Back Issue #25

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II SS SS U IRON MAN & DEATHLOK TM & © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. • SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN TM & © UNIVERSAL TV. • WARLORD TM & © DC COMICS.

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Rich Buckler’s first-ever Deathlok interview!

Six Million Dollar Man & Bionic Woman!

Interview with Warlord’s Mike Grell!

IRON MAN

IN THE ’80S! BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE

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MACHINE MAN • BYRNE’S ROG 2000 • STEEL THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN TV’S LEGENDS OF THE SUPER-HEROES • AND MORE!

Volume 1, Number 25 December 2007 Celebrating the Best Comics of the '70s, '80s, and Today!

The Ultimate Comics Experience!

EDITOR Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow DESIGNER Rich J. Fowlks COVER ARTIST Bob Layton

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

COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg

BEYOND CAPES: Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 The story behind Charlton Comics’ adventures of Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers INTERVIEW: Full Metal Junket: Deathlok the Demolisher’s Rich Buckler . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 The artist/creator of Marvel’s trailblazing cyber-crusader in his first-ever Deathlok discussion

CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Bob Brodsky, CookieSoup Periodical Distribution, LLC

FLASHBACK: Deathlok: Beyond Buckler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 Joe Casey, J. M. DeMatteis, Dwayne McDuffie, and Daniel Way follow in Buckler’s footsteps

PROOFREADER Eric Nolen-Weathington

INTERVIEW: Blade of Steel: The Warlord’s Mike Grell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26 Enter the lost world of Skartaris, courtesy of the popular writer/artist

SPECIAL THANKS

FLASHBACK: “Call Me Mister… Mister Machine!”: The Story of Machine Man . . . . . . .37 Barry Windsor-Smith, Herb Trimpe, Tom DeFalco, and Mike Royer on the Jack Kirby-created 2001: A Space Odyssey spin-off

Michael Ambrose Brad Sanders Terry Austin Philip Schweier John P. Barker Richard A. Scott Jerry Boyd Alex Segura Aleisha Brevard Rick Shurgin Mike Burkey Zack Smith John Byrne Anthony Snyder Joe Casey Joe Staton Dewey Cassell Tom Stewart Sean Clarke Herb Trimpe Mike Cross George Tuska Nick Cuti Keith Veronese Chris Darley Daniel Way Tom DeFalco Bob Wiacek Michael DeLeRee Barry Windsor-Smith J. M. DeMatteis Alfie Wise Mark Evanier Marv Wolfman Angela Fowlks Peter Gallay Grand Comic-Book Database Mike Grell Jack C. Harris Allan Harvey Heritage Comics Auctions Dan Johnson Arvell Jones Scott Kress Paul Levitz Andy Mangels Luther Manning Kelvin Mao Marvel Comics Yoram Matzkin Dwayne McDuffie Chris Murrin Warden Neil Herbie J Pilato Michael Rankins Mike Royer Rose Rummel-Eury

Detail from the cover of Iron Man #229 (Apr. 1988), penciled by Mark Bright and inked by Bob Layton. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore

PRO2PRO: Marvel’s Metal Men: Iron Man’s Bob Layton and David Michelinie . . . . . . . .44 The duo who took Tony Stark to new highs and lows in an exclusive chat—with never-beforepublished Layton Iron Man art!

BACKSTAGE PASS: Super Friends Live: The Strange Saga of Legends of the SuperHeroes . . . .59 Holy Reunion Movies, Batman! Go backstage with the steel-nerved actors who sported spandex in 1979 INTERVIEW: Brainiac vs. the Man of Steel: Paul Levitz Remembers The World’s Greatest Superheroes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67 DC Comics’ president and publisher looks back at his days as the writer of the Supermancentric comic strip FLASHBACK: Steeled for a Fight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71 The story of DC’s retro-fitted star-spangled sentinel, Steel the Indestructible Man FLASHBACK: John Byrne’s Bucket of Bolts: ROG-2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 From mascot to star to mascot again, Byrne’s spunky robot keeps popping up where you least expect him WHAT THE--?!: H.E.R.B.I.E.! The World’s Most Hated Robot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78 Why, oh, why doesn’t anyone like the Fantastic Four’s robo-pal?

BACKSTAGE PASS: MoCCA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 Visit New York City’s Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art in this photo tour BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .82 Reader feedback on issue #23, plus a special treat for Transformers fans!

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, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. Email: euryman@msn.com. Six-issue subscriptions: $40 Standard US, $54 First Class US, $66 Canada, $90 Surface International, $108 Airmail International. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Bob Layton. Iron Man and Deathlok TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. The Six Million Dollar Man TM & © Universal TV. The Warlord TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2007 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing. BACK ISSUE is a TM of TwoMorrows Publishing. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING

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I am a man of steel.

No, I wasn’t born on Krypton (despite my claim in my 2006 book, The Krypton Companion, that I am actually Myk-El of the Bottle City of Kandor). I do not wear a high-tech suit of battle armor or an exoskeleton. I am not an android or a robot (although I dance “the Robot” when given the chance). My bones are not made of an indestructible metal. The only blade I wield is my razor.

But I am a cyborg. Not the Deathlok the Demolisher variety, but more along the lines of Steve Austin, aka the Six Million Dollar Man. Like Steve, I have “bionic” hearing. Due to a progressive hearing loss and auditory damage caused by my past as a musician and music lover, I’ve experienced, over the past 16 or so years, a gradual loss of hearing that is now categorized as “profound.” Each morning I’m greeted by relative silence until, one ear at a time, I “plug in” by inserting my hearing aids (which cost, for the pair, close to six thousand dollars, not six million), allowing me to navigate the hearing world with artificial hearing. Should my condition worsen, perhaps one day I’ll be a candidate for a cochlear implant, a device that is surgically attached to the base of the skull to simulate hearing for the deaf or the severely hard of hearing. Then I’ll really be a bionic man.

Since I rely upon technology to hear, I feel extremely close to this issue’s subject matter, “Men of Steel.” The Man of Steel, Superman, gets a little coverage this issue (through our Paul Levitz interview exploring the World’s Greatest Superheroes newspaper strip and its Superman vs. Brainiac battle), while some of Superman’s super friends are on hand in Andy Mangels’ look at the Legends of the Superheroes TV specials of the late 1970s (starring Adam West as Batman, Burt Ward as Robin, and a group of steel-nerved actors brave enough to parade around in spandex as DC’s best and baddest). The steel-helmeted, sword-swinging Warlord, Travis Morgan, is in this issue, through an interview with his creator, writer/artist “Iron” Mike Grell.

Our remaining features explore comic-book characters that represent a fusion of man and machine, or are machines themselves.

Our cover star, Iron Man, was one of Marvel’s B-list heroes until co-plotter/inker/cover artist Bob Layton and co-plotter/scripter David Michelinie were assigned his series. Through their development of the man inside the armor, Tony Stark, Iron Man became one of Marvel’s heavy hitters and will soon be the subject of a major motion picture—and as you’ll read in this issue’s “Pro2Pro,” the duo of Layton and Michelinie are reuniting for not one but two new Iron Man projects for Marvel.

Rich Buckler might be known among comics fans as the artist of just about every Marvel and DC character imaginable, but his creation (or co-creation, since he had a little developmental help from Doug Moench) of Deathlok the Demolisher is perhaps his greatest single contribution to comicdom. Long before RoboCop, Deathlok was a sympathetic, cybernetic crimecrusher, and as our own Michael Aushenker points out in his interview with Mr. Buckler— Rich’s first-ever Deathlok interview—the first RoboCop movie borrowed liberally from Buckler’s mid-1970s Deathlok stories.

You’ll also find in these pages histories of Marvel’s post-Buckler Deathlok adventures, as well as Machine Man, Steel the Indestructible Man, John Byrne’s ROG-2000, and the Saturdaymorning-TV-spawned, crammed-into-comics Herbie (aka H.E.R.B.I.E.) the Robot. (If you were expecting the Vision, Red Tornado, Jocasta, Sarge Steel, the Metal Men, Astro Boy, and other men of steel

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from ’70s/’80s comics, sorry, space wouldn’t allow their inclusion … but we’ll eventually give them the BACK ISSUE treatment.)

And, of course, there’s this issue’s lead-off feature by Dewey Cassell, a spotlight on my aforementioned bionic “brother” Steve Austin and his gal pal Jaime Sommers. NBC-TV’s Fall 2007 Bionic Woman television series may have reimagined Jaime for a contemporary audience, but Dewey’s dynamite retrospective whisks us back to the mid-1970s, when Charlton Comics’ Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman brought the Bionic Duo to spinracks and newsstands.

Lastly, for those of you inclined to contact ye editor by postal mail, please note that the BI editorial office has changed locations.

In mid-September, my wife Rose and I moved away from Oregon, our home of 14 years, and returned to our native state, North Carolina.

As a result, I plan to attend more east coast comics conventions in the coming year, and hope to meet or be reunited with many of BACK ISSUE’s readers. The new BI editorial address appears in this issue’s “Back Talk” column!

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Dewey Cassell

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.

We can make him better than he was … stronger, faster.”

Before Deathlok and Darth Vader, and long before the Terminator and RoboCop, there was the Six Million Dollar Man. But before the Six Million Dollar Man, there was Cyborg. The novel Cyborg, written by Martin Caidin and published in 1972, introduced the character of Steve Austin. Lt. Colonel Steve Austin was an Air Force test pilot and former astronaut who crashed while flying an experimental NASA aircraft over the Mojave Desert. With the financial backing of the Office of Special Operations, represented by Oscar Goldman, Doctor Rudy Wells and a team of surgeons replaced the arm, legs, and eye that Austin lost in the accident with state-of-the-art bionics, giving him superhuman abilities. The gift, however, was not without a price. Austin became an agent for the OSO, undertaking missions that no normal human being could possibly accomplish.

Herbie J Pilato, author of The Bionic Book, published by BearManor Media in September 2007, indicates that Martin Caidin knew the potential for Cyborg. “Caidin very much wanted to bring Cyborg to life in film, whether it was for the small or big screen. He had done so with one of his previous books (Marooned, which was released as a theatrical film in 1969). So he made the studio rounds, and met with Richard Irving, an executive with Universal. Universal then convinced ABC to produce what ultimately became the TV-movie pilot called The Six Million Dollar Man.” However, ABC did not then immediately launch into a weekly series. In fact, there were a total of three movies, as Pilato goes on to explain: “ABC was still trying to find its way in the early 1970s. It was the youngest of the only three major networks at the time, so they were very cautious with any property that [was] placed on the air. With The Six Million Dollar Man, they knew they had a great show, but they wanted to proceed gingerly. So they had a regular movie series

“This one’s for my buddy Chewie!”

Steve Austin wallops Bigfoot in this dynamite Geoff Isherwood commission, from the collection of Mike Cross.

[Isherwood fans, Geoff’s back next issue in our Suicide Squad spotlight!]

Six Million Dollar Man © 2007 Universal.

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called the ABC Suspense Movie, which was broadcast on Saturday nights. The first three Six Million Dollar Man films—which featured a very James Bond-like Steve Austin—would alternate Saturday nights with various other TV movies and early episodes of Kung Fu. Once The Six Million Dollar Man became a weekly staple on Friday nights in January 1974, its playing time was cut from 90 to a regular 60 minutes, and Steve Austin became less like James Bond and more like a regular man, which contributed to the show’s appeal.”

Casting for The Six Million Dollar Man was not a trivial matter. The lead role demanded an actor who could be both strong and vulnerable, while at the same time believable in extraordinary situations. The studio turned to an up-and-coming actor familiar to TV viewers, Lee Majors. Pilato explains why: “Lee himself had been looking for a lead series. He was one of the many co-stars on The Big Valley, and he was second lead to Arthur Hill on Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, but he wanted his own show. At the time, too, he was newly married to Farrah Fawcett. And though his being cast as Steve Austin pre-dated Farrah’s superstardom on ABC’s Charlie’s Angels, the network knew they had a power-couple on their hands. So they cast him as the Six Million Dollar Man. Lee left Owen Marshall and became TV’s first realistic superhero.”

The show was a hit. Every week, Steve Austin was called upon to deal with a new threat, from the theft of the Liberty Bell to an encounter with Bigfoot. In 1975, a two-part episode introduced an old flame of Steve Austin named Jaime Sommers, a professional tennis player portrayed by actress Lindsay Wagner. Austin and Sommers rekindled their relationship, but when a skydiving accident left Sommers seriously injured, Austin persuaded Oscar Goldman and Dr. Rudy Wells to give Jaime bionic replacements for her damaged legs, arm, and ear, and she thereby became the Bionic Woman.

Although Jaime Sommers “died” at the end of the episode, the character was very well received and ABC brought her back to life, ultimately launching a spin-off

© 1972 Martin Caidin.

© 2007 Universal.

He’s No Fall Guy Artist Bob Larkin provided a dead-on likeness of Lee Majors in this illo from Charlton’s Six Million Dollar Man black-andwhite magazine.

Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © 2007 Universal.

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series the following year. There were periodic crossovers between the two series and supporting characters Oscar Goldman, played

by Richard Anderson, and Dr. Rudy Wells, played by Martin E. Brooks, appeared in both. The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman ran until 1978, and were followed in later years by three made-for-TV reunion movies, featuring both Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner.

Merchandising for The Six Million Dollar Man, and to a somewhat lesser extent The Bionic Woman, was broad and aggressive. Kenner produced a 12-inch Six Million Dollar Man doll that featured a “bionic” eye you could see through and “skin” on one arm that could be rolled back, revealing bionics underneath, as well as myriad variations and accessories. There was also an Oscar Goldman doll and several villains. A Bionic Woman doll was also produced, as well as designer fashions and a Bionic Beauty Salon playset. In addition, there were Six Million Dollar Man lunchboxes, posters, puzzles, board games, trading cards, and even a Bionic Action Club Kit.

CHARLTON COMICS And, of course, there were comics. In 1976, Charlton Comics launched The Six Million Dollar Man comic book.

The title was initially published every other month, although after a few issues publication became more sporadic. The comic book typically included one or two feature comic stories, as well as a short text story that included a few illustrations (typically panels reprinted from a comic story.) The series was written by Charlton house

writer Joe Gill and assistant editor Nicola (Nick) Cuti, and the primary illustrator for the series was Joe Staton.

Staton had started with Charlton in 1971, working on books like Ghost Manor, The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, and Haunted Love. Working as an artist at Charlton was different from the “big guys,” as Staton explains: “At Charlton, they tried to keep everything as much as possible with each person doing all their own work. That way, it kept their editorial people from having to go to a lot of extra trouble bringing things in, sending them out. They would send you a story and you did the whole thing. You penciled, lettered, and inked it.” Staton enjoyed the creative freedom that Charlton afforded its artists. “They kept you busy with all kinds of different things and they didn’t mind if you suddenly changed styles from one story to another. You could try anything out.”

Precisely how or why Charlton got the license for The Six Million Dollar Man is uncertain, but Staton mentioned one possibility: “They said at one point that they got a lot of licenses because they could keep a book going longer than other people because they worked so cheaply.” Nick Cuti had a similar impression. As part of his job as assistant editor, Cuti also did some of the production work, pasting, correcting artwork, proofing, etc. “I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that not only were we inexpensive, but we did our own printing and distribution,” Cuti says.

Staton not only did much of the interior art for The Six Million Dollar Man comic book, but he painted one of the covers as well. “That’s when we were doing a lot of painted covers. I think it was Pat Boyette, but I won’t swear to it, that found a color separator down in Texas that could do color seps cheaper than Charlton could actually hand-separate the covers, so they encouraged us to do painted covers. It was fun. I think mostly I did them in acrylic. You could work with just about anything.”

However, they were still subject to editorial approval.

With issue #4 (Dec. 1976) of The Six Million Dollar Man comic book, for example, editor George Wildman opted for a Jack Sparling cover rather than the painting Joe Staton did for it, possibly because the Sparling version featured Steve Austin more prominently. Other artists who contributed to The Six Million Dollar Man comic book included Pat Boyette, Fred Himes, Hector Castellon, and Demetrio. Neal Adams did the cover for the second issue.

FACE TIME ABC expected the comic-book characters to look like their counterparts on the television series, but that was easier said than done, as Staton notes. “We had some stills, but they never sent us enough reference. We had very little reference when we started. My wife and I were living in the mountains at the time, and we weren’t actually getting the show. I’m not sure we were getting any TV. We were pretty far out. But we could come into Kingston, which was the closest town, and you could get it in town. So to get our reference, we came into the Ramada Inn in Kingston the night the show was on.

My wife had a good camera, but she didn’t have a tripod, so we stacked up a bunch of books and she balanced her camera on top of the books and shot photos off of the TV screen while the show was on.

That was most of the reference I had. It was very grainy.”

Occasionally, though, the reference material for the comic book was outstanding. Staton recalls, “There was a Six Million Dollar Man story that started out at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. Of course,

I didn’t have any reference on that, so I called a publicrelations number at the Air Force and told them I was doing a comic and would they send me some photos.

They did. They sent me a big packet of all the buildings and planes and landing strips and everything at Andrews Air Force Base. I always told everybody that in those days, if you wanted to be a good Soviet spy, you could pretend to be a comic-book artist and call up and get very useful shots for low-level bombing.”

When it came to storylines for the comic book, beyond the initial “origin” story that appeared in the first issue, writers Joe Gill and Nick Cuti were given a lot of latitude. As Cuti notes, “I’m sure Universal and ABC were sent copies of the artwork and stories before they were published as a courtesy, but I can’t recall an instance where they ever requested a change or praised a particular story.”

There was one notable exception. Joe Staton remembers the circumstances well: “I think the only one where we were specifically told the story we had to do was when they were selling a Six Million Dollar Man doll and

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Gator Gladiator Joe Staton’s splashy painted cover to The Six Million Dollar Man #4 (Dec. 1976) was rejected and replaced by a Jack Sparling cover.

Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions. © 2007 Universal.

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they wanted the doll to be prominently featured in the story. It had to be built around that. It was a pretty large doll, as I recall. It was before the six-inch action figures. I think it may have even talked. We even had an ad for the doll as a part of the story. It wasn’t set off as an ad or anything. That was kind of odd.”

Around the same time that Charlton began The Six Million Dollar Man comic-book series, they also launched a black-and-white magazine with the same theme. This was a strategy that Charlton had used successfully the previous year with another television property, Space: 1999. Nick Cuti explains the rationale: “It was simply a matter of hitting two audiences at the same time. The way comics were viewed during that time period, older fans, such as college students, would have been embarrassed to be seen reading a comic book in public. So we gave them a comic book in the form of a magazine, which included articles and photos along with the black-and-white comic-book stories. The power of ‘fandom’ was just in the beginning stages, so it was ‘not cool’ for an adult to be seen reading comics.” The magazine began with a brief origin of the Six Million Dollar Man, more closely tied to the Caidin novel than the television series, but otherwise featured unique stories, distinct from its comic-book counterpart, and often darker and more violent. The magazine also included

From the B&W mag’s first issue (July 1976)… …a page of Terry Austin pencils. Also shown from that issue are a script page by writer Mike Pellowski and corresponding breakdowns by Neal Adams. Special thanks to Mr. Austin (Terry, not Steve) for the images! © 2007 Universal.

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articles about the television series, like “Meet the Bionic Woman,” including photographs of the actors and behind-the-scenes information. The black-andwhite magazines were a whole different operation than the color comic books. Joe Gill and Nick Cuti, along with Mike Pellowski, wrote most of the scripts, but Charlton farmed out the artwork for the magazine to Neal Adams and Continuity Associates. Cuti shares what transpired: “Neal Adams and Dick Giordano (Continuity) just showed up at the office one day and asked to do the work. How they heard about it, I don’t really know, but I knew both men and Continuity from my freelance days, so I guess they figured they had an ally in the office. They were right. I had always been a great admirer of their skills and was very excited when they volunteered Continuity, a legendary studio in the industry, as the main source of artwork for the Six Million Dollar Man.” Neal and others like Earl Norem provided gorgeous painted covers for the magazine, and the interior artwork was primarily done by the staff of Continuity Associates.

AUSTIN MEETS AUSTIN One of the talented artists at Continuity who worked on The Six Million Dollar Man magazine was Terry Austin. Austin inked the backgrounds on much of the first issue, including pages 17 and 19, where you can find “AUSTIN’S” written backwards on the restaurant window. Austin also penciled some of the book, as he explains: “I penciled pages 46, 47, 48, and 53 in issue one of The Six Million Dollar Man. I was assigned that whole story (‘Escape From Shark Island’) to pencil by Neal, who helped me with some of the layouts (especially on page 53), but I quickly realized that I was in over my head, being a fairly new recruit, and Neal stepped in and penciled the rest of the job after I waved the white flag. So lovers of Neal’s art owe me a big thank you, since if I hadn’t thrown in the towel, there would have been a lot less of his art in that issue! Dick Giordano inked all the figures in that story, by the way. So that one story, at least, was penciled by myself and Neal, and inked by Dick and myself.”

© 2007 Universal.

© 2007 Universal.

Steve Austin in Action!

Original cover paintings to issue #3 (above left), by Jack Sparling; #4 (above right), by Earl Norem; and #5 (left), by Sparling. © 2007 Universal.

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There were a number of people from Continuity who were involved in The Six Million Dollar Man magazine, as Terry Austin notes. “Dick Giordano was the main inker, and I was his background assistant at the time. The zip-a-tone effect on all the jobs was a group affair, as I recall, with all of us pitching in to do the tedious job of cutting the zip screens by hand under the direction of Dick and Neal.” Others from Continuity who worked on The Six Million Dollar Man included Joe Barney, Joe Brozowski, Rick Bryant, Karin Daugherty, Klaus Janson, Bruce Patterson, Carl Potts, Mark Rice, Josef Rubinstein, and Steve Austin. Of the latter, Terry Austin comments, “Most people assumed that it was a joke, like we actually had the Six Million Dollar Man there inking pages. But, in reality, there was an inker named Steve Austin (no relation to me, by the way) who showed up for a brief time and did a tiny amount of work on one of the issues.” Some of the magazine artwork, in later issues, was done by Win Mortimer, Howard Chaykin, and Jack Sparling.

Generally speaking, Charlton editor George Wildman and ABC were pleased with The Six Million Dollar Man comic book and magazine. They were sticklers, though, about the appearance of the main character, as Joe Staton found out firsthand. “At one point, they objected to how I was drawing Lee Majors,” Staton recalls, “so they were having somebody at Continuity paste in Lee Majors faces on my Six Million Dollar Man. Which was funny, because on somebody else’s Space: 1999, they were pasting in my Martin Landau faces.” Ironically, Charlton did not appear to be at all concerned about realism when it came to coloring. The characters and background of the comic-book pages frequently sported bright colors, completely unrelated to the subject matter.

Bionic Duo A Joe Gill/Fred Himes/Pat Boyette page to Charlton’s Six Million Dollar Man comic #9 (June 1978), the series’ final issue (courtesy of Heritage); and a UK Bionic Woman page by an unspecified issue of Look-In (courtesy of Allan Harvey). © 2007 Universal.

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WE CAN REBUILD HER, TOO In 1977, Charlton started a new comic book based on The Bionic Woman. The format was similar to The Six Million Dollar Man comic book, with a combination of comic and short text stories.

Most of the illustration for The Bionic Woman comic book, interior and covers, was done by Jack Sparling.

Joe Gill presumably wrote the stories, which may account for why “Jaime Sommers” was spelled a variety of ways. About Gill’s writing style, Staton notes that he turned out “full script, one draft. That’s it. That’s why characters’ names might change part way through. He might forget something, but that’s how it came. It came out of the typewriter a full script.”

It is worth noting that both the television series and their Charlton incarnations differed significantly from the Cyborg novel and three sequels written by Martin Caidin. Joe Staton observes, “In the book, Steve Austin’s body would behave very robotically.

There was one time where he was trying to survive in the desert and walk out, and he completely passed out.

A day later, he woke up and his body had kept moving, completely without his awareness.” Austin was also equipped with more gadgets in the books. Staton comments, “The eye was much more mechanical in the books, not quite as high tech, but more machinery.

They never actually delved in the comic or the TV

show with how it would feel to have a big hunk of your body being machine. The books kind of did.”

The television series changed several elements from the novel, such as altering Goldman’s organization from the “Office of Special Operations” to the “Office of Strategic Intelligence.” The Charlton stories were based largely on the television series, but included some elements from the novels, such as a laser in Steve Austin’s bionic eye.

Charlton titles were not the only place where The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman comics appeared. Color “picture-strips” of both appeared between 1975 and 1979 in Look-In [see sidebar], the Junior TV Times magazine published in the UK. The serial picture strips were unique stories featuring the creative talents of writer Angus Allan and artists John Bolton, John Burns, Arthur Ranson, Martin Asbury, and others.

By the time The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman television series were canceled in 1978, the Charlton comic books and magazine had also run their course. The Six Million Dollar Man comic book ran for a total of nine issues, the magazine only seven. The Bionic Woman comic book ended after issue #5. Cuti notes, “I suppose once the popularity of the show waned, so did the sales.

The best way to keep merchandising going as long as possible is to get in while the show’s popularity is rising.

I think we came in after it had peaked.” Little remains of the Charlton legacy to the TV shows, as Joe Staton laments: “There’s not a lot of that art around because Charlton just shredded most of it. Or pitched it on a pile and used it for mats during the rainy season. Sometimes, Nick Cuti would smuggle stuff out for me. [Charlton] didn’t return art.

A lot of the stuff was just destroyed.”

The Three Million Pound Man?!

by Allan Harvey

The UK has long had a tradition of publishing TV-based comics. The granddaddy of them all, TV Comic, started in 1951; the 1960s brought TV Century 21, Lady Penelope, and TV Tornado; while the 1970s would see the launches of Countdown, TV Action, and Doctor Who Weekly, amongst others. One of these, Look-In, debuted in January 1971.

For the most part, Look-In was a kind of junior magazine largely made up of articles, posters, and quizzes featuring celebrities and pop stars of the day. There were also a number of comic strips based on then-current shows airing on the ITV network. Among these were such eclectic series as Kung Fu, Space: 1999, and Benny Hill. The Six Million Dollar Man strip debuted in 1975, with The Bionic Woman arriving the following year.

These Look-In strips were all new material originated in the UK, not merely reprints of the Charlton comics. Martin Asbury, now a well-regarded movie storyboard artist, was responsible for depicting Steve Austin’s adventures, while Jaime Sommers fought dangerous criminals under the brush of occasional Marvel luminary John M. Burns.

Both strips comprised two pages of fully painted color art every week. In addition, the stars often appeared on Look-In’s distinctive painted covers as well.

Toward the end of the ’70s, as the shows’ popularity waned on television, the two bionic heroes featured in a single combined strip.

Sincere thanks to Joe Staton, Nick Cuti, Terry Austin, Bob Wiacek, John P. Barker, and Herbie J Pilato, whose The Bionic Book is highly recommended to fans of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman.

DEWEY CASSELL is a frequent contributor to BACK ISSUE as well as author of the book The Art of George Tuska, available from TwoMorrows Publishing.

Photo by Michael Eury.

It could be fairly argued that, while it lasted only a few years, The Six Million Dollar Man franchise paved the way for numerous science-fiction stories to follow, in print, television, and motion pictures. In recent years, the original television series was released on DVD in Europe, but its distribution in the United States is at this writing mired in legal issues. There were rumors about a feature film of The Six Million Dollar Man, but nothing came of it, which for fans may be just as well since it was billed as a comedy starring Jim Carrey. September 2007 saw the launch of a new weekly Bionic Woman television series on NBC, starring British actress Michelle Ryan as Jaime Sommers. The premise for the new series differs somewhat from the original, reportedly focusing more on the angst the character feels dealing with her transformation into a cyborg, perhaps being more faithful to the Caidin novel.

There are apparently no plans for a new comic book, nor any concerted effort to collect the original Charlton series into a trade paperback, but if the new TV show is a hit, who knows? In the meantime, the original comics are generally inexpensive and in fairly plentiful supply, providing a nostalgic look back at what six million dollars would buy thirty years ago.

© 2007 NBC Universal, Inc.

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Full Metal Junket TM

WELL, ’PUTER. WHAT IS THE STORY BEHIND MY EXISTENCE?

DIRECTIVE RECEIVED, LUTHER MANNING. DECYPERHING PROCESS ACTIVATED. MONDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER, 2006, 10:00:00 HRS. CONVERSATION CONDUCTED WITH DEATHLOK THE DEMOLISHER CREATOR RICH BUCKLER. This was not by accident.

What better interview subject, on the five-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, than the creator of a prescient futureshock series, published more than three decades ago, that was set in a near-future dystopia rife with crumbling Manhattan skyscrapers against doomsday horizons.

Even in the funky 1970s—when Marvel Comics characters practiced voodoo, descended from Satan, brandished flaming skulls, drank blood, and suffered from lycanthropy—no American comic-book series was as cinematic, offbeat, and downright weird as “Deathlok the Demolisher.”

As the character first appeared in Astonishing Tales #25–36 (Aug. 1974–July 1976), Deathlok was clearly the dark horse of the Marvel Universe. The titular cyborg, once a mere mortal US Army soldier named Luther Manning, struggled to reclaim his humanity while fighting a wily, power-hungry adversary in the midst of a cavernous, deserted New York City. Set in the far-flung future of 1990, Deathlok’s machine/man Manning grows increasingly disillusioned as he crosses a decaying Manhattan island and uncovers the truth— that he is a pawn in an evil plan hatched by his former superior, demagogue-run-amok Major Ryker, whose Savior-Machine scheme intends to consolidate all computer power for ultimate control.

Deathlok was the creation of artist Rich Buckler, who was given rare carte blanche by Marvel to take an underselling title and present within it a deeply personal and brooding vision of societal decay; an epic battle of humanity versus a rapidly encroaching technology cinematically executed, in collaboration with writers Doug Moench and Bill Mantlo, and artists including Keith Pollard and a budding Klaus Janson. In just 12 issues, series architect Buckler delivered a short-lived yet quietly groundbreaking and influential story arc that, a decade later, became a font of inspiration for Hollywood. Readers at once embraced the series’ experimental storytelling style and flinched at its

Don’t Mess with This Cyborg From the Heritage Comics Auctions archives, the demolishing Deathlok penciled by the character’s creator and our esteemed interview subject, Rich Buckler, and inked by Greg Adams. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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by

Michael Aushenker

unvarnished honesty, which did not shy away from exploring brutal violence or complex themes (interracial relationships, suicide, biblical allegory).

In this BACK ISSUE exclusive, Buckler, for the first time ever, discusses Deathlok the Demolisher in print. In this candid conversation, a revelation emerges that is nothing short of “astonishing”—despite an ostensible nihilism and cynicism toward a Vietnam/Watergate-era US Government—the Deathlok series was, in fact, an apolitical metaphor conceived with none of those objectives in mind.

—Michael Aushenker [Editor’s note: Although this interview was conducted just over a year ago, due to its subject matter its publication was delayed until this “Men of Steel”themed issue.]

MICHAEL AUSHENKER: Five years ago today, at almost this very hour, the ominous events of September 11th, 2001 took place. You reside in Manhattan. Where were you at the time?

RICH BUCKLER: Where I was living you could literally see [the terrorist attacks by] looking out the window.

When it happened, I was both horrified and not quite surprised. I just couldn’t believe what was going on.

And when I understood that the buildings were in danger of collapsing … I just felt a jolt. I don’t give a damn for buildings … I know it’s a powerful symbol.

I just felt the huge loss of life. It was a tremendous blow.

AUSHENKER: As these terrible events unfolded, what goes through the mind of the creator of the quintessential futureshock comic?

BUCKLER: Where was the security? Where are the planes that were supposed to intercept this? Where is the control, where is the technology … why did it even happen?

My thinking hasn’t changed too much regarding the technology. It’s flawed, we rely too much on it, we’ve got way too much information, and everything is going way too fast. We live very artificially … I felt that back when I created Deathlok and what I wanted to bring out was what it means to be human and explore that. While he looked like a monster and was plugged into the technology, the computer, the programming, the modern world, or what I perceived as the future (only ten or 12 years from there), it was really something that was going on in me internally as I was seeing where we were going in a general with this, and I wanted the character to personify that and go through some of the changes that I was going through … I didn’t, by the way, have anything to do with computers. I had an aversion to them, not a hatred of them, but I thought, “Now this is not really the way to go.” Now I’m very well-versed on computers.

AUSHENKER: I want to quickly read a passage from Astonishing Tales #35, where Deathlok is locked in battle with Ryker.

Beginnings: Penciler of “The Symbionts” (inks by Neal Adams) in House of Secrets #90 (Feb.–Mar. 1971)

Milestones: Creator of Deathlok the Demolisher for Marvel Comics (Doug Moench, co-creator) / creator of Demon Hunter (Atlas Comics), Devil Slayer (Marvel), and Darkling (member of the Mighty Crusaders, for Archie/Red Circle) / co-creator (with Roy Thomas) of All-Star Squadron, Invincilbles!, Forever Warriors, Saga of the Human Torch, and Saga of the Sub-Mariner / Fantastic Four / Black Panther in Jungle Action / Superman / All-New Collectors’ Edition #C-58 (Superman vs.

Shazam!) / Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man (“Death of Jean deWolf” storyline) / World’s Finest Comics / artist of Hulk, The Phantom, and Flash Gordon newspaper strips

Works in Progress: How to Draw Dynamic Comic Books (Vanguard Productions, released in Aug. 2007) / Secrets of Drawing Comics (Vanguard, forthcoming)

Cyberspace: www.richbuckler.com (for surrealism and comics) / www.myspace.com/art_of_rich_buckler www.surrealismnow (surrealist paintings only; go to gallery, alphabetical listing)

RICH BUCKLER, SR. Courtesy of richbuckler.com.

Man-Made Manning

[Ryker explains he has relocated all citizens to Long Island.]

The rebuilding of Luther Manning, as seen on page 10 of Deathlok’s premiere outing, Astonishing Tales #25 (Aug. 1974). Courtesy of Deathlok art collector supreme Kelvin Mao.

DEATHLOK: You moved everyone in Manhattan?

© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

RYKER: “Look down again, Deathlok! Explosions … tearing Manhattan apart! But who…? We never learned who … a terrorist perhaps! Maybe just a madman … or maybe the enemy! Our system began to crumble, Deathlok! Because of them!

DEATHLOK: Who’s they, Ryker? And why’d they scare you?

RYKER: Because they represented disorder, Deathlok! And chaos.

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RYKER: It was essential! The enemy had disrupted day-to-day functioning! We had no choice!

DEATHLOK: Bull! There was no enemy, Ryker! You just wanted control—total, complete order...!

RYKER: It was for their own good! People need someone to watch over them!

DEATHLOK: So you elected yourself! Dictator and God all rolled into one! You’re mad, Ryker!

In the Bombastic Buckler Manner

It’s eerie how scenes such as this one anticipates not only the destruction in Manhattan but the suspicion of government today in the wake of 9/11; the perception many have of our leaders exploiting the enemy as an excuse to trample over our civil liberties—the Patriot Act, phonetapping, Guantanamo, etc. My intent is not to get into a political discussion but just to show how prescient your book was.

BUCKLER: Ryker’s ambition to connect up to all the computers in the world and become a god and run everything—that’s probably the ultimate goal of anyone who has a lot of power and is seeking more and has

From the Kelvin Mao collection, an unfinished version of page 18 of Astonishing Tales #26 (Oct. 1974), and page 25 of issue #25. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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gone over into that area of insanity or megalomania. So he’s sort of the quintessential mad guy, who is just totally absorbed in himself and has decided that nothing else exists and he’ll have ultimate control.

AUSHENKER: There are many elements in Deathlok—a distrust of government, military, authority—that are in the cultural atmosphere now.

BUCKLER: Well, Deathlok was a soldier and that was his world. I was never in the military. But I have friends and family members who are and were … but I wasn’t taking a stand against the military. [Deathlok’s] world was the military. That provided order for his life. But as a character, for the reader to identify with him, it was necessary for him to go through problems that the reader could relate to in a personal way. Everyone has felt from time to time that their world, it doesn’t make sense—I don’t fit in, why am I not connecting, what’s going wrong here. And I’m not talking about government or military, I’m talking about [when] your sense of reality is shaken a bit. Of course, 9/11 shook up everyone’s sense of reality.

AUSHENKER: Were you reacting to the fallout from Vietnam/Watergate, since Deathlok was first published in 1974?

BUCKLER: Undoubtedly, since I was fully aware of things going around me and I had my view of things.

Understand where I’m coming from—my view usually consists of a number of points of view, because I’m a very surrealist-type thinker … seeing things from multiple points of view.

AUSHENKER: So you were not trying to be on-the-nose about anything going on back then or trying to predict anything…

BUCKLER: I wasn’t trying to predict anything. Certainly I was making commentary with storytelling elements, but what I was doing was pointing out—What are we?

Why are we here? Where are we going? At the same time, I was dealing with this myself, so of course if

you’re thoroughly immersed in your art, what you’re going through internally is going to come through.

And this was an opportunity for me to do this … it was a very personal project. I was left on my own to do what I wanted to do. A very great opportunity.

AUSHENKER: There were some controversial scenes that stirred up the letter columns—I’m thinking particularly Astonishing Tales #28 (Feb. 1975), where a frustrated, disillusioned Deathlok rips the American flag off his chest, throws it to the ground, and steps on it.

BUCKLER: A very important scene, yeah. This is a person who realizes that his world—and his reality—was shattered. He had to then find something to replace it with, or at least had to try to make some sense [of] the stage he had come to. It was an awakening, and this is where the character development came in, and I wanted to explore this as much as I could. He would have to figure out how to integrate this into his view from before.

But his immediate reaction was it was all unreal—none of it mattered—and when he tore up the flag for me it was symbolic of not rejecting anything that the symbols stood for specifically but in general he was rejecting his past.

What he was before … more in the sense of being an everyman, a person who has no country, no identity.

AUSHENKER: He was more disoriented and disenfranchised than anti-patriotic.

BUCKLER: Oh, this is long before The Matrix, but suppose you find out that everything is God and we are all, the whole universe is, God and the only reality is God and you go there and you find this out to be absolutely true. What do you do with it afterward when you come back to you, and there’s not supposed to be any you, it’s just supposed to be we’re all one? You have to integrate that into your thinking.

AUSHENKER: There’s a war between humanity and science raging in Deathlok. We see that on the page with the dueling narratives between Manning and the computer, the battle for control of his mind.

BUCKLER: Technology as religion … at war with the new mentality of the scientific mind, but as it’s developed through humanity and ultimately into a religion. It’s a religion with no god, it still has doctrine … dogma. It has everything that a religion has—places of worship.

AUSHENKER: And it influences millions and has a hold on society.

BUCKLER: It’s tremendously influential. A surrealist will very often take opposites and try to make it reconcile.

That makes for very dynamic storytelling and very dynamic character development.

AUSHENKER: What struck me about “Deathlok”, as a series and in spirit, is, it wasn’t like any other comic book or Marvel comic at the time. I see it more like a Sam Peckinpah movie.

BUCKLER: I’m a big Sam Peckinpah fan. I was very young and nobody could tell me what to do. Young enough to not know better and to go where nobody went before … but also in terms of the opportunity to use it in a meaningful way. See, I’m coming from comic-book fandom … I can pretend I’m Jim Steranko … I can pretend I’m these big guys that are the storytelling greats [and] build on what they did. And where normally you’re on Captain America or on Fantastic Four or whatever, you have to follow what went before … there were no giant leaps because it’s a commercial medium, so it’s very difficult to find opportunities to do something new.

AUSHENKER: It’s also a hit book and you don’t want to rock the boat…

BUCKLER: Right, right, but I remember that several people came up to me and they said, “Richard, you’re

on Fantastic Four. You’ve been at Marvel Comics for a couple of years … and you’re drawing their numberone best-selling title. You’re on top, it’s you, Kirby, and John Buscema!” Of course, if I was riding on ego, I would say, “That’s it, everybody else is dust.” But I remember saying,”Well, let’s see what happens in six months or a year … I’ll probably be drawing something else and I don’t know where this is going, but I’m going to ride this.” My goal was never to be famous or influential. Of course, those things come with the territory if you are successful, but always it was and is the art first and telling a good story.

AUSHENKER: Deathlok was your baby. It’s obvious that you pushed the envelope and really experimented with the multiple-narrative device, with compositions, and layout. Some pages were literally sideways. I would assume you even had discussions with the colorist because there are flashbacks that are in different color schemes, passages that were monochromatic.

BUCKLER: I colored a cover and a couple of pages and I consulted with [then-Marvel art director] Marie Severin about how to do it. She was an absolute sweetheart.

I found out that the coloring was tremendously slow for me, so I gave it over back to the [colorists]. I worked closely with the colorist and the letterer. I met Annette Kawecki, a new person starting—she was the only one willing to hand-letter that computer font.

AUSHENKER: Right, she got a special credit for the computer’s lettering.

BUCKLER: She actually invented the typeface. She took time and worked it all out and showed it to me.

We did it step by step and it was grueling for her to do it.

It took two or three times longer … because we didn’t

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© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

War-Wolf Redux Courtesy of the artist, Rich Buckler’s acrylic painting recreation of his classic Deathlok vs.

War-Wolf cover (seen in the inset). © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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have computer fonts [in the mid-1970s]. We didn’t have the technology to express the technology that we were commenting on. [laughs] I’ll give you another example: Most people don’t know about this, but there’s a cover of Deathlok where Ryker’s on one side and Deathlok is on the other, I can’t remember what number it is [Astonishing Tales #35], but in the background, there’s a cityscape that’s curved.

It looks all high tech. Again, we had no computers, I had no time to draw this city on a curved horizon. I knew what I wanted in the background, but I didn’t know how to implement it. And I thought, “How do I solve this problem?” And I picked up my cup of coffee and finished it, I put the cup down and looked at it, there’s the city, on the cup … in a moment of inspiration, I dried up the cup, broke it apart, flattened it, put it on a piece of paper, and I ran to Stu Schwartzberg, who was doing the photostatting, and I said, “Can you make me a quick photocopy of this? I need it, the cover is due,” and 20 minutes later I had it pasted it right into the background. No one would ever guess. It’s a very low-tech answer for a high-tech effect. It was like making a low-budget movie where you had to do very cool things on the fly with a budget. You have to be really inventive. And Klaus Janson, who inked many of the issues, was just absolutely great. When he first started out, I had to get him the job, I literally grabbed

© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Man vs. Machine Manning revolts against his programming in this panel from the second Deathlok story in Astonishing Tales #26, plus, from the Roland Reedy collection, a 2005 Buckler convention sketch. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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pages from Black Panther [in Jungle Action, with writer Don McGregor] and I told John Verpoorten, the production manager, that Klaus was inking them. [laughs] AUSHENKER: Klaus, as we learned from Frank Miller’s Daredevil run, was one of the most cinematic artists.

[Editor’s note: See BACK ISSUE #21 for an in-depth look at the Miller/Janson eras of Daredevil.]

BUCKLER: His drawing ability just increased tremendously. He’s still one of my favorites.

AUSHENKER: Who were some of your friends at the time?

BUCKLER: Don McGregor, Klaus, Ed Hannigan, Ron Wilson.

AUSHENKER: Getting back to Sam Peckinpah for a moment: In the letter pages, “Deathlok” got some flak for being too violent, which brings to my mind Peckinpah, who used violence in his films that were ultimately antiviolence. He received a lot of criticism for his use of violence, and was accused of glorifying it, but, in fact, he used vio-

lence to condemn violence and not to glamorize it at all.

I feel in many ways that’s the spirit of “Deathlok” as well: to hold a mirror to it, not so much to exploit it. Do you feel that way as well?

BUCKLER: Well, absolutely… the idea wasn’t just to come up with a violent assassin character. If that was the case, he didn’t have to go through any internal changes, just keep his computer programming and let him go around shooting people. I think [on] the first page of the first story, that’s what he did. He did what he was programmed to do, and right away you get a grip on what the character is but then you realize— oops! It’s not so simple, it’s going in this direction, and then it starts to get really interesting, I think.

AUSHENKER: You originally conceived “Deathlok” as a novel. What was the road to bringing Deathlok to comics?

BUCKLER: I had drawn just about every major character at Marvel and DC, but I thought maybe I could get an opportunity to do something new. Of course, it would get me a crappy deal because that’s just the way it was.

But maybe I can get a less-crappy deal than most.

AUSHENKER: Was your desire to express yourself with Deathlok more important than your concern that you were jumping into a bad work-for-hire situation?

BUCKLER: It was so important to me to be able to create a new character that was a new archetype, like Superman or Batman, which I think that Deathlok is.

We’ve seen so many versions of this character in movies [since]. But, see, it’s because it was the time for that archetype to break into our conscience, that’s what I believe, since I didn’t create it, I was a conduit for it. Me and Doug Moench, we developed the character together. It was my concept initially, my creation, but we need to give Doug credit.

Doug helped develop it and, if not for Doug. … he’d be called “Deadlok,” because Deadlok was originally his name. That sounds dumb now, but I remember when Doug brought in the whole presentation written up, after we had a number of sessions at his apartment and various places going to eat and we talked over everything, he comes in with this and … we have five minutes before a meeting with Roy Thomas to give it to him and he says, “Just one change I made. Don’t get too upset about it, I called the character Deathlok and I just think it sounds better.” And I said, “Deathlok?! That sounds so stupid!” And I thought, “How am I going to go through the whole presentation in five minutes and change everything? Too late.” And I thought, “Well, Deadlok, Deathlok, whatever, let’s just let it hang and see what happens,” and he said, “Yeah, you can change it later if you want to, but think about it, it’ll grow on you.”

He was right … his instincts were just right on.

AUSHENKER: So he would’ve been called “Deadlok the Demolisher”?

BUCKLER: Deadlok is all it was supposed to be. Roy Thomas said, “It has to be Deathlok something.

Stan likes it that way” … it seemed like the Marvel style. He said, “How about ‘the Demolisher’?”

I said, “Fine, call him whatever you want as long as he’s Deathlok.”

AUSHENKER: You had given up on the name at that point. [laughter] BUCKLER: Well, it was just a nickname to go with it because people were going to remember Deathlok. Roy gave me the break … he was always having

conferences or meetings. I said, “Roy, sorry to interrupt.”

He said, “Rich, it’s okay. The only way to see me is to interrupt me. What is it?” And I gave him the spiel and he said, “You know, we’re negotiating for the rights for Six Million Dollar Man right now and I think Charlton has a bid on it too. If we pick that up, we can’t even consider picking up your project.” He said, “I don’t want you to go and do some work on spec.” Roy’s always very respectful about that. And I said, “If I work something up and present it to you, if a book opens up and if you’re not doing something that’s competitive, is it a possibility?” “Yes.” That was enough for me. I worked on it for about two months, and then Doug and I worked on it together for another six weeks at least.

AUSHENKER: At what point did you learn that Marvel was not doing the Six Million Dollar Man comic?

BUCKLER: I came in and gave them the presentation.

Roy liked it, but he said, “We don’t have a book for it.

We don’t know what’s happening yet with the Six Million Dollar Man.” And I thought, “Well … that’s an opportunity for me to go out and buy the novel by

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Spirit of ’76 A painted pinup produced by Rich Buckler in 1976, courtesy of Kelvin Mao. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Martin Caidin, Cyborg [the source material for the Six Million Dollar Man], because I hadn’t read it yet. It was in the air but I didn’t want to be a second-rater.

AUSHENKER: Your idea was independent of Cyborg, and it was coincidence that the show was coming out at the time.

BUCKLER: So what I did was rethink part of it and make sure that I had things that were the opposite—see, I deal a lot with reconciling the opposites—so while the Six Million Dollar Man was a good-looking regular guy, I took that all away from Deathlok. I made him a monster, and instead of being friends with the technology, he was enemies with it. And then it developed from there. And it actually got deeper as a concept. It was a good way to go.

And then one day—I was going to Marvel every day, I had office space there—and Roy said, “Rich, by the way, Charlton picked up the Six Million Dollar Man, I got a go ahead for your project. I can’t give you Deathlok #1, but Astonishing Tales is open for a few issues, will you give it a shot?” I said, “Let’s go.”

Mind Games Deathlok’s struggle against series menace Major Ryker. Page 2 from Astonishing Tales #35, signed by artist Rich Buckler. Courtesy of Kelvin Mao. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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AUSHENKER: I’m going to assume Astonishing Tales wasn’t a top-selling title. Was it an advantage to work under the radar?

BUCKLER: I didn’t have to meet a sales mark, I had to just do something interesting. I remember Stan Lee did a blurb to promote it. He said it was either going to be the most popular superhero or a complete flop [laughs] … which is almost saying nothing.

AUSHENKER: Thanks, Stan. [laughter] BUCKLER: I like the way they promoted it: “Is he Man or is he Monster?” That’s sort of like the Incredible Hulk.

The new wrinkle was connecting with the technology.

AUSHENKER: Making him a “monster” adds to our sympathy for the character and his struggle.

BUCKLER: His life was taken away, his humanity was lost, and he has to find that [along the way]. It turns out, of course, that the person who appears to be a monster has more humanity than most of the people he’s dealing with.

AUSHENKER: So Roy Thomas was instrumental in supporting your vision of the character.

BUCKLER: He didn’t rein us in … he let us do what we [wanted to] do.

AUSHENKER: How did you choose to collaborate with Doug?

BUCKLER: We just resonated. When I read his work, it reminded me a little of Don McGregor, but only in that he has a really good grasp for words, almost poetic.

AUSHENKER: But it was your idea and Doug was trying to help you flesh it out. How was this different—collaborating on your idea?

BUCKLER: I was trying to run everything and, at the same time, collaborate. I probably drove Doug nuts a little here and there, but I was the editor on the book, too, just not in title. I was given free rein to do what I want.

AUSHENKER: So it was very much an unorthodox setup.

BUCKLER: Completely, yes.

AUSHENKER: Before the Deathlok run ended, Moench had left the book and Bill Mantlo replaced him as writer.

Were there creative differences that led to Doug’s departure?

BUCKLER: I took over writing it and then I found out I couldn’t handle it … I needed someone else and Doug wasn’t available. It wasn’t Doug and I having an argument or having a falling out or creative differences.

Nothing like that.

AUSHENKER: How was working with Bill Mantlo?

BUCKLER: With Bill, I edited a little more heavily than usual because Bill was new. I wasn’t sure what he could do, but I liked what he was doing. He seemed to understand the character … creatively, we got along well. I was getting what I wanted.

When Roy left [his position as Marvel’s editor-in-chief] … problems came up. And it was not because that [new editor-in-chief] was causing problems, necessarily.

I remember the atmosphere was very, very tense, because nobody knew who was going to be in charge.

A couple of weeks there was one guy and suddenly there was another guy and another month later there was another guy. Archie Goodwin … Gerry Conway …

I think Len Wein was there … Marv Wolfman. It was a lot of people until they finally settled on somebody.

And probably that allowed for a lot of things that I did to slip between the cracks.

For instance, one issue, I brought in the artwork and I was in John Romita’s office and somebody pointed out, “You can’t do that!” And it was a page that I drew sideways and I said, “But of course I can, I just did.”

“But you can’t do that, that’s not done, nobody’s done

that, it’s just not done. Well, we’re going to have to re-paste this up.” And I said, “Excuse me, go talk to Sol Brodsky and ask him to look at my contract.”

And there was no problem. Sideways page! I was shaking up the world back then. [laughs] AUSHENKER: Astonishing Tales #27 (Dec. 1974), the War-Wolf issue, is particularly outstanding in terms of visual techniques. We learn a lot about Manning’s military past in flashback, which employs bright colors contrasting to the gloomy present-day muted colors. There’s also a full page where Deathlok is held captive, strung up on the wall, and, from the bird’s-eye view, he resembles Christ nailed to the cross.

BUCKLER: That was inspired by Salvador Dali’s rendition of Christ. Salvador Dali is my favorite artist. It’s a powerful image, too. Modern man being crucified on the cross of technology. It was a bit daring for comics because yes, it could be construed for a religious image or blasphemous. I think originally I wanted him to be on an actual cross. I wasn’t struggling to be original so much as going for this, going for that … it’s not all intellectual.

Being a surrealist, you bring the disparate together, you bring opposites together. It all works somehow.

AUSHENKER: It formed its own logic.

BUCKLER: Right, exactly...

AUSHENKER: “Deathlok” was so expressive, less selfconscious...

BUCKLER: It wasn’t at all self-conscious. Literally, as I was plotting the stories, I was making them up as I went along, but it was going exactly where it was supposed to go because I always trust the creative process. I think Jack Kirby worked that way. I love all that New Gods [Fourth World material]. He was incredible and, again, he was making it up as he went along. I remember people coming up to me in the office saying, “Yeah, Jack’s great, but he needs a real writer.” [I said,] “But he is a real writer! What are we talking about here?

Oh, you mean like a Mario Puzo? Okay, okay.” [laughs] AUSHENKER: Astonishing Tales #27 contains another aspect in which the series was ahead of its time: At the end of the story, when Deathlok, no longer Luther Manning, returns home unrecognizable to his wife Janice and the young son whom Manning never got to know because she was still pregnant when he left her and underwent his conversion into Deathlok. In an extraordinary subtle backstory for the era, wife Janice just happens to be black, the kid is white, presumably of mixed race—interracial love, no explanation, no big deal.

BUCKLER: See, again, we’re going with opposites here.

I have a man who represents every man but what I wanted to do is point out that I’m not ignoring race … culture, etc.

AUSHENKER: Of course, this backstory is a very contemporary idea, contemporary to now. But back then…

Robotic Rough Stuff

BUCKLER: It parallels sort of what was in my life. I wasn’t married to a black woman but I was married to a Puerto Rican woman. My son is half white/half Puerto Rican.

So that was a little bit close to me.

But the race issue was always on my mind. I come originally from Detroit, Michigan. I had friends who were black. My friends were martial artists. They were so tough they could kick their own butts. [laughs] When I left Detroit, Detroit really didn’t leave me, so my mentality was still the same … even more so by living in New York.

There were people here from all over the world … every language … every kind of culture is mixed in, absolutely great. I wanted to bring some of that into the storyline …

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Another treat from the Kelvin Mao collection: A neverbefore-published Buckler Deathlok rough from 1974. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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bring it into reality. Plus, it was an opportunity to handle something most people wouldn’t touch.

Don McGregor would handle it. We explored it a bit when he and I worked on “Black Panther.” And prior to that, I worked for Sol Brodsky’s company [Skywald Publications, a 1970s publisher of horror comics magazines]. There was the Butterfly, a black superheroine—I did a lot of research and worked closely with the writer to develop an actual black character, not one that they’re just calling Black so-and-so...

AUSHENKER: That family sequence and the way it caps off with Deathlok attempting to commit suicide by his own laser and not being able to—that was not something you would see in your average Marvel comic back then.

BUCKLER: Most characters are not allowed to even consider suicide, let alone have problems that would drive them to it.

AUSHENKER: In a sense, though, in this little moment, technology saved his life—his inner computer wouldn’t let him kill himself. Which is another nice contradiction.

Voices Inside My Head Page 17 from Astonishing Tales #36 (July 1976), from the Mao collection, shows the “Deathlok” series’ specially created computer lettering style. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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BUCKLER: Because technology is not evil in itself.

It’s not good or bad.

AUSHENKER: What was the reaction at the time to these mature themes?

BUCKLER: I don’t remember. Now that I think about it, how did it get by? [laughs] How did any of this get by?

And him being white and having a black wife.

AUSHENKER: All in the same issue, by the way.

BUCKLER: Another opposite—the head of the CIA, the chief of human intelligence—she’s female … French … not American … I thought, “Why not?”

AUSHENKER: Were there letters?

BUCKLER: I always assumed the letters were made up by someone internally. [laughs] I wasn’t paying attention …

I was paying more attention to indulging myself as a comics fan and seeing it from a comics fan’s point of view.

Of course, it was too good to be true. It couldn’t last.

It didn’t. Then the character went through other permutations that were ridiculous. Making him a pacifist is like taking away a huge amount of the concept.

AUSHENKER: What’s “astonishing” is that you got away with all of this stuff. That was the “astonishing” in Astonishing Tales. [laughter] BUCKLER: We shouldn’t have had to get away with anything. In the literary world, you can do it.

AUSHENKER: Thank God it got through. In terms of complex themes and character angst, even though Marvel was known for the tragic superhero motif, “Deathlok” raised it to another level.

BUCKLER: It was a living contradiction.

AUSHENKER: Okay, now you’re sounding like the lyrics to a Kris Kristofferson song. [laughter] Speaking of song lyrics, there are many Doors references: one story title [AT #28], “Five to One, One in Five, No One Here Gets Out Alive,” and another [AT #30] was called “The Soft Parade.” Do you remember this?

BUCKLER: I’m a big Jim Morrison/Doors fan … Doug Moench was a big fan of the Doors, too.

AUSHENKER: You were really getting your influence from everywhere—movies, artists such as Dali, literature.

BUCKLER: David Bowie, again, a tremendously powerful artist who reinvented himself constantly. I always admired that.

AUSHENKER: One Deathlok artist we haven’t mentioned yet: Keith Pollard.

BUCKLER: Keith Pollard was a friend of mine and probably he was available as I was having some problems.

I had moved back to Detroit from New York— turned out to be a mistake timing-wise…

AUSHENKER: During the “Deathlok” run?

BUCKLER: The book started to get sabotaged from someone in the office. When you really accomplish a lot, you get a lot of attention. I worked with Keith and Arvell Jones on some fan project … I’d be working on the latest issue of Fantastic Four or Thor and I’d be drawing the cover of the fanzine, too. I didn’t make any distinction.

Anyway, when I moved back to New York, I thought, I’m going to solve this problem. It just seemed that I was getting a lot of interference. I got frustrated, I didn’t want to deal with it, it was becoming a headache, so I just left [the series]. Probably mid-story...

AUSHENKER: They didn’t want to continue “Deathlok“ once you left?

BUCKLER: Well, the problem is, see, I’m the only one who knew what the character was, except maybe... Doug Moench... but nobody called me, nobody called Doug.

AUSHENKER: Were you getting too experimental?

BUCKLER: I was just getting too much resistance. I was probably being a pain in the ass, to be fair.

MICHAEL AUSHENKER is a Los Angeles-based writer and cartoonist. His comic books include the El Gato, Crime Mangler series, Cartoon Flophouse, and Those Unstoppable Rogues. Visit cartoonflophouse.com.

Photo by Marlene Aushenker.

AUSHENKER: You had a strong vision.

BUCKLER: Yes, yes. I was personable about it, but somebody got ticked off.

I remember I wanted to color a page and the editor at the time, whom I won’t name, said, “Rich, you can’t color, you’re not a colorist.” I said, “I’m not an editor, either, but I can do your job.”

AUSHENKER: Wow. BUCKLER: So I colored it. So I walked down the hall and there’s Stan in his office and I said, “Stan, how ya doin’?” “Hi, Rich, what’s up, is everything okay?” And I said, “Well, yeah, it is and it isn’t, though, there’s a problem.”

And he said, “What’s the problem? Do what you want to do … go ahead and color it.” So I went back and I colored it and it was put into production and the editor who said I couldn’t do it got pissed off. I said, “Stan said I can do it!” But … I reversed this editor’s decision. That was enough to get me buried.

AUSHENKER: So office politics essentially killed Deathlok. [laughter] Did you ever long to return to the character?

BUCKLER: Anytime I would be invited, I would be glad to … I made it abundantly obvious and it just never happened.

AUSHENKER: I’m assuming you weren’t too thrilled with the subsequent interpretations?

BUCKLER: Well, that was beside the point. I didn’t even consider it the same character. They kept redoing it anyway.

AUSHENKER: Did you consider Deathlok part of the Marvel Universe of superheroes? He wasn’t a clear fit.

BUCKLER: Deathlok was in his own world.

AUSHENKER: So when they started sticking him in Marvel Two-in-One opposite the Thing?

BUCKLER: We came to the point where I had to bring him into the Marvel Universe so we split him into two characters. So one existed in the future, one existed in the present. They co-existed. In other words, it was a solution that wasn’t a solution.

It worked. It was a little bit of a cheat.

AUSHENKER: Let’s talk about the influence on Hollywood, because it’s so painfully obvious. I’m thinking particularly of RoboCop, Escape from New York, The Terminator. You’ve seen them, right?

BUCKLER: Yes. I think the RoboCop Murphy even works in Detroit. [laughter] AUSHENKER: They even swiped your hometown! What was that experience like, seeing Robocop for the first time?

BUCKLER: Actually, I enjoyed it, I thought it was cool. But enough people came up to me and said, “That’s Deathlok!”

AUSHENKER: In the original RoboCop, which is a great movie, it’s very obvious—the POV shots of RoboCop coming to; the computer communicating within his visor, giving him directives; the scenes of Murphy searching for his family, past, humanity— straight out of Astonishing Tales.

BUCKLER: Well, that’s called “borrowing ideas.” Look, I was inspired by Jack Kirby.

In fact, Deathlok is really an inverted Captain America.

AUSHENKER: A great way of putting it.

BUCKLER: And Captain America is my favorite character. We all borrow ideas … we’re all inspired and influenced by things.

AUSHENKER: It speaks to the vitality of your concept, which came out in the mid1970s, to find elements of it popping up in films in the 1980s and beyond.

Supposedly, there’s even a movie literally based on Deathlok in development. Would you go see a Deathlok film?

BUCKLER: Sure I would … if it’s a good smart movie that’s based on the original concept, I think it’ll work.

AUSHENKER: Looking back, is “Deathlok” your finest moment in comics?

BUCKLER: I don’t know how to judge my best work.

AUSHENKER: Do you feel that you said everything you wanted to say with “Deathlok” in its original run?

BUCKLER: No, not at all, I can do more stories for it now. They’re living inside of me. I don’t even have a time sense about it, really.

AUSHENKER: So you were just getting warmed up. You still have a lot of Deathlok stories to tell.

BUCKLER: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Buckler, Before Deathlok Courtesy of the artist, Rich Buckler’s tryout pages for Marvel’s “Black Panther” series. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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by

Zack Smith

Beyond Buckler At comic-book companies such as Marvel and DC, unraveling the history of a long-running character can be like playing a game of “Telephone.” Each time a new creative team uses a character, they add a new chapter to that character’s history, sometimes taking it in a wildly unpredictable direction.

And when that character is a cyborg soldier named Deathlok from an alternate, post-apocalyptic America … and when there have been at least three characters to use that name … things can get even more convoluted.

The formula for Deathlok has always been the same: an unwilling participant’s brain is transplanted into a powerfulbut-hideous cyborg body. Over the years, many different creators have offered their own take on this formula, making the man inside the machine a soldier, a pacifist, and even a comic-book publisher (sort of).

In talking to some of the different writers who’ve worked on Deathlok over the years, we found that in each case, Deathlok represented a unique turning point in their respective careers.

As you’ve read in our Rich Buckler interview, the original Deathlok was Luther Manning, a morally wounded soldier in a future America ravaged by war. This series ran for 12 issues of Astonishing Tales, and ended with Manning’s humanity somewhat restored in the form of a clone of his original body, while the cyborg-Deathlok was sent through a time-portal by an underwearclad being called “Godwulf.”

Still with me, folks?

“DEATHLOK LIVES” The time-lost Manning made a few appearances in Marvel Twoin-One (where, among other things, he was nearly made to brainwash Jimmy Carter) as did a Deathlok robot that the Thing thankfully destroyed. The character wandered around in limbo for a few years until the memorable Captain America story “Deathlok Lives,” by J. M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck.

DeMatteis recalls that the story was the brainchild of Marvel editor and future Cap writer Mark Gruenwald, who had noticed that Deathlok’s “future” was actually the early 1980s. “Since we were rapidly approaching the date of Deathlok’s ‘future,’ it was Mark’s idea to do a story that would address that directly,” DeMatteis recalls.

DeMatteis had enjoyed the original stories, which he now sees as “ahead of their time. That fusion of cold computer consciousness and hot human emotion is a fascinating mix,” DeMatteis says.

“Deathlok Lives”… …and the Star-Spangled Avenger had better duck for cover! Mike Zeck’s recreation of the cover he originally produced for Captain America #286 (Oct. 1983). From the collection of Kelvin Mao. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Gruenwald helped put together a timeline to sort out Deathlok’s already-twisted continuity. DeMatteis tried to give his friend a co-plotting credit on the book, which Gruenwald then promptly took off. “Gruenwald was a terrific guy,” DeMatteis recalls. “He didn’t just understand the Marvel Universe, he believed in it with all his heart and soul.”

Still, there was the matter of both cleaning up the continuity and telling a good story in the process. “There was one point where I told Mark I didn’t think I could do it,” DeMatteis relates. “We were very close to dumping the whole idea. Then I suddenly realized that Deathlok’s story was, above all, a search for personal identity. He was a fragmented self trying to achieve wholeness. That theme gave me the hook that made the story work.”

“Deathlok Lives,” which ran in Captain America #286–288 (Oct.–Dec. 1983), saw the Luther Manning clone head back in time to rescue the original Deathlok.

After recruiting Captain America to his cause, the two found the brainwashed cyborg working for the criminal organization Hydra, having denied all links to his past or his humanity. Mortally wounded, the Manning clone managed to reawaken the cyborg’s humanity … but Deathlok was still a cynical, burnt-out killing machine.

Captain America followed Deathlok back to his ruined future, where they encountered Godwulf. Godwulf explained that he was actually one of the scientists who had helped neutralize the superheroes in Deathlok’s timeline.

Now, in an effort at redemption, he was leading a group of freedom fighters to overthrow Hellinger, a cyborg who had once been Harlan Ryker—the man who had put Luther Manning’s brain in Deathlok.

Godwulf’s group had sent Deathlok to the past to temporarily hide him from Hellinger, but he had gotten lost. Now, with Deathlok back, he could lead them against Hellinger—a symbolic hero, as Captain America had once been.

Deathlok was reluctant, but Cap convinced him that even within this cyborg body, there was still a human soul.

In a final confrontation, Hellinger took control over Deathlok’s systems and forced him to knock out Cap … but the part of Luther Manning that still lived within Deathlok was able to overcome his programming.

Screaming, “I’m a man!” Deathlok killed Hellinger, saving both Cap and the world. His shattered psyche healed, Luther Manning found a new purpose in rebuilding his shattered America. Cap went back to his own time, musing to himself that “the future is in good hands.”

The story proved popular with fans, and was even reprinted years later. DeMatteis says that he considers it the “peak” in his Captain America run with Zeck, whom he calls “one of the all-time greats.”

“One of the great things about working with an artist like Zeck is that the writer doesn’t have to belabor things in the captions and dialogue,” DeMatteis says.

“The action, the movement, the surface emotions— everything’s crystal clear on the page. That leaves the writer free to go deeper into the character’s psyches.

Which is exactly how it worked with the Deathlok story: There was one level of story happening in the pictures and a whole other level, an interior journey, happening in the captions.”

The Deathlok story, the writer says, helped provide a “jumping-off point” for the DeMatteis/Zeck team to collaborate on “Fearful Symmetry: Kraven’s Last Hunt” a few years later.

That intensely psychological swan song for one of Spider-Man’s classic villains is widely considered one of the best superhero stories of the 1980s … and, as it turns out, it had its roots in Deathlok.

Accept No Imitations (below) Luther Manning, the original Deathlok, junkheaps his successors in this awesome Arthur Adams commission. (right) Also, Deathlok

by Cry for Dawn’s Joseph Michael Linsner. Both from the collection of Kelvin Mao. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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“THE FUTURE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT” With Luther Manning’s story having reached a happy ending of sorts, it looked like Deathlok had vanished from the Marvel Universe. However, a few years after the Captain America story, a funny thing happened— a film called RoboCop, about a policeman transformed into a cybernetic superhero, became a huge hit.

It was RoboCop that would provide the impetus for Deathlok’s next incarnation. Marvel was taking pitches for a comic tie-in, and writers Gregory Wright and Dwayne McDuffie came up with an idea for the tie-in book. However, when Wright wound up becoming the editor for the RoboCop comic, they decided it would be unfair to greenlight their own pitch.

In discussing other ways they could use their ideas, Wright and McDuffie discussed their love of cyborg characters, and found both were fans of the original “Deathlok” series in Astonishing Tales.

“I remember getting that first Astonishing Tales with Deathlok in it,” says McDuffie, at this writing the writer on Fantastic Four at Marvel and Justice League of America at DC. “I had never seen anything like that before in my life!

“The sequence from the machine’s point of view as he hunts down and cold-bloodedly kills this guy— and this was the lead character, the protagonist, the hero!—did bad things to my young mind. It would be hard for someone used to modern comics to get a sense of how very, very different that was from anything else that was out at the time.”

Wright and McDuffie thought that merely reviving the old series would do a disservice to the original stories.

They began discussing ways to rework Deathlok in a modern context that would tie into the traditional Marvel Universe, throwing out most of their RoboCop ideas in the process.

Exit Luther Manning, enter Michael Collins.

A KINDER, GENTLER DEATHLOK?

Nick … though, in his cyborg form, he did wind up becoming an unconventional husband and father.

The miniseries, co-written by Wright and McDuffie, with art by Jackson Guice and Denys Cowan, proved a surprise hit. Soon, Deathlok was promoted to an ongoing series, with Wright and McDuffie taking turns scripting each arc.

McDuffie says that he started the concept for the new Deathlok with the idea of a “double consciousness, a voice in your head with its own point of view.” Much of Deathlok’s ongoing series dealt with Deathlok’s efforts to not be the violent, gun-toting killer he was built to become.

Keep in mind this was the early 1990s, when violent characters were the most popular thing in comics.

The series often received complaints from readers wondering why Deathlok didn’t just blow away his opponents, leading to a humorous story in an annual where Deathlok explains his point of view to a classroom full of jeering kids.

McDuffie says that Deathlok’s “no killing” perspective was a conscious rejection of the “dark and gritty” trend in superheroes at the time. “The only way you could distinguish between heroes and villains was whose logo was on the cover,” McDuffie sighs. “I kind of wanted Deathlok to be a counter to that.”

Unfortunately, the more thoughtful approach to the book had a couple of downsides. McDuffie says, “One, the people who really liked that stuff wouldn’t try the book because they looked at it, and it was called ‘Deathlok,’ and had a guy with a big gun on the cover!

“On the other hand, the people who were buying it because [Deathlok] looked cool and had a big gun were really, really upset, because he kept questioning the fantasy they wanted to have—the book constantly questioned the premise of whether going around hitting stuff is really the best way to make the world better.”

The new Deathlok debuted as a four-issue prestige-format miniseries (cover-dated July–Oct. 1990) after a preview story in Marvel Comics Presents. Unlike the original series, this was set in the present-day Marvel Universe, and instead of a soldier in the cyborg’s body, the mind in the machine was that of a pacifist.

Michael Collins was a good man, a loving husband, and a father who dedicated his working life toward helping develop artificial limbs for his employer, Cybertek. Unfortunately, Cybertek was a subdivision of the villainous Roxxon Oil Corporation, and Collins’ work was really being used to build a new Deathlok body.

When Collins discovered that his work was being used to develop a weapon, he was captured by his bosses before he could blow the whistle. As it happened, this world’s version of Harlan Ryker was a Roxxon executive who needed a new human brain to operate Deathlok … and this man of peace soon found his mind inside a weapon of war.

But like Luther Manning, Collins was able to overcome his programming and rebel against the men who had turned him into a monster. On his own, he found friends and allies in the superhuman community … but was unable to escape his hideous body.

Only a few things gave Collins something to hold on to. Like Manning, his cyborg body had an onboard computer that conversed with him, but he was able to override it with a “no killing” parameter. In addition, he had evidence that his human body was somewhere in suspended animation. If he could get it back, he could find a way to return to his wife, Tracy, and his son,

© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

The Demolisher Returns Jackson “Butch” Guice’s rendition of the antihero, from issue #1 (May 1991) of the miniseries Deathlok Special. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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This conflict even extended to the writing of the book. According to McDuffie, Wright was more interested in stories where Collins’ personal code would be pushed to its limit, while McDuffie was more inclined toward stories where Collins questioned a violent approach. “It made for an interesting tension in the storytelling,” McDuffie says.

McDuffie eventually left the book, which ended after 34 issues with a story where Collins teamed up with Luther Manning to help settle the time-paradoxes that led to Manning’s future coming about.

Still, he remains fond of the book and the character … who’s even been the subject of a couple of action figures, including one with an exposable brain. “I’ve got one in a box pinned up on my wall, and a loose one that lives in my pencil cup,” McDuffie says. “I think that it was probably the first thing I ever worked on that had its own toy, so I was really happy about that!”

M-TECH While working on Deathlok, McDuffie met Denys Cowan—and their after-work discussions helped lead to the formation of the groundbreaking Milestone Media. “Actually, Deathlok royalties helped pay for that!” McDuffie laughs.

The Milestone line of books led to McDuffie’s work on the Emmy and Humanitas-winning animated series Static Shock, and his subsequent acclaimed work on the Justice League Unlimited cartoon … which in turn helped lead him back to his new gigs at Marvel and DC. His new superhero work gave him a chance to revisit the character … but we’ll get to that later.

In 1998, Marvel’s cyber-themed “M-Tech” line introduced a new Deathlok, whose series ran for 11 issues. Written by Joe Casey and illustrated by Leonardo Manco, it told the story of Jack Truman, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent introduced during Casey’s run on Cable as an antagonist for the mutant cyborg.

Was Truman’s introduction in Cable a set-up for the ongoing series?

Actually … no.

“The editor came to me and basically laid it out like this: ‘We’re doing a Deathlok book, and the character you created in Cable, Jack Truman, is going to be the new Deathlok. Do you want to write it?’” Casey says. “I figured, if anyone was going to screw up a character I co-created, it might as well be me.”

At the climax of Casey’s run, Truman’s body was almost destroyed; in the new series, his mind was saved in a robotic form from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Logarithmic Organic Kinetics (L.O.K.) department. Now in a metal form with a fake-skin covering, Truman was left to wonder not only if he was still human, but if he had even been human to begin with.

The only previous stories with Deathlok that Casey had read was the DeMatteis/Zeck tale in Captain America, so his version of Deathlok had no connections to the other versions besides the name.

Aware that “any Deathlok book is going to be a fringe book,” Casey instead focused on having a good time with the material, cranking out such offbeat tales as one where a broken Deathlok journeys inside his soul, and an ongoing subplot where Marvel’s hypnotic villain, the Ringmaster, runs for president under the name “Martin Thraller.” “The one thing I will say about the Ringmaster-asPresident … he probably would’ve kept us out of Iraq,” Casey says.

The series ended with Truman, having grown tired of his life as a spy, getting a new lease by switching bodies with an obnoxious former colleague—Larry Young, whose name and look are based on Casey’s friend and occasional publisher. When last seen, Jack Truman was wandering off into the night, while the drunken Young was left ranting in his new metal body.

Casey sees his Deathlok series as an important stage in his writing career: “I look back on the series as the beginning of a particular thread in my work, a much looser, no-holds-barred style of writing where I just try to open up my imagination and let it fly out on the page, as unfiltered as possible.

“I mean, when you can come up with something as nutty-sounding as ‘Deathlok dates a supermodel’ and then figure out how to actually make it play in the book … that’s a good experience, regardless of sales,” Casey says. “I think Deathlok was absolutely the precursor to other improvisational-style comic books I’ve written like Automatic Kafka and now Gødland.”

A DEATHLOK TALE UNTOLD A few years later, the original Deathlok, Luther Manning, made a comeback … almost.

In 2002, editor Axel Alonso announced that a new Deathlok miniseries by writer Daniel Way and artist Darick Robertson would appear later that year as part of Marvel’s “mature readers” MAX imprint.

Though several pages of preview art were released … the series wasn’t.

What would have happened? We tracked down Way for his pitch: “Deathlok: Detour would have featured Luther Manning, the original Deathlok,” Way says. “In the not-too-distant future, Canada has become the seat of world power and a powerful politician named Chief Bleeding Stump has just purchased Deathlok (who had been lying dormant for many years) in a bottom-dollar sell-off of outdated American arms.

“Once Deathlok goes online, well … he’s not happy about it. He just wants to die. He never wanted to be this killing machine—and he sure as

Pondering Demolisher Deathlok strikes a Thinker pose in this Ken Steacypainted pinup from Marvel Feature #32 (Nov. 1985).

Special thanks to Kelvin Mao. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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hell didn’t want to come back. Unfortunately, his onboard computer systems won’t allow him to kill himself.

Therefore, the only way for him to get what he wants is to throw himself headlong into the most dangerous, volatile situations possible (in other words, he needs to go to the US, which has devolved into a complete wasteland, the citizens having sectioned themselves off into brutal, intolerant clans) and hope against hope that someone or something will successfully end his misery.

“This all changes when he meets David.

“David is a mentally and physically challenged young man whose mother and stepfather are accidentally killed in a clash between Deathlok and the Canadian military as he (Deathlok) attempts to cross the US border.

In David, Deathlok (Luther) sees something of himself–— just like him, David, through no fault of his own, is trapped in a body he cannot control. In addition, David, now that he has no mother to look after him, is completely unprotected. Luther Manning, Deathlok, is still determined to off himself—but first, he’s going to find a safe place for David.

“But in this post-apocalyptic America, that’s not just difficult—it’s damn-near impossible.”

The miniseries was the first thing that Way ever wrote for Marvel. He’s since gone on to such high-profile books as Ghost Rider and Wolverine: Origins, but his Deathlok work is still sitting on the shelf.

Way was recruited to do a Deathlok pitch by Alonso.

Though he hadn’t read the original series, he loved the concept. “The mind of a peaceful man trapped inside the world’s greatest killing machine … I mean, really— how can you improve on that?” Way says.

Why was the series never released? Way says he’s never been told the exact reason, though he has a few ideas. “At the end of the day, I look at it this way: They paid me for the story, so I came out of it a lot better off than Marvel did,” Way says.

Still, the series holds a special place in Way’s heart.

“I basically learned how to write comics by writing the Detour miniseries, so it’ll always be one of those things that sticks out in my memories,” Way says. “What can I say?

It was fun. And you know how writers always look back at their past work and fret over how they should’ve done this or that differently? Not so with this book. It was perfect.

“But [expletive deleted], was it offensive!”

Deathlok remained in limbo until 2006, when Dwayne McDuffie was given a chance to return to the character he co-created. In the miniseries Beyond!, which McDuffie describes as “Secret Wars without stars,” Michael Collins turned up on a planet created by longtime Marvel character the Stranger. It turns out that he’d been there for years, during which time the nanotechnology in his body had slowly returned him to a more human appearance.

“It was my way of explaining where he’d been since Greg’s run on the book ended,” McDuffie explains.

At the end of the series, Collins helped the other heroes escape, but found himself back on Earth with no apparent powers … and his humanity restored. He was finally able to go home to his family, but has stayed in touch with his superhuman past, occasionally helping out the Fantastic Four in McDuffie’s run on the book. “He’s sort of the Wyatt Wingfoot character, the human guy who goes along on their adventures,” McDuffie says.

According to McDuffie, Collins’ inclusion in Beyond!, along with him losing his powers, were part of an editorial mandate when he took on the series.

Consequently, he’s willing to bet that Marvel will introduce a new Deathlok in the future.

“It’s way too cool a visual to leave in limbo,” McDuffie says. “I’m sure Deathlok will be back in some new incarnation that’s every bit as cool as the last three or four times they did it.”

Whether Luther Manning will come back from the future, Larry Young will try to destroy the Marvel Universe, or some new unfortunate soul will find his mind in the machine, it’s clear that Deathlok is a concept that’s here to stay in the Marvel Universe. A film version has been in development for years, and solicitations for upcoming books hint that some version of Deathlok will soon rise again.

For readers, Deathlok has been a concept with many different iterations, each one tragic and compelling in its own way. And for the creators who have worked on the different versions of the character, Deathlok represents a unique chapter of their careers, whether it’s a high point or the start of something bigger.

But whether it’s been Luther Manning or Michael Collins or Jack Truman, each version of Deathlok has been able to rise above circumstances that could have turned him into a monster, and instead become a hero.

And each has done so not as a machine … but as a man.

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Tin Man Tussle One-time Deathlok artist Arvell Jones pitted Marvel’s Demolisher against DC’s Cyborg in this 2005 commission, courtesy of Michael Rankins.

Deathlok © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Cyborg © 2007 DC Comics.

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by

In 1975, DC Comics was expanding its comics line with several sword-and-sorcery titles such as Beowulf, Stalker, and Claw the Unconquered. The genre had often proved a hard nut to crack for comics publishers, and most of the titles launched at this time died quick and early deaths.

Note that I said “most.” Enter The Warlord, which ran for 133 issues before ending its run in 1989.

The Warlord told the adventures of Travis Morgan, a modern man who discovers a barbaric world inside the hollow crust of the Earth. Created by Mike Grell— who at the time was illustrating one of DC’s best-selling titles—Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes— Warlord was healthy mix of mythical creatures, evil sorcerers, and blade-wielding heroes inspired by the works of Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and J.R.R. Tolkein.

But every legend has its roots, often shrouded in the mists of a forgotten age. Join creator “Iron” Mike Grell as we return to the lost world of the Warlord.

– Philip Schweier PHILIP SCHWEIER: Let’s talk about The Warlord.

MIKE GRELL: Do that.

SCHWEIER: You had started kind of developing the creation when in college, is that right? In art school?

GRELL: Ah, no. Well, I suppose you could say that; art school, post-college, post-Air Force.

I was at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art when I started doing “The Warlord,” and I was also moonlighting in commercial art at the time, and “The Warlord” had his genesis as a comic strip called Savage Empire.

SCHWEIER: Then you offered it to … was it Charlton? … no, it was Atlas— GRELL: Atlas [aka Seaboard, a mid-1970s publisher].

I was already working at DC Comics, and I found out that Atlas was offering a hundred bucks a page,

Iron Mike’s Lost World Hero Travis Morgan, aka the Warlord, in a commissioned painting by the swashbuckler’s creator, Mike Grell. Courtesy of Scott Kress of Catskill Comics (to inquire about commissions by Grell and other artists, visit www.catskillcomics.com). © 2007 DC Comics.

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Philip Schweier

conducted July 18, 2006 and transcribed by Brian K. Morris

which was about two and a half times what DC was offering at the time, and it sounded like a real good idea.

But when I pitched the thing to [Atlas editor] Jeff Rovin, I explained to him that I already had a commitment to DC and I wanted to make sure that I demonstrated to them that I could meet all my commitments, and asked him to keep it under his hat until I had a couple of issues in the can. He said, “No problem,” and I walked from his office to DC, which was about 20 minutes across town.

And by the time I got there, [then-DC publisher] Carmine Infantino was waiting for me in the hallway.

He said Jeff Rovin had just called and told him that he had me tied up for two books a month. And Carmine, of course, wanted to know why I hadn’t brought the concept to DC instead, and I explained to him that I honestly didn’t think DC would be that interested because they hadn’t had any success, really, with fantasy and science fiction, non-action/adventure kind of stuff. And he said, “Well, why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

So we walked into his office and as we walked in, the telephone was ringing and he excused himself to take the call, which was just as well because as we were sort of going through his door, almost in that moment, it dawned on me that there was no way he was going to buy it, not in the form that it was.

So while Carmine was on the phone for about two or three minutes, I completely revised the concept from The Savage Empire into The Warlord. Savage Empire was the story of an archeologist who stumbles through a time portal and winds up in Atlantis. It was sort a “Connecticut Yankee in Atlantis” instead of King Arthur’s court. And my story changed to become the story of a US spy pilot who stumbles on a portal into the world at the center of the Earth where creatures from mythology and Earth’s ancient past co-exist, leftovers of the civilization of Atlantis and other things as well. About the only thing that I kept in there was the name of the villain, Deimos. I was going to change that to “Phobos,” but it was just such a cool name that I decided to keep it.

SCHWEIER: “Deimos” has a much more threatening sound and is worthy of being Travis Morgan’s archnemesis.

GRELL: Well, it’s taken from the moons of Mars, Phobos.

SCHWEIER: Exactly. Now, this was not your first writing gig for DC. You had done a Green Arrow story.

GRELL: Yes. SCHWEIER: How did that Green Arrow story lead to writing The Warlord for you at DC? Did it kind of prove yourself in the eyes of the editorial department?

GRELL: I think so, to a certain extent, maybe to a large extent. I had always thought that if you were capable of creating an interesting story in pictures, why shouldn’t you be able to put the words with it as long as you have the basic English Lit skills, which I never had a problem with. I sort of aced it in college so storytelling kind of came natural for me.

I had an idea that I pitched to [editor] Julie Schwartz, and [one-time Green Arrow writer] Elliot Maggin was writing at the time, and I wanted to do this story with me doing Green Arrow’s basic plots and all the lines and then everything else, and Elliott doing the dialogue. And I kind of was all finished.

The first one came out pretty good. The second time around, I thought that Julie’s ending was a little heavy-handed. It was changed from a story about a female counterpart to Green Arrow to a story of a

Beginnings: Dale Messick’s assistant on Brenda Starr / Aquaman backup feature in Adventure Comics #435 (1974)

Milestones: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes / The Warlord Green Lantern/Green Arrow / Starslayer (Pacific Comics) / Jon Sable, Freelance / Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters / Green Arrow James Bond 007: License to Kill and Permission to Die graphic novels Shaman’s Tears (Image Comics) / Iron Man / Jon Sable, Freelance: Bloodtrail / The Complete Jon Sable trade paperbacks

Works in Progress: new Jon Sable, Freelance graphic novel (ComicMix) / The Pilgrim graphic novel

Cyberspace: www.mikegrell.com (official site) www.catskillcomics.com (commissions)

MIKE GRELL Photo from Amazing World of DC Comics #12 (1976).

young boy who is the reincarnation of King David.

Instead of a bow and arrow, he’s using a sling to knock off bad guys. You know, I pretty much threw my hands up in the air and said, “Okay, I’ll let somebody else write it, but I’ll draw it.” I pretty much shelved the idea and pulled it out again—at least the basic concept of it—years later for Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters.

But, yeah, in all of that, as I was getting going, I had already shown Joe Orlando my portfolio, which included The Savage Empire, and I had shown him the old Iron Mike stuff that I had done years before that, a private-eye comic strip. And that, I think, swayed him as much as anything else. Plus, I had a great line of B.S. and, well, I got the shot. You know, Carmine promised me a one-year run on the book, and I thought that was a lot better guarantee than a crapshoot with Atlas. And it turned out that Atlas wasn’t around for very long. You know, they only published a few issues of the books that they did bring out. Some of them were brilliant, but unfortunately, the company didn’t last and the titles went down with it. [Editor’s note: Join us next issue for a history of Altas Comics.] And Carmine, of course, wasn’t very good for his word because he canceled The Warlord after story number three, issue #2, I think it was.

SCHWEIER: It debuted in First Issue Special #8 (Nov. 1975).

GRELL: Correct.

SCHWEIER: And then there was The Warlord issue #1 (Jan.–Feb. 1976) and 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1976), it was canceled.

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GRELL: Well, at the end of the third story [Warlord #2], imagine my surprise when I’m reading through and looking at the lettering and I read “The End” at the end of it. I was very surprised and DC said, “Well, Carmine canceled it,” and there was nothing I could do. But fortunately, Jenette Kahn replaced Carmine very shortly after that and it turns out that Jenette had been a big fan of The Warlord, thought it had some merit, and had it put back on the schedule.

[Editor’s note: The Warlord #3 was cover-dated Oct.–Nov. 1976.]

SCHWEIER: That … hiccup in the early issues—did that affect you at all in terms of production? Or was it just a quick jump-in-the-saddle again to launch that third issue and the ongoing series?

GRELL: It was pretty easy. The story had already been planned out, there was no question about where it was going. I had the first year’s worth of stories already plotted out, so jumping in and continuing with the production was no big deal. This part of the big “DC Implosion” thing where everything that wasn’t canceled went from bimonthly to monthly, so there wasn’t that much of a gap, actually.

SCHWEIER: A lot of different elements were borrowed to go into Warlord, such as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and some of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar material. But what else did you include in the mix? A little bit of everything, from what I understand.

GRELL: A lot, a lot. Before the turn of the century, the 20th Century, there were something like 57 or 58 different titles written on the theory of Hollow Earth, and I drew on several of those that I had at my disposal, along with the inspirations of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar, and combined some of those aspects. For instance, the world of Skartaris is named for the mountain peak in Journey to the Center of the Earth that points the way down into the volcano that shows the party the proper tunnel to take that leads them to the center of the Earth, except it’s spelled “S-c-a-r” instead of “S-k-a-r.” “Shamballa,” of course, is from [the '70s rock band] Three Dog Night: “How does

Mr. and Mr. Warlord Travis Morgan and Tara, from page 1 of Warlord #17 (Jan. 1979). Art by Grell and Colletta. (next two pages) Warlord commissions

by Grell, courtesy of Catskill Comics. © 2007 DC Comics.

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the light shine in the halls of Shamballa?” which is actually, again, spelled differently, spelled with a “C.” But it’s the fabled golden city that’s supposed to be in a hollow mountain in Tibet someplace. There’s supposed to be a tunnel or a cave, a cavern, that leads to this golden city somewhere buried in the Earth.

SCHWEIER: Kind of a Shangri-La. GRELL: And that had a bit to do, with Shamballa, with the world at the center of the Earth as well.

SCHWEIER: Let’s talk about supporting characters.

There was Tara, Morgan’s wife, and they had something of a rather dysfunctional relationship.

GRELL: Morgan himself was pretty dysfunctional.

Here’s a guy who starts out with all these noble intentions. And among them is to put an end to things like slavery, the abuse of power, and all of that has to do with the fact that he’s a victim of those things. And as soon as he’s no longer a victim, he sort of forgets about it, kind of like the people during the '60s who were protesting the war in Vietnam and wanting to make the world a better planet. Well, the planet we have right now is a byproduct of that generation. That generation is now the people who are running things and is it better? You could say maybe so, but maybe not. Not a lot has changed, really. And the fact is that after the Draft was abolished, it was no longer any concern to them. They were less concerned with making things right in the world, with taking care of the planet, with taking care of their fellow man, because it wasn’t of immediate importance to them, and Morgan is very much like that. Plus, you have a strong, independent woman who is, just coincidently, the queen of her own nation.

Now she has responsibilities and understands the responsibility that she has. And so to her, her duties to her people come first. And Morgan, of course, is always just running around, swinging his sword, he’s having a great old time: “Bye, honey. See you later. I’m off to the wars. I’m off to have some adventures,” and he leaves her, ditches her to go off and have fun. And every single time he comes back, she breaks his nose. Every single time, she punches him in the nose, knocks him on his ass, and for the life of him, he can’t figure out why. He doesn’t have a clue.

SCHWEIER: Sadly, most men are like that these days.

GRELL: Oh, yeah!

SCHWEIER: I mean, he’s hardly acting out of type, whether he’s in Skartaris or 20th Century America.

GRELL: Exactly, exactly. He’s sort of the quintessential caveman. He’s a modern man in a primitive society, but the primitive is just barely below the surface in him, which is one of the things that makes the character interesting. He makes all of the mistakes that we make, that ordinary people make—but in the end, he has a tendency to at least want to try to do something good. He just stumbles and fumbles and bumbles and along the way, he’s lost track of what it was that he set out to do. Ultimately, that’s going to be his downfall.

SCHWEIER: Getting back to Deimos, he was Morgan’s arch-nemesis … and a rather powerful one at that.

GRELL: Right. He combined at least the rudimentary knowledge of Atlantean science that he acquired by experimenting with machinery that had been left over from this lost race with mystical, magical abilities that made him a pretty formidable enemy, and tough to kill.

SCHWEIER: Yes, he came back a number of times.

GRELL: [chuckles] Yes, yes, that was the fun part about Deimos. [laughter] One of my favorite Deimos resurrections was when he was killed by a dog who knocked him off the edge of a canyon and he’s crushed and mangled down below. And when he’s resurrected, bits and pieces of the dog go along with him. So now he’s got patches of fur that sticks out a bit all over the place, he’s got fangs like the dog. No nobility, though.

SCHWEIER: And then there’s—help me with the pronunciation here—is it Machiste [pronouncing it “MahKEE-stay”]?

GRELL: Actually, it’s “MAH-kiss-tee,” but close enough. I had never heard that name spoken and I assigned pronunciation to it, based on what I thought it might be. And then I’ve heard it pronounced “Mah-CHEE-stay.” As far as I’m concerned, it’s to-may-to/to-mah-to, po-tay-to/ po-tah-to.

SCHWEIER: A lot of Morgan’s supporting cast seems to be people who were from the surface world, like Mariah, the Russian archeologist.

GRELL: Yeah, Mariah, as in “they call the wind…”

SCHWEIER: [chuckles] And Jennifer, his daughter.

GRELL: Right.

SCHWEIER: Jennifer seemed to go from a woman in search of her father to the high priestess/sorceress of Skartaris in a pretty short time. Was that an effort to just kind of round out the cast and this is the role she’d fill?

How did that development come about?

GRELL: Well, part of the reason for bringing Jennifer in to it was to remind the readers that Morgan had another life before he became the Warlord of Skartaris. And having her become the sorceress supreme was almost for the fun of it as anything else.

I wanted to give her a meaningful role in the storylines to make her a valuable ally and an asset to Morgan, particularly in his battles against Deimos, but I also wanted to explore some other things with her. And Mongo Ironhand—Mongo was the little wizard from a sort of a land inside a mirror. When Morgan travels back and forth in time, he encounters a land inside of this mirror. He doesn’t just backpack it, but he travels back and forth through time, by passing through this magical mirror. He travels to a land where things are as they were in Skartaris before the Atlanteans arrived, a land of mystical magic and no science involved, just an incredible, fanciful place.

And Mongo Ironhand was this little dwarfish wizard who, in my vision, I saw him as sort of a sawed-off George Burns, if that’s possible, [Philip laughs] with magical powers. Instead of the perennial cigar, he had a giant martini, and I thought the two of them playing together were a great combination of humor and lechery that seemed to go well with the George Burns-type of a character. And I thought it was awfully interesting that, as a juxtaposition of powers and abilities, I show how this woman who comes from a land of modern technology and science jettisons all of that, but finds a way to become really a supreme force in the world that she lives in.

SCHWEIER: I see. That’s a lot more than I ever expected of the character. I thought, “Oh, we just gained another character. Let’s make it a magical

© 2007 DC Comics.

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one,” and lo and behold, Morgan’s daughter fit the bill. I never realized you had such subtle intentions with her role.

GRELL: In order to create a good character, you have to think beyond the page. You can’t just put something down and say, “Okay, this is what it is and we start from this point and go on.” You have to start further back in their backstory in order to make them believable and real. And they have to be real to you in order to write them convincingly. So when I create a character, I always think about where were they before this story started. The reader comes to it fresh.

They look at what’s on the page, but in order to give the page life, you have to give them something else. You have to have that in mind. You have to have the past in mind in order to make the present interesting and in order to make the future interesting enough to read it.

SCHWEIER: It makes total sense to me. I was at the age of 13, 14, when all this was developing in the world of comic books back in the ’70s, and I believed creating comic-book characters was simpler: “Ah, we’ll just create a new character, and put a costume on him, and that’ll be that.”

GRELL: There was plenty of that.

SCHWEIER: Oh, I’m sure there was.

GRELL: There was plenty of that on my part and on other people’s parts. Sometimes, you create a character that is intended to be a throwaway, and something happens along the way, and they become rather interesting and sort of take on a life of their own.

For instance, personally, when I did Starslayer, it was originally intended to be a counterpart to The Warlord.

You know, a direct opposite from a modern man in a primitive society to a primitive barbarian in an all too futuristic society, and I thought that would be the interesting and compelling thing. And then I got to writing the story and I discovered that the more interesting and compelling character was actually Tamara, the lady scientist who in the process of involving Torin into this story, it’s revealed that she’s the one who’s setting out to actually destroy the planet Earth. I thought that was more interesting than just a guy with a sword.

SCHWEIER: True. I was thinking you might have said that Sam was going to be the interesting one, the mechanical monkey.

GRELL: Sam was a lot of fun, a lot of fun.

SCHWEIER: I’m sure he was.

GRELL: But I had to figure out some way to have this primitive guy be able to function in a world where, face it, he’s never seen a toilet, let alone knowing how to use one.

SCHWEIER: When Warlord came out, you had a rather heavy workload. You were working on Legion of Super-Heroes…

GRELL: Yep. SCHWEIER: …Green Lantern/Green Arrow…

GRELL: Yep. SCHWEIER: …and then Warlord, which was published every other month. So what started to give with that workload? You know you had to shuffle something onto a back burner. What went first?

GRELL: I think the first thing that went was the backup stories, the Green Lantern/Green Arrow backup stories.

But no, wait a minute—nope, we’re off, we’re off.

It wasn’t the Green Lantern/ Green Arrow backup stories, it was the Green Lantern/Green Arrow monthly. It was already going.

SCHWEIER: Right.

GRELL: It was already going and the thing that had to give for me was—that was an easy choice. Once the so-called “DC Implosion” hit, the easy choice was to drop The Legion of Super-Heroes. That was a combination of the massive amount of work that that book was.

Twenty-six characters, sometimes five or six of them in every panel on a page, and balancing that against two books that I really loved: Green Lantern/Green Arrow and The Warlord.

SCHWEIER: Pop-culture-literate readers would catch certain references in Warlord with your working in references to, say, movies like The Three Musketeers and The Man With the Golden Gun. Were there any kind of large cinematic influences on you, for you in the Warlord book, as far as thinking cinematically?

GRELL: Cinematic influence? Let’s see, [Warlord’s] helmet is straight out of The Vikings, except I added wings and took off the eye mask and the chin strap.

A lot of the costuming was similar to that. There’s elements of Spartacus and just about every gladiator movie I ever saw. I’d say, at least in terms of visual sense and in some cases, storylines, there’s a spin on the Arthurian legend. I had very foolishly created this elaborate sword, the Hellfire Sword, for Morgan, and as soon as I committed it to the story where he was always brandishing this thing, as interesting as it was, I thought, it turned out to be the hardest damn thing to draw. [laughter] All of the twisted swirls of the sword were just an absolute nightmare. I kept my preliminary drawings of the thing pinned over my drawing board and every time I drew that stupid sword, I had to figure out again what it would look like from a different viewpoint. And it got to be so much of a pain in the butt that I had him throw it away. And of course, he throws it in a lake and later on, it shows up [again] and it’s stuck in this stone at the bottom of the lake.

Per your question, there’s, again, that sort of bittersweet “Did I do the right thing?” kind of aspect to it. The question at the end of all of this is, “Have you done what you set out to do? Did you accomplish your goals or did you just piss it all away?” Pardon my French. And, of course, in Morgan’s case, it turns out he pissed it all away, or at least eventually, it’s the way it was intended.

SCHWEIER: With #15, The Warlord went monthly and again, your workload increased. Help came in the form of Vince Colletta as inker.

GRELL: Oh, yeah. At the time, it was a big help.

SCHWEIER: And then later on, it was Bob Smith. How much did they contribute to the book?

GRELL: Well, let me say this: Vinnie was the go-to guy for anybody who had a scheduling problem, okay? Your book could be two months behind and they’d hand it over to Vinnie and he hands it back four hours later, 20 pages inked and it’s done. It wasn’t quite that way, but literally, he could turn a book around in a weekend. And at the end of that weekend, he wouldn’t have a clue what he’d worked on and unfortunately, at the end of that weekend, it would bear very little resemblance to the initial work that you had turned in as well. As an end result of it, I thought I had a very negative experience in that respect and I would say that it was not so much because Vinnie didn’t care what it looked like, but that I had begun to not care what it looked like, and that was no good. That had to change. So basically, what I did was I held back one

issue and sent it in, completely inked. I’d been promised that if I got six weeks ahead of my deadlines that they would just give me another inker and that didn’t happen. I was so far ahead that Jack Adler, the production manager, complained and said, “Don’t send any more art in because we don’t have anyplace to store it.” I was four months—four issues—ahead on my covers, I was three issues ahead on the interior work, and I still couldn’t get a replacement artist. So I held back an issue and inked it myself and the message finally got through. And that’s when, like, first Joe Rubinstein inked the following issue after that and then Bob Smith took over.

SCHWEIER: And how did that work out for you?

GRELL: Oh, it was great. It was great. I felt so relieved that I had someone who actually paid attention to the lines that I was putting down. My interest increased in the book again and I think I was doing a lot better work than I had been doing for quite some time.

SCHWEIER: Another added supporting player was Shakira. And I won’t ask the question, but we’ll give the readers of BACK ISSUE the answer that—yes. All we’re going to say is, “yes.” Is she a cat who turns into a person or a person who turns into a cat? The answer is “yes.”

GRELL: Yes, the answer is yes.

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Vinnie at the Earth’s Core An example of Vince Colletta inks over Mike Grell’s pencils: the splash page to The Warlord #29 (Jan. 1980).

Original art scan courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © 2007 DC Comics.

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SCHWEIER: And why is that?

GRELL: Why is that?

SCHWEIER: From your lips to the readers’ “ears,” why is that?

GRELL: The real reason for that is, why would you want to ruin a perfectly good character by taking away the mystery? I know the answer, but I’m not telling. I had it figured out right from the start whether she’s a woman who turns into a cat or a cat that turns into a woman, and I wrote her according to that from the get-go, but I purposely avoided that question and refused to answer it because I knew that once you took away that mystery, the character would be virtually destroyed.

It was the same reason why I resisted, for all the pressure, to draw a map of Skartaris. Once you have established the boundaries of your world, you’ve put a boundary on your imagination. That was one of the things that really made The Warlord successful. I could do a story that was based on pure science fiction one issue, I could do fantasy/sword and sorcery the next issue, I could have him go from arctic blizzards to tropical jungle to deserts without having to explain how he got from here to there. It just made more sense and of course, [chuckles] after I left the book, one of the first things they did was they sat down and had somebody draw a map of Skartaris. Ah, well.

SCHWEIER: In your eyes, wasn’t the map accurate? Or did you just never give it any thought?

GRELL: Oh, hell no. [Philip laughs] I have an idea, I have an idea of what Skartaris looks like, but—

Mr. Smith Goes to Skartaris This double-page spread (pages 2 and 3) of The Warlord #45 (May 1981) shows the brushwork of Grell’s second inker, Bob Smith.

Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions. © 2007 DC Comics.

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SCHWEIER: You’re not sharing?

GRELL: —I would never commit it to paper, never commit it to paper. Like I said, once you put it down, you’re locked into that. It’s why in the Conan stories, they had to always explain how he got from suchand-such a place to such-and-such a place. Why was he in the desert now? How could he be in the jungle?

How was that possible? Well, it doesn’t make any difference how it’s possible. It’s just make believe.

It’s just a comic book, for God’s sakes.

SCHWEIER: My thinking would be, “Okay, well, he was there, but now he journeyed to here, end of discussion.” You know, people move all the time.

GRELL: Ah, right, right. But they want to know what happened in between, how he got there, if it makes any difference.

SCHWEIER: Often, it doesn’t. Often, it’s just a man on horseback.

GRELL: That’s pretty much what it is, that’s pretty much what it is. The thing applies for, “Where does the Warlord keep his bullets?”

Eventually, I stood up in public and said, “Think of 240 grained, full-metaljacketed suppositories.”

SCHWEIER: Ooh! GRELL: And then I told them that if they were that concerned about it, they were taking it entirely too seriously because it’s only a comic book. And the whole crowd went, “Booooooooo!”

SCHWEIER: [laughs] Apparently, it’s not a comic book to them.

Constipated Champions (left) DC Comics’ Arion and Hercules (Unbound) fleshed out Remco’s Warlord action-figure line. (far left) Another fine Grell commission, courtesy of Catskill Comics. © 2007 DC Comics.

GRELL: [laughs] Apparently not, apparently not.

SCHWEIER: Starting around issue #50, with Deimos vanquished yet again, Laurie Sutton took over as editor of the book—actually, with issue #52—and the art was handed over to somebody else for the first time: Mark Texiera and Mike DeCarlo.

GRELL: Right.

SCHWEIER: What prompted this? Did you just need a break? This was probably back about the time you were starting Starslayer, wasn’t it?

GRELL: I was starting Starslayer, [and] I was doing the Tarzan comic strip in the Sunday papers. As a matter of fact, I was already working on Starslayer and I was beginning developing [Jon] Sable.

I had already, when Laurie Sutton took over the book, also stepped back from the writing and handed that over to my then-wife, Sharon Wright, who ghosted it for I don’t know how many issues, but turned in some of the better stories of the whole run. I learned an awful lot about good storytelling and good character development from Sharon. She is a terrific writer.

SCHWEIER: And nobody noticed. I mean, nobody noticed that a new writer had taken over.

GRELL: Naw. If they noticed in any material sense, I’m sure it was that they noticed that the stories had suddenly gotten much better or more character driven and less action-oriented. My formula was, get as much action as possible, sprinkle with characterization throughout. And Sharon’s was character first and foremost and let the character guide the action. But Laurie Sutton knew.

SCHWEIER: Oh, sure. And about this time, there was a line of Warlord toys.

GRELL: [laughs] Oh, yeah, yeah.

SCHWEIER: What kind of feeling is it to look at something on a toy shelf in any given store in America, knowing you created that?

GRELL: It was very weird because they used the bodies from the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toys and everybody looked, dare I say, constipated? [laughter] You know, excessively bulging muscles.

The costumes were fairly accurate, and some of the faces were not too bad. But they all had this very angry, squatting-down, flexing-their-muscles-likeArnold-Schwarzenegger kind of pose on them. It’s very strange.

SCHWEIER: And it seems you left the book entirely around issue #70, then a whole other writer took over.

Apparently Sharon was no longer writing it and you were no longer doing the covers. It seems that when you finish with a book that on your cover for your last issue, somewhere in there, you’re going to see the number “30,” and that was on the cover of issue #70. But that seemed to happen in the middle of a story. Was it intended to break off in the middle of the story with the idea of “let’s pass the torch and see this end in a completely different fashion”?

GRELL: It wasn’t intended to be as large a break in a storyline as it turned out to be. I’d give an editor notes on where the story was supposed to go, what the intent was. I had left off with Morgan being, essentially, his usual idiot self. He goes off to have fun and Tara basically tells everybody she’s changed the locks on the palace. [Philip laughs] In other words, he can’t come back this time, and my intent was that they should be separated for at least a year’s worth of issues so that Morgan could go on to other things; and that when he came back, that it couldn’t be the same as ever, that he would come back and for the very first time, face the consequences of his actions, M e n

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so he could bring about some character development and change. And I honestly don’t recall the writer, but whoever it was that took over the storyline felt that it was just wrong for a husband and wife to separate under any circumstances and the only right and proper thing was to get them back together again and reconcile, and make everything sweet and lovely, which I think happened in the very next issue.

SCHWEIER: Aw, that’s disappointing.

GRELL: Yeah! I also think—I’m not positive—but I believe that’s the last issue that I read.

SCHWEIER: You did return for some cover work over the years, drawing a cover here or there. What was it like coming back to the book that you had launched? Was it comfortable? Was it like wearing somebody else’s clothes all of a sudden?

GRELL: No, still in my clothes, [Philip laughs] still in my clothes. They’re tailor made to fit me and other people can wear them, but it’s always going to look

Anniversary Issue After leaving his creation, Mike Grell occasionally resurfaced as The Warlord’s cover artist, as with this painting for the cover of issue #100 (Dec. 1985).

Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions. © 2007 DC Comics.

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like a bad fit with the single exception of Dan Jurgens.

Dan brought so much to that book that he can step into The Warlord and wear him like a second skin, no problem at all. But the fact is that The Warlord was tailor made for me and when I go back, it’s like slipping into a pair of old shoes.

SCHWEIER: Early in the run of The Warlord, he was popular enough where a lot of fans said, “Team him up, team him up.” And they actually did think that maybe they would team him up with Batman in The Brave and the Bold, but that never materialized. And Julie Schwartz had said that your stories take place on Earth Grell. But yet, you did team up the Warlord, sort of, with Oliver Queen when you were writing Green Arrow.

GRELL: Yeah, and that was Dan Jurgens’ idea.

[Then-DC editor] Mike Gold called me up and he said, “Dan wants to do a team-up book with the Warlord,” because Dan was drawing Green Arrow at the time. [chuckles] And I said, “Absolutely no bloody way.” And Gold comes back with, “Well, let me put it to you this way—it’s based on the premise that you only know how to draw one face,” and I laughed my butt off. I said, “Okay, let’s do it.” And it became a story about mistaken identity where Ollie will open the door one day and there’s Travis Morgan standing in the doorway. And without any preparations or introductions, he just punches him in the mouth and knocks him on his ass because it turns out that the whole time Morgan has been in Seattle, people have been trying to kill him because he looks like Oliver. [laughs] SCHWEIER: But that was pretty much the last time we saw the Warlord until he appeared on the Justice League Unlimited cartoon. How did that go over with you?

GRELL: I thought it was a hoot. I got a big kick out of watching it. I thought it was well executed, but a bit crowded. I think they were making a concerted effort to establish certain territorial right to aspects of the character and the premises. And so they threw everything they possibly could into the storyline with little regard for whether or not it was really pertinent to the story that was going on at the time. It would have been better if it had been leaner.

SCHWEIER: It seemed to me at the time that they wanted to include somebody different from the DC Universe, and I’m sorry to say that maybe Travis Morgan was not the right choice, given that the nature of his adventures are so different from your costumed superheroes.

Perhaps had they chosen somebody like Adam Strange or something like that, it might have worked a little better.

GRELL: I’m not in a position to judge what audience response was to it, but the feedback I’ve gotten from pals who’ve seen it, they all enjoyed it.

SCHWEIER: I think Warlord fans enjoyed it. I know I did.

So Warlord came back in a new series in 2006, and you were listed in the credits as “Warlord created by Mike Grell.” Have you read it?

GRELL: I have read the first three issues, which is what I’ve got so far. I’m still trying to figure out what the story is, but sooner or later, I’m sure they have a direction that they’re going. It’s just the storytelling technique, Bruce’s [Jones] approach to writing a story, is different than mine so he’s spending more time in the development of the stages than I would have. Beyond that, like I say, I’m trying to figure out what the story is. I’m not really in a position to judge.

SCHWEIER: That’s a pretty fair assessment, I think.

Also, comic-book writing today is a lot different than it was in 1976 in terms of extended story arcs and fewer panels to a page, so you have that broader canvas to explore characterization and drag things out a little bit.

Some people appreciate that; personally, I like a highly dense, condensed story. But that’s just me. I’m old school.

GRELL: Ah, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with “old school.” Good storytelling is good storytelling. You can only rely on your [laughs] contract for so long, okay?

SCHWEIER: Uh-huh.

GRELL: If you’ve been signed to a contract to write a 12-issue book, then you can feel a certain amount of freedom to take as long to develop that story as you want. But I’ll tell you what, if the readers do stay with you for 12 issues, you had damn well better deliver.

The last two issues can save the first ten. But in the real world of publishing books, of writing stories, having always been a big admirer of Mickey Spillane, I’m belaboring his theory that it’s the first page of your book that sells that book and it’s the last page of your book that sells your next one. And you have to think of that in terms of storytelling in, you know, comics and series as well. It’s your first book that’s going to sell your next book and it’s your last book that’s going to sell your next series.

SCHWEIER: I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. Any final thoughts on The Warlord? Anything you care to add?

GRELL: Nah, other than the fact that I know how the [Warlord’s] story ends and I ain’t telling unless and until DC gives me the opportunity to write and draw that story.

SCHWEIER: For such an important story in the Warlord tale, I would think that you would be maybe working on that off and on, developing a script or sketching out some pages.

GRELL: It’s already developed, sketched out, and written in my brain.

SCHWEIER: [laughs] And that’s where it’s going to belong, for safe keeping.

GRELL: Yep. I had this story locked down and locked in when I first began the series.

SCHWEIER: Think you’ll ever get a chance to do that?

GRELL: I don’t know. I think it really all depends on the success of the current series. If the current series is successful, then probably not. If the current series is not successful, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we came back a few years from now and took another whack at it and went ahead and told that story the way that it’s supposed to be told.

SCHWEIER: Well, I guess that’s a bittersweet hope.

You want to see it—but then again, you don’t want Warlord to end. Nevertheless, in comics today, whatever ends?

GRELL: [shouts] I HOPE TO KILL THAT BASTARD OFF! [laughter] When you just stop and think for a minute, when Hal Foster began Prince Valiant, Hal always intended to kill Prince Valiant. He always intended to turn the entire storyline over to his son, Prince Arn. And that seemed like such a wonderfully logical approach to an epic story that I’ve always wanted to do the same thing. Who the archetype for it, of course, is the story of the son fulfilling the father’s dream.

SCHWEIER: The Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner’s Ring cycle?

GRELL: Absolutely, absolutely. The father starts out with the best of intentions, but because of his own inherent weakness, somehow is unable to fulfill them.

Sir Lancelot and Galahad and the quest for the Holy

Grail—Lancelot’s personal weakness, despite the fact that he was the best knight in the realm, his personal weakness when it came to Guinevere made him unworthy to achieve the Grail, but his son could.

And in Arthur himself, you have a dual failure because Arthur fails in that his son’s a miserable bastard who becomes the ultimate villain of the piece. It’s just a great way of repeating something that is in the basic human makeup as well. We all hope that our children will have a better life than we had, will fulfill the dreams that we never fulfilled, live out the promises we never kept.

SCHWEIER: I’d buy that story.

GRELL: I hope so. [Philip chuckles]—I hope you get the chance.

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Warlord #112 Grell’s cover rough to issue #112 (Dec. 1986), courtesy of Scott Kress, and the published, finished cover (in the inset). © 2007 DC Comics.

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Call Me Mister … Mister Machine!

THE STORY OF

TM

by

Allan Harvey

Upon his return to Marvel Comics in late 1975, writerartist Jack Kirby was offered a peculiar assignment. 2001: A Space Odyssey had been a hit movie in 1968, telling the story of mankind’s evolution from primitive man-ape to godlike Star Child. Now Kirby was tasked with developing a comics adaptation. It’s not clear as to why anyone at Marvel thought such a project would be a success eight years after the movie’s release.

BEYOND 2001 The adaptation duly appeared in mid-1976 as a tabloid-sized Treasury Special. While Kirby was no doubt fascinated with the premise of the movie, his bombastic, action-packed art style was almost the antithesis of that required for a faithful adaptation of what was a very ponderous film.

Kirby then had the chance to go beyond the movie.

As a monthly comic 2001: A Space Odyssey was something of a mixed bag, being an anthology series featuring plots similar to the film. Following #7, however, Kirby—or Marvel—had a rethink. Anthologies were a notoriously difficult sell, and so the decision was made to create an ongoing character for the 2001 title.

Running over the final three issues of 2001 (#8–10), “Mister Machine” features a secret military/scientific establishment that has developed “thinking computers in the form of men.” Labeled the “X-series,” these machines appear almost human, but are in fact robots intended for space exploration.

However, when a number of the X-series exhibit signs of madness, they are all marked for destruction.

X-51 is different. He has been allowed to stay at the home of scientist Abel Stack. Stack has taken such a shine to X-51, he’s renamed him Aaron, and begun to treat him as a surrogate son. Aaron has a humanlooking facemask and wig that hides his robotic visage.

Informed that X-51 is to be terminated, Stack is understandably distraught.

Avenging Automaton Signed by the King himself, original cover art to Machine Man #8, penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Bob Wiacek. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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X-51 barrels through soldiers on this Kirby/ Royer page from 2001 #9 (Aug. 1977), courtesy of Anthony Snyder (www.anthonysnyder.com/art). © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

He removes an explosive device from Aaron’s interior and sends his “son” out to be amongst real humans.

Aaron is excited and relishes this chance to experience humanity. Stack dies when the device explodes.

Unaware of the fate of his “father,” Aaron explores the world at large. Flying over a city, he soon attracts the attention of a police SWAT team and is chased away, only to fall foul of a small army unit that blasts him with sonic weaponry.

Held captive on a military base, Aaron is confronted

by Colonel Kragg. Kragg hates the X-series for costing him an eye. Project head Doctor Broadhurst, meanwhile, attempts to understand Aaron. He is convinced that X-51 is different from the other X-models, and won’t similarly go mad. Kragg is far from convinced.

Aaron is visited by the Monolith, that mysterious alien artifact from 2001. While it’s not explicitly stated, the implication is that the Monolith helps Aaron evolve into something more than the simple machine he was.

Aaron escapes his confinement, more sure of his humanity than ever, and Doctor Broadhurst arranges

2001 © 2007 MGM.

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for him to be allowed to leave the base. Unaware that a tracking device has been secreted on him, Aaron tells the soldiers that next time they meet he will insist on being called “…Mister! Mister Machine!”

The Monolith appears again and imparts more quasi-mystical knowledge, then vanishes (never to be mentioned again), leaving Mister Machine (MM) alone with a small boy, Jerry Fields, whose elder sister requires help with a flat tire.

Observing these events is the mysterious Mr. Hotline, and his chauffeur, the wonderfully named Kringe.

Hotline is keen to secure an X-model for his own purposes. He sends a small force to attack, but MM overcomes them very quickly.

Young Jerry Fields idolizes MM, believing him to be “a Marvel Comics super-hero” (clearly Kirby intended this story to take place outside the Marvel universe).

Sadly, Aaron is treated with fear and resentment by almost everyone else he meets.

Mr. Hotline and Kringe ponder their failure to capture X-51. Kringe believes that X-51 is “veritably human!

He thinks like a man! He acts like a man! That machine possesses the faculty of free will!!” Hotline threatens him into silence, for Hotline is a member of the Brotherhood of Hades, a society that opposes free will.

Meanwhile, at the home of the Fields, Aaron is made welcome. It is the first real kindness he has known since he left Abel Stack’s care. Suddenly, Hotline’s soldiers burst in and attack the family. They threaten the Fields with harm unless MM comes with them. Reluctantly, he does so.

Technicians dismantle him, and take his head to Satan-like Mind Monitor. MM’s electronic brain is probed to discover the programming that allows him free will. Thus defined, the Mind Monitor will then eliminate free will from humanity and enslave the planet.

MM takes remote control of his limbs, which kick and punch their way free and reassemble themselves in the Mind Monitor’s chamber. He then blasts the Monitor with his weapons system. The truth is revealed: The Monitor is just a super-computer.

Aaron destroys it and flees, freeing the Fields family from their captivity. As he watches the Brotherhood’s complex burn, Aaron ponders his destiny.

It’s an interesting story—and a strangely low-key one. Kirby was attempting something different. The vast majority of comics he produced in the 1970s followed a set layout: a page-one splash, followed by an all-action double-page spread. However, in all the 12 comics Kirby drew featuring MM, only one has a double-page spread. It seems that Kirby deliberately intended MM’s story to be more cerebral than action-packed.

Through MM, Kirby was exploring themes such as alienation, place within society, the rights of the individual, and whether a machine that looks like a man, acts like a man, and thinks like a man should be considered a man— all questions later posed by the film Blade Runner.

That Aaron Stack is hounded at every turn, and feared by the very people he tries to help, is essentially a continuation of themes Kirby had explored before with the Silver Surfer. They’re ideas that must have fascinated him, as he would return to them once again in his late masterpiece, Silver Star.

MM himself is hardly Kirby’s most interesting design. He wears a purple jumpsuit with silver trimmings, and balaclava-like headgear. His large yellow eyes are the most distinctive aspect of his appearance.

He can fly or, as Kirby put it, “cancel the gravity equation.” His pride and joy is his hand-weapons system that includes a flamethrower and various blasters. Later on, things would get even wilder as almost every issue had some new device popping out of MM’s body.

Mister Machine’s origin concluded in 2001 #10 with a blurb anticipating a solo title. By the time that magazine appeared—six months later—he’d changed his name.

MACHINE MAN SPINS OFF When all nine issues of Kirby’s Machine Man are read in a single sitting, it becomes clear—like with his Fourth World material at DC—that Kirby intended the saga to have a definite end. In this respect, as in so many areas, Kirby was decades ahead of fashion. Today, comics routinely serialize longer stories that are then collected in book form. In 1978, that was unheard of in American comics; but Kirby dared to dream.

Machine Man #1–9 (Apr.–Dec. 1978) presents a single, ongoing story where MM tries to find his place in the world. He is hunted by the authorities, and treated with fear and suspicion by almost everyone he meets. All the while he fights for humanity, and his goodness in the face of such adversity shines through.

The first issue sees the US government declaring MM a menace due to the destructive tendencies of the earlier X-models. Doctor Broadhurst is ordered to destroy X-51, and bring about the total closure of the project.

Meanwhile, MM meets Peter Spalding, a psychiatrist. Intrigued by this artificial man who thinks like a human, Spalding offers to help, but Colonel Kragg’s forces attack them. This disgusts Broadhurst, who implores Kragg not to “destroy that miraculous brain!”

MM manages to escape and Spalding offers him sanctuary, but he is soon caught up in the invasion plans of Ten-For, a malevolent alien machine intent on subjugating mankind. Even while he tries to find a way to defeat the menace, MM is hounded by the military and faces a moment of doubt as to whether he is doing the right thing protecting an ungrateful humanity.

Eventually, MM faces Ten-For one-on-one, machine against human machine, and destroys him. Temporarily reprieved, MM finds himself brought before a Congressional Committee that will decide his ultimate fate. Colonel Kragg, impressed by MM’s conduct in the battle against Ten-For, comes to respect his former quarry. The case for destroying MM is then taken up by the evil Senator Brickman, who means to ensure that the Congressional Committee finally decides against MM by organizing a negative publicity campaign.

It is at this point that Jack Kirby’s contract with Marvel expired, and he left comics for animation. Had he stayed, there’s little doubt that he would have concluded the Machine Man story with the final hearing of the Congressional Committee. There, MM would probably have delivered a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style filibuster speech convincingly arguing for his inherent humanity, free will, and right to life. The End. But, sadly, Kirby never got that far, so we’ll never know for sure.

ROYER’S RECOLLECTIONS Famously, Kirby had something of a cloth ear for dialogue and his characters tend to speak with a single voice filled with unnatural emphases and unlikely slang. Provided the reader can get past that, though, there is much to love in Machine Man, and Kirby’s art and storytelling skills are as strong as ever.

Throughout this period Mike Royer was the book’s inker.

“Most of the time,” recalls Royer, “Jack would mail me a complete book of pencils via the old Special Delivery Service of the USPS. About half the time I would return the completed lettered and inked pages to him in the same manner.

“My first thought when getting a book from Jack to ink was the initial rush of holding all that power in my hands. I loved the raw energy of his pencils and then I was filled with dread. ‘Gawd … don’t blow this, Mike.’ But to keep up with Jack’s output I had to letter a complete book in less than two days, and ink three pages a day after the lettering was completed.

Kirby magic from two issues of MM’s original series: page 23 of issue #7 (courtesy of Keith Veronese), and page 7 of #8 (courtesy of Heritage). © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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“I was always intimidated (in a positive way) by the power of Jack’s work and I didn’t want to screw anything up, but I was not influenced by a recent body of work that Jack had inked himself. So, in essence, I just ploughed into the work and did it. There are those who don’t care for my work, but they have to let it go. I gave Jack what he wanted and it was a hell of a long time ago.

“I don’t know if I ever really gave [Machine Man] much thought. On my drawing board was another book of raw power and energy and I just dove into the maelstrom. There was a part of me that secretly wished that I was lettering and inking Captain America (I got to do a few!) and The FF, or The Hulk, but Jack rarely looked back.

“There are those who don’t care as much for the later Jack Kirby creations but they need to realize that Jack, as a creator, continued to evolve. He didn’t stand still and he had concepts that he felt were perhaps served better by new characters and situations.

One can find those that greatly dislike Devil Dinosaur, but they would be amazed at how many fans have told me at comic cons how much they love Devil Dinosaur. It’s the first Kirby they saw and they were caught up in the energy of his storytelling, period!”

MACHINE MAN: REACTIVATED With Jack Kirby’s departure, Machine Man was canceled.

Marvel had plans for the character, though, and the final issue asked readers to look out for a future appearance in The Incredible Hulk. Sure enough, MM guest-starred in a four-part story that ran through issues #234–237 (Apr.–July 1979) of the Jade Giant’s magazine. Roger Stern wove a tale that quickly tied up the dangling Congressional Committee plotline, and brought the character firmly into the Marvel universe.

© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Artist Steve Ditko was well suited for Marvel’s Machine Man, as seen here on the cover to issue #14 (Apr. 1980). © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Following his brawl with the Hulk, MM was left severely damaged. This plot was taken up the very next month in Machine Man #10 (Aug. 1979). The revived title was now in the hands of writer/editor Marv Wolfman and artist Steve Ditko.

Machine Man #10 features a flashback to X-51’s origin and sees him repaired by Doctor Broadhust, who takes the opportunity to redesign Aaron’s systems.

As a result of this, many of the more outrageous Kirby gadgets are removed. Gone too is the hand-weapons system. One improvement is the reduction of his ocular system, so facially Aaron now looks more human than before.

Wolfman changed the direction of the strip.

Whereas Kirby had always emphasized MM’s humanity, Wolfman tended to have him make speeches about how hard it is to be a machine in a world of men.

Peter Spaulding (now spelled with a “u”) remains his constant sidekick, however, and offers Aaron a partial solution to his problems by arranging for him to take on a job, as Aaron Stack, at an insurance firm.

As an insurance investigator, Aaron takes to wearing a purple suit and dark glasses. Though quiet and aloof, he soon finds himself subject to the unwanted attentions of company fox, Maggie Jones—with much sub-Clark Kent/Lois Lane humor resulting.

After five issues Wolfman departed, and Machine Man #15 was the first written by Tom DeFalco.

DeFalco wasted no time in completely changing the book’s style. What had been a solid, if uninspired, title suddenly saw a rip-roaring revival of the Silver Age House of Ideas, with DeFalco solidly installed as Stan Lee! Alliteration abounded, and the scripts took on a knowing tone with frequent winks to the audience.

For any fan of early Marvel comics, this run is a joy— especially as Ditko remained in good form throughout.

DeFalco remembers his work fondly: “[The new direction came about because] I was desperate. Machine Man was the first regular assignment that I was given by Marvel Comics and I only got it because the title wasn’t selling well and no one else wanted to do it. I remember talking to my editor—the legendary Denny O’Neil— and we threw a lot of ideas at each other. We wanted to do something that was different from every other comic book on the market at the time. Somehow we decided to kick the dialogue into adjective overdrive.

“I read Kirby’s Machine Man—heck, I read everything that Kirby did! I was and still am a big fan of his work.

Jack Kirby was a living idea factory. He was an onrushing freight train that hurled ideas at you, one after another, until you were completely buried under them. His technique could be a little unsettling at times and didn’t lend itself to coherent stories and identifiable characters.”

How did DeFalco find working with that other ’60s legend, Steve Ditko? “It was a fan’s dream come true.

When Denny asked me to write the book, he told me that Steve wanted to see my first plot before he would agree to stay. In those days, I used to put my phone number on every plot that I wrote, just to make it easier for the editor or artist to get a hold of me. A few days after I sent the plot in, I got a call from Steve. I’ll always remember that he began the conversation by asking, ‘What qualifications do you have to write about heroes and how do you define a hero?’ We ended up talking for almost two hours and he decided to stay on the book.

“Steve told me early on that I was the writer and it was my job to develop the story ideas. However, while we didn’t discuss story ideas, we pretty much discussed

everything else. We talked about philosophy, ethics, politics, and dozens of other subjects. Steve is one of the most fascinating conversationalists I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. He could debate an issue for hours. If I happened to agree with him on a certain point, he would take the other side just so that we could better explore the issue together.

“Long after Machine Man was canceled, Steve would often stop in my office for coffee and conversation.”

DeFalco wasted little time in making a major character change. Peter Spaulding had been a friend to MM since the first issue, but now he would be sidelined in favor of DeFalco’s own creation, Gears Garvin.

“Peter was a psychologist, a man of thoughts, words, and feelings, a man who could mentally aid MM in his quest for his own humanity,” explains DeFalco.

“I introduced Gears because I thought the series needed a more down-to-earth kind of guy, a mechanic who could help repair MM and aid him on a more physical and visual level.”

Though the title was cancelled with #19, the five issues written by DeFalco are chock full of fun, introducing such villains as Baron Brimstone, Madam Menace, and Jack O’Lantern (who later became the Hobgoblin).

Indeed, so charmed with MM was he, that DeFalco would go on to utilize him in several stories in both Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Two-In-One.

Herb had already drawn the first issue of the limited series and had started work on the second. Barry saw Herb’s pencils and was intrigued enough to ask who was going to ink the series. Since no inker has been assigned yet, Barry volunteered for the job. Initially, [he] was going to ink the book under a pen name. As he got deeper into the series, he decided that he would use his real name.”

“Barry was a close friend at the time,” recalls Herb Trimpe, “and, in spite of what I knew about his work and the way he felt about Marvel, I thought it would be fun [to collaborate]. [My] pencils were full-size and tight. I think the only thing I didn’t spend a lot of time on was indicating the blacks. Otherwise, the drawings were very detailed.”

This collaboration, with Trimpe providing the pencil artwork to be finished and colored by WindsorSmith, was not as smooth as it appeared.

“Not to cut the point too fine,” says Trimpe, “it was not an enjoyable thing to work on. Barry considers himself a great storyteller, and he is a very good one, but if you pointed out that my storytelling was some-

An elektra-fying Frank Miller-penciled (with Dave Simons inks) cover pairing Spidey and MM, from Marvel Team-Up #99 (Nov. 1980).

Original art scan courtesy of Mike Burkey (www.romitaman.com). © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

MACHINE MAN 2020 Cancellation proved not to be the end. While MM’s career lay dormant for a few years, he was revived in 1984 for a brilliant four-issue limited series.

DeFalco remained as writer, with the art now handled by the unlikely, but extremely effective, team of Herb Trimpe and Barry Windsor-Smith.

DeFalco: “Herb Trimpe and I enjoyed working together and we decided to put a project together.

We started tossing ideas around and I mentioned MM. Herb was thrilled because he wanted to do something different and thought MM would give him the opportunity. I pitched the idea of a limited series to editor Larry Hama. Larry liked the idea but he didn’t want to just bring the character back. He challenged me and Herb to come up with something really different—something that was different from every other comic book on the market.

“Herb and I kicked into story mode and we came up with the idea for Machine Man 2020. I wrote an outline that broke the story into four issues. Larry loved it and so did editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, who approved it.”

The plot for the miniseries had MM’s dismantled “corpse” discovered on a scrap heap by a gang of scavengers in the year 2020. Revived by them and given a new red-and-white paint job, he helps them overcome the machinations of the evil Sunset Bain, aka Madam Menace. Aided and abetted by Arno Stark, the Iron Man of 2020, and the aged Ambassador Brickman, Bain wants nothing more than MM’s total destruction.

Following a brutal battle with Stark in the fourth issue, MM and the scavengers ultimately triumph thanks to the intervention of Jocasta, one-time Avenger, and Aaron’s long lost love—a fellow survivor from the 20th century.

The series saw the return to comics of once and future superstar Barry Windsor-Smith. He’d left after his much-lauded run on Conan in the early 1970s, and spent the intervening years producing fine art.

By 1984 he was keen to find an avenue back to comics.

“Herb Trimpe and Barry Windsor-Smith were friends and neighbors,” explains Tom DeFalco. “At some point, Barry visited Herb and asked him what he was working on.

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© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Look closely at panel 5 on this page from the 1984 Machine Man miniseries for finisher (over Herb Trimpe’s pulsepounding layouts) Barry Windsor-Smith’s signature (initials, actually). Original art scan courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Aaron Stack takes a lickin’ but keeps on tickin’!

Detail from page 22 of issue #10 (May 2000) of MM’s X-51 series. Art courtesy of Anthony Snyder. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

thing that matched his, you’d have a problem. So a marriage made in Heaven is not the way I would describe that project, and neither would he—granted, for different reasons.”

For his part, Windsor-Smith feels differently: “I had wanted to return to comics art for awhile, but found that I had lost touch with comics’ necessary dynamics after a ten-year absence from the medium. Around that time, my friend Herb Trimpe was beginning the MM series. Inking his pencil work seemed like a good way to jump-start my dormant stylistic brain patterns.

It helped me enormously. By the fourth book I was writing, penciling, inking, and coloring again.

“I did enjoy it. It was an important re-learning exercise for me.

Herb was gracious to let me take it over the way I did. It was a necessary thing to do, though, to find my feet again.”

DeFalco: “I loved working on [Machine Man 2020]. It gave me a chance to stretch myself creatively and to work with Herb.

Herb and I had a blast. We collaborated very closely, discussing how each scene would play out and the themes we wanted to hit.

“Herb and I were the storytellers for the first three issues.

Barry worked closely with Herb on the artwork. For reasons that I no longer remember, Herb couldn’t do the last issue of the series, so Barry graciously did the pencils as well as the inks. Needless to say, Barry did a terrific job, but I still wish Herb could have been there!”

The resulting series, with its blend of sci-fi, super-heroics, and the best efforts of three unique creative talents was, to this author, one of the finest things Marvel published during that period.

“Really?” ponders Windsor-Smith. “I’m certainly not questioning your taste or choice in the matter, but this must mean that most of the other stuff from that period was pretty low grade.

“I don’t usually praise myself—quite the opposite, in fact— but I thought the last issue was really very good. The old guy shooting himself; the love-lost dynamic between MM and [Jocasta]; and the fight between Iron Man and MM, where MM gets pretty much smashed to pieces. I thought that was cool.”

With the limited series proving successful enough to be reprinted several times, it is perhaps a little strange that there was no sequel.

DeFalco again: “When we were working on the series, Herb and I were just focused on doing the best four issues we could. We had no plans beyond the one story. After the series came out, enough people seemed to like it to justify a sequel.

Herb and I kept trying to get together to work one, but something else always got in the way. We were both very busy in those days and never got beyond the ‘Hey, we should do another one of those’ stage. It never occurred to us to pitch a series about Machine Man 2020. We both knew that no one would buy a series based on a possible alternate future … at least until Spider-Girl came around.”

Following the limited series, and a stint as an Avenger, MM headed temporarily for comics limbo.

He would be revived again several times in the 1990s and beyond—and even get his own series again under the X-51 title, which ran 12 issues (Sept. 1999–July 2000). All of which goes to prove that you just can’t keep a good machine down—especially a human one.

“I loved the fact that Machine Man was always struggling with his humanity and trying to improve himself,” concludes DeFalco. “He wanted to be best the ‘man’ he could be—a worthy goal for all of us!”

ALLAN HARVEY is a London-based writer and artist. He maintains Gorilla Daze, a blog that appreciates wacky comics. It can be found at www.thefifthbranch.com/gorilladaze.

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TM

by

Dan Johnson

cond ucte d July 12, 2007

If you want to succeed in business, you have to tap into your full potential. While on the comics page Tony Stark may have learned that lesson a long time ago, some of the writers and artists who were crafting tales of his alter ego, Iron Man, had not. All that changed though when inker Bob Layton and writer David Michelinie were given the nod to helm the adventures of Ol’ Shellhead from Iron Man #116 (Nov. 1978) to #153 (Dec. 1981). During their run on the book, Iron Man became a major power player in the Marvel Universe and a huge hit with fans of Marvel Comics.

More importantly, the man in the Golden Armor, Tony Stark, took center stage in the series and was finally fleshed out as a character. The world that the man behind Stark Industries inhabited, and comics in general, became richer for this new emphasis. Indeed, Layton and Michelinie’s initial run was so successful and fondly remembered that they were asked to return to the book for a second time during Iron Man #215–232 (Feb. 1988–July 1989).

Recently BACK ISSUE caught up with Layton and Michelinie and got the story about their two times with the Golden Avenger, and we also got the inside scoop about how they are returning to the character once more in an effort to yet again build a better Iron Man. – Dan Johnson DAN JOHNSON: Thank you both for sitting down and doing this “Pro2Pro” interview with BACK ISSUE. The theme of this particular issue is “Men of Steel,” and you certainly can’t do an issue like this without talking about Iron Man. Tell our readers how you two came to work on this character.

DAVID MICHELINIE: We had worked together at DC on Claw the Unconquered and we had become friends over that [series]. We had both recently left DC to work for Marvel and we were offered Iron Man by Jim Shooter.

I had never read Iron Man before, and it was one of Bob’s

Iron Men Tony Stark and his temporary replacement as Iron Man, James “Rhodey” Rhodes, in a 2001 Bob Layton commissioned illustration.

From the collection of Chris Murrin. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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favorite books, so we made a good team. Bob knew all the stuff that had happened in the past, and I knew absolutely nothing, so I was coming to it with fresh eyes.

BOB LAYTON: If I remember correctly, there were three books offered to us and Iron Man was one of them. They were three books that were at the bottom [in sales rankings]. Do you recall that?

MICHELINIE: It may well have happened, but I have no memory of that.

LAYTON: I think I was just so excited to find out Iron Man was one of the books they had available.

MICHELINIE: If so, then that’s probably the reason I picked it. The advantage of having you know the character was probably a factor.

LAYTON: It’s safe to say that Dave kind of rolled with this.

I was always such a huge fan of armored characters anyway, from my King Arthur obsession on, that Dave just listened to all my ranting about this character from my childhood and he formed his take on Iron Man from my opinions. Is that fair, Dave?

MICHELINIE: [slight pause] Okay.

LAYTON: [laughs] MICHELINIE: I don’t know if I formed my opinions, but I certainly got a great deal of background, and your enthusiasm bled off into my viewpoint, I’m sure.

LAYTON: I was a lot more excitable in those days.

MICHELINIE: I don’t know if that has diminished.

LAYTON: [laughter] Thanks!

JOHNSON: You said Iron Man was selling poorly when you took over. When you sat down together to discuss what needed to be done to improve the sales, what conclusions did you draw? What changes did you think had to be made?

LAYTON: Get rid of the Ani-Men! [laughter] Wasn’t that our first agenda, Dave?

MICHELINIE: I think our first agenda was to push the character into a more realistic direction, looking at Tony Stark as a real guy and determining what would a real guy in his position do.

That’s why one of the first storylines we wanted to do was “Demon in a Bottle,” an alcoholism storyline.

S.H.I.E.L.D. had been trying to take over his company and [Stark] had all kinds of women problems. As some would say, you wouldn’t give his problems to a monkey on a rock. [Faced with these problems,] what would a real person do? A real person would look for some kind of safety valve and at the time, with Tony being a millionaire playboy in the 1980s before crack cocaine became such a popular item, drinking seemed to be the logical way to push him. That was our main thrust, to try and take this character and change him as a real person and see where that led us.

Corner symbol art by Bob Layton used during the Iron Man run penciled by John Romita, Jr.

Beginnings: Inker on Charlie Nichols’ pencils for “By the Dawn’s Early Light,” published in Charlton Comics’ Beyond the Grave #5 (Apr. 1976)

Milestones: Co-creator of the Huntress / plotter and inker on Iron Man / writer and artist on Hercules limited series / writer on X-Factor / co-founder of Valiant Comics / co-creator of X-O Manowar / co-founder of Future Comics

Works in Progress: Iron Man: The End one-shot / a new miniseries featuring the third installment of the Iron Man/Dr. Doom/Camelot trilogy for Marvel Comics / writer and inker of the online monthly web-comic, Colony, at www.boblayton.com

Cyberspace: www.boblayton.com

BOB LAYTON Photo courtesy of Bob Layton.

Beginnings: “Puglyon’s Crypt,” published in DC’s House of Secrets #116 (Feb. 1974)

Milestones: Co-plotter and scripter of Iron Man / The Avengers / Star Wars / The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones / The Unknown Soldier / The Bozz Chronicles / The Amazing Spider-Man / creator of Venom / Action Comics / co-founder of Future Comics

Works in Progress: Co-plotter and scripter of Iron Man: The End one-shot and Iron Man/Dr. Doom/Camelot trilogy miniseries for Marvel Comics / short stories for Moonstone prose anthologies including The Phantom Chronicles and Moonstone Monsters: Werewolves

DAVID MICHELINIE Photo courtesy of Bob Layton.

© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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(above left) Layton’s first cover to Iron Man #121 (Apr. 1979), guest-starring the Sub-Mariner, was bounced for the version in the inset because “the characters were considered too high on the page and the editor felt the Iron Man figure needed to be more dynamic.” (above right) “This was my original draft of Iron Man #128 (yep—‘Demon in a Bottle’),” Layton discloses.

“When you look at it, you’ll easily be able to tell why it wasn’t used. It just didn’t have any ‘ommph’—if you know what I mean. (Okay …

I was still wet behind the ears then, but this drawing has to be a collectors’ item given the story’s place in history.)” (left) It’s a bad idea to turn your back on the Hulk! Note that the position of Iron Man’s body in Bob Layton’s original, unpublished cover to Iron Man #131 (contributed by Yoram Matzkin) was changed by the artist in the published version, seen in the inset. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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(right) The imbibing Iron Man, by David Michelinie, John Romita, Jr., and Bob Layton, from issue #123. Special thanks to Sean Clarke. (below) Bob Layton’s takeoff of his immortal Iron Man #128 cover, a commission from the collection of Michael DeLeRee. Iron Man © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. Preacher © 2007 Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.

LAYTON: One of the key things Dave did when we first sat down to do this thing was ask what makes this character different than all the other Marvel characters.

He wanted to know what we could do to make him different. Over the course of that discussion, we talked about the fact that Tony Stark was a businessman and he ran a business, and that became the thrust of the personal conflicts with the character. We wanted to emphasize that aspect and I think it was Dave who really clued in on this fact that was really the catalyst for some really good stories.

MICHELINIE: Thank you. If you look back at our run, you’ll see that most of the stories were generated from Tony Stark’s activities as a businessman as opposed to him being a superhero and bad guys coming to attack him.

The other element we realized is that Iron Man doesn’t have any powers and he makes his power with his armor, and that was the unique aspect of him.

He wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider or bathed in gamma radiation. Tony made himself and made his powers and his superhero identity. That was another thing we wanted to explore and play up.

JOHNSON: It plays into the type of person Tony Stark would be, too. He’s not only self-made in terms of being a businessman, but he’s self-made as a superhero.

You gents have already touched on several things I would like to explore further. First, let’s talk about the character’s alcoholism. Was there ever any concern at Marvel about pursuing that storyline? These days, flawed superheroes are a dime a dozen, but back in the day this was breaking new ground. I could be wrong, but that was really the first time you had a major superhero being shown with an addiction.

MICHELINIE: Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams did do the Green Lantern/Green Arrow stuff with drugs.

That preceded us over at DC. It was Speedy, wasn’t it, who was the addict in Green Lantern/Green Arrow?

LAYTON: Yeah, and this is not to diminish that story at all, because it’s a great story, but the difference was our story was the first time a title character got involved in substance abuse.

JOHNSON: That’s what I was thinking. At the time of Denny and Neal’s story, Speedy was a sidekick and not really being used all that much. Iron Man was a betterknown character, with toys that were based on the hero, like the Mego action figure. Since there was merchandise out there, I figure Marvel might have gotten hesitant at some point about Stark’s drinking.

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MICHELINIE: Actually, Iron Man, at the time we took him over, wasn’t a top-tier character. He wasn’t a Spider-Man or an Incredible Hulk. He was still a secondary character at that time, both sales-wise and perception-wise. If we had tried to make Peter Parker a drug addict or something like that, we might have hit more resistance.

As I remember it, we were only given one criterion to follow. We were told to do it well. Marvel gave us a lot of trust. It was a good story and they let us go.

I don’t remember, and Bob, maybe you do, so feel free to break in, but I don’t remember anytime when we were doing that story arc that Marvel said, “Don’t do this,” or “Pull back on that.”

LAYTON: I think Marvel thought we were really on to something, given where we started. Plus the idea was solid, and it wouldn’t be irreparable [where] if we deal with this subject Tony Stark couldn’t be Iron Man anymore. I think we presented it in such a way that

it made sense. As long as we didn’t have Tony Stark vomiting on camera or taking a piss in a flower pot in the lobby of Stark International, we were going to be fine.

MICHELINIE: Save that for the sequel.

LAYTON: Yes! [laughter] JOHNSON: Back in the day, the concept of a public figure like Tony Stark being an alcoholic would have been fodder mainly for tabloid newspapers you would find at supermarket check-outs. Today, though, given the world we live in with 24-hour-a-day news channels, the Internet, and the ability for the common person to record and distribute information, people are very aware that celebrities in stress-filled positions can and do turn to drugs and alcohol.

What you guys did originally showed some tremendous insight into the mindset of someone who has some pretty amazing powers via his armors and a vast fortune, but who still can find his life spinning out of control and needs a crutch.

LAYTON: I think that’s exactly it. It was a logical progression, especially for a guy under that much pressure and a guy who has to deal with his own celebrity as well. Tony Stark was just as famous as Iron Man. Dave and I kind of touched on that in the story where Iron Man was always kind of a nice escape valve and it was a way Stark could become anonymous and go do things. In the course of the story, when we took that away from him and he couldn’t be Iron Man anymore, that’s when the pressure really started to build for him.

JOHNSON: You said you really wanted to build up the character of Tony Stark, and one of the best moves you made was to begin introducing new supporting characters to Stark’s world, both confidants and adversaries.

One of the best of the new characters was Jim Rhodes. I thought it was great that Stark had someone there he could trust with his secret identity and could depend on.

LAYTON: In order to make the fantastic believable you really have to surround the person doing the fantastic stuff with real human beings. That was one of the things we realized was seriously lacking, people who could see what was happening to Tony with their eyes. Tony Stark didn’t have any friends to speak of and no one to talk to who could second-guess him.

Bob Layton reveals that “this cover [Iron Man #143 (Feb. 1981)] was rejected after the editor-in-chief stated that he wanted more scope on the scene, since it took place in ‘friggin’ outer space.’ So in the final version [inset], I made the figures smaller and showed more of the space station and debris. This page was originally penciled back in 1981 and inked by me in 2005.” © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Says Bob Layton, who kindly submitted this art, “This was a cover I did for a popular Iron Man webzine, Advanced Iron, based on the cover to Tales of Suspense #41 (May 1963).”

Compare it to the published cover, in the inset. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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MICHELINIE: The thing was Iron Man had friends, like Captain America and so forth, but we never wrote Iron Man. We always plotted and wrote Tony Stark. Whether he was in a business suit or a suit of armor, he was the same character, and we felt that was a very important focus of what we did. As far as creating a supporting cast, we looked at it from a logical viewpoint and said, “What do we need?” As Tony Stark he’s not going to fly around. He needs someone to fly him, he needs a pilot. That was the genesis initially of Jim Rhodes, and as we developed Jim, he became Tony’s friend. It was the same with Mrs. Arbogast. Tony needed an executive secretary.

LAYTON: [He also] needed a woman who was immune to his persuasive powers.

MICHELINIE: Well, I think most people would have been immune to her feminine wiles as well. Arbogast was someone who stood up to Tony, too.

JOHNSON: How about Justin Hammer?

MICHELINIE: Hammer also came from need. There were all of these secondary bad guys who always seemed to be caught.

They could never successfully rob a bank, but you wondered where the hell they were getting all their costumes and weapons. Some of them were really dumb and couldn’t have invented this stuff, so where was it coming from?

Justin Hammer [was] the solution to that question. He’s a villain, but he sits back and doesn’t take chances. He finances other villains for a percentage of the take. That seemed to make sense and it filled a gap that we perceived in the Marvel Universe.

(right) “I did two drawings with the concept of creating a streamlined nanite version of both Doctor Doom (April 2006) and Iron Man (not shown),” explains Bob Layton of this illo. (below) A commission based on a variety of images from the “Armor Wars” storyline. Courtesy of Bob Layton. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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JOHNSON: So he was sort of the Anti-Stark, an evil businessman Tony could go up against in and out of the boardroom?

LAYTON: We were focusing on Tony Stark being a businessman, so one of the questions that came up was that there had to be a counterpart to him in the business world, how do we portray him? Unlike Tony, Hammer was a recluse, he was somebody who wasn’t in the public eye, and he did everything clandestinely.

He was a fun character to create parallels to Tony Stark. Tony needed a counterpart—and an incredible counterpart at that, to his world.

JOHNSON: You two introduced new Iron Man armor designs, which gave Tony Stark the ultimate power suit no matter what the situation. It was a logical idea, as I couldn’t see Stark solely relying on just one armor all the time.

MICHELINIE: Again, I think that’s an example of us looking at the character and the situation and wondering what would really happen. You hit on the point there that one suit of armor wouldn’t do it all. Bob was the

one who designed all the armors, so I’m going to turn it over to Bob now.

LAYTON: Technology is different today than it was when we were doing this book back in the '80s. Part of my whole Iron Man obsession came from when I was a kid and drawing cars and stuff like that. I was always perturbed that Iron Man never looked like metal ’cause all the cars I always drew were shiny. I realized then, to some degree, that if you’re in a stock-car race, you don’t run an Indy car. If you’re in a drag race, you don’t run a stock car. Machines are designed for a specific task and I remembered this old Batman story that Bob Kane did, “The Different Suits of Batman,” and he had like a green suit for hiding in trees and a white suit for hiding in the snow. I think he even had a suit

(above) Layton’s original design for Iron Man baddie the Ghost. “As you can see,” remarks Bob, “nothing varied from the original concept to the finished page.” (left) Re this unpublished version of the cover to Iron Man #219 (June 1987), Layton confesses, “It was a real shame that no one ever saw this cover.

You see—I never turned it in to Marvel.

Just as I was completing this version, I got an inspiration to do the same scene in a more simplistic fashion. The printed version of this cover [see inset] had only the two figures (medium shot) against a totally white field.” © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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made out of whipped cream so he could hide under a banana split. It was goofy, okay? [Editor’s note: This story was actually “The Rainbow Batman,” from Detective Comics #241 (Mar. 1957), reprinted in Batman #182 (Aug. 1966).]

But it got me thinking, as a kid, to come up with different designs for Iron Man armor for specific tasks, and this was one of the things I discussed with David as we progressed on the series. When the opportunity came up to do a different armor, we just did it.

JOHNSON: It was another logical idea that made Tony Stark a more realistic character. He’s the type of person who I could see sitting back after building a state-of-the-art body armor that was light years ahead of anything anyone else could come up with and thinking to himself, “I can do better.”

LAYTON: It’s not only that, but David will tell you after all the years we’ve worked together, I’m a stickler for physics. I’m a stickler for making things credible. There is just no way in the world you can design a suit that’s going to take the pressures of being a mile under the water and it will be the same as one that will go flying through the air.

There are environmental issues to deal with, like when we did the space armor. I asked Dave what he thought about taking the mouthpiece out. He can’t talk anyway and this would just be another hole he could get sucked out of [if he had it]. It just didn’t seem logical that he could create one armor that could do everything.

JOHNSON: Did you guys come up with the armor design first and then work it into the story, or did you make the designs after coming up with the story?

MICHELINIE: The story always came first. The story dictates everything.

LAYTON: Dave and I learned from good people and we’ve always been slaves to the story. That’s the reason we got involved in the first place. As an inker, the reason I wanted to get involved with the stories was that I realized there were so many things going on with some stories that didn’t make sense and I would just keep my mouth shut. Dave was kind enough to take my ideas to heart and allow me to have input.

That’s why this partnership has gone on for thirty

On Bob Layton’s website (www.boblayton.com), the artist occasionally displays new designs for Iron Man and the supporting cast of characters. (above left) “This particular armor was a sonic-powered concept where the armor converted sound waves into energy,” Bob says. (above right) Layton’s preliminary design for the post-Armor Wars Iron Man armor. (left) Courtesy of the artist, Bob Layton’s “Iron X” design for “my version of ‘Armor Wars 2’ when I was still the writer of the series. Unfortunately, I left Marvel before completing my draft, so this version of Tony Stark’s nanite doppelganger was never seen.” © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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years. I don’t think I ever came to Dave and said, “Hey! Here’s a green Iron Man with training wheels! Let’s do it!”

It never happened.

MICHELINIE: On the other hand, that’s kind of cool.

Wheels of Iron, yeah.

JOHNSON: Let me ask you about the pencilers you worked with while on Iron Man. The first penciler you worked with was Jerry Bingham— LAYTON: Nope. John Romita, Jr. JOHNSON: Really? I thought you worked with Jerry first and then John, Jr. LAYTON: What happened was we worked with Johnny initially, then Johnny went away and Jerry came on and then Johnny came back.

JOHNSON: Okay, I see. So, then, let’s start with John, Jr. MICHELINIE: JR was a lot of fun. He really took the plots to heart and made them funny and he added little things.

He wasn’t involved with the plotting of the stories— Bob and I would do that. They would go to John and he would draw them and add nice little touches which I would pick up on as the scripter, and that made the story all the more entertaining. He seemed to get into it and understood what we were trying to do and did a great job. I had a great time writing from his stuff.

LAYTON: That was John’s first series for Marvel. That was his fledgling period where he was trying to stand on his own two legs and demonstrate all the things his dad had taught him. You could really see a progress from his earliest books to his later ones, and it was exciting because every month he would turn in pencils and he would be getting a little better with each issue.

Dave, we never really had to bounce anything back to him [for corrections], did we?

MICHELINIE: If we did, it must have been really minor.

I don’t recall ever sending anything back to him.

LAYTON: Iron Man was a good series for Johnny, too, because he had a billionaire industrial playboy lurking inside of him all the time anyway. He was quite the dashing young playboy himself. As we progressed, he began to understand the things that I did well [as an inker] and kind of allowed me to do that, and he went to a breakdown kind of thing and he would concentrate on storytelling and the drama and left all the glitzy stuff to me. It was a really good collaboration and I think that’s one of the reasons he came back after taking off for a while.

JOHNSON: So, then, how about Jerry Bingham? Was there any change in momentum when Jerry came in to replace John, Jr.?

MICHELINIE: There’s always a change if you get a new penciler because you’ve got someone else who has a different viewpoint and a different style. I’m not sure what you mean exactly by “momentum.”

LAYTON: Dave, I think what he’s trying to ask is if we had to start over or if we just kept the pace we had going with the new guy on board. I think one of the big drawbacks, artistically to Iron Man, was me, because I had a very distinct vision of what I wanted this thing to look like. I had a tendency to put my own imprint on this, which a lot of pencilers don’t like. Dave and I have gone through a lot of pencilers on Iron Man over the years. In Jerry’s case, his was a very distinct style, very different from John’s. I felt my task was to keep this book as consistent as I could with what had gone before.

MICHELINIE: Absolutely. I think that’s one of the reasons why the book increased its sales and kept its sales— it was the consistency of the characters and the look and the quality of the stories. That was very important overall, as opposed to the specific style of a single artist.

LAYTON: Jerry was interesting. There was a sort of an awkwardness to some of his characters, but he had moments where he really shined. He got incredibly

© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Re this unused splash for Iron Man #241 (Apr. 1989), Bob Layton says, “This page was finished from a page breakdown by Denys Cowan. If memory serves me correctly, the splash was bounced, due to the lack of an establishing shot of downtown Hong Kong (which was expressly called for in the script). The actual published page wound up being penciled and inked by me, since Denys was not available to do any redraws.” © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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“This is from an issue of Iron Man [#243] that was penciled by me and inked by the fantastic Barry Windsor-Smith,” says Layton.

“Interestingly enough, I had originally done simple layouts because I had intended to ink it myself. However, Barry had a severe automobile accident and was confined to a wheelchair for a lengthy rehab. During that time, since he couldn’t do much else, he volunteered to ink an issue of Iron Man for me. Being no dummy, I jumped on the opportunity to have my meager pencils embellished by one of the great comic illustrators of the 20th century.” © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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better after he left us. What can I say? It was good for him, bad for us. He was a terrific artist, and I have nothing but respect for Jerry, but his storytelling style was different and I don’t think he was quite as good as JR. JR, who was basically the Son of Marvel in terms of action.

Jerry did bring something to Iron Man, though, without a doubt. I think the challenge was to keep our story going no matter who was penciling it.

JOHNSON: I did want to ask about the end of your first run on Iron Man and perhaps the bestremembered story from it, Iron Man versus Dr. Doom (Iron Man #149–150, Aug.–Sept. 1981).

How did that idea come about?

MICHELINIE: I believe, and Bob can talk more about this, but I think it was Bob’s love of King Arthur and the Arthurian legends that led us to do that particular storyline. Right, Bob? LAYTON: I think what it was is that during most of our plotting sessions I would always make references to Tony Stark being a modernday King Arthur and Stark International being Camelot. When I was a kid, I used to make up my own Iron Man stories, and one of the stories I had was Iron Man in the days of King Arthur. It didn’t come out like the one you and I wrote, David. I had knights and horses toys, and I made one of the knights S t e e l

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into Iron Man. Plus, in my mind, Dr. Doom was the perfect counterpart to Iron Man. He should have been an Iron Man villain. When I was a kid, that was one of the things in my head, “Why isn’t Iron Man fighting Dr. Doom?”

Plus, I like the way Dave writes Doom anyway and I have to give him a lot of credit for the way he played Doom’s attitude towards Iron Man. I think it was hilarious 'cause he looks down his nose at him and doesn’t see him as an equal.

MICHELINIE: Doom thinks Iron Man is a lackey and that he is an employee. Doom has a lot more respect for Tony Stark than he does Iron Man. JOHNSON: A lot of people think of that storyline as one of the quintessential Iron Man tales.

LAYTON: I guess that’s why they have us back at Marvel now doing another one.

JOHNSON: Again, this storyline came near the end of your first runs on the book. How did you come to the decision to leave the series?

LAYTON: I have one word that describes why I left the book: Hercules. During the whole process of working with David, I was also learning from him, too. I think he is one of the best writers comics has ever seen and he was really good at explaining things to me. I knew that eventually I wanted to start writing some

things on my own. We had hit that point where we had gone to where we wanted to go with the story.

We used to sit down and have these sessions where we would plot the next 12 issues in advance.

We had an idea of where we were going from Point A and how we were going to get to Point B. Dave, didn’t we just get to the point where we sat down to plan the next arc and I think I just chimed in that I wanted to go and try something on my own? Isn’t that how it happened?

MICHELINIE: I just remember you left and I did a plot of my own and three issues and I realized it wasn’t as much fun [without you]. Also, I really didn’t have that much else left to say about the character at that time. So rather than just write it to be writing it, and having to come up with stories that perhaps were not the equal of what we had done together, I decided to go on to other things as well.

LAYTON: It wasn’t that I wanted to leave the book, or that Dave and I were tired.

I had always set out a goal to write and draw my own material, and honestly I didn’t want to write and draw Iron Man because I had a working partnership with David on that and it worked well. It was just one of those things where I had to take a step back and then take the next step in my career. I felt I had learned a lot from Dave and now was the time for me to do it. I saw the opportunity coming up, and all the time I was working on Iron Man, I had these ideas for doing something that was a little more lighthearted.

Even though there was lots of humor in Iron Man, the book was at time pretty grim and gritty. I really wanted to try my comedy chops, so to speak.

JOHNSON: You both ended up leaving Iron Man, but then you returned to it a few years later. What prompted that return?

MICHELINIE: [We were offered Iron Man] several years later and we were both doing other things, but I had an opening in my schedule.

[Editor] Mark Gruenwald offered me the book, and told me Bob was going to be doing the inking, so we were going to be working together again.

Our batteries had been recharged and it seemed like a good idea and I hopped on. I can’t speak for Bob...

LAYTON: In all honesty, the book was starting to tank again. The main reason for getting us back on the book was Marvel figured it would help sales.

MICHELINIE: I was speaking of my reasons, not Marvel’s reasons.

LAYTON: Oh, okay. I had gotten to do what I wanted to do, and I was very happy with that, and I think it was just one of those situations where it was like going home. By that time we had tons of new ideas on where to go with this character.

JOHNSON: In the issues between your two runs on Iron Man, Marvel did number of things to shake up Tony Stark’s world. Tony hit the bottle again and

(above right) Bob Layton’s original but unpublished version of the cover to Iron Man #230 (May 1988), the last issue of the “Armor Wars” and with Iron Man in the Silver Centurion armor.

“As fate would have it,” Bob tells us, “Marvel rejected the layout, citing it as being too graphic. The paste-ups are new. Everything else is as you would have seen it at the end of the ‘Armor Wars.’” (right) An unpublished version of the cover to Iron Man #240 (Mar. 1989), illustrated by and courtesy of Bob Layton, who observes, “As you can see, the original version of the cover [see inset] had the characters much closer to the camera than the published one. The editor felt that we didn’t get the full impact of the situation. Ultimately, I agreed, mostly due to the fact that I felt the crouched I.M. looked too small, even though he was proportional to the other characters.” © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Layton’s pencils, and the finished inks, to an unused version of the cover for Iron Man #250 (Dec. 1989), the second Camelot/ Dr. Doom story. “Barry Windsor-Smith (who I was staying with at the time I was drawing this) convinced me to throw out this cover and do something more fanciful and Camelot-y,” recalls Layton. “Ultimately, I did an homage of a famous illustration by Gustav Klempt (another pre-Raphaelite influence of BWS’s) for the final cover.” (The penciled version is courtesy of Bob Layton; the inked version hails from the Yoram Matzkin collection.) © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

he lost everything, Jim Rhodes took over as the new Iron Man, and Marvel introduced the red-and-white armor when Stark returned as Iron Man. LAYTON: Yeah, see, I designed that new armor, so I wasn’t too upset about that.

I thought that Iron Man was one of the few characters where updating his look is part of the canon. As technology improves, the armor should change. Gruenwald came to me when I was doing other things and asked me to design an armor that had a “samurai” look to it. I was kind of opposed to that because my basic philosophy is that as technology gets more streamlined, it should get smaller and not larger and bulkier.

But they were pretty insistent on that [new armor]. So I sat down and pretty much did what they were asking for and designed the Silver Centurion armor. It was probably my least favorite of all the armors, but it is possibly the one with the biggest fanbase.

JOHNSON: What were your thoughts on the books that were produced between your first run and second run? How did the books in between impact your Iron Man the second time around?

LAYTON: I didn’t read those comics. Did you, Dave?

MICHELINIE: No, I didn’t.

LAYTON: Whatever we needed we got from Mark Gruenwald. I can’t speak for David again, but there is something inherently wrong about watching somebody else play with your toys, or raise your kid without you. Generally, when I leave a book, I don’t go back and continue reading it. No matter who it is, and no matter how good they are, it’s not going to be my vision or our shared vision of that character, so it’s more of an exercise in futility or pain than anything.

JOHNSON: Let’s talk about the pencilers you worked with on your second Iron Man run. Tell us about Mark Bright.

LAYTON: Mark was a very constant journeyman who was pretty good about making deadlines and everything. My only complaint with Mark was that he didn’t quite have the playboy feel for Tony Stark.

Generally speaking, I had nothing but respect for him, but it could be that Mark was probably not the right guy for that series. He was good to work with, but as far as the technology and things of that nature, it really wasn’t his strong suit.

JOHNSON: You also worked with Jackson Guice during the second run on Iron Man. LAYTON: Jackson was someone I had worked with on X-Factor and a project for George Romero called Copperhead, which was a movie that we did storyboards for. Plus, I knew Jackson socially and we were quite use to each other and we complemented each other’s art.

JOHNSON: Right now you’re gearing up to return to Iron Man yet again, on a couple of projects that will be released in time for the new Iron Man movie.

Plus, Bob, you almost returned to Iron Man as the book’s regular inker, but then you decided not to do it, is that correct?

LAYTON: It’s a little more convoluted than that, Dan. To me, all’s well that ends well, but at the time I was very conflicted about [returning to ink Iron Man]. Marvel wanted me because they thought it would be beneficial to the book to have me back as an artist while they are promoting the movie.

I went out to California last September and did the DVD interview for the special features that will be on the Iron Man DVD when it comes out.

They work way ahead out there, by the way. Marvel figured it would make sense to have me and David come back, and I was also looking for work.

I had contacted [editor] Tom Brevoort about just inking something at Marvel—

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DAN JOHNSON is a regular BACK ISSUE contributor whose writing credits include Herc & Thor for Antarctic Press and occasional gags for the daily and Sunday Dennis the Menace comic strip.

Photo by Michael Eury.

[I wasn’t looking] for anything in particular, I just wanted to get back in and do a little work. That’s when they offered me the inking on Iron Man, which was actually the last book I wanted to do because I had this policy of not doing Iron Man without David. To me, Iron Man has always been David Michelinie and Bob Layton. It just being me didn’t work.

I was conflicted about this and had long talks with David and he was very supportive of me and said, “If you need the work, you need the work.” So I agreed to ink the series even though I would have no creative input into it. I figured with the movie coming out it would be a smart move for me.

What happened was that no sooner had I agreed to do that the regular penciler, the guy they wanted me to come on and work with, quit. Tom remembered all the ideas I had talked with him about before that Dave and I had years back, and he felt really bad about what had happened, so he said he would see what he could do about getting our special projects going. So Tom initiated Iron Man: The End and the new Camelot story. Marvel wanted to have something that was by us out in time for the motion picture.

As far as the Iron Man inking goes, I’m kind of relieved [that it didn’t happen], because it’s not something I necessarily wanted to do, but that I needed to do. This has worked out so much better ’cause I’m working with my buddy again.

JOHNSON: What can you tell the readers about your new Iron Man projects?

MICHELINIE: We have been asked specifically not to give out too much information. Marvel doesn’t want the interest to peak before the comics come out, so it’s a little difficult to know how much we will be allowed to reveal. We can say that Iron Man: The End is a one-shot, 48-page story. I have already written the script, and it has been approved, and Bob will be inking it.

We don’t have a penciler as of yet.

The other project is a four-issue miniseries, and the plots have been approved. It’s Iron Man and Dr. Doom in the third part of the Arthur and Camelot trilogy. The penciler on that, we’re delighted to say, is Ron Lim. Ron’s an artist that Bob and I both enjoy working with a lot. We suspect that both projects will be out in the spring [of 2008] to be available when the Iron Man motion picture comes out.

JOHNSON: Please make me a happy camper and tell me that neither of these projects will be taking place in the current Iron Man continuity.

LAYTON: Make him a happy camper, Dave.

MICHELINIE: They don’t fit into current continuity. The miniseries, on purpose, starts out in the current continuity in the first few pages, then the rest is basically a flashback and it concerns an incident in Tony Stark’s life that had been wiped out of his memory and he is now getting it back and reliving it. We [took it out of current continuity] because, perhaps, we’re not the biggest fans of the current continuity, and also because it’s the third part of a trilogy of which we had Parts One and Two looking and sounding the same. If we did Part Three in current continuity with a different armor and supporting cast, it would be jarring. It was a creative decision, as well as a personal decision, that this is set in the past.

Iron Man: The End is basically a giant What If? story. It takes place forty years in the future and shows what Bob and I would have done had we continued on the book and guided it through those forty years and how we would have ended the series. It’s in a universe of its own.

“This project was one of the more creative and fun assignments that I’ve received in a long time,” admits Layton. “Matt Hull, Iron Man aficionado extraordinaire, dreamt up the idea of adapting the now-legendary cover to X-Men #141 by John Byrne into an ‘Armor Wars’ poster featuring the villains that were part of that saga.” © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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by

Andy Mangels

“For centuries the world has been protected by a group of extraordinary men and women, who have dedicated themselves to fighting crime ...” (opening announcer for Legends of the SuperHeroes) For those who opened their TV Guides in the third week of January 1979, a surprise awaited. An ad showed liveaction versions of various DC Comics superheroes, fighting the world’s worst supervillains! Even more interesting: Adam West, Burt Ward, and Frank Gorshin were headlining, returning to their iconic roles as Batman, Robin, and the Riddler!

What was this oddity that brought Green Lantern, the Flash, the Huntress, Black Canary, and Hawkman to the small screen? Who conceived of a rogues’ gallery containing Mordru and Dr. Sivana, as well as Solomon Grundy, Giganta, Sinestro, and Weather Wizard?

In the article that follows, you’ll get a comprehensive look at the mystery that was Legends of the SuperHeroes, the campy pair of 1979 live-action telefilms. While it has later been argued by critics that the real villains were NBC and Hanna-Barbera for foisting the shows on the American public, fans who’ve obtained the specials on bootleg videos, DVD, or YouTube find them—although anachronistic and campy— oddly entertaining and true-to-comics as a whole.

We’ll first take a look at the plots of the shows, then delve into the behind-the-scenes creation of the questionable cult “classics.”

LEGENDS OF THE SUPERHEROES: The Challenge The Heroes: Batman (Adam West), Robin (Burt Ward), Black Canary (Danuta), Captain Marvel (Garrett Craig), Green Lantern (Howard Murphy), Hawkman (Bill Nuckols), Flash (Rod Haase), Huntress (Barbara Joyce), Retired Man/Scarlet Cyclone (William Schallert).

The Villains: Riddler (Frank Gorshin), Sinestro (Charlie Callas), Weather Wizard (Jeff Altman), Mordru (Gabe Dell), Dr. Sivana (Howard Morris), Solomon Grundy (Mickey Morton), Giganta (A’Leshia Brevard).

LEGENDS OF THE SUPERHEROES: The Roast Additional Cast: Atom (Alfie Wise), Ghetto Man (Brad Sanders), Hawkman’s Mother (Pat Carroll), Aunt Minerva (Ruth Buzzi), Rhoda Rooter (June Gabel).

The Creative Team: Directed by Bill Carruthers and Chris Darley (associate); written by Mike Marmer and Peter Gallay, with additional material by Mort Greene and Ken Harris; consultant was Sol Harrison; based on an idea by Sheldon Moldoff; narrated by Gary Owens.

Suck in Those Guts!

The heroic cast of The Challenge (credits at right). All photos in this article are courtesy of Andy Mangels.

Legends of the SuperHeroes © 1979 DC Comics Inc. and Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

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LEGENDS OF THE SUPERHEROES: The Challenge January 18, 1979, NBC-TV, 8:00–9:00 PM The episode begins with a heroic roll call, wherein each hero poses and/or demonstrates their power. Then, we cut to a secret hideout located in a hidden swamp on a remote island, where the arch-enemies of the SuperHeroes have gathered to hatch a diabolical plot.

After a roll call of the villains—who sit semi-circle in a hall with curving architecture that brings to mind the headquarters of the Legion of Doom on Hanna-Barbera’s Challenge of the Super Friends (coincidentally on ABC Saturday mornings at that time)—Dr. Sivana introduces his Doomsday Device which will destroy the world by the end of the show (i.e., 60 minutes). The SuperHeroes, meanwhile, are deep in their own secret cave fortress, honoring the aging super-hero Scarlet Cyclone, now known as “Retired Man.” But when the Riddler sends them clues, the heroes break into action to find the Doomsday Device and deactivate it before it explodes.

Batman and Robin soon encounter Solomon Grundy at a gas station, where he further sabotages the already-sabotaged (by Sinestro) Batmobile, forcing the heroes to race off without their famous car. Then, Green Lantern discovers that a strange gypsy fortuneteller is really Sinestro; after a short battle, he presses on.

Meanwhile, Batman and Robin buy a motorcycle and sidecar from “Honest Hal” (really Weather Wizard), which splits up the Dynamic Duo when it splits in two.

But horrors, Hawkman and Black Canary are captured

by Grundy at the gas station, and are rescued later by Captain Marvel, who’s narrowly escaped a Freudian psychologist who is really the Riddler.

Later, Sivana slips a potion into lemonade, which strips several heroes of their powers, but soon, Batman is chasing Mordru on a jet-ski at Hidden Island Lake!

Toasting their impending victory, the villains accidentally drink the anti-power formula. The heroes—who have mysteriously and without explanation gotten their powers back between commercials—eventually converge on the villains’ hideout with only minutes left. After a brief slapstick battle, the heroes are triumphant and stop the doomsday machine with only a second to spare!

COMMENTS: With a very heavy emphasis on Batman, Robin, and the Riddler, this was obviously supposed to play on the popularity of the original Batman show. Slapstick is prevalent, logic is non-existent, and Flash, Huntress, and Giganta act largely as set decoration. Robin’s moronic “Holy expletive” dialogue lends the funniest moments, although the Solomon Grundy scenes (with Greek chorus-like Marsha Warfield of Night Court providing a running phone commentary) were relatively funny.

And just in case viewers didn’t catch the jokes, a “helpful” laugh track was there to aid them. Still, how cool was it to see Black Canary and Hawkman versus Solomon Grundy?

(top) Villains unite to challenge the SuperHeroes.

Left to right: Solomon Grundy, Sinestro, Dr. Sivana, Mordru, Giganta, Riddler, and Weather Wizard. (center) Gotham’s grooviest: (left) Ward and West back in tights, and (right) Barbara Joyce as the Huntress. (bottom) Sinestro’s up to no good under the Batmobile’s hood.

Legends of the SuperHeroes © 1979 DC Comics Inc. and Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

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LEGENDS OF THE SUPERHEROES: The Roast January 25, 1979, NBC-TV, 8:00–9:00 PM Ed McMahon hosts this special, which is intended to be a roast of the SuperHeroes. While modern roasts are more clearly raunch-fests, 1970s television roasts of celebrities required the comedians of the day to be cleverer with their zingers, while still being raunchy.

The writers of this second Legends special had to neuter the jokes even further, to keep it mostly clean enough for younger viewers to enjoy.

The heroes assemble for their special tribute, each dutifully sitting behind a silver podium with their symbol emblazoned on its slanted top. Ed McMahon then begins introducing those who have come to roast the heroes, beginning with Flash villain Weather Wizard, who rains on the heroes and their hideout. Next, Hawkman’s aged mother Esther Hawkman (from Thanagar) grouses about raising a son with wings.

We soon meet Ghetto Man, a jive-talkin’ street hero who gains superpowers when he shouts “Kareem!” Ghetto Man even riffs on the need for “colored” heroes, disqualifying Green Lantern as he’s not colored (is it a stretch to think this could reference the infamous story by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams?). Dr. Sivana shows up to give everyone physicals and try to woo the heroines, before Retired Man stumbles in again to join the fun.

Superhero gossip columnist Rhoda Rooter fills us in on the latest, including an interview with the Atom and Giganta, who have recently married.

Later, Ed McMahon is battered senseless by Solomon Grundy, before Sinestro shows up to zap Green

Lantern. Crack-shot villainess Aunt Minerva shows up (carried by two Speedo-wearing bodybuilders) to get a sixth husband, eventually deciding on Captain Marvel.

When he cries at the shotgun wedding, she dumps him, wanting a real man. It is only then that the heroes discover her superpower is the ability to turn into a ravishing blond. But by now, it’s too late.

The evening ends when Mordru makes a nasty entrance, does a song-and-dance number, and blows up part of the heroes’ headquarters. He is rewarded by a pie-in-the-face from Batman. Bringing the roast to a close, Ed McMahon yells “Kareem!” and flies off the stage.

(left) Grundy gets ugly to Roast host Ed McMahon. (top right) Lucky for Black Canary and the Huntress that dirty ol’ Retired Man’s advances took place in pre-Viagra 1979. (bottom center) With one magic word: “Kareem!” It’s Ghetto Man! (bottom right) Hawkman, Ghetto Man, and Captain Marvel.

COMMENTS: This hour was mostly tiresome (especially the Mordru and Sinestro’s scenes) and inert (due to a one-stage set), yet it had a few funny moments.

Hawkman’s mother was humorous, as was Rhoda Rooter with her tactless questions about the sex life of the Atom and Giganta (jokes which producer Deke Heyward apparently fought with writer Marmer about including). One favorite moment was when Ed McMahon was repeatedly beaten up by Solomon Grundy. Talk about wish-fulfillment! Perhaps the best sequence is when Robin has totaled the Batmobile and tries to disguise this from Batman. When an emergency arises and Batman wants to race to the Batmobile, Robin plays a game of charades with him to drag out the fatal news.

At the end, Batman is so excited that he’s figured out the phrase “The Batmobile is totaled!” that he’s almost too excited to get angry. This sequence rivaled some of the best of the 1960s moments from West and Ward. Unfortunately for Bat-fans, though, Frank Gorshin’s Riddler is M.I.A.

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Legends of the SuperHeroes © 1979 DC Comics Inc. and Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

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MAKING LEGENDS OF THE SUPERHEROES

(top) Charlie Callas as Sinestro. (center) Gabe Dell as Mordru the Merciless. (bottom) Jeff Altman as the Weather Wizard.

Legends of the SuperHeroes © 1979 DC Comics Inc. and Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

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Executive in charge of production Louis “Deke” Heyward apparently wanted to do the Legends shows in the worst way … which some may argue is indeed what happened. The ex-head of AIP Films in England, Deke was brought back to the States in the 1970s, where he eventually became vice-president in charge of development at Hanna-Barbera. The animation company was having major success with the long-running Super Friends, whose 1978–1979 season of Challenge of the Super Friends featured the Justice League versus the Legion of Doom.

Heyward conceived of doing the Legends specials, and first brought aboard Mike Marmer, a veteran comedy writer whose work included The Ernie Kovacs Show, Get Smart, and Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. Marmer, in turn, knew comedy writer Peter Gallay (who had written for some celebrity roasts), and brought him onto the project. The two were soon busy on a conference call with DC’s Sol Harrison, hashing out characters and plotlines, while steeping themselves in comics of the moment. Somewhere along the line, Sheldon Moldoff pitched in, gaining a credit for the idea behind the specials.

The hero characters were mainly chosen due to legalities: Superman and Supergirl couldn’t be used due to the film licensing, and Wonder Woman was already airing in live-action.

One wonders why Aquaman was unavailable, but at least Captain Marvel was billed with his own name, not with the “Shazam!” sobriquet that the Filmation live-action series (then in reruns) and Marvel Comics’ copyright maneuvering had identified him with in the public eye. The Huntress, who was barely a year old at DC Comics, was given her debut screen appearance, as was Black Canary, making them the only two legitimate DC heroes that had never before appeared on television in animated or live-action form.

For reasons lost to time—perhaps because they were most used to producing animation— Hanna-Barbera decided to only film two live-action specials. Director Bill Carruthers, who had worked with Marmer before, was also a good friend of Joe Barbera. He soon landed the job to direct the specials, aided by Chris Darley. The writing and production team in place, work began on casting the iconic roles.

Three actors were picked for the shows without delay: Adam West, Burt Ward, and Frank Gorshin. Heyward was a friend of West’s, and felt he should be working. “It’s unfortunate he couldn’t find work and he was stuck in one role,” Heyward said in a 1991 interview, “but I got him some jobs here.” During an interview with this writer that same year, Marmer echoed Heyward with, “Adam is as nice a human being as possible. I ended up using him in Crackers, a pilot I later did. He tried very hard at what he did, but the world didn’t give him much of a chance to spread his wings.”

With West aboard, getting Burt Ward back into the tights of Robin was a no-brainer.

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filming. “He got along with everyone just fine.” The third Batman television veteran, Frank Gorshin, was brought in as the Riddler, although Heyward also knew Cesar Romero, who would have been happy to play the Joker.

Still, Marmer said that, “We got everyone we wanted and needed for the script. Everyone was happy to do the show.”

Others actors were brought in by popular appeal, such as William Schallert, a Get Smart veteran, who became the crotchety Retired Man. Probably due to his friendship with stunt coordinator Buddy Joe Hooker, stuntman Alfie Wise (who would appear in many Burt Reynolds films) was cast in the “bit role” of the Atom.

Relative newcomer Brad Sanders, who played Ghetto Man, was suggested by Peter Gallay and seconded by Marmer after they saw the comedian on a Flip Wilson show. Sanders was a standup comic from Chicago’s Southside who had come to LA and was living in a one-room apartment across the street from the Hollywood Cemetery. In 1979, he said of his Legends role, “Since I am the personification of Ghetto Man, and have survived on peanut butter, bread, and jelly, I would say that I bring to this show a real flavor of the ghetto world.”

The villains were populated by familiar faces: Laugh-In and Tonight Show regular Charlie Callas had been hand-picked to play Sinestro, and Your Show of Shows regular and popular voice actor Howard Morris became Dr. Thaddeus Bodog Sivana (no stranger to comic characters, Morris was also the voice of Jughead and others on the Archies cartoons).

Past “Dead End Kid” Gabriel Dell was brought as Mordru, perhaps the most unusual character choice given that he was a 30th-century villain who menaced the Legion of Super-Heroes; his appearance was probably based on the fact that he had just fought the Justice League in a comic book crossover story in late 1977.

Mickey Morton, who would steal both shows as Solomon Grundy, often played monsters and creatures, including an appearance in the original Star Trek, the first season of Wonder Woman (where he was the monkey Gargantua), and the venerable Star Wars Holiday Special (in which he played Chewbacca’s wife, Mallatobuck!).

The part of Weather Wizard went to a relatively new standup comedian, Jeff Altman, a likeable chap who had done a few roles for sitcoms and appearances on The Merv Griffin Show and others. Although he would later achieve standup success and appear on The David Letterman Show more than almost any other performer, Altman’s most-remembered Hollywood foray was the bizarre 1980 variety series, Pink Lady and Jeff. The show teamed him with a pair of Asian sisters who sang and danced, neither very well. “It was an abysmal failure,” says Bill Carruthers. “Neither of the sisters could speak English, which left Jeff to do all the work.” That show had its own comicbook pedigree, as comic scribe Mark Evanier wrote most of the material.

MEMORIES OF GIGANTA The sole female villainess on the specials was Giganta, a past Wonder Woman foe whose origins were unusual— she was a woman who had been evolved from an ape!

The role was cast with statuesque beauty A’Leshia Brevard, best known for playing showgirls. Today Brevard laughs that she even remembers what she wore to her closed audition, set up by her agent, Erica Wain.

“High-heeled boots and jeans. I went in and read and it went very nicely. I got the role.” She remembers that the producers told her that Giganta was “a tall strong woman that had been a gorilla. Don’t you know that thrilled me!” She laughs and adds, “But I had experience with the ‘had been’ aspect…” More on that in a moment.

Although her debut in Hollywood came in the 1969 film The Love God, Brevard had previously been a performer at famed San Francisco nightclub Finocchio’s in 1959. Once in Tinsletown, she was a Playboy Bunny and appeared on variety shows including The Red Skeleton Show, and others by Andy Williams and Dean Martin. As a tall woman, Brevard says that “I used to put on my resume that I was 6'1" or 5'13". I was tall, but was not bulky.

They had to bulk me up for Legends of the SuperHeroes, with a costume that was I’m sure made of automotive padding. I hated it!

“They had taken measurements,” Brevard says, laughing, “but it certainly wasn’t fitted! I don’t think they wanted anything sexy. I think that the bulk was more important. It just killed me. Even the hairstyle … the whole look was bizarre, and I think that was their intention. It wasn’t too far removed from a gorilla!

“During one of the segments [we filmed], I got to play Giganta as a geisha, to deceive Batman and Robin.

There was this wild scene and I really loved it and thought it looked great. It ended up on the cuttingroom floor. I told myself that maybe I looked too great.” Brevard recalls that Ward and West were “delightful,” and notes that when she showed up on set, “Ed McMahon walked over and introduced himself and said, ‘Hello, I’m Ed McMahon,’ and you want to say ‘Duh!’” Later, when Frank Gorshin invited her for a drink after work, they discovered her car battery had died. “He called AAA and put it on his card. There was not this sort of stratified segment in show business.

“I had a segment with the Atom,” Brevard recalls of The Challenge. “I ran into Alfie Wise all the time after that, around Universal City. We were filmed in different locations and that was composited, so he was put in my hand somehow. I found that really interesting.”

She doesn’t recall many of her stunts, though “I do remember falling out of the chair over and over and over, whether that was from wind or lightning of Weather Wizard.” As for on-set cut-ups, Brevard notes that everyone was mostly well-behaved. “It strikes me that people were sort of there to get their paycheck and go home.

“When the thing aired, I had a lot of people over,” Brevard says. “Due to my big geisha scene, I was expecting a lot of screen time. I sort of had to shamefacedly show people out the door because the scene just wasn’t there. My feeling was that I was just as happy that [the show] was a one-time thing.”

Shortly after completing Legends, in 1980, Brevard left Hollywood and returned to college to teach theatre, “at the same university I’d begun undergraduate work as a boy.” She also wrote a book entitled The Woman I

Was Not Born to Be, detailing her early life as Alfred Brevard Crenshaw, and her gender-reassignment surgery in 1962 (one of the first of its kind in the US).

“I lived in stealth until the publication of that book in 2001,” Brevard says. Not only did none of her past co-stars or producers or directors know the truth about Brevard, neither did her agent! While performing in the 1960s, Brevard had gone by Leeshaw, and when her surgery was complete, she chose the name A’Leshia (with an apostrophe she has since dropped).

Today, Brevard has been a gender pioneer, an actress, a director, a writer, and now has co-written a new play called Inside Out, a dramatic look at her life and that of fellow transsexual Gina Grahame. “Since I wrote the book and came out of stealth, I have heard from people all over the world that are in transition that desperately need role models. That is what the play has been written to address, to show where we come from and what our goals are. I was one of the first in this country, and nobody told me I couldn’t be an actress, or a Playboy Bunny. Because I didn’t know it ‘wasn’t allowed,’ I went ahead and lived my life.”

To find out more about Aleshia Brevard and her life and career, visit www.aleshiabrevard.com.

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Only her hairdresser knows for sure!

Aleisha Brevard, as Giganta, harbored a secret from the SuperHeroes cast and her agent.

Legends of the SuperHeroes © 1979 DC Comics Inc. and Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

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CASTING CALL

(left) The Alex Tothdrawn casting ad for the SuperHeroes specials. (right) Garrett Craig, the third actor to play a live-action Captain Marvel in the 1970s.

(BACK ISSUE #30, our “Saturday Morning Heroes” issue, will feature interviews with the first two— Jackson Bostwick and John Davey, the stars of TV’s Shazam!)

While many of Legends of the SuperHeroes characters were cast with veterans, the remaining heroes had to be cast more economically, with newcomers. On the back cover of the August 8, 1978 edition of The Hollywood Reporter, an ad appeared (featuring some awesome Alex Toth art). “We’re looking for some Super ‘People’!” is headlined, asking prospective actors if they were “man enough to fill the shoes of Captain Marvel or woman enough to match the powers of the Black Canary?” The ad also promised that the one-hour specials would be “produced on video tape using the most advanced state of the art,” and asked those who had video technical hardware or video effects to offer their participation.

At 10:00 AM on Thursday, August 10th, HannaBarbera’s open-to-the-public casting call began. Casting director Lee Guardino, director-producer Bill Carruthers, associate producer Joel Stein, and the writers Gallay and Marmer spent three days looking at over 400 hopefuls.

“It was an adventure,” admitted Guardino in later press materials for the specials, “because we got people from all walks of life. One 80-year-old lady, who admitted she never acted before, flexed her muscle and tried out for Aunt Minerva. She would have made a perfect Aunt Minerva without make-up, but she couldn’t act.”

Legends of the SuperHeroes © 1979 DC Comics Inc. and Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

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Writer Mike Marmer was initially terrified with the casting session, saying in 1978, “We were concerned whether they’d be able to deliver lines, but every one of them turned in a very good performance.” In a 1991 interview, he noted, “We had a lot of weirdos, but we went with the people who we knew would do a good job.” Meanwhile, Peter Gallay remembered little of the casting, saying, “I don’t think we turned anyone down. We must have, but looking at the results, I can’t see how we did.” Bill Carruthers added, “We were casting more for their physique and bodies.

We didn’t have the money they do on The Flash [in 1990], so the actors had to look their parts.”

The casting session session yielded: Garrett Craig, whom Guardino found more handsome than the comics’ Captain Marvel. Writer Gallay was unaware that two actors had portrayed Marvel in Filmation’s live-action Shazam! in 1974–1977, and no attempt was made to contact either actor. In a 1991 interview, Heyward noted that he felt both of the Shazam! actors were too old for the role by that time (although it was only two years later, so it’s likely that Hanna-Barbera just didn’t want to promote a rival company’s actors). Craig had a few bit parts in Hollywood, but his current whereabouts are unknown.

Danuta, a blonde, blue-eyed Hollywood newcomer from Chicago, landed the role of Black Canary.

Gallay remembers that she later became someone influential in Hollywood’s wife, but chuckles, “God knows whatever became of poor Danuta!” Heyward added, “I shall never forget Danuta. She went on to netherstardom and melted into obscurity.” Internet sources link this Danuta to Danuta Rylko Soderman Pfeiffer, a past host of The 700 Club, radio talk show host, author, and now vineyard owner of Pfeiffer Vineyards in Junction City, Oregon. However, a recent call to Pfeiffer elicited much laughter, and a promise that she had not been the Danuta of Legends infamy. After extensive research, it appears that super-Danuta may have been Danuta Wesley, a buxom blonde who had appeared in a pair of Charlie’s Angels

episodes and a Chico and the Man, before briefly taking the role of the Matinee Lady in Johnny Carson’s Art Fern’s Tea Time Movie sketches on The Tonight Show. Whatever her real identity, Danuta’s whereabouts are unknown today.

Howard Murphy, a Minneapolis actor struggling to establish an LA theatre career, was “as far as we were concerned, [the] only Green Lantern,” said Guardino. He made a few more appearances in film and television, but has apparently disappeared into pop-culture history since 1982.

Bill Nuckols, whose Hawkman was the most physically impressive of the Legends participants, was a competitive bodybuilder. Although press materials for Legends specified that he was Mr. California 1977, this fact is disputed by some websites. However, Nuckols did come in 6th place in the “Tall” division of the 1978 Mr. America contest, given his reported sixfoot stature, 210 lbs. weight, and 18 1/2" arms.

The Pineville, Kentucky, native also played the Incredible Hulk at Universal Studios Tours. In a 1991 interview, Gallay assured me that the actor was indeed handsome, but they didn’t want to remove the Hawkman mask on screen. Nuckols could be seen in John Paschal’s 1979 book Paschal’s Principles of Weight Training, but wasn’t made for a Hollywood career. His modern whereabouts are, as you might expect, unknown.

Rod Haase, a marathon-running actor with a Master’s Degree in Corporate Finance from UCLA, became Guardino’s “perfect Flash.” Haase had a good list of credits behind him, including two episodes of Battlestar Galactica in 1978. He would later play the character of “Captain Avenger” in the John Ritter film Hero At Large (1980).

These days, he still lives in California, but was unavailable to interview for this article.

Barbara Joyce, a comedienne, became the very buxom Huntress, a role added because DC had so few super-heroines, Wonder Woman was on the air, and Supergirl was optioned by the Salkinds. Joyce never achieved fame, and apparently retired to Earth-Two. As for some of the minor characters, Gallay noted that later Night Court comedienne Marsha Warfield actually had to audition for her role in The Challenge. “It was her first role, but from the start we thought she was great.” Oddly, Warfield went uncredited for the role, both in press releases, and onscreen. Carruthers, meanwhile, especially liked Pat Carroll, whose turn as Hawkman’s mother cracked him up on set.

COSTUMING THE HEROES Once the show was cast, it was up to costume designer Warden Neil, with a crew of five tailors, four dressmakers, two pattern-makers, one wardrobe assistant, and a boot designer, to spend two weeks creating 40 costumes for the show.

Total value was about $32,000 in costumes which were mothballed and never seen again. Heyward notes that “since Western [the costumer] was a pretty big company, we felt they could re-use them, or build more if we ever did this again.”

Warden Neil began his costuming career in the 1960s, then spent much of the 1970s costuming for variety shows, including The Donny & Marie

Show and The Jackson Five. Legends producer Bill Carruthers had worked with Neil before and brought him aboard. “I was thrilled to do SuperHeroes,” says Neil. “I was somewhat of a comic-book fan, but I was not really up on some of the characters, so those I had to research more.”

Sent DC comics to reference, Neil stayed extremely true to the comic designs. “I had to get exactly like it, otherwise it wouldn’t be approved.

They wanted no compromises. Even the colors, we had to dye some to match; the rest I was able to get lycra and spandex to match. The satin was used for capes.” When told of Brevard’s costume complaints, Neil laughs, “Yeah, that fur stuff was very uncomfortable and very hot.”

The Batman and Robin costumes were the original costumes from the 1960s series, but the Riddler was remade by Neil. Almost thirty years later, the costumer isn’t sure how much input he had for the new costumes of Scarlet Cyclone and Ghetto Man, but he does remember the most elaborate costume: Hawkman. “The wings were built at NBC on this kind of wire frame where they could actually expand out like a fan, to come out and down again. Each feather was glued on individually. It took a long time!”

Neil never worked with any of the actors again, and went on to do Bob Hope specials, WKRP in Cincinnati, and lots of films and TV series. When I interviewed him in the fall of 2007, he was working on location on a Lifetime film. He notes that when Legends aired, “there was a lot of talk about them in Hollywood, but then … everyone moved on to the next projects.” One of those projects for Neil was comic-related, though—he costumed the final three seasons of Tales from the Crypt!

FILMING THE LEGENDS Meanwhile, over in stunts, coordinator Buddy Joe Hooker used stuntmen for some scenes, although most of the fights were done by the actors. Burt Ward, a black belt in Karate, surprised everyone and earned from Hooker the statement that “I’d hire him as a stuntman any day.” On the other hand, the stuntwoman playing the motorcycleriding Black Canary was involved in an accident early on. Gallay, being the only one on set with a camper truck that could haul the injured woman to help, was “forced” to drive the buxom, fishnet-stockinged woman to a hospital.

Gallay remembers the shoot fondly: “The whole experience was fun. It had location shooting and it was a low-pressure assignment. I took my 11-year-old son with me, who enjoyed the shooting, but thought the shows were dreadful.”

It was Gallay’s son, in fact, a comic-book fan, who noted that in one scene in The Challenge, as the heroes race from their hideout cave to stop the villains, it is the Flash who is bringing up the rear!

In addition to the geisha scene described

by Brevard, two other scenes were apparently planned for The Challenge, but it isn’t known if they were filmed or not. In one of them, Flash confronts Mordru and Giganta in a Japanese restaurant, only to have his boots nailed to the floor. In another scene, the Huntress is trapped in a net by Sivana, who is disguised as “Ranger Bob,” and who threatens to arrest her for hunting without a license.

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(top) Howard Murphy as Green Lantern. (center) Beefy Bill Nuckols as Hawkman. (bottom) Rod Haase as the Flash.

Legends of the SuperHeroes © 1979 DC Comics Inc. and Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

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One scene was written to include Sivana’s lemonade stand near the waters where a jet-ski battle occurs between Mordru, Batman, and the others, but problems cropped up. “They had done all this location scouting, and built the whole lemonade stand set in a completely different area, nowhere near the water,” notes Gallay.

“I showed them that the stand had to be near the water to witness the jet-ski battle, so they tore the whole thing down and rebuilt it after heading back to the lake.”

It was The Challenge, actually the second show shot, that took the most time to film: approximately ten days because of locations, according to Carruthers. The Roast, for which Gorshin had not been available, was shot in two days, after an in-studio practice of less than a week.

Carruthers feels that The Roast is the stronger of the two, while Heyward noted that it was originally the only special slated; The Challenge was added soon after as a follow-up.

(top) One-time sitcom dad (from The Patty Duke Show) William Schallert as the Scarlet Cyclone, aka Retired Man. (bottom) The entire cast of The Challenge.

Legends of the SuperHeroes © 1979 DC Comics Inc. and Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

After the shows were shot, edited, and ready-to-air, NBC censors got nervous. Over Black Canary and Huntress’ excessive cleavage? No. Over Robin’s more prominent basket? Nuh-uh. Over the offensive Ghetto Man? Nope. It was over Retired Man’s scenes. NBC had been getting flak over their making fun of old people in sitcoms, and it was decided that Legends of the SuperHeroes crossed the line too far. Thus, Gallay, who had dropped into the offices to pick something up, had to immediately come up with a voice-over for Schallert to loop in which he explained why he was so infirm.

NBC censors were pleased, and the shows aired.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LEGENDS Ratings were okay for the two Legends specials, but no series was even contemplated. Heyward laid the series rejection at NBC’s feet, citing the restructuring in the network which messed up a lot of shows that year.

Marmer, meanwhile, felt that the shows were not promoted well at all, thus not earning better ratings.

“The world didn’t know what to do with the show,” said Marmer, “but the people in the business loved it.

People who were alive and intelligent at that time seem to remember it well,” he laughed.

The two specials were lost to the archives, forgotten by almost all TV reference books ever written. Years later, Peter Gallay was working on the Mary Tyler Moore Hour, when a fellow writer who was talking on the phone handed the phone to him. “Harlan Ellison wants to talk to you,” the writer said. Harlan came on the phone, complimenting Gallay on Legends of the SuperHeroes. According to Gallay, Harlan reportedly said something along the lines of, “Those are the greatest things I ever saw! I’ve got them on tape,” before discussing his favorite moments.

Today, with the advent of unusual shows and specials being released to DVD, it seems that a release of Legends of the SuperHeroes should be a slam-dunk for Warner (which owns the Hanna-Barbera library).

After all, with the Batman TV series tied up in legal wranglings and unlikely for release anytime soon, this could allow the company to capitalize on the appearances of Adam West, Burt Ward, and Frank Gorshin.

Perhaps executives are embarrassed by the campy shows. But need I remind Warner that they produced and released Catwoman? And that mocking ironic selfawareness of camp value is in? More likely, they probably aren’t even fully aware the two specials exist. Perhaps now, the light will dawn on them, like a Batsignal to the skies, and the “group of extraordinary men and women”— and their laugh track—can fight crime yet again….

ANDY MANGELS is a best-selling author, award-winning DVD Special Features producer, and past comic-book writer. He is working on two books for TwoMorrows: an autobiography of Lou Scheimer called Creating The Filmation Generation, and The Wonder Woman Companion, both due in mid-2008. Like Harlan Ellison, he loved Legends of the SuperHeroes, even with its campy sensibilities.

Visit him at www.andymangels.com and www.wonderwomanmuseum.com.

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Photo by Darryl Ballini.

An earlier, smaller version of this article appeared in Amazing Heroes #187 (Jan. 1991). Special thanks to all interviewees, plus Delmo Walters for the tip on how to contact Aleshia Brevard, Brian MacDonald for his scans of an older article, and Steven J. Wachtel of Brady Investigations for his help in finding some of the other interviewees!

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The World’s Greatest Superheroes A newspaper syndicate ad, illustrated by George Tuska, for the strip starring DC’s Justice League heroes. Unless otherwise noted, all art in this article is courtesy of its author, Dewey Cassell. © 2007 DC Comics.

Dewey Cassell

“Look, down in the newspaper! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!

No, it’s Superman!”

For DC Comics, 1978 was a year of branching out for its flagship character. Production was underway on a major motion picture adaptation of Superman, starring Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel, which would be released in December.

Witnessing the success of the Spider-Man newspaper strip, launched in 1977, the Chicago Tribune/New York News Syndicate approached DC Comics editor Julie Schwartz about developing a strip based on Superman and the Justice League of America, and replete with all the action typically found in the comic books. The World’s Greatest Superheroes newspaper strip was launched in May 1978 with Golden and Silver Age artist George Tuska tapped to pencil the strip, fresh off a successful run illustrating Iron Man for Marvel Comics. Vince Colletta, then art director at DC Comics, supplied the inks. Marty Pasko wrote the early story arcs, which featured various members of the Justice League, including Aquaman, Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Black Canary, Batman, Robin, and Black Lightning. However, the focus of the strip ultimately shifted to just Superman and his supporting cast of characters, including Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry White, with only occasional guest appearances by other heroes. The villains of the strip were a rogues’ gallery of DC Comics’ best of the worst, including Vandal Savage, Lex Luthor, Doctor Destiny, the Prankster, the Weaponer of Qward, the Joker, and Brainiac.

Some of the newspaper storylines actually mirrored the comic books, although not necessarily in the same timeframe. (There were no “synchronized” storylines between the newspaper and comic books, like Marvel Comics did with the wedding of Peter Parker and Mary Jane.)

One great example of The World’s Greatest Superheroes (TWGS) strip is the Brainiac storyline, which was written by Paul Levitz, who assumed the writing chores from Marty Pasko in the fall of 1979.

Brainiac was first seen in comic books in issue #242 of Action Comics (July 1958), in a tale written by Otto Binder and illustrated by Curt Swan and Stan Kaye.

In the TWGS newspaper tale, which began in January 1980, Brainiac kidnaps Lois to lure Superman into a confrontation. Brainiac then sends a robot to attack M e n

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Beginnings: The Comic Reader fanzine (1970s)

Milestones: Writer: Justice Society in All-Star / Stalker / Aquaman in Adventure Comics / co-creator of Earth-Two Huntress / Legion of Super-Heroes / JSA Editor: Adventure Comics / Batman, Detective Comics, and The Brave and the Bold Executive: an unmatched climb up the DC corporate ladder in a celebrated career spanning over three decades

Work in Progress: President and publisher of DC Comics

Cyberspace: www.dccomics.com

PAUL LEVITZ Photo © 2007 and courtesy of DC Comics.

Dynamo No-No George Tuska’s sketch of the Crimson Dynamo (right), and the Dynamo-like robot from the 1/11/80 TWGS strip (below).

Crimson Dynamo © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. World’s Greatest Superheroes © 2007 DC Comics.

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Superman. When the robot fails to dispatch Superman, Brainiac shrinks Metropolis (à la Kandor), along with Lois, Jimmy, and Superman. Superman ultimately outwits Brainiac, reversing the polarity of the shrinking ray and restoring himself and the rest of Metropolis to normal size. Superman damages Brainiac’s spaceship in the process, forcing it to crash land, and confines Brainiac to the wreckage of his ship. Using his superior intellect, Brainiac manages to construct another shrinking weapon from the remains of his ship, but when he attempts to use it on Superman, it backfires and Brainiac himself is reduced to subatomic size.

One interesting anecdote about this storyline surrounds the robot sent by Brainiac to battle Superman. Notations on the original artwork indicate that Tuska was asked to go back and add antennae to the robot, probably because without them, the robot bore a striking resemblance to an Iron Man villain, the Crimson Dynamo.

I talked with Paul Levitz, now president and publisher of DC Comics, about The World’s Greatest Superheroes newspaper strip and the Brainiac storyline.

DEWEY CASSELL: By the time you started on The World’s Greatest Superheroes strip, the editorial reins had shifted from Julie Schwartz to Joe Orlando. I take it Joe had a different approach to the strip.

PAUL LEVITZ: They came to the process with very different experiences. Joe had written the Little Orphan Annie newspaper strip for a stretch by that time, probably about four or five years previous. He was a great fan of the earlier newspaper strips. Julie, as far as I know, had never come anywhere near the newspaper strip side of the business. He didn’t have any particular interest in or passion for it. I think Julie started out approaching it as a more literal translation of the comic books and Joe had more interest in what the synthesis of the two could be.

CASSELL: Many of the storylines, like Brainiac shrinking Metropolis, were adapted from the comic books. Was that a conscious decision?

LEVITZ: I don’t recall. Obviously, it wouldn’t have been an unconscious theft. We were towards the end of a period in which there was an assumption that most of our readers of comics turned over every few years, so people wouldn’t remember older stuff anyway.

CASSELL: It seemed like most of the villains used in the strip were comic-book villains, not new villains. Was that deliberate?

LEVITZ: It was a combination of two things. One, there was probably some effort at familiarity, but also I’m a fairly bad villain-creator over the course of my

history. Certainly, I had to create some on Legion [of Super-Heroes], where I was on the same strip for a long period of time. But, on the newspaper strip, where you only needed to do a few stories a year, it was probably the most workable crutch.

CASSELL: Did you find it challenging to write the newspaper strip?

LEVITZ: Well, the newspaper strip had a number of downsides for me. The largest was that it stopped being run in the New York Daily News the day I took over. It felt like I was writing into a vacuum.

Although it had probably a wider readership than anything I’ve ever written, I had no feedback. There was no tendency for people to write letters, which was always something I valued very greatly as a comic-book writer. It wasn’t in print in New York where all my peers were, so nobody in the industry was reading it and giving me any feedback. It really was very hard to do on that basis, which was the primary reason I gave the strip up after two years.

Even though it was by far the most lucrative assignment I’d had at that point in my career, I didn’t think it played to my strengths as a writer, particularly at that time in my career.

CASSELL: Was the New York Daily News unhappy with the way the strip was going?

LEVITZ: The newspaper strip business is pretty vulnerable.

There are lots of other guys knocking on the door.

I think it’s fair to say they were not happy with what was going on, particularly since the syndicate distributing the newspaper strip was co-owned by the New York Daily News. It may have been part of the feedback from the syndicate that motivated them to shift from it being basically a Justice League strip to a Superman strip.

CASSELL: There were a lot of characters in the JLA to keep track of.

LEVITZ: Yeah, the JLA just doesn’t really, I think, make sense as a newspaper strip. Marty had an almost impossible assignment.

CASSELL: Were there any stories you wished you could have told in the newspaper strip, but didn’t get a chance to?

LEVITZ: That’s not really my approach as a writer.

I mostly tend to develop work when someone comes

Bottle City The shrunken Metropolis (below), from the 2/7/80 strip, and (right) a Tuska Superman sketch. © 2007 DC Comics.

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Tuska’s Other Man of Steel (below) Let’s not forget that George Tuska also served a stint as the artist of this issue’s cover star, Iron Man. This neverbefore-published Tuska illo of Iron Man and the Black Widow (next issue’s cover star, by the way) is from the collection of frequent BACK ISSUE contributor Jerry Boyd. Also, (right) Brainiac gets small in the conclusion of the story arc (strips courtesy of Anthony Snyder).

Iron Man and Black Widow © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. World’s Greatest Superheroes © 2007 DC Comics.

and says, “Hey, will you do an episode of ____?” Something like Legion, where I was on it for a long time, I had pages and pages of notes I never got to, but that’s not my usual approach.

CASSELL: Was there ever any thought of trying to tie in the strip with the movies?

LEVITZ: I think the primary issues there were economic and would have brought a whole bunch of other financial participants into the mix. Of course, in those days, the syndicate was in the Daily News building, which was the building we used at that point for the Daily Planet for the first three movies. That was kind of fun, too. You would go up there to deliver your work.

CASSELL: Eventually, as the strip went on, you left and other writers followed.

Later George Tuska left and Jose Delbo took over as penciler.

LEVITZ: I think George left around the time that the number of papers had declined, so it wasn’t paying any better than comic-book work.

CASSELL: So the pay was based upon the circulation?

LEVITZ: Yeah, we were following a version of the newspaper strip methodology, where DC took a cut and the writer and artists benefited by the total sales of the strip. That was a tradition that went back, I think, to the old Superman strip with Siegel and Shuster.

CASSELL: Then, at some point, the decision was made to start running puzzle pages on Sundays.

LEVITZ: Yeah, the Sundays definitely separated out into games pages at some point, I think when Bob Rozakis was writing it. He was/is particularly skilled at doing puzzles and games. I think they decided to take advantage of that, possibly hoping to make the Sunday circulation better, since that’s where the money was.

CASSELL: Is there any hope of DC reintroducing a Superman newspaper strip?

LEVITZ: Not in the culture we’re living in. Spider-Man, I think, continues to be done, but that is one of the last of the adventure strips around. Newspapers have so little space available for it and such a limited readership for anything like an adventure strip. There might be a daily comic on the Web. It wouldn’t surprise me to see an adventure strip emerge there—Superman or superheroes or otherwise— but I don’t think we’ll see it in the newspaper.

Paul is modest about his contributions to The World’s Greatest Superheroes strip, but his tenure marked a high point in the series. He provided a great balance of dramatic tension, action, irony, and humor. Ultimately, though, nothing could save the Man of Steel and the strip was canceled in February 1985.

Superman finally succumbed to an ailment common to earthly mortals as well—poor circulation.

Sincere thanks to Paul Levitz for his insight and Alex Segura for arranging the interview.

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Stewart

by Tom “The Comics Savant”

Throughout the 1930s, America was dealing with the worst depression of the new century. People were out of work in record numbers, jobs being scarce; in big cities the problem was worsened by the crush of people coming from the countryside looking for work that wasn’t there. Drought and delinquent loans were closing farms. The last thing a struggling America needed was to get embroiled in Europe’s war. It was far away and not the USA’s problem. Hitler made a lot of noise, but he was just a little man who liked to yell, nothing to be really worried about. America was consumed with its own problem, not those of the Germans and the Japanese.

It was the era of hope for “Peace in Our Time.”

In DC Comics continuity, in the late summer of 1939 biology student Hank Heywood was returning from Munich, Germany, with his mentor Doctor [aka Professor] Gilbert Giles. They’d literally been run out of the country after presenting their findings on “biological retardents,” a process that would allow surgical replacements of damaged limbs and organs … not sure why that would be called a “retardent” [Editor’s note: Or why it wasn’t spelled “retardant”].

On their way out of the hall, Hank tried to put a stop to a couple of Nazi Brownshirts beating a defenseless old man.

Steel the Imploded Man Original cover art to the unpublished Steel the Indestructible Man #6, penciled by Don Heck and inked by Al Milgrom, from the collection of Rick Shurgin. Steel was axed with issue #5, a casualty of the DC Implosion, but issue #6’s material received a second lease on life on two occasions: first in the black-and-white, low-print-run grab bag of remaindered comics stories, Cancelled Comic Cavalcade #2 (1978), then serialized (with Jerry Ordway re-inking the Heck pages) in the two-part All-Star Squadron #8–9 (Apr.–May 1982). © 2007 DC Comics.

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Pre-war Protagonist

The old fellow covered for Hank and Giles, misdirecting the Nazis, but ended up dying in a hail of bullets while they made their escape.

Heywood knew what he had to do.

When the boat docked in New York weeks later, Hank joined the Marines, readying himself for the war he felt would be inevitable. In stopping some saboteurs that were trying to break onto the base, Hank was caught in a blast and almost killed. His friend Professor Giles then rebuilt him, making him better and stronger, using the new discoveries they had both developed, replacing his pulped and damaged bones and organs with steel and steel tubing, installing micro-motors to power and move all that new weight, and using the bio-retardent to re-grow the burned and charred skin. Hank Heywood was now, literally, a “man of steel.” He soon adopted a colorful costume and the name “Steel,” then started after the German Bundists who, working with Baron Death (sent right from Hitler himself), were trying to undermine America. The USA had its first flagwearing hero.

Well, first in a retconned sort of way. The Shield was really the first, punching his way through the MLJ [Archie] line in 1940, then Captain America in 1941 (he got to punch out Hitler right on the front cover— now that’s a hero!). Steel was really a late-’70s addition to the patriot game, arriving full blown in Steel the Indestructible Man #1 (Mar. 1978).

The splash and page 12 (signed by inker Joe Giella) of Steel #1 (Mar. 1978), from the Rich Shurgin collection. © 2007 DC Comics.

© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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SHE’S A WONDER, WONDER WOMAN To find the alloys that made up Steel, you have to go to a certain scantily clad Amazon.

In the mid-’70s, former Marvel Comics writer (and editor-in-chief) Gerry Conway was working away on the scripting of DC Comics’ Wonder Woman. The WW comic book, in accordance with the then-current Wonder Woman TV show, had been set back to the time of the superheroine’s creation, World War II, where the Amazon Princess fought the good fight against the Nazis and the advances of Steve Trevor on the home front. As in any period writing, this involved a lot of research, digging into the history and social mores of the time. Gerry became interested not only in the period of the war, but the time before the war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, America—its people, government, and industries— threw itself headlong and wholeheartedly into defeating the Nazis and the Japanese. So much so, it almost erased the time before December 7th, 1941, when America didn’t really want a part of “Europe’s War.” Yes, war protests are nothing new—the ’60s didn’t invent them. “America First” groups formed with the intent of keeping America free of “European entanglements” and the German Bundist movement (German-American organizations here in America) was rife with German spies, acting to keep America out of the war.

On the other side, some saw the world situation and felt America must act before it would be forced into another world war unprepared. This included President

Fists of Steel The Indestructible Man tangles with Sledgehammer on the Heck-illustrated cover to Steel #3 (June 1978), from the Shurgin collection. © 2007 DC Comics.

Franklin Roosevelt, who was already trying to find ways to aid the British in their fight against the Nazis.

According to Steel assistant editor Cary Burkett, who wrote in the letter column of issue #2 (Apr. 1978): “Gerry wanted to put a character in this setting who had been to Germany, and who knew some of the realities of the situation. Thus, he would be committed to the war, and face not only the Nazi menace, but an America divided over the question of the war.”

Gerry Conway originally was thinking along the lines of a “Super-Soldier” (the original title of the series), an anti-isolationist-Nazi-saboteur-butt-kicker of steel.

In developing Steel with DC publisher Jenette Kahn and managing editor Joe Orlando, the concept shifted from super-soldier to super-hero. Series editor Al Milgrom took Gerry’s rough costume ideas, and between Milgrom and Steel artist Don Heck worked out a costume that looked part Captain America, part Fighting American, and all American flag. (Pick up a copy of Steel #2 to see Heck’s concept drawing of the character. It’s a nice one!)

“EVERYTHING WAS DERIVATIVE” Steel the Indestructible Man by Gerry Conway and Don Heck crashed onto the stands in 1978. It was a mixture of old and new, a big hunk of Captain America, some Six Million Dollar Man, even a little Spider-Man-like “with great power comes great responsibility” thrown in.

It wasn’t the most original concept ever, but after over forty years of superheroes, what could be? Here’s Jack C. Harris, editor on Gerry Conway’s Firestorm run, on working with Gerry’s concepts: “In editorial conversations, Gerry often pointed out that everything was derivative in concept and that the originality comes from new presentations, combinations, and rearrangements of these concepts.

The more script-plotting sessions we had, the more I saw that he was right.”

As mentioned, Gerry’s flip on the flag-wearing super-patriot concept was to make Steel an early M e n

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patriot, one who sees the coming war as, well, coming and vows to be a part of helping America see the fight it was in for. Steel’s fight starts in 1939, two years before America is forced into the war, and just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. Heywood joins the Marines, and Steel fights homegrown and imported Nazis and strange villains like the Gadgeteer, Sledgehammer, and the Mineral Master, the whole time trying to convince his friend Doctor Giles and Giles’ daughter (and Hank’s girlfriend) Gloria that his joining the Marines and advocating the entry of America into the war is not crazy. He never would.

Steel lasted only five issues, as the “DC Explosion” advertised in its pages became the infamous Implosion, and the title was canceled. The concept of the pre-war war hero never really gelled, regulated to a few scene-setting speeches in-between the overly familiar hero action. It didn’t help the series that Don Heck didn’t ink his own pencils. Under his own ink (or that of a sympathetic inker), Heck’s

Inspector Gadget (above) Steel vs. the gimmick-packed Gadgeteer, on Heck’s cover to issue #4 (Aug.–Sept. 1978). (above right) Steel’s final adventure was mopped up in this photocopied collection of axed DC series. © 2007 DC Comics.

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pencils could be quite smooth and dynamic, something like the then-current commercial-ad art, but under mismatched inkers Heck’s art could just lay on the page. It wasn’t a great series, and wasn’t a bad one, either—it was okay, and an okay series couldn’t survive the massive cuts forced on DC by parent company Warner Bros.

Steel the Indestructible Man faded away without much notice.

Steel the character was brought back in the early 1980s by Roy Thomas in All-Star Squadron, who gave Heywood a promotion to Commander Steel. Steel retired after the war, later turning his grandson into a new Steel, who joined the Justice League of America (during a period when Gerry Conway, not surprisingly, was writing Justice League; this version of Steel continues to appear in the DC Universe upon occasion, a © 2007 DC Comics. recent, as of this writing, example being 2007’s Justice Society of America #7, featuring the Alex Ross-painted cover shown in the inset). The original Steel came out of retirement, once again answering his country’s call and becoming a part of that old character butcher shop Suicide Squad. He died like the old soldier he was, fighting Eclipso.

Maybe it was just as well.

“The Comics Savant” TOM STEWART, star of stage and reader of moldy old comics, is a regular contributor to BACK ISSUE, as well as other TwoMorrows publications.

He has a top-secret project in the works that we’ll gladly tell you about whenever we’re allowed.

by

Al N ickerson

THE BIRTH OF A ROBOT John Byrne’s spunky robot, ROG-2000, first appeared as a mascot in Bob Layton and Roger Stern’s comic-book fanzine Contemporary Pictorial Fanzine (also referred to as CPL) #6 (1973).

ROG (or Rog) is short for “Roger” and rhymes with “lodge.”

Where did ROG-2000’s name come from? Legend has it that Bob Layton named him. Byrne confirms that “there were several Rogers working on CPL, Layton’s Indiana-based fanzine, and when I sent in a spot illustration of a robot, Bob declared him to be the new editor and dubbed him ROG-2000.”

Byrne recalls that “Rogie began as a spot illustration of a rather different-looking robot. Layton put ‘ROG-2000’ on its chest and asked for more. I didn’t keep copies of the stuff I sent in to ’zines, so I designed a whole new robot along basically the same configuration. I added the cigar, and his ‘personality’ was set almost immediately.”

A ROG-2000 story, “The Coming of the Gang,” was the first published ROG-2000 story. It appeared in Contemporary Pictorial Fanzine #11 (1974). “The Coming of the Gang” featured ROG-2000 with the CPL Gang as they try to find a way to get to Duffy’s Tavern in Brooklyn, New York. “The Coming of the Gang” was written by Roger Stern with artwork

by John Byrne and Bob Layton. Thus began the heroic adventures of ROG-2000.

ROG-2000 AND E-MAN

Ay-Yi-Yi, Robot An early ROG how-to by John Byrne. All ROG-2000 art courtesy of Al Nickerson. © 2007 John Byrne.

Charlton Comics’ Nick Cuti (also the co-creator and writer of E-Man) played a very important role in getting ROG-2000 to appear in backup stories for Charlton’s E-Man. John Byrne remembers that “Nick had seen the CPL stuff, and was looking for a backup for E-Man, since Steve Ditko’s Killjoy had run its course. Nick asked me if I would be interested in doing ROG, with Nick writing.”

Cuti confirms “that was in the early 1970s during my tenure at Charlton as assistant editor to George Wildman. We received a small publication from a group of guys from Indianapolis, Indiana, who called themselves the CPL Gang. The ringleaders of the group were Bob Layton and Roger Stern. They were interested in doing a Charlton fanzine called The Charlton Bullseye and wanted to pay us a visit. Even though their fanzine was half-size and printed in black-and-white, the artwork in it was very professional in quality, especially John’s art where he drew this little robot which he called ROG-2000. They did come to visit us and they did publish The Charlton Bullseye just as they said they would.”

So, whose idea was it to have ROG-2000 appear in E-Man? As Cuti continues, “Actually, the CPL Gang suggested it.

When we started E-Man, we decided to devote a few pages in the rear of the book to try out other superheroes. We ran a few, which just didn’t take off. Then, at a convention, the CPL Gang approached me about the possibility of running ROG-2000 as the E-Man backup. Well, the fans loved ROG.” M e n

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How did Byrne feel about ROG-2000 appearing in E-Man? Did Byrne think that he made it to the big-time in comics at that point? “Medium time, maybe! But it was fun working at Charlton, and working with Nick.” Byrne continues, “ROG stayed the backup until E-Man was canceled, with issue #10. That was when I moved on to ‘greener pastures’ with Doomsday + One.” ROG-2000’s first backup story was the seven-page “That Was No Lady,” which appeared in E-Man #6 (Jan. 1975). “That Was No Lady” also featured a fictional inventor by the name of “Burns,” who had an uncanny resemblance to ROG-2000’s real-life creator. John Byrne points out that “that was Nick’s idea. It was probably the first time I drew myself in a professional publication.”

ROG-2000’s adventures continued with “Withering Heights” in E-Man #7 (Mar. 1975). “Withering Heights” is Byrne’s favorite ROG-2000 story: “I liked the story with the big blob living in the closet of the old hotel. The artwork really clicked on that one, for me, although unfortunately, I inked it with felt tip pens, and Charlton’s poor printing dropped out many of the lines. (I used a pen with blue-based ink, to avoid fading, and Charlton’s camera had trouble reading some of the thinner lines.)”

“The Wish” in E-Man #9 (July 1975) was where ROG-2000 discovers that it really stinks being a flesh-and-bone human being. “The Wish” is Cuti’s favorite ROG-2000 story: “ROG saves an old lady from muggers and she grants him what she believes he wants more than anything else, to become human. It turns out, however, that ROG hates being human and now must track down the little old lady so she might turn him back to the way he was. The reason I like ‘The Wish’ is because of the lesson it explores which is that everyone believes everyone else would prefer to be like them.”

The last ROG-2000 backup story appeared in E-Man #10 (Sept.

1975). In “ROG vs. the Sog,” ROG-2000 valiantly defends New York City from a giant, slushy, “living garbage heap” of a monster.

ROG-2000 AND STAR TREK There were Star Trek references in “That Was No Lady” and “Withering Heights.” In these two stories, ROG-2000’s cars had “NCC-1701” listed as license plate numbers. As most Star Trek fans know, “NCC-1701” is the USS Enterprise’s registry number.

Who was the Star Trek fan: John Byrne, or Nick Cuti, or both?

Byrne comes clean: “I don’t know if Nick is/was a Star Trek fan.

I’m a big fan of the original series. If you see any visual Star Trek gags, they are almost certainly mine.”

Brave and the Bolts (above) ROG-2000 teams up with his creator in E-Man #6 (Jan. 1975), plus (below) a Star Trek sight gag from the same issue. © 2007 John Byrne.

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Bugged ’Bot Byrne’s moody splash page to the ROG story in E-Man #7 (Mar. 1975). © 2007 John Byrne.

Cuti enjoys Star Trek as well: “I was certainly a big fan of Star Trek during that time but, to be perfectly honest, I did not know that NCC-1701 was the Enterprise’s call numbers. I just never picked up on it.

Therefore, the credit must go to John Byrne.”

STATON VS. BYRNE? One subtle and very humorous element found in Charlton Comics’ E-Man was the friendly rivalry between Joe Staton (E-Man’s co-creator and artist) and John Byrne. The artists poked a little fun at one another in the pages of both E-Man and in the ROG-2000 stories.

In ROG-2000’s “That Was No Lady” from E-Man #6, Byrne included a newspaper headline which read “Staton Dies! Famed Cartoonist Eaten by Frogs,” and in E-Man #10’s “ROG vs. the Sog,” another newspaper headline stated “Joe Staton Trampled by Enraged Aardvark.”

Were the two comic-book creators friendly?

Byrne explains that “we didn’t see enough of each other to really use the word ‘friends,’ but we got along well when we were actually in the same room.”

In the E-Man story “The Inner Sun,” which appeared in issue #9, Joe Staton included the newspaper headline “John Byrne Run Down by Wolverine.”

Nick Cuti remembers, “As far as I know, this was Joe’s only poke at John. Joe used to write funny headlines and toss them around the story. John picked up on the idea and used the technique to toss a few friendly jabs at Joe. Joe was always plugging in little things that I hadn’t written into the script, which was fine by me.

I enjoyed the rivalry, which was always friendly.”

Staton agrees with Byrne and Cuti: “That seems to cover it pretty well. Like John says, we were never really around each other enough to say we were friends, but we got along when we crossed paths. The only real connection was the overlap in E-Man.”

featured an all-new ROG–2000 one-page story.

“ROG-2000 vs. Auntie Decay” was a spoof on the Hostess cupcake ads that were then appearing in comic books. Byrne recalls that “Mike Gold, who was editor-in-chief at First, contacted me about doing something with ROG for their first E-Man issue.

Twinkie ads were running in most books at the time. I’d even done one. So, I suggested a fake Twinkies ad. I was under exclusive contract with Marvel then, and got clearance from them to do that single page, but no more.”

ROG-2000 VS. CAPTAIN AMERICA?

ROG-2000 AND SHE-HULK?

On the cover of Captain America #249 (Sept. 1980), it looks like Captain America is fighting a headless ROG–2000. Cap seems to be fighting ROG–2000 inside the comic as well. Am I seeing things? “You’re not seeing things,” says Byrne, who penciled the issue and inserted the ROG appearance.

THE COLLECTED EDITION “The Coming of the Gang” and the ROG-2000 stories from Charlton Comics’ E-Man were collected in Pacific Comics’ The Complete ROG-2000 (June 1982). It’s great to know that someone was smart enough to collect (up until then) ROG-2000’s adventures. Other than the firstprinting mishap where some of the pages were out of order, John Byrne was happy with The Complete ROG2000: “I thought that was a good-looking collection.”

Does Byrne have any plans for any new ROG-2000 collected editions? Byrne says, “I have no immediate plans for more, though. Sometimes I kick around the idea of trying to sell ROG as a newspaper strip.”

FIRST COMICS In 1983, a second E-Man series was published, this time by First Comics. First’s E-Man #1 (Apr. 1983)

Apparently, ROG-2000 (or someone named “Roger” who looked very much like ROG-2000) was supposed to have made an appearance in John Byrne’s Sensational She-Hulk. However, that never came to be as Byrne explains: “I had planned a story called ‘Who Framed Roger Robot,’ in which a very ROG-like character would be introduced and become She-Hulk’s ‘butler.’ I got screwed over by the editor, fired off the book, and the set-up page was dropped.”

© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

WHERE IS ROG-2000 NOW? Nowadays, ROG-2000 is the “host” for John Byrne’s website, Byrne Robotics (www.byrnerobotics.com).

Will we see any new ROG-2000 stories any time soon? Sadly, Byrne says that “nothing definite is planned.”

Still, there was once talk of ROG-2000 appearing in Byrne’s webcomic, You Go Ghoul. Byrne “was planning to recycle a very modified version of ‘Who Framed Roger Robot’ as a story for You Go Ghoul, but I had to put the whole project on the back burner when other things came onto my plate. Someday, perhaps.”

We hope that that some day comes soon.

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by

Tom “The Comics Savant” Stewart

First of all, there is the myth to deal with. No, Herbie was not created to allay parents’ fear of a burning man on their TV screens. Since even before the Saturday Night Live skit with Dan Aykroyd as Irwin Mainway, huckster for the “Johnny Human Torch” Halloween costume (consisting of a bag of oily rags and a lighter—get yours today!), parents have long suspected that kids really wanted to light themselves on fire (who needs cosmic rays?) and join a group of misfits in a large downtown Manhattan office building to fight intergalactic villains bent on world domination. I mean, who wouldn’t?

Nope, Herbie was created to fill a gap in the Fantastic Four created by Hollywood. See? Hollywood is out to destroy all! In the ’70s, Marvel Comics made a deal with Universal Studios to produce television movies and series using their characters. The package included Captain America (two TV movies starring Reb Brown as a motorcycle-driving Cap), The Incredible Hulk (the hour-long drama starring Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby), The Amazing Spider-Man (featuring Nicholas Hammond with mirrored, sunglasses-like eyes), Dr. Strange (with a perm), The Sub-Mariner, and, of course, The Human Torch (sans the FF … I think that’s kinda like making a Robin the Boy Wonder TV series. You’d sit around wondering when Batman was going to drop by). Johnny (Torch) Storm was to be a racecar driver who was able to set himself on fire, which would save some time, I suppose. A pilot script was developed, and sent into “devo” hell, where it bounced around, slowly giving in to the laws of physics, bouncing less and less with each rejection and turnaround.

HOLLYWOOD STRIKES! Over at the other end of the Hollywood biz, Hanna-Barbera was looking for new projects to pitch. After running though new versions of the old H-B favorites, someone suggested another try at the Fantastic Four, something H-B had done back in the ’60s. Sounded like a good idea, so master designer Iwao Takamoto was assigned to make up some presentations. Enter writer and friend of Jack Kirby, Mark Evanier (for those who came in late, Jack Kirby co-created the FF and most of the Marvel Universe. He has a whole Eisnernominated magazine dedicated to him). Mark, noting the Kirby comics Iwao had for reference, told him he should get Kirby himself to do some presentations. Iwao didn’t realize that Jack now lived and worked in Thousand Oaks, right in sunny California itself.

Mark handed over Jack’s phone number and encouraged him to give him a call. Takamoto did.

At this point in his career, Jack Kirby looked at his future with a growing depression. He felt stuck at Marvel and he didn’t see a way out of doing the same thing he’d been doing for the last

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From the summer of ’79, (above) Herbie’s introductory cover blurb from FF #209 and (below) a Marvel house ad trumpeting his arrival. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

forty years. He was bored with the constant superhero fights, and the editorial fights; it was a business he was tired of, and he wanted out. He and his wife Roz (who deserves an article—or book—of her own) didn’t know quite what to think of the man with the Japanese name offering a good chunk of money to draw FF pictures for animation, but Roz had Jack there the next day. Suddenly, Jack Kirby was working in animation.

Now, Hanna-Barbera was working on spec with the Fantastic Four, as they didn’t have the rights yet.

Before they spent a basket of money securing the rights, they needed to know if there was an interest in the concept itself. A danger of doing business this way is the fact that the rights might not be available.

And they weren’t. Over at Marvel, they were working on getting some Hollywood projects going, and animation seemed the easiest (and cheapest) foot in the door.

Marvel was working on its own presentation with Doug Wildey. H-B sold the network on an FF show, but Marvel and its partner studio DePatie-Freleng held the rights and weren’t about to release them to a rival, even with a contract. It was a clash of the titans! It was the battle of the century! It was resolved peaceably! Dang it. In the end, DePatie-Freleng got the FF contract and Jack Kirby, and H-B got Doug Wildey and another series: Godzilla (you know the one, with Godzooky).

AND LO! THERE SHALL BE A ROBOT! This is where our little pal Herbie comes in. (I know someone out there is saying, “That’s not really his name!” You’re right. His name is Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics: H.E.R.B.I.E. Onward…) With the Human Torch unavailable (and Universal not about to give him back—there was still some bounce left in that racecar-driver concept), who should they turn to but the man himself, Stan Lee: “Make it a robot. The kids like robots” (and Star Wars was BIG at the moment). With Jack not yet onboard, Dave Cockrum was called on to design Johnny Storm’s replacement. He drew up several possibles (that sounds like a good team name, “The Possibles”), one of which was chosen to stand (hover?) alongside Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, and the Thing. This design was passed to Jack who modified it during the storyboard/design phase, and then was further tweaked for animation. (One thing about Kirby: He was a brilliant comics artist and storyteller, but he was not a trained animation guy. His storyboards and designs often had to be simplified for the animation process.)

Herbie, voiced by master voice artist Frank Welker, made his NBC-TV debut in the fall of 1978, to great acclaim. Okay, maybe not so much acclaim as howls of pain from longtime fans. Cries of “cute robot” were heard throughout the land; comparisons to The Brady Bunch’s Cousin Oliver were freely bandied about. This is where the “kids lighting themselves on fire” story came in. It seemed to grow from the cynical fears of a few longtime comics fans, and was even confirmed a couple of times in the Marvel mags themselves. Probably an easier story to tell than the truth.

The FF series lasted 13 episodes, starting in September of ’78 and ending its original run in December—then it faded away to become blurry fifth-generation copies on dealer tables at conventions.

The End.

“NEGATIVE AND DESERVEDLY SO.” Or it might have been, if not for Marv Wolfman and the Powers-That-Be (good name for a band). Marv was the then-current guardian of the Fantastic Four comic at Marvel, and he brought Herbie into the “real” world of the FF comic. In Fantastic Four #209 (Aug. 1979), Reed Richards creates Herbie to help out around the Baxter Building, using Herbie to calculate where to find the planet-eater Galactus. The world of fandom picked up that issue and had one question: Why? Marv?

“I was told to,” Wolfman reveals. “It was something that was being done in the cartoon and we had to incorporate it into the comic.”

Okay. What was the fan reaction?

“Negative and deservedly so.”

Marv Wolfman, writer and creator of many a comic, didn’t care for Herbie, not one little bit. He was not alone. Fans didn’t have to wait out the Herbie saga too long. In #217, Herbie is revealed to be the villain Doctor Sun (Doctor Sun?!), who had downloaded himself into Herbie’s computer brain.

Really, don’t you think poor Herbie got a bad rap?

“It was an obvious gimmick that we were doing something from a cartoon show, and that he didn’t fit into the slightly more grownup comic we were doing,” Wolfman says. “I think fans felt it ‘kiddy-fied’ the comic.”

And what was the fate of “the robot that would be Johnny Storm”?

Wolfman: “When we got the okay to get rid of it, I wanted to have him set up as a bad guy being and turned him into a villain; I thought that was proper.”

Ben Grimm never did trust the little bucket of bolts.

With Herbie revealed as the villain and usurper that the fans always knew him to be, he was destroyed, with not even enough of him left to adorn the trophy room wall.

The End.

© 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

THE ROBOT THAT WILL NOT DIE! Okay, again, the little robot had his fans, particularly among the kids whose first encounter with the World’s Greatest Comic Magazine was through that derided Saturday-morning cartoon show. We often forget, those of us who labor in the fields of fandom, that many people find their way to comics through movies or television (nowadays, video games might lure a player into the comics stores, never to be seen again).

Some looked back at Herbie with, well, if not fondness, maybe a sense that an almostwas, sorta member of the FF should have been treated a little bit better. Now Herbie can be found in print once again, guarding and befriending little Franklin Richards in the Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius one-shots as his helpmate and partner in disaster.

And yes, he’s still a cute robot.

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by

Richard A. Scott

Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art 594 Broadway, Suite 401 New York, NY 10012 Telephone: 212-254-3511 Hours: Friday through Monday, 12:00 PM till 5:00 PM By appointment only on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Admission: General Admission: $5 Children 12 and under: Free Group Rates: Call ahead!

“MoCCA Mondays” begin at 6:30 PM and are free to all! Doors open at 6:15. Attendees are advised to arrive early, as seating is limited.

For additional information, visit www.moccany.org.

MoCCA—it’s not just coffee anymore. No, what MoCCA is, is a scholarly examination of all things comic- and cartoon-related. A 501(c)3 non-profit, MoCCA’s stated purpose is the “collection, preservation, study, education, and display of comic and cartoon art.”

MoCCA was founded in October 2001 by Lawrence Klein, a lawyer and comics fan. It has been in its current Soho location for roughly three years.

Prior to that it had office space in Union Square, and before that MoCCA was a virtual museum on the Internet. MoCCA continues to maintain exhibits on its website: As of this writing in July 2007, online MoCCA exhibits are “Cartoons Against the Axis!,” “NOW THEN!” (covering artists’ earliest and current works), and “DUCK!” The museum frequently features rotating displays.

Recent exhibits included “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” which due to popular demand was extended beyond its February 23–July 3, 2007 schedule to August 3; “Looking For a Face Like Mine,” covering the landscape of African-American artists and writers in the comics industry; “New York Artists Showcase: Jim Salicrup,” featuring the career of one of comicdom’s notable editors; and “The MoCCA Art Festival 2007,” a celebration of comic and cartoon arts!

Many individuals have donated time and materials to the exhibits. There were many wonderful items showcased during my summer 2007 visit. I saw original artwork by Jack Kirby, John Buscema, Stan Goldberg, Gene Colan, Todd McFarlane, and many others.

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(above) Welcome to MoCCA! Do drop in! (below) Among the Kirby klassics on display is this repro of the FF #1 cover.

All MoCCA photos by Richard A. Scott.

Fantastic Four © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

My impression of MoCCA is: with great artwork comes great displays! The Stan Lee exhibit showcased some of the coolest art that I have had the privilege to see up close in person. The Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko pages were great examples that I have not seen before.

There was art from Avengers #18 by Don Heck and Dick Ayers, and issue #32 with Don Heck art. There was a reproduction of Fantastic Four #1’s cover, and actual pages of Fantastic Four artwork by Kirby, including issues #9, with inks by Dick Ayers; #39, with inks by Frank Giacoia (as Frankie Ray) and with Daredevil inks by Wally Wood; Fantastic Four Annual #1 featuring Spider-Man, with inks by Steve Ditko, and Annual #3, with Vince Colletta inks; Hulk #3, with inks by Dick Ayers; and Journey into Mystery #107, with Chic Stone inks. Also presented there was the letter to Stan Lee from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that was the inspiration for the anti-drug, non-Comics Code three-part storyline in The Amazing Spider-Man #96–98.

It was incredible to see so many examples of Stan Lee’s career, from the ’40s, with his very first scripted work on Captain America, right up to the 2000s, including the TV series Who Wants to Be a Superhero?

The “Looking For a Face Like Mine” exhibit, an examination of African-American artists and writers, showcased art including Nat Turner by Kyle Baker, Wee Pals by Morrie Turner, Scorchy Smith by Alvin C. Hollingsworth, and Curtis by Ray Billingsley.

There were also some TV cartoon offerings with Clerow Wilson and the Miracle of PS 14 (featuring Flip Wilson’s drag alter ego), The Harlem Globetrotters, and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

Also featured were some items that were set to finish their museum run: Stuck Rubber Baby art by Howard Cruse; a week of Brenda Starr dailies by Dale Messick; and a Dennis the Menace Sunday strip featuring the original art, the color separations, and a copy of the printed strip. The neatest and the oldest (from 1928) of the exiting displays was a J. R. Williams original daily.

The Jim Salicrup display had more modern-era examples. Featured was a display dedicated to the wedding of Spider-Man (Peter Parker) and Mary Jane Watson. It included several issues of Spider-Man comics and a Mary Jane Watson-Parker Barbie doll. Also on hand were some of Mr. Salicrup’s Topps comics; his current work from Papercutz, including Nancy Drew Manga and The New Tales From Crypt comics; a Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham stuffed doll; an X-Files painted cover (from the Topps Comics series of the 1990s); a Kirby Captain Glory splash page; and Todd McFarlane’s cover art to Marvel Tales #224. One of the funniest items there was the Marvel Comics toilet paper edited by Mr. Salicrup! An interesting inclusion was Kool-Aid Man Comics edited by the aforementioned Mr. Salicrup. The A-Team was there as well.

What I really enjoyed was the art from the Fantastic Four #236 backup story. The artwork was taken from storyboards for the 1978 Fantastic Four cartoon series by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. “Meet Doctor Doom” became “The Challenge of Doctor Doom” for that 20th anniversary issue. The artwork was inked by Vince Colletta. Spidey Super Stories was also represented, and there was artwork from the proposed Muppets daily strip with art by John Byrne and Terry Austin.

All in all, MoCCA is a wonderful display of all things comic and cartoon. I have a great appreciation for the organization and for the volunteers who gave of their time so that I might try to give you a remote showing of this great museum.

(top) Two more by King Kirby: pages from FF #39 (with Giacoia inks, and Wood inks on DD) and the Thor splash from JiM #107. (2nd tier) A Dale Messick Brenda Starr daily. (3rd tier) From the Salicrup exhibit, a Kool-Aid Man display; and a 1928 comic strip by J.R. Williams. (bottom) One of Byrne and Austin’s unpublished Muppets strips.

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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 118 Edgewood Ave. NE • Concord, NC 28025

Our eagle-eyed readers might notice a minor editorial change beginning this issue: the spelling of “superhero.” Since Day One of BACK ISSUE, I’ve hyphenated that word— after all, I am a former editor of DC Comics’ Legion of Super-Heroes, and old habits are hard to break. But as caped crusaders and comic books have, over recent years, become commonplace in the pop-culture landscape, “superhero” (without a hyphen) has become the most accepted spelling of the word … so I give in (except when referring to titles with hyphens, such as the aforementioned LSH and series like Marvel’s Super-Villain Team-Up). But don’t try to convince me to drop the hyphen from “Spider-Man”—that’s just plain wrong!

– M.E.

A STERN DRESSING-DOWN I just read BACK ISSUE #23, another wonderful issue, particularly the roundtable about Spider-Man’s love life, but I can’t understand how you can have left Roger Stern out of it. Stern is probably the best Spider-Man writer ever (after Stan Lee) and the most popular Spider-Man writer in the ’80s. I find this omission a great mistake. His opinions were the ones I was looking forward to most. Any reason for excluding Roger Stern out of this discussion?

– Eduardo Lopez I asked Dan “the Menace” Johnson, who conducted the interviews, and he said:

© 2007 Marvel.

“I really can’t say for sure if Roger was invited and just didn’t get back up with me (which happened with a couple of guys) or if I overlooked him. I do know for sure that there came a point where I had to decide who to pursue next, who to keep pursuing, and who to forget about simply because we would have ended up running the roundtable in the entire issue if I had kept going.

In the end, I figured everyone we had could weigh in about Peter’s love life in one way or another and that way their comments wouldn’t just read like a fan’s response.

“Please, reassure the BI reader that I liked Roger’s run on Spider-Man, too (‘The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man’ is one of my all-time favorite Spidey stories). It’s good stuff, and he was the guy who helped bring MJ back into Peter’s life. But in terms of examining Peter’s love life and marriage to her, we had some folks who offered just a little more insight, at least I think so, especially in talking about their life together as man and wife.”

I hope that Roger Stern’s exclusion didn’t affect your enjoyment of BI #23 too much, Eduardo. And as you saw as recently as last issue, Roger Stern is a frequent interview subject in our pages.

– M.E.

© 2007 Hasbro.

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© 2007 Hasbro.

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE I wish to submit some unusual artwork from the Transformers comic book that Marvel put out in the 1980s.

Back in 1990, I received a kind letter and an original art page from Transformers artist Frank Springer. Later, from another source, I got a Xerox of an earlier version of that same Springer page. It was from a story called “Cosmic Carnival,” in issue #44.

I have included copies of both.

BEFORE: Top of page: Mentions that page is from issue #43. Later, it was changed to #44, because #43 was used as a comic adaptation of the Transformers TV episode “The Big Broadcast of 2006.”

AFTER: Top of page is cut off.

BEFORE: Middle frame: The children (with the basketball and teddy bear) have frowns on their faces.

AFTER: The faces of the children look sad. The hairlines of the boys on the far right and left have been made higher (with White-Out).

BEFORE: Middle frame: Above the boy with the basketball is a sign that says, “Play Dr.,” with an inverted “R.” AFTER: The sign has been completely removed.

BEFORE: Bottom-page edge: Shows the page number as a circled “6.”

AFTER: The “6” has been crossed out, the page number was changed to “8,” and the page bottom has been partially cut off.

Also, in the bottom-left frame of the AFTER page: Above the sulking boy with the ball is a light pencil sketch which shows that the artist had originally planned to show the boy throwing the ball into the hoop.

(The BEFORE page probably had this sketch, too. However, it didn’t show up on the Xerox made of it.)

In the middle frame, from left to right, the children’s names are Sammy, Robin, Jed, and Allan. Their earliest appearance was in Transformers #35.

– Patsy Zukav

ANOTHER GANDER AT GLADSTONE I very much enjoyed the article “A Gander at Gladstone” (BACK ISSUE #23, August 2007). Although I was doing work for Gladstone during the period the article covered, I simply never knew a lot of the things that happened behind the scenes since I was a freelancer and wasn’t in the office every day.

The article filled in quite a few of the details about what was going on behind the scenes that I’ve often wondered about in the years since.

The article also conveys some of the excitement, especially in the concluding quotation from Geoffrey Blum, that the people working for Gladstone felt during its first run. It really seemed as though Gladstone was going somewhere, and if you loved Disney comics, it was a great place to be. Then, of course, it all hit a brick wall with the Disney company’s unfortunate decision to publish the comics itself, and things were never the same again. Even though Gladstone eventually did get the comics back for a second run, the momentum had been lost. I don’t know where Gladstone 1.0 might have gone if it had been allowed to continue— the declining comics market overall would have perhaps caught up with it eventually—but it would have been fun to watch and be a part of.

If I have a quibble about the article, it would be that I don’t think the situation with the European Disney comics that Gladstone reprinted was clearly explained. But then I was a translator; like all freelancers, I only saw the part of the picture I was directly involved with, and in turn that was the most important part for me. In any event, the article gives the impression that all of Gladstone’s European stories were simply re-scripted based on English-language scripts or synopses provided by a single overseas publisher identified only as “European.” Actually, a number of stories were in fact translated outright, mostly from Dutch and Italian, and came from several different countries.

The background is that long ago, foreign publishers with Disney licenses found they needed more material to fill their books than American comics were producing. Part of the solution was that Disney itself had an in-house operation for some years providing stories and art directly to the foreign market, while the other part was that several overseas publishers commissioned original Disney stories from local artists and writers, with the cumulative result over the years of literally thousands of stories featuring Donald, Mickey, and all the rest that have never been published in the United States.

In Europe, the main sources of original material have been publishers in Italy, Denmark, Holland, and France, each with its own approach and style.

One way to make sense out of all this is to note the “story code”: Each Disney story has an alphanumeric code number in the splash panel, such as “H-9999,” for identification and tracking purposes. “H” stands for Holland, “D” for Denmark, “I” for Italy (though in practice it tends to look like a “J” when it’s hand-lettered), and “FJM” for France (standing for something like

France–Journal de Mickey, the flagship French Disney magazine). Stories produced by Disney itself when it had its in-house comics-production unit years ago were coded “S” (for “Studio”) and occasionally turn up in reprints.

The Danish publisher (currently Egmont, formerly known as Gutenberghus) has long had all original scripts written in English to begin with, so the stories can be provided to publishers in other countries for translation into local languages. At the time of Gladstone I, as Geoffrey Blum says in the article, the company had been soliciting stories from British writers, with the results he notes. However, the publishers in other countries doing original material, notably Italy, Holland, and France, have the stories written in their own languages, and while in some cases English translations could be ordered from those publishers, the results were often questionable and it was often just easiest to hire somebody on the American side to translate the foreign-language scripts. Since I was a comics fan familiar with Disney comics and had chanced to pick up Dutch and Italian during my misspent career, that was where I came in.

One European story Gladstone printed seems to have been a milestone of sorts. “The Blot’s Double Mystery,” which began serialization in Mickey & Donald #6 (Oct. 1988), had originally appeared in Italy and was drawn by Romano Scarpa. I’ve seen that story reprinted in Swedish and German collections recently, nearly twenty years later, with editorial commentary remarking that it was the first Italian Disney story to see print in the United States. In the editors’ view, the story’s publication in English showed that European artists had finally earned a place at the Disney table alongside the American masters like Barks, Gottfredson, and Murry, and were no longer just poor relations cranking out mediocre filler because there wasn’t enough classic American material to reprint. Actually, what had happened was that the American Disney publisher was finally in the same position the Europeans had been in for so long: So little new American material was being done any more that a source of fresh material was needed, and the European art was on a high enough level to look pretty good.

As I said, each country producing original Disney stories had its own style and approach.

Italian Disney comics, for instance, assume Duckburg is in America (at least I haven’t seen an Italian story where it obviously wasn’t): the Money Bin has a big dollar sign on it, Mexico is in easy reach … Dutch stories, on the other hand, set Duckburg pretty clearly in Holland, with a Euro symbol on the Money Bin (older stories used the symbol for the former currency, the Guilder). This caused an interesting problem back in the days of Gladstone I, when a Dutch story I was given to translate had Donald drive his car from Duckburg to Paris in apparently just a few hours. The time and distance relationships fit perfectly for driving from Amsterdam to Paris, but there were some problems if Duckburg is assumed to be somewhere on the west coast of the United States.

Editor Byron Erickson ended up papering it over with captions to explain that Donald had hopped the first available Concorde to Paris and then rented a car that looked just like his own back home. Well, thinking up stuff like that is why they pay editors the big bucks.

In the years since Gladstone I, most of the people mentioned in the article have continued to work on Disney comics for one publisher or another. Several of the original crew are working for Gemstone while Byron Erickson is at Egmont in Denmark, and I’m still merrily freelancing away for anyone who needs strange foreign tongues rendered into something reasonably approximating English. But I think there’s a special feeling we all have for that time in the late ’80s when Disney comics were new again and something wonderful seemed to be happening.

– Dwight R. Decker P.S. Hey, I remember the Spider-Man wedding issue! All that hype, one of the major comics events of all time, something really important happening to one of the biggest characters in comics, even a specially commissioned wedding dress by a major fashion designer … and who did they get to ink it?

© 2007 Disney.

Here’s what was different between the two versions of the page:

Guess we can add “assistant fashion designer” to Vince Colletta’s résumé, eh, Dwight? And it’s great to hear from one of comics’ best known translators and longtime fan writers.

– M.E. M e n

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SUPER-ARTISTS SPEAK!

WAITING FOR THE WONDER TWINS

I received my copies of your amazing magazine today and I am blown away! I wish the Average Joe could conceive how much time and effort goes into something like this, as it is beautifully assembled. And thank you so much for including me inside, and doing the junk I call art some serious justice. My respect, gratitude, and thanks!

– Steve Stanley

I enjoyed reading David Gutierrez’s “Backstage Pass” on the Flash television series. I wish this series had been on the air the same amount of years as Lois & Clark ran during its successful run on ABC. John Wesley Shipp will always be remembered as the Flash.

Second, I also wanted to write about the late Marshall Rogers, because it was so shocking and unbelievable that we would lose another member of the Batman family. There will never be another artist who captured the artistic style that he gave to the Caped Crusader.

I also hope there will be a “DC TV Comic” article on the Super Friends showcased in a future issue of BACK ISSUE. – Ricky T. Butler, Jr.

And thank you for contributing your Christopher Reeve-as-Superman illos to BI #23, Steve. For more of the art of Steve Stanley, visit www.stanleyart.com.

– M.E.

Ricky, Super Friends will be among the “Saturday Morning Heroes” featured in an upcoming issue of BI! – M.E.

WHAM! POW! SMASH! Just got the latest issue today, not read anything so far but the letter from fellow Brit Dave Barker. Those UK reprints that mixed T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents with Marvel superheroes, pre-Silver Age horror tales (not EC), and Charlton’s Action Heroes weren’t produced by Fleetway. Astounding Stories, Creepy Worlds, and co. were packaged by Alan Class Comics.

London’s 30th Century Comics has a helpful guide: www.thirtiethcentury.free-online.co.uk/articles/alanclass.htm.

Perhaps Dave was getting them mixed up with the Odhams titles Wham!, Pow!, and Smash!, which threw Marvel stuff in with British strips.

Odhams was taken over by Fleetway/IPC. – Martin Gray Thanks, Martin. By the way, readers, expect more articles on Marvel’s UK comics in upcoming issues.

– M.E.

In 1964, I knew we would travel from Pittsburgh to New York to see the World’s Fair. Why not? It had Disney, the monorail, dinosaurs, a new world of the future, and one more thing: Superman! There was no way I was going to miss seeing Superman fight a Cyclops, not after clipping the 40-cent coupon from the DC Comics house ad and wondering, “How come a Cyclops?” I still have the souvenir booklet and some personal snapshots of the Man of Steel’s heroic battle at the Walter’s International Wax Museum, 1964–1965, New York World’s Fair.

The 1980s tie-in? Well, that came when I drew Superman for Julie Schwartz, and no, he didn’t have a clue as to why a Cyclops either.

– Howard Bender In addition to Superman, Howard Bender (www.howardbenderart.com) has drawn Richie Rich, Ghostbusters, Archie, and several comic strips including Billy & Pop. Thanks, Howard, for sharing with BACK ISSUE the cover and interior page seen here from the program booklet for the 1964 World’s Fair’s wax museum exhibit.

– M.E.

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While it would’ve been great to see a JoAnna Cameron as Isis cover [on BACK ISSUE #23], the Adam Hughes MJ was a nice substitute.

I loved the friction between Jim Shooter and the others in “Twenty Years of Webbed Bliss.” Usually that kind of thing is hidden from view, or the names are withheld so we won’t know who the bad guy was. Good to see some of that come to light.

Personally, I never had a problem with Peter and Mary Jane marrying. I do wonder whether she will survive this upcoming “One More Day” storyline. I’m glad Paul Ryan got the art assignment for that Annual.

“Lift Me Now So I Can Fly”: Great Isis article by Andy Mangels, who also did a great job on the extras of the DVD set. It’s really a shame that JoAnna Cameron didn’t participate in either the extras or the article, through no fault of Mr. Mangels’.

I was very surprised to read in P.C. Hamerlinck’s Isis in comics article that Paramount is developing the BlueWater version as a feature film.

They would be better off trying to do a film of the Filmation version.

“The Flash: Racing for Ratings”: I really enjoyed this series when it aired, though there was room for improvement. The Flash isn’t a dark character, so trying to make him and/or the series dark was a mistake. The rubber suit was also a mistake, a very expensive mistake.

Considering the fact that Shipp was in good shape, a rubber muscle suit was unnecessary. They were trying to cash in on the popularity

© 2007 Warner Bros. TV. The Flash © 2007 DC Comics.

SPANDEX PREFERRED

TABLOID TIME WOW! BACK ISSUE #23 was one of my favorite BI issues, ever. Maybe it was the subjects (the Flash TV show, Ray Harryhausen, the Superman movie adaptations, the Star Trek roundtable) or how each of them were handled. Usually there’s one or two articles per BI that I either skim over, or, when going back and re-reading issues, don’t return to. Not this time!

A few brief comments: Spider-Man marrying Mary Jane: Wow, reading other comics pros interact with Jim Shooter is uncomfortable.

Isis: Felt a little strange that there was no word from, or mention of, JoAnna Cameron outside the show history.

Does she not want to be associated with the show anymore?

The Flash: A good show that never got the chance to be great. Good to hear from the Flash himself, John Wesley Shipp!

Star Trek: A great roundtable, full of fun anecdotes, with no awkward moments à la Buscema/Shooter.

Superman movie adaptations: Great choice for an article. Making movie adaptations special in comics is a lost art

Thanks, Rob, for sharing that Superman Returns fantasy tabloid cover with us. Fans of tabloid (treasury) comics must pay a visit to Rob’s site: www.treasurycomics.com.

JoAnna Cameron did not respond to contact attempts to procure an interview. While BACK ISSUE is disappointed in her lack of participation in issue #23 (and on the Secrets of Isis DVD set), we certainly respect her privacy. (Ms. Cameron, if by chance you’re reading this, you’ve got a lot of fans who would love to hear from you!)

– M.E.

THE PHANTOM MENACE Regarding issue #23’s letter column, and the letter of comment from Bill Pearson on Don Newton’s work at Charlton on The Phantom, I thought that I could share a few memories that might help to solve the puzzle a bit. As always, these are my memories versus absolute fact, but they stem from visits with Don where he would be speaking on the phone to Bill, writing notes to Bill on his Phantom pages, and also from noting the irregular correspondence that Don wrote to Howard Siegel during this time.

I also knew Bill reasonably well before he went off to Connecticut to work with Charlton, so I remember his part of this because of my previous associations with him.

First off, and I don’t think Bill will disagree, Charlton was an inconsistent company to work for, at best. They were in their final years of publishing comics, and their correspondence to Don tended to be off and on.

As a matter of fact, it should be noted that the one thing that made Don’s working with Charlton bearable was having Bill there to “fill in the gaps” for Don in the latter years of his association with the company. I can tell you from a personal experience of visiting Bill at the Charlton Bullseye offices in the latter part of the ’70s that Bill had worked hard to make Charlton a professional place. He had organized the offices and looked out for the professional creators, and as I’ve mentioned to [Newton historian] Barry Keller before, Bill single-handedly was responsible for Don getting much of his Charlton artwork returned to him. When Bill first arrived at the job, one of the first things that he did for Don was to send Don any artwork that he found in the offices from previous Newton mystery and Phantom art jobs. Don was ecstatic that Bill did this, and Bill had pretty much done it behind the scenes, most likely without Charlton’s knowledge. Bill organized the mountain of artwork that existed in the Charlton offices before his arrival and during his time there, returned much of it to the original artists before his job was ended.

Regarding Don’s contributions to The Phantom, the key to this whole situation is in noting the personality of Don himself during this time. Don had become a success at Charlton, but he was only producing his penciling work for them during night and weekend hours, as Charlton’s work assignments and pay rate were not enough for Don to support himself full time. This tended to make

© 2007 King Features.

Delmo, back in 1990, when I was on staff at DC Comics, I got to tour the Warner Bros. studios and visit the set of The Flash. I observed the filming of a special-effects sequence with John Wesley Shipp, in costume, running (in place) with Amanda Pays over his shoulder. After the excitement of the experience wore off, I remember thinking, “Ouch, that Flash suit looks pretty uncomfortable!” Kudos to Mr. Shipp for making the man inside the cushy suit believable.

– M.E.

nowadays (I even worked up my own treasury-sized cover for Superman Returns for my treasury site, just so I could see it for myself).

Alex Toth: More about the Master is always welcome, though reading that he considered Rush Limbaugh “a favorite” is something I could’ve lived without learning.

– Rob Kelly

© 2007 DC Comics.

of Batman, where the physique-less Michael Keaton needed a rubber muscle suit. Shipp may think that red spandex tights would’ve been a joke, but Jackson Bostwick, Chris Reeve, John Haymes Netwon, Gerard Christopher, Dean Cain, Tobey Maguire, and Brandon Routh all looked great in their fabric costumes. Pet Fly would’ve saved a fortune had they gone the spandex route. And Shipp himself would’ve been able to sit down between takes, not sweat through the suit before they sprayed it with a sealant (which then trapped the sweat inside the suit), and not needed a coolant vest to be worn under the suit so he wouldn’t overheat within it. If that Ryan Reynolds as Wally West/Flash film ever gets made, I hope they stay away from a rubber suit.

Star Trek Writers’ Roundtable: I love the roundtable idea. Good stuff!

As evidenced by IDW’s new Star Trek comic, not every artist can pull off Trek.

Superman Movie Adaptations: Nice job by Eddy Zeno, and I liked the art by Steve Stanley, though the limbs of the Chris Reeve figure in his character montage looked odd. What I liked about the film Superman III was the fight between Superman and Clark Kent. In a time before CGI, it looks like there are two Chris Reeves battling it out.

The basic premise for Superman IV was sound, it’s the execution of it that was lacking. As for Curt Swan trying to capture Reeve’s likeness in the adaptation of S III, he didn’t. I have a Xerox of an original page before it was inked, and Superman looks like the comic version.

Sal Amendola was the one who tried to make Curt’s Superman look like Reeve when he inked it. He recounted this to us students when he was teaching at School of Visual Arts.

Superman vs. Cyclops: I’ve seen that ad in many DC Comics and always wondered if there was such an exhibit, and where it ended up.

Guess we may never know where it ended up but it’s nice to know that it did, in fact, exist. The costume is obviously based on the George Reeves’ version. As for the likeness, it looks more to me like a regular guy who needs a shave than Kirk Alyn. Still, it was nice to finally see it.

“A Boy and his Curmudgeon”—I mean, “Unca”: Interesting remembrance of Alex Toth by Darrell McNeil. It’s a shame Toth passed away before he could contribute to the Space Ghost DVD. – Delmo (The Saint) Walters Jr.

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Don continue to feel as though he had not “made it” in comics yet, as he was not working at DC or Marvel Comics, and was not able to consider himself a full-time artist. He was a junior high art teacher who dabbled in drawing comics on the side. Hence, when Don would write to Howard, he would tend to exaggerate his contributions in the whole process to impress his old friend, and frankly, to make Don himself feel more like he was growing successful in the comics industry.

As we all know, the first Phantom story was by Joe Gill, and Don was not a huge fan of Gill’s work. He tended to try and change what Gill had asked for in the script, and when the art was sent in, Don would make notes on the art and script to make certain changes. Gill was someone who, by reputation, was knocking out scripts at faster-than-light speeds, so to my knowledge, he didn’t care when Don made changes. I can remember Don telling assistant editor Nick Cuti that he wanted to see if Charlton would let Don write the book himself.

Cuti responded by working on scripts for Don himself starting with the next issue.

It should also be noted that Don did not fashion himself a writer. Despite what he states to Howard in the letters, during all the years that I knew Don, he never displayed an interest in writing the comics that he drew. If you look at his entire career after Charlton, his entire output is based upon the receipt of scripts from writers at Charlton, DC, or Marvel. Don had an interest in controlling the quality of his work, and if that meant taking on the writing as well, then so be it. However, what he had determined to do was to have John Clark do the writing on the books with Don’s input into the plotting. Charlton, or George Wildman specifically, was not so convinced that such an plan was a good one.

When Nick Cuti left Charlton, his good friend Bill Pearson took over his position there as assistant editor. As Bill states in his note, he was, indeed, in Connecticut when the story for issue #70 was created. I can confirm this as well, and can tell you that not a single issue of The Phantom was produced with Don “hanging over the shoulders of Bill” on the writing of the scripts for the book. Bill wrote this story himself and Don’s contribution, from my memory, was in suggesting or adding many of the side characters. I do remember Don and Bill discussing the story on the phone, because I remember hearing both of them get excited as they began to list characters from the cinema that the Phantom could run into during the story. Don’s main contribution was adding to that list. When Don began to draw the story, he did so from a script from Bill, but his additions to the artwork (i.e., illustrating the details of the scenes described in the script) were all Don’s own decision, or were done with phone input from Bill.

Like a lot of young creators, Don felt that he knew better than the comics companies how to produce good comics, and would often express that fact to us when we would visit.

His frustrations with Charlton were many, but he also had just as many with DC and Marvel in the years to come. The difference here is in the confidence that he felt in himself, however.

In the Charlton years, he was still a fan artist attempting to make it big in comics, so his contributions to the comics were very important to him. He needed to feel successful, and his letters to Howard were probably a part of his building that feeling of success. Years later, however, I can tell you that such matters would have been trivial to him. Sure, he would complain about inkers on books and ask to draw certain characters, but by this time, he knew that he was a successful artist, so the fanboy inside of him moved aside to let the professional out. By that time, the quality of his work spoke for itself and he knew that he was a success.

Thanks for all of the hard work in producing a terrific magazine!

– Jay Willson

Black Widow © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. BACK

ISSUE © 2007 TwoMorrows.

Thanks for the info about Don Newton, Jay. It’s always a pleasure hearing from one of fandom’s nice guys.

But next issue, nice guys finish last, because “Spies and Tough Guys” are taking over. PAUL GULACY and DOUG MOENCH compare notes in a “Pro2Pro” interview surveying their longtime partnership, and “Greatest Stories Never Told” blows the lid off their unrealized Nick Fury/Master of Kung Fu crossover. DC’s hard-hitting ’80s super-team the Suicide Squad also gets the spotlight, with the help of JOHN OSTRANDER, BOB GREENBERGER, LUKE McDONNELL, JERRY BINGHAM, and KARL KESEL. Plus: superhero spy Black Widow, MAX ALLAN COLLINS and TERRY BEATTY’s Ms. Tree, CHUCK DIXON and TIM TRUMAN’s Airboy, the Atlas/Seaboard line of the ’70s, Sgt. Rock’s oddball superhero team-ups, private eye Nathaniel Dusk, JOE KUBERT’s unpublished series The Redeemer, and James Bond and Mr. T in comic books. I pity th’ fool who misses BACK ISSUE #26. Look for its eye-popping Black Widow cover by Paul Gulacy in a mere sixty days. Don’t ask—just BI it!

Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor 8 6

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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.

Please allow 6–8 weeks for a response to your proposals.

Artwork submissions and SASEs for writers’ guidelines should be sent to: Michael Eury, Editor BACK ISSUE 118 Edgewood Ave. NE Concord, NC 28025

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We hope you enjoy this FREE

DRAW! #15 PREVIEW! Edited by top DC and Marvel Comics artist MIKE MANLEY, the Eisner Award-nominated DRAW! magazine is the professional “How-To” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features in-depth interviews and step-by-step demos from top comics pros on all aspects of graphic storytelling, as each artist invites you into their studio to reveal their working methods and tricks of the trade! #15 is our BACK TO SCHOOL issue, covering the major schools that offer comic art in their curriculum, through interviews with faculty, students, and grads, to give prospective students the best overview to date of collegate-level comic art classes. Plus, there’s an interview with B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS, discussing (and showing) how he produces the fan-favorite series; MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ Comic Art Bootcamp series, chock full of drawing tips; product reviews, a color section, and more!

Includes a FREE Preview of WRITE NOW #17!

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Drawing Your Best Foot Forward T

By Bret Blevins and Mike Manley

hey say a person should always start out on any journey putting their best foot forward, and this is just as true for an artist as it is for anyone embarking on a sequence of grand actions or events.

This being so, it is of course vitally important that we visual artists have a solid grasp on the anatomy of the human body as a whole, with extra attention given to the head, hands and feet, which offer every artist a great challenge.

One of the main judgments of an artist’s ability is their skill in drawing people, and especially the face, hands and feet.

Where would the portrait artist be—or the fashion artist or comic artist—without these skills? Probably mostly underemployed. Drawing the figure well clearly separates the A-level artists from the C-level artists. And it seems artists who don’t draw the figure well, and are weak on their drawing of hands and feet, will go out of their way, try anything to avoid drawing them.

Feet of Clay? Nay, Feet of Smoke!

It is sometimes surprising to see how poorly so many artists (pro as well as amateur) draw the foot, as well as shoes. Often they will employ an amateurish bag of visual tricks to avoid drawing the feet altogether. In the ’90s, during the boom and rise of the Image Comics look, it became the rage for artists to

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DRAW! #15 Preview

avoid drawing the feet by “fading them away,” hidden in some ever present mist or low lying ground fog that perpetually surrounded and obscured the characters’ feet in any drawing. It could be outer space, it could be the bottom of the ocean; it mattered not what time of day it was... nope, those pesky feet were a problem to draw, and so they were eliminated in puff of smoke or series of “fade-away lines.” I can’t tell you how many portfolios from prospective artists I saw doing the “fade-away feet” back then, and still do now. It’s one of the biggest deficiencies I see in the work of artists I meet at conventions who are looking to break into the business. They draw the foot like they’ve never seen one, don’t have two themselves dangling at the end of their own legs. As a result, the shoes are poorly drawn to boot, their figures often awkward, clumsy looking and off balance. Nothing can ruin an otherwise good drawing of a sexy girl or super-heroine faster than big, ugly or clumsy feet.

Since this is such a big hurdle for so many artists, Bret and I decided right away one of the earliest “Comic Art Bootcamp” articles should be devoted to drawing the foot. To get started on

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP

the right foot, let’s begin with some basic anatomy to give you some solid knowledge of how the foot is constructed and how it fits or is attached to the tibia—one of the shin bones of the leg.

Fear not loyal DRAW! reader, Professors Bret and Mike won’t leave you with feet of clay, after the mini-lessons in the next few pages you will be able to blow away the fog of ignorance and draw feet that not only stand on solid ground, but are dynamic, powerful, sexy and fashionable.

To start off let’s cover some basic construction fundamentals about the foot. It doesn’t matter if you are drawing realistic feet or

BLEVINS & MANLEY

a more stylized foot, say for an animated character where you must eliminate detail and rendering, the basic construction is still the same. The foot breaks down into these basic parts: • The Heel (The Oscalcis) • The Ankle • The Arch • The Toes (Phalanges)

DRAW! #15 Preview 91

BLEVINS & MANLEY

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP

INNER VIEW

1

A

C

D B

2

E F

Both pairs of my daughter’s feet were drawn from observation, and while they are very animated, their basic form breaks down to the rough, simple forms in Examples 1 and 3. It’s always best to sketch in the gesture of the feet first, then locate the ankles to observe how far the foot is flexed (the arch and instep).

The arch of the foot acts like a spring, pushing the foot upwards. The flexing of the toes in Pose B forces the instep upwards.

3

BREAK DOWN THE FOOT INTO THE SIMPLEST SHAPES

C) The instep D) The Arch E) The Tibula or ankle bone F) The Oscalcis 92

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COMIC ART BOOTCAMP

BLEVINS & MANLEY

FRONT

LEFT TOP: When the foot pushes against something convex it bends, forcing the instep upwards.

RIGHT: A) The ankle of the foot is basically a hinge which fits in between the notch of the Tibula and Fibula— the bones of the lower leg. The inner ankle bone is higher than the outer ankle bone. There is a nice line of energy or arch that runs from the inside of the knee down along the shin, terminating at the inside high point of the ankle. Accentuating this natural shape is really good when doing super-heroes or a more animated, shape oriented drawing as it gives your figures a lot of power and spring even in a static pose.

A

BACK

MOVES JUST LIKE A HINGE

DRAW! #15 Preview 93

BLEVINS & MANLEY

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP FEMUR PATELLA (KNEE CAP)

FIBULA

THE CURVE OF THE ARCH

TIBULA

FAY PAD TIBIAL PROTUBERANCE

THE HIGH POINT OF THE SHIN

1 2 3

For the rest of this Bootcamp and more, don’t miss DRAW! #15, on sale now!

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These two stylized drawings illustrate the position in the frontal view of the leg where the Astragalus rests between the Tibula and the Fibula. You can think of the foot in this view as a triangle dividing the foot into three sections: 1) the Tarsal 2) the Metatarsal 3) the Phalanges The outside of the foot turns in at the little toe.

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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!

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“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!

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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!

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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!

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‘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!

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“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!

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“Big, Green Issue!” Tour of NEAL ADAMS’ studio (with interview and art gallery), DAVE GIBBONS “Rough Stuff” pencil art spotlight, interviews with MIKE GRELL (Green Arrow), PETER DAVID (Incredible Hulk), a “Pro2Pro” chat between GERRY CONWAY and JOHN ROMITA, SR. (Green Goblin), the unproduced She-Hulk movie, and more. New cover by ADAMS!

“Unsung Heroes!” DON NEWTON spotlight, GERBER and COLAN on Howard the Duck, CARLIN and 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!

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“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!

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

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: JUL073976

BACK ISSUE #25

BACK ISSUE #26

BACK ISSUE #27

BACK ISSUE #28

BACK ISSUE #29

“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; interview with ALAN WEISS; spotlights on ARION, LORD OF ATLANTIS; NIGHT FORCE; KING KONG; and more!

Cover by NICK CARDY!

“Heroes Behaving Badly!” Hulk vs. Thing tirades with RON WILSON, HERB TRIMPE, and JIM SHOOTER; CARY BATES and CARMINE INFANTINO on “Trial of the Flash”; JOHN BYRNE’s heroes who cross the line; Teen Titan Terra, Kid Miracleman, Mark Shaw Manhunter, and others who went bad, featuring LAYTON, MICHELINIE, WOLFMAN, and P REZ, and more! New cover by DARWYN COOKE!

“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; the Beast’s tenure with the Avengers; the return of the original X-Men in X-Factor (and the revaltion of Nightcrawler’s “original” father), a history of DC’s mutant, Captain Comet, and more! Cover by DAVE COCKRUM!

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: SEP074091

(100-page magazine) $9 US Diamond Order Code: NOV073948

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

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

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

A NEW MAGAZINE COMING FEBRUARY 2008 FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING: BrickJournal magazine is the ultimate resource for LEGO enthusiasts of all ages!

Edited by JOE MENO, it spotlights all aspects of the LEGO Community, showcasing events, people, and models in every issue, with contributions and how-to articles by top builders worldwide, new product intros, and more! Produced with assistance from the LEGO Group. Volume 1, #1-8 are available NOW as downloadable PDFs for only $3.95 each, and #9 is available FREE so you can try before you buy! Go to www.twomorrows.com to order.

The first print issue ships February 2008—order now! 80 pages, full-color!

SINGLE COPIES: $11 US Postpaid (add $2 US First Class or Canada, $7 Surface, $9 Airmail).

4-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTIONS: $32 US Postpaid by Media Mail ($42 First Class, $50 Canada, $66 Surface, $78 Airmail).

BrickJournal #1 (Volume 2) BrickJournal #1 (Volume 2) features reports on some of the top events worldwide that are held by the LEGO community, including Northwest Brickcon in the US, and events in Denmark and Germany. There's also interviews with LEGO set designers and other adult LEGO builders, including LEGO Certified Professional Nathan Sawaya! Plus there's stepby-step instructions, new set reviews, and other surprises in every issue!

TwoMorrows Publishing

DOWNLOAD A FREE DIGITAL EDITION OF VOL. 1, #9 NOW AT www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 FAX: 919-449-0327 • e-mail: john@twomorrowspubs.com • www.twomorrows.com

COMING SOON FROM TWOMORROWS!

ROUGH STUFF #7

DRAW! #15

WRITE NOW! #17

ALTER EGO #74

BRICKJOURNAL #1 (V2)

Features an in-depth interview and cover

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

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

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

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!

The ultimate resource for LEGO enthusiasts of all ages, showcasing events, people, and models! #1 features an interview with set designer and LEGO Certified Professional NATHAN SAWAYA, plus step-by-step building instructions and techniques for all skill levels, new set reviews, on-the-scene reports from LEGO community events, and other surprises! Edited by JOE MENO.

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships January 2008 Diamond Order Code: NOV073966

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $9 US Ships November 2007 Diamond Order Code: AUG074131

(80-page magazine) $9 US Ships November 2007 Diamond Order Code: AUG074138

(100-page magazine) $9 US Ships December 2007 Diamond Order Code: OCT073927

(80-page FULL COLOR magazine) $11 US Ships February 2008 Look for it in December’s PREVIEWS

KIRBY FIVE-OH! (JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50)

SILVER AGE MEGO 8" SUPERSCI-FI COMPANION HEROES: WORLD’S In the Silver Age of Comics, space was GREATEST TOYS!TM

ALL- STAR COMPANION V. 3

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME 14: FRANK CHO

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) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: JUL078147 Ships February 2008

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! (160-page trade paperback) $24 US ISBN: 9781893905818 Diamond Order Code: JUL073885

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!

Lavishly illustrated with thousands of CHARTS, CHECKLISTS and COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS, it’s an obsessive examination of legendary toy company MEGO (pronounced “ME-go”), and the extraordinary line of super-hero action figures that dominated the toy industry throughout the 1970s. Featuring a chronological history of Mego, interviews with former employees and Mego vendors, fascinating discoveries never revealed elsewhere, and thorough coverage of each figure and packaging variant, this FULL-COLOR hardcover is the definitive guide to Mego.

BRAD MELTZER raves, “I’ve waited thirty years for this magical, beautiful book.”

And CHIP KIDD, internationally-recognized graphic designer and author of BATMAN COLLECTED, deemed it “a stunning visual experience.” Written by BENJAMIN HOLCOMB. (256-page COLOR hardcover) $54 US ISBN: 9781893905825 Diamond Order Code: JUL073884

SUBSCRIPTIONS:

US

More amazing secrets behind the 194051 ALL-STAR COMICS and the 1941-44 SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY—and illustrated speculation about how other Golden Age super-teams might have been assembled! Also, an issue-by-issue survey of the JLA-JSA TEAM-UPS of 1963-85, the 1970s JSA REVIVAL, and the 1980s series THE YOUNG ALL-STARS and SECRET ORIGINS, with commentary by the artists and writers! Plus rare, often unseen art by KUBERT, INFANTINO, ADAMS, ORDWAY, ANDERSON, TOTH, CARDY, GIL KANE, COLAN, SEKOWSKY, DILLIN, STATON, REINMAN, McLEOD, GRINDBERG, PAUL SMITH, RON HARRIS, MARSHALL ROGERS, WAYNE BORING, GEORGE FREEMAN, DON HECK, GEORGE TUSKA, TONY DeZUNIGA, H.G. PETER, DON SIMPSON, and many others! Compiled and edited by ROY THOMAS, with a new cover by GEORGE PÉREZ! (224-page trade paperback) $31 US ISBN: 9781893905801 Diamond Order Code: MAY078045 Surface

Airmail

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$44

1st Class Canada $56

$64

$76

$120

BACK ISSUE! (6 issues)

$40

$54

$66

$90

$108

DRAW!, WRITE NOW!, ROUGH STUFF (4 issues)

$26

$36

$44

$60

$72

ALTER EGO (12 issues) Six-issue subs are half-price!

$78

$108

$132

$180

$216

Features an extensive, career-spanning interview lavishly illustrated with rare art from Frank’s files, plus huge sketchbook section, including unseen and unused art!

By ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON. (120-page TPB with COLOR) $19 US ISBN: 9781893905849 Diamond Order Code: AUG074034

MODERN MASTERS: MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD Shows the artist at work, discussing his art and career!

(120-minute Std. Format DVD) $35 US ISBN: 9781893905771 Diamond Order Code: MAY073780

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

TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics.

TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com