Alter Ego #70 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Roy Roy T Thomas homas ’ ’70 ss---Something Something Comics Comics Fanzine anzine

YOU ASKED FOR IT— SO IT SERVES YOU RIGHT!

ROY THOMAS

ON MARVEL IN THE 1970s! $$

6.95

In In the the USA USA

No. 70

82658 27763

July 2007

“ROY THE BOY” TALKS ABOUT WORKING WITH:

PLUS GOLDEN AGE GREAT

ADAMS * ANDRU * BORING * BOTH BUSCEMAS * BRUNNER * BUCKLER LILY RENÉE CHAYKIN * COCKRUM * COLAN * CONWAY * ENGLEHART * EVERETT & GERBER * GOODWIN * KANE * KIRBY * LEE * MOENCH * PÉREZ PLOOG * ROBBINS * ROMITA * THE SEVERINS * SHOOTER * SMITH THORNE * TRIMPE * TUSKA * WEIN * WOLFMAN * WRIGHTSON, & MORE!! Human Torch, Captain America, Sub-Mariner, & The Red Skull TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Vol. 3, No. 70 / July 2007 Editor Roy Thomas

Associate Editors

— Contents —

Bill Schelly Jim Amash

Design & Layout Christopher Day

Consulting Editor John Morrow

FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck

Comic Crypt Editor Michael T. Gilbert

Editorial Honor Roll Jerry G. Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White

Editor Emeritus Mike Friedrich

Production Assistant Chris Irving

Circulation Director Bob Brodsky, Cookiesoup Periodical Distribution, LLC

Cover Artist Tom Ziuko

Writer/Editorial: The Devil Made Me Do It! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 “Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

With Special Thanks to:

Roy Thomas talks to Jim Amash about the 1970s at Mighty Marvel.

Dan Adkins Karen Kraft Heidi Amash Bob Layton Nick Arroyo Stan Lee Bob Bailey Bruce MacIntosh Michael Baulderstone Michel Maillot Alan Barger Jonathan Mankuta Allen Bellman Mark Muller Al Bigley Jim Murtaugh Dominic Bongo Jerry Ordway Jerry K. Boyd Tom Palmer Mike Burkey Nigel Parkinson R. Dewey Cassell George Pérez Larry Clay Joe Petrilak Gene & Adrienne John G. Pierce Colan Trina Robbins Teresa R. Davidson Phil Schlaeffer Jack DiMartino John Severin Chris Fama Marie Severin Michael Finn Rick Shurgin Gregory Fischer Keif Simon Shane Foley Anthony Snyder Todd Franklin Flo Steinberg Jenna Land Free Steve Stiles Janet Gilbert Aaron Sultan Arnie Grieves Marc Swayze George Hagenauer Dann Thomas Jennifer Hamerlinck Frank Thorne David G. Hamilton Angelique Trouvere Heritage Comics Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Tom Horvitz Alan Waite Jay Kinney Hames Ware Scott Kolins Nicholas Yutko

Lily Renée At Fiction House—And Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Gene Colan

Cover Colorist

A far-too-brief look at a “Star Woman Cartoonist” by Trina Robbins.

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Mike Mallet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Michael T. Gilbert presents “The World’s First Adult Comic,” by Bob Powell.

re: [comments, correspondence, & corrections to >ulp!< A/E #57!] . . 74 FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America] #129 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 P.C. Hamerlinck showcases Marc Swayze, John G. Pierce, and Roy the [Shazam!] Boy.

FREE! Rough Stuff #5 preview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 On Our Cover: “Gentleman Gene”—“Gene the Dean”—even “Adam Austin”—Stan Lee called Gene Colan all of the above during the early days of Marvel Comics. Other people have called him other things, among them “an artist’s artist” and “a painter with pencil.” Gene and Roy Thomas never worked together on The Invaders—but English collector Michael Finn commissioned Gene to draw this powerful illo of Timely’s “Big Three” facing off with The Red Skull—so, with Gene’s blessing, nothing was gonna stop us from reproducing it as our cover, straight from Mr. C.’s pulsating pencils, with Tom Ziuko adding the colors. What’s more, you can rhapsodize over the penciled original art on p. 31! [Captain America, Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, & Red Skull TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Above: Gil Kane, who (twice!) came within an ace of becoming the first artist ever to illustrate Conan's adventures in comics form, drew the Cimmerian in this time-tossed setting for the 1976 Mighty Marvel Bicentennial Calendar. Maybe the barbarian wound up at Lexington and/or Concord because of Shamash-Shum-Ukin's fabled Well at the Center of Time from Savage Sword of Conan #7 (Aug. 1975) and What If? #13 (Feb. 1979)! Repro'd from a scan of the original art, as retrieved from the Heritage Comics Archives by Dominic Bongo. [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.] Alter EgoTM is published monthly by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: 32 Bluebird Trail, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Single issues: $9 US ($11.00 Canada, $16 elsewhere). Twelve-issue subscriptions: $78 US, $132 Canada, $180 elsewhere. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © Roy Thomas. Alter Ego is a TM of Roy & Dann Thomas. FCA is a TM of P.C. Hamerlinck. Printed in Canada. ISSN: 1932-6890. FIRST PRINTING.

writer/editorial

The Devil Made Me Do It! W W

ell, not actually the Devil. It was more like John Morrow and Jim Amash.

Cross my heart—doing a second issue of Alter Ego centered around my own career in only two years was not my idea! Jim and I always intended to pick up where we left off in A/E #50, which covered mostly my 1960s work—and a number of readers did ask for the 1970s follow-up—but there was no particular hurry. I was content to toss in occasional articles about the birth of the Star Wars comic (in #68) or my recent “JSA” concept (#69), and to otherwise concentrate on the likes of Ramona Fradon, ACG, and Jerry G. Bails. But then, some months back, the San Diego Comic-Con invited me to be a “special guest” in July of 2007. Since I now live in South Carolina, I’d only attended that mothership of cons once in the 21st century—in 2004, when the Discovery Channel folks flew me out. But when I mentioned the invitation to TwoMorrows’ avaricious publisher (and I use that adjective in only the most positive sense), he suggested that’d be the perfect time to deal with Yours Truly and Mighty Marvel in the 1970s. Jim concurred enthusiastically, even though lately he’s been so busy between A/E gab-fests and inking for Archie and spelling Joe Sinnott as inker on the Sunday Spider-Man comic strip that yet another super-long interview would tax him to the limit. Still, we did it—over several marathon phone calls that left my ears ringing—and naturally realized, when we were finished, that many, many things had not been covered that are of equal importance with what was discussed. Partly, Jim and I wanted to avoid covering too much of the same ground that Jon B. Cooke did in his interview with me in Comic Book Artist (Vol. 1) #2, since that’s been reprinted, as well. The volume of reminiscences printed in this issue and in A/E #50

is there not because I’m some colossus of the comic book world, but because my situation in the 1960s and ’70s put me very much at the center of Most Things Marvel, which meant I’d have at least a few words to say about just about everybody then in the field, as well as about my own two-year stint as Marvel’s editor-in-chief, and about a certain Cimmerian that you and I know well.

We’ve tried to hold down the number of illos—both so the ones we did use could be larger, and so we could also deal with another San Diego Comic-Con “special guest,” the great Golden Age artist Lily Renée. By the time I learned she was invited, I knew we couldn’t do her justice in this issue, as well… so we’re reprinting a few words written about her by Trina Robbins, and Jim is prepping a full-fledged interview with Ms. Renée for the near future. What you’ll see this time around is just to whet your appetite. Oh, and one more thing: because Marvel’s finally leaped with both feet into doing both color and black-&-white reprints of its 1960s+ work (and I personally couldn’t be happier about it, incentive payments aside), we’ve been able to avoid reprinting quite as many 1970s covers and interior pages as you might expect. Instead, you’ll find more original art and sketches, many of which were previously seen only in Marvel’s ’70s fan-club publications Marvelmania and, especially, FOOM (which, in case we don’t mention it anywhere else this month, stood for “Friends of Ol’ Marvel”). So, if you’ve forgiven me for usurping yet another issue of Alter Ego, we can now return you to our regularly-scheduled mag…. Bestest,

COMING IN AUGUST

THE GREAT CANADIAN COMIC BOOKS OF THE GOLDEN AGE!

• A nifty North-of-the-Border cover by GEORGE FREEMAN, from a layout by JACK KIRBY—featuring Canada’s greatest super-heroes! • The Great Canadian Comic Books! The full text of the milestone 1971 book by MICHAEL HIRSH & PATRICK LOUBERT on the World War II action tales produced by Bell Features—showcasing rare art of such heroes as Mr. Monster, Nelvana of the Northern Lights, The Penguin, Thunderfist, The Dreamer, The Brain, Johnny Canuck, and many others! • “One Minute After!” What happened sixty seconds after the cover scenes of the most memorable 1970s issues of The Invaders—as depicted by JOHN BYRNE, MIKE GRELL, ERNIE CHAN, RON LIM, & others! • AL SCHUTZER, Golden Age scripter of Superman, John Wayne, Hopalong Cassidy, Straight Arrow, etc., interviewed by JIM AMASH! • Plus: FCA with MARC SWAYZE, C.C. BECK, & Colonel Porterhouse—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on early “Kooky Krossovers” of the Quality & Archie/MLJ heroes—& MORE!! Edited by ROY THOMAS TM & ©2007 Marvel Vindicator & Wolverineheroes TM & ©2007 Nelvana r ©2007 Comely Comix; Captain Canuck TM & ster TM & ©2007 Michael T. Gilbert; othe Mon Characters, Inc.; Mr. ved. Limited. All rights reser

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“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life” ROY THOMAS Talks About Writing—And Editing— For Marvel During The 1970s

Interview Conducted by Jim Amash NTRODUCTION BY JIM AMASH:

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Sol Brodsky was there—right before he left for Skywald and was succeeded by John Verpoorten. As production manager, Sol ranked me in certain ways, and I had no problem with that—but he wasn’t involved in editorial decisions except from a scheduling angle, so the three of us took care of things… well, in a sense maybe there were four of us, because Stan relied on John Romita in certain areas concerning Spider-Man and even art direction and corrections. JA: Now, as you rise in the company, is your compensation rising that much? THOMAS: I was doing okay. Is anybody ever really ever paid what they’d like? I was working, really, for [Marvel publisher] Martin Goodman, and he wasn’t somebody you could go to directly and say, “I’m worth more money.” Remember, Flo Steinberg quit in the late ’60s because she couldn’t get a $5 raise, because Goodman felt secretarial positions paid a certain salary and not a penny over that. But, between Goodman and Stan, I got raises from time to time, when sales were fairly good. There were sometimes Christmas bonuses, too. And, unlike back in the ’40s or ’50s, they never had to lower my salary, although back around ’68 they probably came close to doing that across the board when sales went soft, right after they turned the three anthology titles into six solo hero titles. JA: How did other people react to your rising in the company? THOMAS: I probably had more friends than I’d had before. [mutual laughter] JA: That’s what I figured.

“By The Middle Of 1970, I’d Been At Marvel For Five Years” JIM AMASH: All right, so it’s 1970 and you’re the second “head writer” of Marvel Comics, with Stan [Lee] being #1. And you’re editing, so you’re the #2 editor, too. THOMAS: That’s like saying you come in second in a horse race. You don’t get nearly as much money. [mutual laughter] Actually, it was a nice situation to be in. By the middle of 1970, I’d been at Marvel for five years, just picking up whatever little tidbits or reins Stan let fall, sometimes at his direction, sometimes at my own initiative. And I just became “#2 editor”—my real title was “associate editor”—by default.

THOMAS: Well, I had more people suddenly finding excuses to hang around with me. I’m not saying they were always doing that consciously. You naturally gravitate towards somebody in a situation like that, as I’m sure I’ve done myself. I never had to work hard at that, because when I was dealing with pros earlier, it was most just writing fan letters to Julie Schwartz or Gardner Fox or Otto Binder. And, with the exception of once or twice with Julie, I wasn’t really thinking in terms of getting into the field professionally. Some people probably accepted what you call my “rise” in the company, and some people didn’t. I wasn’t handing out assignments directly at that stage, but I had some growing influence, and Stan often listened to my suggestions. Sometimes he’d ask who should do this or that. It was a case of a gradual evolution. If I’d looked from one year to the next, I was probably handling a little more and I was having to deal with a few other writers and a bit more with the art—less with the art than with the writers. But I wouldn’t have noticed from day-to-day or week-to-week.

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

“[Readers] Were Mostly Saying ‘Do Conan!’” JA: Now, Conan the Barbarian starts in 1970, and I know you’ve talked about how you got Marvel to publish Conan. THOMAS: I may have spoken about that somewhere once or twice, yeah. [laughs] I’ve written all those articles in the past few years for Dark Horse’s Chronicles of Conan reprints, and before that for Marvel—and even something like 100 such articles that were printed only in Spanish, in Barcelona, back in the ’90s. Of course, when I was writing such articles for Marvel, I was a bit more constrained about what I might say. Stan and Goodman wouldn’t have liked it if I’d mentioned another company’s comic books, or a policy of theirs I was unhappy with—that kind of thing. And I accepted that. But I never really had to lie. So I guess I can save most of the Conan talk for the upcoming Alter Ego issue on the history of sword-and-sorcery comics.

Roy The Beverly Hills Barbarian! (Above:) One of the few photos of himself Roy really likes is this one, taken at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, circa 1977. He and friend Alan Waite, a producer of TV commercials, were waiting to interview comedy legend Phil (Sgt. Bilko) Silvers about his latest—and sadly, as it turned out, last—role, in the movie The Chicken Chronicles, for Marvel’s new magazine Celebrity. (The latter was a well-named but under-funded People-style brainchild of Stan Lee’s.) Right after Alan snapped this pic, the Lounge’s personnel descended on them to inform them that photo-taking was verboten in the fabled watering-hole. Silvers soon arrived and kept his interviewers in stitches for an hour—and the guys took photos of the comedian in his Century City digs a few days later—but alas, Celebrity died after only an issue or two, as that piece was literally on the presses. [©2007 Alan Waite.] (Right:) Barry Smith’s powerful pencils for the cover of 1970’s Conan the Barbarian #1 as they first appeared in print—on the cover of Marvelmania Magazine #2, the Marvel-published fan club mag, that same year. [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

JA: In the early ’70s, I know Stan was often only coming in like two days a week. THOMAS: Two, three days tops, even back when I started in 1965. He’d already worked things out with Goodman so he could work at least two days a week at home. And soon I worked it out with Stan so I could work a couple of days a week at home, and still get paid freelance for pages I wrote there, just as he did. It was like a de facto raise. You’d think Stan would’ve wanted to stagger it so I was there days when he wasn’t, but Stan preferred me to be there the same days he was, for conferences and the like. So the days we weren’t there, Sol and Flo kept things moving. Sometimes they or some assistant editor made a phone call to me or to Stan, depending on what the situation was, and asked, “What do we do?” I don’t even know who the assistant editor was, except when Gary Friedrich was there from 1966 to 1968. In 1970, Allyn Brodsky was on staff for a while, and was spelling me when [my first wife] Jeanie and I went to England that summer. But Sol—later Verpoorten—they were mostly just interested in getting the books out. They both knew what they could do without checking, and what they couldn’t, just as I did.

JA: Right. But I still have a couple of questions that I don’t think I’ve seen in print. THOMAS: Okay, shoot. JA: By the time you pitched Conan to Stan

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

Lee, how often were you pitching ideas for series? THOMAS: Good question. Not that often, because Stan was really the guy who generated the ideas, and I don’t think he pushed us to come up with new characters in the early days, except for villains. If something came up, he was open to it. As I’ve often said, I didn’t like creating many characters for Marvel, because I knew I wouldn’t own then… not that I advertised that feeling to Stan or Goodman! Besides, we already had a fair number of books. Marvel over-expanded in ’68, the field got overcrowded, and there was a brief downturn in sales. By 1970 or so, we started expanding again. Stan was very open to what readers wanted. So, when fans wrote asking us to pick up properties from outside the comics field—especially Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Conan/Robert E. Howard material, Doc Savage, and Tolkien—we were open to that. At one time or the other between 1970-75, we went after each one of those. And, except for Tolkien, whose people turned us down flat, Marvel did end up eventually doing all of them.

our super-hero comics, elements which would appeal to the same readers. One was a strong, action-oriented hero—another was colorful villains and, I probably emphasized, monsters. The other thing I stressed was that there would be lots of beautiful women. I probably glossed over the fact that such a comic would look as if it were set in the ancient or medieval world, because that wouldn’t have had an innate appeal to Martin Goodman. After all, Black Knight never went anywhere in the 1950s, nor did most other Timely/Marvel comics that were set in the real or imagined past, except for World War II or the American West. Goodman liked the memo and authorized us to go after a character. I first went after Lin Carter’s Thongor, who was a quasi-Conan with elements of John Carter of Mars, partly because Stan liked that name the most.

JA: I had seen pages in Comic Book Artist where you and Barry Smith made up a team, I think it was Bucky and Quicksilver and Red Raven. THOMAS: I think that’s something Barry and I were just kicking around. Maybe Barry was looking for some extra work. It wasn’t Bucky, though; it was actually Rick Jones. Barry drew up a handful of pages, most of which have been reprinted somewhere-or-other, because, if we were going to talk Stan into it, it’d be better if he saw some pages. But whether we actually ever showed the pages to him and he said no, I don’t recall. JA: Did you ever talk to Martin Goodman about Conan? THOMAS: I didn’t talk; I wrote. When I think about things I wish I’d saved to document my career, such as it was, one of them is the memo Stan suggested I write to Goodman to see if he’d allow us to license an existing sword-and-sorcery hero, such as our readers were asking for. Not that readers were really saying, “Do sword-and-sorcery.” They were mostly saying, “Do Conan,” or “Do Robert E. Howard,” or something like that. Just like they weren’t saying, “Do jungle comics”; they were saying, “Get Tarzan or John Carter,” and “Get Doc Savage,” “Get Tolkien.” It wasn’t all just hype when Stan said Marvel’s readers were the real editors. Maybe that’s the reason why I don’t believe Stan and I ever discussed the possibility of making up a new sword-andsorcery hero. If we had, I suspect we’d have made it quite different from Robert E. Howard’s. I don’t think it would have worked out as well, so we were all winners on that one—Marvel, and myself, and the Robert E. Howard heirs. So Stan suggested to me, while we were kicking around the swordand-sorcery thing: “Why don’t you write a memo to Martin Goodman, to explain why we ought to license one of these characters?” It was left up to me because I was collecting a lot of the paperbacks—mostly for their covers, then—to decide which one. I felt that bringing such heroes into Marvel would upgrade comics. I wrote that memo, two or three pages, telling Goodman that sword-and-sorcery stories contained several elements in common with

Not To Mention Buscema The Barbarian! It’s well-known that the artist originally intended to launch Conan the Barbarian was Big John Buscema—seen above at the All Time Classic New York Comic Book Convention held in White Plains, NY, in summer of 2000. (Photo courtesy of host Joe Petrilak.) The original Buscema/Montano art for the splash page of Conan Annual #2 (1976) headed an interview with Roy T. conducted by Ralph Macchio that year in the 4th issue of FOOM, the second Marvel-published fan club magazine. At that time or soon after, newcomer Ralph was assistant editor on such mags as The Savage Sword of Conan—and today he’s a senior editor at Marvel, and has Roy happily adapting such classics as The Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island, and The Man in the Iron Mask for him and the ambitious new Marvel Illustrated line. What goes around, comes around! (But Crom—didn’t either of those geniuses notice that the word “under” is missing in the last line of Robert E. Howard’s famous “Nemedian Chronicles” prologue? It got printed that way in the comic, too!) [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

JA: He would. THOMAS: Well, it was a better comic book name than “Kull” or “Conan.” Stan even liked “Kull” better than “Conan,” because it has that “K,” and “Conan” is just another name, like in Arthur Conan Doyle, and “C” isn’t a strong letter. I wouldn’t have pushed for Conan, because I figured it’s Stan’s business. Thongor and the City of Magicians is the first sword-&-sorcery novel I ever read, and I later owned Frank Frazetta’s cover painting for that novel, the one with the hero riding on a giant pterodactyl above flowing lava on a black background, for ten or fifteen years. Months, maybe a year, later, Martin Goodman threw a party— maybe it was at The Illustrators Club—to me it just looked like some big empty room—I think he was celebrating making an extra million bucks or something, [Jim chuckles] and thought maybe he’d cut us a tiny piece of cheese out of it. So he came up to me during this gathering and really raved over my memo. Of course, there was no offer of any extra monetary compensation. Hey, I was getting to write the comic— that was enough of a reward, right? And he mentioned that memo to me at least one other time we ran into each other—probably because he couldn’t think of anything else I’d ever done! [mutual chuckling] It made a big impression on him. And it was very important to my life, certainly—and to Conan and REH’s heirs, as well—because I soon got stalled by Lin Carter’s agent on Thongor (he was hoping I’d offer more than the $150 per issue I was authorized to offer), and I got a sudden impulse to go after Conan—I contacted Glenn Lord from the address that L. Sprague de Camp put in his preface to the new paperback Conan of Cimmeria, and that was that.

“Barry Smith [Was] Looking For Work” JA: I know the initial sales on Conan were not that strong. THOMAS: Well, #1 did very well. But then, each of the next six sold less well than the one before, nadiring out with #7—actually, one of Barry’s and my best issues, I think. JA: I know it was actually cancelled for a day. THOMAS: Yes. Based on the sales reports for #7. There’s no accounting for readers’ tastes. JA: Still, was there a buzz in comics fandom about Conan? THOMAS: To a great extent, it started right away. We got a fair amount of mail, mostly enthusiastic. Of course, there were people who hated the idea that Barry Smith was the artist, and felt it should’ve been someone like—if not Frazetta, then Bernie Wrightson in particular. A couple of people may have suggested Frank Brunner, who was just starting out, too. Bernie actually did up a couple of sample Conan drawings. He was just becoming a pro at that stage, and those drawings were very nice. I was more enthusiastic about his work than Stan was,

but it was Stan’s decision. So I figured I’d wait and do something with Bernie later; and, of course, we soon did that “King Kull” story, “The Skull of Silence,” which was lovely. I wish he and I would’ve had a chance to do even more together, though at the time I suspect Bernie thought I was down on him. I honestly don’t recall if we saw his Conan drawings before or after we decided on John Buscema as the original Conan artist. JA: And then Buscema didn’t work out, and you couldn’t get Gil Kane for the same reason. THOMAS: Yeah. Goodman said they were both too expensive. He wanted to get back that $200 an issue I had overenthusiastically offered Glenn Lord for the Conan rights, so we had to get somebody cheap.

And Now—Bernie The Barbarian! (Top center:) Photo taken at a Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC, some years back by Dann Thomas. (Top right:) The splash of Bernie’s story in Creatures on the Loose #10 (March 1971)—repro’d from a scan of the original art, courtesy of Jim Amash. With thanks to Teresa R. Davidson. [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.] (Right:) A Wrightson Kull sketch from the program book for Creation Con 1974. [Kull TM & ©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

It didn’t have to be a beginner. At least two other regular Marvel artists were pushed to me by Stan—I won’t mention their names, but I told him I didn’t think they’d bring Conan the singular quality I wanted, now that I had read all the Conan material. Stan said, okay, if I could find someone else acceptable, I wouldn’t have to use one of them. And here was Barry Smith—deported back to England because he’d been working in the States without a green card, and looking for work—the immigration people gave him 24 hours to leave the country or be locked up—so I lateraled Conan the Barbarian to him. It was one of the best decisions I ever made—for Marvel, for me, and for Barry. JA: Did you get a lot of mail on the book? THOMAS: Yeah, including some hate mail. Some people didn’t like the way it was done, because, after all, it wasn’t really Robert E. Howard. Or they excoriated us because they hated Barry’s earliest work. But most of the mail was pretty favorable from the start. JA: Frankly, Barry Smith drew a leaner Conan than what Frazetta represented in his paperbacks. THOMAS: It wasn’t exactly my idea of how Conan should look, I’ll admit. I liked the face okay, but he was just too thin. He should’ve been bigger. But Barry was lean, and artists have a tendency to draw their own body types when they get a chance. Barry’s artwork was so beautiful, though. Not so much in the first issue. There were good panels and bad panels in #1, but from #2 on, it was increasingly good work. Even #1 has a lot of good stuff in it. But we almost replaced him. [mutual laughter] If we’d had another good choice walk in the door, we might have done it. I’m glad we didn’t. He is, too—or at least, he ought to be. JA: He quit Conan two or three times. THOMAS: Three. That was a year or two down the road, though. In the early days he was just happy to be working steady, just like I was. JA: Because you were working Marvel style, it seems to me you’d have had to do a little more than just a Marvel-style plot on Conan, since you were adapting stories. THOMAS: Well, at the beginning. But Barry read all the Howard material, and I think we were in sync pretty much from the start. So, soon, I turned Barry loose on stories, though I know I did a severalpage plot even on #4, “The Tower of the Elephant,” as well as on the early non-adaptation stories, of course. Working on Conan kept Barry attached to Marvel, and I really liked him, in addition to liking his work. There wasn’t much I could do, except gradually, about his page rate, but it worked in his favor for a while. He got raises when the book sold better, and he was up to a decent rate for those days, by the first time he quit.

“Both [Buscema and Kane] Knew Enough About Conan” JA: I’m going to skip ahead slightly here—to when Barry Smith leaves and Gil Kane does a couple of issues, and then, of course, Barry comes back and Barry leaves again and John Buscema becomes the regular Conan artist. Did you have to write a little more or spend a little more time talking to Kane or Buscema? THOMAS: Not really. I’d sent some of the paperbacks to John

Face-Off! Collector Aaron Sultan provided us with a photocopy of Barry Smith’s original art for the cover of Conan the Barbarian #8 (Aug. 1971)—the first issue that began the climb back up the sales charts. Note that the face of the heroine is missing—blotted with Whiteout, it would seem. Stan didn’t think Barry drew Jenna pretty enough. On the printed cover, Jenna’s visage was rendered by John Romita. Inks by Sal Buscema. [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.] At left, Barry (top) and Roy, in photos printed in Savage Tales #3 (Feb. 1974). [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Buscema when he was going to be the artist for #1. He may have even had the plot for #1 when Goodman nixed him as artist. John had read a lot of that material, so he was ready when the time came. As for Gil— he was familiar with Conan a decade or two before I was. He had all those Gnome Press hardcovers from the ’50s and early ’60s. In fact, I purchased his collection eventually. There might’ve been something in particular I might have wanted to say, but both those guys and Barry, once they read the Howard material, knew enough about Conan to draw anything that came up. We fixed it in between issues, like between #1 and #2, and then between the next ones, etc. The second issue was pretty good, but was a little too much Edgar Rice Burroughs and not quite enough Howard—even though our pro peer group nominated it for an ACBA Shazam award. By the fourth story he did—“Tower of the Elephant”—and the fifth, where we adapted the Howard story “The Grey God Passes,” and then

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

I bumped it up to #3—by that time, Barry had really honed in on it, just as I was honing in on the writing. It took a few issues for us to find our way, because not much like it had been done in comics. There was Gardner Fox and John Guinta’s “Crom the Barbarian” back in the 1950s. And there’d been “Nightmaster,” of which Bernie Wrightson drew the second issue. Actually, that probably worked against him, because while it was nice, it had kind-of a scratchy look. Stan wouldn’t have wanted that look in a Marvel comic at that time. We were all blazing a new trail. JA: The only other instance of Conan in a comic book—Gray Morrow had drawn a “Conan” story in the ’50s for a small company that never got published. When I talked to Gray about it, about a year before he passed away, he hadn’t seen the story since the day he turned it in. He never got it back.

THOMAS: And nobody ever saw it. Gil told me he had wanted to do Conan originally, rather than His Name Is Savage, as his first black&-white book when he was easing out of mainstream comics about 1969-70. But his financial backers wanted a modern-day thing, so he did Savage. Conan was going to be the second title, and of course it never materialized. Ron Goulart has often reported Gil’s saying he gave me the idea to do Conan, but that’s not really how it happened. The readers gave us the idea… but Gil was in there like a sort of cheerleader, and, because he knew about his own input but not about other inputs, I’m sure he felt he gave us the idea. Certainly, once we’d decided to do Conan, he influenced my thinking in various ways. And I was delighted when he took over the book as the second artist. I don’t know why we didn’t go back to John at that time, but I don’t think we did. John may have been too busy. Then, too, Gil and I socialized on a personal basis, while John just dropped by the office once in a while and considered everybody else idiots, with his “I hate comics,” and all that. Gil really wanted to do Conan—until he actually did it. Then, he told somebody, “Roy wants me to do a goddam epic every month!” Which was true. [mutual laughter] What choice did I have? Barry had set such a high standard—and then there was the Howard material itself. So, after two issues, Gil decided it was too damn much work, and he quit. JA: But they were beautiful issues. THOMAS: They were. That first one, inked by Ralph Reese, was absolutely superb. The second, inked by Adkins, was also very good, and sold even better—I suspect partly because of the way John Romita inked Gil’s cover. JA: So you only spent a marginal amount more time on Conan than your other series. THOMAS: I was reading all the Howard books, partly because I enjoyed them, partly thinking where to go next. With most other comics, I’d sit down and just plot them. In 1967-68, I was living out in Brooklyn, and sometimes I’d get on a subway with a nearly hour ride into Manhattan, without an idea in my head for some plot I was supposed to call somebody with from the office that morning. By the time I got to the office, I usually had an idea. But, with Conan, I was always thinking, because I wanted to follow his life as it was laid out by Howard and by L. Sprague de Camp and others, and I had to find events to go in between their stories. Glenn Lord, the literary agent for the Howard estate, was sending me a lot of never-published stuff or rare stuff. So I did spend more time on Conan than I spent on any of the other books, I’m sure, not so much plotting as thinking and reading. JA: You had a timeline for Conan. Did you have it in your head, or did you have that written down or on a chart?

Kane The Conqueror Like Big John and Bernie, Gil Kane, too, just missed becoming the first artist of Conan the Barbarian—twice! Like Buscema’s, his page rate was too high for the cost-conscious Martin Goodman. But Gil was tapped 3H years later by writer/editor Roy to be the premier artist of Giant-Size Conan, which adapted the REH novel Hour of the Dragon, a.k.a. Conan the Conqueror. This page from GSC #3 (April 1975) is repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of George Hagenauer. Luscious inks by Tom Sutton. [©2007 Conan Properties/Paradox Entertainment.] The photo of Gil was taken nearly a decade earlier—at John Benson’s 1966 New York Comicon. [Photo ©2007 Jack C. Harris.]

THOMAS: The basic thing I used was the essay L. Sprague de Camp and, before him, these guys, Schuyler and Miller, had written back in the ’30s. The earlier two guys’ work had been more or less approved even by Howard himself before he died. Their “A Probable Outline of Conan’s Career,” though, didn’t cover all the stories even Howard wrote, because they didn’t know about two or three that hadn’t

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

been published yet. And, of course, in the 1950s de Camp started adding to the canon. By the time I came along in 1970 and for several years afterwards, we didn’t have the contractual right to adapt any of Robert E. Howard’s stories, only to use the character (Glenn Lord and I arranged adaptations of REH tales by letter on an issue-by-issue basis)—and certainly not the right to use anything by de Camp or Lin Carter. In fact, they were a little hostile. Lin once wrote me that we’d gone behind his and Sprague’s back to get Conan, which was ridiculous. I went to the literary agent of the Howard estate! Who was I supposed to go to? [laughs] And I really let Lin have it in the mail, even though I liked Lin. Maybe he was a little annoyed because we’d dropped Thongor to go after Conan, but that was because of Lin’s agent, not because of any treachery on our part.

“Conan Is The Best Character Of Any Of Them” JA: I wanted to talk to you about “Thongor” and “Gullivar of Mars” and “Kull.” Why do you think none of them seemed to have staying power? THOMAS: Maybe it’s just that Conan is the best character of any of them. Obviously, some of Howard’s contemporaries didn’t agree. Several of those, like Robert Bloch and H.P. Lovecraft, liked the Kull stories and hated the Conan stories. Lovecraft considered the Conan stories the “dregs” of Howard’s talent, and Bloch referred to Conan as that “Cimmerian chipmunk.” But that doesn’t mean they were right, you know? They were looking for the supernatural aspect in Howard’s work, and Howard was wanting to write like Rafael Sabatini, as Gil

Kane pointed out to me—you know, the guy who wrote Scaramouche and Captain Blood. Howard wanted to write swashbucklers, but he was trying to sell to a magazine called Weird Tales. He couldn’t just go in there with Captain Blood. It’s got to be Captain Blood Meets the Octopus from Hell, you know? [mutual laughter] And that’s why Conan became sword-and-sorcery—because Howard knew he couldn’t sell just swords. King Kull could have been just as good. He had everything going for him, although the place and character names Howard made up for Kull’s earlier stories weren’t as good as the ones he made up later for Conan. The latter had this vaguely familiar feel to them because they came from existing places—you know, Turan or Darfar. Nowadays, using Howard names like Zimbabwei and Darfar will confuse, because those are more or less the names of actual countries again. Aquilonia came from the Aquitane, things of this sort. But the Kull names lacked that color. Somehow, everything clicked with Conan. JA: I have two thoughts on this. The Marvel “Gullivar of Mars” and “Thongor,” I think, weren’t as rich as “Conan.” I think they were perceived by fans—and certainly by me, as a reader then—as copies, even though I liked some of the art on “Gullivar of Mars.” There was also the fact that “Gullivar” and “Thongor” were in books that had reprints in the back. You’re only getting half an issue or so of new stuff. THOMAS: It didn’t help. We got “Thongor” during a period where we were looking to save a little money, so we were doing our own equivalent of Martin Goodman wanting to get back the money we were paying for the rights. Although in the case of “Gullivar of Mars,” that was in the public domain. I was happy to make a deal with Lin for “Thongor,” because I didn’t want him to think we’d abandoned him. Earlier, he had relented and actually let us adapt his one Conan story that wasn’t tied in with de Camp’s at a time when de Camp was still holding out. JA: You know I love John Severin’s art, but his Kull just seemed quiet until Mike Ploog took over. THOMAS: That’s partly because of John’s style, and partly because Kull is a king. It’s harder to have a king in the same kind of action as a young barbarian just coming down from the hills. We didn’t start, after all, with King Conan when we did his comic, even though Howard had started that way. I think [Ross] Andru and [Wally] Wood, and then the Severins [siblings Marie and John], were wonderful teams.

Art “Kulled” From Various Sources Marie Severin and her big brother John, in self-portraits—juxtaposed with their art. The top left illo is Marie’s rough pencils for a Kull/Thulsa Doom drawing in a Severins-sibling portfolio (with, alas, some loss of detail) as printed in FOOM #16 (Dec. 1976)—while the drawing at right center is a J. Severin solo effort from his own Kull portfolio. But the Severins made a sensational team on early issues of Kull the Conqueror, beginning with #2 (Sept. 1971). [Portraits ©2007 Marie Severin & John Severin, respectively; Kull art ©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

Maybe, too, it’s because Kull was given more to thinking than Conan was. He was the kind of guy who could lose himself looking into the mirrors

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

a few touches here and there. I suspect he didn’t do the Kull book because, by then, he was more involved with DC. JA: Swamp Thing starts not too long after that. THOMAS: Otherwise, I’d have been very happy to work with him on Kull. But I wound up going to Ross Andru, whose work I also loved. But I felt his pencils needed a bit more decoration to compete with what Barry was doing, just as I later thought Buscema did, which led to my getting Alcala and Chan. For Andru’s Kull—well, you can’t get any better inker than Wally Wood. They’d have been the regular team. But there were several months between those first two Kull issues. And by that time, Andru and Wood were both gone, so by Kull the Conqueror #2—the third “Kull” outing—we wound up up with yet another team. We had three different overall “teams,” if you count Bernie, in just three issues. Three artistic looks—and all of them excellent! [laughs] A plethora of riches. JA: Later you changed the book’s title to Kull the Destroyer. THOMAS: Stan changed it, just as Ploog came in to draw it and I wrote that one issue. Stan felt maybe the word “Conqueror” was hurting the book—it sounded too much like a king—so he changed the word to “Destroyer.” I remember the two of us were walking down the hall and I argued, “I don’t think the word ‘Conqueror’ is the problem, or that changing it will make a difference.” He got a bit teed off at me for not thinking it was a great idea. I usually did like Stan’s ideas; and in this case, it wasn’t like it was a bad idea. I just didn’t figure it would help. I think what helped sell that book then for a little while was Mike Ploog’s cover and art, plus we were doing a Robert E. Howard story, which got me all fired up. But I was just too busy to continue doing it. I think Steve Engelhart did a good job on Kull after that, but still it kind-of petered away. Maybe if Mike had kept on inking it—but we also lost Mike’s inking after that one issue, and Mike’s work never looked as good when someone else was inking.

Conqueror, Hell! I’m A Destroyer! Mike Ploog’s cover for Kull the Destroyer #11 (Nov. 1973), as reprinted in black-&-white, with gray tones added, in FOOM #2 (Summer 1973). See photo of Mike on p. 51. [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

of Tuzun Thune, and he’d wonder about who was real, him or the Serpent Men—that sort of thing. JA: Now a couple of things: the first “Kull” story is in Creatures on the Loose #10—because I own that original art, you know. [chuckles] THOMAS: Do you? The whole story? The story that Bernie thought for a long time that I had? It got stolen from the office between when it was first printed in Creatures on the Loose and right after I reprinted it in Savage Tales so we could see the artwork better in black-&-white, and I could even print Bernie’s cover. How did you get hold of that story? JA: It was eventually found and returned to Wrightson, who later sold it to an art dealer, and the art dealer sold it to me. Was that a test for “Kull”? So if it had done badly, you might not have done a Kull comic? THOMAS: It was an attempt to get Kull out there, and see if we could get a second Howard comic—and because Bernie had really wanted to do Conan and that hadn’t worked out. Of course, we ended up with a Herb Trimpe cover. Stan didn’t like Bernie’s cover, which underscores the fact that, had I pushed hard earlier for Bernie to do the Conan book, it might not have worked to either my or Bernie’s advantage. The “Kull” story was months later, by which time Bernie had gotten more experience, and his “Skull of Silence” adaptation is gorgeous work. He said equally nice stuff about my adaptation at the time, because I added

JA: Why did Ploog replace the Severins? THOMAS: I don’t remember why Marie left. Remember, the last issue she penciled wasn’t inked by John, and I think she lost interest after her brother left, plus the fact that it wasn’t selling that well, anyway. Marie would have to tell you more, if she remembers. I don’t think she was taken off Kull. JA: Okay, Red Sonja is an immediate hit when you introduce her into the Conan series. THOMAS: Well, in terms of reader reaction, anyway. She wasn’t even on the first cover. JA: Right, but since she was popular with the readers almost immediately, why didn’t you use her more often in the Conan comic book? THOMAS: Conan was a loner. So, once he met her, she had to wander off at the end of the second story [Conan the Barbarian #24]. I always knew she’d be back. But I wanted several months to go by first. I felt Conan shouldn’t be part of a regular team. JA: So you were thinking more in terms of realism than for sales, in a sense. THOMAS: I didn’t really think a lot about sales in terms of Conan. And that’s probably why Stan saved our bacon [mutual chuckling] by insisting that Barry and I use more humanoid villains, starting with #8. That probably made the upturn that saved the book. I wanted to sell the book, of course, but mostly my feeling was that, if we did the best job we could, the book would either sell or it wasn’t going to sell. And it was picking up in sales at that time, so I didn’t have to worry too

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

much. It’s not like I needed Red Sonja and other characters to sell Conan. So I didn’t have her reappear till around #40 or 41. Actually, there’s another story we prepared that should’ve been in Conan the Barbarian a month before that second two-parter—it’s the one that became the lead story in Savage Sword of Conan #1. But, as usual, when we launched Savage Sword— “We have a new book on the schedule and it’s late!” [laughs] She could’ve come back earlier, but I was adapting a lot of Howard’s stories, and I didn’t feel like shoehorning Sonja into those, so I just kept on working. Then the chance came to bring her back, and we did. Are we through with the Howard stuff now? JA: [chuckles] No, you don’t get off that lucky, Roy! [mutual laughter] Because Conan was a more writer-intensive series for you, did you feel like working on this helped you grow as a writer? THOMAS: I’m sure it did. I always thought in terms of bringing pulp-like writing into comics—even Doc Savage, which I was never wild about as writing—and there were a lot of clumsy things about Burroughs, even Howard. It was all pulp-type writing, but I felt that bringing in those characters and those concepts would elevate comics a little. It wasn’t that I didn’t like what Stan Lee, Gardner Fox, and other people had done, myself included… or that everything Howard did was better than most of what, say, Stan Lee did. It’s just that I felt that having a noncomics approach would broaden the appeal of comics and enrich it in some vague way. This is the same motivation that later made me want to bring in science-fiction and to do horror adaptations and not just new stories. JA: You did that Worlds Unknown color comic— THOMAS: Yeah, that was a favorite. But it didn’t sell. JA: —and I forget the name of the other one, that had that great Steranko cover with The Invisible Man. THOMAS: That was Supernatural Thrillers. Stan had the idea for that one, then turned it over to me, and I decided we should adapt some fantasy/horror classics, like Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” and “Killdozer.” H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man was Stan’s idea. I remember some of those worked out quite well, like Howard’s “Valley of the Worm.”

Red Sales In The Sunset You can’t say Red Sonja artist Frank Thorne didn’t throw himself into his work! At top center he confronts Big Red in the flesh (and lots of it!) at the unique Red Sonja Convention held in New Jersey in 1976! Photo courtesy of “Sonja” Angelique Trouvere. The Hyrkanian’s comic sold quite well for a year or two there! Frank himself provided a scan of the original art to the cover of Red Sonja #7 (Jan. 1978). [Art ©2007 Red Sonja Properties, Inc.]

JA: Yeah, that was a good one. Okay, now this is hindsight, [laughs] but it seems to me—and maybe I noticed this because, when I started reading comics, you were already writing—but it seems to me that this is one of your real growth periods, the turn of or the early to mid-’70s. THOMAS: I think working with this other, non-comics material caused me to think more about the writing. I was trying to match Howard’s style, or at least write a bit differently from what I was writing in The Avengers. Challenges like that do make you grow as a writer. You don’t necessarily have to be constantly thinking, “I’m growing as a writer! I’m growing as a writer!” I get physically ill when I see actors and actresses on TV talking about how they’re “growing” all the time. I was just trying to do a good job, and as you do that, maybe you improve in certain ways.

“I Really Did Like Deepening The Marvel Universe” JA: That’s right, because in that same period you did the Kree/Skrull War in The Avengers, which was a bit different from what you’d done before in Avengers. You had like a “Women’s Lib” issue, and things like that in Avengers. In fact, I think you took the whole idea of that further than Lee and Kirby had done in Fantastic Four when they first introduced the Kree. THOMAS: There were two factors in that. One is what you’re talking about, how working with Conan and other adaptation materials made me start thinking a little differently, so that ideas would occur to me that maybe wouldn’t have otherwise. Actually, there are another three things—I sound like Monty Python here, I know. Another was the fact that I really did like deepening the Marvel

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

longer than you anticipated? Did it become richer than you anticipated? THOMAS: Well, I don’t know. It only lasted a few issues, after all, with Neal, plus the four with Sal before. It might have taken up more actual pages if we’d kept the double-size issues that began with Neal’s debut. Actually, I never had thought about exactly how long it would last. I certainly didn’t have any particular idea, say, it was going to last through #100, which was three issues later than it did, and which some thought it might have been intended to do. I was plotting things by the seat of my pants in those days. I would more or less know where I was going, but I wasn’t necessarily planning out where it was going to be at the end of three or four or five issues. I do know I’d already had the idea about the super-heroes coming out of Rick’s brain at the end before Neal arrived, while that’s kind-of peripheral to the actual “Kree-Skrull War.” Otherwise I wouldn’t have done a set-up with the Golden Age heroes in Sal’s last issue. I knew I wanted to use The Supreme Intelligence, though I always liked my own name for him, The Intelligence Supreme, far better. I thought it was classier, and I’m sorry they went back to the other after I left. I knew the war would eventually go off into space, because my template was the Raymond Jones novel This Island Earth. I hated the movie version, but I loved the book in the mid-1950s. But once Neal came aboard, he altered my thinking to some extent, because he would come up with an idea, or do something, and I saw no reason to say, “Don’t do it.” [mutual laughter] He had some ideas, they seemed to work, so that’s fine with me. I just wanted pages to write. JA: Yeah, because I got the feeling that there was a certain “freeformness” as you went along, and you verify that for me.

This Means War! Neal Adams (seen on left with fan Keif Simon) at a recent New York comicon. Photo courtesy of Jim Murtaugh & Keif Simon. Above is a “Kree/Skrull War” page from The Avengers #96 (Feb. 1972), as penciled by Neal, inked by Tom Palmer, and scripted by Roy T. The Rascally One’s proofreading marks are visible at right and bottom; repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Tom. [Art ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Universe a little, so I came up with the “Kree/Skrull War” idea several issues before Neal Adams began to draw The Avengers. I don’t want to, in any way, minimalize Neal’s importance, because, once he was there, he added so much in terms of—not the basic concept, that was already there, and it was just a case of whether I did it right away or whether I let it lie fallow a while and then came back to it—but if Neal hadn’t wanted to do the war, I might’ve gone off in a different direction for a while. But because he liked the idea, and drew it so well, and added plot ideas of his own, it ended up being, I think, far better than if I had done it with most other artists, simply because I didn’t usually talk over story ideas with artists like Sal or John when they were drawing Avengers. It would have just been my ideas. When Neal and I started working together, it became our ideas—not just my ideas, and not just Neal’s ideas—but our ideas. And that was fine with me, because I wasn’t trying to be an auteur; I just wanted to get some comics done and have a good time and have them look and read as well as they could. JA: When you came up with the idea, did your original plan grow

THOMAS: For example, at the start of one issue, Neal suddenly drew Nick Fury on this space station. Now there’d never been a space station run by SHIELD, and it didn’t really have that much importance. It’s only in there for a few pages as a kind of way station. Neal was just doing his version of the way Jack used to do things, where Jack would make up some great idea and then 2-3 pages later he’d moved on and you’d forget it ever happened, but it looked beautiful while it was there. All these touches enriched the story. The Ant-Man’s journey inside The Vision has almost nothing to do with the KreeSkrull War, but Neal wanted to do it, and I said, “Hey, we’ve got a lot of pages to fill, so go for it.” We had just gone to extra-size for what we thought was forever. The Ant-Man sequence is now counted as an integral part of the Kree-Skrull War, but it’s actually totally peripheral to the main plot. If it didn’t exist, you wouldn’t need it, but it was fun and beautiful. JA: But considering that Barry Smith would have the occasional lateness problem, why put him on The Avengers a few issues later? THOMAS: In those days, I don’t think Barry had deadline problems if he wasn’t getting embroiled in trying to draw really ornate material as he was increasingly doing in Conan, so it was easier for him to draw Avengers. He didn’t get so caught up in it as he had with Conan. If Barry ever had deadline problems, it was just because he was putting in so much work. It wasn’t because he was going off and doing other projects. You want to go along with somebody like that. I had more patience with that than I did somebody who I thought simply wasn’t giving us the priority we should have.

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

“I Spent Less Time On The Hulk… And It Sold Better” JA: You wrote some Captain America and some Hulk. You wrote The [Incredible] Hulk for a long time. THOMAS: Captain America, strangely, I never really did write much of. I’d start on him once or twice, and then I’d always find something else to do. But I spent a couple of very successful years on The Incredible Hulk with Herb. JA: But let’s be honest: The Hulk, in some ways—the basic concept is kind-of limited. THOMAS: Yeah, and I wasn’t trying to stretch it, particularly. I was just trying to do fun “Hulk” stories. Herb and I would sit around for twenty minutes or so—since he was working in the office—and talk over an idea. Then he’d draw the pencils from that conversation. I spent less time on The Hulk in terms of both plotting and even dialoguing than I did on any other book I wrote at that time, and it sold better. [Jim chuckles] I know they increased the print run at least a couple of times based on what Herb and I did. It was doing quite well when Herb and Stan had been doing it before, but it picked up even more under us as a team. Of course, having John Severin ink it didn’t hurt, but I think it was primarily the free-wheeling approach Herb and I had to the stories. We were always trying to find—not just another story of the Hulk fighting somebody, but some weird angle on The Hulk. We’d bring in a black kid to be his partner, so that suddenly Hulk had in common with Jimmy Wilson that their skin color’s part of their problem. Having the Hulk split into two characters was like an old DC gimmick, to see how that works with Bruce Banner and the Hulk—or bringing back The Heap, who was a Golden Age character that probably influenced the Hulk in the first place. I wanted to call that character “The Shape,” but Stan insisted I change it to “The Glob.” [Jim chuckles] His instincts were probably better. But I’m proud of the fact that The Glob precedes both Man-Thing and Swamp Thing by quite some months!

The Incredible Herb So much of Herb Trimpe’s work on The Incredible Hulk is back in print that we thought we’d show you instead the special drawing below that he did for FOOM #19 (Fall 1977)—plus something of his that’s never been printed: pencils for an unused cover for Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD drawn circa 1969, courtesy of collector/dealer Tom Horvitz. That’s when Herb illustrated issues #8 & #13-15 of that series. Photo from a 1970s Marvel collection; thanks to R. Dewey Cassell. [Art ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: The Hulk, at times, got a little sciencefictiony, too, which I think helped to get him out of that desert setting, endlessly fighting “Thunderbolt” Ross. THOMAS: One nice thing was when Gerry Conway did that Moby-Dick approach, which I suspect was his idea. He ghosted the plots on those couple of issues. JA: The Hulk is a limited concept. He’s a very primal character, and even has another skin color. A lot of comic readers have a sense of alienation from society. That’s a broad brush to sweep with, and I wonder if the Hulk kind-of fuels into that kind of feeling.

THOMAS: I think he does. Of course, in recent years, Peter David and others have gone a lot further with the Hulk. But, at that time, I don’t think Stan would have wanted to make the kind of radical changes in the Hulk himself that have been done in the last 20 years. What I had to do was to change, not the Hulk, but to see what I could do with the

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

Hulk as he existed. Remember, at this time, these characters were all just five or ten years old. It’s not like when they were 20 or 30 years old.

“I Wasn’t Looking For An Excuse To Change [FF And Spider-Man]” JA: I think the same might be said of Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man, which you also wrote. You were more or less following Stan’s lead, rather than expanding it. THOMAS: I wasn’t looking for an excuse to change them radically. Since Stan had already replaced Invisible Girl/Woman with Crystal for a while, I brought in Medusa, and that worked reasonably well. And I had a lot of fun when we put Ben in an exo-skeleton that looked like The Thing, and brought in Power Man. I could play around with it, but I wasn’t looking to do major things, just to do reasonably good stories with the Fantastic Four. Maybe I should have been more adventurous with it. JA: The FF and Amazing Spider-Man were the top series at that time, and of course very closely identified with Stan as the writer, no matter who the actual scripter was. THOMAS: Yeah, I’ve heard that. JA: [laughs] I wonder if you felt any trepidation, because you once said you were more comfortable writing Fantastic Four than Spider-Man.

Spiders, Lizards, and Bats The Amazing Spider-Man #101-104, the quartet of issues Gil Kane and Roy Thomas did together to spell Stan while he wrote a screenplay with French New Wave director Alain Resnais, is in print in both a color Marvel Masterwork and a b&w Essentials volume—but at left are Gil’s pencils for the splash of #102 (Nov. 1971), as preserved by David G. “Hambone” Hamilton. Sorry the photocopy gets weaker on the left, but hey—at least this art exists! [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Just occurred to us we haven’t shown you a picture of Stan the Man yet this issue—and we should! So above is an oft-reprinted photo of Stan and friend, as personalized by Stan when he couldn’t attend Roy’s 48th-birthday party in LA in 1988.

THOMAS: It was just that I liked writing the FF better than Spider-Man. I wasn’t really into that angst kind of thing Spidey went in for. Gerry Conway really got into that, later. Whether Spidey was a teenager or 20, I wasn’t as interested in all those personal touches, or in his romance with Gwen Stacy. I did some of that kind of thing earlier, when I was doing The X-Men, but I was never as fascinated with the soap opera element of comics as Stan was. That’s probably a weakness of mine in terms of the Marvel line, but it just meant I was better off getting someone else to write those strips. Gerry proved very adaptable to it, while I think I did okay with Fantastic Four, which also had those elements, though Jack had never got into those elements as much as, say, Ditko— and later Romita—did with Stan. Even having the same writer, you end up with quite different books, because of the differences between Kirby’s approach and the approaches of Ditko and even Romita. JA: Now Stan was fairly hands-off on you, compared to today’s editorial style. Would he have been more critical, or would he have been paying a little more attention, once you got writing the FF or Spider-Man? THOMAS: By that time, I don’t think that he had any real problems with my writing—even though the four issues of Amazing Spider-Man I did [#101-104] were in the midst of his run. When I became the second person to write SpiderMan, I deliberately did some things differently. I mentioned characters like Batman and The Spider, which Stan had never done. But in #101-102 I inherited that damn extra-arms thing from Stan and didn’t do much with it. I certainly wasn’t able to inspire Gil to do anything with the extra arms, and he had them finally fade away, because he ran out of room. I

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

thought was bad, but the rest of our run was pretty good, I think. I think Gil and I made a good team. We took what was in the Lee-Romita approach, but we felt like, “It’s only four issues, so we can turn ourselves loose.” We were doing something different, because we were doing the first vampire story in Spider-Man. Even though that was Stan’s idea because the Code had just been changed to allow vampires, and he wanted a vampire, he didn’t want Dracula. He wanted a more super-villain kind of vampire. Within those limits, he turned us loose. He was busy working on a screenplay with Alain Renais, and except for okaying the covers, I don’t think that he asked me to change anything or had any complaints, even when Gil and I went a little further out than most issues of Spider-Man, when we suddenly, for our last two issues, took him down to the Savage Land. Stan might have done that—after all, he took Daredevil to Ka-Zar’s world—but our story doesn’t have as much of a Stan Lee feel as, say, Gerry Conway’s do a year later. Gerry was making—very successfully—more of an attempt to imitate Stan’s style, because he was in it for the long haul. I was just playing around for four months, so I didn’t worry about it as much. So when Gil came up with this idea of a King Kong-type story he’d like to do, I said, “Hey, that sounds like fun. It’ll be different and we’ll get Jonah Jameson down there and turn him into Carl Denham [Jim chuckles] and have a lot of fun,” and we did.

Four-Warned Is Four-Armed A fabulous foursome of John Buscema-penciled panels from Fantastic Four #108 (March 1971) which were deleted. Stan Lee, rather than Roy, wrote this issue—Roy’s first was #119 (Feb. 1972)—but we figured you wouldn’t mind. Thanks to Rick Shurgin (we think!) for saving these pieces, as related in an earlier issue of A/E. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: Do you think Stan felt any kind of pangs of regret in giving up those titles when he finally did? THOMAS: Yeah, I think so. In varying degrees, I suspect he hated giving up every one of the titles he relinquished, starting with Sgt. Fury that I inherited, maybe even Millie the Model. In late 1965 he was going to give me “Iron Man,” but then he took it back. He gave up “Doctor Strange” and I, then Denny [O’Neil], did the rest of them. These were characters that he had started. He had taken all of them back after that first year or two when Larry [Lieber] and others were writing some of them from his plots or ideas. I think he would have liked to have kept on writing all of them, in a way. That’s one of the reasons I hadn’t applied for a job at Marvel and was only interested in DC—I figured Stan wanted to write the whole line, and it made sense that he did, because he was better than anybody else. But, of course, if you want to expand, eventually you have to get another writer or three. Even so, he wrote a hundred-plus issues of FF, and an even hundred of Spider-Man, before he left them even briefly. When he came back to them, he probably intended to do them for a longer time. But he soon became the publisher and president, and then he just had to give up most writing. JA: Is it true that around 1967-68 Stan basically said to you and a few other people that, instead of changing things drastically in series from that point on, now you’d do only “the illusion of change”? THOMAS: That was said to Gary Friedrich and me, so it was 1968 or before. It wasn’t “don’t make any changes,” but he wasn’t looking for a lot of radical stuff. When I see the way the comics change radically now every three months, so that everything you knew three months earlier is wrong, something that finally totally turned me off reading current comics—well, how can I get interested in a comic book when I know that somebody will turn it on its head a few months later? JA: It drove a reader like me out, too.

THOMAS: Stan meant that when he said it. And it did put on the brakes a little bit. If you asked him about that today, he probably wouldn’t even remember he ever said it. It’s easy to get paralyzed by success and think, “Now, I’ve got everything just right, so let’s keep it going this way.” And, of course, it never works. JA: Well, your changes in Fantastic Four are generally cosmetic and only for short periods. THOMAS: Right. That was partly based on my own instincts. I wasn’t looking to radically change Fantastic Four because I liked it the way it was. JA: But you did little things, like giving The Human Torch a red costume. THOMAS: I thought they looked kind-of dull in all-blue uniforms, so I decided to change that. I also had John Buscema start drawing the Torch more like the Russ Heath version from that one 1953 story. It was an attempt to to see if we could jazz up the character. The Torch hadn’t become as popular on his own in the ’60s and ’70s as he was in the ’40s, because he was a team member, so I was looking for something to make him stand out. JA: Do you think also, it might have been because of the fact that the original Human Torch was an android? In the FF he was very young and cocky, more than confident. Spider-Man is neither cocky nor confident. But I wonder if the Torch’s personality might have held him back, because, let’s face it, he’s such an iconic, powerful figure. I remember, in Marvel Team-Up for a while, every third issue was a Human Torch team-up. THOMAS: Maybe we were trying to find some way not to be so dependent on Spider-Man. I think it was somebody else’s idea—maybe Gerry’s—but I don’t recall. JA: But then you do a Human Torch comic that only lasts eight issues and it’s all reprint.

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

THOMAS: We were given the directive to do a Human Torch reprint comic. At the time, they were looking for ways to make money without spending money. It appealed to me, because I could put those Golden Age stories in the back. We weren’t expecting really good sales out of that book—and of course we didn’t get them. [mutual laughter] We got less than we hoped for, because I’d have liked to see it go on. I don’t believe I championed a Human Torch title with original stories, because I didn’t even like the idea of The Thing having his own title in Marvel Two-in-One. One of the reasons I didn’t mind giving up Fantastic Four later was because then I was only one of two Thing writers, and I mostly like to take a character and write all his adventures. I can adjust to being part of a team of people writing, but it’s not my natural thing… and I couldn’t have done both titles. Even after writing the first issue of Marvel Team-Up, I turned it over to others. JA: You only wrote a few of the What Ifs, as well. THOMAS: I’d thought I’d write them all, originally, and the one by Shooter [#3] turned out quite well. I’ve never read the whole story, but I know it was quite popular, with Gil Kane’s art. By then I had moved to L.A., and there are other things to do in southern California [Jim chuckles] that I couldn’t get out and do in New York. It was a new life. I was going through a longterm separation that would lead to a divorce, I was on a new coast, I was meeting new people and doing different things. So I found it harder and harder to concentrate on just grinding out the comics. Conan wasn’t so hard, but What If—well, okay, let somebody else do some. Don Glut needed the work at that time, so I would come up with some of the ideas, like the “1950s Avengers,” and he would write them. And after a little while, I drifted off totally from What If, once I’d done the handful of stories I’d thought up at the outset. And with Red Sonja, I was working with my friend Clara Noto, a former Hollywood film editor who’d moved back out to L.A. to write screenplays. She needed wheels, so I was paying for her rental car for months [Jim chuckles] in exchange for her doing the plot and first draft. I always rewrote the scripts, but it was basically her story with just input from me. It probably didn’t do my reputation any good, because, though she and Don did good work, it was different from what the folks back East expected from me. But by then, I’d been at the game for over a decade, and I was losing a little interest in it, once I was no longer involved editorially on a day-to-day basis. Once I left being editor-in-chief soon after Labor Day weekend of 1974, I began to mentally distance myself from comics, even though I’m still in it now, 33 years later. I still worked for Marvel for another six years under contract as writer/editor, and then I was under contract to DC for six years. Originally, at Marvel, I’d sort-of worked my way up without really trying to, to being editor-in-chief and in charge of things, under Stan. Once I left that position, I found myself becoming less interested in current comics. I even stopped reading most of them, and I never started up again.

“[Sub-Mariner] Was Always #3 Of The ‘Big Three’ In the 1940s” JA: Yeah, I understand. By the way, I want to ask about SubMariner because it was my feeling as a reader at the time that it was

The Ancient Mariners Bill Everett in the early 1970s (he passed away in February of ’73), from that 1970s Marvel collection, courtesy of R. Dewey Cassell—and two beautifully-crafted heads of his major creation, The Sub-Mariner, from a 1974 Creation Con program book. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.—and both Bill and Namor were definitely that!]

not really one of the top-tier books. Considering how popular he’d once been, why do you feel that character couldn’t elevate himself into a top-tier book? THOMAS: I don’t know. He was always #3 of the “Big Three” in the 1940s. I suspect it’s partly because he didn’t have a costume. [mutual chuckling] I hate to come up with something as crass as that, but that’s part of the reason for John Romita and me giving him that costume near the end. He’s certainly one of the best characters in the history of comics. He was popular as a guest star in Fantastic Four, and he did okay in the comic books done by both Buscemas and Colan—and of course, when Bill Everett came back, he did some interesting work with him. But nothing had really made the character grab the modern-day Marvel readers as much as before. In the early Fantastic Four, he was basically the villain. So later on, when he becomes the hero, who is he going to fight against? Are you going to bring in a guest star every issue to fight against him, or just have him fighting normal humans? If he starts battling super-villains, then he has to act more like a super-hero. Somehow or other, we just never really quite found the right range for him. There were other attempts here and there later, but nobody’s ever really made a top-tier character out of The Sub-Mariner again. And that’s a shame. JA: You knew that character as well as anybody, but even you weren’t able to do it. You certainly had the ability to do it, but something about the character seems to have held you back. THOMAS: Yeah, it sold pretty well through that period when I was doing it, but it was not as strong as some other books, even when we had John or Sal or different good people doing it. I always enjoyed doing the book, but somehow it didn’t quite work over the long haul. Bill restored a nice, quirky, personal punch near the end, but it still didn’t grab enough readers. It was just too alien to the rest of the

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

Marvel Universe at that time, because Bill didn’t really think in terms of what the Marvel readers wanted at that stage in his life. JA: [chuckles] Yeah, I don’t think he was very worried about it. THOMAS: No. JA: Now, did his books—his Sub-Mariner issues, I think he started like issue #50—did they sell very well? THOMAS: I don’t think they sold too well, or else they would have lasted. But I think that they sold okay. They didn’t decline especially from what was going on before. But the problem was that Bill was very spotty on it. We had to keep throwing in reprints in the back, and things of this sort, because he wasn’t able to do it on a regular monthly basis. JA: Then they had Sam Kweskin help draw it. THOMAS: Yeah, and there’d be issues where Bill would be absent entirely or we’d have to cut a story in the middle because he couldn’t finish it in time. I enjoyed throwing in a reprint from the ’50s, but that’s not what the readers were looking for. There were so many other books fighting for attention that Sub-Mariner got lost in the shuffle. But he was too good a character not to stick around. We kept trying different things. That was the whole idea of Super-Villain Team-Up, too, which was probably Stan’s idea—to team up Dr. Doom and SubMariner permanently. JA: When you started doing anthology books again, like Astonishing Tales and Amazing Adventures, you took lesser characters to see if they would fly. Wally Wood did those first few “Dr. Dooms.” Why did he leave? THOMAS: Well, we felt that, every issue, we were getting less and less of Wally. Stan, I remember, particularly felt on one or two of those stories that “This isn’t really Wally. This is him having some assistant doing it and him just inking it,” and he didn’t feel we were really getting the best of Wally Wood the way he had a few years earlier in Daredevil. So, since Stan and Wally hadn’t always had the best of relationships—to say the least—Stan asked me to talk to Wally about doing more of his stuff and not farming it out. That didn’t work out too well. What happened was that Wally just quit entirely. I’d told Stan earlier, “I don’t think it will work. I think he’ll just leave if we start talking about assistants.” Maybe I just didn’t do it tactfully enough—or maybe nobody could’ve. God knows I tried, because I really liked Wally’s work. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d argue harder to Stan that we should just leave him alone, because it was either have Wally to the extent that we did or not have him at all. Wally was never really going to be committed to Marvel in any particular way, shape, or form. You always knew that the minute something else came along, he was going to be off like a shot. Some people felt they were investing in Marvel and they wanted to be around for a while. Wally was not that way. If he hadn’t left then, he’d probably have left a month or two or six later.

Tuska Is Doom-ed Since Wally Wood’s handful of “Dr. Doom” stories are more accessible, here’s something you probably haven’t seen before—a recent commission drawing by George Tuska of Vic with Mr. & Mrs. Fantastic, courtesy of Arnie Grieves. George took over the feature in Astonishing Tales when Wally walked. [Dr. Doom, Reed & Sue Richards TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

kind-of interesting, because there weren’t too many villains who’d headlined their own books before. THOMAS: Dr. Doom was one who could have just about handled it. Maybe the mistake was to try to do it in the 10-page installments. Maybe the time of the “split book” was dead by then and we shouldn’t have tried to revive it. Maybe it would’ve been better to have had a whole Dr. Doom book and a whole Ka-Zar book. The two-character book was worth another try, but nothing much came of it. “The Inhumans” didn’t last, nor did “The Black Widow.” Well, Ka-Zar got his own book eventually and limped along. He’d been conceived as an imitation of Tarzan—so do you keep having him be a pseudo-Tarzan, or have him try running around in cities like our other heroes? In a city setting, he’s just a guy with his shirt off, except, of course, he does have a saber-tooth tiger, which you can’t denigrate too much.

JA: Yeah, because the first story that he did was his best one.

JA: [laughs] Certainly, it’s a little harder to handle than the ocelot you owned.

THOMAS: The first one was no problem, but then the next couple looked less and less like Wally. It wasn’t they were bad, and it wasn’t like we had anyone lined up to replace him, so maybe we should have just tried to live with Wally. We were hoping, I guess, that he’d just shape up. But he decided to ship out instead.

THOMAS: Well, I don’t know. I had as much trouble with that ocelot as he could’ve had with that tiger. [NOTE: See a fuller accounting of the “ocelot incident” in the TwoMorrows trade paperback John Romita—And All That Jazz!, now on sale.]

JA: [chuckles] Well, even to do a “Dr. Doom” series, I thought, was

JA: [laughs] It just seems like some characters—and I’m thinking Black Widow and Ka-Zar in particular—were better suited to be

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

THOMAS: He didn’t give me the title “editor-in-chief” title right away. I was just supposed to be the “story editor.” I don’t know if that would’ve been the term in the books, but I suspect Stan as publisher saw himself continuing to act as editor-in-chief, because he knew that his strength really was the stories, the direction of the books. He didn’t want to give that up. There’s no reason to think I could do it as well, and he wanted to do as much of it as he could himself, and besides, he and I worked rather well as a team. I wasn’t so ambitious that I was looking to wrest it away from him. I was quite content to be second banana. When you’re a second banana to somebody as good as Stan, you don’t mind that much. Well, maybe somebody else would, but this wasn’t All About Eve. [mutual chuckling] This was more like Batman and Robin. While I wanted to do things on my own, I was just happy to help Stan realize what he wanted to do, because he’s the guy who’d had the vision for the company. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t Martin Goodman, it wasn’t even Jack Kirby—it was Stan. I’ll get some arguments on that, but I’m absolutely convinced. He’s the only person that did it, and maybe he’s the only person who could have done it. There’s certainly no evidence that anybody else could have. So I wasn’t looking to overthrow that. I just wanted to make my own little niche and have fun with it and do the best job that I could. Still, I didn’t like being just “story editor,” because I really wanted to be—under Stan, at least—over the art and everything else. I felt that was the only way to be efficient.

Frankie And Johnny Were… Well… Frank Giacoia (far right) & John Romita (right) each had a piece of the “art director” title and responsibility in the early 1970s—but by 1973 Jazzy Johnny was definitely the man! Giacoia, of course, remained one of Marvel’s top inkers, despite his deadline problems. Photos from FOOM #3 (Fall 1973). Earlier, John and Frank had worked in tandem on layouts by Jack Kirby for the “Captain America” story in Tales of Suspense #77 (May 1966). Thanks to Matt Moring and Chris Fama. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

supporting characters that appear every so often, instead. THOMAS: Like The Vision. I never really had any thought of trying to put him in his own book. He was a great character in Avengers, and that was fine. That’s what he stayed for the whole almost 50 issues that I wrote after Avengers #57.

“I Was Just Supposed To Be The ‘Story Editor’” JA: Okay, you became editor-in-chief in 1972. Now Stan moves up in the company. How do you think Stan felt about giving up being editor-in-chief? And how much did you want that job?

So Stan appointed me “story editor,” and John Verpoorten was the production manager, and Frank Giacoia got named—well, I don’t know if it was ever an official title, but I always thought of him as “assistant art director,” with Stan as the art director— although John Romita had a big role to play there, too. So who was the art director as of mid-1972? There wasn’t one. Stan had always had that title, “Editorial and Art Director.” So Frank and I were just “promoted” to being “story editor” and “assistant art director”—and it didn’t work out. It was an unstable little triumvirate that Stan created there, and it didn’t last more than a few weeks— because Frank Giacoia, as good as he was, just wasn’t up to the job of being an art director like Romita was a little later. If Romita wasn’t offered the title, it was only because he was just too valuable, doing so many other things, including Spider-Man. Frank really wanted the job, because it was a chance to mostly to deal with covers; it gave him a chance to make money without having to do as much drawing and inking. The only thing is, we suddenly had these impasses. Well, I’ve told that story before. JA: Which one? THOMAS: I just didn’t really feel the story editor thing was working out. It was just too frustrating, because I’m having to deal with Frank, but he wasn’t under me—and he wasn’t producing cover sketches as fast or as good as we needed. So unless I went to went to Stan and he talked to Frank, there was nobody to tell Frank, “Do something.” I had no such problems with Verpoorten as production manager. But, after just a few weeks, I was at my wit’s end and just thinking, “Maybe I should just get out.” I always had feelers from Carmine at DC, and sometimes they were tempting. I liked DC’s characters. Maybe it was time for a change—and that was another time when Gil Kane was so

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

supposed to be and what you and Stan wanted.

important in my life. I remember moaning the blues to Gil about it, the same way he did to me about other things.

THOMAS: Yeah. He and I were both good at anticipating Stan… and at turning his ideas into finished products. Stan knew we’d take the ball and run with it. He could count on us in that way, just as, earlier, in a production situation, he’d been able to count on Sol Brodsky. I don’t think John Verpoorten and Stan had the same rapport as Stan and Sol had, although they got along well. I think Romita, Brodsky, and I were probably three of the people who were the most in tune with Stan during the period of the ’60s and ’70s, the same way Joe Maneely or a couple of people were back in the ’50s.

And Gil says, “My boy, [mutual laughter] don’t let it worry you. It’ll all come to you.” I said, “What are you talking about?” And he says, “Well, look. You’ve got these three people.” And he just analyzed it perfectly. He says, “John Verpoorten doesn’t count. He just wants to get the books out. He doesn’t care how it happens, as long as he can get the books out, so he’s no threat. He’s not ambitious, trying to build an empire or anything. And Frank’s a good inker, but he’s totally incompetent as an art director because he’s never really worked at being at artist. He’s always been an inker. You know he can’t make it over the long haul. So,” Gil said, “all you have to do is hang in there a little while longer, and everything will come falling to you, just like you want.” I wasn’t too sure. And then, a few days later, maybe a week later, something came up and Stan called me in because he wasn’t happy with the stuff Frank was doing. He wanted to know why I wasn’t riding Frank, [laughs] to make him shape up. I said, “There’s a very simple reason, Stan. It’s because Frank is not under me. You made us equals, so therefore the only person who can give him orders is you. I can’t tell him what to do, because I’m not his boss.”

“Skywald And Atlas” Like, “Jolly Solly Brodsky” Didn’t Occur To Stan In 1964? “Sparkling SOLLY BRODSKY”? Well, that’s how Stan tagged him in the photo section of 1964’s Marvel Tales Annual. While Sol isn’t primarily remembered as an artist, he was drawing (and occasionally writing?) back in the Golden Age, and once told Roy T. he had created the Holyoke hero “The Red Cross” in 1942. Along with inking Fantastic Four #3-4, he embellished John Buscema’s pencils on the cover of Sub-Mariner #1 (May 1968) while serving as Marvel’s production manager. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

So Stan said, “I think maybe we’d better change that.” [chuckles] So that’s when I officially became editor-in-chief, and Frank was still assistant art director or whatever, and before long he was sort-of shunted back into being an artist and Romita finally became the official art director, as he should’ve been all along. I’ve always found it funny that Gil analyzed the situation exactly. All I had to do was sit tight and not do anything for a couple of weeks. [Jim chuckles] Once John Romita was art director, I guess I was technically his “superior”—but it was never a question. For one thing, we respected each other and John just wanted to do whatever was necessary. Of course, if John and I had gotten into a serious dispute, John would’ve had direct access to Stan in a way Frank hadn’t… but, like I said, it never came up.

Frank got to hate me, feeling I had sabotaged him… when in reality he had sabotaged himself. I suspect he felt similarly about John Romita. Frank talked to me from the heart once, soon afterward, about how he had “busted my hump” at that job, and I didn’t know what to say except make sympathetic sounds, because it sure hadn’t looked to us like he was busting any humps. But we all liked Frank, sometimes in spite of himself, and we liked his inking. JA: Don’t you think it worked so well between you and Romita because of John’s temperament, his willingness to be a team player, rather than to live by a title like Frank, in a certain sense, was doing? Also, John probably had a better grasp on what Marvel was

JA: Well, there’s also the fact that, frankly, Sol Brodsky wasn’t that great a comics artist.

THOMAS: He was a competent artist, but it wasn’t his major talent. He was a good inker, but he was just more of an organizer and overseer. Sol’s idea was always whatever will get the book out in time. Well, that’s good up to a point, because you need somebody like that. Otherwise, even somebody like me who is pretty practical can worry something to death and not get it out. And guys like Sol, and Verpoorten later on, they’d be the ones riding Stan or other editors, saying, “We’ve got to get this book out.” Somebody sometimes had to stand up to Stan and say, “You can’t play around any more, or we’re going to eat a big expense on this book.” JA: Right, because of late fees. I think your point about Sol is particularly well-illustrated by what happened when he left and started Skywald. I know that later, when Goodman started Atlas Comics, you had some discussion with some creative people, that, “Hey, if you leave here for Atlas and it doesn’t work out, don’t count on automatically being able to come back.” Why do you think Sol was able to escape that?

THOMAS: Because Stan needed him—also because Sol had left under very friendly circumstances. Besides, I don’t think Stan ever saw Sol Brodsky or Skywald as a real threat, even though Goodman got really annoyed at Skywald for various reasons. Stan knew Sol’s skills, which were as an artist in general and a production person/overseer, an expeditor. He never said this to me, but I think he probably didn’t feel that Sol Brodsky and Israel Waldman were going to come up with a company that would be much of a threat to Marvel at that stage. Besides, he liked Sol, and I think he felt, “If Sol can make a go of it, okay.” Sol was smart to talk to Stan before leaving, the same way Stan’s

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

I remember once Stan had to go out to lunch with some businessman because Chip had sold the same character rights to two different people. Chip had gotten himself in a real potential legal bind there, and Stan had to smooth-talk one of the parties. And of course Romita’s told the story of how, in the early 1970s, he and Stan prepared samples for a Spider-Man newspaper strip, and Chip never even took it to anybody. They found the package of strips unopened in Chip’s drawer when he left the company, months and months later! JA: To go back here, I want to tie a little bit of a contrast between Skywald and the Atlas company because, you know, Andru and Esposito go to work for Skywald. I think Bill Everett did some work for them, too. And none of them seemed to suffer any repercussions from that. It seemed like they were welcomed back with open arms, more or less.

Son-Rise You’ve seen this photo before—but it’s the only known pic of Martin (on right) and Chip Goodman together, at a dinner party in 1966. Photo courtesy of Bruce Jay Friedman.

brother Larry did later on—that he just felt he needed to try this. It’s not the same as Jack Kirby calling Stan up and saying, “I’ve already quit and I’m working for DC.” Or Ditko, who just told Sol one day, “I’ll finish this job and then I’m done.” The extra problem with Atlas later, of course, was—you know, it’s like Jaws 3, “this time, it’s personal.” Martin Goodman was out to destroy Marvel, or do anything he could to Marvel, because the Cadence conglomerate had reneged on its promise to keep his son Chip in charge as publisher. Stan somehow got the high position away from Chip. I don’t know about all the things that happened in that connection. I wasn’t privy to it. JA: One thing I heard was that Stan told them, “It’s either Chip or me.” THOMAS: Well, he may have. I think Chip was somebody whose judgment it was hard for Stan to respect as much as he respected Goodman’s. Martin Goodman was the guy who started the company, and Stan always said he had a good cover sense. Stan had a grudging respect for Martin Goodman that didn’t translate to somebody who was his own age or younger who was just there because he was the boss’ son. And, while Chip probably worked hard, I don’t really think he was particularly up to the job. I mean, Stan never had us put animal masks on a bunch of Western villains hiding behind trees. [Jim chuckles] I kind-of liked Chip. I think he tried hard, he tried to be a dutiful son and so forth. He just didn’t quite have it. Maybe if he’d run it with a looser hand—but I think he and Stan were just going to be at loggerheads. And eventually, Stan must’ve thought, “Well, I’m the guy who brought this company up,” especially when Goodman wasn’t there any longer. Chip Goodman had nothing to do with it. JA: I can’t imagine that Chip Goodman could have come anywhere near Stan in terms of keeping Marvel what it was. THOMAS: I don’t think he could have. Without Stan there, I think he might well have run it into the ground. Even if he had some other people like myself and Romita who knew what we were doing, I think that to the extent that Chip meddled in things, he’d have made it worse. I say that as somebody, as I said, who did not hate or even dislike Chip. I never really had any unpleasant dealings with him, but I just felt he really wasn’t particularly up to it. We’d just go in and hear his pronouncements and roll our eyes.

THOMAS: I think Stan groused about it a little, but in the long run, Skywald didn’t last long enough. On the other hand, if we hadn’t had work for people when they were left high and dry by Skywald, or later by Atlas, I don’t think that Stan—or I, if I’d been editor in the latter case—would’ve felt any responsibility toward those “prodigal sons.” The only person besides the Goodmans that Stan felt anger toward, so far as I know, was Archie Goodwin, because he came to feel Archie was trying a bit too hard to raid some of “our people” for Atlas. But Stan got over it—or else Archie wouldn’t have become editor-in-chief a couple of years later, right? JA: Were either you or Stan worried about Atlas hurting the company before the books even came out? THOMAS: I can’t speak for Stan. But you had to take Martin Goodman, with all the money he had, plus his track record, as a serious threat. I sure did, or else I wouldn’t have considered working for him, as I was half-tempted to do when I was approached. Just a little bit, because who knew how things were going to go, and I wasn’t always having the best time at Marvel because—not because of Stan, but because of this guy Al Landau, who was put in as the president of the company. He and I didn’t get along. So some of my loyalty to Marvel and Stan were kind-of being eaten at by other factors—plus, maybe just a natural restlessness after being someplace for about a decade. Luckily, once I saw the Atlas product, I began to think, “Except by sheer flooding of the newsstands, this isn’t really good enough to be a threat.” Some of those books were maybe better than some of Marvel’s books, but on the average, they weren’t. They were just rubber-stamp versions. Everything was some Marvel character taken in a slightly different direction. The Brute was the Hulk, and this character was that character, and so forth. JA: Ironjaw was Conan. [chuckles] THOMAS: Yeah, so they probably weren’t going to become a primary force. But I had to tell one or two people—maybe it was Don McGregor or somebody, since I think he might have been on staff at the time—I said, “You’re free to leave. It’s not like we’re going to hold it against you in the sense of, ‘You’ll never work again at this company,’ or anything like that. But think about it, because, if it doesn’t work out at Atlas, we’re not going to get rid of somebody else to make a place for you.” And there’s no reason we should have. I mean, they take their chances the same way we all do. JA: It’s fair. I mean, if someone stays loyal to you, you’re not going to displace him. THOMAS: Yeah. That’s why I always tried to find a place for people like Don Heck and Bill Everett and others who had trouble. They’d been loyal and been important to the company, even if they weren’t so much any more. Stan believed in rewarding loyalty, and so did I.

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

“Maybe I Wasn’t Really An Editor-In-Chief Type” JA: When you became editor-in-chief, with the title comes a pay raise, I hope. [chuckles] THOMAS: I don’t remember. I was given the choice—did I want to be called “editor-in-chief” or “executive editor,” and I said, “‘Executive editor’ sounds like somebody who comes to work every day in a tie, and ‘editor-in-chief’ sounds like Perry White. I want to be editor-inchief.” I put in the hyphens. I like it hyphenated, like one word. JA: Did you get your own office? THOMAS: Oh, yeah. Finally. It was small—but it was an office. JA: [laughs] Then did you have to sign a contract? THOMAS: I never had a contract until after I left that job.

unless Stan could have learned to be much more hands-off, I suspect he and Will—well, their approaches would have clashed. Eisner was never really a super-hero guy. The Spirit was just a guy in a mask to him— and he’d have dropped the mask if he could’ve. I’m not sure what my own reaction would’ve been to Eisner—let alone Sol Brodsky or John Romita or someone else—suddenly becoming editor over me, a layer in between Stan and myself. I’ve a feeling I might have left for DC a few years earlier, or at least left the staff job and just gone off in my own little corner, as I did in ’74. That would have been with ultimate respect for Stan and Will, or for Sol or John—but I would’ve felt that, if I wasn’t good enough to inherit that job from Stan, then why stay there? JA: What were the best parts and the worst parts of being editor-inchief? THOMAS: The best part was just being—subject to Stan, anyway— something resembling the final word on most things Marvel. I always

JA: How much did being editor-in-chief take away from your writing? THOMAS: It took away from my time, because I suddenly had to come in five days a week instead of two or three, which meant I couldn’t write as much—so I had to give up Avengers and so forth. But at the same time, I still had to write, so I felt I couldn’t give as much time to writing as I wanted and I couldn’t give as much time to being editor-in-chief as I wanted. I wasn’t able to even read all the books. I had good writers, but you still need to keep on top of things more than I did. I did enjoy things about the job. But, after a while, it kind-of palled on me, and I was mostly treading water for a couple of years, and I don’t think that’s the best way to pursue that job. JA: You were also still editing certain titles in a more hands-on fashion. THOMAS: Well, on all the books I edited—and that included Savage Sword of Conan, on which I did more editing because of back-up features, articles, and the like—my philosophy was get good writers and good artists, and let them go. The writers became virtual unpaid editors, the same way I had been. You put in extra work, but on the other hand, you got more authority over what you did. It was a tradeoff. You got more responsibility for no extra money, but I wasn’t going to be looking over the writer’s shoulder, and he didn’t have to get his plots approved by me and be trekking in all the time to talk to me. If they had an idea, they could just do it—and if I didn’t like it, we’d talk about it, with an eye toward the next issue. It worked pretty well with the top-line writers; some of the secondary writers it didn’t work as well with. JA: Did being editor-in-chief change your relationships in the office that much, or with freelancers? THOMAS: Yeah, I think so. You don’t really notice it because it was just like suddenly doing a bit more of the same thing I’d been doing. Stan was still there, except more often, and I was still there, except more often. Suddenly, I was making more decisions directly, but a lot of that was still coming from Stan. He was a very hands-on publisher. That gradually evolved over time, and I suspect it would have evolved further if I had stayed more than two years.

Sinister? Supreme? You Decide!

I suspect there was some resentment toward me, as there would be with anybody who has that job. But I think most people just thought it was natural that, if Stan wasn’t going to be editor, I was just the logical person to do it. I’ve heard these tales about Stan wanting, sometime or another, to give the editor-in-chief job to Will Eisner. I don’t know exactly when that would have been. I really don’t think that Eisner, genius that he was, would have been right for Marvel Comics. Also,

Perhaps the prime casualty of Roy’s two-year stint as Marvel’s editor-in-chief was his having to relinquish the scripting of his beloved Avengers in mid1972—though the writing reins were admirably picked up by Steve Englehart with issue #105. Here’s a page from Avengers #85 (Feb. 1971), the first appearance of The Squadron Supreme—a year after the debut of their evil twins, The Squadron Sinister. Art by John Buscema & Frank Giacoia. Lady Lark and Tom Thumb (and some of the plot elements for this ish, Roy believes) were the idea of fellow writer Len Wein. Thanks to Jerry Ordway, of all people, for the photocopy of the original art. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

felt that my basic job was to come in and make decisions. I didn’t have to plan ahead too much at that time, but I just had to make decisions every day. And sometimes, I don’t think it made as much difference what the decision was—it’s simply the fact that I could make one, and one or two of my successors had more problems in that area. I liked the idea of being the head of all those comics. And the thing that was least pleasant was almost exactly the same thing: it was having so many books under me that I couldn’t make that much of an imprint on any of them unless I really wanted to devote every spare moment to the job, 80 hours a week. I didn’t have time to even read the comics any more. I was spending all my time looking over Xeroxes in order to come up with cover ideas and writing cover copy and things of this sort. Maybe I wasn’t really an editor-in-chief type. When I see one or two of the other people who were editor-in-chief, maybe I should be prouder of that. [Jim laughs] But it’s hard to say. I know that it became less and less pleasant to me as time went on, so that by the time we finally came to a parting of the ways in August of ’74, I was pretty much ready to leave the job, when this dispute came up with Stan— which was not really a personal dispute with him. I was perfectly willing to say, “Yeah, maybe it’s time I just moved on.” But I wasn’t talking about sitting at home and writing for Marvel. I was talking about going to DC.

so, I hadn’t held a 9-to-5, five-day a week job in the sense of having to come into an office five days a week. And now suddenly, I was having to do that again, and I found I didn’t really care much for it. JA: So why did you quit being editor-in-chief? Or do you not want to talk about your leaving the editor-in-chief job? THOMAS: I might as well. It’s a long time ago now—and I’m just repeating what I said years ago. The basic thing was that, after a little while, I found I wasn’t that happy in the job. I was trying, I guess, to walk a tightrope between being creative and being part of management—however the artists and writers might have thought of me at the time—and obviously I didn’t quite pull it off, in the end. Forget what anybody else thought—there were a lot of different reasons. My first wife Jeanie always said she knew I didn’t really like that job, because I was there for more than two years, and I never even personalized my office. She felt it was almost like I always had one foot practically out the door, that I was always ready to leave. Still, it’s true that I’d originally liked the idea of being editor-in-

JA: When Stan quits writing the books and becomes publisher, is he in the office every day? THOMAS: Pretty much, unless he had some other business that took him out. He was still doing a little writing, for a few special publications. I myself didn’t like having to be in the office every day. Since sometime in ’66 or

When The Frank-Frank Robbins Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along Frank Robbins, as per the 1975 Mighty Marvel Convention program book— flanked by pages he penciled for DC and Marvel. At left, a page from his last “Batman” story, in Detective Comics #429 (Nov. 1972)—at right, one he penciled for Giant-Size Invaders #1 (June 1975), with inks by Vince Colletta, script by Roy Thomas. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of a sadly forgotten donor to whom we owe a copy of this issue of A/E. Thanks to Chris Fama and Gregory Fischer for the “Batman” scan. [“Batman” page ©2007 DC Comics; Invaders page ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

chief—not that I’d actively sought it, but I liked it when it came my way. I thought for a while that I wanted to give up most of the writing and just be editor. But, once it came, I really found I didn’t like that. I was just talking to writers and artists and doing this and that, but I wasn’t doing that much hands-on editing. I didn’t have any great reason to do that, or time to do it. I wasn’t even finding the time, unless I took it outside the office, to keep up reading all the comics. I was just too busy, and I found that, increasingly, I liked the time when I was just writing.

LenAndMarv Len Wein (caricatured above) & Marv Wolfman (below) served as Marvel editors-in-chief between late 1974 and early 1976. By 1977, Marie Severin had visually skewered them (and other writer/editors) with these headings to columns about their work that appeared in issues of FOOM. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

At the same time, this guy named Al Landau was put in by the conglomerate, Cadence, to be the president of Marvel after Stan withdrew from that position once he realized he didn’t want to be involved in the business aspect of things so much. Landau and I didn’t get along, because—well, eventually he came to feel I wasn’t enough of a “company man,” because I sometimes disagreed with his policies. Sometimes—although, God knows, the freelancers probably didn’t feel that way—I took the part of freelancers and told him and Stan, “We shouldn’t do this or that. It isn’t fair to the freelancers.” But of course I generally couldn’t tell the freelancers about my disagreements with Landau. To them, I was just a part of the hated management, I suppose. But to Al Landau, I was disloyal and an impediment. Once, I was supposed to fly halfway around the world to the Philippines to talk to a bunch of the artists there, at the DeZuniga studio, at a time when they were having a civil war on some of the islands. And Landau wouldn’t let me go, because he said it was “too much like giving me a vacation.” [Jim chuckles] To paraphrase Hamlet, he never took anything from me that I was more willing to part with. But he was doing it because he wanted to get back at me. We just didn’t get along, and we argued about so many things. There was the time that the woman who was in charge of selling the advertising for Marvel—Connie LaRocca was her name—came in with an assistant and tried to convince me that she should be allowed to sell every right-hand page in every Marvel comic as an ad! We were already selling about half the book—that was in the period when we only had 17 or so story pages—but at least they were grouped so that some ads came together, and some were on left-hand pages. Can you imagine how much worse it would’ve been if all the story art had been just on left-hand pages? The reader could’ve flipped all the way through an issue and never seen the artwork at all!

But, somehow or other, this matter apparently came up between Stan and [DC publisher] Carmine Infantino at a lunch I was not privy to. And between them—and this has long been part of the public record, so I’m merely repeating what I said in 1980—they agreed that, in the future, if a freelancer went from one company to the other, and if, say, Carmine called me up and asked me for the rate of one of our freelancers who might be telling him he was getting a certain rate, I was to tell him. And vice versa with the DC people. To me, this had finally crossed the line of what I was willing to do. JA: That’s collusion! THOMAS: That’s what I felt—even though I’m sure Stan and Carmine didn’t see it that way, but then, neither of them was a legal expert any more than I was. After I heard about this new policy from Stan, I wrote a short memo saying I didn’t feel it was right to do that. I felt that freelancers don’t have that many weapons in their arsenal, and we shouldn’t do it. I do recall that I said that, whatever the precise intentions of Stan and Carmine, I felt this put us in the situation of doing something, quote, “immoral, unethical, and possibly illegal.” Paul Levitz later, when he rose to a higher position at DC, told me that he felt my judgment about the dubious legality of the project was correct. But, at the time, I just wrote this memo, and when I came back the next day from—for some reason I don’t recall—working at home for one day, Stan called me in and said, “I guess you meant this as your letter of resignation.” Maybe Al Landau had seen it, and he was probably incensed by it. Stan wasn’t fuming or anything, but after all, I was basically refusing to obey a direct order.

Connie LaRocca said, “I think I could sell all those ads for a lot of money.” I said, “Yes, you could sell them for a few months—and then you’d have no more company, because the kids wouldn’t read the books! This is such a terrible idea—I just want you to know that I will fight it with all my being.” Well, the idea withered on the vine, but for all I know Al Landau may have liked that idea, so it just helped me become persona non grata to him, which didn’t help things between me and Stan.

Other people have told me what I was supposed to say then. I should’ve backed down a little bit, and I could probably have continued along and just back-pedaled in enforcing that agreement. But instead, I replied, “Yes, that’s okay with me.” Because I wasn’t going to carry out that policy, no way. The funny thing is that, after I left, that policy seems to have become a dead letter immediately. I don’t think anybody ever reported any freelance rates back and forth. Marv doesn’t even remember hearing about the policy.

Stan and I still got along well, but Stan was caught in the middle in his own way. So he was increasingly reluctant, understandably, to champion me; so we were kind-of growing apart. The final straw had to do with Frank Robbins, of all people. As I recall it, when he left DC for Marvel, he apparently had fudged a little bit on what his rate had been at DC, a not-unusual thing for a freelancer to do in any field. You still end up paying somebody what you think he’s worth to you, not what he says he got at another company. If you don’t think he’s worth it, you say, “We can’t afford you,” and he either accepts a lower rate or goes away.

But my mind started racing immediately. I’d gotten feelers at various times from Carmine, who always reminds me that he wanted me to come over to DC and handle “Superman.” Well, God knows I never had a burning desire to do “Superman” or “Batman.” But I did like the idea of going over to DC and playing around with their characters. I knew it would be interesting, as much as I liked working with Stan. So I said to Stan, “Well, okay, I guess I’ll just leave. That’ll be okay.” And Stan said, “I don’t want you to leave. I want you to stay as a writer.” The editorship would be more or less divided between Len and Marv, who were already there. Marv was handling the black-&-white mags, and Len was the assistant editor on the color comics.

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

I said, “I’ll stay—if I’m also the editor of the books I write.” I think the contract was Stan’s idea. I didn’t want to have to report to anyone else. And he saw right away that could cause certain problems, because suddenly there’s somebody who isn’t under the new editor-in-chief. He said, “You know you won’t have trouble with Len and Marv,” since Stan and I had agreed that the color and black-&-white mags should be basically divided between them, though maybe Len, as official editorin-chief, would’ve had a bit more authority. I said, “No, it’s not that. I hired those guys, I like them, I respect them. It doesn’t matter to me who has the job. I want to be my own editor, or I want to leave.” Stan decided to give me a writer/editor contract. I had actually wanted to step down as editor-in-chief that very day. When I’m out of somewhere, I’m out of somewhere, you know? [mutual chuckling] But the Labor Day weekend was coming up, and Len and Marv were away at the World Science Fiction Convention down in Washington, DC, and they were not of a mind to come back early just in order to take over Marvel. So I went down to the convention—partly by

interest and partly to talk to them—and I stuck around as editor-inchief for an extra couple of weeks at Stan’s request. And then I was gone. Well, actually, I still came into the office two or three days a week, at least—and I didn’t leave for LA right away. I actually lived in New York for nearly another two years. I’d come in to deliver stuff and I’d hang around. I had my own desk in another room for the next couple of years, and Len and Marv had desks there, too, after they stepped down from their positions. By the time I left New York less than two years later, there’d already been four different editors-in-chief of the color comics. When Gerry Conway didn’t get a writer/editor deal when I did in 1974, he soon left for DC. Len and Marv were friends of his, but he wasn’t willing to work under them. I’d told Stan in that first conversation: “If you want to keep Gerry”—and he was the most valuable writer Marvel had, perhaps even ahead of Len and Marv and me, at that stage, since he was doing Spider-Man and FF—“you need to give Gerry something, too, independent of Len and Marv, or he’s going to walk.” I hadn’t talked to Gerry. I just felt I knew what he’d think and do. Stan talked it over, I think, with Len and Marv, and understandably they were against Gerry being independent of them. So Gerry did leave within a short time. I’m not a touchy-feely “people person,” but to a certain extent, I understood people. [mutual laughter] JA: Still, at the beginning of 1976, you nearly become editor-inchief again. THOMAS: Yeah. I was feeling increasingly restless in New York, especially once Jeanie and I separated for the final time in mid1975—we’d broken up earlier in late 1972 through early ’73, so I was getting almost used to it. [laughs] By this time Marv had succeeded Len as editor-in-chief—Len’s health had never been that good—and I get the impression that Marv wasn’t too happy in that job, either, and was looking to get out. John Verpoorten, as production manager, told me that; and besides, John and Marv apparently didn’t get along too well—or at least John felt they didn’t—and John asked me if I’d consider coming back if he talked to Stan about it. I told him, “I’m tired of hanging around the house, but I don’t know if Stan would want me back.” Landau was gone by this time. Having left the job under a bit of a cloud, I kind-of liked the idea of being offered the job again, and I thought I wanted to take it. So at the beginning of 1976 I met with the guy who’d replaced Landau—because, otherwise, they’d never have been able to tempt me, and Landau wouldn’t have wanted me back. That was Jim Galton. We had lunch, and he seemed to feel I passed muster. He made it clear to me that I seemed to him a bit less of whatever kind of “Crusader Rabbit” mentality Landau had felt I had. He okayed me coming back as editor-in-chief. And then, of course, it came down to working out my salary.

“Merry Gerry” Gerry Conway, as seen in the first issue of FOOM magazine in 1973—and a page from Fantastic Four #147 (June 1974). By the end of that year, Gerry would leave Marvel to become a writer/editor for DC—but, at Roy’s suggestion to Stan, would return briefly circa March 1976 as Marvel’s editor-in-chief. That stint lasted only two or three weeks, for a multiplicity of reasons we’d rather let Gerry himself tell you about sometime. FF page by Rich Buckler & Joe Sinnott, repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of George Hagenauer. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Sol Brodsky was back, of course—and he was given the job of working out a salary with me. I told him, “Well, it’s very simple, Sol. I want $50,000”—which seems like very little money nowadays for that job, but Marvel considered it a pretty fair piece of change back in early ’76, let me tell you! [chuckles] So I had a lunch with Sol. Part of my salary was supposed to cover my continuing to write all the Conan books—no other script writing. I said, “Oh, yeah. I’ll write the Conan books. That’s part of the fifty grand.” But Sol kept trying to whittle away at that $50,000… because that was what he was

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

told to do. He kept trying to get me down to, say, 45,000 or 47,000, something like that. Finally, while Sol was doodling numbers on sheets of paper, trying Archie’s Rival, Roy T. to figure, “Well, this money will Naw, Archie Goodwin and Roy Thomas were never really “rivals,” at all. That’s just a wordplay on the title of an old be for the Conan writing, and this Archie comic book—as a way of completing our riotous roster of crazy editor-in-chief caricatures by Mirthful Marie: will be for the editing,” etc.—at at top is the one she did for Archie Goodwin’s corner of FOOM (while we’re not quite sure what she’s trying to say last I lost patience. Not with Sol, here—that Archie was accident-prone?), and at bottom her take on Roy (a bit easier to understand). Now isn’t this but with his mission, so to speak. better than still more mug shots of guys you see every couple of issues? [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] And I said, “Sol, I’m going to make your job real, real easy for you. The important thing to me is not how many pages I have to write for it. I can write a couple more, do a little something else. The important thing to me, as a THOMAS: Oh, I knew he wouldn’t. The thing is, everybody else who matter of principle, is the fifty grand. I want $50,000 a year. Don’t even had that job after Stan left—including Gerry, briefly—was somebody mention $49,999 to me. It’s $50,000 or we can just finish our lunch and who wanted it. Whether they liked it after they got it, well, that’s go home.” something else, but at least they’d wanted it. Archie was just doing it He laughed and said, “Well, you just made it real easy.” [mutual because he felt it was a career move he should make. But it wasn’t, not laughter] So he went back to Galton and Stan, and they agreed to the really. fifty grand. And then, of course, while they were having the contract written up, I flew off to LA because I knew I wasn’t going to get a “I Don’t Think It’s Possible To Set A Hardvacation for at least a year once I started that job. Gerry Conway was asking me right before I left: “Why do you want that job again?” Some people have suggested he was trying to talk me out of it so he’d get it, but I’m sure that wasn’t his main motivation. We were friends, and he knew how frustrating I’d found the job the first time around. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I really didn’t want it. I’d just wanted to be offered the job, to erase the sting of the way I’d left. Having put down that particular cow, I didn’t really want to try to pick it up again. It was okay when I was carrying a calf that gradually got bigger, but now it had definitely grown into a cow, and I didn’t really want it. That’s why, during my February 1976 trip to LA, even before I came back to New York, I rented an apartment in a singles complex up the hill from the Warner lot that wouldn’t come open till four months later. And I went in and told Stan, “I’m afraid you’ll have to tear up the contract you’re working on, because I’ve decided to move to California instead, and I’ve already rented a place.” And Stan was very sympathetic, saying he wished he could move to LA himself—he eventually did, of course, and he’s still there—and so I continued at Marvel as a writer/editor for another six years, under two three-year contracts that lasted from late 1974 to late 1980. JA: But, with your contract, up until Shooter in 1977-78, you didn’t really report to any editor-in-chief? THOMAS: I never reported to Shooter or technically worked under him, till the day I left in 1980. JA: So there were no problems as far as you with Wolfman or Wein or Archie Goodwin when they were editors-in-chief? THOMAS: No. I had a couple of minor problems with Archie, but they weren’t much, considering all the problems we could have had, especially since I’d moved out to the West Coast in 1976. Once or twice, he had someone do a fill-in book on one of my titles without consulting with me in advance, and we had a few words about that. I liked Archie, and we respected each other. I just didn’t think he was a good fit for Marvel editor-in-chief, and I suspect neither did he. JA: Well, Archie told me that he didn’t enjoy being editor-in-chief.

And-Fast Date For The End Of The Silver Age”

JA: Stan moved from editor to publisher/president in 1972. Is that, perhaps, rather than the “traditional” date of 1970, a good time to date the end of the Silver Age? THOMAS: It might be. I don’t think it’s possible to set a hard-and-fast date for the end of the Silver Age, and I steadfastly refuse to be held to one. I could see 1970, with Jack leaving Marvel and Conan the Barbarian starting up—or I could see 1972, when Stan stopped being editor and even a regular writer. For Alter Ego’s purposes, I use the turn of 1974-75, since that’s when the last comics I’d been involved with as Marvel’s editor-in-chief came out. But that’s only for my own convenience. By coincidence, soon after that is the end of Carmine Infantino’s rein at DC, as well. JA: In my own mind, I figure the cutoff was when you left and when Carmine left. For a lot of people, the Silver Age ends around 1970 when Kirby leaves Marvel and Conan starts. How you feel about that demarcation line? THOMAS: No demarcation line is really exact. Nobody can say for sure when the so-called Golden Age ends. Some people say 1945, when World War II ended—others say around 1949, when most of the superheroes vanished—some would say 1950-51, when All-Star Comics ended—still others, when the Comics Code came in in 1954-55. I tend to use the Code as the cutoff point, because comics after it were produced under different circumstances from the ones that came before… but in some ways, the early 1950s were really some sort of interim period, neither Golden nor Silver. The Silver Age sort-of creeps in, starting in ’56 and especially by the late ’50s. 1970 makes as good an end date as any, if you have to have a cutoff date, which you don’t. So for purposes of Alter Ego, of course, I’ve kind of expanded that. But that doesn’t mean I consider that’s when the Silver Age ended, when I left Marvel Comics. Some people would say the Silver Age ended when I became editor-in-chief in 1972. [mutual laughter] After all, that’s when Stan stops being editor at Marvel. That would make as good a date as any, except, of course, that it doesn’t have any real correspondence at DC.

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

JA: Okay, during the hailstorm, [laughs] a lot of new people came in. Frank Brunner really starts about then, and Jim Starlin and Al Milgrom, Engelhart comes in around in ’72, I think. Did you have an accounting for why all this new—and good new—talent comes into the field at that time? Do you think you had anything to do with it? Were you looking to bring more people in?

Silver Age Among The Gold Whenever the Silver Age started or ended, these three DC guys were an integral part of it. (Left to right:) artist Carmine Infantino… editor Julius Schwartz… artist Joe Kubert. Because all three of them (and writers Robert Kanigher and John Broome) had produced the Silver Age-jumpstarting Showcase #4 in 1956, after also taking part in the Golden Age, they starred on a special “Flash” panel at the All Time Classic New York Comic Book Convention in 2000. Photo courtesy of Joe Petrilak.

THOMAS: Well, peripherally. But it would’ve happened anyway. These were all talented people who got stirred up by what had happened in the preceding decade, especially in the latter half of the ’60s, when Stan and Jack, Ditko, and Romita all hit their stride on the Marvel books. And of course, they were also inspired by some things at DC—the coming of Neal Adams with “Deadman,” and other books here and there. DC was experimenting, after Carmine came in. DC had had an earlier experimentation stage, which had kind-of petered out by the mid-’60s. I remember how startled I was when I learned from Stan that Hawkman didn’t sell well, because I loved that character. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. It never had sold as well as even The Atom, and there are reasons for that, I think. However much we may love him, Hawkman is just a guy with a beak who can fly. And he has what I always called a “church window” costume—too many colors fighting each other. [mutual chuckling] Not that that stopped him from being my favorite Golden Age hero of all time… and one of my

JA: I always thought the Silver Age kind-of ends when Kirby goes to DC, only because that affects both companies, whereas Stan Lee stepping down as editor only affects Marvel, you see? But it’s arbitrary. For Alter Ego’s purposes, I know you count through the end of 1974—and when I’m interviewing, I often count through when Carmine Infantino stepped down at DC—at the end of 1975 or early in 1976. THOMAS: It must’ve been around then that Jenette Kahn became DC’s publisher, because I left New York in early July of ‘76 for the West Coast, and Jenette was in at DC for several months before that. She and I even dated a couple of times. She took me to a Patti Smith concert and a cocktail party for some prospective Democratic Presidential candidate… Morris Udall… even though I’d stopped being a Democrat the year before, when the Democratic Congress stopped President Ford from coming to the rescue of South Vietnam when the North broke the peace treaty and invaded. When that helicopter took off from the US embassy building in Saigon, it took with it my old party affiliation. In 1976, Gerald Ford became the first Republican I ever voted for.

“Talented People Who Got Stirred Up By What Had Happened In The Preceding Decade” JA: Okay, a couple of editor-in-chief questions that I didn’t ask you last time. During your reign— THOMAS: Whatever. JA: Yeah, and you can spell it “R-A-I-N”. [laughs] THOMAS: It was more like a drizzle.

Duo For A New Decade Steve Englehart (above, as writer) and Frank Brunner (as artist) became the cosmic caretakers of the “Dr. Strange” feature beginning in Marvel Premiere #9 (July 1973). Soon co-plotting the book, as well, they became one of the most successful “Dr. Strange” teams ever. Thanks to Bob Bailey for the scan. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

favorites of the early Silver Age, as well. And so, between what had happened at Marvel and DC, but also at other companies, there were more and more people getting inspired by comics—and fandom was allowing those people to be in touch with each other—people who might never have met in an earlier day because they weren’t all in New York. In the old days, guys like Gil Kane and Carmine and Giacoia and Toth and Hasen all knew each other, because they all lived in New York, even if they may have come from different parts of the country. The new guys were in touch with each other even before they came to New York. JA: How actively were you recruiting? At all? THOMAS: Well, off and on, yeah. By the early ’70s, we began to expand again. In mid-’72 or so, when Stan became the president and publisher, suddenly, we had not just our own president and publisher, separate from Magazine Management and the other magazines, the men’s sweat and romance and confessions and crosswords and all that. That meant that, suddenly, Marvel had to support all that, see? Marvel suddenly had to pay a few extra salaries, and I don’t mean mine. [mutual laughter] I remember one of the first things Stan had to do was to hire a comptroller—whether they spell that with an “M” or an “N”—and there was this guy named Conway—I think it was Richard Conway, no relation to Gerry—brought in to handle the money. A great big Verpoorten-sized guy [Jim laughs] whom I don’t remember too well. He was around for a year or so. He seemed like a nice guy. I had a few dealings with him. That was one of the new salaries, and we had to expand a bit to support all this. And, of course, only two or three years earlier, we’d gone to a different distributor [Curtis], since Marvel was now owned by Cadence, which had started out as Perfect Film (or been absorbed by them, I forget which—it didn’t matter much to those of us in the trenches). So, Marvel being a separate company, we had to add more books. And that was, coincidentally, also the period in which the Code was rewritten, liberalized. All of a sudden, the monster field opened up to us, so even without just flooding the stands with more super-heroes, pure and simple, we had another genre or two we could play around with. The Kung Fu angle, for example—we got a book or two out of that. The monster angle, we got 80 titles. [mutual chuckling] JA: Right, including a lot of reprints. THOMAS: Yeah, but we needed more people on staff even just to handle the reprints! And to handle the mail for the extra books. All of a sudden, we had maybe another assistant editor where before just one might’ve sufficed. By the mid-’70s, Roger Stern and Roger Slifer and Dave Kraft and others were hired to answer letters, as much as anything else. Well, like I said, we suddenly needed more people, and that was part of my job—but the thing is, all I had to do was walk out the door and stumble over some of these guys. [Jim laughs] Steve Englehart was sent

Starring Starlin Jim Starlin and his lady at the Wizard World convention in Philadelphia, June 2005—and a 1980s drawing of Mar-Vell that he did in marker for collector Phil Schlaeffer, used by courtesy of Phil and Jerry K. Boyd. Jim’s 1970s work on Captain Marvel and Strange Tales/Warlock is mostly in print, or soon will be again! Photo by Keif Simon & Jim Murtaugh. [Captain Marvel TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

up there. He was a summer replacement or some such thing for Gary Friedrich. When Gary wanted to go away for a while, he got Steve, who was sortof a young aspiring artist when he came up to Neal’s studio, and he ended up at Marvel as a proofreader. Then he wanted to write, and I believe he wrote a few pages of a sample script. Anyway, I gave him “The Beast” to try out on, and that worked out pretty well. JA: I think he colored before he wrote. THOMAS: Maybe so. He’s always said he got back into reading comics by seeing that last issue Ditko did of Spider-Man, where Stan wrote this caption about the villain being “a full-time nut.” Alan Weiss—I always liked Alan, but I don’t remember how he came up there. Frank Brunner had worked there on staff, a couple of years earlier—a talented young artist in the Frazetta vein, but “Frank Brunner” and “Marvel staff job” are not two phrases you’d think belong in the same sentence, then or now, and I think he’d agree. Whether it’s right or wrong, some staffers had the impression he sortof wandered around all day saying how great Frazetta was. [Jim laughs] His art at that stage was like Bernie Wrightson’s. It was kind-of rough, but you knew it was going to come together one of these days. And, my God, Barry Smith hadn’t done any work that good, really, when he wound up drawing for Marvel! Frank did this story called “What Rough Beast?”—a quote from Yeats—in one of the Warren magazines. I got in touch with him because this was his breakthrough story as far as I was concerned. In short order, he was drawing “Dr. Strange” in Marvel Premiere. JA: Which I thought he did a great job on. THOMAS: Right. Starlin came in by other means; I didn’t have anything to do with that. He was this guy that had a lot of the feel of Gil Kane and Kirby and others. So he started off on things like Iron Man, and then he inherited Captain Marvel. He was a dynamic artist right away, long before anybody knew he would also soon be writing and telling his own stories. So some of these artists maybe I particularly

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

reached out to, but I reached out to them because they were good enough and ready. If I hadn’t, they might well have come to Marvel anyway.

“We Never Gave Much Priority To The Westerns” JA: Getting back to the reprint books for a minute, there were a lot of Westerns, like The Mighty Marvel Western. I loved those books, because it was the only way to see Joe Maneely, Kirby, John Severin, Doug Wildey’s Outlaw Kid. But they were all reprints. Was that just to try to get extra revenue, and also to take up more rack space? THOMAS: Well, yeah. The rack space—I don’t know if that was the major thing in the sense of trying to crowd DC as such. The main thing was that Marvel needed more titles, which of course amounts to more rack space. If each title earned just a couple hundred or a few hundred dollars, in those days, with a price tag at, what, 15¢ or something, you weren’t going to make a lot of money on any individual issue—and you could lose a lot more money if you were late on books and had extra shipping costs from the printer. It was more important to have something out there than that it be exactly right. We did the Westerns because we couldn’t reprint a lot of old super-hero stuff like DC could, because we didn’t have it! But we had a lot of Westerns, and they might just appeal to some super-hero readers. And if you sold some thousands of copies, you’d make a few hundred bucks here and there. JA: Yeah, especially since there was a lot of Kirby in there and he was real popular then.

Go Western, Young Men! As Roy and Jim affirm, nearly every comic book artist or writer would love to saddle up and do a Western! At the turn of the ’70s, Marvel reprinted some cowboy classics from the 1950s in comics that often also contained original material. Chief among these was the over-size Western Gunfighters #1 (Aug. 1970). New tales therein were “Gunhawk” by Jerry Siegel (writer) and Werner Roth & Sal Buscema (artists)… “Tales of Fort Rango” by Gary Friedrich (w) & Syd Shores (a)… “The Renegades” by Roy T. & Mike Friedrich (w) and Tom Sutton (a)… and “Ghost Rider” by Gary Friedrich (w) and Dick Ayers (a)… as well as reprints drawn by Ayers and Sol Brodsky. The closest to a successful Western the company had, though, after its 8 late-’60s issues of Ghost Rider, was Red Wolf—a series which proved to be the last hurrah for 1940s Timely mainstay Syd Shores, once the major Captain America artist. This scan of the splash from Red Wolf #1 (May 1972) was sent by both Bob Bailey & Alan Barger. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

THOMAS: Right, and there were other artists who were doing the other books whose names might be familiar.

THOMAS: Timely had done a feature named “Gunhawk” before, although a different character. So I think he made up the general concept for it, just a few sentences.

JA: Really, there were hardly any new Westerns, maybe because Marvel didn’t have faith that Western books would sell.

JA: The Outlaw Kid, for a brief while, had new stories. I think Dick Ayers drew them; then they went back to Doug Wildey reprints.

THOMAS: I don’t think we particularly did. Was that the period when we did “Gunhawk” and those things? That was an attempt to see if you could sell a new Western, but I don’t think anybody had a lot of faith in them. After all, a couple of years earlier, Ghost Rider had even had some quasi-super-hero elements, and art and story by Gary Friedrich and Dick Ayers, who were known to super-hero fans, and it still didn’t sell. But at the same time, I think Stan was kind-of hoping for something better.

THOMAS: I don’t recall too much about that. We never gave much priority to the Westerns. Though I had my own Western I was trying to do at that time. I remember that my fan-artist friend Grass Green had the plot for it, at one stage. It wound up becoming a two-issue story, drawn by Tom Sutton. It was called “The Outcasts,” though Stan renamed it “The Renegades.” And what it really was: I had seen this movie I liked as a kid, in the early ’50s, maybe, with Glenn Ford. It was called The Man from the Alamo, and it’s about this guy who leaves the Alamo, the last man out before the slaughter, and everybody thinks he’s a traitor. He’s branded the man who’d left the Alamo, but he

JA: There was “The Gunhawks”….

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

actually was doing it on a secret mission for Colonel Travis. I came up with this idea of a group of several people who left the Alamo together, and it’s basically the same kind of notion. I wanted to do it myself, but didn’t have the time. JA: And there was also a one-shot, Western Team-Up. It was Rawhide Kid and somebody. I forget who the other character was. THOMAS: We had one called “The Halfbreed”—did that ever appear? JA: I don’t remember that one. THOMAS: Barry Smith was working on it at some stage. That was a little earlier than 1970, I believe. Bill Everett was going to do it at one time, too. It was about a guy who was half-Indian and half-white, but I don’t know that it ever really appeared.

JA: So would I. THOMAS: Gil Kane and I would always talk about wanting to do one together. He did a “Lone Ranger” thing or two, but I never quite got a shot at the genre. And of course, that whole thing with Mike Ploog and “Tin Star” [NOTE: See A/E #62.]. Whether it was in a Roy Rogers style, or a Clint Eastwood style, or whatever—everybody had his own idea of what it ought to be, but everybody wanted to try one. JA: Okay, let me move on just a little bit because I want to talk about — THOMAS: I want to talk about Westerns! JA: Well, if you want to, go ahead! THOMAS: Just kidding.

JA: And, of course, there was Red Wolf, which was set in the past. THOMAS: Yeah. That came out of The Avengers. Stan and I decided it’d be good to have a book with an American Indian hero, but he decided he didn’t want it done as a modern-day character. I guess he was trying to see if he could find a way to get a Western to sell, because everybody in the field wanted to write or draw a Western. I remember that in October 2001 I was at a convention in Spain with the great cartoonist Victor de la Fuente, whom Gil Kane had turned me on to when he was doing his sword-and-sorcery feature Haxtur back in the ’70s—the award given out by a comics convention I’ve attended in Gijon, Spain, is called the Haxtur, in fact—and Victor and I discussed doing a Western together. I’d have done something up, if I’d thought we could find a publisher. I’d really love to do a Western.

“I Always Liked Seeing Those Early-1940s Stories When I Was A Kid” JA: I know that. Because one of my favorite series of yours is The Invaders. so I want to— THOMAS: Funny you should mention it. Mine, too. [laughs] JA: Tell me how it started, and why you picked Frank Robbins, who’s also one of my favorite cartoonists. THOMAS: I always liked seeing those early-1940s stories when I was a kid, even though I started reading comics right around the end of World War II, so I didn’t see those except at some relatives’ house as “old” comics—2, 3, maybe even 6 or 7 years old. I loved those characters, the Big Three Marvel characters, and I thought there was just something about the idea of these three guys and World War II. I didn’t know much about the other wartime Marvel characters, until I read Don Thompson’s “OK Axis, Here We Come!” article in the Lupoffs’ Xero #4 in early 1961. But there was something about that mystique of Cap, Torch, and Sub-Mariner. They wouldn’t really have fit together as a team in the modern day; they were just three guys who had no more in common than any other heroes. But in the ’40s, it somehow seemed like they should’ve been a team, and they almost never were. I have no idea if I saw the two “All Winners Squad” stories circa 1946. So I thought it would be kind-of fun to do that. I may have suggested it to Stan earlier, and never got any encouragement from him. I didn’t push it because it was, after all, a period piece. JA: Well, you did kind-of allude to the series years before in The Avengers #71, when they went back in the past.

Forget Darth Vader! Here’s The Invaders! Since, to Roy’s recent astonishment, Marvel is planning to release a color trade paperback collection of the early issues of his 1970s series The Invaders, here’s Frank Robbins’ rendition of those 1940s superstars done for the Mighty Marvel Bicentennial Calendar in 1976. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

THOMAS: Yeah, but I guarantee you that I didn’t have an Invaders book in mind then. I have no memory that I intended it as a prototype, so to speak, for a series. I would’ve been open to that in a heartbeat, but I’d have figured it was too much of a long shot that Stan would let me do it. I had so many other things going, like The Avengers and then starting The

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

Defenders and other series. But that Avengers issue does show how much that the idea of those three guys together appealed to me. So when I was looking for somebody to fight The Avengers in a story that could involve time travel, that team-up And No, He Didn’t Flip A suddenly occurred to me. Coin! After I quit as editor-in-chief, I was looking for something else to keep me out of the Marvel mainstream. After the larger part of a decade of either writing or editing Spider-Man and the FF and Thor and the Hulk and all these characters, writing so many of them and liking them as much as I did, I really didn’t care if I ever did any of them again. I wasn’t even interested in going back to The Avengers, if it had come open, or trying to start a new super-hero—since I couldn’t own it. But I thought, “Gee, I’d love to do a book set in World War II, only I’ve got to make Stan like the idea,” because he had done those “Captain America” WWII stories with Jack, but they were just retelling old tales. Sgt. Fury wasn’t a big deal any more.

Okay—quick, guys! It’s 1977. You moved to Los Angeles about a year ago, and you’ve got this choice— either write a script for The Invaders—or spend the evening with a redhead named Danette. Which one would you choose? Well, Roy loved The Invaders—but there are priorities! So his buddy Don Glut, creator of Dr. Spektor and Dagar the Invincible, got to write a tale of the World War II heroes fighting the Frankenstein Monster, behind a cover by Joe Sinnott. Late-’70s photo by Nick Arroyo. [Art ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

So I thought, if I could come up with the right name—and then I remembered that, a couple of years earlier, Stan had wanted to do a book called The Invaders, keeping that uneasy team of Sub-Mariner and the Hulk together after they had that fight in Tales to Astonish #100. I don’t think it was that TV series starring Roy Thinnes that got in the way. Anyway, Stan soon dropped that notion, but I knew he liked that name, and the TV series was now further in the past. The name “Invaders” had never been used for a super-hero group. So I told Stan my idea and said, “And I’ve got a great name for it.” He says, “What is it?” “The Invaders.” He said, “I like the name.” [mutual laughter] Whether he remembered having it himself or not, I don’t know—but then it just became a matter of choosing an artist. I don’t remember much about how Frank Robbins got the job, except that he sort-of wandered in around that time and they were looking for a book for him. Romita may have partly behind this, because Romita was a big Robbins fan, as so many artists were, since he was one of the earliest and best Milt Caniff disciples, with his strip Johnny Hazard. Frank had certain problems as a Marvel super-hero artist. He was wonderful on the stories. When I’d give him these several-page plots, he’d throw in all these wonderful World War II details. He’d do these weird angles where there might be a model airplane or something on the wall—extra work for him, but he’d draw it because he liked drawing things like that. The one thing he didn’t do as well was superheroes. When John and I and maybe Stan talked to him about the Kirby approach, I think Frank thought of that as just a species of bad drawing. [Jim chuckles] I don’t think he liked those dynamics. He was a Caniff fan. John Romita had come up, in the ’50s, with this perfect synthesis of Kirby and Caniff in his “Captain America,” which I think was virtually perfect—my favorite of all John’s work, still. But Frank Robbins was no Kirby or super-hero buff. Although his Batman and Man-Bat stuff at DC had a certain lilt.

But when Robbins had to do Kirby-style action, where Jack would draw people really straining when they leaped and punched— well, Frank’s version of it came out a bit more rubber than steel. It wasn’t quite right for Marvel, yet it was so good on its own terms, so I figured, “Maybe if I got it inked in a more Marvel style—!” Since Frank wasn’t pushing to ink his own work, since he was still writing and drawing the Johnny Hazard comic strip, I got what I still feel is a good idea—having Vinnie Colletta ink The Invaders. Of course, that made it poor Frank Robbins, but it made it look more like the other Marvel books. Vinnie would zoom through the art, as usual, but with all his noodling and scratching; somehow it wound up looking even a bit illustrative, as Thor did. He’d take off some of that rubbery look that might’ve stopped people from taking Robbins’ stuff as seriously as they wanted to take Marvel Comics. It worked. I don’t know if it’s total coincidence, but those seven or so issues Vinnie inked sold quite well. Then he left to become the assistant art director at DC when Jenette came in. And I made Frank Springer the Invaders inker, and the result was a much closer approximation of Robbins’ style. And the sales immediately dropped. I don’t blame that on Frank Springer, because that’s what we wanted him to do. For whatever reasons, the sales declined, even though we’d just introduced Union Jack and we had Kirby covers. The book never really recovered. Maybe it didn’t help that, over the next year or so, I was doing less actual writing, and Robbins drifted away, too. And while other people—like Alan Kupperberg and Jim Mooney—all worked very hard on it, the book never really again had the unity it had for those first dozen or so issues.

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

This Power, These Pencils! Gene Colan’s original and gorgeous pencil drawing used as this issue’s cover. Actually, Gene and Roy never worked together on an issue of The Invaders—but, recalling what a pleasure it was to script Colan-drawn pages of Dr. Strange, Daredevil, and The Avengers, Roy sure wishes they had! Only thing is, Mr. T. is still trying to wash all that rubbed-off #2 pencil lead off his hands! With thanks to proud owner Michael Finn—whose wonderful collection “One Minute After” drawings by Byrne, Grell, and others will be seen in the very next issue of A/E. [Characters TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: Well, I agree. Robbins stays on through issue #26 or 27 or 28, right around in there. THOMAS: With one or two fill-ins. There was one early issue [#5] that Rich Buckler started but had to be finished by Dick Ayers. Another problem was that I was getting busy with other things in Los Angeles, one of them having red hair. [Jim laughs] I had other things on my mind besides writing comics. My friend Don Glut, who’d written a lot of comics for Gold Key, was going through a patch where he could use some extra money. So I’d get him to write some issues, either from my concepts or his own (like his “Frankenstein” issue, that subject being a specialty of his), and I’d just do a bit of editing. But that meant I wasn’t giving Invaders the attention I should have. Nor was anybody back East exactly trying to help me find a major artist to replace Robbins. I was kind-of off to the side, and I was independent. I didn’t report to those editors, to Marv or Len or Archie. So they had no great reason to suggest major artists to me. Not that Kupperberg and the other later artists didn’t work their tails off and turn in some good work. I think the cause for the eventual failure of The Invaders was partly the market and partly my fault. It’s a shame. Even the final issue (which wasn’t intended as the final issue when it was plotted) ended up being one I didn’t write. As I look back on it now, I feel I should’ve written the whole run of Invaders just as I wrote every issue of All-Star

Squadron—well, except for a couple of dialoguing jobs. Still, I’m proud of The Invaders, and of the issue of What If? where we carried them beyond World War II. JA: That was one of my favorite stories. THOMAS: It’s amazing to me. I’ve had a number of people over the years remark to me about that story, and I’m happy that my view of having that be a What If? issue that actually counted in Marvel continuity has prevailed… at least up till now. That story didn’t even really belong in What If?, but I did it anyway. What if The Invaders had stayed together? Hey, guess what—they did! [mutual chuckling] Frank did a great job, as usual, and we were able to tie in John F. Kennedy and the “missing” “All Winners Squad” story that should have been in All Winners #20—if that comic had existed at all, which it never did. JA: It also was a way of explaining why there was a Captain America after Steve Rogers vanishes. THOMAS: That was because of a failure to communicate, as they said in Cool Hand Luke, between Steve Engelhart and me. I told Steve I wanted him to account in Captain America for the years 1945-54, since events in Avengers #4 had ignored all post-WWII “Cap” appearances. But I guess I didn’t make myself clear enough, and Steve didn’t account for the full time. So I took care of it in What If? #4. There’d been two men playing Captain America during those years, instead of there being just one new Captain America.

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

was in New York, through the late ’70s or so, no editor-in-chief had the authority that they did later when Stan relocated to California. As for the Giant-Size titles, I know this may shock you, but I suspect they were probably put out so Marvel could make more money. [mutual laughter] Our heroes already had monthly books. So if you add an over-size quarterly, you can charge more money for it—and maybe even get away with a reprint in the back. I don’t recall when Marvel started paying us a couple of dollars a page for reprints, but they didn’t in the beginning. And even when they started, it wasn’t much.

JA: I seem to remember that one of them was the character who’d been The Spirit of ’76. THOMAS: Yeah. I killed him off in the space of that one story. But then the one who became the major postwar Cap, which made more sense because he was a real Marvel character and had a longer life, was The Patriot, from Marvel Mystery Comics. Still, in that area and others, I think Steve did a great job writing Captain America; the book sold well, with Sal Buscema as artist. Later, Robbins drew it, too, but I guess that was after my time. JA: I noticed that when Robbins did Captain America, the first inker on him was Joe Giella.

JA: Didn’t Dick Ayers sue over that?

THOMAS: Yeah, that, too, would have brought Robbins’ art into that Marvel mainstream, even though Joe wasn’t a regular Marvel artist. My preference would be for Robbins inked by Robbins, but I don’t know if the average reader would’ve related to such stories. They weren’t as clear in terms of storytelling as they could be. Clarity was a real virtue in those days. JA: I liked those Robbins “Batmans” better than Neal Adams’, to be honest with you. Julie Schwartz told me that those Frank Robbins stories—people either loved them or they absolutely hated them. No middle ground. THOMAS: I can believe that.

Too Bad There Was Never A Giant-Size Giant-Man! Roy felt one of his perks should be to write the first issue of Giant-Size Avengers (Aug. 1974), since he’d scripted a 70-plus issue run of the regular title from 1967-72. With the aid of artists Rich Buckler & Dan Adkins and some Photostatted negatives, he brought the Golden Age Whizzer into the modern Marvel Universe—and introduced Nuklo, son of The Whizzer and Miss America. Reprinted from the 2005 trade paperback Giant-Size Marvel. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: But Robbins was writing a lot of “Batman” stories he didn’t draw, and I think the last one or two that he drew didn’t sell, so that’s why there’s no more Robbins art on “Batman.”

THOMAS: Yeah, but they were extraordinary issues in their way. At Marvel, didn’t he do some Human Fly, too, as Lee Elias did? I get confused because Elias was yet another Caniff-influenced artist who didn’t adjust to Marvel as well as he could have. I think it was frustrating to Romita, because these were two guys he greatly admired, people who were artists when he was growing up, who were other Caniff fans, and he couldn’t quite get them to make the changes they needed to make to become successful Marvel artists. John had made the change, so he felt that these other talented guys ought to be able to do it, but it just didn’t quite work out.

“The Giant-Size Titles… Were Probably Put Out So Marvel Could Make More Money” JA: Well, he had Fred Kida doing a bit of art. He’s another artist heavily influenced by Caniff, but he fit in the Marvel style a bit better. Okay, the Giant-Size books. Whose idea was that, and how did it start? THOMAS: Like most things in those days, it was Stan’s idea, as publisher. I may have been called “editor-in-chief,” but as long as Stan

THOMAS: If so, it was after my time. Some artists who’d been around for years—like Ayers and Heck—were having trouble getting much work, and here they were, appearing in reprint books, and people were thinking, “Hey, they’re still part of Marvel!”— yet they weren’t getting paid. I know Stan tried hard—and I did, too, and I think a couple of my successors did, as well—to find work for guys who’d been loyal to Marvel. Later editors had far less commitment to that ideal. And, as Stan got less involved, that gradually went by the wayside over the years. JA: The Giant-Size books were quarterlies, as I recall.

THOMAS: Yes. Every third month, you’d have an extra story, make a little extra money. We were expanding, getting more artists. Next thing you know, we had what—six, eight Giant-Size titles? God, no wonder I didn’t like being editor-in-chief after a while. It was like the old Alice in Wonderland line about having to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. JA: But didn’t you like writing those stories? You had more than the regular 20 pages.

THOMAS: I liked writing them, but I was too busy to do too many of them. Of course, I did Giant-Size Conan, which I made a “King Conan” book, adapting the Conan the Conqueror/Hour of the Dragon novel. One other Giant-Size I really wanted to get in on—and Steve Engelhart and I disagreed on this, but that was one of the perks of being editor-in-chief—was that, if there was going to be a Giant-Size Avengers, having written 70 Avengers issues in a row and having relinquished it mostly because I’d become editor-in-chief, I was determined I was going to write the first issue of that one. So I did. Then I relinquished that title totally to Steve. I figured, if you’re not going to enjoy a perk or two, there’s no sense in having a back-breaking job. In the 1990s I had comics editors, especially at DC, tell me—and I don’t necessarily think they were always just blowing smoke—“I can’t just hire you or this writer or that writer to do a book; I have to have it

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

approved by other editors, etc.” Even people in high editorial positions would spout that line, to me and apparently to others. God, I wouldn’t want to be an editor, let alone an editor-in-chief, if I had to constantly check with other people about making art and writing assignments. My feeling was: I have the job. If my superiors don’t like the way I do it, they can get rid of me. But as long as I have the job, I’m going to do the job. Once in a while, that means doing something I especially want to do, and I felt entitled to that. I know Dick Giordano was criticized behind his back at DC for supposedly grabbing the best inking assignments when he was DC’s equivalent of editor-inchief in the 1980s. But hey, he was given that position partly because he was a great inker, as well as a very good editor. So why shouldn’t he hire a top inker, namely himself, sometimes, to do a job? Well, I was one of Marvel’s top writers in the 1970s, so why not occasionally have that writer step in and do an issue? I’ve never felt I should make any apologies for that, even though I never liked the idea of bruising anybody else’s feelings, and I tried not to do it too often. JA: Well, you could have exercised that more than you did, certainly. THOMAS: No doubt about that.

JA: I think you were rather actually restrained, as far as that’s concerned. THOMAS: I think I was a gentleman and a scholar. [mutual laughter] It’s just that once in a while these things are going to happen. Occasionally I was on the other end of it from Stan or someone else. It’s inevitable.

“We Didn’t Need Any Cue From DC To [Do] Tarzan And The Like” JA: DC was licensing a bunch of stuff: The Shadow, The Avenger—which was Justice, Inc.—and of course Tarzan and all. THOMAS: They’d probably have licensed Fu Manchu if we hadn’t beat them to it! [laughs] JA: Right, right. But Marvel did Doc Savage, which I assume might have been a reaction to DC getting licensed properties. THOMAS: Not really. Remember, when we were talking about Conan, I said the readers in the late ’60s were bombarding us with mail about properties we ought to get. And one of them was Doc Savage. We didn’t need any cue from DC to want to do that, as well as Tarzan and the like. JA: How come that first issue of Doc Savage starts out, it seems, in modern times and the story switches to the past? THOMAS: We were trying to do a story that was set in the present, but keep the ’30s feel. That’s hard to do, so maybe we gave up on it quickly. I don’t recall. My involvement was mostly in plotting the first issue with Ross Andru based on the first novel, Man of Bronze. But Steve Engelhart did the dialoguing, and after #1 I had little day-to-day contact with that title except in terms of covers and general direction. I’d read two or three of the Doc Savage novels, and that was enough. The main thing I’d wanted to do was to establish the characters, get an autogiro in there—which I don’t think is in the original stories, but gave it that ’30s feel. It was tricky, because I don’t know if Stan would’ve wanted the stories set in the ’30s, and we were trying to walk a tightrope between being vintage and being modern.

Mayan Mayhem In Manhattan Roy and Ross Andru did the co-plotting/adapting of the 1933 Doc Savage magazine “novel” The Man of Bronze for Marvel’s Doc Savage #1 (Oct. 1972), though Steve Englehart was tapped to write the actual dialogue. Roy had his own ideas about why that Mayan assassin missed an easy shot at the beginning of the very first Doc tale. Inks by Jim Mooney. [Art ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Doc Savage TM & ©2007 The Condé Nast Publications.]

One thing I was happy about in Doc Savage #1 was that wristband Ross and I came up with. That might’ve been Ross’ idea. But the thing I was the proudest of was “refractive glass.” I’d always been annoyed by the fact that, in the very first Doc novel, we first see him through the sights of a gun from another building—Doc’s in what is obviously the unnamed Empire State Building. This Mayan assassin shoots at Doc—and misses him through a window! Now, if the Mayan’s a good shot—and that’s why he was hired, right?—there’s no 180 or whatever-it-is other Doc novels. That was just a crude mistake [writer] Lester Dent made, probably because he was just starting out. So I decided Doc shouldn’t survive to chapter 2 by sheer luck! Figuring that someone might take a potshot at him, he’d invented this “refractive glass” that made everything look about a half a foot away from what it

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

was. So if somebody shot at a person’s head, he’d probably miss it by an inch or two—and probably not hit someone he was talking to, either. I was real pleased when George Pal [director-to-be of the 1975 Doc Savage film] came by the Marvel offices and asked if Marvel minded if he used that wrist apparatus and the refractive glass, which he really liked, in his movie. That meant he’d noticed that we improved on the story! I was happy to see that make it into the movie—even if it wasn’t one of Pal’s great films. After #1, we had Gardner Fox and others writing Doc Savage. I think it wasn’t a bad comic, but Doc never really made it in comics— not even in the ’40s, when he was biggest. Back then, they had to give him some kind of super-ruby. He never worked as well as a comic book hero as he did as a pulp hero. [NOTE: At this point Jim and Roy discuss the development in 1976-77 of the Star Wars comic that was a phenomenon in itself. But since Roy wrote at length on that subject in Alter Ego #68, at the time of the film’s 30th anniversary, we’ve omitted most of that section as redundant.] JA: Did you find that writing the Star Wars comic was harder or easier than Conan? THOMAS: It’s hard to compare. You know, I despise Truman Capote’s old line that everybody quotes—Bob Kanigher used to spout it all the time!—about how “Some people are writers and others are typists.” Because, of course, everyone who ever says that always assumes, guess which one he is, and guess which one the writers he doesn’t like are! But in adapting the Star Wars movie, I came closer to just being a typist than usual, because artist Howard Chaykin was doing most of the adapting without much input from me. I enjoyed the “Solomon Kane” stories we did together more. Howard was always hustling for work in those days, and I tried to keep him busy because I liked his work. I remember I loved what he did for Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction with Larry Niven’s short story “All the Myriad Ways.” JA: Okay, let me get to Tarzan. Whose idea was it to get it? How excited were you about doing the series? THOMAS: Tarzan had been at Gold Key, so we couldn’t get it in 1971 or so, and then when it and the other Edgar Rice Burroughs properties went to DC, we thought, “Well, that takes care of that!” But the DC project didn’t last too long because, although a lot of the work was exceptional—especially Joe Kubert’s art on Tarzan, but some of the other stuff, as well—it apparently didn’t sell as well as everyone had hoped. As it deserved to sell. Maybe Tarzan’s time had come and gone, to a certain extent. So at some stage, out in LA, I heard Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., had approached Marvel. Marion Burroughs, the daughter-in-law of Burroughs, had been married to one of his sons who’d passed away; I guess she was the aunt of Danton Burroughs, ERB’s grandson. She was in charge of ERB, Inc., and came to New York with a couple of other people and had a meeting with Stan, et al., and they agreed Marvel would take over the books.

Star Wars And Swashbucklers Even though Roy pretty much spilled his guts about his involvement with the 1977 Star Wars comic two issues ago, we couldn’t resist running this recent sketch by Howard Chaykin of Han Solo/Harrison Ford (above left). With thanks to Todd Franklin. [Han Solo TM & © Lucasfilm, Ltd.] Roy (and, he suspects, Howard) both had an even better time co-adapting several of Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane stories—such as (above right) “A Rattle of Bones,” from The Savage Sword of Conan #18 (April 1977). But, if RT had it to do over, he wouldn’t let Howard talk him into drawing the Puritan adventurer with bumblebee-striped sleeves! [©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

I wanted to do John Carter of Mars. I loved Tarzan, both in the movies since the mid-1940s, starting with Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, and the Dell comic that began in 1948. I never had any problem with Jesse Marsh’s artwork, as some did. But I wanted to do John Carter. Only thing is, I couldn’t stand to see a grown man named Marv Wolfman cry. [Jim laughs] Marv had already staked out his claim to do John Carter because he’d written that character at DC. He’d even been attached as writer some months earlier to an ERB line of comics that was going to be published by the Burroughs company itself; Mark Evanier was involved in writing and editorial. So Marv naturally wanted to write John Carter for yet a third company. I suspect I could’ve got it away from him, but that would’ve damaged my friendship with Marv. I’m not saying I’d have done John Carter of Mars better or that it would’ve sold better or worse than Marv’s. I just would’ve liked to do it. I wouldn’t have minded doing a Carson of Venus comic, but we didn’t start one of these. Marion Burroughs loved me for a little while

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

Edgar Writes Barrels When Marvel parceled out its two newly licensed Edgar Rice Burroughs properties between scripters Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman, Marie Severin was asked to do a contents-page illo for FOOM #20 (Winter 1978). We think she caught the spirit of our two writer/editors pretty accurately. Oh, and the parody of ERB’s name in this caption’s heading was coined by Roy when he and Marie did their “Tarz an’ the Apes” spoof for—well, Spoof #2 (Nov. 1972). Today, he and Dann have a donkey named Edgar Rice Burro—but that monicker was Dann’s idea! [©2007 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.]

there, because, at Stan’s request, I’d written a long memo about what various series Marvel should make out of ERB properties. She loved my vision, and told me so. I was thinking long-range, and I leaned on both my own ERB knowledge and on past conversations with Gil Kane, who was a Burroughs fan as well as a Howard fan. Gil had got me interested in the notion of doing something with the ERB hero Red Hawk, from the book The Moon Men. Red Hawk is an American Indian fighting aliens who’ve conquered the Earth. I wanted to team up with Gil and do a book called Red Hawk and the Moon Men—which sounds like a rock group, actually. [Jim laughs] I also suggested a Warlord of Mars title, and a Carson of Venus, and a “Pellucidar” (under some other name)—and The Monster Men, which would’ve adapted that novel and carried on from there. I even suggested a Jimber-Jaw title, about a caveman awakening in modern times… and maybe doing something with the book Beyond Thirty, which was a sort of post-apocalyptic sciencefiction adventure, for which Gil had earlier done a nice book cover. I’d have loved to edit a line of those books, as I did with Howard! Carson of Venus would’ve been great, because it’s so close to Flash Gordon. I’ve always felt it was an influence on that strip. There were these giant tree-cities in both of them, for example, in the early days. I would rather have done Carson or any of these things than Tarzan. But Tarzan and Warlord of Mars, with John Carter, were the two they were going to do right away. So I wrote Tarzan, and I’m not totally happy with what I did with it. One mistake I made—and I did this with Star Wars, too, in a way—was to keep too much of the original writer’s prose descriptions in writing captions. This worked better with Conan, because Robert E. Howard’s colorful purple prose lent itself to captions. When I would do

The Beasts of Tarzan The preceding is the title of an early Tarzan novel —but the image at right is actually from Marvel’s adaptation of Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, with script by Roy T., pencils by John Buscema, and inks by Tony DeZuniga. This great page of wild animal action is from Tarzan #5 (Oct. 1977). Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, with thanks to Anthony Snyder. [©2007 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.]

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

it with the Star Wars screenplay or Burroughs, it didn’t work as well. Burroughs just described the action going on, and you don’t need to do that in a comic book. The pictures are there for the straight-on action. So I feel my writing of Tarzan was partly successful, partly unsuccessful. I did love the first couple of issues, because John Buscema both penciled and inked them. We told the story of Tarzan of the Apes to get it out of the way, then went on with the first real novel after the ones Joe had adapted—not counting Tarzan and the Lion Man, a later story. We did Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, which had been adapted by Manning and Gaylord DuBois, I guess, at Gold Key, but as only three comics or so. I wanted to do it at much greater length. I had fun with it, and I threw in ape language pages, but the Marvel Tarzan was never a great success, either—not under me, or when Dave Kraft took over after I left it and went to all-new stories. The Burroughs books just never really caught on that well, even though they looked good much of the time. Warlord of Mars looked great under Gil, inked by Nebres and others. But, all along, Gil would keep bugging me, “My boy, you’ve got to take over the writing of this book,” because he and Marv didn’t get along that terribly well. I thought it was a shame, because Marv is a very talented writer, Gil was a talented artist, but somehow they were always on different wavelengths. At least Gil felt they were. I would’ve started at a different point in John Carter’s life than Marv did—I’d have begun with A Princess of Mars and ignored the DC version of same, if I’d had my druthers—but I can’t say that would’ve made it more commercially successful. I told Gil, “Look, I’ll come in if Marv ever leaves the book, but I’m not going to try to push him off.” But I missed my chance entirely, because the book died ere long, just as Tarzan did. I suspect ERB, Inc.’s, cut of the profits didn’t help those books turn a profit, either. JA: [chuckles] But didn’t you quit Tarzan over a dispute?

Warlord Of Marvel Marv Wolfman, flanked by (above) Gil Kane’s thumbnail sketches for a page from John Carter, Warlord of Mars #1 (June 1977)—and a more detailed pencil breakdown by Gil of a page (was #10 really already in the works like the caption says?). The photo and art spots appeared in FOOM #20. [Art ©2007 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.]

THOMAS: Oh, yeah. The basic thing is, I gave John Buscema a few fill-in stories to draw when he needed a Tarzan plot and I was busy doing something else instead of working on the chapters of Jewels of Opar. I thought it’d be wonderful to adapt the stand-alone stories of Burroughs’ Jungle Tales of Tarzan, and I was told by Marvel that was all right. Jungle Tales is a collection of short stories about Tarzan in the days before he met any white people, when he mostly just interacted with animals, and I loved those stories, just as I loved Kipling’s Mowgli stories in The Jungle Books. A couple of those Jungle Tales adaptations went into an annual we did, and a couple of others were sandwiched into the main Tarzan comic. I’d give a story to John and tell him, “Just draw it in pictures.” That’s all you had to do with John. He preferred that to a synopsis. Then I’d add the dialogue later. Actually, I think the Jungle Tales adaptations worked out better than that of Jewels of Opar. But then, one Friday afternoon in late 1977—December, I guess—I got a phone call from Marion Burroughs. She was in Tarzana, just a few miles away, and I’m in my apartment just up the hill from the Warner Studios. She was very upset because we’d done these Jungle Tales of Tarzan. I said, “I don’t understand.” She says, “You have no legal right to do this.” I said, “Well, you’ll have to take that up with Marvel. They told me it was okay, or I wouldn’t have done them.” Several had come out by this time, and this was the first word of complaint I’d heard. I don’t

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

know if she got a complaint from Burne Hogarth, or she was just worried that she might get a complaint from Burne Hogarth—but he [Tarzan comics strip artist in the late 1930s and 1940s] had come out with his second Tarzan “graphic novel,” doing new adaptations, and he’d done a couple of the Jungle Tales, including at least one of the same ones I’d adapted. I even had his books, though I’d never paid any attention to them. So I told Marion Burroughs, “Your problem is with Marvel, not with me. If we can’t do any more Jungle Tales, I won’t do any more. It’s that simple.” But she kept riding me, like I was supposed to offer some huge apology. I couldn’t really figure out what

Jungle Tales Of Thomas Since it was a dispute concerning Marvel’s adaptation of short stories from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Jungle Tales of Tarzan that led to Roy’s leaving the book in December 1977, it’s ironic that the only typed synopsis of RT’s from that series known to still exist is the one he sent John Buscema for the two introductory pages of a framing sequence for Tarzan Annual #1 (1977)—the rest of which adapted two of those very Tales! Thanks to Michel Maillot, over in France, who somehow latched onto the original typed manuscript. Inks on the printed pages by Steve Gan. Also shown (above) are Buscema’s pencils of two panels from that sequence, as per FOOM #17 (March 1977). Roy’s always felt that this Annual, along with Tarzan #1-2 penciled and inked by Big John himself, were the best of those he worked on in the Marvel series. The series was later ably continued by David Anthony Kraft, one of Roy’s later Marvel recruits. [©2007 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.]

she wanted. Then she said, “A lot of the writing is even the same. A lot of the wording is the same in your version and Hogarth’s.” [Jim laughs] I said, “Well, of course it is. He and I were both adapting the same Edgar Rice Burroughs story. It’d be strange if the wording

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

H.E. And Him Penciled Gil Kane panels from the “Warlock” stories he and Roy did for Marvel Premiere #1 & #2 (April & May 1972). Depicted are The High Evolutionary and the entity called Him, who had been created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for earlier issues of Thor and Fantastic Four—and was mutated into Adam Warlock. Thanks to David G. Hamilton. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

weren’t the same in a lot of places. That doesn’t mean he looked at my version, or I at his.” Then she says, “Even the art is similar in a lot of places.” [Jim laughs again] I said, “Well, I suppose that’s inevitable, too. But there, I think you’re exaggerating, because not only does Buscema’s art not resemble Burne Hogarth’s—but John doesn’t even like Hogarth’s work.” If Gil Kane had been doing the stories, maybe— but John Buscema was a fan only of Hal Foster’s earlier Tarzan strip work. He’d made it real clear to me he didn’t like Hogarth’s work on Tarzan. Later, he confirmed to me that he didn’t even own those Hogarth books.

“the ceremony of the Iron Fist” in it. I thought that was a good name, and we already had Master of Kung Fu going, but I thought, “Maybe a super-hero called Iron Fist, even though we had Iron Man, would be a good idea.” Stan liked the name, so I got hold of Gil and he brought in his Amazing Man influences and we designed the character together and we had a lot of fun with it. We intended to do more than one issue, and why we didn’t, I have no idea. I just know that, after one issue, both of us decided to quit. We totally invented the character and we gave some thoughts to Len in connection with the second story, because we had a direction it was going, but from then on it was Len’s.

So I told Marion, “Any similarity is due to the fact that they’re drawing the same scenes; there can’t be much similarity in the actual drawing.” But she kept at it and kept at it, and then she got back on my case, about how I’d taken the writing from Hogarth. I said, “I hope you’re not accusing me of plagiarism.” And she said, “Well, you can hope!” I said, “I can do a lot more than that!”—and I hung up on her. I immediately dialed John Verpoorten at his apartment in New York—it was night there—and I told him, “John, I’m quitting Tarzan. I’m not taking another phone call from that idiot woman. I love Tarzan, I love Burroughs, but I quit Star Wars because I felt too hamstrung once Star Wars became a hit and a holy property, and I’m sure not going to take abuse from Marion Burroughs.” So he said, “Yeah, we’ll give it to somebody else.” And that was that.

We stuck around a bit longer on “Warlock,” but Gil had to be spelled by John Buscema for an issue or two, even when he was doing it. I was very busy with the demands of both editing and writing, and Gil was busy because he had various financial problems, some of them involving alimony payments, so he was always looking for the main chance, and if he saw an opportunity to make a little more money doing something else, he’d feel he’d better grab that. It’s not that he intended to betray me or Marvel. So we had some problems in that area, but I assure you, there was no plan.

Only not quite. Because, unfortunately, that’s the weekend John Verpoorten died. On Monday morning, I got a call from Archie Goodwin telling me he’d been found dead in his apartment, so I had to quit Tarzan all over again. I may well have been the last person to speak with John. I’m sorry it was over such an unpleasant subject, though there was no problem between him and me. I remember him telling me he had a bit of a cold or something, and I guess that brought on the congestive heart failure that killed him sometime over the weekend. So I can’t think of Tarzan and that damn phone call from Marion Burroughs without thinking of my friend dying soon after I talked with him that night.

“I Didn’t Like To Create Things For Marvel Because I Knew I Wouldn’t Own Them” JA: There was a time when you and Gil Kane would do the first issue of something like “Iron Fist” and “Warlock”—was that planned? THOMAS: [laughs] You flatter us by assuming we had a plan. [Jim laughs] No, we started “Iron Fist” because I’d seen my first Kung Fu movie, even before a Bruce Lee one came out, and it had a thing called

I would’ve loved to do a bunch of Warlocks with Gil or a bunch of “Iron Fists,” and one of the last things we did together involved an adaptation or two of stories from The Jungle Book as a series starring Mowgli. Gil and I talked over some plots—I believe we combined a couple of the Mowgli tales into one in at least one case—and then, when I left Marvel, it popped up. Gil did it, but without me. Well, they were Kipling’s stories, really. JA: Why did you pick the “Him” character to be Warlock? THOMAS: I don’t know exactly why that particular character, but it grew out of the fact that I didn’t like to create things for Marvel because I knew I wouldn’t own them. I also had a natural proclivity for working with old characters. I think it was John Byrne who said he likes to play with other people’s toys, and I feel much the same way. I’d think, “Gee, why make up new characters when there are so many great old ones?” What got me in the field was liking all these old characters, not a desire to create new ones, even though I did create some. But once I started thinking about how someday they might make a movie or TV show out of one of these characters and how I’d hate the hell out it if I didn’t get money or credit out of it— In the past few years, they’ve announced Werewolf By Night and Iron Fist as potential movies, and guess what? [chuckles] I have exactly the reaction that I knew I would, ten or twenty or thirty or forty years ago. It’s not that I’d ever think of taking legal action like some others have, because I feel I knew and accepted the rules when I went to work

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

for Marvel—I’d signed away my rights for a mess of potage, and glad to have it—but I just feel like, gee, would it really hurt to pay me and an artist something and insist that our names are on the films like Stan’s has been? An Iron Fist movie should say that character was created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane, just as Bill Everett got credit on the Daredevil movie even though he only did the first issue. Marvel Comics—DC Comics—they never “created” anything. That’s just a legal fiction. I can accept it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it, or that I think it’s just. So that’s why I made up a modern-day Black Knight, and a Warlock who was based on Him, rather than being a totally new character, and put together The Invaders even if I made up a few new characters for it, or fashioned Red Sonja from a Robert E. Howard character who was changed slightly. JA: You do get some compensation for Red Sonja, don’t you? THOMAS: Yeah, that was because of the Robert E. Howard estate with its original literary agent Glenn Lord, and Arthur Lieberman as the attorney handling Red Sonja Properties for so many years. They both agreed I should get something. Glenn did it first, then Arthur continued it later. I probably made more money out of Red Sonja in the ’70s than the movie people did, since the movie was such a bomb. [Jim chuckles] Of course, “Warlock” was also a reaction, in part, to Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, my own version of that kind of thing and of Jesus Christ Superstar. I combined aspects of those, so it made sense to me to take some Kirby characters and put them together, and that suited Gil fine, as well.

“Seeking A New Market” JA: And, of course, Jim Starlin took the whole messiah-like thing a lot further than you did, too. THOMAS: Yeah, once I’d left it, I figured Jim had done interesting things with Iron Man and Captain Marvel, so I let him run with it. But it’s probably just as well that, soon after giving Jim “Warlock,” I resigned as editor-in-chief, because, much as I liked Jim, I don’t think I would’ve let him take the lightning bolt off Warlock’s chest, and he was doing some kind of anti-Catholic thing that I’d have taken umbrage at. But by then I was gone, so I didn’t have to worry about it! JA: Do you think Marvel got a lot of flack for that? THOMAS: I don’t know, because I wasn’t paying too much attention. It was certainly ingenious stuff, but I might’ve wanted to change a few things here or there. JA: When Stan did the Spider-Man drug issues, how much flack did he get from the Comics Code or anybody else? THOMAS: Well, the flack was simply that he approached them and they said no. That’s why they did it without the Code, because he’d been asked by this government agency to do it, and he felt it was a good thing to do, and he wanted to tie it in with maybe some good publicity and maybe do a little bit of good. And the Comics Code was getting in the way, which he felt was ridiculous. So he got his back up a bit, and for some reason Martin Goodman decided to back him, which is strange, because Martin Goodman was not somebody who ordinarily bucked the Code, either. In this particular case, I guess he thought it was a good thing to do, but I don’t really quite know why. JA: I know there was a lot of reluctance from Goodman over Marvel’s black-&-white magazines. In fact, you told the story before why the long term between Savage Tales #1 and Savage Tales #2.

What’s Black And White And Red All Over? Answer: Dracula sucking a victim’s blood in one of Marvel’s 1970s black-&white horror mags! There were originally four such: Dracula Lives!, Monsters Unleashed, Vampires Tales, and Tales of the Zombie, to which The Haunt of Horror was later added. Dracula Lives! was the one to which Roy contributed most as writer. There was the adaptation he and Dick Giordano began of the novel Dracula (finally finished thirty years later and issued as the 2005 hardcover graphic novel Stoker’s Dracula)… the Salem Witch Trial story “Suffer Not a Witch” in issue #1, reprinted in the 2006 hardcover Marvel Visionaries: Roy Thomas… one set in New Orleans... and the one whose splash is shown above. Alan Weiss, a young artist getting noticed for the sheer beauty of his all-tooinfrequent comics offerings, had drawn “Suffer Not a Witch” in #1, and he and Roy teamed up again to have Robert E. Howard’s hero Solomon Kane encounter Dracula in ish #4 (Oct. 1973). Puritan and vampire even had a swordfight straight out of Flynn and Rathbone! The “Crusty Bunkers” consisted of Neal Adams and whatever artists dropped by his Manhattan studio—which included Alan Weiss. [Solomon Kane TM & ©2007 Paradox Entertainment.]

THOMAS: The same thing happened with the two issues of Spectacular Spider-Man, even though the second one was a color book. Goodman just didn’t want to get into that whole different market. He didn’t like going outside the Comics Code because, I think, he thought the Code might retaliate by giving him trouble on the regular books. JA: But he’s gone so by the time you start doing the black-&-white books. Whose idea was it to go into that? THOMAS: Stan’s, from Day One. The rest of us were happy to do it, but it was all Stan. It was just a way of seeking a new market that

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

wouldn’t be under the Code. We had trouble sometimes because Stan would worry about advertising those mags in the color comics, to which the Code might object. But we did advertise them. JA: For the adaptation of the Dracula novel you wrote, did you do much research? THOMAS: I’d read the novel and the books coming out about that time on the life of Vlad Dracul. I had first read Dracula when I was in like junior high or something. I’d always loved it. It was Stan’s idea, of course, to do Dracula first in the color comic and then in the black-&-white, although the color comic may have started out to be a black-&-white and then got changed over. But, of course, it soon became a black-&-white, as well, so we had two Dracula books. There’s Dracula Lives!—and then Stan added two more monster books the next day, and Tales of the Zombie the third day. So within 48 hours or so, we had four books—and they’re all late! JA: [laughs] Savage Sword of Conan seemed to be the best seller of the black-&-whites.

THOMAS: Yeah, it had this rocky start as Savage Tales, but from the time we started Savage Sword of Conan—and actually even in Savage Tales—whenever they’d get the sales figures, it always sold. Savage Tales #2 and #3 and #4 all sold well. It’s just that there was a long time between issues. Martin Goodman had been very happy to cancel it after #1. And then Stan, I think, was a little edgy, so there was an extra month or two between 2 and 3, dividing the parts of “Red Nails.” But once it got going, it became clear it was selling okay, and Savage Sword, in all those years until the ’90s, never had any sales problems. Between the very good-selling color comic that Conan the Barbarian had become and the black-&-white with its dollar cover price and no color, I would suspect there were times when Conan was making more money for the company than any other Marvel character, even SpiderMan. JA: Why do you think the black-&-white horror magazines didn’t seem to do that much after the initial flush? THOMAS: I don’t know. Maybe we were just spreading ourselves too thin and doing too many. Maybe if we’d just started out with one or two and put all our eggs in that basket instead of starting book after book. We were never able to really concentrate on the books the way, say, Joe Orlando could on the couple of color comics he edited for DC. It was always just, get those stories in there! It was always production, production, production. And while I think there was some very good material that appeared in those books, nobody ever had the time to oversee those books with the care I took with the Conan book. And, of course, we had text articles and reprints in the mags, which didn’t help any. Savage Sword didn’t really have to have reprints. It did okay from the beginning, so we could do all-new material, and that helped out for almost the beginning. When we did have one reprint issue, it was only for deadline reasons. But on the other books, people could look at them and say the Dracula book wasn’t all about Dracula—there was older material. Some of the reprint material was quite good, and some of it was just in there because we had pages to fill. JA: Yeah, I thought it was rather scattershot in terms of quality. THOMAS: If we’d had two books instead of three or four right away, we might’ve done better. We had Dracula Lives! and then Vampire Tales, and we didn’t need both. And Monsters Unleashed could have also covered zombies, but once Stan thought of Tales of the Zombie, he wanted a zombie title. [Jim chuckles] He also wanted vampire stories besides those about Dracula. Well, that’s great, but to start out with all four books—you were suddenly asking people to spend a lot more money. Several dollars every month; plus you’re giving them a lot of those characters in color, too. We were expanding so much, but the audience wasn’t necessarily getting any bigger. We were just asking them to spend more money—and some of them didn’t do it. JA: Well, I was one of them that couldn’t do it. [laughs] I could only get them when I had the extra money. By the way, where did the idea for The Defenders come from?

Halloween Hauntings Roy asked penciler Ross Andru to insert his then-wife Jeanie and himself into the second “Defenders” story, in Marvel Feature #2 (March 1972), as they listened to a “ghost story” that actually had been told them by Tom Fagan— who was and is a very real personage. This was the second of Roy’s two socalled “Rutland stories,” which launched a spate of same over the next few years, centered around an annual Halloween gathering in Vermont’s secondlargest city. Inks by Sal Buscema. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, sent by a sadly forgotten donor. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

THOMAS: It grew out of the fact that I had Sub-Mariner, Hulk, and Silver Surfer together in two issues of Sub-Mariner. That went pretty well, so Stan and I both thought it made sense to continue the group. But he didn’t want the Surfer in it because he liked to write all the “Silver Surfer” stories himself at that time. He’d given me permission to use the Surfer in that pair of stories, but he didn’t like the idea of him being a regular member of this group. So he came up with the idea that it should be Dr. Strange instead, because Strange would then be the guy to gather the other two. I actually think that worked better, because there wasn’t any focus with those other three guys. Each one of them was a chief, while Dr. Strange was the kind of guy who didn’t have his own ego involved. He’d be trying to think of the team, where

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

Sub-Mariner or the Hulk or Silver Surfer—it would’ve been out of character for any of them to be really a team leader. Sub-Mariner was an emperor, so the idea of him as chairman of The Defenders didn’t seem quite right, and the Hulk and Silver Surfer don’t work, either. So it was one of those cases where, because we had to get rid of The Silver Surfer, Stan suggested Dr. Strange, and it turned out to be work better than my original idea. Stan was pretty good. Sometimes, you’d think he ought to have been a comic book editor.

“Marvel Had [Jack Kirby] And DC Didn’t” JA: [laughs] Well, there’s still some time for him to get some experience. Now, when Kirby came back, I know you told Stan you didn’t think he should write, but that was part of the deal, so you went along with it. THOMAS: Well, Stan was just asking my advice at that point, because I wasn’t editor-in-chief when Jack came back. And my advice was, well, if Jack insists on writing, too, then I think you ought to still bring him back. I think Stan would have done it anyway, but he was asking my advice because at least a couple of people around there—and I don’t know who they are; he never said, and I never asked—were advising him not to let Kirby come back, especially if he insisted on writing. I thought they were wrong, and so did Stan, but maybe he was looking for somebody else to reinforce his gut feeling. JA: Because of Jack’s insistence on writing, was that why he didn’t come back to The Fantastic Four or Thor? THOMAS: I don’t think he particularly wanted to come back to those books. Who was writing them then? I know that when George [Peréz] left Fantastic Four and I was writing it, I offered the art to Jack. I called him up and told him, “I’d really like you to come back to Fantastic Four triumphantly. I’d be the editor and writer, but you could plot the book.” I don’t recall if we got as far as discussing the precise money split. My idea was that then his credit could be first, because he would be the co-writer as well as the penciler, and that wouldn’t upset the customary system of having the writer’s name first. It was to say “plotted and drawn by Jack Kirby, scripted by Roy Thomas,” or some such. Jack would be getting top billing, and I thought maybe that would appeal to him.

And he said yes, except for one little, little, tiny detail. And that is: he wanted me to break the story down in writing, panel by panel. And I figured, if I’ve got to do that, it makes more sense to have Rich Buckler, or somebody, do the art, where I’ll get some added thinking. Jack was trying to avoid giving anything more than his pencil, and if that’s all I got, I didn’t need Jack, good as he was. Jack was so determined not to be taken advantage of that, even when I tried to work it out so that he’d get credit for what he did, by that stage it just wasn’t enough for him. At an earlier stage, I think he’d have been happy with something like that. But now he wasn’t, so I withdrew and just handed him that What If? assignment, where I’d had the idea for four of us to become the FF, with me being The Human Torch. Jack took it and cut me out, making Sol Brodsky the Torch—but actually, that was a good idea, because in the really early days of the FF, Sol was already at least an informal production manager, and even inked #3-4. I don’t think Jack did it because of hostility towards me. To him, I was just “Houseroy,” you know? And sometimes, to me, he was something else. [Jim laughs] But I respected his work, though I think some of his thought processes were a little muddled. JA: Well, he’d been through enough, and I guess he was being overprotective of himself. THOMAS: Yeah, but I think he did himself a little harm, because it would’ve been nice to see him do Fantastic Four, and some of his new Marvel books weren’t such huge hits. But I had gone as far as I could by offering him top billing, plotting or co-plotting credit, whatever. I didn’t take it personally, though. I had him do all the Invaders covers I could. Other than that, though, I didn’t have that much involvement with him. JA: And you know there are those stories where he felt that people in the offices were working to sabotage him, but you weren’t in the offices. THOMAS: No, I was in California. I suspect there are aspects of truth to his suspicions. I mean, some people felt Kirby had betrayed Marvel, and there’s always this dislike of the prodigal by the people that stuck around. It doesn’t matter that the prodigal was a genius. [mutual chuckling] JA: Or partly responsible for them having jobs, as he certainly helped build that company. THOMAS: That’s right. I had no real prejudice against him, “Houseroy” to the contrary, although I knew how much he had hurt Stan in 1970 by the way he quit. He didn’t handle that well at all. But my feeling in 1975 was that Jack should come back, period—just

“Jack’s Back!” In FOOM #11 (Sept. 1975), Rich Buckler and Joe Sinnott provided an illo for an interview with Jack entitled “Kirby Speaks!” Above is one of the photos of Kirby that accompanied the piece, including a balloon sporting a quote from it. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

JA: You worked well together, but it seemed like you guys weren’t exactly similar personalities. THOMAS: Well, no. We both liked to talk a lot. With Gil, I did tend to do more listening than talking, [Jim laughs] but I did my share. Not 50%, I’m sure, if you had a tape recorder out, but I did enough. I was intimidated by him to some extent. Gil had been around longer—he’d been the artist of Green Lantern and The Atom, for chrissake—and he’d thought more about comics. Like most people in the field, I wasn’t given to a lot of analysis. I did it more on instinct, and Gil was a selftaught guy who sometimes maybe talked himself out of things a little too much. He theorized so much that, sometimes, he’d put more work into the theory than he did into the pages, and he couldn’t quite live up to what he wanted to do. But there was never a Gil Kane job that didn’t have some interesting aspects, with an individualistic look to it. After that first Captain Marvel story, I rarely just came to him and said, “This is what we’re going to do, and you’ll draw it.” I’d have an idea—sometimes a sketchy idea, sometimes a little firmer idea—and then Gil would become a creative part of it, and not everybody would let him do that. Even Archie Goodwin, another favorite collaborator of his, would often just write something and then Gil would draw it. They might talk it over, but it wasn’t quite the same kind of collaboration. Gil liked working with Archie, but he liked to be a creative part of things, and I allowed him to do that. In later years, he wanted to be so much a part of it that I found that, unless whatever we did was initially his idea, I could no longer interest him in things. So I adjusted myself to that, and it worked out okay. The only exception, I suppose, was the Ring of the Nibelung adaptation we did at DC, which was something Mike Gold approached me about, because he knew I’d like to do it.

Kirby’s Krusaders Roy snagged Jack to draw as many Invaders covers as he could—since Kirby, along with Joe Simon, Bill Everett, and Carl Burgos, had been one of the four artistic pillars on which the early Timely/Marvel had been built in 1939-41. The King’s pencils for the cover of #14 (April 1977) showcase The Crusaders, the hero-villains Roy and Frank Robbins devised as an homage to Quality Comics’ WWII-era stars Uncle Sam, Black Condor, The Ray, Human Bomb, et al. Thanks to John Morrow and the Kirby Estate. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

as I’d hoped to ease the way for him to come back the previous year, when he and his family talked to me about it in San Diego—and it’s a shame he stopped himself from being as integral to the company the second time around as he’d been before, which would’ve been to his advantage as well as theirs. Even so, I felt it was good to have him back, because then Marvel had him and DC didn’t. But he soon left again anyway, when he wouldn’t sign the work-for-hire agreement, and I can’t fault him for that, even though I signed it.

“[Gil Kane And I] Both Liked To Talk A Lot” JA: I started to ask you about why you and Gil Kane worked so well together. THOMAS: I think that we just had similar viewpoints, which Gil realized when he first saw my Captain Marvel #17 plot, the revamp of the Fawcett Captain Marvel, which was already plotted before he came aboard as artist.

Gil and I often had dinners and lunches together. We talked about work and about personalities and business and theory, a little bit of everything. Again after he moved to L.A. in the early ’80s, or whenever it was, we spent a lot of time together. We’d go out every couple of months or so with our wives and have dinner together, and a lot of the talk was not about comics, and a lot of it was. It was a wonderful, a very nice relationship. I think maybe at times I was kind-of the junior partner in it, [Jim chuckles] but it was a good relationship and I felt a real loss when—oh, God, I know how hard it was when he had cancer, and he didn’t tell me because he was just so terrified that somebody would let it slip to DC that he was ill, and they might take him off the Ring series we were working on. Nobody would’ve learned that from me, but he was understandably a bit paranoid about it. It did kind-of hurt me to be kept in the dark, but he didn’t tell many people, so I didn’t feel singled out. But going through something like that is so incredibly difficult, perhaps I’m lucky I didn’t know about it at the time. JA: How did you feel about winning the Inkpot Award [at the San Diego Comic-Con] in 1974? THOMAS: Well, it was an honor. The convention at that time was only four or five years old. I know I first attended in 1972, when Jeanie and I were driving south on a vacation in California. The real thrill to me in 1974 was being up on the dais between three artists I particularly esteemed. On one side of me was Milt Caniff, and on the other side, Russ Manning, and right next to him, Charlie Schulz. So I felt great about that, even though Russ and I quickly found we didn’t agree on much about how to do comics. [mutual laughter] He started asking me why the words that were bold in my Marvel scripts weren’t the ones that people speaking would actually emphasize. And I said, while there might be an occasional exception—for instance, Stan didn’t like the word “himself” lettered bold—I felt, in general, that the bold words in my scripts were exactly the words to be emphasized in speech. Russ was just reading the lines differently than I was writing them. He also

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

Just A Perfect Blendship (Center:) Though they never really collaborated until Captain Marvel #17 in 1969, Roy Thomas and Gil Kane first met at Dave Kaler’s New York Comicon in summer of 1965. The photo at top right shows them talking to fans [is that Rick Weingroff?], after a panel they were on together. Roy was wearing his spanking-new Fantastic Four T-shirt, just then being offered for sale; Gil was a bit more nattily attired. See A/E #20 for in-depth coverage of that “first full-service comics convention,” including a transcription of that panel. From the Jerry Bails collection, courtesy of Jean Bails. Both Gil and Roy admired the concepts of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, as per these two covers and a story page they devised together. (Clockwise from right center:) Astonishing Tales #11 (April 1972) starring Ka-Zar… Creatures on the Loose #20 (Nov. 1972) featuring “Gullivar of Mars”… and “The Valley of the Worm” from Supernatural Thrillers #3 (April 1973). Ka-Zar was a Tarzan wannabe, right down to being the son of an English lord who was reared by jungle beasts (#11 featured his origin, by Thomas & Kane)… “Gullivar,” which Roy & Gil launched together, was inspired by a novel that had actually preceded the first John Carter adventure by several years and may even have influenced ERB, so Roy and Gil gave it a decidedly ERB twist… and “Worm” adapted an REH story which postulated that tales of ancient heroes slaying dragons were distorted human-racial memories of an even more gruesome account lost in the mists of pre-history. Inking in this art montage is by Romita (“Ka-Zar”), Gil himself (“Gullivar”), and Ernie Chan (“Worms”); Gerry Conway dialogued the last half of “Worms” when Roy’s time got eaten up by legal/marital problems. “Gullivar” and “Worms” art repro’d from Australian reprints supplied by Shane Foley; thanks to Bob Bailey for the AT cover. [“Worm” art ©2007 Paradox Entertainment; covers ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

disparaged the Marvel way of working from plot first, so I backed away from my initial intention of seeing if he’d be interested in doing a story for Marvel. But I still respected his work. Of course, it was wonderful meeting Schulz and especially Caniff, who was, of those three, the one I admired the most. But I was pretty awed at being up there with the creators of Terry and the Pirates and Peanuts.

“The Academy Of Comic Book Arts” JA: How involved were you with ACBA [the early-1970s professional group]? THOMAS: Quite a bit, because the Academy of Comic Book Arts was Stan’s idea. He got in touch with Carmine at DC and got Carmine to become the co-sponsor or co-initiator, although I think Carmine mostly went along with Stan just because they used to socialize a fair amount. Being Stan’s second-in-command, I naturally got involved in ACBA, because he’d use me as a sounding board for ideas. He wanted to have it be a forum to promote comics and give out awards...

An Evening With ACBA Unfortunately, we’ve never even seen any photos from ACBA’s early meetings, but The Academy of Comic Book Arts Newsletter #21 (June 1973) featured a number of pics from the banquet held on May 29 of that year at Patricia Murphy’s Candlelight Restaurant in New York to give out the organization’s Shazam Awards. Sorry that repro in the Newsletter was imperfect, but here’s a group shot from p. 1. (L. to r.:) Dick Giordano, Cory Adams (Neal’s then-wife), Jean & Roy Thomas, and Karen & Joe Orlando. Board members at that time were: Neal Adams (president), Herb Trimpe (VP), E. Nelson Bridwell (secretary), Marie Severin (treasurer), Dick Giordano, Steve Skeates, Flo Steinberg, Elliott Maggin, and Gerry Conway. Thanks to Fabulous Flo for preserving this artifact!

Some people said, “Stan just founded it so it’d give him awards.” But, actually, it never did give him any, and I don’t think he cared. He just wanted to promote comics. It’s a shame it lasted only a few years, because I think it was a good organization. It worked especially well because at that time the comics business was still primarily centered in New York. We didn’t get much cooperation from a few companies, especially Gold Key, because they were afraid Marvel and DC would lure away their artists with living wages. JA: [laughs] They were always kind-of stand-offish. THOMAS: We had to get information about their creators indirectly.

JA: Stan said he liked the idea, but that Neal Adams tried to turn it into a union. THOMAS: Well, it wasn’t just Neal. Stan probably remembers Neal because Neal was pretty forceful and outspoken. But there were a number of younger people who maybe weren’t as vocal as Neal originally, but, as soon as ACBA was organized, they wanted to turn it into a union or at least a guild; something stronger than just a—what do they call it, a “drinking and wenching society”? Like some said the National Cartoonists Society was. JA: Right, which it probably was. [chuckles] Do you think that maybe people like Stan and Carmine, and maybe some other editorial types, might have been a little surprised at the amount of complaints that freelancers had, and how they felt? THOMAS: They might’ve been, but they shouldn’t have. Carmine had been a freelancer until just a few years before. Stan almost never was. Stan had spent a few months as a beginner in 1941, and, after that, he became Timely’s editor, and from then on he never had equals again at the company. He had a superior or two like Goodman, and he had people working for him, but nobody on the same level. Nor was he ever a freelancer. He knew there were grievances, but I think he felt people shouldn’t let that come to the fore in this kind of society, but work for the common good. But what’s one person’s idea of working for the common good is another person’s idea of just glossing over the

inequities of the system. And, of course, since ACBA was founded by Stan and Carmine, it was actually formed by management, not the workers. So some people would automatically be a little suspicious of it. So there were of tensions built into ACBA from the very beginning. JA: How were your feelings about it? THOMAS: I’m not a strong pro-union person, but I really felt the companies were, at that time, still so much run by these tyrants—even if now maybe it was corporate tyrants instead of “benevolent despots” like Goodman and maybe Donenfeld. I was kind-of in the middle of the road. I didn’t want to see either ACBA or the companies torn apart by a lot of fighting for unions, when we could maybe do things some other way. On the other hand, without pressure from some sort of group, change usually doesn’t get done. I mean, it’s all very well to say that now the American workers are better off than lots of others in the world without having to rely on strong unions, but there had always at least been the threat of unions. I don’t think these changes would all have necessarily come about on their own. They didn’t come about because guys like Andrew Carnegie wanted to give away money. [Jim chuckles] I was always—and this is true when I was editor-in-chief, as well— caught in between, being management on one hand, and on the other hand being more sympathetic than probably a lot of the freelancers knew to their concerns. I was very interested in getting the art back to them, and reprint payments, and so forth. On the other hand, I probably wasn’t as forceful about putting that view forward and certainly putting my own job on the line for it—which wouldn’t have worked anyway—as maybe some other people might’ve been. JA: But some good came out of it, because don’t you think the pressure to return art and maybe start paying reprint fees and stuff came out of ACBA, as they did—I think in the late ’70s, but I might be wrong on that. THOMAS: By that time, ACBA had faded away, after ’75 or so. But it

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

ACBA-Cadabra! This page of photos from the ACBA Newsletter spotlights a whole slew of 1973 celebrators, most of them identified in the accompanying captions. It’s hard to recognize most folks in the snapshot at bottom left, but the tall mustachioed personage is Sergio Aragonés… the smiling gent facing him is Marv Wolfman…and the bearded lad at far right is Len Wein. Incidentally, the Shazam winners that night for their 1972 work were: Julius Schwartz (Superior Achievement by an Individual)… Marv Wolfman (Best Writer, Humor)… Marie Severin (Best Penciler, Humor, and Best Colorist)… Sergio Aragonés (Best Inker, Humor)… Len Wein (Best Writer, Dramatic)… Bernie Wrightson (Best Penciler, Dramatic)… Tom Palmer & John Severin (tie – Best Inker, Dramatic)… Outstanding New Talent (Mike Ploog)… John Costanza (Best Letterer)… Jean (“Mobius”) Giraud (Best Foreign Artist)… Harvey Kurtzman (Hall of Fame)… with Special Recognition going to fans Jerome Sincovec and Michael Tiefenbacher for their Menominee Falls Gazette (which reprinted newspaper comic strips) and to longtime production person Gerda Gattel. Conan the Barbarian won for Best Continuing Feature, with the Best Short Story, Best Humor Story, and Best Feature-Length Story awards (Humor and Dramatic) all going to DC tales edited by Joe Orlando.

had helped lead to pros communicating more with each other. So I think it had something of an effect.

“The Writers Should Share In [The Return Of The Original Art]” JA: [chuckles] I guess I will ask this question, because this is the only thing you and I have ever really disagreed on. THOMAS: That we know about. JA: [chuckles] Well, in six years, that’s not bad. The idea of—and you know how I feel about this—giving the writers any share of the artwork back. I just don’t agree with that, and I’m just wondering how that got started and why did you agree with it? THOMAS: Well, I suspect it was Stan who first voiced it, because he was the person trying to put together that package, arguing with the people over his head, after we were bought by a conglomerate. He thought returning the art was a good idea, and that there was more to be gained than lost by it. He just felt the writer was a part of the

process, so the writer ought to get some of it. After all, most of the pages had words on them, and those words—and I don’t mean just overlays, like Craig Russell gave back to Marv Wolfman on that infamous Dr. Strange Annual—but the story that the writer gave to the artist, whether it was a full script or a plot, meant that there was a lot of the writer imbedded in the art from the beginning. So if the art was being given back partly as an economic incentive—and one of the things the artists kept saying was not that they wanted it back to hang on a wall, but so they could sell it make extra money—then the writers were not going to get much benefit out of that. The writers should share in that, not as largesse or as a gift, but because they’d contributed to the story. They’d either told the artist what to draw or pointed them in the direction of what to draw. They had added the dialogue, they had directed the storyline. The writers at Marvel—and probably to some extent at DC—were sort-of unpaid editors at that time, and to be shut out of the art and get nothing but their scripts would be a potential hardship on them. It seemed to me that giving them a couple of pages out of 20 acknowledged the fact that the writers were important. That’s the way I felt then, and 30-plus years have not changed my viewpoint.

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

JA: Right, exactly. [laughs] Okay, there was one thing Marvel did that, frankly, I always hated— THOMAS: Only one? JA: There was a while around ’72 or ’73 when Marvel’s cover layout had that border around the side and the bottom. THOMAS: I got the directive from Stan. But whether that was his idea, or someone else suggested it to him, I don’t recall. My impression was always that it was Stan’s idea, and that he thought it’d give the covers a distinctive look. I never cared much for it, because, yeah, it’s distinctive, but you lost a considerable amount of art area. It made it easier to put the copy in, but that really was never really a major concern. I don’t really know why it happened, and I never liked it. I don’t know how long it was around, a year or so. And then it faded away, and I’m glad it did. JA: Well, I thought it was terrible. THOMAS: Well, you and I are back to agreeing on things.

“I Like A Few People” JA: Right. [laughs] Okay. Let me go ahead and ask you about a few people. THOMAS: I like a few people, and that’s about it. [laughs] JA: We’ll start with Rich Buckler. Was he asked to draw in the Kirby style, or was that his idea?

Give Me Liberty… Or Give Me Art! We haven’t printed any Sal Buscema pencils so far this issue, so we’ll illustrate this section on the return of original art with a page of his from the “Thing & Liberty Legion” team-up in Marvel Two-in-One Annual #1 (1976). Script by Roy Thomas; inking was by a tag team of Sam Grainger, John Tartaglione, and George Roussos. Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of dealer/collector Mike Burkey, whose ads can be seen on pp. 65 & 78. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: And I knew that. Of course, you know I side with the artists, because it’s not the artist’s fault that people don’t want to buy scripts. Also, the fact that, at Marvel, since the artist then was almost always the co-plotter and occasionally suggested dialogue, the artist was the one doing the physical artwork, not the writer. Therefore, to me, the writer is taking the physical property away from the people who actually did the art itself. THOMAS: Yeah, and I pretty much disagree with that viewpoint. JA: [laughs] I know you do. THOMAS: And we can go on to a different subject. I don’t think there’s anything else to say. You know, you either like vanilla or chocolate. You either believe in one God or another one. JA: Well, I just felt that, since this thing’s been discussed a time or two in print, we would be hypocritical if we didn’t. THOMAS: Yeah, and it’d be hypocritical if we pretended we could agree on it.

THOMAS: I think it’s one of these things that just arose. Sometimes he was asked to work in that style, but that was because people had seen work of his that was in that style. They would give him work on characters that had been done by Jack; he’d turn in a job resembling Jack’s work, with his own twist. He would combine his own style, which had a little more illustrative look when he came in, a bit more influence of Al Williamson and people like that, with Jack Kirby’s style. And when people would see he could do that, it’d be natural to put him on Marvel books Jack had done, which was the majority of them, [chuckles] directly or indirectly. Sometimes he would get so close to Jack’s style that in some ways it hurt his reputation, because people would think, “All he wants to do is ape Jack Kirby.” Rich was much better than that. He was and he still is. JA: He got in a little trouble for it later when The Comics Journal printed that thing about Buckler imitating Kirby at Archie Comics. THOMAS: Yeah. I believe Rich told me he was asked to do that close copy of Kirby at the time at Archie. JA: What was he like to work with? THOMAS: He was great. He was a young guy who came in, I remember he had these Al Williamsony drawings—it was like Williamson with more bite, but still illustrative. I seem to remember seeing some early stuff that featured some sort of wild boy, a Mowgli kind of character with wolves running around. I believe he’d done work for other companies by that time, and I don’t know what he

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

liked to draw! [mutual laughter] He would put in so much more detail and so much more thought than you thought he was going to. He was a delight to work with. I didn’t work with him that much, but the times I did were very enjoyable, and I know that Dann enjoyed it, too, when she worked with him on three or four “Raven” stories on that mid-1980s THUNDER Agents comic David Singer published. JA: Okay, I’m asking about this next guy because I know nothing about him—and that’s Vincente Alcazar. THOMAS: I don’t know much about him, either. We got along great, and he came from—wasn’t it South America, somewhere? He just sort-of wandered in. I have vague memories of him having a moustache. He was a very good artist, but I don’t really recall that much more about him off the top of my head, I’m afraid. JA: For a brief while, in between Gil Kane and Jim Starlin, Wayne Boring did a few Captain Marvels. How did that come about, and did you deal with him much?

Thor Loser The above unused (if not quite actually “lost”) Thor cover penciled by Rich Buckler popped up in FOOM #21 (Spring 1978)— while Marie’s caricature of Rich hard at work is from #5 (Spring ’74). For a photo of Rich, see A/E #50—or The All-Star Companion, Vol. 2, which features his and Roy’s work on the 1980s All-Star Squadron. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

worked on first at Marvel or what I worked on first with him, but he very quickly became an integral part of the company, one of these very good second-tier people—and I say that without any kind of denigration to Rich, because in many ways I’m the second-tier Stan Lee. He became one of Marvel’s most important artists, because he’d take books like Fantastic Four and Thor and do them in a way that had a lot of the Kirby excitement and yet, at the same time, wasn’t Jack, so it had new thinking at a time when Jack had ceased to want to give his thinking to the company. Rich and I always found excuses to work together, and he would always be one of the people I’d think about giving any given assignment to. JA: Okay, George Pérez. THOMAS: I guess George started out as kind-of a second-string Buckler, [Jim chuckles] working with Rich as his assistant but very quickly developing his own style. When I worked on that handful of Fantastic Fours with him in the mid-’70s, I was just delighted to see the inventiveness of his storytelling and all the little things he would add, or just the way he would do it—because this is a guy who really

THOMAS: Well, Marv might contradict me on this— but I believe it was my idea to put him on Captain Marvel. He was looking for some work in comics after Mort Weisinger had kicked him off Superman after so many years, and I thought, “Well, he’s been shafted by Weisinger, so we have something in common!” It never hurt me to try to undo what I felt had been a wrong done, whether by Marvel or another company. I thought it would be great if we could find a place for Boring at Marvel. He did an issue of Thor and three issues of Captain Marvel. I thought it’d be funny if one of the earliest guys ever associated with “Superman” drew a character called “Captain Marvel.” It was a real assignment, but at the same time there was a little extra agenda there, just like there was with Marv making up a guy called “Dr. Savannah,” spelled

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

“The Swordsmen, The Damned Stupid Swordsmen, Will Win After All” Vicente Alcazar illustrated the adaptation of sf author Larry Niven’s “Not Long before the End” for Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #2 (May 1975). For a photo of Vicente, see p. 45. As the b&w mag’s editor, Roy admired this short story despite (or perhaps because of) its anti-Conan philosophy. Larry, whom Roy got to know later in Los Angeles, felt that in sword-and-sorcery tales it was the wizard, not the brutish warrior, with whom an intelligent modern reader should empathize. Lacking the time to script the adaptation, Roy had that ably handled by Doug Moench, seen at right in a photo taken at the 1975 Mighty Marvel Convention, as printed in FOOM #10. Doug had been brought to New York by Roy and b&w editor Marv Wolfman a year or so earlier to fill a crying need for stories for their horror mags—and Doug was well up to the task! [Art ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.; original story ©2007 Larry Niven.]

Superman Vs. Captain Marvel—A Boring Confrontation Wayne Boring (photo at bottom right), surrounded by two super-heroes he drew from time to time: (Below:) He’d been either the second or third person ever to draw “Superman” (running neck-and-neck in that department with Paul Cassidy), and penciled the Man of Steel’s newspaper comic strip for years. When he later sold dailies that didn’t depict Superman, he sometimes drew the hero right on the original art, as per this 1982 addition to a 1960 strip. [©2007 DC Comics.] (Right:) Boring penciled Marvel’s Captain Marvel #22-24, with inking by Ernie Chan, as per this page from #24 (Jan. 1973). Script by Marv Wolfman, who added villains like “Dr. Savannah” and “Dr. Mynde” as tips of the hat to foes of the original 1940-53 Fawcett Captain Marvel. Both pieces of art in this group repro’d from photocopies of the original art; thanks to Anthony Snyder. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

like the city in Georgia. We were always doing crazy things like that, and why not? After all, earlier, I had revamped our Captain Marvel to make him a sort of science-fictional revival of the Fawcett hero, at a time when we didn’t think the original would ever be coming back. And now he was back at DC, but Marvel had the trademark on the name “Captain Marvel,” so I figured, let’s continue doing whatever we can legally and ethically. Wayne Boring was good, but he was a little too stiff and stylized to work out for Marvel, I guess. Yet there were certain panels I’d see, and I’d say, “Ah, that reminds me of the old Superman!” In fact, most of his panels reminded me of panels in Superman in the 40’s and 50’s. I liked that very much. We just couldn’t find a really good place for him. He was the uncle of Ralph Macchio, who became, in the late ’70s, an editor at Marvel and who’s still there.

“[Stan] Wanted To Do Some Books That Would Have Special Appeal To Girls” JA: There was a time when Marvel decided to do a few comics geared towards women. You had Night Nurse and The Claws of The Cat and tried to find women to write and draw them. THOMAS: And don’t forget the third of that trilogy—Shanna the

Stars In Our Eyes George Pérez , as per FOOM #15 (Sept. 1976)—first with a Star Wars comicon sketch, courtesy of George and Anthony Snyder. George said in FOOM #22 (Autumn 1978): “The first color comic I did was ‘Man-Wolf’ with David Kraft. After I did ‘War Toy’ for Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, Roy Thomas offered me what worked out to be two issues of the Fantastic Four, which were followed by two more issues as a guest artist. I had a long run as a guest artist—until I finally wound up becoming the regular penciler.” At left is George’s splash page for “War Toy” from UWSF #2 (March 1975); inks by Rico Rival. Tony Isabella wrote the story, based on a concept of Roy’s that had been painted as a cover by Michael Kaluta. Roy and George’s two 1976 FF issues that brought The Impossible Man back into the Marvel Universe after a 12-year absence have been reprinted recently. [Darth Vader TM & ©2007 Lucasfilm, Ltd.; “War Toy” art ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

She-Devil. I think they were all thought up the same day, basically. JA: Oh, yeah? By whom? THOMAS: Stan had the idea, and I think the names, for all three. He wanted to do some books that would have special appeal to girls. We were always looking for ways to expand our franchise. We had a lot of super-hero books. You can’t just go on putting out more and more books that are in exactly the same genre, but if you could find ways to nibble around the edges, to add on at the edges, you can maybe cover a little more territory. Conan was like that, a hero with a little different feel. The kung-fu heroes were in that vein, and the monster heroes like Dracula and Werewolf by Night, so maybe a couple of women characters might bring back a few of the female readers who’d been lost to comics over the years with the decline of humor and romance comics. There’d been a time when women used to buy even super-hero comics. When I was back in grade school, one of the main people I traded comics with around the block from me, a few minutes walk away, was a girl named Joyce Glueck, my age or a year younger.

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

[Jim chuckles] And there was Carolyn Froemsdorf—when I was six, I remember seeing All-Star Comics #33 at her house, having somehow missed that Solomon Grundy issue on the stands. I didn’t think anything about it being unusual that I was trading comics with girls. But the female audience had largely drifted away, and those three books were an attempt to see if we could get some of them back. My idea—this was not part of Stan’s initial idea—was to try to get women to write them. And of course, if we could get a woman to draw them, too, that was great. Stan tapped Marie, of course, for The Cat. Ramona Fradon wasn’t there, but I had her in mind from the start, and when we made contact, she was in. But at least I could hire a few women writers. I lined up my first wife Jean to write Spidey Super Stories. I worked with her a little on it, but it was mostly her, especially after an issue or so. She was a fast learner. And Linda Fite was working on staff, had done a couple of “X-Men” back-up features. Then, for the third person, I thought of my friend Carole Seuling, who had done a bit of writing for her ex-husband Phil in conjunction with his comicons. I approached her to do the Shanna book because I knew she liked jungle comics and adventure comics. She’s a huge Wonder Woman fan, and owns that unpublished H.G. Peter cover we used on the cover of Alter Ego #23, and has a Mary Marvel one, as well. Dann and I still see Carole twice a year, when she’s passing through, driving between her homes in Pennsylvania and Florida. I worked with the three women writers, and I think they did some interesting work. They were kind-of tossed in suddenly without much preparation on ideas that maybe weren’t as commercial as some others, but I don’t think the failure was primarily theirs. If there was a failure, it was ours, not theirs. JA: Why do you those books failed? THOMAS: I don’t think the women were there to pick them up, you know? [laughs] We tried to see if we could grab a women’s audience, and we never did. We got some guys who liked looking at goodlooking girls buying Shanna. Maybe it was the approach. Maybe, because they were working for Marvel, the women were trying too hard to make the comics appeal to guys, as well. It’s really hard to say. JA: Right, you tried—because the first issue of The Cat had Wally Wood inks. THOMAS: Oh, we tried, all right! I put Ross Andru on as the Shanna artist, with Vinnie Colletta inking to make Ross’ Shanna look attractive, and I was very pleased with the way that looked. And while Night Nurse was less exciting—Winslow Mortimer was a much quieter artist—it was really the right kind of look for a book of that type. I think Mortimer’s work didn’t compare unfavorably with that of Al Hartley and some of the other artists who’d worked on similar comics in the past like Linda Carter, Student Nurse. In fact, wasn’t her name Linda-something, too? I think Stan named the comic Night Nurse to give more feeling of drama than, say, Day Nurse or Wet Nurse. [Jim laughs] But all it did was make it seem kind-of funny. I mean, is it a romance comic or a medical comic or a porn comic or a gothic comic or what is it? JA: [laughs] And you also tried My Love again. I remember there were Romita covers, and I think John Buscema might have drawn a story. THOMAS: Oh, yeah. Romita, John, Don Heck, Gene Colan, Steranko. But again, this was an idea whose time had pretty much come and gone. They tried them back up at DC once or twice, too, under Dorothy Woolfolk. But once their time had gone, it was just gone. JA: Even Joe Simon, who created the romance comics, couldn’t save them.

I Am Woman—Watch Me Soar Marvel produced this “backer board” for comic book racks circa 1972, at the time Shanna the She-Devil and The Cat were being launched in their own books. The figure in between is Princess Lyra, from “The Femizons” in Savage Tales #1 (1971), as drawn by John Romita. The Shanna figure was penciled by Ross Andru, The Cat by Marie Severin. This art appeared in Trina Robbins’ 1996 book The Great Women Super Heroes. [Femizon art ©2007 John Romita; other art ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

THOMAS: Yeah, nobody could save them. JA: By the way, you want to talk about Robin Green, who recently has been a writer and producer on The Sopranos? THOMAS: Well, what little I can. Robin was one of the—I can’t remember whether she came in right after Flo Steinberg left as secretary and girl Friday, or if there was somebody else in between—but she came in very soon after Flo left. Flo quit in the late ’60s because Stan wasn’t allowed to give her a $5 raise. We were all sorry to see her go. I do recall we had trouble getting someone to replace her. One young woman was supposed to start two different Mondays in a row, and called in with an excuse both times, and finally just bailed out entirely. [Jim chuckles] Flo just sat there, saying, “Well, I’m leaving on the same day. They can do what they want.” And she did. So Robin Green came in—Jeanie may have helped out a bit, but Robin stayed some months. I don’t recall a lot about her, though we got along well because we worked in the same room, just us and Sol Brodsky. The guys called her “Legs,” but I don’t remember any of that. She had long legs and was fairly tall. She was quite a forceful personality. I remember once she startled me when she looked over at me and

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

said, “I’ve been looking at all of your vouchers.” I said, “Yeah?” And she says, “Yeah, you’re kind-of a catch.” [mutual laughter] We would joke around. She left after some months, whatever it was—it wasn’t too long. She soon did some writing for Rolling Stone, and did that article on Marvel for them which was kind-of a big deal at the time. And the interesting thing is—I recall that one of the things she’d come to New York to do was to write soap opera for TV! She had a letter of introduction to somebody at one of the networks that did soap operas, and she told me they gave her an assignment: write some scenes and send them in. She was working on it, but she also had this 9-to-5 job, so she took several weeks to write them, and when she went in, they didn’t want to talk to her: “Soap operas are on every day. We aren’t interested in somebody who takes that long to deliver.” Of course, they probably hadn’t told her they needed to see it that fast. But there are places that are always looking for excuses to turn people down. They set up a bunch of hurdles, and if you don’t get through them, that just gives them one fewer person they have to talk to.

“They Were All Talented” JA: Chris Claremont started out on staff. I guess he was an assistant editor or something. THOMAS: He actually started off an unpaid intern for a few months in the late 1960s as a college project, and then he came back later and became an assistant editor. JA: What do you remember about him before he got really big with The X-Men? THOMAS: I just know he was there, and he contributed some plot elements, although we don’t necessarily agree on which ones, to a

Robin, I guess, persevered—because while I heard nothing about her for years, a couple of decades later she suddenly emerged as one of the writers and producers of The Sopranos, which I’ve never seen more than one episode of, but which I know is considered a good show. I think it’s great that she finally got her soap opera, after a fashion! JA: I’ve never seen her discussed in an interview in the comics. THOMAS: I think there were a couple of references to her by Herb Trimpe or others in a couple of interviews. But of course she never really worked on the comics. JA: By the way, your first wife, Jeanie, was listed as the “coconceiver” of Werewolf By Night. THOMAS: That’s true. We plotted the first story together, so I count her as a co-creator because of what came out of our conversation. We went to a car show in Columbus Circle one day, because she had a friend who was a model who was working that show, standing around leaning on the cars. But our interest in cars—we didn’t even own one, living in Manhattan—lasted about half an hour, walking around, and then we left. I was distracted by the fact that I had to get this plot in for the first issue of what had become “Werewolf by Night”—my concept, “I, Werewolf,” with Stan’s title—and I had the general idea: I Was a Teenage Werewolf meets Spider-Man, to use the TV Guide term. Stan approved it, but I had to get a plot in right away. It was probably a Sunday, so we sat down outside on some monument or something and talked it over. And the next thing you know, we had the full-blown plot, so I gave her a well-deserved co-plotting credit. Of course, I then assigned the actual scripting to Gerry Conway, and neither Jeanie nor I ever worked on the character again, not counting my editing. Jeanie did a nice job on Spidey Super Stories, too, in spite of the idiocy of some of the people she had to deal with at The Electric Company. JA: Did that book sell, by the way, much? THOMAS: It wasn’t a big seller. I think it did okay for a long time.

No Longer New, But Still Outstanding Michael Ploog (front and center), original artist of Werewolf by Night, is shown being congratulated by ACBA president Neal Adams (left) at the 1973 bash mentioned on pp. 44-45. Mike had won the Shazam Award for Outstanding New Talent of 1972. Seen at right is Michael W. Kaluta, winner of that same award for 1971, who had presented the plaque to Ploog. Maybe your first name had to be Michael for you to win that award? Thanks to Flo Steinberg. (Above:) Ploog’s doubly-swampy cover for Giant-Size Man-Thing #1 (Aug. 1974), repro’d from a photocopy of the original art sent by Jerry K. Boyd. The Glob was an even earlier homage to Hillman’s 1940s-50s “Heap” than was “Man-Thing,” let alone DC’s “Swamp Thing,” as it had been introduced by Roy T. and Herb Trimpe in The Incredible Hulk #169 (Nov. 1969)—the first issue of that mag RT ever plotted. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

Bonfire Of The Fanities Marie Severin drew her own impression of “what the fans wanted to do to [l. to r.] Chris Claremont, Len Wein, and Dave Cockrum for destroying the X-Men before they saw the book. Once the finished product was in their hands, they quickly changed their minds.” Len scripted Giant-Size X-Men #1-and-only, then turned the writing reins over to Chris. At right is Dave’s cover for FOOM #10 (1975), from which both pieces of art in this montage were taken. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

couple of stories. I think at least the first chapter of that final Sentinels story I did before I left The Avengers (#102-104) was based on a plot of his, because I was buying plots occasionally when I was very busy. I bought a few from him, and from Len and Gerry Conway, at different times. They were paid a pittance, but they knew the rules up front. Hey, at least they got paid! When I helped Gil plot a Spider-Man once for Stan, it was part of my staff job, though we co-plotted after hours. I remember that, when I would read Chris’ plots, they had a real nice turn of phrase. It wasn’t any great surprise that he became an important writer in the field. I remember he told me once that he was writing the best- and the worst-selling comics at Marvel. He was writing X-Men and Spider-Woman. [mutual laughter] Other than that, I don’t really recall too much about Chris, because we didn’t really hang around a lot together. JA: What do you remember about Dave Cockrum? I don’t recall that you worked with him very much, either. THOMAS: No. I knew him originally through Mike Friedrich. Mike is the one who first broached the idea of doing some of the characters that Dave had come up with. Supposedly, one of those was a character called “Wolverine,” though I have no conscious memory of that, let alone what it looked like. Probably left-over “Legion of Super-Heroes” characters. Dave and I got along, but since I was married, I wasn’t spending a lot of time socializing with people from the comics that I hadn’t already been socializing with before. There were a few people I spent a fair amount of time with—Gerry Conway in particular, and to a lesser extent Len and Marv and a few others here and there… Steve Gerber for a little while, Gary Friedrich, who was an old friend—we spent a lot of time together during the years he lived in New York, which was off-and-on. But with a lot of the new people, especially artists, I never really had much of a personal relationship. I’d thought I had one with Barry Smith for a few years, but considering how he’s

acted since, I guess he was pretty insincere about it. Mostly, I was busy enough, without thinking of excuses to get together with people for dinner. If it had come about at a different stage in my life, it might’ve been different. But as it was, we just talked about what we needed to talk about, then we went our separate ways.

JA: We haven’t really talked about Gerry Conway much. You were partners for quite a while. THOMAS: Yeah, in the early ’80s. He was a very talented kid who came in at 18, 19 years old. He’d been studying, writing science-fiction. He’d been at a couple of these sf workshops they had, and was the darling of those. He even sold a couple of science-fiction novels when he was 19 or so. So we were all very impressed by him. I remember Denny O’Neil once said he hated to be around Gerry because this is a guy who was going to take these 20 pages of artwork he was carrying around of Daredevil or something, go home, and come back the next day with them all written. Denny wasn’t that fast, and I wasn’t that fast, except on rare occasions. And Gerry was turning it out like clockwork. It didn’t make us dislike him, but it made you feel like he was a threat to everybody’s income. JA: A little bit of envy? THOMAS: Yeah, I wished I had that facility. JA: How fast a writer were you? THOMAS: Occasionally I’d turn out something overnight, if I had to, by staying up all night. But then I was out of it the next day if I had to come into the office. On the other hand, I often stayed up all night writing when I wasn’t the editor-in-chief, too, but was just procrastinating. I would spend most of the day trying to figure out ways to avoid work, sitting around home. That’s when HBO first came in, and I suddenly found weird excuses to watch a lot of movies I hadn’t bothered to go out and see. [Jim chuckles] I remember I hadn’t cared that much for Chinatown when I’d seen it in a theatre, probably because of the downer ending. And I watched it a couple of times at home on TV during the day, in order to avoid work as much as anything, and it became one of my favorite films.

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

“You Hold The Lives Of These Editors In Your Hands!” Another skewering by “Sev.” This one depicts caricatures of six 1970s Marvel editors facing a firing squad. (L. to r.:) Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Don McGregor, Tony Isabella, Gerry Conway, & Roy Thomas. It illustrated a subscription ad, headed by the above quote in FOOM #7 (Fall 1974). At right is a page scripted by speed demon Gerry, penciled by Gene Colan, and inked by Syd Shores for Daredevil #85 (March 1972). Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art; thanks to Aaron Sultan. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

So I was never that fast. I could do, if I put in a decent day’s time, 5 to 8 pages. But I would end up wasting the whole day away and then, at 10 or 11 at night, I’d suddenly realize I had to get to work, and by that time I was getting tired! I didn’t have the best work habits in the world. I got a lot done, but I suffered for it. JA: Sounds like you had a little bit of that Frank Giacoia syndrome. [laughs] THOMAS: Oh, well… very few people were in Frank’s class. JA: [chuckles] I know. I’m just razzing you. THOMAS: But I can understand how it could happen to somebody, because there are so many things to distract you. Gil Kane ran into that, too; a lot of people did. Even John Buscema and others said they had, at one time, somehow worked past it. But it was difficult, so whenever I had an artist who was late bringing in work, it drove me crazy, because I was really going to be up against it. By the time some artists would give you late work, you didn’t have any spare time. And once I became editor-in-chief, I had even less, because then I had to come into the office five days a week. But I was never, never that fast. Now Gerry was fast, and he was good. He had a nice agile turn of phrase, so he became one of these people we fed a lot of stuff to. He very quickly became the keeper of some of the company’s most important books, including Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and Thor, which had been the last three titles Stan had relinquished. In the early days, I could tell I was being assiduously courted by Gerry, when he would suddenly show up at Jeanie’s and my apartment on Saturday morning, saying he was just taking a walking tour around the city. Of course, he lived on the other side of town, [Jim chuckles] so maybe it was a total coincidence he ended up on East 86th Street. But we got along well. If we hadn’t, and if he hadn’t been good, he wouldn’t have been able to insinuate himself with me, however hard he tried. JA: Basically, the same question about Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. THOMAS: Yeah, we did tend to think of “LenandMarv” as a multisyllable word. [Jim laughs] It’s not fair to them, but they even hung around together before they came in the field co-writing stuff. They were such good friends and you saw them together all the time. I eventually became better friends with Marv. I saw more of him and maybe we had a few more interests in common, but I liked both of

them, I respected their writing, and we inherited all of them at Marvel around 1970 or so. Marv and Len and Gerry and maybe one or two other young writers had all been doing a little bit of work for DC, especially the mystery mags. Then suddenly DC discovered they had a lot of inventory, so they told these guys, “Go away and don’t eat for a few months, and then maybe we can give you some assignments.”

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

And of course, 15 minutes later, they’re all over at Marvel, clamoring for work, and I was able to give them work. We were expanding at the time. Some artists came that way, too, probably, as work on House of Secrets and the like slowed down. Gerry was initially the most valuable of them, but they were all talented. Len was very good at picking up other writers’ styles, as Gerry was. They were probably both a bit better at that than Marv. Marv always felt he didn’t have any feel for super-heroes in the early days and was surprised when I put him on an F.F. Annual. But I thought he did a good job with it. Of course, he went on to become quite an accomplished super-hero author; yet, at Marvel, his major success was the Tomb of Dracula book, which he took to with a vengeance. JA: One of the better books of that period, I think. THOMAS: It definitely was. I even read two or three of them myself. [mutual laughter] He wrote that book so well that all I had to do as editor was work out the covers and make sure things were going along okay. And I never had to pay any attention to the book again. My style of editing was to get people to make my job easy for me, as Al Jaffee says. Stan was always doing that, although he was far more of a natural teacher than I was, and that’s the attitude I picked up. If you’ve got to go around micromanaging and editing every word and watching everything they do, and making sure that what they do conforms exactly to what you’d have done, then that’s neither fun for you nor respectful of them. And you don’t get variety. I think Marvel gets maligned sometimes about the ’70s because we were treading water a little in some areas. We weren’t looking real hard to add a huge number of super-hero books, or do things in a radically different way. When you really look at the stuff, though, there was a lot of invention and experimentation going on during that period, but maybe they were not the things that make people say later, “This was a great, wonderful time for comics,” and it’s easy to disparage. But I think the people who say that are basically wrong. JA: Now you’re talking about experimentation, and I figure that two people who came in who were definitely off the beaten track— and I mean that as praise, not as anything else—were Steve Gerber and Don McGregor, because they were a little bit more, at times, cerebral, and certainly a little bit more literate than your average comic book writer. I was wondering, what did you think of their work, and of them, personally? THOMAS: Steve I’d known since he was in junior high back in St. Louis and I was in college 100 or so miles away. We had met in the early days of fandom, though we weren’t close friends, due partly to the age difference. But I liked Steve, and I knew he was a very bright guy. Later he was brought in to write Marvel comics and he took that off in his own different direction. But that’s good, because Marvel couldn’t just stay the same. You needed some stories to be “more of the same,” but with enough differences that readers didn’t feel they were buying the same comic they bought last month. You also needed to have some other people who took things off in different directions. And so you tried out a bunch of people, then you saw which ones were which, and Steve and Don both turned out to be ones who advanced the field. I don’t have a memory that either of them was a terrific comic seller, as such. But then, all of us had comics that didn’t sell as well as they could, and that’s not the only criteria, even if we were basically hired to sell comic books. Of course, Steve’s Howard the Duck did pretty well for a brief time after my time, but the whole

Suffering Fools Gladly Steve Gerber at Phil Seuling’s 1974 New York Comicon, as per FOOM #7— and the splash page of Man-Thing #4 (April 1974), which featured his offbeat “hero,” The Fool-Killer. (Actually, using the words “Gerber” and “offbeat” in the same sentence is something of a redundancy.) Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Anthony Snyder. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

history of that first issue is so confused by whatever it was, [chuckles] hijacking a truck containing a zillion copies of the first issue, or whatever happened to it. I don’t think Don McGregor’s work sold terribly well, but I always thought he was doing some interesting things, and I thought, “Well, the stuff we put him on was the kind of stuff that we didn’t expect to become great sellers anyway, like ‘Black Panther’ and ‘War of the Worlds.’ So let him experiment with it and see what happens.” And he certainly did a lot of interesting things with it. Of course, Steve and I had been in touch, off and on. He had come to visit me, in fact, in late ’65, when I was new to the field. He came to New York for a few days upon graduating from high school, I think, while I was still rooming with Dave Kaler in the East Village. Later I’d occasionally see him when I went back to St. Louis. Did you know he’s the guy who picked up Jeanie for a date with me when I was in town in ’68, because her parents didn’t want her going out with me? He was “the beard,” so to speak. [Jim laughs] Then, a couple years later, I got a letter from Steve, saying, in essence, “Help! I’m going crazy in my advertising job!” And well, Steve was crazy anyway, [mutual laughter] so what else is new! So I thought, “Gee, he’d be a good person to get up here, so if he wants to make a change, let’s give it a try.” He was brought in to be an assistant editor on staff. That didn’t work out so well, because for whatever

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

reason, whether it was narcolepsy or just late hours, he had trouble staying awake. At the time, he wasn’t a staff kind of person, at least in terms of what Marvel needed, but he was a real good writer and did some interesting things with “Man-Thing.” And of course, he created Howard the Duck. JA: Which you didn’t like at first. [laughs] THOMAS: Well, I liked him okay as sort-of a weird character in a book, but I didn’t think he should stick around. [Jim chuckles] I was a little worried, and I think wrongly so. I was thinking in terms of The Impossible Man that the readers a few years earlier had disliked so much that Stan wouldn’t let him be used for a decade. I was concerned about stepping over that line into making [the comics] seem a little less serious, so that maybe the readers wouldn’t respond to them. But I think times had changed, and Steve had a unique style, so although I pushed him into “killing off” Howard the Duck in that first story, we always knew we could bring him back, because you can bring anybody back. As a matter of fact, some months later, I approached Steve because I was then editing Arrgh!, which was a combination of new and reprint material in a vaguely Mad vein. I knew he’d wanted to do more Howard the Duck, so I said I’d love to have him do a “Howard” story for Arrgh! But by then, unbeknownst to me, he’d already made arrangements to put him into a Man-Thing Annual, which led to his own comic. I feel I absolved myself to

Howard The Duck Lives! Editor Roy may have forced his old friend Steve Gerber to “kill off” Howard the Duck in that “ManThing” story—but who else do you know besides RT (and maybe Steve) who still owns a set of syndicate proofs to the entire run of the Howard the Duck newspaper strip? Seen below is the 9/13/77 daily by Steve and Gene Colan. At left is a recent Howard sketch by Gene, done at a Hawthorne, NJ, high school and sent by Jack DiMartino. Photo of Gene from the 1975 Marvel Con book. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

some extent by offering him a chance to bring Howard back—which would’ve been used, had he not already had a different berth. Maybe it would have saved Arrgh!, who knows? [Jim laughs] Steve and [artist] Frank Brunner made a really good combination on Howard the Duck. And McGregor—I’d seen a lot of his stories for Warren. Not my kind of thing, exactly, but I knew he was a good writer. We needed writers, so I remember he had a security guard job or some such thing as his regular gig. I can’t call it a day job, [chuckles] because it might have been at night. So I called him up and hired him as an assistant editor with the idea that he could also do some freelance writing and make more money, because our staff jobs didn’t pay abominably well. He came in and he worked very hard at it, and made a name for himself. Somehow, whenever he’s interviewed on his career, he manages to omit my name from them, as if he somehow just surfaced at Marvel like Aphrodite emerging full-grown from the sea in a clamshell. That’s because, in the mid-’70s, we came to a personal parting of the ways— though Don has claimed that my explanation as to why that happened isn’t correct, and he refuses to enlighten me as to his actual motivations. So I’ll just let it go at that. JA: Did you get much controversy much about his ‘Black Panther,’ because he dealt with a lot of sensitive issues at times? THOMAS: There might have been a little. I don’t recall any. JA: [laughs] You didn’t have any contact then with John Byrne then, did you? THOMAS: No. Somebody told me he might have given me a Conan drawing that I used, but I don’t recall, because in those days everybody wanted to do a Conan drawing. But I did publish one or two of them, so I must have liked them. But that was near the end of my tenure around there, so I never had much contact with him at all before I moved to LA.

“I Never Really Enjoyed Writing Animation” JA: How did you get the job writing animated cartoons? I know you did some writing on the Fantastic Four series. THOMAS: At the very end of the ’70s, yeah. Well, it was because Stan was doing them for DePatie-Freleng and I lived in LA. He couldn’t write them all, but I don’t remember if he approached me or vice versa. I was still

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

infamous HERBIE the Robot [Jim chuckles] was not as much fun as it would’ve been to work with The Human Torch. I remember I had writer’s block for a couple of hours when I tried writing my first animation script. But I eventually got it done, after Dann gave me a pep talk. JA: I’ve seen some of storyboards Kirby did on Fantastic Four. So how did you deal with Jack then? THOMAS: I didn’t. The storyboards were just sent to me by DePatieFreleng. It was animation done Marvel style. I would do a plot, Jack would break it down into pictures, storyboards, which were apparently quite different from the usual storyboards, because I don’t think he had a lot of expertise in that area at that time. I would then write the script, looking at the storyboards. I’ve seen a few of those shows they released on tape, and I think they caught the spirit of the comic books better than most TV cartoons did back then, probably because Stan and I were writing them. Christy Marx wrote one, as well. I’ll have to talk about that experience at greater length some other time. JA: Didn’t you write some Plastic Man cartoons? THOMAS: One. I wrote one for Ruby-Spears, and all I remember about it was that he had this Hawaiian buddy. [NOTE: Transcriber Brian Morris says he thinks his name was Hula-Hula.] It wasn’t

War Of The Words Don McGregor in his Marvel office, as per FOOM #2 (Summer 1973), with Marv Wolfman in the background. Craig Russell came aboard as artist of the “War of the Worlds” feature with Amazing Adventures #27 (Nov. 1974). He and writer Don made that series a truly memorable one—eventually retitled “Killraven, Warrior of the Worlds” after its hero, seen above in a specialty page for AA #30 (Feb. 1975), as printed in FOOM #21. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

working for Marvel at that time. I suspect I may have been sent there by my agent. By then, he’d already gotten me involved in trying to create a number of different TV series. I had several TV series ideas that got halfway close to development, particularly through Charles Fries Productions. At least they got past the early hurdles. Thanks to my screenwriting friend Clara Noto, whom I met in New York in 1975 through our mutual friend Ed Summer, I’d lucked into getting an agent without having to really write spec scripts, or I’d probably never have had one. I was going to an awful lot of TV- and even movie-related meetings in the late 1970s after I moved West, so when the Fantastic Four show came up, they hired me to work with Stan and DePatie. I never met Freleng. It was interesting, even though, of course, working with the

Speaking Frank-ly Not long before he became a regular penciler for Marvel, John Byrne was drawing spot illos for FOOM, such as this drawing of the Frankenstein Monster for issue #5 (Spring 1974); inks by Duffy Vohland. JB was in good company: right above his illo on the same “FOOM Fan Art Gallery” page was a Sub-Mariner pic by another youngster, name of Ken Steacy. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

A Very Special “Olympics,” Indeed Roy scripted several episodes “Marvel style” for DePatie-Freleng’s 1979 Fantastic Four animated series, thrilled to be writing dialogue to Kirby storyboards (from RT’s plots). We’ve long heard veteran animators say that Jack didn’t fully understand the medium and that his storyboards were hell for animators to work with—but Roy felt that in that TV series he was able to tell a story which compared not unfavorably with an actual FF comic of the era, allowing for the somewhat younger audience. Above are Kirby storyboards from the Thomas-scripted “Blastaar, the Living Bomb-Burst,” with thanks to John Morrow & the Kirby Estate; at left is the box art for the commercial video of “The Olympics of Space,” an RT original. As for the art—is it by Ron Lim? Other? [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Woozy, but some guy based on Lou Costello, I think. I don’t remember the villain. I remember I made up a rich guy like a William Randolph Hearst and I named him “William Randolph Scott” [Jim chuckles] and they changed that. I was annoyed at that. I never really enjoyed writing animation, from the ’70s through the ’90s. The stuff with Kirby was interesting because it was Kirby and Stan and everything. I also worked on a part of a GI Joe, I did part of a Thundarr—I seem to recall I found excuses to leave in the middle of them. [Jim laughs] Dann and I worked together on one or two things. Even if I’d written them exactly the way the producers wanted, it would never have meant anything to me, because it wouldn’t have been anything I’d have wanted to watch on TV in the first place. I like to write comic books and I liked writing screenplays—at least to some extent—but, even though Fantastic Four and Thundarr in particular were concepts I liked, I’d never have bothered to watch them as animated cartoons.

“Covers” JA: When you were editor-in-chief from 1972-74, did your working relationship—because you had a good one with John Romita— change any when you become editor? Because, before, you were sort-of like equals, and then you’re editor-in-chief. THOMAS: Well, I don’t think the matter ever came up directly, because, for one thing, John had direct access to Stan. If we’d had a management chart, the lines between people would’ve been drawn every which way. I never worried about that. It was a problem when Frank Giacoia was the assistant art director. It never was a problem with John, because I don’t remember us ever really having any kind of clash. Although Len and Marv and Archie were all good men and talented ones, I like to think things flowed a little more smoothly when

I was there than later… not because of any great skill on my part but because I had a closer and different relationship with Stan than any of them did. John and I actually did a lot of work together on covers, character designs, that kind of thing. In terms of stories, we only did that one little “Satana” four-pager overnight. I’d have loved to do a Captain America with him, of course—or even a Spider-Man. JA: When you worked with Romita on costume designs, what was the give-and-take like? THOMAS: If I had some vague idea, I might have mentioned it verbally, and John would’ve just started drawing. Probably more likely, he’d have started drawing based on just a name. Some of the things were just inherent. You get a character like Brother Voodoo—what’re you going to make him look like? But I liked his design for that hero. I remember that we worked together a bit more closely on Luke Cage, but the things I mostly remember, like the chains, were probably John’s. I think I was there mostly to kibitz, and I could veto something if I had a different idea. But mostly I was content to let John do it. He knew what he was doing. I’d only visually drawn up the costumes of a few characters myself, like the first four members of The Squadron Sinister/Supreme and Union Jack. JA: How did you work on covers with Gil Kane? THOMAS: Gil loved doing covers because, even though he only got paid a regular page rate, it was just the one drawing. He loved to come in once every couple of weeks, and he’d go home with a whole mess of work after we sat around and talked for an hour or so, usually looking at photocopies of stories already penciled. I think maybe a few of his covers looked a little too much alike,

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

Kataclysmic Kane Kovers A pair of covers penciled by Gil Kane, selected almost at random from among the many he did for editor-in-chief Roy: Supernatural Thrillers #6 (Oct 1973), inked by Ernie Chan… and The Tomb of Dracula #28 (Nov. ’74), inked by Tom Palmer. Repro’d from b&w images in various issues of FOOM. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

because Gil was such a stylized artist. If one artist was going to draw a big percentage of Marvel covers, it would’ve worked out best if it had been Jack Kirby or John Romita—or maybe John Buscema, except that he didn’t always have the kind of “poster” approach that worked best for covers. I think Kirby or Romita figures would’ve worked a bit better for a mass of covers, but Gil drew heroes who looked like gymnasts, whereas Kirby and Romita drew these big, powerful characters. But Gil was such a good artist—and besides, Romita was too busy to do many covers and Kirby wasn’t working for Marvel when I was editor-in-chief, and John Buscema didn’t especially like doing covers anyway. In the end, I’m basically very pleased to look back on all the nice covers Gil and I did together. Of course, he did a bit more work on them than I did! [laughs]

“I’m Not Going To Sign Any Contract With Marvel That Isn’t A Writer/Editor Contract” JA: So finally, do you want to talk about why you left Marvel in 1980? THOMAS: I can only say what I said once before. One day late in 1977 it suddenly occurred to me that Archie [Goodwin] had been editor-in-chief for a

Land Of Oz Ho! One of many covers on which Roy “collaborated” with John Romita (of course, Jazzy Johnny did a bit more of the work): JR’s pencils for that of the tabloid-size Marvel Treasury of Oz #1 (1975), which adapted L. Frank Baum’s second Oz book, The Land of Oz, as a follow-up to the Marvel/DC Wonderful Wizard of Oz tabloid earlier that year. Even when Marvel went ahead with its own Oz series, it still used, under license, the likenesses of the MGM movie versions of some characters. Alfredo Alcala drew the interior art; Roy was the scripter. Marvel Treasury of Oz #2, adapting Baum’s book Ozma of Oz, was prepped by the same Thomas/Alcala team (again with Romita covers, front and back) but was never published due to legal problems. RT still has photocopies of that issue, which he hopes will see print one day—along with reissues of the first two! [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.; based on characters © 1939 Loew’s, Inc., renewed © 1966 MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, ©2007 MGM’s successors in interest.]

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

Everybody Loves A Parade

year and a half, and I just felt he wasn’t likely to stick around much longer. Since they’d always promoted the next-in-line assistant editor to the editor-in-chief job, that meant Jim Shooter would be taking over. Now, my contract still had me independent of anybody but Stan, but I just had the feeling, based on things I’d learned from Archie and others, that neither I nor a lot of other people were going to like the idea of Jim Shooter as Marvel’s editor-in-chief. It wasn’t personal dislike… I didn’t really know Jim. I made the tactical mistake of writing Stan a letter saying that I felt that I and a number of other creative people didn’t believe Jim Shooter was a person we wanted in that job, and it was better if Stan knew this in advance, rather than learning it as a rude shock later. Of course, Stan, being an open, forthright kind of person in many ways, showed the letter to Jim Shooter, which probably didn’t endear me to Shooter. So Jim and I talked, and I said, “Well, look, Jim, I’m willing to start from Square One. If Stan wants you to be the editor-in-chief, you know I’ll try to work with you. I said my piece, which I felt I had a right to say, but I’d cooperate with you and act like that letter never happened.” And Jim said fine, I’m sure things will work out well. But, when it finally came time for me to renegotiate a third three-year contract in 1980—well, by that time, Marv’s own writer/editor contract had come up for renewal several months earlier, and Marvel had refused to renew the writer/editor part, so Marv had left. Len had already left Marvel earlier. So I told Jim by phone, “Well, look, I can save us all some trouble.” I was trying to do the same thing I’d done with Sol, just be logical and straightforward. “I’m not going to sign any contract with Marvel that isn’t a writer/editor contract,” whatever he and Jim Galton wanted. “I’ll just quietly leave Marvel. So we can both save ourselves a lot of trouble and ill feeling if you’ll just tell me up front if the writer/editor thing is out, because then I won’t have spent any money on a lawyer drawing up the contract”—Shooter wanted me to have my attorney adapt the old contract, rather than Marvel’s, which saved them dough. “I’ll only get upset if I spend money on the contract and then you tell me it can’t be as writer/editor, because that would’ve wasted my time and money.” I wouldn’t have liked their decision or agreed with it, but at least I’d have felt it was just a business decision and they’d told me about it up front.

Recognize this Romita/ Thomas collaboration of sorts? According to FOOM #12 (Dec. 1975), “Marvel’s Art Director John Romita, along with Writer/Editor Roy Thomas, briefed artist Ed Hannigan on the editorial contents of Invaders #5. Ed returned with the pencil sketch reproduced [at left]. Reaction was quite favorable. (Note John Romita’s suggestions to Jack Kirby.)” At far left is Hannigan’s sketch, at left Jack’s powerful pencils based on that sketch, courtesy of John Morrow and the Kirby Estate—and below is the published cover, with thanks to Bob Bailey. It remains one of Roy’s favorite Invaders covers. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roy Thomas Talks About Writing—And Editing—For Marvel During The 1970s

The Shootist Jim Shooter, as per FOOM #21 (1978), the issue that announced his appointment as Marvel’s editor-in-chief. At that time, there were still several writer/editors like Roy, Marv, etc., whose responsibility was directly to Stan Lee, not to any editor-in-chief. Also seen is the heading of Shooter’s department in FOOM, though whether Marie Severin drew this one or know, we don’t know. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

I mentioned that, after all, Marvel had refused to renew the writer/editor provision of Marv’s contract a few months earlier. Jim said, over the phone, and this is pretty much a quote: “Well, the way we treated Marv is not necessarily the way we’ll treat you.” I felt he was implying that somehow Marv and I were on a slightly different plane, as far as Marvel was concerned. I had a relationship with Stan, I’d been with the company longer, the Conan books were big moneymakers, etc. I was probably more important to the company at that stage, which is not to say that Marv wasn’t important to them. But whatever Jim meant, and I didn’t ask, I just said, “Okay, as long as it would be a writer/editor contract.” One change that had to be made was that I was going to have to work under Shooter from now on, not directly for Stan. Stan felt it had to be that way—and I suspect Jim wanted it that way, too. Whose idea it was doesn’t matter. But I’d told Stan, “Well, I can understand that. Time has gone by, I’m out here in LA, you’re busy with many different things. I accept that; that status can change. As long as I’m a writer/editor, I don’t mind working under Shooter as editor-in-chief. His name’s on the books, and I’ll just have to hope it works out. I’m willing to take a flyer with that, no problem.”

that were done to me were the worst things in the world. They don’t begin to compare with a war crime [Jim chuckles] or anything like that. It’s just that I didn’t feel I was dealt with honestly by Jim Shooter—to put it mildly. And I have a real thing about being lied to. Somebody may claim, “Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie.” To me, it was—pure and simple—and since I felt it was, that’s what mattered to me. Jim and I have more or less made our peace over the years, and we have respect for each other’s work, if not necessarily methods… so I’m no longer angry about it, but neither will I whitewash the situation as I saw it. Of course, I don’t discount the fact that Jim Galton backed Jim on this—but Galton had never misled me, and I regret a couple of intemperate things I said about him in print soon afterward. But the main thing is, nobody was standing up for me. So, while I hated to leave Marvel, I went over to DC and had a couple of good years and several not-sogood years there, but I’m still not sorry I did what I did. I can’t see my being happier if I’d done anything differently. JA: It didn’t affect your relationship with Stan, apparently.

THOMAS: Well, not terribly. We kept in touch over the next few years before I started working for him again. We would have lunch once in a while, because he had moved to LA. It was a different kind of relationship, since I So I had my attorney write the contract up wasn’t working for Marvel any more, that way, and we sent it to Marvel. And of but at the same time, there was always that possicourse I had to pay the attorney for that, as well as bility that I might be working again for Marvel. I spend time on it myself. And then, when I got it never really planned that far ahead with my career. back, Shooter had marked the writer/editor part of [Jim chuckles] I just played it day-by-day, whatever the contract with a big “NO” on it, and I was came up, and over the long haul it worked out okay. told the writer/editor thing could not be in But I’ve never really had, or felt I needed, any kind of writing. This really angered me, because I had long- range plan about how, three years from now or made my position clear—as Conan said just five years from now or twenty minutes from now, I before he sliced a judge from stem to stern at want to be doing this or that. I don’t think that way. the start of “Queen of the Black Coast.” I just go with the flow, and it’s led me from teaching I’d made my situation so clear, and then to doing comics to writing movies to living on a spent time and money on the new nice big spread in South Carolina. I’ve long had a contract—and suddenly found that the motto: “Happiness is not needing the bastards.” matter was never really on the table, as But I’m happy to be still writing comics, because I’d been led to believe it was. So before that, far more than the brief fling at movies, turned I even answered Shooter, I called up Paul out to be what I really wanted to do with my life. Levitz at DC and made an arrangement There aren’t a lot of 66-year-old comic book with them. Only then did I call writers around, so I’m just happy Marvel and tell them I was to still be gainfully employed— This Ain’t No Disney Ride—Or Movie leaving. even though I’d get by equally Don’t ask him why, but somehow Ye Editor just felt this pen-and-ink sketch well, as the Eagles said, “if it all It’s not so much that the things by the late great John Buscema was the right one to print at this point in the falls to pieces tomorrow.” interview. With thanks to Anthony Snyder. [©2007 Estate of John Buscema.]

“Writing Comics Turned Out To Be What I Really Wanted To Do With My Life”

“The Most Important Professional Relationship In My Life” JA: I think that’s a good closing note, but I want to inject one thing. Your bond with Stan Lee is—for me, anyway—beyond professional, as if you have a personal bond with him. THOMAS: Yeah, I guess there is one. It’s not that we’ve ever been personal close friends or anything of that sort. It just never quite worked out that way. Plus, when you work for somebody for years, as I worked for Stan—and still do, to some extent—that kind of relationship has a tendency to permeate and to remain, whether the exact working relationship continues or not. But we were always friendly. We always got along pretty well. We differed on a lot of things, but we had enough things in common, including my admiration for his work. He respected my work, too, though I don’t delude myself that it has anything like the importance his does. We’ve had a good relationship—easily the most important professional relationship in my life.

JA: I’d say so, too. But it just seems like, even now, there’s a real warmth in the way that you discuss Stan that’s not always there when you discuss some other people. [chuckles] THOMAS: Yeah, and this is despite the fact that from time to time—just as he with me, I’m sure—I’d occasionally get furious at something he did. But even when I left the editor-in-chief job in 1974, as much by his wish as by mine—whether I quit or I was fired depends on your interpretation of what happened that day—things would always cool off, and in the long run it would get back to the point where I admired Stan and his work. I learned much from him, I felt I benefited a lot. And I tried to give back in kind. JA: But you also like him. THOMAS: I like him, yeah. JA: It shows through in the way you talk about him. THOMAS: Yeah, well, there are other people, I guess, who wouldn’t have that same tone in their voice. [laughs] It all depends on your own particular relationship to someone. You ask twenty people about the same person, you get twenty different versions of that person. If you’d ever talked to Frank Giacoia or some other people—I’m sure there were others— [mutual laughter] you’d have seen that many different Roy Thomases, some good, some bad. There’s no ultimate truth. And that’s true with Stan Lee, as well. When it comes to truth, we’re all blind men feeling up the same elephant.

Together Again! With Stan dwelling high up in the Hollywood Hills and Roy happily ensconced in rural South Carolina, “Stan the Man” and “Roy the Boy” don’t exactly run in the same social circles these days—but their paths have crossed occasionally in the past few years: (Top of page:) In 2004 Roy was flown out to the San Diego Comic-Con by the nice folks at the Discovery Channel, because of his (and Dann’s) cameos in the Travel Channel special The Marvel Super Heroes’ Guide to New York City. L. to r.: overall producer Karen Kraft, Roy, Stan, Comics Buyer’s Guide senior editor Maggie Thompson, line producer Molly Herman, and Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada. Thanks to Karen for the photo— and the tickets! (Above:) RT also had to fly out to LA twice in 2005, in August and September, to serve as advisor for Stan’s recording sessions for the 2006 Sterling volume Stan Lee’s Amazing Marvel Universe. Roy wrote the text of that book, while Stan recorded audio tracks to be activated with the touch of an “icon.” (L. to r.: editor Jenna Land Free, Stan, Roy, and audio session director Leigh Gilbert.) Thanks to Jenna of becker&mayer!, Ltd., for the photo from the September 5 session. (And, left:) Scott Kolins’ delicious pencils for the final page of the story he drew and Roy wrote for Stan Lee Meets The Thing #1-and-only (Dec. 2006), one of a recent series of Stan-homages. Sgt. Stan is shown daydreaming in 1944 about making up some “really great” comics characters after World War II ends—so Roy and Scott showed a multitude of the main ones in whose creation Stan would have a major hand. (Roy suggested dropping The Silver Surfer, since he had definitely been Jack Kirby’s idea—though Stan would still have to be considered that hero’s co-creator. Surfy was replaced in the finished art by Professor X.) For the color version, pick up a copy of the 2007 hardcover Stan Lee Meets…. Thanks to Scott Kolins for sending a scan of his pencils. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

A San Diego Comicon Special Treat Robert Beerbohm Comic Art Presents In Booth #5414 “From The Collection of Jerry Bails” June 26, 1933-November 23, 2006

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Lily Renée At Fiction House —And Beyond A Far-Too-Brief Look At A “Star Woman Cartoonist” by Trina Robbins

NTRODUCTORY NOTE: On July 26-29, 2007, Golden Age comic book artist Lily Renée will be a special guest at the San Diego Comic-Con International. This will be her first appearance ever at any comics convention. In honor of that landmark event, Trina Robbins has granted us permission to reprint the paragraphs below, slightly edited, from her prior coverage of Ms. Renée’s career and the world in which she worked from 1943 to 1948. This material originally appeared, in a somewhat different form, in Trina’s invaluable 2001 book The Great Women Cartoonists, from Watson-Guptill Publications, and is ©2001, 2007 Trina Robbins. We’re pleased to announce, as well, that Lily Renée has consented to be interviewed at length by Jim Amash for a near-future issue of Alter Ego!) Of all the comic book companies in the 1940s, one publisher hired more women cartoonists than any of the others. That was Fiction House, a company whose comics line was launched in 1936 by Jerry Iger and Will Eisner, artist/creator of The Spirit comic strip. The six longest-running Fiction House comic book titles—Jumbo Comics, Jungle Comics, Fight Comics, Wings Comics, Rangers Comics, and Planet Comics— specialized in luridly sensationalistic stories with strong and beautiful female protagonists. And they were likely to be drawn by women.

Señorita Renée (Top right:) Lily Renée circa 1947-49, the years when she drew for St. John Publishing—and (above) a splash page from one of her signature series, “Señorita Rio”—in this case from Fiction House’s Fight Comics #41 (Dec. 1945). Thanks to Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., for the scan. The photo is courtesy of Trina Robbins. [©2007 the respective copyright holders.]

Unquestionably, the star woman cartoonist on the Fiction House staff, and the only woman who ever drew a cover for them, was Lily Renée. From 1943 through 1948, her elegant art graced the pages of their books. Although she contributed some light and cartoony filler pages, such as “Tex Taxi,” her best work could be seen in “The Lost World,” “Señorita Rio,” and “Werewolf Hunter.” “The Lost World,” the lead feature in Planet Comics, took place in a post-apocalyptic future. Amid ruins of

A Far-Too-Brief Look At A “Star Woman Cartoonist”

Fiction House Favorites By Lily Renée

Señorita Trio (Clockwise from top left:) “The Lost World” ran in Planet Comics from issue #21 (Nov. 1942) through #70 (Winter 1953), missing only #69. This splash page, which led off the issue, is from Planet #44 (Sept. 1946). Thanks to Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., for identifying this art as that of Lily Renée. “Jane Martin” by Lily Renée, from Wings Comics #33 (May 1943). Thanks to Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., for the scan of this page and the next. This Renée-drawn episode of “Werewolf Hunter” appeared in Rangers Comics #15 (Feb. 1944). [Art on this page ©2007 the respective copyright holders.]

New York City, a plucky group of survivors, led by Hunt Bowman and his fetchingly ragged companion Lyssa, battled the Voltamen, their green-skinned and Nazi-like alien conquerors. “Señorita Rio,” who starred in Fight Comics, was a Brazilian nightclub entertainer who fought Nazis in her spare time. The character bore a strong resemblance to Tarpé Mills’ Brazilian anti-Nazis guerrilla leader, Era, in Mills’ newspaper comic strip Miss Fury. Renée was an artist whose rendering of women far surpassed that of male artists, and “Werewolf Hunter,” a horror/fantasy strip in Rangers Comics, inspired some of her most decorative and imaginative art, with stories that often involved some mystic or supernatural woman character.

Lily Renée At Fiction House—And Beyond

When World War II ended, women in every industry were encouraged to vacate their jobs in favor of the returning men. In the world of comics, where women had been working since 1901, the backto-the-kitchen movement took a different form. Although women continued to draw lighter strips through the 1950s, the men took back action comics. By 1951, when Tarpé Mills’ Miss Fury ended, Brenda Starr Reporter was the only adventure strip that starred a woman and was drawn by a woman. The women had stopped drawing action strips. Trina Robbins, formerly another underground cartoonist, now writes novels and works of non-fiction.

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From The Sublime To The Ridiculous In the late 1940s, Lily Renée drew stories for the Abbott and Costello comic book put out by St. John Publishing and starring the world-famous movie comedy team. This page is from A&C #5 (Oct. 1948), with thanks to Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Jim’s fellow comics historian Hames Ware writes that Abbott and Costello “appeared to be written as well as drawn as a team with Lily’s husband Eric Peters, whose own art career went back to at least 1940, on such Dell features as Mr. District Attorney.” Hey, Hames—does that mean “John Graham” is a joint pseudonym? [©2007 the respective copyright holders.] The story’s splash echoes an A&C 1948 movie hit, Mexican Hayride— while one of the team’s greatest successes (both financially and, many would say, artistically), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, is plugged at the bottom of the page.

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Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

Mike Mallet: The World’s First Adult Comic! By Michael T. Gilbert

ike Mallet made his debut in Panic #11 (cover-dated Feb. 1966), in a feature billed as “The World’s First Adult Comic!” Of course, there had been other, earlier “adult” comics, from Eric Stanton’s bondage comics in the ’40s, to the so-called “Tijuana Bible” sex comics decades earlier, as well as stories with adult themes by Charles Biro, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Eisner, among others. But Bob Powell’s Mike Mallet certainly stands as a bold early attempt to push the medium’s boundaries.

It should be noted that Panic Publications’ Panic had no connection to the earlier EC color comic of the same name. This Panic was a black-&-white humor magazine, one of many short-lived Mad imitations. It lasted six issues from July 1957 to July 1958. The creative lineup included Bob Powell (who also held an editorial position), Jack Davis, Jerry Siegel, George Tuska, Angelo Torres, and two of Powell’s old assistants, Martin Epp and Howard Nostrand. Panic returned a few years later for a three-issue run (Vol. 2 #10- 12) from Dec. 1965 to April 1966, consisting mostly of reprints. The publisher was listed as Robert W. Farrell, and the editor was Carl Burgos, creator of The Human Torch. I first came across a used copy of Panic #11 in the early ’70s, and discovered a feature inside that really didn’t belong there. While the rest of the magazine featured the usual ham-handed humor common to the genre, Mike Mallet was done straight. What humor it did have was subtle and very dark. In fact, someone at Panic felt that additional gags had to be pasted onto the strips in order to make them “funny” enough to see print. That’s probably because Mike Mallet wasn’t originally intended for Panic at all. The origins of the strip have been lost to history, but the format suggests that Mike Mallet was unsuccessfully pitched as a newspaper strip, most likely in the early ’60s. Powell patterned his detective on the popular Mike Hammer series of novels, starring Mickey Spillane’s brutal, misogynist private eye. Like Hammer, Mallet reveled in cheap sex and brutal violence. In fact, the strip is so similar in tone, one wonders if Mike Mallet might have been Powell’s attempt to sell an actual Mike Hammer-style comic strip. If so, it was doomed to failure. Mickey Spillane, a former comic book scripter who passed away a year or so ago, wrote his first Mike Hammer novel in 1947, and it proved immensely successful. He and cartoonist Ed Moore produced a Mike Hammer newspaper comic strip in 1953, but censorship battles killed the strip after only a year. It’s hard to imagine any paper in the early ’60s taking on such a risky strip again. So how did Mike Mallet wind up in Panic?

Powell had been one of the lead illustrators for the title during its first run in the ’50s. When the magazine was revived in 1965, Powell undoubtedly saw it as an opportunity to recycle some unsold art. Of course, the strips had to be reworked first, and the changes were pretty extensive. The art was crudely rearranged to fit the magazine’s 8G x 11" format, leaving empty space between the strips. Panels deemed too racy were censored—with talking fingerprints! More on that later…. And, since Panic was a newsstand publication primarily aimed at teenagers, even mildly offensive words like “call girls” were removed for the printing therein. You can see examples of this on the previous page, and in the last frame of the second strip on the opposite page. Powell also used squiggle marks in the word balloons to suggest cursing, though it’s unknown whether these were lettered that way originally. For this printing we’ve attempted to restore Powell’s strips as closely as possible to the way he originally drew them. Strips have been rearranged, missing title lettering has been added, and thumbprint smudges removed. And now, without further ado, here’s Mike Mallet — the selfproclaimed World’s First Adult Comic!

Mike Mallet: The World’s First Adult Comic!

Oh, the indignity! Mike Mallet—censored by a fingerprint! (The “fingerprints” have been removed, leaving white, finger-shaped forms at one point in each of the strips. We preferred not to add Powell-style art, but to leave those areas blank.)

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

Polly, The Talking Fingerprint! Some of Mike Mallet’s voluptuous ladies were a bit too hot for Panic’s editors to handle, so a staffer blotted out any offending cleavage with, well... inky fingerprints. Talking fingerprints, no less! The artist then drew a female body beneath each smudge to create the illusion of a tiny cartoon woman seen from behind. That was the idea, anyway. And so was created Polly, the bluenose fingerprint! Polly appeared throughout Powell’s strip, commenting on Mallet’s language and excessive violence, while removing anything too risqué with a tiny

whiteout brush. Her wry comments, sprinkled throughout Powell’s strip, added some “humor.” Or so they hoped. Polly finally turns around in the final panel to reveal herself as “Polly Sadler, the Madame,” as per below. This was a thinly disguised parody of the infamous but real Polly Adler, who ran houses of prostitution in New York City between 1920 and 1944. (Shelly Winters played her in the 1964 movie made from her 1953 autobiography A House Is Not a Home.) We’ve chosen to retain the darker mood of Powell’s original strip by removing “Polly Sadler” for this printing. Sorry, Polly, but this time we’re censoring YOU!

Mike Mallet: The World’s First Adult Comic!

Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt

To Be Continued? And so ended Mike Mallet. Not with a whimper, but with a kick to the, er… chops! A closing blurb promised the story would be “continued next issue,” but for decades Panic #12 eluded me! I finally scored a copy this past January, concluding a 35-year search. Unfortunately, while other Powell strips appeared in Panic’s final issue, Mike Mallet was missing in action. Powell probably did draw more Mike Mallet samples, but none seem to have survived. According to his family, much of Powell’s art was discarded after he passed on in 1967. Presumably, any remaining unpublished episodes are lost forever.

wonderful staging, sharply delineated characters, and expressive drawings are a joy to behold. The strip’s gritty, understated feel is reminiscent of the early-’60s TV crime drama Naked City. More importantly, Powell’s fatalistic anti-hero was unlike anything else being done in comics at the time—predating another Spillaneinspired series, Frank Miller’s Sin City, by decades. Towards the end of his brilliant career, Bob Powell was still blazing new trails. Mike Mallet is ample proof of that! Till next time…

And that’s a pity. Mike Mallet was a fascinating strip. Powell’s

Mickey Spillane and Ed Robbins’ Mike Hammer comic strip lasted from 1953 to 1954. These samples are from the 1985 Ken Pierce reprint collection, courtesy of Timo Ronkainen. [©2007 Estate of Mickey Spillane.]

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oy here—so what else is new? Well, one thing that’s new is the drawing at right, conceived and executed by the dependable and ever-inventive Shane Foley. Even though, being an Australian, he has to draw upside down, he managed to come up with this homage to Golden Age DC cover artist Fred Ray—utilizing caricatures of this issue’s interviewee (myself, at left) and interviewer Jim Amash (at right), à la Ray’s cover for Superman #17 back in 1942. The gent in the middle, of course, is the super-hero called Alter Ego, the star of a four-issue comics series in 1986—and one of our two costumed “maskots.” You’ve done it again, Shane. (Just don’t ask us what you’ve done again!) [Art ©2007 Shane Foley; Alter Ego is a trademark of Roy & Dann Thomas; costume designed by Ron Harris.] And now on to our hopelessly-mired letters section on Alter Ego #57 (featuring comments on a mag that came out 13 issues ago—some kind of a record, even for us!). The spotlight shone in March of 2006 on Mike Nolan’s Timely Index of every super-hero story published by proto-Marvel between 1939 and 1957—and it attracted a bit of attention, as most letter-writers proclaimed it an invaluable research tool and, in its own way, even something of a fun read! Still, there were a handful of errors—a few belatedly spotted by me (the ones listed below that aren’t credited to someone else’s finding them), others by our hawk-eyed readers—so let’s get the goofs out of the way up front, taking it page by page in A/E #57:

P. 7: The listing for The Yellow Claw “#1-14” should be “#1-4.” My typo. Luckily, the numbering is rendered correctly on p. 64! P. 9: Jerry Bails, some months before his untimely passing in November 2006, sent in numerous additions (not corrections per se) regarding artist IDs, the first of which is that the one and only “Red Raven” story was drawn by Louis Cazeneuve. P. 18: Jerry Bails wrote: “That’s our man Oksner on ‘Terry Vance’ (p. 18), which he wrote and drew for five years, before going to Better and later to DC.” We only wish Jerry’d still been around to read the extended coverage of Bob Oksner in A/E #67; he’d have thoroughly enjoyed it, as would have Bob himself. P. 19: Reference to Marvel Mystery Comics #51 should be to “#50,” as per the actual listing of the issue on the preceding page. P. 22: The name of the 1970s retro Invaders character listed in the caption as “Sun Girl” should be “Golden Girl.” Both names, of course, were used for Golden Age Timely/Marvel heroines, and I simply got the two momentarily confused. P. 23: Jerry Bails felt that the “Human Torch” splash from Marvel Mystery Comics #86 was “probably penciled by Maurice Gutwirth, although Green Lantern creator Mart Nodell can’t be ruled out, looking at just this one page. Inkers at the time were [Joe] Giella & [Vince] Alascia.”

Terry And The Bylines

P. 30: Hames Ware points out not an error, but the identity of the unsigned artist of the “Witness” splash from Mystic Comics #7 shown

Here’s a Bob Oskner-drawn “Terry Vance” splash we didn’t have room for in A/E #67. It’s from Marvel Mystery Comics #11 (Sept. 1940), and lists Ray Gill as writer. Thanks to Bob Bailey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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on at the bottom left on that page. He feels it’s by “Mike Suchorsky… not Mike Sekowsky, mind you… which means that both Sekowsky and Suchorsky were providing art simultaneously to Timely, at least for a while. What else makes this all fascinating is that there is no record of Suchorsky ever working for Timely via Lloyd Jacquet [Funnies, Inc.], which means he was working directly for Timely… though I’ve never seen anyone recalling that he was there.” P. 35: Jerry K. Boyd notes that, contrary to our caption saying The Red Skull hadn’t appeared on a Captain America Comics cover through the first six issues, that ultimate Nazi nasty had popped up on that of #3! (We missed that one in flipping through our hardcover reprints. Guess we mistook it for a sunburned Adolf Hitler!) P. 51: “P. 77” should be “p. 7.” P. 52: “Captain Daring” from USA Comics #7, according to Jerry Bails, “is by Alex Schomburg (says right on it!).” We didn’t list Schomburg in the caption because the credit was right there—but we should’ve made clear it was only the other two splashes in that grouping whose artists were “uncertain.” Surprising, because Schomburg drew mostly covers and very little interior art for Timely— in fact, it’s often been reported that he drew no stories for the company during the 1940s, but that’s apparently incorrect! Jerry also says that “Marvel Boy,” in that same montage, is by Bob Oksner, “though there is a strong hint of the ghost penciler Pierce Rice on the secondary characters.” Could be, since various artists often worked on the same page at Timely and at Funnies, Inc. P. 53: Jerry again: “The Human Top” in Tough Kid Squad #1 was drawn by Dick “Frankenstein” Briefer—while the “Whizzer” splash from USA #14, he felt, is “by Don Rico, with possibly Al Fagaly inking.”

However, Golden Age Timely artist Allen Bellman wrote that he believes the artist who drew that particular “Whizzer” page “was Elmer ‘Tom’ Tomasch, who sat near me. I remember Tom doing that character as a regular feature and that was his drawing style. He was great with wash drawings. He helped me many times with my drawings, and he was indeed a fine artist and the forgotten man. As I was told, he was teaching art in a college in the Midwest and is now deceased. I believe his wife at the time he worked on staff at Timely was a professional ice skater in Lake Placid in New York.” P. 61: Marvel Boy’s original wristbands projected only blinding light, not “powerful force-beams” as stated; Ye Editor forgot that it was he who added the latter, when he brought a slightly older Marvel Boy back as The Crusader in Fantastic Four #164-165 (Nov.-Dec. 1975). Whew! That’s mercifully few errors, considering the size of the “Timely Index” section—but maybe there were others that nobody found, or whose letters or e-mails got misfiled over the past year. Also, here’s another boo-boo on our part, of a more personal nature, caught (understandably) by Jonathan Mankuta: Hi Roy, I know you wanted to give me proper credit for the pages I colorcopied for ya of the Torch #8 comic. Well, while I appreciate the blurb, you thank “Dan Mankuta” for those pages in the latest Alter Ego… not Jonathan Mankuta. Side note: So that’s where the Schomburg cover to Invaders Annual went. I was looking for the cover and “Torch” pages for years. Just curious—why does the Torch look different on the published cover from on the painting? Jonathan Mankuta Sorry about typographically confusing your name with that of another of our correspondents, Dan Makara, Jon. As for the Human Torch figure on that great 1976 cover—you’re right, of course. Though I no longer remember whether Alex Schomburg himself did it or not, the Torch’s head was completely redrawn for the finished cover, turned to the side (for some reason) and the facial features not showing, as per the way the hero was drawn in the 1940s. Whether it was done at Stan Lee’s direction or mine, however, I no longer recall… but it definitely wasn’t a change ordered by the Comics Code, as the “vanishing blood spot” was. Fortunately, the face change was apparently done on an overlay or Photostat, not on the original art. Next up is a letter from Nigel Parkinson in Britain, which deals primarily with the “Comic Crypt” section of that issue of A/E: Hi Roy— I seriously urge you never to stop making Alter Ego. But one small thing which you probably never noticed… in Michael T. Gilbert’s piece, he mentions there was an English Dennis the Menace that debuted a few days after the US Dennis. As they used to say: Hooo Boy!! The “English” Dennis is actually a BRITISH Dennis, or, to be pedantic, a SCOTTISH Dennis. The artist, Davy Law, was Scots, the writer and editor were Scots, the publisher was Scots! Imagine if we talked about that great Yankee writer Mark Twain? Or that famous Canadian John F. Kennedy? You know what I’m saying? You must have seen Braveheart! Okay, point 1 dealt with?

My Super-Hero Can Whip Your Super-Hero! Actually, it won’t be long now before Marvel reprints the entirety of The Human Torch #8 (Summer 1942) in the second volume of its Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Human Torch. But meanwhile, to whet your appetite, here’s the final of the five chapter splashes (and that doesn’t count a two-page spread!) from that Torch/Namor battle issue. With thanks to— wait for it!—Jonathan Mankuta. (And thanks for being a good sport about our little mistake, Jon.) [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

In Britain, Dennis the Menace (our Dennis) is like Mickey Mouse. Everyone grows up reading it, he’s on TV, you can buy lunchboxes, wallpaper, notepads, etc., etc., with Dennis on them. He’s the most recognisable iconic figure in all British comics. Okay, that’s like saying it’s the highest skyscraper in Idaho, but come on, he’s ours and we’re proud. He started in 1951 (actually 11 March, but who’s counting—it’s still a spooky coincidence) and is still going very strong

[comments, correspondence, & corrections]

material, and one issue featured “Hector the Specter,” who I believe they said also appeared in his own feature in Giggle Comics. Thought you’d want to know! Enjoy your feature very much! Nicholas Yutko Dreamscape Comics 302 West Broad St. Bethlehem, PA 18018

Threat Or Menace? The British Dennis the Menace was created by writer/artist Davy Law, as seen in A/E #57—and above. Also seen is a drawing of Dennis by writer/artist (and letter-scribe) Nigel Parkinson. Both were sent by Nigel. Hmmm… we’ll bet Mr. Wilson would vacate the premises in a hurry if this Dennis moved in next door to him! [©2007 D.C. Thomson & Co., Ltd., Dundee.]

today. He’s star of a weekly comic, he has his own hardbound annual every December, several monthly mags, and seasonal specials. OK, rant over, but it’s only ’cos I love the work you put in detailing all those unsung heroes of the American comic book (as well as Kirby and the other guys) and put aside my lunch break when I get a new issue to zoom through it. I just thought you might like to hear about some of the even more unsung British artists and their work! And yes, as you might have guessed, I am the current artist of Dennis the Menace (British version)! But I actually am English, not Scots! Nigel Parkinson In rainy Liverpool, England, Home of… aw, you remember, don’tcha? When I forwarded Nigel’s note to “Comic Crypt” editor & assembler Michael T. Gilbert out in sunny Oregon, he and Nigel got in touch—and Michael advised him that in various places the start-date of the British Dennis the Menace is given as a few days later in March—e.g., a UK Dennis website lists a date of March 17, 1951, while the American Dennis the Menace debuted on March 12—which is one day later than the British Dennis. MTG also apologized for saying “English” when “British” or “Scottish” would’ve been preferable: “Seriously, I had always assumed that ‘British’ was interchangeable with ‘English.’ Shameful! See what happens when one sleeps through geography class? On the other hand, I’ve learned something today. And I also have a chance to say ‘Hi!’ to the bloke who currently draws the Engl… er… British Dennis the Menace.” Here’s another note sent to Michael, this one by Nicholas Yutko: Hello, Michael— Just a note to let you know you missed a spook! In Alter Ego #57 you enumerate different ghosts that imitated Casper, but you missed two. There’s Spencer Spook, published by ACG in both Giggle Comics and his own brief title. He was featured more recently in Adventures of Spencer Spook #1-6, published starting in 1986 by Ace Comics. Those Ace issues are a combination of new and reprint

To which Michael replied, via e-mail: “Hi Nick! Actually, I knew about Spencer (though not Hector!) and have some of the Ace reprints. I wasn’t trying for a complete collection of cheap imitations, just a few highlights. If I’d included them all, my article would have had to be around 100 pages… and that’s just for the Atlas knockoffs! Thanks for the nice words on The Crypt!” I echo them, Michael. Wow—think about it! 70 issues of Alter Ego, Volume 3—and “Comic Crypt,” like FCA, has been in every one! Bill Schelly’s “Comic Fandom Archive” has only missed a few, as well—and that’s sometimes been due to lack of room—while Jim Amash has had an interview in all but two issues since #11. Is this a team, or what? To the very end of his 73 years, Jerry G. Bails was an inveterate researcher, and sent this note re the 1968 Binder Shop Reunion, photos from which were reprinted in #57’s FCA section: Dear Roy, Alter Ego #57 is an interesting issue, but in a few cases either memories are fuzzy or communications got garbled. On page 84, the photo caption says that Marc Swayze and Wendell Crowley (who passed away back in 1970) place Carl Pfeufer in Binder’s shop. I don’t think so! I had the shop records for Jack Binder’s shop with the actual breakdown of the piecemeal assignments, and checked with many of the well-acquainted members of that shop (many were fellow graduates of Pratt Institute and played softball together). None of the artists put Pfeufer (pronounced like “Feiffer”) at Binder’s shop. At the time the short-lived Binder shop operated, Carl was busy as a bee over at Funnies, Inc., where he was widely identified by fellow shoppers. By the time Carl went to do Fawcett features on a regular basis, the Binder shop was long gone. Crowley became editor at Fawcett and probably knew that Carl came from a shop, and merely confused the two (Binder and Funnies). Funnies, Inc., did do some work for Fawcett circa 1942-53. Maybe Pfeufer did “Don Winslow” or “Commando Yank” from Funnies. The first clear sign of his work that I have confirmed is cover-dated 1945. Can anyone place him at Fawcett earlier? To further strengthen my confusion, I notice that the Binder shop records were so detailed that they even list a small job that a young Gil Kane [Eli Katz] did—a sort of one-afternoon affair. From those records I could tell when someone was taking a bathroom break—well, almost. Every page of every story was broken down by: “layout artist,” “penciler of main figures,” “penciler of secondary figures,” “background penciler,” “inker of main figures,” “inker of secondary figures & background,” “letterer,” “writer,” “who sharpened the pencils” (well, he did list someone at the bottom of the pay sheets who

re:

department included artists in different capacities. Marc did indeed have his drawing table next to Pack and Weill. A year after the photo was taken, the art department was split, with the comics employees placed together in their own area. Weill’s only connection to the comics was having Mac Raboy draw him in a panel as a statue in an issue of Master Comics (recently reprinted in Shazam! Archives). Marc says that, during the time of that photo, Weill had gone through a divorce and had asked Swayze to share an apartment with him in Jamaica, NY, which Marc did for several months, and the two commuted to work together…until Marc moved closer to the Fawcett offices, per Fawcett art director Al Allard’s suggestion. (Marc never knew for sure why Allard suggested it… to be closer to the action, I suppose.) So he then moved to an apartment near Columbia University. Hope this info was helpful.” It certainly is, P.C.—and Marc. We’ve pretty much established that Elmer Tomasch was the person whom the late Vince Fago, WWII-era editor at Timely, remembered in A/E #11 as the “Thomas” who, he said, drew some “Human Torch” stories. Hmmm… he may even have been a distant relative of mine, since my Thomas ancestors apparently came to the US from Germany in 1842, and it’s always possible that the original spelling of that name was indeed “Tomasch”—though I’ve never seen it listed that way in old recountings. Send all mail (well, at least the mail you want us to get) to: Roy Thomas 32 Bluebird Trail St. Matthews, SC 29135

e-mail: roydann@ntinet.com fax: (803) 826-6501

Next issue: Canadian capers, circa World War II—a host of new “Invaders” drawings by some talented contemporaries—and an interview with 1940s comics writer Al Schutzer. A true Golden Age extravaganza!

A Study In Scarlet Splash page of a “Mr. Scarlet” story attributed to Carl Pfeufer, from Wow Comics #50 (Dec. 1946)—as restored by Bill Black and his AC Comics crew for Golden Age Men of Mystery #13 (published in 1999, but still in print). See AC Comics’ ad on p. 82 for a gallery-full of luscious black-&-white reprints of Golden Age goodies from Fawcett, et al.! [Retouched art ©2007 AC Comics; Mr. Scarlet is a trademark of DC Comics.]

did such chores). I’ll take written records over memories 9 times out of 10, unless, of course, the auditor was notorious for fudging records. There’s a lot of that going around. Nevertheless, I have high praise for the reminiscences of Marc Swayze. Can he enlighten us further about Paul Pack and Irwin Weill (photo on page 79)? Did they do comics? Since the photo was taken before the Fawcett staff was divided, it is not clear, and I have nothing on these two artists. They do seem to be sitting back toward the far wall. Were they the ones who got walled off by the partition? Inquiring minds want to know. Jerry Bails P.C. Hamerlinck responded to Jerry: “I know Marc (and I) never claimed that Pfeufer worked at Binder. Looks like he was simply invited to the party, too, along with Pete Costanza, who also never worked for Binder. Judging from research and my own extensive Fawcett collection, Pfeufer’s Fawcett work didn’t appear until books cover-dated 1945, as Jerry stated.” Later, after talking by phone with Marc Swayze, P.C. reported: “Marc says Paul Pack and Irwin Weill did not work in the comics; they were magazine layout artists. This was mentioned in an early installment of his column. At the time of the photo, the Fawcett art

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yes, to what extent, and at what rate? And by what criteria? Could the gender have something to do with it? I would never have hesitated to lay a year or so on the Phantom Eagle. But on his girlfriend, Jerry? Never! Nor on Flyin’ Jenny. Or Mary Marvel! Youth, to my way of thinking, was a prime characteristic of that little super-damsel. To imagine her growing older? Nah!

Yet she underwent changes… that began even before she left my drawing board. No conferences had taken place following approval of the original portrait sketches, and the alterations … good or bad … that occurred before completion of her first story, were mine … the boots … the art style … even Mary’s face.

[FCA EDITORS NOTE: From 1941-53, Marcus D. Swayze was a top artist for Fawcett Publications. The very first Mary Marvel She was a new character. Not just one to play the lead role in a character sketches came from Marc’s drawing table, and he illusstory, but a major feature … meant for story after story … maybe book trated her earliest adventures, including the classic origin story, after book. She was included in a partnership fighting evil with the “Captain Marvel Introduces Mary Marvel (Captain Marvel great Captain Marvel. I saw considAdventures #18, Dec. ’42); but he was erable merit in having the newcomer primarily hired by Fawcett Publications visibly related to Fawcett’s #1 superto illustrate Captain Marvel stories and hero. Her costume was evidence of covers for Whiz Comics and Captain that. If changes in it were needed, now Marvel Adventures. He also wrote many was the time to make them. Captain Marvel scripts, and continued to The boots were a puzzle. I had do so while in the military. After leaving never quite understood the boots worn the service in 1944, he made an by Captain Marvel. Why those foldedarrangement with Fawcett to produce art over tops didn’t droop down around and stories for them on a freelance basis the ankles in the high action scenes … out of his Louisiana home. There he and what the heck did those miserable created both art and story for The little stitches down the front mean … Phantom Eagle in Wow Comics, in things like that. They didn’t bother addition to drawing the Flyin’ Jenny Captain Marvel, however … so they newspaper strip for Bell Syndicate didn’t continue to bother me. (created by his friend and mentor Russell Keaton). After the cancellation of Wow, On Mary I cared. In the beginning I Swayze produced artwork for Fawcett’s had drawn her boots with notches at top-selling line of romance comics, the top. I don’t know why I did that. It including Sweethearts and Life Story. was quickly seen as a time-consuming After the company ceased publishing whim and discarded. comics, Marc moved over to Charlton Publications, where he ended his comics In her first several adventures Mary career in the mid-’50s. Marc’s ongoing shared the pages with Captain Marvel. professional memoirs have been FCA’s That meant the art style was not to be most popular feature since his first hers—as seen in the original portraits column appeared in FCA #54, 1996. Last and on the cover of Wow Comics issue Marc discussed the “panel.” In this #10—but his. Out went the finer line installment, he reflects upon the aging of and delicate shading originally deemed comic characters and the evolution of more in keeping with a young superMary Marvel. —P.C. Hamerlinck.] “The Mini-Skirt Had To Go!” lady. Fear of forthcoming restrictions and a predicted rigid “Code”

The next item to come under may have had their effect on Mary’s costume… particularly the ave you ever noticed how your hem of the skirt. Marc Swayze drew the cover of Wow Comics scrutiny was Mary’s eyes. The eyes, I favorite comic strip character #10 (Feb. 10, 1943). [©2007 DC Comics.] had thought, offered another opporseems to be aging? Or how some tunity to relate Mary to Captain grow older and some don’t? Or … they don’t age at all … and you do? Marvel by converting his squint to the laughing eyes of a pretty young

And there’s an unfair inconsistency about it. I couldn’t help watching the splotches of gray at my own temples grow whiter and whiter … while, in the newspapers, the head of Li’l Abner Yokum stayed black as ever.

girl. In drawing Captain Marvel I had never experienced them as a problem, those slits and dots by C.C. Beck … obviously an influence of the old cartoon strips … and perfect for the Fawcett super-hero. But the lifestyle I saw ahead for Mary called for a wider array of facial expressions. There would be no slits and dots.

Not a matter of great concern, but you had to conclude a definite decision was involved … likely made by the creator … or possibly the editor … or publisher … whether to age the character or not. And, if

The intention had been that Mary’s hair be black, like Captain Marvel’s … signified in painting by an overlay of blue. Somehow,

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

but for the most part the original image had been maintained. There was little or no evidence of aging. Her costume, other than rearrangement around the collar and chest emblem, was true to the original. All in all, I was quite pleased with what I saw. Until I came to the last page! Neither the story nor the particular publication was identified in the margin, but there was a penned note: “Mary, as she appears today!” Five complete panels devoted to Mary beating the hell out of … of all people, Sivana, our old enemy of other days. And the neat inking indicated Sivana as having weathered the years well. As a matter of fact, the whole page was excellently rendered. It was Mary’s performance that brought the disappointment … scowling, screaming, snarling … The scene is resolved to some extent in the dialogue … mention of Mary’s husband and children … reasons for her behavior. Still … surprising to see. Not the Mary Marvel I knew.

though, probably in the coloring process, on Mary the mixture of hues resulted in a reddish brown, and Mary’s hair was destined to be auburn. Once Mary was on her way in Wow Comics, the feature was assigned to the Binder Shop. Rendered capably in their version of the C.C. Beck art style, the work saw little change other than Mary’s miniskirt. In only one or two issues, it had grown to near knee-length. And there may have been a reason for that. Whispers about a move against comic books as harmful for young people. Mary Marvel’s longer skirt could possibly have been Fawcett’s way of preparing for the forthcoming “Code” … which, somehow, saw something terrible about a bare knee. I never kept up with Mary Marvel after her final appearance in Wow Comics in 1947, although I’ve learned she remained in print through the end of The Marvel Family (and Fawcett’s comics) in 1953. Several pages brought to my attention recently reveal changes in the concept,

“Not The Mary Marvel I Knew” Marc was impressed with the artwork on this page, and the accurate detail shown in the costume. The attitude and performance of the super-heroine were another matter. This particular page Marc saw actually featured Mary’s mom with the power of Shazam in a “distorted reality” tale in which Sivana had altered time and, in a twist of events, Billy and Mary’s parents were super-heroes. However, Mary’s mother was essentially drawn identical to the look of Mary Marvel at the time, mostly-white costume and all. From Power of Shazam! #26 (May 1997). Art by Peter Krause & Mike Manley; story by Jerry Ordway. [©2007 DC Comics.]

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Of Men And Marvels (And Some Bunny-Rabbits, Too!) The First True Team-Up Of Superman And Captain Marvel by John G. Pierce

Edited by P.C. Hamerlinck

ack in 1980, when I heard that Roy Thomas was about to jump ship from Marvel to DC, and that one of the features he wanted to write was “Shazam!,” I became excited. On other occasions I have written of how Roy was important in my own development as a Capfan, especially his outstanding article about The Marvel Family in “One Man’s Family” way back in Alter Ego (Vol. 1) #7, 1964. So, the logical thing when I heard the news was to write to him about it. His reply to me, dated Oct. 10, 1980, both dismayed and excited me. Since this article deals with the exciting part rather than the dismaying, let me dispense rather quickly with the latter. I was somewhat dismayed with Roy’s then-tentative plans (which later came to fruition, though only briefly) for a new Captain Marvel, created on Earth-One by the wizard Shazam (“I did it before and I can do it again!”). “Gone, I’m afraid, would be much of the Parker/Binder feel, except in broad outlines, if I handled the character...” I felt then, and still do, that this would be wrong for the character.

But happily, that’s not what I’m here to write about on this occasion. Instead, I’ll cover the other exciting news that letter contained, as introduced to me by Roy with these words: “Still, just to be inconsistent, I took the opportunity in DC [Comics] Presents #34 to toss Superman and Captain Marvel (whom I’m trying to forge into fast friends, since they have far more in common than Superman and Batman, say) into a funny-animal dimension, while using Hoppy the Marvel Bunny for the first time in 30 years.” (Actually, it was rather more than 30 years.) The exciting part of this news was not so much the team-up between Superman and Captain Marvel, as that had already been done twice, first in Justice League of America #135-137 (1976), in the threepart story which brought together the JLA, JSA, and the former Fawcett heroes (then still located on Earth-S), and secondly in 1978’s All-New Collector’s Edition #C-58 (“Superman vs. Shazam!”), a Gerry Conway-authored tale in which the two heroes met, with able assistance provided by Supergirl and Mary Marvel. However, the centerpiece of both of those tales had been battles between the two characters, with the actual team-ups coming only briefly near the conclusions. It could be argued that there was actually an earlier crossover, in Superman #276, the Elliott Maggin-authored, Curt Swandrawn 1974 tale entitled “Make Way for Captain Thunder!” in which Superman met up with an alternate-Earth’s Willie Fawcett, who could magically change into Captain Thunder (which in 1939 had been Captain Marvel’s original, pre-publication name). This sort of “two steps removed” tale was done because, for legal reasons, DC could not co-utilize Cap and Superman at that time. There are many who believe that this was the best of all the crossovers, and that Captain Marvel and Superman, ideally, simply don’t belong in the same story. (It should be noted, also, that this story was a battle more than a team-up; the story I’m about to review marked the first actual team-up of the two characters.)

Of Cheeses Red And Blue The Rich Buckler/Dick Giordano cover of DC Comics Presents #33 (May 1981) was the first comic to be scripted by Roy Thomas under his new three-year contract with DC, upon leaving Marvel after 15 years. Where did he dream up this notion of Superman and Captain Marvel switching costumes? Read on! [©2007 DC Comics.]

In any event, Roy’s brief description whetted my appetite for his forthcoming tale, not so much for the team-up aspect, but for the return of Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. Hoppy had debuted in Fawcett’s Funny Animals #1 (Dec. 1942), where he starred for a number of years, as well as appearing in 15 issues of his own title. In “real” life, he was Hoppy Rabbit, who, upon reading a Captain Marvel comic, wistfully remarked that he wished that he, too, could become strong just by

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

And The Hits Just Keep On Comin’! A Marvel-ous montage of the Superman/Captain Marvel encounters that had preceded the 1981 DC Comics Presents #33—backdropped by a panel penciled by Doug Braithwaite and painted by Alex Ross for Justice #9 (2007). Like John G. Pierce says in the article: not a hearty handshake in the bunch! (Left to right:) Superman #276 (June 1974), with “Captain Thunder,” art by Nick Cardy... Justice League of America #137 (Dec. 1976), art by Ernie Chan... Superduperman meets Captain Marbles in the Harvey Kurtzman/Wally Wood parody from Mad #4 (April-May 1953)... Shazam! #30 (Aug. 1977), art by Kurt Schaffenberger... and All-New Collectors’ Edition #C-58 (1978), art by Rich Buckler & Dick Giordano. [Mad panel ©2007 EC Publications; other art ©2007 DC Comics.]

saying “Shazam!” And of course, you know what happened next, as Hoppy was changed into Captain Marvel Bunny, or just plain Marvel Bunny.

(Say those words again for us, Jimmy: “affectionately known as the ‘Big Red Cheese.’” Certain current writers seem to think this term was demeaning to Captain Marvel. But, of course, it wasn’t.)

(Note: This means that the title of the feature was actually a combination of his secret identity name and his nom de guerre, not unlike, say, the Quality Comics 1940s feature “Stormy Foster, the Great Defender,” or DC’s later “John Jones, Manhunter from Mars.” Though he is most often alluded to as Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, that was not his full name in either identity. Incidentally, unlike the other Marvels, whose secret identities were often anything but secret, it was always stated that Marvel Bunny’s secret, if revealed, would result in the loss of his powers. Just why was never specified.)

Clark then spots a potential disaster with a couple of elevated trains, and is off to the customary storeroom to change clothes. It is here that he gets his first big surprise of the story, when he doffs his mufti to find that he is instead wearing a red outfit with “this puny little cape”! (Although Rich Buckler and Dick Giordano, the artists, are certainly competent draftsmen, Rich had a tendency to draw Cap’s cape as quite long, almost floor-length, and often with a stand-up collar which made it look more like that of the original Green Lantern. Thus, the intended humor of the line falls a little flat.)

But Hoppy’s reappearance (unheralded until it actually occurred) was not to happen until the second part of a two-part tale, the first chapter of which was seen in DC Comics Presents #33 (May 1981), under the title of “Man and Supermarvel!” officially co-authored (as would be both parts) by Gerry Conway and Roy.

In any event, with “no time to worry about it now,” Superman is off to save the trains. It is here that he encounters his next surprise, in that his X-ray vision, which had worked fine a few minutes earlier, now does not function. Still, he has his other, non-sensory powers and is able to avert a disaster. Passengers are very grateful for the rescue but mystified by his different outfit.

In an amusing opening sequence, Clark Kent chides Jimmy Olsen for reading a comic book on company time. The comic turns out to be an old issue of Captain Marvel Adventures (though the Adventures part isn’t seen on the cover of the comic book shown), about the character Jimmy gleefully proclaims as “my favorite super-hero— Captain Marvel, otherwise affectionately known as the ‘Big Red Cheese.’”

Realizing that the mix-up which has happened to him might also have occurred to Captain Marvel, Superman makes his departure for Earth-S, after which the source of the problem, Mr. Mxyzptlk, materializes in the spot Superman had vacated. Superman utilizes the Rock of Eternity (“two fast loops around the

Of Men And Marvels (And Some Bunny-Rabbits, Too!)

Now That’s Funny! (Above left:) A Fawcett house ad for Funny Animals #1 (Dec. 1942), the debut of “Hoppy the Marvel Bunny.” Captain Marvel Bunny didn’t appear in this ad— but the human Cap did! (It was a few years later that the name of this comic was officially changed to Fawcett’s Funny Animals.) (Above right:) A splash page from an issue of Funny Animals—number & date uncertain. Art by Chad Grothkopf. [Captain Marvel & Marvel Bunny TM & ©2007 DC Comics; other characters ©2007 the respective copyright holders.]

Rock”) to gain access to Captain Marvel’s world, and soon he is in the Earth-S equivalent of New York City. (Only in later versions would Cap’s home base actually be specified as Fawcett City.) Hearing a disturbance on the East River, he attempts to intervene, only to be outdone by Captain Marvel, who is, predictably, wearing Superman’s outfit. (Here again we see the weakness in the Buckler-Giordano art. When depicted in their traditional styles, Cap and Superman should never be confused—by the readers, I mean—even when their costumes are switched. Superman’s more realistic, angular features are an easy contrast with Cap’s rounded face with bushy eyebrows and slit eyes; but alas, Buckler did not draw Cap that way. The team had actually done a slightly—though only slightly—better job in the aforementioned All-New Collector’s Edition tale, “When Worlds Collide.”

Captain Marvel’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen Splash page of DC Comics Presents #33. Although Gerry Conway is listed as plotter and did indeed write the formal synopsis, the concept and some details of the story were Roy Thomas’—but Roy was still under contract to Marvel at the time this story was plotted, so his buddy Gerry was helping him out. By the way, no Fawcett cover for Captain Marvel Adventures ever looked anything like the one Rich penciled here... except on Earth-One! [©2007 DC Comics.]

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

(Incidentally, that particular story was originally scheduled to have Buckler and Giordano do the main art, while Kurt Schaffenberger was to draw the Earth-S figures. But apparently Kurt was not available at the time, so the project went ahead with only Rich’s and Dick’s art. Actually, Kurt should have drawn the whole thing, either on that occasion, or this one. It is a shame that the one artist most identified with both characters and their families was never given the opportunity to draw them together, except for that almost-doesn’t-count and extremely brief battle between Cap and a Superman robot in Shazam! #30 in 1977.) Anyway, Cap wants to test a theory he has, so he asks Superman to say “Shazam!” When he does, magic lightning changes the Cap-clad Superman back into Clark Kent—a nonsuper Clark Kent, who then proceeds to fall off the roof of the skyscraper they are on! Cap rescues him. On the street, Clark says the word again and changes back. Then, some mysterious green tentacled monster appears to challenge the two. They don’t make much progress until Superman urges Marvel to use his heat vision. Eventually, they finish off the monster, which is when Mr. Mxyzptlk makes his appearance. Later, back at Mrs. Potter’s boarding house, she treats Billy and Clark to crêpes, unaware that their conversation is being monitored by Mr. Mxyzptlk’s previously-mentioned but unseen “silent partner,” Mr. Mind. And thus ends Part I. Part II (DC Comics Presents #34), picking up behind a BucklerGiordano cover which shows King Kull having not only Superman but also the three members of The Marvel Family at his mercy, with another mysterious figure being seen only by a shadow, is entitled “The Beast-Man That Shouted ‘Hate’ at the Heart of the UN!” (From a George Bernard Shaw-inspired title on Part I to one inspired by Harlan Ellison this time, we see that Roy utilized eclectic sources.)

Up, Up, And Shazam! The two sequences above show Clark Kent discovering that he’s wearing Captain Marvel’s costume under his suit—and Cap finding that, when he shouts “Shazam!,” he turns into Clark, not Billy Batson. Roy Thomas got the idea for this story from a 1964 Steve Stiles cartoon in Don & Maggie Thompson’s fanzine Comic Art #5 (seen at right). In 1965’s Alter Ego (Vol. 1) #8, Roy had asked fan-artist Jay Kinney to draw a response to it (below). [DC art ©2007 DC Comics; Stiles cartoon ©2007 Steve Stiles; Kinney-Thomas cartoon ©2007 Jay Kinney & Roy Thomas.]

Of Men And Marvels (And Some Bunny-Rabbits, Too!)

As the tale picks up, Cap and Superman are back to their normal selves, and Cap tells Superman the story of his own surprise appearance in the blue-and-red outfit. Kal-El follows Marvel to Freddy Freeman’s newsstand, where, as it turns out, both Mary (Batson) Bromfield and Uncle Dudley are hanging out.

During this time, Superman and Cap land on some other world, where they immediately hear a cry for help, which happens to be coming from “rabbits in clothes!?” At that point, a giant robbit (i.e., robot in the form of a rabbit) is about to step on some of the bunnies. As the two heroes fight back, they discover Mr. Mind is behind the robot.

“So you’re Superman, eh? Mary’s told me all about you, and—” says Freddy, bringing an exasperated “Fred-dy!” from Mary, who doesn’t wish for her brief crush on Superman (back in “When Worlds Collide”) to be rehearsed at this time. (Or at least that’s the obvious implication for those who had read the earlier tale. I’m not sure just what the line might have meant to any readers who had not seen that earlier story.)

Meanwhile, readers are reminded that earlier Myx had spoken of “trading” Superman and Captain Marvel for two inhabitants of the dimension to which he had sent them, and now we catch up with those two, who were “delayed a bit in cosmic transit.” (Oh, the beauty of being able to make up stuff like this as you go along!) The two turn out to be what a local policeman thinks must be juvenile delinquents in Halloween costumes. “Hold it, Bugs Bunny! Just where do you think you’re going?”

In any event, soon the magic words are said (along with Unc discarding his outer clothing). The three go off patrolling, while Superman and Cap head for the Rock of Eternity, where they find old Shazam asleep, and are confronted by Mr. Mxyzptlk and yet another “silent partner,” Cap’s old nemesis, King Kull. (Not, of course, to be confused with the barbarian character of the same name formerly written by Roy Thomas.) Mr. Mind is there, too. Although the two heroes attack, they are easily rebuffed, and then sent off, by Mxy’s magic, into “another dimension—one they can’t escape!” However, King Kull wants them returned so that he can “smash them—kill them!” Mxy is a bit unsettled by talk of killing, since his main objective in life is simply to torment Superman, not to do him in. Meanwhile, Mr. Mind recounts his own origin as “an intelligent worm, born on a planet inhabited only by creeping, brainless grubs and night-crawlers and maggots—as inferior to me as an ape to an Einstein,” while the flashback panel hilariously shows Mr. Mind as emerging from a hole in the ground with the one-word comment of “Bor-ing!”” (Otto Binder’s original name for Mr. Mind’s home was the planetoid Punkus, but perhaps Roy felt that name wouldn’t quite work in 1980.) Anyway, the continued talk of killing upsets Mxy, who threatens to withdraw his support from the other two. However, knowing that he can do that only by saying his name backwards and disappearing into the Fifth Dimension, they aren’t worried, so Mr. Mind sends King Kull back to Earth-Two to wreak havoc.

A Hob-Nailed Rabbit’s Foot? The giant “Robbit” attacks Superman and Captain Marvel—and grabs Hoppy, to boot. That was its big mistake! From DCCP #34; art by Buckler & Giordano, story by Conway & Thomas. By this issue, though, Roy believes he plotted the entire issue and just put Gerry’s name on it to avoid problems with Marvel (Comics Group, that is). [©2007 DC Comics.]

Back on Earth-S, King Kull goes to attack the UN headquarters, but is opposed by Cap Jr., who doesn’t get very far. Mary also goes up against Kull, but is similarly rebuffed.

Coming Events Cast Their Shadow (Left:) The Buckler/Giordano cover of DC Comics Presents #34 (June 1981). The shadow is being cast by none other than—Captain Marvel Bunny, back after more than three decades. Guess his ears were tucked low in this shot. [©2007 DC Comics.]

FCA [Fawcett Collectors Of America]

Soon, Unc has caught the bunny’s attention, while King Kull is up front, breathing threats. Bravely, Marvel Bunny decides to attack. “What?? I can’t believe it!” shouts Kull. “I join forces with a worm—and end up being attacked by a flying rodent!?!” But “back in the funny-animal dimension,” Myx is having second thoughts. “All I’ve ever asked of life is a nice soft cloud, and a chance to make Superman miserable—but not this miserable!” Myx confronts Mr. Mind, who threatens to “sic King Kull on you!” (Kull’s strength has been augmented by Shazamic power; otherwise, it is difficult to imagine that he could be much of a threat to a person of Mxy’s vast powers.) So, Mr. Mxyzptlk teleports back to the Rock of Eternity, where he says his name backwards, thus awakening Shazam, and destroying the power of the “Robbit,” which enables Superman and Cap to defeat it. “You know, Superman—we’ve met before, once or twice—but somehow I’ve got the feeling this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship!” proclaims Cap, to which Superman responds, “You know, Cap—you could just be right!” However, it would remain for that friendship to be realized primarily by later and newer versions of these two classic characters, in the post-Crisis world in which they all lived on one Earth—although the pre-Crisis characters would meet again in DC Comics Presents #49 (1982) as well as DC Comics Presents Annual #3 (1984).

Hare I Come To Save The Day! (Above:) Hoppy becomes the Marvel Bunny in DCCP #34. Roy was disappointed that DC’s crew got some of the coloring wrong: Hoppy’s face was left white, while it had been pink in Fawcett comics—and in the 1940s his hands were colored yellow, as if covered by gloves, not bare and “flesh”-colored. But Roy felt Rich did a great job of capturing the feel of the Chad Grothkopf Marvel Bunny—including the trademark “sweat beads” that inexplicably flew from the characters’ heads in many panels. [©2007 DC Comics.] (Right:) A panel from the story “Mary Marvel and the Asteroid Adventure” in The Marvel Family #28 (Oct. 1948), wherein Mary met Capt. Marvel Bunny. Art by Jack Binder; script probably by Otto Binder. [Mary Marvel & Marvel Bunny TM & ©2007 DC Comics.]

“Who? I’m afraid I never heard of any Bug—Look out, Millie! That giant-in-blue is pointing a weapon at us!” Soon the two bunnies, now given names as Hoppy and Millie, are herded into a police wagon. When Hoppy hears one of the policemen say that somebody is “clobbering The Marvel Family at the UN,” he realizes just what world he is on. Millie has the good sense to faint, in old-serial-heroine style, allowing Hoppy to say his magic word and turn into Captain Marvel Bunny. As he flies into the UN headquarters, he comments to himself that “I can’t bear the thought of that nice Mary Marvel in peril! She—“ But his thought is cut short. Of course, this is an allusion to the one time in the Golden Age in which Hoppy appeared together with Mary Marvel and Billy Batson, in “Mary Marvel and the Asteroid Adventure” from Marvel Family #28 (Oct. 1948). Though no footnote references it, it is obvious to Golden Age cognoscenti that this is what Marvel Bunny is referring to.

Anyway, another result of Myx’s withdrawal to his own world is that the extra power Kull had is gone, thus enabling Marvel Bunny to defeat him with one blow. Finally, just before the goodbyes, Superman has the opportunity to meet the Marvel Bunny, who tells the Kryptonian that “You’ve always been my favorite comic book hero,” which, of course, doesn’t square with Hoppy’s origin story. And later, back at the Daily Planet offices, it is Jimmy’s turn to chide Clark for reading old comics on company time, especially since Clark is reading a funnyanimal title—an old issue of Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. “What’s wrong with funny animal comics, Jimmy?” asks Clark. “They’re just so—so unrealistic!” replies Olsen. “Oh, I don’t know, Jimmy... they seem awfully real to me!” Clark ends the tale with a George Reeves-like wink to the readers. (This final page of the story was printed in A/E #25, so we won’t repeat it here.) It is clear that Roy Thomas had fun writing this story, and especially in bringing back Hoppy the Marvel Bunny... and it was fun for fans to read, as well.

We hope you enjoy this FREE

ROUGH STUFF #5 PREVIEW! ROUGH STUFF magazine celebrates the ART of creating comics! Edited by famed inker BOB McLEOD, each issue spotlights NEVER-BEFORE PUBLISHED penciled pages, preliminary sketches, detailed layouts, and even unused inked versions from artists throughout comics history. Included is commentary on the art, discussing what went right and wrong with it, and background information to put it all into historical perspective. Plus, before-andafter comparisons let you see firsthand how an image changes from initial concept to published version. So enjoy these excerpts from issue #5, which presents galleries of NEVER-BEFORE SEEN art by: STEVE RUDE • PAUL SMITH GIL KANE • CULLY HAMNER ASHLEY WOOD • DALE KEOWN Plus a STEVE RUDE interview, an examination of JOHN ALBANO and TONY DeZUNIGA’S work on JONAH HEX, and a new RUDE COVER! (100-page magazine) SINGLE ISSUES: $9 US SUBSCRIPTIONS: Four issues in the US: $26 Standard, $36 First Class (Canada: $44, Elsewhere: $60 Surface, $72 Airmail).

ROUGH STUFF #1 ALAN DAVIS • GEORGE PÉREZ BRUCE TIMM • KEVIN NOWLAN JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ ARTHUR ADAMS • JOHN BYRNE WALTER SIMONSON Plus a NOWLAN interview, and a new TIMM COVER!

ROUGH STUFF #2

ROUGH STUFF #3

ROUGH STUFF #4

PAUL GULACY JOHN ROMITA JR. • MIKE ALLRED MICHAEL KALUTA • GENE COLAN BRIAN APTHORP • ALEX TOTH JOHN BUSCEMA • YANICK ANDREW ROBINSON • HOWARD FRANK BRUNNER PAQUETTE • P. CRAIG RUSSELL CHAYKIN • JOHN TOTLEBEN JERRY ORDWAY • MATT WAGNER LEE WEEKS STEVEN BISSETTE Plus a PAUL GULACY interview, professional art critiques, and a new GULACY “HEX” COVER!

Plus a JOHN ROMITA JR. interview, looks at the earliest work of some of your favorite artists, and a new ROMITA JR. COVER!

Plus a JOHN TOTLEBEN interview, art from the Wonder Woman Day charity auction, and a new KALUTA COVER!

D U R E F E A T

I S T A R T

R E N M A H Y L L U C

e to me, was a new nam Cully Hamner EEN rst work on GR fi is h ce n si t bu books ciled many top n pe s e’ h N R L ANTE s an and others. He’ C D l, ve ar M r fo r of ntinuing membe ng on the original and co currently worki s e’ h d an , os Studi for DC. To my Atlanta’s Gaijin NE mini-series O R A E Y : G IN from the BL ACK LIGHTN th of fresh air ea br a is e yl st clean today. eyes, his open, s so abundant ic m co d re de dark, overly-ren

CULLY HAMNER This is from the first issue of my aborted run on The Authority. I have a tendency, for good or ill, to grid out perspective during the early stages of a layout. For some reason it works with my thought process, helping me see the space the characters are occupying and making the dynamics and movement work for me. As you can see from the layout, I work in a “tight, but loose” format: tight in the sense of all the construction being there; loose because there’s no detail. It’s all body language and narrative. Also, three penciled pages from the Hawksmoor story Warren Ellis and I did for the Gaijin Anniversary book, Wildstorm Summer Special. This was one of the last times I worked with an inker, my brilliant studio mate Karl Story. To me, it’s an interesting lesson in penciling too tightly, as I don’t get anywhere close to this level nowadays inking my own stuff. I’ve always liked this progression, though; Warren and I were really in sync on this story. It’s one of those rare times in my career when everything, from the script to the inks to the lettering to the colors, just totally worked for me. And I went nuts on the architecture!

ROUGH STUFF #5 PREVIEW

D U R E F E A T

I S T A R T

GIL K ANE

ame Eli Katz, il Kane (real n G d n ge le s ic om the ’40s C d in comics from k on ke or w 0) 00 -2 1926 his wor is death. I loved AN right up until h SP ATOM, IDER-M E TH , N R TE N GREEN LA e far too achievements ar ention that some consider is H . N A N O C d m an hic ere, but I should h t lis to s be the first grap ou to er K R A num M K C LA perback B HAWKS was his innovative pa mic strip STAR co er ap sp ew n is work was ily o-tier format. H novel, and his da tw l u rf de on w a any of using g, influencing m noteworthy for tin ci ex d an ic d dynam always solid an ts. today’s top artis

BOB McLEOD Heritagecomics.com

Alter Ego #10 While I was still busy graduating from high school, Roy Thomas used this for the cover of his fanzine Alter Ego #10, way back in 1969. The great Marie Severin, who’ll be featured in Rough Stuff #7, drew the caricature of Gil in the middle, and then I think Gil himself added the montages on the sides. Gil was very tall, and had a lofty attitude about him, and Marie captured him perfectly.

BOB McLEOD Gil kept sketchbooks and did practice sketches every day. This is an example from one of his sketchbooks. He knew the human form so well I think this was mostly because he just liked to draw. He wasn’t learning anything new here, just putting his thoughts down on paper. Notice the three-dimensional way he pictured the

Heritagecomics.com

forms in his mind, though. He was sculpting with a pencil.

ROUGH STUFF #5 PREVIEW

BOB McLEOD I don’t know what this was used for, but it’s large features a much more detailed inking style than he employed later in his career. Like many artists, he pared his

GIL KANE

in size (20" x 30") and

style down to more essential techniques as

Heritagecomics.com

he matured.

BOB McLEOD Tarzan While drawing his own Star Hawks newspaper strip, in his spare time Gil also took on the Sunday Tarzan strip from 1979-1981, following Russ Manning. I always enjoyed Gil’s jungle technique. As usual, he made everything look easy in this sequence, but just think of what he was asked to draw in each panel here. Panel three alone Courtesy Matt Huesman

would challenge most artists: “Show Tarzan in the jungle battling a tribe of great apes”. He probably batted it out in an hour.

ROUGH STUFF #5 PREVIEW

the legend of

By MICHAEL BROWNING

ong-time comic book writer John Albano was working for DC Comics in the early 1970s when editor Joe Orlando came to him with a

request: Create a new western hero for DC Comics’ All-Star Western, which was soon changing to Weird Western Tales. Albano created Jonah Hex, a ruthless bounty hunter who had been scarred during the Civil War, to fill a spot in All-

ROUGH STUFF #5 PREVIEW

Star Western #10 in 1972. Jonah was featured in AllStar Western #11 and then, when the title was changed to Weird Western Tales with issue #12, he carried over as the star of the comic. Albano wrote both of Jonah’s All-Star Western appearances, in addition to those in Weird Western Tales #12-14, 16-19 and 21 before leaving the title to oncoming writer Michael Fleisher. Albano’s only other work on Jonah Hex was in the form of a four-page satire originally intended for a DC comic to be called Zany, which was never published. The story, drawn by Tony DeZuniga, was published in The Amazing World of DC Comics #13. Sadly, this was Albano’s only interview with the comics media. He died only weeks after it was conducted in early 2005. Albano passed away at the age

of 80 in late May, and he was still working in comics right up until a few weeks before his death. His last comics work appeared in Archie Comics and he was working on a stage play days before his passing. Artist Tony DeZuniga is still alive and well and has drawn at least two Jonah Hex adventures in the new, ongoing series written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti. DeZuniga still continues to produce fine artwork and commissioned drawings of Jonah Hex and other comic and literary characters. In this excerpt from the three-hour long interview with the writer, Albano discussed the creation of Jonah Hex, how he drew the breakdowns for artist Tony DeZuniga, and gives hints at an unknown origin for the western anti-hero. “Tony drew, I’d say, 99 percent of the stories I did on Jonah Hex,” Albano said, fondly recalling his work with DeZuniga. “He had told someone that he had created Jonah Hex...

For the rest of this article, and more from each of these artists, get Rough Stuff #5, on sale now from TwoMorrows Publishing! 94

ROUGH STUFF #5 PREVIEW

Prices include US Postage. Outside the US, ADD PER ITEM: Magazines & DVDs, $2 ($7 Airmail)

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AE #35: #20: (108 (108pgs.) pgs.)STAN TIMELY/ LEE, MARVEL focus,DICK INVADERS JOHN ROMITA, AYERS, overview with KIRBY, KANE, ROY THOMAS, & AL JAFFEE ROBBINS, BOB DESCHAMPS on the 1940s & 1950s Golden intv., FINGER, Age at panel Timely/with Marvel, FCA, BINDER, FOX, & ROMITA WEISINGER, MR. MONSTER, and $9 US FCA, rarecovers! art, more! $9 US JAFFEE

AE #36: (108 pgs.) JOE SIMON intv. & cover, GOLDEN AGE HEROES of Canada, ELMER WEXLER, MICHAEL T. GILBERT on MR. MONSTER’S ORIGINS, FCA, ALEX TOTH, and more! $9 US

AE #37: (108 pgs.) BECK & BORING covers, SY BARRY intv., Superman “K-Metal” story, FCA with C.C. BECK, MARC SWAYZE, DON NEWTON, and Shazam!/Isis!, MR. MONSTER, and more! $9 US

AE #38: (108 pgs.) JULIUS SCHWARTZ tribute & interviews, art by INFANTINO, ANDERSON, KUBERT, KANE, TOTH, SWAN, SEKOWSKY, FCA section, INFANTINO and HASEN covers, more!! $9 US

AE #39: (108 pgs.) Full issue JERRY ROBINSON spotlight, with comprehensive interview and unseen Batman art, AL FELDSTEIN on EC, GIL FOX, MESKIN, ROUSSOS, & ROBINSON covers! $9 US

AE #40: (108 pgs.) JULIUS SCHWARTZ memorial issue with tributes by pros, GIL KANE interview, comprehensive interview and unseen art by RUSS HEATH, GIL KANE and HEATH covers! $9 US

AE #41: (108 pgs.) BERNIE WRIGHTSON on FRANKENSTEIN, art by KALUTA, BAILY, MANEELY, PLOOG, KUBERT, BRUNNER, CRANDALL, FCA #100, & more! WRIGHTSON, SWAYZE covers! $9 US

ALTER EGO #42 Covers by FASTNER & LARSON and ERNIE SCHROEDER, a celebration of DON HECK, WERNER ROTH, and PAUL REINMAN, rare art by KIRBY, DITKO, AYERS, Hillman & Ziff-Davis remembered by SCHROEDER, HERB ROGOFF, and WALTER LITTMAN, FCA, ALEX TOTH, & more!

ALTER EGO #43

ALTER EGO #44

ALTER EGO #45

ALTER EGO #46

Flip covers by TUSKA and JSA/All-Star Squadron/Infinity Inc. Interviews with Golden Age The VERY BEST of the 1960s-70s STEVENS, yuletide art by SINNOTT, special! Interviews with JOE Sandman artist CREIG FLESSEL and ALTER EGO! EVERETT/SEVERIN BRUNNER, CARDY, TOTH, KUBERT, IRWIN HASEN, MURPHY 1940s creator BERT CHRISTMAN, cover, classic 1969 BILL EVERETT NODELL, and others, interviews ANDERSON, JERRY ORDWAY, MICHAEL CHABON on researching interview, art by BURGOS, with Golden Age artists TOM GILL 1940s Atom writer ARTHUR his Pulitzer-winning novel Kavalier GUSTAVSON, SIMON & KIRBY, (Lone Ranger) and MORRIS WEISS, ADLER, art by TOTH, SEKOWSKY, & Clay, art by EISNER, KANE, KIRBY, and others, 1960s gems by DITKO exploring 1960s Mexican comics, HASEN, MACHLAN, OKSNER, & AYERS, FCA, MR. MONSTER, & E. NELSON BRIDWELL, FCA, FCA, MR. MONSTER, ALEX TOTH, INFANTINO, FCA, MR. MONSTER, ALEX TOTH, & more! TOTH, & more! & more! ORDWAY cover, more! (100-page magazine) $9 US (100-page magazine) $9 US (108-page magazine) $9 US (100-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #47 MATT BAKER, Golden Age cheesecake artist of PHANTOM LADY, plus art from AL FELDSTEIN, VINCE COLLETTA, ARTHUR PEDDY, JACK KAMEN & others, FCA, BILL SCHELLY talks to BUD PLANT, MR. MONSTER, ALEX TOTH, and more! (100-page magazine) $9 US

(108-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #48

ALTER EGO #49

The late WILL EISNER discusses ’40s Quality Comics with art by FINE, CRANDALL, COLE, & CARDY! EISNER tributes by STAN LEE, GENE COLAN, & others! ’40s Quality artist VERN HENKEL interviewed, FCA, MR. MONSTER, TOTH, & more!

Interview with CARL BURGOS’ daughter! Unused 1941 cover layouts by BURGOS and other Timely titans! The 1957 Atlas Implosion, MANNY STALLMAN, and the BLUE FLAME! Also, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER and more!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #54

ALTER EGO #55

MIKE ESPOSITO on DC and Marvel, ROBERT KANIGHER on the creation of Metal Men & Sgt. Rock (with comments by JOE KUBERT & BOB HANEY), art by ANDRU, INFANTINO, KIRBY, SEVERIN, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, GIL KANE, plus FCA with SWAYZE, ALEX TOTH, & more!

ALEX ROSS cover, JACK & OTTO BINDER, KEN BALD, VIC DOWD, and BOB BOYAJIAN interviewed, FCA with MARC SWAYZE & EMILIO SQUEGLIO, Christmas Card Art from CRANDALL, SINNOTT, HEATH, MOONEY, and CARDY, 1943 superheroine Pin-Up Calendar, and more!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #50

ALTER EGO #51

ALTER EGO #52

ALTER EGO #53

Golden Age Batman artist/Bob JOE GIELLA on the Silver Age at ROY THOMAS covers his 40-YEAR career in comics, with ADAMS, Kane ghost LEW SAYRE DC, the Golden Age at Marvel, and BUSCEMA, COLAN, DITKO, GIL SCHWARTZ interviewed, the JULIE SCHWARTZ, with rare art by KANE, KIRBY, STAN LEE, ORDWAY, Golden & Silver Ages of INFANTINO, GIL KANE, PÉREZ, ROMITA, and many others! AUSTRALIAN SUPER-HEROES, SEKOWSKY, SWAN, DILLIN, Also, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT Mad artist DAVE BERG interviewed, MOLDOFF, GIACOIA, SCHAFFENand MR. MONSTER and more! FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT on BERGER, and others, JAY SCOTT WILL EISNER, ALEX TOTH and PIKE on STAN LEE, MARTIN (100-page magazine) $9 US more! THALL, and more!

Halloween issue! GIORDANO & 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, and others!

(100-page magazine) $9 US

ALTER EGO #57

ALTER EGO #58

ALTER EGO #59

ALTER EGO #56

Issue-by-issue index of Timely/Atlas GERRY CONWAY & ROY THOMAS Batman & Superman in the Golden NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews & Silver Ages, ARTHUR SUYDAM super-hero stories by MICHELLE on their ’80s “X-Men Movie That with Superman creators SIEGEL & interview, NEAL ADAMS on NOLAN, art by SIMON & KIRBY, Never Was!” with art by ADAMS, SHUSTER, Golden/Silver Age DC 1960s/70s DC, SHELLY MOLDOFF, EVERETT, BURGOS, ROMITA, COCKRUM, BUSCEMA, BYRNE, production guru JACK ADLER, AL PLASTINO, Golden Age artist AYERS, HEATH, SEKOWSKY, KANE, KIRBY, HECK, & LIEBER, NEAL ADAMS & TV iconoclast (& FRAN (Doll Man) MATERA Atlas artist VIC CARRABOTTA comics fan) HOWARD STERN on SHORES, SCHOMBURG, MANEELY, interviewed, SIEGEL & SHUSTER, Adler, art by CURT SWAN, WAYNE & SEVERIN, GENE COLAN & ALLEN interview, ALLEN BELLMAN on ’40s FCA, MR. MONSTER, SUYDAM Timely, FCA, 1966 panel on EC BORING, AL PLASTINO, plus FCA, BELLMAN on 1940s Timely heroes, cover, & more! Edited by ROY FCA, MR. MONSTER, & BILL Comics, & MR. MONSTER! Edited MR. MONSTER, & more! Edited by THOMAS ! SCHELLY! KIRBY & VON SHOLLY by ROY THOMAS. ROY THOMAS. cover! Edited by ROY THOMAS. (100-page magazine) $9 US (100-page magazine) $9 US (100-page magazine) $9 US (100-page magazine) $9 US

SUBSCRIBE! Twelve issues in the US: $78 Standard, $108 First Class (Canada: $132, Elsewhere: $180 Surface, $216 Airmail). NOTE: IF YOU PREFER A SIX-ISSUE SUB, JUST CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!

ALTER EGO #60

ALTER EGO #61

ALTER EGO #62

ALTER EGO #63

ALTER EGO #64

Celebrates 50 years since SHOWCASE #4! FLASH interviews with SCHWARTZ, KANIGHER, INFANTINO, KUBERT, & BROOME, Golden Age artist TONY DiPRETA, 1966 panel with NORDLING, BINDER, & 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, & more! GIORDANO cover!

HAPPY HAUNTED HALLOWEEN ISSUE, featuring: MIKE PLOOG & 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—& 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!

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, & others! Interview with MARTIN FILCHOCK, Golden Age artist for Centaur Comics! Plus MR. MONSTER, DON NEWTON cover, plus a FREE 1943 MARVEL CALENDAR!

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY063496

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JUN063522

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: AUG063690

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: OCT063800

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: NOV063991

ALTER EGO #65

ALTER EGO #66

ALTER EGO #67

ALTER EGO #68

ALTER EGO #69

NICK CARDY interviewed on his work in the Golden & Silver Ages, with CARDY artwork, plus art by WILL EISNER, NEAL ADAMS, CARMINE INFANTINO, JIM APARO, RAMONA FRADON, CURT SWAN, MIKE SEKOWSKY, and others, ERNIE SCHROEDER & DAVE COCKRUM tributes, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, 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 & artifacts by SHELLY MAYER, IRWIN HASEN, LEE ELIAS, C.C. BECK, GIL KANE, CARMINE INFANTINO, and JULIE SCHWARTZ, FCA with MARC SWAYZE and C.C. BECK, MICHAEL T. GILBERT on BOB POWELL Part II, and more!

Tribute to JERRY BAILS—Father of Comics Fandom! Features a cover by GEORGE PÉREZ, plus art by JOE KUBERT, CARMINE INFANTINO, GIL KANE, IRWIN HASEN, DICK DILLIN, MIKE SEKOWSKY, JERRY ORDWAY, JOE STATON, MIKE VOSBURG, RICH BUCKLER, JACK KIRBY, and others! Plus, the story behind Marvel’s 1977 STAR WARS comic by THOMAS, CHAYKIN, et al.

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!

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: DEC064009

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JAN073982

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: FEB073887

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAR073852

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: APR074098

ALTER EGO COLLECTION, VOL. ONE

ALL-STAR COMPANION

ALL-STAR COMPANION VOLUME 2

ALTER EGO #70

ALTER EGO #71

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, The Penguin, Thunderfist, The Dreamer, Johnny Canuck, et al.! Plus new Invaders art by BYRNE, LIM, GRELL, CHAN, and a new cover by GEORGE FREEMAN, from a layout by JACK KIRBY!

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073879

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JUN074006

Collects ALTER EGO #1-2, plus 30 pages of NEW MATERIAL! New JLA Jam Cover by KUBERT, PÉREZ, GIORDANO, TUSKA, CARDY, FRADON, & GIELLA, new sections with art by GIL KANE, WILL EISNER, DICK DILLIN, MIKE SEKOWSKY, CARMINE INFANTINO, MURPHY ANDERSON, & more!

ROY THOMAS has assembled the most thorough look ever taken at ALL-STAR COMICS, including issue-by-issue coverage of ALL-STAR COMICS #1-57, the original JLA-JSA teamups, the 1970s ALL-STAR REVIVAL, art from an unpublished 1945 JSA story, looks at FOUR “LOST” ALL-STAR issues, and more!

ROY THOMAS’ new sequel, with more secrets of the JSA and ALL-STAR COMICS from 1940 through the 1980s, including unused 1940s JSA STORY ART, coverage of the 1980s ALL-STAR SQUADRON and AMERICA VS. THE JUSTICE SOCIETY with scarce and never-published art, and more!

(192-page trade paperback) $26 US ISBN: 9781893905597 Diamond Order Code: APR063420

(208-page trade paperback) $26 US ISBN: 9781893905054 Diamond Order Code: APR042953

(240-page trade paperback) $29 US ISBN: 9781893905375 Diamond Order Code: AUG063622

TwoMorrows Publishing 2007 Catalog Update JUNE-DECEMBER 2007 • ORDER AT: www.twomorrows.com TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com

Introducing: COMICS INTROSPECTIVE!

TwoMorrows Publishing proudly presents a new book series that spotlights indy comics talent with an outside-the-box approach. Through a combination of original photography, multiple art gallery sections, and an introspective dialogue with each subject, COMICS INTROSPECTIVE is unlike anything being published. Printed on deluxe glossy stock to maximize the impact of the art and photography, the goal is to make the series as breakthrough as the innovators it covers.

Volume 1: PETER BAGGE

Volume 2: DEAN HASPIEL

With a unique, expressive style, PETER BAGGE’s work runs the gamut from political (his strips for reason.com), absurdist and satirical (the BATBOY strip for WEEKLY WORLD NEWS), and dramatic (APOCALYPSE NERD). From his Seattle studio, Peter Bagge lets journalist CHRISTOPHER IRVING in on everything from just what was on his mind with his long-running Gen X comic HATE!, to what’s going on in his head as a political satirist. This debut volume of COMICS INTROSPECTIVE features an assortment of original photography, artwork picked by Bagge himself, and a look at where Bagge’s work (and mind) is taking him.

Volume Two shines a light on DEAN HASPIEL, the multi-genre cartoonist behind BILLY DOGMA, the existentialist bruiser hero, and the artist on Harvey Pekar’s AMERICAN SPLENDOR mini-series and THE QUITTER graphic novel. Writer/editor CHRISTOPHER IRVING hangs with Dean in his Brooklyn apartment for the day, talking about Haspiel’s diverse and unique approach to comics, his use of Dogma as a semi-biographical “avatar”… and just what “Aggro-Moxie” really is. Featuring galleries of original Haspiel art, as well as original photographs by RYAN ROMAN, and an introduction by Y The Last Man’s BRIAN K. VAUGHAN, we continue this experimental and bold new series.

(128-page trade paperback) $21 US • ISBN: 9781893905832 Diamond Order Code: DEC063948 • Ships July 2007

(128-page trade paperback) $21 US • ISBN: 9781893905900 Ships January 2008

Coming in 2008: Volume 3 featuring JAY STEPHENS, and Volume 4 featuring BOB FINGERMAN!

UPCOMING BOOKS: MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

Vol. 14: FRANK CHO

Vol. 15: MARK SCHULTZ

Vol. 16: MIKE ALLRED

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905849 Ships October 2007

(128-page TPB) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905856 Ships December 2007

(120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905863 Ships February 2008

MORE MODERN MASTERS VOLUMES ARE COMING IN 2008: GAIJIN STUDIOS AND JOHN ROMITA JR.! SEE OUR JANUARY CATALOG FOR DETAILS!

t o

KIRBY FIVE-OH! (JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50) ALTER EGO: THE BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE

(10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) In 1961, JERRY BAILS and ROY THOMAS launched ALTER EGO, the first fanzine devoted to comic books and their colorful history. This volume, first published in low distribution in 1997, collects the original 11 issues (published from 1961-78) of A/E, with the creative and artistic contributions of JACK KIRBY, STEVE DITKO, WALLY WOOD, JOHN BUSCEMA, MARIE SEVERIN, BILL EVERETT, RUSS MANNING, CURT SWAN, & others—and important, illustrated interviews with GIL KANE, BILL EVERETT, & JOE KUBERT! See where a generation first learned about the Golden Age of Comics—while the Silver Age was in full flower—with major articles on the JUSTICE SOCIETY, the MARVEL FAMILY, the MLJ HEROES, and more! Edited by ROY THOMAS & BILL SCHELLY with an introduction by the late JULIUS SCHWARTZ.

Picks up where Volume 1 left off, covering the return of the Teen Titans to the top of the sales charts! Featuring interviews with GEOFF JOHNS, MIKE MCKONE, PETER DAVID, PHIL JIMENEZ, and others, plus an in-depth section on the top-rated Cartoon Network series! Also CHUCK DIXON, MARK WAID, KARL KESEL, and JOHN BYRNE on writing the current generation of Titans! More with MARV WOLFMAN and GEORGE PÉREZ! NEAL ADAMS on redesigning Robin! Artwork by ADAMS, BYRNE, JIMENEZ, MCKONE, PÉREZ and more, with an all-new cover by MIKE MCKONE! Written by GLEN CADIGAN.

(192-page trade paperback) $26 US ISBN: 9781893905887 Ships February 2008

(224-page trade paperback) $31 US ISBN: 97801893905870 Ships March 2008

TITANS COMPANION VOLUME 2

The publication that started the TwoMorrows juggernaut presents KIRBY FIVE-OH!, a book covering the best of everything from Jack Kirby’s 50-year career in comics! The regular columnists from THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine have formed a distinguished panel of experts to choose and examine: The BEST KIRBY STORY published each year from 1938-1987! The BEST COVERS from each decade! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! And profiles of, and commentary by, the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! Plus there’s a 50-PAGE GALLERY of Kirby’s powerful RAW PENCIL ART, and a DELUXE COLOR SECTION of photos and finished art from throughout his entire halfcentury oeuvre. This TABLOID-SIZED TRADE PAPERBACK features a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover inked by “DC: The New Frontier” artist DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, helping make this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! (A percentage of profits will be donated to the JACK KIRBY MUSEUM AND RESEARCH CENTER.) (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905894 Ships December 2007

HOW-TO MAGAZINES

DRAW! is the professional “How-To” magazine on cartooning and animation, featuring in-depth interviews and step-by-step demonstrations from top comics professionals. Edited by MIKE MANLEY.

WRITE NOW! features writing tips from pros on both sides of the desk, interviews, sample scripts, reviews, exclusive Nuts & Bolts tutorials, and more! Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH.

ROUGH STUFF features never-seen pencil pages, sketches, layouts, roughs, and unused inked pages from throughout comics history, plus columns, critiques, and more! Edited by BOB MCLEOD.

DOWNLOAD DIGITAL EDITIONS OF OUR MAGS FOR $2 95, STARTING IN JULY! SEE PAGE 4 FOR DETAILS! 2

NEW MAGS: T H E U LT I M AT E C O M I C S E X P E R I E N C E !

BACK ISSUE celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through a variety of recurring (and rotating) departments, plus rare and unpublished art. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

ALTER EGO focuses on Golden and Silver Age comics and creators with articles, interviews and unseen art, plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), Mr. Monster & more. Edited by ROY THOMAS.

BACK ISSUE #23

BACK ISSUE #24

BACK ISSUE #25

BACK ISSUE #26

“Comics Go Hollywood!” Spider-Man roundtable with STAN LEE, JOHN ROMITA, SR., JIM SHOOTER, ERIK LARSEN, and others, STAR TREK comics writers’ roundtable Part 1, Gladstone’s Disney comics line, behindthe-scenes at TV’s ISIS and THE FLASH (plus an interview with Flash’s JOHN WESLEY SHIPP), TV tie-in comics, bonus 8-page color ADAM HUGHES ART GALLERY and cover, plus a FREE WRITE NOW #16 PREVIEW!

“Magic” issue! MICHAEL GOLDEN interview, GENE COLAN, PAUL SMITH, and FRANK BRUNNER on drawing Dr. Strange, Mystic Art Gallery with CARL POTTS & KEVIN NOWLAN, BILL WILLINGHAM’s Elementals, Zatanna history, Dr. Fate’s revival, a “Greatest Stories Never Told” look at Peter Pan, tribute to the late MARSHALL ROGERS, a new GOLDEN cover, plus a FREE ROUGH STUFF #6 PREVIEW!

“Men of Steel”! BOB LAYTON and DAVID MICHELINIE on Iron Man, RICH BUCKLER on Deathlok, MIKE GRELL on Warlord, JOHN BYRNE on ROG 2000, Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman, Machine Man, the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes comic strip, DC’s Steel, art by KIRBY, HECK, WINDSOR-SMITH, TUSKA, LAYTON cover, and bonus “Men of Steel” color art gallery! Includes a FREE DRAW! #15 PREVIEW!

“Spies and Tough Guys”! PAUL GULACY and DOUG MOENCH in an art-packed “Pro2Pro” on Master of Kung Fu and their unrealized Shang-Chi/Nick Fury crossover, Suicide Squad spotlight, Ms. Tree, CHUCK DIXON and TIM TRUMAN’s Airboy, James Bond and Mr. T in comic books, Sgt. Rock’s oddball super-hero team-ups, Nathaniel Dusk, JOE KUBERT’s unpublished The Redeemer, and a new GULACY cover!

(108-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073880

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships September 2007

(104-page magazine) $9 US Ships November 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008

ALTER EGO #72

ALTER EGO #73

ALTER EGO #74

ALTER EGO #75

ALTER EGO #76

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, ROY THOMAS’ 1971 synopsis for the origin of Man-Thing, interview with publisher ROBERT GERSON about his 1970s horror comic Reality, art by BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, JEFF JONES, and others FCA, MR. MONSTER, a FREE DRAW! #15! PREVIEW, and more!

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 WALT GROGAN and 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!

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships September 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships October 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships December 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships March 2008

DRAW! #15

WRITE NOW! #17

WRITE NOW! #18

ROUGH STUFF #6

ROUGH STUFF #7

BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE, covering major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, featuring faculty, student, and graduate interviews in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with B.P.R.D.’S GUY DAVIS, MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, a FREE WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW, and more!

HEROES ISSUE featuring series creator/ writer TIM KRING, writer JEPH LOEB, and others, interviews with DC Comics’ DAN DiDIO and Marvel’s DAN BUCKLEY, PETER DAVID on writing STEPHEN KING’S DARK TOWER COMIC, MICHAEL TEITELBAUM, C.B. CEBULSKI, DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, Nuts & Bolts script and art examples, a FREE BACK ISSUE #24 PREVIEW, and more!

More celebration of STAN LEE’s 85th birthday, including rare examples of comics, TV, and movie scripts from the Stan Lee Archives, tributes by JOHN ROMITA, SR., JOE QUESADA, ROY THOMAS, DENNIS O’NEIL, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, JIM SALICRUP, TODD McFARLANE, LOUISE SIMONSON, MARK EVANIER, and others, plus art by KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, and more!

Features a new interview and cover by BRIAN STELFREEZE, interview with BUTCH GUICE, extensive art galleries/commentary by IAN CHURCHILL, DAVE COCKRUM, and COLLEEN DORAN, MIKE GAGNON looks at independent comics, with art and comments by ANDREW BARR, BRANDON GRAHAM, and ASAF HANUKA! Includes a FREE ALTER EGO #73 PREVIEW!

Features an in-depth interview and cover by TIM TOWNSEND, CRAIG HAMILTON, DAN JURGENS, and HOWARD PORTER offer preliminary art and commentaries, MARIE SEVERIN career retrospective, graphic novels feature with art and comments by DAWN BROWN, TOMER HANUKA, BEN TEMPLESMITH, and LANCE TOOKS, and more!

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Ships October 2007

(80-page magazine) $9 US Ships October 2007

(80-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships October 2007

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008

Digital Editions: $295 Pros@Cons!

Summer 2007 Update Edition • Hype and hullabaloo from the publisher determined to bring new life to comics fandom • Edited by John Morrow

New Cover Art!

For various reasons, we’ve had to change cover art on a couple of items since we published our January catalog. Above are new covers for WRITE NOW #16 (shipping in July), and MEGO 8” SUPERHEROES: WORLD’S GREATEST TOYS (shipping in October)! For WRITE NOW, we’ve added a roundtable of Silver Surfer writers, including STAN LEE, STEVE ENGLEHART, JIM STARLIN, J.M. DEMATTEIS, and RON MARZ, so we felt this new cover painting by MIKE ZECK seemed spot-on. And the MEGO cover changed at the polite request of our friends up at DC Comics, so who are we to argue? Same great pubs, but with great new fronts! Get ’em soon!

Beginning with our July issues, we’ll begin offering digital editions of all our new magazines at www.twomorrows.com, for only $2.95 PER DOWNLOAD (way less than HALF THE PRICE of the printed versions)! Not only that, but these new PDF editions will feature much of the art from our printed magazines’ black-andwhite pages in FULL COLOR! As a special bonus, subscribers to our printed magazines will get FREE ACCESS to the digital versions of the issues in their subscription, which will generally be available 2-3 weeks BEFORE copies are even printed. So if you’ve hesitated to subscribe because our mags show up in your local comics shop before they’re in your mailbox, you can now see the whole issue digitally (and in color) weeks earlier, for no extra charge! We’re offering these digital editions as a test to see if there’s a market for them, not as a way to do away with printed magazines. But we’re relying on the honesty of our readers, to NOT share their digital editions with others. Since we rely on sales from every printed copy and download to keep the magazines going, if readers illegally share these files with others, the TwoMorrows mags you love so much could cease to be published in ANY format. So enjoy the files, but make sure you pay for yours! And if you’re a subscriber, send your e-mail address to www.twomorrows.com to get free access to these new digital editions!

During the second half of 2007, we’ll be exhibiting at the following comic cons: COMICON INTERNATIONAL (San Diego, CA, July 25-29, 2007) WIZARDWORLD: CHICAGO (Chicago, IL, August 9-12, 2007)

BALTIMORE COMICON (Baltimore, MD, September 8-9, 2007) SPX (Small Press Expo) (Bethesda, MD, October 12-13, 2007)

ULTIMATE SINNOTT

So stop by our booths and buy something!

We Built And Diamond Order Codes It, They Came...

Here’s a list of Diamond Order Codes that weren’t yet available when we printed our January Catalog: Alter Ego #68: MAR073852 Alter Ego #69: APR074098 Alter Ego #70: MAY073879 Alter Ego #71: JUN074006 Back Issue #22: MAR073855 Batcave Companion: NOV068368 Brush Strokes With Greatness: Joe Sinnott: MAR073744 Comics 101: FEB070050 Draw! #14: MAY073896 Image Comics: The Road To Independence: MAR073745 Jack Kirby Collector #49: JUN074028 John Romita... And All That Jazz! (HARDCOVER): APR074019 John Romita... And All That Jazz! (SOFTCOVER): APR074018 Rough Stuff #5: MAY073902 Write Now #16: MAY073903 Modern Masters Vol. 12: Michael Golden: APR074023 Modern Masters Vol. 13: Jerry Ordway: JUN073926 Modern Masters: Michael Golden DVD: MAY073780 Working Methods: MAR073747

BATCAVE DELAY Our upcoming book THE BATCAVE COMPANION (by MICHAELS EURY and KRONENBERG) has been pushed back to April, to allow extra time to make it the most outstanding “Companion” we’ve ever done. Stay tuned! We guarantee it’ll be worth the wait!

Over 25,000 copies of COMICS 101 (our Free Comic Book Day publication) were handed out on May 5 at comics shops across the country, and from our webstore. And thousands more have been given away at conventions we’ve attended. If you somehow missed your copy of this great sampler of our mags (featuring “how-to” and history lessons from our editors), you can still get one online for a measly $2 IN THE US (which covers our postage costs to send it to you). Get it while the gettin’s good!

Only at www.twomorrows.com, we’re offering an ULTRA-LIMITED EDITION (only 52 copies, lettered “A” to “Z” and “AA” to “ZZ”) of our Joe Sinnott bio, BRUSH STROKES WITH GREATNESS! Joltin’ Joe has drawn 52 pencil drawings, and one has been bound into each copy, making a truly one-of-a-kind edition! So hurry online to get yours, and you can choose which character you want before they sell out! NOT SOLD IN STORES!

New Subscription Sell Outs! Rates: (due to postage hikes) JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Four tabloid issues in the US: $44 Standard, $56 First Class (Canada: $64, Elsewhere: $76 Surface, $120 Airmail).

BACK ISSUE!: Six issues in the US: $40 Standard, $54 First Class (Canada: $66, Elsewhere: $90 Surface, $108 Airmail). ROUGH STUFF, DRAW! & WRITE NOW!: Four issues in the US: $26 Standard, $36 First Class (Canada: $44, Elsewhere: $60 Surface, $72 Airmail). ALTER EGO: Twelve issues in the US: $78 Standard, $108 First Class (Canada: $132, Elsewhere: $180 Surface, $216 Airmail). NOTE: IF YOU PREFER A SIX-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION, JUST CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!

These items are now SOLD OUT: HEROES & VILLAINS: THE WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS TRIBUTE SKETCHBOOK WRITE NOW! #12 DRAW! #9 and #12 COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOLUME 2 COMIC BOOK ARTIST #11 To get periodic e-mail updates of what’s new from TwoMorrows Publishing, sign up for our mailing list! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ twomorrows

NEW RATES: Prices include US Postage. Outside the US, ADD PER ITEM: Mags & DVDs, $2 Canada ($7 Surface, $9 Airmail) • Books, $4 Canada ($12 Surface, $22 Airmail)

NOW SHIPPING FROM TWOMORROWS!

BACK ISSUE #23

ROUGH STUFF #5

DRAW! #14

WRITE NOW! #16

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

Comics Go Hollywood! Spider-Man roundtable with STAN LEE, JOHN ROMITA, SR., JIM SHOOTER, ERIK LARSEN, and others, STAR TREK comics writers' roundtable Part 1, Gladstone’s Disney comics line, behindthe-scenes at TV’s ISIS and THE FLASH (plus an interview with Flash’s JOHN WESLEY SHIPP), TV tie-in comics, bonus 8-page color ADAM HUGHES ART GALLERY and cover, plus a FREE WRITE NOW #16 PREVIEW!

NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED art galleries (complete with extensive commentaries by the artists) by PAUL SMITH, GIL KANE, CULLY HAMNER, DALE KEOWN, and ASHLEY WOOD, plus a feature interview and art by STEVE RUDE, an examination of JOHN ALBANO and TONY DeZUNIGA’s work on DC’s Jonah Hex, a new STEVE RUDE COVER, plus a FREE BACK ISSUE #23 PREVIEW!

Features in-depth interviews and step-bystep demos with DC Comics artist DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), plus Part 3 of editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, a new MAHNKE cover, and a FREE ALTER EGO #70 PREVIEW!

An in-depth TODD McFARLANE interview, STAN LEE, STEVE ENGLEHART, JIM STARLIN, GEORGE PÉREZ, and J.M. DeMATTEIS on writing the Silver Surfer, Nuts and Bolts script and pencil art from BRIAN BENDIS and FRANK CHO’s MIGHTY AVENGERS and from DAN SLOTT’s AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE, STAR TREK comics writers' roundtable Part 2, cover by MIKE ZECK, plus a FREE DRAW #14 PREVIEW!

WARRIORS, spotlighting Thor (with a look at hidden messages in BILL EVERETT’s Thor inks), Sgt. Fury, Challengers of the Unknown, Losers, and others! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, new interviews with JERRY ORDWAY and GRANT MORRISON, MARK EVANIER’s column, a pencil art gallery, a complete 1950s story, a wraparound Kirby Thor cover inked by JERRY ORDWAY, and more! SHIPS IN AUGUST!

(108-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073880

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073902

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073896

(84-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: MAY073903

(84-page tabloid) $13 US Diamond Order Code: JUN074028

JOHN ROMITA... & ALL THAT JAZZ!

THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE

IMAGE COMICS

COMICS INTROSPECTIVE VOLUME 1: PETER BAGGE

WORKING METHODS

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME 12: MICHAEL GOLDEN

The artist who made AMAZING SPIDERMAN Marvel’s #1-selling comic book in the 1960s talks about his life, his art, and his contemporaries! Authored by former Marvel Comics editor in chief and top writer ROY THOMAS, and noted historian JIM AMASH, it features the most definitive interview Romita’s ever given, about working with STAN LEE and JACK KIRBY, following Spider-Man co-creator STEVE DITKO as artist on the strip, and more! Lavishly illustrated with Romita art, it’s a career overview of a comics master, and a firsthand history of the industry by one of its leading artists! Available in Softcover and Hardcover (with 16 extra color pages, dust jacket, and custom endleaves). (192-page softcover) $29 US ISBN: 9781893905757 Diamond Order Code: APR074018 (208-page hardcover w/ COLOR) $49 US ISBN: 9781893905764 Diamond Order Code: APR074019

In 1992, seven artists shook the comic book industry when they left their topselling Marvel Comics titles to jointly form a new company named IMAGE COMICS! IMAGE COMICS: THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE is an unprecedented look at the history of this company, featuring interviews and art from popular Image founders ERIK LARSEN, JIM LEE, TODD MCFARLANE, WHILCE PORTACIO, MARC SILVESTRI and JIM VALENTINO. Also featured are many of finest creators who over the last fifteen years have been a part of the Image family, offering behind-thescenes details of the company’s successes and failures. There’s rare and unseen art, making this the most honest exploration ever taken of the controversial company whose success, influence and high production values changed the landscape of comics forever! Written by GEORGE KHOURY. Introduction by DAVE SIM.

First volume of TwoMorrows’ new book series spotlighting INDY COMICS TALENT with an outside-the-box approach, combining original photography, multiple art gallery sections, and an introspective dialogue with each subject—all on deluxe glossy stock to maximize the impact of the imagery. Volume One features PETER BAGGE, whose work runs from political (his strips for reason.com), to absurdist and satirical (the Batboy strip for Weekly World News), and dramatic (Apocalypse Nerd). From his Seattle studio, Bagge lets us in on everything from what was on his mind with his long-running Gen X comic Hate!, to what’s going on in his head as a political satirist. Written by CHRISTOPHER IRVING.

Art professor JOHN LOWE puts the minds of comic artists under the microscope, highlighting the intricacies of their storytelling and creative processes stepby-step. For this book, three short scripts are each interpreted in different ways by professional comic artists to illustrate the varied ways in which they “see” and “solve” the problem of making a script succeed in comic form. It documents the creative and technical choices MARK SCHULTZ, TIM LEVINS, JIM MAHFOOD, SCOTT HAMPTON, KELSEY SHANNON, CHRIS BRUNNER, SEAN MURPHY, and PAT QUINN make as they tell a story, allowing comic fans, artists, instructors, and students into a world rarely explored. Hundreds of illustrated examples document the artists’ processes, and interviews clarify their individual approaches regarding storytelling and layout choices.

(280-page trade paperback) $39 US ISBN: 9781893905719 Diamond Order Code: MAR073745

(128-page trade paperback) $21 US ISBN: 9781893905832 Diamond Order Code: MAY073779

(176-page paperback w/ COLOR) $26 US ISBN: 9781893905733 Diamond Order Code: MAR073747

Features an extensive, career-spanning interview lavishly illustrated with rare art from Golden’s files, plus huge sketchbook section, including unseen and unused art! By ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905740 Diamond Order Code: APR074023

MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD Shows the artist at work, discussing his art and career! (120-minute Std. Format DVD) $35 US ISBN: 9781893905771 Diamond Order Code: MAY073780

SUBSCRIPTIONS: JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: Four issues US: $44 Standard, $56 First Class (Canada: $64, Elsewhere: $76 Surface, $120 Airmail). BACK ISSUE!: Six issues US: $40 Standard, $54 First Class (Canada: $66, Elsewhere: $90 Surface, $108 Airmail). DRAW!, WRITE NOW!, ROUGH STUFF: Four issues US: $26 Standard, $36 First Class (Canada: $44, Elsewhere: $60 Surface, $72 Airmail). ALTER EGO: Twelve issues US: $78 Standard, $108 First Class (Canada: $132, Elsewhere: $180 Surface, $216 Airmail). FOR A SIX-ISSUE ALTER EGO SUBSCRIPTION, JUST CUT THE PRICE IN HALF!

For the latest news from TwoMorrows Publishing, log on to www.twomorrows.com/tnt