neither of greater nor lesser importance than those mentioned above: a “Golden Age” panel

Bestest,

COMING IN FEBRUARY

157

JOYE MURCHISON KELLY Writer of Wonder Woman, 1944-48 & BARBARA FRIEDLANDER

DC Romance Editor/Writer, 1960s!

TM & © DC Comics, Inc.

• A sensational shout-out to JOYE HUMMEL MURCHISON KELLY—assistant to Wonder Woman co-creator DR. WILLIAM MOULTON MARSTON and ghost writer of numerous mid-1940s Amazon sagas! An intriguing interview by RICHARD ARNDT, featuring artwork by H.G. PETER, et al.! Plus excerpts from Mrs. Kelly’s blockbuster 2018 San Diego panel, conducted by MARK EVANIER & TRINA ROBBINS! Golden Age history comes alive! • BARBARA FRIEDLANDER, assistant editor—and scripter—of 1960s DC romance comics, talks about life at DC—just down the hall from the Silver Age! Art by ROMITA, PIKE, GIORDANO, ABRUZZO, ROTH, ROSENBERGER, ESTRADA, et al.! • FCA spotlights Fawcett’s HENRY A. PERKINS, “The Stan Lee of ’43”!—MR. MONSTER sneaks a peek at “The PAM Papers, Part 4”—more JOHN BROOME memories— BILL SCHELLY & NICK CAPUTO on Marvel fans’ P.O.V. in the early ’60s—& MORE!

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ALL TIME CLASSIC NEW YORK COMIC BOOK CONVENTION PART The Cast & Crew:

Ron Goulart Award-winning science-fiction, mystery, and comics writer, in 2009.

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

CUIDERA, BOLTINOFF, HASEN, SCHWARTZ (& Others) Bring 1940s Comicbooks To Life—Whether They Want To Or Not! Panel conducted by Ron Goulart

Charles (“Chuck”) Cuidera Artist/co-creator of “Blackhawk,” longtime inker of same for both Quality and DC, at the 2000 con. Thanks for this and the following two photos to Russell Rainbolt.

Henry Boltinoff Veteran DC humor artist, taken at the 2000 con.

Irwin Hasen Artist of “Green Lantern,” “Justice Society of America,” “Wildcat,” Dondi, et al. From the 2000 con.

Alvin Schwartz Novelist and well-known scripter of “Superman,” “Batman,” etc. Photo taken at the 2000 con—perhaps by official photographer Anthony Koch.

Transcribed by Steve Tice

A/E

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: This discussion was held from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 10, 2000, officially the second day of the convention, though there had been only two scheduled panels on the previous day. Announced in advance as the members of the Goulart-hosted event were Chuck Cuidera, Irwin Hasen, Henry Boltinoff, Lew Sayre Schwartz, and Alvin Schwartz. However, as will be seen, LSS arrived late and sat in the audience, although he did participate. Also in the audience, either at the outset or arriving after it began, were three other 1930s/40s professionals: Red Wexler, Gill Fox, and Creig Flessel. It was quite a gathering of Golden Age talent! [Panel videotape ©2018 Marc Svensson.]

RON GOULART: This is the Golden Age—the general, generic Golden Age panel… [introduces panelists] Chuck Cuidera… Henry Boltinoff… Irwin Hasen… Alvin Schwartz. One of the many Schwartzes in comics.

beginning… I became the art director, and retired in 1988.

ALVIN SCHWARTZ: Lew Schwartz is supposed to be here.

GOULART: Let’s go on. By the way, I’ve got to mention that these gentlemen—because I’m much younger than these gentlemen, obviously—but these guys all corrupted my youth, because I read all of what they were doing, particularly [to Boltinoff] the fillers that you were doing, mostly for DC. [Henry Boltinoff’s first remark is unintelligible] You probably did more filler pages than just about anybody. You also did some straight stuff, too. “Young Doc Davis.” [to audience] Didn’t he do that?

GOULART: We got Lew, we got Julie, we got… SCHWARTZ: Julie’s not allowed in. [laughter] GOULART: Julie came in the last panel late and ate cake, so…. This is rather good. This is more general than the last one we did, which was about “The Flash,” so what I would like to do is have each of the gentlemen on the panel—we’ve got writers and cartoonists— [say] just a little bit about where you started. [to Cuidera] Your major character was “Blackhawk,” so do you want to start there? CHUCK CUIDERA: I started at Fox Features doing one called “The Blue Beetle.” I don’t know if some of you remember that. [brief interruption as Golden Age pros Gill Fox and Creig Flessel enter the room] So anyway… from Quality Comics, Bob Powell, who was a Pratt graduate, called me up and said, “The editor over here will double your salaries.” I said, “You’ve gotta be kidding.” So I went over there, and Will Eisner, who I was supposed to work for, was down south hunting. So I met the publisher…. He gave me top dollar, more than most of these guys were making. But, anyway, I got in there and I created a feature called “Blackhawk” and I did that from the

MRS. CUIDERA: [from audience] ’68. You said ’88. It’s twenty years different. [laughter]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, he did that. IRWIN HASEN: [to Boltinoff] You did straight stuff? HENRY BOLTINOFF: Once. HASEN: I always thought you were straight. BOLTINOFF: You shut up. [laughter] GOULART: Can you tell us briefly—or longly, I don’t care—how you got into the comicbook business? BOLTINOFF: I was doing magazine cartoons. And you’d never know from week to week if you sold one or not. I was getting married, and I said, “Oh, I’ve got to pay rent now, the electric, the phone bill”…. So I met with

Cuidera, Boltinoff, Hasen, & Two Schwartzes

Blue Beetle-Mania As Ron Goulart stated in A/E #148, Chuck Cuidera seems to have come to believe he was the “Charles Nicholas” (since the latter was his middle name) who is credited with the very first “Blue Beetle” story, in Fox’s Mystery Men Comics #1 (Aug. 1939)—but that Charles Nicholas was someone else entirely! Seen here are the tale’s splash page and first two pages showing The Blue Beetle as he was back when he was just another “Green Hornet” wannabe, before he got his unique costume and any super-powers. Thanks to Comic Book Plus website. [Blue Beetle is now a trademark of DC Comics.]

Whitney Ellsworth, DC’s editor. I went up to see him and said, “I’m getting married. Can I do some work for you?” He said, “Sure, you can do some filler pages, whatever you want.” In those days, the comicbooks had 64 pages. There was no advertising. They sold them for a dime. Now the comicbooks are half advertising. So I started doing some filler pages. Then he said, “I’m getting busy. I need an assistant. Do you know anybody?” So I sent my brother [Murray] up there. He had worked for the New York American, the newspaper, and the paper folded…. So I sent him off to Whit Ellsworth, and he went for it. He cursed me every year since. He was there for forty years or something. He said, “I hate the place.” “Murray, see the door? You can walk out if you don’t get along with it”…. Whenever I do a cartoon, I sign my name to it. If I’m embarrassed in any publication with my name, I wouldn’t work for that publication. Before, in the comicbooks, nobody signed their name. Now, if you get a comicbook, the first page it says, “Story written by, penciled by, lettering by, inked by, and the colorist.” Everybody gets a credit. [laughter]

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

This full-page ad appeared in the adzine Comic Buyer’s Guide #1382 (May 12, 2000). Host Joe Petrilak tended to get a bit mixed up on his comics “ages” (Jim Shooter and Roy Thomas, at the very least, were definitely also in the “Silver Age” category), but his heart was definitely in the right place—and his guest list was staggering. With thanks to Russell Rainbolt, who photographed the page. [© the respective copyright holders.]

So then I got out of that—I had done work for about 30, 40 years in the comicbooks—and did a syndicated feature for King Features. I did a couple, but the last one, I’m very happy because I can do a whole week’s worth in a day and a half. I’m working for [unintelligible] now, so I’m sort of semi-retired. So I do two weeks of work and go to the post office and mail them off to New York, to

the syndicate, and it’s great. I love it. I don’t want to stop doing it. GOULART: All right. Now we’re going to move to Irwin Hasen…. Initially you were the unsung “Green Lantern” artist for a while. HASEN: Well, I think in those days there were no [credited] creators except probably the two people called Siegel and Shuster,

Cuidera, Boltinoff, Hasen, & Two Schwartzes

Do You Think He Knew “Young Dr. Malone”? (Left:) Henry Boltinoff’s “serious side.” Splash page of the second “Young Doc Davis” story, written and drawn by him for World’s Finest Comics #2 (Summer 1941). (Right:) For several years, Boltinoff wrote and drew “Dover and Clover,” who were for a time the cover features of More Fun Comics. This late splash page is from All Funny Comics #21 (Jan.-Feb. 1948). [TM & © DC Comics.]

and you know what happened to them. But all of us were just lackeys. We were guys who were making a buck… cartoonists, and writers, and editors, and that’s all. There were no stars, there were no guys who created anything. We were all under the aegis— BOLTINOFF: I remember your stuff at DC. HASEN: We were all under the aegis of editors and writers, and I drew the “Green Lantern” and “Wildcat,” and those were my crea—whatever you want to call them. But all we did was just work, as kids. Young kids. We were looking to make a buck. It was after the Depression. The first printing I ever had published cartooning was a sports cartoon. Got right out of high school, I looked at a list of all the newspapers in New York City where I should go with samples…. Samples are things that were very important. I was in the prize fight business at that time, and my first magazine, first newspaper… I started from 14th Street downtown. I lived way uptown, and I went on the subway to 14th Street because I saw there was a magazine, a paper called The Daily Worker. In those days there was no stigma about being a Communist except when you got into the movies ten years later. And I took my samples, which were portraits of prizefighters… and I put it on the desk of a sports editor at Daily Worker named Lester Cohen. He was eating a herring sandwich. And I put my samples out. He liked them, this and that. He said,

“Next week we’re having a soccer game, the [Hartingford?] soccer game.” I didn’t know from soccer from Hartingford. All I knew was, he gave me an assignment to do a sports cartoon. I was 19 years old, never published yet. If I had wanted to run for Congress ten years later, I’d be on my ass. [laughter] To make a long story short, the thing was bought, and I said, “Well, where do I go to get my check?” I didn’t even know how to say “check.” So he said, “Oh, you’d better go down to Mr. Walker.” He was the editor of The Daily Worker. “Go down on the fifth floor.” I left all the samples up on Lester Cohen’s desk. I go down to the editor, or publisher, and I said, “Sir, my name is Irwin Hasen. They’re using a cartoon of mine this Sunday. Lester bought it.” And he looked at me. I said, “You know, I’d like to get paid.” This is my first shot at getting paid. He said, “Don’t you believe in the cause?” [laughter] I said, “Nah.” I’ll never forget that episode. So I’m a kid from uptown. I just want to sell my work. So he said, “How much did it cost you to come down here?” I said, “A nickel.” He said, “We’ll pay your car fare.” And I looked at him, and I was smart enough to go right upstairs where I left all my cartoons, grabbed them from the desk. Lester Cohen probably had spit out his herring sandwich. But the following Sunday my cartoon appeared on the back page of The Daily Worker. First published work. BOLTINOFF: A freebie.

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

DC Come, DC Go! (Left:) A Hasen-drawn page from Green Lantern #29 (Dec. 1948-Jan. 1949), the issue that featured three GL-vs.-Harlequin escapades, all scripted by Robert Kanigher. Thanks to Doug Martin. (Above:) One feature Irwin drew in his later years at DC was “Sargon the Sorcerer,” as per this splash from Sensation Comics #58 (Oct. 1946). Scripter unknown. Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

GOULART: You could have got a nickel for it. HASEN: If I’d played my cards right. A Communist Party card. And then I went to Sheldon Mayer. I worked in the prizefight business, Marc Jacobs sports cartoons for the fights. I met all the great fighters… Joe Louis, Henry Armstrong. And also gangsters. I met the top gangsters, because I worked in a little office of a little publishing magazine called Bang magazine. It was a trade magazine on 49th Street, New York City, where the prizefight people were. Damon Runyon was upstairs, and I met Frankie Carbo by accident, one of the most vicious gangsters in the history of New York. Worse than Al Capone. He happened to come into the office where I was working, typing. Fast backwards. And then I went into the comicbooks. Sheldon Mayer, a friend of mine, I knew him. I went there, and the rest is comicbook history. I went down to Gaines, and I did the covers, most of the covers. I was never an inside man. I never could do the stuff that Joe Kubert, Infantino, all these, Alex Toth, of course—for some reason or other I just did covers. I gave great covers.

Maybe Fairyland Isn’t Just In Comics Anymore… One of the irascible Irwin Hasen’s consistent false memories was that he had primarily drawn covers, and only rarely interiors, for DC. In actuality, as was pointed out in the Hasen-centered A/E #140, he not only illustrated many stories and even entire issues of Green Lantern, etc.—he also drew major portions of many issues of All-Star Comics, including penciling and probably inking the entire 38 pages (plus cover!) of the “Justice Society of America” adventure in All-Star #39 (Feb.-March 1948). Script by John Broome. From Ye Editor’s bound volumes. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Cuidera, Boltinoff, Hasen, & Two Schwartzes

GOULART: Can we move to Mr. Schwartz, and then you can— HASEN: I’m sorry I kept talking, I get carried away. Sorry. GOULART: We’ve got an hour to fill. SCHWARTZ: [to Hasen] Go ahead and finish your story. I like your story. HASEN: No, no, that’s the story. I got into comicbooks, and then Whitney Ellsworth one day asked me to come into his office after ten years of working with DC, and he said to me, “Irwin, you know, you’re a single guy. Why don’t you take a trip? Why don’t you get on a ship? You’re a bachelor.” I didn’t know I was being fired. [laughter] So I went down to the Pierre Bar, I had two martinis, and I got a travel agent. And I booked passage on the Liberté to go to Europe! And as I passed the Statue of Liberty, I realized I’d been fired. [laughter] GOULART: He didn’t offer to pay your boat fare, did he? HASEN: No, I didn’t know. I was eased out. In other words, I couldn’t hack it. I really mean it. I just couldn’t hack it. This was in ’52. And that was the best thing that ever happened to me. I went to Europe, three weeks on my own, broke. If I’d had a family, it would have been a different story. And then I met Gus Edson on USO trips, and Dondi was born. That’s it. Go ahead. SCHWARTZ: That’s a hell of a story. Well, I got into comics about 1939, completely by accident. I’d been a writer all my life. I started when I was seven years old. I always wanted to write. I wrote my first lousy novel at the age of seven. “Dick [Frankle’s?] Adventures.” I remember that very well. My uncle had given me a typewriter, and I just went wild with it. But I got my first story published when I was twelve in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I won a rabbit for this story…. And then my family moved to New York, and things were really bad. I was a poet. I was getting published in poetry magazines. I was a literary type. I was putting out a literary magazine that you could buy at the Gotham Book Market if you were in New York. I never had anything to do with comics except that, when I went to high school, Will Eisner was a friend of mine because he was on the school magazine and I was one of the editors. But that was it. And one day, many years later, I’m living in the Village. Things are bad. I’m married to a sculptor, and we had no food in the house. We’re in a place on 8th Street. The rent’s unpaid. Once in a while we’d sell a book for about three or four bucks, from our library. But I figure, on 8th Street, sit by the window, pretty soon somebody’s going to walk by that I know and I can borrow a quarter. Well, for a quarter in those days you could get the whole Chinese meal with the egg rolls, chow mein… [laughter] Anyway, along comes a guy named Jack Small, whom I knew socially, whom I’d met in his home. Actually, I had first met Bill Finger, before I was into comics, and we knew each other socially. This was to pay off later. But I said to Jack, “Look, we’re broke.” Jack said, “You’re a good writer. Why don’t you go to my editor? I’m writing Fairy Tale Parade. They’re very hot on Russian fairy tales these days. Go up to a guy named [DeGrucci?], which is at Street & Smith. But first go to the library. I’ll show you a sample script. Copy a Russian fairy tale into script language, take it to DeGrucci, and see if you can’t sell it.” I did that. I took it to DeGrucci. DeGrucci looked at it, and he said, “One of our staff writers just did this story, but if I like it, I’ll call you back.” So I figured, well, that was that. I got home… there was a call waiting for me from DeGrucci. “We liked yours better. We’re taking it.” So began a series of Fairy Tale Parades. I don’t know, maybe I did ten, twelve of them for a while. And one day I’m sitting in the—

“Your Two Favorite Heroes… In One Adventure Together!” After the first official “meeting” of Superman and Batman in Superman #76 (July-Aug. 1952), Alvin Schwartz scripted the first real team-up of the pair in World’s Finest Comics #71 (July-Aug. 1954), with pencils by Curt Swan and inks by Stan Kaye. Here, Superman (disguised as Batman) gets felled by Kryptonite, while Robin helps Batman (disguised as Superman) look like he’s flying! Oh, and for an in-depth interview with Alvin Schwartz, get hold of a copy of A/E #98. [TM & © DC Comics.]

There’s a “Superman” story called “The Chef of Bohemia” that I wrote some years later. And I could see Rich grinning, because he knows the story so well. RICH MORRISSEY: [From audience] Action #78, I believe. GOULART: The Human Footnote we have here! [laughter] SCHWARTZ: There’s this place called Alex’s Borscht Bowl in the Village. It’s right next to Café Society. But Alex used to buy his food in the A&P and then cook up hamburgers for people. He was supporting all the pregnant girls in the Village. He couldn’t stand seeing anybody hungry, and he hated to cook, and he had the thickest Russian accent you ever heard. But people loved him and used to come in there and hang around, and Alex would shut down the counter and sit on the counter and play his mandolin. And he was very good at it. One day he came over to me. He said, [Russian accent] “You liking funny books? I introduce you to friend mine, Mayer Sheldon.” That was Shelly Mayer, and sure enough, he introduced me to Shelly Mayer. I wound up working down at Gaines’, writing everything that Shelly could throw at me, from “Newsboy Legion”—I can’t even remember all the different strips. [to Morrissey] You remember some of them.

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

plotting. He’d have to write a whole issue. So he’d get together with me. We’d sit around, and we used to pop bennies to try to get enough euphoria to get the plots going. I remember one day, when Charlie couldn’t get enough out of the bennies, he said, “I found something new. It’s wonderful.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “It’s atropine sulfite.” I said, “What’s that?” “I don’t know,” he said. “Try it with the bennies.” And I didn’t realize that this is the stuff poisonous snakes use to kill you. So, okay, I tried it. Your mouth turns dry, and it lasts forever, and you turn out stories. And so Charlie and I were a pretty good team. Charlie was turning out the stuff. By the way, Charlie was the poor man’s Conrad. He came here from, I think, Poland, and learned English. English was his second language, and he was writing this stuff which was very colloquial. One day Charlie says, “I’ve been invited to a Christmas party at DC.” The National Comics at that time, what was it called? MORRISSEY: Detective Comics, I think. SCHWARTZ: Detective Comics, okay. And then they changed to National Periodicals. He said, “They had this Christmas party, and they want me to write ‘Batman,’ but I can’t write comics. Why don’t you come with me?” The upshot was, Charlie and I did our first “Batman” together. Charlie couldn’t stand doing it. The medium was just too tight. He couldn’t think pictorially. And so what happened: we did the first one, I took over the second. The third one, Jack Schiff [thought it had been written by] Don Cameron. That, to me, was the highest flattery, because Don was really the best writer they had around there. I always liked Don Cameron’s work; and, in fact, over the years, I feel there hasn’t been enough recognition of Don’s skills and abilities. But in any case, I wound up writing “Batman,” and shortly after that I was doing “Superman.”

Super-Chef Audience member Rich Morrissey was a fountain of information for the 2000 panel, including about the Alvin Schwartz-scripted “Superman” story “The Chef of Bohemia” in Action Comics #78 (Nov. 1944), with art by Ira Yarbrough. The splash of that miniature epic saw print in A/E #98, so here’s a page whereon the Man of Steel played a one-man short-order chef to a thick-accented Russian (?), based on an acquaintance of Schwartz’s. Reproduced from the hardcover Superman: The Action Comics Archives, Vol. 5. [TM & © DC Comics.]

MORRISSEY: Yes. You did “Flash,” I think a “Green Lantern”… “Wildcat”… SCHWARTZ: There was another “Green.” MORRISSEY: Oh, “Green Arrow.”

Rich Morrissey Thanks to Patricia Floss.

SCHWARTZ: “Green Arrow.” MORRISSEY: That was at DC. HASEN: [to Schwartz] How come I never met you? I was there. SCHWARTZ: We must have not—I don’t know…. Maybe we changed a little bit, then maybe I did meet you. [laughter] HASEN: Yeah, come to think of it. He was avoiding me. [laughter] SCHWARTZ: I’ve got this friend, Charlie Green. Charlie was a top pulp writer who was working for Standard Magazines, and he used to write for Phantom Detective, from which a lot of people say Batman really evolved. And Charlie was always having trouble

At the same time, I led a double life. In 1948, my first novel came out. The [New York] Times called it “the first conscious existentialist novel in America.” It became a bestseller in France, because existentialism was a very fashionable philosophical movement in France at that time. And so they interviewed me. They sent a guy up from The New Yorker. “How come you can write philosophical novels and you write ‘Superman’?” Because they mentioned, in the article, that I’d been anonymously writing “Superman” when it was supposedly getting written by Jerry Siegel for a number of years. So how did I keep the two things apart? Well, I was not aware of the value of publicity in those days. I had no idea about self-promotion. So I said, “Well, I have these two rooms that are painted in different colors, and I wear different suits. I have two suits, and there’s a phone booth between these suits. [laughter] So that story never made it in The New Yorker. They gave me a small review for my book. They praised it, which was nice, but the book was not as big a success in the U.S. as it was in France. That’s another story. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just would like to ask the panel one question. I’m doing some research on the origins of comics and super-heroes, and it seems to me that Hugo Gernsback and Nikola Tesla—Tesla much more indirectly so than Gernsback—seem to have had some influence on the origins of the comicbook industry. There was a notation in a Comic Book Marketplace, I think it was issue #58, in which Joe Simon was being interviewed and said that many of the comicbook publishers had their roots in working for Hugo Gernsback, and I’m wondering if any of you gentlemen were familiar with Gernsback, or whether or not he had any influence on the super-hero industry, or if you’ve even heard of Nikola Tesla. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: The speaker from the audience may be Joe Latigo, who has written and published a number of pieces concerning the Hugo Gernsback pulp magazines.]

Cuidera, Boltinoff, Hasen, & Two Schwartzes

Another Kind Of “Golden Age Greats” While most of the treasures of comics’ Golden Age lie hidden in old comicbooks, a number of pages of art and story exist that were never published—including much of the “Justice Society of America” story “The Will of William Wilson” written by Gardner Fox, with this “Flash” chapter drawn by Martin Naydel, showing the hero retrieving Genghis Khan’s sword. (The preceding row of panels in this chapter was seen in A/E #148.) Thanks to Larry Guidry for coloring this page especially for Alter Ego. See more on this lost tale in The All-Star Companion (Vol. 1) and elsewhere. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

Terror” was the star of whatever… WEXLER: Ned Pines comicbooks? GOULART: Pines, yeah. And he also did, what’s that other guy? MULTIPLE PEOPLE IN AUDIENCE: “The Fighting Yank”! GOULART: “The Fighting Yank,” yeah. Plus “Hercules.” And “Zambini the Magician.” I mean, how can anybody forget that? [indicating another person in audience] Lew Schwartz, another Schwartz, who drew “Batman” for many years. LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: Lew Sayre Schwartz. GOULART: Lew Sayre Schwartz. I should put his middle name in there. And way in the back, two other greats who go back to the beginning of comics, practically, working on cave paintings before they started in comics. My dear friend Gill Fox right there. [applause] And the other, Creig Flessel, who started earlier— GILL FOX: [from audience] Than anybody. GOULART: —in comics than anybody, Creig Flessel. [applause] And I believe he did the first covers with The Sandman, the original Sandman, then drew “The Sandman” for many years, and “The Shining Knight.” And also worked on Dixie Dugan, if you read

Does A Joker Beat A Royal Flush? Splash page of a “Batman” caper scripted by Alvin Schwartz for Detective Comics #118 (Dec. 1946); art by Howard Sherman. Repro’d from the hardcover Batman Archives, Vol. 5. [TM & © DC Comics.]

SCHWARTZ: Did you say Nikola Tesla? The inventor of the Tesla Coil? GOULART: Yes, yeah. So you’re familiar with Tesla? SCHWARTZ: Well, I didn’t know any connection between Gernsback—The most important reading to me when I was a kid was Amazing Stories, and of course that was the source of many kinds of what we call science-fiction, super-hero. It branched out, it led to many kinds of things. It was a wonderful magazine. I didn’t think Nikola Tesla had anything to do with that. AUDIENCE MEMBER: With Gernsback, I can tell—Have you ever heard of Modern Electrics, or Electrical Experimenter, any of you? GOULART: Excuse me. I’m still the moderator of this thing. Can we just save that question? It really isn’t germane to what we’ve been talking about right now, so we’ll get into more details. Now, one thing I’d like to do for those of you who are in the audience is mention that we have several other Golden Age greats here. [indicating a man in the audience] Red Wexler. Now, he doesn’t even remember this, but he’s the man that created “The Black Terror,” if anybody read those comicbooks. RED WEXLER: [from audience] I don’t even remember. GOULART: He doesn’t even remember. [laughter] “The Black

“This Is A Job For…” Superman springs into action (what else?) on the second page of his exploit in Action Comics #129 (Feb. 1949), courtesy of writer Alvin Schwartz, penciler Winslow Mortimer, and inker Al Plastino. Various pages from this story, “Lois Lane, Cavegirl,” have been seen in A/E #98 and earlier issues. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Cuidera, Boltinoff, Hasen, & Two Schwartzes

each other. That is, we would get together, I’d go to his house, or he’d come to mine, and we would work together and help each other write the plot to a story. All I can say about Bill Finger is that Bill Finger had no academic background as I did. Bill was marvelous at visualizing. He understood comics in a way—I learned from him. I was a literary writer. I had a different kind of background. If you look at some of my old comics, they’re wordy compared to Bill’s except for things that I loved doing, like Buzzy and Date with Judy and stuff like that, the kid stuff. But when it came to “Superman,” Elmer “Red” Wexler “Batman,” I had very complex, very intricate plots, so, in a way, I helped Bill develop his language. Bill helped me develop the pictorial side. Bill did have a problem, which I think I understand very well, in that his work was always late. In the old days, when Freud was writing, this was known as passive aggression. In a certain way, Bill was angry about a lot of things in his life that he’d never been able to overcome, starting with his parents. I heard stories about his parents coming in and taking him by the ear when he got his first check. [after sharp “click” sound] That’s my hearing aid going off. Taking his money. He moved out of the house. He got married to somebody he wasn’t terribly in love with. It was a good woman, by the way. BOLTINOFF: He had a boy. HASEN: He had a son.

Them’s “Fighting” Words—And Pictures! Unfortunately, the only photo we have of the late Elmer “Red” Wexler, obtained for Jim Amash’s interview with the artist in A/E #81, was taken in the 1960s. Here, he seems to be looking at the splash of the “Fighting Yank” story he drew for Nedor’s Startling Comics #12 (Jan. 1942). Scripter unknown. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

ALVIN SCHWARTZ: And he had a son. I knew them all pretty well, and Bill always had a bad time with that problem of—It was a frustration. It was a feeling of, he couldn’t—He felt oppressed by the comics. He wanted to try to get out and do something. He wanted to write film. In a certain way, he couldn’t write well enough. On the other hand, he was a master at plotting, and he was wonderful to plot with and wonderful to work with. Some of the stories that were credited in the reprint by Kitchen Sink Press of the Batman dailies and Sundays and so on, I made mistakes. I attributed—

newspaper comics. And did a lot of advertising. And then did some dirty old man stuff for Playboy or something. [laughter] Now we’ll get back. Let’s take questions from the audience for a while and see what we’ve got. There’s Lew Schwartz with a question!

BOLTINOFF: He was responsible for Batman.

LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: Yeah, I think it would be really good if Julie’d give us a little background on—

HASEN: Bill Finger.

GOULART: This is Alvin Schwartz. This is a different Schwartz. LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: Alvin, I’m sorry. A little background on Bill Finger. On the origins. ALVIN SCHWARTZ: I don’t know whether you, any of you who are able to use the Web—I have a regular weekly column in which I have a very detailed story about Bill Finger. It goes back one week… I’m on column 58 now. But, basically, I first started with Bill Finger. I met him at Jack Small’s house. There used to be quite a number of people circulating through Jack’s place. Jack, if you’ll remember, was the one who got me onto Fairy Tale Parade. And Bill and I became friends. We didn’t have anything to do with each other in comics. I actually did, for a short while—I wrote some “Captain Marvels” for Fawcett, for another person I met at Jack Small’s. But in the meantime, Bill’s friendship and mine continued to grow, and gradually we got to the point where we would spark

ALVIN SCHWARTZ: Who was? GOULART: Finger.

ALVIN SCHWARTZ: That’s right. BOLTINOFF: He worked for me. ALVIN SCHWARTZ: Not only did he create—Well, I assume everybody knew that Bill Finger created Batman. Having had Bob Kane in my 1A class long before I ever met Bill Finger, I remember Bob Kane. The only memory I have of Bob was sitting on a dunce

Bill Finger The writer/co-creator of “Batman,” in a detail from a 1948 staff photo reprinted in Taschen Books’ 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking, by Paul Levitz; with thanks to Todd Klein. Finger scribed the “Batman” story seen on the facing page.

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

The Good Old Days (Left:) Lew Sayre Schwartz, who from 1946 to 1953 was the principal “ghost artist” of “Batman,” says that Bob Kane often drew the Batman and Robin figures during that period. At far left we have a page from World’s Finest Comics #48 (Oct.-Nov. 1950). Inks by Sy Barry; script by Bill Finger. Thanks to Bob Hughes.

Lew Sayre Schwartz

(Below:) Creig Flessel goes even further back with DC— all the way to the days when Adventure Comics was still named New Adventure Comics, as per #29 (July 1938), for which Flessel drew the cover. Thanks to Mitchell Senft. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Creig Flessel

stool with a dunce cap on his head all through 1A. Which was a terrible way to treat kids with problems, but he was not very bright even then. He was really a handicapped kid. So he leaned—If Bill hadn’t come along, there would have been no Bob Kane, there would have been no Batman. There’s no question. GOULART: Irwin, you worked with Bill Finger, too, right? HASEN: Bill Finger to me was the saddest unheralded genius in the comicbook business. And I worked with him on the “Green Lantern,” and, unfortunately, you’re absolutely right about his being late. And the poor guy just was sucked under by whatever happened when he was a kid. But there’s one story I’ve got to tell you about Bob Kane. Bill Finger probably did all the work. BOLTINOFF: You’d better believe it. HASEN: And Bob Kane, the luckiest thing that ever happened to him was that he had a father, because I remember, when I was a kid at DC, I wanted, I’ve got to make some money. Somebody said, “Bob Kane needs a letterer.” Well, hell, I don’t letter. So, for some reason or other, I found myself going up to the Bronx to meet Bob Kane. His father opens the door, and his father shows me some pages, and I looked at them, and he said, “Can you letter these? Are you a letterer?” I said, “Yeah, I’m a letterer.” So I said, “Well, how much, what is the rate?” So the son-of-a-bitch said, “What do you mean, rate?” He said, “This is Bob Kane. This is the creator of Batman. We’re doing you a favor.” [laughter] I swear to God! And the bottom line on Bob Kane is that his father, when he got his first check from DC, insisted that he not sign away any rights. In other words, all of us signed away our life. Bob Kane’s father was responsible for Bob Kane being, God bless, wherever he

is... Batcave? Is he in the Batcave? [laughter] But if it wasn’t for his father, he’d be nowhere. He would be just another lackey like all of us. But the old man, really—If we all had a father like that guy. And he was right! The father was right. GOULART: And he got a free letterer, too. LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: Irwin, Bob signed that check. HASEN: Really? LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: He signed the check. Where the old man—I was at Bob’s house the afternoon that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster tried to get Bob into the [Superman] lawsuit. That afternoon. And the old man said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Almost his words, you know? And he was so smart about it. HASEN: Yup! LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: He wouldn’t let Bob join the lawsuit. And you know what happened. They won a $2,000,000 lawsuit. The lawyers took one million. HASEN: Naturally. LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: And Joe and Jerry split up the other, oh, $500,000. And they were broke in three years. But the old man did all kinds of things for Bob. I would go up there, and I was 19, 20, and the mother was wonderful. They were a typical Bronx Jewish family. But the old man was smart as hell. HASEN: Well, Bob Kane—there’s a lot to be desired as his being

Cuidera, Boltinoff, Hasen, & Two Schwartzes

smart. He was a [unintelligible] himself all his life. LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: Well, Bob Kane, in 1951 in Los Angeles, picked up the first tab that I ever saw him pick up. [laughter]

Was Kane Able? Bob Kane with some Batman paintings he did in the 1960s, probably at the height of the Batman TV craze. It’s never been A/E’s intention, and probably wasn’t the 2000 panelists’, either, to strip Kane of all claim in the creation of the Dark Knight—only to get due credit for writer/co-creator Bill Finger, which wasn’t achieved until decades after the latter’s passing. Thanks to John Firehammer.

HASEN: It goes back to his father. We all had fathers, but most of our fathers were busy trying to make a living for their family. But Bob Kane had a perfect comicbook father. LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: He did.

HASEN: The deal that they got with the publishers! ALVIN SCHWARTZ: The deal was set up where DC was in delicate negotiations with McClure Syndicate. [interruption] HASEN: I’m sorry I didn’t take that lettering job. I would have been known as Bob Kane’s letterer. [laughter] GOULART: You also did “Wildcat,” which Bill created.

been asked right after “Superman” was a big hit for DC to come up with new ideas for strips like “Superman,” and I believe—[to Creig Flessel] Was it you or was it Bert Christman who came up with Sandman? In any case, they did “The Sandman,” and they did “The Crimson Avenger,” and Bob Kane, who had been doing gag cartoons like “Ginger Snap” and “Peter Pupp”—I think he’d just started doing a drama strip called “Rusty and his Pals,” which was a direct ripoff of Terry and the Pirates, and he came up with “Batman.” His idea, though, was that Batman would be a man who could fly, like Superman. He had a bat-winged device on his back like Leonardo da Vinci. That was his whole idea of a man who looked like a bat. And he brought it to Bill, who had been writing “Rusty and his Pals.” They met at a party. Bill was a shoe salesman—that’s how he made a living until he hooked up with Bob, and Bob said, “This is my character, Batman.” He was actually a bit like the character on the new Batman Beyond, because he could fly with the bat wings, and he had a red-and-black suit. And Bill said, “No, he’s a bat. He’s a dark creature of the night, so it should be black or dark blue. And he should have a cowl, and, of course, he has to have gloves so he won’t be leaving fingerprints all over the place.” So they developed the character together, and Bill wrote the story, and Bob Kane brought it in to DC and said, “Here’s this character I created, wrote, and drew, and what do you think of him?” So they bought him. They assigned Gardner Fox to write him for about six months, and then Fox got hired away to do Flash Comics, so Bob got Finger to come back, although Finger went to DC a bit afterwards, when he realized Bob wasn’t paying him what he was getting from DC for writing as well as drawing it. But Bob essentially had made all the contacts. Years later, they talked to the editor, Vin Sullivan, who died just recently, and he said he never heard of Bill Finger. As far as he knew, Kane had just come up with it all by himself. So that’s how Kane got all of it. LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ: You mentioned, when did Kane actually start to get a piece of the pie? GOULART: The audience is interacting. Do we have any other questions?

[interruption] ALVIN SCHWARTZ: [to Rich Morrissey in audience] Rich, you know the story of how Bob got that cushy deal… that said that he got a hunk of everything Batman ever sold. MORRISSEY: Yes. ALVIN SCHWARTZ: Well, tell us the story. BOLTINOFF: I’d love to hear that one. AUDIENCE MEMBER: [as Morrissey starts to answer] Wait a minute. What comicbook did you draw? MORRISSEY: Oh, I didn’t draw any. I just have talked to all these people and found out the work. I mean, It’s A Bat… It’s A Plane… I wasn’t born when For the cover of 1999’s Alter Ego, Vol. 2, #5, which itself was this happened. I the flip cover of Jon B. Cooke’s Comic Book Artist #5, artist know it second-hand. Arlen Schumer drew a masterful version of what, according Most of these to some accounts (including that of Rich Morrissey on the people were there 2000 “Golden Age” panel), Batman might have looked like first-hand. But the on the cover of Detective Comics #27 if Bill Finger hadn’t wandered into Kane’s office that day in 1939. Arlen’s full way I understand it article can be seen in the trade paperback Alter Ego: The is, Kane had been—I Comic Book Artist Collection—if you can find it! [Batman TM & think everybody © DC Comics; other art elements © Arlen Schumer.] in the office had

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

The Moving Finger Writes… (Left:) Writer Bill Finger and artist Irwin Hasen put Green Lantern, Doiby Dickles, and some hoodlums through their paces in “The Circle of Kafoon” in All-American Comics #40 (July 1942). (Right:) Splash page of the second “Wildcat” story, by Finger and Hasen, from Sensation Comics #2 (Feb. 1942); repro’d from the hardcover The JSA All Stars Archives,Vol. 1. However, despite what gets said on the panel, Hasen insisted in several interviews that “Wildcat” was his idea, and that Bill Finger was then brought aboard as the writer—though he did count Finger as the hero’s co-creator. [TM & © DC Comics.]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Irwin, that cartoon that you did for The Daily Worker never came back to haunt you, did it, in the ’50s? HASEN: No, I just took it around the neighborhood and said to my friends, “Look! I’m published!” [laughter] But I say, if I were to run for public office 25 years later, that would surface. Especially if what’s-his-name, in Jersey today, if I were to run against him. GOULART: [acknowledging Roy Thomas in audience] Roy Thomas, another famous, not a Golden Age guy, a Silver Age guy. ROY THOMAS: I was just a kid then. I wondered, Chuck Cuidera—I’m not sure if you were writing these stories during “Blackhawk”—but I was kind of curious always as to how this airplane, I forget the numbers and letters, but the Grumman Skyrocket was the name of the experimental plane that practically never really flew, was never mass-produced. How did that particular weird-looking plane, one of the oddest-looking planes that ever came around, end up as the Blackhawk plane? CUIDERA: Well, the war broke out and I was inducted, had to leave “Blackhawk.” I went into the [Army] Air Force. That’s where, like most of the guys, I wanted to be a pilot. But they told me they had enough pilots, so I just became an officer. But I used to get the Air Force magazine which had everything on airplanes, and that’s how I created the airplane.

BOLTINOFF: It was the Air Corps in those days, not the Air Force. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Actually, the name of the Army Air Corps was changed to the Army Air Force (or Forces) in June 1941, before the creation of “Blackhawk.”] THOMAS: But I have to say it was an inspired choice. GOULART: It was an inspired choice. I didn’t really like the airplanes as much as I really liked the guys flying without the airplane—that’s what I liked. Okay, now the man with the tie. AUDIENCE MEMBER: First of all, I want to say I’ve read Mr. Goulart’s book, and it’s one of the best books I’ve seen. I don’t remember the name; it has a black cover to it. I lent it to a friend a few years ago and I never got it back. GOULART: That happens a lot, yeah, with my books. People steal them. That’s why they’re not on the bestseller list, because people steal them out of the stores and they don’t get credited that way. Yes, go ahead. AUDIENCE MEMBER: One of the characters I found fascinating that you talked about was Major Nicholson, and I’m wondering if anybody has any recollections or any more information about him. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: He is referring to Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, founder of National Allied, the forerunner of DC Comics.]

Cuidera, Boltinoff, Hasen, & Two Schwartzes

Blackhawk Down? (Left:) Artist Chuck Cuidera (and reportedly writer/editor Will Eisner) introduced the Blackhawks’ new fighter plane, a knockoff of the experimental Grumman XP-50 Skyrocket, which never actually flew in combat, at the end of the “Blackhawk” story in Quality’s Military Comics #3 (Oct. 1941)—and it saw action in #4 (Nov. ’41). Repro’d from the DC hardcover Blackhawk Archives, Vol. 1 (and, sadly, only, to date). (Below:) Long after he switched from penciling to inking, Chuck Cuidera embellished Dick Dillin’s pencils for this splash page from Quality’s Blackhawk #75 (April 1954). And the pair would carry on for a decade or two with the character, even after “Busy” Arnold sold that title and others to DC a couple of years later. Scripter unknown. A photo of Roy Thomas, who asked Cuidera a question from the audience, can be seen on p. 2. [TM & © DC Comics.]

FOX: [from audience] Yeah, he owes me money. [laughter] It’s true. GOULART: Actually, we have here Creig Flessel. [indicates Flessel in audience] Creig Flessel worked in the bullpen, at the offices, with the Major, and he actually knew Major Nicholson. Do you got anything to say about Major Nicholson? CREIG FLESSEL: Well, Major Nicholson was… He owes him twenty bucks. ? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Was he a real major, or was that…? GOULART: He had been a major in the [U.S.] Cavalry, yeah. What I’ve read about him since, he was a pulp writer, and he wrote stories in Argosy and Adventure [pulp magazines], and his name was on the covers. He wrote stories about the Cavalry, and he also wrote stuff about the Middle Ages and knights and all that stuff. But Creig was—you were there in the office, right? FLESSEL: I was there, [with editors] Whitney Ellsworth and Vin Sullivan and a secretary. And Major Nicholson with a bag… his bag with nothing in it. We opened it up one day and there was absolutely nothing in it. No, he was formerly a major, and he was part of the invasion that—Do you know that we once invaded Russia? Through Siberia? And he was part of it. And it didn’t work, so he came back and started comicbooks. [laughter]

GOULART: He also took part, I believe, in the invasion of Mexico, when the United States troops crossed the border into Mexico after Pancho Villa. FLESSEL: Well, he did that so he could write for the pulps. [laughter] But he never had a cent, and he was a nice enough man. And I was smart enough to sit there and get paid, but he—[to Gill Fox] Twenty-five bucks? You’re never going to get it. [laughter] GOULART: You can sue DC now, right? Well, the other story that Sheldon Mayer told me once about when he was up there, when he first started working for Nicholson, and I think they offered him, like, a dollar or something for this filler page, whatever it was. Five dollars, let’s say. And he went up there and I think it was… It wasn’t Ellsworth. It was [William] Cook and [John] Mahon, I think,

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Now, from what I’ve read, he sold out approximately right before Action #1 came out. FOX: He sold out of comics. GOULART: Well, [Harry] Donenfeld did like a lot of distributors. Donenfeld was the distributor, a printer. He printed the covers, he printed the magazines, and he owned Independent News. So he had the whole thing, and what happened was, they were advancing money, as I understand it, to Nicholson. They’d Gill Fox. give him so much money, and then he’d give them the magazines, and that was an advance against sales, and they never sold. So at one point Donenfeld said—I think they wanted to start Detective Comics; probably Rich knows this, too—and the only way they would finance, let [Wheeler-Nicholson] go ahead with that was that they would come in as partners. So Donenfeld and [Jack] Liebowitz came in at that point and became partners with Nicholson. The early issues of Detective Comics had Nicholson’s name on them, and about a year later they just sort of eased him out. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So he never sold out, then? GOULART: I think they might have made a settlement. I don’t know the details. Yes, Roy? THOMAS: So Liebowitz, who was sort of an accountant type, was in on it at the very beginning with Donenfeld? GOULART: In the early Detective Comics, it says, “Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and Jacob Liebowitz” as the two guys. But that’s all technical. [to Hasen] Did you know those guys?

The Fox & The Condor Veteran artist and editor Gill Fox at the 2000 con, in a photo taken by Russell Rainbolt—and his handiwork on a “Black Condor” splash page from Quality’s Crack Comics #25 (Sept. 1942). Writer uncertain. Thanks to Jim Ludwig for the art scan. [Black Condor TM & © DC Comics.]

who were there before, and Mayer said he delivered the artwork and he said, “I’d like to get paid.” And they said, “Oh, just a minute.” And they went and opened a drawer, and they took these envelopes that had the subscription money, and they took $5 out of the subscription and said, “Here’s your money.” [laughter] And at that point he figured, “These guys aren’t too solvent.” In one of the books I interviewed an artist named Lyman Anderson, who became a successful magazine illustrator, and he has the distinction of having done the first cover for New Fun. Because, what they did, they took a page from the inside and made it the cover so they could save money. And he said at one point Major was so broke he was living with Lyman Anderson and his wife or something in their apartment, sleeping on the couch, and every once in a while he’d say, “Could you loan me five bucks to keep the magazines going?” And I knew Tom McNamara, who was an art editor up there, and Tom said nobody was buying those comicbooks, and they were stacked up. They were getting returns and they were just piled up to the ceiling at wherever he was, Lafayette Street or wherever the Major was in the initial days. But you have two guys—Gill Fox, you sold your first work to the major and didn’t get paid? FOX: I think they were my first, yeah. I was doing movie and Believe It or Not pages for Ripley and stuff like that.

HASEN: An uncle of mine, who was an artist, said, “Go to see Jack Liebowitz at DC.” So I went over to Jack Liebowitz’s. This is a very funny little story. You might get a kick out of human nature. Liebowitz was wearing a black suit that was shiny. It wasn’t mohair; it was an old suit. And this was at the beginning of DC. And that’s how I met Jack Liebowitz, when he was with Donenfeld, and he sent me down to Sheldon Mayer. Okay. Now, this is human nature. Thirty-five years later, I had been doing [the comic strip] Dondi, and I was out of the loop of the comicbook industry, and I’m invited to a cocktail party. Liebowitz by now is a multi-millionaire banker. He is past the period of what we’re talking about, with a white mustache, gray hair. And I meet him at this cocktail party given by a girl named Toni Mendez. And Mel Lazarus was there, the cartoonist. Famous cartoonist. Wonderful. And A Major Force In Early there were a group of other Comics people there. And I’m standing Former Major Malcolm Wheelerthere, and this is 35 years after Nicholson, circa 1934-37. With thanks to Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson. he [Liebowitz] told me to go [Photo © 2009 Major Malcolm see Sheldon Mayer. And I’m Wheeler-Nicholson Estate.] standing with a group, having

Cuidera, Boltinoff, Hasen, & Two Schwartzes

and Adventure. And then the fourth upcoming comic, of course, was Action. GOULART: Well, there’s one point where I read some correspondence of Jerry Siegel’s printed somewhere, and Siegel said, as he recalled, they had submitted “Superman” to Nicholson and he turned it down and said no or something. AUDIENCE MEMBER: In fact, he submitted “Superman” to Nicholson about 1936 or ’37. Nicholson accepted it, and Siegel decided that Nicholson wasn’t all that steady, and so he actually said no. GOULART: Oh, that’s—Well, see, he talked to Gill Fox and Creig Flessel, and they said you’re not going to get paid.

The Powers-That-DC (Left to right:) DC publisher Harry Donenfeld, accountant/partner Jack Liebowitz, and Harry’s son (and heir apparent) Irwin Donenfeld, in a photo taken at the latter’s wedding in 1947. Photo supplied by IW for Alter Ego #26.

a drink, and I see Liebowitz in the back. And he looks at me, I walk over to him and say, “Hi, Jack.” He looks at me and he says, “What are you doing here?” This told me a lot about the psyche of the fellow who came up from nowhere, and he knew who I was from a kid trying to get some work. Why should I be at this cocktail party where he was? [laughter] I didn’t mean to explain it that way, but can you believe this kind of mentality? “What are you doing here?” I said, “First of all, I know Toni Mendez. She’s a friend of mine.” But the point is, the thing that disgusted me, why the hell didn’t I say to him, “Why, you son-of-a-bitch, [laughter] I’m doing a comic strip that’s read all over the country. You’re an accountant who made big by being an accountant.” But I didn’t say it. These are things when you get up in the middle of the night and you say, “Why the hell didn’t I say that?” [laughter] BOLTINOFF: Did he have a shiny suit? GOULART: I think that’s a better punch line, there, if he had the same suit. HASEN: No, he didn’t have a shiny suit. He lived at the Pierre Hotel. Oh, boy. GOULART: I think we’re going to have to put a disclaimer on this if they show this movie and say, “I’m not responsible for anything these guys say.” [laughter] AUDIENCE MEMBER: He’s still alive. GOULART: Liebowitz still alive? HASEN: Oh, yeah. GOULART: And what is he, in his nineties? AUDIENCE MEMBER: He’s very close to 100. Liebowitz said that he bought Wheeler-Nicholson’s properties at a bankruptcy auction. He actually went down on the courthouse steps at the bankruptcy auction and put in the winning bid. Whether it was for him and Donenfeld, I don’t know. That’s the story he’s telling. GOULART: Yeah, but they were already partners by that time. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, they were only partners in Detective Comics. But that didn’t cover New Fun or whatever it was called then,

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, he was already trying to get checks out of him. Nicholson wasn’t paying him on “Doctor Occult” and “Spy” and all that stuff, and so, when he said, “Yeah, I’ll buy ‘Superman,’” Jerry kind of said, “You haven’t paid for this other stuff. I don’t think we’re going to do that.” MORRISSEY: Didn’t he also originally at that point want to have “Superman” as a newspaper strip? Thought he would be better for a strip than for a comicbook? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, now, “Superman” was originally conceived as a newspaper strip, and when it didn’t sell, then he started trying to see who else would take it. And among the people he submitted it to was the guy he was already working for. But then, when the guy said, “Yeah,” he said, “I’m not getting paid for the other stuff. I don’t want to give you this.” GOULART: I’ve talked to both, during their lifetimes, Shelly Mayer and Vin Sullivan. Each one says they were the ones that bought “Superman,” but Shelly Mayer said that the way he saw it was that Siegel and Shuster had sent it to McClure, to [M.C.] Gaines, and Gaines took credit, also, for having sent it over to DC, but then Mayer said it was his thing. And then Vincent Sullivan, I talked to him, and he said, “No, they just walked in with it, and they were already working for us, and I bought it.” So I don’t know. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’ve heard all three of those versions. WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: [apparently indicating Fox and Flessel] These two are saying that Vin Sullivan really bought it. FOX: I think he was instrumental. GOULART: Oh, yeah, he was instrumental, but who got it there for him to see is— AUDIENCE MEMBER: The story that I have figured out, based on everybody’s own perspective, was that Siegel and Shuster did submit “Superman” to McClure. Shelly loved it, and he took it to Gaines, and Gaines says, “No, it’s not right for newspapers.” And at that point, whether Gaines got in touch with Sullivan, or Sullivan got in touch with Gaines, or Gaines got in touch with Liebowitz… not clear on that. But Gaines did send the strip over to DC. Sullivan looked at it, made an instant decision, and said, “I’m buying it.” And that was that. But lately I’ve been trying to figure out who took the strip over to DC. I thought maybe Shelly, being the errand boy, was the guy to do that. But… [to Flessel] Do you know? FLESSEL: You know what it really comes down to is the last guy that had the money, and then… Siegel and Shuster, the last guy to pass them money, he’s the guy that discovered me, because otherwise…. Siegel and Shuster actually came in. I remember the two of them came in hungry from Cleveland, and they had this idea. Oh my God. It was kicked around. [overlapping voices; unintelligible]

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

Sheldon Mayer M.C. Gaines Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster Success Has Many Fathers…” Cover of Action Comics #1 (June 1938), flanked on the left by Superman’s creators, artist Joe Shuster (seated) and writer Jerry Siegel—and on the right, top to bottom, by three comics talents who might have conceivably (and did) claim credit for “discovering” the Man of Tomorrow: cartoonist & future All-American Comics editor Sheldon Mayer—McClure staffer and future All-American & EC publisher M.C. Gaines—and DC editor Vin Sullivan. Some would place Major Wheeler-Nicholson with the latter trio; see the extensive coverage of the National/DC founder in A/E #88. Thanks to Wendy Gaines Bucci & Michael Feldman for the Gaines photo; Vin Sullivan pic taken by Marie Flessel. [Cover TM & © DC Comics; Sullivan photo © Charlie Roberts.]

Vin Sullivan

Incidentally, it should be said: Although several members of the audience, not all of them identified, offered considerable historical information on the origins of DC Comics, Superman, and various other things, the inclusion of those comments in this transcription doesn’t mean that A/E necessarily agrees with everything they may state. Getting at the truth behind things can be elusive, no matter how authoritative a source may be.

GOULART: Let’s have a couple more questions and then we’ll all go eat some more cake or whatever. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Success has a thousand fathers and failure’s an orphan. Nobody claims credit for discovering “Federal Men,” for instance. [laughter] ANOTHER IN AUDIENCE: Give ’em time. AUDIENCE MEMBER: [to Boltinoff] I was wondering, Henry, when did you start drawing? What year did you start your career? BOLTINOFF: I started while I was in law school in 1934. I started doing theatrical portraits for the New York American [newspaper]. My brother was an assistant, the second-string theatre critic, and the second-string to the head of the theatre department. So he had me do drawings. I did them from photographs. Shows on Broadway. The reason I remember the date… I have one original. Well, two, but one is an original I did of Bob Hope, and I look at the back and it’s dated “1933.” I kept it because I looked at it and said, I couldn’t do that today. A wash drawing from a photograph of Bob Hope with the details in his face, a beautiful piece of art. And I did it. He was in the [Broadway] show Roberta. From the minute he went to Hollywood—they made the movie [version of] Roberta, and then he stayed. So I did two drawings a week, sometimes a caricature, or sometimes a portrait. And the paper didn’t pay me. I did a two-column drawing, and the bill went to the press agent of the theatre, sometimes getting $12.50 a column,

Finding The Founding Fathers We’ve printed this cartoon by Creig Flessel before, but it can’t be seen too often, as far as we’re concerned! In the 1990s Flessel drew this image of (left to right) Vin Sullivan, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, the artist himself (at the drawing board), and early and longtime editor Whitney Ellsworth in the ramshackle offices of National Allied/Detective Comics. But boy, did Creig draw thin ankles on people! Thanks to David Siegel; first printed in the TwoMorrows book The All-Star Companion [Vol. 1]. [© Estate of Creig Flessel.]

Cuidera, Boltinoff, Hasen, & Two Schwartzes

Golden Age Goodies From The (Clockwise) Panel Quartet Chuck Cuidera’s “Blackhawk” splash, complete with a bit of racial stereotyping, from Quality’s Military Comics #10 (June 1942); script attributed in Blackhawk Archives, Vol. 1, to Dick French. Henry Boltinoff’s cover (reportedly drawing both Green Arrow/Speedy and Dover & Clover groupings) for DC’s More Fun Comics #103 (May-June 1945). Irwin Hasen penciled and inked the cover (and some of the interior “JSA” chapters) of All-Star Comics #42 (Aug.-Sept. 1948). Alvin Schwartz scripted the “Superman” story for Action Comics #129 (Feb. 1949), with pencils by Winslow Mortimer and inks by Al Plastino. [All images TM & © DC Comics.]

“The Golden Age Of Comics”

so I ran two columns to get $25 a drawing. I did two a week. I made $50 a week in 1933. Not only that, I saw all the Broadway shows for nothing. Big deal. A show at that time at a Broadway theatre was $3.30 a seat. A musical was $4.40. I used to take a date out, 19 years old… we’d sit in the third row orchestra. She was very impressed. [laughter] Then the paper folded, so I said, well, what do I do now? Oh, one interesting story. Old Man [Randolph] Hearst [newspaper magnate] once called the editor at the New York American and said, “I didn’t want two-column drawings, I want four-column drawings.” So I was happy, four columns is twice as much money. It came to $50 a drawing, it would have been 100 bucks a week. Then he’d get another phone call, “I want two-column drawings again.” He’d get you crazy. But once I drew a show… Green Pastures opened on Broadway. It was an all-black show. I did a—[Unfortunately, at this point the tape cuts out for a few moments]

“Casey” At The Bijou

…Jack Schiff, Mort Weisinger. I’m This “Casey the Cop” half-pager, one of many in that cartoon series, was written and drawn by Henry talking about all the editors. When I’d Boltinoff and appeared in Detective Comics #107 (Jan. 1946), filling in space amid features “Batman,” go up there, I used to come Wednesday “Air Wave,” “Slam Bradley,” and “Boy Commandos.” [TM & © DC Comics.] morning. I’d walk in to see the editors. I said, “You’re sitting waiting to see somebody? You built this whole goddam industry, and you’re sitting waiting to see somebody?” AUDIENCE MEMBER: Was Jerry Siegel waiting? HASEN: Those two kids. Those two kids from Cleveland. GOULART: As a moral, let’s let them be the epitaph of this thing. We’ll end it now. You’ve got several immortal people in the comic business here, if you want to circulate and talk. We’ll now end this discussion and you can fight among yourselves. [applause]

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MARVEL’S 1970s CONAN BACK IN PRINT

IN A NEARLY 800-PAGE OMNIBUS! Re-presenting

CONAN THE BARBARIAN #1-26

by THOMAS • WINDSOR-SMITH KANE • BUSCEMA Featuring nearly 150 pages of bonus materials, including unpublished art, synopses, etc. Regular Edition (John Cassady cover): ISBN #978-1-302-91512-4

Variant Edition (cover from CTB #1) ISBN #978-1-302-91513-1

$125 U.S. ($158 Canadian)

Release date: Jan. 16, 2019

ALL TIME CLASSIC NEW YORK COMIC BOOK CONVENTION PART

“Bronze To Present Age Marvel Comics”

Craig Shutt then a.k.a. “Mr. Silver Age” in his regular column in Comics Buyer’s Guide magazine, moderated the Marvel Bronze Age panel. (Note: A photo of Marv Wolfman will appear at the point in the text where he joins the panel.)

SEVERIN, SIMONSON, SHOOTER, WOLFMAN, & THOMAS Throw In A Touch of Silver! Moderated by Craig Shutt

Transcribed by Steven Tice

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Marvel’s role in the 2000 All Time Classic New York Comic Book Convention took some strange turns, as a look at the con’s panel schedule (reprinted in A/E #148) reveals. The “X-Men from 1963 to the Movie” panel was transcribed way back in A/E #24… but alas, the “Silver Age Marvel panel,” which Ye Editor moderated and which was also to have featured John Buscema, Dick Ayers, Marie Severin, and Joe Sinnott, was apparently not videotaped (though I’m pretty sure Buscema never made it to that event anyway—his limo got lost in the South Bronx)— or, if it was taped, nobody seems to have a copy of it. We do have, oddly, the middle part of the “Marvel Bronze Age” panel moderated by Craig Shutt, which showcased the

A/E

Jim Shooter

Marie Severin (artist of “Dr. Strange,” Sub-Mariner, The Incredible Hulk, Kull the Conqueror, and Not Brand Echh, among others) shares one of her sunny smiles with the con. Photo courtesy of Russell Rainbolt.

at a comics convention— precise event unknown. Active in the field since 1965 when he began scripting DC’s “Legion of Super-Heroes,” he was editor-in-chief of Marvel from 1978-87. Photo courtesy of Bill Broomall.

Roy Thomas

Walt Simonson is celebrated for his work on DC’s “Manhunter” and Marvel’s Thor, but has many, many other top pro credits under his belt. He entered the comicbook field in 1972.

in a selfie with hat-sporting Mike Colter (who stars as Luke Cage in the Marvel/ Netflix series of that name—a hero most would consider “Bronze Age”), and news anchor Fraendy Clervaud of WACH-TV in Columbia, South Carolina, who hosted a Colter/Thomas panel at the Soda City Con there on Aug. 25, 2018. Roy’s been in the comics field since 1965, working mostly for Marvel and/or DC. Photo from the WACH-TV website.

Have A Marvel-ous Christmas! Above, courtesy of Michael Dunne, is the Will Meugniot blue-pencil original art to the composition used as our capricious cover. See the “On Our Cover:” note on page 1 of this issue for the story behind it all. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Severin, Simonson, Shooter, Wolfman, & Thomas

A Sub Sandwich Two of Marie Severin’s cover sketches for Sub-Mariner #31 (Nov. 1970)—and the printed cover, based on the second. Occasionally, Marie or another artist would have to go through several sketches before one was approved by editor Stan Lee—or later by Roy T. or his successors. But Marie was an ace at both sketches and finished covers, as well as interiors! Sadly, she passed away on Aug. 29, 2018, as this issue was in preparation. More about her will most definitely be seen in future issues! [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

aforementioned Severin and Thomas, plus a couple of other souls… all of them except perhaps Walt Simonson figures of the Silver Age as much as of the so-called Bronze. Marv Wolfman joined after the panel was in progress. Marc Svensson’s generously provided videotape (which is © 2018 by him) begins with the panel already well in progress, so that we’ve probably missed much of what he and Marie had to say… and it cuts out as the panel had turned into a sort of de facto “Marvel editors” confab between Shooter, Wolfman, and yours truly, with Marie and Walt eventually cutting out so they could get back to drawing sketches at their tables. But we’ll take what we can get, as Marie is speaking about how covers were handled at Marvel circa 1964-65. The “he” she’s talking about is clearly editor Stan Lee…. MARIE SEVERIN: —and he’s a real editor underneath the—He holds your hand. So anyway, I really enjoyed, I used to love to design the rough covers. We used to have time to do that because it was getting too big for Stan to—Too much time was involved, and he’d tell somebody, “Tell Sol I want a cover of Iron Man, Doom, blah, blah, blah, whatever.” This was really before the boys came. And they came in, and we had to do paste-ups and change it because he didn’t like it, so we figured out we’d get somebody to design a cover and he can reject the design easier than all the time involved sending it back. So I did an awful lot of cover designs, and an awful lot were rejected, but an awful lot went through, and that was very satisfying, too, because it also got me in the flow of the characters, since I don’t read comics that much, hardly ever… and so that’s how I’d get the Xeroxes or whatever. I have a funny story I wanted to tell on another panel. When I first came there, I met Stan’s brother, Larry Lieber—Larry’s an artist, also, and he’s also a pretty good writer. Walt [Simonson] mentioned we didn’t have Xeroxes and we didn’t have Photostat machines, or the quality thereof. When Xerox machines first came out, you would feed the page in, it would go into this funny little machine and get very hot, and the original would come out, and a few seconds later this funny-colored pink thing would come out, and you’d pull it out, and that would be this reproduction that was on like a salmon-colored thing. This was very early; I’m sure it’s in the antique shops now, with this grayish kind of impression of

“Bronze To Present Age Marvel Comics”

Larrupin’ Larry Lieber tore himself away from writing and drawing Rawhide Kid long enough to pencil 43 pages in The Amazing Spider-Man [Annual] #5 (Nov. 1968). This story, rather than an issue of the wall-crawler’s monthly title, is probably the Lieber-illustrated “Spider-Man” yarn Marie Severin refers to on the panel. Thanks to Bill Mitchell for the 1976 photo, taken in the Marvel offices, and to Barry Pearl for the splash scan. [Page TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

the pencils, and that was our only record of stuff when we sent it out, okay? Larry Lieber was always terrified because he was intimidated by Stan, his older brother and the head of the company. So he was doing some “Spider-Man” thing, penciling, helping John with—No, he was doing a story in [Amazing] Spider-Man, and he took John Romita artwork—no, excuse me, a Jack Kirby page, and he fed it into this primitive machine—and he comes in—[turns to others on panel] you know how Larry is—he says, “Oh, my God, guys, what’ll I do?” And he held up the page of Jack Kirby’s, and a corner of it had burned off. [laughs] And I was hysterical. [laughter] WALT SIMONSON: How kind of you. SEVERIN: I’m the sweetest, nicest person in the world. And he said, “What are we gonna do?” And I said, “What do you think?” And Johnny says, “I’ll put it on the lightbox.” And [Larry] says, [whiny voice] “There’s a hole in it! There’s a hole.” I said, “No, no, in your other hand, look. You have a salmon-colored copy.” He said, “Oh!” So we held him off and we brought him to the machine and sat there, and we put it on the lightbox, and he penciled—and he was a good Kirby swiper. He penciled in the replacement on Kirby’s page. We cut it out and we sent it to the inker, and Stan never had to know. And Larry was completely traumatized for the rest of the month. But that is one of my favorite Larry Lieber stories. He was so nervous, and he’s the nicest guy, but he’s just—And he’s much better-looking than Stan, which is hard to believe. But he’s bald. It’s strange. I don’t think it runs in the family, though. SIMONSON: One quick notice from the ’70s. I did do “Manhunter” with Archie Goodwin. I’ve said elsewhere in print, I would say it again, that I haven’t had any better experiences in comics than the time I spent working with Archie on “Manhunter.” And I’ve worked with a lot of great writers, and some of them are sitting here at this table, and I don’t think any of them would hold it against me for saying that, really, the two of us together, there was something about working together with Archie that just made both of us better. At least me better, anyway. I’m not sure if it made Archie better, but it made me better. There was a—I hate to use the word “synergy” because it’s such a dull word, but there was some quality of working with Archie that just brought out the best I could do, even before I was able to really draw all that well, and I haven’t had any better experiences in comics. I’ve had a lot of great experiences, but I’ve had no better ones than the time I spent

working with Archie on that strip. [scattered applause] ROY THOMAS: I think there are probably just different people who just should work together, and you never really know until you try it for a while. I mean, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby… and Simon and Kirby getting together in the early days, and that lasted for a decade-and-a-half, and so forth. And I, myself, had a number of experiences like that. I had met Gil Kane four years before we worked together. He did a couple of covers for Avengers that weren’t really right because he wasn’t really a group super-hero artist guy, and we saw each other casually at a party or this or that, and said a few words. But then, when he inherited a plot I had already actually done for Don Heck on Captain Marvel, to change the character, suddenly it just kind of clicked. And from that time on, for the rest of our lives—it wasn’t as often as we would have liked, but whenever we got a chance, we worked together. That was an example. And there are other people. Marie was always a joy to work with. We worked together on Sub-Mariner, on Not Brand Echh, where I made about—I think now, with Alter Ego, I am probably back to making about the kind of money that I think I made on Not Brand Echh! It took two or three times longer [than anything else I wrote], but it was such fun. And, of course, Marie did a lot of the work because she would put a lot of things in there. Not Brand Echh was really a good book. Maybe we were all lucky it didn’t last long. It would’ve bankrupted us because it was so much work. SEVERIN: But it was cannibalistic, because you were eating up your own stuff, and then there was nothing else. It wasn’t like Mad magazine that would parody everything. We were eating up the comic industry, and when we finished, what’s left? At least we stopped and didn’t ruin it.

Severin, Simonson, Shooter, Wolfman, & Thomas

Home Is The Manhunter! (Left:) Archie Goodwin wrote and Walt Simonson illustrated a landmark run of their own version of the DC hero “Manhunter.” Here’s a two-page sequence from Detective Comics #438 (Dec. 1973-Jan. 1974). Scans courtesy of Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.] (Right:) A preliminary for a 1973 Manhunter drawing by Simonson. Thanks to the Diversions of a Groovy Kind website. [Manhunter TM & © DC Comics.]

THOMAS: Yeah. There were artists with whom I didn’t have a special rapport, or them with me, or we just worked together okay. And other times there would be just a couple of people, the people like Barry [Smith], like Gil, like John Buscema, in particular—Sal, too, but especially John Buscema—where we just kind of clicked and we liked working together. Other people, you know, we’d work together, and then we’d go off and if we never saw each other again, or never worked together again, it was okay. Everybody Archie Goodwin has favorites. Maybe I really liked Gil Major comics writer and better than he liked me, or vice versa, but editor for Warren, Marvel, sometimes it just kind of worked, and and DC. From the 1975 those were nice. And I had a number of Marvel Con program book. things like that in the ’60s, but especially in the ’70s, and one of the nice things was that, because Stan was the boss and he kind of trusted us, and he was very busy—he mostly left us alone to do what we wanted to do. Sometimes Stan—I hate to say it, but he can be an oppressive presence, because he had such a depth of ideas about what he wanted to do, and—The first few months [I worked for him], he

would rewrite all the stuff. Do you remember that “Iron Man”? The first Gene Colan “Iron Man” is one of the few books that doesn’t have credits on, weirdly. It’s one of the first— SEVERIN: Pasteup, probably. THOMAS: There are no credits to say [who did what] because—well, I guess Stan had plotted this with Gene Colan, for Tales of Suspense #73, with the Black Knight. It starts with Iron Man charging down the hospital corridor, and I inherited this to dialogue. I did it on [transparencies taped over the original art]. I was staying there [in the office] late at night doing that. I was under the impression I was going to get paid freelance for this. Later I discovered that he was expecting this for his 110 bucks a week. We worked that out eventually. But anyway, Stan rewrote maybe about half of it. A lot of stuff I can see in there I know is mine, some of it I wouldn’t

“Bronze To Present Age Marvel Comics”

know, but he wrote a lot of it. So he decided that [the credits would say that] “Everybody worked on this one, Smilin’ Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Mirthful Marie Severin, [Flo Steinberg,] and Sol Brodsky.” It’s like one of the very few stories at Marvel that had no exact credits, so people keep asking me, “What did anybody do on that? What did Marie do?” She probably colored it. And I think Sol—I don’t even know… SEVERIN: He signed. THOMAS: But eventually, after a few months, especially after I inherited the Sgt. Fury book, and after two or three issues—Well, he would drag me in. Sol would be on the right hand and I would be on his left hand, and he wanted to go over the work, whether it was my work, or his work, or whatever. And with Sgt. Fury, he’d be rewriting those first couple. But, since he didn’t want to look at it until it was lettered, it had already been lettered in ink and inked, and then suddenly, “Well, I’d like to change a few thousand words.” And [production manager] Sol, it was just driving him crazy, so one day after two or three issues, Stan said, “You know, I’ve been thinking….” Sol breathed a sigh of relief because he saw what was coming. Stan says, “I’ve been thinking about this. I change the stuff, but, you know, I just sort of change it so it’s sort of more like me, but maybe it doesn’t have to be just like me. But if I see it and I think of another way I want to say it, then…” So he says, “From now on, Sol, I just want you to show me the first and last page of [any book Roy writes].” [laughter] “And if I want to see more, I’ll look at it. Just show me the first page and last page.” And, you

know, somehow, I mean, I wrote another year’s worth of Sgt. Fury. It didn’t really make that much difference. JIM SHOOTER: In the ’70s, most of my time I was an editor, and I sort of felt it was my duty to put that first, so a lot of the stuff I wrote in the ’70s was stuff they just simply could not get anyone else to write. If there was an issue that somebody didn’t finish in time, sometimes you’ll see my credit on it, or “written by so-and-so and Jim Shooter,” because I’d be coming in for the last ten pages or something. And I’d end up doing books like Team America because no one in their right mind would do it. But whatever. I actually had fun with some of the stuff, but, basically, often I did not work with artists that I had any special rapport with or people I even would have picked or whatever. I sort of always felt like, well, I’ll just be the kind of the clean-up guy. But I did luck out a couple times. In the ’70s I did some Daredevils with Gil Kane, and Klaus Janson inked them and colored them, and Klaus was always doing things. He was always doing things in coloring that were risky and experimental. Sometimes they didn’t work, but a lot of times he’d do something and it would come out pretty well. SEVERIN: He was on his own. SHOOTER: Yeah. He was very creative. And, also, I got to work with Carmine Infantino on Daredevil. It was great fun doing some of those jobs, and the rest, I thought, well, I gave it my best and tried to pull my own weight with it. And I get a lot of joy out of being the editor and contributing little things here and there, for which there are no credits, but sometimes I felt like I maybe

Smile For The Camera! Marie Severin walked a tightrope between “serious” and humorous in this limited-edition print; date uncertain. This is one of the super-rare copies she handcolored. Thanks to Mike Mikulovsky. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Severin, Simonson, Shooter, Wolfman, & Thomas

We Double-Daredevil You! (Left:) Writer/associate editor Jim Shooter teamed up with penciler Gil Kane and inker Klaus Janson on Daredevil #147 (July 1977). Thanks to Barry Pearl. (Right:) Two issues later, Jim was working again with inker Janson—but this time with penciler Carmine Infantino on Daredevil #149 (Nov. ’77). Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

bumped somebody in the right direction. Actually, I dragged them kicking and screaming to be more clear and tell the story better and stuff, and try to do some of the stuff that Stan and Mort had taught me to do. So a lot of [unintelligible] is from the ’70s. The thing with George Pérez—the trouble with him is he talked me into doing that story with all those characters, that Korvac thing? And then he left in the middle of it. And then I’m trying to find someone else who wants to draw 200 characters. So, fortunately, I brought in Dave Wenzel. But anyway… THOMAS: We have one other 1970s Marvel person here in the back. Maybe you’d like to say a few words. Marv? [applause, then, as Wolfman makes his way to the panel table] Marv Wolfman. The way I got a few writers there, I was lucky. Sometime around maybe the late ’60s, I was still associate editor, but Stan wanted me to help bring in a few writers, and I brought my friend Gary Friedrich from my hometown in Missouri, Steve Gerber from St. Louis whom I knew, and a couple other people, and a few others wandered and out. But we had a great thing happen. Maybe Marv will tell you about it. Sometime in the late ’60s, DC suddenly had too much material for, like, House of Mystery and House of Secrets and all these books that Joe Orlando and Dick Giordano were editing that had

to do with mysteries, and all the anthology titles that Marv, Len Wein, Steve Skeates, Gerry Conway, a couple other guys, were doing—and all of a sudden one day [the editors] said, “If you guys don’t eat for about six months, we’ll be able to buy some more stories from you.” And all of a sudden I got a great deal. I got this reputation that I was hiring all these great people. All I had to do was open the door, stand at the door: “Next! Next!” Here’s this guy, that guy. Of course, the great majority of those people had already had a little training, so you didn’t have to teach them what a balloon was, and it saved time. They had some skills, they had some talent, and they were just all ready to be turned on. And Marv ended up working with an artist named Gene Colan on his very first story for Marvel. Never worked with him again, but that one story… [laughter] Marv, do you want to say a few words about the ’70s? Do you remember them? MARV WOLFMAN: Yeah, I do remember them. I just walked into the back, so I’m not even sure where I fit into— THOMAS: This is called the Bronze Age Panel. WOLFMAN: Oh, is that what we’re called? When is it going to be the Paper Age, or the Iron? So we keep getting worse? I’ve said on some panels today it’s like the opposite of marriage. It gets lower and lower instead of better and better. [Someone says that the Bronze Age may have started while Marv Wolfman was editor-in-chief.] WOLFMAN: Oh, that week and eleven minutes? Yeah. I was there for almost a year as editor-in-chief. Not quite, but almost. In the early time, Roy is absolutely instrumental in getting me over to Marvel first in terms of the Tower of Shadows story that Roy just referred to, which was, I think, called “Ten Little Indians.” To this day, I don’t remember if I plotted that story or just dialogued it, or both. I have no memory of that particular story outside of getting these incredible pencils by Gene. He just blew me away how good the pencils were. And then I did a “Two-Gun Kid,” or a “Rawhide Kid,” or some “Kid.” A Western story. I had no idea who the character was. And then, of course, the height, the absolute—I never reached this point of quality again, unfortunately—was my two-part Captain Marvel story. [laughs] THOMAS: With Wayne Boring. WOLFMAN: With Wayne Boring. And it was, like, the disaster from hell. I was so lost, and I think it clinched people’s minds that

“Bronze To Present Age Marvel Comics”

Gil Kane and a climactic page from Captain Marvel #17 (Oct. 1969), the first comicbook on which Gil and Roy Thomas ever collaborated. The splash from this tale was depicted in A/E #149. Thanks to Chris Smith for the photo. [Page TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

After you were done with the story, he would go over it and say, “Don’t do this again,” if you’d made a mistake. He wasn’t someone who tried to censor you or do things in advance, so you were given a phenomenal freedom of doing what you felt was right, and then Roy would come in and just sort of guide you in any mistakes, and he created a situation where I think people were allowed to do, and able to do, some very good work because we had to trust ourselves, and we didn’t want to disappoint Roy. THOMAS: It’s called “non-directive.” WOLFMAN: As opposed to the prime directive. THOMAS: After Stan, it was a weird change. WOLFMAN: Yeah, yeah. The thing that I think I brought into Marvel was

there was no way I could do super-heroes. I was the horror writer, of course, and it took years upon years for me to make up for the fact that those books ever existed, that two-parter. THOMAS: Do you remember that time I offered you a Fantastic Four Annual that I had started doing, with the Four Horsemen or something, and you said, “Yeah, but I don’t like to write these super-heroes”? WOLFMAN: Yeah, I had done such a bad job on Captain Marvel. I mean, it was—I’m amazed that I was allowed to walk down the street. It was a really bad two issues. And then I worked from there, and did all the other stuff from Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and Daredevil and, God, everything and his mother, it seemed like, that I was working on at one point or another. Wayne Boring It was a was either the first or lot of fun second artist hired by back then. “Superman” co-creator Roy set up Joe Shuster, circa 1939, to a beautiful help meet the demand for situation material featuring the Man when he of Tomorrow. He drew the trusted Superman newspaper comic strip for years, and in the you and 1950s became the primary essentially artist on “Superman” would— comicbook stories.

Marv Wolfman has been a writer and editor for Warren, Marvel, and DC—and was the scripter of Captain Marvel #23 (Nov. 1973), which probably wasn’t half as bad as he remembers it being! Pencils by Wayne Boring, inks by Frank McLaughlin. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Severin, Simonson, Shooter, Wolfman, & Thomas

on the black-&-white books. Marvel had always been plot-driven; that is, the stories were done plot-style. Some of them were very loose plots, anything from a paragraph to a page, or two pages, to, say—the stuff that I used to do was nine pages single-spaced, which was sort of ridiculous. I may as well have done the script. But on the black-&-white comics was the first time that, on a regular basis, everything was done full-script, because we had hundreds upon hundreds of stories we had to turn out. I pointed out to Marvel, this is one of those weird situations you don’t even know that you’re in it. I’m going to make up a number, okay, because I can’t remember it exactly. The color line had something like 350 pages a month of original artwork spread over 50 comics. We only had 11 black-&-white magazines, so no one ever realized, until I counted it up, we had, like, 375 pages of original material every month. THOMAS: Probably not counting the text pages. WOLFMAN: Not counting the text, which was even more difficult. And the color department had an editor-inchief and three assistants, I believe, and I had me. Eventually, Tony Isabella came in

there, and it’s like, aagh! So we had to make sure we had to find all these incredible ways of making sure we actually got the material out on time. THOMAS: And then you had Crazy, which was probably more work than all the rest put together. WOLFMAN: Oh, and Stan would not let me use any other Marvel person on Crazy, editorially. It had to be done outside my regular Marvel work. Which meant doing the 11 magazines, and then suddenly doing Crazy, which was 52 pages of comedy every month. And I couldn’t use anyone from Marvel, editorially, on that book. I used writers, but not— SIMONSON: We were talking about, before you were here— wasn’t it Tony Isabella who slept in the office? Tony actually slept in the office. WOLFMAN: Yeah, Tony slept in the office. I don’t think he had an actual apartment. He had built a—Tony is about this big, so he built a several-level thing under his desk, a four-story house under his desk, and lived there. [laughter] He lived there, and,

Q: What’s Black-&-White And Read All Over? A: Marvel’s merry early-’70s lineup of mostly 75¢ comics, that’s what! Though originally Roy Thomas was officially the mags’ editor (or, in the case of Crazy, “executive editor”), associate editor (and Crazy editor) Marv Wolfman bore most of the workload, with the help of a small cast and crew. The first four mags out of the gate, represented here by issues Marv definitely ramrodded, were Dracula Lives! (#5, March ’74; cover by Luis Dominguez)… Monsters Unleashed (#4, Feb. ’74; cover by Albert Pujolar)… Vampire Tales (#3, Feb. ’74; cover by Luis Dominguez)… and Tales of the Zombie (#4, March ’74; cover by Boris Vallejo)… soon to be followed by Crazy Magazine (#5, March ’75; cover by Kelly Freas). There followed The Deadly Fists of Kung Fu and Haunt of Horror, on top of a revived Savage Tales starring Ka-Zar. Except for Crazy, though, most lasted only two or three years at most. Well, at least Marv didn’t have to waste time riding herd on The Savage Sword of Conan, which began in 1974 and ran for 21 years, the first half dozen under writer/editor Roy T. Thanks to the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Bronze To Present Age Marvel Comics”

God, he was a workhorse. Tony was the workhorse of that staff. But it was a hell of a lot of fun. The black-&-white books, which is what I primarily did for many years before I became editor-in-chief of the color line, were a tremendous amount of work, but I think it was some of the most satisfying stuff that I had done because they were all over the place. We were allowed to try the weirdest things because nobody looked at them at the office. Nobody cared. I’ll tell you one story, then pass the mike, to show you that nobody looked at them. I don’t even think anyone bought them, to be honest. [sighs] We had hired, I wish I could remember her name. [to Marie:] You may. Somebody who had just come over in the paste-up department from Russia. SHOOTER: Nora? WOLFMAN: Nora, thank you. SEVERIN: Maclin. Nora Maclin. WOLFMAN: Nora Maclin. I didn’t remember her last name. A very, very talented person from Russia, very sweet. Spoke about as much English as I do Russian, and we had an issue—What was the title of the generic monster one?

A Titanic Twofer Writer/editorial person Tony Isabella and production staffer Nora Maclin were two of the crew on the black-&-whites that Wolfman singles out for praise. Thanks to Bernie Bubnis and the 1975 Marvel Con program book, respectively.

THOMAS: Monsters Unleashed. WOLFMAN: Thank you, Monsters Unleashed. Doug Moench used to write the next-issue ads. And they were all these Doug Moenchisms, which were combined words and bizarre, weird things. One was supposedly in the old-fashioned EC style where it’s exaggerated writing and such. And he wrote, “Next issue, so-and-so is happening, and eyeball-popping photos,” and all this sort of stuff. Well, Nora didn’t know English whatsoever, and she combined the typeset, because this was before computers and you pasted down every word; she combined words in weird ways and left out words because she didn’t know. So first it said “nex tissue” instead of “next issue,” and down at the bottom it said, “And you’ll love the ball-popping photos!” [laughter] Now, the problem was also not only did Nora miss-set this up, but this was her first week there. She was unaware it was supposed to come to me for proofreading. It was sent directly to the printer. I got the, what was at that time the brownlines. They were on this paper you could literally get high from. It was awful, awful smelly paper. But it was the brownlines for the black-&-white magazines, and it comes in and I’m proofreading it, and, of course, this is the very last page of the magazine, because this is the next-issue ad. And I get to it and I go, “Nex tissue.” Half the paragraphs are missing. I’m going, “What?” Then I hit “ball-popping photos,” and fwump! And I’m going, “Oh, my God. I am gone. I am history.” Yes, I can’t even say, technically, I didn’t get to see this, because it doesn’t matter, the buck stops there. So what if it was sent out without my permission or without me seeing it? So I girded up every bit of courage I could possibly do and walked in to Stan with the brownlines and said, “Stan, we have a problem. We can’t call this back. It’s already late. I hadn’t seen it before, but I have to show you the problem. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.” He looked at it, read it. He said, “Has anyone ever responded or made any comments on any of your material to date?” I said, “No.” He said, “Nobody’ll read this. Forget it.” [laughter] And that was the whole thing, and that was it. And from that moment, I loved Stan no matter what he did. THOMAS: Is that how your great phrase “Don’t fail to miss” got going? WOLFMAN: Oh, no, I gotta tell that one. Okay, yes. In Crazy Magazine, we had a budget that was approximately—It was at least

Proof Positive! This full-page next-issue ad from the inside back cover of Monsters Unleashed #6 (June ’74) was a real festival of errors, as Marv points out. Sure, there’s the “ball-popping” typo near the bottom of the page—but dig that top paragraph!: the word “straining” is divided badly (minus even a hyphen)—and this is also the infamous page where “next issue” reads more like “nex tissue.” [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

over a quarter, way over a quarter, actually, and one of the ways to save money, because I was always trying to figure out ways to pay the artists and writers a little better, I came up with something called the “Crazy Radio Show.” My wife, who was a photographer

Severin, Simonson, Shooter, Wolfman, & Thomas

introduce him, I tell him all the films of his I loved and all of this. He said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have one question. My English isn’t all that good, but is this right? ‘Don’t fail to miss the next exciting issue’?” [laughter] I went, “Eep!” I faded away, went to lunch or something. SIMONSON: Okay, any more? CRAIG SHUTT (MODERATOR): Yeah, any other questions? One thing I was interested in, and I hate to keep putting Marv to work, here. Maybe Roy and Jim can say something, too, but there was quite a bit of that, with the revolving door of the editor-in-chief of the color line. And there obviously something that attracted you guys to want to do it, but something that obviously didn’t work very well for you to want to get back out of it again. And I was just wondering what was going on with it at that time, and what were some of the attractions or the pressures? THOMAS: Do you want to do it in order? SHOOTER: Yeah, we should do it in order.

“Don’t Fail To Miss…” The infamous Marvel Doc Savage ad mentioned by Marv Wolfman proved a bit tricky to find, because it turned out it wasn’t a next-issue ad in the black-&-white Doc Savage magazine at all—but an ad for the first issue itself, which appeared in the final issue of its sister mag Monsters Unleashed (#11, April 1975). Thanks to Hoy Murphy. [Doc Savage art TM & © Advanced Magazine Publishers d/b/a Condé Nast.]

at the time, took a photo of an old-fashioned radio that we found, a real old-fashioned radio, and we printed the photo, like 69 times on the page, and I just had dialogue. It’s a radio show. You don’t need pictures, right? And it would appear two or three times per book because it would mean I could save all that money and be able to use that money for something else, to pay a little bit better elsewhere. And it was just a very silly, bizarre radio show, and as a joke, it would always end with, “And don’t fail to miss our next exciting chapter!” And, you know, you get into the habit, you write this, like, nine, ten, twelve times, “Don’t fail to miss our next exciting chapter,” that you don’t even think about it. So move that aside. I’m on the first issue of Doc Savage, and I had just edited Crazy Magazine, and, as I say, I was editing a lot of material very fast. And I wrote on the next-issue ads, “Don’t fail to miss the next issue of Doc Savage magazine.” [laughter] And it doesn’t even enter my mind. It gets published, and nobody spots it, of course. And then George Pal, who was doing the Doc Savage movie at the time—George Pal was a brilliant director of special effects and you’ve seen his work all over the place. He’s German with a very thick German accent, so English is not his first language. He comes in and I

THOMAS: I was first. Stan, of course, had been there, except for a little period during World War II, since ’40, ’41 or something, when Joe Simon left. So he didn’t really really want to make me editor-inchief. He had this great thing. He was going to make me, like, story editor. Because Stan didn’t want to give anything up. He was going to be publisher and he was going to be president and all that, but he didn’t think that anybody else needed to be called “editor,” so he said, “You’ll be the story editor.” Which didn’t thrill me too much, because it meant a lot more work and so forth, and there wasn’t any talk about money. And Frank Giacoia was going to be the assistant art director. That way Stan could keep his title of art director and not have to give it up. The logical person there, obviously, was Romita at that stage. God knows he never drew anything. He just sort of sat there and corrected other people’s work, and laid out Spider-Man, and took all month to draw up to 20 pages of rough pencils. So that was logical, but, no, Stan wouldn’t have it. So I was about to leave, to just refuse to do it after a couple of days and everything. It was going to be a triumvirate—Frank Giacoia, and me, and John Verpoorten as production manager. And it was like—I don’t know if you’ve ever read Julius Caesar or Roman history, but the most unstable form of government in the world is a triumvirate, whether it’s Antony and Octavius and Lepidus. Remember Lepidus? [NOTE: Roy paraphrases how, when Octavius says something disparaging about the absent Lepidus, Marc Antony insists, “He’s a tried and valiant soldier.” Octavius’ reply: “So’s my horse.”] Anyway, so the

Doubling Down In 1974, Stan Lee (on left) and Carmine Infantino were the head honchos of Marvel and DC, respectively. By then, each held the title of publisher, though Stan had long since relinquished his “president” status. Roy relates how, caught between the two of them in a particular matter, he stepped down as editor-in-chief around Labor Day of that year. Stan photo from the 1974 Marvel Con program book; Carmine pic is from the Internet.

“Bronze To Present Age Marvel Comics”

Len Wein was editor of Marvel’s color comics line (while Marv spearheaded the black-&-whites) from September 1974 until early ’75, but his poor health would not allow him to continue. Sadly, Len passed away in 2017, leaving behind a fabulous four-color legacy that includes such wonderment as DC’s Swamp Thing #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1972, with art by Bernie Wrightson) and Marvel’s Giant-Size SpiderMan #1 (July 1974, with art by Ross Andru & Don Heck). In the cleverly constructed latter, Spidey and Dracula take part in mayhem on the same ocean-going “Ship of Fiends”—yet never quite run afoul of each other! Photo from the 1975 Marvel Con program book. Thanks to Barry Pearl for the latter scan. [Swamp Thing page TM & © DC Comics; GSSM page TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

thing is, I was ready to get out of there because I didn’t really want to do this. I had the responsibility but no power. And I went to see Gil Kane, who wasn’t always right, but this time it was good. He said, “My boy—“ SEVERIN: Of course. THOMAS: Of course he said “My boy.” “My boy,” he says, “don’t go anywhere. It’ll all come to you.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He says, “Look, John Verpoorten, does he care about authority? No. He just wants to get the books out. He has no interest in encroaching on anything. Frank Giacoia, talented artist and everything, but you know he’s not going to last at that job because he’s basically an anchor and he won’t deliver the work. You can just sit around and wait.” So I sat around and waited, and after a couple of weeks, something happened—something went wrong with a cover—and Stan calls me in to rake me over the coals at least mildly about it. And he says, “It’s gotta be changed.” And I said, “I can’t do it. I’m not Frank’s superior. I can’t tell John Verpoorten what to do, I can’t tell Frank Giacoia what to do, or anything like that, because I’m just the story editor.” So he said, “Well, I guess you’d better be editor-in-chief.” So that’s how I got to be editor-in-chief.

Anyways, so I kept at it a couple of years. My first wife Jeanie always said that she didn’t think I really took to the job as much as I thought I might have, because I had those whole two years, during which I never put up a single picture or anything. It was always like I always had one foot out the door, because once I got the job, I just felt more and more removed from things. The make-readies and stuff would cross my desk and so forth. So I felt like I was really proud of the people that we had working there, but I myself just didn’t find it that fulfilling after a while, so I decided to get—Jim’s always talking about being fired from a couple companies, and I think it’s great that he says it that way, you know. I practically was, too, because I refused to carry out a direct order from Stan. He and Carmine [Infantino, then publisher at DC] had gone out to a few-martini lunch, and they worked out a deal to tell each other’s rates, the company’s rates, back and forth, because Frank Robbins, I think, sort of lied to one company about what his rate was at the other company. And I just refused to go along with that. And Stan and I had been having problems. [Marvel President] Al Landau didn’t like me, because I didn’t go along with his plan with his advertising people who wanted to sell the right-hand page of every issue to advertisers, and I dared suggest that might interrupt the story flow… so I just decided it was time to go, and Stan said, “Well, maybe this should

Severin, Simonson, Shooter, Wolfman, & Thomas

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels By mid-1975, Marv Wolfman was editor-in-chief of Marvel’s entire line—as witness his “editor” designation in Super-Villain Team-Up #3 (Dec. 1975), with script by Jim Shooter and art by George Evans & Jack Abel. Wolfman was also writer/editor of comics he scripted, such as Tomb of Dracula #38 (Nov. 1975); art by Gene Colan & Tom Palmer. Scans provided by Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

be your letter of resignation,” and I said, “Fine.” And we worked out a deal where I stayed as writer and editor. Of course, now, I’m going to let Marv at it, but before he throws it back to Shooter, I’ve got to get it again because I got the job twice. Go ahead. But I’ll be brief the second time. WOLFMAN: After Roy, Len Wein was the editor-in-chief. Len at that particular time in his life was having health problems, and the situation at Marvel was very tense. He really preferred being a writer and an editor than an editor-in-chief. An editor-in-chief’s job was slowly morphing at that particular time, and it hadn’t quite gotten to where it would go, but he really found it physically not good for him. And, at the same time, DC was asking him if he’d like to do “Batman,” which is his all-time favorite character in the world, and I think to be an editor, and I think he found at that time that, for health reasons alone, it was easier for him to give up the editor-in-chief’s job and just go back to writing and editing on a smaller basis, where you don’t have any of the other worries. SHUTT: How did he get talked into it in the first place? THOMAS: He was there. That job always went to the next person in line. The assistant editor always got it. WOLFMAN: Roy was real clever. One of the things that I thought Roy handled beautifully, that I had never seen anyone else do—and I always said that, were I in the position, I would do it—is: Len was

the top writer at DC. He was writing Swamp Thing, he was writing Justice League. He wrote the best Justice Leagues I thought had ever come out at that particular point, and was writing Phantom Stranger. And his quality alone certainly was—Swamp Thing was tremendous. There was no reason for Len to leave DC, except Roy offered him one book that he couldn’t turn down because he loved the book. I don’t even remember which one it was. You offered him one of the books he was the all-time favorite fan of, and Len is, like, the biggest fan of everything. So when he’s a fan of something, you know it. And he couldn’t help it, he just loved it. He had to do it. Well, once he started doing that one book, he had to give up something [at DC] because he couldn’t write that much. As soon as he gave up something else, Roy said, “How would you like this title?” [laughter] And shortly, before he was aware, he had been, no pun intended, weaned from DC and was totally over at Marvel. And I’m like, “This is the way you get good people! You take the top people and slowly offer them stuff, just a little bit of duck nibblings, until you’re totally gone.” And you were suddenly over at Marvel working for Roy. I was already on the black-&-white books, and when Roy decided to leave, I was elevated to editor-inchief of the black-&-white books, and Len was elevated to the color books. SIMONSON: I’m going to actually go bail, because I had a couple guys who still wanted some sketches. They may be gone by this time, but it’s after 5:00. I’m sure the place is about closed down. And

“Bronze To Present Age Marvel Comics”

really, as one of the few up here who was not editor-inchief, I don’t have to worry about this question, so I’m going to hand it over to whoever’s next in line. Thank you very much. [applause] THOMAS: The next in line was me again, because when Marv decided that he wanted to leave—Well, Len first, and then [to Wolfman] you became editor…. You were editor-in-chief of everything for a while. SHUTT: [to Wolfman] Did you see this coming? Did you kind of cringe as you saw you coming up on the firing line? WOLFMAN: No, I actually was looking forward to it, because, as I told you, there were less pages of editing to do on the color comics than on the black-&-whites, and you had a whole staff. I really loved the idea of doing it. I think we did some incredibly creative things. And the problem was, there was multiple—There were three things that happened doing my tenure as editor-in-chief which prompted me to leave. One was, it became totally non-creative to me. It became far too much business, and at that point in my life I was twenty-something. I had no interest in business whatsoever. And, under Cadence, in the editor-in-chief job I started to have to worry about salaries, I started having to worry about appeasing people, I started having to worry about 18 million things all at once that had nothing to do with what I enjoyed doing, like Len, the creative process. The second thing was, during that time my mother passed away, and that put me in a real bad frame of mind. And the third thing that finally did it was I was separating from my wife, and at that point I wanted as far away from—My wife was working for her [Marie] as colorist. SEVERIN: I have to leave. Thank you for your time. [applause] WOLFMAN: And I just didn’t want to deal with business anymore. I went away to England for five weeks, or a number of weeks, I don’t remember exactly how long. I tried to make a decision if I wanted to leave, came back, spoke to Stan and said, “Can I have the same type of contracts Roy did where I could edit my own stuff?” He said, “Yes,” and that’s how I asked to get out of that, because I just, I didn’t love the business side. Today I can handle it, but back in that day I was not prepared to handle it.

Sailing Off Into The Hyborian Sunset After reluctantly reneging on his verbal agreement of February 1976 to return as Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas soon moved to Los Angeles and concentrated whenever possible on such non-mainstream Marvel titles as Conan the Barbarian, The Savage Sword of Conan, Red Sonja, The Invaders—and, by the turn of ’77, Star Wars. Seen above is the splash page of CTB #65 (Aug. 1976), with pencils by John Buscema and inking by Tony DeZuniga and the self-styled “Tribe” in the Philippines. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Conan Properties International, LLC.]

THOMAS: So I was back in, like a bad penny, and Stan and John Verpoorten talked to me about doing it, and I said, “Fine, but I’ve got one little thing I’ve got to do first while you’re getting the contract together.” First we had to come to terms with the money, and that was my favorite experience of it, really. I don’t remember what our salaries were, maybe it got a little better by the time Jim was in a couple of years later, but the salary of the editor-in-chief [in 1976] wasn’t really that wonderful, even allowing for inflation. Plus, of course, we had to do a lot of [freelance] work to make up for it. But when they asked me to come back, I sort of wanted to. I had separated from my wife, too. Marv and I had a lot in common in certain ways. And I figured, well, I could kind of use an office job now, kind of get me out of the house, although I used to come in three or four days a week anyway for a couple hours. So I decided that I’m just going to ask for whatever I want. It’ll include doing the Conan books, which is going to be ten or twelve thousand bucks worth of work a year, so I just made up a sum, 50,000 bucks, which sounds like a lot of money. In some ways, it doesn’t sound

like a lot of money. Yeah. It was a lot of money, then. WOLFMAN: Oh, it was? THOMAS: It was. And I said, “I want 50 grand. But I’ll throw in, there’s 10, 12 thousand bucks’ worth of Conan for that, and if something else comes up, fine.” So they sent Sol Brodsky, who was back at the company after having his own thing, to negotiate with me, because he did everything Stan didn’t want to do. So he takes me out to lunch and he starts talking about, “Well, you know, we could shave off a few hundred here, and a little there.” And I figured out what Sol was doing, so I finally said, “Look, Sol, I’m going to save you a lot of trouble and then we can enjoy our lunch. It’s not important to me exactly what I’ll write. I’ll write another few pages here and there, or I’ll do this, or I’ll do that. The only thing that’s important to me is the 50 grand. As a principle. So you can tell—“ it was [James] Galton by that time—“that we’ve come

Severin, Simonson, Shooter, Wolfman, & Thomas

In Clockwise Conclusion… How about a five-star salute to the “Marvel Bronze Age” panelists that features a cover commissioned (and in a couple of cases drawn) by each of them: Marie Severin’s Not Brand Echh #6 (Feb. 1968) cover fronted a parody of a Marvel wedding. Despite the artistic presence in NBE of Jack Kirby and newcomer Tom Sutton, Marie was the heart and soul of that title. Roy Thomas, as writer/editor, called on “King” Kirby to pencil the cover for The Invaders #7 (July 1976), which was inked by Frank Giacoia, with some extra touch-ups by John Romita. Writer/editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman rechristened and launched his own fan-creation “Black Nova” in Marvel’s Nova #1 (Sept. 1976), with a cover by Rich Buckler & Joe Sinnott. Writer/editor-in-chief Jim Shooter led the way to block-bustin’ booty with Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars #1 (Sept. 1984), behind a cover by Mike Zeck & John Beatty. Walt Simonson served as both writer and artist on Thor #350 (Dec. 1984), in the midst of his legendary run on the thunder god. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

to terms.” And Stan felt—wrongly, I think—that I had mellowed during that couple of years. No, I was just indifferent. [laughter] I said, “If the offer is $49,999, the answer is no. If it’s $50,000, it’s yes.” So he went back, and Stan and Galton accepted the deal. Then, after doing that clever ploy, I realize I’m not going to have a vacation for another year or two after I take this job back. I’m going to have to prove I’m worth this money. So I decided to go out to L.A., spend a week with a woman friend whom I’d gone to high school with, and stayed at her place. It turned out she was busy off

substitute teaching, so I hang out with Don Glut and a few guys out there. It’s— [A/E EDITOR’S AFTERWORD: Alas, at this point the recording ends, before I finish telling how I quickly changed my mind about returning as editor-in-chief… after which Jim Shooter related his own experiences in ascending to the editor-in-chief position at the very end of 1977, following Archie Goodwin’s tenure. If we ever find out that the missing beginning or ending of this panel has been recorded elsewhere, we’ll stick it into the first issue we can!]

ALL TIME CLASSIC NEW YORK COMIC BOOK CONVENTION PART

“The Gold Key Comics Chat” ARNOLD DRAKE, WALLY GREEN, FRANK BOLLE, & TOM GILL On Western’s Comics— And Yeah, There’s Plenty Of Stuff On Dell, Too!

Conducted by Ken Gale

Transcribed by Steven Tice

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Western Publishing and Lithographing Company, which published the fabled Dell comicbook line from the late 1930s through 1962 and then the Gold Key line from 1962 till the early 1980s, doesn’t always get its propers from comics fans—while Alter Ego’s primary mission, of course, is to document heroic comicbooks of the 1930s through the mid-’70s, so we don’t always help things all that much. However, we did make something of an attempt to deal with Western/Dell, Western/ Gold Key, and Dell solo A pair of screen captures by Marc Svensson, who filmed the 2000 Gold Key panel. (Left to right:) (in their various four-color Moderator Ken Gale… artist Frank Bolle… writer Arnold Drake… editor Wally Green… and artist permutations) back in A/E #151—and we’re Tom Gill, standing, gazing down at a comicbook Green’s rifling through. Thanks, Marc! Like we said pleased to present this five-man panel that took back in A/E #148, we couldn’t have done it without you! place on Saturday, June 10, 2000, at the All Time Classic New York Comic Book Convention. run a radio show about comicbooks called ’Nuff Said! It’s a weekly Quasi-official documenter Marc Svensson (by show out of New York City. I’m moderating this as necessary. whom the film of the panel from which this transcription was made is ©2018) started filming the panel a few moments before some of the FRANK BOLLE: I’m Frank Bolle. Born in Brooklyn. participants realized it had begun, and we thus intercept veteran writer Arnold Drake in mid-sentence…. GALE: And what did you draw?

A/E

ARNOLD DRAKE: —strange little niche in the industry. It was off in a corner someplace, no one at stake. WALLY GREEN: Gold Key? Definitely. Didn’t belong to the Comics Code or anything. We said we didn’t need to. DRAKE: Right. You were clearing the Code. GREEN: Sure. We were. Have we started the discussion already? MARC SVENSSON: I’ve started filming. DRAKE: And if you were going to sell in the five-and-dimes, you had to be as [innocuous?] as possible. It had to do with distribution as much as anything else, I think.

BOLLE: I drew everything. I started out doing Westerns, and mysteries, and horror stories. I did romance stories until I did some science-fiction. Did Doctor Solar for Gold Key, and Boris Karloff, the Grimm stories, Ripley’s Strange—I don’t remember the title. EVERYONE: Ripley’s Believe It or Not! DRAKE: What else would it be? BOLLE: I did everything that came up, whatever was asked of me to do. DRAKE: And I wrote a lot of the stuff that you drew. GREEN: And who are you?

KEN GALE: Well, you may have gotten here before the panel began, but you actually arrived in the middle of a discussion.

DRAKE: I’m Arnold Drake. And I wrote a lot of the stuff that you [Bolle] drew.

DRAKE: So there.

BOLLE: Oh, good. We never met, because I was always delivering it and walking out when you were—

GREEN: Can you introduce everybody? GALE: That’s exactly what we’re going to do. I am Ken Gale. I

DRAKE: I always thought there was a conspiracy to keep writers

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

DRAKE: Some of the Turok. Oh, a lot of Twilight Zone. A heck of a lot of Twilight Zones, yeah. But you had to write a heck of a lot, considering the rate. The rate made it impossible for you to make a living unless you wrote twenty pages a week or something like that. So that’s what the conditions were. And now let’s hear from the editorial end.

Paul S. Newman

Solar Energy A page from Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom #10 (Jan. 1965), drawn by Frank Bolle, scripted by Paul S. Newman. Scan courtesy of Mark Muller. [TM & © Random House, Inc.]

One of comics’ most prolific scripters. This photo appeared in the program book of the ATC con, at which were given out the first (and sadly, only) Paul S. Newman writing awards. The latter were to have been regularly associated with Joe Petrilak’s comicbook conventions— only there weren’t any more, more’s the pity.

and artists from meeting each other. BOLLE: It could be. It could be. TOM GILL: There was, definitely. He can tell you all about it. [laughter] BOLLE: I think I met [writer] Paul S. Newman just once in all the years that I worked with him. I drew so many of his stories, and met him once. As he was walking out, I was walking in. GALE: How’d you even know it was him? BOLLE: One of the editors introduced us. GALE: Oh, well, that was nice of him. [Voices overlap for a few seconds] BOLLE: As we were squeezing past each other in the doorway. DRAKE: Yeah. It was the same way over at DC. Well, there was one difference. At DC there was a conference room which we called the Bullpen, where writers could get together. They used it to do rewrites. But doing your rewrites gave you a chance to—[overlapping dialogue] I wrote all sorts of things, didn’t I, Wally?

GREEN: I’m Wally Green. I was the editor at Gold Key for many years, and I’m sitting among three of my stalwarts who did an untold amount of work for me. Arnold as a writer, Frank and Tom as artists. As for artists not meeting writers, that was not the editors’ fault. It just didn’t work out that way. For example, Tom, you did Lone Ranger for many years, which was written by Gaylord Dubois, who was living up in Plattsburgh somewhere. He never came in. He just sent his stuff in, and when I had a script, you came in and picked it up and went out and did the pencils, came back with your pencils, and then we’d go over them, maybe make some changes. Then you could go ink them. I’m trying to think of why Arnold didn’t meet anybody. You must have met Arnold. You don’t remember? Because you were both in the office a lot. But people came in, they dropped off their work, and we may have talked it over, and then they left. And the artists didn’t necessarily come in the same day, because we would get the thing ready, get the script ready, and then tell the artist to come get it. Only sometimes we even sent it to them. GALE: Arnold, did you know in advance who your artists were going to be? GREEN: No, he didn’t. DRAKE: Nope. GREEN: But he could guess. By the people we were using at the time. DRAKE: Well, I knew Irving Tripp was going to [draw] a lot of the Lulus. I knew that in advance. And occasionally a Win Mortimer would slip in there. But, by and large, Wally’s right. I didn’t know in advance who was going to be doing it. GALE: You couldn’t tailor your scripts to an artist’s strengths, for example? GREEN: No. DRAKE: Not really. GREEN: We tried to pick the artist according to what the story was about, what was needed in the story. But you couldn’t always do that, because sometimes those artists weren’t available, and you had to—Whoever was there and ready to work were the ones we gave the work to. GALE: Tell the folks about the East Coast/West Coast. I mean, people think of Gold Key as Gold Key, but there were actually two Gold Keys, in a matter of speaking.

DRAKE: Yeah. I wrote the mystery stuff you were talking about, the witch, Grimm, and Boris. Not only Boris Karloff, but Boris and Natasha.

GREEN: Oh, I wouldn’t say that. No. We had an East Coast office, where I worked, and the West Coast, where Chase Craig… A lot of these names escape me. I know all these people. [Sounds like “Zetta Devoe”] was out there.

GREEN: Bullwinkle? Did you write some of those?

BOLLE: Russ Manning?

DRAKE: I wrote Bullwinkle, sure, a lot of the Bullwinkles. And about ten years’ worth of Little Lulu. And what else?

GREEN: No, no, I’m talking about an editor.

BOLLE: How about Twilight Zone?

GREEN: It was just a—Okay. I’ll give you the history. Western

GREEN: Yes, you did.

BOLLE: What was the difference between Gold Key and Dell?

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

Boris—And Boris! (Above:) The first issue of Gold Key/Western’s Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery for which we have definite Arnold Drake writing credits is #40 (April 1972), for which he scripted no fewer than three stories. This one was illustrated by Jack Sparling. From Dark Horse Comics’ hardcover Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery Archives, Volume Six. [TM & © Boris Karloff.] (Top right:) Boris and Natasha—no relation to Karloff and Romanov! Chances are fairly good that Drake scribed this lead story from Gold Key’s Bullwinkle #13 (Sept. 1976), since the online Who’s Who says he wrote that title from 1973 through 1980. Artist, alas, unknown. Scan courtesy of Jim Ludwig, editor-in-chief of InDELLible Comics, whose two issues (thus far) of the print-on-demand All New Popular Comics can be checked out on Facebook and ordered via Amazon.com; you’ll find new tales starring such vintage Dell/Western heroes as Phantasmo, the Dracula/Frankenstein/ Werewolf trio, et al.! [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“Little Lulu, Little Lulu, With Breakfast On Your Chin…” (Right:) Once again, we can’t be anything like certain Arnold Drake scripted this saga from Gold Key’s Little Lulu #231 (May 1975)—but it does give a glimpse of the feature during that era. Scan courtesy of Jim Ludwig. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

Publishing Company was in Racine, Wisconsin. They sort of became a publisher without saying so, because a couple of these publishing companies that they were printing for went belly-up, and they took them over. Now, I guess once they got in this business of doing editorial kind of work, they got involved with Dell. And Dell was really—They called themselves the publisher. They were really the distributor. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: In his explanation of the relationship between Western and Dell in issue #151, Mark Evanier says that Dell’s role was to finance the comics line, while Western handled editorial matter and printing.] Everything was done at the Western offices. All the creative work went through our offices, either out on the West Coast, or on the East Coast. When I joined Western in 1959, we were then doing the Dell comics. Shortly thereafter, Dell and Western split. I don’t know why. They thought we were too expensive or something like that. Now, at Western, we did a number of licensed properties. All that Disney stuff, and Warner Bros., and that was all licensed by Western. So we just went on and did these same comics as Gold Key, meanwhile picking up—We used to do a lot of television properties. We’d pick them up as we went along. I’m trying to remember all of them, but you probably remember Bonanza. We did Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea…

never did Green Hornet, and no one in the room points out that, actually, both with Dell and Gold Key, Western did indeed publish a bit of “Green Hornet” work. See art below, as detailed in A/E #151.]

[At this juncture, Frank Bolle mentions Zorro, Star Trek, and Green Hornet as titles done by Western. Green states that Western

GILL: That could be good.

DRAKE: Wally, I didn’t know that history about a couple of publishers going bankrupt and the distributor taking them over. GREEN: Yeah, Whitman was one of them. DRAKE: Well, what’s interesting about that to me is that DC did the same thing…. Harry Donenfeld was a printer, and Donenfeld was printing a bunch of magazines, and the publisher went under, and Donenfeld was stuck with the bill. So he grabbed the magazines and distributed them just to get the money back, and in the process, he said, “Hey, we could do this.” And he had a young go-getter of an accountant named Jack Liebowitz, and the accountant said, “Yeah, it makes sense. Let’s do it.” And that’s how they got off the ground. So it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good, or what have you. The poor bankrupts, that’s another matter. GREEN: We haven’t heard from Tom Gill yet.

Western Did Too Do The Hornet, Darnit! Contrary to editor Green’s recollections, Western did indeed publish at least four comics issues featuring the 1936 radio creation “The Green Hornet.” To wit: (Left:) Frank Thorne drew the “Green Hornet” Four Color #496 (Sept. 1953) for Dell/Western. Writer unknown. The cover and another page from this one-shot were seen in A/E #151. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. (Right:) In late 1966-early ’67, in conjunction with the Green Hornet TV series, Gold Key/Western published three issues of a Green Hornet comic. Art by Dan Spiegle; scripter unknown. This page from #1 (Feb. 1967) was provided by Jim Kealy. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

Dell Personnel

GREEN: I hope it’s not good. GILL: I’m thinking, where did you start in relation to what we’ve heard so far? Well, I started way back. I’m trying to think of the editor’s name. Way back…. GREEN: Yeah, I was trying to figure it the other day and I thought of it, but now I’ve forgotten it. GILL: Regardless, it was Whitman Publishing, way back, and he was the editor of it. GREEN: Oskar Lebeck! GILL: Oskar Lebeck, you’re right. He was the editor of it. And they worked out of the toy building they had, and it was Whitman Publishing. I dropped my stuff off, and that was all. Somebody would say, “Oh, hello,” and I’d say, “Hello,” and I’d walk out. And once I got hit in the head with something as I went by a wall, and I look up and Walt Kelly is throwing down spitballs. [laughter] And I said, “Hey, what are you doing there?” He said, “Aah, you’re a freelancer. Get the hell outta here!” [laughter] So I said, “What are you?” He said, “Oh, I’m a member of the Bullpen.” And it was there, I guess, he started to think about Pogo and doing things like that. And they did have a small bullpen. So it went on like that, and then all of a sudden, Oskar Lebeck retired, and the guy came in there, I don’t know who, I don’t remember.

Chase Craig A productive editor (and even scripter) for Western’s comics, in both Dell and Gold Key incarnations, from the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s. Thanks to Jim Kealy.

Oskar Lebeck Managing editor and art director of Dell/ Western’s comics line, 1938-1949.

GREEN: I’ve heard his name, but I wouldn’t remember, because—Brenner? GILL: George Brenner? DRAKE: Could be the guy. GILL: He was there for a little bit. So I didn’t do much, because I was really working for The Daily Walt Kelly News, and I kind of freelanced in this while I The one-time Disney animator and later writer/artist/ learned how to do it, you see. And I think I came creator of the popular comic strip Pogo—seated with a to Whitman after being with some Catholic group drawing of the esteemed possum, probably sometime in the 1950s, with an unidentified marsupial admirer from that did Bible stories, which is always a great San Clemente, California. Thanks to John Firehammer. place for a young cartoonist to start. And then I did something for Bill Gaines. You did wherever you could handle it or learn. And, finally, then, when this guy whose name you just remembered— Brenner—he came in there, and I—Oh, by this time, I had done a strip for the Herald Tribune. I quit the News to do a strip… Flower Potts. His last name was Potts, and he was a former boxer, and he had a cauliflower ear, because in those days, it was not uncommon for a stumblebum, and former boxers, to become cab-drivers. GALE: Now it’s the other way around. [laughter] GILL: I did a strip about one of those, and just my luck, the Herald Tribune was looking for a cab-driver strip when I walked in to them. At any rate, so it was really doing things for Whitman, and so forth, and Gaines, and wherever I could. GALE: What did you do for Bill Gaines? GILL: Some kind of a Bible story.

George Brenner Mentioned as having succeeded Lebeck as Dell/ Western editor. Photo courtesy of his son John Brenner; see interview in A/E #146.

Animal Attraction Pogo actually began life in 1942 in Dell/Western’s Animal Comics, as a supporting character in a feature that at first starred Albert the Alligator. Here Pogo and Albert share the cover of issue #21 (JuneJuly 1946), a couple of years before they graduated to the newspapers— and more than two decades of superstardom—with Pogo promoted to headliner. Thanks to the Grand Comics Database. [Pogo & Albert TM & © Okefenokee Glee and Perloo, Inc.]

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

Potted! (Top:) A sample daily of Tom Gill’s newspaper strip Flower Potts, courtesy of Art Lortie. (Bottom:) A 1957 Pottsy strip about a cop, written and drawn by Jay Irving— who asked Tom Gill for permission to use the name. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Tom Gill giving a chalk-talk utilizing drawings of The Lone Ranger. Courtesy of Bill Schelly. Gill says he learned everything he knew about drawing horses from this famous 1949 book Draw Horses by Paul Brown.

Jay Irving draws Pottsy the policeman at a 1963 event. Thanks to James Cassara & Dr. Michael J. Vassallo.

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

GALE: Do you mean Max Gaines? GILL: Yeah, I’m talking about his father, yeah. Max. Not the son. This is way back. And I guess when you get older, you’re talking about a lot of people that go so far back, nobody remembers. Bill Gaines got the business from his father, who did Bible Stories when he first started. Then, of course, he got into—he got Mad. So I did the strip for about three years. You can’t make enough money with a strip about a cab-driver, I tell my students right away, because he’s too local, and the papers that can support, with interest, if not money, are not identified with a cab-driver. So outside of the New York market, the Herald Tribune, Sidney, Australia, of all places, and one paper in Pennsylvania, nobody else wanted my strip. So you can’t live too long on what one paper can pay, so I had to give it up. So then I went back to Whitman Publishing, and there I met Matt Murphy, because he was now [the editor]. I don’t know what happened to Brenner. GREEN: Brenner died. GILL: Oh, yes, he did. That’s right. He died. And he was a nice guy. Not that nice guys always die, but—[laughter] Anyway… there it was. I met Matt. I was doing different things, all under the label of Whitman, I guess, and, I don’t know, maybe it was Dell or not. And I got a call one day from the Gene Autry people, who were put onto me by Jay Irving, who did Pottsy. He had called me and said, “Can I name my strip Pottsy?” I said, “Well, why?” He said, “Well, I like it. And it isn’t Flower Potts, it’s Pottsy. Can I do that?” And I said, “Sure, Jay.” I love the guy. And he said, “All right, fine.”

all the love stuff for Al Harvey at Harvey Comics. He was doing heavy love, and it wasn’t pornography like we know today. It was love stories, lovely little things about adventures in high school and college, and first experiences, and so forth. And I got so I could draw some really lovely, nice girls. Which gave me all kinds of trouble when I got into the Westerns, because it’s awful hard to draw handsome guys and beautiful women and then have to draw bad guys with six-shooters on top of cows and horses and every other thing. But after I did this thing for the Autry people, I got a two-week strip. One finished ink, and one pencil. All within three weeks. And I wouldn’t have been able to do that except I found this little book, How to Draw Horses – It’s Fun and It’s Easy by Paul Brown. I still have it. A priceless book. It was a dollar. GALE: Was it easy? GILL: No. I worked like hell. DRAKE: Was it fun? GILL: Yes, it was fun. As soon as I learned that a horse is nothing more than a box with an extension on the front. And it was that extension

Well, it so happens that his connections or whatever put the Gene Autry people onto me, and it seems that Roy Rogers had just had a comic strip, and Gene had to have one right away. So could I get one by next week? I had never drawn a horse in my life. I had done

Under The Western Stars Tom Gill’s potential assignment to draw a Gene Autry comic strip ran afoul of there being already, by some counts, too many Westerns in the newspapers, as witness, top to bottom: The Lone Ranger—in this undated panel drawn by Charles Flanders. Writer unknown, though co-originator Fran Striker wrote the strip for some years. [TM & © Lone Ranger Television, Inc., or successors in interest.] The Cisco Kid by artist José Luis Salinas and writer Rod Reed—this 12-13-56 daily repro’d from one of the three collections still available from Classic Comics Press. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.] Roy Rogers—as seen in this 1951 Sunday drawn by Al McKimson. Writer unknown. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

that gave me a lot of trouble. I could draw the box. But, anyway, the Gene Autry thing didn’t go at all, because when they brought it to the syndicates, the syndicates said, “No way. You’ve got The Cisco Kid out there, you’ve got The Lone Ranger out there, and now Roy Rogers. We’re not going to buck that.” So they didn’t take Gene Autry on. But I have a lot of these things that I did, and I happened to bring them in to Matt, see? And I said, “Hey, look at this.” Matt said, “Can you draw horses?” I said, “Sure.” “I didn’t know you could draw horses.” I said, “Yeah!” I didn’t give him any dates. [laughter] He had a pile of scripts that high waiting for somebody to—Westerns were just coming in, and he gave me this, he gave me that. And one day, it was around Christmas, he said, “Here’s something. It should last at least a year.” And it was a Lone Ranger [comicbook] strip. And it lasted twenty years, from ’50 to about ’70. And then, in between, I did all the Bonanzas and the Hi-Yo Silvers, so, man, I was horses up to here. [laughter] But it was great, and, of all things, I liked the Silvers best, written by Gaylord Dubois. Of course, Paul Newman did all of the other Westerns. GREEN: I don’t know. I can’t remember now. Paul wrote an awful lot for us, but Gay wrote a lot, too. I remember The Lone Ranger. Maybe it was Paul wrote The Lone Ranger. Yeah, it was Paul. GILL: Paul wrote the Lone Ranger strip, and then the books, but it was Gaylord Dubois who did those— GREEN: He did the Silvers. GILL: —wonderful stories on the Silvers. And I later got to know him. I wrote him or something, and then we corresponded a little bit. But he died, I think, around ’93, when he was 93, and the Westerns, though, with the horses and with everything else, were mostly written by Paul Newman. For a while, it got to be some sort of a contest between Gaylord and Paul, [as to] who wrote the most. And Paul’s wife Carol was here earlier today… and she was saying how it was Paul’s grandson who said, “Grandpa, you wrote so many stories. The Guinness Book of World Records should be interested in you.” Paul kept meticulous records of everything he did, how much he got paid for it, how long it took, how many words, how many pages, everything. He was a record-keeper. Then somebody brought up Gaylord Dubois, who didn’t keep such records, but he was—

were my students. So they insisted that I stay. And I told Silas Rhodes, the director, just starting out then, “I can’t do it. I’d love to, but—” He said, “Well, why the hell don’t you get some help?” And I thought to myself, “Hey!” A light bulb went on. Get some help! Sure! So in that way I started to teach there. And, a reminder: I have taught, I’m still teaching two colleges, I have taught over 2500 people children’s books, which I added later, and cartoons. GALE: The Cartoonists and Illustrators School is now the School of Visual Arts, right? GILL: Yes. In about ’65, I think, we changed our name. We started in ’47. East 23rd is their main address, but we go down—and I say “we” because I’m still a consultant to them—we go down to 14th Street, and we go from 3rd Avenue over to 8th. Buildings all around between there. So, I mean— GALE: I think we know who you are now. GILL: Well, this is the only way you’re going to find out. [to Tom Gill] You invited me to do a show with you, and you never remember to call me up. GREEN: Oh, God, let’s not bring things like that out. GALE: I’ll have to get your number again. GILL: I won’t tell you the next time. You just heard everything I got to say.

GREEN: He did a lot. He did something on the West Coast, too. GILL: He worked for a lot of publications. At any rate, Paul Newman was called the king of the comics, the comicbook writers. The story of The Lone Ranger, then, went to ’70. But in the meantime, when I was doing the strip, there was a young school that got started called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, and they wanted me to teach, and I said, “No, I can’t do that. I’m too busy. I’m doing the strip.” And at that stage in my development, it took every hour that I could find to do it as good as I could. So I said I couldn’t teach there, but I would give a lecture and tell them what it was really like, without peeing on their parade. DRAKE: Mm-hm. Good idea. GILL: So I told about the strip and the problems of it, and so forth, and so on. And they thought it was wonderful, and the room was packed. And I found out later it was just a class. It wasn’t a lecture. Those

Gaylord Du Bois was, along with fellow Western Publishing scripter Paul S. Newman, easily one of the most prolific writers in the history of comicbooks.

“A Fiery Horse With The Speed Of Light…” First interior page of The Lone Ranger’s Famous Horse, Hi-Yo Silver #11 (July-Sept. 1954), drawn by Tom Gill and scribed by Gaylord Du Bois. [TM & © Lone Ranger Television, Inc., or successors in interest.]

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

“The Lone Ranger Rides Again!” (Left:) Paul S. Newman and Tom Gill relate a one-page version of the hero’s origin in The Lone Ranger #56 (Feb. 1953). Scan courtesy of Jim Ludwig. (Right:) The same creative team pits the Ranger, Tonto, and young Dan Reid against bad-guys in LR #143 (Dec. 1961-Jan. 1963), only two issues before the Dell/Western run ended with #145, to be continued by Gold Key. Gill probably employed assistants on some of the material in this issue. [TM & © Lone Ranger Television, Inc., or successors in interest.]

GALE: Oh, okay. Well, in that case, I’ll memorize it, and then I’ll just repeat it word-for-word. [A bit of discussion about an earlier lapsed communication; then:] GILL: You’re right, Western and Gold Key were kind of separate entities, divisions, and for that reason, because I was out of newspapers, I went from whatever it is I did to The New York Times for a while. GREEN: You did the first map of Pearl Harbor, right? GILL: I did that, yeah. I happened to be working on the News that Sunday. That was long before Western or anything else. I worked for the News, the Herald Tribune, and the Times. You can’t do more than that in one city and live. GALE: Now, Wally, so you edited humor titles, you edited Westerns, you edited romance. You edited the whole line? GREEN: Yeah. We didn’t do much romance. I couldn’t even remember anything we did do on romance. It got to be very popular, and we considered doing it. But I worked on everything except what the West Coast did. I never worked on any of the Disney comics, and we did move the Warner Bros. stuff from the West Coast to the New York office, so I did work with them. GALE: Was it a different editing style depending on the type of work, or is editing editing? GREEN: I guess editing is editing. A lot of it is picking the right people to do the writing and the artwork. I mean, I would never

have asked Gill to do O.G. Whiz. GILL: Well, try me! [laughter] Now that I can’t see, try me. [laughs] DRAKE: [to Green] Who did you ask to do O.G. Whiz? GREEN: Actually, we got a guy after John Stanley. John Stanley did the first one. John is a funny, hard guy to work with. He’s strange in many different ways, but— DRAKE: I didn’t know him. GREEN: Terribly, terribly creative. DRAKE: You bet. GALE: Do you think there’s a connection [between being strange and being creative]? GREEN: There may be. I don’t know. It’s possible. There’s that theory. And he illustrated the first O.G. Whiz. But he would change his mind many times while he was working, and all he did was take some whiteout and white out whole panels, almost whole pages, and redraw them. When he brought the thing in, I was afraid if I dropped it, it would break like a vase. [laughter] I really did. GALE: He would change it after he inked it? This is not just a case of erasing pencils? GREEN: No, he would go with the whole thing. I don’t know where he got all that whiteout. He was keeping the whole industry busy. He was a good artist.

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

over after he wrote the first O.G. Whiz, and I wrote that for its shortlived life. So I was kind of Stanley’s shadow. But that’s a good guy to be the shadow of. Man, he was creative. When I came to work at Western, I initially, I believe, began on probably Boris [Karloff] and Twilight Zone, and so on. And one day you called me in and you said, “How would you like to do our animated titles, in particular, Lulu?” So I said, “Yeah, I’d like to. I think I could do a good job on it.” And you said, “Okay, but you’ve used a typewriter up until now. I’d like you to use a pencil.” And I said, “Why is that?” And you said, “Because I think that, as you put the lines down, more points will keep occurring to you, which doesn’t happen when you’re on the typewriter.” And you were 102% right. GREEN: Well, I felt very strongly about that. DRAKE: Yeah. So I got to do a lot of storyboards, as a result. GREEN: [to audience, indicating Drake] He became a reasonably good cartoonist. DRAKE: Yeah, not bad. GREEN: I mean, I wouldn’t print any of this stuff, but it was good to look at. [laughter] DRAKE: [Editor] Paul Kuhn said he wanted to print some of my stuff, and I said, “Paul, I don’t think I can make a living that way, because it takes me longer than it should take an artist to do the

A Polar Gale Marc Svensson, who filmed several of the panels at the 2000 White Plains con (as well as many others at other cons), took time out to sketch Gold Key panel moderator Ken Gale with Polar Boy of DC’s Legion of SuperHeroes. [Art © Marc Svensson; Polar Boy TM & © DC Comics.]

DRAKE: A pretty good writer, too. GREEN: Well, there he was great. He started Little Lulu. It was a panel strip that Marge Henderson drew for The Saturday Evening Post, but when it became a comic[book] strip, he took it over, and he created a lot of the characters. He wrote some great stories. Unfortunately, I never did Little Lulu with him. He was already off it. He had some argument with somebody or something. He was that kind of a guy. And then he would disappear for weeks. DRAKE: A little prickly, huh? GREEN: Yeah. GALE: And then Arnold did it? GREEN: The first thing I ever did in comicbooks was write “Little Lulu” stories. I wrote about three of them. I was still looking for work, and I guess one of the editors liked it. Matt Murphy called me and asked me if I wanted to come in and work as an editor. So I did. After that, I just edited “Little Lulu” stories. DRAKE: Yeah, I was kind of John Stanley’s shadow, because I took over after he left Little Lulu and wrote that for ten years, and I took

If Ever O.G. Whiz Of A Whiz There Was… Gold Key/Western’s O.G. Whiz #9 (Sept. 1978) was scripted at least primarily by Arnold Drake and drawn by Gary Terry. Scan courtesy of Jim Ludwig. Also seen is a screen capture by Marc Svensson of Drake (on left) and his then-editor Wally Green on the 2000 panel. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

job.” So I said I’d rather write than draw for a living. But I do like drawing. Anyway, that’s the story of how I got to do storyboards. And I still have quite a few of those. GREEN: We gave them back to you?

John Stanley As seen in Bill Schelly’s 2017 art-filled biography John Stanley: Giving Life to Little Lulu from Fantagraphics.

…O.G. Whiz Was One Because… (Above:) O.G. Whiz #1 (Feb. 1971) had launched the character, who had first appeared in a Four Color issue or three, into his own color comic, with a cover by creator/writer/artist John Stanley, noted for his earlier work as the scripter of the classic years of Little Lulu. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

DRAKE: Well, I made copies of them before I gave them up is what I did, because I kind of liked them. And Paul Kuhn was the guy I worked with there, and Paul is, I think, one of the unsung heroes of the editorial end of this business. Like Murray Boltinoff, he was a guy who did not appreciate himself, and so, as a result, nobody else recognized [him]. But Paul worked very well with writers. He brought out good things from writers. GALE: How does an editor do that? GREEN: Well, for one thing, he’s good at assessing a story. We used to work—Different comic companies work different ways. We always did it by starting with a synopsis. I mean, even if you were going to do a storyboard, to do a synopsis first. Then we could either accept it, or reject it, or send it back and say, “Jake, we’d like to see a certain number of changes,” or have the writer come in and discuss it with him. Then he would go back and write the script. And after the script was written, then we would give it to an artist. What was your question?

A Couple More Karloffs (Left & above:) Drake scripted at least two stories for Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #51 (Dec. 1973). Both were illustrated by John Celardo. Scans courtesy of Bill Mitchell. [TM & © Random House, Inc.]

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

GALE: Actually, a question to all four of you. What does an editor do to bring out the best?

DRAKE: Yeah. Because you had to work with both kinds of writers.

GREEN: Oh, well, I think he’s got to know who is good at writing what, who is good at drawing what, and he has to be able to help them over the rough spots. I think sometimes a writer gets to a point where he’s writing a story and he can’t quite get through it exactly the way he wants, and the editor can often help him do that. And the same with the artwork.

GREEN: Yeah. Some writers, the stuff was perfect.

DRAKE: I found, Wally, that different editors worked well with different writers. There were writers who liked an editor who was kind of a crutch for them, somebody who was there to support them when they were running out of ideas. And then there was the writer who would like the editor who said, “I like your storyline. Just go ahead and write it.” And the writer who needed, who had this dependency, liked to work with those editors, and the writer who, like myself, wanted somebody to say to him, “Just go ahead and write it.” That worked well with Boltinoff and with Paul, for that reason. GREEN: Yeah, well, I tried to be that kind of an editor. Well, I mean, when I say “that kind of editor,” I mean both types that you were talking about, because if the story wasn’t quite right but needed some help, I was happy to do it.

Solar Power (Above:) A pre-costume sequence from Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom #4 (June 1963), drawn by Bob Fujitani and scripted by Paul S. Newman. For more about Doctor Solar, see our Dell/Gold Key coverage in A/E #151. A photo of Fujitani appeared in that issue. (Right:) With issue #6, Frank Bolle took over the art chores, at the same time the good doctor was given a super-hero garb and identity. The switch clearly worked, as the series survived for several years, and the hero has returned since. Script by Paul S. Newman. [TM & © Random House, Inc.]

GALE: Well, it sounds like you got all the difficulties in a story out in a synopsis stage. GREEN: We tried. We didn’t always succeed, but that was the idea. GALE: But we haven’t mentioned any of the hero books, and Gold Key certainly did hero books. Right, Frank? GREEN: Oh, yeah, Frank hasn’t spoken a word in an hour. BOLLE: Well, I said hello. GALE: He started everything! GREEN: He didn’t start Doctor Solar. Bob Fujitani did the first. But he didn’t do more than two, and then Frank took over. BOLLE: I took over in the middle of a book, I think. Someone just called me up and said, “Why don’t you go see Wally Green,” and they gave me the address. I’d never done anything for Gold Key at the time. And I went up there and met Wally for the first time, and Matt Murphy, and [Bill Harris?]. And Matt Murphy says, “Well, can you ink this?” He showed me some pencils, and I said, “Oh, yeah, I can ink that.” And he says, “Well, maybe you should put a tracing over it, tracing paper over it, and ink that so we can see.” And I sort of looked at him. I said, “That’s doing it the hard way. Let me just ink it. Trust me, man.” And he trusted me, and from then on, I just

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

Debbie Deere We don’t have those On Stage/Mary Perkins samples that Frank Bolle says he brought in to Gold Key editor Wally Green to show his work, but here’s a 1966 daily from a short-lived comic strip he drew. Thanks to Art Lortie. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

did Solar and Boris Karloff and Twilight Zone. Anything that they ever gave me. In fact, I used to bring in one story to be lettered, I’d get a script to do another one, and when I brought back the script in pencil, they’d give me the one that was just lettered. So I’d come in every week, almost. And I still missed the writers. [laughter] GREEN: Frank was in frequently. I can’t remember what the samples were that you first showed us. BOLLE: I think the samples I brought in were some that I did for Mary Perkins – On Stage, which was syndicated, but I penciled that for the first six years. So I had some pretty good experience.

the picture, I’d have the horse outside the border going into the picture—people jumping out, guys socking someone out of the frame. But I worked out all the perspective. Like, if there was a log on the floor, you could see that it’s going into the picture, so it was just a matter of understanding perspective both ways, so I just exaggerated a little bit, and it always looked like it was in 3-D. The lines were a little heavier coming out, and thinner as they went in. It lasted a few years, just like it did on the movie screen. People got a little tired of it. GILL: They blackened the pages, too, if I’m not mistaken, right? In order to get that…

GREEN: Yeah, and that would give you some pretty good samples for us to decide that you were a good artist to use.

BOLLE: In some of them, yeah—in some of them they reproduced with the borders that were a little darker.

GALE: Let’s take some questions.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m a big Turok collector, and I’ve been trying to do all kinds of research just about everything, and it’s so difficult, to know—you said you did some Turok writing at one time?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’ll ask a question, although it’s not a Gold Key question. Frank, did you originate the 3-D technique in Tim Holt? I loved that. BOLLE: Yes. I walked in. I was doing Tim Holt for maybe a couple of years, and then there was that 3-D craze that came on, and they printed some magazines where you had to wear glasses to look at them, and I was always so good with perspective. I walked into Ray Crank one day—he was the editor up at Vin Sullivan—and I said, “You know, Ray, I could draw three-dimensional stuff without glasses.” He said, “Really? Do it.” He was such a good editor. He just would tell you what, and he could fix stuff that was wrong, and so he said, “Do it.” And I brought it in, week after week, and month after month, I was doing Tim Holt in 3-D. DRAKE: Fascinating. I never saw it. GREEN: I never did, either. I guess before my time, we did some 3-D comics that you needed the glasses for, and I think if you read them for very long, you’d go blind. GILL: I did one of those. I forget now how you did it. You needed to do two lines… GREEN: Each eye was shut out from one of the drawings, and you had to get the 3-D with two different colors, usually red and green. [to Bolle] And you could do that without any glasses? BOLLE: Well, what I did was draw a regular panel. I made the borders a little bit smaller, and then, if the horse was jumping into

DRAKE: Yeah. Not many. I don’t recall doing many. It was later. No credits. GREEN: No, we never put credits on. AUDIENCE MEMBER: And I’ve been trying to find out, like, who did the first eight Turoks. GREEN: We had bound volumes of all of our comics that I often used to look through, and I know Rex Maxon did— [There ensues a query whether artist Rex Maxon or someone else created Turok – Son of Stone, and its similarity to an earlier Maxon series, “Young Hawk,” but the conversation is hard to follow on the recording.] GREEN: Nobody ever got much credit at our place. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right. And it’s hard to figure out, to do all this research to figure out— DRAKE: Didn’t we do a title based on the post-World War III? What was that? BOLLE: Mighty Samson, was it? GREEN: Well, yeah, Mighty Samson was one. You’re thinking that or the one about the war.

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Total War. DRAKE: I did three or four Mighty Samsons. GALE: Gold Key continued to not give credit long after all the other companies had decided to. GREEN: Yes. Well, we started with licensed properties, big among them Walt Disney. Walt Disney never wanted anybody to know that anything that had the Disney name on it was created by anybody but Walt Disney. DRAKE: Walt was drawing 24 hours a day. GALE: In 47 styles. GREEN: Floyd Gottfredson—I think he used to do the [Mickey Mouse] comic strip. Another guy… BOLLE: Carl Barks. GREEN: Yeah. When you look at the number of Disney comicbooks and Disney everything, how could one man do all that? Just impossible. But they wouldn’t let us use any credits, and that sort of pervaded… DRAKE: So what was DC’s excuse? AUDIENCE MEMBER: But, I mean, the artists—you could tell pretty much tell—you’ve got a style, and Gill’s got a style. DRAKE: Oh, the artists, yeah. There are one or two guys around who are not comics professionals, but who are able to tell writers’

Red Mask—Without Red-And-Green Glasses! Even the covers of Magazine Enterprises’ Red Mask had a “3-D effect,” as witness this cover and action page from issue #43 (Aug-Sept. 1954), the second issue of the comic after it changed its name from Tim Holt. The cover of #42 was seen in A/E #148. Thanks to the Comic Book Plus website. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

styles, and I was very impressed with that. They’ve studied the writers, studied phrases that they used repeatedly, the use of a double-dash or whatever it may be. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Or spellings that could let you tell which one. Or if a character was surprised, do they say, “Oh my God,” “Oh, my gosh.” “Omigod” as one word, as three words? Do they use two exclamation points every time they say “Oh my God?” Do they say “Jeepers” or whatever? There are all these little things that differentiate writers. I myself go by pacing and sort of style of characterizations. But it’s really more accurate when you go by the other way. DRAKE: What could you tell about my stuff? How did you spot mine? AUDIENCE MEMBER: It’s hard to put it to words, because there’s a feeling of pacing that would remind me—You have a few writers that are real obvious. Robert Kanigher is really obvious, and your pacing is similar to Kanigher, but your characterization is much better, and so if it has Kanigher’s pacing, but it’s got more of a realistic feel of dialogue, that may be you. But some writers—their characters are obviously urban-based in the way they talk. Other writers’ characters are obviously suburban-based in the way they talk. And so you can tell, “Oh, this guy is obviously from the city, this guy is obviously from the country, this person must be from the Midwest or something like that,” because of the way their characters

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

react to each other and assumptions they make when they meet each other.

GREEN: We were. Much more so than other—

DRAKE: [DC editor Murray] Boltinoff once paid me a kind of a compliment, I guess. He said, “I find your stuff very tough to edit.” I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because there isn’t a wasted panel. It’s very hard. When I need to throw away a panel, I can’t find it.”

DRAKE: In the other houses you had some flexibility with the structure of the page, you know? But at Western, it was five panels to a page, and that was it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You can tell artists just by the way they did the panels. Some will be straight— ANOTHER IN AUDIENCE: Yeah, some artists like establishing shots to be sort of horizontal, a horizontal rectangle. Other artists like establishing shots that are the vertical-style rectangle. Some of the establishing shots are these big panels that take up one-third of the upper left hand corner. GREEN: Sometimes that was the way they were directed to do it by an editor. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, that’s what I was going to ask. Did you have input on that? That you wanted a panel to be straight, or up-and-down, or…? GREEN: Oh, yeah. We had instructions. We made sure of that. DRAKE: Western was pretty rigid, actually.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right, yeah, the certain style. FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Excuse me, Mr. Green. Why would that be that they would be so rigid? GREEN: Because that is the way that we thought that comics ought to be. FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: If it wasn’t broke, don’t fix it, right? GREEN: Yeah. I remember once reading a DC war comic… and I forget who the artist was. I think it was a four-page story; I don’t know whether it was Kubert or whoever. But I was reading this story and I’m looking through Venetian blinds at people, and I’m trying to figure out, where do I go next? What happens here? And I turn the page—do I look here, or here, or here? And, I mean, I get triangles and squares. And when the story ended, I was kind of confused. And then I saw this story that Russ Heath drew, and he used our system, and I said, “Gee, this is easy to read.” I didn’t have anywhere near as much trouble reading this as I did reading

Not Set In Stone (Left:) Neither we nor the GCD know (any more than Arnold Drake or Wally Green did in 2000) precisely who scripted Gold Key’s Turok, Son of Stone #118 (Nov. 1978)—but the tale apparently isn’t listed in the meticulous writing records of Paul S. Newman, so it may (or may not) have been scribed by Drake. We do know that the pencils were by Giovanni Ticci, the inks by Alberto Giolitti. (Right:) Drake tossed a pre-Catalclysm Bullwinkle parade balloon into the company’s Mighty Samson #30 (Dec. 1975), at the same time he was writing comics starring Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle Moose. Art by Jack Abel. Both scans courtesy of Jim Ludwig. Dark Horse Comics has reissued the entirety of the original Mighty Samson series—and a considerable portion of Turok, Son of Stone—in hardcover. [TM & © Random House, Inc.]

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

Russ Heath at age 86, about five years before he passed away in 2018. One of the best draftsmen in comics history, he was a super-clear storyteller whether Wally Green encountered him in Our Army at War #87 (Oct. 1959), in a story written by Bob Haney—or in Sgt. Rock #396 (Jan. 1985), in a Robert Kanigher yarn. Scans courtesy of Bob Bailey and Gene Reed, respectively. Sadly, we didn’t turn up the precise DC war comic Wally mentions in which the reader is peeking at characters through Venetian blinds… not that Ye Editor is necessarily against that sort of panel, mind! [TM & © DC Comics.]

the other story. So I felt we were on the right track.

GALE: There was a woman editor you kept talking about.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: When you do a splash, is that a standard in the industry, to have one total page, or a real big one and maybe a little, tiny one right below it?

GREEN: Yeah, that was… You keep mentioning her name. I had her first name while I was out walking this morning. Denise—

GREEN: Well, we never had a standard like that. The story, the action at the time would have to call for a big panel. You know, we would do a full-page splash if that would help the story. DRAKE: Wally, I think Western had a younger audience than most of the other publishers did, and I think that that had something to do with the fact that the other publishers were adventurous in their layouts and so on, because the older reader could accept it, but a younger kid would probably be confused by it. GREEN: Well, this old adult was confused by it. [laughter] DRAKE: You’re young in your head, Wally.

BOLLE: Van Lear. GREEN: Van Lear. Hey, thank you, Frank. Denise Van Lear. She worked with him. AUDIENCE MEMBER: What was it that you didn’t like? GREEN: Oh, I can’t remember. I think I just didn’t like the way he did his story. AUDIENCE MEMBER: He certainly would have been the unorthodox, triangular panels and whatnot. GREEN: Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Wally, were you at Gold Key when Frank Miller was working there?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Who determined how many pages a story should be? I know there was a standard length, but when was that determined, and who determined it?

GREEN: Yeah, but he didn’t do much for us. Actually, I don’t think I liked what he did.

GREEN: It was usually determined right at the beginning.

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

GREEN: Yeah, generally, I think we would. BOLLE: Well, I know Turok was almost always ten, but you would sometimes have an eleventh page. Generally speaking, it’d be twelve/ten, but sometimes it would be eleven/eleven, something like that. GREEN: I can’t quite remember. If we thought the story was good, we may have let it go longer than we originally had hoped. Maybe we could use it in a different magazine or something like that, a different issue. GALE: Now, Gold Key did the Star Trek comics… GREEN: Yes, we did. We kept Star Trek alive for years. GALE: Yeah. And this is before it was anywhere near as popular as it later became. And Paramount is famous for interfering with everything that has “Star Trek” on it. Did they interfere with you guys in those days? Did they care about Star Trek in the ’60s and ’70s? GREEN: By the end, they did. At the beginning, nobody gave a damn. I mean, the show was off the air most of the time that we were doing it. I guess the only people who read it were the Trekkies, and little by little they got to be more and more a larger group, and eventually—

Frank Miller Before he gained fame first as the resuscitator of Marvel’s Daredevil and then as the architect of DC’s The Dark Knight Returns, artist Frank Miller drew a single three-page story for Gold Key’s The Twilight Zone #84 (June 1978). Writer unknown; could it have been FM himself? Scan courtesy of Jim Kealy. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

DRAKE: Schedule had a lot to do with it. GREEN: Yeah, the schedule—how you wanted a book divided. So you would tell a writer, “Write me a synopsis for an eight-page story, write me a synopsis for a six-page story, or a four-page story, or a 24-page story,” and we tried to determine from the synopsis that he had got the right number of pages. AUDIENCE MEMBER: And what if he didn’t? GREEN: Well, it probably could be changed, the story could be changed a little bit to add something or take something out. DRAKE: To cut it back or expand it.

On The Right Trek

GREEN: But it’s easier to do that—

Splash page of Gold Key’s Star Trek #19 (Aug. 1973), written by Arnold Drake and penciled by Alberto Giolitti. Inker uncertain. Scan courtesy of Bill Mitchell. Editor Wally Green felt that Western/ Gold Key “kept Star Trek alive for years.” And there may well be some truth in that. The Western Star Trek run has been collected in hardcover by IDW. [® & © CBS Studios, Inc.]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So you would stick to the page length you needed rather than change the page length based on the synopsis?

Alberto Giolitti was also a long-time artist of Gold Key’s Turok, Son of Stone.

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

GREEN: Well, he probably even thought about this. It’s “Lieutenant Commander Spock’s Psycho-File,” and that’s the sort of thing Arnold would have come in and said, “Why don’t we do something like that?” And we said, “Sure.” DRAKE: They wanted some filler, and said, “Let’s go to the individual characters and do background on them.” So we did. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Which you’d already done with The Doom Patrol and The X-Men. DRAKE: Yeah. One of my favorite things in The Doom Patrol was the “Robotman” series. It ran four or five issues, and it was just Robotman. Called “Robot-Maniac,” that particular series. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I remember. I liked those. Those were about Robotman before he joined The Doom Patrol. In terms of the work, which companies do you prefer working for, leaving the page rates aside? DRAKE: You can’t do that. GREEN: We won’t let him answer that question. DRAKE: You can’t do that. It wasn’t the companies so much as it was the editors. I liked working with Wally Green, okay? Not just because he’s here, but that helps. [laughter] I liked working with Paul Kuhn And over at National, I liked working with Boltinoff. I liked working with Schiff, too, but Schiff wanted to write the script. He really did. He was kind of a frustrated writer, so you found that he was often dictating, you know. But Boltinoff and Kuhn did not do that. They respected you. And that gave me a good feeling when you sat down with a story. You have to continue to maintain that respect.

To Boldly Go… Reportedly, Drake’s final Star Trek script was for issue #59 (Jan. 1979), which featured art by Al McWilliams. By now, the comics printed writer & artist credits. [® & © CBS Studios, Inc.]

GALE: Did that reflect in sales? Did the sales of Star Trek go up? Could you see the Star Trek phenomenon building from your sales? GREEN: I don’t remember. I couldn’t answer that question. But we liked doing it. We thought we had a good property. And, yeah, they did leave us alone for many years. And toward the end they got very fussy. DRAKE: I wrote it for a couple of years, and nobody ever came to me and said, “We’ll sue you if you use this or that.” AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you remember what years you wrote it? DRAKE: Probably ’74, ’75, ’76. GREEN: [holding up notebooks] I brought my reference library.

GREEN: When Star Trek first went on the air, we got the license to it. AUDIENCE MEMBER: You got the license to everything. GREEN: Well, just about, yeah. GILL: Who did the drawings? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Did Alden McWilliams do Star Trek for a little while? GREEN: Well, this first thing here, the “Spock Psycho-File,” that’s McWilliams. This is copyright ’77, ’74, ’73. [to Drake] That’s when you were doing it. That was McWilliams. All the rest of it is Alberto [Giolitti]. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Didn’t Dick Wood write some of that? I have an early one from when the show was still on network TV. GREEN: I think he probably did. Dick Wood did a lot of writing for us. I liked Dick’s stuff very much.

DRAKE: Ah-hah!

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I liked [his brother’s] stuff on Little Lulu, too, when that was winding down.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: He expected questions like these from somebody!

GREEN: Yeah.

GREEN: Except that I don’t think I have any Star Trek except for one of our big specials. But this would be, I believe, all reprints. [to Drake] Maybe you can tell me which ones you wrote.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And speaking of people who analyze writers’ styles, that man right there is one of the best.

DRAKE: Maybe. [pointing to something in the notebook] Oh, I did that. I remember that well.

ANOTHER AUDIENCE MEMBER: My friend Martin O’Hearn is the real master of that. I’m just his pupil. He has long lists of artistic stylistic things from which he’s able to tell, at least if he’s familiar with the writer’s style, for which he needs to have stories that he knows he wrote, but in your case he would know it, because he knows you wrote all the

GREEN: Yeah, this would be your style. AUDIENCE MEMBER: What makes that his style?

GREEN: Oh, really?

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

He, Robot (Above, left, & right:) One of Arnold Drake’s favorite Doom Patrol efforts for DC Comics was the multi-part backup adventure that he remembered as “Robot-Maniac,” but was actually titled “Robotman Unchained” after its first chapter appeared in DP #100 (Dec. 1965). Also seen is the splash for #101. Art by Bruno Premiani. Incidentally, art provider Bob Bailey informs us that the serial ran from Doom Patrol #100-106, skipping only #102 & 105. (Right:) The splash page of the final issue of the first go-round of The Doom Patrol (#121, Sept.-Oct. 1968) depicted editor Murray Boltinoff and series artist Bruno Premiani. The story was scripted by Drake, but he always maintained that, by order of DC’s co-publisher, Irwin Donenfeld, his likeness was replaced by Boltinoff’s, with no mention of the fact that the tale had a writer. Of course, that didn’t stop Drake from singing Boltinoff’s praises a third of a century later. The complete series has been collected in hardcover form by DC Comics. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“Doom Patrols,” which he has, and that you wrote several X-Men, which he has, and so can tell your style when you were at Gold Key. DRAKE: What he probably doesn’t know, and I don’t, either, are a lot of the things that I did for House of Mystery and House of Secrets, Tales of the Unexpected. I poured that stuff out. I must have done a hundred of those. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Actually, he spotted one recently. DC was thinking of reprinting the very first revived House of Mystery, even though it’s all reprint, and it had horror stories in it, and he was able to look at it and say the first one, which was called “The Wondrous Witch’s Cauldron,” is yours, and the second one is Don Cameron, the third one is Otto Binder, and the fourth one was, I believe, Jack Miller. ANOTHER IN AUDIENCE: And therein lies one of the problems

Drake, Green, Bolle, & Gill

with Gold Key, which is that people like Martin O’Hearn are oriented toward certain types of comics, and he hasn’t really studied the Gold Key stuff like he has studied the DC stuff. AUDIENCE MEMBER: He has studied some of it. I have quite a few Little Lulus, so he knows your style, he knows John Stanley’s. Was there anybody else who wrote Little Lulu besides those two? GREEN: Yeah. There were several people, including me. DRAKE: I think Newman wrote a couple of them. GREEN: Newman may have written a couple of them. AUDIENCE MEMBER: He must have. DRAKE: You couldn’t stop him! GREEN: He wrote a little bit of everything. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Buell did the original panels, but I don’t think she wrote the comics. GREEN: She never wrote a comic, no. Stanley created the thing. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was talking to Newman, and he was saying that if Gold Key wouldn’t publish it, he’d go to DC and say, “Oh, I have a story,” and he kept on going until he finally sold it. DRAKE: I think I did about 90% of the stuff in Little Lulu during that ten-year period, I think. I also did a lot of the witches. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh, “Little Itch.” He was curious about that, because even though the “Little Itch” story was supposed to be by Fred Fredericks, he said it was hard to tell his style from yours when you were writing the “Lulu” stories. DRAKE: Oh. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Was that the same Fredericks who used to draw Mandrake the Magician who wrote that?

At His Beck And Cauldron (Above:) Comics researcher Martin O’Hearn, a protégé of whose was apparently in the 2000 audience in White Plains, NY, reportedly calculated that Arnold Drake was the scripter of “The Wondrous Witch’s Cauldron,” a story that had first appeared in DC’s House of Secrets #58 (Jan.-Feb. 1963), with art by the estimable Lee Elias. The splash is repro’d here from its reprinting in The Witching Hour #16 (Aug.-Sept. ’71), courtesy of Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

GREEN: Yes. He wrote a lot for us. I don’t think he wrote any serious stuff. He wrote a lot of comedy stories. He was a very

“Using Mommy’s Lipstick For The Letters You Write” One Little Lulu sighting whose creative team readers will have no trouble identifying is Western Publishing’s 1974 kiddies book Little Lulu’s Birthday Mystery, since both Drake and the artists are credited for a change. This wasn’t produced, however, by the same people who edited Western’s comicbook line. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“The Gold Key Comics Chat”

Four-Runners Of Gold Key Wally Green was the editor of much if not all of the material seen in this triptych featuring work by his three fellow Gold Key panelists. Counting coup, clockwise: This free-for-all between Barnabas the vampire and Quentin the werewolf (two of the most popular characters on the cult TV series) is from Dark Shadows #27 (Aug. 1974), as scribed by Arnold Drake and drawn by Joe Certa. The run of Gold Key’s Dark Shadows comics has been reprinted in hardcover by Hermes Press; look ’em up online. [TM & © Dan Curtis Productions, Inc.] When Russ Manning moved on from drawing the adventures of “Magnus – Robot Fighter,” Frank Bolle picked up the reins, as per this backup tale from Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom #31 (March 1982)—the final issue of that title in its Gold Key incarnation. Script by Roger McKenzie. This and the preceding scan courtesy of Jim Ludwig. Both Doctor Solar and Magnus have been handsomely reprinted in hardcover by Dark Horse Comics. [TM & © Random House, Inc.] Artist Tom Gill and ubiquitous scripter Paul S. Newman retold, in some detail, the origin of the “masked rider of the plains” in The Lone Ranger #118 (April 1958). Scan courtesy of Jim Kealy. Wouldn’t it be great to see a hardcover Lone Ranger reprint series? [TM & © Lone Ranger Television, Inc., or successors in interest.]

versatile artist, a very versatile person. He’d bring in these beautiful storyboards, which he seemed to be able to do a storyboard in no time at all. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is that how Lulu was always done? I know that’s how Stanley did it. He did it as a stick-figure thing, even though Irving Tripp was the actual artist. GREEN: As far as I know, everybody did storyboards for Lulu. Somebody was doing a lot of them when I started. I can’t remember his name, and I can’t remember why he left us, unless he felt he could make more money somewhere else, which a lot of people felt. I can’t remember who all, over the years, did Little Lulu. I know Arnold did, and Fred may have written a couple of Little Lulus. I don’t know. GALE: We’ve been here for more than an hour. Thank our guests, and thank you for coming. [applause]

Cat Tales From A Comicbook Master

Part VII Of Golden/Silver Age Writer JOHN BROOME’s 1998 Memoir A/E EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Except for #153, each of the past eight issues of Alter Ego has sported a few pages from our authorized serialization of John Broome’s “Off-beat Auto-bio” titled My Life in Little Pieces. This small and idiosyncratic book was written just a year before Broome died in Istanbul at the age of 86; since the 1960s, he and his family had mostly lived in Paris, although he himself spent his later years teaching English in Japanese schools. Our thanks to his and wife Peggy’s daughter Ricky Terry Brisacque for permission to reprint this reminiscence, and to Brian K. Morris for retyping it onto a Word document.

had only too recently (no pain but rendering her pale and ill), she had at once left her apartment door open and plunged her feet and hands into hot water. She had, said Fernande, beaucoup du courage. (When the French say that, they don’t mean they have less fear but more and that they struggle strongly to survive.)

Last issue’s installment related a couple of anecdotes concerning people dining at the Coupole, a famed Parisian eatery. This time, John continues in that vein, with a change of species….

Minus And His Grey-Haired Mistress

inus was a cat. His mistress was a lightly-bearded old girl known simply as Fernande who always occupied the same seat in the cafe part of the Coupole. One night, when I got to talking to her, she told me about Minus and said that he had a ﬁancée and that he was amoureux. Naturally I became interested and a few evenings after, to start her off, I asked her if Minus was still in love.

“Oh, toujours,” she told me with sweet matter-of-factness. “Avec les chattes il y a des saisons. Mais pas avec les chats. Mais il va arriver peut-etre a maitriser ses sentiments.” She said Minus was very “ardent.” She went on to say it was like that with people, some were “ardent” all their lives, others never. I asked her about his fiancée, but she said nothing had happened. Apparently, the arranged nuptials hadn’t suited Minus after all. Incidentally, I seem to recall her telling me that Minus got his name because as a kitten he was so very tiny—“presque moins que rien.” Later, I learned that this Fernande had in bygone days been La Belle Fernande, a painters’ model—perhaps Picasso’s—much prized for her beauty. She still had a shapely leg which she took care to show me, but also an aneurism in her throat which she said would carry her off suddenly some day. When the aneurism attacked, as it

John & Peggy Broome in a picnic photo taken, according to daughter Ricky Terry Brisacque, in Gaylordsville, Connecticut, on Sept. 28, 1946—can you be any more precise than that? Although domestic cats are a primary focus of this installment of Broome’s memoir, and even though a kindly soul has provided us with a list of virtually every comics story he wrote in the 1940s and ’50s, we couldn’t find a single one that had a true “cat” theme. But Jim Ludwig kindly provided us this Broome-scripted splash from Hopalong Cassidy #126 (Nov.-Dec. 1957), with pencils by Gil Kane & inks by Joe Giella. Will a jaguar be close enough? [© DC Comics.)

Cat Tales From A Comicbook Master

Cats? Did You Say Cats?

On EUTHANASIA: Already there are places in the world where they take you in, surround you with all the comforts of modern life and then, in their own inimitable way, put you to death. They call these places hospitals.

Cats, contrary to dogs, do not lend themselves to any kind of frivolity when you set out to write something about them. There is hardly anything anywhere as solemn as a cat. But not merely solemn. An owl is solemn, too, but you can make fun of an owl. You can’t make fun of a cat, that’s the difference.

•••

Stones There are stones of the mind as well

Furthermore, cats, contrary to dogs, do not begin to resemble their masters or mistresses. Perish the thought! If anything, it is their mistresses who come to resemble cats. Dog owners, for their part, don’t come to resemble dogs, nor bird owners birds, as far as I have been able to see. This thing happens only with cats who alone have the power to enlist humans into their ranks, though how it happens remains a mystery, like so many things connected with cats.

as the body. What scalpel can bare the calciﬁed desire? What knife excise a mummy of hope from the ﬂesh? Adze-hard The fear-longing oysters lie buried in life-ooze Clinging with indissoluble fingers To their unfathomable perch. A riddle: What is the favorite food of the delegates of the United Nations in New York? (Clues: a near-homonym of delegate is delicate. Start with that and add a word that in a foreign language means eat.) •••

Hi, Boys & Gargoyles! Remember ’way back last issue when we showed you the splash page of Broome’s Flash chapter for “The Mystery of the Vanishing Detectives” from All-Star Comics #57 (Feb.-March 1951)? Well, therein we showed a situation, set in John’s beloved Paris, in which someone was somehow stealing the gargoyles from Notre Dame Cathedral—so we thought you might like to view the final page of that segment, to see how it turned out in that last Golden Age “Justice Society of America” adventure. Thanks to Jim Kealy. [© DC Comics.]

How I love to watch the clothes in the hot air dryer at the laundromat: the swooping towels, the nose-diving shirts, the parachuting underpants... Virtues and vices are in reality one and inseparable. Without virtue, there would be no vice—and vice versa. ••• Some jets had passed by And there was the sky Cracked in a dozen pieces. (“The sky is falling,” said Henny Penny. “A piece of it fell on my head!”) The screen goes dark. A long silence. Then, from a distance, the playful engaging mini-essay music is heard, pianissimo at ﬁrst, then con spirito, rising up and under… Cats? Did You Say Cats?

Not long ago I read a man in Vermont taught his dog to respond to a total of 2,000 words. This startling feat points up another difference between dogs and cats. No cat has ever been taught to respond reliably to a single syllable of human utterance. Whereas dogs pride themselves on understanding their masters, cats, it is quite clear, have nothing but contempt for human speech—if not for the human race in toto.

Those who think I’m exaggerating and that cats and dogs are basically much alike, like brown and white eggs, should consider the names we give these pets of ours. We call dogs Fido or Rover. Did you, by any chance, ever hear of a cat named Fido? No, and you never will. No matter how faithful a cat may be (to their domicile, of course, not to their mistress), you still can’t call him or her Fido. And no matter if Tom is a bit of a gadabout, you still can’t call him Rover. Cats will simply not accept such inelegant un-catlike names, and that’s all there is to it. Clearly, cats have to be given names of character and distinction, such as here in Japan Suzume-chan (Little Sparrow) or Hiwa-chan (Little Goldﬁnch). Names like those are satisfying to cats and allow them to retain their natural dignity as they pad about the house or set out for a stint of mouse-catching. Would a cat named Rover ever catch a mouse? Ha! Obviously not! Now as it happens. Suzume-chan and Hiwa-chan are the names of two gentleman cats of my acquaintance here in Tokyo (belonging to the lady who for a while had that toilet paper receptacle on her table). Incidentally, l use the term “gentleman cats” in an honorific or meritus sense since both these chaps were altered when little, leaving them, alas, gentlemen no longer, but still

Part VII Of My Life In Little Pieces By John Broome

When I look into Suzu’s yellow eyes, I get the feeling of being close to mystery. And by the way that’s another big difference with dogs—a dog is about as mysterious as an old sneaker, there’s just no comparison on that score. Perhaps a cat doesn’t have nine lives; perhaps it can’t really see in the dark; perhaps a black cat crossing one’s path doesn’t augur bad luck—but can we be sure? l mean to say, it would be such a relief to know once and for all about cats, wouldn’t it? I’ve wondered sometimes what would happen if Suzume-chan could actually talk (like Saki’s eloquent Tobermory) and were asked to explain himself. What would my little friend say? Providing, of course, that he could overcome his natural repugnance for our clumsy word-language to reply. Well, I have an idea what he might say. The great Irish playwright Sean O’Casey once refuted a charge he was echoing another’s opinions in something he’d written by riposting angrily and grandly. “O’Casey is always O’Casey.” And in the same vein, Suzu, I feel, would arch his back high and haughtily, stretch out both his hind legs slowly and comfortingly before coming to rest and looking me deliberately in the eye. “Suzume-chan,” he would announce in a growly voice like a strong vocal purr, “is Suzume-chan.” And not being able to get another word out of him, I would, for better or worse, have to be content with that. John Broome’s memoir will continue next issue.

Hold That Tiger-Man! Here’s the second-closest thing to a Broome-scribed “cat” story we found, courtesy of Bob Bailey. This “Captain Comet” tale is titled “The Lady or the Tiger-Man!,” and was drawn by Murphy Anderson for Strange Adventures #34 (July 1953). The first few “Captain Comet” entries were credited scriptwise to “Edgar Ray Merritt,” a combination of the names of SF writers Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Cummings, and A. Merritt. [© DC Comics.]

less ladies—oh, emphatically not ladies. Of the two, Suzume-chan is really and invincibly a gentleman. His cat spirit chooses to ignore the contemptible robbery perpetrated on his person when he was still too young to defend himself, and soars loftily to confront the world around him with a fierce serenity that never flags. He is really the perfect cat, calm but fiery, loving but immensely proud. To come back to what I said in the beginning, l could never make fun of Suzume-chan. The truth is his character is so whole, so compact, so ﬁlled with his unique Suzume-personality, that he daunts me. Hiwa-chan on the other hand is another portion of sashimi entirely. He is “complainative.” He can be a bully and the place where he wants to be in the apartment is always the place where Suzu has chosen to curl up. But nature is wise and this daily hectoring by his lifelong companion has at least prevented both parties from putting on weight—although I doubt if Suzu, sparring precariously with an aggressive Hiwa high on a closet top can appreciate the unasked “favor” being done him. Both cats are grey tabbies, beautifully furred and cared for, and Suzu—which my diminutive friend sometimes allows me to call him—has an especially distinctive tail, round as a sea-urchin and perched on his backside like a pert little chignon, adding just the right touch of piquancy to his appearance to make him truly unforgettable.

It’s Raining Birds And Dogs! Here’s a splash page from The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog #44 (March-April 1959), with pencils by Gil Kane and inks by Bernard Sachs, which spotlights a cat’s natural enemy and natural prey—a dog and a bird—though on a science-fictional scale. Thanks to Jim Kealy.[Page © DC Comics.]

(Above:) NoMan from Tower’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1, (Nov. 1965). (Right:) “Werewolf!” from Creepy #1 (1964). [© Tower and Warren.]

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

We interrupt this magazine to present a

SPECIAL “JUSTICE SOCIETY/LEGION/LEAGUE” SECTION! Around the time he was trying to sell Julius Schwartz on reviving the “Justice Society” as the “Justice League,” Larry Ivie also began work on several related stories, hoping he could persuade the DC editor to let him draw one of the prospective series—particularly “Hawkman.” Text & captions by Roy Thomas. With special thanks to Sandy Plunkett, executor of the Ivie estate, for permission to print this rare material.

“The Justice Society” (Left:) It seems likely, though it’s unprovable, that Ivie devised these two pages of scripted layouts for a “JSA” return before he began thinking of it as a “Justice Legion,” let alone his “sons and daughters of the JSA” idea. Surprisingly, however, the “once-powerful villain” he “reintroduces,” Zeron Villor, was actually a brand new character! (Below:) Larry also laid out a couple of JSA-related pinups or action splashes. [Heroes TM & © DC Comics; other art & text © Estate of Larry Ivie.]

Special “Justice Society/Legion/League” Section

“Hawkman” These two pages illustrate the essence of Ivie’s “Justice League” concept, in which the son of Carter and Shiera Hall stumbles onto a family secret. The Hawkman who debuted in Flash Comics #1 (Jan. 1940) had been created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Dennis Neville; but Larry’s art was primarily influenced by that of Sheldon Moldoff, who became the Winged Wonder’s illustrator with Flash #4. Chances are that the “Hawkman” splash page reproduced in A/E #152, p. 25, was intended as the first page of this story. [Hawkman TM & © DC Comics; other art & text © Estate of Larry Ivie.]

Mr. Monster’s ArticleComic Title Crypt!

The middle pages of Ivie’s “Hawkman” story are currently MIA (though they were probably completed), but directly above is the final one— which, however traditional it may be in other respects, anticipates by two or three years highschooler Peter Parker’s going into action as SpiderMan rather than Spider-Boy. The other two pages, only roughed-in, appear to begin a second outing for this new Hawkman—and to retell the origin of the first one, since the sketchy lettering gives the year as “1939.” While Larry’s penciling skills were still developing, there seems little doubt that, if he’d been given an ongoing assignment, he had the talent to soon be turning in fine professional work. [Hawkman TM & © DC Comics; other art & text © Estate of Larry Ivie.]

Special “Justice Society/Legion/League” Section

“Green Lantern” Ivie also roughed out a retelling of the origin of the 1940s Green Lantern, as created by artist Mart Nodell and writer Bill Finger for All-American Comics #16 (July 1940). Was this new spinning of an old yarn designed to lead to the emergence of Alan Scott’s son as a new Emerald Gladiator— or was this work done before the young artist decided to opt for the “second generation” approach? [Green Lantern TM & © DC Comics; other art & text © Estate of Larry Ivie.]

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

“Doctor Fate” Once again, Ivie begins a retelling of a classic origin—this time, that of the occult hero introduced in More Fun Comics #55 (May 1940) by scripter Gardner Fox and artist Howard Sherman. The character’s full origin, however, wasn’t revealed till More Fun #67, and then it was somewhat in conflict with what had been related in #55… no big deal in those days. The single panel at the bottom of this page was probably meant to replace the version seen in the middle of page 2. [Doctor Fate TM & © DC Comics; other art & text © Estate of Larry Ivie.]

Special “Justice Society/Legion/League” Section

(Above:) The third and fourth pages of Ivie’s “Doctor Fate” origin. Although he got no further than rudimentary layouts, he fully scripted the pages. With Larry, it was all about the story. [Doctor Fate TM & © DC Comics; other art & text © Estate of Larry Ivie.]

“Wonder Woman” It’s unknown whether this halfpenciled page was meant to be part of a story, or merely a pinup, of the super-heroine created by writer William Marston and (though you wouldn’t know it to read the credits in the recent Warner/DC movies Wonder Woman and Justice League) artist Harry G. Peter. Interestingly, Diana had made rare JSA-related use of her invisible plane in 1951’s All-Star Comics #57, the final Golden Age issue. [Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics; other art © Estate of Larry Ivie.]

Many thanks to Michael T. for giving this issue’s Comic Crypt section over to this special Larry Ivie/Justice Society section! —Roy.

Previously Unpublished Brunner Artwork!

ATTENTION: FRANK BRUNNER ART FANS! Dr. Strange & Clea TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc..

Frank is now accepting art commissions for covers, splash panels, or pin-up re-creations! Also, your ideas for NEW art are welcome! Art can be pencils only, inked or full-color (painted) creation! Contact Frank directly for details and prices. (Minimum order: $500) Visit my website at: http://www.frankbrunner.net

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

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The Fan P.O.V. Of The Justice League of America —In 1962!

CFA EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Bill Schelly here. With all the discussion arising from the adaptation of the Justice League from comicbook to film, including the mixed reception to the 2017 movie, we at Alter Ego thought it would be interesting to see how fans felt about the “new JSA” in fandom’s early days. Or, rather, super-fan Nick Caputo came forward with the idea, which we enthusiastically agreed to feature in the Comic Fandom Archive. Take it away, Nick!

Introduction by Nick Caputo

arry Herndon’s fanzine Hero #1, with a December 1962 cover date, is a time capsule into fandom’s past. Along with articles and art devoted to the growing “hero boom,” the zine’s first issue included a novel idea originated by Rick Weingroff (who wrote for RBCC and went on to publish Slam-Bang): assemble a group of well-known, knowledgeable fans for a discussion of DC’s popular Justice League of America comicbook and present it in an informal style, where one can imagine them chatting in a living room or at a diner. The JLA was not only a proven financial success, but garnered robust support from a majority of fans, including a portion that had collected All-Star Comics in the 1940s and early ’50s, which starred the original Justice Society of America. As the “chairman,” Weingroff posed questions to his virtual panel. This “Point of View” column was a popular feature and continued in subsequent issues of Hero. The round-table panelists were Rick West (comics and Disney scholar), Paul Gambacinni (who wrote for RBCC and became a published author and radio broadcaster for the BBC), and Roy Thomas (who would go on to write a few issues of the JLA for DC, along with the All-Star Squadron). In 1962, the pre-Rascally Roy never dreamed he’d become a comics professional and was simply an active fan who co-edited a little publication of Jerry Bails’ named Alter-Ego. And now, from the tattered pages of a fanzine over half a century old, here’s a look back at fandom’s thrilling past, presented with almost no editing:

Point Of View

n order to present a cross-section of fan opinions, Hero now presents the first in a series of articles—a new idea in comic fanzines: opinions of various fans, in conversational tones on a topical subject, in this case the Justice League of America. As Chairman, and with the consent of Editor Herndon, each issue I will compile a list of questions on a different hero, or group of heroes, and send this list to various fans throughout this nation. The fans are picked mainly for their qualifications in judging comics, and our belief that they will present a fair answer to the questions. I reserve the full right to alter and edit these answers, in order to make a more smoothly moving article. I have further

“A Special Commendation For His Expert Assistance” Since this segment of CFA deals in large part with who should or should not have been a member of the JLA back in the early 1960s, what better visual to start the ball rolling than the Mike Sekowsky/Bernard Sachs splash page of Justice League of America #4 (April-May 1961)—the very first time a new member was added to the group’s original roster of seven! Script by Gardner Fox; edited by Julius Schwartz. [© DC Comics.]

taken the liberty of adding comments—however, they in no way change the opinion of the people queried. This issue’s questionees [sic] were Roy Thomas, Rick West, Paul Gambaccini, Don Foote, and Bernie Bubnis—however, for various reasons—for instance not meeting the deadline, and not presenting full enough answers— the latter two will be asked to comment on next issue’s article. Next issue, an entirely new line-up of fan writers will answer questions on the new Atlas [=Marvel] heroes. But now, on to the matter at hand: CHAIRMAN: In order to start the discussion, I’ll read the first question asked, and throw the floor open to comments: Should the JLA be further

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Rick Weingroff (“Chairman”)

Rick West

Paul Gambaccini

Roy Thomas

The “Point of View” panel for the fanzine Hero #1 (Dec. 1962). Rick Weingroff, as the panel’s moderator, is listed as “Chairman” throughout, to differentiate him from fellow fan Rick West without getting last names involved. Sorry, the somewhat fuzzy photo of Rick West was the only one available.

expanded by admitting Hawkman and Adam Strange to its ranks? RICK: Adam Strange and Hawkman are two of my favorite comic characters, and as such I naturally want to see them in the JLA. Both are interesting and colorful characters and would be a definite asset. PAUL: I have to disagree with you on that—I do not believe that Adam Strange should join the JLA. How would it look to have a JLA member run away in the middle of a case to hop onto a Zeta-beam? How would it look to have a JLA member with absolutely nothing special about him—except that he has a ray-gun? CHAIRMAN: Those are good points, Paul; the latter, however, can be answered by “What special powers do Batman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman have that makes Adam different?” The first question is perhaps true, but this idea might alleviate the overcrowded situation. ROY: Yes, I agree with you, Mr. Chairman. Adam Strange should, whether as a member or not, make a fair number of appearances in the JLA. I personally think that only certain members should show up in each issue. One issue would perhaps feature Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Flash, John Jones, and the Atom showing

Sidebar:

Herndon The Hero Larry Herndon of Carrollton, Texas, published the article-zine Hero from late 1962 to the summer of 1964, for a total of four issues. At this same time, he and fellow Texans Buddy Saunders and Howard Keltner published the early issues of Star-Studded Comics. Buddy did all the covers for Hero except #3, which was handled by Larry Kopf. “Point of View” was the best-remembered feature of the publication, discussing a different publisher’s super-hero comics in each issue, with a varying group of participants. [Characters TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Larry Herndon Larry Herndon and his multicharacter cover for Hero #1 (Dec. 1962). [Characters TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

up for a meeting. Next issue it might be Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Flash, Superman, Atom, Green Arrow, and Aquaman. Adam Strange fits into this perfectly—in that while on Rann, he would be unable to attend the meetings. RICK: Yes, Julie might introduce a rotation of members, the others being “otherwise engaged.” Although this would alleviate the problem of over-crowding, allow an infinite number of members to be feasible, and answer Paul’s first question pretty well, there are drawbacks—for instance, the cover artist could never be certain just which JLAers, to depict for any given issue. CHAIRMAN: Don’t forget that, if Julie established an almost regular rotation, Gardner Fox could easily work these characters into the script.

The Fan P.O.V. Of The Justice League of America—In 1962!

A Hero Sandwich Clockwise from above left: the covers of Hero #2 (Spring 1963), #3 (Fall 1963), & #4 (Summer 1964). [Heroes TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

A system of honorary membership could be formed, similar to the old JSA. However, what do you feel about the addition of Hawkman? PAUL: Hawkman should definitely be admitted—without him, the JLA is incomplete. ROY: Yes, I concur. As a matter of fact, I think Elongated Man (who deserves his own comic) should become a member—or at least an honorary member. However, it is almost impossible for me, as a fan of the old Justice Society, and as owner of most issues of All-Star Comics, to picture the JLA without Hawkman. RICK: I agree that he would be an asset, but his membership eligibility is by no means certain, since there is no definite announcement as yet on his [series’] success or failure. ROY: To me, Hawkman is by far the best character DC ever came up with, and I hope that National decides to keep him around, perhaps to star in issues of Strange Adventures. PAUL: I agree, but if made a JLA member, it would be difficult to fit him into the Sekowsky art style. Sekowsky rarely does well in my eye, his art being very poor. RICK: Re this point, the panels are plainly cramped and Sekowsky tries to get too many characters in at one time. This isn’t invariably so, but it is true quite often. ROY: Sekowsky’s fine, but why not let Infantino, Anderson, Kubert, or Kane have a whack at it? CHAIRMAN: I personally feel that Anderson does a better job on the covers than does Sekowsky on the interiors—and, as an alternate artistic

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ROY: Though I have a special place in my heart for the recent “Cavern of Deadly Spheres” story (since the fan-artist “Jerry Thomas” was composed of the names of myself and Jerry Bails), I think I like “When Gravity Went Wild” and number 14, the inclusion of the Atom, the best. CHAIRMAN: I personally can’t pick any one story as my favorite—but I think that some characters have more potential than the others. What do the rest of you feel?

A POV On “Point Of View” Art that originally headed this article in Hero #1 by popular fan-artist Grass Green, who in the mid-1960s would draw a couple of pro stories for Charlton. [© Estate of Richard “Grass” Green.]

replacement, a good idea might be to have the artists of the separate heroes handle the JLA—each doing his own character, as was done in the JSA stories. But, what do you think of Fox’s writing? RICK: With 10 members to portray in only a maximum of 26 pages, the JLA logically should be too crowded for satisfactory coverage of all, but so far, Gardner Fox has done an admirable job of featuring them. PAUL: I think that the lack of characterization on the parts of many characters is a glaring fault, but when you think about it, you discover that, in their own magazines, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Batman, Superman, John Jones, and Green Arrow have never been characterized successfully.

PAUL: The strongest character in the JLA is undoubtedly the Flash, but the character with the most potential is Green Lantern.

RICK: I personally think that the strongest character currently in the JLA is Green Lantern. His origin and powers are very different and interesting, the characters and gimmicks in his exploits are good, and his personality is better developed (his pride and all that) than most of his fellow JLAers. (I qualified this with “currently,” because in my estimation, Adam Strange is a more plausible and better-developed character.)

CHAIRMAN: Don’t forget that it is difficult to characterize a hero in this type of comic, where the writer only writes one of the characters regularly, and a great change in characterization might have to be added into the original comics. ROY: One trend in the JLA that I abhor is that they are fighting too many alien villains. PAUL: I’ve noticed that, too—the aliens are traditional-comic-book aliens, as had been regularly exploited in the Schiff monster comics. RICK: One thing that I had noticed about the writing is that the comic relief allegedly supplied by Snapper Carr is not in the least comical, and the dialogue among the members sometimes suggests the mentality of a two-year-old. ROY: Yes, for instance, the dialogue is sometimes idealized and therefore unrealistic (as in the fact that the members are always explaining things to each other). Further, I dislike the superamiability of the members. (I don’t favor squabbling like the occasionally sophomoric Fantastic Four, but…) RICK: Actually, every JLA story that has appeared thus far has been at least good, and many have been superb, but, my favorite story, all things considered is “When Gravity Went Wild.” The commendable plot construction, the literary devices of flashback and the first person narration, the inclusion of such intriguing elements as the trial of a member who has turned “traitor,” the impersonation of another member, the battles with an “injustice league” all contribute to make this story one of the classics of comicdom. PAUL: Yes, that was my favorite story also, first because of the good development, and a variation on an old plot, but also because of the unusually fine art. The story hinted at further developments (which still have not been realized) that would provide excellent opportunities to turn out another top-notch full-lengther.

Make Room! Make Room! An article titled “The JLA—Overcrowded?,” written by fan Drury Moroz under the pseudonym “F.T. Frost,” was published in Alter Ego #5 (March 1963), the first issue of the 1960s fanzine edited and published by Ronn Foss. It also represented the first artwork by fan-favorite Biljo White to appear in A/E, of which he would be art editor from #7 through #9. [Heroes TM & © DC Comics; other art © Estate of Biljo White.]

The Fan P.O.V. Of The Justice League of America—In 1962!

when he was created, but the trick arrow theme has long since gotten ridiculously out of hand. I like Wonder Woman and the JLA needs a female member, but she is poorly handled in her own comic. PAUL: Actually, we were discussing the overcrowded condition, but it seems to me that it could easily be solved by perhaps substituting or dropping various members. This would draw rage-letters from Superman-Batman-John Jones-Wonder Woman fans, they being the heroes most likely to be dropped, but they never do much anyways that is in the realm of the believable. RICK: Yes, I for one consider Wonder Woman, John Jones, Green Arrow, and Aquaman perfectly expendable, and would not shed a tear to see them ousted to make room for other characters—so long as these others were superior, which they almost certainly would be. However, as you pointed out, Paul, there are millions of fans who would object to this. Actually, I have a suggestion which would allow for future revivals, and prevent these characters— who conceivably would be very fine—from exclusion from the JLA. One answer might be to form a second “Justice League” that would comprise the excess of available members worthy of the honor, who would go into action when the JLA is busy. PAUL: Of course, this idea of having another JLA wasn’t too successful with the old Leading Comics.

When It Was All Just A Game Murphy Anderson’s cover for Justice League of America #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1960) appeared on American newsstands just four months after the previous “JLA” appearance, in The Brave and the Bold #30. It was actually the fourth go-round for the DC super-group that had debuted in B&B #28, whose Starro cover has been reprinted even more often! [TM & © DC Comics.]

ROY: My personal favorite is Hawkman—but, of the JLA members, the Atom and Green Lantern are my first- and second-place favorites. In general I think these two are handled best in the individual magazines featuring them. CHAIRMAN: I go along with your reason, but perhaps more important is the weakest member—in that this would tend to hurt the comic. PAUL: The weakest JLA member is Batman. This is perfectly fitting with his own magazine, where the asinine editorial policy apparently calls for little if any characterization. The only roles Batman plays, in both the JLA and his own magazine, come when he opens his utility belt, happens to have the right thing, and throws it. Wonder Woman, Superman, and Green Arrow take the following “honors.” RICK: I disagree with your first choice, and feel that indubitably, Wonder Woman is the weakest character. Her impractical costume, especially the high heels, and her over-fanciful implements like the bracelet-shields and magic lasso are horrible detriments, as is true of her ridiculous origin (whatever version you take) and the inane characters in her strip. Her personality is not only underdeveloped, it is nonexistent. ROY: The weakest members are Green Arrow and Wonder Woman. The former’s basic idea is great, or at least it was back in about 1941

The Arrow Of His Ways Sekowsky/Anderson cover for Justice League of America #4 (April-May 1961). The splash page for this Green Arrow-inducting issue was seen back on p. 69. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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PAUL: There are many sides to the question, though, Roy. The “alternative worlds” method is the best introduced to date. But several difficulties follow. Undoubtedly, several members would still be crime-fighting, some will have lost the touch, some would have died, and some would have lost their effectiveness. In addition, it is hard to stretch the mind to the point where the Wonder Woman of the ’40s is the original version of today’s corrupted form. Imagining two Batmans is even worse. CHAIRMAN: I agree, Paul, and there is the problem of explaining the two Supermen, Batmen, and Wonder Women, who haven’t “changed” since their creation like the revivals. I would like to pass on some more interesting points from Don Foote: The JSA would be good to revive. Even the old stories to reprint, even if they were pre-Code. The ones from as far back as #35 weren’t gory at all. Take, for example, the Black Cat stories. They are all reprints of that age. After the war things weren’t that bad. Now, I would like to close this discussion with a brief summary of our conclusions: 1) Hawkman and Adam Strange should be admitted to the JLA, although adding to the overcrowded situation. 2) Although the JLA is overcrowded, several solutions are easily available—such as a rotation of members or the expanded-size comic. 3) It is sad, but unless a comic expansion is made, or the current unpopular members are dropped, the JLA should stop admitting new members. 4) Flash and Green Lantern seem to be the strongest characters in the JLA, with the latter having a slight edge. 5) Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Batman, and John Jones all have deficiencies, but the first character seems to have more than the other three put together.

When Fan-Critics Went Wild! The four panelists seem to concur that, of the then-published JLA issues, the best was #5 (June-July 1961). [TM & © DC Comics.]

RICK: Yes, and of course, it is questionable if Mr. Fox, even with help from John Broome, can provide exciting adventures for the two groups. Plans for a Junior JIA suggest the affirmative. PAUL: Actually, the ideal solution is expanding the JLA to a 25-cents-sized comic. If this was introduced, there would be little limit on the number of members. CHAIRMAN: Right here, I’d like to pass on a suggestion from Don Foote and Jerry Bails: This 25-cent mag would give more than enough room to develop the plot and the individual characters to a really good story. Any extra room could be used by fillers, or if enough, for stories of individual members of the JLA. I agree with this idea, wholeheartedly. However, don’t forget, costs being what they are, this 25-cent mag would probably only have 64 pages—the 80-page mags are cheaper, since writerartist-editor time is almost nil on the comic and no payment is made. I think that we’ve covered just about everything that I had hoped, and after getting your opinions on one more thing, I’ll summarize the entire discussion. What is your opinion on a revival of the old JSA via the parallel worlds method (as was used in Flash #123)? RICK: The “alternate worlds” method is the most plausible means of explaining the resurrection of the JSA. I think the group should be revived for occasional guest appearances in, well, any of the DC mags, since about every character has his JSA counterpoint. ROY: Quite simply: certainly. I favor the revival of the old JSA in any form. I think we’ll see it ere long.

6) Unanimously, the old JSA should be revived—both in reprints and new form. 7) “When Gravity Went Wild” is the best JLA story to date. 8) The art, several members, characterization, script-dialogue, and overcrowding seem to be the most serious detriments in the JLA. Well, that’s Point of View for this issue. Remember, if you are asked to contribute to this feature—please, by all means do so. Rick Weingroff, Chairman NEXT CFA SECTION: In the interest of equal treatment, Nick Caputo will present the Point of View column from Hero #2, wherein a different group of fans discuss the Marvel super-hero comicbooks. Bill Schelly back again, with a BIG “thank you” to those of you who purchased my NEW memoir Sense of Wonder, My Life in Comic Fandom—The Whole Story. For those who don’t know, it’s NOT a reprint of my original memoir with a similar name from 2001. The original book was taken “back to the studs” and revised substantially, and the new Part 2 is a book of equal length that continues the story to the present day. If you’re “on the fence” and want to find out more about it, and/or my other new books, there’s lots of info at my web site www.billschelly.net. Comic Fandom Forever!

The Fan P.O.V. Of The Justice League of America—In 1962!

The Space Between Atoms The Atom became the second member added to the group, in Justice League of America #14 (Sept. 1962), again behind a Murphy Anderson cover—but, a few months earlier, some of the panelists had gotten their wish to see starman Adam Strange at least guest-star with the group, in his own series, in Mystery in Space #75 (May ’62); cover of the latter by Carmine Infantino & Murphy Anderson. Sadly for the panelists, who were unable to see into the future, their sentimental favorite prospective JLAer, Hawkman, wouldn’t be invited to join the League till issue #31 (Nov. 1964) of its mag, once more with a cover by Sekowsky & Anderson. [TM and © DC Comics.]

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of course, having interviewed you back in 2005 for Back Issue magazine. But this new telling was so detailed, so informative, so enlightening, and so compelling that it was a page-turner all its own. Incidentally, I’ve interacted with Charles Lippincott on Facebook numerous times, and I agree with you—he’s basically a nice guy. And, having read many of his posts, I was already aware of things he’s said about the Marvel series, you, Howard Chaykin, Steve Leialoha, etc. A lot of what he wrote just didn’t seem right to me. I’m glad you were able to address it all in your interview. Glenn Greenberg Yeah, as was apparent, Charley and I have vastly different and perhaps irreconcilable takes on a number of things that occurred more than forty years ago in conjunction with the deal for Marvel to adapt the then-forthcoming film Star Wars. I won’t re-hash any of that here, but I’m very happy to mention two things: Charley, 1976-77 Star Wars artist Howard Chaykin, and I got together at the TerrifiCon held at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Connecticut, in August (not October, as I mistyped someplace) of 2017, for a “40 Years of Star Wars” panel. A full and illustrated transcript of that confab will appear in A/E #158, just two short issues from now!

his issue’s got ’em all: Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age… Marvel, DC, Gold Key… artists, writers, editors. So, choosing from amongst so many possibilities, Shane Foley opted to use a Russ Manning Magnus, Robot Fighter drawing as the starting point for this issue’s “maskot” illo… and Randy Sargent has handled the coloring. A nice choice—the more so since Manning was the original artist of the Star Wars newspaper comic strip in the late 1970s, and the “re:” section this time deals with communiques about Alter Ego #145, which celebrated the 40th anniversary of Marvel’s Star Wars comic (and, incidentally, of the George Lucas film). So let’s jet right into it, as soon as we get past our cavortin’ copyright credits for the above art. [Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly; created by Biljo White; other art © Shane Foley.]

Our first cyber-missive is from Glenn Greenberg, who for much of the 1990s was an editor at Marvel and now is senior editor of the magazine TIME for Kids…. Hey Roy, Richard Arndt’s interview with you about how Star Wars originally came to Marvel—and what happened in the months that followed—was an incredible read. I knew a lot of the facts already,

Vive La FORCE! Along with pages from a Russian adaptation of Star Wars, A/E #145 also featured several covers done for non-U.S. reprintings in the late ’70s and early ’80s of the Marvel Comics version, such as this one for the French magazine Titans #18. Thanks to Jean-Michel Ferragatti. [TM & © Lucasfilm, Ltd.]

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

Far more welcome news: Charley reported at that time that the diagnosis that he had mentioned online several years ago, that he had contracted Alzheimer’s Disease, turned out to be incorrect. He did have other health problems, but not ones nearly as severe as he had thought. If something like that doesn’t put arguments over pride-of-place in the Star Wars comics pantheon into perspective, nothing will! Here’s a note from regular correspondent Jeff Taylor, who had sent us scans of four pages from a (probably unauthorized) Russian adaptation of the Star Wars movie that we used in #145…. Hi Roy, I had quite forgotten I had sent those Russian Star Wars comics pages to you. I’m glad you printed them, because the eBay page I got them from was deleted ages ago and the links no longer exist in my files. Luckily, you have the platform to get your side of the Star Wars comics story out there so that people can hear from someone who was actually there. Speaking of someone who was also there, I think my favorite part of the issue is the bit where Howard Chaykin complained that he had to cut the interview short because his grandchildren were dragging him to see a new Star Wars movie! It gives me a warm glow of amusement to know that, no matter how cool we were when we were young, we still end up becoming like our parents/grandparents in some shape or form. Jeff Taylor I run into Howard at the occasional con, Jeff, so if you think I’m going to add any kind of coda to your comments, you’ve let the Wookiee win one time too many. In #145 we announced that “our own” Shane Foley, who does our “maskot” illo each and every issue, had drawn a cover for a The Phantom comic in his native Australia. We soon received this slight elaboration: Hi Roy,

gang stumbled onto an “after-show” party with all the honchos from the convention and Cab. I just had to thank him for the Betty Boop cartoon “Minnie the Moocher.” I remembered it from my childhood and how scary and cool it was to see it for the first time. Somehow the conversation got to comics and he said he loved Captain America: “All his long legs and arms everywhere. He moves like me!” And Mr. Calloway laughed loud and long, and you could not help but laugh along with him. Incredible energy and a fantastic and unique performer. He also did a few more for the Fleischer Studio, and some cable channel should feature them in a special. I have to admit that I never actually met Gordon [G.B.] Love. Sent in my stuff and it magically appeared in the RBCC with all the typos I had typed into the original article. I think he may have added a few more, just so I didn’t feel the typos were all my fault. But I have always admired his spirit and success. To read of his last days… well, it was not easy. I just always imagined that he would live forever. Bill Schelly (like Mr. Monster, as usual and expected) did a fantastic job with this series of articles. G.B. deserved it. Thank you. What, Roy? Only five photos of you this issue? Six, if you count the A/E back issue page. Are you actually running out of photos? Bernie Bubnis Hardly! And I’ll admit, sometimes it’s hard to resist printing certain photos—as, for example, the one on the very next page! Now, a few more quick notes re #145: Steven Roman writes that, as someone who became a Star Wars fan after seeing the third issue of the Marvel adaptation, he “wanted to offer a minor correction. On page 51 [of A/E #145], you reproduce the Star Wars cover for Crazy Magazine #32, with the caption: ‘Cover artist unidentified.’ Actually, it’s the work of my friend Bob Larkin, who did quite a number of covers for Marvel (as I’m sure you’re

Stunned to see the little piece on me doing the Phantom covers. Very nice, thanks. A little clarification: the publisher is not ABC Wide Bay—that’s the local radio company where super-comics-fan Ross Kay works—but FREW, the same Sydney [Australia] company mentioned so many times when you did your Sy Barry issue. Under them, The Phantom has lived for 1775 issues so far. (My covers have been for 1754, 1757, and 1768 to date, with another almost done) and they’re not “horizontal”—that was just the way the cropped pic appeared. Shane Foley Thanks for the clarification, Shane. Great to see somebody besides A/E making use of your considerable talents! Bernie Bubnis, the co-host of the first comics convention ever (in New York City in 1964), seems to have taken up semi-permanent residence in the “re:” section, and this time we wanted to print his comments about the non-Star Wars-related features in #145: Hi Roy— “Mr. Monster” was (as usual and now expected) great. I will add one more “jazz” great to the list: Cab Calloway. He performed at an Eastern Lumberman’s Association convention in Boston circa ’70s. My

Cab Calloway The great jazz singer and bandleader in a 1940s zoot suit—juxtaposed with Jack Kirby’s cover for the Italian edition of Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, as inked by Frank Giacoia (with a bit of additional art by Marie Severin and John Romita). [Cover TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

re:

A Well-Red Pair Since Bernie Bubnis is always counting up the number of photos of Ye Editor that appear in a given issue of Alter Ego, we wanted to give him one more: the recent above snapshot of Roy T. (on our left) and veteran Spanish comics artist Esteban Maroto. The two have worked together a number of times since the 1970s—starting when it was a younger Maroto who mailed in to Marvel the very first drawing of Red Sonja in an “iron bikini,” which a younger Thomas (as editor-in-chief) immediately had other artists adapt and use as the regular garb of Robert E. Howard’s She-Devil with a Sword. However, Esteban and Roy had never met—until April 13, 2018, at the Salon Internacional del Comic de Barcelona, held in that Spanish city. The two of them are seen above together in a booth, signing copies of the gorgeous Red Sonja black-white-&-red graphic novel that they and artist Santi Casas had produced especially so that it could be debuted at that convention by Spanish publisher Planeta, under editor David Hernando Serrano. And now that graphic novel’s being published in English as well, by Dynamite—so it’s available in two languages! See ad on p. 83 of this issue. [TM & © Red Sonja LLC.]

aware), including the one for Marvel’s The Empire Strikes Back adaptation. His signature appears down near the bottom of Vader’s cloak, near the Nebbish.” Thanks for backstopping us, Steve. Sean Howe, author of the 2012 book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, informs us that it “looks like Tunisia was the North African filming location, although scouting was done in Morocco.” Well, either one of those is a better answer than “Algeria,” which is what I accidentally said at one point. Rob Smentek, A/E’s intrepid proofreader, says that he “found the Marvel circulation guy’s [Ed Shukin’s] story about [Marvel] ‘going to the well once too often’ very funny, as I used to see that Star Wars Treasury (the complete one) on the shelf at toy stores and local bookstores into the early ’80s.” Yeah, it seems they took a while to sell out, Rob. In fact, sometime in the first half of the ’90s, a well-known TV “shopping channel” evidently stumbled onto a hundred-plus copies of that particular edition that collected issues #1-6 and paid me a whopping $2 apiece to sign them all. When they shipped them to me, I found that many of them were in considerably less than mint condition; some front covers were partly stuck to the back covers of others, etc. The channel had me sign them anyway and send them back. When they popped up being sold on TV a few weeks later, they were being hawked for $200 per, and were noted as being ‘specially signed by the writer, Ray Thomas.’ But hey, their check was good. Doug Abramson tells us he can’t be absolutely sure about the photo on page 15 of A/E #145 of George Lucas, Mark Hamill, Alex Guinness, and an “unidentified movie staffer,” but that “I think Mr. Unidentified is Producer Gary Kurtz. In a photo I’ve seen of Lucas and Kurtz on location in Tunisia, Kurtz is even wearing the same outfit.” Could be, Doug! Send those epistles and e-mail to: e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com Roy Thomas 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135

Meanwhile, if you’re still into e-mail discussion lists, try AlterEgo-Fans on the Yahoo Groups. Subscribers will learn about future issues of A/E and maybe even get a chance (lucky them!) to help Ye Editor acquire some desperately needed art or photo or info for an upcoming edition. Just visit http:/groups.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans. Yahoo Groups has deleted its “Add Member” tool, so if you find it won’t let you in, please contact our ever-moderate moderator Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll walk you through the process. He’s good about that. In addition, over on Facebook, dealer and con-expeditor John Cimino is in charge of what he has christened The Roy Thomas Appreciation Boards to discuss anything and everything dealing with a certain misplaced Missourian, including this mag, upcoming con appearances, comments on comics or super-hero movies, or whatever. The site is fully interactive—which is more than I am! SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT! At about the same time this issue of Alter Ego goes on sale, Taschen Books (publisher of 2014’s humongous 75 Years of Marvel: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen) will be debuting a 444-page, 12.4” x 18.5” volume, also written by Yours Truly (that’s Roy), titled The Stan Lee Story. This will be a special “collector’s edition” in English, limited to 1000 numbered copies, each signed by Stan, for a $1500 cover price. A huge “career biography” of The Man, it contains more than 1000 photos and reproductions of artwork, many of them never before seen… and is printed on archival paper and presented in an acrylic slipcase. (Plans for a general-market edition, perhaps next year sometime, still seem fluid; as they say, watch this space.) So, if you want to pick up a last-minute Christmas treat for that special Marvelmaniac or just comicbook fan, you could do a whole lot worse! End of hard sell.

re: Special Addendum:

More Unseen Gold

Those Pesky “White Spaces” In The Gerber Photo-Journal Guide To Comic Books by Mark Gaddy

irst of all, allow me to apologize for this article. I am not a writer, an artist, or in the profession. I’m a reader, a fan, and a collector in that order. For those who might be unaware of it, there was in 1989 the release of a pair of excellent and very massive books compiled by Ernst and Mary Gerber, entitled The Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books. These two volumes included some 21,000 color cover illustrations of Golden Age and early Silver Age comics. However, no undertaking of this broad a scope could be complete. There remained over 100 missing comic issues, often referred to as “White Spaces” (for the blank spots left for them in Gerber, onto which, presumably, a small Photostat/sticker of the cover could later be pasted), and at least one mistake that I am aware of. The mistake, I discovered while completing my collection of the Street & Smith Shadow Comics, was that there was a Vol. 2, #2 (14), shown in the Photo-Journal that didn’t match the one I had in my collection. And there wasn’t a “White Space” for issue Vol. #2, #1 (13). But, once I checked the dates, I found that the issue shown on this A/E page is the real Vol. 2, #2 (14). What the Photo-Journal has in its place is actually Vol. 2 #1 (13), and it does exist. If there is any doubt, check the cover dates: Nov. 1941 (13) and Jan. 1942 (14).

Real Shadow Comics, V2 #2 (Jan 1942): 1680-14 (2/2) [TM & © Advanced Magazine Publishers d/b/a/ Condé Nast]

Several years later, Comic Book Marketplace magazine, published by Gemstone, attempted to add to the completeness of the Gerber guides. Matt Nelson started on this occasion to include cover reproductions properly sized to fit their respective “White Spaces” on removable stickers. These updates included, to my knowledge, a total of 44 more comics. Published in CBM issues #74 (Dec. 1999) and #75 (Jan. 2000), and in CBM Special issues #2 (Summer 1999), #3 (Spring 2000), #4 (Summer 2000), and #5 (Summer 2002) over a 4-year period. Since that time, I have often wished that the remaining “White Spaces” could be filled, and to that end, I happened to find I had acquired a few of those missing unseen gold. It occurred to me that maybe other collectors would like the same thing, so I contacted Roy Thomas at Alter Ego, to see if he might interested in picking up the mantle and passing the word for more updates. He prompted me to prepare a short article on the updates I have. Maybe it will spark a fire under those collectors who might be in a position to add to the project. Among my collection I found the following comics that were not represented in the Photo-Journal:

Doc Savage, Vol. 2 #3 (published by Street & Smith, cover-date May 1943): 548-15 (2/3) [TM & © Advanced Magazine Publishers d/b/a/ Condé Nast]

re: Special Addendum

And two miniature giveaway comics: The first is one of the Superman miscellaneous comics listed in Gerber as 1847-5. This was the third of 3 Superman issues from Kellogg’s Pep breakfast cereal.

The second was an Oxydal-Dreft giveaway of Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner.

1419-1 [TM & © Al Capp Enterprises, Inc.]

1847-5

According to my list of missing comics in the Photo-Journal, which might not be complete, there are still over 60 more to find.

Curt Swan pencils. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Here is my list. I hope to see more from you! Good Hunting. Gerber Set #

Issue #

Title

Page # Vol 1

Publisher

A-1

114(2)

A-1

32(3/8)

Air Ace

S&S

All Top

Fox

All Top

Fox

All-True Detective

Avon

5(nn)

All-True Detective

Avon

Animal Crackers

Green

Animal Crackers

Green

133

Atomic Thundrbolt

Regor

147

Indian Braves

Ace

151

Barker

Quality

154

Barnyard Comics

Nedor

236

Blue Beetle

Fox

113

289

10 or 11

Cody of the Pony Express

Charlton

130

316

Captain Battle

Lev Gleason

139

322

Captain Flight

Four Star

140

326

Captain Marvel Bond Bread Giveaway

Fawcett

144

333

9-13, 10,11

Captain Steve Savage

Avon

150

443

Courage Comics

J E Slavin

181

454

Crime Can't Win

Marvel

189

501

Dark Mysteries

Merit

208

507

A Date with Millie

Marvel

209

548

15 (2/3)

Doc Savage Comics

S&S

231

619

Famous Crimes

Fox Features Syndicate

247

622

Famous Funnies

Eastern Color

248

Page # Vol 2

re: Special Addendum

Gerber Set #

Issue #

643

Feature Books Lone Ranger

McKay

258

643

Feature Books Lone Ranger

McKay

258

646

Feature Stories

Fox Features Syndicate

265

674

Flame

Fox Features Syndicate

273

698

4 Favorites

Ace

306

Title

Publisher

Page # Vol 1

Page # Vol 2

698

4 Favorites

Ace

307

699

4 Most

Premium

308

702

Fox Giants

Fox Features Syndicate

310

702

Fox Giants

Fox Features Syndicate

310

702

Fox Giants

Fox Features Syndicate

311

713

10(2/7)

Frisky Fables

Novelty Press

313

713

14(2/11)

Frisky Fables

Novelty Press

313

729

Funnies

Dell

318

775

1-4

Giant Comics Edition

Charlton

330

874

Terrific

Comic Media

364

973

Joker

Marvel

386

1046

Kit Carson

Avon

421

1070

Large Feature Comics (1st Series) Terry

Dell

424

1070

Large Feature Comics (1st Series) Gang Busters

Dell

425

1087

Liberty Comics

Green

432

1087

Liberty Comics

Green

432

1109

Little Dot

Harvey

435

1302

Movie Comics

494

1304

Movie Love

Famous Funnies

495

1307

Murder Incorporated

Fox Features Syndicate

495

1310

2(nn)

Mutt and Jeff

496

1419

Oxydol-Dreft Giveaway Lil' Abner

Oxydol Dreft

521

1469

Picture Stories from the Bible

535

1504

Popular Comics

Dell

550

1504

Popular Comics

Dell

550

1557

Red Ryder

Hawley/Dell

571

1696

22a

Silver Streak comics

Lev Gleason

600

1696

24a

Silver Streak comics

Lev Gleason

600

1696

25a(nn)

Silver Streak comics

Lev Gleason

600

1746

Sparkler Comics

United Features

614

1783

Star Comics

Centaur

625

1847

5(3rd of 3)

Superman Time Capsule Minature-Kelloggs

DC- Kelloggs giveaway

661

1942

Tim Holt

701

1986

Toy Town Comics

Sterling

715

2012

14(2/2)

True Sport Picture Stories

S&S

721

A Hardcover Graphic Novel by

ROY THOMAS, ESTEBAN MAROTO, & SANTI CASAS Now available in both English & Spanish!

English-language edition from Dynamite:

Spanish-language edition from Planeta Comics, Spain:

A stunning 2018 work scripted by Red Sonja’s co-creator—produced in cooperation with Spanish publisher Planeta—an oversize (9½” by 12½”) hardcover, in black, white, & red!

Reuniting Roy Thomas & illustrator Esteban Maroto— designer of Big Red’s “iron bikini”—plus artist Santi Casas, in this 3-color instant classic, first published in Spain, 2018! See p. 79 for Spanish cover.

88 pp. / $19.99 / Teen+

88 pp. / 9½” x 12½”

Visit Dynamite online

Visit “Planeta Red Sonja” online

RED SONJA ® & © and related logos, characters, names, stories, copyrights and distinctive likenesses thereof are owned by Red Sonja, LLC “Dynamite” and “Dynamite Entertainment” are ®, and the “DE Logo” is ™ and ©, Dynamite Entertainment. All rights reserved.

ROY THOMAS PRESENTS

14 VOLUMES OF CLASSIC OUTER SPACE ADVENTURES...

Long before Star Wars, there was Planet Comics, home to a veritable parade of steely-jawed interstellar adventurers and some of the most gorgeous damsels in distress you could ever wish to find...

FEATURING THE COMPLETE 73-ISSUE SERIES FROM 1940-1953

STD BOOKSHOP PRICE: $55 SLIPCASE EDITION PRICE: $70

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New Books! MIKE GRELL: LIFE IS DRAWING WITHOUT AN ERASER (Softcover & Hardcover) From a seminal turn on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and creating the lost world of the Warlord, to his work on Green Arrow—first relaunching the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series with DENNY O’NEIL, and later redefining the character in Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters— MIKE GRELL made an indelible mark at DC Comics in the 1970s and ’80s. But his greatest contribution to the comics industry was in pioneering creator-owned properties like Jon Sable, Starslayer, and Shaman’s Tears. Grell even tried his hand at legendary literary characters like Tarzan and James Bond, adding to his remarkable tenure in comics. This career-spanning tribute to the master storyteller is told in Grell’s own words, full of candor, optimism, and humor. Lending insights are colleagues PAUL LEVITZ, DAN JURGENS, DENNY O’NEIL, MIKE GOLD, and MARK RYAN. Full of illustrations from every facet of his long career, with a Foreword by CHAD HARDIN, it also includes a checklist of his work and an examination of “the Mike Grell method.” It is a fitting tribute to the artist, writer, and storyteller who has made the most of every opportunity set before him, living up to his own mantra, “Life is Drawing Without an Eraser.” By DEWEY CASSELL, with JEFF MESSER. NOW SHIPPING! (160-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $27.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-088-5 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 • Diamond Order Code: JUN182065 (176-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER) $37.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-087-8 • Diamond Order Code: JUN182066 (This LIMITED HARDCOVER EDITION is limited to 1000 COPIES, and includes 16 EXTRA FULL-COLOR PAGES not in the Softcover Edition.)

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID!

(JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #75)

This first-of-its-kind examination of the creators of the Marvel Universe looks back at their own words, in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and television interviews, to paint a picture of JACK KIRBY and STAN LEE’s relationship—why it succeeded, where it deteriorated, and when it eventually failed. Also here are recollections from STEVE DITKO, WALLACE WOOD, JOHN ROMITA SR., and more Marvel Bullpen stalwarts who worked with both Kirby and Lee. Rounding out this book is a study of the duo’s careers after they parted ways as collaborators, including Kirby’s difficulties at Marvel Comics in the 1970s, his last hurrah with Lee on the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel, and his exhausting battle to get back his original art—and creator credit—from Marvel. STUF’ SAID gives both men their say, compares their recollections, and tackles the question, “Who really created the Marvel Comics Universe?”. Edited by TwoMorrows publisher JOHN MORROW. (160-page trade paperback) $24.95 • (Digital Edition) $11.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-086-1 Diamond Order Code: MAY182059 • SHIPS DECEMBER 2018!

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: The 1990s

AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: THE 1990s is a year-by-year account of the comic book industry during the Bill Clinton years. This full-color hardcover documents the comic book industry’s most significant publications, most notable creators, and most impactful trends from that decade. Written by KEITH DALLAS and JASON SACKS. (288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $44.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.95 • NOW SHIPPING! ISBN: 978-1-60549-084-7 • Diamond Order Code: MAY182060

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History. Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

THE 1990s was the decade when Marvel Comics sold 8.1 million copies of an issue of the X-MEN, saw its superstar creators form their own company, cloned SPIDER-MAN, and went bankrupt. The 1990s was when SUPERMAN died, BATMAN had his back broken, and the runaway success of Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN led to DC Comics’ VERTIGO line of adult comic books. It was the decade of gimmicky covers, skimpy costumes, and mega-crossovers. But most of all, the 1990s was the decade when companies like IMAGE, VALIANT and MALIBU published million-selling comic books before the industry experienced a shocking and rapid collapse.

in memoriam

Jay Disbrow

(1926-2017) From Comicbooks To “Government Technical Illustrator” by Roy Thomas

never met Jay Disbrow in the flesh. However, from years of correspondence and the occasional phone call, I felt I knew him, and I was saddened when I learned he had passed away.

He was a fan of comics—especially adventure comics—from early childhood, and in his early teens wrote and drew such stories “at a furious pace.” He was emboldened when giants such as Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and Burne Hogarth took the time to critique artwork he mailed to them during those years. In 1950 he obtained a job as an inker at the Jerry Iger Studio, working initially on books that comics shop was producing for the Fiction House line. After a year, he branched out on his own and got a job working for artist L.B. Cole, then editor of the Star Comics line. Cole soon had Jay writing as well as illustrating stories. His first such solo effort, from an idea provided by Cole, was “The Beast from Below,” in Blue Bolt Weird Tales of Terror #112 (Feb. 1952). Over the next three-plus years, he wrote and drew more than 100 stories and fillers (many of them in the horror genre) for Star, though he also produced stories for other publishers such as Ajax/

Farrell, Fox, ACG, and even Classics Illustrated. He was responsible for a particularly celebrated (and/ or decried) big panel featuring Jay Disbrow a Lovecraftian circa 1970, and his art on the cover of IW’s human horror in Strange Mysteries #9 (1958). The artwork was Crime Detector #5 reprinted from one of Disbrow’s efforts for (July 1954)… and Star Publications. [© the respective copyright for numerous tales holders.] of jungle heroes and heroines done for Star. During the 3-D craze of that era, he produced for Cole a one-shot comicbook titled Picturescope Jungle Adventures, which attempted to give a three-dimensional “effect” (minus red-andgreen glasses) via the use of framing and extreme foreshortening. That issue was turned by 3-D comics enthusiast Ray Zone into an actual 3-D comic in the 1980s. The coming of the Comics Code and the subsequent demise of numerous publishers spelled an end to Jay’s career in mainstream comics. After 1955, he made a living in commercial art. He even took the well-known Famous Artists Schools course to further his skills, graduating in 1963. His obituary in a Brick, New Jersey, newspaper reported that after the 1950s he “became a Government technical illustrator for approximately 27 years.” He did, however, return to the comics medium for a number of special projects, including a 1979 Flash Gordon-style comics issue (The Flames of Gyro) for Fantagraphics and, on his own, another adventure series titled “Lance Carrigan of the Galactic Legion.” In the mid-1980s, he authored The Iger Comic Kingdom, a history of the Iger Studio (which was reprinted in its entirety in A/E #21). In 1986 he drew the Captain Electron promotional comic for Brick Computer Science Institute, featuring some rare super-hero work by the artist. From 2000 to 2005 he wrote and drew an online comic strip, Aroc of Zenith, which was, like Flames of Gyro and “Lance Carrigan,” an homage to the work of Alex Raymond. In retirement, he greatly enjoyed his contacts with fans and fellow professionals. He is survived by his wife Amelia and two children—and is revered by many fans of 1950s horror comics in particular. Much of this information was gleaned from Ray Zone’s interview with Jay Disbrow that was published in Alter Ego #117.

in memoriam

Nick Meglin

(1935-2018) “Insulting Editor” Of Mad Magazine by Mark Evanier

veryone in the extended family that is Mad magazine is shocked at the news that Nick Meglin died this morning (June 2, 2018) of a sudden heart attack.

Nick worked on Mad for close to half a century, starting as an idea man and writer, moving to an associate editor position, and then to being co-editor (with John Ficarra), and then, upon his retirement in 2004, becoming a “Consulting Editor.” Given his wicked sense of humor, “Insulting Editor” might have been a better title. Many of us are especially jarred because we spent last weekend with Nick at the National Cartoonists society convention in Philadelphia. I had lunch with him a week ago today and, a week ago tomorrow, moderated a Mad panel in which he participated. He was alert and funny and seemed like a guy in good health for a man of 82. Since leaving regular duties on Mad, he had mostly been involved in writing musicals and was looking forward to the opening of the stage version of Grumpy Old Men (based on the movie) at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, Maine, in August. Nick did the lyrics for that show; and, for the musical Tim and Scrooge, a sequel to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, he wrote both book and lyrics.

But, getting back to Mad: I want you all to know this about my friend Nick. The sense of humor that permeated that magazine from Nick Meglin about 1957 into the and the famous flip covers of Mad #60 (Jan. 1961), ’80s was mainly which managed to congratulate both candidates Nick’s. The editor for the U.S. Presidency—Richard M. Nixon and of Mad for much John F. Kennedy—no matter which of them won… of that period, Al a clever dig at hypocrisy. Meglin served in one Feldstein, was a editorial capacity or another at Mad from the latter skilled craftsman 1950s through the early 21st century, after which he at producing a was still listed as “contributing editor.” [Covers TM magazine on time & © EC Comics] and in giving the best possible presentation to the work of his freelance writers and artists… but Feldstein wasn’t all that funny. Meglin was funny. He wrote much of Mad’s editorial material (intros, ads, etc.). He rewrote or punched-up articles that were in need of extra laughs. And he recognized comedic talent in writers who submitted work and encouraged them and guided them. At least half of Mad’s best writers during that period were “found” by Nick, as were many of its artists. When I researched my now-outta-print book Mad Art, I interviewed just about everyone who’d ever worked for the magazine and was still around to be interviewed. A lot of those folks told me that, had it not been for Nick, they would never have had their proud association with the magazine. I’ve talked to a few of them again today. They’re all very sad about this news, and so am I. This piece originally appeared in Mark Evanier’s informative blog, Newsfromme.com.

RICHARD A. LUPOFF: The Master Of XERO! An Interview by Richard J. Arndt Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Richard A. Lupoff was born on February 21, 1935. He began his writing career as a fan-writer in the 1950s for various science-fiction fanzines before starting his own fanzine—the acclaimed Xero—in 1960. Xero, co-edited with his wife Pat and EC scholar Bhob Stewart, ran for ten well-remembered issues from 1960-1962 and won the 1963 Hugo Award for best SF fanzine. A list of contributors to Xero reads like a Who’s Who of science-fiction and comics fandom in those days, including Harlan Ellison, Avram Davidson, Frederick Pohl, James Blish, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, future mystery writer Ed Gorman, future film critic Roger Ebert, future comicbook writer Roy Thomas, fan favorite Bob Tucker, and artists Dan Adkins, Larry Ivie, Steve Stiles, and Roy G. Krenkel. In the mid-1960s Lupoff was the editor of Canaveral Press, which reprinted numerous novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. He was a leading founder in the field of comics historians with his essay collections All in Color for a Dime and The Comic-Book Book, both co-edited with Don Thompson. He published his first book—Masters of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs—in 1965 and was soon writing science-fiction novels and short stories. In the 1980s, following a slump in the science-fiction field, he switched to mystery novels, including the comics-related novel The Comic Book Killer (1988), which has spawned eight sequels to date. He has published well over fifty novels, nonfiction books, story collections, and anthologies. The collection The Best of Xero, co-authored/edited with Pat Lupoff, appeared in 2005 from Tachyon Publications

and includes important early comics history essays by Lupoff, Thompson, and Thomas, among others. He is also the author of a recent autobiography titled Where Memory Hides: A Writer’s Life. My interview with Mr. Lupoff was conducted in June of 2018. RICHARD ARNDT: Let’s begin with a little about your early history and how you became interested in Captain Marvel. Did you start right off with Whiz Comics #2? RICHARD LUPOFF: I was about five years old. My father rented a cottage in Venice, Florida, and sent my mother, grandmother, brother, and myself there for the winter. I remember the trip south on the train, the famed Orange Blossom Special, eating in the dining car, getting off the train in that small town in Florida. A few days later my mother gave my brother Jerry a quarter and told him to take me into Venice’s downtown, such as it was. There was a single drugstore in Venice. Jerry bought us each an ice cream cone (chocolate for him, strawberry for me—5¢ each) and a copy of Whiz Comics #2. Despite the numbering, that was actually the first issue. I was an early reader—used to sit outside our rented cottage and amaze the neighboring kids by my almost supernatural ability to read. I read the “Captain Marvel” story in Whiz #2 and other stories in early issues. I remember the origin story… the abandoned subway station, the ancient wizard, Billy Batson’s transformation… as well as other

Richard Lupoff at a signing for both of the Arlington House hardcover comicbook histories he co-edited: All In Color For a Dime (1970), and its follow-up The Comic-Book Book (1974). Both were classic compilations of nostalgic essays edited by Lupoff and Don Thompson. Photo courtesy of Audrey Parente. [Art © the respective copyright holders.]

Richard A. Lupoff: The Master Of Xero!

the other writers had glorious imaginations. Around 1945, there was an infusion of whimsy for the postwar stories, and I loved reading them. It’s important to note that I was growing up, then, and I certainly read with a different identity as a five-year-old in 1940, a ten-year-old in 1945, and a fifteen-year-old in 1950. I was on the edge of my seat for the serial where Captain Marvel battled another Whiz Comics hero, Spy Smasher [Whiz #16-18]. I took that one very seriously at the time, but I laughed at the later serial in which Captain Marvel battled Oggar [CMA #61-65]. I remember these two rivals frantically flipping pages in their notebooks in search of magic spells that they hadn’t used up yet. However, the later stories, with Korean War themes or horror images, were something of a turn-off for me. I think the last “Captain Marvel” story that made a strong impression on me was the origin of Radar, the International Policeman [CMA #35]. RA: What’s your take on Otto Binder and Bill Woolfolk’s work on the various Captain Marvel titles? LUPOFF: I never knew Bill Woolfolk, but I knew Otto quite well, and of course, his wife Ione and daughter Mary. Mary Binder’s death [NOTE: in a car accident in 1967 at the age of fourteen —RA] was a shattering blow to the Binders, from which neither of her parents ever recovered. Otto always spoke favorably of Bill Woolfolk. I don’t know how to distinguish Bill’s stories from Otto’s, largely due to Fawcett’s policy of omitting by-lines from their comics. RA: Were you a member of the Captain Marvel Club?

“Welcome, Billy Batson”—And Richard Lupoff With a strawberry ice cream cone in hand, young Dick was there, in the very beginning… for Whiz Comics #2. [Shazam & Billy TM & © DC Comics.]

characters: Dr. Sivana, Beautia, Magnificus, Sterling Morris… I was totally captivated. RA: Are there any specific “Captain Marvel” stories that you thought were particularly good? LUPOFF: The early stories set on Venus, with their weird sciencefictional creatures, intrigued me [Whiz Comics #4 & 15]. I remember the origin story of Captain Marvel Jr., who was crippled by Captain Nazi [Whiz # 25]. I vividly recall the lengthy serial, “Captain Marvel versus the Monster Society of Evil” [Captain Marvel Adventures #22-46], with such scenes as Billy Batson trapped in a giant ice cube so that he cannot say his magic word… and a scene in a later chapter in which the villainous Mr. Mind crawls out of a steak on Hermann Goering’s dinner plate. Another favorite of mine was “The Earth Dreamer” [CMA #52], in which it’s revealed that our entire universe is a dream in the mind of a farmer—I think he was a farmer—in a meta-universe. And, of course, the epic battle between Captain Marvel and Mr. Atom [CMA #78]. RA: Is there anything specific you’d like to comment on regarding the different periods of the Captain Marvel saga at Fawcett? LUPOFF: The earliest C.C. Beck/Bill Parker stories were actually pretty minimal. For example, I recall one in which crooked gamblers are working to fix a track meet [Special Edition Comics #1]. Captain Marvel doffs his super-hero tights in favor of running shorts, enters the track meet, and foils the gamblers. Now, really…! Once Bill Parker went to Mechanix Illustrated and Otto Binder was called in as chief writer, the stories really blossomed. Binder and

LUPOFF: Oh, yes! You mailed in a dime for your membership. I had a membership card and button, a Captain Marvel tie-clip, a Captain Marvel glow-in-the-dark pin-up. All gone now, alas! How about putting on an International Captain Marvel Alumni Association Convention? You can count me in! RA: What can you tell us about your captivation with Otto Binder’s 2-page “Jon Jarl” prose tales that appeared in Captain Marvel Adventures? LUPOFF: There was a lot of overlap between pulp and comicbook writers at the time [NOTE: Besides Binder, Alfred Bester—writer of the All-American “Green Lantern” stories—as well as National editors Julie Schwartz and Mort Weisinger, were either science-fiction writers or had strong ties to both science-fiction and comics. RA] and it took me a while to learn that “Eando Binder” was originally “Earl and Otto Binder,” but mainly Otto. His “Via Etherline” series in Thrilling Wonder Stories was a great favorite of mine. The “Jon Jarl” series of stories Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…? were clever, entertaining, miniature space operas. Young Dick Lupoff was an original member in good standing of the Captain I’ve been trying for years Marvel Club… but he no longer has his to get them collected button or membership card containing into a book, and the last Cap’s secret code. [Shazam hero I heard, Wildside Press TM & © DC Comics.] had such a project in the

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Froggy Went A-Courtin’ A trio of Lupoff’s favorite “Captain Marvel” adventures. (Clockwise from above:) He was fascinated with the science-fiction elements of the Sivanas’ residence on Venus, and, in particular, with the planet’s giant-frog inhabitants known as Glompers. Bill Parker’s magnificent final “Captain Marvel” script in Whiz Comics #15 (March 1941) revealed the origin of Dr. Sivana. Nor can he forget the potent events that unfolded in Captain Marvel Jr.’s origin in Whiz Comics #25 (Dec. 1941), plotted by Ed Herron, scripted by Bill Woolfolk, and illustrated by C.C. Beck and Mac Raboy. And he got a tremendous kick out of Mr. Mind popping up in the steak dinner of a real-life-monster and worm, Hermann Goering, head of Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe. A scene from Chapter VII [“The Lost Sunrise”] of “The Monster Society of Evil” serial, from Captain Marvel Adventures #28 (Oct. ’43). Script by Otto Binder; art by C.C. Beck and art staff. [Shazam hero, Billy Batson, Dr. Sivana, Beautia Sivana, Captain Nazi, Freddy Freeman, & Mr. Mind TM & © DC Comics.]

Atomic Dreams (Above:) Otto Binder’s wonderfully unorthodox stories like “The Earth Dreamer” delighted young Lupoff… and still do! From Captain Marvel Adventures #52 (Jan. 1946); art by C.C. Beck/Pete Costanza. (Right:) Dick also marveled at the first smashing battle between Captain Marvel and Mr. Atom by writer Bill Woolfolk and artist C.C. Beck (CMA #78, Nov. 1947). [Shazam hero & Mr. Atom TM & © DC Comics.]

Richard A. Lupoff: The Master Of Xero!

I Spy With My Little Eye… (Clockwise)… Lupoff remembers the thrill of the two major heroes of Whiz Comics facing off against each other for three consecutive issues. Seen is part five of the Captain Marvel vs. Spy Smasher storyline, from Whiz #18 (June ’41), written by Bill Parker & drawn by C.C. Beck; the mini-serial concluded in the “Spy Smasher” strip that same issue. While not as well-received as the earlier “Monster Society of Evil,” Otto Binder’s short-lived “The Cult of the Curse” serial still had its witty moments, as pointed out by Lupoff, such as these Cap and Oggar notebook-flipping scenes from its fourth chapter, in Captain Marvel Adventures #64 (Aug. 1946). Art by Beck & art staff.

works. I can’t wait to sit down with such a collection. RA: What was your reaction to Fawcett’s dropping of their comicbook line in the ’50s? Did you keep up with any comics, like the EC books, after that point in time? LUPOFF: By late 1953, I was a college freshman and my whole world was very different from that of a few years earlier. I was deeply involved in science-fiction as a reader, fan, and writerwanna-be, so I wasn’t paying much attention to comicbooks. An exception, however, was the EC comics that you mentioned. I especially enjoyed the EC science-fiction, fantasy, and horror comics. Of course, many of the stories in Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, The Vault of Horror, etc., featured plots adapted from the works of Otto Binder, Ray Bradbury, and other SF writers— sometimes with credit, sometimes not. RA: What prompted the creation of your fanzine Xero? LUPOFF: In 1960 I was recently out of the Army, and my wife Pat had also recently received her college degree. I was a typical young businessman (tech writer for a computer company) at the time, and Pat was a typical suburban housewife of the era. We both found those lifestyles unfulfilling, but I still had some ties to the science-fiction fan world. I subscribed to such fanzines as Fanac, Oopsia!, Quandry, and Slant. One day Pat noticed a stack of them in our apartment and asked what they were. I did my best to explain fandom and fanzines. Eventually we decided to try our hands at a fanzine of our own. Think of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland: “Gee, my dad owns a barn—let’s get some kids together and put on a show!” Xero was strictly a labor of love. Since our fannish connections were limited, we wrote most of that first issue ourselves. Pat wrote about British fantasy author Mervyn Peake, the creator of the Gormenghast trilogy, and thriller writer Sax Rohmer, who wrote the Fu Manchu novels. I wrote about Captain Marvel. The

The origin of Radar—“The International Policeman”—piqued the interest of a young Dick Lupoff when he picked up a copy of Captain Marvel Adventures #35 (May 1944). The first appearance of Pep Pepper (Radar) was drawn by Beck and the art staff. The hero was created by managing editor Will Lieberson, in cooperation with the U.S. government, but the writer of the debut story remains unknown. [Shazam hero, Spy Smasher, & Oggar TM & © DC Comics.]

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only outside contributor was Harlan Ellison, with an essay about the movie version of Psycho. Everything took off from there. RA: So Pat’s role was as a writer for the fanzine as well? LUPOFF: As I said, she wrote those two essays for the first issue. In all the issues of Xero, she edited the letter column, cut stencils, and fed our volunteer staff at collating parties.

You’re In The Army Now! Lupoff in the U.S. Army, 1957, just a few years before Xero was unleashed. Photo courtesy of Bill Schelly.

RA: What was the origin of the title Xero? Does it mean anything specific?

LUPOFF: We’d originally planned to call the magazine Xanadu. Our friend, Joe Sanders, designed a logo and drew a picture of the famous “pleasure dome” of Kublai Khan. Then we learned that there was already a fanzine called Xanadu Newsletter—I believe edited by Bill Myers. Since Joe Sanders had already done so much work, we went scrambling to the dictionary for a suitable replacement… preferably starting with the letter “X.” When we came to “xero” (a prefix meaning “dry”), we figured we’d got the right name for the fanzine. It was short, catchy, and intriguing. I came across a website for another magazine called Xero many years later and wrote

to the publishers, but they never responded. RA: You and your wife’s appearance as Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel at a 1960 convention in Pittsburgh is still one of the most definitive and earliest cosplay appearances of two super-heroes. It took place long before the term “cosplay” was even created. The photograph of the two of you in costume is one of the most famous in fandom. What can you tell us about creating the costumes and the reaction to them? LUPOFF: Pat and I had just put together the first issue of Xero, and we were planning to attend the Pittcon, the 1960 World Science Fiction Convention, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Xero #1 was dated September 1960. It was actually published the last week of August, and copies were distributed at that Worldcon in Pittsburgh on Labor Day weekend [Sept. 3-5, 1960]. The planned print run was 100 copies. Allowing for spoilage, file copies, contributors’ copies, etc., the actual circulation was approximately 90 copies. Xero was initially a mimeographed publication, for the most part, but in the last few issues we used photo-offset printing for covers and for some inserts. There were actually ten issues of Xero, plus an Index Edition and a special one-shot called The Reader’s Guide to Barsoom and Amtor [RGBA]. The first issue ran something like 32 pages in length, and the magazine eventually grew to 100 pages with a circulation of 300. RGBA had a print run of 500 copies, plus a second printing. Roy Krenkel did the cover for Xero #10. We also used that as cover art for RGBA. We used a lot of artwork in the magazine, largely arranged for by Bhob Stewart. Contributing artists included Atom (Arthur Thomson), Dan Adkins, Larry Ivie, Landon Chesney, and the great Steve Stiles.

…3… 2… 1… Xero! The Lupoffs’ seminal fanzine Xero was the spark needed to ignite a nostalgia phenomenon that prospered into the development of comics fandom. Seen left to right are the covers of issues #1 (Sept. 1960), #5 (1961), & #10 (1963), by Joe Sanders, Larry Ivie, & Roy G. Krenkel, respectively. [The Atom TM & © DC Comics; other art © the estates of the respective artists.]

As for the convention, we thought it would be a hoot to participate in the costume event. Of course, nobody had even heard of such a thing as cosplay at the time. We just thought it would be fun.

Richard A. Lupoff: The Master Of Xero!

Otto Binder himself, providing details and corrections to my errors in “The Big Red Cheese,” which I’d written based on childhood recollections rather than on research. RA: How long was Xero an ongoing concern?

Now And Then—Though Not Necessarily In That Order Richard and Pat Lupoff were a big hit appearing as Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel at the World Science Fiction Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, held on Labor Day Weekend, Sept. 3-5, 1960, as immortalized in a pair of oft-reproduced photos. At center of page is a snapshot of the Lupoffs in 2011, proving that the couple that Shazams together, stays together. Photos courtesy of Bill Schelly.

Here’s how the costumes were created. My Captain Marvel suit was basically a set of men’s long red underwear, supplemented by a pair of red underpants. The yellow sash was a woman’s scarf. Wrist decorations were a pair of yellow rubber gloves with the hand parts cut off. Yellow “boots” were just long yellow socks. The yellow lightning bolt was cut out of a piece of cloth and sewn to the chest of the costume. The white cape was a pillow-case. Pat’s Mary Marvel dress was basically just a long red t-shirt. Her lightning bolt, yellow sash, and “boots” were similar to the Captain Marvel devices, as was her cape. Those costumes were very popular, and a couple of photos of the two of us at the convention have become classics. Within a couple of years, Don and Maggie Thompson came to a Worldcon as Ibis the Invincible and Princess Taia, and members of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society were turning up as the Justice Society of America. RA: What was the reaction at the time to your using articles about a comicbook hero—Captain Marvel—in what was technically a sciencefiction fanzine? LUPOFF: Reaction to the article—“The Big Red Cheese”—was surprisingly and gratifyingly enthusiastic. We invited readers to contribute essays about their own favorite comics, and they literally lined up to join in the fun. I even had to publish a stylesheet for would-be contributors. One of the first to contribute was

LUPOFF: Xero never had a formal schedule, but the first few issues appeared bimonthly. As the page count, circulation, and design-and-production elaboration increased, the frequency decreased. The last issue appeared, as I recall, in 1962. Xero won the Hugo for best fanzine the next year. All in Color for a Dime and The Comic-Book Book were both published a few years later. Those hardcovers were from Arlington House, and the paperback versions from Ace Books and Rainbow Books, with later paperbacks from Krause Publications. Don Thompson and I shared editor’s bylines on the books and were planning a third volume, but Don’s death prevented us from getting that third volume together. RA: Do you think the two of you in your costumes helped further along an early wave of interest for the Golden Age of Comics? LUPOFF: As to whether what Pat and I did with Xero and All in Color for a Dime and our costumes in Pittsburgh were somehow the magic word or lightning bolt that created the whole world of comicdom, comic-cons, cosplay and the whole nostalgia phenomenon … that’s really not for me to say. All those years ago, we weren’t trying to change the world or to start a huge cultural movement. We were just a couple of newlyweds out to have a good time. Regarding that, I will say that we did, indeed, have a wonderful time. RA: What, besides your own strong interest in the characters, compelled you to choose Captain Marvel and family as subject matter to write about in Xero? By doing so, you became one of the earliest comics historians. LUPOFF: As for why I included a comicbook essay in what was ostensibly a science-fiction fanzine… well, first you must remember that there was no such thing as a comics fanzine in 1960, at least as far as I know. Captain Marvel was just a subject that interested me and one that I enjoyed writing about. Although our original concept of Xero was as a science-fiction fanzine, the magazine

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quickly evolved into a broad-based journal of popular culture. Unfortunately I don’t have access to my personal library and files at the moment, but you should definitely get hold of The Best of Xero, published by Tachyon Publication out of San Francisco. A good deal of the artwork from the original magazine is included in that book. As I said, Pat and I didn’t have high ambitions for ourselves or what we were doing. When we were invited to the San Diego Comic-Con in 2011 to honor us for creating comics fandom (both Comic Art and the original Alter Ego, actual comics fanzines, followed Xero’s debut in short order), we couldn’t have imagined that this “movement” we’d founded would end up taking over an entire city for a weekend, draw coverage on network TV, and become a global phenomenon. By the way, 2011 was supposedly the 50th anniversary of comics fandom, dating from the publication of the first issue of Xero. It was actually the 51st anniversary. But I figure the people putting on the convention weren’t mathematicians, they were comicbook fans, so they were entitled to have the date a little bit wrong. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Technically, the 1961 start date was taken by San Diego from the debut dates of Alter Ego and Comic Art, as true comics fanzines—but Xero’s primacy was tacitly acknowledged and celebrated.]

The “Write” Stuff In the mid-1960s, Lupoff blossomed as a writer. 1965 saw his first published novel, One Million Centuries… and the next year, his Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, the first-ever serious work on ERB as an author. The original edition of the latter had no cover art, so here’s a later edition, utilizing the Reed Crandall/Al Williamson portrait of Burroughs and his creations, Tarzan, et al., that had appeared in the first edition. [Covers © the respective copyright holders.]

RA: Who were your favorite Captain Marvel artists? For that matter, what’s your take on Jack Kirby’s sole “Captain Marvel” effort in Captain Marvel Adventures #1? LUPOFF: You know, as a young kid, I didn’t understand the publishing world. Comicbooks were just “there.” In later years, I got to know Otto Binder, met Will Lieberson, corresponded with C.C. Beck. To me, Beck was the classic “Captain Marvel” artist. His humorous, clean style was a perfect fit for “Captain Marvel.” But I was especially fond of Mac Raboy’s graceful, exciting work on “Captain Marvel Jr.” As for Jack Kirby’s work in CMA #1, I think it was fine, but it somehow gets absorbed into Beck’s work and the Fawcett house style. Kirby’s work for Timely, especially on Captain America, is much more important. RA: Both of your comicbook essay collections are available on Amazon, as is The Best of Xero, which also has a number of essays on comics. Is there anything you’d care to share about them? LUPOFF: My intent with All in Color for a Dime was to collect all the related essays from Xero into a book from the outset. With a reasonable degree of editing, the book that eventually appeared was pretty much what I’d hoped for. The Comic-Book Book was essentially more of the same [but with all-new articles]. RA: You’ve been writing mystery novels for a number of years, and you started off full-time in the genre with The Comic Book Killer. The lead characters of that series—Lindsey and Plum—have had at least nine books appear in print about their adventures since that first one. What can you tell us about the origin of their first comics-related novel? LUPOFF: My first published novel, One Million Centuries [1965], was a take on the Edgar Rice Burroughs formula of plunging a super-competent, civilized white man into a primitive world where his superior intellect and skills swiftly brought him to a status of

authority. In my novel, a contemporary African-American was plunged into a world where he has to learn such skills as how to fire a bow and arrow. For the next fifteen years, I wrote a lot of science-fiction and a little fantasy. Then, circa 1980 or so, the literary market crashed and all of my outstanding contracts were cancelled. By the time the market showed signs of recovery, I felt that science-fiction had tired of me and I had, in turn, tired of science-fiction. My wife had long urged me to try writing a mystery novel. My agent, Henry Morrison, had the same advice, as did my longtime friend—and librarian—Noreen Shaw. So I decided to scout around for an interesting milieu to use as a background for my mystery story. What could be more suitable than the world of collectibles—and, for my own personal use, collectible comicbooks? I’d done a little work in the insurance world, so, instead of a police detective or a conventional private eye, I made my detective an insurance claims adjuster. And there was my book! RA: What can you tell our readers about your autobiography? LUPOFF: By my “autobiography,” do you mean Where Memories Hide? That’s as close to an autobiography as I’ve written, but a lot of my essays, especially those collected in Writer at Large and Writer (Vols. 1, 2, & 3), are autobiographical in nature. The first significant piece I wrote was “The Big Red Cheese” in 1960. Before that, I’d earned a few dollars as a stringer, covering schoolboy sports for major newspapers, had done some writing for Uncle Sam while in the Army, and placed a few magazine pieces that are long since forgotten. I’ve always mixed fact and fiction. Some of my most successful short stories, “Fourth Avenue Interlude,” “Cairo, Goodbye,” and

Richard A. Lupoff: The Master Of Xero!

“I’d Kill For That Comicbook!” Comic Book Killer (1989) became the first of numerous mystery novels authored by Lupoff. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Bold Venture Press, Audrey Parente, became the latest to urge me to write an autobiography. When I put her off (and how many times had that happened?), she assembled those Writer books, went through them, and cherry-picked the autobiographical essays. She assembled them into a master file and emailed it to me, as if to say, “All right, bozo, here’s your damned autobiography, now do something with it!” I started reading, and as each incident emerged from the hidden corners of my memory, others that had been in hiding clamored for attention. I expanded the manuscript that Audrey had complied, fleshing out bare-bones anecdotes, adding recollections. Some were funny, some were painful. They were pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of eighty years. I scraped together dozens of family photos and sent them to Audrey. Her partner, Rich Harvey, did a spectacular job of designing the book. We compiled a list of potential titles for the book, finally choosing Where Memory Hides: A Writer’s Life. I e-mailed Audrey and asked who had devised that title and she replied, “You did!”

“Heaven God” are more or less thinly disguised autobiographies. Several of my brief memoirs, such as “Not Catching for Bordertown” and “I Coulda Had a Three-Pointer,” have more than a trifle of fiction mixed into them. I’m not sure who first said, “A good story was never hurt by a little tasteful embellishment.” Maybe Ben Franklin or Mark Twain, but whoever it was, I’m with him. In the past few decades, a good many of my overtly nonfiction pieces have made their way into books. The first of these was Writer at Large, edited by Gary Lovisi, and collecting a series of essays from Murderous Intent magazine, edited by Margo Power. This was followed by Writer, Volume 1, 2, and 3, edited by Fender Tucker and Gavin O’Keefe. Still… no sign of an autobiography. In 1994 my brother Jerry died. A couple of months later, my son Ken and Jerry’s son Peter hijacked me to a San Francisco watering hole and laid a trip on me. “You’re now the oldest living Lupoff. You need to write a family history, or once you’re gone everything will be lost.” A challenging notion, but I didn’t feel up to taking it on. Decades passed, and various pieces of family tradition floated into my consciousness. The story of my father’s entertaining a ballroom full of passengers on a sinking steamship with a series of mandolin solos. The story of my grandmother traveling from Austria to the New World, at the age of fifteen, on nine gold dollars. The story of my cousin Aaron, who gave his life fighting fascists in Spain while serving in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The story of my Aunt Marion on strike in the 1930s, fighting mounted strikebreakers armed only with a hat-pin. Once a hidden memory is unearthed, others rise to the surface, one by one. But I wasn’t writing the book. From time to time people would urge me to get on with it, but the bigger the task came to look, the more daunting it became. Then my friend and editor at

Mars Needs Vision ERB authority Richard Lupoff also wrote the hardcover book Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision (Mirage, 1976), just one of his many ERB projects. Cover by Ron Miller. [Art © the respective copyright holders.]

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Another elusive memory. The book has been around for a year or two now, and has been greeted warmly by critics and readers alike. It isn’t exactly an autobiography, but it’s as close as I’ll ever come to writing one. RA: It’s a very entertaining book. After all these years, what are your thoughts on Captain Marvel and family, comicbooks in general, and your place in the field of a cultural historian? LUPOFF: I think—in fact, I know—that Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel, Jr., Mary Marvel, Uncle Marvel, the three Lieutenant Marvels, and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny brought uncounted hours of wondrous entertainment to tens of millions of kids of my generation. The whole Fawcett line of comics filled a huge gap in my imagination with exciting, colorful, joyous stories. Certainly there were others—the Martin Goodman comics (Human Torch, Captain America, Sub-Mariner) and the great DC/AA line-Up (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern)—are worthy to stand beside the Fawcett group. I guess it’s up to each individual’s taste. Maybe it’s just a question of being in the right place at the right time. If my brother hadn’t picked up that copy of Whiz Comics #2 that day in 1940, my life might have been changed. Come to think of it, there should be a story in that.

Where Memory Doesn’t Hide Richard A. Lupoff’s “autobiography” of sorts, Where Memory Hides: A Writer’s Life, was published by Bold Venture Press in 2016, and edited by Audrey Parente. Get your copy today!: boldventurepress.com [Cover art © the respective copyright holders.]

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FCA SPECIAL! Golden Age writer WILLIAM WOOLFOLK interview, and his scripting records! Art by BECK, SCHAFFENBERGER, BORING, BOB KANE, CRANDALL, KRIGSTEIN, ANDRU, JACK COLE, FINE, PETER, HEATH, PLASTINO, MOLDOFF, GRANDENETTI, and more! Plus JOHN BROOME, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and the 2017 STAR WARS PANEL with CHAYKIN, LIPPINCOTT, and THOMAS!

Peter Cannon–Thunderbolt writer/artist PETE MORISI talks about the creative process! Plus, his correspondence with JACK KIRBY, JOE SIMON, AL WILLIAMSON, CHARLES BIRO, JOE GILL, GEORGE TUSKA, ROCKY MASTROSERIO, PAT MASULLI, SAL GENTILE, DICK GIORDANO, and others! Also: JOHN BROOME’s bio, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and BILL SCHELLY!

KIRBY & LEE: STUF’ SAID! The creators of the Marvel Universe’s own words, in chronological order, from fanzine, magazine, radio, and TV interviews, painting a picture of JACK KIRBY and STAN LEE’s relationship—why it succeeded, where it deteriorated, and when it eventually failed. Includes a study of their solo careers after 1970, and recollections from STEVE DITKO, WALLACE WOOD, & JOHN ROMITA SR.

FATHERS & SONS! Odin/Thor, Zeus/ Hercules, Darkseid/Orion, Captain America/ Bucky, and other dysfunctional relationships, unpublished 1994 interview with GIL KANE eulogizing Kirby, tributes from Jack’s creative “sons” in comics (MUMY, PALMIOTTI, QUESADA, VALENTINO, McFARLANE, GAIMAN, & MILLER), MARK EVANIER, 2018 Kirby Tribute Panel, Kirby pencil art gallery, and more!

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(160-page trade paperback) $24.95 (Digital Edition) $11.95 • Ships Dec. 2018

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BACK ISSUE #110

BACK ISSUE #111

BACK ISSUE #112

RETROFAN #1

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION

MAKE MINE MARVEL! ENGLEHART’s “lost” issues of West Coast Avengers, O’NEIL and INFANTINO’s Marvel work, a WAID/ NOCENTI Daredevil Pro2Pro interview, British Bronze Age Marvel fandom, Pizzazz Magazine, Speedball, Marvel Comics Presents, and backstage at Marvel Comicon ’75 and ’76! With DeFALCO, EDELMAN, KAVANAGH, McDONNELL, WOLFMAN, and cover by MILGROM and MACHLAN.

ALTERNATE REALITIES! Cover-featuring the 20th anniversary of ALEX ROSS and JIM KRUEGER’s Marvel Earth X! Plus: What If?, Bronze Age DC Imaginary Stories, Elseworlds, Marvel 2099, and PETER DAVID and GEORGE PÉREZ’s senses-shattering Hulk: Future Imperfect. Featuring TOM DeFALCO, CHUCK DIXON, PETER B. GILLIS, PAT MILLS, ROY THOMAS, and many more! With an Earth X cover by ALEX ROSS.

NUCLEAR ISSUE! Firestorm, Dr. Manhattan, DAVE GIBBONS Marvel UK Hulk interview, villain histories of Radioactive Man and Microwave Man, Radioactive Man and Fallout Boy, and the one-shot Holo-Man! With PAT BRODERICK, GERRY CONWAY, JOE GIELLA, TOM GRINDBERG, RAFAEL KAYANAN, TOM MANDRAKE, BILL MORRISON, JOHN OSTRANDER, STEVE VANCE, and more! PAT BRODERICK cover!

THE CRAZY, COOL CUTURE WE GREW UP WITH! LOU FERRIGNO interview, The Phantom in Hollywood, Filmation’s Star Trek cartoon, “How I Met Lon Chaney, Jr.”, goofy comic Zody the Mod Rob, Mego’s rare Elastic Hulk toy, RetroTravel to Mount Airy, NC (the real-life Mayberry), interview with BETTY LYNN (“Thelma Lou” of The Andy Griffith Show), TOM STEWART’s eclectic House of Collectibles, and Mr. Microphone!

AN ORAL HISTORY OF DC COMICS CIRCA 1978! Marking the 40th anniversary of the “DC Implosion”, one of the most notorious events in comics (which left stacks of completed comic book stories unpublished and spawned Cancelled Comics Cavalcade). Featuring JENETTE KAHN, PAUL LEVITZ, LEN WEIN, MIKE GOLD, and others, plus detailed analysis of how it changed the landscape of comics!

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TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

BRICKJOURNAL #55

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #19 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #20

DRAW #36

LEGO HEADS & TAILS: FELIX JAENSCH’s remarkable LEGO sculptures, from realistic animals to the human skull and amazing face masks! BRYAN BENSON’s detailed Kermorvan Lighthouse and how he built it from LEGO bricks. A spectacular Winter layout by DAVE SCHEFCIK! Plus: Minifigure customizing from JARED K. BURKS, “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd, & more!

Celebrating the greatest fantasy artist of all time, FRANK FRAZETTA! From THUN’DA and EC COMICS to CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA, STEVE RINGGENBERG and CBC’s editor present an historical retrospective, including insights by current creators and associates, and memories of the man himself. PLUS: Frazetta-inspired artists JOE JUSKO, and TOM GRINDBERG, who contributes our Death Dealer cover painting!

NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOES! Interview with JOSEPH MICHAEL LINSNER (CRY FOR DAWN, VAMPIRELLA), a chat with JOE SINNOTT about his Marvel years inking Jack Kirby and work at TREASURE CHEST, JOE JUSKO discusses the Marvel Age of Comics and his fabulous “Corner Box Collection,” plus the artists behind the Topps bubble gum BAZOOKA JOE comic strips, CRAIG YOE, and more!

MIKE HAWTHORNE (Deadpool, Infinity Countdown) interview, YANICK PAQUETTE (Wonder Woman: Earth One, Batman Inc., Swamp Thing) how-to demo, JERRY ORDWAY’s “Ord-Way” of creating comics, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, plus Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY! May contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; for Mature Readers Only.

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#4: Interviews with the Shazam! TV show’s JOHN (Captain Marvel) DAVEY and MICHAEL (Billy Batson) GRAY, the Green Hornet in Hollywood, remembering monster maker RAY HARRYHAUSEN, the way-out Santa Monica Pacific Ocean Amusement Park, a Star Trek Set Tour, SAM J. JONES on the Spirit movie pilot, British scifi TV classic Thunderbirds, Casper & Richie Rich museum, the King Tut fad, and more! SHIPS MARCH 2019!

NEW!

RETROFAN #3 celebrates the 40th ANNIVERSARY of SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE with an exclusive interview with Superman director RICHARD DONNER! Editor MICHAEL EURY voyages to the bottom of IRWIN ALLEN’s sci-fi universe and Retro Travels to Metropolis, IL, home of the Superman Celebration! ANDY MANGELS dives in to Saturday morning’s undersea adventures of AQUAMAN! ERNEST FARINO flips through monster fanzines of the Sixties and Seventies! The Oddball World of SCOTT SHAW! unravels Marvel’s wackiest product ever: Spider-Man and Hulk toilet paper! SCOTT SAAVEDRA adopts a family of SEA-MONKEYS®! Plus FUNNY FACE beverages and collectibles, a fortress of SUPERMAN AND BATMAN MEMORABILIA, and more fun, fab features! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.95 • NOW SHIPPING!

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TwoMorrows. The Future of Pop History.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

#2 NOW SHIPPING! TV horror-hosts ZACHERLEY, VAMPIRA, SEYMOUR, MARVIN, and cover-featured ELVIRA interview! Groovie Goolies! Creepy, kooky sitcoms Bewitched, The Addams Family, and The Munsters! The long-buried Dinosaur Land amusement park! History of Ben Cooper Halloween costumes! Super collection of character lunchboxes! Plus superhero ViewMasters; Sindy, the British Barbie; Mood Rings; and more fun, fab features! Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

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Edited by Back Issue’s MICHAEL EURY!