Back Issue #18

Romita & Conway go “Pro2Pro” on Green Goblin!

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GREEN LANTERN AND GREEN ARROW TM & © DC COMICS. HULK TM & © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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GREEN HORNET • GUY GARDNER • MARTIAN MANHUNTER • GREEN TEAM

The Ultimate Comics Experience!

Volume 1, Number 18 October 2006 Celebrating the Best Comics of the '70s, '80s, and Today!

EDITOR Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

BACK SEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Bob Brodsky, Seastone Marketing Group PROOFREADERS Eric Nolen-Weathington & Christopher Irving COVER ARTIST Neal Adams COVER DESIGNER Robert Clark SPECIAL THANKS Dan Johnson Arthur Adams Dale Keown Jason Adams Jim Kingman Neal Adams Scott Kress Bill Alger Bob McLeod Mike Baron Brian K. Morris Mike W. Barr Al Nickerson Al Bigley Dennis O’Neil Alex Boney John Petty Jerry Boyd Robert Reilly Michael Browning Adam Richards Randy Buccini John Romita, Sr. Mike Burkey Rose Rummel-Eury Jeff Butler Philip Schweier Tony Caputo Scoop Ernie Chan Joe Staton Continuity Studios Brian Stelfreeze Gerry Conway Tom Stewart Nicola Cuti Shannon Wendlick Peter David John Wells J. M. DeMatteis Marv Wolfman Shelton Drum Ed Dukeshire Steve Englehart Steve Erwin Ron Fortier Dave Gibbons Grand Comic-Book Database Mike Grell David Hamilton Jack C. Harris Heritage Comics Adam Hughes

ISSN 1932-6904

INTERVIEW: Peter David on The Incredible Hulk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The celebrated “writer of stuff” surveys his days in Bruce Banner-land NEAL ADAMS GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW ART GALLERY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Four pages of ultra-rare Adams illustrations Original 1993 commissioned drawing of the Hulk by Ernie Chan. From the collection of Al Bigley. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

DESIGNER Rich J. Fowlks

BACKSTAGE PASS: An Afternoon with Neal Adams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 An intimate portrait of the groundbreaking artist YOUR BACKSTAGE PASS TO CONTINUITY STUDIOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A photo tour that’s the next best thing to being there FLASHBACK: Lone Lantern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 The solo adventures of Hal Jordan after Green Lantern/Green Arrow OFF MY CHEST: Guy Gardner: The One, True Green Lantern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Al Nickerson (with help from friends) reveals why this GL’s his number-one Guy INTERVIEW: Mike Grell on Green Arrow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The writer/artist draws aim on DC’s archer, with never-before-published illos ROUGH STUFF: Dave Gibbons Pencil Art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 From Albion to Watchmen, “raw” work by a modern master PRO2PRO: Gerry Conway and John Romita, Sr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Revisiting “The Green Goblin’s Last Stand,” and lamenting the death of Gwen Stacy BEYOND CAPES: Now Comics’ Green Hornet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 The story behind the popular and controversial rebirth of the classic crimefighter WHAT THE--?!: The Lost Adventures of the Green Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 “The Comics Savant” examines Joe Simon’s boy millionaires FLASHBACK: The Martian Manhunter Chronicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Making sense of J’onn J’onzz’s ever-changing history BACK IN PRINT: E-Man: Recharged . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Cuti and Staton’s energy man is back on the stands … and we helped put him there!

BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Reader feedback on issue #16 BACK ISSUE™ is published bimonthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor, 5060A Foothills Dr., Lake Oswego, OR 97034. Email: euryman@msn.com. Six-issue subscriptions: $36 Standard US, $54 First Class US, $66 Canada, $72 Surface International, $96 Airmail International.

Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Neal Adams. Green Lantern and Green Arrow TM & © DC Comics. The Incredible Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2006 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing.

BACK ISSUE is a TM of TwoMorrows Publishing. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

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Michael Eury

This issue has been a pain.

No, I’m not grousing about deadlines. Or the tough-to-manage process of producing a magazine in the thick of the rollicking convention season.

I’m dealing with an injury that makes onceroutine tasks—from brushing my teeth to loading the dryer to opening a window—annoying and painful. I have “golfer’s elbow,” an overuse of the forearm tendons and muscles in my right arm.

Pretentious-sounding malady, huh? Truth is, while I do own a Cutter and Buck shirt and live in a golffriendly community, the closest I’ve come to the sport is a putt-putt game in New Bern, North Carolina, back during the summer of ’92.

Mine’s an occupational injury caused by excessive computer use (maybe I’ll write a new Disney movie called That Darn Mouse!). Being middle-aged—an incurable condition shared by many of you who are inclined to read a magazine titled “BACK ISSUE”— I’m discovering what it’s like to have my body slowly decay, despite my eating organic produce, riding a bike and walking for transportation, and going to the gym each morning. It’s difficult for me to type about the return of E-Man when the abhorrent ErgonomicMeddler is firing shafts at my elbow.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Yeah. Okay. You’re right, Ollie. You know what it’s like to overcome an occupational injury. Sorry for whining.

Let me soothe my golfer’s elbow by popping one of my favorite painkillers: old comic books. If you’ve got an itch to explore comics from the ’70s and ’80s, then BACK ISSUE is your one-stop pharmaceutical supplier. No prescription necessary, but highly addictive.

In these pages every other month, series from comics’ Bronze and early Modern Ages are examined—and sometimes exhumed—with a journalistic balance of careful study and diehard devotion.

We do this, as longtime readers know, through these regular and rotating departments: • “Pro2Pro” (dialogues between two or more comics professionals); • “Greatest Stories Never Told” (investigations of lost and unpublished treasures); • “FlashBack” (histories of classic comics stories and series); • “Beyond Capes” (chronicles of non-super-hero comics); • “Off My Chest” (guest editorials); • “Backstage Pass” (behind-the-scenes glimpses at comics-inspired retro cinema, artists’ studios, or other sites of interest); • “Interview” (cozy chats with some of comics’ greatest); • “Bring on the Bad Guys” (super-villain case studies); • “Comics on DVD” (reviews of new releases of interest to the comics reader); • “Back in Print” (reviews or previews of collected editions and revived series); and • looks at the comic-book oddities that make us collectively gasp “What The--?!”

And, of course, there’s “Rough Stuff,” our pencil-art showcase that has recently graduated to its own quarterly title! This issue’s Dave Gibbons “Rough Stuff” is the feature’s last outing in these pages … but art fans will be happy to learn that rare comics illos will continue to see print in BACK ISSUE, in articles and in art galleries.

Another feature makes BACK ISSUE unique (other than my habit of both capitalizing and italicizing its title): Each issue’s content is structured around a unifying theme. This “Big, Green Issue” you hold in your hands has nothing to do with Al Gore’s environmental crusade—instead, it shines an emerald beam on a gaggle of comics characters with “green” either in their names or as their pigmentation!

Effective immediately, my editorials will appear on this page, to provide insight into each issue’s material.

While my fingerprints might be all over each issue, this magazine would not exist without our talented team of writers and designers, the contributions of supportive original-art collectors, and the enthusiasm of our readers.

Thanks to everyone for helping make BACK ISSUE the comics mag that keeps our competitors green with envy!

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Many classic comic-book runs are historically defined by the artists that worked on them: Joe Shuster/Wayne Boring/Curt Swan on Superman, Neal Adams on Batman, or Jack Kirby on darned near everything he did.

However, fewer seem to be associated with a single writer, especially if he speaks with an American accent.

Peter David’s 12-year association with The Incredible Hulk is one such exception.

While still a recognizable figure to pop-culture fanatics outside of comics fandom due in large part to the CBS-TV series featuring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, the Green Goliath’s comic’s sales had plunged dangerously towards cancellation in the 1980s. But just as Frank Miller’s creative input on Daredevil saved that magazine from becoming a trivia question, the self-professed “writer of stuff” pulled The Incredible Hulk from its sales morass. Working with a series of talented artists, David applied a combination of sharp dialogue, dark humor, and innovation to keep the book fresh. Eventually, The Incredible Hulk worked its way toward the top of Marvel Comics’ sales charts.

Listing Peter David’s creative output over the last two decades would fill this magazine to bursting! He’s written comic stories for DC, Dark Horse, Claypool, Ocean, and others. He’s also scripted for TV and movies, along with numerous articles and more than 50 books—fiction and non-fiction—carrying his credit, some of which have made the New York Times best-seller list.

And fortunately for his loyal fans, Peter David shows no sign of slowing down.

—Brian K. Morris

s B r i a n K . M o r r i200 6

con duc ted via em ail

on July 13,

Gray Hulk vs. Green Hulk Detail from penciler Dale Keown and inker Bob McLeod’s original cover art to the Peter David-written Incredible Hulk #376 (Dec. 1990).

Courtesy of Bob McLeod. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Beginnings: “Compulsion,” Spectacular Spider-Man #103 (June 1985)

Milestones: Comics: The Incredible Hulk / Spectacular Spider-Man / Spider-Man 2099 / X-Factor / Sachs and Violens / Wolverine / Captain Marvel / The Atlantis Chronicles / Aquaman / Star Trek / Spy Boy / Spike: Old Times / Spike Vs. Dracula / Books: The Incredible Hulk: Ground Zero / Photon and Psi-Man series (as “David Peters”) / various Babylon 5 and Star Trek novels / co-creator of the Star Trek: New Frontier series Howling Mad, the King Arthur trilogy / movie novelizations / Television: Space Cases / Babylon 5 / Crusade / Movies: Oblivion / Oblivion 2: Backlash / Trancers 4: Jack of Swords

Works in Progress: Fallen Angel (IDW) / Soulsearchers and Company (Claypool) / Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man / Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man / X-Factor / 1602: Fantastic Four / Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series / “But I Digress” for The Comics Buyer’s Guide

Cyberspace: www.peterdavid.net

Peter David Photo courtesy of Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find.

BRIAN K. MORRIS: You began your career at Marvel Comics in its Direct Sales department. How did you get the job and what were your duties?

PETER DAVID: Interesting story: I was assigned by Comics Scene magazine—long defunct—to do a story on the direct-sales market. One of the people I interviewed was Carol Kalish, then the newly instituted head of Direct Sales. We hit it off and talked for hours, until both our throats were raw.

Toward the end of the interview, she asked what I did for a living when I wasn’t doing freelance stories. I told her that I was working in the wholesale division of a book publisher which had been sold, so my job, along with about a hundred other people’s, was going away. This immediately piqued her interested, because she was looking to hire an assistant. She hired me a few weeks later after she brought me back for more formal interviews.

My duties were many and varied, including putting together the sales orders, overseeing print runs, troubleshooting, dealing with distributor problems, etc. Basically, anything having to do with getting books into the stores, I was involved with at some level.

MORRIS: When you were working in Direct Sales, was getting to the writing side your ultimate career goal at Marvel? © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DAVID: No, not at all. I got the job in Direct Sales because my career track at the time was book sales.

Writing was what I did on the side. The more time I spent at Marvel, though, the more it seemed a challenge to try and sell a few stories here and there. It never occurred to me that I could make a fulltime living at it.

MORRIS: What was your prior writing experience?

DAVID: I had a Bachelor’s degree in journalism. I did some newspaper work. I also started writing novels, including Knight Life, which was published

by Ace books.

MORRIS: How did you get an opportunity to write The Incredible Hulk after Al Milgrom?

DAVID: Bob Harras walked into my office and asked if I’d be interested. Honestly, I wish I had a snappier answer than that. But the truth is that no one else was really interested in writing the book at the time.

MORRIS: When you first thought of submitting stories to Marvel, was the Hulk on your list of characters to write for?

DAVID: No. MORRIS: Was there something you’d have preferred to work on?

DAVID: Pretty much anything else, actually. The green, brainless “Hulk smash” Hulk had absolutely no allure for me. But when Bob approached me, he told me they had just transformed him back to his early gray, gangsterish incarnation, and that sounded like it had potential.

MORRIS: What inspired you to return to the Lee/Kirby gray, brutal Hulk?

DAVID: Again, I didn’t return to it. It’s a popular misconception: It’s so associated with me that people assume I made that change. I didn’t. Al and Bob made the change. I simply came in and stuck with it.

MORRIS: How were the sales when you started on the book?

DAVID: Sales were pretty much flatlined.

In fact, even for most of Todd’s [McFarlane] run they were still pretty flat.

MORRIS: To what do you attribute the increase in sales as the years went on?

DAVID: It wasn’t until the Wolverine guest shot in #340 (Feb. 1988) that people started seeing what we were doing with the book.

Ironically, once retailers finally started increasing orders, Todd was off the book. Sales started climbing with the Jeff Purves era [issues #347–366], interestingly enough, and then really skyrocketed once Dale [Keown] came aboard [issue #367]. I guess people just liked the combination of story and artists.

MORRIS: Where the savage/dumb Hulk persona lasted for years and years, it seemed like you reinvented the book every year or so. Since your sales seemed to be gaining momentum as time went on, why did you change the direction of the title so often, as opposed to sticking with something that comic fans were obviously responding favorably to?

DAVID: I didn’t change it “so often.” I changed it when I saw sales starting to dip. Back in those days, I had total access to sales numbers. So if a particular incarnation of the Hulk was starting to lose momentum, I was able to perceive that three, four months in advance and immediately course-correct.

I miss those days. It made it so much easier as a writer to have that information because it enabled me to stay ahead of the curve … as opposed to discovering reader erosion—not three months in advance of sale—but two months after the book has hit the stands.

MORRIS: What were your inspirations for the various phases of the Hulk, such as Joe Fixit, “the Professor,” the Pantheon, Savage Banner, etc.?

DAVID: Joe Fixit stemmed not only from the attitude of the Hulk as seen way back in the original Incredible Hulk #6 (Mar. 1963), but from the idea of flip-flopping the status quo. A typical Hulk story has Banner having set up some sort of life for himself and then the Hulk comes along and ruins it.

With Mr. Fixit, it was the Hulk who had a pretty sweet deal going … and Banner comes along and mucks it up.

For the merged Hulk—not “the Professor,” a term I despise to this day—it derived from the notion that, in treating MPD [Multiple Personality Disorder], the therapist typically tries to merge the personalities. So the merged Hulk was supposed to be the ultimate blending of the shattered personalities that Bruce and the two Hulks represented. Again, some of that stemmed from Hulk #6, when—for a few very loopy pages—the Hulk had Bruce Banner’s head. And that was such a weird looking image that it became the artistic model for the merged Hulk. If you look at him carefully, you’ll realize he’s got Bruce Banner’s face.

The Pantheon was simply a means of giving the merged Hulk some sort of base from which to work. I wanted to create a think tank with teeth. Since the Hulk had the brains and brawn to accomplish anything, it seemed logical to give him an environment that would enable him to do so. The real genesis for it stemmed from a time when Dale Keown

McFarlane Smash!

and I were on a promo tour for The Hulk and we flew over a mountain range. And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was an entire organization hidden in one of those mountains?”

“Savage Banner” was merely a short-term story device that stemmed from, yet again, flip-flopping the familiar status quo. Instead of the madder Hulk gets, the stronger he gets, in this instance it was the madder he got, the weaker he got.

MORRIS: You had many outstanding artists on your run such as Todd McFarlane, Jeff Purves, Dale Keown, Gary Frank, Liam Sharp, Angel Medina, Mike Deodato, and Adam Kubert. Did you tailor your plots to your artists’ strength or did you write the stories, trusting them to use their own skills to deliver what you intended?

DAVID: I tried to tailor them, yes, with varying amounts of success.

MORRIS: What did Bobbie Chase bring to the editorial

The splash page (story page 2) of Incredible Hulk #336 (Oct. 1987), with pencils by Todd McFarlane and inks by Jim Sanders III. Courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

© 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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The Unpublishable Hulk If you can’t recall this eye-catching Todd McFarlane/Al Gordon cover to Incredible Hulk #346 (Aug. 1988), your memory’s sound: this art wasn’t published. In its place ran an Erik Larsen-penciled/McFarlaneinked cover emphasizing supporting-cast members Clay Quartermain, Rick Jones, and Betty Banner, more appropriate to the subject matter of the issue’s Peter David script, “Whys and Wherefores.” Special thanks to Mike Burkey (www.romitaman.com) for this find! © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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table and how did her approach differ from Bob Harras, your first editor?

DAVID: They were fairly similar, I thought, which made sense since Bobbie trained under Bob. Basically she had a rock solid story sense, was supportive of the many and whacked ideas I came up with, and protected my backside as much as possible in dust-ups with the Powers That Be. That’s pretty much the most you can hope for from an editor.

MORRIS: In time, the book became one of Marvel’s most popular titles. What benefits and challenges did this bring to you as writer?

DAVID: Well, the benefit was, naturally, notoriety.

The downside is that, when something becomes successful, people in authority who had nothing to contribute before suddenly decide that they know how to make it even more successful. Thus resulted, for instance, the directive to take the Hulk and make him mute and brainless, a move that I felt would be catastrophic. They went ahead and did it without me, and bam, sales went right down the chute. Naturally, once they started going back to the types of stories I had told, sales went back up.

MORRIS: What were the challenges of having to write around the “Heroes Reborn” Hulk?

DAVID: It was a mess. I wasn’t sure how much of his personality I had claim to, or what he was supposed to be or what he was supposed to do. It threw off the entire dynamic. I hate those stories to this day.

MORRIS: Eventually, you left the title with issue #467 (Aug. 1998). Why? DAVID: Because, as mentioned, they wanted me to take the Hulk in what I felt was a completely wrong direction. I refused. They said not to let the door hit me on the way out. Since then, everyone who was responsible for those decisions is gone, and I’m still working for Marvel. Funny how things turn out.

MORRIS: What plans did you have for the book if you’d stayed on?

DAVID: You can actually see all the plans I had for the Hulk in #467. I had intended to stay on the title to issue #500 and then bow out. So I compressed all the story ideas and concepts into #467, some of them reduced to a couple of passing lines.

MORRIS: You returned last year for Hulk (new series) issues #77 through 87. What brought you back and why did you leave again?

DAVID: Actually, it was supposed to be a limited series, set off by itself. But then when Bruce Jones unexpectedly quit and went to DC, it was decided [that Marvel would] take my miniseries and put it into the book itself. Then came “House of M.” They were going to do it whether I was on the book or not, so they asked me if I’d care to stay on the book and do “House of M,” and I said sure. Then one thing led to another, yadda yadda, and I was doing other projects.

MORRIS: Did you have any trepidation about returning to a title that for many fans, you are THE writer? Or were you looking forward to it?

DAVID: Some. I knew there would be huge expectations that for some people couldn’t be met. They would not only expect the level of stories from ten years previously, but—impossibly—they’d want to experience them on the same level as they did when they first read them ten, 20 years ago. You can’t re-create a reading experience. The long-time readers were in a different place in their lives, and I was as well.

Super-Skrull Returns Dale Keown pencil art. Page 9 of Incredible Hulk #375 (Nov. 1990).

Courtesy of Bob McLeod (who inked the issue). © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

© 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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So naturally there were going to be differences DAVID: Probably Future Imperfect. Loved working and disappointment for some was inevitable. I just with George Pérez. I don’t think my work on the couldn’t let it concern me.

Hulk got better than that.

MORRIS: Other than crafting a superb MORRIS: On the other side of the coin, story around it, “Nightmare Island” if you had a second chance, what [Incredible Hulk #81, July, 2005] would you want to do differently? seemed like a very convenient way to DAVID: I’d have quit when “Heroes write off creative misfires such as Mike Reborn” happened.

Murdock, most of the Spider-Clone MORRIS: What are you working on Saga, or even events that refuse to now that you’d like BACK ISSUE’s jibe with previous continuity. Did you audience to check out? have any further plans for the concept DAVID: Fallen Angel from IDW. or was it for the other Marvel writers Probably my best comic work, ever. I to use? have a book out on writing comics DAVID: Definitely for other writers. called Writing for Comics with Peter And for the readers, for that matter.

David [from Impact Books] that people The Bruce Jones continuity—or lack seem to like. And the third book in thereof—was so tangled, that I basically the King Arthur trilogy, Fall of Knight, created it to be an excuse for readers is also on the stands. to ignore what they didn’t like, and for MORRIS: And my most important subsequent writers to have carte question, what did I forget to ask you? blanche to pick and choose what DAVID: I can’t recall. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. worked for them and what didn’t.

The interviewer wishes to thank Peter David MORRIS: Looking back over your 13 for his time and generosity as well as to Michael Eury for years with the character, what stands out as your services above and beyond. favorite story/run/phase?

Not-So-Puny Banner Page 21, panel 3 of Incredible Hulk #376 (Dec. 1990), by David/Keown/McLeod. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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An Afternoon with

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Every so often, mankind is blessed with an individual who excels in numerous arenas. Legend has it Leonardo DaVinci could simultaneously write with one hand and draw with the other. Thomas Jefferson, besides being one of America’s founding fathers, was an accomplished inventor and architect.

In comics, there are a great many creators who write, pencil, ink, and color their own work. But few are known to have moved into other disciplines, such as science or film. It should come as no surprise that comics legend Neal Adams is just such an individual.

A graduate of the School of Industrial Arts (now known as the Manhattan School of Art & Design), Adams began his career at Archie Comics, doing occasional pages and backgrounds. At age 20, he was probably one of the youngest artists to capture what was then considered the brass ring for comic artists: a daily newspaper strip. He drew Ben Casey for about three years before moving on to Warren Publications. In the late 1960s, Adams managed to squeeze in the door at DC, starting out drawing war comics, and then working his way into more and more titles, such as The Spectre and Deadman [in Strange Adventures].

“When I came into comic books, one of the things that I discovered,” he says, “was that it wasn’t necessary to design a panel and a panel and a panel and a panel, you could design a page. It wasn’t necessary to use the colors that were available to you. You could use other colors and you could find ways to bring in other colors.”

At the time, the [Caucasian] skin tone in comics published by DC was more pink than flesh, because unlike Marvel Comics, DC’s color spectrum did not include a toned yellow. Their four-color printing process used combinations of cyan, magenta, and black in tones of 100%, 50%, and 25%, but only 100% yellow.

“That’s the math part of science,” explains Adams.

“If you add two more colors and you multiply those colors with all the other colors you have instead of 32 colors, you’ll have 64 colors. To me, science is like anything else. It’s like design, it’s like art. Science is dependable; like math, it works. If you got it right, it makes sense.”

He regards this period of comics as something of a dark age. Most readers weren’t very discriminating, and the few remaining publishers felt they were on borrowed time, believing that the demand for comics would eventually dwindle into non-existence.

Improving printing techniques wasn’t high on anyone’s agenda. Nevertheless, DC was losing half their available color range.

Philip Schweier

Double Vision Scan of the original art to an unused version of Neal Adams’ cover to Green Lantern/Green Arrow #77 (June 1970). The published version appears in the inset. All original art in this article is courtesy of Neal and Jason Adams, unless otherwise noted. © 2006 DC Comics.

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“So the question was, ‘How do I change it?’, because I’m one of the ***holes. I change it through being clever, by getting the word to the publisher [DC’s Jack Liebowitz], who will be damned if [Marvel publisher] Martin Goodman gets 64 colors and he gets 32 colors and he’s paying the same price to the same separator. He gets mad, goes to Production. I get it to him without him knowing I gave it to him. He goes to the head of Production [Sol Harrison] and says, ‘How come Martin Goodman is getting 64 colors and we’re getting 32 colors?’ ‘Well, because it’s cheaper, boss.’ ‘You’re telling me that that guy, Martin Goodman, is paying more for his color than I am? Are you out of your mind?

Call the separator.’ He calls the separator and says, ‘Well, how much more will it cost us to get toned yellow?’ ‘Oh, you want toned yellow? Well, you can have it.’” Adams snaps his fingers: “Less than 14 seconds. ‘Okay, we’ll take it. They’re going to give us 64-colors. Fine.’

“When I said these things, everybody thought I was crazy. And instead of just railing, I went out and proved it,” he says. “I would go off by myself and do the things that I would say because it really became a waste of time to say them, to minds that were closed. Clearly, I was right, but that didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It only matters if you prove it. And so I did, and so things changed, and so the business is different than it was, and I’m happy.”

Adams has had a fascination for science since he was a 13-year-old. “I loved science,” he says. “I used to read science books like you would read a mystery book. I’d stop off at my local library and they would have books that would have these experiments and then set up the experiment, tell you what chemicals and other things to use, and then they would say, ‘And then you do this, and then you’d pour this into this. What’s going to happen?’ Aw, man, I couldn’t wait to get to that next page. ‘Is it going to boil over? Is it going to turn blue? What’s going to happen?’ They’d tell you and then they’d give you the conclusion.

They’d tell you why. It’s like a magic trick, you know? I love science for its discovery.”

As much as Adams enjoys the scientific approach, he avoids the technical end. “I don’t touch computers hardly at all, but I know what computers can do. So I’m always constantly telling people, ‘No, that’ll work on that program.’

And they say, ‘No, it won’t work.’ And I say, ‘Yes, it will work.’ They say, ‘No, it’s not going to. Neal, I’m telling you, you don’t know computers. You don’t know what the program will do or doesn’t—you’re not listening to me. You’re not listening to me.’ I say, ‘Look, if it can do this, and it can do this, because it can do this and it can do this, it has to be able to do this. Not because I say so, but because it has to be able to do this or else it couldn’t do this, not because I know. I’m trying to tell you I’m simply saying the

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Neal Adams This self-portrait appeared in DC house ads in late 1970. © 2006 DC Comics.

logic is, you can’t do this without being able to do this. It just can’t be.’

“My daughter says, ‘I hate that about my dad.

He’s always right. Makes me crazy.’”

Adams’ passion has taken him through many disciplines, from paleontology to cosmology. “I don’t study it deeply because you haven’t got time in your life to do that. I’d just go in like a bird and I’d dive, and I’d get what I need, and I’d go. And if I realized I left something behind and I’d go back and I’d read it.

What’s amazing is that all of the information you really need to get is available to anybody.

“Unfortunately, it’s not translated into English, which is a real problem because sometimes you have to go to four or five sources to actually know what the heck they’re talking about, because most of the time, it’s in Latin, or six-syllable words, or mathematical formula that only they understand.”

Which presents Adams—and most lay people— with a substantial bone to pick with the scientific community. “If I could have a campaign in the world, it would be to make everybody speak English or whatever language it happens to be in, but not to speak that tech talk. I would make doctors, lawyers, and scientists speak regular English. You’re not an otolaryngologist—you’re an ear, nose, and throat man. Get off your high horse.

“You can be talking to somebody, not even about technical stuff, but you lose them within a word.

Anybody who doesn’t understand this, to me, doesn’t understand the nature of people understanding and not understanding things. You can have one scientist talking to another scientist. They are of equal skills, this guy uses a term and this guy is expected to understand it, and he doesn’t, he loses the thought. I don’t do that.

“I’m a comic-book writer and artist,” he continues.

“I talk English. I talk regular talk—what I call regular talk—to people, and that’s the only way I can tell a story. And that’s the way stories have to be told, and that’s the way the story of science has to be told.”

Science includes many stories, with varying degrees of believability. For instance, it is commonly believed that at one time the land masses of the world formed one larger continent dubbed Pangaea.

However, Adams doubts very much that the Earth was the same size then that it is now.

“You know, I’m jinking through space in my Gil Kane Space Taxi and I’m approaching the Earth, and I fly around it and they’ve got this one big, giant island like an iris, sitting on one side. And there’s nothing but ocean, five miles deep—five miles deep—around the rest of the planet. That’s an odd picture.”

So odd that he regards it with skepticism. “Now these land masses could not fit together, just like this globe I have here. I mean, it’s not possible, unless they fit together at some point. I could not possibly take those continents that are on that globe down there and magically just go ‘foop’ and they go together. You have to turn them and twist them and find out how they get together.”

Adams argues that the land masses could only come together like that if the Earth were 50% smaller.

To illustrate his point, he uses a soccer ball as an example. “If you make a soccer ball any bigger, the designs don’t work. They work for this size. Make the soccer ball bigger, keep the designs the same size, it won’t fit because the geometry doesn’t work.

If you make the Earth smaller, what happens is things tend to curve, like this, and go like that, and the shapes interlock.

“So it’s not if the Earth is the way the geologists say, that these things moved around and crashed into one another, and made mountains, and they made all kinds of configurations. And believe me, I’ve seen all these maps that they have and you would find it incredible the jigs and configurations that, presumably, the Earth went through.”

Using a globe, Adams indicates an enormous crack down the center of the Atlantic seabed. “You see that crack? That’s the spreading rift down the Atlantic so presumably, by pushing these two sides together—which they say happened in reverse— you basically move these pieces toward one another to that crack, see? And when you get all the continents together, you make the giant island of Pangaea.”

But if the Earth was smaller, how did it get bigger?

Did the Earth grow? “Well, for Earth to grow, matter has to be made,” he says. “It’s not blowing up like a balloon, so matter has to be made. If matter is made on the Earth, we don’t see it happening. You know, I don’t see my table growing, so it has to be made somewhere I can’t see it. It has to be made inside the Earth, which we can’t know, so we’d better start studying physics to find out if matter can be made.”

Adams explains that if he were to go to a physicist and ask, “Can a rock grow?” the answer would be, “No.”

“Physically, you can’t make matter. ‘It’s impossible.’

If I go to a geologist and ask, ‘Can a rock grow?’ he’d say, ‘Define your terms.’ Well, already, this is a different answer.” A geologist would explain that a rock is a crystal. By joining crystal to crystal, a rock will grow, forming crystals in caves and geodes. So scientists in different specialties respond differently, not that anyone says matter is made.

Then Adams cites the work of Carl David Anderson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his experiments with cosmic ray and the discovery of what is known as anti-matter. This research led to further work regarding positrons and the creation of atomic particles.

Supporting Adams’ belief is an ongoing debate among paleontologists regarding the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Some scientists claim the T-rex to be a scavenger. Due to its size, a Tyrannosaurus Rex couldn’t run more than ten miles an hour, nor could he swing his head around fast without breaking his neck. An elephant’s bones are structured so that his shoulders protect his neck because his head is too heavy, and it would break its neck if it were to swing its head too quickly. Without similar built-in protection, the same would happen to a Tyrannous Rex, a creature of comparable size.

Others who study dinosaurs firmly believe that everything about the anatomy of a Tyrannosaurus Rex—such as its teeth and the length of its stride— say it was a predator. In the film Jurassic Park, a Tyrannosaurus is shown running, illustrating clearly how they may have done it, running 40–50 miles an hour.

Adams concedes that both sides of the debate are right.

“On a (smaller) planet with less gravity, half or a quarter of the gravity that the Earth has today, a Tyrannosaurus Rex could run and be a predator.”

By reducing the size of the Earth, he continues to follow logic. “Okay, you’ve got all the continents, and then you have these lines”— which might resemble stretch-marks—“then you have these cracks, okay? We’re headed for the cracks and you have these lines as if somebody went in and drew them.

“So we’ll say, ‘Okay, Scout’s honor, I’m going to follow your lines.

I’m going to move the continents

Caped Crusader Neal tries out a new look for Hal Jordan. © 2006 DC Comics.

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© 2006 DC Comics.

back along those lines and where the lines disappear, I’m just going to keep the movement the same.’ If I do that, it should be possible, according to this theory, that that tectonic plate, at that level, could come back together again all around the world.”

Adams is not alone in this belief.

“There were some scientists, some geologists, who in the ’60s insisted that that was the case. And they were humiliated and made to go away by the scientific community. And one geologist said, ‘Well, you know if you look at it, the question is more easily, and more logically, answered by the idea that the Earth grew, and these cracks open as the Earth grew, and these were the pieces that were left.’ So if you were to make the Earth smaller, and I’m correct, all these pieces would come together.

“We’ve got a history of Earth, we’ve got paleontology, we’ve got geology, we’ve got physics … how does this work? I figured I really ought to study all that stuff and see if there’s a theory that explains it all. Now it may end up being a strange theory, whatever it is, but it’s sort of what Sherlock Holmes said: ‘When you eliminate all the possibilities and you’re left with only one possibility, that’s got to be the truth.’ I think that’s really good thinking, whether it’s done by a fictional character or not. If you do eliminate all the possibilities and you’re left with only one possibility, chances are that’s the truth, unless you’ve left one out.”

Adams’ scientific approach to problem solving has supported him on many occasions, including an instance in which his entire reputation as an artist was on the line.

“I used to hang out at DC at night and I’d talk with a guy named Jack Adler,” Adams relates, and they would talk about the technique of 3-D. The process had been done for comics in the 1950s, but as comic books began to die, 3-D died. “It was a fad that disappeared and I wanted to know how it happened.

So this production man and DC’s best colorist, Jack Adler, who helped developed the technique for 3-D comic books, and who was my production guru at DC Comics, explained to me in detail how it worked and it’s a relatively complicated process, but logical and sensible. So I had him tell me everything about it so that I knew it, so that I had it locked in my head.”

While the process may seem complex, according to Adams, once it’s understood, it’s just tedious. Basically, it is a scientific way to fool the brain by presenting a picture to one eye that isn’t presented to the other eye.

While there are other techniques, using the red/blue format is simplest. Two slightly offset identical images,

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one red, one blue, are viewed with a red filter over one eye and a blue filter over the other eye. That which is printed in red ink is invisible when viewed through the red filter because everything is red. The red image disappears, and only the blue image is seen. As a result, the eye looking through a red filter only sees the blue image, and the eye looking through the blue filter only sees the red image. The brain then takes those two images and mixes them together because it thinks one eye is seeing one image, and the other eye is seeing the other image.

One day, Adams’ agent called and asked if he could do 3-D. While it hadn’t been done in many years, Adams assured him he could. About an hour later, his agent called him to a meeting with Capital Records, who were interested in him doing a 3-D cover for the Grand Funk Railroad album Shinin’ On, released in 1974. After explaining the 3-D process, it was clear the record executives were still blurry on the concept.

They asked to see some samples, and Adams showed them some old 3-D comic books he had brought with him. “They looked at me and said, ‘These look pretty old.’ I said, ‘Well, it hasn’t been done in a long time.’ They said, ‘Well, what have you done?’ I said, ‘I haven’t done anything.’ [pause] ‘You haven’t done this?’ ‘No.’ ‘Your representative told us that you were an expert, that you were the top expert in 3-D.’ ‘As I analyze it, I am,’ not that I would say that.

‘I know some people who know the technique, but I know the technique as much as they do and in fact, I probably have figured out some new wrinkles for it.

But I know I haven’t done it; but yes, I am an expert in 3-D.’ My rep, Sam Brody, was sitting there with egg on his face. Of course he’d kind of misrepresented just a little bit and I said, ‘Look, I’ll tell you what. I say I’m an expert in doing 3-D. This is my portfolio, this is my work, the kind of stuff you want or don’t want, whatever you want. You go out and find somebody who’s more of an expert than me. If you haven’t found somebody in a week, give me a call.’

I packed up my stuff and left. Five days later, they call. ‘Come on back. Well, maybe you are an expert.

Can you do this?’ ‘Haven’t found anybody?’ ‘No.’ ‘In the world?’ [softly] ‘No.’ “So I’m going to do this album cover and I decide what it’s going to be. And it’s going to be this group, and there’s going to be planets floating around, and galaxies, and all kinds of stuff. They come popping out. It’s a wraparound album, you know, when we had albums. And it’s called Shinin’ On and it’s got this tag on the front that’s got the red and the blue glasses, and you pull it out and you look at the thing. I start to build this album cover out of all these galaxies and worlds and moons, and photographs of characters floating on rings.”

Adams did what he feels may be the most ambitious 3-D image ever, nine layers with two more for mechanical work. “I don’t think anybody ever did any 11-layer 3-D job, maybe seven. And so I hand it in, the thing weighed a ton. I gave the instructions on how to shoot it and how to rearrange the layers and everything.”

However, like so many artistic endeavors, successfully pulling off a 3-D image lies in the execution. And when other factors come in to play, that’s usually where problems arise, as Adams discovered.

“Sunday morning, I get a call at home. ‘We’re at the printers. This isn’t working.’ They send this limo to get me to take me out to New Jersey and we go to

look at this. Look at the other one. F***ing son of a bitch, look at this. I can’t f***ing believe it.’ He’s touching it, he’s going apesh*t. Totally like he flips out. ‘I don’t—how does this happen?’ ‘I told you, the magenta’s got blue in it.’ ‘Oh, f**k! Why should it—? F**k!’ Why, he just totally goes nuts, totally. And it’s the science. That’s the thing about science, you can count on it.”

It was in the few years following the release of Grand Funk’s Shinin’ On that Continuity Studios was established, though it was never Adams’ intention to form a company. The evolution began when one of Adams’ clients offered him their workspace. “They said, ‘Look, we’re going to be moving out. Why don’t you move in while we move out? It’s going to take us like a year to get out. We’ll give you a room and then you take another room, take another room.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t want all these rooms. I just want a room.’ And they said, ‘Well, the rent’s low.’ I said, ‘Oh, wow.

Okay, why don’t I do that?’

Shortly after accepting, Dick Giordano left DC Comics. “He talked to me and he said, ‘Well, I’d kind of like to come in to the studio. You know, maybe we can do something together.’ So I started this studio, then Dick came over and we became partners, and that was it. It was pretty casual.”

Even though Neal Adams and Dick Giordano had been a team on many issues of Green Lantern/ Green Arrow and Batman, the studio atmosphere was different. “I’m not really a work-with-somebody type of person,” Adams explains, “but when artists get together in a studio, they don’t really work together, either. They might share work, pass work, but it’s not like a business. One artist sits at a desk, another artist sits at a desk, they do their work, they have their own assignments, and they do it. So we didn’t really expect it to be much more than that.

“I sort of had some ambition to do more commercial work, to—actually, I don’t know what I had in mind. You know, I’d like to make it sound like I knew what the hell I was doing, but I really didn’t know what I was doing. It was just a studio and we were paying rent, that’s it. But it became something.

I don’t even know what it became and I don’t even know what it is now, to tell you the truth. It’s just fluid, it changes all the time.”

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this printing plant. They had a proof of the thing up and they had these glasses. ‘Where did you get the glasses?’ ‘We got them from where you told us to get them and it’s not working, just seeing double images.’ I take the glasses and I look at it and sure enough, I get double images. Oh, God ... it doesn’t work. ‘Can you call the printer in here?’ The guy comes in. He said, ‘Look, I matched your colors. This is the color, this is this color, I matched your colors.’ I said, ‘Well, did you look at it with the glasses?’ He says, ‘I looked at it with the glasses. Even when I was a little kid and I saw this stuff, it never worked for me.

I gotta tell you, it never worked for me. I don’t believe this sh*t, I just don’t.’

“I said, ‘Well, look, can I go with this guy? We’re going to go into the plant and we’re just going to talk.’ I take the guy, he says, ‘Look, I know what you’re talking about. I just matched your inks. I never saw this sh*t in my life. When I was a little kid, I never saw it.’ He says, ‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s like a fairy tale. It doesn’t exist.’ I said, ‘Well, just take me to where you did this.”

The frustrated color mixer took Adams to his work area in the printing plant, showing him the buckets of ink he used in mixing the necessary colors and explaining how he combined them. ‘I matched your color. I matched your f***ing color. What do you want from me?’ ‘Just tell me how you did it.’ He says, ‘Look, there’s green,’ and he tells me what he mixed with the green and he says, ‘This is blue, this is a cerulean blue, cerulean blue light, blah, blah, blah.’ ‘Okay, fine. And how did you mix the red?’ He says, ‘Okay, so I mixed this orange bright, then I mixed a rose red, then I did a little magenta to give it some body—’ And I said, ‘What? Magenta? You put magenta in the color?’ He says, ‘Yeah, just to give it a little body. You know, I brought it in to match the color.’ I said, ‘No, magenta has blue in it, you see. If you put magenta into an orange-red, there’s blue in it. You’ll see it with the red eye.’ He says, ‘You wouldn’t see it. I mixed it to the color you want.’ I said, ‘No, scientifically, if you put magenta in there, you’re putting blue in there. If you put blue in there, no matter how much you hide it, the eye’s going to see it.’ ‘Yeah, if you say so.’ I said, ‘Look, do me a favor. Don’t use the rose red, don’t use the magenta, just use the orange that’s in the red. Just use those. Can you match the color if I asked you to do this?’ ‘I can match the color, no problem.’ He says, ‘Give me five minutes.’ I say, ‘Okay,’ and I walk back to the office, sweating, because those guys in there look really tough. They’re businessmen, but they’ve got a lot of money resting on this Grand Funk album, Shinin’ On, probably their last, or next to last, album; lots of money.

“So the color mixer comes in with the proof, says, “Here you go,” slaps it up against the wall, ‘Exactly the same.’ I said, ‘Yes, it is,’ and I looked at it. He says, ‘And that’s the color, I matched the color perfectly.’ I say, ‘I want you to do me a favor before you leave. I want you to look at it with these glasses.

‘I don’t want to look at it through these glasses,’ he says. ‘Look, I told you I never see this stuff. Since I’m a kid, I never saw this thing. It doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m like, something’s wrong with my eyes.’ He’s a color mixer. Nothing’s wrong with his eyes. I said, ‘Fine. Just look at it and tell me what you think.’ ‘All right, all right … holy son of a bitch! Holy son of a bitch. Holy spit, I don’t believe a f***ing—

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Continuity continued to evolve. In 1983. Adams contributed Ms. Mystic to the lineup at Pacific Comics, one of the first companies to allow comics creators to retain the rights to their characters. After Pacific folded the following year, most of the titles found new homes in the growing independent market. Adams decided to publish his own line of comics instead.

“I had done Echo of Futurepast and Ms. Mystic, and I had invested some of the profits—or the income, it was money I didn’t take for myself. So they [Pacific Comics] owed me something in the order of $60,000. Well, the question was, ‘What do I then do with my lost investment? Do I just let the art I bought sit there on the shelves or do I then do what Pacific did? Do I publish?’ And I realized, ‘Well,

Thank Goodness They Didn’t Call Him “Black Lantern” Adams’ original, but unused, cover to Green Lantern #87 (Dec. 1971–Jan. 1972), GL John Stewart’s first appearance. © 2006 DC Comics.

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if that was going to turn into a bad debt, I’d better publish myself.’ So that was really the motivating decision. A motivating factor on my publishing was that I was really caught with my pants down and so now I had to decide what to do. And it really came from Echo of Futurepast, of all things, because I had bought art, I had paid for art, it was just a lot of stories there, and so I decided to publish. But I didn’t publish wholeheartedly, I published randomly.

At that time, you couldn’t do that. People were more interested in seeing monthly books. So for me to try to jump in and compete on that level, I would have to turn my whole operation into a publishing company. But I couldn’t really make a living that way because I have to get investors, that would have to become this business. So I tried to run it as best I could under the circumstances, which was probably a mistake, but it was an interesting mistake and we had a good time doing it. The business part wasn’t fun at all, but the product was great fun. I have fans who are waiting for these characters to come back.”

To Adams, creating new characters is not very hard. “It’s something that I easily do, but I think that it’s part of the storytelling thing. Now if you said, ‘Sit down and create three characters before the end of the day today,’ I would probably do it, and they would all have histories, and that’s sort of what I do.”

So Adams took some of the characters from the New Characters Portfolio (1979) and launched titles such as Toyboy, Megalith, Armor, Crazy Man, Samuree, and Zero Patrol. However, with the comics market explosion in the mid-/late ’80s, there followed the inevitable implosion. Smaller publishers such as Comico and Eclipse were relatively short-lived, and retailers were closing their doors as quickly as they opened. Despite the long-time popularity of Neal Adams, Continuity struggled in a demanding market.

“We went out when it was a bad time in the business,” Adams admits. “When we went out, we had just finished Deathwatch 2000, we actually made quite a bit of money on that, and we were going into a series called Rise of Magic, which was a difficult series because I didn’t have enough artists and we were trying to go on a monthly basis. We had stored up Deathwatch 2000 so we could do it. Now, we didn’t have time to store [Rise of Magic] up. There weren’t enough good artists out there. Comic books were coming into my front door and I would open them up and I would throw them down because I didn’t like the artwork. I didn’t like the storytelling. So I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing? You know, I’m publishing comic books I don’t like. You know, it doesn’t even sound like me.’”

Adams feels one of his mistakes was to accede to other people’s opinions that he had to come out monthly. “I should have just stopped, taken my money, built up The Rise of Magic thing, and then started it again. But I didn’t do it.”

Adams tried to stay in the market. “Comicbook stores were going out of business left and right, and they would use any excuse they could to

While the X-Men are not the only characters to which he’s has a desire to return, comics is only one area for Continuity, as the company continues to grow and change with each opportunity. “I’m interested in getting some comic-book work out there, maybe a Batman—which I can do, incidentally— but I’m more interested in forging ahead into film and television and seeing, experimentally, what can be done that hasn’t been done before. There are things I have observed in film and television, but in particular, in film, the storytelling methodologies that haven’t been ever explored. To me, it’s like Square One, so I’m looking for the opportunity to do this, to find out what I can do.”

In the realm of film and television, Adams has been encouraged by a variety of successful endeavors.

In the course of working out computer-generated “animatics,” he realized there was a potential for more sophisticated computer animation for television. “So I presented ourselves, we did a couple of samples, and my first campaign is the Nasonex® bee commercials. It was me entering the arena. Turns out that this campaign is tremendously successful.”

With the success of the Nasonex® ads, Adams doesn’t expect it to become just another boring TV commercial. “You don’t go, ‘Oh, that damn Nasonex® bee again.’ I don’t want to bore you, even though it’s only 30 seconds. When you see it, when it comes on, you almost smile. Well, that’s the tip of my hat creatively, to say, ‘You have this commercial, you’re nice enough to let me do it, I will do the best damn job that I can for those 30 seconds, and this is what I’ve done.’ So it’s sufficiently successful that it surprises the client and the advertising agency. It’s become the big campaign at the agency, but it’s my first.”

Adams relates his first effort to his early days drawing Batman. “You kind of go, ‘Well, so he’s doing Batman. Big deal.’ Well, it turns out 25 years later, they’re reprinting my Batman in $50 books. They’re starting to license the bee, put him on t-shirts and things.

So it’s become like a surprise to everybody and they’re kind of going, ‘Wow, aren’t we lucky we created this wonderful thing?’ [pause] Yeah. There are people around here who might say, ‘Aren’t you lucky you got Neal to do it?’ That’s a little egotistical, I agree, but at the same time, we’re doing an awfully sincere job.”

That sincerity is demonstrated as he explains one of the goals in producing the commercial: expanding the boundaries of rendering humans in a CGI environment. “I have this little boy in bed and he’s sneezing. And then his mom takes care of him, gives him some Nasonex®. She doesn’t really actually give it to him on screen because you can’t do that in commercials. And then the next morning, at the end of the commercial, he’s standing by the window and she puts his baseball cap on him so he can to go out and play baseball,

© 2006 DC Comics.

cancel orders. And I was a small comic-book company, so any excuse they could use to cancel my orders, they did, and I’m moving towards Rise of Magic. This is like suicide. So I basically packed up my toys and left.”

Even though stepping out of publishing may very well have saved Continuity, people often ask why he stopped publishing. “I say, ‘Don’t you remember? It was like it was hell.’

“As much as I loved comic books, I was not willing to take the money of my family, and my business, and everything that I am, and go into the bankruptcy court and say, ‘Well, because I love comic books, I’m going to ruin my life.’ It didn’t make any sense to me. So I basically packed up and left.”

Sadly, too many comics fans fail to appreciate the demands of the business side of comics. “I read on an Internet site that people were criticizing me, saying, ‘Well, you know he took his money and he went away,’ or whatever. And I’m thinking, ‘Wait a second.’

If I was making money, wouldn’t I stay? God, you know, I would like nothing more than to continue publishing. I had Rise of Magic coming.”

An earlier version of Rise of Magic may have been aborted, that doesn’t mean the book has been permanently shelved. “It was a really great series and we’re still actually working on it.

Periodically, I sit down and I ink pages. But when Rise of Magic does come out, it’s all going to be good.

They’ll all be good looking, all have good art. I actually have half a dozen books that we have in the series that I junked and we’re just re-doing them because I can’t stand them. You know, as soon as somebody who does something for me starts doing a crappy job, I don’t want it.”

Adams has a number of writers and artists he works with from time to time. “I pull people in, but I really just work with a group, a small group, that I really don’t want to talk about.

Ernesto Infante is my chief guy and he’s doing an awful lot of penciling, and I’m doing an awful lot of inking, because we’re really tailoring these things. I have a few other guys that come in and out, that as we have money in the bank, then we decide, ‘Well, let’s do this and let’s do that.’ So I kind of want some of it to be a surprise.”

And fans enjoy the special treats, such as with 2005’s Giant Size X-Men #3. Intended to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Giant Size X-Men #1, health problems sidelined X-Men artist Dave Cockrum, and Adams stepped in. © 2006 DC Comics.

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because now he’s not sneezing. It’s a simple story, nothing big about it. At a certain point when the kid is in bed, he lies back because he’s a little bit more relaxed. Not a lot, but a little. He lies back and you have a nice big closeup on the little boy.

“Now if you track computer animated humans, and you saw The Polar Express—not that I wish to pick on Polar Express—but there’s a part of you that says, ‘Why didn’t they use real people because the people look kind of cold? You know, if you’ve got Tom Hanks, why don’t you use Tom Hanks? Disney can work animated.’ And as you look at the real people, you know they’re not real, but they’re computer-animated people, you kind of go, ‘They’re really not very warm,’ like the little boy in Toy Story. Ohh, he’s not a very pretty human being. You don’t see many people in computer animation and when you see them, you kind of do that little head turn and pull your head back and go, ‘Uhhww, uhhww. That’s not very pretty. That’s not warming the cockles of my heart.’”

When the [Nasonex®] campaign was first presented to him, Adams doubted the project would be suitable for his company.

“So for two months, I turned it down. And then I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I thought, ‘Well, wait a second. Why are these people that they do in all these other projects so turn-offish?’

And I realized, well, part of it had to do with whoever designed them. It really doesn’t have to do with their animation so much.

The animation’s pretty good, it’s their design, the way they look. You know, the flesh isn’t warm. They’re not cute. I don’t love them. Let me see, how many people do I know who can draw things where you kind of love them? I can think of about maybe ten people like that. I’m one of them. I thought, “Well, let me do some tests,” and I did some tests. If I depend on me, and the abilities of everybody around me, I could do a warm-looking kid and a warm-looking mom.

And for 30 seconds, I could get them really warm and really cuddly.

And when you see the little kid go back and put his head back, you go, ‘Aww.’ If he can do that, that’s my job.”

But it’s a job that Adams does not handle alone. “I don’t draw the whole thing. I don’t have to draw it frame by frame. I don’t even have to touch the computers. What I do is I do a storyboard that delineates it carefully. Then I do drawings of the characters and I do them in perspective, and I do the front and sides, and I figure out all the problems that are going to happen with the character during the animation; do the expressions on the faces and the other things.”

From there, the process is turned over to Adams’ talented staff.

And even though the task at hand may be simply a 30-second TV commercial, the requirements are no less demanding than those of a $60 million movie. “I make the decision as to how detailed the flowers are going to be, because it seems to me that if all it is is a bee and some flowers, those flowers ought to be fantastic. They ought to be as good as Disney could do or Dreamworks can do. So I sit and I do my little Dreamworks job and I require of my people that the same thing that Dreamworks or Disney would require. If they’re working for me, they ought to do a great job. So when you see those commercials, you kind of go, ‘Wow, those are really pretty flowers. I don’t know who did it. Somebody good did it, clearly.’ And it’s because I expect them to do a good job, they don’t want to disappoint me, so they do a great job. But I’ve only done a series of drawings, they do all the work. They do all the animation, they build the models on computer. I just say, you know, ‘That’s not good’ or ‘It is good’ or whatever. So I’m only doing a small portion of the work, but it’s key work. So I could be drawing a Batman comic book while we’re doing these, or I could be doing some other commercials, or I could be shooting a film. I just need to be there for key moments to make sure that it turns into this. Well, that’s pretty nifty for me.”

Adams equates his position to that of being a director on a film, depending on the abilities of other people to come through. “The best movies are the ones with the best effects,” he says, “And the best acting, and the most dramatic costuming, where all these people are putting all their abilities together. And the director gets to sit back and go, ‘Wow. Cool.’”

Being a director is something for which Adams has aspirations, and is a skill he is in the process of learning. “It’s actually weirdly

All comics © 2006 Continuity.

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easier to learn it doing commercials than it is doing film; but, of course, I want to do film. So what do I have to do it with? Well, I have the business acumen to be a producer so I know how to produce and I have no problem with that. I have properties that are worthwhile properties and can turn into film, so I have that as a bargaining chip, so I’m not stepping off sideways, laterally from comic books into film.”

At this writing, Adams is working on a documentary on Irwin Hasen, the creator of Dondi. “But I really do like shooting and directing, so what I’m doing is presenting myself as a director to my advertising clients. The Nasonex® commercials are sort of part of that. On my website (www.nealadams.com), you’ll see that other stuff that I’ve done.”

He also hopes to license many of his original characters to film and television. “I have these properties and if you actually start counting up my properties, they’re quite a mass and they all seem to be aimed at doing films. So there’s a library of stuff to do and I don’t know exactly how it’s going to happen. But I have an associate who’s a film producer and an associate who’s a TV producer. So we’re presenting projects and we’re going to move projects forward.”

Among those projects are Bucky O’Hare as a computer-animated feature, and also a project entitled Blood as a finished film. “Those two are definite,” he continues. “Then I’m talking to people who will help me put together other projects, whether they’re as investors, actors, or even directors. I’m not interested in directing everything that I have. I’m interested in cherry-picking my stuff to direct because in all honesty, I think anybody could direct a Crazyman that was good. Samuree could be directed by anybody good.

Armor maybe, you know, as a series.”

Despite a successful foray into computer animation, and ambitions of developing material for film and TV, Adams isn’t prepared to abandon comics any time soon. By his own estimate, he has done more comic books in the last year than in the previous two or three years, understanding that is how he is perceived, both by himself and others. “I’m a skilled artisan, but I’m a storyteller. People say, ‘Why do they reprint Neal’s stuff over and over again while there are other artists who worked in very similar styles, but somehow, their stuff is not collected and turned into $50 books? What’s the difference?’ The difference is, I’m a storyteller, that all of the things that I do are children of the story, not because I like to draw. I like to tell a story, that’s what I do.

“So in any medium, whether I do a storyboard for a commercial, whether the Nasonex® commercial, or I do an animatic, or I design rides for amusement parks; even when I do that, I have to tell a story. Film, if I shoot film, I have to tell a story. When I do comic books, I have to tell a story. I mean, I do pinups sometimes at conventions and other times, hardly ever am I happy doing those.

Hardly ever, unless I can enter a story into the drawing, unless I can see something happening with part of the story, then I don’t mind doing the drawings. To just do a glamour picture, boring as hell. I hate it. I like to tell a story. That’s what I do.

“I think of myself as a comic-book creator, artist, writer, even publisher; and I think of this as my business. This is what I do, but there are times, whole segments of times, that I don’t do much of it. I mean, I’m talking to DC very seriously, for example, about doing a series of Batman, six books.

If I do it, I’m going to be doing a bunch of comicbook stuff. If not, I’ll be doing less comic-book stuff, but I’m also doing comic book-related stuff. And everything I do—I call the company ‘Continuity,’ because to me, it was the best word for it, because to me, what I do is I tell stories.”

My Father the Squid Neal’s original cover sketch for 1977’s House of Mystery #254, courtesy of Heritage Comics; in the inset is the published version. © 2006 DC Comics.

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Photos and captions courtesy of Philip Schweier. All photos © 2006 Philip Schweier. Comics images © 2006 Continuity Studios.

This is Neal Adams’ office, where he conducts general business such as meetings. The globe in the lower right was used as he explained his expanding Earth theory for this interview.

This is the wall behind Neal’s desk, featuring original artwork by the man himself (as if he’d hang anything else).

No, this isn’t the bridge of the Enterprise— it’s Neal’s computer work station. The window to the left allows him to observe the outer office area.

A sound-editing work station inside the sound/photography studio.

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In the rear of the offices is the studio, where artists design layouts, work on storyboards, and assemble graphics for eventual use in one of Continuity’s many ongoing projects.

The main editing station, also used for finished video presentations.

Opposite the sound/photography door, to the left of the sound equipment, is this massive green screen, enabling digital imagery to be dropped into still photography or video.

Secondary editing bay.

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.© 2006 DC Comics. by

Jim Kingman

Comic-book historians hold a bright light on the early career of Green Lantern Hal Jordan, who debuted in DC’s Showcase #22 in 1959 under editor Julius Schwartz. Throughout the 1960s, the majority of Green Lantern’s adventures were written by John Broome and Gardner Fox and illustrated by Gil Kane, who also designed one of the best super-hero costumes in comics. These exploits of the Silver Age Green Lantern— the fearless test pilot with the power ring that worked off his tremendous will power, and not to mention a founding member of the Justice League of America—warrant high and justified praise.

Green Lantern also maintains a special place in comic-book history as half of the legendary Green Lantern/Green Arrow team depicted by writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams in the early 1970s. As classic as that then-socially conscious and politically relevant series has become, as numerously reprinted as it has been, it did not sell well at

the time, and we all know what that meant. The cancellation ax did fall on the Emerald Crusader’s magazine, with #89, after a 12-year run. This was not the end of Green Lantern, however, but the beginning of the second stage of his career, a lengthy emerald epoch—once again steeped heavily in science fiction and space opera—that most comicbook historians have not shone a bright light on (it’s pretty dim, at best).

That changes as of now. I’m carrying a big, green spotlight that shines brightest on Hal’s solo adventures.

Every phase of Green Lantern’s two official solo careers from 1972 to 1976 and 1979 to 1986 has its hits and misses, moments of weirdness, ludicrous debacles, touches of controversy, and just plain fun cosmic drama (which, of course, is the whole point). I have seen and read it all, yet hold this era high in unabashed and unashamed reverence.

Green Lantern is my favorite super-hero, and has been since I started

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collecting comics at the age of ten in 1972 (just in time to feel the weight of the ax). Green Lantern is very much a part of my personal Golden and Silver Ages of comics.

There is no higher praise; and there is no change in praise, no matter the number of times I rolled my eyes in critical dismay while rereading these books in chronological order and back again to research this article.

Four months after the cancellation of Green Lantern in February of 1972, the Emerald Crusader and the Emerald Archer moved to the back of The Flash beginning with #217 (Aug.–Sept.

1972). After a three-part story by O’Neil, Adams, and Dick Giordano, Green Lantern’s solo adventures began in The Flash #220 (Feb.–Mar. 1973), published in December of 1972 (the same month Green Arrow went solo in Action Comics). GL appeared in 25 issues of The Flash for a total of 12 adventures, including the three-part GL/GA adventure and three team-ups with the Scarlet Speedster (issues #222, 225, and 235, which features Carol Ferris’ only appearance with GL during his stint in Flash).

GL’s return to straight science fiction (Flash #220) was impressive. Solidly plotted by Denny O’Neil with exquisite artwork by Dick Giordano, the two-part “Duel For a Death-List” and “Death-Threat on Titan” begins in the Arizona desert. Green Lantern is handed a message by a dying extraterrestrial. He soon battles another alien of the same race, who GL surmises is after the message. After the alien apparently self-destructs, GL reads the note. It is a death-list, and all the names on it have been crossed out except the last: Hal

Sharing is Fun! (above) GA gets the shaft from GL as Hal gets up close and personal with old pal Flash in this DC house ad. Special thanks to Jim Kingman. (below) GL recites his oath.

© 2006 DC Comics.

© 2006 DC Comics.

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Jordan’s. From the Arizona desert to Titan, moon of the planet Saturn, GL hurtles headlong toward a diabolical plot to destroy the Guardians of the Universe.

Hal is still on leave from the Green Lantern Corps in the first part of this story, but is officially reinstated into the Corps in the second part (#221). Hal comments on his “split” with Green Arrow. Hal is also down to his last $200 and is pursuing a job in Phoenix, Arizona, until adventure interrupts, of course.

O’Neil and Giordano continued a winning run in Flash #223 (Sept.–Oct. 1973). In “Doomsday …

Minus Ten Minutes!”, Green Lantern returns to Hal Jordan’s car somewhere in the American Midwest and is apparently attacked by a bug-like extraterrestrial before he can recharge his power ring. There’s more to this alien than meets the eye, however, and while GL will always remain baffled by the extraterrestrial’s actions, the reader is allowed access to the alien’s thoughts at story’s end. O’Neil shifted gears in #224, bringing Green Lantern down to Earth and involving him in some small-town thievery.

A real treat for Green Lantern fans came in The Flash #226 (Mar. 1974). Neal Adams returned to pencil an eight-page tale involving contaminated chili. While not a great O’Neil story, it was just plain exciting to have Adams back, if only for one issue.

After that … matters got weird for a while.

In what should have been a self-contained story in #226, O’Neil decided to further expand upon that plot for GL’s adventures in Flash #227 and 228. O’Neil trashed the ending of #226’s tale and continued it in #227 from where GL rescued a young female hiker. GL suddenly developed an obnoxious, abrasive attitude toward everybody he came in contact with. He even went so far as to physically assault park rangers. When he finally got enough of a grip on himself to realize he shouldn’t be using the ring, he learned a group of campers had become surrounded by a raging fire and that only he could save them. Towards the end, nasty extraterrestrials become involved, and GL eventually comes to his senses.

I was glad when this misguided adventure was over (and on a bimonthly pace it seemed to take forever).

Then came the startling return of Aaron Burr in Flash #230 and 231 (Nov.–Dec. 1974 and Jan.–Feb. 1975). Yes, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a historic duel, and, as believed in some historical quarters, the leader of a failed attempt to attack Mexico. That Aaron Burr, never having died, merely transported off-planet (just prior to the duel) and replaced by a very convincing clone from outer space (who died in 1836 while the real Burr lived on to rule an alien race and ache for home). I believe O’Neil was affected by some of that contaminated chili before writing this tale, but it does have its amusing moments. In fact, this story is so outlandish that it is a true joy to read. O’Neil righted plot matters in The Flash #233 and 234, batting out a more straight science-fiction tale with a tragic denouement.

With issue #237 O’Neil and artist Mike Grell guided Green Lantern on a very interesting cosmic chase that spanned six issues. GL was in pursuit of the Ravagers, a band of extraterrestrials intent on joining some kind of federation, but first they had to perform the Biblical creation story in reverse by destroying various worlds through flooding, snuffing out the sun, devolving the planet’s life forms, et al. The climatic chapters had Green Lantern saving his home planet.

Along the way, GL picked up a traveling companion, the alien creature known as “Itty.”

© 2006 DC Comics.

Lots of Lanterns Hal may have split from Ollie, but as a member of the Green Lantern Corps this “Lone” Lantern was never fully alone. Page 4 of Green Lantern #127 (Apr. 1980), penciled by Joe Staton and inked by Frank McLaughlin, courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 DC Comics.

I asked Mike Grell about his involvement with the story arc, one of my favorite GL solo stories, especially since the artist already had so much going on at that time (Superboy starring the Legion of Super-Heroes, Green Arrow in Action Comics, and The Warlord in the works). “It was easier than you might think,” recalls Grell. “I worked at least one hundred hours a week and rarely slept more than a few hours at a time. Hence, I was able to take a lot of assignments, particularly backup stories, which put my work into a lot of different titles in a short time. Getting the Green Lantern assignment was easy, because I had already done Green Arrow and Julie Schwartz knew I’d kill to add Green Lantern [to my plate].

“The only suggestion I made to the story was that in the episode where the reversion ray is making Green Lantern ‘devolve’ into a Neanderthal, I suggested to Denny that Itty should regress into a human— meaning that, rather than being a primitive life form, Itty was possibly the next step in human evolution— and become the hero of the story. Denny didn’t go for it and the story ran as he wrote it.”

Green Lantern’s last appearance in The Flash was #246 (Jan. 1977). That adventure, begun in #245,

Recognize This?

featured the return of Jason Woodrue and his conversion to the Floronic Man. GL was already three issues into his revived magazine, once again teamed with Green Arrow. (A solid-selling pair of DC Specials released in 1975—showcasing GL reprints—helped the Emerald Crusader tremendously in earning his own title. I found it interesting that GL’s cancellation in ’72 warranted a house ad, but his return did not.) It was announced in the letters column of Flash #245 that GL would go solo in Green Lantern #93 (Feb.-Mar. 1977). But while the Emerald Crusader had a dominant role in that particular issue, Green Arrow remained the co-star for over three years. Upon reviewing the strong initial sales of the revived GL/GA, DC’s then-new publisher Jenette Kahn decided that the Emerald Team should remain intact.

Hal Jordan also became a trucker during this time (well, at least he didn’t attempt to run a disco).

While not acquiring an ongoing solo feature as Green Arrow did in World’s Finest Comics, Green Lantern did have solo adventures during this period in DC Super Stars #14, DC Special Series #1 (5-Star SuperHero Spectacular), and Adventure Comics #459–460.

He had a solo tale in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #100

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A photocopy of Joe Staton’s remarkable pencils from an unidentified issue of Green Lantern, courtesy of David Hamilton. The first reader to email the editor at euryman@msn.com to identify this page will receive a complimentary copy of BACK ISSUE #20. © 2006 DC Comics.

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Pollard and Tuska (right) Two panels of Keith Pollard’s Green “Lantren” pencils, from issue #160 (Jan. 1983), contributed by David Hamilton. (below) Page 13 of issue #167 (Aug. 1983), from George Tuska’s brief stint as GL penciler. Inks by Frank McLaughlin, Courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 DC Comics.

(Jan. 1978) that introduced his younger cousin, Air Wave II. He also guest-starred in Secret Society of Super-Villains, Super-Team Family, The Brave and the Bold, Metal Men, Showcase, and DC Comics Presents.

Green Lantern finally flew solo in his own book. In September of 1979, Green Lantern #123 sported a satisfying Gil Kane cover, heralding a brief return of GL’s premiere artist for the first time in almost ten years. Inside, GL made a less than cordial split with GA, but a more respectable break with fiancée Kari Limbo; and sparred with old foe Sinestro to rescue the mentally unstable Guy Gardner. From soap opera to space opera, this issue had it all, even Superman! Hal also returned to his test pilot job at Ferris Aircraft, and Carol Ferris and Tom (no longer called “Pieface”) Kalmaku once again were ongoing supporting characters. Long-time GL fan Joe Staton came on board as penciler.

“My pal Jack Harris was editing the book at the time,” remembers Joe Staton, “and he certainly knew of my long-time attachment to GL. So when the job opened up, Jack made my case to DC and I guess he was sufficiently persuasive.”

With Green Lantern #129 (June 1980, after #128’s all-new fill-in story by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum, originally scheduled for Adventure Comics #465), Denny O’Neil, who had scripted the Emerald Gladiator’s adventures for over ten years, left the book and DC to work at Marvel. I remember how O’Neil’s leaving GL affected me at that time—it just didn’t seem possible— so given the opportunity after all these years I asked the writer if he felt he had set GL on a satisfying course.

“I thought of myself as the Complete Professional.

Do the job, get paid, avoid emotional involvement. So, at least consciously, I didn’t think about things like leaving a character on a satisfying course. But the day I realized that by going to Marvel I would probably never do another Batman or GL story, I found myself running around Washington Square Park. At two in the morning.

In a rainstorm. Not exactly the behavior of someone not emotionally involved.”

Writers Bob Rozakis, Mike W. Barr, and Paul Kupperberg filled in for three issues (Green Lantern #130–132), while a new and surprising choice for writer prepared to chronicle the Emerald Crusader’s adventures.

When Marv Wolfman came over to DC from Marvel in 1980, one of his first ongoing assignments was Green Lantern, beginning with issue #133 (Oct. 1980). He utilized a more “Marvelized” approach, placing GL firmly between 2 8

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soap opera and space opera. The space opera aspects were terrific (the return of Dr. Polaris and Space Ranger, the threat of Eclipso, the introduction of the Omega Men). The soap opera aspects (anything involving Ferris Enterprises) I found difficult at the time. Wolfman was so good with the science-fiction aspects and the return of obscure members of GL’s rogues’ gallery (notably Goldface) that I felt the Earthbound plotlines were a distraction. However, I have a greater appreciation now of what Wolfman accomplished, especially in his handling of the romance between Hal and Carol Ferris, than I did 25 years ago. Staton remained as artist. I don’t want to give the impression that Wolfman peaked early, because he essentially wrote a GL novel and Staton rose to the occasion—but Green Lantern #134, “Snowbound,” is a stand-out, one of the all-time great Green Lantern stories.

“Working with Marv Wolfman, that was a thrill,” recalls then-GL editor Jack C. Harris. “Marv and I clicked, we got along great, and I remember our plotting sessions as being some of my most enjoyable as an editor. We bounced ideas off of each other like a couple of tennis pros. One of my favorites was issue #134 when, in a battle with Dr. Polaris, GL was injured and suffered from snow blindness. The images Marv conceived, and the way artist Joe Staton illustrated them, were sensational; some of the best work from both men at that time in their careers, in my humble opinion. I think my best contribution during that period was bringing artist Brian Bolland on board. He did a number of covers for me which led directly to the Tales of the Green Lantern miniseries. I don’t feel I ever reached the heights of greatness I wanted to on the title, but I think I did the character proud during a few brief but brightly shining moments.”

“Green Lantern was something I really wanted to write,” Wolfman recalls. “As it turned out, O’Neil was ending his run so I was able to easily take over, or at least that’s what I was told. GL was one of my absolute favorites.

“I was given a lot of freedom in writing the series, but not free rein. I had to submit ideas, but they were all taken. I do remember suddenly switching plots. I think it was my third; after working it out with Jack I suddenly came up with the ‘Snowbound’ story and wrote that one instead. It’s one of my favorite issues.

“I think I grounded GL a bit after a series of directions that kept changing him. I hope I gave some more personality to Hal. I infused the series with lots and lots of subplots that I think enriched the focus of the book. I was very happy with the book and wish I could have stayed with it, but I was on a number of other titles that I created and something had to give.

“I’m mostly pleased, as I said, with the issue where Hal finds himself snowblind in the Arctic. It was truly a story about Hal Jordan, a man born without fear, and not GL. Unlike most heroes, GL and his alter ego were not dissimilar; most secret identities seemed to have been timid or fools, but Hal was a hero on his own. I went into the root of what made Hal work and think it came out really well.”

Says Staton, “Marv had a nice handle on the ‘man without fear’ aspect of GL and how Hal Jordan functioned in the world. Marv did a really nice bit with Hal trapped in the Arctic without his ring and walking out through a blizzard. You really got to know what the guy meant by ‘will power.’”

On working with Staton, Wolfman has this to say: “Joe is not only a good artist—better than most

realize, very adaptable, and has many styles—but one of the nicest guys in comics. Working with him was a dream. I’d love to do so again.”

(As noted by Jack Harris, in 1981 the Green Lantern Corps had their own three-issue miniseries, Tales of the Green Lantern Corps, written by Len Wein from a plot by Mike W. Barr, and illustrated by Joe Staton and Frank McLaughlin. It featured the entire Corps, the introduction of young GL Arisia, and the return of the villainous Krona, the Oan who set the DC multiverse in motion.)

Marv Wolfman ended his run in GL #151 (June 1982), having exiled GL from Earth for conduct unbecoming of a member of the Green Lantern Corps. Hal, by direct orders from the Guardians of the Universe, would be banished from his home planet for one year, but still active as a Green Lantern. After two issues written by Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn, Mike W. Barr took the exile concept and ran with it, beginning in GL #154 (July 1982), returning GL to his science-fiction roots. Keith Pollard took over as artist after famed GL artist Gil Kane stepped in to illustrate issue #156.

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Nobody Does It Better One of artist Gil Kane’s return visits to Green Lantern: the cover art to issue #170 (Nov. 1983), courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 DC Comics.

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“I got to work with Gil Kane,” recalls Barr, “and it doesn’t get better than that for a GL fan. GL #158—‘A Loop In Time’—is probably the best story of the bunch, in that it’s an actual science-fiction story, not just a super-hero story with ray guns instead of magic swords. I tried to do the best I could with the legacy of John Broome and Julius Schwartz, and I hope I did a good job. Keith was swell. He was a good storyteller and drew attractive characters. He worked from my plots, and did a great job.”

“Concerning the exile into space,” continues Barr, “I wasn’t happy about it, but I was told I had to continue it, even though it had begun only the issue or so before I took over. I wanted to write the GL I had grown up with. I recall giving GL the Dorine character as a temporary love interest just so that he would have some kind of personal stake in the stories.”

During his run, Barr scripted one of the most controversial scenes in GL’s solo career. In issue #162, Green Lantern battles his own spaceship, which has stolen his power battery.

An innocent ten-year-old boy explodes in space, gruesomely and violently (the scene is even spotlighted on the cover).

“Ah, #162,” recalls Barr. “Don Thompson, then-editor of The Comics Buyer’s Guide, hated it, thinking it unnecessarily violent and graphic. I’m no fan of bloody death, but I do recall thinking that once in a while you have to have a villain do something really evil if he’s to remain any kind of threat.

Compared with what’s in comics today, it now seems understated.”

In the next issue, GL locates and repossesses his power source. While consoling the dead boy’s parents, Hal suddenly disappears. In issue #164 (May 1983), Green Lantern becomes … a barbarian! It is revealed that Myrwhydden, the evil sorcerer who lives in GL’s power ring, was behind the possession of the ship and murder of the young boy.

Issue #165 was Barr’s swan song on the book, starring Green Lantern John Stewart (who had moved up in the alternate ranks due to Guy’s ongoing mental and physical disabilities) and Green Arrow on Earth in battle together against a rampaging crystal creature (who had been a sub-plot tease for several issues).

For Green Lantern #166–170, Joey Cavalieri, utilizing some of the elements Barr had left behind, stepped in to script a five-issue story arc that for the most part took place in the mind of Hal Jordan. The reason for this

“psychodrama” imposed upon GL by the Guardians of the Universe is a tad contrived, but effective. It certainly sets the stage for GL’s anticipated return to Earth. The majority of the artwork was penciled by George Tuska.

Issue #171 (Dec. 1983) was GL’s last adventure as an exile in space. This issue stands out as an odd entity.

The tale was written by a “Noel Naïve.” The script is blessed with the artistic teaming of Alex Toth and Terry Austin. According to Mike W. Barr, editor Ernie Colón reworked the story considerably, so much so that the author did not want to have his real name connected with the story, hence the credit “Noel Naïve.” Bob Rozakis reveals, however, that the mystery writer was actually Robin Snyder. No editor is noted on the story or in the indicia.

Len Wein brought GL back to Earth in GL #172.

Dave Gibbons, later of Watchmen fame, became the artist. Wein brought Hal and Carol back together, and also introduced the mysterious Predator, who had a strong interest in Ms. Ferris. In issue #182, Hal relinquished his role as Green Lantern out of desire to stay with Carol, one of the most controversial actions up until then in Green Lantern’s career (in all fairness, Wein’s plot twist is mild compared to what would befall Hal in early 1994). Backup GL John Stewart was instated as the protector of space sector 2814.

Green Lantern #186 (Mar. 1985) was Wein and Gibbon’s last issue. For #187 Paul Kupperberg and artist Bill Willingham provided a seamless bridge that eased the transition between the departing team and the new creators on GL’s block.

In Green Lantern #188, writer Steve Englehart began his run on the book. Englehart, and the returning Joe Staton, put added emphasis on members of the Green Lantern Corps (John Stewart, Katma Tui, Guy Gardner), and also expanded the Predator’s role and connection to Carol Ferris. “Steve came into his own with the book in revamping Guy Gardner,” notes Staton. Not that Hal was out of the picture, of course, but it was pretty clear that he had once again become a co-star in his own book. Yet as the Crisis on Infinite Earths raged, Hal would not be relegated to civilian status for much longer. Although under tragic circumstances (the death of fellow Green Lantern Tomar Re), Hal returned to full Green Lantern glory at the end of GL #198 (Mar. 1986). Three issues later, Green Lantern became a team book, The Green Lantern Corps, with #201 (June 1986).

Hal would not go solo again until he moved over to the revamped Action Comics Weekly. But that’s the beginning of the third act of Hal’s lengthy GL career.

For now, I will dim the green spotlight; the second act of Green Lantern’s history has drawn to a close, at least the predominantly solo act (Green Lantern Corps would continue until #224). There are several reasons why I would begin the third act with Action Comics Weekly in 1988 and not Emerald Dawn in 1990, but that’s the subject of another article.

In time, there would be only darkest nights for Hal Jordan, but not on this second stage of GL’s mostly solo career. Although sprinkled with a few strange and wacky moments, it showcased many of Green Lantern’s brightest days.

We switch off our power battery... ...with this illustration by an artist we’d love to see draw a Green Lantern story, Paul Smith. Courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 DC Comics.

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Guy Gardner: The One, True Green Lantern by

Al Nickerson

Editor’s Note: Comics inker and columnist Al Nickerson (www.yacanteraseink.com) believes that someone other than our cover star Hal Jordan is “the one, true Green Lantern,” and he’s anxious to get his opinions off his chest…

Guy Gardner is my favorite Green Lantern. Thaaat’s right. Guy Gardner. Hal Jordan is cool and all, but Guy has been called (mostly by Guy himself, mind you) the “one, true Green Lantern.”

Guy Gardner made quite an impact in the 1980s with his appearances in Legends, Justice League, and Green Lantern.

Guy Gardner is strong, confident, boastful, and assertive. Back in the 1980s, Guy was a wonderful symbol for Ronald Reagan’s America.

But, let’s start off at the beginning, shall we?

The History of Guy A friendly Guy Gardner was created by John Broome and Gil Kane. Guy first appeared in Green Lantern #59 (Mar. 1968), entitled “Earth’s Other Green Lantern!”

As the story goes, Guy was supposed to be Earth’s Green Lantern, but that pesky Hal Jordan got in the way and stole Guy’s glory. As he lay dying, the alien Green Lantern, Abin Sur, sought a replacement for himself in the Green Lantern Corps. Two people were chosen—Guy Gardner and Hal Jordan. However, since Hal Jordan was closer to the dying alien, Hal was selected to be Earth’s Green Lantern. Later, Guy suffered brain damage and, for many years, lay in a vegetative state. In Green Lantern #193 (Oct. 1985), Steve Englehart and Joe Staton brought back Guy Gardner, but here was the imposing Guy Gardner that we know and love today. Two months later, with Crisis on Infinite Earths #9 (Dec. 1985), the Guardians of the Universe made the wise decision of appointing Guy Gardner to be an official Green Lantern.

Who is Guy Gardner?

So, is Guy Gardner a hero, a jerk, or both at the same time? Sure, Guy Gardner can be arrogant and annoying, but he’s also been a fearless hero. So, who is Guy Gardner, really?

Steve Englehart (writer of Green Lantern) agrees that Guy is “arrogant and annoying.” And that Guy “operates directly from the id—like James ‘Sawyer’ Ford on [the television series] Lost.”

Joe Staton (penciler of Green Lantern) says that “Guy is a clean-cut American hero who’s been damaged so that the self-censoring elements of his personality no longer kick in as they do in most adults.”

J. M. DeMatteis (writer of Justice League) suggests that Guy is just “a human being who, like most of us, is a mass of incredible contradictions. Hard as he tries to be a total bastard ... and he succeeds more often than not ... he can’t quite hide a (sometimes extremely small) core of decency and humanity. In the end, for all his extreme behavior, he always ends up siding with the good guys. That’s his choice ... and it speaks volumes about his character. (Such as is it!)”

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After all these years, I am still fond of Guy Gardner.

I think that he’s a likeable character regardless of his obnoxious behavior.

Staton feels the same way: “I’m really fond of Guy. He’s sort of like a tough little kid.”

“You can’t write a character and hate him,” DeMatteis continues. “Even if you’re writing the most despicable villain that ever lived, you have to have compassion for him ... for the forces that turned him into a monster. Plus, Guy (well, OUR [Justice League] version of Guy) is often as hilarious as he is obnoxious ... so how could you possibly hate him? The funny thing is, Guy was never one of my favorite Leaguers. [Blue] Beetle, Booster [Gold], J’onn [J’onzz], Fire, Ice, Ralph [Dibny] and Sue [Dibny] ... those were the characters that I fell in love with. That said, Guy provided a dynamic that really galvanized the team. The other characters were constantly bouncing off him, reacting to his behavior ... so he was an essential component of our League. The book wouldn’t have been the same without him.”

© 2006 DC Comics.

Before the Bowlcut Detail from the cover of Green Lantern #59, Guy Gardner’s first appearance.

Englehart “liked [Guy] a lot. He was incredibly fun to write (which is why I created him). And he worked so well against the more upright heroes of the Green Lantern Corps.”

Englehart explains, “John Broome created a, um, nice guy named Guy Gardner, who after two or three stories became a mental vegetable, and there he languished for years and years. When I took over Green Lantern, I created a completely new character with a completely new personality—and said he was Guy Gardner for continuity’s sake.”

Some readers do dislike Guy. So, what’s their problem?

Englehart suggests that “envy” could be the answer.

Staton believes “they probably are responding only to the aggressive elements of his personality. Steve Englehart was a very sophisticated writer who balanced the extremes of Guy’s behavior so that Guy could be seen either [as] a jerk or an over-the-top, take-charge hero.”

Or maybe there’s not a problem in readers hating the “one, true Green Lantern.” As DeMatteis explains, “I don’t think it’s a problem. I think that Guy has become very real to them and so they’re responding emotionally to his personality. I don’t think that means they don’t like the character. I suspect that they completely enjoy reading about him ... and part of that enjoyment is in disliking him!”

The Green Lantern Corps During his time in the Green Lantern Corps, Guy wasn’t above getting into a tussle with his fellow Green Lanterns when he thought they needed to learn a lesson or two (The Green Lantern Corps #207, Dec. 1986). Guy even got a chance to kick some commie butt when he took on the Soviet Union (The Green Lantern Corps #210, Mar. 1987).

Steve Englehart has his own favorite Guy Gardner issue: “The Green Lantern Corps #211 (Apr. 1987), ‘Pink Elephants,’ is one of my all-time favorite stories.

Guy gets the entire Corps drunk and they play out their innermost desires. It’s revealing character insights for the drunks, and a revealing character insight—the very essence—of my Guy Gardner.”

Joe Staton offers his favorite Guy Gardner moment: “I enjoyed the encounter between Guy and Kari Limbo. I was always hoping for something to come of that. It would be great to have them playing off each other, the NRA, NASCAR guy, and the New Agey, mystical babe (Green Lantern vol. 3 #18, Nov. 1991).”

© 2006 DC Comics.

Legends Guy Gardner’s heroism really shined in the Legends miniseries. Guy saved a passenger jet full of people (Legends #2, Dec. 1986), he captured a group of muscle-bound, bodybuilding villains (Legends #4, Feb. 1987), and he squashed some of Darkseid’s giant robot Warhounds (Legends #6, Apr. 1987).

Yet Guy’s most amusing adventure in Legends was his battle with the super-villain Sunspot (Legends #5, Mar. 1987). To me, Sunspot seemed awfully familiar. In fact, Sunspot looked just like then-Marvel Comics’ editorin-chief, Jim Shooter. With a strong likeness to Shooter, and such catchy dialogue as, “I wield the ultimate power ... the power to create a New Universe...”, it’s difficult not to imagine that the folks behind Legends had Shooter in mind when they created Sunspot.

Unfortunately, I was unable to get a conformation of my Sunspot-is-Jim-Shooter theory from any of the Legends creators.

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The Justice League Right off the bat in Justice League #1 (May 1987), we see Guy Gardner wanting to take charge and lead the Justice League. Could Guy have done it? Could he have successfully led the Justice League? Would the other Leaguers have followed his leadership?

J. M. DeMatteis doesn’t think so: “Guy is too arrogant, too egotistical, too narcissistic, and too much of an undisciplined wildcard to be a good leader. Plus, I don’t think he ever really wanted the responsibility of leading the team ... he just wanted the ego-boost. In the end, it’s probably more fun for him to moan and complain about not being the leader, telling everyone within earshot about what a great job he’d do if they’d only let him.”

Having Guy on the Justice League added a wonderful and interesting dynamic to the team. He was a comical powder keg. I always wondered whose decision it was to add Guy to the League.

“The team roster was already in place when I signed on to the book. It might have been a [Andy] Helfer-[Keith] Giffen decision ... or the lineup might have been in place before that, a decision made by the DC higher-ups,” recalls DeMatteis.

In Justice League #5 (Sept. 1987), tempers flared between Guy Gardner and Batman over who should lead the Justice League. This confrontation led to Batman knocking out Guy with a “lucky punch.” That was both a humorous and, yet, sad moment for Guy. Did Guy deserve such a thrashing from Batman?

DeMatteis thinks so: “Absolutely! That brilliant moment, by the way, was pure [Keith] Giffen. I take no credit for it whatsoever!”

After knocking himself unconscious in Justice League #6 (Oct. 1987), Guy had a drastic personality change. Gone was the boisterous, abrasive, and arrogant Guy Gardner that we all loved. Guy now became a polite, sweet, gentle, and wholesome fellow.

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Batman is Not Amused… (above) Kevin Maguire’s original artwork to a 1991 Justice League T-shirt, courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 DC Comics.

A Legend in His Own Mind (left) John Byrne/Karl Kesel promo art from the miniseries that foisted Al Nickerson’s favorite Guy upon DC’s readership, Legends. © 2006 DC Comics.

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According to DeMatteis, the change to Guy’s personality was “just a way to play with the character ... and to play on the readers’ expectations. I loved the wholesome Guy. I thought he was totally hilarious.”

The change to Guy lasted until Justice League International #18 (Oct. 1988)—too long for me since I liked the obnoxious Guy Gardner better than the sweet Guy Gardner.

DeMatteis doesn’t feel the same way. “Considering that we did the book for five years, it really wasn’t all that long. I think we milked it for the right amount of time ... it probably reached the point where many readers honestly believed the change was permanent ... and then we switched him back to the same arrogant idiot he was before.”

Guy had some memorable battles while serving in the Justice League. In any given Justice League book, you might find Guy smacking around Despero (Justice League America #39, June 1990), slugging it out with fellow teammate Metamorpho (Justice League Europe

Now in a Magazine of His Own! Page 20 from 1993’s Guy Gardner #14, penciled by Joe Staton and inked by Terry Beatty. Courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 DC Comics.

#11, Feb. 1990), and even getting in a scrape with a crazed alley cat (Justice League America #37, Apr. 1990).

In Justice League International #19 (Nov. 1988), Guy fought Lobo. During the tussle with Guy, Lobo (an interstellar assassin, mind you) complains of Guy’s fighting tactics: “You’re actually indulging in hair-pulling?! What kind of Green Lantern are you, anyway?” In true Guy Gardner form, Guy responds, “The kind that eats punks like you for breakfast!”

DeMatteis points out that, “There were no limits with Guy. He got the job done in any way possible. In his mind, the ends always justified the means.”

Now, you wouldn’t ever see Superman pulling the hair of a foe, but this does show us the length to which Guy will go in defeating an opponent.

Guy Gardner: Ladies’ Man? We saw a softer, more sensitive side to Guy in regard to his relationship with his fellow Justice Leaguer, Ice. Ice was Guy’s gal, and he seemed to genuinely care for her.

Is Guy Gardner truly capable of loving someone ... anyone other than himself, that is?

J. M. DeMatteis believes so. “As events in ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League’ (JLA Classified #4–9, Apr.–late Aug. 2005) proved, Guy’s love for Ice was very deep, very real. As noted earlier, Guy, like most of us, is filled with contradictions. Just because someone is a self-involved, arrogant ass doesn’t mean he’s not capable of truly loving another person.” DeMatteis continues, “The issues that specifically focused on Guy and Ice dating were, I think, among our best ... and the entire Guy-Ice relationship was a high point of the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League run. It allowed us to add more layers to a character who sometimes seemed like a two-dimensional cartoon. You’d see him soften around Ice then immediately act like a jackass with the others ... and you had to wonder, as you just did, which Guy is for real? The answer, of course, is both of them.”

Guy’s An Alien?

With the 1990s series Guy Gardner: Warrior, Guy discovers that he isn’t entirely human; that he is a descendant of an alien race called the Vuldarians. With his alien DNA, Guy possessed weird shape-shifting powers.

Least to say, I wasn’t all too happy about that particular change to the character of Guy Gardner.

J. M. DeMatteis didn’t follow this part of Guy’s story: “I’m happy to say that I had no clue that any of that was happening! When we brought Guy back for ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League,’ we pretty much picked up where we left off with the character.

Keith [Giffen’s] plot made a few (very) minor nods to continuity ... and then we did whatever we wanted. That was pretty much our philosophy for our entire Justice League run; a vague nod here and there to the gods of continuity ... then ignore it all and have some fun.”

Steve Englehart has a more diplomatic opinion of the idea of Guy being turned into an alien: “Seems pretty weird to me, and the waste of a good character, but if the story worked, I’m for it.”

Guy Gardner: Rebirth Thankfully, we can now ignore all that junk about Guy Gardner being some freaky alien. With 2005’s miniseries Green Lantern: Rebirth, Guy Gardner has returned to his role as a ring-wielding Green Lantern.

Some fans love Guy Gardner. Some fans hate him. As far as I’m concerned, Guy Gardner is still the “one, true Green Lantern.”

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by

Alex Boney

con du cte d on Ma

rch 31 , 20 06

When promotional posters for Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters went up in comic shops in 1987, the comics industry was still reeling from the shakeup that DC Comics had initiated two years prior. Crisis on Infinite Earths had realigned DC’s complex mainstream super-hero continuity, but the publisher had actually diversified its line of comics offerings.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns had injected a dose of gritty realism into super-hero comics, Swamp Thing had emerged as the industry’s premier dark fantasy comic for adults, and Watchmen had reimagined what super-heroes really were from the ground up. By the time Green Arrow was launched as a monthly series in early 1988, DC’s checklist consisted of the following: Vigilante #50, Hellblazer #2, Swamp Thing #69, New Teen Titans #40, The Question #13, and Wasteland #3.

It was another Golden Age of sorts, and Mike Grell added a touch of green to DC’s rich palette for the next five years.

Mike Grell did for Green Arrow in the late 1980s what Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams did for the character in the 1970s. Grell not only redefined Oliver (Green Arrow) Queen’s look and personality, but also made the character relevant to his time. O’Neil and Adams’ Ollie became a radical social reformer who took Green (Hal Jordan) Lantern on a journey of self-discovery across America and across the universe, and both characters learned quite a bit about themselves and their turbulent world along the way. In Mike Grell’s Green Arrow, Oliver Queen and his partner Dinah (Black Canary) Lance relocated from the fictional Star City to “real-world” Seattle, Washington, and examined what America had become by the end of the Reagan era. The three-issue prestige-format Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters (Aug.–Oct. 1987) and the subsequent ongoing Green Arrow series didn’t provide a serious study of super-heroes and super-villains, but instead offered a serious study of politics, justice, and a range of social issues from government corruption to sexual victimization. In Grell’s hands, Oliver Queen was not a super-hero. Rather, Ollie adopted the identity of an urban hunter and tried to become an extraordinary man.

—Alex Boney

Arrow Head Grell’s pencil rendering of Longbow Hunter GA. Unless otherwise noted, all artwork in this article is courtesy of Scott Kress and Catskill Comics (www.catskillcomics.com). © 2006 DC Comics.

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Beginnings: Assistant to Dale Messick on the Brenda Starr newspaper strip (1972)

Milestones: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes / Green Lantern/Green Arrow The Warlord / Jon Sable, Freelance / Starslayer / Tarzan newspaper strip / James Bond graphic novels / Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters / Green Arrow / Shaman’s Tears / Iron Man

Work in Progress: Jon Sable: Bloodtrail

Cyberspace: www.mikegrell.com/mikegrell/index.jsp and www.catskillcomics.com/grell.htm

Mike Grell Photo courtesy of Scoop.

ALEX BONEY: What led you to work on Green Arrow in particular? Was it a long-time respect for the character, or was it timing?

MIKE GRELL: It was both, really. I was a fan of Green Arrow when I was a kid—back in the old days when he had all the specialized arrows. I had actually gotten away from comic books altogether about the time I got seriously interested in girls, which was pretty typical back then. Along about 12 or 14 years old, your thoughts stray to other things, and so my comics pretty much went into a box under the bed. You know, I had Spider-Man #1 and Fantastic Four and all that good stuff.

Then when I was in the Air Force, I ran into a guy who was a huge comics fan. In fact, I was stationed in Saigon and he showed up with his comic-book collection with choice bits and pieces, and in among those was Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams, and Dick Giordano’s run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, and I was stunned. I had no idea that comics had grown up at the same time that I had grown up. Back in the old days, Batman had a chest shaped like a cardboard box and everything was way over the top, and all of a sudden here were stories about real issues in the real world with reasonably real people. And I guess what always attracted me to

Ollie’s Pal A commissioned illo of Green Lantern. © 2006 DC Comics.

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Green Arrow was the fact that he didn’t have any superpowers. He just had this extraordinary skill. And it’s a skill that, in all honestly, if you dedicate enough time to, you can learn it whether you’ve ever shot a bow or not. And that strongly appealed to me. I decided right then and there that that was the kind of work that I wanted to do.

But I had already geared myself toward newspaper comic strips. And then, finding that the newspaper-strip business was completely locked off—nobody was interested in buying action/adventure strips—I had the good fortune of running into Allan Asherman and Irv Novick. Irv, of course, [drew] Batman, and Allan Asherman was Joe Kubert’s assistant [at DC Comics] at the time. And they both told me in no uncertain terms that I should get my carcass up to Julius Schwartz’s office and show him my stuff. And Julie, in fact, gave me my first Green Arrow assignment, which was a backup story—“Little Dog Lost”—about Krypto wandering around and being found by Oliver Queen and joining in the crimefighting there. Elliot Maggin wrote that one.

BONEY: Do you remember what book that was in?

GRELL: No. It was a backup story that, I think, ran in Action Comics. [Editor’s note: Action #440, Oct. 1974.]

BONEY: That’s what we’re for. We’re supposed to research this.

GRELL: Yep, that’s your job. [laughs] Actually, people ask me questions like that all the time, and the truth is no, I just write the darned things and draw them and, in fact, very seldom get a chance to re-read them afterwards.

Sometimes I’ll be sitting at a table at a convention and somebody will come up with a book that I haven’t seen in ten or 15 years and ask for it to be autographed. And before I autograph it, I’ll take it out of the bag and read it, sign it, and hand it back to them. A lot of times, it’s like a family reunion, going back to the old homestead again.

You know, it gives you a great feeling—and sometimes a weird feeling, but that’s another question, I guess.

BONEY: Right. I guess any time you look back at what you did earlier, it can be a little embarrassing.

GRELL: I’m always alarmed. So when I was doing the backup stories with Green Arrow, it was sort of steps in a progression. My first story that I wrote, I actually did the plot and then about half of the dialogue. Elliot Maggin did the finished dialogue on it, and it was a Green Arrow story called “Black Canary is Dead” [Action #444, Feb. 1975]. It was I think a three-parter, and there’s foreshadowing of some of the themes that I incorporated into The Longbow Hunters. If you go back and check it out, you’ll see that. And then, when Denny O’Neil was going to resurrect Green Lantern/Green Arrow, I heard about it and I caught him in the hallway at DC Comics and asked him who I needed to kill in order to get it. And so, he just said “If you’re interested in it, it’s all yours.” And that was great. I think that was Green Lantern/Green Arrow #90 (Aug.–Sept. 1976), and that was like a dream come true for me, because I was finally working on the title that got me interested in comics in the first place. And then, many years and lots of water under the bridge later, after I had gone on to do The Warlord and Sable and Starslayer, I got a phone call from Mike Gold, who was editing over at DC Comics at the time. He asked me if there was any particular character at DC that I’d really like to do— wanted to do badly enough to come back to DC and work for them—and I said that I did such a miserable job on Batman when I was on that book that I’d always wanted to get back and take another shot at that. But I also knew that Frank Miller was just starting his work on Dark Knight Returns, and I told him that when Frank’s

done with this one, that’s going to put a period on the end of the Batman sentence.

BONEY: Yeah, that’s a hard act to follow.

GRELL: Well, he was essentially redefining the character, and that would be the definitive concept of Batman.

So what was the point? Gold said, “What about Green Arrow?” And I said, “Well, he’s always been my favorite.” Then he said “Well, think about this: Green Arrow as an urban hunter.” And he had me. I was hooked. That was it.

BONEY: So that was Gold’s idea?

GRELL: The urban hunter aspect. Everything else was mine, but that whole concept was the trigger that started it all.

BONEY: A lot of influential creators worked on Green Arrow before you came to the character. You’ve mentioned a couple of them. Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams and Jack Kirby all had a time with the character.

They all made their marks on Ollie’s life and adventures.

Do you have a favorite incarnation of the character from previous creators? Was it O’Neil and Adams’ run?

GRELL: Oh, yeah, no question about it. The two combined were the strongest single influence on me.

Well, really you have to say three, because Dick’s [Giordano] work—his contribution to that book— can’t be discounted by any means. Dick Giordano is the best comic-book inker that ever walked, bar none.

There’s nobody who can surpass him. There are a few who come close, but the guy is just terrific. He’s got such an amazing fluidity of line. You look at the layers in his panels and there’s no question about it: these drawings are enhanced by his work instead of just being something that’s just traced along underneath.

It was that combination of Denny’s unique storytelling and Neal’s powerful illustration, topped off by Dick’s amazing inks, that just did it for me. What I liked about Denny’s stories was that he dealt with real-world issues. Even though they were basically science-fiction stories, they were all fairly thinly veiled metaphors for the problems of the world that we live in. And he tackled some serious social issues. He tackled the drug problem.

BONEY: Right. With Speedy.

GRELL: Yeah, the concept of dealing with drugs was a strict taboo in comics. You didn’t mention things like that because it might offend somebody, might offend the Comics Code Authority. And working with Denny, I learned so much what makes a good comic-book story—how to write a good comic-book story. You know, there’s so much involved in what you don’t write.

There’s so much involved in having faith in the artist and being able to state clearly what it is that you want and not worry about all the extra stuff. It’s sort of like the difference between a good screenplay and a bad screenplay. A bad screenplay is full of detailed camera direction for the director, which does nothing but piss the director off. It makes him want to throw away the script and do his own thing anyway. But Denny’s scripts contain all the elements you need in order to make the story work, and then he has faith in the artist to be able to interpret that in such a way that it will be able to come off. And it gives him room to add enough of his own personality into it that things really shine. It brings out the best in everybody.

BONEY: And the material’s usually good, so it’s easy to bring the best out of everyone.

GRELL: It sure is. I’ve worked with other writers who wrote a phone book for a 22-page comic book. And all that extra writing was just wasted.

BONEY: You mentioned that Green Arrow was your favorite super-hero, and that was part of what led you to the book. Oliver Queen is the preeminent super-hero with a social conscience. But is he a super-hero, really?

Or was he in how you wrote him?

GRELL: No, I didn’t write him as a super-hero at all. In fact, when I did Longbow Hunters and the Green Arrow comic book, you’ll notice I moved him away from Star City and put him in Seattle, Washington, which was a real-world city. The stories that I dealt with were all based on real-world situations. I took a lot of my story ideas from headlines. Some of the more controversial ones came out of the headlines. In Longbow Hunters, in one case, I jumped the gun on the whole Iran-Contra scheme by six months. A radio station in New York phoned me up to find out whether I had an inside track or not. And I said no, I just looked around, dealt with the characters and the situations that I was seeing, incorporating the CIA and the drugs and all this other stuff. I thought, now what would be the stupidest thing these people could do if they thought they could get away with it? And that’s what I wrote, and sure enough, that’s how it happened.

BONEY: Sometimes you just have to read between the headlines.

GRELL: For all I know, someone read the comic book and said, “Hey, this would be a great idea.”

In point of fact, it was all probably happening at the same time, and maybe I just plucked it out of the ether. But I took great pains not to call Oliver Queen “Green Arrow.”

BONEY: Yes, and that’s especially noticeable early in the book.

GRELL: Because, face it, it’s a silly name. I got to do an origin story, Green Arrow: The Wonder Year, and I wrote this scene where he’s at a costume party and he’s dressed as Robin Hood.

He’s just been out shooting archery golf.

He unknowingly shot a golf ball with a fieldtip arrow, and the golf ball winds up stuck on the end of his arrow. Well, in comes this guy who’s going to rob the party, and Ollie reaches in his quiver for an arrow to take a shot at the guy as the guy is swinging his shotgun toward him. And as he pulls the arrow back, there’s a golf ball stuck on the end of it. So he figures “Okay, maybe I can hit him in the head.” He takes the shot, and the weight of the golf ball makes the arrow drop like a rock. Instead of hitting him in the head, he hits him in the crotch and takes him down that way. And as the police are dragging him off in chains, he says, “You never woulda caught me if it hadn’t been for that big, green, arrow-guy!”

And in the next scene, Ollie’s reading the newspaper and it says “Green Arrow Grabs Greedy Gooch.”

BONEY: The origin of the name and the origin of the trick arrow.

GRELL: That’s right. Ollie says: “Melvin Purvis gets George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly. I get a semi-literate named Lester ‘the Gooch’ Norton, who never goes to the movies, let alone read the classics. Melvin Purvis gets: ‘Don’t shoot, g-man!’ I get: ‘That big, green,

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Boxing-Glove Arrow Mike’s 2002 rendition of the pre-Longbow Hunter GA, courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 DC Comics.

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arrow-guy’… and a reporter with no sense of style.” You know, you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life. So I made a joke about that. In reality, the name Green Arrow was intended to be evocative of the Golden Arrow.

BONEY: One of the first super-heroes of the Golden Age. GRELL: Yeah. If you look at the time frame in which the comic book was created, they were looking to do a combination of Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow.

Hence the name Green Arrow. That’s really where that came from. But I made it a point not to do that— not to use the name in the comics. I also didn’t do any super-hero stuff. When Hal Jordan showed up, he showed up as Hal Jordan.

BONEY: Out of costume.

GRELL: Right. And Black Canary didn’t have any sonic scream or anything like that. She was just a superb martial artist. I always thought the canary scream was kind of stupid anyway. I know I’m violating doctrine by saying that, but…

BONEY: Because it’s returned.

GRELL: Well, there you are. But it was a silly power. Of course, later writers felt compelled to explain why she didn’t have any sonic powers. Somebody even went so far as to say that in the scene in The Longbow Hunters where she was being tortured, someone had jammed a rag down her throat and ruined her vocal cords. Nah ... give me a break.

BONEY: That raises another issue I’d like to ask you about. Green Arrow was featured as a backup character in other heroes’ books for years. You mentioned a couple of backups that you drew. So DC had a long-standing tradition of using him as a team-up character. You used Green Lantern, as you mentioned (or at least Hal Jordan out of costume), in a two-part story about Ollie’s descent into alcoholism. But for the most part, these team-ups were limited. Was this a conscious decision or an editorial mandate by DC when you decided to take the book the “mature readers” route?

GRELL: Conscious decision. A decision made between myself and Mike Gold, backed up very firmly by Dick Giordano.

BONEY: You did manage to write team-ups with some of your own creations, though. Was that fun?

GRELL: Ah, that was hysterically funny. We did a Warlord team-up because, back in the old days, Julie Schwartz used to say that Mike Grell’s comics didn’t fit into the DC Universe. So all of Grell’s stories took place on EarthGrell. There’s Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-Prime, and Earth-Grell. And that was because I refused to play the game. In The Warlord, for instance, I had to separate the world of the Warlord from the world of Superman because in the continuity of the Superman comics,

Rooftop Archer A commissioned illustration of Green Arrow by Mike Grell. © 2006 DC Comics.

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Superman has bored through the center of the Earth— you know, in one side and out the other. Well, if Skartaris existed in Superman’s world, he would have come out into Skartaris. So we had to change that. It was necessary to explain that the reason why that didn’t happen is because it took place on a different world, which was basically Earth-Grell. When Dan Jurgens was drawing Green Arrow, he wanted to do a team-up book. He approached Mike Gold and said, “You know, wouldn’t it be fun if we did ‘Green Arrow meets the Warlord’?’”

And I said, “Absolutely no way.” And Gold, being the instigator and the devil’s advocate—I swear to God, he’d make a great professional little brother—says, “Well, think about it this way. It’s based on the concept that you only know how to draw one face.” And I laughed my ass off and I agreed to do it because it was so funny.

And of course that particular story is predicated on the resemblance between Green Arrow and the Warlord.

BONEY: Right. Everybody’s chasing Travis Morgan, thinking that he’s Ollie.

GRELL: Sure. Every place Morgan goes, he gets beat up because Ollie has this uncanny knack for pissing people off. And it’s one of those cases where you finally get to see the two guys side-by-side, face-to-face, and then you can see the differences. But it’s real subtle.

BONEY: Travis is a little shorter than Ollie, right?

GRELL: You know, I ain’t saying that. All of the DC Comics characters used to be perceived as over six feet tall and under 30. I always saw Oliver Queen as maybe 5'9"–5'10" maximum, maybe 165–185 pounds. On a 5'10" guy, 185 pounds is a lot of muscle. So I saw him as a medium-sized guy, not a big guy, because his skills didn’t involve so much physical strength, although physical strength and coordination are part of it. He doesn’t have to be super-strong in order to be able to do what he does, although physical strength and fitness are by-products of archery. If you shoot a hundred arrows a day, which avid archers generally try to do when they can—and in particular, if you’re shooting an old-fashioned longbow, as opposed to a modern compound bow—just walking back and forth to the target is decent exercise, but you also build a lot of upper-body strength by pulling that bow. It’s a healthy activity. So he’s going to be pretty fit, but he doesn’t have to be huge. Which is another reason why I did the Shado character. She’s tiny by comparison. She shoots a bow that’s scaled to her physical strength and everything else, but she’s every bit an equal to Ollie.

BONEY: One of the most memorable Green Arrow partnerships during your tenure on the book was with the Question, but these team-ups occurred in the annuals—and once in the Question monthly—away from the main Green Arrow book and were written

by Denny O’Neil. Vic Sage offers an interesting philosophical counterpoint to Ollie. Was there a reason why Vic Sage didn’t make his way into the monthly Green Arrow book?

GRELL: Professional courtesy. I didn’t want to tread on other people’s toes. I didn’t feel like it was my right to grab hold of Denny’s character. Certainly, in my view, Denny has more right to the Green Arrow character than just about anybody on the planet. And I thought that Green Arrow and the Question made a great team-up in The Question. But I would have been reluctant to bring him into the Green Arrow comic book, just for that reason.

I’ve got too much respect for Denny and his character to wreck him by taking a whack at the guy by attempting to write Denny’s character. I felt proprietary in my own right toward Green Arrow because I had such a long-

standing, vested interest in the guy, but I would have been reluctant to go ahead and do somebody else’s character.

BONEY: Given Denny O’Neil’s work with Green Arrow, and given his use of Ollie in The Question, I’m wondering how much he was creatively involved or editorially involved in the direction of Green Arrow. Did he provide much feedback as you were writing?

GRELL: No. As a matter of fact, my whole run on Green Arrow, I had virtual carte blanche. There was never any particular criticism or input from editorial beyond the courtesy. I would always run the next storyline past the editor because you have to do that—you know, let them know what it is you’re going to write about. But my relationship with Mike Gold was strong. I decided that I wanted to do a story based on incidents that had happened in the real world involving a white slavery gang from Canada that was selling girls across the border into the U.S. One of these girls wanted to break away, and as a sign of their power, the gang crucified her. They nailed her to the cross as a warning to all the other girls. And I said I wanted to do a story based on this, and Mike Gold— with Dick Giordano’s backing—encouraged me to push the envelope. When it came to the illustration, Dan Jurgens asked Gold how far he should go. And again, they discussed it with Dick Giordano, and Dick said, “Push it.”

That was probably the greatest act of faith that anybody could give comic creators. When a guy who’s that high up in a company realizes that you’re trying to do something serious here and says, “Push the envelope,” you don’t get any better situation for creativity. And in fact, the reason why we were able to get away with the storyline that was written and the illustrations that Dan did—that actually showed frontal nudity—was that Dick Giordano, who was number two in the company, was the inker. You look at that finished book and go “Hey, how can they do this?”

Well, the answer is, “Because Dick said so.”

BONEY: That makes sense. And I remember that it was really a strong, powerful story.

GRELL: It made The New York Times and Time magazine in the same week. But unfortunately they didn’t mention my name.

BONEY: They didn’t at all?

GRELL: No, but they did refer to Green Arrow as “borderline pornography pandering to the prurient interest of today’s youth.” I remember that quote.

BONEY: I remember the letters column received quite a bit of a stir after that storyline, but I don’t remember reading those articles.

GRELL: Oh, man, I had people criticize me for having come up with such a misogynistic story. I was compelled to point out that I don’t make this stuff up. The fact that I portrayed women as victims wasn’t because I was touting that women should be victims. I was pointing out the fact that most often, in cases of this type of violence, women are the victims. If anything, I’m more of a women’s advocate than most people and a staunch supporter of women’s rights. You’ve got to go a long way to find someone who’s more in their corner than I am. If you take a look historically at all my female characters, they are generally more accomplished, more adept, better-adjusted, and in a lot of ways more compelling than my male characters.

BONEY: I agree. And sometimes, you have to raise an issue in order for people to confront it. And a lot of times, people just don’t want to confront the issue.

GRELL: Well, they don’t. One lady accosted me, calling me a misogynist, and said “How dare you blah blah blah” and all this other stuff, and she was clearly over the edge—I mean on the verge of hysterics. She was

The Shado Knows Grell’s specialty drawing spotlights Longbow Hunters’ breakaway character, Shado. © 2006 DC Comics.

screaming at me, swearing at me in front of God and everybody, and I pointed out to her that I don’t make this stuff up. I said that I read it in the papers. She said, “Well, not in the papers that I read.” And I said “Well, then, you must read USA Today. Because if you read the real-world newspapers, this stuff goes on all the time.”

Years ago, I rescued a crow that was injured and I took it to a wild bird sanctuary.

And I was shocked to see the state of some of the rescued animals they had there. And I expressed this to the lady who ran the shelter, and she looked at me and she said, “Honey, you ain’t seen nothing ’til you see what they do to their own children.” And she was right. People do the most horrific things to other people. I don’t have the answers for all of this, but, boy, I’ve got questions. I see my role as a writer as essentially the devil’s advocate. I raise as many sides of the issue as I can, but I get the issue out there. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Although my characters tend to have a solution to the immediate situation, they don’t have the answer to the problem. That’s for other people to think about. My job is to make them think about it in the first place.

BONEY: And one of the most successful things about Green Arrow, at least as I could tell from the letters column, was that it made a lot of the readers think about these things in ways they might not have otherwise.

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GRELL: Absolutely. And again, Mike Gold gets credit for that because he was very good in that letters column. If we got negative mail, he printed it. If we got positive mail, he printed it. If we got controversial stuff—stuff that raised other questions that we didn’t have the answers for—he printed it because it would inspire other writers to write in the following month. And in some cases, there was an ongoing dialogue, almost like the equivalent these days of a blog.

BONEY: And the same conversation lasted months— lasted years, in some cases. That was one of the things that made Green Arrow distinct and unique. Green Arrow, much like The Question, was hard to pin down and classify at the time. After Crisis on Infinite Earths, there seemed to be a clear segmentation of the DC Universe. On one hand, you had dark, hard-edged, revisionist super-heroes in books like Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns. Then you had mature horror and fantasy titles, like Hellblazer and The Sandman, that would eventually become Vertigo books. Then you had mainstream super-hero books. Did you see your work as any of those types, or were you trying to create something new apart from all of that?

GRELL: If I were going to put it into a niche over at DC, I would probably say that it came a little bit closer to Vertigo than it did to the mainstream DC comics. In point of fact, I was trying to make my own niche. I was trying to stay away from the traditional DC Universe and not get involved with the things that the other people were doing. It gave me certain freedoms in a lot of ways. For instance, we could go back to the Question team-up. The logic that follows the people who are

Extreme Makeover Mike’s alteration of GA’s uniform in 1986 costume studies. © 2006 DC Comics.

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obsessive about continuity goes like this: Green Arrow appears in The Question. Batman appears in The Question. Therefore, Green Arrow and Batman appear in the same world. Therefore, since Batman exists in the same world as Superman, Green Arrow exists in the same world as Superman. Therefore, super-powers exist and Green Arrow should be dealing with super-powers.

The best way to not have to do that is to avoid the subject altogether, to insulate myself and the character from having to deal with that. At the same time I was doing Longbow Hunters, Frank Miller was doing Dark Knight Returns. And in there, you’ve got Superman and Green Arrow, and I know that everybody kept looking to see where Longbow Hunters was going to lead and how it was going to dovetail into Dark Knight—where it would lead 20 years from now. And I just ignored it.

BONEY: Yes, because you would have to have chopped off one of Ollie’s arms to fit him into that continuity.

GRELL: Yeah, well, you’d have to. I tell you, I thoroughly enjoyed that story. I liked it quite a lot. And I liked it for what it didn’t say as much as for what it did say.

The subtext was just great. It never really explained what the grudge was between Ollie and Superman.

But you get that impression pretty clearly.

BONEY: I’d like to shift to art, if we could. You worked with a number of high-profile and talented artists during your time on the book—artists like Ed Hannigan, Dan Jurgens, Denys Cowan, and Rick Hoberg. Did any of them specifically capture the Green Arrow you had in mind as you were writing it?

GRELL: Oh, yeah. It’s almost alarming to say all of them. But each one of these guys brought something

so unique and distinctive to the character that I was almost always amazed at how well the story came off in print. It’s one thing to sit down at a typewriter or a keyboard and bang something out. You have an idea or a vision of what the thing should look like, but to see somebody else apply this and put his stamp on it is pretty damned amazing. Ed Hannigan’s work sort of went though an evolution during his time on the book. The change was pretty dramatic, and it was interesting to watch. Of course, when Dan Jurgens teamed up with Dick Giordano, it seemed to bring out amazing qualities in Dan’s work that even I hadn’t seen before. And I can’t say enough good stuff about Rick Hoberg, except to say that Rick threw away better art than I printed. I swear, this guy would sit down and do a layout of a panel that was as good as my finished pencils.

BONEY: He had a really clean pencil. And I think that, of all the creators on that book, he was the one who I as a reader saw the most development from.

GRELL: A rough to Rick was like a finished pencil to me.

And then he’d go back over it with a felt-tip pen and refine that. He’d take his felt-tip drawing, put it on a light-box, and he would go over it with pencil until it was absolutely precise. You’d have to be a moron not to be able to ink one of Rick’s books and not have it come out looking exactly like Rick. And then his felt-tip line, that was just like a finished ink to me, would go in the garbage can and he’d have this finished pencil, and he’d ink the finished pencil. He was like a machine, day after day and page after page—the most incredibly detailed, precise stuff. If I gave him a scene that took place at a certain location in Seattle, he’d grab his camera and head out the door and go photograph that spot, because it was important to him and it lent a feeling to reality and authenticity to everything he drew.

We did a story that took place in a big rotating restaurant at the top of the Space Needle. It was about a terrorist takeover. So Rick heads down there with his camera, walks in snapping photographs, and he gets accosted by the management wanting to know who he is and why he’s taking pictures and all this other stuff. And he says, “Well, we’re doing a comic book that’s set up here and terrorists are trying to take over the Space Needle.” And they say, “Ah, no, I don’t think so.” They got on the telephone to the editor, Mike Gold—Rick gave them the contact information—and the president of the Space Needle himself (I don’t know, Mr. S. Needle or something) phones up Mike Gold and wants to know if he’s crazy. Gold is completely cool about the whole thing and says to him, “I gather from the tone of your conversation that you believe that there are terrorist groups possibly in existence and active in the Pacific Northwest.”

And the guy says, “Well, it’s possible.” And Gold says, “Well, do you think it’s possible that any of these terrorist groups at the moment, who don’t know about the existence of the Space Needle, are likely to discover the existence of the Space Needle by reading a comic book?”

And the guy cussed and swore and he said, “Print your comic book.” And that was pretty much it. In this day and age, ten years or so after the fact, we probably couldn’t have done that. If you wrote a story like that right now, I’m sure the Space Needle Corporation would block it rather than put it out there. There’s no possibility.

BONEY: Rick was really great, as were Denys, Dan, and Ed. They were talented artists. But I think one of the attributes that was lost after Longbow Hunters was experimental, innovative page layouts and composition. One exception was the issue you returned to illustrate as well as write—

Rough Stuff These various Green Arrow headshot studies and cover sketches were penciled by Grell on a 12" x 18" sheet. © 2006 DC Comics.

issue #40’s “Spirit Quest” (Dec. 1990). Did you ever think or wish you could have stayed on as the artist as well as the writer on the monthly book?

GRELL: Oh, yeah. Any time you go from having your hand in every portion of the creative process to stepping back and really surrendering a lot of the control, you’re always nervous. You’re always worried about what it’s going to look like. Is it going to match your vision? And the best thing that I can say is that I was very, very fortunate to always work with guys who not only saw what I saw in the character, but who lent something special of their own personality to the book. It came out different from what I would have done, but better. Different is not always worse. Different is just different.

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But sometimes different can be dramatically better.

And it’s because of that cooperative relationship we had as a creative team that I think the group of us working on that book made it better than it would have been with just one person. It was hard walking away. I would love to have stayed on there and actually done the finished artwork on all the stories that I wrote, but that just wasn’t to be. “Spirit Quest” was one that was near and dear to my heart, and I felt like if I was going to get one shot at drawing a story, then that was probably the one that was going to be it.

I also want to mention Denys Cowan. Cowan had a brief run on the book, but the stuff that he did on his run was just amazing. I’ve always been a huge fan of his work, going all the way back to the early days, and having the opportunity to work with him on Green Arrow was quite a jolt for me.

BONEY: His was the most aggressive-looking Oliver Queen I’ve ever seen. It was really dynamic, especially when Ollie was having a conversation with George H.W. Bush on a plane after he was betrayed by the government organizations. And Denys drew the anger like no other artist probably could have.

Evolution of a Cover (above and opposite page) Grell’s cover studies for the first issue of Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, and the actual published cover. © 2006 DC Comics.

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GRELL: Denys got it. He clearly got it. He’s one of the most dynamic artists ever to hit the business, and he had such a raw energy to his drawing that it just always came through. If you wrote a page that had strong emotional impact, Denys wouldn’t draw it in a light, lyrical way. He’d draw it emotionally. And that’s something that I always admired in his work.

BONEY: Most people ask artists about their artistic influences, but not many ask about their literary influences. This is one of the things that I’m interested in with your work on the title. Denny O’Neil provided a “Recommended Reading List” at the end of every issue of The Question. What literary artists or works had influenced or affected you the most, either personally or professionally?

GRELL: Well, I kind of run the gamut. But the truth is, as a kid, I was a huge Edgar Rice Burroughs fan. And Jules Verne. And you can see that in the work that I did on The Warlord, obviously. Later on—in fact not so much later on—my favorite writer to this day is Mickey Spillane.

And it’s not so much that his work is the best writing, but it sure was entertaining at the time. Spillane’s method of writing is one of the greatest helps to any writer that I’ve come across. Spillane says he writes the end of the book first because that way he knows where the hell he’s going. In the case of writing a mystery, that certainly holds true. You have to know how the thing ends because that’s your wrap-up, and you can work back from there and make sure you get all the clues in there— who done it and how done it and why done it and how the character discovers all of these clues. That’s all basically contained in your last chapter. The other thing that I liked about Spillane was that he broke all the rules.

His characters were gritty and vicious and hard-edged.

Mike Hammer wasn’t a pretty guy, but he sure was charismatic. The women weren’t always the victims. In fact, in many cases, they turned out to be the killers, and Mike Hammer dealt with them in the same fashion.

It didn’t matter to him. He was out for his brand of justice, and I liked that. I like his first-person narrative and the fact that Spillane would always give you all the clues that you needed to solve the mystery. If you followed along with it—if you were sharp enough— generally, by the time you’re even a quarter of the way through the book, you’ve already got all the evidence that you need to solve the mystery. If you’re sharp.

BONEY: And actually, that usually happened at the end of the first issue of each two-issue arc that you did for Green Arrow. We had all the information we needed. We just needed to put it together.

GRELL: Right, but the surprise is in how it comes together. Spillane said his goal was to delay the revelation as long as possible. If you can save it until the last page, great. And in one case, in one of his books, he saved it for the last word on the last page. And it was perfect. It was terrific. There are elements in his writing that I always liked—the way he’d set up the backstory and the way he’d develop things as they went along. He always said the first page of your book is what sells that book. The last page of your book is what sells your next book.

BONEY: It’s clear from the detail of your Green Arrow stories that you were pulling from a wealth of knowledge, especially regarding hunting and military matters. Did you have to do much additional research for the stories?

GRELL: To a certain extent. Any time you’re working with real-world issues, you have an obligation to get as much of your information accurate as possible. Just like writing anything else. You can’t come out and say that the CIA was founded in 1955 when the CIA was actually a spin-off of the old OSS from World War II, you know?

You have to get certain details accurate and it helps your storytelling. The more accurate you can be in small details, the easier it is for the audience to accept the things that you’re fudging on. The more fact, the easier it is to accept the fiction. Denny O’Neil used to say, “Yes, it’s bullsh*t science, but it’s our bullsh*t science.” In cases where you’ll write something that has little to deal with the real world, as long as you establish what the rules of the road are first, and then stick to the rules of the road, then you’re good to go. Your audience will accept it.

And you don’t have a problem with that. Beyond that, it’s like what Agatha Christie said: Any time you read a book, you get 10% plot, 20% characterization, and 70% whatever the author knows best.

BONEY: That’s good.

GRELL: Yeah, I use that one all the time.

BONEY: Part of what made Green Arrow so distinctive during your time on the book—and you’ve touched on this a bit—was the no-holds-barred way you approached social and political issues. You dealt with the ecology, you dealt with victimization, and slavery, and suicide….

GRELL: The Aryan Nations.

BONEY: Right. The Aryan Nations. Neo-Nazis. Just a wide spectrum of political and social issues. Did Green Arrow reflect your own politics, or were you using the character to explore the socio-political issues that were important at the time?

GRELL: Yes. How do I say this? My own politics tend to be conservative, but I see Oliver Queen as a moderate humanist. Ollie would be more inclined to vote Democrat than Republican, whereas I would be more inclined to vote Republican than Democrat. Within reason. I say “within reason” because the current situation in our country is the exception to that rule.

There’s no way that I could, in good conscience, vote Republican right now.

BONEY: It was an interesting mix for the book, then. Having a conservative-leaning writer writing a liberal-leaning character.

GRELL: As Denny wrote Green Arrow, he was quite liberal. And I being more conservative … in truth, I’m probably more middle-of-the-road, more moderate, than anything else. I honestly don’t adhere to a political philosophy. In fact, my political philosophy is, “Deal me out, thank you kindly, pass me by.” I hate politics. The only thing I hate worse than politics is politicians, and that’s a fact. They’re one of the greatest evils in our world today, but unfortunately a necessary evil.

The difference is that Denny’s approach to Green Arrow was so liberal that in one case, after Ollie had killed a man by accident, he goes to a Buddhist monastery and swears that he will never ever kill again.

In point of fact, I used that as part of the inspiration for The Longbow Hunters. Because it occurred to me that making that statement for a guy who is in the business of shooting arrows at people is 1) a little silly and 2) given the right stimulus—cause and effect—anybody will kill. A mother will kill to protect her child. A father will kill to protect his family. People kill all the time to protect their homes, their country. And it’s not because they’re natural-born killers. It’s that the response to a threat, if it is a sufficient threat, brings you to that moment of decision. And that’s why in The Longbow Hunters, I gave Ollie that moment. I gave him the opportunity to make the decision. Certainly, he’s already demonstrated his skill with a bow. In an earlier scene, a guy is brandishing a knife. Well, it’s no problem for Ollie.

You know, he could shoot the knife out of the guy’s hand if he wanted to. But he doesn’t. He shoots him square through the heart because the son of a bitch deserved it.

BONEY: Sometimes Ollie’s social conscience came into conflict with his personal ethical conscience. You and Mike Gold took some heat in the Green Arrow letters column for Ollie’s willingness to kill.

Mike often defended Ollie’s methods in “Sherwood Forum.” But how would you explain his views on taking life? I mean, are there boundaries or limits?

GRELL: Of course, there are boundaries and limits. Just because a police officer in the line of duty is sometimes called on to take a life, it doesn’t mean that that man is a natural-born killer. A soldier who is in combat shoots to kill. He doesn’t shoot to wound. The idea is that you’re facing a threat that, if you don’t eliminate that threat by killing that person, you could die. George Patton: “No son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country.

He won it by making some other son of a bitch die for his country.” So in Ollie’s case, I approached this as a man stepping up to the brink of a cliff and making the conscious decision to jump off. Once he’s jumped off, he can’t un-jump.

He took that step knowing what he was doing. It was a conscious decision to kill this man.

BONEY: In The Longbow Hunters.

GRELL: Right. And when he made that decision, everything changed for him. He became different, and there was no going back. He could deal with it in whatever fashion. He could struggle with it, he could accept it, he could blow it off, or whatever. But his life was going to be different from that point on. Because of that, I felt that it was logical then to take him into

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situations where he would face similar things with people. He was the spirit of justice, which is really the difference between Green Arrow and Green Lantern.

Green Lantern is the letter of the law. Green Lantern always followed the letter of the law.

BONEY: That was always the appeal of their team-up.

GRELL: Right. And Ollie always represented the spirit of justice. This is a rich guy who dresses up like Robin Hood. He sees himself as the defender of justice. And sometimes justice means that the person on the other end really deserves to die, and that is the immediate justice. And if you turn it over to the court system, maybe they get a slap on the wrist, maybe a plea bargain, bump it down to manslaughter in the second degree or something like that. For instance, there was a case here in Washington State of a little boy who was savagely beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend. I mean, this little child was brutally beaten to death by a grown man. The guy was first convicted of murder in the first degree, and then they changed the law to say that if a death occurs but the assault wasn’t actually intend to cause death, then you couldn’t call it murder in the first degree. And this guy wound up, for the sake of the state not having him go through another trial, pleading out to seconddegree manslaughter. And instead of life in prison, he’s going to serve eight years. This little boy is still dead. In the real world, that’s what happens. But in Ollie’s world, the guy wouldn’t be around.

BONEY: You took a hard look at justice and government corruption throughout Green Arrow. All of the major government agencies were involved—possibly even, as Ollie once joked, the SPCA. One of my favorite lines from the book is from issue #39 (Nov. 1990). After Ollie confronts the president, Bush remarks, “Why is it always some guy named Oliver?” There was a realism to Green Arrow that I had never seen before and haven’t seen much since in super-hero comics. Do you think a lot of the political and social issues you raised in Green Arrow are still relevant today? Would Ollie’s political philosophy translate well to the 21st century?

Issue #3 The writer/artist’s original cover concept for the third Longbow issue. © 2006 DC Comics.

© 2006 DC Comics.

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GRELL: Oh, hell yes. Hell yes. In fact, if Ollie were being created today, starting from whole cloth, I could see Oliver Queen as a true Robin Hood—as something of a revolutionary. The world that we live in today is a very, very scary place. And while Ollie would be fighting against things like terrorism and the spread of hate throughout the world, he would also be fighting against the political system that has become as corrupt as it is. He would be fighting very, very hard against the degradation of American liberty.

BONEY: And that seems to define a lot of people’s interpretations of their experiences in America right now, I think.

GRELL: Right. And that’s what was always so great about Green Arrow—at least from the Denny O’Neil era onward. Here was a character who could do this, who could function in the real world, that could step across the lines of fantasy into the world of reality and raise issues and questions among the readers to get them thinking about what’s really going on in the world. I think that having a character like Green Arrow who can do that is a very important thing. It’s one of the things that I still love about the character.

I’d love to see that happen some more.

BONEY: A lot of these issues—issues of power and authority—have been tackled by writers like Warren Ellis and others in The Authority and Mark Millar in The Ultimates, too. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen them as clear and directly grounded in the headlines of the real world as they were in the late ’80s and early’ 90s in Green Arrow.

GRELL: A lot of it depends on … well, I don’t want to say that it’s necessarily always a question of balls, but there is a certain amount of that. Without an editor like Mike Gold, who thrives on controversy, sometimes you find that it’s easier from a corporate standpoint to take the middle of the road rather than to go aggressively toward the edge. And that was what we always did with Green Arrow. We went toward the edge and jumped off every chance we got just to see what would happen. It was a freedom that I don’t know everyone necessarily has today. But it would sure be nice if you saw more of it.

In terms of keeping up with what’s going on in the world today, the simple fact from a publishing standpoint is that it’s changing so rapidly that you are uncertain that the world of today is going to be the same world by the time you get into print. We did a story way back when, in Sable, where it was an assassination plot against Ronald Reagan. And the world being what it was, and Reagan having already been shot, we were facing the question of “What happens if, between the time that we write and draw the story and the time it appears in print, somebody does actually take the guy out?” Well, then you’re faced with either being perceived as cashing in on the tragedy or being clairvoyant. We decided that we would take that risk because it was an essential part of the story, and sometimes you just have to take that leap of faith.

BONEY: Your run on Green Arrow ended with issue #80 (Nov. 1993). Was that your decision, or was it an editorial call at the time? Were they sending the book in a different direction, or had you just told the stories you had to tell?

GRELL: In point of fact, I ended my run on Green Arrow so that I could concentrate on Shaman’s Tears.

BONEY: A creator-owned book (from Image Comics).

Even more freedom, probably. Were 80 issues too long, too short, or just about right to tell the stories you wanted to tell with Ollie?

GRELL: It was too short. I could step back into writing Green Arrow today.

BONEY: Are you reading Green Arrow today?

GRELL: My rule is that if they don’t send them to me, I don’t read them. It’s not because I don’t have an appreciation for the work that the guys are doing on the book. It’s just that if I don’t rate the comp list after 30-odd years in the business, then I’m not going to read it.

But DC recently put me back on the comp list and I’m currently enjoying catching up on my comics reading.

BONEY: Fair enough. I think that’s fair, especially with Green Arrow. Ollie’s mayor now. I don’t know if you’ve received a copy of Green Arrow #60 (current series, May 2006) yet, but he’s become mayor of Star City.

GRELL: You know, Denny O’Neil was going in that direction pretty close to 30 years ago. And it’s sort of a logical progression. I don’t know if he’s still wearing the mask, but it seems a little silly. It seemed to Denny that Ollie running for office and still being Green Arrow would lead to the exposure of his secret identity.

Because how many public figures have this goatee? It’s like Clark Kent and those glasses. You know, he puts on those glasses and nobody recognizes him. [laughs] BONEY: Right. It’s rather a large suspension of disbelief.

Looking back now, are you pleased with your stint on the book?

GRELL: Oh, yeah. I think that some of the stories that we did in Green Arrow were important to tell at the time. And from a pure entertainment standpoint, I would say that you could stack The Longbow Hunters up against not just any of the work that I’ve ever done, but anything that anybody did. I think that, in terms of what it was at the time … I’m not saying that it’s the equal to, say, Watchmen or Dark Knight, but it deserves to be in the same club.

BONEY: I would absolutely have to agree—especially having read them again recently. A lot of the issues you were confronting then were either prophetic or were tapping into undercurrents that hadn’t been tapped into before and still are incredibly relevant today.

GRELL: As far as prophecy goes, cartoonists … and that’s what we are, okay? The word is “cartoonist.” Not illustrator. You know, that’s for snobs. [laughs] We’re all cartoonists. But cartoonists have a legacy of clairvoyance that dates back to Milton Caniff in World War II. He was doing Terry and the Pirates, and he wrote several strips that caused the FBI to come knocking on his door.

There was a six-week lead on daily strips and a nineweek lead on Sunday strips. In his advance copies, the FBI discovered that Milton Caniff had accurately predicted the invasion of Burma. They showed up on his doorstep saying, “How did you know this?” And there were a number of ways that he could have anticipated that this was going to happen. One is that he read the newspapers. The other is that, because he did a lot of public relations and design work for the Army

Green Arrow vs. Shado

Air Corps back then, he had lots of friends in the military and he had a complete understanding of military theory and how operations like that would develop. So it was logical for him to say that this was probably the next big stage. And so they went away and said, “Well, don’t do it again.” A couple of years later, Caniff writes a storyline that predicts the D-Day invasion. He even used two of the code-words that they used for the beaches. And there’s this knock-knock-knock at his door, and it’s the FBI again. And they’re going, “Okay, Milt, how did you know this?” And he had to say, “You know, I just plucked it out of the thin air.” And they go away and say, “Well, don’t do it again.” Many years passed, and in the 1970s, Milton Caniff had six weeks’ worth of strips done—in the can, lettered, drawn, the whole nine yards—about an heiress who is kidnapped by a revolutionary group, winds up joining them, and essentially helps take over running the operations.

BONEY: That’s uncanny.

GRELL: Right. Patty Hearst. Milt was in the hospital at the time, and when that story broke, they had to yank all the strips. He stayed up day and night, in his hospital bed, re-drawing the dailies so that they could be run.

He completely created a new story. And it wasn’t until years later that enough time had passed—you know, water under the bridge—to be able to actually publish what was essentially a Patty Hearst storyline.

BONEY: Amazing. There are very few cartoonists who have that sort of clairvoyance—or at least the staying power. I think certainly Will Eisner’s run on The Spirit taps into a lot of that, too.

GRELL: Sure, and in a lot of cases, I think as a cartoonist— you know, the guys who write and draw their own stuff—you tend to pay attention to the world around you and tend to watch what’s happening and use your imagination constantly in your search for storylines.

And you say, “Okay, what would be this story? How could this be adapted into a story? What is the essential drama here? If you change just a couple characteristics, can you make this an exciting or compelling action story or a mystery?” And the answer is yes. There’s a lot to be said for a good old-fashioned super-hero bang-bang story. But there’s quite a lot more to be said for stuff that draws people in because it has at least some bearing on the world that they live in.

BONEY: And Green Arrow certainly provided that, at least for a number of years. Mike, thank you so much for your time, and thanks for giving me a reason to read through these books again.

GRELL: Thank you. You know, one of these days I’ve got to get out my boxes and dig them out and read them again myself.

Detail from pages 26 and 27 of Longbow Hunters #2. Courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 DC Comics.

© 2006 DC Comics.

Alex Boney teaches writing and literature courses at Ohio State and Ohio Dominican University in Columbus. He has presented on comics and modernist literature at several conferences, including the Comic Arts Conference in San Diego and the Bloomsday 100 International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin.

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© 2006 WildStorm Productions.

(right) Alan Moore and I talked over the cover designs for the series one afternoon, and this was done immediately after I hung up the phone.

I blew up the thumbnail and put it underneath the layout paper I drew this on. The pencils were then scanned and printed out in light blue on the final board for inking.

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ALBION #1 (2005)

Pencil art and captions by Dave Gibbons

© 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

This was one of a pair of covers for the collections of Amalgam [hybrid DC/Marvel characters] stories. The crowd of figures took a bit of juggling, and this was the last in a series of layouts I progressed through before settling on the final arrangement.

AMALGAM MARVEL COLLECTION (1996)

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THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #200 (1983)

© 2006 DC Comics.

The final page of the Earth-One/Earth-Two Batman story that finished the title’s run, with issue #200.

Drawing in two different styles was a lot of fun, and a chance to make an homage to Dick Sprang’s wonderful work.

DIGITAL CREATIVE ARTS (2005) A cover for a British computer arts magazine, containing a step-by-step of how I use the computer in comic artwork. This character has no name! © 2006 Paragon Publishing.

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TALES OF THE GREEN LANTERN CORPS (1981)

© 2006 DC Comics.

One of the first jobs I drew for DC. These are not the finished pencils. I traced them onto the final board for inking!

© 2006 DC Comics.

GREEN LANTERN CORPS v.2 #4 (2006)

From an early GL job (opposite page) to just about the latest. I scanned this and printed it out in light blue for inking.

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JSA #67 (2005) © 2006 DC Comics.

I didn’t ink this job, so the pencils are extra tight for me. Inker James Hodgkins didn’t let me down!

(99% of my work I’ve inked myself.)

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GREEN LANTERN SECRET FILES (2005)

A Mongul pinup for a Secret Files issue.

When I drew Mongul back in Superman Annual #11 (1985), I made a little clay head of him to get the form right. I still have it! © 2006 DC Comics.

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STAR WARS: VADER’S QUEST (1999)

© 2006 Lucasfilm.

This was one big illustration that broke down into the four individual covers (shown here are #1 and 2) for Dark Horse’s Vader’s Quest series.

I did tight pencils, then Angus McKie painted over those, and did final tweaks on the computer.

WATCHMEN 20th ANNIVERSARY

This was a cover for a French magazine, paying a 20th anniversary tribute to Watchmen. This was doped out on a printout of their logo.

It was good to draw these characters again after so many years as a finished piece rather than a quick convention sketch.

Watchmen © 2006 DC Comics.

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by

From the time the Green Goblin was introduced in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man #14 (July 1964), his and Spider-Man’s destinies were intertwined in a manner readers had never seen before. Their relationship went beyond the standard “good guy versus bad guy” dynamic, as Spider-Man and the Green Goblin were more than just adversaries. They were mortal foes that were engaged on a personal level, both in and out of their masks.

After all, Peter Parker was a close friend of Harry Osborn, Norman (the Green Goblin) Osborn’s son. Indeed, when Norman was in his right mind, he was a friend to young Parker. But when under the influence of his darker persona, Osborn, as the Green Goblin, knew all of Spider-Man’s secrets, including his true identity, and he knew how to best strike at the Wall-Crawler.

In The Amazing Spider-Man #121 and 122 (June and July 1973, respectively), the conflict between these two characters came to a head when the Green Goblin committed his ultimate sin, one so terrible it sealed the fate of one of Marvel’s most memorable menaces, and also marked a major turning point for Spider-Man. —Dan Johnson

Dan Johnson

cond ucte d Marc h 23, 2006

DAN JOHNSON: Before we discuss the death of the Green Goblin, I think we have to first touch on the death of Gwen Stacy. How did the decision come about to kill these characters off?

GERRY CONWAY: [Killing Gwen and then the Green Goblin] were two separate decisions. As I remember, John, I think it was originally your idea to kill Gwen Stacy….

JOHN ROMITA, SR.: Well, we had decided we were going to kill somebody. The original thought that was brought to us was that Aunt May would die. I remember telling Gerry that Aunt May was too important to Peter’s secret identity for us to kill her. I know she was a pain in the neck to a lot of readers, but she was a good foil and as long as Aunt May was around, Peter was going to be a kid. I suggested that if we were going © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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to kill somebody, it should be Gwen or Mary Jane. [This was] based on Milton Caniff’s trick. Caniff used to take very important female characters in Terry and the Pirates and knock them off regularly every four or five years. As a young kid, I was very much into Terry and the Pirates and I remember when Pat Ryan, who was the main hero, lost his girlfriend, there were people on the street the next day talking about how Raven Sherman had died. I thought, “This can’t be! I thought I was the only guy who thought of these characters as real people!” It stuck in my mind that if you’re going to kill somebody, kill somebody very important, make it a real shock.

CONWAY: Make it count.

ROMITA: That was the only suggestion I made to Gerry when we were plotting this. I thought if somebody was going to die, it should be Gwen. I thought she was so important, [the readers] imagined she would never die. I think it bears out, because 35 years later we’re still talking about it!

JOHNSON: Gwen’s death was a major turning point for Spider-Man. Until her death, the driving force for Spidey had been, “With great power comes great responsibility”: When Peter had the power to act, but chose not to do, so he lost Uncle Ben. Now, all of a sudden, Peter does everything he can and yet still fails to save the woman he loves.

ROMITA: We were counting on that.

CONWAY: That was the idea. This was a more mature Spider-Man, a more realistic Spider-Man. JOHNSON: A lot of people see Gwen’s death as the end of the Silver Age. ROMITA: I don’t think that was expected or planned, was it, Gerry?

CONWAY: Oh, no. We were just trying to tell an interesting story, something that mattered. I guess we succeeded.

ROMITA: I don’t know if we anticipated that we might have to kill the Green Goblin until after the reaction to Gwen’s death … that is, after everyone in the office realized what we had done.

CONWAY: I think it was part of the plan because it was a two-part story. We were going to end up [killing the Green Goblin]. I don’t think we thought any further about the repercussions, like what would these deaths mean.

JOHNSON: How did you decide that the Green Goblin would be Gwen’s murderer?

ROMITA: Spider-Man was in the middle of a confrontation with Norman Osborn and the Green Goblin anyway. I think he was a natural character to use because of all the intermeshed lives [of the Spider-Man cast].

CONWAY: I don’t think there was any ulterior motive.

This was Spider-Man’s main villain and his main girl.

For Gwen’s death to have consequence, it had to be tied to Spider-Man’s most potent enemy. For the Green Goblin’s death, it has to be tied to a crime that’s unforgivable.

JOHNSON: I believe this was the first time that a major Stan Lee-and-Steve Ditkocreated character was going to be killed off. What were your thoughts as you plotted the Goblin’s final battle with Spider-Man? CONWAY: I can only speak for myself, but I was, at that time, maybe 20 years old, and I don’t think I had a great sense of history or anything. We were just going to do this and see what happened. It did have some consequences, but I don’t think it was something where we sat down and thought it all the way through. That’s one of the reasons Stan later said that nobody talked to him about it. We talked about it, and it did seem like a big deal, but not like it was a major, life changing event.

ROMITA: Supposedly, Stan and Roy discussed this.

Stan claimed that he never expected the Green Goblin to be done away with.

CONWAY: Well, that was Stan’s memory.

ROMITA: Which we know has its faults.

Like Father, Like Son John Romita, Sr.’s original cover artwork to Amazing Spider-Man #136 (Sept. 1974). This issue, written by Gerry Conway, featured Harry Osborn taking on his “late” father’s guise. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Beginnings: “Aaron Philips’ Photo Finish” from House of Secrets #81 (Sept. 1969)

Milestones: Writer (comics): The Amazing Spider-Man / Atari Force / Daredevil / Fantastic Four / Firestorm / The Incredible Hulk / Iron Man / Justice League of America / Metal Men / Sun Devils / Superman / Werewolf by Night; Writer (film and television): co-writer of Conan the Destroyer; Editorial: creator or co-creator of Atari Force, Firestorm, Man-Thing, the Punisher, Power Girl, Steel, and Werewolf by Night; former DC Comics editor and Marvel Comics editor-in-chief

Works in Progress: Writer and Co-Executive Producer of TV’s Law and Order Criminal Intent

Cyberspace: http://homepage.mac.com/gconway/ Sites/blog/Blog.html

gerry conway Photo courtesy of Gerry Conway.

Beginnings: Various stories for Famous Funnies

Milestones: Artist: Young Love / Young Romance / The Amazing Spider-Man / The Avengers / Daredevil / Captain America / numerous Marvel covers; Editorial: former Marvel Comics art director / Character designer of the Black Widow, the Kingpin, Luke Cage, Ms. Marvel, the Prowler, the Punisher, the Rhino, Sentry, the Shocker, and Wolverine

Works in Progress: Retired

Cyberspace: www.romitaman.com

John Romita, Sr. Photo courtesy of Scoop.

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CONWAY: The reality was, none of us were going to do anything that affected those characters without Stan’s okay. It would have been like killing off one of Milton Caniff’s girlfriends without talking to Caniff.

You just can’t do that. We’re just the fill-in people here.

Not to be cavalier about it, but I don’t think we saw it as major as it actually was.

ROMITA: I don’t know about you, Gerry, but my impression was that in five years, I didn’t think anyone was going to remember. We always thought we were just one slump away from [comics going out of business for good]. I didn’t think we would be discussing this in five years, let alone 35 years!

CONWAY: This was a disposable media. The characters, while we valued them, I don’t think we thought of them as immortal figures. Thirty-five years later though, people are still talking about the story. It’s very flattering, but it’s also like, “Wow! How did that happen?”

ROMITA: It’s a tribute to how much we put into the characters. I know if I didn’t think of the characters as real people, I couldn’t have drawn them as well. If you ever heard a story conference up at Marvel in those days, we talked about the characters as if they were alive. I always thought of them as real people, and I always said that we could never make them do something that was out of character. I always told Stan, [when he requested something of the characters that didn’t seem right], “I can’t make the characters do some of the things that you ask for because it is just not like them.” One time Stan asked me to make Gwen as goofy and glamorous as Mary Jane, and I had a hell of a time with it. [Gwen] was supposed to be a different kind of character, and I couldn’t make her act the way Mary Jane acted. I remember when I first started doing Peter Parker as a character in 1966, my son, John, Jr., was eight years old. John, Jr., after watching me put Peter Parker through his paces for a few months, said, “Why don’t you give Peter Parker a break and give him a good issue where he doesn’t have a lot of troubles?”

Here’s a kid, who knew this was just something on paper, but he thought of Peter Parker as a member of the family.

In fact, he still feels that way to this day.

CONWAY: Well, these characters do matter. It’s just we don’t necessarily know how much they matter to the readers until something like this happens.

JOHNSON: What was the initial fan response to this story? What kind of mail did you get when you killed Gwen and then offed the Green Goblin in the next issue?

CONWAY: I couldn’t go to conventions for about ten years. I got a lot of heat on that.

JOHNSON: In the issue where Gwen died, I still remember the last page, and the trick you guys used where you didn’t reveal the title of the story until the very end.

Also, that final image, with Spider-Man holding Gwen and raging at the Green Goblin, for anyone who had fallen in love with Gwen through Peter, seeing that image was sheer agony.

ROMITA: I never told you this in person, Gerry, but I’ve mentioned it several times in interviews, “The Death of Gwen Stacy” was one of three times that I had been touched very closely as a reader. When I read the secondto-the-last page, where Spider-Man is saying to Gwen, “You can’t be dead, kid ... I saved you. Don’t you remember? I saved you,” that brought up tears. For the same reason I was puzzled about my son’s reaction, I get touched every once and a while. Something in a story reaches me and gets me practically to tears, and that was one of them. The first time that happened was when Captain Stacy died, when Stan wrote it.

Then J. M. DeMatteis did a story which showed [Peter

and Gwen’s] last date in one of the annuals. Between the drawing and the writing, [Gwen’s death] certainly grew in stature in my mind.

JOHNSON: Gerry, when you were getting ready to write the second part of this story, the retribution part, what did you imagine was going through Peter’s mind?

CONWAY: I think there was the notion that revenge doesn’t solve anything. At the end of the day, Gwen’s still dead. Spider-Man wasn’t able to save her. It was sort of a bookend to the Uncle Ben story, in the sense that all those years, in his mind, Peter could have saved Uncle Ben. But the reality is maybe he couldn’t have. Maybe Peter had been beating himself up, and taking the rap for something for many, many years.

Revenge can be emotionally satisfying in the moment that you take it, but then afterwards, where are you?

That’s what we tried to show.

JOHNSON: I first read this story as a reprint in the mid1980s, around the time that comics were starting to get very dark. Many readers then thought that if a “hero” killed a bad guy, that was justice. This story for me was a striking contrast to the current material being published because here was Spider-Man, who had more justification than most to kill his arch-enemy, but he knew there was a line he didn’t have the right to cross.

This story said to me that villains can commit murder.

Heroes do not. The real justice was that the Green Goblin was killed by the trap he intended for Spider-Man. CONWAY: Because revenge doesn’t do it. It didn’t make us feel any better that the Goblin was dead.

JOHNSON: There is a huge difference between the Peter Parker we saw in [Spider-Man’s debut in] Amazing Fantasy #15 who ran off blindly into the night to find the burglar who killed his uncle and the Peter Parker who chooses to spare the man who murdered the woman he loved. It speaks volumes about Spider-Man that he made the choice not to kill. Gwen’s death marked an end of innocence for Peter, but choosing not to kill her murderer was a huge step into adulthood for him, too.

CONWAY: It was a mature response to tragedy. When something comes out of a character flaw in the hero, that’s what creates tragedy. To an extent, it means Spider-Man’s hubris and his sense of responsibility is kind of what got Gwen killed. He was going out there and being Spider-Man, being the hero, and then all of those powers couldn’t save her, which is reality. And that’s the tragedy he was left with. But what are you going to do? Again, not to make light of it, but it was a story. We were just trying to do something that would have an impact. The kind of impact it ended up having was far beyond anything we could have imagined.

JOHNSON: Marie Severin had a very interesting take on her work at Marvel that rings true for most folks who worked in the business during those early years: “No one knew we were making history.”

ROMITA: No, absolutely. We were fighting a deadline and we wanted to make it as exciting as possible and whenever we could ratchet up the emotions, we would do that. I just wanted to get my work done and get a little bit of sleep. Gerry had the same thing, right? He’s knocking [his scripts] out, but the point is he puts emotion into the script because that’s something he feels he has to bring to it.

CONWAY: We were also doing something we loved, so that affection for the material empowers it, too.

Then again, in the early 1970s, comics were on their last legs to an extent. They were already starting to lose some of the readership that they had.

There was no ancillary market for this stuff. This was before the first Superman movie and the live-action Spider-Man television show. It was fun, and we certainly took it seriously, but at the same time none of us imagined we were creating something that was going to last a long time. Also, in 1972, [the character of ] Spider-Man was only ten years old. [We thought] this could have gone away at any minute, and who would have known?

Now here he is, Spider-Man is over 40 years old, and now he is as much of an icon as Superman was at that time.

JOHNSON: This had a huge impact on future Spider-Man stories. With the death of Norman Osborn, you got to explore how that affected Harry Osborn and show how he became the second Green Goblin. Plus, the Hobgoblin stories that Roger Stern and Tom DeFalco did in the early 1980s can be traced back to the original Goblin’s death.

ROMITA: That’s the way Marvel was doing things. We planted seeds in the 1960s that ended up paying dividends in the 1970s and every decade after that.

Itsy Bitsy Spidey (left) The SpiderMan/Green Goblin grudge match also spilled over into the pages of Marvel’s kid-friendly Spidey Super Stories series.

This Romita cover preliminary for issue #23 (June 1977) comes to us courtesy of Brian Boggs. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Gorgeous Gwendolyn A 2001 convention sketch of Gwen Stacy by John Romita, contributed by Robert Reilly. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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CONWAY: There’s also a reason, Dan, why the first two Spider-Man movies are [based on] this material. It’s the material that starts the ball rolling for a lot of stories that came after it.

JOHNSON: The first Spider-Man film owes a lot to the work you gentlemen did.

In the scenes at the bridge and the final confrontation, I could see Gerry’s work in there, and your work, John— ROMITA: —and Gil Kane’s.

CONWAY: You know, we can reveal this now. There is one aspect of that second Green Goblin story where John’s contribution is so crucial. In the original art Gil did, the entire battle was done on one page. John had to take it and extend it into a two page sequence so it had some impact. Gil’s one major flaw as a storyteller was that he tended to fill-up the beginning part of the story with a lot of great panels and interesting scenes, but he’d forget to tell the story until the last five pages.

ROMITA: That was the Jack Kirby infection. Jack used to do that, too. Another thing, before we forget, on the last page of the second issue, Mary Jane comes to Peter, which is another interesting ramification.

CONWAY: And it is also her moment of rebirth.

ROMITA: Mary Jane could have walked out the door and just gone to a party [but she stayed with Peter]. She became a responsible citizen in that last page. That was one of the things that Stan and I planned when we first introduced her, she was going to be an airhead and then slowly, but surely, mature.

JOHNSON: Considering all that came out of these two deaths, I think you managed to prevent Spider-Man from getting into a potential rut as he entered his second decade.

ROMITA: We felt like we needed to shake up the readers to keep that from happening. We were thinking that we were going to start repeating ourselves quite a bit, and I think that’s what we were asked to do. We wanted to prove that everyone is not 100% safe, and it worked.

JOHNSON: As important as some characters are for merchandising, I doubt you could do that with today’s comics. For example, you could never have a truly final battle between Superman and Lex Luthor, or Batman and the Joker.

CONWAY: Again, Spider-Man was only ten years old, and there wasn’t that much of a sense of permanence. You could kill the Joker off, and I think they did in the early Batman stories, but they would always bring him back and that was sort of where we were.

ROMITA: We were a little freer. We were able to do more than people who had 50 years behind them.

CONWAY: Nowadays, creators are so tied to the history of the material and to the expectations of the readers, they don’t have that kind of freedom anymore. Lucky us.

ROMITA: We were lucky. And also, probably, we had the lack of wisdom which allowed us to be crazy.

CONWAY: Naiveté. We were naive, but in a good sense.

JOHNSON: I still think it took chutzpah to kill off Spider-Man’s arch-enemy. I mean, what would happen to Superman if Lex Luthor was killed off for good?

CONWAY: It would be incredibly liberating. I think DC would finally get back to some serious sales. Part of the problem with Superman and the older heroes, and also with the ones now, is that there doesn’t seem to be a sense of consequence to their stories. They’re just stories.

JOHNSON: If you hadn’t killed the Green Goblin off when you did, and say another writer and artist proposed doing the same thing 15 or 20 years later, do you think they would have been allowed to pull the trigger?

ROMITA: [They would have said, “No,] there are movies coming out.”

CONWAY: One of the reasons we brought back the Goblin was because there was a hole in the dynamic. The perfect replacement was having the new Goblin be Harry.

JOHNSON: What did you gentlemen think about the fact that Norman Osborn was reintroduced to the Marvel Universe a few years ago, and the revelation that his death was just part of a bigger plan to keep striking at Spider-Man and his loved ones?

ROMITA: I never read any of those. My gut impression of it was that it was a mistake.

I also understand what problems they’re up against because when you’re the guy making decisions on future plots, you’ve got your hands full. You don’t want to do repetitious stuff, you want to do something new, something that looks like it was done in the 21st century, not the middle of the 20th century. You’ve got to try and come up with something spectacular, but sometimes you overdo it.

This Gal Makes You Go AH! Fans are still talking about Gwen 35 years later, and fans-turned-pro like Adam Hughes are drawing her. Art courtesy of Robert Reilly. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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TM

by

Michael Browning

In the 1980s, all the buzz about the Green Hornet was dead.

For nearly two decades, the TV show had been off the air, except in cable-television reruns. The most popular member of the TV show’s cast, Bruce Lee, who played Kato, had died in 1973. The radio show had been off the air for 40 years. A Green Hornet comic-book series hadn’t been published since 1967, although several comics companies had tried to get the rights to put the Hornet back in print.

A new Green Hornet comic book, it seemed, just wasn’t in the cards.

No one seemed to care about the Green Hornet, except for writer Ron Fortier, artists Steve Erwin and Jeff Butler, and Now (NOW) Comics publisher Tony Caputo.

Back in the mid-1980s, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had started an independent-comics revolution that saw numerous comic-book companies spring up. Now Comics, then owned by Tony Caputo, opened its doors in 1985. Now became a major publisher when it acquired the license to do new Speed Racer comics and a series based on James Cameron’s first Terminator movie, and soon published comics such as Ralph Snart, Syphons, Mr. T and the T Force, Fright Night, Vectors, and Married... With Children (and its many spin-offs and one-shot tie-ins).

But the company struck gold (or, rather, green) with the Green Hornet.

The New Buzz Begins Ron Fortier, a longtime fan of the Green Hornet of the TV show and the Gold Key comics series, actually had the idea for a new Green Hornet series in the late 1970s. But it didn’t catch on until 1989, when Now published the first issue of the new Green Hornet series.

“What started the whole process of getting the Green Hornet back into print as a comic book was a meeting between myself and artist Steve Erwin,” Fortier says. Erwin is best known for his art on New Teen Titans, Deathstroke the Terminator, and Checkmate, all at DC in the early- to mid-1990s. He later went on to work on Star Trek comics for different publishers and now works in advertising and does commission art for fans.

“Steve had hooked up with a small, independent comic company in Texas; Lonestar, I believe they were called,” Fortier continues. “They started putting out a few books. Supposedly, they got together and decided they were going to do a cross-country tour of comics shops to promote their books. This was a small outfit and they scrounged up a lot of money and everybody put in their own two cents for gas. Steve and three or four other guys loaded up in this jalopy and started driving across the country from Texas, just basically using The Buyer’s Guide to Comic Fandom’s [precursor to The Comics Buyer’s Guide] list of comics shops, stopping in and visiting with the fans. Ultimately, they wound their way up here to New Hampshire and showed up at a local comic shop that I frequented at the time. The guy who ran it, a friend of mine, had known they were coming up.

They had called ahead and made arrangements and said they were going to

The Green Hornet and … a Chick?!

Jeff Butler’s rendition of the masked crime fighter and his controversial sidekick.

The Green Hornet and related characters TM & © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

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As Seen on TV! (above) These photo covers make Gold Key’s three Green Hornet comics a sought-after series. © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

be up on this particular Sunday afternoon to spend a few hours at the store. So he had let me know this one or two days ahead of time and he said, ‘Stop by. You’d probably get a kick out of meeting these guys.’ So, sure enough, there I am and I meet Steve and the other guys.

“Steve and I hit it off immediately,” Fortier reveals. “I’m a little older than he is, but we had pretty much the same background as far as our likes in comics and growing up and those kinds of experiences. The next thing you know, they’re sitting down, Steve’s doing sketches for people, and I pull up a chair and sit next to him and we spend the next couple of hours talking comics, movies, and things we liked. Somewhere in that conversation, Steve turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Man, I’d sure like to work on some of those great old heroes that nobody does anymore.’ We’re talking the Lone Ranger and Tarzan and, in that mix, comes the Green Hornet. Our only real connection to the character was the 1960s television show with Bruce Lee and Van Williams. We start talking about that and the fact that Gold Key at that time put out all of three comic books involved with the series. And they were great books. They had the photo covers, the art was great, and the stories were awesome, but that was all they ever did. The Hornet came and did that ridiculously short one season, disappeared, and was gone off the face of the Earth.

“Steve, who was a much bigger fan than I was, was like, ‘Man, I’d really like to do that.’

‘Okay.’ We talk and talk and exchange telephone numbers and addresses and shake hands, and Steve goes off to finish his tour and go back home to Texas,” Fortier says. “I came back home and started mulling over what it would take to put together a really nice presentation package were we to get together and do something for a comics company. I started doing my homework. I called Will Murray, an old friend and pulp expert, and said, ‘What do you know about the Green Hornet?’ The next thing you know, I got this manila envelope in the mail with all this [historical material about] the Green Hornet, going back to his radio days at WXYZ in Detroit where he got started, then the stories of the two serials that Universal produced, The Green Hornet and The Green Hornet Strikes Again, and then, the TV show. Will had amassed all this stuff. Some of it was research for articles he’d written in the past. It was a phenomenal wealth of information on the character and more than I could ever, ever need. The thing was, the more I kept looking at it, it was bothering me that you basically had various versions of the character. Every time you went from another generation or another decade, people who creatively got a hold of him kept changing and altering him to bring him up to our time. One of the things Steve had talked to me about was how great it would be to do a modern-day Green Hornet with a female Kato. And I liked that idea. I thought that was such a great idea and would be so much fun.”

Heroes of Two Eras From Fortier’s original Green Hornet presentation, Steve Erwin’s illos of the Hornet and Kato in their radio-era garb (left), and their TV show-inspired look (opposite page). © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

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Green Hornet: Generations Fortier says that although he was excited to be working on a proposal for a new Green Hornet series, he knew he didn’t want to alienate the devoted Hornet fanbase, who loved the TV and radio characters.

“I’d looked at the past history of the character,” Fortier explains, “and said, ‘If all we’re going to do is revamp the character, we’re going to get into this thing and already basically have some negative vibes from people who like the old versions. People are very territorial.

I’ve written classic icon characters, like Popeye and Peter Pan comic books. I’ve gone to conventions and literally had people come up to me and tell me I’m the spawn of Satan because what I did in the [1980s Ocean Comics] Popeye comic book. For real. Some people don’t take their meds and really believe this stuff. They really live it.

“So, having had those kind of experiences, I thought, ‘How do I make the Green Hornet palatable for everybody and pay homage to what was done before?’

Ultimately, the hook was to make it a generational thing,” Fortier says. “I thought, ‘I won’t make a new Green Hornet. And I won’t say one was better or more real than the others or more genuine. What I’ll do is look at all his incarnations over the years and make that a family.’ So that was the hook. I started looking at the times when everything appeared and I’m trying to work it out so that every generation there’s a new Green Hornet coming up in the Reid family. It drove me absolutely bonkers, because I couldn’t make it work. It would fall short. I would always end up with one generation where the Green Hornet was 13 years old. I had this conundrum I couldn’t solve until one day I took a break from it and sat back and looked at the data again.”

Fortier went back to the original Hornet that appeared in the radio show, the Britt Reid character. He says he tried to come up with some way to make the new Green Hornet a descendant of the first and second and to tie them all together in some way that wouldn’t make anyone hate the current incarnation.

To do that, Fortier had to start from the beginning and work his way forward.

George W. Trendle, the manager of radio station WXYZ, and his head writer, Fran Striker, had created the Lone Ranger, which was one of the more popular American heroes to ever come out of that time. Years later, Trendle sent Striker home one weekend with the directive to come back with a new hero. Striker came back with the Green Hornet, which was an updated version of the Lone Ranger.

Fortier says he got a great idea from the original Hornet’s connection to the Lone Ranger.

“The kicker was, they thought they’d have fun by connecting the two characters by making the Lone Ranger the Green Hornet’s great uncle,” Fortier says.

“So, I’m thinking about this and I thought, ‘This is where I make the timeline work. I don’t make it father and son—I make it just as they did, uncle to nephew.’

Each Green Hornet has a brother and the brother is the one who goes off and has a family while he goes and fights crime and becomes the avenger type. But the brother has a family and from that family comes the next Green Hornet. That worked. That totally clicked into place. And suddenly, by honoring the tradition of the original character, my timeline worked beautifully.”

Fortier says usually, smaller is better in the cases of most successful comic-book presentations. But that wasn’t the case when he prepared the new Green Hornet comic presentation. In this case, it was the size that mattered—and bigger was much better.

Ron Fortier and Steve Erwin The writer and artist of Now’s Green Hornet. Be sure to visit Ron’s website at www.Airship27.com.

Photos courtesy of Ron Fortier and Steve Erwin.

“By the time I was done working this whole thing out and really writing it up, explaining the characters, the history and where we wanted to go with the series,” Fortier says, “Steve had done a few really nice sketches for it and I had a presentation package that was almost 40 pages long. Here comes Step 2.

In the course of meeting Steve and working on the project for almost a year, I had become a client of [agent] Mike Friedrich, who was running Star*Reach out of California. Mike wanted me to come out to San Diego. Along about this time, I’d started selling my work. I’d had one or two independent series come out from a small company called Ocean Comics.

They’d done those Popeye books I was talking about. And, I’d done an original thing called Streetfighter.

Mike was telling me I had to come to [the] San Diego [Comic-Con] and shake hands and meet other publishers.

My wife and I made plans to fly out to San Diego, our first time going to the big convention. I was loading stuff into my briefcase and there’s the Green Hornet package. I made three or four copies of it and stuck it in my briefcase and off the San Diego we went.”

Networking “During the course of San Diego, I made two really important connections,” Fortier says. “The first one was when Mike introduced me to another of his clients, artist Jeff Butler. Jeff, at the time, was the art director for TSR, which is now Wizards of

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the Coast. He’d had that job for a couple of years and was very comfortable at it. When I met Jeff, he had a little booth at the San Diego Comic-Con and he was representing TSR there.” Butler, who co-created the Badger with writer Mike Baron, admits, “For years I had made no secret of my love for the Green Hornet character and his mythos. I’m sure I came to the character down the same path as a lot of guys my age.

I was a fan of the TV show, and filled countless pages of bond paper with sketches of the Hornet and Kato.”

One of those drawings caught Fortier’s eye. “He took out this portfolio and started showing me some of the stuff he’d done,” Fortier recalls. “In the mix, he’s got this picture of a female Green Hornet. It was really neat! I said, ‘Back up. Let me see that picture again.’ He showed it to me and I said, ‘Wow, that’s too cool.’ He said, ‘I love the Green Hornet. I love those Gold Key books.’ He and I hit it off and I never even told him what I had in my briefcase.”

The second of Fortier’s “important connections” occurred when Friedrich introduced him to Now Comics Publisher Tony Caputo. “Tony’s the ultimate showman,” remarks Fortier. “He is like P. T. Barnum.

He’s out there all the time, always hustling and always looking for people to work for him.

“In our first ever meeting,” Fortier reveals, “Tony said to me, ‘What are your thoughts on The Terminator?’

I said, ‘It’s a great movie and I enjoyed it immensely.’ He asked me if I’d seen his Terminator comics. I said, ‘No.’ He gives me a bunch of their comics and says, ‘Stop by tomorrow and talk to me about this.’ Apparently, he wasn’t happy with the plots and scripts he was getting from the current writer. Overnight I read the books

Dynamic Duo, Take One Steve Erwin’s earliest renditions of Mishi and the Hornet, glimpses of how the artist would have handled the characters. This is also the first ever drawing of the female Kato.

Courtesy of Ron Fortier, from his GH series presentation. © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

Heroes of Yesteryear (center) Butler’s version of the Golden Age Kato and Green Hornet. © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

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[published to date] and the next day I went back to meet him again and got to talking about The Terminator. I told him I had two or three plot ideas that might carry the book for another year and a half. I said I’d love to take a crack at it. He said, ‘Fine, when you get home, why don’t you write them up and I’ll take a look at them and we’ll see what we can do.’ Business was pretty much conducted and we were standing there talking and we got into this whole discussion about classic heroes that aren’t being used.

“Talk about fate and destiny,” Fortier continues.

“Tony’s mouthing, ‘It’d be great to be doing Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and The Phantom.’ Then he said, ‘The Green Hornet.’ I looked at him and said, ‘Are you sincere?

Would you really go after the Green Hornet if you had the chance?’ He said, ‘Yeah, totally. Why?’ So, I put my briefcase down on the table and took out the presentation and gave it to him. He said, ‘Is this what I think it is?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s an entire concept from head to toe. It’s everything you need to do to put out a brand new Green Hornet comic book. It also has the name of the people who own the license right now [Leisure Concepts]. They have an office in New York.’

I had done my homework. Everything was in that presentation package. He looked at me and says he was going to follow this up and would get back to me. I didn’t give it a second thought. I came back home and got busy writing up Terminator plots to send to the editor at that time, who was a very nice lady, who called me back in a day or two to tell me to start writing scripts because I had the job. So now I was writing Terminator for Now Comics. I didn’t hear from him for another two months, and then I get a phone call and it’s Tony.”

Caputo informed Fortier that he was in New York preparing for an appointment the next day with the folks at Leisure Concepts to discuss the Green Hornet license. During the meeting, Caputo presented Leisure Concepts’ Cindy Weston with Fortier’s Green Hornet comic proposal.

Fortier says he didn’t get a call back from Caputo the rest of the day. Saturday and Sunday came and he still hadn’t heard anything from him. But on Monday, Fortier got the word that the new Green Hornet comic had gotten the green light.

“One of the things that helped solidify the deal with Leisure Concepts was the proposal from Ron Fortier,” Caputo says. Fortier adds, “Tony said, ‘Your presentation did it. They were blown away.’

They’d already been approached by everyone else in the industry, First Comics, DC, and Marvel, with the same typical modernization of the hero. But when Tony threw my presentation on the table and they saw the family-generation approach, it was like nothing they’d ever seen or expected. And it was what they wanted to do with the character.”

“In 1988, Now Comics was exploding with licensed properties,” Caputo says.

“Those were doing very well for us. At that time, the Green Hornet was dead and, as a property, had been dead for

20 years. Nothing was going on with it. It cost me a $1,500 advance and seven percent of receipts.

When I bought Speed Racer, it was for $1,000 and five percent of receipts.”

Once the deal was signed, Caputo immediately commissioned scripts from Fortier, asking, “By the way, do you have an artist?” When Fortier mentioned Steve Erwin’s earlier involvement, he was asked to call Erwin— but was surprised by his response. “Instead of euphoria, there’s this calm, dead silence on the other end of the phone,” Fortier admits. “Steve said, ‘I can’t do it. I just got hired by DC a week ago.’ He says they were offering him a job and he couldn’t turn it down. Steve said, ‘Man, I hate leaving you in a lurch.’ I said, ‘You’re not leaving me in a lurch, because you’re the guy who put me here. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t put me onto this trail.’”

The Butler Did It Recalling Jeff Butler’s drawing of the female Green Hornet and his enthusiasm for the Gold Key comics, Ron Fortier next called Mike Friedrich about his fellow Star*Reach client Butler. Friedrich approached Butler and offered him Green Hornet.

“I got the call at work and it left me a little offbalance,” Butler confesses. “I really couldn’t believe that I might have the opportunity to be involved with bringing the Hornet back to comic books. I’d broadcast my love for the character to plenty of people in the past.” Butler says that while he was working for TSR, he had tried to get Green Hornet for a proposed series of comics the company wanted to publish. “I had been asked to do a feasibility study on TSR possibly publishing

its own comic books, says Butler. “One of the things I proposed was publishing licensed characters, as well as developing our own properties as comics. We looked into the Western Publishing/Gold Key heroes that eventually popped up at Valiant, as well as the Archie heroes that ended up getting their own treatment as the Impact! line at DC. Part of that proposal involved getting in touch with the company that represented Mr. Trendle and the Green Hornet. How could I exclude a gem like the Hornet from my scheme?

“Unfortunately, nothing came of my run at the Hornet. We eventually scuttled the comic-publishing idea, in favor of licensing a few of TSR’s properties to DC. I did manage to get a few DragonLance graphic novels published in-house, which was a great experience. That’s where I first hooked up with Mike Friedrich, who would later become my agent.”

Butler continues, “After getting the first couple of calls, the whole prospect of actually leaving my cushy little job at TSR started to make me more than a little nervous. I had been thinking of going freelance for a while, but I was making a pretty good living. The thing that tipped the scales was the fact that I was doing more and more middle-management stuff and less artwork. Tony and Now were getting some rough press at the time. But I had been on both the editorial and freelance sides of the publishing biz, so I went in with my eyes open. Plus, I was hoping Mike Friedrich would let me join his stable of comic creators at Star*Reach. I took the leap. There were only a few characters that could’ve enticed me away from TSR, and the Hornet was at the top of that list!”

Soon after leaving TSR, Butler was fast at work producing Green Hornet promotional art. “In two or three weeks, Tony had a marketing blitz,” Fortier recalls. “He had posters out there and artwork. And we started working on the series.”

© 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

A Kickin’ Cover by the Dude Steve Rude’s sketch for his cover to The Green Hornet (Now series 1) #3 (Feb. 1990). Art courtesy of David Hamilton. © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

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The Time is Now In November 1989, Now Comics published the first Green Hornet comic in 22 years. The first issue was destined for success.

It had a Jim Steranko painted cover that was later turned into a poster, and was so successful for Now that it went into a second printing.

“I was really a packager of products and I was interested in blockbusters at the time, and I had decided I was going to approach Jim Steranko to do the cover,” Caputo says. “It was his return to comics after a decade or two. He did it because he loves the Green Hornet and because I paid him $3,000. I paid more for the cover than I did for the license. I worked with him on [the book] Visual Storytelling and I hope to work with him again.”

The generational saga Fortier had created acknowledged that Britt Reid and Ikano Kato, the heroes featured in the radio show, were the first Green Hornet and Kato in the 1940s and that Britt Reid II and Hayashi Kato, who were featured in the television show, were the heroes in the 1960s and ’70s. It also told of Alan Reid, a thirdgeneration Green Hornet, who only lasted one mission in 1986. His death came as he entered a building that was rigged with explosives. From there it was up to brother, Paul, to carry on the Green Hornet tradition.

After his brother’s tragic death, Paul modified Alan’s disco-looking Hornet costume to include a green trench coat, added the Green Hornet symbol to his mask, and went out to fight crime on his own.

The Now Comics series focused on Paul Reid, who was joined by Mishi Kato, a female version of the Green Hornet’s faithful assistant, who had been made popular in the 1960s TV show by male martial arts star Bruce Lee. It took seven issues to tell the origin story developed by Fortier in the 40-page presentation.

“It was, by far, the most popular comic book I’ve ever been involved with,” Fortier says. “It just went over big. We got letters from people who remembered the serials and the radio shows.” Fortier adds that Green Hornet was Now’s highest-grossing comic. The first issue, according to Caputo, sold 225,000 copies on the newsstand and in the direct market.

Green Hornet (Now series 2) #9 (May 1992) Original cover painting by Val Mayerik. Courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

“KATO’S A CHICK?” Later in the series, Mishi Kato left the title and, at the insistence of George Trendle, Jr., a male assistant named Kono Kato was created to take her place.

Fan-favorite Mishi lasted as Green Hornet’s partner (she didn’t like being called a sidekick and showed the Hornet exactly what a “side kick” was) from #4 (Feb. 1990) to 10 (Aug. 1990) of the initial Now Comics Green Hornet series. She left, sadly, with a kiss

© 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

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for Paul and walked off into Green Hornet history as his only female partner.

“The license was actually owned by George Trendle’s son, George Trendle, Jr., who, at this time, was in his ’80s, retired and living in Hawaii,” Fortier says. “Leisure Concepts was managing the property for him. Part and parcel for their deal was they would always show him what they were doing with the property. He’s an old conservative dude and, had they shown him right from the start that we were going to have a female Kato, I tell you right now, he never would have gone for it. The story is that somehow or other, they kept him in the dark and the book started coming out. To this day, I’m still of the belief that they played footloose and fancy free and didn’t show him what we were doing. We got to the female Kato and we had one or two adventures with her there and, somehow, someway, in some place in Hawaii, somebody showed him a copy of the book and he hit the ceiling, without even giving it a chance. It was not the real Kato, according to him. And he basically called and reamed them out in New York, and Leisure Concepts called and told Tony ‘She’s gone.’”

When Caputo called Fortier with the bad news, the writer resisted. “I started screaming and complaining,” says Fortier, “and Tony said it wasn’t going to do any good: ‘It’s work for hire. They own the property.

Get rid of her.’

“Man, that was the hardest comic book I’ve ever had to write in my life,” Fortier admits. I loved that character, Jeff loved drawing her, and the fans loved her.

We got her to issue #10 and then I had to come up with some cockamamie, logical reason why, after fighting so hard to become Kato, she gives it up. It didn’t make any sense, but I didn’t have any choice in the matter.”

Mishi’s reason for leaving was that she received a letter from her place of employment and had to leave behind the Green Hornet and her mask because she was needed in Zurich. It was an abrupt ending for a great character, one that neither Fortier nor Butler wanted.

Butler says he liked the female Kato and was glad to draw a woman action hero. He says he was sad to see her go.

“My only reservation about Mishi was that she wasn’t Bruce Lee! Other than that, I thought it was a brilliant idea,” Butler says. “How could we top Bruce Lee? Well, Ron could have been ‘safe’ and just written a pale imitation. But instead, he kinda went around it.

I thought what he did was very shrewd and creative.

Not only did he create a female Kato, but he made her tougher and more savvy than the Hornet himself.

Wow! Talk about turning things on their ears. Even if you were a fan and hated the idea, you almost had to read it to see how it would all unfold.

“I’m a fan of vintage pinup art, and anyone who knows me, knows I like to draw women,” Butler continues. “Back in the TSR art department, we used to draw each other’s names at Christmas time. Then, we would do a piece of ‘cheesecake’ art for the person whose name you drew. Think about this: How would you like to get a piece of art from Jeff Easley, Clyde Caldwell, Larry Elmore, or the late Keith Parkinson? Nice Christmas present, huh? Well, one year I did a sexy pinup piece called ‘the Green Hornette’ for Jeff. The hook was, I painted her clothing on two layers of acetate with cartoon colors.

I guess I’ve had ‘Hornet-on-the-brain’ for a while.

“So Mishi was a very welcome component for me.

Most of the fans I encountered seemed to really like Mishi. I think it helped that our ‘Bruce Lee’ Kato

character, Hayashi, was still around as a mentor of sorts.

I remember one guy in San Diego came up to me and just said, ‘KATO’S A CHICK?’ Then he shook his head and walked away. That was the only really negative review I ever ran into concerning Mishi. Believe me, I was upset when word came down that Mr. Trendle had reconsidered the concept, and we were going to have to write her out of the book. That was toward the tail end of my tenure on the regular series, and was one of the reasons I began to lose interest in the project.”

Caputo says he didn’t believe Trendle cared what happened with the Green Hornet, except the fact that Fortier gave him a female assistant. “Cindy never bothered to read it. I explained it to her and she thought it was fine,” Caputo says. “George Trendle, Jr. is a traditionalist. He called me and we had a long discussion and he wanted the Green Hornet to be like Batman—timeless. He [thought] it should be the same Green Hornet and Kato from the 1940s. He hated the 1960s show. I said, ‘Well, I understand that, but this sells.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.’ He said it was the property his dad invented and it should be timeless.”

The Green Hornet’s Sting With Mishi Kato gone, The Green Hornet wasn’t as fun for Fortier to write, and it helped signal his and Butler’s exodus from the title when the first series ended with #14 (Nov. 1990).

“There were many factors that moved me away from the Hornet’s regular series,” Butler says. “I had gotten pretty sick toward the middle of my run on the first series. Something called Sarcoidosis, although I didn’t know that at the time. Anyway, after fumbling around for months, the doctors finally told me I was very ill, and I’d have to take some time to rest. Now let me out of the last couple issues in my contract so I could recuperate. I was very lucky. What could have been a debilitating illness for life basically went away after a while.” ”I hated that politicizing back and forth, and licenses getting involved and not letting creative people do what they should do,” Fortier says. “We had a big hit on our hands and this guy totally gummed it up. That left a bad taste in my mouth and Jeff’s, as well. Both of us finished off the first season and Now got into all kinds of money problems. They went bankrupt.”

Caputo refinanced, and a year later Fortier was approached again by Mike Friedrich, “saying they want to bring back The Green Hornet,” the writer says. “He asked if I wanted to write it. That bad taste in my mouth caused me to say, ‘No, I don’t want to do that again.’ So I politely bowed out.” The second volume of The Green Hornet was then offered to writer Chuck Dixon, called by Fortier “a good pal and a great writer.” The Green Hornet vol. 2 #1, written by Dixon and illustrated by Tod Smith and David Mowry, was cover-dated Sept. 1991. Its cover artist was Jeff Butler, who had declined Now’s offer to draw the interiors.

“By then, Jeff had gone on to do other stuff,” Fortier says. “But somewhere in the conversations they had with Jeff, somebody said to him, ‘Could we twist your arm to come back and do a miniseries?’” Butler called Fortier and suggested that they collaborate on a miniseries starring the original Green Hornet from the 1940s radio program, a comic that would be produced in the style of the old Republic movie serials. “I love old serials and cliffhangers,” says Fortier, who adds, “also, it was a chance to work with Jeff, and I always love working with him. So I signed on to it.”

Titled Sting of the Green Hornet, the miniseries (#1, June 1992, through 4, Sept. 1992), was “peppered with so many cameos, like Captain America, although we don’t call him Captain America,” says Fortier. “There’s a guy we called Commando Yankee.

Then the Shadow shows up and we call him the Dark Avenger or some such. Lois Lane and Clark Kent show up after interviewing the president on the train.

That’s clearly them. Someplace else, somebody mentions this underwater agent working for the Allies out of a submarine base and, of course, we’re talking about

Dark Tomorrow Sketches by Dave Simons, who drew the Green Hornet: Dark Tomorrow miniseries (June–Aug. 1993). Courtesy of Ron Fortier. © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

Van the Man Butler’s dead-on likeness of TV Hornet Van Williams. The actor returned to the character to pen Now’s 1990 miniseries Tales of the Green Hornet. © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

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Namor. Throwing in all these cameos with the Green Hornet fighting Nazi saboteurs who had come to kidnap FDR, it was an outlandish plot, but it was right out of the old serials and the old radio melodramas.”

Butler says he was glad to work with Fortier again on the Sting miniseries. “That was probably the most fun I ever had doing comics: plotting, penciling, inking, and painting covers,” Butler says. “Just when I was really starting to have fun with Mishi, the plug was pulled. Doing Sting was great because I wanted to get back to the Golden Age characters and do them right, something I felt I hadn’t quite nailed in the first issue of the regular series.”

Mishi Kato, incidentally, didn’t stay gone for long. She returned, now known as the Crimson Wasp, in the second issue of Green Hornet vol. 2.

Back in the Saddle While at a Sting of the Green Hornet Madison, Wisconsin, promotional event with Butler and the project’s editor Joan Weis, Fortier “was making nice comments about the new book that Chuck was writing, because I loved Chuck’s work. The new editor turns around and looks at me and says, ‘Would you like to come back on the book?’” Dixon was ready to move on to other projects, and Caputo had asked Weis to offer Hornet to its original writer.

Fortier was at first surprised by the offer, but soon warmed up to the idea: “I thought about it and, before I left Wisconsin that weekend, I went back and said, ‘Sign me up.’ I got back in the middle of the second volume and did another seven or eight issues.”

Fortier made Paul Reid the lone Green Hornet by killing off his great uncle Britt, the first Hornet.

Britt was also killed in an explosion when he dove onto a hand grenade thrown into his house by mafia boss Angela DeVane’s henchmen. Britt Reid

Feel the Sting of the Green Hornette (above) A sketch by Jeff Butler, and (right) a finished portrait; the latter is from the personal collection of Ron Fortier. © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc.

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died saving his great niece, District Attorney Diana Reid. The Reid family made it look like Diana had died in the blast, along with her great uncle, but she survived to help wage war on crime.

Several issues into his run on the second volume, Fortier faced a familiar problem, when Now “started having money problems again.” Delayed checks gave the writer pause: “I know where this is going,” he thought. “I’d been there the first time around.” After completing his next issue, Fortier politely left the series. “They did two more issues at the most,” he says, “and they went bankrupt again and that was the end of The Green Hornet.” The final issue of Green Hornet vol. 2, #40, was published in 1995. Annuals were published in 1992 and 1994.

Fortier says he would have loved to have worked with Erwin on The Green Hornet, crediting Erwin with him getting to do the series in the first place. “Steve and I have remained buddies since,” Fortier says.

“We’re the closest of friends.”

Now’s Hornet Franchise Now Comics published a total of 12 series, miniseries, or one-shots related to the Green Hornet universe, including Green Hornet vol. 1, Green Hornet vol. 2, Green Hornet Anniversary Special, Green Hornet Annual, Green Hornet: Dark Tomorrow, Green Hornet: Solitary Sentinel, Sting of the Green Hornet, Tales of the Green Hornet vol. 1–3, Kato of the Green Hornet, and Kato II. The first 12 issues of Green Hornet vol. 1 were collected as an oversized hardcover in the mid-1990s by Bonus Books, but the book is quite rare. Caputo says it’s so rare that, after the book was released by Bonus Books, he didn’t even have a copy of his own. He says he bought his only copy from eBay. Oddly enough, the hardcover had no price anywhere on the cover nor inside the book.

Ron Fortier remembers, “One day, I go to the post office and there’s this huge package and I see Steve’s address on it. Erwin is just too cool. The minute the book came out, he went out and bought one for me.”

When Jeff Butler was recuperating from his illness, he was commissioned to paint the cover of the Bonus Books collection by its editor, Sharon Mulvihill. “This was great news for me,” he remembers. “I had been getting back on my feet, doing some commercial illustration and was still doing freelance work for TSR. Mostly for the Marvel Super-Heroes Role Playing Game (for which I did a lot of work, while I was still on the TSR payroll.) It couldn’t have come at a better time. I was finally feeling healthy again. I really poured myself into that one, and I was fairly happy with the results. It looked great on the books, and Tony later turned it into a promotional poster for the return of the regular Hornet series. One of the best parts of that job was that I was able to cross over into another of my favorite artistic areas: portraits. I incorporated portraits of the Golden Age Green Hornet and Kato, and the TV Hornet and Kato. These portraits surrounded the figure of the modern Hornet. Sadly, Mishi is conspicuously missing. But that was a fun job.”

Some of comics’ best artists created covers for the Green Hornet series. After Steranko’s painted cover to #1, other cover artists were Dave Dorman, Lenin Delsol, Steve Rude, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dell Barras, Matt Wagner, John K. Snyder III, Doug Tallala, Gale Heimbach, Norm Breyfogle, Jason Palmer, Sandra Chang, Sal Velluto, Tony DeZuniga, Max Seibel, Patrick Zircher, Mike Okamoto, and Karl Kerschl. Several others drew or painted covers, but not all were credited.

The Green Hornet vol. 1 covers were all painted. It wasn’t until vol.

2 #2 that the first line-drawn art graced the cover of Green Hornet.

Van Williams wrote Tales of the Green Hornet vol. 1, a two-issue miniseries published in 1990 that told a tale of the second Green Hornet, the star of the TV show.

James Van Hise, the author of The Green Hornet Book, wrote Tales of the Green Hornet vol. 2–3 and Green Hornet: Solitary Sentinel, which was set between Green Hornet vol. 1 and 2. This three-issue miniseries shows how Paul Reid discovered the importance of being the Green Hornet.

Green Hornet: Dark Tomorrow saw the return of Butler as the Hornet cover artist.

Longtime Marvel and DC inker Dave Simons, best known for his inks over Bob Budiansky’s pencils on the mid-1980s run of Ghost Rider and the Dungeons and Dragons-related comics, did the interior art.

Kato starred in two miniseries of his own, both written by Mike Baron. The first miniseries is about Kato going back to the Shaolin Temple where he was trained to protect it from the Chinese army. The second miniseries casts Kato as a bodyguard to a spoiled rock star.

Baron, who has written Punisher, Nexus, and Badger stories, among others, says he had no desire to write a Green Hornet series, but he did want to write about Kato.

“I was mainly interested in Bruce Lee,” Baron says.

“I asked Now if I could write Kato as a separate title.

I approached him as if Bruce Lee were alive today. The TV series was galvanizing because of Bruce Lee. You could tell he was the real thing.

“Here was the real deal: a guy who was a kung-fu master. It was different and much more exciting than the usual John Wayne barroom bust-ups.”

On the two series, Baron worked with artists Val Mayerik, James Sherman, Brent Anderson, Tod Fox, and Tony DeZuniga, all star artists. Baron praises their work and says some of them liked Kato as much as he did.

“These are all world-class artists,” Baron says.

“Brent and Val in particular loved the character and envisioned him as I did. They also contributed magnificent fight choreography. I always discuss the story with artists, particularly something involving fight scenes, which must be choreographed. Val and I went on to script a six-issue Bruce Lee series for Malibu. I don’t know why that’s never been collected.”

Baron says he believes the Green Hornet and Kato are characters that could be viable for any company.

But he says he doesn’t believe there will ever be another Kato comic-book series.

“The Lee family has tired of exploitation in any form,” Baron says.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You In the late 1990s, a movie was planned with Kevin Smith writing and directing. There were also reports that Dark Horse Comics was planning a Green Hornet comic to coincide with the proposed movie. Smith commented on the movie in interviews, but later said he was off the project. It has since gone into movie limbo.

“Is Kevin Smith’s Green Hornet script going to get produced?” asks Fortier. “Who’s going to direct it? Who’s going to star in it? Once that happens, who is going to

do the next incarnation of the Green Hornet comic book? From what I’m led to believe, Dark Horse will be producing the movie with Universal. If and when a movie gets made, Dark Horse will have the rights to do the comic book.”

Screenwriter John Fusco wrote a screenplay for the film around 2002. But by the summer of 2004, Kevin Smith was busy writing a screenplay for a new rendition of The Green Hornet, which was originally scheduled for release in 2005. Rumors were flying that martial arts star Jet Li would portray Kato and Jake Gyllenhaal of Brokeback Mountain fame would play the Green Hornet.

In 2004, Smith reportedly had put the film on the backburner. Then, after a long downtime in which his status with the project was unknown, Smith announced at the 2006 WonderCon that he officially no longer has anything to do with the Green Hornet movie.

Tony Caputo says that, not long after the first issue of Green Hornet vol. 1 hit the stands, the movie was optioned for film and television for $7 million

by Universal Pictures.

“Of course, Now didn’t get anything,” Caputo says. “I purchased the rights to publish a comic book. I purchased the privilege to bring the character back to life so the owner, George Trendle, Jr., and the licensor could become millionaires. That’s how the licensing world works.”

According to Caputo, Smith faced the same problem Fortier and Butler faced when they worked on Green Hornet.

“The problem Kevin Smith had that nobody knows is that he wanted to have a female Kato,” Caputo says. “He loved the multi-generational concept from the comic book and he wanted to bring that to film. George Trendle, Jr. would say no to that. That’s why the film is not going to be made— unless Kevin decides to do a timeless, 1940s version.”

In 1991, Now Comics was nominated for an industry award calling it the “Best New Publisher.” By 1994, the company was gone. Now Comics was relaunched as Now Media Group Inc., a graphic-novel selfpublisher in 2003, but folded in 2005. The entire Now corporation closed down in February 2006.

“The biggest disappointment for me of the second volume closing its doors was that Tony wanted to collect Sting of the Green Hornet as a graphic novel,” Fortier says. “I would love to see that in a bound set.”

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The AlwaysAnimated Mike Baron We thought about asking the Kato writer just what it is he’s doing in this photo … but some things are better left un-asked.

Photo courtesy of Mike Baron.

Alternate Cover Butler’s interpretation of what this issue’s cover might have looked like.

Green Hornet TM & © 2006 Green Hornet, Inc. BACK ISSUE © 2006 TwoMorrows.

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by

Tom “The Comics $avant” $tewart

Or … How to Waste a Perfectly Good Million Dollars They were dead almost before they were born. Four boys with money to burn and an unquenchable yen for adventure, they were the Green Team, and you could join them. If you had a million dollars. From their New York office, in their Green Room, with their ticker-tape communicator watches, they were venture capitalists of adventure! They were: Commodore Murphy, shipping magnate and owner of a scale model toy boat that shot real missiles!

J. P. Huston, oil magnate!

Cecil Sunbeam, “starmaker” and movie mogul (with a disconcerting habit of calling people “sweetie”)!

And Abdul Smith, shoeshine boy and newest member of the team (and its only African American).

They gathered to judge applicants to see who was worthy of their million-dollar challenge of financing adventure.

Gangway for Simon!

The Green Team’s first and only official adventure was in First Issue Special #2 (May 1975). The team was a creation of Joe Simon, who was employed at DC as an editor and idea man, and drawn by artist Jerry Grandenetti. Simon was the co-creator of Captain America and half of the legendary team of Simon and Kirby, and was recognized as a powerhouse creative force in the comics industry. But… …Joe had not been involved in comics for a while.

He’d left the long-underwear characters behind for the lure of the magazine market and MAD imitator, Sick. In the late ’60s, Joe got a bit more active in the comics biz again, developing titles for Harvey Comics like Jigsaw and B-Man. In 1968, Joe came on board at DC at the instigation of editorial director Carmine Infantino. A buzz was created throughout the industry. Joe Simon was well known as an innovator, an idea man with a

1st Issue Special #2… …was the not-so-special last issue of the Green Team. © 2006 DC Comics.

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string of successes. It was seen as a coup. Sure, he’d been out of the “Big Two” hero market for a while, but new winds were blowing through the industry, and Carmine was listening to his fellow artists and their fans, creating innovative titles—it was a new spirit at staid National Periodical Publications (DC Comics).

Simon’s concepts would find a ready home. His first book for DC in almost 20 years was the hippie, counterculture classic Brother Power the Geek, one of the most infamous titles in a period at DC that spawned several.

It seemed to combine the worst aspects of the clueless middle-aged men that readers suspected DC to be, with a complete misunderstanding of just what made Marvel “cool.” It lasted two issues. Joe went back to his own projects.

In 1971 Simon returned as editor of the romance line at DC, a genre that he and Jack Kirby pioneered back in 1947.

This time Joe was coming home. He brought back Black Magic, a title he had done back in the ’50s with Jack Kirby, filling it with reprints of the classic Simon and Kirby stories.

He also started Champion Sports (a sports anthology) and Prez (the adventures of the first teenage president), as well as editing the romance line. But it just wasn’t the ’40s and ’50s anymore. The kid audience that the industry had nurtured and relied on for decades was changing, dropping out and finding other things to do its quarters. Now the market was skewing to older kids and adults, the kind that thought Neal Adams was the coolest thing on the block, bought extra copies of #1s, and didn’t have much use for chaste romance stories that seemed to have been written before the sexual revolution. DC’s attempts to reach the older kids came off like your parents trying to be cool.

Prez, with its attempt at hipness and satire, lasted four issues, and Champion Sports lasted three, both ending with Feb.–Mar. 1974 issues, barely enough to get the initial numbers from the stands. Black Magic lasted till the ninth issue, a full year past the new titles. Simon and Kirby even re-teamed on an updated version of Sandman, a character they collaborated on in the 1940s. It was a bizarre concept for the hero, with Sandman monitoring the dreams of people, and then leaping into action with sidekicks Brute and Glob when the dreams would turn dangerous. The first issue tryout sold well, but Kirby hated the book, and refused to work with a partner again.

Remember This House Ad? (above) DC’s promotional campaign for the Joe Simon creation. © 2006 DC Comics.

Takin’ it to the … Penthouse?

Joe had revisited the genres that had made him his name at DC and beyond: super-hero, horror, and romance. There was only one left. Back in the ’40s, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were the kings of the kid gangs: the Newsboy Legion, the Young Allies, and the most successful, the Boy Commandos, all by Simon and Kirby, all bearing a trace of the streets that Joe and especially Jack knew so well. Like other S&K creations, their gangs were often imitated, but nobody did them better.

This would be the next genre that Simon would revive.

This time the boys wouldn’t be poor youths, orphans, or even sidekicks of older heroes. No, this time the boys would be millionaires, each with their own special talent and a mountain of inherited cash to pursue adventure—except for shoeshine boy Abdul Smith, who made his money mostly by accident (in unpublished stories, it’s revealed that his

From the Unpublished Second Issue (right) The Green Team’s second adventure wound up dumped into Cancelled Comic Cavalcade. © 2006 DC Comics.

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Three Strikes and Yer Out! (left) A page from the Green Team’s unpublished third story. Special thanks to Bill Alger. © 2006 DC Comics.

funny book do at BACK ISSUE, at the very obscurity of the things we write about, and ask, “Isn’t there anything you don’t like?” Well, of course. Many things. That question, for one. I, too, sometimes wonder at the teary-eyed romantics who defend anything their favorite artist/writer did (I’m looking at you, Ms. Mystic fans), overlooking any flaws in the material on the theory that “Well, but this is the guy who did X, so Y must be good!”

Besides, it’s old!

This is a problem here in the mighty comics nostalgia press, the never-ending ability to see anything old as “good” or at least “fun,” and anything new as “bad,” or the dreaded “disrespectful of past creators.” Let me break this cycle.

The Green Team is not very good. There, I said it.

The art is fine (you either like Grandenetti or you don’t; I do); the story is silly; and the concept—well, there we have a problem. Even as a kid, I found it hard to care about a bunch of rich kids blowing stacks of money to have a good time. I could take it from Richie Rich, in doses, but a whole team of spoiled millionaires so bored with their money and lives that they offer people money to find ways to entertain them? I know my grandmother wouldn’t approve. It would have been passable if the stories were good, fun adventure yarns, but they weren’t.

The Lost Adventures of Joe

“talent” seems to be Wall Street wizardry) and joins in the first issue with barely a million to his name. In that issue, the boys fund Professor’s Dinkle’s Great American Pleasure Machine, a sort of really, really fun carnival ride that drives one man mad with … well, pleasure. The boys were off and running!

All the way to Cancelled Comic Cavalcade. Their first meeting happened to be held in the mid-’70s dumping ground, First Issue Special. Those issues may have been first, but there was usually nothing special about them. It was a graveyard for projects that never got off the ground, or for orphans, not of the scrappy, kid gang variety, but of the ‘Well, we paid for it, we might as well use it’ variety. The boys were right there with Lady Cop, Atlas, and the Outsiders; some good, some bad, almost all doomed before even being printed.

Green Team Returns (above) The nearly forgotten rich kids made an appearance in Adventures of Superman #549 (Aug. 1997).

Comics Nostalgia Ain’t What it Used to Be Now, there are those … those spoilsports we see at conventions, in comics stores, and sometimes at family reunions, who will sneer at the writing, or rather, the subject of the writing we slaves of the

© 2006 DC Comics.

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In the two unpublished issues, the boys met giant lobsters, Russian sailors, and an old man who has made it his job to defend the lobsters from the Russian sailors. The boys offer to buy their way out of danger, to buy the lobsters, then stand by as the lobsters attack the Russians and solve the problem themselves. Buying your way out of trouble is fine in real life, but in adventure fantasy? Gabby of the Newsboy Legion would never do that.

In what was meant to be the third issue, J. P. Huston and Abdul go undercover in the slums to try to better understand how to help the poor. They end up buying the neighborhood just to take over the local mission that is being run by a less-thancompassionate owner, and hiring the Paperhanger to spruce the place up. He turns out to be a Hitler look-alike and an insane wallpaperer to boot, who uses his special evil wallpaper to grow huge plants that threaten to take over the city. They defeat the mad wallpasterer, and his super trees, and head off to their next adventure, and next million-dollar thrill.

It wasn’t to be. Maybe if there had been a Cancelled Comic Cavalcade #3. The series had been an attempt to return to the fun comics of the ’40s, but it just didn’t work. The humor was off and the concept was old fashioned, clichéd, and weird. Joe Simon stayed on at DC for a little while, but the romance comics were being phased out. By the end of ’75 Simon was gone. His time at DC in the ’70s would be just a blip, a fond, can-you-believe-it type of memory of one of comics’ founding fathers.

by

John Wells

Everything you know is wrong. Now there’s a concept fans have gotten to know quite well over the past few decades (even if some have never gotten used to it). Whether it’s the 1986 revamp of Superman or the 2006 swing backward of the pendulum in the latest Wonder Woman relaunch, the rewriting of super-hero history has been with us nearly as long as there have been superheroes themselves. What’s changed is the assumption of writers and editors that readers would neither notice nor object. The events of Justice League of America #71 (May 1969) may represent one of the last major instances where that actually held true.

Fourteen years earlier, “John Jones, Manhunter from Mars” had debuted as a backup feature in Detective Comics (’Tec) #225, joining such stalwarts as Roy Raymond, TV Detective and the book’s real moneymakers, Batman and Robin. Created by writer Joe Samachson and artist Joe Certa, the series revolved around a green Martian scientist accidentally teleported to Earth by the “Robot-Brain” of a scientist named Mark Erdel. With Erdel’s death, J’onn J’onzz found himself stranded and took the persona of police detective John Jones while he bided his time for a means of returning to Mars. Over time he’d develop a small supporting cast that included Captain Harding (beginning in #228), police officer Diane Meade (#246), and an other-dimensional childlike creature named Zook (#311). His base of operation—Middletown—would not be named until ’Tec #322.

Big Green Man The Martian Manhunter by Brian Stelfreeze, a 1997 convention sketch obtained at Aggiecon by its contributor, Adam Richards. © 2006 DC Comics.

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Fight Club Detail from Nick Cardy’s cover to World’s Finest Comics #212 (June 1972), featuring Superman and—make that versus—Martian Manhunter.

Originally operating invisibly, the Manhunter from Mars was forced to reveal his existence in 1959’s Detective #273, conveniently right about the time he joined the fledgling Justice League of America in The Brave and the Bold #28. By this point, the beetle-browed depiction of his face had given way to a more human look, all the better to help him fit in. Over the first several years of the strip’s existence, J’onn had made multiple attempts to return to Mars and finally succeeded in Detective #301, where a scientist reconstructed the Robot-Brain. Having now formed an attachment with Earth, J’onn didn’t stick around long but was heartened by the fact that he could visit his parents and brother whenever he wanted.

Following a story in which Detective Jones was killed by a menace released by the Idol-Head of Diabolu (’Tec #326), the series was spun off as the lead of House of Mystery, starting with #143 (June 1964).

Finally defeating the threat of the Idol Head in #158, J’onn took the new persona of billionaire Marco Xavier to investigate the crime combine Vulture (#160) and wound up unmasking their leader as the real Xavier in the last issue of the strip (#173, Mar.–Apr. 1968).

Shortly thereafter, the first two Manhunter from Mars stories were reprinted in World’s Finest Comics (WFC) #175 and 176 (May and June 1968), and they were likely the only exposure Denny O’Neil had to J’onn’s past prior to writing him out of the Justice League in the aforementioned JLA #71. Suddenly, the Manhunter was a military science leader in exile who was only now returning to Mars to oppose the threat of Commander Blanx and his pole-dwelling White Martians. In the end, Blanx used the planet’s previously-

© 2006 DC Comics.

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unheard-of Blue Flame to all but obliterate the Martian population, and J’onn resigned from the Justice League to accompany the handful of survivors as they sought out a new planet to call home.

Despite the wholesale contradiction of the Martian Manhunter’s established history, few, if any, readers objected. Most fans—and writers—got their knowledge of J’onn J’onzz from Justice League of America and perhaps the occasional origin reprint.

Indeed, though telepathy is now regarded as one of the Manhunter’s foremost abilities, it was used in a mere four Silver Age stories—but two of them were the oft-reprinted origin of the JLA (Justice League of America #9) and the aforementioned Detective #225.

O’Neil belatedly penned a follow-up in 1972’s WFC #212, where the Martian refugees found sanctuary on the world of Vonn even as they were secretly imperiled by J’onn’s traitorous girlfriend Bel Juz, and a rather inconsequential reunion with the Justice League in 1974’s Justice League of America #115.

Also during 1974, an abortive attempt at a consecutive reprinting of the original John Jones series was attempted, with only the stories from ’Tec #225–227 being reprinted in WFC #226–227 before DC abandoned its 100-Page Super-Spectacular format.

O’Neil’s final contribution to the Manhunter from Mars came in the form of a three-issue backup series published in late 1976 and early 1977. After his friend R’es Eda was mortally wounded by an unknown assassin alleged to be from Earth, J’onn came to the unlikely conclusion that one of his former Justice League comrades must be responsible. Setting a course for Earth over the violent protestations of his people, the Manhunter was pursued by army commander N’or Cott (Adventure Comics #449). After confrontations with Supergirl (#450) and Hawkman and Hawkgirl, J’onn finally came to his senses but an attack by N’or Cott threatened to kill them all (#451).

The action concluded in World’s Finest #245 (June–July 1977), edited by O’Neil but scripted by Bob Haney with art by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson.

Returning to Mars with Superman and Batman, the Manhunter learned that R’es Eda had faked his death, intent on sidetracking J’onn while plotting a raid on the wealth of the ancient Vonn city of Baltaz. The invasion plans came to an abrupt halt when N’or Cott, who had entered Baltaz earlier, died from exposure to the city’s atmosphere, toxic to the Martians.

Justice League of America #144 (July 1977), published just a month after WFC #245, offered perhaps the most affecting portrait of the Martian Manhunter to date. Scripted by Steve Englehart, the story flashed back to 1959, bridging the divide between the Certa era and O’Neil’s JLA #71 backstory. Here was a John Jones living in a vacuum, frustrated that he couldn’t take credit for his victories or confide in anyone or even repair the Robot-Brain that had stranded him on Earth. A John Jones who didn’t need the nightmare of being approached by Commander Blanx and his Pole Dwellers.

Though J’onn was unaware of it, he’d actually succeeded in partially repairing the Robot-Brain, something Blanx had tested by allowing the device to pull a cache of Martian weapons to Earth (as seen in ’Tec #264). The White Martians were ready the next time the teleportation ray struck Mars—and ready as well to invade Earth.

“Martians!” One word spoken in an interrupted exchange between a fleeing J’onn and a visiting hero

named the Flash was all it took to trigger full-blown panic in Middletown. One word that brought J’onn’s old Detective co-star Roy Raymond to town and who, in turn, used his TV show to alert more than two dozen heroes of the era.

Breaking into teams, most of the heroes wound up chasing false leads wonderfully tied to comics of the era. It was a different story for the group that went to Cape Canaveral, flushing out the White Martians and discovering a captive invisible man left behind, his presence made known only by “water droplets gleaming in the searchlights’ glare.” Freed by Batman and Robin, J’onn J’onzz assured the Dynamic Duo that he was “not a Martian such as they. And to prove it, I’ll tell you the most closely guarded secret known to any Martian—our one fatal weakness!”

The Pole Dwellers felt the burn courtesy of Superman’s heat vision—and the Man of Steel prepared to take everyone back to Mars. J’onn, surprisingly, declined.

“Once I would have sold my soul to return home.

Now, I see the truth—the truth I should have seen years ago. The Mars I loved is gone. It is a world of lost causes and dead dreams. Evil triumphed over good there. But here, on Earth, the eternal struggle continues.

Here one such as I—and ones such as yourselves—can still tip the balance the right way. I love my adopted world. It needs—a Manhunter from Mars.”

Superman, more than anyone, could relate. A discussion among the heroes present ensued, speculating that J’onn might go public several months down the road—after the hysteria had faded—and that he could do so with the backing of these well-established super-heroes. The seeds of the Justice League of America had been planted. And after J’onn went public in ’Tec #273, they bore fruit.

The newfound buzz surrounding J’onn was due in no small part to the sleek, angular stylings of the Mike Nasser/Terry Austin art team on the initial Adventure trilogy. Most significantly, they restored the longabsent jutting brow of the 1950s stories. There was also a striking new logo, one designed by Nasser himself (falling back on his early career as a sign painter). The Manhunter from Mars had an undeniable cool factor, one that DC intended to capitalize on.

Gerry Conway planned to get the ball rolling with a serial pairing J’onn with a succession of DC heroes (starting with Green Arrow and Black Canary). Originally slated to begin in Super-Team Family #15, Part One was pushed back to #17 and left for dead after the book was cancelled. So a Cary Burkett/John Fuller/Bruce Patterson solo series was scheduled as a 1978 backup in Aquaman, rescheduled for Adventure Comics #461–463 and finally abandoned altogether when the latter title became a repository for higher-profile inventory left in limbo by the “DC Implosion.”

Consequently, the Manhunter didn’t return until 1980’s Justice League of America #177–178, challenging Despero in a reprise of JLA #1’s cosmic chess game. In that summer’s DC Comics Presents #27, J’onn was cast as guardian of yet another secret of his new solar system: a key that could unlock a planetary doomsday weapon called Warworld. Len Wein and Jim Starlin’s new powerhouse Mongul, unable to wrest the key from the Manhunter himself, coerced Superman into doing the job for him.

At the end of 1980, Detective Comics celebrated its 500th issue with a plethora of commemorative stories,

Branded!

The Mike Nasser-designed Manhunter logo.

among them a Paul Levitz/Joe Kubert piece wherein Hawkman and Hawkgirl opened a cold case and investigated the suspects in “The Strange Death of Doctor Erdel.” Turns out he was killed by the RobotBrain, which had gained sentience and subtly administered an electric shock while Erdel was distracted by the Martian in his midst.

And finally, in late 1981’s Justice League of America #200, an ensorcelled J’onn was thrown up against a fitting if surprisingly ineffectual opponent in the form of Firestorm.

Gerry Conway intended to return the Martian Manhunter to the fold immediately thereafter, following, according to The Comic Reader #197 (Dec. 1981), an Earth/Mars war. Once again, the revival was stuck in limbo but the persistent Conway finally got the story into print two-and-a-half years later, using it as the impetus to radically shake up the Justice League.

The sparks were the Viking Landers, innocuous NASA probes whose 1976 arrival on the red planet had dire consequences in the DC Universe. Echoing moments in Earth’s own history, “a minor military figure” named the Marshal played on his people’s sense of pride, characterized the probes as an invasion and an act of war, and used his Red Brotherhood to seize control of the Martian government.

Such were the dire tidings delivered to Earth by J’onn J’onzz in “War of the Worlds 1984” (Justice League of America #228–230). The Justice League, no surprise, provided a strong defense though the invaders from Mars very nearly destroyed the JLA’s satellite headquarters. Revealed to have pressured the Marshal into starting the war, the traitorous Bel Juz finally received her long overdue comeuppance and was returned to Mars II for punishment along with the other war criminals. Ostracized from his people (including his new love, J’en), J’onn had no choice but to remain on Earth and rejoin the Justice League—on the eve of being reconstructed as a haven for mostly third-tier heroes and teenagers.

Though remembered primarily as an ill-advised melding of early 1980s clichés, the retooled Justice League of America (dubbed “Justice League Detroit” by some) was pivotal in addressing the Martian Manhunter’s place in a world far removed from Middletown and ancient Idol-Heads. Conway wisely refused to allow J’onn to be defined by Superman, employing instead the unique mimicry, elasticity, invisibility, and intangibility that were rarely considered in the Silver Age JLA. And as illustrated by Chuck Patton, J’onn was fully a head taller than any of his teammates, an imposing presence for friend and foe alike.

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Telepathy, used in a handful of Silver Age stories, was acknowledged here but remained largely absent from J’onn’s repertoire. He could still read minds but rarely did so. And he had no tolerance for those who abused their own telepathic powers, straying from his own unflappable demeanor to castigate Aquaman for one such incident (Justice League of America #239).

This quiet respect for individual privacy along with his populist conviction that the team should live among Earth’s people rather than above them (JLA Annual #2) won him the respect of the new Leaguers. He settled into the role of Teacher, Father Figure, and Elder Statesman so effortlessly that it soon became hard to imagine him any other way.

Prior to J’onn’s return to the League, plans had been afoot to feature him as a supporting character in the Jemm, Son of Mars maxiseries. The JLA storyline necessitated Jemm’s background be moved to Saturn but anyone familiar with JLA #71 and 144 could easily see the parallels, from white Saturnians to a red Saturnian named Jogarr with considerable familiarity with Superman. When penciling a mob scene of DC’s heroes in 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths #5, George Pérez made it a point to place the beetle-browed Jemm and J’onn side-by-side.

It was 1985 and all was right with J’onn J’onzz’s world. His estrangement from his fellow Martians notwithstanding, the Manhunter was enjoying his new family, a more close-knit incarnation of the Justice League who’d naturally accepted him as their leader.

Unthinkable even a few years earlier, J’onn even acquired his own action figure that year, part of the second wave of Kenner’s Super Powers series. Included in the package was a mini-comic that pit J’onn (and pals Firestorm and Wonder Woman) against Desaad.

Said comic also provided a nice new logo, one modeled after the Nasser design but which now formally referred to J’onn by his codename of Martian Manhunter rather than the more descriptive Manhunter from Mars. The logo also turned up in 1986’s Who’s Who in the DC

© 2006 DC Comics.

Alien Nation J’onn J’onzz, Manhunter from Mars, and Jemm, Son of Mars Saturn. © 2006 DC Comics.

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Universe #14, whose adjoining write-up was emblematic of fandom’s unfamiliarity with J’onn’s past.

Primarily referencing Detective #225 and the JLA #71 revisions, the piece made no reference to J’onn’s early returns to Mars and declared he had no relatives. In a way, it presaged what was to come.

Post-Crisis, as they did throughout the rest of the DC Universe, everything had changed. For the Martian Manhunter, those changes were subtle, first hinted at in Justice League of America #246 (Jan. 1986). Therein, the Manhunter resumed his John Jones persona, this incarnation having previously worked for the Metropolis Police Department and apparently never having “died.” He had, it was implied, been around since the 1950s in real time as well as comic-book time and was therefore rejected as too old when he tried to hook up with the NYPD. Instead, he agreed to work for a small private eye firm, immediately getting himself framed for murder by the owner’s secretary (#246–248, 251, 255).

Vastly more challenging was the Manhunter’s attempt at a psychic rescue of the cult leader Adam, who was gripped by madness after channeling Zatanna the Magician’s power into his own. In a telling display of empathy, J’onn viewed leaving Adam to his fate as unacceptable, even persuading a justifiably vengeful Zatanna to join him and the illusionist Gypsy in delicate telepathic surgery. It was not an altogether successful operation, one that left Zatanna in the thrall of Adam (Justice League of America #256–257). Consequently, J’onn would resist subsequent requests to plumb the cerebral depths of later allies Blue Beetle (Justice League America #26) and Maxwell Lord (Justice League America #53).

Justice League of America #256 also touched on Martian theology, courtesy of J. M. DeMatteis, an incoming writer with no small interest in religion.

Conway had casually referenced the “Gods of Mars” in J’onn’s most frequently used oath (#228 and others) but DeMatteis went a step further and actually had the Manhunter see one of them while he was trapped in a raging fire. H’ronmeer had been the subject of stories told by J’onn’s grandmother in his youth and he would soon see this God of Death and Fire again.

Specifically, in DeMatteis’ 1988 four-issue Martian Manhunter miniseries (wherein J’onn acquired another new logo, this one spectacularly ugly but which he’s been unaccountably saddled with ever since). It took the previous year’s Justice League Annual #1 as its jumping-off point, dealing with the consequences of J’onn’s absorption of an alien spore. He’d believed he could contain it where a human metabolism could not. In the miniseries, the Manhunter found himself pursued by H’ronmeer himself, initially convincing himself that it was a manifestation of the spore.

A succession of stunning discoveries wore down J’onn’s resistance. Doctor Erdel (named Saul here) showed up alive, revealing further that the Manhunter had arrived on Earth in a very different form, elongated, angular … and carrying the corpse of a Martian girl.

It was Erdel who helped the telepath block out and reshape the trauma of the planetary plague he’d experienced and suggested the strange visitor take a form and name closer to that of a human.

“I borrowed bits and pieces from the pulps … created the kind of Martian I knew best … the kind Edgar Rice Burroughs would’ve been proud of … I figured a beetlebrowed Martian right out of a ’50s sci-fi movie would

still be an alien that folks would be more comfortable with. He’d fit their concept of what a man from Mars should be,” Erdel explained.

Noting that the Martian’s true name was unpronounceable (but “beautiful”), he came up with J’onn J’onzz as an alternative.

And for his final step, Erdel allowed J’onn to believe him dead rather than serve as “another painful reminder of [his] past.”

And for a final twist, J’onn’s fear of flame was exposed as a personal psychosis, an unconscious reaction to his horror at watching his wife’s plague-infested corpse being burned in the Fires of Purification.

Having accepted this much, the Manhunter realized he needed to take one final step, actually using Erdel’s long-repaired teleporter to return to Mars. There he was embraced by H’ronmeer and reunited with the spirits of his wife and daughter. It was they who explained that J’onn’s longing for his beloved home and family had unwittingly kept all the ghosts of Mars “tethered to this world.” For centuries. So long that H’ronmeer was forced to seek out the lost son of Mars himself in order to give the rest of the race passage to Heaven. “When that beam tore you away from us, beloved,” J’onn’s wife explained, “It not only ripped you across space … but across time, as well.”

The solution, mother and daughter continued, was for J’onn “to remember … cherish the memories … but don’t—oh, please don’t—cling to them. Be yourself. Accept who you truly are … and take that back with you—to your new home. To that world you love far more than you admit.”

So J’onn let go, watching in awe as a seemingly endless stream of spirits rose into the sky, melting into a welcoming H’ronmeer. And then he called out to Doctor Erdel, telling him he was ready to come home.

And Earth was home now though J’onn would continue to revere the planet of his birth, privately celebrating in the song and dance of Mars’ native tongue. In periods of meditation, he would revert to his true form and reflect, thanking all the gods of Mars: “O, H’ronmeer, god of Death. O, C’eridyall, goddess of Life.

O, Unnamable One, who is the God behind all gods.”

With its philosophical plot and stylized, somewhat off-putting artwork by Mark Badger, the Martian Manhunter miniseries was hardly a sales success. It was a satisfying story, though, and one that managed to address the dated aspects of J’onn’s backstory, from his look and name to the now-confirmed absence of life on Mars.

[It also, ironically, returned the Manhunter to his role as the Justice League’s green Superman. One of the details of John Byrne’s post-Crisis relaunch was that the Man of

Steel was not now nor had he ever been a member of the Justice League. J’onn, conversely, had never left since Commander Blanx, the inhabitants of Mars II, et al. no longer existed. So the Martian Manhunter—himself now the last survivor of a doomed world—became Superman’s designated substitute in all those old 1960s and 1970s adventures, as seen in the odd flashback in the late 1980s. In a sense, J’onn also became the League’s Captain America, himself a man-out-of-time who came to symbolize the team that took him in.]

Elsewhere, Secret Origins editor Mark Waid had scheduled a Martian Manhunter piece to run in #35 (Feb. 1989), unaware that a reworked origin would be appearing only a matter of months before it.

Consequently, a different perspective was required, one prompted by “an offhand question by Justice League International plotter Keith Giffen: ‘How did a super-powered alien from another world end up as a police detective, anyway?’”

The answer amounted to the origin of John Jones and one of the most unique storytelling exercises in Secret Origins’ run (courtesy of Mark Verheiden and Ken Steacy). Written entirely in first-person captions overlapping three rectangular panels per page, it was framed in the unlocked memories of a gray-haired policeman who worked with John in the 1950s and 1960s.

“He was fascinated by television,” the cop said of the newly arrived J’onzz. “With Martian telepathy, visual forms of communication were unnecessary.

Why go to the bother when you can peer into the storyteller’s mind and experience a vision firsthand?

“Maybe that’s why he was so intrigued with the tube. It brought back the joy of surprise. There were no minds to read, no instantaneous give and take. He was forced to accept the vision at face value.

“It was television’s Golden Age, and cop shows were hot. Night after night, week after week, the good guys triumphed over the bad guys.

“He had found his calling.”

So J’onn became John, telepathically creating a backstory and relationships for himself in the Denver Police Department (following the recent placement of Erdel in Colorado)—including a friendship with the unnamed narrator. Eventually, the cop “developed a real kinship with John” and discovered his secret when the Manhunter was nearly killed by fire in a spectacular kidnapping case. Lurching out of bed in 1988, the policeman suddenly remembered everything—after having the memories telepathically buried for decades.

John Jones had “died” in a 1968 police raid but J’onn J’onzz still lived. Newly sensitized to the importance and fragility of memory, the green man began reconnecting with his past. “Maybe that’s why he decided to unlock my—our—little secret,” the old cop thought as he and J’onn embraced.

“Or maybe he just wanted to see a friend— for old times’ sake.”

This story, in turn, had a sequel of sorts in 1989’s Justice League Annual #3, one that sadly found John Jones investigating the murder of a veteran cop named Frank, the same friend he’d just left in Secret Origins.

The murder investigation was tangential to a deeper look into the mind of the Martian Manhunter.

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Little Green Man The Martian Manhunter Super Powers action figure, produced by Kenner in 1985. © 2006 DC Comics.

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Perceptively, the story explored the role that J’onn’s surface telepathy played in his interaction with friends and foes, taking to another level the human inclination to adjust one’s behavior to fit the expectations and perceptions of others. It was something he’d never really considered until recovering his memories and now he found himself frustrated that even his closest acquaintances in the Justice League didn’t really know him.

“How tired I’ve grown of this ’heroic’ lifestyle,” he thought. “The violence … the posturing … There are other ways … better ways … to live. On Mars, we were focused on art, love, self-sacrifice. We’d known peace for untold thousands of years. But, of course, this isn’t Mars.”

These thoughts and more came to J’onn’s mind as he worked with Batman on the investigation of Frank’s death. From J’onn’s telepathic perspective, the deaths of Bruce Wayne’s parents were fresh and he was still “the traumatized child punishing himself for a crime he had no part of.” And when Batman discovered that their investigation had ultimately

From the J’onn J’onzz M’iniseries Original art to Martian Manhunter #1 (May 1988), page 4, illustrated and autographed by Mark Badger. Courtesy of Heritage Comics. © 2006 DC Comics.

been fruitless, that Frank’s death was a random act of violence, J’onn had an epiphany.

“On Mars,” he suddenly recalled, “we believe that there’s a plan inherent in everything. No act occurs without the divine will … for the ultimate good.” Batman wouldn’t hear of it and J’onn let the matter drop.

“My culture … my race … had answers to those questions. But my culture and race are long dead while I’ve lived so many lives … assumed so many roles … since I came to Earth. Can I ever understand those answers the way I once did? Do they even apply to this world?”

Such philosophical questions never truly left J’onn but they tended to wax and wane, his mood— like his more conscious actions—sometimes influenced by those around him. And sometimes by circumstances themselves.

The League had changed dramatically since 1984’s street-level JLA. After two years of being critically broiled and skewered, the members were systematically retired or killed, gradually being pared down until, at the end of Justice League of America #261 (Apr. 1987), only the Martian Manhunter remained.

Elsewhere, Glorious Godfrey had whipped up public sentiment against super-heroes in the Legends miniseries, culminating with the reformation of a defiant Justice League that J’onn happily agreed to join.

Cynical at first over the public’s fickleness [“They are wolves—waiting to consume us,” he snarled in May 1987’s Justice League #1], J’onn quickly found his sentimental side reasserting itself and he leaped to the team’s defense when plans were made to align it with the United Nations. And Batman emphatically added that the Manhunter was ideally suited to lead the revitalized team: “The one person really qualified to command an international League is the only one of us who really sees the planet as a unified whole.”

It was a recommendation with a pay-off in the retitled Justice League International #13 (May 1988) that most likely made the 1988 Bat-editorial offices apoplectic. On a mission in a Soviet prison, an argumentative, contrary Batman was inviting an international incident over the captivity of U.S. hero Nemesis and J’onn had finally had enough: “If you don’t cease this arrogant, juvenile behavior, I’ll see to it that you’re booted out of Russia—and out of the Justice League! Remember who you are. What you stand for. What this team stands for. And remember who the leader of this team is. The leader you selected.

The leader you agreed to follow.”

One beat.

Two. Three.

“So …”, Batman asked. “What’s the plan, chief?”

This was the Giffen-plotted, DeMatteis-scripted Justice League at its best, setting itself squarely in the midst of the revamped DC Universe and mocking the character excesses of its sacred cash cows.

The impact of the lighterweight Justice League titles was felt across the line, even spilling into “respectable” titles like Neil Gaiman’s new Sandman title.

In #5 (May 1989), a testy J’onn was awakened by Scott (Mister Miracle) Free to help TM & © Nabisco.

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the Dream Lord Morpheus. Where Mister Miracle saw a human Sandman, a thunderstruck J’onn saw a flameheaded entity he addressed as Lord L’zoril.

Afterwards, the Manhunter explained to the New God that they’d just met “an old god. A very old god.

Come, Scott Free; let us hit the kitchen. I have a secret stash of Oreos of which you are welcome to partake.”

The Oreo subplot typified the other end of the League spectrum. It was introduced in JLI #8 when moving men questioned whether a crate labeled “Oreos” was for real.

J’onn assured them it was [“Captain Marvel introduced me to them. I like them.”] and then hoisted a massive crate over his shoulders, declaring, “Do you see what a man is capable of—when he has his milk and cookies every day?”

What seemed like a bit of leg-pulling eventually became reality with subsequent references in #21 and many others, even serving as the catalyst in one short story that began with J’onn’s midnight run for a package of cookies (Showcase ’93 #10, Oct. 1993). “What if Oreos have the same effect on Martians as crack and heroin have on humans?” Giffen asked in a Martian Manhunter #4 text piece. “I’d like to give J’onn a $57.00-a-day Oreo habit.”

Though best-remembered for its comedic moments with J’onn as a gruff, sarcastic ringmaster, the Giffen/DeMatteis League had some effective moments of drama, notably a harrowing Despero sequence (the retitled-yet-again Justice League America #38–40) that found the monstrous creature stalking the Justice League Detroit members who’d defeated him last. Much of #38, in fact, seemed to represent the final hour of young heroine Gypsy: Her family’s deaths. Her desperate flight.

Her surrender to save the lives of a crowd. And her stab of hope when a green man stepped from the shadows.

Despero, modified significantly from his Silver Age incarnation, proved to be one of the most formidable opponents of the Martian Manhunter’s career, battering him both physically and mentally. In the end, J’onn was victorious by using compassion, a sacred Martian “gift of love” called Mayavana that created a new reality in Despero’s mind, one where the villain destroyed the Justice League and the entire world. It was also, because of the spiritual and telepathic toll, an ability that could only be used once.

“I used it for my friends,” J’onn explained quietly. “For my adopted world. And perhaps for Despero, as well.”

Despero, for his part, was unappreciative, later shaking off the illusion and returning to battle the League again (Justice League America #58; Justice League Europe #34–35).

By that point, the League was in disarray and J’onn was again entertaining thoughts of moving beyond a life defined in terms of the name Martian Manhunter. “For years, I’ve had to surround myself with a personality barrier—as much to protect my true Martian nature as to keep the others in line. Someday I’ll be able to fully discard that barrier … be one with that true nature” (Justice League America #56, Nov. 1991). Wracked with guilt, J’onn did his best to stabilize the Justice League, even setting them up in the team’s original Secret Sanctuary [“In many ways, that cave was the first real home I had on this world.”], but finally acknowledged that he had to put himself first. So in January of 1992, he took a leave of absence and flew into the sunset (#60).

It wasn’t to be. J’onn was soon drawn back into the League—initially in the guise of Blood-wynd— and has remained in varying degrees ever since. He starred in another miniseries and a well-respected ongoing series by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake (even delivering on the longthreatened Oreo addiction story). Despite an expanded profile courtesy of the Cartoon Network’s Justice League series, however, mainstream success would not be his.

“A lot of [writers] tell me they don’t like the Martian Manhunter,” Grant Morrison remarked in Wizard’s JLA Special (1997), “and think that if there was going to be a story where someone betrays the JLA, then he’s the guy who would do it. I see him much differently. If someone was to betray the JLA, he’s the last person who would do it.” Noting that J’onn was the one constant in the post-Crisis League’s history, Morrison explained, “He’s the keeper of the flame for everything the JLA represents. He’s remote from the others, but at the same time, completely dedicated to what they represent, like honor, truth, and justice.”

Morrison theorized that racism was at the heart of the Martian Manhunter’s unpopularity as a leading man. “His alien-ness is so out front that people can’t overlook it.” While there may be a measure of truth in that, it must be said that nearly every solo super-hero revival since the 1970s has flopped, whether their star was green, black, or white.

Until a Manhunter from Mars feature film stirs up mainstream interest in a back-to-basics X-Files approach, any future “solo” comic is obligated to rely heavily on guest-stars or commit commercial suicide.

It’s a formula that allowed Ostrander and Mandrake’s series to survive for a full three years in a market where most new launches die in less than 12 issues. And there’s no shame in embracing what has become a part of the fabric of the Manhunter’s very being.

Many years ago, a group of heroes held out their hands to a man from another world, an unconditional act of brotherhood that tacitly endorsed him before a world not always known for its trust and solidarity. J’onn J’onzz’s life was changed for the better on that day.

[Editor’s note: This article was written before the Aug. 2006 premiere of an eight-issue Martian Manhunter series. Whether this new title disproves the author’s contentions about the character’s marketability remains to be seen.]

Has Anyone Seen My Oreos?

J’onn J’onzz in a 1990 convention sketch by Adam Hughes.

From the collection of Shannon Wendlick.

Martian Manhunter © 2006 DC Comics.

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IS BACK!

Michael Eury

E-Man: Recharged #1 Written by Nicola Cuti, illustrated by Joe Staton Digital Webbing Press (www.digitalwebbing.com), Sept. 2006 32 color pages • $3.99 U.S. E-Man TM & © Joe Staton.

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My very first job, believe it or not, was “in” the comics biz! Each weekday after school and on Saturdays in the mid-’70s, I worked as a clerk and short-order cook at Williams Candy Kitchen, a mom-and-pop’s newsstand/lunch counter in my hometown of Concord, North Carolina. In those pre-comics-shop days of spotty distribution, the Candy Kitchen ordered (and received!) almost every comic book published. I took immense pride in policing the comic shelves, tidying up after aggressive manhandling from kids (most of whom were routinely dispersed by pint-sized powerhouse “Mom” Williams’ banshee-worthy shriek of “This ain’t no liberry!”). I confess that I would go behind my employer Tommy Williams’ back and re-rack the comics, showing unabashed favoritism by displaying my personal must-reads (The Brave and the Bold, Superman, and Amazing Spider-Man among them) on the front rows … while shunting the titles I cared little for to the back and lower rows, including almost everything from Charlton Comics, that odd little publishing house out of Derby, Connecticut.

When I arrived at work one afternoon during late summer 1973, excited about that week’s new comics, the boss had given a coveted front-row spot to a quirky new Charlton title: E-Man #1 (Oct. 1973).

Instinctively I reached for it to banish all copies to the “bowels” of the shelves, but its cover gave me pause: its confident, colorful rendering featured a dynamic super-hero, a sexy female sidekick, and one of comics’ most iconic super-villain archetypes, a brain under glass! Why, substitute a DC bullet or Marvel corner box for the Charlton bullseye, and this could have been a major-league title (in fact, it was more polished than many of the big-league series of the day).

But it wasn’t a DC or Marvel book, so being an unenlightened, brand-loyal teen, I moved E-Man to the back row when Tommy wasn’t looking.

A few weeks later, I finally sampled E-Man #1, upon the urging of my comics-reading friend Alan Misenheimer (who managed to locate the title despite my back-row exile) … and what a pleasant surprise it was! Between Nick Cuti’s bouncy dialogue and sly humor and Joe Staton’s semi-cartoony, spirited art, E-Man, the adventures of a sentient E-Man TM & © Joe Staton.

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energy force-turned-shapeshifting crimefighter and his saucy exotic-dancer sidekick Nova Kane, was a sheer delight. E-Man was immediately added to my regular reading list… …but not for long. Just under two years later, E-Man bit the dust with issue #10 (Sept. 1975). But E-Man simply refused to stay dead. An outfit called Modern Comics reprinted six of the ten issues in 1977 and 1978. The title (with scripts by Cuti, Staton, Martin Pasko, and Paul Kupperberg) was revived by First Comics for a 25-issue run from Apr. 1983–Aug. 1985; First also reprinted the original Charlton run in The Original E-Man and Michael Mauser #1–7 (Oct. 1985–Apr. 1986). E-Man next resurfaced at Comico the Comic Company in a 1989 one-shot (which I co-edited), followed by a three-issue miniseries the next year.

Think we’re done yet? Not quite. Amid the carnage of comics of the early to mid-1990s, the “Dark Age” (with apologies to Mark Voger) where Superman was beaten to death, Batman’s back was broken, and the Punisher and Venom became “heroes,” Alpha Productions published a 20th anniversary E-Man one-shot in 1993, and another one-shot (E-Man Returns) in 1994. Yet the light-hearted E-Man seemed out of step with the Spawns, Lobos, and Bloodshots du jour, and Alpha’s revivals went nowhere. Aside from a two-page E-Man tale by Cuti and Staton in Comic Book Artist #12 (Mar. 2001), it seemed as if E-Man’s atoms had been dispersed into comics limbo.

Last year, perhaps subconsciously inspired by my guilty remembrances of shoving E-Man #1 onto the Candy Kitchen’s back shelf in ’73, I assigned a Nick Cuti/Joe Staton “Pro2Pro” interview on the topic of E-Man to Michael Ambrose (editor of the outstanding Charlton Spotlight ’zine) for BACK ISSUE #13 (Nov. 2005), which sported a “That ’70s Issue” theme. Little did Michael or I know that we would play a role in helping Alec Tronn (E-Man’s alter ego) do what he does best (besides entertain, that is): return to print.

“Yes, the article in BACK ISSUE was the catalyst for this new issue of E-Man,” reveals Randy Buccini, editor of the one-shot E-Man: Recharged, published by Digital Webbing Press (DWP). “When I read that Nick and Joe would say ‘yes’ to a publisher interested in reviving the character even before discussing money, I knew I had to see if this was true. I had met Joe just weeks before and gave him a call. He was familiar with DWP and after a quick conference with Nick, the deal was done.

Like Nick and Joe, [DWP publisher] Ed Dukeshire and I are involved with this because of a real love of the character.” And they’ve recruited another E-Man fan to their fold: “We’ve asked Michael Ambrose to write a text piece for the issue.”

But no one loves E-Man more than his creators.

Remarks Nick Cuti in an August 2006 email, “Wow! How do you sum up a character who’s been so much a part of your life for so long? Let’s say I enjoy working on E-Man almost as much as I enjoy working with Joe Staton. Both are men with extreme talents and delightful personalities.” Joe Staton adds, “Here it is, something like 34 years later, and we’re still doing EMan #1. Strange that a character with only ten issues from a minor publisher would keep on showing up after all this time. The great thing this time around is that with the classy computer coloring by Matt Webb, we can finally see the flashes and bursts that an energy creature would really produce.”

Palm Pilot

Will DWP’s E-Man: Recharged recharge the energy man’s comic-book career? “My fingers are crossed that sales will be decent enough to continue doing more one-shots and miniseries!” beams publisher Dukeshire. And Cuti, having ridden the E-Man rollercoaster on so many occasions, adds, “I’ve said farewell to E-Man so often, I’m hoping this time I won’t have to. But the fans will make that decision.”

You, the BACK ISSUE reader, are among those fans. In letters to or during personal contacts with me, many of you have lamented the absence of fun comics. Here’s your chance to help restore some balance to the market—buy a copy of E-Man: Recharged!

And while hopeful that Alec Tronn will plug in for another extended go-’round, Nick Cuti is thankful for the stories he’s been able to tell: “It’s been a grand ride.”

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Sans lettering, page 11 of E-Man: Recharged. Art by Joe Staton. Courtesy of Ed Dukeshire.

E-Man TM & © Joe Staton.

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Send your comments to: Email: euryman@msn.com (subject: BACK ISSUE) No attachments, please!

Postal mail: Michael Eury, Editor • BACK ISSUE 5060A Foothills Drive • Lake Oswego, OR 97034

No BACK ISSUE fan is more devoted than Ricky T. Butler, Jr.! Ricky writes at least one letter per BI issue, and recently donated to the BI office two batches of comics and fanzines as reference materials.

Thank you, Ricky!

Ricky has suggested a number of ideas for BACK ISSUE articles— any seconds on the following…? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal, Judge Dredd, the death of Captain Marvel, Elfquest, and the ’70s Atlas line.

– M.E. Just got my comp copy of Art Adams’ Gumby interview [in BACK ISSUE #16] and wanted to thank you for remembering!

The interview was hilarious, and I’m glad you got to use at least two of the three images you borrowed from me. And thanks, of course, for the bylines and for crediting me on the Special Thanks list.

By the way, I don’t know if you caught this or if anyone else has brought it up, but on page 7 of the interview, you asked Art if that was the first time he had drawn Godzilla for publication. In his response, he referred to Web of Spider-Man Annual #2 and a character named “Longshot” who could turn into different characters. I’m

sure he actually meant to say “Warlock” from the New Mutants.

Was that a misprint, or a proofreading error, or was it his actual response transcribed as-is?

– Eric Delos Santos It’s all Arthur’s fault! He misspoke, and I transcribed his comment as gospel. But then again, why would I doubt the wisdom of the all-knowing Arthur Adams?

Seriously, Eric, we appreciate the correction. Usually either yours truly or the folks at TwoMorrows HQ will catch this sort of thing, but this one slipped past us. And thanks again for your art contributions!

– M.E. Just a note to tell you how much I enjoyed BACK ISSUE #16. The Art Adams Gumby piece was fantastic!

I bought the issue for the Rom/Micronauts article, which was also very good. This is the first interview with Sal Buscema I’ve ever read, and I’ve got to say—this man’s a riot. I would love to see you folks do a more in-depth interview with my favorite Buscema brother. His views on the industry as a longtime worker would interest me greatly.

Herb Trimpe’s comment on G.I. Joe being a “pain in the ass” was worth the cover price!

On the downside was the Masters of the Universe article, and its lack of coverage of the Marvel version—especially since it outdid its DC counterpart by 10 issues! An interview with Ron Wilson (who penciled most of the series) would have been welcome as well—he’s another artist I’ve never had an opportunity to read an interview with. On the plus side was discovering that Mark Texiera drew those He-Man mini-comics … who knew?! I always assumed Sectaurs was his first gig.

Also, thanks for confirming something that has been a mystery to me for years—that Super Powers vol. 2 was indeed Kirby’s last sequential work. It was a little sad hearing how much he had dropped off, but if I can draw at 70, I’ll be amazed!

Once again, great issue. I also read your sister publication Draw! and miss Comic Book Artist.

– Derrick Williams Thanks, Derrick. Sal Buscema will (hopefully) return in #20’s Captain America “Pro2Pro” with Steve Englehart.

Don’t blame writer Dewey Cassell for the slim coverage of Marvel’s Masters of the Universe—it was my editorial direction to spotlight the DC series, because of the historical significance of DC being the first publisher to handle He-Man. And thank you for reminding me of Ron Wilson, who was a Marvel mainstay during the ’80s. We’ll see if we can involve him in a future issue.

– M.E.

A Hulk convention sketch by Arthur Adams, courtesy of Jerry Boyd. © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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I just finished BACK ISSUE #16. It was a fun trip through parts of my childhood. There was one comic missing that I thought fit the theme, Atari Force from DC Comics. The original stories were mini-comics packaged with select Atari 2600 cartridges.

This was followed by a series from DC. I don’t remember if this was a mini- or an ongoing. After that came a second series which, as I remember, was a decent space opera.

As for Wonder Woman and the Star Raiders, you could have saved that story for closer to Halloween. The Horror, the horror!

– Doug Abramson Being inspired by video games instead of toys, Atari Force wasn’t considered for issue #16. Atari Force has a fascinating backstory, as it represented DC’s early-1980s goal of partnering with the then-emerging gaming industry. We’ll put an Atari Force spotlight on our “to do” list.

– M.E. Atari Force is a TM of Atari, Inc.

I just got the new issue of BI, and once again I dropped everything else to sit and read it cover to cover. Since I never found the Transformers the least but interesting, even as a kid, I thought maybe I’d be bored by a whole article on them … and I was right (not writer Chris Irving’s fault, mind you).

Thanks for including Tony “the Tiger” Isabella’s sidebar on Bill Mantlo; it’s a weird thing that this industry, which seems so interconnected sometimes, seems to spit out people, and then they are never heard from again. I grew up reading some of Bill’s books like Alpha Flight and Hulk; and I’ve made a mental note to send him a birthday card this November. Any chance of an occasional “Whatever Happened To...?” feature, but on real people? I bet some of the workhorses of ’70s and ’80s comics who have left the field might have no idea that their work is beloved by a great many people, and would probably be touched if they knew.

While I understand the marketing needs to probably keep BI’s cover format consistent, I really loved #13’s DC-romance-comic pastiche, I would have loved to have seen this issue’s cover ape an action-figure package or something (“BACK ISSUE ... now with laser sword!”). Oh, well!

As always, keep up the good work!

– Rob Kelly

Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor

BACK ISSUE © 2006 TwoMorrows.

Batman © 2006 DC Comics.

Rob, you might have noticed that some former comics pros, such as Bob Rozakis and Jack C. Harris, have contributed to past BI issues, and don’t be surprised to see more familiar “old” names resurfacing in these pages. But re a “Whatever Happened To…?” feature, I’d considered that way back when, when we were developing this magazine, but the idea was shelved. Would anyone else like to see this as a recurring department?

Next issue: our tribute to comics’ Unsung Heroes. Our cover feature celebrates the extraordinary art (and life) of the late Don Newton, with an eye-popping array of artwork. Also, Danny Fingeroth and Mike Carlin go “Pro2Pro” on the topic of Marvel Assistant Editors’ Month (yes, Golden Oldie fans, your time is coming!) while Steve Gerber and Gene Colan recall their Howard the Duck collaboration. Plus: the Defenders, the Champions, TV’s unseen Unlimited Powers pilot, a salute to Mark Gruenwald, Image’s new Marvel Handbooklike Invincible Handbook, artist Bob Wiacek meets 50 Cent (!), a Richie Rich interview (?), and a look at the unrealized She-Hulk movie (originally planned for this issue but rescheduled). See you in sixty!

S U B M IS S IO N G U ID E L IN E S BACK ISSUE is on the lookout for the following comics-related material from the 1970s and 1980s: Unpublished artwork and covers Original artwork and covers Penciled artwork Character designs, model sheets, etc.

Original sketches and/or convention sketches Original scripts Photos Little-seen fanzine material Other rarities Creators and collectors of 1970s/ 1980s comics artwork are invited to share your goodies with other fans!

Contributors will be acknowledged in print and receive complimentary copies (and the editor’s gratitude).

Submit artwork as (listed in order of preference): Scanned images: 300dpi TIF (preferred) or JPEG (emailed or on CD, or to our FTP site; please inquire) Clear color or black-and-white photocopies BACK ISSUE is also open to pitches from writers for article ideas appropriate for our recurring and/or rotating departments. Request a copy of the BACK ISSUE Writers’ Bible by emailing euryman@msn.com or by sending a SASE to the address below.

Artwork submissions and SASEs for writers’ guidelines should be sent to: Michael Eury, Editor BACK ISSUE 5060A Foothills Dr. Lake Oswego, OR 97034

Advertise In BACK ISSUE! FULL-PAGE: 7.5" Wide x 10" Tall • $300 HALF-PAGE: 7.5" Wide x 4.875" Tall • $175 QUARTER-PAGE: 3.75" Wide x 4.875" Tall • $100 Prepay for two ads in Alter Ego, DRAW!, Write Now!, Back Issue, Rough Stuff or any combination and save: TWO FULL-PAGE ADS: $500 ($100 savings) TWO HALF-PAGE ADS: $300 ($50 savings) TWO QUARTER-PAGE ADS: $175 ($25 savings) These rates are for black-&-white ads, supplied on-disk (TIF, EPS, or Quark Xpress files acceptable) or as cameraready art. Typesetting service available at 20% mark-up.

Due to our already low ad rates, no agency discounts apply.

Sorry, display ads not available for the Jack Kirby Collector.

Send ad copy and check/money order (US funds), Visa, Mastercard, or Paypal to: TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 Phone: 919/449-0344 • FAX 919/449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com

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THE ULTIMATE MAGAZINE FOR LEGOTM ENTHUSIASTS OF ALL AGES!

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Reprints Digital Editions #1-3 (below).

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2008 Interactive Catalog

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COMICS GONE APE!

NOW ALL BOOKS, MAGAZINES & DVDs ARE 15% OFF COVER PRICE EVERY DAY AT www.twomorrows.com!

The missing link to primates in comics, spotlighting a barrel of simian superstars like Beppo, BrainiApe, the Gibbon, Gleek, Gorilla Man, Grease Monkey, King Kong, Konga, Mojo Jojo, Sky Ape, and Titano! It’s loaded with rare and classic artwork, cover galleries, and interviews with artists & writers including ARTHUR ADAMS (Monkeyman and O’Brien), FRANK CHO, CARMINE INFANTINO (Detective Chimp, Grodd), JOE KUBERT (Tor, Tarzan), TONY MILLIONAIRE (Sock Monkey), DOUG MOENCH (Planet of the Apes), and BOB OKSNER (Angel and the Ape)! With its all-new cover by ARTHUR ADAMS, you won’t be able to keep your filthy paws off this book! By MICHAEL EURY. (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905627 Diamond Order Code: FEB073814

Edited by ROY THOMAS The greatest ‘zine of the 1960s is back, ALL-NEW, and focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, and more!

2007 EISNER AWARD WINNER Best Comics-Related Periodical

Go online for an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

DIEGDITITIOANL ONLY!

ALTER EGO #1

ALTER EGO #2

ALTER EGO #3

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

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

GIL KANE and JACK BURNLEY flip-covers!

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

(80-page magazine) SOLD OUT (80-page Digital Edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL991700

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT991711

DIEGDITITIOANL ONLY!

ALTER EGO #4

ALTER EGO #5

ALTER EGO #6

ALTER EGO #7

ALTER EGO #8

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

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

by CARMINE INFANTINO and JERRY ORDWAY!

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN001713

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

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL002003

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV002267

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB012215

ALTER EGO #9

ALTER EGO #10

ALTER EGO #11

ALTER EGO #12

ALTER EGO #13

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

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

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY012450

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL012309

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP012273

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV012568

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN022737

ALTER EGO #17 Spotlighting LOU FINE (with an overview of his career, and interviews with family members), interview with MURPHY ANDERSON about Fine, ALEX TOTH on Fine, ARNOLD DRAKE interviewed about DEADMAN and DOOM PATROL, MR. MONSTER on the non-EC work of JACK DAVIS and GEORGE EVANS, FINE and LUIS DOMINGUEZ COVERS, FCA and more!

ALTER EGO #14

ALTER EGO #15

ALTER EGO #16

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB022730

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: APR022615

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY022386

ALTER EGO #18

ALTER EGO #19

ALTER EGO #20

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

Spotlight on DICK SPRANG (profile and interview) with unseen art, rare Batman art

by BOB KANE, CHARLES PARIS, SHELLY MOLDOFF, MAX ALLAN COLLINS, JIM MOONEY, CARMINE INFANTINO, and ALEX TOTH, JERRY ROBINSON interviewed about Tomahawk and 1940s cover artist FRED RAY, FCA, and MR. MONSTER on WALLY WOOD’s Flash Gordon, Part 2!

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

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG022420

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT022884

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV022845

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL022370

ALTER EGO #21 The IGER “SHOP” examined, with art by EISNER, FINE, ANDERSON, CRANDALL, BAKER, MESKIN, CARDY, EVANS, BOB KANE, and TUSKA, “SHEENA” section with art by DAVE STEVENS & FRANK BRUNNER, ROY THOMAS on the JSA and All-Star Squadron, more UNSEEN 1946 ALL-STAR ART, MR. MONSTER on GARDNER FOX, FCA, and more! DAVE STEVENS and IRWIN HASEN covers!

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: DEC023029

ALTER EGO #22

ALTER EGO #23

ALTER EGO #24

ALTER EGO #25

ALTER EGO #26

BILL EVERETT and JOE KUBERT interviewed

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

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

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

JACK COLE remembered by ALEX TOTH, interview with brother DICK COLE and his PLAYBOY colleagues, CHRIS CLAREMONT on the X-Men (with more never-seen art

by DAVE COCKRUM), ROY THOMAS on All-Star Squadron #1 and its ’40s roots (with art by ORDWAY, BUCKLER, MESKIN and MOLDOFF), FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more! Covers by TOTH and SCHELLY!

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

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN032492

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB032260

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR032534

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: APR032553

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY032543

ALTER EGO #27

ALTER EGO #28

ALTER EGO #29

ALTER EGO #30

ALTER EGO #31

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

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

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

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

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

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUN032614

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL032570

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG032604

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP032620

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT032843

ALTER EGO #32

ALTER EGO #33

ALTER EGO #34

ALTER EGO #35

ALTER EGO #36

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

Covers by DICK GIORDANO and GIL KANE!

Symposium on MIKE SEKOWSKY by MARK EVANIER, SCOTT SHAW!, et al., with art

by ANDERSON, INFANTINO, and others, PAT (MRS. MIKE) SEKOWSKY and inker VALERIE BARCLAY interviewed, FCA, 1950s Captain Marvel parody by ANDRU and ESPOSITO, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY, MR. MONSTER, and more! Covers by FRENZ/SINNOTT and FRENZ/BUSCEMA!

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

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

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

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV032695

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: DEC032833

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN042879

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB042796

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR042972

ALTER EGO #37

ALTER EGO #38

ALTER EGO #39

ALTER EGO #40

ALTER EGO #41

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

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

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

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

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

Covers by WRIGHTSON & MARC SWAYZE!

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: APR043055

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY043050

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUN042972

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL043386

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG043186

ALTER EGO #42

ALTER EGO #43

ALTER EGO #44

ALTER EGO #45

ALTER EGO #46

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

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

JSA/All-Star Squadron/Infinity Inc. special!

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

Interviews with Sandman artist CREIG FLESSEL and ’40s creator BERT CHRISTMAN, MICHAEL CHABON on researching his Pulitzer-winning novel Kavalier & Clay, art

by EISNER, KANE, KIRBY, and AYERS, FCA with MARC SWAYZE and C.C. BECK, OTTO BINDER’s “lost” Jon Jarl story, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom, and ALEX TOTH! CREIG FLESSEL cover!

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

Cover by EVERETT and MARIE SEVERIN!

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP043043

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT043189

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV043080

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: DEC042992

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN053133

ALTER EGO #47

ALTER EGO #48

ALTER EGO #49

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB053220

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR053331

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: APR053287

ALTER EGO #50 ROY THOMAS covers his 40-YEAR career in comics (AVENGERS, X-MEN, CONAN, ALL-STAR SQUADRON, INFINITY INC.), with ADAMS, BUSCEMA, COLAN, DITKO, GIL KANE, KIRBY, STAN LEE, ORDWAY, PÉREZ, ROMITA, and many others! Also FCA, & MR. MONSTER on ROY’s letters to GARDNER FOX! Flip-covers by BUSCEMA/ KIRBY/ALCALA and JERRY ORDWAY!

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY053172

ALTER EGO #54 ALTER EGO #51

ALTER EGO #52

ALTER EGO #53

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUN053345

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL053293

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG053328

MIKE ESPOSITO on DC and Marvel, ROBERT KANIGHER on the creation of Metal Men and Sgt. Rock (with comments

by JOE KUBERT and BOB HANEY), art by ANDRU, INFANTINO, KIRBY, SEVERIN, WINDSOR-SMITH, ROMITA, BUSCEMA, TRIMPE, GIL KANE, and others, plus FCA, ALEX TOTH, BILL SCHELLY, MR. MONSTER, and more! ESPOSITO cover!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP053301

ALTER EGO #56

ALTER EGO #57

ALTER EGO #58

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

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

by JACK KIRBY and PETE VON SHOLLY!

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

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: DEC053401

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN063429

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR063545

ALTER EGO #55 JACK and OTTO BINDER, KEN BALD, VIC DOWD, and BOB BOYAJIAN interviewed, FCA with SWAYZE and EMILIO SQUEGLIO, rare art by BECK, WARD, & SCHAFFENBERGER, Christmas Card Art from CRANDALL, SINNOTT, HEATH, MOONEY, and CARDY, 1943 Pin-Up Calendar (with ’40s movie stars as superheroines), ALEX TOTH, and more! ALEX ROSS and ALEX WRIGHT covers!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT053396

ALTER EGO #59 Special issue on Batman and Superman in the Golden and Silver Ages, ARTHUR SUYDAM interview, NEAL ADAMS on 1960s/70s DC, SHELLY MOLDOFF, AL PLASTINO, Golden Age artist FRAN (Doll Man) MATERA and VIC CARRABOTTA interviewed, SIEGEL & SHUSTER, RUSS MANNING, FCA, MR. MONSTER, SUYDAM cover, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: APR063474

ALTER EGO #60

ALTER EGO #61

ALTER EGO #62

Celebrates 50 years since SHOWCASE #4!

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY063496

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JUN063522

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG063690

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ALTER EGO #63

ALTER EGO #64

ALTER EGO #65

ALTER EGO #66

ALTER EGO #67

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

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

NICK CARDY interviewed on his Golden & Silver Age work (with CARDY art), plus art

by WILL EISNER, NEAL ADAMS, CARMINE INFANTINO, JIM APARO, RAMONA FRADON, CURT SWAN, MIKE SEKOWSKY, and others, tributes to ERNIE SCHROEDER and DAVE COCKRUM, FCA with MARC SWAYZE, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, new CARDY COVER, and more!

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

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

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: OCT063800

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV063991

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: DEC064009

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN073982

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: FEB073887

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ALTER EGO #68

ALTER EGO #69

ALTER EGO #70

ALTER EGO #71

ALTER EGO #72

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

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

Cover painted by JOHN WATSON, from a breathtaking illo by RAMONA FRADON!

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

Represents THE GREAT CANADIAN COMIC BOOKS, the long out-of-print 1970s book

by MICHAEL HIRSH and PATRICK LOUBERT, with rare art of such heroes as Mr. Monster, Nelvana, Thunderfist, and others, plus new INVADERS art by JOHN BYRNE, MIKE GRELL, RON LIM, and more, plus a new cover by GEORGE FREEMAN, from a layout by JACK KIRBY!

SCOTT SHAW! and ROY THOMAS on the creation of Captain Carrot, art & artifacts

by RICK HOBERG, STAN GOLDBERG, MIKE SEKOWSKY, JOHN COSTANZA, E. NELSON BRIDWELL, CAROL LAY, and others, interview with DICK ROCKWELL, Golden Age artist and 36-year ghost artist on MILTON CANIFF’s Steve Canyon! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR073852

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: APR074098

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY073879

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JUN074006

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ALTER EGO #76

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV073947

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN084019

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: AUG074112

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ALTER EGO #74 STAN LEE SPECIAL in honor of his 85th birthday, with a cover by JACK KIRBY, classic (and virtually unseen) interviews with Stan, tributes, and tons of rare and unseen art by KIRBY, ROMITA, the brothers BUSCEMA, DITKO, COLAN, HECK, AYERS, MANEELY, SHORES, EVERETT, BURGOS, KANE, the SEVERIN siblings—plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

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ALTER EGO #78 ALTER EGO #77 ST. JOHN ISSUE! Golden Age Tor cover by JOE KUBERT, KEN QUATTRO relates the full legend of St. John Publishing, art by KUBERT, NORMAN MAURER, MATT BAKER, LILY RENEE, BOB LUBBERS, RUBEN MOREIRA, RALPH MAYO, AL FAGO, special reminiscences of ARNOLD DRAKE, Golden Age artist TOM SAWYER interviewed, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Ships May 2008

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

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Ships June 2008

ALTER EGO #79

ALTER EGO #80

SUPERMAN & HIS CREATORS! New cover

by MICHAEL GOLDEN, exclusive and revealing interview with JOE SHUSTER’s sister, JEAN SHUSTER PEAVEY—MIKE W. BARR on Superman the detective— DWIGHT DECKER on the Man of Steel & Hitler’s Third Reich—plus the NEMBO KID (Italian for “Superman”), art by BORING, SWAN, ADAMS, KANE, and others!

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

New cover by RAFAEL KAYANAN!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Ships July 2008

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Ships August 2008

12-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTIONS: $78 US Postpaid by Media Mail ($108 First Class, $132 Canada, $180 Surface, $216 Airmail).

For a 6-issue sub, cut the price in half!

COMPANION BOOKS

NEW FOR 2008

TITANS COMPANION VOLUME 1

JUSTICE LEAGUE COMPANION VOL. 1

Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the NEW TEEN TITANS, this comprehensive history features interviews with and rare art by fan-favorite creators MARV WOLFMAN, GEORGE PÉREZ, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍALÓPEZ, LEN WEIN, and others! Also included is a indepth Silver Age section featuring interviews with NEAL ADAMS, NICK CARDY, DICK GIORDANO and more, plus CHRIS CLAREMONT and WALTER SIMONSON on the X-MEN/TEEN TITANS crossover, TOM GRUMMETT, PHIL JIMENEZ and TERRY DODSON on their ’90s Titans work, rare and unpublished artwork by CARDY, PÉREZ, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, GRUMMETT, JIMENEZ, and others, a new cover by JIMENEZ, and an introduction by GEOFF JOHNS! Written by GLEN CADIGAN.

A comprehensive examination of the Silver Age JLA written by MICHAEL EURY (co-author of THE SUPERHERO BOOK). It traces the JLA’s development, history, imitators, and early fandom through vintage and all-new interviews with the series’ creators, an issue-by-issue index of the JLA’s 1960-1972 adventures, classic and never-before-published artwork, and other fun and fascinating features. Contributors include DENNY O’NEIL, MURPHY ANDERSON, JOE GIELLA, MIKE FRIEDRICH, NEAL ADAMS, ALEX ROSS, CARMINE INFANTINO, NICK CARDY, and many, many others. Plus: An exclusive interview with STAN LEE, who answers the question, “Did the JLA really inspire the creation of Marvel’s Fantastic Four?” With an all-new cover by BRUCE TIMM!

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905504 Diamond Order Code: SEP053209

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905481 Diamond Order Code: MAY053052

FLASH COMPANION Details the publication histories of the four heroes who have individually earned the right to be declared DC Comics' "Fastest Man Alive": Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West, and Bart Allen. With articles about legendary creators SHELLY MAYER, GARDNER FOX, E.E. HIBBARD, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, ROBERT KANIGHER, JOHN BROOME, ROSS ANDRU, IRV NOVICK and all-new interviews with HARRY LAMPERT, CARMINE INFANTINO, CARY BATES, ALEX SAVIUK, MIKE W. BARR, MARV WOLFMAN, MIKE BARON, JACKSON GUICE, MARK WAID, and SCOTT KOLINS, among others, THE FLASH COMPANION recounts the scarlet speedster's evolution from the Golden Age to the 21st century. Also featured are "lost covers," never before published commission pieces by Flash artists throughout the decades, a ROGUES GALLERY detailing The Flash's most famous foes, a tribute to late artist MIKE WIERINGO by MARK WAID, a look at the speedster’s 1990s TV show, and "Flash facts" detailing pivotal moments in Flash history. Written by KEITH DALLAS, with a a cover by DON KRAMER. (224-page trade paperback) $26.95 • ISBN: 9781893905986 • Ships July 2008

NEW FOR 2008

KRYPTON COMPANION

BLUE BEETLE COMPANION

Picks up where Volume 1 left off, covering the return of the Teen Titans to the top of the sales charts!

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

Unlocks the secrets of Superman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, when kryptonite came in multiple colors and super-pets scampered across the skies! Writer/editor MICHAEL EURY explores the legacy of classic editors MORT WEISINGER and JULIUS SCHWARTZ through all-new interviews with NEAL ADAMS, MURPHY ANDERSON, CARY BATES, RICH BUCKLER, NICK CARDY, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, KEITH GIFFEN, ELLIOT S! MAGGIN, JIM MOONEY, DENNIS O’NEIL, BOB OKSNER, MARTIN PASKO, BOB ROZAKIS, JIM SHOOTER, LEN WEIN, MARV WOLFMAN, and other fan favorites! Plus: Super-artist CURT SWAN’s 1987 essay “Drawing Superman,” JERRY SIEGEL’s “lost” imaginary story “The Death of Clark Kent,” MARK WAID’s tribute to Superboy and the Legion of SuperHeroes, and rare and previously unpublished artwork

by WAYNE BORING, ALAN DAVIS, ADAM HUGHES, PAUL SMITH, BRUCE TIMM, and other Super-stars.

Bonus: A roundtable discussion with modern-day creators (including JOHN BYRNE, JEPH LOEB, and ALEX ROSS) examining Superman’s influential past! Plus an Introduction by Bizarro No. 1 (by SEINFELD writer DAVID MANDEL), and a cover by DAVE GIBBONS!

The Blue Beetle debuted in 1939, rivaling Superman and Batman for longevity in comics, but not in popularity until his recent death and resurrection as a result of DC Comics’ hit INFINITE CRISIS. Now CHRISTOPHER IRVING explores the history and uncovers the secrets of his 60+ years of evolution—from the world of FOX COMICS to an in-depth history of CHARLTON COMICS—all the way to the hall of today’s DC COMICS. Find out what really happened to infamous Golden Age publisher Victor Fox, and get an in-depth look at the Blue Beetle radio show and JACK KIRBY’s Blue Beetle comic strip. Also, presented for the first time since 1939: the character’s first appearance from Mystery Men Comics #1! Featuring interviews with WILL EISNER, JOE SIMON, JOE GILL, ROY THOMAS, GEOFF JOHNS, CULLY HAMNER, KEITH GIFFEN, LEN WEIN, and others, plus never-before-seen Blue Beetle designs by ALEX ROSS and ALAN WEISS, as well as artwork by WILL EISNER, CHARLES NICHOLAS, STEVE DITKO, KEVIN MAGUIRE, and more! With an introduction by TOM DeHAVEN, and a new cover by CULLY HAMNER, this is the ultimate look at one of comicdom’s longest-living heroes!

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95 ISBN: 97801893905870 Diamond Order Code: JAN083938

(240-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905610 Diamond Order Code: MAY063443

(128-page trade paperback) $16.95 ISBN: 9781893905702 Diamond Order Code: DEC063946

TITANS COMPANION VOLUME 2

NEW FOR 2008

BEST OF THE LEGION OUTPOST

ALL- STAR COMPANION VOL. 2

Originally published in 1972 as the official newsletter of the Legion Fan Club, the LEGION OUTPOST soon became the premier Legion of Super-Heroes fanzine of the 1970s, featuring contributions by fans, pros, and soon-to-be pros. Launched at a time when the future of the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES was in doubt, the LEGION OUTPOST was at the center of fan-based efforts to revive the title, and was largely responsible for its rescue from obscurity, leading to it becoming a runaway best-seller! This trade paperback collects the best material from the hard-to-find fanzine, including rare interviews and articles from creators such as DAVE COCKRUM, CARY BATES, and JIM SHOOTER, plus never-before-seen artwork by COCKRUM, MIKE GRELL, JIMMY JANES and others! It also features a previously unpublished interview with KEITH GIFFEN originally intended for the never-published LEGION OUTPOST #11, plus other new material! And it sports a rarely-seen classic 1970s cover by Legion fan favorite artist DAVE COCKRUM! Edited by GLEN CADIGAN.

ROY THOMAS presents still more secrets of the Justice Society of America and ALL-STAR COMICS, from 1940 through the 1980s, featuring: A fabulous wraparound cover by CARLOS PACHECO! More amazing information and speculation on the classic ALL-STAR COMICS of 1940-1951! Never-before-seen Golden Age art by IRWIN HASEN, CARMINE INFANTINO, ALEX TOTH, MART NODELL, JOE KUBERT, H.G. PETER, and others! Art from an unpublished 1940s JSA story not seen in Volume 1! Rare art from the original JLA-JSA team-ups and the 1970s ALL-STAR COMICS REVIVAL by MIKE SEKOWSKY, DICK DILLIN, JOE STATON, WALLY WOOD, KEITH GIFFEN, and RIC ESTRADA! Full coverage of the 1980s ALL-STAR SQUADRON, and a bio of every single All-Star, plus never-seen art by JERRY ORDWAY, RICH BUCKLER, ARVELL JONES, RAFAEL KAYANAN, and special JSArelated art and features by FRANK BRUNNER, ALEX ROSS, NEAL ADAMS, GIL KANE, MIKE MIGNOLA, and RAMONA FRADON—and more!

(160-page trade paperback) $17.95 ISBN: 9781893905368 Diamond Order Code: SEP042969

(240-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905375 Diamond Order Code: AUG063622

ALL- STAR COMPANION VOL. 3 In this third volume, comics legend Roy Thomas presents still more amazing secrets behind the 1940-51 ALL-STAR COMICS and the JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA! Also, there’s an issue-by-issue survey of the JLA/JSA TEAM-UPS of 1963-85, the 1970s JSA REVIVAL, and the 1980s series THE YOUNG ALLSTARS with commentary by the artists and writers! Plus rare, often unseen art by NEAL ADAMS, DICK AYERS, MICHAEL BAIR, JOHN BUSCEMA, SEAN CHEN, DICK DILLIN, RIC ESTRADA, CREIG FLESSEL, KEITH GIFFEN, DICK GIORDANO, MIKE GRELL, TOM GRINDBERG, TOM GRUMMETT, RON HARRIS, IRWIN HASEN, DON HECK, CARMINE INFANTINO, GIL KANE, JACK KIRBY, JOE KUBERT, BOB LAYTON, SHELDON MAYER, BOB McLEOD, SHELDON MOLDOFF, BRIAN MURRAY, JERRY ORDWAY, ARTHUR PEDDY, GEORGE PÉREZ, H.G. PETER, HOWARD PURCELL, PAUL REINMAN, MIKE SEKOWSKY, HOWARD SIMPSON, JOE SINNOTT, JIM STARLIN, JOE STATON, RONN SUTTON, ALEX TOTH, JIM VALENTINO and many others! Featuring a new JLA/JSA cover by GEORGE PÉREZ! (240-page trade paperback) $26.95 ISBN: 9781893905801 Diamond Order Code: SEP074020

NEW FOR 2008

SILVER AGE SCI-FI COMPANION

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS COMPANION

Instantly recognizable among comics fans, Hawkman is one of the most iconic heroes ever created. Inspired by tales as old as mankind and those much more recent, this four-color legend has left an indelible mark upon the comic industry. Behind a fabulous CLIFF CHIANG cover, this collection contains interviews and commentary from many who have helped Hawkman soar through the ages, including JOE KUBERT, GEOFF JOHNS, SHELLY MOLDOFF, TIMOTHY TRUMAN, JUSTIN GRAY, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, RAGS MORALES, STEPHEN SADOWSKI, DON KRAMER, BEN RAAB, TONY ISABELLA, DAN JURGENS, ROY THOMAS, STEVE LIEBER, MURPHY ANDERSON and many other top comics creators. Also included is a copious image parade, profiles on the Hawks through the ages, as well as their allies and adversaries, and a timeline of Hawkman's storied existence throughout the DC Comics Universe. With insight into the character and the creators who made him what he is, the HAWKMAN COMPANION is certain to please any Hawkfan. Written by DOUG ZAWISZA.

In the Silver Age of Comics, space was the place, and this book summarizes, critiques and lovingly recalls the classic science-fiction series edited by JULIUS SCHWARTZ and written by GARDNER FOX and JOHN BROOME! The pages of DC’s science-fiction magazines of the 1960s, STRANGE ADVENTURES and MYSTERY IN SPACE, are opened for you, including story-by-story reviews of complete series such as ADAM STRANGE, ATOMIC KNIGHTS, SPACE MUSEUM, STAR ROVERS, STAR HAWKINS and others! Writer/ editor MIKE W. BARR tells you which series crossed over with each other, behind-the-scenes secrets, and more, including writer and artist credits for every story!

Features rare art by CARMINE INFANTINO, MURPHY ANDERSON, GIL KANE, SID GREENE, MIKE SEKOWSKY, and many others, plus a glorious new cover by ALAN DAVIS and PAUL NEARY!

The definitive book on the history of such memorable characters as DYNAMO, NO-MAN, LIGHTNING, ANDOR, THE IRON MAIDEN, and all the other super-heroes and super-villains created by the late, great WALLACE WOOD and company! Included are interviews with Woody’s creative team, as well as those superb writers and artists involved in the various T-Agents resurrections over the decades, and a detailed examination of the origins and exploits of the characters themselves, including the shocking truth behind the first super-hero to ever be “killed,” MENTHOR! This exclusive book features reams of artwork, much of it rarely-seen or previous unpublished, including a rare 27-page T-Agents story drawn by PAUL GULACY, unpublished stories by GULACY, PARIS CULLINS, and others, all behind a JERRY ORDWAY cover. Edited by JON B. COOKE.

(208-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905931 Ships October 2008

(144-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905818 Diamond Order Code: JUL073885

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905436 Diamond Order Code: MAR053228

HAWKMAN COMPANION

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

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Edited by MICHAEL EURY, BACK ISSUE magazine celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through recurring (and rotating) departments such as “Pro2Pro” (a dialogue between two professionals), “Rough Stuff” (pencil art showcases of top artists), “Greatest Stories Never Told” (spotlighting unrealized comics series or stories), and more!

Go online for an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE! 6-ISSUE SUBS: $40 US Postpaid by Media Mail ($54 First Class, $66 Canada, $90 Surface, $108 Airmail).

BACK ISSUE #1

BACK ISSUE #2

BACK ISSUE #3

“PRO2PRO” interview between GEORGE PÉREZ & MARV WOLFMAN (with UNSEEN PÉREZ ART), “ROUGH STUFF” featuring JACK KIRBY’s PENCIL ART, “GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD” on the first JLA/AVENGERS, “BEYOND CAPES” on DC and Marvel’s TARZAN (with KUBERT and BUSCEMA ART), “OFF MY CHEST” editorial by INFANTINO, and more! PÉREZ cover!

“PRO2PRO” between ADAM HUGHES and MIKE W. BARR (with UNSEEN HUGHES ART) and MATT WAGNER and DIANA SCHUTZ, “ROUGH STUFF” HUGHES PENCIL ART, STEVE RUDE’s unseen SPACE GHOST/HERCULOIDS team-up, Bruce Jones’ ALIEN WORLDS and TWISTED TALES, “OFF MY CHEST” by MIKE W. BARR on the DC IMPLOSION, and more!

HUGHES cover!

“PRO2PRO” between KEITH GIFFEN, J.M. DeMATTEIS and KEVIN MAGUIRE on their JLA WORK, “ROUGH STUFF” PENCIL ART by ARAGONÉS, HERNANDEZ BROS., MIGNOLA, BYRNE, KIRBY, HUGHES, details on two unknown PLASTIC MAN movies, Joker’s history with O’NEIL, ADAMS, ENGLEHART, ROGERS and BOLLAND, editorial by MARK EVANIER, and more! BOLLAND cover!

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP032621

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BACK ISSUE #4

BACK ISSUE #5

BACK ISSUE #6

BACK ISSUE #7

BACK ISSUE #8

“PRO2PRO” between JOHN BYRNE and CHRIS CLAREMONT on their X-MEN WORK and WALT SIMONSON and JOE CASEY on Walter’s THOR, WOLVERINE PENCIL ART by BUSCEMA, LEE, COCKRUM, BYRNE, and GIL KANE, LEN WEIN’S TEEN WOLVERINE, PUNISHER’S 30TH and SECRET WARS’ 20TH ANNIVERSARIES (with UNSEEN ZECK ART), and more! BYRNE cover!

Wonder Woman TV series in-depth, LYNDA CARTER INTERVIEW, WONDER WOMAN TV ART GALLERY, Marvel’s TV Hulk, SpiderMan, Captain America, and Dr. Strange, LOU FERRIGNO INTERVIEW, super-hero cartoons you didn’t see, pencil gallery by JERRY ORDWAY, STAR TREK in comics, and ROMITA SR. editorial on Marvel’s movies!

Covers by ALEX ROSS and ADAM HUGHES!

TOMB OF DRACULA revealed with GENE COLAN and MARV WOLFMAN, LEN WEIN & BERNIE WRIGHTSON on Swamp Thing’s roots, STEVE BISSETTE & RICK VEITCH on their Swamp work, pencil art by BRUNNER, PLOOG, BISSETTE, COLAN, WRIGHTSON, and SMITH, editorial by ROY THOMAS, PREZ, GODZILLA comics (with TRIMPE art), CHARLTON horror, & more! COLAN cover!

History of BRAVE AND BOLD, JIM APARO interview, tribute to BOB HANEY, FANTASTIC FOUR ROUNDTABLE with STAN LEE, MARK WAID, and others, EVANIER and MEUGNIOT on DNAgents, pencil art by ROSS, TOTH, COCKRUM, HECK, ROBBINS, NEWTON, and BYRNE, DENNY O’NEIL editorial, a tour of METROPOLIS, IL, and more! SWAN/ANDERSON cover!

DENNY O’NEIL and Justice League Unlimited voice actor PHIL LaMARR discuss GL JOHN STEWART, NEW X-MEN pencil art by NEAL ADAMS, ARTHUR ADAMS, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, ALAN DAVIS, JIM LEE, ADAM HUGHES, STORM’s 30-year history, animated TV’s black heroes (with TOTH art), ISABELLA and TREVOR VON EEDEN on BLACK LIGHTNING, and more! KYLE BAKER cover!

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR042973

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BACK ISSUE #9

BACK ISSUE #10

BACK ISSUE #11

BACK ISSUE #12

BACK ISSUE #13

MIKE BARON and STEVE RUDE on NEXUS past and present, a colossal GIL KANE pencil art gallery, a look at Marvel’s STAR WARS comics, secrets of DC’s unseen CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS SEQUEL, TIM TRUMAN on his GRIMJACK SERIES, MIKE GOLD editorial, THANOS history, TIME WARP revisited, and more! All-new STEVE RUDE COVER!

NEAL ADAMS and DENNY O’NEIL on RA’S AL GHUL’s history (with Adams art), O’Neil and MICHAEL KALUTA on THE SHADOW, MIKE GRELL on JON SABLE FREELANCE, HOWIE CHAYKIN interview, DOC SAVAGE in comics, BATMAN ART GALLERY by PAUL SMITH, SIENKIEWICZ, SIMONSON, BOLLAND, HANNIGAN, MAZZUCCHELLI, and others! New cover by ADAMS!

ROY THOMAS, KURT BUSIEK, and JOE JUSKO on CONAN (with art by JOHN BUSCEMA, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, NEAL ADAMS, JUSKO, and others), SERGIO ARAGONÉS and MARK EVANIER on GROO, DC’s never-published KING ARTHUR, pencil art gallery by KIRBY, PÉREZ, MOEBIUS, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, BOLLAND, and others, and a new BUSCEMA/JUSKO Conan cover!

‘70s and ‘80s character revamps with DAVE GIBBONS, ROY THOMAS and KURT BUSIEK, TOM DeFALCO and RON FRENZ on Spider-Man’s 1980s “black” costume change, DENNY O’NEIL on Superman’s 1970 revamp, JOHN BYRNE’s aborted SHAZAM! series detailed, pencil art gallery with FRANK MILLER, LEE WEEKS, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, CHARLES VESS, and more!

CARDY interview, ENGLEHART and MOENCH on kung-fu comics, “Pro2Pro” with STATON and CUTI on Charlton’s E-Man, pencil art gallery featuring MILLER, KUBERT, GIORDANO, SWAN, GIL KANE, COLAN, COCKRUM, and others, EISNER’s A Contract with God; “The Death of Romance (Comics)” (with art by ROMITA, SR. and TOTH), and more!

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

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BACK ISSUE #14

BACK ISSUE #15

BACK ISSUE #16

BACK ISSUE #17

BACK ISSUE #18

DAVE COCKRUM and MIKE GRELL go “Pro2Pro” on the Legion, pencil art gallery

by BUSCEMA, BYRNE, MILLER, STARLIN, McFARLANE, ROMITA JR., SIENKIEWICZ, looks at Hercules Unbound, Hex, Killraven, Kamandi, MARS, Planet of the Apes, art and interviews with GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, KIRBY, WILLIAMSON, and more! New MIKE GRELL/BOB McLEOD cover!

“Weird Heroes” of the 1970s and ‘80s!

MIKE PLOOG discusses Ghost Rider, MATT WAGNER revisits The Demon, JOE KUBERT dusts off Ragman, GENE COLAN “Rough Stuff” pencil gallery, GARCÍALÓPEZ recalls Deadman, DC’s unpublished Gorilla Grodd series, PERLIN, CONWAY, and MOENCH on Werewolf by Night, and more! New ARTHUR ADAMS cover!

“Toy Stories!” Behind the Scenes of Marvel’s G.I. JOE™ and TRANSFORMERS with PAUL LEVITZ and GEORGE TUSKA, “Rough Stuff” MIKE ZECK pencil gallery, ARTHUR ADAMS on Gumby, HE-MAN, ROM, MICRONAUTS, SUPER POWERS, SUPER-HERO CARS, art by HAMA, SAL BUSCEMA, GUICE, GOLDEN, KIRBY, TRIMPE, and new ZECK sketch cover!

“Super Girls!” Supergirl retrospective with art by STELFREEZE, HAMNER, SpiderWoman, Flare, Tigra, DC’s unused Double Comics with unseen BARRETTO and INFANTINO art, WOLFMAN and JIMENEZ on Donna Troy, female comics pros, art by SEKOWSKY, OKSNER, PÉREZ, HUGHES, GIORDANO, plus a COLOR GALLERY and COVER by BRUCE TIMM!

“Big, Green Issue!” Tour of NEAL ADAMS’ studio (with interview and art gallery), DAVE GIBBONS “Rough Stuff” pencil art spotlight, interviews with MIKE GRELL (on Green Arrow), PETER DAVID (on Incredible Hulk), a “Pro2Pro” chat between GERRY CONWAY and JOHN ROMITA, SR. (on the Green Goblin), and more. New cover

by NEAL ADAMS!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV053296

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(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR063547

(108-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY063499

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL063569

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BACK ISSUE #19

BACK ISSUE #20

BACK ISSUE #21

BACK ISSUE #22

BACK ISSUE #23

“Unsung Heroes!” DON NEWTON spotlight, STEVE GERBER and GENE COLAN on Howard the Duck, MIKE CARLIN and DANNY FINGEROTH on Marvel’s Assistant Editors’ Month, the unrealized Unlimited Powers TV show, TONY ISABELLA’s aborted plans for The Champions, MARK GRUENWALD tribute, art by SAL BUSCEMA, JOHN BYRNE, and more! NEWTON/ RUBINSTEIN cover!

“Secret Identities!” Histories of characters with unusual alter egos: Firestorm, Moon Knight, the Question, and the “real-life” Human Fly! STEVE ENGLEHART and SAL BUSCEMA on Captain America, JERRY ORDWAY interview and cover, Superman roundtable with SIENKIEWICZ, NOWLAN, MOENCH, COWAN, MAGGIN, O’NEIL, MILGROM, CONWAY, ROBBINS, SWAN, plus FREE ALTER EGO #64 PREVIEW!

“The Devil You Say!” issue! A look at Daredevil in the 1980s and 1990s with interviews and art by KLAUS JANSON, JOHN ROMITA JR., and FRANK MILLER, MIKE MIGNOLA Hellboy interview, DAN MISHKIN and GARY COHN on Blue Devil, COLLEEN DORAN’s unpublished X-Men spin-off “Fallen Angels”, Son of Satan, Stig’s Inferno, DC’s Plop!, JACK KIRBY’s Devil Dinosaur, and cover by MIKE ZECK!

“Dynamic Duos!’ “Pro2Pro” interviews with Batman’s ALAN GRANT and NORM BREYFOGLE and the Legion’s PAUL LEVITZ and KEITH GIFFEN, a “Backstage Pass” to Dark Horse Comics, Robin’s history, EASTMAN and LAIRD’s Ninja Turtles, histories of duos Robin and Batgirl, Captain America and the Falcon, and Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, “Zot!” interview with SCOTT McCLOUD, and a new BREYFOGLE cover!

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

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP063683

(104-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV063993

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BACK ISSUE #24

BACK ISSUE #25

BACK ISSUE #26

BACK ISSUE #27

BACK ISSUE #29

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

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

Includes a FREE DRAW! #15 PREVIEW!

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

“Comic Book Royalty!” The ’70s/’80s careers of Aquaman and the Sub-Mariner explored, BARR and BOLLAND discuss CAMELOT 3000, comics pros tell “Why JACK KIRBY Was King,” “Dr. Doom: Monarch or Menace?” DON McGREGOR’s Black Panther; an exclusive ALAN WEISS art gallery; spotlights on ARION, LORD OF ATLANTIS; NIGHT FORCE; and more! New cover by NICK CARDY!

“Mutants” issue! CLAREMONT, BYRNE, SMITH, and ROMITA, JR.’s X-Men work; NOCENTI and ARTHUR ADAMS’ Longshot; McLEOD and SIENKIEWICZ’s New Mutants; the UK’s CAPTAIN BRITAIN series; lost Angel stories; Beast’s tenure with the Avengers; the return of the original X-Men in X-Factor; the revelation of Nightcrawler’s “original” father; a history of DC’s mutant, Captain Comet, and more! Cover by DAVE COCKRUM!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL073976

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(100-page magazine) $6.95 Ships July 2008

NEW STUFF FROM TWOMORROWS!

ALTER EGO #77

ROUGH STUFF #8

WRITE NOW! #18

DRAW! #15

BRICKJOURNAL #2

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

Features an in-depth interview and cover painting by the extraordinary MIKE MAYHEW, preliminary and unpublished art by ALEX HORLEY, TONY DeZUNIGA, NICK CARDY, and RAFAEL KAYANAN (including commentary by each artist), a look at the great Belgian comic book artists, a “Rough Critique” of MIKE MURDOCK’s work, and more!

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

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

The ultimate resource for LEGO enthusiasts of all ages spotlights blockbuster summer movies, LEGO style! Go behind the scenes for new sets for BATMAN and INDIANA JONES, and see new models, including an SR-71 SPYPLANE and a LEGO CITY, plus MINIFIGURE CUSTOMIZATIONS, BUILDING INSTRUCTIONS, tour the ONLINE LEGO FACTORY, and more! Edited by JOE MENO.

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(80-page FULL COLOR magazine) $8.95 Ships June 2008 Diamond Order Code: MAR084135

KIRBY FIVE-OH! (JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50)

SILVER AGE SCI-FI COMPANION

BEST OF WRITE NOW!

BEST OF DRAW! VOL. 3

In the Silver Age of Comics, space was the place, and this book summarizes, critiques and lovingly recalls the classic science-fiction series edited by JULIUS SCHWARTZ and written by GARDNER FOX and JOHN BROOME! The pages of DC’s science-fiction magazines of the 1960s, STRANGE ADVENTURES and MYSTERY IN SPACE, are opened for you, including story-bystory reviews of complete series such as ADAM STRANGE, ATOMIC KNIGHTS, SPACE MUSEUM, STAR ROVERS, STAR HAWKINS and others! Writer/editor MIKE W. BARR tells you which series crossed over with each other, behind-the-scenes secrets, and more, including writer and artist credits for every story! Features rare art by CARMINE INFANTINO, MURPHY ANDERSON, GIL KANE, SID GREENE, MIKE SEKOWSKY, and many others, plus a glorious new cover by ALAN DAVIS and PAUL NEARY!

Features highlights from the acclaimed magazine about writing for comics, including interviews from top talents, like: BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS, WILL EISNER, JEPH LOEB, STAN LEE, J. M. STRACZYNSKI, MARK WAID, GEOFF JOHNS, TODD McFARLANE, PAUL LEVITZ, AXEL ALONSO, and others! Plus “NUTS & BOLTS” tutorials feature scripts from landmark comics and the pencil art that was drawn from them, including: CIVIL WAR #1 (MILLAR & McNIVEN), BATMAN: HUSH #1 (LOEB & LEE), ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #47 (BENDIS & BAGLEY), AMAZING SPIDERMAN #539 (STRACZYNSKI & GARNEY), SPAWN #52 (McFARLANE & CAPULO), GREEN LANTERN: REBIRTH #1 (JOHNS & VAN SCRIVER), and more! Also: How-to articles by the best comics writers and editors around, professional secrets of top comics pros, and an introduction by STAN LEE! Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH.

Compiles more of the best tutorials and interviews from DRAW! #5-7, including: Penciling by MIKE WIERINGO! Illustration

by DAN BRERETON! Design by PAUL RIVOCHE! Drawing Hands, Lighting the Figure, and Sketching by BRET BLEVINS! Cartooning by BILL WRAY! Inking by MIKE MANLEY! Comics & Animation by STEPHEN DeSTEFANO! Digital Illustration

by CELIA CALLE and ALBERTO RUIZ! Caricature by ZACH TRENHOLM, and much more! Cover by DAN BRERETON!

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME 16: MIKE ALLRED

(144-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905818 Diamond Order Code: JUL073885

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905924 Diamond Order Code: FEB084082

The regular columnists from THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine celebrate the best of everything from Jack Kirby’s 50-year career, spotlighting: The BEST KIRBY STORIES & COVERS from 19381987! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! Interviews with the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! A 50PAGE KIRBY PENCIL ART GALLERY and DELUXE COLOR SECTION! Kirby cover inked by DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, making this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! Edited by JOHN MORROW. (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: JUL078147 Now Shipping

Go to www.twomorrows.com for FULL-COLOR downloadable PDF versions of our magazines for only $2.95! Subscribers to the print edition get the digital edition FREE, weeks before it hits stores!

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US

(256-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781893905917 Diamond Order Code: JAN083936

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Features an extensive, career-spanning interview lavishly illustrated with rare art from Mike’s files, plus huge sketchbook section, including unseen and unused art!

By ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905863 Diamond Order Code: JAN083937

COMICS GO HOLLYWOOD Unveils secrets behind your FAVORITE ONSCREEN HEROES, and how a character goes from the comics page to the big screen! It includes: Storyboards from DC’s animated hit “THE NEW FRONTIER”, JEPH LOEB on writing for Marvel Comics and the Heroes TV show, details on the UNSEEN X-MEN MOVIE, a history of the JOKER from the 1940s to the upcoming Dark Knight film, and a look at Marvel Universe co-creator JACK KIRBY’s Hollywood career, with extensive Kirby art!

(32-page comic) FREE! at your local comics retailer on FREE COMIC BOOK DAY, May 3, 2008!

TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics.

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