Alter Ego #2 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Roy Roy T Thomas’ homas’ Legendary Comics anzine Comics F F anzine

5.95

In the USA

SILVER AGE-GOLDEN AGE-BEYOND!

No. 2 AUTUMN 1999

THE

ATOM

was CREATED by:

Gil Kane B) Gardner Fox C) Julie Schwartz D) Jerry G. Bails E) All of the Above A)

Don’t answer Till you read this issue’s Extensive ExEgesis of the Tiny Titan--&

Mike W. Barr’s AwEsome Addendum!

A Surprise-Filled Interview with

Larry Lieber First scripter of THOR, IRON MAN, et al.!

A Rare Photo Gallery

Fandom’s FAN-tastic Past! From the ’60s to the ’90s!

PLUS RARE ART BY:

Michael T. Gilbert Jerry Ordway

BLOCKBUSTER BONUS!

Mr. Monster Presents a Never-Reprinted

Gil Kane John Romita And much more!

SPIRIT story by Will Eisner!

TwoMorrows Publishing Update 15%

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SUMMER 2011

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BACK ISSUE #51

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• Digital Editions available: $2.95-$3.95! • Back Issue & Alter Ego now with color! • Lower international shipping rates!

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “AllInterview Issue”! Part 2 of an exclusive STEVE ENGLEHART interview (continued from ALTER EGO #103)! “Pro2Pro” interviews between SIMONSON & LARSEN, MOENCH & WEIN, and comics letterers KLEIN & CHIANG. Plus JOHN OSTRANDER, MICHAEL USLAN, and longtime DC color artist ADRIENNE ROY! Cover by Englehart collaborator MARSHALL ROGERS!

“Gods!” Takes an in-depth look at WALTER SIMONSON’s Thor, the Thunder God in the Bronze Age, “Pro2Pro” interview with TOM DeFALCO and RON FRENZ, Hercules: Prince of Power, Moondragon, Three Ways to End the New Gods Saga, exclusive interview with fantasy writer MICHAEL MOORCOCK, art and commentary by GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, BOB LAYTON, and more, with a swingin’ Thor cover by SIMONSON!

“Liberated Ladies” eyeing female characters that broke barriers in the Bronze Age: Big Barda, Valkyrie, Ms. Marvel, Phoenix, Savage She-Hulk, and the sword-wielding Starfire. Plus a “Pro2Pro” interview with JILL THOMPSON, GAIL SIMONE, and BARBARA KESEL, art and commentary by JOHN BYRNE, GEORGE PEREZ, JACK KIRBY, MIKE VOSBURG, and more, with a new cover by BRUCE TIMM!

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THE BEST IN COMICS AND LEGO MAGAZINES!

ALTER EGO #105

ALTER EGO #106

ALTER EGO #107

ALTER EGO #108

DRAW! #22

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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LEE & KIRBY: THE WONDER YEARS (KIRBY COLLECTOR #58)

Special double-size book examines the first decade of the FANTASTIC FOUR, and the events that put into motion the Marvel Age of Comics! New interviews with STAN LEE, FLO STEINBERG, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, and others, with a wealth of historical information and Kirby artwork!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

BRICKJOURNAL #17

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BRICKJOURNAL #19

“Kirby Vault!” Rarities from the “King” of comics: Personal correspondence, private photos, collages, rare Marvelmania art, bootleg album covers, sketches, transcript of a 1969 VISIT TO THE KIRBY HOME (where Jack answers the questions YOU’D ask in ‘69), MARK EVANIER, pencil art from the FOURTH WORLD, CAPTAIN AMERICA, MACHINE MAN, SILVER SURFER GRAPHIC NOVEL, and more!

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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Volume 3, No. 2 Autumn 1999

™

Editor Roy Thomas

Associate Editor Bill Schelly

Consulting Editors John Morrow Jon B. Cooke

FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck

Contents

Contributing Editor

Silver Threads among the Gold (& Bronze, & Beyond!) . . . . . . . . . 2

Michael T. Gilbert

Our Only Writer/Editorial This Ish.

Editors Emeritus Jerry G. Bails, Ronn Foss, Biljo White, Mike Friedrich

Cover Art

Splitting The Atom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Roy Thomas Tells All (We Hope!) about the 1960-61 Origins of the Tiny Titan, starring Gil Kane, Julius Schwartz, Gardner Fox, and Jerry Bails.

Gil Kane, Jack Burnley

Cover Color

Splicing The Atom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Tom Ziuko, Jack Burnley

Mike W. Barr’s Fearless Footnote to the Previous Piece.

Design & Layout Jon B. Cooke/ GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS

“Stan Made Up the Plot... and I’d Write the Script” . . . . . . . . . 18

Mailing Crew

A Conversation with Larry Lieber, Spidey Comic Strip Artist—and One of the Most Important Scripters of the Silver Age.

Russ Garwood, D. Hambone, Glen Musial, Ed Stelli, Pat Varker

Mr. Monster Introduces “The Spirit”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

And Special Thanks to:

Michael T. Gilbert Presents an Ultra-Rare 1966 Spirit Story by Will Eisner.

Neal Adams Mike W. Barr Jack Burnley Ernie Colon Craig & David Delich Al Dellinges Will Eisner Nancy Ford Ron Goulart Grass Green Mark Hanerfeld Roger Hill Gil Kane Robert Kanigher David Anthony Kraft Stan Lee Larry Lieber Russ Maheras Lou Mougin Will Murray Jerry Ordway Jon E. Park Julius Schwartz J.E. Smith Marc Swayze Daniel Tesmoingt Joel Thingvall Marv Wolfman

Hark, The Herald Tribune Sings! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Ye Editor Examines an Extraordinary Issue of the Trib’s New York Magazine.

Fandom’s FAN-tastic Past—from the ’60s to the ’90s! . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Bill Schelly’s Guided Tour of Photos and Other Artifacts of the Early Movers and Shakers of Comics Fandom.

Golden Age Section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flip Us! Our sincere thanks to Gil Kane for giving us his blessing to print as our cover the little-seen, undated illustration of himself and The Atom. Thanks also to Mike Barr for making us aware of it, and John Dacey at Hi-De-Ho Comics in Santa Monica, California. [Atom ©1999 DC Comics, Inc.] Alter EgoTM is published quarterly 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@oburg.net. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Single issues: $5.95 ($7.00 Canada, $9.00 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $20 US, $27 Canada, $37 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. Alter and Captain Ego ©1999 Biljo White. The Atom, Batman, Billy Batson, Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Junior, Doll Man, Dr. Mid-Nite, The Flash, Green Lantern, Infinity, Inc., JSA, Mary Marvel, Mr. Mind, Rex the Wonder Dog, Robin, Rose & Thorn, Shazam, Sivana, Starman, Steamboat, Superman, Wonder Woman ©1999 DC Comics Inc.; Ant Man, Captain America, Captain Britain, The Hulk, Iron Man, Mr. Morgan’s Monster, Rawhide Kid, Spider-Man, Thor, Wasp, Watcher ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.; The Destructor, Tiger-Man, Warhawk ©1999 Atlas Comics; Xal-Kor ©1999 Grass Green. Mr. Monster © Michael T. Gilbert. The Spirit ©1999 Will Eisner; The Eye, The Eclipse ©1999 Bill Shelly; The Viper ©1999 Ronald E. Foss. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING

Writer/Editorial

Silver Threads among the Gold

(and Bronze and even beyond!)

eems like only days ago that publisher John Morrow and I were as frantic as ferrets, trying to finish off the layouts and proofreading of A/E V3#1, after original layout man Chris Knowles had to withdraw soon after making a good start.

called a fanzine at this point, as we wrote on our first-issue cover.

And here we are finalizing V3#2 already, with Comic Book Artist editor Jon B. Cooke now regularly handling the layout chores even as he prepares for CBA to go bimonthly. (Yea, team!)

If we do continue to use the term “fanzine” from time to time, it’s because, even though A/E (like CBA and TwoMorrows’ third mag, The Jack Kirby Collector) is professionally published and printed, it still retains much of the spirit of a fanzine.

While here I sit at my word processor—my “glorified typewriter,” to use Isaac Asimov’s pithy phrase—trying to come up with an editorial, because custom demands a few hopefully-well-chosen words up front to help orient the reader to the magazine to follow. Custom is undoubtedly right, but our second issue is so chock-full of material that Ye Editor begrudges every page, every paragraph, that doesn’t contribute directly in some way to the history of comic books and comics fandom. That’s why, though I did manage to squeeze in a letters section this time around (and will strive mightily to include one in each and every issue in the future), you won’t find any book reviews and the like. I’ll print such features now and then, if either a book or a particular review catches my fancy, but I’d prefer to leave such things to Jon Cooke and his thicker (and soon more frequently published) CBA. A couple more thoughts, tossed out under the gun literally an hour before this issue must be Express-Mailed en toto to Jon, and then I’ll leave you to it (with no apologies for the fact that there’s no Golden Age editorial as such this time— consider this it): First, I’ll confess I’m a bit puzzled whether Alter Ego should be

Four seasoned pros smile for the camera at the 1995 Chicago con which produced last issue’s Stan Lee Roast: (L.-to-R.:) Irwin Hasen, Roy Thomas (the baby of the group), John Romita, Stan Lee. Together this quartet has more than two centuries’ worth of professional comics experience! [Photo courtesy of Nancy Ford]

The original definition of “fanzine” is, of course, an amateur magazine published by fans expressly for fans, and not for the more casual comics-buyer, let alone the general public.

That’s the way I always intended it, and that’s the way it will stay. As I announced in Vol. 2, #1, when it ran as part of CBA #1 in early 1998, the revived A/E came about partly out of my offer to Jon and John simply to “spotlight the bits and pieces of artwork and information I’ve salted away over the years, particularly in three major areas: “(1) The Golden Age of Comics, by which I mean anything from the 1930s up to, say, the creation of the second Flash in 1956; “(2) Those aspects of the Silver Age and beyond, from ’56 till the day after yesterday, of which I have personal knowledge, either as active participant or as bemused spectator;

Writer/Editorial

“(3) Certain material from early comics fandom which I feel deserves a new audience....” Still, perhaps I should have clarified things, to indicate that: (a) The special purview of A/E is, and will remain, the Golden and Silver Ages, even though I place the end of the latter vaguely somewhere in the early to middle 1970s; (b) I’ll cover anything else I feel like covering, though in consultation with Jon Cooke and John Morrow so that our three magazines don’t step on each other’s toes too often or too hard.

ed a couple of minor errors in) my article on the salvaging of DC art. Stan Lee (who still does a lot more than just “present”) sent us a fax. Even Ye Writer/Editor is still scripting a comic or three, but won’t let anything keep him from putting out an issue of Alter Ego every three months, even as he puts the finishing touches on The All-Star Companion, coming very soon from TwoMorrows. We’re pros, yes... But we’re all fans at heart, too.

End of Mission Statement Revisited.

Every coin has two sides. By the way, when I said above that Alter Ego retains the spirit of a fanzine, I meant it.

And love of the comics medium is the coin of our realm. Bestest,

For, even though the major thrust of this magazine has shifted from “Volume I’s” straight fan-oriented viewpoint back in the 1960s to a more professional, behind-thescenes approach, everyone associated closely or even peripherally with A/E (as with CBA and TJKC) is doing it out of love for the comics medium, not for any sizable commercial reward. Take this issue, for instance: Michael T. Gilbert, though busy with his own comics work, not only contacted Will Eisner about our reprinting a hard-to-find 1966 Spirit story, but drew a two-page Mr. Monster introduction; Bill Schelly is a small-press publisher involved with comics-related material. Marc Swayze, who continues his Fawcett reminiscences in the FCA section, was one of the most in-demand artists of the 1940s. Jack Burnley, another top Golden Age artist, not only consented to be interviewed, but put together and mailed me a mountain of additional materials for inclusion; Larry Lieber, always pressed by those daily Spider-Man comic strip deadlines, did very much the same; Will Murray has written numerous novels under both his own name and that of “Kenneth Robeson” et al., but still loves to dig up historical info on comics and pulps (as does novelist Ron Goulart, who supplied us with a few pieces of art this time around);

Co r r e c ti o n Roy Thomas’ longtime fandom associate Marty Greim, who published the excellent Comic Crusader some time back, has pointed out that V3 #1’s previously unpublished H.G. Peter art of Wonder Woman atop a bucking bronco was from his collection, a copy of which

Gil Kane took time off from drawing a Superman prestige-format book for DC, among other projects, to sketch us a brand new Atom drawing to approximate one he did circa late 1960, and Julie Schwartz was gracious enough to talk with us at length, as well;

he sent Roy years ago. We

Longtime comics writer Mike W. Barr photocopied a number of much-needed pieces of Silver Age art to go with his own (and even with others’) articles;

Bails, who’d sent the actual

Even longer-time writer Robert Kanigher wrote us a long, long (and extremely colorful if potentially controversial) letter. New Teen Titans co-creator Marv Wolfman read over (and correct-

apologize to Marty for crediting its source as Jerry WW scripts, Marston letter, and Phi Beta Kappa piece we also ran last issue.

Splitting The Atom

Splitting The Atom More Than You Could Possibly Want to Know about the Creation of the Silver Age Mighty Mite! #34 (cover-dated Dec. 1961, but actually on sale several months earlier). After appearing also in #35-36, he graduated at once to his own bimonthly magazine, The Atom (#1, June-July 1962).

by Roy Thomas

AST YEAR AT RASHOMON DEPT.: Back in A/E V2#2, Ye Editor offered the classic 1950 Akiro Kurosawa film Rashomon, whose theme is the impossibility of ever knowing the whole truth about any event, as a template for comics (or any other kind of) history. Then there’s New Wave director Alain Resnais’ 1961 masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad, in which the male protagonist confronts the heroine again and again to insist the two of them had an affair “last year at Frederiksbad, perhaps at Marienbad.” In its own way, the French film plays with truth and memory every bit as much as does Rashomon—which, believe it or don’t, brings us to the creation of the Silver Age Atom. Ray Palmer wasn’t the first DC hero called The Atom, of course. The original one appeared from 1940-1951 in All-American Comics, Flash Comics, Comic Cavalcade, and All-Star Comics.

The Mighty Atom, as he was called in his origin in AllAmerican #19 (Oct. 1940), was a short, red-headed Calvin College student named Al Pratt who had been trained to physical perfection. Until 1948 this Atom had no superpowers, just a rather odd, leather-girdled outfit with a full face mask. Then, still early in the Atomic Age, DC decided a crimefighter with so timely a name needed powers to match; so The original, non-super-powered Atom, overnight, in a 1945 page drawn by Jon Chester with no explaKozlak. [Art courtesy of Jerry Bails; nation, he Atom ©1999 DC Comics Inc.] gained “atomic strength” and, soon afterward, a new costume with a stylized atom emblazoned on its tunic. The first Atom’s last Golden Age appearance was in All-Star #57 (Feb.-March 1951). A few facts about the creation of the second Atom are pretty much set in concrete: Scripted by Gardner Fox, penciled by Gil Kane (with Murphy Anderson inks), and edited by Julius Schwartz, he debuted in National/DC’s Showcase

Alas, almost everything else about the origins of the six-inch stalwart is up for grabs. Fact is, a study of The Atom’s less than immaculate conception is a textbook example of how difficult, if not downright impossible, it is to reconstruct comics history—even when most of the people involved in a particular creation are still alive. Maybe especially then, because it’s harder for anyone to make sweeping assumptions without someone else arising to vociferously deny them! Offered for your consideration:

Background image: Jerry Bails’ 1960 concept of The Atom— like the one that eventually appeared in this panel from Showcase #35—called for a hero who shrank from 6’ tall to 6”! [Original artwork by Kane & Anderson courtesy of Mike W. Barr; Atom ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

The Silver Age versions of Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman, for all the science-fictional trappings which set them apart them from their 1940s forebears, were still basically “revivals,” as DC editors and fans alike called them back then. However, the star of Showcase #34 was destined to have virtually nothing in common with the old Atom except his name. The new hero’s main schtick would be that he fought crime while shrunk to a height of six inches. For the first time, DC would take one of its “revivals” off in a radically different direction from the original, making him in effect a totally new character. Ever wonder why? In attempting to reconstruct the creation of the Silver Age Atom, we must examine the potential contributions of four principals. In alphabetical order: Jerry G. Bails, in 1960 a young associate professor of natural science at Wayne State University, Detroit, and soon to become the first editor/publisher of Alter Ego (Volume 1) and a founding father of comics fandom;

Jerry G. Bails, circa 1960-61. [Reprinted from Alter Ego V1#5 by way of the 1997 trade paperback The Best of Alter Ego.]

Gardner F. Fox (1911-1986), writer/co-creator of the Golden Age Flash, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, and Justice Society, among others—who by late 1960 had likewise co-created the Silver Age Justice League, Hawkman, and Adam Strange; Gil Kane, a professional comics artist since 1942, best known in late 1960 as the illustrator of the Silver Age Green Lantern—a perennial

Splitting The Atom in comics history. Much as the four protagonists of Rashomon relate widely varying recollections of the same event, the saga of the Silver Age Atom is fraught with questions about precisely what was done when, by whom, and how important it was to the development of the new hero. Fortunately, we don’t have to rely overmuch on current memories of an episode now nearly four decades old, because there exists a surprising amount of relevant correspondence from late 1960 and early 1961. Rarely before or for some years afterward was the development of any comics character so well (if contradictorily) documented. To wit:

talent who remains active in the field even today; Julius Schwartz, in 1960 the editor and de facto co-creator of comics starring the new Flash, GL, JLA, and Hawkman, and a DC editor from 1944 until—well, I was about to say “until he retired,” but in 1998 he edited the first Green Lantern Annual ever, thus extending his editorship into a second halfcentury. Quite a cast! With talents like those behind him, small wonder the Small Wonder has endured for nearly four decades! And certainly the last thing I’d want to do is denigrate any of them: I began corresponding with Julie, Gardner, and Jerry (in that order) in late 1960, several years before I met any of them in person; and Gil has been both collaborator and friend since 1969. For that reason, all four are generally referred to below by their first names. In the interests of full disclosure, I should state here that I myself played a part in events, though hardly one to rank with these four fathers (forefathers?) of the incredible shrinking Atom. Think of me more as a spear-carrier, at most a supporting character with an interest

Jerry Bails saved most letters he received from Gardner Fox (beginning in 1953!), Julius Schwartz (starting in mid-1960), and myself (as of November 1960). He also kept carbon copies (remember them?) of some of his early missives to Gardner and Julie. Gardner Fox, too, tended to save letters he received, though seldom carbons of those he wrote. Many of the former are now archived in the library of the University of Oregon (in Eugene). Letters in this collection from Jerry and me were photocopied for us by Mr. Monster creator Michael T. Gilbert, bless him, while working on his own Fox-related pieces for A/E, Volume 2. Gil Kane’s initial but crucial contribution to the Atom’s development was a series of conceptual illustrations, long since scattered to the winds; fortunately, we have access to 1961 comments made by Gil, Gardner, Julie, and Jerry about those drawings. I also discussed the hero’s creation with Gil by phone in 1998.

Julius Schwartz generally didn’t save correspondence, but he’s well represented anyway—by early-’60s letters squirreled away by Gardner and Jerry. In addition, he spoke with me at length by phone in spring of 1998 about the “Atomic Matter.” And me? I saved relatively little correspondence, but luckily, in 1964, Jerry mailed back my early letters to him so I could use them to write a piece called “The Alter Ego Story.” Among other things, that unfinished history of Roy Thomas circa 1961 A/E’s first incarna(not that he’s particularly tion recounted his proud of the photo). and my connection with The Atom’s genesis, then a mere 3-4 years in the past. Most of my article finally saw the light of day in the 1997 Best of Alter Ego volume from Hamster Press, but much of the Atom-related material was omitted there as irrelevant; so some of it is printed here for the first time. Below: Detail from the cover of The Atom #1 (June-July 1962). [©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

Splitting The Atom Unavoidably, there is more documentation still in existence from some of this quintet than from others. But sheer volume, of course, proves nothing in and of itself. I simply wanted to lay all the material I could find on the table, and let readers weigh the evidence for themselves. So—five witnesses, counting myself. Five blind men, trying to pin the tail on an elephant called Truth. Where to begin? For various reasons, let’s start at the earliest moment when anyone but a handful of people at National/DC’s New York offices learned there was to be a second super-hero called The Atom. And that means we start with: JERRY BAILS In Alter-Ego (Vol. 1) #1, a 22-page spirit-duplicator fanzine mailed in March 1961 to 150 or so comics fans, editor/publisher Jerry added the following postscript to other news he’d received from Julius Schwartz about upcoming DC comics: “And now, for what I believe is possibly the best news of all—the revival of another JSA hero. JLA author Gardner Fox and GL artist Gil Kane are teaming up with editor Julie Schwartz to create one of the most unusual heroes on the modern scene. I feel especially happy about this one, because I suggested the idea initially in a letter to Gardner Fox dated August 29, 1960. I followed it up with another letter to Julie Schwartz on December 8, but by this time this industrious gentleman had already taken up the idea and developed it along lines very similar to those that I suggested in my second letter. This new hero with a familiar name will be given a try-out in Showcase #34, which should appear in early August.”

Schwartz’s fledgling letters columns, naturally without the DC editor’s knowledge. (“You got me!” Jerry said, with a grin I could hear over the phone, when I asked him about the authenticity of the “poll.”) He says he did show copies of JLA to a few local kids for comment, but there was no true poll. Nor did he solicit their opinions as to which JSAers might be worth reviving after twenty years in limbo. So it was actually Jerry Bails, not his “little friends in the neighborhood,” who no later than August 1960 came up with the concept of a “real small” Atom, patterned after the old Quality Comics hero Doll Man (the official spelling). By the time Jerry ran across his carbon copy of this seminal letter in September 1998—38 years after it was written—I had spent months trying to track down the original. Of course, since Gardner had saved many letters sent to him, they’d probably be in the aforementioned University of Oregon collection of his papers, right? GARDNER FOX Wrong. For, in spring of 1998, when the ever-helpful Michael Gilbert perused the 1960 missives in the Fox archives, he found letters from Jerry Bails dated June 24 and September 11—but none dated in August. What happened to Gardner’s copy of that letter? The answer lies in this reply Fox sent to Jerry on September 1, 1960, which read in part:

Jerry added further information in a coded message which, when deciphered, read: “WITH THE ABILITY TO COMPRESS HIS BODY INTO SIX INCHES OF NUCLEAR FORCE, THIS MIGHTY MITE WILL TRULY BE THE ATOM.” This was the climax, or perhaps the anti-climax, of a campaign begun half a year earlier. That’s when Jerry had sent his favorite comics writer a letter that began with the following two paragraphs:

Interesting that Jerry had neglected to capitalize the name of his undersized hero suggested for revival! Jerry readily admits today that he made up his “poll” out of whole cloth, with an eye to jazzing up Julie From 1941 to 1953, The Doll Man was one of Quality Comics Group’s most popular heroes. This 1943 panel was drawn by John Cassone. Doll Man ©1999 DC Comics Inc.

It was probably Jerry’s bogus “poll” which caused Gardner to show the letter to Julie. It’s quite possible Fox didn’t consciously notice the suggestion of a “real small” Atom, in the vein of “the Dollman,” even though Jerry suggested that that idea be passed along to “the editors.” For one thing, Gardner had entered the field in 1937 not as a comics fan, but as an adult with a law degree. And,

Splitting The Atom

though Doll Man had been one of the most popular heroes at the rival Quality group, it would surprise few who knew him if it turned out Gardner Fox had never even heard of the character.

revive the Atom as a character like the old Dollman. Do you remember him?’”

Gardner’s next communication to Jerry is undated, but is typed on a small, square paper with “JULIUS SCHWARTZ” printed at the top (obviously a memo sheet, possibly even mailed while at DC’s offices), clearly an early follow-up to his Sept. 1 letter [see preceding page].

ROY THOMAS

JERRY BAILS And, indeed, most of Jerry’s 8/29/60 letter to Gardner was printed in JLA #3 (coverdate March 1961), which contained the very story, “The Slave Ship of Space,” which the scripter had been writing on September 1: Julie printed the first four sentences of Jerry’s letter (adding exclamation points to the last one)— dropped the next four (which said the kids also read Jerry’s All-Stars and made the passFan letter by Jerry Bails and answer by editor ing sugJulius Schwartz as printed in Justice League of gestion of America #3. ©1999 DC Comics, Inc. a “real small,” “Dollman”- like Atom, a notion Jerry hoped Gardner would pass along to “the editors”)—then skipped to the alleged poll report. To edit it thus, the entire letter had to be read, or at least skimmed, by Julie. Which is not to claim that Julie, either, consciously noticed the Atom reference. He had lots of other things on his mind. In a Sept. 11, 1960 note to Gardner at his home in Yonkers, New York, Jerry thanked him for his part in getting him the art to The Brave and the Bold #30, and asked if Gardner could send him a JLA script sometime—but did not mention The Atom. On November 14 Jerry wrote Gardner again (to thank him for sending a JLA script), but again made no reference to a possible Atom revival. In fact, ’twould seem that the second time Jerry mentioned The Atom in writing was in his second letter to his newest correspondent—myself—a missive I seem to have received on December 3, 1960. In 1964 I paraphrased and quoted from it in “The Alter Ego Story”: “Besides liking my idea of a ‘newslegion,’ [Jerry] had one of his own, which he had suggested to Gardner Fox already in a letter the previous summer: ‘I also think that D.C. should

I certainly did, though Jerry had mentioned no more specifics. Being small, as a kid I’d been a fan both of the 1940s Atom and of Doll Man, who had lasted from 1939 to 1953. But it had never occurred to me to give a hero the name of one and the attributes of the other, as it had to Jerry. As I wrote in 1964 concerning a time then four years past: “The next day (December 4), I fired off a letter myself to editor Schwartz” concerning the notion of a pint-size Atom. I had also “dashed off a twopage synopsis of an Atom origin…. In my version, Al Pratt was a college student… who was given his power to shrink by MOM (Molecular Order Modifier), the invention of a physics professor with whom he was friendly, and who was killed in the first story by spies. I also included an idea which I wish to this day the Atom would incorporate on at least a sporadic basis—a non-talking parrot named Copernicus (Copey for short) who would serve as short-range transportation for the Mighty Mite. I had even created a host of subsidiary characters: a roommate, a girl friend, and a grandmother, who would now seem like a wealthy version of Spider-Man’s Aunt May.” Undoubtedly I also mailed a copy of my origin to— JERRY BAILS In the meantime, on December 8, Jerry had decided to approach Julie directly at last, with a detailed outline:

Splitting The Atom This letter contains the first known specific suggestion that The Atom be “six inches tall,” the height he would ultimately become. (Doll Man had generally been drawn between 8”-12” tall, not that it made that much difference.) Jerry also sent me a copy of his full-blown concept, adding: “What I really wish is that I had the time to write an occasional Atom script for Showcase. Maybe you and I could collaborate in some way and submit a script and cover panel to Julie. How about it?”

friends—the Freedom Fighters.” Jerry added an intriguing thought: Why not make it necessary for The Atom to use a wand similar to the defunct Starman’s Gravity Rod in order to shrink and regain his size? (“This suggestion,” I agreed in my ’64 piece, “was pregnant with possibilities, and it still seems to me that it makes more sense than having the Atom constantly get himself into scrapes where he can’t reach his own belt-buckle.”) Jerry suggested, however, that my MOM (Molecular Order Modifier) be “changed to something like HIP (Heavy Isotope Producer), as ‘a machine that would modify molecular order would possibly upset the delicate chemical balance necessary for life.’” I willingly concurred; he was the scientist, not I.

As I wrote in 1964, “I immediately plunged myself into the project.” Thus, ironically, before comics fanzines in general and Alter Ego in particular were even a gleam in Jerry’s mind, he and I were thinking about trying to write a professional comic book! Over the next week or so, Jerry sent me two more letters outlining his expanded ideas for The Atom. The “Newslegion” he’d mentioned to Julie referred to my pet notion of a kid group inspired by The Newsboy Legion in 1940s Star Spangled Comics. Jerry had reworked it and incorporated it into his Atom proposal. I quoted from his letters in my 1964 piece: “From the four corners of the world come four young men to matriculate at a large midwestern university. Each one is a refugee from a war-torn country—one from a satellite country in eastern Europe, where he fought against modern tanks in an effort to win freedom for his people—one from a new African nation where a self-imposed ruler used fighter planes to suppress the people—one from a small nation in S.E. Asia where invading hordes used machine guns to put down resistance—and one from a Latin American dictatorship where uniformed police beat back the revolting students with clubs.

ROY THOMAS My 1964 mini-history continues: “At this point we also began to collaborate on plans for a costume for our Miniature Manhunter. Various drawings were sent back and forth through the mails for the next several weeks, ranging from near-copies of the old Atom (and even Dr. Fate) costumes to some almost as unwieldy as if the Mighty Mite had been carrying his shrinking machine about on his back. Our major point of disagreement was over the matter of the Atom’s headgear. I preferred a mask-less helmet similar to Starman’s, while Jerry—who desired to see the Tiny Titan occasionally battle criminals at his full six-foot height—felt a face-mask to be a necessary part of the costume.”

“As part of World Refugee Year, the United States has admitted these four young men, who come together on the same campus, where they dedicate themselves to the cause of freedom and to the cause of the 15 million people who still live in refugee camps. “It happens that, on this same campus, a professor of physics, Al Pratt, has just won a prize for his development of a peaceful use for isotopes. Al dedicates his knowledge to peace and actively opposes the use of atomic weapons. However, he faces a moral dilemma. His discovery has untold potential as a weapon. With it he can create an army of miniature super-commandos. “When he hears that a gang of white-hooded men have terrorized the foreign students on campus, he decides to take action as the Atom. In several chapters, he saves first one student, then another. In the end all four students join the Atom in a commando-styled raid on the headquarters of the gang. They discover that the gang has been responsible for spreading the poison of prejudice. The Atom dubs his four young

Also during December I sent Gardner a drawing I’d done of our proposed Atom, hoping he would show it to Julie. I costumed my version very much like the 1948-51 Atom, and had him

riding Copernicus. Evidently Gardner replied quickly, because on Jan. 1, 1961, I sent him “thanks for the compliment on my drawing of the Atom and his parrot Copernicus. However, I’m not Joe Kubert, I know.” To say the least. (Interestingly, Gardner would introduce a mynah bird named Major Mynah in The Atom #37 [June-July 1968], the last issue drawn by Gil Kane. The inspiration for the Major was doubtless a story Gardner would write in Strange Adventures #140 [May 1962]—the offbeat “The Strange Adventure That Really Happened!” in which he and Julie Schwartz were the heroes, with Gardner’s pet mynah Yakky inadvertently giving him a clue to save the world from alien invaders. However, Gardner’s daughter, Lynda Fox Cohen, doesn’t remember her family ever owning a mynah. In any event, a mynah isn’t a parrot.) And then, a pair of letters sent from the New York area early in the New Year dashed some of our hopes, even while raising others.

Splitting The Atom GARDNER FOX

On January 10, 1961, the same day I mailed the above missive to Gardner, Jerry received a chatty letter from the veteran scripter dated January 1. It read:

and radiate energy. By radiating and absorbing cosmic energy, the Atom can compress his body or resume normal size at will, subject to two limitations: (1) an hour maximum in the miniature state, and (2) an hour minimum in the normal state. In other words, the Atom would have to wait an hour between compressions, but he could return to the normal state at any time.” Jerry also wrote that we had given “our” Atom (now christened “Dr. Evan Sander”) “a group of boy companions”; he summarized an account of an initial story very much like the one he had submitted earlier. Most likely he had sent Gardner his detailed Atom proposal at the same time he mailed copies to Julie and me, since his letter of 1/11/61 refers as if for a second time to his notion of the hero shrinking into a “subatomic world” if his way back to normal size was blocked by lead: “The idea of subatomic worlds was designed to give the Atom an occasional change of scenery. Our thought was that the Mighty Mite could have different and quite unusual powers on each occasion. On one subatomic world he might be lighter than a balloon; on another he might be a giant with all the troubles of Gulliver. Well, that’s our idea. I hope it offers you some suggestions.” If Jerry ever received a precise response from Gardner to this particular letter, he has no a copy of it. But he hadn’t really asked for an answer. CUT TO: In February of 1961 Jerry used a coincidentally-arising trip east as an excuse to visit the National/DC offices in Manhattan and to meet Julie and Gardner. Out of his discussions with Julie in particular came the inspiration to expand a projected “JLA Newsletter” he’d been thinking of doing into Alter-Ego, the first super-hero comics fanzine. (Julie had co-founded one of the very first science-fiction fanzines back in the early 1930s.) On returning to Detroit, Jerry mailed me what I phrased in ’64 as “inside information on the forthcoming Atom, who had been temporarily frozen by D.C., which

JERRY BAILS Jerry at once wrote me about Gardner’s letter and suggested we abandon our plans for The Atom and direct our energies elsewhere. Like we had a choice? JULIUS SCHWARTZ On January 6, 1960, the DC editor finally sent Jerry a direct response to his December 8 missive; probably Jerry received it very soon after he got Gardner’s. It’s reprinted at right. JERRY BAILS With The Atom’s “revival” now out of our hands, Jerry decided his best bet was to try to influence the new hero’s scripter. So he wrote Gardner with complete sincerity on January 11 that he and I were “both happy to hear that the Atom will be revived and that you will handle the stories.” He briefly outlined a combination of our ideas, which included Copernicus and a “neutron rod… to help him absorb

Splitting The Atom

The Silver Age Atom exploded on the scene in two stories in Showcase #34 (Sept.-Oct. 1961), with art by Gil Kane & Murphy Anderson, and scripts by Gardner Fox. Since the origin’s art was incinerated, art from the issue’s second tale is the earliest Atom art still in existence. But at least Fox’s origin script still survives. [Origin script (hand-edited and dedicated by Julius Schwartz) courtesy of Paul Gambaccini; Atom ©1999 DC Comics Inc.; Showcase #34 art courtesy of Roger Hill.]

feared, he said, ‘flooding the market with costumed heroes’…. Jerry had seen Gil Kane’s preliminary sketch of the Atom, which pictured him astride a dog, but he didn’t know if the canine mount was to be a permanent fixture in the strip or not and said that the topic never came up in conversation.” The Atom’s debut, of course, was not long delayed, despite DC’s concerns. Sales of Showcase #34 were evidently very good, perhaps helped by the inclusion of a drawing of the original Justice Society on a text page; and the Mighty Mite was given his own title almost at once, even if it was not destined to have the long run of The Flash and Green Lantern. The new Atom had proven more popular to date than the revived Hawkman.

In my fanzine days the only public statement I ever made with regards to how I felt about our experience with the Atom “revival” was shoehorned into “The A/E Story,” though it didn’t see print until 1997:

After entering the comics industry in mid-1965, I never again discussed the Atom with Gardner or Julie. It was a dead letter. Truth to tell, since I worked for DC for only two weeks before quitting to join Stan Lee at Marvel for 15 years, I saw Gardner and/or Julie only rarely, though such contacts as we had were always exceedingly cordial. Still, there was Dave Kaler’s 1965 comics convention, held in Manhattan’s decrepit Broadway Central Hotel over the weekend of July 31-August 1. Only a few weeks into my job as a writer and assistant editor at Marvel, I took part in a panel composed of fans and pros, called “Comics and Fandom: Where Do We Go from Here?” Sitting in the front row of the audience was Gil Kane, now Green Lantern and Atom artist. At this point he and I had met only in passing, if at all.

ROY THOMAS As I wrote in ’64: “It goes without saying that The Atom is today one of Jerry’s and my favorite comics—and not just for sentimental reasons, either— but I think we both heave an occasional sigh for what might have been.”

“Jerry (with perhaps a little extra help from me) had influenced National to ‘revive’ the Atom—a feat for which he was never given any recognition.”

When panelist James Warren, publisher of Creepy, sarcastically disparaged the very possibility of fandom contributing to the comics industry, I cited, as an example of a fannish contribution, that Jerry Bails and I had proposed a miniature Atom to DC, and had thus initiated a new and successful comic book hero.

Splitting The Atom

Right: Besides Hopalong Cassidy, Gil Kane had recently seen both Rex the Wonder Dog cancelled in 1959—and All-Star Western (for which he did a great Johnny Thunder) would end its run with issue #119 (June-July 1961). [Original Rex art courtesy of Roger Hill; ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

To my surprise, Gil Kane began to vigorously shake his head in the front row. He mouthed or muttered words to the effect that “That’s not how it was.” Gil was soon invited to join the panel, but the subject of the Atom was not explored further. So I assumed Gil was simply unaware of how Julie and Gardner had been handed the concept for the new Atom, whose adventures he had been drawing for four years. From 1969 onward, Gil and I collaborated on Captain Marvel, Warlock, “Iron Fist,” “Ka-Zar,” Amazing Spider-Man, Conan the Barbarian, plus a mountain of Marvel covers when I was editor-in-chief. At some state during this time I learned the broad outlines of the reason behind his vigorous head-shaking that hot summer day in 1965…. GIL KANE But it was not until a phone conversation of April 7, 1998, that Gil and I really discussed the matter at length. On that occasion he said that by late 1960 he had lost several DC assignments through attrition, and wanted to replace them. Hopalong Cassidy had been cancelled with #135 (May-June 1959), The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog with #46 (Nov.-Dec. 1959). Besides Green Lantern (which after all was only a bimonthly in 1960), he did some work for Julie’s science-fiction titles and the just-being-cancelled AllStar Western; but that combination was not enough to keep him busy fulltime.

Alas for comics history, Gil understandably has no memory of even an approximate date when, at some time in 1960 (obviously prior to Gardner’s letter of January 1, 1961), the concept of an Atom along the lines of Doll Man—an old favorite of his—occurred to him. Gil assumed that DC had purchased all the Quality heroes back in the mid-’50s, including Blackhawk, Plastic Man—and Doll Man. We have all since learned that DC actually bought only a handful of Quality titles then (with Blackhawk the only hero) when “Busy” Arnold’s longrunning company folded; DC didn’t purchase Plastic Man and other Quality heroes till the late 1960s. This matters little, however, since the point is that Gil thought DC owned Doll Man. Back to Gil: He recalls that, at this point, he executed on huge illustration boards what he termed “a series of drawings”—first, a depiction of his Atom on the back of a German shepherd—basically Rex the Wonder Dog, still fresh in his mind. (He was unaware that, circa 1950, Doll Man had likewise worked with a dog partner, a Great Dane named Elmo, before swapping him for the more comely Doll Girl.) He also recalls drawing a pistol firing at The Atom—with the bullet(s) bouncing off him. The hero’s costume, he says, was exactly like the one he later wore in Showcase #34, Gil Kane’s 1960 concepexcept it had no belt. Whether these two drawings were tual Atom drawings are both on the same board or on different ones he does not long since scattered to recall. (And see Mike W. Barr’s accompanying article for the four winds, but he yet a third Atom illo almost certainly done at the same graciously drew this time, which Gil seems to have totally forgotten.) approximation of the best-remembered of them especially for Alter Ego. Thanks, old buddy! Art ©1999 Gil Kane; The Atom ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

Gil, who then lived in Jericho, Long Island, recounts that he drove over to the Hicksville, L.I. home of Tom Nicolosi, a DC production man. Nicolosi, who had a box of St. Martin’s dyes at his home, agreed to color the drawings, refusing any payment.

Splitting The Atom

Having reviewed the letters exchanged between Jerry, Gardner, Julie, and myself in 1960-61, and even having consulted Gil, I still had not yet spoken directly with Julie about the matter in lo, these many years. So I phoned him on May 29, 1998. He was most generous with his time and memories, even while reminding me that it was a very long time ago. Julie said that, after launching Flash, Green Lantern, the Justice League, and Hawkman, the next character he thought about reviving was The Atom. Only, he says, he didn’t want to do the “Al Pratt” version, because he was just some little guy who was fairly strong. Around this time—and at this point Julie definitely does not recall asking him to do so—he says Gil Kane brought him a drawing of “a man on a big cat” called The Atom, who was to be a miniature superhero. Julie does not recall Gil at any time mentioning Doll Man, nor does he remember ever having heard, back then, of the Quality hero. Since Julie has often related how he bought his first and only comic books en route to his job interview at DC in 1944, a total lack of knowledge of Doll Man’s existence is even easier to believe in his case than in Gardner’s!

As soon as possible, Gil showed the illustrations to Julie. Gil recalls Julie’s immediate response as favorable, though he insisted on adding a belt to the costume for size control. Gil never liked the belt, because “it broke up the costume lines.” Gil insists he was never aware, then or later, that Jerry Bails and/or I had written Gardner or Julie about a miniaturized Atom. Nor has he any doubts himself about the origins of the character. As he stated unequivocally in the August 21, 1998, issue of The Comics Buyer’s Guide: “I created the Atom. No debate necessary. I needed some additional work when I was doing Green Lantern and I knew that DC owned The Atom. I also knew that they now owned the Doll Man title, so I created a new character based on the two. I made up a series of drawings and submitted them to Julie, who submitted them for the final approval from [publisher] Jack Liebowitz. I got the OK for it, and that was it. We were off and running.” JULIUS SCHWARTZ Gil’s oversize “series of drawings” of Atom scenes are doubtless the same “art samples” and “sketches” about which Fox and Julie wrote Jerry in December 1960 and January 1961; Jerry saw at least one of them for himself in Manhattan that February. But, as quoted earlier, Julie indicated in his letter that he himself “had already had some similar ideas on the same subject,” and that he had “even [gone] so far as to have artist GIL (GL) KANE do some sketches.” Let’s get one thing straight up front: To quote the above is not, certainly, to accuse Julie Schwartz of mendacity! For one thing, people’s memories of events often differ, even soon after the fact; and, after all, Julie was merely dashing off a hasty note to a fan. Also, as a DC editor, Julie may have known without consciously thinking about it that he should not state in black-and-white that anyone besides a DC editor had come up with the concept for a new Atom—not even a freelance artist like Gil. In 1960 the dire spectre of the late-’40s Siegel-Shuster lawsuit over Superman/Superboy still cast a very long shadow. Why do you think credits disappeared from most DC and other comics circa 1947-48? In the bizarre “work-for-hire” world of comic books, of course, the legal creator of the Silver Age Atom is DC Comics itself. Perhaps we should have named DC Comics a fifth claimant for the title?!

When I told Julie that both Gil and Jerry had told me Gil’s drawing had shown The Atom riding a dog, not a cat, I could hear him shrugging at the other end of the line: “Well, it was some kind of an animal.” Science-fiction fan Julie went on to state that, shortly before Gil brought in his drawing, he had been reading about white dwarf stars. So it occurred to him that a fragment of a dwarf star might be used to reduce the hero in size. Julie doesn’t specifically recall insisting that Gil add a belt to The Atom’s costume, but he says he never liked the notion of people having to change clothes to don their costumes, à la Clark Kent in that infamous phone booth. He wanted “his” Atom to be wearing his costume all the time, but for it to be invisible until he shrank. (Julie stated that he also originated the idea of Wonder Woman twirling her The Kane-Anderson cover for Showcase #35: “The Atom’s lasso around small size naturally made me think about what situations her to switch such a tiny character would be most effective in.” outfits, at the (Gardner Fox, quoted from a letter written in 1979.) time when [©1999 by DC Comics Inc.] she reapplied for JLA membership after her un-super-powered “mod” period.) While we were on the subject, Julie said he and Gardner Fox plotted out all the early Atom stories together.

Splitting The Atom JERRY BAILS

Neither Jerry nor I ever nurtured any ill will toward anyone at DC over what happened with regard to The Atom. After all, Jerry had originally suggested the concept in passing in a letter to Gardner Fox—treating it as a notion of some neighborhood children, not his own—while my own intention had merely been to help Jerry convince DC to publish a Doll Man-like Atom.

Gardner Fox, one of comics’ major creators and true nice guys, passed away in December 1986. As the original writer, he must certainly be counted as a co-creator of the 1960s Mighty Mite. As editor of The Atom, Julie Schwartz, too, must be considered a co-creator; he even named the hero’s civilian identity (after his sciencefiction writer friend Ray Palmer) and came up with the dwarf star origin, at the very least.

As Jerry wrote recently: “I have no reason not to believe that Gil and Julie arrived at their concept of the Atom before our ideas reached them…. As I recall, Julie responded to me [i.e., to Jerry’s letter of 12/8/60] rather quickly, indicating that he had already been at work on a similar idea. It’s not like it wasn’t an obvious next step. Now that I think about it, he wouldn’t have been doing his job had he not been toying with such ideas. We were only part-time dreamers. He was getting paid to think full-time about the next hot idea. It’s interesting to demonstrate that historical events are not strictly linear, but emerge from interweaving threads.”

And both Gil and Julie are clear nowadays that Gil Kane drew his first Atom illos totally on his own volition. Even if he hadn’t done that, Gil’s work on the seminal issues would earn him, at the very least, cocreator status on the minuscule hero. He may well have been his major creator.

Jerry has also stated, “Clearly I wrote the 8/29/60 letter with the thought they [DC] might use it. If it sparked Julie’s thinking, he could certainly not be faulted for forgetting it.”

1.) Jerry’s letter of August 29, 1960, which Gardner showed to Julie a few days later, led Julie to toy (consciously or unconsciously) with the notion of a “real small” Atom—and some time later, while talking with Gil, Julie may have mentioned the concept to him in passing. Since Gil was familiar with Doll Man, the idea resonated subconsciously in him, too, and he soon executed his illustration, bringing it in to Julie.

True enough, even if there was a period of weeks between Jerry’s Dec. 8, 1960, letter and Gardner’s and Julie’s replies (both dated in early January), making chronologies impossible to pin down. And of course Jerry had suggested a “real small,” “Dollman”-like Atom to Gardner on August 29, 1960—in a letter soon given to Julie—even though neither DC pro ever confirmed that he had consciously noticed the suggestion for a pint-size Atom. GARDNER FOX In the last decade of his productive life, Gardner stated, in a letter to comics fan James Flanagan dated March 26, 1979, and printed in Robin Snyder’s History of Comics, Vol. 2 #2 (Feb. 1991): “I rather imagine the [Showcase] Atom sold very well, which would be its reason for being published ahead of Hawkman in its own book. I enjoyed writing Atom, as I liked writing all the stories I did. The Atom’s small size naturally made me think about what situations such a tiny character would be most effective in, certainly.” A paragraph later, after a few comments about his surprise at the extent of early comics fandom, he wrote— most likely in response to a query about the Atomic Matter: “I doubt that any feedback from Bails or Thomas had very much of an influence, though we always kept their ideas in the back of our minds.” That’s all we ever asked. SUMMING UP No, the full truth about the creation of the Silver Age Atom will surely never be known—not to Julie Schwartz, not to Gil Kane, not to Jerry Bails, and certainly not to me.

In closing: After reviewing all the documents—and there are enough of them that we’ve probably told many readers more than they care to know about the origins of the Silver Age Atom—I submit that there are many scenarios possible, only a few of which are:

Or— 2.) Jerry’s initial letter caused Julie to begin to think about a miniature Atom, even if he soon forgot the source of the idea—and Julie was mulling over the notion when, quite independently, with no prior consultation between them, Gil brought in his unsolicited but all-important illustrations. Or— 3.) Jerry and Gil (and possibly even Julie) each came up independently with the idea of a miniature super-hero called The Atom, with Julie having never noticed the part of Jerry’s 8/29/60 letter to Gardner that suggested it. Even in this scenario, it’s unlikely that either Gil or Julie conceived the “shrunken Atom” idea before Jerry did; but of course that’s immaterial if Gil never heard about it. Or— The reader, naturally, can easily compose myriad other possible scenarios in his own mind. We’ll probably never know exactly what actually happened. In one sense it hardly matters, even in terms of comic books, and even though The Atom was one of the early stars of what is now revered as the Silver Age of Comics. For, in any sane scenario, Gil Kane and Julius Schwartz and Gardner Fox (at the very least) are co-creators of The Atom, albeit perhaps in varying degrees; while Jerry Bails, however great or minuscule his role, was never seeking self-aggrandizement or profit, but simply wanted to suggest a potentially good idea to DC Comics. Or, as I said in that Writer/ Editorial in A/E V2#2: “Rashomon, Mon Amour.”

Splicing The Atom

Splicing The Atom by Mike W. Barr [NOTE: This short piece serves as a footnote to the foregoing article—but what a footnote! —R.T.]

’m told that a 19th century scientist named John Dalton was the first man to gather evidence for the existence of the atom, although many had theorized of it for centuries. In a way, I know how he feels. In October 1977 I moved from my native Ohio, leaving my job as night maintenance man at a local Sears & Roebuck (which taught me the real value of a B.A. in English) to take a position as the staff proofreader at DC Comics in New York. The hours were long; the pay was, to be diplomatic, meager ($125 a week—which, after taxes, shrank to about $99 a week— to live in New York? I was making less than that in Ohio, but the money went farther there); and the benefits weren’t much. But, like many before me, I was glad to have made at least a foothold in becoming a fulltime comics pro. I realized much later that I had come into comics at a crucial time. In 1977 the business of comics—printing, distribution, payment, rights—had remained essentially unchanged since the dawn of comics, over forty years before. It could not have been predicted with any reliability that within a few years the entire business—with the advent of the direct market, some tentative steps toward creators’ rights, the payment of royalties, among other, long-overdue innovations—was about to change forever. (More to the point, several old pros were convinced the business was dying. And from the quality of the work they were turning out, you couldn’t say they were wrong.) As remarked, my lowly job didn’t have much in the way of perks. I had to proofread the original art for each and every DC comic (which, in the days of This double-page pinup by Gil Kane from The Atom #26 (Aug.-Sept. 1966), Mike tells us, is quite similar to the late100-page all-new comics, 99 of which 1960 concept drawing which he returned to the artist while on staff at DC. (©1999 DC Comics Inc.) often seemed cranked out by the aforementioned “old pros,” was not ipso facto a But the job did have its advantages, though none of them were of a bed of roses, though it was better than waxing floors at Sears), as well as financial nature. I really wanted to be a fulltime writer, so meeting make copies for the editors, fetch lunches, and run errands for the higher scripters I’d always admired, like Robert Kanigher, was a genuine thrill. echelon of the editorial staff. (Remind me to tell you the time DC art I was also in charge of returning original artwork, which I enjoyed, as it director Vinnie Colletta tried to get me fired because I refused to do his put me in direct contact with a number of pencilers and inkers who supjob by writing critiques on a seeming mountain of unsolicited art samplied a different perspective on comics from that of the writer. And if a ples and signing his name to them. [Hey, I guess I just did.])

Splicing The Atom red-and-blue costume, standing, hands raised above his head in a heroic Gil Kane pose, the soon-to-be-familiar “atomic rings” effect around him. I don’t believe a bullet was bouncing off him, but I know he wasn’t riding a dog, a cat, a mynah bird, or anything else (except maybe the coattails of the unfortunately-named Doll Man, the Golden Age hero who was the first comics “shrink”). I returned the drawing to Gil Kane, who was both astonished and glad to see it, the next time he came into the office. I asked Gil about the only uncertain element of the piece—the belt on The Atom’s costume, which seemed added in haste and somewhat carelessly. Gil agreed, explaining that he had conceived The Atom without a belt, preferring the lines of his costume that way. But taskmaster Schwartz wanted the character to have a belt, so one was added, albeit grudgingly. As a number of us staffers—mostly the younger guys— listened to Gil and Julie reminisce about the piece, it occurred to me, for the first time (but by no means the last), that comics is a business that has very little sense of its own history; that the self-contempt which many comics pros hold for their chosen field of endeavor will always mean that the most important piece of past fact always becomes, somehow, less important than whatever aggregation of fight scenes or movie tie-ins is due tomorrow. Which is why I thought someone should write all this down, someday.

big-name artist, eager for a pile of originals to sell at an approaching convention, offered me a page or a sketch for putting him at the front of the line... well, who was I to say “no”? Since the concept of returning art was a relatively new innovation, begun due to the lobbying of Neal Adams, among others, DC had several years of old art sitting in a hot, dusty, windowless room. Needing the space for some poor schlub (and fearing it might be me), I nonetheless dove into my task with gusto, wondering what oddities the pile might hold. I was rewarded by uncovering an original All-Star Comics cover that hadn’t seen the light of day since before I had been born—and I still remember the look on the artist’s face when I presented it to him. I found several stories whose artists had thought them long since stolen or (perhaps worse) destroyed.

You Won’t Find Him in a Comic Book Store

And I discovered one of the original conceptual drawings for The Atom.

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It was on a large piece of art board, larger than even the “twice-up” size of early comic page originals (that is, twice the size of the printed page). It was clearly the work of Gil Kane, the modern Atom’s co-creator; that much would have been evident even without the signature. Editor Julius Schwartz quickly identified it as one of the first visualizations of the updated revival of the Golden Age Atom.

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I recall for certain that it showed The Atom, already in his familiar

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“St “Stan an Made Made Up Up the the Plot Plot... ... and and I I ’d d Write Write the the Script Script... ...””

A Conversation with Artist-Writer Larry Lieber

Conducted & Edited by Roy Thomas, Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson

Larry Lieber

t’s hardly a secret that Marvel’s premier writer/editor, Stan Lee, was born Stanley Lieber… or that Larry Lieber, early Marvel artist and writer, is his younger brother. The splash pages of a number of major early-1960s Marvel super-hero tales give Stan credit for “plot” and Larry credit for “script.” However, what this actually means, and the brothers’ method of working together, has only rarely been touched upon, even in passing. Over the years, even after becoming the artist of the long-running Spider-Man newspaper comic strip written by Stan, Larry has preferred to keep a low profile, but I will readily admit that, besides liking Larry on a personal basis, I have always felt a certain kinship with him because he was the only person besides Stan to write any real volume of Marvel stories before I wandered in in July of 1965. Alter Ego is grateful for the privilege of interviewing Larry. —R.T. ROY THOMAS: Larry, when did you decide—if you ever did, exactly—that you wanted to be an artist?

LARRY LIEBER: Oh, God, that would be years before I was doing it professionally. I must’ve been a kid, a teenager, in school. I guess it was when Stan was a young man, first working for Timely Comics. I knew my brother was a writer for that company, and I was interested in comics—all the kids were. It was during the war, and I remember Kirby, when Captain America began. I remember having a “Sentinels of Liberty” card

and badge. As a kid I liked to draw, and for most kids, liking to draw then—maybe it’s the same thing today— I turned to comics. So that was the beginning of it. RT: Where were you born? LIEBER: In Manhattan, in 1931. Six months later we moved to the Bronx. I lived there A sketch of our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler, by the man who’s drawn his newspaper comic strip adventures longer than anyone else. [Spider-Man ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

until I was about ten and a half, then we moved back to Manhattan, up in Washington Heights. During that time, Stan went into the Army, and I was just going to school and drawing. When I was in junior high, I tried to get into the High School of Music and Art, but I couldn’t. I asked the teacher why, and he said something about my attendance not being good. It wasn’t true; I was always there. Anyway that was a big disappointment, because I felt I could probably draw as well as the other guys. So I went to George Washington High School in Manhattan, and the years passed…. RT: It’s been reported you did your first professional work around 1950, when you were nineteen or twenty. LIEBER: In 1951 I went into the Air Force, for four years, during the Korean War. I spent two of them on Okinawa. Before I went in, I was working for Magazine Management…. RT: When I walked in the door there for the first time in 1965, I’d never heard the name “Magazine Management.” Turned out that was the umbrella name for Martin Goodman’s company, which included Marvel Comics, which then was at most one-third of the company… but also men’s magazines, true confessions, detective, puzzles, movie mags, a little bit of everything.

LIEBER: Right. Back then Marvel was Timely Comics. At the time I worked there, Magazine Management was big when the comics were big… it was small when the comics were small. At one time in the late ’50s it was just an alcove, with one window, and Stan was doing all the corrections himself; he had no assistants. Later I think Flo [Steinberg, secretary] and Sol Brodsky [production manager] came in. But a few years before, I was working for Magazine Management, doing

Larry Lieber

Three splashes from Strange Tales #99 (1962)—by Kirby & Ayers, Heck, and Ditko. Only the latter had a writer’s credit for Stan Lee, so the other two were quite probably dialogued by Larry Lieber. [©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

paste-ups, and I wanted to be an artist, an illustrator. I was working during the day, and I went to Pratt Art Institute the evening. RT: In ’50-’51, would you have been drawing or writing or both? LIEBER: The writing I didn’t do. When I came out after the service, I went to the Art Students’ League, and I still wanted to be an artist and do comics, but I had in mind to eventually become an illustrator. I was drawing, but I was slow. I didn’t have the skill to draw quickly, and in 1958 I had to earn a living. And Stan, at the time—well, things were bad. He had almost nobody working for him.

doing the lead story, and Don Heck was there. Ditko used to do the story at the end of the books, and later he and Stan did Amazing Adult Fantasy. At the time I had a room in Tudor City, and I was writing stories for Jack to draw. Jack was so fast, and I was learning to write. You can appreciate this, I’m sure: I didn’t really know how, and Stan was giving me a writing course!

RT: That was right after the American News collapse, when Goodman’s comics almost closed down for about a year.

LIEBER: Just in general. The change in his style really came, I think, with Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. Before that, he didn’t have that kind of style; and with me, it was just the principles, you know: just how you write, and “This is too many words” and “Put in less words, because even if it’s well-written they won’t want to read it,” that kind of thing. I learned a lot of the basics.

LIEBER: Wait a minute—I did do some comics then. I did some romance comics. I was penciling them. And there was a point where I did writing, because I remember Stan saying to me, “You write romances really well,” so I must have written some. In 1958 Stan said he wanted somebody to help him write, and he had nobody then; he was doing it all himself. I said, “I’m really not a writer.” He said, “Oh, I’ve read your letters.” So I probably wrote the romances sometime after that.

Later on, he got his style, and I didn’t particularly want to go with that style myself. I continued to write whatever way I did write. Later, when I did the westerns, they were not written in Stan’s style. I remember that Kirby was so fast he could draw faster than I was writing! Stan would say to me, “Jack needs another script!” I was on 41st, and I used to sit there Saturday and Sunday, and there was the Grand Central Post Office that was open all the time.

RT: When the comics were just getting started up again. LIEBER: Well, they were putting out… let’s see… Journey into Mystery… Tales to Astonish.… I remember Jack Kirby was usually

RT: I had that advantage, too—as only one or two other people did—of working closely with Stan, in the mid-’60s. I got the impression that, as he was developing this new mutation of his style, he just had an irresistible impulse to teach you to write in his style, or just in general.

RT: I used to take cab rides down there from the East 80s at midnight or later,

Larry Lieber hoping Special Delivery would get to Sam Rosen in Brooklyn or Artie Simek in Queens by the next morning. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. You were a few years ahead of me in that department. You mentioned earlier that Stan would say to you, “Jack needs a story now.” Did you plot some of those lead monster stories, as well?

LIEBER: No. Stan made up the plot, and then he’d give it to me, and I’d write the script. Tudor City had a park; and when it was nice, I’d sit there and break the story down picture by picture. I was unsure of myself just sitting down to write a script. Since I knew how to draw, I’d think, “Oh, this shot will have a guy coming this way… this shot we’ll have a guy looking down on him,” and later I’d sit at the typewriter and type it up. After a while, I’d just go to the typewriter. I would follow from Stan’s plots. RT: Would Jack have already penciled the story? LIEBER: No. These were all scripts in advance. RT: So this wasn’t “Marvel style” yet? I asked Stan recently just how that style started. He felt maybe Fantastic Four #1 was the start of it, but I wondered if, by 1961 and before, he was already doing some things plots-in-advance for Jack and others. LIEBER: No, I think it started with Fantastic Four, or around the time he did the super-heroes. RT: So you’d turn Stan’s plots into a full script for Jack or whoever? LIEBER: Or for Don Heck, or someone. Stan liked writing his own stories for Ditko. Jack I always had to send a full script to. Also, what Stan liked was that I made up names. As a matter of fact, I made up the name “Henry Pym”…. RT: That would be in the “Man in the Anthill” story in Tales to Astonish #27, which led to Pym returning as AntMan. You probably made up a lot of names that people assume Stan or Jack coined. Didn’t you make up “Don Blake” when you scripted the first Thor story?

RT: Killing you with compliments, huh? LIEBER: Right, it was sort of a compliment. With me, he had no other writer to compare me to, except what he remembered. So whatever faults he saw in me, he just felt I wasn’t as good as he was. So he took things very easy: “Well, why don’t you do this?” But as it went on, he got better with me. Jack had been drawing Rawhide Kid, and he gave it up. RT: That western had a nice feel, which is probably one reason it was the most successful of the westerns for several years. LIEBER: I don’t remember why I wanted to do it, particularly. I think I wanted a little more freedom. I didn’t do enough of the super-heroes to know whether I’d like them. What I didn’t prefer was the style that was developing. It didn’t appeal to me… but it appealed to everybody else! RT: Was it the fact that it was more melodramatic, or was it the realism? LIEBER: Maybe there was just too much humor in it, or too much something. I don’t know. But, of itself, it wasn’t bad. I remember, at the time, I wanted to make everything serious. I didn’t want to give a light tone to it. When I did Rawhide Kid, I wanted people to cry as if they were watching High Noon or something. The writers I used to love were Rod Serling, Paddy Chayevsky, Sterling Siliphant. So I was trying to write that kind of thing. RT: Your first super-hero work seems to be Thor in Journey into Mystery #83. That came out in the summer of ’62, so you’d have done the script in the Spring, if not before. LIEBER: One incident I remember with you and me was: I was in the office, and you came in. You’d been poring over Bulfinch’s Mythology or something, and you said, “Larry, where did you find this ‘uru hammer’ in mythology?” And I said, “Roy, I didn’t find it; I made it up.” And you looked at me like, “Why the hell did you make it up?” You went and found the hammer’s original name, Mjolnir.

LIEBER: I probably did. I wrote a full script and sent it off to Jack. When was it you came there, or when Stan started writing the super-heroes? RT: Fantastic Four came out in summer of 1961, and I started working at Marvel in mid-’65. By then, I believe you’d abandoned super-hero writing maybe a year before. Stan told me he always liked your scripts, but that you didn’t write a lot of stuff. You seemed better off concentrating on the westerns, especially Rawhide Kid. LIEBER: Stan was critical sometimes, and he knew I hadn’t written before I started writing for him. He thought back on writers he had known in the

past—he had a couple of them he tried out, some of the old pros, and then he said to me, “Your stuff isn’t that good, but you know, you’re better than these guys!”

RT: But I kept your name for it, too, because I thought “uru” could be the metal it was made of.

LIEBER: I kind of liked it; it was short. It’s easy on the letterer; they’re going to be using it all the time. I don’t know

Larry Lieber ciled. A full script is the only way I know how to write. No, wait… I remember that I did write at least one story from the artwork, but that was in the ’70s. I remember that the penciler had left me a lot of empty space to fill up with dialogue, and I didn’t want to use it all… so I drew in some more art to fill up the space!

where the hell I came up with it. RT: Stan said he always thought you got it from a mythology book. I’d been trying to track it down before I talked to you. LIEBER: I used to get names out of the back of the dictionary, from the biographical section where you have foreign names, Russian, this and that. I used to go to it and gets parts of names to put together.

RT: Stan plotted the early stories, but still, the person who turns a plot into a full script RT: “Uru” sounds like a has to add things. For little town in Pakistan. example, Journey into There’s probably an “Uru” Mystery #85, the third somewhere. Even after all Thor story, introduced these years Mjolnir’s been Loki and Balder and around, anyone who’s ever Thor’s stories carried no credits till Journey into Mystery #86, but even #83’s origin Asgard and the Rainbow was dialogued by Lieber. [©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.] read the old issues still knows Bridge. And #86, with the “the uru hammer.” By that Tomorrow Man, was the stage, of course, Stan was doing the plots and Jack was breaking down first with credits: “Plot—Stan Lee; Script—Larry Lieber; Art—Jack the stories. Did you realize your career was entering a new phase with Kirby; Inks—Dick Ayers.” Maybe Stan made up the name Tomorrow all these super-heroes, or was the Thor origin just another story to you? Man, but would you have made up his real name, Zarrko? LIEBER: Thor was just another story. I didn’t think about it at all. Stan LIEBER: It sounds like it could have been one of my names. Stan said, “I’m trying to make up a character,” and he gave me the plot, and would make up the big names, like “Colossus” or “Grogg”—that’s a he said, “Why don’t you write the story?” helluva name. He gave me the title, and I’d write the story. RT: You were still writing full scripts when you did Thor? I know it’s RT: Why would Stan have not written the whole Thor story, which was got to be hard to obviously the thing—if anything was—that was going to sell the magaremember after zine, and yet he’d write backup stories drawn by not just Ditko, but by almost forty years. Don Heck, Paul Reinman? I’ve never quite been able to figure that out. You wrote the first Of course, he did plot the Thor story. half dozen or so Thor stories. LIEBER: He thought LIEBER: I wrote that many? I thought it was just two or three; but I remember AntMan. I think I wrote that the same way I wrote the other scripts, with a full script. RT: I never knew that. Stan probably doesn’t remember. I always assumed Jack broke down the stories, because that’s what he was doing for Stan.

LIEBER: Let me put it this way: I wouldn’t swear to it, but I have no recollection of ever writing a story that had already been pen-

of it. The only thing I can think of is that he didn’t know it was going to be that big a feature. Remember, Stan wasn’t writing dialogue for the rest of Tales of Astonish; he only did that for the Ditko story. When we had “Colossus,” a creature of stone, that was me writing from Stan’s plot. RT: So you and he were continuing the method used in the monster books. The only difference is that, when Stan did start writing full stories himself, he

Larry Lieber

equally good or even better way to do it.” But I still feel that 80-90% of what he said was the best way to do it. Now I’d like to ask you about a few other Marvel scripters in the early ’60s. There was Bob Bernstein, who wrote as “Robert Burns”; he’d been an oldtime comics writer. Ernie Hart wrote a couple of stories as “E.E. Huntley,” and one Iron Man story—the one that introduced the Black Widow—was scriptcredited to “N. Krok,” who I guess was really Don Rico—who later used his real name on a Dr. Strange story. Do you know why they used pseudonyms?

would get Jack or someone, or later Ditko on Spider-Man, to break down the story. LIEBER: When he saw that the strips had potential, he started writing them, and he was working with Jack. Then, I think he was doing so much that he found it was better—and also, when you’re working with a guy like Jack— Jack was very creative, and wanted to put a lot of things into it. Jack always welcomed doing it, I’d imagine, to some extent. Some artists you wouldn’t have let work that way. They weren’t all particularly good at it.

LIEBER: No. At that time, I lived in Tudor City, and I would just drop off my work at the office and go back home. I didn’t know what the heck was going on. I just want to say one thing about Stan: I was able to take the criticism from him because he was always right! Even if the things he would say didn’t feel good to me. In a way it was almost like I was playing out a scene in the movie Scaramouche. Have you seen that movie?

RT: Some liked it, some hated it. Some hated working “Marvel style” at first, but then they got to like it, and later they’d get upset if someone gave them a full script to draw! LIEBER: But Jack was so creative, and he probably welcomed it. It was easier for Stan, once he had the pictures there, to fit in copy. I remember he’d say, “Oooh, there’s a little space, I can put a word balloon there. This would be good.” It was very easy for him, and it worked beautifully. RT: Stan spent a lot of time with me in the mid-’60s on placing balloons, because it was so important. Did he ever work with you on balloon placement—where to put the word balloons?

RT: Only when it first came out, when I was a kid. I know it comes from a book by Rafael Sabatini….

LIEBER: Oh, he was very fussy about the balloons and the pointers. Even now, it’s “Don’t put the pointer there—look at it there.” RT: I absolutely agree with his theory, after thirtysomething years. In any particular case, I might think, “There’s another,

LIEBER: Scaramouche starts off where somebody is killed by the greatest swordsman in France, played by Mel Ferrer. Stewart Granger tries to protect the victim, but he doesn’t know how to duel, and Ferrer is just toying with him. Later, Granger becomes a swordsman, and they fight to the death at the end. But sometimes I would think, with Stan—with somebody who knows how to write well and you don’t know how to write—“Well, you could’ve said it this way! Well, you could have said it that way!” And you didn’t think of any of those. At least I agreed with him, which was a lot better, because sometimes you work with people who tell you things you don’t agree with.

LIEBER: Only when I started drawing the syndicated Spider-Man strip, years later. When I start a week of the strip, it’s not where to put the balloons, but I go nuts with the lettering, trying to make the words come out. I have almost no space to work with. RT: Placing balloons got so ingrained in me that after a few weeks of writing for Stan, I’d be watching TV and I couldn’t help imagining where the balloons would go if the screen were a panel in a comic!

RT: That can be hard.

LIEBER: I remember Stan saying years ago, “Look, I don’t care—you don’t have to write in my style. I don’t care about that. Just make it correct. Don’t make mistakes. Just know what’s

Larry Lieber

good writing, what’s decent.” It wasn’t even that he was looking for great writing. Just don’t write badly; he would settle for that. Also, I must say that his criticisms in the artwork were usually right. They might annoy you sometimes, but he doesn’t tell you to take something and make it ugly when you’re supposed to be making it pretty. RT: It may not have much to do in every case with art, as such, but after all, in comics, you’re not talking about art; you’re talking about a certain kind of commercial art. LIEBER: To enhance the story, he wants it to be this, he wants it to be that—and I’ll tell you, I have met at various places artists who have said, “Oh, I remember working for Stan years ago, and he’d get on the desk and act it out, and this and that, and he made me a better artist.” RT: There are other people who resent it, still; but most people did feel they got a lot out of it. Maybe it depended on whether they wanted to get a lot out of it. LIEBER: He may have told me things where I might have thought, “He makes a fuss over things that aren’t that important.” But I never felt that he was saying something that was incorrect and I knew better. He appreciated when you did something well, too; that’s another thing. He’d say, “Hey, that’s good!” At any rate, I’m a little unclear about leaving the super-heroes and going to Rawhide Kid. I know that at the time I wanted—what’s the expression?—a little space for myself or something, and I wanted to do a little drawing again. RT: Because in Rawhide Kid you could handle the whole book, you could write it, and you could pencil it.

there was a Dr. Doom story where you wrote and penciled the first half; I wrote and Frank Giacoia penciled the second half, probably because you were busy on the westerns. Did you always like westerns in particular? LIEBER: Not particularly, but I did like them more than super-heroes, because I felt the western was a real story, and the super-heroes were more fanciful. The westerns were more grounded in reality, at least more grounded in reality than a guy who could fly. I liked that, and I tried to make it as real as I could. If I were writing it, I tried to make it a combination of Wuthering Heights and High Noon if I could, and I was just limited by my own abilities. RT: You did the Human Torch series in the beginning, didn’t you? LIEBER: Yes, I did a few with Johnny Storm. I’d forgotten that. Somewhere along the way, I also did The Watcher. RT: I remember my favorite of all the Ant-Man stories was the one with The Scarlet Beetle, who was a giant insect with superhuman intelligence. You always signed your name “Larry Lieber,” except in one case you signed “L.D. Lieber.” LIEBER: “D” is my middle initial. Maybe there wasn’t room to sign my full name. RT: A bit later, you started doing backup features in Tales to Astonish, after Ant-Man became Giant-Man. You were writing mystery stories, but you also started increasingly drawing those stories. This would have been ’63 or ’64, before you did Rawhide Kid. There were some five-page Wasp and Watcher stories. It was as if Stan realized the day of the backup was ending, and that one way to extend it was to have “Tales of the Watcher,” who of course was a character from Fantastic Four. So all of a sudden the comics have the same backup stories as before, except now The Watcher is narrating them.

LIEBER: I wasn’t even that ambitious to handle the whole thing. What happened when I started doing it was, number one, the westerns weren’t that important, because once they In the case of Iron Man, Larry shared credit from the start (in Tales of Suspense #39) started with Fantastic Four, with Stan Lee and Don Heck. [©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.] “Thor,” Spider-Man, and all LIEBER: I don’t remember that—the westerns, who cared about them? much about them. I did them, but I don’t remember my feelings and attitudes, because it was sort of a transition between my early years RT: So you were trying to work yourself into a nice corner of obscuriwhen I did Tales to Astonish and the like, and doing The Rawhide Kid. ty? LIEBER: I don’t know that I did it deliberately. But it came out that way. None of the westerns sold all that well. Years later, I would meet someone sometimes who would say, “You know, I read your westerns and I liked them.” Which was odd, because nobody wrote fan letters to the westerns. But it was always very gratifying to hear that. RT: Once in the late ’60s I finished off a Rawhide Kid story you’d penciled and then had to quit writing partway through the dialogue. And

RT: You even inked one or two of those stories. LIEBER: I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t like doing it. RT: One of the strangest inkers you had was Matt Fox. LIEBER: I hated that stuff! Oh, God, and years later, I learned that Matt Fox is considered one of the greats by some people, and his artwork brings a buck or two.

Larry Lieber

RT: Yeah, but not in comics.

was so strange—his line just deadened everything.

LIEBER: I hated his stuff because I struggled with drawing, and I was trying to make the drawings look as real as humanly possible, and I had a tough time. I remember I once had Don Heck inking me on a fivepage western, and I remember saying, “My God, he’s good at making my stuff look better than it is,” and he was. Matt Fox—if my stuff was a little stiff, he made it even stiffer; he made it look like wood cuttings!

LIEBER: One of my traits was that I was reluctant to say anything bad about anybody, because everybody has to earn a living. I wouldn’t complain, no matter who they put on. But one day I was working in the office penciling a western, and Stan walked by. He saw my pencils and he said, “This is your penciling?” And I said, “Yeah.” Stan said, “This is pretty good. I’ve been looking at the finished stuff, and that looks terrible.” And he removed that inker—it wasn’t Matt Fox—and gave me a better one. But I, of my own volition, wouldn’t say a word about it.

RT: Fox had been in advertising. He’d done lithographs, pulp illustrations; evidently he did some covers for Weird Tales, the magazine that published H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, including Conan, back in the ’30s. Fox did color wood cuts; he was a real artist, but his comic inking Though pulp fans may have collected his work, Larry detested the heavy inking style of Matt Fox. These two panels are from Strange Tales #110 (1963), the same issue which saw the debut of Dr. Strange. [©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RT: Fox obviously had a style that just didn’t translate well into comics. LIEBER: Then there was a period—I don’t know when it was—when I just did writing. But maybe that came after the westerns, because I had the experience of writing scripts for different artists. RT: Well, I know in the early ’70s we had these mystery stories. And you were sort of a liaison working with some of the writers for a while there, too. LIEBER: I learned there’s no script that is so good it can’t be ruined by somebody. Once I was doing a western script, and my artistic inspiration as always was Jack Kirby. When Kirby drew something, he made it as interesting as you could get. I had Indians chasing the hero. I figured this would be colorful on the title splash, thinking the way Kirby would do it. He would do an Indian, and it wouldn’t matter if it was the correct tribe….

Larry Lieber

RT: He wasn’t a researcher, but he was always dramatic. LIEBER: It looked like Cecil B. DeMille, right? Okay, this artist gives me the hero riding his horse—and between the hero and the Indians he puts smoke and dusk from the horses. Over the dust there are a few feathers! That’s when I realized, as I was sitting there racking my brain, that no script is artist-proof. RT: I remember Sol Brodsky telling me of a case where an artist penciled a bunch of cavalrymen on horses in the background, and the inker put a huge hill in between most of them and the reader, so he only had to ink a couple of horses coming around it. But that would be very frustrating to you as a writer, to feel your story is being judged on something you didn’t intend. Now, you also did the finished script for the very first Iron Man story. Did you name Tony Stark, too? LIEBER: That I remember. RT: And you did the first handful of stories, when he was in the big, clunky armor. Would you have done a full script on that, too, from a plot by Stan? LIEBER: Yes. Every one. RT: One reason I’m curious about that is that, although Don Heck is the only person listed as artist for that first Iron Man story, some people believe Kirby laid it out, and I just wondered if that was all Don. LIEBER: I don’t know. I think I recall Jack having something to do with it, but all I really know is that if my name was on it, then I wrote it. I’m safe there.

RT: Sometimes your name wouldn’t be on a story. Then, after two or three stories in a series, the credits would gradually start creeping in, and your name would be on the stories, so fans would sort of work back from that. Back then, Stan didn’t sign all the stories, either. There’d be issues with super-hero stories up front, but only the

For a year in 1974-75 Martin Goodman’s Atlas Comics flooded the field with both color and black-&-white comics, as shown by this house ad drawn by Ernie Colon. Can you name all the heroes? We didn’t think so. [©1999 Atlas Comics.]

backup Lee and Ditko story had credits. LIEBER: When I was doing the stories, I remember Stan telling me, “Jack can do five pages a day of these monster-story pencils… no, six pages a day. When he does a western, he can only do five a day, because of the gunbelts.” The gunbelts slowed him down or whatever. RT: Not even the horses? The gunbelts? Anyway, in 1964 or ’65, the staff started to increase. First Sol came on staff as production manager…. LIEBER: When you started there, where were we? On 57th Street? RT: It was on Madison Avenue. LIEBER: Madison Avenue, near the bank on 57th Street. Okay. When I started, we were a couple of blocks up, on 60th Street. That’s the place where I said there was no room, when Stan worked in this little alcove. RT: Magazine Management was always moving around. I remember someone joking that the company moved up and down Madison Avenue, depending on how much walking Martin Goodman’s doctor told him to do. When I arrived in ’65, Stan had a nice big office that took up at least half the space that was given over to Marvel. Did you ever consider inking other artists?

Larry Lieber

27 LIEBER: That was a very tacky business. Maybe I shouldn’t go into it.

RT: I don’t know much about it. But Atlas was certainly paying great rates, because Goodman wanted to get everybody away Letters page heading featuring new color comics editor Larry Lieber. from Marvel if he could, I guess. I’m not asking you to bad-mouth LIEBER: I inked a page of Kirby once, in a book anybody, Larry, because Atlas was a job like everything else. I do which had different feature pages, puzzles and so remember that Stan appreciated the fact that you came in and told him forth. I did ink years ago, when I started… I’m going ’way back, before you’d accepted an editing job at Atlas, because you knew there were bad I was in the service in ’51. It was Tessie the Typist, I think. As a matter feelings between Stan and Goodman at that stage. of fact, around then, I did some teenage inking, Millie the Model or Tessie or something like that for a while. I was never very confident LIEBER: I told him. There had been a period where I couldn’t get any about my inking. I was always spilling the ink bottle. I only started inkwork at Marvel, and I had to go to National. And National wouldn’t ing “for real” when I started doing the Spider-Man strip some years ago. give me work because they were mistrustful…. RT: Steve Ditko left around the end of ’65, beginning of ’66. You were soon working on the Amazing Spider-Man Annual. LIEBER: I remember doing a couple of annuals of Spider-Man. Here’s a story: The way Ditko drew didn’t appeal to me. I thought his stuff was very stiff, you know what I mean? I did like the way John Romita drew, which was very pretty and flowing and so on with the figures. So at that time I did a lot of my drawing in the office, and I was drawing under John’s direction. Do you remember those days? People would comment about it, I think—my showing John every picture I was drawing.

RT: It’s amazing you couldn’t get more work going at Marvel. LIEBER: It wasn’t such a nice thing, but I won’t go into it. I don’t want to go into all the Atlas thing, except to tell you this, which was a basic fact: When I went there, Martin put out two kinds of books. He was putting out color comics, and he was also going to put out black-&white comics like Warren and Marvel. Now, I knew nothing about black-&-white comics, right? My only experience was in the color comics. And Jeff Rovin came from Warren, and he knew nothing about

RT: John very quickly became a sort of informal assistant art director to Stan. LIEBER: So I get all through with a Spider-Man story and I bring it in, and Stan looks at it and says, “I like it. It’s got that nice ugly feel that Ditko had!” So, no matter what I drew, there was a lot of frustration. I was trying to get away from it, but I couldn’t. Ditko in his own way is actually very good, but I just felt it wasn’t the kind of drawing I wanted to do. RT: As good as Ditko was and is—and I’ve been a big fan of his since his Captain Atom days at Charlton—within six months after Romita became the artist, Spider-Man finally passed Fantastic Four in sales. It had been gradually creeping up in sales, and it might have become #1 under Ditko, but it was only #2 until Romita took it over. He had that golden touch. Earlier, when he’d taken over Daredevil from Wally Wood, it had instantly shot up to be Marvel’s best seller in percentage terms. John didn’t have as much overt style by the ’60s as when he’d been doing his half-Kirby, half-Caniff Captain America in the ’50s—that style had sort of been washed out of him doing love comics at DC—but he drew dramatically, he told a great story, and he did pretty people. And the readers really responded to that. LIEBER: Yes, he did attractive people, he told a story, and also he could work with Stan very well. He knew what Stan wanted. He was very good. And he was busy later fixing up everybody else. RT: By the early ’70s, of course, Martin Goodman had sold Marvel, and in ’74 he started his own competing line. I know you and Stan were related to Goodman by marriage, so of course you’d known him forever. How did you come to work for Goodman at his new company? LIEBER: I was working for Marvel, but I had difficulty sometimes getting work. It wasn’t a very easy period. They needed super-hero reprint covers, and I could do them somewhat in Kirby’s style. And then Martin Goodman went into business. RT: Right. Seaboard, a.k.a. Atlas. You were one of two editors there… you and Jeff Rovin.

Larry Lieber

color comics. And Martin unfortunately put Jeff in charge of all the color comics, and put me in charge of the black-&-white books. RT: That is a backward approach. LIEBER: It was an unfortunate thing, and basically what happened was that Jeff’s books didn’t turn out so well. RT: But there sure were a lot of them! LIEBER: Yes. And, as you said, Martin had to pay high freelance rates, because otherwise nobody would work for a new and unproven company. RT: You know, Chip [Martin Goodman’s son, who had briefly been Marvel’s publisher] offered me a job at Atlas as an editor. I had nothing against Jeff Rovin, but I just had a feeling that to step into the middle of that situation would be more trouble than it could possibly be worth—even in the unlikely event that Atlas was going to last longer than a year or two. LIEBER: It didn’t work out too well, and Jeff finally left angrily or something, and I had to take over all his books. At this point, business was bad, and I tried to do what I could. One of the things I had to do was to cut rates and tell people they were going to make less money, which was not an enviable position. I had one guy, who’s probably gone by now—a nice guy, but he had a drinking problem, and was also a gun collector. RT: Great combination. LIEBER: And he was going to come in, and I had to tell him that we weren’t going to give him work! It was quite an experience. But in the end it was just that Martin lost too much money. There was nothing I could do to help out. I wasn’t a genius, too much was lost, and so they gave it all up, except for Swank [a Playboy imitation] and a couple of magazines, and Chip would continue with them. RT: Any other funny stories you can tell me for print?

Chip?” Now, I get off the phone; she hasn’t told me what it’s about, but I figure, “I bet this means they’re going out of business.” So I start getting very nervous, and I go back in the jury box, and a policeman is testifying, and as he starts talking, I’m so panicky about going out of business that I think I’m going to scream. I just remember being there, thinking, “I don’t want to scream and cause a mistrial.” And sure enough, I was right. When I went back there to see Chip, he said Atlas was going out of business. RT: Maybe if they had just done a few titles and nursed them along. But they tried to enter the field with thirty, forty books right away, and as a result they couldn’t— LIEBER: It was more than that. For instance, Jeff put out one issue which had a very dull cover, all gray. A zombie coming out of the water. And when it was mentioned to him that this was a dull cover, his reasoning was, “That’s why it’ll stand out, because all the books are brightly colored in the store, and if you have one in gray, it’ll stand out.” It didn’t work out that way. RT: Did you find it easy to come back to Marvel when Atlas folded? LIEBER: What happened was, Martin and Chip gave me six months’ severance pay. I was trying other things; I was trying to make up a newspaper strip… and after a while, Stan offered me a job as editor of Marvel’s British department. I remember that the previous editor had given demerits to people. He’d say, “Frank Giacoia is late,” and he’d tell him, “You’re getting a blue dot,” or “a yellow dot.” Can you imagine how Frank reacted to getting a dot? Still, it was a nice department, and gee, the people and names I haven’t thought of in years. Duffy…? RT: Duffy Vohland. And Dave Kraft. LIEBER: Yes. Mike Esposito came in occasionally, and Danny Fingeroth. And Bob Budiansky. They became my assistants. The only thing in that department we did that was original was Captain Britain. Buscema drew it at first, and Tom Palmer inked it. And during that time, in the late ’70s—that’s when Stan had Spider-Man come out in the newspaper.

LIEBER: I’ll tell you one because it’s only about me: Near the end, Atlas was maybe going to go out of business, and I got called on jury duty. At that time, I used to sometimes get anxiety attacks, and I used to take Valium to prevent the attack. So when I had RT: So how was it you eventually wound to go down to the jury, I called up the up penciling the Spider-Man strip? company and I said, “Are we still in busiWhat’s in a name? All Captain Britain stories were totally ness?” And the secretary said, “I don’t produced in the U.S. [©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.] LIEBER: Well, even when John Romita did know; Chip hasn’t made up his mind yet,” it, I was helping a little sometimes. Jim or “Mr. Goodman hasn’t made up his mind yet; just keep in touch with Shooter sometimes did breakdowns for Stan for the script, and after Jim, us and you’ll find out.” I did some, also. I sat in on story conferences with John and Stan. So here I’m going—it’s like a Woody Allen thing—I’m going on jury RT: Later there was Fred Kida, and different people…. duty, I’m nervous to begin with, and I’m trying to keep calm, and during a break on the jury I call up and the secretary says, “Tomorrow LIEBER: Kida, right. In the early days, there was also a Hulk strip. morning, before you go on jury duty, or after, will you stop up and see

Larry Lieber

29 the television, because I didn’t want to duplicate anything. Later on, I did a story down South with a werewolf and The Hulk that was interesting. And then finally the strip died. I remember there was a point where they wanted me to pencil the Spider-Man dailies, and I tried, but I wasn’t fast enough, and I gave it up. Then I was doing Spider-Man Sunday pages for a while, and then that stopped. Stan left for California, and Jim Shooter was there…. RT: He became editor-in-chief at the very end of ’77. LIEBER: I was having a very tough time because he wanted a kind of drawing that was difficult for me to do. You know, different artists tell stories in different ways. Me, I was pretty good with closeups. I wasn’t good if you gave me a scene with forty people in it, big things like Kirby would make all interesting and wonderful. If I did it, it might look a little dull. Yet Jim wanted those kinds of shots, full shots. It was difficult, and I was slow, and I struggled with it, Left: John Romita was the first artist of the Spider-Man daily strip. Here are the first three dailies from January 3-5, 1977. [©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Right: For a while Larry Lieber wrote and penciled, and Frank Giacoia inked, the Incredible Hulk newspaper strip. Here’s a three-day continuity, dated January 11-13, 1979. [©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RT: Right. I was part of that period, too. Conan the Barbarian started in newspapers at the same time as Spider-Man and Hulk, and a little before Howard the Duck. I have a complete collection of the early dailies of all four strips. I told the Des Moines syndicate I needed them for “research.” LIEBER: I remember doing The Hulk, with Frank Giacoia inking. I recall we had problems because Frank was late, and we tried other inkers on it, and maybe I was late doing it. And then there was a point where it wasn’t selling that well, or Stan didn’t want to bother with it, and he let me write it. So I started writing and drawing it, and Frank was inking it again. I enjoyed that very much. I remember doing a story about a boxer and The Hulk, and I was very inspired by what was on television, with Bill Bixby. I remember going out with a camera, getting photographs to try to make the strip look authentic. They had just come out with VCRs then, and I would have my late wife, before we were married (I guess it was), tape it for me off

Larry Lieber

and then what happened was that Fred Kida, who had been doing Spider-Man at this point, retired, and Stan tried somebody else out on it… Dan Barry, I think… and it didn’t work out between him and Stan. There was a conflict. Stan wanted this, Barry wanted that…. RT: Barry had done Flash Gordon for years, so he probably wasn’t too used to working for a writer. LIEBER: And so Stan asked me, or I asked him… anyway, we spoke about it… “Do you want to try it?” And I said okay. And this time I stuck with it, and I was able to do it. I’ve been doing the dailies now for… it’ll be thirteen years. RT: That’s probably a record for you! LIEBER: It is! I’ve been drawing Spider-Man longer than anyone else. RT: How did you manage to come to terms with turning out six dailies a week? That may not sound like a lot to some people, but it really is. LIEBER: I did even better than that, because after a while I wanted to do my own inking. I wasn’t really that experienced as an inker, but I wanted to do it because I felt that only I could keep what I put in the pencils. There are certain inkers who would have enhanced what I drew, but I wasn’t getting that kind of inking. I did that for a few years, but it was very hard. I’d end up sitting up all night inking it out, and I was always afraid, because you’ve got that deadline there from the syndicate. So finally they said, “No, let’s have somebody else,” and I agreed. And they said, “When you get caught up, Larry, you can do it again.” Well, Larry has never gotten that far ahead! RT: But still, that’s a pretty good amount to do every week. LIEBER: You know, people will say to me, “How many hours do you put in to work that way?” A year and a half ago, my wife died. I was married for almost seventeen years. And since then it’s been a bit harder for me, getting the work out. I work alone here in the apartment, except for my For a time in the late ’80s/early ‘90s Larry not only penciled but even inked the Spider-Man dailies. From top: December 29, 1988; May 26, 1989; May 11, 1990; and February 1, 1991. [©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Yorkshire terrier. Stan gives me full scripts, which tell me exactly what to do. Stan is very good at visuals, thinking what would look good. I’m only glad that Peter Parker or SpiderMan only has two arms, because if he had more, Stan would have something for him to do with

every arm every day! RT: Yeah. When Stan did give Spidey four extra arms in the last panel of Spider-Man #100, he turned #101 over to me and I had to write those issues! So I know what you mean. If Peter had several arms, Stan would say, “Well, the left hand is doing this, and the right hand is doing that….” LIEBER: “He’s going out the door, he’s putting on his hat, he’s turning

Larry Lieber around with a wry smile—not just an ordinary smile, but a wry smile… and Mary Jane, who looks at….” But of course we’ve only got one picture that I can draw in any one panel. RT: At least you’ve got three panels a day! Mary Worth a few years ago went to two, and now there’s nothing in the stories at all! LIEBER: I like the stories, and it’s challenging. I’m just glad it keeps going, so I have work. RT: Spider-Man has been going for about twenty years now. They should do more collections of the strip. It’s one of the few success stories among dramatic comic strips in recent years. They tried bringing back Terry and the Pirates… Zorro… Tarzan… and none of them really worked, but somehow Spider-Man does! Do you think it’s partly because of the emphasis on Peter Parker’s life, instead of the super-heroics? LIEBER: Maybe so. Stan does put a lot of that in there. They’re always talking about SpiderMan, but there are periods where there’s a lot of Peter Parker. As a matter of fact, one of the things about the strip that makes it a little hard is because there’s Peter Parker and Mary Jane, and so he’s writing it like a romance strip… you know, the pretty girl, the goodlooking guy… and then it shifts to the villains, and Spider-Man. It’s not just a super-hero strip, and it’s not just a romance strip. It’s both. RT: It must have the right combination to have kept going for more than two decades. LIEBER: I think so. And I try to give it whatever I can, and I’ll tell you why—I’ve learned while I’ve been doing it. Going back to when I worked for Shooter, and he wanted full scenes—that forced me to try to grow as an artist. It wasn’t a question of whether I approved of it, or didn’t approve of it; I had to do it. And I had to go back and re-learn perspective. Then, because I was slow, I said, “I’ve got to get faster with this,” whether I was doing The Hulk or Spider-Man. I said, “How the hell do I get faster?” And one day John Buscema gave a lecture at Marvel Comics on “How to Draw Fast.” RT: He should know! LIEBER: So I took notes, and John had a whole bunch of steps. Later I even went out to his house, and he showed me. Well, I don’t know if it helped me to draw faster, but it helped me to draw better, and to see what mistakes I was making. John said, “This isn’t how you draw— this is how you draw fast.” There was a lot in the process that helped me to draw with more substance; it Larry Lieber in a photo apparently from the ’70s, a decade when the writer also became editor-in-chief of the shortlived Atlas/Seaboard comics line.

was just better. And I had to face things I hadn’t faced as an artist in those years. I’ve been studying. I took up anatomy, I tried to train myself to see threedimensionally, which I hadn’t been very good at. My construction I felt wasn’t very good, and so on, and so on. I was looking at the work of other artists, not only Buscema, but Kirby and Gil Kane and this one and that one… and it’s been a constant process of learning, which maybe is one reason I can keep doing it. It makes it interesting. I keep trying new methods, and new this and new that… to try to get better. And meanwhile I’ve seen the whole field change, two new generations from the people that I knew. It’s interesting, because when I look at some of the current art, the characters don’t look like humans to me. The faces look more like designs of faces than faces. Yet, if you take a page by the new artists and put it up against the old artists, the new page looks a lot more alive and interesting, in a way, and the old page looks dull and old-fashioned. To me, it does, at any rate. So it’s an interesting thing; the whole world has changed, and I say, “What am I still drawing for? What am I trying to learn?” It’s all passed me. It’s all gone…. RT: Come on, Larry, we can’t end on that note! Doing something successfully for thirteen years, you must have learned something. LIEBER: Let’s put it this way: Now, when Stan asks me to draw something new, I don’t get as nervous. I used to say, “Oh my God, how do I draw this! The guy is on the wall, and he’s doing this, and he’s doing that, and he’s carrying Mary Jane, and… how the hell do you…?” And now it’s “I’ll do it! I’ll figure it out!” RT: Good for you! LIEBER: So, I feel more confident. Also, I feel closer to Stan since I’ve been doing SpiderMan than I was before, in a way. Which is good, because doing a strip, you don’t get much feedback. If I get a fan letter, half the time they’re just asking for a sketch or an original daily or a signature. But Stan is the only one who really looks at my stuff, and if I do anything good, he appreciates it. He’ll look at a strip and say, “Well, I know that must’ve been hard,” or he’ll say, “Gee, that’s a good expression you’ve got on that girl; you ought to be directing movies,” or something like that. It’s been a nice working relationship all these years.

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt presents—

—The “Found” Spirit Section

The “Found” Spirit Section W e very definitely wanted to reprint the two preceding pages prepared by Michael T. Gilbert in this Digital Edition—as well as the short piece by Ye Editor which appears on page 38. However, we aren’t re-presenting the five-page 1966 Spirit story itself, because Denis Kitchen, on behalf of the Will Eisner Estate, has

informed us that DC Comics intends to reprint it as part of its excellent ongoing Spirit Archives. So we’re featuring just a tantalizing foretaste of panels from that epoch-marking tale below—and, on the following two pages, some additional Eisner art that wasn’t in A/E V3#2….

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt presents—

Will Eisner––– A Man of Quality And Spirit

Wasn’t That Also The Name Of A Hitchcock Movie? In the October 1938 issue of Quality’s Feature Funnies, writer/artist Will Eisner inaugurated a series called “Espionage”—later to be known as “Espionage, Starring Black X.” (The hero’s name was originally rendered as “Black Ace.”) Here, since a quasi-splash page was seen in A/E #12, are two story pages from that series, whose art style was clearly influenced (and what comic book wasn’t, in those days) by Milton Caniff’s newspaper strip Terry and the Pirates. Repro’d from photocopies of the original art, with thanks to Ethan Roberts. [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

The “Found” Spirit Section

The Cristo Kids In early issues of Jumbo Comics, Eisner also wrote and drew part of an adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo, before handing it over to an equally young Jack Kirby. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Ethan Roberts. [©2006 the respective copyright holders.]

I’ve Got You Covered (Above:) The original pencil-and-ink art to the cover of the 11th issue of Warren Publishing’s The Spirit magazine (Dec. 1975) was reprinted in an art catalog, and was sent to us by Jerry K. Boyd. The cover was then painted, with considerable detail added. The magazine itself contained reprints of vintage Spirit stories in black-&-white, with gray tones added. [©2006 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

The Spirit Meets The Wolfman (Left:) Eisner drew this sketch of his always hard-pressed hero for comics writer Marv Wolfman at a week-long comicon in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1985. With thanks to Marv—and to Denis Kitchen for permission to use this Spirit drawing. [©2006 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.]

Hark, the Herald Tribune Sings!

Hark, the Herald Tribune Sings! A Look at a Very Special Issue of New York Sunday Magazine by Roy Thomas [An Informational Addendum to What Has Gone Before]

y the start of 1996, the New York Herald Tribune was nearing the end of a long and colorful career as a daily newspaper, but it was still a force to be reckoned with. The so-called New Journalism, for example, was represented in its pages by the irrepressible Tom Wolfe, whose 1965 article about Hugh Hefner’s life style and revolving round bed had made a strong impression on neo-Manhattanite R.T. (not to mention a lot of other people).

The paper’s Sunday supplement magazine New York, in fact, would—after the Herald Trib itself folded its U.S. tents a few years later, leaving only its famed International edition— spin off into a separate and influential monthly magazine. But on Sunday, January 9, 1966, as documented earlier by Michael T. Gilbert, New York discovered comic books in general… and The Spirit in particular. “The Great Comics Revival,” heralded the Trib’s cover, although the photo there was merely of a New York skyline.

Will Eisner—“reasonably young and still reasonably grand,” in Marilyn Mercer’s pithy phrase—in 1965.

There were six comicsoriented pieces in that landmark issue, and all but three of them—articles on the campy Batman TV show set to debut the very next night, and on the upcoming Broadway musical It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s SUPERMAN, set for a March 29 opening, and the infamous Lee-Kirby interview reprinted in The Jack Kirby Collector #18—had at least a tangential connection with Will Eisner’s quirky plainclothes super-hero, who had been out of the public limelight for a decade and a half. The magazine’s lead article, accompanied by a photo of “Batman” reading a newspaper on the subway, was written by cartoonist/satirist Jules Feiffer, whose groundbreaking 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes had made writing about old comics almost respectable in some circles. His “Pop-Sociology” listed Jerry Siegel, Bob Kane, Jack Cole, and Will Eisner (“authors” of Superman, Batman, Plastic Man, and The Spirit, respectively), as “the writers who influenced me,” in contrast to the usual list of respectable men of letters such as “Blake, Lawrence, Emerson, and Whitman.” Simply stated, Feiffer’s theme was: “To know the true temper of a nation’s people, turn not to its sociologists, but to its junk.” He maintains that “there is room, important room, for junk in our culture… But good Lord, let’s not make it respectable!”

The Spirit just goes on… and on… and on. Roy Thomas’ wife Dann bought this cover for him because of his own love-hate relationship with his aracari toucan, Gonzo. [1990 Kitchen Sink Spirit comics cover ©1999 Will Eisner; from the collection of R.T.]

Nowhere in Feiffer’s article, however, does the playwright of Little Murders and the future screenwriter of Carnal Knowledge bother to mention that he was once Eisner’s assistant on the weekly Spirit strip. That was left to his and Eisner’s onetime colleague, Marilyn Mercer, who may well have been the catalyst for getting the old gang

Hark, the Herald Tribune Sings!

39 Marilyn Mercer continued a distinguished career as a New York writer and editor. She was an editor at Glamour magazine through the early 1970s. If we (or Will) knew where she is today, we’d have tried for an update. Does any one of our readers, perchance, know her whereabouts?

together again in New York. The first page of her article “The Only Real Middle-Class Crimefighter” basically serves to introduce the five-page Spirit story you have just read. Mercer, it seems, worked for Eisner between 1946 and 1948, along with Jules Feiffer, in a five-man shop at 37 Wall St., where they turned out a weekly Spirit section, including the lesser “Lady Luck” and “Mr. Mystic” backup strips.

The 1965 New York City mayoral campaign itself has long since faded into the mists of local history, since the victorious candidate—43-year-old “maverick Republican” (i.e., a Democrat in all but name) John V. Lindsay— did not go on to bigger and better things nationally, as pundits who hopefully compared him to the late John F. Kennedy predicted. Lindsay presided over the Big Apple for a couple of terms, then drifted slowly into the footnotes. So did his campaign slogan: “He’s fresh while everyone else is tired.” (It sounded a lot better in ’65, honest.)

“As I remember it,” she wrote, “I was a writer and Jules was the office boy. As Jules remembers it, he was an artist and I was the secretary. Will can’t really remember it very clearly. It is his recollection that Jules developed into an excellent writer and I did a good job of keeping the books. Neither one of us could, by Eisner standards, draw.”

Ms. Mercer had recently discovered that Eisner Michael T. Gilbert did this illo for the 1990 San Diego Comicon book, in celebration of The was currently living in New Spirit’s fiftieth anniversary. [The Spirit ©1999 Will Eisner] York, turning out PS, a monthly maintenance manuIronically, one of two men he defeated, diminutive city comptroller al for the U.S. Army. Given the growing notoriety of comic books in Abe Beame, was elected mayor in the 1970s, as Lindsay’s Democratic the aftermath of a 1965 story in Newsweek (as well as the Spirit episode successor. reprinted in Feiffer’s book), Eisner had been getting requests to revive The Spirit, but was reluctant to do so. Mercer was less willing to take Even more ironically: Of the trio of 1965 mayoral hopefuls, today “no” for an answer: only the Conservative candidate—William F. Buckley, Jr., the tart“Couldn’t, I asked, the middle-class crimefighter come back? The old tap dancer [Eisner] looked doubtful, although he allowed that a West Coast television outfit had been after him with that very request. ‘It would be fun,’ he said. ‘The Spirit to me is like an old mistress— you hate her, but you still have a yen for her.’”

tongued editor of the National Review, host of TV’s Firing Line, and author of bestselling non-fiction and spy thrillers—might still be recognized by a statistically significant percentage of people if he walked down the street in broad daylight. Far as I can recall, Buckley was never elected to anything.

Long story short: Eisner drew his first new Spirit story in fourteen years, which led to all those Spirit comics from Harvey and Warren and Kitchen Sink and all those wonderful Eisner graphic novels which have come our way since. The New York effort, incidentally, was a rare black-&-white Spirit story, which was introduced by a typeset paragraph on the preceding page:

Such are the vicissitudes of life. Will Eisner and The Spirit, too, are still very much with us, and we thank Mr. E. most sincerely for yielding to Michael T. Gilbert’s and Alter Ego’s blandishments by allowing us to reprint the foregoing “lost” Spirit section for the first time ever.

“Now that Mayor Lindsay has been safely inaugurated, Will Eisner reveals how The Spirit returned from Limbo to combat backstage skulduggery during the recent campaign.”

Who knows? Just to bring things full circle— maybe one of these years Alter Ego will even be up for an Eisner award.

(Lindsay’s inauguration had taken place only eight days earlier, on New Year’s Day, 1966. So had the onset of the usual everysecond-year citywide strike of subways When he saw the two-page preface MTG had prepared for his 1966 Spirit story, the effervescent Mr. Eisner responded in his customary manner— and buses. Call it an omen.) with a cartoon. [art ©1999 Will Eisner]

If so, we hope we do at least as well as William F. Buckley, Jr.

COMICOLOGY COMICOLOGY COMICOLOGY COMICOLOGY G N I M CO 2000 COMICOLOGY G N I R P S FROM COMICOLOGY S W O R R COMICOLOGY O M O W T COMICOLOGY COMICOLOGY COMICOLOGy

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Fandom’s FAN-tastic Past!

Fandom ’s FAN-tastic Past... from the ’60s to the ’90s Photos and Other Artifacts of the Founders of Comics Fandom Commentary by Bill Schelly

f few people once thought that old comic books would ever be sought after as prized items, fewer still ever anticipated that photographic images of the early gatherings of comics fans would be treasured as they are today—let alone that these photos, often taken with early portable cameras “on the fly,” are studied like rare artifacts of an ancient culture.

Almost forty years have passed since Jerry Bails set in motion the twin wheels that became comics fandom and Alter Ego. Before this, no one except the late Don Thompson seems to have imagined that a fandom for admirers of comic art could exist apart from science-fiction fandom—let alone that it would become a self-sustaining phenomenon, with sufficient impetus to propel us into the next millennium. Such photos provide a portal to a time before anyone had heard of price guides, autograph fees, or signed editions—or the word “comicon”! In the early 1960s, just bringing together a handful of fans from different cities was an unbridled thrill. A new fraternity of comics aficionados was busy being born. Or, as a well-known troubadour of the day sang, “The times, they are a-changing!” Let us begin our travels back in time with… Spring 1963. Bill J. (“Biljo”) White was visited at his new home in Columbia, Missouri, by fan-artist Ronn Foss, who showed him a Grass Green drawing which inspired Biljo to launch his own super-hero, The Eye. (Ronn and writer Drury Moroz’ creation, The Eclipse, would debut in the Foss-edited A/E #5, which was at the printer even as Ruth White snapped this photo.) In the cinder-block “White House of Comics” built in his backyard to house his collection of rare comics and art, Biljo showed Ronn the original Kubert cover of The Brave and the Bold #35. Only a few days later, Biljo hosted the first face-to-face meeting of A/E cofounders Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas. This photo appeared postage-stamp size in Voice of Comicdom #4 (Apr. 1965) from Golden Gate Publishers. Reproduction is far from ideal, but it remains the only photo of the three and their ladies together. (L-to-R: Roy Thomas, Linda Rahm, Jerry & Sondra Bails, Biljo & Ruth White.) Surprisingly, Biljo also has home movie footage of the visits of Ronn, Jerry, and Roy!

[Above] As Jerry and Sondra examine the White House treasures, can you identify the pieces of original art adorning the walls? (Biljo ruefully informs us he has parted with most of this artwork in the ensuing years.) [At right] “Fannish Love in Bloom.” Ronn Foss and Illinois fan Coreen Casey married in 1965 and co-edited the fanzine Pandora: The Romance of Adventure. Their own romance produced two talented children, Scott and Alexandra, now grown and living in Oregon.

Fanzine writer Glen Johnson lounges on the porch of Magnus artist Russ Manning in 1964, soon after assuming editorship of The Comic Reader from Jerry Bails. Then a school teacher, Glen now makes his home in Brigham City, Utah.

Fandom’s FAN-tastic Past—

Like other cities across the country, Chicago spawned its own comics club in response to the fan movement spearheaded by Alter Ego, Comic Art, Xero, and a few other early fanzines. The 1962 World Science Fiction Convention held in the Windy City also helped bring area comics fans together. Don Glut (later the writer of novelization of The Empire Strikes Back and creator of Dr. Spektor, et al., for Gold Key) and his friend Dick Anderson (right) flank Forrest J Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, at the ’62 ChiCon. Forry’s probably displaying a copy of Don’s movie fanzine Shazam!

[Above] Many out-of-towners were drawn to Chicago’s fan meetings. (L-to-R:) Bob (Keith) Greene, Bob Butts, Alex Almaraz, Chuck Moss, Russ Keeler, and Larry Raybourne. Those who visited Ross and Larry in Cleveland never failed to be shocked upon meeting their pet python! [Left] Don Glut was known for his Captain America costume, but here’s a rare look at him garbed as another Golden Age hero. Yet another publicity shot for his fanzine Shazam!?

{Above] Members of the Chicago Comics Club, 1964. (L-to-R:) Ed Navarrete, Bob Noga, Paul Thompson, Greg Feldoman, Ronn Foss, Ann Foss, Ross Kight (behind Ann), Marti Beck, Bill Placzek, John-somebody (behind Bill), and (kneeling) Alex Almaraz.

[Left] The Eclipse (created by Drury Moroz & Ronn Foss; TM 1999 Bill Schelly)

[Left] Later Warren/Marvel/DC writer Doug Moench at a mid-’60s meeting of the Chicago Comics Club. Like just about everyone else, Doug published his own fanzine, called Review. Copies are as scarce as hen’s teeth!

[Right] Bill (then Billy) Placzek and Ed Navarrete pose with some vintage comics, circa 1964. Bill had been given a huge collection by a family friend, and his small attic couldn’t accommodate many people at one time, lest someone step on a vintage issue!

—From the ’60s to the ’90s!

The Alley Tally Party, held at the Bails’ Detroit homestead on March 21-22, 1964, was the first sizable gathering of comics fans from a multi-state area. Nineteen fans from as far away as Nebraska and Ohio gathered to count the 1963 Alley Award ballots. This meeting is recounted in detail in my book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, but to the best of my knowledge, none of the photos on this page has ever been fully published before.

The Tally’s host, the debonair (and rail-thin!) Jerry G. Bails, holds a copy of his Alter-Ego #4, which cover-featured Alley Oop, since, being a caveman, he was “obviously” one of the earliest possible “superheroes.” At least, that had been Roy Thomas’ reasoning in naming the fandom awards the Alleys.

Grass Green poses with the original redwood Alley Award carving by Ronn Foss, and some plaster duplicates painted gold and silver (for pro and fan awards). Photo by Chuck Moss.

[Left] The Human Cat (TM 1999 Richard “Grass” Green) [Below left] The Viper (TM 1999 Ronald E. Foss)

[Above] Arrivals include fanzine editors Bob Butts (Fan-to-Fan), Jim Rossow (Countdown), and Ronn Foss (A/E, Comicollector). (That’s Grass Green half-cropped on the left.)

[Left] Talliers in Jerry’s basement gather around Don Thompson (center), who keeps track of the votes on a handy chalkboard. (P.S.: Maggie T. was there, too.)

[Right] Day Two of the Alley Tally saw a surprise appearance by Rocket Man—actually Ronn.

Fandom’s FAN-tastic Past—

Flash forward more than a third of a century—to the 1997 Fandom Reunion Luncheon held during the Chicago Comicon. The Pine Grove Restaurant was the site for a gathering that included six participants of 1964’s Alley Tally Party, as well as numerous other members of Fandom Past:

Jerry Bails and wife Jean are obviously having a good time. Or maybe those smiles are because Jerry had recently retired from his teaching post at Wayne State University?

(L-to-R:) Roy Thomas, J.E. (Jeff—“Not the Bone Guy”) Smith, Tony Isabella, Bob Ingersoll. The latter pair would soon collaborate on the novel Captain America: Liberty’s Torch; both write popular columns for The Comics Buyer’s Guide. Jeff presented Roy with a beautiful color poster of his Bestest League cover from that first 1961 issue of A/E.

Longtime Chicago fan Ron Massengill meets up with artist/writer Jerry Ordway, who began his professional career in the early 1970s with his zine Okay Comix.

Dann Thomas (Roy’s better half, or maybe 2/3), Yours Truly, and CBG’s Maggie Thompson—with Y.T. shamelessly plugging his and Roy’s then-forthcoming Best of Alter Ego volume.

—From the ’60s to the ’90s!

As a wraparound cover for his Fandom Come special, J.E. Smith drew no less than 29 super-heroes created by fans for fanzines, from the ’60s through the ‘90s. Next issue, we’ll present the key to who’s who. [©1999 J.E. Smith and their respective creators.]

Mike Touhey, who assisted Jerry with production on A/E #2-3 in 1961, holds up the original ditto master (i.e., the original art!) to #3’s cover. Howard Keltner and Grass Green. Howard, one of early fandom’s Texas Trio which published StarStudded Comics, had been seriously ill for some time, but was determined to make the trip from Chicago to meet his one-time collaborator Grass, Jerry Bails, and other fans he had known for years—but never before met. Sadly, Howard passed away a year later, leaving as his legacy a monumental Index to Golden Age Comic Books.

Jon E. Park, a ‘90s fan who came to the luncheon with Jeff Smith, generously volunteered to give Roy and Maggie a ride back to the Rosemont Convention Center— and later recalled that experience in this cartoon. [Art from Fandom Come ©1997 by Jeff Smith.]

Others who attended the 1997 Fandom Reunion Luncheon but aren’t shown in these pages included: Reva Keltner, Jay Lynch, Bob Beerbohm, Ray Bottorff Jr., Dwight Decker, Jim Engel, Mark Heike, Russ Maheras, Bob Butts, Mark Heike, Mark Edmunds, Gary Carlson, Ed DeGeorge, Jim Rossow, Joe Sarno, Joel Thingvall, Mike Tiefenbacher, and John Canfield. In all, 33 fans got together for these two hours, to re-visit those memorable days of fandom’s first decade. No one who attended will ever forget this magical event. [NOTE: Our thanks to Russ Maheras for many of the Reunion Luncheon photos, and to J.E. Smith and Jon Park and Jerry Ordway for permission to use material from Fandom Come.]

5.95

In the USA

Roy Thomas ’ Legendary Comics Fanzine

No. 2 AUTUMN 1999

GOLDEN AGE-SILVER AGE-BEYOND!

With Speci al Bonus:

EXTRA!

Kanigher on Kanigher! Marv Wolfman on Saving Golden Age Art Treasures!

Plus Rare Art By:

Joe Kubert Marc Swayze C.C. Beck Mac Raboy R.D. Taylor INSIDE:

Will Murray on The Lost Origin of the Sky Wizard!

Ernie Colon H.G. Peter and MUCH More!

Star-Spangled Interview with

Jack Burnley 1940s Artist of Starman, Batman, Superman & the JSA!

AN A/E EXCLUSIVE! THE MYSTERies Behind the first two Wonder Woman stories!

Volume 3, No. 2 Autumn 1999 Editor

™

Roy Thomas

Associate Editor Bill Schelly

Consulting Editors John Morrow Jon B. Cooke

FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck

Contributing Editor Michael T. Gilbert

Editors Emeritus Jerry G. Bails, Ronn Foss, Biljo White, Mike Friedrich

Cover Art Gil Kane, Jack Burnley

Cover Color

Contents Re: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Letters from Stan Lee and lots of other folks. “It Was Only Starman I Paid Attention To!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Actually, Golden Age great Jack Burnley lavished attention on all aspects of his art, as shown in this stunningly illustrated interview.

How Marv Wolfman and Company Saved (a Bit of) the Golden Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 You don’t believe us? Read it and see! The Sky Wizard’s Lost Origins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Tom Ziuko, Jack Burnley

Will Murray’s unearthed the detailed documentation of a Golden Age hero. So how come most of us never heard of him?

Design & Layout

Kanigher on Kanigher (and Everything Else!). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 We mean what we say. An All-Star Sensation!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Roy Thomas examines curiosities behind the first two Wonder Woman stories. FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) #61 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 P.C. Hamerlinck presents another edition of FCA—with a C.C. Beck cover! “We Didn’t Know... It Was the Golden Age!” (FCA) . . . . . . . . 36

Jon B. Cooke/ GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS

Mailing Crew Russ Garwood, D. Hambone, Glen Musial, Ed Stelli, Pat Varker

And Special Thanks to: Neal Adams Mike W. Barr Jack Burnley Ernie Colon Craig & David Delich Al Dellinges Will Eisner Nancy Ford Ron Goulart Grass Green Mark Hanerfeld Roger Hill Gil Kane Robert Kanigher David Anthony Kraft Stan Lee Larry Lieber Russ Maheras Lou Mougin Will Murray Jerry Ordway Jon E. Park Julius Schwartz J.E. Smith Marc Swayze Daniel Tesmoingt Joel Thingvall Marv Wolfman

Captain Marvel artist Marc Swayze regales us with tales of the creation of Mary Marvel—and of going off to war.

The Richard Deane Taylor Interview (FCA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 A conversation with a noted Fawcett alumnus. The Captain’s Chief (FCA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 The late Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. Beck’s history lesson on Fawcett Publications and a certain Big Red Cheese and his friends and relations.

Silver Age Section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flip Us! Our thanks to Jack Burnley for allowing us to use his great Adventure Comics #71 cover recreation as our cover illo, to Jerry Bails for loaning us the art from his collection, and to Craig and David Delich, who first published it in black-&-white in the 1977 All-Star Comics Revue. [Starman ©1999 DC Comics, Inc.] Alter EgoTM is published quarterly 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@oburg.net. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Single issues: $5.95 ($7.00 Canada, $9.00 elsewhere). Four-issue subscriptions: $20 US, $27 Canada, $37 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. Alter and Captain Ego ©1999 Biljo White. The Atom, Batman, Billy Batson, Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Junior, Doll Man, Dr. Mid-Nite, The Flash, Green Lantern, Infinity, Inc., JSA, Mary Marvel, Mr. Mind, Rex the Wonder Dog, Robin, Rose & Thorn, Shazam, Sivana, Starman, Steamboat, Superman, Wonder Woman ©1999 DC Comics Inc.; Ant Man, Captain America, Captain Britain, The Hulk, Iron Man, Mr. Morgan’s Monster, Rawhide Kid, Spider-Man, Thor, Wasp, Watcher ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.; The Destructor, Tiger-Man, Warhawk ©1999 Atlas Comics; Xal-Kor ©1999 Grass Green. Mr. Monster © Michael T. Gilbert. The Spirit ©1999 Will Eisner; The Eye, The Eclipse ©1999 Bill Shelly; The Viper ©1999 Ronald E. Foss. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING

re: Letters to the Writer/Editor Dear Roy, Regarding your exhaustive comments on your collaborations with Neal Adams over the years, I must add my thanks. Although I don’t pretend to know what was really going on behind the scenes, I thought I found too many inconsistencies in his interview in Comic Book Artist #4 to take his comments at face value. I wrote a letter to CBA pointing out the obvious bias of the interviewer toward his subject and his failure to follow up contradictory statements. You addressed those very contradictions in such a way as to leave the least offense. I think you’re in a unique position to clear up a lot of misconceptions and conjecture about how things were really done at Marvel (and heck, maybe even at DC, too!) during the ’60s and ’70s, and although I don’t expect you to harp on it constantly, I would like to see you bring your experience to bear when it’s appropriate. Pierre Comtois 18 Desrosier St. Lowell, MA 01850 Of course, anybody who writes a piece attempting to “clear up… misconceptions and conjecture” opens the door for someone to disagree with him/her, but that’s as it should be. Often, there isn’t a real conflict, merely a desire on all sides to learn the truth behind an event in comics history. Can we ever reach our goal 100%? No. But on some occasions we can, perhaps, come closer than on others.

Because the issue we refer to in shorthand as “V3#1” was published before “V2#5” (which of course was part of Comic Book Artist #5), we trust readers will forgive us if we include letters to both in this letters section. Onward: When Bill Schelly first executed the title illustration for “The Stan Lee Roast,” advance copies were sent to several of the participants. A few days later, we received this fax from The Smiling One:

Hi, Roy, I just wanted to say I’m looking forward to the All-Star Companion. I’ve been a fan of the JSA since I was nine and bought JLA #113 in 1974. All-Star Squadron is my favorite series of all time (with Infinity, Inc. a close second). I periodically re-read it every few months. 1983-84 is my favorite period, especially the JSA stories you wrote, including the 1984 Annual. I hope you do more work with DC’s Golden Age characters. One of my favorite characters ever is the Golden Age Fury [from Young All-Stars]—she just rocked! Aside from whatever Goyer & Johns decide to do with her character, I was wondering what your original plans were concerning “Whatever Happened to the Golden Age Fury?” I don’t know why, but I just love that character. I always assumed the Furies of myth abducted Helena after she conceived her daughter and maybe kept her in stasis, until somehow Helena escaped, gave birth, and took the child to Joan Dale. I think it’s one of comics’ greatest unsolved mysteries. Mike Bise via e-mail

re: Letters to the Writer/Editor

One which will not be solved by any current creative team, Mike. May Ye Editor be perfectly frank? Since, as the co-creator of the All-Star Squadron/Young All-Stars concepts, he is ready, willing, and able to write new exploits of same anytime DC gives the okay, and has submitted plans for such to DC editors at various times, he summarily rejects the validity of anything done by others with those concepts. Does that help you imagine how he feels about others’ plans for Fury, Jade, or whoever... or about what’s been done to the heroes of Infinity, Inc. over the years? If it’s desired to utilize heroes/concepts a co-creator conceived while he’s still around, ’twould seem that he, not others should write the stories. Ye Editor was reminded recently of how co-creator Bob Haney was denied a chance to script a new Metamorpho series a few years back, so that a young “cutting-edge” talent could do it; the new version sank without a trace—and deserved to, just on general principles. Ye Editor certainly has no grudge against DC (for which he has worked off and on since 1980, or actually since 1965); but this is one area where few companies these days—and we don’t mean just DC and Marvel—have their editorial heads screwed on straight with regard to respect for creators. But, as long as readers don’t object, such policies will continue. Dear Mr. Thomas, Through a mishap by the comics shop, I didn’t receive issue #3 [of Vol. 2] until after issue #4, thus reading your response to Neal Adams’ recollections of his and your collaborations at Marvel before reading Mr. Adams’ interview. One thing Mr. Adams said in regard to his Thor issues was that Stan Lee asked him what he wanted to do and he said he wanted to do a story about Thor and Loki switching bodies. The stories which Neal illustrated were Thor #180 and #181. But—that story was a three-part story, which had started in issue #179, by Lee and Kirby! In #179 Loki had a clay model made that would switch personalities from one body to another. Balder and Sif were searching for Thor and ended up battling the ThorLoki until he persuaded him that he was actually Thor. I haven’t seen this comic since I was a kid, but I remember the story. Thelmon Baggan 710 East 60th St. Long Beach, CA 90805 Thanks for the information, Thelmon. We’d forgotten the lead-in in Thor #179 as thoroughly as Neal seems to have. Dear Roy, Irwin Hasen produced a number of strips for Robert Kanigher: “General Little,” “Khaki-Yaks,” “Route-step O’Malley.” These appeared in All-American Men of War, G.I. Combat, Our Army at War, Our Fighting Forces, and Star-Spangled War Stories, 1952-57. In addition to all of the above, Irwin also drew the covers for Wonder Woman and produced all the issues of Here’s Howie in the same period. As wonderful as all of the above are, I’m most partial to the delightful “Chicken Hearted Hare” he did for Yosemite Sam, his scifi/fantasy cover I published on Revolver, RK’s sparkling little dream sequence starring Honcho the Wonder Dog in Frisky Frolics, and his work in The Comics! Ever enthusiastic, Hasen is always energetic and entertaining. Robin Snyder Bellingham, WA

Another page of Jerry Ordway pencil roughs from Infinity, Inc. #10 (1983), this one showing the original Wonder Woman fighting Nuklon, and Infinity’s Fury fighting the Golden Age Atom. [Art ©1999 Jerry Ordway; characters ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

Irwin Hasen tells us all the “filler” humor strips you mention were done before he was summarily detached from DC in the early/mid-’50s. So the name of one feature was “Route-step O’Malley,” not “Round-step,” eh? Thanks for straightening us out. Guess it’s superfluous to point out that Ye Editor was classified “1-Y” by his Manhattan draft board during the late ’60s, huh? (And A/E strongly recommends Robin’s The Comics! See information elsewhere in this issue.) Dear Roy, In Alter Ego V2#4 you said the first official naming of the KreeSkrull War was, per Avengers #97 cover copy, “The Skrull vs. Kree War.” That may not be so. Re-reading Conan the Barbarian #14 today, I came across the Mighty Marvel Checklist entry for Avengers #97, and it clearly promises “The cataclysmic conclusion of the Kree-Skrull War!” So, if the Checklist saw print before the comic, you nailed it the first time. Steve Billnitzer via e-mail (continued on pg. 29)

“It Was Only Starman I Paid Attention To!”

A Conversation with Jack Burnley Conducted & Edited by Roy Thomas Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson

s a kid in the late 1940s, I ran across an “old” (i.e., 1942) copy of Superman #19 at my grandparents’ farm. Inside were advertised the covers of other DC comics—including All-Star Comics #13, wherein the Justice Society were “Shanghaied into Space.” I spent years yearning to see the comic that went with that ad. But it would be more than a decade before I’d see it—or would learn that the artist of that stunning cover (and, as it happened, of quite a few pages inside) was one Jack Burnley… who was also responsible for some of the most beautiful Superman, Batman, and Starman artwork ever done, including much of the 1940s Superman and Batman newspaper comic strips. In the final, 150th issue of his pace-setting Comics Interview magazine in 1995, David Anthony Kraft presented a lengthy talk with the artist, ably conducted by Lou Mougin, and I urge readers to seek out a copy. I was tempted to reprint it here, with Dave’s permission, but decided that, because I had a few questions of my own, it would be better to accept Jack Burnley’s kind offer to be interviewed again. However, Lou’s interview for CI blazed the trail I followed, and I hereby acknowledge that debt, with thanks. Thus, on July 10, 1999, I phoned Mr. Burnley (who quickly insisted I call him “Jack,” which I found a bit difficult, given my upbringing) and taped the following interview.—RT.

ROY THOMAS: You were born Harden Burnley. How did you get “Jack” out of that? JACK BURNLEY: Well, my middle name is John, so I used Jack. Harden Burnley’s a family name. When I first became a syndicated sports cartoonist with King Features, I was eighteen. That sports cartoon, which was syndicated to the Hearst newspapers, or to any newspaper throughout the country, used the name “Harden Burnley” for a year or two. But then I had them change the byline to just “Burnley.” By two years before I went into comics, I was using the name “Jack Burnley” professionally. RT: Where were you born? BURNLEY: New York City. We lived in a large apartment house on Riverside Drive, just across from Grant’s Tomb. It’s been torn down, and now there’s the Riverside Church there. RT: You were born in 1911. Your older brother, Depree, who was called Ray…. BURNLEY: I’d like to correct that, if I may. His name was Dupree. With a “u.” It’s pronounced “dew-pray.” It’s a French name. He didn’t use “Ray” until he went into comics with me. RT: I understand both of you got into comics around the same time, in 1939. BURNLEY: He never settled into any particular art line. He was interested in fine arts. He liked the French impressionists, and he liked to do This page: Superman, Batman, and Starman—the Big Three of Burnley’s comic book career. [Superman-Batman illo ©1999 Jack Burnley; Superman, Batman, Starman ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

Jack Burnley illustrations, but he was never really successful. When I left King Features and went into comics, I took him with me, and he worked as my assistant. He did penciling and inking of some of the backgrounds.

times after that. I didn’t see his actual fights—I was too young—but I saw him work out in the gymnasium. RT: Jim Steranko’s History of Comics says you got into sports cartoons professionally because your sister took you up to King Features.

RT: He was never interested in a separate comics career for himself?

BURNLEY: Her name was Martine. My other sister, Elizabeth—who goes by the name of Betty—did the lettering for several years.

BURNLEY: He just got into it with me; he didn’t have a regular job otherwise, and it just turned out he was able to become a successful inker. But that was only through the association with me. He knew nothing about comics otherwise.

RT: So you were an artistic family.

RT: Comics Interview mentioned that some of your influences included one of my favorites, George Herriman, who did Krazy Kat, and Billy DeBeck on Barney Google… also Alex Raymond on Flash Gordon, and William Gould…. BURNLEY: Will Gould was a sports cartoonist. He spent a A past master holding a past masterpiece: This photo, taken a few years ago, shows year at King Features before I Jack Burnley holding a copy of the 1940 edition of World’s Fair Comics—the first time Superman and Batman appeared on a comic cover together, and containing took over the job. He later did his first Superman story. a Dick Tracy type of strip called Red Barry. But his influence on me was only as a sports cartoonist. apprenticeship. RT: You also mentioned Bill Ripley…. RT: Was it your idea, BURNLEY: He was originally a sports cartoonist with the New York or your sister’s, to Globe in the ’20s. I was still a sports cartoonist when he started doing show your cartoons? Believe It or Not, which started out as a sports cartoon. But it became so Were you pushing popular that he dropped the sports part. this, or was it just something she RT: You did a lot of boxing cartoons. Was boxing a special favorite, or saw and said, did you like all kinds of sports? “People ought BURNLEY: When I was quite young, I was interested in boxing and to see this”? baseball. I’m one of the only persons around who can say they saw Ty BURNLEY: Cobb, Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, and of course Babe Ruth. I used to I wanted to go to ballgames at Yankee Stadium; we weren’t living too far from there. be a cartoonIt was the old Polo Grounds where the Yankees played, and from the ist! I wanted time I was around nine or ten years old, I used to go there, sitting in the to get out of bleachers. school! I felt I RT: The 1920s are often called “The Golden Age of Sports.” Do you could go right agree that it was a particularly golden time? in and start a comic strip BURNLEY: I think it was probably the most colorful time…. RT: You’ve said you saw Jack Dempsey fight. BURNLEY: I saw him work out in an open air stadium, when he was training for a fight with Bill Brennan in 1921, and I saw him a number of

Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion 19191927, as drawn by Jack Burnley.

BURNLEY: I guess. Martine had done some modeling for an illustrator who used to do work for The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, which had short stories with some illustrations. She showed an artist some of my cartoons when I was about thirteen. He liked them and suggested she take them to Jack Lait, who was an editor at King Features. Lait liked the stuff. He said, “Just sit in the art department there, and do whatever you want. Watch the cartoonists work; eventually you’ll learn and go on from there.” It was just like an

Jack Burnley possibility Ham Fisher saw those strips, before he created Joe Palooka? BURNLEY: That can’t be proved, but I had given some of those strips to Harry Hirschfield, the cartoonist. Hirschfield was a very good friend of Ham Fisher. Fisher at that time was a salesman, but he wanted to be a cartoonist. He’d go in to see Hirschfield often, and I’m sure he saw those strips. He might have claimed he already had the idea before he saw the strips, but it is a coincidence. RT: Quite a coincidence. Did you remain a sports fan as you grew up, or did you just get more interested in drawing? BURNLEY: I was a sports fan. Originally I was doing the humorous strips of the ’20s, not the adventure type of thing. I switched to sports cartooning, which would be more serious, not a cartoony thing, but an actual drawing of the athlete. Burnley’s 1948 farewell to The Babe.

right off the bat. I was pretty pugnacious at that time. RT: One of your cartoons they printed in Comics Interview was a “So long, old pal” to Babe Ruth. I presume this was done when he died, around 1948? BURNLEY: Yes. After I left comics in 1947, Hearst offered me a job as staff sports cartoonist for the Pittsburgh SunTelegraph. So that was easier for me than comics. Comics were always a difficult thing for me.

RT: You also illustrated some Damon Runyon short stories for newspaper syndication….

BURNLEY: That was around ’37 or ’38, just about the time my sports cartoon was discontinued at King Features. My wife Dolores was a very good friend of Damon Runyon’s. She was a famous dancer and musicalcomedy actress. She was a big star in the ’20s. I recently wrote a book about her that you might be interested in seeing. RT: I read mostly history and biography, so I’d love to read it.

RT: Well, you had to draw six pictures on every page…. BURNLEY: It was difficult, and I wanted to get out of it, so when I had the offer to go back to the newspapers, I took it. RT: I was surprised to read in Comics Interview that you did up samples for a strip called Charlie and Joe, whose boxer hero had the last name “Palooka”— it was Charlie Palooka. When was that? BURNLEY: I was 15 or 16 at the time, so it would be around 1925 or 1926. Anyway, it was before Joe Palooka. RT: And you think there’s a

Illustrations by “the brilliant Hardin Burnley”—that’s “Jack” to us—done to accompany syndicated stories by Damon Runyon, today remembered primarily because of movies, including the musical Guys and Dolls, based on his fiction.

Jack Burnley

Gallery of sports and entertainment cartoons by Jack Burnley

Jack Burnley

Jack’s illustration of a Damon Runyon short story.

back in the early ’80s, in a comic called All-Star Squadron, which was set in 1942 and had Starman and other heroes in it. I did a whole issue almost entirely devoted to Starman’s origin; I had him inspired by seeing Batman in action. Not that it was necessarily a great story—probably neither is the new one—but that was the first origin ever done for Starman. I’ve read you did your first comic book work for the Hillman The artist and his lovely bride holding choice Burnley-drawn collectibles.

BURNLEY: It’s an authentic story of the Roaring ’20s, and she was right in the middle of it, and was involved in some very interesting stories. I’m not really interested in publication of the book; I just wanted to write a personal record. RT: So you’ve written this book fairly recently, and you obviously wrote your sports cartoons. But you never had any desire to write any comic book stories? BURNLEY: No, although I did write some of the Starman stories. Or, rather, I rewrote whole portions of some of them, particularly some of the early ones I didn’t like. For instance, Gardner Fox wrote some Starman stories later on, and I would change them, and he would get very mad and he refused to write any more. Anyway, the first Starman story—I don’t know who wrote the script. I thought [DC editor] Murray Boltinoff did, but he didn’t remember doing it when I spoke to him much later. So I really don’t know who wrote the first script, but I didn’t like the last half of it, so I rewrote that.

RT: Well, now we know at least one writer of the first Starman story. He didn’t start out with an origin like most heroes. BURNLEY: A friend of mine sent me some new stories in which they give him an origin. RT: I wrote the first origin for Starman,

Gag cartoon from Jack’s newspaper days.

Jack Burnley

RT: Your only other comic book work that wasn’t for DC was evidently some sports cartoons for McKay from ’39 to ’45. BURNLEY: McKay was associated with King Features. Bob Dunn, who was a cartoonist in King’s art department, was cutting out the main figures from a whole stack of my old sports cartoons, adding a couple of other cartoons around it, and selling it to McKay! McKay had a contract with King Features; their King Comics was just reprints of King Features stuff. I didn’t know what was going on until I sent a postcard to Dunn. RT: DC didn’t mind that? BURNLEY: I explained to them that I didn’t actually do any new drawings. I just pasted them up in different ways, put them together, and let my sister Betty do the lettering. RT: I understand King Features had been your connection for getting to work for DC, too. Hadn’t DC editor Whitney Ellsworth worked for King Features? BURNLEY: Yes. He knew who I was the minute I walked into DC, and he welcomed me with open arms. He said, “Great! Come on in!” He gave me a job without any question. RT: The first super-hero you did there was Superman, so you started out right at the top… with the second World’s Fair Comics, the one for 1940.

company, but that it wasn’t published for two years? BURNLEY: After I ended the sports cartoon, I was looking around for something to do. A friend at King Features, an editor named Chester Weil, suggested I go to a friend of his who was publishing comic books. I don’t remember the name of the fellow or the outfit—I just remember that he was kind of an odd-looking, shifty fellow. That was when I first got my brother to help out. We made up a series called “Bullet Bob.” The publisher gave me a check, but I didn’t see the story printed for a long while. And then, a couple of years later, while I was at DC, I was surprised to see it come out—published by Hillman, in something called Miracle Comics. I don’t know whether the guy I sold it to was originally with Hillman, or whether he sold what he had to Hillman. The DC editor showed it to me and asked, “What are you doing, working on the side for somebody else?” I tried to explain it had been done a year or two before, but I don’t know if he believed me. RT: Did DC discourage you from taking other work, even though you were technically a freelancer? BURNLEY: I was not a freelancer. I wasn’t under contract, but I was on a regular salary. RT: In that case, I guess they would get a little upset when they recognized your work. BURNLEY: Sure. But “Bullet Bob” was just a one-shot, about six or eight pages.

BURNLEY: Right. That was really a historic issue in many ways. It was the first time Superman, Batman, and Robin were ever together in one scene—and the first time they were ever drawn by somebody other than their creators. RT: The Shuster studio had nothing to do with your story?

BURNLEY: Neither Shuster nor Kane had anything to do with me. I worked independently. RT: Did they bear you any ill will because of this? BURNLEY: They had nothing to say about it, because DC had the rights to the characters. They may have resented it, but they had to accept it. RT: It’s odd that, when DC published its very welcome World’s Finest Comics Archives recently, it neglected to even mention the two World’s Fair Comics, even though they were the impetus for World’s Finest! A weird oversight. I’m a big fan of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair.

Jack Burnley My great dream, though I was only born in 1940, would be to go to that fair. I’ve collected lots of material about it. Did you ever get out to that fair?

11 You can see his first attempt at Superman wasn’t very good; it was fairly crude. He did the figure of Superman on the cover of Macy’s Superman’s Christmas Adventure. But he soon got very good.

BURNLEY: No. RT: You did a famous comic associated with the World’s Fair, but you never actually went?

RT: People like you, Fred Ray, Shelly Moldoff, Howard Purcell, Irwin Hasen… you were sought out by DC in the early ’40s to do covers. What do you think makes a good cover artist? What quality is it that a lot of other comic artists, who may be good at telling stories, don’t have when it comes to covers?

BURNLEY: That’s right. And, you know, that issue also had the first Superman story I ever drew. RT: You also did one of the first, if not the first, independent Batman stories that Bob Kane didn’t oversee in any way… although he still signed it, right?

BURNLEY: I don’t see why there should be much difference. Sometimes they even used a panel from the story as a cover. I don’t see why there should be some special quality for a cover artist.

BURNLEY: Yes. All the stuff I did was anonymous at that time, because Siegel and Shuster and Bob Kane did have the right to have their names on the strips.

RT: Didn’t Whitney Ellsworth do crude pencil sketches for you to follow when you drew covers for him?

RT: After that, I take it you started doing Superman and Batman stories occasionally in the regular comics, starting with Action #28, and some covers. Wayne Boring and others were working on Superman earlier than you, of course, but they weren’t doing independent “solo” work.

BURNLEY: Yeah. I wasn’t interested in thinking up ideas for covers. I did do the ideas for the covers of Starman, but I didn’t particFinal page of Jack’s first Superman story, Action Comics #28 (Sept. ’40). ©1999 DC Comics, Inc. ularly like doing it. Ellsworth would just send me a very crude dummy pencil thing, showing what he wanted the figBURNLEY: Boring did draw Superman more realistically than Shuster ures doing, just getting the theme of the cover. did, but that was long after I had RT: Do you have any idea of how you came to be the artist on Starman? started doing those covers, Were you looking for some strip to do besides Superman and Batman? and Fred Ray was the second after me, but before BURNLEY: I didn’t care one way or the other what I did. But they Boring alone. decided they liked my work so much that they thought they could make RT: You and Fred Ray did some of the truly classic covers of the early ’40s.

another big feature out of a character drawn by me, and they had a conference. That was covered pretty well in the article that I did on Starman that was published in the Gold and Silver Age Annual by Overstreet, about five years ago.

BURNLEY: Several interviews have published lists of most of my covers. Fred’s stuff was similar to mine in many ways, but he came after me.

RT: I understand that the late science-fiction writer Alfred Bester wrote some of the Starmans. He was one of the best Green Lantern writers, too. Do you know which writer made up The Mist, Starman’s most memorable villain?

Preceding page: Jack Burnley’s art for the Macy’s department store giveaway, printed as a Sunday advertising supplement in the New York Journal American, November 24, 1940. [Superman ©1999 DC Comics, Inc.]

BURNLEY: I think it was Bester, but I’m not positive. I think he wrote the best Starman stories. RT: Why do you think Starman, who was such a good-looking charac-

Jack Burnley position of advertising the name of an artist whom they wouldn’t let sign the other strips he drew! Jack at the drawing board during his days in the newspaper business.

BURNLEY: One ad said, “We’re positive this feature will be as popular as Superman and Batman!” RT: If anybody could ever really be that positive, we’d all be rich. As screenwriter William Goldman once famously wrote, “Nobody knows anything!” BURNLEY: I wrote an article explaining the reasons why I think Starman failed for Robin Snyder’s magazine. It was later reprinted. RT: Robin’s The Comics! is a fine publication. Very soon after you started Starman, you drew the introductions and conclusions to the Justice Society stories in three issues of All-Star Comics—#11 through #13. I presume you didn’t volunteer for such a backbreaking task. BURNLEY: I didn’t volunteer for anything. Shelly Mayer, who edited All-Star, liked my work and asked Ellsworth for permission for me to do some of his All-Star features. Ellsworth said okay. But it got to be too much work, drawing all those characters!

ter—even if red and green don’t usually go together as colors except at Christmas—failed to catch on? DC obviously thought he’d be a big star, because as soon as he came along they booted another Adventure Comics hero called Hour-Man out of All-Star and put Starman into the Justice Society in his place. But somehow Starman never took off. BURNLEY: They had high hopes for Starman. I’ve seen copies of other DC comics that had big ads for Starman, with my name in very big letters. One of the people who sent me those said they’d never seen any artist’s name featured that big in the old comics. RT: That is odd, especially since you hadn’t signed any of your Superman or Batman work. So DC was in the

RT: You obviously felt each hero should look exactly the way he did in his solo stories, which was not the way the JSA chapters had been handled previously. In your three issues The Atom looked as if he’d been drawn by Bill Flinton, Hawkman by Shelly Moldoff, Dr. Mid-Nite and Johnny Thunder by Stan Aschmeier, and so forth. Of course, Starman was easy for you. But everybody looked as if he’d just walked out of his own strip. BURNLEY: That’s what I tried to do, but it was too much hard work. Finally I got one script which had a splash page with a whole bunch of these characters all charging together in some big panorama, and I said, “That’s it! I’m not going to do any more of these!” So I told Ellsworth I was through with that. “Take me back to Batman and Starman!”

This Batman and Robin re-creation features The Penguin— whom Burnley saw as a Jerry Robinson sketch before the villain appeared in a story. [Courtesy of David A. Stepp; art ©1999 Jack Burnley; Batman, Robin, Penguin ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

Jack Burnley

RT: Often in those days the covers had nothing to do with the stories inside. On All-Star, though, the covers always did have something to do with the stories. I was curious, since you worked with a number of editors, what you thought of some of them. Whitney Ellsworth, for example. A lot of people liked him, and a lot of people didn’t. BURNLEY: Whitney was very, very nice to me all the time; we were quite friendly. In fact, he’d take my wife and me out to dinner at a steakhouse occasionally when we came in to the office. We were good friends. RT: What about Shelly Mayer? BURNLEY: He was always very pleasant to me; I never had any problems with him. He was kind of short-tempered, and tended to get into arguments with some other artists. But he never bothered me at all. I knew Jack Schiff well, too. The only one I didn’t like was Mort Weisinger. And I don’t think anybody liked him. RT: You probably don’t know this, but I worked my first two weeks in comics for Weisinger. I was hired in 1965 to be his assistant editor on Superman. But after two weeks I left to go to work for Stan Lee at Marvel. I just couldn’t work for Weisinger, so I can understand your feelings. BURNLEY: You had the same reaction I did. Any contact I had was unpleasant, so I just avoided him. RT: What about some of the other editors of the early days, like Julius Schwartz or Robert Kanigher? Did you deal with them at all? BURNLEY: I knew Julius Schwartz. I didn’t know Robert Kanigher.

Starman fights for hemispheric solidarity in wartime Bolivia! A caption has been cut off the bottom right of this page of original Burnley art from All-Star Comics #9 (Feb.-March 1942). [Courtesy of Joel Thingvall. Script: Gardner Fox; art: Jack Burnley. ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

RT: Let’s see… you drew the JSA chapters in #11, where they all joined the armed services… #12 with the Japanese Black Dragons… and then #13, where they were gassed by Nazis and sent in rockets to other planets. So the next issue, #14—that must be the one you turned down! And it does indeed start out with a splash page of all nine heroes, counting Wonder Woman, all charging at the reader. That was the one you didn’t want to do? BURNLEY: I don’t know. But I was faithful to the rendition of each one, and that took some work! RT: E. E. Hibbard drew the earliest JSA chapters in his own style. And the artist who took over the JSA with #14 was Joe Gallagher, who had a much cartoonier style than yours. You were the only one who ever made it look as if these eight or nine separate comics features had had a head-on collision. But it was very effective in its own way. I go on at length about that because All-Star is my favorite comic; I’m writing a whole book about it that will come out ere long. Your work is prominent in it, of course. In All-Star #13 the cover and splash page were the same drawing. You’d have done the splash page first, wouldn’t you, and then they decided to use it as the cover, as well? BURNLEY: I’m not sure which came first. Usually the covers were done independently of the stories. There’s some confusion about my first Superman story in Action Comics, because the previous issue, before they printed my circus story, had a cover of Superman riding a lion or something, like with a circus.

Jack Burnley

RT: It’s interesting that DC didn’t then have anybody called “assistant editors” or “associate editors.” They were all called “editors.” Shelly Mayer was an editor, Julie Schwartz was an editor, but Julie worked for Mayer. Did you often work in the DC offices, or did you just come by to deliver work?

to any of the other comics. RT: Did they send you copies of comics with your own work in them, or did you have to pick them up at the office?

BURNLEY: I never worked in the offices, in what they called the bullpen. I worked at home all the time, and I would either bring work in or send it in by my fatherin-law or my brother.

RT: So you didn’t know the other Batman artists, either—like Dick Sprang, Jerry Robinson, Winslow Mortimer? BURNLEY: I would see Jerry Robinson whenever I would come into the office. He’d say hello, I’d say a couple of words. The only thing I remember is, one time he showed me a pencil drawing of The Penguin, and asked me what I thought of that character. That’s before The Penguin was introduced, and he’d done a pencil drawing of him. I don’t know whether he or Kane had originated the character. But I do remember him showing me the drawing.

RT: DC knew your brother Ray was working with you, didn’t they? BURNLEY: Yes. He was on salary, too. RT: Did you socialize much with other comics people? BURNLEY: No. I didn’t know any of them at all. Just to say hello. RT: Did you look at other comics, to see what else was being done in the comics industry? Batman & Robin in the spotlight. Commission piece. [©1999 DC Comics, Inc.]

BURNLEY: I didn’t pay attention

BURNLEY: They’d send me proofs.

RT: Charlie Paris inked a few of

Jack Burnley

your covers. How did it happen that you ended up collaborating on a few covers?

before you sent it in, or did you always send the pencils in, and they’d decide if they wanted you to ink it?

BURNLEY: I didn’t collaborate with anybody. I sent my penciled stuff in, and they’d give it to whatever inker they wanted to do it.

BURNLEY: They would just send me the pencil dummy, and it was either understood I would ink the thing, or they would tell me just to pencil it and they’d take care of the inking. They found out I was pretty slow at doing both, but they liked my pencil work, the creative work, so they figured it’d work better if I just did the pencils and they had a fast inker do the inking.

RT: But didn’t you ink quite a few yourself? BURNLEY: Yeah, most of the early ones. I didn’t ink many of them. The penciler drew the drawing, the inker just executed it. With me particularly, I was penciling every detail. All the inker had to do was just follow it. He didn’t have any creative input at all. RT: When you both penciled and inked, did you do the whole thing

Jack Burnley RT: You’ve mentioned liking Alfred Bester’s writing on Starman. Were there any other writers whose scripts you especially liked to illustrate?

bothered to get into the business of doing re-creations, as some artists from the 1940s have. You’ve said you prefer not to bother doing them, and you never go to comics conventions.

BURNLEY: I didn’t pay much attention to the scripts on Superman or Batman. It was only Starman I paid attention to.

BURNLEY: I never do. I’ve done maybe eight or ten recreations since I retired. But I haven’t done any drawing for the past four or five years. One re-creation I did was the World’s Fair cover, which was auctioned off at Christie’s New York auction for $5000.

RT: Did you ever consider during that period the possibility of working for one of the other outfits, like Fawcett?

RT: But that clearly didn’t tempt you to do any more. How did you first come into contact with comics fans? Back in 1977 Jerry Bails and Craig Delich printed your first new Starman drawing in decades in their All-Star Comics Revue—the illustration you and they have been kind enough to let us print in color for the first time as one of this issue’s covers. Did they track you down?

BURNLEY: I was happy at DC. I didn’t want to switch. They had the biggest outfit, anyway. RT: During the mid-1940s you did several years’ worth of Superman and Batman newspaper comic strips. I could’ve asked you a lot about those, because it was such excellent work; but that was covered so well in the hardcover reprints that I decided not to. What do you think of the fact that they’ve collected all of your and other people’s Batman and Superman work in those lovely books over the past few years?

BURNLEY: They must have. I didn’t contact them. Jerry asked me to do a re-creation of the All-Star characters. He wanted me to do a bunch of them, but I just did the drawing Jerry loaned you…

BURNLEY: It was nice to have them with a credit line.

RT: The Starman.

RT: I presume you don’t have copies of all those strips otherwise, or any of the original art from the strips or books? BURNLEY: I had a number of black-&-white proofs of the Batman Sundays. But all the original art got lost over the years, unfortunately.

BURNLEY: …the Starman, and that’s it.

This page from the first All-Star issue (#11, June-July 1942) produced after Pearl Harbor shows Burnley’s penchant for drawing every JSA hero in the style of his regular artist. The bottom quarter-inch, set off by a black line on the art from which this illustration was reproduced, was not printed in the comic; this page of original artwork has been valued as high as $11,500. [Courtesy of Joel Thingvall; ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

RT: So how did you decide after the war to get back into the newspaper business? BURNLEY: As I told you, in ’47 I got a call from Hearst. Lou Green asked if I wanted to go back into sports cartooning, and I said yes. He said, “Well, we have an opening for you in Pittsburgh,” and that was it. RT: So after you quit comics, both comic books and strips, you did primarily sports cartoons. I notice that you retired from that in 1976, and that’s just about exactly when you would have turned 65. Did you just figure enough was enough? BURNLEY: Oh, sure. I wanted to retire. I had no ambition to keep working in the art department. The sports cartoons were all over by that time. RT: You must have done okay out of them, because you haven’t

RT: Is there anything else you’d like to say to close out this interview?

BURNLEY: Well, it may have been said before in other interviews, but I don’t think it was pointed out that I was the first to do both Superman and Batman completely independently of the creators, and the first to work on both newspaper strips, both the Sundays and dailies, and the first to do both Superman and Batman on both covers and in comic book stories. RT: That’s quite a few firsts. Thank you… Jack. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. [NOTE: In a near-future issue of Alter Ego Jack Burnley will share more of his reminiscences with us, written in his own hand. We can’t wait!]

Submit Something To Alter Ego! Alter Ego is on the lookout for items that can be utilized in upcoming issues: • Convention Sketches • Unpublished Artwork • Original Scripts (the older the better!) • Photos • Unpublished Interviews • Little-seen Fanzine Material We’re also interested in articles, article ideas, or any other suggestions... and we pay off in FREE COPIES of A/E. (If you’re already an A/E subscriber, we’ll extend your subscription.) Contact: Roy Thomas, Editor Rt. 3, Box 468 St. Matthews, SC 29135 Fax: (803)826-6501 • E-mail: roydann@oburg.net

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How Marv Wolfman & Co. Saved (a Bit of) the Golden Age

You’ve Heard of the Book Titled “How the Irish Saved Civilization.” Now read—

How Marv Wolfman and Co. Saved (a Bit of) The Golden Age by Roy Thomas

e can’t get around it. We have to begin with what seems like an unabashed plug. And maybe it is:

In the works is a new book from TwoMorrows Publishing: The All-Star Companion, compiled by Ye Editor with the help of several other prominent fans of the Justice Society of America. One of the highlights of that volume will be more than a dozen pages’ worth of art panels from a never-published JSA story written and drawn circa 1946: “The Will of William Wilson,” with script by JSA co-creator Gardner Fox, and art by Martin Naydel, Jon Chester Kozlak, Stan Aschmeier, and Paul Reinman. The story of how so many pages of this story—and literally hundreds of other pages of Golden and even Silver Age art—came to be salvaged and preserved is virtually a comic book epic in and of itself. It’s a story that deserves telling. Circa 1967-68, a young New York fan named Marv Wolfman was just edging into the comic book field. Such scripting triumphs as Tomb of Dracula and The New Teen Titans still lay several years in his future. In the late ’60s he worked for a couple of summers as an “intern” (gopher) at DC Comics, performing whatever odd jobs needed doing around the offices. One of which was to cut up original comic book artwork to prepare it for incineration. For, believe it or not: Until the early 1970s, DC (and doubtless other companies, as well) routinely burned all original art once it had been printed, presumably so that no unscrupulous artist or writer (or editor!) could sell entire covers and stories to some Godless foreign land which might re-publish same without paying for the privilege. Also incinerated on such occasions was unpublished artwork, which was often stamped “WRITTEN OFF”: i.e., DC had decided not to print it, either because a feature had been canceled or for some other reason. Actually, we need to back up a little, because the

This “Written Off” page of a 1940s Dr. Mid-Nite story, most likely by Arthur Peddy (pencils) and Bernard Sachs (inks), is unusual in having four tiers rather than three, but was rescued during the episode recounted here. Only one piece at the bottom right was missing from the photocopies sent to A/E by Mark Hanerfeld. [Dr. Mid-Nite ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

How Marv Wolfman & Co.—

Get a grip! Two Green Lantern panels by Paul Reinman from the long-lost Justice Society story. They and several more of GL—plus another dozen pages’ worth of this never-printed JSA tale—are a highlight of TwoMorrows’ forthcoming All-Star Companion, edited by Roy Thomas. [Green Lantern ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

1967ish act of rescue heralded above wasn’t the first time Marv Wolfman, among others, had become engaged in saving original artwork from the flames of perdition. A year or two earlier, Marv tells us: “Several fans and I were on one of DC’s regular Thursday afternoon tours when production manager Sol Harrison came wheeling a huge postal cart past us, filled with ‘Written Off’ artwork, mostly from the ’40s. He was bringing the pages to the building’s incinerator to destroy them; obviously, the small office DC had at the time was running out of space and they had to clear away room. “Sol asked the fans on the tour if we wanted any of the art. As fans, we all knew artwork was important, even if the professionals didn’t. We all dove into the postal cart like Uncle Scrooge into his money bin and took everything we could, then scurried downstairs and traded in the building’s lobby. “I had so many pages by the end of the day that I had to take a cab home from Manhattan to Flushing, Queens, which was very expensive for a kid. I don’t remember if every page was stamped “WRITTEN OFF,” but most were. “The pages we got then were full pages, and uncut. I realized early on that I had gotten almost all the pages of a 12-page never-published Siegel and Shuster Superman story and managed to trade for the other pages. I still have that story and it has never been printed. The pages have “WRITTEN OFF” stamped on them, as well as editing notes which were never corrected in the story. It has an incredibly good splash page with a full-page Superman shot on it. “Later, when I went to work for DC, I went through their library to try to trace the time period of that story. As best I could figure out, it must have been done about 1942. In 1947, I believe, the story was rewritten as a ten-page story and then redrawn by Wayne Boring and was published. Why the Siegel and Shuster version wasn’t used, I don’t know. “It is called ‘Too Many Heroes!’”

CUT TO: The 1967-68 period, when Marv was an “intern” at DC. Part of his job, as directed by production manager Harrison, was to slice pages of artwork into several pieces—diagonally, from an upper corner to the lower opposite one—so that they would fit more easily into the incinerator chute. From time to time, however, Harrison would allow him to keep a small amount of artwork—as long as it was properly sliced first with the large paper-cutter, so that Marv would have only pieces of pages and panels, not whole pages, let alone whole stories. Marv readily admits that, as soon as Sol left the room on other business, he immediately commenced to slice the pages he wanted to keep in a more creative way—horizontally—in between what were usually three rows (or “tiers”) of panels, rather than diagonally. That way, no panels were mutilated. If one just happened to save all three tiers on a normal page, one could eventually tape them together again, and have a complete page. Marv says that Harrison returned once or twice, noticed him cutting the pages the “wrong” way and insisted that he got back to doing it the “right” way. Naturally, as soon as he was left unattended, Marv went back to his preferred method. And more power to him. “My hope,” Marv says, “was to preserve as much of this art as possible. Many of the 1940s pages [that exist today] exist only because they were rescued from incineration.” Most of the artwork that passed through his hands, alas, wound up being destroyed. Among the treasures he specifically recalls having to consign to the flames were pages of Alex Toth art, a Neal Adams Deadman story, and the Gil Kane-drawn origin of the Silver Age Atom from Showcase #34. (Though, curiously, the second story in that landmark issue—the first in which he appears in costume—somehow survived intact, not even sliced into thirds!) Over the long haul, Marv estimates that he managed to depart with perhaps five hundred pages’ worth of original art—some complete pages, many individual tiers.

—Saved (a Bit of) the Golden Age “In terms of what I still have,” Marv says, “a quick look shows many ‘Written Off’ pages from Flash Comics (up to issue #110, which shows how far ahead they were working), Green Lantern, All-American, Comics Cavalcade, and assorted other strips.” (The significance of the “Flash #110” reference, of course, is that Flash Comics was discontinued in 1949 after issue #104.) Later, at a meeting in Queens of the comics fan group to which he belonged—T.I.S.O.S., or The Illegitimate Sons of Superman—Marv let the other members, including future comics writer/editor Len Wein and other future pros, take home 25 pages each; he kept a mere two hundred or so for himself. One of the real prizes of Wolfman’s haul consisted of more than a dozen pages’ worth of artwork (both complete pages and parts of pages) of what would turn out to be a never-printed 1946 Justice Society story, “The Will of William Wilson”—all cut up into nice horizontal tiers. Still extant from this tale, so far as we can determine today, were: three tiers of Green Lantern drawn by Paul Reinman; four Atom tiers by Jon Chester Kozlak; at least one Dr. Mid-Nite tier by Stan Aschmeier; fourteen Flash tiers by Martin Naydel (out of a possible seventeen, counting the missing splash as only one tier); and fifteen (out of a possible eighteen) tiers of the concluding JSA chapter! Apparently, no splash panels (which would have consisted of 2/3 of a page for each of the six solo chapters) were preserved. No doubt those had been too large for Marv to avoid slicing, and he hadn’t saved any artwork he’d sliced in two. And nothing whatsoever of the first (JSA) chapter or of the Hawkman and Johnny Thunder segments has ever turned up—though they were probably drawn. Not that everyone in T.I.S.O.S. instantly recognized these pages as part of an unpublished issue of All-Star Comics. All but the JSA pages would have looked like parts of mere solo adventures of Flash, Green Lantern, Dr. Mid-Nite, and The Atom from DC’s monthly anthologies Flash and All-American, or perhaps from the giant-size bimonthly Comic Cavalcade. And anyway, some of the group, Marv included, were far more interested in other features than in the JSA.

But one T.I.S.O.S. member—Mark Hanerfeld, later an assistant editor at DC and the original model for Abel, host of the House of Secrets comic—seems to have recognized at once that much of the artwork belonged to the same JSA story. And he wanted it all! Mark promptly traded with his fellow Illegitimates to get the rest of the All-Star tiers, just as Marv had earlier traded in order to obtain the entire 1942 Superman story. For some reason, however, Mark seems never to have had any Dr. Mid-Nite tiers; that turned up later from other hands. Mark hung on to the JSA art for years before selling it to Ye Writer/Editor in the 1980s. In 1985 the first page of the JSA finale, forty years late but in full color, was finally printed in the one-shot The Last Days of the Justice Society of America. Thus, at least a baker’s-dozen pages of an otherwise “lost” AllStar—and of some five hundred other Golden and Silver Age DC pages floating around today in one private collection or another—owe their survival to those heady days in the late 1960s when Marv Wolfman and Mark Hanerfeld became the super-heroes who rescued much of a “lost” adventure of the Justice Society. But just think: If DC’s incinerator opening had been a bit larger, so those pages hadn’t needed to be sliced up in order to slide down the chute, all five hundred of them might well have been forever and irretrievably lost like their brothers! For a full printing of all surviving art from the unpublished “The Will of William Wilson”—for the first time in its more than half a century of existence—see The All-Star Companion, coming next year. President Harry S Truman was fond of saying: “There’s nothing new under the sun, except the history you don’t know yet.” I used to wonder what my fellow Missourian meant by that. Not any longer.

Monthly! Edited and published by Robin Snyder

www.comicsfun.com/thecomics

The Sky Wizard’s Lost Origins

The Sky Wizard ’s Lost Origins The Golden Age Hero That Time—and Everybody Else—Forgot! by Will Murray

ontroversies aside, the stories behind the creations of the major Golden Age super-heroes are pretty well documented. We know how Superman, Batman, Captain America, The Human Torch, and The Sub-Mariner were created, among others. But what about the also-rans and the second-stringers? Come on, admit it. Wouldn’t you just love to have been a fly on the wall when they were brainstorming the likes of The Red Bee or Spider Widow? Bulletman or Bob Phantom? Not to mention The Claw and The Comet? We’ll probably never get the inside scoops on the more minor super-heroes of that era. But once in a while, we do get lucky. It just so happens that the lost origin of one obscure super-character of the Golden Age of Comics was documented. The Sky Wizard, Master of Space, had a relatively short run as a comics character. He debuted in Hillman’s Miracle Comics #1 (Feb. 1940). The strip was signed Emile C. Schurmacher. The Sky Wizard was not exactly the most illustrious creation of the Golden Age. He lasted only four issues—the entire run of that brief title, which happened to mark Hillman’s first, brief foray into the four-color field. But The Sky Wizard’s origin has come down to us, thanks to an article Miracle Comics #1 cover. penned by Schurmacher himself—not an artist, as you might expect from his prominent signature, but a forgotten writer of that period who scripted large chunks of Miracle Comics. In “Action, and How!” (Writer’s Digest, Feb. 1940), Emile C. “Schnurmacher” (note that here his last name is spelled with an “n”)

gives his contemporaries a glimpse of what it’s like to be a comic book scripter during the early Golden Age: “After some fifteen years of freelancing on four continents, doing features for newspaper and magazines, I thought, reasonably enough, that I knew what action meant. I’ve bumped guys off in anything from 500-word shorts to 7,500word features, depending on what the traffic would bear. But that was before I began writing for the action comics, a field which during Miracle Comics #2 cover. the past year or so has zipped along almost as fast as the contents of its own publications. “Take that phone call this morning from Tony Field’s. Tony, who ordinarily seems like a nice quiet gent, edits the new line of action comics for Hillman Publications, 7 East 44th Street, New York, an outfit which started with Crime Detective a couple of years ago and has branched out plenty. “‘That last installment of Sky Wizard is static, no action at all,’ Tony growled. ‘Hop over and fix it up!’ “‘Look here,’ I answered indignantly. ‘On page one the terrible giant Snow Men abduct the heroine. On page two, three of them are blown to bits by sky mines. On page four the villain makes a 50,000foot parachute jump, and on...’ “‘Yeah!’ hooted Tony. ‘But page three! What about page three? Whatcha trying to do, cheat our readers?’” Incredulous? A couple of months ago I would have said so, too. But that was before I discovered this new and fast-moving market which pays decent prices and pays ’em promptly for reasons which I’ll point out. Tony Field was one of the many pseudonyms for the improbably-

The Sky Wizard’s Lost Origins named Anatole France Feldman. In his pulp days, Feldman created the notorious Gangster Stories hoodlum-cum-hero, Big Nose Serrano, as well as having ghosted The Phantom Detective pulp magazine. He also did some radio work and edited a tony of true-crime magazines for Hillman-Curl throughout the early ’40s. Schnurmacher goes on to relate how he fell into comics writing—a fate that doubtless befell many pulp writers of his time: “When I became interested in this new market a couple of months ago, I learned that Lionel White, for whom I had written we he was editor of True, was going to publish two or three of the action comics. “I was writing fact features for both his Crime Detective and Crime Confessions and suggested that he let me submit an action comic strip. He murmured something about it being my headache but said he’d look at a synopsis. I found out what he meant about the “headache” gag pretty soon. He had been reading so many synopses that turtle neck men snapped at him as he walked down the hall, rocket guns were shot at him in his sleep, and strange leprechauns stalked head downward across his ceiling. Pretty soon they were doing it to me, too. That’s the frame of mind you get into when you’re writing stuff for the action comics.

Even after more than fifty years, it’s still possible to identify the mysterious “Eddie.” After duly conferring, Jerry Bails and I decided that he could only be Ed Kressy of Lone Ranger and Power Nelson fame, possibly inked by his studio mate Norman Fallon. It’s generally believed that the early Hillman comics were products of the Harry “A” Chesler shop, but nowhere does Schnurmacher mention this. He goes on to recount how his new hero was designed: “I told him my idea about Sky Wizard, an athletic young man who was one of the world’s greatest scientists living on a helium-filled island in the sky. He became enthusiastic and drew a series of sketches. Starting with the first, S.W. looking like a knight of the Middle Ages, he was modernized, streamlined, then futurized in five succeeding sketches until he took on the appearance and personality he now bears.” Fortunately for posterity, Writer’s Digest saw fit to reproduce Kressy’s six-step evolution of the character design. Regrettably, this rare glimpse of Golden Age conceptualization is of a character whose adventures few read then, and fewer still remember now. Sky Wizard’s origin documented, his creator goes on to tell other would-be comics scribes how he gets his ideas:

“It was about that time that Sky Wizard began to take “After working out a shape in my mind. Talking to synopsis and throwing in most kid readers of other comics, I of the pseudo-scientific material had ’em discuss what they in my fields, Sky Wizard’s liked and what they didn’t like adventures began to take shape. This, the lone graphic which accompanied Schnurmacher’s Writer’s Digest article, in an action comic hero. They About this pseudo-scientific depicts the varied stages of development of the lost hero Sky Wizard. liked one to be almost invulmaterial, the daily newspapers nerable, but not totally so. are full of it. For example a Otherwise there would be no risk in his adventures. They liked him to story that an explorer had seen footprints in the Himalayas which an have some pet gadget like a rocket gun or a paralyzing dagger. And they old legend said were those of a race of giant snow men, gave me both preferred him to wear the minimum of clothes to show off his beautiful, locale and villains. Very considerately I added wings to the snow men so streamlined body. Whatever else the action comics may be doing to the that they could attack airplanes. Another dispatch from the Western imagination of youngsters, they’re stimulating a healthy desire for Front which said that the Germans were planning to mine the skies strong, athletic bodies.” against invading airplanes gave me a swell action situation in which Sky Wizard could destroy the flying snow men with sky mines filled with triplenitro. That explosive naturally would be three times as strong as Market research finished, Schnurmacher took his nascent concept nitroglycerine.” to an artist: “Having assimilated this data, I sought out an old A.P. cartoonist friend of mine, Eddie. I found him hard a work turning out action comics for a couple of competing publishers. Because of this, I’m not mentioning his last name.”

Considering that he thought nothing of sticking wings on Yeti, Emile C. Schnurmacher was surprisingly concerned about maintaining a factual basis for his fledgling strip:

The Sky Wizard’s Lost Origins “I worried a bit as to where Sky Wizard would get food on Sky Island. Then I read a scientific feature on hydroponics—the new method of growing giant vegetables in water— and my problem was solved. I mention these things because they illustrate how actual news features serve as a springboard to dive off into the realm of the pseudo-scientific and fantastic and to show that there’s plenty of this sort of material available for every writer who wants to tackle this market.” Miracle Comics #3 cover.

Schnurmacher mentions going on to script other strips for Miracle, including “K-7, Secret Agent” and “The Scorpion” with Ed Kressy. He also penned “Dusty Doyle, the Circus Cyclone,” and one I can’t place, “Captain Hazard.” He apparently signed “The Scorpion” with a variant of his own name, “Carl Sherman.” I wonder if the “Rocket Riley, Prince of the Planet” lead strip in Rocket Comics wasn’t his Captain Hazard under another name. There was a Captain Hazzard pulp, and a rights search of the name might have suggested a prudent change. Ed Kressy also drew Rocket Riley. Another possibility is Rocket’s “Buzzard Barnes and His Sky Devils.” Whatever the truth is, there’s no doubt that Emile C. Schnurmacher was Hillman’s main comics writer from the start. He may have singlehandedly scripted all of Miracle and Rocket, though I wouldn’t put it past editor “Tony Field” to have pitched in. Writing the other strips was no picnic, Schnurmacher admitted to Writer’s Digest readers: “With Sky Wizard safely on the drawing boards I began to submit other strips. And as they were accepted I began to realize more and more what Lionel meant when he said ‘my headache.’ I’ve got one script running, for instance, which features Dusty Doyle, the Circus Cyclone. I was enthusiastic about the locale and thought I could hold a lot of interest with it. But when it got on the boards, I found that the artist was drawing mostly tent canvas backgrounds. So I’ve had to pull Dusty outside of the Big Top for many of his thrilling exploits. “Then again there was K-7, Secret Agent, the radio dramatizations of which you may have listened to. K-7 got into so many complications as a Secret Agent that a lot of explaining had to be done in panels and dialogue. This detracts from action and so I’ve had to simplify the plots. “As a result of this rather intensive experience, I’d suggest that if you’re going to start submitting scripts to the action comics you follow these simple rules. They’re easy enough to follow when you learn ’em, but believe me learning ’em was quite a job. Here they are: “1. Have your hero almost invincible, but not entirely. “2. Put him in an exotic locale. “3. Use a chase theme. There’s more action in a continuous story than one of those “in the meantimes” which are difficult to handle. “4. Make most of your action take place out of doors. That gives

the artist a chance to do his stuff. “5. Keep wordage to absolute minimum. “6. Ditto love element. “Mebbe this sounds like a lot of fuss and dither over submitting a four, eight, or 16 page sequence to an action comic. But remember this. If you do land, the $10, $20, or $40 check you land is but the first return. If your character is popular, the kids will want to read him every month. If he is above average, he may land in the movies, on the radio, or in a newspaper comic section, and take you, his creator, with him…. “Publishers prefer the shorter lengths [for stories] and pay you $2.50 a page for your stuff. If you can’t turn out at least an eight-page continuity in a day, worth $20 to you, you’ve never written any action stuff. If you sell it, it will go into a 64-page book which retails for a dime. You’ll probably never see the artist who draws it. He gets $10 a page for his drawings and good artists are turning out so many pages these days that they’ve got a regular conveyor belt system, with one man to do figure work, another to do backgrounds, a third to ink in, and a fourth to letter.” Well, this was sound advice, good theory, but it was not to be—at least where Emile C. Schnurmacher and his Sky Wizard were concerned. After only four issues, Hillman folded Miracle and its sole companion title, Rocket Comics. Under the editorship of former Miracle Comics #4 cover. Timely scripter John H. Compton, the company revived its comics line late in 1941 with Victory Comics and Air Fighters. A market notice in Writer’s Digest pointedly noted that the new line would not feature “super-men” characters. But Hillman’s second attempt to elbow aside Superman and Captain Marvel from America’s newsstands died a quick and ignominious death as well. It remained for editor Ed Cronin to relaunch Air Fighters for good in 1942, and to make Hillman Comics a “contender,” first with Airboy and later with The Heap. As for Emile C. Schnurmacher, it’s not clear what happened to him. I don’t know if he made the final cut. I wouldn’t be surprised if he worked on characters like The Crusader and The Conqueror for Victory, but that’s only a guess. After that, he vanishes in a puff of pulp flakes, both from comics and pulps, leaving behind one nagging mystery: Is his last named spelled “Schurmacher” or “Schnurmacher”? [Special thanks to Jerry Bails and other members of the Grand Comics Database <http://www.comics.org:8000> for their kind assistance.] WILL MURRAY is a longtime pulp magazine and comic book historian, the author of over fifty novels in the Destroyer, Doc Savage, and other series, and a professional psychic. His next novel, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD: Empyre, illustrated by Steranko, is due out in November.

Kanigher on Kanigher

Kanigher on Kanigher (and Everything Else!) A Long Letter from “RK”—and Ye Editor’s response

ne of the foremost writers from the 1940s through at least the 1960s, no doubt about it, was Robert Kanigher, longtime DC editor and writer. Recently, via e-mail, JSA expert Jerry Bails and I were discussing 1947’s All-Star Comics #36 (“Five Drowned Men”), when Jerry came up with a tentative theory about its authorship—generally attributed as one of three JSA stories scripted by RK—as well as a few thoughts on what counts as “creating” a comic book hero. Jerry felt that internal evidence indicated that in #36 Kanigher might have been rewriting an earlier, unpublished Gardner Fox script called “The Men of Magnifica.” (For more about this, see TwoMorrows’ and my forthcoming trade paperback The All-Star Companion.) I duly sent a copy of Jerry’s musings to RK, hoping to prod him into thinking a bit about those bygone days, and received a lengthy missive—a welcome one, despite some of its more arguable opinions. Here is that letter, followed by a few comments from Ye Writer/Editor.— R.T. Dear Mr. Thomas: I received your deluge of detritus yesterday. I’m restless. So I’m going to reciprocate in my own fashion....

work part-time. Later it became full-time. I supported them in their own flat (without their asking me), paying for everything from chewing gum to their coffins, 28 years later. I didn’t mind the money. My wife Bern’s income as a principal of a NYC high school was always greater than mine. What haunted me all those years was that I had become the parent of my parents. I was forced to make decision of life and death at any moment without warning. Economic circumstances forced me to answer [Victor] Fox’s ad in the New York Times for a writer. After one sentence from me, he sent me to W.W. Scott, his editor, as he “liked a man who can think on his feet.” It was 1940. I never plotted. One summer I wrote 100 pages a week. I never forgot to write poetry, short stories, plays, novels. And later to paint oils and water colors. Fox eventually folded, and I was introduced to Dick Hughes [at Better/Standard/Nedor/Pines]. All I knew is that he never rejected any of my ideas; but I grew tired of his having to go somewhere in the back and get permission to give me the assignment; so I left.

Snyder knows the name of the woman editor who called me to write for Fox again. We “plotted” in her Mr. Bails’ objection that creator-writers’ opinions about their brownstone apartment in the Village and had a merry time, work isn’t carved in stone and that readers can disagree segues with an with her hilarious tales of the people she lived with in the objection that Rich Morrissey raised in the latest Florida Keys, who became addicted to Coca-Cola edition that [Robin] Snyder sent me of his Comics. I and waited for each ship’s delivery like panting Robert Kanigher, as depicted by artist was moved to reply. Ernie Colon. [Art ©1999 Ernie Colon] sheep dogs. To Mr. Rich Morrissey: I read your highly intelligent and challenging question in Robin Snyder’s Comics—shot into the air like a bowman at Agincourt. Since of two writers you mention my name, and I had my first short story titled “The Night God Rode the El,” published in the Phoenix, a literary magazine in New York, when I was an American schoolboy of eleven and I have been writing ever since, I owe you this answer: I light the lamp In the darkness And leave the light behind me For you to see. RK My father was destroyed by the Great Depression. At 12 I had to

Fox failed again, and I walked into Fawcett’s offices on Broadway. I wrote for Stanley J. Kauffman. Captain Marvel. No plotting. He quit when Fawcett in an economy move made editors out of secretaries. And I with him. He became drama critic, temporarily, for the New York Times, and I don’t know how I wound up at the abbatoir that Harry Shorten conducted at MLJ. One day I came in—Shorten was hysterical. Irv Novick was on the phone. He hadn’t received his Steel Sterling script. Shorten asked me whether I could dictate a finished script over the phone to Irv. I said: “Give me a chair and a glass of water.” The script is reprinted in my book on writing, asked for by my friend (whose name escapes me for the moment) who was the general manager for Cambridge House, New York, in 1943. My title was Breakthrough. The publisher changed it to How to Make Money Writing for Newspapers and Magazines, Radio, Movies, Stage, Comics

Kanigher on Kanigher waiting room at DC at the other end of the hall. Larry handled the funnies. I wrote super-characters for Schwartz. Less than two or three minutes for plotting. I don’t plot. I don’t use a computer. My mind is a computer. Ben timed me. I composed scripts at sixty words a minute. With two fingers. Hardly any errors. Except when two keys came up at the same time and got entangled. Bern said I could always get a job as a typist. Yes, Larry mentioned to me that he had a brother he called Marty, a cartoonist, who died at the age of fifty from a heart attack. Larry followed in his heartbeats much later. Everyone worshiped Shelly. I thought he was more of a performer than creator. When he wanted us, he blew on a police whistle. When he asked for more visual dramatics, according to my Comics Journal interview (on Page 70, illustrated): “Kanigher’s first use of a ‘cinematic device,’ a series of panels that is part pan, part zoom.” On Page 7 [of that same interview]: “The triptych, another classic Kanigher cinematic device: three panels consecutive in time, but with a continuous background. (From Our Army at War #150.)” We moved. Larry had an office to himself. Schwartz and I shared the same office, our desks back to back. I erected a “Chinese Wall” of books so I wouldn’t have to see his lemon face each morning. But, unlike Mort and Schiff, we never quarreled. We simply had nothing in common. Except when he needed scripts. An Eskimo and a polar bear had more in common.

This page and next: Two pages from the unpublished third meeting of the Golden Age Flash with first Thorn, then her alter ego Rose, circa 1948. Alas, the glitches in copy and art exist in the photocopies which are all that remain of the story; they were printed in Robin Snyder’s The Comics! a few years ago. Note that Thorn retains here original, scantier costume on p. 4, panel 4. Doubtless it would have been changed if the story had seen print. [Story by R. Kanigher, art by J. Kubert. Flash, Rose & Thorn ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

Magazines, Popular Novels. I could regurgitate when I think of the sheer nerve of it. And yet, each paperback sold out at one dollar each. And so did the following hardcover at three dollars for all of them. Robin told me some time ago that it cost him thirty dollars for a single tattered paperback. I loaned him my only copy until he could xerox it. I haven’t read it. My friend Ben Raeburn quit and became general manager of Arco Publishers, whose offices were next door to National’s. Bails says they’re “AA” [All-American]. So be it. What did I know about comics? I never heard of Marvel! Either Ben—or Ben induced one of the partners at Arco, Dave (whom I later met socially) to do so—introduced me to Shelly Mayer. Ted Udall had quit. His editors were Larry Nadle and Julius Schwartz. There were no assistant editors or secretaries or even a switchboard operator. We received our calls from Phyllis Reed, in the

We never co-edited a single book. Because I created and wrote the western Johnny Thunder and The Trigger Twins, and designed all the covers, fans thought we co-edited AllAmerican Western. But Schwartz was the editor. Toth illustrated Johnny Thunder. He used to come in at lunchtime for his check, when Schwartz was playing cards with Miltie Snappin. Toth’s check was in Schwartz’ desk drawer. It would have taken him two seconds to open it and give Toth his check. A yelling match ensued. Schwartz gave Toth his check and fired him. Thus did DC lose a great talent.

A demonology began to spring up about me. Fans thought I fired Toth. Schwartz kept a craven silence. Snyder finally questioned Toth about what happened. Alex agreed with me. If the fans had a brain they would have seen I couldn’t fire Toth. (Schwartz was the editor, not I.) Shelly asked me to write a Wonder Woman. I did. He threw it on the floor and jumped up and down on it. (My first rejection!) He did his Jumping Jack routine on my second and third scripts publicly. I said: “F—- you!” And left. He phoned me that night and said he and Liebowitz wanted to see me. I deliberately waited a few days and then came in. Shelly and [co-publisher Jack] Liebowitz wanted me to be the editor and sole writer of Wonder Woman. They offered me the same salary as Nadle and Schwartz. I said: “I could make more money at home, writing, without getting out of my pajamas.” Liebowitz said: “We want

Kanigher on Kanigher

you to be a writer-editor! You’ll have two incomes! A staff salary as an editor and a free lance income as a writer!” I agreed, thinking I wouldn’t stay long. A month or two. Little did I know that fate was going to play an unexpected trick on me. I walked out twenty-two years later. There’s been a lot of guessing why. They were all wrong. What lulled me was that I had complete freedom. I answered to no one. They never knew what I was going to come out with in the books I edited. In Kubert—the War Years, Joe said that the most astonishing thing about Kanigher was that “he never missed a deadline in his life!” Do you think if I had told Liebowitz, an American Jewish manager of an American Jewish publishing house that an American Jewish editor would do something that had never been done before—create and write Enemy Ace, an enemy of America in two World Wars, and make him a sympathetic, tortured, but deadly character—that he would have allowed me to do it? Or Blitzkrieg? Or Panzer? The first anyone knew of Von Hammer was when I handed Joe Kubert a script finished in every detail. I even choreographed the aerial dogfights as if they were a ballet. Seven thousand complimentary letters came in. It’s been described as “a world-wide achievement.” Flashback to Shelly before he took “early retirement.” Every Friday he drew an invisible circle around me and asked me to write a Wonder Woman. He was grateful for my taking her off his hands. He hated her. The [William Moulton] Marston family approved of my choice. I worked with [artist] Harry G. Peter. A white-haired elf who came in from Staten Island, who completely ignored my ranting and raving with his invincible silence. Once, for a joke, I asked for one hundred Amazons in a single panel. He delivered. I counted them. He was right, in the end. His insane illustrations were mythic. Just what Wonder Woman needed. I always wrote the characters I created. First, with Schwartz as the editor, The Gentleman Ghost, a whimsical ghost in formal attire, but a space where his head would be, except for a monocle and a top hat. I don’t know who illustrated it. But Kubert illustrated Rose and The Thorn. Successful. Until Liebowitz cancelled it saying it was too sexy. Joe can’t draw women. His hookers look like princesses and his princesses look like hookers. My origin story was that Rose, accompanying her botanist father in the jungles, was scratched by a strange thorn which turned her into a schizoid (the first in comics). Years later, [E. Nelson] Bridwell asked me to revive her. I completely forgot my initial origin. Rose became schizoid when she saw her detective father, murdered by the 100 Gang in his car, being pulled out of the East River. I didn’t plot, but she was successful again. In the big hardcover [The Greatest Golden Age Stories Ever Told— R.T.], although Gardner Fox is named as the writer, I wrote [the first JSA-vs.-Injustice Society story reprinted therein]. Also, the wonderful Broome is listed by Schwartz as the writer of “Too Many Suspects”— until Broome denied it at the San Diego Convention. How many other

“mistakes” has Schwartz made? He still hasn’t admitted it. Isn’t he Saint Schwartz to the fans? Do saints admit mistakes? By the way, I never wrote a chapter of anything. Only complete finished scripts. If you want comments about anything I’ve already done—doubtful. My work speaks for itself. I don’t speak for my work. But if your questions are provocative—perhaps. Although Robin has said more than once that I have a remarkable memory. But that memory isn’t about numbers. I’m not an accountant. My memory is visual, it’s about events: people, places, landscapes, actions, talk, emotions, passions that forever remain in the inner theatre of my mind. Concerning Mr. Bails’ musings and revelations about “Five Drowned Men”—it’s his privilege. Let him enjoy himself. Although I am a fencer, I don’t consider him my opponent. I like his passion about the minutiae about every detail in comics. It’s not mine. All I can repeat is that I never rewrote anyone’s script. That’s a job for hacks. Or as Truman Capote succinctly put it: There are writers and typists. I am a writer. All my scripts are originals. I’ve written a lot of material for Snyder’s Comics originally to start him off. Or when I was aroused by something someone wrote. As in the case of one of Steve Ditko’s lengthy philosophical articles; so I have fun

Kanigher on Kanigher

by answering him with a long article called “No Spinach for Socrates.” On the other hand, Robin recently told me that, in seven years or so, I was the only one who backed Ditko publicly, in his claim that he created Spider-Man.

point?

There was a point in time in the past when I thought comics would become a legitimate medium in its own right, treated seriously by legitimate critics. I regret to say that typists like Len Wein and especially Marv Wolfman buried comics with their killings and parallel worlds until comics became a travesty of itself.

(d) Over a leisurely dinner during the 1999 Heroes Convention in Charlotte, NC, Julius Schwartz told his own version of the long-whispered-about “firing” of Alex Toth referred to by RK. He says Kanigher’s version is correct as far as it goes: that he (Julie) didn’t feel like interrupting his card game (and lunch hour) to give the artist his check. But Julie maintains there was a second factor of which RK is perhaps not aware, which involved Julie giving Toth, after the lunch-game ended, a particular script to illustrate. According to Schwartz, the artist insisted he wanted to draw a different feature first, in the regular rotation he was accustomed to, while Julie persisted that, this time, the two features needed to be drawn in a different order for deadline reasons, and that this led to a flareup. However, Julie may (or may not) prefer to tell this story more fully in his eagerly-anticipated autobiography, due out next summer, so we’ll say no more here. As is so often the case, there seem to be neither heroes nor villains in the incident—merely a disagreement between two people. (And of course we’d love to hear as well on the matter from the inestimable Alex Toth, one of the best artists at DC or anywhere else in the ’40s and ’50s—and since, now that we think about it.)

(c) Was the All-American Comics Group (the M.C. Gaines company allied with DC in the 1940s under a common logo) really ever known as “Arco,” as RK writes? We’ve never heard the term before.

[And, from a second package received around the same time, came these additional RK comments:] I’m sending you my only copy of my interview in The Journal. Keep it as long as you need it. But don’t forget to return it. (My typewriter and I are locked in a deadly battle regarding spacing, etc. It’s the last of its kind and won’t surrender. So be it.) John Broome is dead. This is my epitaph to him, which will probably appear in Snyder’s Comics. To John Broome The Last Haiku He was a tree among men Tall with stellar wisdom His gaze fixed on an unseen horizon Until the clouds parted to welcome him. RK

(e) Interestingly, RK confirms Ye Editor’s throwaway deduction (in V3#1’s Wonder Woman piece) that editor Shelly Mayer was probably not overly fond of having Wonder Woman in the Justice Society. RK goes us one better, saying Mayer “hated” the Amazon, by which we’d guess he means Mayer didn’t like having to deal with writer/co-creator W.M. Marston’s demands on how she was treated.

John analyzed my first haiku, which he said was better than most Japanese he read in translation. A blind falcon lives inside me And dreaming of escape Sharpens his spurs on my heart. It seems I’m an American Jewish writer who can write Japanese haiku poetry without ever having seen any. It all pours out spontaneously, instinctively, fast and finished. Some force is using me as a conduit. Sayonara! RK As the reader can imagine, it’s always a distinct pleasure to receive a communication from the man who wrote such great tales of the Golden and Silver Age Flashes, Hawkman, Green Lantern, Justice Society, Viking Prince, Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace, et al. A few necessary points of clarification, albeit a bit after the fact, since you’ve already read the preceding letter: (a) The female editor at Victor Fox’s company mentioned by RK was Mercedes Shull, who, Robin Snyder advises us based on earlier Kanigher letters, “may have come over from Fawcett” to a “resurrected Fox” in early 1944. Thanks, Robin! (b) Comics historians been trying for years to determine the correct spelling of the names of “Larry Nadle” and “Martin Naydel,” who were apparently brothers, one a comics editor and the other the major artist of All-Flash and the JSA in the mid-1940s. Can anyone enlighten us on this

(f) Just to set the record straight: RK’s Hawkman villain The Ghost was never actually called “The Gentleman Ghost” until the 1960s version. The artist of all Hawkman/Ghost stories in the late ’40s, of course, was Joe Kubert. (g) Both Kanigher versions of “Rose and the Thorn” were winners. See the accompanying pages from a third late-’40s Flash story (which DC never published in full) featuring that multiple-personalitied (not technically schizoid) villainess. (h) Joe Kubert “can’t draw women”? There may be a few readers who will disagree with RK on that one! (i) Marv Wolfman and Len Wein can hardly be “blamed” (or credited) for establishing “parallel worlds” in the Silver Age, whatever one thinks of the concept. That was done by Julie Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox in the famous “Flash of Two Worlds” story in The Flash #123 (Sept. 1961); the first such tale at Marvel was written several years later by Ye Editor/Writer in Avengers Annual #2 (1968)… and he hopes he can be forgiven for believing that none of the above-named fit Capote’s definition of “typists,” any more than RK himself does. However, all the above demurrings aside, Alter Ego is always happy to hear from the supremely talented Robert Kanigher, and hopes (if he doesn’t mind our disagreeing with him as much as he disagrees with us) to conduct a major interview with him in a near-future issue of Alter Ego. We feel he still has much to offer the comics field as one of its living legends and spirited raconteurs.

re: Letters to the Writer/Editor

re:

(continued from pg. 3) Sonuvagun! Since the cover of Avengers #97 was drawn (and thus its cover copy was written) at the eleventh hour or even later, it’s quite probable that the Checklist entry you mention was written first—and most likely by Ye Editor, who was handling those chores for Stan Lee by that time. Still, we were clearly still ambivalent, at best, about the name of the interstellar conflict. But thanks for the research! Dear Roy: In A/E Vol. 2, #5, in discussing the American Airlines giveaway that featured Bob Kane, Sheldon Moldoff states: “I Rarely seen Neal Adams art from the French satirical magazine, Fluide Glacial #80. think there was an article in Comic Book [Courtesy of Daniel Tesmoingt; art ©1999 Neal Adams.] Marketplace about a little giveaway that he did for [American Airlines]. He described to damn piece of Batman art of the period, it’s sometimes hard to know the interviewer how he worked up this giveaway. Well, he didn’t do for sure. If Shelly says he drew it, then so be it. any work on it. I did it.” Those who’ve seen this piece may agree with me, though, that it I wrote the article that appeared in the July 1997 (#49) of CBM. is quite interesting and very collectible. In the piece Kane tours two I did not interview Bob Kane for it, but wrote it based on my own young boys around New York. In one panel he takes them to a stuspeculations of how it might have come about: First, the time peridio and says, “This is where I draw Batman and Robin for the comic od, 1966, would have been in the early era of the “New Look.” It’s books.” In one fell swoop, he ignores the Robinsons, Schwartzes, my understanding that Kane was still doing some penciling at that Sprangs, Moldoffs, and so many others. At that time, Infantino and time, and to me, the art had an “early Kane” look. Second, it just other new artists were adding to the canon, but Kane was clearly didn’t look like Moldoff to me. Third, it was my opinion that Kane’s taking full credit for every Batman panel ever drawn. enormous ego would Lynn Wooley have led him to do 2805 Creek Side Drive the work himself for Temple, TX 76502 something that would be seen by a wider, more adult audience. However, since Kane signed every

Thanks, Lynn. We know only too well that getting credits straight is a difficult task. What’s amazing isn’t that things occasionally get mis-credited—but that so much stuff gets credited right!

Left and below: The really secret origins of The Joker and The Penguin, as narrated in Real Fact Comics #5 (1947). Other panels from this kurious klassic were shown in A/E V2#5. [Art by Winslow Mortimer; ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

An All-Star Sensation!

An All-Star Sensation! An Examination of the First Two Wonder Woman Stories by Roy Thomas the Golden Age, either before or after?

When Wonder Woman burst upon the comic book scene in autumn of 1941, she quickly became one of the hottest tickets in the field.

That move, after all, cost DC good money. In a day when a dime was all it could charge for 64 interior pages, the page count of All-Star #8 was raised by one halfsignature to 72 pages.

As noted last issue, the amazing Amazon was conceived by Dr. William Moulton Marston, eminent psychologist who briefly held an official position on DC’s “Editorial Advisory Board” made up of educators, psychologists, specialists in children’s literature, and ex-heavyweight boxing champ Gene Tunney. Her exploits were drawn, in a studio operated by Marston, by H.G. Peter.

(A “signature” is a printing term which refers to a sheet of newsprint which, in the process of printing, becomes 16 different pages of a comic; thus, a half-signature would be eight pages. This is why most comics, by the early 1950s, had dropped from 48 interior pages to 32, and not 40 or some other number in between. When a half-signature was used, I’ve been told the other half-sheet of newsprint often had to be thrown away as wastage. Even if it weren’t, DC was definitely spending extra money to add eight interior pages to All-Star #8.) The inclusion of Wonder Woman’s origin couldn’t have been done to “help” All-Star. Not only was the JSA-starring title one of DC’s new smash hits, but—even more tellingly—there isn’t the slightest mention of the Amazon on the cover, let alone a picture!

Her debut came in All-Star Comics #8 (cover-date Dec. 1941-Jan. 1942), as a nine-page backup to the lead feature, The Justice Society of America. Within a few weeks at most, Sensation Comics #1 (Jan. 1942) went on sale, with Wonder Woman as the issue’s cover (and longest) feature. Sensation was the right word, because her rise was almost unprecedented. By spring of ’42 (with a “Summer” cover date) she already had her own fourstory Wonder Woman quarterly. She had started out a year or two behind The Flash and Green Lantern, but would soon have every DC hero except Superman and Batman eating her Paradise Island dust! And yet…

Nor was there any announcement at the end of the 56-page Justice Society story about the backup feature. You simply turned the page—and there it was. (Many a regular All-Star reader must have been quite surprised to see a backup feature of any kind in All-Star, since there had never been one before.) So what does the lack of fanfare both on the cover and even inside All-Star #8 indicate? Wonder Woman ©1999 DC Comics, Inc.

One lingering mini-mystery of Wonder Woman’s beginnings is that first story in All-Star #8. Its existence raises several intriguing questions… and it seems that, at last, we may be able to answer some of them with a bit more than guesswork and farfetched surmises.

So why in All-Star, and not in some other comic?

The premier question about that origin has long been:

Well, for one thing, Gaines was partnered with DC publisher Harry A. Donenfeld in his All-American Comics line, which was published under the DC symbol. Thus, the pure-DC titles (such as the five Superman and/or Batman mags, but also Adventure, More Fun, and Star Spangled) were probably offlimits, since Wonder Woman (like Gaines’ two mainstays, The Flash and

If publisher Max C. Gaines truly believed Wonder Woman was going to be the hottest thing since sliced bullets, then why was her origin put into the back pages of another comic before her first regular story saw print—unlike any other “star” feature DC introduced in ©1999 DC Comics, Inc.

Most likely, that Wonder Woman’s origin was a last-minute inclusion, with no opportunity—maybe even no inclination—to change any cover copy or interior captions.

An All-Star Sensation!

31 appeal to the possible prurient interests of pre-adolescent (or even older) males, as Phantom Lady and others would do a few years hence. Ah, but if those selfsame little boys just happened to stumble upon Wonder Woman’s origin in the same book as the all-male JSA, they might get intrigued by her before they had a chance to think, “Hey, she’s a girl!”—let alone “Hey, she’s only a girl!” This, in turn, might make them more predisposed to purchase, shortly afterward, the first issue of Sensation, with Wonder Woman emblazoned on its cover. In addition, it may have occurred to Gaines and/or Mayer that Diana only appears as Wonder Woman in the origin story in the final panel. While, in 1940, Green Lantern hadn’t appeared in costume till the end of his first story (and The Atom not till his second one), Gaines may have wanted the readers to see more of Wonder Woman in her colorful costume when they picked up Sensation #1, not a lot of derring-do by Steve Trevor and some nondescript Amazons running around chasing deer and stopping bullets with their bracelets. Okay, so let’s say the decision to forcefeed Wonder Woman’s origin into All-Star #8 was made more or less along these lines—and that Gaines figured the extra expense for the eight-page half-signature was a necessary business expense. Let’s assume he didn’t even mind that, because of a 1/3page ad for a Lionel Trains Catalog, for the first time the house

Two slightly marred photocopies of Marston’s script for what became the Wonder Woman tale in Sensation Comics #2.

Green Lantern) was strictly an AA character. All-Star had originally been created to showcase the DC/AA heroes who didn’t have their own titles, so it was an even more logical choice than Flash Comics or All-American, let alone All-Flash or Green Lantern Quarterly. If Gaines was hedging his bets by shoehorning the first Wonder Woman story into the back of one of his most popular titles, that suggests he had perhaps a bit less faith in the Amazon’s pulling power than he could have had. I can see why. After all, Wonder Woman wasn’t the first costumed heroine in comics: August 1941, for instance, had been the cover date of comics introducing (a) Quality’s Miss America (in Military Comics #1); (b) Quality’s Phantom Lady, as well, in Police Comics #1; and (c) Holyoke’s Miss Victory in Captain Fearless #1. Phantom Lady’s had even been one of several cameo heads featured on the Police #1 cover. However, Princess Diana was the first super-heroine who would be the star of both cover and comic—the focal point, the obvious raison d’être of the new magazine. She might well bomb. Gaines and company could hardly have failed to know that the main audience for comic book super-heroes was young boys. Would they relate to a superheroine—especially since, in those days, she couldn’t be drawn with her eagle and star-spangled panties barely covering what the law disallowed? DC clearly had no intention of trying to

An All-Star Sensation!

ad for DC’s monthly anthologies had to take up less than a full page—in the very month that those house ads plugged Star Spangled Comics #1, “featuring The Star Spangled Kid!! by Jerry Siegel, creator of Superman!” Still, why that particular Wonder Woman story? Why her origin, which naturally belonged in Sensation Comics #1 (and would be fully told later in Wonder Woman #1), not as what radio’s Hit Parade called in those days “A Lucky Strike Extra.”

stories for the first several years has exactly the same format: a big splash panel, plus one panel. The All-Star story, however, has three panels besides the splash. (3) After two pages of straight comics, Pp. 3 and 4 of the origin— except for a big introductory panel—are suddenly typeset to show Queen Hippolyte’s narration to Diana, though with seven additional comics-style illustrations. At least two of these—depicting mother and daughter—simply cry out for word balloons. (4) Page 8, which commences the tournament to decide which Amazon will return to Man’s World with the downed Captain Trevor, abruptly has four tiers (rows) of panels, while all previous comics pages in the story had three tiers. In at least one of those panels (Panel 3) the artwork is so crowded that the caption and word balloons take up 75% of space in the panel—suggesting that the picture area may originally have been a bit larger.

That’s where my theory comes in. Last issue, amid commentary about the Fox and Marston scripts for the Wonder Woman chapter in All-Star #13, I wrote a throwaway line: “I have a theory, based on analysis of internal evidence, that Wonder Woman’s nine-page origin may actually have started out as a 13-pager slated for Sensation #1, and then truncated so she’d get advance exposure in the popular JSA title….”

(5) A single caption accompanying Panel 7 on Page 8 covers several more “tests of strength and agility,” “until each [of the final two masked candidates] has won ten of the gruelling contests”—which suggests, though it does not prove, that some art and story may have been dropped out.

To my own shock and delight, I have even more faith in that theory now than when I voiced it three short months ago.

(6) On the final page, Panel 5 and 6 overlap some of what should have been the art area of Panels 3 and 4— something very rarely done at DC during this period.

And for good reason! First, though, let’s take a fast look at the “internal evidence” I believe I had found for the story “Introducing Wonder Woman” originally being intended for the first issue of Sensation, not for All-Star #8 where it actually appeared.

I based my hypothesis on the following observations of the origin, which can easily be checked by looking at the first volume of the Wonder Woman Archives (or your own personal copy of the actual Sensation #1, if you happen to run in those circles): (1) The Wonder Woman figure which is the only art in the splash panel is exactly the same as that on the cover of Sensation #1, and thus is probably just a photostat thereof. (2) The splash pages of each of Marston and Peters’ Sensation WW

(7) The story ends with a dialogue-less pose of Diana in costume for the very first time as Wonder Woman— with the caption that would naturally have gone above (or even under) that picture instead placed to its left— beneath a panel in which Hippolyte hands Diana the outfit, in yet another panel in which the characters’ dia-

logue takes up 3/4 of the panel area. My conclusion: The script for “Introducing Wonder Woman”— with or without finished art, but quite possibly with—was originally of the same standard 13-page length as every Wonder Woman story would be in early issues of Sensation; but the story was truncated—cut down— to nine pages by a combination of an untypical several-panel splash page, one four-tier page (all other are three), the re-formatting of several pages of backstory into two typeset pages, etc.

An All-Star Sensation! Of course, none of the above bits of evidence—not even all of them taken together—conclusively proves the conclusion I drew. It was still very much speculation, argued after the fact, with no corroborating evidence. Until recently. A few weeks ago, I was happy to receive—from a source wishing to remain nameless—a copy of William Moulton Marston’s script for the 13-page lead story that appeared in Sensation Comics #1. I was, of course, floored that any copy of that script existed. This script is even older, by a full year, than the Fox and Marston All-Star chapter scripts we ran in Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #1—and older than any other comic book script on which I personally have ever laid eyes. The story in Sensation #1, of course, follows directly after the tale from All-Star #8, and indeed synopsizes the earlier story in a long splash-panel caption. (Alter Ego here reproduces the first two pages of that script, as a genuine archive and landmark in the history of comic books.) I was intrigued by several minor changes which had been made in the script as it was lettered. For instance, the last sentence in Marston’s script reads: “Here on Paradise Island, on which man had never before set foot, the Amazon maid, Diana, fell in love with Captain Trevor, and decided to come to America with him to wage battle for freedom, democracy and womankind!” Whether changed by Marston or by editor Sheldon Mayer, “come” has been replaced by “bring him back.” Far more interestingly, an additional phrase has been tacked on behind the last word of the typed caption. Diana and Steve will now “wage battle for freedom, democracy, and womankind thru-out the world!” A minor blow for clarity, since it would have read a bit odd to boys, especially in those days, to say that Steve Trevor would fight for “womankind.” Adding “thru-out the world” subtly de-emphasizes that, since it no longer ends the caption. However, the most important aspect comes at the top of the first page of the script. It’s moderately interesting that the words “WONDER WOMAN,” typed in all-upper-case at left, are crossed out, with a “#1” and “Sensation” handwritten in. This probably just means that, when he wrote the script, Marston didn’t know the precise name of the new monthly comic in which she’d be appearing. But the real kicker can be seen in the upper right. There, in the phrase “Episode #2” as typed by Marston, the “#2” has been crossed out—and “#1” written above it—in Marston’s handwriting, I have been told. But even if it weren’t…. The lead story in Sensation #1, in other words, was originally written for issue #2—and only later graduated to the head spot in #1. This suggests that the origin story that precedes it was intended for Sensation #1—and got bounced into All-Star #8 at the eleventh hour. This makes considerably more sense than beginning Wonder Woman’s initial tale in Sensation with a long caption which relates events concerning Diana and Steve which no Sensation #1 reader could know in 1941—unless he/she had already read All-Star #8 cover to cover!

Incidentally, a few other changes were made in captions and dialogue of the Sensation #1 story between original script and printed comic, but these are mostly cosmetic. E.g., the first caption on Page 2 of the script reads: “And at the controls is the Wonder Woman… Diana, the Amazon!” In the printed comic this caption reads: “And at the controls is an Amazon maiden, named Diana by her mother, queen of the Amazons, after her godmother, goddess of the moon!” Hmmm… that last is a bit awkward. But at least it reads like something more likely to have been put in by Marston, rather than editor Shelly Mayer. Perhaps it was added on the original script, since what we have is a photocopy of the carbon copy originally typed by Marston. There are numerous other minor changes, as well. A man ogling Wonder Woman’s clothes says (in the script): “Well, they certainly got my eye attracted all right!” In the published comic this comes out more euphoniously: “Well, they certain attracted my eye!” One nice improvement occurs on Page 4, when Wonder Woman stands over fallen crooks as policemen rush up and ask what’s going on. In the script Diana answers, “A bank robbery… or should I say, an ATTEMPTED bank robbery!” Someone seems to have decided Wonder Woman shouldn’t really be thinking in terms of “bank robberies” yet, since she just landed in America from Paradise Island, which has no banks, so her printed line is: “I don’t know. I heard someone say ‘It’s a hold-up.’” Yet, in the next panel, when the cops try to question her, Wonder Woman’s scripted line (“Some other time, when I’m on a quiz program!”) has become “Some other time, when I’m on the ‘Quiz Kids’ program!” A vague reference to an American culture she could as yet know little about has been rendered even less believable by her mention of a specific popular radio program, The Quiz Kids! Booking agent Al Kale has an interesting line cut, too. On Page 5 in the printed Sensation, he simply tells Wonder Woman that in a theatre her abilities “would bring you plenty of money!” In the original script, Kale goes on to say, “… and you wouldn’t have to wear that phoney jewelry. No rocks that big could be real!” Marston was still learning about the space limitations of comic books, and tried to crowd too much dialogue into that panel—though admittedly the lost line was pretty good. (On the other hand, it may simply not have fit: What “jewelry” exactly is Kale referring to? Her tiara?) Beyond a doubt, however, the most important thing about the script carbon—besides the fact that it exists at all—is the fact that it points toward Wonder Woman’s origin as having been intended for Sensation #1, and shoved into All-Star #8 at the last minute. How often do we get a chance to reinforce our pet theories about comics that were published well over half a century ago? Or are there, perhaps, a few more such unexploded early-1940s bombshells out there moldering in attics or languishing in old trunks? Not many, surely… but we can always hope. After all, only weeks ago, I’d have laughed out loud if someone had told me that I’d ever see the script for the Wonder Woman story that ran in the first issue of Sensation Comics! We’re never too old to believe in miracles.

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no. 61

C.C. Beck

Fawcett Collectors of America

“C.C. Beck called us the unknowns. Rod Reed had called us the forgotten ones. I am said to be the most forgotten of the unknowns, or the most unknown of the forgottens. Like the rest of the comic book people at the time I had no idea it would become the Golden Age. Had we known, would we have done anything differently? I doubt it.”

—Marc Swayze FCA #54, January 1996

From 1941 through 1953, Marcus D. Swayze was a major artist for Fawcett Publications, specializing in Captain Marvel and The Phantom Eagle, but also being the first artist to visualize Mary Marvel—as he details below. His ongoing professional memoirs have been an important part of FCA since #54 in 1996.—PCH

hen I was a schoolboy, I got a job with the city, painting signs. An uncle, who just happened to drive along where I was creating some “Caution, Men Working” masterpieces, stopped with a little advice. All my uncles had advice. “D—” (he called me “D”) “—when you paint a sign, first plan it. Decide which word or words are of greatest importance and emphasize those most… then, the next in importance, and so on. That way you’ll have some parts of your message in big letters, in the more prominent locations, and others on down the line.” Uncle Delly was right. He had never painted a sign or rendered a work of visual art in his life, but he was smart. He was talking about an order of emphasis. I finished my signs that morning with “CAUTION” in big red letters and “Men Working” in smaller black letters. That incident has stayed with me. Some years later, in packaging graphics where the “order” was important, I translated it as: “Get the shoppers’ attention first… then tell them the good things about the contents.” What does all this have to do with comics? Well, Uncle Delly’s advice came to mind when I was drawing Captain Marvel. C.C. Beck and I were talking about the heavy contour line… as it, in our work, took prominence over details within the contour. We got around to shading the figure. Beck, the number one proponent of the bold contour, said, “When too many muscles are put on the guy, he’s gonna look more like a Charles Atlas ad than a super-hero… and the reader is gonna pay more attention to the muscled figure than what the muscled figure is doing! Heh, heh, heh!” Beck rarely failed to throw in that little chuckle. My uncle’s advice carried with it another thought: “First, plan it!” In our business that translated to layout, preliminary composition… to thinking before you act.

you have to do it. That was the case in the creation of Mary Marvel. Creating Mary was a fairly simple task… a face, a figure, a costume… all influenced in one way or another by Captain Marvel. And right away she was plopped into her first story, then another, then another. There were no conferences, no joint skull sessions of any kind. I don’t recall ever being aware of who the first writer was. Everybody, however, seemed happy with the new feature. Everybody but me. I wasn’t ready for it. Mary wasn’t ready. She had been hastily sketched for approval, but in my opinion she wasn’t ready for the road… wasn’t ready for panel after panel of appearances under inconceivable comic book circumstances.

Marc Swayze on staff at Fawcett, circa 1941-42.

Of course, there are instances where there is no time to plan… where you just have to do the best you can in the time

Marc writes: “This was

Call it methodical plandiscovered recently in ning. I never liked to let my old sketches of go of a character until, 1942… was never pubthrough ample prelimilished.” Well, then, it’s about time… because nary sketches, I knew the character pretty it’s a real beauty! [Art well. I suppose it was a natural ©1999 Marc Swayze; desire to take care of probMary Marvel ©1999 DC lems likely to demand Comics Inc.] resolution later. But, in Mary’s case, there wasn’t time for that. It was 1942. Despite its being our first full year of participation in World War II, Captain Marvel was selling like the proverbial hotcakes. Things in the Fawcett comics department were hectic… but good. My idea for Mary Marvel was that she be of light heart, light hand, light step… a wisp of a teenager, never a grim super-person who might joy in bashing an opponent into a senseless mass, but who pleasantly and gracefully clipped him with her dainty fist or foot into slumberland. In the evenings at home… I called it home, my tiny quarters up Broadway… I began to sketch and make notes… Mary’s features, expressions, angles, lighting.

Her costume… that cape! During phone conversations I

We Didn’t Know... It Was The Golden Age!

minute flight as a nervous guest in a Piper Cub. I was so naive as to begin the syndicate idea with an American bomber crew in action, over enemy territory, wearing dress uniforms with neckties! Oh well… who would have known? Or cared?

found myself doodling sketches of that confounded cape. I felt that Mary’s cape should serve as an identification with Captain Marvel… should therefore be displayed more prominently, particularly the floral design down the left shoulder. I pictured it as being of much lighter material than the Captain’s, and I attempted in my sketches to suggest that lightness with smaller ripples.

I ignored the daily mail that lay on my little drawing stand that had once belonged to fellow artist Irwin Weill, to shuffle through the Lucky Bill work. I had six daily strips in various stages of completion, some panels inked and lettered, some partly inked, others only penciled. I had completed three weeks of scripts in longhand, with not the slightest idea how I would resolve the plot.

Her hair in the original sketches had been hastily done and offered very little to suggest how it might behave under different circumstances. I hoped in my nightly sketches to show it as billowing away from her ears at the slightest forward step or breeze. Ironically, little benefit came from those efforts. All of us were so busy at the office that the notes and sketches of the evenings before were ignored or forgotten. I drew the first Mary stories and was doing my regular Captain Marvel work at the same time. Writer Bill Woolfolk was heard saying to Mercy Schull of the editorial department, “Marc is in there drawing Captain Marvel with one hand and Mary with the other!” Not exactly accurate, but you get the idea.

Then I looked at the mail. Holy Moley, Billy would have said… here was a message from Whitehaven, Tennessee. The Selective Service guys there had decided not to be so selective, and were inviting me to come on down and see what they had in store for me! I couldn’t refuse!

It was just not in the cards that I continue Mary Marvel. In the first place, my job was Captain Marvel. Secondly, I was a prime target for the military… healthy, unmarried. Perhaps executive editor Rod Reed suspected that, although he never mentioned it. Instead, he somewhat apologetically explained that I couldn’t be spared from the efforts to get the increasing load of Captain Marvel material to the presses. It really didn’t matter all that much. Flying around in my head and landing on my drawing board on West 113th was my newest idea, with which I intended to stun the New York newspaper syndicate… “Lucky Bill”… an American flyer… stranded in Nippon! During my years in comics I made about 14 stabs at the newspaper syndicates before finally getting the contract I wanted. Most of the features were, in one way or another, based in concept on my own experiences. “The Great Pierre,” for example, came from a hunting incident in a Louisian swamp, “Neal Valentine” from experiences as a professional musician, “Judi of the Jungle” from the profound impressions upon me by the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Lucky Bill O’Brien, on the other hand, got on the drawing board simply because I thought a background like his might appeal to the 1942 newspaper readers. My own flying experience consisted of a single 20-

In our family we’ve always tried to look on the bright side of things.

During my growing-up years there were many times when we had to… and, believe it or not, I’m thankful for those days. Now, how could one, here in 1942, find anything to be thankful for in being yanked out of a civilian life he loved… to go into

Fawcett Collectors of America

the military? It didn’t take a lot of contemplation to realize that the hurry-hurry atmosphere of the Fawcett comics offices was getting to me… to the quality of work I produced. In looking through the old books of that period, it becomes obvious that I wasn’t getting better. I was… well, going the other way. I never felt the pressure of the workload to a point of depression… but who knows what more of it might have led to? My writing an occasional Captain Marvel story had diminished to nil. I didn’t like that. And no more was there time to do illustrations for the non-comics magazines. I didn’t like that, either. As I went over these things in my mind, I almost… but not quite… felt like sending the draft board a thank-you note. Bless their hearts… their little invitation was quite clear… something like, “Be damn sure you show up as instructed!” The 22nd floor of the Paramount Building rang out over Times Square… a Fawcett office party! The comics offices and the art department were lavishly decorating for the occasion and a streamer near the ceiling of the reception room read: “We’ll Miss You, Marc!” What the heck, the party was for me… a surprise party. And was I surprised! I was also very, very flattered. I must have been more important to them than I had ever imagined. It was a nice feeling. “Here’s something you can take with you to remember us by.” It was C.C. Beck as he thrust a gift at me. It was the original drawing of a Whiz Comics cover. Scrawled on it was: “To Swayze from Beck, the best pair of drawers Fawcett ever had.” I liked that. I also liked the statement of Paul Pack, giant-sized member of Al Allard’s art staff: “Many a word of truth is spoken in jest!” [ED. NOTE: See the reproduction of that cover, from the original art, in our previous issue.]

As they passed from view, Rod and Kentuck were howling with laughter. Then a voice from behind me: “It ain’t hurt!” A sailor stood holding the stained package upright. “Look! It’s still nearly full! Just broke off at the neck!” He was excited. “No. May as well throw it out. It has broken glass in it,” I said sadly. This sailor wouldn’t quit. “Naw, man! The glass in it is heavier than whatever this is….” He sniffed the wet paper sack. “Southern Comfort,” I said. I could have cried. “The glass, being heavier than the Southern Comfort, will sink to the bottom, and by pouring it off the top carefully….” He had a point. I’ve always been afraid of swallowing broken glass, even a little bit, so as the train picked up speed toward Washington, D.C., I strained mine through a handkerchief… the first couple of times. After that it didn’t make much difference. A pair of GIs joined us and we got some pretty good barbershop harmony going before we reached Washington. So they told me. From Washington on down into the deep South I sat mostly alone and thought of what might be before me. I knew so little about military life I didn’t know what to expect… so I tried not to expect anything. I guess that’s the way it was for most of us. In the Army all the good cards seemed to come my way. While still a recruit I received an assignment to do some illustrations promoting military insurance and war bonds among servicemen. Before that was completed, I was asked about my experience in personnel work. “Absolutely none,” I answered.

Meanwhile, a member of headquarters company, a sergeant who Above: The first appearance of Captain Marvel Jr. as a Master Comics’ played neat jazz piano, said they were During the evening gifts were cover subject (issue #22). Opposite page: As a farewell gift (!), organizing a small combo and would legendary artist Mac Raboy gave the original art to Swayze when offered by others. Original art for a I be interested. Hot-zigetty-dog! I Marc left the Fawcett offices—note the inscription. Master Comics cover was given me by was beginning to like the place! I was [Captain Marvel Jr. ©1999 DC Comics, Inc.] shy, soft-spoken Mac Raboy, who once asked again about my experience in had suspected me of being a bigot, and personnel work. “Come to think of it, then later became one of my best friends. I’ve always had a deep interest in personnel work,” I lied. I was assigned to headquarters company as a classification interviewer. I still have those gifts, as well as a small oil painting by Pete Costanza and a girlie drawing by Jess Benton, and others… some darkI wrote home for my guitar. ened a bit by age, but cherished nonetheless. I don’t know whether Harry Taskey ever served in the military, but My pals from Malvernie, Rod and Kentuck Reed, went to Penn I recalled his having said as I left the Fawcett offices: “Take your guiStation to see me off and stayed until the train pulled away. They had tar… you’ll have a ball!” held their gift back until the very last moment, then handed me a brown Permanent assignment opened up another plus… an environment paper bag containing… a big bottle of Southern Comfort. The signifiwhere I could write. And did I write? cance was… well, me being Southern, you know. Kentuck said, “Excuse Captain Marvel stories, yet! the paper bag. But we thought maybe if you got thirsty on the train you could make it look as though you were sipping peanuts or something.” [ED. NOTE: Look for more of Mark Swayze’s I was already on board, standing on the observation platform at the artistic reminiscences in the next issue of Alter Ego and rear of the passenger car. As the train lurched forward, the bag and its FCA.] bottle slipped from under my arm and fell to the metal floor with a sickening sound… the sound of breaking glass in a brown paper bag.

Fawcett Collectors of America

The Richard Deane Taylor Interview Conducted by P.C. Hamerlinck P.C. HAMERLINCK: Richard, tell me briefly about your upbringing, schooling, and when you became interested in art. RICHARD DEANE TAYLOR: I was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1925, the youngest of three brothers and two sisters. I attended Brooklyn Technical High School, a 45-minute trip from my home in the Bronx. After the first two years of classes, studying mechanical and free-hand drawing among other technical subjects, my art teachers encouraged me to select the art program as my major for the remaining two years. Their arguments were all the more persuasive as they had rewarded me with numerous citations and a medal for my first two years of art. PCH: How did landing a job with Fawcett Publications come about? Who were you interviewed by? How old were you? When did you meet C.C. Beck and the other staff artists? TAYLOR: During my junior year in high school, a Dr. Aposdorf, having seen some of my illustrated and lettered notebooks, suggested I get in touch with Frank Taggart at Fawcett Publications and show him my work. Taggart was a former student of Dr. Aposdorf and a graduate of Brooklyn Technical High School where I attended. I called him a few days later and he invited me to come up and see him at Fawcett’s offices with samples of my work. He looked at my portfolio with great interest, but what caught his eye was my lettering. At Tech we were required to letter all our notebooks and, needless to say, after three years of lettering, I could letter faster than I could write.

proofread all his work and devote valuable time to correcting his many errors and omissions. After this initial job, Allard began giving me more and more pages to letter. During this period, which was in the early spring of 1942, I met C.C. Beck and the Captain Marvel staff, as well as Captain Marvel Jr. artist Mac Raboy. As the months went by, I found myself spending more and more afternoons at the Fawcett offices, chatting with C.C. Beck and the staff, while watching and studying them closely as they worked. Within a few months I got up enough courage to begin badgering Beck about the possibilities of joining the Captain Marvel staff. At first he scoffed at the idea, but after I wore him down, he acquiesced and gave me a tear sheet of directions to follow to take “The Captain Marvel Test,” which consisted of showing how I could handle a watercolor brush with India ink. Beck wanted to see whether I could produce an interpretative contour line, and if I could draw a figure in action, etc.

I practiced at home until I felt confident in doing a finished brush-and-ink page. When I brought it in for Beck’s inspection, he was delighted and offered me a staff job just as the summer of 1942 began. This was my first job. I was only seventeen, and Fawcett artist Richard Deane Taylor my salary was to be $37.50 a week. Because of —a recent self-portrait. my age, an official from the state labor department came to check the working environment Taggart was so enthused with the quality of to ascertain that the child labor laws were not being violated. my work that he suggested we both go in and meet with Fawcett’s art PCH: After joining the Captain Marvel staff, what, besides lettering, director, Al Allard. Upon reviewing my lettering samples, he asked if I were your exact job duties? would be interested in doing some speedball lettering for Fawcett. He promptly handed me a set of eight penciled pages of a Whiz Comics TAYLOR: My job duties with the Captain Marvel stories were working Lance O’Casey story, along with a typewritten script. Since I was still a on foregrounds, backgrounds, villains, and minor figures, inking them student at Tech, I did the lettering in the evenings and brought back the from approved pencil layouts, and proofing the lettering to correct any finished pages to his office the following week, after school. The next errors with opaque white. One of the stories I worked on and still afternoon I received a call from Allard expressing amazement and plearemember was “Captain Marvel and the Lie Detector” [Captain Marvel sure at a job well done. What delighted him was the fact that there was Adventures #23, 1943]. I had a ball inking Captain Marvel tied up in not one error or correction needed on all eight pages. Their regular letrope from head to toe. This was such a memorable story that even C.C. tering man was so careless that they had to have someone on their staff

Richard Deane Taylor

The Captain Marvel art staff of Fawcett Comics—Paramount Building, New York City, 1942. Richard Deane Taylor (a.k.a. Meyer Tuckschneider) is the gent seen front and center, drawing away… while fellow artist Jack Keats holds up a page of original Captain Marvel art for C.C. Beck to peruse. Marc Swayze is seen at left. This photo was originally published in FCA #54.

Beck remembered it much later, in a letter he wrote to me in the ’70s from his studio in Florida.

only seventeen when you started working for Fawcett, did you feel intimidated or pressured amongst the other, more experienced artists?

PCH: What were the commonly-used tools of the trade in creating the Captain Marvel character?

TAYLOR: As a teenager, I was somewhat intimidated by Beck and the rest of the very talented staff at Fawcett. I was in awe of everyone: Beck, Swayze, Raboy, etc. I was also very serious and conscientious and a little insecure, especially since Beck was situated right behind me and could observe my every move.

TAYLOR: As you can see from the classic photo of C.C. Beck, Marc Swayze, Jack Keats, and myself, I had a large drawing board at my disposal, with a taboret at my side containing a bottle of India ink, a water jar for rinsing brushes, a jar of clear water for opaque white retouching, Windsor and Newton No. 2 watercolor brushes, a palette, pencils, and a cleaning rag hanging from my lamp. PCH: Did you enjoy working on comics, or was it merely breaking ground for higher aspirations? TAYLOR: As a teenager I enjoyed that period tremendously. In fact, I was a fan of the comics during that period, even before my job at Fawcett. Although I was planning to continue my comic book career after my Army service, I found after the three years I spent at a reproduction plan in World War II, creating posters, training charts, and illustrated manuals, that I really began to waiver regarding the direction I wanted to take. When I was finally discharged in 1946, I began thinking seriously of specializing in commercial and advertising art. PCH: What was it like working with Beck, Swayze, and others? Being

PCH: Who were some other Fawcett artists you admired? TAYLOR: Ed Robbins, who was a terrific layout artist and sat directly in front of me. Every so often he would stop working, leisurely take out his pipe, ream it, put fresh tobacco in, and light it. For the next few minutes he would lean back and puff away and then put the pipe down and slowly get back to work. Carefully peering over my drawing board, I watched him for the next few days going through this same ritual. It occurred to me that, although he looked very busy and completely occupied, he was literally going on five- to ten-minute breaks every so often. It hit me like a rock! Why not get a pipe and a tobacco pouch and do the same thing? I, too, could take an occasional break without appearing to be goofing off. Besides, I would look so much more mature, especially since I was very self-conscious about being looked upon as a kid. I got the courage to speak to Ed about what I should look

Fawcett Collectors of America

for in purchasing a pipe, and he was kind enough to offer me one of his; and to this day, although I have given up smoking more than 25 years ago, I still treasure it. Needless to say, I took my carefully-orchestrated breaks and learned to relax at the job and acclimate myself to the wonderful and creative atmosphere of a great bunch of talented guys whom I admired and looked to for advice and guidance. Al McLean was another talented member of the staff with a great sense of humor and a handlebar moustache, whom I admired greatly. After I completed the “rope” panels of the “Captain Marvel and the Lie Detector” story, he honored me with a full figure brush and ink drawing of Captain Marvel tied up from head to toe and inscribed it, “To M’ol Pal, Tuksniffer, in Memory of Th’Lye Detector.—Al.” PCH: Tuksniffer? TAYLOR: A month before I was to enter the service, I had my name changed from Meyer Tuckschneider to Richard Deane Taylor. C.C. Beck, in a letter dated May 31, 1973, wrote, “I could never understand why you wanted to change your name from beautiful, resounding Meyer Tuckschneider to plain-sounding Richard Taylor, which sounds like some third-rate British actor. But according to my own familiar history, my first ancestor from Germany was named Hans Yorg Pecker, so we’ve changed our name, too!” I must take exception to C.C.’s comment—second-rate, perhaps, but not third-rate! PCH: Did you do any more comic book work for Fawcett after you returned from the service? TAYLOR: When I returned to civilian life in 1946, C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza had formed their own studio with offices at 67 West 44th Street and were still doing all the Captain Marvel work for Fawcett. I did some lettering for them on a freelance basis, but had decided to fur-

ther my studies and head back to school under the G.I. Bill. I applied and was accepted by the École Des Beaux-Arts and the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere in Paris, and for the next three years (1946-1949) I spent the most exciting time of my life painting and exhibiting in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. PCH: After Paris, where did your art career lead you? TAYLOR: Upon returning home from my art studies in Paris, I prepared a commercial art portfolio. After a few months at the drawing board, I began making the rounds, showing my work to art directors and art agents. Rejections were numerous, but some meetings were encouraging enough to make me get back to the drawing board to produce additional samples and begin my rounds anew. After about a year of meetings and appointments, an art agent agreed to take me on and represent me. Within a few weeks he had gotten me a commission for a full color double-page magazine spread in Collier’s, illustrating a story about the Kentucky Derby and Bill Corum. That successful first assignment opened the floodgates and my career as a freelance artist took off. Among some of the most important and noteworthy commissions I have had during my career were portrait paintings of Herbert Hoover, Winston Churchill, Margaret Truman and Princess Margaret, Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, and President Goulart of Brazil for the covers of Collier’s, True, and Newsweek magazines. Among some other important assignments were a series of portraits of sportsmen for Hiram Walker & Sons and Imperial Whiskey, which appeared as full-color paintings in Life magazine and on billboards across the country. Other major commissions for still-life paintings were executed for Air France, Pillsbury Foods, Gulf Oil Corporation, Eversharp-Shick, Johnson & Johnson, Folger’s Coffee, Esso/Standard Oil, the costumed marching

Richard Deane Taylor

Near left: Fellow staff artist Al McLean’s drawing to Taylor, referring to the inking of all the rope panels in “The ‘Lye [sic] Detector’ Captain Marvel story, 1943, three pages (all inked by Taylor) of which appear on opposite page and at left. [Captain Marvel ©1999 DC Comics, Inc.]

Scotsman for Dewar’s Whiskey, and the popular “walking fingers” illustration for the New York Telephone Company.

Acting Chairman of the Art Department of the High School of Art and Design, and after more than 25 years at the school I retired in 1989. PCH: Thank you for your time today, and for your remembrances of the Golden Age, Richard. Any current projects? Are you still painting and drawing? Any final comments about being on Fawcett’s Captain Marvel staff in the ‘40s?

PCH: You mentioned doing a cover for True magazine, which was published by Fawcett. What year was this, and what was it like returning to Fawcett? The stark realism and intensity of your cover renderings are superb and amazing.

TAYLOR: I have returned to my first love— fine arts—and I am as busy now as I have ever been, painting. Since my work is of a very realistic nature, I have been exhibiting these past nine years in group shows which learn toward photo-realism. I enjoy working in all media, but find that I favor oils, gouache, and blackand-white pencil line and halftone.

TAYLOR: Thank you. It was a great feeling to come back to Fawcett and to greet Al Allard as a budding cover artist after starting out as a 17-year-old speedball letterer and inker on the Captain Marvel staff. The $1000 check I received for the Eisenhower and Stevenson True magazine cover painting in 1956 was a far cry from the $37.50 per week salary I started out with as a young cartoonist at Fawcett in 1942. PCH: Did you continue creating commercial art, or did you move on to other areas? TAYLOR: In 1963, while continuing my commercial art career, I began teaching art at the high school and university levels. In 1980 I was appointed

Taylor-made cover for True magazine, November 1956 depicting the two major Presidential candidates Eisenhower and Stevenson… his pride-and-joy commission for Fawcett art director Al Allard. [©1999 Fawcett]

Occasionally I’ll do a brush-and-ink drawing that will bring back those memories at Fawcett, where I became pretty adept at using a No. 2 watercolor brush and ink. It’s at that moment that I relive those wonderful memories at Fawcett with C.C. Beck, Marc Swayze, Al McLean, Ed Robbins, and the rest of the Captain Marvel staff of some 56 years ago. As a 17-yearold, that was truly the “Golden Age” for me.

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The Captain ’s Chief The Original, Genuine, Golden Age Captain Marvel, the World’s Mightiest Mortal As Remembered by C.C. Beck, Chief Artist, Captain Marvel, 1940-53, Fawcett Publications Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck (with special thanks & love to Jenny) I. ABOUT MYSELF My first paying job as an artist was drawing cartoon figures on lampshades. Rather than print pictures of popular comic characters of the time (1928) on their custom-made lampshades, the company for which I worked hired artists like myself to draw figures taken from work by the top syndicated cartoonists, whose permission to do so they had obtained.

on his books disappeared. III. CAPTAIN MARVEL CHARACTERS BILLY BATSON AND CAPTAIN MARVEL The first character to appear in the first Captain Marvel story in the first issue of Whiz Comics was Billy Batson, a homeless newsboy. (Although Captain Marvel appeared in the title splash preceding the story, he didn’t appear in the story itself until later.) Billy Batson was, although the publisher wasn’t ever aware of it, the real hero of all the Captain Marvel stories from the first issue till the last. A previously unpublished Captain Marvel head by C.C. Beck. [Captain Marvel ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

Actually, it was cheaper to draw the characters than it would have been to print them, for the work was done at rather low piecework rates. I made a very good living at the job, however, and got a good education in cartooning at the same time.

At one time, believe it or not, the publisher sent down word to drop Billy from the stories, saying that he was only taking room that could have been used to show Captain Marvel instead, and that he wasn’t

This education enabled me to get a job with Fawcett Publications later, working on their humor magazines Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, Smokehouse Monthly, and other titles. In 1939 Fawcett got into the comic book field and I was assigned the job of illustrating three stories in the first issue of Whiz Comics. These stories, featuring Captain Marvel, Ibis the Invincible, and Spy Smasher, had all been written by Bill Parker, and I simply put them into picture form. When Captain Marvel was discontinued in 1953, I went back to being what I had always wanted to be: a commercial artist and copywriter. Over thirty years later, however, people still remembered me for my work on Captain Marvel. II. FAWCETT COMICS Fawcett’s Captain Marvel was produced by writers and artists working separately. The scripts were prepared by the editorial department, the drawing by the art department. The writers, who worked under the supervision of a managing editor, had nothing to say about the art, and the artists, who worked under the direction of an art director, had nothing to say about the stories they were given to illustrate. In the thirteen years I spent drawing Captain Marvel, I wrote only one story (“The Temple of Itzalotahui,” Whiz #22), which had to be submitted in typed form and edited and approved before I was allowed to illustrate it. As Fawcett’s writers, artists, and editorial and art directors were all professionals with years of experience in their trades, Fawcett’s comic books quickly took over the market, and Captain Marvel and his family of characters became famous all over the world. Captain Marvel was a big hit for thirteen years. Then, as times changed, his style of comedy and old-fashioned storytelling went out of fashion. Loose morals and unrestrained behavior patterns took over, and Captain Marvel and all the editors, writers, and artists who had worked

Beck drew this page especially for the 1974 Orlandocon. See later in the article for references to Dr. Sivana’s penchant for transparent disguises. [Captain Marvel and Billy Batson ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

The Captain’s Chief

Previously unseen (and still pretty darn hard to see) treasure: Unfinished C.C. Beck extraterrestrial panorama featuring Billy, the Big Red Cheese, Sivana, and the wicked (if loveable) Mr. Mind! [All characters ©1999 DC Comics, Inc.]

contributing anything to the stories. Fortunately, the editors paid no attention to so ridiculous a memo and Billy Batson continued to appear in every story. Without Billy Batson, Captain Marvel would have been merely another over-drawn, one-dimensional figure in a ridiculous costume running around beating up crooks and performing meaningless feats of strength like all the other heroic figures of the time who were, with almost no exception, cheap imitations of Superman. It was always Billy Batson who got into trouble and had to call Captain Marvel to the rescue by saying the magic word “Shazam!” As silly as this bit of childish magic was, it was accepted without hesitation by readers all over the world who really didn’t believe that comic book stories were actual accounts of events in the real world, but knew that they were nothing more than entertaining fiction. As a fictional character, Billy Batson didn’t have to look like a real boy at all, but was definitely a cartoon character. He had dots for eyes in the best tradition of comic characters from Felix the Cat to Charlie Brown. A March 1970 Beck sketch of Billy Batson, done for fan John Ellis. [Billy Batson ©1999 DC Comics Inc.]

When other artists than those under my supervision drew Billy

Batson, they never got him quite right. Fawcett farmed out some of the early Captain Marvel stories and Billy came back looking like a wooden puppet or a witless imbecile. In the DC Captain Marvel stories, and also in the movie and TV versions, Billy Batson appeared as a rather stupid young man about twenty years old. Why he appeared this way I have never been able to understand. Perhaps it was because A Beck drawing previously published only in other people didn’t the Legion Outpost fanzine. [Captain Marvel understand that the con©1999 DC Comics Inc.] trast between a 14-yearold boy and a grown man was a more effective literary and artistic device than presenting the same character in disguise or two characters who didn’t look anything like each other.

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Billy Batson was Captain Marvel—as a boy of fourteen. He had the same nose, cleft chin, and dimples as Captain Marvel. Only his eyes were different—and his hair became magically combed back when he changed to his adult form.

and wistful, like Tiny Tim in Dickens’ “Christmas Carol.” Personally, I thought Captain Marvel Junior to be a sickeningly sweet, non-comic, and dull character, but some readers who found Captain Marvel too “cartoony” for their tastes loved him.

And Captain Marvel, although he had the powers of Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, and other great heroes, was really a small boy at heart. He was merely Billy Batson grown up, not a godlike creature from another planet nor a Frankenstein’s monster sort of being created by a mad scientist or by a nuclear accident. He was just the World’s Mightiest Mortal, nothing more.

MARY MARVEL Mary Marvel, who was really Billy Batson’s twin sister, was created to attract girl readers.

As such, he was human, which few of the other comic book heroes of the time were, and therein lay his appeal to readers all over the world. SHAZAM Bill Parker’s first Captain Marvel script gave me no description of the ancient wizard Shazam, whose magical powers Billy Batson inherited. I drew him as a combination MosesMerlin-good magician figure, sort of a benign semi-Biblical character. After giving his powers to Billy, old Shazam disappeared for good in the original story. Later, Shazam was revived, or appeared in spirit form, or was seen in flashback scenes. When drawn by other artists, he sometimes appeared evil and threatening, or March 1970 was a busy time for like a madman. Nobody seemed C.C.! Here’s Shazam from the same to realize that I had drawn him as period. [Shazam ©1999 DC Comics Inc.] Captain Marvel as an old man. He had the same feature, just altered by old age. SIVANA The evil scientist Sivana was based on a druggist I had once known. He was bald-headed and had a big nose and ears, protruding teeth, and was short-tempered and nasty. He always wore a white lab coat and dark trousers and was definitely a comic figure, not a real menace, because readers could see immediately that none of his schemes to become Rightful Ruler of the Universe would succeed. Many other villains appeared in the Captain Marvel stories, but Sivana was in the first story and he was never killed off, as other bad guys were. He was so strong a character that, no matter how poorly the other artists drew him, he was instantly recognizable, even when wearing one of the disguises he sometimes donned to fool Billy Batson (but not the readers).

Strangely enough, the publisher once wanted to drop Sivana from the stories along with Billy Batson, claiming that the old rascal was becoming a more interesting character than Captain Marvel. The editors paid no attention to so silly an order, and kept him alive and cackling away. CAPTAIN MARVEL JUNIOR A teenage Captain Marvel was created, at the publisher’s orders, to capture the interest of younger readers and to compete with Batman’s Robin and other junior super-characters. When I drew Captain Marvel Junior I drew him as a husky young fellow of about fifteen, but when Mac Raboy and other artists drew him he always looked more like an eight-year-old Peter Pan or, dewy-eyed

I always drew her to look somewhat like Billy Batson, but other artists, most notably Marc Swayze and Jack Binder, drew her in various ways. Her stories were usually fairytale-like and unconvincing. In my opinion, Mary Marvel was a weak, synthetic character created on the order of the publisher. She never came to life the way Billy Batson and Captain Marvel did, but always seemed wooden and artificial. SIVANA JUNIOR AND GEORGIA SIVANA These two characters were supposed to be Sivana’s son and daughter. Sivana Junior was tall and gangly and Georgia was short and ugly. Neither one had any brains at all—they inherited only their father’s looks. I could never stand these two characters, but Kurt Schaffenberger made a career of drawing them, both for Fawcett and DC Comics. STEAMBOAT This character was created to capture the affection of black readers. Unfortunately, he offended them instead and was unceremoniously killed off after a delegation of blacks The controversial Steamboat, in an unpubvisited the Fawcett edilished 1981 sketch showing how he might have tor’s office protesting looked “today.” (The “W.W.” reference is to because he was a ser“Walter Wego,” an alias occasionally used by vant, because he had C.C. Beck.) [Steamboat ©1999 DC Comics Inc.] huge lips and kinky hair, and because he spoke in a dialect. He was always a cartoon character, not intended to be realistic at all, but he was taken seriously by some, sadly enough. IV. THE CAPTAIN’S CREATORS Fawcett’s artists were trained illustrators and, along with some very talented writers and editors, they brought to life characters that captured the hearts of readers everywhere and that have found their places in folklore and literature. There were dozens of people who must be credited with helping to create Captain Marvel. First and foremost there was BILL PARKER, who, under the supervision of RALPH DAIGH, Fawcett’s managing editor, wrote the first story in which the World’s Mightiest Mortal appeared. Parker based Captain Marvel’s powers on those of classic figures taken from mythology, not from science fiction sources. He created the word “Shazam,” which has now become part of our language, and also created the name “Sivana” by combining the name of the Indian god Siva with the word “nirvana.” He did not deliberately try to create something new and startling in his comic book characters and stories,

The Captain’s Chief

Cheers for Captain Marvel! (L.-to-R.:) Jack Binder, Charles Clarence Beck, and Otto Binder making a toast in the Golden Age.

but combined old familiar terms and plots in new and novel ways. This gave his work more lasting value than other Golden Age comic characters and stories had, as the elements in Parker’s stories were already familiar features in our culture. As the artist who first brought Parker’s character to life in drawings, I also stuck pretty closely to standard methods of illustration, never striving to impress the reader with displays of artistic talent which would have meant nothing to most people. Parker belonged to the National Guard and left to join the armed forces in the early ’40s. When he came back after World War II, he was made editor of Fawcett’s Mechanix Illustrated and had nothing further to do with comic books. I have always tried to give as much credit as possible to Bill Parker and Ralph Daigh and Fawcett Publications for starting Captain Marvel off in the first place. I certainly didn’t think him up; I merely made him visible in the drawings I made to illustrate his stories, all but one of which were written by other people.

York City office. Peter was an established illustrator at an early age, and I learned as much from him about story illustration as he learned from me about cartooning. OTTO BINDER, who wrote the majority of the Captain Marvel stories, had been a successful science-fiction writer in the 1930s. When he came to work for Fawcett, he brought his knowledge of science-fiction themes along with him, as well as an engaging sense of humor which he injected into the Captain Marvel scripts. There was never any direct cooperation between the writers and the artists at Fawcett, but there did develop an interplay of ideas between the two departments which kept Captain Marvel changing and developing, instead of getting bogged down and repeating himself tiresomely after the first few issues, as so many other comic characters did.

When the writers saw what we artists did with their stories, they were always pleased. It was, Otto Binder once told me, like seeing your photos after they had come back from the drugstore. You saw where you had gone Soon after Otto O. Binder passed away on Oct. 13, 1974, wrong and vowed not to repeat your misthe following Beck drawing was published in the Legion Outpost. (“OOB,” as he sometimes signed himself, had PETE COSTANZA was the first artist takes. At the same time you were delighted to scripted the first Legion of Super-heroes story.) see where things had come out better than hired to assist me when Fawcett’s comic you expected them to and were inspired to try department started to expand in the latter new and more difficult approaches in your next stories. part of 1940. We later went into partnership, and Pete was in charge of our studio in Englewood, New Jersey, while I operated out of our New WENDELL CROWLEY was one of Fawcett’s very able editors. He

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had started working in the Jack Binder studio, then had worked for me. After Fawcett had hired him as an editor of the Captain Marvel magazines, he became the boss of us all. And a very able boss he was. Although Wendell was ten years younger than the rest of us (and twenty years younger than Jack Binder), he never bowed to our seniority but kept us all in our places. He knew his part in the production of comic books and took no backtalk from anyone. JACK BINDER, Otto’s older brother, was an all-around artist and had been a printer, a painter, and an illustrator before he got into the comic book business. At one time he worked for me; then he took over illustrating Mary Marvel. MAC RABOY was a frustrated fine artist forced to make his living in comic books illustrating Captain Marvel Jr., Dr. Voodoo, and various covers. He had little use for cartoonish tricks and distortions and always drew as realistic as possible, being a great admirer of such artists as Hal Foster and Alex Raymond.

Marvel stories to Jack Kirby, George Tuska, and the Harry Chesler shop. The work of these people was so substandard and so distorted from the way I had shown things in the early Whiz Comics that Fawcett’s art director Al Allard was moved to call all work back into his control and to set me up as chief artist to set the pace and standards from then on. The introduction of the talking tiger, Mr. Tawny, and of the intelligent worm from outer space, Mr. Mind, turned some of the readers who didn’t like to see anything funny in their comics away from the Captain Marvel magazines. These people spread the belief that Captain Marvel was an overstuffed, stumble-footed clown who ran around with talking animals and cracked jokes, did pratfalls, and generally made himself ridiculous. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Captain Marvel himself was never funny—there were funny characters in his stories. They did the jokes and had the potato noses and comic makeup; Captain Marvel was their straight man. When DC Comics revived Captain Marvel in the ’70s, the editors and writers, some of whom hadn’t ever seen a Golden Age comic, proceeded to turn Captain Marvel into a standup comic spouting one-liners and making a fool of himself. I left DC soon afterward. Ignorance can be relieved, but stupidity is pretty hard to overcome.

These men were, like myself, experienced professionals, although none of the others had worked extensively in comics before coming to Fawcett. We used all the principles we had learned in other work Mr. Mind—the world’s wickedest when producing the Captain Marvel stories and art, worm! [Mr. Mind ©1999 DC Comics. which we regarded as simply another form of popular literature. This attitude was, I believe, what enabled us The most distorted beliefs about Captain Marvel are that I, C.C. to surpass the other comic book workers of the day in the quality of Beck, created him, and am now a retired millionaire. Those beliefs are our scripts and illustrations. None of us needed to copy and steal totally false. I didn’t create Captain Marvel; I merely brought him to from other comic book work; after the first few issues of Whiz life in picture form. I received no royalties or percentages of profits; I Comics had appeared, other writers and artists copied and stole our was paid piecework rates for whatever pages I did myself or had material. other artists produce under my supervision. Since 1973 I have In spite of DC’s claim that Captain Marvel had been copied received one or two very small token payments from DC for reprints from Superman, after Captain Marvel had disappeared DC was of old stories. I never received anything from Fawcett other than the unable to reproduce the success of the original World’s Mightiest page rate I got back in 1941—no bonuses, no dividends, not even a Mortal (even with my help) when they tried to revive him in 1973. letter of appreciation. They tried to turn him into a buffoonish, idiotic, revolting caricature of what he had never been in the first place, and seemed to be trying VI. CAPTAIN MARVEL, R.I.P. to pump life into a great comic character who had died an untimely Captain Marvel had his day of glory and so did I. Neither of us death over a generation ago. can stage a comeback; we are both entirely out of step with today’s Great comic heroes, like everyone else, don’t live forever. The trends and customs. lucky ones die at the peak of their powers. There’s something sad Whether today’s readers would appreciate Captain Marvel’s kind about a hero who is still around in an age when he’s getting short in of simple, old-fashioned story is doubtful. The world has changed too the wind and long in the tooth. Even old Shazam gave up at last, much in the years between 1940 and today. It’s too bad there’s nothalthough he had to wait 3000 years before he found someone to take ing of the kind on the market today. If one appears, it will take the his place! world by storm, as Captain Marvel and Whiz Comics did once long ago, quite to the surprise of a lot of people who never expected them V. THE MARVEL MYTHOS to amount to much when they first appeared. In all of the years that have gone by since Captain Marvel disappeared from the comic book stands, many false impressions of his [NOTE: The foregoing overview of Captain character and his activities have been formed. The most harmful Marvel and Fawcett Publications was originally impression is that he was nothing but a baggy-pants comic bumbling written by the late C.C. Beck in the mid-1980s.] around like an oldtime vaudevillian or burlesque actor. Very early, in the first year, Fawcett farmed out some Captain

Edited by ROY THOMAS

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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!

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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!

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

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

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!

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

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

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

(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