Alter Ego #157

ALTER EGO #157

Roy Thomas' Wonder-Full Comics Fanzine

ONLY Three YEARS INTO HER CATACLYSMIC CAREER—

GOLDEN AGE WONDER WOMAN SCRIPTER JOYE MURCHISON • BARBARA FRIEDLANDER’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH DC COMICS • FCA • BILL SCHELLY • MR. MONSTER • & MORE!

DC’S AMAZING AMAZON HAD A

FEMALE GHOST WRITER!

$9.95

In the USA

No. 157

SPOTLIGHT ON GOLDEN AGE WONDER WOMAN SCRIPTER

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Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics

JOYE MURCHISON

March 2019

JOYE H

UMMEL

BONUS! BARBARA FRIEDLANDER’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH DC COMICS!

(MURCH

ISON), 1

943

Vol. 3, No. 157 / March 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 Artist H.G. Peter

Cover Colorist Unknown

With Special Thanks to:

Joye Murchison Doug Abramson Kelly Heidi Amash Jack Kelly Pedro Angosto Thomas Kiefer Richard J. Arndt Todd Klein Bob Bailey Lamiek Linedia Benaca Barbara Friedlander Comiclopedia (website) Bloomfield Mark Lewis Jared Bond Art Lortie Dominic Bongo Jim Ludwig Ricky Terry Bruce Brisacque McCorkindale Bill Broomall John McElvee Bernie Bubnis Will Meugniot Mike Burkey Brian K. Morris Nick Caputo Larry & Marilyn John Cimino Niven Shaun Clancy Will Murray Joshua Hansen Jacque Nodell Clark Nate Palant Chet Cox Barry Pearl Brian Cronin Trina Robbins Sean Dulaney Bob Rozakis Mark Evanier Randy Sargent John Fahey Buddy Saunders Shane Foley David Saunders Stephan Friedt Jean-Paul Gabilliet David Shay David Siegel Janet Gilbert Anthony Snyder Great Comics Robin Snyder Database Dr. Elizabeth Bruce Guthrie Sudduth George Hagenauer Jeff Taylor Heritage Tenth Letter of Auctions, Inc. the Alphabet Roger Hill (website) Alex Jay Dann Thomas Alex Johnson Gary Watson Comic Douglas Jones Book Collection (“Gaff”) Rick Weingroff Jim Kealy Mike Zeck

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

James Galton, Herb Rogoff, Harlan Ellison, & Tom Wolfe

Contents Writer/Editorial: Wonder Of Wonders! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The First Amazon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Richard Arndt interviews 1944-48 “Wonder Woman” ghost writer Joye Murchison Kelly!

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics . . . . . . . . 35 Silver Age romance from Young Love to Heart Throb to Swing with Scooter.

Of Crows And The Cosmos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Part VIII of Golden/Silver Age star scripter John Broome’s 1998 memoir.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Bruce McCorkindale’s Mighty Marvel Mashup! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Michael T. Gilbert shows how Marvel splash pages might’ve become Marvel covers!

Comic Fandom Archive: The Fan P.O.V. Of The Marvel Super-Heroes—In 1963! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Bill Schelly and Nick Caputo with some surprising vintage fan-opinions of early Marvel.

re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . . 72 Tributes: James Galton, Herb Rogoff, Harlan Ellison, & Tom Wolfe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #216 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 P.C. Hamerlinck hosts Will Murray on Henry “Lynn” Perkins—“The Stan Lee of ’43!”

On Our Cover: What artist’s work could we possibly have chosen to grace this issue’s cover but that of the legendary H.G. Peter, who drew (or at least penciled, with inking help from quasi-anonymous assistants) virtually every “Wonder Woman” story from 1941 through 1958, and every WW and Sensation Comics cover through the latter 1940s? For one of the reasons Ye Editor selected the first splash page from Wonder Woman #15 (Winter 1945), see p. 18. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. And thanks to Joye Murchison Kelly for the photo of her 1943 Joye Hummel self that appears up front. [Artwork TM & © DC Comics.]

Above: Okay, so call it Personal Preference Month here at Alter Ego! Roy T. has always had a weakness for the cover of Wonder Woman #18 (July-Aug. 1946), which showed the Amazon lassoing a medieval knight in full armor. But the Joye Hummel-scripted, H.G. Peter-drawn lead-off splash page from that issue works even better here, since it depicts Diana battling menaces from various ages—as of course she did in her classic comicbook stories. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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.

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writer/editorial

Wonder of Wonders!

W

onder Woman holds a very special spot in the history of comicbook super-heroes.

No, she wasn’t the first super-heroine in the medium (“The Woman in Red,” “Invisible Scarlet O’Neil,” “Amazona the Mighty Woman,” and one or two other obscure characters all beat her out for that honor)—but she was probably the best, and by far the most successful. From late 1941 through the present, there’s never been a time when her adventures weren’t pouring forth from DC Comics or its one-time junior partner All-American Comics.

And, for some years now, since Elizabeth Marston, the widow of Wonder Woman co-creator Dr. William Moulton Marston, first put my friend (and Alter Ego’s founder) Dr. Jerry Bails into contact with her, we’ve known that a young lady nee Joye Hummel and latterly known as Joye Murchison wrote a number of the Amazon’s adventures published between 1944 and 1949… including a few truly classic “Wonder Woman” tales, like “Villainy, Incorporated!”

Last year, A/E interviewer Richard Arndt and I ran across an interview with Joye—now Joye Murchison Kelly—in a Florida Sunday supplement, and soon, Richard had recorded their phone conversations for this issue. Not long afterward, the San Diego Comic-Con also happened across Joye, and she became a major guest at its 2018 edition—even wound up sharing last year’s Bill Finger Award (given to writers who received too little credit back in their heyday) with 1940s DC story editor Dorothy Roubicek.

Happily, Mark Evanier arranged for the excellent panel he and Trina Robbins conducted with Joye to be transcribed so that excerpts from it could be included in this issue.

Around the same time, Richard interviewed Barbara Friedlander Bloomfield, who in the ’60s and early ’70s had been associate editor (and sometime editor) of DC’s line of romance

comics, as well as a co-creator of the teen title Swing with Scooter. So we’ve got both the Golden and Silver Ages covered in this issue— and that’s just the way we like it!

Just one thing I have to say before we move on, though.

I can’t deny that, over the past couple of years, I’ve been both personally and professionally bugged by the lack of credit given to Harry (H.G.) Peter as what I feel he most definitely is: the co-creator of Wonder Woman. I mean, the guy drew all but a bare handful of “WW” stories between 1941 and 1958—and it’s clear that he designed, under Dr. Marston, the Amazon’s star-spangled, eaglebreasted costume.

And yet, on the three films to date in which she’s been ably portrayed by Gal Gadot, all credit for the heroine’s creation go to Dr. Marston. Worse: At the end of the otherwise excellent 2017 Wonder Woman movie, any number of comicbook artists and writers—including the second regular penciler, Ross Andru; Marston’s writing successor Robert Kanigher; later artists such as George Pérez, et al.—are all listed as contributing to the mythos… but nary a mention of H.G. Peter.

I hold that not since the way-too-long denial of credit to writer Bill Finger as co-creator of Batman has such an injustice been dealt to an important comics creator… and it would be good to see DC, Warner, and/or whoever remedy this unfairness.

Harry G. Peter has been dead for 60 years as of last annum.

Isn’t it about time he had justice? After all, Wonder Woman was a member of both the Justice Society and Justice League of America!

Bestest,

158

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COMING IN APRIL

Golden Age Writing Great

WILLIAM WOOLFOLK

& The 2017 STAR WARS COMICS

40-YEAR REUNION PANEL!

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• Special FCA coverage of WILLIAM WOOLFOLK, often called the “Shakespeare of the [Golden Age] Comics” for his scripting for Fawcett, DC, Marvel, etc.! Featuring his own writing records—a RICHARD ARNDT interview with daughter DONNA CROSS—and a 2002 San Diego Comic-Con panel showcasing WOOLFOLK, NOVICK, LUBBERS, CARDY, OKSNER, [LEW SAYRE] SCHWARTZ, & EVANIER! Art by the likes of BECK, SCHAFFENBERGER, KANE, CRANDALL, COLE, FINE, LEAV, SIKELA, MOLDOFF, RABOY, THOMPSON, et al.!

• Together again for the first time since San Diego, 1976! Artist HOWARD CHAYKIN, George Lucas’ media projects director CHARLES LIPPINCOTT, & writer/editor ROY THOMAS hold forth on a 2017 panel about their 1976-77 STAR WARS comicbook work for Marvel! Find out what didn’t make it into Alter Ego #145!

• Plus: JOHN BROOME—MICHAEL T. GILBERT with more on PETE MORISI—BILL SCHELLY’s “Comic Fandom Archive”—& MORE!!

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The First Amazon

JOYE HUMMEL MURCHISON KELLY— Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer Interview Conducted & Transcribed

by Richard J. Arndt

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Joye Hummel in the early 1940s. Photo courtesy of Joye Murchison Kelly.

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NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Joye Hummel was born April 4, 1924. She started working with Dr. William Moulton Marston in 1944, after she graduated from the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City, where she had taken a psychology class from him. “Wonder Woman” was appearing in four comics at that time, in three of which Marston wrote nearly all the stories (Gardner Fox wrote Wonder Woman’s first appearance in a “Justice Society” tale in All-Star Comics, and the dialogue she exchanged with her fellow JSAers in various group chapters). Being also in the early stages of launching the Wonder Woman comic strip, Marston needed a second writer who was not only talented and reliable but could follow and believe in the underlying philosophy that formed the foundation for the heroine’s character and mythos.

Joye Hummel was the answer to his prayers, and she was soon working at what was essentially Marston’s self-contained studio offices in New York City, where he and artist Harry G. Peter took the Wonder Woman comic, as well as the Amazon’s stories that appeared in Sensation Comics and Comic Cavalcade, from script to ready-forcoloring art pages, overseen by All-American Comics’ lead editor, Sheldon Mayer. Between 1944 and 1947, Hummel wrote at least 74 “Wonder Woman” stories, split between the three comics, none of which appeared with her name on them. Most of those stories were solo efforts, though some may have been co-written with Marston.

Joye Murchison Kelly with a Wonder Woman cosplayer at the 2018 San Diego Comic-Con. Joye was thrilled to be reminded of the impact the Amazon has had on readers down the decades.

Photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie.

Wonder Woman #12 (Spring 1945) contains one of the earliest published comics stories written by young Joye Hummel, under the direction of Dr. William Moulton Marston. Read more about its Venusian subject matter on pp. 21-22. This book-lengther, scripted in 1944, went on sale at the turn of ’45, before her first “Wonder Woman” entries in Sensation Comics (#41, May 1945) and Comic Cavalcade #11 (Summer ’45). Art

by H.G. Peter. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

When Marston fell ill only a few months after her hiring, she found herself responsible for writing her own scripts, typing up both Marston’s and hers, as well as conducting the lengthy travels from her home on Long Island to New York City and the offices there, and then on to Rye, New York, where Marston was confined to his home. When Marston died in 1947, she became the lead writer of “Wonder Woman” and was expected to continue on the book, but very soon decided for reasons of her own (which are described in the interview) to leave the book following her marriage to David Murchison. Robert Kanigher took over the editing and writing of the “Wonder Woman” stories, greatly changing the way the character was perceived and behaved.

Shortly after this interview took place, an effort was mounted to bring Joye (now Joye Kelly) as a Guest of Honor to the 2018 San Diego Comic-Con. She did attend and was awarded the Bill Finger Award for overlooked excellence in comicbook writing. Joye is the first woman writer to receive that honor. (The “posthumous” half of that award went to the late Dorothy Woolfolk—who was Mayer’s assistant editor during part of the 1940s.) Long out of touch with the world of comics, this is Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly’s first interview to appear in a comics-history magazine, and was conducted on April 2 & 9, 2018. Although our cover refers to her as “Joye Murchison” because that’s how she’s identified in the Grand Comics Database, et al., we’ve used her current last name “Kelly” in the headings for her comments below....

RICHARD ARNDT: Today we’re welcoming Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly, the first female writer of “Wonder Woman.” Thank you for agreeing to this interview!

JOYE HUMMEL MURCHISON KELLY: You’re welcome!

RA: What can you tell us about your early life? Where you were born, where you got your education, anything about your family you’d care to share, that sort of thing.

KELLY: I don’t like talking too much about personal matters. I believe a private life should be private. Professional things I have no trouble talking about, but I’d rather not discuss family matters.

As I often say, “That’s personal.”

I was born on Long Island. The town there was a slow, little place. Everything was slow back then, as compared to now. [laughs] My parents were divorced. I don’t really know the reason why, but I went to a number of different grade schools and high schools when I was a child and young teenager. I regarded that as somewhat of an opportunity.

RA: Were you, or rather your parents, moving around a lot, or was there some other reason for all the different schools?

KELLY: I wasn’t really paying all that much attention, or perhaps I just don’t remember. Part of that is that I just turned 94, and some of what you’re asking me about occurred when I was a child. I guess I was kind of an adaptable person. Imagination was something that was always present for me. All that moving around may have helped me in cultivating that imagination. I was a good storyteller. I was also a very good student. Following my high school graduation from Freeport High, there was a year spent attending Middlebury College in Vermont. Then my parents divorced and I didn’t want to leave my

Now, Voyageur (Left:) Joye in a photo from the Voyageur, the Freemont High School yearbook for 1941, the year she graduated. Thanks to the Tenth Letter of the Alphabet website, via Richard Arndt.

(Right:) Title page from the 1924 edition of the Katharine Gibbs School handbook.

mother alone. So I transferred to the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City.

RA: Was that a college, or a technical school, or an undergraduate school?

KELLY: It was a school that offered a two-year college education.

A certification [diploma] from the Katharine Gibbs School would open almost any door in the business world for an interview. It had two other branches—one in Providence and one in Boston. I spent a year at Middlebury and two years at Katharine Gibbs. You had to have really good grades in high school to attend either one of those schools.

It was in my second year that I found myself taking a psychology class with Dr. [William Moulton] Marston. He was a brilliant teacher. I inhaled his class. Mind you, while taking the course I never had a personal conversation with him. Never even shook his hand or told him that I really liked his course. We didn’t go in for

Dr. William Moulton Marston (Left:) Probably around the time the “Wonder Woman” feature was first being developed, the well-known psychologist (seen wearing a lightcolored suit jacket) administered what was billed for publicity purposes as a “Jekyll and Hyde lie detector test.” He measured young women’s blood pressure while they watched footage from the then-new film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), starring Spencer Tracy. Posted by John McElvee; forwarded by Sean Dulaney.

(Above:) Dr. Marston in the mid-1940s.

The First Amazon

5

SIDEBAR #1:

THERE’S JOYE IN SAN DIEGO…!

A/E EDITOR’S INTRO: Not long after Richard Arndt conducted his telephone interview with Joye Murchison Kelly, we learned that the San Diego Comic-Con planned to invite her to be a special guest in mid-July 2018. Frequent panel-moderator (and TV and comics writer) Mark Evanier would handle her panel, in tandem with author and cartoonist Trina Robbins. Mark generously arranged for us to receive a recording of the panel so we could excerpt it in Alter Ego. It’s a fine conversation, which would’ve made a great lead piece for this issue if we didn’t already have one in hand. Over the course of Richard’s interview, we’ll be interspersing several sidebars such as this one to highlight exchanges on the panel. Mark (with Trina unavoidably delayed at another panel) opened the conversation before a packed room of several hundred people…

MARK EVANIER: I have been looking forward to this panel for months.

Every Comic-Con, there seems to be one moment that I really, really take home with me and I love, and there’s been a couple here, and they’ve all involved this person. Last night at the Eisner Awards, the professional community stood up and cheered for this lady when we presented her with the Bill Finger Award. [applause] Save it for one big burst, okay? And, this morning, we had her at the Quick Draw game and 2700 people leaped to their feet and cheered for her, and it took up about eight minutes of the game because they were just clapping all the time, and things like that, and we love that, too. One of the things that happens at this convention for years is that we honor people who never in the world, when they did their most famous work, thought it would endure, and thought they would— [to Joye Murchison Kelly] You never thought that you would be in front of a room of people clapping because of that work you did. You never dreamed of that.

JOYE MURCHISON KELLY: Absolutely not. I’m thrilled.

ME: So these people gave us wonderful work and characters we love, and characters that the industry was built upon, and that future stories were built upon. And this is one of the ways we pay people back…. We fly them out here and put them up in a good hotel, and show our appreciation for them. I thought we were done doing that, because we had run out of people who did comics in those eras. We just ran out. There was just nobody else we could do this to. And then we found this woman, and what a perfect that sort of thing much in those days.

RA: Was it a large class?

KELLY: I’d say it was a fairly large class. Their goal at Katharine Gibbs was to make you as perfect as you could be in any course that they wanted to teach—whether it was a business course or academic or anything in between.

At that point in time, because of the conditions at home, I was aiming to obtain an education that would allow me to go out, get a job and make money. Very pragmatic. My mother was single at the time and I was very young. I did some research and discovered that the Katharine Gibbs School would, in two years, give me opportunities to do many different jobs in various fields. I looked at what other students had become after graduating and realized that there were a number of opportunities for women that weren’t so available elsewhere. I didn’t know it was going to lead me directly into comicbook writing, but the Gibbs school had a very good track record for women finding jobs after completing the year or two-year courses. That was what gave me the desire to go there.

A Panel About Panels (Left to right:) Trina Robbins, Joye Murchison Kelly, Mark Evanier.

Thanks to Mark Evanier.

person to give the Bill Finger Award to. Ladies and gentleman, thank and welcome Miss Joye Murchison Kelly. [applause, cheers] KELLY: Thank you. Thank you very much.

ME: Are you getting tired of people clapping for you here?

KELLY: Never. [laughter] ME: [after a couple of introductory questions] What city did you grow up in?

KELLY: Freeport, Long Island.

ME: What did you want to do with your life? Did you have a career goal?

KELLY: Actually, I wanted to be an actress. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: At this point, Joye relates how she felt a need to get a job as soon as possible, which led her to the Katharine Gibbs School. One day while there, she was giving a report on a book she had read—dealing with the then-ongoing Japanese invasion of China, quite likely one by Pearl S. Buck—and when she saw how enrapt the other students were, she thought to herself, “Well, this is a form of acting.”]

[A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Further sidebars featuring segments of the Joye Murchison Kelly panel at the July 2018 San Diego Comic-Con will appear at intervals throughout the A/E interview….]

You couldn’t be late for classes. It didn’t matter if the Long Island Railroad broke down. You were not to be late for class. You had to dress to go to school, too. Hat, gloves, skirt. Not like today.

You dressed up for work and you trained for that by dressing up for school. [laughs] RA: Am I right in assuming that your maiden name was Hummel?

KELLY: Yes, that’s correct. I was Joye Hummel when I wrote most of those “Wonder Woman” stories. I use Murchison Kelly because I was married to David Murchison for many years and am currently married to Jack Kelly. I’ve been very lucky. Two great men in one life.

RA: How did Dr. Marston end up offering you a job?

KELLY: That was the surprise of my life. As I told you, I took the psychology class that Dr. Marston taught. It wasn’t by choice. It was a required second-year course that you had to take. I thought he was a remarkable teacher. The way he explained his philosophy, how to get along with people, how to treat people on an everyday

6

Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

One Singular Sensation…

(Left:) An action page scripted by Joye Hummel for Sensation Comics #41 (May 1945), apparently the first issue of that DC title in which her work appeared. Art by H.G. Peter. The Wonder Woman Archives, Vol. 6, attributes the writing of “The Octopus Plants” to Robert Kanigher; that’s probably an error, although RK did scribe a few “WW” tales during this early era, probably beginning with Sensation #42. Art by H.G. Peter. Scan courtesy of Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

(Right:) Probably the first public mention of Hummel as a writer of Golden Age “Wonder Woman” stories occurred in a 1972 issue of G.B. Love’s adzine RBCC #88. Columnist Howard P. Siegel reported that, in October of the preceding year, Dr. Jerry Bails, “the father of comics fandom,” while preparing the first volume of the original print edition of The Who’s Who of American Comic Books, had received a letter from “Mrs. David W. Murchison of Hollywood, Fla.” acknowledging that role.

Bails was probably given Joye’s then-name and contact info

by Mrs. Elizabeth Marston, the author’s widow, with whom he was in contact. The 3rd through the 5th paragraphs of Siegel’s article are composed of quotes from Joye’s letter, albeit partly minus sufficient quotation marks. Scan courtesy of Richard Arndt. [© the respective copyright holders.]

basis, all of that was very practical. It wasn’t just theory but a way to deal with people on a practical level. To my thinking, it was wise. His philosophy has helped me through life. It absolutely has.

I’ve been quite a happy person for most of my life. I’ve had my ups and downs but I’ve always gotten through them. The information and philosophy that I got in that class got me through a lot of situations in a positive way. My thinking, even to this day, is very positive.

What got me the job with Dr. Marston was that he gave a final exam for his class. [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Smithsonian Institution records indicate this test was administered on Jan. 25, 1944.]

It wasn’t an exam that you took sitting down in a classroom but

one that you could take home. They weren’t yes/no answers but composition answers. I actually have a copy of that exam, but not the one that has my answers. [chuckles] The answers that you were expected to give weren’t answers that you could look up or memorize but instead were answers that were supposed to reflect your understanding of the course, of how to deal with people. The questions posed various situations, and you responded as to how you would deal with those situations. I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote in the space provided. I wrote up and down the sides of the paper. [laughs] The person who was correcting the exam told Dr. Marston that [Marston] he needed to take my exam and read it. After he read it, he asked the dean from Katharine Gibbs if, when I graduated, he had permission to call me, because he wanted to interview me. That’s how I got my chance to work with him.

He sent me a letter and then called me. [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Smithsonian Institution records indicate that Marston sent Joye Hummel a letter on March 3, 1944, which, presumably, is the letter she mentions.] He invited me to the Harvard Club in New York. You could imagine how surprised I was.

RA: He was a graduate of Harvard, correct?

KELLY: Yes. Both he and his wife, Mrs. Marston—Keetsie, I called her... Well, I called her that after I knew her. When I first met her it was “Mrs. Marston.” [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: For the record, Joye wrote the story “Who’ll Adopt Teasy?” for Wonder Woman #25 [continued on p. 9]

The First Amazon

7

Sidebar #2:

[From San Diego Comic-Con Panel, July 2018, continued] TRINA ROBBINS: You had talked, Joye, about Marston’s philosophy… and that you agreed with it. That you guys really got along because you felt the same way. Can you just elaborate a little on his philosophy?

strong man, a nice-looking man.

JOYE MURCHISON KELLY: Well, what I agreed with was the philosophy of the best way to be able to get along with people, whether you’re in business, or you’re married, or you’re together in any way that you want to be together, because men and women are not the same, thank God…. [laughter] In a nutshell… here is a very, very bad way to be able to relate to a human being, one human being to another. The very bad way is to use dominance and compliance, because if you dominate somebody, there is no love in it. To dominate somebody is to make them go along with how you feel. But you’re using a threat, a physical threat, [even if it’s] something that isn’t physical, just a mental threat, and you comply because you’re afraid….

Now, the other kind is inducement and submission.

Inducement means that you have a reason behind what you’re asking to do with the other person.

You are not forcing yourself on the person. I’m not talking about seducement. I’m talking about inducement. You relate to the other person, and they want to do what you’re asking them to do, and therefore [they] submit to it. There’s no violence in that. It’s not any kind of violence. One side is inducing; the other side is submitting. If you use those kinds of actions, there would never be a war, because war is always contrary to the big leaders in [unintelligible]...

KELLY: And he was a very good speaker. When I started to work with him, I went with him to lectures and he would ask me, “How did I do?” And I found this problem with a lot of us when we’re older: we talk too long. [laughter]

ME: And he was a good speaker.

[A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Further Kelly/San Diego sidebars will appear amid later pages of the Arndt interview.]

MARK EVANIER: Now, when you took his class, did you know going in that this guy wrote “Wonder Woman”? Was that part of the syllabus?....

KELLY: He never talked about Wonder Woman.

I never knew about Wonder Woman, and I never heard him talk about Wonder Woman. His class was to make the students understand how to relate properly in business, which also goes into your way of acting anytime. Except there’s one big difference in business. Although you don’t have to dominate somebody, business does not entail love. Business is an inanimate thing. It’s not a person with a heart, and everything used to work in business, like the computers and all, they certainly don’t have a heart.

So, in business, you have to use a different type of working together. He never came out and really explained the things that I’ve explained to you already, but he made a point that in business, it’s your education, your training, and your ability to have a good work attitude. And it was more like, do your best— Like, when you’re going to school, study and do your best, and then you progress doing that. Don’t try to get ahead in other ways.

ME: Now… the people that wrote about him said he was always doing lots of different projects.

KELLY: Yes, his mind, his brain was so active. He was never satisfied unless he had a lecture to give, a story to write. In between he played tennis. He was a very

Enough Rope Even Wonder Woman had to resort to the “physical” from time to time—as per this page

by Joye Hummel (writer) and H.G. Peter (artist) from Sensation Comics #55 (July 1946).

Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

8

Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

Cheetahs Never Win! (Above & top right:) Splash and 6th page from Hummel’s first foray into Wonder Woman’s third magazine, Comic Cavalcade, an extra-length 15-center in which the Amazon shared cover billing with The Flash and Green Lantern—but, as the most popular of the trio, her exploits always occupied the opening spot. In CC #11 (Summer 1945) the heroine battled recurring foe The Cheetah. Art by H.G. Peter, aided by, one presumes, the “two women who worked under him.” Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Wonder Women (Above:) A backyard gathering of Dr. Marston’s female brain trust at the Marston home in Rye, NY, in the summer of 1944, not long before the August onset of the psychologist’s disabling illness. (L. to r.:) Olive Byrne, Joye Hummel, Elizabeth & Dr. Marston. More about each of these personages will be found in Mrs. Kelly’s interview. Thanks to the online Lambiek Comiclopedia, found by Richard Arndt.

(Right:) Elizabeth Marston’s nickname “Keetsie” may have been the source of the name “Teasy” in a story Joye Hummel wrote in Wonder Woman #25 (Sept.-Oct. 1947)—although the fictional character was a red-headed boy.

Art by H.G. Peter. Courtesy of the Gary Watson Comic Book Collection, Irvin Dept. of Rare Books and Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries, Columbia, SC—with special thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Sudduth and David Shay.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

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[continued from p. 6] (Sept.-Oct. 1947), which might tie in with Mrs. Marston’s nickname.

In addition, Dr. Marston wrote several “Wonder Woman” stories that featured characters with his children’s names or featured names that were very similar to theirs.] So he interviewed me at the Harvard Club.

After the interview he told me that he would like to try me in regards to working for him. He told me that I seemed to have understood his philosophy and how to treat people. He had been trying to find somebody who understood his philosophy and could both write adventure stories and keep that philosophy active in “Wonder Woman.” He really wanted Wonder Woman to be a positive role model for the young female readers of the comic. I wasn’t even aware that he wrote “Wonder Woman” at the time. I didn’t read comics. He didn’t sign his name to it, either. He used a pen-name—“Charles Moulton.” I can tell you why he used that name, if you’re interested.

RA: Yes, please do.

KELLY: Charles stands for the publisher’s name, Charles Gaines.

RA: Oh, yes. M.C. Gaines, the publisher of All-American Comics.

KELLY: Yes, and Moulton was Dr. Marston’s middle name, so “Charles Moulton.” Gaines put up the money to publish “Wonder Woman.” Gaines had been a school principal, I think in New Jersey, and he produced adaptations of history and the Bible, as well as super-hero comics. He wanted children to have an opportunity to learn from comics as well as be entertained. He thought if he put educational things in a comic story, then the children would read that and perhaps follow up on that information. A lot of children retain for all their lives things that interested them as children. I see that even today, at 90-plus years old. People my age remember things they read in comics. Lots of children, particularly girls, of course, read “Wonder Woman” and those stories influenced them.

I’m really amazed at that.

RA: The very first thing I remember actually reading was a comicbook.

KELLY: Right! And that’s not unusual. That’s why comics, particularly the comics that Dr. Marston and I wrote, have a big responsibility. Dr. Marston always said, “What you read, what you watch, what you listen to, has an influence on you. You may not realize it, but it’s going to have an influence.” It’s a great responsibility to publish something. You should know who your readers are, who your audience is, and beware. You have to be aware that you’re responsible for what you’re putting into their minds.

Everything that you write is either advertising or can be used for advertising. That’s why advertisers put their ads in comics or TV or radio to begin with. They’re trying to sell you something.

Dr. Marston didn’t want Wonder Woman to be just a female version of one of the male super-heroes. He wanted her to be an alluring, wise, and loving woman who could stand up to evil while promoting goodness. He liked the word “alluring.” He didn’t mean it as just physically beautiful but to describe a woman with many good attributes.

RA: After he hired you—there’s a mention here that you were his assistant. Was that your actual job title, or were you writing for him from the get-go?

KELLY: He wanted me writing as soon as possible. Before he hired me, he’d only been able to have men writers, many of whom didn’t have his background or really understand his philosophy. The

Give Till It Helps!

Dr. Marston, Joye notes, believed that with great super-powers (and comics sales) came great responsibility. Here, Wonder Woman makes a plea for the March of Dimes, the organization formed to battle infantile paralysis (a.k.a. polio)—in honor of the birthday of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a victim of the disease. Art by H.G. Peter. This public service announcement appeared, among other places, in All-American Comics #64 (March 1944)—ironically, only a few months before Dr. Marston himself was suddenly stricken with polio. [TM & © DC Comics.]

women in his family, all very talented women, including his wife, could write, but evidently what they didn’t have was this huge imagination. The ability to write adventure stories. Dr. Marston was brilliant. He understood the classics. He did the layout work for the first lie detector. He had a far-ranging brain, and one of the things he could also do was create an adventure that children understood and liked.

It sounds like bragging, but he thought that I was the most brilliant student he’d ever had, anywhere, in any college. Why he decided that, I don’t know, but I was able to get that kind of psychology into my stories that reflected his philosophy and beliefs. We both had this huge imagination. We would laugh about the things we would think about when writing the stories. The different heroes and heroines we came up with. All of that. It was such a fascinating job. You might think it was just comics, but he was such a brilliant man and I watched him, saw how much he wanted to do, to teach, to influence his young readers. He wanted to help them make the right decisions in their lives.

He wanted women to get out there. He felt that women had enormous possibilities inside them. A real ability to project their strong, positive qualities that would help them to realize how

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

The Wandering Amazon Stories written for Golden Age comicbooks didn’t always wind up in the precise issues—or even magazines—for which they’d been commissioned. The “1A” and “WW 31 A” markings on this H.G. Peter splash page for a Hummel-scribed story indicate it was originally meant to be the lead-off story in Wonder Woman #31.

It actually led off Sensation Comics #79 (July 1948). Art by H.G. Peter. Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

name of Olive Byrne, one of Marston’s chief assistants.] Sanger was a hero of the suffragette movement and one of the bravest women alive. I was born in 1924, and it was only in 1923 that women nationwide got the right to vote. [laughs] That speaks for itself.

RA: Am I correct in assuming that Dr. Marston had his own studio? That “Wonder Woman” was produced pretty much in his studio from script to finished art and only then delivered to All-American or DC/National Comics?

KELLY: He had several offices on Madison Avenue—the building at 43rd and Madison. He had a large office and then several separate offices. Harry Peter did all of his artwork in one area. His was a larger area. The business aspect was done in another area. Different things were done in different areas.

I was given my own office, once Dr. Marston realized that I could write “Wonder Woman,” across the hall from the art office. I had my name on the door, which was quite a thrill for a 20-year-old woman.

That really got to me. [laughs] However, I didn’t use it that much after Professor Marston got ill.

RA: Did you co-write stories with Dr. Marston before you wrote your own first solo story?

KELLY: We talked about stories a lot together. However, I was only with him for a matter of months when, so unexpectedly, he was important they were. How important it was for them to reflect the right things, the strong things that would influence future generations, both men and women, but particularly women.

He wanted them to consider jobs that no woman had ever had and feel they’d be right for that job.

If they thought they could do it, then go for it!

RA: He was several decades ahead of his time in that regard, particularly with men. I do know that quite a few members of his family, particularly the women, were involved with the suffragette movement early on.

KELLY: I’m not really aware of any of that. I don’t get into his private life.

RA: I’m not sure if that would be considered “private life”—just a possible influence on why and what he was thinking about in the creation of Wonder Woman.

KELLY: Margaret Sanger was Olive B. Richard’s aunt. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: “Olive B. Richard” was the official married

“You’re Sensation-al!”

The lead stories from Sensation Comics #52 & #53 (April & May 1946, respectively) are listed in the hardcover Wonder Woman Archives, Vol. 7, as having been scripted by William Moulton Marston… though Mrs. Kelly has listed them as episodes she herself wrote. Of course, she’s also said that the two of them “talked about stories a lot together.” Art

by H.G. Peter. Thanks to Jim Kealy—and to Cole Porter, whose Sinatra-sung song title from the 1956 film musical High Society was appropriated for the heading above. [TM & © DC Comics.]

The First Amazon

You’re A Wonder, Girl!

In “The Secret of the Limestone Caves” in Wonder Woman #30 (July-Aug. 1948), whose splash page can be viewed on p. 29, Joye utilized a young girl named Olive Norton (no doubt named after Olive Byrne, Dr. Marston’s primary assistant and a member of the Marston household), who had first appeared in a Marston-scripted story in Sensation Comics #58 (Oct. 1946). In WW #30, Olive has become a bully because, Wonder Woman says, “We taught [her] to be as strong as an Amazon but neglected to train her in self-control and submission to loving authority”—so Olive is enrolled in “the Athena School” to correct that omission. This tale introduced the concept of a pre-adolescent Diana as the prototype for the later “Wonder Girl,” seen in Queen Hippolyte’s Magic Sphere—and her example inspires Olive to mend her ways. Art by H.G. Peter. Thanks to Joshua Hansen Clark, Jim Ludwig, and Chet Cox for the scans, and to the Great Comics Database for the cross-reference info. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Wonder Woman Strips!

One reason Dr. Marston welcomed Joye Hummel’s help on comicbook scripts may have been because he and DC were about to launch a Wonder Woman daily comic strip, which he would write. Seen above and at right are a newspaper promotional ad, and an additional plug that accompanied a Marston article in a 1943 issue of The American Scholar. Art by H.G. Peter. The entire 1944-45 run of the strip was reprinted in hardcover by IDW in 2014. Thanks to Art Lortie. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

don’t remember the name, but it was the most prominent one at the time. When I heard the news I went right to the hospital. He was diagnosed with polio—technically poliomyelitis—which had given him infantile paralysis. They had no idea why or how he’d gotten it. He had a family and no one else got it. He was in his early 50s, and generally that would be considered far too old to get those symptoms but he got it.

I didn’t get it, but I never told my mother what he had. I told her the reason he had to go to the hospital was that he had very severe arthritis. That was believable to her, because Charles Gaines was stricken with such bad arthritis that he was nearly crippled as well. It made sense to my mother that Dr. Marston, who was close in age to Charles Gaines, might be afflicted with the same health problems. If I’d told her he had polio, which usually struck children and people my own age, she would not ever have allowed me to go back to work for him. I was an only child. There is simply no way she would have allowed me to continue working with him a single hour if she’d known the truth. In 1944, no one really understood how polio was contacted or spread.

He was a big man. He was six foot plus and built like a football player. They had rings installed over his hospital bed that he would pull on and get to his feet so he could try to relearn how to walk. He’d yank on those rings so hard he’d nearly pull them from the ceiling. It didn’t help, however. He never walked again.

He continued to work at his home, trying to relearn how to walk, but it just didn’t happen.

We had to do so much talking to calm him down. He couldn’t believe that he would never walk again. He was very athletic. He liked tennis. Sports in general. He was a well-rounded person.

Hail, Hail, The Gangsters Are All Here!

In this Marston-scripted tale from Sensation Comics #36 (Dec. 1944), a forgotten actor driven insane by obscurity forced other thespians to portray some of Wonder Woman’s most infamous foes in order to humiliate her. The Cheetah, Duke Deception, Dr. Psycho, and Giganta had all been scriptually created by Dr. Marston, though Joye and others would later utilize them in stories. The actor’s name? Bedwin Footh. In the spirit of the times, Marston was anything but subtle about naming his characters, and Joye and others naturally followed his lead. Art by H.G. Peter. Reproduced from Wonder Woman Archives, Vol. 5. [TM & © DC Comics.]

stricken with infantile paralysis. I went to work for him in the spring of 1944 and he was stricken in August. The illness came completely out of the blue.

He gave a lot of lectures on psychology and things that pertained to that. He didn’t give lectures on Wonder Woman, though—nothing like that. His lectures were quite popular. I often went with him to the lectures. We’d have lunch and discuss all kinds of things. Working with him was like taking advanced college classes. He often gave me things to study. I did a lot of research on the brain.

RA: Did you accompany him on the trip where he became ill?

KELLY: No, he was on a train. I’d seen him to the station and put him on the train to go to Harvard. He had a big meeting there.

While he was on the train, he went to get up and he couldn’t walk.

There was no warning whatsoever! Absolutely no warning!

RA: That must have been terrifying.

KELLY: It was terrible! They had to get a crane to lift him and he was taken to the most prominent hospital in New York City—I

Once he got out of the hospital, he would never go back to New York. He wouldn’t let anyone see him crippled.

RA: So he stayed at home in Rye, New York, and you worked out of the main offices?

KELLY: I worked in both places—at the office and at his home in Rye. I had to go up to Rye to see him, get his scripts, which were hand-written and then I would type them up. They had a parlor and I met with him there. He was in a wheelchair. Still, we made the best of it. We had great story ideas. I guess you could say our minds went out of this world. [laughs] We made use of anything you could think of and we could think of a lot of them. I’d come to Rye with my ideas, as well as stories I wanted to write, and he’d tell me his ideas and stories.

He’d tell me his new characters and I did the same. I’d go to the New York Public Library and study up on things like leprechauns for a story that involved them. Sometimes I felt people would think it strange that a young woman my age would be studying leprechauns, but I enjoyed it! [laughs] [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: This research would probably be for the story “Shamrock Land” from Wonder Woman #14 (Fall 1945).]

Atoms! For some reason something I saw somewhere in a newspaper got me interested in atoms. It fascinated me. So I went to the library and got all kinds of information on it and wrote a “Wonder Woman” story that involved atoms. We ended up being investigated by the powers that be and the government. They wanted to know why we were writing stories about atoms. I told them I thought they were very interesting. [laughs] I had no idea at the time why the government was interested in me writing a “Wonder Woman” story about atoms, but not long afterwards came the announcement that we’d developed an atomic bomb! [continued on p. 16]

The First Amazon

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Up ’n Atom!

The Hummel-scripted story that got delayed for a year or so by the U.S. government was probably the three-parter cover-heralded as “The Adventure of the Atom Universe” from Wonder Woman #21 (Jan-Feb. 1947), which saw print in autumn of 1946—a year after the first A-bomb explosions. Of course, it seems unlikely that German or Japanese nuclear spies could’ve learned all that much from this tale, unless they believed the sub-atomic world was ruled by the despotic Queen Atomia! Art by H.G. Peter. With thanks to Jim Ludwig & the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

Sidebar #3

[From San Diego Comic-Con Panel, July 2018, continued] TRINA ROBBINS: I wonder if you remember, because “Wonder Woman” had a lot of villains. Usually they were women, actually, but there were also some male villains.

JOYE MURCHISON KELLY: They were not usually women.

TR: They weren’t?

KELLY: No. The Cheetah was the big one. No. He didn’t have many women. Sometimes from an island or something there might be a group of women. It was mostly men.

TR: Did you by any chance create any of those villains?

KELLY: Yes, I probably created different kinds of people, but I don’t remember…. I didn’t read them. [laughter] [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: More excerpts from the 2018 panel to follow.]

There Is Nothing Like A Dame…

Although Dr. Marston probably conceived the majority of them, the Amazon faced rather more female foes than Joye remembered—and she wound up writing quite a few of them. For instance, in the “Villainy, Incorporated” group in Wonder Woman #28 (March-April 1948), Eviless brings together no fewer than seven additional distaff do-badders, all female—including Blue Snow Man (really Byrna Brilliant)… Princess Maru, who in an earlier issue had been the apparently male Dr. Poison… and Hypnota, despite her fake goatee. Script by Joye; art by H.G. Peter. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]

The First Amazon

15

The “Fab Four”—1942 Edition (Left:) This oft-reproduced photo and text piece from the inside front cover of Wonder Woman #2 (Fall 1942) shows the All-American Comics personnel who formed the Amazon’s early brain trust. (Left to right in photo:) Dr. Marston (seated), artist H.G. Peter, editor Sheldon Mayer, and publisher/managing editor M.C. (“Charlie”) Gaines. [TM & © DC Comics.]

(Above:) Sadly, only two years later, Marston was stricken with poliomyelitis. This photo of him appeared in Jill Lepore’s best-selling 2014 study The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

Joye In Shamrock Land The lady must’ve enjoyed writing the three-part, cover-titled “Shamrock Land” tale in Wonder Woman #14 (Fall 1945), whose first splash is seen at left—for, in Sensation Comics #75 (March 1948), she revisited the place, and its people, in “The Return of ‘Shaggy,’ the Leprechaun.”

Art by H.G. Peter. Thanks respectively to Jim Ludwig and Jim Kealy.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

[continued from p. 12] RA: That must have been one of your first stories to see print, if it came out before the first atomic bomb explosion of World War II. Do you remember what story that was?

KELLY: The one thing I told my husband when we agreed to this interview was “Please don’t have them ask me questions about specific stories, because I simply don’t remember that kind of detail!” [both laugh] If I can come back and do an interview with you when you’re 94 and you can actually remember the exact title of a story you wrote 73 or 74 years earlier, then I would be astonished! [laughs] RA: I know what you mean. Sometimes things acquire a certain amount of importance to people down the line, but at the time you were just writing stories and had no idea that someone decades later would want to know tiny details about those stories.

KELLY: Exactly! [laughs] Some things you can remember more than others. Some extra thing, like being investigated by the government, keeps a particular story in your memory.

RA: There was something my editor, Roy Thomas, wanted me to ask you, because it’s something of a mystery. In a 1950 issue of Wonder Woman—#43 (Sept.-Oct. 1950)—there was a story called “Nuclear Returns” [written by Robert Kanigher] which is clearly a follow-up story

Polar Power Joye mentions elsewhere in this interview that “Wonder Woman could punch a polar bear to save somebody”… and that’s all the excuse we needed to spotlight this Hummel-scripted splash from Sensation Comics #65 (May 1947). Art by H.G. Peter. Thanks to Jim Kealy.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

to an earlier tale involving the villain Nuclear. However, the earlier story had never been printed! “Nuclear Returns” appeared a couple of years after your time on the title, but I was wondering if that story may have had something to do with your “atoms” tale.

KELLY: I’m pretty sure our story was published. It may not have been immediately, but I think it was published .

[INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Joye may well be right in believing that “atoms” story was delayed but published. “Tide of Atomic Fire,” written

by Joye, was published in Wonder Woman #21 (Jan.-Feb. 1947), which would have come out in the fall of 1946. The mystery of Nuclear’s first appearance may never be solved.]. I have no idea, really. All of my original stories and scripts are in the Smithsonian. I donated them there several years ago.

Iron In His Diet “Wonder Woman” splash page for Comic Cavalcade #25 (Oct.-Nov. 1947).

Script by Joye Hummel; art by H.G. Peter. Thanks to Jim Kealy.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

When I was still writing “Wonder Woman” but knew I was going to be leaving the book, the office staff encouraged me to take all the comics that had my stories in them, because my name wasn’t on any of them. Like Dr. Marston’s, all my stories appeared under the pen-name of “Charles Moulton.” All of my stories and scripts that I still had I’ve since donated to the Smithsonian, to the Dibner Library, in bound volumes. So, questions on specific stories, I probably can’t answer. [continued on p. 19]

The First Amazon

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“Nuclear” Explosions Joye Kelly expressed an interest in learning more about the two “Wonder Woman” tales that featured the super-villain Nuclear, so here are a few clockwise tidbits: He was created for “Nuclear, the Magnetic Menace,” a story code-slated for inclusion in Comic Cavalcade #25 (Feb.-March 1948); this means it was written and drawn no later than mid-1947, though it’s unlikely Joye wrote it. For reasons unknown, it was never published, and much of the original art eventually wound up in collectors’ hands, including the splash page (a scan of which was supplied by fan Michael Finn some years back) and the accompanying never-before-printed panel in which Holliday College girl Etta Candy is Nuclear’s captive. See A/E #23 for more details on this and two other never-published “WW” adventures. (Oh, and not so incidentally, Roy T. scripted his own version of what might have happened in this missing yarn in All-Star Squadron #16 [Dec. 1982].)

Oddly, the sequel, “Nuclear Returns,” was published—in Wonder Woman #43 (Sept.-Oct. 1950), complete with flashback panels that pictured events that occurred right after those in the unpublished tale (see below.)

Records indicate the sequel was scripted by Robert Kanigher, who began scribing occasional “Wonder Woman” episodes by 1945, while Marston and Hummel were still the Amazon’s chief chroniclers… so perhaps RK wrote the earlier epic as well. All art on this page by H.G. Peter. Scans from WW #43 courtesy of Jim Ludwig.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

Trident True A personal interjection: A/E’s editor, during his primo comicbook-writing days, was inspired to borrow elements of one particular Joye Hummel-scripted, H.G. Peter-drawn story--twice. Chronologically clockwise from above left: In Wonder Woman #15 (Winter 1945), Solo, leader of invaders from sunken Neptunia, is momentarily captured by Diana. Script by Hummel; art by H.G. Peter. Thanks to the Gary Watson Comic Book Collection, Irvin Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC; with special thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Sudduth & David Shay. [TM & © DC Comics.]

In Sub-Mariner #25 (May 1970), writer Roy Thomas had penciler Sal Buscema attire the Atlantean forces in similar uniforms, likewise sporting a trident symbol, when Prince Namor briefly attempted to shield the world’s oceans from the surface-men’s depredations. Inks by Jim Mooney & Mike Esposito. Scan courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] Seventeen years later, when initiating the series Young All-Stars for DC, writer/ creative editor Roy had artist Brian Murray adapt the earlier Neptunians’ (and Atlanteans’) look as a costume for Neptune Perkins, an aquatic super-hero originally created for the mid-1940s “Hawkman” feature by scribe Gardner Fox and artist Joe Kubert. Depicted is Murray’s dramatic cover for Young All-Stars #4 (Sept. 1987). Thanks to the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

The First Amazon

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“Now Go Ahead And Write A Good Story—I Dare You” (Above:) Editor Sheldon Mayer’s memo titled “Note to Writers and Artists,” most likely written while All-American and DC were operating as basically separate companies (through 1945), first saw print in Alter Ego, Vol. 2, #2, in “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!,” after Michael T. Gilbert found a copy amid writer Gardner Fox’s papers at the University of Oregon, in Eugene.

“Torture scenes” or “anybody being whipped” or an electric chair or a hanging or “anybody [being] stabbed” or “roast[ing] anybody alive” were no-nos…

(Right:) …but apparently not a madman about to murder some young girls with a hatchet as per the story “Hatchet of Death” in Sensation Comics #57 (Sept. 1946), by Joye Hummel and H.G. Peter. Well, Mayer’s note did say that “on rare occasions… it may be necessary to threaten [little children’s] lives”… or maybe the rules of the road had changed by then.

Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

[continued from p. 16] I would like to know more about that—the two Nuclear stories. When I started working for Dr. Marston, any other writers who’d done stories before me stopped. When he and I were working together on “Wonder Woman,” only my stories and his stories were published. Of course publishers can mix up times on you—publish stories long after you’ve written them.

One of my chief jobs was to type my scripts and to type his, then go to the editor, Sheldon Mayer, and give those scripts to him for approval. There were also ten people on an advisory board which was composed of educators, child welfare experts, psychologists and celebrities, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Pearl Buck. They had a list of ten things you couldn’t do in comics. We couldn’t put anything in a story that they considered harmful to a child. Things like racism, direct murder, weapons shown killing someone, that sort of thing was forbidden. They were

quite strict. Sheldon would scrutinize the scripts for story appeal— the ability to sell the issue—and always said that a writer’s done a good job if they’ve written a story to sell and can still obey those ten no-nos that you weren’t allowed to use. In fact, he used to say, “I dare you to write a good story and still follow these restrictions!” [laughs] A lot of things have been published about comics, and I don’t really like reading about them because so much is simply untrue.

As a writer, you know you can take just one word out of something to change the whole meaning and intent of a sentence. There’s a reason I wasn’t discovered for years. It was because I didn’t want to be. [both laugh] RA: “Wonder Woman” is somewhat unique in that much of the background material is based on actual Greek myths. Wonder Woman herself is a made-up character, but her mother—in fact, all the Amazons— have a basis in actual Greek mythology.

KELLY: The use of Greek mythology as the background of the comic was Mrs. Marston’s idea. Elizabeth Marston was a major influence during the time that “Wonder Woman” was being created by Professor Marston. She was a brilliant, brilliant lady. She was a lawyer and a major executive in one of the larger insurance companies. Very well-educated. She was the power behind Dr. Marston. He was brilliant in his own right, but she added her brilliance to what he was doing. She was a practical person, however. She could not write “Wonder Woman.” Not the right kind of imagination.

Everybody in that household was brilliant in one way or another.

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

had. The writing, art, and lettering were all apparently done in his offices. You mentioned Sheldon Mayer.

Could you tell us what you remember about him?

KELLY: He was strict but I liked him very much.

Sheldon was fair and very easy to work with. I never had him reject any of my scripts. Sometimes Professor Marston had to rework his because he made something too sexy. [laughs] RA: Well, that can happen when you’re writing about a girl super-hero. [both laugh] KELLY: One church, and I’m not going to name names, was really after him. They weren’t angry about the stories but rather the length of her shorts! They thought they were too sexy! We didn’t change those much, though. [laughs] [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: At one point in her July 2018 interview at the San Diego Comic-Con, Joye quotes Dr. Marston as insisting, “I don’t want them to look like men’s underwear!”]

“Introducing WONDER WOMAN” (Left:) The first page of the 9-page “Wonder Woman” story that was printed right after the 56-page “Justice Society of America” lead tale in All-Star Comics #8 (Dec. 1941-Jan. 1942). Based on analysis of surviving manuscripts (see A/E V3#1), it’s likely the Marston script was abridged from a 13-page original, with the help of typeset prose on several of the truncated flashback/origin pages. Art by H.G. Peter. Reproduced from Roy Thomas’ bound volumes of the original All-Star run. [TM & © DC Comics.]

(Right:) Gal Gadot has appeared as Wonder Woman in three films to date.

The actress herself is pretty much the only thing from the WW movie that Joye Kelly liked. [TM & © DC Comics or successors in interest.]

I loved visiting Dr. Marston. I loved his family and I loved his children. I learned how to cook from the lady who worked as their cook. Sometimes, because of his polio, he would have to rest from the story conferences we held there and during the down time I’d learn how to cook. His daughter Olive was the flower girl at my wedding.

I was an outsider who was a little bit of an insider professionally. I had a long way to commute, from my home into New York and then on to Rye. The trip took several different subways as well as the Long Island Railroad. You had to go through Grand Central Station. The Wonder Woman offices were near Grand Central Station.

I was nicely treated by Dr. Marston and his family. They were wonderful. I had dinner with them from time to time. Sometimes, because of the commute from Rye to home, I might not get home until after midnight.

RA: I suspect it was unusual in those days for the writer of a comicbook to have as much control over the production as Dr. Marston seems to have

RA: There were things, objects that Wonder Woman used on a regular basic. One was the golden lasso, which I understand, because it’s still in use and because of its connection to his co-inventing the lie detector, but there were a few things that were in those stories that I don’t recognize.

What the heck was the “Venus Girdle”? Do you know anything about that?

KELLY: [laughs] If I ever knew about that, it’s been erased. I know nothing about the Venus Girdle.

RA: I know the word “girdle” would have gotten banned from use by the 1950s, and they apparently must have dropped it much earlier than that, if you weren’t particularly familiar with it.

KELLY: I have a hard time believing that that would have gotten past Sheldon Mayer! He would have known that something like that would never have gotten by the editorial review board. I wish I could remember all ten no-nos that the board insisted upon.

Wonder Woman could punch a polar bear to save somebody, but she couldn’t hit or shoot people. Wonder Woman was not a killer. It’s not so easy to write an exciting story with all those restrictions. I don’t know why the religious folks were so worried about the shorts. There was no way that Sheldon Mayer was going to lengthen those shorts. They weren’t showing anything that shouldn’t be shown anyways. A woman’s leg looks a lot better when the garment doesn’t stop at the knee. The ugliest part of a woman’s leg is the knee.

They got over that shorts thing, though. In later years I don’t remember any discussion of the shorts.

RA: Were her wrist bracelets brass or bronze early on? They’re silver today, or at least a silver color, in the comics. Maybe not real silver, because a bullet would go right through silver. In the movies they appear to be either silver or gold, but in the 1940s reprints that I’ve seen, they’re colored black, with blue highlights.

The First Amazon

One Touch Of Tokyo— & Two Touches Of Venus

Gardner F. Fox Co-creator of The Flash, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, and the JSA—detail from a photo taken in April 1940.

(Above left:) “Wonder Woman” splash from All-Star Comics #11 (June-July 1942)—the first “Justice Society” story commissioned after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. She helped the U.S. armed forces in the Japanese-invaded Philippines regain “control of the situation—for the time being, anyway.” In the real world, alas, the Philippines fell over the course of the next few weeks. Script by Gardner Fox; art

by H.G. Peter.

(Top right & right:) Wonder Woman made only a token appearance in All-Star #12, but in #13 (Oct.-Nov. 1942), Fox wrote a solo chapter in which she, like seven of her fellow JSAers, is “Shanghaied into Space” by a Nazi rocket scientist. Marston, however, intensely disliked Fox’s script and talked editor Mayer into letting him scribe his own version of her trip to Venus for Peter to illustrate. Both writers’ scripts survive and were examined in detail in A/E V3#1 and in the TwoMorrows book All-Star Companion [Vol. 1]. All art on this page is from Roy Thomas’ bound volumes.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

KELLY: Those [the All Star Comics appearances] were written by the author of that title. I know very little about those stories.

RA: The reason I say I don’t think Dr. Marston had a great deal of input into her “Justice Society” appearances is that, when she did appear, the first thing the writer did was promptly make her the team’s secretary. That doesn’t strike me as something that Marston would have done.

You mentioned Etta Candy earlier, and from what I’ve read she was a pretty strong character for a supporting role at the time. Many of those supporting characters for the various super-heroes were both overweight and used strictly for comic relief; but Etta, although she was a big girl who certainly liked her candy, often came to Wonder Woman’s rescue and was fairly handy in a fight. She’s no pushover by any means. What were the Holliday Girls that Etta was a part of? Where they a choral group or some kind of club?

KELLY: I don’t really know. I never got into that. They were just college girls that Etta was friends with. They were helpers at times with Wonder Woman, whom they loved, when Wonder Woman was trying to accomplish something good or put down something bad. Some interviewer at one point wanted to know where all the names came from, and I really don’t know where Dr. Marston came up with the names from. Etta Candy was part of the original characters, and those were all created and named by Dr. Marston.

There was so much to do and discuss with the writing of the current stories that I don’t remember us getting into that kind of background information too much. What was important was to find a really good heroine or villain for each story. Find something in each story to demonstrate Wonder Woman acting in the correct way, show what kind of person she was and what she believed in, without having to say it—to show it but not say it. He didn’t want his creation to do anything that was in conflict with his philosophy.

Yet Another Touch Of Venus In Wonder Woman #12 (Spring 1945), Joye wrote a three-part reunion of the Amazon, Queen Desira, and the “Winged Maidens of Venus” from All-Star Comics #13. Diana Prince convinced Steve Trevor she had borrowed the radio-receiver earrings Wonder Woman had received from Desira in All-Star #13. Art by H.G. Peter. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]

KELLY: They were golden. I think. You know, I never really paid that much attention. They might have been silver. They were just used to stop bullets, but I just don’t remember them being black.

RA: I should ask, I suppose, what you thought of the recent movie—that is, if you’ve seen it.

KELLY: Are you kidding? That movie was so inaccurate. The only thing I liked in that movie was that gorgeous actress—Gal Godot— and Dr. Marston would have loved her as Wonder Woman. She was marvelous! Wonder Woman wasn’t even born before World War I! They made Etta Candy a secretary for the department of the Navy.

Etta Candy! I guess it’s poetic license. Still, I’m not a film critic. Let’s get on with the interview. [laughs] What else would you like to ask me?

RA: You started writing your “Wonder Woman” stories in 1944, and it now seems that your first printed story appeared in Wonder Woman #12 (Spring 1945). She was appearing in four different titles at the time—her own book, along with solo stories in both Sensation Comics and Comic Cavalcade and an occasional appearance in All Star Comics with the Justice Society. I don’t believe either Dr. Marston or yourself wrote any of the “Justice Society” stories. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Actually, Marston did script one “Wonder Woman” chapter in All-Star. See preceding page for clarification.]

RA: I’m going to drop some names on you and if you remember anything about them, feel free to talk about them. Do you remember Robert Kanigher?

KELLY: Was he one of the male writers?

RA: He was the writer and editor who took over “Wonder Woman” after both Sheldon Mayer and you left the book. He did write a few stories during the period when you were involved with the book, as well.

KELLY: I know nothing of him. After I left the book, I never looked at any of the “Wonder Woman” stories that came after me. I just couldn’t read it. I just couldn’t.

RA: Did you know Whitney Ellsworth?

KELLY: No, I don’t know who that is.

RA: He was the editor-in-chief of DC Comics. Did you know Dorothy Roubicek? She was an editor at All-American for a time in 1942-1944 and worked on “Wonder Woman” during that time as Sheldon Mayer’s assistant editor.

KELLY: No, sorry, I don’t know that name. I never worked with any editor but Sheldon Mayer on a direct basis.

RA: What can you tell me about Harry Peter?

KELLY: He was marvelous. He was very down-to-earth. Very easy to work with and such a wonderful artist. He had two lady assistants to help him with his art. Like I said earlier, he had the office right across the hall from mine.

His artwork was wonderful. There’s something you should [continued on p. 26]

The First Amazon

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The First Amazon

Sidebar #4

[From San Diego Comic-Con Panel, July 2018, continued] MARK EVANIER: Now, did you pay a lot of attention to the artwork?.... Did you get involved in making comments on the artwork?...

JOYE MURCHISON KELLY: My job was to see the finish[ed art pages], that they had understood what Marston and I had written.

Now, it’s something like somebody who was a stage director, and he directs where every chair will be in the scenery and all that.

We had to write in a certain form that would tell them how her expression should be, what she’s going to be doing, who else is in the panel with her, what kind of furniture is it, where is she. Every single thing that he drew had to be done by what we said, and I had to make sure that that was done.

And In This Corner…

This circa-1943 color display drawing by H.G. Peter shows The Cheetah in combat with Etta Candy. Thanks to Dominic Bongo, Jared Bond, & Richard Arndt. [Etta Candy & The Cheetah TM & © DC Comics.]

Incidentally, Art Lortie was kind enough to do a bit of back-issue newspaper research on Harry G. Peter and reports that he was son of Louis and Louise Peter, with a brother and two sisters. On January 16, 1912, he married Adonica Fulton; she passed away in 1948. H.G. Peter himself died in 1958, soon after he was removed from drawing “Wonder Woman” by editor Robert Kanigher.

ME: So you would look at the artwork—

artwork, Harry usually went over it first, before me. You know, it’s not easy for an artist to always know— You may not make things clear enough. You make think you did, but they have to understand.

So everybody is patient with one another. We had great respect in that office for everyone who worked there, so we did not— We had a team of a man and woman, the Wrotens, who did Leroy lettering, because that’s another thing, the lettering had to be done and placed where it should be placed. And I had to make sure that the conversation was correct. Proofread the whole thing.

KELLY: All the artwork, proofread it.

TR: How much did the assistants do of the art? Was it just minor things?

ME: —and you might go to him and say, “I think this panel is wrong,” or, “I think this scene is wrong”?

KELLY: I think that most of the time Harry did a pencil quick thing, and I think that his work was the first work I would look at. And then you have to look at the last.

KELLY: Well, I would be very tactful. [laughter] I wouldn’t say to him, “Harry, that panel was wrong.” No. [laughs] I would show him what I wrote and say, “You know, I think it would be better if she were doing this or that.” You know, we would talk about it. And he had an assistant artist. I just never had a problem.

TRINA ROBBINS: I had heard that he had several assistants. You say he had one?....

KELLY: Oh, there were two women. Anyone that was doing the

TR: And at some point they’d do the inking?

KELLY: Yes, they could do the inking. Most of the original sketching would be done by him. They were very good, but he was the master.

[A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: More San Diego sidebars to come….]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

The Wondering Kind (Right:) An early-20th-century illustration

by H.G. Peter, from the humor magazine Judge, showing society people as slaves to fashion. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert and Jean-Paul Gabilliet.

(Below:) Peter’s original designs for Wonder Woman—both the oft-reproduced one (with copious notes from both artist and writer) that was basically accepted, and a “rejected” version that nonetheless featured the boots she’d wear for her first decade in comics. Both are reproduced from Jill Leopore’s 2014 book The Secret History of Wonder Woman but have been printed elsewhere as well. How any intellectually honest person can claim with a straight face that Harry G. was anything less than at least the secondary co-creator of the character is almost beyond Ye Editor’s comprehension—except as a legal technicality, à la Bob Kane and “Batman.”

[Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.]

The First Amazon

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Famous Funnybooks (Above left & right:) Even before he drew “Wonder Woman,” however, Peter was a working super-hero comicbook artist, as witness his Eastern Color covers featuring newspaper strip star Invisible Scarlet O’Neil on Famous Funnies #87 (Oct. ’41)… and another super-hero he also drew inside, Fearless Flint, on Famous Funnies #89 (Dec. ’41). Yep, Wonder Woman wasn’t even the first super-heroine he drew—though he didn’t illustrate Scarlet’s adventures inside the issue. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

H.G. Peter A photo sold in a 2016 auction of the artist’s personal effects, courtesy of Alex Johnson, Todd Klein (who tweaked the image slightly for his own blog), and Alex Jay.

“The Face Isn’t Familiar, But I Can’t Quite Place The Body Color” A 1941 illustration by H.G. Peter personally drawn and colored for Famous Funnies/Heroic Comics editor Stephen Douglas, showing Fearless Flint (on right) and Man o’ Metal, whom Peter also drew, beginning in Eastern Color’s Reg’lar Fellers Heroic Comics #7 (July 1941).

Thanks to George Hagenauer. [Heroes TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

remember that he was very fast in starting and completing a page.

When I wrote a page, I had to make my directions very, very clear so that things made sense from panel to panel. Marston had to do the same thing. We wrote the directions, while the artist followed those to draw the page. I didn’t just write. Before the final stage, which would be the inking, I went over the pages to see that anything that was wrong was corrected.

RA: Was the same procedure used for the covers?

KELLY: Harry G. Peter did the covers. I checked the covers as well, but I don’t remember writing any of the cover copy. Dr. Marston may have done that. Harry Peter may have done it under the guidance of Professor Marston. No one’s ever asked me that before, and it’s a good question. I’m just not sure at this point who did what on the covers. Sheldon Mayer may have had something to do with the covers.

Robert Kanigher Dorothy Roubicek served as story editor under Sheldon Mayer from 1942-44, working on titles that included Wonder Woman. She was known to object to some of the feature’s more eccentric aspects. Photo from the Internet.

succeeded Roubicek as a story editor in ’44 and wrote a few “Wonder Woman” stories beginning soon afterward. After Marston’s death in 1947 and Joye’s departure from comics, he became writer (and soon full editor) of Wonder Woman for the next two decades.

A detail from an early1940s photo of a DC dinner grouping.

Harry and his two assistants did all the page artwork. One of them was named Arlene. I don’t remember the name of the other lady. She was younger. Arlene, who was the older of the two, was a very efficient, very good artist in her own right. She was the chief assistant. I’m sorry I only remember her first name. They both helped Harry do the artwork, but Harry was always the one who did the finishing.

[continued from p. 22] know about Harry. In those days, people dressed up to go to work.

In New York City, men wore suits and ties. Harry, however, didn’t dress that way. He came into work dressed super-casually. He dressed the way Harry G. Peter wanted to dress. One day he’d gone off to lunch while I was in the office in New York City. Well, he didn’t come back for quite a while. I finally received a phone call from one of the hospitals in New York. It wasn’t the very expensive hospital that Dr. Marston went to after his polio attack but one that had a large number of indigent people going there, to their emergency room.

The caller on the phone was a gentleman, and he said “Do you know a Harry G. Peter?” I said yes. “Well, we have him here in the indigent ward of our hospital. He claims he knows you and that you would pick him up.” [laughs] I asked why he was in the hospital. They told me that he’d had a chicken bone which had gotten caught in his throat when he was eating in a restaurant, and they’d rushed him to that hospital’s emergency room. Because of the way he was dressed—not in a New York business style at all—they judged him by what they thought he looked like. He couldn’t talk because he had that chicken bone stuck in his throat. [both laugh] They weren’t sure where they were going to put him, so they’d put him in the charity ward. I had to go down there and rescue him. By then, they’d taken the chicken bone out, of course.

Harry was a great artist. They kept telling me that they could make an artist out of me, but noooo! [laughs] I can’t draw.

RA: I’m assuming he did both the pencils and inks on his pages?

KELLY: I don’t remember him using a pencil. He was a very strong artist. The lines were very clear. The preliminary work must have been with some kind of art pencil, though, because the art sometimes had to be changed. I truly can’t remember. I do

Wanted: Eyes In The Back Of Her Head H.G. Peter’s cover for Wonder Woman #25 (Sept.-Oct. 1947) showed three of her old enemies sneaking up on her. Joye scripted the story inside.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

The First Amazon

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The letterers were a husband-wife team. Skippy and James Wroten. They used Leroy lettering for the pages. Leroy lettering was done by hand but it was a fairly involved process.

No coloring was done in our office. All of that was in another office at All-American or National. Whichever company was in control at the time. I never went there.

RA: There was a four-page feature in Wonder Woman called “Wonder Women of History” that Marston generally wrote. It was an educational history piece about real-life famous women. The reason I’m asking is that it continued after Marston’s death, and I was wondering if you wrote any of those.

KELLY: I never wrote them. I remember the feature, but I don’t remember it well enough to give you a lot of information on it.

It ran right in the middle of the Wonder Woman comic, but I only wrote “Wonder Woman” stories. Nothing else. Believe me, that took enough time. [laughs] It may look simple when you’re reading the comicbook, but there’s a lot to writing a comicbook story.

You’re actually writing a mini-play, with stage directions and panel descriptions, the expressions on faces, the staging of characters and so on. There was a great deal of detail written into those scripts.

RA: You left off writing the “Wonder Woman” stories for the three titles after you married David Murchison sometime in 1947. Do you remember what month in 1947 that was?

KELLY: I was married on Aug. 17, 1947, and it was shortly after my marriage that I [quit]. I remember that I was three months or better ahead of the deadlines at that point. They published stories that I wrote for a good year or more after I left off actually writing the book.

You know, I never expected to quit. I hadn’t really planned that, and they [DC/National] did not expect me to quit. [laughs] I was not expected to resign by Sheldon Mayer, and I didn’t expect to resign.

“How To Become An Amazon” (Above:) Far as we know, the final “Wonder Woman” story scripted by Joye Hummel Murchison appeared in Sensation Comics #85 (Jan. 1949), which would’ve gone on sale in autumn of ’48. Of course, it might ‘ve been written before some other yarn that got published earlier, since adventures were often printed out of order. Art by H.G. Peter. Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

When I got married, I’d inherited a little 4½-year-old, platinum-haired, green-eyed girl.

She was teeny for her age. She’d lost her mother when she was younger.

My new mother-in-law lived next door to me, and I’d taken my new daughter next door to the motherin-law so she could babysit before I left for my first story conference in New York after the marriage. It took

Alice Marble—A “Wonder Woman Of History” Then-tennis star Alice Marble—shown at left in a photo from Wonder Woman #1 (Summer 1942)—was officially “associate editor” of the magazine and the author of each issue’s “Wonder Women of History” biographical feature. The one in WW #1 spotlighted nurse Florence Nightingale and was drawn by Sheldon Moldoff. It’s long been assumed, though not proven, that Dr. Marston himself scripted those features. Exactly what if anything Marble contributed to the Wonder Woman mythos is up for debate, but she provided prominent endorsement of the feature for several years. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

Sidebar #5

[From San Diego Comic-Con Panel, July 2018, continued] MARK EVANIER: Were you happy with what [Dr. Marston] paid you [since you didn’t work directly for DC Comics]?

JOYE MUCHISON KELLY: I, you know—I was just literally a little bit over being a kid. I had no knowledge what you should be paid in that world.

ME: Were you living decently?

KELLY: Yes, my mother and I had an apartment, and I’d say we were living fine. Not wealthy, but fine. Actually, you want to know what I got for sure? Fifty dollars.

ME: For a script?

KELLY: For a script.

ME: Of how many pages?

KELLY: Well, you read “Wonder Woman.” How many pages? [laughs] ME: Twelve-page stories?

KELLY: A full story when it was published.

ME: Okay. That wasn’t bad for the time.

TRINA ROBBINS: No, not for those times. I don’t suppose you can possibly remember what some of your plots were?

KELLY: You know, I talked about being an actress, and some actresses, they are in a play, and they’ll remember the words of that play if they do one hundred plays. I did a lot of acting at school, but when the play was over, it was over. When I wrote a story, it was out of my mind. My mind was clear. It was gone. I had proofread it. I had read it again. Gone. So it was opened up to something new.

[A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: More excerpts from the San Diego panel to come.]

The Long And Short Of It A bit of elaboration on the length of mid-1940s “Wonder Woman” stories: At least the first tale Joye wrote for Sensation Comics (#41, May 1945’s “Octopus Plants”) was still 13 pages long, though that length soon shrunk to 12 pages. The first three Wonder Woman three-parters she scripted (#12-14) averaged roughly the same, each being composed of two 11-page chapters followed by a 16-page finale… and in #15 the breakdown was 11, 11, & 14. We assume she was being paid $50 times three for the triple-part yarns. Accompanying art from Wonder Woman #12 (Spring 1945) by H.G. Peter, of course. Script by Joy Hummel. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]

The First Amazon

a certain amount of time to get ready because you really had to dress up in those days to go into New York.

Just before I was to leave to go to New York, I went back next door to kiss her goodbye. My mother-in-law had her sitting in a high-chair. I always had her in a chair at the table. She looked at me with those big green eyes and asked me with tears in her eyes, “Are you ever coming back?” She saw me all dressed up and ready to leave. I assured her that I would be back that afternoon. It was a happy thing when that little girl and I met. We just fell in love with each other.

Those tears coming down and her looking at me and asking me if I was ever coming back… I just couldn’t keep going to work anymore. When I wrote “Wonder Woman,” I wrote all night. I was always half-asleep going into New York on the Long Island Railway. I could not give enough of myself when writing a story.

But, no matter how the philosophy of Professor Marston was interpreted, first comes family. Above money or anything, your family, your children, come first. I believe that.

When I met with Sheldon Mayer in New York, he asked if I was ready to go back to work, because he thought I was there to discuss a new story. I told him that I was at least three months ahead and that I could not do this anymore. I thought I could, but I couldn’t. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. He told me that I was giving up a big career. Not big money, mind you. I have yet to see any of that. I just told him that I couldn’t do the stories

29

anymore. I resigned. He told me that I’d be sorry, but I told him that I didn’t think so. [laughs] That was how it ended. I think he may have been overwhelmingly disappointed in me when I resigned.

I have never regretted my decision to resign. My days were well spent being a stay-at-home mother during my children’s early years. However, at age 40 I re-entered the work force as a secretary and was trained, on the job, to become a stockbroker. The money earned from that job enabled our children to eventually go to college.

RA: You mentioned it a bit earlier but we never really discussed Dr. Marston’s death.

KELLY: First, you have to understand that the polio left him in considerable pain. He was undergoing treatment for the pain from the famed Australian nurse, Sister [Elizabeth] Kenny. But he was actually suffering from two sources of pain, although he didn’t realize that he had cancer as well. Marston’s cancer was diagnosed in September of 1946 and he passed away May 2, 1947, just a week shy of his 54th birthday. I don’t believe he was ever actually told that he had cancer. He and I worked on “Wonder Woman” stories right up until the time he died.

During this final illness, he would have whatever treatments he needed. Sometimes I would stay overnight and work with him again the next morning. I had to type everything he wrote. He told me that I was the only one who could ever read his handwriting.

Last Of The Amazons (Above left:) The final Joye-scribed “Wonder Woman” tale to appear in Comic Cavalcade can be viewed in #29 (Oct.-Nov. 1948)—while her Wonder Woman run ended with a story in #30 (July-Aug. ’48), seen at right. Art by H.G. Peter. The latter yarn (also sampled on p. 11) related the exploits of the Amazon as a kid princess—wearing her costume years before she won the right to wear it in All-Star Comics #8—and may have been a response to the popularity of the “Superboy” feature in Adventure Comics and ere long in his own mag. Scans supplied by Jim Kealy and Joshua Hansen Clark, respectively. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

Sidebar #6

[From San Diego Comic-Con Panel, July 2018, continued] MARK EVANIER: Did you continue to read the “Wonder Woman” comics after you left?

JOYE MURCHISON KELLY: I’d rather not talk too much about that because I don’t like to give opinions on somebody else’s [work]. [laughter; applause] TRINA ROBBINS: You told us what we needed to know.

ME: So you did read them. [laughter] KELLY: Not long.

ME: Okay. Did you follow “Wonder Woman” at all in later years?

Did you watch the Wonder Woman TV show when it went on?

KELLY: Oh, not much. I really didn’t follow “Wonder Woman.” I didn’t even talk about that I had written “Wonder Woman,” personally. I had all my stories, because the office—we got along so well, and when I left, it was sad.

I heard for years from people who worked in the office, and the Marston family. But they influenced me, before I even decided that I was getting married and going to have another career, to have all the books that I wrote put in binders—you know those blue binders that you put things

Kanigher In Charge With Dr. Marston’s death and Joye’s departure (both in 1947), Robert Kanigher became the chief writer—and soon the editor, since Shelly Mayer had left the editorship by 1948—of the Amazon’s tales, such as “Nuclear Returns” in Wonder Woman #43 (Sept.-Oct. 1950). With WW #98 (May 1958), he replaced H.G. Peter as story artist with the team of Ross Andru (penciler) & Mike Esposito (inker); others, mostly Irwin Hasen and Irv Novick, had been already drawing the covers for several years. Peter died later that year, at age 78. See Andru & Esposito on p. 51. Thanks to Jim Ludwig & the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © DC Comics.]

in. Those binders are now in the Smithsonian. [applause] My children read them and read them, and I lived in south Florida, and a lot of my memorabilia of the scripts that I wrote—we didn’t have air-conditioning in the beginning, and so the papers were just getting thinner and thinner. It happened in 1990 that this wonderful woman who is a professor at Harvard University called me and said she had researched and found me….

[A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: A final San Diego sidebar follows on p. 32.]

The First Amazon

Both of us wrote the initial story by hand. It was only typed when the story was deemed done and needed to go to the editor.

31

I knew what Marston wanted by doing “Wonder Woman.”

His life’s project was that he so much wanted women to have their chance in the world. He was a very kind man. There was nothing mean about Dr. Marston in his associations that I knew about. He was just not a mean person.

then you should really go for it. Study for it, do what you can for it. However, if you make a decision and it’s not working or you feel you’ve made a mistake, get off it! You don’t have to stand on a decision that’s going to ruin your life or the lives of other people. If you’re conscious of the effect that your decisions are having, then you have to consider the effects of your decisions upon yourself.

People know when they make a bad decision. No matter what they tell you, they know! They may not want to admit it.

Marston’s theory, his belief, was for women to get out into the world and do something’s worthy. If you had an ability, then go out and do it, show it, make those decisions. If there’s one thing that I’ve carried over into my own thinking it’s making decisions.

A decision that you make can be very good. If it’s good and you feel you want to do things that will help that decision come true,

Once you realize it’s a bad decision, then don’t keep following that bad decision—break away from it! The number one thing for a happy life is the ability to change and reconsider the decisions you make. To be worthy is not to cause harm, to yourself or anybody else. If you’re doing something that’s making your life horrible, then change it! Stop it!

That sort of philosophy is more complicated than I’m making it, but that’s the simple version of it. But that’s Marston’s thinking and I’ve tried to live by that.

I would like to say that my working with Dr. Marston was a wonderful thing for me.

He was truly a great psychologist. He worked for many of the big universities. After we finished talking about the “Wonder Woman” stories and our ideas for them, he would share with me the different ways he helped students who were having problems with their grades. “Wonder Woman” was hard work but we had fun doing it.

Amazons Twain A powerful display drawing of Wonder Woman done in the 1940s by H.G. Peter, as a Yule greeting to editor Sheldon Mayer—and a recent pic of Joye Murchison Kelly, courtesy of Joye and husband Jack. Thanks to Nate Palant for the art scan.

[Wonder Woman art TM & © DC Comics.]

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Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly—Wonder Woman’s Mid-1940s Ghost Writer

I would like women to know that personal achievements can be recognized at any time of your life. I never thought my work on “Wonder Woman” would end up in the Smithsonian, for goodness sakes!

get women to have a more equal life. We’re not there yet.

RA: It ended up there because it is important. You may not have realized it at the time, but it’s become important to a lot of people.

I’ve had a good life, by and large. There’s been sadness. Deaths in the family. But life goes on. I think my working with “Wonder Woman” and with Dr. Marston was a positive thing, because I only got good out of it.

KELLY: It’s an honor to me and, through me, I hope to all women.

An honor that the Smithsonian, or anyplace really, thinks that my work was important enough to be able to influence people, to try to

RA: It’s a steady onward process. You have to look at it that way.

KELLY: I do. Some women may not, but I do.

I only got good.

Sidebar #7

[From San Diego Comic-Con Panel, July 2018, concluded] MARK EVANIER: [indicating Joye’s husband, Jack Kelly] So you have this man, Jack, here.

JOYE MURCHISON KELLY: Oh, yes.

ME: How long have you two been together?

KELLY: We’ve been together 16 wonderful years.

Joye & Jack Kelly at the July 2018 San Diego Comic-Con. Courtesy of the Kellys.

ME: Anyway, he’s funny. Jack is amazing. I like Jack. We talked on the phone when you weren’t around sometimes. He’s a funny man.

KELLY: Well, I’m not leaving him here! [laughter, applause] TRINA ROBBINS: I’m wondering if all the women here who are dressed like variations on Wonder Woman could all stand up so Joye can see, can see what an incredible influence she had fifty years ago. [they do so; applause] ME: How long did you know Jack before you told him you had written “Wonder Woman”?

KELLY: I really can’t remember. Maybe Jack remembers. [to husband ] How long did you know me before I talked about “Wonder Woman”?

Faster Than A Speeding Bulldog…

The Amazon may have been swifter than the Roman god Mercury—but could she outrace a whole horde of “Speed Maniacs from Mercury”? Script

by Joye Hummel, art by H.G. Peter, from Wonder Woman #26 (Nov.-Dec. 1947). Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]

JACK KELLY: About six months. [laughter]….

TR: Joye, I have been noticing your beautiful jewelry, so I want to give you my Wonder Woman bracelet. [applause] ME: Now, if you see any bullets coming your way… [laughter] Joye, do you want to add anything else?

KELLY: No, if I saw any bullets coming my way, I’d be gone. [laughter] Even with some of her limbs caught in bear traps, Wonder Woman could still fend off bullets with her metal bracelets. From Sensation Comics #43 (July 1945). Script by Joye Hummel; art by H.G. Peter.

Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

The First Amazon

33

JOYE HUMMEL MURCHISON KELLY Checklist [This checklist is adapted from the skeletal information in the Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, established by Dr. Jerry G. Bails, and viewable online at www.bailsproject.com (see ad below), combined with information from the online Grand Comics Database, which also relies in part on information gathered by Bails, as confirmed by his 1970s-80s correspondent Craig Delich. In point of fact, Kelly was legally “Joye Hummel” during the period of all or virtually all of her comics writing. Because her comics credits consist entirely of the scripting of “Wonder Woman” stories, the specific issues she is credited in the GCD as having written are noted in this checklist.]

Name & Vital Stats: Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly (b. 1924) – writer [also served in unofficial editorial capacity] Pen Names: All her stories were written under the same “Charles Moulton” byline that appeared on all “Wonder Woman” tales published during the 1940s; that was the pseudonym of WW co-creator Dr. William Moulton Marston, utilizing his own and All-American Comics, Inc., publisher M.C. Gaines’ middle names, even after Gaines sold the AA operation to National/DC proper in 1945.

Education: Katharine Gibbs School, New York City COMICBOOKS (U.S. Mainstream Publishers): DC Comics: [“Wonder Woman” stories in] Comic Cavalcade #11-13, 15, 18, 23, 29 (1945-49); Sensation Comics #41, 43, 48, 49, 52-55, 57, 59, 64, 65, 71-79, 81, 82, 85 (1945-49); Wonder Woman #12-21, 25-30 (1945-48). [NOTES: (a) In the WW title, Hummel did not always script all “WW” stories or chapters, particularly in the very late issues when the three-part-story format was abandoned. (b) The hardcover Wonder Woman Archives, Vol. 5-7, citing some “assistance on credits provided by Craig Delich,” list Dr. Marston as the writer of the “WW” adventures in Sensation Comics #52, 53, and 55, and Robert Kanigher as writer of those in Sensation Comics #41, 43, 48, & 49. Joyce’s own records, however, indicate otherwise.]

“The Menace Of The Rebel Manlings” Sometimes it must seem to modernday comics historians as if the above would make a fitting title for nearly any early “Wonder Woman” story. But scripter Joye Hummel and artist H.G. Peter turned out an exciting adventure with that specific title for Comic Cavalcade #18 (Dec. 1946-Jan. 1947).

Scan courtesy of Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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 Wonder Woman finds herself in a bind—as per usual—in Comic Cavalcade #15 (June-July 1946), in a tale scripted

by Joye Hummel & drawn

by H.G. Peter. Needless to say, since she can’t rip her magic lasso, she tears out the entire wooden wall! Thanks to Jim Kealy for the scan. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Don’t STEAL our Digital Editions!

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Art by John Romita.

Captain America TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

35

BARBARA FRIEDLANDER’s Love Affair With DC Comics On Being A Romance Writer & Editor— Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

I

by Richard J. Arndt

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Barbara Friedlander Bloomfield was a freelance writer and associate editor for DC editor Jack Miller and served as a sometime de facto editor on at least six romance titles for DC Comics between 1964 and 1970. She was also the co-creator (with Joe Orlando) of the comicbook series Swing with Scooter.

Following her comics career, she worked in the jewelry and antiques fields. In August 2018 she attended her first comics convention (TerrifiCon in Connecticut) and enjoyed talking to fans of Swing with Scooter, in particular. Because she used her maiden name “Friedlander” during her years in the comics field, we’ve employed that appellation in this interview, which was conducted between January 26 and February 1, 2018. Special thanks to Jacque Nodell, Jim Ludwig, and Bob Bailey for their help in supplying art and info to accompany this interview….

Barbara Friedlander Bloomfield and her son, Cliff Bloomfield, a few years back—juxtaposed with: (Below left:) The lead splash page from Girls’ Romances #127 (Sept.

1967), one of the issues in whose indicia she’s listed as full “editor”— though she suspects Jack Miller wrote this particular story. Artist unidentified. Thanks to BFB for this & the photo scan.

(Below right~:) Barbara scripted this tale from Girls’ Love Stories #152 (July 1970), with pencils by Werner Roth & inks by Jack Abel. Thanks to Jacque Nodell, and to Robin Snyder for the writer ID. [TM & © DC Comics.]

36

On Being A Romance Writer & Editor—Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

RICHARD ARNDT: It’s a pleasure to talk with you, Barbara. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

BARBARA FRIEDLANDER: I was a baby boomer, born on Sept.

27, 1945. I was born and raised in New York and I loved it there. It was very hard for me to leave it. My father had a hardware store on 6th Avenue and 52nd Street. That entire area is now built up. The building number was 1303, and that’s now a huge building that houses the garment workers’ union, I believe.

RA: What kind of education do you have?

FRIEDLANDER: I went to PS [Public School] 69 in the city. Its main claim to fame was that Bernard Baruch, the financier, also went to that school. I graduated from Julia Richman High School.

Then I went to Hunter College for a while, finally switching to taking night classes there. This was just after my father passed away and it was hard for me to think straight. So I decided I would work and go to school at night. I went to an employment agency and they got me several jobs. I really didn’t have any job skills at the time except that I could type and be a file clerk. The place that I eventually ended up was DC Comics.

RA: Outside of the fact that you needed a job, what attracted you to DC Comics? Were you a comics fan?

FRIEDLANDER: My introduction to comics was Archie Comics, Katy Keene, and Millie the Model. I loved pretty things, and those books had lots of that sort of thing. I never read Batman or Superman. I was surprised that those two titles were still being published. But I loved the romance books. That’s what got me interested.

I started out in the DC subscription department. That office included Mr. Liebowitz’s secretary. I also knew Irwin Donenfeld’s secretary.

I wrote a few stories as a freelancer and they liked them. It took a while, but after about a year of freelancing I was hired in editorial.

I was working, freelancing, and going to school, and then I got the

job at DC. I enjoyed it because I got to meet some very interesting people. I also began to know the staff on the other side of the office. People like Jack Miller, who became my mentor. I learned a lot from Jack.

RA: What sort of freelance work were you doing?

FRIEDLANDER: I was writing love stories for Jack Miller. I wrote the advice columns— including “Advice to the Lovelorn,” which featured advice to young girls on how to put on makeup, all kinds of things like that. It was what they called filler material, but a lot of that filler material that I was doing wasn’t necessarily in those DC romance titles before I started doing it.

Jack Miller The former DC editor and writer at Barbara’s wedding in May 1969.

Sadly, he died of cancer only a year later.

Thanks to BFB & Linedia Benaca.

I started doing the freelance work in 1964, and then I became a fulltime worker in 1965, and in 1966 I became an associate editor, working for Jack Miller in the romance books. I still have a wonderful caricature of me, drawn by Joe Orlando, which also features caricatures of nearly everybody who worked in the DC bullpen at the time. It’s just adorable and came as a complete surprise to me. He did it when I got the associate editor’s position.

RA: Do you remember the names of the other people in that caricature?

FRIEDLANDER: Sol Harrison and Jack are in there for sure. I think the rather heavy-set man is Julie Schwartz. The young girl isn’t anyone in particular. I think she represented the switchboard operators. There was also E. Nelson Bridwell, Bob Haney, Arnold Drake, and several other editors depicted there.

RA: Did you ever become a full editor?

FRIEDLANDER: No, my job title was always associate editor, but I did all the work of a regular editor. I wrote my books, did the art assignments and so on… that’s what I did. I’m listed as the editor

Archie, Katy, & Millie Barbara’s “introduction to comics” most likely came with earlier issues of these series than the ones depicted above; still, as a teenager years she still might’ve encountered the likes of Archie #140 (Sept. 1963), with cover pencils by Harry Lucey… Katy Keene #61 (Sept. ’61), art by Bill Woggon… and Millie the Model Comics #106 (Jan. 1962), drawn by Stan Goldberg. [Archie & Katy Keene covers TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.; Millie cover TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics

37

Joe Orlando was already a well-respected artist when he came to work for DC in the 1960s, but soon became the editor of DC’s most successful suspense comics, beginning with House of Mystery. He’s seen here penciling an issue of Daredevil for Marvel, circa 1964. Thanks to Shaun Clancy.

Venus Rising Orlando drew this cartoon of and for Barbara in 1966, upon her official promotion to associate editor of the romance comics. Thanks to BF. [Art © Estate of Joe Orlando.]

on a number of books. I don’t think I was ever listed as an associate editor, but that was my actual title. I think at some point the higher-ups at DC assumed that I was an actual editor. I can’t really explain that. That’s just the way it was.

He was a very interesting character. He was so ingrained there in the organization that he was just a permanent fixture. I don’t know how long he worked after I left DC but he was still there when I did leave.

RA: What can you tell us about the DC bullpen of the 1960s? Sad to say, there are not many people left who have direct knowledge of that period.

So many people—Irwin Hasen, Bob Haney, Arnold Drake, Carmine Infantino—so many, many people. The greatest authority on Superman there was a young man named E. Nelson Bridwell. He was the most complicated, quiet, nerdy person I ever met, but he was wonderful. He was just delightful. The office I ended up in I shared with Nelson and Jack Miller.

FRIEDLANDER: I knew Sol Harrison, Jack Schiff, Ira Schnapp, and Walter Hurlicheck. Walter was a letterer. I think he was also the fellow who escorted the young people who came to tour the offices. Ira was a letterer as well. Ira was ancient, an elderly person when I knew him. He’d worked at DC for years but before that he’d worked in the movies doing the lettering on movie posters.

He could tell you about all the movies that he made posters for.

I think Nelson may have had a nervous disorder, because he would make sounds, interesting sounds while he worked. He was so dedicated to Superman! He would carry a razorblade to edit

Three Memorable DC People-Plus!

Sol Harrison

Ira Schnapp

DC head of production, later vice president—and apparently the guy who came up with “go-go checks” circa 1966 (see pp. 39 & 48). Photo

by Bob Rozakis.

Major DC letterer, who designed some of its archetypal title logos.

Photo courtesy of his son; forwarded by Michael T. Gilbert.

Jack Schiff Longtime DC editor. Photo

by Jack Adler; courtesy of Todd Klein’s blog.

“Proofreading At Left, Lettering At Right” That’s how comics fan John Fahey labeled the above snapshot he took of part of DC’s production area during an office visit on December 29, 1964. This is the first time this photo has been reprinted since it first appeared in Alter Ego [Vol. 1.] #9 in 1965; it is reproduced from that issue. Sorry it didn’t repro better.

38

On Being A Romance Writer & Editor—Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

pages when he was working for Mort Weisinger. Mort used to torture the poor man! Mort was mean to a lot of people, but he had to be nice to me because I was just sort of an odd duck at the offices. I wasn’t a secretary and I didn’t report to him. Mort had a lovely-looking wife, so that wasn’t a factor. But I was a young woman and I was really no threat to him. I wasn’t going to take over anything that he believed was near and dear to him, so I was outside his domain of torture. But he tortured Nelson.

He was just not nice to him.

Mort was funny-looking. He’d work in his short-sleeved shirt and tie. Everyone at DC at the time dressed up. Mort would come into our office and lord it over poor Nelson. Or Nelson would have to go into his office. Mort would keep writers who came in for story conferences waiting for long periods of time, just because he could.

Power games, I guess. He was just not a nice

E. Nelson Bridwell

person in terms of dealing with his writers and artists. He was just mean.

When Julie Schwartz took over Mort’s duties, after Mort left, Julie was also overbearing but he wasn’t mean. At least, not in the way that Mort was mean. Julie wrote articles for Reader’s Digest on the side, in order to make extra money. I never read them myself so I don’t know what they were about, but I know he was doing that on a regular basis.

Mort Weisinger A photo of the Superman line editor, courtesy of Bill Schelly and the late Jerry Bails.

RA: I assume he wasn’t using his own name, or someone would have mentioned that in other interviews and articles about him. I certainly didn’t know about Schwartz writing for Reader’s Digest.

FRIEDLANDER: Possibly so. I think he came up with obscure things.

The Superman line’s assistant editor, later a reprint editor and writer for DC Comics.

RA: Oh! Maybe he wasn’t credited at all. I recall Reader’s Digest having these little tidbits of information—sometimes a paragraph and sometimes just a line or two--that would appear at the end of an article to fill up the space at the bottom of a page.

Perhaps that’s what we’re talking about.

Julius Schwartz in a photo taken by fan/visitor John Fahey on Dec. 29, 1964.

Reprinted from A/E V1#9. Roy Thomas suggests: “When Barbara speaks of Julie writing about ‘obscure things’ for Reader’s Digest, I can’t help wondering if perhaps she’s momentarily confused him with Mort Weisinger, who definitely did write that kind of column for the magazine. Not that Julie didn’t know plenty of obscure facts on his own!”

FRIEDLANDER: Possibly.

Julie was a much more pleasant person to the staff, in general, than Mort ever was.

RA: Roy Thomas, the editor of Alter Ego, replaced Nelson Bridwell as Mort Weisinger’s assistant for a two-week period in 1965, and he remembers sharing an office with you for that brief period. Do you remember him?

FRIEDLANDER: It’s possible he’d remember me. I had bright red hair at the time. Natural redhead. I was very young and I was pretty. To go back fifty years and remember someone who was there for only a short period of time—I have to really stretch my memory and I’m sorry to say I just don’t remember.

RA: Well, after working with Mort for two weeks, he left to take a job with Stan Lee. Apparently working for Stan was a lot more fun than working for Mort. Mort was none too happy when he found out about it.

Irwin Donenfeld DC’s co-publisher through the latter 1960s (until shortly after Kinney purchased the company) is seen here as if giving the fish-eye to a Friedlander-scripted splash page from Girls’ Love Stories #145 (Aug. 1969). He agreed to give her a page-rate raise—but not one for her staff job, he said, because she was a woman! Pencils by Ric Estrada; inks by George Roussos. Thanks to Jacque Nodell for the scan, and to Robin Snyder for the writing credit. [TM & © DC Comics.]

FRIEDLANDER: Mort probably threw him out of the office or shot him with a bow and arrow! [laughs] People took a lot of guff from editors in those days because they really needed the work.

Bob Haney used to come in from upstate New York some place and hammer out scripts. Bob was a very nice person. Very smart, very clever.

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics

39

I loved Arnold Drake. He was a very sweet man, particularly to me. [laughs] I was a nice Jewish girl! They just treated me very nicely. Arnold wore black glasses over a little nose. He was charming. As a matter of fact, I had a girlfriend who was moving to Switzerland, and she gave Arnold her pet, for his little girl. That’s how close we were, in terms of friendship.

I can tell you a funny story about Irwin Donenfeld. It’s kind of the be-all and end-all story about women in business, particularly in the 1960s. I went in to ask him for a raise. Irwin said to me, “Barbara, you live with your mother. You don’t have a family.

These men working here have families. I’ll raise your page rate for writing, but I’m not giving you a raise for your editorial work, because you don’t have a family to support.” I walked out and realized that he was right. I didn’t have a family and I was still living at home. That was the mindset of the time and I bought it! [laughs] He was absolutely correct, but it didn’t make me feel better about not earning more money. The truth is that, if I did have a family to support, I still wouldn’t have gotten the raise, because he would then have pointed out that I had extra income from my husband working. That’s just the way it worked back then, the way they thought. Either way, you weren’t getting a raise! [laughs] I was also friendly, now that I think of it, with Irwin’s daughter.

I don’t remember her name after all these years, but I do remember that she introduced me to steak tartar. I think she was a law student and we went out to lunch together on occasion. She was a very pleasant young lady. I don’t think she wanted anything to do with comicbooks.

RA: I suspect she looked at comics and realized that there wasn’t much of a future in that for her, especially if she was studying to be a lawyer.

FRIEDLANDER: Probably. At the same time, my position at DC was unusual. I was surprised to get an editorial position. I asked them, “Are you really going to make me an editor?” and they told me that I would be an associate editor. I said “OK, what does that mean?” They told me the job requirements and I, of course, said OK. Being an associate editor gave me the chance to develop characters that I wanted to develop and see in the comics.

I loved old movies and soap operas, and that was how I approached romance stories. I tried very hard not to talk down to the readers but to raise their level of awareness.

RA: What did the job of associate editor at DC entail? At Marvel, they had assistant editors, but from what those who had those jobs have told me, they were mostly involved in proofreading and art corrections, not actual editorial decisions.

FRIEDLANDER: An associate editor at DC was essentially doing the same job as an editor. You assigned artwork to artists, you developed characters and storylines. As I said, I created a lot of the “filler” material, like the beauty and self-help columns. Essentially what Jack Miller, my boss, was doing, except that Jack was the main force and I was second. I was a lousy proofreader, so I’m glad I wasn’t doing that!

I came up with a lot of ideas for the romance books and I enjoyed doing them. I was more interested in creating a “grownup,” sophisticated aspect that I thought young girls could relate to, so I created the “Mad Mad Modes for Moderns” pieces. I would go through woman’s magazines and pick out clothing and styles which I thought our readers could relate to. The colors were indicated by myself and the artist. These were almost always done by either Tony Abruzzo or Jay Scott Pike, who would translate them into their own magic. Scott was my go-to artist. Both his and Tony’s artwork was superb. Scott signed all of his drawings, although Tony did not.

Keep On Throbbing One of the many covers on which Barbara F. played “associate editor” to Jack Miller’s “editor” was that of Heart Throbs #105 (Dec. 1966-Jan. 1967).

Art by Jay Scott Pike. Thanks to BFB. For its first 46 issues, Heart Throbs had been published by Busy Arnold’s Quality Comics Group. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Jack Miller and I wrote many of our romance stories together.

We also wrote three screen treatments together. For the screen treatments, we’d go to my apartment after work. My mother would fix us dinner and we’d knock out those scenes together. We never sold anything. We did have an agent in London for a while, but nothing sold.

I actually went to London when I was 20 or 21, when I was a real puppy. I went there because Jack’s and my screenplay agent put me in touch with a person from the London Times who was writing a piece on romance for a Valentine’s Day story. I sat in the Parkway Hotel with him and talked during tea about Jack’s and my unproduced screenplay, which was called Love Is the Enemy. The article appeared in the Times, but, unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of it.

RA: We’ve mentioned Jack Miller several times so far. Since he was your boss and mentor, what can you tell us about him?

FRIEDLANDER: Jack was the editor of the romance books—there were five of them—and he also edited some super-hero tiles. I had nothing to do with those, but I did work on the romance titles— Secret Hearts, Girls’ Romance, Girls’ Love Stories, Heart Throbs, Young

40

On Being A Romance Writer & Editor—Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

off. It was hard not to laugh since the rabbi had an accent and was explaining why he couldn’t be in the room with us, but it reminded everyone of a super-hero or some supernatural being proclaiming from somewhere over our heads. It was both funny and sad at the same time. The way it came off was not worthy of anybody, let alone Jack Miller.

The funeral was ridiculous.

How do you send somebody off like that? Jack certainly didn’t get his just reward.

Jack’s daughter and I were very close at the time and she wouldn’t go to the cemetery.

She stayed in the car with my husband and myself.

RA: In 1968, several of the romance titles were taken over by Dick Giordano and Joe Orlando.

Was that before or after Jack’s editorship?

“Mad Mad Modes For Moderns” Barbara launched this “filler” series to keep the romance comics’ readers up to date on the latest fashions.

Exact issue & artist uncertain. Thanks to BFB & RA. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Romance, and Young Love. I never wrote the super-hero material because I never knew the ins and outs of those storylines.

Jack continued to work on both the romance and super-hero titles until he left DC. He wasn’t an editor anymore, but I think he still continued to write for DC. He was very sick at the time with cancer. It just riddled his body, and about a year later he ended up dying from his illness. At the time I was married and we visited him in the hospital.

Jack had the most amazing funeral. It was the funniest funeral I’ve ever been to. Mind you, Jack was a very sophisticated person. He had his suits tailored for him. He smoked Players. He was an Anglophile.

He read everything. He had extensive knowledge about music and paintings. So his wife Helen arranged a service officiated by The Next Brave And The Bold a religious person. I don’t know Team-Up: Deadman & Scooter? if you’re familiar with Jewish Jack Miller, besides editing and writing ceremonies, but if you are a Kanan, for DC’s romance comics, also scripted which is a rabbi whose parents are super-hero and other tales. His apex, alive, then you’re not allowed to surely, came with the “Deadman” series see a dead person and cannot go in Strange Adventures in the latter 1960s: to a cemetery, unless it’s for your he and artist Neal Adams inherited that immediate family. So we’re all at ongoing feature on the heels of the Jack’s funeral and it’s packed. All origin story by scribe Arnold Drake and penciler Carmine Infantino, and quickly the DC staff was there because made Strange Adventures one of DC’s Jack was greatly respected. But “must-read” titles of that era for older his funeral service, overseen by readers (and for the competition at the rabbi, was piped in on the PA Marvel). Thanks to BFB for this ad, which system because the rabbi wasn’t juxtaposed Deadman and the Swing with allowed in the same room as Jack’s Scooter mag that his associate editor body. I’m positive that if Jack had Barbara Friedlander had co-created with been alive to attend that funeral artist Joe Orlando, and possibly Miller. he would have laughed his head [TM & © DC Comics.]

FRIEDLANDER: That was after. Late 1968 or early 1969.

When Jack left, I was largely in

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics

charge of the books we’d done together, and I was not comfortable with that. That’s because I’d always looked up to Jack. Jack was a master of his stories. He could pound them out. I had a lot more difficulty with that. Between the two of us, we got all the issues written. I don’t recall any other writers doing stories for us during our time on the books together. We had many different artists, but the two of us wrote everything.

RA: That work is largely uncredited, because up to about 1970 or thereabouts there were no formal credits given in the anthology books, regardless of genre. The artist might sign their name somewhere on the splash page, but the writer was simply unknown.

FRIEDLANDER: Yes. [Jay] Scott Pike, when he did the “Mad Mad Modes for Moderns” strips, did sign them. Tony Abruzzo did not but Scott did.

As I said earlier, I wrote all the “Mad Mad Modes for Moderns.” I did that because I loved doing the fashion material.

That was my meat at the time. I also did a lot of the “Lovelorn” stuff, but Jack wrote a lot of that as well. You had to interpret and answer the letters that came in so that no one got hurt. They were generic and white bread by the time the kids read them, although they certainly weren’t when we got them! Still, I hope they had some positive effect on the children. I genuinely believe that, when Jack or I wrote the advice columns, the primary goal was meant to soothe and help. They were fillers but they were enjoyable fillers.

Absolutely!

pages for all the romance publishers of the period, including DC. Colletta would take care to ink the main figures—especially the female figures—but quite a number of artists, now largely unknown, worked in his studio.

FRIEDLANDER: That’s right. All of the art for these stories had to be done in a beautiful way. Done in a more feminine style than the rest of the work coming out, because the romance titles were appealing to an entirely different audience. Of course, our artists had to be able to draw not only pretty girls but fashion as well.

They had to keep up with fashion. Some artists were very good at that. Some artists simply couldn’t handle it. All artists can draw clothes, but drawing fashion is an entirely different thing.

That’s what I always saw in Scott Pike. He knew what a pretty girl should look like and what she should be wearing. Tony [Abruzzo] was the same way. That’s why I admired the two of them so much. Those two really knew what fashion was, what young girls liked to see, and how to make something romantic. They drew pretty girls doing pretty, pretty things! If you couldn’t do the sex stuff, you had to know how to do the pretty stuff. That’s what I tried to aim for—the romantic pretty stuff. The stand-alone stories were romantic. The serials I wrote were soap operas because I loved soap operas, but the stories were romantic and pretty soap operas.

We used John Rosenberger, who’d also worked for Archie, and many of his ladies looked like either Betty or Veronica! He’d been doing those characters successfully for so long that, if he was drawing similar characters for us, it was probably inevitable that some of them would look like Betty or Veronica. John’s work didn’t have the edge that I was looking for as an editor. They were wonderful for what they were. Well-drawn. And he was a wonderful person.

Winslow Mortimer was around, and I’m sure he worked with Jack on a lot of stories. Gene Colan did a lot of work in the early years that I was there. Mike Sekowsky did a lot of work. Mostly penciling.

RA: Sekowsky was also doing Wonder Woman at much the same time, during that period when she wasn’t wearing her costume and the book was something of an adventure/fashion-plate title.

FRIEDLANDER: Yes, that’s right. Well, Mike was working for us.

Dick Giordano did a lot of work for us. Inking and penciling. He was later an editor. He did a lot of covers. Gorgeous covers. I think he inked Sekowsky’s work quite a bit.

RA: When Giordano had been the editor at Charlton, he’d done nearly all of their romance covers.

FRIEDLANDER: I wish I’d known more about the Charlton titles at the time. I knew about the DC books because that’s where I worked, but I hadn’t actually read romance comics all that much when I was younger and didn’t really know anything about Charlton’s output.

RA: Vince Colletta did a lot of romance work for Charlton. In fact, I think for a time he had a studio of various artists that did an enormous amount of work for romance

Dick Giordano at the 1971 New York comics convention. Thanks to Mike Zeck & Pedro Angosto.

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One Down On The Cover—Two To Go, Inside!

Dick Giordano’s cover for Heart Throbs #115 (Aug.-Sept. 1968), which featured the 14th episode of the Friedlander-conceived continuing series “3 Girls—Their Lives… Their Loves.” Thanks to BFB; thanks also to Jacque Nodell. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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On Being A Romance Writer & Editor—Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

Jay Scott Pike was one of Friedlander’s favorite artists on the romance titles. At left is an apparent introductory page to one of them, bylined by the illustrator. Thanks to BFB. [TM & © DC Comics.]

I did write Swing with Scooter with Jack Miller at this time as well.

Joe Orlando did the pencils for the book, although I don’t know who the inker was. [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: The Grand Comics Database lists Mike Esposito.] Scooter was my baby!

Joe made the characters come to life.

Jack oversaw everything because he had more experience in this genre. I know that I co-wrote at least the first four or so issues. [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Barbara is listed in the GCD as the co-writer with Jack Miller, though with a question mark, through #11.] I came up with the title. It wasn’t a straight romance title. Scooter was from London and came over to the U.S. to escape his fans. That aspect of it got lost over time as he morphed into an Archie-type character. It wasn’t, at least when I was doing the book, drawn like Archie, although it later on may have been.

RA: When Henry Scarpelli started drawing it with #14, it was definitely done in an Archie art-style. You’re also listed on the GCD as a writer for Leave It to Binky, but, oddly enough, for Swedish reprint titles, not the

Because everything you could possibly use that had an edge was cut out by censorship.

Many of the problems we wrote about were silly problems.

Not real-life stuff. When I created and wrote the serials “Reach for Happiness” and “Three Girls—Their Lives… Their Loves,” I tried very hard to give them a richer, more sophisticated plotline, even though it was still nearly completely vanilla. To establish the idea or notion that these things could happen in real life. It may not happen to you, but you should read about it because it might, and the result would be kind of sexy in an under-toned kind of way. That type of storytelling was what I tried to do.

My stories aren’t usually credited, but I can often tell by the names I used for characters if it was my story or Jack’s. I also used pen names from time to time. Jill Taylor, for example, was always me. I created that pen name. Scott Pike created the drawn face of Jill Taylor used in the comics. Other pen names were ones that both Jack and I used.

RA: Were you “Cookie” or “Barbara Miles”?

FRIEDLANDER: No, not Cookie. There were times when I was Barbara Miles and times when Jack was. There was also a “Feature Reporter Mary Marx” filler series that both Jack and I wrote.

John Rosenberger Photo courtesy of Roger Hill. HIs study of Rosenberger appeared in A/E #23.

I’m Confessin’ That You Wrote This…

Jacque Nodell’s researches credit Barbara F. with the story “Confessions” in Girls’ Love Stories #147 (June 1970). Art by John Rosenberger; inks by Vince Colletta. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics

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at super-hero comics, but he didn’t have the feel for romance work. It is not the same thing, at all. Carmine could think in many directions but he couldn’t draw that way. He wanted to control all the covers, but he didn’t do any romance covers when I was there.

When Jack and I were there, we decided who would do the covers. Jay Scott Pike did most of my covers. That was because Jay could create women that were ethereally beautiful.

Not just good-looking but good-looking in a romantic way. Jay’s range went from ethereal romantic for the comics to very sexy work for outside projects.

RA: I think after he left comics, he devoted his time to pin-up art and calendar art. I have a book of his from that period—The Pin-Up Art of Jay Scott Pike, Vol. 1—that came out in 2006. Just beautiful work.

“Jill Taylor Was Always Me” Barbara reveals that she wrote all the “Jill Taylor” columns for DC’s love titles. Not sure of the particular issue this one appeared in, but she says the art spot is by Jay Scott Pike.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

FRIEDLANDER: Jay was just amazing. He and Tony Abruzzo were the two main romance artists when I was there. Tony did the majority of my “Mad, Mad Modes for Moderns” pieces.

I loved doing those. It may have been very girly for me, but Tony did a great job of capturing

English language volume.

FRIEDLANDER: I don’t remember ever writing Binky. It may be that one of my “Scooter” stories was reprinted in a Swedish Binky title. It’s also possible that someone in Sweden redid one of my “Scooter” stories and transformed it into a “Binky” story. I would suspect something like that happened for the reference you mention.

RA: Did you write anything for Date with Debbi?

FRIEDLANDER: No, that wouldn’t have been me. It’s possible that a story of mine ended up there as a redone story, with redrawn clothing. I didn’t write for that title, however.

RA: The last credit that you’re listed for in CBD is a story for Falling in Love that came out in 1972.

FRIEDLANDER: That would have been me, even though I’d quit freelancing in 1970 or so. Falling in Love was a title I did write for.

That story may have been in inventory for a while. That would have been for Joe Orlando. I liked working with Joe. After Jack left, Joe was the lead editor that I usually worked with.

Now, when Carmine Infantino became the art director, he shared the office with myself and Nelson. I don’t think he relinquished the art director job. I think they just kept adding things to his position until he was the full editor-in-chief. He had a finger in a lot of pies. I believe he was over-extended. He had too many job titles and couldn’t cover what each of them needed all of the time.

He couldn’t do all of that stuff, but what he did do he did extremely well. Like Cleopatra—“How did she do it? She did it well!”

Carmine was a wonderful artist. You can’t take that away from him. His covers were absolutely magnificent! They were works of art. I don’t think anyone would tell you differently. He was able to create beautiful artwork, but he tended to take on too much responsibility for himself. He tried to do work for the romance books, but it was way outside his normal parameters. He was great

Swing With Scooter One of a number of “Scooter” stories Barbara co-wrote with editor Jack Miller—this being from Swing with Scooter #2 (Aug.-Sept. 1966). Art by Joe Orlando & Mike Esposito. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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On Being A Romance Writer & Editor—Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

Binky & Buzzy—Meet Barbara?

Leave It to Binky and the hero of the defunct title Buzzy—both teen creations dating back to the 1940s—were on their last four-color legs by 1970, but Barbara reportedly happened along in time to script these tales from, respectively, Leave It to Binky #71 (Feb.-March ’70; art attributed to Winslow Mortimer) and the rechristened Binky #75 (Oct-Nov. ’70; artist unknown). She doesn’t specifically recall doing these stories, however. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]

the outfits. Tony was just wonderful.

RA: Tony was someone who didn’t appear much outside of the romance books, to my knowledge, at least in the years we’re talking about.

FRIEDLANDER: You’re right. Tony, when I was coming up, rarely did anything but inside, interior romance pieces. He didn’t do many covers. Jay and Tony were so nice and so creative. I can’t say anything bad about them. They were at the top of their game, when I was there.

RA: When you first started doing romance work, in 1964, that would have been the tail end of when John Romita and Gene Colan were doing romance work for DC. Did you actually work with them?

FRIEDLANDER: I don’t think I did. Jack did. He worked with them quite a lot. Gene Colan did a lot of work on Falling in Love.

This Must Be A Reprint!

Barbara Friedlander may or may not have written this story that appeared in Falling in Love #129 (Feb. 1972); in any event, according to the GCD, it was merely reprinted there from Girls’ Romances #127 (Sept. 1967)—although with wardrobe and dialogue changes. See the original version on p.35.

Artist unknown. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics

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been Jack’s idea. He liked nurse stories and stewardess stories. I stayed away from those kind of stories. They weren’t in my wheelhouse at the time.

Carmine Infantino

RA: Do you remember Arthur Peddy or Bernard Sachs? Both of them ended their comic book careers around that time. They were doing quite a lot of romance work up through 1965-1966, then left for advertising work and never looked back.

FRIEDLANDER: Good for them. I honestly can’t remember them, though I do remember Bernie Sachs’ name. If I saw a picture of either of them, it might jog a memory, but it wouldn’t be more than “Yes, I saw him.” I don’t remember working with either of them.

Even if they were still working at DC when I was freelancing, if I wasn’t in editorial yet there’d have been no reason or maybe even opportunity to meet them.

RA: Bernie Sachs was also inking the Justice League of America at the time. Am I correct in remembering that you wrote the “20 Miles to Heartbreak” serial that Alex Toth illustrated in late 1969-early 1970?

You’re credited as the writer when the serial was reprinted in 1977. I didn’t read a lot of romance comics back in the day because I was only 12 or 13 and nobody I knew brought them, but recently I’ve been reading

Carmine Infantino By the end of the 1960s, he had become DC’s editorial director, on his way to a stint as publisher. Also seen is a scan of the original Infantino art for a DC love-comics cover—though whether or not it was ever used is not known. Thanks to Mark Evanier’s blog www.newsfromme.com for the photo, and to dealer Mike Burkey (visit his www.romitaman.com site) for the art scan. [Art TM & © DC Comics.]

RA: Both John and Gene quit DC and went over to Marvel in 1965. Gene used the pseudonym of “Adam Austin” for a while, to hide the fact that he was working for both companies for a period of time.

FRIEDLANDER: When Jack took over the romance books, he was originally working with more artists than later on. Certainly more than I was. He used John Romita a lot. I think they [Romita and Colan] went over to Marvel because they could be more creative there. The romance department at DC was a small department compared to the other genres, and neither John nor Gene was getting a lot of work outside the romance books at DC. Certainly no super-hero work that I’m aware of. Of course, they were both gone when I got the associate editor job.

RA: John Romita was doing a nice series about a young nurse for Young Love. It was reprinted a few years back in a Showcase Presents volume.

I think Robert Kanigher wrote the series.

FRIEDLANDER: Oh, but that would have

Tony Abruzzo was, perhaps second only to Jay Scott Pike, Barbara Friedlander’s go-to artist for romance work. Seen here is his splash for a story in Young Love #56 (Aug. 1966). Thanks to Jacque Nodell. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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On Being A Romance Writer & Editor—Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

some of them from pre-Code comics, and I’ve also focused on the comics of the late 1960s and 1970s because there are actually some good stories in there and some absolutely gorgeous art. Of course, that particular story was done by Alex Toth and I really liked his artwork anyway, even back then. He was also drawing Hot Wheels and various mystery and war stories and his style was pretty recognizable, so I followed his work, regardless of where it went.

FRIEDLANDER: I think I did. Without the Alex Toth comic right in front of me, I can’t be certain.

I think that story came out after I’d left DC editorial. I left in late 1969 or 1970. At that point, of course, I had no control over who did the artwork. When I did, I liked Jay Scott Pike to do the covers. I left because there was a lot of change going on in the office. I just walked out. They called me to come back—told me they would forgive and forget my leaving so abruptly, but I didn’t want to.

I did a little more freelance work for a while after I left, but only for about a year. That was for Joe Orlando, who’d officially taken over the romance titles when Jack Miller left. The reality was that I was doing a lot of the work on them, though. Joe was a friend of mine, so I felt comfortable with him. Joe was good with anthology books. He worked with Mad magazine, too.

RA: He also had been an artist at EC Comics in 1950s.

FRIEDLANDER: Joe was a very capable guy. Joe did a book for Nelson and Jack called The Inferior Five, which didn’t stay around for long, but I liked the book. It was an anti-super-hero book because the heroes were klutzes. Very nerdy heroes, or anti-heroes, or whatever you’d want to call them.

Joe loved that kind of satire. Just loved it, because it was the same type of work that he’d done at Mad. Joe told me a story once that, when he was on the staff of Mad magazine, the staff took a vacation together so that they could all visit the only subscriber they had in the nation of Haiti. So the entire staff of Mad was going to Haiti to get that one subscriber in the country to sign up for a new subscription. That was their motive in going there. It was a joke motive.

Anyway, they got there and got into a taxi. Now Papa Doc Duvalier, a real violent dictator, was running the country at the time with an iron fist. Papa Doc’s security force, who were called the Tonton Macoute, stopped their cabdriver. In the trunk of the cab were all these anti-Duvalier signs. The Tonton Macoute hauled the driver away and they never saw him again. When they realized that this was serious and was not going to be a fun trip, they left Haiti right away. Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoute were killing people right and left. When the Mad staffers saw how the driver was handled as the Tonton Macoute pulled him out of the car, everything stopped being fun. It certainly put a big damper on the original purpose.

RA: We mentioned him earlier, but what can you tell us about Robert Kanigher? He wrote a fair number of romance stories during this time period as well. I know he shared an office with Julie Schwartz, but that was when they were both editors.

FRIEDLANDER: Yes, they shared an office. I think Kanigher did war books and maybe Wonder Woman. I think it was after Kanigher was fired as an editor that [George] Kashdan took over the war books.

RA: Joe Kubert took them over originally, although Murray Boltinoff worked on the war books as well. Kanigher had some sort of nervous

Alex Toth One of the acknowledged comicbook greats. He penciled, Vince Colletta inked, and Barbara Friedlander wrote the multi-part romance serial “20 Miles to Heartbreak.” This installment appeared in Young Love #79 (March-April 1970). In her “Sequential Crush” blog from which this image was taken, love-comics expert Jacque Nodell notes that the serial, in accordance with the times, displayed “overtones of equality and social justice.” [TM & © DC Comics.]

breakdown or an illness of some kind and lost his editorial job.

FRIEDLANDER: It’s possible. I don’t remember that. I understood that he lost his job because he was not well, but I don’t remember it all that well.

RA: Although Kanigher had been fired from his editorial position, he worked as a freelancer at DC for nearly two more decades. Something apparently similar to what happened with both Jack Miller and George Kashdan when they lost their editorial jobs.

FRIEDLANDER: You had a lot to do in those editorial jobs. You had to be pretty strong to juggle everything.

RA: The impression that I’ve gotten from people was that Kanigher liked writers and was actually quite supportive of them, but, with the exception of Joe Kubert, he didn’t like artists at all and treated them quite badly while he was an editor. Not as bad as Weisinger, but not good, either.

FRIEDLANDER: I would have to agree with you. Do you remember Sugar ‘n’ Spike?

RA: Yes, Sheldon Mayer. In fact, I have the Archives volume of the first

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics

47

From INFERIOR FIVE #6 (Jan.-Feb. 1968) on sale Nov. 1967: In the doorway are editor Jack Miller with his assistant Barbara Friedlander and his boss “I.D.” Big Boss (Irwin Donenfeld). From left to right at the table: war comics editor Bob Kanigher, Superman editor Mort Weisinger with his super-cape, George Kashdan with foot in mouth, E. Nelson Bridwell with Murray Boltinoff behind him and Bat-editor Julius Schwartz about to get splashed by editor Jack Schiff.

I’ve Got A Secret The cover of a Friedlander-edited romance mag: Secret Hearts #144 (June 1970). Art by John Celardo. Thanks to BFB. [TM & © DC Comics.]

ten issues or so.

FRIEDLANDER: Irwin Donenfeld called me into his office and said, “I want to send you upstate—you can take your mother with you—which tells you how young I was—to Sheldon’s. You’re going to spend time with Sheldon and learn the ropes from him. So I did. [laughs] THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH IN 1968: Editorial Director Carmine Infantino is in the doorway with camera-shy Steve Ditko. The editors left to right are: Mike Sekowsky also avoiding the camera, Jack Miller (whose books WONDER WOMAN and METAL MEN Mike will inherit in 1969), war comics editor Joe Kubert, Mort, Nelson, Murray and Julie are the same; Dick Giordano gets a foot in his mouth and Joe Orlando is about to splatter Julie Schwartz.

The DC Crunch-For-Lunch Bunch (Top of page:) At upper left of this panel depicting DC’s editorial staff as of 1967, Barbara appears with her editor/boss Jack Miller and DC co-publisher Irwin Donenfeld (drawn as super-short, which he wasn’t). This image appeared in the parody comic Inferior Five #6 (Feb. 1968); script by E. Nelson Bridwell, pencils by Mike Sekowsky, inks

by Mike Esposito. Jack Schiff, though, had actually retired in the spring of ’67. Thanks to Douglas Jones (a.k.a. “Gaff”) for supplying this compare-and-contrast page he put together, including his own typeset comments and identifications—though it should be noted that another source reverses the IDs of editors Schiff and Kashdan.

(Bottom:) Some time back, “Gaff” re-did aspects of that IF #6 panel on his own to reflect a slightly altered editorial staff of 1968, as per his notes below it. Among other things, Jack Miller has been moved to the table in this rendition, utilizing a drawing Gaff lifted from earlier in the issue. Thanks for sharing, old buddy! [TM & © DC Comics.]

My mother went with me, screaming all the way. We met Sheldon and his wife. His wife was making cosmetics out of natural products. After a while, that sort of thing became very popular. Organic makeup.

Now, I learned a lot from Sheldon Mayer. Unlike the other DC editors, Sheldon’s Sugar ‘n’ Spike was a comic I actually did read. They were adorable babies! I loved being there. Learning from the master. Katy Keene was another book that I loved.

RA: That was a Bill Woggon book from Archie Comics. You’d get along well with Trina Robbins. She’s a huge Katy Keene fan. She liked doing those paper-doll cut-outs.

FRIEDLANDER: I remember those! I had those, too.

RA: We’ve talked a little bit about Sol Harrison. A lot of the younger men working at DC were terrified of him.

FRIEDLANDER: He and Jack Adler worked together. I’m not sure doing exactly what. Jack, I think, was a colorist

48

On Being A Romance Writer & Editor—Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

for the covers. Sol was the production head, I think. Sol may have scared the young men there, but he was so nice to me. He would come up with ideas all the time. Once he came up to me and said, “You know what we should put up on the top of your covers? We’re going to put that checkerboard across the top.” They were already doing that with the super-hero comics. Sol was the mind behind the checkerboard comic tops. Do you remember those?

RA: Sure, they were called the “go-go checks”!

FRIEDLANDER: He put those up on top of the romance books because he believed that everybody would see that when they were flipping through the comics on the spinner racks and know it was a DC romance title.

He also told me that he’d gotten me an interview with Coty Cosmetics. I went over to their offices, which were on 9th or 10th Avenue at the time. I spent a couple of sessions with them because we put their cosmetics in the books. It wasn’t an easy task on their part, getting the right shade for different women’s makeup. Sol thought that romance comics and makeup should be linked. He was very enthusiastic about some things. Later on, after Warner took over DC and the offices were in Rockefeller Center, wasn’t he made some kind of associate?

RA: Did you know Jack Schiff? He was an editor there who either retired or was let go sometime before Mort Weisinger left DC. FRIEDLANDER: I remember the name, but I think he was gone before I was on editorial. I seem to remember that Mort Weisinger was fired. They said he retired but I think he was asked to leave.

Marvel was threatening DC in sales. Plus their artwork in their books was much more exciting than what was appearing in the DC comics. Marvel’s artwork was just phenomenal. They were taking artists from DC—Gil Kane, John Romita, Gene Colan—who’d had problems at DC and were giving them this freedom at Marvel that the rigid structure at DC just wouldn’t give them. Those Marvel books were selling!

RA: Do you remember George Kashdan? He was an editor there and, like Jack Miller and Robert Kanigher, after he either quit or was let go from his editor’s job, continued to write stories for DC for many years.

FRIEDLANDER: I remember a Kashdan, but I thought his name was Bernie. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: According to Jim Amash’s interview with George Kashdan that was serialized beginning in A/E #91, George’s brother Bernard “worked in the business department” of DC Comics for some years and suggested in 1947 that George, fresh out of college, try writing scripts for them.] The politics at DC were very

RA: Actually he was made President of DC Comics for four or five years, until, I think, he retired.

FRIEDLANDER: I went to see him after I left DC. He was a Vice-President or something at that time. I was a nice Jewish girl, had my baby daughter with me, and he was just delighted to see me. He was a very nice man to me. But I have to agree, he could be very caustic to everybody else. [laughs] RA: Except for secretaries, there probably weren’t a lot of women working for DC at the time.

FRIEDLANDER: Oh, yes, there were. Maybe not in editorial, but everybody on the switchboard, handling all the phone calls, was female. And there was a whole other section of DC that nobody ever talks about, which was the distribution department. There were a lot of women working there. DC distributed their own magazines and comics—also magazines from other companies. I think they distributed Playboy for a while.

RA: That’s true. They distributed Marvel Comics for about a decade.

FRIEDLANDER: Possibly. That I didn’t know about. But when I started and was doing clerical work, I used to have to go over to the distributors’ offices and it was always freezing there. They had to keep it very cool for the computers of the day.

Distribution was on one side of the offices and the comics section on the other.

The distribution offices were not only freezing, but they were huge! Nobody from the comics side ever went there, however, unless you had to deliver something. The clerical department handled nearly everything between the two sides.

Maybe They Lived in Apartment 3G? Two more pages from the “3 Girls—Their Lives… Their Loves” ongoing series: the cover of Heart Throbs #112 (Feb.-March 1968), with art by Jay Scott Pike… and the first interior splash of Heart Throbs #117 (Dec. 1968Jan. 1969), drawn by Dick Giordano. Thanks to BFB & Jacque Nodell, respectively. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics

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Jazzy Johnny Romita went from producing beautifully drawn but tepid DC romance covers like that of Young Love #46 (Nov.-Dec. 1964) to his very first cover for modern-day Marvel, Daredevil #12 (Jan. 1966), albeit reportedly with an inking touch-up by Vince Colletta. But when Stan Lee revived the romance genre in 1969, Romita could even put plenty of action into this color prelim for a My Love cover… though this layout doesn’t seem to have been used (with or without the purloined bra that some office jokester added)—assuming Romita did draw this prelim, as the dealer selling it thought. Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for the published covers, and to dealer Anthony Snyder (www.anthonyscomicbookart.com) for the prelim. The photo is from the 1969 Fantastic Four Annual.

[Cover art TM & © by DC Comics & Marvel Characters, Inc., respectively.]

destructive. You could begin to doubt yourself because there was so much one-upmanship going on. If you work in an office for long enough, you learn the politics of the place. I started on the other side, in clerical, at DC and I came in one day when I’d started in clerical and a woman told me, “You know you’re late.” I replied, “Please, don’t count the freckles on my face.” Then I sat down. You can draw your own conclusions. I was late getting back from lunch.

RA: Do you remember Joe Kubert?

FRIEDLANDER: I remember Joe Kubert. He was rather short. A nice man.

He drew war books, I think.

RA: He had an editorial job, replacing Bob Kanigher, where he was only in the office for two or three days a week and the rest of the time he was home, drawing.

FRIEDLANDER: Huh. Good deal. Different editors did things differently.

All of them worked different times, different ways. Joe and Carmine called their books “monthly,” but they were actually eight issues a year with a couple of giant reprint books taking up the rest of the schedule. However the romance books, when I was there, were monthly or bi-monthly. Most were monthly. There might have been one or two which were bi-monthly.

Most of the romance titles I worked on didn’t start out at DC. They were picked up from other companies, like Crestwood and Quality. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon started Young Romance in the 1940s.

RA: For some reason, for many years DC hid, or appeared to try to hide, the fact that they even published romance comics. Whether they were home-grown titles or acquired from other companies, up to about 1963 or so, DC published their romance titles under a subsidiary company’s name, with no DC logo on them at all. Possibly because so many of them

Maybe Romance Went To Her Head?

The Toth/Colletta cover of Secret Hearts #142 (March 1970). Thanks to BFB. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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On Being A Romance Writer & Editor—Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

had been acquired from other companies.

read a lot of this stuff were often sad people.

FRIEDLANDER: That’s interesting. I didn’t know anything about that. Before my time. When I arrived they were all DC comics, although I knew a large number of them had come originally from other companies. They’d bought them cheap.

RA: If you’re asking advice from a comicbook column—“Advice to the Lovelorn” or something like that…

Jack Miller and I would trade series back and forth. Sometimes I’d be doing Young Love and sometimes he would. We might use the same artists across the board. As I mentioned earlier, in the advice columns, we’d have to write our own advice because we were so restricted on what we could say by the Comics Code. We couldn’t farm out that work. People would write in with really horrible problems, but you could not answer them. It was impossible.

RA: Or course, if they’re really horrible problems, anything you say in reply might be the wrong thing to say.

FRIEDLANDER: Quite often, the mother would be the problem for a teen-age girl writing in, and you couldn’t address that sort of thing at all. Sometimes I thought the mother was coaching the young letter-writer. The young ladies, whoever they were, who did

FRIEDLANDER: They were usually called things like “Jill Says…” or “Ask Ann” or something like that. [chuckles] Jack wrote them, too, under a woman’s name.

Dealing again with censorship, there was something that Sol told me, and I expect it’s been reported a number of times, but he explained that in a love scene in the romance comics you couldn’t use the word “flickering,” as in a phase like “the candles were dim and flickering,” because the ink for the letters might bleed too close together and you could get an entirely different word than “flickering”! [laughs] Actually, there were a couple of words like that we weren’t supposed to use for the exact same reason. So I never had a candle flicker and dim in any story!

In order to save money, Mr. Donenfeld asked me to rewrite old stories. They took off all the word balloons, made the dresses shorter and changed the hairstyles. So it would basically be the same artwork from ten years earlier with art corrections. [chuckles] I’d write my own story to match the redone artwork. It was very cheap, since they didn’t pay reprint fees at the time and production was all done in house. It would be filling the pages. You did all kinds of stuff. Everybody did everything because that was the job.

After I left DC, I was friendly with [DC artists] Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. They’d gotten money from some financier, and they wanted to publish a magazine called Up Your Nose (and Out Your Ear), a humor magazine. One of them called me and asked me to do a couple of things for them. The magazine didn’t last more than two or three issues. The stories I did for them featured a very sexy character called “Thelma of the Apes.” I also wrote a piece for Up Your Nose on the Cosa Nostra, a piece on how the Mafia got started, although I called them the Cosa Nostril.

Unfortunately, if you don’t have the right distribution or it’s not the right time for your magazine, no matter how good it is, it just isn’t going to go. I think Ross and Mike lost money on it.

RA: They wouldn’t be the first people to have that happen to them. If you don’t have the right distribution or are underfinanced, it’s just not going to go.

FRIEDLANDER: Yeah, but if you don’t try, you’ll never know. I was still there at DC when Warner took over. There was a small office for writers to work in, and Warner’s took that away because they needed to use it for secretaries and other people. There wasn’t enough room anymore for the writers to work in the bullpen.

RA: When you left DC, were you replaced by Dorothy Woolfolk or was she there already?

FRIEDLANDER: There was no other female working at DC editorial when I was there. She was there after DC moved their offices to Rockefeller Center That’s when I visited the DC offices after I left the company and she was working there then. At least, I think it was her. She didn’t talk to me. I actually went around with Sol, who was nice as he could be with me.

Reach For A… A full-page DC house ad (doubtless run in the romance mags) for Secret Hearts #119 (April 1967), one of the issues that contained the continued feature “Reach for Happiness” scripted by Barbara Friedlander. DC production head Sol Harrison had another name for the series. The GCD lists this story as being scripted by Jack Miller, but that’s probably not accurate.

Thanks to BFB. [TM & © DC Comics.]

I think the romance books, the gothic romance titles, and even the humor books died in the 1970s because they were under such restrictive limitations from both the Comics Code and the publishers themselves. By the 1970s there were so many non-restricted books coming out for girls that the romance comics just looked too safe. The young ladies in the stories weren’t supposed to go for the wild guy or the guy who wasn’t ultra-

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics

51

diverse group of characters. Life is not always young and pretty.

conservative. The stories were written so that the heroines went for the marriageable guys, not the exciting guys or the bad boys, although the bad boys in the comics weren’t really all that bad.

In the 1970s especially, readers began to reject that kind of thinking.

RA: For a time, particularly in the mid- to late 1960s, when you were working on them, and in the early 1970s, DC really tried to do something different in the romance comics, but they were just so constrained by the both the Code and by the fact that they really couldn’t address any kind of adult problem with any degree of realism. That hadn’t been true in the pre-Code years. The books of that period could address some problems that a teenage girl might actually have, but much of that vanished after the Code came in and the publishers started censoring themselves so severely.

When I did the series “Three Girls—Their Lives… Their Loves” for Heart Throbs, I think those girls had real ambitions that reflected the time it was set in. I also did a series called “Reach for Happiness,” which Sol used to call “Reach for a Penis.” [both laugh] But the restrictions on what you were allowed to write about were so severe!

Mike Esposito & Ross Andru The girls in the stories had to conform. (left to right) in a photo originally seen in Comic Book My characters conformed but they did Marketplace #28.

FRIEDLANDER: Yes, in the pre-Code interesting things. I tried to do that with years they could address quite a lot every story, but it was very difficult. of things. Not sex, but a lot of things that you simply couldn’t do There couldn’t be a hint that they were or had been bad girls, so when I was working on the books. When we tried to update the if the girls couldn’t be bad, they had to be pretty. My girls weren’t stories we included black characters and other things but it was still always nice, though. I put older men and women in some of the so restrictive that we couldn’t break through no matter what we stories, just to make it more interesting. Not simply young people did. I don’t think the black audience of the 1970s was interested in in every story. I tried very hard to write interesting stories with a the genre. The publishers finally lost faith in the idea that the books

Up Your Nose (And Out Your Ear) Yep, that was the actual name of the parody mag published for two issues by the artist team of Ross Andru (penciler) and Mike Esposito (inker) in 1972… but Esposito said in his interview back in A/E #54 that they got in trouble because distributors and retailers were terrified that the “Up Your Nose” part of the title was a thinly veiled reference to cocaine. This black-white-&-red spread from the takeoff—in every sense of the word—titled “Thelma of the Apes” was scripted

by Barbara Friedlander and drawn by the duo for #2. Thanks to BFB. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

52

On Being A Romance Writer & Editor—Just Down The Hall From The Silver Age

could be turned around. Romance books were also a nearly total girls’ market and that was a problem.

RA: I suppose so. The new, younger editors and writers, most of them men, weren’t really interested in comics that only appealed to girls. There was no chance for advancement to a “hot” title if your work was only regularly appearing in a romance book.

FRIEDLANDER: I sometimes wonder if they could have built up a male character for a romance book, who would have appealed to the boys. Someone who traveled to exotic places and met pretty girls but also had exciting adventures. Maybe something like that would have worked. I recently saw the film The Shape of Water, and it’s basically a love story. There are people who really love love stories and there are people who will appreciate a good love story, even if it’s not clearly identified as a love story. The films the studios actually make in the name of romance—the romantic comedies— are awful. Other genres have good love stories. They’re just not identified as love stories from the start. People adore love stories, but the stories have to have an edge to them.

RA: Charlton tried some of what you’re saying about a change of lead character with some sort of motorcycle-riding guy, but I don’t think it went too far.

FRIEDLANDER: Charlton was one of those companies that didn’t do a lot of super-heroes, so the owner sold the characters that he could and went out of business.

RA: There’s been some efforts in recent years to revive some of the Charlton romance material.

Vintage stories have been appearing off and on in the reprint title Weird Romance, and Paul Kupperberg has done a couple of issues of Secret Romances, with new stories and art, for Charlton Neo.

don’t appear to be interested in publishing straight romance. The Charlton material is apparently out of copyright. The last time DC did anything with a romance book was a mini-series reviving Heart Throbs, which featured some really hard-core horror/romance stories. Not “nice” romance tales at all.

FRIEDLANDER: I’m working on a history for my grandchildren that has artwork for stories I worked on. Collecting art and some of the old comics I can find. I want them to know their grandma did something.

After comics, I first went into jewelry and then into antiques.

I did antique shows for years in various locations. At one of the shows, I saw a dealer selling comicbook art pages. I went up to him and said “That certainly brings back memories!” and he asked me who I was. When I told him, he said he’d heard of me. I was shocked that there was any sort of recognition of my work in comics. That started a bee in my bonnet about seeing what else was out there about me.

In some ways I thought of myself as a footnote and was happy with that, because I worked with some really wonderful people.

RA: I know you have to go. Any last thoughts?

FRIEDLANDER: Shedding light on the romance genre is long overdue. The romance comics have been vastly under-appreciated, and it’s been my pleasure to talk about them. The people that I knew at DC were just people with amazing talent. It was what they

FRIEDLANDER: There’s no effort to revive the DC material?

RA: No, because DC still owns all of that and they

Teen Beam (Left:) That was the monicker of what amounted to a one-shot, less-than-50%-comics magazine on which Barbara worked for DC in 1967… though the DC symbol isn’t displayed. Seen is the cover of #2 (Jan.-Feb. 1968); if there was ever a #1, please let the Grand Comics Database know about it! DC apparently intended the title to be Teen Beat—but Sterling Publications beat DC to the punch with that name, launching its own long-running non-comics magazine with an Aug. 1967 cover date.

(Above:) One of the quasi-comics-style features in Teen Beam #2—a two-pager—was Barbara Friedlander’s article on TV’s Monkees, which was illustrated by Joe Orlando. This original art from that piece is owned by David Siegel; thanks to Richard Arndt for the scan. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Barbara Friedlander’s Love Affair With DC Comics

53

Today They’d Call The Series “3 Women” (Right:) Jay Scott Pike’s cover for Heart Throbs #111 (Dec. 1967-Jan. 1968) was a most unusual one in one respect: namely, the guy wore glasses! Thanks to the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.] (left:) Barbara Friedlander Bloomfield set to greet fans at her booth at the TerrifiCon in Uncasville, CT, in August 2018. She also appeared on a panel.

Thanks to BFB.

produced that has made them live on. We’re both aware that fiction is the story, not the reality. The reality is that the DC men were both decent and quirky, and that quirky aspect only upped their talent.

I think I was very much a product of the thinking at the time. I wanted very much to get married and have children. I didn’t realize that I could have a career and have both. Irwin asked me to stay, but I didn’t see clearly at the time how to do that. Today the world is different and women can have careers, children, marriages, and feel good about themselves.

ADDED NOTE FROM RICHARD ARNDT: Sadly, there’s very little of the romance genre that has been reprinted to date. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s work, both pre- and post-Code, is available in Fantagraphics’ hardcover Young Romance, Vols. 1 & 2. Marvel put out a Marvel Romance book some years back, but it devoted a lot of space to post-Code 1950s romance stories—the least interesting period in romance comics, in this writer’s estimation. However, there are some 1960s “Patsy Walker” tales and some primo 1970s work included in it as well. Although some Charlton material is being reprinted in Weird Romance, the majority of that company’s output, including some stunning covers by Dick Giordano, remains in limbo.

BARBARA FRIEDLANDER Checklist

DC Comics has reprinted about a year and a half of Young Love, from 1963-1965, in their black-&-white Showcase Presents volumes, featuring some tasty work from John Romita and Gene Colan. They also did a hardcover, color volume Heart Throbs: The Best of DC Romance in the mid-1980s, which, like Marvel Romance, concentrated heavily on 1950s post-Code work. It did reprint a chapter of Barbara Friedlander’s “Three Girls” serial, as well as some other interesting 1960s-1970s stories, including the somewhat infamous “Lois Lane-goes-undercover-as-a blackwoman” story from Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane.

[This checklist is adapted from the online Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, established by Dr. Jerry G. Bails (see ad on p. xx). Names of features that appeared both in comicbooks of that title and in other magazines as well are generally not italicized. Barbara Friedlander Bloomfield is the source of some of this information. Key: (w) = writer; (e) = editor (officially, associate editor or similar title).]

Much of Alex Toth’s romance work for Standard and Frank Frazetta’s romance work for various publishers has been reprinted in books that focus on the individual artist, rather than the genre. It’s stunning work. Matt Baker, probably the supreme romance artist of any age, has been reprinted in Canteen Kate, Matt Baker: The Age of Glamour, It Rhymes with Lust, Phantom Lady, and Romance without Tears. Michael Baron compiled a volume called Agonizing Love. Jeanne Martinet edited a DC collection called Truer Than True Romance for Watson-Guptil in 2001. And John Benson’s 2007 Confessions, Romances, Secrets, and Temptations: Archer St. John and the St. John Romance Comics is a thoughtful analysis of the four-color love tales by writer Dana Dutch, whose “frank, anecdotal, understated style masked a radically different approach to romantic complications”; this one was published by Fantagraphics. The website sequentialcrush.com, run

by Jacque Nodell, is by far the best online source.

Married Name: Barbara Friedlander Bloomfield

Name & Vital Stats: Barbara Friedlander (b. 1945)—editor, writer

COMICBOOKS (Mainstream U.S. Publishers): DC Comics: Buzzy (w)(unconfirmed) 1970; Cynthia (w) (unconfirmed) 1960; Date with Debbi (w)(unconfirmed) 1970; fillers (w) 1967-70; Girls’ Love Stories (w)(e) 1965-71; Girls’ Romances (w) (e) 1966-68; Heart Throbs (e) 1966-67, (w) 1966-68; Leave It to Binky (w)(unconfirmed) 1970; Mal (w) 1970; Secret Hearts (w)(e) 1969-71; Showcase (associate e) 1967; support (associate e) 1964-67 (under Jack Miller); support (e) 1966-68; Swing with Scooter (w)(e) 1966-67, 1971; Teen Beam (w)(e) 1968; Young Love (w)(e) 1966-71; Young Romance (w)(e) 1970-72 KLEVART ENTERPRISES: Up Your Nose…and Out Your Ear (w) 1972

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

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55

Of Crows And The Cosmos

Part VIII Of My Life In Little Pieces By JOHN BROOME

A/E

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: In most issues since #149, we’ve been serializing, with the blessing of his daughter Ricky Terry Brisacque, the abovenamed “Off-beat Autobio” of Irving Bernard (“John”) Broome, the much-respected Golden and Silver Age comics writer, who tarried upon this Earth from 1913 to 1999. Beginning in 1956, he was for years the primary writer of tales of the revamped “Flash” and “Green Lantern” for DC Comics—two titles which sparked the rejuvenation of the comics field and helped point the way to the modern era. John’s memoir is not strictly-speaking an “autobiography” at all, but rather a collection of anecdotes, observations, and musings, many of which provide insight into this important comics scripter… even if comicbooks are never directly referred to in his short 1998 book, and only rarely do any of his four-color colleagues of the 1940s through the 1960s put in an appearance.

This time around, crows and trees and the universe are the subjects… or at least the pretexts. Thanks to Brian K. Morris for retyping the work into a Word document for Ye Editor….

Putting In A Good Word For Crows Chickens you can have, brother, and pigeons, too, but crows are different. Mister All-Black is a bird with pride, that’s what he is; and you won’t catch him snibbling around looking for a handout.

Nossir! Or running around a barnyard, either, after his head has been cut off! Why, even the measliest, scroungiest crow would think far too much of himself ever to do something as undignified as that.

Of course you won’t see a crow work. You can’t train him like a falcon or get him to go fishing for you like a cormorant. And you’re not likely to be watching Timothy T. (for Tecumseh) Crow in a circus or on TV. Truth is, your Mr. A-B is your iron-bound, oak-lined, moss-covered individualist if there ever was one. This funereal-feathered vagabond is a bit of a thief, species of gypsy, strictly no account by the world’s standards, and with a bank balance perpetually scraping zero, but come what may he’s his own bird and no one tells a crow what to do. Nossir!

Once I had a half-wild crow for a pet. Although you can’t really tame a crow, he’ll come and live with you for a spell if the spirit moves him, and that’s what Gregor did with us. We called him Gregor on onomatopoeic grounds after listening to his attempts at conversation, all of it in a critical vein, by the way, as far as we could tell. He came sailing out of the blue on those big black wings of his and, if memory serves, landed on our clothesline.

My wife had gone out to hang clothes and she came back a moment after with eyes wide. “There’s something on the line,” she said. I went out and met Gregor. As I approached, he sidled away

muttering. Critically. But he didn’t take off. Somewhere, he’d lost his fear of humans. Later, I got the impression that his visit with us was based mainly on curiosity. In his own community, maybe Gregor was something of a sociologist: who knows about crows anyway?

Something To Crow About (Left:) John Broome with Gregor the crow, circa 1956; photo courtesy of Ricky Terry Brisacque.

(Below:) While Broome occasionally wrote stories that dealt with birds, the avian with which he’s most closely associated in the minds of comics readers is the robin—or rather, Robin the Boy Wonder. John was one of the primary writers of Julius Schwartz’s “New Look Batman” in the mid-1960s, a reasonably successful attempt to update the Caped Crusader not long before the 1966 TV series would make him an overnight sensation by camping him up! Art by Shelly Moldoff, doing his own interpretation of Carmine Infantino’s rendition of Batman, for Detective Comics #342 (Aug. 1965). Art scan courtesy of Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

56

Part VIII Of My Life In Little Pieces By John Broome

Look! Up In The Sky! It’s A… We kinda blew the one Broomescripted splash page we had on hand showing an actual bird (albeit a sciencefictional one) in our previous installment, so here’s an avian ancestor from The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog #31 (Jan.-Feb. 1957). Pencils by Gil Kane, inks by Bernard Sachs.

Thanks to Jim Kealy. [TM & © DC Comics.]

incorrigible. I set a trap for him once, tying my pencil to the leg of an outdoor table where I was working. He made a landing on the table as usual and nosed about here and there as if paying a mere social call, but his larcenous eye was on the pencil. Suddenly, he grabbed it and flew off with a guffaw that crescendoed into a loud squawk of dismay as the string tightened and somersaulted him in mid-getaway. After that, a certain coolness sprang up between us. I’d violated something in his crow code of ethics and he wasn’t about to forgive me, not too quickly anyway, but finally he did.

Gregor had one habit it’s hard to forget. Every evening at sundown, before flying off to his mountaintop aerie where he always spent the night, he’d become strangely still and silent, looking off toward West Mt. Sometimes he’d remain like that perched on my shoulder for as long as fifteen minutes as the sun sank slowly before us. You may laugh at me for saying so but I suspected at such a time that Gregor was doing his level crow best to fathom the nature of the universe. Looking back now, I realize maybe he wasn’t so much a sociologist as a blinking cosmologist, that’s what!

Anyway, with us, Gregor lost whatever was left of his fear of people and therein lay his undoing, or at least ours.

A neighbor reported he saw an auto stop on the road, the door open, and a crow hop in. Just like Gregor, off to new adventures. Alack and lackaday, we never saw him again.

His visit lasted only a short time, a brief three weeks. He liked to fly down from the top of our old barn and land on my head—maybe the closest thing he could find to a “pallid bust of Pallas”—and if he could dig in his claws, he’d give a horsey laugh of satisfaction. Early on, he established a separate set of relations with each of us in the family.

I was biggest so he treated me as an equal. When my wife ventured out of the house, he pecked at her feet and harried her: he was a bully.

But our brisk little daughter, eight by this time, he steered clear of; wisely.

As a mischiefmaker and pilferer, he was

Like Clockwork…

The splash and a key page from one of the most important concepts ever devised by John Broome, quite likely in conjunction with his editor, Julius Schwartz: mutant super-hero Captain Comet meets “The Guardians of the Clockwise Universe” in Strange Adventures #22 (July 1952), with art by the estimable Murphy Anderson. This notion would lead directly to Broome & Schwartz’s Guardians of the Universe in the Silver Age Green Lantern series. “Edgar Ray Merritt” was a house name. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Of Crows And The Cosmos

57

Some Sayings In its nightmare the pretty butterfly had turned of all things into a slimy caterpillar.

A dead body won’t bruise; neither will a dead conscience.

There is no defense against the common scold.

French saying: partir c’est mourir un peu.

Tatsy’s version: mourir c’est pourrir un peu.

The verdict in favor of Hinckley, the would-beassassin of Reagan, suggests the need for special trial procedures to test the sanity of jurors.

Genius largely escapes the psychic gravity of boredom.

“Only God Can Make A Tree” Perhaps the above denouement of Joyce Kilmer’s famed poem was on John Broome’s mind when he wrote “The Tree” paragraphs of his 1998 memoir… perhaps not. At any rate, nearly six decades earlier, he had scribed the science-fiction yarn “Land of Wooden Men” for the pulp magazine Fantastic Adventures (Vol. 2, #4, April 1940)… three-quarters of a century before Lee & Kirby’s Groot became virtually a household name.

The pulp “double-truck” illo is by Polish-born artist Julian Stanislaus Krupa (1913-1989); thanks to David Saunders for the biographical info. [© the respective copyright holders.]

But that year no new rootlets appeared and the tree’s sadness grew. By the following year the tree was weaker still.

Life could be a discovery the All-Embracing is inordinately proud of, like an artist who dotes on his pet chef d’oeuvre.

Miserliness is only love gone a bit haywire.

It’s light that makes color (Cezanne); and dark that makes light, in watercolor anyway (].B.).

Dim-witted people don’t get headaches. (Japanese saying) “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes down to the bones.”

(Dr. Hari Singh) God to Job (brought up to date): “Canst set the explosive for Ye Big Bang? Start the clock for Time? Prepare the Naught for Space?”

Having lived in Japan already longer than Lincoln Steffens did in Russia, may I say: I have seen the future and it’s work.

The Tree Let me flower, the tree begged God. That year a sickness had come to the tree, and no new blossoms appeared on its boughs, or only sickly ones, stunted and ill-formed.

Oh, let me feel my roots digging deeper into Thy earth, begged the tree. Let me feel again the joy of expanding into Thy living earth.

Let me live, cried the tree to God. Let me exult in Thy gift of life. Let me live out my span of years.

But a strange dull dryness covered the tree everywhere, bark, branches, and roots, and it was clear the tree could not pass another winter.

Then must I die? pleaded the tree forlorn. But of course no answer came, and, indeed, the tree’s voice was so low it could only barely be heard above.

Now, as the tree knew, all simple creatures are accorded a final request in their moment of death, and this request if possible is granted. And God, listening, could not help wondering what the tree’s final request could be. It had already asked for life, greatest of all boons; what unknown passion could so occupy the soul of the tree as to reign over its dying thoughts?

As the moment of death approached, the tree’s lifeless limbs arched skyward more steeply than ever, and a quiver passed the length of its gaunt frame. Then did the tree send its last thought upward along the naked branches.

Let me love Thee, whispered the tree. And with that its stilled branches moved no more.

“Part the Second” of John Broome’s memoir will commence next issue, and will feature such familiar comicbook names as David V. Reed, France “Ed” Herron—and Julius Schwartz.

Edited

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ALTER EGO #152

Relive JOE PETRILAK’s All-Time Classic NY Comic Book Convention—the greatest Golden & Silver Age con ever assembled!

Panels, art & photos featuring INFANTINO, KUBERT, 3 SCHWARTZES, NODELL, HASEN, GIELLA, CUIDERA, BOLTINOFF, BUSCEMA, AYERS, SINNOTT, [MARIE] SEVERIN, GOULART, THOMAS, and a host of others! Plus FCA, GILBERT, SCHELLY, and RUSS RAINBOLT’s 60-ft. comics mural!

Showcases GIL KANE, with an incisive and free-wheeling interview conducted in the 1990s by DANIEL HERMAN for his 2001 book Gil Kane: The Art of the Comics—plus other surprise features centered around the artistic co-creator of the Silver Age Green Lantern and The Atom! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by GIL KANE, JOE GIELLA, and MARIE SEVERIN!

STAN LEE’s 95th birthday! Rare 1980s LEE interview by WILL MURRAY—GER APELDOORN on Stan’s non-Marvel writing in the 1950s—STAN LEE/ROY THOMAS e-mails of the 21st century—and more special features than you could shake Irving Forbush at! Also FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), BILL SCHELLY, and MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Colorful Marvel multi-hero cover

by Big JOHN BUSCEMA!

Golden Age artist FRANK THOMAS (The Owl! The Eye! Dr. Hypno!) celebrated by Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt’s MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Plus the scintillating (and often offbeat) Golden & Silver Age super-heroes of Western Publishing’s DELL & GOLD KEY comics! Art by MANNING, DITKO, KANE, MARSH, GILL, SPIEGLE, SPRINGER, NORRIS, SANTOS, THORNE, et al.! Plus FCA, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Unsung artist/writer LARRY IVIE conceived (and named!) the JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, helped develop T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, brought EC art greats to the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and more!

SANDY PLUNKETT chronicles his career, with art by FRAZETTA, CRANDALL, WOOD, KRENKEL, DOOLIN, and others!

Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

ALTER EGO #153

ALTER EGO #154

ALTER EGO #155

ALTER EGO #156

Remembering Fabulous FLO STEINBERG, Stan Lee’s gal Friday during the Marvel Age of Comics—with anecdotes and essays by pros and friends who knew and loved her!

Rare Marvel art, Flo’s successor ROBIN GREEN interviewed by RICHARD ARNDT about her time at Marvel, and Robin’s 1971 article on Marvel for ROLLING STONE magazine! Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

ALLEN BELLMAN (1940s Timely artist) interviewed by DR. MICHAEL J. VASSALLO, with art by SHORES, BURGOS, BRODSKY, SEKOWSKY, EVERETT, & JAFFEE. Plus Marvel’s ’70s heroines: LINDA FITE & PATY COCKRUM on The Cat, CAROLE SEULING on Shanna the She-Devil, & ROY THOMAS on Night Nurse—with art by SEVERIN, FRADON, ANDRU, and more! With FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Golden Age artist/writer/editor NORMAN MAURER remembered by his wife JOAN, recalling BIRO’s Crime Does Not Pay, Boy Comics, Daredevil, St. John’s 3-D & THREE STOOGES comics with KUBERT, his THREE STOOGES movies (MOE was his father-inlaw!), and work for Marvel, DC, and others!

Plus LARRY IVIE’s 1959 plans for a JUSTICE SOCIETY revival, JOHN BROOME, FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY and more!

All Time Classic Con continued from #148!

Panels on Golden Age (CUIDERA, HASEN, SCHWARTZ [LEW & ALVIN], BOLTINOFF, LAMPERT, GILL, FLESSEL) & Silver Age Marvel, DC, & Gold Key (SEVERIN, SINNOTT, AYERS, DRAKE, ANDERSON, FRADON, SIMONSON, GREEN, BOLLE, THOMAS), plus JOHN BROOME, FCA, MR. MONSTER, & BILL SCHELLY! Unused RON WILSON/CHRIS IVY cover!

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59

(Far Left ^& above:) Steve Ditko’s Strange Tales #146 cover (July 1966).

When Ditko unexpectedly quit the title, editor Stan Lee was forced to use some of Steve’s interior art for the issue’s cover. Above, Bruce McCorkindale turned interior art into a faux cover. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

The Mighty Marvel Mashup!

by Michael T. Gilbert

R

ecently the Crypt published a series of articles on the late, great cartoonist Dan Adkins. In it, a number of respected comic professionals debated the pros and cons of swiping art without attribution—something that got Dan in hot water in the late ’60s.

This issue we’re exploring a similar topic, but one less controversial: fully credited original art re-creations. Who among us hasn’t dreamed of owning Kirby and Ditko’s Amazing Fantasy #15 cover, or the one featuring Infantino’s classic “Flash Of Two Worlds”? However, with rare comic art going for stratospheric prices nowadays, many cash-strapped fans find cover re-creations to be a fun, affordable alternative. Hey, it looks great hanging on a wall, and you won’t need to get a second mortgage. Trust me— your “significant other” will thank you!

For the artist, cover re-creations can be a fun challenge, and a profitable hobby. I’ve done a few, and it’s a kick to see how closely one can follow the original. One can also learn a surprising amount by imitating the masters.

Bigger Than Life?

(Above:) Bruce replaced the Ditko cover image with Ditko’s splash page from the same ish (left). Bruce generally does his art in the classic large Golden Age size (13" x 20"). Say, is it just me, or does Steve’s splash drawing make an even more dramatic cover than the real one? [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

(Above:) Steve Ditko’s cover image for The Incredible Hulk #6 (March 1963). [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Mighty Marvel Mashup!

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Cartoonist Bruce McCorkindale has made comic art re-creations a specialty. Over the years he’s redrawn classic ’50s and ’60s covers from a variety of companies—always crediting the original artists.

Bruce, a hardcore comic fan, clearly loves a wide range of comicbook creators. However, judging from his many Steve Ditko “What If” cover homages, Mr. Ditko must rank near the top of Bruce’s list.

For this article, we’ve opted to focus on Bruce’s after-the-fact Ditko collaborations –– mostly cover re-creations from the early ’60s that most diehard Silver Age Marvel fans have long committed to memory. Ah, but Bruce decided it would be fun to do something a little… different.

Bruce has re-purposed old Ditko splash page illos and interior panels into alternate “imaginary” classic 1960s Marvel covers! Looking at these, I was immediately impressed with McCorkindale’s sheer technical ability. Few can imitate Steve Ditko’s lively ink and brush line, but Bruce pulled it off.

It should be pointed out that the illustrations published here are not simple Photoshop mash-ups, but fully penciled and inked re-creations. In an e-mail of April 29, 2018, Bruce explained the

Mysterioso (Below & upper right:) Two more of Bruce’s alternate covers, cobbled from Ditko’s interior art. The one on the right is particularly…uh…striking! [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

(Above:) Ditko’s published cover to Spider-Man #13 (June 1964). [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

process he uses to create his remarkable reproductions: “A big part of my process in making comic art re-creations is preparing a good template. I look for the best source material possible; if I don’t have the actual book that the cover (or interior art) is from, then I go online to find a hi-res scan. If the scan’s in color, then I de-colorize it in Photoshop, which can be time-consuming. When the template’s ready, I print it out in light gray or blue onto the Bristol board via a large format printer. I often just print out the logos and lettering in full black and then do touch-ups by hand.

After the board’s ready, I ink it up with mostly old-school tools: a sable brush (Winsor & Newton Series #7 or Raphael #8404), a dip pen (usually a crowquill like Hunt #102 or Esterbrook #62), and India ink. I sometimes use archival quality permanent pens for lines that require a ruler or French curve.“

Tinker, Tinker, Little Star…

(Above:) Amazing Spider-Man #2 featured two stories starring two different villains: The Vulture and The Terrible Tinkerer. Stan and Steve chose The Vulture for their cover, but Bruce thought Ditko’s second-story splash, featuring the Tinkerer, would make an equally powerful cover. What do you think? [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Flyin’ High!

(Left:) Ditko’s original Amazing Spider-Man #2 cover (May 1963) starred The Vulture. Bruce tried another variation depicting the scene from a different angle (right). Interesting take, but it’s hard to beat Ditko’s vertigo-inducing original! [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Mighty Marvel Mashup!

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Double Take?

Mash-ups!

In the pic above, Bruce took his imaginary Amazing Spider-Man cover (seen on the previous page), and transformed Spidey into Charlton’s Blue Beetle—another ’60s-era hero with the Ditko touch. [© Blue Beetle TM & © DC Comics; Tinkerer TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

(Above:) Another McCorkindale Amazing Blue Beetle cover, based on Amazing Spider-Man #20.

(Left:) Ditko’s published cover to Amazing SpiderMan #20 (Jan. 1965). [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

(Below:) Bruce’s Beetle-fied take on Amazing Spider-Man #29! [© Blue Beetle TM & © DC Comics; Scorpion TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Whew! Beyond McCorkindale’s ability to mimic, what really caught my eye was his clever re-imagining of those classic Marvel covers. Bruce states that Ditko sometimes put even more effort into his splash pages than into his covers. McCorkindale’s artistic re-imaginings make a convincing argument. Indeed, the new covers (based on Steve’s interior art) are often better than the published version—a testament to Ditko’s remarkable design sense.

Bruce, 57, was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, and currently resides in the nearby city of Gretna with his wife Rebecca and their two cats, Mews and Momo. His first published comics work was an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Festival” for New Media/Irjax’s Fantasy Empire in 1984. Since then, he has gone on to ink such works as Rune vs. Venom (Marvel/Malibu), Black Orchid (DC), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Malibu), and Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters (IDW). He has also penciled a few projects here and there, including Tor Johnson, Hollywood Star (Fantagraphics) and Heretic: The Templar Chronicles (Markosia). Recently, he completely revamped his creator-owned work The Falling Man and has it available on Comixology. Omaha Bound has also published The Falling Man Omnibus, which contains the new version, the previous versions published by Image Comics and Caliber Comics, and a variety of extras. You can find more info about it at www.omahabound.com.

Oh, and he re-creates classic comic art. Like, a lot of it!

Till next time…

Strange But True!

(Above:) Bruce’s dynamic re-imagining of the cover for Ditko’s “Dr. Strange” story in Strange Tales #133 (June 1965). Bruce recycled Ditko’s “Dr. Strange” splash from Strange Tales #146 (July 1966). [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“The End…At Last!”

(Left:) Ditko’s splash page from his final “Dr. Strange” story in issue #146. Bruce’s imaginary illo above proves Ditko’s drawing would’ve made a spectacular cover! [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

(Right:) The published Strange Tales #133 cover by Jack Kirby and Mike Esposito. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Now available from Pulp Hero Press!

Order at pulpheropress.com and Amazon

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Comic Fandom Archive

The Fan P.O.V. Of The Marvel Super-Heroes—In 1963!

Bill Schelly here—presenting another trip in the Time Machine back to the early days of comic fandom—with a helping hand from Nick Caputo. Alter Ego is grateful to him for resurrecting the “Point of View” columns from Larry Herndon’s fanzine Hero in the early 1960s.

Last issue, Nick introduced the round-robin discussion of the Justice League of America comicbook that had been printed in Hero #1. This time, he’s presenting the following discussion of the Marvel super-heroes as of early 1963. You have the floor, Nick!

Rick Weingroff Chairman.

Introduction by Nick Caputo

Buddy Saunders

Hero #2 continued the “Point of View” column, a round-table commentary, this time with a partly-new group of participating fans: Bob Butts, Buddy Saunders, and Al Kuhfeld. The first issue had spotlighted DC’s heroes, so it was only natural that issue #2 focused on the newly christened Marvel Comics Group and their super-hero features.

Chairman Rick Weingroff supplied the questions to this trio, as he had in the previous issue.

A little background: publisher Martin Goodman’s super-hero revival was less than two years old when Hero #2 was mailed out to fans in May of 1963. Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four had started the ball rolling in mid-1961 and had become one of the best-sellers from what remained of the line once known as Timely Comics (or Atlas, or occasionally even as Marvel). The FF was soon followed by The Incredible Hulk (which failed to achieve adequate sales and only ran six issues), “The Mighty Thor” (in Journey into Mystery); “The Astonishing Ant-Man” (in Tales to Astonish); “The Human Torch” (in Strange Tales), “The Invincible Iron Man” (in Tales of Suspense), and The Amazing Spider-Man. With six super-heroes either starring in their own comicbook or as the lead feature in

And now, from the pages of Hero #2 (Spring 1963), the narration by Chairman Rick Weingroff: A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: Last issue, we altered the identifying proper nouns of the “speakers” (e.g., Chairman:) to all-caps and bold (e.g., CHAIRMAN:). This time around, however, in the interests of authenticity, we’ve left them in non-bold upper-and-lower case, as they appeared in the original fanzine. Ditto with the phrase “comic book,” which A/E now customarily spells as one word. Oh, and the cover of Hero fanzine #2 (May 1963) was printed with last issue’s installment.

L

ooking through the eyes of a young, enthusiastic, and talented group of fans from the distance of 55 years is intriguing. One can’t help but be impressed by their efforts: unpolished, certainly, but bursting with fervor. It echoed a similar development with a different set of teens that formed bands and practiced in their basements (later dubbed garage rock). Both were deeply inspired by their passions and sought to create something they could call their own. As editor and publisher of Hero, Larry Herndon achieved those results.

a fantasy title (The Avengers—mentioned in the article—and The X-Men would follow in three months), more than half of Goodman’s comicbook output now consisted of costumed heroes. These colorful characters were seized upon by young fans (and a selection of older ones) who not only read the stories but had strong opinions on their content, as will be evident in the discussion republished below.

Bob Butts

Once again, Hero throws open its pages to discussion on one of the favorite topics for fan consideration: The Marvel Comics Group. This issue the opinions were supplied by Bob Butts (editor of Fan-to-Fan), Buddy Saunders (artist and writer for many zines), and Al Kuhfeld (popular contributor).

Before we start this discussion, for the benefit of any newcomers, I will briefly explain how “Point of View” is done. The article is made up of opinions sent to me by several fans, asking seven or eight questions which I sent to people who I feel will have a good, honest opinion on the topic. I reserve the full right to alter and edit these answers, in order to make a more smoothly moving article, although in no way do I change the opinions of the people queried. That out of the way, let’s get on with the discussion.

Chairman: Just to start this discussion off, I’ll ask one of the original questions and see if we can’t get a discussion going on the point: Who is your favorite hero at Marvel?

Buddy: My favorite hero is Spider-Man. He greatly outranks any of the other Marvel heroes, and Ditko draws the character in a manner that actually suggests the spider qualities.

Al Kuhfeld

Al: I agree that Spider-Man is the best Marvel has to offer, not only because of his great artwork, but also because of Spider-Man’s sense of humor. Though it

The Fan P.O.V. Of The Marvel Super-Heroes—In 1963!

think the art teams are better than the artists themselves. For instance KirbyDitko is the best Marvel has, while Kirby-Heck is certainly good.

doesn’t receive a full play in the stories, Spider-Man is the only Marvel hero with a fully-developed sense of humor. Only he would get a job with Jameson for the reason that he did.

Bob: I personally think that Kirby’s art is often too outré and bizarre, but then I’m not exactly an authority on the Marvel artists.

Bob: Actually, although Spider-Man and the Ant-Man are my two favorite single heroes at Marvel, their adventures are, when probable, either too mundane or too outré. They can’t seem to hit the balance between science fiction and plausibility.

Al: Of course the art is important, but I think the best thing about the Marvel heroes is the general impression they give. Rather than appearing to have been stamped out by cookie-cutters as some heroes do, they have knocks and bumps all over their psyches.

Al: I can’t agree with you there, Bob. “Spider-Man versus the Vulture” was, for example, very good, although how much of that was due to the “brick wall effect” (it feels so good when I stop) is uncertain.

Bob: There’s no question but that Stan Lee is Marvel personified. If he fails, Marvel fails. If he succeeds, Marvel succeeds. He makes each hero act alive! They’re heroic humans, not gods who never make mistakes or show emotion.

Buddy: And the Vulture, and also Dr. Octopus from the third issue, brought out very well the many potential story lines for the Spider-Man.

Buddy: One of Marvel’s greatest accomplishments has been its characterization; no other group has done so well with this.

Al: Right. Certainly the introduction of a villain like the Vulture—with every bit as much dash as Namor or Doctor Doom—is worthy of a good deal of credit.

Buddy: Of course the art does have a lot to do with Spider-Man’s success.

Ditko has a clear snap that I like.

Al: Strictly speaking, although he may not be one of the best draftsmen Marvel has, his work is stylistically attractive, being decorative rather than merely illustrative.

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You Don’t Know Jack!

One or two of the panelists seem dismissive of Jack Kirby’s early Marvel work. What can we say? Best just to show the Kirby cover, inked by Ditko, of Fantastic Four #14 (May 1963), which went on sale a couple of months before Hero #2 went into the mails. Thanks to the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Bob: One thing about the art at Marvel in general is the new art concept. Basically, there seems to be a change in the coloring.

Marvel is more somber than DC and the layout of colors is different.

Buddy: The coloring of the Spider-Man is actually one of the few points that I think this dark coloring has helped. The covers, for instance, are colored too darkly to be good.

Bob: Perhaps so, but the darker coloring and the more rigid panelstructure and grey-building-backgrounds are a relief from the monotony. Since Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko seem to have created this style, I would say they are my favorite artists at Marvel.

Buddy: I go along with your second choice, but couldn’t agree with you less on Kirby. Some say Jack is overworked, but whatever the problem is, the fact remains that his work isn’t as good as it should be.

Al: I don’t even consider Kirby in a rating of Marvel artists. To me the order is: Ditko, followed at a great distance by Joe Sinnott and Don Heck. The latter two just plug along, doing nothing poorly enough to annoy and occasionally something quite good; Ditko’s forte, on the other hand, is in his flashes of brilliance, which Heck and Sinnott can’t even come near matching.

Buddy: Yes, other than Ditko, Heck, and possibly Sinnott, the Marvel group is producing very little good art. Actually, though, I

Al: Of course this characterization doesn’t always work out right. The recent attempt to give Ant-Man emotions by introducing the Wasp and his late wife is still too uncertain to be evaluated, but right now he is the worst Marvel has to offer—thanks mainly to the loss of the Hulk from his own comic.

Buddy: I disagree with you on that point, Al. Ant-Man is my favorite hero (aside from Spider-Man), mainly because of the Heck art and the fact that, although his stories aren’t as good as the DC type, they are much better than the trash forced upon Iron Man, Thor, and the Human Torch.

Al: I couldn’t disagree with you less on that. Until the Wasp, Ant-Man could have been replaced by an exceptionally smart ant with little loss in interest except for those who prefer human heroes. As for the Torch, where most heroes would hesitate to give hot feet to their enemies, the Torch passes them out with abandon to his friends. This is the type of good story line in this series.

Buddy: I guess the main problem with the Torch, as far as I’m concerned, is that I expect the villains to be of the caliber of those in the Flash, and Marvel just doesn’t make those kind. If the Torch has to be tied down with poor enemies like the Wizard and Paste-Pot Pete, it’s no wonder he doesn’t get his own mag!

Bob: In my opinion the Torch is one of the most un-fantastic Fantastic Four. He still looks like a “cheap cigar”! In fact, I hope that he is eventually removed from Strange Tales and replaced by another hero.

Buddy: Actually, the Torch’s art doesn’t fit him. Those thick ink lines give him a heavy appearance—unlike the old Timely Torch.

Bob: But the Thing falls into an entirely different category. He is the

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Comic Fandom Archive

most original character to come along in two decades. First of all, his most appealing attribute is his realism.

Buddy: Yes, he’s a pretty good hero, and, as a matter of fact, I was really rooting for him in the Hulk-FF story, so you can see that he is realistic.

Al: But there’s one thing wrong with the Thing and the rest of the group for that matter. In stressing internal conflict these heroes at times carry it a bit too far. It’s new to see heroes argue in private, but the experience palls when they continue bickering as they go after the villain.

Bob: That seems to be Marvel’s only real liability—overstressing the characterization. When they take things a little easier and dispense with the crazy plots and adopt some that follow a sort of Calculus of Probabilities, then they’ll really go places!

Al: In time, however, their newness will wear off and the only distinction between them and other groups will be that they are psychological heroes rather than being largely concerned with external menaces at the expense of themselves.

Buddy: This seems to be the big difference between the FF and the JLA. The JLA has better stories, action-wise, and, though Lee’s plots aren’t as scientifically and internally correct, there is much more variation, human interest, and internal discord, making each story somewhat different.

Bob: The dispute boils down simply to whether you prefer action-filled plots—in which case you’d prefer the JLA, or characterization—in which case you’d prefer the Fantastic Four. I happen to look for plot, and therefore prefer the JLA, but I could change my mind at any time.

Al: I prefer the Fantastic Four because, mainly, they have a smaller number and can go forth in battle together rather than in teams, which segments the story. Also, the action seems to flow more smoothly in the Fantastic Four than in the JLA.

Buddy: Of course it’s very hard to break away from my old allegiance to the JLA, but as you say, the Fantastic Four isn’t as crowded and the stories seem to be somewhat different, unlike the JLA plots, which run into a sameness that, at times, grows dull. Of course, they each have their good points.

Al: One thing that the FF have that the JLA doesn’t is several good villains: Sub-Mariner and Doctor Doom. In FF #6, for instance, the pacing was perfect, starting peacefully, building steadily to the glorious fight of Namor and Doom, then easing off only on the last page. The switch of allegiance of Prince Namor from Doctor Doom to the FF shed a new light on the Sub-Mariner’s character, making him both a hero and a villain—a combination which is hard to find these days.

Bob: This is what makes Lee so great—not only do the heroes have a specific characterization, but the villains have them, too.

Dr. Doom and the Sub-Mariner act like true villains, giving even Luthor and Sinestro a hard time.

Al: Right. With a stable of reliable, time-tested villains, no time is wasted creating a new villain each issue, explaining how he got his powers and such. Sub-Mariner and Doctor Doom are as well known to the readers as the Fantastic Four are.

Buddy: And besides these two, Spider-Man has just fought the Vulture and Dr. Octopus, two of the greatest villains around. I’d like to see the FF battle these two once and give Spider-Man a crack at Dr. Doom and Namor.

Bob: But you know, a lot of the Sub-Mariner’s success is due to the nostalgia surrounding him which tends to lure the older fans.

Marvel could sure scoop the comic world by reviving Captain America out of the ashes.

Buddy: Sure, I’d like to see Captain America revived—who wouldn’t? But I want to see the return of Captain America—not the creation of a hero bearing only the Captain’s name. I don’t want another Human Torch incident.

Another Fantastic Foursome The opinions expressed in “Point of View” were naturally geared toward relatively recent developments at Marvel. Apart from a few comments on the Hulk title, which had ended with #6 at the turn of 1963, the discussion focused a great deal on the Sub-Mariner, who at that time was appearing as a villain in numerous comics, and Spider-Man, whose first battle with Doc Ock appeared on the stands in early April. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Fan P.O.V. Of The Marvel Super-Heroes—In 1963!

Green Grow The Mastheads Another great header for P.O.V. by Richard “Grass” Green.

Al: And carried one step further, if you are talking about the Captain America that slugged his way through hordes of crooks with Bucky at his side—yes! If you mean the Captain America that pranced about with Golden Girl at his side—no! Frankly, I’d rather see Miss America back.

Bob: Of course the patriotic superdoer is a thing of the past, and, although the U.S. isn’t at war, I for one think he’d be widely accepted by the readers.

Buddy: From what I’ve read of the old Capt. America, he was a very good hero, and if he was handled correctly could still be a great star.

Bob: Speaking of Cap, it would be a treat indeed to see one of his old foes, the Gargoyle, resurrected and pitted against the FF; he’d give the Thing a better fight than either Namor or the Hulk!

Al: Of course any good villain would be a treat. Credit accrues to a hero in proportion to the strength of the villain he defeats.

Like, the Torch just licked Paste-Pot Pete. So what? But when he fights Sub-Mariner and only ties—it’s a great story! Put Namor on the cover of a comic making fists at Torch and sales are sure to skyrocket.

Bob: You know, I’d like to see the Torch removed from Strange Tales and replaced by Sub-Mariner.

Al: That would be okay, so long as Namor doesn’t become a hero.

Every comic has a hero that the readers, writers, and artists are familiar with, but not every comic has a villain like Namor—that is completely familiar to all the readers. Marvel shouldn’t give up a thing like that; Sub-Mariner is worth twice as much to them as a villain and ten times as much to me.

Buddy: Of course, by the same token, getting back to what Bob said, I don’t think any of the heroes not now in their own book could hold them if they had ’em.

Bob: I agree—even though the Thing and the Invisible Girl are great, I don’t think any of the FF merit their own books, nor do I think Thor, Ant-Man, or Iron Man merit their own.

Al: And don’t forget the business side. If they get their own books,

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they would go bi-monthly, so that every other month we would get a full comic with them, instead of every month getting half a comic. Also, more artwork would be required, which might bring Al Hartley and Larry Lieber up from the scrubs to the first team.

Buddy: Actually, aside from Spider-Man and Ant-Man, I have no great love for Marvel (Fantastic Four not included, natch!) The Torch has crummy villains, Thor isn’t much better off and Iron Man is to be pitied.

Bob: Part of the trouble with Thor is that he doesn’t have plausible stories. It is harder to “suspend disbelief” with him than with Spider-Man or the Ant-Man, for instance.

Al: Perhaps, but don’t forget that because, as a group, the Marvel characters are so powerful, the action is occasionally slighted to allow character development. Thor and Loki, for instance, battle whenever they meet, but much of this fighting is done with their tongues.

Buddy: Thor actually started out quite well. But as Kirby continued to maul the art, I started losing interest in the character. Sinnott did a fair version and the most recent Kirby version was one of the best stories, art-wise, in the series.

Al: Both Heck and Sinnott are doing a good job—better, on the average than Ditko. But, then, after seeing Hartley maul Thor, ANYTHING is an improvement!

Buddy: At first I didn’t like Heck—he seems to have a scratchy style—his inking not being too great—and I felt that Kirby’s style was suited to super-heroes, while Don’s wasn’t. Now, I’ve completely changed my opinion.

Al: You know, Marvel has one gigantic advantage. Being young heroes, they have not used up all the simple plots. There is not such an elaborate structure of story and character development.

Bob: Perhaps this can explain the fact that Marvel is so popular.

We break away from the conception of one major company and we can feed on the hero concepts of another, breaking the flow of “the same old thing.” Thanks to Stan Lee, that’s one thing that Marvel doesn’t have!

Buddy: This thing about originality seems to be the only point that is favorable with the Marvel heroes. As a rule, the stories aren’t too great.

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Comic Fandom Archive

Buddy: One thing’s for sure—the Fantastic Four is the most popular comic he has. They sure get around, appearing in just about everything—Strange Tales and Spider-Man, and the other characters appear with them—Ant-Man and the Hulk, for instance.

Al: By the same token, he has had some real duds. Case in point: the Hulk. I’m glad he was finally ousted from his own comic, but am wondering what his role in the Avengers will be like.

Purple Prose—Spirit Duplicator Style (Above:) The Hero #2 scanned for this edition of “Comic Fandom Archive” was originally panelist Al Kuhfeld’s own copy.

(Bottom right:) Steve Ditko’s cover for Charlton’s Space Adventures #38 (Feb. 1961). Kuhfeld considered Ditko’s “Captain Atom” art superior to his early work on The Amazing Spider-Man. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Al: It’s hard to say exactly what is a good point. If the originality is over-stressed, the heroes will have another liability. Also, their uniqueness is by virtue of their recent creation and not inherent in them. Soon it will wear off.

Buddy: One thing that has already worn off is Iron Man’s uniqueness. He’s probably Marvel’s worst creation at the time. To begin with, his costume is ridiculous in both its explanation and its appearance. I thought he would undergo a costume change, but the only change was in the color; now he looks like a refugee from Ft. Knox. Besides, the majority of his stories have been lacking.

Bob: As I’ve said, when these heroes take things easier and dispense with the crazy plots, the group will have nothing to worry about.

Al: Also, Iron Man doesn’t have any internal conflict like the rest of the group. Whereas Superman’s only recorded instance of internal conflict came when he had to decide whether to save Lois or Lana, the Marvel heroes thrive on this. Ant-Man is a good example— realizing the lack of this turmoil, Lee has introduced it.

Buddy: This is all very fine, but there is simply the problem of that costume! I don’t doubt that if the stories were improved just a bit they would be fine, but that costume is absurd—looks like a stovepipe with legs!

Bob: You’re right about that, but I think that the costume could be over-looked if the stories were more characterized. I’m a confirmed heroine-hater, for example, but the Invisible Girl appeals to me. She acts natural, the way one would expect a heroine to act—not like Wonder Woman. It’s hard to explain but Lee’s flair for character development makes his characters some of the most plausible around.

Buddy: There’s no doubt about that, but Lee doesn’t write Iron Man, he only supplies the plot.

Al: It’s obvious that they need more writers—but where can they get them? My own favorites are the ones Lee handles: Spider-Man and the FF. The others are okay, but can’t compare with those two.

Bob: True, but don’t forget the popularity of these heroes—in part—can be likened to nostalgia. Of course, Torch and Namor are the only revived heroes, but they are both handled by Lee, and although Lee has some problems, his work has been proved better.

Buddy: I never particularly cared for the Hulk. He seemed to be an imitation of the Thing, and although the Thing is portrayed beautifully, the Hulk was just another monster from Lee’s pre-super-hero days. I did think the last issue was an improvement though—especially Ditko’s artwork.

Bob: The Hulk wasn’t just the same character as the Thing. The Thing was bitter because of the accident that made him a monster but he still acts the part a hero is supposed to act.

Al: You mentioned the art in Hulk by Ditko. I haven’t really thought much about this, but seems to me that it wasn’t as good as it could have been. Much of Steve’s Marvel work hasn’t been up to his Charlton Captain Atom stories, but the cover to Spider-Man #2, “The Iron Warrior,” and others of his recent shorts have been among his best.

The Fan P.O.V. Of The Marvel Super-Heroes—In 1963!

Buddy: I’ve thought all his Spider-Man stories have been great. And he does a great job in “weird”-type stories.

Al: Well, his art can, at times, stand even without a story; I liked his Charlton work, which proves the point. Only a couple of those stories had any “real” story to them.

Bob: Besides Ditko’s art, the Spider-Man stories have another asset: the coloring. The color pigment, as well as its placement, is different than in the DC line—again, relief from “monotony.”

Chairman: Well, fellas, I’m going to have to stop you here, although this has been a most interesting discussion. Before closing, I would like to summarize the findings of Bob, Buddy, and Al: 1. The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man seem to be the most popular Marvel characters, while the others are about equal.

2. Seems like, in this instance also, the decision over who is the worst hero is under dispute. Some dislike Hulk-type heroes, while others dislike Torch or the others.

3. The problems in the JLA-FF question rests simply on this: if you like action-filled plots, then you prefer the JLA, but if you prefer characterization, then the Fantastic Four would be your choice.

4. Perhaps the biggest asset Marvel has is its strong lineup of characters and, in particular, its editor, Stan Lee. 5. The only real drawbacks at Marvel are in the colors and the poor work Jack Kirby has been turning in recently, although naturally

71

this would depend upon your opinion of just what is good.

6. Ditko seems to be the favorite Marvel artist, with Heck running second. However, Kirby, simply because of his work in the forties, would probably carry the vote of fandom in a poll.

7. Captain America should definitely be revived.

8. The best plan for the Marvel heroes is to stay in the comics they are now in, with guest appearances in other mags. Also, the creation of The Avengers (a group comic) is a good move.

There you have it. You can draw your own conclusions on the subject. Do you agree or disagree? Either way, I hope you’ve enjoyed this discussion. In the next issue, incidentally, will be what could turn into a controversial discussion, as POV asks: “What Happened to Hawkman?” Don’t miss it!

Rick Weingroff Chairman Thanks, Nick, for presenting this look back to a time almost a year before Captain America was revived by Marvel. What seems clear to me is that these guys were groping with understanding and valuing what Stan and his talented artists were offering. Marvel at this point was still very much in DC’s shadow. Over the coming year, that would change a great deal. Note: the introduction is © 2018 by Nick Caputo. Bill Schelly can be contacted at: hamstrpres@aol.com.

72

perhaps future magazine project. Wow, I get a letter requesting some visuals (movies posters and stills) to accompany the “project.” Long story condensed: got everything back two years later, after a short feature on the “Kids” was published with my “visuals” and sans my name. Actually, I was still so impressed to be part of anything at that age that I never developed a bad taste for Warren or his staff.

I never know what to expect when I see that a pro’s relative will be interviewed. John Brenner does a fantastic job painting the backstory of Mr. George Brenner. My father also passed away when I was 15.

You sure learn to grow up quickly. Kooiman leads him in a great direction. Just enough background to give this article some real interest.

As for Ted White—he is and always will be a BNF [Big Name Fan]. I gobbled up his sci-fi fanzines long before A/E appeared. His LOCs [letters of comment] were always read first.

The art in those Fawcett comics from Argentina is breathtaking. We just came back from Barcelona and found a “flea market” with a stack of Marvels in Spanish (though I’m not certain of the country of origin). With this much unseen (at least in the U.S.) quality comicbook art existing, the notion of a great coffee-table book springs to mind.

D

uring much of the Golden Age, our spotlight star Wonder Woman shared the covers of Comic Cavalcade with The Flash and Green Lantern—so, this issue, artist Shane Foley and colorist Randy Sargent persuaded her to hang around with our “maskots” Alter Ego and Captain Ego instead, homaging the figures on the cover of CC #15 (June-July 1946). Great job, guys—and the two Egos were more than willing to lend a hand with a spot of spring cleaning!

[Alter Ego hero TM & © Roy & Dann Thomas; costume designed by Ron Harris… Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly; created by Biljo White… Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.]

Alter Ego #146 dealt with the early career of Doug Moench, particularly at Warren, DC, and Marvel, and definitely garnered some interest… as did the issue’s other features. Here’s an overall appreciation

by Bernie Bubnis: Hi Roy— Am I the only person who is constantly astounded at an interviewer’s amazing ability to be completely familiar with the work of the subject he is interviewing? Mr. Arndt was certainly the correct choice to interview Doug Moench. Wow, what a fun read, and I know very little if any of Doug’s work. I sure missed a lot of great stories. I think I was just “buying” comics at this period, almost like a pre-programmed robot: Buy, because it was a decade-long habit. Then carefully putting them away, unread.

Thinking that I would soon have the time to finally enjoy them at a later date. That “later date” was trampled on by marriage, mortgages, lawnmowers, and a little girl who wanted a pony.

You know, everybody’s “later date.” Doug sure produced a lot of inventory.

James Warren!! Love him or hate (maybe detest) him.

I collected everything to do with a number of movie series featuring the original kids from the Dead End play and movie.

Forry Ackerman encouraged me to put all my “knowledge” of these movies into text form and submit it to Warren Pbs for a

I really am surprised how many copies of the Ballmann book on the 1964 con I am signing for fans under the age of 18. These kids relate to the present day Comic-Cons much the same way we older fans once related to fanzines. They really seem to embrace the time-travel feeling of reading about those early-’60s cons and how simple everything was. Never thought they would be part of the audience.

Bernie Bubnis To most millennials and folks even younger, of course, anything emanating from as far back as 1964 might as well be antediluvian… but happily there are exceptions to this willful ignorance, and those people seems to be seeking you out, Bernie, as one of the co-hosts of the very first real comics convention ever, in that fateful year… just as they do Alter Ego and the all-too-rare other sources of same such as DC’s Archives, Marvel’s Masterworks, and the occasional reprinting by Dark Horse or another company. Keep holding the fort, friend!

Another “re:” regular, Jeff Taylor, had this to say: Roy— I loved the cover showing Shang-Chi punching out the mask in the Alter Ego logo! I would love to know who was responsible for coming up with that idea (and possibly Paul Gulacy does, too.)

The Doug Moench interview was also great, and the neverbefore-printed “Bill of Rights and Liberty Belle” story was pretty cool in its own weird way, but what I really got a kick out of was the stuff on comics’ first masked hero, The Clock. Now there was a guy who really deserved his own radio show… [ticking sound] Criminals beware! Your time is running out! The minutes are ticking away to your final hour of reckoning, as justice stalks the night in a black silk mask. Know that, whenever evil thinks it is safe from the law, that is when… THE CLOCK STRIKES! [sound of clock chiming] Ahem, sorry… I just couldn’t resist.

Also, I would like to point out that, on page 88 in the Fawcett section, Captain Marvel is not the only “foreign” super-hero on the

re:

73

thoroughly enjoyed that you allowed Mr. Arndt to cover more questioning of that particular material, as I felt it is Doug’s best work. I wonder if people realize that the “kung fu craze” had worn off, but Doug was still creating strong stories beyond the material/craze, as he shares about in the interview. This book was groundbreaking in its storytelling at the time. And it appeared to not be able to find its direction after Doug left.

I also wanted to point out that your viewpoints are excellent about the field, as you worked behind the scenes in one way or another and have firsthand experience. I want to tip my hat to you, as I find your coverage extremely objective. Case in point is how you wrote such an objective obituary for Mort Weisinger, with whom you had strong negative experiences. You provide opinions and facts from all angles. You also did this well in the back of the Dark Horse Conan reprints. So forgive me if I ask for you to include more of the Silver Age/Bronze Age material.

Bill Broomall We’ll continue to straddle the two eras, Bill—and everything in between. After all, those two eras are the twin reason why I revived A/E in the first place: the Golden Age consists of the comics that I read when young and that influenced me as a child and maybe teenager—and the Silver Age was the time when I came of age and even became a professional, so that I gained some first-hand knowledge of the 1965-and-later period.

Thomas Kiefer couldn’t let A/E #146 pass without uttering a few words on that issue’s “Comic Crypt” offering…

Who Was That “Maskot” Man? You know how much we hate to see anything wasted—so here’s an alternate “maskot” drawing done by Shane Foley a year and a half back, as opposed to the one we wound up using and coloring in A/E #146. It references a piece of Werewolf by Night art by Don Perlin & Vince Colletta.

[Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly—created by Biljo White.]

cover of Almanaque Do O Blobo Juvenil. The masked knight on the right side of the page is Sir Falcon (also known as Aguia Nero/Black Falcon in Brazil), a mysterious modern-day crusader known only as “Mr. Knight,” who donned his ancestor’s armor to fight evil in the family tradition. Created by artist Peter Chapman, he was one of several Phantom clones published in Australia back in the ’50s and ’60s.

Jeff Taylor Can’t recall whose idea the smashed A/E logo on #146 was, Jeff— though I’m pretty sure it was either publisher John Morrow or layout man Chris Day. Thanks for the added info.

Here are a few thoughts on coverage of the Golden vs. the Silver Age, from Bill Broomall: Hey Roy, Just wanted to send a response to what appears to be a controversy with the magazine… the controversy being how to cover the 1940s and 1950s compared to the Silver Age coverage. I have been with your magazine since #1, and I find that I have truly enjoyed the Silver Age coverage you have had recently. Loved the recent Doug Moench and Gerry Conway interviews. I think I have enjoyed this material more than the Golden Age material, as I was brought up with this material and so I relate to it very strongly.

I know that Richard Arndt may have gone further from the timetable of the magazine with his coverage of Master of Kung Fu, but I loved MOKF and thought it was revolutionary at the time. I

Dear Mr. Thomas, I lack the words to express how incredibly cool Michael T. Gilbert’s “The EC Variants” article was. His choices of Molino’s art, and their pairing with the right EC titles, was pitch perfect and a genuine artistic statement in themselves. These covers are the kinds of things that should be shared as widely as possible on social media. As an aside, one can only imagine how differently comicbook history would have unfolded had Dell/Gold Key used these kinds of painted covers on their comics!

Thomas Kiefer They’d probably have gotten themselves and the comicbook industry in even deeper trouble than it already was in the early 1950s, Thomas!

Maybe we’re just as well off that we had just that Johnny Craig severed head from EC and all those violent Crime Does Not Pay covers.

Just room to mention that you should send all comments and corrections to: Roy Thomas e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135 And we wanted to remind you that our e-mail discussion list, Alter-Ego-Fans, is still going strong, with news and views, etc. Visit http:/groups.yahoo.com/group/alter-ego-fans. Since Yahoo Groups no longer has an “Add Member” tool, you may experience a slight problem getting in; if so, please contact moderator Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll walk you through the process.

He’s helpful that way.

While, on Facebook, genial John Cimino ramrods The Roy Thomas Appreciation Boards, which discuss anything and everything related to Stan Lee’s one-time apprentice, including upcoming con appearances, etc. Fully interactive!

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75

in memoriam

James Galton (1924-2017) “[Given] A Year Or Two To Turn Marvel Around”

James Galton Also seen is a cel from the Marvel Productions TV series G.I. Joe, featuring the villain Destro. Thanks to Heritage Auctions, Inc. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

by Roy Thomas

A

s reported in places as varied as the online Scoop and in the Wall Street Journal, former Marvel publisher James Galton passed away in Naples, Florida, on June 12, 2017, at age 92. He was credited on both sites as the man who had “saved Marvel Comics”—and there’s doubtless a fair amount of truth in that.

After graduating from Antioch College, Ohio, with a business degree, he worked first as an accountant, then for an advertising agency, a magazine publisher, and as a top executive at paperback publisher Popular Library Books.

As Sean Howe reported in his 2012 book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, in 1975 Galton was a consultant for Curtis Circulation, and thus was already working for the Cadence Industries conglomerate that then owned Marvel, when head honcho Sheldon Feinberg appointed him to replace Al Landau as Marvel’s president. Comicbooks at that time were facing an irreversible

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downturn in the number of retail outlets that were willing to handle the relatively unprofitable product. At the time Galton took over, working with publisher (and Marvel co-creator) Stan Lee, the comics company was worth perhaps $12 million. Friends advised him not to take the job, as the field was dying: “But I had four kids—two in private school, two in college—and two mortgages.

I had to take the job.” His bosses gave him a year or two to turn Marvel around or it would be basically sold off for parts.

Galton saw comics stores and direct sales as the industry’s way out of the morass. In that, he was proven right. Probably nothing could have preserved comicbooks as the mass medium they had been since the 1940s, but Galton positioned Marvel to take advantage of comics stores and found ways to increase mail subscriptions. He was also pivotal in launching an animation studio (Marvel Productions) in Los Angeles that produced not only shows about Spider-Man but also the likes of G.I. Joe, and The Transformers. He and Stan Lee were unable at that time to get Marvel’s heroes onto the big screen, but they kept pushing.

Meanwhile, he started a Marvel Books division. He left Marvel in 1991.

Some news sources credit him as the man who in 1976 brought to Marvel the ultimately ultra-successful Star Wars comics franchise, which helped turn the company’s fortunes around at a time of vulnerability. Of course, he merely agreed to a proposal brought by George Lucas/20th Century-Fox representative Charles Lippincott and myself; still, many executives in his position wouldn’t have allowed such a deal to go forward, since Marvel was never going to be able to merchandise Star Wars as it could the characters it owned. Galton appreciated the importance of the 1977 Star Wars comics in his own career, however; in 2006, he asked an academic-publisher friend of mine to convey his greetings to me because, to quote him, “He made me rich.”

James Galton was a hardworking, decent, and eminently competent man and executive… and in his own way he was probably as important to Marvel as most of the writers and artists who created the company’s key super-heroes.

76

in memoriam

Harlan Ellison

(1934-2018) “The Writer On The Edge Of Forever”

by Stephan Friedt

T

he Writer on the Edge of Forever is gone. Controversial, opinionated, combative, prolific... there were as many descriptions of Harlan Jay Ellison as there were fans.

Harlan had an opinion on everything, and everyone formed their own opinions about Harlan. Some formed those opinions from the personal encounters they had with him, some from the effect his writings had on them… but everyone whose path he crossed formed an opinion. I like to think that was his intent in life… to make people think… and to make them think passionately was the ultimate goal.

Author Robert Bloch of Psycho fame called Harlan “the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water.”

In the introduction to I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Theodore Sturgeon described Harlan as “a man on the move, and he is moving fast. He is, on these pages and everywhere else he goes, colorful, intrusive, ABRASIVE ... and one hell of a writer.”

J.G. Ballard, one of his fellow writers in the “New Wave” of science-fiction, described him as “an aggressive and restless extrovert who conducts life at a shout and his fiction at a scream.”

Stephen King, in his book-length horror study Danse Macabre, referred to Harlan’s story collection Strange Wine as one of the best horror collections published between 1950 and 1990.

Harlan Ellison at an ABA (American Book Association) convention some years back—and Herb Trimpe’s cover for The Incredible Hulk #140 (June 1971), which was plotted

by Ellison and introduced Jarella, “The Girl in the Emerald Atom,” to the Marvel Universe—and its prequel in The Avengers #88 (May 1971), with art

by Sal Buscema. The photo, taken by Larry and Marilyn Niven, is courtesy of Andrew Porter via Art Lortie. [Cover TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Harlan wrote 70 books, some 400 short stories, dozens of TV screenplays, and more than 1,000 essays, introductions, and columns. I first read science-fiction pieces by him when I was in my formative teen years. I was hooked and read anything with Harlan’s name on it… stories, articles, anthologies, etc.

His first paying story was a plot for an EC comic: “Upheavel” in Weird Science-Fantasy #24 (1954), scripted by Al Feldstein, with art by Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel and coloring by Marie Severin. That started him on the road to being a professional writer. But it was a long hard road. Many adult-themed books and magazine articles later, Harlan sold his first science-fiction story, “Glowworm,” to Infinity magazine in 1956, and he began to be a regular name in the SF magazines. Drafted in 1957, he filled the Army newspaper with articles and stories. In 1958 his first book, Rumble, and his short-story collection Deadly Streets were published, and he had as many as ten stories a month in publication.

Beginning in 1962, Harlan tried his hand at TV and movies. He worked as a writer for TV shows like Ripcord, Burke’s Law, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Outer Limits, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Alfred Hitchcock Presents—and the well-known Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.” He also tried his hand at movies, scripting the poorly-received film The Oscar (1966), and adapting his story “A Boy and His Dog” for the cult-favorite film directed

in memoriam

77

Comics Over Seven Decades Covers of Harlan Ellison’s comic work, from a short story in 1954’s Weird Science-Fantasy #24 (cover by Al Feldstein) to 2013’s original graphic novel 7 Against Chaos with artist Paul Chadwick. Also included are Detective Comics #567 (Oct. 1986), with a cover by Klaus Janson and art

by Gene Colan, and Daredevil #208 (July 1984), written with Arthur Byron Cover and featuring art by David Mazzuchelli. [Weird ScienceFantasy TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.; Detective Comics TM & © DC Comics; Daredevil TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; 7 Against Chaos © The Kilimanjaro Corporation.]

by L.Q. Jones in 1975. He also worked on the Canadian series The Starlost (becoming so angry at the rewrite of his pilot script that he instigated his future pseudonym “Cordwainer Bird” to be used in the credits) and the revival of Twilight Zone (he quit over a rewrite), and he was a creative consultant for Babylon 5. Along the way he managed to garner 8½ Hugo Awards (he always called his shared Hugo for the screenplay for A Boy and His Dog “half a Hugo”), 4 Nebulas, 5 Bram Stokers for horror, 2 Edgars for mystery, two George Melies fantasy film awards, and a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1963.

And when Harlan returned to comicbooks, I was ready for the ride. I had caught his story “Rock God,” inspired by a Frazetta cover, in Creepy #32 in 1970. Then in 1971 his plotting for scripter/ editor Roy Thomas the story that became The Avengers #88 and The Incredible Hulk #140 in 1971 was a fanboy’s treat. Thomas also adapted an unsold Ellison “Hawkman” synopsis for Avengers #101.

After that, it was just an adventure watching for comics adaptations of Harlan’s stories… and they popped up: “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” adapted by Gerry Conway & Syd Shores for Chamber of Chills #1 in 1972, “Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman” adapted by Doug Moench & Alex Nino for Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #3 in 1975.

In between, Harlan popped up in some unusual places: a text article in Crazy Magazine #1; foreword, introduction, preface, afterword in The Anthology of Slow Death; helping out Denny O’Neil on a Daredevil script and a “Batman” story; a story in ground-level Ariel Magazine; a story in Heavy Metal, etc.

Then, in 1978, Baronet Publishing put out the book The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, produced by Byron Preiss and utilizing the talents of people like Michael Whelan, Jim Steranko, Alfredo Alcala, Ralph Reese, Tom Sutton, William Stout, and others. I owned my comic shop at the time and grabbed a hardcover and a trade paperback copy for my personal library.

Harlan Ellison was one of a kind. He was provocative and thought-provoking. The world is a little emptier with his passing, but thankfully we have a library of his thoughts put down on paper.

For a bibliography check out https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Harlan_Ellison_bibliography #Graphic_story_adaptations

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78

in memoriam

Herb Rogoff

included Wild Boy and Crime Clinic. His last comicbook project before Ziff-Davis folded its comics line was an adaptation of the 1953 film Hans Christian Anderson, which he wrote and edited. He segued into being an art director for the pulps and magazines, but that didn’t last as the company reduced their output.

The Thoughtful Man (1927-2018)

by Jim Amash

H

erbert Rogoff was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 12, 1927. He originally wanted to be a cartoonist, graduating from the High School of Music and Art in 1944, subsequently taking classes at the Arts Students League. His first job was working as an apprentice for editor Harry Shorten at MLJ (later known as Archie Comics Publications) in 1943, and for a short while, he worked in the art department. He also did artwork for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team for several years. And he was a copy boy for the Sports Week newspaper.

In 1945, Herb was drafted into military service as a Marine for sixteen months, and was the staff cartoonist for the Camp Lejeunne Globe. When he got out of the service, Herb went to the Cartoonists and Illustrators School. He returned to Sports Week as a sports cartoonist until 1948. For three weeks, Herb did some lettering for Magazine Management and Timely Comics (later known as Marvel Comics). In 1949, he was hired by Hillman Publications editor Ed Cronin as his assistant editor, a post he held until 1952, when he went to work at Ziff-Davis Publications as an assistant editor over failure to get a raise. Herb, among others, always described owner Alex Hillman as a tightwad.

At Hillman, he edited copy, dealt with freelance writers and artists, and did whatever else needed to be done. His lifelong friendship with “Airboy” and “Heap” writer/artist Ernie Schroeder began here. He considered Ed Cronin a good teacher who was very detail-oriented, and Herb learned what it took to be a good editor.

When Ziff-Davis forced Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel out as the lead editor, Herb replaced him.

The company’s best-selling comicbook was G.I. Joe. Herb introduced new characters to the series, wrote text pages, and tinkered with the overall direction of the book, which boosted sales further.

While other editors like Ned Martin, Jim Miele, and assistant editor Ed Murphy (later replaced

by Harry Stein) worked on books for the executive in charge, Lou Zara, Herb was mostly given a free hand to do as he pleased on his books, which

After that, Herb began a long career with the art supply company Grumbacher as a salesman, and then a public relations director. He freelanced as a writer for a while, but the work for Grumbacher soon left him no free time. Part of that freelance writing was comics for Western Publishing, where he wrote Wally and Rocky and His Fiendish Friends in Hollywood. During this time, he met and married the famous painter, Helen Van Wyck. Among the projects they did together was Palette Talk magazine and, later, Alla Prima. Herb and Helen had a very happy marriage that lasted until her passing. He went into semi-retirement, publishing various books, tapes, videos, and DVDs. His last project was an on-line collection of amusing stories from his life that was published in 2018. Herb Garden: Self-Portraits of a Lucky Guy is currently available, and I recommend it.

Educated by the “School of Hard Knocks,” Herb was a very thoughtful, loving man with an observant, incisive wit. The stories he told me ranged from funny to tragic with occasional irony.

Our friendship was deep and rewarding for both of us, filled with laughter and very serious conversations for the last 14 years of his life. In 2004, Herb and his girlfriend Shirleen traveled from Florida to North Carolina to spend time with me at the Heroes Convention. It was his only comics convention appearance. Herb was responsible for getting me in touch with Ernie Schroeder and Hillman cartoonist Wally Littman, and interviews with all three were published in Alter Ego #42.

Herb was a big supporter of Alter Ego. Our interview awakened a part of his life he had thought was long past him. His interest in comics renewed, he happily contributed to this magazine when asked. He was a proud man who valued people, always giving thought to the needs of his family, friends, and acquaintances. He felt the joys and pains of their lives, and equally shared in both with concern and loving, practical advice. He was a cultured gentleman who will missed by all of us.

Jim Amash has worked as a finisher for most of the comicbook companies over the years, as well as being an associate editor, writer, and interviewer for this magazine since 2001. He has also written/co-written several books on comics creators, all of which have been published by TwoMorrows. Currently, he freelances for Archie Comics.

Herb Rogoff is seen flanked by the last comicbook which he edited (and also wrote) for Hillman Periodicals, the movie adaptation Hans Christian Anderson (1953; art probably by Vic Martin & Marv Levy)—and the first issue of Ziff-Davis’ bestseller G.I. Joe that he edited: #12, cover-dated June 1952, with a cover painting by Norman Saunders. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

in memoriam

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Tom Wolfe & The Marvel Age Of Comics

A Neo-Journalist & Future Novelist’s Four-Color Detours

B

A Personal Remembrance by Roy Thomas

estselling fiction writer and “New Journalist” Tom Wolfe (born 1930) died at age 88 on May 14, 2018. He was the author of such acclaimed books as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), The Right Stuff (1979), Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), A Man in Full (1998), and other popular and influential works both long and short.

Now, ordinarily, since Thomas Kennedy Wolfe, Jr., never wrote, drew, or edited a comicbook—and, so far as I know, only rarely read one as an adult—his passing would not be noted in Alter Ego, even though he has been a literary and cultural icon of mine since the mid-1960s. Newspapers, TV, and print journals have paid just tribute to his life and work.

However, Wolfe did have a “comicbook connection,” even if he never sought one. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he detailed the antics of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey and his acolytes, the self-styled “Merry Pranksters,” on a 1964 crosscountry journey in a psychedelically painted school bus (and with plenty of LSD on board to justify those hues; non-druggie Wolfe had been tolerated “on the bus” as an observer). Early on in the reportorial work, Wolfe refers to the modern “myths” that had truly touched people a couple of decades earlier: “not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas—but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Plastic Man, The Flash….”

Later in the book, Wolfe discovers there are a number of recent Marvel comics aboard the bus—especially issues of Strange Tales featuring “Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts”— which seem in some oddball way to be fueling some of the Merry Pranksters’ fantasies. At one point he describes Kesey as “[sitting] for hours on end, reading comic books, absorbed in the plunging purple Steve Ditko shadows of Dr. Strange attired in capes and chiaroscuro, saying: ‘How could they have known that the gem was merely a device to bridge DIMENSIONS! It was a means to enter the dread PURPLE DIMENSION—from our own world!”

There’s a later reference to Doc battling Aggamon (in that selfsame issue), in the chapter Wolfe titled “Dream Wars.”

Intrigued by this, and greatly admiring the entirety of Kool-Aid for reasons totally unrelated to comics, I wrote its Manhattan-dwelling author a fan-letter of sorts (sent in care of his publisher, I’m sure), which ended by asking him if he would mind if I wrote him into a scene in the Doctor Strange title I was then

scripting with artist Gene Colan (Ditko having moved on by early 1966). I was delighted to receive a quick response, a handwritten letter that made abundant use of dazzling calligraphic flourishes, including cartouches—boxes around certain important Tom Wolfe words or phrases, just as the Back in the day. names of Pharaohs had once been enclosed amid Egyptian hieroglyphics written on monuments of stone. That particular missive, alas, has gone lost over the years amid my moves from Coast to Coast to Coast; but, to my overjoyed surprise, he granted me the blessing I sought with no request for prior (or later) approval. So I had Gene pencil him into a sequence in Doctor Strange #180 (May 1969), in which Stephen and his extradimensional ladyfriend Clea run into journalist Tom Wolfe amid the multitude of revelers on Broadway in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. (This story had been intended for #179, which came out at the turn of 1969-70; but unremembered circumstances intervened and #179 had wound up sporting a Ditko reprint instead.) I’m not entirely happy with the dialogue I put in the two men’s mouths during their brief exchange, but I’m happier with the sequence in general—a brief interim, just moments/panels before a huge pterodactyl flies into the electric news-ticker that dances around the Allied Chemical Tower. As I recall, Marvel received a number of letters expressing shock and awe at the unexpected meeting of Doc and Tom Wolfe.

Soon afterward, Wolfe told a fellow journalist—or at least he was indirectly quoted as doing so—that some time later he had been “killing time” in some waiting room by paging through a Doctor Strange comic lying there (what kind of waiting room was he in, anyway?) when he’d been surprised to spot his likeness therein.

Well, maybe he just forgot he’d okayed our depicting him. For, surely I’d sent him a copy of the comic. (Or did I somehow forget to do so? Not likely—but it was a long time ago.) In any case, if I received any sort of early reaction to the story from Wolfe, I don’t recall it now.

Some time later, I read his newest bestseller, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers—or, since that 1970 work was

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“Purple” Rain (Left:) From Strange Tales #119 (April 1964), the splash page of the “Dr. Strange” yarn set in the Purple Dimension— and p. 9 of the story, in which the Mystic Master fights a supernatural battle with that realm’s evil ruler, Aggamon.

Script by Stan Lee; art (and quite possibly plot) by Steve Ditko.

Thanks to Barry Pearl for the scans. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

actually a compilation of two of his fairly recent articles gathered in book form, perhaps I was reacting to the original publication in New York magazine of “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” its original title. In that piece, which introduced into the language a new term that is still with us, he reported on a cocktail party he had attended at the 13-room Park Avenue penthouse of composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre on January 14, 1970. The event was intended as a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party—yes, the same controversial AfricanAmerican organization founded in late 1966, no doubt coincidentally, half a year after the first appearance of Marvel’s super-hero Black Panther in Fantastic Four #52-53 (July & Aug. ’66).

Wolfe took no stance for or against the real-life Panthers, who were seen

Strange Bedfellows Panels from the two pages in Doctor Strange #180 (May 1969) in which Stephen and Clea encounter Tom Wolfe in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, 1968. Roy Thomas, writer; Gene Colan, penciler; Tom Palmer, inker. Thanks to Barry Pearl.

[TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Tom Wolfe & The Marvel Age of Comics

“That Party At Lenny’s” This photo, from the 1970 issue of New York magazine in which Wolfe’s article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” first appeared, shows world-famous composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre smiling for the camera with Don Cox, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, in the couple’s Park Avenue penthouse on January 14, 1970. Photo by Stephen Salmieri; found on the Internet.

Bernstein, of course, is most noted in popular culture as the composer of the music for the Broadway play (and film) West Side Story. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

by different factions as either a dangerous quasi-military gang or as a black-oriented political organization whose activities by that time had grown to include various community social programs.

He was merely present, as an invited guest and (I presume) journalist, to report on the evening’s events… which, at least as seen through his keen eyes and mental lens, offered up the colossal incongruity of well-heeled white members of New York society attempting to graft themselves, perhaps for dubious reasons, onto a movement whose activities and goals clearly ran counter to the status and privileges of the Eastern elite. Wolfe’s article was both lauded and condemned, mostly depending upon one’s politics. As for your humble servant: I had voted for LBJ in 1964 and Hubert Humphrey in ‘68, but I found his observations fascinating and dead-on.

More to the point from my POV: “Radical Chic” might make a good starting point for a Marvel Comics story.

In addition, as it happened, the first big public meeting of comics professionals’ newly formed Academy of Comic Book Arts was coming up very shortly; and so, on July 27, 1970, probably without bothering to clear it in advance with Stan, I banged out a hasty letter to Wolfe. That missive survives in Wolfe’s papers, and somehow made it out onto the Internet; I’ve no idea, alas, who sent me the scan. The letter is printed at right. It should be read before continuing to peruse this article….

The precise order of some events has understandably faded in the nearly five decades since, but a few things seem clear enough: First of all, at that time I was planning to make my own homage to the “Radical Chic” phenomenon in the pages of Daredevil, not the comic where it eventually wound up. Secondly, Wolfe accepted my invitation to attend

Roy Thomas at the 1971 New York Comic Art Convention.

Thanks to Pedro Angosto & Mike Zeck.

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the ACBA meeting only a few days later. His circled notation at the top of my letter (“Ans’d in person July 3”)—“Ans’d” obviously means “Answered”—might seem to suggest he didn’t respond to my letter but merely showed up on the appointed date, but I’m almost positive he phoned me first.

Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have been standing around, eager and a bit anxious, in the hotel antechamber to the grand meeting-room a few days later, not long before ACBA’s public coming-out conclave was to begin. Most comics people I knew would have been, at most, dimly aware of who Tom Wolfe was, but Stan Lee and artist Gil Kane certainly were—and I recall fellow writer Denny O’Neil, who had been a reporter for a time and was likewise an admirer of Wolfe’s, being startled and impressed when I told him the author was going to be my guest at the event.

Wolfe arrived, genial and gregarious, attired in his alreadytrademark white suit (I believe), and we exchanged small talk for a few minutes. He retained the remnants of a Southern drawl from his Virginia upbringing, which somehow made this rapier of a journalist seem just ever so slightly gentler. I suspect he realized I was a bit nervous about meeting him and did his best to put me at ease, which mostly worked. I particularly recall his mentioning during our conversation that his foremost desire was to become the Samuel Pepys of latter 20th-century New York City… the American metropolis’ diarist, so to speak, just as Pepys had been that of 17th-century London. Somehow, we even discovered that each of us had briefly dated the same young woman a few years before (a relative of a famous novelist, as it happened). It’s a small world, after all.

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One reason for my anxiety was that, soon after sending him the invitation to the ACBA affair, it had abruptly dawned on me precisely what I’d done: I had invited a genius journalist who had a propensity to skewer the pretensions of status-conscious people and groups into attending what was clearly an attempt by a nascent association of comics professionals to acquire a bit of public recognition and legitimacy for… the lowly comicbook. I had suddenly had half-glimpsed visions of a nigh-future New York magazine article of his that took aim with deadly Robin Hood accuracy at our demented four-color hubris. Wolfe wouldn’t have to be hostile to comicbooks to make us look bad… indeed, I was relatively certain he wasn’t. He just had to write, and we’d probably look ridiculous to the great mass of humankind… hoisted on our own vain, naïve petard.

I remember very little of the ACBA presentation at which Wolfe and I sat side by side, listening… only that it was the occasion on which Stan read from the stage a telegram from former Magazine Management employee/writer Mario Puzo, by then celebrated as the author of The Godfather, which read (and I just-about-quote): “Thanks to Stan Lee and Marvel Comics for teaching my children to read when the public schools failed.” Also, Gil Kane gave a speech in which he derisively referred to the Comics Magazine Association of America (the “Comics Code” folks) as “the Cattlemen’s Benevolent Protective Association.” It was, I suppose, all very uplifting… or at least it attempted to be.

Somewhere over the course of that couple of hours, I reiterated my desire to make the “Radical Chic” phenomenon the centerpiece of a Marvel story; he was enthusiastic about the notion, but I hadn’t really yet worked out exactly what I wanted to do. After the public meeting, we said our polite goodbyes and went our separate ways.

As it happened, I needn’t have worried. Whether from politeness or disinterest, he never wrote any article about comicbooks or ACBA. Now, with the distance of half a century, I rather wish he had… no matter what he’d written.

In August, my then-wife Jeanie and I were off to England for three weeks, bussing and walking around London and driving around the English countryside. That’s also the trip on which artist Barry Smith and I plotted out additional details for our adaptation of the Robert E. Howard story “The God in the Bowl” for Conan the Barbarian #7.

On October 18th, the notion of a Marvel version of “Radical Chic” still very much on my mind—particularly after Wolfe’s book was both defended and (I felt) ludicrously attacked on an installment of film producer David Susskind’s TV talk show—I finally got around to sending Wolfe another letter, which has also survived and found its way into the outside world.

And yes, this is the point at which you should take a minute to read it, before proceeding:

Back already?

In the letter, as you saw, by now I had, I think, improved my notion by having the jade-hued Hulk stand in for the Black Panthers, rather than some anonymous group bent on world conquest. I presented the vaguest précis of the proposed “Radical Chic” issue of the Incredible Hulk comic I was regularly scripting (with some sales success, I was happy to know). Wolfe’s handwritten notation at the top indicates that, one way or another, he gave the concept his “OK” and my letter was “Ans’d Nov 15.”

So I went ahead with the story, working with artist Herb Trimpe, and I was far more satisfied with The Incredible Hulk #142 (Aug. 1971) and “They Shoot Hulks, Don’t They?” than I had been with my handling of Tom Wolfe in Doctor Strange. The new yarn was basically a lampoon of the Bernsteins’ Black Panther party, but with Ol’ Greenskin as the living, breathing cause célèbre onto which the Manhattan socialites latched in order to make themselves feel good and useful and virtuous. With Marvel staff artist Tony Mortellaro as our physical model, Herb and I even turned one whole page of the story into an homage to the comic strip work of satirist Jules Feiffer. And we brought back The Valkyrie—well, a new incarnation of her, anyway. (I’d decided she was too good a concept to remain just a temporary alias of Thor’s foe The Enchantress.)

But the real fun, for me, was writing dialogue for Tom Wolfe… first establishing him silently in a full-page party scene (on p. 9)… then scripting him in a couple of panels on p. 10… and finally, on p. 16, having him pronounce the final coda to the evening after the battling Hulk and Valkyrie have trashed the penthouse. Need I add

Tom Wolfe & The Marvel Age of Comics

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Radical Shriek

that I think the combination of Herb as penciler and the always incredible John Severin as inker/embellisher could not have been bettered? (I’d have loved to mention “Radical Chic” and/or Tom Wolfe on the cover—but we didn’t have specific permission to do so, so Stan and I felt it was best not to push it. Not that I have any recollection of what Stan thought or said about this comicbook cameo, except that I’m certain he was aware of it in advance and approved the idea. He generally had faith in my taste.)

Panels from the three pages in The Incredible Hulk #142 (Aug. 1971) on which Tom Wolfe appears—first seeming just another bemused guest… then ID’d as basically a continuing character, footnote from Stan (actually Roy) and all… and finally commenting on the story and sequence, in a breaking-down-the-fourth-wall way. Script by Roy Thomas; pencils by Herb Trimpe; inks by John Severin. Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] Wanna hear a weird coincidence? The very day I was working on this piece, I was also in phone and e-mail contact with Alexandra Wolfe, a reporter and book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, concerning “my” forthcoming Taschen book The Stan Lee Story—and it was my wife Dann who had to inform me that my e-correspondent was none other than Tom Wolfe’s daughter! Like the Disneyland ride and I always say (and did, on p. 81): It’s a small world, after all!

Not long afterward, I received a second ornate, handwritten two-page note from Wolfe. (Yeah, I guess I should call him “Tom”—and I did when we met in person—but I’m reluctant to pretend to more familiarity with him than I actually ever had.)

You know the drill. Read the letter from Wolfe printed on the following page and report back.

He was clearly pleased with the presentation, and couldn’t resist just the slightest oblique reference to his detractors on the earlier Susskind TV show. He even ended the note with a definite willingness to be “of service again”… doubtless meaning in a third cameo.

I’m sorry I never pursued that possibility. Perhaps I thought I had pushed things far enough. But the two I did originate always remained a fond and slightly incredible memory.

I met Tom Wolfe only one time after that: on the evening of January 5, 1972, at the standing-room-only Stan Lee/Marvel Comics one-night show at New York’s famed Carnegie Hall, arranged by promoter Steve Lemberg, who had recently licensed the Marvel characters. Stan had suggested that I write some short “essays” about several of our superheroes, to be read onstage by whatever celebrities Stan or Lemberg or I could line up. My contribution in that arena was Tom Wolfe, who arrived at the theatre that evening (all in white, of course) to read my piece on the red-white-and-blue Avenger, Captain America. I suppose

in memoriam

[Letter TM & © Estate of Tom Wolfe.]

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a fair number of the fans who had shelled out good money hoping to see the Hulk and the Thing show up in person and mud-wrestle probably had no idea who Wolfe was (either from his own work or from the two comics in which he’d allowed me to cast him)… but to me it was a highlight of my career. He had left the building by show’s end, I think… perhaps he had sensed that some in the audience were less than pleased with the evening’s events. (Crom only knows what they expected—but then, despite his previous experience as a rock concert promoter, Lemberg had done a lackluster job of pulling the show together.)

Tom Wolfe’s path and mine never crossed again. As he rose to stellar heights with the magnificence of The Right Stuff, his 1979 book about America’s astronaut program, and then his first and most celebrated novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in 1987, I probably became more inhibited than before about reaching out to him. But I continued to follow his career… and was genuinely saddened when I learned of his passing. I suppose I had hoped that, sooner or later, we’d meet again and lift a pint in memory of glory days in the Big Apple—and in the pages of Marvel Comics.

One otherwise astute journalist friend of mine had once referred to Tom Wolfe, back in the late ’60s or so, as a “fad/fraud.” To me, he was (and is) neither.

He was a groundbreaking journalist, whose work continues to inspire… and, despite having written only three fiction works, an important novelist. In Radical Chic, Bonfire, and others of his works, I think he achieved at least part of his goal of being the Samuel Pepys of latter-20th-century New York City.

And he guest-starred in two primo Marvel comics, each of which was by far the better for his presence.

Special thanks to Brian Cronin, whose online article “Tom Wolfe’s Place in the Marvel Universe” was useful to the author in re-constructing a few of the occurrences detailed above.

Tom Wolfe & Captain America The journalist and future novelist was always interested in the sartorial splendor of status-celebrating citizens. Thus, on January 5, 1972, it was Roy T.’s distinct pleasure to see and hear him read the Rascally One’s own melodramatic musings on the Star-Spangled Avenger before a packed audience in the legendary Carnegie Hall. Wolfe resplendent in white—Cap splendid in red, white, and blue—what could have been more perfect?

Thanks to Shaun Clancy for the scan of one-time comics artist Everett Raymond Kinstler’s portrait of Tom Wolfe—and to the Grand Comics Database for the Jack Kirby/Syd Shores cover of Captain America #109 (Jan. 1969). [Portrait © Everett Raymond Kinstler or successors in interest; cover TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“The Stan Lee Of 1943!”

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Fawcett Associate Editor Henry “Lynn” Perkins

by Will Murray Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

[The following piece originally saw print in Comic Book Marketplace #120 (March 2005). It is re-presented here with its text revised/updated, and accompanied with new illustrations. —PCH.]

F

ew remember Henry “Lynn” Perkins. Yet, back in the Golden Age of Comics, he was a significant writer and editor. How significant? In addition to being a pivotal presence at Fawcett, where he inaugurated intriguing changes that smack of the kind of super-hero revolution Stan Lee kicked off in 1961, Perkins constituted a one-man British Invasion as well.

I had never heard of Henry Perkins until the day I was going through bound library volumes of a forgotten 1940s writers’ periodical called the Writer’s Journal. The April 1943 issue carried a cover story titled “Comic Magazines Turning Comic, And Hungry For New Writers.”

Henry Aveline (“Lynn”) Perkins Born in Petropolis, Brazil, on April 22, 1919, he was the second son of British parents, F.W. and Winifred Perkins. His brother, Frederick F. Perkins, was five years older. After the family moved back to England, Henry attended the Charterhouse School near Godalming before beginning his writing career, which encompassed newspapers, pulps, comics, and movie serials.

Officially becoming a U.S. citizen in 1951, Perkins and his wife left Hollywood and returned to New York; the couple had a least one child. By the 1970s, he was working at public relations firms.

Henry Perkins passed away in New York City on July 20, 1999.

Perkins plotted the “Captain Marvel” story “The World of Your Tomorrow,” which appeared in America’s Greatest Comics #7 (Spring 1943); art by C.C. Beck & staff. Read this FCA article to learn the thing that occurred in that story that became the last time anything of its sort ever happened in a Fawcett comic! [Shazam, Billy Batson, & Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

“The Stan Lee Of 1943!”—Henry “Lynn” Perkins

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“I was a literary agent before I got into comics,” recalled Schwartz. “Among the magazines I dealt with was Weird Tales. The editor up there was Dorothy McIlwraith. To my knowledge, Perkins was her first reader. He had a strong British accent. He was quite tall and good-looking. Blond hair as I recall.”

Schwartz remembered him as Lynn Perkins, the first name an apparent diminutive of his middle name, Avelyn.

Soon mastering the position, Perkins grew bored with the work and sought out freelance opportunities.

As the Writer’s Journal explained it, “From the time of his arrival in this country, he had been fascinated by the quantity and success of the comic magazines. They were pretty crude in the early days, but they seemed to him to have tremendous possibilities.”

So Perkins took a swing at comics scripting. By night, he pounded them out. His originality caught the attention of various editors, who began buying everything he could turn out.

Quickly, he was selling to “Superman” and Detective Comics, Inc. He claimed to have sold hundreds of scripts without a single rejection. It was an education in writing.

“The search for novel and different plot angles is endless,” Perkins said. “And in the searching, a writer automatically learns a vast amount about plotting.

The Road From Rio Perkins arrived in New York City from Rio de Janeiro in December of 1939.

Soon thereafter he became an associate editor for the pulp magazines Short Stories and Weird Tales—the latter from the issues for May 1940 through September 1942. Above is Margaret Brundage’s cover for the March ’41 Weird Tales. [Weird Tales art TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

It was a long interview/profile of Fawcett Comics Group associate editor Henry Perkins. Although I was researching another project, I knew I had to record this information. The problem was that the Writer’s Journal was a tabloid newspaper. Its browning pages were crumbling into pulp dust. I could not photocopy it.

Recognizing the significance of the piece, I laboriously hand-copied all of the quotes and essential information. They were fascinating.

According to the Journal, Henry Perkins was born in Brazil of British parents. Life took him back to London, where he went to the School of Charterhouse. Writing was an early interest, and Perkins landed a reporting job on the London Daily Mirror. Relocating to Rio, he became a staff writer on the Rio de Janeiro News.

In 1939, Perkins came to the USA, where his writing and editing skills got him a position on the New York-based pulp magazines Weird Tales and Short Stories.

There, he came into contact with future comicbook editor Julius Schwartz.

A Hard Day’s Knight Henry Perkins took part in the early development of DC’s “Shining Knight” and is credited for writing his stories for Adventure Comics #s 73-78—and there may have been more. Above is the first page of “The Black Baron” from Adventure #78 (Sept. 1942); artwork by Louis Cazeneuve. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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outright. But there were loopholes. Perkins developed a lead feature around Britain’s famous “Legless Ace,” Douglas Bader. For this, he recruited another English expatriate, artist Jon Small. The UK connection was enough to turn the trick with Canadian officials.

As the Journal reported, “The ‘Legless Ace’ was so successful that the magazine, Pioneer Picture Stories, was not only admitted to Canada, a feat in itself, but sold out every copy of the first issue in that country. He received an exceptionally high rate for the ‘Legless Ace’ scripts and continued to write them until he joined the Fawcett staff.” (The “Legless Ace” stories ran from issue #1 [Dec. 1941] to #8 [Sept. 1943].)

According to the Journal, Perkins broke into Fawcett through a new villain.

“He got his entree to Fawcett by thinking up a villain who has reappeared at intervals ever since, ‘The Weeper,’ a character who is convinced that life is sad and that it’s criminal for people to be happy. He wrote continuously for the Fawcett Comics magazines until joining their staff as an editor.”

The Weeper, a.k.a. Mortimer Gloom, debuted in Master Comics #23 (Feb. 1942). He was a “Bulletman” foe. Seven months later, Master #30 ran “The Return of the Weeper.” He also appeared in Bulletman #7 and #10, and later in Mary Marvel #8. It was in Bulletman #7 that The Weeper teamed up with The Black Rat and The Murder Prophet as a member of the Revenge Syndicate.

Perkins seems to have joined the Fawcett staff not long after writing this story, before [editor] France Herron left in March 1942 and was ultimately replaced by freelance scripter Rod Reed.

One of the largest comic houses of the ’40s, Fawcett was a wartime boomtown. It was also spearheading a new approach to comics.

Getting “Legless” For publisher Street & Smith, Henry Perkins wrote the adventures of reallife war hero Douglas Bader—a.k.a. “The Legless Ace.” The lead feature starring the famed Canadian Squadron pilot with prosthetic legs appeared in Pioneer Picture Stories and was illustrated by fellow Brit (and first “Bulletman” artist) Jon Small. Above is the first issue, from December 1941; cover artist unknown. [TM & © Street & Smith Publications, Inc., or successors in interest.]

“For instance, although I was a pulp magazine editor and read many thousands of scripts, and although I could judge where plots lived and where they died, I was never much of a hand at creating plots myself until I started to write comic scripts.

“My plotting ability continually improved as a comic writer.

And later, when I came to edit comic magazines as a full-time job, I found that the faculty for dreaming up all kinds of ideas and angles grew even greater, and continues to grow.”

At DC, Perkins wrote unidentified “Superman” and “Batman” stories. He was an early scripter on “The Shining Knight,” who debuted in Adventure Comics in 1941. Most 1942 “Shining Knights” are by an unidentified author, and it’s tempting to speculate from Perkins’ British background that he originated the character, a knight of old who wound up in modern times, fighting evil armed with a sword and golden armor given to him by Merlin the Magician.

Perkins made a big splash at Street & Smith, when he came up with an idea that enabled S&S to get their new title, Pioneer Picture Stories, into Canada. Wartime restrictions on magazine imports were stringent. US comicbooks and pulps were banned

“For a long time,” the Journal reported, “the most successful comic magazines presented dramas that were essentially grim and horrific. ‘Captain Marvel’ was the pioneer of humorous and human stories. Here, for practically the first time, were tales where the ‘characters’ had ‘character’—where they gave at least the illusion of reality. The consequence is that ‘Captain Marvel’ is one of the best-selling comic magazines in the field. Every story is novel and different; the reader never knows what to expect. And the hero himself is often made fun of!”

Perkins explained the old method in a way familiar to Golden Age collectors the world over. The article continues: “There was a time, he reflects—and it was new and novel at first—when the most effective comics consisted of three sequences, formula stories.

There would be some villain who, perhaps, took on the attributes of some animal. Followed a fight, in which the hero would get some clue, follow it up, fight and get captured. The villain would then boast of his next coup, go off and carry it out. The hero would make a clever escape, pursue the villain, who had already courteously tipped him off, and beat him up in the final fight sequence. This kind of story is now definitely out, Perkins says emphatically.”

Contrasting with this, according to Perkins, is a trend to make comicbooks truly comic. Hence the article’s title.

As an example, the Journal recounted: “To get a really different menace, Perkins recently suggested to one of the Fawcett writers that he build a story around a Jap villain who had everything that the corny and conventional Jap has—including buck teeth, heavy spectacles, and the like. But in the story, this villain complains bitterly that he is a corny cartoon. He doesn’t like being a corny Jap villain—and does everything he can to alter his appearance and acquire Western ways.”

“The Stan Lee Of 1943!”—Henry “Lynn” Perkins

…Losers… Weepers!

Created by Henry Perkins, “Bulletman” villain The Weeper (Mortimer Gloom) was the exact opposite of Batman’s Joker. Instead of cracking quips followed by maniacal laughter, The Weeper would shed tears for the world and his victims. He despised anything joyful and was intent on being the foremost killjoy as he committed his acts of larceny and murder. The Weeper would often lament, “How sad life is, so terribly sad!” Attired in a stove pipe hat and an early 19th-Century suit, he looked not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge from Dickens’ The Christmas Carol.

(Clockwise from above left:) The Weeper first appeared in “The Murderer Who Mourns His Victims!” (Master Comics #23, Feb. ’42; plot and possibly script, by Perkins; artwork by the Jack Binder studio).

After his initial defeat, courtesy of Bulletman and Bulletgirl, he was back again in “The Return of the Weeper” (Master #30, Sept. ’42; plot

by Perkins; art by Binder studio)… and, that same month, he joined the Revenge Syndicate (Bulletman #7), allied with fellow Bulletmanhaters The Black Rat and The Murder Prophet. (Same credits as in Master #30).

The Weeper also popped up in Bulletman #10; later on, writer Otto Binder teamed up The Weeper with Dr. Riddle, with the two going up against Mary Marvel and Bulletgirl (Mary Marvel #8). After that, The Weeper was never heard from again—until plotter E. Nelson Bridwell included him in “Crisis on Earth-S!” (Justice League of America #136, Nov. 1976). The Weeper was later immortalized on a 2011 episode of the animated TV series Batman: The Brave and the Bold, teaming up with The Joker, no less. The Weeper was voiced by affable comedic actor Tim Conway.

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This doesn’t seem to be Nippo the Nipponese, who first fought Captain Marvel in Captain Marvel Adventures #9, returning several times, once as a member of The Monster Society of Evil. He might mean one of the other Japanese members of that infamous group, Hashi or Smashi or Peeyu, who debuted in Captain Marvel Adventures #29 (Nov. 1943).

From there Henry Perkins describes his recipe—really the Fawcett Group’s recipe—for scripting exciting comicbook stories.

“To write comics,” he declares, “you need a certain piece of creative mechanism which is lacking from the minds of most writers. That piece of mental mechanism is visualization. For while most writers see pictures then they write—they do not write the stories in terms of pictures.

“They don’t do this because they don’t have to. Their skill in handling picture words conjures up for the reader the necessary pictures. A pulp writer’s story comes out in the magazine essentially as he wrote it on his typewriter. But a comic script is not published—any more than a moviegoer pays to see a scenario.

“Essentially,” continues Perkins, “a really effective picturefiction scenario is produced by a writer who has conjured up a really thrilling and very pictorial mental movie—then cut it up into the most dramatic stills. With the story cut up into stills, the author then describes each still for the artist, adds the appropriate dialogue and captions where these are called for.

created Stinky Printwhistle, who becomes Ibac, the villain who combines the worst attributes of Ivan the Terrible, Cesare Borgia, Attila the Hun, and Caligula. “Captain Marvel and the Curse of Ibac” debuted in Captain Marvel Adventures #8 [March 1942]. Writer John Broome is said to have written the story.

But Perkins wasn’t done. Again and again, he called up story after story, offering a rare picture of a Golden Age comicbook editor at work transforming the still-young medium.

“Again, I thought up a story for ‘Captain Marvel’ about the world of the imminent and foreseeable future. The gadgets, inventions, and miracles of this amazing world that most of us will see, and which certainly all children will live in and enjoy, turned into a very glamorous, very graphic story. It was titled ‘The World of Your Tomorrow.’” The tale ran in America’s Greatest Comics #7 (Spring 1943). It was also notable for a panel where a group of people copy the Superman radio opening, saying “Is it a bird?”

“Is it a plane?” Fawcett executives, under legal pressure from DC Comics, forbade any future references to Superman, even joking ones.

“Or take the character story,” Perkins said. “An example of this is a story I wrote out for ‘Lance O’Casey,’ a roving, swashbuckling, happy-go-lucky type of adventuring hero. A pirate tale always makes good pictures, but the theme is worn out and hackneyed.

“As a matter of fact, the similarities between comics writing and movie writing [are] amazing! For writing comics scripts is the closest thing to writing a movie script outside the movies. Neither technique is, essentially, writing. It’s devising. Both demand co-operation with, and knowledge of, other skills and minds. The movie writer must have an understanding of actors, directors and camera techniques. The comic script writer must understand the possibilities and the limitations of the artist who is going to ‘produce’ his script.

“First of all,” explains Perkins, “the story must be very simple, and be pictorially conceived. In other words, the basic plot idea must lead to pictorial sequences when the script gets to the stage of being drawn up. The usual pulp plot is of no use whatever.”

At this point in the interview, Henry Perkins starts recounting intriguing specifics.

“For instance, among the many basic plot ideas which I’ve dreamt up and then passed on to writers was the notion that it’d make swell pictures and a novel story if surrealist pictures were brought into play.

“Accordingly, the writer and I cooked up a yarn where poltergeists get into a surrealistic picture exhibit and animate the artists’ nightmare. Amazing and convincingly realistic sub-characters were injected, and an amazingly novel and very pictorial story was the result.”

Claiming that anything went in comics, Perkins took credit for ideas as diverse as bringing Dillinger, Two-Gun Crowley, and other dead gangsters back to life for a new crime spree in a “Mr. Scarlet” story in Wow Comics #8 (Dec. 1942) called “The Gangsters from the Grave”… and a tale involving Captain Marvel as a modern version of Robinson Crusoe and ancient flying machines. “The Modern Robinson Crusoe” appeared in Captain Marvel Adventures, #30 (Dec. 1943).

A reference to having come up with storylines involving “phantom madmen” and “ancient dictators” suggests Perkins

The Old Nightmare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be Perkins references plotting a Fawcett story wherein supernatural beings “animate the artists’ nightmare.” Could that tale be Ibis the Invincible in “The Adventure of the Living Paintings” from Whiz Comics #40 (Feb. 1943)? Art by Bob Hebberd. [Ibis the Invincible TM & © DC Comics.]

“The Stan Lee Of 1943!”—Henry “Lynn” Perkins

Two Studies In “Scarlet” (Above:) Perkins plotted the “Mr. Scarlet” episode “The Gangsters from the Grave” for Wow Comics #8 (Dec. 1942). Script by Otto Binder; art by Jack Binder studio.

(Right:) He also plotted “The Modern Robinson Crusoe” for Captain Marvel Adventures #30 (Dec. 1943); art by C.C. Beck’s art staff. The unfortunate racial stereotype Steamboat was the “Friday” of the story.

[Mr. Scarlet & Pinky, Shazam hero, & Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

Most pirates are blood-thirsty monsters. So I thought up ‘The Pirate Who Hated Blood.’ It made a very entertaining and novel yarn.” (“The Pirate Who Hated Blood” ran in All Hero Comics #1 [March 1943].)

“In line with this new trend,” says Perkins, “I have revamped a number of our characters. ‘Mr. Scarlet’ formerly had the alter ego of Brian Butler, district attorney. He was dull and lifeless. So I had him fired; indignant citizens complained that Scarlet was doing all the work. Now Brian is a struggling lawyer, never has any dough, is always hungry. Mr. Scarlet is now a character. The reader feels sympathetic—begins to like him. Mr. Scarlet on one occasion even hocked his uniform to get some cash!” Entitled “Make-Believe Mastermind,” this story appeared in Wow Comics #9 (Jan. 1943).

“Another hero, a youthful aviator called Phantom Eagle, always seemed rather static and lifeless. So after discussions with the author, the idea was evolved that the Phantom Eagle should crash and lose his nerve. His girl friend, an inventor, gives him back his lost confidence by convincing him that if he wears a certain helmet he’ll be okay.” This change occurred in “Has the Phantom Eagle Lost His Nerve?” — Wow Comics #14 (June 1943).

“These little touches give life and depth to a hero,” summarized Perkins. “They’re equally effective when applied to a villain. Or to sub-characters. The author who is able to add this ‘extra something’ not only ensures a virtual monopoly on the particular strip concerned; he is also giving himself the finest plotting practice in the world.”

It’s clear that Henry Perkins was a breath of fresh air blowing through the Fawcett offices. In revamping clichéd characters, he

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Ibac The Attack (Above:) Remarks by Perkins in the 1943 Writers’ Journal article seem to indicate that he was behind the creation of Stanley “Stinky” Printwhistle, a.k.a. Ibac, the villain who combines the abhorrent traits of Ivan the Terrible, Cesare Borgia, Attila the Hun, and Caligula. First appearing in Captain Marvel Adventures #8 (Mar. ’42), Ibac’s debut was probably plotted by Perkins and possibly scripted by John Broome. Artist(s) unknown. [Shazam hero, Billy Batson, & Ibac TM & © DC Comics.]

Free “Lance” Writer (Right:) Perkins conceived a tale where sea adventurer (and monthly Whiz Comics backup star) Lance O’Casey encountered an unusually benevolent pirate in “The Pirate Who Hated Blood,” from the Fawcett one-shot anthology All Hero Comics #1 (March 1943). Art, in part, by Harry Anderson. (Lance O’Casey TM & © respective trademark & copyright owners.]

“The Stan Lee Of 1943!”—Henry “Lynn” Perkins

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I, Revampire (Left:) Perkins also claimed to have “revamped” several Fawcett characters, including Mr. Scarlet, making him more relatable to the readers by plotting the story “Mystery of the Make-Believe Mastermind” for Wow Comics #9 (Jan. 1943), in which Scarlet’s alter ego lost his D.A. job. Art by Jack Binder studio. This tale was reprinted in the Mr. Scarlet “Mighty Midget Comic” that same year. [Mr. Scarlet & Pinky TM & © DC Comics.]

(Above:) The British-born associate editor likewise viewed The Phantom Eagle as a “static and lifeless” character. To rejuvenate his feature, Perkins worked with an undisclosed writer to formulate the “re-boot” story “Has The Phantom Eagle Lost His Nerve?” in Wow Comics #14 (June 1943). Art by Bert Whitman, who also wrote some of the “Phantom Eagle” yarns during this era. [Phantom Eagle TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

sounds very much like Marvel’s Stan Lee, circa 1961. If not for the fact that he soon departed Fawcett’s halls, Perkins might have ascended to editorial prominence and gone on to make a larger impact on the field. At the time of this interview, Fawcett Comics was at its height. Mary Marvel had just been introduced. Captain Marvel Adventures was then shifting to twice-a-month frequency, having started outselling former industry leader Superman. The famous “Monster Society of Evil” serial was in its early chapters.

Fawcett was the top of the comics heap for 1943.

Fawcett was also a hungry market. Via the article, Perkins was trolling for fresh talent. In 1943, good scripters were scarce.

Many had gone off the war. And here he makes his pitch: “The comics script-writer then is never faced with the gloomy prospect of finished and effective work being rejected—the pulp writer’s greatest dread,” Perkins points out.

“Of all the magazines in this tremendous field, the Fawcett Comics Group offers the highest rate of pay—the minimum is

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three dollars a page, and prices go up from there. Writers can, and frequently do, make up to two hundred dollars a week. Fawcett offers, too, the most cooperation and the finest opportunities for writers.

“Anything goes in comics,” Perkins is quoted as saying, “provided the idea is simple and can not only be told in pictures— but will make pictures!”

As an example of what was needed, the article is illustrated by two script page samples—one from Jungle Girl [Fawcett’s adaptation of the 1942 Republic movie serial, Perils of Nyoka] —the other, a “Mr. Scarlet” story from an unidentified issue of Wow Comics.

Few recall Henry Perkins today. But, in 2005 when this article was first written, there were still some who did. Captain Marvel artist Marc Swayze was one. He had worked with him until Swayze was drafted at the close of 1942.

“I do recall him very well,” Swayze said. “I worked with him rather closely in ’41 and ’42. We were both members of the comics staff. I was with the art department at the same time Henry Perkins was a respected member of the comicbook editorial staff. He was a typical editor there. I don’t know a whole lot about him.”

Like Julie Schwartz, Swayze remembers a tall slender young man with a pronounced British accent.

Swayze’s chief recollections were of Perkins taking part in the Fawcett staff softball games played against the Jack Binder Shop crew.

It was Henry Perkins who dubbed Binder “Backside Binder the Bushman” for the artists’ stubborn propensity of submitting work showing characters seen from the back or behind bushes—all tactics designed to speed up art-shop production at the expense of good storytelling.

“I understand that later he was called Lynn Perkins,” Swayze adds. “I never heard him called Lynn while I was there. We all called him Henry. I believe he was there towards the end of ’41, well before John Beardsley and Otto Binder went in as interim editors. That would put him under Ed Herron.”

Because the scripts he worked from often lacked any author name, Swayze couldn’t say which “Captain Marvel” stories he might have drawn from Perkins’ scripts, but he does recall this: “I remember illustrating one. The title was ‘Henry’s Grandmother.’ If I’m not mistaken, I wrote the story and named it after Henry Perkins. He’s not in the story or anything like that. It was a takeoff on [the famous stage comedy] Charlie’s Aunt.” Captain Marvel Adventures #14 (Aug. 12, 1942) featured that tale, which was

“Henry’s Grandmother”—Or Charlie’s Aunt?

(Above:) The title “Henry’s Grandmother” (CMA #14, Aug. 1942), from which the above panel is taken, was named after Fawcett editor Henry Perkins, according to the story’s writer and artist, Marc Swayze. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

(Left:) When this 1941 photo of Swayze working at Fawcett’s Paramount Building offices in New York City was first published in FCA back in 1996, the artist/writer told P.C. Hamerlinck that the fellow barely visible behind him was comics editor Henry Perkins!

a farce wherein Captain Marvel played the title character in a stage play, wearing a flowered dress and white wig, as part of a plot to foil Nazi saboteurs.

One anecdote stuck in Swayze’s mind.

“He was a rather high-key fellow. I guess anything he did he went at enthusiastically. I can tell you a funny story. And the joke was on Henry. I believe the perpetrator was fellow artist Pete Costanza. We used to order lunch sent up from the Walgreen’s on the first floor of the Paramount Building. Henry had ordered a sandwich for lunch. When it was delivered, Henry was in the bathroom or some place, and Pete opened his sandwich up. By the time he and his buddies got through, they fixed that sandwich up until it was the most terrible and disgusting thing, with rubber cement and various colors and this, that and the other. So when Henry got back—I don’t know whether he took a bite or what caused him to open up the sandwich—he was infuriated. He called the eatery and he had big words with the manager. I don’t know how far it went. I think the manager was going to come up and take him apart. I know Henry was not going to go down and take the manager apart, because he wasn’t that type. But it was a very funny thing. It was wartime. We were looking for something to laugh at.”

“The Stan Lee Of 1943!”—Henry “Lynn” Perkins

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Rod Reed, under whom he worked after Ed Herron left Fawcett, said this about Perkins: “Lynn was a Fawcett editor. His whole name was Henry Avelyn Perkins. We called him Henry, but his pals outside the office called him Lynn. He was a dedicated student of the comics business with a keen sense of story and art.”

Reed once recalled Perkins luring seminal “Batman” writer Bill Finger over to do a little moonlighting at Fawcett. While Finger only wrote one “Captain Marvel” story, it was considered a coup to get him.

Not everyone who worked with Perkins recalled him with equal fondness.

Writer Joe Millard derided him as “a British-born character with all the rollicking sense of humor of an icicle display.”

Perkins was often the butt of jokes, according to Millard: “Rod used to drive Henry nuts when Henry would try to phone the drug store in the building to send up his lunch. Rod would get the calls diverted to his phone and used a combination of deliberate misunderstanding and inspired double-talk to drive Henry up the walls and halfway to the funny farm.”

“Captain Marvel” scripter William Woolfolk also offered a frank and unflattering opinion: “As a person he set my teeth on edge. He was tallish, blondish, slenderish, and snobbish. Everyone made secret fun of him. I remember him saying about Otto Binder, ‘The world is getting much too full of small, dark round people.’ He was all pose and attitude.”

“Superman” and “Batman” scripter Alvin Schwartz had contact with him on two levels.

“I knew Perkins personally before I ever worked for him,” recalled Schwartz. “I met him at the home of another Englishman, the comics artist ‘Jack’ [Jon] Small. About Henry—he was tall, thin, freckled and a true product of the British ‘public school’ system.

What did I work with Perkins on? ‘Captain Marvel’—and only ‘Marvel.’ I did several with him. As an editor—the best I can say, he was quirky. I don’t know how he ever got the job. I didn’t get along too well with Perkins, who had very definite and unclear ideas about what he wanted—probably reflecting the insecurity he felt as an editor. He didn’t last too long at Fawcett himself.”

William Woolfolk Detail of a photo taken at a party at Fawcett managing editor Will Lieberson’s home, 1948. A major examination of Woolfolks’ comics career is coming in the very next issue of Alter Ego & FCA.

Woolfolk Would Grit (Or Was That Brit?) His Teeth Writer William Woolfolk, in his enlightening essay “Looking Backward … From My Upside-Down Point of View” (see A/E V3#6) said that Henry Perkins “set my teeth on edge,” and that his former editor “was all pose and attitude.” So it’s no surprise that Woolfolk, in his script “A Good Neighbor” (Captain Marvel Adventures #63, July 1946), christened his story’s villain…

Henry Perkins! Art by C.C. Beck & Pete Costanza. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

But Perkins didn’t leave comics behind. Jumping over to Timely, he simply switched officers, writing “Captain America” for two years. Or so the legend goes. This account remains unsubstantiated.

After that, the trail gets murky.

Perkins seems to have departed the company in 1943.

Will Lieberson took over from editor Rod Reed in June 1943, just months after the Writer’s Journal interview was printed. It’s been said that Perkins was relieved of his editorial duties to help prepare Fawcett’s defense in the Superman plagiarism suit initiated

by DC Comics. He may never have resumed them.

In 1944, Mort Weisinger cited him as an editor at Parade magazine. That stint does not seem to have lasted very long.

One could speculate that since a succession of freelancers were promoted to the top spot over him, Perkins decided he had no longterm future at Fawcett. Or, just as likely, he finally realized how some of his fellow staffers truly felt about him.

“Eventually,” noted Woolfolk, “I heard that he later found a niche as a salesman for Rolls Royce automobiles, which suited him much better than being an editor of comicbooks.”

DC editor Jack Schiff, who remembered him as Lynn, recalled that he went to Hollywood. That much is verifiable. A “Lynn Perkins” co-scripted four Republic serials: 1945’s The Purple Monster Strikes, then Daughter of Don Q, King of the Forest Rangers, and The Phantom Rider in 1946. His Republic Pictures period is said to have encompassed 1944-50.

Nor was he forgotten at Fawcett. In a William Woolfolkwritten tale in Captain Marvel Adventures #63 (July 1946), the Big Red Cheese fought a villain named… Henry Perkins!

The last that’s known of Perkins is a stint in public relations in the 1970s, which is how DC editor Mort Weisinger remembered him. But Perkins seems to have finally settled down to using Lynn as his preferred professional name.

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Serial Boxes With his Fawcett days behind him, Perkins re-located to Hollywood and co-wrote four movie serials for Republic Pictures: 1945’s The Purple Monster Strikes, then Daughter of Don Q, King of the Forest Rangers, and The Phantom Rider in 1946. He was with the studio from 1944-50.

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

Like a lot of early comicbook people, Lynn Perkins recognized the immense potential of the exciting new medium. This is how he closed out his 1943 interview: “Writing for the comics guarantees economic security and a greatly increased income, and work that is forever fresh and fascinating. Comics offer, also, to the ambitious writer, a chance to grow creatively—and to gain a working preview of the future.

“For, with the promise of television and other miracles of amusement, comics are truly the shape of things to come in publishing and entertainment!”

Will Murray writes The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, King Kong and Tarzan of the Apes at www.adventuresinbronze. com. He is also to blame for Squirrel Girl.

Will Murray

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION

ALTER EGO #158

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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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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.

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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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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 1975! With DeFALCO, EDELMAN, KAVANAGH, McDONNELL, WOLFMAN, and cover by MILGROM and MACHLAN.

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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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#3: SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE Director RICHARD DONNER interview, IRWIN ALLEN’s sci-fi universe, Saturday morning’s undersea adventures of AQUAMAN, ’60s and ’70s horror/sci-fi zines, Spider-Man and Hulk toilet paper, RetroTravel to METROPOLIS, IL’s Superman Celebration, SEA-MONKEYS®, FUNNY FACE beverages & collectibles, a fortress of Superman and Batman memorabilia, and more! NOW SHIPPING!

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RETROFAN #4 spotlights ANDY MANGELS’ exploration of the Saturday morning live-action Shazam! TV show, featuring interviews with JOHN (Captain Marvel) DAVEY and MICHAEL (Billy Batson) Gray. MARTIN PASKO’s Pesky Perspective sets its sting on the Green Hornet in Hollywood! ERNEST FARINO remembers the magical monster maker RAY HARRYHAUSEN! The Oddball World of SCOTT SHAW! time-travels to the long-gone, wayout Santa Monica Pacific Ocean Amusement Park! Plus: the Star Trek Set Tour, interviews with actor SAM J. JONES and Jan and Dean’s DEAN TORRENCE, the British sci-fi TV classic Thunderbirds, Super Collector’s virtual museum of Harvey (Casper, Richie Rich) merchandise, the wild and crazy King Tut fad, and more fun, fab features!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.95 • SHIPS MARCH 2019!

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Pop History.

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#5: Interviews with Star Wars’ MARK HAMILL and Greatest American Hero’s WILLIAM KATT! Blast off with Jason of Star Command! Stop by the Museum of Popular Culture! Poke fun at a campy Batman comic book! Plus: “The First Time I Met Tarzan,” Major Matt Mason, Moon Landing Mania, Snuffy Smith at 100 with cartoonist JOHN ROSE, TV Dinners, Celebrity Crushes, and more fun, fab features! SHIPS JUNE 2019!

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

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Edited by Back Issue’s MICHAEL EURY!