Alter Ego #168

Roy Thomas' Subaqueous Comics Fanzine

PAUL NORRIS

AND HIS AQUATIC CO-CREATION IN WORLD

WAR II!

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In the USA

No. 168 March 2021

8

WILLIE ITO’s WAR—and REMEMBRANCE!

82658 00424

Art TM & © DC Comics.

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Vol. 3, No. 168 / March 2021 Editor

Roy Thomas

Associate Editor 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, Bill Schelly

Proofreaders

Rob Smentek William J. Dowlding

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Cover Artist

Contents

Cover Colorist

Writer/Editorial: “Two Billion Stories…” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Paul Norris Paul Norris, et al.

With Special Thanks to: Heidi Amash Richard J. Arndt Bob Bailey Mike W. Barr Ricky Terry Brisacque Ben Bryan Michael Bryan John Cimino Comic Book Plus (website) Chet Cox Brian Cremins Craig Delich Patrick Dilley Shane Foley Joe Frank Stephan Friedt Janet Gilbert Eric Gimlin Grand Comics Database (website) George Hagenauer

Heritage Auctions (website) Tony Isabella Willie Ito Sharon Karibian Jim Kealy Todd Klein Mark Lewis Art Lortie Jim Ludwig Doug Martin Bruce Mason Will Murray Michael Norris Paul (“Reed”) Norris, Jr. Rich Pileggi David Saunders David Siegel Russ Sprout Stripper’s Guide (website) Dann Thomas Qiana Whitted

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Paul Norris, Cal Massey, & Mort Drucker

Richard Arndt talks with the justifiably proud sons of the co-creator of Aquaman.

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist” . . 28 An interview with Willie Ito about comics, animation, and World War II injustices.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Raiders Of The Lost Art . . . . . . 49 Michael T. Gilbert stripmines some gems from the 100-year-old Cartoons Magazine.

Feel The Vern! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Part XV of our serialization of John Broome’s memoirs, starring writer David V. Reed.

Tributes to Mort Drucker & Cal Massey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 re: [correspondence, comments, & corrections] . . . . . . . . . 66 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #227 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 P.C. Hamerlinck presents Brian Cremins on Fawcett’s Jackie Robinson Comics.

On Our Cover: A marvelous montage of two vintage “Aquaman” splash pages—a special illustration of DC’s Sea King done in 1993 for hand-outs at comics conventions—and a Jan. 8, 1945, photo of original Aquaman artist Paul Norris with his wife Ann and young son Michael, during his time with the armed services during the Second World War. The two splashes are those of the very first “Aquaman” story, from More Fun Comics #73 (Nov. 1941), and the one from More Fun #79 (May 1942), both drawn by Norris. The first was scripted by Mort Weisinger; the writer of the latter is unidentified. Thanks to Jim Kealy & Michael T. Gilbert for the splash scans, and to siblings Paul Norris, Jr., and Michael Norris for the 1993 art and the photo. [Aquaman TM & © DC Comics.]]

Above: Cartoonist/animator Willie Ito never drew super-heroes, horror, or even six-gun Westerns—but a comicbook artist he definitely was, at least when he had the time! Here’s his spirited cover for Dell/Western’s Beany and Cecil #3 (Jan.-March 1963), featuring Bob Clampett’s engaging TV creations. Inks by Beverly Ware. Thanks to the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Alter Ego TM is published 6 times a year by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344.

Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: 32 Bluebird Trail, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices.

Six-issue subscriptions: $68 US, $103 Elsewhere, $27 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

G

“Two Billion Stories…”

etting personal for a moment—and what better place for that than up front in a magazine I edit and (to some minor extent) co-created:

I don’t suppose it’s any great secret that, at least for the past five decades or so, I’ve been fascinated with the horrific planet-wide conflagration known as the Second World War. The “why” of that extreme interest I really couldn’t say, except perhaps that it’s because it occurred during the years when I was a pre-school child, and so in a later day I became filled with an overwhelming curiosity as to what had gone on during that period: in the broader world, in film and radio, in comics… you name it. (Well, not so much in sports.)

While my own professional career, which began in 1965, overlaps the latter half of the so-called Silver Age of Comics, plus what’s come since, the storied Golden Age of Comics—the World War II years, plus what came immediately before and after them— has always held even more attraction for me.

This issue of Alter Ego is one of quite a few to date that hearkens back to that now-distant time… but with a difference.

It focuses on two well-known and talented artists and their experiences between 1941 and 1945… experiences that for the most part don’t involve comicbooks they produced during that period… experiences that, in important ways, could not be more different: Paul Norris, the artistic co-creator of “Aquaman,” one of DC Comics’ longest-lived heroes, was a young adult during those war

years… yet the comics work of his that largely concerns us herein was done not for a mainstream comics company but for the U.S. military in the Pacific Ocean… and must be discussed by his sons, since Paul himself left us in 2007 (though, thankfully, Jim Amash was privileged to interview him for A/E back in issue #69)… …and Willie Ito, who, having been born in 1934, was only eleven years old when that most destructive of all wars ended… but who, being of Japanese descent and born on the West Coast, had undeservedly spent most of its duration interned with his family as an “enemy alien” (beginning at the age of seven!)—and yet, despite those circumstances, became a comics fan and was pointed toward his later career in animation and comic art while in the bleak desert confines of a place called Camp Topaz that should probably never have existed.

But, should we truly be surprised that such widely differing experiences could have occurred, at the same time yet thousands of miles apart and incredibly divergent in kind?

After all, there were more than two billion people on our troubled globe while the Second World War was going on… so there were likewise two billion stories waiting to be told.

The ones that follow in this issue are merely two of them… but two that are very much worth the telling.

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PAUL NORRIS & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa Conducted & Transcribed by Richard J. Arndt

Part I: PAUL NORRIS, JR. (a.k.a. REED NORRIS)

I

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Paul Norris (1914-2007) is best known as the co-creator/original artist of “Aquaman.” But he also illustrated the original “Sandman” in Adventure Comics and, working with writer Mort Weisinger, transformed that character from a gasmask-wearing pulp-style mystery-man into a fully costumed comicbook super-hero… complete with a sidekick, Sandy the Golden Boy. Paul also drew the adventures of “Johnny Quick” and “Captain Compass” for DC. In the late 1940s he finally achieved his early ambition to draw a newspaper comic strip, starting with Jungle Jim. In 1952 he began his 35-year run on the science-fiction strip Brick Bradford. He kept his hand in comicbooks, however, drawing issues of Western’s Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, the comicbook version of Jungle Jim, and work on such comics as Tarzan and Magnus, Robot Fighter. He co-created, with writer Gaylord DuBois, the comicbook The Jungle Twins, which ran from 1972-1975. These two interviews were conducted on June 9, 2016.

RICHARD ARNDT: We’re talking to Paul Norris, Jr., who goes by the name Reed, and Michael Norris, the sons of artist Paul Norris. Welcome!

We’re here today primarily to discuss a little-known part of your father’s career during World War II. I know your father served in the 10th Army during the war, drawing propaganda leaflets. Oh, and thanks, Reed, for sending me all the photos and artwork. That will be a huge help here.

Paul Norris is seen on right in the above 1945 photo, taken on the Pacific island of Okinawa, after its capture… with an unidentified American lieutenant on our left, and an unidentified Japanese prisoner of war between them. Japanese troops had been told that any who surrendered would be executed by the Americans.

Thanks to the Norris brothers (Paul, Jr., a.k.a. Reed, and Michael), via Richard Arndt.

(Above:) Perhaps the only Norris-drawn “Aquaman” story with a true World War II theme is this one from More Fun Comics #79 (Oct. 1942); scripter unknown. The bad guys in this one were Nazis who operated a U-boat disguised as an iceberg. Thanks to Jim Kealy & Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © DC Comics.]

(Above right:) The final panel from the World War II propaganda comic page drawn by Paul Norris. See the entire page on p. 12.

PAUL NORRIS, JR.: Well, that was the intent. We hope it’s helpful.

RA: Now, at the time we’ll be discussing here, the World War II years, was your dad drafted or did he enlist?

NORRIS: I believe he was drafted, towards the middle years of the war.

RA: His work in comics was interrupted in 1943-1945, which would indicate he was drafted sometime in 1943.

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

Back in those days, Dad and Mom were living in Bergen, New Jersey, right across the river from New York City. I believe they crossed the river on ferries. They had a little apartment, the three of them—my father, my mother, and my brother Michael. Dad always worked at home. He never could work in a bullpen or shop environment. He liked to be at home with Mom and Michael. His family meant everything to him. Everything in the world.

RA: I can tell that just by looking at those cards you sent me.

NORRIS: Absolutely!

When I found those old cards, I thought they were remarkable, because there’s so much in them. You could see from them the kind of father that he was.

RA: I think it’s because he’s not just writing to his son, your brother, but also your mother, letting her know he’s all right. There are layers to the messages. I thought that was a cool way of doing the cards.

The Norris Siblings—Then & Now (Above:) Paul (“Reed”) Norris, Jr. (on left), Joyce Weisinger Kaffel, & Mike Norris at the world premiere of the blockbuster hit film Aquaman.

The sons of the original “Aquaman” artist and the daughter of the first “Aquaman” scripter, Mort Weisinger, met at this event on December 12, 2018. According to Paul Norris, in 1941 DC editor Whitney Ellsworth handed him a copy of a guy smoking a cigar underwater, presumably with the name “Aquaman,” and told him to draw up the character—after which Weisinger was assigned to write the origin tale, and Norris to illustrate it, for More Fun Comics #73 (Nov. 1941).

(Right:) A 1945 photo of Paul and Ann Norris and young son Mike. Both pics courtesy of the Norris brothers.

NORRIS: That date sounds familiar. [NOTE: From statements in Phil Norris’ self-penned bio “Born in Greenville,” he went into the service sometime in September of 1943. —RA.] RA: I’ve got a note here that says he was starting up a comic strip named Vic Jordan at the time. And that his work was intended to be exclusive to the strip, which meant that he couldn’t draw comics for DC/National. That 1943 date may or may not be accurate, since his work on the comic strip was interrupted by being drafted.

NORRIS: Yeah, Dad admitted that he kind of got himself into a jam there. I believe that the strip was intended for PM [newspaper] or some offshoot of PM Management.

NORRIS: And he always

“For We Were Soldiers Then, And Young…”

(Right:) Or at least, Paul Norris soon would be serving in uniform for America, by the time this photo was taken— while the unglimpsed publicist/ underground hero of the newspaper strip Vic Jordan, in this first 1943 daily (below) that Norris drew for the Marshall Field Syndicate feature that appeared in the famous liberal newspaper PM, was already clearly working undercover for Uncle Sam! (The strip had been launched by other hands in 1941. According to the Stripper’s Guide website, Norris’ tenure lasted only until July 10 of that year—when he was drafted.)

Thanks to the Norris brothers for both scans. [Daily © the respective copyright holders.]

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

5

Let’s Strip!

(Above:) The first of several unsold dailies written and drawn in 1942 by Paul Norris of Curlie McKey, a projected comic strip about a girl moving from Ohio to New York City to get a job in the war effort. Reed N. says it “has Dad’s early signature logo.”

(Below:) Red Pepper—Reed says he’s only guessing that would’ve been the name of that unsold 1942 comic strip—exists in the form of this Sunday. [© Estate of Paul Norris.]

took the opportunity to include a little teaching moment in the cards. And they’re beautifully illustrated. They look like children’s books of the time. He really put some work into those cards. One that I found interesting was one where he was probably going through the Kamikaze attacks off Okinawa and you can really see how rushed and shaky and nervous the artwork is. He had one thing he wanted to say and that was “I love you.” Those attacks really had an effect on him. That’s why I sent the picture of the

kamikaze being shot at. Just imagine having that flying bomb headed right at you!

RA: We should mention which branch of the service your dad was in.

NORRIS: Dad was in the Army. He would have been on board a transport ship, a troop ship, during the Okinawa campaign. [continued on p. 8]

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

From The ’30s— Sketches—And A Real Scoop!

(Clockwise from top left:) A sketch drawn by young Paul Norris as editor of the 1939 yearbook for Midland College (Fremont, Nebraska—he drew for it portraits of each of its 50 students, instead of using photographs!)… a political cartoon he executed that same year… a “Cities Service Cy” gag panel... and the 1939 announcement of Paul and Ann’s wedding, which was integrated with the Scoop Lenz comic strip he was then writing and drawing for the Dayton Daily News.

Courtesy of the Norris brothers. [© Estate of Paul Norris.]

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

—To The ’40s!

(Left:) Norris’ original concept illo for “Yank and Doodle,” which would become a long-running series in Feature’s Prize Comics, starting with #13 (Aug. 1941). The first story’s splash page saw print back in A/E #69, the “Aquaman” issue, which showcased an interview with the artist— and you can also see it on p. 19 of this issue. Courtesy of the Norris brothers. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

(Below:) The final page of the Aquaman-vs.-the-Nazis tale in More Fun Comics #79 (Oct. 1942). Art by Norris; writer unknown. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

[continued from p. 5] Originally he was in the Signal Corps and then he was transferred over to military intelligence. Dad didn’t talk to us too much about this but if a stranger came in, like yourself, and asked him about it, he would talk like crazy about it. [laughs] But, around the home, he

usually wouldn’t talk about this stuff.

RA: You mentioned in an e-mail that he worked on a ship’s newspaper and I assume that would have been on that transport ship. Do you have any idea how long a transport trip lasted? I imagine that they would be shipped out to Pearl Harbor first, and from there on to a military base closer to the action, and then from there to the island intended for attack.

NORRIS: In the notes that I have, I found two interviews. One was called “Born in Greenville,” which Dad wrote and was basically his life story up to WWII. That would be Greenville, Ohio. Because of Dad’s art training, he was put into the 82nd Signal Battalion. I know he worked on a ship’s newspaper, drawing a comic strip. I know the Signal Battalion was in charge of getting communications right, stringing telephone or telegraph wire and whatnot. They also were heavily involved in painting and making signs—road signs, company signs, any kind of signs needed to run a large outfit. Not artwork necessarily, but a lot of stenciling.

Here’s a quote from my dad: “They sent me to the Signal Corps at Fort Ord, California, for basic training. After basic training I was deemed too healthy to be shipped out of a line company.

“Somewhere In The Pacific” (Above:) This caption’s heading is the only way Norris could’ve indicated his location when he created this illustrated letter to Michael, intended at least equally to be read by his wife Ann. Not only didn’t Norris know exactly where he was—but he’d have been forbidden to mention it if he had. Reed Norris believes the letter may have been sent back to the States from Leyte, in the Philippines, where the fleet stopped for a time. At right, top, is a photograph, taken off the Internet by Reed Norris, of a Japanese Kamikaze (“Divine Wind”) attack in the seas off the then Japanese-held island of Okinawa, only 400 miles south of Japan itself.

(Right:) Another Kamikaze attack photo, in this case with an image of a fast-approaching Japanese aircraft (probably a Zero) circled. Reed N. says that when the family watched a documentary about Okinawa on TV, “our father would walk impatiently around the room as if he was distracted and had something else to do, but when film of the Kamikaze attacks came on, he would wait for these specific images and then point them out, saying, ‘That is what it was like… the sky was full of lead!” During that time— probably not long before or after such an attack—Norris designed this birthday card for his wife. All scans provided by the Norris brothers. [Letters © Estate of Paul Norris.]

Oh, and Reed tells us: “I own a car that was built by Mitsubishi.

Many times my father would tease me about how easily Mitsubishis would go up in flames.” The Japanese Zero fighter plane was manufactured by Mitsubishi.

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

en route to Okinawa from the Philippines I met two officers from the Psychological Warfare division of JICPOA. They had seen some cartoons that I had drawn for the ship’s newspaper. They wanted me to draw psychological warfare leaflets to drop on the enemy on Okinawa. I gave them what they wanted. They wanted me to transfer to JICPOA. I really didn’t have much choice. During the early part of the battle of Okinawa I saw [those same] officers a few times. They reported to me that the leaflets that I had drawn for them were very successful and that Japanese soldiers surrendered clutching the leaflets in their hands. General Buckner, Tenth Army Commander, believed in psychological warfare and he was impressed by the success of the leaflets. [By then] the battle of Okinawa was near the half-way mark. …lo and behold the General ordered my transfer to Tenth Army G-2. …the next day after the order came down General Buckner was killed at the battle of Shuri Castle.” [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Ibid.]

Keep Your Distance!

One of the propaganda “surrender” leaflets Norris drew, apparently for U.S. military intelligence. This one, as outlined on p. 15, is telling Okinawan civilians to “stay away from certain places [like ammunition dumps, etc.] if you don’t want to get shot.”

Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

{both laugh} I was assigned to battalion headquarters. Apparently they thought I would make the greatest of sign painters.” He also mentions drawing pictures showing how personal belongings should be displayed during inspection. “To make a long story short, I wound up as operations NCO of the battalion,” which earned him five stripes—a noncommissioned officer.

Now, this was not the big-page “Propaganda Comic Book” that we’re going to be discussing. These were smaller leaflets. When anyone would bring up the large artwork, [Dad] would start talking about the surrender leaflets, referring to, but not mentioning [that he was talking about] the smaller leaflets. So, people thought he

It was when he was on the troop ship, where people from military intelligence were also stationed, that military intelligence actually saw his work. They got him to draw some leaflets for the Psy-Ops people. This would have been propaganda. I don’t know if he was still on the ship when he was doing the leaflets or if this was later, when he was actually on Okinawa. After the island was taken by the U.S. forces, Dad was stationed on Okinawa for a while.

In Dad’s own words: “On Okinawa we did a lot of reconnoitering. Our mission was to maintain communications between the Infantry, the Corps, and Army Headquarters. Our battalion had a lot of [telephone communications] wire strung out on Okinawa. The local women thought it made a good clothes-line.”

[INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: The quotations in the preceding three paragraphs are from p. 3 of Norris’ brief memoir “Born in Greenville,” which is printed in full at the end of these interviews.]

Dad’s job was to repair those phone lines. The Japanese would cut the lines and then set ambushes for the men who came to repair them. He and his unit managed to avoid the ambushes.

RA: Your dad become involved in the propaganda project we’re going to discuss because of the massive loss of civilians on both Saipan and Okinawa. Before the battle started, it was estimated by U.S. forces that some 300,000 civilians lived on Okinawa. Up to this point, most of the islands invaded by the U.S. and Allied forces had had relatively small populations. Okinawa’s population was actually quite large. By the end of the battle, nearly half of that civilian population was dead. 40,000 of them had been impressed into the Japanese Army and killed during the battle.

The rest were simply missing or died from mass suicides ordered by the Japanese military forces. This followed 8,000 civilians and soldiers leaping off a cliff to their deaths during the Saipan campaign. Japanese civilians were told by their military that the Americans were barbarians who would rape their women and devour their children.

NORRIS: That’s correct. In my dad’s own words: “On shipboard

9

Nearly A Year After D-Day In Europe Another Norris letter home, this one sent June 4, 1945. Hostilities ended on June 22, when the island finally fell to U.S. forces after a long and casualty-strewn battle. Reed Norris writes that “Unfortunately, no one knows what happened to the ring.” Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

[Art © Estate of Paul Norris.]

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

because of the unexpected success of those leaflets that Dad was transferred over to the Psy-Ops division. I’ve read that the Psy-Ops campaign on Okinawa was the largest effort ever up to that point.

RA: That may be because the Army and Marines were just coming off of the Saipan campaign, where thousands of civilians leapt to their deaths off a cliff rather than surrender, due largely to Japanese propaganda.

NORRIS: Yes, that was terrible. Still, the Psy-Ops campaign on Okinawa resulted in the surrender of 11,000 Japanese prisoners-of-war.

Until that campaign it was widely believed that Japanese troops could not be convinced to surrender. That was what my Dad was referring to when he mentioned how surprised everyone was that the leaflets that he worked on apparently worked in actual practice.

Psych ’Em Out! The officers and men of the “Psych Warfare Office” (including Norris) on Okinawa, 1945… with Norris’ identifications (l. to r., then sitting) handwritten on the back. Courtesy of Norris brothers.

was talking about the large propaganda artwork, which led to a lot of confusion. Even I was confused by this. It was the earlier, smaller leaflets that Dad said were so successful, because the soldiers were carrying them as they surrendered. This was remarkable, because the Japanese had a history of not surrendering. Up to that point, Japanese soldiers were known to hand a Japanese family a grenade, have the family gather around, and then the father would pull the pin. They were able to do this because of their own propaganda machine, which terrified the population with the notion that Americans were barbarians, who were coming to rape, pillage, and murder them. Committing suicide was more honorable than being degraded by the “barbarians.” To die for the Emperor was honorable.

As Dad would tell it, the O.S.S. was astounded that his surrender leaflets were having an effect because I think it was the first time in the Pacific War that Japanese soldiers and civilians were surrendering with American leaflets in their hands.

Those smaller leaflets had to have been drawn while Dad was aboard ship, in advance of the actual invasion, and likely during the Kamikaze attacks those on the transport ships had to endure. It was

Sometime between the end of fighting in Okinawa and his post-war duty in Korea, Dad worked on the “Propaganda Comic Book.” The artwork was done the size of a full Sunday comic page. This book, or perhaps you should call it a twelve-part single-page series, was to have been used during the Allied invasion of Japan itself. The intent was to allow the Japanese civilian population, who were often told complete falsehoods about American intentions, a chance to know that they could surrender without being massacred.

RA: Which is something that the Japanese soldiers themselves did to quite a lot of surrendering military and civilian populations.

The “Surrender” Leaflet The most important leaflet illustrated by Norris seems to be the one at lower left, which is basically instructions (translated into English at right) to the Japanese troops on how to surrender and avoid being shot. According to the artist, this leaflet was credited with getting as many as 11,000 enemy soldiers to surrender, probably because it presented—visually—an alternate to the “fight-to-the-death” orders the island’s defenders had been given, along with the claim that the Americans would execute any soldier who gave himself up. Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

(Incidentally, regular A/E contributor Art Lortie tells us he’s in touch with a guy who worked for scientist Carl Sagan who thinks the leaflets were written by the bilingual science-fiction author Cordwainer Smith.)

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

NORRIS: Yes. Dad told stories of how he worked with Japanese prisoners on Okinawa after the surrender there, to create the “Propaganda Comic Book.” In a 1955 interview, when Dad’s memory was still fresh after the war, he mentioned the name of one of the Japanese prisoners that he worked with. There were apparently three altogether, but he remembered the one that he used as a “calligrapher.” This calligrapher, named McNeil, was a Master Sergeant. McNeil’s father had been a Scottish seaman while his mother was Japanese, and so McNeil spoke perfect Queen’s English. McNeil had apparently been a reporter for an Englishlanguage newspaper in Japan before the war. I should note here that, although my dad always referred to him as a Master Sergeant, there was no such rank in the Imperial Japanese Army. However, there was a Sergeant Major rank, which he may have been actually referring to.

Much later on, Dad referred to the same man as “George Totari,” but Dad was 92 at that time and a memory lapse would have been possible, if not probable, after 61 years.

Dad needed a translator when he was working with the Japanese prisoners, because he needed to know that what was being scripted for the comicbook was authentic. I grew up with my father telling this story, and I remember that Dad always called this project the “Propaganda Comic Book.”

He said: “Turning out that strip was something. I needed someone to insert the Japanese dialogue and was told of one of the prisoners who spoke some English. I located him in the stockade [and] I said, very slowly, “I understand you speak English?”

To which the prisoner responded “I speak a wee bit, old chap!”

[INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: From a 1955 interview.]

Dad loved telling that story because he thought it was the funniest thing to hear a Scottish accent from a Japanese soldier. He got the biggest kick out of that.

There’s also that watercolor that I sent you. The one that was given to my dad by a prisoner, apparently named Yamaguchi. It’s just a beautiful piece of work. One thing that always puzzled me though was, “Where did they get the art supplies?” [laughs] I figure that my father probably brought a lot of that with him. Even today I have a hard time finding decent art supplies. How do you locate them when the country’s been bombed out and transportation and shipping between cities is in a shambles? Finding art supplies in a war zone must have been really tough!

I’ve only heard Dad tell of working with those two different POWs. Yamaguchi, who painted the watercolor, and McNeil, the Scottish/Japanese translator. I’m not certain as to what exactly Yamaguchi did in collaboration with my Dad. RA: It’s possible that the George Totari that your dad mentioned in 2006 was a totally different POW from the Scottish/Japanese McNeil, or he may have even been an American Nisei soldier [American soldiers of Japanese descent, many of whom could speak the Japanese language]. It’s possible that Totari worked on translating the Okinawa leaflets while McNeil worked on the “Propaganda Comic Book” work. One would think that the surrender leaflets were done on board ship, rather than after the landings, since they were actually air-dropped on Okinawa.

NORRIS: The thing that struck me about this was the way Dad

Beauty Amid The Rubble This exquisite painting was rendered in 1945 by a Japanese POW named Yamaguchi and given to Paul Norris at that time. The artist’s sons suspect that their father probably gave the prisoner the art supplies he used to create the piece of art. Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

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always indicated that the POWs and he bonded. They were both in this situation where only a matter of weeks earlier they’d been trying to kill each other on the battlefield and then, all of a sudden, they’re working with and bonding with their enemy counterparts.

Yamaguichi and Dad bonded over brush techniques.

My Dad worked with Al Carreno prior to going into the war, ghosting Blue Beetle. Dad did a lot of “ghosting” for other artists over the years. Milton Caniff had set Dad up as an assistant for Carreno. Al taught my father how to use the Windsor-Newton Series #3 brush, which was the brush that my father stuck with for the rest of his life. My father even taught me how to work with it when I was younger. It’s all about the skill of rolling it in your fingertips as you do the stroke, that affects the thick and thin lines.

Well, the Japanese use the same techniques in their watercolor work. They worked to produce a minimum number of brush strokes to achieve the maximum effect. A leaf would be a single stroke. I always thought it was great that these two warriors would bond over brush techniques. In my Dad’s case, the brush was mightier than the sword.

RA: In this case, that’s certainly true. Now as I understand it, only the one page of the “Propaganda Comic Book” was drawn. Penciled and inked by your father, with a lettered Japanese script.

NORRIS: Yes, according to Dad, that was the only page completed.

The other pages were probably in various stages but apparently weren’t saved. The project was never completed, because they dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

The “Propaganda Comic Book” (On this page:) The single page, out of a projected twelve, that seems to have been produced by Norris (and the writer) for what was called the “Propaganda Comic Book,” as described in this interview. (On facing page:) The English-language translation of the page. Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

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editor in Korea? [laughs] It’s a small world. One of the things I find amazing was that, during WWII, the armed services really seemed to use the talents of the individual soldiers, particularly the artists and writers. They’d find out what they were a specialist in and try to get the most out of them from their specialty.

Japanese surrendered. Since the war ended they, of course, never needed to finish it.

As Dad described it: “Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of Superman, was on the staff of the official Army newspaper, [stationed] in Tokyo. We had both worked for DC Comics before the war. He saw my cartoons in Korea Graphic and followed up with a letter to me.

He made plans for us to get together after the war and create the

Yamaguchi, the POW who drew the watercolor art for him that I’ve sent you, was a commercial artist from Nagoya, Japan.

That information is taken from a note that Dad made on the actual watercolor in the 1950s, again when his memory would have been much fresher.

The POW who is featured in the photograph with my Dad and another officer is unidentified and has no insignia of rank on the collar of his uniform. [INTERVIEW’S NOTE: See p. 3.] Perhaps his rank was removed during combat, or for surrender, or perhaps as a POW. My dad and the other soldiers also did not wear rank on their field uniforms. This was so that the Japanese wouldn’t know which soldiers were officers or non-coms and shoot them first.

After Okinawa, Dad was transferred to the 24th Corps in Korea. His mission there was to convince the Japanese occupying Korea to surrender. They were also working on stabilizing the country itself. Korea had been occupied by the Japanese for some years. Dad designed the cover for the instruments of surrender for the Japanese troops in Korea. He was also the Sergeant Major supervising two Nisei language teams and one Russian language team. He also did some cartoons for the Korea Graphic, the official Army newspaper in Korea.

RA: I find it interesting that at one point, during his stint in Korea, he was working, at long distance, with Jerry Siegel. I’m not sure if anyone actually knows that.

NORRIS: Yes, isn’t that an interesting story? Who, back in the States, would know that Jerry Siegel was quite likely my dad’s

“Look! Down On The Ground!”

Jerry Siegel, original writer/co-creator of Superman—seen on right in a World War II-era photo with cartoonist Ben Bryan—at a time when they were doing comic strips together for an armed forces magazine— “probably Yank.” Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert and Michael Bryan.

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

Every Picture Tells A Story Two photos taken of Paul and some fellow uniformed personnel on Okinawa soon after the surrender, probably in front of one of the now-abandoned Japanese bunkers. The picture at left shows “Red” Fetters, Fred Hirano, and Kenneth Nakada; the one at right shows Nakada, Norris, and Fetters. Chances are the missing man in each photo is the one snapping the pic. Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

Next Stop: Korea While stationed in Korea after the fall of Okinawa, Norris turned out this work for the Korea Graphic, which was “the official Army newspaper in Korea.” At left is a 1945 “Charter for Peace” which he illustrated; above is a 1946 calendar with art that reminded the G.I.s what they were fighting for. This artwork is discussed on pp. 13 . Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

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was doing was entirely different from what you see on many wartime propaganda pages.

RA: And what I’m seeing is something that is designed to be read as a comic. I don’t speak or read Japanese so I don’t know what the captions are saying but it seems clear in this leaflet sequence that he’s telling civilians to stay away from certain places if you don’t want to get shot.

NORRIS: Yes, it’s self-explanatory.

RA: You don’t need the words to get the gist, although being able to read the text certainly wouldn’t hurt. If you see an ammo dump, get away from there! If there’s a howitzer sitting in front of you, run away! It doesn’t take genius to get the gist of the leaflets.

NORRIS: I have the carbon copies of those pages. The carbon copies from 1945.

RA: I’m looking at the leaflets and the artwork is in black&-white, which I would have expected, but the script—the Japanese script—is in red ink.

NORRIS: That’s exactly the way it looks on the

“How The Little Boys And Girls Look On This Side Of The World” This Paul Norris card home to Michael (and Ann) depicted a (Korean?) family, in a beautiful watercolor with no trace of caricature, only good drawing. It was dated “August 10,” which is after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima (Aug. 6th) and Nagasaki (the 9th), but before the Japanese surrender on August 15. Courtesy of the Norris brothers. [Art © Estate of Paul Norris.]

world’s greatest comic feature, but it never happened. We never met each other. We’d never been in the DC office before the war at the same time. It is strange how many artists and writers worked out of the DC offices at that same time and never met each other.

The reason for that was they all worked as stringers or free-lance operators.” [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: “Born in Greenville,” page 4.]

As I understand this, what Dad called the single existing “Sunday page,” that large comic art of the “Propaganda Comic Book,” was never used. The end of the war put a stop to it. The smaller leaflets or pamphlet pieces were used on Okinawa and actually did cause a number of surrenders.

RA: I would refer to what your dad was doing not so much as propaganda in the traditional sense but as counter-propaganda. Something that attempted to nullify actual propaganda.

NORRIS: Yeah, that may be right. The actual propaganda of the period, from either the Japanese or the Americans, were actual attempts to demonize the enemy. Tojo was thoroughly demonized

by American propaganda. They drew him with the big buck teeth and the gigantic horn-rim glasses. My father didn’t do any of that stuff.

RA: Much of the propaganda was extremely racist, whether it was government-issued on posters and the like, in comicbooks, or in editorial cartoons. Much of the American propaganda seemed to be lifted from the “yellow peril” stories that were common from the 1930s pulps. The Germans and the Italians weren’t hit with that heavy level of sub-human depiction from war-time propaganda as the Japanese were. The Japanese were often drawn with rat tails and teeth to show that they were as much an animal, and usually a rodent, as actually human.

However, the artwork you’ve shown me, that your dad drew, is of Japanese as human beings.

NORRIS: Exactly! Dad’s propaganda leaflets don’t deal with sub-humans. These are people that he’s trying to reach. What Dad

Run Silent, Run Deep Aquaman battles the Nazi raiders in another page from his story in More Fun Comics #79, only the seventh adventure of the Sea King. Art by Paul Norris; scripter unknown. Thanks to Jim Kealy & Michael T. Gilbert.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

RA: Perhaps we can find someone to translate the page we have and see if it’s a complete story or a “to-be-continued” effort.

NORRIS: There actually is a translation there. It’s kind of hard to read because it was likely the last page using the same carbon copy paper and it’s a little dim. The translation is there, though.

For many years I thought that the “Sunday page” propaganda piece had actually been printed up in preparation for the invasion, but when my Dad was giving a still-unpublished 2006 interview to Mike Catron and Eric Nolen-Weathington, I was astonished to hear him say that it never had been. That kind of shocked me.

Reading Material – Okinawa 1945 Seen above, and described by Reed Norris in his interview, is a photo found on Wikipedia in a piece about the surrender leaflets mentioned back on pp. 9-10. It shows a Japanese POW apparently looking at one while awaiting transportation “to the rear,” as they said. Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

Then, after Dad passed, I was cleaning things up around the house, taking care of the estate, and I actually found a print that had been done of the work. When we met with Mike and Eric, all we had was the original art, which was large and brown and faded with age. The art you’re seeing in the scan I sent you is from the unused print, not the original art, although they’re identical.

The print is bright and clear. It was like new. I don’t know if that was a proof, or why it was done or if they ever used it for anything.

original leaflets. Probably to make the script stand out more. You know, it’s in red—READ THIS! The second leaflet gave instructions on how to surrender, and explained that if you surrendered the Americans would take care of you.

RA: Yes, how I would read that second leaflet is that the soldier should strip down, to show that you didn’t have a grenade strapped to your leg or a concealed weapon, and then you’d be allowed to put your clothes back on. Then, afterwards, you’d go to the POW camp and get a good meal, apparently.

NORRIS: Get medical care. Get a cigarette. The “Comics Propaganda Page,” as mentioned, was intended as a twelve-page project, to be dropped on Japan following an Allied invasion.

RA: Would it have been a continued story?

NORRIS: I don’t think so. I think it would have been twelve individual stories. Each page telling one story.

Down At The Jungle Gym After the war, Norris visually returned to “exotic” locales when drawing Jungle Jim, the comic strip created

by Flash Gordon artist Alex Raymond. This strip, supplied by Ger Apeldoorn, is dated March 26, 1950—while the Norrises’ speciallydrawn Christmas card (at right) (with no year/date) was sent by Art Lortie. [Jungle Jim TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

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my dad or somebody higher up the line.

That, we just don’t know. The team he was working with, the Psy-Ops team, was really small. That’s amazing to me. Just a handful of people. Every ship and every land unit—every division—had printing abilities. All of them had a newspaper geared to their unit or ship and then an all-encompassing one like Stars and Stripes.

RA: Then, after the surrender, your dad went to Korea and that’s where this calendar art was done?

A Fan From Down Under—And Flash Gordon Underwater Paul Norris and Australian fan Anthony Gillies at a comics convention around the turn of the century. Also seen is Norris’ cover for Dell/Western’s Four Color #247 in 1949, which contained an original Flash Gordon story drawn by that artist. Thanks to David Siegel and Shane Foley, respectively. [Cover TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

I remember Mike and Eric and my dad and me going down to Kinko’s and trying to get a good copy of the original art, and all along my Dad had an excellent proof!

I’m sure that he’d just lost track of it.

RA: My guess would be that they actually printed the page but the war ended before they could use it and your dad saved a copy for himself while the rest was pulped overseas. The reason you have this one print is because your dad brought it home. There would have been no reason to use any pages that had been printed once the original purpose was rendered moot.

NORRIS: I sent you a picture that’s on Wikipedia, showing people who’ve surrendered—supposedly military people but they’re in civilian clothes. Not a typical military uniform. There’s one fellow who’s reading something that Wikipedia says is a surrender leaflet.

You can’t tell what it is from the picture, though. I love that picture, because in the background there’s a G.I. with a walkie-talkie and a cigarette, with a big smirk on his face. [laughs] The look on his face is just classic!

I once had some Japanese friends do some translations on the surrender leaflets and they didn’t find anything remarkable about the original translation, but they did point out that a grandmother is featured on that page and that is significant in Japanese culture.

That cultural bit of including the grandmother in the storyline may have come from the Japanese side of the collaboration. I’m sure that the idea was to communicate with the Japanese population in words and situations that would resonate with their culture.

The idea was not to sound like Americans talking down to them. They wanted a true nuance in the communications. That’s one of the things I admire about the leaflets, the level of what they were attempting to do. They were trying to be politically correct, long before that term became popular, or unpopular.

RA: Or we could call it culturally sensitive.

NORRIS: Yes! Culturally sensitive! I guess that’s the best way to put it.

RA: And that’s not an approach that the average person would be thinking the U.S. Army was going to be using in 1945. Especially after four long, bloody years of fighting the Japanese.

NORRIS: Yeah! Somebody had a good idea. It may have been

NORRIS: Yes, I believe so.

RA: It’s nicely done. The girls are cute.

NORRIS: Yeah, I think so. The other page from Korea is a U.N. piece dealing with their goals for 1946. The artwork down in the corner on that page is my dad’s. I sent a blow-up of that art.

I’m hoping this is a story that people will want to read. There’s some good visual material as well. My dad was a friendly person.

He had a magical, charmed life about him. Always had a smile for you. The kind of person that when you met him, you knew he was somebody special. That’s why I would like to do everything I can to honor him. I think that his own honor, that specialness of my dad came out in the surrender leaflets which, in their simplicity and the kindness underlying them, just worked. I’ve always been thankful that my dad was able to save lives, thousands of lives, in the midst of war. In dad’s case, the brush was certainly mightier than the sword.

RA: That sounds like a great place to stop. Thank you!

Part II: MICHAEL NORRIS RA: We’re talking now with Michael Norris, also Phil Norris’ son and Reed’s older brother. What can you tell us about your knowledge of your Dad’s work during the war years?

MICHAEL NORRIS: You have to remember that I was very young.

There are gaps in the things that I remember. My grandfather was my surrogate father during the years Dad was in the military.

When you’re a kid, you don’t really form impressions, but the greatest impression, if you can call it that, or the thing that impressed me most about him, was that he was a man without enemies. From when he was a young man right through to his passing. There seemed to be no negativity among his friends and acquaintances. It didn’t matter if they were people that he worked with or competed with. None of them had a negative comment about him. At least, I couldn’t find any. That’s quite an accomplishment in the sum of a man’s life.

RA: That’s probably why he was able to work so well with the Japanese POWs, both during and after the war.

NORRIS: Oh, yes. He was as interested in their art techniques as they were in his. He learned brush techniques and control from the Japanese that most American artists didn’t have the opportunity to.

In a way, it was like a second chance at art school for him. Simple, but oh so important things like how you keep a point on a brush.

How to turn a brush in your hand while you’re pulling it without it falling out of your hand. Dad could do fine inking with a brush that looked like he’d used a pen. He could do both fine and broad lines

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

with the brush.

His ability to do that with a brush was always an amazement to me.

Later, when I was a teenager, I would help him ink his Brick Bradford strips and I did fairly well but there were times when he was not pleased {chuckles} because I’d get lazy and I hadn’t quite mastered the technique the way he had.

RA: Do you remember when your dad came home from the war?

NORRIS: Yeah, I do. I remember being out in the back yard. When my Dad was in the service we were living in Ohio. One of the things we did in Ohio when the sun went down was you’d sit out on the grass under a shade tree. You played hard until it got dark and then you played with the lightning bugs. Dad, Mom, Grandpa, and Grandma would all play with us. It was just a great time to be a kid and I always have fond memories of those years.

My grandfather, whose name was Henry, was quite a trickster and he would always be working on a practical joke of one kind or another. Dad would try to beat him at it but he could never quite beat Henry.

In Ohio, we lived in an apartment complex which was a set of old barracks down near the cement plant off of Fairborn Avenue. I probably remember that place because of a set of stairs that I was not always graceful enough to negotiate.

Return To Normalcy The Norris family circa 1956, in a photo taken in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Behind Ann and Paul are their sons Paul, Jr. (on left), and Mike. Courtesy of the Norris brothers their own selves.

That same year, Paul became the artist—and later the writer as well—of the science-fiction adventure newspaper strip Brick Bradford, begun by Clarence Gray & William Ritt. For some years, Brick was the third most popular SF strip, after Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. This Sunday original is from October 19, 1958; with thanks to Heritage Auctions.

[TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

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“Yank And Doodle”—Dandy!

(Above:) The splash pages of the first and last “Yank and Doodle” stories Norris drew for Prize Comics—respectively, #13 (Aug. 1941) and #33 (Aug. 1943). Under his artistic hand, they had long since become the comic’s cover stars. Scripters unknown. Thanks to Comic Book Plus website.

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

“Mr. Sandman, Bring Me A Dream…”

It seems to have been penciler Paul Norris, inked

by Chad Grothkopf, who illustrated the tale at far left in Adventure Comics #69 (Dec. 1941), the one that first put the hero in full purpleand-yellow costume and introduced Sandy the Golden Boy. Script probably by Mort Weisinger. (Please pardon the mediocre reproduction from microfiche.) The same team probably also produced the “Sandman” yarn in #70 (Jan. ’42). Both underscore the attempt to turn the “Sandman” feature into the next “Batman and Robin.”

When Joe Simon & Jack Kirby took over the series with #72, it returned to cover status.

Thanks to Bruce Mason for the scan; and to Craig Delich for the art IDs. [TM & © DC Comics.]

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

strip. It was a beautiful strip. Well thought-out. Made Looney Tunes look like child’s play—which is what Looney Tunes actually is, I suppose.

Dad wanted to do things like that. He would have been great at something like that. But Dad was a company man. That may be due to his experiences in the Army. But I think that it was part of his character to be a part of the team. If required, he would lead the team, but he wasn’t going to go out and try to take things over.

He would fill a vacuum. If something needed to be done, he made sure it got done. I think, in many ways, those wartime letters reflect that.

As you mentioned, the letters are to my Mom, although they’re addressed to me. But he’s trying to explain things, what he’s doing, not only to my Mom but to me ten years, twenty years down the line, when I’d be old enough to understand them.

The Once And Future [Sea] King Paul Norris, pictured in 2004 with various artifacts representing Aquaman, the comics work for which he is most remembered today, despite his long, successful runs on strips like Brick Bradford and Jungle Jim. Seen below is one of several color drawings of the Sea King that he executed in 1993.

[Aquaman TM & © DC Comics; other art elements © Estate of Paul Norris.]

Mom and Dad would both make these crepes, using a lot of powdered sugar, and that was one of my favorite treats as a kid. It was the only way they could get eggs in me! [chuckles] I was actually allergic to eggs. But back then nobody knew allergic from anything. Mom would try giving me eggs in milkshakes, that’s an Eastern custom, but it never really worked.

Then we moved out of Ohio, after Dad came back from overseas in 1946, to Bergen, New Jersey. From there Dad would go into New York to work.

RA: One thing I noticed about your dad’s letters home was that they were often addressed to you. Addressed to you, but he was really talking to your mom. I think that’s a rather interesting and somewhat unique way of letting someone know you’re OK without going into great detail.

NORRIS: Yes. Dad was quite a writer, not just an artist.

He had a way of turning a phrase. He could have been an English teacher if he wanted to. He really knew the American language, in terms of using the right word at the right time. He was just really clever that way.

RA: Did he ever do children’s books—because those letters he sent you would have made an interesting children’s book of the day?

NORRIS: He wanted to. One of the things we found tucked away in Dad’s files was a series of Western comic strips that were comedic… I don’t want to call it Tumbleweeds, but it was something similar… but he had done eight weeks of strips, along with a letter addressed to King Features, saying he’d like to start this strip. It went to the King Features board, because all comic strips were syndicated back then, and we have the rejection letter from them saying they didn’t think it would sell, largely because it was Western and, at the time, Westerns weren’t popular. Then, two years later, Gunsmoke came out, TV-wise, in 1955. The strip would have been right on the money, because Westerns became hugely popular. He was sort of before his time with the

Of course, by that time, all of that stuff was put away, packaged up in storage, and I didn’t really see or read most of that stuff myself until after Dad had passed.

RA: At least all that “stuff” was kept, which is important, and you can share it with your children and grandchildren. Thanks for taking the time for this. It’s much appreciated.

NORRIS: You’re welcome.

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

Addendum: [A/E EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: The following piece, which has apparently not been previously published, was supplied to Alter Ego by Reed and Mike Norris, and was written by their father in 2003, a year-date that appears in the text. It is a brief account of his life up through the end of his service in World War II, and is © 2020 Estate of Paul Norris.

Punctuation, capitalization, etc., have largely been printed as he rendered them.]

Born In Greenville

B

by Paul L. Norris

orn in Greenville, Ohio, April 26, 1914. Son of Roy and Lesta Arnett Norris. My mother passed away when I was seven weeks old. I grew up in Palestine, Ohio. Raised by my maternal grandparents and my mother’s sister Aunt Minnie Arnett. Graduated from Palestine High School in 1932. Worked for the J.C. Penny company in Greenville for two years. Attended Midland College, Fremont, Neb., in the fall of 1934. Left college February 1936 to develop a comic strip for a new syndicate in Ohio.

My cousin, Myron A. Reck, who was in radio in Chicago, wrote the continuity for the strip. Unfortunately, the syndicate folded and the strip never went into syndication. I was out of college, out of work, and job opportunities were rather scarce. After all it was still the great depression. I worked on my grandmother’s farm.

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had a topcoat over my right arm, a felt hat in my hand, a drawing board under my arm, and a roll of charcoal paper with a bunch of charcoal sticks. I opened the big double doors. They were about twelve feet high. One door hit the roll of charcoal paper, I tried to retrieve it, I dropped everything. I was directly opposite the nude model. Some people laughed, some went aaahh, some ooohh, I wanted a place to hide, but I found an open easel and my FUTURE. A very lovely young lady had the easel next to me. We didn’t know it then, but we would and did spend 61 wonderful years of life together... and 15 days.

The lovely young lady was Annabeth Mayenschein. On Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 1939, we were married in Springfield, Ohio. Between that night at the Dayton Art Institute and that Thanksgiving Day many things had happened. I had met the Art Editor of the Dayton Daily News, Myron E. Scott, and through his good graces I got a comic feature started in the Sunday

Eventually I got a job at Leland Electric in Dayton, Ohio. I enrolled in the Dayton Art Institute and attended night classes.

The first night was life class... I made a spectacle of myself. It was February 1937, the beginning of the second semester. It was cold. I

Tour De Force (Left:) In 1935, while a student at Midland College in Fremont, Nebraska, Paul Norris (“recently voted Midland’s handsomest man and most promising freshman”) and three friends took an ambitious 13-day road trip across six states and into Canada and back, in a 1909 automobile belonging to one of them... quite a feat decades before the Interstate Highway system. It was written up (complete with photo of the returning heroes) in the local newspaper.

(Above:) 71 years later, in 2006, when he was being honored by Midland, Paul was driven past the same Midland campus building by his sons Reed and Mike… this time in a new Pontiac Solstice. Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

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How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

Camerica section of the newspaper. The strip was SCOOP LENZ, the story of a newspaper cameraman. Our wedding was celebrated in a full page spread on the back page of the Camerica section.

SCOOP was the start of my long journey through comic books and syndicated features, such as VIC JORDAN, JUNGLE JIM, and BRICK BRADFORD. Scottie was very supportive of me. He arranged the move of SCOOP from a black and white feature to a full color page.

George Caniff, the cousin of Milton Caniff, worked in the advertising department of the News. He came up to the art department one day and introduced himself, we became lifelong friends. Meanwhile, as in the comic strips, Ann worked at Donnefelds, a ladies’ department store, with Mrs. Caniff, Milton’s mother. Need I say more? Milton became a very important part in the lives of Ann and Paul Norris. He was the tour guide for the rest of our lives. He advised me to take my foot in hand and head for New York City. He arranged a job for me. Al Carreno, who drew the BLUE BEETLE comic books, needed an assistant, so I hightailed it to New York as fast as the New York Central could get there. Al was a wonderful person and a terrific artist. His life was a storybook. Born in Mexico. His father was a lieutenant in Pancho Villa’s organization. Al could remember Pancho bouncing him on his knee when he was a child. Anyway, Al’s father sent Al to Chicago to study law, but Al enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute. I don’t know if Al‘s father forgave him or not, but Al became a great artist. He taught me how to use a number 3 Windsor Newton brush.

I am forever in his debt for that. I didn’t work out too well as Al’s assistant. He was the seasoned professional and I was a greenhorn.

He suggested that I start out on my own. I took his advice. I had a good portfolio. It was full of SCOOP pages.

The first place I went was DC Comics. My luck was holding. The person that I met was Whitney Elsworth, chief honcho at DC. He looked my portfolio over, asking questions, finally he said, “I don’t have anything at the present time, but as soon as something shows up I will get in touch with you.” My heart sank. I thought that was it. I might be heading back to Dayton.

Then he said, “Wait a minute, I’ll make a phone call.” Which he did. It was to Milton Caniff PRIZE Comics. He sent me One of the greatest and most influential over there to meet Mr. Reece, writer/artists in the history of comic strips, Caniff was the creator of Terry the managing editor. It was and the Pirates, later of Steve Canyon. getting late in the afternoon, He was an important figure in Paul Whit warned me that Reece Norris’ life as well. might be leaving early. What a squeaker!!! He was leaving the office as I stepped off the elevator. He said, “You are Norris.” I responded, “You are Reece.” A beautiful friendship started there.

We went into his office. When I left I had a lot of work to do. I had to layout seven pages of POWER NELSON over the weekend and have it back Monday for editing. Everything went great with PRIZE Comics.

I created a new feature for PRIZE... YANK and DOODLE. Which I wrote. I also wrote POWER NELSON. About a month later I got a call from Whitney Elsworth, he had work for me.

A script for The CRIMSON AVENGER. A feature that had been running for a long time. One day when I had brought in a finished script to Murray Boltinoff, I was told that Whit wanted to see me.

Murray Boltinoff was the editor of The CRIMSON AVENGER. I stopped in Whit’s office. They wanted to start a new feature about a character that lived in the sea. Whit asked me to create the character... that is how AQUAMAN was born.

I drew up a character as I visualized him and got it to Whit as soon as I could. It was a matter of about two days. Whit liked what he saw. He said he would get a script to me as soon as possible.

At that point Mort Weisinger came into the picture. He did the original story line. AQUAMAN was off and running. Little did we expect it would be still running in 2003. I followed AQUAMAN by re-creating SANDMAN. He was a character that ran around the panels of comic books in a tuxedo and wearing a gasmask. We changed his dress to tights and a cape. We added a new character named SANDY. A youth. Mort wrote the script for it. When I brought in the first completed SANDMAN and SANDY, Mort’s remark was, “I think we have a new BATMAN and ROBIN.” Everything went well through the year 1941. I produced my regular features for Prize Comics and DC Comics. I think it was in the latter part of February 1942 that I received a call from Russ Countryman, Art Editor of the newspaper PM, he informed me that Elmer Wexler, the artist who drew the adventure strip VIC

It’s Your Future, Man! Norris reportedly began drawing the Prize Comics feature “Power Nelson, Futureman” in issue #7 (Dec. 1940), but scans of that art are tricky to come by. We had to settle for his splash page from Prize #9 (Feb. 1941), courtesy of Comic Book Plus. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

I’ve Got A Secret [Agent]

Primarily they thought I would make the greatest of sign painters.

I painted signs. I drew pictures showing how personal belongings should be displayed during inspection. To make a long story short I wound up as operations NCO of the battalion. It earned me five stripes. The table of organization had been changed while I was in basic training. The job I held was originally filled by a Captain. I did it remarkably well as a Technical Sergeant.

This cut-out, worn newspaper printing of a 1943 daily he had drawn for the comic strip Secret Agent X- 9 was carried by Norris in his wallet. While the byline says “Robert Storm,” the strip—officially created by Maltese Falcon author Dashiell Hammett in the 1930s—was then officially being drawn by Mel Graff. However, Norris ghost-drew X-9 during part of ’43.

Courtesy of the Norris brothers. [TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

JORDAN for PM,was entering the Marine Corps. Question? Would I be interested in trying out for the task of drawing the strip? Milton Caniff had been pointing his finger at me. Milt had worked with Russ at Associated Press. They were old friends, so Russ had turned to Milt for advice on a replacement for Elmer Wexler. I started drawing VIC JORDAN in April 1942. I thought I could continue my comic book work at the same time, but that wasn’t possible. My contract with PM was exclusive. An oversight on my part. Mort Weisinger never forgave me. Although we worked together at DC for a short time after World War II. In April 1943 I moved from PM to King Features Syndicate.

Ward Green and Bradley Kelly, Managing Editor and Comics Editor of King Features, had been trying to contact me by letter, but their letters weren’t getting through the PM office to me. So, they set up a contact through an Advertising Agency. It worked. One more problem!!! PM had an option on me that had to be served before the end of April 1943. Hannah Baker, Editor of PM, was supposed to renew the option, but she became ill and went to Florida to recuperate. Forgot my option and I was free to sign a contract with KFS. I started ghosting SECRET AGENT X-9 for King.

I was in charge of plans and training for the battalion. I was also the S3. I found myself in a rather awkward situation. Col. Kerrigan, battalion commander, and Major Scher, executive officer, saw things from different perspectives. The Colonel delighted in checking out daily activities and assignments with me. Then he would go to the Major and question him to see if the Major had any idea what was really going down. Always gave him an opportunity to embarrass the Major. I felt the wrath of the Colonel in the early days until I learned how he operated. I had the opportunity to correct him a few times. I didn’t know what it would bring me. I think he admired the fact that I had enough brass to speak up. We got along great. On Okinawa we did a lot of reconnoitering. Our mission was to maintain communications between the Infantry, Corps and Army Headquarters.

Our battalion had a lot of wire strung out on Okinawa. The local women thought it was good for one purpose. It made a good clothes-line. It was designed

Hannah Baker was released from her job due to her failure to renew my option. She took her case to arbitration. I had to testify on her behalf. PM owed me back royalties in the amount of six hundred dollars. Hannah was the one that had to be back on the job so I could get paid. I got paid, Hannah got her job back. I never saw her again. Last that I heard of her she was the private Paul Norris On secretary to some Hollywood producer. I worked on SECRET Okinawa AGENT X-9 about three months, then Uncle Sam called. I had a The artist’s various war-clause in my contract that brought me back to KFS after a propaganda leaflets, tour of the Pacific.

The fact that I had been a cartoonist in civilian life played an important part in the shape my military career would assume. It started at the induction center. Since I was a cartoonist the only place for me was the Signal Corps. Either the animation studios on the West Coast or the studios on Long Island, New York. They sent me to the Signal Corps, at Ft. Ord, California, for basic training. The 82d Signal Battalion. After basic training I was deemed too healthy to be shipped out of a line company. I was assigned to Battalion Headquarters.

23

along with photos of his soldier cohorts and the like, have been shown on earlier pages… but here’s a photo of Norris taken during his brief sojourn on Okinawa after its capture by the Americans. Courtesy of the Norris brothers.

24

How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

Back In A Flash (Left:) Norris writes that his first assignment for King Features Syndicate after mustering out of the service was a Flash Gordon comicbook. If so, it almost certainly is the one that became Dell/Western’s Four Color #173 (Nov. 1947), nearly two years after the Second World War ended. He drew the Alex Raymond-style cover as well. Courtesy of the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc.] (Right:) Another of his earliest postwar assignments, according to his own account, was to render this Erle Stanley Gardner/Perry Mason mystery in partly-illustrated form for Feature Book #50 (1970), for the David McKay Company. Thanks to Art Lortie. [© King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

to carry telephone communications. At the start of every recon adventure the Colonel would caution, “Let’s not get in front of the Infantry.” We did get in front of the Artillery on one occasion. We were on re-con. This was before Shuri Castle fell.

The artillery unit was so well camouflaged we didn’t notice it or hear it until it fired a barrage. We knew it was there then. We got in a more proper location hurriedly. The Signal Corps had unmanned circuit breakers mounted on wood panels which were mounted on posts or trees somewhere between HQ and the front.

The Japanese liked to sabotage these installations. Set up an ambush and wait for someone to come and repair the panels. Fortunately none of our men fell prey to the enemy’s trick. Happy to say that, because the Colonel and I had checked out many of those lonely little panels.

On shipboard en route to Okinawa from the Philippines I met two officers from the Psychological Warfare division of JICOPA. They had seen some cartoons that I had drawn for the ship’s newspaper. They wanted me to draw psychological warfare leaflets to drop on the enemy on Okinawa. I gave them what they wanted.

They wanted me to transfer to JICPOA. I really didn’t have much choice. During the early part of the battle of Okinawa I saw the officers a few times. They reported to me that the leaflets that I had drawn for them were very successful and that Japanese soldiers surrendered clutching the leaflets in their hands. General Buckner, Tenth Army Commander, believed in psychological warfare and he was impressed by the success of the leaflets. The battle of Okinawa was near the halfway mark, lo and behold the General ordered my transfer to Tenth Army G-2. Colonel Kerrigan was very unhappy about the turn of events, but he couldn’t do anything to stop it. He was outranked by a few grades. Ironically, the next day after the

order came down General Buckner was killed at the battle of Shuri Castle.

I was out of the 82d Signal Battalion and in Tenth Army G-2.

So, I had to leave all my friends with whom I had served since basic training. I had to say farewell to Colonel Kerrigan. He wished me well. I never saw him again. I do know that he returned to the States safely.

After the battle of Okinawa I was transferred to the 24th Corps and shipped to Korea. Our mission was to get the surrender of the Japanese troops still stationed there. Also, to establish stability within the nation. I designed the cover for the instruments of surrender. I was Sergeant Major over two Nisei language teams and one Russian language team. Also did some cartoons for the Korea Graphic, the official Army newspaper. Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of SUPERMAN, was on the staff of the official Army newspaper in TOKYO... We had both worked for DC COMICS before the war.

He saw my cartoons in Korea Graphic and followed up with a letter to me. He made plans for us to get together after the war and create the world’s greatest comic feature, but it never happened.

We never met each other. We had never been in the office of DC before the war at the same time. It is strange how many artists and writers worked out of the DC office at the same time and never met each other. The reason for that was they all worked as stringers or free-lance operators.

I came home to join Ann and Michael. They had lived in Fairborne, Ohio, with Ann’s folks during my sojourn in the Army.

I was mustered out of the Army at Ft. Benjamin Harrison near Indianapolis, Indiana... Ann was there to meet me. What a happy occasion. I took off a week or so before heading to New York to pick up where I had left off before entering the Army. I had a war

Paul Norris & The Secret World War II Comics For Military Intelligence

Paul Norris contemplates a statue of hometown heroine Annie Oakley on a 2003 return to Greenville, Ohio. Also seen on this page are the splash page of the very first “Aquaman” story, from More Fun Comics #73 (Nov. 1941)—reprinted for a change from the original comicbook, not from a reprint (note the vintage yellow gloves, a dead giveaway!)—and a drawing he did for a blood drive in San Diego, depicting Brick Bradford, whom he drew for 31 years, from 1956 to 1987, and Aquaman, whom he artistically originated for DC Comics in ’41. [Brick Bradford TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc.; Aquaman TM & © DC Comics.]

clause in my contract with King Features Syndicate, a division of the Hearst Newspaper Organization. I had a job, the editors were not sure what they wanted me to do. I worked with Clark Kinniard, a Senior Editor with KFS. The first thing that I did was a Flash Gordon comic book, writing and drawing it. The next assignment was the editing of a PERRY MASON story, The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe, and condensing and drawing it in comic book form. That was followed by illustrating the Syndicated Mystery Story Series. A mystery written by a well-known writer was broken down into six chapters... I had to provide an illustration for each chapter. That wasn’t always easy. Sometimes I had to play up the action that a character mentioned in dialogue with another character, having little to do with the story line, but providing an action scene, which Clark Kinniard wanted. That lasted a few years. I read, I think, every mystery story on the market during that period. Which was the late Forties.

Now, to catch up with important facts that were omitted during the telling of the prewar and war stories. The big event was the birth of our first son, Michael. That took place on December 9, 1942. That was a hectic morning. Ann’s mother was so excited she tried to take a chair through a doorway crosswise. It was also a cold morning with snow and ice on the ground. When I went into the Army Mike was 10 months old. It was hard to leave the two most important people in my life. Ann and Mike.

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26

How The Co-Creator Of “Aquaman” Helped Win The Battle Of Okinawa

PAUL NORRIS Checklist [This checklist is adapted primarily from information provided in the online Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, established by Dr. Jerry G. Bails and viewable at www.bailsprojects.com. Names of features that appeared both in magazines with that title and also in other publications are generally not italicized below. Key: (w) = writer; (p) = penciler; (i) = inker; (l) = letterer; (d) = daily/Monday through Saturday newspaper strip; (S) = Sunday newspaper strip.]

Name & Vital Stats: Paul Leroy Norris (1914-2007) – artist, writer, letterer Pen Name: Roy Paul Education: Dayton Art Institute (one year); Midland College (Freemont, Nebraska, 1½ years) Influences: Matt Clark; Sidney Smith; Milton Caniff Member: Comic Art Professional Society; National Cartoonists Society; Southern California Cartoonists Society

Fox Comics: Blue Beetle (asst. i) 1940-42 directly for Al Carreno King Comics: Brick Bradford (w)(p)(i) 1967-68 Marvel Comics: covers (p)(i) 1977-78; Dynomutt (p)(i) 1977-78; Laff-a-Lympics (p)(i) 1978 (all Hanna-Barbera titles) Western Publishing (Gold Key): Aliens (p)(i) 1968-69; Jungle Twins (p) 1972-75; Magnus, Robot Fighter (p) 1968-69; New Adventures of Huck Finn (p)(i) 1968; Tarzan (p)(i) 1969-72; Woodsy Owl (p)(i) 1974-76

Print Media (non-comics): artist – advertisement, early 1950s, 2-page spread in Life magazine; artist – books, 1995 (or 1955) Underwater Sport; 1982 Father Can’t Forget; artist – newspapers, Dayton Daily News, late 1930s; artist – promotions, Puerto Rican Rum Commission Syndication: Brick Bradford (d)(ghost w)(ghost p&i) 1951-52 for King Features Syndicate; Brick Bradford (d)(w)(p)(i) 1952-87 for KFS; Brick Bradford (S)(w)(p)(i) 1957-87 for KFS; Damon Runyon (p)(i) 1946-48; Flash Gordon (d)(ghost p&i) 1953, one week for KFS; Geriatrix (S) (p)(i) 1977-79 panel; Jungle Jim (S)(p)(i) 1948-54 for KFS; mystery stories (p)(i) 1946-48; Scoop Lenz (S)(p)(i) c. 1938-39; Secret Agent X-9 (d) (ghost p&i) 1943, 1948-59 for KFS Comics in Other Media: Vic Jordan (d)(p&i) 1942-43 for PM newspaper, Marshall Field Syndicate Co-creator: Yank and Doodle, Aquaman, Jungle Twins Promotional Comics: propaganda (p)(i) c. 1942-45 during WWII; various comics (p)(i) for the Taft-Hartley Act 1947 Comics Studio/Shop: Hanna-Barbera Studio (p)(i)(l) 1977-78, see Marvel credits COMICBOOKS (U.S. Mainstream Publishers): Better Publications: Brick Bradford (p)(i) 1948; covers (p) (i) 1949; Jungle Jim (w)(p)(i) 1949-51; Shankar the Shakiri (w)(p)(i) 1949-51 Charlton Comics: Brick Bradford (p)(i) 1969 David McKay Comics Group: Perry Mason (w)(p)(i) 1946 DC Comics: Aquaman (p)(i) 1941-42; Captain Compass (p) (i) 1949-51, 1953; Crimson Avenger (p)(i) 1941-42; Darwin Jones (p) 1950; filler (p)(i) 1941; Johnny Quick (p)(i) 1950; Sandman (p) 1941-42; Strange Adventures (p)(i) 1950 Dell Publications: covers (p)(i) 1949; Flash Gordon (w)(p) (i) 1947-49; Jungle Jim (p)(i) 1956-57; Shankar the Shikari (p)(i) 1956-57; Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (unconfirmed; no date) Feature/Prize Comics: crime (w)(p)(i) c. 1946; Power Nelson (w)(p)(i) 1941-42; Yank and Doodle (w)(p)(i) 1941-42

“The Man From 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” Since a league is far more than a mile (it’s 18,228.3 feet, to be precise), this story’s first “sentence” is more than a little misleading—but it’s all in good fun; and besides, Paul Norris merely drew the story, not wrote it (the scripter is unidentified). Aquaman popped up in the extra-sized World’s Finest Comics #6 (Summer 1942), sandwiched between Superman and Batman. Thanks to Bruce Mason. [TM & © DC Comics.]

WIN THE TRADE (PAPERBACK) WARS!

CONAN THE BARBARIAN

THE ORIGINAL MARVEL YEARS – EPIC COLLECTION

Vol. 2 – Hawks From The Sea

Re-presenting Conan the Barbarian #14-26 (1972-73)

by ROY THOMAS, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, GIL KANE, & JOHN BUSCEMA 300+ Pages On Sale March 23, 2021 $34.99 US ISBN #978-1-302-92655-7

Art by John Romita.

Captain America TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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

Don’t worry— Aquaman won’t remain a Nazi captive for long, in these panels drawn by Paul Norris for More Fun Comics #79 (May 1942).

Scripter uncertain.

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

28

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

An Interview with WILLIE ITO

by Richard J. Arndt

Willie Ito in a recent photo, flanked by his artwork for some of the most famous concepts he’s worked with over the decades.

(Top left:) Film and TV animation characters Cecil the Seasick Serpent, Fred Flintstone, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Lady from the Disney film Lady and the Tramp. That’s a self-caricature of Willie himself in the middle of them all, of course. Thanks to Thorsten Brümmel.

[TM & © respectively Bob Clampett Co., Hanna-Barbera, Walt Disney Productions, & Warner Bros. or successors in interest.]

I

NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Willie Ito was born July 17, 1934. He attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles before landing a job at Walt Disney Studios. His initial animation work for the studio was as an “in-betweener” (one who draws the in-between frames from major segment to major segment on an animated film). He soon joined Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes unit for six years, largely working for Chuck Jones and, later, Fritz Freleng. While there he worked on such shorts as One Froggy Evening, What’s Opera, Doc?, and Prince Violent. He left Warner Bros. to join Hanna-Barbara as one of the developers of The Jetsons. He stayed there for fourteen years, working on such shows as The Jetsons, The Flintstones, The Atom Ant Show, Frankenstein Jr. and the Impossibles, The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, Josie and the Pussycats, and The Yogi Bear Show. He also designed characters for that company’s Hong Kong Phooey and Goober and the Ghost Chasers. Other shows he worked on included The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour and The Richie Rich/Scooby-Doo Show.

In the late 1970s he moved back to Disney, working in their character

(Bottom left:) Ito’s penciled cover for Marvel comicbook Fantastic World of Hanna-Barbera – Laff-A-Lympics #3 (June 1978), inked by Scott Shaw!, and spotlighting the Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo, and several other H&B favorites. [TM & © Hanna-Barbera or successors in interest.]

merchandising department, designing toys and collectibles.

He also worked with the original group that launched Disney Television Animation. During these years he has also produced comicbook work for CARtoons, Beany and Cecil, and Crazy Magazine, done layouts on many Dell covers, and drawn such comic strips as Winnie the Pooh, as well as ghosting the Pogo newspaper strip. This interview took place on June 22, 2018.

RICHARD ARNDT: We’re talking today to cartoonist and comicbook artist Willie Ito. Why don’t we start with your early life and where you got your artistic education?

WILLIE ITO: Basically, I was five years old when I realized, after watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the big screen, that what I wanted to become was an animated cartoonist. I grew up in San Francisco, so every Sunday morning I’d get the San Francisco Examiner and open it to the comic strips. In those days the comic strip sections were huge! Practically every comic strip that a kid could enjoy would be in there, such as Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, Blondie, along with Mickey and Donald and all the Disney characters.

I was totally immersed in a world of cartooning from a very early age.

Then the unfortunate situation came about, because World War II started. Being of Japanese ancestry, my family and many

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

Camp Topaz (Left to right:) The fence around the Japanese-American internment center known as Camp Topaz, Utah, where young Willie Ito and his family were forced to spend several years during World War II… and an actual postcard image of the camp, showing the inhabitants’ hastily erected living quarters.

While the term “concentration camp” came, during this same era, to mean something far more dire and deadly in the hands of the Nazi Third Reich, and attempts to conflate the two types of camps are often overstated, the fact remains that the internment centers did fit the original definition of a “concentration camp.”

others were all shipped out to concentration camps. In Camp Topaz, where I was at, I no longer had access to the comic strip pages and the 10¢ comicbooks that I used to buy every weekend. Many of the cartoons that I used to see every weekend before the movies weren’t available any longer either because of the incarceration.

Then a young Japanese-American who’d worked in animation before the war started to do a comic strip for the people in the camp.

It was called Jankee. It was both a shock and a thrill to realize that this was a comic strip being done by a fellow Japanese-American.

His weekly strip was really my only source of new comics during my years in the camp.

29

ITO: Yes, we could order for our needs—clothing, shoes, whatever.

There were no dry goods store in camp, of course. There was a little store that sold toothpaste and things of that nature, but clothing you had to order through the catalog.

So every three months we’d get a new, up-dated catalog. I would then take the old catalogs and on the margins I would make little drawings in sequence. When you flipped the pages, the figures would become animated! That’s where I really took to my big interest in animation.

In the meanwhile, the Jankee comic strip was a great inspiration to me. So I followed the strip every week.

RA: Do you remember the name of the writer/artist?

ITO: Yes, his name was Bennie Nobori. I recently visited the grand opening of the Topaz Museum in Delta. There’s a gal there named Jane Beckwith, who is the founder of the museum. She sent me clippings of the Jankee strips. I’m going to revise the character, with the blessings of the Nobori family, with the idea of doing some coloring books or what have you that has Jankee reliving some of

The camp I was in, the Topaz Camp, was right in the middle of the Utah desert. I think all of the camps were in the middle of nowhere! [laughs] The Topaz Camp was near a little town named Delta. We arrived there by train. From Delta we were transported by buses and trucks to the camp. Sixteen miles from Delta in the middle of nowhere. For a kid who’d been born and raised in San Francisco, it was excruciating to be there.

From mild temperatures year-round to that unrelenting heat of the summers and the cold, cold winters—it was really a climate shock.

The barracks there were, of course, brand new.

They were wooden structures, covered with tar paper.

There was no other insulation, so during the winter it was very cold and during the summers it was hot, hot, hot. What we had to warm ourselves during the winter were big, cast-iron, pop-bellied stoves that burnt coal.

The whole family would gather around the stoves.

Pretty much our whole winter family lifestyles were based around those stoves.

I spent a lot of time drawing. We were issued Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs every three months.

RA: Could you order from them?

Other Skies, Other Memories In later years, Ito illustrated the story of another young Japanese-American, Shigera Yabu, who was likewise a denizen of an internment camp during World War II. Shigera Yabu himself wrote Hi Maggie, a collection of letters published in 2007… while Barbara Bazaldua wrote and Ito illustrated that tale more fully in 2010’s A Boy of Heart Mountain. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

30

An Interview With Willie Ito

Jankee Doodle Dandy!

A great inspiration to youngster Willie Ito during those dark days was another, slightly older Camp Topaz citizen, Bennie Nobori, whose comic strip Jankee appeared in the Topaz Times. Some of this information came online from the “Humor behind Barbed Wire” blog of Kate Page. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

the experiences that I lived through at the time. The character could be on T-shirts and other merchandise. Of course, Bennie’s grandkids would benefit from that.

I now have the distinction—it’s a rather odd distinction—but I’m now the oldest surviving Japanese-American animator that has experienced the incarceration of the Japanese-Americans during World War II. [chuckles] RA: Well, if you’ve got to be famous for something…

ITO: [laughs] Right! Unfortunately, all of my contemporaries from that time are in the animation studio in the sky, along with Uncle Walt.

RA: Was it only West Coast and Pacific islanders who were sent to the internment camps? I know there was a large contingent of East Coast Japanese-American letterers, working in comics, who did not appear to be sent to camps.

ITO: It was strictly on the West Coast, from Seattle down to San Diego. I guess the government felt that we might be saboteurs. There were notions that the gardeners, which many of the Japanese-Americans were at the time, would mow an arrow in the grass, pointing towards strategic war installations. [chuckles] I see that idiotic notions like that are again recurring. It’s reminiscent to me of the panic we had to endure during the war years. You know, after the war, the government acknowledged that there was no recorded incident of any espionage by Japanese-Americans on either coast or in Hawaii.

RA: Unlike several recorded instances of German sympathizers helping the Nazi.

ITO: The government justified German- and Italian-Americans not going to internment camps by saying there were too many of them, and that they were already heavily assimilated into the regular U.S. population.

In our case, the Japanese-American were easy to identify, and the first generation of Japanese immigrants—not Japanese-Americans but Japanese immigrants—those families were still pretty much intact. The second generation—the Japanese-Americans—the Nisei, were still of college age, young adults. We were easy to locate, I guess.

There was 120,000 of us, living on the West Coast, mostly in California, who were sent to concentration camps inland. Not just Utah, but Arizona,

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

31

Here Be Dragons—And Worse!

An online map showing the location of the various World War II internment camps, all west of the Mississippi.

All Aboard!

A Willie Ito color illustration done for A Boy of Heart Mountain, one of the books relating Shigera Yabu’s wartime experiences at “Heart Mountain.”

Written by Barbara Bazaldua. The mood may seem light… but the situation is, of course, tragic… a lingering disgrace to the names of everyone from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the order creating the internment centers, to the war-panicked citizenry that saw nothing wrong with them. A/E’s editor, from a less personal perspective, devoted stories in Marvel’s The Invaders and DC’s Young All-Stars to the shame of the internment camps. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Colorado, Nevada—places of that nature. 11,000 went through the Topaz Camp, where I was interned.

There were indeed Japanese-Americans living on the East Coast, but none of them were bothered or harassed in particular.

Perhaps, because they could say that they were Chinese-Americans.

During World War II, Chinese-Americans would wear badges that said they were Chinese-Americans. So did Filipinos. That was so they wouldn’t get beaten up in the streets, you know.

RA: I wonder if that situation prompted some of the name changes that were going on over on the East Coast? You’re aware that many of comics’ early Jewish creators changed their names to be less ethnic?

Disney, New Funnies titles. I was more into the “funny animal” comics and strips than the other genres. Most of those characters were in Dell Comics’ titles. I gathered quite a collection. I wanted my comics to be pristine, so I would always buy two comics, so there’d be one that I would put away and the other was for reading.

Back then, you’d roll them up and stick them in your back pocket.

That was so my friends wouldn’t want to borrow my comics. [laughs] And if it got too beat up, it didn’t hurt too much.

I would buy comicbooks to study and read. I was really into it. I continued collecting through high school and into college. By then, I was a closet collector, so to speak. You were supposed to be too old for comics when you hit high school. Finally, when I was finishing up my two years studying art at San Francisco City College, my art teacher, Carl Beetz, arranged for me to meet with Don Graham. Beets was a protégé of Graham, who was both an instructor at Chouinard Art Institute [now the California Institute of Art] in L.A. and the head of internal training classes for Walt Disney Productions.

I brought down my portfolio for Don Graham. Don and his committee reviewed it and offered me a scholarship. I gladly took it. Now, mind you, this was the first time I ever left the bosom of

ITO: Yes, right, right.

RA: Someone once told me that several of the Japanese inkers, who had a studio where they did lettering for various comicbook companies, changed their last names as well, but he was laughing about it because they changed their Asian names to Jewish names [Ito laughs]… which, really, probably did them little good in New York City, or really protected them from racially bigoted people.

ITO: Yeah, right! [laughs] That’s funny!

RA: Of course, it’s entirely possible that those name changes were to steer publishers, who may not be actually meeting with them, away from considering them as Japanese-Americans and, instead, as Jewish, as there were a lot of Jewish creators in comics at the time.

ITO: That’s kind of interesting. Anyhow, during the camp period, I maintained my interest in animation until I got out of the camp, around July of 1945.

I immediately resumed collecting my Looney Tunes, Walt

Carl Beetz Noted artist and teacher.

Don Graham as art director, supervising instruction with boss Walt Disney at the latter’s “animated drawing school” in New York, during the days when Disney’s cartoons were still released by United Artists. Walt is the mustachioed guy on our left, of course, while Graham is on Disney’s left in the dark sweater. On Disney’s right is George Drake, chief animation instructor.

32

An Interview With Willie Ito

my family. Not just my family, but the friends and the comfort of San Francisco’s Japan Town. However, when I started classes, there were a number of Japanese kids there at Chouinard, including Jimmy Murakami. Jimmy Murakami became an Academy Awardwinning producer [NOTE: For 1968’s The Magic Pear Tree, though he’s probably best known for his adaptation of the Raymond Briggs classics When the Wind Blows and The Snowman. —RA]. He teamed up with Fred Wolf to form Murakami Wolf Productions, which became one of the hot small animation studios in town during the 1960s.

There were lots of animated commercials on TV in the 1960s, so lots of small teams set up small companies. Some became well known, like Playhouse Pictures that did commercials for Ford.

It wasn’t just unknowns, either. Tex Avery started his own small company—Cascade Films—to do commercials. Even HannaBarbera had a commercial unit. Lots of people who worked at Disney also worked at Filmfare, which did things like the Keebler commercials, the Tony the Tiger commercials, and the Kellogg commercials.

So animation was extremely rich back there, with lots of smaller companies to take up the slack.

But back to my own story—so when I was at Chouinard, I was in T. Hee’s animation class. [NOTE Thorton Hee was a famed Disney animator, always credited as T. Hee. —RA.] While in that class, a fellow named Chase Craig, from Western Publishing, came to the class and offered $10 for any kind of cover or one-page story ideas we could throw at him. He even wanted stories up to twelve pages. I personally jumped on the cover idea, so I submitted covers for New Funnies, Looney Tunes, and the Disney Books. As a hungry student, that was a great way to make a few bucks.

I’d spend the evenings just cranking out cover ideas. Some of them good, some of them kinda reaching. [laughs] Sometimes I was remembering an old cover that someone had done for Disney which I may have recycled. But I was making a few bucks, doing this and that.

RA: When they bought these from you, they would have a professional artist redraw them, right?

ITO: Oh, yeah, yeah, I was doing the roughs. These were layouts on 8½” by 11” art sheets. I’d trace out the logos onto the roughs. Try to make it look as good as I could, you know.

When I was still at Chouinard, I took a big chance, since I still had my portfolio with me and because I really wanted to see the inside of the studio. I’d grown up reading all of these books such as The Art of Walt Disney and History of the Disney Studio. Even with my Encyclopedia Britannica at home, the section containing the articles on Walt Disney was the only volume that had wear and tear on it. [chuckles] The rest of the volumes were brand new.

Thornton Francis (“T.”) Hee

Chase Craig

Noted Disney animator and instructor… also noted for his work on UPA animated cartoons.

Western Publishing’s West Coast comics editor. Thanks to James Kealy.

Iwao Takamoto The established animator was one of those who welcomed Willie Ito to the Disney lot in 1954. Like Willie, a young Iwao Takamoto had also been confined to an internment camp—in his case, the one at Manzanar, California.

So I was reading about the Disney Studio anywhere I could, at libraries and what have you. I especially wanted to see those iconic street signs, with Mickey Avenue and Dopey Drive. I wanted to see all of that. So I called the studio and asked if I could make an appointment for them to see my portfolio. They OKed me to come in, which I did, although I was very intimidated to walk onto the Disney lot that day. This would have been in June, about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. It was about 90 degrees out. I had on my San Francisco best—my tweed jacket, old slacks, and a heavy knit necktie. I was perspiring up a storm lugging this huge portfolio onto the lot.

I walked into the main animation building, which was air-conditioned. I got into the elevator and pressed for the fourth floor. When the doors opened up, there was Walt Disney himself.

He was with an associate. They were deep in conversation, but as they stepped into the elevator, Walt acknowledged me with a polite nod, even though I was cowering in the back of the elevator. They both turned around and continued their conversation. I was behind them, realized that I was in the company of one of my all-time idols.

Someone that I’d admired for many, many years and he was right in front of me!

Anyway, I went into personnel and the personnel manager got on the intercom to get a couple of people to review my portfolio.

One of the people who came in was an Asian guy. His name was Iwao Takamoto. I was a little surprised, but it made me feel a little more at ease at the same time. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Iwao had also been incarcerated during the war years—at the Manzanar Camp, in the shadows of the Sierra Mountains in California.

In 1945, when the war was nearing its climax, Iwao was a lost young man. His education had been interrupted and, although still a teenager, he had no idea what the future held for him. A fellow inmate, who’d worked in the animation industry prior to the war, suggested that, with his drawing skills, he should buy a couple of ten-cent notebooks and fill them with his drawing and cartoons. Upon his release from Manzanar, he sent his sketch book

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

off to Disney and the response came rather rapidly. Iwao’s drawing ability was exactly what Disney was looking for. Iwao was the first Japanese-American hired into such a mainstream studio. He rose rapidly in the ranks there and blazed the trail for future JapaneseAmerican candidates, such as myself, who sought employment at Disney.

Anyway, both Iwao and the other fellow went into the conference room to look at my portfolio. About twenty minutes later they came back out and Ken Seling, the personal manager, thanked me for coming in. He told me that they enjoyed reviewing my portfolio but “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

I thought that was fine. I figured I would spend my four years at Chouinard’s, then make up a professional portfolio, and, using that, I’d really seek a job at the Disney Studios. I was happy that I just got the chance to see the studio, and, let me tell you, I took my sweet ol’ time leaving the studio that day. I got my eyeful of the beautiful art on the walls. Back then, they exhibited the actual animation art and cells, background art, all that sort of thing, on the walls.

They didn’t have the thievery that you’d have today doing that. Nowadays it’s all prints.

RA: There was no market for the original art back then.

ITO: No. Of course not. That day was quite an adventure. But now my mind was set. I determined that I was really going to pursue getting into either Disney Studios or the animation field itself.

Fortunately, in my drawing class, taught by Don Graham, were guest teachers like Chuck Jones and Abe Levitow and Ben Washam.

The last two guys were Chuck’s premiere animators. One of my other classes was taught by Marc Davis, whom I greatly admired. He directed segments of Disney’s Cinderella feature. And, of course, T. Hee, whom I admired from his great work with UPA Studios, was also one of my instructors.

So about two weeks after my visit to Disney Studios, I came back to my rooming house. None of the students there had phones of their own. It was a community phone, but I never bothered to check to see if I’d gotten any phone calls. Well, I got back to the rooming house and found I had a Western Union telegram stuck on my door. My first thought, being I was away from home, was that it was either really good news from home or really bad news. [laughs] I was quite nervous about opening the envelope. So I get it torn open and the headline says “From Walt Disney Productions” and the letter asked me to please report to the studio Monday morning. It gave me a time and was signed by Ken Seling, the personnel manager.

So, that following Monday morning, I made it all the way from downtown Los Angeles to Burbank. I spent my first day as an employee on the studio lot, where I was assigned to one of

Spaghetti—Ohhh!

Ito’s first assignment at Disney was in-betweening the famous “spaghetti kissing scene” for the film Lady and the Tramp, which would be released to box office success in 1955. This is a later “re-creation” by Willie. [Lady and the Tramp TM & © Disney.]

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those classic Disney desks and a production head named Johnny Bond. He handed me about ten different model sheets—everything from the classic Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland pages to the Goofy and Donald Duck work. It was all a test to see if I’d be up for the work required. Johnny told me to remember: “These are model sheets, but you’re not to trace them. You’re supposed to interpret the model sheets and draw the characters in various poses, with various attitudes.” So I spent the morning hours doing that, took a lunch break and then came back to my desk. Johnny Bond came back and told me, “We’ve reviewed your work and we like it very much. You’re hired!” I couldn’t believe it!

I was just a kid of nineteen. I’d never had a real job before in my life. I didn’t even have an art degree, or formal training, except for my two years at Chouinard’s. But I was hired! They told me they were going to start me in the Lady unit.

RA: Now, was this 1953 or 1954?

ITO: 1954. I thought, “The Lady Unit? That must be some sort of entry-level position where I would be spending time in inking or painting.” I thought he meant for me to work where all the ladies were working. Johnny tells me to go to the D Wing and look for Milt Kahl’s office. “The fellow’s who’s working in there is Milt’s assistant. He’ll work with you.”

I went down the hall and knocked on the door. I heard “Come in” and I walked in. There was Iwao Takamoto, the same Asian fellow who’d reviewed my portfolio. I guess he was responsible for

34

An Interview With Willie Ito

my being hired. I mentored under him. It turned out that “the Lady unit” meant the Lady and the Tramp unit, and the first scene I was assigned to was the iconic spaghetti kissing scene in that movie.

RA: That’s pretty impressive!

ITO: I think so, too! Iwao was such a perfectionist. All of Disney’s “Nine Old Men” wanted Iwao to follow up their work because he could really give their work a beautiful cleanup, keep it on model and give it a real attractiveness. [NOTE: Disney’s “Nine Old Men” were the core animators at the Disney Studios, during Disney’s lifetime: Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Frank Thomas.

Disney began referring to them as his “Nine Old Men” while they were all still in their twenties. —RA.] Iwao was known as the “ladies’ man.”

Not as a Don Juan but because he could make either Cinderella or Princess Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, look very much a lady, with all that cute, subtle feminine beauty that was sexy, too. The beautiful eyelashes on those ladies were his cup of tea.

I worked under Iwao. It was wonderful training, but

The Rabbit And The “Ribbit!”

Two classic mid-’50s theatrical cartoons to which Ito contributed during his time at Warner Bros. are One Froggy Evening (1955) and the Bugs Bunny starrer What’s Opera, Doc? (1957). The former is represented by a pencil drawing Willie did some time later. [TM & © Warner Bros. or successor in interest.]

eventually good things come to an end. Lady and the Tramp was completed and they had to lay off all the lower-level newer employees, including myself.

Now, before the Disney work, I’d also gone to see Johnny Burton at the Looney Tunes division at Warner Bros. Johnny told me, “I liked your portfolio very much but we don’t train people here. If you ever get trained, give me a call and you’re hired.” So the minute on that Friday that I learned that I’d be laid off for three months before Sleeping Beauty began production, I got on the phone to Johnny Burton and by that Monday I was working for Warner Bros. at the infamous “Termite Terrace”—which was a building.

My career was rolling along.

I did get a call back from Disney three months later, but I told them I was now working as an assistant animator in Chuck Jones’ unit. I was assisting a fellow there named Ken Harris. He was also a premier animator in Chuck’s unit. I asked Disney if they would be able to match the salary that I was earning at Warner Bros.

Disney’s response was that they were the major leagues while I was working in the minors. [laughs] Majors or minors, it’s who pays you the most that counts. So I worked for the next six years for Warners.

Follow That CARtoon!

The first page of an Ito-drawn comics story from CARtoons magazine #21 (Feb. 1965). Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

35

I continued to submit cover layouts to Western Publishing during all those years. I was never assigned to do any finished work there, though. No interior pages, or anything of that nature. Just the rough layouts.

RA: During that time period, you also worked for CARtoons Magazine, didn’t you?

ITO: Yes, I was doing artwork for CARtoons. While I was there I created “Unk Kohler and the Varmints.” They were published

by Peterson Publications. I only freelanced there for about a year, when the magazine was just starting out, but it was fun.

Foot-Prince In The Sands Of Time The 1961 Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny animated short Prince Violent was a spoof of the famous Sunday comic strip by Harold R. Foster—and sported Ito’s first onscreen credit. Later, for TV, the name of the cartoon was changed to the more socially acceptable Prince Varmint. [TM & © Warner Bros. or successors in interest.]

Towards the end of my six years at Warner Bros., Fritz Freleng was looking for a new layout man. He wanted to promote his current layout man, Hawley Pratt, to a directorship. Fritz knew I wanted to do layouts and asked Chuck if he could borrow me for one picture, to see how I would do. I went over to Fritz’s unit and laid out my first Bugs Bunny-Yosemite Sam short, which was called Prince Violent.

RA: I assume that was a take-off on Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant.

ITO: Yes. However, when it was released to TV, the title was softened to Prince Varmint. [chuckles] That was the first short for Warner Bros. that I received credit on. Before, I was always uncredited. During my stint at Warner Bros., I met a lot of the comicbook guys who were doing the Warner Bros. comics for Western. A lot of these guys were the ones I’d been reading when I was growing up. Many of them were doing assistant animation jobs for Warners, so I figured out that they were moonlighting for Western on their down time, in between animation jobs. Pete Alvarado was one of them. Many others.

So, after I finished that first picture with Fritz, I got a call from Bob Clampett’s wife, Sody Clampett. I hadn’t met Bob Clampett during my time at Warner Bros. because he’d left that company years earlier. So Sody says, “We’ve heard of you and we’d like you to come on in and see us.” I took an early afternoon and visited the Clampett Studio, which was called Snowball Productions. I met Bob and Sody, and Bob says that Mattel had just bought his Time for Beany, which was a puppet show that had run on our local Los Angeles TV station. But Mattel wanted to change it to an animated series for ABC. Bob thought I was a good character designer. I certainly wanted to be a good character

Time For More Beany (Left:) The final Ito-drawn page of “In the Bag” from Beany and Cecil #2 (Nov. 1962) spotlights villain Dishonest John. Scripter uncertain. Thanks to Jim Ludwig.

(Right:) A 2015 pencil sketch by Willie of Beany and Cecil. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. [Art on this page TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

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An Interview With Willie Ito

Eenie-Beany-Minie-Moe (Clockwise from above:) Former Warner Bros. animation director and then puppet-master Bob Clampett with Beany and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, a publicity photo for the TV series Time for Beany, circa 1954… the original format of Clampett’s fabulous characters.

A page drawn by Jack Bradbury for Dell/Western’s “Beany and Cecil” Four Color #368, cover-dated Jan. 1952. Scripter unknown… but, in the 1980s, Clampett told Roy Thomas that those stories were adapted from the scripts written for the TV puppet show.

The cover of Dell/Western’s Beany and Cecil #2 (Nov. 1962), penciled by Willie Ito, who also drew that issue’s interior stories. Inks attributed by Ito to Beverly Ware. Scripter unknown, but Ito says Clampett did “a lot of the writing” himself. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert for both comics pages.

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

designer in our business. So he made me an offer, which I, of course, couldn’t pass up. [chuckles] I went to Chuck and Fritz and told them I was going to be leaving because Bob Clampett had offered me this job. They shook their heads at me, because Bob was working in TV and that kind of work wouldn’t last. [chuckles] Warners was a major studio and would be there to stay.

They’d had worked with Bob in the past. [chuckles] They thought he was kind of a kook. They tried to discourage me, but I told them he’d doubled my pay and my wife was pregnant, so it behooved me to take the job.

So I started with Bob Clampett and redesigned all of his puppet characters into animation characters. Once the series started to roll, Western Publishing approached Bob and reminded him that they’d done a whole comicbook series, with Jack Bradbury doing the art, that was based on the puppet show. Now they wanted to adapt the animated version, which was called Beany and Cecil. Bob was a little reluctant, because he was afraid that Jack Bradbury’s style would reflect the puppet version more than the animated version. So he asked me if I’d do the pilot book—the covers and interior pages and all that—for Western. In that way, any of the assigned artists to Western Publishing could take over the book and follow my style.

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

I said OK. I ended up doing the first two or three issues of those.

RA: Now, you know you’re only credited with doing the covers on those.

[NOTE: Since we talked, the GCDB has put up Willie’s name as the probable penciler & inker of issues #2-3 and possibly #4. He’s still only credited with the cover to #1. Perhaps his remarks here will clear up some of the confusion. —RA.] ITO: Yeah, see, what I did is that I penciled the covers and a gal named Beverly Ware, who wasn’t a comicbook inker but an ink-and-paint inker for animation, she inked those. The comicbooks didn’t have quite the quality that I would have liked. I also did the coloring books of Beany and Cecil which I both penciled and inked.

All the pages and the covers.

Bob didn’t want me to take too much time away from my daytime work at the studio. So I roughly penciled the pages of the comicbook and then someone else took over to do the finished art.

That’s basically what happened with those comics.

RA: Do you remember who the writer was on those Beany and Cecil books?

ITO: I think that Bob did a lot of the writing himself.

Even on the coloring books, Bob would do thumbnails of the pages, which I turned into finished art. Of course, once the shows went into production, we were persistently late, because we didn’t have the production system down like HannaBarbara did.

Bob was used to making a lot of changes,

Hanna-Barbera Days (Above:) Willie Ito, fellow layout man Jerry Eisenberg, and writer Tony Benedict at H&B circa 1964. Photo found

by Jim Kealy.

(Below:) A publicity illo of The Jetsons, the Hanna-Barbera animation show that aired during 1962-63 and was revived successfully in the ’80s.

(Right:) An Ito character-design sheet for H&B’s Hong Kong Phooey. Courtesy of Willie, via Richard Arndt.

[TM & © Hanna-Barbera or successors in interest.]

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which was possible for the Warner Bros. movie shorts, and he was doing a lot of that on his own. But TV production is a lot faster. It was a tug-of-war with ABC on that show.

Unfortunately, when it came back down to renewal time, Bob thought that he should have another show to present, just in case. He came up with an animated version of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. We did the presentation work based on Harvey Eisenberg’s comic work on those characters that he did for Western Publishing in the late 1940s.

Certain set-ups had been done very well in those comicbooks, so I would blow those up and re-ink them for animation boards.

Then we had Francis [Bergen’s wife], Charlie, and Edgar Bergen come in to see the presentation. Young Candice Bergen was also there. They were very impressed with the presentation. We thought we would have that extra half-hour on ABC, where we’d team up with Beany and Cecil, all sewed up with The Charlie McCarthy Show.

But, instead, ABC bought The Jetsons, from Hanna-Barbara, to use in that prime-time spot that Beany and Cecil had held.

Bob kept me on for a time, the last employee left, working on other new show ideas, but I was getting a little impatient. Then Hanna-Barbara called me and told me they would love to have me come over. They were neck-deep in production of The Jetsons and they told me that they could use my help. I told Bob that I was going to have to take a regular job, which he understood. But then he asked me if I could come over in the evenings and work on his stuff. [chuckles] If I had done that, I would never have seen my family. [chuckles] Anyway, I started working on The Jetsons, and that was fun.

Now Beany and Cecil, The Jetsons, and, of course, The Flintstones were all originally prime time cartoon shows. They were later re-run on Saturday mornings, but they all started out on prime time, in the evenings. The Yogi Bear Show was the beginning of prime-time animation. That was then followed up by The Flintstones and the rest.

I was with Hanna-Barbara for the next fourteen years, doing any number of animated shows.

38

An Interview With Willie Ito

they assigned me. It was great that they assigned it to me, but I sat on the script and procrastinated. So finally one day I got a phone call from Tom Goldberg. He asked me if I remembered that ten-page script that they had assigned to me two months earlier. [chuckles] He wanted to know where was I with it. I told him that I was coming along and that I was half-way through it. The truth was I hadn’t even started it. So he asked me to bring it in tomorrow so they could see how I was doing on it.

Great! A little white lie has caught up with me! So I burnt the midnight oil. Thank God, I got five of the ten pages finished. With my eyes dragging, I went to the Disney studio and met with Tom Goldberg and a guy named Don McGlocklin. They both reviewed my five completed pages and then asked me to leave those pages with them, go home and finish the other five pages. “OK,” I said, got home, and I crashed. Then the phone rang and my wife tells me that Walt Disney Studio is on the line.

“Oh, boy,” I said, “am I in trouble.”

I answered the phone, and they asked me to come into the studio the next morning to talk to them. So I did, and they told me they had an opening in the comic strip department and wondered if I’d be interested in taking that position. I thought to myself, “If it gets me away from animation…” So I jumped at the opportunity.

RA: Was Disney still doing the comic strip for American newspapers or was this for overseas?

ITO: At that time, Disney was still producing the syndicated strips for King Features, for both U.S. and European comic strips. The comic strip department had been formed way back in the 1930s. When that happened, all the comic strip artists were folded into the union with the animation artists.

RA: Were you working on the Winnie the Pooh comic strip?

Crazy, They Call Him! An Ito-illustrated page scripted by Bob Foster & Greg Crosby for Marvel’s black-&white Crazy Magazine #12 (Aug. 1975). Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RA: What about your work on Crazy Magazine for Marvel Comics?

ITO: Like CARtoons, Crazy was a black-&-white magazine. My work for Crazy was all done strictly with Bob Foster. I guess Marvel had their own editor [Marv Wolfman], but the only person I worked for in any editorial sense was Bob Foster. When I was at Disney Publishing, later on, we had people like Marv Wolfman and Len Wein working on staff. We were more closely connected with Marvel and DC that way. We became professional friends though that.

RA: You also worked on some comic strips, I believe.

ITO: Yeah. In 1976 I had left Hanna-Barbara for Sanrio, another animation company. I was working on that disaster called Metamorphoses for Sanrio. [NOTE: Metamorphoses was a 1978 film, also known as Winds of Change. —RA.] Working on that was pretty much the last straw for me in the art of animation, having to deal with that day-to-day grind of cranking out animation art.

I went back to Disney, hat in hand, to the comic strip department. I did a ten-page sample of a “Mickey Mouse” story that

ITO: Yes. At that time a fellow named Carson Van Osten who, along with me, was developing the strip with some of those new characters—I don’t remember all of them today. I did the rough layouts. We also had a guy who had a very veiny style who did the writing on it. [NOTE: Maybe Don Ferguson? —RA.] We actually had a couple of writers on it. Floyd Norman was one of them.

Richard “‘Sparky” Moore did the finishes on the strip, the inking. He lived on a ranch about 100 miles north of L.A. He would come in once a week to pick up his new assignments, my roughs, visit with us, and then he’d drive home and mail in the finished strips.

Sparky really drew up the characters in the way the department wanted.

RA: Were you also working on Walt Kelly’s Pogo at that time?

ITO: Oh, that was earlier. Walt Kelly was working with Chuck Jones, at Chuck’s studio, on the Pogo

Slipping Him A Mickey Willie and friend at the San Diego Comic Fest a year or three back.

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

39

The Big Pooh-Bah (Above:) An Ito sketch of Winnie the Pooh and friends.

(Below:) An ad for the Winnie the Pooh comic strip, from the New York Daily News for June 14, 1978, which probably utilized art by Willie Ito. [TM & © Disney.]

Birthday Special, an animated show which came out in 1969. When I was working at Sanrio, we had a fellow named Don Morgan working for us. The studios for Sanrio and Chuck Jones was cattycorner from us. Morgan got to know Walt Kelly quite well and worked on layouts for the Pogo Special, so Walt was very familiar with his style. Anyway, Walt got seriously ill and was unable to draw his strip. It didn’t usually matter how ill he was, he was still able to perform and do beautiful work on the strip. But this time he was too ill, so he asked Don to fill in and ghost the next few weeks of the strip. Don said he’d be very happy to do that. Then Don calls me and tells me that he knows that I’m a very big fan of Walt Kelly, which was true—I had all of the Pogo and Albert the Alligator books, and the Our Gang comics [laughs]—and then Don asked me for a favor. He’d promised his son that he was going to take him camping for two weeks. The same two weeks he’d just promised he’d ghost Pogo! So he asked me if I’d ghost him while he was supposed to be ghosting for Walt Kelly! [laughs]

RA: The ghosting of a ghost!

ITO: Yes! Now for some time up to that point, I’d been doing all my inking with a Pentel pen. I’d gotten good with a brush when I was doing some work for the Hank Ketchum estate. I’ll have to tell you about that in a bit. However, by this time, I was out of practice. I told Don that I was going to have to take a while to retrain myself to use the brush, so I could give Pogo that beautiful thick and thin line that Walt Kelly did so well. Don tells me that I don’t have the time, that I was going to have to just dive right into it. Oh, my gosh!

Don sent me the dailies. Now, the dailies were already mapped out. The balloons and the lettering was pre-done. I had to base my characters around the balloons. It was kind of restrictive. I went ahead and did the two weeks, inking it to the best of my abilities with the Pentel and trying to emulate that beautiful thick and thin line of Kelly’s. By the end of it, I thought I’d done a pretty good job.

To a layman, they may not spot any difference. To a Kelly fan, of

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An Interview With Willie Ito

Pogo And The Passing Parade Willie drew approximately a week’s worth of daily Pogo strips that came out shortly after creator Walt Kelly’s passing. This strip, probably written by Walt’s widow Selby Kelly, is dated December 25, 1973. Thanks Art Lortie. [TM & © Okefenokee Glee and Perloo, Inc.]

course, [laughs] they’d be able to tell!

done by a Japanese artist!

Anyway, I submitted it and Don was happy. He had to do one or two Sunday pages on his own. We turned in the two weeks and it was published.

Last year, or the year before, I was sitting in on the Walt Kelly panel at the San Diego Comic-Con, in the audience, when Mark

RA: Do you remember the dates of that ghosting run?

ITO: No. I know it was reprinted at least once, though. Selby Kelly, Walt’s wife at the time, mentioned to someone that they’d had to have the strip ghosted for a time, but part of the strip looked like they’d sent to Japan and had some of those Japanese artists ghost the strips. [laughs] I was kind of laughing to myself at that! It wasn’t sent to Japan, but it was

The Puppet & The Princess Ito’s pencils for the cover of a Pinocchio Color and Activity Book and for a page from a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs storybook. [TM & © Disney.]

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

Merry Christmas From Disney Examples of four of the 13-week “Christmas story” newspaper strips produced by King Features for Disney, at least the first and last of which reportedly featured work by Willie Ito. (From top to bottom:) No Puppets for Christmas, 12-22-77; Christmas Comes to Neverland, 12-23-83; A Christmas Present for Mr. Toad, 12-22-84; and Cruella’s Very Furry Christmas, 12-5-85. Thanks to Art Lortie. [TM & © Disney.]

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An Interview With Willie Ito

Evanier spotted me. On the panel were Maggie Thompson and Carolyn Kelly. [NOTE: Carolyn, Walt Kelly’s daughter, is now sadly deceased. —RA.] Some real comicdom dignitaries. Mark asked me to come up and tell the ghosting story. The word is out now! Walt and Selby are, of course, no longer with us, so I went up and told the story to the amusement of many Walt Kelly fans.

RA: I’m looking at an art example from the Internet and it’s in Dutch, so I can’t read it, but did you do some Disney Christmas stories for overseas distribution? I have you doing these in 1977 and then again in 1983-1985.

ITO: Yes, that was for Disney and King Features, after I started at Disney again in 1976. Every year King Features would run a 13-week episode of a Christmas story featuring one of the classic Disney characters—Peter Pan one year, Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse another, Sleeping Beauty still another, and so on.

I did the pencils on several of those limited strips, with different inkers working on the finished product. I have none of those in my possession, however. They were really promotional items, reminding people of Disney at Christmas time, but I had a ball doing those.

The Disney comic strip department ran until Disney, and all the animation studios, were involved in that big ten-week strike in 1982. When the strike happened, all the comic strip people had to honor it, because they were in the same union, as I mentioned, as the animators. After the ten-week strike, our VP Don McGlocklin said that “This is ridiculous. We’ve lost all this time!” You know, in comic strips, you’ve got to hit your deadlines. Your weekly schedule was six dailies and a Sunday page. No “buts” about it! That was firm. Back in 1982 they didn’t believe in doing reruns, like you see with Peanuts today.

So, while we were out on strike, the comic strips were handed over to King Features, so the strips could be produced by their own bullpens. Everything worked out fine for Disney and King Features. The strips never missed a day, and the studio suddenly realized that they could close the comic strip department, not have

Duck!

Willie’s sketches of Launchpad McDuck and Uncle Scrooge McDuck.

[TM & © Disney.]

to pay all those benefits, and still get the Disney strips out on time.

Unfortunately, a lot of comic strips artists and writers lost their jobs.

They could work directly with King Features, but no longer for Disney.

So the department—Disney Comic Strips—segued into Disney Publishing, which published the new Disney comicbooks, under the Gladstone name. I segued into Disney consumer products which, at that time, was just a small division. However, with the advent of the Disney Stores, all 800 of them, based all over the world, it suddenly grew huge overnight!

RA: So the consumer products division would have been doing promotional artwork for the stores.

ITO: Right! I was involved with the stores from the inception. A guy named Steven Burke, who’s now with Comcast and is currently trying to outbid Disney for 21st Century-Fox, was the VP of consumer products for Disney.

RA: We’ll have to see how that bidding war works out. [NOTE: For the record, Disney won. —RA.] ITO: One day Burke called a meeting and we all gathered around this big conference table—art directors, executives, regular artists, and more. Steven Burke stood in front of an easel and asked us for any kinds of ideas. No matter if they’re good or bad, he was going to jot them down. All kinds of ideas were thrown out there, and one of them was Disney Retail.

Now, remember that I’d worked at Disney in 1954, when Walt Disney was still around, and he was reluctant to get into retail. He was so involved in films, both animated and live-action, and the upcoming park, that he just felt that he’d keep the merchandising outsourced and centered in New York. At that time, Disney had

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

“Steamboat Willie Ito” That’s how the artist titled this drawing, which pays homage to Steamboat Willie, the very first Mickey Mouse cartoon with sound (in 1928, just a year after sound had been introduced to movies in The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson). [Mickey Mouse TM & © Disney; other art © Willie Ito.]

43

especially in terms of nostalgia items. He had this girl who was going to all the antique stories, swap meets, and flea markets to see what old, retro Disney merchandise was selling well there.

So we replicated the old Donald and Mickey and other characters’ toys and put them in the stores in the collectible corner.

He also wanted new merchandise that would be limited, numbered editions. That’s when the stores started to recycle animation cells and old comic strips. Have them signed and framed and all that, with big prices on all of the items. [chuckles] That was the birth of the Disney Store.

an office there that handled all the licensing. He personally never wanted to get into manufacturing retail products himself. Walt’s example was that if we licensed to, say, a confectionary company, and some child got sick on their product, a product which had Mickey Mouse on the carton or can, the family couldn’t sue Disney because Mickey was just licensed to that company. But if Disney packaged chocolate milk themselves that made kids sick, Disney was liable for it. He just didn’t want to get involved in litigation of that sort with his characters.

So when the notion of retail came up, I was thinking to myself, “Nah, Walt would never have gone for that.” But three weeks later I got an e-mail from Steven Burke, telling me that Disney was going to get into retail and that we’d be opening the first of the Disney Stores over in Glendale, California, at the galleria, and then a second store in west L.A. at a place called the Westside Pavilion, and then a third store at a later date.

That first store, in Glendale, opened up with great fanfare.

Disney characters were there in costume. They had balloons, and basically everything you’d expect from a Disney opening. The customers flooded the store, and Steven was extremely happy with the results. Eventually, though, the customers started to say that they didn’t see anything new in the stores that they couldn’t get elsewhere, in regular stores. This was true.

RA: There wasn’t anything exclusive to the stores. Nothing homegrown.

ITO: No, nothing homegrown at all. So Steven called me into the office. He told me that he knew that I was a collector and that he thought that I would know what the customers would like,

Out of that was where I worked my last five years at Disney. It was, I thought, a rather interesting assignment. I became the international director of character art.

I was sent to all of the countries that had Disney Stores to check on the merchandise, because a lot of the merchandise for international stores was produced locally.

RA: You had to make sure the characters were on model and that there was a reasonable quality control and so on…

ITO: Yeah, that’s right. We made up a whole new department under the guidance of a man named Greg Crosby. There were six of us in the department and all of us were directors! [laughs] It was director-heavy!

But whenever we had artists from other countries visiting the U.S., we would host them. Eventually we decided to have an annual international conference. We’d do big things, like go to Florida and host all the representatives from all the Disney Stores there.

By the time I finally retired, I’d had the opportunity to see the world on Disney’s dime. That was kind of nice. One of the nice things that I remember was traveling to Italy and seeing the Italian Disney comics. The Italian artists were really fantastic! They had a great handle on doing art in the style of Floyd Gottfredson or Carl Barks. The way they handled the Disney characters was very edgy, yet beautifully done. They were big fans of the early adventurestyled stories of Mickey and Donald.

Then you’d go to Japan and they’d do the Disney characters overtly cute. They made no effort to imitate Carl Barks or any of the original artists. They have their own little style. Seeing all of that was an interesting experience.

RA: Now, before I forget, you had mentioned a Hank Ketchum story

44

An Interview With Willie Ito

earlier…

ITO: Yes, well, the story goes back to my times at Chouinard’s, in the early 1950s, where I had a best friend by the name of LeRoy Hollie.

RA: I’ve heard the name, but don’t really know that much about him.

ITO: Lee was sitting in the back of the classroom, wearing his all-white Navy uniform. He was a very quiet, shy sort of guy. We students at Chouinard’s were uniquely dressed.

Early hippie or bohemian. We looked, well, like typical artists!

However, Lee was in a full uniform!

I see Lee sitting back there and nobody’s talking to him, so I introduced myself. He told me he’d just gotten mustered out of the Navy and was planning to attend the art school of his choice, using his G.I. Bill benefits, so he was checking out Chouinard’s. I saw him making sketches on the table and I thought they were great drawings. I asked to see his sketchbook and “Oh, my Gosh!” They were really great!

So I got to know him quite well. Later, when I was working at Warner Bros. during the day, I spoke to Johnny Burton, saying, “I know you don’t hire non-experienced people, but I met a guy in my class at Chouinard’s and you should really look at his portfolio.”

The next day I told Lee that I’d made him an appointment to see Johnny Burton. He got hired, so I guess I was onto something!

Lee started working in the bullpen at Warner’s, but very soon he was promoted to Fritz Freleng’s unit. He had such a natural knack that he was soon doing junior animation. But, the Warner Bros. animation unit closed every summer for two weeks. We’d all go our separate ways. Two weeks later, we’d all come back. So we did this and when we got back Lee tells me that he had something to tell me. Over lunch he tells me that during those two weeks he went up north to Carmel, where Hank Ketcham’s studio was, and that Ketcham had offered Lee a position as his assistant. For years Ketcham had been searching for an assistant to take over the strip when he wanted a vacation. See, Ketcham’s new wife was from Switzerland and the plan was that, with a reliable assistant, he

could live abroad, still write and pencil the daily panels and send them to the studio in Carmel, where Lee and the little staff could work on finishing the strips.

So Lee left Warner’s and was doing fantastically well. I was living in Burbank at the time, with my wife and two kids, in a little bungalow apartment. Lee would come over when he had business in L.A. We were both aspiring comic strip artists, so we’d sit in my kitchen and work on our own comic strips. Lee was working on his teenage strip…

RA: Would that have been Ponytail or something different at that time?

ITO: It wasn’t called Ponytail, not yet anyways. He did have a working name for it. I was doing that CARtoons work for Peterson Publishing on a freelance basis at the time and so I talked to the editor of Teen Magazine. I told him that Lee had a great little feature about a teenager and it might make a nice two-page story in their magazine. He asked to see it, and so Lee met with the editor and showed him some examples. They wanted to publish it. So you might say that Lee did a dry run with Ponytail with Peterson Publishing. He eventually left Ketcham and Dennis the Menace and focused on Ponytail for many years.

Lee was my oldest friend in animation and he just passed away this last May in a plane accident. He was 85.

RA: Yes, I remember reading about that. Very sad news.

ITO: Now, Ketcham was publishing also a comicbook version, for Standard/Pines, of Dennis the Menace. I don’t remember if it was monthly or bi-monthly, but he wanted to give some relief to the Dennis the Menace comicbook people, so I teamed up with writer Carl Kohler, presented him with my idea for a new comicbook.

Carl worked at Peterson Publishing. [NOTE: Peterson is the home of CARtoons and Hot Rod Cartoons. —RA.] The comicbook was called Oceans of Fun with Davey Jones. It was a kind of a kiddie version, and looking back on it today, we had a version of the Little Mermaid right in it.

LeRoy (“Lee”) Hollie This good friend of Ito’s ghosted Dennis the Menace for years, then launched his own daily panel Ponytail.

[TM & © King Features Syndicate, Inc.]

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

45

I did the art for a 32-page book—it was already to go, completely finished. The publishers loved it. They thought it was an answer to Dennis the Menace, one that could be alternated with Dennis’ publication. So it was time to sign the contract, but Carl Kohler didn’t think the contract was that beneficial for the two of us. Me, I didn’t care. I just wanted to see my own work published. I was ready to sign the contract, but Carl procrastinated. Finally, he said it wasn’t a good contract and he said we shouldn’t go forward with it. I think back on what could have been, us having our own somewhat prestigious comic title, alternating with Dennis the Menace. I still have the whole thing in my files.

“Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall…”

Self-caricature by Willie Ito. [© Willie Ito.]

You know, the comics side of animated characters, the work done by Carl Barks, Jack Bradbury, Harvey Eisnenberg, and many, many more was really impressive. Those guys were just—my goodness! What they did was quite a thing. The animation industry is really color blind. Talent and ability is the criteria there for success.

In fact, whether it was animation or comic strips or comicbooks, I worked with some really great guys.

But, at some time, you grow old and have to retire. [laughs]

Davy Jones, Alas, Wound Up In Davy Jones’ Locker Two pages from the never-published Oceans of Fun with Davy Jones comicbook, drawn by Willie Ito and written by Carl Kohler.

[TM & © Willie Ito & Carl Kohler.]

Big, Bigger, Biggest!

Willie Ito’s full-page contribution to the humongous tabloid Wham-O Giant Comics #1 (April 1967). The page dimensions of “The World’s Largest Comic Book” were 21” tall by 14” wide! [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

46 An Interview With Willie Ito

“What I Wanted To Become Was An Animated Cartoonist”

47

WILLIE ITO Checklist [This checklist is adapted primarily from information provided in the online Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, established by Dr. Jerry Bails and viewable at www.bailsprojects.com. Names of features that appeared both in magazines with that title and also in other publications are generally not italicized below. Key: (p) = pencils; (i) = inks. All other listings are for “full artist” unless otherwise identified.]

Name & Vital Stats: Ito, Willie, Jr. (artist) Education: Chouinard Art Institute [Los Angeles] Print Media (non-comics): contributor, 1978 C.A.P.S. Portfolio; juvenile books – 1960s Beany and Cecil coloring book & 1988 Duck Tales: Silver Dollars for Scrooge & 1988 Oliver and Company Animation: for Bob Clampett (TV): producer director, & layout artist, 1961-62 Beany and Cecil; Disney (film): in-betweener, 1954 Lady and the Tramp; Hanna-Barbera (TV): animator 1962-63 The Jetsons; art director, 1964 Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear; Hanna-Barbera (TV): producer & layout artist, c.

1963-66, The Flintstones; Schlesinger (film): producer & layout artist c. 1955-61 Bugs Bunny cartoons; various others 1945+ Syndication: Christmas Comes to Neverland (daily)(p) 1977, 1983 seasonal for King Features/Walt Disney Productions; Disney Christmas Story (daily)(p) 1985 seasonal for King Features/Walt Disney Productions; Pogo (ghost p&i) 1973-74, two weeks of dailies for Post-Hall Syndicate Comics in Other Media: cartoons (writer, p & i) for satire magazines Comics Studio (Shop): Hanna-Barbera Studio (p) 1978

All Aboard The Leakin’ Lena!

A splash page from Dell/Western’s Beany and Cecil #2 (Nov. 1962), drawn by Willie Ito. Scripter uncertain. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders

COMICBOOKS (U.S. Mainstream Publications): Western Publications: Beany and Cecil (p & i) 1962-63 Marvel Comics: covers (p) 1978; Crazy Magazine (p & i) 1974-75; Hanna-Barbera strips (p & i) 1978 Petersen Publishing: CARtoons (writer, p & i) 1960s-70s

Yosemite Sam A drawing by Ito of one of the Warner Bros. characters he drew for animated cartoons. [TM & © Warner Bros. or successors in interest.]

Wham-O Manufacturing Co.: Klunker the Misfit Monster (p) 1967 in Wham-O Comics #1

–On Sale March 3, 2021–

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[Dr. Strange, Black Widow, & Man-Thing TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Red Sonja TM & © Red Sonja Properties, LLC; other art © Frank Brunner.]

Previously Unpublished Brunner Artwork!

49

(Right:) Everett E. Lowry from Cartoons Magazine, Vol. 11, #3 (March 1917). [© the copyright owners.]

50

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Raiders Of The Lost Art!

C

by Michael T. Gilbert

artoons Magazine was a periodical devoted to (surprise! surprise!) cartoons, primarily editorial cartoons—and the cartoonists who created them. It provided a fascinating overview of illustrated opinions from around the world, back when editorial cartoons were still a force to be reckoned with.

The magazine was created by Henry Haven Windsor in 1912; he had previously founded Popular Mechanics in 1901. Cartoons Magazine purported to present “What the World’s Nations Think of Each Other.” Reading the issues, it was particularly fascinating seeing viewpoints of cartoonists from Germany and the U.S. in the years leading up to World War I. Cartoons Magazine began as a 64-page mag, eventually growing more than twice that size, filled with editorial and gag cartoons. It also featured articles and contemporary news notes on cartoonists and their creations. These issues were later collected into a series of books.

The title was merged with the illustrated adventure-story magazine Wayside Tales in 1921, under the title Wayside Tales and Cartoons Magazine—apparently a last desperate attempt to keep a failing magazine going. The Cartoons Magazine part of the title was dropped in January 1922, with the final issue of Wayside Tales appearing in May of that year.

Now, I realize articles about century-old editorial cartoons aren’t strictly within the purview of Alter Ego. Not a single super-hero in the bunch, to be honest. But we’re pals, you and I, and frankly, this stuff is too good not to share!

If it makes you feel more comfortable, think of these as very early Platinum Age comics.

Or not.

Let’s start with an article that especially tickled my funny-bone. The premise is simple: one month in the life of a cartoon character… told by the little guy himself! This piece is surprisingly sophisticated, deftly playing with the conventions of comic strips that were already clichés a hundred years ago—and firmly breaking the “fourth wall” in the process!

The Diary Of A Comic Strip Character!

by William P. Langreich From Cartoons Magazine, Vol.10, #6 (Dec. 1916) Monday — I am four hours old. I have a funny mustache and extraordinarily large feet. In stature I am not in the Jess Willard class.

I am, in fact, rather short and dumpy. My clothes are very loud; they have a foreign cut and run to checks. My hat is an ill-fitting affair which comes down over the ears. I can’t say that I like it. Two little “x”-marks represent my eyes. I am not beautiful, but if it were not for me, my boss would be out looking for a job.

Tuesday — Here I am at the top of the last page, next to the joke column. In the strip with me is a long, lanky individual who, I believe, is to go through life with me. I do not fancy him particularly, and he looks as if he had designs on me. He seems to regard me as a sort of animated football. We are introduced formally to the readers.

Raiders Of The Lost Art!

51

Wednesday — Came out of the inkwell today to give the readers their first laugh, but what is comedy to them is tragedy to me. Their sense of humor is all wrong, all wrong. In the grand finale I am hit in the face by my partner with a custard pie. I see stars. Life in a comic strip is no sinecure [ie: a cushy job].

Thursday — Felt rather foolish today when the boss insisted on my wearing a brand-new straw hat. My partner ducked me in the lake, and my cue was to say “Blub, Blub!” under the water. Everybody laughed except the editor. Gee! You gotta work hard to make HIM laugh. I seem to be old stuff to him.

Friday — I am becoming careless in my speech. I use such phrases as “gotta” and “don’ wanna.” They are not at all grammatical.

My partner also is acquiring bad manners. He dropped a bowl of tripe upon my head. Why is it that folks laugh at me and yet feel sorry for a man that gets run over by a street car?

Saturday — This was some day. I had my revenge for the custard pie, the ducking, and the bowl of tripe. I hit my partner so hard with a slapstick that he had to be carried out of the strip on a stretcher. It served him right for getting so fresh. It was he this time who saw the stars. There is a big bump on his head. The readers seem to enjoy the sight as much as I did.

Sunday —Took a day off, as this is an evening paper.

Monday — My partner’s head is healed. The boss couldn’t think up any idea of his own, so he is reading the newspaper. Perhaps I’m going to fall heir to a million dollars and break into society. Fine spectacle I’ll make in the atrocious suit of clothes with my “gotta” and “don’ wanna” and “Please pass them prunes.”

Tuesday — I knew it. I’m going to make a boob of myself in society. My partner is going into society with me. The boss has been reading a book of etiquette which he borrowed from the society editor. I suppose I’ll be drinking out of a finger bowl tomorrow or be eating peas with a knife.

Wednesday — I have been introduced to a girl with star eyes—Miss Peacherino. She is a millionaire’s daughter. I must make love to her and propose, kneeling down. Horrors! She is already married. I suppose her husband will knock me into the middle of next week.

Thursday — Yes, sir. That’s exactly what happened. They summoned the butler to sweep me up in a dustpan. I am now out of society and on my way to the trenches to stop cannon balls.

[NOTE: This was during World War I.] Friday — When I heard a shell whistle today I started to go home, thinking it was twelve o’clock. The boss got the idea out of an English paper.

Saturday — This is atrocious. My partner tries to give me a haircut, but cuts my ear off by mistake. I simply had to duck that shell. If this keeps up I’ll call a strike.

Monday — Fell out of an airship and landed on a ton of coal.

My partner tried to explain that I wasn’t hurt because it was soft coal. Not much of a joke, what?

Tuesday — I am back from the trenches and pretend to like the smell of the gasworks. Another crib from an English paper, yet some say the British have no sense of humor.

Wednesday — I slipped on a banana peel today and saw stars.

Don’t cheer, boys, the poor fellows are dying.

Thursday — Am not really so dense as I appear to be in today’s strip. I only bought that gold brick to keep the boss on the paper’s payroll. I got hit with it as usual in the last picture.

52

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

Friday — Went to the ball game with my partner and, of course, got into an argument with the umpire. Result—two beautiful black eyes and stars ad nauseam.

Saturday — The boss is trying to make good. If you don’t believe it, look at today’s strip. My partner misses a nail he was trying to hammer, and hits me on the head instead. The usual stars.

Monday — The boss had his salary raised to $100,000.23 and is going into vaudeville. He is going to take me along. I hope he leaves my partner behind. Wonder what has become of Miss Peacherino, and whether I will meet her there. Hope her brute of a husband doesn’t butt in again. What if I should have stage fright?

Tuesday — When I found myself dressed up in a white suit that day I knew something was going to happen. It did. I fell from a ten-story building into a barrel of mud. Anyhow the mud was soft.

Wednesday — Going into the animated cartoons, and will be on the same bill with Charlie Chaplin. Perhaps we can sympathize with each other.

MTG here.

It should be noted that cartoonist “chalk talks” were common back when ink-slingers were big-time celebrities. It wasn’t uncommon for folks like Winsor McCay to entertain audiences on the vaudeville circuit by drawing their famous characters. Strips like Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff and McCay’s Little Nemo were also being made into animated cartoons.

The art in this piece was by Eugene Zimmerman, known as “Zim,”one of the most respected cartoonists of his day.

Next up is “Genuine Originals” by Everett E. Lowry. Here, we enjoy Mr. Lowry’s jaundiced description of some of the earliest original art collectors. He also suggests that some of these pests might actually consider ponying up a couple of bucks for original comic art… an almost heretical idea during a time when the rarest original cartoons were there for the asking. Paying for comic art?! It sounds crazy, but who knows? It just might catch on! Now let’s see what Mr. Lowry has to say…

END

Genuine Originals Story and drawings by Everett E. Lowry from Cartoons Magazine, Vol. 13, #5 (May 1918).

A superstition seems to have long existed in the popular mind that to cross an artist’s palm with coin was downright unlucky—and to be avoided accordingly. And in justice to said popular mind it must be admitted that there was a time—oh, way back in the cloak and dagger period!—when the mention of pelf [dirty money] to an artist was almost sure to produce heart failure. In consequence, in order

Raiders Of The Lost Art!

to reduce the death rate among old masters, the subject of money was generally avoided. That, however, was before automobiles were invented.

Snippy Stuff Later on, in the “art-for-art’s sake” days, it was learned that if some patron of the profession admired an original, and tossed a purse (snippy stuff) to a long-haired student, no more serious results were likely to follow than red ink and revelry by night. However and notwithstanding, there are still people a-plenty who wouldn’t mention money to an artist on a bet—the collector of “originals” among them.

53

cartoonist who fails to get this following might as well take in his shingle.

Paging Mr. Cartoonist You know him at once. Out of the corner of our eye we can see him now, as he glides through the open doorway on rubberine soles.

He glances hopefully over the department, and after tuning up on a couple of preliminary coughs and a polite “ahem!,” pages Mr. Blank, the cartoonist.

Until a quite recent date it has been customary among cartoonists to hand out originals to any and all appreciative strangers who would take the trouble to ask, the artist, no doubt, feeling himself honored by the request, and at the same time happy in the thought that he was increasing his world fame. Today, however, if one of these poor fish desires to hang an original cartoon in his little old den to divide honors with the family goldfish and his mother-in-law’s stuffed pet spaniel, he must bring along his checkbook. And as likely as not he will be turned down at that, for since the war began original cartoons have been taken off the free list.

He has, in fact, sought us out for years, and we have learned to know him so well that we would know him on a dark night.

Sometimes he is fat and puffy, and looks like a defeated candidate; then again he may be lean and wistful. But always, he is a booster of “our stuff,“ and perhaps that is why we used to even help him pull up a chair, and hearkened with bated breath while he told us how good we were. He always carried a full line of encomiums that listened [sounded] like an obituary with the dates left open, and as he drew the curtains gently aside, so to speak, and disclosed the future that awaited us, and gave us a peep at our own name writ large and shiny all over the tablet, or whatever it was our name was to be written on. We found it almost impossible to hate the cuss, and so, when he departed, on his rubberine soles, he usually carried another trophy for his wigwam.

Salting ‘Im Down

The Mystery Of It All

This action is due, not altogether on account of the increased cost of the drawing material—although cold, unsympathetic commercialism has at last crept into the art game—but to the fact that every cartoonist—bud or bloom—considers that he as a cartoonist is doing his bit, and looks fondly forward to the publication someday, in form suitable for preservation, his own daily history of the great war.

That posterity may not be denied his personal opinion of Kaiser Bill, he also jolly well sees to it that these portrayals are given a secure place in the vault along with his liberty bonds and save ‘em stamps.

What in the world he ever did with all this ill-gotten junk, nobody seems quite able to say. The fact that some collectors considered plain, everyday cartoons vastly superior to tar paper for lining garrets hardly explains the demand. And besides, there are few mentalities hardy enough to withstand the depressing effects of such pictorial ménage. Perhaps, however, the pictures are turned towards the wall, in which case (the obverse side of a cartoon is usually left blank) a large, snowy field would be conveniently exposed upon which to figure how to win the war, which baseball club will win the pennant, or, incidentally, one’s income tax, with plenty of sea room left over for revisions and corrections. Oh, there are many excellent uses to which an original cartoon can be put—which, however, does not explain why the collector is so fastidious about the signature. You will always notice how particular he is about that.

Collectors, Bring Your Check Books

Pat For Short The cartoon is, by its very nature, ephemeral. It is called Pat for a day, and Dennis from then on. Usually, rigor mortis sets in shortly after sundown on the day of publication, if it is not already rotten (artists’ slang for “punk”) to begin with—in which not infrequent case it just keeps on getting worse. In peace time, with but a few notable exceptions, the historical value of the cartoon is insignificant, and then only when arranged in consecutive order and published in a book or magazine form. That there are few things more thoroughly dead than an old cartoon every artist knows, which perhaps accounts for the prodigal distribution of originals in the past.

They actually cry out for burial, these old cartoons, and to paw over a stack of dead ones is about as edifying to their creator as a visit to the morgue on a rainy Sunday. In fact, most artists would prefer to listen to their own love letters read in court.

And yet, there are people, otherwise normal, who for one of those old thumb-marked originals would climb a porch.

Owing to this lax attitude on the part of the artist, the collection of originals has been “duck soup” to the bird whose penchant ran in that direction. So much so that the pest has been tolerated with more or less—yes, I say it —veneration, since the days of Thomas Nast. In fact, the

54

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!

It Takes Courage Personally, I lack the courage to turn down this staunch friend, and so I take this cowardly method of breaking the news that he has an awful jolt coming. To speak plainly, the artists’ fraternity has at last decided to become vulgar—just like plumbers, and butchers—and charge for their wares. They reason that a man usually appreciates an article in proportion as the said article sets him back financially, and as cartoonists very naturally wish their stuff appreciated, they have decided to make a nominal charge, and have instructed their secretaries accordingly. Said secretaries will be only too glad to show the collector through the “line” and help him make selections— all prices plainly marked on the drawing. Secretaries are further instructed to take notes (short-hand, not promissory) on whatever nice things are said about the artist and his work. All such pleasant expressions are bound to reach the proper person, and will be regarded as confidential.

The above rule will be strictly adhered to, with the exception, to be sure, of presidents, and generals in the army. In such cases, upon receipt of a polite request, originals, all dolled up in a nice frame, and marked “glass,” will be gladly furnished absolutely free of charge.

My own private guess is that the cartoon hound who thus goes prowling about newspaper offices in search of “originals” is a sort of overgrown stamp or autograph collector. If this surmise be true, he must of necessity “exchange,” and from his home in St. Louis, say, will write to a New York brother somewhat after this fashion: “Dear A.: Would you be so good as to step into the Evening Mail office on your way down town, and get that one of Brinkerhoff’s that appeared on the 17th? You will have to hurry to head off G., who I have reason to know is after it hotfoot. I’ll do the same here for you any time. Mail flat.

“Thanking you, etc.,

B.

“P.S. You might step in and see what Briggs has while in the neighborhood. Oh, yes! I picked up two attractive McManuses last week.

“Respectfully,

B.”

Or, C., of Chicago, sends the following cryptic wire to D., of St. Louis.: “Dear D.: Will exchange McCutcheon in good order for Fitzpatrick. Have you Ophelia? If not, what have you?

“Very truly,

C.”

Goodbye, Old Man Yes. We shall miss you, Mr. Collector. There will come moments when it seems that the world does not appreciate us; dark moments when we shall weaken, and would give the other leg just to have you drift in again on your rubberine soles and spill us out an earful of that good old chatter—even if you didn’t mean a word. But, alas! business is business. Bohemia of song, story and scenario has gone glimmering, and from now on, art is, so far as we are concerned, a regular sort of business.

End And there you have it, readers. The beginning of the comic art collecting mania that continues to this day. One wonders what Mr. Lowry would think to learn that an original Frank Frazetta “Buck Rogers” cover recently sold for over half a million bucks on Heritage… with one of his paintings topping the five million mark?

By contrast, $65,000 for an early Hal Foster Prince Valiant seems like an incredible bargain!

And how about that Bob Crumb Fritz the Cat cover selling for $717,000? Undoubtedly Mr. Lowry’d think we collectors had all gone mad.

And then he’d laugh and laugh… all the way to the bank!

Till next time…

55

Feel The Vern!

Part XV Of JOHN BROOME’s My Life In Little Pieces

A/E

EDITOR’S NOTE: Most editions of Alter Ego beginning with Vol. 3, #149, have included at least a few pages of comics writer John Broome’s 1998 “Offbeat Autobio” as he subtitled the book named above. Our thanks to his and Peggy Broome’s daughter, Ricky Terry Brisacque, for her kind permission to serialize this memoir by one of the most important writers of comics’ Golden and Silver Ages. John himself passed away in 1999.

Few and far between are the references to comicbooks, or to comics people, in My Life in Little Pieces. This time around, however, he focuses on his fellow comics writer “Dave Vern”—birth name apparently David V. Levine—who wrote for DC and pulp magazines under the name “David V. Reed” and seems to have had one or two other aliases as well. Vern, like Broome, contributed to DC editor Julius Schwartz’s “New Look” Batman of the mid-1960s… and to John, he was always “Dave” or “Vern”….

Friend Vern Jack Rollins, producer of Woody Allen’s movies and longtime friend of Dave Vern, once swore in my hearing that if Dave were put in a room, say, with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, it would be Dave who would monopolize the conversation, and quite easily I could be persuaded to agree.

Whereupon I cannot refrain from whispering to Dave, seated beside me in the darkened auditorium, “What could he say?”

Without noticeable hesitation, Dave whispers back, “Well, he might say, ‘I seem to have gotten stuck!’” And unable to control myself, I have to abandon my seat and flee to the rear.

Dave and I first met in shorts in the kadooey of a children’s summer camp in the Catskills where we’d been hired as counselors—he as dramatic counselor. He stuck out his hand and with a sort of a smile said as we shook, “Yipsel or Yickel?” This initial greeting I was able to realize afterward was in a number of ways pure Vern. To begin with, those actually were his first words to me before he even knew my name or l his. Second was the word Yickel. Of course I knew that Yipsel meant the YPSL or Young Peoples Socialist League, but not before (or even afterward for that matter) did I ever hear the Young Communist League referred to in similar acronymical fashion. Was it possible that Dave coined the word on the spot as we shook hands there in the camp’s john? Yes, it is entirely possible.

Yickel, as Dave delivered it with zesty relish lighting up his broad, rather dark-skinned face, apparently borrowed some of its built-in charge of risibility from euphonic siblings tickle and pickle, but also, and mainly, owed its subtly hilarious effect to a ludicrous contrast with the somber, heavily-bearded Marxist thought couched in quasi-religious awe that as a rule reigned over all mention of communism in that strangely bedazzled day and age.

The melodrama on that screen long ago was Drums along the Mohawk with Henry Fonda. In it, some settlers under attack by Indians had planted sharpened stakes around their camp as a defense and one Mohawk hurling himself at his hated foes with savage abandon had the ill luck to land flush on a stake which passed clean through him. In the movie, one character is describing this shocking spectacle even as we are looking at the impaled Indian.

And also quite Vernatre was Dave’s assuming—or seeming to assume—that I had to be a member of one or the other of the two Leagues; but actually, he was right, as he so often was: l was a communist. But not, l think, a good one. (I remember refusing to peddle the Daily Worker on the streets Sunday on the grounds that the assignment just didn’t appeal to me,

“And he hung there,” says the narrator, “not saying anything.”

John Broome & David V. Reed (left to right), flanking a page of the “Batman” story from Detective Comics #185 (June 1952), which some sources feel was written by one, some by the other, of the above talented twosome. We do know the tale was penciled by Dick Sprang and inked by Charles Paris. The tale’s splash was seen in A/E #159. Thanks to Bob Bailey for the art scan, and to Mike W. Barr, Todd Klein, & Will Murray for the photos. [Page TM & © DC Comics.]

Part XV Of John Broome’s My Life In Little Pieces

56

Here’s Looking At You, “Kid Poison”!

As “David V. Reed,” Vern/Levine had also authored numerous science-fiction stories for pulp magazines, such as this one for the Aug. 1941 issue of Amazing Stories. Art by R. Fuqua (the pen name of Joseph Wirt Tillotson); thanks to Eric Gimlin for the scans, and to David Saunders for the ID. [© the respective copyright holders.]

which to be sure, earned me coolly appraising looks from the two big lrishmen, both hard cases, who controlled our cell and whose judgment of me was soon confirmed: as a communist, I didn’t last out the year.) * Nor did Dave last long at camp. He seemed infected with an odd phobia—an absolute horror of respectability, of doing anything in the way that anyone had ever done before. He was seen running around the grounds in his jockstrap; when he couldn’t sleep, he beat his easy-going cabinmate Harvey with a broom to get him up, too. (Later, when he was writing for the Jimmy Gleason show, Gleason would schedule a writing conference for Tuesday and Dave would show up on Wednesday. Another job he lost was SF editor for Ziff-Davis, the Chicago publishing house. He got the job on the basis of a story he wrote in which the hero is carried on a throne of sugar, a substance scarce on that planet like gold on earth. No doubt he had it in him to be a ranking science-fictioneer except that that might have made him too respectable in his own eyes. However, he took the risk at least once and penned the first SF story that Argosy, the quality pulp, ever published. Just how he lost his post at Ziff-Davis eludes me now, but I know he would have found a way.)

* During that first summer, Dave lost no time in alerting the owners of fair Camp Mayfair to the considerable booboo they’d made in hiring him as dramatic counselor with the responsibility— horrid word—of putting on a show each weekend. These shows, usually based on published one-act plays, or the like, were designed to employ talents among the counselors, but also and basically to provide entertainment for the kiddies, instructive if possible. Dave, however, was never one with much of a rapport with children and so understandably, perhaps, chose instead to put on plays for his own delectation.

His first show was studded with outrageously adult scenes that Dave had inserted into the original material along with pornographic innuendo and some hilariously ribald dialogue that sent the staff around the hall into gales, but only puzzled their wide-eyed charges. The next two shows were more of the same, but that was all the owners, mindful of the wraith in a jockstrap, said to haunt the grounds by night, would put up with and Dave was paid off.

I think, after his three short weeks in camp, my future friend

Feel The Vern!

57

But hardly had the hostilities on our linoleum got under way than I sensed that friend Vern, smoking his Camel unfiltereds off my starboard wing, had quickly tuned in with interest to my adversary’s bizarre game style—a style which blending to near invisibility in the ne plus vulgar world of 42nd Street, was nothing if not coffee house in its purest, most potent, and most objectionable form. (More than a few loft regulars had pointed out that if Treysman had been allowed his usual tactics in the national tournament some months before, he would have been a lead-pipe cinch to snag top honors—if honors is really the right word here.) *

Gleason The Wheels Broome refers in his book to “Dave Vern” as writing for “the Jimmy Gleason show”… but Ye Ed strongly suspects he really meant TV’s popular Jackie Gleason Show of the late 1950s, which soon spawned the even more iconic spinoff The Honeymooners (above left). However, there really was a “Jimmy” (more usually “James”) Gleason, who was a beloved character actor in movies and on TV—seen above right in a frame from the 1941 Frank Capra film Meet John Doe. [Images TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

went home happy, for not only had he succeeded in outwitting success in notable style, but had even made a few enemies to boot; one of these, Alex Boskoff, a fellow counselor, was editor of the student newspaper at his and my school, Brooklyn College, at the time. These two hated each other so heartily they agreed to a grudge fight with boxing gloves, but Vern was so much bigger than journalist Boskoff that it was no contest and we soon stopped it. However, after the failed dramatic counselor had gone home, even Boskoff could assert that Dave was not just vulgar, he was Rabelaisian.

“Why don’t you be quiet for a moment and give him a chance to think?”

This was friend Dave responding quite suddenly, but reasonably enough, I thought, to my opponent’s non-stop coffeehousing. I had hardly finished making my eighth move and already had weathered a string of epithets… “Potzer!... Mazette!...

Fusha!...” as well as jeering asides to the kibitzers: “Can you beat it? This shtunk has the nerve to call himself a chessplayer!”… (some snickering and a few inarticulate cries of pleasure)... and directly at me feigning a jocular good humor... “Tell the truth, they call you s*** for short, don’t they, kid?” (laughter that joined his and more cries of pleasure)… and in a loud voice, pretending to bluster ...

(This selfless tribute to his late opponent was all the more impressive, pronounced as it was by Boskoff through a badly thickened upper lip.) * Some time afterward, having nothing better to do one afternoon, Dave accompanied me to a haunt of mine, the chess club on 42nd Street in Manhattan, then a lively center of the game, if unabashedly prolo [sic] with dirty squares of green and white linoleum for chessboards and long narrow raw wood planks for tables, the whole high-ceilinged second floor loft presided over by one G. Treysman, the strongest player, he who the year before had unexpectedly—for a contestant not representing one of the major clubs—tied for fourth place in the U.S. national championship. * As the loft’s top hit man, Treysman plainly regarded it as his privilege to be—what he manifestly would have been anyway, considering his miserable nature—bellicose, rude, and insulting to any and all who mounted the rickety creakity staircase to his grime-laden precincts. Needless to say, he was way out of my class but as it happened, there was no one else for him to play that afternoon, and more important, I was willing to meet his minimum stakes-fee for a game, a quarter-of-a-dollar cash. (One must bear in mind that in those days, even the highest ranking chess mavens earned about as much from their skill as bootblacks from theirs.) So if Treysman could polish me off in a few quick ones, he could likely earn enough—at New York prices then—for his supper that night. We began to play. * Dave was there simply to watch. Perhaps he knew the moves of the pieces, but not much more. Anyway, he was no chessplayer.

Hiding In Plane Sight!

Dave Vern did write his share of important “Batman” stories—including the introduction of the second Batplane in Batman #61 (Oct.-Nov. 1950). Art by Dick Sprang & Charles Paris. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Part XV Of John Broome’s My Life In Little Pieces

58

Chess One Of Those Things!

The one chess-related comics story by John Broome we located was the “Captain Comet” yarn “The Cosmic Chessboard” in Strange Adventures #35 (Aug. 1953). By then, Broome’s pseudonymous byline “Edgar Ray Merritt” had been dropped; only fair, since regular artist Murphy Anderson never received a credit. Note the similarity of the Venusian on these pages to the alien Despero, who played a chess-like game against the entire JLA in Justice League of America #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1960)!

Coincidence? Considering that Julius Schwartz was the editor of both mags—and that Anderson also drew the JLA #1 cover (quite possibly before the interior story was illustrated)—that seems highly unlikely. Thanks to Bob Bailey, Michael T. Gilbert, & Sharon Karibian. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Feel The Vern!

59

“Move! You looked at it, you Fusha!”... and even though our game was scarcely through the opening... “Give it up, you Potzer! You’re rocking a dead baby…”

“Umpire—!?” Always short-tempered, the loft’s kingpin was beginning to look a trifle apoplectic. “I’ll give you some advice: drop dead!”

Dave’s unexpected query piercing through the sounds of high enjoyment on the part of Treysman’s claque made the king of this 42nd Street jungle look up in astonishment. Probably nothing like it had ever happened to him before. A nobody, an unknown “shtunk” sticking his two cents into his, George Treysman’s game!?

“You first,” grinned Dave. He was in his element now, his dark face lit with devilish joy. Chess was one thing, but the sport of Insult and Invective was something else again, and as it happened, it was a game in which friend Vern had somehow been born a grandmaster (and his foe only a bumbler at best). After a relatively mild exchange of unpleasantries, Dave unlimbered his artillery and wound up by laying a curse on the chess master that l swear he made up on the spot:

“Who are you?” he snarled. (Translation: What’s your Elo rating? High enough to give you talking rights in this club—I don’t think!) “Who asked your opinion?”

“Nobody,” said Dave.” I decided to volunteer my services as an umpire in this contest.”

“May your intestines grow out of your ***hole... and grow up around your ears… then down around your neck… to strangle you with your own guts!”

This was too much for Treysman. He paled visibly, and turning to me, said in a noticeably changed voice: “Your friend is no gentleman!”

I could hardly believe my ears.” “Your friend is no gentleman!” This from Treysman the Tyrannosaurus of his Turf… the man with the dirtiest mouth for miles around...

“My god,” l thought, “he’s appealing to me to protect him from Dave!” And yet, despite all, l felt a pang of sympathy for Treysman. We all knew what it was to be beaten and humiliated by defeat. Now he knew, too, and in his own club, to boot.

Another installment of John Broome’s memoirs will appear in A/E #170.

Gorilla My Dreams (Above:) Remember when “gorilla stories” were all the rage at DC? John Broome wrote this one for Strange Adventures #100 (Jan. 1959)—to be penciled by Carmine Infantino and inked by Joe Giella. Thanks to Bob Bailey.

[TM & © DC Comics.]

(Right:) As a DC writer back in the day, “Dave Vern” may have written a few “gorilla stories” of his own—but he also scribed this paperback book (date unknown, alas) titled The Whispering Gorilla, published by the L.W. Curry Company of Britain. Except for its being a bit too sexy for the period, this would’ve made a good DC comics cover! [© the respective copyright holders.]

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THE FINAL VOLUME! Order at pulpheropress.com and Amazon

61

In Memoriam

Mort Drucker (1929-2020)

He “Received Praise From Everyone He Worked With Or Inspired”

by Stephan Friedt

M

aster artist and renowned caricaturist Morris “Mort” Drucker died at his home in Woodbury, NY, on April 9, 2020, at age 91, after having trouble breathing and walking. His daughter Laurie stated he had not been tested for Covid-19. No cause of death was reported.

He was born in Brooklyn on either March 22 or March 29, 1929, depending on whom you reference. His father Edward Drucker

Mort Drucker as seen on the cover of Mort Drucker: Five Decades of His Finest Works (2012), spotlighting some of the many caricatures he drew for Mad magazine—and the splash of a page from Tomahawk #138 (Jan.Feb. 1972), as reprinted from All-American Western #124 (Feb-March 1952). Script by Alvin Schwartz. Thanks to John Cimino and Jim Ludwig, respectively. [Book cover TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders; Tomahawk page TM & © DC Comics.]

was a businessman, his mother Sarah a homemaker. Mort met his wife Barbara while attending Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. After marriage, they moved to Syosset, Long Island, and raised two daughters, Laurie, and Melanie, who gave them three grandkids.

Drucker started in comics fresh out of high school as assistant to artist Bert Whitman on the comic strip Debbie Dean.

He soon joined National (DC) Comics as a staff retoucher, though he also moonlighted as ghost artist on Paul Webb’s gag panel The Mountain Boys for Esquire magazine. Early in the 1950s he became a freelancer, though continuing on DC humor and war titles. At Dell he worked on Westerns in the Four-Color series… his Timely/Atlas art included Westerns and war… and he began exploring his caricature talents on St. John’s Abbott and Costello.

In 1956, Mort found his home at Mad magazine. His talent for caricature would surface to the point that editor Al Feldstein credited Mort’s work as the primary reason Mad would include movie or TV parodies in every issue. He contributed to Mad for 55 years.

During this time, he also freelanced for DC, where his gift for caricature served him on long runs of the Bob Hope and Jerry [continued on p. 63]

62

In Memoriam

CAL MASSEY (Feb. 10, 1926 – June 10, 2019)

“Art Is An Expression Of How I Feel”

by Stephan Friedt

C

alvin Levi Massey passed away on June 10, 2019, of pneumonia, according to his wife, at the ripe old age of 93.

Cal Massey grew up just outside of Philadelphia in Morton and later Darby Borough with his mother and four siblings. He drew or created art his entire life. At the age of four, he would trace comics using his window as a lightbox. “It’s a labor of love, and it’s one of those things that with this kind of blessing when God gives it to you and you don’t use it with great respect, then God takes it away from you. I’ve been using it ever since I discovered it when I was 4 years old,” he said in an interview on his 83rd birthday in 2009.

When Cal graduated from high school, he went into the military and served his time as a mechanic. On the side he drew stories for Cross Publications and Superior Publishers. Upon finishing his tour in the service, he enrolled at the Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia, while he continued to moonlight in the comicbook industry. When he graduated in 1950, he immediately went to work for Timely (now Marvel) Comics: “When I came out of school, I supported myself illustrating comicbooks for three different publishing companies. That’s where I met Stan Lee.” At Timely, Cal specialized in war and science-fiction stories, but he could handle any task. He drew romance stories for St. John Publishing, “The Little Wise Guys” for Lev Gleason’s Daredevil Comics, and “Crimson Avenger” and “Masked Ranger” for Story Comics.

Even as he plied his trade in the comics, he also played jazz piano; his trio once accompanied Aretha Franklin at a concert in Philadelphia. Once, as his brother, jazz trumpeter Bill Massey, led rehearsals, Cal sketched John Coltrane.

Cal migrated to commercial art during the late-1950s implosion in the comics industry, working for advertising agencies in Philadelphia and New York. In 1966 he joined a world league of 13 artists to design the 1966 Summer Olympics medals. Cal designed the medal for the high jump, the only medal featuring an athlete of color.

In the 1970s he went to work for the Franklin Mint as a designer and sculptor and created their first commemorative medal, honoring General Arthur McArthur, father of Douglas McArthur.

Cal designed over 200 different designs for the Franklin Mint. He also has statues he designed in Valley Forge Park and at the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island.

He would eventually concentrate on painting, specializing in representing the African-American community with inner strength, pride, and determination. His most popular piece, called “Angel Heart,” was inspired by the lack of black angels in traditional artwork.

Cal Massey beams above a splash page drawn for Cross Comics’ Super Circus #1 (Jan. 1951). Writer unknown. Super Circus was a kids’ TV series from 1949 through 1956. All art accompanying this tribute courtesy of Stephan Friedt. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Cal Massey credited his longtime marriage to fellow artist Iris Massey as a source of inspiration. “Art is an expression of how I feel,” his wife quotes him. “I like to reflect hopefulness, joy, and color in my work, and I always hope that on seeing it, others will feel this also.” [see additional art on facing page]

In Memoriam — Mort Drucker & Cal Massey

[Massey continued from previous page.]

Massey At Marvel Two Timely/Atlas splash pages which display Massey’s versatility are the above pair from Unknown Worlds #16 (March 1953) and Battlefront #11 (April ’53). Scripters unknown. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

[Drucker continued from p. 61] Lewis comicbooks. He also illustrated several politically centered coloring books including JFK, Ronald Reagan, and Ollie North, and provided the poster artwork for George Lucas’ classic 1971 film American Graffiti. He contributed commercial art for Target and other companies. From 1984 to 1987 he served as the artist of Jeff Dumas’ newspaper strip Benchley.

Mort Drucker received praise from everyone he worked with or inspired. The Time magazine covers he drew are in the National Art Gallery. He was awarded the National Cartoonists Society Special Features Award each year from 1985-88, and its Rueben Award in ’87. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2010 and into the NCS Hall of Fame in 2017.

Hope Springs Eternal!

Drucker’s cover for The Adventures of Bob Hope #69 (June-July 1961).

[TM & © DC Comics.]

63

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66

P

aul Norris, co-creator of “Aquaman,” is cover-featured this time around, primarily concerning his doings during World War II. However, he was also the artist of Dell/Western’s Flash Gordon comicbook a few years later, and we’re blissfully pleased with Shane Foley’s terrific transmogrification of one of Norris’ Flash figures into our miraculous “maskot,” Captain Ego! [Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Estate of Bill Schelly; created by Biljo White.]

If Norris channeled the likes of Alex Raymond during his Flash Gordon days, Pete Morisi—the cover star of Alter Ego #159—channeled at least the superficial stylistics of fellow Golden Age comics artist George Tuska for years. But Pete (a.k.a. “PAM” when working pseudonymously for Charlton Comics in the 1960s) had his own muse and was never content to be a mere copycat. His signature creation in the super-hero world was Charlton’s title Peter Cannon…

Thunderbolt, which was one of the major topics (along with his views on the comics biz and its practitioners) of the study put together for #159 by “Comic Crypt” editor/writer Michael T. Gilbert. The piece drew considerable interest from our readers, including Bronze Age and Beyond comics writer Mike W. Barr: Dear Roy: As a longtime fan of Pete Morisi’s Thunderbolt, I enjoyed Michael Gilbert’s “In Praise of PAM” in A/E #159, and had some contributions: Despite your left-handed compliment of PAM as an artist “whose signature style was mostly, and unabashedly, based on the signature style of another artist entirely (i.e., George Tuska),” Morisi rose above his influences and became a better artist than Tuska. Less stiff, more illustrative. But that’s not why I’m here.

Crime Marches On! Compare the styles for yourself! A George Tuska splash page from Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay #60 (Feb. 1948)— contrasted with Pete Morisi’s work from CDNP #145 (May 1955), just three issues before the magazine folded. Scripters unknown.

Thanks to Comic Book Plus website and Michael T. Gilbert, respectively.

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

re:

67

In the middle ’80s to early ’90s, Pete and I corresponded about a lot of subjects, most of them T-Bolt. He liked what I’d done with the character in DC Challenge #5 (March 1986) and wanted me to write the DC ongoing series. (But then, Johnny Carson wanted David Letterman to take over The Tonight Show.) Pete said he liked neither the O’Neil nor the Boyette versions of the character, feeling them too melodramatic.

I wrote the T-Bolt Who’s Who page on page 39. I offered to buy the art from Pete, but he wanted to keep it, since it was the only art of his that actually saw print at DC. Pete later sent me an original T-Bolt drawing I cherish.

Regarding the ongoing DC series, DC was not as cooperative as Pete hoped they’d be. When it turned out he would have no creative participation in the series, he told DC he would withdraw his permission for them to use the character. Dick Giordano replied that, if Pete did this, DC would withhold the return of T-Bolt to Pete “until after you’re dead.” Pete gave in.

Despite all this sturm und drang, T-Bolt/Morisi fans still have Pete’s run on his creation to return to. Which I do, often.

P.S.: In “My Day in Prison with Daredevil,” you write: “My villainous additions to DD’s rogues’ gallery were hardly my proudest hour.” Not so fast! Starr Saxon is still one of my favorite Marvel villains of all time!

Mike W. Barr For more on Pete Morisi’s tangled relationship with Charlton and later DC editor Dick Giordano, take a gander at our very next letter.

Meanwhile, regarding my (i.e., Roy’s) fun little cameo in the third season of Marvel/Netflix’s Daredevil series, as covered in A/E #159, reader Rich Pileggi filled me in on the fact—which I failed to learn when I was there for five or six hours—that the former prison in which those scenes were filmed had once been “the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility (love the name, but it was named for the body of water), [which] closed in 2011. I resided near there for nine years, before I moved to Delaware.” Thanks for the welcome info, Rich.

Pete Morisi was very enthusiastic about his relationship with Dick Giordano as his editor at Charlton from 1965 until Dick split for DC a very few years later. But things between them apparently didn’t continue with that kind of equilibrium forever, Mike, as you mentioned above. As a curious footnote to that later hostility between the pair over control of Peter Cannon, George Hagenauer tosses in a bit of additional flavor: Hi Roy— I think my contact with Pete Morisi appeared in an earlier A/E, but I thought you might find this piece of art by him to be fun. I think it is from Vengeance Squad #2 (1975). The criminal in the third panel is pretty obviously based on Dick Giordano. Which of course relates to Pete’s comment in the article on how he was collecting photos and images of people to use in a recurring fashion in the comics he drew. In this case, Giordano ended up as a villain.

It also suggests that a lot of the “types” he used were of people he knew, a common practice in the illustration field. Illustrator/ pulp artist Ernie Chiracka often used his building’s janitor as the villain on his pulp covers. With the field paying so low, anyone willing to pose or be photographed for reference often ended up on pulp covers or as background in comicbook stories.

George Hagenauer Thanks, George. It’s interesting, but no doubt merely coincidental, that Pete portrayed Giordano as a bad-guy in 1975. It would be at least a decade before “PAM” would have a truly hostile run-in with Dick as DC’s managing editor, over Peter Cannon. Not knowing all the facts in the matter ourselves, and since the late Dick G. never (to my knowledge)

Vengeance Is Mine!

This Morisi-drawn panel, probably from Charlton’s Vengeance Squad #2 (Sept. 1975), apparently used a doppelgänger of his former editor Dick Giordano as one of the crooks in a story. Scripter unidentified. Reproduced from a scan of the original art, courtesy of George Hagenauer. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

reported his side of the story, we’ll just have to “leave it there,” as they say on TV news shows.

Michael T. Gilbert, who strung together and annotated the years’ worth of missives exchanged between Morisi and comics fan Glen Johnson, attempted to straighten me out on a couple of errors I let slip into #159: Hi Roy! One minor correction to my coverage of Pete Morisi in Alter Ego #159: In your intro you stated that Pete began his comics career in 1946. Unless you have info I don’t, his first published story (solo) was in 1948, though he may have sold some scripts before that. We printed the splash to that story in the issue. In any case, the Bails Who’s Who says 1948.

Also, you said PAM’s last comic work was in 1978 (for DC’s Who’s Who series). That pinup appeared in issue #23 in January 1987 (I think you just reversed the last two numbers). However, I think the last paid comic art he did was two stories for DC in 1988: the Secret Origins story of T-Bolt that he did, and the unfinished story for Blockbuster Weekly. Both were unpublished until Dynamite printed his DC Secret Origins story in 2012. So his last comic work would either be 1988—or 2012. ’Nuff said!

68

[correspondence, comments, & corrections]

Also, later in the issue, you printed a Torchy cover that you said was a Quality comic. It was, of course… but the cover you showed was an IW reprint (the 12¢ price is a dead giveaway).

Michael T. Gilbert You’re doubtless right about Morisi’s last comicbook work, Michael— and about the IW reprint cover, which I should’ve noted. However, the “1946” date for Pete’s first work in comics that you fault in the editorial I wrote was not an error—or, if it was, I was merely repeating it from one of the more authoritative sources for comics credits. The online Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, as assembled by the late Jerry Bails, lists Morisi as inking something for an issue of New Heroic Comics (a.k.a. just Heroic Comics) in the year 1946… although it doesn’t say what, and there are no listings for that inking in the Grand Comics Database. However, I went with the 1946 date because I strongly suspect that “PAM” personally responded to one of Jerry’s Who’s Who questionnaires in the early 1970s and was probably referring to some early inking work he didn’t sign and which is thus not credited to him.

Next up, Joe Frank has a few words on the Morisi memories….

Dear Roy, Even though I wasn’t a long-time fan of Peter Cannon…

Thunderbolt, not having read it, I very much enjoyed the article. It

worked on two levels: as a history of PAM and as a look behind the scenes at Charlton of that era.

It also reinforced that, for some, the lower wages were more than offset by greater creative freedom. Here, Pete Morisi was also given extra consideration, for a while, because he was working another job, in law enforcement, and was a perfectionist with his work. The pen-pal relationship with Glen Johnson was another interesting aspect. Morisi’s news items, per letter, were no longer for fanzines distribution, but he continued writing as more of a personal friendship, which was a nice evolution of their relationship.

Charlton’s distribution in the mid-’60s wasn’t all it could have been. I know I rarely saw them on the spinner racks when I was a kid. Hard to sample books when you don’t know of or can’t find them.

The Bart Bush profile was welcome. Fanzines production or convention attendance, back then, wasn’t part of my experience. But the hunting for new and back issues was very much a common theme. If one store got shipments slightly earlier or had a better selection, it was important. Back issues, in my case, were less about finding a local bookstore with a decent selection than finding classmates with older brothers or writing to the dealers, advertising in the comics, who had some for sale.

Joe Frank Sadly, we received the news that Bart Bush had passed away as this issue of Alter Ego was in preparation. The next scribe, Patrick Dilley, also enjoyed seeing the coverage of Bart Bush in the Comic Fandom Archive….

Dear Roy, I was surprised and excited to read the first part of Bill Schelly’s interview with Bart Bush. Bart helped finance my undergraduate degree by buying Golden Age comics I had collected.

Further, I was stoked to see remembrances and a photo of Robert Brown. I have been lifelong friends (well, since high school) with Robert’s daughter. I learned a great deal about Americana, popular culture, and of course comics from Robert and his wife Hattie. He was always willing to share his joy in his comics, pulps, and other media and art.

I met Bart through Robert, and remember fondly their weekend afternoon trading sessions, each trying to outdo yet aid in the other’s collecting. As Bart mentioned, Robert was a pioneer in fan organizing in the Southwest.

Patrick Dilley Just sorry Bart didn’t get a chance to read your comments, Patrick.

Meanwhile, Russ Sprout sent this, concerning my article about my cameo in the third season of Marvel/Netflix’s Daredevil in 2018….

Hi Roy, I got a chuckle out of your exchange with the “prison guard” about Jerry Lee Lewis! Many “course corrections” these days—I suppose Robert E. Lee is lumped in with Hitler now in textbooks! Thanks to your genetics, you will be silent witness at age 120 when they dynamite Mount Rushmore!

The City Primeval

Russ Sprout

Peter Cannon… Thunderbolt deals with a dinosaur in his Charlton issue #1 (Jan. 1966). Pete Morisi, a.k.a. “PAM,” both wrote and drew the early issues of the title. Thanks to Doug Martin. [TM & © Estate of Pete Morisi.]

When you wrote these words in August of 2019, Russ, they probably sounded far-fetched and even humorous to you, as they did to me when I received them. What a difference a year can make.

re:

69

In the letters section of A/E #159, artist Neal Adams made a strong case for at least part of the sales problems of comics such as his and Denny O’Neil’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow at the end of the 1960s. Below, Tony Isabella, who wrote for both Marvel and DC a few decades back and is currently celebrated as the creator of Black Lightning, star of a popular super-hero TV series, adds to what Neal said….

Many such regional distributors were not.

Roy…

There was another element to this wholesale larceny. In my neck of the woods—and I’m talking woods large enough to encompass my own Ohio and its neighboring states—boxes of comicbooks would “fall off the truck.” There was a real problem in the Cleveland area with a dealer who set up at comicbook flea markets on Sundays, before the comic shops got their new comics, and he would sell those new comics at huge discounts.

Sometimes discounts as high as 50% off. When the dealer hit the Cleveland area, all the local shops would take a massive hit in sales.

Thankfully, someone dropped a dime on him and put an end to his business.

In Alter Ego #159, the legendary Neal Adams wrote about the comics and distribution industry practice called “affidavit returns.”

It was as pernicious as he says.

General distributors didn’t want to go to the time and expense of shipping unsold comics back to publishers, who would not have had any place to put them anyway. They didn’t want to pay their workers to strip covers or logos from the unsold comics as proof the comics hadn’t been sold. Ultimately, all they had to do was report numbers of unsold comics to publishers and promise (with fingers crossed) that those unsold copies would be destroyed.

I was a comics retailer from 1976 to 1989. The local distributor from whom I bought magazines and comicbooks was fairly honest when it came to destroying unsold comics, though likely not honest when it came to accurately reporting the numbers of unsold comics.

As Neal accurately reported, these supposedly destroyed comics were sold to comics dealers at the same time and often before the comicbooks were distributed to drug stores, newsstands, supermarkets, and other outlets. The dealers and distributors were stealing from the comics publishers.

I’m aware of one other way “affidavit returns” made their way into the marketplace. Distributors, even some who stripped the covers or logos off unsold comics to send to publishers, would then sell the comics to jobbers for as little as a quarter-cent per comic. These comics would be bagged, usually by threes, and sold to convenience stores and other outlets. If memory serves, the going price for the comics packs was a quarter.

I have no way of knowing how much harm this wholesale theft did to titles like Green Lantern/Green Arrow. But it certainly didn’t help them stave off cancellation.

Tony Isabella Yeah, it does seem there was considerable skullduggery going on during those days, Tony. I remember that knowledgeable pros with whom I discussed the matter back in the day used to refer to the filing of those “affidavit returns” as “a license to steal.” All I said in A/E #159 was that there might be additional factors in play, since other titles Neal mentioned from that general period, notably Swamp Thing and Conan the Barbarian, managed to thrive, and the decline of the latter’s sales between #1 and #7, prior to its swift comeback beginning with issue #8, seems attributable to something other than just copies falling off a truck. Still, there were clearly some bad actors around at the time.

Got some other bouquets or beefs you wanna get off your chest? Sail ’em toward: Roy Thomas e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135 While waiting for next issue’s in-depth coverage of 1960s-70s Marvel writer Gary Friedrich to come your way, you might want to check out The Roy Thomas Appreciation Boards on Facebook, named and presided over by my buddy and manager John Cimino. Facts, photos, and fun.

You can also have a peek at our e-mail discussion list, AlterEgo-Fans, which can be joined at http:/groups.yahoo.com/group/ alter-ego-fans. Since Yahoo no longer has an “Add Member” tool, you might experience a slight problem getting in; if so, please contact moderator Chet Cox at mormonyoyoman@gmail.com and he’ll fox-trot you through the process!

The Mag Clearly Needed More Green (Money, That Is)!

Neal Adams’ cover for Green Lantern #84 (June-July 1971), a title that was generally referred to as “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” during this period, for obvious reasons. Whatever the combination of factors leading to its cancellation, the comic drawn by Adams and written by Dennis O’Neil was one of the best on the stands at the time. Incidentally, the gent playing the villain in the photo is then-Kinney/Warner executive Marc Iglesias. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

NOTE: We’re sorry to have to announce that Gene Reed, a longtime comics fan and contributor to the pages of Alter Ego, passed away on Sept. 9, 2020. His “day job” had been in software design, but he always found time to send comments (and welcome art scans) to this magazine. He is survived by his wife Marilyn and three daughters. We were never privileged to meet him in person—but we’ll miss him anyway.

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

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72

“You’ve Got To Be Yourself!”

Why You Should Read Fawcett’s Jackie Robinson Comics

by Brian Cremins Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

“Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”

While all their other baseball comics were one-shots, Fawcett published six issues of Jackie Robinson from 1949 to 1952. All stories were written by Charles Dexter and illustrated by Clem Weisbecker (with an assist from John Jordan in issue #1). Editors for the series included Captain Marvel/Whiz Comics/Marvel Family editor Wendell Crowley and, later, Harvey B. Janes; an interview with the latter appeared last issue. Scans courtesy of the Comic Book Database website.

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

P.S.: The heading above is the title and opening line of a popular song written in 1949 by Buddy Johnson and recorded at various times by Count Basie, Natalie Cole, and many others.

“You’ve Got To Be Yourself!”

S

ometimes it’s good to meet your heroes.

In his 1992 autobiography Just Let Me Play, golfer Charlie Sifford remembers a conversation he had with Jackie Robinson in the late 1940s. Only a year earlier, Robinson, the first African-American recruited for a Major League Baseball team, began playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Two fellow AfricanAmericans, catcher Roy Campanella and pitcher Don Newcombe, soon joined Robinson as his teammates. While Robinson remains a legendary ballplayer and one of the great athletes of the last century, few remember that he was also an avid golfer, along with his good friend Joe Louis, long the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

During a tournament in Los Angeles in 1948, Robinson offered Sifford advice that would change the history of golf in the U.S. Sifford, after all, paved the way for Tiger Woods, whose son Charlie is named for the man that Tiger once called the “grandpa that I never had” (Lavner). For almost five decades after it got its start in 1916, the PGA (Professional Golfers’ Association of America) allowed only white players to join. Like other black golfers of the day—including Ted Rhodes, who landed a spot in the 1948 U. S. Open—Sifford wanted the opportunity to compete

73

at PGA Tour events (Denney, Rose). “Look here, Jackie,” he asked Robinson, “what do you think of this proposition of me becoming a professional golfer?” (Sifford 113). Robinson warned Sifford of the violence and hatred he would experience not only from fans but also from other players, managers, and journalists. Nonetheless, Robinson encouraged Sifford to push against ignorance, fear, and bigotry. “It’s going to be awfully tough to do, Charlie, but can’t nobody do it but you,” Robinson assured him. Also, he added, “You’ve got to be yourself” (Sifford 113). As Sifford reminds his readers, he finally received his PGA Tour card in 1961 (Denney).

After telling this story in his autobiography, Sifford adds a note of thanks to his old friend, who’d passed away in the fall of 1972: I’m pleased to report, Jackie, that I still haven’t gone after anyone with a golf club. And I’m still out here plugging away at my game. I haven’t done it because I particularly wanted to force my way into a white man’s world. I did it because playing golf is all I’ve ever wanted to do, as far back as I can remember. (Sifford 113–114) Given his talent and his determination, it’s likely that Sifford would have found his way to the PGA Tour even without the example Robinson had set for him, but it’s impossible to deny the impact that a real-life hero can have on those who admire and respect them. Think, for example, of Congressman John Lewis who, as I was writing this essay, passed away on July 17, 2020. Or just ask Tiger Woods. After learning of Charlie’s death in 2015, Woods— on his Twitter account—called his mentor “a brave, decent and honorable man. I’ll miss u Charlie” (Lavner).

At this point, you may be thinking that you’ve picked up a copy of Golf Digest or Sports Illustrated by mistake. Isn’t this a magazine about comicbooks? My reference to John Lewis should assure you that you’re in the right place. Robinson and Lewis are both towering cultural heroes who’ve starred in their own comicbooks. You’ve no doubt seen the photos of Congressman Lewis with his tan raincoat and his backpack, marching with a line of kids at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con. Lewis’ comics autobiography March, created in collaboration with Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, has captivated a new generation of young readers (and, for the other teachers who are reading this, I can’t recommend it strongly enough; my students have loved it). Fawcett fans and scholars who’ve read March will recognize in it elements of Jackie Robinson, the series that company began publishing in 1949.

Faithful readers will recall P.C. Hamerlinck’s article in FCA #204 [A/E #145, March 2017] in which he highlighted the more forwardthinking comics Fawcett published in the years following the 1945 removal of Steamboat from Captain Marvel Adventures. FCA #204 also includes Jay Piscopo’s fabulous cover drawing of Captain Marvel with none other than Jackie Robinson.

The Golf Stream The cover of Charlie Sifford’s 1992 autobiography “Just Let Me Play”: The Story of Charlie Sifford, the First Black PGA Golfer, written in collaboration with James Gullo. Sifford is pictured here with his trademark cigar! [© the respective copyright holders.]

As Hamerlinck points out in that article, by the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fawcett was producing some of the most racially progressive comics of the period, including Negro Romance (1950) and numerous sports titles featuring athletes such as Campanella, Newcombe, Larry Doby (the first African-American player in the American League), Joe Louis, and—of course—Robinson. (For a checklist of all of Fawcett’s sports titles, including the ones about Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra, and Eddie Stanky, check out the index on p. 158 of Fawcett Companion: The Best of FCA.) In his just-published study The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson, historian Michael Lee Lanning points out that Fawcett’s six-issue Jackie Robinson series, published between 1949 and 1952, was just one example of how Robinson had captured the public’s imagination at the dawn of a new decade.

Shortly after making his debut on the silver screen with actress

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Charles Dexter was the longtime pseudonym of sportswriter Lewis F. Levenson (18951969)—seen in photo from the yearbook of the University of Rochester (NY).

Thanks to pulp-mag expert David Saunders (www.pulpartists. com) for photo and information.

with Yankees manager Ralph Houk on the 1962 book Ballplayers Are Human, Too and, in 1964, edited Baseball Has Done It by Robinson—a history of the players who challenged the color line in Major League Baseball in the 1940s and 1950s. These Fawcett titles, however, have largely been ignored, as have other sports comics from the last century.

As a result, our history of American comics, as scholar Amy McCrory and cartoonist Eddie Campbell have both argued, remains incomplete.

In fact, comics storytelling as we now understand it owes a clear debt, McCrory and Campbell show in their research, to the newspaper illustrators and cartoonists of the late 19th century. McCrory explains that early cartoonists working in these newsrooms mixed various genres with energy and enthusiasm: “The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offer examples of overlap between sports cartoons and other genres often regarded as exclusive, such as ‘editorial,’ ‘gag,’ and ‘domestic’ comics and drawings” (McCrory 48). In his excellent 2018 book The Goat Getters, Campbell builds on McCrory’s

“The Dodgers Are Welcome Here!”

Jackie quiets the KKK in Jackie Robinson #1 (1949). Script by Charles Dexter; art

by Clem Weisbecker & John Jordan. The splash page of this story was printed in last issue’s FCA. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Ruby Dee in the film The Jackie Robinson Story, the baseball star appeared on the cover of Life magazine in May 1950. “Jackie’s growing fame expanded to other media,” Lanning writes. Examples of this “fame” included the Fawcett comics written “by sportswriter Charles Dexter about Jackie’s life and career, each costing a mere ten cents” and marketed “to reach adults as well as children” (Lanning 124–125).

In addition to his newspaper work, Dexter collaborated

Larry Doby, Baseball Hero This 1950 one-shot shone the spotlight on the first black player in the American League. Script by Charles Dexter; artist unidentified.

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

“You’ve Got To Be Yourself!”

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for all that some have said that it did. It came from sports cartooning. (Campbell 7) Campbell urges readers to consider, for example, “the blocky fighting figures of Jack Kirby in the mid-1960s,” which owe a clear debt to this earlier, neglected tradition. While other important genres, from science-fiction and mystery to horror, crime, and romance, have all received critical attention, sports comics remain obscure, at least to comicbook fans and scholars interested primarily in super-heroes or in autobiographical narratives like Maus and Fun Home. The genre has also produced its share of curiosities, including DC’s short-lived (but recently revived) series Strange Sports Stories and Ron Wilson’s Super Boxers from 1983.

If you haven’t read any of Fawcett’s sports titles, especially the ones featuring Robinson and his teammates, you should, not only because they’re historically important, but also because they’re just good comics—a mixture of heroics, biographical facts, stats, and lessons on how to become a better ballplayer and all-around citizen. And, as we’re about to see, an issue of Jackie Robinson is much closer in spirit and content to an issue of Captain Marvel Adventures than you might expect.

In the baseball comics he scripted for Fawcett, writer Charles Dexter accomplished a feat that C.C. Beck and Otto Binder never

Robinson & Dexter – Take 2!

Jackie Robinson’s memoir Baseball Has Done It (1964), editetd by Charles Dexter.

work by drawing a direct line from these early sports comics to Jack Kirby’s powerful layouts.

Although, as Campbell writes, “the sports cartoon has slipped from the popular memory,” its role in the development of comic art in the U.S. is worth a closer look: In its classic mode, it [these newspaper drawings and cartoons] mashed up the serious, the humorous and the photographic in a unique way…. And where did the early comic book artists get their concept of dynamic anatomy?

That didn’t come out of regular literary illustration, or even the pulp magazines,

Don Newcombe The first African-American pitcher in Major League Baseball, Newcombe played on the Brooklyn Dodgers alongside Robinson and catcher Roy Campanella. Script by Charles Dexter; artist unidentified. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

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progressed, in addition to dramatizing Robinson’s career, Dexter also included short, fictional stories in which the celebrated Dodger offered advice and encouragement to aspiring athletes.

A Pair Of Whiz Kids (Above:) Billy Batson encounters the mysterious stranger who will lead him to his Shazamic destiny in Whiz Comics #2 (Jan. 1940).

[Billy Batson TM & © DC Comics.]

(Below right:) A young Jackie Robinson meets Salt Lake Bees player Tony Lazerri under not dissimilar circumstances in Jackie Robinson #1.

Script by Dexter; art by Weisbecker & Jordan. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

quite managed. Here let me remind you of a 1952 memo included in Binder’s papers at Texas A&M University. In that memo, he lists seven ideas he hoped would save Captain Marvel Adventures as its sales slipped and as the copyright infringement case with National continued with no end in sight (see A/E #123/FCA #182 for my full transcription of OOB’s notes). Aside from suggesting that Fawcett and the rest of the Captain Marvel creative team “[k]eep abreast of times and present market with Korean war and horror stories,” Binder also argues for a shift in focus. Instead of keeping the spotlight on Captain Marvel, especially as super-heroes saw a decline in their fortunes, why not make Billy the true star of the series? “I think on this point we can all agree—the stories should have more of Billy Batson and his doings and problems. I’m trying to get more BB in,” Binder wrote. As Bill Schelly explains in the revised 2016 edition of Words of Wonder, his groundbreaking Binder biography, it’s unlikely that the writer ever shared these thoughts with his colleagues; someone, probably Binder himself, has with a pencil crossed out these notes with a large “X” (Schelly 308). As in so much of his other writing about comics, Binder was ahead of his time here, as he emphasized Billy’s more realistic, human characteristics, those “doings and problems” he hoped would attract new readers. But Charles Dexter was there first, writing real-life stories about these “baseball heroes,” to borrow the subtitle that appeared on most of these Fawcett titles.

The cover of Jackie Robinson #1—which, like all the other issues in the series, cover-features a photo of the handsome ballplayer—promises the “True Life Story of the Famous Brooklyn Dodger.” Artist Clem Weisbecker, who was part of Jack Binder’s studio early in his comics career and later drew “Lance O’Casey” stories for Whiz Comics, fills the Robinson pages with the kind of “dynamic anatomy” that Eddie Campbell finds so compelling in those turn-of-the-century newspaper strips. As the series

Read the first issue of Jackie Robinson online at the Digital Comic Museum, where you’ll find color scans of the entire run, and you might experience a sense of déjà vu. Not only is the comic an origin story in the grand heroic tradition dating back to Superman’s and Batman’s first appearances in the late 1930s, but it’s also a variation on Billy Batson’s debut in Whiz Comics #2. I don’t know if Dexter read other Fawcett comics to prepare for this assignment, or if editor Will Lieberson gave him a huge stack of Captain Marvel Adventures to serve as a masterclass in how to write good comics.

We do know, however, that beloved Captain Marvel editor Wendell Crowley worked on the Robinson book, which might explain some of the similarities between these two origin stories. By the sixth and final issue of Jackie Robinson from 1952, Harvey B. Janes had taken over for Crowley; the masthead for issue #6 lists Janes along with Art Editor Al Jetter. The visual parallels between the opening pages of Whiz #2 and Jackie Robinson #1 immediately caught my attention when I began reading the Robinson comics, which, like other Fawcett books of the early ’50s, are well-written and superbly drawn. Did Fawcett see Jackie as a new hero for the new decade?

Dexter, consciously or not, wrote a script for Jackie Robinson #1 that echoes Billy’s first encounter with the wizard Shazam.

Dexter and Weisbecker begin the first issue with one large rectangular panel and three smaller panels of Jackie in action at the bottom of the page. At the center of that first panel is a portrait of Robinson himself, surrounded by smaller drawings of him at the plate, stealing a base, and jumping into the air to catch a fly ball. His name appears in a large, ornate font across the top of the page. Then, to the right of this opening portrait, a long caption introduces readers to Dexter’s protagonist: “JACKIE ROOSEVELT ROBINSON, Marvel of the Baseball Diamond, is the sharpest hitter, the speediest base-runner and the surest fielder in our national pastime!” Notice the adjectives that Dexter employs: “sharpest,” “speediest,” “surest.” As his teammates and his opponents would

“You’ve Got To Be Yourself!”

tell you, Robinson was so gifted, so skilled, that, like other sports legends of the 20th century, he did at times appear to have superpowers. To prove it, Dexter includes another word that—again, intentionally or not—alludes to the character that put Fawcett on the comics map in the early 1940s. Jackie is as tremendously gifted as Ty Cobb and, Dexter writes, he’s also a Marvel, “a symbol of the fighting spirit of the American boy!”

Since I gave Otto Binder so much space earlier, I feel I should give artist C.C. Beck equal time here. In the opening chapter of The Steranko History of Comics 2 from 1972, Captain Marvel’s co-creator famously noted his reservations about costumed heroes: “I never read comic books because most of them were tasteless,” he admitted to Steranko. “I considered my magazines to be illustrated boy’s adventures and handled the art accordingly” (Steranko 11). Dexter frames Robinson’s origin story in much the same way that Beck approached his work on Whiz Comics and on Captain Marvel Adventures: these are stories of young men, role models with great “fighting spirit.” Sound familiar? Turn to page 2 of Jackie Robinson #1 and you’ll discover other similarities, including a kid selling newspapers, a cityscape with a clock tower, and a mysterious figure wearing a fedora.

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same role as Mr. Morris, who, at the close of Captain Marvel’s first appearance in Whiz #2, offers Billy a job at his radio station. Since Billy’s story, as Beck always insisted, is a fairy tale, his fortunes change much more radically and quickly than Jackie’s do; after all, anything is possible in a dream. I don’t know how Beck felt about Fawcett’s venture into these sports comics, but I am certain that he would have admired Dexter and Weisbecker’s story-telling skills.

Jackie Robinson #1 is, like the “Captain Marvel” comics that came before it, another modern take on the “boy’s adventure” genre, one with narrative roots in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens.

Given the quality and sheer fun of these comicbooks, why, as Amy McCrory and Eddie Campbell have asked about the 19th-century comic strips that preceded them, are they still largely ignored? Perhaps it goes back to the solitary nature of being a comicbook reader in the first place. Let me give you an example: by

In the first narrative panel of Whiz #2 (actually the first newsstand issue), Billy stands outside the subway, newspapers cradled in his left arm. Writer and Captain Marvel co-creator Bill Parker’s simple caption reads, “Night in the city.” As the clock on the tower in the distance nears midnight, one pedestrian clutches his umbrella while another ignores Billy and walks through the rain. (See accompanying panels.)

After we meet young Jackie and his mother Mollie on page 2 of Jackie Robinson #1, Dexter and Weisbecker shift to a street scene that should be familiar. Look for yourself, on the previous page.

Dexter’s caption is much more descriptive than Parker’s: “Jackie’s school marks were high and in his spare time he helped support his family!

He sold papers!” Another clock tower appears behind him. In the foreground of the second panel, a man approaches, his hands folded behind his back. Jackie even holds the newspapers in much the same way that Billy does in Whiz #2. Like Billy, Robinson is about to get a glimpse of his future, only in Jackie’s world there are no magical trains, creepy statues, or ancient wizards. While Billy is an orphan, Jackie comes from a strong, supportive family, thanks not only to his mother Mollie but also to his older brother Mack, who—as you may know—was himself an outstanding athlete. A track star, Mack Robinson was a Silver Medal winner, second only to Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympic games (talk about real-life heroes who stood up against Hitler and the Nazis!).

The stranger here turns out to be Tony Lazzeri, a player for the Salt Lake Bees baseball team in the Pacific Coast League. (His name is misspelled in the comic.) Lazzeri, who went on to join the Yankees in 1926, invites Jackie to see a game: “Come on down to the ball park with me! You can get a job selling hot dogs—and you’ll make more money, too.” Here, Lazzeri plays the

The Swift Family Robinson Jackie Robinson #1 (1949) didn’t ignore the baseball player’s Olympic-champion brother, Mack.

Script by Dexter; art by Weisbecker & Jordan. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

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Fawcett Collectors Of America

July 1985, thanks to my dad, I knew how to swing a golf club. I wasn’t naturally gifted at the sport like he was and still is, but, as an 11-year old, I’d played enough that I could launch the ball from the tee. I was OK in the fairway as long as I had my trusty 5 iron with me. As a shy kid, however, what I found most challenging about the game was EnGolfed playing with other Article author Brian Clemens some years back, kids, especially the with one of his father’s golf clubs. hyper-competitive ones with visions of becoming the next Arnold Palmer or Calvin Peete or Caroline Keggi, the young woman from my hometown who went on to join the LPGA Tour in 1988. When paired with kids like that, I prayed for the round to end as soon as possible. Just get me to a comicbook shop or spinner rack ASAP! One of my great skills, as my dad likes to remind me, is that I am a perfectionist; and, therefore, one of my great flaws is that I am a perfectionist. I’d missed the lesson my dad was

trying to teach me: it’s a game, and it’s supposed to be fun. So, sometime in the summer of 1985, I found myself sitting in a golf cart with my dad on the second hole of the Waterbury (Connecticut) Country Club, the Donald Ross-designed course where Caroline Keggi had trained with PGA pro Floyd Gensler. I had a copy of Judge Dredd #21, published by Eagle Comics, with me. Thumbing through the pages of the comic, and frustrated with my poor putting skills, I decided to give up. Golf was not for me. Soccer, which I’d also played, was not for me (or so I thought; God bless that little boy and his willfulness). I would lose myself instead in comicbooks—in my beloved copies of All-Star Squadron, Spider-Man, Swamp Thing, Mage—and not worry about competing with other boys and girls my age, especially since no one else at my middle school liked or cared at all about comicbooks. I couldn’t find a place for myself in sports, at least as an 11-year old. Maybe other comics fans felt or still feel the same way. Why read comics about sports when playing them can be so scary and intimidating? Decades later, as a 45-year-old, I discovered how wrong I’d been. My dad, as always, had waited patiently for me to catch up.

Once I began researching these comics, I decided to break with my younger self. In the summer of 2019, I picked up a golf club again for the first time since 1985. To write about athletes, even about one simply being depicted in a comicbook, I had to become an athlete again myself, no matter how amateurish. I have long been haunted by Langston Hughes’ advice in his essay “How to Be a Bad Writer (in Ten Easy Lessons)”: “Write about China, Greece, Tibet, or the Argentine pampas—anyplace you’ve never seen and know nothing about. Never write about anything you know, your hometown, or your home folks, or yourself.” My dad was so happy that I felt like the prodigal son, returned from my silly and self-imposed exile. To my surprise—and perhaps to my dad’s,

“Jackie Robinson In Action!”

From the final issue, which for the occasion had been retitled Famous Plays of Jackie Robinson, Baseball Hero, we present a page of Jackie “in action”—of his being heckled by the opposing team— and of his and St. Louis Cardinals teammate Stan Musial’s joint performance in the 1949 All-Star Game. For the latter, Robinson had received the most fan-nominations of any National League player.

Script by Dexter; art

by Weisbecker; edited

by Harvey James. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“You’ve Got To Be Yourself!”

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still have heroes like Robinson, Sifford, Campanella, Willie Mays, and Althea Gibson in our midst. I look forward to one day reading a comicbook about NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace or Tiger’s niece Cheyenne Woods. If those comics are even half as good as March and Fawcett’s Jackie Robinson, we’ll have a lot of good reading to look forward to.

Notes & Works Cited Thank you to the real athletes in my family: my dad, the Hon. William T. Cremins; my mom, Nancy Cremins; my sister, Alison Cremins; and my cousins Oliver and John Gilhooley (all amazing golfers). And thank you to PCH and Roy and to my friend Qiana Whitted for encouraging me to research these comics in the first place.

Sturm Watch Cartoonist and Center for Cartoon Studies co-founder James Sturm’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing, published by Drawn & Quarterly (2001), was followed in 2007 by Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, a graphic novel created in collaboration with Rich Tommaso. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Campbell, Eddie. The Goat Getters: Jack Johnson, the FIGHT of the CENTURY, and How a Bunch of Raucous Cartoonists Reinvented Comics. IDW and the Ohio State University Press, 2018.

Denney, Bob. “Timeline of African-American achievements in golf.”

PGA.com. January 13, 2020. https://www.pga.com/story/timeline-ofafrican-american-achievements-in-golf. Accessed 19 July 2020.

too, though he’s too reserved to say it—I could still swing. And, by picking up an old, persimmon-headed driver, I unlocked a store of childhood memories—“boy’s adventures”—I’d forgotten: sunlight blinking through the maple trees on a warm summer day, walking with my dad across the sloping green hills of the fairway, silent except for the occasional crack of an old-fashioned wooden club on a dimpled, bright orange golf ball—still my color of choice, since it’s a lot easier to find in the rough or in a sand trap than a white one.

Take some time to read Jackie Robinson and the other sports comics that Fawcett published and you’ll discover in them plots and images familiar from the company’s more popular and beloved super-hero comics. You’ll also understand why contemporary cartoonists like James Strum and Wilfred Santiago have turned their love of baseball into some of the best comics of the last two decades. Sturm’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2001), about a Jewish baseball team with an African-American pitcher in the 1920s, and Santiago’s 2014 The Story of Roberto Clemente both use comics to illuminate unjustly ignored corners of American history. At the close of his autobiography, Charlie Sifford urges other golfers— amateur and pro alike—to tell his story and those of others like him who fought to break the color barrier in professional sports (237). You can hear Jackie Robinson’s advice once again here in this passage: Just let us play. That’s all we want to do. Give us an equal shot out there and you might be surprised at what you’ll find out. For one thing people would see that the golf ball doesn’t care if you’re black, white, yellow, or brown. It will still refuse to drop into the cup on a bad day. They might also actually find out that they have a thing or two in common with a black man. They might even find a new friend. (Sifford 237) I should warn you that, in my experience, and with all due respect to Charlie Sifford, even on a good day, the ball can and will refuse to drop into the cup, at least for a player like me. I’m sure it’s the same with baseball, with basketball, with hockey. Meanwhile, by reading these comics, we can better understand the social and cultural changes that swept the United States following World War II. We might also discover a way forward into a better future. We

The Life So Big They Had To Tell It Twice!

Jackie Robinson: My Own Story, written with reporter Wendell Smith and first published in 1948, was the first of Robinson’s two autobiographies.

I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson, written with Alfred Duckett, was published in 1972.

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“Ex-Lobo Caroline Keggi Inducted into Women Coaches HOF.” New Mexico Golf News, October 30, 2019, 12:05 pm. https:// newmexicogolfnews.com/ex-lobo-caroline-keggi-inducted-into-womencoaches-hof/. Accessed 19 July 2020.

Hamerlinck, P. C. (Ed). Fawcett Companion: The Best of FCA. TwoMorrows, 2001.

Hughes, Langston. “Langston’s lessons on how to be a bad writer.”

The Free Library. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Langston’s+lessons+o n+how+to+be+a+bad+writer.+(poetic+license).-a082511067 Accessed 19 July 2020.

Rose, M. L. “The First Black Golfer in the PGA.” Golfweek.com. https://golftips.golfweek.com/first-black-golfer-pga-20547.html. Accessed 19 July 2020.

Schelly, Bill. Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionary. North Atlantic Books, 2016.

Sifford, Charlie with James Gullo. “Just Let Me Play”: The Story of Charlie Sifford, the First Black PGA Golfer. British American Publishing, 1992.

Steranko, Jim. The Steranko History of Comics 2. Supergraphics, 1972.

Lanning, Michael Lee. The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson: The Baseball Legend’s Battle for Civil Rights during World War II. Stackpole Books, 2020.

“Tony Lazzeri.” National Baseball Hall of Fame. https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/lazzeri-tony.

Accessed 23 July 2020.

Lavner, Ryan. “Woods on Sifford: ‘Terrible loss for golf and me personally.’” Golf Channel, 4 February 2015, 2:34 pm. https://www.golfchannel. com/article/golf-central-blog/woods-sifford-terrible-lossgolf-and-me-personally. Accessed 19 July 2020.

Brian Cremins is the author of Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and co-editor with Brannon Costello of The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics’ Crucial Decade (LSU Press, 2021). An FCA contributor since 2013, he is also an Associate Editor for Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and a Professor of English at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois.

McCrory, Amy. “Sports Cartoons in Context: TAD Dorgan and Multi-Genre Cartooning in Early Twentieth-Century Newspapers.” American Periodicals 18.1 (2008): 45–68.

Robinson, Jackie and Charles Dexter (Ed). Baseball Has Done It. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1964.

Brian Cremins A more recent photo of the author.

Batter Up! (Left:) When “Captain Marvel Plays Baseball on Mars” in America’s Greatest Comics #8 (Summer 1943—the final issue of Fawcett’s anthology series), some of the fundamentals of the game have to be changed! Writer unknown, but edited by Rod Reed and drawn by C.C. Beck and his team of artists.

[Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

(Below:) The cantankerous comicrelief Western movie star Gabby Hayes also finds time to play ball in “Wild West Baseball”—a backup story in Fawcett’s Monte Hale Western #43 (Dec. 1949). Writer and artist unknown. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

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Interviews with MARK HAMILL & Greatest American Hero’s WILLIAM KATT! Blast off with JASON OF STAR COMMAND! Stop by the MUSEUM OF POPULAR CULTURE! 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!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99

OLD GODS & NEW A COMPANION TO

JACK KIRBY’S FOURTH WORLD

For its 80th issue, the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine presents a double-sized 50th anniversary examination of Kirby’s magnum opus! Spanning the pages of four different comics starting in 1970 (NEW GODS, FOREVER PEOPLE, MISTER MIRACLE, and JIMMY OLSEN), the sprawling “Epic for our times” was cut short mid-stream, leaving fans wondering how Jack would’ve resolved the confrontation between evil DARKSEID of Apokolips, and his son ORION of New Genesis. This companion to that “FOURTH WORLD” series looks back at JACK KIRBY’s own words, as well as those of assistants MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN, inker MIKE ROYER, and publisher CARMINE INFANTINO, to determine how it came about, where it was going, and how Kirby would’ve ended it before it was prematurely cancelled by DC Comics! It also examines Kirby’s use of gods in THOR and other strips prior to the Fourth World, how they influenced his DC epic, and affected later series like THE ETERNALS and CAPTAIN VICTORY. With an overview of hundreds of Kirby’s creations like BIG BARDA, BOOM TUBES and GRANNY GOODNESS, and post-Kirby uses of his concepts, no Fourth World fan will want to miss it! Compiled, researched, and edited by JOHN MORROW, with contributions by JON B. COOKE. (160-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $26.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-098-4 • SHIPS MARCH 2021!

BACK IN PRINT IN 2021: AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES The 1950s

NEW PRINTING WITH MINOR TEXT CORRECTIONS, AND EVEN BETTER BINDING AND DURABILITY!

MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1970s (Expanded Edition)

PIERRE COMTOIS’ sequel covers how STAN LEE became publisher, JACK KIRBY left Marvel, and ROY THOMAS rose as writer & editor! New edition with 16 extra pages!

2021

(240-page trade paperback) $29.95 (Digital Edition) $12.99 INCLUDES 16 EXTRA PAGES! BACK IN STOCK FEBRUARY 2021!

SUBSCRIPTION RATES Alter Ego (Six issues) Back Issue (Eight issues) BrickJournal (Six issues) Comic Book Creator (Four issues) Jack Kirby Collector (Four issues) RetroFan (Six issues)

REED CRANDALL ILLUSTRATOR OF THE COMICS

(Softcover Edition) ROGER HILL’s history of Crandall’s life and career, with never-seen photos and unpublished artwork! NOW IN SOFTCOVER! (256-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $39.95 (256-page Digital Edition) $13.99 NEW SOFTCOVER EDITION IN STOCK FEBRUARY 2021!

ECONOMY US $68 $90 $68 $46 $49 $68

EXPEDITED US $80 $103 $80 $56 $59 $80

BILL SCHELLY tackles the Atomic Era of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis: EC’s TALES FROM THE CRYPT, MAD, CARL BARKS’ Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, the FLASH in Showcase #4, return of Timely’s CAPTAIN AMERICA, HUMAN TORCH & SUB-MARINER, & FREDRIC WERTHAM! (240-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $46.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 BACK IN STOCK FEBRUARY 2021!

PREMIUM US $87 $113 $87 $60 $63 $87

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

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

The 1990s

KEITH DALLAS & JASON SACKS detail the decade X-MEN #1 sold 8.1 million copies, IMAGE COMICS formed, Superman died, Batman broke his back, Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN led to the VERTIGO line of adult comics, and gimmicky covers, skimpy costumes, and mega-crossovers ruled!

(288-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $48.95 (Digital Edition) $15.99 BACK IN STOCK FEBRUARY 2021!

LOOK FOR THE NEW 1945-49 VOLUME IN FALL 2021!

INTERNATIONAL $103 $137 $103 $69 $72 $103

DIGITAL ONLY $27 $36 $27 $18 $18 $27

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