Roy Roy T Thomas' homas' Obsessive Obsessive Comics Comics F Fanzine anzine
No. 175 May 2022
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All-Star Squadron heroes TM & © DC Comics.
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KIRBY COLLECTOR #83
FAMOUS FIRSTS! How JACK KIRBY was a pioneer in all areas of comics: Romance Comics genre, Kid Gangs, double-page spreads, Black heroes, new formats, super-hero satire, and others! With MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, plus a gallery of Jack’s pencil art from CAPTAIN AMERICA, JIMMY OLSEN, CAPTAIN VICTORY, DESTROYER DUCK, BLACK PANTHER, and more!
Vol. 3, No. 175 May 2022 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) Mark Lewis (Cover Coordinator)
Comic Crypt Editor
Michael T. Gilbert
Editorial Honor Roll
Jerry G. Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White Mike Friedrich, Bill Schelly
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William J. Dowlding David Baldy
Cover Artist
Arvell Jones (pencils) & Bob McLeod (inks)
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Contents
Writer/Editorial: …And That’s The Last Time We’ll Ever Say “Final”! . . . 2 “Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]” . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Arvell Jones interviewed by Richard Arndt about his early years in comics.
Cover Colorist
“[Drawing Golden Age Heroes] Was Sort Of A Dream Of Mine” . . . . . 27
With Special Thanks to:
“Something Different Or Distinct From The Justice Society…” . . . . . . 37
Gerry Turnbull
Arvell & Wanda Mike Alderman Jones Heidi Amash John Joshua Pedro Angosto Jim Ludwig Ger Apeldoorn James E. Lyle Richard J. Arndt Mike Machlan Jean Bails Bob McLeod Jeff Balke Stephen Baskerville Al Milgrom Mark Muller Ray Bottorff, Jr. Jerry & Peggy John Burk Ordway Aaron Caplan Bob Peak Matt Childers Barry Pearl Craig Demak Ian Richardson Michael Dunne Randy Sargent Janet Gilbert Ron Shalda Grand Comics Derrick Simpson Database Ian Sokoliwski (website) Jim Starlin Mike Gustovich Dann Thomas Shane Foley Gerry Turnbull Brendon Fraim Shawn van Briesen Brian Fraim Mike Vosburg Scott Goodell John Watson Richard Howell Christopher Ivy Staz Johnson
Richard Howell documents his time on All-Star Squadron.
A conversation with Jerry Ordway about the 1980s All-Star Squadron—& Infinity, Inc.
The All-Star Squadron Covers That Never Were—Till Now! . . . . . . . . . 57 John Joshua reveals all concerning his multi-artist online fan project.
Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!: It’s A Cracked, Cracked, Cracked, Cracked World! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Michael T. Gilbert shines a spotlight on Mad magazine’s longest-lived competitor.
FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #234 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 P.C. Hamerlinck hosts Ger Apeldoorn’s look at Fawcett’s Mad wannabe—Lunatickle!
On Our Cover: Amid the many All-Star Squadron-related commissioned drawings that our three iridescent interviewees have done over the years, we had a plethora of riches from which to choose re this issue’s cover. But we decided at an early stage on Arvell Jones’ “wraparound”-style image of the AllStars, as inked by fellow pro Bob McLeod… and we thank both gents for permission to use it! Of course, when you first spy this issue’s front cover, it may look like “merely”a depiction of the 1940-spawned Justice Society of America—because all the non-JSA Squadders happen to appear on the left half of the Cinemascopic drawing, which means they wound up being relegated to the back cover. But then, if Arvell had decided to draw all the heroes in the Squadron, we’d have had to have at least a four-page cover, right? Special thanks to art owner Mike Alderman. [Characters TM & © DC Comics.] Above: One memorable example of All-Star Squadron splash-page art (among many!) is this one by Richard Howell & Larry Houston from #27 (Nov. 1983), in which Al (The Atom) Pratt and Danette (Firebrand) Reilly wave adieu to some friends, as they hold infant Terri Curtis, future mother of the Infinity, Inc. hero who’ll be known first as Nuklon, later as Atom Smasher. To see whom they’re waving to, sneak a peek at p. 27. [TM & © DC Comics.] Alter Ego TM issue 175, May 2022 (ISSN 1932-6890) is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Periodicals postage pending at Raleigh, NC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Alter Ego, c/o TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. 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, $29 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. FIRST PRINTING.
2
Article Title writer/editorial
L
ast issue’s tease for this issue read: “The Final (?) Secrets Of The All-Star Squadron!” The emphasis, as it turns out, was definitely on the question mark—because this issue contains only half or so as much as I’d hoped to cram into it. Originally, I intended to include just interviews with artists Arvell Jones and Richard Howell, neither of whom has spoken before (at least not in Alter Ego) about their 1980s work on Squadron… plus many if not all of the “faux covers” commissioned by fan John Joshua (see pp. 57-61 for a few of them, at least), and photos of some All-Star Squadron models constructed by intrepid fans. However, Arvell’s interview ran a bit long, because he talked with Richard Arndt about his career before Squadron, and I didn’t want to lose any of that. In addition, I’d asked Richard A. to speak with Jerry Ordway, one of the series’ original artists—but since previous interviews with Jerry have appeared in A/E, I figured he’d just want to say a few words, we’d run specimens of his work (including some astonishing commissions), and that would be that. Turns out, though, that Jerry had some new things to say about All-Star Squadron—and the related title Infinity, Inc. that debuted in it—and everything he had to say was fascinating, so RA and I wanted folks to read all that as well. So we wound up with an issue that, though crammed to the gills with art and verbiage about the WWII-set super-hero series I conceived for DC Comics in 1980-81, no longer had room for all the faux covers I wanted to run—or for the hinted-at commissions by Ramona Fradon, et al.—or for the photo feature mentioned above— so that even our “re:” section and the penultimate chapter of John Broome’s memoir had to be delayed till #176.
And that means two things: (a) the remainder of those intriguing faux Squadron “covers” are going to be serialized over several of the next few issues of A/E; and (b) sometime in the next year or so, there’s gonna be another issue of this mag devoted to Squadron and the artists and concepts associated with it. Hope that’s okay—even though we might as well announce here and now that A/E #180 was already scheduled to throw a spotlight on The Young All-Stars, the sequel series DC and I birthed when the mid-’80s events of Crisis on Infinite Earths undercut All-Star Squadron. So hang in there—and maybe, sooner or later, you really will learn the “final final secrets of the All-Star Squadron”! Meanwhile, in closing: we’ve had requests for info about which issues of the 70 or so in that 1980s series have been reprinted—and are either currently in print, or at least might be easily attainable in collected format via the Internet. As it turns out, nearly half the editions of All-Star Squadron have been reprinted. To wit: #1-18 (plus the 16-page insert from Justice League of America #193, and Annual #1) – in the softcover, black-&-white Showcase Presents: All-Star Squadron, Vol. 1 (2012); #25, 26 & Annual #2 – in hardcover Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Vol. 1 (2011); #50-60 – in hardcover Crisis on Infinite Earths Companion Deluxe Edition, Vol. 1 (2019); #67 (plus a color version of the JLA #193 prologue)– in hardcover Justice Society of America: A Celebration of 75 Years (2015). Hopefully, one of these days, DC will reprint the entire run in color and hardcover!
Bestest,
176
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COMING IN JUNE
STREET & SMITH CRED! What THE SHADOW Knew— & DOC SAVAGE Forgot!
Publishers, Inc; TM & © Advance Magazine . ions licat Pub t Nas de The Con
• THE SHADOW! DOC SAVAGE! RED DRAGON! SUPERSNIPE—& many more! The grandiloquent Golden Age comics from major pulp-magazine publisher STREET & SMITH—examined in dynamic detail by MARK CARLSON-GHOST! Plus–ANTHONY TOLLIN on “The Shadow/Batman Connection”—& WILL MURRAY interviews Shadow scribe WALTER GIBSON! Tons of 1940s art by BOB POWELL, HOWARD NOSTRAND, GEORGE ROZEN, FRANK TINSLEY, GEORGE MARCOUS, VERNON GREENE, CHARLES COLL, JACK BINDER, et al. • Extra! More awesome ALL-STAR SQUADRON goodies that didn’t quite make it into #175—FCA—MICHAEL T. GILBERT continues on his Cracked way— JOHN BROOME—& MORE!!
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3
Part One
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!” An Interview with ARVELL JONES About His Early Years In Comics Conducted & Transcribed by Richard J. Arndt
Arvell Jones in a recent photo, above a pair of All-Star Squadron art commissions he’s done in recent years: (Left) A Jones-penciled illo that could easily have become a Squadron cover, had he drawn it in the mid-1980s! Featured are Liberty Belle, Firebrand, Johnny Quick—and that time-traveling troublemaker Per Degaton from the first three issues of All-Star Squadron in 1981 (and originally, of course, from 1947’s All-Star Comics #35). Scan provided by Pedro Angosto. (Below:) Another Arvell Jones commission of the All-Stars, this one inked by Bob Peak and colored by Derrick Simpson. Thanks to AJ. [All-Star Squadron heroes TM & © DC Comics.]
4
An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
I
NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Arvell Jones got his first professional comics gig doing background artwork for fellow Detroiter Rich Buckler on the early-1970s “Black Panther” feature in Marvel’s Jungle Action and on Buckler’s creation “Deathlok,” which ran in Astonishing Tales. After doing backgrounds and breakdowns on various comics, his first solo penciling credit came with Marvel Premiere #20 (Jan. 1975), featuring “Iron Fist.” During his time on that strip, he visually co-created Misty Knight, originally a supporting character, with writer Tony Isabella. Other Marvel books he worked on included Iron Man, Captain America, and Daredevil. For DC he drew Super-Team Family, The Superman Family, Superboy and the Legion of SuperHeroes, and All-Star Squadron. This interview was conducted May 22, 2019. RICHARD ARNDT: We’re welcoming Arvell Jones today! Thanks for agreeing to this interview. ARVELL JONES: Before I was working at Marvel, Roy Thomas was an idol of mine. I’ve always enjoyed his work. When I was a little younger, the original Alter Ego was the gold standard. After, what—forty or fifty years—it still is. I’m honored to do this. RA: Now, I know you were raised in Detroit. I’m originally from Michigan myself, the Big Rapids area… JONES: Really? I’ve never actually been to that town myself.
RA: It’s a nice town, but if you’re living in Detroit, most of what you’re really looking for is likely right around the corner. JONES: [chuckles] I was born and raised in Detroit. I only left that city because in the 1970s you had to go to New York if you wanted to work for Marvel. RA: How did your interest in comics get started? JONES: I probably had three big influences. My father was somewhat of a comicbook fan and somewhat of an artist in his own right. He saw what I could do as a kid, saw that I had an interest in drawing things, and decided to push that ability that I had. My original intentions were based on television. I wanted to be a TV producer or a director or a writer. I tried to push my father into buying me a super-eight-millimeter film camera. He went with me to a department store to take a look at one. I was probably eleven or twelve years old at that time. He told me that he was going to buy it for me. I was trying to convince him that I was going to do some amazing things with it. So we looked at the prices and I had a good feeling about it. My father pretty much had his wallet out to buy the camera. Then the salesman said that we were going to need film for it; and then, once we got the film developed—which we could do at the store we were at—then we’d need a film projector to see it and likely a screen to project it on as well. My father was deterred by the list of future attachments and expenses that the salesman was trying to sell us on. He then decided that a better investment was in order. He sat me down at our dining room table and gave me a stack of paper, a bunch of #2 pencils, and a stack of comicbooks. He told me that once I convinced him that I could create stories that people might buy, then he would buy me the film camera. Long story short, he never bought me the film camera. [laughs]
Let’s Appoint A Commission! (Left:) A 2016 All-Star Squadron commission, penciled by AJ and inked by Mike Gustovich—plus (right) a color one of Thor. Roy T. recalls that Arvell and his wife Wanda attended a comics convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, several years back… and when she saw the demand for his drawings of the All-Stars and various other DC & Marvel heroes, she said, “We’re gonna be going to a lot more conventions!” Covid concerns temporarily derailed those plans, but readers who’d like to inquire about a commission drawing by Arvell should see his ad on p. 9. [Heroes TM & © DC Comics & Marvel Characters, Inc., respectively.]
So when I finally got to Marvel and showed my father the books that I would be working on, he said, “Great! Now you can buy your own film camera!” [laughs] He did take me around to a lot of the comic-cons. Remember, this was in the late 1960s and early 1970s; comic conventions were nowhere near as huge as they are today. These would
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
5
The Fist & The Mist (Left:) One of Arvell’s first solo assignments at Marvel was penciling the “Iron Fist” feature in Marvel Premiere #20 (Jan. 1975); he and scripter Tony Isabella started on the series at the same time. Inks by Dan Green. (Right:) By the next issue (#21, March ’75), the pair co-created Misty Knight, who’d go on to a long career in Marvel’s comics—and on Netflix. Inks by Vince Colletta. Thanks to Barry Pearl for both scans. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]
have been the ones that Phil Seuling put on in New York from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s. I remember finding out about the first convention from one of the fanzines that I subscribed to. I think I was only thirteen years old when I went to my first New York Comic-Con. From that experience I was inspired to create my own fanzine, called Fan Informer. My father always supported all of that. He gave me enough allowance, which, combined with my newspaper route, gave me enough money to buy everything that I wanted or needed. He also never minded taking me where I needed to go, either.
they’re called Crime Does Not Pay—adventure/drama comics, Prize Comics, Jack Kirby’s Blue Beetle. I think it’s the first Blue Beetle. It’s all torn up. You know, this came from the days when you rolled up or folded those comics and stuck them in a side or back pocket. It’s in horrible shape, but I’m keeping it! [laughs]
He would drive me to some of the other local fanzine writers’ houses. Me and my other friends. So my father was a big influence in terms of allowing me to develop as a cartoonist or an animator. He could see me making a living doing that. He was pretty good about everything, but he never did buy me that film camera. [laughs]
JONES: Yeah! Very well-used. Still, he never threw them away. He kept them in a box that kind of went along with him wherever he moved. Actually, they were originally in a bag, and then later in a box.
RA: You mentioned that he was a comics fan in his own right. What did he read? JONES: When he started to introduce me to comics, he did have a little collection of his own. He had some Fawcett titles, a few crime comics—in fact, I think I’ve still got a couple of those, I think
My father also had an old Captain America, some of Will Eisner’s Spirit newspaper comics from the Detroit Free Press. Again, though, anything he had from that era was in terrible shape. RA: I guess you could say that it was well-used, certainly well-read.
RA: What comics were you using for your inspiration when you were working on your early comics? JONES: Initially, my father went out and bought me a stack of used Marvel and DC comics. This would have been the early 1960s, again. I had Amazing Fantasy #15—the first appearance of Spider-Man—the first few issues of The Fantastic Four. I had some Incredible Hulk, some Batman, some Superman. All kinds of stuff,
6
An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
really. All in pretty bad shape. I still have a few of those, I guess, but I’m not as big of a packrat as my dad was. [laughs] My brother and I got to be fans of those comics, and when we could, we just kept buying them. I probably got serious about keeping up with them when Captain America and Iron Man were teamed up, having their big adventures in The Avengers. I had a paper route between the ages of eight and twelve, so I had some money. I started that fanzine called Fan Informer, which I was doing pretty early on. My
A Clockwise Collage Of Covers Various issues of Arvell’s early-to-mid-1970s fanzine Fan Informer featured covers by his up-and-coming contemporaries such as Rich Buckler (#23), Arvell himself (#31, with Buckler inking as “Dixon”), Keith Pollard (#37), Al Milgrom (#39), and Michael Netzer, then Mike Nasser (#40, inked by Aubrey Bradford). Neal Adams, Rich Corben, and others likewise contributed covers to the art-rich zine. [Black Panther & Captain America TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Spectre & Superman TM & © DC Comics; Buckler full art © Estate of Rich Buckler; Pollard full art © Keith Pollard.]
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
father got a mimeograph machine and we printed out the fanzine in our basement. At first, we gave it out to the neighborhood kids, all the ones who were interested in comics at the time. Later, as the neighborhood changed and the kids got older, we learned a bit more about fandom. We offered some subscriptions and the early books were getting mailed out. At its height we only published around 200 copies per issue, tops. Then I started running into people in Detroit. The first people I ran into, and really the second set of people that really influenced me, were Greg Theakston and Richard Buckler. Another was a guy named Bob Brosch. Brosch was organizing swap meets for comicbook fans, along with Professor Jerry Bails. Those swap meets eventually developed into the Detroit Triple Fan Fair. It was not only Detroit’s first comic convention but one of the first comics conventions in the nation. The first one in Detroit happened in 1965 and they ran annually until 1977. I started meeting these local guys, other fans, who were all very interested in actually getting into the business of creating comics. At one point there were about fifteen of us, really die-hard fans, and a lot of us did become pros. Besides my brother Desmond, Greg Theakston, and Rich Buckler, there was also Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Tom Orzechowski, Mike Vosburg, Keith Pollard, Aubrey Bradford, Terry Austin, Michael Netzer (who originally entered comics under
7
the name Michael Nassar), Don Vaughn, Tim Dzon—I’m missing some people, I’m sure. There were other folks who weren’t actually from Detroit—Frank Lovece and Ken Stacey—who were also in our group. Another Detroiter, Mike Okamota, whom I graduated high school with, didn’t actually hang around with us, but he did team up with Frank Lovece to work on a story that was first published in Fan Informer. The science-fiction/fantasy paperback book cover painter Carl Lundgren was also there. We all started in the comics business at around the same time. Rich Buckler was the first one to go pro, around 1970 or thereabouts. Maybe even a little bit earlier. He first did a back-up piece for King Features. Then he was doing mystery stories for DC. Greg Theakston eventually had his own publishing company— Pure Imagination. He published collections of Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, and Steve Ditko. I was the one who influenced him into liking Jack Kirby. We would have these debates about Joe Kubert vs. Jack Kirby—who was better. [laughs] I was the Kirby fan. Greg was the Kubert fan. RA: You’d have to stretch some to find two more different artists! JONES: They really were both great. Jim Starlin became a pro after Buckler and Orzechowski did. He started off doing assistant work for Rich Buckler and quickly started getting his own work.
Fan/Friends & Future Pros : A mélange of some of the artists who were part of Arvell’s social/professional circle in Detroit and elsewhere during the late 1960s.
Rich Buckler Desmond Jones Arvell’s brother, who also did a bit of pro comics work.
on the left, with prominent early Buckler-booster Dr. Jerry Bails, founder of Alter Ego (and to some extent of comics fandom itself), circa 1969. Rich became a major penciler for Marvel, DC, et al. Thanks to Richard Arndt & Jean Bails.
Aubrey Bradford & Keith Pollard (left to right) seen in 1984. Keith had a long career as a penciler at Marvel and elsewhere, while Bradford inked a number of mainstream series. Thanks to Arvell Jones.
Mike Vosburg Another Detroit alumnus who went on to work for Marvel, et al., seen here in the late ’60s. From Bill Schelly’s book Founders of Comic Fandom; special thanks to Aaron Caplan.
Al Milgrom circa the 1970s. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Bernie Wrightson with Arvell at the Detroit Fan Fair in 1967.
Jim Starlin in the U.S. Navy, circa 1969. From his published artistic biography.
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An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
RA: The first time I remember seeing Starlin was when he did the issue of Iron Man that, I think, introduced Thanos. [NOTE: Iron Man #55. –RA.] JONES: Thanos was actually a fanzine character originally and then ended up at Marvel. Drax the Destroyer may have started out in the fanzines as well. I think that Jim and Rich worked for the first time together on the Thanos fanzine stuff. The first pro story Jim actually worked on A Marvel-ous Montage was either a “Man-Thing” Arvell’s first “teaming up” with fellow story or a “Ka-Zar” story. aspiring pro Rich Buckler, in 1969— I think it might have been a panorama of Marvel entities. Courtesy inked by Joe Sinnott or of AJ. [Characters TM & © Marvel Dan Adkins—somebody Characters, inc.] along those lines. [NOTE: If Arvell’s memories are correct, the “Man-Thing” story appeared in Fear #12 (Feb. 1973), some five months after Jim Starlin’s official debut on a two-page story in DC Comics’ House of Mystery #207 (Oct. 1972), although his work as an assistant was probably earlier than this. Rich Buckler inked that “Man-Thing” story. There was also a Ka-Zar cover partially drawn by Starlin that appeared in Astonishing Tales #16 (Feb. 1973). –RA.] Like I said, Rich Buckler was the first to go pro, then Keith Pollard and myself came in together on assistant work, then Tom Orzechowski as a letterer, then Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Mike Nassar, and Terry Austin. All of us from Detroit. Mike changed his name to Mike Netzer years after he debuted in comics. Mike had a strong Neal Adams influence when he got to New York, but before that his artwork leaned more towards Al Williamson. Those two guys really aren’t all that far apart, though, I guess. George Pérez replaced me as Rich Buckler’s assistant. George, though, was a New Yorker. RA: Well, that makes sense, since I remember that Pérez was doing fanzine work at that time in the same fanzines that were featuring Rich Buckler, although Buckler was already a pro by then. Now, the first artwork I have you doing for Marvel—first that you got credit for, anyway—was covers for the British weeklies. In those days the British comics came out weekly and they would split a 17-page story into two parts and the second part would get a new splash page, often done by one of the young American Marvel artists. I have you credited for eight or nine of the UK covers. JONES: Sometimes on the British covers they would hand us a cover from an entirely different character and change it. “We want you to change this from, say, Iron Fist to Shang-Chi.” [NOTE: This comment refers to The Avengers (Marvel UK) #61 (Nov. 16, 1974). – RA.] Or maybe change the character from Captain America to Iron Man. There was also uncredited work that appeared here and there. Some of that was the British stuff, but there was also stuff for the U.S. market. I think my very first job was a one-page story for
Marvel’s black-&-white magazine Monsters Unleashed. It might have appeared as the frontispiece or on the inside back cover. That was my first published piece. [NOTE: Arvell is referring to “The Atomic Monster” from Monsters Unleashed #9 (Dec. 1974). He penciled the frontispiece one-pager, which was inked by Duffy Vohland. –RA.] I also drew a Marvel Two-in-One story featuring the Thing that didn’t see print until a year after I started work on “Iron Fist.” I know because the art for that work was part of my sample pages that got me the Brit and monster assignment stuff. My actual first credit was an assisting penciling job for Rich Buckler on Thor #228 [Oct. 1974]. I wasn’t the only assistant on that one, though. Keith Pollard and Aubrey Bradford worked on that one as well. Rich called us up in Detroit on a Friday and told us he had to get this book done by Monday. We asked him how much he had done and he told us he’d done the splash page. [laughs] He needed seventeen more pages by Monday! We left that Friday night, drove all night from Detroit, got to New York City Saturday morning, and Rich put us to work. By Sunday evening we were done. It took us twelve hours to drive back to Detroit. We got back there just in time to take Keith to his day job. [laughs] We had to leave that Friday night, because Keith was still working during the daytime. I also did three issues of “Iron Fist” when he was starring in Marvel Premiere and four issues of Iron Man. The problem was that they would give them to me and I didn’t know if they were fill-in issues or whatever. I would just be doing a little run on those characters. Then I would move to whatever book they were having deadline troubles with. I guess you would have to say that I was doing fill-ins, even if those fill-ins lasted for more than one issue. I didn’t know at the time how long I was going to be on any one assignment. In those days, when I came into the office to deliver some pages, [Marvel production manager] John Verpoorten would ask me, “What are you working on?” I’d tell him what I was turning in—whether it was assisting somebody or solo art—and he’d say “Well, here! Do this!” I would go “Wow! Really?” [laughs] “When do you need it, John?” He’d always go “Yesterday!” Then I’d reply— sometimes—“When do you really need it?” He’d say, “I needed it two weeks ago!” What I was trying to get from him, you know, is when he would need it from me. But the answer would always be “I needed it two weeks ago! Why are you still talking to me? Get out of here!” [laughs] RA: The life of a production manager. [chuckles] JONES: Yeah! I’d be trying to get a realistic
Kung Fu Chameleon Arvell reports that one of his very first assignments for Marvel was to transform Gil Kane’s Iron Fist figure from the cover of 1974’s Marvel Premiere #15 into Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu, for Marvel UK’s The Avengers #61 (Nov. 16, 1974). Looks like he did a good job of it! Thanks to the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
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deadline, but I’d never get one! [laughs] RA: Knowing what I know about Marvel at that time, he was probably behind or close to it on just about every book he was putting out. JONES: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s how it worked. I’d walk in with “Iron Fist” and walk out with Iron Man. I was supposed to get them done fast! “Iron Fist” was bi-monthly but Iron Man was monthly, so I would be going from one to the other. RA: You did some work on “Deathlok,” too. JONES: Mostly that would have been done with Rich Buckler. Rich would sometimes lay everything out in thumbnail fashion and then either Keith Pollard or I or both of us would hand pages back and forth. We usually did stuff like that in Rich’s apartment, so we were in front of him most of the time. He had his eye on all of it. At a certain point, we’d all pass the pages around. Everybody would do a little bit of something. But it got done. We did that a couple of times, and then another couple of times Rich would divide pages between us. Rich would take pages 1-2, give me 3-4, give Keith 5-6 and as soon as the pages were penciled, we’d start on another set. RA: I actually have a note here of an issue where everybody’s work was noted in detail. Ron Wilson is listed as the penciler of page 1, you are credited with breakdowns for the next 17 pages, and then Dick Giordano is credited with finishing the art overall. This would have been for Marvel Two-in-One #15 [May 1976], which would have been the Thing’s team-up comic you mentioned earlier. In this one, he was teamed up with Morbius, the Living Vampire. That sounds like a match made in heaven. [both laugh] JONES: Like I said, that was my sample work. My actual first
Two’s A Crowd! In 1974, Arvell showed art director John Romita several penciled pages of a sample “Thing vs. Morbius” story he’d worked up on his own, and wound up assigned to finish penciling it, working with assigned writer Bill Mantlo, behind a new splash penciled by Ron Wilson. Inks by Dick Giordano and The Crusty Bunkers. That work became Marvel Two-in-One #15 (May 1976)! Thanks to Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]
comicbook work. I came up with the idea and brought those breakdowns to Marvel as a sample of what I could do. It was only the first five or six pages at that point. I showed it to John Romita. He said, “Huh, this is pretty good! Why don’t you finish it?” I said “What?” [laughs] He replied, “Finish it!” It was my first job and I was a little nervous and I told him that I would really like to have a writer with me. I think they assigned me Bill Mantlo, and we worked out a plot together. From page 6 or so it was based on the plot we came up with together. I drew the whole thing but they rejected the splash page, although I didn’t know that at the time. Ron reworked the splash. I actually drew full pencils on those pages, and Dick Giordano did ink them, but not all of it. A few of those pages were inked by the Crusty Bunkers. RA: That wouldn’t have been unusual for that time period. JONES: I think it was finished and then sat for a while, until somebody needed it to plug a gap in the schedule. I finished it in 1974. Dick was not the inker originally assigned to ink it. I want to say that it was Chic Stone. I don’t remember why he didn’t ink it, but Dick eventually became the inker. It took a while to get done.
10
An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
That work was done before or at the same time as the one-page filler that I did for Monsters Unleashed. The Marvel Two-in-One was my first real assignment. Then I was assigned on some Master of Kung Fu stuff, and then the British stuff came along. RA: What were you doing on Master of Kung Fu? JONES: I assisted Keith Pollard on the Giant-Size books, I think. I don’t know if I’m credited on those, however. [NOTE: Apparently this would have been for Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #4 (June 1975), or possibly #52 of the regular title, which featured a Pollard-drawn story intended for the never-published Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #5. —RA.] Keith and I were roommates at that time, so we were passing pages back and forth all the time. Deadlines were always tight. We also worked on Luke Cage [official title: Hero for Hire] after the title was changed to Power Man. I also worked on The Fantastic Four, when Rich Buckler was penciling it, although there again, I never got credit for it. I was doing all the backgrounds for one issue. Another time I’d be doing thumbnail layouts. Rich, of course, was doing the final pencils. Other times, I was penciling Rich’s layouts. It was whatever was needed to make the deadlines. This would have been the first period that Rich worked on the Fantastic Four. [NOTE: Buckler started penciling The Fantastic Four with #142 (Jan. 1974). —RA.]
RA: The first DC work I have you doing was a “Legion of Super-Heroes” story for DC Special #28 (June-July 1977). JONES: Yeah, that was a special dealing with disasters. Al Milgrom drew the cover and there were three separate stories inside, all dealing with some sort of disaster. Mine was the “Legion” story, which was inked by Bob Layton. The other two stories featured Batman and Aquaman. RA: We’ve mentioned how you got to work for Marvel. What led you to go to DC at this point? JONES: By this time, I was living in New York. Keith and I were roommates. Marvel wasn’t giving me regular assignments. I was assisting, I was doing short runs on certain titles but had no regular assignments. I was told that I would be following George Pérez on a quarterly book of the Fantastic Four that Marvel was doing. It was probably one of the Giant-Size books—48 pages or thereabouts. I was excited about it. George was leaving the book to work on something else for them… I don’t know what. I left working on Iron Man to work on that [FF] book. I spent two weeks or so waiting for the plot to be sent to me. Then I found out that they decided to cancel the quarterly. I asked when they decided to cancel it and they told me last week. I told them that I’d been waiting on that book and could have been doing something else if I had known it was cancelled. [laughs]
All In The Family One of Arvell Jones’ first assignments for DC Comics was a 30-page multi-hero blast in Super-Team Family #12 (Aug.-Sept. 1977), scripted by Gerry Conway and inked by Bill Draut. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
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I asked what they were going to give me in its place and they told me that they didn’t know what they were going to give me. I was a little steamed. We were all living hand-to-mouth and I could have used some money. So I decided to head over to DC. I made an appointment to speak to Paul Levitz. Went over and showed him the pages I’d done for Marvel and he said he’d give me a try. He had written a ten-page or so “Legion” story that needed an artist. I said “Cool!” That was the first time I was assigned a full script. At Marvel I’d always been handed a plot. The dialogue came later.
and a half. I was going to Wayne State University in Detroit, which was Jerry Bails’ school, if I remember correctly. To put my mother off, I had also been attending adult-ed classes or extra-curricular classes while I was in New York. These were anatomy classes at the Art Students League at the School of Visual Arts. I was really all over the place, just trying to find things to let my mother allow me to stay in New York! [laughs] But I had to come home sometimes and actually work on my degree. I’d made that promise to her. Those “Legion” stories came about when I was in Detroit.
After that story I was offered a full script for the Super-Team Family #12 (Aug.-Sept. 1977), written by Gerry Conway. That was a long story—30 pages, and featured Green Lantern, Hawkman, and The Atom. I penciled the whole book. Bill Draut inked me on it. The story was broken up into chapters. Supergirl and The Flash had appeared in the first half of the story from #11, which had been penciled by Alan Weiss. I took over the second half of the story in the next issue. That book had as many pages as what the Giant-Size Fantastic Four would have needed, but it was a bi-monthly instead of a quarterly. It only lasted four issues before it was cancelled, too, but I got to draw all kinds of DC heroes, including Kid Flash, Wonder Woman, The Atom, The New Gods, Darkseid, Gorilla Grodd. It was a crash course on DC characters.
RA: Would that have been when you worked on those “Supergirl” stories as well?
RA: You also did a story or two on the World War II-era character Gravedigger around this time.
JONES: Yeah, the “Supergirl” stories were done while I was in Detroit as well. I actually had to get an assistant to help me on those. Even though they were short stories, I was bogged down with classes. One of the guys from our group there assisted me on the “Supergirl” stories. He later moved to New York, but he only did independent work there. His name was Jay Jones, no relation. He did a comicbook in New York called the Bicycle Messenger Comic. I think he did two issues of it. He gave me an issue of it but I can’t remember if I had both of them. It was published out of New York. His actual job there was as a bicycle messenger, so he was doing a comic about his own job, and got it published.
JONES: Yeah, Super-Team Family was a bi-monthly, so I had some time on the off-month to pencil “Gravedigger” for Men of War #2-3. I’m pretty sure I only did two of those. RA: I think Gravedigger was a Joe Kubert creation, so in the course of a couple of months you got to do a Kubert creation and Jack Kirby’s New Gods. That ain’t bad! JONES: True! [laughs] It was kinda cool to work on those. At the time, my inker was Romeo Tanghal, who was from the Philippines. He was a rather new inker at the time, at least in the States. I never actually met him. I don’t know if they shipped the art to the Philippines or if he’d moved to New York. I would think he was in New York, because we were doing a lot of work together, but DC was way ahead of Marvel in terms of production times. Marvel was always “Get it done now, because it’s already late!” DC, I think, had an extra two months between final deadline and actual publication. RA: I think, for Marvel at that time, it was get the story and art done in May and have the book on the stands in July. JONES: In some cases, it was on the stands within a month and a half! The very first issue of “Iron Fist” that I did, I was told that it would be out in about three months. The next time I came into the office, Stan came out and congratulated me. He had a make-ready already! I asked, “How’d you get a make-ready so fast? I only just finished the artwork two weeks ago!” I was totally confused on how that got done so fast. [laughs] [NOTE: A “make-ready” was a printer’s proof of the entire book, printed in color, minus the cover. The pages were untrimmed, not stapled. —Arvell.] After Super-Team Family was cancelled, I did some more “Legion of Super-Heroes” work. That sort of came in between projects. At one point, I wasn’t in New York anymore. I’d gone back to Michigan and back to school. My mother was a big proponent of me finishing my college courses and getting my degree. I’d already finished three years of work on that. RA: What degree were you working for? JONES: It started out as a Humanities/Liberal Arts degree in general and then I switched it out to Commercial Art in the last year
Let’s Keep It In The Family! “Supergirl” splash page from Superman Family #191 (Sept.-Oct. 1978)— script by Gerry Conway, pencils by AJ, inks by Romeo Tanghal. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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Putting Some Iron In His Diet In 2014, three decades after he penciled some of the earliest “Iron Fist” stories for Marvel, Arvell drew the above commission piece. He draws a mean Batman and Hawkman as well. [Iron Fist TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Batman & Hawkman TM & © DC Comics.]
RA: I also see you were one of the infamous artists for the Hostess Twinkie Ad pages. [laughs] JONES: I only did one! That was an “Iron Man,” because I was drawing the strip at the time. [laughs] RA: That’s okay. They were kind of like Bazooka Joe comics. Everybody read them, even if you didn’t think much about them. JONES: Yeah, that’s true. [chuckles] Besides, everybody back then ate Hostess Twinkies. RA: When you got done with your degree, you began to switch back and forth between DC and Marvel. JONES: Yeah. While I was going to school, I was doing a lot of fill-in work, trying to keep a foot in the door at both Marvel and DC. When I finished school I wanted to go back to working with one or the other. Or both! That last year of school took me maybe two, or even three, years to finish up. I was only taking a class a semester, and to keep my parents off my back, I was still paying rent. I’d do a semester in Detroit and then go back to New York for two quarters to take classes there, then back to Detroit, and then back to New York. As long as I was working towards a degree, my mother was happy and left me alone. RA: Now there’s a big break in credits during that time period. From mid-1980 through 1982 you don’t have any comics credits, except for reprints.
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
JONES: That was a period of time where I would do an issue here and an issue there but, like I said, they were fill-ins and it might be years before they would use those stories. There may be no credits in those years, but I was still doing the occasional job. That was also a time when I was offered a job to work at a local television station here in Detroit. I kept the TV job until 1990, but the first couple of years working there were the most challenging. This was before computer graphics, so everything was being done by hand. My brother had worked at the station prior to me, and when he left to work at another station for more money, he kind of ushered me in to take his place. I was brought in to be a courtroom artist. So for half the day I was sitting in the courtroom drawing serial killers. RA: We should mention that, back in those days, cameras were not allowed in the courtroom. Everybody today kind of expects actual photos or video of court proceedings, but that was largely unheard of in the 1970s1980s. If you wanted to see anything from the courtroom, it was going to be a hand-drawn illustration by a courtroom artist. JONES: Exactly. Cameras weren’t allowed at all. I can’t remember the actual cases at this point, but I did two of them back to back. Serial killers were in vogue at the time. Ted Bundy had been captured only a year or so earlier. [NOTE: For the second time. He’d escaped from jail during his first incarceration. —RA.] After him, and the coining of the term “serial killer,” they seemed to be popping up all over. In Michigan there was the Oakland County Child Killer in the mid-1970s—another guy known as the Stalker. I sat in on a couple of those trials. Between those trials I would sit in at the station, because I was very interested in doing television or movie producing. So I would hang out at the station, go to the art department, sit on the set of the news, and just watch what they did. Since I was working for them, they gave me access to a lot of stuff that my initial job didn’t actually apply to. I tried to learn as much as I could about television production. So I wasn’t really doing much on the comicbook side. The station hired me part-time and then, eventually, full-time. By then, the court-artist thing was over because they started allowing cameras into the courtroom, but the station kept me on as a part-time artist, doing all kinds of stuff. I was doing vehicle graphics, billboard art, TV Guide ads, station IDs, and what they called bumpers-and-joiners, which were the artwork that said “We’ll be right back! Stay tuned to Station whatever,” and then I was also doing the news graphics and animation, weather graphics, set designs, presentations for the sales staff—they called them one-sheets. We did animation and logo work for the station’s clients. If it was art-related, I drew it. I was doing all of that work. RA: That sounds like a very busy time period for you. JONES: It was crazy! When I started working on the news, it got really crazy, because most of the other stations had five or six artists on their staff, but the station I worked for had only three. We had to work 25% harder than any other art staff. I spent hours and hours working. I also met my wife during that period—dating and so on for about three years. RA: I notice that a Sam Dela Rosa inked a What If? story you did—“What If the Thing Continued to Mutate?” [#37 (Feb. 1983)]. I remember an inker called Felipe Dela Rosa. Would they have been the same fellow? JONES: I don’t know Felipe Dela Rosa. Sam was my running crew, so to speak. Sam was out of Texas. He and John Workman plus a couple of other artists were all known to me from when I was
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doing my fanzine stuff. That’s where I met Sam. [NOTE: For the record, that eliminates Felipe and Sam being the same fellow. Felipe was a Skywald artist who likely hailed from Spain. —RA.] When I went pro, my brother had kind of taken over the fanzine thing. Him and Greg Theakston. Mike Nasser, too! Sam contributed a lot of artwork to the fanzine and inked some of my spot illustrations for that. My brother Desmond was a real fan of war comics, and he had planned an issue of Fan Informer that was to focus solely on that. A Grave Matter Russ Heath was living Surprisingly, the official indicia title of this in Chicago at the time, Feb. 1975 Marvel comic for which Arvell late 1960s or early 1970s, penciled the cover was simply: Uncanny and that’s not far from Tales. But somebody—probably publisher Stan Detroit, so Desmond Lee—sure liked that word “Grave”! Inks by Klaus Janson. Courtesy of the Grand Comics and I went to Chicago Database. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.] and did an interview with him there. Russ wasn’t living in the Playboy mansion then, but he was living in a penthouse. We were really impressed by that. That was another reason that I wanted to get into the business. I saw how he was living and I thought comics must be paying pretty good if he could live there. RA: Well, Playboy did, but I’m not sure his DC work was where he was getting that kind of money from. JONES: I think that there was also an interview done with Dan Adkins, in Youngstown, Ohio, that focused at lot on his assistant work with Wally Wood. All those interviews were done on tape. All that stuff was left with my brother when I moved to New York. There’s a lot of photos from the Detroit conventions that were taken back then that have never been published. Ken Steacy, Richard Corben, and Marshall Rogers were also involved in the fanzine at that time. There was also a guy by the name of Greg Potter, who later wrote Manhunter. RA: I remember Greg Potter. He was good! JONES: Yeah, he was! We had a lot of people—guys like Mike Vosburg, who was also from Detroit, but we had branched out from just people from Detroit by that time. We had artists contributing to Fan Informer from all over. All of that was happening when I started working at Marvel and my brother had taken over the fanzine. He and Greg Theakston did a couple of issues after I originally moved for New York. After my brother and Greg got too busy to work on the fanzine, it was passed along to Brent Carpenter and Alan Oldham, but I don’t think they ever got an issue out. Oldham became a house-music DJ and moved to Germany! Brent Carpenter went on to publish some comics for Caliber Comics.
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An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
RA: Now we’re coming up to your sustained run on All-Star Squadron, which Roy Thomas wrote and you penciled for a fair length of time, about two or three years, starting with #37 (Sept. 1984) and ending with #67 (Mar. 1987)… the final issue of the series. JONES: That was interesting. I was still working at the TV station, but I was also drawing that monthly book. It was very difficult to keep up with both but I did it. Roy was telling two stories basically—one was the first retelling of the origin of the Justice Society and the second revolved around the All-Star Squadron. He wanted them to run at the same time. It was me and Mike Clark, illustrating these two stories, which sometimes ran in the same issue. Mike Clark might do three or four pages, and then I would do the rest of the book or, vice versa, I would do the one or two or three short pages and Mike Clark would do the rest of the book. That sort of arrangement allowed me to work on the book on a regular basis. Roy was slipping in those origin stories all the time— Johnny Quick, Tarantula, Starman, all those guys. Something like the origin of The Guardian would also include The Newsboy Legion. I think that one was something of a sneak peek at what eventually became the long-running Secret Origins book. In fact, that “Guardian” story actually ended up in Secret Origins, but I think it was originally done for All-Star Squadron. I think I drew that one not too long after the origin of Starman
Arvell Jones in his studio in 1984, around the time he began penciling All-Star Squadron. Courtesy of AJ.
Catch A Rising Star Roy Thomas is surprised at a birthday party sometime in the 1980s by a cake decorated with the Trylon and Perisphere, the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair theme structures he’d made the All-Star Squadron’s HQ— even though, in the real world, they’d been turned into wartime scrap not long after the Fair ended. Photo courtesy of the late brothers Shel & Michael Dorf.
Although Arvell’s first work on the 1980s DC series All-Star Squadron had come four issues earlier, he talks first about the Starman origin issue, so here are his cover and splash page for #41 (Jan. 1985). The former was inked by Jerry Ordway, the latter by Bill Collins. In this issue, Roy merely plotted the story and scripted its beginning and ending, getting Paul Kupperberg to dialogue the rest, probably due to RT’s screenwriting activities at the time. Starman/ Ted Knight had never had an origin in the Golden Age, so Roy and Arvell gave him his first one ever, belatedly making him a cousin of Sandra Knight, alias Quality’s Phantom Lady. [TM & © DC Comics.]
story, but it didn’t appear until two years later. [NOTE: All-Star Squadron #41 (Jan. 1985) and Secret Origins #19 (Oct. 1987), respectively. —RA.] Greg Theakston was the inker on the Guardian and Newsboy Legion origin. We Detroiters kept running into each other every once and a while. RA: Sometimes it’s who you know and who you’ve worked well with before that gets you the job. JONES: Yeah, it works that way a lot. Those were fun times, and I enjoyed working with Roy. He would call me up—and you know, Roy talks about 90 miles a minute [laughs]—and I’d be trying to take notes. I’d get most of what he said. I kept expecting him to call me up and tell me, “You’ve gotten this whole sequence wrong!
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
“Shanghaied Into Space (& Hyperspace)” (Above left:) What Arvell remembers as Roy T.’s retelling “the origin of the Justice Society” amid an All-Star Squadron tale was almost certainly the material in issues #50-60 that retold the events of 1942’s All-Star Comics #13, a.k.a. “Shanghaied into Space.” Since that Golden Age yarn had the Nazis sending eight JSAers (by rocket!) to eight different humanoid-inhabited planets of the Solar System, RT figured the only way to make the “science” work for the more sophisticated ’80s readers was to set those adventures in “Hyperspace” instead. Arvell was tapped to pencil the “Starman on Jupiter” episode, which shared space (excuse us… hyperspace) in Squadron #57 (May ’86) with the off-world sojourns of Wonder Woman and The Atom. Inks by Alfredo Alcala. (Above right:) For comparison purposes only—the original “Starman” chapter page from All-Star Comics #13 (Oct.-Nov. 1942), scripted by Gardner Fox & illustrated by Jack Burnley. [TM & © DC Comics.]
You need to redraw it!” But he never did. [laughs] Whatever I put down, he pretty much used. In 1980, before Roy started on All-Star Squadron, before he even knew it was going to be All-Star Squadron, he called me up and said, “Keep this quiet. I’m leaving Marvel and I’m going to DC.” Really? I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked. Roy Thomas leaving Guardian Angel Marvel? I could not fathom the Arvell believes the re-telling of idea. Stan Lee’s hand-picked the origin of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby’s successor? But he told me, “No, hero The Guardian from their 1940s I’m leaving. Now, I want you “Newsboy Legion” series was originally to do some layouts.” I asked done for All-Star Squadron but then him what he needed. He said, shifted to Secret Origins #19 (Oct. 1987) “I’m going to do a presentation instead. Roy T. figures he’s probably at DC,” and he needed three or right. This splash page, inked by Greg Theakston, is an homage to S&K’s cover four pages on a modern take for Star Spangled Comics #7 (April ’42), on Captain Marvel and three or the issue that had introduced that series four pages of the Justice Society. to the world. Thanks to Mark Muller. He gave me a weekend to do [TM & © DC Comics.] them.
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An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
Three years later, Roy calls me up, pretty much out of the blue, to tell me that Rich Buckler was working on an issue of All-Star Squadron but for some reason wasn’t able to finish the story. It was a two-parter. Roy wanted me to do the second part. I told him, “Really?” He said, “I never forgot you for helping me out.” Remember, I hadn’t really talked to him in years and I thought he hated those layouts. They certainly didn’t get me any immediate work, so I thought he wasn’t very impressed. So he tells me that he wanted me to finish that two-parter. It was a story showing Superman battling Captain Marvel. This would have been for All-Star Squadron #37 [Sept. 1984]—my first issue. The way he put it to me was, “How would you like to draw Superman battling the Big Red Cheese—Captain Marvel?” I couldn’t turn that down! That’s a fan’s dream battle! He sent over the plot and this was when I was preparing to marry Wanda and was still working at the TV station as well. Wanda was asking me to go to these social events. She was working at the time as either a Senatorial or a Congressional assistant. She started with Senator Carl Levin and then joined Congressman George Crockett’s staff. She also worked with Rosa Parks. So there were bigwig events that I’d be showing up to, and then have to explain that I had to get back to work. I’d slip away and finally Wanda says, “You’re drawing comics again!” I told her I had to get this done. It was a cool assignment! I knew that I would never get the opportunity to draw something like this again. I was very excited. I admit that I was fanboying out completely! [laughs]
Another “Battle Of The Atlantic” The Golden Age Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern join forces against the Nazis alongside Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel, and Captain Marvel Jr. high above the World War II seas in All-Star Squadron #37 (Sept. 1984), Arvell Jones’ very first work on the series… with inks by Richard Howell, who’s interviewed later in this issue. Seeing such a combo would’ve been a dream come true for many fans during the 1940s—so Roy T. commissioned his own version of it, at age 43! He doesn’t remember the regrettable incident Arvell relates in which, in 1980, he apparently asked the artist to prepare JSA and Captain Marvel samples for submission to DC Comics as he prepared to switch over from Marvel. He does recall that DC turned out not to be interested in a Shazam! revival just then—and Roy at some stage veered off into creating the All-Star Squadron concept—but he very much regrets neglecting to keep in touch with Arvell over the next few hectic years. Hopefully, he made amends of a sort in ’84, when he named him Squadron’s regular penciler. [TM & © DC Comics.]
I told him that there was not a whole lot I could do in that time period. He told me that that was what he needed. So I did three or four pages dealing with Billy Batson turning into Captain Marvel and flashbacking to when Billy decided to investigate a closed subway station and meets Shazam. Then I did three or four pages of the Justice Society fighting with Solomon Grundy at the Statue of Liberty. They weren’t ground-breaking, I guess, but they were what Roy asked me to do. I explained to Roy that I’d gotten the layouts done but they were really rough, I didn’t have time to do any tight pencils. He didn’t care, just told me to send them to him. I did, but I don’t know if he ever used them or not. We didn’t really talk much after I sent him that stuff.
Roy was throwing some curves at me with the plot, but I was enjoying all of that. There was a big page when all of the All-Star Squadron gathered together. Superman and Wonder Woman were there and all of this was taking place in the 1940s, so they were fighting Nazis. They were upending battleships in the middle of the ocean. Wonder Woman was lassoing Luffwaffe planes out of the sky. I was having a ball! I finished it and turned it in, and Roy told me that he liked what I did with it. He asked me if I would like to stay on the book. I told him that I’d love to stay on the book, but that I was going on my honeymoon. So for the next issue he got Todd McFarlane to draw a re-told origin of Dr. Fate. That might have been the first professional work that Todd McFarlane did. However, that issue didn’t directly follow mine. It appeared nearly a year later. The actual next few issues had Rick Hoberg or Richard Howell doing the pencils. By the time it appeared, Todd was already the regular artist on another Roy Thomas book—Infinity, Inc.—and had made his official debut in Steve Englehart’s Coyote #11 [March 1985]. I had finished that first All-Star Squadron story and turned it in. Wanda and I had just gotten married and we had picked Los Angeles for our honeymoon. I had told Roy this while we were going back and forth on that All-Star story. Roy suggested that while we were out there we should stop by or give him a call because he was living in San Pedro and maybe we could go out to dinner or something. When we got out there we visited Roy, where we met Dann Thomas as well. Roy suggested we eat on the Queen Mary. The Queen Mary is a legendary [British] passenger ship from the 1930s1940s that is tied up permanently in Long Beach. It’s a massive ship that is currently being used as a hotel and restaurant. Fax machines were not common back them, but Roy had one and he was waiting on something coming in from Gerry Conway. He was a little concerned about it. Dann finally said to him, “Roy, forget about it. It’ll get here when it gets here. Let’s go out and eat.” So we went out to the Queen Mary. It was docked right next to Howard
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
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Wedding Bells & Beyond (Clockwise)
Hughes’ Spruce Goose. Arvell’s wedding party in Detroit on May 12, 1984, included not We didn’t have all a few comics professionals. From left to right: Father Walker, Arvell, brother Desmond, Keith Pollard, Ron Wilson. that much time to look at it before we Newlyweds Arvell and Wanda, back on the day. went to dinner, but Son Malcolm Jones (b. 1989)—seen here at age 4, encountering what a plane! We Spider-Man at a comics convention. From The Detroit News. had a good time [© respective copyright holders.] talking about All-Star Daughter Elisa, with Arvell and his father Harold Hamilton Jones. Squadron and all the And, to make the family picture complete—Arvell’s mother, characters we hoped Imuria Jones. All photos courtesy of Arvell & Wanda Jones. to see in it and that sort of thing. At some point while we were there, at least this is how I remember it, Roy offered me the regular gig on the book. Now, the experience of eating on the Queen Mary, this huge luxury liner, right next to the incredible Spruce Goose, and getting that gig was really impressive. It was a great time. When I came back from the honeymoon, Roy asked me what other characters I’d like to work on. I wasn’t really sure. Then he asked if there were any Kirby characters that I wanted to draw [in All-Star Squadron]. I said “Yeah, I want to do The Guardian!” So he created a Guardian story for me to do. Then he mentioned that Starman, the original 1940s Starman, had never had an origin story. How would I like to do that? Well, yeah! We felt we needed to correct that lack-of-origin problem right away, as Starman was kind of cool. After that Roy pretty much had me roped into the series. I was willing to do whatever by then, because I was having so much fun doing All-Star Squadron. Still, during the day, I was turning out 25 pieces of news graphics a day. If a plane crashed, I’d find myself working on animation showing how the plane went down. I was doing weather animation, re-formatting news graphics. The news shows went from five-minute update segments to half-hour and then hour-long shows. On the weekends and weeknights,
A Four-Color Riot (Left:) While working on All-Star Squadron #41, his first as regular penciler, Arvell also drew the cover of #40 (Dec. 1984), which was inked by his Detroit buddy Aubrey Bradford. Back then, writer/editor Roy T. heard neverconfirmed rumors that #40, with its “RACE RIOTS IN DETROIT” cover headline, was yanked off some newsstands in the Motor City. Maybe he should’ve written a less volatile headline… but the Detroit riots of February 1942 were a historical fact, the setting for a several-issue tale featuring Amazing-Man, the black hero Roy and Jerry Ordway had co-created. Incidentally, Arvell penciled the covers of issues #40-46, 52, 55, 58, 59, & 64-66. [TM & © DC Comics.] (Right:) In a 2017 issue (#12) of the Image Comics title Rumble, which celebrated Black History Month, writer John Arcudi paid homage to the cover of Squadron #40 by having Arvell use its layout for a variant cover of that magazine. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]
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An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
I’d work on the All-Star Squadron.
and would do a lot of the extra research for me.
Like when we were starting out, I’d grab guys around Detroit and get them to help me as assistants. Aubrey Bradford, Wardell Simpson, my brother Desmond, and Gerald Teon Walker—who got a shot doing Deathstroke, the Terminator for DC—all worked with me when I was overwhelmed. They would stop by my studio in Detroit and work all night doing backgrounds and research with me.
I should tell you that getting that box of research material was a huge surprise to me. [laughs] I’d never worked on any title before that required that much research! Lucky for me that Roy took the time to bring me up to speed on that sort of thing. When I was working at Marvel, most of the time I’d be handed a script and told to “wing it”—just get it done. [laughs]
Right when I started out as the regular penciler, Roy sent me out a box which weighed maybe 50 pounds! [laughs] It was a ton of research material—books—not just comicbooks but photo books, books dealing with World War II, actual pictures, pages and pages of stuff, all there to help me do research because All-Star Squadron was set in the 1940s. It was a deep dive into that whole era! There were original books from that time period, comics, and so on.
RA: Probably that was because most of the Marvel comics of that time period were contemporary. You could just walk outside and see what buildings and signs and cars looked like. What people wore. The 1940s was really another world.
My brother Desmond would help me with the research, developing the background. He’s also a bit of an artist. He was totally into World War II movies and comics. Where I collected super-hero comics, he collected war comics like Sgt. Rock, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, and that sort of thing. That was his sweet spot in comics. He would always point out stuff we could use
JONES: Even when I was doing “Gravedigger” for DC, I wasn’t getting any research material to help out with the time period. I don’t recall getting that kind of material for any other books or strips that I did. I can’t remember the character—maybe Roy can—but in that box of research material there was one clipped-out panel of art from a comicbook with a character that he’d never used before in All-Star. When we got to the 50th issue of All-Star, about a year or so later,
The Quality Of Mercy… Sorry to disappoint Arvell, but 37 years after All-Star Squadron #50 (Oct. 1985), writer/editor Roy has no idea which hero it was—from DC, Fawcett, or Quality— of which he sent the artist a “clipping” to be used as reference in drawing him in that issue. Seems likely it was one of the Quality group’s guys—though Arvell’s two-page spread of the Quality heroes migrating belatedly to what Len Wein had christened “Earth-X” shows most of the main ones: Uncle Sam, Plastic Man, Black Condor, Phantom Lady, The Ray, Doll Man, Midnight, The Jester, The Human Bomb, Manhunter (with his dog Thor), the archer alias The Spider, and all six Blackhawk planes with their seven occupants. Surely, that ought to have been enough Quality stalwarts to please even the finickiest writer/editor! Inks by Tony DeZuñiga. [TM & © DC Comics.]
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
19
Like I said, it was a long time from my seeing that little clipping and actually doing the work on #50, but Roy wanted me to include that character, whoever he was, into that double-page spread where all the characters were moving from one universe to another. I called him when I got the page penciled and told him “I got everybody you wanted except that one character from that little clipping. Do you have another copy of it because I lost that clipping?” He said “What! You lost it! That was the only artwork I had on that character! I really wanted him to be in that two-page spread!” I felt so bad. I tore up my studio looking for that little clipping. My brother and another couple of people helped and we went all through that studio. I just could not find it. To this day I have no idea what happened to it.
“I Contain Multitudes…” Exhibits “A” through “C” in support of Arvell Jones’ statement that writer/ editor Roy Thomas “kept adding characters” to All-Star Squadron stories. (Clockwise from above left:)
RA: The irony of that is that today you could probably find an example of that character in a few seconds using the Internet. Back then, if you didn’t have a physical example in your grasp, you just couldn’t use it.
On this DeZuñiga-inked page from #53 (Jan. 1986), Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick are zapped into a scene coordinated with the ongoing Crisis on Infinite Earths series, joining mid-1980s (and other 1940s) heroes from Earths-One, -Two, and all other DC parallel dimensions, to learn about the threat facing the multiiverse (and, far more worrisome in RT’s view, the very existence of All-Star Squadron). The Jones/DeZuñiga cover of #55 (March ’86) showcased the female Firebrand leading a time-tossed tribe of DC heroes—namely, Miss Liberty (Tomahawk’s ladyfriend), The Silent Knight, The Black Pirate & son, Super-Chief, Valda the Iron Maiden (from Arak, Son of Thunder), and either Wayne or Walt, one of All Star Western’s 1950s Trigger Twins. And there were several more Crisis chrononauts inside! On the cover of #59 (July ’86), the same artistic team rendered the 23rd-century living robot Mekanique, framed by the visages of virtually the entire Squadron roll call… but if we named them all here, we’d have no room for the Howell and Ordway interviews that follow! Suffice it to say, the original art for this cover is currently framed prominently in the foyer of the Thomas residence in South Carolina! Thanks again for the gift and the excellent work, Arvell! [TM & © DC Comics.]
there’s a scene in there with… I don’t know how many super-heroes there were… but there were Quality characters, Fawcett characters, DC characters, All-American characters—I mean, a lot of characters, including the regular All-Star Squadron guys. But there was this one character who had appeared in that single clipped panel, which was only 2” x 3”, from that box.
JONES: So I let him down on that. I felt pretty bad about it. To tell the truth, I was also a little mad at him because if I’d known I was going to have to use all these obscure characters, I’d have probably kept better track… I mean, I knew I was going to be drawing a lot of DC characters, but some of these guys were from companies that hadn’t been in business since 1953. [laughs] I’d had that clip for a long time before Roy even mentioned using him, but I guess he wouldn’t have sent that clipping if he hadn’t been planning, a year or more ahead of time, to use him somewhere. RA: Now you know! JONES: Yeah! Now! I hope Roy can remember what character that was! Roy kept adding characters to the book. Before that book, I had pretty much been a one- or two-character-at-a-time guy. The only full group work I’d done was maybe that Super-Team Family story.
20
An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
Maybe The Guy Should’ve Said “Please”? There’s a tale of sorts behind this panorama from #59 (July 1986), just one issue before the main thread of the series ended. Since by then the Golden Age Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman were all scheduled to be erased “forever” from DC continuity following the events of Crisis, and because Aquaman had previously appeared in Squadron only in a single (symbolic) panel, a coordinating DC editor around this time asked Roy T. rather pointedly—for reasons he didn’t deign to explain—not to depict Aquaman again in the series before it wound up. No longer in a mood to be cooperative with the DC brass, Roy made certain the Sea King was front and center in this two-page spread, surrounded by most of his fellow Squadders and readily identified by his yellow (rather than green) gloves and calf-fins. Inks by Vince Colletta. [TM & © DC Comics.]
But other than that and the “Legion” stories I hadn’t really worked on a group book. But now, every time I looked up, Roy was adding more characters. We’d started off focused on one or two characters but then it branched out, so that by #50 I was drawing Quality Comics characters, Fawcett characters, as well as the old DC Justice Society characters. I was going, “Roy, what are you doing to me?” [laughs] RA: A smorgasbord of characters! You were having fun, anyway. JONES: I thoroughly enjoyed that book. Every issue it was a surprise to me where Roy was taking it. It was fun doing it and having a chance, with a reflective eye, to go back and look at all of those older characters. How they worked and all. I always loved Hourman and loved his Miraclo pill-based powers. There was one scene that I got to use him in where he was in the middle of getting beat up by two Nazi spies. They were putting him through the wringer, so he takes the pill but has to wait for the pill to kick in while they’re still beating him up! [both laugh] Just when they’re getting ready to throw him out the window and fall 50 feet to the street and his death, the pill finally kicks in. I remember trying to figure out how to visually depict that particular instant where his powers start up. Roy’s description was, he’s going out the window,
totally defeated, and then the pill kicks in. So I focused on his eyes, him looking towards the window, getting beat up, he’s already taken the pill and then, suddenly, his eyes perk up. He gets a little smile on his face. Roy’s description of that moment was “Hel-lo!”
No Photoshopping Was Employed In The Making Of These Two Pages! (Opposite page, top:) On page 16 of All-Star Squadron #60 (Aug. 1986), Johnny Quick takes a photo of the assembled group for President Roosevelt— and of course was swift enough to be able to appear in it himself. Art in these two scans by Arvell Jones & Tony DeZuñiga. (Opposite page, bottom:) Then the Crisis on Infinite Worlds finalized its dirty work—and, later that same day, the photo FDR received showed Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman (all of whom suddenly no longer existed in Golden Age continuity) replaced by several Quality heroes—who otherwise would’ve still been on Earth-X. Of course, not all the restored Quality heroes were depicted, or else there’d have been another dozen or so folks in the picture! Incidentally, even this “photo” turned out not to be quite 100% accurate by the time it was printed, as DC’s upper echelons almost immediately decreed that Green Arrow and Speedy had also been “retroactively deconstructed.” Roy’s comment on hearing that news is unprintable in a family magazine. [TM & © DC Comics.]
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
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22
An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
Golden Age Forever! Arvell’s kept busy in recent years, too, as witness:
Take A Pill! Arvell says he greatly enjoyed orchestrating this scene of Hourman, having swallowed a Miraclo pill some seconds before and then getting pummeled by the Nazi villains Night and Fog while he tries to save Phantom Lady, suddenly feeling his power-giving chemical discovery “kick in.” Plot by Roy Thomas; script by Paul Kupperberg; inks by Pablo Marcos. [TM & © DC Comics.]
[laughs] Maybe that was Paul Kupperberg doing the actual scripting on that part. Remember, Roy didn’t actually send me scripts. He sent plots, so I never really knew how the final story would appear when I was drawing it. I’d work off the plot, send in the pencils, and Roy would script the pages, then whoever inked the pages got them and they went off to production. Unless I sat down and read the actual comic, I might not see the final version of the story at all. I liked that sequence, though, and wished we could have done even more with Hourman. He was one of my favorite characters. RA: I think doing that sequence the way you described and just having a caption saying “Hello!” as the art shows his eyes lighting up and then having Hourman just beating the crap out of the guys who’d been manhandling him is pretty funny. [both laugh] JONES: The way I was trying to draw it was that he was just trying to fend off their attack long enough for the pill to kick in. I just really liked how they handled the writing on that. The art and the writing really flowed together there. All I really had to do was draw it.
(Above:) “The Bombadier,” Arvell writes us, “a commission which turned into an 8-pager, I did as a bonus story for The Specialist Omnibus… a sort of All Winners Squad and Justice Society of America take on World War II heroes, where the Nazis had a squad of scientifically enhanced Nazis and Old World monsters (vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and ghosts). The Allies compensated with technologically advanced Super Soldiers. It’s a cool series very much like All-Star Squadron. I met the creators Shawn Gustafson and Al Fukalek when I sat next to them at a convention [a few years ago]. The series is on their website TheSpecialistComic.com, but my story is only in the printed collection, which helped them to publish it as a perfect-found book of more than 300 pages.” [Art © Arvell Jones.] (Right:) Not long ago, Arvell also contributed a cover and story to Mike (no relation) Jones’ independent comicbook Yeet!, which collects public-domain stories and new indy stories. For it, Arvell drew a tale of “Black Fury,” a costumed hero from early-1940s comics published by Street & Smith. By sheer coincidence, the very next issue of Alter Ego will feature Mark Carlson-Ghost’s extensive article on the S&S comics line, including The Shadow, Doc Savage, Supersnipe—and Black Fury! [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
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Comes The Dawn (Left:) Splash page of All-Star Squadron #52 (Dec. 1985), in which Green Lantern, Liberty Belle, and Johnny Quick arrive on Earth-Shazam—and are greeted by a fighting-mad Captain Marvel! But the All-Stars soon made him see reason. Script by Roy Thomas, pencils by Arvell Jones, inks by Alfredo Alcala. (Right:) Another Jones-favorite scene… the morning after the wedding night of Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick, with Libby waking up wearing a spare Billy Batson sweater—to find Captain Marvel and Green Lantern hovering outside their window. (P.S.: It was a favorite sequence of Roy’s, too!) [TM & © DC Comics.]
I also like the way Roy developed the relationship between Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick. I got to draw the wedding, and then they get ready to go on their honeymoon when they get transported to the world that Billy Batson and Captain Marvel operate in.
up. Liberty Belle looks out the window and goes “Whoa!” [more laughter] Just two super-heroes hovering in the air waiting for them to get up. It does make you wonder how long those two guys were out there. Every so often we did a little thing here and there in the book that was just fun.
We got to do a scene of Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle in the bedroom. Not really a risqué scene. They spent the night in Billy Batson’s apartment. Liberty Belle wakes up in the morning wearing one of Billy Batson’s trademark T-shirts. [laughs] Now Green Lantern, the 1940s Alan Scott version, is also there, and Billy spent the night as Captain Marvel. So Liberty Belle opens up the shade on Billy’s window and outside the window are Captain Marvel and the 1940s Green Lantern, just hovering in the air, waiting patiently for her and Johnny Quick to wake up! [laughs]
That scene sparked an idea I had of doing an all-woman issue of All-Star. I had wanted to do a story arc dealing with Phantom Lady, Wonder Woman, Liberty Belle, and Hawkgirl. The story would be about them going out and proving they were as important to the All-Star Squadron as any of the men. So, inside the main group, they formed their own little group.
RA: I bet that made it a little awkward! [more laughter] JONES: It was like they didn’t have anything else to do, except hover outside the apartment building. RA: Checking their watches! JONES: Not watches! They were waiting for that shade to roll
I did some sketches and drawings of them. I know I started off with what I hoped was a funny sequence. They’d be in costume, going out on their own mission. Johnny Quick would show up, asking “Hey, where are you girls going?” The girls are kind of putting him off. He’s going “Can I go? Can I come along?” This would have been right after he and Liberty Belle got married. She goes, “No, Johnny, leave me alone. We’re going out.” Johnny goes, “I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone.” Then he starts kissing her all over the face, hugging her, at super-speed. [laughs] She’s completely discombobulated by the time that he’s done.
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An Interview With Arvell Jones About His Early Years In Comics
Lo, There Shall Come An Ending! Arvell Jones happily ensconced in L.A, 1984—framed between his final cover for All-Star Squadron (#66, Feb. 1987) and his splash page for the series’ last issue (#67, March ’87), both inked by Tony DeZuñiga. The former related and expanded upon the origin of Golden Age hero Tarantula, as visually redesigned by Jerry Ordway… while the latter related the first actual adventure of the Justice Society of America, re-spun from All-Star Comics #4 (Spring 1941). Of course, Arvell’s career in comics hardly ended there! [TM & © DC Comics.]
I can’t recall the dialogue exactly, but either Wonder Woman or Phantom Lady says, “He really must be a whirlwind in bed.” Or something to that effect. [both laugh] Liberty Belle looks at the other ladies, a little embarrassed, and says, “Uh, yeah, let’s get out of here.” I never got to show any of that to Roy, because the Crisis [on Infinite Earths] series started at DC and we couldn’t use Wonder Woman, Superman, or Batman in the book anymore, because in the new DC Universe they didn’t exist in the 1940s. Roy wasn’t very happy about that. RA: If you can find any old artwork for that storyline, that would be great. I bet Roy would like to see examples of that, if they still exist. JONES: I’ll see if I can drag some of that stuff up. I’ve got some thumbnails and rough drawings. I’m pretty sure I’ve got it, just not sure where. RA: I hope you can find them. This has been fun. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. JONES: You’re welcome. Richard Arndt is a practicing librarian and comics historian in Nevada. His interviews and articles have appeared in Alter Ego, Back Issue, and Comic Book Creator. He is the author of Horror in Black & White and The Star*Reach Companion and co-author of the recent Our Artists at War.
“Roy Kept Adding Characters To [The All-Star Squadron]!”
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ARVELL JONES Checklist This checklist is adapted primarily from materials contained in the online Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, compiled by Dr. Jerry G. Bails. Names of features with that title that also appeared in other publications are generally not italicized below. Key: (p) = penciler. (i) = inker. Name & Vital Stats: Arvell Malcolm Jones (b. 1952) – artist DC Comics: All-Star Squadron (p) 1984-87; Codename: Gravedigger (p) 1977; covers (p) 1984-87, 1994; illustration (p) 1985; Legion of Education: Arts and Crafts; Wayne County Community College; Super-Heroes (p) 1977-78; Secret Origins (p) 1987-88; Secret Society of Wayne State University (all Detroit, Michigan) Super-Villains (p) 1977; Supergirl (p) 1978-79; Who’s Who in the DC Universe (p) 1986 (various entries) Family In Arts: Desmond Jones (brother) Influences: Jack Kirby, Rich Buckler, John Buscema Print Media (Non-Comics): Tribe magazine 1976; Gasm magazine 1977 Assisted: Rich Buckler (with pencils & inks) 1974-78 Marvel UK: various covers (p)(i) 1974-76 COMICBOOKS (U.S. Mainstream Publishers): Atlas/Seaboard: Man-Monster (p) 1975
Marvel Comics: Captain America (p) 1994; Daredevil (p layouts) 1995; Deathlok (p) 1975; G.I. Joe (p) 1987; horror (p)(i) 1974 plus; Iron Fist (p) 1975; Iron Man (p) 1975; Marvel Two-in-One (p) 1976; Marvel Universe (p) 1986; Nightmask (p) 1987; Red Skull and Hate-Monster (p) 1980; Star Brand (p) 1987; Thor (asst. p & i) 1974; Thor 9p) 1979 Milestone Press (DC Imprint): Blood Syndicate (p) 1993; covers 1994; Hardware (p) 1993; Kobalt (p) 1994
“Girls’ Night Out” (Left:) Shane Foley (artist) & Randy Sargent (colorist) did this artful homage to a Jones-penciled figure for this issue’s “re:” section, with Captain Ego standing in for an All-Star—only the letters pages got delayed till next issue, so we’re including that illo here. Thanks, guys! [Captain Ego TM & © Roy Thomas & Estate of Bill Schelly; created by Biljo White.] (Below:) The wonderful women of the All-Star Squadron—a potential cover worked up by Arvell back in the day but never even shown to Roy, “because Crisis.” Would’ve been fun! Courtesy of AJ. [Characters TM & © DC Comics.]
Once A BARBARIAN— Now A WARRIOR KING!
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THE ORIGINAL MARVEL YEARS OMNIBUS, VOL. 1 Reprinting
KING CONAN #1-19 Stories & Art by THOMAS • BUSCEMA • MOENCH • CHAN FRENZ • SILVESTRI • ZELENETZ • NEBRIS Introductions By Roy Thomas & Doug Moench 776 Pages — In Color! $125 U.S. ($157 Canadian) — On Sale June 29, 2022 ISBN #978-1-302-94665-4 (Kaare Andrews Cover)
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Online Edition Created by Jerry G. Bails
The WHO’S WHO of American Comic Books 1928-1999
The Golden Age Green Lantern—as if you didn’t know—in a pen-and-ink sketch by Scott Goodell. [TM & © DC Comics.]
TM
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Part Two
[Drawing Golden Age Heroes] Was Sort Of A Dream Of Mine” RICHARD HOWELL Talks About His Time On All-Star Squadron
Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Richard J. Arndt
Richard Howell in a recent photo with some of his current work— juxtaposed with the double-spread title panel from his penciling debut on All-Star Squadron #27 (Nov. 1983). Inks by Larry Houston. Clearly, writer/editor Roy Thomas put him right to work drawing a baker’s dozen of All-Stars— after a first-page splash that depicted only The Atom and Firebrand, holding the infant son of the villain Cyclotron— as seen back on p.1 of this A/E issue. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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Richard Howell Talks About His Time On All-Star Squadron
I
NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Richard Howell (born Nov. 16, 1955) broke into comics in 1977 with his own self-published title Portia Prinz of the Glamazons. In 1980 he and Carol Kalish became the co-editors of the comics-related publishing & distribution company called New Media/Irjax. Among the titles they worked on was Comics Feature, which sported articles and interviews related to the field. Richard also edited two short-lived comics magazines—Fantasy Illustrated and Adventure Illustrated. In 1982-1983 he began working as an artist first for Marvel, then for DC, on such titles as Conan the Barbarian, Moon Knight, The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones, The Vision and The Scarlet Witch, All-Star Squadron, Hawkman, The Shadow War of Hawkman, Firestorm, and numerous others. In 1993 he became a founder of Claypool Comics, which published Deadbeats, Phantom of Fear City, Soulsearchers and Company, and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. He also worked on various titles for Eclipse, Comico, and Harris Comics. This interview was conducted on April 19, 2021. RICHARD ARNDT: We’re talking with Richard Howell, largely about his work on DC Comics’ All-Star Squadron. Welcome, Richard. RICHARD HOWELL: Happy to be here. RA: Before we get too deep into All-Star Squadron, I wanted to ask you about New Media. I didn’t read a lot of comics-related material at the time, but was that also the publisher of Fantasy Illustrated, which introduced The Djinn and Alexander Risk, and Adventure Illustrated? HOWELL: Yes, I was the editor for both of those titles. RA: I did read those two titles and admired them quite a bit—they introduced the Steve Englehart-Steve Ditko & Steve Leialoha Djinn character and Don McGregor & Tom Sutton’s Alexander Risk, among other stories and serials. They didn’t last long, but I very much liked them. I still have them somewhere in the house.
HOWELL: I do, too, somewhere. We’d hoped to have them last longer than a single issue each, but it was hard to get people to continue to work for you, if your publisher doesn’t pay them. RA: Now, how did you get involved with All-Star Squadron? HOWELL: My wife, Carol Kalish, had just gone to work for Marvel. I was trying to break into the industry as… well, really anything… a penciler, an inker, a colorist. I wound up doing all of those things at some point. Marvel, at the time, however, was not a welcoming community for me. So, my first Marvel job, which was a Conan fill-in, also wound up looking terrible. I was not used to having other people ink my pencils. I got that fill-in job from Louise Simonson, sort of a good-will gesture. Also, just because she’s nice. It turned out that DC was a bit more open to employing me as a freelancer, not as an editor, which is what I’d been doing at New Media. Carol and I had already interviewed Roy for a New Media magazine called Comics Feature #11, so I had a relationship of sorts with Roy. I don’t know if Roy really wanted to keep the Justice Society adventures separate from what was happening in All-Star Squadron. It certainly wound up that most of the issues that I drew were largely Justice Society stuff. I got to draw the Golden Age versions of Starman, The Atom, and Wonder Woman. That was kind of a dream of mine. Roy basically called me up out of nowhere and told me that he had a two-part fill-in for All-Star Squadron and was I available? Well, boy, was I! RA: That would have been All-Star Squadron #27-28 (Nov.-Dec. 1983), correct? That was basically a Spectre and Dr. Fate story. HOWELL: Yes. There was some confusion about the first issue— #27. Larry Houston inked the first nine pages, then left to take on an animation job, which certainly paid better than inking for DC. So I got to ink the rest of the issue myself, which worked out well for me. I’m not sure that DC was all that fond of it, however. I had a discussion with Dick Giordano about inking the second issue—#28— and he said “Yeah, yeah, we can think about that.” Then the next thing I knew, it was inked by Gerald Forton. [chuckles] RA: Sometimes when that happens, there’s a worry on the company’s part that they’re going to lose control if they depend on one guy to do all the artwork.
And We Do Mean “Illustrated”! Howell served as the editor of the single issues of the anthology comics Adventure Illustrated (Winter 1981) and Fantasy Illustrated (Spring 1982), with covers by P. Craig Russell and Jim Starlin, respectively. They featured work by an honor roll of comics creators. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]
HOWELL: And they’re also considering deadlines, which can creep up on you so fast that you don’t really know that you’ve made a bad decision until the exact moment it turns bad. RA: Especially on fill-in
“[Drawing Golden Age Heroes] Was Sort Of A Dream Of Mine”
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“Looking Ahead At DC” (Left:) Richard Howell, Jack “King” Kirby, & Carol Kalish at a comics convention a few decades ago. Photo courtesy of RH. (Below center:) Howell & Kalish’s New Media company published the comics-related magazine Comic Feature, whose 11th issue (Aug. 1981) heralded the imminent first issue of All-Star Squadron. But, in answer to Rich’s musing in this interview: No, Roy had no plan to keep the exploits of the Justice Society “separate” from what was happening to the rest of the All-Stars… except from time to time when the comic veered off to deal particularly with JSA matters, often events which had occurred in the early-1940s pages of All-Star Comics. Howell probably wound up working primarily on issues that dealt with JSA stories because they were a bit more easily detached from the main story arc. [Heroes TM & © DC Comics.]
issues, because you’re basically working off the last guy’s deadline. HOWELL: The next issue I did was again one of those situations that started when Carol and I were getting ready to go to the San Diego Comic-Con and Roy called me to ask if I could swing by the house. He had something important that he wanted to talk to me about. So, we went to his place, which was quite nice. He told me that he had another issue of All-Star Squadron that was to feature the Justice Society, mostly. It was mainly centered on Liberty Belle, telling a story which Wonder Woman was transcribing, or maybe it was the other way around. Anyways, there were chapters for individual characters. I remember The Atom fighting various Japanese stereotypes. The thing was that either DC had changed the deadlines or Roy was running a little late and he just wanted to get it done. So, I spent the entire San Diego Comic-Con that year up in the hotel room, drawing pages for All-Star Squadron #30 [Feb. 1984]. I think Carol had to keep telling people, “Yes, Richard’s here. Maybe he’ll get
A Fate-ful Encounter (Left:) Jerry Ordway’s cover for All-Star Squadron #27 (Nov. 1983), which apparently was drawn before Richard Howell had penciled the issue… a departure from the way editor Roy Thomas usually operated. Courtesy of the GCD. (Above:) Inside #27, as penciled and inked by Howell, Dr. Fate does indeed find The Spectre—and realizes he’s about to be caught up in a battle for his life! Script by Roy Thomas. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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Richard Howell Talks About His Time On All-Star Squadron
HOWELL: I would not disagree with that. Sometimes he looks like Neal Adams, sometimes he looks like Jack Kirby. There are a lot of jobs that one would not immediately identify as Rich Buckler’s work. Arvell Jones’ work is quite different. I actually may have over-inked his work on that second issue—the two-issue arc involved the Justice Society meeting The Marvel Family. Basically, Roy didn’t object if I made Mary Marvel look a lot more like [1940s Fawcett artist] Jack Binder’s version, while Captain Marvel Jr. I inked in the Mac Raboy style. I didn’t try to make Captain Marvel himself look the way C.C. Beck drew him. That would have been a tonal shift that wouldn’t have worked with the other characters. It would have taken the reader right out of the story. RA: He probably would have had to look more like the Jerry Ordway version.
The Kulak Archipelago Howell’s splash page for All-Star Squadron #28 (Dec. 1983), as inked by French artist Gerard Forton. Script by RT. [TM & © DC Comics.]
the chance to come down and talk to people. Who knows?” [laughs] I didn’t get much of a chance, however. I did get the book finished up, though. RA: How many pages did you end up doing for that issue? HOWELL: I don’t know. I think I might have done the whole issue. RA: The reason I ask is that the credits in the Grand Comicbook Database list you and Mike Machlan as the pencilers and then Machlan and Sam Dela Rosa as the inkers. HOWELL: I distinctly remember that the pages I penciled, Mike Machlan inked. They were very crisp—kind of Kirbyese. I don’t remember him penciling any of the book, but I have a tendency to forget what other people do on a book that I’m involved in. There could have been a framing sequence that Mike penciled and Dela Rosa inked. I don’t know. I also contributed to two other issues—#36-37. This wasn’t the All-Star Squadron itself but actually featured the Justice Society. One of those, #36 [Aug. 1984], featured pencils by Rich Buckler, and the other’s pencils were by Arvell Jones, and I inked them both. Dealing with the two different artists made for an interesting contrast. RA: Rich Buckler was something of a chameleon. You’d usually associate him with someone like Neal Adams, but I’ve seen art of his that looked very similar to George Pérez and even Joe Kubert. When you’re thinking of Joe Kubert, you’re usually not thinking Rich Buckler could imitate him.
The Rising Son Richard penciled the second nigh-half of All-Star Squadron #30 (Feb. 1984), a yarn begun by Mike Machlan, who found that penciling a monthly title was more than he could handle at that stage and switched to inking Howell’s pencils before he moved on to other projects. That issue adapted the “Justice Society of America” adventure from All-Star Comics #12 (Aug.-Sept. 1942), the second post-Pearl Harbor issue, which dealt with Japan’s legendary (but apparently real) Black Dragon Society. While wartime prejudices against Japanese and even Japanese-Americans were on display in the original wartime story, the U.S.-born Nisei in the “Atom” chapter was a sympathetic character, so all writer Roy Thomas had to do was re-cast the dialogue a bit. [TM & © DC Comics.]
“[Drawing Golden Age Heroes] Was Sort Of A Dream Of Mine”
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Six From Column “DC,” Three From Column “F,” One From Column “Q” (Left:) The World War II Superman and Captain Marvel battle it out in the skies above London in this page inked by Howell over Rich Buckler pencils in All-Star Squadron #36 (Aug. 1984). Contrary to Richard’s remembrances, though, this wasn’t a JSA story as such, but had been designed by writer/editor Roy T. to feature DC’s top six super-heroes of the era (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman), Fawcett’s top three (The Marvel Family), and Quality’s top one (Plastic Man—not counting the even better-selling Blackhawk as a super-hero). (Right:) Arvell Jones picked up where Buckler left off, as per this splash page for #37 (Sept. ’84), inked by Howell. It features all the super-heroes listed in the preceding paragraph except Captain Marvel, who was then off somewhere under the control of the Nazis. Script by RT. [TM & © DC Comics.]
HOWELL: I don’t think that version existed at the time. Although I think Ordway did do the covers for the two issues in question. RA: He inked both covers, but the penciling was by Rich Buckler and Rick Hoberg, respectively. HOWELL: Ordway did draw the covers of #27 and 28, but those didn’t feature Captain Marvel. They had been done and ready to go before I went to work on the interiors. Jerry, as many pencilers have been known to do, used a mystical background in the style of Steve Ditko on the cover of #27 and I personally would have gone in another direction, I think, but I thought, “Nope, this is what’s on the cover, so I’ll follow it!” and went with that. I was actually scolded one time in print for swiping Steve Ditko designs for that issue. [laughs] RA: Swiping isn’t the worst thing an artist can do while trying to make a deadline. When Dick Ayers had to draw Doctor Doom, he nearly always swiped from Jack Kirby. Probably because Kirby drew so many panels of Doom. Esteban Maroto swiped for, I think, a “Dax” story from John Buscema’s design for a wizard from an old issue of either Tower of
Shadows or Chamber of Darkness. HOWELL: Oh? That’s kinda cool. After that two-parter, I drew #40—which, for once, actually involved the All-Star Squadron. [laughs] RA: Did you have a hard time drawing all those characters? I’m looking at some of the issues and there’s as many as thirty different characters—not just the All-Star Squadron and the Justice Society but villains those two groups would have fought as well. HOWELL: As long as I had reference art, I could manage to arrange the panel so they looked well-enough designed. I was brought up on, among other things, Mike Sekowsky’s Justice League of America. I know what happens when you need to cram thirty characters into one panel. RA: There’s also work from you on a two-page sequence for All-Star Squadron Annual #3 (Sept. 1984). HOWELL: Oh, that’s true. The individual character chapters for that story were split up and plotted to feature three panels on two
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Richard Howell Talks About His Time On All-Star Squadron
It’s Amazing, Man! The climactic sequence of All-Star Squadron #40 (Dec. 1984) was an epic battle between Amazing-Man and the Real American, a phony patriotic “hero” who actually turned out to be a voice-mesmerizing robot. Script by Roy Thomas; pencils by Richard Howell; inks by Bill Collins. There actually had been a shortlived hero called Real American in wartime Street & Smith comics—and he’ll be seen in the next issue of A/E. Surprisingly, Roy wasn’t aware of that character when he coined the name of the DC baddie, though. [TM & © DC Comics.]
“Venus, If You Will…” (Top right:) In the “Shanghaied from Space” yarn from All-Star Comics #13 (Oct.-Nov. 1942), Wonder Woman battles Solaris, leader of the rebellious males of a rather unscientifically realized planet Venus. Script by William Moulton Marston (following a general plotline by Gardner Fox, whether he admitted it or not); art by H.G. Peter. From Roy T.’s bound volumes. (Right:) Richard Howell interpreted that free-for-all in his chapter of All-Star Squadron #57 (May 1986), in the partly reimagined other-dimensional Venus of “Shanghaied into Hyperspace” continuity in issues #50-60. Script by Roy Thomas—adapted from Marston’s, of course. [TM & © DC Comics.]
“[Drawing Golden Age Heroes] Was Sort Of A Dream Of Mine”
Meanwhile, Back At The Two-Page Spread… As Richard says, he was tapped to pencil (and ink!) this two-page spread for the third and final All-Star Squadron Annual (1984), in which Hawkman, Hawkgirl, The Spectre, The Atom, and Sandman battled villains Alexander the Great (no, not that one), Zor, and Tarantula (no, not that one, either) on June 28, 1941—a date that would turn out to have momentous importance in the tale’s last-page denouement. Script by Roy Thomas. Thanks to Jim Ludwig. [TM & © DC Comics.]
pages by Roy along the lines of “Oh, by the way, Hawkman and Hawkgirl defeat this guy, Starman defeats this guy, The Atom defeats this guy,” and then back to our regularly paneled pages. [chuckles] The last thing I did for All-Star Squadron was near the end of the series, in All-Star Squadron #57 [May 1986]. That was another extra-length issue which featured individual character chapters, and I got to draw the “Wonder Woman” chapter. Speaking of swiping, I did my best H.G. Peter impersonation for that issue. I enjoyed inking my re-do in his style, which is somewhere between fashion design and German woodcuts. [both laugh] It was a delight to draw in that style. I thought it looked great, but there aren’t that many people these days who would buy an H.G. Peter comic. Even in his day, I don’t think Peter’s style was close to the mainstream. RA: That’s a shame, because I remember his art as having day-glo colors that really popped out at you. If he had continued drawing into the 1960s, fans would have gone into raptures for it. His artwork was perfect for day-glo images. The credits on the Grand Comics Database for #57 are rather
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confusing. It appears that Roy was adapting old stories from the 1940s that were being retroactively tied into the Crisis on Infinite Earths series, although the issue itself is not identified on the cover as a Crisis cross-over like most such issues were. The story has been reprinted in the Crisis on Infinite Earths Companion Deluxe Edition (Jan. 2018). Your story was apparently taken from one that originally appeared in All-Star Comics #13 (Oct.-Nov. 1942). That original story was written by Gardner Fox and William Marston and illustrated by H.G. Peter. HOWELL: This would have been a story from early in the Justice Society’s run. I’m pretty sure that Roy splitting up the storyline into different chapters was based on how the story originally appeared. It was rare in the early All-Star Comics that the characters actually fought together as a team. They’d appear in an introduction chapter and then all split up into chapters done by their regular writers and artists for an individual chapter. RA: Even when they took on Solomon Grundy, they’d meet up, agree to take him on, and then all split up to fight him on their own. HOWELL: Yeah, that was great strategy. If Grundy could defeat Green Lantern, he could probably take care of Wildcat or The Atom fairly easily. I also did some inking on an Infinity Inc. Annual [#1, Dec. 1984], but I was never told who the penciler was. I think it might have been Ron Harris. It’s the issue where Green Lantern married the 1940s Harlequin. This Harlequin was a Golden Age Green Lantern villainess/love interest. I got to ink the page where they actually got married. It was a full-page splash. Todd MacFarlane also penciled
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Richard Howell Talks About His Time On All-Star Squadron
artists as possible, which I suspect was as exasperating for the DC brass as it was helpful to us. If he got three pages of pencils, he’d send it on directly to the inker and that meant yet another air-mail bill. I’m sure that he wanted to make sure that he’d make his deadline. He could have had someone else write a couple of fill-in issues for when deadlines were tight, but I suspect he didn’t want to do that. Once I was up at the DC offices and Pat [Bastienne], Dick Giordano’s assistant, said, “Do you know what I got from Roy today?” Now I barely knew Pat, so obviously she just wanted to vent. She shows me what looks like a phone book of air-mail bills and says, “These are all from Roy Thomas.” [both laugh] RA: I certainly would like to thank you for taking the time this morning to do this. HOWELL: It was fun.
And May All Your Problems Be Little Ones! (Yeah, Right!) Richard inked Ron Harris’ pencils on the final page of the 1985 Infinity, Inc. Annual #1, which features the long-delayed marriage of Alan (Green Lantern) Scott and Molly (Harlequin) Maynne, with the Justice Society and Infinity, Inc., in attendance—and maybe a few leftover All-Star Squadron veterans lurking just off-panel, for all we know. A final happy moment—before the Crisis on Infinite Earths spelled trouble, if not downright doom, for both Thomasconceived group comics that Howell had helped illustrate at one time or another. [TM & © DC Comics.]
some of that issue, but I’m 98% sure that I didn’t ink any Todd MacFarlane artwork. RA: That covers all the issues that you worked on. Before we go, do you have any anecdotes that you remember that you’d like to include? HOWELL: Roy insisted on absolute fidelity to all of the Golden Age characters, except when I wanted to put Wonder Woman’s culottes back on. He said “Absolutely not!” [both laugh] I remember this very directly—he said, “No comicbook ever sold worse because it showed more of a woman’s legs.” [chuckles] I don’t think he had any actual statistics to back himself up on. [laughs] Still, it probably is true. Basically, working with Roy was a lot of fun. I never had enough time to do my best work on anything for that series because everything was always overdue by the time that I got it. It did teach me to draw fast, however. Roy did try to make it as easy on the
“More Beautiful Than Aphrodite…” A very nice commission drawing of Wonder Woman by Richard Howell. Courtesy of the artist. [Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.]
“[Drawing Golden Age Heroes] Was Sort Of A Dream Of Mine”
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RICHARD HOWELL Checklist This checklist is adapted primarily from materials contained in the online Who’s Who of American Comic Book 1928-1999, founded by Dr. Jerry G. Bails. Names of features that appeared both in magazines with that title and in other publications are generally not italicized below. Key: (w) = writer; (p) = pencil; (i) = ink; (e) editor
Future Tense Rich as seen on a YouTube video a few years ago—surrounded by his cover art for The All-Star Index (published by ICG in Feb. 1987) and the cover of the first issue (Oct. ’85) of one of the Marvel projects for which he’s most remembered, the second The Vision and The Scarlet Witch limited series (he both inked and penciled the two preceding items)—plus his Jim Mooneyinked cover for Deadbeats #72 (June 2005), from the long-running Claypool Comics series he created, writes, and pencils. [JSA TM & © DC Comics; V&SW cover TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; Deadbeats cover TM & © Richard Howell.]
Name & Vital Stats: Richard Howell (b. 1955) – artist, writer, editor, publisher, colorist, letterer Education: Harvard University Family in Arts: Life partner Carol Kalish Influences: Charles Dickens, Jack Kirby, Leonard Starr, Milton Caniff Member: CAPA-alpha 1982-86; UFO c. 1980 Performing Arts: Musician & vocalist – coffeehouse circuit 1974-76 Comics in Other Media: Birth of the Atomic Bomb (p)(i) 1986; Lane Mastodon (p)(i) 1986 (both with computer games) Desperado/Eastern: Portia Prinz of Glamazons (w)(p)(i) 1977 Infocom: The Adventures of Lane Mastodon (p) 1986; Lane Mastodon (p)(i) 1986 & cover; Quest for Knowledge series (p)(i) 1986
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Richard Howell Talks About His Time On All-Star Squadron
Lantern Corps (p) 1983; Hawkman (p) 1985-87; illustrations (p)(i) 1984-85; Infinity, Inc. (i) 1985-86; Superman & Hawkman (p) 1986; Who’s Who in the DC Universe (p)(i) 1985-87 series Disney Productions: Dinosaurs (p) 1993 Eclipse Enterprises: Alien Encounters (p)(i) 1986; Amber (p) 1983-84, 1986; covers (p)(i) 1984-87; DNAgents (p) 1984-86; Liberty Project (p) (i) 1987-88; Merchants of Death (i) 1988; Portia Prinz (w)(p)(i) 1986-87; support (letterer) 1982 on own features; text (w) 1986 Harris Publications: backup feature in Vampirella (i) 1991-92; Creepy: The Classic Years (e) 1991; introduction (w) 1991; support (e) (lettering) 1991-92 Marvel Comics: Avengers (p) 1990; Conan (p) 1983; covers (p)(i) 1983-90; Coyote (p)(i) 1984-85; The Dark Crystal (i) 1982; Hellcat and Son of Satan (w)(p) 1991; Indiana Jones (p) 1983; Inhumans (p) 1984, 1990; Iron Man (p) 1990; Marvel Universe (p) 1983, 1985-86; Moon Knight (p) 1983; Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (p) c. 1985; Open Space (i) 1990; Power Man and Iron Fist (plot) (p) 1984; Rick Jones (w)(p)(i) 1990; Scarlet Witch (w)(p)(i) 1990-91; Spider-Man (plot)(p) 1990; support (e) 1985; support (lettering) (coloring) on own features; The Vision and The Scarlet Witch (p) 1985-86; What If? (w)(p) 1990; Willie Lumpkin (p) 1989; Wolverine (w)(p)(i) 1990-91
Onward & Upward!
COMMISSIONS ARE AVAILABLE
This house ad in 1986’s All-Star Squadron #60 (among various other DC issues) shows that Richard Howell would be continuing his association with such heroes as Hawkman—only in his second (so-called “Silver Age”) incarnation, in a new ongoing Hawkman series. Inks by Dick Giordano. [TM & © DC Comics.]
Comico the Comic Company: covers & illustrations (p)(i) 1988; Jonny Quest (p) 1988; support (colorist) 1988 Elite Comics (Independent Comics Group): cover (p)(i) Official Hawkman Index; cover (p)(i) 1986; The All-Star Index & Official Legion of Super-Heroes Index (p)(i) 1987 New Media Publishing: Adventure Illustrated (w) c. 1981; editorial (w) 1982; support (e) 1981-82 COMICBOOKS (U.S. Mainstream Publishers): Dark Horse Comics: Creepy: The Limited Series (i) 1992 DC Comics: All-Star Squadron (p)(i) 1983-86; Blackhawk (p)(i) 1990; Blackhawk Detached Service Diary (p)(i) 1994; covers (p) (i) 1985-87; Firestorm (p) 1988; Green Lantern (w)(p) 1988; Green
[Scarlet Witch TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]
Claypool Comics: covers (p)(i) 1993-94; Deadbeats (w)(p)(e) 1993-2007; Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (w)(p)(i) 1993-94, (e) 1993; Fear City (w)(p) 1993-94; Phantom of Fear City (e) 1993-94; Soulsearchers and Company (plot)(e) 1993-99
from
RICHARD HOWELL B&W Cameos: $50-75 Color Cameos: $85-125 B&W Full Figure: $150 Color Full Figure: $200
RHOWELL@nj.rr.com Personalizations also an option!
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Part Three
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“Something Different Or Distinct From The Justice Society…” A Conversation with JERRY ORDWAY About The 1980s All-Star Squadron Conducted & Transcribed by Richard J. Arndt
Jerry Ordway was obviously feeling in a “Three Stooges” mood at a comics convention a few years back. Also seen is his first full-art cover for All-Star Squadron (#19, March 1983)—the first issue, likewise, in which he penciled the story as well as inking it. Thanks to the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © DC Comics.]
I
NTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Jerry Ordway (born Nov. 18, 1947) is one of the mainstays of modern comic artists/writers. His artwork reminds one a bit of the classic work of Curt Swan; and, like Swan, he had a long run on DC’s various Superman titles, as inker, writer, penciler, and full artist. After appearances in various fanzines in the mid-late 1970s, he entered professional comics in 1980 at DC, inking the likes of Carmine Infantino, Joe Staton, Dave Cockrum, and Trevor Von Eeden. With writer Roy Thomas, he helped launch All-Star Squadron, the principal subject of this interview, in 1981. He also co-created Infinity, Inc. with his friend Mike Machlan and Roy & Dann Thomas in 1983. He inked the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths over George Pérez’s pencils in 1985-1986. In 1987 he helped re-launch Superman, in the pages of The Adventures of Superman, with writer Marv Wolfman. In fact, he spent nine years straight drawing, inking, and penciling (sometimes all three) on various Superman titles. He was the co-writer of the “Death of Superman” storyline in 1992. He has also drawn such characters as Batman, the original Captain Marvel (Shazam!), Wonder Woman, The Human Bomb, Challengers of the Unknown, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and many others. Additionally, he has worked for Marvel, WaRP Graphics, AC Comics, Charlton Comics, Paragon Publications, Eclipse Comics, and Dark Horse Comics. One of his more recent accomplishments has been a stunning adaptation of one of Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology chapters for a Dark Horse comic. This interview took place on April 22, 2021. RICHARD ARNDT: We’re welcoming Jerry Ordway, to talk about his work on All-Star Squadron and, to a lesser extent, Infinity, Inc. How did you get involved with the All-Star Squadron, as your inking work there came before your pencil work on Infinity, Inc.? All-Star was set in the 1940s, correct? JERRY ORDWAY: Yes. It was a separate group from the Justice Society. I think Roy Thomas probably knows more about the reasoning behind that than I do. I suspect he wanted to do something different or distinct from the Justice Society. I mean, nobody is a bigger Justice Society fan than Roy is. Fans have often asked me why the book wasn’t just the Justice Society, but I think it really was Roy, and not DC in particular, who probably wanted it to be distinct from the Justice Society.
The way I look at it is that All-Star Squadron reminded me very much of what Roy did when he took over The Avengers from Stan Lee. At that time, he wound up inheriting the B-Team. Not the Avengers that everyone remembers from the early days, but the much-weaker team of Captain America, Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver. Goliath and the Wasp had returned by
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
Drawing Comics The Ordway This commission drawing was done for collector John Burk; colored by Ian Sokoliwski. Our thanks for permission to print it here. It features some of the DC heroes Jerry Ordway drew for All-Star Squadron, Infinity Inc., and Shazam! Because Jerry has been interviewed a time or three before for Alter Ego, and those pieces were usually festooned with his covers and interior artwork, Ye Editor elected this time around to illustrate this offering partly with Jerry’s gorgeous commission work, most of it never printed before. Thanks to Jerry for permission to do so. Aficionados desiring to commission an illustration can reach him on Twitter @JerryOrdway. [Heroes TM & © DC Comics.]
the time Roy took over, but no Iron Man, no Thor. Roy gradually added in Hercules and whoever to bring up the power level for The Avengers; but, from a reader’s point of view, I thought the concept of a team based on members that were the B-level heroes, the concept that Roy revisited in All-Star Squadron, was brilliant. In fact, Roy took characters from DC that weren’t even the B-Team, but really the C-Team—characters like Robotman, Johnny Quick, and Liberty Belle—and made them the centerpiece of the group. He gave them backstories and characterizations and made the fans of the book care about these super-heroes, who’d previously been considered pretty minor characters. Roy’s take on those characters has really provided the background for other writers to continue to use them right up to today. RA: I have to admit I wasn’t even aware there was a Robotman in the 1940s, as the only one I knew by that name was the character from Doom Patrol. ORDWAY: Yeah, that’s probably the character most fans remembered. The good thing for me as a fan was that I bought all
the DC books from, I guess the mid-1970s, when they were doing the reprints in the books when all the titles were 48 pages for 25 cents. To fill up those extra pages they used reprints of some pretty obscure stuff. That was good for me as a fan, because it filled me in on characters that I never even knew existed, many of them drawn by artists I loved. The “Johnny Quick” reprints had artwork by Mort Meskin, and that was kind of cool. I think Roy gave those 1940s characters new life, just by developing them into a team where Johnny Quick was being kind of a smart-ass, The Shining Knight was a sort-of cross between Captain America and Thor in a way, and Robotman being annoyed by pretty much all the rest of them. There was a similar dynamic to what Roy had done in those inherited mid-1960s Avengers characters before he either created or settled on his own semi-regular bunch of heroes, many of whom were not the ones that Stan [Lee] had passed on to Roy. RA: I don’t think a lot of people realize that the Hawkman and Hawkgirl of the 1940s and the Hawkman and Hawkgirl of the 1960s on through 1986 were quite different from each other, no matter how alike their costumes looked. ORDWAY: Oh, yeah. And all the 1940s characters that appeared in All-Star on a regular basis were characters that hadn’t been carried on or reinvented by DC in the Silver or Bronze Ages. The 1940s Hawkman was a reincarnation character, whose powers came from ancient Egypt. The Hawkman of the 1960s was a Thanagarian police officer—an alien from another planet. I think that the Egyptianbased, reincarnated Hawkman of the All-Star Squadron came in when people, readers, were becoming interested or re-interested in
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Roy also did something with Plastic Man that I don’t think had been done with him before. In one story, Roy had Plastic Man change himself into a duplicate of Winston Churchill to foil an assassination plot. In effect, giving Plastic Man shape-shifting powers. I was inking the strip at that point and I remember thinking, “Wow! I didn’t know Plastic Man could do that!” Still, it kinda made sense that he could. [chuckles] RA: Well, Plastic Man had impersonated inanimate objects before, things like tables, chairs and lamps. ORDWAY: Yes, but drawing a hero impersonating someone else so that impersonation looks close enough to a viewer to be mistaken for the actual person is different from impersonating a chair. [chuckles] That chair will never be as detailed as that person. When I started on All-Star Squadron, I was the finisher, which is an amped-up version of an inker. I started working over rough
All-Star Six-Pack This commission piece by Jerry O. seems to have been printed like a comicbook page. It features three of the actual Golden Age, non-JSA heroes that writer Roy Thomas wound up playing up the most: Liberty Belle, Johnny Quick, and Robotman—alongside Dr. Fate, The Atom, and Hourman (the latter, by the time of the events of the 1980s comic, was no longer a JSA member). Thanks to Jerry for permission to reprint this image. [TM & © DC Comics.]
things like reincarnation and archeology again. Probably from the Indiana Jones movies. RA: The first Indiana Jones movie—Raiders of the Lost Ark—and the first issue of All-Star Squadron came out at almost the same time. ORDWAY: Those notions of mystical objects that still hold massive power today became a very popular story hook for writers in a very short period of time. The 1940s DC characters were much more in the vein of being archeologists and fortune-hunters/adventurers than the average 1970s characters were. RA: A lot of those 1940s characters got their inspirations from pulps like The Shadow and comic strips like Terry and the Pirates. ORDWAY: Those same sources influenced the 1930s-1940s movie serials as well. Including Plastic Man in the group, who was originally from an entirely different company altogether, was, I think, a nice move. [NOTE: Quality Comics Group. —RA.] He was kind of a wacky character—kind of the comedy relief in All-Star.
Watching Him Like A Hawk, Man (Above:) A sketch of the Golden Age Hawkman by Jerry Ordway—apparently drawn in 1981, when he was “merely” inking and embellishing All-Star Squadron. (Right:) The Silver Age Hawkman has, since the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985-86, become the official “look” of the character, with a one-beaked helmet and a hawk emblem on his chest. While the original Winged Wonder was an archeologist, the one introduced in 1961 was a scientist from the planet Thanagar. Thanks to JO. [Hawkman TM & © DC Comics.]
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
The fun part for me, in doing All-Star, was that I grew up in Milwaukee, where my mom was over forty when I was born. I was always surrounded by older people. She had a tavern and we lived in the back. The tavern catered to mostly old retired guys, who lived in rooming houses in the neighborhood. Mom had the tavern open from 7:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night. These guys were there from the beginning to the end. That’s where they hung out—their daily routine. All these guys had stories. They’d all fought in either World War I or II. The young guys were from WWII. I grew up surrounded by ancient slang. Damon Runyon-ese slang. I felt I was very well-suited to drawing All-Star because of that background. All the guys in the tavern still wore the same type of clothes they’d worn back in the day. They all wore hats. Those old battered-looking fedoras. I was accustomed to that sort of look. Whenever I’d meet somebody in the business who came from an earlier era, they’d always go, “Oh, I thought you were an older guy!” [chuckles] I’d ask them why, and they’d say that my style harkened back to the older stuff. I thought that was kind of cool, but it also made me think of how people make assumptions about you based on your work that aren’t necessarily quite accurate. With All-Star I was actually trying to go the opposite of the Neal Adams style. That very contemporary look, the look of my generation, that he had developed.
Stretching A Point Actually, as shown by these panels from All-Star Squadron #7 (March 1982), what Jerry recalls as the exploding “Churchill” in that storyline was actually a booby-trapped robot—and it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt that FBI agent Plastic Man had been impersonating. In truth, while Jerry’s too young to remember it, the Golden Age Plas did occasionally assume the shape of other human beings, though he was indeed more frequently a table, a rug, or a kite. Script by Roy Thomas; pencils by Adrian Gonzales; inks (and a bit more) by Jerry Ordway. [TM & © DC Comics.]
pencils by Rich Buckler, and then, with #6, over rough pencils by Adrian Gonzales. [Previous to that] I had wanted to pencil, and I ended up getting an assignment to do an eight- or ten-page backup series, both pencils and inks, featuring “The Creeper,” that was to appear in Flash. I just wanted the opportunity to pencil. At that time, I was trying to convince DC to let me do that, and the editor on The Flash thought I could accomplish that on a backup strip. I figured that if I did pencils & inks on “The Creeper,” I’d have to quit All-Star Squadron. I probably couldn’t make as much money doing that ten-pager, but it was easier than trying to convince DC that I could handle a 24- or 25-page book, which was the page count for story content at the time. RA: Actually, at the time DC’s books were 25-27 pages while Marvel’s were 21-22 pages. ORDWAY: A lot of the early All-Star Squadron books varied from 25 to 27 at the time. That length gave the DC books, especially the single-hero titles, the ability to allow the longer lead story to have a backup story featuring a character who didn’t have his or her own book at the time. So, I was going to do “The Creeper,” and I told Len Wein, who was the All-Star editor at the time, that I was going to quit All-Star Squadron. He said, “Instead of doing that, why don’t you pencil All-Star Squadron?” I didn’t want to have the current penciler [Adrian Gonzales] lose his job, and Len said “Oh, don’t worry! I’ll keep him busy. I want to shift him over to Arak,” which was another book Roy was writing. So, as long as the previous penciler wasn’t losing his job, I was fine with penciling the book.
Group Effort Jerry’s first work as full penciler on All-Star Squadron was this splash page for #19, on which the heroes charge out to the borough of Queens, to the site of the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair grounds. On Earth-Two, unlike on our sphere, the Fair’s Trylon, Perisphere, and statues of the Four Freedoms were still standing a year and a half after it closed. Script by RT. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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ORDWAY: That’s true. It’s probably the same for you and me. I can remember certain storylines that I read when I was ten years old and they just imprint on you in some way. I think that’s one of the reasons I agreed to do All-Star Squadron. Not the only reason but a good reason. I mean, Roy Thomas! Roy was my comicbook hero because of his run on The Avengers. That was my favorite Marvel comic when I was a kid. RA: I think that Avengers run had that effect on a lot of readers. It’s still echoing through the movies, some fifty years later. ORDWAY: I remember an Avengers issue where there was a big argument between Hawkeye and Captain America. It was really intense and I remember thinking, “These guys are just like me and my brother. Fighting over something stupid.” That sort of fight over something trivial didn’t happen all that often in comics. RA: The Fantastic Four were family, even if they weren’t all related to each other. The Justice League seemed to get along pretty well. But The Avengers seemed to hate each other at times. They had rude nicknames for each other sometimes, too. “Winghead” for Captain America is a good example. In fact, I think that was probably started by Hawkeye.
“People… People Who Need People…” Jerry didn’t get all that many opportunities to draw ordinary early-1940s Americans in the street, but when he did, they looked right! Men wore hats, women had the right hairdos, and, realistically, many of the cars were 1930s models. From All-Star Squadron #22 (June 1983). Script by RT; inks by Mike Machlan. [TM & © DC Comics.]
RA: You’re right. If I was going strictly by your style, at least at that point, I would have been thinking more Curt Swan than Neal Adams as an influence. ORDWAY: I just remember, very distinctly, that when I took on All-Star Squadron, Rich Buckler was still doing the Neal Adams swipes. I really didn’t want the book to look like a Neal Adams comic. I was convinced it should look like a 1940s book. I specifically used my artistic reference point as more Wally Wood or Will Eisner. I thought that would give the book a kind of style. RA: A sort of “everything old is new again” approach. ORDWAY: You know, in television, the easiest way to establish time and place isn’t just focusing on clothes or cars. It’s haircuts. If you’re doing a show about the 1930s and your characters have 1970s haircuts, it pulls you, even if you don’t really register it, a little, and sometimes a lot, out of the story. Same thing in comics. If you’re doing a story set in historical times, you need to approach it with the idea that it needs to look right. Not contemporary, but true to the time period. You can’t do it all, not on a monthly comic, but I think the fans appreciate you taking the extra effort to achieve some of that look—a correct-for-the-time-period look. I actually think that approach has helped with the longevity of the books I’ve worked on. That fans still like them and still seek them out years after the fact. I hear from people about that from time to time. An artist, Bryan Hitch, always tells me how important my debut penciling gig on that 1940s Green Lantern story in All-Star was to him. I don’t know what age he was at when he first read it, but it was apparently an important story for him. RA: Sometimes you’re not aware, until years after the fact, how something, often some little thing, in comics has really affected you.
ORDWAY: All that jockeying for position that they were doing. All that “I’m the son of a god. Don’t argue with me.” Tony Stark as the head of a multi-billion-dollar company and having to deal with a hot-head like Quicksilver who didn’t respond to orders very well. That was the appeal of the group. They were a team, but they weren’t necessarily good buddies. That made it lively and more real. They’ll fight together but they may not hang out together. [laughs] I think that kind of storytelling works better in the long run. It wasn’t long after I started penciling All-Star that I started hearing about Infinity, Inc. By 1983, Mike Machlan, who was inking All-Star Squadron over my pencils, and I had started getting involved with Infinity, Inc. Both of us were working on that title well in advance of its appearance. Mike was going to pencil it and I was going to be the inker. We worked on the design of the characters over a period of time. DC flew both Mike and myself to New York. I was still living in Wisconsin at the time. Roy and Dann had also come into New York, and DC put
Avengers Assemble! A color commission illo of Iron Man done in 2012— just to remind us all that Jerry later drew for Marvel, too! [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
for a lot of characters. I don’t think, early on, that anything was set in stone. Both Jade and Obsidian came about after a lot of back-and-forth between all of us. The Silver Scarab was also a late addition to the group. I remember having to go back in to draw him on an already completed cover where the group was introduced. [NOTE: All-Star Squadron #25 (Sept. 1983). —RA.]
Mike Machlan is a co-creator (along with Jerry Ordway, Roy Thomas, and unofficially Dann Thomas) of Infinity, Inc., the comicbook about the sons, daughters, and heirs of the original Justice Society of America. The foreground figures on the cover of issue #1 were penciled by Mike. Jerry inked those, while an earlier re-creation by JO of the JSA cover image from All-Star Comics #3 (Winter 1940) was used as the background. [TM & © DC Comics.]
us up. All of us were supposed to meet with Julie Schwartz to plan out the debut of the group. Originally that debut was intended to be in DC Comics Presents, which was a Superman [team-up] title at the time. That debut was supposedly all set, when something happened during the meeting and that appearance fell apart. Plan B was Roy saying “Well, we’ll just introduce them in All-Star Squadron. It makes more sense there, but the debut won’t have as big an audience for the introduction.” We just had to make do with the situation, as the original idea had fallen through. RA: Infinity, Inc., unlike All-Star Squadron or Justice Society, was set in the 1980s. A lot of the characters were new, and the 1980s Justice Society basically acted as a shadow outfit behind what was going on in Infinity, Inc. ORDWAY: Roy and Dann’s idea was that Infinity, Inc.’s relationship to the ‘80s version of Justice Society was a generational thing. The offspring of some of the Justice Society characters would form a group. There was a core group in mind, but Mike and I did sketches
The Sons [And Daughters] Also Rise When plans fell apart to introduce Infinity, Inc., in the ongoing title DC Comics Presents (Roy recalls it as being mainly because editor Julius Schwartz had planned out his contents many, many issues ahead and was unwilling to bend his schedule), the new group was instead introduced via time travel in All-Star Squadron #25 (Sept. 1983). As Jerry recalls, he had to add The Silver Scarab to the cover after the rest of it had been drawn—because the Golden Age Hawkman’s son hadn’t yet been created when it was originally assigned! Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.] For the full, unfettered background of Infinity, Inc. #1, including sketches of some of the young heroes who didn’t quite make the cut, scout up a copy of Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #1 (1999), later reprinted in the (probably also out of print) Alter Ego Collection, Vol. 1 (2006)—or in The All-Star Companion, Vol. 4 (2009)— all from TwoMorrows Publishing.
Some of my memories from that time, especially about the group’s debut, are a little shaky because Mike was going to pencil. He would be the guy who had the back-and-forth with Roy and Dann over character design and whatnot. I was seeing what Mike was doing for character sketches and, since I knew I wouldn’t be penciling it, I probably wasn’t paying as close attention as I would otherwise. RA: That situation clearly changed before the first issue of Infinity, Inc. came out, because the artist line-up is the exact opposite of what you just described. ORDWAY: What happened was, I’d already had a time frame where I would stop penciling All-Star Squadron, which was actually the end of the All-Star Squadron, Justice Society, and Infinity, Inc. time-travel storyline, which ran through All-Star Squadron #25-26 and ended in All-Star Squadron Annual #2. Then I was going to draw the America
“Something Different Or Distinct From The Justice Society...”
vs. The Justice Society mini-series. Mike was going to pencil Infinity, Inc. and someone else was going to be taking over All-Star Squadron. Something happened where Infinity, Inc. was a little delayed, because I remember drawing an All-Star Squadron fill-in, featuring the Seven Soldiers of Victory [#29] while Mike was doing another All-Star Squadron fill-in [#30]. I think at that point that Roy, maybe with Dick Giordano, decided that Mike would not pencil Infinity, Inc., because he was going really slowly on the All-Star Squadron fill-in. They were concerned about launching a book with a first-time penciler who was under the gun. Was he going to make a monthly deadline if he was having trouble making a fill-in deadline? So we just shifted. I took over penciling Infinity, Inc. while Mike inked me. I was no longer going to draw the America vs. The Justice Society mini-series. I think, regarding the fill-in issue, that it was just a case of Roy, and maybe Dick, giving Mike the chance to prove he could make those monthly deadlines. What I heard was that he just wasn’t able to work fast enough, and that worried editorial. People forget that in those days you weren’t allowed to miss deadlines. [chuckles] Those books had to come out on time; otherwise, the publisher had to pay a late fee to the printer. If you screwed up, it required someone to come in at the last minute to save your bacon. That didn’t reflect well on you as a creator. If you got a reputation as someone who couldn’t make deadlines, that could follow you for a long time.
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editorial even more nervous about every issue being on time. They figured that the fans in the shops would be even more fickle about picking up a new book as opposed to someone just leafing through a newsstand comic. RA: They were probably right on that score. Comic fans who’d moved to buying only direct market titles were very vocal and dismissive about late books and the artistic line-ups being correct on advertised books in general, since many of them were pre-ordering. ORDWAY: DC was also launching a lot of direct-only titles at that time as well. Teen Titans moved from a strictly newsstand book to a direct market deluxe version and a newsstand book, initially each of them having different contents. The deluxe direct market version had the promise of better royalties. Titles like Legion of Super-Heroes, Omega Men, and Batman and The Outsiders went direct market-only. Now, Jim Aparo could make his deadlines on the Outsiders like clockwork. I believe Pérez, though, bailed on the newsstand Titans books at some point earlier than they’d planned, because drawing two monthly books of a single title was just too much. Pérez was drawing the deluxe, direct-market one because it was on better paper, printed offset, and there was a promise of better royalties, on a book that looked nicer than the newsstand titles. There was still a need to hit a sales threshold. I think a newsstand book had to hit 100,000 before royalties cut in, while directmarket books had to hit 75,000, which sounds crazy when you consider sales figures now. Your page rate was considered an advance on your royalties, so you didn’t get your royalties until you earned your page rate back. To do that you really did have to sell 100,000 copies before you edged
They were also launching these books as direct market titles, not newsstand or newsstand/direct market titles. The titles were going directly to comics stores. That made
Round & Round & Round We Go… The art assignments for the Roy-Thomas-written-and-edited DC mags were a game of musical chairs around the end of 1983, with Jerry Ordway penciling All-Star Squadron #29 (Jan. ’84)… Mike Machlan penciling the first half of #30 (Feb. ’84) and inking the last half… and, while he and Mike were switching roles on the projected Infinity, Inc. title, Jerry bowed out of drawing the America vs. The Justice Society mini-series, although he still illustrated the covers of all four issues of the latter series when they came out in late 1984/ early ’85. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
I think they were trying to deliver books to the direct-market that were fan-favorites—that would appeal to hardcore fans, while the newsstand books were aimed at the general public. I don’t know if Roy was aiming the actual book in that direction. Perhaps he heard of marketing’s aims in that direction and said, “Hey, I want in.” I’m not sure how that whole thing got started. It was weird, though, because at the time comic stores were not the only place to get comics. But it was the only place you could get Infinity, Inc. You have to remember that, in those days, there weren’t as many comic shops around. Even after the shrinkage of comic shops that you’ve seen for the last decade or more, there are still more comic shops now than there were in 1983-84. RA: By that time, I was buying a lot of my comics in comic shops, mostly because that was where you knew you’d find the independent publishers’ titles. I was a lot more interested in Zot!, American Flagg, or Jonny Quest that I was in anything from Marvel and DC. ORDWAY: I remember a comic shop in Milwaukee that started up in 1978 or so. He sold direct-market and newsstand books, and there wasn’t such a desperation to buy the books on a weekly basis. You could get a comic shop to hold your books and you could come in once a month to buy any comic, regardless of whether it was
These Kids Today! The Golden Age Green Lantern with his twin offspring (by the villainess called Thorn), Jade and Obsidian, in a commission drawing by Ordway. Both the youngsters have appeared in live-action TV series (Legends of Tomorrow and Stargirl, respectively)… and may well get together on-screen yet! Thanks to Pedro Angosto. [TM & © DC Comics.]
into getting actual royalties. For many books, that was a difficult target to hit. When DC set up those deluxe books, they set them up in more of a traditional book-publishing design rather than the way comics had traditionally been sold. The page rate wasn’t a flat fee. It was considered an advance. RA: That is a fair way to approach that, since it followed what was being done with regular print books and writers. Your advance was called an “advance” because it was a part of your royalties that was paid to you on acceptance of the work. ORDWAY: It was fair, but the downside of that system was that they overestimated the size of the market. Especially when they were putting books only in the direct market. I think that they thought those books would sell more. Some did, but many did not. The way it actually worked out for most direct-market books was the first issue paid some decent royalties, the second considerably less, and after that it was basically page rate only. Some books started out newsstand, went to direct-market, and then back to newsstand. I think Infinity, Inc. ran its entire run, four years or so, as a direct-market book only. It began before Crisis and continued after Crisis. From a creator point-of-view it was a situation where we had some creator equity for licensing and a lot of little clauses in the contract that you wouldn’t have seen in a regular newsstand book.
“All-Stars Assemble!” For this exciting 2013 commission illo casting Justice Society heroes (all of them also members of the All-Star Squadron, natch) against an Injustice Society foursome, Jerry was asked to utilize Sal Buscema’s layout for The Avengers #70 (Nov. 1969). [Characters TM & © DC Comics.]
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would sell out first, and then you’d wait until the next week or so to purchase anything else. That’s how I shopped. RA: When the two main companies—DC and Marvel—really got into the direct market, I think they flooded the market. Not only to establish themselves as the leading force in that market, but also to drive out of the business many of the new independent companies. Anybody buying Eclipse, Pacific, Comico, First, and other independent books, especially since they were higher priced, was dropping one or even two Marvel or DC titles to buy one of those comics. ORDWAY: The stores were buying the books in advance, and there were no returns so no huge overprinting as there were in newsstand books, both of which were a new thing in comics, but there, as you said, was a finite budget—not only for the reader but for the store owner. If Marvel puts out five books that the store owner thinks will sell better than any DC book, they’re going to buy more of the Marvel, and somebody, somewhere, is not going to get more of their title bought. Not just DC, but the independent companies as well. There was a lot of competition for the comic buyer’s dollar.
Nowadays They’d Just Call Them The “G.O.A.T.”! Jerry’s painted cover for the epoch-marking 1990 hardcover collection The Greatest Golden Age Stories Ever Told—whose success no doubt helped point the way to the launching of the (sadly mostly discontinued) DC Archives series, the much-longer-lived Marvel Masterworks line, and the ever-ongoing explosion of reprinted stories from the late 1930s up through the day before yesterday! [TM & © DC Comics.]
direct-market or newsstand, that you asked to be saved, instead of that need to know the delivery day in various newsstand-type stories so you’d be there on time to get the comics that you wanted. Otherwise, you’d miss an issue. RA: You’re right on that. I had to go to at least five different stores each week to get different titles, before comic shops came into vogue. Black&-white magazines were in one store, others were in a supermarket, yet more in the big drugstore in town, and still more in a couple of mom & pop stores. Nothing was in one place. Everybody I knew who loved comics knew the day that new comics were put out on the racks—late Tuesday and all-day Wednesday. You left time in your schedule to visit such stores where you needed to find your favorite books and check out the new ones. Comic shops not only shrunk that down to one store, but they also tended to have a lot of stuff that you’d maybe heard of, but never had the chance to read, because the newsstands in your area didn’t carry them. Also, you were introduced to a lot more adult titles—and by that I don’t mean porn comics, although I’m not excluding those either—but titles that had more to offer in content than just the monthly slugfest. ORDWAY: Right. And most people had a finite budget to buy comics. Your first purchase would always be the books you thought
Maybe Rhymes With “Megaton”? Now here’s a commission drawing by Jerry O. that would’ve made a fabulous All-Star Squadron cover—heralding a return of the group’s first real foe, Per Degaton, back from issues #1-3 (and from the Golden Age All-Star Comics #35 & 37). Degaton seems to intrigue Squadron fans and pros alike—remember Arvell Jones’ pencils for a prospective cover back on p. 3? Thanks to Pedro Angosto. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
RA: One thing I noticed was that when DC or Marvel chose a title to go direct-market only, it was usually, not always, but usually a marginal title. Not one of their big titles. So a title like Ka-Zar or Moon Knight or Infinity, Inc. would have better paper, better printing, and longer stories than Superman, Fantastic Four, Batman, and so on. ORDWAY: I worked on John Byrne’s Fantastic Four title in the early/mid-1980s—inked a half dozen or so—and the thing that was amazing to me was that when I got my royalty check, I went from a book that was selling 30,000 copies in the direct market to a book that was selling 290,000 copies on newsstands and direct-market combined. At that time, the newsstand was still fairly strong. Even when I was working on Superman from 1987 on, the newsstand was still accounting for more sales than direct-market. Adventures of Superman probably sold less than the Byrne titles, but it still sold 140,000 copies. 40,000 in the direct-market and 100,000 on the newsstands. That’s why the big titles didn’t need to go fully directmarket. They still sold well on the newsstands—two times or more than what they sold in the direct market. There was too much at stake to take a Superman or Fantastic Four title off the newsstand. The titles that did go to direct market sold decently there, and the hope was they’d make up for the lost newsstand sales by the higher prices charged for non-returnable direct-market comics. Fans who went only to the comics shops were considered to be more
likely to be fickle or more interested in an obscure character than the newsstand customer. RA: I never understood Marvel releasing Dazzler to the comic shops as one of their first direct-market titles. That book was dull! ORDWAY: The first issue of that title sold very well. RA: I know. Still, I have a hard time figuring out why anyone who read that first issue would have bought #2. It did run for 42 issues, however. ORDWAY: Marvel didn’t really upgrade their paper all that much, as I recall. RA: True, Marvel initially used white paper—Baxter paper—only for their short-run reprint titles. The new direct titles may have had slightly better paper but not by much. ORDWAY: I still have copies of Infinity, Inc. on my spinner racks here at the house, and they’re still pretty durable. The paper was decent. Not really thin. These books have been on and off my spinner racks numerous times, and they’re still in pretty good shape. The newsstand books [chuckles] just get shredded if you use them like that, or read them too many times. RA: The newsstand comicbooks themselves were printed terribly. Color registration was off. The black lines were often missing segments. All the newsstand books were starting to look like they came from Charlton. ORDWAY: The printer’s presses were falling apart and they weren’t updating them because it was expensive. They tried using plastic printing plates called Flexi-Graphics, but the printing process was done the same way as when they used metal plates. The raised plastic would wear down after only a short run on the presses, so the end of any full run of printing on a comicbook would just look bad. The color was also really horrible as well. The old-style printing when used on metal plates had to have a coating of oil on them. The oil, by itself, put a 20% gray on the paper. [chuckles] The color was toned just by using that process. The Flexi-Graphics didn’t use the oil, so the paper was bright white. The color was so bright you had to use sunglasses to look at some of those books. It wasn’t really the printers’ fault but, at some point, somebody should have said, “Maybe we should tone this color down.” It took a long time for someone to actually say that. I started at DC in 1980 and, around 1979-1982, those were really horrible printing times. The presses were bad. The newsprint was about as bad as it had ever been. It was super-thin. Sometimes, you could see the art from the other side of the page on your side. Comics were always a marginal business, and all of that was done in an effort to cut costs as much as they could. In that respect, the direct market really saved everybody, because it dramatically raised the quality of the books. RA: I think it was Marshall Rogers who really mastered how to do superior coloring on the quality white paper they were using at the time— Mondo? Bondo?
The Greatest Of All Time! Probably some of the greatest newsstand exposure Jerry’s art ever received came when he inked John Byrne’s Superman drawing for the cover of Time magazine for March 14, 1988—more or less the 50th anniversary of the Man of Steel. Both artists had signed this cover we found online. [Superman TM & © DC Comics; Time TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]
ORDWAY: Mando paper. The other cool upgrade, which I don’t think Infinity, Inc. really took advantage of enough, was the gray plate. In regular comics you had to create gray out of a small percentage of red and a small percentage of blue, which really created a pale purple, but that was what they used for gray. In direct-market books like Infinity, Inc., you really had the ability to use gray or K-tones, which was kind of neat. Still, that wasn’t as groundbreaking as what you could soon do commonly with computers just ten years later. To me, the flat color is still preferable. I like the look of it. But colorists who were working on the direct-
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Color Me All-Star! (Above:) Jerry Ordway’s color guide, prepared by him for his cover for All-Star Squadron Annual #2 (1983). Courtesy of JO. (Top center:) The cover as printed. [TM & © DC Comics.]
Three To Get Ready… (Clockwise from above left:) A trio of basically “new” World War II-era super-heroes—re-cast in three different ways—in whose development Jerry took particular part during his time on All-Star Squadron were (a) the female Firebrand (sister of the original male Quality hero of that name, and introduced in issue #5, Jan. 1982) as penciled by Rich Buckler and inked by Jerry; the above 2018 commission sketch, though, is all-Ordway… (b) Amazing-Man, the retroactive-continuity African-American hero who debuted in #23 (July ’83), created with Roy T.… and (c) Tarantula, a pre-existing hero from early-’40s Star Spangled Comics whom Jerry worked with writer/editor RT to visually revamp, with considerable success, in #24 (Aug. ’83). Thanks to Pedro Angosto & the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
have artwork running all the way to the edge of the paper. You could use actual black on costumes and backgrounds, which made the costumes pop more. You could use actual black as a panel border that would bleed to the edge for storytelling and design purposes. I enjoyed playing with that a lot. On All-Star it probably helped me that I’d been the inker for about a year and a half before I became the penciler. I was very familiar with all the characters and was truly trying to make a distinctive look for each one of them. I remember Roy saying—and remember, he was a fountain of knowledge for all of that stuff—he informed me that the 1940s Green Lantern was supposed to be called Alan Ladd—because it would sound like Aladdin and tie the ring/battery in with Aladdin’s magic lamp—but there was an upcoming actor named Alan Ladd so Green Lantern’s civilian name became Alan Scott. RA: That reminds me of Two-Face’s original name being Harvey Kent. They changed it after a couple of stories because somebody finally thought that “We don’t want anyone thinking that Harvey Kent over in Batman is a relative of Clark Kent’s over in Superman!” ORDWAY: [chuckles] Yeah, that sort of stuff is funny. When I
Amazing, Man! An early concept sketch by Jerry O. of Amazing-Man, as his color scheme developed. Another early sketch was reproduced elsewhere, some time back. In the end, a mostly green-and-yellow combination was adopted, with his legs not left bare. Thanks to Pedro Angosto, who located this gem on the Internet. [Amazing-Man TM & © DC Comics.]
market books weren’t getting any extra money to work on them, so they were essentially coloring the better-quality-paper books the exact same way they were coloring the newsstand books. The better paper was not taken advantage of in, perhaps, the way it should have been. RA: And that was really evident in the books. ORDWAY: It was certainly nicer for the artist, as readers could see your linework. If you used zip-a-tone or whatever, it showed up on the printed page. I don’t believe it was until Frank Miller’s Ronin appeared and looked good on better-quality paper from DC that the coloring approach started to change. You need to remember about that time period that when DC and Marvel were using that Flex-aGraphic printing that it wasn’t clear to the artists or the colorists in advance which books would be done with Flex-a-Graphic or the new style of printing. I think that was always a surprise to the creative teams. It probably was based on print run. If the book doesn’t sell more than a hundred thousand copies, then the printer can use the Flex-a-graphic process because the plates will hold up for that long of a run, but if they sold more than that then it would run the new way. I look back on that time as pretty exciting. I was a young guy and it felt like DC was offering perks, not just standard operating procedures. Full-bleed printing was a big deal. With that you could
The B-Team Takes Charge! This splash page from All-Star Squadron #20 (April 1983) features some of the most prominent All-Stars who weren’t also members of the JSA. (Clockwise from top left:) Tarantula (before his costume overhaul—when by sheer coincidence he was nearly a dead-ringer for Simon & Kirby’s Sandman)… Johnny Quick… Firebrand… Robotman… Liberty Belle… and Commander Steel, who’d been created by writer Gerry Conway and artist Don Heck as a WWII super-hero a couple of years earlier as Steel the Indestructible Man and who’d received a battlefield promotion in Squadron. Script by Roy Thomas; art by Jerry Ordway. [TM & © DC Comics.]
“Something Different Or Distinct From The Justice Society...”
was drawing Alan Scott, the Green Lantern, I always tried to give him a sort of Alan Ladd look. With Liberty Belle, you can see from the original story back in the 1940s that she had a bit of a Veronica Lake look to her, with the hairstyle coming over her eye. RA: You know, Lake’s over-the-eye hairdo was very popular in 1942, after the Alan Ladd-Veronica Lake film This Gun for Hire. So much so that military factories employing women during World War II had to issue orders that women had to change their hairstyles from the Lake design, because it kept getting caught in the machinery. I think Lake herself was asked to change her hairstyle for that very reason. ORDWAY: Really? That’s funny! You know you have limitations drawing a comic with that many characters, because you never really get enough room in a panel to draw a face with too much detail. I did try to use specific styles of faces, to keep them all distinct. Even though group drawings are all really shorthand, in a way.
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in color, when we had a sleepover Saturday. I didn’t see the 1960s Batman in color until well into the 1970s. RA: True enough. On Infinity, Inc., The Huntress had a very convoluted origin. [Jerry laughs] For a long time she was from Earth-Two, where she was the daughter of that alternate Earth’s Batman and Catwoman and her name was Helena Wayne. That Huntress appeared in at least 25 issues of Infinity, Inc. That version of her died in the Crisis series and her past was erased. The new version—the one most people nowadays remember— first appeared after the events of the first Crisis event, where she was now Helena Bertinelli, a mob boss’ daughter who survived the slaughter of her family and became The Huntress, as Batman did, to avenge her family’s murder. ORDWAY: I was off Infinity, Inc. and actually inking Crisis when a lot of that took place; but Crisis, in general, made the characters from Infinity, Inc. harder to sustain, because many of the characters’ parents were dropped from DC’s roster of heroes. All-Star Squadron was cancelled and replaced by Young All-Stars. The Huntress and Power Girl were particularly affected. Power Girl had numerous attempts to fit her into the Post-Crisis storylines, but none of them particularly fit. As you said, The Huntress was given an entirely new civilian name and origin. I regret that. Super-heroes whose parents were also super-heroes was, I
I did enjoy drawing Robotman. He was a good character, who Home Is The Huntress provided much of the same thing that Jerry drew a mean Huntress (the one who was the Earth-Two the Vision did in The Avengers over at Batman’s daughter) on the cover of the newszine The Comic Marvel. He tries to fit in, but he knows Reader #214 (Nov. 1983). She, Power Girl, and The Star-Spangled Kid were charter members of Infinity, Inc. that he’s different. With All-Star’s [TM & © DC Comics.] Robotman, he had pretty much the same back story as Doom Patrol’s [later] Robotman. He was a guy in a robot body with a human brain. I think, a fun notion. don’t really like drawing war stuff—soldiers, guns, tanks, that The problem, of course, with all comics is that nobody at the stuff—but I like that era, the time frame. Looking at it, when you beginnings of those series envisioned that those characters would drew a radio from that time period, it was a really cool-looking still be around 50, 60, and now 80 years and counting. Black Canary radio. When I was a kid, I saw a ton of 1930s-era movies. You only was also a character who had a very convoluted back story when had three or four channels back then, and I probably wouldn’t have they tried to fit her into the Earth-One continuity. Her background watched much of that stuff if I’d had Cartoon Network, or the sheer had to change from being the 1940s version on Earth-Two to the level of choice, like today’s kids do. 1970s version on Earth-One, even though she was actually the same RA: That’s true. I’ve discovered that kids today don’t like Looney Tunes. character. As a reader, that stuff was more confusing to me than That boggles my mind, since Bugs, Daffy, Porky, and all the rest were many of the revamps. The Earth-One, Earth-Two concepts would the crème-de-la-crème of cartoons where I was a kid. Way better than the have been easy to handle if they’d been consistent with it, but that suburban dads that Mickey, Donald, and Goofy had evolved into. The rarely happened. Looney Tunes were leagues better than anybody else’s cartoons. But RA: Bob Haney’s work on Brave and the Bold used Earth-One and it’s really difficult to get kids today interested in watching them, or even Earth-Two characters as though they all came from the same Earth, so holding their attention for a cartoon that usually only lasts for seven if you didn’t read Justice League of America, where the Earths were minutes. always separate, but did read Brave and the Bold and then you read a ORDWAY: When you’re at a certain age, when that stuff really gets storyline where those alternate world concepts came up, you were totally hard-wired into your brain, it depends on what sort of access you confused. have to those things. Bugs, Daffy, all those guys don’t run non-stop ORDWAY: That’s exactly what I was thinking of—the B&B issue on any network these days. If I’d had a thousand channels when where Batman and Wildcat teamed up together. When I was I was a kid, like kids do today, I certainly wouldn’t have watched working on All-Star Squadron, Roy was trying to establish continuity many 1930s movies. The stuff we watched as kids was watched from the 1940s to the 1980s, and it was hard because DC always because it was there and, in many cases, was all that was there. ran continuity differently than Marvel. As a reader, I always liked You also need to remember that, even if it was filmed in color, Marvel’s continuity better because it was a continuous thread most kids saw it on TV in black-&-white. It was a big deal when from the 1940s on, even if you had to have a character preserved in my aunt got a color TV in the 1970s and we could see all that stuff
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
suspended animation for a couple of decades. They all had the same thread of history. At DC, just like you, I was reading those Brave and Bolds, then read something that depended on Earth-One or –Two, and then I had to stop and think about where that Brave and the Bold story happened? Earth-One? Earth-Two? A lot of that just didn’t make sense. But, again, that was because their framework was designed with the idea that these characters wouldn’t last for decades. We had the same problem when I was writing Superman in the 1980s. My goal was to have all the DC titles present a cohesive frame-work, even when those books were often not edited by the same person and certainly not written by the same writers. It was incredibly difficult to even come close to that notion. We had a good guy on staff, Bob Greenberger, who knew all the ins and
One Man’s Family Even after he stopped penciling Squadron interiors, Jerry continued to do fullart covers for a few months—then switched to inking several that were penciled by others. One particularly memorable pair were those of issues #36 & 37 (Aug. & Sept. 1984), penciled by Rich Buckler and Rick Hoberg, respectively—and featuring Captain Marvel, whom JO would eventually write and (sometimes) draw in a Shazam! series. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]
Uncle Jerry Wants You! (Left:) Ordway’s cover for All-Star Squadron #31 (March 1984), the first whose interior art would be penciled by Rick Hoberg, utilized the ubiquitous wartime “Uncle Sam Wants You” image with regard to America’s super- and costumed heroes. The only difference was that, on Earth-Two, Uncle Sam was a super-hero himself… the red-white-and-blue-clad incarnation of the country. (Above:) In 2017 Jerry adapted that layout for a commission illo. with a partly different cast of All-Stars, with Amazing-Man replacing Uncle Sam. Courtesy of JO. [TM & © DC Comics.]
“Something Different Or Distinct From The Justice Society...”
From Atom To (Not Quite) Atom Smasher (Clockwise from top left, in chronological order:) The Golden Age Atom as he looked from 1940-48, then as depicted from 1948 to the present—a pair of black-&-white commissions by Jerry Ordway, ferreted out on the Internet by Pedro Angosto. A bit of retroactive continuity, as Roy and Jerry turn Terry Curtis (from c. 1940 Superman-vs.-UltraHumanite yarns) into the supervillain Cyclotron—whose costume will seemingly influence, but actually was influenced by, that of the post1948 Mighty Mite. Cover of All-Star Squadron #21 (May 1983) by Ordway. Nuklon (nee Albert Rothstein) is Cyclotron’s 7-foot son, reared with the help of Atom and Firebrand, and eventually surfacing in Infinity, Inc. #1. Nowadays, he’s altered his costume and changed his name to Atom Smasher (no comment), but he’s proved popular enough to become a hero/villain’s buddy and foil in the forthcoming Black Adam movie. Still, a cyclotron is an atomsmasher, right? Art by Ordway & Machlan. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
Some Hot Air About Balloons Roy T., who was editor of All-Star Squadron #21 & 22 (May & June 1983) as well as of the magazine now in your hands, admits to stuffing a fair amount of dialogue into some comics panels; but he good-naturedly defies anyone to find a panel where he really wiped out anything like “25 cars” with word balloons, as Jerry jokes on p. 53. Still, he can’t deny there might’ve been a flivver or two that got covered up by Johnny Quick’s thought balloons in the final panel from #22, p. 10, above. Whenever possible, however, RT placed text in what Stan Lee used to refer to as “dead areas”—spots where there either was no art, or as little art as possible. Cases in point: In #21, p. 9, the four balloons in the splash panel hide only, respectively, (a) a little of Atom’s cape and a line or two on the building behind; (b) some dark, roiling smoke, which the reader’s eye will mentally fill in to match that which swirls around it; (c) a corner window or two on the burning building; and (d) a bit of the street and maybe a few sketchily outlined passers-by amid a milling crowd. Roy—and other writers of the day—spent a lot of time figuring out what they wanted (or needed) to say without erasing any more penciled art than they had to, since they were often fans of the artist with whom they were working—as Roy was of the Ordway/Machlan art team that produced these two examples. [TM & © DC Comics.]
outs—worked on Who’s Who in the DC Universe—and, even with Bob in your corner, you couldn’t get some editorial groups to agree to someone else’s concept and follow it for any length of time. Another thing I think might be interesting is that while I was working on both All-Star and Infinity, Inc., I tried really hard to have the colors of the costumes be distinct from each other. A lot of the characters were new—their links to DC history were their uncles, fathers, mothers, maybe even grandfathers, but the characters themselves were often new. I tinkered a lot on costumes, particularly Nuklon’s. We stripped down his costume from multicolors to basically red, black and flesh tones. Changing him wasn’t a particular battle, but you end up fine-tuning characters bit-by-bit. I was proud of the group shot from the first issue as the characters all distinctly had their own look.
years later, down the road. Hourman II was one of those. So was the female Wildcat, who, I think, appeared quite some time after she was first designed by Mike and myself. The female Wildcat was supposed to appear right from the start, but she didn’t fit in, and I think Roy added her in a couple of years later. Same with Mr. Bones.
Mike Machlan and I would get together at the end of a work week and work on this. Remember, he was inking All-Star Squadron and doing these sketches on the side while I was penciling All-Star. We’d get together on a Friday night, go to the comics store, then to a regular bar and start sketching stuff back-and-forth on cocktail napkins. We didn’t even have art pages to work on. We’d look over our stuff and fine-tune it, then submit the results to Roy, who’d say “yes” or “no.” There were a lot of characters that never got used, because we really were working by the seat of our pants.
Doing group books, with all those characters, can be exhausting. Especially since both All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc. were never just those characters. As you mentioned, there could be as many as ten main characters, plus the JSA, plus the bad guys for each one of those books. As many people as Roy wanted to put in each issue. Unless you’re George Pérez and you really like doing that sort of thing, it’s a real challenge. I don’t mean that it’s horrible, but it can drain you over time. The fight scenes, with so many characters to fit in, were very hard to do.
RA: There were a lot of characters moving though both of those books. You had eight or so members of the actual group, often had Justice Society members floating in and out of the book, and villains, often more than one at a time, appearing.
I don’t know if you know how scripts are done now, with all the panels broken down in the script. It’s basically full scripts. All-Star and Infinity, Inc. were done plot style—Marvel style—where I’d get a plot or the outline of a plot but the basic breakdown of each page was up to me. Roy did not break down pages. You were given just an outline. I’d have to go through the outline and make page breaks myself. When it came to fights—it often was “Have them doing something exciting here!” and that’s a lot of work, especially dealing with so many characters who all have different powers.
ORDWAY: The number of characters that were regular members of either group was never locked down. I think Roy had an idea of how many characters would generally appear in each issue, but some of those that were designed were never used. Some appeared
I worked on Infinity, Inc., I think, for ten issues and did covers for a number of issues after that. It was a twelve-issue contract, but I think they counted the two issues of All-Star Squadron where Infinity, Inc. was introduced as part of that contract. I think I left because I was mostly just burned out.
“Something Different Or Distinct From The Justice Society...”
In a team battle, if you have a fast guy, you’re going to have to have him fighting someone who’s within his realm of fighting— the strong guy has to take on a strong guy. Those are the easier ones. But when you do characters with more specialized things—such as magic—you have to imagine who their adversary is going to be in a gigantic fight, which is basically a free-for-all. That’s something that the readers, and some of the creators, don’t realize. That choreographing those kinds of battle scenes is really difficult. And with all those characters, both good and bad, and possibly other characters in street scenes and whatnot, you still have to provide room for word balloons. By doing it that way—plot first—I could choreograph those heavily
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populated scenes, but a lot of the work would end up getting covered up by the word balloons. Sometimes you’d look at the finished page and you’d go, “Wow! I wasted a lot of time drawing 25 cars in the background. You can’t even see them because of the word balloons.” That type of thing is what can really drain you on a group book. You know, there’s no real solution to that, of course. RA: The only way you could make that work better is if you were putting in the word balloons and lettering as you were actually drawing the page. Make them a part of the page design from the word go. ORDWAY: I would do that when I was writing Superman. I did rough layouts, put the balloons and lettering in and then sent it to the artist. But Roy and I weren’t doing it that way. The way we were working on this—plot-style—is that the artist has a lot more control over both the art and the story. The artist controls the pacing, can throw in a lot of “acting” spots where the writer can either follow or ignore your suggestions. You’re, of course, always hoping he will
“I Am Become Death… The Shatterer Of Worlds” Perhaps the strongest scene in the 67 issues of All-Star Squadron was the Brain Wave-induced “dream” in issue #20 (April 1983) in which a vengeful Green Lantern, post-Pearl Harbor, used his Power Ring to level Japan—a visual precursor of 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wound up anticipating Dr. Robert Oppenheimer’s above quotation from sacred Hindu texts (with “Shatterer” substituted for “Destroyer”)—and sobbing in Wonder Woman’s arms. Script by Roy Thomas; art by Jerry Ordway. Roy regrets that he didn’t really follow up these events in later issues. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
follow your lead. If you draw a really emotional scene or a lighthearted moment, laughter, whatever—you hope that the writer will write to that. You’re giving the writer added value on the page. It’s nothing that was written in the plot or script or outline. You’re basically giving the fans something to like. When I was reading comics, I loved the little character moments. When I was a kid, I was reading a Green Lantern/Green Arrow by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams and there was a little bit where they’d gone camping. Oliver Queen dumps a can of mushrooms into their chili, which they are cooking over an open fire. Hal Jordan goes, “Oh, my God! Who puts mushrooms in their chili?” It’s a stupid thing to focus on, I guess, but it was so memorable to me. A few years later, someone had created a thing about Martian Manhunter liking Oreo cookies. Those little character bits helped define those characters for a lot of readers. It made them a little bit more real. RA: I suspect that those little offbeat bits of characters are harder to come by in many full scripts. There’s no back-and-forth between the writer and the artist where they truly bounce off each other. ORDWAY: Sometimes the writer does that. In a full script, it’s more like the writer contributed more of those moments rather than the artist. Still, when I work with full scripts, I’m always adding bits here and there. I think of it as you’re being an actor in a way. You play off the script with little bits to make your part come alive. If the characters have a bit of history between them, I can use facial expressions and body language to indicate they’re comfortable or awkward with each other. That’s the type of thing I think an artist can add, providing added value, whether it’s full-script or plot-artscript. As a reader, I’m always up for seeing that, and, as an artist, I like to provide that. When I got into comics, it was really a great time to do so, because I got to meet a lot of the old-timers. I used to do comic shows and I’d see Martin Nodell [co-creator of the 1940s Green Lantern] with his wife Carrie. You’d get to be friendly with them. I don’t mean to say we were tight friends, but you were friendly. It was fun to meet all these people. When I’d see Julie Schwartz, he’d always try to introduce you to other artists. If they were famous, he’d always act as the go-between. One time I was in San Diego and
he introduced me to Ray Bradbury. I mean—Ray Bradbury! Julie was, I think, one of Bradbury’s first literary agents. Julie also knew Robert Bloch, who wrote the novel Psycho. RA: Julie was also Bloch’s agent in the early 1940s. I liked Robert Bloch’s work. He gifted his famous saying, which came about when fans asked him where he got such awful ideas for novels and stories, to Stephen King to continue saying to fans: “I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.” [both laugh] ORDWAY: There was another writer that Julie knew and introduced to comics… I can’t remember the name. RA: Probably Alfred Bester. ORDWAY: Yeah, Bester! He wrote Green Lantern. The 1940s version. RA: He also created Solomon Grundy. There’s a backstory to that: Theodore Sturgeon, another science-fiction writer, had written the very first swamp-monster story, called “It.” Great story. It’s the one that the Heap, the Glob, Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, all the swamp monsters in comics basically sprang from. Roy Thomas and Marie Severin did a pretty good adaptation of “It” in 1971, in Supernatural Thrillers. Well, Bester liked Sturgeon’s story and wanted to introduce a similar swamp creature into one of the comics he was writing. He didn’t want to copy Sturgeon directly, so he created the dead-white-skin zombie Solomon Grundy. ORDWAY: Did he invent the name and the poem as well? RA: No, I believe the poem and Grundy’s name are quite old, although the poem itself didn’t appear in print until a couple of hundred years ago—in 1842, collected by James Orchard Halliwell. Bester did write the Green Lantern oath, however. [A/E EDITOR’S NOTE: This is assumed by many fans and pros, but Bester himself never remembered doing so, and other scripters, including fellow SF author Henry Kuttner, were scribing “GL” stories around the same time.] ORDWAY: Who was married to Leigh Brackett? He was a sciencefiction writer who did a lot of comics as well. RA: That would be Edmond Hamilton, who wrote Superman for quite a few years. He died in 1977. Leigh Brackett was still alive, because she worked on the screenplay of The Empire Strikes Back. She also co-wrote the film versions of The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and El Dorado with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. ORDWAY: Yeah, I liked both Brackett’s and Hamilton’s work. RA: I want to thank you for taking the time to do this interview. ORDWAY: I enjoyed doing it. Bye.
Crisis In Hyperspace! Our intrepid interviewee’s final two covers for All-Star Squadron were bookends that began and ended an 11-issue adaptation of All-Star Comics #13 (Oct.-Nov. 1942) and its “Shanghaied into Space” storyline, as discussed more fully in conjunction with the Jones and Howell segments. The cover of #50, of course, also heralds the coming of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and is one of Ordway’s most memorable for the series. That of #60 announced the return of the JSA to Earth—just in time to wind up the basic continuity of the series, whose final seven issues would be devoted to origins and the like. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]
“Something Different Or Distinct From The Justice Society...”
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JERRY ORDWAY Checklist This checklist is adapted primarily from materials contained in the online Who’s Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999, established by Dr. Jerry G. Bails. By title definition, it generally does not cover Ordway’s work since 1999... though that work is considerable. Names of features that appeared both in magazines with that title and in other publications are generally not italicized. Key: (w) = writer; (p) = penciler; (i) = inker; (e) = editor. Name: Jeremiah Joseph Ordway (b. 1957) – artist, writer, editor Education: Milwaukee Technical High School (Wisconsin) Family in Arts: Peggy May, marketing dept. (publicity manager) at DC Comics, 1984-1990 Influences: Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, Neal Adams, Milton Caniff Print Media (Non-Comics): artist – Captain America, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man (all juveniles) 1979-80; Superheroes Golden Beginning Stampbook (juvenile title) 1979 Commercial Art & Design: Milwaukee art studios 1978-80; typography 1976-78 Fine Arts: painter – oils, water colors, acrylics, 1977+ Honors: Jack Kirby Award – Best Art Team, 1986 (with George Pérez), for Crisis on Infinite Earths BAM Productions: covers (i) 1985-86 J.E. Smith: cover (i) 1999 (for Bulletproof)
Peggy & Jerry Ordway & Friends (Clockwise from top left:) As Peggy May, JO’s better half worked in DC’s marketing department in the 1980s, and he suggests that her title at one point was “Publicity Manager.” Jerry with a Wildcat sketch. One of the most ambitious of all Ordway’s commission drawings is surely the one at right, also done for collector John Burk, and colored by Jeff Balke. It officially depicts an expanded roll call of the Justice Society—but it looks to Ye Editor more like a depiction of something close to the full cast and crew of both All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc.—since the former included the JSA, Seven Soldiers of Victory, Freedom Fighters, and even the original Marvel Family. Probably took you a few hours to crank this one out, Jer! Nice work! Special thanks to John Burk. [TM & © DC Comics.]
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A Conversation With Jerry Ordway About The 1980s All-Star Squadron
Martin Greim: Hyperman and Black Terror (p)(i) 1977; Thunderbunny (i) 1977
Charlton Comics: covers (i) 1982
Armageddon: Alien Agenda (p)(i) 1991; Batman: A DC Movie Special (p) (i) 1989; Black Racer (w) 1989; covers (p)(i)(paint) 1982-99; Creature Commandos in the War That Time Forgot (i) 1981; Crisis on Infinite Earths (i) 1985-86; filler (p)(i) 1987; Gangbuster (w) 1993; Geo-Force (p)(i) 1986; Green Arrow (i) 1989; Green Lantern (i) 1982; Heroes against Hunger (i) 1986; House of Mystery (p)(i) 1983; The Huntress (i) 1982; illustrations (p)(i) 1983, 1985, 1987; Infinity, Inc. (p)(i) 1984-85, 1988; Jimmy Olsen (w)(p)(i) 1990; Justice League of America (p) (i) 1981; Justice Society of America (p) 1985; Lex Luthor (w) 1989; Lois Lane (i) 1988; Mr. Mind (i) 1999; Mr. Mxyzptlk (w)(p)(i) 1989; Mystery in Space (i) 1981; Secret Origins (p)(i) 1986; Sergio Aragonés Destroys DC (i) 1996; Shazam! (w)(p)(i) 1993, 1995-98; Superman (p)(i)(w) 1987-93, 1995-98; support (color/paint) 1988-99; support (lettering) 1983; War That Time Forgot (i) 1991; Weird War Tales (i) 1981; Who’s Who in the DC Universe (p)(i) 1985-87; Wonder Woman (i) 1982; Zero Hour: Crisis in Time (p)(i) 1994
Dark Horse Comics: covers (p)(i) 1993
Eclipse Enterprises: covers (p)(i) 1986-87; DNAgents (p) 1985
DC Comics: All-Star Squadron (p)(i) 1981-84; America vs. the Justice Society (p) 1984; An Untold Tale of Tom Strong (p) 1999;
First Publishing: covers (p)(i) 1988; Munden’s Bar (p)(i) 1985 (reprinted 1988)
Paragon Publications: Star Fems (p)(i) 1982 Tiger Comics: Phantasy against Hunter (i) 1987 AC Comics: covers (p)(i) 1983-86; The Messenger (w)(p)(i) 1983; The Slayer (i) 1983; support (letterer) 1983 Deluxe Comics: Codename: Danger (p) 1986; covers (i) 1986; filler (p) (i) 1985; illustration (p)(i) 1984; T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (p)(i) 1986 WaRP Graphics: covers (i) 1985 COMICBOOKS (U.S. Mainstream Publishers):
Image Comics: covers (p) 1993; Wildstar (p) 1993 Marvel Comics: covers (i) 1985-c. 1986; Fantastic Four (p)(i) 1985-86; Marvel Universe (p) 1984-88
Wedding Belles & Bunnies (Left:) Our inspired interviewee did this exquisite rendering of the wedding of Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick as a commission in 2017, acknowledging a Dick Dillin/Blackhawk drawing as his template. Thanks to Michael Dunne. [TM & © DC Comics.] (Below:) Jerry, masked in the age of Covid, poses at a comics convention with Captain Carrot—or perhaps with a cosplayer garbed as same. Maybe Jerry never drew CC himself, but he did draw Infinity, Inc., into one panel of an issue of the Captain’s 1980s DC comic.
TM
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Part Four
The ALL-STAR SQUADRON Covers That Never Were— Till Now! A One-Fan (And Multiple-Artist) Project by John Joshua A/E EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: I (that’s Roy, of course) had long assumed that the 70 or so covers that original editor Len Wein or later I myself had overseen for DC’s 1981-87 All-Star Squadron series were the only ones ever commissioned related to that particular concept. Imagine my surprise in 2020 when my longtime correspondent Ray Bottorff, Jr., sent me samples of a whole slew of imaginative “faux covers” that had been posted online, which picked up the numbering of the actual series after #67 (and of the Annuals after #3) and assumed the magazine had never been canceled and replaced with The Young All-Stars on the heels of Crisis on Infinite Earths. I quickly contacted the mental progenitor of all those covers, one John Joshua, and was delighted that he and the talented artists (a few of them longtime pros) involved would allow Alter Ego to print them, beginning in this issue. And we thank DC Comics in advance for its presumed indulgence in understanding that this is totally a fan homage for the fun of it, not an attempt by anyone to usurp trademarks or copyrights (which are rendered for DC in any event). Alas, we had room this time around for only the initial handful of these wonderful faux covers… but we plan, going forward, to stick a new batch of them into each and every issue of A/E where we can find the space, till they’ve all seen print! Meanwhile, here’s John Joshua himself on the subject….
B
lending super-hero action, real history, and a strict adherence to Golden Age comics continuity, Roy Thomas’ All-Star Squadron has been my favorite series for forty years. Since DC wasn’t doing anything with the property in 2018 (or for years beforehand), I thought it was about time someone picked up the baton—and it might as well be me. I’d commissioned a few covers from artists, both professional and amateur, on other subjects prior to this, but I knew I wanted to do something special with this project. After some thought, I came up with the following rules: First, I’d assume the Squadron’s adventures would continue without being affected by the Crisis on Infinite Earths (as it was on our Earth), and with the heroes who were thereby removed from continuity (Superman, Batman and Robin, Aquaman, et al.) still in place; Second, not only would the team’s ranks include all the DC/ All-American and Quality Comics heroes either published or set in the World War II years, but the roster would also include the Fawcett characters, Charlton’s retroactively-wartime martial artist Judomaster (actually created in the 1960s), and the post-Crisis heroes and villains created for The Young All-Stars; Third, each and every commission would adapt the cover of some comicbook issue written, plotted, or scripted by Roy—for any
All-Star Squadron #112 Wait—hold it right there! Maybe it’d be best if you read John Joshua’s text before you peek at the image above. Oops—probably too late! Well, actually, we’re jumping the gun a bit here by showcasing this out-oforder (and colored) “faux cover” among the many commissioned by John to “continue” the World War II adventures of the All-Stars… or at least, the types of covers that might have accompanied such a continuation. In this case, actual All-Star Squadron veteran artist Rick Hoberg drew this one, an homage to John Buscema & George Klein’s for that of The Avengers #56 (Sept. 1968)—here with the emphasis on The Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy. Colored by Ron Shalda. Pretty intriguing stuff, right? Okay—now read the article! [Characters TM & © DC Comics.]
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John Joshua’s One-Fan (And Multiple-Artist) Project
publisher—and it would be rendered in black-&-white, although a few might be colored later; Fourth, there would be regular “Altered Egos” spotlight issues, roughly every 8-10 outings, in which Jonathan (Tarantula) Law sits down with one of his fellow heroes to take notes for his post-war book that would take that name, as seen in various issues of Squadron. Initially, I saw this as a mechanism to use covers from the books Roy had written featuring solo characters, but over time that requirement fell away; Fifth, no artist would produce two consecutive issues; and Finally (and this is just a personal quirk), I had to know, at least in outline, what the underlying story for the issue was, rather than just creating random covers. I wanted to create my own continuity, and by doing so map out enough long-term plots that I could foreshadow upcoming events and stories. No pressure, eh? When I started, this was just for my own entertainment; but I soon began to share them in a few Facebook groups devoted to the JSA, and somewhat to my surprise they seemed to be quite popular. In 2020 a member of one of these groups shared a few of the covers with Roy, who was kind enough to e-mail me to say that he liked
what I was doing, and would I be interested in having some of them, alongside an article, featured in Alter Ego? I couldn’t say yes fast enough. A dozen of the earliest faux covers saw print in Michael Eury’s Back Issue magazine (#112, June 2019), but for this piece and subsequent ones they will be presented in numerical order, whether or not they were featured there. As I type these words, we’re currently up to a faux cover for All-Star Squadron #137—and there’ll probably be a few more completed by the time this first installment sees print. Meanwhile, if you want to view them online, you can visit my Comic Art Fans page at https://www.comicartfans.com/ galleryroom.asp?gsub=190068. Has this project been a success? Obviously, only the reader/ viewer can decide that – but it’s certainly given me a newfound appreciation for the All-Star Squadron and the complexities which Roy faced in writing their adventures. I’m not a professional writer, and I’m sure I’ve taken the team in directions which Roy wouldn’t have—but I hope I’ve done his creation justice. Oh, and a special tip of my hat to Rob Shalda, who colored the three faux covers which have been rendered into color hereafter. Now, let’s get started, beginning with “All-Star Squadron #67”….
Presenting—The Faux ALL-STAR SQUADRON Covers (All Heroes & Villains on next 4 pages TM & © DC Comics)
#68: Art by Ian Richardson; homage to Fantastic Four #158 (Rich Buckler & Al Milgrom). In the aftermath of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the newly expanded Squadron faces an attack by Spectre foe Kulak—or do they?
#69: Art by Brendon & Brian Fraim; homage to X-Men #90 (John Buscema). Five heroes must save FDR from the new Black Assassin! Plus—the final fate of the mystery-man known as The King!
#70: Art by Christopher Ivy; homage to The Avengers #75 (John Buscema & Tom Palmer). Wonder Woman and her fellow super-heroines attack the Justice Society, as the “All-Star War” begins!
The All-Star Squadron Covers That Never Were—Till Now!
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#71: Art by Brendon & Brian Fraim; colors by Ron Shanda; homage to The Avengers #57 (John Buscema & George Klein). Back from their honeymoon, Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle battle the JSA, as ”The All-Star War” continues.
#72: Art by Shawn van Briesen; homage to Sub-Mariner #26 (Sal Buscema & Mike Esposito). It’s Quick and Belle in aerial combat with the high-flying Hawkman, in chapter 3 of “The All-Star War.”
#73: Art by Michael T. Gilbert; homage to The Invaders (2nd series) #3 (Dave Hoover). Can Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Firebrand, Minute-Man, and Wildcat survive—when The Spectre attacks in chapter 4 of “The All-Star War”?
#74: Art by Brendon & Brian Fraim; homage to The Invaders #6 (Jack Kirby & Joe Sinnott). It’s hero vs. hero, in the endangered heart of Washington, DC! Plus—a breakthrough in “The All-Star War”!
#75: Art by Ian Richardson; homage to Avengers West Coast #61 (Paul Ryan). The All-Star Squadron unite against the secret mastermind behind “The All-Star War”—Dr. Fate’s arch-enemy Wotan!
#76: Art by Brendon & Brian Fraim; homage to All-Star Squadron #1 (Rich Buckler & Dick Giordano). What’s the new status quo for the Squadron? Featuring new missions for Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters—and for Spy Smasher and the Fawcett heroes!
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John Joshua’s One-Fan (And Multiple-Artist) Project
Annual #4: Art by John Watson; homage to The Avengers #61 (John Buscema & George Klein). The All-Star Squadron battle two mystic menaces that threaten reality itself! And, in this issue—an All-Star dies!
#77: Art by Craig Demak, colors by Ron Shanda; homage to Daredevil #53 (Gene Colan & Joe Sinnott). Special “Altered Egos” spotlight on Mr. Terrific, featuring a previously unseen clash with Batman, The Crimson Avengers, and The Sandman! But— are those really the heroes taking on the Man of 1000 Talents?
#78: Art by Matt Childers; homage to The Invaders #5 (Jack Kirby & Joe Sinnott). The Axis of Evil starts with a bang, as Baron Blitzkrieg attacks the Squadron at a bond rally, and his allies capture several of the other heroes.
#79: Art by John Watson; homage to The Avengers #54 (John Buscema & George Klein). It’s the Shining Knight to the rescue—as the Axis of Evil trilogy continues!
#80: Art by Shawn van Briesen; homage to The Invaders (2nd series) #4 (Dave Hoover). The final showdown with Baron Blitzkrieg and his allies, as the Axis of Evil trilogy concludes!
#81: Art by James E. Lyle; homage to Fantastic Four #168 (Rich Buckler & Joe Sinnott). Robotman—restored to his human body? The All-Star Squadron— slaughtered? What’s really going on here?
The All-Star Squadron Covers That Never Were—Till Now!
#82: Art by Staz Johnson; homage to Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (Topps) #4 (Claude St. Aubin). Following Young All-Stars #15, the revived Miss America and Manhunter must stop a rampaging dinosaur— controlled by The Ultra-Humanite!
#83: Art by Stephen Baskerville; homage to Fantastic Four #161 (Rich Buckler & John Romita). Only Wonder Woman, Robotman, The Atom, and Hourman can stand against—the Ultra-Saurus!
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#84: Art by Shawn van Briesen; homage to Captain America #215 (Gil Kane & Joe Sinnott). Special “Altered Ego” spotlight on The Guardian—his deepest secrets revealed!
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The early days of DAVE COCKRUM— Legion of Super-Heroes artist and co-developer of the revived mid-1970s X-Men—as revealed in art-filled letters to PAUL ALLEN and rare, previously unseen illustrations provided by wife PATY COCKRUM (including 1960s-70s drawings of Edgar Rice Burroughs heroes)! Plus FCA—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on PETE MORISI—JOHN BROOME—BILL SCHELLY, and more!
Spotlight on MIKE FRIEDRICH, DC/Marvel writer who jumpstarted the independent comics movement with Star*Reach! Art by NEAL ADAMS, GIL KANE, DICK DILLIN, IRV NOVICK, JOHN BUSCEMA, JIM STARLIN, HOWARD CHAYKIN, FRANK BRUNNER, et al.! Plus: MARK CARLSONGHOST on Rural Home Comics, FCA, and Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Justice League of America cover by NEAL ADAMS!
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FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA (FCA) Special, with spotlights on KURT SCHAFFENBERGER (Captain Marvel, Ibis the Invincible, Marvel Family, Lois Lane), and ALEX ROSS on his awesome painting of the super-heroes influenced by the original Captain Marvel! Plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt” on Superman editor MORT WEISINGER, JOHN BROOME, and more! Cover by SCHAFFENBERGER!
Salute to Golden & Silver Age artist SYD SHORES as he’s remembered by daughter NANCY SHORES KARLEBACH, fellow artist ALLEN BELLMAN, DR. MICHAEL J. VASSALLO, and interviewer RICHARD ARNDT. Plus: mid-1940s “Green Turtle” artist/creator CHU HING profiled by ALEX JAY, JOHN BROOME, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and Mr. Monster on MORT WEISINGER Part Two, and more!
Two RICHARD ARNDT interviews revealing the wartime life of Aquaman artist/ co-creator PAUL NORRIS (with a Golden/ Silver Age art gallery)—plus the story of WILLIE ITO, who endured the WWII Japanese-American relocation centers to become a Disney & Warner Bros. animator and comics artist. Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, JOHN BROOME, and more, behind a NORRIS cover!
Spotlight on Groovy GARY FRIEDRICH— co-creator of Marvel’s Ghost Rider! ROY THOMAS on their six-decade friendship, wife JEAN FRIEDRICH and nephew ROBERT HIGGERSON on his later years, PETER NORMANTON on GF’s horror/ mystery comics, art by PLOOG, TRIMPE, ROMITA, THE SEVERINS, AYERS, et al.! FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and Mr. Monster, and more! MIKE PLOOG cover!
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PAUL GUSTAVSON—Golden Age artist of The Angel, Fantom of the Fair, Arrow, Human Bomb, Jester, Plastic Man, Alias the Spider, Quicksilver, Rusty Ryan, Midnight, and others—is remembered by son TERRY GUSTAFSON, who talks in-depth to RICHARD ARNDT. Lots of lush comic art from Centaur, Timely, and (especially) Quality! Plus—FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, JOHN BROOME, and more!
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BLACK HEROES IN U.S. COMICS! Awesome overview by BARRY PEARL, from Voodah to Black Panther and beyond! Interview with DR. WILLIAM FOSTER III (author of Looking for a Face Like Mine!), art/artifacts by BAKER, GRAHAM, McDUFFIE, COWAN, GREENE, HERRIMAN, JONES, ORMES, STELFREEZE, BARREAUX, STONER—plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and more! Edited by ROY THOMAS.
FCA [FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA] issue—spearheaded by feisty and informative articles by Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. BECK—plus a fabulous feature on vintage cards created in Spain and starring The Marvel Family! In addition: DR. WILLIAM FOSTER III interview (conclusion)—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on the lost art of comicbook greats—the haunting of JOHN BROOME—and more! BECK cover!
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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!
It’s a Cracked, Cracked, Cracked, Cracked World! by Michael T. Gilbert
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reviously, the Comic Crypt explored a bitter feud between the early Mad magazine and a gaggle of cheap imitations with names like Frenzy, Loco, Panic, Fooey, Frantic, Crazy, Lunatickle, Thimk, and Zany. Said feud was instigated by a snarky Mad article pretending to teach their imitators how best to copy Mad. None of these clones lasted longer than a fly’s lifespan--with one exception. Robert’s Sproul’s Cracked Mazagine [sic] not only survived…it thrived! The magazine lasted 365 issues plus countless spin-offs and specials over a period of over forty years! So why did Cracked succeed when so many others failed? In a word… Mad. Or more to the point, Mad’s leftovers. Before we continue, a quick history lesson may be in order. In 1956 Mad creator (and satirical genius) Harvey Kurtzman gave EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines an ultimatum: “Give me 51% and controlling interest of Mad or I’ll walk!”
Look Mom—No Originality! (Above:) Cracked wasn’t the only Mad clone. It was inevitable they and Mad would sometimes parody the same subject. (Top Left:) Norman Rockwell illustrated Crest toothpaste’s famous “Look, Mom—No Cavities!” ad from 1958. (Top Right:) A Kelly Freas Crest parody from Mad #43 (Dec. 1958). [Mad page TM & © EC Publications, Inc.; other ad TM & © the respective copyright holders.]
Here, Either! (Above Left:) Another Rockwell Crest ad. (Above Right:) A few months after Mad’s Crest satire, Charlton’s This Magazine Is Crazy also parodied one in Vol. 4, #8 (March 1959). Artist unknown. [Real ad TM & © the respective copyright holders; Crazy page © the respective copyright holders.]
What, Me Moonlight? How To Put Out “How To Put Out An Imitation Of Mad” (Above:) The intro page from Mad #43 (Dec. 1958), featuring “How to Put Out an Imitation of Mad.” It stirred up a hornets’ nest among the competition, which probably delighted Gaines and crew! [TM & © EC Publications, Inc.]
(Left:) A supposedly “rejected” John Severin cover idea, featuring the back of you-know-who, as published in Cracked #21 (Sept. 1961). [TM & © Cracked Entertainment or successors in interest.]
It’s A Cracked, Cracked, Cracked Cracked World!
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Or words to that effect. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner had recently offered Kurtzman an opportunity to start Trump, a new upscale humor magazine. Gaines rejected Kurtzman’s ultimatum, of course, even though he assumed Mad couldn’t survive with its creator’s departure. He assumed wrong. When Kurtzman walked, a desperate Gaines hired his former right-hand man, Al Feldstein, to take over. Feldstein, who had edited EC’s own Mad knockoff, Panic (as well as Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Shock SuspenStories, and most of the rest of EC’s pre-Comics Code lineup), turned out to be the perfect choice, turning Mad into one of magazine publishing’s greatest success stories. Meanwhile, although Kurtzman produced some of his finest work for Trump (which was not unlike a color, slick-paper version of Mad), financial setbacks to the then-young Playboy empire forced Hef to pull the plug on the magazine after only two issues. (Hefner would, in a sense, make it up to Harvey in the 1960s by publishing Kurtzman and Will Elder’s long-running “Little Annie Fannie” feature in Playboy for decades.) With Trump’s cancelation, Harvey and some of his fellow Mad artists then tried a quixotic self-publishing venture, Humbug, which also folded--though after 11 issues, not two. A few years later he tried again, creating Help! magazine for Warren Publishing. Though never a sales blockbuster (and produced on the cheap!), Help! was more successful, lasting 26 issues. When Kurtzman jumped ship in ‘56, he took Mad artists Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Bill Elder, and Russ Heath with him. Naturally,
Mad About The Don (Above:) “Mad’s Maddest artist,” Don Martin, from Mad #29 (Sept. 1956). This was Don’s first work for Mad. [TM & © EC Publications, Inc.]
Don We Now Our Cracked Apparel! (Above:) A not-so-funny parody from Cracked #27 (Nov. 1962), aping Don Martin’s style. Despite the signature, I’m guessing Jerry Lewis was not the artist. Ironically, decades later the real Don Martin would defect to Cracked over a copyright dispute with Mad. [TM & © Cracked Entertainment or successors in interest.]
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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!
Gingerbread Men (Left:) Early on, Mad magazine had some very detailed covers, like this Jack Davis beauty for issue #27 (April 1956). [TM & © EC Publications, Inc.] (Right:) By the time Cracked tried to imitate those (as per this John Severin cover for Cracked #4 in Sept. 1958), Mad had already simplified its covers. When Paul Laikin replaced Sol Brodsky as editor with issue #11, Laikin streamlined Cracked’s covers and gave a more prominent role to their simple-minded mascot, Sylvester Smythe. [TM & © Cracked Entertainment or successors in interest.]
Mad was…er... mad about the defections. All, except for Wood (who wisely returned to Mad after contributing to only one issue of Trump), were no longer welcome at the magazine they’d helped birth. But their bad news was good news for Robert Sproul’s new magazine. With Mad out of the picture, Cracked was able to snag the Mad outcasts. Jack Davis provided some handsome art for the magazine, as did Russ Heath and occasional Mad artist Basil Wolverton. Even the great Will Elder drew a few pages and a cover for an early issue. Of course, Heath was more well-known at that time for his Marvel art (including some for their color Mad parody, Riot!) than for his handful of Mad pages. Which brings us to Cracked’s second lucky break. In 1957, when Marvel’s distributor American News went bankrupt, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman fired the entire staff, with the exception of editor/writer Stan Lee and a skeleton crew. It was fortuitous timing for both Cracked and Marvel’s other out-of-work creators when Bob Sproul decided to do his own Mad knockoff a year later. Sol Brodsky was hired by publisher Sproul to package it for his company, Major Publishing. Let’s talk about Sol for a moment.
Brodsky had been a successful Marvel artist and production man, but now work was scarce for freelancers. According to Wiki, “During a 1957 economic entrenchment at the company, Goodman again fired the staff, except for Lee. Brodsky teamed with friend and fellow comic artist Mike Esposito to attempt launching a publishing company. Neither Brodsky’s magazine prototypes, which included a rock and roll fan magazine, nor his travel kits for children, containing things to draw, play, and stay amused with during trips, found an investor. “Brodsky had much more success with a series of promotional comic books he created and produced for the Big Boy restaurant chain. Lee would script the majority of these. Brodsky also assembled promotional comics for Bird’s Eye frozen foods, featuring talking vegetables. In 1958, Brodsky became founding editor of the satirical magazine Cracked.” Artist and colorist Stan Goldberg, a company colleague, recalled this in 2005: “I was in the Bullpen with a lot of well-known artists who worked up there… until about 1958 or 1959. [NOTE: Actually 1957. —MTG.] The guys... who actually worked nine-to-five and put in a regular day, and not the freelance guys who’d come in to drop off their work... were almost a hall-of-fame group of people. There was John Severin. Bill Everett. Carl Burgos. There was the all-time
It’s A Cracked, Cracked, Cracked Cracked World!
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Plastered Cracked’s mascot, Sylvester P. Smythe. As depicted at near right on the John Severin cover from Cracked #11 (Oct. 1959), Sylvester started out looking disturbingly inbred. But Severin soon redesigned him, turning him into the cute mascot we know and love (as seen at far right on a classic cover from Cracked #75, from April 1969). Sylvester started out as a plasterer (fixing big cracks on the magazine’s early covers) before graduating to become Cracked’s official janitor. [TM & © Cracked Entertainment or successors in interest.]
Go West, Young Mazagine! In any humor magazine, we’re bound to find ideas similar to those on display in the pages of rival periodicals. Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis deconstructed Hollywood’s glamorized Western movies for “Cowboy!” in the color comicbook Mad #20 (Feb 1955). Years later, another founding Mad artist, John Severin, illustrated a story with the same premise in “TV and Real Life Western Heroes” in Cracked #14 (June 1960). [Mad page TM & © EC Publications, Inc.; Cracked page TM & © Cracked Entertainment or successors in interest.]
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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!
Beautiful Hair: Breck, Blech, or Blecch? Only Their Copy Editors Know For Sure! (Left:) Commercial ads were an easy target for parody mags. One target was this popular 1960s ad campaign featuring a young Cybill Shepherd hawking Breck Shampoo Hair Care. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.] (Center:) John Severin’s version from Cracked #21 (Sept. 1961) starred the magazine’s beautifully styled mascot, Sylvester Smythe! [TM & © Cracked Entertainment or successors in interest.] (Right:) Ringo Starr stars in this parody from Mad #90 (Oct. 1964), illustrated by the great Frank Frazetta! [TM & © EC Publications.]
great Joe Maneely.… [W]e all worked together, all the colorists and correction guys, the letterers and artists... we had a great time.” As a result of the firings, Sol was able to snag some of Marvel’s finest artists for Cracked, and for a very reasonable price. In addition to Heath, Cracked would soon be publishing Carl (Human Torch) Burgos, Bill (Sub-Mariner) Everett, Joe (Black Knight) Maneely, Angelo Torres, and Al Williamson.
With Jack Davis and Bill Elder on board, it was an all-star lineup. Also part of the Cracked crew was another Timely/Atlas and EC mainstay who, more than any artist, came to define the look of Cracked. But we’ll discuss that legendary creator… next issue! Till next time…
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Meet JULIE NEWMAR, the purr-fect Catwoman! Plus: ASTRO BOY, TARZAN Saturday morning cartoons, the true history of PEBBLES CEREAL, TV’s THE UNTOUCHABLES and SEARCH, the MONKEEMOBILE, SOVIET EXPO ’77, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.
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MAD’s maddest artist, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, is profiled! Plus: TV’s Route 66 and an interview with star GEORGE MAHARIS, MOE HOWARD’s final years, singer B. J. THOMAS in one of his final interviews, LONE RANGER cartoons, G.I. JOE, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.
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Fawcett Behaving MADly The Truth About Lunatickle by Ger Apeldoorn
W
hen I wrote my Eisner Award-nominated 2017 book about Mad magazine imitations Behaving Madly with Craig Yoe, we had a small hiccup at the last moment. We had carefully checked all the copyrights for the 160-page reprint section, but when the files were already in China to be printed we discovered that everything to do with the publisher Whitestone had to be removed because the copyrights were renewed by Fawcett in the mid-1960s as part of a company-wide copyright renewal of all their titles. This was a shame, because I had included in the book about twenty pages from the Whitestone titles Cuckoo, Cockeyed, and Lunatickle. They contained material by Joe Kubert, Lee Elias, Ross Andru, Mike Sekowsky, and editor Myron Fass. We were still allowed to use single illustrations from the Whitestone publications in the lengthy dossier section describing all of these Mad magazine imitators chronologically, but it had to fall in the category of “reasonable representation.”
Lunatickle’s editor was an unlikely candidate: Myron Fass—a master of many trades, but doing none of them very well. He started out as an artist who did comics for a wide range of publishers in the late ’40s and early ’50s. By the mid-’50s Fass had moved on to editing and publishing. Lunatickle may have been his first editing job, and certainly was his cleanest one, as he soon moved into genres of increasingly outrageous sleaze, gore, and eventual soft-porn. It has always amazed me how big a connection there was between satire and so called “men’s magazines,” with many of the Mad-imitation publishers also being involved in sleaze and soft-porn and, on the higher end of the ladder, newsstand magazines such as Playboy and everything down from that always had some humor or satire in between the smut pics. The biggest link between Whitestone and Fawcett was in that same area. Looking at copyright lists, I found that Whitestone
Although I hated to lose all these great stories (including “The Horrible Comic Story behind the Horror Story Comic Books!”— Lee Elias and Jack Mendelsohn’s 10-page take-down of the horror industry in Lunatickle #2, which I had painstakingly cleaned up myself), I was quietly vindicated, because I had suspected all along that Whitehouse was owned by Fawcett! Initially, the evidence for this was completely circumstantial. It started with the fact that Lunatickle was obviously made with a lot of money. While some of the Mad imitations were cheap and quickly done, the two issues of Lunatickle had only the best writers and artists, and paid them enough to let them do their best work.
Ger Apeldoorn is flanked by (on left) the 2017 coffee table art book of Mad magazine imitators, Behaving Madly, which he wrote with publisher Craig Yoe—and the cover of Whitestone/ Fawcett’s Lunatickle #1 (Feb. 1956), with cover by Bob Bean, who had recently worked with and for fellow Lunatickle artist Joe Kubert on St. John’s Meet Miss Pepper comicbook. [TM & © the respective copyright holders.]
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The Notorious Myron Fass likewise sandwiched between Lee Elias’ cover of Whitestone/ Fawcett’s Lunatickle #2 (April 1956) and Fass’ equally infamous M.F. Enterprises Captain Marvel, represented by Carl Burgos’ cover for issue #3 (Sept. 1966). Around the latter time and for a while afterward, Fass would also edit and publish black-&-white magazines that reprinted some of the most salacious 1950s horrorcomics material—retouched to make it even more tasteless! [© the respective copyright holders; Captain Marvel is now a trademark of Marvel Characters, Inc.]
specialized in “photography” books for men, especially those by famous glamour and nudity photographer Bunny Yeager. Some of the “books” by Yeager (often nothing more than a magazine with a harder cover and back) were copyrighted and reprinted by Fawcett from the late ’50s onward. Did they own Whitestone as an outlet for less-respectable material, or maybe they bankrolled it? Or did they buy it later on, lock-stock-and-Lunatickle-barrel? I turned to the only guy I know who would know such things: pulp and magazine expert Will Murray. He told me he had never heard of that connection. Other comic and magazine historians couldn’t help, either, and advised me not to blindly publish my guess. The late-in-the-day find of Fawcett’s copyright ownership of all Whitestone magazines sort of confirmed my suspicions, but without actually telling me “how.” Not having any further leads, I had to drop it. And then came Harry Matetsky. A long-time comics/ memorabilia collector and writer of the book The Adventures of Superman Collecting, he was interviewed in FCA #224 (Alter Ego #165) by P.C. Hamerlinck himself. In the article PCH referred to Harry as the “pre-eminent Captain Marvel connoisseur.” From the interview I learned that he was art editor at Fawcett during the same period as Lunatickle editor Myron Fass, so I decided to contact him with my question about the ownership of Whitestone. Harry not only replied to my question, but also added some more detail I didn’t know. Here it is, with some additional comments of my own. Hi, Ger, This story you are about to read has never been told to anyone before now! After leaving Fawcett, I was then employed by Hillman Publications in late 1955, working in [Main text continued on p. 78]
Fawcett Behaving Madly
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Harry Matetsky in 1956, while working at Hillman Publications. He started there in late 1955 after leaving Fawcett. Also seen are the cover of Hillman’s humor mag Who Goofed? #2 (March 1956), the issue in the works when Matetsky met artist Myron Fass—and, below it, the mag’s masthead. Harry is referred to as “Hardworking Art Associate” The Bill Harris referred to as “Jovial Art Associate” is probably the same BH who was, in the 1960s and early 1970s, editor of the Gold Key and King Features comicbook lines. Photo courtesy of Harry M. [© the respective copyright holders.]
Fass Times? (Below:) A pair of art spots from Who Goofed? #2. Ger Apeldoorn says: “I have long wondered who the artist of these two pieces from Who Goofed? #2 could be. Since they are the only illustrations in WG that are not cartoons, they probably are pieces Harry Matetsky bought from Myron Fass. If so, they are some of the best drawings he ever did!” The first of the illos parodied the famous 1955 bestselling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson. [© the respective copyright holders.]
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Flipping The Bird Myron Fass himself did a one page “explanation” of Lunatickle’s bird mascot (which was included in Apeldoorn’s book Behaving Madly) and various small drawings on the contents pages of the first issue, including this one of the editor and his crew, which Fass signed with his initials. [© the respective copyright holders.]
A Lunatickle Asylum A pair of splashes by Joe Kubert (at right) and (below) Lee Elias from Lunatickle #1 (Feb. 1956). The style of the parodies (long stories with text underneath the images) was directly copied from the style of Harvey Kurtzman’s issues of Mad magazine (#24-28). Often, they also included large introduction pages, where the artists added lots of so-called “chickenfat” extra gag drawings. Here we see Joe Kubert (probably with Bob Bean) doing a Jack Davisstyle illo… and Lee Elias pulling a Wally Wood. [© the respective copyright holders.]
Fawcett Behaving Madly
More Lunatickles In Charge of The Asylum (Clockwise from top left:) Page 6 from Lunatickle #1; art by Ross Andru. For the two issues of Lunatickle, editor Fass must’ve had a sizable budget. He managed to get Joe Kubert (with Bob Bean), Lee Elias, Russ Heath, Bob Powell, Ross Andru, and Mike Sekowsky to do ten-page stories. (Kubert, Bean, and Elias even did several of them.) Other artists, such as Arthur Peddy and Fass himself, only did bits and pieces. Page 46 from Lunatickle #1; art by Russ Heath. Page 64 from Lunatickle #2 (April 1956); art by Mike Sekowsky. Page 55 from Lunatickle #2; art by Bob Powell. [© the respective copyright holders.]
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[Main text continued from p. 74] the art department on various magazines. At that time they decided to publish a magazine called Who Goofed?, dated January 1956. An attempt to join in with the then-trending other “satire/humor” magazines. With the 2nd and last issue, dated March 1956, I met Myron Fass who came up to Hillman to deliver his art assignment for the issue. Who Goofed? is described in Behaving Madly as one of the first wave of Mad magazine imitations. It was published by Hillman, who had earlier profiled Harvey Kurtzman in their main magazine Pageant and made him an offer to become its editor. Who Goofed? was primarily filled with doctored photos to produce “goof” articles such as “I Am a People Fighter” (bullfights from the point of view of the bull) and “A Look inside Marilyn Monroe” (which, when you flipped over the page, turned out to be an X-ray). There was very little artwork in the first issue, and a bit more in #2. The artwork that’s there is of a high quality. I am very glad to be able to put Fass’ name to it. I would never have guessed, as both illustrations in that issue are better than anything else I ever saw Fass do. And now, back to Harry: Fass was then a comic book artist with greater ambitions! We lived near each other and became friendly. At that time he began freelancing a digestsize magazine called Foto-rama, owned by a printer in New York City. He asked if I was interested in doing the layout and paste-ups on a freelance basis and I accepted the job. At the same time he approached someone at Whitestone—wholly owned by Fawcett and located at the same address where I had worked—about a magazine to be called Lunatickle, dated February 1956. He was given the job as Editor! The mid-50s were lean times for comic book artists who were eager for the job. Fawcett, having left comics, were able to supply the names and a generous budget. Fass also had the great idea of attracting some of the best writers in the field, including Jack Mendelsohn, Jean Hubbell, and Jerry Siegel. Harry again:
The Write Stuff Only three writers were credited in Lunatickle (which is two more than in most Mad imitations): artist Carl Hubbell’s wife Jean (a formidable writer on her own), Jack Mendelsohn (who was also scripting Panic for EC around that time), and Jerry Siegel. Contrary to what you may believe, this story by Siegel is not about a certain super-hero he had created some two decades earlier. The illustration is most likely by Myron Fass. From Lunatickle #2 (April 1956). [© the respective copyright holders.]
Lasting only two issues, Myron Fass already had another idea: He talked the owner of Foto-rama into being his partner of his next venture, a magazine called Oogle [sic], dated March 1956, [which was] mostly photos and a little art. Ogle was another photo-humor magazine, too far removed from Mad to be included in Behaving Madly. The only art I found in the few issues I have was a self-portrait by the editor and a couple of cartoons—all which may be by Fass, working in a variety of styles, to make the budget of the magazine seem more than it was. Apart from that, it was filled with funny articles based on photo material (mostly of nude and half-nude women). The latest issue I have is Vol. 3, No. 5, dated October 1960. Fass is still listed as editor. Back to Harry: Next came a romance magazine called True Problems - June
1956, a similar format to the EC Picto-Fiction titles. I was its freelance Art Director, and it featured many pages of art by the great A.C. Hollingsworth. To clarify, Ogle was also published by True Problems Publications. Myron and I ended our relationship when I refused to work for him full-time and he went on to publish many other magazines; his company was called Country Wide Publications. At my request, Harry told me a bit more about True Problems, which seems like a natural candidate for the Michael T. Gilbert treatment:
Fawcett Behaving Madly
Ogle Is As Ogle Does! (Left:) The back cover of the “photo-humor” mag Ogle #1 (March 1957) had a very non-flattering drawing of editor Myron Fass. “Why is it,” Ger asks, “that pornographers have such an affinity with satire and relativism (up to the point of self-hate)?” Although cover-dated March of 1957, Ogle most likely was on the stands in late 1956. The latest issue the author has seen is #6 (Jan. 1960). (Right:) The cover of the second issue of Ogle (dated May 1957). [© the respective copyright holders.]
Let’s Take A Fass Foto! A peek inside the June 1957 issue of Fotorama reveals that Myron Fass did some illustration work for the magazine as well (notably the cartoon on the far right). As long as you have an artist working for you, why not? [© the respective copyright holders.]
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When I met Fass, he already was involved with Willie Harris, the wealthy printer-inventor of the famous Harris press. He owned and published Foto-rama, and he was looking for someone to provide other titles for his printing presses. Harris owned the title True Problems, although Fass created it. He was the Publisher. I met Fass in late 1955. As I mentioned I was art director for it. Yes, I have a copy and, yes, Fass drew a story in it. But at this point we’re getting too far away from Fawcett, so I better hold it here. Which is not to say I won’t be carrying on my research…! Ger Apeldoorn is a writer for television, stage, and screen in the Netherlands, and writes and translates comics on the side. As a comicbook historian, he has contributed to Alter Ego and Hogan’s Alley and runs the blog The Fabulous Fifties. At 17 years old, he began his career translating for the Dutch Mad; 40 years later, he edited a short revival of the magazine.
Ain’t It The Cockeyed Truth! We kinda shortchanged the Whitestone/Fawcett parody titles Cockeyed and Cuckoo artwise—so find a copy of Ger’s book Behaving Madly online already!—but here’s a sampling that shows that Cockeyed, at least, was pretty much identical to Lunatickle: (Left:) Cover of Cockeyed #5 (June 1956). Art by Virgil Partch, who became famous as “VIP.” Mad’s Basil Wolverton was also added to Cockeye’s line-up. (Below:) Cockeyed #5 art by Joe Kubert. Many of the artists who produced work for Lunatickle also turned up in the later issues of Cockeyed. None of these were ten-page assignments, so they may have been done separately and not through editor Myron Fass. [© the respective copyright holders.]
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THE
CHARLTON COMPANION by JON B. COOKE
An ALL-NEW definitive history of Connecticut’s notorious all-in-one comic book company! Often disparaged as a second-rate funny-book outfit, Charlton produced a vast array of titles that span from the 1940s Golden Age to the Bronze Age of the ’70s in many genres, from Hot Rods to Haunted Love. The imprint experienced explosive bursts of creativity, most memorably the “Action Hero Line” edited by DICK GIORDANO in the 1960s, which featured the renowned talents of STEVE DITKO and a stellar team of creators, as well as the unforgettable ’70s “Bullseye” era that spawned E-Man and Doomsday +1, all helmed by veteran masters and talented newcomers—and serving as a training ground for an entire generation of comics creators thriving in an environment of complete creative freedom. From its beginnings with a handshake deal consummated in county jail, to the company’s accomplishments beyond comics, woven into this prose narrative are interviews with dozens of talented participants, including GIORDANO, DENNIS O’NEIL, ALEX TOTH, SANHO KIM, TOM SUTTON, PAT BOYETTE, NICK CUTI, JOHN BYRNE, MIKE ZECK, JOE STATON, SAM GLANZMAN, NEAL ADAMS, JOE GILL, and even some Derby residents who recall working in the sprawling company plant. Though it gave up the ghost over three decades ago, Charlton’s influence continues today with its Action Heroes serving as inspiration for ALAN MOORE’s cross-media graphic novel hit, WATCHMEN. By JON B. COOKE with MICHAEL AMBROSE & FRANK MOTLER. SHIPS OCTOBER 2022! (256-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-111-0
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TEAM-UP COMPANION by MICHAEL EURY
THE TEAM-UP COMPANION examines team-up comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages of Comics—DC’s THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD and DC COMICS PRESENTS, Marvel’s MARVEL TEAM-UP and MARVEL TWOIN-ONE, plus other team-up titles, treasuries, and treats—in a lushly illustrated selection of informative essays, special features, and trivia-loaded issue-by-issue indexes. Go behind the scenes of your favorite team-up comic books with specially curated and all-new creator recollections from NEAL ADAMS, JIM APARO, MIKE W. BARR, ELIOT R. BROWN, NICK CARDY, CHRIS CLAREMONT, GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE GERBER, STEVEN GRANT, BOB HANEY, TONY ISABELLA, PAUL KUPPERBERG, PAUL LEVITZ, RALPH MACCHIO, DENNIS O’NEIL, MARTIN PASKO, JOE RUBINSTEIN, ROY THOMAS, LEN WEIN, MARV WOLFMAN, and other all-star writers and artists who produced the team-up tales that so captivated readers during the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s. By BACK ISSUE and RETROFAN editor MICHAEL EURY. (272-page SOFTCOVER) $36.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-112-7 • SHIPS AUGUST 2022!
THE LIFE & ART OF
DAVE COCKRUM
by GLEN CADIGAN
From the letters pages of Silver Age comics to his 2021 induction into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, the career of DAVE COCKRUM started at the bottom and then rose to the top of the comic book industry. Beginning with his childhood obsession with comics and continuing through his years in the Navy, THE LIFE AND ART OF DAVE COCKRUM follows the rising star from fandom (where he was one of the “Big Three” fanzine artists) to pro-dom, where he helped revive two struggling comic book franchises: the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES and the X-MEN. A prolific costume designer and character creator, his redesigns of the Legion and his introduction of X-Men characters Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Thunderbird (plus his design of Wolverine’s alter ego, Logan) laid the foundation for both titles to become best-sellers. His later work on his own property, THE FUTURIANS, as well as childhood favorite BLACKHAWK and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, plus his five years on SOULSEARCHERS AND COMPANY, cemented his position as an industry giant. Featuring artwork from fanzines, unused character designs, and other rare material, this is THE comprehensive biography of the legendary comic book artist, whose influence is still felt on the industry today! Written by GLEN CADIGAN (THE LEGION COMPANION, THE TITANS COMPANION Volumes 1 and 2, BEST OF THE LEGION OUTPOST) with an introduction by ALEX ROSS. (160-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $27.95 • (LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER) $36.95 • (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-113-4 • SHIPS JUNE 2022!