Back Issue #36 by TwoMorrows Publishing

This issue: WRIGHTSON • DeZUNIGA • ISABELLA & AYERS

r 2009 Octobe

N$o6..3965

82658 27762

MORBIUS • VAMPIRELLA ≈ FRANKENSTEIN ≥ SWAMP THING Ω ARCANE & UN-MEN GOLEM ≈ IT, THE LIVING COLOSSUS ≥ MAN-BAT Ω PATCHWORK MAN ≈ DR. THIRTEEN

THE

BATCAVE C O M P A N I O N NOW SHIPPING! Batman. Is he the campy Caped Crusader? Or the grim Gotham Guardian? Both, as The Batcave Companion reveals. On the brink of cancellation in 1963, Batman was rescued by DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, who, abetted by several talented writers and artists, gave the hero a much-needed “New Look” which soon catapulted Batman to multimedia stardom. In the next decade, when Batman required another fresh start, Schwartz once again led a team of creators that returned the hero to his “creature of the night” roots. Writers Michael Eury (The Krypton Companion, The Justice League Companion) and Michael Kronenberg (Spies, Vixens, and Masters of Kung Fu: The Art of Paul Gulacy) unearth the stories behind the stories of both Batman’s “New Look” and Bronze Age (1970s) comic-book eras through incisive essays, invaluable issue-by-issue indexes, and insightful commentary from many of the visionaries responsible for and inspired by Batman’s 1960s and 1970s adventures: Neal Adams, Michael Allred, Terry Austin, Mike W. Barr, Steve Englehart, Mike Friedrich, Mike Grell, Carmine Infantino, Joe Giella, Adam Hughes, Sheldon Moldoff, Will Murray, Dennis O’Neil, Bob Rozakis, Mark Waid, Len Wein, and Bernie Wrightson. Featuring 240 art- and info-packed pages, The Batcave Companion is a must-have examination of two of the most influential periods in Batman’s 70-year history.

Written by Back Issue’s

MICHAEL EURY & MICHAEL KRONENBERG ISBN 978-1-893905-78-8 $26.95 in the U.S. plus shipping Batman, Robin, and all related characters and indicia are TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

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

Volume 1, Number 36 October 2009

The Retro Comics Experience!

Celebrating the Best Comics of the '70s, '80s, '90s, and Today! EDITOR Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

BACK SEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 DESIGNER Rich J. Fowlks

INTERVIEW: Bernie Wrightson: Perfectly Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 The master of the macabre discusses his obsession with Mary Shelley’s tale, and more FLASHBACK: The Monster of Frankenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 Mike Ploog, Roy Thomas, and Gary Friedrich recall the Marvelizing of the Monster

COVER ARTIST Earl Norem

TIMELINE: Frankenstein in Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 No pitchfork or torch is needed to hunt down these comics appearances of ol’ Flattop

PROOFREADERS John Morrow and Eric Nolen-Weathington SPECIAL THANKS Arthur Adams Michael Aushenker Dick Ayers Frank Balas Alex Boney Jerry Boyd Michael Browning Bruce Buchanan Jose Cabrera Piers Casimir Dewey Cassell Ernie Colón Gerry Conway Nicola Cuti Darren Davis Tony and Tina DeZuniga Mark DiFruscio Joshua Dysart Ray Falcoa Shane Foley Gary Friedrich Mike Friedrich Grand Comic-Book Database Larry Guidry Allan Harvey Mike Hawthorne Ola Hellsten Heritage Comics Auctions Tony Isabella Michael Wm. Kaluta Len Kaminski

David Anthony Kraft Kirk Langstrom Paul Levitz Alan Light Dave Louapre Michael Mantlo Marvel Comics Mark McKenna David Michelinie Mike Mignola Ian Millsted Nightscream William F. Nolan Eamon O’Donoghue Jimmy Palmiotti Martin Pasko Mike Ploog Howard Post John Romita, Sr. Bob Rozakis Alex Saviuk Bill Schelly Philip Schweier Steve Skeates Anthony Snyder Roy Thomas Rick Veitch Len Wein John Wells John Whalen Mel Whitlow Alex Wright Bernie Wrightson

FLASHBACK: Taste the Blood of Vampirella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20 Lordy, Lordy, Vampi’s 40, and BI eyes the vivacious vixen’s history BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: Morbius, the Living Vampire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28 How Morbius went from Spider-Man supervillain to Marvel monster-hero FLASHBACK: Mud, Moss, and Mayhem: The Original Swamp Thing’s Latter Days . . .35 Nestor Redondo and the men who brought life to Swampy after Bernie Wrightson FLASHBACK: Monsters (Almost) Unleashed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 Revisit 1975, the year the Patchwork Man and Man-Bat briefly became solo stars ART GALLERY: Monster Rally Gallery! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 A cool and creepy collection of creature features by Starlin, Kaluta, Wrightson, and others BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: Major Arcana: The Life (and Death) Story of Anton Arcane and the Un-Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50 Exhuming the legend of the Swamp Thing foe who won’t stay dead BEYOND CAPES: Follow You … For I Am Dr. Thirteen! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 The real star of The Phantom Stranger steps into BACK ISSUE’s spotlight INTERVIEW: Dining with the DeZunigas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67 Pull up a chair with superstar artist Tony DeZuniga and his delightful wife, Tina PRO2PRO: Tony Isabella and Dick Ayers’ It! The Living Colossus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69 The writer/artist team and their recollections of the short-lived Colossus comeback FLASHBACK: Golem, Golem … Gone! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72 Marvel’s take on an old Hebrew legend WHAT THE--?!: Power Records’ Monster Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 Peter Pan Records’ not-so-kid-friendly Marvel Monster book-and-record sets GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD: The Secret History of All-American Comics, Inc. . . . .82 “In and Out of Darkness,” concluding Bob Rozakis’ fantasy comics history BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 Reader feedback on “New World Order” issue #34 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. E-mail: euryman@gmail.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 Earl Norem. Morbius and Werewolf by Night TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2009 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing. BACK ISSUE is a TM of TwoMorrows Publishing. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING. Monsters Issue

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COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg

Hi, Dewey! Hey, thanks to you (or whoever did it) for sending me the new issues with your splendid, beautifully researched piece on Logan’s Run (the #1 highlight of my 55-year career.) You may want to do a follow-up based on a three-year contract I just signed with Bluewater Productions for a six-issue run of Logan’s Run. As a comics buff, I look forward to the new series (and Logan is still very much alive at Warner/Silver Pictures). So ... after 12 years we may yet see a new screen Logan... I have seven large scrapbooks filled with Logan material (comics, posters, stills, etc.) and I have the original art cover for Marvel’s Logan’s Run #1 framed on the wall. (Pérez art, of course.) If you ever get up this way I’ll be glad to share ’em with you. Again, my thanks for a wonderful article on Mr. L. Happy to add it to my collection! Best always! William F. Nolan

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That’s great news! Here’s the buzz from Bluewater Productions: “The original Logan’s Run depicted a dystopian future of the 23rd Century, enjoyed by the young (reach a certain age and it’s time to die). This comic adaptation, entitled Logan’s Run: Lastday, revisits Nolan’s literary Logan trilogy and moves forward with new adventures written by Paul J. Salamoff with art by Daniel Gete. Logan’s Run: Lastday is scheduled for a November 2009 release.” Special thanks to Darren Davis for sharing this art with us.

Logan’s Run TM & © MGM.

With this issue, we’ve got six years of BACK ISSUE under our editorial belt! (So that explains why I’ve had to go up one waist size…) Pesky typos and occasional factual errors aside, our magazine’s well oiled now, and our readership is loyal and consistent. On that topic, I hereby deputize you, the regular BI reader, for a special mission (just don’t expect a badge). Almost every issue I receive a letter enthusiastically stating, “I just discovered BACK ISSUE.” Many comics shops, especially smaller ones, don’t carry our magazine. Some larger shops purchase only enough copies to fill orders. This means that there are potentially thousands of readers who haven’t yet discovered us. So please help us spread the word about BACK ISSUE. Hammer your comic-shop dealer to stock BACK ISSUE (many shop owners are from the BI era—they might nostaligically appreciate the magazine). Recommend it to your fellow fans. And if you can afford it, buy a few extra issues to share with friends to turn them on to us. (I can use phrases like “turn them on” in a retro magazine.) And don’t worry, this isn’t a veiled “we’re on the verge of cancellation message”—our sales remain healthy, but I’m convinced our audience would be larger if readers simply knew we existed. Thanks for your help! If you are one of those newer readers and are wondering where Tomb of Dracula, Godzilla, Ghost Rider, and some of your other favorite frightening funnybooks are in this “Monsters” issue, check out our back issues for BI #6 (“Horror”) and 15 (“Weird Heroes”). Speaking of issues past, two final remarks about our “Teen Heroes” issue, #33: We weren’t aware at press time that Jonathan Mueller is the owner of the original design art for Kitty Pryde by John Byrne and wish to acknowledge him in print. And regarding the article on The Man Called Nova, Marv Wolfman writes to tell us: “There’s one mistake. [John] Buscema did not do the cover to #1. Rich Buckler did. I can easily understand the confusion as he was aping John but the B/S on the cover was Buckler/Sinnott.” Thanks, Marv! Regular BI writer Dewey Cassell recently received the following letter and kindly shares it with us:

Michael Eury

Philip Schweier

“There’s nothing worse than an unhappy horror artist,” says Bernie Wrightson. Fortunately, Wrightson is pretty satisfied with his career which spans 40 years. “It’s all rewarding as long as there are monsters in it and it’s a horror story, because those are the things I love,” he told an audience at the 2008 Dragon-Con in Atlanta, Georgia. His passion for the genre resulted in his most personal project to date, an illustrated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Over the course of seven or eight years, he assembled a collection of about 60–65 illustrations for the novel. “This was my labor of love,” Wrightson beams proudly during a later interview. “I think the seed was planted when I was very young, and it kind of grew and grew. By the mid-’70s, to carry the metaphor, it blossomed.”

INFLUENCES According to Wrightson, he has been a Frankenstein fan since the age of seven, while growing up in Baltimore, Maryland. “I just fell in love the movies. Universal had a whole package of old monster movies that they released to TV. It was the time of the horror host on Shock Theater. There was Zacherly in New York, and our version of Zacherly was a guy named Dr. Lucifer. He had a lot of the same schtick. He had a coffin where his dead wife slept and … the usual stuff, the tombstones and the cobwebs. Very jokey things, and he would occasionally break into the movie with some kind of schtick related to what was happening in the movie. It was kid’s stuff.” He also became a big fan of the EC’s horror comics and its stable of artists. “I liked Jack Davis, Johnny Craig, and George Evans, Reed Crandall. Everybody who worked for EC was just top-notch. They were the best people in the business.” One artist stood out. “For me … the creepiest story was always drawn by Graham Ingels. Ghastly Graham Ingels. And to this day, if you pick up Vault of Horror, Crypt of Terror, or Haunt of Fear, and you look at any of those, and I guarantee, the Graham Ingels story,

That’s My Boy! Blacks, hatching, and intricate linework—Bernie Wrightson hallmarks—make the artist the perfect candidate to adapt the Mary Shelley classic. Page 37 from the Frankenstein graphic novel. © 2009 Bernie Wrightson and Darkwoods Productions.

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Beginnings: First sale: “Nightmaster” in Showcase #83 (1969) First published art: House of Mystery #179 (1969)

Milestones: Comics: House of Mystery / Swamp Thing / Frankenstein / Creepshow / Batman: The Cult / The Weird / Captain Sternn / Batman/Aliens / City of Others / Dead, She Said / many memorable covers Film: character designs for Creepshow / Ghostbusters / Spider-Man / Serenity / Ghost Rider / The Mist

Works in Progress: Frankenstein (25th anniversary edition hardcover, Dark Horse, 2008) / DC Comics Classics Library: Roots of the Swamp Thing

Cyberspace: www.wrightsonart.com

Bernie Wrightson Photo courtesy of Bernie Wrightson.

just looking at it—you don’t even have to read it, just look at the pictures—and it’s the creepiest stuff in the book.” Such artists as Ingels and Frank Frazetta inspired the young Wrightson to pursue art on his own. His earliest lessons came from a Saturday morning television program featuring artist Jon Gnagy. “It was a half-hour show and he would, in the course of the show, draw a picture starting with basic shapes—circle, square, triangle. He would show you how to turn the triangle into a cone and turn a rectangle into a cylinder, and, by finding a light source and making a shadow, turn the circle into a globe. He said, ‘If you can draw these three basic shapes, you can draw anything. This is what all drawing is based on.’”

ART SCHOOL However, it wasn’t until his teen years that, despite a few hurdles, Wrightson began thinking of a career in art. “There were no art classes in Baltimore at the time, in the 1960s, when I got out of high school. I tried to find a college that taught commercial art and there was nothing. I think the University of Maryland taught fine art, but I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to learn how to draw, you know, commercially. There was nothing at the time. This was years and years before anybody thought of teaching comics or just illustration in schools. But I found a correspondence course in Connecticut, the Famous Artists’ School, so I signed up for that.” Today, taking art courses by mail may sound rather suspect, but at the time, it was the only option for Wrightson. “It was the only place at the time that had what I was looking for and I still have the course books. I look at them from time to time and it’s still the best art training that I’ve ever seen. There are a lot of imitators, or there used to be. There were a lot of correspondence schools but I never looked into any of those. I just got lucky and found the best one.” While the Famous Artists’ School didn’t offer a degree, that was never a concern for the budding illustrator. “This was just a personal best kind of thing and I wasn’t interested in a degree anyway,” says Wrightson. “I always felt that for an artist, the best thing you can show is your portfolio. An artist is judged by his work, not by how much he studied or what grades he got.” Embarking on his art career after high school, Wrightson took a job with the Baltimore Sun, which lasted less than a year. “It was kind of sobering. I thought I’d be getting a job where I’d be drawing all the time, but most of it was re-touching photos or doing paste-ups. But the experience was valuable. It was not what I particularly wanted to do, but I learned a lot from it.”

Peeking Through the Scream Door Bernie Wrightson’s cover art for the 1971 fanzine Scream Door #1 shows his affinity toward Mary Shelley’s patchwork man. According to Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com), who kindly provided this scan, the bottom panel of this art was also used in the publication Berni Wrightson: A Look Back. Art © 2009 Bernie Wrightson.

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A TRIP TO ORLANDO Wrightson then began looking for work in the comicbook field. “I went to comic-book conventions, basically, and just started showing my stuff around to anybody who wanted to look, and some of the people eventually who looked at it were editors at DC, and they said, ‘You know, you could work in comics. You’re good enough.’ I had to think about that for a while—maybe a month—and then I moved to New York.” By now it was the late 1960s, and DC’s horror line consisted of House of Mystery and House of Secrets. Both followed the old EC anthology format, “hosted” by a couple of ghoulish type of characters. “I just happened to be very lucky, in that a year or so before that they had started House of Mystery. And, of course, it was under the Comics Code Authority, so you couldn’t really deal with stuff like vampires and werewolves,” Wrighston says. “The Code was very strict about that the really horrific kind of stuff, like zombies. You couldn’t use the word ‘horror’ in a title; really, really strange, strict rules. Joe Orlando was the editor of House of Mystery, and he was one of the original EC artists. His idea was, ‘Well, if we can’t have really good, gritty horror stories, you know, if we can’t do it with the content, let’s find artists who can draw stuff that looks creepy, and just make the books look like horror comics.’” The short-story format helped novice writers and artists learn the ropes before moving on to higher-profile books such as DC’s superhero titles. “I never related much to superheroes,” confesses Wrightson. “I read Superman and Batman and Fantastic Four and all that stuff when I was younger. It was fun to read but it was nothing that I ever really wanted to draw. Superheroes were somehow not real to me ... compared to werewolves and mummies and stuff. I can buy that, but I can’t buy the X-Men. But that’s just me.” DC Comics’ horror line expanded slowly, with titles such as The Unexpected and The Witching Hour added by the early 1970s. Each issue would feature a handful of stories, perhaps eight to 12 pages long. One of the most popular of these, illustrated by Wrightson and written by his “partner in grime” Len Wein, was “Swamp Thing,” which premiered in House of Secrets #92 (July 1971), then made the leap into a title of its own. [Swamp Thing vol. 1 #1 was cover-dated Oct.–Nov. 1972.] Wrightson explains, “Part of the fun is following a character and watching him develop and seeing which direction he’s going to follow. It just seems that most of the time people jump in with that initial enthusiasm and after a while the characters begin to pull you along as a creator, and the characters begin to tell you what do with them.

“We were pretty much making [Swamp Thing] up as we went along. It was basically a monster-of-the-month kind of thing, like the Kolchak/Night Stalker TV show. It was the same hero, but a hero needs someone to fight and it would be another monster. But I’ll take the blame for that. I was looking for stuff that was fun to draw, so maybe Len had other ideas about developing the character and taking it in another direction, or maybe I held him back because I wanted to have another monster. I never talked with him about that, but looking back and rereading it, it looks a little suspicious now.” Swamp Thing eventually stumbled once Wrightson and Wein departed after the tenth issue, and was canceled after #24 (Aug.–Sept. 1976). Revived in the early 1980s, it led to two feature films and a syndicated television series, as well as a Saturday morning cartoon show. Since the Swamp Thing was created under DC Comics’ work-for-hire policy, Wrightson and Wein saw only token appreciation for their creation.

TM & © DC Comics.

Swamp Thing, Take One When Wrightson and writer Len Wein introduced Swamp Thing in House of Secrets #92—the moody title page from which is seen at right—they had no inkling that they had created a horror and pop-culture icon. The issue’s cover is seen in the upper right. TM & © 2009 DC Comics.

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THE FAB FOUR

“The Lurker in Tunnel 13” Wrightson’s layouts (left) and finished art for page 9 of his breakout series Swamp Thing, issue #8 (Jan.–Feb. 1974), courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

In the mid-1970s, Wrightson began to move away from comic books. With fellow artists Michael William Kaluta, Jeffrey Jones, and Barry Windsor-Smith, he formed what would later become known simply as “the Studio.” Wrightson remembers, “We wanted to do bigger and bigger work and just kind of spread out in our artwork both physically and emotionally. We were lucky enough to find this really huge loft space, but the problem was it was too expensive. “It cost an astronomical $400 a month,” Wrighston says. “Barry and I were the guys who found it and it was just too much. We could not afford this on top of our $180-a-month apartments. We needed to bring someone else in, and the first people we contacted were Jeff and Michael. They came in on it, so the Studio was born.” The four artists, independently of each other, had all entered the comics business at roughly the same time, and now found themselves at a point in their careers where they were perhaps getting a little burned out on comics and looking to expand their horizons a bit. Posters and prints were just coming into vogue, and they each began looking in that direction. “I think we were all kind of spreading out a little, you know,” muses Wrightson. “Barry had started a couple of years before, publishing his own prints. Kaluta and I both, I think, at the time were starting to do big prints, you know, posters. It was the tail end of

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the poster craze, when everybody decorated their rooms with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and all that stuff.” According to Wrightson, the Studio lasted not quite through the first year of a three-year lease. “What happened was a fella from England came to the door one day claiming to represent a publisher in England. His company, Big O Publishing, had just done a book on the work of Roger Dean, an artist whose work was featured on album covers for the band Yes. He said, ‘We want to do a book on the top ten fantasy artists in America.’ I, being young and cocky and kind of a loudmouth, answered, ‘Well, you got your first four right here.’ “We opened up a couple of bottles of wine and we got him—well, all of us, really—toasted so by the end of it he said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do a book on you four guys.’” Wrightson says that was the beginning of the end of the Studio. “Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of fun—there was an awful lot of fun—but there was a lot of fighting and hard feelings about dividing the book up and exactly what will it look like, and ‘What will we call it?’ We had a big piece of butcher paper tacked to the wall and we started writing titles on this thing. We must have had three or four hundred titles for this book, and we ended up calling it The Studio. My favorite was The Bastard King. I loved that one for some reason. Another one was Monkey Pie. It got insane.” The Studio book came out in the late 1970s, and today is a rare treasure among fans of the artists.

“It’s really hard to find,” says Wrightson. “It sold for $12.50 when it first came out in ’79 or ’80, and that was pricey at the time, but it’s a gorgeous book. It’s beautifully produced.” The book itself represents only about a decade in the career of the four artists, and today many fans might hope for a sequel but are doomed to disappointment. Wrightson has no interest in reprinting it, expanding it, or updating it due to the labor involved. “Put the word out. If there’s somebody out there who is willing to do all the work and give me bushels of money, that would be great. I would do it on those terms, but as far as actually doing it, you know, I worked on one and it was a back-breaker. Book design is not what I do.”

FRANKENSTEIN Book illustration, however, is another story. It was in the mid-to-late 1970s that Wrightson began thinking about illustrating Frankenstein. “I had been in the business by then for not even ten years, but it was long enough to know that if I talked a publisher into this project, it just wouldn’t be mine anymore,” he says. “They would have all kinds of ideas of their own. “I’m sure nobody would want an illustrated book, because these were comic-book companies. They’d say, ‘No, I’m not interested in text with illustrations. Adapt it. Turn it into a comic book. Let’s do it in full color.’ But that just wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to illustrate the book, and I wanted the illustrations to look very antique-y and kind of quaint. I guess I had it in the back of my head

that I wanted it to look like the illustrations were done at the time the book was written, the early 19th century. I purposely tried to make the drawings look like woodcuts or steel engravings.” Wrightson had previously illustrated “The Muck Monster,” an homage of sorts to the Frankenstein story, published in Eerie #68 (Sept. 1975). He also had begun looking at other artists for inspiration. “I looked at a lot of old pen-and-ink guys, like Raymond Everette Kinstler and Montgomery Flagg, J. C. Cole. Mostly Franklin Booth. I just love his work. Still do.” Without an editor or art director leaning over his shoulder dictating terms, Wrightson was free to follow his own instincts. “It kind of evolved as it went along. I did a number of thumbnails, just quick ballpoint sketches of key scenes and everything, the scenes that I wanted to draw, that I knew I wanted to include in the book.” Such moments include the creation scene, the monster standing over Victor Frankenstein’s bed, and running through the streets. “I can’t recall all of them, it’s been too long,” says Wrightson. “Some of the laboratory scenes, so full of junk and so cluttered up. That was the stuff I was really itching to do.” He soon realized that due to the structure of the book, there were long stretches where not much happened that lent itself to illustrations. “I had many sketches of basically scenes with the monster that I didn’t want the book to be unbalanced,” explains Wrightson. “When you just pick it up and flip through, I wanted an illustration to fall every

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Suitable for Framing Between 1977 and 1980, Wrightson produced three Frankenstein portfolios for Tyrannosaurus Press and for Les Editions Du Triton. At left is a signed portfolio cover, and at right, a plate of the Monster cliff-leaping. © 2009 Bernie Wrightson and Darkwoods Productions.

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few pages and not go for too long without a picture. So I had to find things to draw to just kind of fill it out.” One reason the project took so long was the intricate pen-and-ink drawings illustrations were sandwiched between actual paying work. “I had to make a living, and it was a little easier back then, in the mid-’70s, because the cost of living was not the insanity it has become now. I could do a six- or eight-page story for Warren Publishing and that would carry me for more than a month when I got paid for that, so I had time to get back to the Frankenstein stuff. That’s pretty much how it was done, and it was over a period of six years—somewhere between six or seven years. And I would have several illustrations going at once. “So they were all done for free and all done exactly the way I wanted to do them and I could spend just as much time fussing over every little bottle or flask in a laboratory scene and get it just right to my satisfaction.” There were a number of false starts on some of the illustrations. “I’d get about half-way through a

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drawing and it would just start looking very flat and stale to me,” Wrightson says. “Something would be wrong with the composition or the pen work or something. So I’d just abandon it half-way through and just start over, and I think there were a couple that never got past the pencil stage.” For about a year he believed he might self-publish. “I just didn’t want to give up any control over it. I thought, ‘Okay, the best way to do this is just do it all myself.’” The artist put together a couple of portfolios, intending to sell those, then turn that money around into getting the book together. “It didn’t really work out because I spent all the money by the time all the illustrations were done,” he says. When finished, Wrightson took the project to Marvel Comics. “Jim Shooter was the [editor-in-chief] at Marvel at the time,” Wrightson says. “He knew I was working on this and he saw all this stuff. I remember having a conversation with him where he was telling me that Marvel wanted to get their comics, their books, into bookstores. This was before Barnes & Noble and Borders, where they have a whole graphicnovel section. He thought that Frankenstein was the perfect opportunity for Marvel to get its foot in the door into bookstores. So I sold it to Marvel.” Wrightson tells of sitting down with Shooter to sign the contract. “I literally had the pen an inch from the X to sign the contract when Jim said something to me like, ‘Would you like to choose one of our guys or would you want to personally color the illustrations?’ The pen was just hovering over the contract, and I just looked up expecting to laugh, because I thought it was joke, and he was dead serious. He wasn’t joking, and I just said, ‘No. The drawings are finished. It’s black and white and no other way.’” There are approximately 40 drawings in the published version, but in total there were probably closer to 60 or 65, according to Wrightson. “There were complete finished illustrations that never went into the book because it was getting too crowded at that point with pictures and I realized I had too many pictures. There were places where you would have two illustrations, one right after another with no text in between, and I thought that was getting closer to a comic book than an illustrated book, so I had to take some stuff out, just to leave some air between the pictures.” When released as a “Marvel Illustrated Novel” in 1983, the book was very well-received, with some people referring to it as “Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein,” a label he disagrees with. “It isn’t; it’s ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.’ I just did the pictures, which are there to serve the story. It’s not about me. It’s about Frankenstein. It’s about Mary Shelley.” With the project completed, the artist was often asked if he had plans to illustrate another horror classic, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Wrightson is inclined to pass. “Without offending anyone who is a Dracula fan, I tried to read Dracula and I thought it was just the dullest, most boring thing. I could not get through it. “Not to say that Frankenstein is a very much better book than that. It’s really hard to read,” he admits. “My goal was that if my pictures could pull someone into reading the book, just one person, well, then I feel like I’ve done my job, because it’s a hard slog but it really is worth it. There are a lot of really interesting, deep, profound themes and ideas in the book. You just have to get through it to find them.”

FRANKENSTEIN LIVES AGAIN A quarter-century after the book’s original publication, Wrightson is still immensely proud of it. “It was then and still is the best thing I’ve ever done,” he points out, and others are quick to agree. For Halloween of 2008, Dark Horse Comics published a new version using more modern printing techniques, which Wrightson boasts as “the most beautiful edition of the book yet.” Though it does not include any new illustrations, modern technology has enabled the drawings to be reproduced from original high-resolution scans. In the years since the Marvel Comics edition was printed, Wrightson’s original drawings have been sold off to collectors, among them Frank Darabont, director of films such as The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. “He’s a friend of mine and a longtime fan,” says Wrightson. “He owns, I think, 15 of the original Frankenstein drawings and he started by taking his drawings out of their frames and having them professionally scanned. Then he put the word out to all his friends, a lot of whom are collectors or who know collectors. He got in touch with a lot of people literally all over the world who own Frankenstein originals, got them to take their expensive original drawings out of their expensive frames and have them scanned. We couldn’t find them all, but we did pretty well. We got between 85 and 90 percent.” Wrightson’s Hollywood connections have opened a second career for him, and he has lent his talent to a number of films, including Creepshow (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), and The Mist (2007). However, despite his success in films, Wrightson is never too far removed from the world of comic books. In the years since completing Frankenstein, he has illustrated a handful of titles such as Batman: The Cult and The Weird, both in 1988. Most recently, he worked with Steve Niles on Dead, She Said from IDW Publishing. Also, Wrightston and writer Bill Willingham collaborated on a new story for House of Mystery #9 (Mar. 2009). “It’s like coming home,” gushes the artist. “It’s a very cute script, a very affectionate monster rally thing.” A variety of work options makes Wrightson feel very blessed as an artist. “I’m able to do comic books and illustrations and conceptual work and I’ve worked in animation. Not all artists can do all those different things, and I’m just blessed to be one of them. “I haven’t had a real job in 40 years, and the most exciting part of my day is to get up and have coffee, then sit down to work. “For my own career it’s wonderful because there’s always something new on the horizon. There’s always something I can find to do when I get tired of doing that or I’m burnt out on doing this, and there’s something out there that will keep me fresh and interested and happy.” PHILIP SCHWEIER is a graphic designer and freelance writer living in Savannah, GA. He is also a frequent contributor to www.comicbookbin.com.

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In the early 1970s, horror comics were experiencing an explosion in popularity. Not since the days of EC Comics had horror been so popular. At Marvel Comics there were the Ghost Rider, Werewolf by Night, Son of Satan, Satana, the Zombie, the Man-Thing, the Living Mummy, the Scarecrow, Dracula, and the Monster of Frankenstein. First and foremost of the Marvel horror explosion was Werewolf by Night, premiering in Marvel Spotlight #2 (Feb. 1972). Then came Dracula in his own series, Tomb of Dracula, which lasted 70 issues. Next came the flaming-skull-headed biker Ghost Rider, who tried out in Marvel Spotlight before blazing into his own title. Then Marvel’s version of Frankenstein burst onto the scene.

IT’S ALIVE!! The Frankenstein Monster is the creation of Mary Shelley, who wrote her famous novel in 1818 and titled it Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The Monster was popularized in the 1931 Universal Pictures movie starring Boris Karloff as the creature. Karloff’s Monster is the image most associated with Frankenstein. But it was almost 42 years between the first Frankenstein movie and Marvel’s Frankenstein comics series. [Editor’s note: See this issue’s Frankenstein in Comics Timeline for a neckjolting jaunt through the Monster’s many comic-book appearances.] Marvel’s Frankenstein Monster actually first appeared in X-Men #40 (Jan. 1968), but that character was an android version with superpowers. The “real” Frankenstein Monster appeared in a cameo

“My Lord!” is Right! Mike Ploog’s freakish interpretation of the Marvel-published Monster, in pencil form, from page 3 of issue #6 (Oct. 1973). Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). (inset) Mary Shelley’s novel. © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Michael Browning

Beyond Karloff The challenge of artist Ploog and Marvel Comics was to make their Monster reminiscent of actor Boris Karloff (left) but unique as a Marvel character (as seen in this detail from the cover of Monster of Frankenstein #3.) (below) Marvel’s first issue. Karloff Frankenstein © 2009 Universal Pictures. Ploog Frankenstein © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

in Silver Surfer #7 (Aug. 1969). Then, in late 1972, the Monster of Frankenstein got his own, self-titled Marvel Comics series. Monster of Frankenstein #1 (Jan. 1973), or, as it’s titled in the indicia on the splash page, simply Frankenstein, was written by Gary Friedrich, drawn by Mike Ploog, and edited by Roy Thomas. Series editor Thomas was first invited to write the book, to be teamed with artist Ploog, who was already making a name for himself with his horror work in the new Werewolf by Night and Ghost Rider series. “I’d been working with Dick Giordano adapting Bram Stoker’s Dracula [in the black-and-white magazine Vampire Tales], so I wanted to start with the [Mary] Shelley Frankenstein story, then bring [the Monster of Frankenstein] into the present,” Thomas says. “But eager as I was to work with Mike Ploog on Frankenstein, I just didn’t have time. “So I turned the project over to Gary [Friedrich], who did a fine job with it.” This was the second teaming of Gary Friedrich and Mike Ploog. With horror comics being hot and Friedrich and Ploog even hotter after kickstarting Ghost Rider, Marvel turned to its star writer/artist combo to produce another fright-filled hit. Instead of delving deep into the occult like Ghost Rider and Son of Satan, Marvel decided to go with an old favorite. “I don’t remember whose idea it was to do a Frankenstein book,” Friedrich says. “But at this time, Marvel was cranking up the gears on the monster mags, and if you’re doing to do a monster comic, what better character than Franky?” Ploog says that because horror was popular, Marvel decided to try the Frankenstein Monster in his own title. “Werewolf by Night had became a successful title and was selling very well and DC’s horror comic line was doing well,” the artist recalls, “so I think Stan [Lee] and the boys decided to expand into that market.” Ploog used a drawing of the Frankenstein Monster by John Romita, Sr. as the basis for his own rendition and turned the Monster into a creature so fearful, yet at the same time one so pitiful and in search of his humanity—or eternal rest. Friedrich wasn’t involved in choosing the appropriate look for the Monster, but loved Ploog’s version. “I don’t remember Romita doing the original drawing, though probably he did since he was there in the office and could show roughs to Stan [Lee] and Roy as he worked, which would have been a lot faster than waiting for Mike to draw them and then bring or mail them into the office,” Friedrich says. “I don’t recall being greatly involved in the project once it was decided to do an adaptation Monsters Issue

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and what the Monster would look like. Ploog didn’t have any objection to drawing the Monster the way Stan wanted, as I recall. He was very amenable to whatever Stan or Roy wanted and I wanted him to draw at that time as he was with me when I told him how I wanted Ghost Rider drawn.” According to Roy Thomas, there was a conscious effort by Marvel not to make their Monster look too much like the Universal Pictures version. “Mike did it in his own way, which I think was great,” says Thomas. Gary Friedrich adds, “As for the Monster looking like the Universal character, although there was, of course, some similarity, I personally thought the Marvel version got it just right.” Friedrich also remembers that he and Ploog “hit it off from the get-go on Ghost Rider, where Mike was able to draw the characters I’d been working on for years just as I described and gave them life. And after the terrific experience we had working on that book, I was thrilled to get a chance to work with him again on Frankenstein.”

THE MONSTER’S FIRST STEPS

The first four issues adapted the Mary Shelley classic novel. “I hadn’t seen what I thought to be a truly faithful adaptation of the novel, so I thought Mike and I would take a crack at it,” Friedrich notes. “I do remember thinking that if the adaptation were successful, we could take the story on from the end of the book. Seemed a reasonable way to proceed to me. It was always the hope that the adaptation would sell well and that the story then would continue from the point where the adaptation left off.” Ploog enjoyed drawing the adaptation of Shelley’s original story. “It wasn’t difficult [adapting the novel] at all,” Ploog says. “There was plenty of room in the short story to expand on visually. A lot was left to the reader’s imagination, which was great as far as I was concerned.”

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Just like in the novel, in the Marvel Comics series the Monster enacts a terrible revenge on his creator for bringing him into the world. “I think it was my idea to set the story in the 1800s, some hundred years after the original story took place,” Friedrich remembers. “Can’t really say why. Seemed like a good idea at the time.” With the adaptation completed with the fourth issue, new and original tales of the Frankenstein Monster started in issue #5. “That was the direction we wanted to go,” editor Thomas says. Friedrich and Ploog took the Monster into uncharted territories with all-new adventures of the misunderstood creature. In issue #5 (Sept. 1973), the Monster saves a crucified girl from a burning ship, only to learn it was her own father who hung her on the cross to die because she turns into a werewolf. The Monster drives a silver-tipped sword through the werewolf’s heart, and that’s when he discovers that the wolf-demon is really the same girl he’d saved! The book’s title changes to Frankenstein Monster with the sixth issue, which would be Ploog’s last. The tale opens with the Monster searching for the last known relative of his creator, Victor Frankenstein. Early in the story, we get a statement from the Monster that gives us insight into the life of the misunderstood creature: “I seek peace and friendship—and am greeted with hatred and bloodlust!” Mike Ploog reveals that “the stories that followed the novel adaptation felt like a sequel to the novel.” Friedrich made the Monster’s search for humanity in a world he never made into a heartwrenching tale. Ploog’s artwork gave the first six issues an almostsickening look that let readers know the Monster wasn’t so much different than the people he encountered—they were just as much monsters as Frankenstein’s horrific creation.

On the first three issues of Monster of Frankenstein, Ploog inked himself. He was inked by John Verpoorten in issues #4 and 5, then inked his final issue, #6, himself. “It was fantastic to get back with Mike Ploog again,” Friedrich says. “I’d work on Millie the Model with him ... or even the original X-Men, which I really hated doing, though I couldn’t specifically tell you why. I thought his work on both titles was brilliant and he remains one of my all-time favorite comics artists.”

IN THE MIGHTY MARVEL MANNER Gary Friedrich personally doesn’t remember what Mike Ploog’s reasons were for leaving the book so early. Roy Thomas feels that Ploog may have left the book due to his heavy workload. “Marvel was in a great surge of growth at that time which resulted in frequent changes on artist/writer lineups on many, if not most, of the titles,” Thomas says, adding that “Mike was quite busy then.” Thomas also remembers that the artist didn’t like the major change of direction in the Frankenstein title which would begin in issue #12: transporting the Monster from the 19th century into the modern world. Thomas’ memory is correct. Ploog reveals his dissatisfaction by saying, “They had decided to change direction with the book and bring him into line with the other Marvel characters. I couldn’t see Frankenstein battling with Spider-Man on 42nd Street. To me, Frankenstein was the perfect anti-hero. He was created out of the greed of man. He entered the world an innocent. It was mankind’s ignorance and fear that he could not understand and would turn him into the monster.” Following Ploog’s departure, in the seventh issue artist John Buscema took over. Buscema’s artwork on Frankenstein Monster #7 (Nov. 1973), inked by John Verpoorten, had a Ploogish feel. Issues #7 through 9 featured Frankenstein’s tussle with Dracula, then in #10 and 11 the Monster came face-to-face with Vincent Frankenstein, “the last Frankenstein,” who claimed to be the great-great nephew of the creature’s creator. Vincent told the Monster he would either restore his humanity or put him out of his misery. The Monster was subdued by Vincent’s minion, Ivan, and Vincent revealed his true plans for the book’s “hero”—to use him to take over the world. During a battle with Ivan, Vincent Frankenstein was summoned to the bedside of his ailing wife. The readers weren’t told what was causing Mrs. Frankenstein’s pain and distress. After a fight with the Monster, Vincent was shot dead by his maid because he left his wife’s side to work in his laboratory. The Monster was saddened by Vincent’s death and was left purposeless. On the last page of #11 (July 1974), Friedrich’s last issue, the writer disclosed that Vincent wasn’t the last Frankenstein—he had a child, and his wife had died in childbirth!

John Buscema drew only four issues of Frankenstein Monster, leaving with #10. “Probably, John was moved off of Frankenstein because he was needed somewhere else because of the aforementioned explosion of new titles at that time,” Friedrich says. “Not only was John one of the greatest artists of all time, he also was one of the fastest. So, for a time, he moved from book to book after only a few issues to get the schedule caught up or ahead. I’m sure that was the case with Frankenstein. “I’m sure I wasn’t thrilled about it. It isn’t every book you first lose Ploog on and then John Buscema.” Friedrich fondly remembers his brief collaboration with Buscema on Frankenstein Monster: “Working with Buscema, even for a short time, was a wonderful experience. John could draw about any type book you could imagine. And he was a super guy to work with. We never had a disagreement about anything, and his storytelling sense was superb. “I don’t recall fan response to John’s artwork on Frankenstein, as I wasn’t actively involved in reading fan mail anymore,” Friedrich adds. “By the

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time Frankenstein came out, I’d moved back to Missouri [from New York]. The editorial reaction was the same as it always was for John’s stuff: ‘He’s done it again!’” The issue after Buscema’s departure, #11, drawn by Bob Brown, was Friedrich’s final Frankenstein tale. “I really enjoyed Frankenstein, because I related to that naïve monster wandering around a world he had no knowledge of—an outsider seeing everything through the eyes of a child.”

Monster Gone Wild! Original cover art to Frankenstein Monster #13 (Nov. 1974), illustrated in the Mighty Marvel Manner by penciler Ron Wilson and inker Mike Esposito. Courtesy of Heritage. © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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FRANKENSTEIN REANIMATED With issue #12 (Sept. 1974), writer Doug Moench took over, along with artist Val Mayerik, and the duo picked up right where Friedrich left off. Moench brought the Monster into the modern day the same way Captain America was brought from the World War II era into the Silver Age of comics: by freezing him in suspended animation inside a block of ice that was found by men on a boat. After the Monster thawed and awakened from his comatose state, he dealt with the harshness of the modern-day world and was again misunderstood and believed to be a murderous beast. Val Mayerik’s style merged elements of Michael Kaluta’s fine line with Bernie Wrightson’s organic art to brilliantly illustrate what would become the Monster’s last seven issues. After a crossover with the Werewolf by Night in Giant-Size Werewolf #2 (Oct. 1974), the Monster battled the Night-Creature and ICON in issues #13–15. Len Wein took over as editor in #15. In Frankenstein Monster #16 (May 1975), the Monster fought a robot called the Berserker, which he later befriended. After the Monster tried to help the robot find humanity, the two were captured by the Children of the Damned in the last issue of the series, #18, which was written by Bill Mantlo and featured a Val Mayerik cover inked by Bernie Wrightson. The Monster learned that these misshapen “children” were his “family,” their creator being Victoria von Frankenstein, the great-granddaughter of Victor von Frankenstein. The series ended abruptly with the introduction of the creature to his father’s descendent, bringing the Monster’s quest to an end. “At the start, the book sold well,” says Frankenstein’s original editor, Roy Thomas, who continues, “The series ended because sales weren’t good enough.” During Marvel’s monster mania, the Frankenstein Monster also appeared in the blackand-white magazines Monsters Unleashed (1973–1975) and The Legion of Monsters (1975). Gary Friedrich and John Buscema produced two Frankenstein stories for Unleashed, while Doug Moench and Val Mayerik did four for Unleashed and one for Legion. The Frankenstein Monster has turned up throughout the Marvel Universe since the series’ end in September 1975. In the 2001–2002 miniseries Bloodstone, starring Ulysses Bloodstone’s daughter, Elsa, the creature was featured prominently and was referred to as Adam the Frankenstein Monster. An intelligent clone of the Monster was a member of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Paranomal Containment Unit called the Howling Commandos in the 2005–2006 miniseries Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos. Matewan, WV native MICHAEL BROWNING is an award-winning newspaper editor, writer, and photographer, and is an advisor with The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. He’s contributed to Rolling Stone, BACK ISSUE, Comics Buyer’s Guide, Comic Book Marketplace, Rough Stuff, and Charlton Spotlight.

compiled by

Michael Eury

1940

1945

1948

Dick Briefer’s “Frankenstein” starts in Prize Comics.

Briefer’s monster-hero goes solo in Frankenstein Comics.

Mary Shelley’s tale is adapted in Classic Comics #26.

Batman and Robin meet Frankie in Detective #135.

1961

1962

1964

Bizarro meets Frankenstein in Superman #142.

Black-and-white mag Castle of Frankenstein begins.

Dell’s Frankenstein #1 loosely adapts the 1931 movie.

Model-building craze spawns this MAD cover.

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All covers © their respective owners.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been adapted, interpreted, borrowed from, parodied, and ripped off in more comic books than a single edition of BACK ISSUE can contain. We’ve dug through the comics morgue for this sampling of covers featuring our favorite reanimated monster (and a few of his distant cousins)…

1964

Herman Munster and TV family spin off into comics.

Lovable Franken-family begins long Gold Key run.

1966

Stone-age guest appearance in Flintstones #33.

Lid-flipping TV cartoon gets a Gold Key tie-in.

Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster in an undated painting by Gray Morrow. Art scan courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © Universal Pictures.

1966

1967

1969

Dell Comics’ short-lived superhero Frankenstein.

Frankenstein, Jr. #1 stars Hanna-Barbera’s giant robot.

Mutants meet Monster in Marvel’s X-Men #40.

Reprinting of Classics (Comics) Illustrated #26.

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1969

1971

Silver Surfer #7 features a Frankenstein appearance.

Maybe you ate Frankenberry cereal while reading comics.

1973

A new Marvel star is born in (Monster of) Frankenstein #1.

“Spawn of Frankenstein” appears in eight issues of Phantom Stranger.

This ad for Aurora’s monster model kits appeared on the back covers of DC comics in 1969. Characters © Universal Pictures.

1977

1980

1983

1984

Marvel Classics Comics #20 adapts Mary Shelley’s story.

Double trouble for the Man of Steel in Superman #344.

Bernie Wrightson’s landmark adaptation of the Shelley classic.

Marvel adaptation distributed into toy stores by Fisher-Price.

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1988

1989

Frankenstein returns to DC in the pages of Young All-Stars.

Malibu/Eternity produces new adaptation of Frankenstein.

1991

1992

Itty-bitty Frankie in Harvey’s Monster in My Pocket miniseries.

Briefer reprints in this one-shot by 3-D comics king Ray Zone.

“Frankenstein’s Monster Descends the Steps to the Laboratory,” an undated painting by Jeff Jones. Art scan courtesy of Heritage. Frankenstein © Universal Pictures. Art © Jefrrey Jones.

1993

1994

1995

Dark Horse adapts the 1931 Boris Karloff horror film.

Topps miniseries brings Kenneth Branaugh’s film to comics.

Elseworlds blending of Batman and Frankenstein legends.

When monsters clash! A Topps Comics three-issue miniseries.

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1996

1999

Don Simpson’s Megaton Man takes on the neck-bolted one.

Superman/Frankenstein merger in this Elseworlds one-shot.

2004

2006

A new take on the legend written by the Matrix brothers.

Morrison and Mahnke sign up Frankie as a Seven Soldier.

The original Ghost Rider gallops to stop Frankie’s chokehold in this 1994 Dick Ayers print, colored by his son Rich. Art scan courtesy of Heritage. Ghost Rider © Marvel Characters, Inc. Art © 1994 Dick Ayers.

2006

2008

A tale of Gepetto’s Frankenstein in acclaimed graphic novel.

Horror-master Koontz’s Frankenstein vision as a graphic novel.

Dark Horse’s deluxe reissue of the Wrightson adaptation.

Santa Claus vs. Frankenstein in Paul Dini’s Jingle Belle.

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In the proud history of comic-magazine monsters, there’s never been a creation quite like Vampirella. Her timing on the national scene was not fortuitous. She followed the slinky and beautiful host Vampira, who in turn ushered, in a manner of speaking, sitcom scarequeens Lily Munster and Morticia Addams. Hammer Films, over in Great Britain, had already pushed the envelope with sexy, seductive vampire brides played by Barbara Shelley (Dracula: Prince of Darkness, 1966) and Marianne Harcourt (Kiss of the Vampire, 1963). By the end of the 1960s, Vampirella’s time had come. And publisher James Warren was glad to have her. His young company had seen some tough times following the initial successes of its illustrated ventures, Creepy and Eerie, but financial problems led to more reprints than many of its faithful readers could bear. By 1969, things had improved slightly, but a shot in the arm was needed. That “shot in the arm” morphed into a bite in the neck. A full-page house ad drawn by Tony Williamsune appeared in the back of Creepy #28 (Aug. 1969). Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie, Warren’s two narrators of the “nauseating novelettes” the company had been doing, were trembling in fear! “She was coming!” Eerie threatened to scream if his uncle let her through the door. In a follow-up ad in the next issue, Vampirella (taken from a Frank Frazetta drawing) strutted her stuff before her still-rattled “family members.” Vampi was a knockout—in more ways than one! Her first issue boasted an unforgettable Frazetta cover, which had to delight longtime readers who’d been clamoring for the artist’s return to Warren. “Illustrated Tales to Bewitch and Bedevil You”—this seductive spiel appeared above the cover’s logo, but more to the point was the further announcement just inside, “Captivating Comics about Fantastic Females!” This was this new title’s subtle secret. These new “excursions into evil” were specifically designed around the enticement of the femme fatale with supernatural specialties. This was made to order for awkward pre-teens (myself included). In ’69–’70, my age group was far too unsophisticated for Esquire, a bit too young for Playboy, and generally too unsure of our rarely tested manhood to read … uh, romance comics (openly, at least). Happily, we now had Vampirella. “We knew we had a hit in her,” Forrest J. Ackerman, one of her creators, told me as he signed my Vampirella and Famous Monsters mags at the San Diego Comic-Con in the late ’90s. “She was sexy … and sensational!” he laughingly added. She sure was.

Necking Vampirella gets ready to put the bite on an unlucky (or lucky—depends upon how you look at it!) victim in this outstanding unpublished ’90s illustration by José “Pepe” González. All artwork and photos in this article were provided by Dewey Cassell and Jerry Boyd. © 2009 Harris Publications, Inc.

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Jerry Boyd

New Ghoul in Town! The delectable Vampirella made her first appearance in this 1969 house ad in Creepy #29. This knee-knocking illo was done by Tony Williamsune. (below) Three great impressarios of horror (left to right): Vincent Price, James Warren, and Forrest J. Ackerman, the latter of whom helped create Vampirella. © 1969 Warren Publishing. Vampirella © 2009 Harris Publications, Inc.

LOVE AT FIRST BITE In her first appearance, beautifully realized by Tom Sutton and nicely written by Ackerman, the young bloodsucker was a carefree flirt/tease. She lived on the planet Draculon (among other permutations). This was a planet of bloodthirsty vampires, but their thirst was easily sated by the rivers of blood (!!) that were natural to the landscape. If any prospective readers had been casual about picking up and thumbing through that historic premiere issue, Sutton’s opening splash with the gorgeous young bat-woman taking a long shower (in blood, yet!) had to be the answer to their doldrums! Vampi’s partially (but carefully concealed) nude body spoke volumes about thrills to come. Other creature queens to follow drawn by Neal Adams, William Barry, Jack Sparling, Billy Graham, Reed Crandall, Sanho Kim, and Dick Piscopo would follow this standard. Their stories of cave girls, futuristic lady space explorers, warrior women, alluring aliens, sea goddesses, and female werewolves came in various states of undress with come-hither smiles that hadn’t been seen in comics ever. Vampi (as she quickly came to be known) bespoke danger, but she was just out to have fun in her first adventure. An intrusion on her world by some of those pesky, gotta-explore-all-of-space Earthmen got the action going. (Ackerman was always partial to science fiction.) The spacemen fire on the curious bat-woman flying above them, but Vampirella’s attack is better coordinated and a few fang-tipped bites later—and it’s all over. Or is it? The vamp discovers that the lifeblood of Draculon is the lifeblood of these space travelers! With a laugh, she readies herself to return in their spaceship to the planet of their origin. Her first adventure was over, but she stepped into the traditional horror-mag narrator mode right after that, posing provocatively on the opening story pages for maximum appeal. And she had appeal to spare! The artists and writers certainly did their part, but the competition couldn’t match up. DC, Marvel, Gold Key, and Charlton had horror-mystery comics in 1969, of course, but the Comics Code ensured that they couldn’t bring “sex” with a capital “S” with them. Publisher Warren could, and did. Jim Warren told Comic Book Artist’s readers (in the superb fourth issue), “We [Ackerman and Warren] had both seen the movie Barberella together and had loved it. I carefully outlined exactly what I wanted: A modern-day setting but something with a mystique of vampires, Transylvania; something legendary—and Vampirella was born. Think about Bram Stoker and what he did with Dracula: Horror and sex. I didn’t want Wonder Woman. I didn’t want a superhero type. I wanted a modern setting. Sexy, but not naked or bare-breasted.” Mr. Warren knew his audience. Readers sensed a turnaround. The reprints were slowly eased out as veterans like Reed Crandall, Monsters Issue

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Pat Boyette, and Neal Adams signed up to do assignments for Vampirella and the other horror magazines. New writers and cartoonists found their way over to the Warren offices. Don Glut, Nick Cuti, T. Casey Brennan, and other fine writers met with critical acclaim for their work. Thanks to a ratings system that had begun in American cinema, some of Vampi’s “competition” was off her younger readers’ radars. Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers, Twins of Evil, and Lust for a Vampire all featured bosomy, half-naked or naked (!) women of the undead, but that dadburned “R” rating kept kids like my buddies and me away and out of the theaters. Not so with Vampirella—she was our secret. Parents who had tolerated our buying Creepy, Eerie, and Famous Monsters didn’t bother to look up when our subscription issues arrived in a plain, tan envelope. “This Vampirella couldn’t be any different,” they had to think. But she was different. She was technically a vampire (though not “undead” in the classic movie sense), but she was actually a succubus. She sucked us in. She took advantage of many young male readers on the onset of puberty and we loved every minute of it. (More on that later.)

Blood Kin (left) Forry Ackerman and Mike Royer introduced our scream queen to Fun City … and Warren Publications (!!) in this Draculina-hosted page from Vampi’s second issue. (right) Vampi narrated many a tale of ancient myths/ legends colliding with the supernatural, as in this Nick Cuti/Mike Ploog tale from Vampirella #14. © 1969, 1971 Warren Publishing. Vampirella © 2009 Harris Publications, Inc.

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A SECOND TASTE We found out in Vampirella #2 (Nov. 1969) that Draculon’s dark-haired daughter had made it safely to Earth. She begins her explorations of our world on a busy New York City street, dazzling the men around her who were no doubt unused to her skimpy outfit. She’s encouraged by a newsstand vendor, who just happens to be displaying copies of Warren’s “Monsterella” (could Jim have been planning ahead?), to try her luck in a beauty contest for monsters! Our vamp meets the two judges, Warren and Ackerman (who again wrote the story), and wins, naturally. However, on a trip to Hollywood to promote the magazine and guest-star in a film, bad luck befalls the plane. It’s struck by lightning—which is incredible since planes fly above the clouds, but, hey, it’s worked that way for years on television and in books, movies, and … comics. Naturally, Vampirella survives. This time Mike Royer did the art and Vampi’s look-alike relative, Draculina (could Warren have been planning ahead?), narrates. (Mr. Warren was apparently looking at possibly duplicating his success with Draculina and Monsterella. They didn’t make the grade, however.) In her first opening engagement, our vamp enthralled at least one of her writers. Nicola “Nick” Cuti recalls, “I first saw Vampirella at Jim Warren’s office in New York when I went to drop off a story I had written. Jim had the Frank Frazetta painting of her, which became the first cover, set up in his office. It was love at first sight. How could I not adore her, a beautiful girl, lost on the Earth, who just happened to be a vampire. I wanted to do a story for the first issue but it was due out soon so I had to come up with something quickly. I rushed [out] a tale called “The Changing Room” and Ernie Colón illustrated it. It was far from the best story I had ever written, but at least it would be in the very first issue. When I received my copy I opened the magazine only to find the printer had left off the credits to my story. Oh, well…”

Ernie Colón wasn’t big on his artwork for it. He says, “I did only one story, but it was possibly the worst few pages I ever did and no doubt the worst Warren ever printed. “My excuse was that I was forced to do it in one sweaty, anxious night, but that’s weak, lame, and worthless. I ran as fast as I could from it and have blocked the contents entirely from my memory banks.” Mr. Colón wasn’t proud of his efforts, but Vampirella in its entirety as a magazine became a quick success. Soon it was outselling the former top title Creepy, and Eerie (which had never outsold Creepy) moved into third place where it stayed for years. Vampi’s third issue met with low distribution and naturally has been harder to find for collectors over the years. Larry Todd, Vaughn Bodé (of Cheech Wizard fame over at National Lampoon), and Rich Corben were three of the underground “comix” sensations that were making their presence felt at Warren Publishing. Having delved into the risqué at other places, they were naturals for the more permissive artistic standards at their new employer’s. Soon, they’d put together eye-catching covers and interior art. Bodé helped out with the cover for the third issue of Vampi, but there was no Vampi adventure inside. Forry Ackerman was probably too busy on FM to stray away for long, and editor Bill Parente and Warren may have felt that having the vampire lady as a narrator was enough. It was the fourth issue in 1970 where I first saw and came under our heroine’s mesmerizing spell. Jeff Jones had been making waves over at Web of Horror (see Alter Ego #81) and his cover collaboration with Bodé was … another knockout! My pre-adolescent fantasies had come true! This was the perfect package of “scare sisters” complemented with art by Piscopo, Sparling, Barry, and Colón— who was back with a vengeance with a tale of a male space traveler who finds himself on a planet inhabited by beautiful young warrior women! With Vampi #4’s wondrous cover and format and feeding my affinity for horror-anthology titles, DC’s House of Mystery and Marvel’s Tower of Shadows became instant also-rans! I wasn’t alone. BACK ISSUE contributor Dewey Cassell, who graciously provided some of the artwork and photos you’re seeing with this article, was and is a big Vampirella fan. His infatuation with her was written in CFA-APA #71. Dewey wrote, “As a teenager raised in the Bible Belt, it was a pleasant surprise when my parents allowed me to add Vampirella to my routine comic purchases. (I am suspicious they never actually looked inside the magazine.) My first exposure, so to speak, to the character was issue #19—the one that featured the gorgeous full-figure color painting of Vampirella by González— and I was hooked.” Across the Atlantic, Piers Casimir edits the British-based fanzine Spooky, the Warren Fanzine. (Check out www.spookyfanzine.com for information.) He relates a similar story. “My first recollection of any Warren magazine was Vampirella #25. I live in England, and imports from America were generally of the DC and Marvel ilk. All good things in their own right. But this magazine was different. I was probably about 13 at the time, young and impressionable. My friend showed me Vampirella, and I was fascinated! The cover was … so grown up, and the quality of the cover picture amazing. (If you don’t know it, it’s a warrior holding aloft a lion’s head, freshly removed!) I am sure Jim Warren would have been happy [with] the impact that magazine had on me. The stories were inked, and scripted and adult. And I loved them. Just had to make sure my mother didn’t find it! Happy days, and the rest, as they say, is history.” And like Dewey and Piers, I, too, had the good sense to keep those comic mags out of my parents’ sight, as well. Again, Vampi was our secret.

VAMPI’S PALS AND GALS Vampi’s lighthearted escapades ended after her second issue. She made a brief cameo in a story that spotlighted a relative, a sinister sorceress named Cousin Evily (who also got a cover). Vampi’s adventures wouldn’t begin again until #8 (Nov. 1970). In the meantime, she still stole the limelight from her fellow ghoul gals as the narrator of their “yelp yarns.” Truth to tell—I preferred it that way. Our heroine’s adventures were nicely done, but the other stories were more to my liking. Curvaceous hillbilly witches, she-spiders, space-alien ladies, and enemy agents (all in Vampirella #4)—sometimes predators, sometimes prey to more conniving women and men—kept readers’ imaginations racing as they tried to figure out the O. Henry/EC Comics-style endings. Sometimes the female protagonists weren’t even monsters. Warren’s staffers were quite capable of putting both sexes in horrific environments where survival meant outmaneuvering some kind of sexless beastly behemoth. Taking a cue from the still-popular romance comics of the early 1970s, scheming young vixens eager to be the biggest thing in movies, television, or on Broadway got their comeuppances not from their more likable rivals or their dream guy, but persons in the business that had the supernatural on their side! With the seventh issue, the editorial and creators’ pool took a daring chance that paid off handsomely with readers. ’Neath another stunning Frazetta cover (his third up to that point), a “witch trilogy” was told. This endeavor was an unconnected but extremely wellexecuted trio of tales that brought the historically foremost of female monsters, the witch, to center stage. The readers, including this author, showered it with accolades. Tom Sutton was again Vampirella’s artist when her adventures resumed in Vampirella #8. The editor and chief writer of Warren’s

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FLAMES: Some of the Men in Vampi’s Life

compiled by Jerry Boyd

Comics have seen lots of “good girl artists” over the decades, but the late, great Wally Wood has and will forever stand near the top. Wood’s work sparkled in Vampirella #9 and 12 in stories he wrote and drew. These were wild fantasy yarns complete with skulls, swords, and spells. Wood was a welcome re-addition to the Warren stable of creators. Ernie Colón and Nick Cuti, two friends of Woody and marvelous talents in their own right, remember the master:

ERNIE COLÓN “The only one I knew (of the Warren cartoonists)—and then for a short time— was Wally Wood. I was thrilled to meet the man who stunned me the first time I saw his work in MAD. His Captain Marbles parody (in “Superduperman” in issue #4) was like nothing ever seen in comics. His style was like no other— though in time his emulators would water down the impact of his brilliance. “He was the Marlon Brando of comics, soon followed by James Dean and all the other actors-by-gesture copycats. He did amazing work even when bedeviled by serious alcoholism. He was [a] kind man, willing to reveal his methods—though it was his original talent that made his conceptions shine above everyone else. One wonders what he might have accomplished had he been able to mature in age and skill.”

NICOLA CUTI “My boss, Wally Wood, used to do stories which appeared in Vampirella but we never knew ahead of time in which of Jim’s horror books the story would appear. “Only if you wrote a Vampirella story were you certain to get it in the issue. I had once suggested to Jim that we give personalities to each of the magazines. Creepy would have all the hardcore horror tales, Eerie would have the sci-fi horror tales, and Vampirella would have the sexy tales. “So Woody and I tried to make as many sexy tales as possible to make certain they would appear in Vampirella.”

BILL DuBAY Dewey Cassell spoke to former Warren editor Bill DuBay about artist José “Pepe” González in the aforementioned fanzine. (All comments are reprinted with Mr. Cassell’s kind permission.) DEWEY CASSELL: Was Vampirella #12 the first story González illustrated for Warren? BILL DuBAY: I believe so, yes. There was no other assignment before Vampirella. He visited us in the US once for a brief vacation. He did a bit of work in the Warren offices. He used my office, actually, working on Wally Wood’s huge drafting table. He was most pleasant, a stout, gay young man who didn’t speak a word of English. Dewey adds that the prolific Mr. “González illustrated a total of 58 Vampirella stories, many of which were reprinted in annuals and translated into a dozen languages. González’s rendering of Vampirella was used repeatedly by Warren Publishing in advertising and special projects. The full-figure painting (right) was made into a six-foot life-sized poster, stickers, a jigsaw puzzle, and graced the cover of the first Vampirella novel by Ron Goulart, as well as advertising for the failed Hammer film.” 24 • BACK ISSUE • Monsters Issue

golden days, Archie Goodwin, also returned to the fold. Goodwin would add the supporting cast and shape the conflicts to come. He succeeded admirably. The vamp’s writers were able to keep her in continuing stories until the title folded with #112 in 1983. The Cult of Chaos was a demonic Lovecraft-inspired brotherhood out to subjugate mankind with their magic, etc. Vampi ran afoul of them, discovered their malevolent aims, and nobly set out to warn and protect humans from them. She was still a vampire, however, and it turned out a pair of vampire hunters had decided to do her in. Conrad Van Helsing was a partially blind, elderly descendant of you-know-who. His handsome young son, Adam, was his helper. Draculon’s self-exiled daughter now slaked her thirst with a serum she drank when her urges grew too great. When deprived of that serum (for any reason), her bloodlust would control her, reminding us and her victims that she was first and foremost a member of Nosferatu.

NIGHTS WITH PENDRAGON Warren Publications did well financially in the early ’70s and Vampirella was solidly placed into the monster-hero mode that Man-Thing, Morbius, Werewolf by Night, and Ghost Rider occupied at Marvel. The same held true for DC’s Swamp Thing and Spawn of Frankenstein. But Vampi’s “true adventures” started in 1971, so she has to be considered somewhat of a forerunner. Vampirella began traveling the world with a comic-relief sidekick named Pendragon whom she first encountered at a mysterious carnival. There were sparks flying between her and Adam Van Helsing. In her 11th issue, he had a chance to take the sleeping vampire off guard and drive a stake through her heart. Her loveliness and the growing attraction he had for her distracted him and she escaped. He spared her, on another occasion she repaid the favor by saving his life, and by Vampirella #15 (Jan. 1972) the young lovers were moving about together with Pendragon in settings in the Caribbean that provided the atmosphere for voodoo and zombies. Vampi continued to battle members of the Cult of Chaos between meetings with other vampires (Count Dracula himself being the most notable!), the risen dead, werewolves, demons, man-made monsters, restless spirits, deranged scientists, and so on. José “Pepe” González pleased his publisher with his stellar artwork and remained the main artist on the vamp’s adventures until the final issue. Occasionally, various guestartists came aboard. They included Gonzalo Mayo, Rudy Nebres, Pablo Marcos, and Leopold Sanchez (among others). These fine talents got to apply their brushes to our heroine, giving González a break. Count Dracula became one of the series’ most important supporting characters. This take on the Transylvanian nobleman was quite different from the thoroughly demonic version over at Marvel. Warren’s Dracula was weary of his centuries-old existence and saddened by the scores of lives he’d ended over that time. He wanted to be cured … or have his life ended if no cure was available. Being undead, he still required his coffin to be nearby, and his continuing bloodlust made for new plot twists. Also, Conrad Van Helsing wanted him destroyed as well as his other enemies. All these new developments complicated his new friend Vampirella’s life. At one point, her sympathies for his dilemmas turned to stronger emotions and non-vampiric kisses were shared! With Adam not far away, the writers now had a love triangle to further shape events. Vampirella was now a horror/soap opera along the lines of TV’s Dark Shadows!

VAMPIRELLA IS HOT! I never heard of a “hot comic” before the 1970s. Everyone I knew who shared my hobby had to get Fantastic Four #100 (1970) and later, Conan #24 (1973), but when Vampirella #31 (Mar. 1974) came out, it was an event. Why? The Comics Reader reported that Frank Frazetta was going to unleash a new cover painting, and my small group of comics-buying buddies was just reeling at the thought of it! By that time Esteban Maroto was one of Warren’s star artists. The Spanish school had taken over much of the page output in the three shock mags, and Maroto was the favorite of favorites. Maroto would be illustrating the story from Frazetta’s cover. You couldn’t ask for anything more! Jose Bea, Enrich, Ramon Torrents, Luis Garcia, and other Spaniards also delivered top-quality work on a regular basis. The issue almost promised to have most of their work included, as well! At Bob Sidebottom’s Comic Collector Shop in San Jose, California (in 1974), a small sign was folded to straddle the stack of Vampis near Bob’s cash register. It read simply, “One copy to a customer, please.” Old and young readers each gingerly reached for one, shaking their heads in amazement at Luana, Jungle Girl, stunningly visualized by Frank Frazetta, and then thumbing in awe at the contents within. “Did people really ever buy more than one copy of a comic magazine?” I thought to myself as a few older guys begged Bob to buy more than one copy. “Did anyone need more than one?”

Boy Toys

It didn’t matter. It was a day for the speculators. And they knew they’d be able to buy, sell, or trade that extra issue for something nice some day down the line. Bob sold out of that stack while my friends and I were there. He got on his phone to call up a friend to get more—if possible. Vampi had once again proved that she and her magazine—were the “things” to have.

(left) The Vampirella model kit produced in 1971 by Aurora caught the negative attention of parents and was quickly discontinued, making them highly collectible today. (right) British actress Barbara Leigh was the first person to bring Vampi to “life.” Unfortunately, her late-1970s movie went unrealized except for publicity stills like this one, from the collection of Dewey Cassell.

MODEL CITIZEN Vampirella’s monstrous success in the ’70s led to the inevitable merchandising that every publishing house dreams about. There were pinbacks, posters, novels, club kits, puzzles (usually adorned with beautiful González art), and the “infamous model kit” that Aurora Plastics put out in 1971. This time Vampi did not go under the parents’ radar! Deemed “too sexy” by the moms and dads who saw them at hobby shops and toy stores, the kit was quickly discontinued by Aurora. Too bad. Vampi was part of the new Monster Scenes lineup that included Frankenstein, Dr. Deadly, and other morbid attractions. Today this model commands hefty prices on eBay and other collectible sites. Vampi also inspired the competition to come up with imitators. Atlas/Seaboard Comics introduced Devilina. Roy Thomas, the top editor at the House of Ideas at the time, reveals of two of Marvel’s 1970s creations, “I suppose Lilith and Satana were responses of a sort to Vampirella.” Even Warren had its own Vampi knock-off. Pantha was an abused young beauty in the big city.

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At times, she could take her revenge on her persecutors by changing into a large black panther. This monster-lady owed some of her success to Vampirella’s, no doubt. Draculon’s most famous daughter was even tapped for a Hammer movie production in the late 1970s. Actress Barbara Leigh appeared on several photo covers in the vamp’s famous outfit and distinctive hairstyle, but unfortunately the film was never produced. Ms. Leigh told Dewey Cassell, “I looked at the script not too long ago and it seemed boring. Not very good at all [laughs], but then it was written 30-plus years ago in 1976 or 1977. Nowadays, we see movies made from comics with special effects that blow you away, so that Vampirella script definitely needed more action. Movies are superior today than from those times.” [See www.barbaraleigh.com for more.] Just for the record, the proposed script would’ve been a live-action Vampi adventure, rather than a quartet or quintet of girlish ghoul stories narrated by her, à lá the magazine. Maybe the filmmakers should’ve gone the other route…. In the 1990s, however, a straight-to-video movie starring Vampirella was released. It wasn’t great—just watchable. (Only the most ardent Vampi fan would’ve called it “great.”) Vampi soldiered on as the ’70s progressed, fighting other monsters until the monster-hero trend had worn out its welcome and readers re-embraced the ever-growing cosmic battles of regular superheroes and the grim-and-gritty ones to come. In the early 1980s, Warren Publishing went out of business. Don Glut, one of Warren’s best scribes and the guy who wrote most of the stories in her first issue, albeit under different names, nailed her appeal when he was interviewed for Spooky Fanzine #2 (2005): “I think Vampirella’s main selling point was that it gave little boys, who were not old enough to, or allowed to by their parents, purchase things like Playboy. It gave them the opportunity to look at a lot of sexy girls, on the pretext that they were really just reading horror stories. You could bring those kinds of things into the house, put them on the shelf with Famous Monsters and Creepy, and you didn’t get into half as much trouble as if you’d brought in a Playboy.” Despite the folding of Warren Publishing, Vampirella refused to die. Harris Comics, an independent publisher, began publishing the character (mostly in comics form). Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Vampi has starred in a variety of series and has teamed up with or battled modern icons like Tomb Raider, Shi, Painkiller Jane, Purgatori, Lady Death, Witchblade, and even a revived Pantha! Draculon’s most famous daughter continues to live on in comics today, which is appropriate, for an ... undying vampire. Special thanks go out to Messieurs Mark Arnold, Piers Casimir, Dewey Cassell, Ernie Colón, Nick Cuti, Roy Thomas, and Mel Whitlow for their comments, use of artwork, photographs, and researching assistance. The remarks made by Mr. Casimir and Don Glut are © 2009 Spooky Fanzine. JERRY BOYD is a professional schoolteacher and aspiring screenwriter living in the Los Angeles area. He has written numerous articles for The Jack Kirby Collector, BACK ISSUE, Alter Ego, and The Harveyville Fun Times. He’s also contributed research to a British book on Marvel romance comics, a documentary on Stan Lee, and articles/interviews for the forthcoming books about Cracked magazine and a compilation of Spooky.

JOSÉ “PEPE” GONZÁLEZ 1939–2009 Shortly after this article was submitted, BACK ISSUE was saddened to learn that Vampirella artist José “Pepe” González had passed away at the age of 70 in his native Spain. Mr. González’s professional career began when he joined the Selecciones Illustradas (S.I.) agency when he was 17. He developed his skills doing romance features like Valentine for the UK publisher Fleetway. In 1970, Josep Toutain, the S.I. agency’s head, approached Jim Warren with a team of artists he wanted the US company to begin using, which included González. González enjoyed Vampirella and rarely did other monster stories other than Vampi. He worked in charcoal and was equally adept in wash and ink. He did many paperback covers and newspaper strips in Europe and he will be missed. – Jerry Boyd

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No one can ever accuse Stan Lee and Steve Ditko of getting off to a slow start with The Amazing Spider-Man. Nearly all of the web-slinger’s great villains were created during the book’s first three years under its creators. But Morbius the Living Vampire is one of the few later creations who has managed to join the pantheon of great Spider-Man foes, alongside the likes of the Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, Mysterio, Electro, the Vulture, and Kraven the Hunter. Created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Gil Kane, Morbius has become a Marvel mainstay who at one point even held down his own monthly series.

SCIENTIFIC ORIGIN Morbius isn’t a true vampire, at least not in the traditional sense, although he shares many traits with the classic vampires of film and fiction. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Michael Morbius learned he was dying from a rare blood disease. He attempted to find a cure, creating a serum derived from vampire bats. The formula did cure his illness, but it also transformed him into a chalk-white, fanged creature of the night. He also developed superhuman powers: enhanced strength and the ability to glide on the air currents. In this respect, there was little difference between Morbius and the traditional vampire. Although he was still alive, Morbius discovered he needed to drink human blood to survive. He also shared the vampire’s aversion to light, although sunlight did not destroy him as it would a supernatural vampire. He also lacked the undead vampire’s aversion to garlic and religious icons. However, artist and co-creator Gil Kane gave the Living Vampire a more conventional supervillain’s costume, rather than the gothic garb most typically associated with literary and movie vampires. Morbius’ introduction in Amazing Spider-Man #101 (Oct. 1971) was noteworthy for more than just the introduction of an instantly classic supervillain. It also marked the first time in the book’s storied history that a writer other than Stan Lee penned the script for the web-slinger’s adventures.

Monster Supervillain Detail from the cover art to Spectacular Spider-Man #7 (June 1977), penciled by Dave Cockrum and inked by Al Milgrom. Courtesy of Anthony Snyder (www.anthonysnyderart.com). © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Bruce Buchanan

Lee was working on a screenplay for a sciencefiction movie at the time, so he needed to take a break from his heavy workload as a writer for Marvel. For this monumental passing of the torch, Lee chose his righthand man, Roy Thomas, to be the new Amazing Spider-Man scribe. “Actually, I wanted to do Fantastic Four, but Stan wanted me to do Spider-Man, so I did Spider-Man,” Thomas says. “I got to write Fantastic Four a few years later and I enjoyed writing Spider-Man, so it all worked out.” Attributing Morbius’ origin to science, not sorcery, was in part a creative, innovative twist on a classic fictional monster. But it also represented an opportunity to take advantage of recent changes in the Comics Code Authority, which governed content in comic books aimed at a youthful readership. For years, the Comics Code declared, “Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.” So using vampires— or any undead creatures—in mainstream comics had been out of the question. (A similar concession was made in a Marvel Two-in-One story set in Haiti. The mindless, perhaps undead, creatures in the story were referred to as “zuvembies” rather than “zombies.”) But the Comics Code’s restrictions were somewhat loosened in the early 1970s and Lee wanted to capitalize by bringing in a vampire to the pages of Amazing Spider-Man. “We were talking about doing Dracula, but Stan wanted a costumed villain. Other than that, he didn’t specify what we should do,” Thomas says. “I deliberately wrote that issue a little differently than Stan would have. Maybe better, maybe worse, but different.” Lee also left Thomas with a compelling plot thread to resolve, as in the landmark Amazing Spider-Man #100, Spidey attempted to find a cure for his spider-powers, only to grow four additional arms! So Thomas started thinking about a possible vampire villain for Spider-Man, and how he could weave that into the storyline he inherited. He says he remembered a science-fiction film from his youth in which a man was turned into a vampire by radiation, not magic. That gave him the inspiration that Morbius should be a creature of science. As for the name “Morbius,” another 1950s sciencefiction film provided the inspiration, albeit inadvertently. A character in the film Forbidden Planet was named Dr. Morbius, and the name stuck in Thomas’ subconscious. He didn’t realize from where he had come up with the name until the book already was in print, he says.

ARMED AND DANGEROUS Amazing Spider-Man #101 picks up with Peter Parker trying to deal with the consequences of his failed attempt to cure his spider-powers. Now, he truly is a freak, unable to move in normal society. Peter responds to the unexpected turn of events with fear, anger and his trademark self-deprecating humor. “S’funny ... in pop fiction, the masked hero's always looking for a gimmick that'll ‘Strike terror into the hearts of evil-doers,’” he says. “The Shadow, Batman ... there was even a guy called the Spider once. Well, cheer up, web-spinner. You’ve got ’em all beat. And the only person you'll scare more than the crooks will be yourself.” He realizes that he can’t see Gwen Stacy, Aunt May, or the Daily Bugle staff until when—or if—he is able to rid himself of his four extra arms. So he calls Dr. Curt Connors, a.k.a. the Lizard, who knows a little something himself

about experiments gone wrong. Dr. Connors offers Spider-Man the use of his beach house in a remote section of Long Island. There, Spider-Man can hole up and look for a cure away from prying eyes. Meanwhile, the scene shifts to a ship floating off the New York coast. Several crew members have disappeared in recent days and the remaining crewmen place the blame on a goateed drifter they picked up shortly before the disappearances began. The man, Dr. Michael Morbius, is forced to flee and hide from the angry mob. However, when the sun goes down, Morbius assumes a far more dangerous persona— that of a living vampire! “But now, it is night once more—and the night belongs to me—to Morbius! For the darkness is a time for strange thirsts, and when Morbius thists—it must be quenched!,” Morbius says as he pulls in another victim. That night, he murders the ship’s entire crew before gliding to shore. Thomas says this introductory scene is a nod to a similar scene in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the definitive and certainly the most famous vampire novel ever written. Monsters Issue

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Creepy Crawlers Six-armed Spidey vs. Morbius and the Lizard, in Kane’s penciled breakdown form (left) and the finished, inked page (right). Page 5 of Amazing Spider-Man #102. © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Morbius arrives at the same apparently deserted beach house where Spider-Man is hiding and working on experiments that he hopes will reverse the process that gave him the extra arms. Morbius is puzzled by what he considers a strange creature, but he figures it will make a decent snack regardless. The two fight, with Morbius getting the better of Spider-Man. Kane draws a fantastic full-page scene of Morbius knocking the eight-limbed wall-crawler off the top of a staircase. But before he can feed on the fallen Spider-Man, Dr. Connors stumbles into the house. It seems he has come to check on Spider-Man and see if he can help. Well, we all know what happens when Curt Connors get agitated—he turns into the deadly Lizard. So Spider-Man wakes up to find himself in the middle of a supervillain smackdown! Morbius actually defeats the Lizard, which establishes him as a heavy hitter from the get-go. He tries to drain the Lizard’s cold blood, but Spider-Man saves his sometimes friend/sometimes foe. Morbius escapes, but not before Spider-Man plants a spider-tracer on his back. However, Morbius’ bite did penetrate the

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Lizard’s thick hide and introduced an enzyme into his bloodstream. The enzyme allows Curt Connors to regain control of the Lizard’s brain, at least temporarily. He hypothesizes that the same enzyme, when mixed with Spider-Man’s blood, may hold the cure for Spider-Man’s extra four arms. But Dr. Connors’ hold over the creature’s mind is tenuous at best, and Spider-Man realizes that they must find Morbius before the Lizard reassumes control. This break in the action gives Thomas and Kane a chance to give readers the Morbius backstory. They also establish him as something more than just a callous killer. “Once more I hear the death-cries of the men I have slain—wailing out like souls lost on a sea of torment,” Morbius says, as he finds a place to hide and rest during the day. “Yet, only in the clear light of day do I hear those anguished voices—that grim, accusing chorus of the damned. If only it could be always night—always night!” We learn that Dr. Michael Morbius was a Nobel Prizewinning European biochemist who was dying of a rare, incurable blood disorder. Morbius attempts a radical treatment to cure his disease. However, the treatment turns him into a living vampire. His first act upon emerging from the treatment chamber is to slay Nicos, his lab assistant and best friend. That thoughtless, evil act set him on the road that led him to Long Island and Spider-Man. A desperate Spider-Man and an unstable Lizard track down Morbius at the docks. After mixing the vampire’s blood with the serum he prepared, the Lizard turns back into Curt Connors. But Morbius snatches the vial and glides away, announcing he intends to drink the serum before Spider-Man can use it. Spider-Man chases after him and in the battle, Morbius falls into the Hudson River. Spider-Man tries to save him with a web-line. But while he saves the vial of serum, the Living Vampire sinks under the water to his apparent death. Of course, a classic new villain like Morbius isn’t going away so easily!

DOUBLE TROUBLE Amazing Spider-Man #102 (Nov. 1971) was a double-sized issue because, at the time, Marvel decided to increase the cover price of comics from 15 cents to 25 cents. Thomas explains, “[Marvel publisher] Martin Goodman and DC by ‘amazing coincidence’— and you can put that in quotation marks—decided to make their books 25-cent, larger versions.” Newsstand sales of comic books were shrinking at the time and the publishers thought that a higher price would make comics more attractive to newsstand vendors. However, Marvel quickly abandoned the larger format concept and worked out a deal to give wholesalers a bigger cut. In fact, Amazing Spider-Man #103 was back to its regular size, although with a 20-cent price tag. DC stubbornly stuck with the higher-priced larger versions and lost market share to their rivals before throwing in the towel and switching back to regularsized comics around a year later. “The 25-cent books were a better bargain, but the fact remains that readers were more likely to buy a 20-cent comic than a 25-cent comic,” Thomas says. Thomas says that without the extra pages, the initial Morbius story would have stretched into a third issue. However, looking back, he wishes they could have done more with the four-extra-arms storyline. “We didn’t do that much with it,” he says. Morbius makes his next appearance in Marvel Team-Up #3 (July 1972), for a two-part adventure. For this issue, writer Gerry Conway was joined by Ross Andru, who soon would become his regular creative partner on Amazing Spider-Man for what many readers believe was one of the greatest runs in Marvel history. The story picks up shortly after the conclusion of Amazing Spider-Man #102. Two brothers, Jefferson and Jacob Bolt, are on the docks arguing about the company Jefferson is keeping. Their conversation is interrupted when they see Morbius floating in the nearby river. They rescue him, but Jefferson Bolt quickly discovers that the man they have saved is more than—or perhaps less than—human. “I ... live. But I am weak,” Morbius says. “And when the man called Morbius is weak … he must feed!” Morbius bites Jefferson Bolt and drains his blood. Soon, Jefferson returns as a vampire himself. The Living Vampire’s quest to cure himself leads him to an Empire State University professor, which in turn leads to a battle with Spider-Man and the Human Torch. The ending isn’t a happy one for the heroes. Jefferson Bolt turns on Morbius when the Living Vampire threatens his brother, Jacob. However, Morbius kills Jefferson and escapes. The closing scene of Spider-Man consoling Jacob Bolt is both painful and powerful. But the villain is still at large. Even worse, it turns out that the injection that Dr. Curt Connors gave Spider-Man to cure him of his four extra arms in Amazing Spider-Man #102 is now killing him. So in the next issue, Marvel Team-Up #4, the original X-Men come to Spider-Man’s aid. Since the injection was created from Morbius’ blood, they must find and capture him to find a cure for Spider-Man. At this stage, Morbius is depicted as a desperate, ruthless individual; at one point, he even takes Marvel Girl hostage and threatens to kill her, until a well-placed optic blast from Cyclops brings down the Living Vampire.

At the time this story provided a rare showcase for the X-Men. As difficult as this may be to believe today, in the early 1970s the X-Men were largely forgotten characters. Their own book had become a bimonthly reprint collection of their early adventures, with no new stories. So this issue gave fans a welcome opportunity to see Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Angel, Iceman, and Professor X in action. Conway says he picked Morbius as the villain for this two-issue storyline because, “I liked the way he looked, and liked the idea of a vampire ‘supervillain.’ And it seemed like he’d be fun to write. Nothing deeper than that.” For Marvel Team-Up #4, Conway joined forces with Gil Kane. The two subsequently worked together on the landmark Amazing Spider-Man #121, the issue in which Gwen Stacy died at the hands of the Green Goblin. Conway says the Marvel Team-Up story was one of their first opportunities to work together and help them iron out their creative partnership. “Gil was a marvelous draftsman and an idiosyncratic storyteller,” Conway remembers. “I quickly learned that working with him Marvel-style (that’s when a writer gives the artist a plot and the artist breaks down the story, panel by panel and page by page) could sometimes result in lop-sided storytelling; the first two-thirds of a story would be leisurely paced, and the last third would be hellbent-for-leather as Gil tried to make up for loose storytelling in the first half. So after doing a few stories with him in my usual, loosely plotted style, I began giving him tighter plots, indicating where the story had to be by such-and-such a page. He seemed to prefer this, too, and I'm generally happier with the later stories we did together than the first few.”

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MARVEL MONSTER MANIA

During the mid-1970s, Marvel made a push to extend its line of comics from the traditional superhero fare into monsters. But unlike the monster comics of the 1950s, these books owed more to the tradition of the old Universal horror films than the grade-B sciencefiction films that inspired the 1950s titles. Gone were the giant city-eating monsters and in their place were werewolves, vampires, and Frankenstein Monsters. Despite his supervillain origins, Morbius seemed to be a natural fit for the company’s horror line of titles. Starting with Adventure into Fear #20 (Feb. 1974), the character had a 12-issue run in this title. Such wellknown writers and artists as Mike Friedrich, Steve Gerber, Doug Moench, Frank Robbins, Rich Buckler, and Don Heck contributed Morbius stories to the Adventure into Fear series, with Morbius co-creator Gil Kane frequently contributing covers. The Kane-drawn cover of the first Morbius adventure in Adventure into Fear promised, “Senses-shattering suspense—macabre mystery—in the

fright-fraught tradition of Dracula!” One storyline saw Morbius’ former fiancée Martine Bancroft briefly become a vampire herself. Another saw Morbius encounter Blade the Vampire Hunter for the first time. The two would become frequent rivals in the years to come. Morbius also was a regular feature in Vampire Tales, a black-and-white magazine published between 1973 and 1975. The magazine was not governed by the Comics Code, so its stories could be more graphically violent and gore-filled. Vampire Tales lasted 12 issues, including one annual. Stories in this collection include tales with such macabre titles as “Taste of Crimson Life,” “Blood Tide,” and “The Blood Sacrifice of Amanda Saint.” Conway and Kane returned to the character in GiantSize Super-Heroes #1 (June 1974), teaming the Living Vampire up with one of their most popular creations— the Man-Wolf. Like Morbius, Man-Wolf was similar to a classic movie monster character but owed his origins to science. In his case, astronaut John Jameson (son of Daily Bugle publisher and Spider-Man nemesis J. Jonah Jameson) finds a glowing stone during a lunar mission. However, the stone transforms Jameson into a mindless werewolf, introduced in Amazing Spider-Man #124 (Sept. 1973). Jameson apparently has been cured of his strange condition, but in Giant-Size Super-Heroes #1, he once again transforms into the Man-Wolf. It turns out that Morbius has secretly been following Jameson and exposing him to the moonstone’s transforming radiation. He believes that a Professor Ward at Empire State University may have the secret to curing his own vampirism. Morbius plans to use the Man-Wolf as a decoy to keep Spider-Man distracted while he seeks out the professor. “I’ve been in Hell, Professor Ward—and I’ve come to you to release me!,” Morbius tells the terrified scientist. Spider-Man is able to defeat the Man-Wolf and outwit Morbius. Professor Ward’s laboratory is smashed to pieces during the brawl, leading the Living Vampire to think his potential cure has been destroyed, too. But it turns out Spider-Man conspired with Professor Ward to replace the real lab equipment with some spare parts. At least for now, the professor will be safe from Morbius’ threat. From there, Morbius wanders off to the pages of Marvel Premiere #28 (Feb. 1976), an anthology title spotlighting various Marvel characters who weren’t regularly appearing in a monthly title. Morbius teams up with Ghost Rider, Man-Thing, and Werewolf by Night to form the “Legion of Monsters.” The concept didn’t gain much traction at the time. Morbius then turns up to menace the Thing in Marvel Two-in-One #15 (May 1976), in which Morbius is listed as the book’s co-star. That Morbius was included as a headliner is an indication of how popular the character had become in just a short period of time. The vampire attempts to prey upon blind sculptress Alicia Masters, who is, of course, the Thing’s girlfriend. The two punch it out, but their brawl is interrupted by the real villain of the tale, the Living Eraser. The Living Eraser transports Morbius

In a Title (Almost) His Own Morbius enjoyed a short stint as the star of Adventure into Fear. Shown at left is the original cover art (by Kane, who signed the page, and Giacoia) to issue #25 (Dec. 1974). Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Lethal Legions (top) Morbius became a team player as one of the Legion of Monsters in this tryout in Marvel Premiere #28 (Feb. 1976), with a rare Marvel cover job by Nick Cardy. (bottom) “The Legion of Monsters” was used as an umbrella title for this collection of horror shorts in the blackand-white mag Marvel Preview #8 (Fall 1976); cover by Ken Barr. © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

and the Thing to an alien dimension. After beating the bad guy, the Thing returns to Earth, while Morbius uses the Living Eraser’s dimension-spanning gauntlets to transport himself to a far-away place, saying he doesn’t wish to return to Earth as long as he remains a monster. In late 1976, Marvel introduced a second solo Spider-Man series entitled Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man. The book’s creative team of Archie Goodwin and Sal Buscema soon turned to Morbius to spice up the new series. The storyline, which began in Spectacular Spider-Man #6 (May 1977), actually started off with an apparent deadline glitch. This issue mostly just reprinted the Conway/Andru story from Marvel Team-Up #3, with a couple of new pages setting up the following two issues. Morbius has returned from the lifeless alien dimension he found himself in back in Marvel Two-in-One #15, and he didn’t come to Earth alone. The Living Vampire has been possessed by the Empathoid, an alien creature who merges with the bodies of its victims and then feeds off of their emotional energies until the host is dead. Prodded by the Empathoid, Morbius goes to the Daily Bugle offices, knowing that Spider-Man frequently is seen around the newspaper. The Empathoid hopes to provoke a fight between the two in order to feed his emotion-draining habit. Morbius kidnaps J. Jonah Jameson’s secretary, Peter Parker’s friend Gloria Grant, to use as a hostage, bringing Spider-Man to the rescue. “It’s easy to forget when a guy feels light as a Kleenex ... that he still can hit like an H-bomb!,” Spider-Man says after finding himself on the receiving end of a Morbius haymaker. The Empathoid ends up possessing Spider-Man, and Morbius believes he must kill Spider-Man in order to destroy the Empathoid. Spider-Man leads the Living Vampire to a packed college football stadium in the suburbs. He’s gambling that the surge of emotions from the sellout crowd will be more than the Empathoid can handle. He gambles correctly—the tidal wave of emotion overloads and effectively short-circuits the Empathoid. With the Empathoid incapacitated, Morbius sees no need to continue the fight, and for the first time, he and Spider-Man part not as enemies, but with an uneasy truce. The Living Vampire apparently reaches the end of his blood-sucking career in Spectacular Spider-Man #38 (Jan. 1980). In this Bill Mantlo/ Sal Buscema story, Morbius returns for a rematch with Spider-Man. However, he is struck by lightning just as he bites Spider-Man. The combination of the electricity and Spider-Man’s own radioactive blood reverses the process that transformed Michael Morbius into a living vampire in the first place.

MORBIUS REBORN The 1980s were largely a quiet decade for Morbius, following his temporary cure. He does turn up in Fantastic Four #267 (June 1984) as one of the scientific experts Reed Richards calls in to aid his pregnant wife, who is suffering from mysterious complications. He also becomes a recurring character in the Savage She-Hulk series, including one story in which the She-Hulk (in her alter-ego of Jen Walters) defends the Morbius on murder charges stemming from his crimes as a vampire. But you can’t keep a good vampire down. Morbius more than made up for lost time in the 1990s after regaining his vampiric powers. The entire comics industry took a turn toward darker, harder-edged characters, and who better embodies those qualities than a blood-drinking vampire? In 1992, writer Len Kaminski and artist Ron Wagner launched Morbius the Living Vampire, an ongoing series. Morbius the Living Vampire was part of Marvel’s “Midnight Sons” line, a series of titles focusing on some of the company’s scary anti-heroes. Morbius continued to kill, but he made a vow to only prey upon violent criminals. He also ditched his traditional costume for a black-and-purple leather outfit that accentuated the grim tone of the book. Morbius crossed paths again with Blade and Spider-Man. Much of the series focused on a new villain, Vic Slaughter, an ex-special ops assassin-turned-

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vampire. Slaughter was hired to kill Morbius by Simon Stroud, a former CIA agent. Another frequent villain was Basilisk, a demon who could paralyze his foes with a glance. The Morbius Basilisk had no connection to the 1970s villain of the same name. Morbius also was infected with a blood-borne demon known as Bloodlust. Eventually, Morbius freed himself of Bloodlust and killed the demon. The series lasted 32 issues, no small feat for a comic based on a one-time supervillain. The creative team of Linda Trusiani and Craig Gilmore provided the final stories of the run, which featured Morbius temporarily evolving into a more monstrous-looking creature, but without the usual bloodlust. Kaminski describes the birth of the Morbius series as “yet another example of the Spastic Hand Of Destiny leaving its dirty fingerprints all over my career. Not long after getting in the door at Marvel, I’d been secretly working on a pitch to revive the character for a year or two, Morbius having been (and remaining) one of my all-time favorites.

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“My subtle plan was to break in big on an established series—Iron Man, for instance—and once I was sufficiently established talk some hapless editor into letting me do Morbius. Meanwhile, the Ghost Rider revival took off, and the mandate came down to start soliciting proposals for relaunches of what I like to call ‘horror-flavored superhero books’—with Morbius being on the short list.” Acting on advice from friend and Ghost Rider scribe Howard Mackie, Kaminski then submitted his pitch to editor Bobbie Chase, and Morbius the Living Vampire was given the green light. Kaminski says the Living Vampire always has had a strong appeal, dating back to Roy Thomas’ original story. “Morbius is such a creature of utter extremes— constantly poised on the razor edge between homicide and suicide—I don’t see how any writer could fail to be facinated by him,” Kaminski says. “Not to mention he’s the Hero, the Mad Scientist, and the Monster all in one—how cool is that?” He says he still isn’t sure why Chase dismissed him from the book after only eight issues. At the time of his departure, Kaminski says he had storylines plotted out up to issue #50, plus he had a rough concept for a Morbius/Spider-Man/Venom project. But why has Morbius proven so popular with fans? Even the men most responsible for his popularity aren’t entirely sure why. “I felt he would be a good addition to Spider-Man’s rogues’ gallery of villains,” Thomas says. “I’m always amazed by what characters ‘stick’ with readers, and which ones don’t,” Conway says. “I never would have imagined the Punisher would be one of the most popular Marvel characters to come out of the 1970s; or that the Tarantula would have his own mini-bust collector’s item. As for Morbius, even when I wrote him, I thought of him as a more or less one-shot villain, so it’s pretty surprising to find him this popular after all this time. I guess folks just like vampires. Call it the Twilight and Dark Shadows phenomenon.” Conway and Thomas agree that Morbius is a sympathetic villain and have no problems with subsequent writers who portrayed the character in a more heroic light. “Both sides of him were always there,” Thomas says. “He always was supposed to be a fairly sympathetic character. He became more of a hero in his own series and he’s gone back and forth depending on the writer.” Conway says, “You can be a sympathetic figure who’s been dealt a bad hand by fate, and flunk the test of adversity at the same time. That pretty much describes Morbius, for me.” BRUCE BUCHANAN has been a journalist and freelance writer since 1996 and is currently working on several comic-book projects. Contact him at brucebuc@bellsouth.net or www.comicspace/brucebuchanan/.

Allan Harvey

One of the most critically lauded comics of the 1970s was the ten-issue run of Swamp Thing by writer Len Wein and artist Bernie Wrightson. But that’s not what this article is about. This is, instead, a look at what came after Wein and Wrightson, for, though one might not realize it today, Swamp Thing ran for a further 14 issues before finally being canceled in the summer of 1976. Swamp Thing debuted in a one-off tale in House of Secrets #92 (July 1971) and the issue garnered very good sales. Indeed, as Len Wein himself was later reported as having said, “House of Secrets outsold everything that month.” Confident in the knowledge they’d spawned a hit, Wein, Wrightson, and editor Joe Orlando had a problem: Success demanded the character’s return, but the story was complete in itself, with little possibility for a sequel. That they succeeded in capturing lightning in a bottle for a second time—and brilliantly— is a matter of record. The resulting ten issues remain so popular that as recently as spring of 2009 they have been reprinted in a new, lavish hardcover volume from DC. But with Swamp Thing #10 (June 1974), an exhausted Bernie [then Berni] Wrightson took his leave. As news of his departure leaked out, fans reportedly suggested Jeff Jones as a suitable replacement. According to an editorial in Swamp Thing #11 (Aug. 1974), however, the powers-that-be felt that Jones’ work would be too similar to Wrightson’s, and wanted to take the series, and its mossy star, in a slightly different direction. The artist ultimately chosen was Nestor Redondo.

THE FILIPINO INVASION Redondo was then best known as a component of the “Filipino Invasion.” Facing falling sales and rising costs, DC had looked to foreign countries such as the Philippines and South America for artists with cheaper rates. Filipino artist Tony DeZuniga had proven himself a valuable resource, and, through him, DC began to secure the services of other talents. Alex Niño, Alfredo Alcala, Gerry Talaoc, as well as Redondo, were just a few of the artists whose work filled pages in various DC books of the 1970s. Len Wein stayed on as writer, though his working method had to change. He and Wrightson had worked “Marvel-style”—plot, art, dialogue—but with Redondo living halfway around the world, Wein now had to produce a full script in advance.

Remarkable Redondo Filipino artist Nestor Redondo ably filled Bernie Wrightson’s vacated artist’s chair on DC Comics’ original Swamp Thing series. Seen here is the cover art to issue #18 (Sept. 1975), courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © DC Comics.

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Better Call Orkin! Swampy needs pest control help on this page 8 splash from ST #14 (Jan.–Feb. 1975). Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

Swamp Thing #11 begins with the erstwhile Alec Holland gazing at the smoking ruin of what was once his laboratory. Having stood staring for so long, however, the Swamp Thing finds he has taken root and, tearing his foot out of the ground, ambles off into the swamp, decrying his pathetic lot. Meanwhile, Abigail Arcane and Matt Cable are tracking the creature, but find themselves kidnapped by huge, mutated “worms.” In the clutches of one “Professor Zachary Nail,” Matt and Abby discover that atomic radiation from Nail’s equipment has mutated a wide variety of swamp fauna, and Nail himself is on a mad crusade to save a few examples of humanity before the world outside succumbs to pollution. The worms are a remnant of some ancient race accidentally revived by Nail. Swamp Thing arrives, and discovers that the worms, unknown to Nail, merely desire to cultivate the humans as food! During the fight that follows Nail opts to destroy his base, and Swamp Thing helps

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everyone escape before the explosion destroys the worms—and Nail. It’s a solid issue; perhaps a little wild plot-wise, but very readable. Swamp Thing himself is cast as a tragic figure, and Abigail Arcane and Matt Cable provide likable support. Nail’s scheme, as unlikely as it is, plays up the pollution concerns of the day. Nestor Redondo’s art is nothing less than brilliant. His lush brush work and hatching often produce a photorealistic feel, but his fluid lines keep the work from appearing static. The man knows his anatomy, providing something of a master class in comic-book figure work. That Swamp Thing and Rima the Jungle Girl were his only regular series is to be regretted. Perhaps the finest example of his work during this period was on the tabloid-sized adaptation of the Bible [in Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-36, June–July 1975], where Redondo worked over layouts by Joe Kubert, producing a result that is simply stunning. He remains one of the most sorely underrated comics artists ever. As writer Gerry Conway tells BACK ISSUE, “I agree that Nestor is one of comicdom’s great unsung talents. His misfortune is that his art is very much part of a ‘school,’ and they were all heavily influenced by each other’s art style. As a result, their work tended to look alike. Nestor, to my mind, was the best of the bunch; I worked with him on a number of stories, including as an editor, and always found his art to be dynamic and interesting. I especially enjoyed the work we did together on Swamp Thing.” Swamp Thing #12 (Oct. 1974) is a time-travel story that finds our muck-encrusted hero dragged unwillingly from era to era by a huge, glowing crystal. Redondo excels himself with some of his strongest art for the series, depicting dinosaurs, Roman gladiatorial showdowns, 14th-Century Europe, and the American Civil War with equal verisimilitude. The research required to believably pull this off would have given many artists pause, but Redondo never skimps on the detail; his panels often filled with half a dozen characters and lush backgrounds. “The Leviathan Conspiracy” in #13 (Dec. 1974) sees Swamp Thing captured for experimentation by a misguided scientist. And with that, co-creator Len Wein bowed out. The editorial in #14 (Feb. 1975) informs the reader that Wein left due to work and health pressures (kidney stones are mentioned), but that a diligent search had turned up a “young, interested, and very committed” new writer: David Michelinie. Michelinie’s debut tale is a beautiful story, which Redondo more than rises to the challenge of illustrating. “The Tomorrow Children” opens with Swamp Thing coming to the aid of a small mutant child who is being pursued by angry, axe-wielding townsfolk. As we’re told, “[N]ature spawns no animal more vicious, no creature more vile, than that mindless flock of humanity called ... a mob!” As the villagers scatter, and the child flees, we learn something of the history of these events. People have been dying and huge creatures have been spied in the swamp. When old Jeb Wheeler found three mysterious children hidden in a box abandoned in the swamp, the answer was clear to the townsfolk— the children were the cause. They, and Jeb, were hounded out of town. Attacked by a giant ant, Swamp Thing is stunned to see more of the creatures controlled by the mind powers of the three kids. The girl, Delta, and her brothers,

Swamp Men

Seth and Jeremy, make Swamp Thing welcome in their home in a hollowed-out tree in the middle of the swamp. Their origin is uncertain, but has something to do with a tank of radioactive chemicals that now lies leaking somewhere nearby. Sadly, after striving to bring the kids up alone, Jeb Wheeler has died, and the kids are struggling to survive on their own. They intend to show Swamp Thing where the radioactive cylinder is hidden so that he can analyze it and perhaps reverse the mutations, but the lynch mob returns, determined to finish the job they’d started earlier. Back at the kids’ tree home, the mob have killed the giant ants and set the tree ablaze. Jimbo, one of the town children, who had previously befriended Delta, has become trapped in the tree after climbing in to warn her. The fire is too intense for Swamp Thing to combat alone, so Delta rides on his back, her mental powers holding back the flames. They reach Jimbo, but having had one arm destroyed, Swamp Thing is unable to carry both children to safety. Delta orders him to save Jimbo first, and he reluctantly does so. Before he can return, however, the tree collapses, killing Delta. Stunned by what’s happened, the villagers accept their responsibility, and determine to give Seth and Jeremy a better life, and a new cabin—outside of town, of course; after all, “I just don’t think the neighbors’d understand...” says Jimbo’s father. Swamp Thing, disgusted, turns and leaves.

(clockwise from top left) The men behind the muck monster: Original Swamp Thing editor Joe Orlando (1927–1998). Swamp Thing co-creator and writer Len Wein (with bubbly Bob Rozakis, who submitted these first three photos, behind him). Post-Wein ST writer David Michelinie (right) chats with Martin Pasko (who wrote ST in the 1980s) at a mid-1980s DC Comics party. Artist Nestor Redondo (1928–1995) at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con (today called Comic-Con International); photo by Alan Light.

It’s a powerful, tear-jerking tale, with a strong message. Nestor Redondo, as ever, plays his part in making the story so successful, with little Delta and her brothers being depicted as horrific-looking, but not unsympathetic. The reader won’t soon forget the pathetic, tear-stained faces of Seth and Jeremy at the end, their whole world having literally gone up in flames. It was clear that, in Michelinie’s hands, the Swamp Thing’s future was assured. And so it proved to be. For the next four issues, the team turned out mini-masterpieces of horror and suspense, with Swamp Thing coming up against a demon-worshiping preacher; a high priestess and her undead army; robots; and a retirement village where the elderly residents will stop at nothing to regain their youth. “I was one of Joe Orlando’s stable of writers at the time,” says Michelinie, “and apparently the kind of work I was doing on The Unknown Soldier made him feel that I could handle Swamp Thing. As far as being familiar with the book ... oh, yeah. It was my absolute favorite title as a reader back then. It was uniquely literate, and made me see how powerful the right words could be when married to the right pictures.” Michelinie remains full of praise for his collaborator: “Nestor has never been appreciated to the degree he deserves. But he was definitely appreciated by the writers and the editorial staff during his Swamp Thing run. I never spoke with him while we were working ‘together’

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Brain Drain Our favorite bog beast runs into trouble on this exquisitely rendered Nestor Redondo page from Swamp Thing #15. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions. TM & © DC Comics.

(unfortunately, this was before the era of e-mail), [but] I met him at a comics convention many years later, and that was a true pleasure.” Their working method? “I would usually come in to Joe [Orlando]’s office with a plot or plotline. He’d read it and then we’d talk about it for a while, and Joe would add his invaluable perspective, suggestions, and guidance. Then I’d go home and write the story up as a full script, neurotically sweating out every word.” Scripting for Swamp Thing, a character unable to talk beyond a few painful growls, his motivations conveyed by actions and internal monologue, presented a challenge. “It was difficult from a technical standpoint, but it was a tremendous help from a creative one,” Michelinie says. “A key to Alec Holland’s character was his extraordinary isolation, and writing a character who couldn’t talk forced me into his head, into his feelings—into that isolation—more sharply than would have been the case otherwise.”

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FROM CONWAY’S CORNER Gerry Conway wrote the two-part story that comprises #19 and 20. For this the writer looked to the Wein/Wrightson run for inspiration: In issue #5, Swamp Thing had had an arm severed but quickly grew a new one. Conway extrapolates from that, and has the severed arm regenerate a whole new body. This mindless doppelgänger finds itself attracted to strong emotions surrounding an elderly Native American who is custodian of a literal fountain of youth. The tale ends with Swamp Thing vs. Swamp Thing in a duel to the death. “I honestly don’t remember the details of that brief hiatus,” explains Michelinie of his absence, “but I assume it must have had something to do with some sort of deadlines. I was obsessively conscientious with my own deadlines, and don’t recall Nestor ever having a problem in that area, but perhaps there was some sort of delay in getting material to or from the Philippines.” Conway, of course, had earlier co-created Marvel’s very own “muck-encrusted mockery of a man,” Man-Thing. Amusingly, the mindless Swamp Thing in this two-part story responds to strong emotions, and Alec Holland’s transformation is blamed on a “super-soldier formula”—both traits more true of Man-Thing. As Conway confesses, “I was more familiar with [Man-Thing] than Len and Bernie's creation, and since it was originally planned as an out-of-continuity story, I probably didn't dig too deeply into the Wein/ Wrightson character when I was writing it. I was writing too much, and didn’t have time to think things through on every title I worked on.” The script was originally intended to be a stand-alone 25-page story for a giant-sized Swamp Thing issue, presumably to be backed up with a reprint of #1. But when DC canceled its giant-sized line, the script was expanded to 36-pages to fill two regular issues. “My guess is,” says Conway, “David was getting behind, or had decided to leave the book, and Joe Orlando used [my] abandoned Giant Swamp Thing story as a fill-in. Expanding it would have been fairly easy—filling in some details, expanding a couple of scenes, and so on.” Michelinie returned with issue #21 (Apr. 1976), a science-fiction piece that sees Swamp Thing teleported aboard a spacecraft where he encounters an all-powerful alien doomed, as punishment, to traverse the stars alone. He has, however, created a teleportation device so as to populate his ship with suitable “company.” Those lifeforms he deems unfit he keeps in holding cells, torturing them for his amusement. “I was just trying to find different angles to tell the stories,” says Michelinie, “so neither the reader nor I would get too complacent about what might or might not happen. And ‘Swampy in Space’ just seemed so bizarre that I couldn’t resist.” Having escaped back to Earth, Swamp Thing is found in a desert in the next issue, where he’s captured and taken to an underground base. There, mutated victims of a terrible manmade virus are herded and experimented upon by scientists, but Swamp Thing’s arrival starts a chain of events that results in the base being blown up—killing everyone, and destroying the virus before it can infect the outside world. This was to be Michelinie’s swan song, the writer having decided to quit while he was ahead. “Like a lot of writers, I’m my own worst critic. And I had such huge respect and affection for the character, and the Wein/ Wrightson issues, that I was always concerned that my stories wouldn’t hold up to that standard. So I decided to leave before the quality dipped.”

Gerry Conway returned with #23, this time as regular writer. With sales falling, editor Orlando wanted a change and he and Conway took the book down an unexpected—even unlikely— route: Swamp Thing became a superhero title!

THE SPECTACULAR SWAMP-THING A dreadful new logo trumpeted the change of direction, and the cover showed a half-human/ half-Swamp Thing Alec Holland mid-transformation being menaced by a gaudily costumed character with a sword for a hand. Conway: “I was under contract with DC to write what amounted to five to six comic books a month— far too much work, but I was young, hungry, and supremely self-confident. As a result, I wrote quite a few stories that left no impression on me (and probably no impression on the reader, too), and I’m afraid my Swamp Thing stories fall a little into that category. “As for taking Swamp Thing in a new direction, that was probably the result of declining sales, and certainly would have been something Joe Orlando and I discussed thoroughly. Most likely it was a last-ditch effort to save the title. Didn’t work.” It certainly didn’t. These final two issues can be seen as either a bold experiment, or a bizarre attempt to mix two disparate genres. It transpires that Alec Holland has a previously unmentioned brother who is twice the scientist Alec was. He quickly dashes off a formula that restores Alec to human form. Meanwhile, the supervillain from the

Wrong Turn for Swampy Three examples of Swamp Thing’s short-lived (and ill-advised) superhero detour: 1976’s Swamp Thing #23 and 24, the original series’ final issues, with covers by Ernie Chan; and one of Swampy’s 1977–1978 appearances in Challengers of the Unknown (seen below is the cover to issue #84, drawn by Rich Buckler and Joe Rubinstein). TM & © DC Comics.

cover, Sabre, and a bulky yellow bad guy called Thrudvang, pursue Swamp Thing intent on securing the bio-restorative formula for nefarious purposes. Nestor Redondo draws #23, but is clearly not enjoying it. Used to drawing realistically, he struggles when asked to draw in the exaggerated manner required for superhero books. His take on Sabre is especially painful to see, looking awkward and stiff. Redondo is gone by #24, which is drawn by Ernie Chua and Fred Carrillo, and Conway is credited for plot only. The issue is scripted by David Anthony Kraft. And, in a telling move, even Swamp Thing himself doesn’t show up for the finale of his own book! With Alec Holland now human, the muck-monster only appears in a couple of flashback panels. Monsters Issue

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Breaker, Breaker! The juggernaut Thrudvang lumbered into the pages of Swampy’s last issue, Swamp Thing #24. Double-page spread pages 8 and 9, penciled by Ernie Chan (as Ernie Chua) and inked by Fred Carrillo. Art scan courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

The next issue box promises a “radical new chapter in the life of Dr. Alec Holland.” One wonders how much more radical it could have been given what we’ve been witness to in the last couple of issues. “Hawkman vs. Swamp Thing” shouts a blurb, but it was not to be. Swamp Thing was canceled with #24 (Sept. 1976). A sad, ignominious end. Alec Holland would reappear the following year in Challengers of the Unknown #83 (Nov. 1977). Picking up where Swamp Thing had left off, and written by Gerry Conway, this sees Holland gradually transforming back into Swamp Thing as his brother’s “cure” wears off. Whether this is the fate Conway had originally intended, we’ll probably never know. Swamp Thing stuck around for the remainder of that short Challengers run (#83–87, Nov. 1977–July 1978), which became a kind of retirement home for defunct heroes: Deadman and Rip Hunter also appeared before the title died in the DC Implosion. The art was by a young Keith Giffen. Today these stories—essentially everything after Wein and Wrightson’s run ended—are forgotten, the events in them either retconned or ignored. While that is perhaps understandable, it’s a shame. Michelinie produced a string of solid, entertaining stories, and Redondo proved himself more than equal to the task of succeeding Wrightson. Together their work was rarely less than magnificent,

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and it deserves reprinting so that it can be seen by a whole new generation of readers. We’ll leave the last words to Michelinie: “I remember going to a party at Jack Harris’ apartment in Brooklyn during my run on Swamp Thing. I met Len Wein there and remember clearly his telling me, “People say I have a writing style, but I never realized what it was until I read your Swamp Thing.” It was meant as a compliment and I took it as such, and it’s one of the high points of my early career. “Before every issue I plotted or scripted I’d sit down and read Len’s entire ten issues. I’d absorb everything I could, and just hope I could come close with my own work. It wasn’t the same, of course; it couldn’t be. But just to hear from Len himself that I might be in the same ballpark, even if in the distant outfield, was a great relief. So, overall, I’d categorize my Swamp Thing time as intense, nerve-wracking, but ultimately satisfying.” Long considered a mockery of a man himself, ALLAN HARVEY luckily remains muck-free. He hails from the wilds of South Wales, and more of his musings can be found at www.thefifthbranch.com/ gorilladaze.

John Wells

Fan out the DC comic books that you bought in the fall of 1975 and you see the sub-groups within. The superheroes, obviously. War. Horror. The recently added sword-and-sorcery books. And Swamp Thing, Man-Bat, and the Patchwork Man (starring in House of Secrets)—the Monster line. Oh, wait … there wasn’t any monster line, at least not intentionally. However comforting the notion of a grand plan may be, the reality is that many publishing decisions owe more to chance or mundane business developments. DC’s highly touted rollout of sword-and-sorcery comics in the spring of 1975, for instance, “was a burst of activity to fill a sudden increase in the schedule,” DC president Paul Levitz explains. “I think any move towards monsters as ‘heroes’ was more a case-by-case reaction.” Up to that point, DC had had a good bit of success with its line of horror comics since the late 1960s, many of them hosted by comedic figures like Cain and Abel. Marvel Comics had taken a stab at the genre from 1972 to 1975, but a lack of staffing and the company’s natural strengths in serial fiction led to their own development of an entire sub-line of monstrous continuing characters that embraced every major horror icon, sometimes twice over. By contrast, DC’s principal venture into the monsterhero genre had been Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing in 1972, itself based on a one-shot story in the previous year’s House of Secrets #92. By 1975, both Wein and Wrightson had left DC’s Swamp Thing, but the book remained a going concern under original editor Joe Orlando, writer David Michelinie, and artist Nestor Redondo. Indeed, there’d even been an uptick in sales, albeit one that took place while the original creative team was on the book and, as Levitz notes, “only became evident after they left because of the lag time in newsstand sales reporting.” Nonetheless, this was enough to warrant the announcement in the Amazing World of DC Comics #6 (May–June 1975) that “Swamp Thing is so hot that its [publication frequency is] shifting from seven times a year to eight!” Enter the Patchwork Man. Seen for the first (and last) time in Swamp Thing #3 (Feb.–Mar. 1973), the man once known as Gregori Arcane was a quasi-Frankenstein Monster whose body had been all but destroyed when he stepped on a land mine. Unfortunately, from Gregori’s perspective, he had a mad-scientist brother named Anton who decided to “improvise” with his sibling’s body

I Hate Meeces to Pieces! Swamp Thing spin-off the Patchwork Man rumbles with rodents in this Nestor Redondo-drawn image from the character’s second solo story. Intended for House of Secrets #141, this tale went unpublished in the US but saw print in Sweden’s Gigant #3. TM & © DC Comics.

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and created a mute creature with only dim memories of his past life. The Swamp Thing was little better at expressing himself than the Patchwork Man, but they ultimately found a common bond in saving the life of a white-haired woman named Abigail Arcane. Gregori’s now-grown daughter had no idea that the father she’d long believed dead had just saved her life. The fact that the Patchwork Man had fallen to his apparent death at the end of the story was immaterial. In comics, as fans often say, if you don’t see the body, they’re not dead. And Gerry Conway, it was decided, would resurrect him for editor Joe Orlando in an ongoing series debuting in House of Secrets #140 (Feb.–Mar. 1976), with art by Nestor Redondo. Enthusiastically welcomed back to DC in 1975 after several years as a major player at Marvel, Gerry Conway soon had a full and varied slate of assignments as both a writer and editor. There was no doubt which of them was the favored child. A full-page house ad in Sept. 1975 cover-dated comics sported a striking illustration by Steve Ditko (himself newly returned to DC) that proclaimed, “Fantasy’s most bizarre hero now in his own macabre magazine— Man-Bat!” All-Star Comics, Blackhawk, and [1st Issue Special’s] “Codename: Assassin” (“three more from Conway’s Corner”) played second fiddle with a short nod at the bottom of the page. Note that this ad appeared three months before Man-Bat #1 was published. “I think we simply needed to fill a page that month,” Gerry believes, “and [publisher] Carmine [Infantino] was eager to showcase Steve Ditko’s arrival at DC.” The Man-Bat comic, according to Amazing World of DC Comics #6, was one that “our publisher has wanted to do for a long time now.” Created by Frank Robbins and Neal Adams in Detective

Comics #400 (June 1970), Man-Bat was a scientist named Kirk Langstrom whose efforts to emulate Batman wound up turning him into a feral creature who began to lose touch with his human side. Robbins cured his tragic anti-hero in his third appearance (Detective Comics #407), but not before adding another wrinkle when Langstrom’s new wife Francine become a She-Bat. Both of the Langstroms suffered relapses in subsequent tales before Kirk perfected his bat-formula, enabling him to switch back and forth with no impact on his faculties. Disappearing after Robbins left DC for Marvel, Man-Bat finally returned opposite Batman in The Brave and the Bold #119 (June 1975) and had his origin reprinted in Batman Family #1 (Sept.–Oct. 1975), renewing his familiarity with readers as the ongoing series loomed. “As far as Man-Bat goes,” Gerry Conway recalls, “I think what interested me was the opportunity to work with Steve Ditko. It’s been a while, obviously, but I believe we came up with the idea of proposing a series to Ditko first, then picked Man-Bat as a natural fit. Patchwork Man was another story. I don’t think I felt any particular affinity for the character, but I believe Joe Orlando was looking to put together a regular series figuring to capture some of Swamp Thing’s audience with a kind of spin-off.” Man-Bat #1, released in early September, traded on its Batman connection through the expected Batman guest-appearance but allowed Kirk Langstrom his independence. Discovering that his wife’s latest transformations into the She-Bat were being caused by one Baron Clement Tyme (ahem), Man-Bat pointedly refused the Dark Knight’s help in stopping him. Batman had become a crutch to him, he asserted, and it was time to stand (fly?) on his own. It was, all told, a solid first issue whose visuals (inked by Al Milgrom) at times echoed Steve Ditko’s classic work on Doctor Strange in shots of the sorcerous Baron Tyme. If there was any awkwardness, it was in the depiction of Batman himself, who seemed somehow less imposing here. Wisely, Ditko mostly kept his shots of the hero in shadows or partial silhouette. Where the jam-packed first Man-Bat deferred the character’s background to a text page, the introductory Patchwork Man story in mid-November’s House of Secrets #140 actually devoted several pages to the character’s origin, expanding on the Swamp Thing backstory. Given a title character who couldn’t speak or even think coherently, the burden of plot advancement and dialogue rested on a new cast of characters who operated out of the Mount Good Hope Institute under Doctor Elijah Chomes. Exactly why Chomes wanted to study the captive Patchwork Man was unclear, but we’ve read enough comics to know that this sort of thing never ends well. Certainly, that’s what the creature must have thought since he escaped at the end of the story with the help of a friendly cab driver. The most provocative detail in the issue stemmed from scientist Darleen Greer’s reaction to Chomes’ description of the Patchwork Man as being not unlike “an infant child.” As the story closed, she confided to colleague Andy Harty that she was herself pregnant, something sure to complicate her relationship with her estranged husband and potentially end her career. In short, she

Man-Bat Flies Solo Steve Ditko and Al Milgrom’s rendition of Man-Bat graces this 1975 DC house ad. (inset) The cover to Man-Bat #1, drawn by Jim Aparo. TM & © DC Comics.

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was considering having an abortion and wondered whether the Patchwork Man would be better off had he never been born. Published less than three years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion—and in a medium many viewed as exclusively for children—this was an eye-opener. If there was any particular feedback, though, no one remembers it. “Joe Orlando was Catholic, as was I,” Gerry Conway notes, “and we both took a perverse delight in tweaking the nose of authority figures, so I imagine we were happy with whatever reaction we got— and probably intended to create a certain amount of controversy.” Two weeks before House of Secrets #140 went on sale, readers of Man-Bat #2 discovered that there had been a wholesale change in that book’s creative team with Martin Pasko now scripting for the art team of Pablo Marcos and Ricardo Villamonte. “Gerry’s plate was pretty full as an editor and a writer for many other books, and he needed to fix his overcommitment problem by passing certain writing assignments on to hungry young up-and-comers like me,” Pasko recalls. Moreover, he adds, Carmine Infantino had been disappointed in Ditko’s art job on the first issue and asked for a change. Tonally, Man-Bat #2 was a very different animal, with a more realistic art style and a sarcastic edge to Kirk Langstrom’s dialogue as he fought another conflicted Frank Robbins villain called the Ten-Eyed Man (who, yes, had optic nerves on his fingers instead of his eyes, as seen on Jim Aparo’s very cool representational cover). Courtesy of a shift in locale to Kirk’s hometown of Chicago, there were also the first steps in the exploration of Kirk’s life outside the confines of Gotham and laboratories via the introduction of his sister Britt. The latter half of the issue actually took place against the backdrop of a “Welcome Home, Kirk” party where the guests were oblivious to the facts that Francine was strapped to a bed (lest she turn into She-Bat) and that the Ten-Eyed Man had just taken a fatal plunge off the roof. The letters column in that issue opened with a death report of its own—the comic itself. “We launched Man-Bat in a market that couldn’t get enough of macabre heroes and monsters,” Paul Levitz explained in the column, “and that’s changed since.” Canceled after a mere two issues, the Man-Bat series would find a new home as a backup strip in Detective Comics #458–459. “After Carmine announced he didn’t like what Ditko had done in Man-Bat #1, Gerry handed it off to me,” Pasko remembers, “saying that he didn’t think the book was long for this world.” While Conway didn’t “recall being so fatalistic about Man-Bat’s chances of survival,” Pasko certainly believed the book was on the bubble and approached the series accordingly. “I didn’t even bother making any

longterm plans. I decided to submit plots for selfcontained stories without any ongoing subplots on the assumption that the book would be canceled at any minute. I never expected the axe to fall quite that quickly, however. “That two-part backup in Detective was a truncated version of my idea for Man-Bat #3,” Pasko continues. “I had no ideas for a Man-Bat #4. Even as I was scripting the backup, Julie and I agreed that Man-Bat was not a strong enough character to support his own series, and we mutually agreed that that two-part story would be his first and last appearance as a backup in Detective, and I moved on. For my part, I was relieved to have had the burden of trying to make the character work as a series protagonist lifted from my shoulders.” The cancellation of Man-Bat before any sales figures could be recorded gained the title a degree of notoriety but it’s more understandable in context. Levitz’s explanation that the creature comic wave had ebbed was quite true, borne out by Marvel’s own 1975 cancellations of most of its monster titles (save diehards like Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night) before Man-Bat #1 had hit the stands. More significantly, as The Comic Reader #121 (Aug. 1975) reported, “the sales reports from last winter [came in] to both DC’s and

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Tyme’s Up for She-Bat (below) Ditko’s Baron Tyme evokes Marvel’s Dr. Strange in this splash page to Man-Bat #1. (inset) Man-Bat’s second issue cover, another Aparo gem. TM & © DC Comics.

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Secret Origin Retold (below) Patchwork Man’s roots are recapped—in Swedish—in Gigant #3 (Mar. 1983), in a tale which has yet to be published in the United States. (top left) Gigant #3’s cover repurposed Bernie Wrightson’s cover art from Swamp Thing #3. (top right) Patchwork Man’s solo outing in House of Secrets #140. TM & © DC Comics.

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Marvel’s offices and they were not good. Subsequently, most of the expansion that had taken place in the last few months [had] been curbed with a lot of frequency cuts and delays.” “It was a pretty rough time for comics, and certainly at DC,” Levitz recalls. “1974 had been a good year, partially due to a paper shortage which meant that what got printed had a better chance of selling, and ’75 had over-production which led to a lot of losses and dead titles. In the newsstand era, starting and canceling titles had to be done on very inadequate information (sales estimates took forever and were often wrong), so Carmine had to do a lot on instinct, or on his own judgment of material. Speaking for my own experience, I know Stalker died without hard sales data, based on Carmine’s judgment of my early writing skills (which he appropriately judged as weak), and his reservations about Steve Ditko and [Wally Wood’s] work ... but I doubt that the ultimate sales numbers would have argued for any different fate.” DC’s horror books took a particular hit that fall. House of Mystery, The Unexpected, and Swamp Thing were downgraded to bimonthly status while the venerable Phantom Stranger and three episodic horror books were canceled outright. House of Secrets, it seemed, would also end at #140. Unknown to most fans is the fact that Conway and Redondo’s second Patchwork Man story (“Night of the Rat”) had actually been completed. Although never published domestically, it wound up in the third issue of a black-andwhite Swedish comic book called Gigant (dated Mar. 1983), along with reprints of Swamp Thing #3 and House of Secrets #140. “When we ordered the material from DC Comics, Inc. in New York, we also asked for the continued story, from, we assumed, issue #141,” Gigant editor Cristian Hammaström explained in that issue’s introduction. Informed that there was no second episode, he continued, “We had given up hope and already planned for a substitute story, as a letter reached our working table. It was DC telling us that they had found the continued, ten-page story, which had never before been published. But if we wanted it, they could send the original material over to us!” Paul Levitz recalls, “We suddenly shifted to bimonthly on HOS at that time, and it’s possible the story for #141 was done and even color-sepped when the title was dropped (the seps would be rare, but possible) ... if a foreign licensee was looking for more, Milt Snapinn could have pulled the negatives off the shelf and suggested it.” In the ten-pager, Gregori Arcane returned the favor to the cabbie who rescued him by saving the man’s wife and daughter from a veritable wave of rats that came churning up from the building’s basement. Unfortunately, gratitude had its limits and the driver had no problem turning the Patchwork Man back over to Chomes in exchange for a reward. The abortion subplot got two-thirds of a page here, as Darleen Greer insisted to Andy Harty that “this is about my career. If I give birth to the child, I’ll never become a doctor.” Challenged by Andy that her estranged husband might have an opinion, Darleen added, “This is my body, not his … and I’ve thought about it … about what you said about the Patchwork Man yesterday. Would it be better for him if he’d never been born? … I believe that the answer to that question is also the answer I seek … so I’d like to talk to him before I make my decision.”

No decisions were forthcoming although the Patchwork Man’s story, at least, would be resolved more than a decade later. Drawn by a newspaper clipping, the crumbling Gregori Arcane willed himself to make it to Houma, Louisiana, and had time for a final loving embrace with his daughter Abigail before he literally fell apart. It was at once heartbreaking and horrifying. Written without knowledge of that second episode (but not really contradicting it), Swamp Thing #59 (Apr. 1987) was itself a final issue of sorts, the last one to be sold on newsstands before the comic shifted to a comic-book-shoponly marketplace. This was a revival of the Swamp Thing comic book, incidentally. The original series expired not long after the “Patchwork Man” strip did. Reflecting, perhaps, the decline in sales in monster-hero books referenced in Man-Bat #2, the series initiated a radical revamp in Swamp Thing #23, again by Conway and Nestor Redondo with Orlando edits. Gone was the book’s classic dripping logo and its stories’ moody atmosphere, replaced by costumed villains, Marvel-flavored soap opera, and an actual cure for the title character himself, who reverted back to the human Alec Holland at book’s end. Starting with issue #25, according to Conway’s successor David Anthony Kraft, the book was even slated to go further mainstream by adding, at the command of Carmine Infantino, Silver Age stalwart Hawkman as the series’ resident superhero. The hope, clearly, was to attract more superhero fans than they’d lose by alienating readers who’d followed the first 22 issues. Instead, “the All-New Swamp Thing” was cancelled with #24 (Aug.– Sept. 1976) and effectively served notice that the monsters-as-heroes rage was officially over. For the moment. Episodic horror comics survived, though, seeing their number increase in titles and frequency in 1977. Sales figures belatedly justified House of Secrets returning in May of 1976 with #141, once again featuring stories hosted by Abel. (He would have been there anyway, though, as the plan was for Abel-narrated shorts to follow each “Patchwork Man” lead.) In an interview with Nick Landau for Comic Media News (subsequently reprinted in The Comic Reader #151, Dec. 1977), DC’s then-public relations director Mike Gold asserted something else. “Those two issues [of Man-Bat] sold well,” he declared. “There was no reason to cancel the book.” In 1977, Man-Bat got his own series again as part of a revamped Batman Family (starting with issue #11). Bob Rozakis’ genial approach perfectly fit the more superheroic direction of the strip but didn’t entirely neglect the monstrous aspects of the character. In #17, for instance, Man-Bat met up with Jack Kirby’s creation, Etrigan the Demon. He, in turn, was spun into a Len Wein-scripted serial in Detective Comics #482–485 (1978–1979), whose villain was none other than Man-Bat #1’s Baron Tyme. Coming full circle, the latter three installments were drawn by Steve Ditko. Perhaps fittingly, it was also Len Wein (the co-creator of Swamp Thing, after all) who finally gave DC a more sustained run of monster-as-hero strips. As editor, he oversaw writer J. M. DeMatteis’ introductions of both the monster-icon soldiers known as the Creature Commandos (starting in

Patchwork Man— Smash!

Weird War Tales #93) and “I … Vampire” (House of Mystery #290). The strips helped sustain their respective titles for another two years, surviving long enough to see a revival of Swamp Thing itself in 1982. And it was in Swamp Thing that the roots of a new line of comics would form. DC never really got its group of monster-hero comics, but with the Vertigo imprint they eventually gained something more.

Patchwork Man leaps to the rescue in this Redondo-drawn page from Gigant #3. TM & © DC Comics.

Special thanks to Ola Hellsten for providing both the copy of Gigant #3 referenced in this article and its translation. JOHN WELLS knows more about DC Comics history than just about anyone, and is kind enough to share that knowledge from time to time with BACK ISSUE readers.

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Classic film and television monsters, as well as created-just-for-comics creatures, constitute some of our beloved industry’s most fascinating creations! In this gallery of the gruesome, I’ve collected artwork by a few of comicdom’s finest talents including some rarely seen and never published pieces for fans who thrill to those “things” that go bump, pow, and crash in the night ... and in the day!

written and com by

piled

Jerry Boyd

(left) Four of Marvel’s mightiest heroic monsters—the Hulk, the Beast, the Thing, and Man-Thing—collide with each other (!!) and with DC’s Swamp Thing in this Jim Starlin pencil plate from the 1972 ACBA Portfolio. (above) Awww, dare we call Hot Stuff and Spooky “monsters”? Sure, why not? The “Tuff Little Ghost” and everyone’s favorite “Devil Kid” wave to us from behind a tree in the Enchanted Forest, courtesy of their longtime artist, Howie Post, who penciled this double-portrait in 2004. Hulk, Beast, and Thing © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Swamp Thing TM & © DC Comics. Spooky and Hot Stuff © 2009 Harvey Entertainment.

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(top left) Mike Ploog does film storyboards these days. Here’s an undated etching of a movie monster that hasn’t been “produced” yet (but maybe one day he will....). (above right) Ghost Rider does his best to smile in this Ploog marker convention drawing from 2007. (far left) His signature got cut off the reproduction of this late ’80s illo, but here’s Art Adams’ rendition of the unforgettable Universal Studios’ Bride of Frankenstein. (left) With his bride around, you knew that Frankenstein couldn’t be far behind! This bust of the (Karloff-like) man of many parts by Mike Mignola was done in ’06. Monster art © Mike Ploog. Ghost Rider © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein © 2009 Universal Pictures.

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A creature by Michael Wm. Kaluta. This scaly subhuman is more intent on “getting his grub on” than menacing people! This homespun scene came from the 1974 ACBA Portfolio.

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Monsters and horror rarely got better than Bernie Wrightson’s stuff in the 1970s. This magnificent but unused Halloween night gathering of grotesqueries was originally meant to be a House of Mystery cover, we believe. TM & © DC Comics.

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As a newly transformed creature lumbers out of the Louisiana bayou in 1972’s Swamp Thing #1, a narrative caption introduces the emerging swamp monster as “a muck-encrusted, shambling mockery of life—a twisted caricature of humanity that can only be called … Swamp Thing!” Although Alec Holland’s transformation into Swamp Thing was a new horror-fiction conceit at the time, the fear of bodily mutation and metamorphosis is endemic to the human experience. In her notes to Dante’s Inferno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), Nicole Pinsky observes that “the notion of Horror as we know it from fiction or the movies involves detailed, uncanny transformation of the human body…. The body may be snatched or bitten, invaded or inverted or duplicated, obscenely revived or repellently distorted, but above all it changes.” From Ovid to Dante—from Mary Shelley to Franz Kafka to Romero’s Living Dead—the fear of corporeal metamorphosis has haunted human storytelling for millennia. Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s best-known creation is no exception. When Alec Holland is transformed into something unbearably monstrous, the reader is compelled to both pity and fear him as the monster tries to regain his humanity. The exact opposite is true of his nemesis, Anton Arcane. If Swamp Thing’s story is a tragedy that loosely mirrors Frankenstein’s monster, then Anton Arcane represents a darker, more sadistic version of the monster’s creator: Victor Frankenstein. Swamp Thing spends much of his time trying to hold onto and recreate his humanity, while Arcane is willing to trade his humanity for the opportunity to live and rule forever. For almost four decades, Arcane has remained not just a common comic-book foil to Swamp Thing, but a dark reflection that reveals the depths of human (and inhuman) horror.

DEAL WITH THE DEVIL Although Arcane spoke his first dialogue in the last panel of Swamp Thing #1, he didn’t fully appear until the second issue of the series. Swamp Thing #2 (“The Man Who Wanted Forever”) begins as a horde of Arcane’s patchwork creations—called Un-Men— surround Swamp Thing, lull him into a trance, and sweep him out of the bayou on board a plane destined for eastern Europe. The Un-Men are only loosely men, as they seem to have been assembled from different parts of humanoid bodies. The Un-Men’s apparent ringleader, a creature named Cranius, is essentially a brain with a face sitting on top of a hand. The only other Un-Man with a significant role in this issue, Ophidian, is the serpent-like creature who hypnotizes

Mortal Enemies By the time he tangled with DC’s resilient muck-monster in Swamp Thing vol. 2 #98 (Aug. 1990), Anton Arcane had become a grotesquery in appearance and soullessness. Cover painting by John Totleben. TM & © DC Comics.

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Alex Boney

Swamp Thing for the journey across the ocean to a castle in the Balkan mountains. Arcane doesn’t appear until almost halfway through the issue, but he quickly takes control of the story. Arcane stands in stark contrast to the rest of the creatures in Swamp Thing #2. While he is clearly old and withered, he is still distinctly human. And whereas he refers to the Un-Men who inhabit his castle with him as “pets” and “experimentations,” he repeatedly calls Swamp Thing “my boy” and “my friend.” He seems at first to want to help Swamp Thing regain the human form he had once had. Arcane has discovered the secret of immorality but, as he tells Swamp Thing, “it is a secret I dare not put to use—while I still inhabit this bent and wizened form.” Through a mystical, alchemical process, Arcane offers to transfer consciousnesses: Arcane will take on the form of Swamp Thing while Swamp Thing reverts back to the form of Alec Holland. As with any deal with the devil, Arcane’s offer is too good to be true. As soon as Alec regains his human form, he learns that Arcane’s plan is little more than a revenge fantasy. As Arcane tells his Un-Men, “this malformed body means far more than immortality, my pets— it means power! Power to exact the vengeance that has gnawed at my heart for years … vengeance against the unthinking cretins who inhabit the village below … the self-centered snobs who shunned me in my youth— who scorned me and my work! In this indestructible body, I’m able to do what I’ve longed to do … I can go

down the mountain—and destroy them all!” From the very beginning, immortality is only really half of Arcane’s design. The plan is foiled when Alec reclaims the Swamp Thing body, sacrificing his humanity to save the lives of the villagers below. Arcane falls to his apparent death from a window high in his castle and, unable to cope with the loss of their master, the Un-Men jump from the same window onto the rocks below. Despite the elaborate thematic mirrors and inversions built into the first Swamp Thing/Arcane confrontation, co-creator Len Wein says he was really just trying to create a good villain that fit the genre of the book. “We never sat down and specified what sort of evil he represented,” Wein says. “I never really thought you needed to compartmentalize evil. I didn’t think it needed that much dissecting to be that disturbing. You want a mad scientist in a horror book, and I liked the idea of giving Alec the chance to become human again very early on. And Arcane fit right into that.”

Oh, the Humanity! (left) Anton Arcane offers to make a man out of our beleaguered bog beast on page 12 of 1972’s Swamp Thing #2. (right) In the next issue, Aracane’s brother Gregori’s life is “saved” as he becomes the Patchwork Man. Art by Bernie Wrightson.

ARCANE, FAMILY MAN Arcane also provided a way to establish a sense of continuity for the series as a whole. Arcane left behind two family members who would play prominent roles in Swamp Thing’s life for years to come. Swamp Thing #3, entitled “The Patchwork Man,” reveals that Arcane had “saved” his own brother, Gregori Arcane, after a land mine accident years earlier. In a twisted act of fraternal salvation, Arcane recreated Gregori as one of his Un-Men

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and confined him to his castle basement. After Arcane’s apparent death, Gregori creates an explosion that destroys Castle Arcane and escapes. As he attempts to reunite with his daughter Abigail, who now lives in the village below the castle, Gregori is attacked by Swamp Thing and the villagers. After endangering his daughter and then saving her, Gregori apparently falls from a bridge to his death below. Though two of the Arcanes are apparently dead three issues into the first series, characters with great potential never stay dead for long. “My standard comment about death in comic books,” Wein explains, “is this: In comic books, nobody is ever really dead unless you can see the body—and usually not even then. The arch-enemy in any series comes back. I realized after the first issue that he was always going to be Swamp Thing’s nemesis. The other villains in the series were all pathos-ridden creatures, almost all of whom died at the end as Arcane appeared to die. Most of the others were one-shot villains; Arcane was always intended to be a recurring villain.”

Indeed, it took less than ten issues for Swamp Thing’s nemesis to return. In Swamp Thing #10 (“The Man Who Would Not Die”), Arcane re-emerges with his Un-Men in tow to plague Swamp Thing in the Louisiana bayou. This Arcane is not the old, withered man who had plunged to his apparent death in issue #2, however. As Arcane explains, “I did not survive the fall! Though the spark of life remained within me—I had shattered every single bone in my body! Those few remaining of my Un-Men, under the direction of the living brain, Cranius, carried my broken body to a secret laboratory—where under my semitelepathic control, Cranius supervised the production of a miracle! From a vast supply of component parts I had stored there for just such an emergency, they constructed a synthetic body to house my undamaged mind.” The new body the Un-Men constructed for Arcane was larger and stronger, but it was also misshapen and grotesque. As artist Bernie Wrightson explains, “Arcane was saved by the Un-Men and they rebuilt him. My thinking was that, if the Un-Men put him back together, they would recreate him in their own image so that he would be this distorted monster-thing.” Wrightson also made major alterations to Arcane’s face—a contorted visage that looked oddly familiar. “That was intentional,” Wrightson says. “I wanted to make him look a little like his nemesis—or at least to have an echo of Swamp Thing.”

In His Image (left) Arcane’s fearsome form in Swamp Thing #10 (whose cover is above) mirrors that of his arch-foe. Original Wrightson artwork to page 13, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © DC Comics.

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Grappling in the Graveyard Original cover art by Tom Yeates for Saga of the Swamp Thing #18 (Nov. 1983), pitting Swampy against the Un-Men. Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

Although Arcane’s new appearance was horrific and haunting, it wasn’t entirely what writer Len Wein had imagined. “Weirdly enough, I ended up— because of health problems at the time—not initially plotting issue #10,” Wein says. “Bernie plotted the story originally. I came in late in the game and had him review some stuff. But my intention was never to have Arcane turn into one of his own grotesqueries. He was actually going to come back in a mechanical suit. The idea was that he had fallen from a great height and broken almost every bone in his body, but the Un-Men wouldn’t let him die. And he was sort of in a wheelchair-like contraption that pushed his lungs, pumped his blood, and kept him alive mechanically. But Bernie forgot that when he plotted the story, and he turned Arcane into the creature he started becoming from that point on.” Wrightson admits that there was probably a miscommunication, but it may have been due to Swamp Thing’s composition process. “We never really had a script when we were doing Swamp Thing,” Wrightson explains. “We did Swamp Thing in the so-called Marvel method, where we would get together, talk out the entire issue, and then I would go home and pencil it. I drew it and occasionally wrote notes in the borders if I had something specific in mind or a question or a suggestion. Then Len would dialogue and script it working from the penciled pages.” Even Arcane’s original appearance had been largely a matter of Wrightson’s interpretation: “We might have talked about what Arcane looked like. We probably discussed the Un-Men, too, but I don’t recall that we really went into a lot of detail about it. I think I pretty much just went home and started to draw. These were horror characters, so they were supposed to be creepy, unsettling monsters. My influences come from old Universal Monsters movies and EC Comics. I also might have just seen Freaks—the old Tod Browning movie (1932)—and that was probably an influence, too.” However the character was supposed to look, Arcane proved to be more of a physical threat in this new incarnation. But Arcane’s obsessive quest for power dooms him once again. Although Arcane neutralizes Swamp Thing, his repeated call for power, control, and human enslavement on plantation grounds that used to be worked by slaves summons vengeful ghosts who surround him and tear him apart. When Swamp Thing regains consciousness, he finds a row of cemetery headstones with Arcane’s name etched into the center stone. After Swamp Thing #10, Bernie Wrightson departed the book. Len Wein would follow three issues later, and the series would only last another two years. Although the Patchwork Man reappeared in House of Secrets #140 and Swamp thing made guest appearances in several different titles before he received his own title series again in May 1982, Arcane wouldn’t resurface in comics again until 1983— a break of nearly ten years.

THE ARCANE TRILOGY As Martin Pasko was winding down his run on Saga of the Swamp Thing (SotST), he reintroduced Arcane in his final storyline. In this new incarnation (SotST #17–19), Arcane has mutated once again into a creature with an insect exoskeleton and the lower torso of a spider. As he tells a victim in SotST #19, the ghosts in the bayou graveyard had torn him apart and buried him in a graveyard. His Un-Men, though, once again recreated his body after exhuming him from the grave. Their work had not been effective, and Arcane “resumed my experiments anew, attempting to breed a more durable body in which I could place my mind … and know true immortality. I saw excellent possibilities in insects—the most adaptable and prolific of organisms.” Splicing the genetic material of humans and insects, Arcane also created a new insectoid group of Un-Men. With his new army, Arcane launches an attack on Swamp Thing and his niece, Abby, whom Swamp Thing has befriended. Arcane is seemingly destroyed again at the end of the issue, but the story closes as Monsters Issue

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Hellllp Meeeeee… A fly offers the mortally wounded Matt Cable a new lease on life on page 7 of Saga of the Swamp Thing #27 (Sept. 1984), from the team of writer Alan Moore and artists Stephen R. Bissette and John Totleben.

Swamp Thing walks off into the swamp in search of Arcane’s body. Pasko’s last story set the stage for probably the most memorable, influential run Swamp Thing has ever experienced. Alan Moore took the reins as writer of SotST beginning with issue #20 (Jan. 1984) and didn’t waste much time before bringing back Swamp Thing’s arch-enemy. If Pasko’s revision of Arcane had been visually disturbing, Moore’s approach to Arcane added layers of visceral and psychological terror the character had never provoked before. Near the end of SotST #27 (Aug. 1984), as Abby Arcane Cable’s husband (Matthew Cable) is lying near death after crashing his car, a fly buzzes in front of his face and offers to save him. On the last page, a perfectly healthy Matthew Cable picks up Abby and drives away. Two issues later, it becomes clear that Arcane has taken control of Cable’s body and, after introducing a new life and home for them, has made love to her. In the next issue, Arcane launches an all-out assault on both Abby and Swamp Thing.

TM & © DC Comics.

It’s no accident that Moore’s “Arcane Trilogy” (as it has come to be known) is the story that led DC Comics to drop the Comic Code Authority’s approval label from the book’s cover. Incest, necrophilia, and all the other horrors introduced in this story are not light thematics, even for a horror book as sophisticated as Swamp Thing. And it’s no accident that Arcane was the character that inspired such a shift. This amplification of Arcane’s threat left a deep impression on the writer/artist who followed Alan Moore after his run concluded. “Alan, Steve [Bissette], and John [Totleben] provided a deeper dimension to Arcane by focusing on the depths of his evil,” Rick Veitch says. “The way he looks—dripping insects out of his mouth and such—provided a sort of tactile quality. This lasted the whole series; he’s a powerful presence whether he's battling Swampy or hanging out in Hell. And then, of course, the sexual angle—what was going on with Abby—was really disturbing as well.” The Arcane Trilogy also provided the first story in which Arcane actually won—at least initially. At the end of SotST #31 (Dec. 1984), Arcane’s soul is expelled from Matthew Cable’s body and is dragged to Hell. But he also makes sure that Abby’s soul is dragged to Hell with him. Swamp Thing rescues Abby from Hell in SotST Annual #2, but the entire experience had a profound impact on Abby for years to come. After Moore’s story, Arcane remained a disembodied head suffering the torments of Hell for the next five years. He appeared as a flashback character in Swamp Thing vol. 2 #59, which revealed the ultimate fate of Arcane’s brother Gregori (the Patchwork Man). And in issue #76, writer Rick Veitch portrayed Arcane cackling through his torture while Swamp Thing and Abby’s child was conceived with the help of John Constantine. The most significant addition to Arcane’s character during this time, however, didn’t take place in the pages of Swamp Thing. “The first time he was actually called ‘Anton’ Arcane was not in the books,” reveals Len Wein. “The first time he was called Anton Arcane was in Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe (#1, Mar. 1985). I was editing and co-writing that book. I actually had a rule for all the other writers that I violated constantly because I figured I could: You’re not allowed to add any new information to the entries that’s not already established in the books. But I was the creator of Swamp Thing. And when I wrote the entry for Arcane, and I realized that the first thing that’s in the character information was ‘First Name,’ I thought ‘Well, crap, we’ve never given him a first name.’ And so I named him after a kid I went to high school with. I always thought Anton was a cool, exotic name, so I used it.”

TIME TRAVELS Anton Arcane’s next significant appearance was actually an origin story of sorts—something that, even after 17 years, had still not been done. Writer/artist Rick Veitch began a time-travel story that jettisoned Swamp Thing back in time as the birth of Abby’s and his child was approaching. In Swamp Thing vol. 2 #82–83, Swamp Thing encounters Arcane twice—during World War II and again during World War I—as he falls back through time. “The obvious thing was to match him up to history,” Veitch says. “To do his origin story, you want to fit him into the time he lived. What we knew about him was that he was born in the early part of the 20th century and he evolved into this weird techno-sorcerer who created the Un-Men. It wasn’t that big of a jump to put him in a Nazi uniform and tie him up with occult objects like the Spear of Destiny. It was an easier jump to put him back in the

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Family Reunion Swamp Thing vol. 2 #59 (Apr. 1987) featured a flashback tale involving the Arcane family. Original art to page 5, penciled by Rick Veitch and inked by Alfredo Alcala, courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

trenches of World War I, where he’s experimenting on wounded and dead people, building his first Un-Men prototypes.” Arcane’s origin story added several key layers of characterization, most notably Arcane’s early fixation on mutilation and his disturbing relationships with his brother and his sister (a new character created by Veitch). Veitch walked away from writing Swamp Thing over an editorial disagreement about Swamp Thing #88. But if he had continued his story, he intended to substantially change Arcane yet again. “In my planned story,” Veitch explains, “Swamp Thing is falling backward in time and Abby’s pregnant with the successor with Swamp Thing. As Abby’s having the baby, a country doctor is brought in to help with the birth. But it's all a set-up. The doctor is really Arcane and he wants the baby for himself. Just when it looks like curtains for Abby, Constantine shows up with that little bit of amber, the Claw of Elk Hound, which I kept showing throughout the time-travel story. Inside the amber is Swamp Thing, who placed his essence inside it way back in time knowing it was the only way to get back to Abby. And then you would have a final battle between Swamp Thing and Arcane, which Neil Gaiman had actually already helped me plot. Arcane was going to take all the evil he had accumulated inside himself and fire it at Swamp Thing. And because Swamp Thing had learned all these lessons from hanging around Jesus, the essence of evil goes right through him and is unable to touch him. In a sense, it purifies Arcane. So at the end of the story, Swampy and Abby are together and they’ve got the baby. And we see Arcane, who has turned into a regular country doctor. He’s free. Somebody surely would have brought him back later, but that how I was intending to leave it.”

MUNDANE MENACES AND NEW MUTATIONS As it turned out, Arcane hit a bit of a stagnant phase for quite a while after Veitch left the series. Although subsequent writers brought the character back, it was usually in tried and familiar ways. In Swamp Thing #96–98, written by Doug Wheeler, Arcane lulls the spirit of Swamp Thing and Abby’s infant daughter (named Tefé) to Hell and tries to hold her there. Writer Nancy A. Collins, who followed Wheeler as regular writer of Swamp Thing, used Arcane twice. In Swamp Thing #125 (Nov. 1992, a 20th anniversary issue), Arcane escapes from Hell and possesses Tefé. He is exorcised from her body at the end of the issue, but he then possesses the cryogenically frozen body of industrialist General Avery Sunderland (a longtime Swamp Thing foe). When Sunderland is resurrected by his daughter in Swamp Thing #133 (July 1993), Arcane launches a new attack on his old adversaries that concludes with him being dragged off to Hell again in issue #138. These were entertaining stories, but they didn’t do much to advance the Arcane threat that had been built by Moore and Veitch. After Swamp Thing #138, Arcane slipped into the shadows as his creations stepped into center stage. While Arcane had been significantly fleshed out as a character, his Un-Men had remained relatively two-dimensional. In some ways, the pathos and tragedy of their situation had been hinted at decades earlier. As Len Wein explains, “How would you feel if you were born and there was a level of consciousness and you looked like those creatures looked? Swamp Thing was busy striving to regain his humanity. These creatures were never going to have that opportunity. I think he bred them as extremely loyal. They were essentially all test-tube babies.” The newly formed DC imprint Vertigo sought to elaborate on this sentiment in 1994 with a five-issue miniseries called American Freak: A Tale of the Un-Men, written by Dave Louapre (of Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children fame) and illustrated by Vince Locke. American Freak tells the story of Damien Kane, a young man whose body begins to mutate when he turns 23 years old. Damien thought he had been orphaned as a child after his parents died

in a plane crash, but he soon learns that his past had been concocted by military scientists to hide his true origin. Damien is actually the offspring of two of Arcane’s original Un-Men, and he embarks on a quest to Arcane’s Baltic castle (which hasn’t been destroyed in this continuity) to learn the truth behind his and his parents’ past. When Damien reaches the castle, he finds several other Un-Men are being held captive in a freak show run for the entertainment of the rich and beautiful. Damien frees them from their captivity and leads them back to freedom, fame, and security in America, but only after many of Arcane’s “first-generation” Un-Men are killed in the process. Rather than picking up where the Un-Men had left off in continuity, Louapre chose to take the characters in a decidedly different direction. “I’m much more interested in character than plot,” Louapre says. “I’ve always been interested with the perspective of, ‘How did I become this thing that I am?’ How does somebody who’s that freakish and that much of a monster cope with it on a day-to-day basis, especially while being exploited? So I took it and ran from there. Did you ever have anyone ask you if you would go back and be 16 years old again if you could? I was always like, ‘f**k no! I don’t want to go through all that s**t again.’ You have all these horrible changes in your body, your hormones are raging, you just feel like a freak. You feel like a monster. That was all subtext in the series.” Ironically, the Un-Men are the most normal, well-adjusted characters in American Freak. “They were really only freaks in the sense of being created in a modern world where the norm is just looking like a normal human being,” Louapre explains. “If everybody else looked like them, they’d be the norm. The irony of writing the ball scene [in issue #4] was that the supposed normal people were the true freaks. These people that are so rich and so bored—they’re the same people who go pay to see Monsters Issue

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people play Russian roulette, who go to these extremes of human depravity and get off on it. I never treated the Un-Men like monsters. They were just freaks by comparison, in the universe they lived in. But if you look at the dialogue and the way they treated each other, they had more humanity than most of the other characters who were not the Un-Men.” Although Arcane did not appear in American Freak, he was an still an unnoticed apparition who hovered over the tiny tragedies of the lives of his creations. Two years after the Un-Men series concluded, writer Mark Millar closed out Swamp Thing vol. 2 with a storyline that significantly altered Arcane as a character. In “Trial by Fire,” a small group of magicians led by the Phantom Stranger and John Constantine try to free Arcane from Hell so that he can do battle with a nearly omnipotent Swamp Thing now intent on wiping humanity from Earth. But when Arcane is freed and confronts Alec in Swamp Thing #168 (July 1996), he reveals that he has actually found God: “Once I looked at the light and saw only darkness, cherished despair and shunned the word of God. But now a terrible weight has been lifted from my soul and I see the world as it truly is. All thanks to a Catholic priest I met in Hell. He taught me that the Lord is a forgiving God, that the fires of Hell were intended to purify instead of punish. Hell isn’t for an eternity. It’s only until we understand the meaning of retribution and then we’re free to do as we please.” After witnessing the transformation and salvation of his longtime foe—a creature once thought to be the essence of human evil— Swamp Thing is moved to abandon his plan to eradicate humanity. He creates a new body for Arcane at the end of Swamp Thing #168, and Anton reconciles with Abby in the last issue of the series (#171, Oct. 2006). As poetic and fulfilling as this ending was, however, a good antagonist is rarely allowed to remain redeemed for good.

FALL FROM GRACE Ten years after the conclusion of Swamp Thing vol. 2, writer Joshua Dysart pulled Anton Arcane out of his salvation in Heaven to again do battle with Swamp Thing and his family. “It was really tricky for me,” Dysart says, “because one of the things I wanted to do with my run—and I didn’t really succeed entirely—was to return everything to their core elements so that we could get back to doing these Wein-esque stories: a monster an issue, really located directly in the Delta. I wanted to get this rich, dark history of the blues in there, and to do that, I needed to get all my elements back in place. And a big part of what I did with Arcane was that, too— finding a way to reconcile what Millar did and still get Arcane to a place where he was the primary antagonist. I didn’t want to negate what Millar had done, but I did want to get Arcane back to being an antagonist.” Arcane’s fall from Heaven could have been treated as a predictable gimmick, but in Dysart’s hands it actually read as a logical and natural progression for the character. Arcane’s core motivations—power and immortality—fit familiar religious and mythological patterns. “I think I always saw Anton as the Morningstar—the Lucifer,” Dysart explains. “It wasn’t that he didn’t love God—it wasn’t that he wasn’t enjoying his newfound position in this new place. But questions have to be asked, and Anton Arcane cannot help but question God. And in traditional Christianity, that is just an unaccepted paradigm. And I think that was the ultimate sin.” When Arcane actually gets to the greatest place he could possibly aspire to after life on Earth has ended, he finds that even that is not enough. “I think Anton was disappointed in God,” Dysart says. “Humanity is capable of imagining a far more compassionate and superior being than traditional Christianity gives us. A very old-world Christianity tends to give us this sort of jealous God that you can’t talk back to, that commands respect, that commands love under fear of punishment. That’s the paradigm that Anton Arcane is locked inside of. And Arcane is capable of imagining a far more compassionate, integrated, holistic entity. And that’s ultimately the problem—he’s disappointed in the way of things.” Dysart’s “Love in Vain” storyline (Swamp Thing vol. 4 #9–12) concludes with Arcane back in Hell, fused with the body of his newfound love Josephine and expecting the birth of a child. The series ended (with Swamp Thing #29) before the Arcane story could be resolved. “One of the real regrets I have about not getting to see my run through to completion was not finishing the ‘Arcane giving birth in Hell’ storyline,” Dysart laments. “Because I think that was the natural progression. If you looked at the way Arcane had been written over the years by different writers, I felt like this suffering, noble villain in Hell was a beautiful thing. I really wanted to explore that—especially through his offspring. The intention was to get to that storyline of Arcane giving birth in Hell, and that was one of the great epic storylines that I had in mind.” While Arcane’s story has not been resumed or resolved, the story of his Un-Men recently had one last hurrah in Vertigo’s Un-Men series (which ran from Oct. 2007 to Oct. 2008). Writer John Whalen and artist Mike Hawthorne effectively took on the daunting task of weaving 25 years of continuity into a single book, and the results were a very fresh take on characters who didn’t at first seem to have much of a shelf life. “What I liked best about the Un-Men,” Whalen says, “was the quirky, Big Daddy Roth-type stylings that had been imparted to them back in the original Swamp Thing series. They were semi-comical because they were just so over the top. American Freak took a more serious and tragic approach. I wasn’t as interested in pursuing that because, while I thought it worked well in that miniseries, it wouldn’t work well enough to sustain an ongoing series. They couldn’t constantly be victims. I wanted to turn it around to where they weren’t victims, but rather

“Kind of a ridiculous character physically” Despite writer John Whalen’s reservations about the absurd appearance of Arcane’s creation Cranius, he and artist Mike Hawthorne used the character in their 2007–2008 Un-Men series, published under DC’s Vertigo imprint. TM & © DC Comics.

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TM & © DC Comics.

were starting to victimize other freaks that they considered to be beneath them. I thought it would be a little more interesting and easier to sustain as a series if there was more to the characters than just oppressed freaks who turned on their masters. That was the basis of my story.” Un-Men, like American Freak, was originally slated to be a five-issue miniseries. But when Vertigo editorial saw the extensive plans that were being laid for the book, they decided to launch it as an ongoing series. Although the series eventually lasted only 13 issues, it managed to synthesize nearly all of the extensive Swamp Thing/Arcane/Un-Men continuity while presenting a very modern tone and energy. “John was going into this as a fan of all the previous incarnations,” Hawthorne says. “He wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or be witty for witty’s sake. Maybe he should have gone nuts with that stuff. We joked around about revealing that Cranius was Swamp Thing’s father, just to get people’s attention. But John respected everything that had come before and tried to fit it all together instead of reinventing everything or ignoring parts of it.” Although the tone of the series was very different from more recent treatments of these characters, Whalen actually sees it as a return— or at least an homage with a modern spin—to the characters’ roots. “There was a level of camp to my series,” Whalen admits, “but I don’t want to say that it’s entirely campy because I did fight against that. It’s very easy to treat the characters as throwaway jokes because they seem so over the top today. But in going back through the original Swamp Thing series, you can’t deny that it comes off as a little heightened and campy today, even though it was meant to be straight-ahead horror. I really wanted to have Cranius as one of the central figures. He’s kind of a ridiculous character physically—he’s a brain on a hand. If you’re going to bring that kind of a character back, you’re going to have to acknowledge the absurdity of it.” The protagonist of the Un-Men series was an albino AfricanAmerican secret-service agent named Kilcrop. While Kilcrop’s appearance sets him apart in the “real” world, he comes across as normal in the new Un-Men-created town of Aberrance, USA. “The Un-Men were larger than life,” Whalen says, “and the counterpoint to them was the Kilcrop character, who was more sedate and morose and serious. He was an earnest character, and part of that was an intentional contrast to the venal, more scheming Un-Men characters.” Artist Mike Hawthorne viewed Kilcrop’s outsider/insider perspective as the book’s biggest appeal—both as a reader and as an artist. “As a little kid, I loved drawing monsters,” Hawthorne says. “And this was a whole book about monsters and how they would fit into American society today. These people walk around; they don’t hide in shadows anymore. They could be on TV and walk down the street. I really became invested in these characters. I thought Kilcrop was a fantastic lead hero. He was so different from the stable of Vertigo heroes, but that might have been part of the problem [with sales]. We used to joke that if we had given him a drinking problem, made him really pissed off and angry and angsty and cynical, we probably would have been hugely popular with the readership. But he was unique because he was really a genuinely good person.” Bringing back old, familiar characters was always a consideration in the plotting of Un-Men, but Whalen was worried that relying on big guns like Swamp Thing and Arcane would come across as forced and gimmicky. “I wanted to use guest characters like Arcane and Swamp Thing sparingly,” Whalen says. “There was never any decree from Vertigo that I couldn’t use them. But those are fairly sacred characters in the Vertigo canon, and I didn’t just want to use them lightly without giving it a lot of thought. I had plans to have Arcane make appearances— mostly in flashback—as I fleshed out the origins of some of the Un-Men. And I did get a chance to do that briefly in a couple issues. As far as bringing Arcane back from Hell, it’s been done by so many other writers—and done so well—that I did not want to mess with that part of the canon. But you can’t resist the urge to think about it, so it probably would have happened at some point. I probably would have found a way to bring Arcane back for a cameo appearance.” While plot and continuity were impediments to bringing some characters back, practical considerations prevented some from appearing before the series ended. “I did also want to bring back some of the other Un-Men characters who have appeared throughout the course of the various comics,” Whalen says. “The one that gave

me the most trouble, but who I really did want to bring back the most, was Avidian—the amphibious snake-man with legs from the first two issues of the original Swamp Thing. He was the equivalent to Cranius in importance back then in the henchman days. The problem was how to deal with a character like that in the semi-realistic world I was trying to create. Granted, Cranius is a physically ridiculous character, just judging from the look of him. But the snake guy with hypnotic powers was even more problematic. But I did want to bring him back and make him sort of a rival to Cranius.” As was the case with several writers before him (notably Rick Veitch and Joshua Dysart), John Whalen left a lot on the table when his tenure ended. One of his most interesting contributions would have been a further expansion of Arcane’s scientific origins in the Balkans. “The arc of Cranius’ origin would be about the fact that he and Arcane were rivals,” Whalen teases. “Cranius, who back then would have been going by Von Schadel (which is German for skull), would have been rivals with Arcane. There would have also been a romantic rivalry going on there with the two of them and Arcane’s sister [who had been introduced by Veitch but never used]. I had plans for her, and I had a few things named after her in the town of Aberrance. This was all setting up the fact that Cranius had had a thing for her, and that was one of the reasons why Arcane turned against Cranius (aside from the fact that they were professional rivals).” Although many of Swamp Thing’s, Arcane’s, and the Un-Men’s creators have left compelling stories on the table over the years, all of them have contributed to preserving a sophisticated, intelligent, and disturbing continuity that was begun by Wein and Wrighton nearly 40 years ago. “Going onto Swamp Thing and handling these characters … it’s such a blessing and a curse to get the phone call that you’re going to be writing that book,” Dysart muses. “So much wonderful work has been done with it that you just don’t know if you have anything else to offer.” While the offerings have varied greatly from one decade to the next, new layers of horror, shock, and even humor have been added with each (frequent) metamorphosis of Arcane and the Un-Men. It’s a legacy that Bernie Wrightson has come to recognize and respect after four decades of watching his characters grow and evolve. “My generation of comic creators—people like me and Len and [Michael William] Kaluta and Neal [Adams] and Denny O’Neil, all the guys from that era—I don’t think any of us thought of ourselves as creating trash for a kid audience. All of us took what we did very seriously. It wasn’t disposable art. I remember years ago, joking with Kaluta about comics when we were collaborating on something. I said to him, ‘It’s like what Robert Crumb says, you know? It’s really just lines on paper.’ And Kaluta said, ‘No, it’s so much more than that.’ And he’s absolutely right.” ALEX BONEY is a PhD student at the Ohio State University. He is currently finishing his dissertation, which is about modernism, comics, and the rise of the American heroic ideal. He has written articles on a variety of subjects ranging from James Joyce to Booster Gold, and co-edits an online comics review site at www.guttergeek.com.

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Multi-Media Arcana Although the bulk of Anton Arcane’s in-continuity story is told in comic-book form, comics are not the only medium in which Arcane has made an impact. Described below are the many media in which Arcane and his Un-Men have plagued Swamp Thing. While many of these adaptations retain some value in the camp and nostalgia markets, most of the producers didn’t seem to be aware that Swamp Thing comics were “Sophisticated Suspense” written for adults.

by Alex Boney

antebellum-style plantation home. Having been rescued and reconstructed after the end of Swamp Thing, Arcane is now falling apart and seeking a way to restore his physical form. He attempts to splice the genetic codes of Abby (his visiting hippie stepdaughter from California, played by Heather Locklear) and Swamp Thing and transfer their life essences to himself, but his plan ultimately fails.

FILM On July 30, 1982, a film version of Swamp Thing—written and directed by noted horror writer Wes Craven—was released in theaters. Arcane (sans first name) was played by French actor Louis Jourdan. Although the film has essentially come to be viewed as a low-budget B-movie, it was played straight and does contain Swamp Thing and the moments of impressive character insight. After Arcane monster in the Arcane drinks Holland’s movies. Famous Monsters of bio-restorative formula Filmland #183 (May 1982). and awaits his own © 1982 Warren Publishing. transformation, he muses in a speech that echoes Emmanuel Kant: “Not to be a phenomenon, but the thing in itself—eternal, absolute beauty, absolute strength and power; physical and spiritual; to be the world and own it.” Pretty weighty stuff for a movie full of rubber suits. Jourdan resumed his role as Arcane in Swamp Thing’s sequel, Return of the Swamp Thing, which saw limited theatrical release on May 12, 1989. Whereas the 1982 film was a B-movie that acted like an A-movie, Return of the Swamp Thing fully embraced the tongue-in-cheek, self-parody approach of the B- (or C-)movie genre. Arcane, for example, had a functioning organ in his bedroom that he played during the movie. This was a surprising turn, given that Alan Moore and Rick Veitch were the most recent writers of the Swamp Thing comic book and that Tim Burton’s Batman (which took comicbook film adaptations in a decidedly more serious direction) opened the same summer. As in the first film, Arcane is portrayed as a wealthy scientist living in an

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LIVE-ACTION TELEVISION

Live-action Arcanes Louis Jourdan (left) and Mark Lindsay Chapman.

A little over a year after Return of the Swamp Thing opened in theaters, the Swamp Thing television show debuted on the USA network on July 27, 1990. Between 1990 and 1993, 72 episodes of the series were produced. In his role as Dr. Anton Arcane, British actor Mark Lindsay Chapman sported a very yuppie look (complete with shoulder-padded suits and a long, full mane of hair). In the television show, Arcane was essentially a young, handsome, sinister scientific virtuoso. At various times an expert in horticulture, physics, general medicine, surgery, and biochemistry, Arcane was depicted as a Renaissance-man-turnedmad-scientist. In the first episode of the series, Arcane takes a date to his cave/laboratory, where he has conducted experiments in “the translocation of phenomenal genetic material from one species to another” that have resulted in the creation of several (unnamed) Un-Men. In the cave, he asks his date, “Did I tell you that I graduated from a major medical school at age 19? A genius! Imagine what I could accomplish if I had used all of my talents for the good of mankind!” But it was the ’90s, so he also displayed a sensitive side from time to time.

Ugly animated Un-Men.

CARTOON

Nearly a year into the Swamp Thing USA series, DIC Entertainment produced a series of five cartoons aimed at younger viewers. Originally slated to air on CBS, which eventually turned it down, the short-lived series eventually aired on FOX Saturday mornings beginning on April 20, 1991. In the cartoon, Arcane is based loosely on the character from the films. Described by his stepdaughter Abby Arcane as a “demented genius” (complete with many monologues that end with “Mwa-ha-ha!!”), Arcane is entirely focused on acquiring Swamp Thing’s power and immortality. The first episode, entitled “The Un-Men Unmasked,” indicates that Arcane is responsible for Alec Holland’s transformation into Swamp Thing. Working on a cure for world hunger, Holland had distilled many of the secrets of bio-genetics into a growth formula that Arcane offered to purchase. When Holland declined, Arcane tried to take it by force and caused the accident that created Swamp Thing. While the cartoon was essentially a vehicle to launch a line of action figures produced by Kenner, it also contained strong environmental overtones. Arcane is essentially an eco-terrorist whose every plot threatens to destroy the natural world. His Un-Men, named Dr. Deemo, Weed Killer, and Skinman, assist him in his various disastrous quests. To bolster his army of three, Arcane builds an electronic coffin called a transducer that amplifies his Un-Men’s power and transforms their already-mutated bodies into giant exaggerated creatures (Deemo into a snake, Weed Killer into a centipede, and Skinman into a bat). When Arcane uses the transducer on himself in the final episode, he turns into a giant spider.

ACTION FIGURES

The Un-Men, from Kenner’s Swamp Thing style guide.

In spring 1991, a total of 12 action figures were produced by Kenner to coincide with the cartoon. Six of them were variations of Swamp Thing, two were allies (Bayou Jack and Tomahawk), and four were villains (Anton Arcane, Dr. Deemo, Weed Killer, and Skinman). Each of the villains was based on the cartoon designs and featured accessories that demonstrated the mutations each character undergoes in the show.

VIDEO GAME In December 1992, video game publisher THZ released a Swamp Thing game for NES and Game Boy platforms. Based on the characters established in the 1991 cartoon series, the video game features many of the same characters. Dr. Deemo, Weed Killer, and Skinman are all level bosses, and the game ends after Swamp Thing defeats Dr. Arcane in his laboratory. Swamp Thing game cartridge. Monsters Issue

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“Follow me … for I am The Phantom Stranger!” So said the logo of one hep early-’70s DC series. And at least one character took those words to heart—Dr. Terrence Thirteen, professional Ghost-Breaker. Yes, when Doc 13 wasn’t shadowing the spookily garbed supernatural superhero around in the book’s feature stories, he followed him as the star of his own occultish backup feature. BACK ISSUE decided to debunk the debunker by hunting down the only men who could reveal what made Dr. Terry and Marie Thirteen tick—Phantom Stranger’s writers.

A DOCTOR OF DATA The year 1951 was quite a year for entertainment: The King and I premiered on Broadway; Bedtime for Bonzo, starring future US President Ronald Reagan, hit the silver screen; and CBS presented the first color TV broadcast … viewed only by network executives since color TV sets had yet to be introduced to the American public. In the world of comics, Osamu Tezuka, father of manga, introduced his most famous creation, Astro Boy. On a lesser note, it was also the year that saw the haphazard creation of DC Comics’ protagonist Dr. Terrence Thirteen, a parapsychologist and investigator of reported supernatural activity. Thirteen was an orphan of a character, created by artist Leonard Starr and an uncredited writer to replace the “Captain Compass” feature. Imagine a less bumbling, more intense Clark Kent and you get the vibe of this neurotic paranormal investigator. The character’s first published appearance arrived in Star Spangled Comics #122 (Nov. 1951), where he toplined his own feature through #130 (July 1952). For generations, the Thirteen family’s less-savvy neighbors had hated and feared them, suspecting supernatural goings-on—but in reality, the Thirteens were thoroughly devoted to science and rationality. Thus, when the family patriarch died and appeared to come back in spirit, son Terry Thirteen, with his wife, Marie, set out to dispel the occurrence. That set the tone for the series, in which the married Thirteens investigated ostensibly occult-like situations, only to arrive at some mundane explanation. Following his Star Spangled run, Dr. Thirteen’s next appearance did not arrive until nearly 18 years later when the character turned up in Showcase #80 (Feb. 1969) as a supporting character in a Phantom Stranger story. When the Stranger received his own series that year, Dr. Thirteen made the leap as the character’s nemesis.

PHANTOM GETS A FOIL The Phantom Stranger was one “weird hero” (see BACK ISSUE #15 for proof!). Dressed like a cross between the Spirit and the Phantom of the Opera, the Stranger operated somewhere between the passivity of the Watcher, old radio man-of-mystery the Whistler, and the crime-busting heroics of The Shadow. More often than not, he would merely materialize and disappear, long enough to forewarn characters of the consequences of their actions. Like a buttinsky Rod Serling, he might occasionally interfere.

“I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts”… …or monsters, or demons, felt DC’s resident Ghost-Breaker Dr. Terrence Thirteen, seen in the foreground in this detail from page 13 of Phantom Stranger #3. The headshot of the Stranger himself came from the character’s first issue. Art by Bill Draut. TM & © DC Comics.

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Michael Aushenk

Dr. Thirteen “No. 1” The Ghost-Breaker bumped the Boy Wonder to grab the cover of Star Spangled Comics #122 (Nov. 1951), his first appearance. TM & © DC Comics.

All of this did much to raise the ire of Dr. Thirteen, a skeptic who did not believe in the supernatural and, least of all, believed that the Stranger was truly a phantom. He took to accusing the Stranger of perpetrating “cheap parlor tricks!” or ”smokes and mirrors!” to make it appear that he was ghostly. And off they went, bickering like an old married couple (yes, Doc 13 and the Stranger, not Terry and Marie)! So, whose idea was it to pit Thirteen against the Stranger as comic relief? “It was editor Joe Orlando who gave me this setup,” explains Mike Friedrich, who wrote fresh wraparound material for the first three issues, which relied heavily on old reprints written by John Broome and others. Friedrich admits that he was not comfortable with the premise. “I was handed archive copies of the early-1950s stories of both characters,” recalls Friedrich. “In the Mike Friedrich original, Dr. 13 was a serious ‘ghost-buster’ and we were reprinting those stories as well. So to run him up against Phantom Stranger meant that Dr. 13 had to be treated as a fool, since we readers knew that Phantom Stranger really is a supernatural being. I didn’t know how to maintain Dr. 13’s integrity in this situation. In retrospect, it would have been better to have created a new foil for Phantom Stranger, but I wasn’t mature enough as a writer or as a person to have suggested that.”

The idiosyncratic scribe was barely an adult when he received the assignment, which appears to have been a bone that the DC editors threw to a young, hungry writer. “I had been writing for about a year,” Friedrich tells BACK ISSUE. “I was 19 years old and writing for DC during my college summer break. I had a contract with them that guaranteed me a certain amount of work, so editorial director Carmine Infantino spread me around to the different editors. Joe Orlando had just come into the company on staff and Carmine asked Joe to give me something to do. Phantom Stranger is what he came up with. So it was a chance to work on something different. It was challenging to me because I was a superhero fan at the time and didn’t have the same kind of visceral engagement with other story genres. “I was writing a lot of different things that summer,” Friedrich reminisces. “I remember a fun issue of Teen Titans, drawn by Gil Kane and Wally Wood, for Dick Giordano; “Batgirl” (also by Kane) for Detective Comics, for Julie Schwartz; an issue of The Flash, also for Schwartz; an issue of Challengers of the Unknown, for Murray Boltinoff; and a spoof on Gil Kane, drawn unwittingly by Kane himself, for House of Mystery, for Joe Orlando.” Writing on Phantom Stranger often meant working with phantom artists. Friedrich: “I was writing full scripts, so I didn’t collaborate with the artist at all. I saw the artwork for the first time when it appeared in print.” For some, plumbing new contexts from old scripts might have been daunting. Not for Friedrich: “Actually, it was a little easier for me to think about how to connect the old material into the present than it would have been to think of new stories from scratch, because going into it I had so little awareness of both Phantom Stranger and Dr. 13.” Friedrich made the most of it, adding flare to early stories such as “Defeat the Dragon Curse … or Die.” “Creatively, I think Phantom Stranger was one of my weaker comic-writing experiences,” says the often self-critical Friedrich. “I was relieved when I returned to college and lost the assignment.”

SCIENCE VS. SUPERSTITION It was a familiar scene. A character in crisis. The Phantom Stranger— reminiscent of Steve Ditko’s snappily dressed, straight-laced anti-heroes and perhaps an echo of the Mysterious Traveler—materialized as an issue’s character arrived at the crossroads of making a decision that could detour his or her fate for the worse. Enter the Thirteens to get ensnared in the proceedings. Sometimes Marie was kidnapped. Once Terry was kidnapped. By the end of the story, after the Phantom Stranger has saved the day, Thirteen thanks the mysterious wraith by threatening to expose him, once and for all, as the sham he is! What an ingrate, that Terry Thirteen! As Phantom Stranger hit its stride, writers Bob Kanigher, Dennis O’Neil, and Gerry Conway contributed to this formula. And, for at least one series scribe, this cocktail of cynic vs. spook was a gas! “I loved writing those stories,” Conway tells BACK ISSUE. “They were, I believe, my first series-character work (not counting the ‘bookend’ Abel introductions I did for House of Secrets), and I had a great deal of fun putting all of those characters together.” Conway is no slouch in the Gerry Conway pantheon of Bronze Age writers.

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A Pair o’ Aparos The Dean of Debunkers as drawn by the amazing Jim Aparo, from (left) Phantom Stranger #8 (July–Aug. 1970) and (right) issue #9. TM & © DC Comics.

He co-created the Punisher and Firestorm, and, arguably, the most memorable Spider-Man storyline ever: the death of Gwen Stacy. “Jim Aparo was a master artist and storyteller,” says Conway, point blank, “and one of the first artists I got to know in the business. Working with him was a delight. “[DC editor] Joe [Orlando] was fun to work with, and had a very different approach to editing than Dick Giordano. He was very influenced by his experience working at EC. He had a dry sense of humor and a great, intuitive understanding of story. And his artistic taste was unequaled.” BACK ISSUE presses Conway to see if he has any more anecdotes related to Dr. Terry and Marie Thirteen. Quips Conway (who, incidentally, crafted the Stranger’s goateed nemesis, Tannarak), “None that come to mind— though I do think Jim Aparo’s version of Marie was pretty hot.”

DR. THIRTEEN GOES INTO PRIVATE PRACTICE When it came to pitting logicians Terrence and Marie Thirteen against the enigmatic Stranger, Conway relished the dynamic. “It seemed like a very natural conflict to play with,” says the writer, “and, as I recall, it worked pretty well.” 62 • BACK ISSUE • Monsters Issue

Len Wein, on the other hand, saw another side of the paradigm. “It didn’t rub me the wrong way, but it just didn’t work,” says Wein of the Thirteen/Stranger tête-à-tête. When Wein boarded the series in 1971 (#14, July–Aug. 1971), it was “very early in my career. I did some of the mystery books. Except for the one Teen Titans book that me and Marv [Wolfman] worked on together. I think that Phantom Stranger was my first serious book.” Wein steered the Phantom ship’s rudder under the supervision of an able captain. “Joe Orlando was a mentor,” glows Wein. “He was very instinctual. He taught me a lot about character stuff.” Before BACK ISSUE can even ask the question, Wein has read this reporter’s mind when he brings up a particularly curious Thirteen story—“The Spectre of the Stalking Swamp,” featuring a bog monster dubbed the Swampster. Familiar? Wein denies that the story had any connection to one of his most famous co-creations. “They were written months apart. Not at the same time,” says the original writer of Swamp Thing, which debuted shortly before. “Although I did use Zachary Nail in an issue of Swamp len wein Thing later on.”

Another writer who tackled Thirteen (with #18, Mar.–Apr. 1972): Steve Skeates. Skeates, who also scripted another apparition-hero, the Spectre, wrote Thirteen’s backup pieces. “Steve’s an old friend of mine, a nice guy,” says Wein. “[As a writer on the series,] he didn’t explore the arctic, didn’t cure cancer.” Nevertheless, Skeates contributed several solid solo stories (“Stopover” and “The Voice of Vengeance” in #18 and 19, respectively), supernaturally enhanced by Tony DeZuniga’s art. “Never having been all that big on Steve Skeates superheroes,” says Skeates, “often actually preferring to use just plain ordinary people as my central characters, I quite enjoyed writing about this ghost-breaking doctor (and his wife), devising various entities that looked like ghosts but, as it turned out, weren’t anything all that spooky after all—hoaxes, aliens, drug-induced hallucinations, even a Flash-wannabe!” Skeates tells BACK ISSUE that the editors’ slant on the paranormal investigator jibed with what should be a given in superhero comics: fantasy and the fantastic. “This all-mysticism-is-fakery attitude upon the part of Dr. Thirteen,” Skeates observes, “a seemingly insane attitude for someone who lived in the comic-book world, a world where the mystical obviously does exist, may, in fact, be the reason those in power … saw this series as being too off-the-wall, rather downright untenable when it came to the possibility of being regularly published, and therefore (as opposed to my own viewpoint) they did see these tales as being but filler, ‘…And the Dog Howls Through the Night’ languishing in an inventory file until someone missed a deadline allowing this tale to finally see print in PS #34 (Dec. 1974– Jan. 1975); ‘The Ghosts on the Glasses,’ though written for Phantom Stranger, finally (and rather enigmatically) materializing in Adventure Comics #428 (July–Aug. 1973).” Here is the book as Skeates perceived it: “The prevailing attitude upon the part of the powers-that-were was that what was essentially an anti-mysticism series simply didn’t belong in the Phantom Stranger book, and therefore they were forever trying to devise a series that would fit, and tossing a Dr. Thirteen tale in there only whenever they had no other choice. “I quite strongly disagreed, seeing the Dr. Thirteen tales as rather the flipside, an equal time sort of deal, the opposition heard from, making for a fuller book, one that didn’t just heavy-handedly lay on the mysticism but gave the other side a say as well! Of course, if I had liked the Phantom Stranger stories themselves, my attitude may have been a bit different.” Wein had philosophical differences regarding the Dr.-versus-Stranger dynamic. “Terry Thirteen is almost proven by that recent weird series [2007’s “Architecture & Morality” storyline by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang from Tales of the Unexpected #1–8] that he was a creature of his time,” Wein states. “When characters dealt with their own little universes, it worked fine. He would prove people were frauds and phonies. But if he’s standing next to a spectre, he’s kind of an *sshole. You’ve got to keep him separated from the legit supernatural or he becomes a joke.” So Wein separated the heroes. Wein confined Thirteen to backup feature status, while he focused on the Stranger in the main feature, offering Iron Messiahs with robot faces named Chuma. When Wein returned to O’Neil’s tomb of the Ice Giants (PS #19, May–June 1972)— first explored by O’Neil and Aparo in the Stranger/Dr. Thirteen tale “Journey to the Tomb of the Ice Giants” (PS # 8, July–Aug. 1970)—Terry and Marie did not return for the journey.

Ghost-Breaking Backup Series Examples of Tony DeZuniga’s moody “Dr. 13” short stories from 1971, both written by Robert Kanigher, as published in (top) Phantom Stranger #13 and (bottom) #15. TM & © DC Comics.

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“And I would’ve gotten away with it, too…” …if it weren’t for those darn meddling Thirteens! Terry Thirteen (left) busts a ghost in Phantom Stranger #16 (Nov.–Dec. 1971), and (right) confabs with his lovely wife in issue #19 (Nov.–Dec. 1971). Art by DeZuniga. TM & © DC Comics.

“Truth be told,” Skeates says, “I may well have been the perfect choice when it came to scripting this particularly crazed character, seeing this doctor as being but a slightly altered version of one of my all-time favorite Charlton stalwarts, Dr. M. T. Graves. “While working for Charlton during the mid-tolate ’60s, I had written more than 30 stories for The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves comic. It didn’t exactly take a huge leap of faith to realize that what I was about to embark upon, DC-wise, would be very much like those old particular and peculiar favorites of mine. “I honestly felt that ‘Creature of the Night’ (PS #22, Nov.–Dec. 1972) was my best eight-page story ever— Terry-wise,” Skeates says, “finally disengaging myself from that well-worn ghost-motif treadmill, building tension rather than posing questions. It wasn’t merely the evil machinations of a greedy schemer that bore the blame for the killing of an innocent man; there was mixed in there as well the stupid gullibility of the general public!” Late, great DC writers Robert Kanigher and Tony DeZuniga’s Jonah Hex co-creator, John Albano, also took a crack at Doc 13. Wein did not agree with Terry’s pragmatic thesis that the Phantom was a sham. He sided with the Stranger. “You’d never see him disappear. When they’d turn their head, he was gone,” the scribe says, adding with a smile, “But we knew he was supernatural.”

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THE ART OF THIRTEEN Qualitatively, “Dr. Thirteen” stories veered between The Twilight Zone and glorified Scooby-Doo mysteries. In one Doc 13 story, “And a Corpse Cried ‘Murder’” (#16, Nov.–Dec. 1971), a movie executive stages his suicide to gain insurance money … only to lose his wife’s life by accident because of his actions. In another, Thirteen exposes a medusa in the Mediterranean as a ruse (“Woman of Stone,” #21, Sept.–Oct. 1971). The denouements often featured Thirteen exposing and unmasking the culprit and his tricks. But what set these gems apart from a Scooby-Doo was the high-caliber art by Jim Aparo and Tony DeZuniga. “The visuals,” Wein cries regarding “Return to the Land of the Ice Giants,” was why Wein revived O’Neil’s Phantom Stranger contributions. “My God! Jim Aparo’s art on that was astonishing.” Both Aparo and DeZuniga delivered rich, textured, atmospheric work, but the two approaches varied wildly. “Jim Aparo was meticulous,” remembers Wein. “He was one of those machine artists, which is not negative whatsoever. Jim would pencil, eat breakfast, pencil, take a break, eat lunch, letter the page, ink the page. If it were a 22-page story, you knew it would take 22 [days] to do it. I always loved that aspect; he was absolutely dependable. He was very quiet, self-effacing. He looked kind of like an accountant.”

“I loved DeZuniga’s art on all of ’em!” gushes Skeates. “I’ve worked with some great artists in my time—Ditko, Aparo, Gil Kane, George Evans. Tony DeZuniga is definitely right up there with the rest of those guys. My favorite work of his may have been lavished upon a “Supergirl” tale I scripted (one in which Ms. Danvers assumes four separate identities and wears 11 different outfits within the course of a 17-page story), but I also can’t say enough about the niftily moody underpinnings Tony bestowed upon my handful of “Dr. Thirteen” episodes … DeZuniga’s great artwork easily provided my often-wacky output with every ounce of mood it deserved!”

A GHOST-BREAKER GOES BUST By the time Phantom Stranger reached the end of its relatively brief run with issue #41 in the mid-’70s, Terry and Marie Thirteen had already moved on. Issue #34 (Dec. 1974–Jan. 1975) turned out to be the Thirteens’ unlucky number. A Skeates “ghost” story called “...And the Dog Howls Through the Night,” moodily and photo-realistically rendered by DeZuniga, ushered the couple’s departure. As with their collaboration on “Creature of the Night” in #22, DeZuniga has fun toying with compositions and page layouts, making a humorless, colorless, superhero-free strip about a man with glasses about as dramatic and exciting as could be possible given the limiting circumstances. The Thirteens continued to make scattered appearances [Adventure Comics #428, the last issue of DC Super-Stars (#18), House of Secrets #150, etc.] before fading fast—ghost-like—from the scene. In hindsight (creatively speaking), the Thirteens’ final appearances proved among their most colorful. Childhood pals Len Wein and Marv Wolfman teamed up for a fun foray, which combined Phantom Stranger with its backup features, “Dr. Thirteen” and “Spawn of Frankenstein.” With issue #23 of Phantom Stranger (Jan.–Feb. 1973), “Spawn of Frankenstein,” written by Wolfman with Mike Kaluta art, replaced “Dr. Thirteen” as the series’ backup feature. That issue wasted no time dragging Terrence and Marie into the proceedings. Marie falls into a coma after a run-in with Frankenstein’s monster and the story ends with her Ghost-Breaker hubby vowing to avenge his wife. When PS #26 (Aug.–Sept. 1973) picks up the plot, Wein and Wolfman join forces with Aparo on the book’s main feature, pitting the Phantom Stranger and a totally emotional, nighirrational Dr. Thirteen against Frankenstein’s spawn. The Stranger helps Terrence regain Marie from the clutches of the monster, which was possessed by a pair of demons. “Another one of his lousy parlor tricks!” ejaculates the doctor as the Stranger materializes and evaporates. While Kaluta’s creepy filigree is missing from this story’s monster, we get Aparo’s dynamic storytelling (although Kaluta drew his monster on #26’s cover). In the second part of the multi-chapter epic that is DC Super-Stars #18 (Jan.–Feb. 1978), Conway finishes what Wein had started in Justice League of America #103 (which featured the Stranger) when Wein had depicted characters based on a bunch of his pals— Conway, Steve Gerber, Glynis Wein—and himself. Conway returns in Super-Stars, but he also throws in his wife Carla; writer Martin Pasko, who penned Super-Stars #18’s first chapter; the issue’s editor,

Paul Levitz; and the story’s illustrator, Romeo Tanghal. Conway writes that “Len and Denny and Roy never showed up, and Steve was here—but he left early” (eerie now, in light of the fact that Gerber, in real-life, has pre-deceased all of the other talents depicted). In what makes for some winkwink moments, Dr. Thirteen turns to the young comic-book talents to assist him in confronting the Stranger, “I plan to expose that fraud once and for all, provided I have your help!” Pasko and Levitz back out. Cameos and inside jokes aside, this story also brings Boston Brand, a.k.a. Deadman, back into the Phantom Stranger fold (from #41), and the Priestess of Evil with a crush on the Stranger known as Tala returns from PS #4. The Stranger defeats the mystic Tala with a Deadman assist. “If I hadn’t been inside you, addin’ my strength to yours, that’d be you down that hole,” Deadman tells the Stranger (and us readers!) before departing. Like Fred Carrillo’s Phantom Stranger work, Tanghal’s art looks crude yet oddly compelling, and the artist takes

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Terrific Talaoc Dr. 13 got no respect, no respect at all in House of Secrets #150 (Feb.–Mar. 1978) … except for this stunning Gerry Talaoc artwork. TM & © DC Comics.

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Terry’s Thirteen Make that nine. (left) The Ghost-Breaker (center) amid the offbeat cast of writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang’s “Architecture & Morality” feature, which ran in 2007’s Tales of the Unexpected miniseries (below left). the spiritual world with technology, effectively nailed the coffin shut on Mr. and Mrs. Thirteen. The 2007 eight-issue Azzarello/Chiang series notwithstanding, Dr. Thirteen has remained dead to the world ever since. For Wein, the party came to an end when he left the book to script one of DC’s most prestigious books, Justice League of America, and continue what would be a lengthy career scripting superhero comics. Looking back, Friedrich prefers Conway’s scripts to his own. “It was more difficult for me to work in the supernatural genre,” he confesses. “I readily understood the underlying premise of superheroes, namely that ‘the good guys win’… Better writers like Steve Englehart on Dr. Strange and Alan Moore on Swamp Thing were able to meld these complementary perspectives very well, but I wasn’t able to.” Wein says, “The problem with Dr. Thirteen was that he was a creature of his times—the ’50s and ’60s— but once he became an anachronism, all the readers knew him to be false. There’s the Spectre, there’s Deadman, who are ghosts. Thirteen became a joke. The character deserved better. That’s one of the reasons I stopped using him so much.”

STRANGER THINGS HAVE HAPPENED…

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MICHAEL AUSHENKER rather enjoyed the original Ghostbusters, but felt that the only good thing about the 1989 sequel was the Run-DMC song played over the closing credits. Michael’s own comic books include Cartoon Flophouse featuring Greenblatt the Great! and the El Gato, Crime Mangler series. He has also cartooned for Heavy Metal and is the writer of Gumby’s Gang Starring… (Wildcard Ink) featuring Pokey and Prickle. Visit www.CartoonFlophouse.com.

Photo: Marlene Aushenker.

TM & © DC Comics.

particular delight in illustrating the heroes and a bevy of bizarro gargoyles. House of Secrets #150 (Feb.–Mar. 1978) celebrated its anniversary issue with what turned out to be the last Bronze Age appearance of the Ghost-Breaker and his bride. But the Thirteens could not have gone out in better fashion than in this story, gloriously rendered by the underrated Gerry Talaoc, who brings here the very quasi-cartoony sensibilities that energized his earliest Unknown Soldier work. (This is the closest readers got to seeing Frank Robbins render Thirteen and the Stranger.) Topping off Talaoc’s terrific talents: a Jim Starlin cover. Despite some 11th-hour flashes of inspiration, Thirteen must have been an unlucky number sales-wise, and the lack of respect for the characters was pretty obvious, as even the creative team on DC Super-Stars egregiously misspells Dr. Thirteen’s first name (“Terrance”) throughout the story. The last words in this issue (“He’s gone!”) are uttered by Terry Thirteen regarding the Stranger––but he might as well have been talking about himself. House of Mystery #150’s “A God By Any Other Name,” a tale written by Conway colliding

Call it a “sixth sense,” but this BACK ISSUE writer entertains the ironic notion of what if Dr. Terrence and Marie Thirteen themselves were dead. I mean, could Marie have emerged from her monster-mash coma? Could the good doctor have really survived that 12-story plunge when the Spawn of Frankenstein threw him out of a window in PS #26? What if the professional Phantom Strangerdebunker was, all this time, a ghost himself? What a strange twist that would be! Before you naysayers start doubting the supernatural, consider that it was only after e-mails were exchanged and phone conversations were scheduled that I noticed my interview with Wein and my correspondence with Friedrich regarding the embattled Ghost-Breaker all occurred on the same day in November. I looked over at the calendar … the date was the 13th. Chew on that, Terry and Marie!

So there we were, somewhere east of Pasadena, breaking bread with the master artist Tony DeZuniga. On the table, a homecooked meal by Tony’s lovely wife, Tina, whom, until recently, worked for many years as a restaurateur. In another corner: Tony’s makeshift studio, where stunning painted commissions of Vampirella and Supergirl hang. by

Michael Aushenk

On April 21, 2008, my pal and fellow humor cartoonist, Crying Macho Man creator Jose Cabrera (top photo, left), and I shared a meal with the artist who, either as a penciler or inker, made fine art out of issues of Conan the Barbarian, House of Mystery, Ghosts, Dracula Lives!, The Human Fly, Strange Tales featuring the Golem, and, of course, his significant creation with writer John Albano, DC’s twisted Western title Jonah Hex. Name the artist, DeZuniga inked ’im: Gil Kane, Lee Elias, Bernie Wrightson, Rich Buckler, Carmine Infantino, on and on. So, how did we get here? It all began last winter. While researching BACK ISSUE articles, including this issue’s one on Phantom Stranger foil Dr. Terrence Thirteen, I corresponded with the Bronze Age artist, who at the time lived in Stockton, California. In Northern California, Tina ran a restaurant called Orchid (no relation to Tony’s Black Orchid). A native of Manila, Tony had long ago moved West from New York City, where he spent his ’70s DC/Marvel years. So binging on issues of Phantom Stranger, I decided to give my friend Jose, on his February 8th birthday, a copy of Showcase Presents: The Phantom Stranger, which includes DeZuniga’s phantasmagoric Dr. 13 backup features. A week later, Jose was hooked. Next thing you know, we’re talking Phantom Stranger and DeZuniga 25/8. So imagine our excitement when, a month later, Jose and I were doing Wizard Con L.A. and we discover that DeZuniga is in the hizzay! Tony was chillin’ with a pair of great “Filipino Invasion” artists he helped usher to American comics: Alex Niño and Ernie Chan. Jose and I ditched our respective table duties long enough to befriend Tony and Tina. Two months later, on April 21, 2008, Jose broke away from his lovely wife Naomi long enough to meet me in West L.A., our point of departure. The night’s magic began early as we enjoyed a traffic-free drive east on the 10 to the 110 (at the height of L.A.’s rush hour–– unheard of!). Once at the DeZunigas’ place, we had a blast. “The DeZunigas were easy to talk to and could keep up with the likes of Michael and myself (we can be chatterboxes),” Cabrera tells BACK ISSUE. “What stood out for me was the incredible hospitality of Tina, Tony’s wife. There was nothing she wouldn’t get us short of water (Tony doesn’t like drinking water).” Following Tina’s lead, Jose dug into Tina’s entrees (bottom left). “The food was warm, home-cooked, and delicious,” Cabrera recalls. “The machada (a Spanish dish of beef flanks and potato, smothered in tomato sauce) melted in my mouth. The other dish consisted of chicken and shrimp with loads of vegetables that were still simmering from the heat of the pan. I could see Michael’s eyes water over from the pure ecstasy of the flavors.” Monsters Issue

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the chicken scratch. Tony scrunched his face in mock despair and breathed a sigh of relief that he didn’t have to actually work from the sketch sitting in front of us.” Indeed, Tony revealed that he wound up using a light board to capture Carmine’s gesture and please the sometimes-prickly DC editorial director (whom he would ink years later on Spider-Woman #3). Tony didn’t let us leave empty-handed, either. Jose and I both walked away with a copy of his latest self-published pinup portfolio.

Once in a while, a BACK ISSUE reporter has to take a bullet for his publication. Luckily, this was not the case, as Tina’s delectable cooking had Jose and I heaping seconds and thirds onto our plates. After dessert––a tasty fruit gelatin from a local Mexican bakery, flanked by a plate of pastries––Tony shared his insights into the decline of the Filipino comic-book industry. We conversed about Tony’s great Filipino peers, including the mighty Gerry Talaoc, whose surname, Tina revealed, phonetically means a rooster’s “cock-a-doodle-doo” sound (the actual word is spelled “tilaok”). Tony gushed over Antonio Velasquez, a Filipino artist who influenced many of the Philippines’ Komiks movement, including Nestor Redondo and Alfredo Alcala. Tony recalled how he got the inspiration for Jonah Hex’s disfigured face design after seeing a medical illustration, exposing the various layers of the human anatomy, at a doctor’s office. Tony also pulled out laminated slicks of the BACK ISSUE #12 Jonah Hex-related interview with him. He expressed how he appreciated working on Hex with Albano, a master cartoonist in his own right, who provided Tony with brilliantly fleshed-out full thumbnails to work from. [Editor’s note: Jonah Hex is the top gun in our upcoming “Wild West” issue, BACK ISSUE #42.] “Another memorable moment was when Tina began pulling out Tony’s artwork,” Cabrera says. “It was amazing to see artwork from a legend that had never been gazed upon by the public. Not only is Tony a great comic-book artist but an amazing portraitist.” After Tina displayed several pencil-and-charcoal sketches of drawing-class models, Tina pulled out a few of these framed DeZuniga pieces, as well as some interesting fantasy art by Chinese artists. I finally asked Tina, as she approached with a framed work with its back facing us, if Tony ever sketches her. “Tony told of his run-ins and collaborations with some of the greats in the business,” Cabrera says. “My favorite moment was when he went into full role-playing mode, pulling out a Sharpie and a piece of paper and mimicking the way Carmine Infantino would quickly sketch a design or some concept for a cover. Tony stated that it was challenging trying to figure out what Carmine wanted from

Many writers and artists are drawn to Los Angeles, and there’s a reason why. It’s nights such as these, when the planets align to make for a magical (and traffic-free!) experience. Artists such as Tony often toil in isolation to perfect their craft. We got the sense that he appreciated a night of socializing with a couple of younger, lessaccomplished cartoonists lapping up his anecdotes (and his wife’s cooking). Just another meal for Tony and Tina, perhaps … but an evening that Jose and I will never forget. As we were about to call it a night, Tina showed us the Karaoke machine she had rescued from her Stockton restaurant. When Tina and Tony learned that we occasionally hit the Karaoke bar with our friends, the DeZunigas lit up. “Who knew that Tony liked to Karaoke,” Cabrera exclaims. “Can’t wait to get him to join us on Karaoke Wednesdays.”

(top) Tina’s cute niece, Marisol, may not be much of a comics reader, but she sure knows a good meal when she sees it. (right) Here’s a recent masterpiece from Tony DeZuniga: a 2009 painting of Jonah Hex, a monster in his own right (the man ain’t purty). Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). (top right) Lo and behold, Tina turned the framed picture around to reveal… a portrait of Tina drawn by her husband. (Aawwww!) TM & © DC Comics.

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Ian Millsted

In the early to mid-1970s, while Marvel was launching new horror series like Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, and Man-Thing, the company also reprinted many short monster stories from the 1950s and early 1960s in titles like Monsters on the Prowl and Where Monsters Dwell. One short-lived series combined the tone of those short stories with the ongoing serial format that Marvel had successfully developed by 1973. “It! The Living Colossus” ran for only four issues of Astonishing Tales (#21–24). The series was written by Tony Isabella fresh from the just-canceled Doc Savage, with artwork from Dick Ayers who had worked on many of the original monster stories. Tony and Dick kindly dredged the dark recesses of their memories for us. – Ian Millsted IAN MILLSTED: Is it true that the series came about because Stan Lee liked the idea of a series called “It”? TONY ISABELLA: The series came about because Supernatural Thrillers #1, which featured an adaptation of Theodore Sturgeon’s “It!”—the granddaddy of all swamp monster stories—sold very well. So Stan and Roy [Thomas] felt we should do a book called “It!” The problem was that Marvel already had a swamp monster series in Man-Thing. So we had to come up with a different type of monster to star in our new “It” series. MILLSTED: How did each of you become involved in the series? ISABELLA: Roy wanted to give me a series to write and knew I was a monster-movie fan. He asked for my input on our new “It,” and that’s when I learned the issues of Monsters on the Prowl which reprinted the original Colossus stories had sold better than other issues of the title. I pitched him on the new “It” being a continuation of those stories, though; in my original pitch, the specialeffects man hero of the second Colossus story had married his actress sweetheart and already started a family with her. Any member of the family would have been able to activate and control the Colossus. Roy steered me to the more dramatic premise of the hero being paralyzed.

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Beginnings: Chamber of Chills #5 (1973)

Milestones: Tales of the Zombie / Hero for Hire / Deadly Hands of Kung Fu / Ghost Rider / Black Goliath / The Champions / Black Lightning (co-creator) / Shadow War of Hawkman / Justice Machine

Work in Progress: Currently on view as “America’s Most Beloved Comic-Book Writer & Columnist” in his “Tony’s Online Tips” column (see URL below)

Cyberspace: www.worldfamouscomics.com/tony

tony isabella

Beginnings: Funnyman (1947)

Milestones: Ghost Rider (the original Western version) / Wyatt Earp / Human Torch / Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos / Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders / Combat Kelly and the Dirty Dozen / Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth / Freedom Fighters / “Scalphunter” in Weird Western Tales / Jonah Hex (Dick’s personal choice for his milestone series) / The Unknown Soldier

Work in Progress: The Dick Ayers Story

dick ayers Photo by Nightscream, from the New York Comic-Con on April 20, 2008.

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DICK AYERS: I dug out my accounting ledgers and did see that I only did about 30 pages for “It” in ’73. I believe I did only pencils and Marvel printed my pencils. I’d been asked to draw the pencils dark, which I do remember doing. I was only rarely happy with someone else inking my pencils and was always trying to get control of how my drawings would be inked. I was more relaxed and happy with my own inking, for I still was drawing while I inked. I worked from synopses when I penciled for Marvel. I didn’t see or read the story until after I saw the printed copy. MILLSTED: The first issue has a tagline on the splash page: “Return to the most thrilling days in Monsterdom.” The series is obviously tapping into the Atlas-era monster stories, but you both seem to have worked in references to the likes of King Kong in both art and script. Were you enjoying yourselves there? AYERS: My memory does tell me that 1973 was a slow period. If the story was penciled before ’73 I might’ve been in better spirits. I do remember enjoying working on the story. ISABELLA: I’m crazy about giant monsters. I grew up watching the likes of King Kong, Godzilla, Gorgo, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and the rest. Even today, no matter how cheesy a movie might be, if it’s got a giant monster in it I’ll watch it. It’s been quite a while since I’ve reread my “It” comics, but in writing them I seldom passed up any chance to reference the monsters and the movies I love. MILLSTED: And, of course, the lead character is an f/x creator called O’Bryan. Referencing Willis O’Brien [the special-effects wizard behind the original King Kong film], presumably? ISABELLA: You assume correctly. MILLSTED: The series seemed to arrive (and disappear) quite suddenly in Astonishing Tales, replacing Ka-Zar. Marvel was expanding titles at the time. How organized were things?

Tag … You’re IT! (right) Isabella and Ayers peek inside the mind of the Colossus on page 8 of Astonishing Tales #21. (below) Detail from the Gil Kane/Mike Esposito cover of that same issue. (opposite) The big guy throws down with Granitor on the cover of AT #22; art by John Romita, Sr. © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

ISABELLA: Looking back on those days through something like 35 years of hazy memories, it seems to be that we were always putting out more and more titles. We were always overworked and under the gun with deadlines looming around every corner. It was exciting, but also exhausting. The chaos took a toll on many of us, but I’m grateful for having had the experiences and the opportunities. AYERS: I left Marvel circa 1975 and was assigned the penciling of Kamandi for DC, which led to Freedom Fighters, Unknown Soldier, [and] “Scalphunter.” MILLSTED: How much freedom did you have in picking which Atlas monsters you used? Fin Fang Foom seems to be the one that has been best remembered. ISABELLA: I could use any pre-hero monsters I wanted to use. I went with the space gargoyles because they seemed like foes that could give the Colossus a good fight without outshining our hero in his first couple of issues … and then added Fin Fang Foom to the mix because his original story in Strange Tales #89 (Oct.1961) was my favorite of all the pre-hero monster stories. Had the series continued, the subsequent stories would have featured Goom and Googam (“The Family of Fear!”) and a team-up with Thor to stop an invasion of Earth by the Storm Giants of Norse legend. MILLSTED: Can you remember what the response was like at the time? Editorial? Sales? AYERS: I know nothing concerning editorial. ISABELLA: There wasn’t a lot of love around the office for “It! The Living Colossus,” and the character remained something of a running joke for a few years. The fan mail was favorable, but most fan mail is favorable. Even today, I still hear from readers who really loved the series. As for sales, I wasn’t privy to the actual numbers. However, when a series gets canceled in four issues, it’s safe to assume it wasn’t selling well. IAN MILLSTED is a writer and teacher based in Bristol, England.

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In 1974, Marvel Comics Group introduced a bold new monster-hero to the readers of Strange Tales. Subtitled “The Thing That Walks Like a Man,” the character was a big, brutish, superpowered man of stone. Sound familiar? But in fact, this “thing” had been around … for about 500 years. The bloodline of Frankenstein, Superman, Captain America and the original Human Torch (both labcreated supermen), and iconic Marvel monster-heroes such as Hulk, Tales of the Zombie’s Simon Garth, and, yes, even the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, harkens back to the Jewish folk tale about the all-powerful stone automaton the Golem. The Eastern European legend had survived via generations of Ashkenazi Jews, right down to their descendants, who included the Jewish superhero creators that dominated comics’ Golden and Silver Ages. So it was inevitable that by the ’70s, after decades chronicling the adventures of popular characters that may as well be “crypto-Golems,” Marvel finally released its official take on the medieval legend. Strange Tales featuring the Golem made its splashy debut in #174 (June 1974). Four issues later, the character was Golem, Golem, gone! So, what happened? Let’s voyage back in time and find out…

BEFORE FRANKENSTEIN, SUPERMAN, THING, AND HULK… “Oh, dreidel, dreidel, dreidel! I made it out of clay…” goes the old Chanukah song. But back in the 16th century, one Rabbi Loew topped that by a country mile when he turned a giant slab of clay into the Golem. The year is 1580 A.D. The place is Prague. There are many variations of this old story. One version, from The Prague Golem: Jewish Stories of the Ghetto, recounts how “a priest called Thaddeus—a fanatical anti-Semite— tried again to … bring about discord and … evoke new superstitious accusations of blood rituals. Rabbi Loew soon learned about it and raised a question ‘upwards’ in his dream to find a solution to the problem how he should fight against the evil enemy. He received the following answer: ‘You shall create Golem from clay and may the malicious antiSemitic mob be destroyed.’ “Rabbi Loew interpreted the line of strange words so that he should create a living body from clay with the aide of the letters provided from heaven. He called for Jizchak ben Simson, his son-in-law, and for a disciple of his, Jacob ben Chajim Sasson, the Levite, and entrusted them with the mystery of how a Golem should be created. “…Together we shall create Golem from the fourth element which is the earth.”

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Michael Aushenker

Reciting the Zirufim, the trio said: “And the Lord formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” Kazam! Loew had an obedient Golem on his hands. “We have created you from a lump of clay. Your mission is to protect the Jews from persecutions. Your name will be Josef and you will live in the Rabbi’s house. Josef, you must obey my commands no matter when and where I might send you…’ Josef nodded his head…” Loew prohibited the people in the house to use Golem for private purposes. One day, after Loew forgets to give Josef his daily chores, his clay creation (not exactly Gumby) is “found rampaging around the Jewish town like a madman, he wanted to demolish everything that got in his way. His inactivity had made him both bored and angry.” Luckily, there’s a failsafe: the Hebrew word emeth (“truth”) etched across the statue’s forehead. Rub out the first character on his forehead and it spells meth, which spells “death” for the Golem, who becomes recumbent again. Michael Chabon, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, drew the connection explicit between the Golem and the creators of the first costumed superhero Siegel and Shuster (who inspired the fictional Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, as did Joe Simon and Jack Kirby). Using the Prague Golem as the basis for this novel’s B-plot, Chabon draws an analogy between the powerful protector and Kavalier & Clay’s creation, the Escapist, a superhero devised during the chaos of World War II as the Jewish people were rendered powerless against the Nazis’ wrath. After all, Superman, Batman, Human Torch, the Spirit, and other Golden Age comic-book characters—as well as scores of Marvel characters (Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, Hulk, X-Men, and, in part, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Iron Man)—were “Jewish” by virtue of their creators. These cartoonists may not have been religious per se, but they were culturally Jewish. No matter their religiosity, Jews are first and foremost a race, with Judaism the biological and cultural connector of a nomadic people scattered around the world over millennia. Marvel’s architects—Stan Lee (nee Stanley Lieber) and Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg), as well as publisher Martin Goodman—were the driving engine of the comic-book renaissance we now call the Marvel Age. The American comic-book industry had always been a magnet for immigrants—Italian, Irish, Asian—and Jewish creators had sizable roles in the birth and rebirth of the superhero, romance, humor, and other genres, from Siegel and Shuster to Will Eisner to the MAD bullpen—William Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman, Als Feldstein and Jaffe, Bernie Krigstein. Chabon in Kavalier & Clay, and Julius Feiffer before him in his superhero myth analysis The Great Comic Book Heroes, made the case that it’s no coincidence that original superhero Superman was portrayed as an outsider, and forced to assume a new alias to try to blend into the American mainstream … much as Jewish immigrants have in their quest to assimilate.

MARVEL MAKES A GOLEM It had to happen. Marvel was first among comics publishers to feature black superheroes—and villains. Marvel was first to recognize the women’s movement in comics with characters like the Black Widow. And now, in this issue of ST, we’re proud to introduce the comics’ first Jewish monster-hero. – A “Special Bullpen Note” touting this “notexactly-original … yet highly innovative feature.” First published in 1951 as a horror comics anthology, Strange Tales, by 1970, had morphed into something of a superhero experiment—a launchpad for new characters/concepts. Editor Roy Thomas, writer Len Wein, and artist John Buscema debuted Golem following the exit of another Thomas-created, Wein-scripted character, Brother Voodoo. “I have this feeling that it was my idea to do the Golem because I had done it in The Hulk,” says Thomas. Monsters Issue

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“Since I knew Len would know how to pull it off as much as I would, it was probably a very brief conversation. Even with Brother Voodoo, which was more my idea and based on a character I came up with called Doctor Voodoo, I left it to Len.” “It was an assignment,” Wein confirms to BACK ISSUE. “Aside from John Buscema, who was always spectacular, there was not much else of any value.” It may have been just a bunch of marching orders to Wein, but there was something comical about the way this future Wolverine co-creator landed his Golem assignment. “Roy, in the heyday of the monster-heroes, decided to come up with a Golem character,” explains Wein. “Roy Thomas had an interesting way of assigning features. With Marv Wolfman, his last name was ‘Wolfman,’ so Roy gave him Werewolf by Night. He assigned me the Golem because I was Jewish.” (Wolfman is also Jewish, but this was clearly a case where his surname trumped all.) ST #174 begins with Professor of Archaeology Abraham Adamson on a Middle East excavation with his comely daughter Rebecca; her fiancé, the excavator Wayne Logan; and her little brother Jason. With his crew’s help, Adamson, descendant of Golem creator Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, has located and unearthed the Golem statue (explained to have wandered many lands from its Prague birthplace) in the middle of the Sahara. Egyptian deserters show up at the site, led by Colonel Omar. They loot Adamson, leaving the graying academic alone to die with his ancestor’s creation. Using the ancient parchments inherited from his ancestors, the dying professor intones the Mystic Alphabets of the 221 Gates to try to reanimate the Golem statue and protect his kidnapped party ... to no avail. Awash in failure,

Adamson weeps. One of his tears lands on the foot of the towering statue. “And in that searing instant,” writes Wein, “the life of Abraham Adamson comes to an end ... while the life of the creature called Golem comes to a new beginning.” Across three panels, the twinkle in the Golem’s eyes burn brighter, as the spirit of the departed Adamson animates the stone automaton. “And suddenly,” the narrator continues, “filled with an overwhelming love for those he knows he must protect, the creature shakes off the dust of centuries— and the Golem walks!” Turns out the Golem also kicks ass. Confronting the slimy Colonel Omar and his dozen—who hold Wayne, Rebecca, and Jason captive— he single-handedly takes on Omar’s automatic weapon-toting men, saving Omar for last: “Relentlessly, he lumbers forward—a moving monolith shedding bullets like wind-blown leaves…” After killing Omar and freeing Team Golem, the purple giant stands before Wayne and Rebecca. “Look at him, Rebecca. He knows us!” “Wayne, there’s something so—so—familiar about him—!” The final panel—closeup: Rebecca screaming… “[A]n involuntary wail escapes Rebecca Adamson’s lips—for there is something familiar about the Golem—a most familiar twinkle in the corner of his eyes.” Chilling! An old Stan Lee tale (“Foolproof”) rounds out this origin issue. But the series was staggered when the Golem-free ST #175 (Aug. 1974) reprinted the 1961 Jack Kirby/Dick Ayers monster tale from Amazing Adventures #1 instead (Torr, anyone?). Thomas: “We kind of fell behind on deadlines and couldn’t get the book out on time, and that doesn’t really help a series.”

RISE OF THE GOLEM Rising power, we’ll raise the night/ Rising power/ Rising power, we’ll wake the dead/ Rise! – AC/DC, “Rising Power,” 1983 Although Wein and Buscema (inked by Jim Mooney) birthed this Golem incarnation, they didn’t stay on the book for long (15 pages, to be precise). “I left after the first issue because the other book I was working on was frankly more important,” says Wein without a trace of regret. By the time Golem returned in ST #176 (Oct. 1974), a new creative team was attached. “I wrote the last two issues of ‘The Golem’ (with Tony DeZuniga as the artist),” recalls protean comics writer Mike Friedrich, who also penned Iron Man for Marvel and The Phantom Stranger and Justice League of America for DC. Indeed, with #176, Friedrich/De Zuniga’s “Black Crossing” kicks off with a pithy recap of #174 to make up for the four months that transpired between Golem issues. The narrative advances the plight of the Adamson kids and Logan in a mad dash to smuggle the Golem out of Africa. The Golem’s one and only supervillain—Kaballa—is introduced. The mad sorcerer sends his devil hordes to stop Team Golem while en route to Miami by ship. After battling Kaballa’s demons, Team Golem winds up shipwrecked on a deserted island. The issue ends with Golem uttering his first words: “I … do not … know! The land is my strength! Mystery … mystery!” Cryptic!

The Golden Age Golem A very young Joe Kubert illustrated writer Robert Bernstein’s tale “The Golem” in The Challenger #3 (Spring 1946). Courtesy of Bill Schelly, author of the mesmerizing Kubert biography Man of Rock (which we’ll spotlight next issue). © 1946 Interfaith Committee of Protestant Digest, Inc.

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WHEN THE GOLEM GETS TOUGH… …Mike Friedrich gets going! As in, out the door! Actually, Golem’s problems truly began with erratic appearances in the bimonthly Strange Tales. Friedrich is unsure why Golem sat out an issue: “I was living in California at the time, before cheap phone calls and e-mail, so I was out of the loop.” He informs BACK ISSUE that he was neither comfortable with the assignment nor satisfied with the outcome. “The major challenge for me,” Friedrich confesses, “was that I was completely unfamiliar with the Golem mythology before I was asked to write the series. There was no Internet then, so I had to scramble to do even basic research, then try desperately to figure out how to make a comics story out of it. I don’t think I succeeded at all.” Friedrich accepts full responsibility for his storyline and says that he did not inherit his ideas from his predecessors. “I think I came up with the villain and storyline (I’d hate to credit Len or Roy with anything so weak),” says the scribe. Unfortunately, readers shared Friedrich’s lack of confidence in Golem. The letters column in #176 did not bode well for this new creature feature, which already contained the stench of meth. It includes a slip revealing that Luis Dominguez might have been the artist originally intended for Golem … or perhaps the editor merely confused the Argentine with DeZuniga. One heated letter, from a Canadian of Arabic descent, accuses the book of favoring Jews in the Arab-Israeli conflict, based on #174’s depiction of Arabs (Omar and his evil band). “The first person you tackle,” he writes, “is the brilliant Jewish professor … opposed to [him] are the deserting, lowest-form-of-life Arab soldiers. Then the obvious happens. The bad … are completely subjugated by the clean white light of the Golem … the avenging white versus the base black.” This missive

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Golem! A Golem statuette typical of those sold to tourists in Czechoslovakian souvenir shops. In Prague, the Golem is a cottage industry, appearing on T-shirts, matchbooks, and mugs. garnered an equally phantasmagoric response: “Regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict … there are almost as many differing viewpoints on the question as there are people, and that’s true in the Marvel Bullpen, too. We have at least one Catholic who’s entirely pro-Israel … one Jew who wants both sides to blow themselves up and let the rest of the world alone … and several people of varying faiths who support the Arab position. There is no one Bullpen position on the issue. We’re a true collection of individualists…” Thorny! (Not as controversial is the reprint of Adventure into Mystery #8’s “The Man Who Couldn’t Be Killed” that follows.) So why did every Golem book rely on a reprint backup? Friedrich gambles, “I think the length of story was planned from the beginning, as a way of keeping costs down. This was at the time the comics market was sliding into oblivion, before the comic-shop network rescued it.” Friedrich launches ST #177 (Dec. 1974) with a syncretic retelling of the Prague Golem’s origin (as cited in Gersham Scholem’s On the Kaballah and Its Symbolism). Drawn by DeZuniga, the stone giant’s design evokes the 1915 German Expressionist film Der Golem. A reprint (“The Girl Behind The Glass”) completes an issue in which the misguided Professor Yeates schemes to revive the Golem under parsimonious circumstances: to score the late Adamson’s university chair. “And once again, the Golem walks the Earth!” This backfires when Golem’s revival attracts Kaballa’s minions. By the final panel, Kaballa stalks the youngest of the Golem’s friends— Jason Adamson … and then … nothing. It would be a long wait until readers would find out what happened next—in another series!

STRANGE ARTISTS: BUSCEMA! DeZUNIGA! ROMITA! BRUNNER! Before we discuss Golem’s hasty resolution, let’s examine the stellar visual storytellers associated with the character’s Strange Tales run. For a character with such a short published life, the Golem could do much worse than the hands of masters John Buscema and Tony DeZuniga, best known for Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian and as co-creator of DC’s Jonah Hex, respectively. Artist extraordinaire John Romita, Sr., then-Marvel’s art director, recalls his introduction to the late, great Buscema—make that non-introduction: “When he came in, I wasn’t even introduced to him at first and I didn’t seem to be involved … I noticed that it [his first book]

You Put a Hex on Me… Artist Tony DeZuniga, who as of this writing is enjoying a professional resurgence as his co-creation Jonah Hex heads for the multiplexes next year, lent atmosphere and psychedelic flair to two out of three issues of Marvel’s “Golem” feature. Shown here: page 2 of Strange Tales #176. © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Going Green Roy Thomas worked the Golem legend into the memorable Incredible Hulk #134 (Dec. 1970) tale, in which Marvel’s Green Goliath becomes a de facto Golem figure to the citizens of an oppressed village. Art by Herb Trimpe and Sal Buscema. © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

was rather quiet. When the new guy starts, I was usually asked to talk to the artist. That was one of the few times that Stan never asked me to give him a pep talk. Stan said, ‘I’m going to expose him to Kirby’s storytelling tricks.’ And the next thing you know, it was history. I did not have a lot of input in the first few months of when John was there. “His pencils were just dreamlike. I can’t explain to you his ability to do grotesque and beauty next to each other. With characters such as the Hulk and Dr. Doom, there’s a way to give them glamour. That knack was something that was in him.” Leafing through ST #174, a critic might observe that not only the Golem but Buscema sleepwalks through this issue, which appears uncharacteristically generic for the artist who made the Silver Surfer shine. But there might be a simple reason why this wasn’t Buscema’s best: He hated superhero books. “He protested all the time that what we were doing was crap,” Romita reveals. “But when the work came in, there was such sensitivity, such beauty. His natural sensitivity would come to the fore. I would try to transmit those plots to John by phone and even when he was grumbling, he was listening. No matter what he thought or how he rushed, the subtleties were never lost on him.” Buscema may have grunted his way through his Golem assignment, but DeZuniga, on the other hand, drew the hell out of his pair of issues (the latter inked by Steve Austin). He improved on what Buscema established, giving the imagery quasi-psychedelic verve and mystical texture. In the early 1970s, DC, in a union-busting move, recruited Filipino artists, and DeZuniga headed a wave of Asian-Pacific talent (that included Alfredo Alcala and Ernie Chan) employed on creature features and horror titles at the Big Two. “DeZuniga was a genius,” gushes Romita. “There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do.” Friedrich is loath to look back fondly on “Golem.” “I’m afraid looking at it now,” he says, “the art and story aren’t in sync with each other. I didn’t have much contact with Tony at the time. It was I believe the first and only time we worked together.” But DeZuniga tells BACK ISSUE that he loved collaborating on “Golem.” “Mike Friedrich is really good and I was really happy to work with him because he knows what he wants and he lets me do my style,” says the California resident. “Roy Thomas is really a nice guy and very easy to work with. He’s a smart, prolific writer and good editor. I enjoyed working with Roy … I still lived in NYC with my family when I did those comics.” Romita, who illustrated ST #176’s Golem cover, thinks DeZuniga had a hard time conforming to the house style that Stan Lee expected from Marvel artists in the wake of Kirby’s grandiloquent, steroid-fueled superheroics. “If he had one shortcoming,” Romita says, “and it was a minor one, [DeZuniga] had a hard time getting a little excitement and intensity. If you were shouting, Stan wanted to see the tonsils on the character. He wanted extremes.” Yet DeZuniga was just warming up on #177, growing more surreal than his comparatively straight-laced work on #176 and offering a peremptory glimpse into what would have been had “Golem” proved popular. No single artist twice drew a Golem cover. Strange Tales #177’s came courtesy of “Far-out” Frank Brunner—Golem trapped within a towering Kaballa’s crystal ball. While punishing when evaluating his own contributions, Friedrich does not mince words regarding pal Brunner’s eye-catching artwork. “I really enjoyed that cover,” says Friedrich. “Ten years later, I commissioned a guy to make a three-dimensional version of it (using layers separated by balsa wood, then encased in a glass frame), which hung on my Star*Reach office wall for many years.” 76 • BACK ISSUE • Monsters Issue

FROM EMETH TO METH: DEATH OF A GOLEM It was while the Golem walked among Marvelites that Friedrich’s interest in mainstream comics began to dissipate. “I don’t remember the precise chronology,” says Friedrich, “but, yes, these two stories were near the tail-end of my work for Marvel as I segued into publishing, which took place over about an 18–24-month period.” BACK ISSUE wonders how the peers where the writer worked felt about his Star*Reach endeavor, an 18-issue anthology series (1974–1979) that anticipated the independent comics movement and garnered Friedrich an Inkpot Award. “Well,” says Friedrich, “I was a freelancer working out of my home [in California], so there was no ‘where’ there. It was my comics friends (I wouldn’t call them peers, as they were more talented than me) like Howard Chaykin, Jim Starlin, Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, and Frank Brunner that I based my publishing company on. Having said that, I don’t think most Marvel/DC artists and writers knew what to make of Star*Reach. It was new creators who actually sustained my publishing, like Steve Leialoha, Ken Steacy, Lee Marrs, John Workman, and Craig Russell.” The title caption on #177 reads “Doomsday for a Demi-God.” And indeed it was. As sales sagged, Golem got sacked. Adding insult to injury, #177 featured a cruel parting shot for any Jewish superhero book—a full-page ad for a Third Reich tome featuring a photo of a sieg-heiling Adolph Hitler! Golem’s departing scribe shed no tears over his abbreviated run. In fact, he preferred what followed in ST. “Starlin’s “Warlock” was one of the high points of Marvel Comics during that period,” Friedrich says. The final page’s “Letters to the Golem” column informed Marvelites…

SPECIAL BULLPEN NOTE: File it under “G.” “G” for “Good idea that didn’t work out.” “G” for GOLEM. “G” for “Good-bye.” This issue marks the last appearance in Strange Tales of our kosher hunk of clay. After three tries, and despite the awesome creative efforts of Len Wein, Mike Friedrich, John Buscema and Tony DeZuniga … our GOLEM strip just hasn’t become what we hoped it would. For a lot of reasons: Deadline hassles caused us to miss one issue, forcing us to replace it with reprints, disrupting the story continuity, and causing no little loss of morale and inspiration on the part of our creative team. Then, too, we never quite found ourselves able to decide on a direction for the strip. Was it a human-interest book like MAN-THING? A smasho-whammo-destructo book like THE HULK? A supernatural mystery thriller like WEREWOLF BY NIGHT? We just couldn’t make up our minds. Thus, even with an open-ended plotline and too much left unexplained, we’ve decided to call things to a halt. We goofed. It’s not the first time. It won’t be the last. (But it may be the only time we’re gonna be so shamefacedly candid about it, so savor these words, pilgrim!) Yet this wasn’t the Golem’s true end. A bright light still sparked behind the eyes. The stone monolith would come back to life for one final appearance…

MARVEL’S GOT A THING FOR GOLEMS For a single issue, Thing team-up Marvel Two-in-One (MTIO) could have been called Marvel Two-Golems-in-One. MTIO #11 became the unlikely (or, depending on one’s perspective, unironic) venue to wrap up this Strange Tales saga. It took a year for the wrap-up of the last Friedrich/ DeZuniga Golem tale to arrive … but when it did, Friedrich and DeZuniga were no longer involved. MTIO #11 hit the stands (Sept. 1975), and “The Thing Goes South” came courtesy of newbie scribe Bill Mantlo (yes, the very Bill Mantlo credited as the colorist on ST #177). “He had started as a ‘colorist’ (paste-ups, actually) when Tony Isabella had a writer miss a deadline for submission to one of the horror titles he was editor on,” recalls Mike Mantlo, Bill’s brother, of his sibling who suffered brain damage in 1992. “Tony happened to mention it to whoever was in charge of the paste-up department, and Bill overheard the complaint, and asked if he could submit a script. Tony said if he could hand one in within about four hours, he’d take a look at it, and see if Bill was good enough. Lo and behold, Bill whipped off a script on his lunch hour, and Tony was floored, and gave him the gig.” Interestingly, this Golem-themed issue (with Bob Brown/Jack Abel art and a sweet Gil Kane cover) was plotted by the scribe due to inherit MTIO but diverted to The Mighty Thor: Marvel’s resident Golem-getter, the Rascally One himself—Roy Thomas! Yet despite his credit on the issue, Thomas insists his plotter role on the book is negligible.

Never Mind Rabbi Loew, Summon Robbins!

“I probably called the artist up and told him the story over the phone before I called Bill Mantlo to come in and fill in the dialogue,” Thomas guesses. Nevertheless, it was an ambitious story— tying up loose ends left dangling when ST evicted its ancient purple behemoth resident for futuristic, orange-skinned new tenant Adam Warlock. In typical Two-in-One formula, the story starts out with Ben Grimm and girlfriend Alicia Masters on a lighthearted trip to Disney World. En route, Grimm is lured by Kaballa’s subliminal mind transmissions to St. Petersburg, where a reactivated Golem is destroying the city. The local news reports that “a monster has been sighted running amok in the city. He is … large, immensely powerful and appears to be made of stone!” Grimm, unaware of the elemental’s presence, misinterprets this as a personal slight. “I come here to save them,” moans an offended Thing, “and what do they do? Call me a … blasted freak!”

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When Thomas returned to the Golem myth in The Invaders (seen above: page 15 of issue #13, Feb. 1977), artist Frank Robbins (inked by Frank Springer) brought the Golem to life with his signature high-energy style. © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Thing confronts the Kaballa-controlled stone creature. After the requisite “battle of misunderstanding,” the novelty of seeing the two characters duke it out shifts to them joining forces against the common enemy. Thing wallops Kaballa’s demons while “prune-puss” (as Grimm calls Golem), spell broken, forces Kaballa to flee. Golem returns to his static form (“Looks like St. Pete’s got itself a new statue,” quips the Thing. “The pigeons are gonna have a field day!”). A flicker in its eyes suggests that the Golem is not gone for good. But this time, he was. MTIO #11 marked the last appearance of the Golem … shelved like another of your bubbe’s clay tchotchkes!

THE GO-GOLEM ’70s It’s worth noting that the Strange Tales Golem was not the only version of the Jewish behemoth to come to life during Marvel’s Bronze Age. The company went Golem ga-ga in the early ’70s, and the common thread between three versions of the earth-elemental was Roy Thomas. “Stan had described the Hulk as a ‘jolly green golem’ in print before,” the prolific writer/editor tells BACK ISSUE. “I’d seen the movie and liked the legend so why not make the Hulk the Golem.” Promised as a nemesis on the cover of The Incredible Hulk #134 (Dec. 1970, “In The Shadow of the Golem”), this pre-ST Golem only appeared in a shadowy flashback sequence recounting the Prague Golem legend. In fact, Thomas’ storyline, with art by Herb Trimpe and Sal Buscema, limned closer to the Hulk completing a self-fulfilling prophecy when he is mistaken for the Golem by Jewish villagers of the fictional Eastern European nation Morvania. Hulk becomes their protector as he defeats their oppressive iron-fisted dictator Draxon (suited up in a tentacle-twirling Tonka-toy-of-destruction-robot-armor dubbed the “War-Tower of Draxon”), becoming a “Green Golem” in the process.

Post-Strange Tales, Thomas returned to the Jewish myth in The Invaders, his long-running World War II supergroup series uniting Marvel’s Big Three: Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and the Golden Age Human Torch. A storyline culminating in Invaders #13 (Feb. 1977, “The Golem Walks Again”), drawn by fast and furious Franks Robbins and Springer, saw a Golem emerge in the chaos of the Holocaust, as Thomas introduced a character named Jacob Goldstein, who, in the midst of the Warsaw Ghetto, resurrects the mythical Golem to combat invading Nazis. “I saw a story in a Protestant [comics] digest—a Golem story set in World War II—that Joe [Kubert] did as a young guy,” says Thomas. “That was part of my inspiration to bring it into [Invaders].”

ANATOMY OF A STRANGE TALE Ultimately, Thomas views the Strange Tales Golem as a failure. “We didn’t come up with anything great,” Thomas admits. “We may have had some preliminary sales that told us it wasn’t going anywhere.” So what led this walking giant astray? Why didn’t Golem click with readers? Thomas theorizes that the Golem, as a monochromatic monster, was visually challenged. “Just like the Hulk didn’t look good grey,” he says, reminding BACK ISSUE of Hulk’s initial six-issue flop, “you had competition from more colorful and interesting characters.” To Golem’s credit, Strange Tales never had a solid track record. “It did very poorly when it had Human Torch, Dr. Strange, and [Nick Fury, Agent of] S.H.I.E.L.D. It was always the bottom or near the bottom. When we split [Strange Tales] into two books, S.H.I.E.L.D. and Dr. Strange were the poorest sellers, even with Steranko [doing Nick Fury],” which Thomas insists retroactively became a fanboy favorite. Then Thomas drops a bomb on BACK ISSUE… According to Marvel’s erstwhile editor-in-chief, Golem garnered bigger sales than the more enduring ST characters—including cult classics Brother Voodoo and Warlock. “I do remember Gerry Conway looking at sales figures when he came in 1976,” says Thomas. “He looked at it more than I did. He said that ‘Golem’ outsold the first couple of issues of ‘Warlock.’ The sales dipped down to ‘Warlock’ from what ‘Golem’ was doing.” Despite this relative “success,” “Golem” may have simply become the casualty of a waning trend, with Marvel features such as Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, Monster of Frankenstein, “The Living Mummy” [in Supernatural Thrillers], “It, the Living Colossus” [in Astonishing Tales], “Morbius” [in Adventure into Fear], and Man-Thing (not to mention Hulk!) oversaturating spinner racks. “‘The Golem’ was just kind of another monster series,” observes Thomas. “By that time, it was hard to do it in a fresh way. How many times can you do the misunderstood monster?”

21st CENTURY ROCKS Twenty-five years later, other Golems have emerged in mainstream comics. Kitty Pryde notwithstanding, the occasional Marvel character was retroactively deemed Jewish (Magneto, Moon Knight). But it was a no-brainer when writer Karl Kesel (with artists Stuart Immonen and Scott Koblish) revealed Thing’s Jewish roots in Fantastic Four vol. 3 #56 (Dec. 2003). After all, Ben Grimm, with his wisecracking and his hair-trigger temper, had long been known to be a cipher for irascible co-creator Kirby, a quintessential cultural Jew. In “Remembrance of Things Past,” Kesel explored Thing’s Jewish roots and drew a logical connection between the rocky superhero and the folkloric stone avenger. The story, referencing Sidney Lumet’s classic Holocaust survivor drama The Pawnbroker, unfolds between Ben and the Rod Steiger-ish pawn shop owner from whom he stole a Star of David necklace as a youth.

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Back in BACK ISSUE #7 (Dec. 2004), Peter Sanderson asked Kesel what he felt was his greatest contribution to the FF’s mythos. Kesel reckoned it was “the ‘Ben is Jewish’ story…” Kesel was not alone in his assessment. Outing the Thing as Jewish was a big enough pop-culture story to warrant Newsweek coverage. “I’m still very happy with how the issue came together,” Kesel told Sanderson, “and would like to finally give credit to [artist] Steve Lieber for contributing the issue’s great last line when the villain tells Ben, ‘You don’t look Jewish.’” In April 2004, a Golem once again surfaced in superhero drag … this time at Marvel’s rival. Writer Jimmy Palmiotti and artist Phil Winslade shepherded The Monolith, DC’s incarnation of the stone monster, which rose from the sewers of modern day Manhattan to befriend recovering drug addict Alice Cohen (a descendent of the Monolith’s creator). “I have always been fascinated with the idea of a Golem,” Palmiotti tells BACK ISSUE, “and when I was younger I took painting classes at an old home near the East River in Brooklyn and was shown that the basement had bricked-up tunnels that were dug during prohibition and were used to smuggle liquor back and forth … I was trying to come up with an idea that would involve something living for over 60 years in that tunnel … the idea of the Golem hit me one day. With [writer] Justin Gray, [Monolith] was created.” Strange Tales’ Golem had little influence on Palmiotti’s. “Honestly,” says Palmiotti, “I read it when I was younger and it has left no lasting impression with me. All my influences with the idea about a Golem character came from film … books. None came from comics.” The Monolith lasted 12 issues before succumbing to the apparent “Golem comics curse.” Palmiotti has a theory on why his Golem failed to connect: “[I]t’s the same old thing,” Palmiotti proclaims. “Readers want nothing new, especially superhero readers. It’s sad, but people would rather see 40 more X-Men comics or Batman books any day of the week. Had this been a Vertigo book, it would still be coming out because their line can support a series that sells less than 15,000. DC has promised to collect The Monolith … so there is still hope yet.”

HERE TODAY, GOLEM TOMORROW Despite an all-too-brief existence, Marvel’s Golem turned out to be the “Thing That Walked Among Talented Men.” “According to Michael Chabon,” says Friedrich, “it was reading this comic (not necessarily my issues) as a child that introduced him to the Golem mythology, leading him ultimately to incorporate the Golem into his Kavalier & Clay book. Chabon made his first appearance after winning the Pulitzer at WonderCon, where I interviewed him publicly.” Friedrich figures that it’s “the power of the original myth that touched the young Michael Chabon. My poor comics were only the vehicle. So while I’m flattered when Chabon mentions the comics, I can’t believe my interpretation had anything to do with his own subsequent work.” Although historically the Golem hasn’t cottoned to comics, superhero creators return to the Golem template for inspiration. So what is this legend’s appeal?

“It’s a precursor to the Frankenstein story that I’m so fond of,” says Thomas, who single-handedly resurrected the Golem more times than Rabbi Loew himself. “It’s sort of like the superheroes, it’s like Billy Batson saying ‘Shazam!’ You had this guy in control of a creature of incredible strength and has some of the appeal of the comic-book heroes.” “I’ve had a few decades to think about this now, unlike the handful of days I had before I had to plot my first Golem story,” says Friedrich pensively. “The critical part of the Golem myth is that he arises when oppressed people need him most. Even though there’s a significant communal aspect to the original myth, why Americans like it is because it’s a single character dealing with the oppression. It was this aspect that has underpinned American popular heroes from Zorro to Superman to the cop in Die Hard.’” The Golem may not have had much luck as a comic-book superhero. But if this venerable myth has evinced two things, it’s that the folk monster continues to inspire cartoonists well into the 21st century … and that the Golem will surely rise again.

“Beyond Strange!” DC Comics’ The Monolith, created by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, is the most recent series (as of this writing) inspired by the Prague Golem tale. Seen here is a 2004 Monolith convention sketch by Gray, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

I would like to dedicate this article to my paternal grandfather, Gershon Aushenker, who lost his family in the Holocaust but survived the Shoah to rise again and again…

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TM & © DC Comics.

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As anyone who reads BACK ISSUE probably knows, the relaxation of the Comics Code in the early 1970s allowed comics companies to start filling their pages with all sorts of monsters previously verboten— vampires, zombies, werewolves, Richard Nixon, etc. No one took more advantage of that new opening than Marvel, which in a short time flooded the newsstands with all sorts of monster mags, even giving the big three— Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man—their own titles, albeit in the Mighty Marvel Manner: Tomb of Dracula, Frankenstein, and Werewolf by Night. But monsters didn’t just start showing up in Marvel’s comics— no, sir, they became part of the company’s regular roster of “stars.” When it came to merchandise, Dracula, Frankenstein, et al. were treated just like Spider-Man or Captain America, and soon they started showing up on Slurpee Cups, stickers, and, most memorably, book-and-record sets. Yes, when the kid-centric Peter Pan Records label started creating book-and-record sets starring various DC and Marvel heroes (under its “Power Records” imprint), they decided to produce a sub-group, called “The Monster Series,” titled Dracula, The Curse of The Werewolf!, The Monster of Frankenstein, and Man-Thing. Each book was a reprint of a Marvel comic, accompanied by a 45 RPM record starring a full cast acting out the story. I had these (and all the Power Records, except for that damn Shazam! one I could never find) as a kid, and when you’re a kid, you sort of just accept stories told to you. You don’t have the critical faculties to step back and wonder, Wow, aren’t these stories a little grim? Should I even be listening to these? No, you just drop the

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Rob Kelly

ol’ Tone Arm Cobra onto the wax, and for a few minutes allow yourself to be transported to a world of blood-sucking vampires, a man made from dead people’s body parts, and suicidal clowns. So let’s take a look at what the oh-so-innocent-sounding Peter Pan Records foisted on a whole generation of comics fans…. In Dracula (reprinting Tomb of Dracula #19), we find the Prince of Darkness lost in a harsh winter storm with his nemesis, Rachel Van Helsing. By page four, Dracula has attacked a nearby ram, and we get to see him dig his fangs into its neck and drink its blood. Fun! Later, even though Dracula has saved her life, Rachel tries stabbing him in the back (literally), only to miss, which causes Dracula to slap her in the face. Later still, another ram attacks Dracula, and Rachel shoots it dead. At the end, Rachel is rescued, and the story ends with her firing at Dracula from a helicopter, hoping she’s killed the Prince of Darkness once and for all! In The Monster of Frankenstein (reprinting Frankenstein #1), we open on Victor Frankenstein, about to be attacked by his creation, the Monster, who promises to kill his creator—but first, a flashback! We see how the Monster was created, and his rejection by Victor. This causes The Monster to run out into the night, where he goes on a murdering spree, killing two innocent people. The Monster wanders in the snow-covered forest for days, alone, and only survives by attacking and eating a bear (the Monster chows down on a bloody piece of meat). Later, the Monster stops a wolf from killing someone by snapping its neck, and is then chased away by shoot-first-ask-questions-later villagers. Eventually, the Monster wanders onto an ice floe, which gives out from under his feet, causing him to plunge into the freezing water below. It ends with the Monster freezing to death, as he “[S]ucked the freezing, salty waters inward ... and peace at last was his!” (emphasis Marvel’s). In The Curse of The Werewolf! (reprinting Marvel Spotlight #2), the cover alone is enough to make a little kid join the Rubber Sheet Brigade—it features a four-panel sequence, drawn by Neal Adams at his peak, of a wolf man about to attack a young woman. This can only get better! Inside, the story opens with our hero (?) running away from police after being seen attacking someone. He wakes up the next day, in his alter ego of Jack Russell, who is tearing his family apart with his strange behavior (disappearing suddenly, killing and eating people, etc.). To make things worse, Jack’s mother is hurt in a car accident while searching for him, which puts her in the hospital. Later, as she is dying, she tells Jack their family history—how his father was a werewolf, and how perhaps the answer to his curse resides in ... Transylvania! Yes, Transylvania—and you know what that means: Dracula will be showing up soon! And indeed he does, with the story ending with a donnybrook between Drac and the Werewolf. They bite into each other, and Dracula, showing very sportsman-like behavior, decides to call the fight a draw, and takes off. As the narrator informs us, “Dracula rises into the night ... and the curse of the werewolf remains bloodied ... but unbroken!” Has any of the above convinced you that the producers over at Peter Pan were the same guys that made Black Sabbath records? If not, then listen to what happens in the last of the Monster Series records, the Man-Thing in “Night of the Laughing Dead!”

In this story (reprinted from Man-Thing #5), we see Man-Thing stumbling through the swamp, as he is wont to do. At the same time, we see a sad clown, sitting on the bank of the river. He puts a gun up to his head, and Man-Thing hears the shot. Before I go on, let’s recap: This children’s record opens up with a clown shooting himself in the head. Anyway, Man-Thing arrives, only to find the clown face down in the water. This makes Man-Thing sad, so sad he recalls his own tragic story—experimental chemicals, car crash, burning hatred towards that big show-off Alec Holland, all of it. As Man-Thing scoops up the clown’s body to give it a proper burial, we see what’s going on in the nearby town. Two hippies overhear a carny talking, and it turns out the carnival’s clown—named Darrel— has gone missing. A young woman named Ayla is very upset over what Darrel might do, and tries to convince the owner, Mr. Garvey, to look for him. Garvey slaps her (!), which causes one of the hippies to intervene. After punching Garvey in his big, fat, handlebar-mustached face, they offer her a ride to help her find Darrel. On the trail, she reveals that she rejected Darrel’s love, which caused the little clown to stop laughing. They find Darrel on the riverbank, sort of—he bows to them and wanders off, across the water. Walking onto the main road, he causes Garvey and his Rondo Hatton-like henchman to crash their pickup truck! This is where we get to hear Darrel talk for the first time, and he says stuff like, “You’ll kill me haha make me die haha where’s Garvey hahaha”— all without punctuation. Creepy! The three young people discover Man-Thing with Darrel’s body, and one of them notices the gunshot, and surmises that the Darrel they saw was … a ghost! Soon, the henchman finds them, gets in a fight with Man-Thing, which he of course loses, ending with the big galoot lying face down in the swamp. But they all manage to see something truly amazing: Darrel’s spirit, rising from his body! He tells Ayla that “What does any clown want but to make people happy! But I could not go on making others laugh, when all I felt inside was pain ... when the love I gave was not returned! But now, my soul is free! I shall feel mortal pain no more ... and I can laugh ... laugh forever!” The narrator—who has been speaking to ManThing throughout the story—says, “You look and listen to the spector [sic] of a clown before you ... and all that you know, Man-Thing, is that never has laughter made you feel so sad!!” Wow. So let’s review: In just these four “children’s records,” we see three animals meet bloody deaths, two women get slapped around, two innocent people get murdered, one man under severe psychological trauma, a suicidal clown, and two stories that end celebrating the Sweet Release of Death. Yep, it was the 1970s, all right. If there’s any lesson to learn from these records, it’s that there was a time, long before “Won’t somebody think of the children?!?” became a fixture of American discourse, when kids were allowed to encounter material that was way beyond what they might be ready for emotionally, to occasionally see the darker sides of life. And Marvel Comics and Peter Pan Records were there, ready to provide that kind of material. Why they chose such particularly dark stories, out of Marvel’s entire “monster” catalog, to dramatize is a mystery lost to the ages. But they did. And for that, I thank them.

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What if … instead of selling his share of All-American Publications to Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz in 1945, Max Charles “Charlie” Gaines had purchased National Comics (DC Comics) from them? That’s the premise of this fantasy series being divided between the pages of BACK ISSUE and its TwoMorrows big-sister mag Alter Ego and set on “Earth-22,” where things in the comics business happened rather differently than the way they did in the world we know. Just imagine: a comic-book industry in which the Golden Age Green Lantern and Flash, rather than Superman and Batman, are the premier heroes of comics, media, and merchandising. The author, Bob Rozakis, a longtime writer, editor, and production manager for DC Comics, has imagined just that in…

The Secret History of All-American Comics, Inc. The Story of M. C. Gaines’ Publishing Empire

Bob Rozakis

Book Two – Chapter Eight: In and Out of Darkness

The Dark Age Begins Frank Miller redefined superheroes for the end of the 20th century with his four-part Green Lantern: The Darkest Night Returns. Art courtesy of Alex Wright. (All images in this article are © DC Comics.) If early comic-book history is broken into the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages, the period following AA’s Crisis on Infinite Earths should be called the Dark Age. “It’s not like we planned it that way,” says Bob Greenberger, AA’s editorial director. “When we revamped the AA Universe in 1986, we felt that we had a blank slate. The writers and editors went in a direction comics had never gone in before.” “We probably brought it on ourselves,” says former editor Len Wein. “It started with the publicity gimmick of allowing the readers to vote whether Girl Lantern or Flashette would die in the Crisis. Once we established that we could and would kill off a fairly major character, there was no stopping us.” Indeed, just months

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after Girl Lantern met the Grim Reaper, Flashette was crippled by Rag Doll in Flash: The Killing Doll. Another major influence on the era was Frank Miller’s four-part graphic novel, Green Lantern: The Darkest Night Returns. Set in a grim and gritty future, the Emerald Warrior is a vengeful, aging character, meting out his own form of justice and coming to blows with his former friend the Flash. The overwhelming success of Miller’s miniseries, as well as that of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, seemed to set the path that the books would follow for the next decade-plus. “The heroes grew angrier, the villains more sadistic, and the entire AA Universe became a much darker place in the ’90s,” says editor Barbara Randall.

KILLING GREEN LANTERN AND SMASHING THE FLASH In 1993, AA got front-page newspaper coverage around the world when it was announced that Green Lantern would die in an epic battle with a villain called Doomsday. [“There was a lot of discussion about what we should name the villain,” recalls Martin Pasko, the editor of the GL books. “At first, he was going to be a reincarnation of Timberano, the giant wooden ape, so we were calling him ‘Timmy.’ But that really didn’t sound scary! We considered names like Green Smasher and Woodbeast before settling on Doomsday, which now, of course, seems like it should have been the obvious choice all along.”] The reaction of the general public was unprecedented. The AA offices were picketed by protestors, demanding that the storyline be dropped. “Save Green Lantern” rallies were held in a number of cities and a candlelight vigil was staged in Littletown, Pennsylvania, the real-world town that claimed to be the home of young GL. “It was crazy,” says publisher Michael Uslan. “I came into work the next day, pushing through a crowd of protestors outside the building. One of them recognized me and started yelling at me. I kept saying, ‘He’s not real! He’s a fictional character!’ But they kept yelling and finally building security had to come and help me get inside.” When Pasko received a death-threat in the mail, the FBI was called in. “It was a little scary at the time, but looking back now, it was just silly,” he says. “It was all cut-out words from magazines, like in a bad movie: ‘If you kill Green Lantern, I will kill you.’ The FBI came and took a lot of fingerprints—probably half the staff had picked up that letter—but they never found out who sent it.” As had been planned all along, Green Lantern came back four months later. “He was dead, but he

got better,” jokes Pasko. There are still those people who claim that it was the public reaction that prompted AA to revive him. “Sure,” says Uslan. “It makes perfect sense that we would kill off our bestselling character and rely on our secondary characters to stay in business. That would be like McDonald’s announcing they were only going to sell Fish Filets from now on.” The dark path that the AA Universe was following continued in 1994 when the Flash’s back was broken in a battle with Solomon Grundy. “Well, we couldn’t kill him,” says Barbara Randall. “We’d just been down that road. Of course, we’d already put Flashette into a wheelchair in The Killing Doll, so we had to do something worse to the Flash. I wanted to have virtually every bone in his body broken. Grundy was strong enough to pound him into jelly. We compromised on both arms, a leg, and his back. Plus a concussion that left him in a coma for three issues.” While the storyline drew some media attention, it did not match that of Green Lantern’s demise, nor did the “battle” between Kid Flash, Johnny Quick, and Max Mercury to determine who would become the new Flash. And, of course, as planned, Jay Garrick eventually healed and reclaimed his position as the Fastest Man Alive. Monsters Issue

BANG! POW! The somewhatinnocuous Rag Doll became a major figure of the Dark Age when he ended Flashette’s career by crippling Kelly Kelley. Even more traumatic was the death of Green Lantern at the hands of Doomsday a few years later. Art courtesy of Larry Guidry and Shane Foley.

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OF NIGHTS, BLACK AND DARK Green Lantern’s oath was created by noted science-fiction author Alfred Bester when he was scripting GL tales for editor Julius Schwartz in the late 1940s. From the beginning, it was “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power — Green Lantern’s light.” So when did the night turn from “blackest” to “darkest”? AA reprint editor E. Nelson Bridwell uncovered the first instance way back in All-American Comics #148 (Aug. 1952). In the story “The Secrets of Green Lantern,” GL is shown charging his power ring and he uses the word “darkest.” The writer of that story has not been determined, but his error was repeated in a number of other stories over the next dozen years. When Bridwell joined the staff in 1964, he made sure the correct word was used and had it changed when he reprinted a story in which it was incorrect. The problem recurred in the early 1970s. Bob Haney, the regular writer of the Green Lantern team-up stories (with the Flash in Comic Cavalcade and various co-stars in The Brave and the Bold), began using “darkest” in the oath all the time. Despite the contradiction with how it was recited in the other books and Bridwell’s objections, no effort was made to fix the problem. “To mollify Nelson and the rest of the fanboys who had joined the staff,” said Julie Schwartz in an article in Dynamic World of AA Comics #7, “I ran a story in which we established that it was not the actual words of the oath but the length of time it took to recite them that charged the ring. Alan could be singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and it would still work.” Whether or not Julie’s explanation satisfied Bridwell, et al., the release of Green Lantern: The Movie in 1978 brought the issue to a head. “The AA staff got to see an advance screening of the movie about a week before it opened,” comics-in-media expert Anthony Allan recounts. “GL charges his ring and recites the oath and as soon as he says ‘in darkest night’ half a dozen voices in the theater shouted, ‘blackest!’ When the film ended, Nelson was complaining to anyone within earshot, but nobody was going to do anything about it.” Ultimately, with millions of new Green Lantern fans now reciting the movie’s version of the oath, the AA editors, and most particularly Bridwell, gave in and made the change as well.

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Solomon Grundy Smashed on Monday Prompted by the huge success of Green Lantern’s death and resurrection, AA made the Flash the next victim. Like GL, however, the Scarlet Speedster eventually “got better.” Art courtesy of Larry Guidry and Shane Foley. PLUNGED INTO THE DARK AGE Over the next five years, virtually every major AA hero went through some kind of “dark period.” Batman was next, when an evil energy being called Surge took control of his utility belt and drove him insane. “We got a lot of mail about that one,” says editor Paul Kupperberg, “especially after Hal [Jordan, Batman’s alter ego] started killing off the rest of the Batman Corps.” The original plot was to end in a to-the-death battle between Batman and Robin, with Batman killing his partner and then finally realizing he’s being controlled by Surge. “But we realized that here was no way we could present Hal as a hero after he’d committed all those murders. So we had Robin defeat Surge, with Batman dying as the energy being’s last victim. And then Pi [Robin] became the new Batman.” Even while he was enraging longtime fans with the demise of Hal Jordan, Kupperberg and writer Cary Bates were wreaking havoc on the life of Barry

[Superman] Allen as well. A trio of Superman’s enemies— Slamblaster, Baron Blizzard, and the Reflector—framed him for murder. He was arrested, unmasked, and thrown into prison, where a specially designed device (conveniently provided by the villains) neutralized his powers. While suffering through his trial, Superman was also confronted by enemies he has jailed, resulting in his being beaten and battered. Though eventually cleared of the crime, Barry was forced to leave Central City, adopt a new identity, and try to put his life back together. Despite no longer having their own titles, Green Arrow and Aquaman did not escape the Dark Age unscathed. They were both members of the Justice League still and appeared regularly in that title. “Someone wrote in and asked why Aquagirl had not been appearing in JLA, even though she was as much a member as her husband,” says Kupperberg. “So we came up with a subplot in which Aquaman, whenever he is asked about his wife [Mera], tells people she’s gone back to Thanagar to be with her ailing father. Then Captain Comet shows up and says he’s been to the Aquas’ home world where Mera’s father asked him to find out why he hasn’t heard from his daughter in months.” When Aquaman began a search for his wife, there was more than a hint planted that he had actually killed her, and members of the Justice League were divided on the subject. Though Mera was eventually found, trapped in suspended animation by the Shadow-Thief, the rift among the JLAers remained. Green Arrow’s life also unraveled when his wife accused him of having an affair with Black Canary and filed for divorce. “Ray Palmer started drinking as a result and his alter ego was a very angry drunk,” Kupperberg says. “He started using his powers to excess and blasted Doctor Light into a coma.” GA was the first hero to be dishonorably discharged from the JLA. “By the end of 1999, we were already looking forward to the revamp in 2001,” says Bob Greenberger. “We had all contributed to creating this dark, angry universe and we wanted to be rid of it.” The staff wasn’t alone in this feeling, if sales were any indication. “The death of Green Lantern was the peak,” says Michael Uslan, “and every ‘event’ after that sold fewer and fewer copies. Trying to reignite the interest and revitalize the sales, we would take each character one step further than the last.” Uslan says that he realized they were going down the wrong path at the 1999 San Diego Comic-Con when, during a panel promoting the coming year’s books, one very agitated fan jumped up and starting shouting at him: “He accused us of destroying the AA universe and everything the heroes stood for. The next thing we knew, much of the audience was agreeing with him and yelling, too.”

R.I.P. The death of characters in the comics was echoed in real life in the AA offices. E Nelson Bridwell passed away in January of 1987, after a period of illness. Though longtime fans like Allan Asherman and Bob Rozakis knew a great deal of the character history, the loss of their “walking encyclopedia” was a blow. A far greater loss occurred in June of 1992 when Bill Gaines died. For the first time in almost fifty years, there was no Gaines at the helm of the company. The Time-Warner board of directors promoted VP Michael Uslan to president & publisher to fill the void. A third death, that of Joe Orlando in December of 1998, left the company without an art director and with no former artists in editorial positions for the first time since Bill Gaines had taken over in 1970.

Bright Spots After a Dark Time (top) A new animated incarnation of the Justice League debuted on the WB network in 2002, evoking memories of the Fleischer cartoons of the 1940s. Art courtesy of Alex Wright. (bottom) Samantha Skimmer (center), granddaughter of longtime AA production man Ted, joined the staff as business manager in 2007. Flanked by editorial director Bob Greenberger (left) and production director Bob Rozakis, she announced the new format of the AA books at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con. Photo by Deb Greenberger and Alex Wright. Monsters Issue

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Collect ’Em All! The huge success of Justice League Unlimited on the WB resulted in the first new line of AA action figures in 20 years. Though some longtime fans complained that the figures looked more like the cartoons than the comic-book versions, sales were brisk. From the collection of Alex Wright.

THE NEW HEROIC AGE

WRITERS WANTED Bob Rozakis came up with an interesting way to find new writers. He worked with Julie Schwartz, who was still attending conventions as AA’s goodwill ambassador, to create the “Pitch a Plot to Julie” event. “When I wrote for Julie, he would always start out by saying, ‘What’s the narrative hook?’ I had to come up with something interesting enough that he would say, ‘Okay, I want to hear this story.’” Prospective writers were given 60 seconds to sell Julie on an idea for an eight-page story, using an existing AA character. It was not as easy as some people might have believed. Julie proved to be just as demanding as he had been when he was editing the books. “A lot of wouldbe comics writers had their hopes dashed when Julie would say, ‘Nexxxxt!’ But if he liked the plot, the writer would get a go-ahead to deliver a script. Most of the scripts needed heavy editing and never made it into print, but a number of them turned out to be publishable. We brought in a few new writers that way.” The event proved so popular at the conventions that it was continued after Julie’s death in 2004 with other AA editors and writers sitting in Schwartz’s seat.

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When they debuted in early 2001, the heroes of AA’s new Earth-Prime (with the previous version now consigned to “Earth-Four”) harkened back to the versions of the Golden and Silver Ages. The company’s house ads and covers proclaimed the beginning of the New Heroic Age and the books all seemed to have a brighter look to them. “We reeducated the colorists on the use of the available palette,” says colorist-turned-editor Rick Taylor, who joined the staff when Roy Thomas retired in 2000. “The computers gave them 16 million different colors and some people tried to use every one of them on every page. Coloring is supposed to enhance the story, not make the art impossible to decipher.” Combined with revised color schemes was a new paper stock formulated especially for AA. “It was better than newsprint,” says Bob Rozakis, who worked with the printer and paper mill to come up with it, “but less expensive than the upscale stocks we’d been using. It was the perfect choice for the whole line.” There was also a new emphasis on telling complete stories in a single issue. “The ardent fanboys would buy every issue and said they wanted more complex, long-running plots,” says Uslan, “but their numbers were decreasing. We were losing any new or casual readers because no one wanted to buy ‘Chapter 7 of a 14-Part Saga.’ Especially when the books were costing $2.50 a pop.” [The books had increased to 64 pages in 1994 when the price went from $1.50 to 1.95. They remained that size through two more price increases until mid-2005, when, in order to hold the $2.50 price, they were reduced to 48 pages again.] “We sat in an editorial meeting one day and said, ‘What is it that made us comics fans when we were kids?’ The books we grew up reading had three or four separate stories in them. Even though they had subplots that might carry on from issue to issue, the main stories were complete in the issue.” Perhaps most important was that the heroes were once again heroic. “They do good things and are trusted and admired by the people,” says Uslan. “Yes, we’ve tried to make them three-dimensional characters, but we’ve steered away from the angst-driven versions they had become over the past decade. Green Lantern, Flash, Wonder Woman—they are all good people at the core.”

A New Beginning Almost 75 years after Charlie Gaines played a pivotal role in the “invention” of the comic book, the company he founded takes the genre in a new direction. Cover art of two of the “Big Twelve” by Larry Guidry and Mark McKenna (Comic Cavalcade) and Guidry and Shane Foley (All-Star). 2009: THE BIG TWELVE At the San Diego Comic-Con in July 2009, president & publisher Michael Uslan announced the end of the 48-page “pamphlet” as AA Comics’ primary product. Beginning the following month, the company would publish all of its material in 12 bimonthly books, priced at $7.50 and with page counts ranging between 192 and 256. AA business director Samantha Skimmer said that the company had signed a deal with WalMart that would make the books available there, as well as in comics shops and bookstores. “Much as we want to see our traditional outlets survive and thrive, our primary goal is to make the books available to as many readers as possible.” She also said that new format would make the books a viable product for sale online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Editorial director Bob Greenberger revealed the contents and titles, showing covers of the new books as well. Each of AA’s six editors would handle two books, all of which would include a mix of new and classic reprint material. “We’re going all the way back in the company’s 75-year history,” said Greenberger. “These books will contain something for everyone.” The titles debuting in August 2009: ALL-AMERICAN COMICS (Martin Pasko, editor): Green Lantern, Birds of Prey, the Lantern Legion, Metamorpho, Golden Age classics FLASH COMICS (Barbara Randall Kesel, editor): Flash, Mr. Miracle, Booster Gold, Stretch Bando, E-Man, Teen Titans COMIC CAVALCADE (Mark Evanier, editor): Green Lantern/Flash team-ups, the Batman Corps, Blackhawk, Challengers of the Unknown, Kirby’s Kingdom JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA (Paul Kupperberg, editor): JLA, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Hawkman, the Huntress WEIRD SCIENCE FANTASY (Joey Cavalieri, editor): Fables, Sandman, Animal Man, the War That Time Forgot, Gary Concord–Ultraman, sci-fi and fantasy stories AA TV SPECTACULAR (Rick Taylor, editor): Super Friends, Tiny Titans, Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo, Flash: Lightning Strikes, Cartoon Network Super-Stars

The titles debuting in September 2009: GREEN LANTERN (Martin Pasko, editor): Green Lantern, Doiby Dickles, Cathy Crain, Kid Lantern, Gotham Underground, Girl Lantern ALL-FLASH (Barbara Randall Kesel, editor): Flash, Flashette, Kid Flash, Flash and the Outsiders, Flash team-ups ALL-STAR COMICS (Rick Taylor, editor): Justice Society, Infinity Inc., Wonder Woman, the Atom and Black Canary, Wildcat TALES FROM THE CRYPT (Joey Cavalieri, editor): Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Jonah Hex, El Diablo, Mister E, horror and gothic stories WORLD’S FINEST COMICS (Paul Kupperberg, editor): Green Lantern team-ups, Superman, Batman, Manhunter, Sgt. Rock, Hero Hotline SHOCK SUSPENSE STORIES (Mark Evanier, editor): 100 Bullets, In the Days of the Mob, Ex Machina, Robot Mobster, mystery and detective stories Greenberger added that the books would also include humor strips, science and history fact pages, puzzles and games, and special features about the AA characters in other media. “We’ve even gotten Bob Rozakis to revive his Answer Man column!” “It has been almost 75 years since M. C. Gaines first introduced the comic book, a ground-breaking and incredibly popular product,” said Uslan in his closing remarks. “I think he would be proud to know that his company continues to lead the industry in finding new ways to reach the readers.”

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A CUP-LE OF CORRECTIONS

E-mail: euryman@gmail.com (subject: BACK ISSUE) No attachments, please!

Postal mail: Michael Eury, Editor • BACK ISSUE 118 Edgewood Ave. NE • Concord, NC 28025

DIGGING THE DIGITALS I’ve been perusing BI #34 via the digital edition and wanted to make a few “early returns” comments. First, to all of your loyal BI readers: If you are buying the magazine from the newsstand, as I was for the duration of the run so far, then you are missing a major piece of the puzzle! The digital edition has color, man, and lots of it! What an enhancing look for an already great magazine! I’d urge all readers to inspect just one of the digital editions—you may not go back to the ol’ B&W pages. Second, Karen Walker’s Warlock article was a great tutorial for a non-Warlock fan. Growing up, I was aware of the character, but never really cared enough to pick up any books in which he starred. I had the MTU that Karen mentioned, and the Avengers and MTIO Annuals—all good stories, but the character just didn’t catch on with me. After reading her synopsis of his 1970s antics, I believe I could be only slightly arm-twisted into purchasing the two Masterworks editions that feature the tales Karen covered— she’s a good salesperson! And third, Lex Carson’s article on the Marvel Slurpee cups was just a fantastic blast from the past! I was a very hit-and-miss collector of these cups when they were available at retail. While we didn’t have a 7-11 in my hometown, my sister and I spent a week each summer at my aunt’s and uncle’s in St. Charles, Illinois. They had a 7-11 right down the block. For whatever reason, there are a few comic books that I specifically recall my aunt purchasing for me (ASM #150, and DD #127 and 138) over those few years. But what I most remember is cutting a deal with the manager at the store to sell me these wonderful cups, but without the Slurpee—hey, a ten-year-old can only take so much brain freeze in a week’s time! I should add that I didn’t get any break on the price, even sans the icy concoction. I ended up with maybe a dozen of the cups for the first series, and another 12–15 the next summer. Just great fun! It used to irritate me, though, when on the way to the store I’d see a cup, inevitably showcasing a character I’d not yet collected, smashed on the sidewalk by some obviously less-sophisticated miscreant. Years later, as an adult, I came across glasses that contained the same artwork as the ’77–’78 cups—I believe there were five in the set, although I can’t verify that. I have three of those glasses in my collection. As usual, Michael, the magazine continues to impress and is almost always a cover-to-cover read. To you and all of the contributors, thanks!—and keep it going! – Doug Wadley You’re welcome, Doug. Thanks for acknowledging BACK ISSUE’s contributors—ye editor is fortunate to have a pool of enthusiastic writers who stand ready to wade through dust and paper mold to reread old treasures in our mission to cover comics history. And re the digital editions, we want to keep our print edition alive and well for years to come: Readers, would you be interested in BACK ISSUE as a color magazine if it meant an increase in cover price? – M.E.

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BACK TO THE LONGBOXES! I received BACK ISSUE #34 and, as always, enjoyed it very much. The first article I came to was the analysis of the Warlock series, which got me thinking about Jim Starlin’s terrific stories. And I thought, “Hey, I should dig those issues out and reread them, because they’re so good, and this article will help me enjoy it even more.” So I rummaged through my comics and found my Warlock issues, and put them aside, ready to read and enjoy again soon. Then I came across the “Pro2Pro” article on Crisis. And I thought, “Man, that was one cool series. I should reread that too.” So back to my collection I went to find my issues of that maxiseries. I smiled at how I kept diving back into the comics swimming hole. Then I read the Logan’s Run article. Yep, you guessed it, back to the comics. And that, I realized, is why I enjoy BACK ISSUE so much. I love the articles, first of all. I find information on some of my favorite comics of days gone by, viewpoints and opinions from their creators, and a lot of “behind-the-scenes” secrets I didn’t know. But more important, your magazine reminds me of some great comics that I have in my collection, and it prompts me to dig them out and reread them, and enjoy them all over again. So thanks for a great package of information and entertainment, and a special thanks for providing a gateway back to some of the best comics of my life. – Michal Jacot

A MENTION OF MOORCOCK Thank you for the wonderful cover and cover story on Adam Warlock. Jim Starlin’s run on the series has long been one of my top five favorite storylines. While Karen Walker’s story was a good recounting of the Warlock saga, I noted one glaring absence in the article: the obvious influence on Starlin’s Warlock of the works of British science-fiction author Michael Moorcock. Beginning with Starlin’s decision to make the soul gem a vampiric soul stealer (echoing the soul-stealing sword, Stormbringer, wielded by Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone), and continuing through the introduction of the

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I’d never given the Slurpee Cups one second’s thought before— and can’t believe there’d ever be a whole article on them. Neither can I believe I’m taking the time to write this—to correct a few errors in Lex Carson’s checklist on page 57. Quicksilver: The image is by Dave Cockrum from FOOM #6, not Buscema’s Avengers #75 cover. Conan: I don’t know where it’s from, but it isn’t from Annual #1. (Looks like it’s from the figure used on covers in the top left corner from #26 on.) The Thing 1: from FF #116, not 117. Triton: from Avengers #95, not 94. (These last two are probably just typos, yes?) And to be complete, the Nick Fury figure was first from Strange Tales #166 before it became a cover corner piece. Lex mentioned the unidentified sources for Black Widow, Iron Fist, and Black Panther cups in ’77. Pity you didn’t print them … you never know when all that wonderful, normally useless comic info stored in our nostalgic brain areas may have been able to help. – Shane Foley

STAR HUNTERS FAN I really enjoy BACK ISSUE. I look forward to each issue. Issue #34 had so many great things between and including the cover. The article on the Star Hunters was just phenomenal. Who would have thought that an eight-issue series (to include DC Super-Stars #16) would have a lot of controversy behind the scenes? Although, I do recall the whole Rich Buckler spaceship debacle in an interview with Bob Layton/Dave Michelinie that I read in Comic Reader #174 (Nov. 1979). I was surprised to have read about the spaceship issue then and I have not heard anything else more about it until now. Also, it was too bad that Don Newton did not like Bob Layton’s inks. I really loved the Star Hunters series. It is one of those comic series that you would always feel that proverbial “what if...” It has so much going for it. It had great writing and wonderful artwork. I have a page of original art from DC Super-Stars #16. I wish I was more tech savvy and I could send you scan or a file of it. Thank you, Mark DiFruscio, for a wonderful and informative article. Another gem was the Logan’s Run article by Dewey Cassell. What a great movie and a fantastic comic-book series. I remember seeing Logan’s Run when it first came out. Box really freaked me out and I remember seeing the comic and wondering how Box was going to look like. I have to say George Pérez did not disapoint. That Box is one creepy dude. Yes, as a kid seeing that final page from issue #2 was a sight all right (thanks, George!). The inverview with another unsung talent, Bob Wiacek, was really good. I enjoyed it. Michael Keane did a great interview, I just wish it was longer. Mr. Wiacek has so much work under his belt. I loved that illustration on the last page of the interview. Also, to piggyback on Daniel Brozak’s letter about suggestions for future issues, I would love to see an all-Charlton issue. That is a company with some history. They covered every comic-book genre that you could possibly imagine and they were able to get the license to publish some of the top cartoon characters and TV shows. Plus, during the 1970s they had some of the best artists working for them. Fanzines! Fanzines would make a great feature. As you know so many comic-book professionals got their start doing fanzines. There is a lot of comics history in those old fanzines. Just a thought. – Steve Ogden We’ve covered some Charlton series, Steve, and undoubtedly will cover more in the future, but the go-to source for Charlton info is the excellent ’zine Charlton Spotlight—visit www.ramonschenk.nl/charltoncomics/charltonspotlight/ for more info. – M.E.

GOLDEN’S RUN I just finished reading BACK ISSUE #34 and I loved Dewey Cassell’s comprehensive article on Logan’s Run. I have fond memories of the Marvel series when it first came out in 1976

and, in fact, I’ve kept that series in my permanent collection. The behind-the-scenes comments with George Pérez and David Anthony Kraft were great. Thanks to Dewey for sharing the Logan’s Run montage from Pérez’s Accent on the First E portfolio. I’ve never seen that one before. It was nicely designed by Pérez. It also reminded me of Paul Gulacy’s incredible cover for issue #6 of Logan’s Run. With regard to Dewey’s reference to the Michael Golden-drawn story, with the Logan’s Run elements, from Bizarre Adventures #28, titled “Huntsman,” well, it turns out it actually was a Logan’s Run story that went unused after the series was canceled. In fact, it was reported in BACK ISSUE #24 by Michael Golden himself that in late 1976, “When I came back (to Marvel’s office), I talked to Archie Goodwin, who was the editorin-chief at that point ... that’s when I did the Logan’s Run story.” Chronologically, this story would seem to fit in nicely after issue #7, although it was largely a series of flashbacks. It may have been intended as a “fill-in” of sorts, as we found out in Dewey’s article that recently Tom Sutton original art pages from the unpublished #9 issue have surfaced. That would make Golden’s story, which was written by Archie Goodwin, issue #8. BACK ISSUE #24 also reported that the original title of Golden’s 17-page Logan’s Run story was “The Golden Circle” and that, “the story was finally published four years later in the black-and-white magazine Bizarre Adventures #28 (Oct. 1981). Since Marvel no longer had the Logan’s Run license, the character Logan was altered into the ‘Huntsman.’” Before I sign off, let me just compliment you on the awesome Jim Starlin cosmic cover featuring Warlock and Thanos. BACK ISSUE just keeps getting better and better. – Dave Lemieux Since ye ed interviewed Michael Golden back in #24, I should have connected the dots between the “Huntsman”/Logan’s Run story in issue #34. Thanks for pointing that out, Dave. – M.E.

JIM SHOOTER: “AN ABUNDANCE OF RICHES” As a contributing writer to BACK ISSUE magazine, I’m writing this time not as Michael Aushenker the BACK ISSUE writer, but as Michael Aushenker the longtime BACK ISSUE reader. I had a lot of fun reading the “Brave New World” issue, and I’d like to say that reading any article which features quotes from former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter automatically contains an abundance of riches. So congratulations to Mr. J. C. Vaughn for his piece on Shooter’s early days at Marvel, as well as the author of the “New Universe” backstory [Dan Johnson]. Shooter’s anecdotes about how he joined Marvel Comics Group were fascinating and insightful. I’ve said this often to my BACK ISSUE brethren: Whether one sides for or against Shooter as a Marvel executive, as some have come to criticize him for, the man comes across in print as articulate, blunt, honest, and facetious. From my own personal experiences writing articles on such titles as The Human Fly and the upcoming Team America, I’ve found that Shooter’s quotes, with their detail and depth, often make my articles. Many times, when interviewing talent for BACK ISSUE, for whatever reasons (age, a bad memory, overworked at the time) subjects will lapse into generalizations. But Shooter always delivers the opposite: vivid accounts, loaded with detail ... and he’s not afraid to criticize himself and others.

Monsters Issue

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BACK ISSUE • 89

forces of Chaos and Order, the influence of Moorcock is strongly displayed. It was Starlin’s work that led me to read the Elric and Dorian Hawkmoon series written by Moorcock. I always felt Starlin did a masterful job of echoing these elements without slavishly copying the Moorcock story archetype. – Brett Hampton

In any case, reading Shooter’s recollections of his early days were fascinating and engaging. As for the New Universe, whose failure may have ultimately cost Shooter his job, at least Shooter was bold enough to go the against the grain of complacency and the status quo and try something out there, something new, something that would propel Marvel forward. (It surely exemplifies the theme of BI #34: “Brave New World.”) The New Universe may have been a failed experiement, but it was better than no experiment at all. For that alone, Shooter should be commended. And it’s a lesson that today’s Marvel could (and should) duly take note of. – Michael Aushenker

ARMCHAIR EDITOR-IN-CHIEF I have most issues of BACK ISSUE and think it’s the best of the TwoMorrows publications and also the best comics-related magazine coming out nowadays. My tastes in comics (and pretty well everything else) have changed over the years, but BI brings me back to when I had the most fun buying and reading DC and Marvel comics. Actually, I probably had more “fun” reading DCs and Marvels as a younger kid, but I was more into following writers and artists and collecting comics in the later ’70s and ’80s. I haven’t really gotten around to reading #34 (“New World Order”) yet but did feel really nostalgic when I came across the “Post-Crisis DC Universe You Didn’t See” list of titles in the “Greatest Stories Never Told” while skimming through it. DC should have rebooted the whole universe back then instead of having pocket reboots happen here and there while continuity was still continuing on after the Crisis ... and I think they should have rebooted from scratch and sort of Ultimate-ized everything recently for the Silver Age’s 50th or Superman’s 70th Anniversary. I often used to self-appoint myself as editor-in-chief of DC and Marvel (separately and at the same time) and fantasy-assign favorite creators to titles I would have liked to have seen them write and draw and then figure out which then-active creators I would stick on what was left over. I would have liked to have seen: • ANGEL AND THE APE mainly by Ty Templeton, but with contributions by Mark Evanier, Sergio Aragonés, Jaime Hernandez, Marie Severin, Joe Staton, Stephen DeStephano, Kyle Baker, Art Adams, Brian Bolland, Dave Stevens, Scott Shaw!, and others • BATMAN by Alan Moore, Rick Leonardi, and Kevin Nowlan • THE CREEPER by Ann Nocenti and Bret Blevins • THE DEMON by J. M. DeMatteis, Gene Colan, and Dan Green • ECLIPSO by Bruce Jones, Steve Lightle, and Randy Elliot • GREEN ARROW AND BLACK CANARY by Mike W. Barr, Adam Hughes, and Mark Farmer • HAWKMAN by Doug Moench, John Buscema, and Dan Adkins • METAMORPHO by Mike Baron and Jaime Hernandez • PLASTIC MAN by Peter David, Paul Smith, and Bob Wiacek • SHAZAM! by Walt Simonson • THE SPECTRE by Neil Gaiman, Mike Mignola, and P. Craig Russell • WONDER WOMAN by Chris Claremont and José Luis García López Can readers be polled for their BI era DC titles and creative team matchups online? And the same could be done for Marvel. – Don Moroney While we don’t have the online resource to allow readers to poll readers on their DC or Marvel dream teams, we can dialogue in this column if anyone’s interested…. Next issue: “Comics Go to War!” On the frontlines: JOE KUBERT’s Sgt. Rock adventures published during the Vietnam era, MARK EVANIER and DAN SPIEGLE’s Blackhawk, and GEORGE PRATT’s Enemy Ace. Plus: Unknown Soldier, Wonder Woman’s return to WWII, the Invaders, Combat Kelly, Vietnam Journal, Sad Sack, the Joe Kubert School, and … the Marvel School (?)! Bonus: “The Other Side of War” examines comics starring real-life heroes Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul. With art by and/or commentary from DICK AYERS, RUSS HEATH, DON LOMAX, DAVID MICHELINIE, FRED RHOADS, FRANK ROBBINS, JOHN ROMITA, SR., BILL SCHELLY, JOE SINNOTT, ROY THOMAS, and the long-awaited return of GERRY TALAOC! With an explosive Sgt. Rock cover by JOE KUBERT! Don’t ask—just BI it. See you in sixty! Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor Sgt. Rock TM & © 2009 DC Comics. BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows.

90 • BACK ISSUE • Monsters Issue

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 (e-mailed 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 e-mailing euryman@gmail.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

Advertise In BACK ISSUE! FULL-PAGE: 7.5" Wide x 10" Tall • $300 HALF-PAGE: 7.5" Wide x 4.875" Tall • $175 QUARTER-PAGE: 3.75" Wide x 4.875" Tall • $100 Prepay for two ads in Alter Ego, DRAW!, Write Now!, Back Issue, or any combination and save: TWO FULL-PAGE ADS: $500 ($100 savings) TWO HALF-PAGE ADS: $300 ($50 savings) TWO QUARTER-PAGE ADS: $175 ($25 savings) These rates are for black-&-white ads, supplied on-disk (TIF, EPS, or Quark Xpress files acceptable) or as camera-ready art. Typesetting service available at 20% mark-up. Due to our already low ad rates, no agency discounts apply. Sorry, display ads not available for the Jack Kirby Collector. Send ad copy and check/money order (US funds), Visa, or Mastercard to: TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 Phone: 919/449-0344 • FAX 919/449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com

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MODERN MASTERS VOLUMES Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW, DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

SAL BUSCEMA:

COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST In 1968, SAL BUSCEMA joined the ranks of Marvel Comics and quickly became one of their most recognizable and dependable artists. Following in the footsteps of his big brother JOHN BUSCEMA, Sal quickly came into his own, and penciled some of Marvel’s most memorable storylines, such as the original AVENGERS/DEFENDERS WAR, as well as “The Secret Empire Saga” and the Nomad arc in the pages of CAPTAIN AMERICA. He also had a ten-year run on THE HULK and drew 100 consecutive issues of SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, making him one of the few definitive artists of the Bronze Age. SAL BUSCEMA: COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST, by Alter Ego’s JIM AMASH with Modern Masters’ ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON, explores the life and career of this true legend of the comics industry, through an exhaustive interview with the artist, complete with extensive examples of his art, including a deluxe color section, and a gallery of work from Sal’s personal files. Fans love the fast and furious style of Sal Buscema, and this first-ever career-spanning book is guaranteed to please! Ships November 2009! (176-page trade paperback with 16 color pages) $26.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490212 (192-page HARDCOVER with 32 color pages, dust jacket, and illustrated endleaves) $46.95 US ISBN: 9781605490229 ULTRA-LIMITED HARDCOVER EDITION (ONLY 52 COPIES!) (52-copy edition, each with a custom pencil portrait of one of Sal’s favorite characters, individually numbered) $100 US • ONLY FROM TWOMORROWS!

Volume 24: GUY DAVIS

Volume 25: JEFF SMITH

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490236 Diamond Order Code: FEB098482 Ships November 2009

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490243 Ships January 2010

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EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE: Indispensable Edition The definitive biography of the co-creator of WATCHMEN and V FOR VENDETTA finally returns to print in a NEW EXPANDED AND UPDATED VERSION! Features an extensive series of interviews with MOORE about his entire career, including a new interview covering his work since the sold-out 2003 edition of this book was published. Includes RARE STRIPS, SCRIPTS, ART, and private PHOTOS of the author, plus a series of tribute comic strips by many of Moore’s closest collaborators, a COLOR SECTION featuring a RARE MOORE STORY (remastered, and starring MR. MONSTER), and more! Edited by GEORGE KHOURY, with a cover by DAVE McKEAN! (240-page Limited Hardcover Edition) $49.95 US LIMITED TO 200 HARDCOVER COPIES!

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MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH GEORGE PÉREZ DVD

Get a PERSONAL TOUR of George’s studio, and watch STEP-BY-STEP as the fan-favorite artist illustrates a special issue of TOP COW’s WITCHBLADE! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues—including MARV WOLFMAN and RON MARZ—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way! AUTOGRAPHED COPY! (120-minute Standard Format DVD) $34.95 LIMITED TO 30 AUTOGRAPHED COPIES!

TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. (& LEGO! ) TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

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BACK ISSUE #36

BACK ISSUE #37

BACK ISSUE #38

“Monsters!” Frankenstein in Comics timeline and a look at BERNIE WRIGHTSON’s and Marvel’s versions, histories of Vampirella and Morbius, ISABELLA and AYERS discuss It the Living Colossus, REDONDO’s Swamp Thing, Man-Bat, monster art gallery, interview with TONY DeZUNIGA, art and commentary from ARTHUR ADAMS, COLÓN, KALUTA, NEBRES, PLOOG, SUTTON, VEITCH, and a painted cover by EARL NOREM!

“Comics Go to War!” KUBERT/KANIGHER’s Sgt. Rock, EVANIER and SPIEGLE’s Blackhawk, GEORGE PRATT’s Enemy Ace, plus Unknown Soldier, Wonder Woman’s return to WWII, the Invaders, Combat Kelly, Vietnam Journal, Sad Sack, the Joe Kubert School, art and commentary from AYERS, HEATH, KIRBY, ROBBINS, ROMITA SR., SINNOTT, and the return of GERRY TALAOC! JOE KUBERT cover!

“Family!” JOHN BYRNE’s Fantastic Four, SIMONSON, BRIGMAN, and BOGDANOVE on Power Pack, LEVITZ and STATON on the Huntress, Henry Pym’s “son” Ultron, Wonder Twins, Commissioner Gordon & Batgirl’s relationship, and Return of the New Gods. With art and commentary from BUCKLER, BUSIEK, FRADON, HECK, INFANTINO, NEWTON, and WOLFMAN, and a Norman Rockwell-inspired BYRNE cover!

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THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

ALTER EGO #89

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C o l l e c t o r

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ALTER EGO #90

ALTER EGO #91

ALTER EGO #92

HARVEY COMICS’ PRE-CODE HORROR MAGS OF THE 1950s! Interviews with SID JACOBSON, WARREN KREMER, and HOWARD NOSTRAND, plus Harvey artist KEN SELIG talks to JIM AMASH! MR. MONSTER presents the wit and wisdom (and worse) of DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM, plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) with C.C. BECK & MARC SWAYZE, & more! SIMON & KIRBY and NOSTRAND cover!

BIG MARVEL ISSUE! Salutes to legends SINNOTT and AYERS—plus STAN LEE, TUSKA, EVERETT, MARTIN GOODMAN, and others! A look at the “Marvel SuperHeroes” TV animation of 1966! 1940s Timely writer and editor LEON LAZARUS interviewed by JIM AMASH! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, the 1960s fandom creations of STEVE GERBER, and more! JACK KIRBY holiday cover!

FAWCETT FESTIVAL! Big FCA section with Golden Age artists MARC SWAYZE & EMILIO SQUEGLIO, and interviews with the FAWCETT FAMILY! Plus Part II of “The MAD Four-Color Wannabes of the 1950s,” more on DR. LAURETTA BENDER and the teenage creations of STEVE GERBER, artist JACK KATZ spills Golden Age secrets to JIM AMASH, and more! New cover by ORDWAY and SQUEGLIO!

SWORD-AND-SORCERY, PART 3! DC’s Sword of Sorcery by O’NEIL, CHAYKIN, & SIMONSON and Claw by MICHELINIE & CHAN, Hercules by GLANZMAN, Dagar by GLUT & SANTOS, Marvel S&S art by BUSCEMA, KANE, KAYANAN, WRIGHTSON, et al., and JACK KATZ on his classic First Kingdom! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, STEVE GERBER’s fan-creations (part 3), and more! Cover by RAFAEL KAYANAN!

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BACK ISSUE! #1-17 NOW AVAILABLE AS DIGITAL EDITIONS! MORE ON THE WAY! We’ve just finished adding all the remaining issues of BACK ISSUE! magazine to our webstore as Digital Editions, offering an inexpensive way to complete your collection, or get a digital version of sold out issues! Throughout 2009, we’ll be adding other older issues as PDFs, so visit www.twomorrows.com regularly for updates!

BRICKJOURNAL #7

BRICKJOURNAL #8

DRAW! #19

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

Focuses on LEGO ARCHITECTURE, with a look at the new sets designed by ADAM REED TUCKER! There’s also interviews with other architectural builders, including SPENCER REZHALLA and JASON BURIK. Then, we take a look at a LEGO BATTLESHIP that’s over 20 feet long, and present event reports from BRICKWORLD in Chicago and other events worldwide! PLUS: Our usual indispensable building tips and instructions, and more!

We go to the Middle Ages, with a look at the LEGO Group’s CASTLE LINE, featuring an interview with the designer behind the first LEGO castle set, the YELLOW CASTLE. Also: we spotlight builders that have created their own large-scale version of the castle! There are interviews with other castle builders, and more surprises, along with a report from BRICKFAIR in Washington, DC! Plus still more instructions and building tips for beginning and advanced builders alike!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE, one of the top realistic artists in comics today, gives a demo and interview, pro inker and ROUGH STUFF editor BOB McLEOD offers a "Rough Critique" of a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS’ “Crusty Critic” column gives the low-down on the best art supplies and tool tech, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP helps you get your penciling in shape, plus Web links, reviews, and more!

STAN & JACK PART TWO! More on the co-creators of the Marvel Universe, plus a new interview (and back cover inks) by Bullpenner GEORGE TUSKA, differences between KIRBY and DITKO’S approaches, WILL MURRAY on the origin of the FF, the mystery of Marvel cover dates, plus MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, behind a color Kirby cover inked by JOE SINNOTT!

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(80-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • Ships December 2009

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BOOKS by BACK ISSUE’s editor MICHAEL EURY

KRYPTON COMPANION Unlocks the secrets of Superman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, when kryptonite came in multiple colors and super-pets scampered across the skies! Writer/editor MICHAEL EURY explores the legacy of classic editors MORT WEISINGER and JULIUS SCHWARTZ through all-new interviews with NEAL ADAMS, MURPHY ANDERSON, CARY BATES, NICK CARDY, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, KEITH GIFFEN, ELLIOT S! MAGGIN, JIM MOONEY, DENNIS O’NEIL, BOB OKSNER, MARTIN PASKO, BOB ROZAKIS, JIM SHOOTER, LEN WEIN, MARV WOLFMAN, and other fan favorites! Plus: Super-artist CURT SWAN’s 1987 essay “Drawing Superman,” JERRY SIEGEL’s “lost” imaginary story “The Death of Clark Kent,” MARK WAID’s tribute to Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, and rare and previously unpublished artwork by WAYNE BORING, ALAN DAVIS, ADAM HUGHES, PAUL SMITH, BRUCE TIMM, and other Super-stars. Bonus: A roundtable discussion with modern-day creators examining Superman’s influential past! Cover by DAVE GIBBONS!

JUSTICE LEAGUE COMPANION A comprehensive examination of the Silver Age JLA written by MICHAEL EURY (co-author of THE SUPERHERO BOOK). It traces the JLA’s development, history, imitators, and early fandom through vintage and all-new interviews with the series’ creators, an issue-by-issue index of the JLA’s 1960-1972 adventures, classic and never-before-published artwork, and other fun and fascinating features. Contributors include DENNY O’NEIL, MURPHY ANDERSON, JOE GIELLA, MIKE FRIEDRICH, NEAL ADAMS, ALEX ROSS, CARMINE INFANTINO, NICK CARDY, and many, many others. Plus: An exclusive interview with STAN LEE, who answers the question, “Did the JLA really inspire the creation of Marvel’s Fantastic Four?” With an all-new cover by BRUCE TIMM!

BATCAVE COMPANION The writer/editor of the critically acclaimed KRYPTON COMPANION and the designer of the eye-popping SPIES, VIXENS, AND MASTERS OF KUNG FU: THE ART OF PAUL GULACY team up to explore the Silver and Bronze Ages of Batman comic books in THE BATCAVE COMPANION! Two distinct sections of this book examine the Dark Knight’s progression from his campy “New Look” of the mid-1960s to his “creature of the night” reinvention of the 1970s. Features include issue-by-issue indexes, interviews with CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA, DENNIS O’NEIL, and NEAL ADAMS, and guest essays by MIKE W. BARR and WILL MURRAY. Contributors include SHELDON MOLDOFF, LEN WEIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, and TERRY AUSTIN, with a special tribute to the late MARSHALL ROGERS. With its incisive introduction by DENNIS O’NEIL and its iconic cover painting by NEAL ADAMS, THE BATCAVE COMPANION is a musthave for every comics fan! By MICHAEL EURY and MICHAEL KRONENBERG. (240-page trade paperback) $26.95 US • ISBN: 9781893905788 • Diamond Order Code: NOV068368

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905481 Diamond Order Code: MAY053052

(240-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905610 Diamond Order Code: MAY063443

COMICS GONE APE!

DICK GIORDANO: CHANGING COMICS, ONE DAY AT A TIME

The missing link to primates in comics, spotlighting a barrel of simian superstars like Beppo, BrainiApe, the Gibbon, Gleek, Gorilla Man, Grease Monkey, King Kong, Konga, Mojo Jojo, Sky Ape, and Titano! It’s loaded with rare and classic artwork, cover galleries, and interviews with artists & writers including ARTHUR ADAMS (Monkeyman and O’Brien), FRANK CHO, CARMINE INFANTINO (Detective Chimp, Grodd), JOE KUBERT (Tor, Tarzan), TONY MILLIONAIRE (Sock Monkey), DOUG MOENCH (Planet of the Apes), and BOB OKSNER (Angel and the Ape)! All-new cover by ARTHUR ADAMS, and written by MICHAEL EURY.

MICHAEL EURY’s biography of comics’ most prominent and affable personality! Covers his career as illustrator, inker, and editor, peppered with DICK’S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS on his career milestones! Lavishly illustrated with RARE AND NEVER SEEN comics, merchandising, and advertising art (includes a color section)! Also includes an extensive index of his published work, comments and tributes by NEAL ADAMS, DENNIS O’NEIL, TERRY AUSTIN, PAUL LEVITZ, MARV WOLFMAN, JULIUS SCHWARTZ, JIM APARO and others, plus a Foreword by NEAL ADAMS and Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ!

(128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905627 Diamond Order Code: FEB073814

(176-pg. Paperback with COLOR) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905276 Diamond Order Code: STAR20439

CAPTAIN ACTION: THE ORIGINAL SUPER-HERO ACTION FIGURE (Hardcover 2nd Edition)

CAPTAIN ACTION was introduced in 1966 in the wake of the Batman TV show craze, and later received his own DC comic book with art by WALLY WOOD and GIL KANE. Able to assume the identities of 13 famous super-heroes, his initial career was short-lived, but continuing interest in the hero has led to two different returns to toy-store shelves. Lavishly illustrated with over 200 toy photos, this FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER SECOND EDITION chronicles the history of this quick-changing champion, including photos of virtually EVERY CAPTAIN ACTION PRODUCT ever released, spotlights on his allies ACTION BOY and the SUPER QUEENS and his arch enemy DR. EVIL, an examination of his comic-book appearances, and “Action facts” that even the most diehard Captain Action fan won’t know! The original softcover edition has been sold out for years, but this revised, full-color hardcover second edition includes behind-the-scenes coverage of CAPTAIN ACTION’S TRIUMPHANT 2008 RETURN to comics shelves in his new series from Moonstone Books, and spotlights the new wave of Captain Action collectibles. Written by MICHAEL EURY. (176-page COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490175 • Diamond Code: APR091003

NEW MODERN MASTERS VOLUMES Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW, DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

Volume 19: MIKE PLOOG

Volume 20: KYLE BAKER

Volume 21: CHRIS SPROUSE

Volume 22: MARK BUCKINGHAM

Volume 23: DARWYN COOKE

by Eric Nolen-Weathington & Roger Ash (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490076 Diamond Order Code: SEP084304 Now shipping

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490083 Diamond Order Code: SEP084305 Ships February 2009

by Eric Nolen-Weathington & Todd DeZago (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 97801605490137 Diamond Order Code: NOV084298 Ships March 2008

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490144 Diamond Order Code: JUL088519 Ships May 2008

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490205 Ships June 2008

AGE OF TV HEROES Examines the history of the live-action television adventures of everyone’s favorite comic book heroes! FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER features the in-depth stories of the actors and behind-thescene players that made the classic super-hero television programs we all grew up with. Included are new and exclusive interviews and commentary from ADAM WEST (Batman), LYNDA CARTER (Wonder Woman), PATRICK WARBURTON (The Tick), NICHOLAS HAMMOND (Spider-Man), WILLIAM KATT (The Greatest American Hero), JACK LARSON (The Adventures of Superman), JOHN WESLEY SHIPP (The Flash), JACKSON BOSTWICK (Shazam!), and many more! Written by JASON HOFIUS and GEORGE KHOURY, with a new cover by superstar painter ALEX ROSS! (192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490106 Diamond Order Code: SEP084302 Rescheduled for July 2009

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EXTRAORDINARY WORKS KIRBY FIVE-OH! OF ALAN MOORE: LIMITED HARDCOVER Indispensable Edition Limited to 500 copies, KIRBY FIVE-OH! The definitive biography of the co-creator of WATCHMEN and V FOR VENDETTA finally returns to print in a NEW EXPANDED AND UPDATED VERSION! Features an extensive series of interviews with MOORE about his entire career, including a new interview covering his work since the sold-out 2003 edition of this book was published. Includes RARE STRIPS, SCRIPTS, ART, and private PHOTOS of the author, plus a series of tribute comic strips by many of Moore’s closest collaborators, a COLOR SECTION featuring a RARE MOORE STORY (remastered, and starring MR. MONSTER), and more! Edited by GEORGE KHOURY, with a cover by DAVE McKEAN! (240-page trade paperback) $29.95 US ISBN: 9781605490090 Diamond Order Code: OCT084400 Limited Hardcover Signed by Alan Moore (100 hardcover copies) $49.95 US Only available from TwoMorrows!

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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$50

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BACK ISSUE! (6 issues)

$44

$60

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$105

$115

DRAW! (4 issues)

$30

$40

$47

$70

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ALTER EGO (12 issues) Six-issue subs are half-price!

$88

$120

$140

$210

$230

BRICKJOURNAL (4 issues)

$38

$48

$55

$78

$85

LIMITED HARDCOVER EDITION covers the best of everything from Jack Kirby’s 50-year career in comics, including his 50 BEST STORIES, BEST COVERS, BEST EXAMPLES OF UNUSED KIRBY ART, BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS, and profiles of, and commentary by, 50 PEOPLE INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! Plus there’s a 50-PAGE GALLERY of Kirby’s PENCIL ART, a DELUXE COLOR SECTION, a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover inked by DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER! Includes a full-color wrapped hardcover, and an individuallynumbered extra Kirby pencil art plate not included in the softcover edition! It’s ONLY AVAILABLE FROM TWOMORROWS, and is not sold in stores! Edited by JOHN MORROW.

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #27-30, with looks at Jack’s 1970s and ‘80s work, plus a two-part focus on how widespread Kirby’s influence is! Features rare interviews with KIRBY himself, plus Watchmen’s ALAN MOORE and DAVE GIBBONS, NEIL GAIMAN, Bone’s JEFF SMITH, MARK HAMILL, and others! See page after page of rare Kirby art, including a NEW SPECIAL SECTION with over 30 PIECES OF KIRBY ART NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED, and more! (288-page trade paperback) $29.95 US ISBN: 9781605490120 Diamond Order Code: DEC084286 Ships February 2009

(168-page Limited Edition Hardcover) (500 hardcover copies) $34.95 US Only available from TwoMorrows!

SHIPPING COSTS: Order online for exact weight-based postage, or ADD $2 PER MAGAZINE OR DVD/$4 PER BOOK IN THE US for Media Mail shipping. OUTSIDE THE US, PLEASE ORDER ONLINE TO CALCULATE YOUR EXACT POSTAGE COSTS & SAVE!

Subscriptions will start with the next available issue, but CURRENT AND OLDER ISSUES MUST BE PURCHASED AT THE BACK ISSUE PRICE (new issues ship in bulk, and we pass the savings on in our subscription rates). In the US, we generally ship back issues and books by MEDIA MAIL.

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR Volume 7

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TwoMorrows Publishing 2009 Update WINTER/SPRING

Supplement to the 2008 TwoMorrows Preview Catalog

ORDER AT: www.twomorrows.com

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BATCAVE COMPANION

IT’S FINALLY HERE! The writer/editor of the critically acclaimed KRYPTON COMPANION and the designer of the eye-popping SPIES, VIXENS, AND MASTERS OF KUNG FU: THE ART OF PAUL GULACY team up to explore the Silver and Bronze Ages of Batman comic books in THE BATCAVE COMPANION! Two distinct sections of this book examine the Dark Knight’s progression from his campy “New Look” of the mid-1960s to his “creature of the night” reinvention of the 1970s. Features include issue-byissue indexes, interviews with CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA, DENNIS O’NEIL, and NEAL ADAMS, and guest essays by MIKE W. BARR and WILL MURRAY. Contributors include SHELDON MOLDOFF, LEN WEIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, and TERRY AUSTIN, with a special tribute to the late MARSHALL ROGERS. With its incisive introduction by DENNIS O’NEIL and its iconic cover painting by NEAL ADAMS, THE BATCAVE COMPANION is a must-have for every comics fan! By MICHAEL EURY and MICHAEL KRONENBERG.

WHE % N YO ORD U ONL ER INE!

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95 US • ISBN: 9781893905788 • Diamond Order Code: NOV068368 • Ships April 2009

COMIC BOOK PODCAST COMPANION Comic book podcasts have taken the Internet by storm, and now TwoMorrows offers you the chance to go behind the scenes of ten of today's top comic book podcasts via all-new interviews with the casts of AROUND COMICS, WORD BALLOON, QUIET! PANELOLOGISTS AT WORK, COMIC BOOK QUEERS, iFANBOY, THE CRANKCAST, THE COLLECTED COMICS LIBRARY, THE PIPELINE PODCAST, COMIC GEEK SPEAK, and TwoMorrows’ own TUNE-IN PODCAST! Also featured are new interviews about podcasting and comics on the Internet with creators MATT FRACTION, TIM SEELEY, and GENE COLAN. You'll also find a handy guide of what you’ll need to start your own podcast, an index of more than thirty great comic book podcasts, numerous photos of your favorite podcasters, and original art from COLAN, SEELEY, DC's MIKE NORTON, and many more! By ERIC HOUSTON, with a spectacular new cover by MIKE MANLEY. (128-page trade paperback) $15.95 • ISBN: 9781605490182 • Ships May 2009

ALL-STAR COMPANION Volume 4 The epic series of ALL-STAR COMPANIONS goes out with a bang, featuring: Colossal coverage of the Golden Age ALL-STAR COMICS! Sensational secrets of the JUNIOR JUSTICE SOCIETY! An index of the complete solo adventures of all 18 original JSAers in their own features, from 1940 to 1951! The JSA's earliest imitators (Seven Soldiers of Victory, All Winners Squad, Marvel Family, and International Crime Patrol)! INFINITY, INC. on Earth-Two and after! And the 1980s SECRET ORIGINS series! With rare art by ALEX ROSS, TODD McFARLANE, JERRY ORDWAY, CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE KUBERT, ALEX TOTH, GIL KANE, MURPHY ANDERSON, IRWIN HASEN, MORT MESKIN, GENE COLAN, WAYNE BORING, GEORGE TUSKA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, GEORGE FREEMAN, DON NEWTON, JACK BURNLEY, MIKE MACHLAN, HOWARD CHAYKIN, DICK DILLIN, and others. Edited by ROY THOMAS.

CAPTAIN ACTION: THE ORIGINAL SUPERHERO ACTION FIGURE

(240-page trade paperback) $27.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490045 Ships June 2009

(Hardcover 2nd Edition)

CAPTAIN ACTION was introduced in 1966 in the wake of the Batman TV show craze, and later received his own DC comic book with art by WALLY WOOD and GIL KANE. Able to assume the identities of 13 famous super-heroes, his initial career was short-lived, but continuing interest in the hero has led to two different returns to toy-store shelves. Lavishly illustrated with over 200 toy photos, this FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER SECOND EDITION chronicles the history of this quick-changing champion, including photos of virtually EVERY CAPTAIN ACTION PRODUCT ever released, spotlights on his allies ACTION BOY and the SUPER QUEENS and his arch enemy DR. EVIL, an examination of his comic-book appearances, and “Action facts” that even the most diehard Captain Action fan won’t know! The original softcover edition has been sold out for years, but this revised, full-color hardcover second edition includes behind-the-scenes coverage of CAPTAIN ACTION’S TRIUMPHANT 2008 RETURN to comics shelves in his new series from Moonstone Books, and spotlights the new wave of Captain Action collectibles. Written by MICHAEL EURY. (176-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490175 • Ships July 2009

MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1960s: An Issue-By-Issue Field Guide

The comic book industry experienced an unexpected flowering in the early 1960s, compliments of Marvel Comics, and this book presents a step-by-step look at how a company that had the reputation of being one of the least creative in a generally moribund industry, emerged as one of the most dynamic, slightly irreverent and downright original contributions to an era when pop-culture emerged as the dominant force in the artistic life of America. In scores of handy, easy to reference entries, MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1960s takes the reader from the legendary company’s first fumbling beginnings as helmed by savvy editor/writer STAN LEE (aided by such artists as JACK KIRBY and STEVE DITKO), to the full maturity of its wild, colorful, offbeat grandiosity. With the history of Marvel Comics in the 1960s divided into four distinct phases, author PIERRE COMTOIS explains just how Lee, Kirby, Ditko, and others created a line of comic books that, while grounded in the traditional elements of panel-to-panel storytelling, broke through the juvenile mindset of a low brow industry and provided a tapestry of full blown pop culture icons. (224-page trade paperback) $27.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490168 • Ships July 2009

GRAILPAGES:

Original Comic Book Art And The Collectors GRAILPAGES brings to light the burgeoning hobby of collecting the original, hand-drawn art that is used to create comic books! Beginning more as a novelty, the hobby of collecting original comic art has expanded to a point where some of the seminal pages commonly run more than $10,000 each. Author STEVEN ALAN PAYNE lets you meet collectors from around the globe and hear their passion in their own words, as they detail collections ranging from a few key pages, to broad, encompassing collections of literally hundreds of pages of original comic art by such artists as JACK KIRBY, JOHN ROMITA SR., and others! Balancing out the narratives are incisive interviews with industry pros, including writers GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, and ROY THOMAS, and exclusive perspectives from Silver Age artists DICK GIORDANO, BOB McLEOD, ERNIE CHAN, TONY DeZUNIGA, and the unparalleled great, GENE COLAN! Completing the book is a diverse sampling of breathtakingly beautiful original comic art, some lavishly presented in full-page spreads, including pages not seen publicly for decades. Fans of comic art, comic books, and pop culture will find in GRAILPAGES an appreciation for a uniquely American form of art! (128-page trade paperback) $15.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490151 Diamond Order Code: JAN094470 • Ships March 2009

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

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

Go online for an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE! 6-ISSUE SUBS: $44 US Postpaid by Media Mail ($60 First Class, $70 Canada, $105 1st Class Intl., $115 Priority Intl.).

BACK ISSUE #1

BACK ISSUE #2

BACK ISSUE #3

“PRO2PRO” interview between GEORGE PÉREZ & MARV WOLFMAN (with UNSEEN PÉREZ ART), “ROUGH STUFF” featuring JACK KIRBY’s PENCIL ART, “GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD” on the first JLA/AVENGERS, “BEYOND CAPES” on DC and Marvel’s TARZAN (with KUBERT and BUSCEMA ART), “OFF MY CHEST” editorial by INFANTINO, and more! PÉREZ cover!

“PRO2PRO” between ADAM HUGHES and MIKE W. BARR (with UNSEEN HUGHES ART) and MATT WAGNER and DIANA SCHUTZ, “ROUGH STUFF” HUGHES PENCIL ART, STEVE RUDE’s unseen SPACE GHOST/HERCULOIDS team-up, Bruce Jones’ ALIEN WORLDS and TWISTED TALES, “OFF MY CHEST” by MIKE W. BARR on the DC IMPLOSION, and more! HUGHES cover!

“PRO2PRO” between KEITH GIFFEN, J.M. DeMATTEIS and KEVIN MAGUIRE on their JLA WORK, “ROUGH STUFF” PENCIL ART by ARAGONÉS, HERNANDEZ BROS., MIGNOLA, BYRNE, KIRBY, HUGHES, details on two unknown PLASTIC MAN movies, Joker’s history with O’NEIL, ADAMS, ENGLEHART, ROGERS and BOLLAND, editorial by MARK EVANIER, and more! BOLLAND cover!

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP032621

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV032696

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN042880

BACK ISSUE #4

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“PRO2PRO” between JOHN BYRNE and CHRIS CLAREMONT on their X-MEN WORK and WALT SIMONSON and JOE CASEY on Walter’s THOR, WOLVERINE PENCIL ART by BUSCEMA, LEE, COCKRUM, BYRNE, and GIL KANE, LEN WEIN’S TEEN WOLVERINE, PUNISHER’S 30TH and SECRET WARS’ 20TH ANNIVERSARIES (with UNSEEN ZECK ART), and more! BYRNE cover!

Wonder Woman TV series in-depth, LYNDA CARTER INTERVIEW, WONDER WOMAN TV ART GALLERY, Marvel’s TV Hulk, SpiderMan, Captain America, and Dr. Strange, LOU FERRIGNO INTERVIEW, super-hero cartoons you didn’t see, pencil gallery by JERRY ORDWAY, STAR TREK in comics, and ROMITA SR. editorial on Marvel’s movies! Covers by ALEX ROSS and ADAM HUGHES!

TOMB OF DRACULA revealed with GENE COLAN and MARV WOLFMAN, LEN WEIN & BERNIE WRIGHTSON on Swamp Thing’s roots, STEVE BISSETTE & RICK VEITCH on their Swamp work, pencil art by BRUNNER, PLOOG, BISSETTE, COLAN, WRIGHTSON, and SMITH, editorial by ROY THOMAS, PREZ, GODZILLA comics (with TRIMPE art), CHARLTON horror, & more! COLAN cover!

History of BRAVE AND BOLD, JIM APARO interview, tribute to BOB HANEY, FANTASTIC FOUR ROUNDTABLE with STAN LEE, MARK WAID, and others, EVANIER and MEUGNIOT on DNAgents, pencil art by ROSS, TOTH, COCKRUM, HECK, ROBBINS, NEWTON, and BYRNE, DENNY O’NEIL editorial, a tour of METROPOLIS, IL, and more! SWAN/ANDERSON cover!

DENNY O’NEIL and Justice League Unlimited voice actor PHIL LaMARR discuss GL JOHN STEWART, NEW X-MEN pencil art by NEAL ADAMS, ARTHUR ADAMS, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, ALAN DAVIS, JIM LEE, ADAM HUGHES, STORM’s 30-year history, animated TV’s black heroes (with TOTH art), ISABELLA and TREVOR VON EEDEN on BLACK LIGHTNING, and more! KYLE BAKER cover!

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR042973

(108-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY043051

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL043389

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP043044

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV043081

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BACK ISSUE #9

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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!

ROY THOMAS, KURT BUSIEK, and JOE JUSKO on CONAN (with art by JOHN BUSCEMA, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, NEAL ADAMS, JUSKO, and others), SERGIO ARAGONÉS and MARK EVANIER on GROO, DC’s never-published KING ARTHUR, pencil art gallery by KIRBY, PÉREZ, MOEBIUS, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, BOLLAND, and others, and a new BUSCEMA/JUSKO Conan cover!

‘70s and ‘80s character revamps with DAVE GIBBONS, ROY THOMAS and KURT BUSIEK, TOM DeFALCO and RON FRENZ on Spider-Man’s 1980s “black” costume change, DENNY O’NEIL on Superman’s 1970 revamp, JOHN BYRNE’s aborted SHAZAM! series detailed, pencil art gallery with FRANK MILLER, LEE WEEKS, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI, CHARLES VESS, and more!

CARDY interview, ENGLEHART and MOENCH on kung-fu comics, “Pro2Pro” with STATON and CUTI on Charlton’s E-Man, pencil art gallery featuring MILLER, KUBERT, GIORDANO, SWAN, GIL KANE, COLAN, COCKRUM, and others, EISNER’s A Contract with God; “The Death of Romance (Comics)” (with art by ROMITA, SR. and TOTH), and more!

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN053136

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR053333

(108-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY053174

(100-page magazine) $5.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL053295

(100-page magazine) SOLD OUT (100-page Digital Edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

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DAVE COCKRUM and MIKE GRELL go “Pro2Pro” on the Legion, pencil art gallery by BUSCEMA, BYRNE, MILLER, STARLIN, McFARLANE, ROMITA JR., SIENKIEWICZ, looks at Hercules Unbound, Hex, Killraven, Kamandi, MARS, Planet of the Apes, art and interviews with GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, KIRBY, WILLIAMSON, and more! New MIKE GRELL/BOB McLEOD cover!

“Weird Heroes” of the 1970s and ‘80s! MIKE PLOOG discusses Ghost Rider, MATT WAGNER revisits The Demon, JOE KUBERT dusts off Ragman, GENE COLAN “Rough Stuff” pencil gallery, GARCÍALÓPEZ recalls Deadman, DC’s unpublished Gorilla Grodd series, PERLIN, CONWAY, and MOENCH on Werewolf by Night, and more! New ARTHUR ADAMS cover!

“Toy Stories!” Behind the Scenes of Marvel’s G.I. JOE™ and TRANSFORMERS with PAUL LEVITZ and GEORGE TUSKA, “Rough Stuff” MIKE ZECK pencil gallery, ARTHUR ADAMS on Gumby, HE-MAN, ROM, MICRONAUTS, SUPER POWERS, SUPER-HERO CARS, art by HAMA, SAL BUSCEMA, GUICE, GOLDEN, KIRBY, TRIMPE, and new ZECK sketch cover!

“Super Girls!” Supergirl retrospective with art by STELFREEZE, HAMNER, SpiderWoman, Flare, Tigra, DC’s unused Double Comics with unseen BARRETTO and INFANTINO art, WOLFMAN and JIMENEZ on Donna Troy, female comics pros, art by SEKOWSKY, OKSNER, PÉREZ, HUGHES, GIORDANO, plus a COLOR GALLERY and COVER by BRUCE TIMM!

“Big, Green Issue!” Tour of NEAL ADAMS’ studio (with interview and art gallery), DAVE GIBBONS “Rough Stuff” pencil art spotlight, interviews with MIKE GRELL (on Green Arrow), PETER DAVID (on Incredible Hulk), a “Pro2Pro” chat between GERRY CONWAY and JOHN ROMITA, SR. (on the Green Goblin), and more. New cover by NEAL ADAMS!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV053296

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(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR063547

(108-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY063499

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL063569

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“Unsung Heroes!” DON NEWTON spotlight, STEVE GERBER and GENE COLAN on Howard the Duck, MIKE CARLIN and DANNY FINGEROTH on Marvel’s Assistant Editors’ Month, the unrealized Unlimited Powers TV show, TONY ISABELLA’s aborted plans for The Champions, MARK GRUENWALD tribute, art by SAL BUSCEMA, JOHN BYRNE, and more! NEWTON/ RUBINSTEIN cover!

“Secret Identities!” Histories of characters with unusual alter egos: Firestorm, Moon Knight, the Question, and the “real-life” Human Fly! STEVE ENGLEHART and SAL BUSCEMA on Captain America, JERRY ORDWAY interview and cover, Superman roundtable with SIENKIEWICZ, NOWLAN, MOENCH, COWAN, MAGGIN, O’NEIL, MILGROM, CONWAY, ROBBINS, SWAN, plus FREE ALTER EGO #64 PREVIEW!

“The Devil You Say!” issue! A look at Daredevil in the 1980s and 1990s with interviews and art by KLAUS JANSON, JOHN ROMITA JR., and FRANK MILLER, MIKE MIGNOLA Hellboy interview, DAN MISHKIN and GARY COHN on Blue Devil, COLLEEN DORAN’s unpublished X-Men spin-off “Fallen Angels”, Son of Satan, Stig’s Inferno, DC’s Plop!, JACK KIRBY’s Devil Dinosaur, and cover by MIKE ZECK!

“Dynamic Duos!’ “Pro2Pro” interviews with Batman’s ALAN GRANT and NORM BREYFOGLE and the Legion’s PAUL LEVITZ and KEITH GIFFEN, a “Backstage Pass” to Dark Horse Comics, Robin’s history, EASTMAN and LAIRD’s Ninja Turtles, histories of duos Robin and Batgirl, Captain America and the Falcon, and Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, “Zot!” interview with SCOTT McCLOUD, and a new BREYFOGLE cover!

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

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP063683

(104-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV063993

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN073984

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR073855

(108-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAY073880

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

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

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

“Comic Book Royalty!” The ’70s/’80s careers of Aquaman and the Sub-Mariner explored, BARR and BOLLAND discuss CAMELOT 3000, comics pros tell “Why JACK KIRBY Was King,” “Dr. Doom: Monarch or Menace?” DON McGREGOR’s Black Panther; an exclusive ALAN WEISS art gallery; spotlights on ARION, LORD OF ATLANTIS; NIGHT FORCE; and more! New cover by NICK CARDY!

“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 PÉREZ, and more! New cover by DARWYN COOKE!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JUL073976

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: SEP074091

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: NOV073948

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: JAN084020

(100-page magazine) $6.95 Diamond Order Code: MAR084109

TITANIC TOMES FROM TWOMORROWS!

ALTER EGO #89

DRAW! #18

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

Spotlighting HARVEY COMICS’ PRE-CODE HORROR MAGS OF THE 1950s! Interviews with SID JACOBSON, WARREN KREMER, and HOWARD NOSTRAND, plus Harvey artist KEN SELIG talks to JIM AMASH! MR. MONSTER presents the wit and wisdom (and worse) of DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM, plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America) with C.C. BECK & MARC SWAYZE, & more! SIMON & KIRBY and NOSTRAND cover!

Features an in-depth interview and demo by R.M. GUERA (the artist of Vertigo’s Scalped), behind-the-scenes in the Batcave with Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the new hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US Ships October 2009

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 US Ships October 2009

ALL-STAR COMPANION Vol. 4

SAL BUSCEMA: COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST

MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1960s

Features: Colossal coverage of the Golden Age ALL-STAR COMICS! Sensational secrets of the JUNIOR JUSTICE SOCIETY! An index of the complete solo adventures of all 18 original JSAers in their own features, from 1940 to 1951! The JSA's earliest imitators (Seven Soldiers of Victory, All Winners Squad, Marvel Family, and Intl. Crime Patrol)! INFINITY, INC. on Earth-Two and after! And the 1980s SECRET ORIGINS series! With rare art by ALEX ROSS, TODD McFARLANE, JERRY ORDWAY, CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE KUBERT, ALEX TOTH, GIL KANE, MURPHY ANDERSON, IRWIN HASEN, MORT MESKIN, GENE COLAN, WAYNE BORING, GEORGE TUSKA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, GEORGE FREEMAN, DON NEWTON, JACK BURNLEY, MIKE MACHLAN, HOWARD CHAYKIN, DICK DILLIN, and others. Edited by ROY THOMAS.

In 1968, SAL BUSCEMA joined Marvel Comics and quickly became one of their top artists, penciling such storylines as the original AVENGERS/DEFENDERS WAR and CAPTAIN AMERICA, as well as a tenyear run on THE HULK and 100 consecutive issues of SPECTACULAR SPIDERMAN. This new book by Alter Ego’s JIM AMASH with Modern Masters’ ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON explores Sal’s life and career through an exhaustive interview with the artist, complete with extensive examples of his art, including a deluxe color section, and a gallery of work from Sal’s personal files! Ships Nov. 2009!

This issue-by-issue field guide presents a step-by-step look at how Marvel Comics went from being one of the least creative publishers in a generally moribund industry, to its most dynamic and original in an era when pop-culture emerged as the dominant force in the artistic life of America. In scores of handy, easy to reference entries, follow the company’s first fumbling beginnings as helmed by savvy editor/writer STAN LEE (aided by such artists as JACK KIRBY and STEVE DITKO), to the full maturity of its wild, colorful, offbeat grandiosity. With the history of Marvel Comics in the 1960s divided into four distinct phases, author PIERRE COMTOIS explains just how Lee, Kirby, Ditko, and others created a line of comic books that, while grounded in the traditional elements of panel-to-panel storytelling, broke through the juvenile mindset of a low brow industry and provided a tapestry of full blown pop culture icons.

(240-page trade paperback) $27.95 US ISBN: 9781605490045 Diamond Order Code: APR091002 Now shipping!

(176-page paperback w/16 color pages) $26.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490212 (192-page HARDCOVER with 32 color pages, dust jacket, and illo’d endleaves) $46.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490229 ULTRA-LIMITED HARDCOVER EDITION (52-copy numbered edition with a custom pencil portrait of one of Sal’s characters) $100 US • ONLY FROM TWOMORROWS!

Go to www.twomorrows.com for FULL-COLOR downloadable PDF versions of our magazines for only $2.95-3.95! Print subscribers get the digital edition FREE, weeks before it hits stores!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 US Ships November 2009

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95 US Diamond Order Code: MAY091042 ISBN: 9781605490168 • Now shipping!

2009 SUBSCRIPTION RATES: (with FREE Digital Editions)

Media Mail

BRICKJOURNAL #7

Focuses on LEGO ARCHITECTURE, with new sets designed by ADAM REED TUCKER, interviews with architectural builders SPENCER REZHALLA and JASON BURIK, a look at a LEGO BATTLESHIP that’s over 20 feet long, event reports from BRICKWORLD in Chicago and other events worldwide! PLUS: Indispensable building tips and instructions, and more! (80-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 US • Now shipping!

BRICKJOURNAL COMPENDIUM 3

Compiles the digital-only issues #6-7 (Vol. 1) of BRICKJOURNAL for the first time in printed form! Interviews with builders and LEGO Group CEO JØRGEN VIG KNUDSTORP, features on LEGO FAN CONVENTIONS, reviews and behind the scenes reports on two LEGO sets, how to create custom minifigures, instructions and techniques, and more! (224-page FULL-COLOR trade paperback) $34.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490069 Diamond Order Code: JAN094469 • Now shipping!

CAPTAIN ACTION: THE ORIGINAL SUPERHERO ACTION FIGURE REVISED 2nd EDITION! CAPTAIN ACTION was introduced in 1966 in the wake of the Batman TV show craze, and later received his own DC comic book with art by WALLY WOOD and GIL KANE. Able to assume the identities of 13 famous super-heroes, continuing interest in the hero has led to two different returns to toy-store shelves. Lavishly illustrated with over 200 toy photos, this FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER SECOND EDITION chronicles the history of this quick-changing champion, including photos of virtually EVERY CAPTAIN ACTION PRODUCT ever released, spotlights on his allies ACTION BOY and the SUPER QUEENS and his arch enemy DR. EVIL, an examination of his comic-book appearances, and more, including his recent return to comics shelves and the new wave of Captain Action collectibles. By MICHAEL EURY.

VOLUME 22: MARK BUCKINGHAM (128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490144 Diamond Order Code: FEB094473 Ships October 2009

VOLUME 23: DARWYN COOKE by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490205 Ships November 2009 Each features an extensive, career-spanning interview lavishly illustrated with rare art from the artist’s files, plus huge sketchbook section, including unseen and unused art!

(176-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 US • ISBN: 9781605490175 • Diamond Order Code: APR091003 Now shipping!

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ALTER EGO (12 issues) Six-issues is half-price!

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BRICKJOURNAL (4 issues)

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TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of LEGO & Comics. TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

A plea from the publisher of this fine digital periodical: TwoMorrows, we’re on the Honor System with our Digital Editions. We don’t add Digital Rights Management features to them to stop piracy; they’re clunky and cumbersome, and make readers jump through hoops to view content they’ve paid for. And studies show such features don’t do much to stop piracy anyway. So we don’t include DRM in our downloads.

However, this is COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, which is NOT INTENDED FOR FREE DOWNLOADING ANYWHERE. If you paid the modest fee we charge to download it at our website, you have our sincere thanks. Your support allows us to keep producing magazines like this one. If instead you downloaded it for free from some other website or torrent, please know that it was absolutely 100% DONE WITHOUT OUR CONSENT. Our website is the only source to legitimately download any TwoMorrows publications. If you found this at another site, it was an ILLEGAL POSTING OF OUR COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, and your download is illegal as well. If that’s the case, here’s what I hope you’ll do: GO AHEAD AND READ THIS DIGITAL ISSUE, AND SEE WHAT YOU THINK. If you enjoy it enough to keep it, please DO THE RIGHT THING and go to our site and purchase a legal download of this issue, or purchase the print edition at our website (which entitles you to the Digital Edition for free) or at your local comic book shop. Otherwise, please delete it from your computer, since it hasn’t been paid for. And please DON’T KEEP DOWNLOADING OUR MATERIAL ILLEGALLY, for free. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, support our company by paying for the material we produce. We’re not some giant corporation with deep pockets, and can absorb these losses. We’re a small company—literally a “mom and pop” shop—with dozens of hard working freelance creators, slaving away day and night and on weekends, to make a pretty minimal amount of income for all this hard work. All of our editors and authors, and comic shop owners, rely on income from this publication to continue producing more like it. Every sale we lose to an illegal download hurts, and jeopardizes our future. Please don’t rob us of the small amount of compensation we receive. Doing so helps ensure there won’t be any future products like this to download. And please don’t post this copyrighted material anywhere, or share it with anyone else. Remember: TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

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TwoMorrows.Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. (& LEGO! ) TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com