Back Issue #136 by TwoMorrows Publishing

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RetroFan: The Pop Culture You Grew Up With! Remember when Saturday morning television was our domain, and ours alone? When tattoos came from bubble gum packs, Slurpees came in superhero cups, and TV heroes taught us to be nice to each other? If you love Pop Culture of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, TwoMorrows’ new magazine is just for you! Editor MICHAEL EURY (author of numerous books on pop culture, former editor for DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics, and editor of TwoMorrows’ Eisner Award-winning BACK ISSUE magazine for comic book fans) has assembled an unbeatable roster of regular and rotating Celebrity Columnists to cover the pop culture you grew up with: • ANDY MANGELS (best-selling sci-fi author and award-winning pop culture historian) • ERNEST FARINO (Emmy Award-winning visual effects designer, animator, and director) • SCOTT SHAW! (acclaimed cartoonist, animator, Emmy Award-winning storyboard artist, and historian) • WILL MURRAY (pulp adventure novelist and pop culture historian) • SCOTT SAAVEDRA (graphic designer, cartoonist, and COMIC BOOK HEAVEN creator) • MARK VOGER (renowned pop culture newspaper columnist and book author), and others!

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Meet JULIE NEWMAR, the purr-fect Catwoman! Plus: ASTRO BOY, TARZAN Saturday morning cartoons, the true history of PEBBLES CEREAL, TV’s THE UNTOUCHABLES and SEARCH, the MONKEEMOBILE, SOVIET EXPO ’77, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Surf’s up as SIXTIES BEACH MOVIES make a RetroFan splash! Plus: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ZORRO’s Saturday morning cartoon, TV’s THE WILD, WILD WEST, CARtoons and other drag-mags, VALSPEAK, and more fun, fab features! Like, totally! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet the stars behind the Black Lagoon: RICOU BROWNING, BEN CHAPMAN, JULIE ADAMS, and LORI NELSON! Plus SHADOW CHASERS, featuring show creator KENNETH JOHNSON. Also: THE BEATLES’ YELLOW SUBMARINE, FLASH GORDON cartoons, TV’s cult classic THE PRISONER and kid’s show ZOOM, COLORFORMS, M&Ms, and more fun, fab features! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Interviews with Lost in Space’s ANGELA CARTWRIGHT and BILL MUMY, and Land of the Lost’s WESLEY EURE! Revisit Leave It to Beaver with JERRY MATHERS, TONY DOW, and KEN OSMOND! Plus: UNDERDOG, Rankin-Bass’ stop-motion classic THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY, Christmas gifts you didn’t want, the CABBAGE PATCH KIDS fad, and more! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

Meet Mission: Impossible’s LYNDA DAY GEORGE in an exclusive interview! Celebrate Rambo’s 50th birthday with his creator, novelist DAVID MORRELL! Plus: TV faves WKRP IN CINCINNATI and SPACE: 1999, Fleisher’s and Filmation’s SUPERMAN cartoons, commercial jingles, JERRY LEWIS and BOB HOPE comic books, and more fun, fab features! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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Dark Shadows’ Angelique, LARA PARKER, sinks her fangs into an exclusive interview. Plus: Rankin-Bass’ Mad Monster Party, Aurora Monster model kits, a chat with Aurora painter JAMES BAMA, George of the Jungle, The Haunting, Jawsmania, Drak Pack, TV dads’ jobs, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by FARINO, MANGELS, MURRAY, SAAVEDRA, SHAW, and MICHAEL EURY.

Our BARBARA EDEN interview will keep you forever dreaming of Jeannie! Plus: The Invaders, the BILLIE JEAN KING/BOBBY RIGGS tennis battle of the sexes, HANNABARBERA’s Saturday morning super-heroes of the Sixties, THE MONSTER TIMES fanzine, and more fun, fab features! Featuring ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW!, and MICHAEL EURY.

Interview with Bond Girl and Hammer Films actress CAROLINE MUNRO! Plus: WACKY PACKAGES, COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE, FILMATION’S GHOSTBUSTERS vs. the REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, Bandai’s rare PRO WRESTLER ERASERS, behind the scenes of Sixties movies, WATERGATE at Fifty, Go-Go Dancing, a visit to the Red Skelton Museum, and more fun, fab features!

MAD’s maddest artist, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, is profiled! Plus: TV’s Route 66 and an interview with star GEORGE MAHARIS, MOE HOWARD’s final years, singer B. J. THOMAS in one of his final interviews, LONE RANGER cartoons, G.I. JOE, and more! Featuring columns by ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, SCOTT SHAW, and MARK VOGER! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

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Volume 1, Number 136 July 2022 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury

Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

PUBLISHER John Morrow DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER David Baldy SPECIAL THANKS Ronn Sutton Mark Arnold Roy Thomas Mike W. Barr Steven Thompson Dewey Cassell Howard Chaykin Mike Tiefenbacher John Wells Gerry Conway Dennis Wilcutt Rosie Ford Marv Wolfman Grand Comics Database Mike Grell Rich Handley Ron Harris Heritage Comics Auctions John K. Kirk Paul Kupperberg Paul Levitz Steve Lipsky Marvel Comics Val Mayerik Robert Menzies Javier Meson Ian Millsted David Moreu Dean Mullaney Bob Rozakis Alex Saviuk Jerry Sinkovec John Siuntres

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BEYOND CAPES: Friday Foster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The pioneering adventure strip starring an African-American heroine FLASHBACK: Charlton’s Funny Papers’ Funny Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Blondie, Snuffy Smith, and other King Features stars in Bronze Age comic books BACK IN PRINT: The Menomonee Falls Gazette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 The rise and fall of the fanzine-newspaper that published strips old and new UNKNOWN MARVEL: Spider-Man and Dan Dare’s Creator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Frank Hampson’s not-so-amazing rendition of your friendly neighborhood wall-crawler PRO2PRO: Spider-Man, the Amazing Newspaper Strip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Alex Saviuk and Roy Thomas discuss the long-running feature’s final years WHAT THE?!: Howard the (Duck) Newspaper Strip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Trapped in a syndicated world he never made FLASHBACK: The World’s Greatest Superheroes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Superman and the Justice League in daily and Sunday adventures BEYOND CAPES: Star Hawks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Ron Goulart and Gil Kane’s space opera ONE-HIT WONDERS: Richie Rich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The poor little rich boy’s blink-and-you-missed-it syndicated strip BACKSTAGE PASS: Star Trek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Boldly going from a movie reboot to your local newspaper BEYOND CAPES: Mike Grell’s Tarzan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 The fan-favorite artist’s version of the Lord of the Jungle BACK TALK: Reader Reactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 BACK ISSUE™ issue 136, July 2022 (ISSN 1932-6904) is published monthly (except Jan., March, May, and Nov.) by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 4490344. Periodicals postage pending at Raleigh, NC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Back Issue, c/o TwoMorrows, 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, $39 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Spider-Man and Howard the Duck TM & © Marvel. Friday Foster © Tribune Syndicate. Star Hawks © Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc. Star Trek © CBS Studios Inc. Other characters © their respective companies. All Rights Reserved. All editorial matter © 2022 TwoMorrows and Michael Eury. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1

Smile! Original publicity artwork by Jorge Longarón, dated October 7, 1973, for the Friday Foster newspaper strip. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com). Friday Foster © Tribune Syndicate.

If you ever think about the classic, long-running newspaper strip Friday Foster, what comes to mind is likely only its badass black reporter heroine, and that’s the problem. Since Friday Foster has never been reprinted until last year, and then only the Sundays, most who know of it at all just think of it as a pioneering feminist adventure strip with a black female heroine. Only Friday wasn’t really an adventure strip at all—more a soap-opera strip. Nor was it “long running,” lasting as it did just a touch beyond four years. Add to that the fact that Friday herself wasn’t really all that much of a badass, or even a feminist. She was, in fact, a photographer’s assistant, a photographer herself, and eventually a model, but never a reporter. So, yeah, Friday Foster isn’t who you think she is. If you actually know Friday at all, it’s most likely from the 1975 Pam Grier movie, released more than a year after the strip itself had ended, but widely seen today on streaming services. It’s a good movie, but it was a whole new Friday. We’ll talk about her in a bit but first, let’s go back to the previous Friday and take a closer look.

by S t e v e n

JUST THE FACTS, FRIDAY

Thompson

“Girl Friday” is a sexist expression derived from the racist expression, “Man Friday,” which originated in Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, Robinson Crusoe. “Girl Friday” as a job description, though, was also what African-American woman Friday Foster was to hunky Caucasian, rich, famous, globetrotting glamour photographer Shawn North. North sometimes seemed like the actual star of the strip. A strong case could be made that the entire four-year run was really the story of a white photographer slowly becoming woke. When white writer Jim Lawrence and Spanish artist Jordi “Jorge” Longarón introduced Friday Foster to the world in January of 1970, the headiest days of the Civil Rights movement were already receding into the past, and the golden age of Blaxploitation was still to come. Thus, even though it’s simple to think of Friday Foster as being strongly influenced by those two things, she was actually more independent than that. According to Lawrence in early publicity, it was 1969 when he noticed that while his native Newark, New Jersey, was 50% black,

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Daily Doses of Friday Original art to three Friday Foster dailies by Lawrence and Longarón, from the stylish strip’s first year, 1970. Courtesy of Heritage. © Tribune Syndicate.

there were no black faces anywhere in newspaper comics, which is A strip set in the world of fashion that revolved around a swinging where he worked. A hack writer in the truest sense of the word, soul sister like Luna would be colorful, with eccentric characters. Jordi “Jorge” Longarón was a Spanish comic artist with no formal Lawrence had started out writing for radio in the 1950s and wrote for many different magazines including a few Doctor Strange comic training who had begun working in the industry in the 1940s when he was still in his teens. In the early 1960s, he was one of the books for Marvel in the 1960s. Mainly, though, he ghosted series many Spanish illustrators whose work appeared in the weekly fiction for young readers including Tom Swift, Jr. and the girls’ comics in the UK, such as Valentine, often illustrating Hardy Boys. At the same time, he had developed a songs or stories of popular music artists. reputation for being able to write continuity strips. According to Longarón, in an interview with David That’s not as easy as one might suspect. The dailies Moreu, Jim Lawrence hooked up with the Spanish carry the story along, but the Sunday has to sum up agency he worked through via his writing James the previous week while showing some movement Bond. Lawrence informed them that he was looking on its own, which would then be summed up in the for an artist to draw an as yet unnamed “character following week’s dailies. Ideally, the Sundays should with an Afro style.” Longarón found his own inspiration tell the story without the dailies, as many readers in Playboy’s Miss October of 1969, Jean Bell, from would only see the Sunday paper. This can all lead whom Friday’s straight hairstyle came, and began to to pretty slow progress unless the writer is particularly draw some samples. adept at his job, like Jim Lawrence. After he was chosen, the strip quickly sold to In 1969, Lawrence was already writing several jorge longarón the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate and strips including Captain Easy and the UK-only Longarón flew to the US to meet Lawrence and sign newspaper version of James Bond, but he became Normaeditorial. contracts. Of Lawrence, Jordi said, “He was a great determined to create something uniquely his person and he also brought me to Harlem to get documentation for the own—a black newspaper strip star. In a piece on black representation in comics, Sepia magazine wrote comic strip.” He added, “I had the feeling it was a poorer neighborhood that Lawrence spotted willowy black supermodel Donyale Luna— than the rest of the city, but it had a lot of life. However, there were some perhaps best remembered today as Groucho Marx’s silent sidekick in black people who did not seem very happy when they saw me with a the infamous movie, Skidoo—on a television program and was inspired. camera.” This scene would be echoed early on in the strip itself. Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 3

Friday Foster debuted in color on Sunday, January 18, 1970, with Friday introduced as a “camera bunny,” a term coined in the 1960s to describe the girls at the Playboy Clubs who would go from table to table snapping pictures of guests. Friday was working at Harlem’s Club Senegal while living nearby and raising her tween-age brother, Cleve. She is presented throughout the run of the strip as nice, compassionate, friendly, helpful, and clever—sort of “Mary Richards” played by Jayne Kennedy instead of Mary Tyler Moore. It would still be two and a half months before the strip settled into its basic premise with Friday working for Shawn North, but that first storyline tells how they meet. When Friday accidentally snaps a compromising photo of Shawn’s fiancée and tries to sell her photos to She magazine, the editors recognize what’s in the photo and decide to send her to show her pics to Shawn. The overworked photographer keeps putting her off, though, and never gets to see what they wanted him to see, but Friday ends up in the right place at the right time when Shawn’s assistant quits and he takes her on to help out. She thinks it’s temporary, but they quickly bond and become a permanent team. As time goes on, Shawn utilizes Friday’s talents both behind the camera and in front of it.

Even more extreme, a running theme was that nearly every adult black male Friday encountered became completely enamored of her and usually proposed. These included a high-priced attorney threatening to sue her, the quarterback-turned-jungle king, a Texas cowboy, a magazine editor, a bestselling author, an amnesiac computer genius, a reclusive millionaire, and Dr. Hoodoo, the cult leader. Whether at the insistence of the syndicate or the writer’s choice, very little related to the real-world situation of blacks in America ever actually made it into the strip. Lawrence tried for some characters to “speak black,” and there were a few references to Harlem’s rats and junkies. One character, named Tarr, said he had been called a “Tarr baby.” Another character refers to Friday as “uppity” and a “cheap little guttersnipe.” A knife was edited out of an early street-gang sequence. Initially, Friday Foster had been picked up by newspapers all across the country, even in the South. Some of the latter are said to have quickly dropped it, though, after realizing that Friday was a black woman. No doubt it was a tightrope walk not to offend more papers. It was a losing battle, though, and soon the strip would be carried almost exclusively in urban northern papers. It’s reported that less than 20 papers were carrying it toward the end.

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

So, why is Friday Foster thought of so highly among comic-strip buffs? Well, there are a number of strips where the stories—no matter how good they are—don’t really matter as much as the art. Leonard Starr’s On Stage is such a strip, as is Stan Drake’s The Heart of Juliet Jones. They are just consistently beautiful, especially on Sundays. Add Jordi Longarón’s Friday Foster to that list. The globetrotting fashion world provided the perfect setting for color and design, and Longarón’s semi-realistic style lent itself beautifully. Longarón’s masterful use of blacks—in more ways than one—gave his panels depth. The main thing Longarón’s art had in common with that of Starr and Drake was the constant presence of pretty girls. Although usually written as a soft-spoken, almost shy character, visually, Friday was gorgeous every step of the way. Her deep eyes, her full lips, and Longarón’s trademark depiction of her very black hair using thick, visible brushstrokes no doubt stopped many an eye just glancing down the comics pages no matter what color their skin was. No matter what was going on in the actual storylines at any given time, his depiction of Friday remained consistently stunning. Referring to them as collaborators, Longarón was assisted from time to time on his end by local artists. According to Javier Mesón and

In 23 separate storylines, Shawn and Friday deal with hiding a supposedly dead British rock legend; protecting a rare bird; the attempted assassination of a defecting scientist; a suicidal, aging, alcoholic actress; a mystery child left in Friday’s care; an ex-horror star who thinks he’s a real monster; dope smugglers; pickpockets; jewel thieves; a runaway heiress; feminist protests; a hoodoo cult; a couple of haunted houses; and an ex-football star who decides to become a real-life Tarzan. Each storyline lasted about two or three months and usually segued into the next. While no syndicate editor at the time would ever have allowed an interracial romance between Friday and Shawn, the two were generally seen as inseparable and made a cute couple. Still, to prove they weren’t an actual couple, Shawn lost his cheating fiancée in the first strip, but was given a couple of other brief but intense romances, both of which changed his thinking. One was with the feminist who had started out protesting him, and the other with the plus-size model and designer who taught him that large women should not be the object of jokes and derision. At one point, it’s strongly hinted that he even slept with the latter.

FRIDAY NIGHT FEVER

No Rest on Sunday Shawn North clobbers a cowled crook on the Lawrence/Longarón strip from Sunday, January 24, 1973. © Tribune Syndicate.

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David Moreu, editors of the first ever book collection of Friday Foster, published in Spain in May 2021 (Norma Editorial), these included Alfonso Font, Víctor Ramos, Francisco Agrás, Artur Aldomà, Julio Vivas, and, toward the end, Andreu Balcells. On this side of the Atlantic, there were a few times when Frank Springer was brought in to cover when the mail from Spain was running slow. Just prior to beginning Friday Foster, Jim Lawrence had been working with Springer on an adult strip for The Evergreen Review entitled Frank Fleet and His Electronic Sex Machine. Quoted on his Wikipedia page, Springer said, “I guess over the years I did two Sunday pages, maybe three.” When Longarón tired of the grind of a regular strip and left late in 1973, his name was dropped from the credits and various fill-ins from both Spanish artists and US artists were printed before Gray Morrow was brought in, with his name added to the credit box. Artist Howard Chaykin is credited online with having worked on Friday during this period but he told me, “To be clear, I ghost-penciled a few weeks of continuity for Gray and that’s that.” According to Javier Mesón, one American artist known to have done some fill-ins at this stage was veteran Creig Flessel, who “signed” his name on a bottle in one late 1973 Sunday. While the so-so fill-ins served mainly to emphasize the vast importance of Longarón to Friday Foster, Gray Morrow, known for his brilliant use of detail and color as seen on hundreds of paperback covers and movie posters, actually seemed the perfect replacement. Morrow’s arrival offered Friday Foster a brief resurgence in quality, and a new luster. By that time, however, so few papers were carrying it that there weren’t many readers left to notice. The final Friday Foster storyline featured a striking bald, black female magazine editor who becomes jealous of Friday and plots corporate revenge but ends up in love with the art director for an old-fashioned happy ending. Any fans still around by that point would have known it was the end because the word “end” appears at the bottom of the last panel, appropriately over top of a lovely final image of Friday and Shawn. Gray Morrow and Jim Lawrence would go on to work together on the Barbara Cartland Romances strip and Buck Rogers. Lawrence would also reunite with Jordi Longarón. In 1975, Lawrence wrote four violent action novels about a black female private detective, Angela Harpe. They were called the Dark Angel series. As written, the only thing Angela and Friday have in common is their race and gender. All four of these now pricey mass-market paperbacks, though, feature beautiful painted covers by Longarón which give the impression of a sexier, more hardened, streetwise Friday.

FRIDAY FOREVER

Normally, that would have been it, but Friday Foster got not one, not two, but three footnotes! The first had actually hit in 1972. Cover-dated October 1972, Dell’s Friday Foster one-shot comic book is said to have possibly been the very last comic book published by the company that, back in the 1940s, probably outsold all the others. For a publisher known since the 1960s for its cheap-looking covers, this one bears a lovely Jack Sparling portrait of Friday. Sparling handles the inside art nicely as well. The story, “The Beautiful People,” is credited by the Grand Comics Database to longtime Charlton stalwart, Joe Gill, and it’s a good one. In real world headlines of the day, the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had married Greek billionaire

Aristotle Onassis. Paparazzi photographer Ron Gallella was constantly following and photographing Jackie, to the point where she sued him. That’s the basic plot of this issue, with Friday assigned to accompany her at all times. In the story it’s an American woman who has married Prince “Wimoweh” of “Teri-Aki.” Despite the silly names, it’s quite the serious story. While the art isn’t anywhere near the quality of the newspaper strip, it’s some of the best Sparling art of that era, leaving the reader wishing the title had continued. The next footnote was even bigger. In 1972, at the height of the strip’s newspaper success, producer/ director Arthur Marks, who had gone from TV’s Perry Mason to Blaxploitation “B” movies—bought the screen rights to Friday Foster with the intent of producing a feature film, then continuing it as a television series. For months afterwards, it was reported that Marks was courting singers Diana Ross or Carla Thomas for the lead. In the end, though, the film starred Pam Grier, which, in retrospect, seems like it should have been a no-brainer. Pam Grier was the absolute queen of Blaxploitation films, referred to in the press as “the black Raquel Welch.” She was gorgeous, and here—really for the first time—was given a chance to prove that she could act with more emotions than just righteous anger. Pam 100% looked the part of Friday Foster,

Fabulous Fill-ins Sunday Friday Foster strips by artists (top) Gray Morrow and (bottom) Frank Springer, both of whom should be familiar to Bronze Age comic-book readers. Courtesy of Heritage. © Tribune Syndicate.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 5

Freaky Friday (top) Dell Comics’ single issue of Friday Foster, #1 (Oct. 1972). Art by Jack Sparling. (bottom) The year after the strip was discontinued, Pam Grier played the comic-strip heroine in the Blaxploitation film, Friday Foster. In this sexy lobby card (courtesy of Heritage), Thalmus Rasulala as Blake Tarr romances Grier as Foster. Friday Foster © Tribune Syndicate.

and she was backed up with an amazing cast of some of the best black screen actors of the day. These included Thalmus Rasulala and Yaphet Kotto as two characters from the strip—black millionaire Blake Tarr and Colt “Blackhawk” Hawkins, here a private detective. Others included Julius Harris, Carl Weathers, Eartha Kitt, Scatman Crothers, Godfrey Cambridge, and Ted Lange. Pam’s Friday was charming, flirtatious, unflappable, resourceful, and observant. At times, she was also scared, sad, aroused, reluctant, curious, and skittish. Only the casting of Shawn was questionable. Logic dictated that they downplay his strong role in Friday’s life in a film aimed largely toward black audiences, but to cast a slight, pretty boy actor—Stan Stratton in his first of only a handful of roles—felt wrong. Kotto’s Colt Hawkins, a winning performance, fills what would have likely been Shawn’s hero role had this story been in the strip itself. It’s a goofy, convoluted plot, in which wheelchair-bound white supremacist Jim Backus (in the film for just about two minutes) funds a plan to gather all the black leaders of the country together secretly, only so they can then be done away with. The film received mixed reviews. Coming so late in the Blaxploitation cycle didn’t help it either. The main issue, though, is the fact that it tied in to a comic strip that parts of the country never saw and that had, itself ended almost two years earlier. Sadly, no TV series was forthcoming. More than 40 years later, in 2019, came the final footnote, as Friday Foster, the character, was revived in a two-week “Minit Mysteries” run in the Dick Tracy comic strip. Illustrated by guest artist Andrew Pepoy, Friday here is a successful fashion photographer. When one of her models turns up dead, Tracy shows up. It’s clear the two are old friends and Friday helps Dick solve the murder. The last Sunday in the sequence appropriately features a full panel text tribute to the then just-deceased Jorge Longarón (Longarón’s son maintains a tribute site at http://longaronmuseum.org) . Her creators played it safe, never really allowing their girl Friday to become particularly controversial. She was a safe, friendly, comic-strip career girl—more Winnie Winkle than Angela Davis by a long shot. But there’s no denying Friday Foster made a lasting impression on anyone who ever discovered her, both inside and outside her comic strip! Special thanks to Javier Meson and David Moreu, Michael Eury, Howard Chaykin, and Ronn Sutton. STEVEN THOMPSON once rode a Greyhound bus 100 miles to catch the Friday Foster movie. He has been writing about comics, movies, TV, and radio since 1988. He has worked in various capacities on more than 150 books and magazines to date. He currently writes a regular column in TwoMorrows’ Comic Book Creator and maintains multiple blogs online.

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by M

ark Arnold

As longtime readers of this magazine probably already know, Charlton was a comic-book publisher that existed from 1945 to 1986 that is now best known for their publishing many superheroes that later became the basis for DC’s Watchmen title, movie, and TV series. They are also known for taking on the Hanna-Barbera titles during the 1970s when Gold Key gave up the license for older characters. [Editor’s note: See BACK ISSUE #79 and 129, respectively, for those stories.] What is not as commonly known is that Charlton took on many of the licensed comic-strip characters from King Features after being published for many years by Dell, Gold Key, and King’s own short-lived line of King Comics. King Features Syndicate is a print syndication company that distributes about 150 different comic strips, newspaper columns, puzzles, games, and editorial cartoons to newspapers worldwide. It is owned by Hearst Communications and was founded by William Randolph Hearst and launched on November 16, 1915. The name King came from Hearst’s manager Moses Koenigsberg, who gave it his own name translated from German (Konig means king). Sylvan Byck was King Features’ comics editor from 1956 through 1978. As editor, Byck helped many King Features comic strips become adapted into both theatrical and television cartoons. He also helped many of these same strips get launched into lengthy comic-book runs initially with Dell and Gold Key, and some with Harvey. By 1966, many of these comic-book titles ended their runs with Gold Key and Harvey and were continued by the company’s own King Comics imprint. King Comics lasted two years, but the line suffered from distribution problems, partly caused by King’s content not being approved by the Comics Code Authority (CCA), according to John Wells and Keith Dallas in American Comic Book Chronicles. (Interestingly, Dell and Gold Key Comics were never CCA-approved, and never had distribution problems until the 1980s, more due to the advent of the direct market.) The King Comics line was essentially done by the end of 1967, with occasional titles appearing from 1972–1979. Charlton took over the publishing duties for many titles during 1968 and 1969, assuming publication with original numbering such as Beetle Bailey with #67, Flash Gordon with #12, Jungle Jim with #22, The Phantom with #30, and Popeye with #94 (all cover-dated Feb. 1969). Strangely, Charlton did not assume publication of Mandrake the Magician from King and the title remained cancelled. Some of these King characters have been discussed in other issues of BACK ISSUE, but here are a few King Features Syndicate characters that haven’t been mentioned, until now.

Everybody’s an Art Critic! King Features cartoonist Bob Donovan kept Charlton’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith comic book looking true to form. Final page of “Snuffy Gets Zee Brushoff” from issue #6 (Jan. 1971). Original art courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © King Features Syndicate.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith #1 (Mar. 1970)–6 (Jan. 1971)

Blondie #177 (Feb. 1969)– 222 (Nov. 1976) © King Features Syndicate.

The comic strip of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith was originally called Take Barney Google, F’rinstance. That mouthful of a title debuted on June 17, 1919 and was created by cartoonist Billy DeBeck. The strip is still around today. [Editor’s note: See our sister mag RetroFan #5 for further details about the

strip’s history.] Barney Google has run for over 100 years and has become the third longest-running comic strip behind The Katzenjammer Kids and Gasoline Alley. As of 2021, Barney Google became the second longest-running comic strip still being produced, behind Gasoline Alley. The success of the strip spawned probably the very first song inspired by a comic strip in 1923 with the songs “Barney Google (with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes)” and also “Come On, Spark Plug!,” a song about Barney Google’s horse. Many other songs based upon the strip also debuted that year. Over the years, the character of Barney Google himself was gradually phased out of the feature in lieu of his hillbilly friend Snuffy Smith, and was officially written out by 1954. Barney Google and his horse Spark Plug have made occasional cameo appearances since. Snuffy Smith, meanwhile, was introduced as a supporting character in 1934, but gradually became the comic strip’s star despite the fact that the comic strip is still officially titled Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Part of the reason that Snuffy became the series’ star is that DeBeck introduced a simpler style to the strip during the 1930s and the fact that he also brought in artist Fred Lasswell to assist on the strip and added the Smith hillbilly family. DeBeck died in 1942, which left Lasswell to continue the strip and expand upon the Snuffy Smith family. Smith proved to be so popular that Lasswell also featured the character in Lasswell’s other comic strip Sargent Hashmark, which ran in the US Marines’ Leatherneck Magazine. With Lasswell at the helm, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith won the Silver Lady Award in 1962 and the Reuben Award for the Best Humor Strip from the National Cartoonist’s Society in 1964. He also won the Elzie Segar Awards in 1984 and 1994. Lasswell also had assistants work with him over the years, the most prominent of which was Fred Rhoads, who went on to do his own work on George Baker’s Sad Sack for Harvey Comics. Rhoads assisted on the strip from 1946–1953. When Lasswell died in 2001, he was 16 weeks ahead of schedule on the strip and left an archive containing over 20,000 daily and 4000 Sunday strips. Today, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith is written and drawn by John R. Rose, who began as an assistant to Lasswell in 1998. Strangely, as popular as Barney Google and Snuffy Smith have been on the comic-strip pages, it never has been really successful in comic books. There were four issues produced between 1951 and 1952 by Toby Press and a single issue published by Gold Key in 1964. Even the Charlton series wasn’t particularly successful, but at six issues, it was the longest-lasting comic-book series for the characters. For the Charlton series, Lasswell did the covers and Bob Donovan wrote and drew most of the interiors. Donovan was also an assistant on the strip from 1957–1987. He passed away in 2002.

Blondie is a comic strip created by cartoonist Chic Young that debuted in newspapers on September 8, 1930. Unlike Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Blondie Boopadoop (later Bumstead) has remained the star of the strip, but her husband, Dagwood Bumstead, has proved popular enough to headline his own comic book for

a while at Harvey Comics. Eventually, Blondie and Dagwood spawned a family with son Alexander and daughter Cookie. They also have a dog named Daisy that ended up birthing a number of pups. Blondie is a housewife [and a caterer in contemporary continuity—ed.], while Dagwood goes to work for Mr. Dithers. Blondie also has been popular in all sorts of media including a series of films, where actress Penny Singleton starred as the character from 1938 to 1950. There was also a popular radio program that ran roughly at the same time. Blondie was somewhat less successful as the star of two separate live-action TV sitcoms: one that ran in 1957–1958 and another from 1968–1969. Chic Young wrote and drew Blondie until he died on March 14, 1973, passing the torch to his son, Dean, who continues to write Blondie to this day. Although an artist as well, Dean Young decided to give the art duties and credit over the years to many others including Alex Raymond, Jim Raymond, Paul Fung, Jr., Mike Gersher, Stan Drake, Denis Lebrun, Jeff Parker, and currently John Marshall. Blondie has remained a very popular comic strip, still appearing in over 2000 newspapers. Unlike Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Blondie was very successful in comic books for many years. Prior to Charlton taking over the series, it ran for 15 issues from David McKay from 1949 and 1950. Harvey Comics took over the numbering and published Blondie through 1965. Then, King Comics continued the numbering for a further 12 issues, when Charlton took over, although they missed publishing #176. After Charlton published 46 issues, the long-running title finally came to an end in 1976 after 221 issues. Hi and Lois stories also appeared in some issues of the Charlton version prior to the feature receiving its own title, which will be discussed next. For Charlton, it is believed that Paul Fung, Jr. drew the Blondie covers and stories.

8 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

Hi and Lois #1 (Nov. 1969)– 11 (July 1971) © King Features Syndicate.

After a few trial appearances in Charlton’s Blondie during 1969, Hi and Lois graduated to its own title. Hi and Lois began as a spinoff comic strip to Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey. Hi and Lois was also created by Mort Walker, but this strip was drawn by Dik Browne, who later went on to also create, write, and draw Hagar the Horrible.

lee holley Facebook.

Thirsty? Original Lee Holley cover art to Ponytail #20 (Jan. 1971), Charlton’s final issue of the series. Courtesy of Heritage. © King Features Syndicate.

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The strip came about from Beetle Bailey going on furlough from his Army duties and visiting his sister, Lois. Lois was married to Hi Flagston and together they had four children: son Chip, twins Dot and Ditto, and later on, baby daughter Trixie. Lois was originally a housewife, but also became a real estate agent later on. Like Blondie, Hi and Lois is about a suburban family. The strip debuted on October 18, 1954, four years after Beetle Bailey. Beetle would continue going on furlough from his strip time and time again, usually with Sergeant Snorkel in tow. Hi and Lois was and remains successful, winning the Reuben Award for Browne in 1962. Dik Browne died in 1989 and Mort Walker died in 2016. Today, Hi and Lois is written by Mort’s sons, Brian and Greg Walker, and drawn by Dik’s son, Chance Browne. Apart from the Charlton series, Hi and Lois starred in one issue from King Comics in 1974, but was only successful in paperback comic-strip reprints and not comic books.

Ponytail #13 (Nov. 1969)– 20 (Jan. 1971) © King Features Syndicate.

Ponytail was a comic panel about a teenage girl’s life that was written and drawn by cartoonist Lee Holley. Prior to Ponytail, Holley worked in animation in Friz Freleng’s Looney Tunes unit of animated cartoons in the mid-1950s, and then worked for Hank Ketcham on Dennis the Menace in the late 1950s, drawing the Sunday strip as well as the character for various merchandise, advertising, and children’s storybooks. Holley sold Ponytail to Teen Magazine in August 1960, and King Features Syndicate picked up the strip for newspaper syndication beginning on November 7, 1960, with a Sunday strip added on January 7, 1962. Holley left Dennis the Menace to work on Ponytail full time. In an interview I conducted with Holley on October 11, 2014, the cartoonist said of Ponytail’s cancellation, “It lasted 30 years from 1960 to 1990. It was a good run. It was a mutual decision to quit. From day one at my earliest days with the syndication, within a couple of years, I knew I was on to a really good thing and was paid, by my perspective, a lot of money for my age. “Then I got to thinking, ‘This may not last forever.’ I’m paying taxes, and I had a conversation with an attorney. He said, ‘Well, look at it this way, Lee. Think about yourself as a young actor. You’re in show business. That’s what you are. Think of yourself as a young actor. What you’re doing if you’re making a movie, you’re big time, but as time goes on another young guy comes along and he’s making the movies and you’re not.’ What he was trying to tell me is that one day you won’t be doing what you’re doing, quite possibly. “In the back of my mind I thought about real estate. I started reading and researching and thought that this may be a good way to go. As much as I loved what I was doing, and I liked the kind of money I was making, maybe I could branch out and continue doing what I was doing and use that money to set up a retirement so to speak, so I started investing in real estate. I was really into it. It was a short period of time that the comic strip became a means to an end. I used the money to make money in real estate. The more involved I got in it, the more successful I became with it. That became my focus.” The strip was successful enough to spin off into its own comic-book series, which debuted in 1962 from Dell Comics. After 12 issues, Dell cancelled the series in 1965. Charlton took over the series in 1969, retaining the same numbering. Holley commented about the comic book, “We wrote it and drew it. I’m sure King Features got their piece of the action. They approached me through the syndicate. We also did a couple of

pocket books through Dell, I think it was. They reprinted the dailies.” For the comic book as well as the comic panel, Holley recruited the services of Frank Hill, who also worked on Dennis the Menace comic books during the 1960s and ’70s, as well as Bob Gustafson (who worked on the comic-book versions of both Hi and Lois and Beetle Bailey) and MAD’s Dave Berg. Said Holley of his assistants, “Frank Hill worked with me for a while. He wrote the Sunday page. Him and I would sit down. We had a lot of fun together writing the Sunday page. Then, the comic book came along and he wrote the comic book and did some of the artwork.” Ponytail was fairly successful throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s, sales to newspapers began to slip, and Ponytail was quietly cancelled on October 16, 1988. Holley didn’t mind retiring from Ponytail in 1988 as he became very wealthy with multiple real estate deals over the years. Holley explained, “The client list started to diminish. It wasn’t an issue with me. I continued until the end until it just petered out, so to speak. The syndicate and I mutually agreed to end it. We had a very nice conversation with a cartoon editor there who asked me, ‘How are you doing, Lee? How are you fixed?’ “I said, ‘I’m fixed fine. Don’t worry about it.’ “He said, ‘Well, I think it’s time.’ “I said, ‘Well, I agree.’ I was down to less than 100 papers. Something like that. It didn’t bother me. It wasn’t a big deal. I had this run and did what I wanted to do and I moved on.” Holley was also a pilot and flew his own airplane. Unfortunately, he died in a plane he was piloting which crashed shortly after takeoff, on March 26, 2018.

Tiger #1 (Mar. 1970)– 6 (Jan. 1971) © King Features Syndicate.

Tiger was a comic strip created by Bud Blake that ran from May 3, 1965 through 2004. It was about a group of suburban boyhood pals along a similar vein as that of Peanuts. Blake drew the strip until he was 85, and then passed away two years later on December 26, 2005. Asked if he could continue to produce the strip, Blake told an interviewer in Hogan’s Alley Magazine, “Sure, I could keep doing it. But I can’t. I’ve had enough.” After Blake retired, the strip continued to appear as reprints. In comic books, Tiger appeared in six issues at the same time as Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Blake drew all of the covers. An additional issue appeared in 1973 where Tiger was paired with Quincy, another King Features comic strip. This issue was published by King Comics. After 1976, King Features Syndicate never tried to publish comicbook titles with these characters again, and decided for the most part to stick with newspapers and paperback compilations. King Features did license some of their characters like Popeye and Beetle Bailey to Harvey Comics in the 1990s, but that seems to be King’s last gasp in the oncethriving comic-book marketplace. MARK ARNOLD is a pop-culture historian with over 15 books to his credit on subjects ranging from The Monkees, The Beatles, Underdog, Pink Panther, Cracked, Disney, Dennis the Menace and more. He is currently at work on a book on the history of MAD and has upcoming books on Disney, TTV, and Pac-Man.

10 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

by J o

hn Wells

Calling All Adventure Lovers! This 1970s DC Comics house ad for The Menomonee Falls Gazette attracted lots of subscribers— including ye ed. Were you one of them? Character art by Mike Tiefenbacher. Prince Valiant and Phantom © King Features Syndicate. The Spirit © Will Eisner, Inc. Batman and Superman TM & © DC Comics. Tarzan © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Buck Rogers © Dille Family Trust.

Collecting comic books in the early 1970s was easy. Distribution could be spotty, yes, but the number of outlets selling them was still large enough for any devoted fan to track down most of their favorite titles on a regular basis. Collecting newspaper comic strips was another matter entirely. The typical fan was limited to whatever strips that were carried in their local papers. Subscribing to major out-of-town papers offered the devoted collector greater selections, but it was also a far more expensive undertaking than buying comic books off the rack. How nice it would be, some fans thought, if someone published all the great current comic strips in one place. The solution had its roots in 1960s fandom, where comic-book and comic-strip collectors took it upon themselves to do what mainstream publishers were not. Canadian fan George Henderson devoted issues of his fanzine Captain George’s Comic World to reprints of vintage strips such as Little Nemo in Slumberland, Krazy Kat, and Superman in a tabloid newspaper format. Elsewhere, Ann Arbor English teacher Edwin Aprill, Jr. published two slick magazines—Great Classic Newspaper Strips (1964– 1968) and Cartoonist Showcase (1968–1972)—that collected runs of long-lost strips such as Buck Rogers and Frank Frazetta’s Johnny Comet as well as then-current fan-favorite features like Russ Manning’s Tarzan and Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson’s Secret Agent Corrigan.

Joining Aprill, Henderson, and others in their noble comics preservation agenda were Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, fans Jerry Sinkovec and Mike Tiefenbacher. “Jerry called me up in May 1970 after seeing a letter of mine that ran in Rocket’s Blast-Comicollector, we compared collections, became friends, I went to work on helping him publish his fanzine, Comics Commentary, wound up writing most of the filler material, drew all kinds of artwork for it, and we began to attend comic-cons together,” Tiefenbacher details for BACK ISSUE. During a spring 1971 drive to Chicago, it was Sinkovec who conceived the idea of a tabloid newspaper called The Menomonee Falls Gazette… as a comic-book news-zine on the order of The Comic Reader. “I talked him out of the idea for the very good reason that we had no source for the news out here in the Midwest,” Tiefenbacher explains. Instead, the conversation turned to newspaper strips, inspired by Aprill and Henderson’s pioneering work. “That newspaper idea, the newspaper name and the fact that using it enabled Jerry to write the syndicates well before we started—and they actually sent sample proofs!—coalesced, having far more to do with Jerry than it did with me. He’s five years older than me, so he naturally became the boss (I was never a partner, only an employee—albeit one who had far more input than that arrangement suggests.)

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Famous First Edition Pages 1, 9, and 16 of the 16-page Menomonee Falls Gazette (MFG) #1 (Dec. 13, 1971). Unless otherwise noted, scans accompanying this article are courtesy of John Wells. Batman TM & © DC Comics.

“Together, we chose the must-have lineup for the first dozen issues, contacted all the syndicates thanks to my access to editor and publisher at the UW-Milwaukee library where I was working while going there, and figured out how much we’d have to charge to pay for the reproduction rights, which of course was never enough. The criterion for inclusion at the outset was simply the ones we knew about from fandom and the recent King Comics failed comics line because we knew we would be selling to a comic-book reader/audience as distinct from comic-strip fans.” That comic-book reader/audience—essentially male—had well-known biases against the so-called “soap opera” strips. Hence, features such as Mary Worth and Rex Morgan, M.D. were disqualified, as were any that weren’t solidly classified as action/adventure. The two costumed-hero strips of 1971—Batman (by E. Nelson Bridwell, Al Plastino, and Nick Cardy) and The Phantom (by Lee Falk and Sy Barry)—each made the

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cut, as did Tarzan, Secret Agent Corrigan, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, and Rip Kirby (all of which had been published in 1960s comic books). Dateline: Danger (dropped early in its run by the Journal) and the obscure Jeff Cobb completed the list of contemporary series. Britain’s Modesty Blaise (from 1966), James Bond (1964), and Jeff Hawke (1967) were added thanks to their earlier exposure to American fans by Ed Aprill. Australia’s Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors (1967) added to the international flavor, thanks to Tiefenbacher’s familiarity with creator John Dixon from the 1960s Aussie Catman comic book. “Early in our plans,” Sinkovec tells BACK ISSUE, “the high point was when we were able to lock in the English strips. Modesty and Bond got us a lot of readers.” The vintage US science-fiction strip Drift Marlo— which had briefly had its own Dell comic book— completed the lineup. (Once Marlo reached its end, a British science-fiction series—Garth—replaced it in

issue #38.) Tiefenbacher notes to BI that its artist Frank Bellamy “had first been seen in America as the cartoonist who contributed comic book art to TV’s The Avengers’ episode ‘The Winged Avenger.’” The roster hinged on the punctuality of the syndicates that Sinkovec contacted. King Features responded first, while Publishers-Hall didn’t get in touch until press time neared and the Chicago TribuneNew York Times Syndicate failed to answer altogether. “Largely,” Tiefenbacher explained in MFG #13, “the syndicates who answered us in the beginning were the ones we bought from.” The Gazette was also prevented from using strips carried by the Milwaukee Journal: Apartment 3-G, Judge Parker, Mark Trail, Mary Worth, Rex Morgan, Andy Capp, Doonesbury, Peanuts, and The Wizard of Id. The Journal was guaranteed exclusive rights to those features within a certain radius in Wisconsin and, despite its international distribution, the Gazette had to comply. “Jerry put the first issue together himself,” Tiefenbacher details, “though I did the collage of all the strips we weren’t going to be carrying on the back cover.” The 24 strips that didn’t make the cut— ranging from big names like Steve Canyon and Dick Tracy to cult attractions such as the recently launched Dark Shadows—didn’t even represent all of the potential candidates for inclusion, but adding anything required a larger circulation. Advance advertising had enabled the Gazette to kick off with “between 250 and 300 subscribers” and 14 ongoing strips, Sinkovec detailed in the 16-page Menomonee Falls Gazette #1 (Dec. 13, 1971). “When the Gazette’s circulation reaches 1,000, we can expand to an additional four [strips]. After that, we can grow even faster.”

Guiding the Gazette (left) Jerry Sinkovec and Mike Tiefenbacher assemble an edition of the Menomonee Falls Gazette. These photos illustrated an article about the Gazette that appeared in the September 2, 1972 edition of the Wisconsin newspaper, the Waukesha Daily Freeman. (right) More regional news coverage, from the March 11, 1972 edition of the Milwaukee Journal. Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 13

Nobody Does It Better (top) MFG #56’s (Jan. 8, 1973) cover by Gary Ricker, contrasting the 1930s Caniff version of Terry and the Pirates with the 1970s George Wunder version. (bottom) A double shot of 007: (left) MFG #76 (May 28, 1973), featuring James Bond by Yaroslav Horak, and (right) #221 (Apr. 1976), featuring Bond by Jim Aparo. Terry and the Pirates © Tribune Syndicate. James Bond © EON Productions.

Sinkovec also vowed not to discontinue any feature in the lineup. “As long as we publish, no strip will be dropped unless the syndicate drops it. One of the worst things that can happen to a collector is finding a strip he follows dropped. I would not do that to anyone. So don’t ask.” That vow was put to the test almost immediately. Effective with issue #5 (Jan. 10, 1972), the artwork on the Batman strip took a nosedive. In short, a contract dispute with DC had resulted in the distributing Ledger Syndicate taking creative control of the feature itself. E. Nelson Bridwell, whose final scripts had been used on the first weeks of the new look, detailed the situation in MFG #12, the last issue to carry the contemporary Batman. In its place effective with issue #15 was the feature most requested by subscribers: Frank Robbins’ Johnny Hazard. (Ironically, Robbins was one of the regular writers of the Batman comic book at the time.) Happily, a DC foothold was maintained in the Gazette through the presence of Superman. The publisher had given its blessing to run reprints of the 1940s newspaper strip, but they had no proofs themselves. Consequently, Sinkovec and Tiefenbacher tracked down and purchased dailies clipped directly from newspapers, cleaning them up for publication (a process that would be repeated for many of the subsequent strips reprinted in the Gazette). Beginning with the May 13, 1940 daily, Superman premiered in MFG #10 (Feb. 14, 1972), taking over a page previously used for a potpourri of features. “We were trying to find a source for Curt Swan’s daily strips [which began in 1956],” Tiefenbacher reveals to BACK ISSUE, “but in the end had to settle for the original ’40s strip from as near to the beginning as possible.” A week’s worth of 1940s daily strips like Superman filled an entire page, but current and more recent strips had smaller dimensions that left a gap. Mike and Jerry filled those columns with editorial matter, reader letters, reprinted comics-related articles, advertising, and a plethora of columns and articles about other newspaper strips. Ken Barker, Bob Bindig, Larry Charet, J. R. Cochran, R. C. Harvey, Ron Massengill, Rick Norwood, and other knowledgeable collectors contributed regularly, although Jacob Moraine’s “Comics Journal” was the most enduring. Debuting in MFG #26 (June 12, 1972), it was a reliable source of strip-related news, including ghost artists, cancellations, etc., over the course of the Gazette’s run. Moraine’s column was renamed “Comic Strip Circus” in issue #229 (Oct. 15, 1977) after the Comics Journal title was claimed by Gary Groth’s soon-to-be-famous magazine. “I was writing all the original editorial stuff,” Tiefenbacher tells BACK ISSUE. “Designing logos for comic strips that never had one, drawing occasional covers, and helping do the paste-ups for the pages, all on Saturdays. I went to school during the week, arrived at Jerry’s house sometime in the afternoon, and we’d work all day and I’d leave sometime after 3 a.m. Sunday—or later. He’d take care of getting the paper to the printer, handling subscriptions, and mailing of the copies, and we’d start all over again the next Saturday.” The tabloid was folded in half for mailing purposes, giving it the dimensions of a magazine. In that form, the Gazette had virtual front and back covers, space whose potential was originally underutilized. Effective with issue #17 (Apr. 10, 1972), the Gazette finally sported proper front covers (with the back featuring a black-and-white Air Hawk Sunday strip) that were usually derived from an enlarged panel of a daily strip. Tiefenbacher drew three early original pieces himself featuring Superman (MFG #24), Drift Marlo (MFG #32), and Mandrake (MFG #45). Presentation was an important factor now that Jerry and Mike aimed to boost circulation by selling the Gazette on newsstands to a mainstream audience. Issue #16 announced the commencement of a three-month trial in that market and urged its 449 subscribers to spread the word to prospective outlets. The move came on the heels of MFG #14’s upgrade from newsprint to 40-lb. stock white paper and the acquisition of a proper publisher name: Street Enterprises, or ST as in Sinkovec and Tiefenbacher. The experiment, Tiefenbacher reported in MFG #95, was a failure. “Milwaukee area newsstand sales resulted in returns of 99% because of poor distribution and no display. 1,500 free copies were given to attendees of Detroit’s 1972 Multicon and 5,000 were given away at the 1972 New York con, each with little or no result.” Meanwhile, MFG #29 reported, the subscriber list had dropped from 752 to 685. Despite the discouraging signs, orders from the extant comics retailers continued to climb. After an Italian vendor signed up for 100 issues

14 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

per week (MFG #41), total circulation reached 994… and plans for the promised four-page expansion were underway. The quartet of newcomers introduced in MFG #46 (Oct. 30, 1972) was heavy on star power. The sole old-timer was 1962’s Ben Casey, superstar Neal Adams’ first extended foray in comics and never reprinted before (or since). Russ Manning’s Tarzan dailies had been a drawing card for the Gazette when it launched, but the writer-artist was now only doing the Sunday strip. Effective with issue #46, they now carried it, too (albeit in black and white). Leonard Starr’s sophisticated Mary Perkins: On Stage—a huge favorite among fans and pros alike—represented the third new face. The final addition was Ambler, a brand-new drama conceived by legendary cartoonist (and Jonny Quest creator) Doug Wildey. Simultaneously, the Gazette was also advertised on a classified page in all October and November 1972 issues of Marvel Comics as well as getting a plug from Denny O’Neil in the letters column of DC’s Weird Worlds #3. Whether it was the ads or word of mouth, circulation had reached 1345 copies by MFG #50, and plans for another fourpage expansion were set into motion. When it added Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon and Roy Crane’s Buz Sawyer to the roster in issue #52 (Dec. 11, 1972), the Gazette went a long way toward earning its declaration of being “America’s Greatest Comic Weekly.” Canyon was still the most popular adventure strip in the early 1970s and Sawyer—now only overseen by the legendary Crane—maintained its creator’s signature Craftint look. Brick Bradford, the third new addition, represented the other end of the spectrum, a 39-year-old science-fiction strip that appeared in so few papers that its presence in the Gazette made it a draw to fans trying to find it. The last of the newcomers was Terry and the Pirates, a feature that had been massively popular and influential under Caniff between 1934 and 1946. The underrated George Wunder continued the strip after Caniff left to create Canyon, but its subscriber base had been shrinking since the 1960s. When the Chicago Tribune—one of its flagship papers—dropped Terry in September 1972, industry insiders expected that the end was near. Sure enough, the strip died on February 25, 1973. In its place, the Gazette #66 (Mar. 19, 1973) presented Stan Lynde’s superb Western comedy-drama Rick O’Shay. The first year of Gazettes had been produced out of Jerry’s bedroom basement, an arrangement that was becoming increasingly untenable as envelopes of syndicate proofs and piles of back issues accumulated in every direction. As 1972 drew to a close, Jerry

celebrated the tabloid’s first birthday by moving the Street Enterprises operation into a rented office elsewhere in Menomonee Falls. “We’re actually becoming strangely akin to something that might be construed to resemble a business,” Mike remarked in MFG #56. Unlike a business, Street wasn’t actually making a profit, but enthusiasm kept the presses rolling. Along with the Gazette, the guys also launched what was intended as ongoing comic-book-formatted black-and-white reprints of Jungle Jim and Prince Valiant in 1972. Sales were brisk and Valiant #1 had nearly sold out when King Features rescinded their licensing agreement in favor of another party who intended to do a higher end collection. Two more books followed in early 1973—Krazy Kat and The Cisco Kid—but the latter also fell prey to bad luck. “The copyright for the character does not belong to King Features,” Mike explained in MFG #86. “They sold us the rights for the first volume illegally.” After two final issues of Street Comix (respectively starring Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby and Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon) in the fall of 1973, Jerry and Mike abandoned the comic-book idea. “King Features contended we didn’t have the rights to create comic books with their property,” Tiefenbacher tells BI. “That right was owned by Charlton.”

ENTER: ‘THE GUARDIAN’

The guys didn’t lack for things to do. Since the tabloid began, readers had been suggesting various popular humor strips even though they were at odds with the paper’s express adventure theme. Ultimately, in MFG #64, Mike floated the suggestion of a companion to the Gazette with the stipulation that Jerry would only proceed if 730 readers committed to subscribing. That goal was met, and The Menomonee Falls Guardian premiered in June 1973. “The Guardian was all my idea,” Tiefenbacher explains. “I conceived a humor collection that spotlighted all the strips we liked that weren’t blocked locally and mostly were cheaper to carry (i.e., light on King Features), and hopefully would attract strip fans who didn’t much care about story strips. I wrote up a pitch for the sister paper and mailed it to Jerry from my desk in the office. Somehow, my offer to do all the work on it convinced him.” As with the Gazette, some of Jerry and Mike’s selections were unattainable. A highly anticipated comic-strip version of France’s Asterix and Obelix was put on hold by US representatives before publication. The fact that the project finally came to be in 1977 was small comfort. Meanwhile, Tiefenbacher’s amateur strip Jornie Bignose (first seen in

Sticking Their Noses Into the Funny Papers (left) The Gazette’s humor-strip spinoff, The Menomonee Falls Guardian, headlined James Childress’ Conchy in issue #1 (June 28, 1973). (right) Mike Tiefenbacher’s Jornie Bignose, from the Guardian #1. Conchy © James Childress. Jornie Bignose © Mike Tiefenbacher.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 15

JIM APARO’s STRIP SEARCH

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Centennial Issue

Dick Giordano provided this character montage for the cover of issue #100 (Nov. 12, 1973). Pete O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise was one of the artist’s favorite strips, and a character he would later illustrate in a 1994 graphic novel published by DC Comics.

(opposite page, left) MFG capitalized on Jim Aparo’s Brave and

Batman TM & © DC Comics. The Spirit © Will Eisner, Inc. The Phantom, Mandrake © King Features Syndicate, Inc. Modesty Blaise © Modesty Blaise Ltd.

the Bold popularity in issue #95 (Oct. 8, 1973) when it ran the artist’s sample strips for the unpublished space feature Zip Tyro. At the time, Aparo’s controversial Spectre series, with writer Michael Fleisher, was launching in Adventure Comics. (opposite page, top right) In issue #104, Aparo shared these samples from Condor, a hard-boiled strip starring a black private eye. The artist’s busy DC schedule kept him from moving forward on the feature—which, from the look of these dailies, was our loss. (opposite page, bottom right and this page) While comics fans best remember Aparo for his superhero and adventure work (Batman, B&B, Aquaman, The Phantom Stranger, The Phantom), he was an excellent humor cartoonist as well. His first published comics work was “Miss Bikini Luv” in Charlton’s mid-’60s humor comic, Go-Go. In the 1960s and 1970s he produced these sample strips, Igloo Pete and Sidney, which went unsold. These were featured in the Menomonee Falls Guardian #11 and 13, respectively.

early issues of the Gazette) served as a placeholder on the Guardian’s back cover as Jerry negotiated with the Milwaukee Journal in vain to get publication rights for Doonesbury. Another political strip, Jules Feiffer’s weekly cartoon, soon wound up occupying the space instead. The 16-page Guardian’s official lineup of daily strips otherwise consisted of B.C., Beetle Bailey, Broom-Hilda, Pogo (including B&W Sundays), Sally Bananas, Tumbleweeds, James Childress’ cult favorite Conchy, and 1933 reprints of Krazy Kat. Several strips, despite cartoony art styles or humorous elements, would have been at home in the Gazette, notably the 1973 versions of Joe Palooka and Mickey Finn and reprints of Alley Oop (1949), Captain Easy (1951), E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre/ Popeye (1933), and British import Romeo Brown (1959). Tiefenbacher regrets not including Bud Sagendorf’s contemporary Popeye, a victim of fannish snobbery that looked down on strips not produced by their creators. “As a 20-year-old fan, I was under the sway of both [collector/historian] Bill Blackbeard and Don and Maggie Thompson, who were entirely against Sagendorf, and entirely pro-Segar, and it would not have occurred to me to include both.” Ironically, Tiefenbacher adds, “we were sending Sagendorf copies of the Guardian. Today, of course, I realize the insensitivity of us sending him a paper he really should have been in—he didn’t

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Simonson’s Got the Spirit Original art (courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions) by thenrising star Walter Simonson brilliantly capturing… well, the spirit of Will Eisner’s celebrated strip, The Spirit. Published as the cover of (inset) MFG #107 (Dec. 31, 1973). (right) Walt returned for #200’s cover, which featured Johnny Hazard, Modesty Blaise, Garth, and James Bond. The Spirit © Will Eisner, Inc.

need to see 40-year-old reprints of strips he no doubt knew very well instead of evidence that somebody loved what he was doing now. It would be like us carrying Rex Morgan reprints and sending [current Rex cartoonist] Terry Beatty a free sub today.” Tempering the excitement over the Guardian’s launch was the simultaneous June premiere of a weekly rival to the Gazette, Golden Funnies. The 12-page 50¢ tabloid eschewed new strips for reprints, sticking black-and-white reprints of the earliest 1939 Superman Sunday strips on its front page. The content otherwise ranged from Buck Rogers (1935) and Dick Tracy (1936) to Little Nemo in Slumberland (1906) and The Katzenjammer Kids (1915). It was published by Alan Light, whose advertisementbased tabloid Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom had become a great success in its two years of existence. While Jerry and Mike had spent a year and a half laboriously building up its circulation past the 1000 mark, Golden Funnies premiered with 2000 subscribers. If nothing else, the affair demonstrated that a bigger audience existed. Jerry tracked down and purchased the mailing list for the defunct Marvelmania fan club of a few years earlier (some 18,000 addresses) and created a direct competitor to TBG—The Menomonee Falls Advertiser. By mailing free copies to all those fans, Jerry reasoned, subs for the Gazette and Guardian were bound to spike up. This was not, he swore in MFG #69 (Apr. 9, 1973), retaliation against Alan Light.

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“If we said it wasn’t due to Golden Funnies,” Tiefenbacher says, “it was we probably didn’t want people to think we were so petty. We were hurt, especially since we weren’t really making money on a format we invented. Jim Steranko co-opted the format for Comixscene, too. We, of course, were chagrined about all of this, especially since we were convinced that we’d have been more accessible if we would have chosen a magazine or comic format.” The first issue of Advertiser was also inserted into Gazette #75 (May 21, 1973), but the startup had a quick death. It was “simply because we don’t have time for it,” Jerry wrote in Gazette #90. To be honest, the lack of ads didn’t help either. […] It served its purpose, though, as we did get a very healthy response from our ads.” Tiefenbacher adds, for BACK ISSUE readers, that “it all might have worked had the Marvelmania mailing list have been worth our investment. The addresses were several years old by that time and we were getting returned copies marked undeliverable for many months afterward.” Nonetheless, circulation had risen sufficiently to warrant a very large expansion. Jerry and Mike were optimistic enough to mention some of the forthcoming additions in another Marvel classified that ran in issues on sale in August and September 1973. The unveiling came in Gazette #95 (Oct. 8, 1973), now enlarged to two 24-page sections retailing for 75¢ (up from 45). Active strips in the lineup were Big Ben Bolt, Captain Easy, Dick Tracy, Dr. Kildare, Friday Foster, The Heart of Juliet Jones, and Kerry Drake, along with the black-and-white Sunday editions of Johnny Hazard, On Stage, Prince Valiant, and Steve Canyon. Vintage reprints were slanted toward fans with the likes of Batman and Robin (the 1943 strip), cult favorites Red Barry and Red Ryder, and creators such as Murphy Anderson (Buck Rogers), Will Eisner (The Spirit), Lou Fine (Peter Scratch), and Frank Thorne (Dr. Guy Bennett). Finally, another batch of British imports joined the fold in the form of Gunner, Paul Temple, Scarth A.D. 2195, The Seekers, and Tug Transom.

THESE STRIPS WILL COME OUT TOMORROW

From the start, Jerry and Mike had blackballed Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, and Li’l Abner from the Gazette over objections to their conservative overtones. Tracy’s addition to the new lineup represented a victory for the detective’s strong fan base among subscribers. Annie was eventually added in Gazette #125, too, after its syndicate began offering 1936 reprints. “The Gazette was the first weekly strip publication,” The Comic Reader #100’s ad for the expansion declared. “Now there’s a whole crowd of them.” Indeed, while Golden Funnies (soon renamed Vintage Funnies) was the only one attempting weekly frequency, strip reprint zines such as Critter, Nostalgia Comics, Phoenix, and Yesterday’s Comics also sprang up in 1973. Even Alan Light tried a second weekly title—Favorite Funnies—but cancelled it after 12 issues. Meanwhile, the buzz surrounding Menomonee Falls grew louder. From the start, the Gazette had a veritable Who’s Who of present and future comics creators among its readership, among them Sergio Aragonés, Max Allan Collins, Mark Evanier, Archie Goodwin, Tony Isabella, Russ Manning, Russell Myers, Alex Toth, and Marv Wolfman. Murphy Anderson provided an original Buck Rogers cover for the Gazette #96, Dick Giordano did the honors for issue #100, and Walter Simonson drew pieces for issues #107 and #200. Jim Aparo not only provided a trio of images for issues #98, 112, and 221 (The Phantom, Batman and Robin, and Flash Gordon, respectively), but also shared samples of several of his unrealized newspaper proposals (Gazette #95 and 104; Guardian #11 and 113). [Editor’s note: Aparo’s Batman and Robin cover art was repurposed—and finally colored!—as the cover of BACK ISSUE #50.] After reading his copy of the Gazette #168, Steve Englehart had the Beast quote a panel from its 1943 Superman reprint in his script for June 1975’s Avengers #139. Four months earlier, Officers Sinkovec and Tiefenbacher had crossed paths with Batman in Len Wein’s script for Detective Comics #447. The patrolmen had been walking the beat since at least the October 5, 1972 episode of Rip Kirby, where writer Fred Dickenson inserted the duo into the strip. In June 1973, the Gazette won a Comic Art Fan Award as Outstanding Non-Newsstand Comic Book. The recognition came amidst plugs for the paper in the text pages of DC’s Tarzan #215, Star-Spangled War Stories #171, and Weird Worlds #8, Marvel’s Monsters Unleashed #3, and all of Warren’s September-dated magazines. Paul Levitz wrote his own plug for the Gazette in a “Behind the Scenes” column that ran in DC’s comics out in August. Far more impressive was the half-page ad that ran in DC’s November’s titles, complete with Tiefenbacher-drawn figures of Batman, Superman, Tarzan, the Spirit, the Phantom, Prince Valiant, and Flash Gordon. “Paul Levitz was fully responsible for our getting that spot,” Tiefenbacher reveals. “Back in those days, full- and half-page ads were sold to various one-shot advertisers. At some point in the production of that month’s comics, DC discovered that someone who’d contracted for a half page in the line had fallen out. Normally, when that happened, they’d resort to filling that space with house ads, but this time Paul

Let Me Make One Thing Perfectly Clear From the Guardian #64: Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation forced the recall of several Jules Feiffer cartoons that assumed he would still be president. Unlike other newspapers, the Guardian published the strips for posterity. © Jules Feiffer.

convinced them that it would be more profitable to sell the halfpage to us than to do that. I can’t recall what we paid—could have been anywhere between $250 and $500—but I don’t recall us hesitating. I think we also had no debate about whether to use copyrighted artwork or provide 100% original art, and we were delighted also to learn that it would be in color. I drew the figures about 200% larger than they appeared there, inked them and provided a color guide and sent them a professional stat of my paste-up. “Did our investment pay off? I believe it did. There were instances in which (to my horror) subscribers tore the ad out of the comic with their subscription order. Beyond the Marvel classifieds, we had never entertained any hope of an ad in national comic books (or National Comics, for that matter). In those days, I considered the ad’s appearance as my debut professional DC credit, and until Funny Stuff Stocking Stuffer (1984), it was my sole art credit.”

THE END OF THE STREET

Levitz’s other contribution to Jerry and Mike’s relative fortunes was bequeathing Street Enterprises with control of The Comic Reader now that he (the news magazine’s editor-publisher) was moving to DC. The additional workload necessitated finally adding a few more bodies to the payroll, and Bob Staszak, Tiefenbacher’s brother Ron, and a pair of local teenagers began helping to process and mail the product. (Staszak later contributed an occasional strip called Road-Runners to the Guardian.) Mike ruefully notes that his own pay came intermittently, at best. TCR’s story is recounted in detail in BACK ISSUE #100, but, briefly, it became a life preserver, the only publication in the office that was showing a profit. Editorial comments had periodically referenced the Gazette’s struggling finances, but the scale wasn’t evident until issue #125 (May 6, 1974). Effective with the next issue, the paper was dropping from 48 to 40 pages, although only one contemporary strip (Big Ben Bolt) was leaving altogether. The price being charged for the doublesized Gazette had been far less than what it should have been, exacerbating debts that already included $4,500 in unpaid bills from dealers. Jerry’s savings account was now empty, and Mike’s salary ceased around March 1974. “We are now, technically, doing it for love,” Tiefenbacher wrote in Gazette #128. Love, as much as anything, had kept the presses running. The Gazette and Guardian subscribers were composed of fans who loved the comics form, people who could be counted on, for instance, to share rare strips from their collections to ensure that the Gazette could publish an unbroken run of a given feature.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 19

You’ve Never Heard of a Talking Horse? The Menomonee Falls Guardian #118 (Sept. 22, 1975) cover-featured Neil the Horse by Arn Saba (now known as Katherine Collins). Bronze Age indie readers recall Neil the Horse Comics and Stories, published first by Aardvark-Vanahein then by Renegade Press, in the mid-1980s. © Arn Saba.

That sense of community extended to the latest crisis. There were, inevitably, angry subscribers who objected to the efforts being employed to stem the tide. Many others rallied, offering financial contributions and supporting fundraising efforts. A STreet Enterprises Portfolio attracted a gorgeous selection of artwork from pros like Neal Adams, Dave Cockrum, Michael Kaluta, Dick Moores, Gray Morrow, John Romita, and Wallace Wood. In Gazette #203 (Nov. 3, 1975), Jerry kicked off a Street Enterprises Rummage Sale and began selling off original art and rarities from his personal collection. Adding to the anxiety, Jerry and Mike’s landlord evicted them in mid-1974, declaring the inventory of back issues a fire hazard. Street Enterprises found a new location and returned to work. Even with crushing debt, they had papers to publish. “The second offices we moved into (two across the hall from each other) were about three times the space of the original one,” Tiefenbacher details, “which was necessary due to the amount of equipment we had acquired. A subscription stencil machine, a baler, and later, a huge typesetting machine (which today could be replaced by a tiny laptop, or even smaller device). A lot of the area was taken up by back issues, but also Jerry’s entire comic-book collection. We lost the smaller office by 1975, but the larger room stuck around through the end of Street in 1985.” Setting aside finances, the general state of affairs for adventure comic strips in the 1970s was not good. Four more Gazette features—Ambler, Friday Foster, Dateline: Danger, and Jeff Cobb—were discontinued by their syndicates following issue #100 with only one immediate replacement (Steve Roper and Nomad: MFG #110). When the Milwaukee Journal dropped Apartment 3-G in early 1974, their territorial claim to the strip ceased, but it took a full year before the red tape could be cleared and the feature added to the Gazette in issue #165 (Feb. 10, 1975). The comparative stability of humor strips meant few changes for the Guardian, whose notable roster alterations were the additions of Dick Moores’ Gasoline Alley (#37) and Gus Arriola’s Gordo (#39) in early 1974. Because the NEA syndicate offered all of its strips as a package, some of its humor comics—The Born Loser, Eek and Meek, Frank and Ernest, Winthrop—were used as filler in each issue. George Breisacher’s Boon Dock also became a recurring filler as of issue #27 and ultimately became a regular feature in issue #61. A surplus of 1973–1974 Alley Oop dailies were published in three issues of the Guardian Special before it replaced the 1949 Oop reprints in the weekly Guardian. “I look back at what choices I might have made in strip selection had I been doing the papers today,” Tiefenbacher says. “I would have featured Gasoline Alley from the beginning had I known how good it was. In hindsight, it’s baffling why I never even considered the Gene Hazleton Flintstones and Yogi Bear, which were both likely to have been cheap acquisitions and artwise would have been delightful. Commercially, of course, choosing Blondie (also delightfully illustrated at the time by Jim Raymond) and Hagar the Horrible would have made sense, though expensive, and Peanuts’ absence was probably detrimental to the Guardian’s success. Going by artistic excellence, Bud Blake’s Tiger and Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace might also have been good selections. Heck, if King Features’ rates weren’t twice what every other syndicates rates were, we probably would have featured most of their offerings, such was the quality of most of them at the time! There would never have been enough room for everyone’s favorites, much less my own.” With options for mid-1970s adventure strips drying up, the Gazette ran a fantasy series by fan Joe Wehrle, Jr. (Fawn) sporadically between issues #142 and 188, along with transferring Joe Palooka and Mickey Finn over from the Guardian effective with issue #192 (Aug. 18, 1975). With runs of some of the vintage strips drying up, the task of filling holes in the schedule became increasing challenging. Frank Godwin’s 1930s strip Connie conveniently became a filler that required no licensing fees. Golden Age publisher Jerry Iger also gave Jerry and Mike his blessing to run some of the obscure strips from his Phoenix Features syndicate, notably Bobby, The Hawk, and Windy City Kitty. Elsewhere, the Guardian made several late additions in issue #116, bringing in the current Gasoline Alley, Mickey Finn, and Rick O’Shay Sunday strips along with vintage Krazy Kat and Mickey Mouse dailies. Arn Saba’s self-syndicated Neil the Horse weekly strip was added in issue #118. Heading into 1976, the Gazette had 1,300 subscribers and debts to newspaper syndicates in the $15,000 range. In a last-ditch effort, Jerry shifted the frequency of the two papers to monthly effective with Gazette #220 and Guardian #141 (both Mar. 1, 1976). In a state of despair, Mike poured out his own frustrations in an editorial in issue #223 and essentially severed his involvement with both papers, preferring to devote all his energy to The Comic Reader. By Gazette #224, the paper had shrunk to 32 pages, its King Features strips now gone due to non-payment of bills. The Batman reprints expanded to two-pages, while six pages of 1941 Flyin’ Jenny Sunday strips filled other gaps. The Guardian finally ended with issue #146 (Aug. 1976), but some of its features were merged with the Gazette for issue #226 (Nov. 1976). After that, all was silent.

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DOES WHATEVER A SPIDER CAN

In the months that followed, something strange happened in the newspaper comic field. An adventure strip was launched, and it was a bona-fide hit. Stan Lee and John Romita’s Amazing Spider-Man premiered on January 3, 1977, and quickly locked up spots in every major market in the United States. One of those subscribing papers was the Milwaukee Journal, of course, so its exclusivity clause would have prevented the Gazette from carrying Spider-Man even in good conditions. Still, the strip’s success sent a flurry of other comic-book projects into development. The syndicates that weren’t looking at DC or Marvel properties were trying to come up with something that might attract fans of a massively popular new movie called Star Wars. It was in this climate that Jerry resurrected the Gazette, issue #227 (June 15, 1977) featuring the first two weeks of Marvel’s new newspaper strip: Howard the Duck (by Steve Gerber and Gene Colan). The plan was to publish the paper twice a month—backed with remnants of the old formats—in the hope that Marvel fans

Taking It to the Street In late 1975, many creators rallied to help Street Enterprises stay afloat by contributing art to the fundraising publication The STreet Enterprises Benefit Portfolio. Shown here are illustrations by Everett Raymond Kintsler, Gray Morrow, Russell Myers, Bob Brown, Howard Chaykin, and Dick Moores. Flash Gordon © King Features Syndicate, Inc. Broom-Hilda and Gasoline Alley © Tribune Syndicate. Daredevil and Black Widow © Marvel. Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics. Jim Hardy © United Features Syndicate.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 21

would support the endeavor. The results were encouraging and issues #227 and 228 sold out their print run. Any momentum was killed by the Gazette taking a four-month hiatus. Its return offered another handsome new addition—Ron Goulart and Gil Kane’s Star Hawks—but more problems emerged. The erratic frequency cost the Gazette its second-class postage privileges, forcing them to go with the slower, more problematic third class. Six weeks separated issues #230 (Oct. 30, 1977) and #231 (Dec. 15, 1977). When Gazette #232 was finally published, it was dated March 3, 1978, and Mike was back at the helm. Frankly expressing his frustrations with the state of the paper, he proposed running nothing but Howard and Star Hawks in each issue until they caught up with current dates. It was a worthy idea, but it never happened. The Comic Reader remained a successful venture, so much so that it had outgrown its digest-sized dimensions and relative slim page count. Effective with TCR #164 (Jan. 1979), it expanded to comic-book size, with 64 pages. A percentage of those pages were filled with Howard the Duck, Star Hawks, Batman, Superman, Ben Casey, and other strips. Gazette readers had their subscriptions transferred over to TCR, a state of affairs that many of them greeted with displeasure. Still, it enabled the Gazette to live on after a fashion. A few of the strips— including Superman—were still running in TCR when its final issue (#219) was published in 1984. Back issues of both tabloids were still being advertised when TCR ended, although some key numbers were no longer available. In the spring of 1972, Tiefenbacher recalled in Gazette #101 (Nov. 19, 1973), “a private individual approached us to buy our entire stock of MFG #1, which was about 350 copies. We accepted his offer as we chuckled over the silly thought of anyone being able to sell that many copies at any price. Unfortunately, we soon discovered our error, as our circulation rose and the demand for issue #1 grew. “We rationalized that at least our readers could purchase the issue, albeit at an inflated price. We found out later that this was not the case: that the entire shipment was lost in the mail, and that the few copies he was selling were purchased from another source.” Since the syndicate contracts stipulated one-time reproduction rights, even a second printing wasn’t an option. Alan Light’s rival Vintage Funnies expired in 1975 after 100 issues, but another publisher took a stab at a tabloid comic-strip weekly in 1980. Composed strictly of vintage strips, Chapters had an impressive lineup—including 1944’s obscure Wonder Woman—but it lasted a mere six issues. As the comics shop market opened up in the 1980s and 1990s, publishers also tried running magazines featuring current humor strips, notably Comics Express (1989–1991), Comic Relief (1986–2001), and Funny Stuff (1995–1997). Comics Review began in the same vein in 1984, shifting direction with issue #4 when Rick Norwood’s Manuscript Press inherited the magazine (and soon changed its name to Comics Revue). On his watch, the zine returned to the spirit of the Gazette, publishing mostly current adventure/story strips with a smattering of vintage material. Nearly three decades later, it’s still running, albeit now composed strictly of classic comic strips. The closest thing to the Gazette and the Guardian was perhaps American Publications’ Strips, a thick newsprint production

Murph’s Turf Murphy Anderson returned to the familiar terrain of Buck Rogers for this 1973 cover for Gazette #96. Buck Rogers © Dille Family Trust.

with varying frequencies—initially weekly—that ran from 1988 to September 2000. Each issue featured dozens of current daily strips in increments of one or two weeks at a time. Eventually, it was split into two parts, one of them—Storyline Strips—devoted strictly to features with continuity. The magazines were also ruthless in their efforts to keep the content current. When Strips fell behind on schedule, they’d skip weeks to get back on recent dates! By the time Strips died, the ability to read every current comic strip was at the fingertips of any fan with a computer keyboard. Today, subscriber-based websites like Comics Kingdom and GoComics offer lineups of comic strips that a 1970s fan could never have imagined. For fans of print, the 21st Century has been an age of wonders for vintage strip fans, with hundreds of handsome book collections now in existence from imprints like the Library of American Comics, Fantagraphics, and Classic Comics Press. The shelves of a dedicated comicstrip collector can now boast volumes devoted to Batman, Superman, The Phantom, Dick Tracy, Rip Kirby, Thimble Theatre, Russ Manning’s Tarzan, Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse, and Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson’s Secret Agent X-9. One of the most amazing things about poring over issues of the Menomonee Falls Gazette and Guardian is the realization that all of those strips appeared at some point in their pages, often exposed to 1970s readers for the first time. Those readers included Mike Tiefenbacher himself who, as previously noted, had resisted adding Little Orphan Annie until very late. In Gazette #169, he echoed Marv Wolfman’s enthusiasm for the 1930s reprints. “Annie has grown on me, too,” he admits. “There’s something about it, sort of like watching old movies. The excesses can be excused. And the stories are marvelously well-plotted.” “I for one am glad that we have published most of the strips we have,” Tiefenbacher declared in Gazette #207 (Dec. 1, 1975), “because I’m positive that I never would have known how good comic strips could be. My tastes prior to the Gazette were much more parochial than they are now, much more restricted to comic books. I recall discussing comic strips with a friend in 1970 and stating that the only good strips were humor strips, and that adventure couldn’t be presented. I’ve changed my mind.” Comics historian JOHN WELLS is the author of the TwoMorrows books American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960–1964 and 1965–1969, and co-author (with Keith Dallas) of the book Comic Book Implosion.

22 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

Characters © their respective copyright holders.

The Menomonee Falls Gazette and Guardian Cover Gallery

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CHECKLIST Listed here are the strips featured regularly in the Menomonee Falls Gazette and Guardian, along with the issues in which they appeared. All were daily only, unless specifically noted.

THE GAZETTE

Prince Valiant: MFG #95–223

Contemporary (1971–1977):

Rick O’Shay: MFG #66–226

Ambler: MFG #46–94 and

Rip Kirby: MFG #66–226

#95–108 (with Sundays)

Secret Agent Corrigan:

Apartment 3-G: MFG #165–226 Batman: MFG #1–12 Big Ben Bolt: MFG #95–126 The Born Loser: MFG #95, 96, 99, 103–106 Brick Bradford: MFG #52–223 Broom-Hilda: MFG #226 Buz Sawyer: MFG #52–223 Captain Easy: MFG #82,

(Sunday only)

Buck Rogers: MFG #95–126,

MFG #1–223 Star Hawks: MFG #229–232 (with Sundays)

issues)

and #95–223

Broom-Hilda: MFGu #1–146

Sundays only)

Bugs Bunny: MFGu #18–19,

Dan Flagg: MFG #116–126

Steve Roper and Mike Nomad: MFG #110–226 Tarzan: MFG #1–34 and #46–228 (Sundays only)

(even-numbered issues), 69–77

(Sundays only) Kevin the Bold: MFG #109–

Dateline: Danger!: MFG

Sunday only)

Dick Tracy: MFG #95–223 Dr. Kildare: MFG #95–223

Air Hawk and the Flying

Fawn: MFG #142–161,

Doctors: MFG #1–204 (with

MFG #95–223 Howard the Duck: MFG #227–232 (with Sundays) Jeff Cobb: MFG #1–201

Funny Business: MFGu #16–146 Gasoline Alley: MFGu #37–115 and #116–146

Little Orphan Annie: MFG International:

The Heart of Juliet Jones:

61–146

Krazy Kat: MFG #226–232

#1–120

(with Sundays)

Frank and Ernest: MFGu #19,

The Hawk: MFG #219–225

Conchy: MFG #226

Friday Foster: MFG #95-116

Feiffer: MFGu #8–68

Flyin’ Jenny: MFG #224-226

(Sundays only)

Flash Gordon: MFG #1–223

#17–146

Drift Marlo: MFG #1–37

#52–64 and #65 (final

183, 188

21–22 Eek and Meek: MFGu

Dr. Guy Bennett: MFG #95–104

(with Sundays)

#16–146

207–214, 217–220 (all

(with Sundays)

Steve Canyon: MFG #52–94

The Born Loser: MFGu

Connie: MFG #96–102,

213, 215–232

163–171, 173–176, 181,

issues), 61–146

128–146 (even-numbered

Terry and the Pirates: MFG

95–228

33–59 (odd-numbered

#135–223

Sundays in #6–232)

(with Sundays) Gahan Wilson’s Sunday Comics: MFGu #112–129

Male Call: MFG #106–126,

(Sundays only)

127–141 (odd-numbered issues)

Gordo: MFGu #39–144

Garth: MFG #38–126, 127–

Peter Scratch: MFG #95–164

Joe Palooka: MFGu #1–112

181 (odd-numbered

Red Barry: MFG #95–126,

Mickey Finn: MFGu #1–112

issues), 182–232 Gunner: MFG #95–126, 127–153 (odd-numbered issues), 154–223

128–152 (even-numbered

Neil the Horse: MFGu

issues)

Red Ryder: MFG #95–126, 128– 140 (even-numbered issues)

#118–140 (even-numbered issues), 142–146

Pogo: MFGu #1–111 (with

James Bond: MFG #1–232

Sam’s Strip: MFG #226–228

Sundays in all but #65–77)

Jeff Hawke: MFG #1–44,

The Spirit: MFG #95–212

Rick O’Shay: MFGu #116–129

46–181, 195–232

Superman: MFG #10–232

(Sundays only)

Joe Palooka: MFG #192–223

Modesty Blaise: MFG #1–232

Tarzan: MFG #35–223

Sally Bananas: MFGu #1–36

Johnny Hazard: MFG #14–94

Paul Temple: MFG #95–232

Thimble Theatre/Popeye:

Winthrop: MFGu #16–146

and #95–223

Scarth 2195 A.D.: MFG #95–

MFG #226–232

(with Sundays)

126, 128–182 (even-

Windy City Kitty: MFG

Kerry Drake: MFG #95-108,

numbered issues), 183–232

127–226 and #109–126

The Seekers: MFG #95–232

(with Sundays)

Tug Transom: MFG #95–126,

Mandrake the Magician: MFG #1–223

#223–226

THE GUARDIAN Contemporary (1973–1976):

Mary Perkins: On Stage:

Alley Oop: MFGu #2–59 Captain Easy: MFGu #6–72 Krazy Kat: MFGu #1–160, 116–143, 226–228

127–147 (odd-numbered issues), 148–191

Pre-1970s Reprints:

Mickey Mouse: MFGu

Alley Oop: MFGu #60–146

#117–125, 128–146

and MFGu Special #1–3

Romeo Brown: MFGu #1–38

MFG #46–94 and #95–226

Pre-1970s Reprints:

(with Sundays)

Batman: MFG #95–232

B.C.: MFGu #1–144

Sam’s Strip: MFGu #134–146

Mickey Finn: MFG #192–223

Ben Casey: MFG #46–232

Beetle Bailey: MFGu #1–144

Thimble Theatre/Popeye:

The Phantom: MFG #1–223

Bobby: MFG #209, 214–218

Boon Dock: MFGu #27–30,

MFGu #1–131, 133–146

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 25

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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.

CREATOR-OWNED COMICS! Featuring in-depth histories of MATT WAGNER’s Mage and Grendel. Plus other indie sensations of the Bronze Age, including COLLEEN DORAN’s A Distant Soil, STAN SAKAI’s Usagi Yojimbo, STEVE PURCELL’s Sam & Max, JAMES DEAN SMITH’s Boris the Bear, and LARRY WELZ’s Cherry Poptart! With a fabulous Grendel cover by MATT WAGNER.

“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!

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BACK ISSUE #129

BACK ISSUE #130

BACK ISSUE #131

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!

BRONZE AGE TV TIE-INS! TV-to-comic adaptations of the ’70s to ’90s, including Bionic Woman, Dark Shadows, Emergency, H. R. Pufnstuf, Hee Haw, Lost in Space (with BILL MUMY), Primus (with ROBERT BROWN), Sledge Hammer, Superboy, V, and others! Featuring BALD, BATES, CAMPITI, EVANIER, JOHN FRANCIS MOORE, SALICRUP, SAVIUK, SPARLING, STATON, WOLFMAN, and more!

TV TOON TIE-INS! Bronze Age HannaBarbera Comics, Underdog, Mighty Mouse, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Pink Panther, Battle of the Planets, and Smokey Bear and Woodsy Owl. Bonus: SCOTT SHAW! digs up Captain Carrot’s roots! Featuring the work of BYRNE, COLON, ENGEL, EVANIER, FIELDS, MICHAEL GALLAGHER, WIN MORTIMER, NORRIS, SEVERIN, SKEATES, STATON, TALLARICO, TOTH, and more!

BRONZE AGE PROMOS, ADS, AND GIMMICKS! The aborted DC Super-Stars Society fan club, Hostess Comic Ads, DC 16-page Preview Comics, rare Marvel custom comics, DC Hotline, Popeye Career Comics, early variant covers, and more. Featuring BARR, HERDLING, LEVITZ, MAGUIRE, MORGAN, PACELLA, PALMIOTTI, SHAW!, TERRY STEWART, THOMAS, WOLFMAN, and more!

THE KIRBY LEGACY AT DC! Explores Jack Kirby’s post-Fourth World Bronze Age DC characters! Demon, Kamandi, OMAC, Sandman, and Kirby’s Odd Jobs (Atlas, Manhunter, and more). Plus: the SIMON & KIRBY Reunion That Wasn’t! Featuring BISSETTE, BYRNE, CONWAY, GIBBONS, GOLDEN, GRANT, RUCKA, SEMEIKS, THOMAS, TIMM, WAGNER, and more. Demon cover by KIRBY and MIKE ROYER!

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1980s MARVEL LIMITED SERIES! CLAREMONT/MILLER’s Wolverine, Black Panther, Falcon, Punisher, Machine Man, Iceman, Magik, Fantastic Four vs. X-Men, Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D., Wolfpack, and more! With BOGDANOVE, COWAN, DeFALCO, DeMATTEIS, GRANT, HAMA, MILGROM, NEARY, SMITH, WINDSORSMITH, and more. Cover by JOE RUBINSTEIN. Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

STARMEN ISSUE, headlined by JAMES ROBINSON and TONY HARRIS’s Jack Knight Starman! Plus: The StarSpangled Kid, Starjammers, the 1980s Starman, and Starstruck! Featuring DAVE COCKRUM, GERRY CONWAY, ROBERT GREENBERGER, ELAINE LEE, TOM LYLE, MICHAEL Wm. KALUTA, ROGER STERN, ROY THOMAS, and more. Jack Knight Starman cover by TONY HARRIS.

BRONZE AGE RARITIES & ODDITIES, spotlighting rare ‘80s European Superman comics! Plus: CURT SWAN’s Batman, JIM APARO’s Superman, DAVID ANTHONY KRAFT’s Marvel custom comics, MICHAEL USLAN’s unseen Earth-Two stories, Leaf’s DC Secret Origins, Marvel’s Evel Knievel, cover variants, and more! With EDUARDO BARRETO, PAUL KUPPERBERG, ALEX SAVIUK, and more. Cover by JOE KUBERT.

SILVER ISSUE, starring the Silver Surfer in the Bronze Age! Plus: JACK KIRBY’s Silver Star, SCOTT HAMPTON’s Silverheels, Silver Sable, Silver Banshee, DC’s Silver Age Classics, and more! Featuring BUSIEK, BUTLER, BYRNE, ENGLEHART, STAN LEE, LIM, MARZ, MOEBIUS, POLLARD, MARSHALL ROGERS, ALEX ROSS, JIM STARLIN, and more. Cover by RON FRENZ and JOE SINNOTT.

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by R o b e r t

Menzies

When Worlds Collide In British Marvel history, there was no decade as memorable, exciting, or unpredictable as the 1970s. Having leased its characters out to a packager in the 1960s, Marvel finally took control of its own empire and relaunched the Marvel Age in late 1972. What came after would never be repeated. Stan “The Man” Lee visited Britain regularly, appearing on TV and radio, and in newspapers and magazines. “The Spider-Man Roadshow” travelled around the UK, going as far north as Clydebank in Scotland, as the Web-Spinner— usually a penurious student in a costume— dispensed free comics and vitamin pills. There was a flurry of free gifts of variable quality and sometimes-dubious safety that were never available anywhere else. Sales were such that the line was soon expanded to a book for every day of the week. It was, in short, a wonderful time to be a True Believer… assuming, of course, that you could survive the experience and didn’t suffocate while wearing your plastic Spidey mask.

These highlights in mind, to some the most audacious—and yet disappointing—act of that decade was when the most famous and respected British artist there has ever been turned his pen and brush to Marvel’s mascot. The Marvel staff in England had never before, and never again, reached out to an artist in quite this way. While it wasn’t unheard of to hire outside artists for merchandising art—the gorgeous posters painted by Lopez Espi being the high-water mark of that practice— all-new covers, posters, and bridging pages for the weeklies were created by US-based freelancers like Jeff Aclin, Ron Wilson, John Romita, Jr., Bob Layton, and Howard Bender. The rare exceptions from art director Alan Murray and artist George Mina were inserts on announcements, promotional pages, and a Merry Christmas message. At a time when almost no artists in Britain were contributing to Marvel’s British line, the London office managed to pull off the remarkable feat of tapping the man unquestionably considered the greatest and most influential artist in British comics history.

(left) Dan Dare, Digby, and the Mekon by Frank Hampson. In the years before the Space Race and actual astronauts, spacesuits were close relatives of deepsea diving suits. (right) From Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes #163 (Mar. 27, 1976), the introduction to the centerspread poster by Hampson. All art scans accompanying this article are courtesy of Robert Menzies. Dan Dare © Dan Dare Corporation Ltd. Spider-Man TM & © Marvel.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 27

Worthy of an Elton John Song Sample panels from Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare strip, originally published in 1950s issues of Eagle. Art restoration by Richard Haines and John Ridgway. Note the stunning sense of depth and the sheen of the Pilot of the Future’s spacecraft, the Anastasia, a.k.a. “Annie,” in the final image. © Dan Dare Corporation Ltd.

PILOT OF THE FUTURE

Frank Hampson (1918–1985) exploded onto the scene with the publication of Eagle in 1950. As writer and artist, Hampson’s innovative storytelling was like nothing else seen before, and Eagle’s success— it sold a million copies every week—was largely down to Hampson’s iconic creation, Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. An overnight sensation, Colonel Daniel MacGregor Dare remained Britain’s most famous and popular comic character until 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd took his crown. (Or helmet.) Dan Dare’s footprint on British popular consciousness in the 20th Century is almost immeasurable and extends to him featuring in songs by iconic performers like David Bowie (“D.J.”), Pink Floyd (“Astronomy Domine”), and Elton John (“Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future”). In terms of cultural relations, Dare is most commonly associated with 1930s favorite Buck Rogers, although the strip was hardly a derivative rehash and Hampson expended a great deal of effort to be scientifically accurate. A conscientious researcher and consummate draftsman, Hampson’s attention to detail on functional technology and minutia like military insignia caused fans to not just read his stories, but study them. He was so scrupulous he hired advisors, including a young Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, for the first Dare story arc. In the late 1970s, Dare was rebooted in the pages of the new sci-fi weekly title 2000 AD, a comic book that came out the gate calling itself “The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic,” no doubt a knowing rebuttal to the Fantastic Four’s claim to be the “World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.” Starting with the first issue in February 1977, Dare’s new adventures bore little resemblance to the original series. Set exactly 200 years in the future from the publication year, a physically and temperamentally transformed Dare was awakened from suspended animation minus his original supporting cast. While this near-complete concept overhaul did not go over well with some older fans and commentators in the press, Hampson himself was gracious about the redesign. Initially depicted by the incredible Italian stylist Massimo Belardinelli, scripts were provided by Ken Armstrong, Kelvin Gosnell, and Steve Moore, who also wrote Hulk, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Doctor Who tales for Marvel UK. A second, perhaps better regarded and certainly less fantastical, relaunch was helmed by Scot Gerry Finley-Day and Dave (Watchmen)

Gibbons, the team who would later create future-war specialist Rogue Trooper, one of the most popular characters in the history of 2000 AD. The Dare stories were discontinued in 1979, although the character was hardly retired. He returned yet again, in the form of his greatgreat-grandson of the same name, in the relaunched Eagle from 1982 until 1994. Most recently, The Boys writer Garth Ennis and former Marvel UK artist Gary Erskine collaborated on a seven-issue Dare miniseries for Virgin Comics in 2007–2008, with Dare a wise old head rather than a swashbuckling adventurer. Even though to many he was still synonymous with his most famous creation, Hampson’s story had diverged from Dare’s decades earlier. Hampson’s final Dare strip was in 1959, and he departed Eagle in 1961. While Hampson continued to work in advertising and book illustration, by the 1970s he had fallen into partial obscurity to a new generation of comic-book fans. Inside the comics industry, and to legions of dads whose childhoods were entwined with Hampson’s tales, his reputation had not only remained intact, but grown. This was best illustrated by him being voted Prestigioso Maestro at the International Congress of Comics held in Lucca, Italy, in 1975, where a jury of his peers, including Jean (Moebius) Giraud, declared him the best writer and artist since the Second World War. So, when it was announced the following year, in a full-page article in Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes #162 (Mar. 20, 1976), that Hampson had accepted an invitation to produce a centerspread featuring New York’s favorite Web-Slinger, it was an incredible coup. Many fans of my generation only knew of Dan Dare indirectly, although we were always informed by our elders and better-informed fellow fans that the Eagle was the greatest comic ever to come out of the British Isles, and quite probably the world, and that Hampson was a visionary genius. In early April of 2017, Alan Murray, art director for the British office, recalled the origins of this unusual project: It was surely Denis Gifford who suggested we might commission Frank to produce something. [The late Denis Gifford was a hugely prolific and influential British comic artist, writer and historian. He also wrote the Hampson article in Super Spider-Man #162.] We used to see Denis from time to time.

28 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

Not surprising, I suppose, the great comic historian and collector that he was. And our reaction was, “Is Frank still around? And is he still drawing?” Both Neil [Tennant, British editor] and I were in awe of Frank’s work on Eagle. Neil’s elder brother used to get Eagle, which is how Neil got to see them. But, we thought, would Frank be able to handle a Marvel-style Spider-Man? Would it sit comfortably in a Marvel comic? It was Neil who said, “Let’s go for it!” Frank accepted the challenge and, I feel, didn’t do such a bad job of it. Although, when we saw the actual artwork, and having seen the superb, clean, slick Dan Dare strips, what he had was a board with a mass of process white around the linework, scratchings out, and patches stuck on to correct the faults. But, once under the camera, and no doubt a bit of retouching at the printer’s, the printed copy wasn’t too bad. One week after the promotional article, as promised, the art [shown on next page] appeared. Alongside a breathless and disjointed narration that is unmistakably English, the unusual trio of Spider-Man, the Thing, and the Hulk (out of shot!) were battling an invasion of birdlike aliens above Westminster in London.

AMERICAN ARACHNID POISED AND WAITING ATOP THE NEW LONDON MARVEL BULL TOWER AT FAR RIGHT? CAN IT BE? … IT IS!… THE WEB WEAVING WONDER HIMSELF…! WE’RE SAVED, CARRUTHERS! SPIDER-MAN, AND THE THING (CENTRE), AND THE HULK, JUST COMING UP (OUT OF FRAME) – I’LL HAVE THREE LUMPS IN MY TEA TODAY, CARRUTHERS. To many fans, myself included, the art was a disappointment. Spider-Man’s costume is ill-fitting, Ben Grimm is small and indistinct, and bizarrely the Hulk only appears in the description. Perhaps that negative judgement is partly attributable to expectations. For anyone raised on Marvel Comics, Hampson’s more naturalistic artwork is perhaps incompatible. My contemporaries recall this poster as being highly controversial and unpopular, and yet a search of old issues offers little to back that memory up. Considering the lack of restraint shown in letters pages of the time, I feel a tad suspicious of the scarcity of printed complaints.

LONDON 2026… UNDER ATTACK! THE THAMES IS BEING LASHED INTO A VORTEX OF FURY. FROM A TELESENDER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WHIRLPOOL SOME SNEAKY MAGICIAN IS FUNNELLING AN ENDLESS STREAM OF BEAKY, HOSTILE ALIENS, PRIMED AND ARMED FOR CONQUEST… THINGS LOOK BLACK FOR THE UNION JACK. THOSE ARMOURED PARROTS AREN’T HERE TO PLAY ‘LULLABY OF BIRD LAND’ ON THEIR PROJECTORS. THIS COULD BE THE FINAL SUNSET OF THE DEAR OLD EMPIRE… (FOR GOD[’]S SAKE[,] STOP SNIVELLING[,] CARRUTHERS.)… BUT HANG ABOUT! WHO IS THAT ALL-

Artist of the Future (top) Frank Hampson with young fans. Undated photograph from the Frank Hampson website (frankhampson.co.uk) managed by his son, Peter Hampson. (inset) Hampson with his Yellow Kid Award in Lucca, Italy, 1975. Credit unknown. (bottom) Hampson bio by Denis Gifford (1927– 2000) from Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes #162 (Mar. 20, 1976). © Marvel.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 29

Some did, however, see print. In The Titans #43 (Aug. 11, 1976), a letter from Andrew Russel, Norwich, reads: “The Frank Hampson centerspread, in my eyes, was not much good.” Stephen Gooch of Rugby was rather more outspoken. “[D]o not bring back Frank Hampson. That was the worst drawing I’ve seen of Spidey” (SMCW #181, July 28, 1976). Neither comment met with a response, which may have been because editor Neil Tennant had been unable to muster an honest defense. Tennant did reply to a more sustained attack from another fan, although he avoided any specific response to the main thrust of the complaint about Spider-Man wearing a sagging costume that looked oversized. (I have yet to locate the “in-depth profile” Tennant refers to, unless he means the original feature by Gifford.) Frank Hampson the world’s greatest comic artist? Are you sure? Positive? Well, I say No! No! NO! For a start, doesn’t the man know that superheroes just happen to wear skin-tight costumes? Take Spidey, he looks more like Flash Thompson in a Spidey costume than Spidey in a Spidey costume. In short, Webhead looked like a ridiculous freak. … I come to my conclusion: Frank Hampson is nowhere near being the world’s greatest comic artist. Peter Bullen, Lancashire Pete – some week’s [sic] back, in an answer to a letter, we did what could be called a ‘thumb-nail in-depth profile’ of Frank Hampson. Now – you wouldn’t want us to repeat it all over, wouldya? SSM #182 (Aug. 4, 1976) It would be an exaggeration to call that feeble response a defense. There were, it should be noted, no letters, not one,

London Calling Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes #163 (Mar. 27, 1976) “London Invaded” centerspread poster by Frank Hampson. Art restored by Andrew Standish. Spider-Man © Marvel.

praising the centerspread. According to the article in SSM #162, Hampson took the original centerspread art to the convention organized by Gifford. COMICS 101—so named to celebrate 101 years of British comics, but obviously playing on the idea of “101” indicating an introductory course—was held March 19–21, 1976 at the Mount Royal Hotel on Bryanston Street in London. Presumably, most fans that approached Hampson at that comic-con would have been Eagle and Dan Dare fans. From the published reception for his interpretation of Spidey, there wasn’t going to be much positivity from Marvel fans. And that’s probably putting it mildly. One wonders what communication passed between Hampson and the Marvel offices in the wake of publication because, to my surprise and I’m sure that of others, they asked him to produce a second poster which appeared in Super Spider-Man and the Titans #206 (Jan. 19, 1977). Thankfully, this delayed follow-up is far superior to its predecessor. It plays to Hampson’s strengths and is more representative of his ability. It’s a fine poster and in many ways a far more impressive piece of work than the usual centerspreads. As a result of the first poster’s

30 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

reception, there may have been some gentle steering in terms of content, as this follow-up poster did not include any Marvel characters. This did have one unfortunate consequence: the poster was out of sync with the usual cast of characters and one wonders whether the average British Marvel fan would have preferred the likes of Nick Fury or the Liberty Legion, who book-ended the new Hampson art. IN ISH No.163 WE SHOWED THE FIRST RECORD OF A SNEAK ATTACK ON LONDON. FOILED BY SPIDEY, THING AND HULK, THE WEIRD INTRUDERS PULLED OUT WHEN THE “SOLPLANET LEAGUE”* DEFENCES WERE ALERTED. HERE IS THE LATEST REPORT OF THE BATTLE. he Solplanet League, a note [*] explains, is a “DEFENCE ALLIANCE T OF INHABITED AND COLONISED PLANETS IN THIS SOLAR SYSTEM. INCLUDES TERRA, VENUS, SATURN MOONS AND GUARD SATTELITES [sic] MANNED BY ROBOT DEFENCES.” With its numbered and lettered guide to the characters and, especially, the technology, Hampson has clearly given the piece a great deal of thought, and are there hints of a playfulness? The Solplanet Leagues Terran Commando is Sergeant Superdare, which may be a combination of the title of the comic, Super Spider-Man and the Titans, and Hampson’s most famous creation, Dan Dare. Another suspiciously deliberate-looking parallel is the Solplanet Leagues’ initials “S.L.”, which match Stan Lee’s. Then again, maybe I’m seeing patterns where none exist. The second centerspread was promoted much more in the other weeklies than the first poster, and with an apparent subtext. The editorial message in Super Spider-Man and the Titans #205 and The

Mighty World of Marvel #224 (both Jan. 12, 1977) that reads, “Frank Hampson, the man who created Dan Dare, dares to draw another Super Spider-Man centrespread” is surely more than just a play on the character’s surname. It had previously been rare to run adverts for pin-ups. This was true even in the case of the Herb Trimpe “Into Battle!” poster that was commissioned at Stan Lee’s legendary Roundhouse event in London in 1975, although that did of course have a one-off feature article. The tone of the promotion does seem to include a sense of vindication, a “See? We told you he is a great artist!” Later that year, in an article publicizing the release of The Best of Eagle that appeared in The Mighty World of Marvel #266 (Nov. 2, 1977), readers learned that the moustachioed main figure in the left foreground was an aged Dan Dare! It was a neat touch, especially as it seemed to reflect a passage of time equal to that since Dare’s youthful adventures in Eagle 20 years earlier. This type of feature on a book reprinting non-Marvel material was unheard of and was surely a sign of the deep respect felt for Hampson, a deep respect that led to a failed experiment that remains a fascinating oddity in British comic history. Thanks to Alan Murray, former art director at Marvel’s London office, and Andrew Standish for art restoration on the centerspreads. In the years since the two Hampson centerspreads were printed, ROBERT MENZIES—who shares his year of birth, 1967, with Dan Dare—has read some of the classic Dare stories and now appreciates the excitement felt by Tennant and Murray when Hampson agreed to create a poster.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 31

by D e w e y

Cassell

Forty-two years is a good, long run for pretty much anything, including newspaper comic strips. True, it’s a far cry from The Katzenjammer Kids, which owns the overall record at 109 years in syndication. But 42 years is an impressive tenure for a strip based on a comic-book superhero. The closest competitor would be Superman, but the Man of Steel can only claim 27 years in his original strip, alex saviuk plus seven years in The World’s Greatest Superheroes starring Superman. The record holder for superhero newspaper comic Michael Eury. strips? The Amazing Spider-Man. Launched in 1977, after an unsuccessful attempt seven years earlier, the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip was originated for Marvel Comics by the legendary Stan “The Man” Lee and artist John Romita, Sr. The creative duo brought the same dynamic action and snappy dialogue to the newspaper strip that fans had enjoyed for years in the comic books, so it is no wonder the strip was a hit. Other attempts to bring Marvel superheroes to the funny pages, including Howard the Duck, The Incredible Hulk, and Conan the Barbarian, met with varying degrees of success. Over the years, there were changes in the artists who drew The Amazing Spider-Man. After almost four years, Romita left the strip and was replaced by Larry Lieber. But after less than a year, Lieber found he could not keep up with the schedule and Fred Kida took over drawing the dailies and Sundays. Fifteen months later, Floro Dery began drawing the Sunday strip. Kida continued drawing the dailies for five years, after which Dan Barry drew them for The Amazing Spider-Man Artist less than a year before Larry Lieber returned to draw An undated Spidey specialty illo by Alex Saviuk, courtesy of Heritage the daily strip for the next 32 years. Dery remained on the Sunday strip for nine years, after which a series of Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). Saviuk, the illustrator of a memorable other artists followed, including Ron Frenz, Sal Buscema, Paul Ryan, and Dave Simons. (For an account of the late-’80s through mid-’90s run on Marvel’s Web of Spider-Man title, early years of the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip, swung over to the enduring Spider-Man newspaper strip in its final years. pick up a copy of BACK ISSUE #44, available in a digital edition from www.twomorrows.com.) Spider-Man TM & © Marvel. 32 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

LISTEN TO WHAT ‘THE MAN’ SAYS

Fred Kida returned to pencil the Sunday strip in the mid-1990s, but it would not be long-term. Enter artist Alex Saviuk. Saviuk explains to BACK ISSUE how he became involved with the strip: “From what I understand, Fred only wanted to do the [Sunday] strip on a fill-in basis, but he ended up doing it for almost two years. At that point, he told Stan, ‘Look, I’ve helped you for two years and I thought it was only going to be a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to do it anymore.’ So, they were in a bind, and I was lucky enough to take up the slack. I got a call from an editor at Marvel named Ralph Macchio, and he asked me if I would be interested in doing the Sunday Spider-Man strip. Of course, I said yes. It paid about the same amount as the regular rate in comics. He said, ‘Here’s the address for Stan Lee and his offices for POW! Entertainment in California. Send him some samples, and we’ll take it from there.’ I still recall a couple of days after I sent my samples, I got a message from Stan Lee on my phone—we still had cassette tapes in those days. I came home from work and played the message from Stan Lee. He said in his inimitable voice, ‘Alex! I love your work! I’m telling you, we could have a great time doing Spider-Man together. It doesn’t pay a lot, but think of the glory!’ I was cracking up, and I said to my wife, ‘Holy mackerel! He liked what I did.’” Saviuk was not new to comics. He started at DC Comics in 1977 and moved to Marvel in 1986. He was also not new to Spider-Man. His first assignment stan lee drawing the Web-Slinger was a fill-in for Amazing Spider-Man #292 (Sept. © Marvel. 1987), noteworthy because on the last page of the story, Mary Jane Watson accepts Peter Parker’s marriage proposal. Saviuk went on to become the regular artist on Web of Spider-Man from issue #35 (Feb. 1988) to 116 (Sept. 1994). “I came in the middle of a Kingpin storyline and [Stan] sent me the scripts,” Saviuk elaborates. “I was getting them two weeks at a time. At that time, Stan was still writing and editing the scripts. It always seemed odd to me because I was working at Marvel in the so-called ‘Stan Lee/Marvel style,’ with a plot with no dialogue, and now all of a sudden, I’m getting scripted pages from Stan Lee. But I didn’t ask questions, I just did the work.” The Sundays were two-tiered, but there were several standardheader tiers available to newspapers that printed them in half-page or tabloid format. Saviuk explains how he worked from the script: “Initially, in 1997, I didn’t have a computer. I would get a FedEx pack with Xeroxes of the previous two Sundays and two weeks’ worth of scripts, every two weeks. With the advent of the computer and email attachments, I was getting those scripts from [Stan’s assistant] Michael Kelly via email. [The script] would [describe each] panel with a one-line art direction: ‘Peter is in J. Jonah Jameson’s office talking about… writing a story or pursuing a storyline. Robbie Robertson is there, just holding his pipe.’ And it’d say, ‘Panel One: Peter delivers his line, followed by JJJ delivers his line, Robbie Robertson delivers his line.’ With full script, I know that Peter should be on the left side, Jonah should be in the middle, and Robbie should be on the right. This way, you can plan out the [word] balloons for succession.”

Spider-Man Sampler Original art panels (courtesy of Heritage) from three Sunday Amazing Spider-Man strips, drawn by (top) John Romita, Sr. (Mar. 20, 1977), (2nd panel) Larry Lieber (Dec. 7, 1980), and (3rd panel) Floro Dery (Apr. 26, 1987). (bottom) Daredevil drops in on Sunday, April 25, 1993. Art by Paul Ryan and Dave Simons. Courtesy of Dewey Cassell. TM & © Marvel.

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What a Workout! Spidey mixes it up with the Kingpin on his dynamic Alex Saviuk/Joe Sinnott original art page from Sunday, March 14, 1998. Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel.

Stan served as both writer and editor for the strip, ROY THE FRIENDLY GHOST so every step of the process went through him. When Roy Thomas was certainly not new to comics either. A Saviuk finished penciling the Sundays, he would send former scribe and editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics, them to Stan. Saviuk recalls, “The first two weeks I sent Thomas had long stints writing X-Men and The Avengers. him, I got a call—and this was my fault—I didn’t put He was responsible for bringing Conan the Barbarian to the balloons in pencil at the top of the panels. So, when comics and co-created a host of characters, including Stan looked at it, he didn’t think there was enough Wolverine. Thomas was also not new to newspaper comic room for the copy and he’d have to crop into my strips, having written the Conan strip in the late 1970s. artwork. I had to use a light box and bring things down Thomas recalls how he got involved with the Spiderand bring in those balloons so it would be easier for the Man strip: “Back in 2000, Stan was in the midst of that letterer to do his job.” dot-com boom with StanLee.com, and he had a huge It is a testimony to Saviuk’s art that only occasionally operation there. I wasn’t really doing that much in comics did Stan require changes. “There were only one or so I thought, well, maybe Stan would have some two instances where he asked for a little revision something. I got in touch with him—probably on something in one panel or another,” dropped him an email—and I got a call Saviuk says. “I think one time, there was back from him. He said he really pretty a Mole Man storyline and he was much had to work with people who showing up in the final panel, but he were right there on the scene for the didn’t look dynamically threatening various projects. I live in South Carolina, enough. [Stan] asked me if I could and he was in Los Angeles, so that have him hunch his shoulders and grit wouldn’t work out too well. But he his teeth, because he was waiting in the said that he did have something else wings, looking at Mary Jane on a stage. for me, though, which I hadn’t been Stan said, ‘He’s still gotta look menacing; expecting, and that was he could use he’s the Mole Man, he’s the villain.’ I a writer—a ghostwriter basically, or said, ‘You got it, Stan!’ I said, ‘Do you ‘someone to help him with’ would roy thomas want me to do the artwork separately be how he might phrase it, but I and you’ll scan it in?’ He said, ‘No, knew what that meant—with the IMDb.com. we’ll send you the artwork and you Amazing Spider-Man newspaper erase it and do it again.’” strip. He said he’d had somebody else working with Saviuk continues, “By around 1999, or late 1998, two him for the last story or two, and I guess he’d had years into it, I found out that Jim Salicrup was going to be other people before, like [Jim] Shooter said he did writing the script and Stan Lee would be editing because something. I know Jim Salicrup was working with him Stan Lee was getting pulled in too many directions with at the time, but he said he had a lot of other stuff his [other] obligations. So, Jim was writing and Stan was for Jim to do, and he asked if I would be interested in editing. Obviously, when Stan edits, it ends up sounding taking it over. And I said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure.’ Why not? like Stan. That was for about a year and a half. After that, “It’s kind of funny because I never really liked SpiderJim said to me, ‘I just feel that Stan edits my scripts so Man,” Thomas admits. “I wrote those four issues where heavily, I’m not making him happy, I’m giving him too Stan handed them in my lap [The Amazing Spider-Man much work, so I’m quitting.’ I said, ‘If you’re quitting, #101–104], and the first issue of Marvel Team-Up who’s taking over?’ He said, ‘Roy Thomas.’” because he asked me to, but otherwise I tried to avoid

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writing that character. As much as I liked him, I just really wasn’t interested in writing him. But it was an assignment and hey, it’s still Marvel and working with Stan and everything, so I said, ‘Great!’ And then Stan says, ‘Well, don’t say it too quickly until you hear how little we can pay you!’ And of course, ‘we’ was actually not Marvel, it was him. I was always paid personally by him, not by Marvel. So, he could pay me as much as he wanted to pay out of what he was being paid. It was seven days a week, but it was like $300 a week. I said, ‘Well, okay, I accept’ and he says, ‘Are ya sure? ‘Cause that’s not a lot of money.’ I said, ‘Stan you have no idea how little I can live on here!’ I live on a farm, and I’ve just about got the mortgage paid off already, so I’m happy. Besides, I knew it wouldn’t take much time. I actually spent somewhere between two to maybe three days a month, tops, on it because I would have to write two weeks at a time. So that was really not too bad for the 300 bucks. So, I accepted it and didn’t know how long it would last, but I started it and it lasted 19 years.” Having Thomas ghostwrite the strip didn’t mean that Stan wasn’t involved. Thomas explains, “I’d get calls from Stan. Sometimes he’d just rewrite stuff. In the early days, he’d call me up to discuss it with me, and I always dreaded those phone calls. I respected Stan so much, but at this stage, I mostly wanted to just write it. Obviously, I had to ghost his style, but on the other hand, I had little differences with him over the way I wanted to handle it. I sometimes felt when I was reading it that I didn’t get enough feeling of what was going on in individual days of time because unless I’d read the previous day, there wasn’t any way for a new reader to get into it. I would try to provide a little more of that sometimes, but basically, it was really nice to work with Stan on it.” Lee retained overall control of the strip, though. “Stan didn’t have to spend too much time on it,” Thomas continues, “but of course, Stan’s name was always on it, from first to last. He figured that for the most part I was going to write it okay, and it wasn’t a big deal to him at that stage anymore. I guess he proved he could write a strip and make it a success. He said [newspaper syndicate] King Features never paid any attention to it. He said that every time he tried to talk to them, they never seemed to be interested in talking about it. They just wanted it to go on. As long as it made a little money, they would keep doing it. In fact, I think for

several years somewhere along the line, they didn’t even necessarily have a written contract. They couldn’t quite agree on the terms, but he just kept doing it. I guess the syndicate kept paying and he kept paying me.” On at least one occasion, though, the syndicate did have something to say about the strip, as Alex Saviuk recounts: “When we were doing a story toward the back end of the strip, there was a storyline set in Chinatown that had to deal with Yellow Claw. The way we had originally drawn the Yellow Claw was to make him—by design— look like he did in the ’50s with the strange-looking headpiece. [The syndicate] wanted to make a change to make him look more contemporary, so I had to make changes by putting him in a suit and tie and taking the headpiece off and he just had a bald head. That’s the only time I ever had changes for the syndicate and those were easy enough to do. I just took those particular panels I had scanned, corrected them in Photoshop, and sent them back.” Normally, working from Thomas’ script, Saviuk penciled the Sunday strips and sent them to Stan Lee. Lee would then send the penciled art to the letterer, who was none other than Stan Sakai. Sakai is best known as the creator of Usagi Yojimbo, first published in 1984 [see BACK ISSUE #125—ed.], but he began his career lettering comic books. Like Stan Lee, Sakai also lived in California. When Sakai finished lettering the Sunday strips, he returned them to Stan Lee, who then forwarded them to Joe Sinnott, who had been inking the Sunday strips since 1992 and continued until he retired in 2019, with an occasional fill-in by the likes of Jim Amash, Terry Austin, Bob Wiacek, and Sinnott’s son Mark. The inked Sunday strips were returned to Stan Lee. As Saviuk describes it, “Stan was the main hub and was traffic-managing to get all the work done.”

Ya Big Ape From the Heritage archives comes this titanic Sunday strip from December 13, 1998. Signed by Stan Lee, Alex Saviuk, and Joe Sinnott. TM & © Marvel.

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Larry Lieber, who had been penciling the dailies regularly since 1986, followed the same process. However, the letterer on the daily strip was Janice Chiang and the inker was John Tartaglione. Tartaglione was a name familiar to comic-book fans, having inked titles like Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos and Daredevil. But fate intervened, as Saviuk explains. “In 2003, around February, I got a call from Michael Kelly that John Tartaglione, the regular inker on the dailies, had to go into the hospital for some procedure. He said, ‘Could you ink a week? We had Terry Austin ink a week and he can’t do another one; can you do one?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I did that and they liked what I did. I said, ‘If you ever need me to do another one, give me a buzz.’ I did get that call. Unfortunately, in November 2003, John Tartaglione had passed from throat cancer. I got the job to ink the dailies and pencil the Sundays.” Saviuk enjoyed working with Lieber on the daily strip, noting his penciling was complete and straightforward to follow. “Larry penciled enough, I would say, for somebody who can draw and ink and make those particular—embellishments—in certain cases. So it was very easy to work on. I embellished the areas that needed it, and the rest was Larry under there. It was a collaborative effort.”

THE DAILY GRIND

For many creators who worked on newspaper comic strips, the toughest part was the unrelenting schedule. However, Alex Saviuk—and Larry Lieber on the dailies—managed to keep up with the pace. Saviuk notes, “The Sundays were three months in advance, pretty much the way it was when I was doing comic books. The dailies were usually six weeks out. If I wanted to go to San Diego [ComicCon] in the late 2000s, I’d have Larry Lieber get me a couple of weeks of dailies done earlier so I could ink them to get them done in that time slot.” Thomas adds, “It was written on a schedule that was related to the Sundays. The Sundays had to be prepared several weeks before the dailies, to do the color. So I had to write on that schedule, but I wrote

Kraven Attention The Hunter in the spotlight, from Sunday, November 21, 1999. Original art page courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel.

them in order. When I turned it in, I’d start with a Monday and end it with a Sunday each time I wrote it. Stan told me, ‘The [stories] are supposed to be about 14 or maybe 16 weeks, but, y’know, nobody pays any attention! I’ve never had anybody tell me it was too long or too short. Just do whatever you want!’ The idea was that every few months there’d be a good chance for new readers to hop aboard. I had to send in a proposal for every story, and I broke it down very roughly. I didn’t have to follow that later, but I did it [by] weeks and that would be my guide. Invariably, I don’t believe I ever did a story that wasn’t at least 20 weeks. Some of them ran 25. Instead of just three or four stories a year, I probably just did two or three. I was prepared at any time to rein them in, but nobody ever said anything.” The final step in the creative process was the coloring. “From what I understand, the Sundays were colored in L.A. by a former Marvel color artist by the name of Janet Jackson,” Saviuk explains. “She did it the old-school way. They would do a reduced Xerox of the artwork and she’d go in there with whatever she used—markers or dyes or colored pencils or watercolors, and then label them the way they used to label the comics with the codes in the margins. The dailies, from what I understand, once they started coloring the dailies in the newspaper, they were colored at Reed Brennan and Associates, which is a pagination company right here in Orlando, Florida. Speaking of Reed Brennan, when I used to initially ink the dailies, after they were lettered, and before I used the computer, I was making original-sized Xerox copies of the dailies done on pretty much 6x14-inch paper. It was a 14-inch horizontal, maybe six or six-and-a-half inch vertical. Larry would cut the board and I’d get those cut dailies. I’d make Xeroxes of those after they were inked, I would send them via FedEx to Orlando to save me the trip. They needed them by Tuesday morning at the latest. Sometimes if I was a little late getting them out, I’d ride from my house on Tuesday morning just to deliver those Xeroxes. That’s not too bad because I’d get out of my studio, I made some friends there, we’d go to lunch… It ended up being a social business trip. [Then] for at least a decade, I was just scanning the dailies and sending them to Orlando.” For the most part, the storylines that appeared in the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip were new. Exceptions include the 1987 wedding of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson, and the 1993 SpiderMan: Mutant Agenda storyline, which was a crossover between the comics and the newspaper strip. However, the newspaper strip often featured characters from the comics, including the traditional supporting cast as well as a host of guest superheroes and villains. Over the years,

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The Amazing SpiderMerchandise (top) Mary Jane realizes the value of franchising her hubby in this Sunday strip from August 29, 1999. (bottom) An MJ sketch by Alex Saviuk. Both, courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel.

Spidey fought in the newspaper alongside heroes such as Dr. Strange, Hulk, Daredevil, Thor, Ant-Man, the Punisher, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and Wolverine. Their foes included the likes of Dr. Doom, Sandman, Lizard, Kraven the Hunter, and Tarantula. But it seems a lot of people have a soft spot for the oldies but goodies, like the Mole Man. Thomas shares his recollections: “One of the things I was happiest about was having Aunt May get involved romantically [with]—and nearly marry—the Mole Man. That was a tremendous amount of fun because I guest-starred the Thing—who is, of course, my favorite Marvel character—in that one, and we went down below the Earth and it turned out that Aunt May couldn’t survive down there, so she had to come back, so that didn’t work out. Then later on, I had Mole Man get tossed out, so he was going to marry her and stay on the surface. Two, three, four years would go by and I’d try another angle. Of course, that was kind of inspired in a sense, by the fact that she had almost married Dr. Octopus once or twice in the comic” [see BI #123 for the scoop on the May/Ock romance—ed.]. It turns out Alex Saviuk has a similar fondness for the ruler of Subterranea. “The Mole Man has to be one of my favorite characters,” Saviuk recounts. Maybe because The Hunchback of Notre Dame sticks in my head—it was one of my favorite movies. There was a Charles Laughton type of effect he had on me from that first issue. He got better looking over time. Even when Jack Kirby drew him—the second time around or the third time around, he got better looking. “I remember sending Stan a suggestion: ‘I have

a storyline [idea] where Mary Jane gets a job to appear in a movie that is taking place in the desert somewhere in Nevada and Peter, to keep tabs on her, uses a spidertracer and puts it someplace where she won’t find it. They’re shooting a scene and the desert floor collapses and she ends up in the lair of the Mole Man. Consequently, Peter—being able to find out about it—wants to employ the Fantastic Four.’ I never got to draw a Fantastic Four [comic]. So, I thought, ‘Maybe it will happen.’ They liked the suggestion but changed things around and it wasn’t like Mary Jane was ending up at a photo shoot. She was on stage in New York and the Mole Man came by because he somehow caught wind of Mary Jane and was enamored by her. He got backstage and she told him she was married. Aunt May shows up in the room and the Mole Man changes his amorous direction and falls in love with Aunt May. It basically became Mary Jane and Aunt May ending up in the subterranean world of the Mole Man, with the Mole Man wanting to court Aunt May to marry him. Spider-Man ended up going to the Baxter Building but couldn’t get the FF to go with him because supposedly Reed, Sue, and Johnny were on vacation. The only one left at the Baxter Building was the Thing. So, when Spidey reached out, the Thing said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go with you.’ So I got to draw the Fantasti-Car, and they went to the Mole Man’s island because that’s where it happened, and I got to draw one of the creatures that appeared in FF #1, which was very cool. Of course, they vanquished that and ended up in the subterranean depths, and I got to draw the Mole Man and all those yellow underlings of his. It was a blast. That was probably my favorite of all.” The newspaper strip also afforded Roy Thomas an opportunity to experiment with some of the primary characters, namely Mary Jane. “One of the main things I did for a couple years—and Stan was not wild about it, but he finally had to let me go with it—was that I couldn’t stand the idea that MJ, who had been this model and a go-go girl, was just working as the manager of a computer store,” Thomas relates. “I thought, this is really kind of dull for her. It’s not what I feel MJ should be doing. So I had her being discovered and next thing you know, she becomes a movie star. She became a secret-identity [movie] superheroine called Marvella. And the movie didn’t do that well. The movie went direct-to-video, but then it became a cult hit and all

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of a sudden, they were going to do Marvella 2. Then I gave her this Broadway show she was starring in, but it would get shut down because of some something or another and then they’d have a chance to go on a little trip together. But the interesting thing is that, although she obviously was making a lot of money then, they kept staying in that same apartment. I had her talk once or twice about getting a nice place out on Long Island or somewhere but, of course… I don’t know if I ever dealt with this much but the idea would be, Peter would think, ‘Jesus, if I’m gonna be Spider-Man, I’m gonna have to commute into town to do that!’”

OUTSIDE INFLUENCES

A Whole New ’Do Witness the Chameleon and Mary Jane’s new hairstyle, on the Saviuk/Sinnott original art page from Sunday, January 13, 2002, shown with its color guide. Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel.

There was no real effort made to maintain continuity between the newspaper strip and the comic books, with the aforementioned exceptions. In fact, in the first issue of the comic book Spider-Verse, part of a Spider-Man multiverse event that began in 2014, it was explained that the newspaper strip existed in its own universe, designated Earth-77013. (January 3, 1977 was the date of the first Spider-Man newspaper strip.) In the story, the villain Morlun comes to the comic-strip reality only to be frustrated by the length of time it takes to do anything, commenting, “In this world it takes days to perform the simplest actions. Weeks even!” The Master Weaver decides to “take this pure, innocent world and place it aside in its own pocket reality, forever safe from the dangers of the Spider-Verse.” However, there were times when outside influences did affect the strip, namely the movies, as Thomas explains. “After the first movie became a hit, all of a sudden, Stan wanted Spider-Man’s webbing powers to be natural rather than come from web-shooters. So I had to adjust to that, and then we sort of edged

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it back after a while. We tried to be kind of vague about it, so we didn’t really talk about whether it came naturally or from web-shooters. And the other thing is, somewhere along the line, after several years, and because [Peter] wasn’t married to Mary Jane in the movies—he was just dating her—I talked Stan into this [idea] that we should go back in time and start a thing with [Peter] and Mary Jane as if they’re just dating because that’s the way that people are going to see it. Millions of people are seeing these two or three movies now and they’re not going to understand that he’s an old married man. So Stan said, ‘Okay,’ and I forget exactly how we went back in time. I think it was just with a caption or something and suddenly we started this thing. We just went that way and then, somewhere about the middle or so of that adventure, Stan changed his mind and went, ‘Nah, I wanna go back to where they were married. I don’t wanna be trying to go back and recapture what was all going on before.’ So he goes to sleep and he thinks he’s waking up in Aunt May’s apartment, but MJ is there because they’re married. That only lasted one adventure.” Spider-Man fans will recognize the similarity to the comic-book storyline “One More Day,” but Thomas indicates the two stories were unrelated. “If [Stan] knew anything about [the comics], he certainly didn’t mention it to me, and I may have heard of them, but I didn’t pay any attention. They were zero influence. If Stan had said it, I might have thought it was influenced by that, but it was my idea, and I know I wasn’t involved in [‘One More Day’]. Nobody from the comics ever approached me or made any suggestions or did I ever think, ‘Oh, I should make this coordinate with the comics.’ I was just doing it on my own because I thought it would make a better story. Any other apparent coordination is sheer coincidence.” Saviuk recalls the storyline as well. “I remember Stan Lee mentioning to me that they were going to try and do this new storyline where Peter and Mary Jane were still younger and they were just dating, or good friends. We ended up doing that particular storyline and the Lizard was the villain. The Lizard was another great character that I really enjoyed drawing. [The storyline] ended up being in the sewers, and I don’t want to say I love the sewers because I’ve never been in one, but they were so much fun to draw. We did that for one storyline, and then I got a call toward the end of it saying we were going back to them being married because our readers got into an uproar: ‘Why are Peter and Mary Jane not married anymore? Because we really enjoyed the fact that they were.’ So that ended up being a break from the Marvel Comics continuity. The newspaper strip was Peter married to Mary Jane.” Movies had an influence on at least one other storyline. As Thomas describes, “The most fun I ever had, and simply because it was kind of off-the-wall, was the adventure with Spider-Man and MJ traveling cross-country, and basically it involved Ronan the Accuser and a Sentry and Rocket Raccoon. Rocket crash-lands on Earth, coming to head off something Ronan is going to do to wake up a new Sentry, and Rocket hangs around with [Spider-Man] and there’s a lot of misunderstanding. Rocket thinks Spider-Man’s weird, and Spider-Man knows Rocket’s weird. They go stay at a motel and he passes Rocket off as a kid who won’t get out of his Halloween costume, and then Rocket goes wandering around and he discovers a raccoon rummaging through a trash can and says, ‘Hey, that’s what I’d like to do!’ And he zaps a coyote that’s scared off, so it goes away. I had a lot of fun writing dialogue with Rocket.”

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS

There were some unique characters created for the newspaper strip. “I didn’t make up new heroes,” Thomas says. “I did make up a few villains, like Clown-9. He was supposed to be a jester. And one of them was a girl who was a reporter, who was masquerading as ‘The Big Man,’ with some kind of exo-skeleton around her.” There was also an occasional homage to current events. As Thomas points out, “For the first year or two, I did have some notice when the 9-11 [anniversary] came up, and [Stan] always had the presidents in there. Since he’d started, he’d had both Bushes and Reagan and Clinton, in at least one strip. So I worked in Barack Obama, since I had heard soon after he was elected that Spider-Man and Conan were his two favorite comics characters growing up.” And occasionally, Saviuk would get to have some fun with drawing the supporting characters in the strip. He recalls, “I always enjoyed drawing the Thing’s head onto a leather jacket of the Yancy Street Gang when we’d draw a street scene and somebody would be approaching Peter—let’s say, one of the gang members. Peter’s in the background and this guy is in the foreground. I drew a Thing head on the jacket, with lettering like, ‘It’s clobbering time.’ This way, I got to see Joe Sinnott ink my Thing and make it look really cool! Joe would get a big kick out of that. Speaking of that, at one point Stan asked me on street scenes to incorporate a celebrity that might be native to New York (or not, it didn’t matter). The first one I did, as Spider-Man was swinging through a panel, there was a billboard for the Oprah Winfrey Show. I drew a likeness of Oprah. Stan said, ‘Celebrities love it when their faces are in the strip.’ I said, ‘Do we need to get permission for that? You don’t want to get sued by somebody.’ ‘No, they’re all okay with it.’ I remember doing Jerry Seinfeld, the actor who played Kramer, a guy from NYPD Blue, Jim Carrey, Madonna…” While he didn’t have trouble keeping up with the schedule, the mechanics of the creative process could be frustrating, as Saviuk explains. “The way Stan [and Roy] wrote the newspaper strip, he didn’t do what Lee Falk did on The Phantom. The Phantom on Sundays was a completely separate story from the dailies’ story because sometimes the newspapers only published Sundays and some only published dailies. If you were reading the SpiderMan newspaper strip, the Sunday followed what happened on Saturday, but there was always a gap. Let’s say I’m doing a Sunday where Spider-Man is getting ready to square off against Dr. Octopus, or maybe they’ve already engaged in some combat in the last panel. There would be a tagline at the bottom that would say, ‘Next week, the aftermath.’ The first panel of the following Sunday is Dr. Octopus being led away by the police. I’m thinking, ‘Wow. Larry Lieber got to have all the fun drawing the fight scene.’ I got to do the aftermath. Not that there wasn’t any combat or conflict engagement throughout the Sundays, but I missed out on a lot of fun stuff during the week from 1997 to 2003. I would just get two complete weeks sent to me, so I could read what happened in the dailies. This way, if there was anything I needed to know, maybe groundwork was laid in a particular daily, I would make that particular artwork evident on Sundays. “Then in 2003, I started inking [the dailies] on a regular basis, and now I could see what was going on artistically because I didn’t get the strips in any paper down here in Florida. I didn’t get the proof sheets for the dailies, just the Sundays. Once I started inking them, I saw the proof sheets to see how everything turned out. Once I got to ink the dailies, the lettering was already being done on the board. Once the panel borders were inked and the lettering was done, it seemed like the strip was half done, and now all I have to do is go ink the insides. I had a lot of fun. I had a good time working on Larry’s pencils.”

Proof Positive The Punisher guest-stars in the sequence shown on a proof sheet of weeklies from early June 2004. TM & © Marvel.

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Rock-’Em/Sock-’Em JJJ An Iron Man robot’s hot on the Web-Spinner’s tail in this Saviuk-drawn Spider-Man daily from January 14, 2014. Courtesy of Dewey Cassell. TM & © Marvel.

WARTS (OR ZITS) AND ALL…

The long tenure on the strip that both Thomas and Saviuk enjoyed provided some stability and continuity of work, but that didn’t necessarily translate into greater financial rewards. “I believe that probably the way it worked was that King Features was paying Stan to produce the strip and then Stan hired the penciler, inker, letterer, and colorist,” Saviuk shares. “So Stan got whatever money up-front to produce the strip and then he just paid us accordingly. I know that when Sy Barry got to do The Phantom at King Features, he was there with his attorney and worked out some kind of a deal. Even though he didn’t create the Phantom, he was probably going to see some sort of back-end payment depending upon how many newspapers it was in. “We never got that,” Saviuk states. “We were basically work-for-hire. I remember, maybe three years in, I got in touch with Stan’s office to find out if we would ever be able to get a raise. Because comic books were starting to decline in sales, they just said, ‘Well, your salary hasn’t gone down like some of the companies that have let freelancers know that because sales were dropping, salaries would have to take a hit.’ “Throughout the entire tenure on the strip, I got paid the same amount,” Saviuk continues. “Of course, when I was penciling and inking the dailies and penciling the Sundays, I made a handsome living just doing those things and turning everything else down.” Thomas had a similar experience, noting, “I never got a raise during that 19 years. I never asked him for a raise and he never volunteered one. But that was okay! If I’d really felt like it wasn’t profitable to me, I’d have insisted on a raise or I’d have left. But it got a little easier to do as time went on, and if I didn’t spend less time on it, I got less and less anxious about it. After a few years I just felt, ‘Well, I’ll write it and if they like it, they like it. And if they don’t like it, they can kick me off, and I’ll survive anyway.’ But for the most part, he liked it. Once in a while, he’d say something nice about it. Sometimes he’d say it was too many words or some little something. But by and large, he was pretty happy with it and let me go my way 90% of the time.” There was one story idea that Thomas never got to do. “I kept trying to talk Stan—off and on, anyway—into seeing if King Features would let us bring in the Phantom or Mandrake or some other King Features character. I knew I was killing myself as it would just end up being a coordination nightmare, and I’d probably end up hating myself because it would be more trouble than it’s worth, but I just

thought of the Phantom or Mandrake meeting Spider-Man and the only comment that I ever got out of Stan, who wasn’t that interested in it, was, ‘Ah, you know, if I were gonna have it cross over with another King Features strip, I’d rather make it Zits.’ That would be kind of fun, too. I don’t know how he could’ve done it. That’s a favorite strip of mine, too, one of a very small number of strips I make sure I read online almost every day. I don’t know how he’d ever manage that, but I would’ve tried it if he’d ever done anything, but I didn’t push that and it never went any further.”

FAN REACTIONS

Like everything in the public eye, the syndicated The Amazing Spider-Man had its fans and its detractors. Some readers commented that Spider-Man seemed less assertive in the strip than in the comics, holding back instead of jumping into the action. According to Thomas, it was not intentional. “I’d give the other characters a chance to shine a little bit, but I wasn’t really holding back with Spider-Man,” Thomas says. “I just figured that people who read the strip knew what Spider-Man could do. It may be a valid criticism. I never thought of doing it. I certainly never did that on purpose. The only thing that I would do is make sure I had enough going on with the new character. But I knew that Spider-Man was still the main thing selling the strip. People weren’t tuning in to the strip to see Daredevil or Luke Cage or even Wolverine. If they were interested, mostly Spider-Man was 90% of it, so I would never have ignored Spider-Man on purpose. I think it’s more I would find a chance to give plenty of action to the guest-star, and sometimes that might be a little more or a little less. And, of course, I had them working together quite a bit, too, or fighting each other or teaming up. I just played it by ear, and if it came out that there were a couple of panels more devoted to the other hero than to Spider-Man, it was just an accident.” Sometimes the things that readers objected to wasn’t a matter of choice. Saviuk provides an example: “There was a storyline we had done, I think about five years ago, where J. Jonah Jameson wanted to get revenge on Spider-Man. Well, he always wanted to get revenge! He went to Stark Industries and he got hold of the old, golden Iron Man armor from yesteryear. J.J.J. entered the armor and wanted to fight Spider-Man. I loved that armor when it was first created in issue #39 in Tales of Suspense. Don Heck drew that issue. But then, the next three or four were done by Jack Kirby, and he drew him in gold armor. Don, when he drew the Iron Man helmet, he actually put a little chin on it, which made sense. But I kind of liked it when Jack first drew it, it was just a big helmet that went straight down to the neckpiece. You couldn’t see a chin and it had a clunky look, which I found more appealing. I tried to draw it in the clunky Iron Man look with the helmet. [But] because it was J. Jonah Jameson inside the helmet, I had to draw basically these jagged lines to show his plotting, smirking face inside the helmet, and I wished I didn’t have to do that. “The other thing is, they colored it properly on the Sundays, but for

40 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

some reason or another, they got it wrong in the dailies,” Saviuk says. “They colored that entire armor in red. When I saw it, I got in touch with Reed Brennan and said, ‘Hey, you guys are coloring it all wrong. It’s supposed to be yellow and you’re turning it red.’ They said, ‘Oh, okay we’ll get on that right away.’ I believe they changed it. If I hadn’t seen it, it would have just stayed red, and I don’t know if anybody would have caught on. But then if you go onto the King Features website on a daily basis and you scroll down, there are all these comments from all these people, and I think to myself, ‘These people really need a life.’ They pick on every little thing. I think some people are haters and I think, ‘Hey, if you hate it so much, what the heck are you looking at it for?!’ For the most part, you have fans of your work that like your work, so, over the years, you just have to take those comments with a grain of salt.”

Fond Farewell It was Roy Thomas, not the credited Stan Lee, writing The Amazing Spider-Man in its final days. Here, courtesy of Roy Thomas himself, is the strip’s final continuity—with the final installment, dated Saturday, March 23, 2019—and Roy’s script for the last two dailies. At the bottom is the final daily, in color, with artist Saviuk and writer Thomas making a farewell cameo in the first panel. TM & © Marvel.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 41

It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over Since Amazing Spider-Man’s March 22, 2019 farewell, earlier Thomas/Saviukproduced material has been reposted online, like (top) this daily (from May 5, 2021) and (bottom) Sunday (from May 23, 2021). TM & © Marvel.

THE END OF THE LINE

All good things do eventually come to an end. The end, in the case of the Amazing Spider-Man strip, was somewhat abrupt. Saviuk explains, “[In] 2018, around June, Michael Kelly calls me up and says, ‘Larry Lieber wants to retire. He’s 87 and he wants to go ahead and finish his novel he’s been working on for years.’ So I got to do the penciling, as of July of 2018, I think. For about six months, I penciled and inked the dailies, and penciled the Sundays. I had a really great thing going, but as you know, unfortunately Stan Lee passed in November of 2018 and immediately that day, I got a call from his office and Michael Kelly said Marvel let him know that we should finish our storyline, but they don’t know what they want to do with the strip after that. We were hopeful. Around Christmas, I got a call from Michael that he hadn’t heard anything, and we should just keep going. I remained optimistic. I would assume that Michael was doing the editing to a certain extent, if not all of it, after Stan passed. It was pretty much Roy, Michael, myself, and Joe Sinnott. We just kept doing what we did until the storyline ended on March 23, 2019, and then that was it. In the meantime, King Features had published a letter saying, ‘Right now, the strip is going into a creative hiatus, but they are working on getting new stories that will be more exciting than ever somewhere down the line.’ We didn’t know if we were going to continue or if they were going to try to get some other creative team to come in. We were hoping for the best. The next storyline was going to have a villain called the Kangaroo that Spider-Man had fought a long time ago. Peter and Mary Jane were going on vacation to Australia and end up meeting with that villain. But the storyline ended with them on a plane and [I drew] Roy and I there [in the last daily] to help send them off.” Saviuk sheds some additional light on the decision to end the strip. “I don’t know if there was a contract between Marvel and Stan, or a contract with Marvel/Stan/King Features. I don’t know the legalities, but the decision to end the strip was all Marvel’s. In 2019, the last time I did New York Comic-Con, one of the editors at King Features came by my table and said, ‘Listen, I just want you to know that it’s still not completely over. There’s some sort of legalities they are going through before they make the decision to continue the strip.’ I said, ‘Well, thanks for letting me know; I’m not losing sleep over it, but it

would be great. Roy and I would be ready to continue on the strip if it should come to pass.’ But I haven’t heard anything from anybody, and I haven’t tried to get in touch with King Features to find out.” If your local newspaper didn’t carry the Spider-Man strip, you could have picked up a copy of Comic Shop News, which included a week of dailies in color in each issue. The early strips have been reprinted in several formats, most recently, as of this writing, The Amazing Spider-Man: The Ultimate Newspaper Comics Collection, published by the Library of American Comics, an imprint of IDW Publishing. Five volumes have been printed to date, with two years of strips in each volume, bringing them up through 1986. But March 23, 2019 wasn’t really the end of the Amazing Spider-Man strip, as Saviuk explains. “In the meantime, though, ever since that hiatus was announced, [the syndicate] never skipped a beat. They started [reposting] material that Roy and I had done together since I guess, April 1, 2019, and they’ve been running those particular storylines ever since. What kind of irks me is that we’ve been doing this since 1997 and there were some really great storylines with the Hulk and Wolverine and Daredevil, Dr. Octopus, and the Kingpin. And they’ve been [using] the ones from the last five or six years. I don’t understand why. I questioned it once and they said, “We’re just going back in the archives for that particular time slot and moving forward.” Once they catch up to where the strip ends, I don’t know if they’re going to continue it. [But] it’s nice to know that online, if you click on ComicsKingdom.com, you can look at Amazing Spider-Man and still see my work and Roy’s work—not that Roy ever got credited—Larry’s and Joe’s.” You can’t keep your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man down. Sincere thanks to Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk for their recollections, as well as Heritage Auctions for the artwork used in the article. DEWEY CASSELL is the Eisner Award–nominated author/co-author of four books and over 45 magazine articles.

42 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

by D

ewey Cassell

The Howard the Duck newspaper strip debuted The 1970s were a period of radical change for the comicbook business. Cover prices increased and the direct on Monday, June 6, 1977. It included dailies and market system was started, changing how comics were Sundays with the storyline running throughout. The distributed. And less-conventional ideas abounded, Sunday strip was drawn in two tiers, with several from stories focused on drug abuse and the plight of panels retelling Howard’s origin and background available as a third tier to papers that ran the strip minorities to unusual new characters like a martial in half-page or tabloid format. artist with a fist of iron, a bikini-clad barbarian, On average, storylines ran eight to and… a talking duck. ten weeks. The first storyline in the strip Tucked into the pages of Adventure featured “Pop” Syke, who promoted the into Fear #19 (Dec. 1973) was Howard “consciousness of success” in his book the Duck, created by writer Steve Think Yourself Human. When Beverly Gerber and artist Val Mayerik. By the decides to attend a personal appearance time Howard the Duck #1 (inset) debuted of the self-help guru, Howard tags along. two years later, drawn by Frank Brunner, “Pop” hands out something resembling Howard was a hit. Gene Colan took a colander with wires and lights on it over as artist with issue #4. Colan was to attendees, and when they don the best known for drawing Tomb of Dracula “psycho-prosthetic” devices, they beand Daredevil, but he took to the new come mindless drones he commands to book like a duck to water, so to speak. steve gerber “Git me money!” Howard’s skepticism Howard was a cynical, wisecracking ends up saving the day. In style and fowl from another dimension that content, it was very consistent with the fell to Earth and landed in Cleveland. John Tighe. Wearing a suit coat, tie and hat, and chomping on a Howard the Duck comic books, full of irony and biting wit. At the beginning of the second storyline, Howard cigar, Howard was befriended by a beautiful redhead named Beverly, and lived among what he called the runs into the Kidney Lady, a Gerber/Brunner–created “hairless apes,” encountering all sorts of oddities from character that first appeared in Howard the Duck #2. a Man-Frog to Dr. Bong. Gerber used the comic book But the main protagonists were the “Cult of Entropy,” as a vehicle for social commentary through parody a group bent on the destruction of the human race to spare us the suffering that is to come when we use up and satire. As soon as the Register and Tribune Syndicate all of our natural resources. In the third storyline, Howard tries to find a job realized that The Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip was a success, they began talking with Marvel about through the Puritan Employment Agency, only to end up other characters that could be adapted for newsprint. working for Fred Feenix, the self-made man… literally. Given his rise in popularity, Howard the Duck was a Think the Six Million Dollar Man gone loony, logical choice, using the same creative team as the convinced we would all be better off if we underwent comics. Gerber negotiated a deal that split the royalties the same procedure. This storyline is noteworthy because in the middle of it, Gene Colan left the strip. evenly between Marvel, Gerber, and Colan.

Waugh’s Up, Doc? The first Howard the Duck newspaper strip, by Steve Gerber and Gene Colan, originally published June 6, 1977. Courtesy of Dewey Cassell. TM & © Marvel.

TM & © Marvel.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 43

‘STEVE GERBER DROVE US CRAZY!’

Colan’s replacement was none other than Val Mayerik. Mayerik explains the circumstances: “It was pretty much a default situation. I had just moved to New York City and was looking for work. [Marvel editor-in-chief] Archie Goodwin called me from Marvel and said Gene Colan had quit the strip, and would I step in? He said, ‘Keep in mind, you’re going to have a lot of catching up to do because Gene was late, but it was no fault of Gene’s.’ Gene was the consummate professional his entire career. And I’m not telling tales out of school because everyone knows this, but Steve [Gerber] was pathologically late. He was so far behind in getting scripts to Gene that Gene got fed up. He said, ‘I can’t take it. I’m too old for this. Take me off it.’ I was the first choice [to replace him], I assume because the character was half-mine… and I think at that time Frank Brunner was no longer interested in doing [Howard]. So Archie contacted me, and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it,’ not realizing how much difficulty I was stepping into. “It was so bad,” Mayerik elaborates. “First of all, Steve had just up and disappeared. That was another thing that Steve was wont to do is that when he was late and he knew that editors were going to be dogging him, he would just disappear. He wouldn’t respond. I’m not even sure where he was living at the time. I think Las Vegas. He was no longer in New York, I know that. So there was the character of Howard and the character of Bev, of course. But other than that, there were all these other characters. There was a whole different storyline taking place in the daily strip than was taking place in the [comic] books. All I got were panel-by-panel breakdowns for each daily strip. “So I would call Marvel and tell Archie, ‘I don’t know what Steve’s talking about here. I don’t know who this character is.’ And

Archie would say, ‘Unfortunately, I don’t know either. Call Gene.” So I called Gene. And Gene, I think, spoke with me once, filled me in. A few days later I got some other scripts. Again, I didn’t know who some of the characters were, I didn’t know where it was taking place, all the things you need to know—who, what, where, when—when you’re doing any kind of a story. And I was calling Gene again, and Gene was super, but at some point, he just did not want to deal with me. He was off the strip. He took a vacation, and I was talking with his wife. His wife, at one point, just got completely upset with me and said, ‘Leave my husband alone! Steve Gerber drove us crazy.’ That was the end of that.” Mayerik eventually reconnected with Gerber. “I think Steve finally did send a fax. That was the newest technological breakthrough at that point. I think he did send a fax to Archie, and Archie forwarded it on to me. All I can remember is that I just had to keep churning away. I was killing myself, and I wasn’t making that much money.” It is to Mayerik’s credit that the rocky transition was not apparent in the comic-strip storyline, save for the differences in artistic style. And it could be argued that Mayerik’s cleaner, more distinctive line made the strip easier to read. “I had to pencil and ink the strip and get them into Marvel as quickly as possible,” Mayerik describes of his approach. “I had to do an average of four dailies a day and get them into Marvel and they would send them off to the syndicate. I don’t know if the syndicate had its own people do the lettering or if the lettering was done at Marvel. Some of the lettering was on acetate overlays, and some of it was paste-up lettering they cut out and pasted right on the panel. I know that I really liked Gene’s interpretation, his drawing of Bev. So I was doing a lot of swiping from Gene’s previous strips for closeups of Bev. He did a nice job with her face.”

Illustrators Three Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com), original art to three HTD dailies, spotlighting the strip’s three artists: (top) Gene Colan, (center) Val Mayerik, and (bottom) Alan Kupperberg. TM & © Marvel.

44 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

RUFFLED FEATHERS

But all of Mayerik’s efforts were not enough. Less than six months later, Denny Allen, president of the Register and Tribune Syndicate, took action. “There were many cancellations [of the strip] for one very good reason: late delivery,” Allen recalled in the Village Voice (Sept. 4, 1978). “I normally get a strip in ten weeks before publication. Gerber’s [script] came in on Thursday before the Monday it was supposed to hit the stands. We could barely get it to the papers in time. I ultimately had to tell Steve there wouldn’t be any Howard unless I got a new team to create him.” Late delivery wasn’t the only problem, though. Sometimes things don’t translate well from one medium to another. As Allen explained, “The editors I was dealing with at each publication didn’t like the writing, either. I thought [Howard] could become a modern Pogo, but they said the public found him too difficult to understand, and the message didn’t come across.” Marvel terminated Gerber’s contract to write the strip. The last story Mayerik drew was based on Gerber’s script from issue #4 of the Howard the Duck comic book. As Mayerik notes, “A few years later, [Gerber] sued Marvel to retain the rights, for himself alone. He didn’t win that suit, but it did set a couple of precedents.” The new creative team on the strip was writer Marv Wolfman and artist Alan Kupperberg. Wolfman didn’t exactly val mayerik volunteer for the assignment, as he recounts. “I was under contract to Marvel, and Jim Shooter, the editor-in-chief, told me I had to write the strip as part of it.” They were also told to change the tenor of the strip, which was a disappointment to Wolfman. “I have to admit I never got to do what I wanted. They wanted single gags and that’s not something I can do; it’s out of my wheelhouse. I’m a story guy, not a gag guy. That takes a very different talent. I think I was given it because I was very fast and could get the strip on schedule, not because I was the best choice. I’m not sure who wouldn’t have been. I don’t think anyone but Steve had any idea what to do with it.” Beginning June 4, 1978, the Sunday strip was no longer part of the daily continuity. The Sunday strips became single-page gags for several months, followed by a Sunday-only storyline titled “The Mystery of the Maltese Human.” The final Howard the Duck strip was published October 29, 1978. Denny Allen said in the Village Voice, “Initially, I got Howard the Duck into close to 100 papers.” Other accounts suggest that number was closer to 70 or 75. However, Howard was reprinted in several publications, from The Menomonee Falls Gazette to The Comics Reader. Even the Marvel in-house fanzine, FOOM, included reprints of several dailies in issue #17. While the reprints were helpful to fans of Howard whose local newspapers didn’t carry the strip, they didn’t broaden the readership of the strip. Ironically, one of the newspapers that dropped the strip was the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In protest, local television station WJKW began broadcasting readings of the strip on a nightly basis.

Bosom Buddies (top) The Kidney Lady jumps from Marvel’s comic books to the Howard the Duck newspaper strip in this panel from a Sunday entry published on July 31, 1977. Courtesy of Dewey Cassell. (bottom) Howard and gal pal Beverly in a color commission sketch by Val Mayerik. From the collection of Steve Lipsky. Howard the Duck TM & © Marvel. Art © Val Mayerik.

There is something humorous about the fact that Howard the Duck, which often poked fun at “cults” of various kinds, itself created a cult following. Diehard fans of Howard sent in their $1.25 for a “Howard the Duck for President” campaign button, attended the Howard the Duck convention organized by the Delaware Valley Comicart Consortium in November 1977, and suffered through the terrible 1986 Howard the Duck live-action film only to be rewarded years later when Howard made a cameo appearance in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. Subsequent appearances in Avengers films and the Disney Plus show What If? have only further solidified the Duck’s celebrity status. The newspaper was really the only place where success proved elusive. As Howard himself would say, “Waaaagh!” Sincere thanks to Val Mayerik and Marv Wolfman for their insight and Heritage Auctions for the artwork used in the article. Mayerik is available for commissions at valmayerik.com. DEWEY CASSELL still has his copy of Howard the Duck #1 he purchased at the local newsstand.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 45

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by J o

hn Wells

‘A New Supercomic’ This colorful ad appearing in the March 26, 1978 New York Daily News trumpeted the upcoming World’s Greatest Superheroes comic strip, starring DC’s bravest and boldest champions. Unless otherwise noted, scans accompanying this article are courtesy of John Wells. TM & © DC Comics.

Imagine that you were a DC Comics fan on March 26, 1978, flipping through the New York Sunday News’ tabloid comics section. Somewhere between Dick Tracy and Peanuts, your mind was about to be blown. It was full-page advertisement for something called The World’s Greatest Superheroes (WGSH), and the characters bursting from the page represented much of the roster of the Justice League of America… with a couple surprises thrown in. It was one thing to see marquee names like Superman, Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman, but quite another to encounter the likes of Black Lightning, Green Arrow, and the Elongated Man in a major US newspaper. This was no simplified Super Friends cartoon, the lineup seemed to imply, but rather a legitimate comic-book adaptation. The question was whether it would succeed. Superman—ironically, a failed pitch for a comic strip— had been spun off to newspapers in 1939 after his comic-book appearances exploded. DC had followed suit with further newspaper features starring Hop Harrigan (1942), Batman and Robin (1943–1946), and Wonder Woman (1944–1945), but none had the Man of Steel’s staying power. The Superman strip itself was cancelled in 1966 even as the TV-inspired wave of Batmania resulted in a return of Batman to comics sections from 1966 into 1972. Outside of Lee Falk’s enduring Phantom, conventional wisdom said that superheroes and the funny pages were no longer a good fit. The January 1977 premiere of Stan Lee and John Romita’s Amazing Spider-Man threw convention on its ear. The comic-book spinoff caught on very quickly, with newspaper berths in most of the markets in the United States. That fact was lost on no one, certainly not in New York offices of Marvel Comics’ biggest rival. It was suddenly imperative that DC develop a newspaper strip of its own. By way of DC managing editor Joe Orlando, the publisher already had a connection to the major Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate (CTNYNS). Orlando had co-written (with Michael Fleisher) CTNYNS’ Little Orphan Annie in the latter half of 1973, and the syndicate subsequently struck a deal to repackage some of its strips as DC tabloid-sized editions (only one of which—Dick Tracy—was published). Consequently, syndicate head Bob Reed and editor Don Michel were in talks with DC personnel by mid-1977. The non-negotiables, Reed and Michel emphasized, were Superman and Wonder Woman. The former was poised for theatrical stardom in 1978, while the latter— as personified by Lynda Carter—had become a household name thanks to her ABC-TV show. For its part, DC wanted to showcase other, lesser-known characters and use the wider audience of a newspaper strip as a gateway back to comic books. “You better believe we’re going to keep those two in the strip every day,” DC publicity agent Mike Gold declared in Mediascene #26 (July–Aug. 1977), “but we’ll use the platform to allow us to showcase our other heroes as well.” Reed and Michel quickly shot down DC’s proposed Justice League of America title as something that failed to describe the strip to the masses unfamiliar with the comic book. Everyone ultimately settled on the World’s Greatest Superheroes, a phrase first used on the cover of DC 100-Page Super Spectacular #DC-6 in 1971. As a compromise, the team would still be properly referred to as the JLA in the stories themselves.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 47

TUSKA TAPPED BY DC

The next trick was finding a creative team to bring the fictional one to life. Drawing a newspaper strip required an artist accustomed to its unique compositional demands, so DC art director Vince Colletta reached out to someone with experience. Industry veteran George Tuska had spent years drawing the Scorchy Smith and Buck Rogers newspaper features before returning to comic books in 1967. He’d been exclusively working for Marvel for several years when the call came. Tantalized by the comic-strip pitch and the pay rate that Colletta was offering, Tuska approached Marvel’s Stan Lee. “Stan was friendly,” the artist recalled to Dewey Cassell in The Art of George Tuska (2005), “but said, ‘Don’t. Give it up.’ But somehow, I felt there was something there, so I accepted it. And I told Stan I was going to give it a try.” Colletta himself came aboard the project as Tuska’s inker. For the duration of their time on the strip, the artists worked 12 weeks ahead of publication date. Meanwhile, Justice League of America editor Julius Schwartz was assigned to its comic-strip counterpart. Impressed by the thoughtful, fresh approach that Martin Pasko had brought to Superman during 1977, Schwartz hoped to extend that bit of sensibility to the new projects on his plate for ’78, both the DC Comics Presents comic book and WGSH. “I’d never done a syndicated strip before when I landed the assignment,” Pasko told me in an April 3, 2018 Facebook post, “so I wanted to learn from the best. One of my mentors was Joe Orlando, who got me into the National Cartoonists’ Society. When I told [legendary Terry and the Pirates/Steve Canyon creator] Milton Caniff what we were trying to do, packing all these characters into a single strip, he just looked at me as if we were all out of our minds. And he was right, of course. We were.” Nonetheless, Pasko told John Siuntres in a September 2007 podcast (wordballoonblogspot.com), he threw himself into learning about the form. “Rick Marschall, who was an expert on syndicated strips, recommended a whole bunch of

It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… (top) The first installment of WGSH, which premiered April 3, 1978. By Martin Pasko, George Tuska, and Vince Colletta. (bottom) Steve Canyon creator Milton Caniff, who produced this unpublished Clark Kent/Steve Canyon illustration for 1986’s Superman #400 Portfolio, was incredulous over WGSH’s use of so many DC characters in a single comic strip. According to Heritage Comics Auctions, this print “features a demolished telephone booth and relates to the AT&T breakup of the 1980s. Unfortunately, due to objections from AT&T, the piece couldn’t be included in the final product. Most of the prints were destroyed, but Julius Schwartz managed to save a few.” John Wells provided this scan of this rarity from the fanzine Caniffites. Superman TM & © DC Comics. Steve Canyon © Field Enterprises, Inc.

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things to Mike Gold, who passed it on to me. I was steeping myself in the pacing because there’s a real art to that stuff. “You had to tell the story from Monday to Friday. You couldn’t advance the story too much on Saturday because [some] papers didn’t publish a Saturday edition. And you had to continue the story on Sunday in color, advance the story enough so there was something worthwhile to look at in color but not so much so that readers of newspapers that didn’t publish Sunday editions wouldn’t know what was going on the following Monday.”

Perhaps the greatest complication was in the Sunday strips, which were required to have panels that could be dropped by newspapers that wanted more space for ads or other strips. A complete half-page WGSH strip consisted of three rows of panels. The top row consisted of a long panel with the logo and a short second panel, both of which could be excised by papers who wished to run it as a third of a page. Other newspapers might want to restack the panels into four rows (tabloid) or two-rows (quarter-page), in which case only panel two of the original format was dropped.

george tuska © Marvel.

martin pasko

Comic Missile Crisis (top) An unused Sunday WGSH from April 1978, featuring Tuska pencil art. Courtesy of Dewey Cassell, author of the TwoMorrows book, The Art of George Tuska. (bottom) The April 9, 1978 installment, WGSH’s first Sunday color strip, offers a Justice League primer for the benefit of the general audience. TM & © DC Comics.

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Occupational Hazards The public at large may have been confused that Clark (Superman) Kent’s and Diana (Wonder Woman) Prince’s vocations were different from what they knew from those heroes’ television incarnations. WGSH strips from April 25 and 26, 1978. TM & © DC Comics.

“You couldn’t use [the drop panels] as filler,” Pasko often very complex and frustrating to artists. Indeed, elaborated to Siuntres. “You had to have something in it wouldn’t be long before iconic Superman artist Curt there that was the illusion of moving the story forward. Swan would grow tired of trying to interpret Marty’s It was a huge, time-consuming thing because you scripts and force DC to select one or the other to were writing this jigsaw puzzle. And on top of this, they continue on the book. In addition, Marty would speak wanted to put in six leading characters!” The fact that often of how much he had learned about comic strips the opening stories actually featured four primary from collections loaned to him by his colleagues after being selected for the assignment. Was that the right heroes apiece was likely little consolation for Pasko. time to be learning your craft? “When I joined the DC Comics staff as “And how many characters were in proofreader in October of 1977,” veteran this thing, anyway? I do not recall DC writer-editor Mike W. Barr recalls for magnifying glasses being offered to BACK ISSUE, “they were gearing up for the strip’s readers. production of The World’s Greatest Su“But I knew better than to question perheroes. I was in a great position to management’s decisions from my be a ‘fly on the wall’ to the strip’s orichair at the bottom of the pile. I just gins, many facets of which I found to watched as Marty, George, Joe, and be a little baffling. Julie put the strip together and often “For example, veteran comics artist took finished strips, inked by Vince George Tuska was selected as the artist. Colletta and lettered by Gaspar This struck me as odd, since it was Saladino, and marked them with well-known that DC artist Jim Aparo blue pencil to be restructured into had long wanted to draw a syndicated mike w. barr other strips. It seemed to me an comic strip—the rumor was that he awfully inefficient way to produce a signed only one-year contracts with DC in case a strip was offered him—and, frankly, Jim comic strip, but I rarely vouchsafed an opinion—and was a better artist than George, and wouldn’t you want was even less often asked for one.” one of the firm’s best artists to render the comic strip that would be seen daily by more eyes than saw the THE ROLL CALL’S ROLLOUT total readership of the comic books, total? Strips were written, drawn, and—in some cases— “Too, Martin Pasko was to be the writer, and his abandoned before publication to ensure a streamlined scripts were invariably copy-heavy. Not that that’s not a introduction to the cast: Superman, the Flash, Wonder valid way to go, as any devotee of the classic EC comics Woman, and Aquaman in the inaugural arc. CTNYNS’s will tell you, but in the ever-shrinking comic strip, the salesmen had done their job well and The World’s words compete with the art even more jealously than Greatest Superheroes premiered on April 3, 1978, with they do in comic books, and you can’t just shift a a strong presence in big-name papers throughout the large panel to the next page. Plus, Marty’s scripts were United States, including the syndicate’s own Chicago

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Tribune and New York Daily News. Starting on April 16, the Baltimore Sun even transformed the front page of its Sunday comics section into a DC/Marvel double feature with a halfpage Amazing Spider-Man above the fold and a half-page WGSH below. As far as Julius Schwartz was concerned, these were exactly the same characters he was editing in the comic books. If readers were confused by details like Clark Kent as a TV newsman or Diana Prince as a United Nations troubleshooter, they’d catch on as things moved along. The opening villains were also characters familiar to comic-book fans but virtual unknowns to the general public. Vandal Savage, a 1940s villain who was revived in 1960s–1970s issues of Schwartz’s The Flash fought the JLA for the first time in the newspaper strip as he tried

to renew his waning immortality. The Savage sequence segued neatly into the strip’s second story as the Flash suffered a critical brain injury and was rushed to a Gotham City hospital. Batman and Robin were soon on the scene, joining Superman and Wonder Woman in a fight with the dream-themed Dr. Destiny (sporting a skeletal new look he’d acquired only months earlier in the JLA comic book). Along the way, Pasko strove to include a bit of character conflict. The Savage opener found Aquaman chafing over his teammates’ apparent perception of him as a weak link on the team. Wonder Woman had similar complaints over Superman and Batman’s dismissive treatment of her in the Dr. Destiny tale, so much so that she nearly quit the team. Teasing the larger team behind the headliners, the second arc also included cameos

Dueling Layouts Depending upon the format of the host newspaper’s Sunday color comics section, WGSH’s Sunday strips might be printed in four different panel/tier configurations. In this installment from Sunday, August 13, 1978, JLA foe Dr. Destiny conspires against our heroes. Note that this also geographically places DC’s fictional cities on a real-world map. TM & © DC Comics.

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Faces Familiar and Fresh Readers of The World’s Greatest Superheroes were exposed to (top) characters they knew, such as Bruce (Batman) Wayne and his “chum,” Dick (Robin) Grayson, and (middle) newer DC heroes like Black Lightning. Original art to the July 14, 1978 and November 16, 1978 strips courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

by Green Lantern and Black Canary. Story #3 moved beyond the confines of JLA membership with the first meeting of Batman and relative newcomer Black Lightning. Adhering to comic-book continuity, the tale noted that Lightning had already met Superman and that Jimmy Olsen was privy to the secret identities of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. That third story—whose Pasko-created villain was the brain-swapping Dr. Giles Manning—was also a transitional one. After a seven-week absence, Superman literally flew back into action in the December 10, 1978 Sunday strip and rocketed by a theater marquee for Superman: The Movie. The Christopher Reeve film had been a smash and its impact would soon be felt in the comic strip. When Dr. Manning met his demise at the end of the arc on January 21, 1979, readers discovered that he’d been working for Lex Luthor. And yet this wasn’t quite the Luthor that comic-book readers were familiar with. He was still bald, of course, but his business suit was more reminiscent of Gene Hackman’s version of Lex in the movie. And like the film incarnation, he had a ditzy female associate—albeit Angela, rather than Valerie Perrine’s Miss Teschmacher—and an underground lair. Indeed, much of the story that continued into May had allusions to bits from the movie, from Clark Kent

resuming his Daily Planet job to a climactic nick-of-time rescue of Lois Lane. It was no coincidence. Julius Schwartz had handed off his responsibilities to Joe Orlando and WGSH’s new editor had big ideas. “The first thing he demanded of me,” Pasko told John Trumbull in BACK ISSUE #109 (Dec. 2018), “was that we ‘tie into’ the movie as best we could, without adapting it per se. So, there is absolutely no ambiguity on this point: all those similarities between that strip continuity and the film […] were conscious and deliberate. And I wrote them with a figurative loaded gun to my head and hated every minute of it.” Pasko said approvingly in the aforementioned 2007 interview with John Siuntres, “Joe also got the idea of [treating the Daily Planet] like a real newspaper. Instead of having a silly office, Perry White had a fishbowl. And there was a city room. Clark Kent didn’t have his own office. We tried to make the various roles of the various characters on the Daily Planet analogous to actual roles on a newspaper and tried to keep it as contemporary as possible. We got a lot of positive feedback from the various newspaper markets.”

NO JUSTICE

The biggest change on Orlando’s watch was the elimination of the Justice League, even as a revised Sunday logo box was introduced with a stock image of Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman. Indeed, an already-penciled Green Lantern sequence during the Luthor story was largely abandoned with GL redrawn as the more famous Wonder Woman in the few strips that saw print. (One of the WW dailies was also featured in a house ad for the strip that ran in January 1979 DC issues.) Batman made a cameo later in the story, but guest-stars had become the exception rather than the rule. Consequently, Pasko’s next—and, as it turned out, last—effort on the strip was a Superman solo story. Indicative of his work on the Man of Steel’s comic book, the writer dusted off a vintage bad guy and reframed him for a contemporary audience. In this case, it was the Prankster, a character who was still played for laughs as he manipulated to legal system to prevent Superman from effectively using his powers. Pasko also gave the villain a real name—Oswald Loomis—that soon found its way into the comic-book canon. Once the story was complete, the writer decided it was time to leave. The final strip to bear his name— Sunday, September 14, 1979—cemented the feature’s shift in focus. The image now featured Superman alone with his iconic logo… preceded in small letters by “The World’s Greatest Superheroes Present…” In later years, Pasko expressed utter disdain for his work on the strip. “The thing was a bear,” he told me in an April 3, 2018 Facebook post. “It never, ever turned out well, IMHO, and it utterly astonishes me that some people remember it fondly.” That’s not to say there wasn’t an upside, Pasko told John Siuntres in 2007. “I had a rare participation deal on [the strip]. I was making royalties on that long before they were paying royalties in comic books. That got

You’ll Believe a Man Can Fly Superman: The Movie gets a plug in this Sunday installment published on December 10, 1978. TM & © DC Comics.

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me out to California and subsidized my first year in L.A. writing spec scripts and breaking into television.” Profits on most newspaper strips, it’s significant to note, were based on the circulation of a given subscriber. The more readers it had, the more a paper paid for a given feature. The metropolitan newspapers that carried WGSH during its first year had, by Pasko’s account, made the strip a real moneymaker. By mid1979, however, subscribers were starting to drop it. “One strategy DC came up with [to slow the decline],” Mike W. Barr tells BI, “was to have a small cadre of employees—including me—call some big-name fans in a town where the strip was running and offer them some of George’s original strips if they’d call their local papers and talk up the strip. I personally remember such a conversation with Martin L. Greim, publisher of Comic Crusader and the creator of Thunder Bunny. Nowadays I am embarrassed by such blatant networking, but back then it was just part of the job. Maybe even George [Tuska] realized how absurd this was; he sometimes contributed strips that consisted of nothing but Photostats that were valueless as incentives. “Once in a while, I was selected to transport a week or two of original strips to the New York News building on East 42nd Street when a messenger couldn’t be found. This is the building that fittingly inspired the design of the Daily Planet building in the Superman franchise and was used for filming exterior scenes of the Planet in 1978’s Superman. “The strip continued to function after I left staff,” Barr says. “Paul Levitz became the regular writer when Marty left, one factor which caused longtime DC scripter Denny O’Neil, who had always wanted to script a comic strip, to become an editor at Marvel Comics as a protest, though I’ve no idea if he ever made his frustrations known.” “[WGSH] stopped being run in the New York Daily News the day I took over,” incoming writer Paul Levitz ruefully recalled to Dewey Cassell in BACK ISSUE #25 (Dec. 2007). “It felt like I was writing into a vacuum.” On Levitz’s watch, the strip abandoned all pretense of being part of comic-book continuity. The writer’s first story was a reconceived origin of Jimmy Olsen’s Elastic Lad persona, this time clad in a bright yellow costume rather than purple. Jimmy was also on hand as 1979 rolled into 1980 and Brainiac returned to shrink Metropolis. “My vague… very vague… recollection is inheriting Elastic Lad from THE ADVENTURES CONTINUE Marty,” Levitz tells BACK ISSUE today. The next story began on December “There were some strips he had 14, 1980, coinciding with a revised written which I was asked to rewrite.” Sunday logo box that now depicted Generally, the writer selected the Superman flying past the Fortress of established villains himself. “Joe wasn’t Solitude rather than the Metropolis into the deep lore of Superman (or skyline. The complex drop-panel paul levitz the other superheroes), so it’s unlikely formula was also revised so that the he suggested any of the elements upper-right corner frame no longer other than perhaps the broad strokes © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. had to be cut in the tabloid or of tying into the film.” quarter-page formats. As revealed in an unpublished The original team concept of the strip was revisited penciled version of that day’s strip (owned by Dewey fleetingly during 1980. In the midst of an adventure Cassell), the new plot would have taken a supernatural with the newly created Gimmick Gang, Wonder turn involving the Man of Steel with black magic. Woman popped up for a few weeks in late May. The Instead, Joe Orlando scrapped the story in favor of an follow-up story found Jimmy Olsen entangled with a exercise in cross-promotion. Weaponer from the anti-matter world of Qward and The objective of this latest serial was simple: Superman culminated in August with the Flash helping seal the II was coming to theaters, and no one reading the strip dimensional rift… and racing Superman just for kicks. should be allowed to forget it. The film premiered in An autumn arc about a prospective nuclear disaster Australia on December 4, 1980, and various countries was ultimately linked to Lex Luthor, with a Batman thereafter before finally opening in the United States in cameo at the end. June 1981. Hence, the longest story in the strip’s history

Your Demand is Our Command! DC Comics house ads from January and February 1979, pushing the World’s Greatest Superheroes comic strip by tying into the media blitz surrounding the recently released Superman: The Movie. TM & © DC Comics.

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(concluding on June 24, 1981) sent the grudging Clark and Lois to Hollywood and the set of a Superman movie. Overseeing the project was Gigi Cusa, an often-exasperating woman who was described as the film’s screenwriter, but seemed to wear a variety of hats as the story proceeded. Gigi was named after then-newlywed Paul Levitz’s wife Jeanette Cusimano, who was referred to by her childhood nickname Gigi in the DC Comics offices to avoid confusion with publisher Jenette Kahn. Levitz later created the more enduring namesake of Gigi Cusimano as a Legion of Super-Heroes supporting character in 1983. Levitz was also making strides in his professional life. Moving up the DC corporate ladder left little time for the newspaper strip. After having Paul Kupperberg ghostwrite a sequence with Gigi and Lois in the Fortress of Solitude (Jan. 12–Mar. 12, 1981), the writer tasked Gerry Conway with wrapping up the story, beginning with the April 6th daily. “I didn’t do full outlines for stories,” Levitz says, “and wouldn’t have had one to pass on to Gerry.” Levitz recalled in BACK ISSUE #25, “Although [the strip] had probably a wider readership than anything I’ve ever written, I had no feedback. There was no tendency for people to write letters, which was always something I valued very greatly as a comic-book writer. It wasn’t in print in New York where all my peers were, so nobody in the

What a Joker! / I Am Curious Yellow (top) Marty Pasko, no stranger to Superman’s rogues’ gallery from his experience writing Superman comic books, brought back the Man of Tomorrow’s old-school enemy, the Prankster. Original art to the June 17, 1979 Sunday strip, courtesy of Heritage. (bottom) Jimmy Olsen as Elastic Lad finally graduates out of comic books to the “big time”—only to have his traditional purple costume miscolored in the funny papers! By this point, writer Paul Levitz had taken over the strip from Marty Pasko. Originally published Sunday, November 25, 1979. TM & © DC Comics.

industry was reading it and giving me any feedback. It really was very hard to do on that basis, which was the primary reason I gave the strip up after two years. Even though it was by far the most lucrative assignment I’d had at that point in my career, I didn’t think it played to my strengths as a writer, particularly at that time in my career.” Picking up a story four months in progress, Conway wrapped things up with the revelation that Gigi was a dupe of Lex Luthor, who had intended the entire theatrical production as a distraction from his theft of a million-dollar sailboat. It was, honestly, a bit anticlimactic. Moving the action back to Metropolis, Conway brought in a familiar face from the comic books when sports reporter/practical joker Steve Lombard joined the Daily Planet. After 29 weeks on the feature, the writer made his departure. “It’s one of two strips I’ve written,” Conway tells BACK ISSUE. “The other was Star Trek, which I did primarily as a lark and as a fan both of Trek and the newspaper-strip format. I do recall enjoying writing Superman but don’t recall the stories— newspaper-strip stories of the time, as opposed to the classic strips from the ’30s–’60s, were constrained by their threepanel format. The older strips gave writers four panels to advance the story—which in practical terms is twice as much story, since the first panel basically recapitulates the previous day’s advance, and the last panel sets up some twist for the next day. That left creators one panel to move the story forward, which of course reduces any hope of anything more than a shallow story arc.” “Then it was my turn,” Mike W. Barr informs BI of his October 26, 1981–January 10, 1982 run. “In 1981, I had come back to DC as a staff editor, and for a short time, the strip had rotating writers. Already growing frustrated by the constraints of a middle-management job that had a lot of responsibility but little power, I began thinking about going freelance. And I thought a syndicated comic-strip credit would only burnish my credentials. “So I pitched a story to editor Joe Orlando I called ‘Stand-In for Superman,’ which he and CTNYNS accepted. It featured only Superman and Batman, with the Joker as villain. I kept the copy as sparse as I could, and the plot fairly simple. I think it’s held up and wish it had had a wider audience. Historically it seems to have been Batman’s last appearance in WGSH. “What’s not in the story is nearly as interesting as what is,” Barr reveals. “A Sunday strip devoted to Batman’s origin was vetoed,

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perhaps feeling a scene—even off-panel—of the senior Waynes’ deaths was too strong for a family newspaper. “Toward the end of the story, the bloom started to come off the rose. Editor Joe Orlando and I were having differences, as our styles of plotting were just too different. (Julie Schwartz had left the project years earlier to also avoid conflict with Joe who was, technically, his superior.) I wanted the story to be over, but Joe seemed to want to squeeze a few more weeks out of it—I think by having the Joker discover Superman’s device to transport him to the JLA satellite. He was talked out of this by some quick thinking by Len Wein, who knew Joe better than I. I no longer recall what Len said, but God bless him for whatever he did say. “And that was it. My last Sunday strip ‘tossed’ the story to incoming writer Paul Kupperberg, and I went back to comic books. It had been a thrill, when visiting a new city, to see my name on the strip in their local paper, and I was paid well for writing it, though my continuity has never been reprinted. As a comics writer I’m interested in more than just the characters and the plots, I’m interested in the basic form and structure of comics, and though comic strips and comic books share many fundamentals, they are in many ways also very different; it was fascinating to explore that. I also love the 1940 Batman syndicated comic strip; it was easy to see my effort as a continuation of that series. “And though I never was able to translate my experience on WGSH into another comic strip, I did come close, having nearly landed first the venerable Mary Worth strip then the Mark Trail strip some years back. But no points for coming close. Maybe in some other four-color life.”

IT’S ‘SUPERMAN’!

Paul Kupperberg slid into the writer’s chair effective with the January 11, 1982 strip and, unlike his predecessors, decided to stick around. For his opening act, he penned another team-up—Superman and Wonder Woman vs. original villainess Lady Steel—that proved to be the final crossover of the strip’s run. Abandoning even the cursory reference in the Sunday title box, the feature was officially retitled Superman as of August 15. By that point, no one from the original creative team remained. George Tuska was the first to go, effective with the May 8, 1982 daily. “I think George left around the time that the number of papers had declined,” Paul Levitz noted in BACK ISSUE #25. “So it wasn’t paying any better than comic-book work. We were following a version of the newspaper-strip methodology, where DC took a cut and the writer and artists benefited by the total sales of the strip. That was a tradition that went back, I think, to the old Superman strip with Siegel and Shuster.” Along with the decrease in pay, Tuska had also tired of the unrelenting 12-week deadline that came with a newspaper strip. “I would never go back to it again,” he declared in The

The Woman of Steel (top) Courtesy of Dewey Cassell, George Tuska pencil art originally produced for the Sunday, December 14, 1980 strip. Its black magic storyline was abandoned in favor of a long Superman saga to tie in to the release of the film Superman II. (middle) The name of Gigi Cusa, WGSH’s Superman movie screenwriter, was inspired by writer Paul Levitz’s then-recent marriage to Jeanette Cusimano, called “Gigi” when visiting DC Comics’ offices to avoid confusion with DC publisher Jenette Kahn. Daily strip from January 20, 1981. (bottom) New villains like Lady Steel were occasionally seen in WGSH. This Sunday, February 7, 1982 smackdown was written by the strip’s new scribe Paul Kupperberg and drawn by its original artists Tuska and Colletta. TM & © DC Comics.

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Art of George Tuska. “You’ve got to sit and work and work and work. If you had originated something, it’s your own, you can have somebody do it entirely for you and pay them a salary. Not like comic books. They give you a story and the deadline is quite a ways away. You can take your time.” DC mainstay José Delbo stepped in to replace Tuska even as Vince Colletta took his own leave of the strip following the September 18th daily. Embellishers Frank McLaughlin and Bob Smith stepped in briefly to keep the feature on deadline before Sal Trapani signed on the regular inker as of October 4th. Tuska himself made a surprise return for a week’s worth of dailies (Oct. 18–23), interrupting an otherwise unbroken run by Delbo. Kupperberg was quite happy with both of his collaborators. “To quote Allan Sherman, ‘Both great!’ he declares to BACK ISSUE. “George may not have always gotten the costume details correct, but he knew how to compose a panel that worked as a piece of the whole, whether it was for a comic-book page or a newspaper strip. José was also a great storyteller. It’s awfully easy for an artist to fall back on a lot of closeups and medium shots to compensate for the tight space, but neither of these guys ever went that route. They each put the work into every panel.” The strip effectively replaced Delbo’s regular “Jimmy Olsen” feature (written by Kupperberg) in the just-cancelled paul kupperberg Superman Family book. Fittingly, the Man of Steel’s pal was prominently featured in © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. a subplot in the artist’s first newspaper continuity that dovetailed into another adventure featuring the Joker. A story running from July 29th to November 13th, 1982 directly addressed the shifting qualities of costumed heroes and vigilante justice in the 1980s. While Lois Lane was romanced by new reporter Daryll Hayden, Superman was contending with a sorcerous rival called the Stalker who was killing criminals outright. Superman and his moral code won out, but the Man of Steel suffered a big loss behind the scenes. Three years after the New York Daily News dropped the feature, the Chicago Tribune did the same when the Stalker story wrapped up. “I don’t remember the genesis of that storyline,” Kupperberg says, “but it seems like it would have been a natural idea, contrasting the flip sides of ‘truth, justice, and the American way’ with their diametrically opposed extremisms.” By this point, the feature had returned to its original editor. “Joe Orlando was still editing the strip when I started writing it over in January of 1982,” Kupperberg continues. “I’m not sure when Julie Schwartz took it over, it may have been as early as my third continuity, the Stalker storyline, but I really don’t remember. “Plotting the strip wasn’t really that different from any story, really,” Kupperberg explains. “Story structure remains the same, no matter what form you’re working in. But plotting sessions with Joe and Julie were two very different things, for sure. I got along very well with Joe; we shared a very similar irreverent humor, so there was always a lot of kidding around, back and forth; plus Joe didn’t stop doing the 17 other things he had going on just because he was in the middle of plotting a story Once, Twice, Three Times a Logo with a writer, so people were always coming and going; The World’s Greatest Superheroes’ Sunday title panel was altered but whoever walked in the door became part of the act. It was a lot of fun, but exhausting. Julie, on the other throughout the run, starting with the Tuska/Colletta three-shot hand, got down to business and would wave off interruptions and distractions. If he had to answer the phone, of the DC Trinity, followed by Dick Giordano Superman redo he’d bark, ‘What d’you want? I’m in conference with a and a later Tuska/Colletta Superman version. very important individual!’ What they shared was their machinegun fire of ideas and story bits that usually left TM & © DC Comics. 56 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

Goodbye Girl Courtesy of writer Paul Kupperberg’s blog, the transitioning Superman/Clark/Lois relationship as shown in dailies originally published (top) April 15, 1983 and (middle) May 17, 1983. Art by José Delbo and Sal Trapani. (bottom) DC’s Puzzlemaster, Bob “Answer Man” Rozakis, wrote this May 27, 1984 Superman Sunday Special entry drawn by Jose Delbo and Sal Trapani. Original art courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

bob rozakis © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons.

me with at least half again as much story as I could possibly fit into a comic book or newspaper strip story. Fortunately, neither ever remembered the dozens of scattershot ideas they’d thrown at me, so I was able to cut the fat.” Kupperberg’s final story of 1982 returned to a familiar face, as Lex Luthor made his fourth appearance in the strip. Rather than evoke the more Earthbound Luthor of films, as in the Orlando era, this Schwartz-edited effort embraced his comic-book roots, complete with the purple-and-green costume he’d been wearing since 1974. As the plot progressed, the action moved to outer space and Lex’s involvement with warring alien races.

SUNDAY IS FUN DAY

Readers who had been following the story only on Sundays never got to see how it ended, though. Effective with the January 9th, 1983 installment, it was rechristened The Superman Sunday Special. In its new form, the feature became a mix of comics trivia, puzzles, and activities like paper dolls. Written by Bob Rozakis, the feature was generally illustrated by Delbo and Trapani, but other artists sometimes stepped in from time to time. Two of the earliest Sundays were credited to Connie Hatch (from DC’s Special Projects department), a penciler named Francis, and veteran inker Joe Giella.

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Bob “was/is particularly skilled at doing puzzles and games,” Paul Levitz stated in BACK ISSUE #25. “I think they decided to take advantage of that, possibly hoping to make the Sunday circulation better, since that’s where the money was.” Rozakis confirms for BACK ISSUE that “the concept was a DC idea to help get some new papers to pick it up. I believe the ones Connie Hatch did were the samples for the syndicate to show what the new plan was for the Sunday strip. Once it was approved, I was given the regular assignment, but they were not going to toss the two that she had worked up. “I think it did pick up papers in some smaller markets as a result. One of the disappointing things for me was that the strip never appeared in a New York newspaper. There was lots of talk about the Daily News picking up only the Sundays, but it never happened. The closest I got to seeing printed versions was when my aunt in Cleveland would send me a couple she clipped from the Plain Dealer.” “Losing [the Sunday feature] did make writing the strip a little easier,” Kupperberg observed. “The Sunday page of a seven-daya-week strip can be a grand and glorious thing; think of Hogarth’s Tarzan, Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Foster’s Prince Valiant. But it can be, as described below, a storytelling roadblock. “Where the process writing of a newspaper strip differs is in the execution of the plots,” Kupperberg explains to BACK ISSUE. “A newspaper strip is a very different sort of storytelling. In a standard comic-book story, the story flows from panel to panel, page to page, without interruption. The writer knows the reader has been there from page one and has been following the story so there’s no reason to pause and fill in backstory. It’s a straight shot through to the end. With a daily strip, you can’t operate on the assumption that every

reader has been there for every installment, so every strip, which has very limited real estate to work with to begin with, has to include some backstory to fill in those who might have missed yesterday’s episode, leading into a panel in which the story can advance, and ending in still more forward movement, but set up in such a way as to be a cliffhanger of some sort that will lure the reader back to read tomorrow’s episodes. “Sunday strips are a whole ’nother structural mess… keep in mind, this was in the 1980s when the printed page was all we had and space on comics pages was precious: a tier of panels that can do nothing but fill space or be redundant or tease what’s to follow because some papers didn’t run three-tier Sundays, then what few panels you did have for story also had to recap the entire previous week without giving away too many new story reveals because some other papers only ran the Sunday strips, while others ran only the dailies.”

AN ‘LL’ OF A MESS

Over in the comic books, the Superman books had received a shakeup in early 1983 that saw Superman and Lois Lane split up while Clark Kent and Lana Lang became a couple. Lana wasn’t part of the newspaper strip cast, but Kupperberg used a Mr. Mxyzptlk story (Mar. 24–July 16, 1983) to adapt the concept. A Lois and Clark romance endured for the rest of the strip’s run. Lana, incidentally, did show up in the strip later in 1984 as an on-air correspondent, joining new reporter Justin Moore and Galaxy Broadcasting head Morgan Edge in making late leaps to the newspaper feature. It was Edge who insisted that Daily Planet editor Perry White have an assistant, resulting in the debut of David Boyle on November 15, 1983. Boyle proved to be the only regular supporting cast member who was unique to the strip.

Makes His Blood “Boyle” (top) Perry White’s blowing a gasket while the Daily Planet’s new assistant editor, David Boyle, is introduced in the November 8, 1983 daily. (center) Luthor’s new battle armor, which debuted in DC’s Action Comics #544, in the December 30, 1983 daily. (bottom) Brainiac’s then-new robotic form, which also premiered in Action #544, as seen the May 11, 1984 daily. Scans from the Kupperberg blog; by Kupperberg/ Delbo/Trapani. TM & © DC Comics.

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From Newspaper to Paperback Front and back covers for the 1982 Tor paperback edition collecting Superman-centric stories from The World’s Greatest Superheroes. TM & © DC Comics.

“We decided to play up the supporting cast and add elements like the Clark and Lois romance and the Perry/David Boyle subplot,” Kupperberg explains, “to be able to play up some of the more soap opera-y elements that newspaper strip readers were used to seeing in other adventure strips. Besides, I liked writing Clark and his friends, especially smart*ss Jimmy, who I’d also been writing in his feature in Superman Family. I even enjoyed dumb*ss Steve Lombard. We didn’t feel entirely bound by the comic-book continuity; in those days, a couple of hundred thousand people, tops, read the comic books, and even with the small number of papers Superman ran in, it was understood that it was being read by a largely civilian audience, most of whom probably had no idea there were even still Superman comics being published.” Kupperberg also noted the relocation of the bottle city of Kandor to an other-dimensional planet in 1979’s Superman #338 when he had a supervillain named Bal-Ga escape its confines to terrorize Earth (July 18–Oct, 29, 1983). The much-heralded new looks of the Man of Steel’s greatest foes (unveiled in Mar. 1983’s Action Comics #544) were also featured in separate newspaper arcs featuring Luthor (Oct. 31, 1983–Jan. 14, 1984) and Brainiac (Apr. 16–July 14, 1984). The Bizarros converged on Earth in another story, while a subplot looked in on their nursing home-bound creator Professor Potter (Jan. 16–Apr. 14, 1984). Potter, previously seen in the strip’s Elastic Lad tale, had been a recurring presence in DC’s Silver Age Super-books, but he hadn’t had a connection with Bizarro there. A Toyman sequence (July 16–Oct. 21, 1984) referenced a cultural phenomenon tailor-made for the character. The villain’s Whatta Pal Dolls caused riots among consumers, a scenario strangely similar to what Cabbage Patch Dolls were unleashing in the real world. The comic strip’s first editor had a cameo as the harried owner of the J.T.E. Schwartz toy store. By the time the Toyman story ran, it was evident from the strip’s shrunken subscriber list that the end was near. Whether written as such or not, Kupperberg and Delbo’s final adventure had an air of finality. The plot found Superman saying farewell to Earth and leaving to join his supposedly resurrected Kryptonian parents on the planet Starzl. Inevitably, “Jor-El and Lara” were exposed as villains and a teary-eyed Superman prepared to fly back to Earth as the final daily ran on February 9, 1985. In an interesting parallel, the final Earth-One canon 1986 issue of Action Comics (#582) before Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” and the launch of John Byrne’s The Man of Steel also featured

a Jor-El and Lara’s seeming return, albeit with different culprits. “I think we’d known the end was coming, sooner or later, for a while,” Kupperberg notes. “The strip had been losing papers, and we hadn’t been in any big circulation papers for quite a while… I lived in New York, and I don’t think I ever saw the printed strip in a newspaper the entire time I was writing it.” Even as the Superman newspaper strip ended, there was a glimmer of hope that it might come full circle. In the DC offices, editor Robert Greenberger was putting together a prospective title called Comics Cavalcade Weekly that was meant to showcase new stories featuring heroes recently acquired from Charlton Comics. As a drawing card, plans were made to also reprint a selection of the Pasko/Tuska/Colletta World’s Greatest Superheroes strips in each edition. “It would be fresh, in color, and hopefully a must-have for comics fans,” Greenberger explained in Comic Book Artist #9 (Aug. 2000). “We formatted it so you would get a week, complete with Sunday strip, in two pages.” The project never got off the ground. To this day, the only collection of the strip is a 1982 paperback entitled The World’s Greatest Superheroes Present Superman. Although the cover suggested it featured the Man of Steel alone, the book ran a reformatted version of the Vandal Savage arc, edited further to eliminate its Flash cliffhanger that led into the second arc. Decades later, Black Lightning creator Tony Isabella lobbied unsuccessfully to have the hero’s comic-strip appearance included in 2018’s Black Lightning: Volume Two trade. In 2020’s DC Through the ’80s: The End of Eras hardback, Paul Levitz was able to include roughly the first three weeks of his 1979 Elastic Lad tale. Today, the strip has become one of the most requested subjects for collection among Bronze Age DC fans, but it remains un-reprinted. Once the Library of American Comics and publisher IDW began releasing volumes of DC’s early Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman newspaper strips, The World’s Greatest Superheroes seemed like a natural for inclusion. LOAC founder Dean Mullaney confirms to BI that they were interested in preserving the feature, but it was not to be. “The DC licensing people at that time simply said that ‘rights were not available.’” As of 2021, the entirety of the 1970s Justice League of America comic-book run is available in three Bronze Age Omnibus editions. Will the JLA’s lost comic-strip adventures ever join them on a bookshelf? Only time will tell.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 59

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[Editor’s note: As production on this issue was nearing completion, word reached us of the passing of author-historian Ron Goulart on January 14, 2022. This article is respectfully dedicated to his memory.]

“A long way from here, a long time from now, in a system not our own…” by S t e p h a n

Friedt

“Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes and is part of the general thematic genre science fictional space warfare with use of melodramatic risk-taking space adventures and chivalric romance. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it features technological and social advancements (or lack thereof) in faster-than-light travel, futuristic weapons, and sophisticated technology on a backdrop of galactic empires and interstellar wars with fictional aliens often in fictional galaxies. The term has no relation to music, as in a traditional opera, but is instead a play on the terms ‘soap opera,’ a melodramatic television series, and ‘horse opera,’ which was coined during the 1930s to indicate a clichéd and formulaic Western movie. Space operas emerged in the 1930s and continue to be produced in literature, film, comics, television, and video games.” – Wikipedia Star Hawks, a swashbuckling adventure that author Ron Goulart once likened to Starsky and Hutch in space, was a newspaper adventure comic strip syndicated by Newspaper Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) that ran daily and Sunday from October 3, 1977 until May 2, 1981, for a total of 1252 episodes.

THE CREATORS

Ron Goulart was born in Berkley, California, on January 13, 1933. He studied writing in high school with classmate Anthony Boucher, who would go on to gain fame as well. Goulart enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951 and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1955. He spent the next years in the field of advertising as a copywriter. In 1963 he left advertising to write freelance full-time. He returned to copywriting from 1966–1968. His first published freelance work was as editor and author of introductions to The Hardboiled Dicks: An Anthology and Study of Pulp Detective Fiction (1965) and Line Up Tough Guys (1966). His first full-length fiction, The Sword Swallower (1968), was a science-fiction novel that introduced a ron goulart universe far from Earth, known as the Barnum System, where shapeshifters ThunderCats Wiki. called the Chameleon Corps operate. The Sword Swallower set the standard for the mystery/science-fiction hybrid that became Goulart’s trademark. Other Barnum System books include The Fire-Eater (1970), Shaggy Planet (1973), A Whiff of Madness (1975), and The Wicked Cyborg (1978). Ron would go on to rack up an impressive library of works including original novels in a variety of genres, novelizations of films, comics, television series,

Kane is Able Gil Kane hand-colored artwork produced for the 1980 Ace paperback reprint of his sci-fi newspaper strip, Star Hawks, created and originally written by Ron Goulart. All artwork in this article is courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © Newspaper Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA).

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short-story collections, entries in existing series under pseudonyms (Flash Gordon and The Phantom novelizations from the world of comic strips), collaborative fictional efforts (the Tek World novels with William Shatner), and a considerable body of nonfiction. Goulart wrote the Star Hawks newspaper comic strip from the beginning through April 1979. During Ron’s run, readers meet Interplan Law Service agent Star Hawk Rex Jaxan, a Flash Gordon–style hero with a healthy mix of humor and contemporary ideas (for the time). Goulart had originally named him “Ben” Jaxan, but Star Hawks artist Gil Kane convinced him that it would sound better if he was named “Rex,” like comics’ Rex Dexter of Mars. Gil had originally imagined Rex in a “James Coburn” style. We also meet Rex’s partner Star Hawk Chavez (no first name). Kane modeled him after a bald Victor McLaughlin. Helping them out is their robot dog sidekick, Sniffer, Ron’s secret favorite character because he could imbue Sniffer with sass and wit the way you would a ventriloquist’s dummy. Also introduced is the Star Hawks’ boss, chief agent Alice K. Benyon, also Rex’s love interest, who is the commander on the floating satellite ship, the Hoosegow. Originally, Goulart had called the team of troubleshooters the “Star Corps,” but Ron and Gil decided to change it to “Hawks” as homage to one of their favorite characters, Basil Wolverton’s Space Hawk. Ron Goulart would leave Star Hawks in 1979 over a creative-differences dispute with the syndicate. After leaving the strip, Ron wrote two novels of the characters. His first was Empire 99 (Playboy Press, April 1980), which was based on a combination of two separate story arcs from the strip itself. His second was Star Hawks #2: The Cyborg King (Playboy Press, December 1981), which was an all-new story using his characters. Comics artist Gil Kane (1926–2000) supplied all the Star Hawks artwork, including spot illustrations in the novels. Born Eli Katz in Riga, Latvia, Kane’s family immigrated to America in 1929 and settled in Brooklyn, New York.

A Long Time Ago… …in a newspaper far, far away, Star Hawks premiered. Lithograph of a 1977 promo poster, signed by creators Kane and Goulart. Courtesy of Heritage. © NEA.

THE STAR HAWKS LIBRARY Strip Reprints: Star Hawks #1 (Ace/Tempo, 1979): reprints strips from 1977–1978 Star Hawks #2 (Ace/Tempo, July 1981): continues reprints from 1978 The Comic Reader #164–186 (Street Enterprises, 1979–1980) Amazing Heroes (Fantagraphics, 1980s): assorted issues Blackthorne’s Comic Strip Preserves: Star Hawks #1–4 (Blackthorne Publishing, 1985–1987)

Star Hawks #1–9 (Avalon Communications, 2000–2001) Gil Kane and Ron Goulart’s Star Hawks: The Complete Series (Hermes Press, November 2003) The Complete Star Hawks #1–3 (IDW, 2017–2018) Novels: Star Hawks #1: Empire 99 (Playboy Press, April 1980) Star Hawks #2: The Cyborg King (Playboy Press, December 1981)

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Gil attended high school at Manhattan’s School of Industrial Art, but he left before he finished his final year because of a job in the production department at MLJ (Archie Comics). Though his first stint there was short, they soon hired him back. His first published artwork was “Inspector Bentley of Scotland Yard” in Pep Comics. Kane would work for MLJ, Timely, and DC before spending time in the Army during the last years of WWII. When he returned home from the service, he spent a brief time working for artist-editor Sheldon Mayer and doing TV storyboards. In 1949 he started a long stint with DC Comics under editor Julie Schwartz. Though considered a mainstream comic-book artist, Gil, thanks to years of work on major DC characters as well as a long stint at Marvel, had been a forerunner for independent projects. His first was his graphic magazine/novel His Name is Savage (1968), which helped to establish the idea of creator rights. (That planned series was in various stages of progression for as much as four issues, but the magazine suffered from poor distribution and only one issue was published.) His second attempt was the paperback Blackmark (1971), which explored a format that non-reprint comics hadn’t used before. (Gil had a contract for four Blackmark volumes, but was unhappy with the final size of the book. He thought it was going to be larger, like the Burne Hogarth Tarzan books.) His third attempt was the Star Hawks comic strip, which started in the dailies as a two-tier format not previously used by daily or weekly mainstream strips. The style was tried two years earlier by cartoonist Arn Saba in the series Neil the Horse. Kane would receive the 1977 National Cartoonist Society Story Comic Strip Award for his work on the strip.

THE CONCEPTION

As originally revealed by Ron Goulart and John Fairfield in an article in Cartoonist Profiles #35 (Sept. 1977), Star Hawks’ conception story goes something like this: In 1976, John “Flash” Fairfield, Director of Comic Art for the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate, had lunch in Westport with some comic creators in Connecticut. Gil Kane, Gill Fox, and Mel Casson were among the group. Fox invited Goulart to join them. During the lunch, it came out that Ron was a prominent

science-fiction writer, which Fairfield noted. Fox asked Mel Casson to tell Fairfield about an idea he had for daily strips that involved a “double-truck format”—a taller, two-tier format which allowed visual expansion beyond most strips’ one-tier blocks—an idea that Flash had been rolling around in his thoughts just days before. When Fairfield returned home to Cleveland, he mentioned that he had met Goulart to his wife, Marianne. Marianne, a librarian, knew well of Ron Goulart, one of her favorite authors. She had Flash read one of Ron’s novels, The Tin Angel. Fairfield realized that Goulart had been writing in exactly the style he thought he had just envisioned. It prompted him to call Ron. He outlined his longtime idea about a return to the narrative style of adventure strip. It would have to be a science-fiction strip. And customer complaints about the size of current adventure strips prompted him to feel it had to start out in two-tier/double truck format to set it off from other strips. He asked Ron if he was interested in writing such a feature. Goulart went on to say, “What Fairfield wanted was a strip which would offer interplanetary adventure, with a touch of humor. Since I’d been writing novels and stories of with those same ingredients for over a quarter of a century, I set out to construct a strip along a similar line.” A longtime comics fan that had done some writing for Marvel in the early 1970s, Ron stated, “I had some idea of how a science-fiction strip was done and a pretty fair knowledge of what had been tried in the past… from Buck Rogers through Beyond Mars and Space Cadet.” Ron based Star Hawks on his own creation, the Barnum System, the galaxy from a few of his novels. He created a gigantic law-and-order satellite nicknamed the Hoosegow, which housed a variety of heroes, pretty girls, androids, robots, computers, and gadgets. He wrote up two weeks’ worth of outlines and continuity, sent it off to the syndicate. After a period of waiting and wondering, Goulart got the okay. Now he had to find an artist. As fate would have it, Gil Kane was one of his neighbors. Ron asked Gil if he’d be interested, Kane agreed, and they built up six sample weeks of dailies and Sundays. Gil used the two-tier layout to do different things with the strip—not just two dailies on top of each other,

Size Matters The double-tier format of the Goulart-penned Star Hawks allowed a better showcase for Kane’s incredible artwork. Original art scan courtesy of Heritage. © NEA.

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 63

It Came Out of the Sky A mecha-dinosaur is a winged foe for Rex and Lhassa in this Saturday Star Hawks strip originally published May 13, 1978. Original art courtesy of Heritage. © NEA.

but making it much closer to being like a page in a comic book with story progression in different directions and word balloons in expressive locations rather than always at the top of the panel. And thus, Star Hawks had blasted off! “We were still learning!” explained Goulart of the mechanics of doing a weekly strip in an article in Future Magazine #7 (Jan. 1979). “During the first six weeks of the strip, we made a mistake. On Saturday we had Chavez dive over the side of a tower holding a bomb, and then there was an explosion. On Sunday we showed that he wore a flying belt, which saved his life. On Monday he and Rex were off on their next adventure. “What we didn’t realize was that many readers couldn’t figure out what had happened because they hadn’t seen the Sunday page.” Some newspapers carried only the daily (Monday through Saturday) installments of comic strips, not the larger-sized, color Sundays. “As a result, we can no longer have anything essential happen on a Sunday.” Artist Gil Kane talked about the evolution of the strip in an interview with Gary Groth in Comics Journal #38 (Feb. 1977): “Ron would bring in a storyline that consisted of, say, the two main characters ending up on a prison farm. We would sit down and spend an evening and work out the continuity about a prison farm. Then I worked out the entire continuity, day by day, on typing paper, then he writes the copy in, and I use that as a basis for my drawing.” Although Star Hawks was sometimes accused of being a clone of Star Wars, the strip was conceived a year before George Lucas’ space epic premiered. Kane also mentioned that “Star Fire” and “Fire Star” were also considered as titles for the strip. As far as Gil was concerned, every concept with “Star” in its name was due to the success of Star Trek. In a 1977 Future Magazine article, Ron Goulart discussed the financial aspects of doing a comic strip.

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“The amount of money a newspaper pays for Star Hawks depends on its circulation,” he revealed. “The syndicate is getting $125 a week from certain papers, out of which Kane and I get $75 between us. At the moment we are on a guarantee. My guarantee is less than Gil’s because it really takes up all of his time to draw the script, I only spend two or three days a week on it.” He went on to explain that they were expecting extra money on the spinoff projects and merchandising, mentioning such possibilities as Star Hawks school tablets in Italy, French and Italian reprint collections, an Italian animated version of the series, discussion about a proposed Saturday morning animated series in the US, and Ace/Tempo Books’ series of paperback reprints (two volumes were published). Ron already had expectations of doing the two novels for Playboy Press.

THE CONTINUATION

After Goulart left the strip, Archie Goodwin (1937– 1998) was the next Star Hawks writer, from 1979–1980. Archie was no stranger to newspaper strips, as he had worked for King Features Syndicate from 1967–1980. He had a long and prominent career as a writer and/or editor with many of the major comics companies and had worked with Gil Kane before. Goodwin set out to take the series into a new direction, giving readers more of Rex’s background, destroying the Hoosegow, putting Rex’s crush, Alice K., in jeopardy, and introducing the new spaceship, the Stellar Cross. During Archie’s stint on Star Hawks, the NEA syndicate reduced the daily strip to the standard single-tier format. Goodwin left the feature in 1980. The next Star Hawks writer was Roger McKenzie, from 1980–1981. Writer Roger Stern was also in the mix and gave the feature an assist in 1979. While Gil Kane continued as the Star Hawks artist, he was dealing with an illness and had uncredited help

from artists Ernie Colón and Howard Chaykin. “I’m worth of a particular strip and was available via pretty certain Ernie preceded me and did fewer strips newsstand distribution, but the bulk of its sales came than I did,” Howard Chaykin tells BACK ISSUE. “We from subscriptions. In November 1973, Street Enterprises took over didn’t work together at all.” While Chaykin had a history with Kane, “In this publishing the long-running comics fanzine The Comic instance, there was no interaction between me and Reader (started in 1961 by the “Father of Comics Gil,” according to Howard, whose Star Hawks liaison Fandom,” Jerry Bails, under the title On the Drawing Board). With the cancellation of The Menomonee was the syndicate. “I had worked for him in Falls Gazette, Street Enterprises moved many the late 1960s, and he remains the most of the strips featured in the Gazette over influential figure of the men who are to The Comic Reader. responsible for my career. Not in terms From 1985 through 1987, Blackof the work, per se, but in the way of thorne Publishing produced four Star thinking that underpins the work.” Hawks black-and-white comic-book Chaykin—who, coincidentally, issues reprinting the strip in their Comic was the first artist of Marvel Comics’ Strip Preserves line. Early issues of the adaptation of the movie to which Star 1980s fanzine Amazing Heroes carried Hawks is often compared, Star Wars— reprints of the strip. All these reprint series had no real interest in Star Hawks prior omitted occasional bridging strips to helping out in its, and Gil Kane’s, (the first two strips, which set the tone moment of need. “I’d seen it, of for the series, often were not reprinted). course, but it wasn’t of any interest archie goodwin In 2004, Hermes Press released the to me. My job, as I saw it, when the entire run of the strip in a single volume. assignment came, was to imitate Gil’s way of thinking, not only his style of drawing. While the IDW Publishing reprinted the complete series—dailies finished rendering wasn’t in any way exact, I think I and Sundays—in 2017–2018, in three volumes. The bottom line is that Star Hawks is best appreciated succeeded in imitating his approach to picture-making.” Besides appearing an over a hundred newspapers by reading it. It was a labor of love by the professionals worldwide, Star Hawks could be read from the beginning involved, and it shows in the final product. in the comic-strip newspaper the Menomonee Falls Gazette, “the international newspaper for comic art STEPHAN FRIEDT has been around comics for a long, long time. fans,” a weekly tabloid that reprinted adventure and A former columnist for The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom, soap opera newspaper comic strips from the United he has contributed to Alter Ego and the Grand Comics Database, and he still finds time to hold real jobs and be at the beck States and the UK [see elsewhere in this issue for more and call of a wife and two daughters in his secret identity as info—ed.]. The Gazette would feature a full week’s a resident of the Pacific Northwest.

Archie’s Here! Beloved writer/ editor/cartoonist Archie Goodwin scripted this July 19, 1979 Star Hawks strip. Art by Gil Kane. © NEA.

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Richie Rich, the Poor Little Rich Boy, first appeared as a comic-book character in the back pages of Little Dot #1 (Sept. 1953). Most people know Richie Rich from either comic books, or three different animated series (one by HannaBarbera in 1980, one by Film Roman in 1994, and one most recently by DreamWorks Animation, in 2018), or two live-action movies (a 1994 theatrical film starring Macaulay Culkin or a 1998 direct-to-video film starring David Gallagher), or the 2015 Netflix live-action TV series starring Jake Brennan. by M a r k A r n o l d What most people don’t know is that Richie Rich was also briefly a newspaper comic strip, from approximately May through September 1979, distributed by McNaught Syndicate. It was drawn by legendary Harvey Comics artist Warren Kremer (1921–2003) and written by Harvey Comics writer and cartoon gagman Lennie Herman (1930–1984). Kremer remembered the strip in an interview he did with Bill Janocha and Brian K. Morris in June 1990, that will be printed in full in the upcoming book, Friendly Ghosts, Little Devils, Giants and Rich Kids: The Art and Creations of Warren Kremer by Mark Arnold. Kremer remembered, “We did a syndicated Richie Rich strip. We did it for six months. McNaught Syndicate put it out. Len Herman was the writer that wrote all of Richie Rich. We had other writers, but he was the best and a funny, funny guy. They didn’t push the comic strip and it never did much.” In this interview, Kremer also discussed the history of the character: “In order to get second-class entry in the comics, you couldn’t sell a comic book with only one character. You had to mix it up with a couple of other characters and you had to put in a two-page text. So, if the star was Casper the Friendly Ghost, we had to have another character to offset it in the back, and that became Spooky. If we had Little Dot, we had to get a character in the back, and that became Richie Rich. Richie was not a big character in the beginning. He was a little five-pager that padded the book for Little Dot. Finally, [publisher] Alfred Harvey felt that he was becoming popular, and he put Richie Rich in his own book. Then, of course, it took off. That character was my idea. Now, you’re going to talk to different people in the field, and you’re going to hear different stories. This happens to everybody. If I tell somebody that Joe Oriolo says he created Casper, somebody will say, ‘I created Casper!’ They all get their fingers in the pie, you know what I mean? You really don’t know who to believe.” (Writer Sy Reit, 1918– 2001, is now also credited with Casper’s creation.) Kremer continued, “In the ’50s, there used to be a show on television called The Millionaire. The guy would sit in a chair with his back to the camera. You never saw the millionaire, but he’d call in his aide, his top guy, and he’d say, ‘Here’s the envelope for the next millionaire.’ This guy, Marvin Miller, played the part. He became famous as the warren kremer guy that gave out the money. So when Harvey asked us to think up new characters, I saw this show and I said, ‘Hey, Courtesy of Bill Janocha, how about a little rich kid, a little kid, who’s the son of a via Comic Book Artist #19. millionaire with unlimited wealth? He could have anything he wants because he’s rich.’ I brought the idea in to [Harvey Comics editor] Sid Jacobson and told him. He said, ‘I think you’ve got something, Warren.’ From there, Steve Muffatti drew up a storyboard of the character, a model Special Delivery! sheet of Richie. We decided Richie would be like Little Lord Fauntleroy with Detail from the Warren Kremer–drawn cover of his black velvet jacket and bow tie.” Knocking Kremer’s memory a little bit, but The Millionaire actually Harvey Comics’ Richie Rich Success Stories #4 debuted in 1955, so this origin is a little bit offbase. Kremer is probably (Aug. 1965), with the poor little rich boy remembering the 1932 film that The Millionaire was based upon called If I Had a Million, which probably aired in the early days of television or Kremer guaranteeing a prompt delivery of the local newsremembered it from his childhood. paper. Fourteen years later, Richie would actually Kremer adds, “My first born son is named Richard Kremer (born in 1951), so I said I’ll call him Richie… Rich. Now, you know that a lot of artists name characters appear inside the paper in a short-lived comic strip that they created after their family members. For example, I would be drawing a that was seen by few and remembered by fewer! rowboat and I’d put her name on the back, Gracie [Kremer’s wife]. All artists do that. All artists draw their children in their strips. I’ve drawn my daughter in it and © Classic Media, LLC. 66 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

I’ve drawn my son in it, so it was nothing for me to take the name Richard and try to create a character called Richard. It just so happened that the kid was a rich kid and Richie Rich became euphonious and it fit. “For six months, this character sat on the boss’ desk, and he didn’t do anything with it. Finally he said, ‘Okay, we’ll take this and we’ll put it in Little Dot.’ The rest is history. It took off and it became so popular that he had, like, 25 different titles out. The sales were phenomenal. We never did any promotion on it, never spent money, never pushed it, never took ads out on it, never did anything on it. Everything Richie Rich became, it became on its own merit, story content, art content, cover, and coloring. “At one point, Alfred claimed that he invented Richie Rich. Now, this was something I invented completely. Alfred had some story about how Buddy Rich lived next door to him, and he got the name from him or something. His wife was very mad at me, she said she had proof, papers that proved that Alfred created Richie Rich. I said I could produce papers, too. After that Alfred was pretty cold towards me, and I dealt with Leon more.” Alfred Harvey’s second-eldest son, Russel, in many personal emails and text conversations with me over the years, claims that Kremer and Herman had no right to do a Richie Rich comic strip, since the character was owned by the Harvey Comics company. Since the strip only lasted for about six months and was not very successful, nothing was done about this apparent subterfuge. Russel also maintains that his father, and his father alone, created Richie Rich. As per usual on things like this, it is the old adage, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” It occurred at Archie with John Goldwater and Bob Montana; it occurred at Marvel with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko; it occurred at DC with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and the powers-that-be at National Periodical Publications. Both Warren Kremer and Alfred Harvey claimed that they created Richie Rich alone, with no additional assistance. This author believes what Harvey artist Ernie Colón said about the situation, backed up by fellow Harvey artist Sid Couchey. Colón said, “Success has many, many fathers. Look at Seymour Reit and Casper, the Friendly Ghost. So many people jumped forward to say they created the character. Same with Richie Rich. Warren makes a good case, I think, because he named the character after his son, Richard. Quite a few people have come forward to say they named the character. It seemed to me that a bunch of guys got together, started brainstorming, and the end result was this new character [that] was then just a minor addition. But, he becomes a success and they each remember their own Rashomon view.” Whatever the true story is may never be known as the majority of the people who were there at the time have now passed on. It is also unknown exactly how many Richie Rich comic strips were produced by Kremer and Herman, but the examples shown here date from May 31, July 9, July 12, July 17, and July 21, 1979. Ironically, there was also a Richie Rich Comic Strip Publisher stamp-pad toy issued around the same time.

Daily Dollars and Cents with Richie Rich From the archives of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com), original art for daily strips by Richie Rich cartoonist Warren Kremer and writer Lennie Herman, from 1979. © Classic Media, LLC.

MARK ARNOLD is a pop-culture historian with over 15 books to his credit on subjects ranging from The Monkees, The Beatles, Underdog, Pink Panther, Cracked, Disney, Dennis the Menace, and more. He is currently at work on a book on the history of MAD and has upcoming books on Disney, TTV, and Pac-Man.

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by J o h n

Beaming Up to a Newspaper Near You The cast of the Star Trek syndicated newspaper strip, by the feature’s original artist, Thomas Warkentin. © CBS Studios, Inc. (CBS).

To a devoted fan of the franchise, a Star Trek newspaper comic strip would be an occasion for great excitement. To its creators, who also loved the franchise’s fandom, even more so. When the L.A. Times Syndicate ran the Star Trek strip from 1979 to 1983, its premiere, which heralded the December 6, 1979 release of director Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, held promise. This interpretation of Star Trek displayed a near-canonical appreciation of the franchise and a chance for readers to enjoy the work of talented writers and artists including Thomas Warkentin, Ron Harris, Larry Niven, and Sharman DiVono. However, the strip disappeared after a short life and has largely slid into obscurity.

WE’RE NOT DEAD, JIM!

The syndicate’s promotional kit for the Star Trek newspaper comic stated that it was aimed at “readers of all ages” who “love Star Trek and will follow its comic strip adventures through uncharted space with fervor.” A mass-marketing media initiative by Star Trek’s original producer Paramount Pictures cast a wide net in promoting the film, believing that the property was due for a comeback. Recent science-fiction successes like the March 30, 1979 theatrical release of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and its subsequent follow-up TV 68 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

K. Kirk

series, and Battlestar Galactica’s 1978 television premiere— or even 1977’s box-office smash, Star Wars—signalled a promise of success for the returning Star Trek. Star Trek: The Motion Picture undeniably reenergized the cult television program. While the NBC-TV primetime series Star Trek (1966–1969)—known in fandom as Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS)—survived to a third season thanks to the 1968 grassroots letterwriting campaign led by Bjo and John Trimble, new material was needed to ensure a return of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. Before the 1979 movie, Star Trek primarily survived in pop-culture memory thanks to television syndication. Outside of a short-lived (1973–1975) Star Trek animated series on Saturday mornings, new stories were the province of dedicated fan club publications and a series of original novels aimed at the existing fan base and not to a mass audience. These novels included Spock Must Die by James Blish (1970) and The Price of the Phoenix by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath (1976), who a year earlier also edited a collection of short stories titled The New Voyages. Other than these stories and a handful of others, most Star Trek mass-market publications were retellings in various formats. Mandala Productions was responsible for photonovelizations (“fotonovels”) that re-presented key

episodes (“Day of the Dove,” “The Devil in the Dark,” etc.) in popular paperbacks with condensed dialogue, and Bantam scored the rights to the novelization of the series. Star Trek paperbacks #1 to 12 were familiar books on many fans’ library shelves. It was these projects that created a culture that would enthusiastically receive the innovative stories the newspaper strip promised. In his introduction to Star Trek: The Newspaper Comics vol. 1: 1979 to 1981, noted comics expert Rich Handley recounted that Laszlo Papas, the president of Mandala Productions, abandoned the photo-novel approach to initiate an audition process for aspiring comic artists to draw the strip for them. With the release of the film, the use for the comic strip as a marketing tool seemed wholly evident. The potential talent for the strip included the likes of Neal Adams and Al Williamson. Papas selected Thomas Warkentin, the first of many artists who would take on the role of producing the Star Trek strip. Warkentin’s numerous and diverse credits included technical illustrations, animation, and art for Heavy Metal magazine. His Star Trek audition

pages were drawn in the style of the original series’ episodes, with the familiar gold, blue, and red uniforms. The Enterprise’s warp nacelles were rounded and the strip had inserts that mimicked violent shifting scenes when the ship encountered impacts in space. It was familiar imagery and painstakingly accurate. Warkentin was thrilled to land the assignment. He had worked for Papas in the past on the Star Trek paperback fotonovels, and was detailed and methodical about his penciling and the quality of his work. He was both artist and writer of Star Trek from 1979 to 1981. Warkentin died in 2002, but his widow, Rosie Ford, tells BACK ISSUE, “Thomas was very much a fan. He loved the TV series, which seemed so futuristic at the time, with great characters and good humanitarian principles. He was always careful to follow the canon and known facts about the Star Trek universe.” According to Ford, Laszlo Papas originally wanted to bring out the Star Trek strip in 1977, but Paramount wanted him to defer publication until they were able to produce the film, which would not happen for another two years.

Phasers Set on ‘Media Blitz’ Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which arrived in theaters for the 1979 Christmas holiday season, inspired many tie-ins including a Marvel comic book, punch-out activity books, and trading cards from Topps. © CBS.

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THE VOYAGES BEGIN

Warkentin’s first Star Trek strip appeared in newspapers on December 2, 1979, four days before the theatrical release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (TMP). He had upgraded the Enterprise and her crew to the same visual specifications of TMP, giving the audience a sneak preview of what the new ship and its crew would look like. The comic strip predated the monthly Marvel Comics Star Trek comic book by about five months, meaning that the newspaper strip enjoyed the distinction of being the first time the TMP era of Star Trek would ever be viewed, an achievement that garners little recognition in the media world. During this run, Warkentin created eight complete Star Trek serialized adventures, with highlights including two Klingon officers seeking asylum within the Federation; the introduction of Dr. McCoy’s ex-wife, Joann; and the return of the roguish con artist, Harry Mudd, previously seen on the TV series. Warkentin received help from other artists during his stint. According to Rosie Ford, her husband once had the flu and was assisted by Ron Harris, who would succeed him on the strip. Other involved artists included Dan Spiegle; Duke Riley (a pseudonym for Warkentin’s son, Karl); another member of his family, Kurt Warkentin; and Mark Rice, as well as Wendy Yang, a pseudonym borne out of pure silliness for Thomas himself. He also received scripting assistance from Peter Jacoby and Tom Durkin, the latter of whom was, at the time, a copy editor for the L.A. Times. Rosie Ford recalls that during Warkentin’s Star Trek run, the contemporaneous Star Wars strip had a team of three staffers, while the Mary Worth strip merited an army of ten staffers. Regarding her husband’s compensation, she informs BACK ISSUE, “The terms of the contract were that Thomas was to get $350 per week; the L.A. Times Syndicate got $450 per week and Paramount got $200 per week. After that any profits were to be divided 18% to Thomas, 37% to Paramount, 45% to the syndicate. He was paid every four weeks.” But an accounting error created a colossal problem. “In April 1981, they sent him a letter saying they were very sorry, but they had been miscalculating his compensation and would be withholding $999 for each of the next four (4 week) periods,” Ford recalls. “This would have left him with very little, and he felt badly [treated] and quit. It was a shame, because he loved doing the strip.”

To Boldly Go Where No Artist Had Gone Before (top left) Thomas Warkentin wrote and illustrated the earliest Star Trek strips. This photo, circa 1980, shows the artist in his studio, working on a Star Trek installment. (top right) Warkentin was famous among sci-fi fans for his Heavy Metal work, such as this cover for the magazine’s July 1982 issue. (bottom) Warkentin’s facility for actor likenesses is clear in this strip, from March 22, 1981. Photo courtesy of Facebook. Heavy Metal © Heavy Metal. Star Trek © CBS.

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FROM J. R. EWING TO JAMES T. KIRK

Warkentin’s decision to leave marked a deep loss for Star Trek. He passed it to Ron Harris, who had been working on the newspaper strip adaptation of the television primetime soap opera Dallas, also for the L.A. Times Syndicate. Harris—known to many BACK ISSUE readers as the artist of such ’80s comics as Marvel/Epic’s Crash Ryan and First’s Alter Ego—says of his predecessor, Thomas Warkentin, “My respect for his work borders on awe. The precision and delicacy of his inking, especially his machinery, is incredible. He worked slowly and always struggled with deadlines, yet his finishes seldom showed it.” Harris’ passion for Star Trek created friction with the L.A. Times Syndicate. “When Thomas resigned [from] Star Trek, I wanted to dump Dallas and take over Trek,” Harris admits. “The syndicate would have none of that. Dallas had many more papers and made much more money than Star Trek, which was limping along in a handful of dailies. “[Writer] Sharman DiVono wanted to break into newspaper strips,” Harris continues. “So I proposed to the syndicate, which hadn’t found a replacement, that I’d draw Trek alongside Dallas with Sharman writing the former. That solved the syndicate’s manpower problem, so they agreed.” Harris’ love of the Star Trek strip was clear, but it was not one shared by the syndicate. He was offered for Star Trek about one quarter of what other, more experienced cartoonists would have been paid. Harris and DiVono partnered on the strip from 1981 to 1982, during which time they collaborated with famed sci-fi writer Larry Niven in a storyline that saw the return of the Kzinti, the feline species fondly remembered by viewers of the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode, “The Slaver Weapon.” (At this writing, Star Trek fans have recently seen the return of the Kzinti in the 2020-launched animated television series, Star Trek: Lower Decks.) In his introduction to Star Trek: The Newspaper Comics, Rich Handley asserted that there was a great deal of controversy associated with this storyline. Ron Harris felt that the story was enormously complex, while Larry Niven was of the mind that Harris had rushed its ending. Another important story arc involved the Enterprise encountering a Klingon ship and its crew that were cybernetically enslaved by a machine race known as “the Overmind.” This was a harbinger of the Borg, who they would face in Star Trek: The Next Generation. “Star Trek was the opposite of Dallas,” Harris reflects. “When we first got the job, Paramount received us warmly. They showed us around sets from The Motion Picture, which were being stored in case there was a sequel. After that meeting, Paramount left us entirely alone.” During their stint on the strip, Harris and DiVono were assisted by Paul Chadwick, Carol Lay, Terry Robinson, Alan Munro, and Laurie Newell. Harris’ final week was actually ghost-illustrated by Thomas Warkentin, in a strangely ironic twist. “The syndicate always feared that I’d put too much time on Trek at the expense of Dallas,” Harris explains. “I certainly enjoyed Trek more, but Dallas took up more time, and the more time it took, the worse the strip looked. After the big reveal of J. R.’s assailant, the publicity bubble had burst, and interest in the TV show tanked. “I was burnt out. I asked to be removed from Dallas to concentrate on Star Trek. The syndicate said no, so I gave them notice,” Harris says. “Thomas stepped in to draw the last two weeks of my final Trek story, and off I went. I was exhausted and thoroughly discouraged. The only benefit I saw in all that craziness was that I’d been too busy to spend much of my pay. I used what I’d banked to attend the international comic convention in Lucca, Italy, a longtime dream. Thus ended my newspaper career.”

WARP SPEED AHEAD

Padraic Shigetani took over writing and artistic duties in 1982. Shigetani’s first strip saw the Enterprise lured into a trap by an enemy fleet of merchants. Writer Marty Pasko joined him in November of that year, with Shigetani as artist. Pasko’s storyline involved a race of shapeshifters that infiltrated and took over the Enterprise. A conflict with the Romulans ensued, and the arc introduced a blonde Vulcan lieutenant, T’Yee, to whom Kirk found himself inextricably drawn. During this period the strip transitioned from depicting TMP uniforms to the ones worn in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Shigetani’s art marked a departure from the styles of Harris and Warkentin. Instead of introductory frames with credits and a title, Shigetani’s strip had no such embellishment, little exposition, and was as “barebones” as possible. Whatever the reason, the minimal level of quality to the art did the strip no favors. According to Handley, Shigetani lamented that his art was rushed because of “unforgiving deadlines.” The artist recounted that he was often expected to turn his work around in a day, hinting at a lack of effective editorial management. The experience jaded Shigetani so much that he left the strip as quickly as he could. Pasko was disappointed by Shigetani’s work as well, and he left the strip around the same time, after just over a year.

Animal Planet Four Star Trek consecutive dailies— which ran from May 26–29, 1982— featuring a battle between the Enterprise crew and the Kzinti. Original Ron Harris art signed by Larry Niven, from the Heritage archives (www.ha.com). © CBS.

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Where Monsters Dwell Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions, original art fpr the Sunday, June 6, 1982 Star Trek syndicated strip, featuring the Enterprise and many of the major characters. By Sharman DiVono, Ron Harris, and Larry Niven. © CBS.

Pasko and Shigetani were replaced by writer-artist team of Gerry Conway and Bob Meyers in February of 1983, with a whimsical storyline about the “Courier Clones,” two Morgan Fairchild lookalikes in ’80s aerobics fashions. With a bizarre similarity to the TOS episode “Wolf in the Fold,” Scotty was accused of murdering one of the clones. Bob Meyers remained on the strip for about three months, replaced for the next four months by Ernie Colón, Alfredo Alcala, and Serc Soc. By July of 1983, Conway would be partnered with “Captain Cartoon” himself, Dick Kulpa, also known for his work on Cracked magazine. One of their storylines involved Spock’s relationship with a woman after he was stranded on an alien planet and plagued by amnesia. Its similarities to TOS’ “All Our Yesterdays” and “This Side of Paradise” are hard to overlook. Conway and Kulpa co-produced Star Trek until the strip’s final panels were published on December 3, 1983… ironically, around the time when Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was breaking records for home-video sales. Their final story arc involved the Enterprise crew’s discovery of a parallel universe about a television show titled Star Trek, in which they were the imaginary characters. This bore striking similarities to two short stories in the fanzine Trek, “Visit to a Weird Planet” by Jean Lorah and Willard F. Hunt and “Visit to a Weird Planet – Revisited” by Ruth Berman. The former involved Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, who were accidentally transported to 20th Century Earth and found themselves on the set of television’s Star Trek. The latter looked at the same situation except from the perspective of the actors in the same transporter accident transported to the 23rd Century Enterprise. Even Dick Kulpa’s talented penciling wasn’t enough to distract the Star Trek fan’s attention away from the story’s parallels. The repetition of storylines to television episodes was a surprisingly common feature in the strip’s lifespan. In another example, in the strip’s ninth story arc, titled “The Savage Within,” the Enterprise discovered a generational spacecraft affected by neutron radiation. This was very similar to the TOS episode titled “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” While the repeated themes suggested the absence of editorial guidance, Ron Harris actually looks back at the lack of corporate interference with a degree of fondness. “I have a vague memory that

one criticism of a Spock head had filtered down from Paramount, but that was it,” Harris tells BI. “We were free to do as we pleased. It was heavenly.” Warkentin’s wife Rosie Ford recalls a similar state of freedom. “I don’t think there was any editorial guidance that I remember, other than that one story was getting too long. I also remember that the odd word got changed before publication… Tom Durkin, [Thomas’] editor at the syndicate, did submit a story idea to him, but that was not in his professional capacity. Thomas knew Star Trek better than any of the people he worked with at Paramount and the syndicate, and cared more than they did if it was consistent with the canon, so there was no guidance of that sort.”

THE WRATH OF INSTABILITY

Originally a marketing tool, the necessity of the Star Trek comic strip diminished after the first film’s release. The interim artists and writers who came on board Star Trek later in its run were unable to recapture the excellence of Warkentin or Harris/DiVono. The frequent “changing of the guard” within the last 15 months of the strip illustrated the instability of the strip’s management and suggested a lack of concern for the standards of quality and for the creators involved. There was a constant struggle to keep talent on the strip, and as a result deadlines grew tighter, as did competition from the Star Wars comic strip also distributed by the L.A. Times Syndicate. It was a case of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, resulting in the demise of what could have been a spectacular chapter in the concept that had captured the imagination of millions and continues to do so today. JOHN K. KIRK is a librarian and English teacher with the Toronto District School Board in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, who incorporates comics and comics history into his classroom teaching. [Editor’s note: Be sure to check out our sister mag, RetroFan #1, for a detailed history of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and RetroFan #14 for a nostalgic look back at “Star Trek: The Lean Years.]

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[Author’s note: The quotes from Mike Grell in this article were taken from a September 2014 interview by Dennis Wilcutt, who graciously agreed to their use here.]

There are some sounds that are just instantly recognizable. You may not remember where you first heard it, but you don’t have any trouble recognizing it when you hear it again. In fact, just reading the words will conjure up the sound in your head. A train riding along the railroad tracks. A horse galloping down a road. The crack of a bat hitting a baseball. Or a Tarzan yell. by D ewey Cassell Johnny Weissmuller made it famous. Carol Burnett made it funny. But if you’ve ever seen the Lord of the Jungle on film or television, odds are you’ve heard it, even if you’re not a fan of Tarzan. And if you are a fan, odds are you’ve probably tried it yourself. So has Mike Grell. In fact, one could argue that he was literally born to draw the character, as Grell recounted: “The very first novel I ever read was Tarzan the Terrible. I must have been seven or eight years old. I could speak most, if not all, of the Ape language by the time I was 12. I had climbed quite a few of the trees in the town I lived in. The area was full of old abandoned mines and hills. I had a rope that would allow me to swing across the open air over a mining mike grell pit that was maybe 100 feet across. There were some huge trees growing Dewey Cassell. all over the place, which was perfect for doing this. One giant old tree, which I nailed steps to, allowed me to climb up and tie a rope to a long, over-hanging branch. I built a rough planked platform for a launching pad, and off I would [go]. Once, I forgot to untie an additional extension piece of the rope from the tree and took off. It hung me out between my legs and stood me up like a flag. I was lucky not drop from that rope. The near-end of Mike Grell.” By 1981, Grell already had a wealth of experience drawing comic books. After spending over nine months in Vietnam, Grell was discharged from the Air Force in January 1971 and went to the Chicago Academy of Fine Art. He was an assistant to Dale Messick on the newspaper strip Brenda Starr before landing a job at DC Comics. His first assignment at DC was drawing Aquaman [in Adventure Comics], but he made his mark illustrating Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and Green Lantern/ Green Arrow, as well as his own creation, The Warlord. That’s an impressive resume. But how did he get the assignment to draw the Tarzan newspaper strip? Grell explained, “A stroke of luck. I got a phone call from Archie Goodwin, who was doing the strip with Gil Kane, and they were leaving the strip and asked if I would mind doing it. I said, ‘Yes!’ and he recommended me for the job. Really! Would I mind? Tarzan is my favorite character.” No Trespassing Like many artists before and after him, Grell had Mike Grell’s Sunday Tarzan strip published October 3, 1982. long aspired to draw a newspaper comic strip. The lure was twofold—financial stability and breadth All art accompanying this article is courtesy of Dewey Cassell, of exposure. Years before, Grell had unsuccessfully unless otherwise noted. pitched his own idea for a strip titled Iron Mike. At the time he took over Tarzan, it was a Sunday-only TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB), Inc. Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 73

Dueling Formats Grell’s Sunday Tarzan published August 8, 1982, during the “Strangers in Pal-ul-don” storyline, shown in both the (top) tabloid and (bottom) two-tier versions. TM & © ERB, Inc.

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strip, but the bonus was the chance to write, draw, letter, and color it. It was a dream come true not lost on Grell, who recalled, “When I was doing the color guide for my first page, I was so excited that I had to go lie down and take it easy for a bit. That is the truth. It struck me that I was really doing Tarzan, and the reality just piled on top of me on that first page. I still love that first splash panel with all the colors.” In doing the Tarzan strip, Grell had several influences. “I am a huge fan of Hal Foster,” he elaborated. “If you look at his work on Tarzan, you can see the beginnings of Prince Valiant. Prince Valiant is the quintessential comic strip of all time. Period. If it had not been for Tarzan, there would have been no Prince Valiant. “I like [Tarzan artist Burne Hogarth] as well,” Grell said. “I had his books when I was in art school. He had a reputation [for] dynamic figure drawing. He made his jungle not all sweetness and the like. There were a lot of things in his jungle that look nasty. He had that kind of organic look with his vines and gnarly stuff. “But in my opinion, the top two guys I liked when I was growing up were Russ Manning and Doug Wildey. I got to meet both of those guys at a San Diego ComicCon. I was in the process of drawing a commission sketch of Tarzan and the Golden Lion when Russ came over to me and looks over my shoulder and asked Wildey to look at what I was doing. He told me I was drawing a lion the way one should be drawn. They watched me for a while and made comments about every single line I drew. I had an attack of perspiration form on my head because I was so nervous. A drop fell on the commission I was doing. I’ll never forget that. They laughed their asses off.” During his tenure on Tarzan, Grell paid homage to classic Edgar Rice Burroughs tales in the storyline “Return to Opar,” but he largely blazed his own trail with the strip. One of the storylines takes place in Wisconsin, which irked some fans but provided an opportunity to further explore Jane’s character. Grell noted, “There’s not really another unique relationship in fiction, in my opinion, where the woman knows she has her man, but she only has part of him. She knows the part she does not have is always going to be wild, untamed, and when the wildness stirs his blood, she realizes he has to respond to his savage calling. Jane may not really understand that calling, but she realizes it. Unlike any female character in a James Bond book, Jane was never a weakling or victim. She was always strong, independent, and capable of taking care of herself in almost every situation. In the [‘Christmas in Wisconsin’] story, I wanted to show that the time she lived with Tarzan had not been wasted. She was to be the hero of that story.” Grell blazed his own trail with the strip in other ways, notably the layout. There is typically a standard layout for Sunday newspaper strips. The reason is that some newspapers will print all three tiers of the strip in a half-page format, but many will only print two tiers and others print the strip in a tabloid format. Grell defied convention in his layouts for the Tarzan strip, often employing tall vertical panels or a large panel to showcase the action. “I understood the layout and format problems,” Grell elaborated. “If you take a close look at what I did on the strip, I broke as many rules as possible in the layout of the page. I knew the top tier was mostly a goner, but the challenge in re-arranging the panels was something no one else was doing. I wanted as much of the strip published as I could if it was less than full half-page format.” Producing the Tarzan strip had its challenges. During the run of “Return to Opar,” United Feature Syndicate had the last two Sundays of the storyline drawn by a

MIKE GRELL TARZAN NEWSPAPER STRIP STORYLINES AND DATES Story Title

Original Dates of Publication

Return to Opar The Mercenaries A Wisconsin Christmas The Wildlife Artist Jane Awakens Strangers in Pal-ul-don Space War Christmas with Meriam Tarzan and the Crocodile

July 19, 1981–September 20, 1981 September 27, 1981–December 13, 1981 December 20, 1981–March 7, 1982 March 14, 1982–May 30, 1982 June 6, 1982 June 13, 1982–August 22, 1982 August 29, 1982–November 14, 1982 November 21, 1982–February 6, 1983 February 20, 1983–February 27, 1983

ghost artist, against Grell’s wishes. Rumor was that the artwork was lost in the mail, but Grell set the record straight: “I was under a deadline crunch, perhaps starting Sable at the time or something else. Anyway, I had my hands full at the time and I told the syndicate that I was under pressure from some other work, but they responded they felt I was lagging behind production for Tarzan. I told them I had them done, but they told me they had already hired a staff artist to do the last two pages. The pages were never lost. That is why they were never published. They sat in a drawer for years before I finally sold them.” Grell’s other Tarzan storylines included a former friend of Tarzan turned mercenary, a wildlife artist in the path of a herd of stampeding elephants, a power-hungry madman who declares himself god of the Ho-Don, and a race to recover a crash-landed spacecraft. The last major storyline by Grell was “Christmas with Meriam,” featuring Tarzan and Jane’s son Korak and his wife Meriam, who gets kidnapped by an angry ape. [Author’s note: Burroughs spelled it “Meriem.”] Grell was reportedly the first artist to draw Meriam in a Sunday comic-strip story, and the second to draw Korak. (Russ Manning was the first.) Each major storyline lasted ten to 12 weeks. (For a complete list of the Grell Tarzan storylines and dates, see the sidebar.) Nothing, even dreams, lasts forever. Mike Grell enjoyed doing the Tarzan strip, but enjoyment was ultimately not enough. “What actually happened was that I was working on Sable and a couple of other things at the same time, and my contract was coming up. I knew I was being paid the same salary that Burne Hogarth was earning in 1953. I asked for a raise, and they said they could not do that. I told them without a raise I could not stay on the strip. They also told me they had never had anyone quit the strip before, and I told them I would be a first. And I left. I would love to have stayed and draw it for many years, but it did not happen.” Grell drew the Tarzan newspaper strip from July 17, 1981 to February 27, 1983, with the exception of a one-week fill-in by Thomas Yeates (and the two ghosted weeks). Gray Morrow succeeded Grell on the strip. However, it was not the last time Grell would draw Tarzan. Grell wrote and drew a four-issue miniseries for Dark Horse Comics in 1999 called Tarzan: The Savage Heart, as well as the story “Tarzan and the Gods of Opar” that ran in three issues of Dark Horse Presents in 2015. He also did interior illustrations for the 2017 novel Tarzan: The Greystoke Legacy Under Siege by Ralph N. Laughlin and Ann E. Johnson and the 2018 novel Tarzan and the Revolution by Thomas Zachek. Several of the Grell Tarzan newspaper strip storylines were reprinted in issue #4 of Comic Strip Preserves, published by Blackthorne Publishing, and copies of the strip clipped from the Sunday newspaper are readily available on eBay. Grell’s Tarzan was larger than life, just like the character of the legendary stories that inspired it. I think Edgar Rice Burroughs would have been pleased. Sincere thanks to Dennis Wilcutt and Mike Grell. The full interview with Grell appeared in The Burroughs Bulletin #96. For more about Grell, try the book Mike Grell: Life is Drawing Without an Eraser from TwoMorrows Publishing.

Lord of the Jungle Blackthorne’s Comic Strip Preserves: Tarzan #4 (Nov. 1986), collecting the Ape Man’s newspaper series, featured this incredible closeup of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ most famous hero as rendered by Grell. TM & © ERB, Inc.

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Send your comments to: Email: euryman@gmail.com (subject: BACK ISSUE) Postal mail: Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief • BACK ISSUE 112 Fairmount Way * New Bern, NC 28562

Find BACK ISSUE on

TUNING IN TO TV COMICS

In response to BI #128’s “Bronze Age TV Tie-Ins” theme, occasional BACK ISSUE and RetroFan writer Ian Millsted kindly shared with us these two images (right) from ’70s UK comics adapting the US television programs Mission: Impossible and Hawaii Five-0. Mr. Millsted will eventually be writing a RetroFan article on this topic. Book ’em, Ian-o!

As always, I enjoyed issue #130 [“Bronze Age Ads, Promos, and Gimmicks”]. Little error in Steven Thompson’s article on the DC Hotline. He says that in the Saturday, March 27, 1977 episode, Joe Orlando spoke of an “upcoming ‘Giant’ monthly Legion of SuperHeroes title that would never materialize.” Incorrect. Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes became a double-sized “Giant” format comic three months later, with issue #231. – Frank Balkin Re BI #131 [“The Kirby Legacy at DC”]: You know, since I’m Kirby Checklist guy, I have to forward three small errors (that’s not bad!): P23: Rosalind Kirby died Dec. 22, 1997, not 1998. This error lives on since Mark Evanier put this in his KKOC [Kirby: King of Comics] book. P45: Black Magic #4 is Apr.–May 1974, not June–July (picky, eh?). P56: “Zed” is mentioned with yo-yo, when it’s “Jed.” Result: BACK ISSUE #131 is awesome. I normally don’t read BI, as my interest only goes to 1978, but I’m gonna order BI #104 [“Fourth World After Kirby”] and complete the journey. – Richard Kolkman

ROY THOMAS SIFTS THROUGH THE SANDS OF TIME

Enjoyed the post-Kirby DC series issue. A couple of additions: SANDMAN: I recall that, at the time in the mid-1970s, when “Simon & Kirby’s” Sandman #1 sold so well, Paul Levitz and others at DC talked briefly of a “Sandman phenomenon” or some such thing because of those high sales. Paul is/was usually far in advance of me when it came to deal with sales figures and the like, since he had after all gone on to become DC’s publisher, while I took a long walk off a short pier after merely being Marvel’s editorin-chief for two-plus years. However, in this particular case, it was my insights rather than his that saw the fuller story… even if, at the moment, I forget one key detail. The time Sandman #1 came out (early 1974) happened to coincide with some 76 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

no second issue, apparently remained on sale for several months, and eventually sold a fierce number of issues. Fierce enough that DC understandably jumped into production with a regular Sandman title… which, despite Kirby covers and later Kirby artwork, was no kind of seller. Conan the Barbarian, too, leveled off… but at the higher percentage sales that it was enjoying by the mid-’70s, as it was slowly emerging as one of Marvel’s bestselling comics. Me, I loved that “S&K” Sandman, and grafted it first into Wonder Woman #300 and then, a bit more changed, into the later issues of Infinity, Inc.—but I did it because I liked the basic concept and costume, not because I was fooled by a single issue’s bumped-up sales. A little later, I made one of my few (at least conscious) contributions to DC while I was Marvel’s ed-in-chief. Gerry Conway, then newly arrived as a DC writer-editor, and my good friend, decided to arrange for me to come over from Marvel to sit down for a meeting with DC editorial director-publisher Carmine Infantino, whom I barely knew. Gerry’s idea, I suspect, was to see if I could be lured to DC… and I was more than happy to play along, as you never can tell where your future fortunes may lie. I don’t recall if Gerry was in Carmine’s office at the time, but—because this was at a time almost immediately after Jack Kirby had made his 1975 leap back to Marvel—I made it a point to suggest to Carmine that Kirby’s leaving was, at least, an opportunity for DC. “How so, chum?” was Carmine’s studiously casual comeback. “Well,” I said, “now you can revive New Gods and maybe other Kirby concepts and see if they can be made to sell when other people do them, without having to relinquish so much control to Jack.” There was an impious method in my madness, but it made sense to Carmine, who within days (hours?) assigned Gerry to revive New Gods. That didn’t work out in the long haul, but it was worth a shot, and I got a kick out of influencing Carmine. From that time on, I guess, dated his attempts to lure me over to DC to write Superman or whatever, attempts I resisted until, alas, he was long gone, and I could no longer come over as writer-editor. – Roy Thomas Thanks for the fascinating stories, Roy! kind of printing problem—I’d have to look up whether it was a paper shortage due to a strike at the Canadian mills where comics got a lot of their paper, or something else of that sort—which led to some comics not coming out on schedule to replace their predecessors on the newsstands. Because of that occurrence, we learned later, the comics that were on sale tended to stay on sale longer than they otherwise would. Monthlies would stay on sale for two months or longer, giving them time to rack up several extra percentage points in sales because a reader returning to a newsstand after several weeks would find the same comics on sale there are before, instead of the new issues. At Marvel, that phenomenon affected particularly the sales of Conan the Barbarian #37 (cover date Apr. 1974), drawn by Neal Adams, which became the bestselling issue for a year or two around it. Lest we at Marvel be fooled into thinking that it was Neal’s admittedly beautiful artwork that accounted (at least primarily) for that increase, the very next issue, #38, with art by Buscema, when it finally limped onto the stands, became the secondbest-selling issue for quite some time before and after. The DC equivalent of CTB, and doubtless another Marvel mag or three whose sales jump made less of a lasting impression on me, was Sandman #1… which, having

ENJOYED THE KIRBY FOCUS

Another fine edition of BACK ISSUE! I was astounded to learn that this was BI’s first Kirby cover. I hope it won’t be the last. I am one of the readers you did this issue for. I enjoy the occasional issue of The Jack Kirby Collector, but I only pick it up when a specific theme interests me. Since Kirby is such a huge part of the Bronze Age, I’d like to see more coverage of his stuff in future issues of BI. After all, other magazines don’t shy away from certain material simply because the subject may appear elsewhere. I can see your point, but I think there is a good part of your readership who, like me, do not read both publications and, also like me, don’t mind if we see another take on the subject anyway. I did appreciate that you steered clear of the Fourth World books. (And anyone who is interested in those classics should check out Old Gods and New, from TwoMorrows, one of their best books yet.) It was nice to see some love given to some of Kirby’s lesser, though just as interesting, efforts. When talking about his DC output beyond the Fourth World, most fans immediately think of the Demon and Kamandi, so I enjoyed the coverage on the “outer fringe” stuff like Atlas, Justice Inc., and the Losers. I was always intrigued by the timeline of DC’s many possible futures. The Bronze Age introduced more attention to continuity than before (Bob Haney notwithstanding). It seemed to be the time when fans started wondering how things pieced together: How did the Legion future fit in with the Kamandi future, or the Omac future? An article in The Amazing World of DC Comics was briefly mentioned. It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I remember it being pretty thorough (as well as being eerily accurate to predicting the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths). I wonder if one of your writers would like to find that article and examine it for the BI readership, perhaps in a Future Worlds–themed issue?

Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 77

Thanks for that (unsolicited) testimonial re TwoMorrows’ shipping practices, Michal. And as a reminder, in earlier issues of BI we explored many other Kirby series, including his runs on Captain America (and the Falcon), Black Panther, Super Powers, and Devil Dinosaur, plus his indie work like Captain Victory and, as recently as last issue, Silver Star. So while #131 was our first Kirby cover, despite my seeming editorial reluctance to navigate Kirby Collector waters, we’ve saluted the King of Comics many times… and we’re probably not done yet!

A ‘COULDN’T-PUT-IT-DOWN’ ISSUE

BACK ISSUE #131 was another superb issue. I was initially hesitant about the content as I wasn’t into comics when Jack Kirby originally arrived at DC, and although I have since bought trades of his New Gods and Mister Miracle stuff, I’m still not the biggest fan of his DC work. However, I can certainly appreciate his vast imagination and his commitment to bringing new and, frankly, bizarre concepts to comics. I was pleased to discover that issue #131 was more about Kirby’s legacy and how creators handled his creations after he left DC. I first encountered the Demon in The Brave and the Bold #109. I have always loved comics’ stranger, lower-tier characters, and I was immediately fascinated by Jason Blood and his demonic alter ego. It was also my introduction to the amazing art of Jim Aparo. In fact, Brave and the Bold was my gateway into Kirby’s creations, and the book really loved using his characters. B&B featured Demon in #109 and 137, Mister Miracle in #112, 128, and 138, and Kamandi in #120 and 157. Whilst over in my other favorite team-up title, DC Comics Presents, Superman would meet Mister Miracle in #12, OMAC in #61, Kamandi in #64, the Demon in #66, and the Challengers of the Unknown in #84, the latter issue being Kirby’s last major work for DC. I loved it when the team-up books featured these characters, as it was really the only exposure they received in the UK, where American comic-book distribution was patchy, to say the least. Whilst I was blown away by the George Pérez art of DC Comics Presents #61, featuring Superman teamed with OMAC, my favorite Kirby character remained the Demon, and I had plenty of sleepless nights when Alan Moore used him to horrific effect in Swamp Thing. I have to heap praise on all the article writers of issue #131, but in particular Robert V. Conte. His expansive Demon article stirred so many memories, and I appreciate the work he put into interviewing so many creators. I found the interviews with Stephen Bissette and Rick Veitch particularly interesting. How incredible would a Moore/ Bissette/Totleben Demon series have been? Not to mention the aborted Swamp Thing #88, which was to have featured the Demon’s origin on Earth.

I literally could not put down this issue. It was thoroughly researched and excellently presented. Well done, all. I also vote for a dinosaurs issue of BI, and I implore you to include one of my favorite strips of all time: “March of the Mighty Ones,” which was published in the UK humor title, Monster Fun, in the 1970s. I was crazily into dinosaurs as a child, and this strip, featuring robotic dinosaurs on the rampage from a theme park, was the first thing I read each Saturday morning. Thanks again for a superb publication. – Paul Burns, UK Paul, you’ll be pleased to learn that a Dinosaurs issue is stampeding your way—this November, in BI #140—with an amazing cover by Mark Schultz. The contents were determined before your message arrived, where I first learned of “March of the Mighty Ones,” so that Monster Fun feature won’t be included. However, now that you’ve put this on the BI radar, we’ll see what we can do about covering it in a future issue (and if any of you BI writers reading this are interested in researching and writing a Monster Fun article, please contact ye ed privately). Regarding B&B and DCCP—you’re preaching to the choir here! My love for team-up comics, especially The Brave and the Bold, has been well documented in these pages over the years. So please indulge me as I plug my new book from TwoMorrows, The Team-Up Companion, the 272-page “ultimate guide to Silver and Bronze Age team-up comics.” In the vein of my previous Justice League Companion and Krypton Companion books, as well as The Batcave Companion, which I co-produced with Michael Kronenberg, The Team-Up Companion explores in depth not only the aforementioned DC team-up titles (among others from DC), but Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Two-in-One, the original DC-Marvel team-ups, Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, and much more—even The New Scooby-Doo Movies! It’s a labor of love, with lots of creator quotes and behind-the-scenes info about those gateway series so many of us followed. Ordering information can be found elsewhere in this issue.

78 • BACK ISSUE • Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue

Richard Arndt’s look at Black Magic reminded me just how much those stories creeped me out and how I need to start looking in comics shops and eBay for those issues. Mr. Arndt’s mention of the “Maniac” story brought back some shivery memories! Another feature I like about BI is that the articles always tell how long a short series was published. If I want to build a full set of Black Magic, I know now that it ran nine issues. The hunt is on! For anyone who has considered a subscription to BI (or another favorite, RetroFan, or any of TwoMorrows’ fine magazines), keep in mind that they arrive in your mailbox in a sturdy plastic mailer with a backing board. These guys know the satisfaction of a mintcondition magazine! – Michal Jacot

DEMONS SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

Just so you know I read the entire issue, the reference to Kamandi #29 is apt as on the Blu-ray It’s been a little since I wrote an LOC, but as of the new movie Justice Society World War II, I said your editorial gave me the impetus to there is a Kamandi short attached (screencompose this. cap above) that details the contest to be worthy As I read Robert Conte’s excellent Demon of the Superman outfit a tribe has found. article, something tweaked in my memory. Everything else in the issue was up to BI’s Fairly recently I tracked down a copy of an usual extremely high standards, including, of old silent black-and-white German movie I course, the images you chose to accompany have heard of for years called Häxan, a history my OMAC article. Every article gives me of witchcraft. background on things I did know and have Just viewing the cover, I was reminded of read, as well as informing me of things I Etrigan and seemed to remember reading about haven’t, but now need to track down! a connection somewhere. So, going through – Brian Martin my Jack Kirby Collector issues, I found the article © Aljosha Production Company/ Svensk Filmdustri. postulating that Hal Foster had seen the movie and used the one image as the basis for the disguise Prince Valiant used that What a ghastly li’l demon that Häxan is! Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, dear readers, was shot in Denmark by director is acknowledged as the inspiration for Etrigan. Benjamin Christensen and released in Germany Since your editorial reflects on the fact that readers in 1922. No matter where he got the inspiration of BI are not necessarily readers of TJKC for Etrigan the Demon, however, Jack Kirby’s and vice versa, I thought it might be a fearsome fiend-hero remains as vital a connection most were not aware of. I character today as he was decades ago when have included the best screen picture I he was introduced. could take (inset above). As for the rest of the Demon article, as I Next issue: 1980s Pre-Crisis DC Miniseries! said, I thought it was fantastic and I thank Green Arrow, Secrets of the Legion, Tales of you for including the image on page 13 the Green Lantern Corps, Krypton Chronicles, (yes, my favorite image in a Demon article America vs. the Justice Society, The Legend is on page 13!). That picture, in isolation, of Wonder Woman, Conqueror of the but even more so in the context of that issue, Barren Earth, and more! Featuring MIKE W. is one of my all-time top comic illustrations. BARR, KURT BUSIEK, GARY COHN, JACK C. It captures the perfect image at the perfect HARRIS, TODD KLEIN, PAUL KUPPERBERG, time in a perfect story (yes, Saga of the Swamp RON RANDALL, TRINA ROBBINS, JOE Thing #25–27 had quite an effect on me). STATON, CURT SWAN, ROY THOMAS, and A final comment on Etrigan. The justother creators. Re-presenting the Green released second issue of the Sandman/Locke Arrow #1 cover by TREVOR VON EEDEN & Key crossover has an explanation of how he and DICK GIORDANO. Don’t ask—just BI attained his rhyming status. it! See you in thirty! Green Arrow TM & © DC Comics. Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, BACK ISSUE © TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Eury, editor-in-chief Bronze Age Comic Strips Issue • BACK ISSUE • 79

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THE

CHARLTON COMPANION by JON B. COOKE

An ALL-NEW definitive history of Connecticut’s notorious all-in-one comic book company! Often disparaged as a second-rate funny-book outfit, Charlton produced a vast array of titles that span from the 1940s Golden Age to the Bronze Age of the ’70s in many genres, from Hot Rods to Haunted Love. The imprint experienced explosive bursts of creativity, most memorably the “Action Hero Line” edited by DICK GIORDANO in the 1960s, which featured the renowned talents of STEVE DITKO and a stellar team of creators, as well as the unforgettable ’70s “Bullseye” era that spawned E-Man and Doomsday +1, all helmed by veteran masters and talented newcomers—and serving as a training ground for an entire generation of comics creators thriving in an environment of complete creative freedom. From its beginnings with a handshake deal consummated in county jail, to the company’s accomplishments beyond comics, woven into this prose narrative are interviews with dozens of talented participants, including GIORDANO, DENNIS O’NEIL, ALEX TOTH, SANHO KIM, TOM SUTTON, PAT BOYETTE, NICK CUTI, JOHN BYRNE, MIKE ZECK, JOE STATON, SAM GLANZMAN, NEAL ADAMS, JOE GILL, and even some Derby residents who recall working in the sprawling company plant. Though it gave up the ghost over three decades ago, Charlton’s influence continues today with its Action Heroes serving as inspiration for ALAN MOORE’s cross-media graphic novel hit, WATCHMEN. By JON B. COOKE with MICHAEL AMBROSE & FRANK MOTLER. SHIPS OCTOBER 2022! (256-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-111-0

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TEAM-UP COMPANION by MICHAEL EURY

THE TEAM-UP COMPANION examines team-up comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages of Comics—DC’s THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD and DC COMICS PRESENTS, Marvel’s MARVEL TEAM-UP and MARVEL TWO-INONE, plus other team-up titles, treasuries, and treats—in a lushly illustrated selection of informative essays, special features, and trivia-loaded issue-by-issue indexes. Go behind the scenes of your favorite team-up comic books with specially curated and all-new creator recollections from NEAL ADAMS, JIM APARO, MIKE W. BARR, ELIOT R. BROWN, NICK CARDY, CHRIS CLAREMONT, GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE GERBER, STEVEN GRANT, BOB HANEY, TONY ISABELLA, PAUL KUPPERBERG, PAUL LEVITZ, RALPH MACCHIO, DENNIS O’NEIL, MARTIN PASKO, JOE RUBINSTEIN, ROY THOMAS, LEN WEIN, MARV WOLFMAN, and other all-star writers and artists who produced the team-up tales that so captivated readers during the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s. By BACK ISSUE and RETROFAN editor MICHAEL EURY. (272-page SOFTCOVER) $36.95 • (Digital Edition) $15.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-112-7 • SHIPS AUGUST 2022!

THE LIFE & ART OF

DAVE COCKRUM

by GLEN CADIGAN

From the letters pages of Silver Age comics to his 2021 induction into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, the career of DAVE COCKRUM started at the bottom and then rose to the top of the comic book industry. Beginning with his childhood obsession with comics and continuing through his years in the Navy, THE LIFE AND ART OF DAVE COCKRUM follows the rising star from fandom (where he was one of the “Big Three” fanzine artists) to pro-dom, where he helped revive two struggling comic book franchises: the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES and the X-MEN. A prolific costume designer and character creator, his redesigns of the Legion and his introduction of X-Men characters Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Thunderbird (plus his design of Wolverine’s alter ego, Logan) laid the foundation for both titles to become best-sellers. His later work on his own property, THE FUTURIANS, as well as childhood favorite BLACKHAWK and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS, plus his five years on SOULSEARCHERS AND COMPANY, cemented his position as an industry giant. Featuring artwork from fanzines, unused character designs, and other rare material, this is THE comprehensive biography of the legendary comic book artist, whose influence is still felt on the industry today! Written by GLEN CADIGAN (THE LEGION COMPANION, THE TITANS COMPANION Volumes 1 and 2, BEST OF THE LEGION OUTPOST) with an introduction by ALEX ROSS. (160-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $27.95 • (LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER) $36.95 • (Digital Edition) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-113-4 • SHIPS JUNE 2022!

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1980s PRE-CRISIS DC MINISERIES! Green Arrow, Secrets of the Legion, Tales of the Green Lantern Corps, Krypton Chronicles, America vs. the Justice Society, Legend of Wonder Woman, Conqueror of the Barren Earth, and more! Featuring MIKE W. BARR, KURT BUSIEK, PAUL KUPPERBERG, RON RANDALL, TRINA ROBBINS, JOE STATON, CURT SWAN, ROY THOMAS, and others. VON EEDEN and GIORDANO cover.

CLASSIC HEROES IN THE BRONZE AGE! The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Flash Gordon, Popeye, Zorro and Lady Rawhide, Son of Tomahawk, Jungle Twins, and more! Featuring the work of DAN JURGENS, JOE R. LANSDALE, DON McGREGOR, FRANK THORNE, TIM TRUMAN, GEORGE WILDMAN, THOMAS YEATES, and other creators. With a classic 1979 fully painted Gold Key cover of Flash Gordon.

NOT-READY-FOR-PRIMETIME MARVEL HEROES! Mighty Marvel’s Bronze Age second bananas: Doc Samson, Jack of Hearts, Thundra, Nighthawk, Starfox, Modred the Mystic, Woodgod, the Shroud, Thunderbird and Warpath, Stingray, Wundaar, and others! Featuring the work of BUSIEK, DAVID, ENGLEHART, GERBER, GIFFEN, GRANT, MANTLO, MICHELINIE, STERN, THOMAS, and other A-list talent!

DINOSAUR COMICS! Interviews with Xenozoic®’s MARK SCHULTZ and dinoartist extraordinaire WILLIAM STOUT! Plus: Godzilla at Dark Horse, Sauron villain history, Dinosaurs Attack!, Dinosaurs for Hire, Dinosaur Rex, Dino Riders, Lord Dinosaur, and Jurassic Park! Featuring ARTHUR ADAMS, BISSETTE, CLAREMONT, COCKRUM, GERANI, STRADLEY, ROY THOMAS, and more. SCHULTZ cover.

SPIES AND P.I.s! Nick Fury from Howling Commando to Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Ms. Tree’s MAX ALLAN COLLINS and TERRY BEATTY in a Pro2Pro interview, MARK EVANIER on his Crossfire series, a Hydra villain history, WILL EISNER’s John Law, Checkmate, and Tim Trench and Mike Mauser. With ENGLEHART, ERWIN, HALL, ISABELLA, KUPPERBERG, STATON, THOMAS, and cover by DAVE JOHNSON!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #81

KIRBY COLLECTOR #82

KIRBY COLLECTOR #83

KIRBY COLLECTOR #84

KIRBY COLLECTOR #85

“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!

“THE MANY WORLDS OF JACK KIRBY!” From Sub-Atomica to outer space, visit Kirby’s work from World War II, the Fourth World, and hidden worlds of Subterranea, Wakanda, Olympia, Lemuria, Atlantis, the Microverse, and others! Plus, a 2021 Kirby panel, featuring JONATHAN ROSS, NEIL GAIMAN, & MARK EVANIER, a Kirby pencil art gallery from MACHINE MAN, 2001, DEVIL DINOSAUR, & more!

FAMOUS FIRSTS! How JACK KIRBY was a pioneer in all areas of comics: Romance Comics genre, Kid Gangs, double-page spreads, Black heroes, new formats, super-hero satire, and others! With MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, plus a gallery of Jack’s pencil art from CAPTAIN AMERICA, JIMMY OLSEN, CAPTAIN VICTORY, DESTROYER DUCK, BLACK PANTHER, and more!

STEVE SHERMAN TRIBUTE! Kirby family members, friends, comics creators, and the entertainment industry salute Jack’s assistant (and puppeteer on Men in Black, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and others). MARK EVANIER and Steve recall assisting Kirby, Steve discusses Jack’s Speak-Out Series, Kirby memorabilia from his collection, an interview with wife DIANA MERCER, and Steve’s unseen 1974 KIRBY/ROYER cover!

KIRBY: ANIMATED! How JACK KIRBY and his concepts leaped from celluloid, to paper, and back again! From his 1930s start on Popeye and Betty Boop and his work being used on the 1960s Marvel Super-Heroes show, to Fantastic Four (1967 and 1978), Super Friends/Super Powers, Scooby-Doo, Thundarr the Barbarian, and Ruby-Spears. Plus EVAN DORKIN on his abandoned Kamandi cartoon series, and more!

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CBA BULLPEN

JOHN SEVERIN

Collects all seven issues of JON B. COOKE’s TWO-FISTED COMIC ARTIST little-seen fanzine, published just after the A spirited biography of EC Comics mainstay original COMIC BOOK ARTIST ended its (with HARVEY KURTZMAN on Mad and TwoMorrows run in 2003. Interviews with Two-Fisted Tales) and co-creator of Western GEORGE TUSKA, FRED HEMBECK, TERRY strip American Eagle. Covers his 40+ year BEATTY, and FRANK BOLLE, an all-star association with Cracked magazine, his tribute to JACK ABEL, a new feature on pivotal Marvel Comics work inking HERB JACK KIRBY’s unknown 1960 baseball card TRIMPE on The Hulk & teaming with sister art, and a 16-page full-color section! MARIE SEVERIN on King Kull, and more! By GREG BIGA and JON B. COOKE. (176-page TRADE PAPERBACK with COLOR) $24.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.99 (160-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-105-9 (Digital Edition) $14.99 • Now shipping! Now shipping!

OUR ARTISTS AT WAR AMERICAN TV COMICS Examines US War comics: EC COMICS (Two-Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat), DC COMICS (Enemy Ace, G.I. Combat, Our Fighting Forces, Our Army at War), WARREN PUBLISHING (Blazing Combat), CHARLTON (Willy Schultz and the Iron Corporal) and more! Featuring KURTZMAN, SEVERIN, DAVIS, WOOD, KUBERT, GLANZMAN, KIRBY, and others! By RICHARD ARNDT and STEVEN FEARS, with an introduction by ROY THOMAS. (160-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $27.95 (Digital Edition) $14.99 • Now shipping!

BRICKJOURNAL #74

Amazing LEGO® STAR WARS builds, including Lando Calrissian’s Treadable PETER BOSCH’s history of over 300 TV shows and 2000+ comic book adaptations by JÜRGEN WITTNER, Starkiller Base by JHAELON EDWARDS, and more from across five decades, from well-known STEVEN SMYTH and Bantha Bricks! Plus: series (STAR TREK, THE MUNSTERS) to lesser-known shows (CAPTAIN GALLANT, Minifigure Customization by JARED K. BURKS, AFOLs by GREG HYLAND, stepPINKY LEE). With profiles of artists who by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by drew TV comics: GENE COLAN, ALEX CHRISTOPHER DECK (including a LEGO TOTH, DAN SPIEGLE, RUSS MANNING, JOHN BUSCEMA, RUSS HEATH, and more! BB-8), and more! Edited by JOE MENO. (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (192-page COLOR SOFTCOVER) $29.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping! (Digital Edition) $15.99 • Now shipping!

(1940s-1980s)

New Magazines!

ALTER EGO #176

ALTER EGO #177

ALTER EGO #178

The Golden Age comics of major pulp magazine publisher STREET & SMITH (THE SHADOW, DOC SAVAGE, RED DRAGON, SUPERSNIPE) examined in loving detail by MARK CARLSON-GHOST! Art by BOB POWELL, HOWARD NOSTRAND, and others, ANTHONY TOLLIN on “The Shadow/Batman Connection”, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, JOHN BROOME, PETER NORMANTON, and more!

Celebration of veteran artist DON PERLIN—artist of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT, THE DEFENDERS, GHOST RIDER, MOON KNIGHT, 1950s horror, and just about every other adventure genre under the fourcolor sun! Plus Golden Age artist MARCIA SNYDER—Marvel’s early variant covers— Marvelmania club and fanzine—FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT on Cracked Mazagine, & more!

Golden Age great EMIL GERSHWIN, artist of Starman, Spy Smasher, and ACG horror—in a super-length special MR. MONSTER’S COMIC CRYPT by MICHAEL T. GILBERT—plus a Gershwin showcase in PETER NORMANTON’s From The Tomb— even a few tidbits about relatives GEORGE and IRA GERSHWIN to top it off! Also FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), and other surprise features!

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ALTER EGO #179

ALTER EGO #180

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #27 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #28 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #29

Celebrating the 61st Anniversary of FANTASTIC FOUR #1—’cause we kinda blew right past its 60th—plus a sagacious salute to STAN LEE’s 100th birthday, with never-before-seen highlights—and to FF #1 and #2 inker GEORGE KLEIN! Spotlight on Sub-Mariner in the Bowery in FF #4—plus sensational secrets behind FF #1 and #3! Also: FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, a JACK KIRBY cover, and more!

THE YOUNG ALL-STARS—the late-1980s successor to ALL-STAR SQUADRON! Interviews with first artist BRIAN MURRAY and last artist LOU MANNA—surprising insights by writer/co-creator ROY THOMAS—plus a panorama of never-seen Young All-Stars artwork! All-new cover by BRIAN MURRAY! Plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and beyond!

Extensive PAUL GULACY retrospective by GREG BIGA that includes Paul himself, VAL MAYERIK, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, TIM TRUMAN, ROY THOMAS, and others. Plus a JOE SINNOTT MEMORIAL; BUD PLANT interview Part One, as the retail and mail-order pioneer discusses his early years and first forays as San Jose comic shop proprietor—at 16!; our regular columnists, and the latest from HEMBECK!

STEVE BISSETTE career-spanning interview, from his Joe Kubert School days, Swamp Thing stint, publisher of Taboo and Tyrant, creator rights crusader, and more. Also, Part One of our MIKE GOLD interview on his Chicago youth, start in underground comix, and arrival at DC Comics, right in time for the implosion! Plus BUD PLANT on his publishing days, comic shop owner, and start in mail order—and all the usual fun stuff!

DON McGREGOR retrospective, from early ’70s Warren Publications scripter to his breakout work at Marvel Comics on BLACK PANTHER, KILLRAVEN, SABRE, DETECTIVES INC., RAGAMUFFINS, and others. Plus ROBERT MENZIES looks at HERB TRIMPE’s mid-’70s UK visit to work on Marvel’s British comics weeklies, MIKE GOLD Part Two, and CARtoons cartoonist SHAWN KERRIE! SANDY PLUNKETT cover!

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ALTER EGO #175

Spotlighting the artists of ROY THOMAS’ 1980s DC series ALL-STAR SQUADRON! Interviews with artists ARVELL JONES, RICHARD HOWELL, and JERRY ORDWAY, conducted by RICHARD ARNDT! Plus, the Squadron’s FINAL SECRETS, including previously unpublished art, & covers for issues that never existed! With FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and a wraparound cover by ARVELL JONES!

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ALTER EGO #174

FCA (Fawcett Collectors Of America) issue—spearheaded by feisty and informative articles by Captain Marvel co-creator C.C. BECK—plus a fabulous feature on vintage cards created in Spain and starring The Marvel Family! In addition: DR. WILLIAM FOSTER III interview (conclusion)—MICHAEL T. GILBERT on early rivals of MAD magazine—the haunting of JOHN BROOME—and more! BECK cover!