Back Issue #125 by TwoMorrows Publishing

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MATT WAGNER’s MAGE and

IN-DEPTH HISTORIES of

GRENDEL COLLEEN DORAN’s A Distant Soil • STAN SAKAI’s Usagi Yojimbo • STEVE PURCELL’s Sam & Max: Freelance Police • JAMES DEAN SMITH’s Boris the Bear • LARRY WELZ’s Cherry Poptart

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

Edited by MICHAEL EURY, BACK ISSUE magazine celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through recurring (and rotating) departments like “Pro2Pro” (dialogue between professionals), “BackStage Pass” (behind-the-scenes of comicsbased media), “Greatest Stories Never Told” (spotlighting unrealized comics series or stories), and more!

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NUCLEAR ISSUE! Firestorm, Dr. Manhattan, DAVE GIBBONS Marvel UK Hulk interview, villain histories of Radioactive Man and Microwave Man, Radioactive Man and Fallout Boy, and the one-shot Holo-Man! With PAT BRODERICK, GERRY CONWAY, JOE GIELLA, TOM GRINDBERG, RAFAEL KAYANAN, TOM MANDRAKE, BILL MORRISON, JOHN OSTRANDER, STEVE VANCE, and more! PAT BRODERICK cover!

BATMAN MOVIE 30th ANNIVERSARY! Producer MICHAEL USLAN and screenwriter SAM HAMM interviewed, a chat with BILLY DEE WILLIAMS (who was almost Two-Face), plus DENNY O’NEIL and JERRY ORDWAY’s Batman movie adaptation, MINDY NEWELL’s Catwoman, GRANT MORRISON and DAVE McKEAN’s Arkham Asylum, MAX ALLAN COLLINS’ Batman newspaper strip, and JOEY CAVALIERI & JOE STATON’s Huntress!

SCI-FI SUPERHEROES! In-depth looks at JIM STARLIN’s Dreadstar and Company, and the dystopian lawman Judge Dredd. Also: Nova, GERRY CONWAY & MIKE VOSBURG’s Starman, PAUL LEVITZ & STEVE DITKO’s Starman, WALTER SIMONSON’s Justice Peace (from the pages of Thor), and GREG POTTER & GENE COLAN’s Jemm, Son of Saturn! With a Dreadstar and Company cover by STARLIN and ALAN WEISS!

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SUPERHEROES VS. MONSTERS! Monsters in Metropolis, Batman and the Horror Genre, DOUG MOENCH and KELLEY JONES’ Batman: Vampire, Marvel Scream-Up, Dracula and Godzilla vs. Marvel, DC/Dark Horse Hero/Monster crossovers, and a Baron Blood villain history. With CLAREMONT, CONWAY, DIXON, GIBBONS, GRELL, GULACY, JURGENS, THOMAS, WOLFMAN, and a cover by MICHAEL GOLDEN.

SUPERHERO STAND-INS! John Stewart as Green Lantern, James Rhodes as Iron Man, Beta Ray Bill as Thor, Captain America substitute U.S. Agent, new Batman Azrael, and Superman’s Hollywood proxy Gregory Reed! Featuring NEAL ADAMS, CARY BATES, DAVE GIBBONS, RON MARZ, DAVID MICHELINIE, DENNIS O’NEIL, WALTER SIMONSON, ROY THOMAS, and more, under a cover by SIMONSON.

GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD! ALEX ROSS’ unrealized Fantastic Four reboot, DC: The Lost 1970s, FRANK THORNE’s unpublished Red Sonja, Fury Force, VON EEDEN’s Batman, GRELL’s Batman/Jon Sable, CLAREMONT and SIM’s X-Men/Cerebus, SWAN and HANNIGAN’s Skull and Bones, AUGUSTYN and PAROBECK’s Target, PAUL KUPPERBERG’s Impact reboot, abandoned Swamp Thing storylines, & more! ROSS cover.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY ISSUE! A galaxy of comics stars discuss Marvel’s whitehot space team in the Guardians Interviews, including TOM DeFALCO, KEITH GIFFEN, ROB LIEFELD, AL MILGROM, MARY SKRENES, ROGER STERN, JIM VALENTINO, and more. Plus: Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon before the Guardians, with CHRIS CLAREMONT and MIKE MIGNOLA. Cover by JIM VALENTINO with inks by CHRIS IVY.

HEROES OF TOMORROW! Mon-El hero history, STEVE LIGHTLE’s Legionnaires, and the controversial Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years era. Plus SEKOWSKY’s Manhunter 2070, GRELL’s Starslayer, Charlton’s Space: 1999 tie-in, Paradox, and MIKE BARON’s unfinished Sonic Disruptors series. Featuring the BIERBAUMS, BYRNE, GIFFEN, MAYERIK, SIMONSON, TRUMAN, VOSBURG, WAID, and more. LIGHTLE cover.

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CONAN AND THE BARBARIANS! Celebrating Celebrates the 40TH ANNIVERSARY of the 50th anniversary of ROY THOMAS and MARV WOLFMAN and GEORGE PÉREZ’s BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH’s Conan #1! The New Teen Titans, featuring a guest editorial Bronze Age Barbarian Boom, Top 50 Marvel by WOLFMAN and a PÉREZ tribute and Conan stories, Marvel’s Not-Quite Conans art gallery! Plus: The New Teen Titans’ 40 (from Kull to Skull), Arak–Son of Thunder, GREATEST MOMENTS, the Titans in the Warlord action figures, GRAY MORROW’s media, hero histories of RAVEN, STARFIRE, Edge of Chaos, and Conan the Barbarian and the PROTECTOR, and more! With a at Dark Horse Comics. With an unused NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED PÉREZ TITANS WINDSOR-SMITH Conan #9 cover. COVER from 1981!

SUPERHERO ROMANCE ISSUE! Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s many loves, Star Sapphire history, Bronze Age weddings, DeFALCO/ STERN Johnny Storm/Alicia Pro2Pro interview, Elongated Man and Wife, May-December romances, Supergirl’s Secret Marriage, and… Aunt May and Doc Ock?? Featuring MIKE W. BARR, CARY BATES, STEVE ENGLEHART, BOB LAYTON, DENNY O’NEIL, and many more! Cover by DAVE GIBBONS.

HORRIFIC HEROES! With Bronze Age histories of Man-Thing, the Demon, and the Creeper, Atlas/Seaboard’s horrifying heroes, and Ghost Rider (Danny Ketch) rides again! Featuring the work of CHRIS CLAREMONT, GERRY CONWAY, ERNIE COLON, MICHAEL GOLDEN, JACK KIRBY, MIKE PLOOG, JAVIER SALTARES, MARK TEXIERA, and more. Man-Thing cover by RUDY NEBRES.

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Volume 1, Number 125 February 2021 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTIST Matt Wagner COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS Roger Ash Mark Ciemioch Shaun Clancy Colleen Doran Grand Comics Database Allan Harvey Heritage Comics Auctions Dave Lemieux Bernie Mireault Arnold Pander Jacob Pander Amanda Powers Tom Powers Rose Rummel-Eury Stan Sakai Tim Sale Diana Schutz James Dean Smith Jerry Smith John K. Snyder III Lynne Twining Brennan Wagner Larry Welz VERY SPECIAL THANKS Matt Wagner

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BACKSEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 INTERVIEW: Vivat Grendel! Matt Wagner and the Devil. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Our cover artist opens up about his cyclical, long-running series; featuring additional interviews with Grendel editor Diana Schutz and Grendel artists The Pander Brothers, Bernie Mireault, Tim Sale, and John K. Snyder III FLASHBACK: Usagi Yojimbo: Stan Sakai’s Samurai Rabbit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 The story of the perennially popular Bushido bunny INTERVIEW: Bear Necessities: Boris the Bear’s James Dean Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Cartoonist Smith’s Boris was “Deadpool” before there was a Deadpool BEYOND CAPES: Going the Distants: Colleen Doran’s A Distant Soil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 The writer/artist discusses the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of her space opera INTERVIEW: Sam & Max: Freelance Police’s Steve Purcell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 The Oscar-winning artist takes us on a road trip with his funny animal agents of chaos FLASHBACK: Mage: The Hero Uncovered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 A behind-the-scenes analysis of Matt Wagner’s Arthurian trilogy INTERVIEW: Cheryl Blossom vs. Cherry Poptart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Is the sexy Cherry a clone of an Archie character? We ask Larry Welz BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Reader reactions

BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 112 Fairmount Way, New Bern, NC 28562. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Eight-issue subscriptions: $90 Economy US, $137 International, $36 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Matt Wagner. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective creators or companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2021 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1

by M

The Comico the Comic Company panel at the 1988 San Diego ComicCon. (front row, left to right) Arthur Adams, Diana Schutz, Dave Stevens, Bob Pinaha, Mike Chen, Mike W. Barr, Michael Eury, Mike Leeke, Paul Fricke, Scott Beaderstadt. (back row, left to right) Matt Wagner, Ted McKeever, Tim Sale, ?, Len Strazewski, Len Wein. Courtesy of Diana Schutz.

A lot of people grew up with comic books, but how many of you can say that comic books grew up with you? I’m privileged to be part of the generation that can make that claim. We were children during the 1960s, as naïve as the innocuous adventures of the superheroes and cartoon characters we read. We were adolescents during the 1970s, when comics’ story content and artwork began to mature alongside us. We were young adults in the 1980s, when independent publishers challenged every industry convention imaginable, from storytelling to formats to creator rights. And now that we’re saying goodbye to middle age in the 2020s, comic books, like our aging bodies, aren’t as publicly visible as they used to be and are predicted by naysayers to be headed to the grave… but don’t count us out yet! We’ve got a lot of good years left! Emerging during the Big ’80s was a generation of artists who received the opportunity to pursue their visions for their creations, unfettered by corporate mandates or editorial intrusion. Many of their stories have been told in previous editions of this magazine, including Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s Nexus, Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg, Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer, Dave Sim’s Cerebus, Wendy and Richard Pini’s ElfQuest, and Paul Chadwick’s Concrete (consult our back issues at www.twomorrows.com for BACK ISSUE’s coverage of these and other creator-owned comic books). This issue we continue to mine the world of creatorowned comic books, and welcome to our pages several extremely talented creators whose 1980s projects

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ichael Eury

have become iconic, and in a few cases, impressively long-lived. I suspect that some of you reading this issue might be new to BACK ISSUE, and if so, welcome. We sift through the yellowing pages of the Bronze Age and beyond eight times a year and would love to have you join us again. Two of this issue’s spotlighted creators/series are especially nostalgic to ye ed. It was on January 2, 1988 that I began my editorial career as part of an editorial team of two at Comico the Comic Company, where I was assigned (among many other absolutely cool books) a Sam & Max one-shot by the insane (in a good way!) Steve Purcell. Thanks, Steve, for always making me laugh. And then there’s our cover-featured series, Matt Wagner’s Grendel, edited by my boss at Comico, Diana Schutz. Diana and I proofread each other’s books, so I was closely reading the Grendel arc of that era, written by Matt and illustrated by John K. Snyder III and Jay Geldhof, where Grendel was taking on a corrupt Catholic Church. As a recent transplant from the Bible Belt (albeit a lapsed Catholic, and an erstwhile altar boy at that), at first I found Matt’s storyline alarming. But I soon grew to appreciate its sophistication, and reading Grendel (and other Comico books) helped me mature as a comics reader beyond the superhero material upon which I was raised. Thanks, Matt! There’s a lot of Comico content this issue, and as such on this page I’ve shared a photo, courtesy of Diana Schutz, of the Comico panel from the 1988 San Diego Comic-Con. I’ll also extend my gratitude to Usagi Yojimbo’s Stan Sakai, A Distant Soil’s Colleen Doran, and Boris the Bear’s James Dean Smith for taking the time to share their stories and art with us this issue. And a special thank-you to Cherry Poptart’s Larry Welz, for both his participation and his patience: our mini-interview with Larry was originally slated to appear some time back in BI #107, our “Archie in the Bronze Age” edition, hence its focus upon similarities between Larry’s promiscuous Cherry and Archie Comics’ vivacious Cheryl Blossom. Yet Archie Comics politely objected to its inclusion, and the interview sat dormant for a while (really, our recent themes of “Heroes of Tomorrow” and “Superhero Romance” didn’t exactly roll out the welcome wagon for Cherry Poptart), so we’re happy to include it this ish.

Grendel. His very name forever echoes in any Grendel fan’s heart and soul. To read any story arc from Matt Wagner’s Grendel cycle is to initiate one’s first step toward falling in love with this darkly complex saga that has forever changed the landscape of independent comics. Since 1982, when the seductively villainous Hunter Rose debuted in Comico Primer #2, to the present day, with the cybernetic Grendel Prime’s galaxy-spanning quest to find a new home for humanity in Grendel: Devil’s Odyssey, Wagner and company have been entertaining and challenging their loyal readership. As one of the many devout Grendel fans, I am thrilled to share my interviews with Matt Wagner, his long-time editor Diana Schutz, and artistic collaborators The Pander Brothers, Bernie Mireault, Tim Sale, and John K. Snyder III.

INTERVIEW WITH MATT WAGNER

The Devil, You Say! A Hunter Rose Grendel commissioned illo by and courtesy of Matt Wagner. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

by T o m

Powers

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INFLUENCES AND ORIGINS

TOM POWERS: Matt, what literary works—for example, Beowulf and John Gardner’s novel Grendel—inspired the character of Grendel? MATT WAGNER: Grendel’s origin was a confluence of many sources. Like a lot of comic fans, I grew up loving heroic fantasy; I loved classic mythology, and I loved superheroes, those legends’ modern equivalent—clear morality tales where good triumphed over evil and the dragons were always slain. But then, again like so many others, during my teen years, things took a turn towards the dark side. As I grew a bit older, all I had to do was look around me to realize that the good guys didn’t always win and the bad guys didn’t always get their just comeuppance. Somehow, those heroic tales that I’d grown up loving now seemed a bit hollow and echoed with a reality that didn’t seem quite true, however much I might’ve wanted that to be the case. You mentioned Beowulf, and, yeah, I was familiar with that uber-myth of European culture, but I was even more influenced by (again, as you mentioned) John Gardner’s 1971 novel Grendel, which I’d discovered in my school’s library around the time I was 12 or 13. Grendel recounts the familiar tale of Beowulf but with a startling twist; it was told from the POV of

Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

the loner-villain and was sympathetic to the title character’s monstrous actions as a desperate and understandable response to humanity’s violent tribalism. I’d never read anything like this, a story that turned the traditional roles of hero and villain on its collective heads and, obviously, the impression stuck… the name, particularly. Shortly after that, I also discovered the many works of Michael Moorcock, particularly the Elric saga, which presented an even more complicated version of good and evil and featured a main character who was both likable and contemptible all at the same time. Elric was the physical and philosophical opposite of most fantasy heroes of that day; he was slender, weak and pale, dependent on dark magic, drugs, and soul-stealing for the source of his strength. As a character, Elric was morally ambiguous, often aiming to do the right thing but usually ending up destroying most everything he holds dear; it was my first exposure to an antihero. Again, this was a huge upset for my way of thinking to that point… the mere idea that basically good people could do incredibly awful things despite their best intentions. There were other sources that strengthened this view, but I’d say those two sources were the most significant in regard to the development of my Grendel. POWERS: Equally, which comic-book creators influenced you? WAGNER: Well, if you look at those first several appearances of Grendel, you’d think I was an enormous anime fan. In fact, I’d only just discovered the world of Japanese animation, and part of its appeal was that it was foreign and a bit mysterious to me at that point… nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is today. As a result, I attempted to play with those forms and design sense for my first published efforts, but it was obviously only a passing phase. matt wagner As a young comics fan, I consumed Facebook. a lot of different art styles. Of course, in the mid-’70s, it was hard to ignore the massive presence of both Jack Kirby and Neal Adams, but this was also around the same time that the more illustrative efforts of the artists who made up “The Studio” (Wrightson, Windsor-Smith, Kaluta, and Jones) were also becoming a really big deal. And I’ve spoken many other times about how discovering Warren Publications over-sized reprints of Will Eisner’s The Spirit opened my perspective on how varied and inventive a comic narrative could be. But I’d say my two greatest artistic influences during my formative years were probably C. C. Beck and Joe Kubert. During my tween years, DC Comics had recently launched Shazam! as a monthly title, reintroducing the world to Beck and the original Captain Marvel. The bold simplicity of Beck’s style really appealed to me, and I think that’s what initially attracted me to anime as well (minus the giant doe eyes and tiny little mouths). But I think Joe Kubert’s incredible and classic run on Tarzan is where I really learned how to tell a comic story— where to focus the reader’s attention, how to establish an environment, when to let the action overwhelm things, and (again, that simplicity factor) how to draw an entire jungle by only using an effective minimum of lines and detail. It was only after quite a few years as a professional comics creator that I fully realized the enormous effect Joe’s efforts had had on my own storytelling, and, in fact, I tell his son Adam about it nearly every time I see him. Poor guy’s probably sick of hearing about it by now! 4 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

Of course, as the years have gone by, I’ve continued to absorb and feel the influence of many other classic creators—Alex Toth, Hugo Pratt, Richard Corben, and Moebius, to name just a few—but Beck and Kubert both left an early and indelible stamp on my development as an artist. POWERS: Grendel’s costume has such an iconic design. How did you come up with the distinctive mask and double fork weapon? WAGNER: Here, we need to talk about influences again. As I was developing what would prove to be my first published character and storyline, I had the idea to try doing a story about a supervillain as opposed to a hero. You have to remember that there really weren’t many comics like that around in those days. Both Marvel and DC had a made a few stabs at centering a book or so around their bad guys, but it never seemed to work out. Titles like The Joker or Super-Villain Team-Up never lasted more than a few issues, and I think this was due to the fact that the bad guys always seemed like second-stringers; readers knew they weren’t the real stars of these narratives, only a source of conflict for the heroes. It was around this same time that I discovered two Italian comics antiheroes through a massive resource book that was popular at the time, The World Encyclopedia of Comics. Italy, it turns out, already had a history of successful series about bad guys, specifically Diabolik and Kriminal. Both of these series were even popular enough to have inspired foreign film versions (again, comic-book movies were a rarity at the time), including the incredibly cool Danger: Diabolik directed by horror-film legend Mario Bava. Both characters were gentleman crooks— urbane thieves and gangsters with whom the reader was sympathetic and who maintained their own somewhat twisted codes of honor. Both characters wore dark jumpsuits and masks, and, in fact, Kriminal even wore a full-cover facemask that bore a skull design. So, with these examples in front of me, I set out to design my own uber-villain as the star of my potential series. Like a lot of people, I’ve always had a certain unease about clowns… I never really got the humor supposedly expressed by the crazy fright wigs and outlandish makeup. So my initial mask designs were meant to look like a scary clown… some more obviously so than others. The one I finally settled on still had echoes of that circus lunacy but also evoked other elements as well. To me, the final design of the Grendel mask looks something like a demonic skull in reverse, with the slashes through the eyes evoking both horns and tusks while still retaining the mocking whimsy of a harlequin. I’ve also always been a fan of swords and swordplay in any sort of film or TV depiction and knew that I didn’t want my character to just pack a gun, which seemed too common and ordinary for the sort of romantic, larger-than-life persona I was trying to spawn. Around this time, someone I knew had managed to purchase an antique sword-cane; you twisted a band on the handle and that released the blade that you could then draw from the cane/sheath. Needless to say, that had an incredibly dashing appeal, and so I decided my Grendel would wield something similar. I decided that, in order to stress the diabolic aspects of his character, it should be a fork instead of a simple sword. But having the three blades of a traditional pitchfork pop out of the slim body of a cane seemed like it would look clunky and unbelievable, and so I settled on the twin, slim blades of Grendel’s now fairly iconic weapon.

COMICO THE COMIC COMPANY

POWERS: How did Grendel end up being published by Comico? WAGNER: I always have people asking me how to get into comics, and I always answer that I’m the wrong guy to ask since a large factor in how I got started was sheer luck and happenstance. In the early ’80s, I was attending an art school in Philadelphia, and I got on the elevator one day and noticed a guy wearing a comic-book-themed T-shirt. We struck up a conversation and that guy turned out to be Bill Cucinotta, one of the founders of Comico. The core members of the earliest version of Comico were just a bunch of college pals who had this dream of publishing independent comics—in a day when there really weren’t so many of those yet. These guys were all “city-lads” and knew a whole lot more about the business and production of comics than I ever had exposure to, having grown up pretty rurally. At one point, we all dropped out of school to follow that crazy dream, and Comico’s initial launch featured four black-and-white books, all done by the three original guys in the group and me, Grendel being one of those titles. Admittedly, our first efforts were crude, and the company was fairly disorganized, but that eventually all turned around when Bob Schreck and Diana Schutz signed on to the ranks. But that’s a whole different story in its own right. POWERS: What are your thoughts on the early Grendel appearance in Comico Primer #2 (1982) and the original three-issue run of Grendel (Mar. 1983–Feb. 1984)? In other words, what did you learn from these energetic first efforts with the character? WAGNER: Well, as I said, my initial efforts were admittedly crude but also, as you said, energetic. Of the four premier Comico titles, only Grendel garnered much positive response, and that’s what eventually led to me getting the chance to develop a color

Roots (top) Grendel’s first appearance, from Comico Primer #2 (1982). (bottom) Grendel’s return, the first of a three-issue miniseries, in 1983. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

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Comico Time Capsule (top left) Baby-faced Grendel editor and goddess in residence, Diana Schutz, just a few months after starting at Comico, at the 1985 San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC). (top right) Bob Schreck in his Comico office, 1988. Comico was headquartered on the second and third floors of a creaky old house in Norristown, Pennsylvania. (bottom left) Mike Baron, Matt Wagner, and Bob Schreck at SDCC 1986. They’re wearing “God Save the King” T-shirts created by Bob Chapman in support of The Comics Journal’s campaign to encourage Marvel to return Jack Kirby’s artwork. (bottom right) Grendel cosplaying for Halloween, probably 1987, at the Comico offices. Gerry Giovinco as Tujiro and Geraldine Pecht as Grendel. Photos courtesy of Diana Schutz.

title for them, which turned out to be Mage (again… a whole ’nother story). And there’s an old professional adage in the field that everyone has 100 pages of bad comic art that they need to poop out first before they get to something credible and at least marginally professional-looking. Obviously, there were ideas in those initial Grendel issues that just wouldn’t die and eventually led to a massive and lengthy publishing history for the character. As with that 100-page maxim, I was definitely working through a lot of what I liked about other people’s comics and honing in closer to what I eventually wanted my comics to be. In effect, during those 100 pages, a comics creator learns what not to do, leaving the excess baggage behind… most obviously in this case, the pseudo-anime style. Still, when I look at those early issues, I can still see the elements that have defined my art and my career ever since… the bold but clear approach to storytelling and layout, the classic pulp-influenced scenarios, and, again, the simplicity of style. People often assume I’m ashamed of these early efforts, and nothing could be further from the truth. I recognize that these were the fledgling efforts of what has since proven to be a long and continuing artistic journey. POWERS: When you later brought back Grendel as a backup feature (Devil by the Deed) that ran for nine parts in Mage #6–14 (Mar. 1985–Aug. 1986), you told the story in a prose style. What inspired this radical storytelling approach to Hunter Rose’s tale? WAGNER: After the launch of Comico’s initial black-and-white titles failed to gain much success, either financially or critically, the company decided they needed to make the move into producing color comics. This was just before the B&W boom of the mid-’80s, and color seemed to be the only way to make it at that point. As I said, of the four titles, only Grendel had gotten much positive response, and so the company offered me the chance to develop a color title… which, again, turned out to be Mage. In the pages of Mage, I really started to hit my artistic stride, and, as a result, I started getting a lot of reader queries about Grendel. They wanted to know what ever happened to that intriguing story that I had just seemed to discontinue in midstream. Since the other Comico members had basically abandoned their B&W titles (mainly to focus on the business of publishing), I had assumed the same was gonna be true for Grendel and that it had just been an early experiment for me, one that hadn’t worked out. But, like I said,

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Hungry Like the Wolf Grendel and Argent face off in Devil by the Deed’s climactic clash. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

reader interest was surprisingly strong for the character again all of a sudden, and I started to think about ways to resurrect that narrative. When I came up with the idea of doing Grendel as a backup feature in Mage, everything seemed to click. The problem was… I would only have four pages every issue to convey a whole new story chapter. And I knew that I wanted Grendel to look and feel utterly different than Mage. That’s when I hit upon the new concepts for how to make that work. I chucked almost all trace of the anime influence seen in the B&W issues and instead adopted an approach that was much more influenced by Art Deco. And, as you said, I elected to tell the story completely through prose captions, an approach that was 180 degrees from Mage, which was told solely through dialogue balloons. Narratively, it enabled me to tell a lot of story in very little space, and, creatively, it was like hitting the jackpot… especially at that early stage of my career. Suddenly, I was working on two very different and very fulfilling storylines, all of which were under my complete creative control. It was just such a ripe and ideal scenario for a young artist looking to stretch his wings. POWERS: But why did Hunter have to die in the final installment? WAGNER: Again, there just wasn’t much like that being done in mainstream comics of the time. Main or title characters never died in comics in those days. Marvel had broken a lot of ground with the deaths of key supporting characters such as Gwen Stacy, Electra, etc.… but Spider-Man and Daredevil were still alive at the end of those storylines. I’d also point to the ending of the Elric saga as having a huge effect on my going in that direction. SPOILER—the ending of the original Elric saga is a shocking and mythic tragedy that brings the “hero” to a grim and ruinous fate. It’s an incredibly resonant moment in fantasy literature, and it definitely influenced me in regard to Hunter’s concluding destiny. As a character, Hunter is like a blazing comet… burning a fiery trail but ultimately going nowhere. He had to flame out under the weight of his own malevolent brilliance. In fact, in those initial B&W issues, the story starts with the aftermath of his final battle with Argent. They’re both lying there wounded and dying as they finally acknowledge each other as opposite equals. The story is told through reminiscence, so the reader already knows that Hunter is doomed even as his story begins. That’s a motif I dropped when I reworked the storyline to become Devil by the Deed as the narrative format demanded a more

journalistic approach rather than a personal recollection. POWERS: Is the spirited Stacy Palumbo, who engineers Hunter’s death through manipulating him into fierce battle against her other father figure, Argent, a sympathetic character? WAGNER: I’d say she’s definitely a tragic figure, but yeah… she’s also a sympathetic character, especially as written by Diana Schutz in the Devil Child miniseries. The thing is, Stacy was originally just something of a story element to me… something to bolster Hunter’s mythos more than anything else. I liked the image of our seemingly invincible supervillain having a soft heart for this precocious little girl (many years before Luc Besson’s film, The Professional, by the way). It seemed to anchor him with a remaining shred of humanity, but, in typical Hunter fashion, it was also self-serving and manipulative. I don’t like over-explaining things in my narratives, but, to my mind, he’s always seen the ghost of his former lover Jocasta in Stacy—the same pluck and spirit and joie de vivre—and that’s why he’s so besotted with and protective of her. And it’s his great affection for her that fuels his intolerance of pedophiles or other forms of child abuse. So, even though he seems loving and altruistic by becoming her guardian, it’s still really just supporting part of his megalomania—his self-generated legend. I can’t recall whether I’d planned to have her be so instrumental in his downfall from the very beginning, but it certainly fit the narrative. But even then, I was still just thinking of her mainly as a plot device… how it was so great that this innocent little girl manipulates these two larger-than-life, volatile characters into destroying each other. She even makes herself hot chocolate to celebrate. But then I started thinking about the repercussions of her “victory”… how she would never escape the stigma of being Grendel’s plaything, how she’d forever have to bear the unforgiving scrutiny of a never-ending media circus and be the subject of ongoing psychiatric analysis, how she’d likely become a ward of the state until she reached legal age, and how all of those factors would ultimately ruin her future life in more ways than one. Once I realized her tragic fate in all this, she suddenly became a lot more real to me and, yeah, a lot more sympathetic as a character. In many ways, she’s a victim… a pet in a cage, surrounded by monsters. But the real tragedy is what happens when she breaks free of that cage and the real world proves to be just as monstrous. continued on page 10

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Interview with Diana Schutz Throughout the majority of the years spanning Matt Wagner’s I felt I was really working for Matt. The more I could do for incredible journey crafting the Grendel cycle, Diana Schutz him, the better his work would be, the more invested in it I served as his stalwart editor at both Comico and Dark Horse would be, and the easier it would be to sell. That’s sort of the Comics. Equally, for Grendel fans, especially those of us who theory anyway. enjoyed her often fiery, provocative letters pages, Diana is a In those days, you know, there were very few female comics legend in her own right. editors, very few women in the field at all, and even fewer But before I present my interview with everyone’s favorite who’d gravitated into comics because of a passion for the art Grendel-editor-goddess, I would like to first share Matt’s kind form. Some guys were threatened by a woman who knew words concerning her: “Diana has been such an integral part anything about comics. Matt was emphatically not one of those! of Grendel from practically the very beginning of the character’s And the creator-editor relationship can often be really intense— published history that it’s still a bit strange for me to process particularly in the case of creator-owned work, especially in the fact that she’s since retired from editing and isn’t helming those early years of our shared struggle to support and solidify the Grendel ship any more. I could go on and on about the the ownership rights of creators. Nowadays, it seems less so: enormous impact she’s had not only on my professional almost all business communication is via email, which tends life but also my private life. She even introduced me to my to be more detached or dispassionate—people have become future wife… her sister! And Diana’s accomplishments in the afraid of the phone! Admittedly, I’ve grown to dislike it myself, industry as a whole are fairly legendary… the list of creators but before email, an editor communicated personally with the she’s worked with reads like a freaking who’s-who of the creator—that was a critical part of the job—and Matt and I greatest talents in the field. She not only kept me on track very quickly became close friends through conversation after and on schedule over the many years of our collaboration, conversation. And of course, he lived in Philadelphia at the but she’s also provided just the right sort of directional time, just a half-hour drive from the town where Bob prodding at those times when I needed it most and I were living. Anyway, I liked Matt from the (like the Batman/Grendel critique I mentioned moment we met. He’s honest and forthright, elsewhere). In addition, she’s spearheaded a smart as a whip, a voracious reader like me, variety of Grendel projects over the years, and he’s been smitten with comics his whole including Grendel Tales and The Art of Grendel. life, also like me. I liked Matt so much that I And of course, in a very rare move, Di actually introduced him to my little sister and watched stepped out from behind her editor’s desk them fall in love in front of my eyes! It was to take over the writing reins for Devil Child, pretty cool. filling in the history of Stacy Palumbo with a POWERS: In regard to Stacy Palumbo, Hunter tale that was touching as well as horrifying and Rose’s troubled adopted daughter, why did you obviously deeply personal. Diana’s contributions want to tell her post-Devil by the Deed life to the Grendel cycle have been a vital part of in Grendel: Devil Child #1–2 (June and diana schutz both the character’s and title’s history. I literally Aug. 1999)? couldn’t have done it without her.” SCHUTZ: I’m not a writer by vocation or trade—at all—but this story wanted to be told and would not TOM POWERS: Diana, how did you become Matt Wagner’s let me rest until I told it. I had, at age 37, then recently editor on Grendel, and why did this partnership of creatorundergone a necessary surgery, which left me unable to editor work so well? become pregnant, and part of the impetus, I think, was a need DIANA SCHUTZ: Ah, kismet! In 1985, I rode into the company to explore the idea, at least, of motherhood. The comics page, that first published Mage and Grendel just the same way I rode of course, was a natural venue for me, although, at that time into Dark Horse five years later: on the coattails of my former (late 1992), the only comics I’d ever written were a couple husband, Bob Schreck, who’d been hired a few months earlier to nonfiction one-pagers. Originally, Devil Child began as run advertising and promotions. It was a very small company, Christine Spar’s story: about her relationship to her mother and no one there knew a damn thing about editing—or (Stacy)—a relationship that Matt alludes to only briefly in schedules. Their books were always late, and that can be the Devil by the Deed and again just briefly in Devil’s Legacy. death knell for a tiny, independent publisher struggling to Unlike me, Christine is a writer by trade: in fact, she’s the survive at the start of what would soon become an overly “author” of Devil by the Deed, as Matt establishes therein. crowded marketplace. I was an experienced editor, though Anyway, Devil Child was also originally planned as a threenot of comics—unless you count my four days (!) at Marvel— issue story arc, but I guess the first 24-page script I wrote was and Bob knew that unless the trains began running on time, pretty awful, because both Matt and Tim [Sale] nixed it, which he’d have nothing to advertise or promote. So, I was originally was a painful reality check for me, but… I sucked it up, tossed brought in as editorial coordinator, specifically to create and out that entire first issue, and started over again. And in that enforce production schedules. Pretty soon, though, I wormed process, Christine’s narrative somehow became Stacy’s. The my way into hands-on editing. I’d been reading Matt’s work story really did have a mind of its own, and I was simply its right from the start and was already a fan of his. If I remember fingers at the keyboard. correctly (We are talking 35 years ago!), I just kinda stepped POWERS: What did you appreciate about collaborating with into proofreading with Mage #6, and our working relationship Tim Sale and Teddy Kristiansen, who respectively illustrated evolved from there. I mean, there were no editors on that and colored your story? small staff until I arrived. And I’ve always believed that the SCHUTZ: I wrote what became the story in early ’93, but it editor’s primary responsibility is to the creator: to do whatever wouldn’t see print until six years later, mostly because artist Tim is necessary at the publishing end to help realize that creator’s Sale’s career had skyrocketed in the meantime, so Devil Child unique vision. And so, despite being paid by the publisher, was put on the backburner until Tim could more easily squeeze 8 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

it into his suddenly full-to-bursting schedule. Patience is definitely Hunter Rose era. What did you like about editing these projects? not one of my (unfortunately few!) virtues, but I’d written the SCHUTZ: Well, in 1999, I won my very first Eisner Award—for story with Tim in mind; he’s a dear friend, and I knew he would Black, White, & Red as Best Anthology—so that’s one very good get it. So, for Tim, I was willing to wait as long as it took. It’s such reason! I’d edited award-winning books prior to this—Sin City a dark story, you know, that it pushed me into some scary places, and 300, among others—but the anthology award is the editor’s and Tim kind of resolutely went there with me. His art is so award. And it was handed to me by Will himself, who used to daring in so many ways that it gave the story exactly the right feel. preside over the awards ceremony every year in San Diego, until I mean, he’s hardly shy in his use of black! Matt had characterized his death in 2005. (This was the summer before I became Will’s Stacy’s life, in Devil by the Deed, as enormously sad, really, and Tim Dark Horse editor and grew to love him like a father.) Black, brought that same air of consequence to Devil Child. White, & Red, in fact, won another two Eisner Awards that year: Teddy came on board at Tim’s request, and his painted color for Best Short Story, “Devil’s Advocate” by Matt and Tim; and for was the perfect complement to Tim’s line art. Teddy is a brilliant Best Penciler/Inker, awarded to Tim. The sad thing is that artist in his own right, and his color sensibility is superb! I’d worked Matt wasn’t able to attend the ceremony; a family wedding with him previously on Four Devils, One Hell, the first Grendel Tales (my family!) kept him away in a year when Grendel had been series, written by a young James Robinson—before DC Comics nominated in seven categories and went on to win three! stole them both away! And Teddy had already shown the magic But to get to your question, Tom… anthologies present he was capable of, both there and in the 1995 Bacchus Color more editorial challenges than any other type of book, though Special, an absolutely gorgeous one-shot written by Eddie Campbell that also means the rewards are far greater. Hiring and then that’s been largely overlooked for no good reason. Well, I learned subsequently juggling 20 different art teams for each of the early on to trust my artists—comics is a primarily visual medium, two series was not easy! Ditto balancing the creative budget, and they are the real experts. Tim also brought in Richard sometimes robbing Peter to pay Paul, begging Dark Horse for Starkings’ lettering studio with a font developed from Tim’s own a few extra dollars here and there, overseeing the quality of all hand-lettering, so the overall look is pretty holistic. And Matt, the stories as well as the bevy of deadlines—for Matt, the various of course, painted those tremendously atmospheric covers based artists, letterers, my in-house designer, and the art techs, not to on Tim’s pencil sketches. I could hardly have asked for better on mention the printer—and ensuring that each eight-page story my first serious outing as a writer. aligned stylistically with its individual POWERS: As editor, you took a artist(s). Luckily, Matt took charge of the refreshingly liberal editorial position in latter, with that amazing eye of his, and the Grendel and Grendel Tales letters wrote all the scripts for the specific artists, pages, one sadly not often seen in comics. playing to their individual strengths— What was your operating philosophy for and what a grand showcase of style this approach? that was! From Jill Thompson’s delicate SCHUTZ: Hah! I had no “operating storybook paintings to the contemporary philosophy,” Tom—just a big fat mouth! Underground flair of Jim Mahfood all the But look, I grew up reading comics in the way to the Renaissance-inspired grace early ’60s, at a time when fandom was just of Michael Zulli… the art really ran the gaining credibility, especially at Marvel. gamut. And despite the phenomenal Stan Lee’s Bullpen Bulletins and his amount of effort involved, one of the lettercols were direct and personal, or many rewards of editing anthology books they certainly read that way, despite the is to work with that wish list of creators— hucksterism and hype. Also, before the artists who might be busy elsewhere but advent of the Internet, comics was perhaps who can slide a short piece in to their the only medium to offer its audience a workload or receive special dispensation mechanism for more or less immediate if under contract to another publishing feedback and even to encourage it and house, like Darick Robertson and, I act upon it. And I had a special affinity believe, Tim Bradstreet and Chris Sprouse for the letters pages: while still working were at the time. Alongside those more in comics retail, in the very early ’80s, I’d established creators, the two Grendel begun writing letters of comment myself anthologies also allowed us to introduce to some of my favorite comics—I still do our readers to some newer talents who on the rare occasion—and you’ll find me were strikingly gifted but whose work Grendel: Devil Child final page. Written by Diana Schutz, art by Tim in ’80s-era issues of Cerebus, Frank Miller’s Sale, colors by Teddy Kristiansen. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner. was less well known 20-some years ago: Daredevil, and the Marshall Rogers run of Dr. Strange. So, when like Cliff Chiang, for instance, or Troy Nixey and Scott Morse. given an opportunity to helm my own letters page, I was all in! And of course, Matt’s 40 (!) new Hunter Rose stories provided a As for my liberal (some might say naïve!) approach… well, forum for several longtime Grendel favorites—artists like Bernie I’ve just never been a very good liar, and when writing anything— Mireault, the Panders, John Snyder, and Jay Geldhof, among these responses, for instance—there’s really no point unless it others. Ultimately, everyone who worked on Grendel felt like comes straight from the heart. An approach that has gotten me family to me, and that sense of personal connection really begins into trouble more often than not, I might add! All credit where and ends with Matt, not just because he’s my brother-in-law, it’s due, however: Matt let me run a little wild in the back pages but because of his immense talent, his skill as a storyteller and of Grendel. Sometimes too wild, but I’ll always be grateful for his extraordinary facility with art, his big love of comics, and his that incredible freedom. level head. Matt has always said that Grendel is an expression POWERS: Both 1999’s Grendel: Black, White, & Red #1–4 of his dark side, but in the 35 years that I’ve had the pleasure and 2002’s Grendel: Red, White, & Black #1–4 offer a who’s to know and work with him, that’s a side I’ve never seen— who of comic-book talent who illustrate Matt’s return to the except on the page. Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 9

The New Grendel (left) A rare developmental drawing of Christine Spar by Arnold Pander, from 1985, utilizing the previous series’ logo. At the time of this writing, this original art is for sale on the Pander Brothers’ Etsy page. (right) Devil’s Legacy begins in Comico’s Grendel vol. 2 #1 (Oct. 1986). TM & © Matt Wagner.

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GRENDEL’S LEGACY

POWERS: Then there’s Stacy’s daughter, Christine Spar, whose story arc, Grendel’s Legacy, is told in Grendel #1–12 (Oct. 1986–Sept. 1987). Why is her role as a female incarnation of Grendel important? WAGNER: She’s important for two different reasons. The first is that her story became the conduit for my opening up the Grendel saga and presenting it as a much larger vista. I initially had no plans to continue Grendel’s story past Hunter’s epic tragedy, and when the idea came up to possibly continue Grendel as a monthly title, my first response was, “No f*cking way.” I mean, he dies at the end of Devil by the Deed, and, so far as I was concerned, that was that. But, of course, that conundrum intrigued me from a creative standpoint, and so I started to think about ways to continue the narrative without utilizing some trite manner of resurrecting Hunter (which has become the norm in mainstream comics these days… dead characters never stay dead). Here again, the stuff I’d read and loved as a kid had some influence, and, in this case, I was inspired by the generational aspects of The Phantom. As a character, Lee Falk’s classic comic-strip hero wasn’t actually just one man; The Phantom was a guise adopted over and over again by descendants of the original Ghost Who Walks. So I was struck with the idea that maybe I didn’t have to dig Hunter back up again in a literal sense… perhaps his dark dominion could be felt from beyond the grave, and so perhaps another person could inherit the mantle of Grendel. And that’s the second reason that Christine’s story is important; she’s the first of what proves to be a long legacy of the continuing Grendel identity. She’s the first to feel continued on page 12

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Interview with the Pander Brothers TOM POWERS: Hello, Arnold and Jacob. Could you please POWERS: In an astounding fashion, Grendel #9 is a share how your collaboration with Matt Wagner on Devil’s nearly silent issue. What type of effort went into illustrating Legacy (Grendel #1–12) came about, and why you wanted to this detail-rich story? illustrate Christine Spar’s story as Grendel? ARNOLD PANDER: By the time we were midway through ARNOLD PANDER: At the time, Jacob and I were both pretty drawing the series, Matt went from sending us pretty detailed fresh out of high school and on our own working out of a tiny script breakdowns with dialogue in the beginning to supplying art studio above a punk club in downtown Portland, creating us with very loose scenes that he would introduce dialogue into rock posters and logos for small business. The opportunity to based on our layouts. We were inventing all sorts of random draw Grendel was a combination of timing things that Matt would integrate into the storyline. One example intersecting with luck. I had some was the metal eye we gave Detective Wiggins to make him original artwork on display at a comiclook more ominous, which Matt turned into a lie detector. book store that was also carrying This organic collaboration led Matt to give a book of short stories we had us the most creative freedom yet with just illustrated for a local writer’s chapter nine, which had only two lines noir stories. of narration on the first and last page, JACOB PANDER: Matt was touring with everything being told visually in with Mage at the time and was between. We took full advantage of seeking a new talent to draw his the possibilities we had with a silent next iteration of Grendel that would issue to create this nightmarish manifest in the Christine Spar tale. world for the fated Detective Riley. He spotted our artwork while in We tapped into some of the jacob pander Portland and invited us to try European comics we had picked up on out for the project. We did some Facebook. a recent visit to Holland, so there’s sample pages of both pencils and inks, and we got the job. a bit of Hergé, Ever Meulen, arnold pander POWERS: What was your approach in depicting the Daniel Torres, Bilal, and a touch of fantastic future world that Christine inhabits (e.g., clothing, Facebook. Eisner. We also used some photo architecture, and cars)? reference with Riley being played by a friend of ours. We still ARNOLD PANDER: My early influences in comics came from consider #9 as one of the favorite comics we have ever drawn. the great Marvel Bullpen of Silver Age artists like John Buscema, It kind of lives on its own in the Grendel run we did. Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, Michael Golden, and others, but my JACOB PANDER: As the coming-of-age interests took front and center. MTV was still run developed, we a music video station where videos for Duran Duran, ABC, became more bold and Human League, and others turned on a new romantic state experimental too, of mind. Growing up with Star Wars and Blade Runner made obliterating the proscenium a big impact on our industrial design sense. Other cinematic of the comic page through influences were also present since Jacob worked in a repertory visual deconstruction, with theatre where I watched a lot of European films. I loved Jean characters and objects Luc Godard and old Hitchcock movies and must have watched casting shadows on panels A Clockwork Orange at least ten times. and drawings appearing The fashion of the era was also a big factor. Prior to Grendel, to tear open and reveal I was toying with the idea of going to the F.I.T. or Parsons in NYC pages below. You can to study fashion design and was drawing a lot of inspiration from see this in issue #9 as fashion illustrators like Antonio Lopez and the sleek art of Patrick bricks are thrown at Riley Nagel, as well as NY artists like Keith Haring and Basquiat, who from above and seem to were capturing my interest in fine art and NYC street culture. tear through the panel Our art studio wall was covered in fashion images from Interview at his feet. In the next magazine and other pop art influences that inspired us at the panel, there is a rip in the time while we listened to New Order and Love & Rockets. All of concrete surface where art these audio and visual influences were mainlined into the characfrom the next page can ter design for Christine Spar and the stylized world she inhabited. be seen. JACOB PANDER: At the time, there was also a resurgence of POWERS: What did you Art Deco in design and fashion as well as a nostalgic embrace enjoy about returning to of film noir seen in films like Blade Runner and the lighting and the world of Grendel for Grendel #9, the death of Riley. Art by Arnold and Jacob Pander. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner. style of a lot of ’80s films at the time. This definitely seeped “Devil’s Curse,” the Hunter into the pages of Grendel with future forward Deco architecture Rose story that introduces voodoo master Benito Emanuel Tomas and the heavy use of light and shadows cast by venetian D’Oro, in Grendel Black, White, & Red #3 (Jan. 1999)? blinds, etc. We were also playing around with the idea that ARNOLD PANDER: It was great. Mostly just to work with technologies would be used to retrofit vintage cars so that Matt’s writing again. We have always had a kind of creative they could fly through the futuristic landscapes we were synergy that is hard to explain. I recall laying out the story, depicting. It was in Grendel that we also established the use and it felt like getting back into a comfortable chair that you of deep and dynamic perspectives. We wanted to really feel could relax and dream up some exciting visuals. the visual depth of the world, finding ways to render the JACOB PANDER: It would be great to collaborate more often. environment both below and above the surface of the pages. It’s always led to a pretty cool outcome. Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 11

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the dark influence of Grendel and have it ultimately consume her, in part because that’s how her life actually began! As I said earlier, I don’t like over-explaining things in my work, and if you look closely, that phantom essence—GRENDEL—is never really defined in any hard sense even over the long course of this epic narrative. Is it, in fact, a conscious demonic force? Or is it actually more of a social phenomenon, a malevolent zeitgeist that refuses to fade into the void? Sometimes it seems more like one, sometimes more like the other. In Christine’s case, it seems to be more of the latter since her mother was effectively Grendel’s heir, and the reality of that black stain filtered down through her daughter’s entire life. In that sense, Christine becoming the next Grendel was a legacy she just couldn’t escape. POWERS: In regard to your artistic collaborators for Christine’s arc, how did you collaborate with Arnold and Jacob Pander for these stories? WAGNER: As I said, creatively this was an incredibly fertile time for me. I’d just completed the first Mage series and, as a result, Devil by the Deed. I was receiving a lot of critical praise and attention,

Merciless Tujiro takes a young victim in Grendel #3 (Dec. 1986), by Wagner, the Pander Brothers, and inker Rich Rankin. Recolored version from Dark Horse’s Grendel Omnibus. TM & © Matt Wagner.

but I knew I didn’t want to get locked in any particular creative mold at such a young age. I’d just finished these two vastly different storylines, and I thought it would be a good idea to try something also very different for my next endeavor. And by that, I mean a different method of creating as much as a different storyline. I decided that for this new incarnation of Grendel, I wanted to step back and try writing for other artists. My hope was that this sort of collaboration would broaden my own perspectives by forcing me to see things through other creators’ eyes. And since this was my first attempt at writing for others and my approach to my own storytelling was very visually based, I decided to write what’s known in the industry as plot-and-dialogue fashion as opposed to a “full script.” This meant that I would provide the artist(s) with a detailed plot, broken down by page and maybe featuring a few key dialogue moments here and there… but without specific panel descriptions or final dialogue and captions. After the artists completed the pencils, then I’d go in and write the final script, dialogue and captions. At that point, I even had a moral outlook on doing it this way; my thought was that, since I can draw, if I wanted more iron-clad control over how the story would be depicted, then I should just draw it myself. My whole purpose with collaborating with other artists was to broaden my own outlook, and so I wanted to allow them the freedom to decide how the action was staged and presented on each page. It proved to be a very invigorating way to work because seeing the concepts I’d created come to visual life always inspired me in regard to the actual script. Slang, syntax, character traits that I hadn’t thought of at first suddenly leapt out of my keyboard and onto the page. I’d first seen Arnold Pander’s work on display at a store during the cross-country Mage Tour I did in 1985. When I contacted him about submitting some tryout samples for this new version of Grendel, he asked if it was okay to collaborate with his brother Jacob since they were hoping to advance both their careers in joint fashion. As it turned out, this sort of writing approach worked beautifully with Arnold and Jacob since they’d also done some filmmaking work together and were thrilled to have such freedom with the visuals. You had asked earlier about the importance of Christine being a woman. The fact that she’s female wasn’t really important to me in any sort of declarative sense at the time. It wasn’t so much a political statement as just another opportunity to grow as an author… I’d never written from a woman’s perspective before, and that seemed like a worthy challenge. Additionally, I’d recently just come out of a relationship with a woman who’d had a child at a very young age. So I’d gotten to see that fiery protective maternal instinct up close, and I knew that was something I could incorporate into this character’s motivation. Plus, since my goal was to utterly change the character, going from a man to a woman seemed an obvious choice. The fact I managed to team up with a pair of artists who drew these fierce yet elegant female characters just brought it all to life.

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Sparring Partners (center) A Christine Spar Grendel commissioned illo by and courtesy of Matt Wagner. (right) The Pander Brothers’ stylish interpretation of an encounter between Christine Spar and Argent, from Grendel #8 (May 1987). Inks by Jay Geldhof. Original art scan courtesy of the Pander Brothers (via their Etsy page). TM & © Matt Wagner.

POWERS: Immediately in the first issue of Christine’s story, the Kabuki performer and vampire Tujiro kidnaps and murders Christine’s son Anson, and he can be seen murdering a child in issues #2–3 (Nov.–Dec. 1986). What influenced this shocking development? WAGNER: The gestation of Tujiro as a character was mainly to provide a counter-balance to Hunter’s previous incarnation as Grendel. Hunter fought a werewolf-ish character, so I decided to have Christine face off with a vampire. And I didn’t want this bloodsucker to be the typical Euro-based variety, so I started doing some research and found a reference to Chinese vampires being all covered in fur and having to cover themselves up to the neck in order to hide their identities. And, the real point is… I wanted to make him really scary. So, rather than stressing the sexual aspects of a vampire and their prey, I decided to continue the child predator motif that was an undercurrent of Hunter’s storyline. Instead of the stereotypically seductive monster that lures its victims into decadence and submission, my vampire would have a specific taste for preying on children. What’s more, after gouging himself on their lifeblood, this fiend then treated itself to a special mignardise (small bite-sized dessert) by eating one of his young victim’s eyeballs. He then saved the remaining eye as a keepsake. Again… I wanted to make him really scary. POWERS: The wolf Argent is the other monster that Christine faces in this story arc. Why is he important to both Hunter’s and Christine’s stories as their archnemesis? WAGNER: Argent was created to be the polar opposite of Hunter, and that goes back to the very initial concept of the character. Since I was portraying my assassin/crimelord/ supervillain as attractive, dashing, and suave, I wanted to counteract that with a “hero” who was ugly, crass, and savage. In the end, the one thing they have in common is a shared aggression and a penchant for violence, a brotherhood they both recognize as they lie fallen in the bloody aftermath of their final battle. In the case of Christine, Argent is the lingering curse of her becoming Grendel. She first actively adopts the identity of Grendel to gain revenge on Tujiro for the loss of her son. But even after she manages to strike back, she finds that she can’t just walk away from the mask and fork.

By taking on the role of this supervillain to achieve her vendetta, she also inherits all of that character’s conflicts and sins. Argent is the Devil’s Legacy from which she just can’t escape… and that ultimately destroys her. POWERS: On this thread of Christine’s gradual downfall, issue #9 (June 1987), titled “Devils Revenge,” is mostly a silent issue that shows her hunting and eventually killing corrupt cop Dominic Riley, who had beat up her boyfriend, Brian Li Sung. How did this tale test your abilities as a writer? WAGNER: Again, I was always trying to push my boundaries in those days, and the experiment of writing plot-and-dialogue fashion was working out so well with the Panders that I wanted to try something even bolder. For that issue, I simply wrote out the plot of what happens to Riley without any page breakdowns and left all of the visual pacing to the Panders. I gave them the two written captions that appear on the first and last page of that issue (1: “AS TO THE CASE WITH DOMINIC RILEY…”, 2: “…EVENTUALLY, I KILLED HIM.”) and told them they had free reign to interpret the events and actions I was describing however they pleased. The results were terrific, with lots of cool surprises as a result of their visualization of my plot; some moments became larger than I imagined, and others became smaller. But the final issue really worked on so many memorable levels, totally achieving the sense of menace and paranoia I was hoping to invoke. Narratively, this issue marks a huge moment of Christine’s downslide into insanity. The cold, emotionless tenor of those two captions contrasts so well against the fierce brutality of her actions. It suddenly seems evident that she’s no longer “using” Grendel to achieve a desperate goal… she’s now actually becoming Grendel.

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Be the Devil Brian Li Sung took the mantle of Grendel in Wagner’s Devil Inside arc. Page 19 from Grendel #14 (Nov. 1987). Art by Bernie Mireault. TM & © Matt Wagner.

THE DEVIL INSIDE

POWERS: With the following story, The Devil Inside, which is told in issues #13–15 (Oct.–Dec. 1987), why did you make Brian the next Grendel? WAGNER: Once I made the decision to continue Grendel as a monthly title, I knew I had to embrace change as a dominant factor in how I approached that concept. I definitely didn’t want to be treading the same ground over and over again, and so, if I was going to have the Grendel identity be handed down from character to character, then I’d have to really make sure that serious change was evident in every aspect that fit the narrative. I was operating under the assumption that the only way I was going to able to keep a monthly series interesting for my readers was to keep it creatively interesting for me. Basically, what I envisioned was an ongoing series of miniseries, all under the collective title of Grendel. In the case of Brian Li Sung, that change factor was embodied by his contrast to the first two incarnations of the character. Whereas both Hunter and Christine were physically adept and type-A personalities, Brian was a different breed from them. He was caring, friendly, and emotional, and didn’t embody the fire and fury of his predecessors. He’s what was referred to back in the ’80s as a SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy). Here again, I was trying to go in unexpected directions, and the idea of just another powerful, fighter-type character taking up the mantle of Grendel seemed fairly predictable. And so I decided to have the Grendel identity next find a home in someone who didn’t have the grit, ferocity, and martial skills of either Hunter or Christine. POWERS: Unlike other Grendel incarnations, Brian actively resists the Devil’s influence. Why is he unique in this way? WAGNER: What Brian has that so many of the other Grendels lack is empathy. It’s his empathy, in fact, that at first opens him to the dark influence of the Grendel persona. During this story arc, he’s obsessively reading the private journals that were left to him by Christine Spar, and he’s so wrapped up in her loss, sorrow, and anger that he doesn’t even realize how deeply that’s affecting him. After that shocking moment when he realizes that there’s definitely some other force at work in both his mind and his actions, he knows he has to do something to save both his sanity and his soul. By resisting the lure of giving into his own growing fury and fully becoming Grendel, he takes a heroic stand and disrupts the Devil’s plans for him… even at the cost of his own life. And that plays a huge role in the rest of the overall Grendel saga. His actions upset the direct line of succession that began with Hunter and continued through Christine. Here again, this development was born out of a desire to not repeat myself. As I was beginning Brian’s story, I knew I was going to have to do something soon to really shake things up in a narrative sense. If I just kept having the next person in line become Grendel, and then the next person, and then the next person… well, that sh*t was gonna get boring real fast. The radical departures I made to the series following Brian’s story were, in fact, spawned from a stray comment that artist Bernie Mireault once made to me. We were sitting around chatting and Bernie asked, “Could Grendel ever inhabit a whole crowd?” Here again, I wanna point out that Bernie was speaking about the Grendel identity as something of a conscious demonic force… and I try to never really define it in such specific terms. Even Brian’s story, where that perception seems most evident and real, is actually the result of a highly unreliable narrator. Still, that intriguing question immediately kicked my creative mind into overdrive, and I thought to myself… “Hell, why not the whole world?!” So The Devil Inside disrupts the flow of the Grendel legacy… but only in an immediate sense. In the long run, Brian wins the battle with Grendel but ultimately loses the war. POWERS: How did Bernie Mireault’s art style shape this darker storytelling?

WAGNER: I don’t wanna sound like a broken record, but again… it was all about change, change, change for me in those days. I wanted my readership to never feel that I was a complacent storyteller, and so that meant changing not only the narrative direction but also the visual flavor of the series with every incarnation of the character. After the Panders, I was really looking to mix things up once again when I struck up a mail correspondence with Bernie. I was a fan of his work on both of his creator-owned titles, Mackenzie Queen (which bore a cursory and completely coincidental resemblance to Mage in certain respects) and, of course, his street-level urban adventurer series, The Jam. He had a distinctive, down-to-earth drawing style and incredibly bold and clever layouts, so I knew Bernie would be the perfect and totally surprising follow-up to the Panders. After Arnold and Jacob’s stylish and sexy, almost fashion illustration reality, Bernie’s grungier indie-style art would decisively establish that you should never know what to expect in the next issue(s) of Grendel. In fact, it was such a drastic departure at the time that editor Diana Schutz actually received a memorable fan-letter to the Grendel’s Lair letters column; it was on a lined piece of notebook paper, and it read, “Dear Diana, Bernie’s gotta go!” And then it was signed in pen, pencil, and even crayon by a petition of a dozen or so kids. Ha! Bernie actually kept that letter tacked up and hanging above his drawing table for years. Bernie’s textured and moody art struck the perfect tone for Brian’s haunting tale, and his bold storytelling was just what we needed for this ambitious tale. This arc interwove three distinct narrative threads; the main action-and-dialogue, Brian’s private notes on what’s he’s experiencing, and then “Grendel’s” commentary on both of those perspectives. Bernie really nailed that difficult balance, and his threeissue arc stands out as one of the series’ most memorable depictions.

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continued on page 16

Grendel’s Groomsmen (left) Matt and his groomsmen at his wedding to Barbara Schutz, July 1988, Montreal. (left to right) Grendel colorist Joe Matt, Bill Cucinotta, Matt Wagner, and Grendel artist Bernie Mireault. (right) Letterer Bob Pinaha, the unsung hero who managed Grendel’s often challenging captions and word balloons, at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1988. Photos courtesy of Diana Schutz.

Interview with Bernie Mireault TOM POWERS: Bernie, what was your process for illustrating Brian Li Sung’s tragic story in Grendel #13–15? BERNIE MIREAULT: Having the opportunity to work on Grendel came out of the blue. Because Matt Wagner had just then moved to Montreal and we shared a studio for a time, I was able to exchange ideas with him and have some input. As a result, I felt very connected to the work, and it was a lot of fun to do. Experimentation with the form was encouraged, and I think that we were successful in creating something very different from the status quo, which has always been— and will be—my aim. Up until that point, I had always made comic art by the seat of my pants because I just did it for myself by myself. Now, suddenly, I was working from a detailed script written by someone else. It was for money, and I was part of a large team (writer/artist/editors/colorists/letterer/production staff), so I couldn’t just do as I wished and had to get approval for the work from higher up. Thankfully, the environment was very supportive, and I was encouraged to go on to develop some of the design concepts that would connect the issues visually and identify them as a set, which I was very happy with. POWERS: In particular, what did you enjoy about working on these issues with Matt? MIREAULT: As stated in the first question, Matt was supportive and open to experimenting with the comic art medium. We both felt that comic art was an exciting art form that deserved development and expansion. As artists, it was our favorite mode of expression, and we all wanted to make comics with more personality than the standard fare of the time and perhaps forge a stronger connection with the audience through more personal work. It’s always a pleasure to work with someone who actually cares about the art form. POWERS: Later on, you returned to ink several issues (Grendel #27–28 and 30–31) of the God and the Devil arc. How did you approach inking this story?

MIREAULT: Jay Geldhof was the inker on that series. Looking at his incredibly detailed, meticulous work, you can perhaps understand how he might occasionally fall behind deadline. When that happened, I was available and jumped at the chance to fill in. Of course, my work was much looser than his. In working on the pencils, I quickly realized how much Jay brought to the work. POWERS: For 1998’s Grendel: Black, White, & Red #2, you illustrated “Devil’s Cue.” What were your thoughts about returning to the world of Grendel with this story? MIREAULT: My favorite. I’m sure all the contributors to that series enjoyed the challenge of the black/white and red format. How will you use the red? Every solution is different, and I really enjoyed being part of one of the collections and in the company of so many interesting and progressive cartoonists. POWERS: You also colored Grendel #34–40, Grendel: War Child #1–10, and several Grendel Tales story arcs (The Devil’s Hammer, The Devil in Our Midst, and The Devil’s Apprentice). What did you learn about your own technique when coloring these stories? MIREAULT: I’ve done a lot of coloring, much more coloring than mainstream-published comic art. While it was hard to get drawing jobs, coloring work seemed to find its way to my door frequently, and I enjoy it, so I took it. (Not all editors in charge of dispensing work were as adventurous as Matt Wagner. Almost none. Diana Schutz was one, and most of the work that was assigned to me from Dark Horse was due to her and/or Bob Schreck, my old editors from Comico.) I’ve worked with process color, watercolor-style color, and cel painting, like oldschool animation. Of course, computers changed everything, and now I can blend all three styles and have great control. Very satisfying! I take my main inspiration from old-school comic books with cheap printing and discernable dots. Also, Japanese animation and video games are a large influence.

Grendel #13. Art by Bernie Mireault. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

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Change, Change, Change (left) Matt Wagner evokes EC artist Harvey Kurtzman for the cover of Grendel #18 (Apr. 1988). (right) Captain Wiggins is featured on Ron Turner’s mixed-media cover of Grendel #20 (June 1988). TM & © Matt Wagner.

continued from page 14

DEVIL TRACKS AND DEVIL EYES

POWERS: After you finished Brian’s story, why did you return to the Hunter Rose era as both writer and illustrator in Grendel #16-19 (Jan.–May 1988)? WAGNER: Like I said… change, change, change, change. I guess maybe I should just put that one on a loop for the rest of this interview. But seriously, it’s true… that’s where my head was in those days. I was just so anxious to try anything new and unexpected. Additionally, I was a young and eager comics artist, and at that point, it’d been nearly a year and a half since I’d drawn any actual comics pages. So it seemed like a good idea to come back and actually draw a few issues in addition to writing. It not only gave me the chance to weave a few untold tales of Hunter Rose, but it served as a nice bridge between the initial direct-lineage movement of the Grendel saga (Hunter-Christine-Brian) and the larger scenarios to come. POWERS: Issues #16–17 (Devil Tracks) are primarily told through 25-panel-grid pages and #18–19 (Devil Eyes) via vertical rectangular panels. What influenced your design choices for these respective two-parters? WAGNER: Again (sorry)…change. I really wanted these issues, the first I’d drawn and published since Mage and Devil by the Deed, to look nothing like those previous efforts. I was also consuming a lot of different comics at that point and was influenced by many different sources. I was heavily inspired by a lot of European comics as well as one of the world’s most incredible comics masterworks, Lone Wolf and Cub (which would later have an even more evident influence on one of the Grendel storylines). It was around this time that I also discovered the more adult-themed American titles published by EC Comics in the 1950s… specifically the work of Bernard Krigstein and Harvey Kurtzman. What intrigued me about so many of these examples was the freedom and energy of the artwork… the bold and expressive use of the ink that stood in stark contrast to the tight, finicky, and academic approach of most contemporary American artists. I really wanted to embrace that aesthetic, and, at the time, I even bought myself a sketchbook and set about filling it with life drawings that were rendered solely with a Sharpie marker, no pencil. I brought that same approach to these issues and tried to keep my penciling on the story pages to a bare

minimum, achieving most of drawing with straight ink. The use of the two different panel formats you mentioned was to try and capture two different styles of crime novels, which were also an influence on me at the time. I’d recently discovered the works of Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, and other postwar crime novelists through a series of all-new reprints of their works published by the Black Lizard Library imprint. The first two issues, with the 25-panel grid, were meant to invoke a police procedural, with the grid acting as the parts of a massive puzzle that the central detective character is wandering through and trying to assemble. Then, when Grendel and Argent finally arrive on the scene for a violent showdown, their presence is too big for this construct and blows the cop’s logical world apart. For the next two issues, I was going for more of a psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator who we can see deteriorating right before our eyes. Here, my big inspiration was Harvey Kurtzman, whose quick, sketchy art seemed so brash and immediate… like his mind was working too fast for his hands to catch up. As opposed to a logical grid, this tale unfolds, as you said, in an ongoing series of vertical panels… like a strip of film that’s unspooling out of control. In keeping with the just-do-it artistic challenge I’d laid out for myself, I actually drew both of these issues—start to finish—in just over a week (per issue). And, I’ve gotta admit, that’s a record that still stands for me… I was a lot younger then! POWERS: Since the now-retired Captain Wiggins is narrating these stories, how accurate are they in terms of true events? Is the Grendel spirit simply authoring these narratives through the vessel that is Wiggins? WAGNER: Again, I don’t like to define the whole “Grendel spirit” thing too explicitly. Maybe it’s a conscious and malevolent force. Maybe it’s more of a cultural phenomenon, a dark expression of any period’s particular zeitgeist. Or maybe it’s a psychological malady, merely imagined by those who utilize the identity as way of giving vent to their own aggressive impulses. In any event and considering the fact that Wiggins was a police detective, I’d say his recounting of these two tales is pretty factually accurate. But the mere act of getting inside the Grendel mindset to dramatize these events obviously has a negative effect on him. He doesn’t look very happy as he wraps up his stories… the whole experience clearly has had a souring effect on him, which comes to an explosive head in the next issue.

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GOD AND THE DEVIL AND MORE

POWERS: In issue #20 (June 1988), Wiggins finally pays the price for his long-term association with Grendel. In particular, his red cybernetic eye is the literal lens through which he witnesses his downfall, leading to the murder of his young nagging wife. Could you elaborate on what shaped the way you wrote this tale? WAGNER: For Wiggins’ part of this short arc, I was operating off the old Nietzsche quote: “When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” That souring effect I mentioned eventually metastasized into something far more sinister for Captain Wiggins, a festering situation that ultimately leads a decorated veteran cop to commit murder. And, here again, it’s fairly ambiguous as to how that actually occurs. Is the Grendel force directly influencing these disturbing visions Wiggins is having? Or is it merely a side-result of his cybernetic eye’s malfunctioning and causing his Grendel-obsessed brain to hallucinate? Either explanation works, depending on the reader’s outlook. POWERS: How does language function in the following issue, #21 (July 1988), which depicts a United States and Soviet Union corporate-instigated nuclear apocalypse, and #22 (Aug. 1988), which shows two star-crossed lovers from warring gangs who fight for oil? WAGNER: I was attempting something really ambitious with this four-issue arc, and I’ll be the first to admit that, in this instance, perhaps my reach exceeded my grasp. I knew my ultimate goal was to transform Grendel into a worldwide phenomenon and, in the process, turn the entire identity’s perception upside-down. What had begun as the name of an infamous crimelord would eventually become the term for a military rank of the highest honor. And to get there, for it all to be believable, I had to go through a lot of societal change in my narrative. Thus, in the course of only four issues and leap-frogging quite a few years of story-time with every turn, I tried to show how “Grendel” went from being a personal vision to a corporate property to a tribal identity to a religious icon. The language and dialogue balloons attempted to help define this transition in a manner that, again, I’ll admit wasn’t always completely successful. But my aim was to show society slowly breaking down as reflected by how language was deteriorating, becoming progressively simpler and less sophisticated. In this increasingly dark future, communication is increasingly reduced to single words and simple phrases, pictograms, slogans, doggerel and ad jingles… what we’ve since come to call sound bites and memes. It was maybe a bit too theoretical, and it cost me a number of readers in the long run. Additionally, we had no active Grendel-in-costume for these four issues, and that made this arc something of a hard sell as well. But, that’s part of the creative process… sometimes you shoot for the stars, and you only make it as far as the moon. POWERS: What are your thoughts on Hannibal King’s pencils for Grendel #20–22 and Tim Sale’s inks for those issues, as well as his full art for issue #23 (Sept. 1988)? WAGNER: Admittedly, that was not a super-successful pairing. This was the first of several instances where the ambitions of trying to weave an ever-changing aesthetic got caught up in the grinding reality of producing a monthly comic-book title. I forget all the specifics right now, but I seem to remember that Hannibal was going through some transitional stuff in his personal life at that point, and those situations can really affect the, again, unforgiving grind of monthly comics production. I’d wanted to work with Tim Sale for quite a while, and, in fact, he’d submitted some Grendel tryout pages right after the Panders’ run. But at that point, we’d committed to doing Bernie’s arc and then… again, kinda hazy on some of

Strung-Out Alter Ego Courtesy of John K. Snyder III, the artist’s early sketches of new Grendel Eppy Thatcher. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

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Time to Collect The new Grendel takes on the church corruption in Grendel #24 (Oct. 1988). Original Snyder/Jay Geldhof art scan courtesy of John K. Snyder III. TM & © Matt Wagner.

the specifics here… I seem to remember that Tim’s schedule briefly opened up for a bit. But we’d already committed to Hannibal by that point, so Tim stepped in as inker. In retrospect, I don’t think those two were a good match, but the issues were completed on schedule. And then (again, as memory serves), I think Hannibal was moving cross country or some sort of huge transition like that, so Tim stepped in to actually pencil and ink the final issue of that arc. Like I said, these issues were an ambitious storytelling attempt that, in the end, wasn’t entirely successful. One thing that does resonate from that arc is the all-pervasive role of Big Pharma and prescription drugs from the final issue (#23)—where there’s basically a pill for every occasion, and they all have these seductive, user-friendly names. I mean, holy sh*t… I see exactly that same scenario every time I turn on my TV these days! POWERS: In continuing with this theme of the real world shaping your story choices, how did your thoughts on—or experiences with—organized religion affect the telling of both Cardinal Emmet Fairbanks’ tale (“The Devil is Ecclesiastical”) in both issue #23 and the ten-issue story arc God and the Devil, which ran in Grendel #24–33 (Oct. 1988–July 1989)?

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WAGNER: Pretty much everything I’ve ever written or drawn has been influenced by the events and conditions of my life at the time. At that point, I’d just married into a large Catholic family and was both amazed and repulsed by so many aspects of that theological monstrosity. I was raised Protestant, and, although there’s plenty of weird sh*t on that end of the spectrum as well, it wasn’t quite the same as Catholicism—the strict adherence to ritual wasn’t nearly as rigid, and the power structures weren’t quite so established and severe. My wife’s family had an unquestioning devotion to Catholic traditions that really struck me as strange and somewhat tribal. I’m certainly not trying to say that Methodism (my family’s denomination) is in any way better or more enlightened… I find any and all organized religions to be pretty much the opposite of enlightened. But Catholicism, with its enshrined rituals, hypocritical gender divisions (Everyone prays to a female entity, but only men are allowed positions of ultimate authority), provided a bizarre backdrop that I knew I could eventually fictionalize and satirize. POWERS: In this tale, why is Eppy Thatcher, an addled drug addict, the person whom Grendel inhabits? WAGNER: Chaos, baby. The world of this future had been through a lot of upheaval, and so society had become extremely authoritarian. You’ve got powerful aristocratic families controlling most all commerce, most of the populace living on a bare subsistence, and the renewed prominence of an “official” church with an all-mighty and singular figurehead. If the Grendel identity was going to find expression in this locked-down and subservient reality, it had to be as an agent of absolute chaos. Eppy fit that role and then some. In a sense, he’s the yin to Hunter Rose’s yang—absolute chaos versus absolute control. This arc also showed the gradual transition of the term “Grendel”… the fact that the term was now applied to a dangerous street-level drug as opposed to an individual or sect implied that big changes were about to happen. POWERS: Conversely, why is Pope Innocent XLII (a.k.a. a long-lived Tujiro) the main villain for this arc? WAGNER: Tujiro was a vampire, and I’d shown at the end of Devil’s Legacy that he was still alive. I always knew I was going to bring him back one day. Another aspect that really puzzled—I guess I should say disgusted—me about the Catholic Church was its vast, institutionalized wealth. All the gold and glitz and financial opulence that the Church embodied seemed so obviously at odds with a religion whose messiah often spoke about the evils of worldly wealth. And yet I’ve almost never met a practicing Catholic who was much bothered by that contradiction. Lastly, the role of the Pope was confusing to me. Again, having been raised as a Protestant, the concept that there was one ultimate voice of authority for Catholics, a human being who had somehow been chosen as God’s one true representative on Earth, seemed utterly at odds with the precepts of the religion itself. And so I decided to make my pope a vampire… a literal bloodsucker who sat atop a corrupt and entrenched power structure that bled its congregants dry in order to feed their leader’s own base cravings. And that role seemed to fit Tujiro very smoothly. As in his earlier incarnation, he dressed in ornate robes and was a stage performer in every sense of the word. And, of course, the Pope and all of the Church’s upper strata of authority have always been men. With that gross inequality firmly in place for millennia, I decided to really crank up the phallic imagery in this story arc to

Anatomy of a Cover (top left) Snyder’s cover rough for Comico’s Grendel #26 (Dec. 1988). (top right) Inker Jay Geldhof’s inky handprint smears, which became (bottom left) Eppy’s blood smears on the published cover. (bottom right) The motif revisted, for a God and the Devil collected edition. Scans courtesy of John K. Snyder III. TM & © Matt Wagner.

an absurd degree. Thus, the Pope lives in an immense tower that is under a constant state of construction (erection), atop which he’s also secretly building a powerful projectile weapon with which he hopes to hate-f*ck the sun itself… and the whole thing is powered by vast quantities of bananas. Vampire pope indeed! POWERS: We are likewise introduced to the wealthy yet humanitarian aristocrat Orion Assante in this storyline, and we learn that his lovers are his two sisters, Neki and Cesti, who are twins. What does this provocative storytelling choice tell us about Orion? WAGNER: As you said… Orion is an aristocrat. And despite any egalitarian leanings, the Assantes are, like any aristocratic family, fairly insular and tribal. There’s a real clan mentality that pervades that sort of arrangement, and we see that reflected in Orion’s relationship with his sisters. All three of them see absolutely nothing morally wrong with their sexual relationship since it springs from a deep-seated belief that their family and their actions are on the right side of history. And so why shouldn’t they choose to share such intimacy within the confines of their own dynasty? I drew somewhat obvious inspiration for this scenario from the Kennedys—an outwardly liberal political family that consistently supports and defends progressive causes and yet still manages to come off as fairly snooty and entitled. But Orion’s relationship with Cesti and Neki stands in direct contrast to the patriarchy of the Church. Unlike the (supposedly) chaste upper echelons of the all-male Catholic hierarchy, Orion accepts and relishes the female members of his family with a lusty bravado. This is a motif that’s reflected later in his life as well… again, with two women at his side. POWERS: It’s also rather unique that John K. Snyder III and Jay Geldhof, along with Bernie Mireault on inks for four of the issues, were

switching roles for the penciling and inking duties on this story arc. What did you appreciate about this artistic approach? WAGNER: Again, this was an ambitious concept that fell prey to that constant and unforgiving monthly schedule. The original idea was to have John and Jay switch off on the penciling and inking duties since I had plans to switch up the POV for this arc with every third issue. The first two parts would concern the upper-crust political maneuverings and schemes of Orion vs. the Church, and then every third chapter would focus on Eppy’s crazed and destitute reality alongside Pellon Cross’ mercenary efforts. The whole point was to show that the different strata of this future society were not only vastly divergent but also intricately enmeshed. But, best laid plans and all that… again, the monthly grind caught up with us, and Bernie had to step in to add a much-needed hand with the inks. As had happened previously, this option kept us on track for that all-important shipping schedule but with better results than our previous stumbles. In fact, I’ve gotta sing the praises of this creative team. This was a really big project and a very complex narrative scenario, not only featuring a huge cast of characters but also requiring a lot of work in regard to setting, style, technology, and even historical accuracy with all the church reference. John, Jay, and Bernie all contributed to fully fleshing out an intricate world with incredible results, and they deserve a lot of recognition for this arc. Of course, John and I have gone on to collaborate on several other projects together over the years, most notably our revamp of Dr. Midnite for DC Comics and a run on Zorro that led to the creation of Lady Zorro. To this day, he’s one of my dearest friends.

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Page from “Devil’s Sentence.” Art by John K. Snyder III. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

Interview with John K. Snyder III

DEVIL’S REIGN AND SILVERBACK

POWERS: Like Devil by the Deed, the first feature presented in the next story arc, Devil’s Reign, which runs TOM POWERS: John, how did your collaboration work with Jay Geldhof on in Grendel #34–40 (Aug. 1989–Feb. 1990), confidently God and the Devil (Grendel #24–33), in that you took turns in penciling employs text instead of dialogue balloons to tell the story of Orion Assante’s rise as the Grendel Kahn. Why and inking this arc (with Bernie Mireault contributing inks for several issues)? did you choose this approach for this narrative? JOHN K. SNYDER III: The collaboration I had with Jay and Bernie was WAGNER: It’s meant to imply a sense of history… spread out all over the ten issues, I did pencils for parts 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, almost like you’re watching a documentary or 8, and most of the 10th for the ten-issue run; these issues (for the old-schoolers) reading a history book. focused on the main storyline with Orion Assante and Tujiro/ There’s a neat visual dichotomy happening Pope Innocent, and Jay penciled three issues, the 3rd, 6th, in this section; we’re watching worldand 9th parts that centered on Eppy/Grendel and the police changing events unfold on a grand scale, detective Pellon Cross. The inks were then split up with Jay and yet all of it is confined and compartinking the first two issues of my pencils. Then I inked the mentalized into the nook-like narrative third issue with Jay’s pencils, to switch the tone from the that history inevitably demands. main story to the backstory. Starting with the fourth issue, POWERS: What kind of leader is Orion? Bernie Mireault took over inking my pencils, and I inked one WAGNER: Again… at his core, he’s an more of Jay’s issues (part 6). Jay then went on to pencil and aristocrat. He grew up with a sense of ink his third planned story in the arc, the 9th chapter. Bernie entitlement and reliance on his own john K. Snyder III abilities and resources over any sort continued to ink my pencils through issues 5, 7, and 8. The of consensus from other factions. And last chapter/10th issue was 40 pages, and I penciled and Photo by Cara inked 32.5 pages, Jay penciled and inked 7.5 pages. Bernie Zimmerman Walton. that insular background provides the fertile ground for his eventual slide into was a big part of the series as well, inking one hundred of the 274 total fascism. So, even though he’s at first reluctant and story pages. So it was quite a collaboration. Hope you could follow all of that! selfless, as you mentioned, he eventually adopts a It was all tied together with Matt Wagner’s story/scripting, and Joe Matt’s brutal decisiveness that’s in part spawned by his own electric 1980s coloring style. I should also note the series was lettered by privileged upbringing. Once he reaches that point, Bob Pinaha. And even a guest appearance by the legendary Canadian band he becomes a dictator, a Khan whose will is undeniable Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra! When the series was reissued and whose retributive strikes result in the death of by Dark Horse, the entire run was beautifully recolored by Jeromy Cox. millions, even though he feels fully justified with every POWERS: What design and storytelling opportunities did the tale offer you such action. That’s when he finally becomes “Grendel” in terms of depicting a dystopian future ruled over by the Catholic Church? and, in turn, spawns the entire Grendel class and SNYDER: A world of opportunities! identity on a global scale. He’s the second major Matt had a very basic outline and opened milestone in the entire Grendel saga. Whereas Hunter Rose’s actions inspire a fairly direct lineage of continuing the door to collaborate and design and aggression, Orion’s influence is more cancerous flesh out the setting and characters. Looking and farther-reaching. Legendarily, after all, Orion to the past to design the future, it seemed was a hunter. the visual direction to go was the way class POWERS: To complement Orion’s story arc, the second warfare was depicted by Charles Dickens feature, “Tales from the Underground,” depicts the and the social/satirical commentary in the vampire leader Pellon Cross and his rise to power in illustration work of William Hogarth, Honoré Las Vegas. How does this story counterpoint Orion’s? Daumier, and Art Young, a cartoonist whose WAGNER: I decided to work with a two-tiered framework I discovered from a book about the work for this arc, in part, because—again—I was always early 20th Century political magazine, looking to challenge myself and present the storylines The Masses. In addition, Matt’s concept in Grendel in new and unexpected ways. One of these allowed me to tap into the cinematic narratives takes place in the world of politics, global imagery that had had such an influence conflicts, and a growing military elitism. I wanted the on me at that point in my late 20s. For other feature to focus on the grimy underbelly of society that often isn’t directly represented by the former example, a lifetime of the gothic settings scenario, specifically prison life. And since I had created of the Hammer movies, plus the stark a new and distinct underclass of citizens with the spread neo-horror visual depiction of the Catholic of vampirism following the end of God and the Devil, that Church in movies such as Ken Russell’s seemed like a perfect vehicle for portraying such a reality. The Devils (with set designs by Derek As the leader of the vampires—their “First One”— Jarman) and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s In the Name of the Rose. Matt also Pellon Cross mirrors Orion’s character arc in significant sent photos from a cathedral undergoing renovation from where he ways. Both are charismatic leaders ostensibly fighting was living at the time in Canada, and that was helpful too! Jay Geldhof to make life better for their constituency, but, in the brought his own sense of dystopian design to the table as well. end, both wind up becoming despots in their own And Bernie Mireault, creator of his own pre-steampunk series, Mackenzie fashion. Orion is passionate and self-sacrificial in his Queen, brought yet another dimension to the final look of the series. efforts to save humanity from its own worse impulses, POWERS: How did you approach illustrating the Hunter Rose-Grendel in the but he ultimately bends the entire world beneath his story “Devil’s Sentence” for Grendel: Red, White, & Black #4 (Dec. 2002)? iron will. Pellon is vengeful and self-indulgent in his SNYDER: I had previously done a black, white, and red gallery piece for efforts to break his kind free of their containment, but he eventually becomes a bloated and ineffectual an early Dark Horse collection of Devil by the Deed, so I just followed in figurehead. The strange dichotomy is that Pellon’s that direction, very stark and clean. I’m so used to rendering Grendel crusade ultimately succeeds in breaking the vampires as the maniacal, twisted Eppy Thatcher that I had to take a step back to free of Grendel’s Palace, whereas Orion’s best intentions get into the more graceful, elegant Hunter Rose version. But it’s always a ultimately lead to a worldwide dictatorship under a pleasure to render Grendel in any form. fanatic military class, resulting in less overall freedom. 20 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

POWERS: Are both Orion and Pellon inhabited by the Grendel spirit? WAGNER: Like I said, Orion is a milestone in the Grendel saga matched only by Hunter Rose. He’s the progenitor of a long, long legacy for the Grendel identity. Eppy Thatcher is the wild-card catalyst that reignites the Grendel spark in real time (as opposed to its incubation period as a pervasive societal influence), but Orion is where Grendel finally takes deep root after several centuries. Again, even though Orion initially seems noble and heroic on many levels, his dark destiny is foreshadowed in the climax of God and the Devil when his internal monologue admits that he’s finally reached the end of his patience and options when confronting the horrors of Pope Innocent and his minions: “Finally, I have seen the day when my solution, simply, is to kill these people. Kill them all.” The final panel of that arc even depicts him with a pair of shadows echoing the familiar Grendel eye slashes across his face. The interesting thing about Orion is that he’s the father figure of the Grendel caste, but he isn’t actively one himself; we never see him wearing a Grendel costume or markings like all of his dedicated warriors do. In regard to the narrative, he’s the flowering tree that ultimately (to quote a famous source) bears bitter fruit. I see Pellon in a different role; he’s not so much another incarnation of Grendel as a continuation of Argent, the feral beast that acts as the equal-but-opposite reaction to the infamous title character. POWERS. Amazingly, in the final issue of this story arc, Grendel #40 (Feb. 1990), you have a 90-year-old Orion baring and giving birth to his son, Jupiter Niklos Assante. What led you to this startling story choice? WAGNER: It was an attempt to show exactly how far he’d gone by his descent into dictatorship and the isolation that would bring. Following the deaths of both his beloved second pair of lovers— Sherri and Fadi—he’s still left without an heir to continue his reign. He’s such a totalitarian that he even decides to usurp the birthing process, assuming he can do it better than any other participant. In the end, he just doesn’t trust such an all-important task to anyone else. POWERS: Regarding the art for these issues, what are your thoughts on this dynamic collaboration with Tim Sale? WAGNER: Tim did a fantastic job on this arc, very adeptly weaving the two opposing narratives by utilizing two different art styles. His visual approach on the Orion parts of this story were, in fact, inspired by a completely different project that never came to fruition for him. Back in the early ’90s, First Comics was producing new and very bold editions of the time-honored Classics Illustrated title, and Tim was slated to adapt the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. To capture a vintage flavor for that time period, he’d developed this really neat rendering style that echoed the look of traditional woodcuts. When First folded the CI line, Tim showed me his development work for that project, and I suggested adapting that to fit the first half of our issues’ narrative. He toned down the woodcut textures a bit but retained the drawing style. Again, I loved everything that Tim did on these issues. My one regret is in not really tapping into the sort of artist and storyteller he has since so adeptly proven himself to be. Tim’s a master of broad, expansive setting and action, told in a deceptively simple approach. He loves to work big and with a minimum number of panels per page, as shown by his many successful collaborations with Jeph Loeb for both DC and Marvel. I’ve always felt bad for constraining him in the tight structures I already had in mind for this story arc, and I’d always hoped and intended to one day write the same sort of big, cinematic tale that he loves so much. Hasn’t happened yet but… who knows? Perhaps some day. POWERS: Around this time, Silverback #1–3 (Oct.–Dec. 1989) also came out, presenting the origin of Argent, with William Messner-Loebs scripting from your plots. Why is this story important to the Grendel mythos? WAGNER: I don’t know that it was crucially important to the overall saga. At that point, I was mainly looking to franchise the Grendel title into a larger spectrum, and Argent was a compelling character whose story had only been hinted at here and there. So it’s definitely a component in the greater narrative but more of a sideline tale than something of world-shaking significance.

Reign of Terror (below) Soon-to-be superstar Tim Sale teamed with Matt Wagner on several Comico Grendel issues, including #35 (Sept. 1989), part of the Orion Assante story arc. (left) Ron Turner cover to the first issue of the Argent origin miniseries, Silverback #1 (Oct. 1989), in which Matt teamed with William Messner-Loebs on the stories. TM & © Matt Wagner.

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TOM POWERS: Tim, you served as inker on Grendel #20–22 and provided the full art for issue #23. What did you like about working on the Incubation Years arc? TIM SALE: It was early years for me, and I didn’t really know what to do with inking someone else, much less Hannibal King, who was also new to the game. So getting to do the Pope Elvis story was a real joy, with Matt giving me the chance to exaggerate and spread my wings. POWERS: In the Devil’s Reign story arc (Grendel #34–40), you take two distinct illustrative approaches to tell Orion Assante’s powerful tale as the world-uniting Grendel Kahn in the first half of the book and vampire Pellon Cross’ rise to power in Las Vegas in the second. What was your process for these stories? SALE: First, it was Matt’s concept and desire, and I was not at a point where I was going to say anything but “You bet!” I think I did a better job on the Orion storyline than the Pellon one, for the most part. I haven’t revisited it in years, and there are moments with the vampires I remember fondly, but I think the storytelling is better with Orion. I do wish that I had a Grendel outfit to call my own, though! POWERS: Why did you want to illustrate Diana Schutz’s tim sale tragic story of Stacy Palumbo’s post-Devil by the Deed © Luigi Novi / life in Grendel: Devil Child #1–2? Wikimedia Commons. SALE: It was excruciatingly dark, and it took a while to finish, but it truly is one of the stories I am most proud of in my career. Diana’s story is daring and exquisitely well crafted; I wish she wrote more, but it’s like pulling teeth for her. And to top it off, my old friend Teddy Kristiansen painted it blue-line! POWERS: Also, what are your thoughts on illustrating “Devil’s Advocate,” the dark tale of Richard, Grendel’s lawyer, for Grendel: Black, White, & Red #? SALE: It was a blast—I was dating a budding interior designer at the time, and she had tons of decorating magazines that were a big help. I chose a panel on each page to feature a room influenced from one of them, and most of the time with Hunter Rose as well—my first time drawing him in print. Also, this was my first story drawn in ink wash.

WAR CHILD

POWERS: In the wake of the Silverback mini and Grendel #40, we did not see another Grendel arc for a few long, excruciating years. Fortunately, the ten-issue Grendel: War Child (Aug. 1992–June 1993) finally came out thanks to Dark Horse Comics. How, then, did Grendel end up at this publisher? WAGNER: After the demise of Grendel’s first publisher, the future of the series seemed uncertain. And that was incredibly frustrating since I’d already had the idea for War Child in mind and was really looking forward to—once again—changing things up by following the intricate, socio-political story of Orion’s ascension with an all-out, slam-bang, action fest. But two of my oldest friends and biggest champions in the industry, Bob Schreck and Diana Schutz, both wound up working for Dark Horse, and they helped facilitate that transition. DH publisher Mike Richardson has always been a huge proponent of creator’s rights and welcomed both me and Grendel with open arms. Dark Horse Comics has been publishing Grendel for nearly four decades now and we have a great relationship. Dark Horse has always treated me like gold; they’ve always honored my rights and interests as a creator and totally supported each and every of the many varied projects we’ve done together over the years. POWERS: Since this is a fast-paced, action-oriented story, which differs from other Grendel arcs. What were your influences for the storytelling? WAGNER: As I mentioned earlier, Lone Wolf & Cub by Goseki Kojima and Kazuo Koike was a huge influence on War Child. I’d done a number of painted covers for the first American reprints of the series, and I really can’t stress enough that I consider LW&C to be one of the world’s greatest comics masterworks. It’s an incredible melding of history and pulp adventure, it delivers episodic thrills and yet maintains a steadily advancing central storyline, and it’s

Concluding page to “Devil’s Advocate.” Art by Tim Sale. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

Interview with Tim Sale

an epic saga that totals over 8,700 pages of material, all done by the same two creators! So, as an homage to that awesome example, the idea of a mighty warrior escorting and protecting a young child really appealed to me. Some commentators have also pointed to similarities between War Child and Terminator 2, especially considering that both feature a motorcycle and a cyborg. But I’d started work on War Child long before T2 came out, so that was merely coincidence (or perhaps James Cameron was mutually inspired by Wolf & Cub?). Aside from that, as I said, I really wanted this to be a relentlessly kinetic storyline, something akin to the old-time movie serials that just kept barreling along from action to cliffhanger and back again. In keeping with that, I just tried to include a ton of classic pulp/serial motifs— a desperate chase and a wicked queen, motorcycle gangs, mutants, pirates, gorillas, rebels, secret weapons, vampires, etc.… I kinda threw in the whole kitchen sink of action elements on this one, and it was a blast. POWERS: For this arc, why did you choose to make this Grendel a cybernetic warrior? WAGNER: I can’t really remember where the initial idea to make Prime a cyborg originated. But, in retrospect, it fits smoothly into Orion’s overall persona, the fact that he would not only gestate and birth his own child but also oversee construction of a singular bodyguard that could ensure his heir’s safety in the event of his own death. POWERS: In terms of the supporting cast of characters for Grendel: War Child, what does Susan Veraghen, the Grendel soldier who serves as Crystal Kennedy’s (Orion’s stepdaughter) bodyguard, offer in regard to depicting queer identity via this story arc? WAGNER: I didn’t really have any political agenda by making Susan gay. Her story wasn’t really about portraying a sexual reality so much as a military one. Susan’s a very dedicated Grendel, but, for whatever

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reason, she’s been relegated to being little more than a guard/chaperone for a spoiled princess. At first, she chafes at this assignment, yet she still dutifully follows orders as she’s been trained to do. Unfortunately for her, she had no clue that she’d end up falling in love with her charge, and that causes huge internal conflict for her since it ultimately means disavowing her oath as a Grendel. I was inspired here by a segment from The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas in which a trusted guard is seduced into helping his patron’s prisoner, Milady deWinter, escape captivity. I decided to make Susan a female and gay simply because it seemed a bit more interesting to me at the time… and not an exact retread of the scene that had inspired it. The real tragedy is that we eventually learn that Crystal’s dedication to Susan isn’t equally requited. In the end, like the spoiled little princess, she treats this romance with her former guard as little more than a convenient opportunity and moves on to riper pastures when the chance presents itself. Pat McEown later explored a more specific look at the Susan’s queer identity in Homecoming, but, like I said, that wasn’t really my motivation at the time. POWERS: How did Patrick McEown’s kinetic art shape your scripts for Grendel: War Child? WAGNER: Like all of the issues of Grendel up to this point, I wrote plot-and-dialogue fashion for Pat. And he proved to be really adept at translating all my wild action into visual reality. I learned early on that Pat could handle pretty anything I was gonna throw at him, and that just opened the floodgates to, like I said earlier, make this whole thing just one big, adrenaline-fueled thrill ride. I’m not really sure of why the decision was made to have me ink Pat’s work on War Child, but I assume it was because this was our first Grendel series at Dark Horse and, from a marketing standpoint, it therefore seemed like a good idea to have me involved in the artistic end of things as opposed to just writing the series. Here again, we ran into the hard realities of monthly comic-book production. After nine issue of incredible layouts and draftsmanship, the grind of having to design and portray an entire world of outlandish characters and settings finally took its toll, and Pat ended up with some health issues that disrupted his ability to fully complete the series. Luckily, he was able to breakdown the layouts for the grand finale (War Child #10), and then I completed the final pencils and inks. But, gratefully, Pat later returned to the pages of Grendel Tales for a memorable closing act, the three-issue series Homecoming.

Grendel Returns After a long wait for fans, Wagner’s Grendel returned—at Dark Horse Comics—with Grendel: War Child, written and inked by Matt, with pencils by Patrick McEown. (right) Grendel Prime painting by Matt Wagner. TM & © Matt Wagner.

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Two Dark Knights Batman/Grendel #1 and 2 (1993), the first crossover, with signed covers by Matt (courtesy of Heritage). Batman TM & © DC Comics. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

BATMAN/GRENDEL

POWERS: Moving on to Batman/Grendel #1–2 (June–July 1993), your first Grendel inter-company crossover, why did you want to team up the Hunter Rose version of Grendel with Bruce Wayne? WAGNER: It started out as a business proposition rather than a creative impulse, which was unusual for me at the time. But, industry-wise, it was a really big deal, and so I jumped at the chance when the opportunity was presented to me. You’ve gotta remember, there weren’t a lot of inter-company crossovers at that point. Marvel and DC had done a number of successful pairings with their respective top-tier characters over the years, but this would’ve been something new—the first crossover of one of DC’s flagship characters with an independently published, creator-owned character. And strangely enough, it wasn’t originally going to be Hunter Rose. Again, this whole setup… having a publishing idea and thus a story scenario basically “assigned” to me… was new and unfamiliar territory. Everything I’d ever created and published thus far had been by my own inspiration and volition. And, admittedly, at first that difference kinda threw me for a loop on this one. Since this deal all came together shortly after the success of the Christine Spar arc, my original idea and pitch actually centered on a female Grendel. Also, “Grendel” was going to be a fictional character in Batman’s world, a persona that one character would become haunted by and later adopt out of desperation and madness (like Christine), leading to a battle with the Caped Crusader. Since I’d also just finished the Devil Inside story arc, obsession and possession were still fresh on my creative palette at the time. All of which is funny considering how much I’ve gone on and on in this interview about change and trying to be new… and here I was just repeating two elements of my most recent efforts. That was also my first go-round with writing and drawing Batman, so I guess I was just a bit intimidated by that daunting aspect as well. In the end, I’ve gotta give credit to long-time Grendel editor, Diana Schutz. After I turned in my proposal and story outline, Di made absolutely the right call by telling me that the whole thing was convoluted and spent way too much time setting up Grendel as

a character. “Why are you even trying to do a female Grendel? And who cares whether Grendel exists in Batman’s world?” she asked. “Hunter Rose… Bruce Wayne, they’re kinda the same character, only opposite. Do that.” Boom—sometimes the solution is just staring you in the face, and you can’t even see it. As soon as she said that, everything really opened up for me, and I realized how to approach the crossover. I would compare and contrast the title characters, but the real human story at the heart of the tale would be about two women (based on two gals in my own life), best friends who would both become involved with these largerthan-life costumed super-personas. Needless to say, the interaction had a devastating effect on both of them. POWERS: Joe Matt provides some lush coloring for Batman/Grendel and had colored various issues of Grendel. What did you enjoy about his work? WAGNER: I’ve known Joe since my earliest days at the art school I attended. He lived in the same house as a gal I had a big crush on at the time, and so I was over there a lot. Eventually, we discovered a mutual love of comics and struck up a friendship. Joe actually came on board in an uncredited role as my coloring assistant on the last issue of Mage: The Hero Discovered. And he also took over on the coloring of Bernie’s run after I’d colored the first issue. In both cases, he used the same palette that I’d established but really brought his own style and panache to the projects as well. As you said, his coloring is lush, but it’s also simple and yet highly sophisticated. If you look at Batman/Grendel again, notice the flat application of color in most cases and the simple airbrush effects in the backgrounds. All of this was done pre-Photoshop, and we were using a now-obsolete coloring method known as “Blue-lines” (which is way too complicated to fully explain here). But the point is, all of that color is hand-painted, and yet Joe managed to strike a style that was both design-ish and organic. As you said… it seems lush. He’s a talented guy, and, as most people know, he eventually went on to great acclaim for his own, warts-and-all autobiographical comic, Peepshow. I was really lucky to have him on board as a collaborator for the first Batman/Grendel.

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GRENDEL TALES, A BATMAN SEQUEL, AND PAST PRIME

POWERS: In terms of the various miniseries comprising Grendel Tales, what led to you so generously sharing the world of Grendel with other writers? WAGNER: I always knew that, at some point, I’d open the Grendel mythos to other writers as well as artists. If my goal was to constantly keep the title changing and unpredictable, then I figured my vision alone wasn’t going to be enough to maintain that momentum. Inviting other writers to put their spin on things seemed like both a creatively fertile as well as a logical option. The very first Grendel Tales contribution was written by my long-time Sandman Mystery Theatre co-writer, Steven T. Seagle, with art by Ho Che Anderson, and it was featured on the flipside of the last issue of the initial series, Grendel #40. It provided a dissenter’s view of the Grendel phenomenon and was meant to launch the Grendel Tales series. That didn’t end up happening until later, once the title had moved to Dark Horse and following the entirety of War Child. There were ultimately eight different Grendel Tales story arcs, and I liked all of them for different reasons. James Robinson and Teddy Kristiansen kicked things off with Four Devils, One Hell, which did an incredible job of continuing the Grendel mythos and showing a dynamic cross-section of different types of Grendels. Devil’s Hammer by Rob Walton looked at the confusing and potentially devastating effects of faith in the world of Grendel. Devil in Our Midst saw the return of Steven T. Seagle with art by Paul Grist and showcased loss and honor alongside environmental concerns. Homecoming was also a bit of an encore with Pat McEown returning to both write and draw a story examining sexual identity and gender justice. The incredible Dave Cooper provided beautifully painted finishes for this one over top of Pat’s pencils. Devil’s Choices stands as a lot of readers’ favorite Tales entry, and with good reason. It’s a harrowing account of the human costs of war by a pair of creators who’d seen the realities of such conflict up close, written and drawn by Croation natives Darko Macan and the sadly missed Edvin Biukovic. The Devil May Care, written by Terry LaBan and lushly illustrated by Peter Doherty, is a grim and wrenching romantic tragedy that spares no one from the effects of Grendel’s influence. And The Devil’s Apprentice, written by Jeffrey Lang and drawn by Steve Lieber, examined cultural identity amid a classic Western backdrop. All of these creators really brought their A-games to their respective story arcs, and I can’t thank them enough for helping to expand and define the brutal landscape of the kingdom of Grendel. POWERS: In Devil Quest, the Grendel Prime backup features that run through various Grendel Tales miniseries, we see a different side to the character, in that he will even sacrifice babies in his attempt to resurrect Hunter Rose. What do these more extreme choices reveal about the character? WAGNER: Grendel Prime is another conundrum as a character. The first time we encounter him, it’s in an arguably heroic capacity… protecting the Grendel-Khan’s only heir from the political enemies that want him dead. But doing that basically means killing anyone

and anything that stands in his way. Remember, Grendel Prime is in fact an extremely efficient killing machine. It’s what he was built for. He was also a dedicated and battle-seasoned soldier who underwent the extraordinary transformation of becoming a cyborg in service of his lord. That’s a pretty big sacrifice to make… almost even more than dying for one’s cause. In the many years since his rebirth as the Grendel Prime, he’d seen the empire he once loved slide into degeneracy and weakness; even Jupiter, the young Khan to whom he’d been a surrogate father-figure, proved to be a self-indulgent failure. By the time of the events of Devil Quest, he’d become so disillusioned that he turned to extreme means to try and reestablish what the Grendel identity meant to him. And he eventually figured he should go straight to the source. The dimensional portal through which he tried to contact the soul of Hunter Rose required an excess of suffering in order to open a gateway into Death’s dark dimension. Prime was no stranger to death and suffering. He’d seen thousands of battlefields and hundreds of thousands of casualties, so dead children were nothing new to Grendel Prime. In point of fact, there was really only one child he was ever officially charged with protecting. And that didn’t work out so well in the end. POWERS: Grendel Prime’s quest continues when he encounters the Dark Knight Detective in the two-issue Batman/Grendel II (June–July 1996). Why did you want to pit these characters against each other? WAGNER: To be frank, money talks. The first Batman/Grendel crossover was a big hit, and so this time it was me who suggested to DC, “Hey… we oughta do another one!” They were all for it, and so I knew from the get-go that it’d be Batman vs. Grendel Prime this time around—the omega to Hunter’s alpha. For one thing, the character of Grendel Prime didn’t even exist when I was

Creator Roundtable Grendel Tales opened the door for different creators’ interpretations. (inset) Cover to Grendel Tales: Four Devils, One Hell #1 (Sept. 1993). Cover pencils by Teddy Kristiansen, inks and colors by Matt Wagner. (right) Interior page from that issue, by writer James Robinson and artist/colorist Kristiansen. TM & © Matt Wagner.

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working on the first crossover. And so, it gave me the chance to do my traditional 180 spin and pull off an all-different kind of story that would nonetheless tie into the first narrative. So, I concocted a way for the Grendel Prime rollercoaster to come barreling through Gotham City. In fact, Devil Quest was a setup for this series. I knew we were doing a second crossover when I started Quest, and so that story sought to place Grendel Prime on a very dark mission, one that would yank him out of his reality and deposit him in Gotham City. Regardless, he’s determined to contact the spirit or soul of the original Grendel, and he knows he’s going to have to sacrifice a lot of lives to do that. It’s an atrocity to which he’s already acquiesced as being necessary, and whether he commits it in the Earth of Grendel’s future or in the current-day Gotham City doesn’t much matter to him. That also provided me the opportunity to present a different kind of Batman—the action hero/warrior as opposed to the spooky detective. I was really happy with how this acts as a bookend piece to the first crossover. The inclusion of Hunter Rose’s skull gave it a mythic quality, and I like the fact that Robin, Batman’s young protégé, helps snatch victory from Grendel Prime at a point when the cyborg has lost all hope… especially in young protégés. POWERS: Grendel Prime also features in Greg Rucka’s Grendel: Past Prime novel (July 2000), for which you provided both the cover and 50 pen-and-ink illustrations. How did this collaboration come about? WAGNER: I met Greg at a party at Bob Schreck’s house here in Portland, and we struck up a friendship. At that point, he’d had three novels published in his Atticus Kodiak series and was looking to break into comics, since he was a huge fan. I later read and really liked his books and offered him the chance to do a Grendel illustrated novel, following the success Mike Mignola had doing similar volumes with Hellboy at the time. Seeing as how it would be prose, it seemed like a natural transition for him. And I was excited by the chance to illustrate a story through singular spot illustrations as opposed to a panel-to-panel narrative. Again, always looking to try something new. It didn’t really show so much in the Kodiak books, but as has since become evident through so much of his subsequent work, Greg really excels at writing females and has a particular sensitivity for queer characters. So when I told him I wanted us to do a story about Grendel Prime and how Susan Veraghen basically becomes his Robin, his battle-comrade and sole companion… Greg was thrilled. The only other story guidance I gave him was to make sure he gave us some hardcore violence, a bit of hot sex, and to make sure Prime and Susan were both a pair of badasses. He did all that… in spades. We’d always intended to do two more books and make it a trilogy, but, of course, Greg’s career in the comics field has since skyrocketed. His star is soaring these days, not only due to his many efforts for the Big Two publishers but also for his indy titles such as Queen & Country and the phenomenal Lazarus. So, chances of us ever getting around to those other two illustrated Grendel novels now seem slim, but I had a blast working with him on this one.

GRENDEL 2K

POWERS: In addition to developing Grendel Prime’s storyline, with Grendel: Black, White, & Red #1–4 (Nov. 1998–Feb. 1999) and Grendel: Red, White, & Black #1–4 (Sept.–Dec. 2002), you worked with various creators in presenting new stories from the Hunter Rose era. Why is intermittently returning to Hunter’s story important to the Grendel cycle? WAGNER: Because everybody f*cking loves Hunter Rose… even me. He’s a very seductive character in that he’s so capable and remorseless, all with the utmost panache. In that respect, he has a lot in common with another popular villain— Hannibal Lecter. Both are tasteful, sophisticated, and erudite, and yet both would carve your liver out without batting an eye if you ever crossed them (and truthfully, for a whole myriad other crazy reasons). There are plenty of differences in the surface details of both characters, but, at their core, they are both gentlemen demons. And it’s funny because both characters appeared in print for the first time within a year of each other, which seems a reflection of the collective zeitgeist at the time. Must’ve been something in the water back then… And yeah, again for all my talk of change and moving forward, it seems a bit weird that I’d keep returning to stories about Hunter again and again. Part of what makes that possible is Devil by the Deed’s narrative style. It’s written in a prose format and presents itself as the history of an infamous figure, but DbtD mainly concerns itself with one particular aspect of Hunter Rose’s character arc. It’s really all about his eventual downfall; you could even call it Le Morte d’Grendel. But you always got the feeling that there were lots of his nefarious adventures that we just weren’t seeing in the scope of this more overall storyline. So that gives me the opportunity to play with Hunter over and over again, and he is a deep, dark well, believe me. Opening up the character to other artists’ interpretations really provided that creative vista I’m always looking for. There’s 40 incredible and varied artists featured in those two series, and that really gave me the opportunity to experiment with an incredibly wide range of narrative styles. As a result, I find the whole thing presents a lush and compelling tapestry of Hunter; it makes the character seem even grander and more terrifying. I always say that every time I come back to Hunter, he’s a little more evil than the last time I saw him. POWERS: Continuing with the subject of you periodically revisiting the Hunter Rose era, why is the black-white-and-red palette appropriate for depicting his stories? I noticed that this minimalist coloring approach started with the Dean Motterillustrated Grendel: “Devil’s Vagary” 16-page comic for the Comico Collection (1987) and that Chris Pitzer recolored Devil by the Deed in this fashion for the story in 2007. WAGNER: It just seems to fit Hunter’s milieu, even though I came to that realization later in the game. It was only after the first B,W,&R series that I decided to make that palette consistent for all of Hunter’s solo adventures. The black-and-white evokes the style and atmosphere of film noir while the red accents the blood-and-roses motifs that are such a major element of Hunter’s visualization. It was after I decided to go this route that we went back to press with DbtD and had Chris Pitzer give it the same

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Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

treatment. That marked the third time that DbtD had been recolored (the first time, by me, and the second time, by Bernie Mireault). I like all of those versions but was happy that the newest version fits so nicely into the B,W,&R reality. POWERS: Later, in Grendel: Behold the Devil #7 (May 2008), a story arc which presents a tale that Hunter had ripped out of his journals, a hoofed demon that he has trapped within a circle of black magic reveals to him that he is neither the first nor last Grendel. This intriguing revelation leads me to ask if you are interested in telling the stories of pre-Hunter Rose Grendel incarnations. WAGNER: I’d have to say that both Hunter and a demon can be considered as pretty unreliable narrators. Was there really a demonic force haunting Hunter, both spurring and feeding off his identity as Grendel? Or was that just an unconscious creation of a sophisticated but obviously twisted and egomaniacal mind? In any event, my main goal with this series was to make Hunter an even bigger bastard than we’d ever realized. Real or imagined, he experiences a vision of the future that his actions will or might spawn, a legacy of violence and madness that stretches over centuries and ultimately claims millions of lives. And, rather than be in any way changed or chastened or even just intrigued by such a possibility… he chooses to ignore this omen and instead expunge all record of this episode from his journals. His megalomania can’t bear the thought that he isn’t utterly unique. In his mind… there is no other Grendel, and his actions and identity are completely self-generated. The future be damned. What a bastard! POWERS: We next encounter the Hunter Rose Grendel in your four-page contribution to the CBLDF Present 2011 Liberty Annual (Oct. 2011), where you present Hunter as defending a gay henchman from other cronies who are beating on him because of his sexuality. What does Hunter’s choice here reveal about this character who is sometimes viewed as the Devil incarnate? WAGNER: That last statement depends on who you ask. Hunter certainly doesn’t think he’s the Devil incarnate; he views himself as personifying a pinnacle of human evolution. He’s really not a bloodthirsty psychopath per se, but he despises human frailties and ignorance and feels perfectly entitled to wipe out any example of such weakness however he sees fit. Bob Schreck was the editor of the CBLDF Liberty Annual that year, and, when he asked me to contribute a Grendel tale for this edition’s lead story and cover, he also asked if I could make it part of the “It Gets Better” campaign. And at first I had to stop and think… Could I do a Grendel story and somehow include that sentiment? And it struck me that Hunter Rose wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about an individual’s sexuality since that aspect of human existence doesn’t in any way affect the character traits he reveres—willpower, strength, and intelligence. To him, it’s not a question of morality, and he’d surely consider any condemnations over any such concerns as the same sort of small-minded hypocrisies that he utterly despises in people. In fact, it’s such a gross triviality that it’d almost be beneath his contempt. Let me point out, I’m talking about sex between consenting adults here… it’s well documented that

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Who Knows What Evil? Another madefor-Matt-Wagner crossover. Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner. The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

Hunter obviously abhors pedophiles. But, of course, he’d also view any sort of mob mentality as artless and brutish. So when he happens upon a group of his minions about to execute a fellow gangster for being gay (inspired, in great part, by the Vito character from The Sopranos), he dismisses their petty vitriol as being ill-informed and an utter waste of his time. If that same mobster had stolen from or crossed Grendel’s orders in any way… that’d be a different situation and outcome altogether. But punishing someone for whom they choose as a sex partner is the same to Hunter as condemning someone over the color of their hair or (to quote an infamous deleted scene from Kubrick’s Spartacus) whether they prefer oysters to mussels. It conveys nothing about a person’s strength of character, and so he’d never consider it as a factor in whether that person lives or dies. So, in that story, he’s not really granting mercy… he’s merely curtailing actions by his underlings that he considers extraneous and stupid. And that

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might be a pretty dark way to express the “It Gets Better” message… but, hey, it’s Grendel. POWERS: Three years later, with the three-issue Grendel vs. Shadow series (Sept.–Nov. 2014), you bring Hunter Rose into The Shadow’s world of 1930s New York City. What was your motivation for this dynamic pairing? WAGNER: It was a big personal thrill for me to have Hunter face off with the Master of Darkness since I’ve been a huge Shadow fan since I was a young comics reader. I first discovered The Shadow via the series DC Comics published in the ’70s, a short and incredible run written by Denny O’Neil and featuring spectacular art from Michael Wm. Kaluta. Around the same time, you could find quite a few of The Shadow’s radio adventures available on LP vinyl, and the original pulp novels were also being reprinted in paperback form with equally spectacular cover art from the legendary Jim Steranko. So I had a lot of Shadow adventures available to me just when I was at a ripe age for those tales to make an indelible impression. Over the many years of my career, I’ve been lucky enough to get the chance to contribute to the various mythos of some of my favorite characters from my childhood, and, for a long time, The Shadow was kind of the final grail on my bucket list of such wanna-do characters. But then I finally got the chance to work on The Shadow by writing and providing cover art for The Shadow: Year One for Dynamite Entertainment. When Dynamite’s editor-in-chief, Joe Rybandt, suggested a Grendel/Shadow crossover to me, I almost knocked him over by bellowing, “YES!!” Following the two successful Batman/Grendel crossovers, I’d been approached many times over the years by various creators and publishers with all sorts of offers to do the same thing with a litany of other characters. But these proposals never really appealed to me considering the fact that I’d already had my character crossover with f*cking Batman… twice! Any other character crossover would seem like something of a letdown after that… except for one. Again, I was a huge Shadow fan as a kid, so both of these character crossovers were something of a professional dream-come-true for me. POWERS: Why is The Shadow’s time period of the 1930s so appropriate in connecting with the Art Deco aesthetics of the Hunter Rose era of Grendel? WAGNER: Hunter has always seemed like a man born outside of the right time period. You get the feeling he’d be more at home in an era where style and elegance were in full swing. In fact, even beyond its Art Deco stylings, Devil by the Deed feels a bit ambiguous in regard to its time frame; it’s supposed to be set in the ’80s, yet it has a flavor reminiscent of the ’30s. It actually predates the aesthetic of TV’s animated Batman Adventures in that regard. So the chance to have him fully inhabit a world where jazz, literature, tuxedos, and gowns were the societal norms really fit Hunter like one of his fine white gloves. It also gave me the opportunity to play with his latent emotions in a way that I couldn’t do in a modern timeframe. Hunter’s love affair with Jocasta stands as an emotional monolith in his psyche… he can’t ever get over her loss. But by placing him in a time period before she was even born, I was able to crack the shell of his outward supremacy and make him vulnerable to romantic feelings that he’d long thought buried. And it was great fun to have my seemingly invincible villain be almost defeated by this brash and independent woman whom he thought he loved, a fiery “daughter of crime.” It acted

as an elegant foreshadowing of the woman-to-be who would ultimately one day be his downfall. POWERS: Moving on to your current Grendel project, Grendel: Devil’s Odyssey depicts Grendel Prime searching for a new home for humanity. What led to this outer-space continuation of the Grendel cycle? WAGNER: It’d been quite some time since I’d done a story with Grendel Prime, and, in fact, the last time we saw the character was in the final pages of Devil Quest, following his defeat at the hands of Batman and Robin. At that point, he was busted all to hell after having been blasted back to the reality of his own world and timeframe. After I finished the final Mage series, The Hero Denied, I felt like I wanted to return to Grendel for my next project. The last two Grendel series that I’d done were both Hunter Rose adventures, Behold the Devil and Grendel vs. The Shadow, and so I decided it was time to revive Grendel Prime. As always, I felt like I needed to push the story in a whole new direction, especially after such a long hiatus. I really needed to shake things up for both the readers and myself, and I felt like we’d already spent quite a lot of time in the futuristic world of Grendel as it stood— the global Khanate, the fractious and varied Grendel clans and all that. So I decided to leave all that behind and send Grendel Prime into outer space. In the Grendel universe, I’d set things up to a point where mankind never really makes it off the planet. As the world becomes lost in feudal squabbling and empire building, more and more resources are directed and squandered towards military causes rather than exploring and possibly colonizing space. Devil’s Odyssey is set nearly a century after the events of Devil Quest. As the global empire is finally gasping its final breaths, the last Grendel-Khan, Juno II, manages to summon the now-rebuilt Grendel Prime out of self-induced exile for one final mission… to venture into space seeking a new home for humanity. When I was a teen comics reader, the arrival of Heavy Metal magazine on American news racks was a huge deal. It was one of my first exposures to adult comics, and the largely European artists it featured were

stylistically so different from the work of contemporary American artists that I knew and loved. So I really wanted this series to be something of an homage to Heavy Metal, with a lone space explorer on an odyssey throughout the galaxy. It’s also a bit of a riff on Gulliver’s Travels, with our intrepid voyager visiting a series of different worlds in which we can see echoes of our own societal and environmental realities. As an undying cyborg, Grendel Prime can uniquely withstand the rigors of extended space travel and so is the perfect vehicle for this kind of tale, a cosmic quest that might wind up taking centuries to complete. POWERS: Why is the droid-head Sigma 7 a good companion/comedic foil for Grendel Prime? WAGNER: Grendel Prime always has a comrade, which seems kinda strange because he also comes off as such a loner. In War Child, it’s Jupiter. Later, Susan Veraghen becomes his companion, and, even in Batman/Grendel II, he’s got an unwilling colleague, a young computer whiz that he kidnaps and forces to aid his dark efforts. So I knew he had to have a companion for this series but, again, faced with the extended length and harsh conditions of this mission, my only option was to have it be another mechanical being. Siggy, as she likes to be called, is a nice counterpoint to Prime. As a floating drone, she’s agile and spritely compared to Prime’s solid muscularity. And where Prime is stern and obstinate, Siggy is chatty and curious. She brings a philosophical aspect to their quest as opposed to Prime’s blunt mission-mindedness. When I was first designing Siggy, my initial sketches were more mechanical. But then I realized that, since Grendel Prime is basically a faceless character, Siggy needed to have a face. I still made the face pretty static, though, to retain her identity as a drone and not look like a disembodied human head. As the story progresses, readers will start to wonder who exactly has the more dominant role in the pursuit of their mission. Is Prime in charge… or is Siggy? POWERS: An older, battle-weary Susan Veraghen shows up again in issue #3 (Jan. 2020). Would you like to continue to develop her story in the future?

Prime Directive Grendel’s latest (as of this writing) series, the eightissue miniseries Grendel: Devil’s Odyssey. Issue #1 cover and interior two-page spread written and illustrated by Matt Wagner, with colors by Brennan Wagner. TM & © Matt Wagner.

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The Next Generation Matt Wagner and Brennan Wagner.

WAGNER: Sure. Like I said, Greg Rucka and I had originally planned on doing a trilogy of illustrated novels, all focused on Prime’s ongoing partnership with Susan. And it’s revealed in Batman/Grendel II that Susan eventually dies not in battle, but of old age. So there’s lot of available story space to explore her as a character. I don’t have any immediate plans for stories about Susan… but I do have an all-new comrade in mind for Grendel Prime. POWERS: Is Grendel Prime as an interstellar savior for humanity ultimately a redemptive figure, or is he something more complicated through the choices he makes in this story? WAGNER: Well, there again… Prime poses a conundrum. Like I said, he was the only option for this mission due to his unique ability to survive the journey. So, he’s not only humanity’s potential savior but also our species’ first diplomat to any other life forms we might encounter out there in the cosmos. But, as I also said earlier, at his core, Grendel Prime is an extremely efficient killing machine. It’s what he was built for. This series is currently still being published, so I don’t really want to say more than that right now. POWERS: What’s it like working with your son Brennan on Devil’s Odyssey, and how does his coloring for your books shape your story choices? WAGNER: I’ve talked a bit in this interview about feeling lucky for so many aspects of my career and my collaborations and the creative freedoms I’ve enjoyed. But being able to collaborate with my son on both Grendel and Mage as well as various other projects pretty much tops that list. Brennan exhibited artistic skills and interests from a young age, and, although I never particularly pushed him in the direction of creating comics as a career path, he did have access to a pretty broad and impressive comics library just by being my son. He basically grew up in my home studio, and so now I find we have a very fluid level of communication when we’re working together. We speak each other’s creative language, and our instincts are usually pretty much in sync. That’s not to say that we don’t disagree on things here and there, but I always particularly love it when his color choices catch me totally by surprise. I wouldn’t say working with Brennan really affects my story choices per se. But I always feel confident that his coloring will enhance, beautify, and, more importantly, clarify the storytelling of any project I’m doing. This may sound like parental pride, and sure… it is. But, trying to speak from an objective standpoint, I really do think he’s an incredibly talented and accomplished color artist, and I don’t think he’s quite yet getting his due from the industry as a whole. There’s probably a suspicion of nepotism at work there, and that might be true… if he wasn’t particularly good. But Bren’s not just a dazzling colorist on my stuff. He’s currently doing some work in the Hellboy universe, with artists Christopher Mitten and Ben Stenbeck, and all of it looks

Grendel TM & © Matt Wagner.

Facebook.

beautiful, lush, and evocative. He’s a damn fine colorist, and, yeah… I’m very proud of him. We’ll hopefully be working on an even closer collaboration in the near future. POWERS: As a closing question, what would you like to be the legacy of the Grendel cycle for not only future generations of comic-book creators but the readers as well? Put simply, what do the various incarnations of Grendel mean to you as a creator? WAGNER: Wow… saved the easy one for last, eh? I don’t really think it’s up to me to say what the legacy of the Grendel cycle will or should be. That can only be determined by, as you said, future generations of both creators and readers. From my end, all I can speak about is the sense of artistic fulfillment I’ve experienced over the years. My career began in a lucky manner at a lucky time and via a lucky set of circumstances. But I met and embraced the opportunities that were afforded to me and tried to never take those freedoms for granted. I’ve consistently pushed myself and my narratives in new and different directions, building a long and intricate saga that’s still continuing to this day. Each incarnation of Grendel stands as an unfettered testament to my creative voice and outlook at the time of its creation, and that’s a rare and pretty awesome thing to be able to claim. Even after almost 40 years of chronicling Grendel’s dark and dangerous adventures, I can honestly say that it’s never gotten boring. I’m still excited and eager to be doing this and don’t see that ending anytime soon. I still hear the Devil’s call. TOM POWERS teaches English at Montgomery County Community College, which is located in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. He would like to thank Matt Wagner for being a generous interviewee as well as Diana Schutz, the Pander Brothers, Bernie Mireault, Tim Sale, and John K. Snyder III for discussing their vital contributions to the Devil’s work, and to Amanda Powers for scanning some of the interior pages accompanying these interviews.

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by M

ark Ciemioch

A samurai wandering from village to village, helping the needy. A ronin who conducts himself with honor. When it comes to the pursuit of justice for the vulnerable, he is fearless. His heart has known love and loss, but his best friend regularly leaves him holding the check. He is Miyamoto Usagi, and he is a rabbit. To comic readers, Miyamoto is known as the hero of Usagi Yojimbo, one of the longest-running creator-owned comic series in history. Created by writer, artist, and letterer Stan Sakai, Usagi has been in publication for more than three decades between multiple publishers, and even appeared in popular cartoon shows and sold millions of toys. But through all of those years and hundreds of issues, Sakai remains the primary creator of Usagi Yojimbo. stan sakai According to Stan Sakai, “[Usagi] is what a warrior should be. He has Emi Fujii. honor, but because he’s a masterless samurai, he’s a bit of a rogue. He has a streak of independence in him. Unlike real samurai, he straddles the Japanese caste system. He flows freely to interact with farmers and peasants to artisans, and that makes for good stories. That’s why I can do stories about crafts like pottery making, or social structure. I can tell a range of stories because he’s such an individual type of character.” BACK ISSUE interviewed Sakai about his career and memories of working on Usagi in March 2020. Let’s go back a few decades (and a few centuries, to feudal Japan) to learn more about the beginnings of Sakai and his iconic hero, Miyamoto Usagi.

Hare on Horseback A 1988 hand-colored Usagi Yojimbo specialty illustration by Stan Sakai. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). Usagi Yojimbo TM & © Stan Sakai.

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ORIGINS

Born in 1953, Stan Sakai spent his childhood in Hawaii, where he lived amongst a Japanese-American population that celebrated the culture. In his neighborhood, there was a movie theater that screened films by Akira Kurosawa, the great Japanese filmmaker behind such epics as Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, and more. Many of these films starred Toshiro Mifune, the intense, charismatic actor who became one of Japan’s most iconic movie stars. Mifune was as adept as playing men of honor as characters of ill repute, along with every personality in-between. Many of these samurai movies made a distinct impression of the young Sakai, and he would spend all day every Saturday watching films at the theater. Meanwhile, young Sakai was also starting to enjoy comic books as well. The first comic he recalls was an adaptation of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty film. He enjoyed many of the DC Comics books of the late 1950s and early ’60s, but when the Marvel Age of Comics began in the early 1960s, it opened a new world for Sakai. “I remember buying Fantastic Four #2 off the stands,” Sakai says. “I fell in love with the Marvel style of storytelling. I bought both DC and Marvel back then because you could do that when comics were a dime. It was affordable, even for kids.” Sakai was fascinated by artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, creators who not only laid the foundation of the Marvel Universe but also became two of the most influential and celebrated figures in the history of the medium. “Kirby, I loved because he was just so dynamic, but Ditko was just plain weird,” Sakai says. “The way his characters moved, his compositions, and his imagination were very different. That appealed to me, his entire style.” The art that Sakai absorbed in his youth became a considerable influence on him, but pursuing a creative career was not something he thought about until he was a high school student. “Back in the day, I never imagined the way comic books worked,” Sakai says. “There were no conventions or magazines about comics. There were fanzines, but they were amateur publishing books. They did not have the fan base that you do now, so it was hard to find out how comics were created. It was in high school that I realized that people actually make them: Writers, artists, letterers, [etc.]. It was such a revelation to me that maybe I could do this.” Along with his friends Gary Kato and Dennis Fujitake, Sakai started developing his own comics. All three would become comic-book professionals in the future. “It became our training ground,” Sakai says. “It was all hand-drawn and put together. We’d pass them onto others. It wasn’t too much later that after high school and I was in university, that I started doing artwork professionally for newspapers and magazines. I graduated from college with a fine arts degree, and I started pursuing art professionally.”

Sakai then moved to Southern California, where he met and befriended several other comics professionals, including Sergio Aragonés, Mark Evanier, Scott Shaw!, and even Kirby, living in the area at the time. Sakai continued doing freelance art, while he also taught a class on calligraphy at his church. He mentioned it to Aragonés, who told Sakai he was interested in having him do the lettering for his new book, Groo the Wanderer. “I had never lettered a comic book professionally, but fortunately at that time, there was a magazine at that time called Comic Scene,” Sakai says. “Each issue focused on another aspect of comic-book creation. That very month, Todd Klein wrote an article, ‘How I Letter Comics.’ I pretty much followed what Todd told me to do, and I adapted his methods. Eventually, I started doing my own lettering [apart from Groo].” Sakai landed several more lettering assignments, including comic strips syndicated by the Los Angeles Times. His work was getting noticed, and after a recommendation from Shaw!, Sakai got a phone call every comics fan dreams they could receive. “I picked up the phone one day: ‘Hi, this is Stan Lee, and I’m looking for Stan Sakai!’” the artist relates. Lee was looking for a new letterer on his daily Spider-Man newspaper strip, and Sakai picked up that baton for 25 years. The working relationship grew to a personal one, as the two Stans would meet every few weeks to exchange work and talk about life. “When my daughter Hanna was four months old, she went to her first convention, and Stan just happened to be there, so she took a picture with Stan,” Sakai recalls. “The next time I went to see him, I gave him a copy of the picture, and he was very appreciative. Then the next time I went to see him, there was a framed picture of Stan and Hanna next to a picture of Stan and President [Ronald] Reagan, so that was funny. He was a neat guy.”

Ronin Rabbit (left) Courtesy of Stan Sakai, some of the artist’s earliest character sketches. (right) Usagi Yojimbo’s premiere, in Albedo Anthropomorphics #2 (Nov. 1984). TM & © Stan Sakai.

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THE RONIN RABBIT

All those samurai stories Sakai absorbed in his youth stayed with him. He kept thinking about the life of a 17th Century samurai named Miyamoto Musashi. “Musashi was looked upon as an epitome of what a samurai should be, though he did have a lot of faults,” Sakai wrote in the introduction of the Usagi Yojimbo: Special Edition. “However, while doodling in my sketchbook, I drew a rabbit with his ears tied into a ‘chonmage,’ or samurai topknot. I loved the design. It was simple but unique. Miyamoto Musashi became Miyamoto Usagi (‘usagi’ means hare or rabbit in Japanese). I had my protagonist.” Sakai originally planned to introduce Usagi in another funny-animal comic, Nilson Groundthumper and Hermy. He designed an epic story for this book of 2500 pages, of which Usagi would have been introduced on page 1000 and “die a glorious death” around page 2300. Sakai finished an eight-page Nilson story and an eight-page Usagi story, but once he completed both, he fell hard for Usagi and made him the focus instead. “I just loved the design, so I went from thinking of human characters (to turning them) all into animals,” Sakai says. “I could have had Usagi interacting in a world of all humans, as Cerebus [by Dave Sim] does, but it just didn’t make sense to me, so I made everybody animals. I’m glad I did.”

EARLY USAGI COMICS

Sakai published his first Usagi story in Albedo Anthropomorphics #2 (Nov. 1984), from Thoughts and Images. The debut story was entitled “Usagi Yojimbo” (later known as “The Goblin of Adachigahara”) and introduced our hero at the end of a long winter journey seeking shelter with an elderly woman. As the woman welcomes him in and prepares a meal for her guest, the two realize their pasts were both connected to the Battle of Adachigahara years ago, with Usagi and the woman’s husband both fighting as warriors. Usagi recalls the rain-drenched, bloody battle, in which he served as Lord Mifune’s bodyguard but was betrayed by one of their own, General Toda. Later that night, a goblin attacks Usagi. The two battle out in the snow, and Usagi slays the goblin. Awakened by the fight, the grandmother cries out for her husband, Toda, who became a goblin after he lost his honor in battle. “I had that first story clanging around in my brain for a half-year or so,” says Sakai, who noted the story set the tone and visual language for Usagi he would follow for years. “I had Usagi drawings from 1983, so it took until a year before he actually first saw print. I read a story called ‘The Goblin of Adachigahara.’ I thought I could adapt the story as my own. I changed a lot—I changed everything—but I liked the title. I kept reworking and reworking, and it eventually it became the first Usagi story. Usagi has been pretty much published continuously since then.” Following his first appearance, Usagi appeared in Albedo Anthropomorphics #3–4 (Apr. and July 1985) for a two-part story, “Lone Rabbit and Child,” inspired by the popular manga series, Lone Wolf and Cub. Sakai was then contacted by Fantagraphics Books to contribute Usagi stories for their new funny-animal book, Critters, which premiered in 1986. The first Usagi story that appeared in Critters #1 (June 1986), “Bounty Hunter,” introduced Gennosuke (or Gen), a rhino bounty hunter who would go on to be one of the most popular recurring characters in the series. Over time, Usagi and Gen were occasional partners and constant annoyances to each other, allowing Sakai to integrate a buddy comedy dynamic into the samurai strip. “I love his personality,” Sakai says of Gen. “It was taken from Kurosawa’s movies Yojimbo and Sanjuro with Toshiro Mifune. He’s kind of groggy and scratches himself, but he also manipulates people. [Gen] always has a scheme up his sleeve, but he’s got a good heart behind it all. He considers himself Usagi’s best friend but has no qualms about cheating him. It makes for an interesting character.” After the debut issue of Critters, Usagi would become an irregular recurring feature in the comic, most of which were standalone eightpage stories. At times, Sakai would draw upon other Japanese films from his childhood for creation, such as Zato, the blind swords-pig who was inspired by the Zatoichi film series. Usagi made his first appearance

First Blood (top left) Fantagraphics’ Critters was an early home for Usagi. Issue #1 (June 1986). Cover (top right) and splash page (bottom) for Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo #1 (July 1987). Usagi Yojimbo TM & © Stan Sakai. Cutey Bunny © Joshua Quagmire. Birthright © Steven A. Gallacci.

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Unseen Usagi Look what we found in Heritage’s online archives! An alternate, unused page from Fantagraphics’ Usagi Yojimbo #2 (Sept. 1987). TM & © Stan Sakai.

in color in Doomsday Squad #3 vol. 2 (Oct. 1986) with “Village of Fear.” The Usagi Yojimbo Summer Color Special was published that same month, reprinting his first appearance, along with “Lone Rabbit and Child” and a new story, “The Confession.” The Special was the first comic that published Usagi as the title character, leading the way for the ongoing series to begin in 1987. He would appear periodically in Critters as well, even after the ongoing series debuted in July 1987. “[Usagi] seemed to be one of the more popular characters, which prompted the [ongoing] series,” Sakai says. “I approached Kim [Thompson, co-publisher of Fantagraphics] about Usagi having his own series. Kim said, ‘Yes, by all means.’ Kim was great because he laid the foundation for the way I work with every publisher. I pretty much own everything [about Usagi], and the publisher has no input in terms of story and art goes. The first time they see me is when the story is completed, and I finish it. I would send them a synopsis of maybe one paragraph of what the story is about, but they don’t see [anything else] until it’s completely finished.”

The next major Usagi story, “Homecoming,” is a two-parter originally published in Critters #10–11 (Mar.–Apr. 1987) that reveals more of Usagi’s past and introduces Mariko, a woman whom he has a relationship with that suggests more than friendship; Kenichi, an old rival who married Mariko; and Jotaro, their son (who kinda-sorta resembles Usagi, wink-wink, nudgenudge). All three characters would return to the pages of Usagi Yojimbo again and again. The original Usagi Yojimbo ongoing series began in July 1987 with a banger: the eight-part origin of Usagi entitled “Samurai!,” published over the first four issues (July–Nov. 1987). Usagi kills a warrior named Gunichi in a duel, and Gen questions why Usagi would pay his respects to his opponent. To explain, Usagi tells Gen the long story of how he became a samurai, the difficult experience he had training under the stern but brilliant master Katsuichi, and his eventual service to Lord Mifune. As it turns out, Gunichi was another bodyguard to Mifune, and abandoned his lord on the battlefield; a betrayal that Usagi never forgave, even if he cannot forget their past friendship. “Samurai!” is a landmark story for Usagi. It brings together all of the major characters of his world introduced so far and puts them in context while showing readers the origins of Usagi’s skills, personality, and ethos. It rewards longtime readers of the character while serving as a perfect introduction to new audiences who came aboard for the first issue of the ongoing series. It’s also a significant leap forward for Sakai’s abilities as a storyteller as he completed his most ambitious project to date.

EVOLUTION

Sakai’s skills as a comic-book artist were also improving. The next major story, “The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy,” runs from Usagi Yojimbo #13–18 (Nov. 1988–July 1989). One of the lords serving under Hikiji is secretly amassing an army of ronin with ammunition, which draws in Usagi, Gen, Zato, Tomoe Ame (bodyguard to the young Lord Noriyuki), and the Neko Ninja, all working for their agendas. Spreading the story out across multiple issues gives Sakai room to establish more atmospheric and moody storytelling, as whole pages go sans dialogue to add to the heightened drama. “Back then, if I was doing an eight-page story a month, I was really going fast,” Sakai says of his evolution. “Now I have to do a 24-page [story], plus cover, in about five weeks. I’ve gotten a lot faster, a lot more confident, and a lot more familiar with Usagi and the telling of a story. Back then, Usagi looked very different. It was unconscious on my part, so it was a natural evolution. [Early Usagi’s] proportions were much different. They were more ‘funny animals.’ Now the stories have become much more dramatic, so the proportions have changed as the storytelling has changed. It was a natural progression rather than a conscious progression on my part.” Despite the presence of anamorphic animals, the storytelling in “The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy” feels more cinematic than many other comics. Sakai uses closeups, landscapes, and weather to heighten the drama of the story. At one point, Usagi and Shingen, then the leader of the Neko Ninja clan, hunt one another until they duel each other on the edge of a waterfall in Usagi Yojimbo #14 (Jan. 1989). It’s a sequence that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Kurosawa movie but was explicitly created for comics. Sakai varies between large, small, vertical, and horizontal panels for maximum effect. “I get most of my storytelling abilities from movies with the pacing and the angles,” Sakai says. “I’m more 34 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

“The Winds Howl” Sakai’s creative calligraphy is on display in this Usagi vs. Shingen battle page from Usagi Yojimbo #14 (Jan. 1989). TM & © Stan Sakai.

influenced by movies than by comic books. I love that you can change the layout and size of panels, but as far as storytelling goes, I refer a lot to cinema.” Also, Sakai’s skills as a letterer supplement the pages and give the story the unified cohesion of one artist. In the duel between Usagi and Shingen, Sakai includes the trademark martial-arts battle cry, “Hiiiiyaaaaa,” across the panels as the opponents cross swords. At the same time, the sounds of the waterfall, “Kshaaaaaa,” hangs in the background with a different, narrower font. Sound-effect lettering is as important as the dialogue balloons in Usagi Yojimbo. “I still do lettering by hand,” Sakai says. “I love it because it’s part of the process where I don’t have to think as much. It’s more mechanical for me. I use a different skill set with Groo, as far as the size of my lettering and the types of pens I use. It’s very different than what I use with Usagi and even Spider-Man. For me, the lettering style and techniques are very different according to what projects I’m working on right now.”

TURTLE POWER

Just as “The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy” was concluding, Usagi made a different appearance. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles title was the most important independentcomic-book success story of the 1980s. By the end of the decade, the half-shelled martial-arts heroes created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird [see BACK ISSUE #22— ed.] had become a pop-culture phenomenon with a syndicated animated series and Playmates toy line.

Having two animal-based sword-wielding warrior properties at the same time was too good of an opportunity to pass up, so in the third season of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show, Usagi made his first appearance on Oct. 12, 1989 episode, “Usagi Yojimbo.” An action figure of the Ronin Rabbit joined the TMNT toy line that same month (see sidebar for a summary of all of Usagi’s animated antics). The seeds of the Usagi/TNMT crossover came together nearly five years earlier, as both properties debuted in comics in 1984. Sakai was impressed with the Turtles book by Eastman and Laird and sent them a fan letter expressing his love for their work. Shortly after that, the Turtles creators sent one back praising Sakai and Usagi. As Casablanca’s Rick Blaine might say, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, even though they lived on separate coasts. “We met at the San Diego Comic-Con, and we became fast friends,” Sakai says. “It was at one of the cons when I was sitting with Peter Laird, and he just continued on page 37

“Turtle Soup and Rabbit Stew” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Leonardo drops in on the Bushido bunny in Mirage Studios’ Turtle Soup #1, from 1987. The Turtles and Usagi would cross over many additional times. TMNT TM & © Viacom Overseas Holdings, C.V. Usagi Yojimbo TM & © Stan Sakai.

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TMNT featuring Usagi Yojimbo, from 1989, 2003, and two from 2017. Images courtesy of Mark Ciemioch. TMNT TM & © Viacom Overseas Holdings, C.V. Usagi Yojimbo TM & © Stan Sakai.

TOON RABBIT (USAGI GOES ANIMATED IN TMNT SHOWS) Millions of children (and some adults) encountered Miyamoto Usagi for the first time through his appearances in the various Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series and toy lines, beginning with the original show launch in the late 1980s. Even though Miyamoto Usagi and Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo were born hundreds of years apart in their storylines, time travel and dimension-hopping isn’t hard when you’re already dealing with anthropomorphic animals with weapons. The original TMNT cartoon, based on the comics from Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, debuted on syndicated television in 1987. Eastman and Laird had significant control over the TMNT property, and when they invited Sakai to bring his most famous creation to the show, he also maintained that leverage. Sakai’s influence came into play when toy designers were developing a figure for Usagi to join the popular line. “With all my contracts with anyone, I have the ultimate say [over Usagi regarding] the look and property,” Sakai tells BACK ISSUE. “I can reject any type of merchandising that I feel is not appropriate for Usagi, and I have. I knew he had to adapt to the look of the entire [Turtles] line, so Usagi was very buffed up and muscular, but I had rejected the first two or three prototypes. I’ve always maintained complete control, so nothing gets on the stands or shelves without my approval. I have even written Usagi scripts [in later Turtles series] to approving character designs, so it’s like a collaboration, but I have the final say in everything.” The character debuted in the third season of the first TMNT show, officially bearing the name of his comic-book title instead of Miyamoto Usagi. “Usagi Yojimbo” premiered on Oct. 18, 1989, and brought the rabbit samurai to the world of the Turtles after some inter-dimensional hijinks between the hero and villains Shredder and Krang. The story mostly follows Usagi as a “fish out of water” in the human city of New York City. By the end, Usagi helps the Turtles and another man, Obento, subdue a giant dragon unleashed by the Foot Clan. Stuck in the real world for now, Usagi is taken in by Obento, a curator at the Far Eastern Animal Museum. The follow-up episode, “Usagi Come Home,” debuted two days later. Shredder tricks Usagi into fighting the Turtles, but they help the samurai uncover the deception. Now on the same page, the heroes track Shredder to a fireworks factory (really). After declaring victory over Shredder, Mikey introduces Usagi to pizza. “I think I’m going to enjoy living in this world,” Usagi says, but never again appears in the original series. Leo, Don, Mikey, and Raph returned to television in the 2003 animated series reboot, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a seven-season series that aired on Fox for most of its run before moving to the CW for the final season. Our favorite samurai rabbit also returned, debuting on the show in the Season Two four-part finale, “The Big Brawl,” airing May 15, Sept. 18, Sept. 25, and Oct. 2, 2004. The Turtles follow Splinter to the Battle Nexus, an inter-dimensional arena where warriors from across the multiverse compete for supremacy in a single-elimination tournament. Usagi (Jason Anthony Griffin) is involved, but so is Gen, along with Splinter and the Turtles. However, outside forces frame Splinter for trying to kill the tournament leader, Ultimate Daimyo, and poison Leonardo while facing off against Usagi, dragging all of the heroes into the plot to overthrow the Battle Nexus. The conspiracy is led by Daimyo’s son, the Ultimate Ninja, and Drako, a red dragon and former adversary of Splinter. They send their minions to a Healing House where Daimyo and Leo are recovering, but Usagi and Don protect them long enough for at least Leonardo to get back into the fight. Meanwhile, Mikey advances to the finals of the tournament as the alliance between the Ninja and Drako breaks down, and the entire conflict spills into the Battle Nexus arena. A War Staff, used by the authority of the Battle Nexus, opens a rift in the sky, sending the Ninja and Drako through before Daimyo manages to close it. Peace returns and Leonardo and Usagi pay extra respect to each other as new friends before departing to their home dimensions. Following “The Big Brawl,” Usagi makes a few more appearances in the 2003 TMNT series, including the Season Three premiere, “The Christmas Aliens,” where Usagi, Gen, and Daimyo visit the Turtles in their dimension for a holiday gathering. Usagi’s final appearance in the series comes on March 25 and April 2, 2005, for a two-parter called “The Real World,” written by Christopher Yost and Michael Ryan. Drako and the Ultimate Ninja return, but as a merged being wielding a Time Scepter that transports Splinter and the Turtles throughout the multiverse. 36 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

Leo lands in Usagi’s universe, and teams with the samurai along with Gen, Tomoe Ame, and Lord Noriyuki to defeat a kidnapping plot by Lord Hebi. Following their encounter, Usagi helps Leo travel back to the Battle Nexus, wherein part two, they team up to reunite the Turtle family and defeat the merged Drako/Ninja being. The animation and style of the second Turtles series feel of its era. Still, Usagi resembles more of the character comic readers would recognize than the 1989 version, who is a comic character. Also, it’s nice to see more of his world incorporated into the TMNT mythology… but sit tight, the best is yet to come. The Heroes in a Half-Shell entered into the computer animation world for their 2012 Nickelodeon series. In the fifth and final season, Usagi (Yuki Matsuzaki) finally debuted in “Yojimbo,” premiering on July 23, 2017. What’s unique about the first episode is that Sakai wrote it. The visual language and tone of these episodes match wonderfully with Sakai’s style in the comics and introduces Jei to animation with a sequence inspired by his first appearance in Usagi Yojimbo #10 (Aug. 1988). Usagi volunteers to help guide a young, bratty boy Kintaro to a faraway temple for safety, as the boy is considered the Golden Child. Jei wants the boy for himself and uses his sorcery to summon the Turtles to this dimension, sending them off to hunt down Usagi. Their first meeting begins in conflict, but Usagi can defend himself long enough for the Turtles to overcome their mind control. In the second episode, “Osoroshi no Tabi,” (July 30, 2017), Usagi and the Turtles journey through a haunted forest encountering spirits, menacing beings, and their distrust of each other. The conclusion occurs in “Kagayake! Kintaro” (Aug. 6, 2017), which sees the heroes reach the Temple, only to find a trap laid by Jei. During the battle, Kintaro’s abilities manifest, helping to turn the tide against Jei. The final encounter between Usagi and Jei is epic, as they duel over Kintaro. The child bites Jei, distracting him long enough for Usagi to deliver the final blow and knock the villain off a bridge to his death, complete with the trademark Sakai death skull bubble. Miyamoto Usagi has become a vital element of the TMNT mythology with his appearances in several cartoon series. Watching all the Usagi episodes in a row gives fans an appreciation of the evolution of the Turtles, and how each appearance from the rabbit samurai connects more deeply to Sakai’s vision. The Nickelodeon series is the best translation for the comic fans of Usagi, and Sakai’s artwork appears as an Easter egg during a flashback scene as well. If the Turtles return with another animated series, it’s very possible that Usagi will appear as well. But who knows, maybe one day the Turtles will make a guest appearance in an Usagi Yojimbo animated series! [Editor’s note: As this issue was entering production, on July 15, 2020 the news broke that Stan Sakai is involved with the development of a new Usagi animated series, Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles, to stream on Netflix. The showrunners and executive producers are Candie and Doug Langdale.]

Cartoonist Crossover (top) Stan, holding the first-ever Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles drawing, and TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman. (bottom) Stan and TMNT’s Peter Laird before a wall of Turtles actions figures. Photos courtesy of Stan Sakai.

continued from page 35

said, ‘We’re expanding the Turtle line with other creators, and would you like Usagi to be part of the Turtles? We’ll make a toy and put him in the TV series.’ I said, ‘Sure, that would be great.’ That started the official collaboration with the Turtles.” Comics being comics, it wasn’t long before the characters met in an official story. In Mirage’s Turtle Soup #1 (Sept. 1987), Usagi encounters Leonardo after a time-travel incident (again, comics being comics). It was a brief story, but Leonardo returned to Usagi’s time again in Shell Shock #1 (Dec. 1989). They and the fans enjoyed these collaborations between the creators, and Usagi and the Turtles would continue to cross over with each other with comics, cartoons, and toys in the following decades. Following Usagi’s appearances in the cartoon series, Sakai says the awareness of the character skyrocketed with new audiences. “It was great, and I loved that,” he says. “People became acquainted with Usagi, and they had never thought of checking out the comic book before he appeared in the Turtles. I take it as a terrific example of brand awareness, particularly with the toys, which I think sold 2.2 million units. It created huge brand awareness, and the last time Usagi appeared with the Turtles was a couple of years ago. It was a three-part story that I had a hand in writing the first part, and I loved the process of working with the studio.” Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 37

Where’s the Wanderer? (top) Look carefully at this page from UY #20’s (Feb. 1990) “Kite Story” for a Groo cameo scribbled in by none other than Sergio Aragonés. (inset) The Groo crew of Mark Evanier, Aragonés, and Stan Sakai, at San Diego Comic-Con, courtesy of Stan. Usagi Yojimbo TM & © Stan Sakai.

INFLUENCES AND MIRAGES

While you can trace much of the look and feel of the Usagi stories to Kurosawa, Sakai cited several other filmmakers whose work made an impact on him as a storyteller. “At the top of my list would be Kurosawa; [he’s] big with an epic style of storytelling,” Sakai says of his cinematic influences. “[Usagi] Yojimbo is a tribute to his movie with Mifune. I love [Alfred Hitchcock and] the way he builds suspense. I love the way James Cameron introduces characters. Taiki Waititi is terrific… his storytelling, sense of style, and his visual style. James Whale from Frankenstein is wonderful. John Landis… there’s just so many [directors].” Individual other comic creators influence Sakai, and the Usagi Yojimbo series shares more connections to Groo the Wanderer beyond Sakai’s lettering. You can see it visually whenever the protagonists leap into battle against of horde of [often hapless] enemies, but Sakai says he deeply respects the work ethic of Sergio Aragonés. “He does his research,” Sakai says. “He appreciates it. Groo is a humor book, but Sergio does an amazing amount of research for the series. If Groo goes on a ship that sinks, [Sergio] could build that ship. He does model shipbuilding, so he’s actually done it. When Groo helped build the pyramids, Sergio did research in different series on how the pyramids were actually built. He encouraged me to do as much research as I can, and I still do. When I do research on Japanese history, I’ll put those [sources] in the back of the book. I’ve done stories about pottery, sword crafting, and various other [things]. I would add more insight into that period of Japanese cultural history. Working with Sergio and Mark [Evanier], we started off as friends before we became collaborators. It’s not so much work but working with friends and collaborating with them.” One of the stories you can see the importance of Sakai’s extensive research is “A Kite Story,” published initially in Usagi Yojimbo #20 (Feb. 1990). Sakai builds the story from the perspective of three main characters: Usagi, a kite maker named Tatsusaburo, and a gambler named Hatsu. They all converge on an annual kite festival called the Tako-Kichi Matsuri. “A Kite Story” became one of Sakai’s favorite stories, and Aragonés left his mark on too, literally, as you can spot Groo on page 5. “I had done the artwork and brought it a meeting,” Sakai says. “I showed it to Sergio, and he went off into a corner to read the story off the art boards. He came back and said, ‘It’s really good, really good.’ That story came out around the San Diego Comic-Con, and people started coming up to me saying, ‘Oh, I loved how you put Groo in there.’ ‘What? I didn’t put Groo in there!’ And in one of the crowd scenes, Sergio made a little drawing of Groo. It was a funny Easter egg for me too.” The friendship between the creators has extended for decades. Sakai has paid respect to it at various moments, from Usagi walking past Groo in one panel from “Lone Rabbit and Child,” to the Aragonés appearing in the background of stories like “The Tea Cup.” The early ’90s marked the end of an era for Usagi and Sakai, as the first ongoing series ended with #38 in March 1993. The comic reached the end

Still Standing First issues of Usagi Yojimbo at Mirage, Dark Horse, and IDW. TM & © Stan Sakai.

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of its run at Fantagraphics, and Sakai moved the ongoing series to Mirage Studios, the publishing house owned by Eastman and Laird, and home of the original TMNT books. The first issue of the Mirage series came out in March 1993 and began with a three-part crossover with the Turtles. “By that time, Fantagraphics had cancelled much of their all-ages titles,” Sakai says of the transition. “Critters was gone, Captain Jack had been cancelled. They were mainly going for the more adult and mature market like Love and Rockets, and I felt out of place there. Around that time, I already had a relationship with Mirage Studios, which published the Ninja Turtles. They did the Space Usagi miniseries, and they had approached me about publishing the Usagi comic. One of the selling points they gave me was that they would publish in color, with the Turtles on [the cover]. I always maintained a good relationship with publishers, even after they stop publishing [Usagi].” Usagi becoming a color series while at Mirage made it distinctive in the character’s publishing run, but did have some drawbacks, according to Sakai, who detailed them in his interview with Kim Thompson of The Comics Journal in 1996. Usagi was the first monthly color series produced by Mirage, but their system was not perfected yet and had some reproduction issues. Besides, almost all of the fan feedback from letters told Sakai they preferred the book to be black and white. “I prefer black and white myself,” Sakai told Thompson. “I’ve always says that black and white looks truer to the original artwork than anything else; you can really see what the artist had intended to do.” However, Usagi’s run at Mirage was fairly brief: 16 issues over two years. Sakai attributed the end to several problems that occurred in short order: the popularity of the Turtles on the downslide, the hardships in the direct market at the time, and a roof leak that destroyed much of the equipment and computers at Mirage Studios. The company gave Sakai eight months notice about the end of volume 2, allowing him time to find a new publisher. He sent out six requests but got 11 responses from companies who would love to publish Usagi.

WHITE RABBIT ON A DARK HORSE

Sakai finally settled upon Dark Horse Comics as the new home of Usagi. He worked with editor Diana Schutz at the company, who said as soon as the final issue of the Mirage series was released, Dark Horse would publish the first issue of volume 3. The series would return to black and white. But first came a diversion to the far future, as the first issue of the third Space Usagi story was published in January 1996. Volume 3 of Usagi Yojimbo began in March 1996 with “Noodles.” The cover announced the new series was only going to be three issues, but as it turns out, Usagi Yojimbo’s ongoing Dark Horse run lasted for 165 issues. “Diana said that Dark Horse would commit to six issues, and so I did two three-issue miniseries,” Sakai says of the cover numbering. “One was a Space Usagi and then another Usagi series. By the time the first issue of Usagi came out, Diana said, ‘Let’s just continue it along. We’ll make it an ongoing.’” One of the most critical stories in the Dark Horse run was “Grasscutter,” which was published in Usagi Yojimbo #13–22 vol. 3 (Aug. 1997–July 1998). It’s a story that goes back into history and myth, as gods create the islands of Japan, as well as a supernaturally powerful sword called the Grasscutter. The sword is passed along through history, not unlike the fabled One Ring from The Lord of the Rings, and eventually comes in-between Usagi and Jei, the mysterious adversary who was introduced in Usagi Yojimbo #10 vol. 1 (Aug. 1988). At the same time, Japan is about to witness a transfer of power, and a conspiracy of eight lords hopes to gain possession of the Grasscutter to assert their authority, a plan that draws the young Lord Noriyuki into mortal danger. In his column published in the final issue of “Grasscutter” (Usagi Yojimbo #22), Sakai said he spent five years developing the story, the longest epic the artist had produced up until that point. All the work he put into it paid off, as Sakai was awarded the Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story in 1999. Over the years, Sakai has won seven Eisner Awards for his work, and several other industry recognitions throughout his career. “My favorite moment was getting the Eisner Award for ‘Grasscutter’ from Will Eisner,” Sakai says of the story. “I got the award signed by Will, and he also wrote the introduction for [the collected edition of Grasscutter].” It was also a key storyline for the development of Jei, the supernaturally powerful villain who is now one of Usagi’s deadliest adversaries. “Jei was intended to be a recurring character,” Sakai says. “That’s why there was never a body when he died the first time after being struck by lightning. His origin was very different from many of the others. Some of the other characters were based on historical characters or people from popular culture. Jei was based on Jason from the Friday the 13th movie. He’s become one of my favorite characters. There’s always

SPACE USAGI There’s no doubt about it, the elevator pitch of a traveling ronin going around solving problems and helping people, and “Oh yeah, he’s a rabbit,” sounds pretty cool for a comic, and even a show or movie. But what would make that even cooler? Put that rabbit in space. The genesis of Space Usagi was born in comics, toys, and animation. Usagi creator Stan Sakai was publishing the Usagi Yojimbo series at Mirage in the early ’90s. The company approached him about licensing Usagi as a space series to follow up on the success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line. Sakai had already been developing Space Usagi as a future comic book. “It was with the intention of putting together a package, a TV series, getting it syndicated, and doing the licensing from there,” Sakai told Kim Thompson in an interview with The Comics Journal in 1996. “This was the first property that Mirage was launching since the creation of the Ninja Turtles, so there was a lot of interest in it.” Complicating matters was Bucky O’Hare, another rabbit space adventurer created by Larry Hama and Michael Golden. The character debuted in Echo of Futurepast #1 (May 1984)—ironically enough, the same year samurai Usagi first appeared in comics. Toymaker Hasbro was ready to make Bucky the successor to the Turtles, launching a toy line, a cartoon series, and video game. Space Usagi already appeared as a figure in the Playmates Turtle line, and the Mirage team prepared to expand Sakai’s character to compete with Bucky O’Hare. Turner Entertainment was interested in taking Space Usagi as a series. “We even got so far as to get a time slot,” Sakai tells BACK ISSUE. Only one problem: The would-be Bucky O’Hare franchise bombed immediately after its 1991 launch. The fallout was so massive that the licensing companies completely lost their appetite for space rabbits, and thus, the animated adventures of Space Usagi were grounded. “It fell apart later by mutual agreement,” Sakai says. On the bright side, fans were able to enjoy Space Usagi through three comic-book miniseries, all lasting three issues. With Sakai creating the entire book (as usual), Mirage published vol. 1 (June 1992 debut) and vol. 2 (Nov. 1993 debut). Space Usagi #1 vol. 3 (Jan. 1996) marked the first issue of Sakai’s relationship with Dark Horse Comics, which would last for more than 20 years.

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a request for Jei to come back, and he always has.” The third volume of Usagi Yojimbo celebrated its longest unbroken run at Dark Horse, with 165 issues published over 21 years, along with assorted miniseries and specials. Sakai began working with IDW on another Usagi/TMNT crossover series in 2017, and the seeds were planted for the ongoing series to make another move. Usagi Yojimbo #1 vol. 4 debuted in June 2019. “It’s now a color series again, and they’ve also committed to reprinting all the previous stories as well,” Sakai says. “That’s one of the nice things about owning your own work; you can work with two different publishers. Usagi has been with a number of different publishers over the years, but it has been one single story. It’s the same character, and one long story of Usagi’s life.”

USAGI’S MODERN LIFE

Usagi’s new series at IDW is accompanied by Usagi Color Classics, which reprints the character’s best stories in color. Volume 4 also transitions the regular book back to color, which Sakai says was out of necessity. “Back in the Mirage days, there were a lot of blackand-white comics on the market,” he says. “People enjoyed seeing Usagi in black and white because they could see the artwork as close to the original as possible. But nowadays, readers want color. The only black-and-white series that’s been around for the past ten years has been The Walking Dead, and even that has ended. Everything [now] has to be in color to be successful in today’s market.”

Step by Step (opposite page) Courtesy of the artist, Stan Sakai’s page process for the opening page of “The Hero, Part One,” published in IDW’s Usagi Yojimbo #4 (Sept. 2019). TM & © Stan Sakai.

2019 also marked Usagi’s 35th anniversary in comics. To celebrate the achievement, Sakai returned to the original “The Goblin of Adachigahara” story, the first appearance of Usagi, and expanded the story with new art and color in Usagi Yojimbo #6 vol. 4 (Nov. 2019). “I have a sense [of how I’ve grown],” Sakai says of working on that issue. “There’s always a sense of, ‘Oh, why did I do this?’ It was a revelation of how I grew and changed as a storyteller. If you compare the two, you can see differences of how I drew the story back then, versus how I would do the story now.”

A RONIN’S HONOR

With 36 years and hundreds of comics written and drawn by the same artist, Usagi Yojimbo is one of the greatest and enduring creator-owned comic books ever. Sakai was an Eisner Hall of Fame nominee in 2020, and his legacy in the industry remains astonishing. “I’d like to think I’m one of the more successful [creators], along with Kevin and Peter, Sergio, and so many others,” Sakai says of his career. “I’ve been doing Usagi for 35 years now, since the beginnings of the black-and-white independent-comic-book movement. It’s staggering to think how long I’ve been doing this.” Sakai has toyed with working on a final Usagi story, but nothing definitive yet. The character will continue his adventures, and Sakai admits he would love to see what other creators would do with Usagi. When asked what he would want Usagi’s legacy to be, Sakai replies: “I was talking to a mother once at a convention. She was telling me that she saw her son reading one of the Usagi trades, and she asked what it was about. He says it was a book about honor. That’s a great answer. I’d love for Usagi to be remembered as good stories about values like honor and loyalty above all things.”

Cover Conflicts (left) Stan’s original color cover art for IDW’s first collection, Usagi Yojimbo Origins vol. 1, published in December 2020. (right) Autographed Sakai Usagi Yojimbo limited edition print, #66 of 200, published in 1988 by Fantagraphics. Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Stan Sakai.

MARK CIEMCIOCH is a writer, pop-culture enthusiast, and lifelong comics fan. He is the writer and editor of the Ultimate Movie Year (ultimatemovieyear.com) and co-author of Buffalo Bizarre. You can follow his work and social media at markciemcioch.com.

Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 41

OLD GODS & NEW A COMPANION TO

JACK KIRBY’S FOURTH WORLD

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

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Of Course, You Know This Means War interview by S h a u n C l a n c y transcribed by Rose Rummel-Eury

While old-school anthropomorphic characters like Yogi Bear and Tom and Jerry were aging out of the limelight in the mid-1980s, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book became a surprise indie smash (and soon, a multimedia sensation that continues to thrive). TMNT’s success birthed a black-and-white comics boom where frenetic funny animals including black-belt hamsters and kung-fu kangaroos ran amok in comic shops.

Enter Boris the Bear, a bad-ass bruin that Rambo-ed over spoofs of numerous comic-book characters in hilarious comics stories produced by cartoonist James Dean Smith. Boris the Bear became a hit comic book… but before long disappeared from the stands. In this exclusive interview with BACK ISSUE’s Shaun Clancy, Smith relives the rise and fall of the furry, fiery, funny fan-favorite of the Big ’80s. – Michael Eury, editor

James Dean Smith’s original color cover artwork to Boris the Bear #1 (Aug. 1986). All original artwork accompanying this article courtesy of Shaun Clancy. Boris the Bear TM & © James Dean Smith.

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Bruin What Comes Naturally (top left) James Dean Smith’s first Boris the Bear illustration, from 1984. (top right) Original Smith cover art to Boris the Bear #2 (Sept. 1986), a Transformers takeoff. (inset) The proud creator in 1986, holding a copy of issue #2. TM & © James Dean Smith.

SHAUN CLANCY: Did your parents name you after James Dean, the famous actor? JAMES DEAN SMITH: Well, they told me no. I’m named after my dad’s brother. I get asked that all the time! “Are you named after the actor?” “Well, no.” But if it’s really good-looking lady, I go, “Well, yeah.” [laughter] CLANCY: Where were you born, and do you have any siblings? SMITH: In Merced, California, at Castle Air Force Base in 1955. Just a sister, a couple years younger than I am. CLANCY: Were you collecting comics on the Air Force base? SMITH: No, I wasn’t then. We moved to Michigan in 1960. My dad was transferred to Kincheloe Air Force Base, which doesn’t exist anymore. I remember when he came through the door with a stack of comics. I’d never seen one before. He had an airman on his staff that had a footlocker in the barracks, which could only hold so much. He found out my dad had a kid and so he gave him a stack of comics. There was one of the first Hulk books with Jack Kirby, Sgt. Rock with a nice Joe Kubert cover… he had everything—Sad Sack, Archie… I remember looking at the Hulk—it was one of the first one on the stack. So, every day, I was bugging my dad, “Did you get more comics? Did you get more comics?” He’d come through every couple of weeks with a big stack and I’d just devour those suckers. I’m not sure if I was really reading them because I was about five, so I was just starting to read a little bit. Mostly I was just looking at the pictures and it’s been a love affair ever since. CLANCY: Did you follow the funnies in the newspaper?

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SMITH: A little bit. It wasn’t until we got to Hawaii that I saw Prince Valiant. I was a huge fan and loved Hal Foster’s work. We’d throw the Sunday funnies away, and I’d think, “I really wish I had that.” Then, I figured out, “Gee, I should cut it out and save it!” so I started doing that and I still have them from 1967 or 1968. CLANCY: You transferred to Hawaii? SMITH: Yes. We transferred there in 1966 and came back to Oregon in 1970. I still collected comics over there and wish I still had them. CLANCY: Your dad was career Air Force? SMITH: Yeah, he got out after 21 years and then he went into the electrical business and did pretty well at that, too. CLANCY: At what point did you start to draw? SMITH: I’d been drawing since I was a little kid. I took some art classes in college—but that was more watercolors and oil painting, not in what I’m doing, which is cartooning. CLANCY: Were you thinking of doing a daily strip, a comic book, or both? SMITH: It didn’t really dawn on me that I could do something like that. At that time, I’d look at the comics and think they were so far beyond me. I kept it in the back of my head. I had little cartoon characters and would make my own little comics using animals—even back then—like rabbits and dogs and whatnot for my superheroes, rather than people. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been more into the animal kind of thing. CLANCY: It was also the height of fanzines, fan groups, and conventions. Did you ever attend any in the late 1960s and 1970s?

Is He Secretly a Cub Reporter? (top) Original Smith cover art to Boris the Bear #4 (Nov. 1986), having fun with John Byrne’s recently launched Superman reboot, The Man of Steel. (bottom) Original cover art to the Swamp Thing spoof, Boris #5 (Dec. 1986). The silhouetted Dump Thing figure was altered for publication, as the inset shows. TM & © James Dean Smith.

SMITH: No, the first one I attended was a show at a Masonic temple in Portland. There was a guy that had a table full of Jack Kirby work. Jim Steranko was there and had done all these big paintings of The Shadow. He’d done a series of four or five paintings for the Shadow novels, which had come out at the time, and he’d done these beautiful oversized paintings. That was my first show. There was a kid there, I can’t remember his character—I think it was a dog—and it was one of the first independent comics coming out. This was even before Cerebus. I talked to him for a few minutes and said, “Are you doing this yourself?” He said, “Yeah.” I think this was even before the direct market took off. I think he might have been selling directly to comic-book stores. I can’t remember the complete conversation. I think Diamond and Capital were around at that time, but I don’t think he was using them. CLANCY: Did you try to solicit or show your portfolio? SMITH: I didn’t have one at that time. Years later, I got involved with Apa-5— a fanzine where you’d do your own fanzine thing and then mail it in to a central person and they’d put them all together and mail them out to all of the people in that APA [Amateur Press Alliance] group. So I did that for a couple of years. After a while, I didn’t have time for it and for what was in there, it wasn’t worth my time. CLANCY: How did you come up with Boris the Bear? SMITH: Boris didn’t come around until after I got back from Canada, probably in 1984. The Care Bears had been around for a little while and I created a character called Blue Bear. He was a bear that didn’t care. He was a nasty little guy. He smoked a cigar and didn’t give a damn about anything— opposite of the Care Bears. I dropped that and began messing around with Boris for a while and finally came up with a name for him. I was watching a movie with Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi, I think called The Black Cat. I was looking for a better name for Blue Bear. I thought, “Boris the bear? Béla the bear? Béla sounds kind of girly.” The more I thought about Boris, though, the more I liked it. That’s how I came up with the name. CLANCY: The 1980s were a fun time and a lot of cartoons were out there. Did you ever have the urge to do animation? SMITH: I think I was 17 and saw something on Merv Griffin where he had an animator on there who said to “send stuff to Disney, blah blah.” I said, “Oh, okay.” I did a bunch of drawings in pencil and stupidly didn’t make copies. I sent them to Disney and got a nice form letter that said I “needed to go to college for four years, and take a bunch of life-drawing classes,” but they didn’t send my artwork back. I sent them a letter asking, “I’d like my artwork back. I put in a lot of hard work on them.” They said, “No, those are Disney characters and all the art belongs to Disney.” It probably went into the round file, but I would’ve liked it back. CLANCY: Was Boris the first real character you created? SMITH: No, I did superhero stuff back in Hawaii. I would use cats, dogs, and rabbits as the superheroes. I’d create my own little comics, basically, about eight or ten pages long on typing paper. I’d staple them together and those were my comic books. CLANCY: In the late 1970s or so, were you starting to think this is more serious? Were you working a full-time job? SMITH: I was over in Salem, Oregon, for a while. I moved back down to the coast because my parents bought a couple of laundromats and needed help for a while. Later, I came back up to Portland in the Beaverton area and then went to Canada for a couple of years around 1983, ’84, doing some wildlife shows. Then in 1985, I came back down here and worked in a comic-book shop. I was there for about 11 months. That’s when I met the publisher of Dark Horse and basically was working on Boris at that time—just doing little drawings. He’d seen it and kept it in the back Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 45

Burying the Competition (top left) Jim Smith’s original cover artwork to Boris the Bear #8 (Mar. 1987), including among its throng a riff on Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo. (top right) An unused alternate cover originally produced for issue #8. (bottom) Paul Gulacy’s Boris the Bear #12 (Oct. 1987) back cover, spoofing James Bond. Scan courtesy of Dave Lemieux. Boris the Bear TM & © James Dean Smith.

of his mind. He started to do comic-book publishing and did Dark Horse Presents. Then he talked to me about Boris, but I didn’t realize at the time, he just wanted to do a one-shot. I did that and we made pretty good money. I talked him into doing another issue and we ended up doing a contract that up to issue #12. The first issue was a lot of fun because I’d never done a comic book before. It sold about 80,000 copies and I convinced him to do another, but things after that kind of went south. I had to leave. I had no choice—he left me no choice, but I don’t want to get into that. CLANCY: How much of the book were you doing? SMITH: He and I were co-plotting all the issues, and I was doing the artwork and all the inking. I think John Workman did the first issue with the lettering, and then I think it was David Jackson, who took over the lettering through issues #12. There might have been someone in between, but I’d have to check. I was doing all the pencils and inking and Gary Martin did three or four pages of inks in issue #3. The rest of the time I was doing my own stuff. CLANCY: Was it a monthly book, or bimonthly? SMITH: It was monthly, but sometimes it was difficult to coordinate a certain person’s time to sit and talk with me to plot the book. A lot of times I’d go home with no plot and no way to work. CLANCY: Did you edit your own book? SMITH: No, no. He had his own editor there. I didn’t have anything to do with that. I’d work out a plot and do quick sketches while we talked and then go home and work on the pages from that. 46 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

CLANCY: This was real early on with Dark Horse, if you were there in 1985. SMITH: Dark Horse started in 1986. I worked in his comic book shop in 1985 and then I left and a couple months later he announced he was starting a company. That’s when we got the Boris thing going and the Dark Horse Presents started. CLANCY: Do you remember any other solo books being done or pitched at the same time? SMITH: Dark Horse Presents was the first and then Boris was the second. Dark Horse Presents was selling around 20,000 and Boris on the first issue sold around 80,000. CLANCY: How did you feel when you saw your comic book out on the stands? SMITH: Excited! People are picking it up and reading it. I felt kind of weird. I’ve always been kind of an introvert, so going to shows and signing autographs just wasn’t in my wheelhouse at the time. Even today, it takes me a couple of hours to warm up to people. CLANCY: Looking back, is there anything you would’ve changed with the series? SMITH: There were a lot of things. Under contract, they wanted to do parodies and I wanted to do more stories, but I was overruled all the time. It was actually after I stopped doing Boris that I looked back a few years later and realized that the stories were okay but not exactly what I wanted to be doing. I was trying to pander to what I thought the fans wanted and not what I wanted. I thought if I do any more stories, they’ll be stories I really want to do, rather than think, “What do the fans want?” I want to do my own thing and I’m sure other people will enjoy my stories, too. CLANCY: In the 1980s, Star Comics was out from Marvel. Did you try to work there? SMITH: No, it’s funny. I’ve never had that kind of itch like other guys who think, “I want to draw Spider-Man,” or “I want to draw Wolverine or Batman or Superman.” I did some samples years ago to show [editor] Archie Goodwin. Randy Emberlin was a buddy of mine and he suggested I do some samples to try and get a job inking backgrounds on Amazing Spider-Man, so I did some samples and went to the show. I think the samples hold up today, even today, and that was 25 years ago. The guy looking at it said, “Can you draw like Jim Lee?” I said, “Nooo, this is my artwork. If you want Jim Lee, go hire Jim Lee. Besides, if you wanted me to draw like Jim Lee, I’d feel like I would need to send half the paycheck to Jim.” It went right over his head, so I said, “Just give me my artwork back.” CLANCY: [chuckles] But Star Comics—you mentioned the Care Bears. Star actually had a comic called Care Bears… and a Heathcliff comic… they had all that. Star Comics was Marvel’s offshoot of that type of stuff and lasted about five years to the late 1980s [see BI #77— ed.]. But you were still at Dark Horse and moved away. SMITH: I started my own company called Nicotat Comics. My biggest problem was, I was an artist but I wasn’t a businessman. I had to do it all by myself. I don’t want to get into a long explanation, but at the same time I was leaving Dark Horse, my mother found out she had ovarian cancer. Within a couple of weeks, she was in for a major operation. So at the same time I was trying to start my own company, my mom was in the hospital. It was the worst time I could have possibly picked to do it, but I was put in the position and I had no choice. It went

okay for a while, but after a while, I’d get people sending me letters for books and I’d have to take time away from my drawing to package something up, run down to the post office, mail stuff out, and then check to see what else had come in. There’d be four or five more letters, so I’d have to package more stuff up, mail them, and then try to get back to the drawing board. The next day, more letters. “Oh, man, I need a break here.” It was nice to have the business coming in, but I had to wear all these hats. I just wanted the one—just to sit down and be an artist. That was not the position I was in. CLANCY: At the height or Boris’ run, the publication was still in the tens of thousands? SMITH: It was slowly dropping from the initial 80,000, to low 40,000s when I left Dark Horse. I started out around 30,000 and then my mother, with the cancer— I was putting the book out every five or six weeks. I had to put the book on hold with issue #25 for about six or seven months because she was getting real bad. After she passed away, it was a couple of months before I could get started again. Once I did get going

Self-Published Boris Smith started Nicotat Comics as the home for Boris the Bear but soon discovered the perils of being a publisher. Covers for 1987 issues parodying Marvel’s Punisher and DC’s Howard Chaykin version of Blackhawk. Boris the Bear TM & © James Dean Smith.

Mirth in the Marshlands Examples of Smith’s The Glades comic strip. TM & © James Dean Smith.

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Punchy, Ain’t He? (left) From the collection of Shaun Clancy, a James Dean Smith Boris commission produced on October 26, 2019. (top right) Smith at a Pacific Northwest convention in 2019, holding the Boris the Bear Hulk and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agent lampoon commissions he produced for interviewer Shaun Clancy. Also shown are scans of both illustrations. Boris the Bear TM & © James Dean Smith. Photo by Shaun Clancy.

again, sales really dropped down to around 10,000. CLANCY: So, from the 1990s to today, what has gone on with Boris? SMITH: Basically, I did another three or four books in the mid-1990s. That was just prior to the collapse of the independents. The numbers weren’t enough—only selling [5,000] or 6,000 copies, which was barely enough to pay the printing costs. I made a few dollars, but not much else. The market changed for Boris. CLANCY: Have you ever thought of assembling them in a trade format? SMITH: Well, I got approached quite a while back from Dark Horse, but no, I don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore even though I penciled up to issue #40. I never got around to finishing those books. I went out of business, so I said, “What’s the point?” CLANCY: You have six issues worth of finished pencils, just not inked but lettered, ready to go? SMITH: Well, I always thought about doing what Dave Sim did with Cerebus. He did Swords of Cerebus and took four or five issues and put them in a bound volume. So I thought about doing something like that with my issues, starting with issue #13. Maybe I’ll do that down the road.

CLANCY: After Boris the Bear, you mentioned to me about something you were working on. Can you tell BACK ISSUE readers something about it? SMITH: It’s called The Glades, based out of the Everglades. When I originally came up with it—I was a big fan of the Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, he had that show on Animal Planet, always jumping on different things and I always liked his style—so I thought about doing something in the Everglades. I’d have a kooky park ranger always getting involved with the animals. Then Steve was killed, so I put it on the back burner. Then I thought I could still do something with the animals and maybe I’d introduce a park ranger later. I have been working on it since around 2005. CLANCY: Do you do thumbnails? SMITH: Yeah. Always to see where I’m going, and I do snippets of dialogue, too. It guides me when I’m writing the scripts myself. CLANCY: If you were approached by IDW today to launch a miniseries, would you be open to that? SMITH: They contacted me well over ten or 12 years ago about a Boris collection. I told them it wouldn’t work because I’d have to do something with Dark Horse and I don’t want anything to do with them. CLANCY: Do you have cases of unsold Boris books? SMITH: Oh, yes. Do you need some? [laughter] SHAUN CLANCY started collecting comics in 1975 at the age of eight, when his father brought home a Charlton horror comic for him to read, and today collects original comic art and interviews with many creators of comics, old-time radio, and television. He currently owns a heating and air-conditioning company in the Seattle area.

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by A l l a n

Harvey

The story of a young girl who discovers she was born heir to a vast alien empire and is in fact one of the most powerful psionic weapons in the universe, A Distant Soil first flowed from the pen of writer/artist Colleen Doran when she was herself a teenager, not much older than her heroine. But even at that tender age, Doran had been drawing, and dreaming of a life as an artist, for some considerable time: at age five, Walt Disney came calling… “I don’t really remember that much about it,” says Doran. “There was a contest to draw a Valentine’s Day card for Mickey Mouse, so I did, and I remember winning and being very happy, and people asking, ‘Did your mother draw that for you?’ and being really offended by that, and it just set me off for the rest of my life! [laughs] Because, forever and ever, when you’re an artist and you do something, people are, like, ‘Did you really do that? Did you copy that?’ Oh, so irritating, it drove me nuts! It actually hampered my growth as an artist, I think, because I was so angry about it, so neurotic about being accused of copying things, I wouldn’t use reference. I was well into my professional years before I would use reference. It was ridiculous.” As a young child she regularly read comics and newspaper strips. She was especially fond of Aquaman, and a voracious collector of the Prince Valiant Sunday strips. Each week she would dutifully clip them out and save them in a special box. Unfortunately, relates Doran, “When I was about ten years old, we moved out of the city into a tiny town, and my parents threw away my comics. So, I didn’t see any comics again for a while; you could not buy them where I lived. “And then I got pneumonia when I was 12. I was very, very sick, and had to be hospitalized. Someone gave me this big box of comics, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God!’ Up until then I thought it would be nice to work for Disney; I thought that’s what colleen doran artists got to do. The idea of actually being a cartoonist and drawing comic books didn’t occur to me until I got that big box, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is what I want to do,’ and I just went for it. I mean, I certainly had my dreams of maybe being an astronaut, and, as a practical matter, I thought I was going to be a doctor, but what I really wanted to do was be a cartoonist. And, 24/7, it was comics, comics, comics, from then on in. “I started sending out samples right away. I was sending out samples and getting rejection letters at 12; it was very funny. [laughs]”

Girl with the Power! Liana Scott, the mysterious girl at the heart of A Distant Soil, lets rip with the psionic abilities that mark her out as a much sought-after weapon and brings down her pursuers, much to her own amazement. Brent, Galahad, and Chris look on in wonderment. From A Distant Soil #10 (Dec. 1994). All art and captions accompanying this article are courtesy of Allan Harvey. A Distant Soil TM & © Colleen Doran.

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Rockin’ the ’70s! Jason Scott in his early superhero form, drawn in the days when Colleen was a regular contributor to fanzines and APAs and Jason was hanging with the likes of Aquaman and the Teen Titans. Dave Cockrum and his revolutionary designs for the Legion of Super-Heroes was clearly a big influence on the young artist. As A Distant Soil developed into space opera over time, the superhero trappings were left behind. © Colleen Doran.

Teen Spirit! Amazingly, this page of a Legend of King Arthur strip was drawn by Colleen Doran when she was just 13 years old. Her interest in Arthurian legends goes back to her childhood and eventually resulted in Sir Galahad joining the cast of A Distant Soil years later. © Colleen Doran.

INSPIRATIONS

With Doran barely into adolescence, the ideas that would eventually develop into her magnum opus, A Distant Soil, were already percolating through her mind, colliding and coalescing to form ever grander and more complex plots from the unlikeliest of sources. “It started because I was doing Aquaman fanfic. I was designing characters and whatnot, and I basically came up with this Mary-Sue character that could communicate with land animals, and she got to be Aquaman’s girlfriend. Believe it or not, she ended up morphing into Liana from A Distant Soil. It seems like a stretch, but it was the idea of having mind powers and so on. “Originally, A Distant Soil was a superhero yarn. In fact, there were characters from the Teen Titans in it. I was just coming up with my own characters and doing this fanfic. As I went along, I realized I was shedding trappings of the superhero stuff and taking it more and more into space opera. Eventually, everyone lost their costumes, and suddenly it was just a space opera. It was me playing with the characters, over and over, until it became something else.”

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Comics weren’t the only influence on the nascent series. Young Doran’s television habit also played its part, with cartoons such as Super Friends and The Space Sentinels adding to the mix. “The Space Sentinels was a very early influence on A Distant Soil. There was a lady in there, Astra, who could change into animals. That’s pretty much where Bast came from. There was a character called Mercury; he was Asian. That’s where Brent came from, although I ended up basing him on one of my high school classmates. And the character Hercules, that’s where Galahad came from. I was a big King Arthur fan, of course, but that kind of look, that’s where some of those A Distant Soil characters came from. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s what happened.” Doran was also picking up ideas from one of the best: the legendary Jack Kirby. Kirby had recently returned to Marvel Comics, following a stint at DC, and was writing and drawing a series that closely hewed to notions of alien visitations in the distant past. Ideas that were at the time promoted in books such as Chariot of the Gods? by Erich von Daniken. “Jack Kirby’s Eternals. I loved it. I thought it was brilliant. Things like the Deviants, that’s where all that Variant stuff came from in A Distant Soil. Now, of course, my art doesn’t look a thing like Kirby’s, but his wild ideas were a big influence on me. It’s all that stuff that was in the zeitgeist then. I had all these books, Mysteries of the Unexplained, and Ancient Pyramids, all that kind of stuff. We all know it’s bullcrap, but it was popular then.

“There was also that British TV show, The Tomorrow People, with all the psychic kids. That was definitely in my head when I was working on this stuff. “Every time you found something, no matter what it was, if it was the worst TV show in the world, if it was geek-oriented, you just glommed onto it like it was wonderful. We would watch anything. We watched The Man from Atlantis, which was terrible. The Phoenix, which was terrible. And I know The Phoenix was an influence on A Distant Soil as well. “A Distant Soil is just a melting pot of ’70s pop culture or geek culture that congealed and became this weird comic book thing some kid was doing in the middle of nowhere. [laughs]”

The Gang’s All Here A character sheet showing various A Distant Soil characters early on, during the WaRP Graphics era. This series is distinguished by its being drawn in a laborious tonal pencil technique, which meant each page could take days to complete. Eventually, the decision was made to move the series to a more conventional inked style. The prominent presence of Dacia here reveals her original importance in the storyline, but she would be played down in later iterations. A Distant Soil TM & © Colleen Doran.

FALSE STARTS

Out of this mélange came more concrete ideas, and Doran began to submit drawings of early versions of her characters to various fanzines. “I remember doing some fanzine stuff really early on, 1979, 1980. Any time I would get a chance to work on a zine, I would just be drawing my characters. I’d do pinups of them, or little two- or three-page stories with them, where they’d be standing around talking. I’d just send them out. Nobody would know who they were, but I would know, and it made me happy to draw them.” This activity eventually drew the attention of the editors at book publisher Donning, and through them Doran was put in contact with WaRP Graphics, which had been publishing ElfQuest. Not yet out of her teens, Doran was finally was able to bring her story into the world. Following a preview in ElfQuest #16 (June 1983), the original A Distant Soil series ran for nine issues (a tenth remains unpublished) between 1983 and 1986, and is distinguished by its mostly being drawn in an unusual, and painstaking, tonal pencil style. It was not a happy experience for Doran and these days she prefers not to talk about it, considering the series an abortive “first go.” Soon after, she found herself back with Donning and offered it a whole new version of A Distant Soil to be published through its Starblaze imprint. Doran started over from scratch for a projected series of oversize graphic novels, in color for the first time, and while the story was basically the same, the art and dialogue were completely new. Unfortunately, although it promised much, within two years this new start was dead: Donning closed and sold off Starblaze. Before the imprint folded in 1989, however, Doran was able to complete two books— Immigrant Song and Knights of the Angel—which together comprise roughly the first act of the overall narrative.

ARIA PRESS

At this point, with two failed attempts behind them, most creatives would have given up, but Doran, disappointed as she undoubtedly was, was made of sterner stuff: if she was going to tell her story, she was going to have to do it on her own. By the early 1990s, only a very few pioneering comics creators had been brave enough to even attempt casting aside the perceived shackles of the large publishers and go it alone. Dave Sim (Cerebus the Aardvark) is a name that instantly springs to mind when considering self-publishers; Jeff Smith (Bone), another. Doran boldly chose to join these rarefied ranks by setting up her own publishing company, Aria Press. “The word ‘aria’ means ‘solo, with accompaniment,’ so I thought that would be a good word to describe the company, because it acknowledges that you’re doing stuff alone, but that you’re never entirely on your own; you always have people helping you.”

Typewriter at the Ready On only a very few occasions has Colleen written a full script for herself to draw. This is the first page of the script for Knights of the Angel, the second—and final—graphic novel of the Donning series, from 1989. TM & © Colleen Doran.

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She quickly found that owning a publishing company wasn’t going to be smooth sailing. “It has its ups and downs. I really liked knowing how the business worked. I think it gave me a much better understanding of how my publishers worked, and why they make some of the choices they do. Why they need so much lead time. Why it’s important to get things done by certain dates. As a creator, you don’t necessarily know these things— and they don’t tell you. They just give you an arbitrary date, and never give you a reason why you can’t have an extra two weeks! I liked knowing why all these things worked the way they do. I liked acquiring that knowledge, but there were definitely some things I didn’t like about it. Such as your distributor going bankrupt and not paying you, which is always fun. [laughs] “All kinds of weird stuff happens when you’re self-publishing. There’s the assumption that you’re either really rich, or really poor. I think people have a very hard time with the concept of a middle-class creator; neither rich, nor poor. You get crap from both sides. From the bottom, you’re the low-hanging fruit, so people go for you. And, from the top, you get bullied. So, you get hammered by both sides! “I had tons of mail: I was getting a foot of mail a day. A foot of mail. A day. It was a nightmare! Tons of people sending me samples. I kept saying, ‘I’m not a publisher, I’m not a publisher, I’m not a publisher.’ Many of the things I was getting were really gross and offensive. I was so wrapped up in doing the right thing for people, I felt, at first, that I had to answer all of this mail. [laughs] It was the biggest mistake I ever made. It was a huge time-sink, and a huge energy-drain. It just stacked up and stacked up. It was a nightmare. I would actually get hate-mail, or have people chewing me out at conventions, because, you know, ‘You’re a publisher and you didn’t answer my mail.’ I’d try to tell them, ‘I’m a self-publisher. I don’t publish other people.’ “In terms of being able to do exactly what I wanted, self-publishing was great, but you need to have a lot of physical and mental energy to be a self-publisher, and you need to be organized. I’ll tell you now, from the beginning, I had no clue how to get and keep my papers together. There were always financial limitations, and there were physical limitations. I didn’t know then—though I do now—that I had chronic health issues, which have been up and down for decades now. I would have these weird surges of energy and then my plug gets pulled and I’m useless for weeks. I’m very vulnerable to getting sick. I never knew what that was. People would denigrate me as being unreliable, or flaky, and that’s been a criticism toward me since the very beginning. Of course, now I know what it is, but it was very frustrating to have to deal with.” Despite the challenges, Doran relished the chance to prove herself and made the most of the opportunity. The Aria run of A Distant Soil commenced in 1991 as a series of regular-format comics in black and white, with color covers. The cover art was new, but the interiors were mainly a reprinting of the Starblaze material with the occasional newly drawn panel thrown into the mix to heighten tension or extend a scene. New tone sheets were also added to the art in places to beef up backgrounds and to compensate for the loss of the color from the previous edition. A brand-new backup series, Seasons of Spring, written and drawn by Doran, ran in the early issues, allowing readers to explore the backstory of A Distant Soil’s main protagonists. A Distant Soil #1 (June 1991) begins the story of Liana and Jason, a teenaged sister and brother, who have been incarcerated in a mysterious institute for years, being experimented upon by scientists. Their parents are dead, having seemingly been murdered. The pair exhibit psionic abilities, can

Magic Man (top) Eventually appearing as the back cover to A Distant Soil #29 (Mar. 2000), Colleen’s full-color painting of magician Dunstan was originally executed in the mid-1980s. (bottom) Sir Galahad, famed hero of Arthurian legend and late of Camelot, makes his entrance in A Distant Soil #5 (June 1993). He was originally intended to be the star of a completely separate story, but Colleen Doran instead folded him into her space opera. Just why he’s there, and what his presence means, has yet to be revealed by the writer/artist. A Distant Soil TM & © Colleen Doran.

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communicate telepathically, and are usually kept sedated to control them. However, at a rare get-together, Jason’s power asserts itself, things go haywire, and he and Liana decide to escape in the ensuing chaos. On the run, the pair are separated, and Jason is captured by unseen forces. Liana seeks help from Brent, a street gang member, who takes her under his wing. While this is happening, aliens Rieken and D’Mer arrive on Earth. They, too, are pursuing Liana and Jason, as, indeed, are the massed forces of the evil Hierarchy who are aboard the huge Ovanan starship, The Siovansin, which is in orbit around the Moon. Who the Ovanan are, what the Hierarchy is after, why Liana and Jason are important to Rieken, how legendary Arthurian knight Sir Galahad is involved, and what this all means for the fate of the Earth, are just a few of the threads that make up the complex, and ongoing, saga that is A Distant Soil… Rich in character and plot, the series is also an exemplary exercise in world building. The Ovanan have a fully realised culture, and their origins, customs, politics, and laws are explored as the series develops. The Hierarchy may be evil to our way of thinking, but they have a reason for doing what they do and are, in many ways, prisoners of their history, and Doran never shies away from showing their depravity along the way. Their behavior is often casually brutal, and the reader is shocked at what they’re witnessing. The series has also won praise for its groundbreaking, positive portrayal of LGBTQIA+ issues, long before such things were more commonplace in comics, with Rieken and D’Mer surely being one of the great gay couples in the medium. That said, the characters’ sexuality and sexual identities are just a part of what makes them who they are; and are never depicted or discussed purely for prurient reasons. The human cast, assembled by Rieken for a daring mission against the Hierarchy, are a disparate bunch, diverse in ethnicity and background. Gang member Brent is Hawaiian, Minetti is a police officer of Italian extraction,

Chris is a middle-class African-American doctor, Serezha is a Jewish Russian dissident, and so on. The Ovanan are similarly diversified, and we see those of the highest status in their society contrasted against the lowest. “A lot of the characters were based on people I knew,” explains Doran. “Brent was based on a kid I knew at school. Minetti was the name of the police chief where my father worked. Corrine… she just came out of nowhere. She was somebody I wished I was more like, because she was so sassy and fun; kind of an Auntie Mame character. Reynaldo, he came from… well, when we first moved, there was this Hispanic family that had just come to our school, and they couldn’t speak very good English. That’s my memory, and that might be false, but they weren’t treated very well. I didn’t know any Hispanic people growing up, except for these people. I remember being very upset about how they were treated, and I never forgot it. I thought, ‘Why are they being nasty to these people?’ I just didn’t get that at all, and it made an impression on me. So, that’s where Reynaldo came from. “Serezha… I was very interested in Russia, growing up. I used to subscribe to Soviet Life magazine when I was a kid. [laughs] Everybody needs a hobby, I guess! [laughs] Serezha came out of my readings about the Young Pioneers, sort of like the Russian version of the Boy Scouts. His look actually came from The Man from Atlantis; he was sort of a Patrick Duffy-looking character. But I think I still have drawings of him wearing a Young Pioneer uniform—which, of course, he doesn’t do in the book—but I remember drawing the little neckerchief and the uniform on the character. “Chris came from a guy in our school who was our student class president. He was really well-liked, popular, attractive, respected. And Dunstan… I don’t know where the hell he came from, honestly. [laughs] I have no idea! “You know, if I thought of something, or liked it, it went into the book. That’s how it happened. What can I say?! [laughs]”

Variants on Earth (left) Fleeing persecution, the Ovanan Variants arrive on Earth and attempt to integrate into its culture, as explained by the beautiful shapeshifter, Bast, in this full-page tableau from A Distant Soil #10 (Dec. 1994). The inspiration for the Variants came from the Deviants in Jack Kirby’s The Eternals. (right) Tasked with training the Resistance’s new recruits, D’Mer begins breaking them in. Brent and Chris take a beating while the cool Serezha looks on, in this action-packed page from A Distant Soil #15 (Aug. 1996), the first issue published under the Image banner. A Distant Soil TM & © Colleen Doran.

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Jason is a Disruptor (left) This delicate preliminary pencil sketch for the cover to A Distant Soil #21 (Sept. 1997) shows Jason testing his power to disrupt machinery while training for a mission to destroy the Avatar. (inset) The finished cover from #21. The original was painted in watercolor. (right) Vain, dissolute, and in control of the ultimate weapon, the Hierarchy represent the dark side of A Distant Soil. Their destruction is the reason our heroes have been gathered together by Rieken, but, unfortunately, they’re often one step ahead. From A Distant Soil #24 (Apr. 1998). A Distant Soil TM & © Colleen Doran.

THE COMICS CRASH AND THE JUMP TO IMAGE

That initial self-published issue sold very well indeed, and eventually went through four printings. Unfortunately, while preparing the second issue, Doran got sick. Very sick. “I got pneumonia. I got the flu. Boy, that was not a good year. It was terrible. I didn’t think I was going to make it. That was expensive on many levels. It hurt me as a self-publisher. It wrecked my health for about a year. I just couldn’t get back on my feet.” The second issue is cover-dated February 1992, the third, January 1993; illness was clearly taking its toll. Doran managed to get back on track and produced issues fairly regularly for the next couple of years, and #12 (Nov. 1995) finally saw her able to move the plot forward, beyond the Starblaze books, with brand-new story and artwork. This, however, proved a mixed blessing: “It felt good returning to new material. It was nerve-wracking, though. I’d just started lettering my own stuff, and my lettering was terrible. I was just the worst letterer. It was awful. And, I didn’t realize how much my art had changed. When I was at Donning, I think the art started out all right, and then, after about 60-pages, I made a stylistic change that I think was a big mistake. I remember making the change and thinking this would be edgier and stronger, but I look back and think that was a big mistake.” Doran was back at the drawing board producing new A Distant Soil for the first time in

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nearly seven years, but the comics landscape was changing. The hugely successful, speculatordriven comics boom of the early 1990s came crashing to a halt. Publishers were hurting, and series were being cancelled. As the writer-artist explains, “The comic-book industry went kablooey. It was, like, ‘My God, the comic-book industry has just imploded!’ That was because Marvel bought Heroes World [Distribution], and that was all she wrote. A lot of people now don’t remember, but we had something like 14 to 16 distributors. Some of them were really small companies, but there were all these distribution outlets for comics. And, suddenly, we were down to two—maybe four— and everybody else went bankrupt. There went our money; we couldn’t get paid. It was a nightmare. I couldn’t believe it; it was the worst luck.” After just one more new issue (#13, June 1996), the series—and Aria Press—came to a premature end with a hastily thrown together “sketchbook issue” (#14, Aug. 1996), a compendium of preliminary sketches, fan art, and pinups, alongside a brief history of the development of A Distant Soil. However, all was not lost, and salvation lay just around the corner: “I was talking to Erik Larsen, and he was, like, ‘Why don’t you bring it to Image?’ I asked if he was for real, but he said, ‘Sure, just bring it on over!’ Okay! So that was the end of Aria Press and the beginning of my time at Image.”

With issue #15 (Aug. 1996), the Image logo adorned the cover and Doran was able to continue her story under the relatively safe umbrella of a major publisher. The Image business model was akin to self-publishing anyway, so she had little editorial interference and could continue to do whatever she wanted with the series, as long as it continued to sell. Issues came out with renewed regularity for several years, but, as the new millennium dawned, the gaps between issues widened, until, eventually, following issue #38 (Dec. 2006), the series went on an indefinite hiatus. For Doran it was a purely pragmatic decision. “Sales were okay— certainly more than okay by today’s standards—but there was just no money in it. We were having to go back to press occasionally with trade paperbacks, and every time you do that it’s a huge money drain. All the money in the comics is actually in the trade paperbacks. In the early 2000s, there was another distributor bankruptcy, one that was a distributor of the trades. So, we went for a period where we didn’t get any money on the trades, and that was where all our profit was. “If the trades weren’t making money, then the comic couldn’t go forward. It got to be more and more of a drag. If it took me two months to do the comic, that’s two months I’m not getting paid. I’ve got to do the comic and then wait for a profit, which may not be until a year later. You can’t sustain that. It’s not because the comic doesn’t sell; the comic sells very decent small press numbers. It’s that all of the real money is in the trade paperback. “Every time we went to trades, and every time we had to go back to press, it was a huge outlay. And that one hit from the bankrupt distributor wasn’t pretty. We just had to sort of limp along, putting the comics out when we could afford to put them out, which doesn’t please anyone.” Around this time, it became clear that the entire future of A Distant Soil was in doubt. The majority of the material that made up issues #1–38 had been collected in four trade paperbacks. These had been selling consistently well and had, in fact, sold out. Going back to press was going to be the only way to finance the end of the series. However, there was a big problem: all the material needed to reprint the books had been thrown away! “The fourth trade came out and did really well,” explains Doran. “Production-wise, Volume 4 was pretty weak. I’d had a friend of mine who’d insisted he was capable of doing the production work on it, but he did not do a good job. It took a while to get all the artwork back, and then I think we had a week or so to get the book to the printer. Not actually knowing how to scan the art, I had to scan the art, which I did all wrong. [laughs] “I turned it in, but the book came out badly scanned and badly designed. It made me sad. However, it sold out very quickly. So, we needed to go back to press with that and, I think, Volume 1, but we couldn’t. That was when we found out the printer had gone bankrupt and thrown out all of our inventory. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we’re screwed.’ It was not a good day. “They had had all our negatives, but they threw them all out. They didn’t just do it to my book, they did it to many, many books. It was nothing personal, it was just them clearing out their archives because they figured they were never going to use this stuff again. It was a major bummer because they were actually being paid to archive the material, but because they were bankrupt, they knew that there would be no penalty toward screwing over their customers. They threw everything out. I can’t remember exactly how long, but it was over a year before the printer finally admitted they didn’t have our archives. [laughs] We were asking and asking, and they were, like, ‘We’ll get them to you.’ Eventually they said, ‘We just don’t have them.’ That meant we had no way to go back to press. “One of the ways I’d helped finance A Distant Soil over the years was selling the original art. And, where I’d scanned my art, I’d done it incorrectly, thanks to poor instruction—not that that’s anyone else’s responsibility but mine—so all the scans I had were useless. So, I had no art, no negatives, and no useable scans. It was a frickin’ nightmare! “Each book is a $15–20,000 print cost investment, and that was four books that were now out of print. That’s a chunk of change: $80,000 right there. A good deal of the cost of printing the book was in the negatives. That’s a huge chunk of the cost, and we didn’t have them anymore. “I thought that just killed my project. But, it didn’t.”

Seren Screams! In this penciled preliminary sketch for the cover of A Distant Soil #30 (Aug. 2000), a distraught Seren screams as he cradles the Liana and Jason. Are they dead, or merely unconscious? The reader will have to open the comic to find out… (inset) The final, painted cover to issue #30. The cool, dark tones chosen add to the oppressive atmosphere as the story takes an unexpected turn. A Distant Soil TM & © Colleen Doran.

An American Artist in London Colleen Doran channels her inner Pre-Raphaelite while visiting the Tate Britain art gallery in London in September 2017. This spontaneous drawing was left behind for some lucky recipient to find. Photo by Allan Harvey.

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Gathering and Ascending (top left) The cover to A Distant Soil: The Gathering (2013), the first volume of the digitally remastered edition of Doran’s space opera magnum opus. The die-cut cover partially reveals psionic siblings Jason and Liana within. The book design was by Jim Valentino. (top right) The Ascendant (2014) is the second volume of the digitally remastered ADS. For this edition, Seren and his lover D’Mer are partially hidden by the die-cut cover. (bottom) Colleen reveals her sensitive side in this tonal pencil piece depicting (clockwise from top), Bast, Seren, and D’Mer. Their Facebook status would read, “It’s complicated!” A Distant Soil TM & © Colleen Doran.

It’s at this point that your humble author enters the narrative, as Doran continues: “You said, ‘I think I can do the job of restoring this.’ To be honest, I was a little reluctant to hire you as I’d had trouble hiring people that insisted they could do jobs they couldn’t. No names. [laughs] I was really nervous. You did a sample, and it was amazing, and I figured this could really work.” With over 20 years of photographic experience behind me, I was able to make high-resolution scans of the earlier trade paperbacks and digitally clean and enhance them to look as good as new. I similarly cleaned any original art pages Colleen was able to scare up, either from her own files or from begging fans who had bought artwork to allow her to scan their purchases. After a number of months, clean digital files had been created for all the pages and a new, restored edition of the first volume of A Distant Soil (The Gathering) was published by Image in 2013, alongside four new issues (#39–42, Apr.–Oct. 2013). The process was repeated for a second volume (The Ascendant) the following year, and, with Colleen now actively working on producing the finale to the series (#50 is the expected conclusion), it’s hoped that the remainder of the material will be made available in restored editions in the near future. Once the series is complete and collected, Colleen expects to go back and finish off the Seasons of Spring prequel storyline. “I’m financing the end of the book through Patreon, which has made all the difference in the world. It’s paid me a page rate; it’s paying me as well as if I were being paid by a publisher, which I never thought I’d see the day. This is pretty much the only time in my career where I’ve been paid a page rate to do A Distant Soil. There’s more of an audience now for it than there was ten years ago. I don’t know what happened. I’m not looking it in the eye, but there’s more of an audience now, not just for A Distant Soil, but for my work in general. I don’t get it, but I guess the market tastes have changed in my favor. “I’m happy. It’s made an enormous difference for me. I have an audience now, and, wow, I’ll take it! I have no concern about being able to finish. When I sit down to work on it, I don’t worry every minute that I’m going into debt. I just don’t think that way anymore. “When we last brought A Distant Soil out of mothballs, around 2013, it was terrifying. Every month I worked on it, I was thinking, ‘Well, there goes $3,000…’ Three, six, nine, 12… that is a huge financial loss every time I worked on this book, and it was driving me crazy. I was so sick. And I’ve paid all that off! So, now when I’m doing it, I not only don’t lose money on it, but I make enough to do the kind of art on it that I wish I’d been able to do before. Now, if I want to spend two or three days on a page, I can do that. I’m no longer killing myself to do a page a day. I don’t need to do that. I can spend as many days as I like on a page and really kick it and do exactly what I want to do on it. It’s amazing to me to be able to do that.” And, as for future dreams, beyond the finale and Seasons of Spring, Doran does have one: “I’d love to have a color edition at some point. That would be like winning the lottery.” And, having come this far, who would bet against her? A hearty thanks to Colleen Doran for an engaging and enlightening chat. ALLAN HARVEY makes a living digitally restoring old comics for new reprint editions. His most recent projects include Kona, Air War Stories, and Atlas at War! www.allanharveyrestoration.com

56 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

by M

ichael Eury

If you put a gun to my head—which both Sam & Max would not hesitate to do—and force me to categorize Sam & Max: Freelance Police, I guess I’d brand it “Funny Animals.” But not the kind of huggable funny animals that greet vacationing families at major amusement parks or hawk sugar-laced breakfast cereals and auto insurance in TV commercials. Sam & Max, as is the tradition of funny-animal cartoons and comics, display human characteristics. In their case, though, they’re the kind of humans you’d probably divert eye contact from, or cross the street to avoid if you saw them strolling in your direction. ’Cause when these private investigators are on a case, stuff breaks—laws, glass, limbs (tree and human), the fourth wall, and most of all, your funny bone. Sam is a dog. A six-foot-tall, talking Irish Wolfhound. He’s the straight man of our duo, except he’s not a man, although he dresses like one, in a Kolchak-worthy crumpled suit, tie, and fedora. Sam is a walking encyclopedia of obscure knowledge. I’d really like to see him on Jeopardy. Max is a rabbit. I think. No, make that a lagomorph. He’s a frenetic, three-foot agent of chaos with an off-kilter, toothy grin so insidious it would purse the Joker’s ruby lips. Max carries a concealed weapon, but since he’s buck-naked Sam wonders where he packs the thing. When together on a case—which might involve combatting a coven of devil worshippers to prairie-dog-looting pirates to Moon-invading giant cockroaches to brain-infesting earwigs— Sam & Max are relentless pursuers of justice. As long as they get to wreck stuff along the way. In Sam’s black-and-white police car (a customized DeSoto Adventurer), Sam & Max’s travels have taken them everywhere from road trips to intergalactic journeys, and from comic books to video games to television animation. Driving them on their wild rides isn’t Sam, however, it’s Steve Purcell. A cartoonistturned-game designer-turned animator, Purcell—after stints at LucasArts and Industrial Light & Magic—landed at Pixar, where he remains today. As one of the main creators of Pixar’s 2012 hit Brave, Steve and his colleagues are 2013 Academy Award winners for that film. He is also, along with his longtime pals Arthur Adams and Mike Mignola, the inventor of what should be the national pastime, steve purcell fizzball, a game whose objective is to whack a tossed beer can with a stick or 2007 photo by Jeffrey Pidgeon. axe handle. I had the pleasure of working with Steve Purcell—twice!—in 1988 as his editor at Comico the Comic Company on the one-shots Gumby’s Winter Fun Special, written by Steve and illustrated by Arthur Adams (see BACK ISSUE #85), and Sam & Max: Freelance Police Special, written and drawn by Steve, with colors by Rick Taylor. And rarely was work ever that much fun. Steve’s scripts, dripping with sardonic comments and utterly insane plots and characters, were LOL-worthy long before “laugh out loud” became an acronym. As I pen this intro in the spring of 2020, we’re all in lockdown from the coronavirus pandemic and could use a good laugh. Fortunately for me, rereading Sam & Max comics has lifted my spirits. Steve has taken the time during this extraordinary period to answer my questions via email, so let’s kick back and learn a little about Sam & Max, shall we? – Michael Eury

Just an Ordinary Day Sam & Max 2017 postcard image. Unless otherwise noted, all images accompanying this interview are courtesy of Steve Purcell. Sam & Max: Freelance Police TM & © Steve Purcell.

Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 57

Arrested Development (top) Steve Purcell’s Freelance Police badge. Jealous? (bottom) The boys and a rat on the run. Max’s teeth are scary, aren’t they? Sam & Max: Freelance Police TM & © Steve Purcell.

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MICHAEL EURY: What kind of training or certification does one have to go through to become a freelance police officer? STEVE PURCELL: I was both shocked and delighted when I realized that anyone could order an authentic police badge with whatever they wanted printed on it. When I was living in Oakland, I flipped through a glossy catalog and picked out a likely-looking design, ordered it with “Freelance Police” embossed, and added the special wallet with a little window pocket holding a slip of paper with Miranda Rights printed on it. Picked it up at this ancient metal workshop in an industrial neighborhood. I think the preparation to become a freelance “cop” is not much more that that. EURY: It’s an oft-told tale that has been etched onto stone tablets and scratched onto bathroom walls, but legend has it that Sam & Max were inspired by a dog and rabbit combo that your younger brother Dave came up with. Tell me that story. PURCELL: Me and my kid brother David were always making little books and comics. He had different characters he would return to like Moo-Hoo Man. Sam & Max were detective animals and that happened to be the subject of one of his unfinished comics he left lying around. For some reason I finished drawing his comic in a parody of the way a kid draws, and had them commenting on how they drawn wrong, as well as forgetting which character they were. On top of that, they happily committed horrific violence on their enemies. Eventually David lost interest in Sam & Max and I started to make stories out of them, using their parody personas. EURY: Were the names “Sam” and “Max” in reference to anyone specific, or just pulled from a hat? PURCELL: Those were the names he gave them. I kept the names and the detective premise and out of the mean parody the characters sort of revealed who they wanted to be over time. He eventually gave them to me for my birthday one year with an “official” document. EURY: Like a lot of fans, I discovered Sam & Max in 1987 in their one-shot comic book from Fishwrap Productions, but some West Coast readers encountered them earlier as a comic strip in the newsletter of the California College of Arts and Craft. When did Sam & Max make their actual first appearance, and how did those early strips differ from the Sam & Max comics, games, and cartoons we’d later get to know? PURCELL: West Coast readers would have been the handful of art students who picked up that school paper every week, including Mike Mignola, who I hadn’t met yet. I’d call the Fishwrap edition the actual first appearance. When Fish Police creator Steve Moncuse asked me if I wanted to do a comic for him to publish, I gave myself four months to write and draw a 32-page book. Up until then I had only done the school strip and one-off sketches and a few ugly one-pagers for my own amusement. When I sat down to do the comic I had to decide what style I would use, since I had cobbled all that other stuff together with not a lot of thought. So I would call that first book more thoughtful than anything that came before it and the baseline for everything after. EURY: How did Sam & Max transition from a comic strip in a newsletter to an actual comic book? PURCELL: I had dabbled with a few other strips before Sam & Max. Donut Driver, about my adventures delivering donuts to mini-marts in Sacramento, How to Make a Sled Kite Out of the School Paper, Spontaneous Human Combustion, and mean parodies of another cartoonists’ Moebius-like sci-fi strip. At some point I thought I’d try a Sam & Max and I slapped it together the night before it was due. A few more followed. All of those pieces were one-offs, and so for the book, for the first time I needed a story that could go on for a stretch. I started to think of things that I was interested in at the time and stringing them together like story cards. I knew I needed to help the audience understand who the characters are, so there’s kind of a day-in-the-life portion at the beginning. I also decided I wanted to interrupt the story with

Old Yeller (top) Behold, Steve Purcell’s first art school strip featuring Sam & Max! We believe this dates back to, what, the 1650s? (bottom) Early Sam & Max one-shots, from Fishwrap and Comico. TM & © Steve Purcell.

Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 59

Nearly Departed (left) A Sam & Max afterlife adventure. (right) Sam & Max Christmas card. From the collection of Michael Eury. (opposite) More Sam & Max goodies. Sam & Max TM & © Steve Purcell.

self-contained pages, almost like segments in a TV show. And somehow I added a little short story at the back with the obscure deus ex machina Rubber Pants Commandos. I figured I might never do another comic (which was close to true), so I put in everything I thought would be fun. EURY: L. Lois Buhalis lettered your Sam & Max comic books. What makes Lois the perfect letterer for Sam & Max? PURCELL: Lois always “got it,” and knew how to design the dialog so it would read as matter of fact, with the integration of the sound effects falling into the flow seamlessly. I would write the scripts by hand and drive the pages down to her in San Francisco. She would tell me that the dialog read like I was talking to myself. It was always a thrill to pick up the pages and see the gorgeous lettering waiting to be surrounded by the art. I would redesign the panels a bit to make the best use of how the word balloons fell into the page. EURY: After the Sam & Max 1987 Fishwrap blackand-white one-shot, the characters would occasionally

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pop up in a one-shot or story at different publishers. Why the revolving door of publishers? PURCELL: When it came time to consider a second issue, I think Steve Moncuse was feeling a bigger publisher might benefit the book. He wasn’t possessive about it at all. Also, when I had a chance to do a few pages for some other magazine, I would do it if I had time. I was still doing freelance illustration and character design for various companies. Comics weren’t my full-time job, though, I had taken a stab at a few “straight” comics projects for Marvel along the way. Sometime after Comico published Sam & Max, they closed shop. Carl Potts was an editor at Marvel/ Epic and a fan of the comics, and so he gave them a home there for a couple of books. We had planned a three-issue anthology of Sam & Max with some of my other characters. It was going to be called The Sam & Max Show. I had written Rusty Razorclam for Mike Mignola to illustrate and written something called Skullboy which Art Adams had fully laid out. Around that time I was at Skywalker Ranch, and Lucasfilm wanted to adapt the characters for an Adventure Game. The previous Epic Sam & Max books did fine but were hard to find in the comic shops, so I chose to stop work on The Sam & Max Show and focused on creating the game instead. For a while The Sam & Max Show was listed in the Comics Buyer’s Guide, even though it never came out. Years later, me and Mike Mignola would finish Rusty Razorclam and years after that it was published. EURY: So with 1993’s release of the very first of several Sam & Max video games, LucasArts’ Sam & Max Hit the Road, Sam & Max began to grow beyond their cult comic audience. Tell me how that project came about, and what were your challenges in adapting the 2D comic characters to this new medium? PURCELL: Lucasfilm Games was looking for an idea that they could turn around quickly with two of their project leaders, Mike Stemmle and Sean Clarke. Sam & Max were already a presence in the company. I had been doing Sam & Max “Sunday Strips” that parodied each new game release in their company paper. I had done Sam & Max animations and sets for their new game programmers to practice with. I was selling Sam & Max T-shirts and pins in their catalog. But when LucasArts president Kelly Flock proposed licensing the characters for a game, I was blown away that George Lucas’ company was licensing something from me. He said he read the comics to his daughter as bedtime stories. Since the adaption was from 2D drawings to 2D animation for the game, it wasn’t a huge visual stretch. Mike and Sean knew the comics, so tonally they understood how to write for the characters. I had recently done the Sam & Max on the Road comic, and so we decided to

TM & © Steve Purcell.

base the game on a road trip. The number of locations could grow or shrink based on what we needed for the story. EURY: Were you personally involved with the casting of the game’s Bill Farmer as Sam and Nick Jameson as Max? Did you already “hear” Sam & Max’s voices in your head and look for someone who could bring that to life, or conversely were you open to what auditioning voice actors might bring to your characters? PURCELL: A voice I often heard in my head for Sam was Donald Sutherland, but that seemed like a pretty unlikely option. Another actor with a different sound was Steve Landesberg from the Barney Miller show. We reached out but his agent wasn’t interested in talking. Our casting director dropped a box full of demo tapes on my desk at some point and I sifted through them. Though he didn’t sound like Sutherland or Landesberg, Bill Farmer (the official Disney voice of Goofy) stood out. He did a Sam that was understated and sort of dry, which I loved. We hired Nick Jameson to do a Joe Pesci type for Max, which was my initial thought, though other Max actors have tried slightly different takes. Robert Tinkler on the TV series added an element were Max would riff in different impressions occasionally, which I was happy to incorporate. So yeah, I’m open to what the actor will bring. EURY: Sam & Max’s next big leap was to television animation, in The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police, which ran for the 1997–1998 season on Fox Kids. Tell me how you developed the series for TV, and the alterations you made to the concept for kids’ television. PURCELL: It’s funny, but at the time it was wasn’t called “The Adventures of…” I’m not sure when that got added to the title. I remember in pitch meetings sometimes the execs acted puzzled. I remember pitching the concept of the Rubber Pants Commandos, two babies and a chimp brandishing deadly weapons. One exec said, “Isn’t that kind of sick?” I guess all I could do was agree with her. In the first meeting after Fox Kids acquired the series, someone said we needed a girl or that maybe Max could be a girl and we just don’t mention it. I remember saying, “I knew it would get weird, but I didn’t realize it would get weird so soon.” In light of redeveloping Sam & Max for a show I had already invented a rotating Max mascot on the roof of their building, a secret sub-basement of solitude, and a teenage “Q”’ type character that would invent ridiculous weapons and inventions for them to use. We decided to make him into the girl character, calling her Darla Gugenheek, otherwise known as “The Geek.” It’s a trick to add a third character into a duo, so she was in about half the shows as a supporting character so as not to break the buddy dynamic of Sam & Max. EURY: Why do you think the cartoon only lasted one season? PURCELL: Around the time that we were waiting for a possible renewal there was an upset at the network and our exec (who had green-lighted the show) was replaced. A lot of the broadcast contact changed after that. It was frustrating, because it usually takes a series a season to figure out its tone and stride and we had just gotten to that point. EURY: In retrospect, do you think a Sam & Max animated cartoon might be a better fit for older viewers on, say, Adult Swim, a cable premium channel, or a streaming service? PURCELL: Definitely. At the time that wasn’t an option but if I had the chance now I’d certainly aim older. EURY: You produced an Eisner Award-winning Sam & Max webcomic from 2005–2007. What led to that revival, and to its discontinuation? PURCELL: I started it to promote the Telltale Games and the fact that Sam & Max had been out of circulation Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 61

Call Them “Dolls” At Your Own Risk (top left) Boss Fight Studios’ Sam & Max action figures. (bottom left) When in Herefordshire, visit the Church of St. Mary and St. David in Kilpeck for a hound and hare encounter! (right) From ye ed’s collection, Purcell’s rendition of BI grand poohbah/former Comico editor Michael Eury as Sam and former Comico art director/colorist Rick Taylor as Max, done at the 1988 San Diego Comic-Con. Steve, are Rick and I still trademarked and copyrighted to you? TM & © Steve Purcell. Church photo by Philip Halling. Hound and hare photo by Simon Garbutt/Wikimedia Commons.

motivated the first strip which had them climbing out of the grave next to an English church. That church in Kilpeck, England, was selected because there’s an image of an ancient carved corbel depicting a cartoony dog and rabbit together. In my mind, the story would circle back to how they ended up in the 12th Century. I posted about a third of what the story was going to be, so that is one I’d like to finish it someday. EURY: In the light of recent protests against overzealous policing, how would you explain Sam & Max to a contemporary audience who might not “get” it? PURCELL: Sam & Max began decades ago parodying overzealous TV and movie crimefighters gleefully waving their guns around. It does give you pause when you think you might be stumbling in among social issues that are boiling up in current times. In my mind, Sam & Max punch up, not down. Their targets, like those of Bugs Bunny or the Marx Brothers, have earned Sam & Max’s wrath. Though they blather on about delivering swift justice, I think the audience is discerning enough to understand that Sam & Max are unhinged attention-deficient lunatics and not delivering any real political stance about what policing ought to be. EURY: What’s next for Sam & Max? PURCELL: There are Sam & Max action figures from Boss Fight Studios that are rolling off the assembly lines even as we speak. The pandemic threw a wrench

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into their schedule, but I’ve recently seen some inprocess photos of little neckties and orange popsicles and more recently the characters cradled in their little red packages. I did a painted strip for the box, recapping who Sam & Max are. There are always a couple of other things brewing for Sam & Max, one of which is underway. Whatever is next to gain traction is yet to be determined. EURY: Are there any plans for a Sam & Max Omnibus, collecting all of the college comic strips and Sam & Max comic books, as well as your webcomics and the comic strips you did for LucasArts’ newsletter? PURCELL: The LucasArts “Sunday Strips” ended up being included in the Telltale version of Surfin’ the Highway. There’s a collection underway that would include all the comics, but I don’t know that my school strips need to be published again. I guess the bar I’d set for inclusion would be how much can I stand looking at something. If it makes me wince, it’s out. EURY: Finish this sentence: A rat, a cockroach, and a monkey walk into a bar… PURCELL: The monkey says, “I’ll have a banana daiquiri and some beezlenuts.” The rat says, “I’ll have an old fashioned and a mixed cheese platter.” The bartender says to the cockroach, “And you, sir?” The cockroach says, “Nothing for me, thanks, I’m driving.”

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

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by R o g e r

In 1984, readers were introduced to Kevin Matchstick and Mirth, the hero and titular character of Matt Wagner’s Mage. It was the start of a heroic trilogy: The Hero Discovered, The Hero Defined, and The Hero Denied, which concluded in 2019, 35 years after the story had begun. Along the way it gained many fans and much critical success. In the introduction to Mage: The Hero Discovered vol. 1 from the Donning Company/Starblaze Graphics (1987), Wagner wrote, “My view on heroes (or should we say activists?) and their commitments to both themselves and others is the voice and conception behind what I see as the Mage trilogy—The Hero Discovered, The Hero Defined, and The Hero Denied.” So from the beginning, the subtitles of each series were in place. One can’t help but wonder how close the final story came to Wagner’s original intent. “I can’t really say, because I didn’t have it all planned out,” reveals Wagner to BACK ISSUE. “And of course, I never expected it to take as long as it did. My initial plan was to move on with it pretty quick, and then Comico’s bankruptcy interrupted all that. In the end, I’m glad it did take that long, because it enabled me to live more of my life and figure out

64 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

Ash

how to mythologize it as the various three stages of a hero’s journey. “In fact, when the second one finally came around, I fell into a real Zen approach to it all. I didn’t do any layouts. I tried not to figure things out. I tried to just let the story take me where it was gonna go. That’s not to say I didn’t have some idea about where I wanted to go; I did. But I would just sit down with blank pages and start drawing. In between the second and third one, I tried real hard not to think about Mage at all. I tried to not lock down any ideas that might become stale over time. I wanted to wait and again let my life roll by and then figure out what it was. And of course, in the third one I had kids and that became kind of a necessity, too: to let them grow up and see what sort of people they were going to become before I tried to depict them in my allegory that is Mage. “I will say I’m extremely happy with how it ended up. I keep telling people that I feel like I stuck the landing. It worked out exactly the way it was supposed to work out, but I truthfully tried not to think about how it was gonna work out. If you put it in a musical sense, it’d be almost like jamming. You just come up with a theme and a riff and you follow it.”

THE HERO DISCOVERED

The Hero Discovered draws heavily from Arthurian legend as Kevin is the latest incarnation of the Pendragon (though this is not something he knows or easily accepts when it’s revealed) and Mirth is of the line of Merlin. The comic also draws heavily from Wagner’s own life as Kevin is modeled after him, though it didn’t begin that way. “It was almost accidental,” Wagner says. “I was living in Philadelphia at the time, which is how I hooked up with the guys who formed Comico; we all went to the same art school together. One day I was down at the waterfront in Philly just doing some drawings. One was of me, but it was kind of a different version of me than I’d ever drawn. It had a certain world-weariness to it. The other one was a character that eventually evolved into Mirth. “I had initially started a different version of Mage way back when, long before I was even close to being ready to attempt something like that skill-wise. It was much more ordinary. It was set in the future and there was a mutant plague, and there was this guy who fought mutants and he called himself ‘The Dragon’ and he had a cape. Just very typical comics. Then DC announced they were going to do Camelot 3000, and it was supposed to be the return of King Arthur. I thought, ‘Oh, well. The hell with that. There goes that idea.’ And then it came out. It was certainly very professional and beautiful, but it just didn’t resonate with me storywise because there wasn’t that much new to it aside from them fighting aliens. It was very superhero-y. King Arthur was almost wearing a Superman costume. He was wearing red, yellow, and blue with a cape. It didn’t speak to me. I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know anybody like this. I don’t know people who walk around with armor and carry swords.’ I was looking for a more personal approach to comics at that time. I finally realized that if I’m going to retell this myth, I’m going to have to personalize it. I have to bring it down to my level. And the people I knew were just dudes in T-shirts running around in the alleyways. Nobody had any swords, but I knew one guy who used to keep a baseball bat under the seat of his car, just in case. So I ended up making Kevin look like me. I didn’t quite realize how purposeful I was making that at the time, in an autobiographical way. It just seemed to make sense. It was only later that I realized that this was me examining my life through these

larger-than-life allegories. Truthfully, it was only later that I realized it’s not uncommon for comics creators to have an alter ego. Charles Schulz was Charlie Brown. Dave Stevens was the Rocketeer Cliff Secord. I always tell people that Jeff Smith is Bone. Whether you see the resemblance or not, he is. Neil Gaiman and Morpheus. Mike Allred and Madman. The list goes on and on and on. I just kind of by happenstance stumbled into a formula that works for a creator. And I was lucky in that regard.” But basing a comic around Arthurian legend meant doing research. “I did a lot of research into Arthurian myth, but I didn’t do a lot of research into the classic hero’s journey,” Wagner continues. “So, for instance, I didn’t know anything about Joseph Campbell’s work, who codified that mythological aspect in a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It was only after I finished Mage that I read that book and I realized, ‘Holy sh*t! Here it is again. This stuff must be hardwired, because I just kind of stumbled into these archetypes.’ When I read the breakdown of the first stage of the hero’s journey in that book, it was like reading a plot-point-by-plotpoint summation of the first Mage series. As a result, in the second and third one I paid closer attention to the stages that Campbell describes. But again, the first one was very intuitive. “As far as the Arthurian stuff, of course there are so many versions of the King Arthur myths and legends that I basically just took the sh*t I liked and distilled it down into the stuff that made sense to me. I was determined at the beginning that my Merlin character was not going to look like a traditional Merlin. He wasn’t going to have a big white beard. He wasn’t gonna be old. He was going to be the antithesis of that. “When I first approached the Arthurian myths, I saw a little more glory in them. In fact, what they’re really about is how Arthur fails. Camelot doesn’t last. In fact, the most famous source of Arthurian myths, Le Morte d’Arthur, means The Death of Arthur. I tapped into a slightly more cynical and darker aspect of it than I think I initially would have approached it with.” But if Kevin is the central character in the series, why call it Mage? Wagner replies, “Because the Mage signifies change. In Arthurian myths, it’s when Merlin comes into Arthur’s life that he becomes the king. I wanted to portray this magical element as the catalyst

Revelations (left) Kevin Matchstick’s first encounter with Mirth, in Mage #1. (right) Shortly in that same issue, Kevin discovers that he can pack a wallop in his Grackleflint fight. TM & © Matt Wagner.

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Who’s That Girl? (top) Wagner’s wraparound cover, featuring Edsel, to Mage #3 (July 1984). (bottom left) Edsel kneels before her lord in issue #3. (bottom right) The shocking death of Edsel, from issue #13 (June 1986). Art by Sam Kieth and Matt Wagner. TM & © Matt Wagner.

for change in every one of the three stages of Kevin’s life. Initially, I just kind of liked the word. It seemed to have a commercial appeal. Good selling point. Good title for a story. So it is about the hero’s journey, but it’s the hero’s journey as seen through the progression of the three different Mages.” The Hero Discovered began with Wagner writing, drawing, and coloring, with Bob Pinaha lettering. Why did Matt decide to do so much? “I didn’t know any better?” he replies. “I was young and had a real do-it-yourself attitude. A real punk rock aesthetic. I was doing everything until it became evident that I just didn’t have time to do everything myself, and that’s when we reached out and got Sam Kieth onboard as inker, as of issue #6. At that point, everything was starting to click for me in regard to my understanding of color and the effect that had on storytelling. I decided if I had to give up one of those art chores, I wanted to give up the inking and stick to the coloring because the coloring was such

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a significant factor in what I was doing at the time. I’ve always had this attitude with comics, that every part has to be vital. I try to make my comics so that if they are going to be colored, as opposed to blackand-white, the color has to provide something that isn’t there in the ink work. Similarly, the words and the word balloons have to provide something that isn’t there already in the visuals. Every part has to be vital. I took that from the famous quote by Edgar Allan Poe, that: ‘In a short story, every word has to tell.’ My attitude towards my comics was that every aspect of it had to tell, had to be a vital thing. If you pulled out that part, it wouldn’t be complete anymore.” That being the case, you may wonder why current collections of The Hero Discovered don’t have the original color. Wagner explains, “That’s due to the fact that we no longer had access to the printing film. After Comico went down, we didn’t have the film and we were trying to figure out how the hell to reprint it. I had sold off a lot of the original artwork over the years, so we didn’t have access to those pages anymore either. “Donning/Starblaze didn’t really do comics. They had gotten into doing some graphic novels with ElfQuest, Colleen Doran’s A Distant Soil, and then they did Mage. They mainly published, if I’m remembering correctly, textbooks, travel books, those sorts of things. Back when I first took The Hero Defined to Image, Larry Marder was the executive director. He came up with the idea, ‘Hey! Why don’t we contact Donning and see if they still have that film from when they did the over-sized editions?’ And sure enough, they still had that sh*t archived. So we were able to purchase back just the black plate at a good cost, and then we were able to have it recolored digitally. It was colored by Jeromy Cox, who was my colorist on The Hero Defined. I instructed Jeromy at the time to just kind of re-create what I did before. Make it look the same with a few more special effects and such that you can do with a computer.” Another contributor who came on board during The Hero Discovered was editor Diana Schutz. How did she become involved? “Kismet! My relationship with Matt Wagner, both professional and personal, was absolute kismet right from the start—as detailed elsewhere in this issue. In 1985, just as I was hired at the small independent company that first published Matt’s work, Grendel: Devil by the Deed was slated to debut as a backup feature in Mage, beginning with issue #6. Devil by the Deed was exquisitely drawn in a lush Art Deco style, with elegant full-page compositions in which the text was embedded in a preordained space. In those days, of course, digital design did not exist, and Matt’s Grendel narrative required outof-house typesetting—a specialized craft that’s now sadly obsolete. With each individual letter of type set manually using tiny pieces of cast metal, mistakes were inevitable. And so as not to incur any extra charges for type corrections, Matt’s text-heavy scripts needed to be grammatically perfect before going out to be typeset, and then the typesetting itself needed to be proofread, corrected, and finalized afterwards. The job fell to me, as the only experienced editor on that five-person staff. And because I was proofing the Grendel backup, I just began proofing the entire book as of that issue. But Mage is Matt’s personal baby, and whether or not there’s a nominal editor listed in the credits, Matt has always been his own story editor on Mage.” As our story begins, Kevin meets Mirth on the street. He thinks Mirth’s just a bum, yet shares more about himself than you would with a stranger. A sign

MAGE PUBLICATION HISTORY Mage: The Hero Discovered

#1 (May 1984)–15 (Dec. 1986)

Grendel (Mage backups)

#16 (Jan. 1988)–19 (May 1988)

City of Brotherly Love (left) Matt and Cooch (Bill Cucinotta) on the couch in Matt’s (Magic is) Green Street home, Philadelphia, 1986. (right) Mage editor Diana Schutz at her apartment in King of Prussia, PA, February 1987. Diana says of the art on the wall behind her: “It’s the very first piece of art that Matt ever gave to me (the cover of Mage: The Hero Discovered #9).” Photos courtesy of Diana Schutz. that something out of the ordinary has occurred. As Kevin continues his walk down the street, he sees a man being assaulted in an alley. He runs to help, and the attacker flees. The man is badly beaten and, as he dies, he says one word. “Grackleflint.” What is a Grackleflint? They are five brothers: Piet, Radu, Stanis, Lazlo, and Emil. They are all stark white and featureless. They can pass as humans, but they all look the same. Their main weapon is a venomous spur on their elbows, and each has a specific power such as flight, invisibility, or discernment. Their father is the Umbra Sprite, the major villain in The Hero Discovered. In his human form, he runs the Styx Casino Hotel where the Grackleflints are all pit bosses. Emil is the most dangerous of the Grackleflints, as his power is initiative, and will stand up to the Umbra Sprite whereas the others blindly obey. Wagner shares more about the villains. “I forget how I came up with the name Umbra Sprite, which of course means ‘dark fairy’ or ‘dark spirit.’ In regard to the Flints, I was just combining words. Flint, of course, is a sharp, brittle form of rock. And a grackle is a very squawky, black, oily kind of bird that is generally considered a real pain in the ass. Those are two harsh, abrasive-sounding words, so I combined ‘grackle’ with ‘flint.’ I remember I did a sketch of a very featureless character, and that seemed kind of spooky to me. In regard to the spikes out of their elbows, I wanted them to have this supernatural weaponry about their body, but I wanted it to be kind of limited. I didn’t want them sprouting spines all over their bodies. So the fact that the spikes came out of their elbows was an interesting limitation. “I was also looking to present myself with a challenge. If I have these five characters who are basically visually indistinguishable, how do I distinguish them? How do I make it obvious that there are five different versions of this character and that they all are different? They all had different names, and each one had an individual supernatural power. Of course, Emil is the most distinctive of all of them. Striking those sorts of challenges for myself has been something I’ve tried to do my entire creative career. When I was in college, I did a comic strip for our college newspaper. It was a superhero spoof called Our Hero. He was a short little fat bald guy who wore a tutu and a cape that was too long for him. He had no mouth, and his eyes were just dots and eyebrows. I did that distinctly to see if I could show emotion on this character’s face without the full range of emotive features on it.” Kevin and Mirth were obstacles to the Grackleflints’ goal, finding and killing the Fisher King, a character from Celtic mythology. His blood would tilt the balance of light and dark to the dark side. He is difficult to find, as he can change his form. The one constant is he is always lame. “The Fisher King is hope,” says Wagner. “He is the harbinger of light that keeps moving forward no matter what. He’s wandering. Never lays down. Never gives up.”

Mage: The Hero Defined

#1 (July 1997)–15 (Oct. 1999) plus 16-page promo, #0 (July 1997)

Mage: The Hero Denied

#1 (Aug. 2017)–15 (Feb. 2019) plus 16-page promo, #0 (July 2017)

Fanzine Farewell Diana Schutz had to relinquish her editorship of Comics & Comix’s The Telegraph Wire newsletter when she joined Comico’s staff. At least she nabbed this nifty— and rare—Mage cast shot by Matt for the zine before she left. Courtesy of Diana Schutz. Mage TM & © Matt Wagner.

Kevin notices some remarkable changes in himself. Since meeting Mirth, he seems nearly invulnerable and can do superhuman things. But he still doubts Mirth when he says they’re part of a vast plan. He goes along with Mirth, but doesn’t believe. He’s a hero, but flawed, which is how Wagner likes it. “A character’s shortcomings and a character’s flaws and a character’s perceived weaknesses are more interesting to me than their strengths. There’s an old rule in writing: be cruel to your darlings. You have to find a certain triumph in things, but you have to search for that triumph in defeat. The flaws and shortcomings of a character are what they need to overcome to be truly heroic.” But Kevin and Mirth are not alone. The first to join their crew is Edsel, a young African-American woman who takes her name from the car she drives. She also keeps a bat under the seat, which she uses when she encounters a Grackleflint. But things aren’t going her way when they find her. Kevin drives off the Grackleflint, and when Edsel looks in his eyes, she knows him for who he truly is. “The character of Edsel came about as a result of working at the Comico offices,” Wagner reveals. “They were outside of Philadelphia in a suburb called Norristown. For a while when they were just getting up and running, I was the Comico office boy. I worked in the office doing anything that needed to be done. One day, one of the guys came in and said, ‘Hey! There’s a service station down the road here that has an old Edsel for sale.’ So we took a trip down there and I took a look at it, and I was just kind of struck with what a cool-looking car it was. I decided to evolve that into a character. I knew at the time that she was going to be a Lady of the Lake archetype.” The other member of the crew is public defender Sean Knight, whom they meet when Kevin is imprisoned after fighting the

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Early Sketches Two early Wagner con sketches from the archives of Heritage Auctions: Kevin Matchstick and Edsel, from 1986; and Kevin and his crackling bat, from 1989 rendered in black and white colored pencils on toned art paper. TM & © Matt Wagner.

Marhault Ogre, who was summoned to this plane by the Umbra Sprite. As Mirth helps Kevin escape, no one can see them except for Sean, because, unknown even to him, he’s a ghost. Sean does develop ghost powers, such as passing through walls and inspiring fear. “I needed a knight,” says Wagner. “But I didn’t want a knight in shining armor. I didn’t want a big bold knight. I wanted to throw that archetype on its ear as well. So I had a quiet, demure sort of character, who was more of a strategist than an actual combatant, become the knight. And very strangely, I had just become friends with a guy named Sean Knight who eventually became my dearest buddy and was best man at my wedding. Everything in Mage has just been me looking around my life and saying, ‘All right, let me see what I can do with that. How am I gonna work that into the story?’” There’s another important character in the story whom Kevin meets in prison: a cellmate named Rashem. Mirth casts a spell to make Kevin’s cellmates forget him, but it misses Rashem who is visited by the Umbra Sprite’s shade, tricked into joining his fight, and gifted with a powerful weapon that oddly looks like a staple gun. While escaping from prison, Kevin has his first encounter with the Red Caps, nasty little beasties in red caps, spiked iron boots, coats are optional, and nothing else. While dangerous, they are no match for Kevin, but they often attack in overwhelming numbers. After collecting Edsel, our heroes return to Kevin’s apartment to plan. It is here that Kevin first encounters a Leanhaun Sidhe, a succubus of sorts, and falls under her thrall. Luckily, Edsel is able to take care of business. Mirth also captures a Grackleflint who was waiting outside, and the team learns two important things: the Umbra Sprite knows where they are as he can see Mirth’s magic, and Grackleflints can be destroyed with water. This leads Mirth to disappear into an ATM’s computer network. He gifts Kevin with an ATM card that can provide all the money they need as well as a way to contact him. The story skips ahead months as the team searches for clues to the Umbra Sprite’s whereabouts. An encounter with a couple Grackleflints yields a clue that points to the Styx Casino. Meanwhile, Emil is getting more and more impatient with the Umbra Sprite, who is spending much of his time trying to find Mirth instead of the Fisher King. This all leads to Kevin, Edsel, and Sean entering the Styx undercover and their first encounter with the Umbra Sprite on his home turf. Things don’t go well for Kevin as he is captured and has to be rescued. During the escape, Emil stabs him in the chest with a venomous elbow spur.

Edsel contacts Mirth as Kevin is in bad shape. While she’s away, the Umbra Sprite sends a dragon, Cromm Cruich, the Worm of the Mists, after them. He arrives in humanoid form at their apartment with two Grackleflints and is confronted by Sean. The others escape, but Sean pays dearly as he is destroyed by the dragon. Kevin is healed in the faerie realm, though it takes months. The trio return to Earth, where they are attacked by Rashem. During the melee, he kills Edsel and is then killed by Kevin. With her dying breath, Edsel reveals to Kevin that he is the Pendragon. He also learns that the bat is Excalibur. The death of Edsel was not taken well by Kevin or fandom. Was Wagner surprised by the reaction? “Yeah, a little bit because I hadn’t been doing comics that long. I got a lot of agonizing fan mail about that. To me it felt like, well, I did something right there. You’ve also got to remember the time and place. Characters didn’t die in comics back then. There were a few. Gwen Stacy. Elektra. But not many. Nowadays they kill characters off all the time, and half the time they come back. The fact that I had so obviously struck a chord made me understand that I’d really created a character that worked. The fact that people cared whether that character lived or died means that I was effective in my portrayal.” Kevin does not want to accept any of this, but in the end he has to, which leads to his climactic encounter in the Styx Casino. While this is going on, Emil finds the Fisher King and attempts to kill him with his elbow spur. It backfires spectacularly, killing one of his brothers and disfiguring him. Kevin encounters Cromm Cruich in full dragon form and defeats him as well as a giant before his first encounter with the Huntsman, a large, armored being on a motorcycle, accompanied by a pack of hounds with the faces of those who have died because of Kevin. “The Huntsman is Kevin’s guilt and despair,” says Wagner. “The Huntsman is all the things that will haunt your mind and drag you down.” Kevin escapes them and is set for his encounter with the Umbra Sprite, but finds him dead, killed by Emil. He manages to get out of the building as it collapses. He and Mirth set off for more adventures. “The whole point with the villains is they’re often off-target, especially the Umbra Sprite in the first volume. He gets obsessed with the wrong things, and he gets obesely fat, and he gets distracted from what his real goal ought to be,” says Wagner. “Conversely, when Emil steps into the lead bad-guy role in the second volume, he attempts to take over the dark quest that he feels his father failed at… but he’s not very good at it either. He’s, as somebody said to me, merely a copy of the true evil… and his offspring are a copy of a copy. And I said, ‘Yeah, exactly.’”

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THE HERO DEFINED

Before The Hero Defined began, Kevin appeared in two short Interlude stories. How did these stories come about? “The first Interlude was mainly created as a result of longtime Grendel editor Diana Schutz’s input. When I decided to return to the art duties on Grendel for issue #16–19 of the original Comico run, Diana suggested that it’d be neat to have a Mage backup in the pages of Grendel to echo how Grendel had once been a backup feature in The Hero Discovered. That led me to create what was basically a Kevin Matchstick solo story (remember… Kevin is not the title character). Years later, when I eventually launched the second series at Image Comics in the ’90s, it seemed like a neat idea to lead the series off with a retailer-exclusive second Interlude that was again a sans-Mage Kevin adventure. In the latter case, the story depicted how Kevin met Joe Phat, who’s already his companion in the actual first issue of The Hero Defined. And then, of course, I kicked off the launch of The Hero Denied with the third and final Interlude, which once again featured Kevin kicking some serious monster butt without the guidance and commentary of his trusted Mage.” The second volume, The Hero Defined, began in 1997 with a change in publisher as the series was now at Image. A number of years have passed between the two series, and the story is now populated with Avatars from other myths, including two who become Kevin’s companions: Joe Phat, the coyote from Native American mythology, and Kirby Hero, the Olympian (think: Hercules). With the addition of these new mythologies, Wagner had a lot of research to do. But there was even more to the story. “One of the reasons the first part of the trilogy resonated with readers is that, as Kevin’s coming into his power, you actually see me becoming a better comics artist from issue to issue. You see me coming into my power. Before I entered the comics field, drawing comics was a fairly solitary endeavor for me. When I became exposed to the world of comics and started to encounter these other creators, I realized they were all on their own journey, too. It’s not just my journey, it’s all of our journeys, but they’re all individualized. That’s why I decided to open it up and have various Avatars from other religions, and they were all comrades of mine at the time as well. Joe Phat’s based on Joe Matt. Kirby Hero’s a combination of both Bernie Mireault and aspects of Sean Knight. Sean Knight, the real guy, is more boisterous and a little reckless, much like Kirby Hero. So I hit on the idea of incorporating these other myth cycles.” Other creators you can find in the series include Tim Sale as the Monkey King and Alan Moore as the Ulster Hound. The reason they’re all around is that they’re hunting all the nasties that have escaped into our world after the collapse of the Styx Casino. The problem is many of them see this as a way of competing with each other, which often leads to fights between the heroes. Out of all of these characters, what made Joe and Kirby good companions for Kevin? “They were his opposites and yet not,” according to Wagner. “They form a triangle, which is a symbol of strength. Kirby’s there to be a foil for Kevin. When Kevin starts to get authoritarian and say, ‘Look, we’re gonna do it like this,’ Joe’s perfectly fine going along with that, because he knows it usually works out. It’s convenient for him. Whereas Kirby bristles at everything Kevin does in that regard. That was kind of my relationship with those two guys as well. I knew it would ultimately come to a big conflict that would break that triangle apart.” All of these Avatars make The Hero Defined the most superheroicfeeling book of the trilogy. Why did Wagner go this route? “I had brought it to Image Comics, and Image Comics were the superheroes of superheroes. It was superheroes times ten. But, additionally, it was my peculiar take on a superhero team. Again, a bunch of dudes in T-shirts. Each of their T-shirts has a cool little insignia, but they’re still just a bunch of f*ckups. The first series was all about discovery, but Kevin’s got his power in the second one. He’s gotta be fully utilizing his power and fully pursuing his purpose, which is very confusing for him as it always is. He thinks he knows what he’s supposed to do, but it turns out that’s maybe not true.

An Ally Defined (top) Kevin Matchstick and Joe Phat meet Kirby Hero in Mage: The Hero Defined #2 (Aug. 1997). Story and art by Matt Wagner, colors by Jeromy Cox. (bottom) Cover to The Hero Defined #3. TM & © Matt Wagner.

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“The point is, though, with all three of the Mage volumes, it’s all about Kevin and his family. Each little group is his family. In the last one it’s his literal family: his wife and his children. That’s the way we go through life. We choose our families. The person you marry and the children you have, you choose to do that. I think you do that at different stages in your life. You have a different family when you’re 20 and a different family when you’re 30 and a different family when you’re in your 40s and 50s. For Kevin, that family progressed until it was the family that was right for him.” Another big change is the second Mage, Wally Ut. He is a short man with a long beard who looks more like a homeless person than a Mage. He’s often forgetful and his magic doesn’t always work as planned, but if you pay attention, you see that he’s more than he appears to be. Other characters pick up on this, but Kevin is steadfast in his disbelief that Wally is actually the second Mage. Furthering the Arthurian connection, the World Mage, of which Wally and Mirth are aspects, ages backwards in the same manner as Merlin is often depicted. So Wally is actually younger than Mirth, and his foibles are not that of an old man, but of a younger, inexperienced Mage. Why did Wagner go with such a drastic change to the character? “Because to do anything else would have been treading water,” he replies. “It had to change. It had to be obvious that we’re no longer in high school, we’re in college. Then we’re no longer in college, we’re out in the working world. It couldn’t be just the same over and over. That vast change leads to Kevin’s continued disbelief: that he doesn’t believe Wally’s the Mage. Wally’s full of sh*t. That’s Kevin’s motif from the very beginning and all the way through. He’s stubborn and he’s disbelieving for the most part until,

all of a sudden, he has to change. He has to believe. He has to reach down within himself and call up the things that he didn’t think were there. To me, that’s the definition of heroism.” While Kevin looks like Wagner, how close is this to his own behavior? “I’m looking in a mirror on every page,” he laughs. “Again, I couldn’t portray it that way if it wasn’t real. The thing I’ve always said about Mage is it’s nothing but honest.” As the series begins, Kevin and Joe are after nasties. Joe, aside from being incredibly fast, can actually smell out their foes. They discover a nest of harpies who have Wally in their thrall, when Kirby, who is incredibly strong and near-invulnerable, shows up to join in on the fun. He is in the midst of completing his 12 labors and states from the beginning that’s what’s most important to him. We also meet the Pale Incanter, Emil Grackleflint, who is purely out for revenge against Kevin. For all Emil’s anger over the Umbra Sprite delaying the search for the Fisher King, Emil has completely forgotten about this important goal. He is building a champion to defeat Kevin, stealing a bit of Kevin’s power every time he uses it and infusing it into the creature. Helping him in his quest are five Sprigginflints, basically five featureless skater punks who ride flying skateboards and have an incredibly nasty bite. For all that, as Wagner puts it, “Aren’t they dumb as hell? They’re just idiots.” Kevin is concerned, as the mystic menaces seem to be disappearing. He doesn’t believe this is because the Avatars have destroyed them but that something even worse is on the horizon. To help figure things out, Kevin takes Joe and Kirby to meet the witch Isis and her husband, Bart Gretch, for guidance. This introduces more people from Wagner’s life into the story. How did they react to their appearance? “Everybody’s reaction was good. The three witches are my wife and her two sisters. Diana Schutz, my wife Barbara, and Trish. Bart Gretch is, of course, Bob Schreck, and that was a particularly funny reaction. I went over to his house to show him that issue where he first shows up. He’s a big guy, so I made him a giant. He f*cking hates KISS, so I gave him a KISS T-shirt. He cracked up when he saw it and gave me a very good-natured slug on the arm. Everybody enjoys seeing themselves portrayed in the pages of the book. I will say it took me a while to get the knack of drawing my wife. I’m drawing her much better in the third one than I did in the second one.” Schutz had this reaction to her appearance. “Well, this isn’t the first time Matt has based a major character on me—but I’ll leave it to you and your readers to figure out where I’ve shown up before. But as a result of The Hero Defined, I also became a fridge magnet for sale, which was definitely a first! As for Isis and her peccadilloes… yeah, pretty darn close! Matt’s got me pegged all right.” After smoking a mystic joint prepared for them by Isis, the three heroes share a vision that culminates with a huge beast perched atop a hill. They only come out of the trip when Isis awakens Kevin because the Sprigginflints have arrived and are attacking Bart. They manage to drive them off but not before all five bite Bart, injecting him with venom. Kevin manages to revive him with a jolt of energy from his bat. After this encounter, the heroes cross into Canada. The mystic beings are drawn to a city by a beacon put out by Emil. Consequently, the city is also overrun with Avatars seeking out the nasties. Kirby shares with Kevin and Joe that he has found something of interest: the mountain from the vision, which looks like Mount Royal in Montreal, complete with a huge, illuminated cross on top. Their fears are confirmed a few nights later when Kevin and Kirby are attacked by hellhounds while searching for clues to the Pale Incanter’s whereabouts in a graveyard near the cross. After Kevin battles the Dragon-Slayer, an Avatar who takes pleasure in battling other Avatars, the crew return to their apartment

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to find Isis waiting for them. She informs Kevin that her sister Magda is on the way. This concerns Kevin as he has actively avoided her since Isis has had visions of Magda enchanting him. He has no time for that. He has his duty. They also encounter Kirby’s sister, Athena, who brings his next labor: defeating a bull with “horns of steel and eyes ablaze.” Wally also arrives to make the crew complete. A council of the Avatars is called to try and get more people on Kevin’s side. Only one steps forward: Garth, the Hornblower. Garth is a bit like an overanxious puppy, and Kevin sends him to keep watch in the graveyard near the cross to get him out of his hair. Unfortunately, a horde of Red Caps emerge and attack. Kevin and Joe arrive in time to drive them away, but not before Garth is killed. Returning home, they find that Magda and Ishtar, Isis’ sisters, have arrived and Kevin is indeed enchanted. The three witches spend their time consecrating the Avatars’ havens as Kevin and Joe continue their quest for the Pale Incanter while Kirby is away trying to complete his new labor. Unfortunately, Emil has called on the Leanhaun Sidhe, who, in the form of Ishtar, enslaves Joe. Between Wally and Magda, they manage to drive her away, but she takes Joe with her. Kevin and Kirby set out to rescue him, and with the help of John Strider, a Christian Avatar based on the legendary Prester John, they finally find their way into the Pale Incanter’s lair. As suspected, it’s at the cross, and that’s right up Strider’s alley. They descend into hell to find Joe. John is lost along the way, but Kevin and Kirby manage to find him and destroy the succubus. As they descend further toward the Pale Incanter, they rescue Wally who was captured by a tribe of Red Caps. They eventually encounter Emil’s creation, which looks oddly like a bull with glowing eyes. Kirby has found his next labor. Kirby goes after the bull, but he’s no match. Kevin tries to blast the bull with his power, but since that is the bull’s energy source, it only makes it stronger. The bull kills Kirby, and in grief and anger, Kevin destroys it. Kevin manages to restore Kirby to life, but doing so then destroys the bat, along with a good amount of his hair. Kevin’s interference creates an irreparable break between Kirby and himself. Kirby leaves, with Joe close behind. Where was the Pale Incanter during all this? Contained in a magical sphere created by Wally, who then explains to Kevin that in addition to being the Pendragon, he is also the Sumerian. The drama between Kirby and himself echoes the travails of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Kevin finally has no choice left but to accept that Wally is the second Mage. In the end, Kevin’s own arrogance may have been a bigger threat than Emil.

Kevin also learns that he does not need the bat. His power can be focused through anything. “I had a drawing class in college where we were supposed to draw a model,” Wagner recalls. “The professor came in and said, ‘Okay. Put down all your pens, all your graphite sticks. Find something in the room that you’re going to draw with.’ So we had to go find an object and dip that into ink and use that as a pen. That’s the lesson Kevin learns. It never had to be a bat. It’s not the form that matters. A master will master whatever is in his hands.” While this is going on, Emil is freed from his containment, but that’s not good for him or our heroes, as he is freed by a returning Umbra Sprite. In an extreme version of “turnabout is fair play,” this time the Umbra Sprite kills Emil. Kevin and Wally, crouched on the shield that was held by the bull, ride a wave of darkness out of the pit. Wally is lost along the way but promises the arrival of the third Mage. Kevin plummets through space, landing in a park where Magda has been waiting for him. He immediately proposes and she accepts.

Bat Man A double loss for Kevin on this stunning Wagner original page (courtesy of Heritage) from The Hero Defined #14. In the inset is the published page, with Jeromy Cox colors. TM & © Matt Wagner.

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The Trilogy Concludes (left) Hugo (based upon Matt’s son Brennan Wagner) clings on to papa Kevin’s neck on Wagner’s cover to Mage: The Hero Denied #2. (right) Cover to the penultimate issue, #14. TM & © Matt Wagner.

THE HERO DENIED

period did, which was a reliance on very clean, flat colors and gradients. The final book in the trilogy began in 2017 with Mage: The Hero Denied. That works fine and dandy for some, but I don’t think that way when This volume added a new creator to the mix, colorist Brennan Wagner, I approach the art. I think more traditionally in a painter’s sense. “I was looking at Jeromy’s art and taking what I could from it. Matt’s son. “I’d grown up reading the first two books religiously,” says Brennan. “In our house, our religion is just storytelling. The meta- The strong thing there is the dedication to power effects. The power concept behind Mage is that the only thing that keeps going is stories effects look really vibrant and lively. They distinguish each power from and storytelling and heroes and myths. I grew up not only reading it, one another. The second book thematically was all about what color is but I recommended it to all my friends. I gave it out to classmates. magic, so it was all about representation of color. Every character had I know those two books like the back of my hand. I had been pushing to have their own color of magic, their own color of outfit that sort of my dad for a while to let me color the third Mage. I was engaged and matched that magic. “Going forward with this book, I didn’t feel like I needed to do had just come back from Europe with my gal, who is now my wife. I was ready for a new project. So when I got back, Pop picked us up that. What I felt more inclined to do was make each moment look distinct. Each scene has its own hue and makes a statement. from the airport and we went out to dinner. He said, ‘What do I took a lot of those hints from Dave Stewart, who is my you want to work on next?’ I said, ‘Well, I want to work main influence and mentor in the coloring realm.” on Mage.’ To my amazement, he said, ‘Let’s do Mage.’ Brennan points to a specific scene in The Hero It was finally time. I was really excited about that.” Discovered that had an impact on him: Kevin’s fight How did Matt feel about working with Brennan on with the dragon. “That scene has a very distinct, Mage? “Working with Brennan as the colorist on The swashy, painterly background that’s just these Hero Denied was a terrific experience, and it served to simple grays. It makes it look real otherworldly and solidify the personal myth aspect of Mage in so many kind of misty and mysterious. I applied that palette ways. Of course, he had a close personal connection to the scene in issue #1 where Kevin faces off against to that storyline as well, since it involved characters a Hob Squad in the forest. It was something that I based on himself, his sister, his mom, and, needless to talked to my dad about. I wanted the scenes when say, his old man. He knew the locales, he knew the Kevin fought these things to suddenly be in a dark emotions and the realities for all of it, so, again, it was faerie realm. Every time that he interacted with just a natural conclusion to the entire saga.” brennan wagner them, he was stepping out of his own world.” “So when we did Mage, I absolutely went back The Hero Denied begins a number of years after and looked at the first and the second books,” YouTube. the conclusion of The Hero Defined. Kevin and Brennan continues. “The color job on them, particularly, because that’s what I do and what I was trying to replicate. But what I was also looking Magda are trying to live a “normal” life with their two young children, at was the evolution of the art style and how the evolution of the art Hugo and Miranda (who is drawn to witchcraft), based on the style called for a change in the style of coloring. My father’s gotten older, Wagners’ real children, Brennan and Amanda. You may think the sturdier in his style, maybe a little blockier, more textured, more gritty. name choices are random, but they’re not. “Miranda is Prospero’s I wanted to color it in a more realistic fashion than the first two were. daughter in The Tempest, which of course is the source for all the I wanted it to still have vibrancy and life, but I wanted it to have a sense chapter titles in Denied,” says Wagner. “And I wanted to name our son Hugo after one of my favorite cartoonists of all time, Hugo Pratt, of realism, too. A down-to-earth realism. My style in general is that. “I was looking at Jeromy Cox’s color art, and I liked it a lot. But it creator of Corto Maltese. Unfortunately, my wife was having none of exemplifies the style of what a lot of comics from around that time that. So I got my revenge by naming him Hugo in the book.” 72 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

Their personalities also rang true. “There’s a scene where my son sneaks out at night and eats some faerie food,” says Wagner. “My son’s done a lot of stupid sh*t like that. With my daughter, those little things she makes called patterens… she actually did that. When she was quite young, five or so, she had these little beads at the table in her room, and she would make these huge ornate arrangements of them. And she called them patterens.” Kevin is having a difficult time because no third Mage has appeared. The magic ATM card still works, but there’s no response when he asks questions of the Mage. But as much as Kevin and Magda long for a normal life, it is not to be. After the Hob Squad attack, they determine they must move to keep their family safe. The Umbra Sprite and the Gracs are also back but with a gender change, as the Umbra Mother and the Gracklethorns. This time, their headquarters is the Acheron Insurance building in the San Francisco Bay Area and looks surprisingly like the Styx Casino building, including the near-bottomless central shaft. And, like its predecessor, both are named after a river in the underworld in Greek mythology. The Umbra Mother is much more effective than her predecessor, as her focus stays on the Fisher King. The Gracklethorns remain white and uniform, but they wear distinct clothing and wigs, so they are easily distinguished from one another. Their hands can become venomous talons. The Gracklethorns also have a secret. “The Gracklethorns are the Spice Girls,” reveals Wagner. “My thought was, if they’re these extra-dimensional creatures who are trying to find ways to disguise themselves, they’d look at pop culture of the time and be like, ‘Well. There’s five of them. There’s five of us. We’re gonna dress like that.’” As the attacks on his family continue, Kevin heads off on his own to draw the attackers away. Before returning, he survives an epic battle with Ereshkigal and an army of the dead, but the family is still forced to move. Things seem to improve. The family now lives quietly in Portland. Kevin even has a reunion with an old friend when Joe Phat stops by for a visit, delivering the sad news that Kirby Hero has died. As Kevin and Joe wander around the city, they encounter a Questing Beast, an extremely rare creature that Kevin is certain will lead him to the Fisher King. He attempts to get Joe to follow it, but Joe is out of the hero game and refuses. Magda is not happy when she learns of this. She wants Kevin to stay quiet in regard to anything mystical. But he can’t give up on the idea, so he goes to a mystical apothecary who gives him magical eye drops to help him follow the Questing Beast’s trail. This sequence is a favorite of Brennan’s. “I grew up in the outskirts of Portland and when Kevin gets to Portland, I got really emotional. Suddenly the work took on a very intimate, very close reality for me. There’s a panel of Portland with Mount Hood in the background. Then Kevin’s down near the Bagdad Theater. My dad even slipped in the Oasis Café, which is a pizza café around the corner from where I used to live. Kevin goes into Powell’s to grab a book. It’s really very Portland-heavy, and I leaned into that with the color. “My favorite sequence color-wise was the one where Kevin trips out in the Rose Garden, because my dad left the sky completely blank. I added in this crazy kaleidoscopic sky. As a result, everything that Kevin’s looking at is kind of trippy. I added a similar effect to all the roses and flowers in the garden. That’s really a colorist making his mark. And I got a good response from people.” Kevin does indeed find the Questing Beast, but instead of leading him to the Fisher King, the Beast leads him to a strange little Imp. When Kevin accidentally reveals his presence, the Beast and the Imp are gone in a flash. What neither Kevin nor the reader know at this point is what the Beast has led him to is the third Mage. While this was going on, Magda was abducted at a school function by an incubus—a male version of the succubus from the first two stories— and turned over to the Umbra Mother. Hugo is apprehended by Red Caps and imprisoned with his mother. The Umbra Mother sends an ogre after Kevin and Miranda at their home. They defeat it and head off in search of the other two. Why did Wagner decide on this pairing of parents and children?

A Family Defined (top) Kevin is reunited with Magda and his kids in The Hero Denied #15 (Feb. 2019). (bottom) Home, sweet home, as the saga concludes. Or perhaps Hugo’s story is only beginning… TM & © Matt Wagner.

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“If you look before the split happens, it tends to be the guys hanging out and the gals hanging out. The daughter seems to be closer to the mom, and the son seems to be closer to the dad. I think that’s just a natural thing that happens in many marriages and families. So there again, you’ve gotta throw a curve ball in by splitting them up. Pairing each with the other made everything seem a little more crucial. It provided the opportunity to have all four of the characters rise to the occasion. All the characters are pretty crucial to what happens in the finale. Kevin, of course, is the thunderbolt that strikes. If Magda wasn’t as clever as she is, they wouldn’t be there. If Hugo didn’t disobey orders, they wouldn’t be there. If Miranda wasn’t as bold and loyal as she is, they wouldn’t be there.” Magda and Hugo are kept in relative comfort, but they make plans to escape. Magda enchants some common items in their room to aid in that quest. Magda also gains a new “familiar,” as her previous one was killed when the ogre attacked their home. Cleo, a purple cat with wings, is a great help in their plans. Their escape goes well until they end up in the Umbra Mother’s inner sanctum where they’re attacked by the Gracklethorns. In their rush to evade them, they go through a door and end up in what appears to be an endless cavern. But things seem to be going better for Kevin and Miranda, as Mirth finally appears after not having been around for most of the story. Or does he? “A key to Kevin and Arthur being the hero, and ultimately being the king, is you can’t rely on the help of the magician,” Wagner explains. “You have to do it yourself. In fact, in this volume, Mirth really does very, very little. He shows up at the end to basically say, ‘You don’t even need a weapon. The weapon is you.’ Other than that, he doesn’t wield his magic very much. “Kevin’s reliance on his Mage also helps to set up the MacGuffin. Any husband or young father who doesn’t recognize that sinking feeling of standing in front of an ATM and not getting what you want out of it, that’s not my world. Kevin wants Mirth to come back so bad. He wants direction, he wants advice, he wants wisdom. He keeps asking for it and not getting it. That was a contrivance so readers would really want it, too, so that when the faux Mirth shows up at the end, you’re willing to accept it and so is Kevin, even though there are certain differences. In fact, if you go and look at when the Umbra Mother is disguised as Mirth, if you reread that dialog, he’s not really supportive. He’s constantly telling Kevin how tough the enemy is and how you’re gonna f*ck up. He’s a total downer. I was really trying hard to make

Farewell Matt bid his readers adieu with this page in Mage: The Hero Denied #15. Photo by Steven Birch. TM & © Matt Wagner.

it so the reader wouldn’t notice that and would have to go back and read it again to pick up on that aspect of it.” Yup. The Umbra Mother leads Kevin and Miranda into her lair. “Mirth” even brings Miranda back to life after she’s been killed. “She had to,” says Wagner. “She knows Kevin won’t go any further without her. It’s not enough for her to let Miranda die. She needs to have Kevin see them all die at once. She has to destroy them all in front of him at once to absolutely crush him. If she just let Miranda die, Kevin might get mad instead of embracing despair. Mirth has told him in the past, as Johnny Rotten would say, anger is an energy. She’s basically forced into it. That’s why she has the wrappings on her arms as well. Those are magical protections in case she has to wield green magic. If she just did that bare-handed, it would have hurt too badly.” And in a big surprise, the Fisher King shows up on his own. He knows that he, the Umbra Sprite, and Kevin are soon fated to meet to determine their future. And that encounter happens as soon as all the players come together in the Umbra Mother’s inner sanctum. “The final battle scene is basically one family versus the other. Our family, the hero family, is the one you’re rooting for, and they fight together and for each other, whereas the other ones are a dark version of that. The Umbra Mother even ends up eating one of her children to get her power back. “Even for the finale, I was still following things in a Zen sort of fashion; in the final battle scene we find out that what looks like a star-shaped tattoo or birthmark on Magda’s cheek is actually a spell she’d hidden there. I didn’t realize that until that page. I suddenly decided, ‘Oh sh*t. That’s gotta be a spell! She’s going to pull that off and use it to drive the Grac away.’” Kevin finally unleashed the full extent of his powers and, in doing so, the Umbra Mother is consumed. But this is not an end to the darkness, only to this aspect of it. This also ends Kevin’s part in the battle, and the family is finally able to enjoy life in their Camelot. And the Fisher King has disappeared to continue wandering. “For me, being part of this team means a sh*t ton,” says Brennan. “I won’t lie to you— I cried on several occasions as I colored this book. Seeing some of the art come in. Reading the script. Reading the final page with young Hugo looking off into the distance, suggesting I’m now destined for things. It was a very deep experience for me. Very meaningful.” This was also meaningful for Diana Schutz. How had her relationship with Wagner changed over the years? “We’re talking about a 35-year relationship. So, it’s evolved dramatically—from a professional affiliation to a longtime friendship to a bona fide family affair! It would be easier, I think, to tell you what hasn’t changed through those years: an abiding mutual respect and affection. With Matt, the professional became personal very early on, even before he married my younger sister. Some creator-editor relationships can be really intense, at least for me—an intensity that’s sparked by the creator’s

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artistic vision and the editor’s commitment to that vision—and Matt is not only the first serious artist whose work I edited, he’s also the artist with whom I’ve worked the longest. My career as a comics editor started in 1985, as I mentioned, with issue #6 of The Hero Discovered, and it came full circle in 2019, with the final issue of The Hero Denied. I’d actually retired from editing a few years before that, and only Matt could—and did—talk me into one last project. I could never have said no to my own brother-in-law, let alone to ending my editorial career full circle, right back where it began: with Matt and with Mage.” Did anything along the way surprise her? “All of it? There’s a spontaneity to Mage, and to Matt’s particular creative process with that book, that is unlike any of his other work. Grendel is so coldly deliberate, whereas Mage exudes a kind of energy that’s very fresh; every new page just radiates life… even when characters die. I was surprised that my niece and nephew had such strong roles in Denied, as did my sister, though in retrospect, that makes perfect sense. Knowing Matt’s life story as I do, I’d say his ability to wrap that in allegory has been a constant surprise throughout the trilogy.” All three series share a cosmetic similarity was well. Near the climax of each series, there’s a foldout spread of an impactful moment: Kevin facing the dragon, the Umbra Sprite destroying Emil, and Kevin realizing that the power is in himself. How did this come about? “That was another example of happenstance that led to opportunity,” says Wagner. “I was getting ready to do the last issue [of Discovered], and the production designer at Comico said to me, ‘Hey, do you want to do a foldout? We could do a foldout.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, great. Let’s do a foldout.’ So then I just kept doing foldouts. Once it became a motif, I had to figure out how to make it work every time.” But there’s something else that ties the books together: Shakespeare. Each part of the trilogy uses quotes from a Shakespeare play as chapter titles. “The first one’s Hamlet, and that’s all about self-doubt,” says Wagner. “And in the first one, Kevin is very doubting that he is, and deserves to be, this hero. The second one’s Macbeth, and that’s all about arrogance and a longing for power. The third one’s The Tempest. They think The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last written play, and it’s about a powerful character ultimately giving up his power on coming to the realization that’s no longer what he needs in his life. “The distance between the books, I now realize, was an absolute necessity,” Wagner concludes. “In regard to my creative approach to it. The creative payoff. How successful I was going to be at it creatively. And the attempt to try and not overthink it. On the next-to-last page, there’s a thing that I only figured out right then. When they come back to the real world, Magda’s ‘familiar’ now looks like a real cat. Miranda says, ‘You look just like a regular kitty now! I’ll call you Domino!’ The cat’s name is Cleo. We once had two kittens at one point and we had names for them, but for one of the cats my daughter decided, ‘No. His name’s Domino.’ We couldn’t talk her out of it. ‘We all call that cat a different name.’ ‘Nope. He’s Domino.’ That’s something that only struck me on the next-to-last page. It’s that creative spontaneity and joy that has stayed with me throughout the entire saga. Over the entire 30-some years of doing all three parts of the trilogy, I never really lost that with Mage. And I’m very grateful that it worked out that way.” And that joy has also been felt by the many readers who have followed Kevin’s journey through the years. A huge “thank you” to Matt Wagner, Diana Schutz, and Brennan Wagner. This article would not have been possible without you. Thanks also to Lynne Twining. ROGER ASH is being Safer At Home in Wisconsin and trying to catch up on his comic reading. He’s got a way to go.

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by J e r r y

Everyone loves Cherry Poptart—especially everyone in her comics. Cherry is a passionate and rather open-minded young woman (but over 18, of course) who enjoys sharing her passion with the world. She has appeared in a number of different titles of her own, spotlighting her amorous adventures. Adults only, please. Creator, writer, and artist Larry Welz has guided the character closely through her various series, including Cherry Poptart (1977–1996), Cherry’s Jubilee (1992–1999), and the one-shot Cherry Deluxe (1998). Cherry Deluxe was drawn by Welz but contained stories by an assortment of writers, including Neil Gaiman. In the 1990s, after the debut of Cheryl Blossom, a rumor surfaced that Cheryl’s creation was intended as Archie Comics’ answer to Cherry. They were both drawn in a similar sexy style, and both a little over-the-top. Since inquiring minds need to know, BACK ISSUE reached out to Mr. Welz to ask him directly what he knew and when he knew it. – Jerry Smith

Smith

Comics directly, although we did have Larry Todd’s “Vampironica” story in the back there, which did that. So when we did another run, I took out that story and replaced it with a story I had done in Bakersfield Kountry Komics in that style. It was a little longer than “Vampironica,” so I also lost Jay Kinney’s “Wholesome Twins” story. That’s why copies from the first run of 10,000 are considered valuable collectors’ items. I think I got another letter later on, acknowledging that and still objecting to the whole idea of it, citing the “distinctive color scheme of the cover art.” It is to laugh, no? Funny thing is they have now done a Vampironica book, or at least a story; I haven’t actually seen it, but I have seen it advertised. Maybe Todd and I should sue them. SMITH: Were you ever an Archie Comics fan? Have you ever read a Cheryl Blossom story? WELZ: I was a fan of Dan DeCarlo’s drawing. I read Archie Comics because I read all comics. Yes, I have read some Cheryl Blossom stuff. JERRY SMITH: Did Archie Comics influence your drawing SMITH: Any general thoughts about Cheryl Blossom and style at all? If so, in what way? how she relates to Cherry? LARRY WELZ: I was trying to mimic the style of all the WELZ: I wonder if she actually is based on Cherry. I don’t wacky teenager comics that every comic company get it. Cherry is kind of generically iconic and open had in the ’60s. Turns out they were all being drawn to interpretation. I was thinking maybe Cheryl was by Dan DeCarlo, or so it seemed. I stole Betty and gonna be more blatantly sexual than Betty and Veronica comics off the spinner rack at the drugstore. Veronica. Who knows, maybe she started out like that, They were only 12 cents, but I was embarrassed to be as envisioned by DeCarlo, and the editors twisted seen buying girlie comics. I would trace the pinups her around so she’s just another snotty rich girl. Which so that I could remove their clothes. of course is Veronica’s shtick. I dunno. SMITH: There is a rumor that the Archie character SMITH: Why the change in title from Cherry Poptart larry welz Cheryl Blossom at Archie was loosely based on or inspired to just Cherry? Did Kellogg’s really object to the title? by Cherry Poptart. Do you know if that is true? WELZ: We actually did that to make the masthead WELZ: I think I started that rumor. I have no idea if that is true or not. shorter and cleaner, although I think [Last Gasp publisher] Ron Turner I met Mr. DeCarlo at San Diego as he was doing a sketch and told him I wanted to not be so blatant. She was still Cherry Poptart; we just didn’t do Cherry. He said, “My hero,” totally deadpan without stopping drawing spell it out on the cover. Much later, an idiot who wanted to be my or looking up. I don’t know exactly how to take that, but I will take it. licensing agent went to the New York licensing show and announced in I liked imagining that all the Archie artists loved my stuff and envied the program or whatever that he was there to license Cherry Poptart as my freedom, and that the editors/publishers hated me. I like to think a property. Well, lawyers are looking real hard at everything people are bringing to a licensing show, so, bigger than sh*t, I get a letter from that Holli Would in Bakshi’s Cool World was inspired by Cherry, too. SMITH: There is another rumor that Archie objected to Cherry Poptart Kellogg’s saying I gotta cease and desist and destroy all blah blah blah and communicated that to you in some way. Is there any truth to that? and don’t even think about marketing merchandise that says Cherry Any Cease and Desist orders or angry letters from them? Poptart on it. Actually, they didn’t say that last part; they didn’t have to. WELZ: Oh, yeah. I got a great letter from a New England law firm, It’s not like I’m in the snack food business or anything; I suppose we Grimes & Battersby, on high-quality stationery with about 50 partners’ could have fought them and won, but at what cost, right? We ignored it, names on top of the letterhead telling us to cease and desist and destroy although I did never write her full name into any stories again. Now I’m all copies and so on. Well, I was parodying the genre, not Archie thinking I’m gonna start calling her Cherry Poppedheart. 76 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

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WHY SO SERIOUS?

Yes, it’s that darn limey here again. Having just finished reading BACK ISSUE #120, I thought it was high time that I put pen to paper (well, okay, finger to keyboard) and gave you my thoughts. Did I like the issue? No, I loved it. I was always fascinated by stories set in the far future, and was a huge fan of the Legion of Super-Heroes throughout my 1970s childhood. My era was that of Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell, and I thrilled to the (mainly) Utopian adventures of those talented teens. So, I reveled in the parts of this edition focusing on that decade and the preceding one(s). Some of your articles stray into later periods. I read those pieces but often can’t engage with them, as they concern writers and artists whose work I’ve never read, or creators that I’ve not even heard of. However, I did appreciate the interview with Steve Lightle. I’d heard the name, but didn’t know much about the man himself or his output, so surprised myself by taking an instant liking to him. His views echoed my own and he obviously shared my affection for the original Legion stories. Which brings me to the main reason I felt compelled to write at this time. I wondered if any of my fellow readers shared my distaste for making every comic seem dark or “relevant.” It seems to me that, since Watchmen (which I think is brilliant, by the way, when judged as a standalone piece of work), every character has to be constantly rebooted and/or given bleaker personas. Stan Lee always said that comics should have the “illusion of change,” in that there could be major shocks during storylines, but in the end the characters and their situations effectively stayed the same. So, the Fantastic Four that I knew and loved in 1974 were not greatly different from the group of a decade earlier. I may have become a grumpy old man, but I found that comforting. Nowadays, there appears to be an obsession with restarting series at issue #1 (or #0, bizarrely) over and over again (Legion

being a good example) and constantly bringing characters back from the dead (I still can’t believe they did that with Bucky. Is nothing sacred?). I understand the economic and creative reasons, but I read about some of the bizarre twists in comics during the last, say, 20 years, and I shudder. Even though the comics of my youth had fantastic concepts like living planets and silvery beings riding the cosmos on surfboards, the stories themselves had a consistent feel to them—nothing seemed to be done purely to make as many dollars (or pounds, of course) as possible. Even shocks like the death of Gwen Stacy fit an artistic purpose and seemed plausible. But I read somewhere that she and Norman Osborn had been resurrected and she’d had a child with him. And that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is where the prosecution rests. I’m sorry to anyone who grew up reading more modern titles than I did. I don’t mean to offend you, or pour cold water on your own cherished memories, but I personally believe that comics lost much of their magic from the 1980s onwards. The artists’ styles became somewhat generic, and often soulless as a result. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d be interested to know if anyone out there shares my sentiments. Thank goodness that BI has plenty of great material from “my” era. I’m looking forward greatly to the next issue on the subject of Conan and the Barbarians, including the wonderful Kull with its magnificent Severin(s) art. I have no idea what Arak, Son of Thunder is, but I’m sure that your writer will entertain me nonetheless. That’s the beauty of your brilliant publication, which has enthralled me from the very first issue. Even if some of the articles concern titles that I’ve never heard of and will probably never read (yes, Sonic Disruptors, I’m looking at you), there is always so much content in each edition to grab my attention and pique my interest. There you are, you see—I’ve cheered up already. Thanks for listening. – Dave Barker, Wakefield, England Dave, I’m glad you discovered Steve Lightle’s work in issue #120. You would probably enjoy some of the Legion issues he drew… even though they were published in the ’80s. The “darkening” of superhero comics is a topic oft discussed in this forum. Even Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons himself voiced his regret, in an interview with Dan Johnson published back in BACK ISSUE #79, that the majority of comic books following Watchmen have imitated its tone, altering the industry as a whole. Times change and so do demographics, and contemporary comics certainly aren’t the types of books that many of us grew up reading. Fortunately, comics publishers, especially Marvel and DC, still continue to reprint their 1970s library, pleasing us old-timers and introducing this classic material to an audience TM & © DC Comics. that came along later. If you want to read new comic books with a ’70s vibe, then check out creator Christopher Mills’ line of Atomic Pulp titles! I plugged the then-upcoming line in BI #114, but have since been able to read several issues… and am having a blast.

Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 77

Just had a read-through of BI #120. Great stuff. I note that on page 56 you reproduced a house advertisement for the “Quiet Darkness” arc in Legion of Super-Heroes. There were actually two versions of this: the more common was the black-and-white one you used, while a color version appeared in Swamp Thing Annual #6. – Legion Lad Thank you for sending that color scan, which we’ve presented on this page. Readers may recall Legion Lad as the contributor of BI #120’s article on Legion collectibles. He has recently updated his Legion fandom website, which is a sight (and site) to behold! Even if you’re not a fan of DC’s team of futuristic teens, you’ll be dazzled by Legion Lad’s impressive database of all things Legion, from publications to apparel and beyond. Visit: www.thelegionofsuper-heroes.com.

(top) House ad featuring the Atomic Pulps pantheon. Art by Rich Hoberg. (bottom left) A Wolverton-ish creature battles Spacehawk in Space Crusaders #2. Cover art by Peter Grau. (bottom right) By Conan! Comics’ first barbarian is back. Savage Sagas #1. Cover art by Sergio Cariello. All characters and titles © Christopher Mills.

AN AMAZING LEGION FANDOM SITE

“FIVE YEARS LATER” LEGION WORTH THE WAIT The conceit here is, Mills has taken a handful of public domain characters from the Golden Age (Crom the Barbarian, Black Owl, Spacehawk, etc.) and brought them back in new adventures set in the 1970s, treating the properties as if they had continuously been in print since their debuts in the 1940s. Chris is the visionary behind the titles, serving as writer, letter, editor, and designer, teaming with very talented artists. The books’ covers mimic the trade dress of DC’s mid-1970s books, although their production values are top notch, on slick paper, not the poorly color-separated newsprint comics we bought back in the day. I highly recommend you giving some of the Atomic Pulp titles a try (after all, they’ve been approved by the Atomic Action Authority!). They’re available through web orders online, at www.atomicactioncomics.com.

Michael, no reason that you’d remember me, but I wrote you four or five years ago suggesting a “Five Years Later” feature on the Legion of Super-Heroes, and after you said it was on the agenda, I wrote you again probably two years after that asking about the status of it. Each time you promptly and politely answered my emails. Well, after reading the article in BACK ISSUE #120, I just wanted to thank you and tell you it was all I could have hoped. It was well worth the wait. All the best, and stay safe! – Russ Benton Nice to hear from you, Russ! I hope you’re healthy and doing okay. Your message made my day! Glad you enjoyed the Legion FYL article. Writer Jim Ford knocked that one out of the park, didn’t he?

78 • BACK ISSUE • Creator-Owned Comics Issue

STEVE LIGHTLE AND FERRO LAD

[BI #120] was incredible. Loved every page of it! I just want to know if Ferro Lad in the proposed Legion Outpost series was Andrew Nolan or not. Since Steve Lightle’s quote mentioned the sacrifice he made for the good of the galaxy, I wasn’t sure if he was back, or if it would have been someone new as Ferro Lad (ignoring the whole clone option)... – Robert Andrews

Robert, I went straight to the source and asked Steve himself. His response: Yes! There is no other. His appearance in that proposed series would have occurred chronologically before his sacrifice—and it would not have been taken for granted that he would necessarily die in the series. – Steve Lightle

ANOTHER SON OF SATURN APPEARANCE

Pawing through my physical copies, Jemm also appears in DC Challenge #4 (below). Loving issue #120, thanks! – Mike Gilbert

THE FUTURE IS IN THE PAST

With things finally opening up in this area [Canada], and Diamond shipping once again, I was finally able to lay my hands on BACK ISSUE #120. Seeing as Steve Lightle has always been one of my favorite artists, to finally see his cover up close and personal was great. It would have been wonderful if the pair of you [writer/artist Lightle and editor Michael Eury] had been able to get that Legion series into print. I’m sure I and many other people would have enjoyed it. I also loved the background on his initial conception of the Quislet character and his perspective on the thinking that would motivate someone with super-speed. Having always been a fan of Mike Grell, and Starslayer in particular, I enjoyed that feature. As always with a BI article, the minutiae of the subject greatly interested me, especially the insights into the beginning of the direct market as a viable outlet for creators to own their own projects and have them distributed alongside the Big Two. Manhunter 2070 was interesting if only for a facet that you and I have touched on recently. That being, no matter how obscure The Flash and Kid Flash TM & © DC Comics. BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows. All Rights Reserved.

a character, there will be a creator out there who will remember and use them. Given the timbre of comics in recent years, fans of these type of characters from the ’60s may prefer they had stayed forgotten, but what can you do. Finally, the Mon-El, oops, Valor article and the “Five Years Later” Legion. I’m not the biggest fan of those stories. I was a big Sun Boy fan and I loved the Element Lad/Shvaughn Erin relationship, so a few of the developments didn’t sit well with me. As well, to paraphrase Mr. Lightle, I thought the stories were interesting science fiction, they just didn’t fit the Legion I knew and loved. That being said, the two articles gave me much more of an appreciation of why those stories turned out the way they did and why certain changes were made. We live now, as they did then, in a time where characters for the big companies live in a shared universe. As well, the term “reboot” has entered into the language. Back when Stan Lee wrote every Marvel comic and DC editors had their own fiefdoms, it was much easier for the characters to interact. If you want to use my character, they have to act this way. However, as things have diversified, and characters and their milieus have influenced and begotten other characters, it has become much more complicated. Certainly in the case of these two subjects. Everything intersects, and creators have great ideas that may be at odds with someone else’s. Regimes change, and so the corporate structure causes ripples down the line. I ran into this while researching my Action Comics Weekly article for BI #98. Neil Gaiman’s story meant for the final weekly issue was deemed unusable at the time, but later became acceptable. Those are the factors the creators involved in these stories had to deal with. Tailoring your stories to fit one set of rules and then having those rules changed later must be an incredibly difficult thing to work with. Both articles did a fine job of detailing the many hoops that had to be jumped through to create any sort of coherent stories. In that light it makes the fact that such quality work was produced even more amazing. I think we all have to put up with changing rules in our jobs and have to adjust, but for the most part I don’t think fans generally appreciate that creators of their beloved art form have to deal with exactly the same issues. Of course, all of this doesn’t really monumentally change my enjoyment of the stories, but it does make it much easier to understand the choices that were made. In the end, discovering these types of things and hearing from the people involved is one of the main reasons I read BACK ISSUE, and helps make every issue a pleasurable reading experience. – Brian Martin Thanks for those astute observations about how the business and political sides of comics sometimes affect their creative content. Next issue: “Legacy,” starring Wally West as the Flash! BRANDON ROUTH Superman interview, Harry Osborn/Green Goblin, Scott Lang/Ant-Man, Infinity Inc., the Reign of the Supermen, and the JOHN ROMITA Father/Son Legacy. Featuring JON BOGDANOVE, GERRY CONWAY, MATT FRACTION, TOM GRUMMETT, GEOFF JOHNS, DAN JURGENS, KARL KESEL, DAVID MICHELINIE, JERRY ORDWAY, SANDY PLUNKETT, ROGER STERN, ROY THOMAS, MARK WAID, and many other superstar creators. Featuring a Flash cover by MIKE WIERINGO and JOSE MARZAN JR. Don’t ask—just BI it! See you in sixty! Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor-in-chief

Creator-Owned Comics Issue • BACK ISSUE • 79

RetroFan: The Pop Culture You Grew Up With! If you love Pop Culture of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, editor MICHAEL EURY’s latest magazine is just for you!

RETROFAN #11

HALLOWEEN ISSUE! Interviews with DARK SHADOWS’ Quentin Collins, DAVID SELBY, and the niece of movie Frankenstein GLENN STRANGE, JULIE ANN REAMS. Plus: KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER, ROD SERLING retrospective, CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST, TV’s Adventures of Superman, Superman’s pal JIMMY OLSEN, QUISP and QUAKE cereals, the DRAK PAK AND THE MONSTER SQUAD, scratch model customs, and more fun, fab features! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!

RETROFAN #6

RETROFAN #7

RETROFAN #12

Hollywood interviewer CHRIS MANN goes behind the scenes of TV’s sexy sitcom THREE’S COMPANY—and NANCY MORGAN RITTER, first wife of JOHN RITTER, shares stories about the TV funnyman. Plus: RICK GOLDSCHMIDT’s making of RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER, RONNIE SCHELL interview, Sheena Queen of the TV Jungle, Dr. Seuss toys, Popeye cartoons, DOCTOR WHO’s 1960s U.S. invasion, and more fun, fab features! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping! Look for #13 in February 2021!

RETROFAN #8

RETROFAN #9

RETROFAN #10

Interviews with MeTV’s crazy creepster SVENGOOLIE and Eddie Munster himself, BUTCH PATRICK! Call on the original Saturday Morning GHOST BUSTERS, with BOB BURNS! Uncover the nutty NAUGAS! Plus: “My Life in the Twilight Zone,” “I Was a Teenage James Bond,” “My Letters to Famous People,” the ARCHIE-DOBIE GILLIS connection, Pinball Hall of Fame, Alien action figures, Rubik’s Cube & more!

With a JACLYN SMITH interview, as we reopen the Charlie’s Angels Casebook, and visit the Guinness World Records’ largest Charlie’s Angels collection. Plus: interview with LARRY STORCH, The Lone Ranger in Hollywood, The Dick Van Dyke Show, a vintage interview with Jonny Quest creator DOUG WILDEY, a visit to the Land of Oz, the ultra-rare Marvel World superhero playset, and more!

NOW BI-MONTHLY! Interviews with the ’60s grooviest family band THE COWSILLS, and TV’s coolest mom JUNE LOCKHART! Mars Attacks!, MAD Magazine in the ’70s, Flintstones turn 60, Electra Woman & Dyna Girl, Honey West, Max Headroom, Popeye Picnic, the Smiley Face fad, & more! With MICHAEL EURY, ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, and SCOTT SHAW!

NOW BI-MONTHLY! Interviews with ’70s’ Captain America REB BROWN, and Captain Nice (and Knight Rider’s KITT) WILLIAM DANIELS with wife BONNIE BARTLETT! Plus: Coloring Books, Fall Previews for Saturday morning cartoons, The Cyclops movie, actors behind your favorite TV commercial characters, BENNY HILL, the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, 8-track tapes, and more!

NOW BI-MONTHLY! Celebrating fifty years of SHAFT, interviews with FAMILY AFFAIR’s KATHY GARVER and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour’s GERI “FAKE JAN” REISCHL, ED “BIG DADDY” ROTH, rare GODZILLA merchandise, Spaghetti Westerns, Saturday morning cartoon preview specials, fake presidential candidates, Spider-Man/The Spider parallels, Stuckey’s, and more fun, fab features!

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RETROFAN #1

RETROFAN #2

RETROFAN #3

RETROFAN #4

RETROFAN #5

LOU FERRIGNO interview, The Phantom in Hollywood, Filmation’s STAR TREK CARTOON, “How I Met LON CHANEY, JR.”, goofy comic Zody the Mod Rob, Mego’s rare ELASTIC HULK toy, RetroTravel to Mount Airy, NC (the real-life Mayberry), interview with BETTY LYNN (“Thelma Lou” of THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW), TOM STEWART’s eclectic House of Collectibles, and MR. MICROPHONE!

Horror-hosts ZACHERLEY, VAMPIRA, SEYMOUR, MARVIN, and an interview with our cover-featured ELVIRA! THE GROOVIE GOOLIES, BEWITCHED, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and THE MUNSTERS! The long-buried Dinosaur Land amusement park! History of BEN COOPER HALLOWEEN COSTUMES, character lunchboxes, superhero VIEW-MASTERS, SINDY (the British Barbie), and more!

Interview with SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE director RICHARD DONNER, IRWIN ALLEN’s sci-fi universe, Saturday morning’s undersea adventures of Aquaman, horror and sci-fi zines of the Sixties and Seventies, Spider-Man and Hulk toilet paper, RetroTravel to METROPOLIS, IL (home of the Superman Celebration), SEA-MONKEYS®, FUNNY FACE beverages, Superman/Batman memorabilia, & more!

Interviews with SHAZAM! TV show’s JOHN (Captain Marvel) DAVEY and MICHAEL (Billy Batson) Gray, the GREEN HORNET in Hollywood, remembering monster maker RAY HARRYHAUSEN, the way-out Santa Monica Pacific Ocean Amusement Park, a Star Trek Set Tour, SAM J. JONES on the Spirit movie pilot, British sci-fi TV classic THUNDERBIRDS, Casper & Richie Rich museum, the KING TUT fad, and more!

Interviews with MARK HAMILL & Greatest American Hero’s WILLIAM KATT! Blast off with JASON OF STAR COMMAND! Stop by the MUSEUM OF POPULAR CULTURE! Plus: “The First Time I Met Tarzan,” MAJOR MATT MASON, MOON LANDING MANIA, SNUFFY SMITH AT 100 with cartoonist JOHN ROSE, TV Dinners, Celebrity Crushes, and more fun, fab features!

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ALTER EGO #167

ALTER EGO #168

ALTER EGO #169

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #23

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #24

Salute to Golden & Silver Age artist SYD SHORES as he’s remembered by daughter NANCY SHORES KARLEBACH, fellow artist ALLEN BELLMAN, DR. MICHAEL J. VASSALLO, and interviewer RICHARD ARNDT. Plus: mid-1940s “Green Turtle” artist/creator CHU HING profiled by ALEX JAY, JOHN BROOME, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and Mr. Monster on MORT WEISINGER Part Two, and more!

Two RICHARD ARNDT interviews revealing the wartime life of Aquaman artist/ co-creator PAUL NORRIS (with a Golden/ Silver Age art gallery)—plus the story of WILLIE ITO, who endured the WWII Japanese-American relocation centers to become a Disney & Warner Bros. animator and comics artist. Plus FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, JOHN BROOME, and more, behind a NORRIS cover!

Spotlight on Groovy GARY FRIEDRICH— co-creator of Marvel’s Ghost Rider! ROY THOMAS on their six-decade friendship, wife JEAN FRIEDRICH and nephew ROBERT HIGGERSOM on his later years, PETER NORMANTON on GF’s horror/ mystery comics, art by PLOOG, TRIMPE, ROMITA, THE SEVERINS, AYERS, et al.! FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and Mr. Monster, and more! MIKE PLOOG cover!

WENDY PINI discusses her days as Red Sonja cosplayer, & 40+ years of ELFQUEST! Plus RICHARD PINI on their 48-year marriage and creative partnership! Plus: We have the final installment of our CRAIG YOE interview! GIL KANE’s business partner LARRY KOSTER talks about their adventures together! PABLO MARCOS on his Marvel horror work, HEMBECK, and more! Cover by WENDY PINI.

TIMOTHY TRUMAN discusses his start at the Kubert School, Grimjack with writer JOHN OSTRANDER, and current collaborations with son Benjamin. SCOTT SHAW! talks about early San Diego Comic-Cons and friendship with JACK KIRBY, Captain Carrot, and Flintstones work! Also PATRICK McDONNELL’s favorite MUTTS comic book pastiches, letterer JANICE CHIANG profiled, HEMBECK, and more! TIM TRUMAN cover.

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #25 WORLD OF TWOMORROWS

BACK ISSUE #126

BACK ISSUE #127

HOLLY JOLLY

BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH discusses his new graphic novel MONSTERS, its origin as a 1980s Hulk story, and its evolution into his 300-page magnum opus (includes a gallery of outtakes). Plus part two of our SCOTT SHAW! interview about HannaBarbera licensing material and work with ROY THOMAS on Captain Carrot, KEN MEYER, JR. looks at the great fanzines of 40 years ago, HEMBECK, and more!

“Legacy” issue! Wally West Flash, BRANDON ROUTH Superman interview, Harry Osborn/Green Goblin, Scott Lang/Ant-Man, Infinity Inc., Reign of the Supermen, JOHN ROMITA SR. and JR. “Rough Stuff,” plus CONWAY, FRACTION, JURGENS, MESSNER-LOEBS, MICHELINIE, ORDWAY, SLOTT, ROY THOMAS, MARK WAID, and more. WIERINGO/MARZAN JR. cover!

“Soldiers” issue! Sgt. Rock revivals, General Thunderbolt Ross, Beetle Bailey in comics, DC’s Blitzkrieg, War is Hell’s John Kowalski, Atlas’ savage soldiers, The ’Nam, Nth the Ultimate Ninja, and CONWAY and GARCIA-LOPEZ’s Cinder and Ashe. Featuring CLAREMONT, DAVID, DIXON, GOLDEN, HAMA, KUBERT, LOEB, DON LOMAX, DOUG MURRAY, TUCCI, and more. BRIAN BOLLAND cover!

MARK VOGER’s sleigh ride thru Christmas pop culture! Explores movies (Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life), music (White Christmas, Little St. Nick), TV (How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), books (Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol), decor (1950s silver aluminum trees), comics (super-heroes meet Santa), and more! Featuring CHARLES M. SCHULZ, ANDY WILLIAMS and others!

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TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

KIRBY COLLECTOR #81

BRICKJOURNAL #66

RETROFAN #13

RETROFAN #14

“Kirby: Beta!” Jack’s experimental ideas, characters, and series (Fighting American, Jimmy Olsen, Kamandi, and others), Kirby interview, inspirations for his many “secret societies” (The Project, Habitat, Wakanda), non-superhero genres he explored, 2019 Heroes Con panel (with MARK EVANIER, MIKE ROYER, JIM AMASH, and RAND HOPPE), a pencil art gallery, UNUSED JIMMY OLSEN #141 COVER, and more!

YUANSHENG HE’s breathtaking LEGO® brick art photography (and how he creates it), the many models of TOM FROST, and the intricate Star Wars builds of Bantha Brick’s STEVEN SMYTH! Plus: “Bricks in the Middle” by KEVIN HINKLE and MATTHEW KAY, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, Minifigure Customization with JARED K. BURKS, and more!

Exclusive interviews with Lost in Space’s MARK GODDARD and MARTA KRISTEN, Dynomutt and Blue Falcon, Hogan’s Heroes’ BOB CRANE, Wham-O’s Frisbee history, Twilight Zone and other TV sci-fi anthologies, Who Created Archie Andrews?, oddities from the San Diego Zoo, & lava lamps, with ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, and SCOTT SHAW!

Behind-the-scenes photos of many of your favorite Sixties TV shows! Plus: an unpublished interview with Green Hornet VAN WILLIAMS, Bigfoot on Saturday morning television, WOLFMAN JACK, The Saint, the lean years of Star Trek fandom, the Wrestlemania video game, TV tie-in toys no kid would want, and more fun, fab features from FARINO, MANGELS, MURRAY, SAAVEDRA, SHAW, and MICHAEL EURY.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Summer 2021

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WELCOME... TO THE FUTURE!

In 1973-74, legendary Producer Gene Roddenberry created two different TV movies that take place on a post-apocalyptic Earth struggling to re-emerge from the chaos. But their best hope lies with a man unfrozen from the past - Dylan Hunt!

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GENESIS II (1973) PLANET EARTH (1974)