Alter Ego #24 by TwoMorrows Publishing

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No. 24 May 2003

SPOTLIGHT ON The Magnificent

MORT MESKIN

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THE BEST IN COMICS AND LEGO MAGAZINES!

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See comic art and script BEFORE and AFTER the Comics Code changes, with art by SIMON & KIRBY, DITKO, BUSCEMA, SINNOTT, GOULD, COLE, STERANKO, KRIGSTEIN, O’NEIL, GLANZMAN, ORLANDO, WILLIAMSON, HEATH, and others! Plus: FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY, JIM AMASH interviews Timely/Atlas artist CAL MASSEY, and a new cover by JOSH MEDORS!

DICK GIORDANO through the 1960s—from freelance years and Charlton “Action-Heroes” to his first stint at DC! Art by DITKO, APARO, BOYETTE, MORISI, McLAUGHLIN, GIL KANE, and others, Dick’s final convention panel with STEVE SKEATES and ROY THOMAS, JIM AMASH interviews Charlton artist TONY TALLARICO, FCA with MARC SWAYZE and ROY ALD, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, GIORDANO cover, and more!

Big BATMAN issue, with an unused Golden Age cover by DICK SPRANG! SHEL DORF interviews SPRANG and JIM MOONEY, with rare and unseen Batman art by BOB KANE, JERRY ROBINSON, WIN MORTIMER, SHELLY MOLDOFF, CHARLES PARIS, and others! Part II of the TONY TALLARICO interview by JIM AMASH! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

1970s Bullpenner WARREN REECE talks about Marvel Comics and working with EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, STAN LEE, MARIE SEVERIN, ADAMS, FRIEDRICH, ROY THOMAS, and others, with rare art! DEWEY CASSELL spotlights Golden Age artist MIKE PEPPE, with art by TOTH, ANDRU, TUSKA, CELARDO, & LUBBERS, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, cover by EVERETT & BURGOS, and more!

Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, and PATRICK OLIFFE demos how he produces Spider-Girl, Mighty Samson, and digital comics. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

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LEGO SPACE WAR issue! A STARFIGHTER BUILDING LESSON by Peter Reid, WHY SPACE MARINES ARE SO POPULAR by Mark Stafford, a trip behind the scenes of LEGO’S NEW ALIEN CONQUEST SETS that hit store shelves earlier this year, plus JARED K. BURKS’ column on MINIFIGURE CUSTOMIZATION, building tips, event reports, our step-by-step “YOU CAN BUILD IT” INSTRUCTIONS, and more!

Go to Japan with articles on two JAPANESE LEGO FAN EVENTS, plus take a look at JAPAN’S SACRED LEGO LAND, Nasu Highland Park—the site of the BrickFan events and a pilgrimage site for many Japanese LEGO fans. Also, a feature on JAPAN’S TV CHAMPIONSHIP OF LEGO, a look at the CLICKBRICK LEGO SHOPS in Japan, plus how to get into TECHNIC BUILDING, LEGO EDUCATION, and more!

LEGO EVENTS ISSUE covering our own BRICKMAGIC FESTIVAL, BRICKWORLD, BRICKFAIR, BRICKCON, plus other events outside the US. There’s full event details, plus interviews with the winners of the BRICKMAGIC CHALLENGE competition, complete with instructions to build award winning models. Also JARED K. BURKS’ regular column on minifigure customizing, building tips, and more!

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Vol. 3, No. 24 / May 2003

™

Editor Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout Christopher Day

Consulting Editors John Morrow Jon B. Cooke

FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck

Comic Crypt Editor Michael T. Gilbert

Editors Emeritus Jerry Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White, Mike Friedrich

Production Assistant Eric Nolen-Weathington

Cover Artists Mort Meskin Dave Cockrum

Cover Colorist Tom Ziuko

Mailing Crew Russ Garwood, Glen Musial, Ed Stelli, Pat Varker, Loston Wallace

And Special Thanks to: Ger Apeldoorn Bob Bailey Mike W. Barr Bill Black Jerry K. Boyd Tom Brevoort Mike Burkey R. Dewey Cassell Chris Claremont Dave Cockrum Teresa R. Davidson Arnold Drake Shane Foley Gary Friedrich Mike Friedrich Glen David Gold Mark & Stephanie Heike Tom Horvitz Michael Kelly Ed Lahmann Stan Lee

Don Maris Robert Marquez Paty Peter Meskin Philip Meskin Joe Petrilak Wilson Ramos, Jr. Charlie Roberts Ethan Roberts Jerry Robinson Randy Sargent Jim Shooter Craig Shutt David Siegel Marc Swayze Dann Thomas Alex Toth Hames Ware Dylan Williams Tom Wimbish William Woolfolk

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Biljo White (1929-2003)

MORT MESKIN: His Kith & Kin Section Contents Writer/Editorial: “Mort Be Nimble, Mort Be Quick!” . . . . . . 2 “He Raised the Artistic Bar!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Jim Amash’s Short Celebration of the Life and Legend of Mort Meskin. Alex Toth: Homage to Mort Meskin: Maestro . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 “He Thought He Was a Great Comic Book Artist!” . . . . . . . . 9 And he was right! Jim Amash talks with Mort Meskin’s sons Peter & Philip.

Portrait of a Collector: Ed Lahmann Revisited! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Bill Schelly interviews a star of 1960s fandom—and remembers the late Biljo White. The Marvelous World of “What If?”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Michael T. Gilbert on some Marvel Age comics covers that never happened!

FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) #83. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 P.C. Hamerlinck proudly presents Marc Swayze and William Woolfolk. X-Men: From Silver to Bronze Section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flip Us! About Our Cover & Contents Page Illo: We wanted you to see it both in color and in black&-white. Collector Ethan Roberts, who acquired this great display drawing a few years ago (he says it belonged at one time to Meskin’s artist-friend George Roussos), believes it may be Mort Meskin’s original concept drawing—i.e., the first illo ever!—of the DC hero The Vigilante, who appeared for years in Action Comics and even had his own movie serial. We suspect Ethan may be right, for the original art is partly colored, almost certainly by Meskin, with a red bandanna mask—a light blue shirt (it became solid blue in the comics)—and white pants (colored light blue in Action). Our thanks to Ethan for letting us print this never-before-published piece. [Art ©2003 Estate of Mort Meskin; ©2003 DC Comics.] Alter EgoTM is published monthly by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. Phone: (919) 833-8092. Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: Rt. 3, Box 468, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Single issues: $8 ($10 Canada, $11 elsewhere). Twelve-issue subscriptions: $60 US, $120 Canada, $132 elsewhere. 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 Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

Title writer/editorial

“Mort Be Nimble–Mort Be Quick!” You may recall my writing some months ago, concerning Alter Ego, that “100 pages ain’t what it used to be!” Well, neither is 108 pages, my friend—for, with all the wondrous words and pictures this time about The X-Men on our flip side, and Mort Meskin on this, we ran so short on room that we had to knock our “re:” section with comments on A/E #19 forward into next issue, where we desperately hope to double up. (We had such informative, even controversial comments on our Dick Sprang and especially Fred Ray coverage in #19 that we didn’t want to squeeze things!)

Yank, Golden Lad, and all the rest. Thanks to the Meskin clan, Dylan Williams, Tom Wimbish, Jon B. Cooke, and Jim Amash for getting us a plenitude of art to choose from. As usual, we had more than we could print—and we look forward to showing you more Meskin magic in issues to come.

On a sadder note, as this issue was in the final stages of preparation, word reached us that Biljo White had passed away unexpectedly. Bill Schelly has written a few words on p. 31 about this 1960s fan-artist and Alter Ego editor emeritus who founded the As for Mort Meskin: he’s not as influential fanzine Batmania, but well known nowadays as he should Johnny Quick employs Mort Meskin’s patented multiple images to show rest assured that we’ll have more to be by a comics readership that may his super-speed in Adventure Comics #131 (Aug. 1948). Repro’d from say about Biljo in a near-future believe the use of moody shadows in AC Comics’ Golden-Age Greats #13—more about this fabulous issue. He was one of the good guys; comic books goes back no further Bill Black mag inside! [©2003 DC Comics.] and to me personally, who visited than Frank Miller, but we’re here to him several times when we lived only half the width of Missouri apart, tell ‘em they’re dead wrong. Meskin was a master at the use of shading it’s going to take a while to sink in that he’s really gone. He was survived and blacks in comics, in addition to being a crackerjack storyteller and a by his wife Hazel, and she has our heartfelt sympathy. He was 73—but master of action second only to Jack Kirby and the barest handful of he left us far too young. others. Mort Meskin had it all—and we’re proud that Alex Toth, Jim Amash, and Meskin’s sons Peter and Philip took the time to tell us about Bestest, this remarkable man and artist. We regret that we didn’t get to print a few samples of his advertising work for BBD&O, but that just meant more room for Vigilante, Black Terror, Wildcat, Johnny Quick, Fighting

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The Magnificent MORT MESKIN part one

“He Raised the Artistic Bar!” A Short Celebration of the Life and Legend of MORT MESKIN by Jim Amash Mort Meskin started drawing comic books in the Eisner-Iger shop in 1938. His stay was brief, but he built up his skills to the point where he became the first artist to draw “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,” proving that Will Eisner’s faith in him was justified. Meskin matured rather quickly as an artist. He had been well educated at Pratt Institute and had already done professional work for magazines, as well as a two-year stretch at a newspaper syndicate. He also studied some of the best artists of his time: Milton Caniff, Herbert Morton Stoops, Roy Crane, Alex Raymond, and Ed Cartier (whose pulp illustration influence was extremely evident in Meskin’s pulp work). Meskin left Eisner & Iger for the Harry “A” Chesler shop, but he didn’t stay there long, either. His work appeared in the comics published by several companies, including Timely, Lev Gleason, and MLJ (later known as Archie Publications), where he drew a variety of super-hero features, including “Bob Phantom,” “Captain Valor,” “Hercules,” “Captain Valor,” “Mister Satan,” “The Wizard,” and more. But he was still finding himself as an artist when he made his next stop, which was a long one, at DC Comics. It was at DC that Meskin found his artistic voice in comic books. He started there on the “Vigilante” feature, and was an immediate hit. “Vigilante” was really supposed to be a filler feature in Action Comics, but Meskin turned it into an artistic triumph. Every page was a visual treat as he refined his storytelling, which was strengthened by his dramatic compositions and his everincreasing use of black areas. His application of defined negative space to reinforce his scene staging only heightened his graphic imagery. Meskin’s compositional arrangements of grouped figures in a scene were always compelling, never contrived. People smiled a lot in his stories, as if to say to the reader, “Join in and have fun with us.” But, good as his drawing was, he never forgot to tell the story first. It was impossible a reader to stop and stare at just one panel, because Meskin knew how to draw the reader into the story and keep him there until the final panel. As experimental as his storytelling was on “Vigilante,” he raised the artistic bar once he was assigned to the “Johnny Quick” feature. While there were several comic book super-heroes applying super-speed as

Mort Meskin inking a page sometime in the 1950s—and a great “Johnny Quick” sequence from Adventure Comics #127 (April 1948) depicting multiple images of hands and arms or whole figures. Most Mort Meskin photos printed in this issue were sent by Dylan Williams, who works with Peter Meskin in running the <www.meskin.net> website, which we definitely invite you to visit! These photos are mostly from the personal collections of Meskin’s sons, Peter and Philip. [Art ©2003 DC Comics.]

their stock in trade, Meskin’s groundbreaking visual treatments of the hero in motion was a sight to behold. His utilization of multiple, fully-drawn images of Johnny Quick to portray rapid movement was inventive and effective. If Meskin was influenced by stop-action photography, his novel use of camera angles convinced any reader that Johnny Quick really moved that fast, leaving the company’s major speedster, The Flash, visually behind in second place. This approach to speed depiction required hard work with no shortcuts, which may explain why few others tried to duplicate it (Witness other artists like Ralph Mayo, who took the more conventional tack when he drew the feature... boring and lackluster by comparison.) Dan Barry, one of the great comics artists of the time, gave it a shot, as did Joe Kubert years later in the 1980s when he drew Johnny Quick on some of DC’s AllStar Squadron covers. However, these two great artists were the exceptions. With this body of work, Meskin became one of the most admired artists among his peers. Many compared his work, in quality and

Mort Meskin

quantity, to that of Jack Kirby. There were similarities in the work the two produced at the time, though it’s more likely Meskin was influenced by Kirby than the other way around. Inker Charles Paris once noted that both men would sit down in the morning and, by 5:00, individually produce four pages of complete art. Paris also observed that Meskin’s figures were not as exaggerated as Kirby’s, and usually his pages were more tightly finished. But sometimes Kirby would draw a page more than Meskin did, and he was also contributing to the final written product as he drew, frequently writing the script or rewriting a script scribed by others. Jack Kirby confirmed the often-told tale that Meskin was intimidated by Kirby’s ability, making it difficult for Meskin to draw in the DC bullpen when Jack was around.

Meskin’s pencils at DC. By this time, Meskin’s style had changed a bit. His staging was more urbane, less kinetic, though that may be due to the change in subject matter, since romance and horror comics demanded a different look than superheroes. He adopted a looser, roughhewn inking style, applying more crosshatching than before, which gave more of a mid-tone to the finished black-&-white art than in his DC days. Sometimes, facial features were suggested more than completed. It was top quality work, but perhaps not as aesthetically pleasing as it had been. Mort Meskin returned to DC Comics in the mid-1950s, staying there until he’d had enough of the comic book business. The industry wasn’t kind to Mort, who certainly gave far better than he received. His work lost some of its vitality and quality, often appearing rushed. Editors such as the tyrannical Robert Kanigher treated Meskin horribly, despite knowing about the artist’s previous emotional problems. It was shabby, squalid treatment of a former star, now on the downside of an impressive career.

It shouldn’t have mattered, because Meskin was nearly, if not completely, Kirby’s equal at the time. Artist and comics historian Jim Steranko, for one, believes Meskin equaled Kirby on many assignments during this period. DC had a giant in their midst, though they didn’t always appreciate him. Meskin was quiet and rather shy, due partly to a speech impediment and partly to emotional Some of the best of Meskin’s solo super-hero comics work—as well problems, which eventually led to a as his monumental teaming with friend and fellow artist Jerry Meskin left DC Comics for the series of nervous breakdowns. He left Robinson—has been restored and reprinted by Bill Black’s AC Comics comparatively safe haven of adverin beautiful black-&-white editions which allow the linework to be DC for a while and worked at other tising work at BBD&O around 1965. seen more clearly. This Meskin splash from Cressen/Spark’s Golden companies, such as Standard The insulting, shortsighted epitaph to Lad #2 (Nov. 1945) appears in AC’s Golden-Age Greats Vol. 13. Publications. He shared a studio with Meskin’s career at DC was spoken by Do yourself and favor and see AC’s ad elsewhere in this issue. partner Jerry Robinson, producing editorial director Irwin Donenfeld. [Restored art ©2003 Paragon Publications.] memorable comics like Black Terror When an artist asked about Meskin’s (previously a very dull, but leading departure, Donenfeld replied, ”We had to let Mort Meskin go. Mort quit company character), and The Fighting Yank, as well as Golden Lad for drawing fingernails.” Spark Publications. Meskin and Robinson were a great team, always transcending the scripts they were handed. Eventually, the two split up Mort Meskin never stopped drawing. His desire and ability to depict their studio, but retained their friendship and mutual admiration. the world as he felt it only grew. In later years, he painted hundreds of scenes in oil, pen and ink, and in watercolor, many of which reside in Meskin went to work for the Simon & Kirby shop, drawing a variety family members’ homes. He endlessly experimented with technique and of genres in books like Bullseye, Young Love, Young Romance, Justice style, always searching for his next artistic discovery. Traps the Guilty, Police Trap, and Captain 3-D (packaged by Simon & Kirby, but published by Harvey Publications). He also worked for a few To Meskin, creating art was a lifelong achievement. Even birthdays, other companies, such as Timely and Standard. Meskin also shared a weddings, religious holidays such as Chanukah and Rosh Hashanah and studio for a while with George Roussos, who had previously inked other events were dutifully and lovingly remembered in fun, well-illustrated cards. Bristol board, canvas, paper towels, napkins: anything that had white space was in danger of being covered with impressionist observations from his creative mind.

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Overall, the legacy of Mort Meskin is an important one. He brought a fresh, vital look to comics that entertained his audience for years. His unique and often daring storytelling, coupled with his dramatic use of positive and negative space, influenced people like Jerry Robinson, George Roussos, Bob Forgione, Joe Kubert, and Steve Ditko. An examination of the facial expressions on many of Ditko’s and Kubert’s characters betray the Meskin influence, as do several stylistic qualities of their inking. Meskin was an artist who tried to grow and change with the times. Whether one can easily dismiss his later work or not (or the varied reasons behind the changes), there’s no denying that the bright light of freshness that Mort Meskin shone on the comics field had a lasting effect on those who followed.

The Magnificent MORT MESKIN part two

by Alex Toth [NOTE: Mort Meskin and Alex Toth have in common the fact that, at various times over their careers, each was doing some of the most creative and innovative work in the comic book field, which is still admired by successors. This piece by Alex, originally intended for publication in John Benson’s magazine Panels, first appeared, complete with crossings-out, in the April 1992 issue of Robin Snyder’s History of the Comics (now The Comics!—see ad elsewhere in this issue). Thanks to Alex for permission to present it here. It’s been retyped, but part of the first of its original seven hand-lettered pages is reproduced. —Roy.]

The first page of Toth’s hand-lettered article featured two art spots by Alex himself. The one shown here, of Vigilante and his junior partner Stuff the Chinatown Kid, approximates a Meskin panel discussed at length on p. 6. We couldn’t locate the original Meskin “Vigilante” panel to which Alex refers by presstime; anybody out there know what issue of (probably) Action Comics it came from? [Art & text ©2003 Alex Toth; Vigilante & Stuff TM & ©2003 DC Comics.]

Mort Meskin broke rules, created his own (and years of splendid artistry along the way)—most notably in his “Vigilante” and “Johnny Quick” series for DC Comics during the 1940s and 1950s—when I was learning my ABCs there, a distant colleague whose socks were knocked off with Mort’s every page and story. His invention, daring, and subtlety were unique and exciting to us young Turks and older pros—Mort created surprises, beauty, action, mystery, art— through his keen talent for the unusual viewpoint, layout, composition, lighting, massing of forms and solid shapes, rich blacks and line work, in ways deceptively simple, bold, strong (yet subtle, remember) and clearly-stated, so respected that no inker of Mort’s fine pencils ever altered the character of his work—and Mort enjoyed the best of the lot at DC—Joe Kubert (first rate), Jerry Robinson, and George “Inky” Roussos.

Mort drew pages packed with up to 12 panels, yet through his excellent design and economy, managed to avoid the trap of clutter and confusion and delivered beautifully-constructed storytelling of dramatic quality. Students of his work will note that Mort’s world was not a realistic one—guns were outsized; cars, trucks, trains, boats, planes were exaggerations and imaginative devices once-removed from the real items (akin to Jack Kirby’s own personalized graphic liberties)—but these distortions added to their visual impact, not unlike the stuff of gag strips, eh? Absolutely correct! Said students of the art could find no better model for emulation than Mort Meskin’s action-filled “Johnny Quick” pages, where he proved exceptionally adept at strobe figure motion, with smooth followthroughs of overlapping bodies of Johnny performing stunts and fistwork without parallel in comic book art— these stories by Mort are landmarks of our craft’s very history; so study up! Mark well their enviable simplicity! Backgrounds (pesky things, I’ll admit) are usually

Mort Meskin in 1992, with fan David Siegel—and a copy of the gorgeous (and now sadly out-of-print) DC hardcover volume The Greatest Golden Age Stories Ever Told, which reprinted a “Vigilante” story by “Robinson/Meskin” from Action Comics #128 (Sept. 1948). For several years in the ‘40s, Meskin and Jerry Robinson worked as a team at DC, Standard/Nedor, and Cressen/Spark. Some researchers believe Meskin did most of the penciling, while Robinson himself has stated that they spelled each other on both activities, making it generally impossible to tell who did what on a particular job—and George Roussos sometimes got into the mix, as well. [Art ©2003 DC Comics; photo ©2003 Charlie Roberts.]

Mort Meskin at all—resulting in messy pieces of business, regularly.

[Above left:] This Toth sketch-approximation of another Meskin panel was included in his article in The Comics! [Above:] Two different kinds of handguns drawn by Meskin for a 1950s crime tale entitled “Double Trouble!” in art sent to us by Ger Apeldoorn of Haarlem, The Netherlands, from a black-&-white reprint; thus we can’t be certain in which U.S. comic mag it originally appeared. [©2003 Alex Toth & the respective copyright holder—respectively.]

absent from Mort’s action panels, as well they should be; why clutter them up needlessly and destroy the clarity of those bold action figures? Mort knew where, when, and how to effect the backgrounds, settings, props—by suggesting their solid forms with strong black dropshadow verticals and establishing horizontals (and his figures’ own floor shadows)—elsewhere, random brick patterns, posters, pictures, etc., created the enclosing set flats of his scene’s action—or, lastly, omitting the lot by use of spotlight effects, blacking out the rest of the scene for rich contrast. He often resorted to circular, rectangular, or square vignette shapes to frame a single head or figure—its usage created pleasant white surrounds which interrupted the repetitious order of standard panel sequences—and, too, reinforced the desired effect of simplicity Mort strived for unceasingly. The memory sketch [on p. 5] echoes a “Vigilante” panel I’ve had locked up for almost 40 years. Boys are, after all, so damned impressionable—it was but a minor panel, true—but I was rocked by its subtle graphic wallop—and here’s why. Mort, for reasons of his own, chose to crop the scene, thusly, and cut off Vig’s face in his headturn as he holstered his sixgun, creating a strong diagonal line of force, up that arm, across Vig’s body, and out of that panel to the next, to where ol’ Vig seemed to be looking. Had Mort not cut off view of Vig’s face, the effect (the eye travel) would have been stopped dead by the vertical (panel border) frame. Mort’s intention was to move your eyes across—out—not to stop your scan of dialogue and art. That was a pro, a thinking pro, at work— and Mort was that, and more. He created action, atmosphere, a sense of place, of movement, throughout his storytelling—drama, suspense, surprise, and novelty—through economy. Mort edited out superfluous technique and distracting clutter—the resulting simplicity made for smoother reading flow of caption and dialogue copy as well as his art— he served his text all that much better for it, too. Also, consider that simplicity of open areas (cleanlined) so receptive to color (the hues of which he could not possibly know in advance, save for his heroes’ costumes) versus his generous sweeps of large masses and spottings of black. What those black and whites of his original art did was to ensure the integrity of his work. How’s that—? Well, I learnt long ago (by studying Mort’s work and many others’ of kindred spirit—and paranoia) not to trust to the vagaries of comic book production colorists’ choices, by (hopefully) tamper-proofing my work via strong blacks, so that the dimmest of minds or most-rushed of hands could not foul up, totally, the effect I’d sought, time of day or night/indoor-outdoor light quality, or the solidity of figure and forms I’d inked in—ever hopeful that clear, bright, contrasting colors would be set down where needed to play against my blacks—or, elsewhere, dark colors to reinforce a dark scene, but with a spot of white or light color to give highlighting of that picture’s center of interest—but, it didn’t happen. Colorists do not read (or scan) the story at hand (no time) to fix day/night, dark/bright ratios

Mort, far more astute and skilled than I, had better results than most, for all the above-listed reasons—simplicity, tho’, I believe, was his best weapon against abusive coloring for, to quote an advisor of good intent, “If you keep it simple, give ‘em fewer items in a scene to color, they’ll have less

chance to muck it up...” Indeed. Things, in fact, haven’t changed all that much, have they? But let me explain a bit about Mort’s penciling method during those mid-’40s DC years—something I witnessed, firsthand, while visiting his studio flat, before I entered DC’s hallowed halls at 480 Lexington as a goggle-eyed tyro—Mort was busy penciling a “Vigilante” story, despite my intruding and questioning presence, and what I saw him do that afternoon was indicative of his unique approach to every part of his creative endeavors... He took a DC page blank and rubbed soft (2B) lead across its face, smudged it, into a smooth, overall gray tone—script at hand, he took a kneaded eraser and (referring to script) proceeded to “pick out”/erase panel borders; across, top row to bottom, from circles to squares to rectangles, in varying sizes, of course (as always, then)—I was fascinated, delighted, and puzzled—then, his eraser picked out solid white shapes of each panels’ interiors—a caption panel, a balloon, another—a figure. Another. Working in reverse, he erased shapes, forms, interlocking compositional elements, to create complete (but negative/white on gray) pictures. It was simple, efficient, and effective. No messy haylined penciling for Mort Meskin. His way was astoundingly basic, elementary—devoid of any concern other than to sculpt out, from a gray mass, his solid forms—damn, it was brilliant. My eyes and memory bank absorbed his every move. Pure joy, it was—panel by panel, enthralled with his overall page composition—if a shape or space didn’t work, he merely smudged in more gray tone, and tried again, until he got it right. Working his magic there before my novice eyes—it was ruddy genius. All the while, he cautioned me not to try the same thing because I was too young, green, and ungrounded in experience to fully comprehend or utilize the procedure.... Well, now, he knew that that was exactly what I intended to do, once home again—he was absolutely right, tho’—absolutely 100% correct! I did try it, again and again and again—never did get it quite right—gave it up—went back to my own stumbling way of creating pictures with a pencil—in turn, with black, blue, heliotrope leads, from 2H to 4B and back again, and with charcoal smudge-stumps (for soft-shaded blocking-in of figures, etc.—did have luck with that method for some time)—years later, I finally learnt enough to use Mort’s reverse method—and learnt even more for having done so—fully appreciating, if not partially-achieving, such concentration on shapes, forms, in those first movements of composition—it led me on, to deeper study of all other types of graphic art—I owe him a great debt. But to wind this up—or down—for you—once Mort’s blocking-in was ended, all over that page, only then did he put pencil(point) to paper. In simple strokes, he refined those shapes, outlining, detailing within those outlines (of heads/figures/props/backgrounds) and lettering his copy. Remember, he was penciling for the editor and inker assigned to

Alex Toth

a looser, rough-hewed, dry-brushed style—bold, strong, black—truly a departure (ditto, his Black Terror), but an attractive one. I loved it for all of that and, again, its economy—Mort carved even more dramatically from his sweeps of black—balanced these sculpturally-solid shapes with a minimum of outlines and interior figure details—introducing a broken inkline, thicker, gutsier—others thought it the mark of rushed work, but I think not—if so, it doesn’t alter my appreciation one bit. Mort shifted gears/viewpoints/emphasis and methods throughout his career—each one another switchback, sidestep, or leap ahead which brought just one more entertaining facet of his talent to the fore—Mort invented, questioned, assessed, discarded, tested, reached out—more than ten other cartoonists of his time—ever searching, finding, losing, winning— ah, but always learning. His restlessness kept him facile—as he learnt, tested, and applied—so did we, his observers and students. My admiration and respect for his craftsmanship is as keen now as it was 35 years ago, if not more so. Mort Meskin created bold, dramatic beauty in his straightforward art and storytelling devices, entertaining us all the while through always doing the unexpected, creating new delights for us—his meaning and intellect were not given the editorial, environmental, or fiscal appreciation due him, and so, as in so many other cases in our curious profession, he was distressed enough with it until his only solace was to leave it—and so he did. The loss was ours....

Mort Meskin was sometimes assisted in the mid-to-late 1940s by a young Joe Kubert as inker, as on this “Vigilante” splash (from Action Comics #69, Feb. 1944) as reprinted in Secret Origins #3 (Nov. 1972). The credits at top and lower left were added in 1972; the 1944 credit, at bottom right, reads only: “by Mort and Joe.” The Dummy, based in part on the super-popular Charlie McCarthy, was Vigilante’s most popular antagonist. [©2003 DC Comics.]

complete the strip—thus he had to tighten it up a touch for it all to read clearly. Mort’s gray smudge-tones were his blacks now—already there— his focus was on delineating his white shapes... it looked so damned easy. Perhaps, for Mort, at the time, it was. Years later, I was quite surprised (if not disappointed) at sight of a set of his blue-penciled pages—he’d abandoned his wonderful method. But the only constant is change, we learn soon enough— As for Mort’s inkers, Joe Kubert, a kid, like me (mebbe a year older), with skill far beyond his years, had a delicious sparkle in his Meskin inking—such a happy blend of two talents. Joe learnt much more in the process, certainly—evident in his subsequent works for DC and other publishers during the ‘40s, ‘50s—also enhanced were the talents of inkers Jerry Robinson and George Roussos. What most affected their own work, it seems, was Mort’s broad, open, uncluttered layouts—his use of space, of shapes, of minimal figure details—of deep blacks—of clean lines. Jerry’s Atoman, Green Hornet, and “Batman”/”Alfred” series demonstrated this influence. Splendid work. George Roussos’ multifaceted talent did benefit greatly from his collaboration, as well—very fine color contrast always (George knew how to use white! few colorists did then, or do now!), very keen on red, orange, blues, to startling effect—good letterer, on Mort’s work, Jerry’s, his own—and first-rate layout/design and inking skills. Interspersed were Mort’s own inks of his work, and they proved eyecatchingly rich—and simple. Upon his exit from DC to begin his Golden Lad series, it was no surprise that he surprised us all—Lad was

The “sweep of blacks... balanced those sculpturally-solid shapes with a minimum of outlines and interior figure details” with a “broken inkline”... Meskin plus Robinson from Standard/Nedor’s Exciting Comics #66 (March 1949), repro’d from b&w art courtesy of Bill Black. [Restored art ©2003 AC Comics.]

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The Magnificent MORT MESKIN part three

“He Thought He Was a Great Comic Book Artist!” And He Was Right! A Candid Conversation (or Rather, Two of Them) with the Sons of Golden Age Legend MORT MESKIN! Conducted & Transcribed by Jim Amash [INTERVIEWER’S INTRO: Mort Meskin left a great comic book legacy, but that’s not what makes him so extraordinary. As most people know, raising children is the most special of achievements, even when things run on an even keel. Battling personal and professional problems, Meskin continued to be a wonderful parent and role model for his two son, Peter and Philip. As Meskin was reluctant to publicly discuss his career or personal life, it falls to his sons to tell us about him (in separate interviews which we’ve combined for the sake of economy). From our vantage point, Meskin’s greatest success was the sons he reared and the feelings he engendered in others. If the make of a man is measured by what he leaves behind him, then Mort Meskin proved he was one hell of a man. —Jim.]

“How Do You Draw, Dad?” JIM AMASH: When and where was your father born? PETER MESKIN: As far as I know, he was born in Brooklyn, May 30, 1916. His full name was Morton Meskin. JA: Sometimes he signed his name “Morton Meskin, Jr.” PETER: He made that up. He also made up “Mort Morton” and, I think, “Mort Morton, Jr.” JA: Why did he invent the “Junior” part? PETER: I don’t know. I guess he was young and thought that the “Junior” would be cool or something. [laughs] His father’s name was Joe. One of my earliest memories of my father was that he would bring home copies of his comics to my brother Philip and me. We’d beg him to do it. We would immediately read them, whether there were two comics or twenty. We’d memorize every single word in every single comic, reading his stories first. We were his biggest fans and had a set of comics that you wouldn’t believe. You could show us one panel from a story of his and we could tell you where it came from. But most of those comics disappeared years later.

Mort Meskin with his sons Peter (left) and Philip (right, and the splash from the superbly-drawn “Johnny Quick” tale in Adventure Comics #127 (April ‘48). Unless otherwise noted, photos in this section are courtesy of Peter Meskin, provided by Dylan Williams from the <www.meskin.net> website. Give yourself a treat and give it a look! We’ve only shown the tip of the Meskin iceberg. [Art ©2003 DC Comics.]

JA: Philip, what are your earliest memories of your father? PHILIP MESKIN: As you know, our nuclear family broke up early. I was in the third grade. I remember crawling around Prospect Park with my father and Peter. I remember living with my grandfather when I was about one or two years old. I also remember going to Paris with my mother and brother on a trip. My father didn’t come along. JA: Did your father have any siblings? PETER: Yes. He had a brother, Nat, and a sister, Muriel. They both passed away before he did, though. Uncle Nat was the oldest and Aunt Muriel was the youngest, so my father was the middle child. JA: What art education did your father have? PETER: He went to Pratt Institute. He never graduated but went there for two or three years. He really learned how to draw human anatomy. He was respected for that. I remember one of the sculptures he made at home. It was a plaster cast of Moses, a copy of the one with horns by Michelangelo, and he could name every muscle in the figure. He also

Mort Meskin He was trying to protect you from what he was going through. Your father sounds like he was a very sensitive person, and the deadlines probably got on his nerves, which might have contributed to some of his problems.

PHILIP: I think he had periods where putting out those pages was a struggle. I remember during his “Mark Merlin” years that he had troubles. My main memories of my father’s comic Under the house name “W. Morgan Thomas,” Meskin drew the first “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle” episode, whose U.S. book career are the House of debut was in Jumbo Comics #1 (Sept. 1938). At this point Sheena was very much in the mode of H. Rider Haggard’s She, Mystery, House of Secrets years. but that would soon change to the Tarzanic model. [©2003 Paul Aratow/Columbia.] I felt his later years in comics took some courses at the Art Students league, and he taught for a while. were not as good as his earlier years. I was proud of his work, but I He still spoke with a stutter at the time, so he was very uncomfortable knew the artwork he had done previously was much more detailed. talking in front of groups. There were more lines, less caricatured faces. I remember someone [Jim Steranko in his History of Comics. —Jim A.] writing, “So what if JA: When did you become aware that your father was an artist? Mort didn’t know the construction of a .45 automatic?” PHILIP: I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t, because he was always brining in art supplies and comic books.

I think it was an issue of Showcase where Dad drew this great story about a pilot who landed in the desert. A dust cloud came along and he was sucked into this other world where the Arabian Nights were. He fell in love with a beautiful girl.

PETER: I’m three and a half years older than Philip. I remember Dad’s studio, which was a room I loved to go in because that’s where magic happened. I’d stand on my tiptoes and look up at his easel and watch him draw and paint. I could smell all the paints and inks. I loved it. I asked him once, “How do you draw, Dad?” He shrugged and said, “I don’t know.” He’d point to his shoulder and say, “It comes down my arm and goes out my fingers and comes out of the brush.” He never wanted to teach Philip and me how to draw. He felt it was too difficult a life. I never learned to draw because he didn’t want us to. PHILIP: That’s true, though I don’t think he actively discouraged it. I once asked him about that when I was in high school. He said it was a conscious decision on his part not to encourage us in art because of the bad feelings he had towards making a career out of art, the struggles you have to go through, etc. JA: Art has never been an easy career path to follow.

My favorite comic book artist who ever lived was Barry Smith, when he was drawing the early Conan comic books. Barry Smith was intense, and he put a lot into his work. JA: You know, my editor on this magazine, Roy Thomas, wrote those comics. PHILIP: I didn’t know that. The reason I mentioned Barry Smith was because I didn’t think Pop was as good as Barry Smith. I think my dad reached his peak in comic book art around 1956. “Johnny Quick,” “Vigilante,” Black Terror... that work was good, but it was done before my time.

This DC page by Mort Meskin from what his son Philip calls “his ‘Mark Merlin years’” was kindly sent to us by Ger Apeldoorn of The Netherlands, who says he got it from the black-&-white British Blackhawk #27. Boy, is Alter Ego going international, or what! [©2003 DC Comics.]

JA: I wasn’t born until 1960, so my earliest memories of your father’s work were the reprints of House of Secrets and House of Mystery stuff. But when DC started reprinting “Johnny Quick” and “Vigilante,” I fell in love with Mort Meskin’s

A Conversation with Peter and Philip Meskin

problems with some of the people he worked with, and maybe they beat him down a little bit. PHILIP: That could be true. He was a lifelong stutterer and wasn’t very aggressive. JA: Did he have the stutter as a child? PETER: Well, no... maybe. As a young child, under the age of six, he was climbing on an icebox and it fell on him. It landed on his leg and he always carried a scar from that. I think that’s when the stuttering started. That was very traumatic for him. But when he sang, he never stuttered. He knew all of the old songs, and I know those songs today because he and my mom sang them to us. He was a good singer and a good reader. At bedtime, he’d make up very clever stories for us. He’d call them “100% Almost True-to-Life Stories.” He’d always feature Philip and me in those stories: “Once upon a time, on a far-off planet, Prince Peter and King Philip...” and so on and on. Great stuff! He eventually stopped stuttering in his later years, as he became more confident in himself. This was after he’d left comic books and was working for BBD&O. I forget who got him that job. JA: Was it [comic book artist] Marvin Stein? PETER: Yes, it could have been Marvin. I remember some of Dad’s friends from my early childhood, like Jerry Robinson. We used to go over to his house on Riverside Drive. Jerry and his wife Gro had a rabbit and I used to play with it on the floor. PHILIP: Jerry was a strong presence in our lives. I remember being in his apartment (where he still lives) as a child. Jerry was a good friend of my father’s and stood by Dad when he was hospitalized for emotional problems in the mid-1950s. I remember Jerry had a Scandinavian wife and a daughter about my age. I used to chase that rabbit around. While working on this issue, we received a scan of this art from collector Don Maris, who writes: “Bob Bailey says you’re doing an issue about Mort Meskin and he thought I should send you the first page from a one-ofa-kind comic. The comic is a 16-page 1940s giveaway called Weekly Comic Magazine. According to Overstreet, it was printed by Fox around 1940-41 and sold to stores that wanted comics to give to their customers or their kids. This is an 8-page story and, as you may be able to see, has a credit for ‘Meskin and Sundell.’” Many thanks, Don! “Sundell” is almost certainly early writer and editor Abner Sundell, whose 1942 article giving advice to aspiring comics scripters was reprinted in A/E V3#4. We caught Don just in time! His copy of WCM will be auctioned off by Heritage Comics in July at the San Diego Comic-Con. [©2003 the respective copyright holder.]

I also remember that my father was friends with Irwin Hasen, who did the comic strip Dondi. I had a picture hanging over my bed of Dondi saying, “Dondi says, ‘Hello to Philip.’”

work, and it influenced me. I used to copy your dad’s super-hero work. Later on, I saw the Black Terror and his work for Simon and Kirby. PHILIP: The “Mark Merlin” stuff was done after my father’s stay in the hospital. He wasn’t into the artwork as much as he had been before. Also, he was living then by himself in Greenwich Village in a one-room apartment where he had a bed and an easel. This was before he met my step-mother Molly, who had a major, positive impact on his life. George Roussos also lived in that building, and they were friends. JA: Roussos inked your father on “Vigilante” and also drew that feature after your father left it. PHILIP: I didn’t know that.

“100% Almost True-to-Life Stories” JA: You dad probably was more into making a living rather than having the passion for the artwork itself, perhaps. Also, he had

Mort Meskin and his first wife, Betty—the mother of Peter and Philip.

Mort Meskin

When two of MLJ’s first super-heroes shared the Shield-Wizard title in the early ‘40s, Mort Meskin drew the two “Wizard” stories in some issues. Thanks to Michael T. Gilbert. [©2003 Archie Comic Publications, Inc.]

JA: You know, even back then, your father’s contemporaries thought he was one of the best. PETER: Really? JA: He probably didn’t talk about it, did he? PETER: Not to me. JA: You know he was a very fast artist, too? PETER: Yes, I did know that. When he was at BBD&O, he got bored at times because he knocked out the work they wanted him to do very quickly and he was faster than anybody there. But then he didn’t know what to do with himself because he’d have nothing to do. He’d literally go into the bathroom and climb the walls. He’d take all the paper towels and go to his cubicle and practice sketching on those towels. He had hundreds, maybe thousands of them, and was going to throw them all away, and I told him, “Don’t throw them away, Pop. I love your work. Give them to me.” And I have piles of those paper towels to this day... nudes, horses, people in all kinds of positions. Some drawings were only roughs, and some were very detailed. He’d practice layouts and storyboards. Whatever came to mind. JA: During his marriage to your mother, he worked in a studio away from the house as well as at home, didn’t he? PETER: Yes. I have some photographs of that. He was gone all day working at the different places he worked. He’d work all day and night and weekends, too. But we still had a family life. We went out together to amusement parks and beaches. I have lots of memories of being a family on weekends, and Dad spent quality time with us, which I very much missed when we weren’t a family any more.

“He Gave Me ‘Artist’s Eyes’” JA: Then you have good memories of your father while he worked in comics. PHILIP: Yes. In fact, I have more trouble remembering things when he worked in his next career phase, at BBD&O. [laughs] My time that I lived with my father was when he was a comic book artist, and BBD&O was just another thing that he did. PETER: At BBD&O, Dad made a lot more money than he did in comic books. My dad had remarried and it was a good marriage. I think it gave him more confidence. He was more settled and just came into his own. JA: Why do you think he didn’t have much confidence as a child? PETER: I think it came from the stuttering. It just hampered his confidence. But what came first, I don’t know... it’s like the chicken-or-theegg thing. I don’t know much about his early childhood but my dad portrayed his mother as being very strict. My dad was a mild-mannered man... a Clark Kent who, privately, probably thought of himself as a Superman. JA: Most artists do. PETER: [laughs] He was in my eyes, I’ll tell you that. He was a goodhearted, kind, gentle human being who loved people and animals and I see the world through his eyes. He gave me “artist’s eyes” with which to look at the world. There’s always beauty in the world and he felt that being human meant that anything humans could do, positively or negatively, we could do, too. He didn’t blame people very much for things.

A Conversation with Peter and Philip Meskin

The cover of Golden-Age Greats #13 (1998), from Bill Black’s AC Comics—an all-Meskin-andRobinson issue, and boy, is it gorgeous! Bill tells us he composed the cover by adapting a Meskin Johnny Quick figure into The Black Terror. The drawing-board art of Golden Lad, The Fighting Yank, and the Terrors is from vintage Spark and Nedor comics. See AC Comics’ ad elsewhere in this issue. [Art ©2003 AC Comics.]

He never hit me, by the way. Never once. My mother once told him to spank me when I had been acting up. Dad took me in another room, laid me on his lap and said, “Okay. I’m going to clap my hands real loud and every time I do that, you scream.” I looked at him as if to say, “What are you talking about?” and he clapped his hands. I faked a scream but had to control the giggles because otherwise my mother would come in and beat me up! [laughs] Dad couldn’t hit me! He was great! JA: That’s funny and charming. PETER: That’s the kind of guy he was. My brother and I would wait for him to come home, and the moment he opened up the door, we sat on both of his feet. At that time, his feet were like the size of boats to us, and then he’d have to shuffle into the house with his two sons on each leg, after a hard day of work. He’d come in and kiss my mother “hello,” and then we’d ask him to play monkey bars with us. He would

Two Meskin-penciled “Wildcat” pages, repro’d from photocopies of the original art, courtesy of Ethan Roberts. What with the wild animals on one page and the cages on another, it’d be tempting to believe they came from the same Wildcat-Huntress clash in the same issue of Sensation Comics—but they don’t. The “43” and “44” at the tops represent the page numbers of issues #68 and #69 (out of 48 interior pages—but not sure which story’s from which issue), since “Wildcat” was generally the last feature each month in Sensation, bookending with “Wonder Woman.” [©2003 DC Comics.]

Mort Meskin

stand, kind of bending a little in a TaiChi position and we’d climb up him like he was monkey bars. When he was in high school, Dad was a talented gymnast and worked out on a high bar. He could swing around and was very mobile.

went to live with my mother for a very short time. We never really had a home together again. JA: How did your dad handle living by himself?

Mort Meskin with young sons Peter and Philip —and with his first wife Betty at Coney Island.

JA: Was he a big man?

JA: Would you say he was happy in the time before he met Molly?

PETER: No. He was about five foot seven, but to me he was my protector.

PHILIP: I can’t really put a finger on that because I wasn’t with him enough at that time. He was taking medications and dealing with his problems. But it was Molly who had the major, positive impact on his life. He went from living in a one-room apartment by himself in Greenwich Village, which to me had some charm

JA: Was your father good in school? PETER: He wasn’t crazy about school. But I know very little about his childhood, as I said. I know he loved Brooklyn and we lived in Brooklyn for a while. We’d always go to Coney Island and Reis Park Beach. I have some pictures of those days.

“We Never Really Had a Home Together Again” JA: Someone in your family sure took a lot of photographs. PETER: For the first twelve years of my life, I have a lot of photographs, until our family broke up. Basically what happened was, my brother and I wound up in an orphanage because my parents became unable to take care of us. We lived there for about five years, in a variety of situations. They separated Philip and me in two different locations. Later on, my brother did get to live with my father for a little bit and I

PHILIP: I don’t know, because I wasn’t living with them then. I was living in a foster home. I didn’t have an awareness of that until the summer of 1963, when I left the foster home and went to live with my mother. I used to go out to Greenwich Village, where I’d meet my father, and it was a nice time for us. We’d buy sandwiches, go down to the dock at the Hudson River, or go to Washington Square. This was the pre-hippie, end of the beat era. We’d do things and he’d go back to work and I’d hang out and read The Village Voice [newspaper].

and I liked it. But getting together with Molly was a lifeenhancing thing for him. JA: How old was your father when he first got married? PETER: They got married on May 17, 1944, so he was twenty-eight years old. JA: Sounds like your family had a great dynamic going in the early days. PETER: Yes, we did. That’s why my brother and I were very surprised when my parents got divorced. I Captain Peter on the Boom. think they kept a lot of things under wraps, because we didn’t know they were having problems at the time. JA: They were protecting the both of you. PETER: I guess so. I remember the night my mother broke the news to us, and Philip and I were shocked. I remember many wonderful times we shared, and when I look at all the pictures, I relive those times.

This photo is labeled “Phil at Full Throttle.” Us, we’re just quoting —we don’t understand all these nautical terms.

JA: So your mother was the disciplinarian of the family?

A Conversation with Peter and Philip Meskin

Two great “Robinson/Meskin” splashes from 1948-49 Nedor comics: Fighting Yank #25 and Black Terror #23, repro’d from b&w art retouched for AC Comics by Bill Black and Mark Heike. Bill notes that the latter issue was literally “banned in Boston,” no doubt for its scantily-clad females, including one in jeopardy on the cover. The snake probably didn’t help, either. [Restored art ©2003 AC Comics.]

PETER: Oh, yeah. No doubt about that. A lot of families are like that. I remember one time getting very angry about something... I must have been about eight or nine. I must have seen a little hobo on television or something. I got a broomstick and a handkerchief and put all my worldly possessions in it... like a couple of marbles, a slingshot and a Hershey bar... real important things. I tied them into the handkerchief at the end of the broomstick, put it over my shoulder and started marching out of the house. I said, “I’m leaving.” My mother got real angry and said, “You’re not going anywhere. You’re not going to leave.” My father said, “No, no. Let him go.” My mother glared at my father. He said, “Let him go. If he has to go, he has to go.” I marched out of our third–story apartment; not knowing my father was following me the whole way. I walked all the way down the block and then I couldn’t go any further. You know why? JA: You didn’t know where to go? PETER: No. It was because I wasn’t allowed to cross the street. [laughs] I must have been younger than eight, I guess. I don’t remember what my father said to me but it was something like, “If you can’t leave today, it’s okay. You can leave another day.” That made me feel free enough to come home. He seemed to have the right thing to say to me. JA: He sounds like a very loving parent. PETER: Yes, he was. Dad was a very nurturing, loving parent. I miss him a lot. I really do. JA: How did he get along with his brother and sister?

PETER: I don’t think he got along great with them. We didn’t see them all that much. We did see Uncle Nat when we were young, and both Philip and I loved Uncle Nat and Aunt Mariam very much, and their two children, Billy and Jay. Nat was very different than my dad. He was an extrovert and a glad-hander; he always smiled when he picked us up and things like that. He was the kind of guy every boy liked. Muriel was quieter and more reserved; not as demonstrative. As a child, I thought everything was okay but they weren’t all that close. JA: Maybe that was because your father was an introvert and that prevented him from getting too close to people? PETER: That’s very possible. He seems to have had a couple of good friends along the way, though. JA: Did you ever go to his studios when he worked outside the house? PETER: I vaguely remember going there once as a kid. I did go to BBD&O a lot but I was older then. I think he took me to his studio once when he worked at DC.

“Dad Was Encouraging about Everything I Did” JA: Philip, do you remember how he felt about making the change from comic books to BBD&O? PHILIP: The reason he did that was because I came to live with him. I was in the tenth grade and could no longer live with my mother because she was having problems. I actually went to live with Peter first; he was

Mort Meskin and make believe we were both sleepy and rub our eyes and the women would say, “Oh, look at those cute kids. Why don’t we give them an apricot?” I could see my mother scowling, like, “Get back to bed.” So we did have a social life. But I suspect it was my mother more than my father who initiated that. He did socialize with Jerry Robinson a lot. They worked together for a long time. I really respected Jerry, and his name is one that’s been a part of my life since my earliest memories. They really liked each other. I don’t know much about their comic book work together, though. I wish I could tell you more, but I can talk about Jerry’s rabbit if you want. [laughs] JA: How encouraging was your father about your schoolwork? PETER: Dad was encouraging about everything I did. I must tell you: anything I ever attempted in my life was fully supported and encouraged by my dad. Dad would design birthday cards and other kinds of cards for me over the years. Anything I happened to be doing at that time, he’d draw me a picture of it as if he were celebrating my life. He loved it when I became a charter boat captain. It absolutely thrilled him. I haven’t really followed in his footsteps, but everything I’ve done, he either wished he had done or he dreamed of doing. JA: He wasn’t much of an adventurer, then?

Though unsigned, this superb splash from Fighting Yank #26 (Nov. 1948) is apparently the work of both Meskin and Robinson. Alas, even as the art in Nedor’s comics got better, postwar super-hero sales had declined and Yank was canceled with #29, Black Terror with #27, both in the fatal year 1949. Courtesy of Bill Black. [Retouched art ©2003 AC Comics.]

in college at the time. I think Peter motivated my father to get his act together and set us up in an apartment in Yonkers, NY. It also allowed him to maintain his relationship with Molly. JA: So he left comics in order to make more money to support the two of you? PHILIP: Yes, I think that was the motivation, and also to have a more regular life. JA: Maybe Molly pushed him, too? PHILIP: Molly pushed him in all sorts of directions. She was a very strong, matriarchal, controlling person, and my father was a less controlling, more passive person. Molly helped him get off the medications, and he became much more alive with Molly. It worked for him. JA: Did your father socialize with his co-workers? PETER: I don’t know anything about that. I was too young. Maybe if I’d been with him during my high school years, I’d have been more aware of it. I do remember my parents giving parties at home and Philip and I would have to go to bed. They had this lovely Lazy Susan out in the living room with cashews, pecans, and apricots. Philip and I caught on to this because we weren’t allowed to touch any of it. We’d sneak out

The original Meskin art for the cover of Spark/Cressen’s Golden Lad #3 (Feb. 1946) was sold via auction by Sotheby’s a few years back. Thanks to Tom Wimbish and Dylan Williams for the scan. [©2003 the respective copyright holder.]

A Conversation with Peter and Philip Meskin PETER: No. Dad wasn’t much of an adventurer at all. JA: He was a dreamer. PETER: Oh, yeah. He knew that. Dad even described himself as that. He was a philosopher, too. He read a lot of books on philosophy: Eastern philosophy, Buddhism and all kinds of stuff like that. He was very articulate about it. It helped form a lot of his worldview, and he continued to be gentle and understanding. JA: He doesn’t sound like a temperamental man. PETER: He wasn’t and I don’t remember too much of that from my childhood. He yelled at me maybe once or twice. Like most very mild people, if they get pushed too far, they explode and then you’re surprised. But he never yelled like that. Most of my memories of my dad are of him being pretty mild. We had a nice, close, loving relationship. JA: Was he a joke-teller?

17 JA: Was it a Kibbutz? PHILIP: Yes. I managed a dairy farm there and was able to go to a formal woodworking program. My working skills really came out in Israel. I always had an interest in building things, and I took a wood design course in college. The motivation for knuckling down and developing woodworking skills came over a period of years from the feeling that I wouldn’t remain in Israel, that I’d go back to the United States, and what the hell was I going to do there? I actually came back to the United States for a short period of time and worked on a dairy farm in Northern California. I did that for a half year and went back to Israel. I discovered that managing a dairy herd wasn’t going to help me survive in America, so I figured I’d better get some other skills together. JA: How did you father feel about your working on a Kibbutz?

PETER: The last ten, twenty years of his life... absolutely. PHILIP: He was very proud Much better than I am, and of me. I started to perceive he’d go on and on. He him being proud of me then, wouldn’t tell you stock and even more so when I jokes, the kind you’d read in came back to the States and a book and remember line developed my own business. for line. He didn’t have the This pencil rough for a late-’40s Black Terror tale was sent to us by Tom Wimbish, who says He thought I was living a it’s from Mort Meskin’s own collection, as well as the Meskin website. While Meskin and memory for that. He didn’t healthy life. Robinson may have taken turns penciling the Nedor strips, this page would seem to be all have a good memory, but he Meskin; Robinson would have added things as he inked it. [©2003 Estate of Mort Meskin.] was funny and very clever. I JA: Sounds like he was can’t tell you how much I very supportive of you. miss talking to him, because he’d bring out my sense of humor. It’s a part of my life that I miss. PHILIP: To the extent that he was able to be. At times he couldn’t be. There were times in my early life when he wasn’t capable of it because PHILIP: In his later years he lightened up a whole lot and became more he was physically and emotionally absent. I tried to comprehend it, but I friendly, open, and affectionate. was very young then, and it was hard. But in the end, I had a positive relationship with my father. I returned from Israel in 1980 and opened up my shop about 1984 or ‘85. From then on, we’d regularly get together for lunch. He’d come by my shop and loved to see what I was doing. He let me know how proud he was of what I was doing, but he JA: Philip, what got you interested in being a cabinet-maker? was worried that I’d cut my fingers off. That made me feel good. I’m a PHILIP: I don’t know if cabinet-making, per se, came from my father, pretty good cabinet-maker. but the model that I might have taken from him was that of being a solo JA: Did you make any furniture for your father? entrepreneur. I also thought that Pop’s working for BBD&O was alien to me. I could never have operated in a corporate setting. PHILIP: No. I made him a new easel once. I graduated with a B.A. in Psychology and worked in a psychiatric JA: Did your father talk much about his comic book days? hospital. I was on my way to a graduate degree in social work when I moved to Israel and lived on a farm for six years. PHILIP: In later years, Pop talked about himself in positive ways. He

“I Started to Perceive Him Being Proud of Me”

Mort Meskin

Meskin worked with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby on their short-lived Captain 3-D comic for Harvey in 1953. Only one issue was published, and AC Comics’ Bill Black feels that page 3 from the story “The Menace of the Living Dolls” [left] “shows Meskin’s touch, especially in the last panel.” [Right:] AC Comics’ Golden-Age Men of Mystery #15 (1999) prints, with grey tones added, Meskin’s pencil layouts for a never-published story meant for Captain 3-D #2. Our thanks to Bill for allowing us to print one of the pages; to find out how to get the rest, see AC’s ad. [Finished art ©2003 the respective copyright holder; pencil art ©2003 AC Comics.]

thought he was a great comic book artist. Being his son, I said, “Yeah, Pop, yeah.” To me, he was Pop. I always loved and respected the fact that he was a comic book artist. I thought it was special. JA: Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about your father thought he was one of the best, from Jim Steranko to Alex Toth to Jack Kirby. His peers certainly thought so at the time he worked, too. PHILIP: I’ve heard that, but I didn’t put him in the same league as Jack Kirby or Barry Smith. I really got into Marvel Comics during the late 1960s, early 1970s.

“This Is Real!” JA: [to Peter] I take it that your dad did okay in comics, but like most others at that time, he wasn’t getting rich. PETER: My family didn’t have much money when we were young, but I think my father’s family did. As a matter of fact, there’s been some talk of my grandfather being part of a furrier business with his brothers. Somehow, they had a falling out... this is the family mythology that I remember... and my grandfather was bought out at a very low amount, so we were left out of the wealthy family Meskins. Pictures of my dad as a young child look as if his family might have had some money.

JA: The only way you could make a living in comics back then was to be very fast because the rates were so low. That’s probably why he was working all the time, because he had a wife and two kids. I’m assuming that your mother didn’t work. PETER: She didn’t work when we were very young, but she did work as a secretary later on. JA: Did your dad go to PTA meetings and other school functions? PETER: He went to a few PTA meetings and a Cub Scout function or two. I was in a play at school and played Peter Pan. Dad was there and was very proud of me. JA: Was your father the type you could talk to when you had a problem? PETER: Oh, yeah. Absolutely, and Dad would have very simple, concrete explanations for me. I remember when I was going through my own existential crisis in college. You get a little confused when you take Philosophy 101 in college. What’s real? What’s isn’t? ...blah, blah, blah. I went to see him at BBD&O and we went to lunch and I was telling him about all of this. Dad was very mild, but this time he expressed the strongest statement I’d ever heard from him. He banged his fist on the table and said, “This is real.” That’s about all he said, and that was

A Conversation with Peter and Philip Meskin

Reich. And then, the psychology moved into Buddhism. He was very enamored by it and read extensively about it, but he never attempted to find out if it was real. JA: What other interests did he have? PETER: He loved bowling and was a fabulous bowler. We used to always go bowling together. JA: Was he a competitive bowler? PETER: No. [laughs] He wasn’t a competitive person, but he could hit 200 often. He taught me how to play chess when I was young, and he’d purposely lose to make me feel better. I knew he was purposely losing and I loved him for it. It was like a game between us. For him, playing the game was more important than winning the game. That’s another thing he taught me. PHILIP: I quit playing chess with him because he let me beat him. I knew it and I didn’t like that. But I loved bowling with my father.

“Love on Paper” JA: Was he a religious man? PETER: Not really. He went along with the Jewish religion and certainly saw himself as Jewish. In later years, in private moments, just Dad and I alone, he’d say that

A montage of penciled art from Mort Meskin’s private collection—sent by Dylan Williams and Tom Wimbish, who says that this story, titled “The Battle of Lexington,” is probably “from early in his Crestwood period (most likely done during the late 1940s to early 1950s).” Was a finished version of the tale ever published? You tell us. (And you probably will.) View them and more at <www.meskin.net>. [©2003 Estate of Mort Meskin.]

enough. He had validated that the way I perceived the world was correct and to be trusted. We went on to talk about it, but what he was saying to me was, “Peter, you can philosophize about what is real and what isn’t real, but reality is right in front of you. It’s what you feel and what you touch and experience. Trust yourself and believe in the truth of your senses and don’t doubt yourself. Just because someone might have some lengthy philosophical approach to it with other confusing interpretations of reality doesn’t mean that life isn’t as you perceive it to be.” My existential crisis ended at that moment. You can read all of the existentialists like Sartre and Camus, and then you can forget about them and get on with your life. It didn’t bother me anymore. JA: Your father read all that stuff but it didn’t keep him from seeing reality. PETER: It didn’t. He was an interesting mix of a man. Pretty philosophical and very basic. PHILIP: He was the one who got me into philosophy. He was an intellectual thinker who never committed. He would read voluminously: anthropology and sociology, for example. He read lots of Freud, Piaget (a French psychologist who wrote about the awakening of consciousness in children), and others. He was heavy into Wilhelm

20 religion brought families together, that it brought cohesiveness. It was important for humans to have religion and believe in it. How strong a believer he was, I don’t really know. I know he believed in God but he was more of a humanist. He cared about people and thought that people did good and that they did evil, but people had to be responsible for what they did. And there was no prejudice in my home. We were brought up to respect all religions, all colors, and all types of beliefs. When my mother started working outside of the home, a black nanny, Louise, took care of us in the afternoons. She was part of the family. We hugged and kissed her and my parents treated her very warmly.

Mort Meskin the works of art he had created. He always wanted to see them displayed. JA: That’s typical of artists, because they want their work seen. He put a lot of himself in that work. PETER: He called it “love on paper.” JA: I love that. And I understand how he felt. It seems to me that he was very much in touch with the child inside himself.

“My Dad’s a Comic Book Artist!” PETER: Absolutely. He was very creative and made all kinds of things for us at home, using cardboard, presentation board, and masking tape. For instance, the living room would become a spaceship that he built for us and that we could get into. He built controls inside and we pretended to fly around the universe. That influenced my brother and me and we learned to build all kinds of things. Phil’s a top-of-the-line cabinetmaker now.

There was a time when I was in the Cub Scouts and we had a project to do. I was unable to carve something and my dad took a bar of Ivory soap and an Exacto knife Meskin’s splash page for the very first “Vigilante” story, in Action Comics #42 and carved the most marvelously (Nov. 1941), was reprinted with credits and issue ID added in Secret Origins, Vol. 1, #1 detailed little Eskimo. I took it in, (Sept.-Oct. 1973). [©2003 DC Comics.] and my den mother said, “Peter, PETER: I don’t think you know you didn’t do that.” I he did too much of that. I remember him reading a lot of art books, and told them, proudly, “My dad did it.” She said, “Yeah, but you were he loved to read children’s books. He loved the artwork in them and supposed to.” loved any kind of children’s books that explained something. He You know what it’s like to walk down the street as a kid and say, thought that many of the people who wrote children’s books taught “My dad’s a comic book artist!” I say it like that to this day. things better to the children than adults did and that they made it more interesting. To this day, I read and enjoy all sorts of children’s books. He JA: Did the neighborhood kids come around to see your father, “the loved to read about artists. He loved Monet, Renoir, people like that. comic book artist”? JA: Did he read the newspaper? PETER: I don’t specifically remember that. What I do remember is being a dumb kid and selling the comics for 2¢ apiece on the street. PETER: Yes, but he wasn’t very political and didn’t focus on a lot of that. He spent more time drawing. After he retired, he drew constantly. JA: Well, you were being an entrepreneur. [laughs] He was very prolific. Dad drew and painted tons of things. And he was an experimenter. PETER: [laughs] That’s right. Another memory I have is that Dad took us to art museums. He’d tell us about the artwork but didn’t make it He would experiment with painting materials and painting techniques seem like we were in school. It was fun. He talked about what he saw in and work on that. Sometimes, he would say that he wasn’t an artist, just the work of art and we didn’t ever want to know about them from an experimenter. He was always experimenting; everything was an books. We just wanted to communicate directly with the painting. Dad experiment. One of his joys was to give me his artwork—and not just had a lot to say, and I don’t remember him stuttering at those times. me, but to other members of the family, too. Dad would often tell me that it was very important to him to give his artwork to me and I’d JA: I know I’m sounding like a psychoanalyst here, but it seems to me proudly hang his gifts in my home. He loved coming by and looking at that your father saw art as his escape from a hostile world. them as if he were in an art gallery because it would remind him of all

JA: He sounds like a true artist to me. Outside of the serious reading that he did, did he read fiction books?

A Conversation with Peter and Philip Meskin PETER: Possibly. Why not? I know that doing my own sculpture was an outlet for the suffering I was going through at various times. When my life got better, I didn’t have as much to sculpt. [laughs] JA: Well, you’ve heard the old saying that artists do their best work when they are suffering. PETER: Yeah. Look at poor Van Gogh! You could be right. JA: I got the idea while looking at your father’s paintings at your website. I got the feeling that when your father felt free to express himself, that it was always in a happy/positive way. Look at his use of color and the quality of his line work. PETER: That makes sense. A lot of his later work was childlike in his use of color, and you’ll find that in a lot of artists’ later work. When Monet’s eyesight suffered in later years, he used more basic shapes in his paintings. I can see in some of Dad’s work when he was trying to solve emotional problems. I have a lot of paintings of faces, faces within faces... trying to discover who he was and how he was feeling. He was working his way back from not having been well to getting his balance in the world again.

“He Gradually Got Better and Better” JA: I realize talking about your father’s problems is difficult and would rather not dwell on this long. What do you want to say about his nervous breakdown? PETER: He had more than one. I know he had one when I was about five or six years old. I’m aware of one he had when I was around eleven, and he was treated for it and recovered well. My parents got divorced and my dad was living alone for a while in Greenwich Village. He was living with a close friend but I don’t remember his name now. Probably Marvin Stein. From there, he gradually got better and better. He met his second wife, Molly, and had a very good relationship with her. She helped him to get better and recover. Molly was really the best thing that happened to my father in the second part of his life. It might not have been the best thing that ever happened to me, but it was good for Dad. She loved Dad, but she didn’t want another family. My mother had more severe problems. She had many nervous breakdowns and now lives in a nursing home that Phil arranged for her. My brother has done a wonderful job of taking care of her and arranged for her to live near us. We visit her every week.

In later years Meskin’s work may have become less “romantic” and lyrical, but his senses of design and storytelling were always there, as these splash pages from Crestwood [left] and DC testify. Thanks to Bill Black. [“Soft Touch!” retouched art ©2003 AC Comics; “The Human Hurricane” ©2003 DC Comics.]

Mort Meskin

JA: Do you know why your parents had emotional problems?

other fear is having clean hands.” He made us crush charcoal in our hands, dirty our smocks, and rub our hands on the paper. He said, “Now you have dirty hands, dirty smocks, and a dirty canvas. What do you have to fear now?”

PETER: I really don’t know. I know my father had the problem first and later, when I was twelve, my mother started having problems. I never learned the reasons why.

“He Was Happy Not to Be There Anymore” JA: Your dad didn’t really talk about his time in comics, did he? PETER: Not much. He told me it was a rough time in his life. Once he left it, he didn’t want to go back. He was very happy not to be there anymore. But he also never really liked BBD&O either, because he was bored there. He had endless time on his hands.

JA: I’m sure they were trying to protect you because they loved you. They knew you were in a tough situation. That’s probably why they didn’t discuss the source of their problems with you. But you know, I’ve heard that your father was given a rough time in comics by some of his editors, and that might have aggravated his problems.

JA: How did your father feel about retirement from BBD&O, Philip?

Mort Meskin at his drawing table—and still another

MESKIN: I don’t know great Meskin-Robinson splash from The Fighting Yank. too much about that. I do [Restored art ©2003 AC Comics.] have some memory of him having trouble producing work around the time of his breakdowns. JA: Joe Simon talks about it some in his book The Comic Book Makers. According to Joe, this happened in the early 1950s. He said your father had trouble working. After a week of sitting at the drawing board, unable to draw, he asked Joe for a paycheck on payday. Joe explained that he couldn’t pay him because he hadn’t done any work. Your father said he couldn’t face drawing on a blank page. So Joe drew a few meaningless lines on the page and said, “Now the page isn’t blank anymore.” Your father then sat down and started drawing around those lines. According to Joe, this became a standard thing, as he had someone draw lines on blank pages for your father. And then he was able to work again. PETER: I’ve heard that story, but I don’t know if it’s true or not. I can picture that helping my father. The story feels right, but I don’t know it for a fact. When I was in college, I took an art course and the teacher said, “One of the biggest fears artists have is the blank canvas, and the

PHILIP: Well, BBD&O became a destructive reality. The art department was sold off to an independent “outsourcer,” and there was Pop no longer working for BBD&O, working for this art service that was subcontracting art from BBD&O. He went from being on salary to being a freelancer again and not getting work from them. Over a period of years, the work he did trickled to nothing. It was humiliating and debasing reality which they imposed on him. He continued to go there because Molly didn’t believe in retirement and she didn’t want him sitting at home. He went to Madison Avenue on the train every day and sat in his cubicle and doodled. They’d give him a job every once in a while to cover his costs. He ended up as a freelancer, not getting work from them. As long as he was getting some work and making some money, he felt it was worthwhile. At one point he stopped doing that, and I thought that was a good idea. After that, Molly and Pop spent the rest of their lives volunteering at St. Joseph’s Nursing Home. Pop seemed to like doing that. He’d dance with the old ladies; he was a good dancer. PETER: When he retired in the mid-’80s, I asked him how it felt. He said, “ You know how it feels when you used to have a toothache and you don’t have it anymore? You don’t think about it.” He still kept drawing and painting. He produced art just about every day of his life. PHILIP: He always had a drawing pad with him and made thousands of little drawings.

A Conversation with Peter and Philip Meskin

PETER: He got enormous pleasure from doing volunteer work and from giving his paintings away. JA: You mean he never sold them? PETER: Never. He tried to when he was younger, when he lived in Greenwich Village. He tried to develop an art store with a friend, but it wasn’t successful. He wasn’t a businessman in any way. He pushed that aside and gave his artwork away to his family. Anybody who’d ask him to draw a picture would get that picture. You should see the beautiful Chanukah and Rosh Hashanah cards he did. Not to mention all the cards he designed for my wife Diane and me. JA: Sounds like he just wanted to share his art with other people. PETER: Very much so. He liked being appreciated. He knew he was tops in my eyes and, as I said, enjoyed giving his work to me and to the others in Molly’s family, too. He loved all of them and they loved him. He’d go through phases. He’d get into what I call his “haikus,” very Japanese-inspired art. He’d do it with markers and did hundreds of them, lovely, charming little things. He experimented so much that he’d mix things out of the medicine cabinet and the kitchen. Molly’s son Richard, from a previous marriage (she had three children), is a doctor, and he once went to an Army-Navy store and bought Dad a gas mask because some of the things he was mixing were poisonous. As a joke, Richard came in wearing a gas mask and gave it to my dad.

“He Was from Outer Space!” JA: Your father didn’t take well to negative criticism about his art, did he? PETER: Well, he didn’t handle that very well. I always thought that he couldn’t draw cats very well. He’d get upset at the least amount of criticism, and I had to learn not to criticize. He didn’t want to hear anything negative about his art. JA: He was creating this art from his heart and didn’t want that spoiled. A lot of artists feel that way, though they may not admit that fact. He’d envision himself on that canvas and was saying to himself, “Don’t reject my art because you’re rejecting me.” PETER: Right. JA: [to Philip] Do you have your father’s artwork hanging in your house? PHILIP: Not as much as Peter does, but I have a few things. Peter’s into collecting everything of my father’s that he can, but I never took a lot of work, just what I really liked. I love his watercolors the best. And his ink drawings. JA: [to Peter] You said your father became more gregarious when he got older. Did he also become more of a social person? PETER: Yes, much more. Molly had a lot to do with that. She was a strong lady and was really the matriarch of her family, very loved and revered in her family, and Dad gained a lot from that. JA: It sounds like your dad just needed a strong support system. PETER: Yes, he really needed that. He needed the right mate and unfortunately, my real mother wasn’t that for him and Molly was. Sometimes the chemistry just doesn’t work, although I must tell you that in my earlier years, my parents were very loving and everything seemed hunky-dory to me. My mother was Hungarian and spoke fluent Hungarian but she didn’t teach it to me. My father was a great artist and he didn’t teach me how to draw. [laughs] Figure that out!

JA: I’m Palestinian and my parents didn’t teach me Arabic. It happens. PETER: It sure does. To add to my story, I’m Jewish and my wife is Presbyterian, and she shares the same philosophy that I do. She’s very loving and caring of other people. We have many children in our lives even though we don’t have our own. Some of our close friends are Indian and came from Calcutta. We spent so much time with their children that they have become our niece and nephew. To this day, we have a loving relationship with them and they call us Peter Uncle and Diane Auntie. They are as much a part of our family and our hearts as anyone else. My wife and I believe in extended families. JA: So do I. Philip, did your father ever talk about being Jewish? PHILIP: No. It was not a part of his consciousness, though it became a part of mine. I got into Judaism in a political and social level and moved to Israel on a Zionist level. To this day I strongly identify myself as a Jew, but I am not religious. I’m a National Jew and a humanist. My identity wasn’t from a religious, God-driven thing, and Pop was nonreligious, too. He was from outer space. JA: You mean that in the nicest way possible, of course. PHILIP: [laughs] Of course. JA: Your dad was a dreamer, wasn’t he? PHILIP: Yeah. One of the loves of my life is Star Trek, but the new show sucks.

Mort Meskin JA: How did the people he worked for at BBD&O look at your father? PETER: I think most people liked him a lot and thought he was very good. I know he had some troubles with different art directors. Some would use him a lot and others just passed him over and didn’t use him. I think that hurt him. I don’t know much about that. JA: When did your father die? PETER: March of 1995. JA: Was his health pretty good before he was stricken with cancer? PHILIP: He’d had some back problems that probably started when he was swinging on that icebox lid and it fell over on him, breaking his leg. They put the bones back together with a metal splice and later discovered that made one leg longer than the other. We know now that bodily changes like that can screw up your backbone. Pop spent many a year in chiropractic. He also suffered from angina, though it didn’t stop him from leading an active life. JA: How long had he known he had cancer? PETER: Two years or more. He had cancer of the esophagus, and also lung cancer. That’s why they had to remove his esophagus. I always went with him to the doctors. He handled it better than I did. JA: Then he was a heavy smoker? PETER: In his younger years, he was. He had stopped for many years but it was too late. When he had his larynx removed, they gave him an external mechanical voice device. It was the kind that you press against your throat and made him sound like a talking robot. But Dad was very good with it. He quickly learned how to use it and became a comedian with it. He’d beep it and let kids play with it and make sounds. None of the kids were scared around him even though he sounded like a robot. He never let his illness get him down at all. JA: He sounds like he was brave.

JA: And your dad was a humanist, too.

PETER: He was. As long as he wasn’t in physical pain, it didn’t bother him. At least I never saw it bother him. I don’t think it really did, and the fact that Molly had a positive attitude helped him, too. They just kept moving on. One of the things he and Molly would say was, “With the hour comes the power.” They would say that for all

PHILIP: Definitely. Not a philosophical humanist; he wasn’t dogmatically anything. He was just a natural humanist and gentle man. He wasn’t out to hurt anyone, and to me, that’s my ideal, even to this day. That’s the kind of person I want to be, and I strive to interact that way with the world. Dad didn’t verbalize his feelings a lot. Dad was closed to discussing certain historical details of our lives. He didn’t like to talk about the problems of the past.

“With the Hour Comes the Power” JA: You mentioned that your dad wasn’t a good businessman. Did that create a lot of problems for him? PETER: Not really, because Molly took care of all of that. Near the end of his life, when he wasn’t well, I discovered that he didn’t understand how his checkbook worked. I told him, “You deposit money in your bank and you write checks against it.” He didn’t get it. But it might have been that he had a lot going on because he was suffering from cancer. He claimed not to know how to do it. My brother and I had to take over his finances.

“The best times were when we went to the beach as a family,” says Peter Meskin. And such moments were captured in numerous photos, including this one.

A Conversation with Peter and Philip Meskin

Whale.” Dad could easily swim the length of a pool under water. I would hold on to his shoulders and be pulled along. It felt as if I were holding onto a rocket. He’d warn me before he’d dive down so I could hold my breath. Otherwise I’d keep my head above the water while he swam. I teach snorkeling now to people who come on my cruises. We even feed the fish by hand. Dad taught me to really love swimming and to feel real comfortable in the water.

kinds of situations. There was a lot of love between them. I loved Molly for loving my dad so much and for giving him a second chance at life. Dad was a wonderful dancer. Molly and Dad used to dance all the time. They used to go to Roseland and dance at every party, dance, Bar Mitzvah, whatever. That’s how they met, by the way. When he first met Molly, he thought she was one of the girls he had to pay a quarter to dance with. He didn’t know that she wanted to dance because she was interested in him. PHILIP: The irony was that, in order for the doctors to operate on his throat, they had to first give him a by-pass operation to strengthen his heart. They gave him the surgery and it was totally successful. In the end, as he was dying of cancer, his heart was in better shape than it ever had been.

The next one that comes to mind is a time when my brother and I were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn with my dad. We were already looking at my father as if he were an old man, even though he was probably not yet forty. We knew that Dad was a gymnast when he was younger, and we were walking by a swing set, but there were no swings attached. To us, it looked pretty high.

JA: Do you think that he felt more content with himself towards the end of his life? PHILIP: Yes, definitely. Whatever he was getting out of all this philosophy helped him. The cancer and the hospital stays didn’t faze him. He handled everything with great dignity.

“Happy Days” JA: When you think about your father, what do you remember the most?

Mort Meskin doing a handstand in the 1940s. As Peter testifies, he could still pull off some strenuous physical stunts a decade or so later.

PETER: I remember that I’ve always loved him. That he was gentle and kind to me. That I’m thankful I see the world through his eyes... his artist’s eyes. Because of Dad I look around and I see beauty everywhere. Dad used to use his hands as a frame and showed me how to look at something as an artist would see it. JA: Do you have a favorite memory of him? PETER: I have a few. The best times were when we went to the beach as a family. To this day tuna fish and egg salad sandwiches taste better with sand mixed in. Mom made wonderful lunches. Dad was a great swimmer. At beaches and pools we would play “Baby Whale and Daddy

Dad said, “I used to be good at the high bar. I could jump up there and swing around and jump off.” We said, “Maybe you could do that

when you were younger, Pop.” He said, “Oh, I can still do it,” as he put his hands on his hips. “Oh, Pop! You can’t do that,” we said. “Oh, yes I can!” he replied. He shimmied up the bar, hung by his legs, and started swinging. Phil and I thought he would get hurt. He was swinging back and forth, gaining momentum, but he had forgotten to empty his pockets. His change, keys, and everything else fell out. People were stopping to look. Then he swung off the bar, did a flip in midair, and landed right on his feet just like a pro! We couldn’t believe it! He gained such status in our eyes and we were yelling, “Yea, Pop!” This wasn’t our dad anymore; it was Johnny Quick, Superman, and Batman all rolled up into one Super-Dad! [laughs] JA: [laughs] Right! Right!

“You know of course,” says Peter, “that our dad invented the first real depiction of fast movement in comics by showing multiple poses of Johnny Quick.” Like this panel also from Adventure #127, Peter? [©2003 DC Comics.]

PETER: You know of course that our dad invented the first real depiction of fast movement in comics by showing multiple poses of Johnny Quick. We were always so proud of that. He was one of my favorite characters. [NOTE: DC’s Flash character appeared

Mort Meskin

before Johnny Quick, but the former’s movements were usually depicted with speed lines which didn’t show actual body movement. —Jim] Another favorite memory of my dad was near the end of his life when we were walking in the park. He already had cancer and his larynx was removed. We went to lovely Manor Park in Larchmont. It was on the water in a beautiful neighborhood, and we talked about life and art and just really enjoyed being together for that hour and a half. We were looking at the boats on the water; it’s not very far from where I taught sailing. We always loved being near the water together. That was a special time. Right after that he became incapacitated and wasn’t able to take that walk again. I must tell you that the reason I became a U.S. Coast Guard Captain was because of the early influence of my dad taking Philip and me to boatyards where the boats were dry-docked in Brooklyn. He’d paint them while Philip and I were climbing on the boats and playing around. It was only much later that I realized it was my early love of playing on boats while my dad painted that made me love them and everything connected to them and the sea. Why else would a boy from Brooklyn grow up to be a charter boat captain in the Caribbean? It’s as if every memory of my father being my father, of time we spent together as father and son, has become sacred to me.

with it. It makes me feel great to see the respect he’s gotten and I wish it could have happened more when he was alive. JA: He didn’t know how much people loved his comic book work, did he? PETER: Not really. He knew it from the family. From Molly’s family. That’s all that really seemed to matter to him. He turned down interviews and trips to the San Diego Comics Convention and other places. He didn’t want anything to do with it. He wasn’t very shy at this point and could talk a blue streak, but he’d left comics behind. He was very loved by Molly’s family and by us. He really lived a very happy second life. When we buried my dad, Phil, my wife, and I placed some of his paint brushes in his coffin so that he could continue to draw. During the outdoor ceremony, I was looking up at the sky and I was thinking, “Okay, Dad. I really need you to paint some rainbows for me now.” Whenever I see a rainbow, it’s as if my father has painted it especially for me. [JIM AMASH’s lifelong addiction to comics has resulted in a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts, an eight-plus-year stint running a comic book shop and comics conventions, a decade-plus career inking for Archie, Disney, and others, and one hell of a hangover. He finds that interviewing comics creators brings him as much personal satisfaction as any other comic-related endeavors. He lives in North Carolina with his wife Heidi and seven cats, all of whom stopped listening to him years ago, in order to protect themselves from an endless torrent of bad puns and defective one-liners.]

I’m looking as I talk to you at a painting my dad did of two boats in dry dock on wooden supports. On one of the boats, it says, “Happy Days.” It’s my favorite painting because it reminds me of the wonderful times I shared with my father and brother, when we were a family. JA: Did you ever take your dad sailing? PETER: I never got him out sailing, but once I took him to sit in the boat at the mooring. I remember him looking around with satisfaction and saying, “I like this.” But for some reason he never found the time to actually go sailing.

“I Really Need You to Paint Some Rainbows for Me Now” JA: Philip, do you have a favorite memory of your father? PHILIP: The most emotionally positive memory I have of him was when he came to Israel for my wedding. It really broke me up, and I realized at that point that I might not ever see him again. I was living in Israel, and for me, it was forever. I didn’t see going back to America, and he wasn’t getting any younger. This was in 1978. I don’t know what I was thinking, but that’s what it felt like. JA: How does it feel to know that your father’s work was and is so well respected and remembered? PETER: It makes me feel absolutely wonderful. I know he would have liked some more attention during his life and wanted me to help him to do that. That’s why I’m so happy about the website that Dylan Williams has developed <www.meskin.net> and about giving interviews. He never really told me that he wanted to be recognized, but I always had the feeling that he’d appreciate it as long as he didn’t have to be involved

The shadows know! Mort Meskin in a heavily-shadowed photo—and an inked but unlettered page from an unidentified (perhaps unpublished) Crestwood crime comic from the 1949-56 period, when he worked for that company. Since shadows and blacks were, from first to last, an integral part of Meskin’s style, it seemed appropriate to end this coverage of the Golden Age great with this pair of images. Thanks to Tom Wimbish and Dylan Williams for forwarding the art-scan; it and the photo can also be viewed on the Meskin website operated by Dylan Williams and Peter Meskin at <www.meskin.net>. [©2003 the respective copyright holders.]

Title Comic Fandom Archive

In Alter Ego #6 (“Vol. 1,” April 1964), then-editor Ronn Foss featured a brief biography of A/E contributor Ed Lahmann, entitled “Portrait of a Collector.” Since forty or so years have passed since then, it seemed time to visit Ed again, in…

Portrait of a Collector by Bill Schelly

ED LAHMANN Revisited!

Introduction: I’ve never had the good fortune to meet Ed Lahmann in person, but I feel as if I know him better than many of the comics fans I’m in touch with—mainly because of his penchant for phoning every month or two to chat. He began calling shortly after The Golden Age of Comic Fandom appeared in 1995, so we’ve covered a lot of ground in the past eight years. For me, a child of the 1950s, it’s been fascinating talking to a fellow who was nine years old when Superman #1 was published, the prime age to read and enjoy comics. Ed has given me a window into the first great days of comic books, as well as the early years of fandom, since he got in on the ground floor. On top of all that, Ed is a prolific artist, working mostly in colored pencil. The Comic Fandom Archive is proud to be able to show visitors some of the many portfolios that Ed has donated. It’s a shame we can’t run some of these marvelous illustrations, but our black-&white printing simply wouldn’t do justice to them. BILL SCHELLY: When and where were you born? ED LAHMANN: I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on December 24th, 1930. SCHELLY: I always like to know something about the parents of the people I interview. How would you describe your folks? LAHMANN: My father’s name was Clarence Lahmann, and my mother’s was Beatrice. They were both college graduates. Dad was an industrial engineer. Mom was set to be a teacher of English literature and grammar. My mother was a genius and Dad wasn’t far behind. Dad was an employment manager for the G&J Rubber Company (later U.S. Royal); he lost that job due to the Depression, but managed to get another job at the Real Silk Hosiery mills, and it was at this time he met Mom on a streetcar ride home. They got married, and then I entered the picture. Things really got rough for the next three years until Dad landed the job with Roosevelt’s WPA during the war. After the war he went into real estate, but then had a major stroke in 1949—just as I was graduating from high school—and passed away just a few years later. He was just 64 when he died, but Mom lived to the age of 99. SCHELLY: Tell us about your early family life, and how you got into reading comic strips. LAHMANN: My father was a great reader of the comic strips. He subscribed to all of the local papers, and on Sunday mornings he would go to the local newsstand and also get the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Herald American. Practically every syndicated strip was

Ed Lahmann today (left), with his two favorite comic books—and in 1974, with a whole wall-full of colorful classics. Photos courtesy of Ed.

covered in our house. My father taught me how to read using these early comic strips. I was reading clearly by my third birthday. I really didn’t develop a favorite comic strip until I was about seven years old. It would probably have been Flash Gordon at the time, but I also liked Tarzan and Dick Tracy. SCHELLY: When comic books came along, how did you become aware of them? LAHMANN: I had an older cousin, Herbert Lahmann, who had the early Famous Funnies, More Fun, New Fun, Popular Comics, Tip-Top Comics and King Comics. The first comic book I ever bought myself was an early Tip-Top Comics. A gentleman lived next door to me who worked for DeWolfe News, a periodical distributor, who gave me all of his damaged returns, with half or no covers. I remember he gave me a nice copy of Marvel Comics #1. It only had part of the back cover missing. When my mom would go downtown shopping with her mother, she would always bring me back four or five comic books. My dad never bought me any comic books until, in the late 1930s, he brought me home Superman #3. From time to time he would buy me others, and when Gilberton’s Classics Comics came out, he bought me all of those up until I decided to buy them for myself. SCHELLY: What were your favorite comics during World War II? LAHMANN: My favorites were Popular Comics, King Comics, TipTop Comics, and in the hero genre, Detective Comics, Action Comics, Flash Comics and Whiz Comics. Plus my special favorite, Joe Jinks #12. During those early years of comic books, in my neighborhood we traded all the time. We also traded the Big Little Books. I liked all the genres. That’s why I had such an affinity for Popular Comics. SCHELLY: Of the comic book publishers during the Golden Age, do you have a favorite? LAHMANN: Looking at their entire outputs, I would have to say Quality is my favorite, overall. But I have to mention Dell, as Popular

Ed Lahmann

Comics was far and away my favorite title. Over the course of the years, Popular had them all, and very well done, at that.

LAHMANN: I never gave it much thought. It was a social evolutionary thing. I was totally into the ECs at this time.

SCHELLY: Did you give up your comics as an older teenager, only to have to re-accumulate them later as a adult, or did you manage to hold onto them all the way through?

SCHELLY: How did you get involved in comic fandom? LAHMANN: When Hawkman reappeared in The Brave and The Bold, I saw an old friend from my boyhood. Sure, I’d seen the new Flash, the new Green Lantern, but Hawkman looked more or less the same as before, and he was being drawn by one of his earlier artists, Joe Kubert. I wrote a letter to Brave and Bold, and it was published along with my full address. Not long after that, I received a copy of Alter-Ego in my mailbox, as well as letters from several comics fans. Alter-Ego was only a small, ditto magazine at the time. Even so, I was hypnotized. I was not alone. Jerry Bails had set some serious wheels in motion. Comic fandom was on the move.

LAHMANN: I gave up all of my old comics by selling them to kids in the “hood” when I went to high school. At that time, I was totally into the EC’s. I subscribed to all of them. When I went to Korea, I had my Mom forward them to me over there. Most of the time I was the last to read them. The other Joes got to them ahead of me, but that was okay! I never did bring those issues back to the States when I returned. I’ve often wondered how many of them might still be floating around over there. SCHELLY: Can you remember any great trades, or other comics deals, that you have been involved in?

LAHMANN: When I came home from Korea, I met a fellow soldier who also had a love of the comics. He still had all of his stored at home. He told me I could have a nice hobby trying to put together a collection of the old comics. I never thought too much about it until the time I encountered an ad in the back of a Mechanix Illustrated. It was for a book hunter, who I contacted. He offered to place an ad in a paper that could possibly gain me access to old comics. I was reluctant but what the heck, I thought. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It turned out to be the best move I ever made, comics-wise. I got a list of old comics from a gun collector by the name of Leo Kon from Fall River, Massachusetts. They were all first issues. There must have been 150 or so on the list. I ordered forty. The books arrived, and it was beyond belief. Theys were in absolute pristine press condition. Have you ever opened a new magazine and have the pages just crack? That was the Leo Kon collection. I wrote him back to get the rest of the books, but someone had beaten me to them. SCHELLY: Would you say your interest in comics is primarily due to nostalgia for the time when they were published in the past, or is it primary your enthusiasm for the sequential art form, words and pictures together? LAHMANN: It probably goes back to the days when my father used the comics to reach me to read. My early reading abilities got me off to a great start and great awareness. I’ve always respected the comics for their practical application to my life. The comics are really no different in effect than any other human endeavor. They can be good or bad or nothing at all. SCHELLY: Who are your favorite artists from the super-hero comics of the Golden Age? LAHMANN: I suppose I’m not too different from most fans on this. Will Eisner, who has one of my recent pictures hanging in his studio… Reed Crandall, who hails from Indiana like me… Joe Kubert, who kept the dream alive… C.C. Beck, who drew my favorite Golden Age hero, Captain Marvel… plus Jack Cole, Jerry Robinson, Creig Flessel. And who couldn’t enjoy Bob Powell’s Shadows near the end of the run. Somebody should collect these into a hardcover. SCHELLY: As a collector and comics reader, what was it like to see the “downfall” of most of the super-heroes in the late 1940s, and the advent of western, crime, and horror comics? Was this okay with you or were you disappointed to see (for example) most of DC’s heroes being discontinued?

SCHELLY: How did you come to write the article for A/E #5, “So—You Want To Collect Comics!”? Did you actually own all the comics you prescribed for the “well-rounded collection”? LAHMANN: Ronn Foss, then editor of Alter Ego, suggested that I write an article to give some of the fans an idea of what to look for. I even messed that one up. I left out Quality comics, which is ironic since Quality was my favorite publisher. Perhaps it was a Freudian slip and I didn’t want anybody else to get them. No, I just overlooked it. I had most of the comics listed in that article.

SCHELLY: Two chapters of your original strip “Cyclops” appeared in Star Studded Comics in 1965. What was the genesis of this strip, and do you think it lived up to your original vision? LAHMANN: “Cyclops” more or less came from something I remembered from an old story about a “twin earth” that was opposite the sun. I really didn’t have a vision about it. I was just having fun and trying to get my artwork back to where it had been in earlier days. Looking at it now, it’s terribly executed—poorly done. Too episodic, and my art had suffered greatly from its being dormant for so long. I also did a daily type strip called “Fannin’” [which appeared in Dave Esser’s Dangling Conversation —Bill] that was a little better, but none of it was the kind of art I wanted to do. SCHELLY: How did that page of “Creepy’s Loathsome Lore” from Creepy #10 come about? LAHMANN: Being a big EC fan, I naturally had been buying Creepy from the first issue. A page by Roy Krenkel impressed me with its layout. Ronn Foss had given me a piece of original art by Mike Sekowsky. I looked at it, I looked at Krenkel’s, I looked at the level of my own work at the time. I told myself, “I can do this.” I did it, on the back of Mike Sekowsky’s original art, as close to a Roy Krenkel lay-out as I could get. Archie Goodwin wrote me and gave me a great compliment. He said he liked my side best. SCHELLY: Are you a fan of the Silver Age of Comics? What were your favorites from that period of time? LAHMANN: Not really, except for the work of Russ Manning, especially Magnus—Robot Fighter. The story “Havoc at Weather Control” was based on an idea I sent Manning. Of course, he and Chase Craig expanded it into the final draft. “Junko” the robber robot was taken from a sketch I did in Magnus #10 for the fan page called “Robrob.” Russ was a great guy. We exchanged many letters. Only Burne Hogarth was better on Tarzan, at least in my eyes.

Comic Fandom Archive SCHELLY: I understand that you’re also a fan of the great illustrators of the early 20th century. As an artist yourself, can you identify what it was about certain artists that influenced you, or taught you something? LAHMANN: Every piece of artwork I have seen has taught me something, even if it was what not to do. Something Bernie Wrightson said somewhere had a great impact on me. He said, “A piece of art is never finished; only abandoned.” This really helped me on the stuff I’m doing today. I had a tendency to “stay too long at the fair.” Now I know when it’s time to leave, especially with the colored pencil efforts. Franklin Booth taught me precision, though I could never do it as well as he. J.C. Coll exudes power. Frank Frazetta’s use of color, Roy Krenkel’s design, Vic Forsythe’s understatement. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Forsythe’s Joe Jinks Sunday pages, from the last quarter of 1929 till his leaving the strip in late 1933. They were a Saroyonesque effort of unmatched caliber. Forsythe was quite influential on the young Normal Rockwell.

29 Mickey Mouse in Color, and The Monster Society of Evil with Mr. Mind and Captain Marvel. I’ve managed to get books from all over the world. When my daughter was in England recently, she bought me a very rare and beautiful book about Sherlock Holmes, covering all aspects of the character in books, plays, movies, and comics. I’ve also managed to put together twenty-five of what I consider to be the most valuable of the Big Little Books. I’ve got most of the old Woody Gelman stuff, including the large and beautiful black-&-white version of Flash Gordon in the Ice Kingdom. I’m always adding to the collection, and my chief source these days is Bud Plant Comic Art. His catalogs have something for just about anyone. SCHELLY: What are some of the features that you would like to see collected into book form?

LAHMANN: Magnus—Robot Fighter by Russ Manning, of course. Also, Smokey Stover by Bill Holman, and the Bob Powell Shadow stories that I already mentioned. I’d love to see a Boy Commandos Archive from DC. I A piece written and drawn by Ed Lahmann for Creepy #10, SCHELLY: Can you tell us a little think the early “Boy Commandos,” and back in the 1960s. [©2003 Warren Publishing.] especially the first two issues of their more about the recent artwork you’ve own book, were the best work that Simon & Kirby ever did as a team. done, in color and black-&-white? Solid stories, good art. This was probably due to the editors at DC, who LAHMANN: In the late 1970s, I became aware of the Duck paintings were real taskmasters. by Carl Barks. I loved the way he took comic book characters and put SCHELLY: Of your experiences in fandom over the past 45 years, them in a colorful, but slightly more realistic world. Therefore, I’ve gravitated to doing individual, large pictures based on various comic what are some of the memories that you treasure the most? book, comic strip, pulp, and related areas. My first color set was on LAHMANN: Some of the very finest people I have ever met are the Mickey Mouse, and my second one called “Comic Book Covers That comics fans I have met through the mails and in person. Jerry Bails and Never Were.” Ronn Foss were in my home on two occasions, and they were a pure joy SCHELLY: Tell us about your book collection. to meet. I could never forget them. LAHMANN: In 1965 I was invited to a poker party at the home of a fellow worker. He had a complete collection of Playboy magazine. During the course of the evening, he showed me an issue containing an article on old comic book heroes by Jules Feiffer. When Mr. Feiffer’s book The Great Comic Book Heroes came out, I bought it. This prompted me to go to the public library to see how many such books were out there. At that time, there weren’t very many. One beautiful book was Steve Becker’s Comic Art in America. One day in the mail I got one of Claude Held’s lists, and on this one he listed several hardcover books and trade paperbacks pertaining to comics, pulps, and related material. I decided I was going to put together a library of these types of items. I wrote to Claude asking if he would be interested in trading this type of material for some of my old comic books. He was, and we did. That’s how my current library got its start. I have close to 500 books pertaining to comics, pulps, BLBs, and related items—also books by artists whose work I admire. I love Beverly Dolittle’s camouflage art, and the distinctive art of Charles Wysocki. I’ve several books by Norman Rockwell. One of those books, My Adventures As An Illustrator, by his son Thomas, has quite a bit about his early days sharing studio space with Vic Forsythe. Some of my more valuable items include Russ Cochran’s Burroughs Library, Barks’ Duck Paintings, Hogarth’s large Golden-Age Tarzan, the large version of

It has been a great love affair, the comics and me. I remember Howard Keltner, who helped me those many years ago by selling me two of the rarest comics, Batman #1 and Marvel Comics #1. I have great memories of Roy Thomas and Biljo White, who did so much to keep fandom going, and Grass Green, who was a brilliant artist and humorist. Mike Vosburg, Howie Chaykin, Russ Manning, Bud Plant, Alan Light, Don and Maggie Thompson, Catherine Yronwode, and many others. I could go on and on about the honesty and integrity of all the people I have dealt with. Also, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know a guy named Bill Schelly. An artist, a biographer of great substance, an archivist, and a comics lover. You’ve done well, and I have a feeling your best is yet to come. SCHELLY: Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up the interview? LAHMANN: The comics are a great American art form, ranking alongside the game of basketball and the banjo! Without the comics I would be a lesser man. [Ed Lahmann’s article “So—You Want to Collect Comics!” is reprinted in full in Alter Ego: The Best of the Legendary Fanzine. A few copies of this book are still available for $17.95 postpaid from Hamster Press, P.O. Box 27471, Seattle, WA 98125.]

Biljo White

Biljo White (1929-2003) by Bill Schelly Bill (“Biljo”) White died Wednesday, February 26, in Columbia, Missouri. Best known as the publisher of the popular fanzine Batmania and cocreator of the super-hero The Eye, Biljo had been one of the most active fans in the early 1960s when fandom was getting started. Born William Joseph White on June 4, 1929, Biljo had bought the comics of the Golden Age right off the rack, and eventually housed his enormous collection in the grandly-named White House of Comics— actually just a cinder block building in his backyard. A talented cartoonist who had harbored dreams of drawing for professional comics one day, White created many heroes in the pages of his first fanzine, Komix Illustrated (1962-63). His best-known characters were The Eye (co-created with Grass Green) and The Fog, who appeared in several different fanzines in the mid-’60s. Biljo was art editor of Alter Ego for three issues in 1964-65, published a magazine for fans of comic strips called The Stripper, and even took on the publishing of The Comicollector before it merged with Rocket’s Blast to form RBCC. But it was as editor and publisher of Batmania, “the magazine just for Batman fans,” that White was best known. Published with the approval of DC Comics, Batmania came on the scene in mid-1964 and reached its peak after the advent of the Batman TV show that began in early ‘66. White found he had a tiger by the tail, because of the large demand for copies. He was written up in articles as far as away as Italy for his part in the “Batmania” craze. Burned out by this frenzy of publishing, White largely withdrew from fandom in the 1970s and sold most of his legendary collection of old comics over the ensuing years. Still, nothing could keep him from the drawing board. His last published drawing saw print in The Eye Collection (Hamster Press), which collected new adventures of The Eye, Underworld Executioner, bringing Biljo a new generation of fans. He also did new drawings of his heroes Alter & Captain Ego for this magazine.

Bill J. White died of Burkett’s Lymphoma, which came on so suddenly that he never experienced any pain, merely a loss of appetite. Reacting poorly to chemotherapy, he died within eight days of being diagnosed. He had retired only three weeks earlier from his job at the local Veterans Hospital. White had requested no funeral, and that his body be cremated. I heard about Biljo White’s passing from A/E editor Roy Thomas, who heard it from TwoMorrows, who heard it from Biljo’s wife Hazel. I phoned her and learned that Biljo had been diagnosed with three different forms of a cancer only a little more than a week before. She said they were all in shock, it had happened so fast, because Biljo had not been sick— merely fatigued. He was, she said, never in pain. We’ve lost one of the true greats of fandom’s first decade, a fan who could do it all: write, draw, edit, publish. Batmania certainly ranks as one of the best fanzines of the 1960s, and he contributed to many other top zines. He was a role model for me, in a way, and I’m just glad that I got to know him better in recent years. I’ll miss you, Cap’n Biljo!

The Eye—Batman—The Fog—there are any number of heroes Biljo White drew during his days in fandom. This splash page from his one story starring "Alter and Captain Ego," two of this mag’s marvelous mascots, first appeared in Alter Ego [Vol. 1] #7 in 1964. [Art ©2003 Estate of Biljo White; Alter & Capt. Ego TM & ©Roy Thomas & Bill Schelly.]

[NOTE: A full-scale remembrance of Biljo White and his work, already in the planning stage when he passed away, will appear in a near-future issue of Alter Ego.]

Michael T. Gilbert Shane Foley, 45, is an ambulance paramedic in Queensland, Australia. He also draws comics, some of which were published in Australia in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. His partner, 48-year-old Randy “Sarge” Sargent, has been a Marvel fan since 1964. Sarge plays music (drums are his weapon of choice!) and works at Criss Enterprises in Parkersburg, Ohio. Sarge says, “I enjoy very much the Silver Age of Marvel Comics. Especially Jack Kirby. To me he was the Silver Age of Marvel Comics.” These two Kirby nuts met electronically on the Kirby-L mailing list two years ago and began collaborating on a series of full-color “what if” covers. Shane draws the covers, freely swiping old Kirby comics to get that authentic “early-Marvel” feel. Then Sarge completes the illusion by pasting up authentic logos, character boxes, and so forth, before computer-coloring the art in a palette eerily similar to that of early Marvel covers. If you like these covers, keep your eyes peeled for more in future issues. Matter of fact, we plan to run some “imaginary” 1963 Hulk covers showing what “might have been” if the first series hadn’t been cancelled with issue #6. Until then, we hope these two will whet your appetite!

The Marvelous World of “What If?” by Michael T. Gilbert What if...? What dyed-in-the-wool comic fan hasn’t asked him- or herself that delicious question? Older Marvel fans still debate such world-shaking questions of comic book trivia as: What if Steve Ditko hadn’t quit Spider-Man after issue #38? Would it have ever been as popular as it became under John Romita’s brush? For that matter, what if Joe Kubert had taken over the strip, instead of Romita? Hmmm... Or what about Giant-Man? He was the big cheese main feature in Tales To Astonish—until the Hulk’s mag got cancelled in 1963. A year later, a ten-page tale of Ol’ Greenskin began sharing Astonish with 12 pages of Giant-Man, beginning with issue #60. Five years later he took over the book completely––kicking Giant-Man out of the mag in the process! That’s a fact. But what if The Hulk’s first run hadn’t been a failure? Well, there’s a good chance Tales To Astonish would’ve turned into a solo Giant-Man title. “What would that have looked like?” you might wonder. Well, wonder no more, frantic ones! Super-fans Shane Foley and Randy Sargent have the answer!

The comic book that never was! What if The Incredible Hulk hadn’t taken over The Wasp’s backup spot in Tales to Astonish #60? Well, instead of sharing the book with ol’ Jade-jaws, lead feature “Giant-Man” might have finally gotten his own title—and it might’ve looked like this! Art by Shane Foley & Randy Sargent, utilizing the artwork of Jack “King” Kirby. [Art layout/concept ©2003 Shane Foley & Randy Sargent; original art ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Giant-Man, Ant-Man, Kang, Wasp, & Sub-Mariner TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

Marvel was mad about crossovers in the early ‘60s. Patsy and Hedy #81 guest-starred The Rawhide Kid—as seen in the panels at right and below! So why didn’t Stan Lee and Jack Kirby—with a bit of help from “Stan G.” (Stan Goldberg) go all the way and have the Fantastic Four guest-star in an issue of Millie the Model, à lá the above Foley & Sargent “what if” cover? Like they say about chicken soup—it couldn’t hurt! [Art layout/concept ©2003 Shane Foley & Randy Sargent; original art ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Fantastic Four & Millie the Model TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Just In Case You Thought We Were Kidding” Dept. Here’s a sampling of that very odd Patsy Walker/Rawhide Kid team-up from Patsy and Hedy #81 (April 1962) that I mentioned earlier. This silly Stan Lee/Al Hartley 4-pager begins with Patsy’s boyfriend Buzz and his buddy reading a Rawhide Kid comic book. Naturally, these typical red-blooded teens worship the half-pint cowboy hero. Well, as it happens, Patsy’s just read in the paper that the Kid’s about to make a personal appearance in Centerville! What fun! Only a consarned continuity-freak ranny would mention the fact that by 1962 the Kid would be old enough to be Patsy’s great-grandfather! Or maybe he was just some actor, though that was never stated in the story.

Anyway, the four head off to see the rootin’-tootin’ Rawhide Kid. The Kid’s a dreamboat, so the girls decide to snare the dreamy hunk! Of course, this was decades before Marvel retroactively “outed” the Kid, or the gals wouldn’t have bothered. When RK mentions that he’ll be heading to the soda shoppe after the show, the gals decide to rope him in by dressing up like purty l’il cowgirls. Imagine their dismay when Rawhide Kid shows up looking like a duded-up city slicker wearing a suit and tie! Worse, the Kid sounds like a dude, too, with his patented Stan Lee “jive-talk” dialogue. “Hi, cats! It sure feels good to wiggle out of those cowboy duds!” Then he sees the cowgirls. “Say! What’s with you two chicks? How square can you be??” You can almost hear the gals’ hearts break. Oh well. See what happens when you mess with comic book continuity?!

Michael T. Gilbert

WHERE MONSTERS DWELL!

Hey, check out this monstrous montage by Robert Marquez which asks the question: “What if all the creatures that infested Tales to Astonish in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s got together to kick mankind’s butt?” Is this cool or what?

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

Till next time...

Missing a Back Issue? Got a hole in your Mr. Monster collection? We’ll gladly e-mail you a free Mr. Monster EEEK-Mail Catalog! Just Contact Michael T. Gilbert at:

MGILBERT@EFN.ORG

For a printed version, send one dollar to Michael T. Gilbert, P.O. Box 11421, Eugene OR 97440

No. 83

William Woolfolk The Human Side of the Golden Age Plus: Marc Swayze

Marc Swayze The executive and editorial offices of Fawcett Publications occupied the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th floors. In talking with the receptionist, I learned of the company having originated in Minneapolis, its growth, and the relocation to New York City. They published numerous magazines on a variety of subjects, she said… movies, confessions, photography, mechanics, and comics.

[FCA EDITORS NOTE: From 1941-53, Marcus D. Swayze was a top artist for Fawcett Comics. The very first Mary Marvel character sketches came from Marc’s drawing table, and he illustrated her earliest adventures, including the classic Mary Marvel origin story, “Captain Marvel Introduces Mary Marvel” (CMA #18, Dec. ‘42); but he was primarily hired by Fawcett Publications to illustrate Captain Marvel stories and covers for Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel Adventures. He also wrote many Captain Marvel scripts, and continued to do so while in the military. Soon after he left the service in 1944, he made an arrangement with Fawcett to produce art and stories on a freelance basis out of his Louisiana home. There he created both art and story for The Phantom Eagle in Wow Comics, in addition to drawing the Flyin’ Jenny newspaper strip for Bell Syndicate (created by his friend and mentor Russell Keaton). After the cancellation of Wow, Swayze produced artwork for Fawcett’s topselling line of romance comics. After the company ceased publishing comics, Marc moved over to Charlton Publications, where he ended his comics career in the mid-’50s. Marc’s ongoing professional memoirs have been FCA’s most popular feature since his first column appeared in FCA #54, 1996. In the past few issues Marc has talked about his pre-Golden Age of Comics period. Beginning with this installment, he returns to discuss his early days at Fawcett Publications, as he did when his column first started in the pages of FCA seven years ago, for a smaller and somewhat different readership. —P.C. Hamerlinck.]

In the art director’s office I was advised that officially I would be on the staff of Allard, but that functionally I would be responsible to Eddie Herron of the comics. Neither saw a problem with my contributing an occasional illustration to the non-comics magazines. My purpose in being there, however, was clear: to aid in getting out the growing volume of artwork made necessary by the phenomenal success of… Captain Marvel. So that was the name of the guy in the red suit! As Allard and Herron briefly related the history of the character, Beardsley left the room. He returned with a smallish, black-haired, clean-shaven fellow in shirtsleeves. “Marc Swayze, this is C.C. Beck,” he said. Joining the art department at Fawcett Publications was like entering another world. My first impression of the place was its size… huge… with some of the upper towers of Manhattan in view through tall windows along two sides. As we stepped in from the art director’s office, the somewhat loud, jovial, mingled conversations subsided, and about twenty or thirty heads turned our way.

The year was 1941. I rose from my seat in the reception room of Fawcett Publications as a big fellow approached with outstretched hand. It was France E. (Eddie) Herron, editorial director of the Fawcett comics group. With him was chief assistant, John Beardsley. We went directly to the office of an art director. “We liked your drawings,” Al Allard said. They had sent me several sketches of a flying hero in a red suit. I didn’t let on that I didn’t even know the name of the character. “Yeah,” said Herron, “We couldn’t distinguish your art from Beck’s.” “Who’s Beck?” I asked. I had arrived in New York the previous evening, had registered at a nearby hotel, and was in the lobby of the Paramount Building by 9 a.m. sharp. “What a place to work,” I thought. On the ground floor was the Paramount Theatre, where Glen Miller and his orchestra were currently appearing. On the corner was a huge Walgreen drug store. Across the street was the Astor Hotel where Hollywood stars stayed when in the city, and where The Three Suns opened their program nightly with their beautiful theme, “Twilight Time.” On the opposite side of Seventh Avenue was the Times Building, where current headlines in lights rotated constantly. This was Times Square!

Marc Swayze’s cover for FCA #54 (Winter 1996) marked the first installment of his column, “We Didn’t Know... It Was the Golden Age!”—and the beginning of P.C. Hamerlinck’s tenure as FCA editor. [Art ©2003 Marc Swayze; Captain Marvel TM & ©2003 DC Comics.]

“We Didn’t Know...”

“Dr. Voodoo... may have represented Mac Raboy at his finest.” English comics artist Kevin O’Neill kindly sent us photocopies of the original art to four early pages of Raboy’s “Voodoo”—and here (above) is one of them. At right is a somewhat slicker panel from a slightly later issue, as Raboy had developed his Alex Raymond-influenced style in Whiz Comics. [©2003 DC Comics.]

Marc Swayze Mac Raboy was illustrating a feature called “Dr. Voodoo,” which could be considered Raboy at his greatest. I don’t know who wrote the “Voodoo” thing or whose concept it was, but it was far ahead of its time and so much in the category and quality of the Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon newspaper features that it looked out of place in comic books. “These’ll give you some idea of what’s been going on.” It was Herron dropping several comic books on my new drawing board. “When you’ve finished, maybe you’ll see that they go back in the library.” Library? Wow! Fawcett maintained a library right on our floor, complete with librarian and scores of magazines, books, and movie stills. The books on my table, Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel Adventures, told me much but still left me with questions I wanted to ask about the drawing of the character and the art style. Later, as I set the books aside, Beck came over. “Why don’t you and I go out for a beer when we get off?” he said. “I’d like to talk to you.” “Fine,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you.” In the days that followed I got to know this fellow, Beck. I’ve always called him “Beck.” Everybody did. Once in a while a “C.C.” would sneak through, and now and then a “Clarence.” But usually it was just “Beck.” [Marc Swayze’s reminiscences of his early days with Fawcett, Captain Marvel, and the Golden Age of Comics will continue next issue.]

Al Allard wasn’t the type to raise cupped palms and shout, “Give me your attention, please!” Instead, he spoke softly to the nearest artist and introduced me. Al Pauly, logo designer supreme, had come east with the company several years back and seemed to know everybody in the department. A likely one to show the “new guy” around. Most of those present worked at tables adjusted to waist-high level. They were, it was learned, layout experts who maintained a close tie with their editors in arranging the pages of the magazines to which they were assigned. Scattered among them were three comic book artists and a letterer: C.C. Beck, whom I had met in the outer office, Pete Costanza, Mac Raboy, and Angelo Grasso. Beck was drawing “Captain Marvel,” of course, and doing some of the greatest “Captain Marvel” art of all time… also some of the greatest C.C. Beck work. Pete Costanza spoke of having drawn “Golden Arrow,” but was transferring his efforts toward assisting Beck.

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The Human Side of the Golden Age

The Human Side of the Golden Age Golden Age Writing Great WILLIAM WOOLFOLK Interviewed by P.C. HAMERLINCK [Introduction: American writer William Woolfolk’s career of 60+ years is still going strong today. An accomplished writer, novelist, playwright, essayist, columnist, and publisher, he was one of the highest-paid, most sought-after writers of the Golden Age of Comics, where some of his peers referred to him as “The Shakespeare of Comics.” His comics writing résumé is an impressive list of classic comics characters: Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Ibis the Invincible, Superman, Batman, Captain America, Blackhawk, Plastic Man, The Spirit… and the list goes on. [Golden Age Comics fan Shaun Clancy originally put me in touch with Mr. Woolfolk in 2000. A correspondence and friendship had begun, resulting in Woolfolk’s fascinating essay, “Looking Backward… from My Upside-Down Point of View,” published back in FCA #65 (Alter Ego V3#6). It was a joy to present the article by one of comics’ greatest writers, but I knew as I painstakingly edited Woolfolk’s 40+ pages down to 9 pages, that a follow-up interview would definitely be necessary. [I was honored to briefly meet Mr. Woolfolk (and his daughter, Donna, also an accomplished author) in person at the 2002 San Diego International Comic-Con, where he received an Inkpot award. It was Woolfolk’s first-ever convention appearance... and I’m glad I put David Siegel in touch with him, the man who was instrumental in getting Bill to the show. Bill resides in upstate New York, where he’s busy working on several projects. Our interview was conducted in late 2002 via e-mail. —P.C. Hamerlinck.]

Bill Woolfolk (at far right) and chums at the San Diego Comic-Con, August 1, 2002—Bill’s first! [Left to right in back:] Longtime “Aquaman” and “Metamorpho” artist Ramona Fradon... Donna Woolfolk Cross... David Siegel... Dick Ayers (among other things, a Timely/Marvel mainstay from the late ‘40s through the ‘70s)... and William Woolfolk. Center with hat: Lindee (Mrs. Richard) Ayers. [Photo ©2003 Charlie Roberts.]

WILLIAM WOOLFOLK: I feel like someone poised in the middle of a high dive into an empty swimming pool, but I’ll do my best to answer your questions. PCH: Thank you, Bill. First of all, I want to ask if you have a basic philosophy behind writing fiction?

PCH: Comic stories from the Golden Age were generally action and plot driven, yet your comic scripts always gave special attention to characterization, making for a better developed, wellrounded, and interesting story. Did you knowingly strive to expand the comic book story beyond its established, streamlined formula? Did you always go about treating the comics as a valid literary art form…or did you view it as simply another job that will help pay the bills?

WOOLFOLK: My basic philosophy in writing fiction is derived from whoever said that what was crucial in writing fiction is to achieve “a suspension of disbelief” in the reader. Until the reader is willing to at least temporarily suspend his disbelief, he will not willingly attend to your story or accept the actions your characters engage in. This sounds more formidable than it is. If you simply put interesting characters into interesting situations, you will hold the reader’s unskeptical attention. PCH: When preparing a story, specifically a comic book script, did you first write out a rough draft/outline containing the plot and sub-plots, or did you simply prepare it mentally without the use of extensive notes?

WOOLFOLK: In preparing a story for any medium, from comic books to novels to television or movies, I always work out a rough outline in advance. This outline is subject to change, often many changes, but at least it gives me a framework within which to operate. Without it, I’m like someone in free-fall without a parachute.

WOOLFOLK: I’m flattered by your description of my work. I did come from a writing background, in

William Woolfolk

“literary” magazines and slick magazines so I suppose I did try to expand the comic book stories to include what I had learned from previous writing. The chief secret in building a character: always ask the why of how. There was a decided scarcity of real writers at the time. Some publishers even left the stories in the hands of the artists to compose, which was roughly equivalent to leaving them in the hands of the Boston Strangler. PCH: You’re regarded as a major Golden Age comics writer who created few major characters but one who was called upon to keep great-established characters strong, even perfecting them. How did you adapt to all the different styles and characters? Was it difficult for you to juggle so many different ones at one time, or did you view one character pretty much the same as all the others?

experience in college, in which I was the darling of professors who persisted in reading my writing aloud to my bored classmates. And my ambitions were further fortified by the fact that I sold a few short stories to avant-garde literary journals that paid mostly in subscriptions. I earned lifetime subscriptions to journals whose lifetimes were considerably shorter than my own. Despite these literary pretensions, my own reading interests were more narrowly focused on science-fiction. I discovered H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and then Hugo Gernsback and his Amazing Stories magazine. I willingly suspended my disbelief in visions of the future. There was an obvious dichotomy between what I liked to read and what I wrote, a dichotomy that in one way or another has persisted to this day. I’m not sure I can explain this, but I suspect it was warring impulses: the desire for enduring fame versus the need for material success. All my writing life I have tried to marry the pursuit of excellence with the pursuit of money, and the two are not always compatible.

WOOLFOLK: Those who accuse me of creating few comic book heroes and villains are quite right. There were two reasons for this: I was always writing for three or four different publishers at a time, so I had to piggyback on their estabA page from “Captain Marvel and Bulbo the Whale,” scripted by lished characters. The other reason Bill Woolfolk, with art by the late great Dave Berg, before he became My friend Seymour Reit is that I never felt fully committed one of Mad magazine’s most popular writer-artists. From Captain (creator of Casper the Friendly to writing for comics. I had loftier Marvel Adventures #15 (Sept. 1942). [©2003 DC Comics.] ambitions. I was quite wrong, of Ghost) was a classmate in NYU, course, for comics have outlasted my writing efforts in other media… and suffered from the same ambivalence. We both hoped that if we shot and nothing upsets me more than being proven wrong. No, I don’t our arrows into the air they would come back to Earth with a golden think it was particularly difficult to juggle writing for many different goose in them. I have related previously in FCA how we had agreed if comic book heroes all at once. Basically the story requirements were after graduation we had not found gainful employment (it was a the same… and, fortunately, the checks I received were equally recession year) we would get into bed and draw the covers up over our cashable. heads and not emerge again until someone came to our rescue. PCH: Let’s backtrack for a bit. You were born in Long Island in 1917 and your family moved around frequently because of their profession as Vaudeville entertainers. How much of an impact, if any, did that have on your becoming a writer? How early did you know you wanted to become a writer? Did reading books and the pulps in your youth prove influential… or did other influences play a part? Also, was Seymour Reit’s suggestion that you try your hand at comics a suggestion you’re glad he made to you… and if he hadn’t, do you feel you would had stayed with the slicks, eventually moving on to writing novels? Do you feel comics made for a good training ground for future works such as The Naked Hunter, My Name Is Morgan, The Builders, Opinion of the Court, The Beautiful Couple, Maggie, The Adam Project, Thai Game, and your other novels? WOOLFOLK: Did you have to remind me of when I was born?! Why don’t you just say, “At the time when dinosaurs were still walking the earth…”? My family was mostly in show business and were even semi-famous in their own time. George M. Cohan was their patron saint. I might have followed in their footsteps except that their kind of show business was decimated by the advent of sound in motion pictures, so I had to seek another form of creative outlet: writing. This was reinforced by my

Sy Reit was an artist as well as a writer and found a job with Jerry Iger’s shop. He suggested I try to write for comics. I usually put off to tomorrow the things I should have done yesterday, but I finally got around to sending ideas to MLJ, where Harry Shorten was the editor. He had been a year ahead of me at NYU and was a football star, so I felt I had a tenuous connection. The upshot of that was that I began writing for MLJ, scripting The Wizard, The Shield, The Hangman, The Black Hood, and Steel Sterling as well as others, until Shorten proved obdurate about matching what I was being paid elsewhere. I had shot my arrow into the air, and by God it came back with a goose in it… and the goose laid golden eggs. In no time I was earning ten times what the average person was. What would have happened if I hadn’t got into comic book writing? I would have continued selling very occasional stories to Toronto Star Weekly and Liberty and secondary slicks, and probably eventually have tried to write a novel. But without the necessary experience and technique, writing a novel is something like the Laurel and Hardy movie in which they are pushing a piano up a steep flight of stairs and every time they get near the top the piano comes tumbling down to the bottom again.

The Human Side of the Golden Age Fortunately, writing for comics proved to be an excellent training ground for writers. Where else can you write four or five stories a week, learning from your mistakes as you go? I learned how to plot from writing comics and I am forever grateful to them for that. PCH: After being in the business for a while you decided to become a publisher yourself, first with your own O.W. Comics (The Mad Hatter, Animal Fables) and later Space World with Otto Binder, and other magazines. Did you regret your ventures as a publisher and the financial woes that went along with it, or do you feel it was it worth the try? WOOLFOLK: I wanted to become a comic book publisher because I had convinced myself that I had the magic talent for success. All the comic books I wrote for were selling beyond the spoilage rate of 3 percent, because newsstands kept even damaged copies, knowing they would sell. What I overlooked was that most other comics were selling that well, even ones I didn’t write for. But I was young and had difficulty keeping my ego in check. My mind was closed off to the idea house with no windows. By the time I finally became a publisher the war had ended, and so had the paper shortages. Everyone and his second cousin was publishing comic books. The market was over-saturated and inferior products were brimming the slop bucket. My first venture was a comic book called The Mad Hatter. It barely made its way through the crowd onto the newsstands but the first issue somehow managed to break even. By then printers were charging even more obscene prices, obeying the immutable laws of supply and demand. Nevertheless I came out with a second issue, this time with Mort Leav as the artist, and this one made money despite the prohibitive printing costs. I also wanted to publish an animated comic book, Animal Fables, but seeing what the market was like got the better of me and I sold the completed book to Max Gaines. Max was formerly a partner in DC comics. Even he was having trouble finding a printer willing to charge survivable prices, but Animal Fables got out and did surprisingly well. The second issue was stalled at the printer because comic books were now being downsized to 32 pages, and Animal Fables was 48 pages. Then fate cruelly intervened. Max Gaines was killed in a weird boating accident. That brought an end to my publishing career… at least for a time.

comic books, but did agree to distribute two vest-pocket-size magazines. These midget-sized magazines were in vogue at the time and I hired Boltinoff to help me edit one of them. One thing led to another, and I finally had a big success with Inside Story, a magazine that featured inside stories about famous people. It became Kable News Company’s biggest seller, with over 700,000 copies in print. Kable News persuaded me to put out another, somewhat racier version called Behind the Scenes, which was equally successful. Flush with success I decided to put out the first consumer magazine about the space age. I called it Space World. I hired Otto Binder as editor and Willy Ley as a consultant. It was a foolhardy attempt to put out a major magazine on a very minor budget. The magazine was gaining readers with every issue but by then I was suffering from one of my frequent paroxysms of self-doubt. Was publishing really what I wanted to do with my life? If life is a voyage I did not want to be traveling on the Titanic, not even in first class. Throughout this time I had kept my writing career afloat. I had published three paperback suspense novels and was anxious to try for a hardcover best-seller. Just then my good friend Reginald Rose, who had carved out a career as one of the greats of the Golden Age of Television had been given his own weekly TV show, The Defenders. Reggie happened to be one of my admirers and wanted me to come aboard as story editor and a chief writer. But I still had a publishing business with a dozen people dependent on it. I didn’t feel I could abandon them. On the other hand I couldn’t sell the business without agreeing to stay on as publisher and chief editor. But there was no resisting the kind of money paid in television and the call of Mammon summoned me again. The best ideas I’ve ever had usually occur to me when it’s too late. I decided to turn the publishing business over to the people who worked for me, accepting only the advertising money in payment. For ten years it had been a profitable enterprise, but somehow the new owners ran it into the ground in a little more than a year and a half. So I sold it in effect for a fraction of its worth. Otto Binder placed Space World with another publisher, who replaced him as the editor and continued publishing it for another twenty years. So ended my publishing career, and so began my work in television. PCH: What was your daily/weekly comic script page output during the Golden Age? Since you were writing for several different companies at the same time, did you get overwhelmed and often have to ‘burn the midnight oil’? Were there any conflicts with other publishers because you were writing their competition’s star feature?

However, it is in the nature of the sun to shine, the rain to fall, and the winds to blow. And it is in the nature of writers to seek the maximum reward for their efforts. It seemed to me that publishing what I wrote was the best way to go. Some years later, through the good offices of Murray Boltinoff who put me in touch with the art editor at McGraw-Hill who was also interested in becoming a publisher, I got back into publishing. The distributor Kable News Company wanted no part of

WOOLFOLK: My daily writing stint consisted of four to six comic book pages. That didn’t vary much, and it appalled some of my fellow writers. I recall Bruce Elliot in particular saying that he often wrote

William Woolfolk

a 12- to 14-page story in a single day. However, when he heard that my four-to-six page pace amounted to at least 150 pages a month, he was staggered. This is another example of the virtue of steady persistence. Witness the story of the tortoise and the hare. At times I would waste a whole workday, only get to my desk after eleven at night to crank out my basic four pages. A tortoise output, but it won the money race and allowed me to write for other publications, which now included the then-popular sinsuffer-and-repent stories in true confession-type magazines. They paid very well although the stories were not true and hardly confessional. I also wrote some gag material for some wellknown cartoonists. No, I never had any conflicts with comic book publishers because I was writing for rival characters. I was a much soughtafter writer in that blessed time and they accepted the fact that this was my insurance policy against any slowdown by any one publisher.

comics empire. In later years we became good friends. Busy Arnold was a drunk. If I sound somewhat testy and critical about some of these people, I beg the reader’s indulgence. During the past year I have lost the two friends I valued most highly: Sy Reit and Reginald Rose were both extremely gifted writers, and no one else I’ve known measured up to them. PCH: After one of your comics stories was published and you saw your script come alive in picture form, were you generally pleased or disappointed at the results? Otto Binder once said the experience was like getting your photos back from the drug store. Who do you feel were some of the best storyteller artists of your scripts (Crandall, Simon & Kirby, Beck, Raboy, Fine, Jack Cole, etc.)? Do you remember Fawcett artist Marc Swayze?

WOOLFOLK: After a comic story was accepted, I was mostly pleased with the prompt payment. I feel the best artists I worked with were Reed Crandall, C.C. Beck, and Jack Cole. Their styles were PCH: While you were in the completely different but equally military in 1943, did you A Raboy “Bulletman” page from an early issue of Master Comics, repro’d from effective. Mort Leav also belongs continue to write comic scripts? a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Jerry Bails & Hames Ware. Woolfolk in their company. I never worked wrote some “Bulletman” stories, if not necessarily this one. [©2003 DC Comics.] with Simon & Kirby, but I WOOLFOLK: During my brief admired them from afar. Mac inglorious military service, I Raboy was a fine illustrator who could not convey the excitement continued to write for both Fawcett and Quality comics, especially The required of a comic book artist. I don’t recall Marc Swayze, although his Spirit. name sounds so familiar to me that perhaps I should remember him. PCH: At MLJ you first encountered editor Harry Shorten, and I PCH: It was artist Warren King’s suggestion that you talk to Fawcett sensed from your essay in FCA #65 (Alter Ego V3#6, Autumn 2000) that you had a rather low opinion of the man. Do you feel he was the after his failed interview with them. Did Fawcett end up being your worst editor you ever had to deal with, or should that title go to the favorite comic company to work for, in terms of both rates and editoinfamous Mort Weisinger? Who were your favorite editors—in rially… or were they all generally the same? particular, the Fawcett editors (John Beardsley, Rod Reed, Wendell WOOLFOLK: Fawcett was the best all-around company to work for. Crowley, Will Lieberson)? What about Busy Arnold at Quality At Quality, Busy Arnold would hire anybody as editors, including Comics? Brown University (his alma mater) football players, drinking companions, and former mistresses. I did very little work for Timely, WOOLFOLK: Harry Shorten was certainly not the worst editor I ever though it was there I met Dorothy Roubicek, who was editing Captain dealt with. He was a tough-minded, competent editor but just an illiterate man. Mort Weisinger I have dealt with separately. [Editors Note: America at the time, and we later married. The belief that I met her See a near-future issue. —PCH] I have nothing to add to what I wrote when she was writing “Lois Lane” at DC is mistaken. about him, and nothing to retract. At Fawcett, Beardsley was very PCH: After your time in the military, comics continued to keep you indulgent to me, and also brought me over to Quality Comics when he close to your typewriter. At Fawcett your output included Captain left Fawcett. I should be grateful to him but he was a totally incomMarvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Ibis the Invincible, Bulletman, and petent editor, as all who worked with him will attest. Rod Reed was the others; over at Quality you were writing Plastic Man, Doll Man, perfect head editor, a charming man, a diplomat, witty and a good judge Blackhawk, and Kid Eternity; and at Timely you wrote Young Allies, of a story. Wendell Crowley was the perfect editor for Captain Marvel, Sub-Mariner, and Captain America. Were you feeling any burnout at and at a gangly six foot nine inches tall he looked as if he had just this point or were you enjoying the constant flow of comics work? arrived from another galaxy. We became great friends, a friendship facilitated by the fact he thought I was the best writer in comics and often said so. Otto Binder, however, did a great deal more for Captain Marvel than I ever did. Will Lieberson was a competent chief editor who unfortunately was condemned to preside over the liquidation of the Fawcett’s

WOOLFOLK: I wrote very little for Timely, mainly for Robert Erisman, who had edited their string of pulp magazines. He was a genuine editor, but worked in the country and admitted he liked to be

The Human Side of the Golden Age around animals more than people. As a result he lost out in the internecine office warfare. I was sorry to see him go, because he had an exaggerated opinion of my abilities. I never suffered from burnout, because I adhered to my four-to-six-pages-a-day schedule. I only suffered from guilt because I was earning so much for so little effort. PCH: Were you aware that in the ‘70s, when C.C. Beck was drawing DC’s revived Captain Marvel in Shazam!, that he was so disgusted at the stories he was getting from their writers that he suggested to the editors that they hire you and Rod Reed to write scripts and “make things right”? The DC editors naturally vetoed the idea, but if they hadn’t, would you have wanted to write new “Captain Marvel” stories again? If so, how would you have gone about it: writing with a nostalgic emphasis or with a modern twist? Of course, you had written for DC in the past, beginning in 1946 writing “Superman.” I understand you returned in the ‘80s to write one modern Man of Steel story; how did this come about?

45 Court and didn’t like the idea of my writing comic book novels, so I used a pseudonym: “Winston Lyon” was my own middle name, linked with my mother’s maiden name. I rather liked the sly innuendo that Winston was Lyin’. Those were the only Batman novels I wrote. I think the paperback publisher made a mistake by deciding not to have illustrations. The readers of Batman comics were certainly not ready for plain, unadorned prose. PCH: Some of your Golden Age comic work was recently reprinted in DC’s Blackhawk Archives, as well as a couple of editions of The Spirit Archives. Fellow Fawcett writers Manly Wade Wellman and Joseph Millard also wrote Spirit scripts. What do you recall about your stint on The Spirit; any stories in particular that you enjoyed writing?

WOOLFOLK: When Will Eisner went into the Army, the writing chores on The Spirit were mainly divided between Wellman, Bill Woolfolk became a major scripter of “Blackhawk” stories, including Millard, and myself. I enjoyed “The Butcher” in Military Comics #13 (Nov. 1942), as seen in DC’s handsome writing stories for a somewhat hardcover Blackhawk Archives, Vol. 1. Art by Reed Crandall. [©2003 DC Comics.] more mature audience of WOOLFOLK: No, I wasn’t newspaper readers… and I aware that C.C. Beck wanted Rod enjoyed the friendship of Lou Fine, the artist who had taken over the Reed and me to be hired to do Shazam! scripts. Beck and I had minimal strip. Lou joined Wendell Crowley and Jack Cole in proclaiming me the contact during the time I worked at Fawcett. I admired his deceptively “Shakespeare of Comics,” an appellation so far beyond my merits that simple artwork and liked his dry sense of humor. If DC hadn’t said no I’m embarrassed to repeat it. Lou was a better artist than Will Eisner, to the idea, I’m not sure I’d have been willing to try my hand with the although he lacked Eisner’s dramatic imagination. Big Red Cheese again. That decision would have depended on where I was in my own career at the time. I would certainly have been tempted. The approach, whether old-fashioned or modern, would have been worked out with the editors.

Yes, I did write one “Superman” story for Julie Schwartz in the ‘80s. That came about when I visited DC for lunch with Paul Levitz, and Julie and I made a lunch date. It turned out Julie had taken over Dorothy’s job when she left DC to marry me, and while we were reminiscing I mentioned that I’d like to write a “Superman” story for old time’s sake. Julie said the only safe story would be set in outer space, since so many things I didn’t know about had occurred in the Superman saga. Within that limitation I think the story worked out well enough, although I was disappointed with Kurt Schaffenberger’s artwork. PCH: How did writing two Batman paperback novels during the Batman craze in the ‘60s come about? WOOLFOLK: Mort Weisinger approached me with an offer to do the Batman novels. I’d just finished writing what others and I consider my best novel, Opinion of the Court, a massive tome about the first two years of a justice on the Supreme Court, the cases he dealt with and the various emotional entanglements in his life. I wasn’t ready for another big challenge, and writing two Batman novels, one based on an upcoming Batman movie, struck me as just the right chore to taper off with. Doubleday was preparing a big campaign for Opinion of the

A story that both Lou Fine and I did and liked involved Ebony, The Spirit’s teen-aged accomplice, giving his version of what had happened in a crime adventure. The contrast between what Ebony was telling in captions, and the actual scenes portrayed by Lou, made for an amusing tale. PCH: Was writing scripts for The Defenders television series more satisfying than the comics? How did the two differ? WOOLFOLK: Writing for The Defenders TV series was much more demanding than writing comic book scripts. The show won every award that wasn’t nailed down and is still remembered as one of the most worthy TV series ever. To maintain that quality week after week was an inhuman task. I recall talking to Reggie Rose one afternoon after beating our brains out revising and rewriting scripts to meet an impossible deadline. I said that one day, years from then, we would probably be tempted to look back and say what a wonderful time we had working on The Defenders… and I urged him to remember that we were going through the gates of hell, and so was everyone involved in the show. Reggie’s marriage ended, so did mine, E.G. Marshall began drinking heavily, and Robert Reed actually fled back to his home in the Midwest to avoid appearing in a show, and someone went into a set one night and leveled it with an axe. The show was victorious but there were human casualties. We fought for the show like General Robert E. Lee in the Civil War, not giving up an inch of ground.

William Woolfolk simpler era, villains were easier to identify and their motivations did not need much elaboration. PCH: When your comic book writing ended, how did you feel? Were you eager to move your career to the next level? WOOLFOLK: I wasn’t aware of a definite ending to my comic book writing! I’ve always improvised my career. My various transitions from experimental literary journals to slick magazines to comic books to magazine publishing to novelist and TV writer/editor all flowed into each other with some overlapping but without any sharp dividing lines. If I had any feelings of loss or gain, sorrow, or happiness about doing less comic book work, I can’t recall them without performing a Caesarean on my brain. PCH: What inspires you to write… and what advice would you give to any writer? What was the inspiration behind your latest novel, The Sex Goddess? Seymour Reit produced the book’s cover; tell us a little about your long friendship with him. Also, I wanted to mention your daughter, Donna, wrote the successful novel, Pope Joan. It appears she is following in her father’s footsteps. You must be quite proud of her; how much of her father’s influence is present in her writing? WOOLFOLK: My inspiration for writing has always been the same: the need to make a living. I’ve been a writer for more than sixty years. It’s been an interesting occupation and I’m glad to have made a living at it. If I had to leave one word of wisdom for other writers it would be this: Tenacity is more important than talent. Sy Reit’s cover for The Sex Goddess was actually a painting he had done earlier and he allowed me to use it for the book’s cover.

PCH: Today, for one to see a superbly crafted 7- to 8-page comic story is pretty much unheard of… yet in the Golden Age of Comics the likes of Binder, Wellman, Millard, Eisner, and Woolfolk produced tiny classics, week after week, month after month. What do you feel are the shortcomings of today’s comics writers... or is it simply a matter that styles and times have changed? WOOLFOLK: I don’t know why we were able to turn out satisfying stories in a shorter compass than today’s writers. Perhaps memory, that trickster, now makes the stories seem better than they actually were. I do recall plotting stories that would obviously have taken more space than was allotted to them, and then having to revise the plot down to a shorter length.

The Sex Goddess is fiction, but based on the real-life events of Ava Gardner. All the content is real, but camouflaged. All names have been changed and the book’s ending is pure fiction but the facts are true. In writing the book, I was hoping to duplicate the success I had with The Beautiful Couple. To tell you about my friendship with Seymour Reit, which lasted sixty years, would take more space than you’d be willing to devote to it. We admired each other and loved each other and shared many experiences that are now mine alone to mourn. His death one year ago has, in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s memorable phrase, “lacerated the continuity of my being.”

PCH: While you wrote many scripts featuring the villainous Dr. Sivana in Captain Marvel Adventures and Whiz Comics, do you recall writing any chapters of the Mr. Mind/Monster Society serial… or did Otto Binder craft the entire saga? Do you remember if you wrote Marvel Family stories, as well? You are credited for writing many early Captain Marvel Jr. tales, and creating the notorious Captain Nazi; do you recall anything behind the creation of this infamous villain? WOOLFOLK: I wrote no chapters of the Mr. Mind serial. They were all written by Otto Binder. He also wrote all of the Mr. Tawny stories. For a long period Otto and I divided up the Captain Marvel tales; he did most of the Marvel Family stories and I wrote most of the Captain Marvel Jr. stories. Because of the events happening overseas, Captain Nazi was an obvious choice for villainy, and there was nothing special I recall in either his creation or subsequent infamous career. In that

Seymour Reit, the late artist who at least co-created Casper the Friendly Ghost, painted this exquisite art that appeared as the cover of Bill Woolfolk’s most recent book, The Sex Goddess. [Art ©2003 Estate of Seymour Reit.]

On the other hand, my daughter Donna has, to put it simply, justified my life. She chose to be a writer and has now succeeded beyond my hopes and certainly beyond my talents. Pope Joan is a remarkable novel and is now being made into a major motion picture. She dedicated the novel to me and gives me too much credit for what help I was able to provide. There was never a time in my somewhat checkered writing career when I could have equaled what she achieved.

Number 11, April-May 2003 • Hype and hullabaloo from the publisher determined to bring new life to comics fandom • Edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington

Roy Internationale ALTER EGO editor ROY THOMAS will be a guest at the Torino Comics Convention in Turin, Italy on May 9-11. But before he leaves, he promises to complete AE #25, shipping in June and featuring a special spotlight on JACK COLE and PLASTIC MAN, as ALEX TOTH celebrates Cole’s creation!

Coming Soon! Alter Ego #24 (Now!) Alter Ego #25 (June) Comic Book Artist #24 (Now!) CBA #25 (May, final issue) DRAW! #6 (May) Jack Kirby Collector #38 (May) Write Now! #4 (May) Modern Masters V1: Alan Davis (Now!) Beck & Schaffenberger: Sons of Thunder (May) Wertham Was Right! (June) Life & Art of Murphy Anderson (June) The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore (July) Against The Grain: MAD Artist Wally Wood (August) Wally Wood Checklist (August)

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New Books Coming On Anderson, Evanier, Wood, & Moore! THE LIFE AND ART OF MURPHY ANDERSON Comics historian R.C. HARVEY has compiled a lavishly illustrated autobiographical memoir of the man whose style defined the DC look for a generation of fans! It covers his career from the mid-1940s to his glory days at DC Comics on SUPERMAN, HAWKMAN, ADAM STRANGE, SPECTRE, THE ATOMIC KNIGHTS and beyond! There’s coverage of his syndicated comic strip work (BUCK ROGERS) and educational comics (PS MAGAZINE), plus Murphy’s recollections and behind-thescenes stories about LOU FINE, WILL EISNER, CURT SWAN, GIL KANE, and others he worked with—and rare art from every phase of his career! 160-Page trade paperback, $22 postpaid in the US. SHIPS IN JUNE!

AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST WALLACE WOOD and the WALLY WOOD CHECKLIST The definitive book on one of comics' finest artists! Twenty years in the making, this biographical memoir of life at the Wood Studio by former associate BHOB STEWART traces Wood's life and career, and features many artists and writers who knew Wood personally, contributing articles and essays to make it a remarkable compendium of art, insights and critical commentary! From childhood drawings and early samples to nearly endless comics pages (many unpublished), this is the most stunning display of Wood art ever assembled! BILL PEARSON, executor of the Wood Estate, has contributed rare drawings directly from Wood's own files, while noted art collector ROGER HILL provides a wealth of obscure, previously unpublished Wood drawings and paintings. It’s a colossal 336-PAGE TRADE PAPERBACK with color section, and a LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER (with 16 extra full-color pages, plus bonus B&W plates)! Softcover is $44 postpaid in the US, or $64 postpaid for the hardcover. We’re also releasing a separate 64-page WALLY WOOD CHECKLIST ($7 postpaid in the US), detailing Wood’s published work! SPECIAL BONUS: Preorder either version of AGAINST THE GRAIN by August 1 directly from TwoMorrows, and GET THE WOOD CHECKLIST ABSOLUTELY FREE! Both SHIP IN AUGUST!

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WERTHAM WAS RIGHT! Writer-historian MARK EVANIER is back with a second collection of POV COLUMNS, including many never-beforepublished on comic book history, creation and appreciation! Included in this volume are his definitive history of the FOX AND CROW comic book, tributes to artists BOB KANE and GIL KANE, Mark’s diatribe on comic book numbering, and many more, capped off by an essay on comics’ greatest villain, DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM! This collection is profusely illustrated by award-winning MAD cartoonist (and Mark’s collaborator of 20 years on GROO THE WANDERER) SERGIO ARAGONÉS, including a new cover! 200page trade paperback, $17 postpaid in the US. SHIPS IN JUNE!

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MUTANT MADNESS MONTH!

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In the the USA USA In

No. 24

THE MEN CALLED “X” Golden, Silver, & Bronze Age Art & Artifacts By:

DAVE COCKRUM STAN LEE ROY THOMAS GARY FRIEDRICH ARNOLD DRAKE MIKE FRIEDRICH LEN WEIN CHRIS CLAREMONT JIM SHOOTER PATY GIL KANE JACK KIRBY WERNER ROTH DON HECK JOHN BYRNE BRUNO PREMIANI JERRY ROBINSON MARIE SEVERIN MARC SWAYZE ALEX TOTH BILL WOOLFOLK MICHAEL T. GILBERT BILL SCHELLY JIM AMASH P.C. HAMERLINCK & MORE! X-Men TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.

May 2003

Vol. 3, No. 24 / May 2003

™

Editor Roy Thomas

Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout Christopher Day

Consulting Editors John Morrow Jon B. Cooke

FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck

Comic Crypt Editor Michael T. Gilbert

Editors Emeritus Jerry Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White, Mike Friedrich

Production Assistant Eric Nolen-Weathington

Cover Artists Dave Cockrum Mort Meskin

Cover Colorist Tom Ziuko

Mailing Crew Russ Garwood, Glen Musial, Ed Stelli, Pat Varker, Loston Wallace

This issue is dedicated to the memory of

Biljo White (1929-2003)

X-MEN: From Silver to Bronze Section Contents Writer/Editorial: The Men Called “X” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Stan Lee: “I Wanted Magneto to End Up Being Professor X’s Brother!” . 3 Roy Thomas: “I’m Proud of Both My Runs on The X-Men! ” . . . . . . . . . 6 Gary Friedrich: “I Was Never Really an X-Men Fan!”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Arnold Drake: “Stan Loved Dialogue!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The X-Men: “A Cool Concept!”–-– A 2000 Panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Craig Shutt with Dave Cockrum, Jim Shooter, Roy Thomas, & Arnold Drake.

Mike Friedrich: “The Topic of Conversation Was the Revival of The X-Men! ” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Len Wein: “Alienation Was What The X-Men Were All About!” . . . 31 Dave Cockrum: “We Kicked the Whole Thing Around a Lot!” . . . . . . . 34 Interview with the “New X-Men’s” first artist—plus a sidebar with wife Paty.

Chris Claremont: “I Was in the Right Place at the Right Time!” . . . . . . . . 48 Mort Meskin: His Kith & Kin Section. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flip Us! About Our Cover: We couldn’t be more pleased and honored that Dave Cockrum agreed to create a new X-Men drawing especially for this edition of Alter Ego, in addition to sending us a multitude of previously unprinted illos of Marvel’s mighty mutants for use with his own and other interviews herein. A word to the wise: Dave does commission work featuring The X-Men, Starjammers, Futurians, Legion of Super-heroes, and other characters he’s drawn, and can be reached at <parrotstew@in4web.com>. [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; X-Men TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Above: As discussed in this issue, a few years back Dave penciled a never-published fill-in X-Men issue, the original art for which has recently been returned to him by Marvel. Several pages (and even one penciled page) from it appear herein, starting with the balloon-less halfpage reproduced above depicting the late-’60s X-Men and their greatest foes. Oh, and those are Lorna Dane/Polaris’ feet above The Angel’s head, jutting out from another panel. Inks by Joe Rubinstein. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Alter EgoTM is published monthly by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. Phone: (919) 833-8092. Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: Rt. 3, Box 468, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Single issues: $8 ($10 Canada, $11 elsewhere). Twelve-issue subscriptions: $60 US, $120 Canada, $132 elsewhere. 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 Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

Title writer/editorial

The Men Called “X” Claremont interview till next issue, where it’ll be accompanied by still more cataclysmic Cockrum art. Since A/E is primarily a Golden and Silver Age fanzine, we hadn’t intended to delve past the first year or so of the revived mutants, and that primarily because I had a personal hand in their rebirth—but once Dave and Chris began giving their own colorful takes on the still-controversial “Dark Phoenix” saga, Jim A. sure wasn’t about to turn off his tape recorder!

This is it—the most pages yet dedicated to a single theme in an issue of A/E—all 52 pages of this side of the mag! Originally, our aim was simple: an interview with or article on each writer of the Silver Age X-Men (Stan Lee, Gary Friedrich, Arnold Drake, and yours truly—and we’d have wanted to talk with Kirby, Roth, et al., if they were still among us, but sadly they are not)—plus interviews with the scripters and first artist of the “New X-Men” in 1974-75 (Mike Friedrich, Len Wein, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum)—separated by a comic-con panel featuring three of the above plus late’70s Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter and a piece on the un-used X-Men screenplay Gerry Conway and I wrote indirectly for Orion Pictures circa 1983. But the best-laid plans of mice and mutants gang aft aglay, as somebody once quipped.

From a cover that spotlights the “New X-Men,” to contentspage art of the late-’60s group, to the above drawing of the early-’60s mutants—our first three Cockrum art spots are moving backward in time! A panel from the unpublished Roger Stern-Dave Cockrum-Joe Rubinstein X-Men, of which more to come. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

For, between the meaty reminiscences that Jim Amash and I gleaned from the above creators, the X-Men panel, and all the artwork provided by Dave Cockrum and a few others, we had to postpone coverage of the shelved screenplay for another day, and leave two-thirds of our

Thanks to all concerned for their enthusiastic cooperation, and to Jim Amash in particular for half a dozen incisive interviews which add to our knowledge about the first dozen years to two decades of what is now the bestknown super-hero group of all time.

As for the source of our title—for it to ring a bell, you’d have to know that off and on between 1944 and 1952 there was a radio series titled The Man Called X, starring English actor Herbert Marshall as an urbane spy who, so far as I can recall from the time when I listened to it, was never, ever called “X” by anybody.

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—PLUS A CORNUCOPIA OF OTHER COLORFUL CREATORS! • Full-color Plastic Man cover by ALEX TOTH (amid a JACK COLE montage) —plus a startling flip cover! ; Toth Art ©2003 Alex Toth 3 DC Comics Plastic Man TM & © 200

• JACK COLE Remembered! An appreciation by ALEX TOTH—and JIM AMASH interviews his brother DICK COLE and several of his colleagues at Playboy! Plentiful and rarely-seen Plas art by COLE, ALEX KOTZKY, JACK SPRANGER, and others! • CHRIS CLAREMONT on The X-Men, part 2—featuring still more never-beforeseen art by DAVE COCKRUM! • WILL MURRAY on “Lost Comics Lore”! • ROY THOMAS on All-Star Squadron #1 and its 1940s roots, with scarce art by JERRY ORDWAY, RICH BUCKLER, SHELLY MOLDOFF, MORT MESKIN, et al.! • MICHAEL T. GILBERT—BILL SCHELLY—FCA with CHAD GROTHKOPF, C.C. BECK, & MARC SWAYZE—and SPECIAL SURPRISE FEATURES! Edited by ROY THOMAS • 108 PAGES!

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The Men Called “X” part one

“I Wanted Magneto to End Up Being Professor X’s Brother!” STAN LEE Talks to ROY THOMAS about the Early Days of The X-Men –––and Even “The Doom Patrol” Interview Conducted by Phone – Feb. 11, 2003 Transcribed by Brian K. Morris [NOTE: Since Stan Lee was the co-creator and first writer of The X-Men, beginning with its first issue in 1963, I could hardly conceive of doing a special issue on Marvel’s merry mutants without getting his thoughts on the matter. I promised him our phone talk between L.A. and South Carolina would take only about fifteen minutes, and I was as good as my word. —Roy.] ROY THOMAS: I always considered it strange that Marvel came out with two super-hero groups at virtually the same time: The Avengers and The X-Men. I was curious why that happened. STAN LEE: They came out at the same time? RT: Within a couple of weeks of each other, at most. LEE: Well, I never thought of them as being similar, because The X-Men was a totally new group of new characters. And The Avengers was just a bunch of guys I put together, but we’d seen them all before. So I never thought of them as being a new group. RT: It seemed to me when I first saw it that, as opposed to The Avengers, The XMen was more in the vein of Fantastic Four—a group created as a group, only with the teenage appeal of Spider-Man. Did you have any of that consciously in mind when you did it, sort of combining those two books? LEE: [laughs] I don’t think I was thinking of that. I think all I was trying to do—and again, I don’t remember it—it may be that [Marvel publisher] Martin Goodman said to me, “Why don’t you do another group?” Because if the Fantastic Four was doing well— RT: So you did two of them. LEE: You’re right, The Avengers were a group. But we always had guest stars. To me, this was the ultimate “guest-star.” [laughs] We had five guest stars in one story. RT: I remember you told me soon after I came to work for you in 1965 that your original name for the comic was The Mutants, but Martin Goodman nixed it. I was wondering why you went with that name, and why he nixed it.

Stan Lee in the Silver Age—as seen in the set of Bullpen photos sold in the early ’70s—and the cover of A Certain 1963 Comic Book that is worth a lot more now than it was then, from the black-&-white pages of The Essential Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1. Thanks to R. Dewey Cassell for reminding Ye Editor that the set of photos had ever even existed! This one was taken circa late spring of 1970, as shown by the cover proofs on Stan’s office wall. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

LEE: Well, I wanted it to be called The Mutants because they were mutants. [laughs] It seemed like the logical name. And I remember this, because I’ve told this story so often—he nixed it because, he said, “Nobody would know what a mutant is.” He didn’t think people understood that word. But if people wouldn’t know what a mutant is, how the hell are they going to know what an “X-Man” is? I needed another name, and I’d decided to call the professor, Professor X. And they were characters with “extra” powers. And somehow, at some point, it made me think of them as The X-Men. You know, Professor X, and they had an “X” power. Of course, one of them was a woman, so I shouldn’t have done that. [laughs] RT: Well, “X-People” or “X-Persons” wouldn’t have sounded very good. I’m curious, did you make up all five of the characters when you made up the idea, or did you leave who some of the particular characters were up to Jack? LEE: Oh, no. I always made up all of them, in all the books. Jack was just the guy to whom I’d say, “Hey, I’ve got something for you to draw.” Of course, after that, his contributions were considerable. [laughs] But in the beginning, I used to just hope he’d like it and say, “Oh, great. I’ll draw it.”

Stan Lee The Brotherhood of Something, I would never have done that, either. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was anything that was like DC. RT: It’s strange, too, because who actually ever calls themselves “Evil”? You know, people don’t think of themselves as being evil. But here were two different groups with these virtually identical names, and in somewhat similar books. Of course, from that point on, they were dissimilar, and they both, of course, came after Fantastic Four and

“When Wheelchairs Clash!” The Chief greets the shadowed Doom Patrolers (you can see ’em more clearly on p. 16) for the first time, in My Greatest Adventure #80 (June 1963)— and in The X-Men #1 (Sept. 1963), four of five mutant students report to Professor X. The “DP” origin was written by Arnold Drake (with Bob Haney) and illustrated by Bruno Premiani; the Marvel credits are on the art. Both classic stories are currently on view—in The Doom Patrol Archives, Vol. 1, and in two Marvel books: The Essential Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1, and, if it’s still in print, Marvel Masterworks, Vol. 3. [Doom Patrol splash ©2003 DC comics; X-Men panel ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RT: One thing people remark on is the fact that The X-Men came out about three months after DC’s “Doom Patrol,” which also had a leader in a wheelchair. LEE: You’re kidding. RT: Nobody ever asked you about that before? LEE: No. No one ever asked me, and I never saw it. RT: [laughs] Well, I recall you didn’t pay a lot of attention to DC Comics. “The Doom Patrol” had three other heroes, plus this older guy in a wheelchair without super- powers. LEE: And they came out first? RT: By about two or three months, yeah. LEE: I had no idea.

resembled that somewhat. LEE: Why were they called “The Doom Patrol”? Were they all dead? RT: No, they weren’t The Doomed Patrol, they were The Doom Patrol. There was a Robotman whose brain had been put into a robot, and a woman who could grow large or small, and a guy sort of like The Human Torch; he turned into negative energy. I guess they had all seemed doomed at one time. And the guy who led them looked like Sabastian Cabot in a wheelchair and had no super-powers at all. He was The Chief. LEE: Well, the only reason I put mine, Professor X, in the wheelchair, was—since all of them had a physical power, I thought it would be interesting to get a guy with a purely mental power. And I figured that, to make the mental power even more definitive, he has no physical power at all. He was paralyzed from the waist down.

RT: “Doom Patrol” was by Arnold Drake who, of course, wrote XMen later.

RT: Chris Claremont, of course, later made Magneto the father of Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch. You’d never had any idea of Magneto being related to any of The X-Men, as such, originally?

LEE: Oh, yeah. I remember Arnold.

LEE: Oh, yes, I did.

RT: [laughs] The other thing is—and you probably won’t know this either: a couple of months before you had The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in X-Men—which was Magneto and the guys—“The Doom Patrol” debuted a group called The Brotherhood of Evil.

RT: You did?

LEE: Oh, come on! RT: You think I’m making this up, don’t you? LEE: [laughs] I guess. I mean, how coincidental could something be? RT: Well, maybe that’s one of the reasons we always thought Arnold was a good writer, because he had written “The Doom Patrol.” I mean, with the lead time, it’d be very unlikely you’d know about the Brotherhood of Evil, unless you were spying on them through somebody at DC. And if you had, you’d have probably avoided that name, rather than used it. LEE: I’ve gotta tell you, had I known they had a guy in a wheelchair, I would never have done that. And had I known they had a group called

LEE: I wanted Magneto to end up being Professor X’s brother. RT: But instead, you did that, sort of, with The Juggernaut? LEE: I remember The Juggernaut—but did they make him Professor X’s brother? RT: You did—in the story that introduced him. He’s Xavier’s stepbrother, not his real brother. LEE: Did I do that? What was The Juggernaut’s power? RT: He was just very super-powerful and strong—a Hulk-type of character. LEE: Yeah, I remember. I made him up. And gee, it’s funny, because I always wanted Magneto to be Professor X’s brother. [laughs] Why would I have made Juggernaut Professor X’s step-brother?

The Early Days of The X-Men RT: Beats me. People ask me about this sometimes: in issue #3, you suddenly wrote a thought balloon from Professor X about how much he loved Jean Grey, but he could never tell her. And nothing like that ever appeared before or since. Do you remember that at all? Was it just a passing thought that you decided better of?

LEE: It must have been a coincidence, because I loved writing Sgt. Fury. I hate war stories, but I loved the patter, the dialogue amongst the people, you know? I liked writing their little gags, if they were gags, or whatever. I think, with The Avengers, after I got past making up the cry “Avengers Assemble,” I think I lost interest in it. [laughs] Because I felt, these are the same characters in other books. I’m not great at group stuff, I think. See, with the Fantastic Four, it was different. I enjoyed their kidding around.

LEE: I thought it would be nice for this guy, who really wasn’t all that old—he didn’t have any hair, but neither does that actor who was in The Fast and the Furious—I figured if he had a secret crush on Jean Grey, also... RT: But there was never any other reference to it, after that one time. LEE: [laughs] Because I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know where to go from there. I stopped writing the book after a while.

Stan may have once had it in mind that Prof. X and Magneto were brothers—but in X-Men #12 (July 1965), he has Xavier refer to the super-villain who’s about to attack them as “my own brother.” Actually, The Juggernaut turned out to be Charles’ step-brother, Cain Marko. (Look him up in the phone directory under “Marko, Cain” and you’ll see the derivation of his name.) This panel from X-Men #13 is repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Glen David Gold. By the way, that word Stan’s handwritten at the top of the page is “relentless,” which has been edited into the first caption. Art by Kirby, Roth, and Sinnott. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RT: Yeah, you gave it to me after nineteen issues. LEE: Oh, there you go. I think I’d planned to have The Angel and Cyclops always competing for Jean, but somehow The Angel never seemed to become one of the big characters. RT: Last couple of questions: did you feel that sticking to this mutant theme—where every month there was a new mutant—was that a strength or a weakness, or both, after a while? Did it limit you in some ways? LEE: No, I liked that idea of new mutants. And, in the back of my mind, I always felt we were building up a hell of a library of characters. RT: The other main menace you came up with, along with The Juggernaut, during your brief time on the book was The Sentinels. Do you remember anything about how that came about, because that was a powerful, popular storyline? LEE: Well, I have another admission to make. I didn’t remember that I had done it. I’m glad I can take credit for that. [laughs] I thought that you or Chris or somebody did that. RT: No, I did the second and third ones, and Chris did them later. But you did the first one. I’m just wondering if you have any idea where you got the concept of these giant mutant-hunting robots. LEE: I think I liked the name: “The Sentinels.” Now I’ll tell you something else, and I’m not sure of this: it may have been something Jack came up with. I have no idea. RT: Except for Fantastic Four, you tended to give up your group books before you gave up a lot of other series. The first three books you gave me to write, in order, were Sgt. Fury, then X-Men, then Avengers. Did you prefer not writing so many group books since you had Fantastic Four, or was it just a coincidence?

RT: Even though it was reasonably popular, X-Men was one of Marvel’s lesser sellers... one of the last books to go monthly of that first batch. Were you surprised it was less of a hit than, say, Avengers or Spider-Man or F.F.?

LEE: You know my memory—but didn’t Jack go off that book after a while, and Werner Roth take it over?

RT: Yeah, just an issue or two before you gave it to me. I think when Jack left, you lost even more interest in it. LEE: Were The X-Men selling well when he drew them? RT: Reasonably well. It was still less popular, though, than most of the other books. It wasn’t long before Jack left that it finally went monthly, but some time after Avengers or Spider-Man. Has it surprised you that, by the late ’70s, The X-Men, in the new incarnation, had become as popular as Spider-Man, and more so, eventually? LEE: Nothing, nothing in comics surprises me. But with The X-Men, I think one of the great things about it is that, in a sense, it started with a new villain in every book. Then, when you took it over, and whoever followed you, and so forth, you kept introducing new X-Men. And I think just the idea that there were so many characters to choose from, and you were all able to get so many interesting, dramatic situations. This one hates this one, this one loves this one, and it became like a soap opera, which people like. RT: Actually, I never got to introduce any new X-Men, per se. The whole time I wrote it, even with Neal near the end, it was the same five guys—except Arnold Drake had created Scott’s brother, who became Havok. He wasn’t quite an X-Man, but we were edging in that direction. Actually, one of the first things I had wanted to do, right after I first started writing The X-Men, was to add a Japanese or Japanese-American mutant like Sunfire. I remember you felt that six characters would be too many, so you didn’t let me do it. I had to wait a couple of years to do him, and then I didn’t make him an XMan. Anyway, Stan, thanks a lot for talking with me about the early days of The X-Men. LEE: Even though I don’t remember anything. [laughs] Take care, Roy.

The Men Called “X” part two

“I’m Proud of Both My Runs on The X-Men!” A Fond Look Back by the Marvelous Mutants’ Second Scripter, ROY THOMAS “Another Mighty Marvel Bullpen Surprise!” “X” has traditionally and mathematically stood for the unknown—the mysterious factor in an equation, either algebraic or human. And, despite the unique talents of the individuals involved with The X-Men after its mid-1970s return, it’s certainly unknown and perhaps ultimately unknowable precisely why that comic became, twenty-plus years ago, Marvel’s best-selling title, surpassing even The Amazing Spider-Man, just as the latter had once passed Fantastic Four. That hardly seemed a likely scenario back in the 1960s, let alone the first half of the 1970s, when there was no original X-Men book. Sure, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby started The X-Men out well, and it always had its following. But in the ’60s it never approached the popularity of The Avengers, let alone of F.F.. And once first Jack, then Stan, departed within a few issues of each other—Jack after #17 (Feb. 1966), Stan with #19 (April ’66)—The XMen began a slow decline which ended in cancellation. I know because, to a certain extent, I suppose I was a part of that late-’60s decline. I’m proud to this day that Stan passed the scripting of X-Men on to me with #20 (May ’66). He handed me already-penciled pages by Werner Roth, who had taken over full penciling with #18, after a brief apprenticeship over Jack’s layouts. As per all my previous hero scripting for Stan (one “Iron Man,” two late Ditko “Dr. Stranges,” and Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos), I started out with a story already plotted by Stan and the penciler. It was Stan and Werner who teamed up mutants Unus the Untouchable and The Blob, decided how Professor X lost the use of his legs at the hands of the recurring villain Lucifer. I was simply the hired gun—or rather, hired typewriter. But I was happy to pick up the torch.

This photo of Roy Thomas from the Silver Age Bullpen series (courtesy of R. Dewey Cassell) has gotta be an early shot, since after ’66 or ’67 the Rascally One rarely wore a tie to the Marvel office! Roy wrote the original X-Men and helped jump-start the new mutant group, both of which are pictured in this Dave Cockrum art—done for a Slurpee cup, Dave tells us. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Marvelous Mutants’ Second Scripter

there’s just a bit too much of it. And even that is a subjective opinion, not shared by everyone who read the issues, I’m happy to say.

“Let’s See How a Swingin’ Staff Handles a Yarn All by Their Lonesome!” The first sour note for me on X-Men came with my second issue, #21. I learned that, for reasons never made clear, Stan had told the artist that he (Werner) would be plotting the upcoming issues, and I’d be simply writing dialogue and captions for them. Now, understand: in those days, Werner wouldn’t have received one extra cent if he had plotted all stories with no input from me; I’d still have received my full script rate, then probably $10 a page. But I felt that I, not Werner, should be plotting the stories. I said so to Stan and prevailed, though I’m not sure how much I contributed to the plot of #20 (“From Whence Comes... Dominus?”) and how much is Werner’s or, indirectly, Stan’s. Werner himself seemed happy either way, and to this day I’ve no idea whether the plotting thing was his idea or not. He was older than most other artists I’d worked with, or so he appeared to me at the time; and though he was always friendly, his enthusiasm for comics seemed limited. Yet he was certainly not un-inventive, as witness page 17 of #20, where one panel on a six-panel page shows five mutants on three sets of stairs ascending the face of Dominus’ enormous machine. Like John Romita, Gene Colan, and other Bullpenners, he had been drawing romance comics for DC and, finding himself with less and less work as that genre slowly imploded, had wandered over to Marvel. Like Colan, Mike Esposito, and others, he opted at first for a pseudonym: “Jay Gavin,” taken from the first names of his sons—a common ploy in those days.

Splash of X-Men #20, repro’d from the black-&-white Essential Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1. The word “Uncanny” was retroactively added to the 1960s title later to avoid confusing with the new X-Men mag begun in the ’90s. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Although X-Men hadn’t been one of my favorite comics before I’d entered the field, I enjoyed writing the mutants—especially The Beast, with his voluminous vocabulary. The others, however, I found less differentiated than Sgt. Fury’s six buddies.

All I recall about doing the “dialoguing” (a term not then in use) on #18 is that, as I’d done with earlier super-hero efforts, I taped tissue paper over the original twice-up penciled art and drew on balloons and captions containing the “copy” (as we called it, taking a term from advertising). I can’t remember if it was my decision to have so many people on the splash talking, or whether Stan added even more balloons when he went over my script with me. I know there were changes; I just don’t know what they were. I do know I hadn’t indicated any more balloons than are there in the published comic: a grand total of ten, not counting the introductory caption and the credits. Stan added the blurb reading “Another mighty Marvel Bullpen surprise!” with an arrow pointing to my name beneath his. I was flattered to have him draw attention to me, indicating he wasn’t totally ashamed of the script. But then, if Stan hadn’t felt I was up to the job, he wouldn’t have given me The X-Men, less than a year after I’d walked in the door. My early X-Men is certainly copy-heavy, even for me. Something about Werner Roth’s pencils lured me into giving most people in the panels dialogue; they usually looked as if they were all talking. But that’s not Werner’s fault. He and I were both simply doing what we felt Stan wanted. Stan seemed to like our X-Men. After all, he hadn’t exactly been shy about sticking lots of word balloons into Werner’s panels himself, as witness #19, page 11: its final 1/3-of-a-page panel contains seven characters—and eleven word balloons! Actually, I’m not at all ashamed of my X-Men dialogue my first time around, even though I feel my second stint (mostly with Neal Adams) was superior. I don’t think that, for the most part, it’s bad dialogue...

“If a super-villain isn’t much by himself, put him in a group with several others!” That was Stan the Man’s philosophy—and it worked pretty well in X-Men #22-23 with Unicorn, Scarecrow, Porcupine, The Eel, and Plant Man. Script by Roy Thomas, art by Werner Roth & Dick Ayers. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Mike Burkey. See Mike’s ad elsewhere in this issue. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roy Thomas Werner and me wasn’t entirely jelling. The art was a reasonably good approximation of the Jack Kirby look, but without the dynamism Jack gave it—and my stories were getting good comments on the letters pages, the answers to which I now wrote; but sales of X-Men, never really strong, were now at least flat, if not declining a bit. (It’s hard to recall precise numbers at this remove, and of course any information then coming in would have reflected the first issue or two I’d worked on, at most.)

With issue #27 I brought in The Mimic, introduced by Stan and Werner in #19. The idea of a guy who could draw powers from all five X-Men and was thus the equal of the entire group appealed to me. We were even allowed to use a Fantastic Four villain, The Puppet Master. We tossed in cameos of fellow mutants Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch, Iceman is felled by an offstage El Tigre (or by Thomas, Roth, and Ayers) in X-Men #23, in a on leave from The Avengers—and four panels photocopy of the original art courtesy of Mike Burkey. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] featuring our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. I The first issue on which I’m sure I gave Werner a synopsis (at least had to get special permission from Stan to include Spidey; this may be two single-spaced typed pages, probably more) was #22 (July ’66), the first time someone besides Stan wrote dialogue for the ol’ wallentitled “Divided We Fall!” I believe it was Stan’s idea for Count Nefaria crawler. I don’t believe he changed any of my copy. to form a group of super-villains. That fit in nicely with my own As I mentioned when interviewing Stan a few pages back, by this predilections, reminding me of the Injustice Society in 1940s issues of time I had tried to persuade him to let me introduce a sixth X-Man, a All-Star Comics. Indeed, one influence on my plot, set as it was in young Japanese or Japanese-American whose mother had been affected Washington, D.C., was the “Dr. Mid-Nite” chapter of All-Star #37 by A-bomb blasts in 1945; to me, this complemented the notion that (Oct.-Nov. 1947), in which Per Degaton conquers the nation’s “Capitol The X-Men’s parents had worked on the Manhattan Project. Stan nixed City.” the idea, so I bided my time. (Sunfire, not necessarily a name I had in Around this time, Stan had to be out of town for a few days—I forget mind in 1966, would become a reality two or three years later.) why or where. When he returned, he tossed an arrow-blurb onto #22’s The second “villain” I dreamed up for The X-Men—along with the splash: “Since Stan is on vacation now, let’s see how a swingin’ staff lackluster Ogre in the same issue, #28—was The Banshee. In Irish handles a yarn all by their lonesome.” Of course, since Stan was back to write that blurb, he could actually still change any of my dialogue he wanted to. But, after my first issue, he never did as much rewriting on X-Men as he had on my first few Sgt. Furys. #22 was the first real use we made of the Danger Room. Werner and I tried to give the opening sequence, where the mutants fight a huge robot, a real Lee-and-Kirby feel, aided and abetted by inker Dick Ayers. In this issue, too, we began to do more with The X-Men’s civilian identities. I suspect Werner felt comfortable with these sequences, since they resembled the romance comics he’d been doing. With the conclusion of the super-villains-take-over-Washington storyline in #23, he started using his real name.

“DR. THOMAS, REPORT TO—” For #24 I thought up my first X-Men super-villain: The Locust. I think this non-mutant master of the insect world was a reasonable success, well-designed visually by Werner. He did a good job on the bugs, too, both small and gigantic. As I said in a 2001 introduction to a handsome full-color Marvel Masterworks volume of X-Men #22-31, “I even gave The Locust the name ‘Dr. Hopper.’ I had no shame.” Werner and I were also getting the range on their private lives, as per the pages in which Marvel Girl leaves the Professor’s school for what she thinks will be “forever.” Pithy and passionate thought balloons abound... and while there are, again, a few too many of them, I think they fit well in the fabric of what was then the Marvel Universe. In #25-26 I utilized memories of my month-long drive around Mexico in 1964 with a lady friend (a Woodrow Wilson scholar, I’ll have you know) during my St. Louis days. El Tigre wasn’t much of a villain; but he was only a lead-in to Kukulkan, who was an alternate mythological version of the Meso-American deity more commonly known as Quetzalcoatl. By now, though, I was becoming aware that something between

The Puppet Master and The Mimic in a photocopy of the original art for a page in X-Men #27, by Thomas, Roth, and Ayers again. Note the plug for the 1960s Marvel Super-heroes semi-animated TV show; the names of regional stations were added at bottom right by the printer. Thanks to Mike Burkey. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Marvelous Mutants’ Second Scripter folklore banshees are female, and so should mine and Werner’s have been, but—well, you can read all about that in the 2000 X-Men panel coming up later this issue. Suffice it to say, Werner did a great job on the character, from the splash through the costuming and face and mannerisms. The story’s been reprinted a few times—unlike, oddly, the Sunfire origin—and I think it holds up reasonably well as the introduction of both The Banshee and Factor Three. Factor Three—which, as I had an X-Man remark, “sounds like some kind of toothpaste”—was an organization fashioned after the secret spy cadres that were all the rage back then, in the early James Bond movies, on TV’s Man from U.N.C.L.E., etc. The source was the new expression “Third World”; Factor Three was trying to pit the West (America and her allies) against the U.S.S.R. for its own advantage.

9 was pleased about that, I can tell you! The antagonist was the “Merlin” of an earlier “Thor” story, though I gave him the more super-villainous name “The Warlock”—one I’d re-use later on a better character. I’m sorry Sparling didn’t do more for Marvel.

With X-Men #31 (April 1967), I conceived a new villain—Cobalt Man, a sort of blue-armored Iron Man. This was in a day when there was lots of furor about a cobalt bomb, a very “dirty” radioactive weapon. But I had more fun, ultimately, playing around with language in the story itself: the “Never-Say-Diner” and a beatnik-type poet’s parody of Charles Schulz: “Happiness is a warm puppet!” And in Candy Sothern—named after the heroine of a popular novel by Terry Roy had been thrilled when Stan threw his name into a squawk-box Sothern, of which a movie was made— call in X-Men #17. Layouts by Jack Kirby, pencils by Werner Roth (as Jay Gavin), inks by Dick Ayers. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] we introduced a supporting character the readers took to. Dan Adkins wandered in, fresh from working for the legendary Wally Wood, to do the cover.

I labeled two storefronts in #28 “O’Neil Tobacco Shop” (after Denny O’Neil, whom I’d help bring to New York and a Marvel staff job) and Kuramoto Fishing Supplies (named for production man Morrie Kuramoto, who’d been in the industry for years and had befriended me). Stan didn’t care much for these “in-jokes,” but let them stand. After all, back in X-Men #17, he himself had had a hospital squawk-box calling out “DR. THOMAS REPORT TO—” in huge, open letters, only a month after he’d announced in the Bullpen Bulletins that a guy named Roy Thomas had just joined the Marvel staff.

“Happiness Is a Warm Puppet!” In #29, with The Mimic still hanging around, I rung in a Lee-Kirby creation, The Super-Adaptoid. Years later, an artist whose own ego could use altering would use that term derisively to refer to me, because of my latter-day penchant for adapting Conan and other material rather than making every single story up from scratch; but he was only a minor annoyance. Hey, I’m far from the only person who could be accused of “adapting” the work of others, in one way or another. Let him who is without sin, etc. For reasons I no longer recall, Werner skipped X-Men #30; maybe he went on vacation, or perhaps veteran artist Jack Sparling simply walked into Marvel one day and I was told to give him a “fill-in” story, to gain time on the schedule. (Werner was a good, meticulous artist, but hardly a speed demon.) Sparling’s take on The X-Men was quite individualistic. I admired his illustrative technique, even if it didn’t all come through as inked by John Tartaglione, now the mag’s regular embellisher. This isn’t to disparage “John Tartag,” as we called him; he was a pro. Jack Kirby penciled the issue’s cover, and I

I’d always liked The Juggernaut, Charles Xavier’s step-brother introduced in X-Men #12-13; so in #32 I brought him back in a tale I called “Beware the Juggernaut, My Son!” (I always loved Stan’s titles which were allusions to other quotes or titles, such as “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Planet!”; my own here was, of course, a slightlyrephrased line from Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky.”) When a coffee shop is invaded by a motorcycle gang in #32, I believe it was my pal Gary Friedrich, by then working on staff, who came up with the name “Satan’s Saints” as a parody/homage to Hell’s Angels. Werner did a nice big panel of the gang RRUMMM-ing their way around the mutants-inmufti, like the hapless heroine in the 1950s Brando movie The Wild One.

The next issue’s conclusion to this story boasted a cover penciled by Gil Kane—except that the Comics Code stuck its oar in. They felt that the gigantic villain there—originally the other-dimensional monstrosity The Outcast, I think—was just too hideous, so we had to change the alien to The Juggernaut. Seems to me the uncensored version of that cover has been printed somewhere since. In the story, The Outcast

Roy Thomas

so resembles a Gil Kane creature that I’m tempted to believe Gil designed him. But I don’t want to shortchange Werner Roth in any way... ’cause I did that once, and I’ve regretted it ever since. (More about that at the end of the article.) #34 was drawn by Dan Adkins; and though, as he’d be the first to admit, there were swipes from Hal Foster (the giant robot) and Joe Kubert (some Angel poses) and elsewhere, it was handsome art. This was my first use of what would become one of my favorite themes in comics—a war between two previously-established entities. In this case it was the underground rulers Mole Man and Tyrannus; in the future it would be the Kree vs. the Skrulls, Turan vs. Makkalet, even Wonderland vs. Oz.

perhaps just because I thought it might sell a few extra copies, I initiated an “X-Men Origins” series which delved into the days prior to X-Men #1, with Werner as penciler. We started off with Xavier’s search for the young mutant who’d become Cyclops. I don’t claim that these backup stories—which were soon taken over by Gary and Arnold Drake—were anything earthshaking, but I’ll admit to feeling angry when some of them were “written out” of Marvel continuity a few years back by over-ambitious writers who wanted to leave their own mark on the Marvel Universe— more, I feel, in the manner of a dog lifting its leg than in the sense of making a meaningful contribution. It frankly smacks of unseemly hubris to decide to bolster one’s own ego by unilaterally deciding that one’s own idea for an X-Man’s origin should take precedence over a story actually written in the Silver Age by the second, third, and fourth people ever to script The X-Men. Hopefully, some later X-writer will one day toss out their “deathless contributions,” as well. And they’ll deserve it. What goes around comes around.

X-Men #35 was very special to me, since it’s the first time anyone besides Stan wrote Spider-Man as a full-issue guest star. (You bet I had to ask permission to use him!) Behind a powerful Adkins cover combining shots by Kirby and Ditko (and why not?), The Banshee was back, too. I never lusted after writing the SpiderMan comic as I did Avengers or F.F., Ross Andru’s first Beast-ly splash, from X-Men #36. but I enjoyed bringing Spidey into [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] With #39, the finale of the longthe book. This turned out to be, for running Factor Three storyline, I reasons I don’t recall, Werner Roth’s last full-issue work on The X-Men. persuaded Stan to let us give The X-Men new costumes, to replace those

“It Might Sell a Few Extra Copies!” As of #36 I began working with an artist whose work I would grow to like more and more as time went by: Ross Andru. I’d admired his early Wonder Woman and Metal Men at DC, even his self-published Mr. Universe and Get Lost! Like Gil Kane, John Romita, and several young writers who’d enter the field over the next few years (Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Gerry Conway, et al.), I liked Ross’ work more than the average comics reader seemed to. George Roussos (as “George Bell”) wasn’t an ideal inker for Ross, but he supplied the blacks Ross tended to leave out. After this, I would look for any opportunity to work with Ross—be it in Sub-Mariner, Kull the Conqueror, or wherever. I set the story in Washington Square Park, near where Gary and I lived in the heart of Greenwich Village. I guess this is where The Changeling was introduced, too... a character who’d serve a useful purpose a couple of years down the line. With the next issue, Don Heck, at loose ends now that he was no longer penciling Avengers, became inker of Andru’s pencils. But somehow the two halves of a double-page spread on pp. 11 & 12 wound up not facing each other, but instead being printed back to back! This occurred because, at the last minute, ABC-TV bought a centerspread ad for its fall Saturday morning cartoon lineup (an ad I had to write copy for over the weekend, as I recall), and I didn’t realize it would change the layout of the story pages till too late. If there’s ever another Marvel Masterworks volume, I hope they’ll have those pages face each other at long last! With #38 (Nov. 1967), perhaps to accommodate Ross’ schedule,

lackluster “school uniforms.” Ross Andru designed them, but had left the book by the time they were added, so it fell to Don Heck to introduce them (and George Tuska to do the cover). In retrospect, I feel I should’ve vetoed what looks like suspenders on The Angel, since it made it appear his wings might be artificial, like those of his DC counterpart Hawkman. #40 gave me a chance to suggest that the Frankenstein monster might well have been an evil mutant. “The X-Men Meet Frankenstein! ’Nuff said!” screamed my cover copy. (Need I add that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is one of my favorite movies?) The partial inspiration for the story was a 1950s EC horror comic in which Arctic explorers discover the Frankenstein monster encased in ice, reflecting the ending of Mary Shelley’s novel; that EC story had itself been a takeoff on the 1950 movie The Thing from Another World, with Franky standing in for the “alien carrot” played by James Arness. Don Heck found a home, at least for a time, as X-Men’s new penciler, inked by George Tuska, who drew the cover on his own. (Ross had moved on, and never, I suspect, liked drawing any group of heroes). I remember a nice editing touch by Stan on that cover. As originally drawn, the monster is just flattened out against the ship’s bulkhead, waiting for the unsuspecting X-Men to walk through the door. Stan wanted to show the monster’s power, so he had George redraw his left hand so it was gripping and crushing part of the bulkhead. Another monstrosity popped up in X-Men #41 (Feb. 1968)— Grotesk, a subterranean prince-mutated-into-a-monster who was “inspired,” if that’s the term, in equal parts by Sub-Mariner and King Kull, the Beast-Man from Fawcett’s Captain Marvel back in the ’50s. The name grew out of memories of the hideous villain played by Boris

The Marvelous Mutants’ Second Scripter Karloff in the movie Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome; maybe I even wanted to call my character “Gruesome.” If so, Stan objected; he wasn’t wild about the name “Grotesk,” either, and had me refer to him in the title as “The Sub-Human.” Considering Grotesk’s above-mentioned forebears, I didn’t mind. I had fun with the idea of a guy whose main ambition is to destroy the world—himself along with it.

“A Last-ditch Effort to Save It!” By now, though, sales reports on X-Men, going back some issues, were soft enough that Stan came up with the idea of reducing the size of the mag’s logo on the covers, playing up instead individual heroes or villains. We started out with “The Death of Professor X”—though I always intended that, if we needed him back, we’d say it was The Changeling who had died, disguised as Xavier. John Buscema penciled a powerful cover, and Grotesk became the villain responsible for the Prof’s apparent demise. I don’t remember precisely at what point I started being responsible for coming up (or helping to come up) with cover ideas for X-Men, but I know I did so for #43, whose large cover subtitle was “The Power of Magneto.” The scene I described to John Buscema was based on the cover of 1945’s All-Star Comics #25; I even asked him to show The Beast climbing up a Kong-size Magneto’s leg, as The Atom had been doing on the leg of a lesser villain a quarter of a century earlier. George Tuska penciled that issue and achieved some nice effects with high winds and rain at Professor X’s funeral. As a five-page backup, now that the several-issue “origin” of Cyclops had ended, Werner Roth and I did a feature on that mutant’s optic powers, which would hopefully serve as a guide to future writers and artists of the series. And there was about to be a new writer... for I was getting busier with other series, and felt a bit burnt-out on The X-Men. If I hadn’t exactly covered myself with glory on the book, I had done my best. When I plotted issue #44 (May 1968), however, I intended to dialogue it, so I made the villain the resuscitated Golden Age hero Red Raven, who had starred in one-count-’em-one issue of his own mag in 1940, then vanished. We didn’t realize back then that this had been done so Red Raven #2 could become instead the first issue of a solo Human Torch mag, featuring a far more popular character. Except for putting a mask-less hood on Red Raven’s head, I left him as he’d been—I’d read his origin in a

bound volume that lay around the office for a while, before it was swiped—and even utilized the bird-people who had raised him. One of my sources for this story was another race of humanoids kept alive in transparent cylinders, in the second “Captain Comet” story in Strange Adventures back in ’51. I try never to throw anything away, at least not mentally. Still, for whatever reason, I wound up having Gary Friedrich write the dialogue for the story—and Gary both plotted and penciled the start of an “Iceman origin” in the back of the book, with Tuska as penciler. Gary stuck around for a few issues before he turned the mag over to Arnold Drake, who’d come over from DC—but I’ll let them relate their own versions of events in the pages that follow. Me, I figured I was done for good with X-Men. Little did I know that, less than a year later, Stan would ask me to write the mag again, in a last-ditch effort to save it—though it could’ve been argued that I’d been writing it when it declined in the first place—and I’d come on board for only one issue before a reasonably talented young artist (a whole year younger than me!) named Neal Adams would be assigned to draw the book. The story of our collaboration was related in two quite different versions by Neal and myself a few years back. Both those Rashomon-style tellings are currently available in trade paperbacks—Neal’s in The Comic Book Artist Collection, Vol. 1, and mine in Alter Ego: The Comic Book Artist Collection—so no rehash is needed here. I’m quite proud of that period of X-Men. Neal and I (with help from Don Heck, Denny O’Neil, Sal Buscema, and particularly Tom Palmer) did manage to halt X-Men’s sales decline and to some extent reverse it—too late to save the mag from cancellation, but with sufficient impact that X-Men continued as a reprint title, keeping the team before readers for half a decade. In 1972 I also conceived Marvel Team-up #4 as a Spider-Man/X-Men tale, with the mutants in civvies rather than costumes, in an effort to find a viable way to bring them back in new stories. And when the opportunity arose, in ’74, to revive them as an international group for purely commercial reasons, I seized on it and work began on what became the 1975 X-Men revival, even if I was no longer editor-in-chief when it came out.

In a later issue of The X-Men, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin telescoped some of the history of the mutants, including the Thomas-Heck issues with Grotesk and the death of Professor X, and scenes from the two DrakeSteranko issues. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Glen David Gold. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

I look back on my 1960s XMen collaboration with Werner Roth, Ross Andru, Don Heck, George Tuska, et al., with some nostalgia, and with a reasonable degree of pride in the stories we produced, and I’m proud of both my runs on The X-Men.

Roy Thomas moment when I notice myself, or someone else, “playing to the Peanut Gallery,” as I call it—after the bleachers where the juvenile audience sat and hooted on the old Howdy Doody TV show. In other words, a writer or artist—and some of them do it often and shamelessly—making deliberately denigrating statements about fellow professionals simply to shock an audience, and incidentally to make themselves look like The Big Man, passing judgment on their peers. I like to think I don’t do it as often as some—but I’m ashamed of myself for doing it at all. I never got a chance to do so thirty-plus years ago, and it’s probably a meaningless gesture now—maybe it’s even more “playing to the Peanut Gallery”—but— Gavin Roth, wherever you are... I apologize. Werner Roth was a talented and dedicated professional, who deserves more credit from me (and from others) than he has received. As readers—and we all are readers, after all, whatever else we may be—we should never forget that each and every person who creates a comic book story is a human being—and usually, a human being who’s doing the best he/she can, trying to entertain and to earn a living. Whether one thinks he/she does it well or ill, that person doesn’t deserve the cheap and easy scorn of dismissal by “playing to the Peanut Gallery.” By me or anybody else.

During their run on The X-Men, Thomas, Adams, and Palmer turned Arnold Drake’s creation, Alex Summers, into Havok. This Dave Cockrum poster was done in 1993 for Aardwolf Publications; repro’d from a photocopy of the original art. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Even so, I can never forget one regrettable moment that grew out of my first X-Men sojourn.

“Sorry about That, Gavin!” Sometime circa 1970, I was coming off a just-ended panel at a New York comicon when two or three teenagers approached and start talking to me about The X-Men. Perhaps I should’ve been alerted by their typically teenage smirks, but I wasn’t. They mentioned the 1966-67 issues—and for some reason I can’t fathom now, I blurted out: “Oh, yeah—with the world’s dullest artwork!” One of those teens turned to another boy who was standing nearby, smirked even more broadly, and said, “Sorry about that, Gavin.” Gavin! Oh, my God, I winced inwardly. This other lad, who now smiled sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Oh, well, it’s no big deal,” must be the “Gavin” from whom Werner Roth had taken his pseudonym “Jay Gavin.” This was Werner’s son—and I had just gratuitously insulted his father’s artwork. I tried to squirm out of it, especially since I hadn’t really felt negatively about Werner’s art—but it was too late. I’ve often recalled that

Besides all those reprints in X-Men #67-93, the mischievous mutants also popped up in fourteen issues of Amazing Adventures between 1979-81, when the new group was riding high. The new John ByrneJoe Rubinstein cover is repro’d from photocopies of the original art, courtesy of Glen David Gold. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Men Called “X” part three

“I Was Never Really an X-Men Fan!” An Interview with Silver Age Mutant Scribe GARY FRIEDRICH

Groovy Gary Friedrich, as seen in a Bullpen photo section in the 1969 Fantastic Four Annual—flanked by (on left) an un-used cover for X-Men #48 (Sept. 1968) penciled by Dashin’ Donnie Heck and inked by Jazzy Johnny Romita—and (on right) by the published all-Romita (?) version. Thanks to Jerry K. Boyd for finding this one for us! Jerry figures—and we agree— that Stan or publisher Martin Goodman may have rejected it at the last minute because both heroes have their faces turned away from the readers—but then, that’s why the big cameo heads at left were added. Also, that monster on the first cover does look a bit like a frog! [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Conducted & Transcribed by Jim Amash [INTRODUCTION: Gary Friedrich did a lot of comics writing between 1965 and the mid-’70s, so he has an excuse for not really remembering his short writing stint on the 1968 X-Men: from issue #44, which he scripted from a Roy Thomas plot, through #47, which Arnold Drake scripted from Gary’s plot. However, Gary has etched himself into X-Men lore by scribing the Iceman origin back-ups in #44-46. In a near-future issue, A/E plans to present a fuller look at Gary’s stint at Marvel, but for now, we’ll whet your appetite with this brief look back. —Jim.] JIM AMASH: How did you get the writing job on The X-Men? GARY FRIEDRICH: The way things worked then was that Stan Lee would give up the writing on a title to Roy Thomas. Roy would then give up something to me. Millie the Model went from Roy to whoever was ahead of me (Ron White, I think), and pretty soon, I came in and got Millie. Then Stan passed something on to Roy, and he passed Sgt. Fury on to me. So probably, Stan passed something on to Roy and he passed The X-Men off to me. JA: Issue #44, the Red Raven issue, was plotted by Roy (so he gets total blame for the Red Raven idea!) and you scripted it. The back-up Iceman story was entirely written by you. So I assume Roy was in the middle of working on the lead story when you took over, because Roy took the Red Raven name from an old Timely comic, packaged by

Simon and Kirby, and it was such a bomb that it only lasted one issue. Only Roy would have remembered an obscure character name like that!

FRIEDRICH: That’s probably what happened. That sounds like something I’d inherit and sounds like something Roy would pull from out of the past. I have to say that the whole memory of writing the X-Men has been flushed out of my memory. I just don’t remember anything about it.

I do remember how hard Roy worked on the series. There was a time when Roy and I were living together, and he was writing The X-Men then. Roy was always a hard worker and he really lived this stuff. He really slaved over The X-Men and you can see that by noticing all the copy in the stories. [laughs] I can remember [letterer] Artie Simek calling in, whining and crying about how much copy there was. He wanted a couple extra dollars a page because the copy was so heavy. [more laughter] I don’t blame him. Artie worked at home and would sometimes call me at home and say, “What the hell are you doing to me? There’s 79 balloons on this page! You’re killing me!” He’d call and ask for Roy, and I’d say, “How are you doing, Artie?” and Roy’d be waving his arms, like saying, “No, no! I’m not here!” [mutual laughter] Artie’d only call for one reason. But everybody liked Artie, so it wasn’t personal. I never met Sam Rosen... only Artie would call! But Roy and I both had a tendency to write a lot of copy. There’s a lot to read in those comics and I always liked to read comics like that. JA: Did you write that heavily because it was your style, or because Stan and Roy wrote a lot and you thought that was the Marvel style? FRIEDRICH: I don’t think it was a matter of style; it just seemed to come out that way. I never liked plotting things, but of course, you had to do that to some degree at Marvel. I liked to start a story with a couple of characters and see where it took me. The writer has more control if he writes a complete script first.

Gary Friedrich

I did write a couple of complete scripts, but that turned out to be a total disaster. The artists were not used to that and didn’t know know to draw from a script. I did that to Gene Colan and he didn’t get it at all! I got a bunch of artwork back and it didn’t match my copy at all. I had to do a lot of rewriting. It wasn’t Gene’s fault, because he had gotten used to another way of working. I don’t mean that as a blast at Gene, because he was one of my two or three all-time favorite artists. JA: George Tuska drew the back-up stories and Don Heck laid out the lead stories for Werner Roth to finish penciling. Do you remember working with them? FRIEDRICH: Of course, I’m familiar with Don because I saw him around the offices, but I didn’t get to know him. I didn’t get to know any of the artists, except for those who worked on staff. I remember working with Tuska on a horror story once, but nothing else. He was really a good guy and easy to work with.

back when I returned. I probably left them scrambling to fill some holes, so that’s probably what happened with The X-Men. JA: Since Stan was the editor of this series, I assume you dealt more with Stan than with Roy on those stories. FRIEDRICH: Stan, Roy, and I worked pretty closely together for the first couple of years I was on staff. Stan was actually editing back then, but as time moved on, he shoved more and more of that off on Roy. As a result, I spent less and less time with Stan, but we spent a lot of time in Stan’s office plotting stories. JA: What would happen when you went into Stan’s office?

FRIEDRICH: Depends on why we went into his office. Gary teamed up with penciler George Tuska on a three-part “Iceman” Sometimes Stan would origin back-up in X-Men #44-46, soon after the Buck Rogers newspaper strip George was bounce his ideas off of us, drawing was canceled and Stan welcomed him back to Marvel with open arms. George sometimes not. Sometimes was soon making his mark on Iron Man. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] he’d bounce thoughts about changing artists off on us. In an editorial session, he’d take a book he’d edited and go over it with us. Again, that’s something that got pushed off to Roy pretty quickly. I must have been doing okay, because Roy didn’t JA: And still a terrific artist, too. I’ve seen his commission drawings at do a lot of work on my stuff, as I recall. If he didn’t like something, I’d shows and they are very nice. Did you have any feelings towards change it and that would be that. these characters when you took over? FRIEDRICH: Well, I was never really an X-Men fan. I can’t give you a particular reason why, but they never grabbed me. JA: Well, they weren’t considered a top book by then, either. Stan and Jack moved on, and the artists who took over just weren’t Jack Kirby. Werner Roth’s art was very lackluster for super-heroes. FRIEDRICH: There’s truth in that. The art didn’t have as much of a hold on me as the writing did. But despite Stan’s and Roy’s writing the series, The X-Men always struck me as an afterthought to The Fantastic Four. It was like they said, “Well, The F.F. is such a success, so let’s try another team book.” JA: I never quite looked at it in that way before now. Okay, so you totally wrote issues #45 and 46. Your last issue was #47, cover-date August 1968, and the credit box reads, “The superb scripting of Gary Friedrich and Arnold Drake.” FRIEDRICH: [laughs] I didn’t write that credit! I never wrote anything with Arnold Drake. I’ll tell you about 1968, which may have something to do with this. I decided to visit “the Promised Land”! [laughs] A friend of mine from Missouri called me up and said, “I’m taking off to California for the summer and I want you to go with me.” Idiot that I am, I gave up my staff job at Marvel, flew down to Missouri, jumped in a car, and drove to Los Angeles. Damn near starved to death in the process! Stan and Sol Brodsky were very nice about it and gave me my job

I don’t recall a lot of rewriting being done. Stan apparently liked our stuff well enough. We had good times and bad times with Stan, depending on what kind of mood he was in. [laughs] When he was in a good mood, it was a lot of fun in there. When he was in a bad mood, it wasn’t much fun at all. By and large, Stan didn’t spend a lot of time going over my work. JA: Since you were going in Stan’s office and kicking around ideas, I’m assuming that when you left with an idea, that was your official “plot approval.” FRIEDRICH: Initially, yes. And Roy would always go over the plots with me before I gave them to the artists. JA: When the pages returned, did they give you stats to take home so you could have them to write the copy off of? FRIEDRICH: No, they gave me the original pages. I took the pencils home and drew the balloon placement and wrote the copy directly on the pages. I really hated that because I’m no artist; it was difficult to do that on the actual pages. I tried not to press down very hard with the pencil, but gave the letterer a basic idea of where I wanted the balloons. That’s the way I always worked at Marvel. JA: Did you write a plot for the artist or did you do it over the phone? FRIEDRICH: It worked both ways, but usually I’d write something up.

The Men Called “X” part four

“Stan Loved Dialogue!” ARNOLD DRAKE Talks about The X-Men, His Time at Marvel—and The Doom Patrol! Interview Questions Prepared by Jim Amash (Feb. 7, 2003) [NOTE: He’s baaack! And we are happy to have him. In Alter Ego #17 Arnold Drake discussed The Doom Patrol, and here he returns to talk (mostly) about his involvement with The X-Men. Considering that there are a few similarities between the two super-hero groups, it seemed like the right time to ask Arnold about The X-Men, while comparing the differences in the writing process between full-script writing at DC and the “Marvel method.” Rather than simply be interviewed, Arnold preferred to use my questions as a springboard to write the following piece, which contain a few choice observations which I found fascinating and thought-provoking. For more on these subjects and Arnold’s creation of “Deadman,” as well as on his Gold Key writing, see Alter Ego #17. And if Arnie wants to spell “comics” as “comix”—well, who are we to gainsay him? —Jim.] In 1966, when I’d been at DC for a dozen years or more, I decided to take my family to live in England for a while. Both my parents had just died (within six months of each other), and my wife Lillian, who at times was closer to my Mom than to her own, mourned her deeply. A major scene change was in order. Too, I thought that for Pamela (seven, at the time), it would be a great adventure. And so it was. In “Nevern Cottage” (a lovely London house that Pam dubbed “Nevern-Nevern Land”), far from DC’s internal and external bickerings and the minutiae of the comix industry, I began listening to my guts. They told me that DC was running, nay, streaking up a blind alley.

Mort Weisinger and Jack Schiff were the top editors. But there was no editor-in-chief. DC President Jack Liebowitz feared that appointing one would drive the other to quit. But I offered a daring notion: “Bring in a top talent from outside. Like maybe hire an editorial VP from TimeLife?” Liebowitz smiled benignly, as you do when you’re talking to a schizophrenic who’s off both his rockers. His words were, “What Time executive would touch the comic book business?” Which, with the passing years, reads as pretty good irony. So, with the market sprinting off in all directions, DC was without a compass. Plummeting sales said something was wrong. But what? Finally they chose Carmine Infantino to supply some answers. Good move! He worked night and day to sharpen the look of the magazines and lift office morale. And he did both brilliantly. Improving sales showed they were beginning to face their problems. But, to quote a Schiff axiom: “The cover sells that month’s issue. But the insides sell next month’s!” And the insides had changed very little. That was where it was at when I returned from London. In a meeting with Irwin Donenfeld (son of founder Harry), I said that Marvel was gaining fast on DC. Carmine was their Jack Kirby. But they also needed a Stan Lee. I offered my services. He said, “We outsell Marvel 3-to-1.” I said, “That’s this year.” He shrugged his executive shoulders. But now I saw that his second favorite sport was running up blind alleys. So I packed my bowling ball and moved over to Marvel. I already knew a bit about Marvel. When The X-Men’s first “ish” appeared some three months after “Doom Patrol” #1 [My Greatest Adventure #80], I pointed out the fantastic similarity to the DC editors. Weisinger said, “Don’t get your bowels

Arnold Drake in uniform in 1942, two years before he took part in the Battle of the Bulge—a recent photo with his granddaughter Tatiana, one of a set of twins—flanking his first plot-and-dialogue contribution to The X-Men, a 5-page feature on Iceman in #47 (Aug. 1968). Photos courtesy of Arnold. [X-Men page ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Arnold Drake

The Chief in his (not-yet-revealed) wheelchair in firstever “Doom Patrol” splash, in My Greatest Adventure #80—and a nice Bruno Premiani-drawn page from Doom Patrol #119 (May-June 1968); script by Arnold Drake. No Robotman, but yep—that’s Negative Man tormenting a retrogressed Elasti-Girl. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art supplied by the late Mark Hanerfeld. [©2003 DC Comics.]

in an uproar. Your man-in-a-wheelchair isn’t a new idea. Nero Wolfe never left his orchids to solve a murder.” He might have added, “Mycroft Holmes advised Sherlock from the best chair at his club.” The point is, Sherlock’s brother and the orchid man weren’t physically handicapped. My guy was. And so was Prof. Xavier. If Weisinger had thought up the man-in-thewheelchair, he’d have howled a different tune. A clear case of N.I.H. (I freelanced lots of PR writing, particularly for AT&T. One morning at their Jersey HQ, my agent and I presented a great answer I’d come up with for one of their problems. They rejected it instantly. On the way home, I wondered why. My agent said, “N.I.H. Not Invented Here. If they’d thought of it first, it would have been ‘brilliant’!”) I didn’t create that crippled master-brain for mere purposes of originality, though that never hurts (except if you work for a TV network). Up to that time, a super-hero was someone with marvelous physical powers. Physical. Kids dreamed of having that strength, speed, etc. But no super-hero championed the intellect. Also, I recalled my boyhood, when bright kids were labeled “Four-eyes” and “Professor,” as today they are “nerds.” What better antidote than a super-hero totally confined to a wheelchair? My cousin Sidney Heilveil was among the last of the polio victims of the ’30s. But he had a major career as a chemist, then went back to school for a second degree in psychotherapy. And he flies a plane! So, reading the adventures of “The Chief,” the anti-nerds might start to question their prejudices, and the nerds might feel a bit better about themselves. Later, Bill Gates would stand the nerd stereotype on its head—thirty years later. Before I walked into Marvel, I understood some of Stan Lee’s strategy. As a comix David against the DC Goliath, he battled against long-standing star titles, better distribution, a larger, more experienced staff, and the best talent in the field. The longest arrow in his quiver was himself. But he was already working around the clock. He needed some new strengths—bought on a shoestring budget. By giving amusing, alliterative credits to writers and artists on page one of each story, he created a star system—the opposite of DC’s policy of anonymity—at no cost! It even attracted talent making far better rates at DC. But some used pen names to escape DC’s wrath.

Another cheap weapon was “letters-tothe-Ed.” The editors at DC hated that, except for Schwartz and Boltinoff: Schwartz with years as a pulpsci-fi editor, where you couldn’t tell the fans from the editors without a scorecard; Boltinoff because he was a bit of a workaholic (Murray never met a petty detail he didn’t like). But neither one of them saw letters as a primary route to fan loyalty. Stan did. I’m told that my first Marvel assignment was to write dialogue for a Gary Friedrich plot. Could be. It was an assignment, period. While I always thought comix could be an art form, I always knew they were a business. As for the “Stan Lee Method” (writer gives plot to artist; artist gives penciled layouts back to writer; writer inserts dialogue): working from images on paper could benefit the writer. But more often it robbed him of some creativity. Under the Method, artists dictated much of the storytelling. And my viewpoint wasn’t always theirs. Of course, if the artist had a well-developed story sense, great! That made Werner Roth and Jim Steranko a joy to work with. Jim, as green as he was, had a strong story sense. And I respected his protective attitude toward his art. We worked almost exclusively by phone. No travel time spent. It wasn’t a Stan-conspiracy to separate the talent from one another. I could call his artists at any time. But there wasn’t the comfort of a writer’s bullpen, as at DC. When (1966) the writers at DC asked Liebowitz to recognize and deal with us as a group, he probably regretted that bullpen. But the lack of contact between writers and artists is what kept the Comics Creators Guild from ever happening. My storylines were very detailed. I preferred that, even though micro-managing the plot stole some heat from the writing of the final draft. But at that point in its development I preferred to concentrate on the dialogue. And knowing exactly where the story was going allowed me to do that. Stan loved dialogue. Not so at DC. In fact, Weisinger had it down to a formula: no more than forty words to a panel and no more than twenty to a balloon. Mort spent a lot of his off-time writing articles (mostly for the Reader’s Digest). So when you worked for him, you were often writing embroidered articles rather than stories. He’d grab an odd fact and say, “Give me a story about—” Item: during the commercials on any major TV show, 40 million toilets are simultaneously flushed across the nation. “Give me a ‘Batman’ about that.” I s*** you not.

“Stan Loved Dialogue!”

them into teams of two. I had already done that job with The Doom Patrol (“Robot-Maniac” and some Negative-Man-alone stories), so it was home territory. About the Doom Patrol/X-Men controversy: in ’62, with major help from good buddy Bob Haney and that fabulous artist Bruno Premiani, I created “The Doom Patrol” for My Greatest Adventure. The X-Men appeared three or four months later, with its amazing similarities to the DP. I reasoned that there wasn’t enough lead time for it to have been a rip-off. But back then I didn’t know that many DC artists were already working for Stan (using pseudonyms, as mentioned above). In short, from the day I dropped my first “Doom Patrol” script on Boltinoff’s desk, news could have leaked to Marvel about “a team of anti-superheroes led by a scientific genius in a wheelchair.” So the plagiarism issue remains open. And unless someone steps up to say, “Yes, one day, I told Stan about that,” it will never close. I left Marvel because there wasn’t enough work for me. Roy already had enough writers on board. And I was getting all I could handle at Western Publishing (Gold Key/Dell/etc.) I began on their sci-fi and mystery yarns (Star Trek, Dark Shadows, Grimm’s Ghost Stories, Boris Karloff, Twilight Zone) but quickly expanded to their “animation” books (Bugs Bunny, O.G. Whiz, Dudley Do-Right, Heckle and Jeckle, and ten years as writer/storyboardman for Little Lulu). I’ve still got several Little Lulu storyboards, in case some collectors are “listening.”

The cover for Captain Marvel #10 (Feb. 1969), repro’d from a photocopy of the original Marie Severin/John Verpoorten art, courtesy of Mike Burkey. Arnold wrote the story inside. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Schiff also preferred writing to editing. But Jack loved, honored, and respected a good yarn. He’d say to a Dave Wood, “You’ve got four incidents strung together. Why not forty, or 400? That’s not a story. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story builds to a climax.” In this day when movies and TV shows rely so much on special effects and trick editing, I wish Schiff’s thesis was posted on every producer’s shaving mirror. Jack, too, was dialogue-shy. But Stan loved it. He knew that dialogue was the second key to characterization: know a man by what he does— and what he says. So that gave me a chance to write some good talk and rumination. Captain Marvel was perfect for that: a man torn between two worlds and hunted by both. Who’s he going to talk to? Himself. Recently I re-read some of those stories and was startled to learn that I’d used a quasi-Shakespearean English. I was trying to represent an alien language of some sort. And I think it worked. I did have one dialogue dispute at Marvel. I wrote a Sgt. Fury where Hitler spoke English with a German accent (“Vot” instead of “What,” “Dis and dot” for “This and that”) larded with true German words: “Himmel! Schwein!” etc. Stan said, “That’s dumb! He spoke his own language fluently.” I said that when I worked at the business of dubbing foreign films into English, I learned that—logic be damned—those phony accents added “verisimilitude” (a word I’ve long loved). In the end, Stan not only left the dialogue unchanged but used the story credits to joke about my diatribe. Stan was not too friendly with me those first few weeks. Roy Thomas handed out the assignments. But you always knew it was Stan’s fiefdom. I liked writing the “X-Men” origin stories, and those in which I split

Since the two issues of The X-Men which Arnold scripted and Jim Steranko drew were recently reprinted in the lavish, slick-paper color collection Marvel Visionaries: Steranko, here’s the splash of his final issue, #54 (March 1969)—the story that introduced Alex Summers, who would soon become Havok. Art by Don Heck and Vince Colletta. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Men Called “X” part five

The X-Men: “A Cool Concept!” A Panel on the Silver & Bronze Age X-Men –-––with DAVE COCKRUM, JIM SHOOTER, ROY THOMAS, & ARNOLD DRAKE Conducted by Craig Shutt (June 11, 2000)

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris

[NOTE: On June 9-11, 2000, the city convention center of White Plains, NY, an hour from New York City out in Westchester County—yes, the same Westchester County that has been home to Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters—hosted Joe Petrilak’s All Time Classic New York Comic Convention, with one of the greatest guest lists of Silver and (especially) Golden Age talent anywhere, ever, period. Alter Ego plans to devote an entire issue to it in The panel gets under way with the moderator and the three previously announced the near future. One Silverguests (left to right): Craig Shutt, Jim Shooter, Roy Thomas, and Dave Cockrum; and-Bronze Age event was an photo courtesy of Joe Petrilak—plus Dave Cockrum and Gil Kane’s cover for GiantX-Men panel, hosted by Craig size X-Men #1 (1975). Dave discusses who did what on the panel. And learn more Shutt, writer of the “Ask Mr. about it in our interview with Dave, later this issue. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Silver Age” column for The Comics Buyer’s Guide. I’ve had to edit and telescope the panel slightly to fit it into this special X-Men issue with so many interviews. Special thanks to Joe Petrilak! —Roy.] CRAIG SHUTT: I have the easy task of introducing three guys who really don’t need any introduction. To my immediate left is Jim Shooter, who worked as editor-in-chief for a number of years on The X-Men... Roy Thomas, who did many of the classic stories with Neal Adams and had some input on the new X-Men when they were first being started up... and Dave Cockrum, whose sketchbook held many of The X-Men, even before any of us had ever seen them. What I’d like to ask each first is: from your time with The X-Men, what do you consider one of the highlights, or one of the key things that you remember best from those years? JIM SHOOTER: Well, I’m kind of one of the least involved here of any of these guys, so... [passes the microphone to Roy, who passes it to Dave] DAVE COCKRUM: Well, it was just mainly fun, most of the time. You know, when you’re young and enthusiastic and a comics fan, that’s the most fun you can have, really. Marvel was a fun place to work, and getting to draw all these people

in Spandex, that was great. I guess, as far as The X-Men goes, “Kitty’s Fairy Tale” is one of my favorite high points, because we were just joking around and said, “Why don’t we do a fairy tale?” It was just spur-of-the-moment, off the top of our heads; we just spun that story out, and that was a gas. And the Brood stuff. The Brood were so nasty that, if Phoenix had eaten their planet, she’d have gotten a medal. [laughs] And I thought that was fun. Those were really mean buggers, you know. [to Roy] It’s your turn. ROY THOMAS: I enjoyed my two stints as writer on The XMen. The first was with Werner Roth, and later Don Heck and Ross Andru, as the second writer of The X-Men, after Stan Lee suddenly turned it over to me one day. But probably the most enjoyable time was working with Neal Adams on all but one of the issues of X-Men that he did. Despite deadline problems, it was always worth it in the end, because they were beautiful; they’ve been printed over and over again, and they deserve to be. It didn’t make any difference what the story was. Just to be knocked out by the beauty of those pages was enough.

But in some ways, the most satisfying thing to me personally is that, back in ’74, not long before I left the editor-in-chief job, one of my last acts was to say, “Hey, let’s revive The X-Men!”—which I’d always been wanting to do and had been trying to do, here and there. We made them an international group... figuring maybe this time they’d make it. Well, it turned out they did, more than any of us could ever have guessed. And I think that Dave Cockrum and Chris Claremont particularly, and Len Wein,

“A Cool Concept”

We’ll confess it up front, with no apologies: Dave Cockrum sent us a lot of rare artwork, and we intend to use nearly all of it in this issue and next! Of this drawing of the “old” and “new” X-Men, though, Dave writes: “Frankly, I don’t remember doing this. It was apparently done for an unused mug design for the Danbury Mint. Very little of this looks to me like my work. I think the inker must’ve heavily reworked it.” The inker is John Koblish, who has done work for both Marvel and DC. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

who wrote the first story, and then later maybe John Byrne as an artist, too—that handful of people ended up turning The X-Men into something that none of us ever would have dreamed as late as 1974, ’75, which was that X-Men would become the hottest thing at Marvel Comics. If you’d told somebody that 25 years ago, they’d have locked you up in a room with Prez or Brother Power, the Geek. SHOOTER: X-Men was becoming the big hit while I was there. I didn’t do much with starting it, so it was always up front and important when I was there. There was an issue with Firelord that Dave drew. He had a big apartment in Queens, and before I found my own apartment, I stayed with him for a while. Well, look at the splash page with Firelord flying over the X-Men mansion, and picture me with a broom in my hand, standing on one leg in the living room. That was my debut in The X-Men. [laughs] He used to ask me to pose. He’d say, “Hold your hand like this.” “I can’t write while I’m holding my hand like this, Dave.” [laughs] But little bits of me crept into the art here and there, and that was fun. In some ways, The X-Men was sort of the hardest book; and in some ways, it was the easiest book. Chris Claremont deserves immense credit for the success of The X-Men; he wrote it and did a great job. A lot of writers—if something was wrong with a script, I’d call up them and say, “Hey, this doesn’t work,” and they’d say, “Well, if you want to change that, it’s okay,” and I would do a rewrite, and that was the end of it. Chris, the first time I changed a word, went ballistic. [laughs] Out of his mind, right? And then he said [angrily], “Just put an ‘X’ in the margin and tell me what it is.” So he would come in and see a little “X” scribbled in the margin. He’d say, [angrily] “What’s this?” I’d say, “Well, you know, it’d be nice to mention a character’s name in this issue, Chris.” And he would—[growls] then he’d go find a typewriter someplace and he would fix it. But he wanted every word to be his, okay? And it was. Okay, with a rare exception—a place where I accidentally wrote some suggested copy. And in the space allotted, he couldn’t figure out anything else to put in there and he was furious, but he had to use those words. Chris, also, was responsible for recruiting all the great artists on The X-Men. He really made it a personal mission. I think he even had some deal where he paid Tom Orzechowski extra to stick with lettering The X-Men. The same with Glynis Wein—Glynis Oliver—the colorist. He really made it his personal crusade to make that book work, and boy, did

it! So it was a joy working on it, and even though Chris and I argued like cats and dogs over the stories, as editors and writers do sometimes, I think all of us really felt we had something special going on there, and a lot of great moments. CS: I was interested in seeing what the new movie [the first X-Men film] does about mutants, and the prejudice against them. And I was wondering what you see as what their appeal has been over the years—if it was the prejudice and the misfits, or if it was the cool characters and the powers they had. SHOOTER: I don’t know. I mean, I think it was a cool concept. I think I really credit it to the fact that the people doing it did a better job than almost anybody else. They did really work their butts off, and Dave used to crash an airplane every issue. [laughs] THOMAS: One of the reasons it wasn’t as big in the early ’60s is because its time really hadn’t come yet. It was before the age of the teenaged super-hero. I noticed back in the ’50s, when I was a teenager, that the teenage idols kept getting younger. First there was Elvis, who was 21 when he really hit. A couple of years later, Ricky Nelson was 18 when he got big. And then suddenly there’s Fabian, who’s like 15 or 16—and I think this is what happened to comics, a decade or so later. Nor was the “outcast” thing quite as big earlier. Remember, ’63 was still the Kennedy years. But by the middle and late ’60s, with Viet Nam and civil rights and all that, the idea of the outsider as the hero came in big. And what did you have as the groups before that? You had Justice League of America. I mean, these guys are just a bunch of Rotarians with super-powers, you know? And the idea that they would ever argue was just beyond belief. The Fantastic Four argued and that was what made them fun, but they were still a group. Everybody knew where they lived. They were heroes and lionized. The Avengers were all heroes—everybody knew who they were, and they had a building. And the mutants were these guys, hiding out behind trashcans or trying to pretend they’re a bunch of innocent kids up in Westchester County. Where is that Westchester County? It’s a fictitious county like Gotham City, you know? [laughs] I think it was a combination those two things, and the incredible talents of the people who did it. Despite the fact that Len Wein did a very fine job with that first issue, and I had a little something to do with getting it going, it was primarily Chris, first with Dave and then with

The X-Men Panel

John Byrne. Once that was in place, everything else since that time, no matter who did it, and how it sold, goes back to those few guys, more than anything else. Sure, the issues Neal and I did were influential on those guys. Plus Lee and Kirby, of course, in the first place. Yeah, they had something to do with it, yeah. [laughs] COCKRUM: One thing that always weirded me out a little with the mutant prejudice thing was, how come guys that acquired their powers later weren’t discriminated against, you know? Why were you only discriminated against if you got born with it? I’d sit and scratch my head an awful lot about that. Mr. Fantastic is weirder than a lot of those mutants. Why don’t people hate him? But they didn’t. SHOOTER: Good P.R. COCKRUM: Yeah. He had money. [laughs] But I think the mutant persecution thing was a good deal of it. But the thing is, they were also treated like a family. In spite of all of this hatred and fear, they hung together and supported each other, and they could count on each other. Well, most of the time, anyway. And that appealed to a lot of the readership, I think. Plus, people were constantly leaving and coming back, and new people coming in, so you had an ever-changing cast, and nobody had a chance to get bored.

says I said, “I want to see how you do a Canadian accent,” because he’d been doing “Brother Voodoo” with a Jamaican accent. What would he say: “Eh?” We just talked it over and, except for those few sentences, everything else was Len working with Herb—I don’t know if Herb contributed a little extra. When Herb and I worked on The Hulk, we just talked over ideas for ten or twenty minutes, and then he’d go and draw. But anyway, they went off and did it. Everything else, even the fact that he was a mutant was, I presume, Len. And the fact that he had the prodigiously-sized claws, that, too, would have been added by Len and Herb. Also, years earlier, I’d needed the name of something stronger than steel or anything else. And I’d read a translation of the play Prometheus Bound by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, which used the adjective “adamantine,” and I remembered that. So I made up this thing called “adamantium” in The Avengers. So, though I didn’t make up the idea of giving Wolverine adamantium claws, I was really pleased that adamantium became a part of it, too. I was thrilled a few years ago when I saw adamantium mentioned by name in either Time or Newsweek. I’d contributed a word to the English language. [chuckles] Maybe it’ll be in the dictionary someday, along with “Quinjet,” or some other deathless contribution of mine. [laughs] But basically, it was Len and Herb; and of course it was developed, later on, by other people. Dave and I were arguing back and forth in print a year or so ago in Comic Book Artist about which of us came up with the idea for the international X-Men. Dave said it was me, and I said it was Dave, or at least Mike Friedrich said it was Dave and that sounded okay to me. So we never did figure it out.

CS: With the second group, Wolverine became a real break-out star. And I was wondering what it was in his makeup that suddenly made him become a guy who could have so many series and miniseries, as that point when he did. SHOOTER: Roy, you were the editor when Herb and Len did it [in The Incredible Hulk #180-181], weren’t you?

COCKRUM: You said, “mutant Blackhawks.” THOMAS: Yeah. I had a couple of [laughs] different names—now, Dave may have shown me a Wolverine character before— THOMAS: Yeah, I [Dave nods] but I had it in my mind that I remember that phrase, but was going to make up a character, or have a Mike Friedrich seemed to character as a villain. And I wanted him to remember you showing me be Canadian, because we had a lot of some sort of international Wolverine co-creator Herb Trimpe at the March 1975 Mighty Marvel Comic readers in Canada, and he was going to be thing that was similar to Convention, as seen in FOOM #10, Marvel’s own “fanzine”—and the rarelycalled either “Wolverine” or “Badger.” But that, before. You and Mike reprinted final panels of The Incredible Hulk #180 (Oct. 1974), the world’s “Wolverine” sounds like a wolf, and first glimpse of Canada’s own Wolverine. Can you believe it—for a change, Friedrich were originally “Badger” sounds like, “Aw, come on.” he’s breaking up a fight, between Ol’ Greenskin and The Wendigo! going to be the team. [laughs] The “Badger” name got used later, Script by Len Wein (whom you’ll see later), inks by Jack Abel. too. Maybe Dave had this other character [Hulk art ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] COCKRUM: I don’t before, which I didn’t consciously remember showing you remember, but there are only so many animals in the world. anything like that. You said “mutant Blackhawks” and maybe an island So I take Len Wein out to lunch, tell him I want a guy named “Wolverine”—he’s Canadian, he’s short and mean. Because a wolverine is a small, fierce creature like the Tasmanian devil. Nelson Bridwell had the Tasmanian Devil in his group over at DC by this time; besides, The Tasmanian Devil couldn’t be Canadian. I don’t remember this, but Len

location, or something like that. THOMAS: My idea, originally—but I didn’t insist on it being used, and I left the editor-in-chiefship soon afterward and it took a long time to get that first issue out, and that’s why my name isn’t on it—[laughs] my idea was to use a couple of the original guys like Cyclops and Marvel

“A Cool Concept”

Wolverine being a mutated wolverine, either. Apparently, he tried it with Spider-Woman and thought it was so gross that he wouldn’t let us do it with Wolverine. [laughs] We were toying with that, yes. Not human, but a mutated wolverine. And the business with the claws—up until, what was it—#98—everybody assumed the claws were in the gloves. But all of a sudden, he pops the claws out of his hands and slashes free. And everybody’s going [gasps with open-mouthed amazement], you know? And even The X-Men didn’t know it. You know, “What the—?” We were just looking for something to startle people. And I figured, God, that has to hurt. [laughs] I mean, The X-Men displayed an amazing lack of curiosity about Wolverine, because they didn’t know he could do that. They didn’t know his name until #104, I think it was. And it wasn’t them that found out. It was one of the little leprechauns that knew his name. CS: When you started out, you weren’t a real big Wolverine fan. COCKRUM: I didn’t like him, no. I thought he was a crazy little psycho. I had him doing things like carving his initials with his claw into one of Professor X’s antique tables, stuff like that. And it wasn’t until Chris and John worked with him, and they gave him a lot of integrity and dignity, in spite of the craziness. SHOOTER: Yeah, that was the cause of some difficulties, actually. He was a beer-swilling Canadian, calling you a “Bub,” and stuff. And the next thing you know, he’s a Shogun Warrior. [laughs] COCKRUM: That’s when I started liking him, though.

SHOOTER: I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but there were a couple of discussions about that. “Guys, can we have some continuity here? [laughs] Was he pretending to be Canadian?” Anyway, it all worked out for the better. Actually, I think people loved The X-Men so much that

Girl; the rest might come in as guests. And the other thing was, we’d make up a few new characters, and they were going to have a ship that would float around—it would generate clouds around it, so it could hover while they were looking for mutants. I don’t think that ever got in there. I don’t know if I ever pitched it to them. Or if I did, it was only, probably, to Mike. In a sense this idea had been suggested by the publisher, Al Landau, who also had a separate company—Trans World—that sold Marvel’s pages internationally. He said, if we could put out a book with characters in it from different countries we sold to, it’d probably help. Of course, he’s thinking about his resale business, probably as much as about Marvel Comics. It’d be great if we could also make this book sell just well enough in the States to break even. And I thought of the Blackhawk-mutant thing at that point. [Production manager] John Verpoorten and Stan were there, and they went for it. COCKRUM: Yeah, well, we knew about that part of the idea, but by the time we were choosing characters, FSSHT, out the window, you know. So we have a Russian, we have a Kenyan, and we might’ve sold some in Germany and Canada, but that whole concept just went out the window. We just got caught up in the enthusiasm of what we were doing. THOMAS: I wanted Banshee in there—a character I’d come up with. COCKRUM: Yeah, with Banshee, we might have sold some comics in Ireland, I don’t know. And maybe in Japan, although we didn’t keep Sunfire. THOMAS: Yeah, all my characters, like Banshee and Sunfire, you threw out. [laughs] COCKRUM: No, no, we kept Banshee. Stan didn’t like the idea of

22 they forgave some of those little gaffes they might not have let go, otherwise. I don’t think anybody figured Wolverine to be the central character. But he started getting all the mail. And those guys were bright enough to pick up on that—and then Chris and whichever artist started developing the character more and more. I was mostly the cheerleader, so I can’t be taking any real credit for any of it. I’d like to, but I won’t. [laughs] [Craig Shutt invites questions from the audience.]

The X-Men Panel they’d chickened out. At the last minute, in what was going to be the last issue of that storyline, they had this ultimate showdown with Jean Grey, and then she thinks: “Oh, I can’t kill my friends,” and then she’s okay. And they say, “Oh, great. Let’s all go back to Westchester.” [laughs] And I said, “You can’t do that. You can’t have World War II and then, after Hitler no longer has his army, you say, ‘Well, he’s okay now. We’ll let him live on Long Island.’ This is not a satisfactory ending. You have to come up with a better ending. This is too good a story to fizzle out like this.” They’d kind of waffled around. They didn’t want to lose Jean Grey, and they’d gotten cold feet about the whole thing, and I said, “New ending, folks. Come up with a better ending than this, because this sucks.” They were all upset, and ornery, and mad, and storming around, and stuff. And Chris said, “All right—you come up with an ending!” And I said, “All right, she gets captured, thrown into jail, and rots in prison for the rest of her life.” [laughs] And he said, “Never! The X-Men would never stop trying to rescue her from Galactic Space Prison, and it would be a circular story.” I said, “All right, your turn.”

FAN: I have a question So he comes in the next day, and says, “We’re gonna kill her.” for Mr. Shooter. I guess He thought I would never go for this, that there was no way I it was twenty years ago would ever agree that a major Marvel character could be killed. I this month that the Jean said, “Okay, done.” [laughs] He’s like, “You don’t mean it.” Grey character was killed off, and “Yeah.” So he runs over and calls John Byrne. I get this obviously Jim was shrieking phone call from John Byrne, [shouting hysterically] involved in that. “Are you out of your mind?” And I said, “Nope. She dies. And then five Kill her. Now.” So they did years later, she the story and they were Dave calls this one “Marvel Girl’s ‘go-go’ costume.” He obviously was resurrected. hating me the whole time felt she needed a new name, as well—and she got one! [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Marvel Girl TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] I’d be curious to and cursing me. And fans hear Mr. Shooter’s are sending me hate mail, recollections about the death of Phoenix, and then the resurrection of and I don’t go to conventions Jean Grey. And then, for the whole panel: what were your thoughts without people throwing things of life and death in comics? Because it seems like sometimes characters on me, and stuff. [laughs] No, do come back to a good benefit, and then they go through a lot of I’m serious! I went to San effort to kill off Aunt May, and then bring her back, and it made me Diego and I was, like, in fear wonder about these things. of my life a couple of times. But anyway, the thing is, SHOOTER: Yeah, the death of Phoenix—I’m going to hear about that looking back on it, it’s a for the rest of my life. [laughs] Chris and the editor at the time, Jim huge story. It was really Salicrup, and I, maybe someone else, we went out to lunch. We were the thing that catapulted talking about the next storyline, and my suggestion to them was, The X-Men to Number “Marvel has had all of these characters that started out as villains: One, where it remained Hawkeye, The Black Widow, and dozens of them who have then for something like become heroes. They get redeemed and they become heroes. Why don’t seventeen years. And my we, for the first time in the history of Marvel Comics, and the first time policy at Marvel was, if in comics, as far as I know, have a hero—a well-established hero—who somebody dies at Marvel, goes bad? And no temporary-and-then-the-red-kryptonite-wears-off, they’re dead. Okay, that’s it. none of that crap. Someone who becomes evil and then becomes the new Dead. I really tried to insist Doctor Doom. And they said, “Great, great. We’re going to do that.” So on it. Of course, from the we talked about various plots and stuff. I’m not sure if they were paying moment Phoenix died, any attention to anything I said. against Chris’ will, virtually every day he’d But anyway, they came up with this story. I thought it was really come in with a story good. They were going to take Jean Grey and make her into the most introducing some heinous villain criminal in the universe. And I said, “Okay, we’re going character in the book who to break some new ground here.” So away they go, and they’re doing looked exactly like Jean this story, and they’re having her commit these crimes, and destroy a Grey. And probably starship, and blow up a planet, and all this stuff. And I’m reading these was Jean Grey. issues as they come across my desk and I’m checking these books as [laughs] And I kept they go out. And they get to the point where I just had to read the end saying, “No, no, no. of the story. So I went to the editor’s office and he had the next issue This, according to Dave, is the “original I don’t care if that about ready to go. He had the pencils for the next one, maybe the plot Thunderbird costume”—his 1975 “Steve Canyon person looks like for the next one, and so I’m looking through it. And I realized that costume.” [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Thunderbird TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“A Cool Concept”

For Scott. Cyclops? Slim, yeah, him. And I’m going, “No way, Chris.” And then, later on, I was doodling another character and calling her “Binary.” And he says, “Jean Grey?” I think, by that time, the process of bringing her back had already started, and I says, “Give me a break, Chris.” [laughs] He said, “Carol Danvers?” And I said, “Wel-l-l-l.” And he got her for that one, you know. But Chris was constantly coming in and looking through my sketchbooks, and things like that, saying, [excitedly] “I want that one!” That’s where, for instance, Mystique came from. Mystique was hanging on my wall in my office at Marvel with no name. And he just took her piecemeal and put her in Ms. Marvel. CS: Roy, didn’t you revive Professor X and do some others? THOMAS: I revived him, I killed him, and everything, yeah. We killed him off because X-Men wasn’t doing that well. It had changed writers, artists, several times, and nobody was really paying attention. So Stan came up with the idea of playing up individual heroes in the logos— one-character, two-characters. And we did one as “The Death of Professor X,” but it was always in my mind—and I told people this— that this Changeling character I’d made up could turn out to have been the guy who actually died. Originally, Professor X’s death had been totally a sales ploy because we needed something. Of course, it maybe would attract attention for one issue, and then it depends on what you do with the book after that, so it didn’t necessarily work. So it made a lot of sense to bring him back, so Neal brought him back in that issue that Denny ended up dialoguing, the space thing. That one was totally Neal’s plot, though I was supposed to dialogue that one,

The Cockrum/McLeod splash page of X-Men #94 (Aug. 1975), the first issue of the revived regular-size series. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Mike W. Barr & Tom Horvitz. To contact Tom about buying or selling original art, phone (818) 757-0747, fax (818) 757-0859, or e-mail <trhgallery@earthlink.net>. Also, check out his website at <www.trhgallery.com>. Tell him Alter Ego sent you, okay? [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

her, but it’s not her.” And we kept playing this kind of stupid game for a decade or so. Also, he kept proposing ideas for how she’d come back. Well, finally, I think it was Byrne who proposed the idea that, I thought, made sense. After all, the character’s name is “Phoenix,” and so when he finally came up with a story that made enough sense to me, I said, “Yes, she is Phoenix. This may be the exception.” And I’d been getting an awful lot of pressure from upstairs to add X-Men books, which I was fighting off all the time. But when the guys themselves said they wanted to do a book, it’s hard to tell them no. They wanted to do New Mutants. “Oh, Okay.” So they did bring back Phoenix, and again, I think because Chris wasn’t the one who did it, he was furious for a while. But I think he was glad she was back, ultimately. And the only other character I can remember letting go like that was Elektra, because Frank [Miller] killed her, and then he came to my office a couple days later and said, “I want to bring her back.” I said, “No.” He said, “Let me tell you how.” And he told me this whole thing about moving energy and revitalizing the bodies. And I said, “Aaah, it can’t work. Sorry.” So I wimped out twice. But anyway, that’s what happened there, and like the guy said, I’ll never live it down, but it’s history now. COCKRUM: Regarding Chris’ plots to bring Phoenix back—if any of you’ve read my Futurians graphic novel Sunswift—I was designing the Futurians characters, and Chris came in one day, and he looked over my shoulder and saw Sunswift. And he says, [gasps] “That’s how we’ll bring Phoenix back. She’s lived a million years and she’s come back for Scott.”

This drawing, Dave says, is “a little fun mixing Broomhilda with Phoenix.” [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Phoenix TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Broomhilda TM & ©2003 Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.]

The X-Men Panel

too. But that was the only issue I didn’t at least co-plot, so I felt so distant from it that I ended up giving it, because I was busy, to Denny O’Neil—but it was really Neal’s story. Neal was always fooling around, like with the idea that The Human Torch’s android body was the basis for The Vision. You just keep throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. But I think it was probably a mistake to kill Professor X off, except to the extent it made it fun to bring him back. At least Bucky isn’t back yet. Bucky and Toro— keep them dead. CS: Did they ever try to bring Bucky back? THOMAS: Somebody tried to bring Toro back a couple years ago—I was very glad to hear he didn’t. CS: There are only so many that are still out in the dead. Does that get to be a problem, that you’ve killed somebody for that kind of impact, but it doesn’t really have that impact? THOMAS: It doesn’t have the impact if you bring them back. You need to have people stay dead, at least a certain percentage of them, because if everybody comes back to life—I mean we have a whole religion here, founded on the idea that one guy came back to life. If he read Marvel Comics, we wouldn’t have to worry about Easter. I always used to say— and this would be as true for DC as much for Marvel—“You cannot kill a villain or a hero thoroughly enough, bury him deep enough, cut him into enough pieces, or dissolve the pieces enough that somebody won’t

find a way to bring him back.” Especially after clones, etc., it just became so ludicrously easy. I think now readers want to see somebody dead for a few years before they’re going to believe it. If General Francisco Franco is staying dead, like they joked about for years on Saturday Night Live—if he was in the comic books, they’d still be waiting for him to come back to life. COCKRUM: Well, we killed Thunderbird. I don’t think he’s come back yet. It’s unfortunate because, actually, we liked the character. But he was an obnoxious loudmouth, and so was Wolverine. And we figured, we only have room for one obnoxious loudmouth, and so we figured—well, shock value. “We’ll kill him and everybody’ll be stunned,” and we didn’t say anything about it on the cover, which I always felt was the best way to do killing a character. You don’t say, [shouts] “Hey! We’re going to kill a character!” You let them find it and go, [distressed] “Oh, my God!” like they did with Menthor in T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. SHOOTER: Well, I think that’s one of the reasons that Marvel did go through a pretty good period when I was there. We did try to keep some consistency. It wasn’t just me. It was the editors in general. We did obey rules like that, for the most part. Basically, if people were dead, we kept them dead, for the most part. You can rely on Death during those ten years, or so, and I think that’s real important. I think the bond of trust with the audience is one of the things that makes or breaks comics. To me, comics is the most collaborative medium, okay? Even the most jaded professional who says he doesn’t listen to fans— his peers are fans, and they’re talking to him, okay? Most people who

“The Big Fight.” This is a 2001 Cockrum commission of The X-Men battling the Shi’ar Imperial Guard. You can’t tell your heroes without a scorecard —and there ain’t no scorecard! [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; X-Men & Imperial Guard TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“A Cool Concept”

are in comics start out as fans and have waited for the opportunity to do some of the things that they liked as readers, and we talk to each other, and we answer letters, and we read letters. It’s a very collaborative medium. I mean, if you don’t like Spielberg’s latest movie, even if you see him in a restaurant and try to walk up to him and tell him so, his bodyguards will throw your ass out on the street. [laughs] But we’re pretty accessible, so I really think of it as a kind of community thing, a gestalt. And I always felt my duty as an editor was to kind of work with what everyone wanted here. The feeling I always got from fans was, “Don’t screw around with me. Don’t set me up and pull these stupid tricks. I don’t want any clones.” And so I think that part of the bond of trust is keeping the dead people dead. Although I have to say, who’s glad that Phoenix did come back? I am. I thought it was a good thing. And Elektra too, I have to say. I mean, I thought Frank did it so well, that if you do it that well, okay. All right, I’m done. CS: One thing I was interested in—and Jim, you have some experience with this, going back to The Legion of Super-heroes— is at what point do you have too many characters running around? THOMAS: [laughs] We’ve got three Legion people here! SHOOTER: When I was a kid, I wanted them all every issue, and Curt Swan said, “Seven is my limit.” [laughs] I swear to you, that’s it. Curt, who never complained about anything, laid down the law. “You can have seven characters an issue, that’s it!” And [editor] Mort [Weisinger] called me up and said, “No more than seven.” I said, “Okay.” But I don’t know. Whatever number you can make, other people can deal with bigger numbers more effectively. But I find with a small group, at least you feature a small group, you can have others in the background. THOMAS: I did The Legion it for six, seven months, or so, and then gave it over to Paul Levitz. But during that brief time in the early ’80s, I did my homework. I went out and bought every single appearance of the Legion, including every little cameo. I had this huge collection, and then, as soon as I could, I got off the book and sold it all. [laughs] But there’ve been—is it nine volumes of the Legion of Superheroes Archives so far? That’s more than there is of Superman or Batman! Somebody’s got to find these people and neuter them so they don’t breed. [laughs]

Dave Cockrum’s first “Legion” cover (done with Nick Cardy), for Superboy #197 (Sept. 1973). It, and most of Dave’s work for that series, was reprinted in DC’s 2000 hardcover volume Legion of Super-heroes Archives, Vol. 10. And there’s been one more since then! [©2003 DC Comics.]

The Legion and The X-Men are almost opposites, in a way. The Legion were the ultimate lionized heroes in the future, and the X-Men are the mutant outcasts. And yet, you had so many of the same people, including Mike Friedrich, who was going to be the first [revived] X-Men writer, [to Dave] yourself, Jim, and myself,

This is the only other official photo taken of the X-Men panel at White Plains in June 2000, shot after Arnold Drake popped in. Left to right: Craig Shutt, Jim Shooter, Roy Thomas, Dave Cockrum, Arnold Drake. Photo courtesy of Joe Petrilak.

who did Legion at one time or another. Did The X-Men ever meet the Legion? They should have, sometime. COCKRUM: It came close, unofficially. In X-Men #107, when we introduced the Shi’ar Imperial Guard, those were Legionnaires. And over at DC, they were talking about doing a reciprocal issue in Legion somehow, and the timing hadn’t worked out because we didn’t let them know in advance, and they couldn’t plan it, but it would have been fun. It would have been kind of like the Rutland issues that crossed over. But I’ve got to tell you, when I was working on it, Cary Bates wrote it and he didn’t want to have to deal with more than about four characters at a time. And I was willing to draw a bunch of them, but Cary goes, “Aww....” So we did the wedding sequence in #200, the wedding of Duo Damsel and Bouncing Boy—why in the world she wanted to marry him! [laughs] I could see why he wanted to marry them, you know. But anyway, we had this wedding. Legionnaires and guests included, there were over fifty super-powered beings in that double-page spread. Well, it wasn’t a double-page spread because there wasn’t room; it was turned sideways on the page. Anyway, the villain shows up with half the bride, and challenges them, boogah-boogah, and they pick a task force of four to go after him. [laughs] I would have seen them rise up, en masse, and squash him like a bug. But Cary didn’t want to have to write the crowd. SHOOTER: What did the other forty-six do? Like go for cocktails? COCKRUM: Yeah, yeah. They played cards. But it was a fun book to do, it really was. [At this point Roy Thomas spots Arnold Drake entering the room.] THOMAS: Oh, we have another X-Men writer—who also wrote another book that was a little like The X-Men. It came a little before, called The Doom Patrol. Arnold Drake. [applause] ARNOLD DRAKE: I would have said The X-Men was a little like The Doom Patrol. THOMAS: Yes. Right, right. We’re doing both the groups with wheelchairs. If you needed a group with a leader in a wheelchair, Arnold was your man. DRAKE: I was willing to say that was a coincidence. [laughs] But when I created the Brotherhood of Evil, and a couple of months later, Stan had the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, I decided Stan was as fond of the word “Brotherhood” as I was.

The X-Men Panel

CS: But no villain in his right mind is going to call himself “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants,” or “Evil” anything, really. They all think their motives are good, you know. Wouldn’t you think so?

doing some X-Men origin stories. That was kind of a kick. But Stan, and Roy, and others had already laid out a clear map, so I couldn’t break much new ground.

DRAKE: You betcha.

CS: Did you see parallels between The Doom Patrol and The XMen? There are also some parallels between the Fantastic Four, with the kinds of powers, and things like that. Did you draw on some of those as you were doing The X-Men?

COCKRUM: Ah, I’m evil. [laughs] THOMAS: Arnold is the guy who came up with Scott Summers’ brother, during your last issue or two of X-Men, that Neal and I turned into Havok—Alex Summers. You were the one who shoved him into all this Egyptian stuff that Neal and I picked up on. DRAKE: Yeah, that’s probably true, too. I had a big thing for Egyptians. I once did a script with Bob Kane in which the villains were Egyptians, and I had him draw what the Egyptians looked like on the hieroglyphics. They were all two-dimensional characters. [laughs; at Craig Shutter’s request, he joins the panel briefly, though he says his wife is waiting outside for him, so he can’t stay long.] CS: All of you did so many different team books. I’d be interested in how all of you approach them, and how you enjoyed those versus the individual characters. DRAKE: Well, The Doom Patrol’s got a special spot in my heart. I just loved it and I did every one of, I think it was 48 books. And I liked breaking new ground, talking about super-heroes who didn’t particularly like to be super-heroes, and also creating a strange kind of villain in every issue—that was a hell of a challenge. But I liked it, I think, basically, because of the dialogue and the human characteristics of these people. So that set The Doom Patrol aside for me.

DRAKE: I didn’t do it consciously. Stan didn’t do it consciously either. I mean, Stan didn’t consciously steal The Doom Patrol. [laughs] As I said, the only caveat I have about what Stan did was his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, after I did the Brotherhood of Evil. That bothered me a little. There were only a few months between them. THOMAS: Yeah. But, of course, with Marvel, you know—Marvel always had about a one-minute lead. [laughs] DRAKE: Yeah, Marvel was fast, you know. SHOOTER: Well, we had to be. COCKRUM: I gotta tell you, my very first fan letter appeared in The Doom Patrol. I phrased it as a letter from Elasti-Girl, complaining about the dowdy costumes. And they got new costumes because of that. DRAKE: All right, you’re the son of a bitch. [laughs] I’m heading back to my wife. [Arnold leaves, to applause.] THOMAS: Arnold was a good writer. We were very pleased to have him working at Marvel for a brief time there, even though he smoked the smelliest cigarettes, and we’d all go run for cover when he came in with those cigarettes. Other than that, he was a great guy.

I created Deadman because CS: He did a lot of humor that’s the way things were Since we included a Doom Patrol page in Arnold Drake’s own piece, a few pages comics too. I mean, he had going at that time. [laughs] The back, here is a recent sketch of his—a “re-creation” of sorts, done for collector quite a range. whole country was into Eastern R. Dewey Cassell: Arnie and artist Carmine Infantino hard at work on the first philosophy. I won’t call it THOMAS: Nice to have this Strange Adventures cover featuring their co-creation Deadman. Courtesy of A.D. [©2003 Arnold Drake; Deadman TM & c 2003 DC Comics.] religion. It’s more a philosophy X-Men panel—[laughs] where than religion. Everybody from we’ve had The Legion of about 16 to 22 was into Eastern philosophy, plus Shirley MacLaine. And Super-heroes, and The Doom Patrol, and Deadman. I decided, well, okay, let’s explore that. And it was about that time that I CS: I know Dave created a number of the characters and, obviously, was beginning to understand what I think we all came to understand, you all worked with them. And maybe just something on which were which was that comics readers were getting older. They were college your favorites, or which ones you liked to work with. You mentioned kids now, and they were studying Comparative Religion and Einstein. Phoenix as being a key part there, and Cyclops has always been a part And so you could start to deal with more complicated themes, and of them. Are there particular ones you see as the real core, or the ones “Deadman” was kind of a complicated theme, so I enjoyed that very you liked working with the most? much. X-Men? I don’t know—old ground had been broken, you know, so there was nothing I could do particularly new. I did have some fun

SHOOTER: No, I think one of the things about The X-Men was that—to me, at least—they were all important. I didn’t feel like it was

“A Cool Concept”

27 basically Storm with no cape, and a tufted haircut, sort of like what Wolverine’s got, and she would transform into cats and things. And during a hiatus in the development, other cat characters had popped up and made her redundant. So we’re going, “What are we going to do? Uhh... uhh...” And you just stuck your head in the door and said, “Why don’t you make the Typhoon guy the girl?” And, “Oh, hey!”

Cyclops and the Seven Dwarfs, or something. I was interested in all of them. Whoever was featured in a particular story just seemed like the most important character. I think if I had to say the best thing about Chris’ writing, it’s that he always made you feel that what he was doing was important, that the fate of the universe, or something, was at stake every issue. Maybe some of the stories were better than others, but none of them felt unnecessary. They all felt like you just had to read it, and you knew you had to read next month.

THOMAS: I didn’t even know what you were talking about.

This 1978 convention sketch shows Dave’s two favorite X-Men enjoying a quiet moment COCKRUM: And we took THOMAS: Except for guesttogether. [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Nightcrawler & Storm TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] the cape off Typhoon, and starring Wolverine in an issue made it black instead of blue, or two to sell a few extra and gave her all-white hair, and then Len’s going, “Are you sure? Aren’t books, or one or two not-quite-in-continuity X-Men that an editor had they going to think she’s somebody’s grandmother?” [laughs] “Trust me, me do, all of my experience was with the original five X-Men. I didn’t Len. She’s not going to look like somebody’s grandmother.” [laughs] have too much choice between those five characters, none of whom I’d

created, though I did want to drag in The Mimic, who’s sort of all of them—and developing Alex Summers/Havok was nice, but the costume that Neal came up with was the main thing good about him. But the character I most liked writing was The Beast, because I could throw in all of these great, wonderful, big words that Stan wouldn’t let me use elsewhere, and he actually liked them there.

SHOOTER: I’ve got a funny story about something like that. Things have changed in comics a great deal over—well, I’ve been in over 35 years. [to Roy] You, a little longer. THOMAS: No, you were in the business before I was. SHOOTER: Really?

COCKRUM: I think everybody probably knows that Nightcrawler was my favorite, with Storm second. Nightcrawler was, like, my alter ego in the book, and I tended to want to give him plenty of room to play. I always felt that, well, if I was blue and athletic as hell, that’s me. [laughs] He’s still just about my favorite character, and I did treat him as my representative in the book, really, a lot. As in The Futurians, if any of you read it, Blackmane is my alter ego there. He represents my loud, obnoxious, and socially unacceptable side. But Nightcrawler was kind of like my— whatever gallant swashbuckler there is here, he’s it. And Storm, well... if you want to draw a beautiful woman, here’s Storm, you know. What can I say? THOMAS: I’ve got a question for Dave, because Len Wein tells a story, an incident which I’ve totally forgotten, that you guys were talking about what character was going to do what, when I came in and said something about making Storm somebody, but I don’t remember what that was. COCKRUM: I had this male character called Typhoon, and he had weather powers. And I had come up with this Black Cat character. I don’t know if you remember that. It was

On the left, Storm’s “predecessor,” Black Cat, in his original 1975 drawing. At right, from FOOM #10, an early pencil drawing of Storm. So where’s Typhoon, Dave? [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Storm TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The X-Men Panel

THOMAS: When I came up to work for Mort Weisenger in 1965, he was telling me about this teenage kid who was doing stories for him. [laughs] I said to myself, “I’m 24 years old. I’m an old man. This teenager’s out there, doing stories.” SHOOTER: We’ve been around a while. We’ve seen some changes. It used to be that editors always thought that young readers—and that’s who they figured were reading comics—were pretty dumb, and so you’d better keep it simple for them. I think that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with Michelangelo and names that earlier wouldn’t have been considered for toys, that sort of broke ground there. And in comics, as the readers became more sophisticated, you could get away with more.

weird names. How will people follow it?” I said, “You know, Stan? Maybe times have changed a little.” Anyway, I think they decided to go with the old X-Men. I don’t think they made that cartoon series. But it was interesting because things really have changed, and I think the audience has become so much more sophisticated, so much more able to handle more complexity. And guys like Chris sort of made a living at it. They understood that and took advantage of it. The time where old fogies like me, instead of lagging along behind, just kind of learning that I didn’t have to call everybody “Potato Man” any more. [laughs]

THOMAS: I still despise the names of characters like Bishop and Gambit. But if people think they work as characters, and they’re just names, then that’s fine, Stan, of course, comes from the old that works. You adjust school, and I remember the first time for that. I’ve always there was going to be an X-Men thought that there’s never probably been any cartoon. I don’t know if it ever worse name for a happened, but they were faced with a character than “Green dilemma: do we do the old X-Men or Lantern,” if you think the new X-Men? And so Stan hadn’t about it. What’s more really been—I mean, he had plenty on schleppy than a lantern? his plate—he wasn’t really involved in Yet, this concept, we’re the comics too much, so he had a guy Dave calls this 1975 sketch “Nightcrawler eats Stan’s shorts.” celebrating its 60th named Sol Brodsky—anybody who knows “Don’t ask me why,” he adds. “I don’t remember.” birthday, and except for comics knows who Sol is, so we won’t get [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Nightcrawler TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] maybe a ten-year into that—Sol got pictures of all The X-Men, period, some version of old and new, and they were sitting on the this character’s been around, selling well, or making some kind of splash, couches in Stan’s office, but they didn’t have any names on them. And ever since 1940. And yet, would anyone today name a character “Green he had a list on paper with the names and powers, but there were no Lantern”? It would be like naming a car a “Buick” or some kind of names on the pictures. So he called me in, and he said, “Okay, look. I name like that. You know, you wouldn’t do it. Like the Edsel of the ’50s, know the old X-Men. Now who are these guys?” [chuckles] right. You just wouldn’t do that. Times change, and what really seems THOMAS: The ones that “Stan Lee Presents.” really cool one year, a few decades later, is just the opposite. So every generation has to come up with its own names and its own concepts. SHOOTER: Yeah, the ones that “Stan Lee Presents.” But he was pretty much out of touch, and The X-Men was a fairly new phenomenon at that time. So he said, “Well, let me guess.” And so he guessed every one wrong. [laughs] I mean, he knew who Cyclops was, but he said, “This Banshee, isn’t that a female?” THOMAS: I had wanted her to be, but he wouldn’t let me. SHOOTER: And he didn’t know who Storm was. And Nightcrawler— I mean, I don’t know who he picked. He picked wrong ones for everyone. And I said, “No, no. See, that’s Nightcrawler, and that’s Storm.” And he said, “Well, what does Nightcrawler do?” And at that time, Nightcrawler was doing everything. He was turning invisible in shadows, he could teleport, he was sort of strong, ran up the wall. So I tried to explain to him that stuff, and he looks like he’s having a very bad headache. [laughs] And finally, he says to me, “Jim, let me explain something to you. Look at these characters over here. Pretend you don’t know who they are.” He points to the old X-Men. “Which one do you think is The Iceman?” I said, “That’ll be the guy over here who’s all frosty.” He said, “Now which one do you think is Cyclops?” “The guy with the funny eyepiece?” And we went down the list, and the only girl left had to be Marvel Girl. And he said, “You can’t have all this complications and

SHOOTER: You crack me up about the names, because I didn’t know you wanted to make Banshee female. THOMAS: I came up with the idea of Banshee—I’d only done two or three issues of X-Men at that time, and I had this idea for this Irish woman mutant called “Banshee.” There had been a Banshee in comics in the ’40s, but I didn’t know it at the time. And Stan said, “You can’t have it. They’d have five guys, counting Marvel Girl, and gang up on her.” It’s the old adage: never fight anyone smaller than yourself, because if you win, you’re a bully, and if you lose, you’re a bum. [laughs] That’s why you seldom saw a villainess as the main enemy at Marvel—because, no matter how much power she might have, if the guys won against her, it just didn’t look right. I argued with him and, of course, I lost that argument, as I lost most arguments during that period with Stan. And whenever I see this character they had—Syrin, who wears the same outfit—isn’t she The Banshee’s daughter?—I think, “That’s the one who should have been Banshee in the first place.” And then you say Stan said later, isn’t The Banshee a woman? [laughs] SHOOTER: Seriously, for all these years, I kept thinking, “What was Roy thinking?” [laughs] THOMAS: Roy was thinking about keeping his job. [laughs]

“A Cool Concept” SHOOTER: I never learned to do that. [laughs] THOMAS: I wasn’t always too good at it myself. AUDIENCE MEMBER: In recent years, The X-Men have taken hits for keeping the status quo, and that’s why Chris ended up leaving the first time. Did you guys, when you were around, see that happening? Was there pressure from management to keep the same stuff, not enough change? SHOOTER: When I became editor-in-chief of Marvel—well, a lot of people think of Marvel management like this smoke-filled room, of big executives chewing on cigars, deciding what we’re going to do about those bastards at First Comics. [laughs] There wasn’t an executive above me who could name four comic book companies. Mike Hobson and I were the highest-ranking folks who knew anything about the comics. And I quickly discovered that I could get away with a lot. Unlike the time when Roy was there, Stan had gone off to Hollywood, and I was pretty much on my own. So my feeling was, we should be daring. We were Marvel Comics, and if we couldn’t expand the envelope, then who could? And so I encouraged people to try to do stuff. I don’t think people realize how revolutionary Marvel Comics were when they came along. Back in the early ’60s, when I’m reading those first ten issues of Spider-Man—nowadays, the heroes-with-problems thing, and heroes having ordinary lives as well as being Superman on the side, is normal. But back in those days, I’d never seen a hero have to launder his costume before. Okay, now it’s common. Everybody has learned that trick, and we all do it. But in those days, the idea of the hero catching a cold—that was news, right? So when I had my chance, I thought, “Well, I want to be like that. I want to see if we can find some new ground.” So I encouraged it, and I tried as much as possible to say “yes,” or maybe “yes, but” to whatever ideas were presented to me. And you know, you get guys like Claremont and Dave, and other people, a little bit of rope, and they’ll either tie some beautiful knots, or they’ll tie the noose around their necks.

“the illusion of change.” Gary and I were just horrified, and Stan didn’t really push that, because he realized, down deep, that if you’re going to keep going, you have to keep doing things. And if you can’t change Spider-Man himself, then you’ve at least got to come up with other changes. SHOOTER: Yeah, but you also have to have some judgment about it. I mean, that’s the thing that I think has been lost in some places—that any idea that occurs to some of these guys, they’re going with it, you know? Even if, upon reflection, it’s a dumb idea, like the Spider-Man Clone thing. I don’t think anybody liked that. THOMAS: Somebody must have for fifteen minutes. SHOOTER: Well, somebody for fifteen minutes. So to me, what I try to do is to encourage the continuing development, but not change things capriciously, or stupidly, but to use some judgment in it. We had really good people working for us, and basically, if you did kind of leave them alone, they had good sense about it. THOMAS: I think that was the second-worst clone idea of all time, the worst being that Gwen clone that Gerry Conway, poor guy, suffered with, which was not his idea. Once Stan saw the Gwen Clone he’d wanted, he realized, “This doesn’t really work, does it?” Whatever happened to the Gwen Clone? CS: They turned her into a real human being; they said she just thought she was a clone. THOMAS: She thought she was a clone? [laughs] Who was she, then? CS: I didn’t get into it then. [Soon afterward, the tape runs out.]

THOMAS: Once you get a style going— whether it’s comics, or Elvis, or anything—a lot of people can come along and imitate it, maybe even build something new on it. But there’s only one of the original. And there was a period—sometime in the late ’60s— ’67, ’68, ’69— where, after several years of pretty revolutionary stuff, which we all kind of recognized—Stan took Gary Friedrich and me into his office, and he said, “I really don’t want Marvel Comics to change too much from now on. I feel like we’ve sort of got it where we want it. And from now on—” Dave did this special drawing to be auctioned off at the 2000 All Time Classic New York Comic Convention. Hey, even Banshee made it! he used the phrase [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; X-Men TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Men Called “X” part six

“The Topic of Conversation Was the Revival of The X-Men!” A 1970s Marvel/DC Writer on How the Mutant Ball Got Rolling by Mike Friedrich [INTRODUCTION: Mike Friedrich, who in 1974 was assigned by Yours Truly to be the scripter of a revived X-Men series, told Jim Amash he didn’t recall enough about the experience at this remove to talk about it in an interview. We thank him, however, for agreeing to set down his reminiscences on the subject. —Roy.] I’m afraid that, with each passing year, my memory fades further of my brief association with the new X-Men.

At the time, I was pretty pissed-off that I’d been cut out of a writing assignment that I had helped create. In recent years, my longtime friend Len has told me that he was unaware that I had been involved at the beginning, and I’m more than happy to believe him. It’s not like Dave and I were close buddies, and I had nothing to do with developing his characters. What I did do was get “the deal” started, and I can understand how that can be forgotten when I’d taken myself 3000 miles away and my deal-partner had left his position. This episode hastened my transition over to running my own publishing company, with Len contributing a couple of stories at my request. Since starting Star*Reach was one of the smart career moves in my life, I’ve never had a regret. Len and Dave were totally responsible for the success that they enjoyed.

What I recall most clearly is one lunch that was held near the Marvel offices with then-associate editor Roy Thomas, freelance artist Dave Cockrum, and myself, who was living in New York Mike Friedrich at a New York at the time, scrambling around for comics convention, circa 1966-67. freelance writing gigs. Roy had a favorite (Photo by Pat Yanchus) haunt nearby in the General Motors Building, where patrons sat in booths stylized as cars, and that’s where we went. I know the topic of conversation was the revival of The X-Men. [NOTE: Since this meeting almost certainly occurred after mid-1972, Ye Ed was actually editor-in-chief at this time. —Roy.] What I remember now is that Roy had conveyed to me the idea of an international group of characters (perhaps that idea had come from Stan or someone else, but it was Roy who told it to me), and I remember him saying, as shorthand, “kinda like the Blackhawks,” which of course was a similar international group, then out of print. Why I helped set up the meeting was the Blackhawks connection, because I knew that Dave Cockrum, with whom I was distantly acquainted, had been showing an idea over at DC to revive the Blackhawks with a number of new characters, and I thought maybe he’d be interested instead in creating these characters for Marvel as X-Men. I know my intentions, which Roy and I clearly discussed at the time, were that I would work with Dave as the writer of the new series, if Marvel liked Dave’s characters. What is less clear to me now is what happened after this lunch. I’m pretty sure that Roy did not get approval to go forward right away, which he communicated to me during my occasional follow-ups. During this period, I moved back to my native California, which meant I wasn’t talking to Roy as often, and in an even more significant move, Roy left his editorial position and was replaced by Len Wein. The next thing I heard, but I don’t remember how, was that the new X-Men was going forward and Len was now writing it. I don’t know to this day how many, if any, of the New X-Men were part of Dave’s old Blackhawk character designs, and how many were developed by Len and Dave after Marvel gave its go-ahead.

During his several-year tenure at Marvel, Mike scripted various series, including a city-bound Ka-Zar and Zabu, seen here in a Gil Kane-penciled splash for Astonishing Tales #15 (Dec. 1972). Inks by Tom Sutton. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Men Called “X” part seven

“Alienation Was What The X-Men Were All About!” LEN WEIN, Co-creator of the 1970s X-Men, Talks about Roads Taken and Not Taken Conducted & Transcribed by Jim Amash [INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Len Wein is one of those writer/editors celebrated by comic book fans for many achievements, particularly the co-creation of DC’s Swamp Thing—but also for his initial involvement in the X-Men relaunch in 1974-75. The X-Men have become ingrained in pop culture, due to strong planning on the part of their re-creators. While Len’s tenure was short and sweet—one whole issue!—he helped build the foundation for a commercial success that no one could have imagined at that time. Built on top of the foundation laid by Len are the successful careers of many creative talents, and Alter Ego is thrilled to give him that kudo now. Take a bow, Len! —Jim.]

days. The biggest problem we had was resolving the story; we couldn’t come up with an ending. We were hammering it out in the office, and I think it was Chris Claremont who suggested the idea of sort of squirting the island out into space. JA: Oh, yeah? How involved was Chris in the early plotting? WEIN: That was as involved as he was. JA: But he sat in on the plot sessions, didn’t he? WEIN: As did everyone else in the office, since we were plotting there. Chris was my assistant, and since I was editor-in-chief, his desk was about fifteen feet from my desk. He sort of basically heard what we were discussing, but he wasn’t really sitting in on the meetings. JA: When you and Dave talked out the plot, did you go and type it up for him? WEIN: I’m not sure, but I believe so. Back in those days, I worked in several ways. I typed plots for various people, and I wrote some down in longhand and dictated them to the artists. I don’t remember which way Dave and I worked, or if we just sat down together and he took notes.

JIM AMASH: How did you get involved with The X-Men? LEN WEIN: Sort of diagonally. It was more by accident than anything else. There were rumors of reviving the X-Men series at Marvel for a number of years. Roy Thomas had the idea of reviving them as a group of international heroes, like the Blackhawks. At one point, Mike Friedrich was supposed to be the writer, but he’d left Marvel by the time the series was actually greenlighted, and I got the job, though I don’t exactly remember the reasons why. I was glad to take it. JA: You became editor-in-chief at Marvel around the same time, didn’t you? WEIN: Yes. JA: Considering The X-Men’s past history, there wasn’t a whole lot expected from the relaunch, was there? After all, The X-Men weren’t the Fantastic Four. WEIN: Exactly. At that point in time, I was also writing several other major titles at Marvel, so this wasn’t like doing the Fantastic Four. Who knew what The X-Men would grow into? It was just another book. It was no different to me than “Brother Voodoo” or a couple of other new series that I was involved in. The special thing to me was that I’d be working with Dave Cockrum. JA: I can understand that. Tell me how you and Dave plotted stories together. WEIN: We went into a room, sat down, and worked it all out. We worked out most of Giant-size X-Men #1 in the office, over several

JA: Whose idea was it to keep Cyclops as the team leader? WEIN: Oh, I think both of us agreed on that at the beginning. We wanted to keep some connection to the old XMen, and Cyclops had been the leader of The X-Men. But we basically had the understanding that most of the group would be new characters and not the old team. JA: Even though Jean was dating Cyclops, you decided to get rid of her. Why? WEIN: For variety’s sake and to open new possibilities. But I had planned to bring her back eventually. JA: Dave told me that you got rid of her because she was a wimpy character and you guys hadn’t decided what to do with her. WEIN: That was part of it. We wanted to find a way to make her interesting. It also opened romantic possibilities for Scott, since she wouldn’t be around. It was worth our time not to have her there. JA: You had created Wolverine before this series got started. Tell me about that.

Len Wein JA: As a reader at the time Giantsize X-Men #1 came out, I didn’t really have the feeling that all these characters were teenagers, except maybe for Colossus. I’m wondering, while plotting the first story, did the youthful aspect of the characters change any?

WEIN: Roy suggested the name and wanted a Canadian in that role. He also wanted to see how I’d write a Canadian accent, because I’d been doing Jamaican accents in “Brother Voodoo,” and Roy always said he couldn’t write accents to save his life. So he said, “Okay, you’re doing good accents in ‘Brother Voodoo,’ so give Wolverine a Canadian accent.”

WEIN: Not at all. I always thought of them as teenagers and wrote them that way. They were in their late teens, and given what The X-Men were, which was a group of young students being trained by Professor X, I was working with that given.

JA: John Romita designed the original costume... WEIN: Yes, while I stood looking over his shoulder. John and I were creating costumes about once a week, in his office. I can’t remember all the characters we designed that way. The Constrictor was done that way, Brother Voodoo... oh, I can’t remember how many characters were done that way.

JA: So, had you stayed on the book, Wolverine might have been a teenager, right? WEIN: You know, I can’t answer that question. If I’d stayed on that book, a thousand things might have changed. Dave might have come to me as he did to Chris and said, “You know, I think Wolverine’s a lot older, and I think he looks like this.” I might have said, “I think that’s cool, so let’s do it.” Who knows what I would have done?

JA: Was Wolverine designed to be a throwaway villain? WEIN: Not at all. Since he had to be a Canadian and there were discussions about bringing back The X-Men, I made him a mutant so he’d fit in with the new group. I figured whoever wound up writing the new X-Men book would have a new Canadian character if they wanted to use him. I certainly didn’t realize it’d be me writing the book. [laughs]

WEIN: Yeah! At the time, it was just another book. I had no idea what it was going to turn into.

JA: Well, it seems to have worked out all right. You originally conceived Wolverine to be a teenager, didn’t you?

JA: Thunderbolt was designed to die.

WEIN: Yes. The idea at that point was that all The X-Men were going to be teenagers. We even de-aged Banshee some, so that he’d be younger.

JA: What was the significance of doing that so quickly?

JA: But as soon as Wolverine’s in the X-Men book, he’s not a teenager. WEIN: True... and they changed him a lot, but I absolutely have no problem with any of the changes that were made. JA: Speaking of changes, Dave Cockrum told me you originally wanted to make Nightcrawler a bitter monster. WEIN: Sure, because it seemed appropriate for the character. But Dave and Chris changed him into a more lighthearted character, accepting of who he was, and I think that was a fine idea. JA: I’ve asked this question of Dave and Chris and would like to get your take on it. In your mind, how old was Professor X? WEIN: In his fifties. JA: Dave Cockrum’s wife Paty thought that Professor X was a bit of a villain because he’d recruit teenagers and put them in harm’s way. I’d like to know what you think of that. WEIN: I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning that aspect, and I never thought Professor X was a villain at all. He is what he is... a great defender and supporter of the mutant community. I never gave any thought before to the aspect Paty mentioned before. I think she’s wrong.

WEIN: Yes, absolutely.

WEIN: The significance was to give you a book where you didn’t know what’s going to happen next. The idea was that no one had ever created a brand new super-hero and then knocked him off in the second story. Our theory was that this told the audience, “Don’t get too complacent. In this book, anything can happen. We can knock off the heroes at any time, and if we can do that, we can do anything.” JA: I once read in an interview that you disagreed with the origin Chris and Dave came up with for Storm. WEIN: Oh, absolutely! That’s because they stole it from Modesty Blaise... verbatim! Of course I disagree with it... it’s plagiarism! [laughs] What I had in mind was what you saw in the very first story. The only origin that matters is, “Hey! I was born different!” My origin was the origin you first saw: she was born with powers and manifested them living somewhere in an African village and was mistaken for a god. She was the goddess of this area. You don’t need more than that. I’ve always resented Chris’ stealing Modesty Blaise’s origin so blatantly. JA: Well, I’ve seen Alan Moore do a similar thing.... WEIN: Yeah, like stealing from an episode of The Outer Limits for the climax of The Watchmen. As the editor, I fought him from the beginning of that. The problem was that I wasn’t the editor of the last five issues of The Watchmen, and the editor who replaced me let him get away with that. I wouldn’t have let him do that.

“Alienation Was What The X-Men Were All About!” I never thought that Brood story Chris did in X-Men... the one where Kitty was alone with the alien... was a good idea. It came straight from Alien. JA: Hey! Even Jack Kirby ripped off ideas from movies, like the King Kong story he did in Kamandi. But it was fun, and Jack could get away with things like that. WEIN: Jack could get away with things like that because it was a lot later in the game. And Jack could put a new spin on what he did. Chris didn’t spin it: he merely copied it! [laughs] JA: You later went to DC and with Marv Wolfman re-created The Teen Titans. Did any unused ideas for X-Men make their way into that series? WEIN: Absolutely none whatsoever. I was working with different creators, who had their own ideas. JA: Even though you were editor-in-chief, did you have to have approval for using new characters? WEIN: I don’t think so. I ran them by Roy Thomas, but I didn’t need official approval. Things were different in those days as compared to now. If we’d have waited for approvals on everything, we’d had never gotten anything done. There was a day that I’ve never forgotten when the business guys from upstairs came down and said, “Our profits are down this quarter. You need to add four more books to the line in order to make more money.” That was 10:30 in the morning, and at 12:00 the editorial staff and I went out to lunch, and when we came back from lunch we had four new books. I called four writers and four pencilers, gave them the assignments, and the books were in the works by four in the afternoon. Now, I’m doing a project for DC that’ll be out in March, which will be three years from the day I first pitched it. It took a year to get it approved. It’s a different world today.

said, “That was a big mistake on my part.” JA: There are no real creator credits on The X-Men. Does it bother you that you’re not attached to it in that way? WEIN: Everybody knows I helped start it. There are places where the credit has appeared. The X-Men/Teen Titans crossover credited Dave and myself with creating the new X-Men. There are little places, like some toys and such, where I’ve gotten credit with Herb Trimpe for creating Wolverine. So the credit does get around. JA: I know you didn’t have much of a chance to explore the characters, but was there a character you identified with right off the bat? WEIN: Oh, wow! 25 years later, it’s hard to say, but I really did identify with Colossus. And I liked Wolverine. Storm was up there, too. While I liked Nightcrawler, I wasn’t emotionally connected to him. I’m a guy who likes to write about heroes, and there’s something about Colossus that makes him the epitome of a hero. He automatically became the character I become closest to. JA: And he was supposed to be the star of the book. WEIN: He certainly was designed, visually, to be that way. I can’t really tell what would have happened, had I stayed with the book. JA: Were team books something that really interested you? WEIN: Yes. I always liked writing team books. It makes it easier right up front in terms of what to do with the characters. The character interaction gets you one step ahead of the game because you have to automatically address that. You’re not starting from square one in a team book... you’re starting from square two. JA: More than any other team book, the X-Men characters are about alienation from society. You see it in other comics, but not usually to this extent—DC’s Doom Patrol being an exception.

JA: Sure is. Why did you leave The XMen so soon? WEIN: I was editor-in-chief and overseeing 54 books a month. It was an overwhelming, daunting task and I realized very quickly, that I couldn’t write more than one book a month. The other book I was writing was The Hulk, who is my all-time favorite Marvel character. When push came to shove, I stayed with the book I loved. JA: Did you ever regret leaving The X-Men? WEIN: All things considered: tremendously! I didn’t really regret it until the day Chris bought a plane with X-Men money, back in the heyday of big sales. That was the day I

WEIN: Alienation was what The XMen were all about. I’d have played that up because it’s the logical extension of what the book was about. JA: A lot of teenagers, at some point in their lives, feel a certain alienation from the world. Did the thought of reader identification enter your mind while re-creating The X-Men? WEIN: I never think about what the audience is going to do.... ever! I did that early in my career and realized it was a terrible mistake, so I stopped doing it. I write the stories that are the best stories to write and hope the audience finds them and deals with them.

The Men Called “X” part eight

“We Kicked the Whole Thing Around a Lot!” DAVE COCKRUM Talks about His Co-creation of the New X-Men in 1974-75 Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Jim Amash [INTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Dave Cockrum was the visual architect of the new XMen series that Marvel Comics launched in 1975. His superior ability to design costumes, coupled with his effective draftsmanship, lent the freshness and convincing reality necessary to the new series’ success. While others such as Chris Claremont and John Byrne were extremely important creators on this series, much of the early impact of The X-Men relied on Dave’s contributions. The current worldwide popularity of The X-Men has its roots in the foundation he helped establish. With that in mind, this interview examines those times from Dave’s point of view as an artist. —Jim.] JIM AMASH: You left DC Comics, where you were doing the “Legion Of Super-heroes” feature in Superboy, for Marvel Comics. What did you start on at Marvel? DAVE COCKRUM: The first thing I did at Marvel was a “Gulliver of Mars” story for a black-&-white magazine. I remember John Romita making me fix a lot of stuff on that story. I wasn’t acclimated with the Marvel style yet... you know, all their characters had these big bodies and little heads, and I was drawing figures with natural proportions. JA: This was in 1973. The new X-Men series started in 1975. What were you doing for those two years? COCKRUM: I penciled two issues of Giant-size Avengers and inked six issues of the regular Avengers comic, in groups of three. I think there were five pencilers on those six issues. One issue had an old George Tuska “Captain America” segment that they just spliced in. Don Heck, Rich Buckler, Bob Brown, and—I believe there was another artist, whose name I can’t remember, who penciled those issues. I might as well have been classified as a penciler, because they told me to “make them all look alike.” In order to make George Tuska’s work look like the others, I had to do a lot of re-penciling. Everything was there; it was just that it was straightforward Tuska art, and they wanted a uniform look to that issue. Basically, I used Dick Giordano’s style over Neal Adams to make the artists all look alike. JA: I don’t suppose you made any Xeroxes of the pencils? COCKRUM: I used to Xerox a lot of the pencils to stories I did, but somewhere along the line I lost most of them. I do have a few things, including an unpublished fill-in story I did for X-Men. In this story, Xavier goes to visit FBI agent Fred Duncan and they reminisce about the career of The X-Men. My tour of duty on The X-Men was covered in one panel, which annoyed the hell out of me. Roger Stern wrote this script and really whizzed past what I’d done on the series. I don’t know

“Dave ‘X-Man’ Cockrum,” they called him in the 1975 Mighty Marvel Comic Convention program book (they couldn’t come up with an adjective starting with a “d”?!)—plus what Dave calls “a revamped version of X-Men head circle.” [Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Cyclops, Marvel Girl/Phoenix, Colossus, and Banshee TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

why the story wasn’t used. Maybe because it’s a very quiet story; it’s just two guys reminiscing. There are a lot of flashback panels, and you do see action shots, but it’s basically not the sort of story they usually do in XMen. Maybe it’ll turn up one day in an annual or something. I don’t know when I drew it... maybe ten or fifteen years ago. JA: Tell me how your involvement with The X-Men began. COCKRUM: Roy Thomas was editor-in-chief, and I’d been badgering him to draw a series. Roy liked my stuff, and at one point I’d shown him some of the character designs for villains that I had done for “The Legion of Super-heroes,” which included a version of a character I named Wolverine. Apparently, this was what gave Roy the idea to ask Len Wein to create a character called Wolverine. When the “powers-

“We Kicked the Whole Thing Around a Lot!”

JA: Did the fact that you were a good costume designer, as well as a good artist, help you get this series? COCKRUM: It may have. Roy knew about my “Legion” work, though Wildfire was the only character of mine that made it into that series. I had created Nightcrawler (in a yellow-and-black costume instead of the familiar red-and-black) for the Legion, but editor Murray Boltinoff was very conservative and didn’t want to do anything to offend his readers. I guess Chameleon Boy must have been introduced into the Legion before Murray handled the feature, or he might not have gotten in, either. He thought Nightcrawler was too strange-looking. I don’t know why he didn’t go for Typhoon, because he at least was fairly normal-looking. At least Wildfire made it into the series. [EDITOR’S NOTE: At this point Jim asks Dave about how The Black Cat “metamorphosed” into Storm. Since Dave talks about that, in similar words, in the 2000 convention panel a few pages back, we’ll skip ahead to his other comments on the creation of Storm. —Roy.]

The splash of the never-published fill-in X-Men issue drawn circa 1990, inked by Joe Rubinstein and scripted by Roger Stern; repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, which was returned to Dave while this issue of A/E was in the works. Thanks to Marvel returns editor Wilson Ramos, Jr., for sending A/E copies, and to Tom Brevoort. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

that-be” decided to revive The X-Men, Roy thought of me and gave me a chance. With the character design of Wolverine, I also had a drawing of his twin sister Belladonna. They both wore black, and he had sort of “tufty” hair and big sideburns and fangs. She wore a black costume that showed a lot of skin, and she carried a whip. There were a couple of other characters, like Manta and Sidewinder. Roy liked my ideas. JA: When you started on the series, Mike Friedrich was involved. COCKRUM: Right. He was going to be the writer. Roy, Mike, and I went to lunch and had a general planning meeting about how to approach the series. I think it was at that point that I started drawing up new characters, one of which was The Black Cat... not the one I designed later for Spider-Man. But then the project was put on hold, and when we got back to it, Mike was no longer involved and Len Wein was asked to write the series. Also, by this time, other cat characters, like Tigra, had popped up, so I decided to do something else with The Black Cat.

This 1972 drawing by Dave Cockrum shows some of the “character designs for villains I had done for ‘The Legion of Super-heroes.’" Guess which one of ’em Dave named ‘Wolverine’! Contrary to what Dave remembers in this interview, Roy T. doesn’t recall having any memory of this character or even his name when he asked Len Wein to develop a Wolverine in The Incredible Hulk #180-181, but it might have been there in his subconscious. [©2003 Dave Cockrum.]

Dave Cockrum

maybe a couple other guys. I was getting a little uncomfortable as the session went along, and finally said, “I’m not sure I like this plot very much.” Len said, “God, I’m glad somebody said that!” So we tossed it out and started over. I was an active co-plotter with Len while we worked together. The original intention was to remake the team. But we didn’t follow the original idea, which was to have an international team whose countries would be glad to import the comic books. That’s not what happened. [NOTE: See the 2000 X-Men panel for more on this.] JA: Why didn’t you follow the original plan? COCKRUM: I’m not sure they made it clear to us that that’s what we were supposed to be doing. They may have and maybe I’ve just forgotten, but it doesn’t seem like to me they did. Roy said something at one point about “mutant Blackhawks.” They’d live on an island and go out like the Blackhawks did, as an international group. That fell by the wayside, too, because they wound up being based at Xavier’s mansion. JA: With all the changes going on, it seems natural that things would evolve. So why did you keep Cyclops?

Dave’s says this was the “cover for the 1997 Wonderfest Toy & Model Show. A little wish fulfillment?” Note a model of the movie robot Gort on a shelf in the background—Dave’s inspiration for Cyclops’ new visor. [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Nightcrawler, The Thing, Storm TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Batman TM & ©2003 DC Comics.]

COCKRUM: He was meant to be the leader of the group and was a very strong character. He was always a straight arrow. I don’t remember if it was Roy or Len who suggested that I modify his costume. The feeling was, if he’s going to be the leader, that he needed to be more dynamic-looking. So I redesigned his visor and his boots. You remember the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still? I loved Gort, the robot character, who wore a visor. It’d open up and you’d see a little light dancing in there. That’s the sort of effect I wanted to use on Cyclops. I gave him a bigger visor so I could achieve that effect. JA: And it was very, very effective. How long did you deal with Len before he left the series?

COCKRUM: Storm’s face came from Quetzal, another unused Legion character I had created. I modeled Quetzal on my cat Sheba. I wound up using that face on The Black Cat, and so it naturally turned up on Storm. I gave Storm the white hair so she’d look exotic. I wanted her to be very powerful, beautiful, and exotic. I’m surprised we didn’t get shot down on the very powerful business, because most of Marvel’s female characters were not like that. Then again, Jim Shooter wasn’t in charge at that time, so nobody said much about it. Shooter once told me that women were in comics stories in order to be rescued. Heroines included. [laughs] I’m sorry, but that’s not how I perceive women. JA: How long a lapse was there between the time you started working on this series with Mike Friedrich and when Len Wein came on board? COCKRUM: I don’t really remember. It was probably several months. JA: When it came time to do the series, how much plotting did you do with Len? COCKRUM: We kicked the whole thing around a lot. As a matter of fact, we originally came up with a different plot than what was used in Giantsize X-Men #1. There were several guys sitting around with Len and me. I’m pretty sure Scott Edelman and Chris Claremont were there, and

[Left:] Dave’s drawing of “Nightcrawler as he was offered to DC for the Legion of Super-heroes.” [Right:] a sketch of “the ‘Legion’ Nightcrawler with ‘X’ added.” But the hero became a Marvel mutant instead of a DC Legionnaire. [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Nightcrawler TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“We Kicked the Whole Thing Around a Lot!”

When Marvel Girl changed code-names, Dave submitted various designs for Phoenix’s costume; all except the obviously darker one he calls his “White Phoenix” outfits, because they were to be white, trimmed in yellow. The “white” idea was rejected by editor-in-chief Archie Goodwin. The one at top left was a 2001 commission for X-World Comics. The darker design, likewise turned down, was green and black, trimmed in yellow, and is far closer to the colors used in the X-Men comic. [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Phoenix TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Dave Cockrum

COCKRUM: We worked well together. We were friends before that; Len was one of the earliest friends I made in the business. It was enjoyable working with him.

Jean’s new look on Farrah Fawcett. I used her hair style and a little of her face. I liked her look on Charley’s Angels, so I borrowed bits of her here and there.

Chris scripted issues #94 and 95 over Len’s plots. He also sat in on the plotting. Originally, those two issues were going to be Giant-size X-Men #2, but they decided to go back to the original series numbering. At that point, Len was editor-inchief and he was very busy. I think he had some health problems at the time, too. So he no longer had the time to devote to The X-Men. That’s how it passed to Claremont.

JA: Nightcrawler was supposed to be more of a real demon than he turned out to be? COCKRUM: My original idea for him was created when I was a fan. He was supposed to be a demon who screwed up on a mission from Hell. Instead of going back and facing punishment, he stayed on the mortal plane and became a sidekick to a crime-fighter I called The Intruder. Nightcrawler was animalistic; he’d run head first down the sides of buildings and bay at the moon. He had a nasty sense of humor. I recently mentioned something about this on an Internet forum, saying that he’d have probably thought a truck full of dead babies was funny. I got considerable flack for that remark.

JA: Was Claremont doing editorial work? I was wondering why he was sitting in on the original plot sessions. COCKRUM: I’m not sure what he was doing at the time, but he did work in the office. I don’t believe I had met him before he sat in on the plotting sessions. He was a natural choice to take over because he had sat in with us kicking ideas around, and he was a very good storyteller, even then.

By the time I actually got to use Nightcrawler, Jack JA: You decided to get rid of Kirby had come up with Jean Grey, along with the rest Etrigan, The Demon, so I of the original group, even Dave writes: “This was my angry reaction to Shooter’s order that Phoenix should die. dropped Nightcrawler’s I later finished it and sold it, but I didn’t get a Xerox of the inked version.” though she was still romantidemon aspect entirely. When [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum.] cally interested in Cyclops, and I offered him to Murray vice versa. Boltinoff as a Legionnaire, he was an alien from another dimension and his people were the source COCKRUM: Yes, but we intended for her to come back, because Chris of the ancient legends of demons. They’d occasionally cross dimensions set up that whole situation with Jean sharing an apartment with Misty and scare the hell out of people. His name then was Balshazaar. He was Knight. I’m not sure that the idea of turning her into the Phoenix was maybe slightly nicer than my demon version, but not by much. the initial idea. We kicked around a lot of ideas as to what to do with her. Marvel Girl... what a dumb name. We needed to do something to beef her up.

JA: Why was the decision made to go a different route with Nightcrawler in X-Men?

JA: So who came up with the idea of turning her into the Phoenix?

COCKRUM: I just thought the character up with very little background, except for what he could do. He could climb up and down walls and ceilings like Spider-Man, he could teleport himself in a fiery blast of brimstone, and he could disappear into shadows. He was very athletic. They’ve monkeyed with his powers since then, but my original write-up on him said that he could do a standing broad jump of thirty feet and a high jump of nearly the same. Now, it’s like he can do a sevenfoot jump. I used to show him bounding through the air like a maniac. But basically, I just created the visual look and the powers. Len came up with the whole German persona.

COCKRUM: I’m pretty sure that was mine. I have an old sketch book of characters and there’s a male Phoenix in there. He had a red costume and sort of looked like Dark Phoenix—although that character was John Byrne’s design, not mine. I drew up several costume designs for Phoenix and the one I liked best was white with gold boots and gloves; I used it later in one panel in X-Men #155, -6, or -7, when I had Kitty Pryde playing with the Shi’ar costume machine. But by the time we got to this point, Archie Goodwin was editor-in-chief, and he absolutely flat vetoed that costume. He said, “You’ll be able to read the back side of the page through her costume.” With the lousy newsprint we used in those days, he was probably right. I finally came up with a green version—her colors, anyway—and he okayed that. Once we decided on her becoming The Phoenix, Chris got the idea of killing Marvel Girl off and reviving herself as The Phoenix. I based

One thing I wanted to establish was that Nightmare—from Dr. Strange—was his father. They wouldn’t let me go with that. They said, “No, he wouldn’t be a mutant then.” I said, “So what?” JA: I like that idea. Who vetoed it?

“We Kicked the Whole Thing Around a Lot!”

JA: So Roy remembered that you had the original idea of the Wolverine character when he asked Len to create that character? COCKRUM: Yes. JA: Was that Wolverine similar to your original idea? COCKRUM: That’s hard to say. Visually, they’re somewhat different. Both versions were animalistic, though Logan is both nastier and yet more civilized than mine was. [NOTE: Here Jim and Dave discuss the origin of Wolverine’s claws coming from his body, rather than from his gloves, in terms much as on the 2000 X-Men panel. —Roy.] JA: Don’t you think those claws really helped define his character? COCKRUM: Oh, yes. All of a sudden, this guy’s got adamantium claws coming out of his hands and then, the whole idea of having his entire skeleton laced with adamantium came up. That was scary and neat. Actually, there was a Captain America novel... was it The Great Gold Steal?... where the writer [Ted White] had the idea that Captain America’s skeleton was laced with steel. We may have had that idea residually, when we came to Wolverine. I don’t know. I know they didn’t use that gimmick in Cap’s comics, though. JA: Who had the idea of lacing his skeleton with adamantium?

COCKRUM: It was Roy. I was on a panel with him at a convention a couple of years ago and the subject came up. I told the audience what I had wanted to do and Roy said, “That’s neat. Why didn’t you do that?” I said, “Because you said we couldn’t.” That got a terrific laugh from the audience. JA: Well, since this is Roy’s magazine, let’s give him the blame! [mutual laughter] It was your idea to make Nightcrawler a swashbuckling hero, wasn’t it? COCKRUM: Yes, it was. Len wanted to turn him into another bitter monster. I said, “Len! Marvel’s up to it’s earlobes in bitter monsters. We don’t need another one.” I think we would have probably had a big fight about that if Len had stayed on. But Chris came on board and he went right along with it. I had recently just taken up fencing and was walking around with an invisible sword in my hand all the time. Nightcrawler represented me in The X-Men, and that was the direction I wanted him to go to. I was living The X-Men’s adventures vicariously through Nightcrawler. I like to think that if I was blue and athletic as hell, I’d have acted the same way Nightcrawler did. JA: A lot of creators identify with their creations. Whose idea was it to bring Wolverine into the series? COCKRUM: That was a suggestion from the powers-that-be, since Wolverine came from Canada. I think Roy had that in mind when he asked Len to create the character.

COCKRUM: That was Chris’ idea. It just made sense to do that. We could have made the claws operate by mechanisms in his arms, but that didn’t seem like a good idea.

As far as I was concerned, in the early days, Wolverine was just a psycho and I didn’t like him very much. I did a lot with giving him nasty facial expressions, sneering at people and looking ferocious as much as possible. When we finally took his mask off and gave him a face, I tried to give him a look of insanity on his face. I don’t know if I succeeded, but that was what I was after. I didn’t think he was stable, and he wasn’t, then. It wasn’t until Chris and Byrne worked on him that they really gave him some character. I came to like him, then. When Wolverine wasn’t in his fighting costume, I dressed him up in western clothes. He wore a jeans jacket, jeans, and western boots. Later on, I gave him a cowboy hat, but the problem with that was that you couldn’t see his hair. He was not a tie-wearing person. Although I did draw him like that one time, just for fun. I have a drawing of him, Storm, Cyclops, Jean, and Nightcrawler all dressed to the nines in evening wear. The logo at the top was: “X-Men! Danger is our business!” I was feeling real James Bondish when I did that piece. [laughs] JA: John Romita designed the original costume. Were you told to keep that design, or did you just decide that you liked it? COCKRUM: I used it and it never occurred to me to change it. I guess I could have. JA: You did subtly change the mask a little.

Dave Cockrum COCKRUM: Well, it’s largely an artistic thing. The person and the powers sometimes suggest the costume. I’m currently working on a new design for Avatar of The Futurians. He had a swashbuckling type of costume in my original series, but I’ve kind of decided that’s not the sort of thing he’d wear. I’m doing something a little more sedate, a bit more elegant and dressy, and trying to update the costume a bit. Some people say my costumes are “retro.” I hate that. The word “retro”makes me grind my jaws and spit. so I’m reworking some of my Futurians concepts. JA: Yeah, but good design is still good design. Colossus was supposed to be the star of the book, but it didn’t work out that way. He had a good costume and a personality to match. COCKRUM: Yes, and it was too bad because he’s such a good character. Len came up with the Russian background, but I had sort of visualized him that way anyway, so we agreed on the idea. He was a simple peasant guy. Later on, I had Kitty Pride give Ilyana [Peter’s sister] a tour of the Xmansion. When they went into Peter’s room, aside from the huge barbells and stuff, there was an easel in the corner with art equipment around it. That’s when I planted the idea that Peter was an artist. Chris wrote in the copy that Peter had the

COCKRUM: Yes. Gil Kane drew it wrong at some point and we thought, “Gee, he looks sort of like Batman. That’s kind of neat.” So we kept that look. JA: Gil drew the cover to Giant-size X-Men #1. Why didn’t you draw that cover? COCKRUM: They didn’t ask me to. I don’t think they thought I was cover-capable until issue 98, which I think is my first cover. On Giant-size Gil drew the new guys and I inked it, and penciled and inked the ghost images of the old team. JA: Right at the end of your first run, you did change Wolverine’s costume just a little. COCKRUM: Right. We wanted to change his costume, and that started a whole new “go-around” with Stan Lee. Stan insisted on approving Wolverine’s costume. I don’t know how many Wolverine costumes I drew in order to get one approved. I have one drawing where I took a shot of Red Sonja’s body by Frank Thorne and attached my Wolverine head on it. There’s a word balloon that says, “I’m going to get you for this, Cockrum!” In that story, in X-Men #107, Wolverine had his costume blown off by some kind of a blast, and he grabs Fang, an Imperial Guard, knocks him out and steals his costume. Actually, I don’t think it would have bothered Wolverine to run around stark naked, but it’d have bothered the Comics Code. I didn’t like his old costume. The new one was brown and orange with claws around the neck and the tops of the gloves and boots. I had intended for that to be Wolverine’s permanent full-time costume. As soon as Byrne came in, though, he junked the new costume. He didn’t want to have to draw all those claws. Shortly thereafter, he came up with a new costume that was practically the old one, but without the claws. JA: You obviously loved doing costume designs. Did the personality of the characters dictate the kind of costumes you designed?

Here, apparently, is a different drawing by Dave with Storm’s head on Red Sonja’s bod, done for the program book of the 1976 Red Sonja Convention—yep, youngsters, there actually was one, with Sonja co-creator Roy Thomas and “Sonjartist” Frank Thorne as guests of honor. [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Storm TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Red Sonja TM & ©2003 Red Sonja Properties, Inc.]

“We Kicked the Whole Thing Around a Lot!”

even suggested it, but when I look back, I think, “What a stupid move.” He was a great-looking character and I love the costume to this day. But we presented him as an obnoxious loudmouth, and Wolverine was much better at that. Did we need two obnoxious loudmouths? Three, if we’d kept Sunfire around. Actually, we could have come up with some nice conflicts had we kept Thunderbird around. There weren’t too many Native Indian heroes, and the ones who were around all wore buckskins. I got to where I hated that... barechested Indians wearing buckskins, being super-heroes. That’s why we gave him primary colors. JA: Another problem with him was that his powers weren’t any different than the other team members. COCKRUM: Yep. Thunderbird was fast and strong and a tracker... all of which Wolverine could do. JA: One thing I liked about Banshee was that he had the most normal-looking face of all the group members. And except for Wolverine, he was the oldest of the group. COCKRUM: That’s exactly why I wanted to keep him. He had the only normal-looking face in the entire group. And yes, he was older than the rest; he was no teenager. Of course, I don’t really think I drew most of them looking like teenagers. One thing that’s important is that the artist must know the personalities of the characters he draws. This enables him to give the right facial expressions and mannerisms to the individual characters.

Two more pages from that 1990s unused X-Men fill-in: Dave’s pencils for one page, and the inked version of another. Dave says he’s “always found a bit of irony about this story,” which contains a fair amount of flashback: “It zips past my run on the book in one panel.” Script by Roger Stern, inks by Joe Rubinstein. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

soul of a poet, but didn’t know how to express it. I understand that he later left The X-Men and made a living as an artist. JA: Didn’t Colossus have a brother in the KGB? How could the KGB have a man in their employ and not know that his brother had all that power? COCKRUM: That’s a good question. Especially since the villagers all knew about it. In the first story, he saves his little sister from a runaway tractor and smashes the hell out of it and nobody seemed surprised. JA: Banshee was a character from the old series, but you kept him in there. COCKRUM: We actually intended to lose Banshee, but I liked him, so I suggested we keep him. That first story in Giant-size X-Men #1 was supposed be a sort of entrance exam for the new members. Thunderbird was created to flunk out. Banshee was supposed to flunk, too. We figured Sunfire would flunk out because he couldn’t get along with anybody. I liked Thunderbird and said, “Let’s keep him.” Then we promptly killed him off. That was unfortunate. I went along with it and may have

Dave Cockrum COCKRUM: I’d say he was at least in his thirties. Actually, when you get down to it, he has to be older than that, because he went to Israel shortly after World War II, as a young adult. World War II is more recent in Marvel time than it is in real life, but still, it’s back there a ways. So maybe that makes Professor X much older than he looks. JA: You said Jean’s new look was partly based on Farrah Fawcett. Are any of the other characters based on real people?

Dave drew these (color) drawings as gifts for Tony Isabella, Bob Ingersoll, and Roger Price “for their help at 1999 MidOhio Con medical emergency.” [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Nightcrawler TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

COCKRUM: No. It’s funny, but I’m not very good at doing real likenesses. I can create a face and draw the same face every time, but doing real likenesses eludes me. I don’t know what the hell the difference is.

JA: Well, when you create a character, you develop more of a personal attachment to them because they came from inside of your imagination. Tell me about the working relationship between Chris Claremont and yourself. COCKRUM: Chris and I got along pretty well. We plotted together, and I’d go home and draw the story from my notes. If I had any questions, I’d call him up and we’d talk. I remember one particular job that was giving me a hell of a lot of trouble and it seemed to take forever to get it done. I finally finished it up one night, about four in the morning, and I called Chris up and said, “I’m done,” and hung up. JA: [laughs] I’m sure he was pleased about that. You say you took notes when you plotted? COCKRUM: Yes. On my first run on the book, I took notes and drew the stories from them. On my second run on the book, Chris took notes, went home and typed them up and sent them to me. Therefore, there were more of my contributions in the first run than in the second run. JA: How extensive were your plot notes during that first run?

JA: You kept Professor X, and made him more human in terms of his feelings. He’s a slightly softer, more likable character in the relaunch. COCKRUM: It’s funny, but my wife Paty hates him. She thinks he’s the worst villain in the book because he took children, warped their minds, and put them in harm’s way... stuff like that. From that point of view, maybe she’s right. But Batman’s guilty of the same thing. Paty also believes Magneto has the correct viewpoint: that humans and mutants can’t happily exist together, and Xavier’s dream is pie in the sky. Personally, I always felt benign towards Professor X, but yeah, he has done questionable things. JA: In your mind, did you have a certain age for Professor X?

COCKRUM: It was mainly a lot of scribbles. There was a page, sometimes two pages, of plot notes. The rest of it was left up to me in the drawing stage. The thing that used to make me crazy, though, was occasionally Chris would say, “Okay. Have four pages of fighting.” I’d say, “Oh, my God! What am I going to do here?” [laughs] I also wrote dialogue suggestions on the page borders. I did that for the first ten to fifteen years I was in the business. I’d write dialogue notes and plot explanations all over the margins. In fact, Roy used some of my dialogue suggestions in Giant-size Avengers #3. And Chris used a lot of the stuff I wrote, too. My influence shows a lot in those stories. JA: Earlier, you said that Stan Lee had to approve any costume changes. It makes me curious as to the amount of editorial interference you might have had. [Dave Cockrum Continued on p. 44.]

The WOMen Called “X” part eight-a ^

“Paty”––It Rhymes With “Katy”! Sidebar by Roy Thomas

I remember Paty—Dave Cockrum’s wondrous wife—telling me back in the 1970s how she adapted her original name “Patty” into its present form after a friend left out a “t” once when writing it. Guess she just liked the way it looked—and, the ramshackle rules of English being what they are, the new version of the name wound up being pronounced with a long “a,” thus giving her a fairly unique cognomen. It fits her. As Paty Greer (her name from her first marriage), she used to write letters to Marvel—maybe she even sent in some sketches with them, for she’s a talented artist. At any rate, sometime during my two-year tenure as Marvel’s editor-in-chief, and for some time thereafter, she wound up working on staff, and doing some artwork, as well. For instance, in 1973 Bill Everett inked her pencils for the third issue of The Claws of the Cat.

Paty, as seen in the Mighty Marvel Comic Convention program book—and a drawing she did especially for FOOM #10 in ’75. Key: The Angel = staff artist Duffy Vohland; The Beast = staffer Scott Edelman; Iceman = editor Marv Wolfman; Cyclops = editor-in-chief (and X-Men writer) Len Wein; Marvel Girl = Paty; Prof. X = Stan Lee. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

And you could’ve knocked me over with one of The Angel’s feathers when, one bright day in 1974, she surprised me in my office at Marvel with a gift she’d made for me— what was described in the Dec. 5, 1974, issue of the Middletown [NY] Times Herald Record as “a complex chess set.” As Hunter Thompson would say: Indeed.

It was a chess set, and then some—with each piece, pawns and all, hand-carved in the shape of a different Marvel character. Heroes on one side, villains on the other. Paty has always had a thing for The Vision (the Silver Age version John Buscema and I introduced in The Avengers #57 in 1968), and back then she followed his longtime and eventually altar-bound romance with The Scarlet Witch—shall we say, closely! So she made Vizh and Wanda the 8"-high king and queen of the “good guys” side. They were counterbalanced by Mephisto and The Enchantress for the “bad guys.”

And nothing has. Nearly three decades later, that exquisite, beautiful chess set which has always meant so much to me sits behind glass in a display case in my home office in South Carolina, maybe 15 feet away from me as I type these words—and once, when I owned a rug with a chessboard design, I even set all 32 pieces up on it, in their proper squares, and played a game with it. Facing each other were the afore[Paty continued on next page.]

“I worked on and off for more than two years” on that chess set, she recalled for the newspaper, while (as described by the reporter) she picked up “a softly hued statuette resembling the 32 pieces she made for the ceramic set, all hand carved.” “It was a surprise,” she continued, referring to the moment when she presented the quite sizable, multi-part gift to me. “And he was surprised!” Paty doesn’t have to rely on memory for that remark; she recorded the moment on audiotape, and still has it—she even sent me a copy! As for yours truly, I eventually transported the set back to my apartment as gingerly as I could, since I didn’t want anything to happen to any of the pieces. “A chess set, and then some.” Photo by Dann Thomas.

Dave Cockrum

[Paty continued from preceding page.] mentioned kings and queens and their colorful entourages. The Black Knight and Conan the Barbarian are the knights (on horseback) for one side; Loki and Arkon (the latter on reptile-back, of course) for the other. Since I’d co-created the modern-day Knight and Arkon, and had brought Conan to Marvel, Paty had obviously thought long and hard about those choices. In the 1974 newspaper article, the chess set is described as a “one-ofa-kind collector’s item” which she valued at the time at $2000. It may be worth that or probably more today... but it makes little difference. I’ve never for an instant considered selling it... nor would my wife Dann let me if I wanted to! And Paty, for her part, has elected to keep it “one-ofa-kind.” When Stan Lee, in the mid-’70s, offered to pay her to make a similar set for him, she politely turned him down. Some months back, when she sent me a cassette copy of the presentation ceremony that 1974 day in my office, she attached a note that ended: “Those were fun times—to live as well as to remember. Dave and I regale people with stories of the Marvel ‘Camelot’ all the time at conventions and personal appearances.” I know just how you feel, Paty. Those were magical days for me,

Roy with several pieces from his treasured chess set. Photo by Dann Thomas.

too... and I felt, even while living them, that they were a special time whose like we wouldn’t see again. And you’re one of the people who made them special! [Dave Cockrum continued from p. 42.] COCKRUM: There wasn’t an awful lot of it. But where some costume changes were concerned, we had to go to Stan for approval. Like on Ms. Marvel, for example, I had a battle royal with Stan. I must have designed fifty costumes. Finally, when I brought in the one that was ultimately approved. Stan said, “Why didn’t you bring me this one first? This is what I’m after... tits and ass.” [mutual laughter] But for the most part, Chris and I were left alone. JA: I’d like to ask you about a few of your inkers. Sam Grainger was the first inker on the series. What did you think of his work? COCKRUM: He had a great, professional ink line. My problem with Sam was all stylistic. If you’ve ever seen his work on, say, Charlton Comics’ “Sentinels,” you’ll notice he used that Bruce Wayne, Dick Tracy, square chin on everybody. My pencils tended to have some of that look, too, but when I’d ink it, I'd round the chins off. But Sam made it worse and it drove me crazy. He took my worst attribute and made it worse. Other than that, he was a good inker and very nice guy. I met him once at one of Shelton Drum’s comic book conventions. JA: I knew Sam pretty well. He really was a kind, decent man. I noticed he made the characters’ eyebrows heavier, too. I know he really enjoyed inking your work. Then he left the book and Frank Chiarmonte did some inking. COCKRUM: Yeah, I didn’t like his inking that much. A couple of other guys, like Dan Green and Bob Layton, inked some issues,too, and I liked their work. I was not the fastest penciler around and was always fighting to get my work in on time. If you’ll look on the cover of Giantsize X-Men #1, you’ll notice they put the year 1975 down, because they weren’t sure when I was going to be done with it. JA: If you had been fast enough, would you have preferred to ink your own pencils?

COCKRUM: Yes, and no. I might have preferred to have done it all, because then the art would have been all mine. But I was not the best inker I knew and I preferred to have others ink my work. That’s the case today, too. Rich Buckler penciled a cover—X-Men #97—and I inked it. But then I said, “If Gil Kane’s not going to do the covers, why can’t I do them?” They said “Okay,” so I started doing them, pencil and ink. I’d submit a cover rough to the editor, and once that was approved, I drew them.

“We Kicked the Whole Thing Around a Lot!”

JA: Marie Severin was doing cover roughs for some of the books, but she obviously didn’t do yours.

#107, I was burnt out from drawing all those characters. The X-Men, the Imperial Guard, the Starjammers—a real mob scene! I was tired, so I left The X-Men and took the staff job.

COCKRUM: That’s right. In fact, when I was on staff at Marvel, I used to do cover roughs for other artists. There’s a whole period when I can look at a cover and not be sure if I penciled it or not. Al Milgrom, for instance, used to take my cover roughs, put them on an artograph, blow them up, and copy them directly on the page, so it’d look like I did it, rather than him.

JA: Did you feel sad about leaving the book? COCKRUM: Yeah... they were my characters, or my kids, as I sometimes call them. I wasn’t happy to turn them over to the tender mercies of John Byrne. [laughs] JA: I imagine Chris was understanding about your leaving. COCKRUM: I don’t know how he felt. I always thought Chris was a little happy to see me go, because there were story ideas he wanted to do, and I didn’t want to do them. He wanted to do the Hellfire Club stuff early on because he was into kinky costumes and stuff. I didn’t want to do that.

JA: In fact, once you were off the series, you were still doing some of the X-Men covers. COCKRUM: By that time, I’d gone into the cover design job at Marvel, and maybe I shouldn’t say this for print, but I did them just to annoy John Byrne. In Dave, who says he generally drew even office gags on Marvel fact, I stayed on the series a cover-rough sheets, did this one circa 1979-80 “when [writer and few issues more than I had editor] Jo Duffy gave me roses for my birthday.” [Art ©2003 Dave intended for the same Cockrum; Nightcrawler TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] reason. John was the heirapparent to that book and he was panting to take it over. But every time he came to the Marvel offices, he pissed everybody off. I stayed on a little longer just to aggravate him. JA: Somewhere in your first run, you had to become aware that you had a real hit on your hands. Why do you think the fans embraced the characters the way that they did? COCKRUM: I think part of it is the sense of alienation and the fact that the world didn’t like mutants. Teenage readers can identify with that, because they all feel alienated. Chris wrote them as a family, too, albeit a contentious family at times. There were always undercurrents of varying feelings in play, as well. Wolverine was obnoxious and not very nice at times; he also had the hots for Jean. And, of course, Jean and Scott were going together, so there’s that whole triangle subplot. And we had individual friendships going on, like Wolverine and Nightcrawler. I liked that stuff, especially when they’d go out into the woods and stalk each other and Nightcrawler always lost. He wound up owing Wolverine an enormous amount of beer. One of the reasons I left the book was that they wanted to make it a monthly series and I just didn’t think I could handle it on a monthly basis. Also, after issue

My staff position at Marvel was to design covers. I wound up doing other stuff as well, like designing characters and doing advertising art. Marv Wolfman, who was editing Spider-Man, asked me to design a Black Cat character, and I came up with the design you see in the book today. I’d also do repairs to artwork; they had me repair Howie Chaykin’s’ work on the first Star Wars issue. Later, when I ran into Howie, I said, “Oh God, Howie, I’m sorry! They’re making me do this.” He thought that was funny as hell. JA: I always thought that was John Romita’s job. COCKRUM: John was doing that, too, but he had a lot of other responsibilities, as well. He was drawing the Spider-Man daily newspaper strip, for one thing. He designed all kinds of things for Marvel, like advertising art and other commercial stuff. His art was kind of the face of Marvel Comics at that time. Marie Severin did a lot of that stuff, too. JA: Did you like working on staff? COCKRUM: I certainly did, especially since it represented getting a regular paycheck every two weeks. I liked most of the people there and it was fun, until Jim Shooter took over as editor-inchief. JA: Was it a step down in income, or were you making more money on staff? COCKRUM: It was better money. Paty and I were both on staff and we were doing pretty well. It was probably the most solvent I’d been in my entire career. JA: For the sake of readers who don’t know, tell me about Paty.

COCKRUM: Paty’s my wife and she worked in the merchandising

Dave Cockrum

“I was burnt out from drawing all those characters. The X-Men, the Imperial Guard, the Starjammers—a real mob scene! I was tired, so I left The X-Men and took a staff job!” Ah, but what an artistic legacy! Here are some original Cockrum sketches of, clockwise from top left: (a) Lilandra of the Shi’ar (his “first character drawing”)... (b) her sister Deathbird (ditto) and (c) “an unused formal dress design for Deathbird as Empress of the Shi’ar”... (d) Dave’s first drawing of Hepzibah of The Starjammers (“She got a better nose later,” says Dave) and (e) and the “first character drawings of Ch’od and Raza of The Starjammers. [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; heroes TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“We Kicked the Whole Thing Around a Lot!”

department for Sol Brodsky. She designed packaging art, game and puzzle books... all kinds of things. She had huge files with clip art from all the books and designed two sets of Slurpee cups for the 7-11 stores. If she didn’t have enough art, she’d finish the art. She was Marvel’s Resident Witch, and was the only person on Marvel’s staff to get Halloween off as her one religious holiday. JA: You were on staff from about 1978 until 1981. How involved was Stan Lee with Marvel? COCKRUM: Stan was around for part of that time. He got involved with the company business, but he was really looking to make movie deals. I’ll tell you this one story about working with Stan. Marvel had licensed the Fantastic Four as a television cartoon series. The Human Torch had already been licensed out for a possible movie deal, so they couldn’t use him as one of the group. Somebody came up with the brilliant idea of replacing him with a robot and Stan asked me to design it. I thought the whole thing was really stupid, so the ideas I came up with were stupid, too. One was a lampshade on wheels, another was a trash can with a “4” on it... and God knows what else. Actually, I kind of liked the lampshade on wheels. But after a dozen or so designs, Stan said, “You know, you’re really hard to work with,” so he called up Jack Kirby and had him design the robot. JA: Why didn’t he just ask Jack in the first place? COCKRUM: I don’t know. I was there, so it was easier to ask me. I didn’t have daily contact with Stan during that time, but he was usually around. I do know one of things we wanted to with Wolverine was to establish the fact that he wasn’t human at all, but that he was a mutated Wolverine. Stan said, “No, you can’t do that. That’s disgusting!” Then he later turned around and used the same idea in Spider-Woman. Apparently, he decided that was disgusting, too, because he quickly changed her origin.

JA: Who was your official boss during this time? COCKRUM: I guess it was Marie Severin. But editors would come to me needing a cover, and hand me Xeroxes of the interiors. I’d go through them, find a good scene, draw a rough, and show it to the editor. If he approved it, I’d send it out to the artist. Marie would bring me stuff; so would John Romita. For that matter, sometimes Sol Brodsky brought me work from the merchandising department. I finally left the staff job because I’d gotten the itch to be a freelancer again. Plus, I’d gotten tired of Shooter’s oppressive management style, which was more the reason than anything. He didn’t oppress me so much as he oppressed friends of mine, other staff personnel. I just got tired of it and bugged out. JA: Looking back on your first run on XMen, was there a highlight for you? COCKRUM: I guess it would have to be issue #107. It was a big kick doing our version of The Legion of Super-heroes in The X-Men. At one point, I showed Paul Levitz what we were doing and he said, “Well, you know, maybe we can do something reciprocal in the Legion book.” Then I guess they decided it wouldn’t work and they didn’t do it. Too bad... it would have been fun.

A self-portrait of Dave Cockrum and a few friends. For the uninitiated, the two Futurians on the left are Avatar and Blackmane. [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Futurians TM & © Dave Cockrum; Storm, Colossus, & Nightcrawler TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

P.S.: WANT YOUR OWN DAVE COCKRUM ART? To find out how to purchase original art or special commissions, e-mail Dave at <parrotstew@in4web.com>!

The Men Called “X” part nine

“I Was in the Right Place at the Right Time!” CHRIS CLAREMONT on the Early Days of the New X-Men The general consensus was that this format would present the series in a back-door pilot format in order to get a sense of what commercial potential The X-Men had. And also construct a publishing plan that was conducive to both Len and Dave’s schedules. As editor-in-chief, Len didn’t have that much time to devote to writing comics, and Dave was not the fastest penciler in the universe. It was felt that this format would allow Dave to present the work in a form that allowed him to maximize the greatest visual potential. It also would allow Dave to stay on the series for a longer amount of time.

Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Jim Amash [INTRODUCTION: Chris Claremont was at the epicenter of a cultural phenomenon, though he didn’t know it yet. He took the 1974 standard of the super-heroic soap opera style of writing and raised the bar for writing in the comics industry. Great successes seldom start out fully formed, and as you’ll see, this one didn’t, either. Claremont and Cockrum took The X-Men, checkered past and all, and retooled the series into something so special that the shockwaves unleashed at Krakoa in Giant-size X-Men #1 still reverberate in our imaginations. And made Chris Claremont one of the most influential writers in comic book history. —Jim.]

What happened was that at the time when Len decided to leave the editor-in-chief position, there was also a rethinking of editorial publishing policies. The decision was made to go from a quarterly format to a bimonthly format. At that point, the second

“Cheerful Chris Claremont,” as seen in the 1975 Mighty Marvel Comic Convention program book. As Chris pointed out at the 1995 Stan Lee Roast, transcribed back in Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #1, they were running out of alliterative inspiration by the time they made that one up!

JIM AMASH: I’m a little unclear as to what your position was at Marvel when the new X-Men series started.

CHRIS CLAREMONT: At that particular time, I was an associate editor. Len Wein was editor-in-chief, and as associate editor, I was number two. For all intents and purposes, I was then what I was the last time I was at Marvel, which was the #2 editorial guy. In those days, it wasn’t as large and complicated a structure as it is today. JA: So that’s why you were sitting in on the original meetings between Len and Dave Cockrum. CLAREMONT: Well, my office was right outside his office... my desk was. We really didn’t have offices, per se. I would kibbitz every chance I got. JA: How involved were you in the early meetings? Were you throwing ideas in, too? CLAREMONT: It was a general, unstructured thing. I would hang out and listen to Len and Dave work. We all just sort of spitballed ideas at each other. It was a lot of fun. JA: So Len leaves the series and you script issues #94 and 95, before completely taking over the writing chores. CLAREMONT: The original publishing plan was to bring out The XMen as a giant-sized quarterly comic book. It was partly to compete against DC’s 25¢ comics... [laughs] twenty-five cent giants! What a change from today.

Nightcrawler and Storm, in a beautiful pencil drawing gifted to Chris by artist Dave Cockrum in 1975. It was used in the X-Men coffee table book, and was done on the back of an X-Men page. [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; Nightcrawler & Storm TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“In The Right Place at the Right Time!”

49 create a big event when the book is only six issues old? What can we do?

giant-size issue was already penciled, except for the last dozen pages or so. It required a chunk of revamping.

Again, it’s a matter of us finding creative energy and synergy as a team. The way Dave visualized Jean in #94, when she left the group, was different than the way he drew her in #97, when she came back. My feeling was that if she’d have looked in 94 the way she had in 97, I’d have never let her out of the book. I was looking for chemistry between the characters. We wanted to shake up the status quo. If we left Jean in the book, it’d become too much like the original X-Men. The original idea was to bring her back, but not as a member of the team—but then what do we do with her? I needed to figure out who Storm was... who Cyclops was... and what were their key elements? How to approach Nightcrawler? How to approach Colossus? And how very much to approach Wolverine?

JA: Who did the revamping? CLAREMONT: The “überplot” was Len’s. We had to build to a point where Thunderbird died at story’s end. The pacing of the events was substantially established, but out of necessity, we had to break the story into two parts. We had to find a place to split the book so that issue #94 had an exciting conclusion,which we did by having The X-Men blown out of the sky. Then we redesigned the second half of the story so it was a coherent stand-alone issue that led to a final conclusion. I did the restructuring, but it was basically Len’s story. Issue #95 was my pacing... mine and Dave’s. #96 was my first official plot, and even then it was amusing, because it was sort of a mess. I was trying to figure out what the hell to do. Marv Wolfman had taken over as editorin-chief, and I was holding down a staff job while trying to figure out what Dave and I wanted to do with The X-Men—who the characters were and what we wanted to do with them—without losing any time.

JA: This was supposed to be a teenage group, but by this time, Scott’s not really a teenager, is he?

CLAREMONT: I think the whole nature of the team was such that Wolverine was a military officer in the Canadian Armed Forces; The final page of The X-Men #94 (Aug. 1975), repro’d from a photocopy of JA: Was the fact that you were therefore, he was not a teenager. the original art, thanks to Mike W. Barr and Tom Horvitz. Originally a longer previously involved with The XStorm... you always had the sense story was planned for what would have been Giant-size X-Men #2, but it Men, as Len’s associate editor, that even if she was a teenager, the had to be cut in two when the comic became a 32-pager. Chris Claremont, make it a given that you’d take first line they used was that “Her script (from a Len Wein plot); Dave Cockrum, penciler; Bob McLeod, inker. over the series? eyes were blue as crystal and older [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.] than time.” There was the sense CLAREMONT: I was in the right that there was more to her than meets the eye. Colossus was very much place at the right time. They needed a body and I needed the work. I a teenager, or at least, in his late teens, in that ambiguous, ephemeral was enthusiastic about the work. I loved working with Dave. I loved the space between 12 and 20. Nightcrawler could have gone either way. I characters. It was one of those circumstances where it was thought, think we all felt that in order to draw a demarcation between the old “Why not give the kid a shot?” It was a low-profile book and no one team and the new one, the idea was to play them a little older and more had any great hopes for it. Dave’s stuff had done exceptionally well for mature. This added a dynamic whereby they are not exclusively kids DC’s “Legion of Super-heroes,” but The X-Men had always had a very trying to learn their powers. We wanted to take it up to the next level; storied history at Marvel. The “Legion” had a measure of historical more of a university level than a middle school or high school setting. chops to it. Curt Swan, Edmond Hamilton, and other luminaries had worked on the feature. The X-Men had Roy Thomas and Neal Adams on the book for a while, but the new series wasn’t viewed as having the potential of becoming a heavy-hitter at that point. At this stage, we were deciding how to define the new characters. We were jumping off into the unknown. So they decided to “give the kid a shot.”

JA: I asked Dave this question and I’d like to hear your thoughts on this subject. What age did you have in mind for Professor X when you started the new series?

JA: Since you took over in the middle of the writing process, you didn’t have time to hit the ground with characters that were fully formed.

JA: He said somewhere in his thirties.

CLAREMONT: I think Dave and I both felt that the issues where things started to creatively jell were issues #98, 99, and 100. 96 and 97 were issues where we were working out the kinks. The other problem was that we had a one-hundredth issue staring us in the face, and traditionally, centennial issues were associated with big events. How do you

JA: But when you started adding details to his background, he has to be older.

CLAREMONT: Forties. What did Dave say?

CLAREMONT: Yeah, about that.

CLAREMONT: The problem with back stories is that they always come back to bite you on the ass. My big mistake, structurally speaking, was making Storm my age. The idea that she was born in mid-century,

Chris Claremont people and put them in danger. She also thinks Magneto had the correct point of view in that mutants should be separate from regular humans, and I’d like to know what you think about this. CLAREMONT: I think she has a very valid argument. It was something that was sort of an undercurrent in a lot of things I’ve done, especially with The New Mutants. It’s part of the reason that Dave and I felt comfortable with making our X-Men a little bit older. The whole notion that a teacher would lie to parents, which is what he did, to recruit these kids, to not simply be students at a school where they learn to use their powers, but to be the nucleus of a clandestine team of adventurers, if not outright crime-fighting super-heroes, is a little disconcerting. If I’d been the kids’ parent, I’d rip his lungs out. The legal liabilities, if not the moral liabilities, are suspect. Magneto could do this because he’s a villain; you expect him to do this sort of thing. Charley lied to Kitty’s parents, Hank’s parents... simply by omission, if nothing else. But the conclusion as to whether or not Magneto’s right and Charley is wrong in their approach, I think, strikes to the heart and soul of what you have to decide that The X-Men are about. To my way of thinking... no, I don’t think they are separate and cannot be separate, because if they are, then you have to build inexorably to a confrontation between the races. Somebody’s got to lose. To me, the tug of war within the team dynamic was: are we mutants or humans? Or are we all humans, and some of us are mutants and some of us are not? I think that is a struggle and a question that remains While plans for The X-Men were getting underway, Dave Cockrum was still drawing art spots for FOOM magazine, like these for #6 (Summer 1974). Well, at least Wanda and Pietro were mutants—so maybe it was warm-up time. [©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

orphaned after the Suez War, which makes perfect sense when you’re writing a book in 1974, because it’s not a big jump. She’s in her early twenties then. Unfortunately, I’m now writing the book in 2003 and she’s not 53 years old... any more than Xavier, who, in the backstory I was building up, was established as being in the military during the Korean conflict. That obviously went the way of all flesh. In this case, the dynamic was that he met Magneto in the Korean conflict in the early 1950s. The encounter with Lucifer occurred in the late 1950s, thereby allowing eight years to pass before establishing the team in the early 1960s. Unfortunately, the moment you tie things down to historical events, you run into trouble. JA: Yeah, like Reed Richards in World War II. CLAREMONT: Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, Tony Stark in Vietnam... probably the only character who has survived that, because it’s become an integral part of his character, is Magneto, who was a child of the Holocaust. The problem was that when we were writing the stuff in 1974, 1975, we never thought of the book lasting over 25 years. None of us felt we’d be around doing the book in 25 years. I certainly didn’t. The seeds you plant along those lines are things you never expect to deal with. It doesn’t become a problem until twenty years later when editors base entire stories on a piece of minutiae. Or you get slammed for creating this backstory of minutiae that everybody feels obliged to acknowledge. Or feeling disenfranchised because they couldn’t deal with it. It’s a sort of frustration for writers now when they write something that someone else will have to deal with in ten years. I doubt any of them think that they’ll have to deal with it, but it’s part of the corporate equation at this point. JA: Getting back to Professor X, Dave told me what his wife, Paty, thought of that character, and I’d never considered this before. Paty thought Charles Xavier was a bad person because he took young

“In The Right Place at the Right Time!”

unanswered to this day. Which is fine by me, because it’s a lot more grist for the creative mill. The problem is that over the years, I’ve submitted proposals for stories to delve into how Charley came to the decision to do this. Unfortunately, Marvel hasn’t been interested. JA: When you were developing the characters in the beginning, who were the easiest and the hardest characters for you to get a handle on? CLAREMONT: The easiest, in a way, turned out to be Nightcrawler, because both Dave and I were not comfortable from the start about Len’s idea to make him a tormented, bitter demon. Dave and I looked at the character and thought, “You got to be kidding? That guy’s cool.” Since Nightcrawler’s condition is so extreme and indelible, our thought was that he either came to terms with it right off the bat or he’d have gone postal years ago. Quite frankly, everyone else associated with it at the beginning thought he should be a bitter, twisted, tormented creature. Dave and I thought it’d be a good twist to make him the most stable, charming, human, bon vivant of all. Nightcrawler, unlike all the rest, has to be the most comfortable in his skin because he has no alternative. We played against type and I think it set the tone for us in terms of wanting to play against type, to present these characters and think what everyone’s expectations would be for them, then flip the coin. I guess the hardest one, in a way, was Cyclops. In one sense, he was closest to me, I think. Also, to be the leader, the hero and lynchpin of the team, he was defined by his neuroses. What made him interesting? What made him tick? I think our intent was to kick over the traces and get him out of his shell. JA: Well, after all, he was in an orphanage most of his life. CLAREMONT: He was a total introvert, a borderline psychotic, but you can’t play that forever. Same with Wolverine. Dave and I would talk a lot about the characters, bat things back and forth to figure out them out. The seminal revelation that we both came to was that Len’s original idea was that his claws were contained in the housing of his gloves. Our thought was, “That would make anyone who wore the gloves Wolverine. What makes him a mutant?” Dave had the idea of making the claws come right out of his hands. I said, “Eeewww! Cool!” But then, we were six issues into the book, and how do we explain it to the readers? The leader of the Sentinels has them all chained up, and Wolverine pops his claws and cuts the chains. The reaction was, “Oh my God! You never told us that the claws came right out of your hands.” He said, “You never asked.” That exchange totally locked in Wolverine’s character in the sense that he’s a small, private firecracker who volunteers nothing. Clint Eastwood and John Wayne were extroverts compared to him. The basic idea was that Wolverine was a riddle wrapped within a secret, boxed within an enigma, and if you want to learn anything about him, you have to work at it. JA: So that was the moment his character crystallized for you? CLAREMONT: That, and the doomed romance with Jean. The other thing was that when we brought back Jean in #97, the idea of giving her the Farrah Fawcett hair and hot pants was quite lovely. She’s young and gorgeous; the “A” babe among the team. Why does she have to dress like a Republican? She’s not a pants-suit gal, and we didn’t want her to be that. We wanted her to light up the page. Storm couldn’t do it because Storm wasn’t a contemporary American. She’s timeless... a native African, for want of a better term. The goal that Dave and I were trying to accomplish was to indelibly establish each of them, so that you’d never confuse Nightcrawler with Wolverine or with any other character. It had nothing to do with their physical appearance, although how they looked in civilian clothes was as important as how they looked in their

Dave Cockrum writes: “Chris Claremont had his ‘Nightwing Restorations’ (from Iron Fist) interacting with The X-Men. This seemed like a logical development.” [Art ©2003 Dave Cockrum; X-Men TM & ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

uniforms. It was how they related to things. Jean was the bright sun of the sky, and Storm was a wind goddess who was a claustrophobe. Storm was an emotional claustrophobe as much as a physical one. That’s what we delved into in issues 101 and 102, when we gave her a backstory. She was truly innocent as to what was beautiful. She asked Kurt [Nightcrawler] if she was beautiful and she’s standing in a shrinkwrapped gown and it’s like, Holy Toledo!—a cross between Halle Berry and Elizabeth Hurley. She had no concept of the effect it had on the guys around her. She never thought of herself as a sexual being. She thought, “I’m Storm. So what?” She’d never seen herself through their eyes. I think that realization was what led us down the road to the Mohawk and the leather outfit she eventually wore. She wasn’t turning into a wild woman, but was discovering the passion within herself. Jean was already there and turning her into The Phoenix kicked her for the extra nine yards. JA: Colossus was originally designed to be the star of the book and it didn’t work out that way. I was wondering if his personality was part of the reason for that. CLAREMONT: With Peter, what you saw was what you got. Peter was a nice guy. The problem was that Wolverine had the edge. He had the visual edge, the character edge; he was dangerous. You can see the same sort of dynamic in ensemble TV shows, where there are characters that you think should be the mainstays and it doesn’t work out, because of the chemistry. Peter worked better as the team’s anchor. JA: I agree, and Cyclops was the only person in the early days who could have been the group leader. Colossus’ personality was not like Cyclops’. CLAREMONT: Right. But also, being the youngest member, coming from a culture that’s much different than America... being around 18,

Chris Claremont JA: You once stated that if you’d had your way, you would not have killed off Thunderbird. Had you not done so, what would you have done with him?

being the nice guy, and also being, regrettably, a one-trick pony. All he could do it to hit things. Colossus could turn into armor, look great, and hit things. Beyond that, there wasn’t a lot he could do. If the group was a quartet, like the Fantastic Four, and he could be like The Thing, it might have worked. But here, we are talking about a cast of seven, and once Jean came back in, you had a reassertion of various romantic entanglements, like Scott, Jean, and Logan right off the bat. Storm’s asking, “Who am I? What am I?” Perhaps, if I’d chosen to focus on Peter in issues 101 and 102, rather than Storm, it would have been different. The thing was that Dave and I were improvising in order to get to issue 100. Once we got to 100, and created The Phoenix, things started locking in. Unfortunately, Peter got locked into my own prejudices, which were at that specific point in time: Why do the guys always have to be the heroes? We’ve got two strong, dynamic female characters. Why can’t one of them shoulder the burden? To a certain extent, Storm assumed a certain part of the role that Len had intended for Peter. To my way of reading comics and books, nobody was doing anything cool with women back then.

CLAREMONT: I have no idea. It would have been problematic. Thunderbird and Wolverine were unfortunately cut from pretty much the same cloth; somebody would have had to go. Either him or Colossus. We had too many similar archetypes. It might have been interesting to have Thunderbird tussle with Scott over leading the team. The story choices you make when writing a giant-size quarterly are substantially different from those you make writing an ongoing bimonthly.

JA: That’s very true. That’s a very important part of The X-Men. In many ways, this could be considered one of the first feminist comic books. CLAREMONT: Yep! JA: As a reader at the time, I was aware that this was a very different look at how women were written in comics, and I liked them for that reason. I was tired of the depiction of the helpless female, waiting to be rescued for the hundred-millionth time. CLAREMONT: I sort of found that hard to fathom. If you could have an invisible force field or could summon the power of a hurricane, you should not be helpless. Or if you are helpless, there’d better be a damn good reason, i.e., you’re fighting a villain the size of King Kong. JA: Or Galactus. CLAREMONT: And even then, you should come up with the idea of how to win. In that context, as far as the abilities to be heroes are concerned, The X-Men has always been, or at least tried to be, genderneutral, in the sense that the women had all the opportunities as did the men. JA: Did you think of your think of yourself as a feminist writer, because in a certain sense, you were?

The two ways you make the death of a character impactful are to build up the character, establishing a long-term bond between him or her and the audience, so that when you sever those bonds, the readers are very pissed. Or you go for shock: “Oh my God! This has never happened before.” In this instance, because we only had four issues a year and they were designed to be one-part, standalone story issues, you don’t have the time to build up that emphasis. You’re talking about two years of reading, maybe.

In this instance, Len went for the sharp, sudden surprise hit: “Oh my God! This has never happened before.” Len’s point was that these kids go out against some pretty powerful heavy hitters. Why is it, except for the story where after a fight with the Sentinels, when Charley went to visit them all in the infirmary, that nobody ever got hurt? There was no sense of risk or danger or consequence in their lives. Thunderbird was a way of shoving the characters’ and readers’ nose into it right off the bat. Which we turned into our advantage, because thirty issues later, we did the same to Jean. And no one saw it coming. The reason that I said I wouldn’t have killed Thunderbird off was because, partly at that time and much more so now, killing off characters had become a joke. There was no credibility in it because we’d resurrected just about everybody who’d ever died. No matter how vehemently the company says that So-and-so will never be resurrected, the readers have become too familiar with the man behind the curtain. They know that if someone decides to do a feature starring that character or if a hot writer comes along with a hot pitch to bring back that character, someone will find a way to bring him back, because this is the marketplace. You never cast away potentially lucrative assets.

[CONTINUED NEXT ISSUE—when Chris talks about the death and life of Phoenix—Wolverine’s claws—and working with Dave Cockrum and John Byrne!]

CLAREMONT: No. I basically wrote characters that I’d like to know. And some of the women I knew back then were very interesting.

Now—FLIP US for our Mort Meskin Section!

Edited by ROY THOMAS

DIGITAL

The greatest ‘zine of the 1960s is back, ALL-NEW, and focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with NS EDITIO BLE ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, A IL AVA NLY UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FOR O 5 FCA (Fawcett Collectors of $2.9 America, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, and more!

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ALTER EGO #4

ALTER EGO #5

ALTER EGO #1

ALTER EGO #2

ALTER EGO #3

STAN LEE gets roasted by SCHWARTZ, CLAREMONT, DAVID, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, and SHOOTER, ORDWAY and THOMAS on INFINITY, INC., IRWIN HASEN interview, unseen H.G. PETER Wonder Woman pages, the original Captain Marvel and Human Torch teamup, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, “Mr. Monster”, plus plenty of rare and unpublished art!

Featuring a never-reprinted SPIRIT story by WILL EISNER, the genesis of the SILVER AGE ATOM (with GARDNER FOX, GIL KANE, and JULIE SCHWARTZ), interviews with LARRY LIEBER and Golden Age great JACK BURNLEY, BOB KANIGHER, a new Fawcett Collectors of America section with MARC SWAYZE, C.C. BECK, and more! GIL KANE and JACK BURNLEY flip-covers!

Unseen ALEX ROSS and JERRY ORDWAY Shazam! art, 1953 interview with OTTO BINDER, the SUPERMAN/CAPTAIN MARVEL LAWSUIT, GIL KANE on The Golden Age of TIMELY COMICS, FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, and SCHAFFENBERGER, rare art by AYERS, BERG, BURNLEY, DITKO, RICO, SCHOMBURG, MARIE SEVERIN and more! ALEX ROSS & BILL EVERETT covers!

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ALTER EGO #6

ALTER EGO #7

ALTER EGO #8

Interviews with KUBERT, SHELLY MOLDOFF, and HARRY LAMPERT, BOB KANIGHER, life and times of GARDNER FOX, ROY THOMAS remembers GIL KANE, a history of Flash Comics, MOEBIUS Silver Surfer sketches, MR. MONSTER, FCA section with SWAYZE, BECK, and SCHAFFENBERGER, and lots more! Dual color covers by JOE KUBERT!

Celebrating the JSA, with interviews with MART NODELL, SHELLY MAYER, GEORGE ROUSSOS, BILL BLACK, and GIL KANE, unpublished H.G. PETER Wonder Woman art, GARDNER FOX, an FCA section with MARC SWAYZE, C.C. BECK, WENDELL CROWLEY, and more! Wraparound cover by CARMINE INFANTINO and JERRY ORDWAY!

GENE COLAN interview, 1940s books on comics by STAN LEE and ROBERT KANIGHER, AYERS, SEVERIN, and ROY THOMAS on Sgt. Fury, ROY on All-Star Squadron’s Golden Age roots, FCA section with SWAYZE, BECK, and WILLIAM WOOLFOLK, JOE SIMON interview, a definitive look at MAC RABOY’S work, and more! Covers by COLAN and RABOY!

Companion to ALL-STAR COMPANION book, with a JULIE SCHWARTZ interview, guide to JLA-JSA TEAMUPS, origins of the ALL-STAR SQUADRON, FCA section with MARC SWAYZE, C.C. BECK (on his 1970s DC conflicts), DAVE BERG, BOB ROGERS, more on MAC RABOY from his son, MR. MONSTER, and more! RICH BUCKLER and C.C. BECK covers!

WALLY WOOD biography, DAN ADKINS & BILL PEARSON on Wood, TOR section with 1963 JOE KUBERT interview, ROY THOMAS on creating the ALL-STAR SQUADRON and its 1940s forebears, FCA section with SWAYZE & BECK, MR. MONSTER, JERRY ORDWAY on Shazam!, JERRY DeFUCCIO on the Golden Age, CHIC STONE remembered! ADKINS and KUBERT covers!

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ALTER EGO #9

ALTER EGO #10

ALTER EGO #11

ALTER EGO #12

ALTER EGO #13

JOHN ROMITA interview by ROY THOMAS (with unseen art), Roy’s PROPOSED DREAM PROJECTS that never got published (with a host of great artists), MR. MONSTER on WAYNE BORING’S life after Superman, The Golden Age of Comic Fandom Panel, FCA section with GEORGE TUSKA, C.C. BECK, MARC SWAYZE, BILL MORRISON, & more! ROMITA and GIORDANO covers!

Who Created the Silver Age Flash? (with KANIGHER, INFANTINO, KUBERT, and SCHWARTZ), DICK AYERS interview (with unseen art), JOHN BROOME remembered, never-seen Golden Age Flash pages, VIN SULLIVAN Magazine Enterprises interview, FCA, interview with FRED GUARDINEER, and MR. MONSTER on WAYNE BORING! INFANTINO and AYERS covers!

Focuses on TIMELY/MARVEL (interviews and features on SYD SHORES, MICKEY SPILLANE, and VINCE FAGO), and MAGAZINE ENTERPRISES (including JOE CERTA, JOHN BELFI, FRANK BOLLE, BOB POWELL, and FRED MEAGHER), MR. MONSTER on JERRY SIEGEL, DON and MAGGIE THOMPSON interview, FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, and DON NEWTON!

DC and QUALITY COMICS focus! Quality’s GILL FOX interview, never-seen ‘40s PAUL REINMAN Green Lantern story, ROY THOMAS talks to LEN WEIN and RICH BUCKLER about ALL-STAR SQUADRON, MR. MONSTER shows what made WALLY WOOD leave MAD, FCA section with BECK & SWAYZE, & ‘65 NEWSWEEK ARTICLE on comics! REINMAN and BILL WARD covers!

1974 panel with JOE SIMON, STAN LEE, FRANK ROBBINS, and ROY THOMAS, ROY and JOHN BUSCEMA on Avengers, 1964 STAN LEE interview, tributes to DON HECK, JOHNNY CRAIG, and GRAY MORROW, Timely alums DAVID GANTZ and DANIEL KEYES, and FCA with BECK, SWAYZE, and MIKE MANLEY! Covers by MURPHY ANDERSON and JOE SIMON!

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ALTER EGO #14

ALTER EGO #15

ALTER EGO #16

ALTER EGO #17

ALTER EGO #18

A look at the 1970s JSA revival with CONWAY, LEVITZ, ESTRADA, GIFFEN, MILGROM, and STATON, JERRY ORDWAY on All-Star Squadron, tributes to CRAIG CHASE and DAN DeCARLO, “lost” 1945 issue of All-Star, 1970 interview with LEE ELIAS, MR. MONSTER on GARDNER FOX, FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, & JAY DISBROW! MIKE NASSER & MICHAEL GILBERT covers!

JOHN BUSCEMA ISSUE! BUSCEMA interview (with UNSEEN ART), reminiscences by SAL BUSCEMA, STAN LEE, INFANTINO, KUBERT, ORDWAY, FLO STEINBERG, and HERB TRIMPE, ROY THOMAS on 35 years with BIG JOHN, FCA tribute to KURT SCHAFFENBERGER, plus C.C. BECK and MARC SWAYZE, and MR. MONSTER revisits WALLY WOOD! Two BUSCEMA covers!

MARVEL BULLPEN REUNION (BUSCEMA, COLAN, ROMITA, and SEVERIN), memories of the JOHN BUSCEMA SCHOOL, FCA with ALEX ROSS, C.C. BECK, and MARC SWAYZE, tribute to CHAD GROTHKOPF, MR. MONSTER on EC COMICS with art by KURTZMAN, DAVIS, and WOOD, and more! Covers by ALEX ROSS and MARIE SEVERIN & RAMONA FRADON!

Spotlighting LOU FINE (with an overview of his career, and interviews with family members), interview with MURPHY ANDERSON about Fine, ALEX TOTH on Fine, ARNOLD DRAKE interviewed about DEADMAN and DOOM PATROL, MR. MONSTER on the non-EC work of JACK DAVIS and GEORGE EVANS, FINE and LUIS DOMINGUEZ COVERS, FCA and more!

STAN GOLDBERG interview, secrets of ‘40s Timely, art by KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, MANEELY, EVERETT, BURGOS, and DeCARLO, spotlight on sci-fi fanzine XERO with the LUPOFFS, OTTO BINDER, DON THOMPSON, ROY THOMAS, BILL SCHELLY, and ROGER EBERT, FCA, and MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD ghosting Flash Gordon! KIRBY and SWAYZE covers!

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ALTER EGO #19

ALTER EGO #20

ALTER EGO #21

ALTER EGO #22

ALTER EGO #23

Spotlight on DICK SPRANG (profile and interview) with unseen art, rare Batman art by BOB KANE, CHARLES PARIS, SHELLY MOLDOFF, MAX ALLAN COLLINS, JIM MOONEY, CARMINE INFANTINO, and ALEX TOTH, JERRY ROBINSON interviewed about Tomahawk and 1940s cover artist FRED RAY, FCA, and MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD’s Flash Gordon, Part 2!

Timely/Marvel art by SEKOWSKY, SHORES, EVERETT, and BURGOS, secrets behind THE INVADERS with ROY THOMAS, KIRBY, GIL KANE, & ROBBINS, BOB DESCHAMPS interviewed, 1965 NY Comics Con review, panel with FINGER, BINDER, FOX and WEISINGER, MR. MONSTER, FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, RABOY, SCHAFFENBERGER, and more! MILGROM and SCHELLY covers!

The IGER “SHOP” examined, with art by EISNER, FINE, ANDERSON, CRANDALL, BAKER, MESKIN, CARDY, EVANS, BOB KANE, and TUSKA, “SHEENA” section with art by DAVE STEVENS & FRANK BRUNNER, ROY THOMAS on JSA & All-Star Squadron, MR. MONSTER on GARDNER FOX, UNSEEN 1946 ALL-STAR ART, FCA, and more! DAVE STEVENS and IRWIN HASEN covers!

BILL EVERETT and JOE KUBERT interviewed by NEAL ADAMS and GIL KANE in 1970, Timely art by BURGOS, SHORES, NODELL, and SEKOWSKY, RUDY LAPICK, ROY THOMAS on Sub-Mariner, with art by EVERETT, COLAN, ANDRU, BUSCEMAs, SEVERINs, and more, FCA, MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD at EC, ALEX TOTH, and CAPT. MIDNIGHT! EVERETT & BECK covers!

Unseen art from TWO “LOST” 1940s H.G. PETER WONDER WOMAN STORIES (and analysis of “CHARLES MOULTON” scripts), BOB FUJITANI and JOHN ROSENBERGER, VICTOR GORELICK discusses Archie and The Mighty Crusaders, with art by MORROW, BUCKLER, and REINMAN, FCA, and MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD! H.G. PETER and BOB FUJITANI covers!

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ALTER EGO #24

ALTER EGO #25

ALTER EGO #26

ALTER EGO #27

ALTER EGO #28

X-MEN interviews with STAN LEE, DAVE COCKRUM, CHRIS CLAREMONT, ARNOLD DRAKE, JIM SHOOTER, ROY THOMAS, and LEN WEIN, MORT MESKIN profiled by his sons and ALEX TOTH, rare art by JERRY ROBINSON, FCA with BECK, SWAYZE, and WILLIAM WOOLFOLK, MR. MONSTER, and BILL SCHELLY on Comics Fandom! MESKIN and COCKRUM covers!

JACK COLE remembered by ALEX TOTH, interview with brother DICK COLE and his PLAYBOY colleagues, CHRIS CLAREMONT on the X-Men (with more never-seen art by DAVE COCKRUM), ROY THOMAS on AllStar Squadron #1 and its ‘40s roots (with art by ORDWAY, BUCKLER, MESKIN and MOLDOFF), FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more! Covers by TOTH and SCHELLY!

JOE SINNOTT interview, IRWIN DONENFELD interview by EVANIER & SCHWARTZ, art by SHUSTER, INFANTINO, ANDERSON, and SWAN, MARK WAID analyzes the first Kryptonite story, JERRY SIEGEL and HARRY DONENFELD, JERRY IGER Shop update, ALEX TOTH, MR. MONSTER, and FCA with SWAYZE, BECK, and KEN BALD! Covers by SINNOTT and WAYNE BORING!

VIN SULLIVAN interview about the early DC days with art by SHUSTER, MOLDOFF, FLESSEL, GUARDINEER, and BURNLEY, MR. MONSTER’s “Lost” KIRBY HULK covers, 1948 NEW YORK COMIC CON with STAN LEE, SIMON & KIRBY, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, HARVEY KURTZMAN, and ROY THOMAS, ALEX TOTH, FCA, and more! Covers by JACK BURNLEY and JACK KIRBY!

Spotlight on JOE MANEELY, with a career overview, remembrance by his daughter and tons of art, Timely/Atlas/Marvel art by ROMITA, EVERETT, SEVERIN, SHORES, KIRBY, and DITKO, STAN LEE on Maneely, LEE AMES interview, FCA with SWAYZE, ISIS, and STEVE SKEATES, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more! Covers by JOE MANEELY and DON NEWTON!

(108-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #29

ALTER EGO #30

ALTER EGO #31

ALTER EGO #32

ALTER EGO #33

FRANK BRUNNER interview, BILL EVERETT’S Venus examined by TRINA ROBBINS, Classics Illustrated “What ifs”, LEE/KIRBY/DITKO Marvel prototypes, JOE MANEELY’s monsters, BILL FRACCIO interview, ALEX TOTH, MR. MONSTER, JOHN BENSON on EC, The Heap by ERNIE SCHROEDER, and FCA! Covers by FRANK BRUNNER and PETE VON SHOLLY!

ALEX ROSS on his love for the JLA, BLACKHAWK/JLA artist DICK DILLIN, the super-heroes of 1940s-1980s France (with art by STEVE RUDE, STEVE BISSETTE, LADRÖNN, and NEAL ADAMS), KIM AAMODT & WALTER GEIER on writing for SIMON & KIRBY, ALEX TOTH, MR. MONSTER, and FCA! Covers by ALEX ROSS and STEVE RUDE!

DICK AYERS on his 1950s and ‘60s work (with tons of Marvel Bullpen art), HARLAN ELLISON’s Marvel Age work examined (with art by BUCKLER, SAL BUSCEMA, and TRIMPE), STAN LEE’S Marvel Prototypes (with art by KIRBY and DITKO), Christmas cards from comics greats, MR. MONSTER, & FCA with SWAYZE and SCHAFFENBERGER! Covers by DICK AYERS and FRED RAY!

Timely artists ALLEN BELLMAN and SAM BURLOCKOFF interviewed, MART NODELL on his Timely years, rare art by BURGOS, EVERETT, and SHORES, MIKE GOLD on the Silver Age (with art by SIMON & KIRBY, SWAN, INFANTINO, KANE, and more), FCA, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom, and more! Covers by DICK GIORDANO and GIL KANE!

Symposium on MIKE SEKOWSKY by MARK EVANIER, SCOTT SHAW!, et al., with art by ANDERSON, INFANTINO, and others, PAT (MRS. MIKE) SEKOWSKY and inker VALERIE BARCLAY interviewed, FCA, 1950s Captain Marvel parody by ANDRU and ESPOSITO, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY, MR. MONSTER, and more! Covers by FRENZ/SINNOTT and FRENZ/BUSCEMA!

(108-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

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(108-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #34

ALTER EGO #35

ALTER EGO #36

ALTER EGO #37

ALTER EGO #38

Quality Comics interviews with ALEX KOTZKY, AL GRENET, CHUCK CUIDERA, & DICK ARNOLD (son of BUSY ARNOLD), art by COLE, EISNER, FINE, WARD, DILLIN, and KANE, MICHELLE NOLAN on Blackhawk’s jump to DC, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT on HARVEY KURTZMAN, & ALEX TOTH on REED CRANDALL! Covers by REED CRANDALL & CHARLES NICHOLAS!

Covers by JOHN ROMITA and AL JAFFEE! LEE, ROMITA, AYERS, HEATH, & THOMAS on the 1953-55 Timely super-hero revival, with rare art by ROMITA, AYERS, BURGOS, HEATH, EVERETT, LAWRENCE, & POWELL, AL JAFFEE on the 1940s Timely Bullpen (and MAD), FCA, ALEX TOTH on comic art, MR. MONSTER on unpublished 1950s covers, and more!

JOE SIMON on SIMON & KIRBY, CARL BURGOS, and LLOYD JACQUET, JOHN BELL on World War II Canadian heroes, MICHAEL T. GILBERT on Canadian origins of MR. MONSTER, tributes to BOB DESCHAMPS, DON LAWRENCE, & GEORGE WOODBRIDGE, FCA, ALEX TOTH, and ELMER WEXLER interview! Covers by SIMON and GILBERT & RONN SUTTON!

WILL MURRAY on the 1940 Superman “KMetal” story & PHILIP WYLIE’s GLADIATOR (with art by SHUSTER, SWAN, ADAMS, and BORING), FCA with BECK, SWAYZE, and DON NEWTON, SY BARRY interview, art by TOTH, MESKIN, INFANTINO, and ANDERSON, and MICHAEL T. GILBERT interviews AL FELDSTEIN on EC and RAY BRADBURY! Covers by C.C. BECK and WAYNE BORING!

JULIE SCHWARTZ TRIBUTE with HARLAN ELLISON, INFANTINO, ANDERSON, TOTH, KUBERT, GIELLA, GIORDANO, CARDY, LEVITZ, STAN LEE, WOLFMAN, EVANIER, & ROY THOMAS, never-seen interviews with Julie, FCA with BECK, SCHAFFENBERGER, NEWTON, COCKRUM, OKSNER, FRADON, SWAYZE, and JACKSON BOSTWICK! Covers by INFANTINO and IRWIN HASEN!

(108-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #39

ALTER EGO #40

ALTER EGO #41

ALTER EGO #42

ALTER EGO #43

Full-issue spotlight on JERRY ROBINSON, with an interview on being BOB KANE’s Batman “ghost”, creating the JOKER and ROBIN, working on VIGILANTE, GREEN HORNET, and ATOMAN, plus never-seen art by Jerry, MESKIN, ROUSSOS, RAY, KIRBY, SPRANG, DITKO, and PARIS! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER on AL FELDSTEIN Part 2, and more! Two JERRY ROBINSON covers!

RUSS HEATH and GIL KANE interviews (with tons of unseen art), the JULIE SCHWARTZ Memorial Service with ELLISON, MOORE, GAIMAN, HASEN, O’NEIL, and LEVITZ, art by INFANTINO, ANDERSON, TOTH, NOVICK, DILLIN, SEKOWSKY, KUBERT, GIELLA, ARAGONÉS, FCA, MR. MONSTER and AL FELDSTEIN Part 3, and more! Covers by GIL KANE & RUSS HEATH!

Halloween issue! BERNIE WRIGHTSON on his 1970s FRANKENSTEIN, DICK BRIEFER’S monster, the campy 1960s Frankie, art by KALUTA, BAILY, MANEELY, PLOOG, KUBERT, BRUNNER, BORING, OKSNER, TUSKA, CRANDALL, and SUTTON, FCA #100, EMILIO SQUEGLIO interview, ALEX TOTH, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and more! Covers by WRIGHTSON & MARC SWAYZE!

A celebration of DON HECK, WERNER ROTH, and PAUL REINMAN, rare art by KIRBY, DITKO, and AYERS, Hillman and Ziff-Davis remembered by Heap artist ERNIE SCHROEDER, HERB ROGOFF, and WALTER LITTMAN, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and ALEX TOTH! Covers by FASTNER & LARSON and ERNIE SCHROEDER!

Yuletide art by WOOD, SINNOTT, CARDY, BRUNNER, TOTH, NODELL, and others, interviews with Golden Age artists TOM GILL (Lone Ranger) and MORRIS WEISS, exploring 1960s Mexican comics, FCA with MARC SWAYZE and C.C. BECK, MR. MONSTER, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom, and more! Flip covers by GEORGE TUSKA and DAVE STEVENS!

(108-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #44

ALTER EGO #45

ALTER EGO #46

ALTER EGO #47

ALTER EGO #48

JSA/All-Star Squadron/Infinity Inc. special! Interviews with KUBERT, HASEN, ANDERSON, ORDWAY, BUCKLER, THOMAS, 1940s Atom writer ARTHUR ADLER, art by TOTH, SEKOWSKY, HASEN, MACHLAN, OKSNER, and INFANTINO, FCA, and MR. MONSTER’S “I Like Ike!” cartoons by BOB KANE, INFANTINO, OKSNER, and BIRO! Wraparound ORDWAY cover!

Interviews with Sandman artist CREIG FLESSEL and ‘40s creator BERT CHRISTMAN, MICHAEL CHABON on researching his Pulitzer-winning novel Kavalier & Clay, art by EISNER, KANE, KIRBY, and AYERS, FCA with MARC SWAYZE and C.C. BECK, OTTO BINDER’s “lost” Jon Jarl story, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom, and ALEX TOTH! CREIG FLESSEL cover!

The VERY BEST of the 1960s-70s ALTER EGO! 1969 BILL EVERETT interview, art by BURGOS, GUSTAVSON, SIMON & KIRBY, and others, 1960s gems by DITKO, E. NELSON BRIDWELL, JERRY BAILS, and ROY THOMAS, LOU GLANZMAN interview, tributes to IRV NOVICK and CHRIS REEVE, MR. MONSTER, FCA, TOTH, and more! Cover by EVERETT and MARIE SEVERIN!

Spotlights MATT BAKER, Golden Age cheesecake artist of PHANTOM LADY! Career overview, interviews with BAKER’s half-brother and nephew, art from AL FELDSTEIN, VINCE COLLETTA, ARTHUR PEDDY, JACK KAMEN and others, FCA, BILL SCHELLY talks to comic-book-seller (and fan) BUD PLANT, MR. MONSTER on missing AL WILLIAMSON art, and ALEX TOTH!

WILL EISNER discusses Eisner & Iger’s Shop and BUSY ARNOLD’s ‘40s Quality Comics, art by FINE, CRANDALL, COLE, POWELL, and CARDY, EISNER tributes by STAN LEE, GENE COLAN, & others, interviews with ‘40s Quality artist VERN HENKEL and CHUCK MAZOUJIAN, FCA, MR. MONSTER on EISNER’s Wonder Man, ALEX TOTH, and more with BUD PLANT! EISNER cover!

(100-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #49

ALTER EGO #50

ALTER EGO #51

ALTER EGO #52

ALTER EGO #53

Spotlights CARL BURGOS! Interview with daughter SUE BURGOS, art by BURGOS, BILL EVERETT, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ED ASCHE, and DICK AYERS, unused 1941 Timely cover layouts, the 1957 Atlas Implosion examined, MANNY STALLMAN, FCA, MR. MONSTER and more! New cover by MARK SPARACIO, from an unused 1941 layout by CARL BURGOS!

ROY THOMAS covers his 40-YEAR career in comics (AVENGERS, X-MEN, CONAN, ALL-STAR SQUADRON, INFINITY INC.), with ADAMS, BUSCEMA, COLAN, DITKO, GIL KANE, KIRBY, STAN LEE, ORDWAY, PÉREZ, ROMITA, and many others! Also FCA, & MR. MONSTER on ROY’s letters to GARDNER FOX! Flip-covers by BUSCEMA/ KIRBY/ALCALA and JERRY ORDWAY!

Golden Age Batman artist/BOB KANE ghost LEW SAYRE SCHWARTZ interviewed, Batman art by JERRY ROBINSON, DICK SPRANG, SHELDON MOLDOFF, WIN MORTIMER, JIM MOONEY, and others, the Golden and Silver Ages of AUSTRALIAN SUPER-HEROES, Mad artist DAVE BERG interviewed, FCA, MR. MONSTER on WILL EISNER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

JOE GIELLA on the Silver Age at DC, the Golden Age at Marvel, and JULIE SCHWARTZ, with rare art by INFANTINO, GIL KANE, SEKOWSKY, SWAN, DILLIN, MOLDOFF, GIACOIA, SCHAFFENBERGER, and others, JAY SCOTT PIKE on STAN LEE and CHARLES BIRO, MARTIN THALL interview, ALEX TOTH, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more! GIELLA cover!

GIORDANO and THOMAS on STOKER’S DRACULA, never-seen DICK BRIEFER Frankenstein strip, MIKE ESPOSITO on his work with ROSS ANDRU, art by COLAN, WRIGHTSON, MIGNOLA, BRUNNER, BISSETTE, KALUTA, HEATH, MANEELY, EVERETT, DITKO, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, BILL SCHELLY, ALEX TOTH, and MR. MONSTER! Cover by GIORDANO!

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #54

ALTER EGO #55

ALTER EGO #56

ALTER EGO #57

ALTER EGO #58

MIKE ESPOSITO on DC and Marvel, ROBERT KANIGHER on the creation of Metal Men and Sgt. Rock (with comments by JOE KUBERT and BOB HANEY), art by ANDRU, INFANTINO, KIRBY, SEVERIN, WINDSOR-SMITH, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, TRIMPE, GIL KANE, and others, plus FCA, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY, MR. MONSTER, and more! ESPOSITO cover!

JACK and OTTO BINDER, KEN BALD, VIC DOWD, and BOB BOYAJIAN interviewed, FCA with SWAYZE and EMILIO SQUEGLIO, rare art by BECK, WARD, & SCHAFFENBERGER, Christmas Cards from CRANDALL, SINNOTT, HEATH, MOONEY, and CARDY, 1943 Pin-Up Calendar (with ‘40s movie stars as superheroines), ALEX TOTH, more! ALEX ROSS and ALEX WRIGHT covers!

Interviews with Superman creators SIEGEL & SHUSTER, Golden/Silver Age DC production guru JACK ADLER interviewed, NEAL ADAMS and radio/TV iconoclast (and comics fan) HOWARD STERN on Adler and his amazing career, art by CURT SWAN, WAYNE BORING, and AL PLASTINO, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, ALEX TOTH, and more! NEAL ADAMS cover!

Issue-by-issue index of Timely/Atlas superhero stories by MICHELLE NOLAN, art by SIMON & KIRBY, EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, AYERS, HEATH, SEKOWSKY, SHORES, SCHOMBURG, MANEELY, and SEVERIN, GENE COLAN and ALLEN BELLMAN on 1940s Timely super-heroes, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and BILL SCHELLY! Cover by JACK KIRBY and PETE VON SHOLLY!

GERRY CONWAY and ROY THOMAS on their ‘80s screenplay for “The X-Men Movie That Never Was!”with art by COCKRUM, ADAMS, BUSCEMA, BYRNE, GIL KANE, KIRBY, HECK, and LIEBER, Atlas artist VIC CARRABOTTA interview, ALLEN BELLMAN on 1940s Timely bullpen, FCA, 1966 panel on 1950s EC Comics, and MR. MONSTER! MARK SPARACIO/GIL KANE cover!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #59

ALTER EGO #60

ALTER EGO #61

ALTER EGO #62

ALTER EGO #63

Special issue on Batman and Superman in the Golden and Silver Ages, featuring a new ARTHUR SUYDAM interview, NEAL ADAMS on DC in the 1960s-1970s, SHELLY MOLDOFF, AL PLASTINO, Golden Age artist FRAN (Doll Man) MATERA interviewed, SIEGEL & SHUSTER, RUSS MANNING, FCA, MR. MONSTER, SUYDAM cover, and more!

Celebrates 50 years since SHOWCASE #4! FLASH interviews with SCHWARTZ, KANIGHER, INFANTINO, KUBERT, and BROOME, Golden Age artist TONY DiPRETA, 1966 panel with NORDLING, BINDER, and LARRY IVIE, FCA, MR. MONSTER, never-before-published color Flash cover by CARMINE INFANTINO, and more!

History of the AMERICAN COMICS GROUP (1946 to 1967)—including its roots in the Golden Age SANGOR ART SHOP and STANDARD/NEDOR comics! Art by MESKIN, ROBINSON, WILLIAMSON, FRAZETTA, SCHAFFENBERGER, & BUSCEMA, ACG writer/editor RICHARD HUGHES, plus AL HARTLEY interviewed, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more! GIORDANO cover!

HAPPY HAUNTED HALLOWEEN ISSUE, featuring: MIKE PLOOG and RUDY PALAIS on their horror-comics work! AL WILLIAMSON on his work for the American Comics Group—plus more on ACG horror comics! Rare DICK BRIEFER Frankenstein strips! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY on the 1966 KalerCon, a new PLOOG cover—and more!

Tribute to ALEX TOTH! Never-before-seen interview with tons of TOTH art, including sketches he sent to friends! Articles about Toth by TERRY AUSTIN, JIM AMASH, SY BARRY, JOE KUBERT, LOU SAYRE SCHWARTZ, IRWIN HASEN, JOHN WORKMAN, and others! Plus illustrated Christmas cards by comics pros, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #64

ALTER EGO #65

ALTER EGO #66

ALTER EGO #67

ALTER EGO #68

Fawcett Favorites! Issue-by-issue analysis of BINDER & BECK’s 1943-45 “The Monster Society of Evil!” serial, double-size FCA section with MARC SWAYZE, EMILIO SQUEGLIO, C.C. BECK, MAC RABOY, and others! Interview with MARTIN FILCHOCK, Golden Age artist for Centaur Comics! Plus MR. MONSTER, DON NEWTON cover, plus a FREE 1943 MARVEL CALENDAR!

NICK CARDY interviewed on his Golden & Silver Age work (with CARDY art), plus art by WILL EISNER, NEAL ADAMS, CARMINE INFANTINO, JIM APARO, RAMONA FRADON, CURT SWAN, MIKE SEKOWSKY, and others, tributes to ERNIE SCHROEDER and DAVE COCKRUM, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, new CARDY COVER, and more!

Spotlight on BOB POWELL, the artist who drew Daredevil, Sub-Mariner, Sheena, The Avenger, The Hulk, Giant-Man, and others, plus art by WALLY WOOD, HOWARD NOSTRAND, DICK AYERS, SIMON & KIRBY, MARTIN GOODMAN’s Magazine Management, and others! FCA with MARC SWAYZE and C.C. BECK, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, and more!

Interview with BOB OKSNER, artist of Supergirl, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Angel and the Ape, Leave It to Binky, Shazam!, and more, plus art and artifacts by SHELLY MAYER, IRWIN HASEN, LEE ELIAS, C.C. BECK, CARMINE INFANTINO, GIL KANE, JULIE SCHWARTZ, etc., FCA with MARC SWAYZE & C.C. BECK, MICHAEL T. GILBERT on BOB POWELL Part II, and more!

Tribute to JERRY BAILS—Father of Comics Fandom and founder of Alter Ego! Cover by GEORGE PÉREZ, plus art by JOE KUBERT, CARMINE INFANTINO, GIL KANE, DICK DILLIN, MIKE SEKOWSKY, JERRY ORDWAY, JOE STATON, JACK KIRBY, and others! Plus STEVE DITKO’s notes to STAN LEE for a 1965 Dr. Strange story! And ROY reveals secrets behind Marvel’s STAR WARS comic!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #69

ALTER EGO #70

ALTER EGO #71

ALTER EGO #72

ALTER EGO #73

PAUL NORRIS drew AQUAMAN first, in 1941—and RAMONA FRADON was the hero’s ultimate Golden Age artist. But both drew other things as well, and both are interviewed in this landmark issue—along with a pocket history of Aquaman! Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and more! Cover painted by JOHN WATSON, from a breathtaking illo by RAMONA FRADON!

Spotlight on ROY THOMAS’ 1970s stint as Marvel’s editor-in-chief and major writer, plus art and reminiscences of GIL KANE, BOTH BUSCEMAS, ADAMS, ROMITA, CHAYKIN, BRUNNER, PLOOG, EVERETT, WRIGHTSON, PÉREZ, ROBBINS, BARRY SMITH, STAN LEE and others, FCA, MR. MONSTER, a new GENE COLAN cover, plus an homage to artist LILY RENÉE!

Represents THE GREAT CANADIAN COMIC BOOKS, the long out-of-print 1970s book by MICHAEL HIRSH and PATRICK LOUBERT, with rare art of such heroes as Mr. Monster, Nelvana, Thunderfist, and others, plus new INVADERS art by JOHN BYRNE, MIKE GRELL, RON LIM, and more, plus a new cover by GEORGE FREEMAN, from a layout by JACK KIRBY!

SCOTT SHAW! and ROY THOMAS on the creation of Captain Carrot, art & artifacts by RICK HOBERG, STAN GOLDBERG, MIKE SEKOWSKY, JOHN COSTANZA, E. NELSON BRIDWELL, CAROL LAY, and others, interview with DICK ROCKWELL, Golden Age artist and 36-year ghost artist on MILTON CANIFF’s Steve Canyon! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

FRANK BRUNNER on drawing Dr. Strange, interviews with CHARLES BIRO and his daughters, interview with publisher ROBERT GERSON about his 1970s horror comic Reality, art by BERNIE WRIGHTSON, GRAHAM INGELS, HOWARD CHAYKIN, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, JEFF JONES, and others FCA, MR. MONSTER, a FREE DRAW! #15! PREVIEW, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #74

ALTER EGO #75

ALTER EGO #76

ALTER EGO #77

ALTER EGO #78

STAN LEE SPECIAL in honor of his 85th birthday, with a cover by JACK KIRBY, classic (and virtually unseen) interviews with Stan, tributes, and tons of rare and unseen art by KIRBY, ROMITA, the brothers BUSCEMA, DITKO, COLAN, HECK, AYERS, MANEELY, SHORES, EVERETT, BURGOS, KANE, the SEVERIN siblings—plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

FAWCETT FESTIVAL—with an ALEX ROSS cover! Double-size FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) with P.C. HAMERLINCK on the many “Captains Marvel” over the years, unseen Shazam! proposal by ALEX ROSS, C.C. BECK on “The Death of a Legend!”, MARC SWAYZE, interview with Golden Age artist MARV LEVY, MR. MONSTER, and more!

JOE SIMON SPECIAL! In-depth SIMON interview by JIM AMASH, with neverbefore-revealed secrets behind the creation of Captain America, Fighting American, Stuntman, Adventures of The Fly, Sick magazine and more, art by JACK KIRBY, BOB POWELL, AL WILLIAMSON, JERRY GRANDENETTI, GEORGE TUSKA, and others, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

ST. JOHN ISSUE! Golden Age Tor cover by JOE KUBERT, KEN QUATTRO relates the full legend of St. John Publishing, art by KUBERT, NORMAN MAURER, MATT BAKER, LILY RENEE, BOB LUBBERS, RUBEN MOREIRA, RALPH MAYO, AL FAGO, special reminiscences of ARNOLD DRAKE, Golden Age artist TOM SAWYER interviewed, and more!

DAVE COCKRUM TRIBUTE! Great rare XMen cover, Cockrum tributes from contemporaries and colleagues, and an interview with PATY COCKRUM on Dave’s life and legacy on The Legion of Super-Heroes, The X-Men, Star-Jammers, & more! Plus an interview with 1950s Timely/Marvel artist MARION SITTON on his own incredible career and his Golden Age contemporaries!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #79

ALTER EGO #80

ALTER EGO #81

ALTER EGO #82

ALTER EGO #83

SUPERMAN & HIS CREATORS! New cover by MICHAEL GOLDEN, exclusive and revealing interview with JOE SHUSTER’s sister, JEAN SHUSTER PEAVEY—LOU CAMERON interview—STEVE GERBER tribute—DWIGHT DECKER on the Man of Steel & Hitler’s Third Reich—plus art by WAYNE BORING, CURT SWAN, NEAL ADAMS, GIL KANE, and others!

SWORD-AND-SORCERY COMICS! Learn about Crom the Barbarian, Viking Prince, Nightmaster, Kull, Red Sonja, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, Beowulf, Warlord, Dagar the Invincible, and more, with art by FRAZETTA, SMITH, BUSCEMA, KANE, WRIGHTSON, PLOOG, THORNE, BRUNNER, LOU CAMERON Part II, and more! Cover by RAFAEL KAYANAN!

New FRANK BRUNNER Man-Thing cover, a look at the late-’60s horror comic WEB OF HORROR with early work by BRUNNER, WRIGHTSON, WINDSOR-SMITH, SIMONSON, & CHAYKIN, interview with comics & fine artist EVERETT RAYMOND KINTSLER, ROY THOMAS’ 1971 origin synopsis for the FIRST MAN-THING STORY, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

MLJ ISSUE! Golden Age MLJ index illustrated with vintage images of The Shield, Hangman, Mr. Justice, Black Hood, by IRV NOVICK, JACK COLE, CHARLES BIRO, MORT MESKIN, GIL KANE, & others—behind a marvelous MLJ-heroes cover by BOB McLEOD! Plus interviews with IRV NOVICK and JOE EDWARDS, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

SWORD & SORCERY PART 2! Cover by ARTHUR SUYDAM, with a focus on Conan the Barbarian by ROY THOMAS and WILL MURRAY, a look at WALLY WOOD’s Marvel sword-&-sorcery work, the Black Knight examined, plus JOE EDWARDS interview Part 2, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #84

ALTER EGO #85

ALTER EGO #86

ALTER EGO #87

ALTER EGO #88

Unseen JIM APARO cover, STEVE SKEATES discusses his early comics work, art & artifacts by ADKINS, APARO, ARAGONÉS, BOYETTE, DITKO, GIORDANO, KANE, KELLER, MORISI, ORLANDO, SEKOWSKY, STONE, THOMAS, WOOD, and the great WARREN SAVIN! Plus writer CHARLES SINCLAIR on his partnership with Batman co-creator BILL FINGER, FCA, and more!

Captain Marvel and Superman’s battles explored (in cosmic space, candy stores, and in court), RICH BUCKLER on Captain Marvel, plus an in-depth interview with Golden Age great LILY RENÉE, overview of CENTAUR COMICS (home of BILL EVERETT’s Amazing-Man and others), FCA, MR. MONSTER, new RICH BUCKLER cover, and more!

Spotlighting the Frantic Four-Color MAD WANNABES of 1953-55 that copied HARVEY KURTZMAN’S EC smash (see Captain Marble, Mighty Moose, Drag-ula, Prince Scallion, and more) with art by SIMON & KIRBY, KUBERT & MAURER, ANDRU & ESPOSITO, EVERETT, COLAN, and many others, plus Part 1 of a talk with Golden/ Silver Age artist FRANK BOLLE, and more!

The sensational 1954-1963 saga of Great Britain’s MARVELMAN (decades before he metamorphosed into Miracleman), plus an interview with writer/artist/co-creator MICK ANGLO, and rare Marvelman/ Miracleman work by ALAN DAVIS, ALAN MOORE, a new RICK VEITCH cover, plus FRANK BOLLE, Part 2, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

First-ever in-depth look at National/DC’s founder MAJOR MALCOLM WHEELERNICHOLSON, and pioneers WHITNEY ELLSWORTH and CREIG FLESSEL, with rare art and artifacts by SIEGEL & SHUSTER, BOB KANE, CURT SWAN, GARDNER FOX, SHELDON MOLDOFF, and others, focus on DC advisor DR. LAURETTA BENDER, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #89

ALTER EGO #90

ALTER EGO #91

ALTER EGO #92

ALTER EGO #93

HARVEY COMICS’ PRE-CODE HORROR MAGS OF THE 1950s! Interviews with SID JACOBSON, WARREN KREMER, and HOWARD NOSTRAND, plus Harvey artist KEN SELIG talks to JIM AMASH! MR. MONSTER presents the wit and wisdom (and worse) of DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM, plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) with C.C. BECK & MARC SWAYZE, & more! SIMON & KIRBY and NOSTRAND cover!

BIG MARVEL ISSUE! Salutes to legends SINNOTT and AYERS—plus STAN LEE, TUSKA, EVERETT, MARTIN GOODMAN, and others! A look at the “Marvel SuperHeroes” TV animation of 1966! 1940s Timely writer and editor LEON LAZARUS interviewed by JIM AMASH! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, the 1960s fandom creations of STEVE GERBER, and more! JACK KIRBY holiday cover!

FAWCETT FESTIVAL! Big FCA section with Golden Age artists MARC SWAYZE & EMILIO SQUEGLIO! Plus JERRY ORDWAY on researching The Power of Shazam, Part II of “The MAD Four-Color Wannabes of the 1950s,” more on DR. LAURETTA BENDER and the teenage creations of STEVE GERBER, artist JACK KATZ spills Golden Age secrets to JIM AMASH, and more! New cover by ORDWAY and SQUEGLIO!

SWORD-AND-SORCERY, PART 3! DC’s Sword of Sorcery by O’NEIL, CHAYKIN, & SIMONSON and Claw by MICHELINIE & CHAN, Hercules by GLANZMAN, Dagar by GLUT & SANTOS, Marvel S&S art by BUSCEMA, CHAN, KAYANAN, WRIGHTSON, et al., and JACK KATZ on his classic First Kingdom! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, STEVE GERBER’s fan-creations (part 3), and more! Cover by RAFAEL KAYANAN!

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “EarthTwo—1961 to 1985!” with rare art by INFANTINO, GIL KANE, ANDERSON, DELBO, ANDRU, BUCKLER, APARO, GRANDENETTI, and DILLIN, interview with Golden/Silver Age DC editor GEORGE KASHDAN, plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, STEVE GERBER, FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), and a new cover by INFANTINO and AMASH!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #94

ALTER EGO #95

ALTER EGO #96

ALTER EGO #97

ALTER EGO #98

“Earth-Two Companion, Part II!” More on the 1963-1985 series that changed comics forever! The Huntress, Power Girl, Dr. Fate, Freedom Fighters, and more, with art by ADAMS, APARO, AYERS, BUCKLER, GIFFEN, INFANTINO, KANE, NOVICK, SCHAFFENBERGER, SIMONSON, STATON, SWAN, TUSKA, our GEORGE KASHDAN interview Part 2, FCA, and more! STATON & GIORDANO cover!

Marvel’s NOT BRAND ECHH madcap parody mag from 1967-69, examined with rare art & artifacts by ANDRU, COLAN, BUSCEMA, DRAKE, EVERETT, FRIEDRICH, KIRBY, LEE, the SEVERIN siblings, SPRINGER, SUTTON, THOMAS, TRIMPE, and more, GEORGE KASHDAN interview conclusion, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, and more! Cover by MARIE SEVERIN!

Focus on Archie’s 1960s MIGHTY CRUSADERS, with vintage art and artifacts by JERRY SIEGEL, PAUL REINMAN, SIMON & KIRBY, JOHN ROSENBERGER, tributes to the Mighty Crusaders by BOB FUJITANE, GEORGE TUSKA, BOB LAYTON, and others! Interview with MELL LAZARUS, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and more! Cover by MIKE MACHLAN!

The NON-EC HORROR COMICS OF THE 1950s! From Menace and House of Mystery to The Thing!, we present vintage art and artifacts by EVERETT, BRIEFER, DITKO, MANEELY, COLAN , MESKIN, MOLDOFF, HEATH, POWELL, COLE, SIMON & KIRBY, FUJITANI, and others, plus FCA , MR. MONSTER and more, behind a creepy, eerie cover by BILL EVERETT!

Spotlight on Superman’s first editor WHITNEY ELLSWORTH, longtime Kryptoeditor MORT WEISINGER remembered by his daughter, an interview with Superman writer ALVIN SCHWARTZ, tributes to FRANK FRAZETTA and AL WILLIAMSON, art by JOE SHUSTER, WAYNE BORING, CURT SWAN, and NEAL ADAMS, plus MR. MONSTER, FCA, and a new cover by JERRY ORDWAY!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO: CENTENNIAL (AE #100)

ALTER EGO #99

GEORGE TUSKA showcase issue on his career at Lev Gleason, Marvel, and in comics strips through the early 1970s—CRIME DOES NOT PAY, BUCK ROGERS, IRON MAN, AVENGERS, HERO FOR HIRE, & more! Plus interviews with Golden Age artist BILL BOSSERT and fan-artist RUDY FRANKE, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), and more! (84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO: CENTENNIAL is a celebration of 100 issues, and 50 years, of ALTER EGO, Roy Thomas’ legendary super-hero fanzine. It’s a double-size triple-threat BOOK, with twice as many pages as the regular magazine, plus special features just for this anniversary edition! Behind a RICH BUCKLER/JERRY ORDWAY JSA cover, ALTER EGO celebrates its 100th issue and the 50th anniversary of A/E (Vol. 1) #1 in 1961—as ROY THOMAS is interviewed by JIM AMASH about the 1980s at DC! Learn secrets behind ALL-STAR SQUADRON—INFINITY, INC.—ARAK, SON OF THUNDER—CAPTAIN CARROT—JONNI THUNDER, a.k.a. THUNDERBOLT— YOUNG ALL-STARS—SHAZAM!—RING OF THE NIBELUNG—and more! With rare art and artifacts by GEORGE PÉREZ, TODD McFARLANE, RICH BUCKLER, JERRY ORDWAY, MIKE MACHLAN, GIL KANE, GENE COLAN, DICK GIORDANO, ALFREDO ALCALA, TONY DEZUNIGA, ERNIE COLÓN, STAN GOLDBERG, SCOTT SHAW!, ROSS ANDRU, and many more! Plus special anniversary editions of Alter Ego staples MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA (FCA)—and ALEX WRIGHT’s amazing color collection of 1940s DC pinup babes! Edited by ROY THOMAS. (NOTE: This book takes the place of ALTER EGO #100, and counts as TWO issues toward your subscription.) (160-page trade paperback with COLOR) $19.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 • ISBN: 9781605490311 Diamond Order Code: JAN111351

ALTER EGO #101

Fox Comics of the 1940s with art by FINE, BAKER, SIMON, KIRBY, TUSKA, FLETCHER HANKS, ALEX BLUM, and others! “Superman vs. Wonder Man” starring EISNER, IGER, SIEGEL, LIEBERSON, MAYER, DONENFELD, and VICTOR FOX! Plus, Part I of an interview with JACK MENDELSOHN, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and new cover by Marvel artist DAVE WILLIAMS!

NEW!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

ALTER EGO #102

ALTER EGO #103

ALTER EGO #104

ALTER EGO: THE CBA COLLECTION

Spotlight on Green Lantern creators MART NODELL and BILL FINGER in the 1940s, and JOHN BROOME, GIL KANE, and JULIUS SCHWARTZ in 1959! Rare GL artwork by INFANTINO, REINMAN, HASEN, NEAL ADAMS, and others! Plus JACK MENDELSOHN Part II, FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and new cover by GIL KANE & TERRY AUSTIN, and MART NODELL!

The early career of comics writer STEVE ENGLEHART: Defenders, Captain America, Master of Kung Fu, The Beast, Mantis, and more, with rare art and artifacts by SAL BUSCEMA, STARLIN, SUTTON, HECK, BROWN, and others. Plus, JIM AMASH interviews early artist GEORGE MANDEL (Captain Midnight, The Woman in Red, Blue Bolt, Black Marvel, etc.), FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and more!

Celebrates the 50th anniversary of FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and the birth of Marvel Comics! New, never-before-published STAN LEE interview, art and artifacts by KIRBY, DITKO, SINNOTT, AYERS, THOMAS, and secrets behind the Marvel Mythos! Also: JIM AMASH interviews 1940s Timely editor AL SULMAN, FCA, MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT, and a new cover by FRENZ and SINNOTT!

Compiles the ALTER EGO flip-sides from COMIC BOOK ARTIST #1-5, plus 30 NEW PAGES of features & art! All-new rare and previously-unpublished art by JACK KIRBY, GIL KANE, JOE KUBERT, WALLY WOOD, FRANK ROBBINS, NEAL ADAMS, & others, ROY THOMAS on X-MEN, AVENGERS/ KREE-SKRULL WAR, INVADERS, and more! Cover by JOE KUBERT!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(160-page trade paperback) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $4.95

HUMOR MAGAZINES (BUNDLE ALL THREE FOR JUST $14.95)

ALTER EGO:

BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE

Collects the original 11 issues of JERRY BAILS and ROY THOMAS’ ALTER EGO fanzine (from 1961-78), with contributions from JACK KIRBY, STEVE DITKO, WALLY WOOD, JOHN BUSCEMA, MARIE SEVERIN, BILL EVERETT, RUSS MANNING, CURT SWAN, and others—and illustrated interviews with GIL KANE, BILL EVERETT, & JOE KUBERT! Plus major articles on the JUSTICE SOCIETY, the MARVEL FAMILY, the MLJ HEROES, and more! Edited by ROY THOMAS and BILL SCHELLY with an introduction by JULIE SCHWARTZ. (192-page trade paperback) $21.95 ISBN: 9781893905887 Diamond Order Code: DEC073946

COMIC BOOK NERD

PETE VON SHOLLY’s side-splitting parody of the fan press, including our own mags! Experience the magic(?) of such publications as WHIZZER, the COMICS URINAL, ULTRA EGO, COMICS BUYER’S GUISE, BAGGED ISSUE!, SCRAWL!, COMIC BOOK ARTISTE, and more, as we unabashedly poke fun at ourselves, our competitors, and you, our loyal readers! It’s a first issue, collector’s item, double-bag, slab-worthy, speculator’s special sure to rub even the thickest-skinned fanboy the wrong way! (64-page COLOR magazine) $8.95 • (Digital Edition) $2.95

CRAZY HIP GROOVY GO-GO WAY OUT MONSTERS #29 & #32

PETE VON SHOLLY’s spoofs of monster mags will have you laughing your pants off— right after you soil them from sheer terror! This RETRO MONSTER MOVIE MAGAZINE is a laugh riot lampoon of those GREAT (and absolutely abominable) mags of the 1950s and ‘60s, replete with fake letters-to-the-editor, phony ads for worthless, wacky stuff, stills from imaginary films as bad as any that were really made, interviews with their “creators,” and much more! Relive your misspent youth (and misspent allowance) as you dig the hilarious photos, ads, and articles skewering OUR FAVORITE THINGS of the past! Get our first issue (#29!), the sequel (#32!), or both!

DIEDGITIIOTANSL E

BL AVAILA

(48-page magazines) $5.95 EACH • (Digital Editions) $1.95 EACH

These sold-out books are now available again in DIGITAL EDITIONS:

NEW!

MR. MONSTER, VOL. 0

TRUE BRIT

DICK GIORDANO: CHANGING COMICS, ONE DAY AT A TIME

Collects hard-to-find Mr. Monster stories from A-1, CRACK-A-BOOM! and DARK HORSE PRESENTS (many in COLOR for the first time) plus over 30 pages of ALLNEW MR. MONSTER art and stories! Can your sanity survive our Lee/Kirby monster spoof by MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MARK MARTIN, or the long-lost 1933 Mr. Monster newspaper strip? Or the terrifying TRENCHER/MR. MONSTER slug-fest, drawn by KEITH GIFFEN and MICHAEL T. GILBERT?! Read at your own risk!

GEORGE KHOURY’s definitive book on the rich history of British Comics Artists, their influence on the US, and how they have revolutionized the way comics are seen and perceived! It features breathtaking art, intimate photographs, and in-depth interviews with BRIAN BOLLAND, ALAN DAVIS, DAVE GIBBONS, KEVIN O’NEILL, DAVID LLOYD, DAVE McKEAN, BRYAN HITCH, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH and other fine gents! Sporting a new JUDGE DREDD cover by BRIAN BOLLAND!

MICHAEL EURY’s biography of comics’ most prominent and affable personality! It covers his career as illustrator, inker, and editor—peppered with DICK’S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS—and is illustrated with RARE AND UNSEEN comics, merchandising, and advertising art! Plus: an extensive index of his published work, comments and tributes by NEAL ADAMS, DENNIS O’NEIL, TERRY AUSTIN, PAUL LEVITZ, MARV WOLFMAN, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, JIM APARO and others, a Foreword by NEAL ADAMS, and an Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ!

(136-page Digital Edition with COLOR) $4.95

(204-page Digital Edition with COLOR) $6.95

(176-page Digital Edition with COLOR) $5.95

SECRETS IN THE SHADOWS: GENE COLAN

TOM FIELD’s amazing COLAN retrospective, with rare drawings, photos, and art from his 60-year career, and a comprehensive overview of Gene’s glory days at Marvel Comics! MARV WOLFMAN, DON McGREGOR and other writers share script samples and anecdotes of their Colan collaborations, while TOM PALMER, STEVE LEIALOHA and others show how they approached inking Colan’s famously nuanced penciled pages! Plus: a NEW PORTFOLIO of never-seen collaborations between Gene and masters such as BYRNE, KALUTA and PÉREZ, and all-new artwork created just for this book! (192-page Digital Edition with COLOR) $6.95

ART OF GEORGE TUSKA

A comprehensive look at GEORGE TUSKA’S personal and professional life, including early work at the Eisner-Iger shop, producing controversial crime comics of the 1950s, and his tenure with Marvel and DC Comics, as well as independent publishers. Includes extensive coverage of his work on IRON MAN, X-MEN, HULK, JUSTICE LEAGUE, TEEN TITANS, BATMAN, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, and others, a gallery of commission art and a thorough index of his work, original art, photos, sketches, unpublished art, interviews and anecdotes from his peers and fans, plus the very personal and reflective words of George himself! Written by DEWEY CASSELL. (128-page Digital Edition) $4.95

OTHER BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

PENCILER, PUBLISHER, PROVOCATEUR

COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST

THE ART OF GLAMOUR

MATT BAKER

EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE

Shines a light on the life and career of the artistic and publishing visionary of DC Comics!

Explores the life and career of one of Marvel Comics’ most recognizable and dependable artists!

Biography of the talented master of 1940s “Good Girl” art, complete with color story reprints!

Definitive biography of the Watchmen writer, in a new, expanded edition!

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95

(176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $26.95

(192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

(240-page trade paperback) $29.95

QUALITY COMPANION

BATCAVE COMPANION

ALL- STAR COMPANION

AGE OF TV HEROES

The first dedicated book about the Golden Age publisher that spawned the modern-day “Freedom Fighters”, Plastic Man, and the Blackhawks!

Unlocks the secrets of Batman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, following the Dark Knight’s progression from 1960s camp to 1970s creature of the night!

Roy Thomas has four volumes documenting the history of ALL-STAR COMICS, the JUSTICE SOCIETY, INFINITY, INC., and more!

(256-page trade paperback with COLOR) $31.95

(240-page trade paperback) $26.95

(224-page trade paperbacks) $24.95

Examining the history of the live-action television adventures of everyone’s favorite comic book heroes, featuring the in-depth stories of the shows’ actors and behind-the-scenes players!

CARMINE INFANTINO

SAL BUSCEMA

(192-page full-color hardcover) $39.95

MARVEL COMICS

An issue-by-issue field guide to the pop culture phenomenon of LEE, KIRBY, DITKO, and others, from the company’s fumbling beginnings to the full maturity of its wild, colorful, offbeat grandiosity!

IN THE 1960s

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

MODERN MASTERS

HOW TO CREATE COMICS

Covers how Stan Lee went from writer to publisher, Jack Kirby left (and returned), Roy Thomas rose as editor, and a new wave of writers and artists came in!

20+ volumes with in-depth interviews, plus extensive galleries of rare and unseen art from the artist’s files!

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

Shows step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and art, to printing and distribution!

(128-page trade paperbacks) $14.95 each

(108-page trade paperback) $15.95

IN THE 1970s

A BOOK SERIES DEVOTED TO THE BEST OF TODAY’S ARTISTS

FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com