Back Issue #39

“ A P R I L

April

F O O L S ”

I S S U E !

2010

N$o6..3995

HOGS THE SPOTLIGHT!

1

AMBUSH BUG • BYRNE’S SHE-HULK • FORBUSH-MAN • MAD in the ’70s • REID FLEMING interviews with FRED HEMBECK & ALAN KUPPERBERG • plus DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE!

82658 27762

8

03

SPIDER-HAM TM & © MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

®

BOOKS FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

MEGO 8" SUPER-HEROES: WORLD’S GREATEST TOYS!

THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE

IMAGE COMICS

G-FORCE: ANIMATED

MARVEL COMICS

Exhaustive examination of MEGO and their line of super-hero action figures!

An unprecedented look at the company that sold comics in the millions, and their celebrity artists!

The official BATTLE OF THE PLANETS guidebook to the Japanese animated TV program that revolutionized anime across the globe!

An issue-by-issue field guide to the pop culture phenomenon of Lee, Kirby, Ditko, and others!

(256-page FULL-COLOR hardcover) $49.95

(280-page trade paperback) $34.95

(100-page COLOR trade paperback) $15.95

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

BATCAVE COMPANION

FLASH COMPANION Details the publication histories of the four heroes who have individually earned the right to be declared DC Comics' "Fastest Man Alive"!

SILVER AGE SCI-FI COMPANION

ALL- STAR COMPANION

Unlocks the secrets of Batman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, following the Dark Knight’s progression from 1960s camp to 1970s creature of the night!

(240-page trade paperback) $26.95

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95

GRAILPAGES

MODERN MASTERS

A BOOK SERIES DEVOTED TO THE BEST OF TODAY’S ARTISTS

EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE: INDISPENSABLE EDITION

HOW TO CREATE COMICS

20+ volumes with in-depth interviews, plus extensive galleries of rare and unseen art from the artist’s files!

Definitive biography of the Watchmen writer, in a new, expanded edition!

Shows step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and art, to printing and distribution!

(128-page trade paperbacks) $14.95 each

(240-page trade paperback) $29.95

(108-page trade paperback) $13.95

Explores the world of original comic book art, and the people who collect it. Includes numerous examples of many key “grail” pages, interviews, and more!

(144-page trade paperback) $15.95

An exhaustive look at Strange Adventures, Mystery In Space, and other ’60s DC science-fiction comics!

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95

IN THE 1960s

Roy Thomas has four volumes documenting the history of ALL-STAR COMICS, the JUSTICE SOCIETY, INFINITY, INC., and more!

(224-page trade paperbacks) $24.95

FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows.Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

Volume 1, Number 39 April 2010 Celebrating the Best Comics of the '70s, '80s, and Beyond!

The Retro Comics Experience!

EDITOR Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

COVER ARTISTS Mike Wieringo and Karl Kesel COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADERS John Morrow and Eric Nolen-Weathington SPECIAL THANKS Roger Ash Heritage Comics Michael Aushenker Auctions Big Boy Restaurants Adam Hughes Alex Boney Greg Hyland Al Jaffee David Boswell Mike Juette Brett Breeding Arnie Kogen Michael Browning Alan Kupperberg Bob Burden Stan Lee John Byrne Andy Mangels Katherine Carroll Marvel Comics Lex Carson Steve Mellor Dewey Cassell Allen E. Miller David Chelsea Al Nickerson Gene Colan Tom Powers Paris Cullins Jim Salicrup Dick DeBartolo Vanessa Hope Tom DeFalco Schneider Steve Donnelly Irwin Schwab Shelton Drum Richard A. Scott Ruben Espinosa Bart Sears Al Feldstein Larry Siegel Robert Loren Fleming Dave Sim Rich Fowlks Steve Skeates Keith Giffen Anthony Snyder Michael Grabois Roy Thomas Grand Comic-Book Don Vaughan Database Matt Wieringo Larry Hama Marv Wolfman Dustin Harbin Eddy Zeno Fred Hembeck Tom Ziuko

BACK SEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 FLASHBACK: Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Sorry, Homer Simpson! This Porker is the real Spider-Pig! INTERVIEW: Fred Hembeck, Comicdom’s Funny Bone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 Pull up a chair and take a load off with one of our favorite cartoonists FLASHBACK: Forbush-Man: The Way-Out Wonder! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 The not-so-secret origin and history of Marvel’s most subpar hero PRO2PRO: The Ambush Bug Interview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming have a Bug up their—whatever FLASHBACK: Gamma-Irradiated Humor: John Byrne’s Sensational She-Hulk! . . . . . . .34 Jennifer Walters breaks the fourth wall in this look back at a Byrne classic WHAT THE--?!: Manny and the Mascot: Bob’s Big Boy Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44 An original T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents artist found work drawing a diner-distributed freebie ROUGH STUFF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 Pencil art rarities from the personal vault of Tom Ziuko INTERVIEW: The Versatile Alan Kupperberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52 A revealing chat with the artist of everything from Captain America to Evil Clown FLASHBACK: MAD in the ’70s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58 Some of the usual gang of idiots regale us with tales of MAD’s most successful decade FLASHBACK: Marvel Gone MAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65 Remembering the House of Ideas’ Bronze Age parody titles Spoof, Crazy!, and Arrgh!

FLASHBACK: Flaming Carrot: The Anti-Anti-Hero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69 Bob Burden discusses at length his carrot-headed character—with Dave Sim joining in!

BEYOND CAPES: Reid Fleming, the World’s Toughest Milkman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 The story of David Boswell’s rogue-to-riches protagonist INTERVIEW: David Boswell: The Man Behind the Milkman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79 Answers to your Reid Fleming whys, hows, and whens, from the creator himself INTERVIEW: For The “Love” of David Chelsea! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81 The cartoonist behind the cult indie favorite David Chelsea in Love ART GALLERY: The Beasts and the Bold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .86 Funny-animal heroes meet DC’s finest in sketches by Breeding, Cullins, Hughes, and Sears BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 Reader feedback on “Comics Go to War” issue #37 BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 time per year 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.

Eight-issue subscriptions: $60 Standard US, $80 First Class US, $85 Canada, $107 Surface International, $155 Airmail International. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Mike Wieringo and Karl Kesel. Spider-Ham TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2010 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing.

BACK ISSUE is a TM of TwoMorrows Publishing. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 1

Ambush Bug TM & © DC Entertainment.

DESIGNER Rich J. Fowlks

This issue’s theme means a lot to me—no foolin’.

Our cover star—Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham—was my first professional comic-book scripting credit. (The story was the backup in Marvel Tales #205, Nov. 1987, featuring the villainous Bookworm— Holy Roddy McDowall!—drawn by Ron Zalme and Pierre Fournier, and edited by a true prince of a fellow, Jim Salicrup.) I’ve had the good fortune to work on two of this issue’s other featured players, Forbush-Man and Ambush Bug, as writer and editor, respectively, and the embarrassment of attempting to write Sensational She-Hulk after John Byrne left the title (those issues are to me what Batman & Robin is to George Clooney).

Plus Alan Kupperberg, one of our interview subjects, penciled some of my Spider-Ham backups. So for me this issue is a reunion, of sorts.

Credit our designer, Rich Fowlks, with the idea to do an “April Fools” issue. A while back he sent me a cover mock-up, pitching the idea of an issue gathering some of the funny and offbeat characters and comic books of the Bronze and early Modern Ages. On Rich’s mock-up was a black-suited Spider-Ham pencil illo by Mike Wieringo, drawn for the 2007 Heroes Con convention program mere months before Mike’s unexpected death. What an intriguing idea for an issue’s theme—as well as an opportunity to posthumously feature a cover by the wonderful, woefully missed Mr. Wieringo.

Shelton Drum and Dustin Harbin of Charlotte, North Carolina’s Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find comics shop (sponsors of Heroes Con) graciously provided a scan of Mike Wieringo’s art (seen in the inset), and the late artist’s brother, Matt, kindly agreed to let us use it for our cover. Then Karl Kesel, Mike Wieringo’s friend and frequent collaborator, signed on to ink it— and, per ye editor’s request, altered Spider-Ham’s costume from the black version to the red-and-blues we know and love! And lo, a cover was born!

A BIG thank-you to these gentlemen for making this cover a reality.

(This issue marks the latest entry in a long line of Spider-Man family covers for BACK ISSUE: #12 [black-suited Spidey], #23 [Mary Jane], #32 [Spider-Mobile], #35 [Kraven’s Last Hunt], and even #36 [one-time Spider-foe Morbius the Living Vampire vs. Werewolf by Night]. But we’ve yet to produce a “real” Spider-Man cover—but trust me, we will, with issue #44’s “Spider-Man in the Bronze Age” issue, featuring a Spidey painted cover by … oh, I’ll keep that to myself for a while.)

Speaking of covers, I’ve added a bonus to this editorial: the unpublished Brian Stelfreeze/Adam Hughes cover for one of the issues of my She-Hulk run, #53 (July 1993).

Michael Eury

© 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

© 2010 Marvel Characters,

Inc.

by

Now, on to a big announcement (and no, this isn’t some lame April Fool’s joke): Beginning with BACK ISSUE #40, this magazine will be published eight times per year! That’s right, for those of you who just can’t get enough of ’70s and ’80s comics, there’ll be an extra two issues each year for you.

Additionally, the 16 pages in the center of the magazine will be published in full-color, on glossy paper! Readers have responded favorably to our almost-all-color digital editions—and admittedly, ye editor, who proofreads BI in color PDFs, has been hankering for color, too—so color is coming!

There’s some “bad” news, though, which I hope you’ll take well: As a cost-cutting measure we’re shaving down our page count from 100 to 84 pages (ten of the pages eliminated will be house ads, though), and our cover price will increase by one dollar. We’re all reeling from tough economic times, but we hope that you’ll stick with us, as we pledge that we will maintain the highest standards of quality—and fun—possible.

pssssT!!! what say we skip all this jibberjabber? meet me on page 34!

®

by

Michael Browning

There was a creative explosion in the 1980s that brought us The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Miracleman, Secret Wars, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and … Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham! And no, I didn’t mean The Spectacular Spider-MAN, although that series was pretty good then, too. I actually meant the Spectacular Spider-HAM! Around 1983, when comics were booming and Marvel and DC were rolling out hits like Uncanny X-Men and New Teen Titans, Tom DeFalco, then a writer for Marvel, decided to pitch something totally new—a parody of Marvel Comics characters as funny animals.

THE (PREVIOUSLY UNTOLD) SECRET ORIGIN OF SPIDER-HAM DeFalco and Larry Hama, who had just come off a long stint as editor of Marvel’s MAD magazine knockoff, Crazy, brainstormed and came up with Spider-Ham. DeFalco thought the idea would make a great comic and an even better cartoon.

“Larry Hama and I were sitting in his office talking about the standard nonsense that creative people talk about,” DeFalco says. “We were talking about Marvel and licensing and that type of stuff. We said, ‘Marvel can license just about anything, but the one thing they can’t license is plush.’ They had nothing for young kids or plush-kind of toys. So Larry said, ‘You know what we should really be doing?

Funny-animal comic books!’

“Now, Larry Hama is so wide in terms of the depth of his creativity,” DeFalco continues. “It depends on what you know him from. I think the vast majority of people know him from G. I. Joe or Conan. Or Crazy magazine, which shows the depth of the man. Larry has always been a fan of funny-animal comic books, like Carl Barks’ stuff, and he said, ‘What we should do

Swinging Swine Move over, Spider-Man! Here comes Spider-HAM! Detail from artist Joe Albelo’s cover to Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham #9 (Aug. 1986). © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 3

Marvel Zoo-in-One (below) Spider-Ham teams with Captain Americat in Marvel Tails #1 (Nov. 1983).

Script by Tom DeFalco, art by Mark Armstrong and Joe Albelo. (below right) Marvel Tails #1’s cover, by Steve Mellor. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

is a funny-animal comic book.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, like Peter Porker, Spectacular Spider-Ham?’ And he said, ‘Exactly!’”

And so DeFalco and Hama began brainstorming the first Peter Porker story. “We just threw ideas around,” DeFalco says. “In those days, if you wanted to do a one-shot or a title, it was fairly easy. We made up a thing called a new project memo and we called the book ‘Marvel Tails’ and we put it through, mentioning that we were doing it for licensing and stuff, and it was approved pretty quickly. We did the comic book and, as we designed what the character was going to look like, Larry knew this person who made dolls and we commissioned this person to make a Peter Porker doll! We had that doll in the office for years and years and I still don’t know whatever happened to my Peter Porker doll. But Larry and I paid for that doll to be made. We had a wonderful time working on the comic book and it went out and we forgot about it because we went onto the next bunch of projects.”

4 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

Hama pitched an entire line of funny-animal parodies of Marvel characters, including Spider-Ham, Captain Americat, Ducktor Doom, Hulk Bunny, and the Fantastic Fur. “I did drawings of all of them,” Hama says. “I also did designs for little-kid versions of the same heroes.”

And history was made with Marvel Tails #1 (Nov. 1983), starring Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. Peter Porker was a mild-mannered spider who was bitten by a radioactive pig and became Spider-Ham. Aunt May Porker and J. Jonah Jackal first appeared alongside Peter Porker in this issue, which also featured the Goose Rider, Captain Americat, and Hulk Bunny.

Mark Armstrong drew the first appearance of Spider-Ham, and DeFalco raves over his artwork for that issue.

“Mark Armstrong was fabulous,” DeFalco says.

“I had worked with him on a couple of things and he was a natural funny-animal artist. He was such a perfectionist that he could have done anything he set his mind to. He was a very slow and meticulous artist and a great artist. Mark was a freelancer and didn’t work in the office. He had done some work in Bizarre Adventures or something and he had done some work in Crazy magazine.”

Also doing the art on that first issue was Steve Mellor and Joe Albelo, who both went on to work on the spin-off Spider-Ham bimonthly series. Mellor drew the cover to Marvel Tails #1.

According to DeFalco, the one-shot was created in one afternoon. “Larry and I were sitting around and just started throwing out ideas, and I’m sure we had the basic framework of the story and the characters we were using. I don’t remember if I did that as a plot or as a full script or a storyboard.

Too many years have gone by. Years ago, when I

SPIDER-HAM AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS … THE CARTOON? Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham was such a great concept that one might think it would lend itself to a cartoon or plush toys, as was the idea when Tom DeFalco and Larry Hama first came up with the characters for Marvel Tails #1.

But neither a cartoon nor a toy was ever in the works for Peter Porker and his alter ego.

“I think at one point,” DeFalco says, “someone came in and wanted to talk about it and the first thing they said was, ‘Oh, we love this concept and we think it’s great, but, the lead character can’t be a pig.’ I said, ‘But, the lead character is called Peter Porker, Spider-Ham.’ They said, ‘Oh, we can fix that.’ And I said ‘Okay! I’d be very pleased to hear your ideas.’ And I don’t think we ever heard from them again. I always remember that one discussion. The people who did animation used to feel that they knew better and, maybe, for their market, they did. Maybe pigs hold no appeal to the animation market. I didn’t presume to tell them what would and would not work for their market. I thought, ‘Okay, let me hear what they have to say. If they are going to develop Peter Porker as something other than a pig, let’s see it!’ For all I know, they went back and tried to work on something and realized they couldn’t come up with anything and let it die!”

worked for Archie Comics, I did things in storyboards.

I can’t draw, so it’s a bad storyboard.

“We did it so we could have the comic book and have the Peter Porker doll. We walked up to licensing and we said, ‘Hey, we did this comic about Peter Porker and we’ve got this plush doll.

What do you think?’ And licensing looked at it and said, ‘Nah, it’s not for us.’ And that was the end of the discussion! They had no interest in it at all. We walked away saying, ‘Oh, well, at least we had fun doing the comic book!’ In those days, you’d get your royalty statements like, nine months after the comic book went on sale. I had no idea if it sold. When licensing said they weren’t interested, I thought it was a failure, that it had bombed out.”

Regarding the reaction to Marvel Tails #1 among his peers in the Marvel Bullpen, DeFalco says, “We got the usual feedback. There were guys in the office who look at anything and say, ‘Oh, man, this is something cool and different,’ and then there are the guys who look at it and say, ‘This is making fun of the characters! You can’t make fun of the characters!’ And then there are the guys who’d say, ‘What the hell is this?’ And then there are all the other guys who’d say, ‘Oh, here is an opportunity to make fun of Tom and Larry!’”

But sales were good for the first and only issue of Marvel Tails.

Although Marvel Tails sold well, still, it was only a one-shot and DeFalco moved on to other projects, not giving Spider-Ham too much more thought.

That is, until he got a message that he was needed in Marvel president James Galton’s office for a meeting.

Solid Gold(en) Michael Golden provided this gorgeous cover art to Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham #1 (May 1985). In the plane are J. Jonah Jackal and the series’ three junior members. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 5

ENTER ... THE DISTRIBUTOR!

REBIRTH OF THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-HAM

This was DeFalco’s first impromptu meeting with Galton, and he wasn’t sure why he was being called onto the carpet. At first, he said he thought he was in trouble.

“Jim was a very, very supportive guy, just a wonderful and great guy,” DeFalco says. “I didn’t know that at the time because this was the first time I was being called into his office. He introduced me to the gentleman who was in charge of Curtiss Circulation, our newstand distributor, and I thought, ‘Why am I here in this meeting? Why isn’t [then-Marvel editor-in-chief] Jim Shooter in this meeting?’ Mr. Galton said to me, ‘Tom, do you know a title called Marvel Tails?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it’s a reprint title that reprints old episodes of Spider-Man.’ And the distributor said ‘Nah, not that Marvel Tales: T-A-I-L-S.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that was a one-shot where we introduced a character called Peter Porker, Spider-Ham. It was a parody so we could have a funny-animal version of Spider-Man.’ And Galton says, ‘So, it was a one-shot?’ And I said, ‘Yes, it was a one-shot that was only going to come out once.’ The distributor said, ‘It sold 60 percent on the newsstand,’ which is very good. Our average sales then were around 30 percent, though we were aiming for 35 percent. Mr. Galton said, ‘When’s the next issue coming out?’ And I told him it was only a one-shot and there was no ‘next’ issue. The distributor said, ‘60 percent on the newsstand’ and Galton said to me, ‘Tom, you’re not hearing me.

When is the next issue coming out?’ I said, ‘Oh, in about four months.’ And I asked if this was to be a regular monthly comic book and he said, ‘Yes, sir, it’s a regular, monthly comic book.’ Galton then said ‘Everything’s fine. You can go.’

“And that is the secret origin of Peter Porker, Spider-Ham.”

Although DeFalco oversaw the publication of the Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham ongoing comic, which first appeared on newsstands two years after the Marvel Tails one-shot, Hama stayed on board as the editor of the regular series. To take over the writing duties, Hama tapped Steve Skeates, who had a history writing funny animals and funny stories.

“Steve Skeates did a fabulous job,” DeFalco says. “To be honest, in many regards, I was a gadfly, a flirt. I’d come up with ideas, do one, and then go work on the next new project. I really enjoyed doing Peter Porker. Steve was the guy who really set up the series. When I did it, I was just thinking of it as a one-shot. I’m glad the characters were strong enough to keep on going. I can’t claim any credit for the success of the series because Steve was the guy who really did all the heavy lifting— and, of course, Larry Hama, who was the editor for most of that stuff.”

Skeates “was doing stuff for Crazy and seemed a likely suspect,” Hama remembers. “Frankly, I couldn’t think of anybody else who could lend the right aura to it.”

Skeates had all but given up on writing comic books when he got the call to tackle writing Spider-Ham. “How did I get the job?,” Skeates says. “Truth be told, at that particular so-called moment within the vastness of my so-called career, I had actually flat-out quit comics, had summarily removed myself from the hustling insanity of all that over-the-top intense competition for the ‘privilege’ of writing for this character or that character, had (in fact) even moved out of the city, relocating my bemused and confused bulk to one of the absolute poorest counties in New York State, a place where life was cheap and where I figured I could live off my savings (for a while, at least) even as I was attempting to figure out what I was gonna do, what I really wanted to do, with the rest of my life! It was the ’80s, after all, and comic books had changed not just slightly but downright dramatically!

And they had changed for the worse as far as I was concerned!

“Considering that I had spent over 20 years writing for comics that had been aimed at the general public,” Skeates says, “comics that were sold in drug stores and grocery stores; I had had (for whatever it’s worth) an audience that I respected, an audience I was trying to expand, endeavoring to reach and titillate as many people as I possibly could, when all of a sudden comic-book shops came into being and the complexion of comics changed forever! To put it simply, suddenly we were no longer aiming our books at the general public; now we were shooting them toward those who hung out in comic-book shops: i.e., the fanboys!

True, these geeks were willing to pay through the nose for the sorts of comics they wanted, and therefore the price of comics suddenly increased incredibly, enabling there to be an improvement in the look (better quality paper, better printing, a greatly expanded color palette) even as the stories themselves got darker and darker, mainly (I figure) due to the higherups figuring that these were the sorts of stories our new fan base wanted.”

Skeates continues, “Unfortunately, they also stood as a type of story I had a damn hard time relating to, couldn’t get into, didn’t particularly enjoy at all. And, trying to write them, because now that’s what editors wanted me to write, was truly a struggle, with the dark matter, all that grim grime, I was now obligated to slosh through being so foreign to this correspondent that I could never be quite sure if I was hitting the mark or not! To say the least, writing comics had abruptly become far far more of a chore than it had ever been before! It was not a happy time! And that is perhaps all the explanation we need vis-a-vis my decision to get out, to seek employment elsewhere! Then, having finally successfully made my move, I suddenly received a phone call from Larry Hama, who (even as I was busy furnishing my new apartment, setting up a new home for myself there in Allegany County) had somehow been able to track down my whereabouts!

Bring on the Bad Guise The Buzzard and Bullfrog bother our hero on the Armstrong/Albelo cover to Spider-Ham #2 (July 1985). © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

6 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

“It seems, you see, that while I had been totally preoccupied (to say the least) with grappling with all sorts of life decisions, back in New York City Marvel had been deeply ensconced within the throes of devising something called Star Comics, a new subheading under the Marvel Comics insignia designed to appeal to a younger audience, and executive editor Tom DeFalco saw this new line as the perfect spot in which to reintroduce one of his favorite concepts: Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham! Now, most of the Star line looked like fugitives from Harvey Comics (you know, those famed Casper and Richie Rich purveyors)—the same bright and cutesy artwork, the same short and simple stories; the head editor [Sid Jacobson] of this line had (in fact) previously worked for Harvey! Spider-Ham (on the other hand) was pretty much the anomaly of the line, hardly in same Casper–like kiddie-comic class into which Top Dog, Planet Terry, and Royal Roy easily fit, yet far from being as oppressively grim and gritty as what the supposedly more adult Marvel Comics had become!

Instead Peter Porker fell somewhere in-between! The big question was, were there enough people extant within that particular neither-nor area who actually somehow wanted to buy comic books—you know, enough of them there to make Peter Porker profitable? An overwhelmingly large percentage of the creative personnel that worked for Marvel back then didn’t think so.”

WHO BETTER THAN STEVE SKEATES? Skeates continues, “Thus, Hama (who had been tapped

by DeFalco to edit this one Star comic) was having a freakin’ hard time finding anyone who’d be willing to write this book, especially considering that this was all unfolding during a period in which Marvel was offering a nice piece of change to those writers whose books really sold, and everyone ‘knew’ that Spider-Ham stood no chance at all of selling even modestly well! Furthermore, this whole situation was (in fact) made even worse (at least for Hama) by the fact that DeFalco had told Hama that if he (Hama) couldn’t find anyone else to write the series then he (DeFalco, who after all had created the character while also writing the very first Spider-Ham story that Marvel ever published) would do the job! No way did Hama want his boss (of all people!) to be (on this particular project) working under him—you can just imagine the sorts of problems that could cause! In other words, Hama was rather desperate, yet getting nowhere, but then he thought of me! I, after all, had previously done so much work for Hama that at one point I was actually making my living solely off of the work I was doing for Crazy magazine back when Larry was editing that total insanity!

And now, to get back to the phone call (because that’s mainly what we’re talking about here, isn’t it?), I daresay it’s no exaggeration whatsoever that Hama literally begged me to become the Spider-Ham writer!

“So, there I was—even though I had flat-out quit and even moved away from the city, I was back writing for comic books! In retrospect, though, I do feel that had I been offered any other series to write, I might well have balked! This one, though, was essentially not part of what was at that point in time going on with comics—the darkness, the fan-oriented stuff! It was instead a throwback, an homage (or at least I saw it that way, wanted to treat it that way) to the early days of Spider-Man! And, yes, indeed, I had high hopes that this baby was gonna be damn fun to write!

Skeates was no stranger to writing funny-animal comics. Working for Charlton and Gold Key, he got his fill as the scribe in charge of a zoo full of anthropomorphic characters.

“Spider-Ham was hardly the first funny-animal character whose exploits I had happily concocted,” Skeates says. “In the ’70s, I had worked on the Gold Key versions of such well known characters as Tweety and Sylvester, Bugs Bunny, and Underdog, while approximately within the same time frame I was both writing and drawing a series which concerned itself with the intellectual adventures of various schools of fish, a series of fish stories that made the scene within a couple of publications foisted upon the general public by Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach Productions. Certainly, my fish art was some of the crudest stuff ever to appear in comics, yet sitting there within (for example) a publication also featuring the work of Jim Starlin, Walt Simonson, and Howard Chaykin, my fish tales couldn’t help but suddenly be taken halfway seriously.

And it was around this same time that the late, great Steve Gerber was effectively smashing the reading public squarely in the face with something called Howard the Duck!

“Sure, Howard the Duck, though often hilarious, was not a funny animal—I daresay there’s general agreement upon that particular judgment; one might (in fact) more properly label this web-footed, cigar-chomping misfit a ‘serious animal’ or, even better yet, a ‘seriously disturbed animal’! Still, I do quite honestly believe that Gerber’s wacky creation (and its popularity) served as a basic impetus for all the various funny-animal characters that made the scene during the late ’70s on into the ’80s—Captain Carrot, Spider-Ham, maybe even the Ninja Turtles!

Howard had another effect as well—he caused a number of us writers to take funny animals more seriously, to see the potential of telling a serious story via the use of so-called funny animals! I, for one, was definitely following Gerber’s lead when I started making my Underdog stories more than merely kiddie fare, adding social commentary, making Underdog cosmically aware, even giving the poetry this canine hero spouted far more complexity than the usual mere couplets. Furthermore, from the outset, I was hoping to do something similar with Spider-Ham!” April Fools Issue

Making Bacon Writer Steve Skeates added satire to Peter Porker, which instead could easily have been an innocuous kiddie comic. From #2. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

© 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

•

BACK ISSUE • 7

THE ARTISTS

Superhero Satires (left) Take a gander at Steve Mellor’s Goose Rider, from Marvel Tails #1. (right) Spider-Ham meets the Bee-Yonder and gets a black suit in in Spectacular Spider-Ham #12 (Nov. 1986); art by Joe Albelo and Pierre Fournier. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Steve Mellor drew the cover to Marvel Tails #1 and wrote and drew the interior story of Goose Rider battling the evil Chainsaw. It was the start of something big for Mellor.

“I met Larry Hama at Marvel back in the 1970s,” Mellor writes in an e-mail interview with BACK ISSUE. “He was editing Crazy magazine and bought something I wrote and drew called ‘When Turkeys Ruled the Earth.’

I did some other stuff for Crazy after that, cover layouts, various story art (a pretty funny take-off on ‘The Cat in the Hat’ that Mike Carlin wrote), and a strip called ‘The Kinetic Kids,’ which was a flipbook thing. When Spider-Ham came about, I think I asked Larry if I could do the cover and wrote and drew the first backup story, ‘Goose Rider.’”

All of the artists for Spider-Ham were former Crazy magazine artists, Hama says, and he praised the work they did on the funny-animal superhero title.

“Steve Mellor is some sort of cartoon genius,” Hama says. “All the best hoo-ha guys at the office (like Bob Camp and Vince Waller) couldn’t wait for the next Mellor job to come in. We’d all stare at it and go, ‘How the heck does he do that?’”

“Steve wrote and drew a number of the backup stories,” Tom DeFalco adds.

Mark Armstrong, according to Hama, sent in samples to Crazy. “I got him to draw ‘Recondo Rabbit,’ which was in either Bizarre Adventures or Savage Tales.” [Editor’s note: It was the former.] “I liked his stuff right away,” Hama says. “Steve Mellor was a friend of a friend.

8 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

It was like, a ‘I know this guy who draws real good and needs a job’ sort of thing. His stuff blew me away from Day One. I got him doing ‘Kinetic Kids’ for Crazy and that is some classic gonzo stuff, I kid you not!

“Joe Albelo was a paste-up guy in the Marvel Bullpen when the offices were on Madison Avenue in midtown,” Hama says. “He had done a bunch of comic-strip parodies for Crazy, and he had a nice, clean style and he was right there in the office! Mark Armstrong lives in the Midwest, and he may still be doing stuff for small presses and indies. Steve Mellor went back to his first love, the theater. He did a brilliant turn off-Broadway in a one-man show about Ambrose Bierce called ‘Fierce Bierce.’ I have lost track of Joe Albelo. I liked Hulk Bunny’s haircut as delineated by Mark Armstrong.”

PLAYING FAVORITES In his regular series, Spider-Ham faced off against such menaces as Ducktor Doom, the Bull-Frog, the Buzzard, the King Pig, Hobgobbler, and Raven the Hunter, among many other parodies of Marvel’s villains. He also teamed up with heroes such as Captain Americat, Awful Flight, Deerdevil, the Fantastic Fur, Croctor Strange, the X-Bugs, and Iron Mouse. No Marvel property was safe! Even the Beyonder from Secret Wars was parodied as the Bee-Yonder.

Skeates doesn’t have a favorite character from his Spider-Ham stories, because they were all near and dear to his heart.

“Perhaps my favorite aspect of the Spider-Ham book was the number of characters I got to create, and, really now, ascertaining which one (or ones) is (or are) my favorite (or favorites) just doesnt seem to wash, seeing as I tend to have affection for them all!” Among those characters were a trio of kids, J. Jeremiah Jackal, Bunsen Bunny, and Upton Adam Stray. “The kids were the first ones I came up with,” Skeates says, “and I had a bit of help there, seeing as Larry wanted there to be three young trainees with one of them being J. Jonah’s nephew! He also wanted one to be a junior scientist and the other to be an inner-city kid. What was up to me was figuring out what animals those two that didn’t either one have to be a jackal were gonna be, while also devising names for all three of them! Hey, I do believe (if I do say so myself) that Upton Adam Stray is indeed an inspired moniker!

“It was in the second issue that I started devising villains, and, since the early issues of Spider-Ham were filled with villains who had fashioned themselves after animals (the Scorpion, the Rhino, etc.), I decided that in Spider-Ham there should be animals who were dressed up like other animals (the Buzzard who beneath his costume was really a possum, the Bull-Frog who was a frog dressed up as a bull)— even though this fit quite snuggly into the same ballpark as a pig that wore a spider suit, having more than one character doing this deal was perhaps still a bit too complicated a concept for something that was supposed to be a simple, straightforward, for-kids comic, yet I do nonetheless like that basic idea here, even though I only used it in that one issue. Then, on into such charming folks as Chief Sitting Duck, Captain Reno, the Senior Simians, the Terrible Terriers, and Winston Caribou!

“As for my favorite issue,” Skeates says, “that would have to be the seventh—a great Mark Armstrong cover, one of my better titles (“A Blitz in Time!”), a mad scientist, and who doesn’t love time-travel stories, especially when they take us to World War II where our hero gets to fight Nazis? Also, the backup story starring Deerdevil (the cloven-hooved mammal without fear) ain’t bad either!”

Indian brave, due to a bit of mystically induced reverse-aging, getting transformed back into an egg; as for my taking the joke even further by emphasizing (in the very last two panels of our tale) that One-Feather was still just an egg—that bothered Mark no end!”

After Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham #1–3, artist Mark Armstrong started missing issues. “I was somewhat out of the loop, living (as I was) some 300 miles away from Marvel headquarters, and therefore I really don’t know what problems Armstrong was having, why he didn’t do either the fourth or the sixth issue, why he started but didn’t complete the seventh issue,” Skeates says. “It could be simply that he was too painstaking and therefore too slow, even for a bimonthly book, but then again (as indicated within the previous paragraph) there was Mark’s problem with anything even slightly dark, which may have put him at odds with Hama, whose history (as writer for G. I. Joe and the editor of Savage Tales) would tend to put him on the dark side!

“In any event, Joe Albelo, who had been inking Armstrong’s pencils, took over both the pencils and the inks vis-a-vis issue #6, as well as finishing up the seventh ish, and, though he didn’t possess Armstrong’s individualistic vision, his unique pizzazz, Albelo was nonetheless a very worthy storyteller,” Skeates continues. “I had enjoyed what he had done with my five-page ‘Iron Mouse’ backup in the third issue and do indeed like where he took Spider-Ham as well! Not quite as dynamic as Armstrong, but so what? It was still great stuff!”

Skeates says, “And what can I say about Fred Hembeck? I had always enjoyed his stuff, his writing as well as his artwork, so it was indeed fun to finally get to work with the guy!” [Editor’s note: Fred Hembeck penciled Skeates’ “20,000-to-One Under the Sea!” in Spider-Ham #4 (Nov. 1985).]

“It wasn’t until a number of years later that I discovered that Hembeck had been rather a fan of my 1960s’ Charlton output,” Skeates reveals,

WORKING WITH THE ARTISTS Skeates raves when he speaks of the art of Mark Armstrong.

“The way I see it,” Skeates says, “Mark Armstrong was born to draw Spider-Ham—the bizarre angular simplicity of his characters, the immediate appeal of the body language of those characters, a nifty variety of panel shapes and sizes (yet never ever variety merely for variety’s sake; instead always in the service of more compelling, more easily understandable storytelling), and those numerous humorous bits he would toss in there, nifty bits that I can and will attest were not in the script that he was working from! Oh, sure, it took Mark a while to warm up to the series— his first issue starts right out with a dreadfully unappealing splash panel, and the further you delve into the tale, the more you notice a certain sameness, nearly everything shot from mid-distance, a sameness that suggests a certain lack of confidence! Totally forgivable, I’d say, especially considering how much he makes that second issue rock, and how (as a matter of fact) he somehow just kept getting better and better!

Interestingly enough, especially in light of the actuality that this particular correspondent quite enjoyed his scripting chores on Spider-Ham mainly (as noted earlier) due to the fact that this comic was nowhere near as grim and disconcerting as were a rather hefty majority of not just the rest of the Marvel line but of every comic book that was being published, do consider that Armstrong (obviously even a worse Pollyanna than I happen to be) would often actually complain about my scripts (are you ready for this?) being “too dark”! He was especially distressed by my not setting things straight anywhere within our third issue for that Duckowee Indian character known as One-Feather! As far as he was concerned, it was bad enough that I had shown, toward the beginning of our saga, this bumbling

Spider-Ham No More!

Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham #15’s cover (May 1987) parodied the iconic “Spider-Man No More!” cover from Amazing Spider-Man #50. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 9

“even crediting a certain Dr. Graves story of mine (illustrated by none other than Jim Aparo) with being the inspiration for a number of his own pieces! Hey, wow, it’s mutualadmiration time! Meanwhile, on Spider-Ham, I loved the way Fred broke the mold, giving the characters here what amounts to human proportions rather than employing the usual big-head, small-body, funny-animal pastiche!”

GONE SO SOON?

© 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

After only 8 issues of Peter Porker, The Specatcular Spider-Ham, Skeates left the book. Why? “I won’t deny that Larry and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on this series,” Skeates says, “yet there’s more to this than that! There’s also the fact that I (often my own worst enemy) rather agreed with Larry when it came to his assessment that I was taking Peter Porker in the wrong direction, that I was being way too verbose, filling the books with way too many words! Now, some 20 years later, rereading these books for the first time in a long time, I can only say, ‘What was I thinking back then?’ Sure, the wordiness is disconcerting at first, but this time around, after a while, like halfway through the second issue, I started to see my

own verbosity as definitely being a major part of the charm of the book! The setting for these adventures is after all another reality! And the way I now see it, this is not only a world where animals act like people; it’s also a world where everyone talks too much! Once you get used to it, all those words make this world seem even more different, even more unlike our world, more alien, and that somehow makes the whole experience even more fun! All in all, then, after a mere 23 years, I now realize that what this all adds up to is that way-back-when both Larry and I were wrong when we concluded that I wasn’t right for this book! It’s as simple as that!”

THE ARTIST/WRITER In addition to drawing a significant portion of the series, Steve Mellor even wrote several stories, including the origin of Spider-Ham. “The series was actually drawn in the beginning by Mark Armstrong, then Joe Albelo, who worked in the Marvel Bullpen,” Mellor says. “Joe drew the Spider-Ham stories I wrote except for the first one I wrote, which was drawn by Tony Salmons. I wrote and drew several of the backup stories and illustrated some that my brother, Mike, wrote. I wrote five of the main Spider-Ham stories (issues #8–9, 12, 15, and 16). Mike Carlin wrote a bunch, too.

I really enjoyed the writing. I also liked drawing the backup stories, too, although it’s a chore for me, especially inking, and, at the time, I was really learning as I went along.

“Writing and drawing my own stuff,” Mellor continues, “I would tie myself in knots telling myself I don’t know how to draw this or that. When I wrote scripts, I would hand in the scripts to Larry, who would then pass them on to the artist. I’d note in the script how many panels per page and give a description for the action in each panel with the accompanying dialogue/word balloons. I would also slip a character design into my scripts now and then.

I think I probably was hoping I could write stories for the series and then Larry asked me and Mike Carlin to write scripts—the necessity of keeping production on the book moving quickly being what it is. I did like writing for the book and looking back at some samples I found online, there was stuff I had forgotten about that made me laugh.

Larry still calls me about once a year to encourage me to write and draw stuff, but if I don’t have a venue for it, I am not much of a self-starter. Larry was a terrific boss and a mensch, his assistant Jim Owsley [now Christopher Priest] was a very funny guy, and Joe Albelo was a real sweetheart.

Those years were a blast even thought I was broke half the time. Marvel paid very quickly and Larry always took freelancers out for lunch. Marvel had Christmas parties back then and everybody got gifts and bonuses!”

In addition to funny-animal versions of the citizens of the Marvel Universe, the real world also inspired many parodies in Spider-Ham. “I’d try to come up with funny-animal variants of Marvel characters and real-life personalities (Mick Jaguar and Barbara Mandrill come to mind),” Mellor says,

From Marvel Tails to Marvel Tales Spider-Ham and the Punfisher battle Doctor Octopussycat in Marvel Tales #215 (Sept. 1988).

Original art signed by writer Michael Eury and penciler Alan Kupperberg; from the collection of Rich Fowlks. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

10 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

“and then stories would suggest themselves after that.

I don’t know that I followed funny-animal superheroes as a kid, but how could you avoid Mighty Mouse or Courageous Cat in the 1960s? I actually came up with and wrote Spider-Ham’s origin. It appeared later in the series and I thought it would be a funny idea to have him be a spider who is bitten by a radioactive pig rather than the other way around. The story is pretty twisted and subversive and I’m pretty proud of it. I see it referenced on a lot of Internet sites. I also gave J. Jonah Jackal and his newsboys superhero alter egos. It doesn’t seem that any of the continuity I came up with has been used with the character since the book was canceled, but that’s okay.

The villains, for the most part, were just funny-animal takeoffs on Marvel bad guys, so I didn’t feel I had to push their backstories so much. That said, you always wanted the characters and stories to stand on their own for readers who didn’t know the originals.”

Mellor adds, “The one thing I did was to give my Spider-Ham stories double titles like on the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. ‘Pigs Over Tokyo, or Kimono My House’ was one. ‘Edam and Weep, or The Gouda, The Bad, and The Ugly’ was another.”

THE GREAT CARLINI Mike Carlin, today a longtime DC Comics editor, wrote several of the Spider-Ham stories and reveals that the last story he wrote, which saw print in the series’ final issue #17 (Sept. 1987), was commissioned as an inventory story.

“I had written several issues of Spider-Ham before that last issue, and I believe it was written unconnected to any issue number,” Carlin says. “Series like that are easier to ‘stockpile’ stories for, since there is little or no continuity. I’m sure it wasn’t written as a ‘Grand Finale!’”

Carlin admits that he loves writing funny-animal stories. “Loved it and love it!” he says. “My natural tendency is to write humorous material … though in mainstream comics, that’s not really a place many folks can make a living these days. So I’ve been happy for my few places like Spider-Ham and Flintstones/Jetsons.

I also used to do little thumbnails to help visualize the story for myself before actually typing the scripts.

I pretty much thought up stories when asked for ’em by the editor and then I’d try to come up with what current pop-culture element besides superheroes could use some gentle ribbing (I think that last issue focused on cat versions of the rap group, the Fat Boys)!”

In comparing the writing of a funny-animal story to writing a regular superhero script, Carlin says they are “pretty different. Ideally, they both have beginnings, middles, and ends, but (even though we’re talking about flying people) superhero comics are more realistic!

Anything really does go in a Looney Tunes world!”

AND LO, THERE SHALL COME AN ENDING Neither Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham nor any of the other Star Comics line sold well in the United States, according to Tom DeFalco, but they sold very well overseas: “We were licensing this stuff like crazy overseas.

People sometimes wonder why we were doing two Heathcliff books and that was because we were bringing in a lot of money from Healthcliff—overseas! As long as the books broke even in the US, they were, as titles, extremely profitable. Most people don’t know that.

“My guess is that they probably put out as many copies of Marvel Tails as they did Marvel Tales [in the US],” DeFalco says. “Everything was over 100,000 [copies produced] at that time. If a comic book sold below 100,000, we would look at it in terms of canceling

it or taking it off the newsstand. We must have distributed a couple hundred thousand of that comic.”

But once Marvel pulled the plug on the Spider-Ham series, the character still had some life left in him after his final issue, #17 (Sept. 1987), hit the stands.

Jim Salicrup was editor of the Spider-Man line of titles when Spider-Ham was canceled. “I had nothing to do with the original Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham comic book,” Salicrup says, “but I did bring the character back, as a backup feature for a bunch of issues of Marvel Tales (not Marvel Tails) and an issue of What The--?! (featuring a parody of ‘Kraven’s Last Hunt’). It was fun working on the series.

“As the Spider-Man editor at the time, I wanted to play with all the Spider characters. I worked with Joe Albelo. Joe was always great to work with. He was known as ‘Mr. Funny’ in the Bullpen. I worked with artists such as Alan Kupperberg, a great cartoonist; Alex Saviuk; Bob McLeod; and, ultimately, Fred Hembeck, who suggested doing his Petey strip instead of April Fools Issue

Raven’s Last Hunt A famous SpiderMan storyline was lampooned in What The--?! #3 (Oct. 1988). Cover art by Alex Saviuk and Bob McLeod. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

•

BACK ISSUE • 11

“Pig Tale” Artist Mike Wieringo legitimized Peter Porker (sort of…) in the hero-hog-packed Ultimate Civil War: Spider-Ham one-shot (Mar. 2007). © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Spider-Ham. Oh, and one of the best writers I worked with on Spider-Ham was a fella named Michael Eury. Maybe you should find out whatever happened to that guy!”

“It was a drag when the Spider-Ham book was canceled,” Steve Mellor says. “After the series ended, I wrote three more Spider-Ham stories which appeared in serialized form in the back of [Marvel Tales]. I think Larry was gone from editing at Marvel around then and so any work there for me dried up. I did spot illustrations after that for a Sunday newspaper supplement called Family Weekly until they went out of business, then got work illustrating puzzles for Games magazine, then for some of the editors who left there and started a puzzle website. Bob Camp, who I met at Marvel, hired me to work on Ren and Stimpy for a little while. I wrote some plot outlines for them, two of which got produced: ‘Jerry the Belly Button Elf,’ for which I also did some character designs, and ‘Flod,’ which I also storyboarded and did the voiceover for. I haven’t cartooned professionally for awhile. I wouldn’t mind getting back into it somehow.”

Spider-Ham backups appeared in Marvel Tales issues #201–212, 214–219, 223–230, 233, 236, 237, 239, 240, and 247.

BUT, THAT’S NOT ALL, FOLKS! Peter Porker has appeared in recent years as a feature in Spider-Man Family, on an Amazing Spider-Man variant cover, and in a Civil War one-shot (which doesn’t fit into Spider-Man continuity) written by J. Michael Straczynski.

Tom DeFalco never really considered bringing Spider-Ham back during his tenure as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. “I wasn’t pushing for Spider-Ham to have his own book again or anything,” he laughs. But after he went back to freelance writing, DeFalco did bring back his creation.

“In Spider-Man Family, in issues #5 and 6, I created Swiney-Girl.

That came about because I spoke to Spider-Man editor Steve Wacker 12 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

and said, ‘Hey, in Spider-Man Family, have you ever thought of doing a Peter Porker story?’ And he goes, ‘No, not really. But why should we do a Peter Porker story? Why not Peter Porker’s daughter?’

“So I went back and tried to come up with a name, because SpiderHam works for Spider-Man, but it was a pain in the neck trying to come up with a name that would end up with Girl,” DeFalco, the co-creator and longtime writer of The Amazing Spider-Girl, says. “I’m kind of a goofball. As a writer, I like to do a lot of different types of things. I think that’s been lost over the years because I’ve been doing Spider-Girl for so many years that people think that’s all I do. Secretly, I’ve done Shrek, Shark Tales, Madagascar, and Monsters and Aliens for Titan Comics and then I do things for Moonstone, but people tend not to notice that other stuff. I love to do a variety of comics. I like to do funny animals, teenage humor, superheroes, Westerns, sword and sorcery.

“I had a lot of fun writing Spider-Ham. We were having fun.

Now, to a certain extent, Spider-Ham is still going with ‘Swiney-Girl.’

I think it’s cool when you create a character that sticks around.

Like with Spider-Girl, I thought it was just going to be a one-shot thing.”

Jim Salicrup says you can’t keep a good character down.

“The idea of a funny-animal version of Spider-Man is simply a fun idea,” Salicrup says.

“And hard to resist.”

Matewan, West Virginia, 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.

Fred Hembeck: a man who drives an Omnibus?

Or, like Galactus, a galactic menace that tried to destroy the Marvel Universe? I interviewed Fred to find out.

So, onward with hysterical Fred Hembeck!

– Richard A. Scott

by

Richard A. Scott conducted on August 6, 2009

RICHARD A. SCOTT: I’d like to ask about your professional associations. You did three pages of assistant work for Bob Layton (Iron Man #117, page 6, and Marvel Premiere #47, pages 11 and 14)…

FRED HEMBECK: Bob was the first person that I met, after I started my cartooning. After that I started doing the strips for Buyer’s Guide for Comics Fandom.

Back then I was working at a gas station booth. I didn’t pump gas, and I took money from people. I had a lot of time for drawing. I was drawing for [the fanzine] The Comic Reader.

This woman came up to the window and said, “Oh, you draw comics? My husband draws comics.

You probably know him … Bob Layton?” I said, “Oh, sure, I know Bob Layton.” She said, “Give me your phone number.” So I quickly wrote down my phone number and gave it to her. I didn’t hear from her for weeks.

Then, on one hot summer day—I was wearing just Bermuda shorts—there’s a knock at the door. It was Bob Layton, and his wife, and their baby daughter.

I grabbed a shirt and invited them in. I was so flabbergasted when I first met Mrs. Layton that I gave her the wrong phone number—we had just moved. Bob said he had seen my work that had been out a few months.

He asked if I was interested in becoming an inking assistant. Being a serious-style cartoonist was my original goal. I said, “Sure.” For a few weeks, I did work with Bob. Then Bob left town, so that was the end of my background-inking career.

SCOTT: Did you feel at the time that was the end of your fledgling career?

HEMBECK: This happened before I had anything published at Marvel or DC, with the exception of a letter in Iron Man. I started doing work in my thencartoony style. There were enough opportunities with that.

SCOTT: Who are your favorite artists, and why?

HEMBECK: The first people you see when you get into comics tend to make a big impression upon you.

For me, that would be Steve Ditko. I idolized his stuff because it was so individualistic. Then Kirby—he was everywhere in the Marvel books. He seemed to have so much energy. I loved Carmine Infantino’s design work—The Flash and “Adam Strange.” I marvel at it and think how clever and sophisticated it is. I like the humor of Little Lulu by John Stanley and Irving Tripp.

Bob Bolling on Little Archie, my favorite. I try to emulate Al Wiseman’s work on Dennis the Menace. Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger doing Superman. I wasn’t that fond of Gil Kane in the early ’60s. When he started inking his own material about ‘65–’66, in Green Lantern and in the “Hulk” in Tales to Astonish, I really liked those.

Neal Adams and Steranko, two favorites [of mine] growing up. I love the clean style of Johnny Craig and

Mid-Ohio Con ’09 Program Cover Convention booklet cover art reimagining the cover to Secret Wars #1 in the inimitable Fred Hembeck fashion.

Art © 2009 Mid-Ohio Con/Fred Hembeck. Characters © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 13

Beginnings: First published work: Iron Man #112 (July 1978), followed by background assists to Bob Layton on Iron Man #117 (Dec. 1978) and Marvel Premiere #47 (Apr. 1979)

Milestones: Hembeck books from Fantaco / DC comic strips for the Daily Planet pages in the ’70s and ’80s / Fantastic Four Roast (one of his all-time favorites) / Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe (and how!) / a lengthy run in Marvel Age magazine / “Zoot Sputnik” in ’Mazing Man / The Comic Reader / The Buyer’s Guide to Comic Fandom/The Comic Buyer’s Guide / The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus (2008, Image)

Works in Progress: Reprints of “Petey” strips in Spider-Man Family / upcoming new “Petey” strips / more of the same zaniness that you have come to expect from Fred Hembeck.

Cyberspace: www.hembeck.com / www.hembeck.com/More/ HembeckOmnibusInfoPage.htm / Also, look for Fred on Facebook, MySpace, and eBay!

fred hembeck

Wally Wood, two other favorites. Johnny Craig was a great writer, too; his EC stories are my favorite books.

SCOTT: Reading through the Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus, I discovered that as a kid you inherited a box of comic books.

Harvey’s Spooky was the first comic book you read.

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #7 (Sept. 1955) was your first DC, and Fantastic Four #4 (May 1962) your first Marvel. Any stories about that box?

HEMBECK: That box pre-dated the Marvels [that I read, actually]. A friend had brought them to school.

Jimmy Olsen was in that box—it was from 1956, before Mort [Weisinger took over as Superman editor].

It had Superman playing marbles on the cover— that’s unthinkable nowadays. It’s [the kind of material] I like to re-read now; the emotions are so heightened in there. Everyone is trying to trick somebody to fall in love with them, become a best friend, betray each other, become a man from the future; some wacky little side issue is going on in every story. They’re entertaining, they’re unrealistic, but they’re fun to read.

That stuff got me going; mainly Bizarro (from Superboy #68, Oct. 1958)—this absurd man talking like a baby, having a cracked face, and doing stuff backwards. I started buying Superman because of Bizarro.

It blossomed from there. When I was 12 or 13, I thinned out that collection (the only time!) and got rid of 85% of my funny comics (I was, ahem, too mature for them, y’see), saving some choice Archies, Barks duck comics, and Little Lulu. Sad Sack was the only Harvey Comic that survived—and that Spooky, long gone—I couldn’t tell you which issue it was. Wish I hadn’t done that.

SCOTT: I had a similar situation (thanks, Steve Cameron!). I got a box of 500 comics as a kid. Virtually every publisher back to the mid-’50s, early runs on the Silver Age books. The first thing I was excited by was Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961). I read FF #1 in 1969!

HEMBECK: I’m missing #1; I jumped in on #4— the cover caught me on that one.

The box also had a World’s Finest, but everything else was humor comics. It took me a while to graduate to capes.

SCOTT: Everyone knows your love of comics is almost without peer. How big is your collection? You cover everything from the inception of comics on, indicating your passion for the field.

HEMBECK: I’ve got most everything, Marvel and DC-wise, from 1961 on. I didn’t buy older comics as back issues, I sought out reprints. I have always been fascinated with the history of comics. My knowledge ends around 1990; I kept buying books up until 2000.

Nowadays, I don’t read new stuff, but enjoy Silver Age faves in deluxe editions. I have 130 long boxes, full.

From 1980 to 1996, Marvel and DC sent me comps.

What I know about Marvel Comics now, I read on the Internet. I don’t read the new stuff. I do keep up, I’m curious to hear about the developments without reading the stories. I’d actually plunk down some money if Brother Voodoo was in his own comic.

[Author’s note: Since this interview, Brother Voodoo— as Doctor Voodoo—now has his own comic, a New Avengers spin-off, which debuted in the Fall of 2009!]

Daddy’s Got a Neat Box… © 2010 ???

…Little Freddy likes to read all night!

Hembeck’s Little Freddy origin story. © 2010 Fred Hembeck.

14 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

Across the Universes (above) Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe one-shot (July 1989). (above right) Two of Hembeck’s Daily Planet strips. (below right) Marvel’s first family gets squiggly kneecaps on Fred’s 1994 takeoff of the cover to Fantastic Four #4; original art courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

Marvel Universe and Fantastic Four © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. Daily Planet stirps TM & © DC Entertainment.

SCOTT: Did your cross-dressing Fred caricature come from Monty Python? What’s particularly amusing is your Daily Planet strip where Robin becomes “Robin the Boy Wonder Woman”!

HEMBECK: I’m not a Python fan. I just think men in dresses are funny! That Daily Planet is a favorite.

SCOTT: Your humor was influenced by stuff you watched on TV. HEMBECK: I watched a lot of comedies on television as a kid, except for things like the Adventures of Superman.

Grimjack #29 (Dec. 1986) had a “Munden’s Bar” story I did. I plopped Lou Grant and Ted Baxter from The Mary Tyler Moore in there. I didn’t name them, but you could tell who it was. That’s another favorite.

SCOTT: Let’s talk about the one-shot Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe (FHDTMU). It underwent several renovations before it was published. It was first mentioned in Marvel Age #28 (July 1985), then in Comics Interview #22 (1985), and later in Marvel Age #76 (July 1989), at the time it was actually published.

HEMBECK: It was initially 48 pages and got shaved to 32. Those extra pages starred [former editor-in-chief]

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 15

Roasted Nuts (above) The Hembeck-driven Fantastic Four Roast (May 1982) featured art by many Marvel stars. (right) Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #86 (Jan. 1984) was not a pleasant experience for Fred. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Jim Shooter, who [was by then gone] from Marvel.

Marvel wouldn’t publish a book about an ex-employee.

That orphaned the framing story. They then decided they could publish the interior with new pages. I liked the framing story more than the interior material. I was never comfortable with killing the characters.

SCOTT: The two framing stories changed the content of the book.

Then there was Fred Hembeck $ell$ the Marvel Universe (Oct. 1990), which appeared to be a follow-up to FHDTMU. Instead it was a “best of” collection from your Marvel Age material, including five new pages where Brother Voodoo was prominently featured.

HEMBECK: At a convention, Jim Salicrup came up and said Marvel wanted to publish a collection of Marvel Age strips as a reprint volume. He said, “Go review it and put it together.” I looked over the old stuff and picked what I liked—we couldn’t use licensed material. Then I did the additional pages. Even if the book did suffer, because the strips were meant to be centerfolds— the artwork would creep up into the spine.

16 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

SCOTT: You drew The Spectacular Spider-Man #86 (Jan. 1984). When I heard about it, I rushed out to buy a copy. Any stories about that issue?

HEMBECK: Not the happiest of stories. Bill Mantlo was instrumental for getting me into comics, as he printed my Iron Man letter [that later opened doors for me into the industry]. We did a story together with no words that’s in the Omnibus, a story he gave me the plot for.

We tried to get it into Epic magazine, but it didn’t go.

He gave it to me and I published it. He’s also the one that got me in that issue of Spectacular Spider-Man. He sent me a minimal plot to work on; it was a couple paragraphs. I wasn’t used to working with other people’s material, especially fight scenes.

There’s a sequence where he had Spider-Man and Human Fly go down to the printing presses and fight, and I’m thinking “That’s all the instruction I get?”

What I turned in was not to their liking. Bill calls and says, “Geez, what’s the matter with you? I told everyone I thought that you’d do better stuff than this.” I told Bill I could have used a bit more direction there. “Ah, all right I’ll have to rewrite it.” I said, “I would appreciate that.”

He re-wrote it begrudgingly, I redrew it. To this day I’m not really happy with the fight scenes. I would love to do a sequel to that book, maybe working Dr. Doom’s time machine? I don’t know if that will ever come about.

SCOTT: I wanted to ask about the Fantastic Four Roast (May 1982).

HEMBECK: That’s my absolute favorite, the book I am most proud of. Jim Shooter called me; Marvel wanted to do this roast book. He assigned a writer, identity forever unknown to me, who called and suggested I do it.

Marvel had me do layouts, due to the art being done by artists who were working on the characters’ books at the time. I did layouts, but I didn’t do the dialogue— in some cases, I didn’t know what the jokes were going to be! So the pages came in out of order—it was a giant

Hey, Where’s Mr. E? (above) Who else but Fred Hembeck could combine Mr. T and Steve Ditko’s Mr. A as a duo? (left) A page from a “Petey” story originally published in Untold Tales of Spider-Man ’97.

Misters T & A strip © 2010 Fred Hembeck. Petey © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

puzzle. I would get pages from the different artists. There would be a humorous sequence on them, in some cases I kind of knew where the jokes were going. I really liked the way whole thing came out.

Frank Miller and John Byrne actually gave me their pages!

Frank Miller’s is framed on my wall. I’m about the only guy that can say that he did layouts for Frank Miller.

SCOTT: What about the work you did for Stan Lee Media that’s never seen the light of day?

HEMBECK: It was back in the early ’90s. I wasn’t expecting a call [from Stan Lee Media], but it did come one afternoon. They were trying to create a cartoon series. Stan wanted to do what [later became] the premise for The Incredibles, 14 years before The Incredibles. He asked me to come up with designs for the family and their grandfather. He told me which powers each would have. I was asked to fax them in.

SCOTT: [doing Rob Schneider impression] Frederino! The Fredmeister— making faxes! Sorry, I couldn’t resist. [laughter] HEMBECK: He picked the designs he liked best. One afternoon [my wife and I] were heading out to a Chinese restaurant; she was eight months pregnant with our daughter. Stan called and said, “Okay, we’re going to work on the preliminary character sketches.” I talked on the phone [with him] for about 40 minutes. We’re batting ideas around for each character, how they would be in action, their personalities and superpowers. He’d throw something to me, I’d throw it back and he’d be really enthusiastic about it. I drew them up and he really liked them, then he couldn’t sell the thing. He wanted Marvel to publish a Captain Super [the concept’s name] one-shot so that they could procure the property. I was to be involved and it never happened. This [character design] gig lasted for maybe two weeks. The whole thing lasted maybe three months or so as a viable possibility, which never happened.

SCOTT: That’s a shame.

HEMBECK: I know it’s the coolest thing that happened to me that no one knows about. I stayed in touch with Stan. In 2000 I got a call from Jim Salicrup; [he said] Stan wanted me to do a weekly column for Stan Lee Media. I did several strips for computers featuring cartoon Fred commenting on current events. Then Jim said Stan changed his mind, he wanted the strips [to be] about various Stan Lee Media properties, and so I did a couple of those, too. Then I told Jim, “We have a Disney World vacation scheduled.” Jim said, “Go have a good time.” When I came back the whole thing was down the tubes and the strips were never published. I was paid better than anything that I had ever done—for the amount of work that I did.

That made up for never getting paid for Captain Super. Later, Stan graciously did an intro to the Omnibus. He’s also tried to plug my stuff over the years. It’s so cool that Stan Lee asked to work with me.

SCOTT: Do you tend to have to do a lot of research for your strips?

HEMBECK: In the late ’70s, early ’80s, a lot of that was in my head.

In the ’90s I’d go and re-read an old comic or two. When I returned to the Comics Buyer’s Guide in the late ’90s, they had theme issues.

I’d go double-check, occasionally they asked for something that I had to look for. Sometimes it was something unfamiliar, so I’d have to do a little bit of research.

SCOTT: Your trademark [knee] swirls are not unlike Ms. Buxley’s belly button from Beetle Bailey.

HEMBECK: I needed to decorate the sparse-looking artwork. The first strip in the Omnibus doesn’t have the swirls, the second one does.

I probably got it from Dennis the Menace, where it’s on his elbows.

It might’ve been Beetle Bailey; Don Martin’s work is where I might’ve seen it. I stuck with it and people just kind of identified with it.

SCOTT: In Marvel Age, particularly, you tended to be like Nostradamus, doing stuff for fun that Marvel later did for real.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 17

Watch It, Shellhead!

Fred Hembeck, inked by his interviewer Richard A. Scott, kindly produced this ultra-cool illo for this interview.

Thanks, gents!

Art © 2010 Fred Hembeck and Richard A. Scott. Characters © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

© 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

In issue #93 (Oct. 1990), Brother Voodoo becomes an Avenger, and in #125 (June 1993), you have SpiderMan 2099 meeting Spider-Man before that actually happened in print.

HEMBECK: I guess I’m Nostradamus with squiggles.

SCOTT: In issue #46, you try to meet Steve Ditko.

Have you?

HEMBECK: Yes and no. No, I haven’t met him, but there is one story: I was visiting DC’s offices, one of the rare times I was there. I went with Joe Staton. Joe had business to discuss with [editor] Jack C. Harris. Jack asked, “Would you mind waiting out in the lobby?” I said, “Sure.” So I’m sitting in the lobby staring into space.

A couple people walked [in] and back out. Joe’s meeting lasted maybe 15 minutes and they came out to get me. Jack then said, “Did you see him?” I said, “What do you mean?” “Ditko came in! He came into our office and went back out again. He walked right past you!” Then I go, “Oh, man, I was staring into space, and not paying attention” So yeah, I saw Ditko, but it was a blur.

SCOTT: In Marvel Age #15, Jim Starlin has a bag over his head. In the Omnibus, you have cartoon Fred being offered to die in your CBG strip like the phone-in Batman promotion deciding if Robin lived or died [during Starlin’s stint writing Batman, in 1988 and 1989]. Jim Starlin shows up and kills you, bag in tow.

HEMBECK: That was Jim’s doing. That Marvel Age strip was about [Marvel’s former imprint] Epic’s Dreadstar, [by Starlin]. There were intros on the inside front cover (Goodwin-esque). He did the bag there, I just carried it over. Years later, the CBG wanted to do this promotion, “should we should kill Fred or should we not kill Fred,” based on the Batman promotion. Waiting for the okay to be shot

18 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

or not, I asked Jim, “Would you be willing to do this part?” He graciously did it when I asked. He put the photo of himself in, with the bag on. I followed Jim’s lead. I thought it would be apropos, since he killed so many other characters.

SCOTT: What do you do when you’re not doing comics?

HEMBECK: I watch TV. [laughs] I do stuff with my daughter. Lynn, my best friend [and wife], being supportive of my work, helps with my website. I listen to music, go shopping. I’m kind of a dull guy.

SCOTT: You’re nothing like cartoon Fred? Your life is pretty much as shown in your strip in Marvel Age #35 (Feb. 1986)?

HEMBECK: Not exactly. I’m a wiseguy, making with the jokes, outside of that not so much.

SCOTT: You did a Batman “Bat-Bat” Daily Planet strip in 1981 (World’s Finest #274, Dec. 1981).

Bat-Bat was a character in 1987s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures TV cartoon. Does John Kricfalusi owe you royalties?

HEMBECK: Call my lawyer!

Comic artist and writer RICHARD A. SCOTT has followed Fred Hembeck’s impressive body of work since the fateful Iron Man #112 (the joke is, he didn’t realize it was Fred’s first, at first!). He is currently writing for several of TwoMorrows’ publications and has been an inker for AC Comics’ Femforce since issue #149 (limited signed copies available at his website, http://home.wavecable.com/ ~richardscott/, or get one at www.accomics.com). Richard has several comics projects currently in development. He wishes to thank his longtime friend Andy Mangels for helping with research materials.

by

Al Nickerson

[Editor’s note: Normally, BACK ISSUE stays put in its Bronze Age backyard, but our “April Fools” issue just begged for the inclusion of one of comics’ most subpar heroes, Forbush-Man! Al Nickerson’s look back at Forbush-Man’s history starts in the late Silver Age, normally the neighborhood of our friend Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego magazine—but quickly brings us home to our BI era. And Roy the one-time “Boy” has his own humor comic issue of AE in the works, with lots of Not Brand Echh material, coming in issue #95 in July 2010!]

THE SUPERHERO SCHLEMIEL What is a “revoltin’ development”? What is “absurd”?

What is “insane”? Here’s a hint: He also wears red long underwear, a kitchen pot for a helmet, and galoshes, t’boot. Now, if your answer is “Forbush-Man,” then you wouldn’t be wrong.

Don’t believe me? Then check out Jack Kirby’s cover to Not Brand Echh #1 (Aug. 1967).

Although Forbush-Man originally appeared on the cover to Not Brand Echh #1, his alter ego, Irving Forbush, was first mentioned in 1955. Stan “the Man” Lee recalls that “years ago, I wrote and edited a magazine called Snafu. For the contents page, I borrowed a line from The Saturday Evening Post which had printed, on its contents page, ‘Founded by Benjamin Franklin.’ Just for fun, I decided to use that on the Snafu contents page, but I’d use a funny name instead of Franklin’s.

For some reason, I dreamed up the name ‘Irving Forbush’—and lo, a legend was born!”

Welcome to the Marble Universe Detail from artist Marie Severin’s cover to Not Brand Echh (NBE) #8 (June 1968), featuring Forbush-Man. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 19

Forbush Firsts (below) Artists Jack Kirby and Mike Esposito provided our first glimpse at Forbush-Man on the cover of NBE #1 (Aug. 1967). (below right) Issue #5 featured ForbushMan’s origin. Cover

by Marie Severin. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

WHO SAYS A COMIC BOOK HAS TO BE GOOD??

A legend, indeed.

In the late 1960s, Forbush-Man often appeared in Marvel Comics’ Not Brand Echh. Using similar humor to that of MAD magazine, Not Brand Echh was a parody of the publisher’s own Marvel Universe.

Where did the idea of Not Brand Echh come from?

Writer extraordinaire Roy Thomas was an associate editor as well as a writer on Not Brand Echh, and says: “I believe Not Brand Echh came out of a lunch Stan Lee, Gary Friedrich, and I had circa 1967... may have been Gary who first brought it up. Which would be funny if true, since Stan had written lots of parody comics over the years … and I was a far bigger fan of the old MAD comics than Gary was.”

If Not Brand Echh was a 1960s comic book, then what was a “Brand Echh”? Stan Lee is able to supply the answer: “I started the Not Brand Echh series because I had been referring to DC Comics as ‘Brand Echh’ in my columns and I figured it would be fun to use that

20 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

name on a mag—and, of course, the only logical name for such a mag would be Not Brand Echh!”

Instead of the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, and Spider-Man, Not Brand Echh featured characters like the Echhs-Men, the Fantastical Four, the Inedible Bulk, Scaredevil, and Spidey-Man. Not Brand Echh even spoofed characters from Marvel’s main competitor, DC Comics, by using such characters as Stuporman, Gnatman and Rotten, Wotta Woman, Green Lampburn … well, you get the idea.

How did Marvel feel about making fun of themselves?

“We took to it like a duck to water,” says Thomas.

“After all, comic-book heroes are mostly inherently ridiculous, so why not make fun of them? But I probably enjoyed as much or more making fun of other companies’ heroes.”

Was there any feedback from Brand Echh … umm, I mean, DC Comics, concerning the mocking of their characters in Not Brand Echh? Thomas doesn’t believe so: “No, except that issue #7 with Stuporman on the cover was the first one that didn't sell well … and I know that Stan (and, I believe, Martin Goodman) suspected DC of leaning on the distributor to hurt distribution.

But that may have been only a coincidence.”

The origin of the Frantic Neighborhood Forbush-Man was chronicled in the classic Not Brand Echh #5 (Dec. 1967). “The Origin of … Forbush-Man” by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby posed a simple question: “Who is this fearless, fighting fanatic—this friendly, neighborhood non-entity in the frantic fright-helmet??”

Well, we soon found out. Irving Forbush once worked in the offices of Marvel Comics, um … I mean, Marble Comics. Honest Irv did all of the lame-o jobs around the Marble office that no one else wanted to do … like cleaning out the broom closet, feeding Lockjaw, or being the Red Skull’s sparring partner.

Still, Irving Forbush longed for something better.

He dreamed of being a superhero. Irving lived with his

pipe-smoking, broom-swinging, dictatorial Auntie Mayhem. Things changed for Irving after Auntie Mayhem clobbered him on the noggin with a kitchen pot. Forbush thought that the pot looked stylish.

He quickly added some long underwear, galoshes, a cape, and, as the saying goes, “the rest is history.”

Even though Irving Forbush never received any respect, it was a different situation for his alter ego— well, at first, anyway. Once the powerful Juggernut was defeated by “the awesome might of Forbush-Man” in Not Brand Echh #5, all of the remaining supervillains in town were fearfully turning themselves into the police. Now, how’s that for respect? But the respect didn’t last long.

In “What Price Forbush-Man?” from Not Brand Echh #8 (June 1968), Forbush-Man decided that he wanted to join a superhero team. The Way-Out Wonder tried to become a member of the Revengers in “This Fan—This Forbush?,” but things didn’t go so well after battling Dang the Conqueror. Forbush-Man tried, but failed, to become an agent of S.H.E.E.S.H. in “And the Dragon Cried … Forbush!” And, the Echhs-Men wouldn’t take Forbush-Man, either, in “Beware the Forbush-Man, My Son!” The legendary Gene Colan penciled “This Fan— This Forbush?” “I remember loving the opportunity to cartoon,” recalls Colan of his time on Not Brand Echh.

“Not Brand Echh was a riot and I had fun. I have no recollection of working with the other [creators] on the book because we all worked independent of one another. Except for Stan, at that time, we all worked from our homes, us freelancers.”

Thomas remembers working with Gene Colan on Not Brand Echh: “Working with Gene was always a delight, and he had a fine feel for parody stories.”

In Not Brand Echh #13 (May 1969), the very last issue of Not Brand Echh, in a titanic tale titled “The Return of … Forbush-Man,” the very last story to appear in Not Brand Echh, Forbush-Man fought the sinister Strangie. And that, truly, was “the living, ever-lovin’ end” of Not Brand Echh.

Why did the series come to an end? Here’s what Stan Lee tells me: “Honestly, all I remember is I loved writing it but didn’t have time to write much after the first issue and was jealous of all the other lucky writers who got to write scripts for the subsequent stories.”

Thomas also has fond memories of the book: “Yeah, I miss Not Brand Echh … even though its pages took me twice as long to write as most other pages, so that it was kind of a money-losing proposition for me.

After all, I had to write the stories at night or over the weekends, so when pages took longer, I got less other things done … like a private life.

“I liked the ending of the one where I wrote Stan coming in and finding Forbush in the office,” adds Thomas. And that would be Roy Thomas’ story “The Return of … Forbush-Man.”

Bottom of the Heap (top) Forbush-Man’s origin in NBE #5 featured Jack Kirby layouts finished by Tom Sutton. (right) Original Gene Colan/John Tartaglione art from “This Fan—This Forbush?” in NBE #8, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 21

You Can’t Keep a Good Forbush-Man Down (left) Forbush-Man corner boxes from the covers of Marvel Age #16, 23, and 28. (below) The conclusion of Forbush-Man’s guest-shot with Spider-Ham in Marvel Tales #211 (May 1988). © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

THE OFFICIAL MARVEL NEWS MAGAZINE Forbush-Man returned in the 1980s as a mascot for Marvel Age, Marvel Comics’ news publication.

Marvel Age was a comic-book-sized editorial magazine featuring articles and promotional material for Marvel.

The book was published from 1983 to 1994. Forbush-Man often appeared on the covers and back covers to “The Official Marvel News Magazine.”

A MARVEL TAIL In Marvel Tales #211 (May 1988), Forbush-Man made a guest appearance in a backup story written by BACK ISSUE’s very own Ye Ed, Michael Eury. In “Enter Forbush-Man! or Trapped in a World He Never Made!,” Forbush-Man was literally knocked into the universe of Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. The two heroes joined forces to defeat the vile Ironing Boar.

Whose idea was it to have Forbush-Man appear in the story? Eury explains all: “Mine, as I recall.

Editor Jim Salicrup let me do whatever I wanted with those Spider-Ham tales, which I appreciate since they were my very first comics scripts. There was only so far you could go with the superheroes-as-animals gags (says the guy who gave the world the Punfisher and Doctor Octopussycat), and I was looking for a different type of character as a guest star. Forbush-Man seemed a perfect fit.

“I was a grade-school kid when Not Brand Echh was published, and appreciated its humor (although some of the more sophisticated remarks flew over my head at the time),” adds Eury.

THE MARVEL MAG OF MIRTH AND MAYHEM!!

In the early 1990s, Forbush-Man made several appearances in Marvel’s parody comic book What The--?!.

It was a very similar comic to Not Brand Echh, but not nearly as good.

With What The--?! #8 (July 1990) and “Return of the Forbush-Man,” the Meshugana Marvel stormed the offices of Marble Comics to demand an appearance in the pages of What The--?! He got his wish, of course.

What The--?! #12 (May 1991) told the tale of Forbush-Man in the Ravaged Land in a story titled, umm … “Forbush-Man in the Ravaged Land.” In What The--?! #20 (Aug. 1992), Forbush-Man, Peter Porker (the Spectacular Spider-Ham, don’t ya know), Milk and Cookies, and Wolverina (don’t ask) teamed together in “An Infinity Wart Crossover” to battle Negative Forbush-Man (a twisted, evil version of Forbush-Man).

To make some easy dough at the races, Forbush-Man traveled back in time in “Salem’s Pot” in What The--?! #22 (Oct. 1992). Two stories featured Forbush-Man in What The--?! #23 (Nov. 1992). First, Forbush-Man taught readers “How to Draw Other Comics the Marble Way.” Then, we saw a muscle-bound, gun-toting Forbush-Man save Captain America from 22 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

More Forbush-Man (left) John Byrne provided a beefier Forbush-Man on the cover of What The--?! #8 (July 1990). (right) Don’t search the back-issue bins for this first issue— it’s actually a splashpage spoof by Aaron Loprestri from What The--?! #20 (Aug. 1992). © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

the villainous Tokyo Ethel in “What If Forbush-Man Were a Real Superhero?”

The Forbush-Man tales from What The--?! seemed uneventful. They paled in comparison to the greatness of Not Brand Echh. Although, I did find funny the line from What The--?! #22 about how mutant powers were “the greatest sales gimmick in the history of product marketing!”

FORBUSH-VISION!?!

I’m not quite sure, but it looked as if Forbush-Man appeared in Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. #9 (Dec. 2006) and 10 (Jan. 2007). However, this bizzaro version of Forbush-Man wasn’t the Forbush-Man that I know.

This Forbush-Man was a superpowered villain who became so distraught over people laughing at his helmet that he turned evil. Thankfully, this demented Forbush-Man was killed after using his “Forbush Vision.”

Perhaps this Forbush-Man was some deranged, warped version from some alternate universe? Or maybe this was just another example of someone soiling fun superheroes.

Has anyone else read this tale of a twisted Forbush-Man? Not Michael Eury: “No! I didn't know that! Poor bizarro Forbush-Man…” Nor Roy Thomas: “Nope. I mercifully missed that one.”

WHAT PRICE FORBUSH-MAN? The importance of Forbush-Man can never be underrated.

The Famous Forbush has had an enormous impact on the comic-book industry, and on those that create comics. Don’t believe me? Well, here’s what Michael Eury has to say about how Forbush-Man has influenced his work: “Not at all, really, but I am fond of wearing cookware on my head.”

Umm … let’s ask someone else…

“As far as Forbush-Man goes, I first read Forbush-Man in Not Brand Echh,” says Greg Hyland (famed cartoonist

and creator of Lethargic Lad). “In the early 1980s, you could pick up Silver Age books pretty cheap, so I managed to get a whole collection of Not Brand Echh.

It was kind of my first introduction to the fact that superheroes could also be funny. I always liked MAD magazine, but now here was something making fun of superheroes. Forbush-Man was great, and a pretty big influence on Lethargic Lad: little guy, doesn't do too much, has a letter on his chest…”

It seems like the days of Not Brand Echh and characters like Forbush-Man are long gone. There aren’t many fun, or even funny, superhero comic books being published today. Would it suit comics better if there were? Hyland thinks so: “Well, if you asked me, I'd say that there probably would be no Lethargic Lad if it wasn’t for Not Brand Echh. Not Brand Echh, and to a lesser degree normalman and Megaton Man, showed me that you could have funny superheroes. So there!”

“As comics content has matured, most readers have no sense of humor when it comes to the medium,” observes Eury. “That’s too bad. (I miss the Inferior Five, too.)”

Roy Thomas shares his insights, as well: “I've no thought about comics today, but I seem to recall paging through a few issues of What The--?! some years back, and that looked like the artists and writers were having fun, too.”

In a time when many superheroes are all grim and gritty, when many superheroes act more like supervillains, I like to think that somewhere out there … in a city … Forbush-Man still faces front.

AL “INK-BOY” NICKERSON is a comic-book inker for Archie Comics. Al is also the self-publisher of Nihilist-Man and His Amazing Friends #1 (www.nihilistman.com).

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 23

®

When Ambush Bug debuted in DC Comics Presents #52 (Dec. 1982) like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus (okay, more like a belch from the mouth of a drunk at midnight), his impact was not particularly groundbreaking.

The character was basically a villain whose mission was to cause trouble and mischief in a Superman/Doom Patrol team-up. But within two years, Ambush Bug had been transformed into one of the most innovative, hilarious, and irreverent characters in mainstream comics. He frequently broke not only the fourth wall (talking directly to the reader), but nearly every comic-book convention his creators could imagine (or at least get away with).

After appearing in several backup stories in Action Comics from 1984 to 1985, Ambush Bug went on to star in two limited series (Ambush Bug and Son of Ambush Bug) and several one-shot specials. After a 16-year hiatus, Ambush Bug returned to his own series in Ambush Bug: Year None (2008). The two men who guided the character through most of these misadventures, Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming, recently talked with BACK ISSUE about the ups and downs of loving the Bug. – Alex Boney ALEX BONEY: Thanks for doing this on Labor Day. I didn’t realize it when I first asked you to do the interview today, but Keith pointed out that it’s a holiday.

KEITH GIFFEN: Everyone’s out doing sh*t. It’s not like we have anything better to do. The fact that we’re all at home speaks volumes about our social lives.

ROBERT LOREN FLEMING: Hey, it’s 9:00 in the morning here, so I’ve still got the full day ahead of me.

GIFFEN: And your great plans are…? [laughter] So, what are we doing here? Are we just going to babble?

BONEY: Sort of. I have some questions about Ambush Bug lined up. As befits the character, there aren’t really any parameters for it. It’s just us talking about the Bug. And I guess it’s timely, because we’ve got the sixth issue of Ambush Bug: Year None coming up … at some point, right?

FLEMING: Actually, not.

GIFFEN: No. FLEMING: The sixth issue will never come out.

GIFFEN: The sixth issue won’t come out, but the seventh issue will.

BONEY: Well, let’s start back at the beginning before we get to the end. I’m having an issue with continuity. In Ambush Bug: Year None #1, Batgirl says Sue Dibny is her mother. This can’t possibly be true. Would either of you care to clarify?

GIFFEN: Why couldn’t it be true? Um … okay, Bob, you’re the one who filled that one in.

FLEMING: It is true. If it’s in the comics, then it’s true.

Let’s Get Physical Actually, let’s not. A Jane Fonda fitness spoof from Ambush Bug #1 (June 1985). Art by Keith Giffen and Bob Oksner, with words by Robert Loren Fleming.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

24 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

by

Alex Boney

conducted September 7, 2009

GIFFEN: That’s right. And as for continuity, my stance on continuity is pretty well known. And that is: What is this continuity you speak of?

FLEMING: We published an issue of Ambush Bug— issue #3 of the original miniseries—called “The Continuity Game,” and that was our take on continuity: It’s a con.

BONEY: No, the question was a joke. You guys are off the hook for continuity.

GIFFEN: Ambush Bug is a book that—I guess to put it harshly—sort of spits in the face of continuity. And yet, oddly enough, when we do Ambush Bug, we find ourselves fascinated with DC’s history—especially the history they would like everyone to forget. If we were over at Marvel, we’d be doing rips on Hercules tying a giant chain around Manhattan Island and pulling it back into place. Those are the things that fascinate us about comics, and they tend to worm their way into Ambush Bug. Ambush Bug is the guy who says, “Hey, c’mere, I want to show you something.” And then he lifts up the corner of the rug and shows you all the dirt swept up underneath.

BONEY: Seriously, though, what’s the super-secretclassified origin of Ambush Bug? How did you guys come up with the character?

FLEMING: We thought him up.

GIFFEN: His secret origin is that we thought him up, and then we drew him, and then we wrote the word balloons, and then DC published it.

BONEY: All true on a practical level. Let me try again—better this time.

In DC Comics Presents #52, Keith, you did the pencils.

But did you create and write the character in that issue too?

GIFFEN: No, Ambush Bug was created when I was sitting around in [editor] Julie Schwartz’s office.

He was gassing on about a DC Comics Presents story he wanted me to do with Superman and the Doom Patrol. This was when Paul Kupperberg was writing Doom Patrol. And I just burped out the name “Ambush Bug,” which had been rattling around in my head. After that, I just sort of made it up as I went along. I put him in the costume and gave him a set of abilities that … well, we ditched pretty fast. Paul Kupperberg provided the writing in that issue. He dialogued my plot and pencils. The second issue with Ambush Bug was another issue of DC Comics Presents [#59], which had the Legion of Substitute Heroes in it. I provided the plot for that one and Paul dropped in the dialogue.

FLEMING: That issue is the only Ambush Bug story that I wish I had written. That was pretty damned good.

In the first one, he was just a villain. It wasn’t really the character. The one that most had the Ambush Bug spirit before I came along was the issue with the Legion of Substitute Heroes. That one still holds up really well.

GIFFEN: When Bob and I pulled the character into the back of Action Comics, what he was going to be about started to crystallize.

BONEY: Like Bob said, he started out as a villain.

Then he tried his hand at being a hero because he was inspired by Superman, but it never really took. Was he

originally intended to be more than a villain or a prankster figure like Mxyzptlk?

GIFFEN: He was a throwaway character. He was meant to be a villain in that one issue, and then I’d move on to something else that would hopefully net me a couple bucks. The fan response was such that Julie said, “Let’s bring him back.” And then, when the issue with the Legion of Substitute Heroes came out, the fan and reader response was such that Julie offered me the back of Action Comics. It was a choice between Ambush Bug and Airwave. I think he made the right choice. [laughter] BONEY: Bob, how did you get pulled into the project?

FLEMING: I was the proofreader at DC at the time.

During that period, before I left the job to write Thriller, Keith and I became friends. When I first got there, part of my duties was to return the artists’ original artwork.

They used to come into my office to collect their artwork, and I wanted to keep them in the office so that I could get to talk to them and make friends with them. I found an ashtray that was in my desk drawer when I got there.

It was huge—the size of a hubcap. I stuck that thing way out on the front corner of my desk, as close to the door as I could, right in front of a chair that they could sit in.

April Fools Issue

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Datacards!

All you need to know about the boys behind the Bug can be found on this intro page (below) to Ambush Bug Nothing Special #1 (Sept. 1992).

TM & © DC Entertainment.

•

BACK ISSUE • 25

A lot of them were smokers, including Keith. That’s how I snagged them. My office was at the dead end of the hallway, so nobody walked past it.

GIFFEN: It was basically a smokers’ lounge.

FLEMING: Yeah, you could actually hide there, which is what Keith did a great deal of the time at DC. He’d come there and have smokes, and that’s how I got to know him.

BONEY: There were a lot of smoking gags in that first Ambush Bug miniseries, so I guess it came from exposure.

FLEMING: Yeah, they were actually second-hand smoking gags, because I wrote a lot of them and I wasn’t a smoker. Which goes to show you what a sacrifice it was for me to put that ashtray out there.

Because I second-hand smoked for the entire time I was proofreading at DC. I guess it was worth it, though, because that’s how I met Keith and Trevor [Von Eeden], my collaborator on Thriller. Keith always said it was the funny stuff in Thriller that made him think I might be good for those Action Comics stories.

GIFFEN: It was Elvis the Bankrobber. Trevor handed me the pencils for that page, and that was the moment when I thought that was the right sensibility for where the Bug should be going.

BONEY: What does the creative process look like for a book like Ambush Bug? GIFFEN: That’s pretty easy to explain. I’d lie to the editor about what I was going to do, I’d go home and draw up the pages, I’d hand them to Bob, and we’d sit down in his office on this horrible yellow couch with yellow polka-dots that I think matched the wallpaper at DC back then. We’d go through the pages, I’d tell him what was going on, and then he’d go home and write it. And a lot of people

find this hard to believe, but I never really explained anything except the most basic stuff to him. He’d ask me, “Why is Ambush Bug being chased by elephants?” And my response would be, “Well, I felt like drawing elephants.”

FLEMING: Sometimes, if there was some specific gag Keith was going for, or if there was a plot point that was important, he would tell me.

But he often did pages that he either didn’t have any idea what to do with or didn’t want to tell me what to do with. He would just give them to me and I’d call him up and say, “What the hell am I going to do on this page?” And he’d say, “I don’t know. Good luck.”

GIFFEN: “Write something funny. Goodbye.”

FLEMING: I can actually describe my creative process with the first few pages of Ambush Bug: Year None #2. I was looking at this the other day, and I realized that it encompasses how I do this thing. It’s more like problem solving than it is about writing gags. I always look at the artwork and figure out what’s happening in the art and what problems I have with it—not mistakes or Keith not thinking or plotting it correctly, but problems in the sense of interesting mathematical problems that have to be solved. In issue #1, we had been doing a parody of Identity Crisis and one of the things I kind of regretted was that we didn’t deal with the JLA brainwashing the villains. You know—taking them up to the Justice League satellite headquarters and Zatanna brainwashing them, which was such a major crux of that whole story.

BONEY: Right. The mind-wiping.

FLEMING: Yeah. And I thought to myself, “Geez, if there’s anybody in the DC Universe that the Justice League would want to mind-wipe, it would have been Ambush Bug.” He’s just a pain in the ass who knows where all their headquarters are and is constantly bugging them. So I came to the second issue thinking I should try to shoehorn that in. The first page gave me the opportunity, since it was just the Source Wall, which is basically five giant captions that I could use to tell the story about Ambush Bug getting mind-wiped by the Justice League. On page 2, he’s climbing the mountains to Tibet. He’s got on a parka and boots, and he’s obviously been trekking for some time up the mountains to Nanda Parbat to consult Rama Kushna. There are a couple problems with these pages.

First of all, why is he climbing these mountains when he can teleport?

Well, the Justice League thing solved that problem too because I was able to establish that he had lost part of his memory and couldn’t remember how to teleport. That also gave him a reason to consult Rama Kushna. I really didn’t think he would come for enlightenment, you know? This is a guy for whom it’s a major problem if he can’t get the lid off a pickle jar. That’s a major problem— not spiritual enlightenment. He’s not that deep. Then there was the problem of explaining why Rama Kushna was wearing a Groucho Marx disguise. Gags sort of come out of me solving all these little problems along the way in order to give the project more cohesion.

Even though a lot of critics have dismissed this stuff as having no plot, I actually think that it does have a plot. It just doesn’t have the kind of plot they’re used to.

GIFFEN: As you can tell, most of Bob’s job is to force a storyline into my drawing.

FLEMING: It always has been, though. There have been issues in which I switch the page numbers all around, change the pages out, and put them in a different order.

BONEY: There is a plot, but it’s more of a puzzle. We as readers have to figure it out like you do, but that’s part of what makes it fun.

FLEMING: I sort of figured out something working on Year None.

Ambush Bug is the DC Universe equivalent of a Monty Python character.

The reason why there’s no straightforward plot is that it’s his point of view we’re looking through the entire time. He’s childlike, he’s got

Julie Schwartz Presents…

An early, pre-Flem Bug outing in Supergirl #16 (Feb. 1984). Art by Giffen and Oksner.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

26 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

no attention span, and—like any kid—he doesn’t control where he goes. He’s always getting slung around everywhere—pulled here and there and getting things done to him just like a kid. A kid doesn’t decide where he goes on any given day. He’s just dressed and thrown on a school bus, or he gets thrown into the back of a car. That’s basically Ambush Bug. He never has much of a goal. I think that’s why it works for this particular character that it’s all so disjointed.

GIFFEN: And through it all, keep in mind that the Bug is probably the most positive character in the DC Universe. He can seem to find the silver lining in any dark cloud.

FLEMING: He doesn’t judge. He thinks that Yankee Poodle and Darkseid are equally good. He doesn’t make lists of his favorites. He’s got some characters that he especially likes, but he thinks they’re all great and worthwhile and lots of fun.

BONEY: It does seem like you guys go after a lot of people and institutions when you’re writing this book, though. You hit all the main companies, all eras and genres of comics—even politics, society, and pop culture.

Was anything ever off-limits?

GIFFEN: The Gilligan’s Island theme song. [laughter] The great thing about the Bug is that it’s impossible to do him wrong. Any mistakes we made, any errors, any last-minute decisions or cuts, were acceptable.

For example, there’s an issue of Ambush Bug: Year None [#2] where an entire page, through a production error, was printed without any dialogue on it. Most of the fans thought that a) it was deliberate, b) it was some kind of postmodern gag, and c) it would pay off down the line.

Which is why we had one page in a later issue [#4] where we just dumped in all these word balloons. The fans seem to have more faith in us than we have in us.

FLEMING: They’re all positive that the delay of Year None #6 was a gag right from the start. The reason it

was not out was that we were making a statement about late books at DC. Some of the fans are so adamant about it that I’ve actually seen message boards where people are putting down other fans for not realizing that it’s so blindingly obvious.

GIFFEN: A horrible mistake will be made in these books, like the word balloon thing, and the readers will tie themselves in knots trying to figure out a way that this was a deliberate gag. I don’t know if it comes down to “I don’t want to be the guy who says, ‘Look, they made a mistake’ and then find out that I just wasn’t hip enough to get the joke,” or if it’s just that they’re so used to the fact that anything goes with this character that they’re willing to wait for the punchline.

But sometimes a screw-up is just that.

FLEMING: We’re like Pee-wee Herman when he fell off the bike, except we don’t even have to say, “We did that on purpose.” The fans say us for it.

GIFFEN: When these mistakes happen, once we get over the fact that we just screwed up the whole damned book, we realize that they work to our benefit nine April Fools Issue

Curby Sez, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (above) From the Ambush Bug backup in Action Comics #565 (Mar. 1985). (above left) Superman’s having a bad day on this Action #563 cover (Jan. 1985). Art by Giffen and Oksner.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

•

BACK ISSUE • 27

Ticked-Off Trinity (below) Bugging the Big Three on the cover to Action #565 (this art was recycled in early 2009 as the cover for Showcase Presents: Ambush Bug). (bottom right) Cover to Ambush Bug #1.

times out of ten. Because they create another gag down the road or give us something else to feed off of. In a way, you really have to work hard to screw up an Ambush Bug story because it is so disjointed and so dependent on the character’s perceptions.

FLEMING: Even Year None #6. I was upset at first that they weren’t going to publish the issue. They are going to publish #7, but it’s not really going to be what #6 was. It’s going to be something very, very different. This was upsetting, and even kind of infuriating, until finally I realized that this may be our greatest triumph ever. Some critics, and particularly Dan DiDio, were very vocal in saying that we weren’t being edgy enough and that our humor wasn’t harsh enough. After #3, he came in and had us do some re-writing and re-drawing and had us take it in a harsher direction. And he continued to tell us as we were re-doing it that it wasn’t edgy enough. We should mention up front that [editor] Jann Jones and Dan DiDio were responsible for this miniseries and for both of us being able to do it together. It’s pretty cool that DC—and in particular, Jann and Dan—would come to us and ask us to do this again.

GIFFEN: Walking in, we were kind of gun-shy because the original two Ambush Bug miniseries were not exactly embraced by some people at DC.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

28 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

FLEMING: Yeah, we’d done this and been burned before.

GIFFEN: Some people didn’t like the fact that we were poking fun at something they took very seriously.

So when we came into this, I thought, “Okay, let me just pull the focus in a bit.”

FLEMING: We were trying to walk the edge; we didn’t want to go over the edge.

GIFFEN: We didn’t do the rabid-dog moments where we would just go on the attack. And Dan would call and say, “No, no, go for it.”

BONEY: That’s pretty surprising, because you guys are pretty brutal to Dan in this series.

GIFFEN: He told us to be more brutal, and at one point he said the wrong words: “Take some shots at me if you want.”

FLEMING: At one point, when he told me we should be harsher to DC, I said, “Can we kill somebody?”

And he said, “Sure, go ahead, kill anybody you want.”

And I said, “Can we kill you?” And he said, “Sure, yeah, okay.” And I said, “In the comic book or in real life?”

A lot of the critics also said that we weren’t as edgy as we used to be. But the fact is that even back then, we never had an issue that was unpublishable. So their refusal to publish #6 is proof positive that we took it as far to the edge as we ever had before.

BONEY: You mentioned that there was resistance during the ’80s, when you were doing the first two Ambush Bug miniseries. Where did that come from? Editorial?

GIFFEN: Let’s just say that various people up at the office were not amused by what we were doing and made their concerns very well known to Dick Giordano, who was then in charge. Julie was Sergeant Schultz [from Hogan’s Heroes]. Julie let us get away with murder in the book. And when people came into his office and said, “Julie, do you know what you’re doing?” he would say, “I know nothing.” [laughs] He would just be like, “I’m an old man. I don’t get it.” Wasn’t it the Ambush Bug Stocking Stuffer where he went to Vietnam?

Our Ambush at War The Bug in Vietnam, from 1986’s Ambush Bug Stocking Stuffer #1.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

FLEMING: Yeah, that was the one.

GIFFEN: Andy [Helfer] went into Julie’s office and, as Andy explained it to me later on, “It was the most humiliating moment of my comic-book career. I had to talk to this 70-something-year-old man and explain to him in detail about why he could not use the Vietnamese province of Poon Tang.”

FLEMING: I had put Poon Tang in the issue because we always used to put one or two little things in that were so far out there that Julie would take those out and leave the ones that we really wanted in there. Poon Tang was one of those that I put in there on purpose. But we eventually realized that he never really caught the really over-the-top gags. He would catch things like the letters column. When I was having Ambush Bug answering letters in the letter column, he didn’t want me to use the name Marvel Comics.

He would catch innocuous stuff like that, that we’d never in a million years be able to anticipate he’d object to. But then there’d be an ad page for a toy submarine, and the tag-line would be, “What’s long and hard and filled with seamen?” and it would get through. For that particular one, Paul Levitz caught it in the production office. It was in the tray about to be picked up to go to the printer when Paul happened to pick it up and glance through it.

GIFFEN: We never did this out of malice. We just put things down that we thought were funny. We figured, well, if it gets through, fine.

But if not, we’ll figure out another way.

FLEMING: The last thing we wanted to do was damage DC, because that would be like burning down the place where you work. You’re not going to get your paycheck the next week.

GIFFEN: It was in our interest to keep DC healthy.

FLEMING: It’s always that way with humor, though. Humor’s difficult because there are so many different interests at work.

BONEY: In some ways, though, it seems at times like a soapbox book.

How much is serious critique and how much is parody?

GIFFEN: I don’t think there was ever any serious critique. Ambush Bug is not a serious book.

FLEMING: Ambush Bug became more serious simply because we were getting the most opposition from factions at DC. They were refusing, for example, to let us use any of the other superheroes or supervillains, which made it really hard to parody the DC Universe. We had a pretty popular character who had sold a lot of comic books, and when we were on our second miniseries they basically said, “Sorry, you can’t use Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow,” and on and on.

GIFFEN: In Son of Ambush Bug, whatever DC did to us, we did it to the Bug. FLEMING: That was, in a way, a political statement. What was happening to him was directly happening to us. The main villain in that series ends up being the Interferer, who comes in and rearranges things to make them more to his liking.

GIFFEN: This was also about the time they were doing Crisis on Infinite Earths, when DC was consolidating all of its universes into one cohesive continuity. They were very serious about it, and the last thing they needed was us reminding people that Ace the Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite were out there. We delight in these characters, but DC was trying very much to scale down the silliness and get into the Marvel mode of one single universe with a solid continuity. We were in the corner saying, “But what about Super-Monkey?” And I don’t think they appreciated that.

BONEY: It’s weird, though, because if that stuff wasn’t a part of the DC Universe proper anymore—if DC wasn’t letting Ambush Bug play there anyway—there shouldn’t have been resistance to using the silliness that came before, which was no longer part of that universe anyway.

FLEMING: Yeah, well, they especially didn’t want us to bring that stuff up. We had actually done that in the issue I was talking about from the first miniseries. “The Continuity Game” was nothing but a parade of that stuff. In a way, I guess you could say that was political.

We came right at them and said, “Here are all these various worlds and all these characters, and pretty soon you’re not going to be able to see any of that anymore. So these are some of the great characters that we love.” We came up with the dumbest characters we could find, but they are fun.

GIFFEN: We do have genuine affection for these characters.

When Zook [Martian Manhunter’s erstwhile sidekick] showed up as a suicide bomber in Ambush Bug [Year None #2], we didn’t do it because we hated Zook and wanted him dead. We did it because we thought Zook was a really great, ridiculous character. Ambush Bug at its best is almost like a love letter to the DC Universe.

FLEMING: Whenever there’s a political stand, it’s usually against some sort of an editorial policy. It’s not about the characters or the universe or the specific creators. We’re pro all of that.

GIFFEN: At its heart, Ambush Bug is a throwback to when comics were fun for the sake of being fun. There’s not a lot of levity in comics lately.

The world’s starting to take this stuff as serious as a heart attack, and the fans are taking it so seriously. I think every so often you’ve just got to kick back and go, “Guys, at the end of the day, it’s a comic book. Let’s have a little fun.”

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 29

BONEY: It’s interesting that you say that, because Ambush Bug seems like a character who would have fit well in a book with a comedic slant—something like the Justice League books you and Marc DeMatteis worked on in the late ’80s.

GIFFEN: Oh, no, no, no. I have always resisted bringing Ambush Bug into a book that already has humorous overtones because it would be overkill. He works best when everyone around him is playing it straight and he’s the oddball out—either reacting to circumstances, having circumstances thrust upon him (which is 90% of the time), or provoking circumstances through an innocent need to fit in.

That’s the theme of Ambush Bug throughout every book we’ve done with him: just a desperate need to fit into the DC Universe, to find his niche. To have brought Ambush Bug into JLI or the “Bwa-Ha-Ha” books would have been a disaster.

BONEY: It seems like you both care about the character quite a bit.

How protective are you of him? Have other creators ever approached you and asked you specifically if they could use the character?

GIFFEN: Nope. We’re not protective at all. It’s odd, because several people have said they’ve thought of using Ambush Bug but they didn’t think they could handle the character. I don’t know about you, Bob, but once I was done with Ambush Bug, I was really done with him. Like with Lobo. Let somebody else play with them for a while.

Whoever wants to use them, good luck.

FLEMING: They certainly could have gotten Grant Morrison and any popular artist to have done Year None if they’d wanted to. I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had, and it might have even been better received. But I’m glad they came back to us. It’s been nice that no one else has substantially touched the character since we worked on him together.

BONEY: You made several references in the first two miniseries to the success of the character and the books he’d been in. Was that success a fiction? Was is measured in sales or from letters, or was it just measured in your heads? [laughter] GIFFEN: All of it. Ambush Bug wasn’t a super-seller. It certainly wasn’t an X-Men or a Superman or a Batman. But it was a good, healthy seller that had a good fan following. Fan response meant a lot back then. Even now, fan response can have an impact.

But back then, fan response wasn’t “I really hate this. I’ll see if the next issue is better.” I mean, why would we change anything for that? He’s going to buy the next issue anyway. Back then, fans tended to vote with their dollars. If they didn’t like it, they didn’t buy it.

FLEMING: It was a very good seller. They all sold really well.

GIFFEN: Julie showed me the charts. Every time the Bug appeared in Action Comics, the sales spiked.

FLEMING: Letters were important to Julie, too. He would get ten letters about Ambush Bug for every one he got about the Superman story. That was a big deal for him. Ambush Bug instantly was a big hit with enough fans that he noticed.

BONEY: At one point, Ambush Bug says, “I’m the only person in the DC Universe to know I’m in a comic book” [Son of Ambush Bug #2].

He frequently breaks the fourth wall and all sorts of other comics conventions. Is this experimentation liberating, or does it create more challenges?

GIFFEN: Oh, it’s completely liberating because I can draw whatever the hell I want and leave it up to Bob to figure it out.

FLEMING: It’s true. He’s not lying.

GIFFEN: To me, it’s a romp. I work on a basic storyline, which could be that Ambush Bug has to break into the supervillains’ hideout. And in the middle of that, I’ll suddenly think, “Hey, I really feel like drawing chipmunks.” So suddenly, the supervillains are chipmunks. The most obvious example of this was when I took Big Jim and all of a sudden, for no reason at all, turned him into an elf [Son of Ambush Bug #3]. There’s that scene where Ambush Bug teleports away, falls down a sand dune, and gets chased by elephants. Literally, I just felt like drawing elephants.

FLEMING: The best gags and lines come out of that stuff, too.

GIFFEN: Nine times out of ten, unless it was something critical to the story being told, I would not tell Bob what was going on.

Everyone always points to one sequence as proof that I’m lying.

That is when Mitsubishi is doing the Hokey-Pokey [in Son of Ambush Bug #6]. Now, I just drew the page and my thought was that Ambush Bug as Mitsubishi is running around the page screaming, “We’re being cancelled! We’re being cancelled! The sky is falling!” And I passed it on to Bob. FLEMING: That was one of the times when I called him. I couldn’t solve it. I asked him, “What the hell is this? He’s just running around screaming for six or eight panels? What the hell’s he screaming about?” And he wouldn’t tell me. He wouldn’t give me any clues. I spent days looking at that page and thinking, “What the f*ck am I going to do?” Finally, I just happened to be looking at it and God only knows why the Hokey-Pokey went through my mind, but it clicked. I started mentally describing what his actions were on that page, and then I realized that they all fit the song perfectly.

BONEY: Is that frustrating, Bob, or is it fun?

FLEMING: That one was frustrating as hell for about four days.

But then it was a triumph that I’m still crowing about today. So who cares if it was frustrating, because there’s always a way to solve it.

Bic of the Litter A Green Lantern takeoff from the sequel miniseries Son of Ambush Bug #1 (July 1986).

TM & © DC Entertainment.

30 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

This is the most fun I’ve ever had working on any book. No matter what’s gone wrong—no matter how many times we’ve been censored or criticized, it doesn’t make any difference.

GIFFEN: Ambush Bug is, at least conceptually and creatively, pretty much bullet proof.

FLEMING: In Ambush Bug: Year None #1, we have the Source Wall reveal that Darkseid has tried to pass through him. Which is true, even in continuity.

Darkseid wants to find out the secrets of the universe, and you have to pass through the Source Wall to reach those mysteries. The original line was, “Darkseid has tried unsuccessfully to penetrate me on at least four separate occasions! Says he wants to ‘tap my mysteries.’” They wouldn’t let us say “penetrate.”

So instead I wrote, “Darkseid has tried to breach my ramparts,” which sounds far dirtier. And they couldn’t say no, because a wall has ramparts. That’s what you do when you try to breach a wall. But it sounded more filthy. “Penetrate” is almost a medical term compared to that.

BONEY: So the lesson for an editor is to leave it alone, then.

FLEMING: No, no, we’d rather they didn’t because we have more fun when we have to be creative.

GIFFEN: We’re completely unfiltered when we’re doing this, and sometimes we do need someone to come in and say, “Guys, guys. Aw, geez, no.”

FLEMING: It’s not our job to police the line. It’s our job to get as close to the line as we can, and it’s the job of the editors and publishers to make sure we haven’t gone over it. They’re the ones who have to legally be responsible for what the company publishes.

GIFFEN: There’s no list of thou-shalt-nots that DC hands us. I think the only thou-shalt-nots we got when we started Year None were: 1) Don’t do anything that will get us sued and 2) You can go after DC Comics concepts, creations, and characters, but do not go after specific people. In other words, we could make fun of Final Crisis but couldn’t take a personal shot at Grant Morrison or anyone who was involved in those books. That made sense to me, so we went with it.

Now, it’s open season on anybody in the credits box.

If you’re working on the book, you are a target and you’d better have thick skin. I think Bob and I took more shots are ourselves than we did anybody else.

FLEMING: I don’t like to be called Flem, and that’s all that Ambush Bug calls me. That’s why he calls me Flem—because it irritates me.

BONEY: Ambush Bug Nothing Special came out in 1992, and Year None didn’t come out until 2008.

The character popped up sporadically in other books, like 52 (which Keith was working on), but he didn’t have his own book again for 16 years. Why was there such a long break between projects?

GIFFEN: Because DC didn’t want to publish it. First of all, Bob and I never pushed.

FLEMING: It was Julie who wanted us to do Ambush Bug Nothing Special, even though he didn’t edit that one.

He was still working as sort of a goodwill ambassador for DC and came up to the office once a week.

GIFFEN: Yeah, we did Nothing Special specifically for Julie.

FLEMING: He asked us to do it, and Michael Eury edited it. He was a good editor, too. There’s no real substitute for Julie, but Michael pinch-hit really well.

GIFFEN: He was almost like Julie-light, in that he played the same game Julie played. “Oh, I didn’t understand that. Sorry.”

Merrily They Roll Along (top) Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con. Photo courtesy of The Legion Omnicom’s Michael Grabois.

Let’s Dance The infamous Mitsubishi/Hokey-Pokey page from Son of Ambush Bug #6.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 31

Love Is A Many Spleendored Thing BACK ISSUE’s editor, who was Ambush Bug’s second editor, took a ribbing after his splenectomy in 1992’s Nothing Special. (below right) Ambush Bug Nothing Special #1 cover.

Art by Keith Giffen and Al Gordon.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

FLEMING: We mocked him too, remember? We did that bit about him losing his spleen. Because he really did lose his spleen. We did a mock cover for a romance comic about him losing his spleen.

GIFFEN: And it was a real tragedy, too, you know?

The guy almost died. It was a real, real tragedy. So, of course, we couldn’t pass that up. The most overt, probably tasteless gags we’ve ever directed at anybody were done to the book’s creators.

FLEMING: And we do it out of love. It’s not like we don’t like and respect these guys.

GIFFEN: It kind of just comes with the territory. You’ve been indoctrinated into Ambush Bug’s world. Have fun.

GIFFEN: We’ve had lots of incidents with Ambush Bug. Bob, you’ve got to tell the story about how we scared Alan Moore.

FLEMING: Oh, yeah. Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and John Totleben were in town running a conference about Swamp Thing with Karen Berger. That was a great time to be working at DC. Stuff like Swamp Thing and Dark Knight and Watchmen were happening, and we were doing Ambush Bug. We had gotten the most vile, disgusting envelope full of these letters that were written in all different hands. It was from this demented family

32 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

who were all Ambush Bug fans, and they were apparently all different ages. All the letters looked different. One was in crayon, and one was with grease pencil on wax paper.

One of letters had one of the young kids hanging himself from a tree in their back yard, which was what he was threatening to do if we didn’t come back with another Ambush Bug series. In the envelope, along with all those weird letters, was a voodoo doll. They said they were going to stab pins in the voodoo doll and kill somebody at DC if they didn’t bring back Ambush Bug. GIFFEN: That voodoo doll had human hair on it.

FLEMING: It was made out of toilet paper and safety pins and at least five kinds of human hair. So anyway, I used to get all the letters because I did the Ambush Bug letters column and Julie would just pass me all the mail.

Keith and I had just opened this envelope and were horrified by this disgusting stuff. I shoved it all into my portfolio to go home, and I ran into Moore and Bissette and Totleben in the hallway. We started talking, and they were telling me about some letter they got from Swamp Thing that had drawn all kinds of parallels between Alan Moore’s work and— GIFFEN: It was basically an issue-by-issue, line-by-line dissertation making the argument, with different Biblical verses and specific panels, that Alan Moore was the anti-Christ.

FLEMING: It was like Charlie Manson distorting the songs on the [Beatles’] White Album to say they told him to go out and kill people. So they’re telling us about this letter, and they actually said to me, “You probably don’t get mail this weird even for Ambush Bug.” And I said, “Oh no?” And I reached into my portfolio and pulled out that voodoo doll and said, “Well, how about this?”

I shoved it right in their faces, and they started backing away. I actually backed them down the hallway against the fire door with this thing. Considering the horror they were dealing with in Swamp Thing, if there was anybody who was hard to scare, it was these guys.

The End of the Bug? Don’t bother looking for issue #6, but here’s the cover to Ambush Bug: Year None #7 (Dec. 2009).

TM & © DC Entertainment.

DC’s Checkered Past Is nothing sacred in Ambush Bug? Why am I asking you questions? A Silver Age JLA takeoff from Ambush Bug: Year None #1 (Sept. 2008).

Art by Giffen and Al Milgrom.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

GIFFEN: Remember when we got the letter with the death threat from the Fred Hembeck Fan Club?

FLEMING: Yeah, they were going to kneecap us— not break our kneecaps, but draw squiggles on them.

GIFFEN: There was one guy who wrote what is still my all-time favorite fan letter. He said he hated the Ambush Bug art—he just despised it. And his suggestion was that DC should take me off somewhere and cut off my hands. And since that My Left Foot guy learned to draw with his feet, they should cut off my feet as well so I could never draw again. He actually referenced My Left Foot. He had really thought it through. And that’s our fan base.

BONEY: Rabid and unstable.

GIFFEN: Why not? You’ve got to be a little unstable to do comics. You might as well be unstable to read them.

We’re all in the same boat.

FLEMING: I’m still really proud of this stuff. I thought that Showcase Presents collected volume was just the greatest damned thing. If they had only created one of those things for me, I would have been happy. I like grabbing the thing and picking it up and leafing through it. That was something that drove Julie nuts.

Keith and I would come into his office and just laugh and laugh at our own stuff.

GIFFEN: No, we would laugh at each other’s stuff.

FLEMING: One time Julie was talking to Kurt Schaffenberger, and there was an extra chair in the office, and he let me sit there if I just quietly proofread the Ambush Bug lettering that had just come in. And I couldn’t help but start laughing, because the sequence had just come in. Julie got really mad and said, “Look at him. He’s laughing at his own stuff.

It’s disgusting. He would laugh at anything.

He would laugh at the nose on my face.” And of course, Julie had one of the biggest noses I’ve ever seen. He had this huge proboscis—just this enormous, freaking nose. I’d been kind of quiet when he first started yelling at me, but when he said that, me and Kurt both looked at each other and just exploded in laughter.

GIFFEN: The years we were doing those first Ambush Bug books were probably the most fun I’ve ever had in comic books. That and the JLI stuff. I just enjoyed every minute of doing those books. There was never a down time when I thought, “Wow, I’ve got to get off this book.”

FLEMING: It really is weird and unusual to have this much fun doing something.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

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.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 33

Tall, strong, sexy, and green are all adjectives commonly associated with the jade superhero giantess originally known as the “Savage She-Hulk,” whose first series lasted a brief 25 issues. After cancellation, the She-Hulk fortunately made her way into the pages The Avengers, under the skillful pen of Roger Stern, which easily lent the terms team player and exciting to her list of attributes. Then along came John Byrne, who took Stern’s cue and brought Jen Walters into the Fantastic Four as the Thing’s replacement, easily adding the words dynamic and scene stealer to her résumé. Let us also not forget the new moniker, sensational, which Byrne gave She-Hulk with her very first graphic novel, setting the eventual stage for her second series.

And what, keen readers, was the operative word to describe She-Hulk in this new comic?

Funny!

Yes, that’s right—She-Hulk, a former second-string character, had cemented her comeback in the Marvel Universe, not because she had a dark edge á là Wolverine or the Punisher, but because she was a strong, articulate woman whose comedic timing and zany misadventures made us laugh out loud in 1989—all thanks to the wit and vision of Mr. Byrne!

One can argue that when it comes to The Sensational She-Hulk’s— Excuse me a second, faithful BACK ISSUE readers… there’s someone knocking at my wall.

Hold on a second!

by

To m P o w e r s

She-Hulk! I mean, Ms. Walters! It is quite an honor to be standing in your superheroic presence!

Save the geek-talk for your fanboy readers, Powers. You can do two more things for me right now.

Yes, Ms. Walters?

First, stop drooling—it discolors the green ink on my legs.

Ink?

Straight from the comic books! All this fourth-wall stuff is complicated, especially when I’m crossing into fan-land with BACK ISSUE! Fan-land? BACK ISSUE is a serious rag—you get exciting interviews with the pros, fascinating comic-book history from the insider perspective, mind-boggling original comic art—

Shut, it Powers! Good boy. Now, for the second thing I want you to do for me...

No words—just nod. That’s better— a hack-writer who’s neither seen nor heard. Powers, my friend, it’s time for you to step aside, so I can give the readers a true insider perspective on The Sensational She-Hulk!

Lean, Green Comics Machine

But— How I love a good sound effect!

Let’s see now … it’s She-Hulk here, readers, tapping away her beautiful, green fingers on Powers’ keyboard…

34 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

A 2007 She-Hulk commissioned illustration by John Byrne.

Courtesy of Anthony Snyder (www.anthonysnyder.com). © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Okay, boys and girls, here’s the article’s new title:

The Byrnester and I go way back, for those of you who didn’t know. Powers already mentioned that Byrne’s buddy Roger Stern had worked wonders with my character once he took over writing The Avengers with issue #227 (Jan. 1983). What Powers didn’t mention was that Byrne couldn’t wait to get his typewriter and pen on me, so he stole me from Roger for his own book, The Fantastic Four, beginning with issue #265 (Apr. 1984), when I returned as the Thing’s replacement after Ben Grimm decided to stay behind adventuring on the Beyonder’s Battleworld. And what a rocking time I had—then Byrne left the book to draw a certain hunky alien boy scout for the Distinguished Competition, and I soon found myself back in the pages of The Avengers.

Yes, my friends, if Marvel didn’t put a ban on characters smoking, I may have lit one up right now—for dramatic effect, naturally. Oh, hold on a second, this is a print article, so you can use your imagination to picture me smoking a cigarette—preferably a long, stylish one.

Now we’re ready for the dirt!

Yes, Byrne sweeping me off my sexy feet and propping me on his drawing table only to repeatedly dump me would prove to be a theme in my life.

Thank God, then, that I’ve been in the spotlight in various Marvel titles over the years, which stops me from aging, according to Byrne-boy’s twisted but true way of reasoning.

But he couldn’t keep away from me for long after “Byrning-out” on cape-drawing, so he returned to illustrating my voluptuous self with The Sensational She-Hulk #1 (May 1989), once more fueling the fantasies of a sweaty herd of pre-pubescent fanboys— the same ones who are now reluctantly careening into middle age and probably gripping the pages of this magazine in the thin hope I’ll leap out from these typed words and make their naughty fantasies come true—

by

Jennifer Walters, Esq.

okay, let’s get this over with...

Take a Chance on Me The Jade Giantess threatens fanboys’ X-Men comics on John Byrne’s cover to Sensational She-Hulk #1 (May 1989). © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 35

Oh, my head…

Powers, is that you? What am I saying?

Of course, it is! “Oh, my head”—it’s that type of clichéd dialogue I expect from a writer of your low caliber.

What do you want? I’ve been knocked out by a woman made of steel-hard paper! Things are kind of freaking me out right now!

Hey, buddy—I’m doing you a favor here.

If I hadn’t shown up, your readers would’ve been flipping to more exciting articles in this magazine—even if their subject matter involved Marvel’s Dennis the Menace or Smurfs series!”

But what you’re doing is way worse, Ms. Walters— the bitter, “ex” character Byrne-bashing and insulting our BACK ISSUE readers!

Moi, bitter? Powers, I know you’re searching for a witty verbal repartee, but I’m ready to feed you another green sandwich of the four-knuckle variety!

Please listen to me, Ms. Walters—the male BACK ISSUE readers reading this piece have had enough angry women in their lives—particularly the readers whose ex-wives and girlfriends didn’t understand their compulsive, religious need to collect comics! Add in the fact that you threatened to rip up their valuable X-Men comics on the cover to issue #1 of The Sensational She-Hulk—

That’s called a sales technique— a successful one, I might add!

Tell you what, Powers, as an attorney, I can confidently say that you’ve made a decent argument for the defense of me not knocking you out again.

What about the article?

I’m going to help you write it!

Just pull out your dog-eared index cards that contain your Q&A with Byrne, and I’ll offer some commentary!

Really?

Questions. Now. And call me Jen. Okay, uh, Jen, the first question I asked Mr. Byrne was, “What are your thoughts concerning She-Hulk’s origin in The Savage She-Hulk #1 (Feb. 1980), and female spin-off versions of male characters in general?” And he kindly replied, “I’m generally not a fan of female versions of characters (Supergirl and Batgirl being notable exceptions in my youth). My initial reaction to She-Hulk was much eyeball rolling and heavy groaning—as seemed to be the reaction from most of the fans at the time. Then, when her own title was canceled, Roger Stern picked her up for The Avengers and made her seem interesting.

As to her origin—well, I guess it was as good as any!”

I guess Byrne-boy pretty much shares my sentiments on that topic. At least I’m grateful that Stan the Man Lee didn’t make me a mutant. What’s the next question?

Wall of Confusion Jennifer Walters, with gal pal Weezi, breaks the fourth wall on page 9 of Sensational She-Hulk #4 (Aug. 1989). Art by Byrne and Bob Wiacek. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

36 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

I gotta say, I don’t even remember any of this. Is this still the right article?

I asked Mr. Byrne what he liked exactly about Stern’s characterization of She-Hulk in The Avengers, and he wrote, “I liked that she liked being She-Hulk. The Savage She-Hulk had leaned much the other way, which made it just a pale imitation of the male version. Roger's ever-sotiny tweak made all the difference.”

Yeah...I was still smashing stuff and beating up the baddies, but good ol’ Rog helped me to do so with a more joyous sense of panache. What’s next?

I asked Mr. Byrne why he decided to do away with your human form in The Sensational She-Hulk Graphic Novel.

He didn’t do away with anything permanently, numbskull. It’s comic books—just ask Bucky Barnes!

You’re right, Jen. In fact, Mr. Byrne wrote, “I didn’t! I had half a dozen ways to get her back to being Jennifer.”

The Bong Show

Remember issue #36, Powers? The Christmas-inCalifornia one Byrne dished out? He temporarily let me change back to my human form for my dad’s benefit.

(left) Sensational She-Hulk #5 (Sept. 1989), page 15, has Howard the Duck menace Dr. Bong chiming in. (right) This idyllic scene from #7 doesn’t hint at the issue’s villain, the furry and fearsome Xemnu.

Original art courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions and Anthony Snyder, respectively.

Yeah—you’re right, but shouldn’t we be sticking to a chronological overview of Mr. Byrne’s runs on your book?

Chronological-shmnological.

Anyone reading this article— if you want to call it that— has read the issues. Full-speed ahead with the questions, Powers!

Damn the continuity cops!

Okay, well, I also asked Byrne about how he successfully pitched a new She-Hulk book to Marvel.

© 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

He didn’t, bozo.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 37

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping Autographed original cover art to Sensational She-Hulk #8 (mid-Nov. 1989), with a kinda-sorta familiar guest-star.

Courtesy of Heritage. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

I know … sigh. Byrne replied to me, “I didn’t!

Marvel, in the form of Mark Gruenwald, pitched it to me. First, he asked if I would be interested in doing a new She-Hulk monthly, which, after playing with her in the Fantastic Four, I very much was.

Then he challenged me to make it ‘different’— which is how the breaking-the-fourth-wall approach was born.” Then there’s the next question I asked Mr. Byrne: “How does one effectively present a comedic female superhero in comics? Additionally, how does a character breaking the fourth wall aid in a comedic approach?”

What did he say?

Mr. Byrne commented, “I have often said the key to writing women is not to write women, but to write people. Don’t obsess about whether this is something

a woman would do or say. Just make her fun, and leave the cards to fall where they may. As to how effective this is—or whether or not the fourth-wall-breaking ‘aids’ in this—I think I will let my work on the book stand in mute testimony.”

Byrne was smart enough to let me tell him the lines—that’s why my dialogue is so authentic!”

But, Jen, aren’t you a fictitious character?

Am I, Powers?

I’m having this conversation with you. Who’s more real to your Back Issue readers— you or me?

Well … you, I guess!

Then case closed. Next topic!

Okay—rolling right along, I asked Mr. Byrne, “In terms of presenting She-Hulk as a strong yet sexy female, what were your thoughts regarding any potential feminist backlash?”

What kind of question is that, Powers? The male readers liked my book, and the same goes for any female readers I had—otherwise, why would they be wasting their time!?

Byrne backs me on this point, right?

Maybe…

Give me those cards! Now, readers, in terms of a “feminist backlash” for The Sensational She-Hulk, my former creator wrote, “I could not imagine there would be any. And it turned out I read my female audience exactly right.

were we really this desperate for gueststars by issue #8? what, were alvin and the chipmunks not available?

“Letters from female readers— mostly girlfriends of male readers—were universally positive.

They even liked the big boobs, since, as was often stated, I drew them moving and flowing and generally behaving like boobs, not like cannonballs stapled to her chest.” Do you have a problem with this response, Powers?

Or does the mention of boobs make you squeamish and feel some sort of feminist backlash in your BACK ISSUE readership?

Uh … I’m cool…

38 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

Let’s see, Powers—you next asked Byrne how my sex appeal contributed to selling copies of the book, and he shot back, “The superhero reading audience is mostly male. Nuff said!”

Next, you sensibly asked Byrne, “What is Weezi’s function in SSH?” and Byrne said, “To ask the questions the readers might ask, so Jennifer won't spend all her time talking to herself.” You also wrote in this following question, “Issue #5 (Sept. 1989) cleverly presents She-Hulk walking through a double-page spread for Big Bucks Comix. What were your thoughts behind these gag pages?” and Byrne told you, “Once the whole ‘she knows she’s in a comic book motif’ was set, I looked for as many ways as I could to exploit it: stepping across panel borders, ripping thru pages, etc. All seemed like naturals.”

jen, this dame ain’t got nothin’ on you!

You’ve skipped ahead to issue #5!

What’s wrong, Powers?

I’m doing your job for you!

But you’re not. Michael Eury, my editor, still wants me to deliver somewhat of a running synopsis of Byrne’s runs on your book.

Yeah, I know Eury— he wrote a story in my book in issue #50 (Apr. 1993) and then went on to write issues #52-57 (June–Nov. 1993).

I’m sure Michael will thank you for the plug, but all I know is that he’ll be p-o’ed with me if I don’t backpedal and tell the readers you had an eight-page preview story for The Sensational She-Hulk in Marvel Comics Presents #18 (early May 1989).

Yeah, yeah, Powers. I also fought those Silver Age losers the Circus of Crime in my debut issue, the goofy Headmen in issue #2 (June 1989) and #3 (July 1989), which guest starred Spider-Man, for all you Web-Head completists out there. Issue #4 (Aug. 1989) had the sorry Stilt-Man as my enemy-of-the-month, while issue #5 had me facing off against that freak Doctor Bong. Does that work for you, Powers?

Sure.

Cover Girl

Don’t shrug your shoulders at me.

It also says here that you asked Byrne why he used US-1 characters during his two tenures on SSH. More specifically, you wanted to know what is it that Byrne likes about these characters from a storyteller’s POV. And he responded, “I was looking for really silly characters I could do something fun with. Neal Adams has famously said, ‘There are no bad characters, only bad writers.’ On She-Hulk, I set that up as a personal challenge.”

Byrne spoofed the pregnant Demi Moore cover of Vanity Fair on Sensational She-Hulk #34 (Dec. 1991).

She-Hulk © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. Vanity Fair TM & © Condé Nast Digital.

Not a bad answer, Byrne, but I wish you could have really set me up against some big heavyweights like Magneto and Doctor Doom instead of just teasing me with them in that Marvel Comics Presents issue— now that would have won me some good contracts for product endorsements!

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 39

Let’s see, Powers—you also asked Byrne what was his philosophy behind using such characters as the Headmen, Doctor Bong, Xemnu the Titan, Spragg the Living Hill, and Mahkizmo.

Why are you looking at me that way, Jen?

Powers, I thought you wanted to present a chronological overview of Byrne-buddy’s run on my late, lamented book. But Spragg the Living Hill, which Byrne could easily draw, didn’t show up until a few years later with issue #31 (Sept. 1991), and I didn’t have to deal with that misogynistic perv Mahkizmo until issue #38 (Apr. 1992)!

You’re right—I’m all over the place. Can we simply tell the readers you teamed up with the canceled US-1 cast in issues #6–7 (Oct.–Nov. 1989) to fight Xemnu and then give them Byrne’s answer to the question?

You’re pushing my buttons, Powers.

Anyway, readers, Byrne says that in regard to the wackoes I fought, “The dumber they were, the more likely to turn up in She-Hulk!” True that, Byrne! This next question’s a sad one, as Powers asks Byrne why the man left SSH with issue #8 (mid-Nov. 1989), and Byrne replies, “I was fired.” What were you expecting, Powers, some “Bad-Byrne” story where he threw a tantrum?

I was just asking a necessary question—BACK ISSUE readers demand the facts!

The fact is, Powers, Byrne was wrongly dumped off my book, despite what I may say about him always leaving me. But I do give you credit for asking this next question: “What were your plans for issue #9?

(Jen mentions on page 3 of SSH #4 that she is not scheduled to get her robot butler until at least the ninth issue.) Also, did you complete any art for the issue?”

What are you waiting for, Jen, a drum roll?

Powers, don’t forget I’m the one with the proven track record in funny!

Drooling readers, Byrne tells us, “I planned to bring in a ROG 2000 avatar called Roger Robot in a story called ‘Who Framed Roger Robot?’” I just bet you would have loved to have seen that tale, huh, Powers?

Well, yeah, all of us Byrne-She-Hulk maniacs back then didn’t want to see him leave the book. By the way, readers, She-Hulk hung out with a Santa Claus–like character who went by the name Nick St. Christopher in issue #8.

Whatever, Powers. Then again, you did manage to ask Byrne who that Lex Luthor figure standing in the shadows of page 8 in SSH #8 was supposed to be, to which he responded, “Mr. L was to be revealed as a famous fashion designer who wanted Jen to front for his new line for plus-sized women.”

Plus-sized? I hope Byrne meant that in a good way.

I’m sure he did…

Big, Green Smackdown mmmm ... This is what my book needed more of... hot hunky man-SMOOCHES!!

Jen locks lips with Wyatt Wingfoot on page 2 of Sensational She-Hulk #36 (Feb. 1992). Art by Byrne and Keith Williams. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

40 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

Stop blushing, Powers, and keep your eyes directly on mine.

I’m trying.

Then why are you twitching?

It’s your She-Hulk allure— the one that led Byrne to return to SSH later with issue #31…

And a lousy, obvious introduction to the next question, Powers.

With this card, you asked Byrne what his approach was to my book two years later, and he responded, “I returned because I was asked. My approach was much the same, except my schedule didn't allow time to do full pencils or inks on much of the run.”

What’s wrong, Powers? Oh, yeah—you need to supply a running commentary on my adventures up until this point.

Readers, I hung out with the nasty Mole Man, who wanted to marry me, in issues #32-33 (Oct. Nov. 1991). Then, in issues #34–35 (Dec. 1991 Jan. 1992), I tangled with that rooster-headed villain, the Black Talon, and his zombie supervillain team, “The X-Humed,” who consisted of a resurrected Living Diamond, Changeling, Black Bishop, and Scale-Face!

Macho Man Beefy bonehead Mahkizmo, on original-art page 7 of Sensational She-Hulk #38 (Apr. 1992).

Special thanks to Heritage.

Now, getting back to the question of Wyatt, you asked Byrne about his thoughts concerning our relationship. Who do you think you’re writing for, Powers? People?

© 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

And then you asked him about his thoughts concerning SSH #9-30 (Dec. 1989 Aug. 1991) and the two-issue She-Hulk: Ceremony (1990) in terms of continuity.

Yeah—that’s a juicy question!

Don’t interrupt! Readers, Byrne said, “I think that's pretty well summed up by having Jennifer wake up from a ‘weird dream’ on the splash of my return issue. (Ceremony was a complete mess anyway. So much wrong, from both real world and Marvel history, I could not even begin to describe it all!)” Yup, that’s the Byrnester for you—always honest!

Jen, do you agree with Mr. Byrne that those issues are a dream?

Well, it doesn’t matter if I dreamed or actually lived them—they’re in print.

I just took my paycheck at the end of the month and bought myself something nice that matched with green!

Anyway, Powers, this next question gets my heart a-pumping!

aw, not this creep!

I’ve heard more original dialogue in tarzan movies!

Really?

In a good way, dirty boy, since you asked Byrne why he reintroduced Wyatt as my boyfriend in SSH #36 (Feb. 1992).

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 41

Comics fans like romance!

Please don’t!

Sure they do—in between a knock-out, building-demolishing fight or two! Anyway, Byrne claims, “Wyatt is strong, smart, sensitive, and built like a brick shipyard.

What was there not to like, as far as Jen was concerned?”

Uh-huh, you got that one right on the mark, Byrne-man! So, Powers, you next asked Byrne why he presented four blank pages in SSH #37 (Mar. 1992). And before you whine—that was the issue where I dealt with the Living Eraser in Dimension X. Anyhow, in response to those four blank pages, he flippantly remarked, “Three would have been too few; five would have been too many.” Oh, that cad, Byrne—maybe we should pay homage to him at this moment by leaving the next several paragraphs blank!

Just kidding, Powers. Your next question to Byrne reads, “You draw the Thing in issue #39 (May 1992) and the Fantastic Four in other issues, sometimes in the present, other times in flashback. How did you feel, then, drawing the FF again from time to time in SSH?” and he replied, “Always fun to draw the FF.” Ah, isn’t Byrne nice? But you also remind him that I ostensibly jump rope in the nude in the beginning of SSH #40 (June 1992). And then you go on to ask him, “Did you plan for this choice to stir waves? (I’m asking you this question since the issue goes for ten bucks or more on the Internet.)”

Powers, is that actually how much you paid for the issue?

No … I swear.

Judging from the guilty look on your face, I’d say you probably paid double. So, Byrne replies to your question, “I find it very amusing that people spend big bucks for Jen ‘skipping rope in the nude,’ since it is established in the issue that she is not, in fact, nude!”

Well, the only thing I can add is that with Photoshop these days, those same basementdwellers probably find a way to rectify my lack of nudity! In your next question, you remind Byrne of the time when I told a reader in the letters page to SSH #46 (Dec. 1992) that “maybe events in my book don’t quite happen the way he portrays them, but they do happen.” Then you ask him to elaborate upon this comment.

Issue #46!?

Fine—your darn recap! Spragg returns in issues #41–42 (July–Aug. 1992)—so does the US-1 gang; Xemnu rears his giant fuzzy head again at the end of #42 and battles me in #43 (Sept.

1992). The Skrulls guest-star in #44 (Oct. 1992), and the Ovoids hang out in with me up until issue #48 (Feb. 1993), to help Weezi and me out after we switched body types!

More Than Meets the Eye This popular image from issue #40 (June 1992) isn’t quite what you think, according to John Byrne. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

42 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

JOHN BYRNE SE NSATIONAL SHE-H ULK CHECKLIST Marvel Graphic N ovel #18:

get this stinkin’ thing outta my way—it’s eating up all of my face time!

The Sensational Sh e-Hulk (writer and penc iler: John Byrne; inker: Kim DeMul der) Marvel Comics Pres ents #18 (early M ay 1989) “X-Mas Te ase” (pages 17–2 4), (writer and penc iler: John Byrne; inker: Bob Wiacek ) The Sensational Sh e-Hulk #1–8 (May 1989–mid-N ov. 1989), (writer and penc iler: John Byrne; inkers: Bob Wiacek , #1–5, 7–8; Al Gordon, #6)

Also, issue #47 is a fill-in, so no Byrne.

Now for your answer. Byrne writes, “A lot of anal-retentive fanboys had problems with the ‘she knows she's in a comic’ motif. That was a sop to them.”

The Sensational Sh e-Hulk #31–46 (Sept. 1991–Dec . 1992), 48–49 (Feb.–Mar. 1993); (writer and pencile r: John Byrne; inkers: Keith Williams, #31–37; John Byrn e: #38–46, 48–49) The Sensational Sh e-Hulk #50 (Apr. 19 93) “He’s Dead?!” (w riters-artists: John Byrne, Dave Gibbons, Frank M iller, Wendy Pini, Walt Sim onson, Terry Austin, Howard Chaykin, Adam Hughes, an d Howard Mackie).

“War Zone” (writer: Michael Eu ry; penciler: Todd Britton; inke r: Mike DeCarlo)

Maybe.

Powers, did you also foresee this?

Foresee what?

As for the rest of Byrne’s second go at me, I fought that hussy Titania in issue #49 (Mar. 1993), and then Byrne pulled in the big-guns for his final issue, #50 (Apr. 1993), as I had Dave Gibbons, Frank Miller, Wendy Pini, Walt Simonson, Terry Austin, Howard Chaykin, Adam Hughes, and Howard Mackie writing and illustrating me in a faux try-out manner.

Yeah—that was a great jam issue, Jen, but then Byrne left. I asked him a question on the matter, you know.

You did indeed, Powers, and on the subject of his second exit from my book, Byrne wrote, “I felt I'd said all I had to say.” You also asked him how it felt depicting his own death in this issue, which was by my hands, and he replied that it was “much like depicting the death of any fictional character!”

Works like a clichéd charm every time! Okay, readers, now let see what card Powers kept hidden up his smarmy sleeve. Oh, what’s this? He asked Byrne, “Do you ever want to return to the character?”

Well, it doesn’t matter what old Byrne-boy says ’cause I’m over him. I moved on with my sexy, green self!

No, I’m not going to look... ah, what the heck! Byrne wrote that he would return to my book “with a different motif, sure. It would still be lighthearted, but the fourth-wall thing is done, I think.”

“The fourth-wall thing’s done,” Byrne?

We’ll see about that!

Yeah, it’s amazing that Mr. Byrne lived on somehow after his horrible fall.

Ohhhhh, my head—again! Where’re you going, Jen?

Just another one of those amazing comic-book resurrections, Powers!

To see Byrne about a comeback series for me. Exit convenient tear in the wall!

That means that Mr. Byrne can write and draw you again, Jen!

What are you talking about, Powers? I read all of your silly questions and answers!

Ah, my dear She-Hulk, I’m still the writer of this article, which makes me somewhat omnipotent. You see, Jen, I had foreseen that you would commandeer my article, so I saved one whammy of a question and its answer to myself…

Is that the question there in your hands?

Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Powers here once more—the always sensational She-Hulk has left the article! By the way, if anyone cares to donate some paper glue so I can repair my fourth wall, please reach into the pages of this issue and hand it to me!

TOM POWERS, co-author of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy: The Discerning Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who (McFarland 2007), is currently composing his first novel—a teen comedy-drama set in the late ’80s, which is mixed with a futuristicfantasy narrative.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 43

Some food for thought: Which comic-book creator produced the most widely read comic of the Bronze Age? Would you believe … Manny Stallman?

No joke! For 17 years throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Stallman wrote and drew The Adventures of Big Boy, a comic-book series produced for Bob’s Big Boy restaurants as freebies for pint-sized customers at the popular chain. A staggering amount––more than five million copies––was doled out to children each month.

In pure Stallman style, the artist––best known for his “Raven” backup feature in Tower’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents in the mid-1960s––mixed humor with messages meant to instruct and inspire youngsters as he chronicled the adventures of the titular oversized, checkered-overalls-wearing restaurant mascot; Big Boy’s girlfriend Dolly; and his doggy Nugget (hot trivia: Nugget was born on Dolly’s birthday, according to issue #311’s “Dear Big Boy” letters column).

Entrepreneur Bob Wian began the first Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Glendale, California, in 1936.

It quickly became a nationwide chain, farming out menu and mascot to regional franchise holders operating under different names (Azar’s Big Boy in Framingham, Massachusettes; Shoney’s Big Boy in Battleboro, North Carolina; etc.).

(One of the oldest Bob’s still standing is in the Los Angeles suburb of Toluca Lake. The outsized statue of its tubby trademark character remains a magnet for members of the Comic Art Professional Society, which holds monthly meetings in neighboring Burbank.)

In 1955, Bob’s restaurants began handing out The Adventures of Big Boy to visiting kiddies. The first issue was written by Stan Lee and drawn by Bill Everett (both of whom Stallman collaborated with as an inker on such issues as Timely’s Strange Tales #57, Apr. 1957). Poster designer Lucian Bernhard, Archie’s Dan DeCarlo (whose Dolly looked Betty-esque), and Amazing Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko were among the notable artists who illustrated issues of the giveaway. After an impressive 35-year run, the comic ceased publication with #466 in 1990. More than 15 years passed before a new cartoonist studio revived the series in 2007, continuing with #467.

Surely, most serious comic-book collectors held little interest in such a blatant promotional exercise as Big Boy. Yet under Stallman’s aegis, the series was alive with wonderfully wonky art that often betrayed its own childlike aesthetic for a sketchier, approachingrealistic style reminiscent of “Raven.” “Jewel Thief Mystery” (#243, 1977) is an example of Stallman’s kiddie art losing its cartoon form. In this “whodunit,”

Bronze Age Bestseller Manny Stallman’s cover to Adventures of Big Boy #274 (1980) features Donny and Marie Osmond (also seen in last issue’s Wonder Twins article!). © 2010 Big Boy Restaurants International, LLC.

44 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

by

Micheal Aushenker

Two Tastes of Big Boy (left) Archie artist Dan DeCarlo moonlights in Big Boy #311 (1983), while (right) Big Boy nearly hurls his burger on a wild helicopter ride in that same issue in a story drawn by Stallman. © 2010 Big Boy Restaurants International, LLC.

Big Boy tracks the “Phantom Spoof,” and we learn that the butler did it. Rendered quasi-realistically, said house servant does not appear to be of the same universe as Big Boy and pals. Neither does the Einstein-ish airport guy in “Let’s Go, Nugget … We’ll Be Late.”

“Memory Book of Visits” (#274, 1980) chronicles Big Boy’s flashback of his visit to Los Angeles, where he met Patricia Ann Pats, star of Annie at the Shubert Theater. (Random.) He recalls his encounter with Noah Hathaway from Battlestar Galactica (while Nugget meets Eve, the chimpanzee inside the Daggit costume), and a Utah run-in with red-hot Donny and Marie Osmond. (This was 1980, after all…)

Stallman’s stories were as joyfully nonsensical as his art was merrily inconsistent. In Big Boy #311 (1983), Big Boy’s apple picking leads to trouble as he accidentally grabs a rope ladder and gets carried off by a helicopter. Big Boy redeems himself by saving people from a sinking ship. (Supporting characters appear hyper-realistic.)

Some of Big Boy’s backup features are mystifying.

In “I’ve Decided to Study to Become a Professional,” Big Boy and Dolly career-hunt. Issue #247 features “I Love Chinese Food,” stars Dolly and her AfricanAmerican gal pal, Iris, and ends with a flat-as-a-Lazy Susan fortune-cookie joke. A two-pager (free of Big Boy’s gang) depicts half of its history class drawn photorealistically. In “How to Make a Hit With Your Lady” (#311), Big Boy blows it big time when he reduces his date plans with Dolly to “Why don’t we stay home … and you cook a good dinner…” (With his clout at corporate, couldn’t Big Boy take Dolly to Bob’s for a free meal?)

It’s fitting that Stallman should craft Big Boy well into the 1980s. Career-wise, he was malleable and unstoppable at a time when fellow Golden Age artists retired. The Brooklynite had drawn crime comics in

the 1940s (assisting on The Spirit). In the 1950s, Stallman drew crime and horror for Atlas, Avon, and Harvey, and contributed to such titles as Phantom Stranger and Our Army At War at DC. He also created comics starring Basky & Robin (Stallman received the BaskinRobbins and Bob’s accounts while working in advertising).

Upon moving to Northern California in the early 1990s, Stallman’s career turned eclectic. He performed stand-up for the senior program at the Albert L. Schultz Jewish Community Center (ALSJCC) in Palo Alto.

When a 1991 stroke robbed his right hand of feeling, he learned to draw with his left hand at age 63 and rendered large, loose figures onto blackboards to teach English and citizenship classes to Russian immigrants at the ALSJCC. Despite setbacks such as diabetes and congestive heart failure, Stallman taught English to Chinese immigrants and used computer-aided drawing to instruct disabled children.

Stallman’s lifelong love of drawing began at age five. On his final day, he crafted cartoon cards for friends. On June 7, 1997, Stallman died at the age of 70 at his Sunnyvale, California, home.

Sure, a John Stanley could have knocked Big Boy out of the park. But there is something delightful about Stallman’s simple stories, in which narratives meander until they come to inert conclusions as gags run out of gas. Round it out with some games and a rollicking kiddie letters page and you’ve got a funny little guilty pleasure. (Hey, it came free with the meal, so why complain?) Generic and disposable to be sure, Stallman’s Big Boy delivered the comic-book equivalent of the parent company’s specialty: dependable comfort food that’s fun for the whole family and blessed by the toothy smile of Bob’s plus-sized mascot.

© 2010 Big Boy Restaurants International, LLC.

Thanks to the Jerry Boyd Lending Library of South Bay, California, for providing me with research materials for this article.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 45

by

To m Z i u k o

Happy Halloween, fright-fiends!!! Nah...

It’s the “April Fools” issue, cats and kittys— let’s have some fun!

One of the best things about original comic-book art is what you sometimes find on the back of the page. Here are two examples—one by Scott Shaw!, the other

by John Byrne. Both date from the 1980s— Scott’s “Starro of David” was found on the back of a Captain Carrot original, while John's was on the back of one of his Superman pages.

Scott was just being his usual mirthful self; what John was up to, I have no idea.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

46 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

From the debut appearance of Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew, here we have a collaboration between Scott Shaw! and the late, great Ross Andru.

I'm assuming you can figure out who drew what.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 47

On this spread are two of the biggest clowns in comics (not including some of the editors I've encountered over the years. Ohhh! I'm here all week, be sure to tip your waitress).

Art on both by the incredibly versatile Alan Kupperberg (look for his interview elsewhere in this issue).

Evil Clown Comics TM & © Nick Bakay and Alan Kupperberg.

48 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

Obnoxio pencils on this page are from the clown’s 1983 one-shot Marvel comic, while the Evil Clown art is a rough layout for the upcoming compilation volume (featuring all the stories from the National Lampoon run, as well as new stories and art never before published), plus the finished cover (inset).

Obnoxio ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 49

Jim Valentino spoofs an iconic Dave Stevens Rocketeer cover with his 1980s creation normalman. normalman TM & © Jim Valentino.

Rocketeer © Dave Stevens estate.

50 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

What humor feature would be complete without the Clown Prince of Chaos himself, the murderous Joker?

We close with this character study art for the graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke. Art by the incomparable Brian Bolland.

TM & © DC Entertainment.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 51

by

Lex Carson

conducted June 8, 2009

He Gets By with a Little Help from His Friends Many of the characters drawn by Alan Kupperberg throughout his career, in a piece kindly produced especially for this edition of BACK ISSUE. Thank you, Alan!

Characters © their respective owners.

Alan Kupperberg is one of the more underrated talents in the comics industry. I’ve been a fan of his since my childhood, especially of his run on Marvel Comics’ Invaders. I got the idea for this interview several months back when I was reading the letters page of BACK ISSUE. I saw that Alan had written a quick note to clarify some published art credits. It immediately got me to thinking, “Whatever happened to this guy?” I approached editor Michael Eury about finding out and conducting an interview with Alan. Michael readily agreed and I set out trying to catch up with the New York-based artist.

One of the things that always intrigued me about Alan Kupperberg is his range. He can write, pencil, color, and letter. He can also pencil and plot 52 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

an icon like Captain America and then delve into the depravity of National Lampoon’s Evil Clown. That in itself is a scope of immense proportions!

I was intimidated when I spoke with Alan. I mean, this guy has worked with all the legends: Kirby, Romita, Wally Wood. I thought I might find someone quite aloof and difficult to approach. The person I spoke with was neither. While Alan does have a great deal of pride in his work and creations, the person I discovered was a genuine and thoughtful individual, very careful to answer all of my questions while making me laugh out loud at some of the stories he told. I enjoyed our interview and I hope you will as well.

– Lex Carson

LEX CARSON: It appears that your first work as an illustrator was at Atlas [Seaboard] Comics and shortly thereafter at Marvel Comics. Is this correct?

ALAN KUPPERBERG: At Atlas I was production manager and did lettering and coloring. Finally editor Larry Leiber assigned me the penciling on The Cougar #3. The book was canceled before I went any further than starting the page layouts. That was my first time laying out an entire superhero book. And I was having a very difficult time of it. So it was a blessing that it didn’t proceed. My first pro humor work was for DC Comics in 1972.

CARSON: What work was that?

KUPPERBERG: My first comic work was in Young Romance #183, I believe. A feature called “Page Peterson’s Do’s & Don’ts of Dating.” Vinnie Colletta inked it and made my work appear professional!

DC had acquired the rights to publish some of Larry Harmon’s British-produced version of Laurel and Hardy.

DC put together a 100-page digest. The proportions of the British pages were different than the American proportions, so artwork was needed to make the pages taller. I did the “extending” work. I also penciled a Laurel and Hardy page or two, written and edited

by John Albano. But the digest never saw print.

DC published Laurel and Hardy #1, a 20¢ comic. It had a beautiful cover by Mike Sekowsky, beautifully inked by my pal Frank Giacoia. Inside was a new Albano lead story drawn by Mike Sekowsky and Frank, but mostly it was British reprints.

I did a lot of extending work and updating of the fashions and hairstyles for Dorothy Woolfolk’s romance titles at DC when they had the 25¢, 52-page books.

CARSON: You worked for Sick Magazine, also, in the ’70s.

What was some of your more memorable work there?

KUPPERBERG: I contributed to two issues, June 1977 and August 1977. What was memorable about working for Sick was the company I was keeping. Besides the great Jack Sparling, I worked with Joe Gill. A few weeks ago, if you had asked me if I had ever worked from a Joe Gill script, I would have said, “no.” Charlton published that iteration of Sick. I didn’t remember that I had done art for Charlton! The art director was Jack Sparling. I also worked for Martin Goodman’s Parody Magazine under editor Tony Tallarico, around 1977.

CARSON: What were some of the things you remember working on in that one?

KUPPERBERG: “Parody Magazine Interviews a TV Repair Man,” and I did a King Kong parody. It looks like I really hacked it out. More importantly, I had also worked on Sally Forth for Wally Wood. That was tremendous.

CARSON: Was Wood fun to work with? In some of his later interviews, he seemed somewhat disillusioned.

KUPPERBERG: Woody was terribly cynical and very depressed. I had been working up at Continuity Associates for Neal Adams. Neal’s phone rang and it was Jack Abel calling from the Wood Studios in Valley Stream, New York, on Long Island. Jack and Syd Shores rented studio space

Beginnings: “The Canarsie Kid” in The Canarsie Courier (July 20, 1967) / “Page Peterson’s Do’s & Don’ts of Dating” in Young Romance #183 (Jan. 1972)

Milestones: The Amazing Spider-Man / The Mighty Thor / The Incredible Hulk (syndicated comic strip) / Howard the Duck (syndicated comic strip) / The Invaders / The Avengers / Justice League of America / The Mighty Crusaders / Flyman / National Lampoon (Evil Clown Comics) / Spy magazine (The Fantastic Foursome) / Cracked / Crazy / Sick / Parody / Obnoxio the Clown and the X-Men

Works in Progress: Evil Clown Comics, The Complete Collection / The History of Comics, The Graphic Novel / a 40-page commission comic

Cyberspace: alankupperberg.com / comicartcommissions.com/Kupperberg.html / www.comicarthouse.com/kupperberg.html

alan kupperberg Photo courtesy of Alan Kupperberg.

Knock-Outs The volatile Mike Tyson/Robin Givens marriage is spoofed in this original cover art by Alan Kupperberg from the Jan.–Feb. 1989 issue of National Lampoon. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © 2010 NL Communications.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 53

Family Ties Two awesome Kupperberg humor pages: (left) Michael and Kitty Dukakis find life after politics at “Duke’s Diner,” a 1988 National Lampoon comic, and (right) AuntySpawn hugs her nephew in this 1997 Cracked Magazine parody.

Duke’s Diner © 2010 NL Communications.

Aunty-Spawn © 2010 Cracked Entertainment.

from Woody. Jack had a script for a parody of The Godfather, called “The Godmother.” Jack was looking for someone to pencil it. This was for a humor magazine called Grin Magazine, written and edited by Don Arneson.

Jack gave me the script and I went home and drew it.

Later I was finishing some of the lettering up at the Wood Studio. And Woody liked my lettering.

Gaspar Saladino had been lettering Woody’s Overseas Weekly work, which at that point consisted of Cannon and Sally Forth. So Woody asked me if I’d like to letter the strips and I said, “Sure!” That week, Woody was just coming off a drunk and his hands were shaking. Then he asked, “Would you like to pencil the strips too?” So, I took the pages home and hauled out my T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and started swiping Wally Wood stuff. I brought the penciled pages back and Woody saw his stuff swiped and he loved it.

Woody was a big swiper. He would never draw anything from scratch if he could swipe it.

CARSON: I did not know that.

KUPPERBERG: Woody had a tremendous swipe file.

He spent so much time looking for swipe, he could have drawn it himself. He wasn’t saving any time.

But I think he was insecure and I believe this was his way of easing into the job. When Woody found all of his swipe, he or I put it in his Art-O-Graph to be projected down and traced onto the boards. Anyhow, within two weeks I was writing, lettering, penciling, and inking the backgrounds on the two strips.

CARSON: That is very interesting, because Wood redesigned the Daredevil costume for Marvel.

KUPPERBERG: I bought that issue in my corner candy store and I remember the thrill. Classic issue. Great cover.

CARSON: And Wood drank?

54 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

KUPPERBERG: It’s no secret. He was an alcoholic.

Woody went on the wagon for quite a good while when I went to work for him. He had burned himself out taking speed in the 1950s. Woody was about 48 in 1973 and he looked 70. Speed is probably one of the reasons why all of Woody’s EC work is so detailed and fidgety … probably.

The bane of Woody’s existence was when people would say, “Gee, I liked your old EC stuff better.”

CARSON: You appear to have had some early influences.

You have mentioned that you were influenced by your father’s humor, and his master joke telling. Would you care to elaborate?

KUPPERBERG: Well, my father was quite a raconteur.

He could be very entertaining. If you didn’t have to live with him. If you were a stranger, you probably loved it. [Alan’s father] Sidney was a salesman and I guess that talent came in handy. I prefer to tell my stories on paper. Verbally I always bollix stories up.

CARSON: You have also mentioned that you “grew up twisted.” Do you still feel the same about your developmental years?

KUPPERBERG: Oh, yeah, absolutely! I guess that is why the “Evil Clown” [from National Lampoon] is so much fun. Spider-Man is not real life. But there are people who live the twisted, degenerate lifestyle of [the Evil Clown] Frenchy. Of the fictional characters I have tackled, the Evil Clown is a lot closer to real life than anything else I’ve done.

CARSON: It also appears that, throughout your life, you have encountered a number of the great, Golden Age comedians, such as Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, and Art Carney. I would imagine this also had an impact on you.

KUPPERBERG: It was exciting! At Westbury Theater, Bob Hope came down my aisle and shook my hand. And I once shook hands with Cary Grant. I’ve had Arnold Stang in my home. Milton Berle kept grabbing my arm that afternoon I spent at his table at the Friars Club in California. It’s always a thrill when you can get to sit and talk to them for a while. Milton Berle did a monologue. Milton would not let anyone else stick his two cents in. Period. I’ve watched Lucille Ball work. I had a wonderful dinner with Will Jordan. And I had dinner with Chuck McCann! Do you know who he is?

CARSON: The name sounds familiar.

KUPPERBERG: In the 1960s, Chuck was big in local, New York City kid’s television. He played many beloved characters. Chuck did one season on Captain Kangaroo and I got to ask him about that. That dinner was after attending a memorial service at CBS for another beloved New York broadcaster, Sandy Becker. That evening I met “Uncle” Fred Scott! Wow! I’ve seen Red Skelton, George Burns, and Jerry Lewis perform on the stage and it was a great thrill. I was one solid goose bump the whole time!

CARSON: At Marvel Comics, you worked with John Romita, Sr., who was art director. How did this compare to working with National Lampoon’s art director Peter Kleinman?

KUPPERBERG: I’d worked for several Lampoon art directors, going back to Michael Gross [Editor’s note: Not to be confused with actor Michael Gross of Family Ties fame] in the 1970s. Michael Gross was a very technically oriented person. Peter Kleinman was more of a “regular guy.” Michael Gross just seemed to be somewhere else.

I love Johnny Romita. Sometimes Johnny made changes to covers that I did. But always at the direction of an editor. There was no personal art direction from Johnny per se. I was almost never asked to make changes at Marvel. It did happen, but rarely. And it was generally the editor who would ask me.

CARSON: You worked with Michael Gross at National Lampoon?

KUPPERBERG: Yes, he went on to work in films, with that American Monty Python guy. Terry Gilliam.

CARSON: I must admit, as a young comics fan, it was quite a stretch for me that the artist from Captain America and The Avengers could also produce work like “Evil Clown” for Lampoon. How do you make that transition?

KUPPERBERG: What do you mean by transition? Are you talking about style and approaches?

CARSON: I suppose going from a heroic, iconic character to someone like Frenchy the Clown, in a humor vein.

KUPPERBERG: To me, there is absolutely no difference at all. You are always telling a story, and you are meeting the requirement of that story. That’s all it is. Every story suggests a different approach and each artist will generally see that approach differently. I am an instinctual artist. I read the script or plot, seeing the story in comic-book terms.

Things kind of percolate in my mind. I mark up the script or plot.

I underline the dialogue; separate the panels, and I lay out the panel arrangement on the margin of the script. And, in going through these steps, I’m assimilating the story, reading it through each process, until I’m ready to draw. I’ve formulated my approach during this digestion period. My mind unconsciously processes the story.

CARSON: At Lampoon you joined forces with legendary artists such as Neal Adams, Russ Heath, and Frank Frazetta.

KUPPERBERG: Well, I joined a roster. I didn’t join forces. Neal Adams and I co-penciled a job called “The Deco Desperados.” Neal penciled the straight stuff. And I penciled the humorous stuff in the style of John Held, cartoonist for the old Life magazine. I inked Neal Adams and myself and I did it very badly [tragic laughter].

CARSON: Did these established and acclaimed artists have an influence

on your work and desire to work in the humor and satire field?

KUPPERBERG: Yes, they were all extremely influential.

CARSON: Perhaps another influence may have been financial.

Lampoon reportedly paid considerably more than Marvel or DC. KUPPERBERG: Oh, yes. Lampoon had more money to work with.

They had a higher cover price and high-end advertising supporting the magazine. My Lampoon rate was three times my Marvel rate.

CARSON: Probably the most acclaimed work you did at Lampoon was “Evil Clown Comics.” How would you describe your collaboration with writer Nick Bakay?

KUPPERBERG: This is going to be boring … but I would get the script and I would draw it. That is almost all I ever did. You get the script from the editor, in this case, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, and you go home and you draw it. If you had a question, you would call and ask the editor. Before the Internet made research a snap, you might ask the editor for some character photo reference.

CARSON: Was there any social interaction between you and Bakay?

KUPPERBERG: We hung out together a bit. I went to a couple of show-biz parties with Nick. But it wasn’t business. We were both satisfied with what the other person was doing. So we didn’t really talk about Frenchy.

CARSON: Bakay is best known, in my house, by my children, as the voice of Salem the Cat in Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch.

KUPPERBERG: I don’t really know much about Nick’s show-business activities. I doubt he follows my career either.

CARSON: If you could do an animated voice for TV or film, who do you think you would choose to be?

KUPPERBERG: I do lots of voices. So, I could do anything. I could be Bugs Bunny [does impression], Daffy Duck [does impression], or Porky Pig [does impression]. [laughter] CARSON: I want to get my Clown chronology correct. Obnoxio the Clown was created around 1979 and encountered the X-Men in 1983. Frenchy, the so-called “Evil Clown” by some, was created in 1987? Am I correct?

Frenchy’s Hang Up Our own Tom “Rough Stuff” Ziuko shared with us this EC-ish Kupperberg cover from Evil Clown Comics, The Complete Collection. Tommy Z is providing color and reconstruction work for the compilation. Thanks, Tom! © 2010 Nick Bakay and Alan Kupperberg.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 55

© 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Kupperberg Team-Ups (inset above) Alan did everything but edit the Spidey/Howard story in Marvel Team-Up #96 (Aug. 1980), as well as (right) the one-shot Obnoxio the Clown vs. the X-Men #1 (Apr. 1983). (below) Captain Kirk quacks up in this Kupperberg-drawn Howard the Duck newspaper strip from May 27, 1978; courtesy of Heritage.

KUPPERBERG: I think Frenchy was created in 1988.

Obnoxio predates Frenchy by nine or 10 years.

CARSON: Since you created both characters…

KUPPERBERG: No, I didn’t create either character.

Larry Hama, the editor of Crazy Magazine, created and did the first drawings of Obnoxio. Nick Bakay, of course, invented Frenchy. I created Frenchy visually.

CARSON: Since you worked with both characters, how do these two characters differ? What nuances does each individual character possess?

KUPPERBERG: As far as I’m concerned, they just have different faces and outfits. Their attitude is essentially the same, except that Obnoxio the Clown, having been for Marvel Comics, had to be appropriate for the people that read that material. And Lampoon allowed a harsher, [laughs] filthier outlook on life, and I enjoyed that.

CARSON: How did you feel about Bob Goldthwait’s Hollywood production, Shakes the Clown, in 1992? Many believe a depressed, alcoholic clown is imitative and repetitive of your Evil Clown.

KUPPERBERG: I certainly wondered! I suspected. But, Evil Clowns? Nick and I did not create Evil Clowns. Evil Clowns go back to Lon Chaney movies in the 1920s and further. I’m no expert on the subject, but the evil or mysterious or creepy clown is not a new idea. The dichotomy of an evil or tragic clown is natural and irresistible.

CARSON: I suppose I can imagine your reaction to the Boston Globe calling that movie the “Citizen Kane of Alcoholic Clown Movies.”

KUPPERBERG: I have to say I did not see the movie. So, I can’t comment on something I haven’t seen.

CARSON: Who owns the rights to Evil Clown?

KUPPERBERG: Nick Bakay and I. CARSON: Recently, a compilation of Evil Clown has been published, I believe.

KUPPERBERG: I hope we are going to publish an Ashcan Edition this week [as of this writing]. So maybe by the time this interview sees print, I will have copies available for sale.

CARSON: Looking at all of your creations to date, what character would be your favorite or the most significant?

KUPPERBERG: I’d have to say, drawing any characters that I loved as a child. Drawing Superman is a great thrill.

I drew several JLA/JSA crossover issues, so I got to draw

© 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

56 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

all of the classic DC Golden and Silver Age characters.

That was hugely exciting. Spider-Man was the same. I feel as though the characters that I read as a kid are the “real” characters. Anything that came after I got into the business is a fake, “made up” character. It’s a weird kind of reverse-snobbism. Working between Stan Lee and Frank Giacoia on the Hulk syndicated strip was great.

CARSON: Obnoxio the Clown vs. the X-Men was somewhat unique to Marvel in that you did all the work, writing, art, inks, even lettering. How did that come about?

KUPPERBERG: I could do it and the editor said, “okay.”

I always asked to do as much as I could on every job.

CARSON: You also had complete credits on Marvel Team-Up #96 with a Spider-Man/Howard the Duck story?

Was this a similar situation?

KUPPERBERG: Exactly. Jim Salicrup the editor, said, “Sure, go ahead.”

CARSON: In 1978, you were the artist on the Howard the Duck syndicated strip. How was it to work on that character?

Did you think you had a good feel for the project?

KUPPERBERG: I felt fairly good about it. I wish I were a better artist at that point. I was just [starting to get] regular Marvel work at that point. The only way to get good is to keep drawing.

So I was beginning to hone my craft. I always wish that I were as good yesterday as I hope I am today. I look back at my stuff and I think, “Wow, that could have been drawn better.” But I did the best I could at the time, within the deadlines I was given.

You know, I followed Gene Colan [on Howard the Duck].

And he is a tough act to follow.

Gene Colan thinks and draws in dimensions that most artists can’t even apprehend. Gene Colan is from another planet. He’s wonderful. So, following Gene Colan, I felt kind of lame.

CARSON: At that time, Howard the Duck was involved in the battle of who owned his rights, Marvel Comics or creator Steve Gerber. Did this have any effect on what you were trying to do with the script?

KUPPERBERG: No. Steve Gerber was still writing the strip when I started. And then he quit after a couple of weeks. He wrote me, saying, “You should quit, too.

You should support my lawsuit.” I did not understand that. When I created a character for Marvel, I understood what I was doing. I was giving it to them. They owned

In the Mighty Marvel Manner A kickin’ Kupperberg/John Beatty cover for Captain America #271 (July 1982), courtesy of Heritage. (inset below) Obnoxio on the cover of The Comic Reader #190 (Apr. 1981).

Characters © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

it. I’m glad Gerber won his lawsuit, but I really didn’t understand. Marv Wolfman, as well. I believe these writers had to have known what they were doing when they were creating these characters. Otherwise these guys are claiming to have been naïve dupes.

And I don’t believe that they were naïve dupes. In any case, I was given and I do have a portion of Steve Gerber’s ashes in a prominent place in my studio.

CARSON: As the co-creator of “Evil Clown Comics” for National Lampoon, how do you feel about creators and their respective rights to their creations?

KUPPERBERG: Whatever the deal is. With the Lampoon, I found out in 1994 that Nick and I owned Frenchy.

So that’s fine! In the mid-1990s, I received a phone call from Matty Simmons, the former publisher of the Lampoon. He was trying to sell HBO a bunch of series.

He asked me to send him a compilation of the “Clown” series. That was very exciting, but nothing came of it.

CARSON: Are characters created at Lampoon owned by their creative people?

KUPPERBERG: I assume the same thing goes for the other creators as for Nick and I. CARSON: Eventually, you lost your passion for working in the comics field. Were you disillusioned, burnt out, looking for a change of focus?

KUPPERBERG: I think it was as much that Marvel lost its passion for my work as anything else [laughs].

When the Shooter regime self-destructed and Tom DeFalco came in, he didn’t seem to have much use for me. I was not in that clique or claque. A lot of guys my age can’t get arrested.

CARSON: That is interesting. Your approach to this is kind of “matter of fact.”

KUPPERBERG: I’ll admit that I am insane, but I believe I know what reality is when I see it.

CARSON: It is very refreshing talking to you. Some creators spend a great deal of time telling how great their work is.

KUPPERBERG: I’m very good at what I’m good at.

I know what I’m doing. I certainly think of myself as a professional and a good storyteller. But the finished product and people’s responses to it are personal taste.

I was just rereading Roy Thomas’ [and Jim Amash’s] wonderful John Romita book, published by TwoMorrows. I love Johnny tremendously.

Anyway, Johnny was saying that one of his childhood heroes was George Tuska. I know George Tuska [was] a beloved artist and a good storyteller. But there is something about his artwork that I don’t like. It doesn’t appeal to me.

There’s nothing objectively wrong with his work. It’s my subjective taste and my reaction to his work. Something is rubbing my esthetic the wrong way. So I understand that everyone has his or her own personal reaction to everything. Everything is filtered through your own personal prism. You can’t fight that. You can’t argue with it.

Whatever it is, if you like it, you like it. It doesn’t mean it’s good or it’s bad. It just means you like it. What is objectively great? Everything is personal and subjective. Totally. So I’m not personally invested in my POV or opinions.

CARSON: What is next for Alan Kupperberg? Any new projects on the horizon?

KUPPERBERG: Well, we’ve already mentioned the Evil Clown book. Danny Fingeroth and I are working on something special. We are not really ready to talk about it yet. Dan is working on the script and pretty soon I hope to start getting drawing on it. And I gladly accept commissions. I enjoy drawing my favorite characters for people. I get to take the proper time on commissions and to draw them well. Back when we were drawing comic books, everything had to be in yesterday. With the commission work, people want a good job, and they give you the time you need. If it takes a couple of weeks, that’s fine. Because folks know they are going to get a beautiful job with the proper time and love lavished on it. So I like to do commissions very much.

LEX CARSON is a Marvel Comics Silver and Bronze Age collector and historian as well as a contributor to BACK ISSUE. He is also an active editor on the Wikia Marvel Database Project.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 57

®

The 1970s wasn’t just the “Me Decade,” it was also the “MAD Decade.”

Between 1970 and 1980, the iconic humor magazine enjoyed unprecedented popularity and the highest sales in its history, at one point selling nearly 2,800,000 copies a month.

Those were glory days that, sadly, started to decline with the growing popularity of video games and VHS movies in the 1980s and myriad Internet distractions in the 1990s and beyond. But prior to that inevitable slide, observers say, MAD was at its peak, throwing funny yet insightful jabs at everything from race relations to the Nixon White House.

MAD has always been a reflection of the times, regardless of decade, say those who pen the words and draw the pictures. But to understand its subtle evolution throughout the 1970s (arguably one of the most surreal decades the world has ever seen), one must know the magazine’s unusual history.

EARLY MAD MAD entered the world in 1952 as a humorous color comic book, priced at 10 cents and written, edited, and generally fussed over by Harvey Kurtzman. Jealous of fellow EC editor Al Feldstein, who was making good money writing, editing, and occasionally illustrating EC’s horror, crime, science-fiction. and suspense comics, Kurtzman approached publisher William Gaines about what he could do to boost his own salary. Aware that Kurtzman, who was writing and editing Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, was really a humorist at heart, Gaines suggested that he create a humor comic. In that moment, MAD was born.

The early issues of MAD poked fun at the most popular comic books and comic strips of the day, but once Kurtzman settled in, he broadened his subject matter to include television, motion pictures, and other aspects of popular culture. A gifted graphic designer, Kurtzman had particular fun with MAD’s covers. Issue #19, for example, looked just like a horse-racing form, while the cover for issue #20 was an exact replica of a black composition notebook—ideal for fooling teachers.

MAD became a 25-cent black-and-white magazine with issue #24, primarily to avoid censorship from the Comics Code Authority and to keep Kurtzman in the EC fold. Kurtzman had been approached by Pageant magazine, and Gaines, who felt that MAD couldn’t survive without the balding humorist at the helm, offered to turn MAD into a magazine if he agreed to stay.

Unfortunately, the Kurtzman era was short-lived.

In 1956, he approached Gaines with an outrageous demand—51 percent ownership of MAD, or he’d walk.

Gaines was livid and fired Kurtzman on the spot, which was exactly what Kurtzman wanted because it allowed him to accept an offer from Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner to edit a slick, more adult humor magazine

What … Me Worry?

Norman Mingo’s cover for MAD #185 (Sept. 1976) was one of many of the magazine’s swipes at politics of the decade.

TM & © EC Publications, Inc.

58 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

by

D o n Va u g h a n

titled Trump. Adding insult to injury, Kurtzman then turned around and raided MAD’s staff, luring away artists Will Elder and Jack Davis. However, Gaines had the last laugh—Hefner killed Trump after just two money-losing issues.

Kurtzman’s departure left MAD without an editor. At the recommendation of family and friends, Gaines offered the position to Feldstein, who had exhibited a flair for humor by writing and editing Panic, EC’s own contribution to the growing glut of MAD imitators.

Feldstein, who had been pounding the pavement looking for work following sergio aragones the demise of EC’s comics line, immediately accepted.

To say that Feldstein was a lucky man would be an understatement. Though his budget for MAD post–Kurtzman was relatively meager, he managed to rebuild its staff with a remarkable collection of gifted writers and artists, including Frank Jacobs, Arnie Kogen, Larry Siegel, Tom Koch, Dick DeBartolo, Bob Clarke, George Woodbridge, and Don Martin, most of whom would continue to work for MAD for decades to come.

(Feldstein also tried to broaden MAD’s appeal by featuring works by the era’s most celebrated humorists, including Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, Ernie Kovaks, and Stan Freberg, but eventually dropped them in favor of his own stable of writers.)

Under Feldstein’s deft stewardship, MAD found its voice, and readers found MAD. Circulation grew steadily throughout the 1960s, which, though relatively staid compared to the decades that followed, still managed to maintain a sharp editorial edge via such features as “Hippie: The Magazine That Turns You On,” “The Ten Commandments—Revisited,” and “East Side Story,” a deft parody of West Side Story featuring the United States and the Soviet Union as rival gangs set against the United Nations.

“We improved our product and found a younger, more receptive readership,” observes Al Jaffee, the creator of the wildly popular “MAD Fold-In.” “Originally, under Harvey Kurtzman, MAD’s fans were college kids who liked its rebellious attitude toward establishment bullsh*t.

When Al Feldstein succeeded al jaffe Kurtzman as editor, he leaned more toward popular humor and less toward sophisticated satire, which brought in large numbers of younger high schoolers and increased circulation.”

Laugh-In and Fold-In (above) A Sergio Aragonés strip from MAD #193 (Sept. 1977), and (right) an Al Jaffe “MAD Fold-In” from issue #196 (Jan. 1978).

TM & © EC Publications, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 59

THAT ’70s MAD The 1970s saw dramatic changes in America and the world at large but, at least in the beginning, very little at MAD. Within its hallowed halls, it was pretty much business as usual. “As MAD left the ’60s and entered the ’70s, in my mind as editor, there was no particular need for any change in editorial policy,” notes Feldstein, who edited the mag until 1984.

“My plans at the time were to continue doing exactly what I was doing—garnering a larger and larger circulation with timely articles about current concerns, presenting our social criticisms in as many new and different formats as we could dream up, and, above all, being funny!

“If there was any angelo torres ‘maturity’ of MAD regarding themes and subject matter as the ’70s progressed, it was a normal and natural one,” Feldstein continues, “driven by our need to constantly introduce new and fresh ideas in the magazine, to continue to satisfy our growing and maturing audience, and to accurately mirror the absurdities and insanities of the times.”

Indeed, MAD’s fabled “usual gang of idiots” approached the ’70s pretty much as they had the 1950s and ’60s—by observing society and poking fun at same. It was a simple yet effective formula that drew more readers by the month.

“Back in the ’60s and ’70s, everybody was reading MAD! Everybody!” says Larry Siegel, who sold his first piece to Feldstein in 1958 and became one of the magazine’s most prolific contributors through the mid-’80s.

“There isn’t a well-known comic figure today who didn’t grow up with MAD and who wasn’t influenced by the magazine. I’ve been don martin told that by so many when I meet them.”

“What’s interesting is that everyone thinks MAD has an ideology, that MAD has a focus,” adds Dick DeBartolo, who has been writing consistently for MAD since 1962. “The reality is that the writers come up with whatever they want to. There has never been a time when we’ve been called together and told, ‘We should be thinking of this area.’

The objective of MAD is to be current, so that involves reading all the newspapers and magazines and finding trends that are taking off.”

Superhero Parodies (above) From MAD #204’s (Jan. 1979) “Incredible Bulk” TV show takeoff, with art by Angelo Torres. (left) A Don Martin Superman spoof from MAD #208 (July 1979).

TM & © EC Publications, Inc.

60 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

MAD GOES DISCO As anyone who lived through the decade knows, the 1970s produced oddball trends on an almost weekly basis, many of which were readily satirized in the pages of MAD. One of the easiest targets was disco, a phenomenon DeBartolo personally embraced with passion.

“I loved disco because it was very high energy and I loved to dance,” DeBartolo admits. “At the time I was also writing for [game-show producer] GoodsonTodman, and we [writers] went to Studio 54 a lot because we were press and could get in with none of the nonsense at the door. I wrote four or five disco pieces for MAD, and they just sat on Al’s desk. Al told Bill Gaines, ‘I know nothing about disco and wouldn’t know how to edit these. I don’t know what the point of satire is because I don’t know the main subject.’”

DeBartolo pressed Gaines to do something with the articles because disco’s popularity was starting to wane, so Gaines decided to publish a one-shot titled Disco MAD. The magazine contained DeBartolo’s work in addition to parodies written by Nick Meglin and Norm Blagman. Though well-intentioned, Disco MAD was not a huge success. “I asked Bill, ‘Did you lose your shirt?’” laughs DeBartolo, “and he said, ‘No, we made a little bit of money.’”

DeBartolo loved disco so much that he spent thousands of dollars to create a working discotheque on his 50-foot houseboat. “I’ve never smoked a day in my life, and discos were getting so smokey and people were getting drugged out, so I thought I’ll just build my own and forbid smoking,” he explains.

“I started with a mirrored ball and some spotlights and had a guy build fountains that would go on and off to the music. I also installed an ‘infinity floor,’ which looked like it went down 10 or 20 feet.”

(DeBartolo recently sold his beloved houseboat after 35 years. His last guest was Woody Allen, who dropped by to check out the boat as a possible shooting location for Whatever Works.) jack davis Disco was just one bit of ’70s silliness to catch the eyes of MAD’s writers and artists. “The ’70s were kind of a goofy time in our lives,” notes writer Arnie Kogen.

“It had pet rocks, mood rings, EST, meditation, rolfing, jogging, polyester leisure suits, strip malls, and bra burning. The decade also saddled us with some heavy issues that had to be addressed—drugs, Watergate, pollution, an unpopular war—and MAD dealt with them all.”

Indeed, the ’70s produced more than its share of inspired pieces. Among them:

Boogie Shoes, Real-Life Blues (left) This one-shot came a bit too late in the disco fad to score with readers. (below) Jack Davis art from MAD #146 (Oct. 1971).

TM & © EC Publications, Inc.

• “Silent Majority: The Magazine for Middle America,” written by Larry Siegel. Cover blurbs include “I Moved Out of Montana When a Negro Family Moved in Next Door—in Idaho!” and “Make War, Not Love: The Heart-warming Memoirs of General Westmoreland.”

• “MAD’s Reality Street,” written by Dick DeBartolo and illustrated by Jack Davis. A parody of Sesame Street, the piece educated youngsters on the pitfalls of real life with no candy-coating.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 61

mort drucker

• “A MAD Guide to the Modern American Class System,” written by Frank Jacobs and illustrated by Paul Coker, Jr. • “The White House Follies of 1977,” a musical salute to the Carter administration written by Frank Jacobs and illustrated

by Mort Drucker.

“During this decade, MAD did touch on the significant social issues of the time, but only if they had the entertainment value the magazine required,” says Jaffee. “MAD was never a crusading pamphleteer; it had no political bias. If it satirized a movie or TV show in which race, politics, or religion played a role, it would only be to humorously reveal hypocrisy, venality, or just plain stupidity.”

MOVIE AND TV PARODIES Throughout the ’70s, Hollywood gave MAD plenty of fodder for its monthly movie and television parodies. Among the most memorable were Jaws (“Jaw’d”), Rocky (“Rockhead”), The Godfather (“The Oddfather”), Love Story (“Lover’s Story”), The Exorcist (“The Ecchorcist”), All the President’s Men (“Gall of the President’s Men”), and Star Wars (“Star Roars”).

Several writers contributed to MAD’s movie and television parodies throughout the ’70s, including DeBartolo, Kogen, Stan Hart, and Tom Koch. But the lion’s share were penned

by Frank Jacobs and Larry Siegel, who Jacobs credits with single-handedly perfecting the MAD approach to film parody.

Habitat for Hilarity (above) Detail from Mort Drucker original art from MAD #197 (Mar. 1978), courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). (left) Issue #196’s Star Wars lampoon attracted the eye of George Lucas’ lawyers.

TM & © EC Publications, Inc.

62 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

(When asked why he was assigned so many movie and television parodies, Siegel humbly replies, “Because I was the better writer. Everyone will tell you that. I started it in the form that it took.”)

Luckily for MAD readers, the vast majority of the magazine’s movie and television parodies during the 1970s were illustrated by Mort Drucker, one of the finest caricaturists to put pen to paper. In fact, Drucker illustrated 11 of the 19 movie and television parodies featured in the anthology MAD About the Seventies (Little, Brown), with the rest drawn by Jack Davis, Harry North, and Angelo Torres.

It wouldn’t be hyperbole to place Mort Drucker on the same pedestal as more esteemed mainstream caricaturists such as Al Hirschfeld and David Levine. Throughout the 1970s, Drucker was at his peak, paying loving homage to the decade’s best movies while skewering them with an unerring eye for detail.

It took a while but, like the ’70s themselves, MAD magazine became increasingly edgier, tackling through articles and special posters such pivotal issues as women’s lib (the Statue of Liberty, christened “Ms. Liberty,” holding her bra aloft), shoddy workmanship by the auto industry (a car falling apart as it receives an “ok” at its final inspection on the assembly line), and the risks of nuclear power (a terrified Alfred E. Neuman standing before a nuclear power plant as he comments, “Yes … me worry!”).

Racism was another central issue tackled in a variety of formats within the magazine’s pages.

One particular highlight was MAD’s parody of All in the Family, written by Larry Siegel, which concludes with a visit from one of Archie Bunker’s old war buddies—Adolf Hitler. Frank Jacobs took the sensitive issue several steps further with a piece titled “You Never Can Win With A Bigot!,” which pulled no punches in regard to racist terminology.

However, in Jacob’s capable hands, the piece makes you squirm and laugh.

CONTROVERSIAL COVERS Some overly sensitive readers may have been offended, but few if any returned their issues in protest. Not so issue #166 (Apr. 1974). With a cover that featured only a hand with the middle finger extended and the words “The Number One Ecch Magazine,” it angered retailers, who refused to place it on their shelves, and distributors, who returned the issue by the bundle.

(As a result, that particular issue has became a rather scarce collector’s item.)

“Two ideas for the text were suggested,” recalls Jacobs. “The first, favored by Nick Meglin and other staffers, proclaimed, ‘MAD—Always Number One in Good Taste!’ The one eventually used was favored by Al Feldstein.”

“I was completely naïve as far as the gesture was concerned,” says Feldstein. “I thought that the popular ‘up yours’ finger was merely an expression of disdain, contempt, and disparagement flashed out of car windows, etc. I was unaware of any sexual connotation and totally surprised at the reaction to its depiction by some women around the country, who vocally complained to their magazine dealer, their objections then being passed on to the wholesalers and distributors.”

And publisher Bill Gaines, who approved the cover?

“He was as surprised as I was!” Feldstein states.

April Fools Issue

“Always Number One in Good Taste” (below) MAD #166 (Apr. 1974) featured one of the magazine’s most controversial covers. (far left) The back cover to issue #182 (Apr. 1976) offered a twist on the US bicentennial.

TM & © EC Publications, Inc.

•

BACK ISSUE • 63

Coming Up Short (right) Many magazine vendors missed the joke of MAD #151’s (June 1972) cover. (below) From Heritage Comics Auctions, Jack Rickard’s original painting for the Rocky spoof in MAD #194 (Oct. 1977).

TM & © EC Publications, Inc.

Issue #166 wasn’t the only one to give Gaines and Feldstein fits.

The cover for issue #151 (June 1972) was another troublemaker.

Ingenious in concept, the cover looked as if the bind line had been printed down the center and bore the words, “MAD salutes American industry in its endless quest for quality, perfection, and high standards of production.” Unfortunately, not everyone got the joke.

“I remember Bill saying, ‘They’re sending the issues back!

Are they idiots?’” recalls DeBartolo. “We had to put something on each bundle saying, ‘This is a joke! These are not misprinted issues!’

People just didn’t get it, which is sad when you think about it.”

MAD also got into trouble, albeit briefly, with attorneys for George Lucas. Shortly after MAD published its de rigueur parody of Star Wars (written by Larry Siegel with Dick DeBartolo), Gaines received a very nice letter from Lucas complimenting all involved. A week later, Gaines received a far more belligerent letter from Lucas’ attorneys, who stupidly believed the parody was an infringement of Lucas’ copyright.

According to DeBartolo, the letter demanded that Gaines turn over all of the original artwork plus 15 percent of the issue’s profits, since the piece took up approximately 15 percent of the issue.

Gaines’ response? “Bill wrote on the letter, ‘Gee, George liked it.

See enclosed letter,’ and enclosed the letter Lucas had sent,” DeBartolo says. “We never heard from the attorneys again.”

POST–’70s MAD Sadly, MAD’s circulation began to slide as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s. Readers, it seemed, were spending their hard-earned money on new, more exciting diversions. “I think as the ’80s started, other people got in on doing satire and MAD was not the bold magazine it used to be when it was alone in pursuing certain topics such as drugs and smoking and taking on the car companies,” observes DeBartolo.

MAD soldiered on through the ’80s and ’90s, its once mighty readership inexorably slipping away. In the years that followed Bill Gaines’ passing in 1992, an effort was made to modernize the magazine by adding color and allowing outside advertising, two things Gaines had adamantly opposed. In 2005, MAD introduced a sister magazine titled MAD Kids, which featured the kind of low-brow humor that appeals to youngsters 6 to 11. The thinking was that readers would transition to MAD when they grew older.

In 2009, MAD celebrated its 500th issue—a remarkable milestone for a publication Time magazine once dismissed as “a short-lived satirical pulp.” However, the celebration was short-lived because with #500, MAD’s frequency was reduced from monthly to quarterly.

In addition, MAD Kids and MAD Classics, a quarterly collection of reprinted material, were canceled.

Looking past circulation figures, were the ’70s a significant period in MAD’s history? Surprisingly, many who were there merely shrug at the suggestion. “The ’70s was like the Alex Trebek of decades,” observes Kogen. “It was good. It was solid. It had some decent stuff but it wasn’t outstanding. Frankly, I couldn’t wait for the ’70s to end and the ’80s to begin. Then the ’80s began, with punk rock and Cabbage Patch Kids, and I looked back fondly on the ’70s.

It wasn’t a standout decade but it could have been worse.”

Larry Siegel, however, has a differing view, noting, “I think the ’70s were a significant decade because MAD was at its peak; everyone was reading it and into it, and there was a lot of excitement.

It was also significant in regard to the quality of the magazine. Anybody who analyzes the book will say, ‘This was the peak, this is when MAD was at its best.’

No question about it.”

DON VAUGHAN has had a love affair with comic books since he was 11 years old. His writing has appeared in an eclectic array of publications, including Military Officer Magazine, Nursing Spectrum, Filmfax, and The Weekly World News.

64 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

by

Dewey Cassell

The best place to start, in this case, would be at the end. The end of Not Brand Echh, that is. Not Brand Echh was the irreverent humor comic book published

by Marvel Comics in the late 1960s. Lasting only 13 issues, it nonetheless set a new standard for self-deprecating humor in comic books, poking fun at the best of Marvel’s superheroes as well as the Distinguished Competition’s. It was a critical success, but lagging sales led to cancellation of the book in mid-1969.

SPOOF So why then, only a year later, did Marvel launch a new humor title called Spoof? Former Marvel Comics editor and writer Roy Thomas says, “I’ve never known.

Stan [Lee] just announced one day he wanted to start a new mag called Spoof, and that it would be more of a general parody mag, not a superhero one. We were trying to branch out in that period.” Adding to the mystery is a two-year gap between the publication of the first and second issues of Spoof, for reasons lost to time. (Marvel would likely not have had the sales figures on the first issue in time to cancel—or postpone— the second.)

Spoof was a departure from the format of Not Brand Echh, typically featuring parodies of movies and television shows, along with the occasional satire on popular culture.

In that respect, it bore some resemblance to MAD magazine. When asked if the resemblance was

Mirthful Marie (left) Marie Severin’s cover preliminary for Crazy! #3 (June 1973), courtesy of Ruben Espinosa. Note that in the final version (inset) the Human Torch and Invisible Girl figures were dramatically altered. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 65

“The Lunatic Side of Life” (left) Marie Severin’s cover to Spoof #1 (Oct. 1970). (right) Spoof #2 (Nov. 1970) took on the movie version of Tales from the Crypt. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

marie severin

intentional, Thomas replies, “Only in a vague way.

I suppose it was hoped it would attract some of the same audience.”

Marvel’s humor comics used many of the same writers and artists that graced their superhero books. Thomas indicates the creators “were asked if they’d like to do such a story,” and several took them up on the opportunity for a change of pace.

Some of the creators, like Stu Schwartzberg, had also contributed to Not Brand Echh. The primary artist for Spoof was Marie Severin, who brought to the stories the same wry sense of humor and gift for caricature that had made Not Brand Echh a favorite of fans. Marie also penciled the covers for Spoof.

Of Marie, Thomas notes, “she was an excellent humor and parody artist.” Marvel Comics writer Marv Wolfman, who also penned several stories for Spoof, concurs. “Marie was the absolute best humor/satire and otherwise great artist Marvel had,” Wolfman says.

Roy teamed up with Marie and her brother John on one of the finest stories of the series, “Tarz an’ the Apes,” in issue #2. In the lampoon of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tale, Thomas pays homage to the artistic Severin siblings [including Marie’s brother, John] when a character that was fired says, “Hey! Don’t I get Severin’s pay?”

Another Marie Severin story from the second issue of Spoof, plotted by Roy Thomas and

66 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

written by Marv Wolfman, was a parody of the 1972 movie, Tales from the Crypt. As for the source material, Wolfman notes, “I had seen the film and, of course, had known all the original stories from the comics.” The story was rife with irony, in that Marie was called upon to pencil a comic-book satire of a motion picture that was based on the comic book she originally colored.

Among the television shows parodied in Spoof were the cult classic Dark Shadows, as well as the long-running medical drama Marcus Welby M.D., both also illustrated by Severin. The “spoofs” of the television shows tended to be based on an amalgamation of the programs, rather than a specific episode.

Spoof was certainly not a chore for Wolfman, who says, “I loved it. I really enjoyed writing them.”

Although the typical approach at the time was the “Marvel method” of writing synopses rather than full scripts, Wolfman adapted his style as necessary for the genre: “I went back and forth depending on who the artist was and how much free time I had.

Humor requires complete scripts but my plots were very, very tight.” One of Wolfman’s stories for Spoof was titled “What If … Celebrities Ran for President?” and it featured Western film actor John Wayne as one of the candidates years before another Western film actor would enter the White House. Irony or premonition?

CRAZY! Sadly, Spoof only lasted five issues before being canceled in mid-1973. Earlier that same year, Marvel launched a comic book titled Crazy! that featured reprints of classic Not Brand Echh stories. Crazy! ran for just three issues, ceasing publication one month after Spoof. The cover to issue #2 of Crazy! was reprinted from Not Brand Echh #6, but the other two covers were originals by Marie Severin. However, although the comic book ended, the name lived on.

Later that same year, Marvel launched a black-and-white humor magazine titled Crazy, intended to be a direct competitor of MAD. [Editor’s note: For more on Crazy magazine, see BACK ISSUE #31.] Asked why they reused the name, Thomas said simply, “’Cause it was a good name.” Indeed, Marvel’s prior incarnation, Timely Comics, published a short-lived humor comic book in the mid-1950s called—you guessed it—Crazy.

The B&W magazine proved to be the most successful version of that title, running 94 issues.

The Inedible Bulk and Friends (left) The cover to Crazy! #2 (Apr. 1973) reprinted Severin’s Not Brand Echh #6 cover art (inset). (below) A sketch of the Bulk by Marie, courtesy of Steve Donnelly (www.coollinesart.com).

ARRGH!

© 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Then, 18 months after the demise of the comic books Spoof and Crazy!, Marvel decided to try its hand at humor comics once again with a new book entitled Arrgh!

Roy Thomas, who served as its editor, explains the genesis of the new venture: “Arrgh! was intended to follow up Not Brand Echh and Spoof, and to be more of a horror/parody rather than a superhero or generic one like the previous two mags. I was proud of the title I’d dreamed up, and knew we could run some reprints from the 1950s’ Crazy, Wild, and Riot (which we had to, because I wasn’t given a budget for full new art each issue).”

Arrgh! was, as Roy described in the first issue, a “genre parody—stories that are simply take-offs of the whole wide spectrum of so-called horror tales, rather than one exact story.” The format led to inevitable comparisons with another horror/humor comic book published by DC Comics called PLOP! The letters column of Arrgh! #3 put that contention to rest with the following missive: “Arrgh! owes not one whit to PLOP [sic] or any other current comic book.

Rascally Roy Thomas conceived the idea for the mag (originally titled FAR OUT! or some such nonsense) several months before the first issue of our Loyal Opposition’s humor mag went on sale, and with no knowledge of (or interest in) its contents. This isn’t to knock our competitor’s efforts, or to say that they copied us, either; it’s just a case, which happens again and again in this medium as elsewhere, of people hitting on similar ideas at about the same time. So why didn’t our mag come out first? Well, as you may have noticed, Marvel has been issuing so many new magazines these past couple of years that something had to go—and, since our 25 cent humor mag would take more care and feeding than most other comics (what with three stories and all), it went. Or at least, lapsed into limbo for some months until the time was riper. We won’t deny that the mere fact that it looked as if there might be a market for such a mag may have helped inspire Roy to bring the

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 67

Monster Madness (above) Ross Andru and Mike Esposito’s cover for the unproduced Arggh! #6, courtesy of Steve Donnelly, and (far right) the cover to issue #1 (Dec. 1974). © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

idea up again more recently to Stan … but Roy first spoke to Tom Sutton about use of his way-out ‘Rat!’ story in such a mag a couple of years ago.”

Arrgh! benefited from the artistic talents of the likes of Sutton, Alfredo Alcala, and Mike Sekowsky, all of whom were experienced at rendering horror stories.

The Sutton story “Rat!,” which appeared in the debut issue, along with the sequel “Rat Reborn,” which appeared in issue #3, were among the best of the series. Sekowsky’s “Fangs for the Memory” was equally outstanding. The reprints were dated, though, in both appearance and content. The last issue of Arrgh! was comprised entirely of reprints by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, from their collaborative venture, Up Your Nose (and Out Your Ear) [which BI covered way back in issue #13. Ed.].

Unfortunately, Arrgh! was canceled after five issues.

(DC Comics’ PLOP! lasted 24 issues.) A sixth issue of Arrgh! was apparently planned, presumably with reprints like issue #5, since a cover was drawn by Andru and

68 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

Esposito. Thomas cites several contributing factors to the title’s demise. “I was never able to give Arrgh! my full attention … and again, had to use reprints. When I didn’t write the stories myself, I didn’t have anybody much to fall back on. Russ Jones [as Jack Younger, who contributed scripts to the earliest issues] wasn’t primarily a humorist, though we were friends … and I was lucky to get Tom Sutton to do a sequel to his ‘Rat!’ story, at least.”

Asked if he enjoyed writing humor stories, Roy Thomas replies, “Very much so, though I lost money doing them because they took twice as long (at least) as the hero stories, and humor didn’t come easily to me … though I was proud of some (not all) of what I did, [like] ‘Darn Shadows’ and ‘Tarz an’ the Apes’ in Spoof.”

The departure of Arrgh! left behind a void in parody humor comics that remains largely unfilled to this day.

Perhaps the day of such humor comics has passed, along with many of the gifted artists and writers who created them. Even venerable MAD magazine, the lone survivor of a bygone era, has been reduced to four issues a year. It’s sad, but it seems there aren’t many of us left with a sense of humor. It’s enough to make you want to open your mouth and go, “ARRGH!” Sincere thanks to Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman for their insight into Marvel’s humor comics of the ’70s, as well as Ruben Espinosa and Steve Donnelly for art contributions. The unpublished cover of Arrgh! and color guide are available on Steve’s website at www.coollinesart.com.

DEWEY CASSELL is a regular contributor to BACK ISSUE magazine and author of the now sold-out book The Art of George Tuska from TwoMorrows Publishing. He is currently writing a book about Marie Severin.

®

by

Roger Ash

Did he really read 5,000 comics in a single sitting to win a bet? Will that many comics really give a person brain damage? Can you actually scale walls using toilet plungers? Would anyone really fight crime wearing swim fins and a large carrot mask with a flame on top? Will they let you gallivant across town on a nuclear-powered pogo stick, throwing stink bombs and blazing away with a brace of automatic pistols?

Will the world accept a blue-collar, working-class superhero? With no superpowers?

These were the questions in 1979 when comic-book auteur Bob Burden unleashed one of the strangest, most addictive and iconic comics characters of its day.

Flaming Carrot fights crime not only for the fun of it but for profit, occasionally keeping the booty he finds on unconscious or riddled criminals. He’s a party animal and a womanizer. When he runs out of death cards to leave on the bodies he sticks baby carrots in the noses and ears of his victims. Sometimes he covers their faces in tin foil for good measure. He sneaks up behind the bad guys and encases them in a giant sock. Recently he became the first comics character to go through a whole adventure in his pajamas. And his #1 issue goes for over $200.

THE CARROT SPROUTS Today, the surreal and picaresque Flaming Carrot is known and loved by comics readers the world over, but it took a while for his legend to take hold. Flaming Carrot first appeared in Visions #1 in 1979. In that first eight-page story, the Carrot battled the Red Dyke.

The art was kind of crude and the Flaming Carrot didn’t look as svelte as he does now, with the mask being thicker.

Where did the Flaming Carrot come from and how did he end up here?

“I started out in comics; in comic fandom, actually,” recalls Bob Burden. “I was a reader and fan first, then a dealer in comics and original art, and eventually a writer. I couldn’t find anyone to draw the stories I was writing—too crazy, maybe—so I wound up drawing them myself.”

Burden never went to art school and is totally self-taught: “I was drawing all the time.

I had a knack but learned mostly from looking at original art. I’d sit there for ten or 20 minutes and just stare at a page of Kubert art or Kirby or Frazetta. I remember a sheath of loose pencil layouts by Gil Kane that I had. They were amazing.

I think I learned more looking at the layouts, studying the construction and composition and all that, than I did from anything else.

After Flaming Carrot came out, I got some mentoring from other artists. Jim Steranko was just a wonderful help. He took time out to give me advice and it was really good advice.

The Real Carrot-Top An undated Flaming Carrot sketch by Bob Burden, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). (inset) Flaming Carrot originally appeared in the hard-to-find title Visions.

Flaming Carrot © & TM Bob Burden.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 69

“When the first Flaming Carrot came out in 1979, I was barely surviving in Atlanta. I was dealing comics and movie posters and old ’30s toys, comic original art, and other antiquities, and marginally staying alive. It was a frugal, Bohemian lifestyle.

“But I only really worked maybe five or ten days a month. I did conventions, ads in the Buyer’s Guide, hit flea markets, antique shows, and shops to buy. So I was able to goof off and party and live life the rest of the time. I really wanted to be a writer, but I was convinced that I needed to ‘live life’ before I could write about it. The old comics and other antiquities gave me the opportunity to do that.

“The initial story? My roommate, Lamar Waldron, was making this comic magazine/fanzine called Visions. It was going to be a high-class fanzine. Four-dollar cover price!

“Well, he was working day and night on his story for Visions.

He was really into all the Golden Age fine-line inkers, guys like Alex Raymond, Mac Raboy, Lou Fine, and Alex Kotsky. And he was putting in so much detail. I didn’t think he would ever finish the story.

“Now, I come home one night from a happy hour, and he’s there, working on his story. He had been working on this one page, the same page, all week. So I sit down at my drawing table, ya know, like, ‘Here’s how ya do it’—and I drew the first Flaming Carrot story. And all in one night, I wrote it and I drew all eight pages and inked two of them, all in one night. And that was when I was still inebriated.

“The idea had been rolling around in my head for a while. I’d just reread the [Jules] Feiffer book on comics and Jim Steranko’s History of Comics and the idea of doing a hero along the lines of some of those really strange Golden Age superheroes from the really early ’40s just kind of grabbed me. The idea was kind of camp but progressed to the surreal real fast.

“I was really into a lot of the ‘avant’ movie directors in the late ’70s, like Louis Bunuel, Jean Cocteau, Felini, Bergman, and Woody Allen. But not just movies, I liked all kinds of surrealism: Alfred Jarry, Salvador Dali, the Marx Brothers. I mean, I had been writing and drawing all my life and got serious about it when I was about 14 or 15,

but by my 20s I wanted to do everything: poetry, comics, movies, lyrics, oil painting … I was sort of artistically manic. I remember Jerry Iger (one of my first mentors, Will Eisner’s first partner, and creator of Sheena) told me something that Winsor McCay, Jerry’s first mentor in comics, had told him: ‘You’re a leaf in the wind, and when you settle down, that’s where you’ll be.’ I settled down in comics, doing Flaming Carrot and that’s where I am.

“I think there were 1,000 copies of Visions #1 printed but about 200 of them were destroyed in a fire. It’s kind of an expensive book now.

I think it’s like $300-500 for a copy. Crazy, huh?”

A NATURAL LAMPOON? Did Burden see Flaming Carrot as lampooning superheroes?

“Not at all. I loved comics. It was just some fun,” he replies. “I started out doing Flaming Carrot because it was fun to do. I wasn’t driven.

It wasn’t a painful labor of passion. It was a happy, wonderful thing.

“A year later my friend Lamar Waldron called me up and said, ‘Hey, everybody liked the Flaming Carrot. Let’s do another Flaming Carrot story.’ He probably just wanted to fill pages and was being charming and nice, but I was naïve back then and was happy people liked it.

“I drew that second Flaming Carrot story in, like, two days.

And it was one of my best stories I ever did. The Artless Dodger story.

Later I went on to flesh that little eight-page story into a full-length 24-page story in Flaming Carrot #3, the only time I did a ‘remake,’ and I think it was even better the second time.”

Flaming Carrot’s manly action, gadgets, and his way with the women may remind readers of James Bond, and rightly so.

“As a kid, I loved the spy/secret-agent genre that exploded back then,” says Burden. “The James Bond stories were great, but more than that, I dug the Matt Helm paperbacks and the Derek Flint movies. I saw Our Man Flint and that was it! I knew right then that whatever I did, I would be the Derek Flint of my field. Flint was kind of a surrealist secret agent and the king of total cool.

“Probably there’s some bits of Conan DNA in the Carrot, too.

See, Conan, like Flaming Carrot, was a bit stupid and when he got into a tight situation, he would just as soon pull out his sword and slash his way out. So Flaming Carrot blasts his way out in a hail of gunfire.

“Maybe, in the whole scheme of things, Flaming Carrot is the first anti-anti-superhero. I think Flaming Carrot may be the next step beyond Hemingway’s Nick Adams or Salinger’s Holden Caulfield or Lee and Ditko’s Spider-Man. I think Cool Hand Luke was kind of the high point of the anti-hero thing. Then you have Flaming Carrot!

“Overall, the anti-hero is sort of pathetic, lonely, and downtrodden.

He’s intellectual and fairly smart but shy and sort of doomed.

Well, Flaming Carrot’s the opposite of all that! Sure he’s got problems: He’s stupid, goofy looking, and has no superpowers. But instead of being gloomy and introspective, he’s up and at ’em, ready to go at the drop of a hat.”

According to Burden, other influences on the Carrot include “for the humor, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, and Ernie Kovacs.

“But humor and jokes are like one-trick ponies. You do it for attention.

Storytelling you do for respect, for the art of it, and for yourself.

“Then my writing got weirder and weirder. I enjoyed humor a lot, but I like movies and poetry and all kinds of artistic expression!

I remember how T. S. Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ turned my head around when I first read it in high school. I became interested in odd literature, the offbeat, and arcane.

“I was always writing this weird, strange literature. I called it Electra-Fiction. So when I hear Dylan music or W. S. Burroughs, I’m curious.

Flaming First Issue The Flaming Carrot’s first spin-off comic, cover-dated Summer–Fall 1981.

Flaming Carrot © & TM Bob Burden.

70 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

One day my friend says, ‘Hey, man, this sh*t is like William S. Burroughs–type stuff.” So I had to check this guy Burroughs out. I said, ‘This guy’s pretty good.’ He writes some really, really weird stuff. And that led to others.

“Back to comics, I was always a big Spirit fan.

If there was one guy I really wanted to team up with and work with, it was Will Eisner. We briefly talked about it a couple times over the years but I never followed up. He came to Atlanta to speak at the Jewish Community Center down the street, about a year before he passed away. That’s when I realized, when we were hanging out and talking after the event, that he appreciated some of this odd stuff I’d done.

It made me so proud. I screwed up in not doing something with him. He was an incredible storyteller, a truly great mind, and a rare, rare talent.

“At one point when I was a kid, I sold all my comics. The whole collection. But I kept the ones I really liked. I kept the [Amazing] Spider-Man #1–38, the Herbies, some reprints I had of The Spirit and Fighting American, and not much else. A few DCs like Russ Heath’s Sea Devils, Mystery in Space, “Atomic Knights,” and the early pre–hero Marvels. I still have my Amazing Fantasy #15 [Spider-Man’s first appearance], the one I bought off the stands.”

SELF-PUBLISHING Flaming Carrot’s appearances in Visions proved to be popular enough that Burden decided to self-publish an issue of Flaming Carrot that featured a new, full-length story. “I was actually co-self-publishing the 1981 oversize #1 with my friend Lamar, the guy who started Visions and ran the Fantasy Fair for many years,” Burden says. “We sold some copies through the limited marketing and distribution system in comics back in those days. Didn’t get rich, but it was fun. That was the real early days of the direct market. At the time, there were maybe 2,000 subscribers to the Buyer’s Guide total. Fandom was a lot smaller back then.”

The big break for Flaming Carrot and Bob Burden came when the series caught the eye of Dave Sim, creator of Cerebus, and Sim’s then-wife Deni Loubert.

What was it about the Carrot that appealed to Sim? “It wasn’t specifically the Carrot,” says Sim. “It was Bob’s unique and fully realized style. I saw his work in 1979 and Bill Loebs’ [William Messner-Loebs] as well, and resolved that if I was ever in the situation to give other cartoonists the absolute creative freedom I had, Bob and Bill were at the top of my list.”

This led to Flaming Carrot becoming a backup feature in Cerebus #61 and 62, where he encounters floating people who are controlled by a performance artist/witch, and later, Flaming Carrot Comics #1, all in 1984. The first issue, “Road Hogs from Outer Space,” introduced Flaming Carrot to new readers and featured Martians who had come down to claim the Earth as “legally” theirs after property lots had been sold to them by a shyster Martian real-estate developer. Issue two featured Flaming Carrot going after some gangsters, who are also being pursued by Death, who they get drunk by lacing his drink with strychnine, and issue #3 was the aforementioned battle with the Artless Dodger.

Burden says, “Dave and Deni were publishing what they liked and thought others would like. They had Neil the Horse, Jim Valentino’s normalman, and all these other wonderful characters. I guess Dave was getting it together to keep Deni occupied. Deni was a creative person and a good businesswoman and she was kinda chomping at the bit to expand beyond Cerebus.

Beware the Scratchy Ink Thing

The marketplace was expanding so they got going.

I guess in the end, we were kind of a divorce settlement for Deni because Dave kept Cerebus and she got the other five or so titles. That worked out for both of them.”

Being published by Aardvark-Vanaheim brought Flaming Carrot to the attention of more readers than ever before. What was their reaction to this strange, new hero?

“People either loved it or hated it,” Burden replies.

“Some comics purist thought I was making fun of comic-book superheroes, thought that Flaming Carrot was a satire. But I don’t do satire. I can’t stand satire.

At the time, comic fandom took their comics very seriously. Maybe because nobody else did.

“But everything in fandom was growing so quickly back then. It was a wonderful era. There was like this feeling of a revolution and a new age, the feeling that anyone can do anything. I kinda wish that feeling was around now.

“We had all the Aardvark-Vanaheim stuff. Then there were the Hernandez Bros. coming out with the first Love and Rockets, and Dan Clowes and Chester Brown coming out with weird, strange, incredible, wonderful stuff. And to be shoulder to shoulder with these guys….

“I think it was really fun for the readers. You’ve gotta put yourself in the shoes of the average comic-book collector back in the early ’80s. They were basically into Marvel Comics and that was it.

DC, Archie, and Gold Key comics were secondary with a few collectors. They [fandom] were all very

April Fools Issue

A 1985 Flaming Carrot/Cerebus jam sketch by Bob Burden and Dave Sim. Flaming Carrot © & TM Bob Burden. Cerebus the Aardvark TM & © Dave Sim.

•

BACK ISSUE • 71

Publisher MerryGo ’Round Aardvark-Vanaheim was the first publisher to produce Burden’s ongoing (but erratically published) Flaming Carrot Comics. Covers to (left) issue #1 (May 1984) and (right) #2 (July 1984).

Flaming Carrot © & TM Bob Burden.

serious, but also open-minded. If you’d come out with stuff that’s got a sense of humor, that’s fun, that’s different, that’s avant-garde, they’d go, ‘Holy cow! This might be interesting!’

“A new age was beginning in comics. At the same time all over America there was New Wave music coming out, the punk-rock movement, and avant-garde cinema.

There was an explosion of non-corporate, independent arts and entertainment. It was a wonderful time.

“There’s always some people who were taking us seriously. One day, I’m sitting down at the table at a comics convention and this kid about eight or nine years old came up to me. He said, ‘Mr. Burden, I really like the Mystery Men. My favorite Mystery Man is Red Rover, but what are his powers?’ I looked at him and I said, ‘Well, kid, what would you like ’em to be?’ He got this frown on his face. He was so dejected. He expected me to have a whole bible like the Marvel comics do—the whole history of the heroes, what their powers are, where do they come from, and what’s their favorite color. I didn’t have that, so he was kind of freaked out. I felt so sad for the poor kid.”

Both Sim and Loubert gave Burden a very free hand with his work.

“Pretty much I handed it in and they published it,” Burden recalls. “I think they did that with most of their books. Dave and Deni were both very supportive of independent comics and independent vision and let us run wild.

72 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

“Dave and Deni trusted me to do the book.

They had faith in me to deliver a book. And for me this was a tremendous responsibility. All of a sudden I had this tremendous responsibility. All of a sudden it was, ‘I’ve got to do these stories!’ The Visions stories and the first Flaming Carrot were kind of a lark. Now, I had to get serious. I had to roll up my sleeves and do a fullfledged story—a series.

“Looking back, I had a lot of fun doing them.

After the first three issues, then I got rolling. But early on there were times when I just said, ‘What have I gotten myself into? What have I promised here? This is like Savage Messiah.’ But I went ahead and did it.

I just couldn’t let those two nice people down, people that had faith in me, and if it hadn’t been for Dave and Deni I would probably have never gotten things off the ground.

“My advice is just jump in and do it. Learn while doing. Don’t sit back and try to make everthing perfect and wait for the right moment. Go! Jump!

Draw! Write! Fly! Don’t care what people think!

“See, I agreed to do a series for them, but I had no idea whether I’d be able to do it or not. I’d never drawn a regular comic. I didn’t know it was hard. If it hadn’t been for my feeling of responsibility to Dave, I’d probably have just sat there and kept dealing comics and not really published the book. Eventually I would have published something because I really wanted to get into the creative arts. That was really my first objective. But we get sidetracked, y’know?”

BLUE-COLLAR ADVENTURES Flaming Carrot #1–4 were published by AardvarkVanaheim, #5 was a joint venture between AardvarkVanaheim and Renegade, and #6 (Mar. 1985) began the Carrot’s run at Renegade, Deni’s new company.

Issues #4–11 featured a long, feature-length story that starts with Flaming Carrot going out for a night on the town. In this case, the town is the Iron City district of Palookaville, a blue-collar town. Why here instead of someplace more glamourous? “You have to do what you’re familiar with,” says Burden. “I came from a blue-collar town, Sharon, Pennsylvania. I came from a blue-collar family. And there’s a beauty and romance to that world. Recently I saw Deer Hunter rerun late one night. They nailed [blue-collar life] there.”

But Iron City is a hopping place as Death returns; a communist scientist discovers how to make an explosive from cellulite; Bela Kharmarian, the Soviet James Bond, comes after the scientist; the governor becomes a baby head; Flaming Carrot takes a trip to limbo; and more.

All these disparate threads come together in an explosive conclusion where Flaming Carrot repulses communists who have taken over the city. The reader also learns more about the supporting cast including the kindly Uncle Billy, the wacky Crowbone, and the scientist Dr. Heller, who provides Flaming Carrot with many of his gadgets.

According to Burden, “I like fun characters, characters that are interesting and unpredictable, and that have a human quality to them. That’s the most important thing. Crowbone, for instance, he’s easily embarrassed.

He fights his embarrassment by busting in on things and blurting out stupid things in a conversation. Then you have Uncle Billy, who’s just happy to be involved in anything that’s going on.”

After such a long story, the book launched into a series of shorter stories with issue #12 (May 1986).

“The Dead Dog Leaped Up and Flew Around the Room” introduced readers to the villainy of Don Wiskerando and his flying dead dog. “Don Wiskerando was a mess,” says Burden. “Like Flaming Carrot, he and the dog were mysterious. He was going to transform from a nemesis into a mentor character in the Las Vegas adventure with the flooby carrot but I never got around to that.”

When Flaming Carrot wins an abandoned and defunct burlesque palace in issue #13, he starts looking for treasure that is supposedly hidden there, but soon is drawn into an adventure featuring the mysterious Red Donut and Captain Commander. Four of his shapely lady friends— Tina, Tammy, Windy, and Scooter—join in on the adventure. As a reward for their help, Captain Commander gives them superpowers and they become the Bikini Teens.

According to Burden, the Bikini Teens creation was a campy sort of “pure, crass commercialism. Sex sells.

Later on, the Swedish Bikini Team came out from Old Milwaukee so I guess I was on the money.” The girls would return a couple issues later to help Flaming Carrot fight monsters.

Where did the Mystery Men come from?

“People kept saying, ‘We’d love to do Flaming Carrot as a movie, but the problem is that we can’t do the Flaming Carrot head on screen,’” Burden says. “‘The CGI would be terrible and you don’t want another Howard the Duck.’ So I had to come up with some new characters that had normal-sized heads, heads that didn’t need to be animated or CGI-ed. I said, ‘This is going to be fun.’

When [DC Comics’] Watchmen came out, I knew the time was right to unleash the Mystery Men. In some ways, the Mystery Men became sort of a goof on the Watchmen.”

A couple other interesting things happened at this time. First, Flaming Carrot returned to AardvarkVanaheim. In Cerebus, the title character is climbing a tower that will take him to the moon. Cerebus gets his foot trapped and, in Cerebus #104 (Nov. 1987), Flaming Carrot comes to the rescue.

Why did Dave Sim decide to have Flaming Carrot guest star?

“Having an elongated tower of demon heads and skulls that would stretch a quarter of a million miles to the moon was the goofiest plot device I ever came up with, and I needed a way to signal to the reader that I recognized that,” Sim says.

“On a professional level, Bob was obviously severely blocked and I wanted, quite selfishly, to jump start him: get him to remember this isn’t rocket science and start banging out six- and eight-pagers in a day or two and have a monthly Flaming Carrot in the stores. Didn’t work, but it was a lot of fun—just Bob, Gerhard, me, and Roxanne. ‘The Ten Days That Shook Atlanta.’”

Burden says, “That was fun. Dave called up one day and said, ‘Let’s do a comic together.’ I said, ‘Great.

C’mon down.’ So he flew down, stayed at my house for ten or 12 days, and we just had a blast. We did the whole bloody comic book in ten days. It was great for me because I, finally, did not have to be in charge of everything. I just did whatever Dave told me and added my crazy sh*t and had fun with it.”

Secondly, Flaming Carrot changed publishers with issue #18 (June 1988) as the book moved to Dark Horse Comics. “They were fun guys,” says Burden. “They were really interested in doing something unusual and creative.

Mike [Richardson, Dark Horse’s publisher] was really a positive, optimistic guy back then.”

Issue #18 is a single-issue story. Flaming Carrot’s friend Uncle Billy sends off for a mail-order bride and he gets a wild woman from the jungle. She arrives in a cage with an instruction book.

© 2010 Dark Horse Comics.

Characters © their respective owners.

I Wanna Be Ringo Next!

Bob Burden, Flaming Carrot Comics letterer Roxanne Starr, Cerebus inker Gerhard, and Cerebus creator Dave Sim (in left-to-right order) in the ’80s, taking off on a famous Beatles pose from the ’60s.

Photo courtesy of Dave Sim.

MYSTERY MEN, CEREBUS, AND DARK HORSE COMICS At this time, Burden introduced some of his most well known characters to the book. In a dream/flashback sequence in issue #16 (June 1987), Flaming Carrot recalls an adventure he had with his teammates including the Shoveler, Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, Screwball, Mr. Furious, and Red Rover—the Mystery Men! In this two-part adventure continuing into #17, the Mystery Men take on the Vile Brotherhood, who are making clones of Hitler’s feet.

Nazi boots march into small towns kicking people to death.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 73

Alternate Cover Original art (courtesy of Heritage) to an unpublished version of issue #21’s (Spring 1989) cover.

Burden then launched into another feature-length continued story (#19–24) in which alien invaders intend to wipe out part of Earth’s population because there are too many people for the planet to support.

Also, Flaming Carrot is behaving even stranger and more violently than usual as he is becoming demented.

If this sounds dark, that’s because it is.

Was this a reaction to the darker turn comics took in the late ’80s?

“I think my life might have turned a little dark at that time,” replies Burden. “I ran into a few major roadblocks and wrong turns in my personal life around then. I think I was getting a little spent and spun out.

“About then was the time in my life when I came to grips with my own mortality. I had to sit down with fear and mortal terror and get to know them. We had tea and cookies. I wrestled with the secrets of the universe.

I walked down the long hallway into the darkness and the unknown. Later I went on a diet where I only ate food bought with coupons.”

Getting serious, Burden says that “the world around me was changing, I saw eras fade, even the comics

Flaming Carrot © & TM Bob Burden.

marketplace was changing. I became detached. I escaped for a while. I entered my wilderness years.”

But the story had plenty of light moments, many provided by Flaming Carrot’s friend from the Mystery Men, Screwball. Screwball is perhaps even stranger than Flaming Carrot. Screwball’s mask makes it look like he has googley eyes, and he has missile-toed boots that allow him to fly. He has a pet shoestring.

What about Screwball appeals to Burden?

“He was innocent,” Burden replies. “He was a ‘monitor,’ he was half human and half robot. He was kind of like Spock or C3PO, sort of human but not able to fit in always. He was a fish out of water in any situation.

The Screwball character was fun. We gave him his own comic book later. He would make a good TV show for kids.”

The aliens themselves were plenty strange. There were an alien man and woman—a couple—who were swingers and couldn’t wait to hook up with Earthlings once their mission was complete. The aliens had a gun that could turn people into cartoon characters. And they convinced Star Trek and Dr. Who fans to help them in their schemes by convincing them that they were friends of mankind. Once the fanboys discovered that they were duped, they joined forces with Flaming Carrot to trounce the aliens and their contacts on Earth, Don Wiskerando and his flying dead dog.

Flaming Carrot’s adventures didn’t stop there, as they continued into the 1990s and 2000s. His adventures included teaming up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. However, since we’re only looking at his adventures in the ’70s and ’80s, that’s a story for another day.

ROXANNE, THE FLAMING CARROT’S CO-STARR Aside from Burden, another person who has been with Flaming Carrot throughout the years is letterer Roxanne Starr.

Burden says, “Roxanne’s been a dear, dear friend all these years and a good member of the Flaming Carrot family and a true character. She’s done a lot of incredible stuff and helped make the book work all these years.

Also, when she’d come over, I’d get work done.

“Roxanne sort of rode shotgun. When I was off-base, she’d let me know it. She’s a former New Yorker so she tells it like it is. She’s very blunt and when it comes to criticism, there’s no checks between the brain and the mouth. When something’s f****d up, she says so in no uncertain terms. With me, that is. She’s probably more diplomatic with other people but she knows I have a thick hide. Familiarity builds contempt, or so they say.”

WHO IS THAT MASKED MAN? After all this time, there is still one big mystery surrounding the Flaming Carrot—who is he? He is based on a real person, and early issues of the comic included a contest where readers attempted to guess his identity.

Will Burden ever reveal Flaming Carrot’s identity or is it destined to remain a mystery?

“I always used to say I’d reveal who he was when I got on Johnny Carson’s show.

Now it looks like the David Letterman show or Jay Leno or whoever’s out there. I don’t know if I’m going to do it on the Craig Ferguson show.”

ROGER ASH lives in Wisconsin, where he works for Westfield Comics. He has never read 5,000 comics in one sitting, but he has been tempted to during the winter.

74 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman originated as a full-page strip in the Vancouver, British Columbia, weekly underground newspaper Georgia Straight.

The year was 1978 and the Milkman replaced artist/writer David Boswell’s own earlier effort titled Heart Break Comics. Living in Toronto when Heart Break began in 1977, by the time Reid Fleming debuted Boswell had moved to Vancouver, where he resides with his family to this day.

THE MILKMAN COMETH

by

Eddy Zeno

After the Georgia Straight work ended, Boswell decided to turn Fleming’s exploits into a comic book. By 1980, when Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman #1 was released, Boswell was a competent artist with excellent storytelling skills. His style is reminiscent of V. T. Hamlin’s on Alley Oop, with cross-hatching and a certain roughness to the art. And just as Oop will take on all comers, so will Reid Fleming mix it up with a fearlessness that belies his dumpy appearance.

Normally one who didn’t purchase a non-superhero book published by the independents, I had to take home this black-and-white comic for the title alone upon seeing a first-issue reprint in the mid-1980s.

Turns out that Fleming is a superhero/anti-hero with powers after all! He has inhuman strength and is nearly invulnerable to terrific falls from his sometimesflying milk truck. Heck, he can outrun a motor vehicle when the need arises.

There’s even a Batcave sort-of feel to the headquarters of Milk, Inc., the place where Reid works. Like a subterranean lair, trucks drive up steep ramps after unloading dairy products from a train which lumbers directly into the cellar. Emerging from a tunnel, the locomotive transports special milk from a secret pasture that few have ever seen.

Originally self-published, Reid Fleming soon moved to Eclipse Comics with a new #1 in 1986. It was the start of a five-part opus titled “Rogue to Riches.”

The “rogue” part came from Mr. Fleming’s on-the-job behavior. For instance, his choice of beverage while driving his route was Owl’s Roost Rye Whiskey, 90 proof. He especially hated Mondays and destroyed a store’s worth of alarm clocks by squeezing them until water came out, throwing them against the wall, or tossing them in the toilet. When he finally made it to work, he’d sometimes muscle his way into customers’ homes to pour milk into their fish bowls, toss cartons of eggs on their floors, or confiscate their televisions to watch his favorite program.

By midday, Reid would either plant himself on someone’s couch or hide the chocolate milk he was supposed to deliver so he could rush home to watch TV. No matter how much his job threatened to interfere, Fleming never missed a daytime episode of The

Making Mother Proud David Boswell’s World’s Toughest Milkman on the cover to Reid Fleming #3 (Dec. 1988).

Reid Fleming © & TM David Boswell.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 75

Dangers of Ivan. He was mesmerized as the show’s star lay comatose for the duration of each episode.

The Dangers of Ivan became The Horrors of Ivan when after six years the show’s befuddled star finally awakened and arose from his coma, only to fall out of a window near his bed. Reid even wrote a fan letter in which he requested (and received) an autographed photo from the now-dead and skull-faced television actor. Ironically, the deceased Ivan gained the ability to speak, though his exclamations made no sense.

Fleming remained as enthralled as ever.

Reid’s girlfriend, the thrice-divorced Lena Toast, had a program, too. She co-hosted a talk show called Commander Bob and Betty with a bizarre fellow who wore a science-fiction costume and could shoot rays from his fingers. He and Lena traveled around in a flying house to interview people. When an unnamed actor (who was obviously Paul Newman) visited their set, he acted like a jerk and was zapped by the Commander. These subplots appeared out of nowhere and speak of the comic book’s wonderful strangeness.

A fellow milkman was Fleming’s best friend.

Like any good Canadian, Lowell Cooper, a.k.a. Captain Coffee, would utter the rhetorical “Eh?” during conversations. When he wasn’t sleeping on the job, the narcoleptic Captain (presumably drinking decaf) bragged about his buddy Reid Fleming to those who would listen. Even when Reid played tricks on him, which was fairly often, Captain Coffee uttered a few curse words but remained loyal.

Reid liked Mr. O’Clock, the president of Milk, Inc., but the company supervisor, the aptly named Mr. Crabbe, was his nemesis—his Lex Luthor, his reason to exist. Crabbe helped get him fired but only after Fleming splashed the flat-headed, Frankensteinlooking curmudgeon with milk, threw him in a river, punched him in the stomach, and stole his car.

Once, Crabbe commandeered another milk truck and shot his pistol at Fleming while the two rammed each other as they caromed down the road. Later he sabotaged Reid’s delivery vehicle so that the motor, transmission, and brakes all failed at once. That would result in Fleming’s ninth truck being totaled and nearly got him killed by the company train. But as dangerous as Mr. Crabbe was, at times even he was afraid of Reid.

“I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU TO SHUT UP!” The gun incident with Crabbe wasn’t the only one for Reid. Within a six-page span of the second part of “Rogue to Riches,” different customers took both rifle and frying pan to the milkman. Fleming prevailed, however, by choking one with his necktie and administering knuckle sandwiches to the other.

Another way of Fleming expressing himself was by threatening to pee on patrons’ flowers. Occasionally, he did shower objects of disdain with a stream of urine, including his alarm clock and the malevolent Mr. Crabbe.

Got Milk? (top) Early visuals for the primary characters, which actually didn’t change a lot as the series evolved. From 1980. (left) Fractured, kaleidoscopic panels portray this nightmare sequence from the third chapter of “Rogue to Riches.”

Reid Fleming © & TM David Boswell.

76 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

Normally offensive statements like, “What the hell are you lookin’ at?” and “I thought I told you to shut up!” seemed appropriate coming from Reid Fleming.

There were at least three reasons. First, he was usually reacting to rudeness that was initiated by the other party; second, Reid’s sarcasm and mannerisms were funny; and third, let’s not forget—he’d been drinking on the job. The booze helped him take his anger to another level and perhaps it contributed to his wit.

An example could be found when a fellow in the next car at an intersection mocked Reid’s chrome dome.

After catching and pummeling the guy, the follicledeprived Fleming’s response: “I’m not bald! I get my hair cut this way!”

In the first “Rogue to Riches” installment, Fleming met his sarcastic equal when he began dating Lena Toast.

On a golf outing that lasted six pages, it was also made clear that Lena didn’t shock easily, matching and surpassing Reid’s sexual innuendoes. David Boswell’s script was especially enjoyable because their repartee did not sound adolescent; it sounded like two smart-aleck adults on a real date.

ART OF THE MILKMAN Some of the comics’ inhabitants had oddly identifying features, while others looked normal. For example, the end of Reid’s nose was shaped like an ice cube.

Certain kids looked average; however, two incorrigible tykes were portrayed more like leprechauns than

little boys. Mr. Crabbe’s Frankenstein–shaped cranium almost shouted that bolts should be popping out of both sides of his neck. This visual scared children and loaned Fleming another excuse to mock the supervisor by building up and topping off his own head for Halloween.

The depiction of people with average features versus outlandish ones matched the alternate realism and absurdity of the storylines. Throwaway characters on succeeding pages in episode two of “Rogue to Riches” were perfect examples. On page 4, standard appearing, middle-aged Mrs. Gooch laughed at one of Fleming’s practical jokes as he exited the customer’s yard. On page 5 we met Mr. Clumb, a businessman who visited President O’Clock of Milk, Inc. to try and obtain some of the secret milk for his stores.

Clumb had dark hollows instead of eyes so we could see into his soulless personality. In a wordless exchange, likable O’Clock and caverns-for-eyes Clumb stared each other down for several panels before O’Clock bid the intruder his leave.

Hairstyles were important to creator David Boswell, from businessman Mr. Clumb’s sprig of curls, to supervisor Crabbe’s ultimate flattop, to best friend Captain Coffee’s 1960s “Fab Four” ’do. Girlfriend Lena’s largecoiffed hair was indicative of her age, her status as a television personality, and her “I’ve seen it all” attitude.

Those without a full head of hair were perhaps even more critical to the artist, beginning with Reid himself.

April Fools Issue

Cemeteries and Combovers (left) Another Fleming nightmare, from issue #3. (right) Characters with bad hair, a Boswell trademark, from Reid Fleming #4 (Nov. 1989).

Reid Fleming © & TM David Boswell.

•

BACK ISSUE • 77

Fun At the Park (left) From the third chapter of “Rogue to Riches,” Reid’s Kodak moments. (right) Reid Fleming #2 (Mar. 1987) featured one of the best staring sequences ever in a comic book.

Reid Fleming © & TM David Boswell.

A decade before people purposely shaved their heads to hide their baldness, bad combovers abounded in Boswell’s world so they could be drenched with water or tousled by the wind.

There were other interesting aspects to Boswell’s storytelling. When Reid was having a nightmare, the layouts became jagged and kaleidoscopic. If Fleming skipped a morning’s work for amusement-park antics, pure joy was expressed as panels tilted and borders perforated, creating the illusion of off-kilter postcards.

ROGUE TO RICHES The customers who enjoyed his goofy practical jokes and seemed to “get” Reid remained a small minority.

One time, a petition was signed by 27,935 people who wanted Fleming removed from his delivery duties.

That didn’t lead to termination, however. Wrecking his tenth milk truck actually got Reid Fleming fired.

Ironically, he transitioned from the anachronistic

78 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

occupation of milkman to the cutting-edge job (for that time) of cable-television installer. Turns out creator Boswell had been a cable installer, too.

Though Reid longed to get back to the business of delivering dairy, he became as successfully reckless and annoying in his new line of work. For example, he enjoyed boring a cable hole through an obnoxious client’s wall which penetrated the forehead of her painted portrait on the other side. And, just as he once drove a milk truck into a swimming pool full of endangered people, as a cable guy he later tossed discarded antennas from rooftops like a champion javelin thrower, not caring where they landed. He pierced a few yard gnomes but luckily didn’t kill anybody.

Reid Fleming went from being a rogue who lost his dream job to becoming president of the Milk, Inc. by discovering that soon-to-retire Mr. O’Clock was his long-lost father. Though the resolution was convenient, the convolutions required to arrive at that moment were what made the series interesting.

Fortunately, back issues, including Fleming’s earliest adventures, are now available under David Boswell’s own Deep-Sea Comics imprint. Even better news is that Mr. Boswell has launched another five-part saga titled “Another Dawn.” To date, the first three installments have been released. His website is www.reidfleming.com and besides comics, T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and original-art commissions, interviews can be read and other items can be purchased. Guess the true rogue-to-riches story is Boswell’s own, as he continues to benefit from recording the adventures of his most famous rapscallion.

Special thanks to Mike Juette, formerly of Comics and Collectibles in Memphis, Tennessee, for his help in preparing this article.

[Editor’s note: Eddy Zeno’s interview with Reid Fleming creator David Boswell begins on the next page!]

by

Eddy Zeno

conducted by e-mail November 4, 2009

EDDY ZENO: How do you look at Reid Fleming and his supporting cast this many years down the line?

DAVID BOSWELL: I see Reid Fleming, Lena Toast, Captain Coffee, Mr. Crabbe, Mr. O’Clock, and all the others as freeloaders and layabouts who ought to be supporting me for a change.

ZENO: How have the characters evolved?

BOSWELL: I’m not sure that the characters have evolved. Each has a certain archetypal quality that I believe may be the key to their appeal. I sure hope that doesn’t sound pretentious or too thinky.

ZENO: Where do you draw the line between reality and fantasy when scripting and illustrating the comic?

For example, houses have normal foundations but the set for the Commander Bob and Betty Show consists of a flying studio.

BOSWELL: A little fantasy goes a long way, so I’m pretty strict about using too much. The world around Reid Fleming should be ordinary, normal, and plain, the better to set off Reid’s somewhat eccentric behavior. Perhaps you’ve noticed that Algy, the dog who seems to live at Milk, Inc., occasionally speaks English. He doesn’t speak in every issue, and when he does, he’s limited to one word.

ZENO: How does your love for old movies influence your storytelling?

BOSWELL: I like the speed and concision—and the brevity—of comedies made by [Buster] Keaton, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, etc., and try to maintain pace and rhythm throughout. The trick is to create the sense of movement in a medium [comics] where there is no movement at all, just static images. I like and admire the lighting and cinematography in many films from the ’20s and ’30s, and use light and shadow as expressive elements.

ZENO: What made you choose the occupation of milkman for your anti-hero? Did you grow up on someone’s route for morning dairy?

BOSWELL: No conscious choice was made, nor was there any influence. Reid just “happened” while I was sitting in the sun with a sketchbook and a little something to smoke. The date was June 29, 1977. Don’t go looking for “Rosebud.” There isn’t one. The milkmen I saw as a child were all very well-behaved.

ZENO: Please talk about what led to the teaming of Reid Fleming and Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot?

BOSWELL: I’d met Bob in Dallas in 1990. We were each nominated for a Harvey Award, and we both lost. Bob’s a fun and gregarious guy. He called me on the phone in 1998 to pitch a crossover with Reid and Flaming Carrot. He’d done a few team-ups with other cartoonists and I guess had done well with them. I must confess to being reluctant about the idea, as it seemed to me that these two comic-book characters inhabit completely different worlds.

Finally he talked me into it, although economic necessity was certainly a factor.

ZENO: You’ve stated in the past that you don’t read comics. Did that ever change? What comic books plans do you have for the future?

Knockin’ ’Em Dead The cover to Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman #5 (Nov. 1990), by David Boswell.

Reid Fleming © & TM David Boswell.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 79

Reality TV (left) Reid’s girlfriend Lena Toast co-hosted the Commander Bob and Betty show. A flying house traveled around to search for guests.

From issue #2. (right) The Horrors of Ivan was appropriately darker than the rest of the comic, as much to show the diminished light coming from the television screen as it was to follow the befuddled, now-dead star’s adventures.

Reid Fleming © & TM David Boswell.

BOSWELL: I was an avid comics reader from the age of five to about the age of 12. Since then, I haven’t read a ton of comics but I have tried to educate myself in certain areas. When I discovered Bob Burden’s work in the ’80s I made a point of tracking down and reading all issues then extant. The real point of my remark is that when one works at comics all day one wants a complete change when work is done. So anything but comics. I get a lot more from music and movies than from comics. And I think comic books should be comic, but seldom are. Funny, that is.

The future: I’m finishing the second Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman graphic novel. It’s called Another Dawn.

IDW is going to be doing a two-volume Reid collection, and Another Dawn will be in volume 2. Volume 1 should be coming out next summer, but I have no firm info yet.

ZENO: How long does it take to write and draw a page?

BOSWELL: I used to time myself on the penciling and inking. A typical Reid page—10"x15"—would take about eight to ten hours to pencil and ink. The writing can take much, much longer!

ZENO: Why are fans attracted to an irascible character like Reid Fleming?

BOSWELL: He’s completely self-confident, which none of us are, and he does what he wants without regard for consequences. Many people would like to have that fearlessness.

And everything Reid does is about laughs and having a good time. He’s that impossible combination: fit and 42.

ZENO: What do you most enjoy about portraying his adventures?

80 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

BOSWELL: Total freedom and absolute control.

ZENO: Do you get many requests on your website for original art commissions? What are the most sought-after drawings from fans?

BOSWELL: Commissions tend to be sporadic. Very often people have specific ideas about the kind of drawing they want. For instance, I did a parody cover of a comic called Preacher—the commissioner had apparently got several artists to do their take on this particular cover.

Many come from women whose husbands/boyfriends are, like Reid Fleming, bald. You know what Reid says— “I’m not bald—I get my hair CUT this way!”

ZENO: Please tell us about your current endeavors/ interests.

BOSWELL: I’ve started a weekly color Reid Fleming comic strip on my website [www.reidfleming.com] and am inching my way toward the completion of Another Dawn.

Photography is a big interest and I have a print-making biz on the side. My wife Kathi and I just celebrated 28 years of marriage and I’m definitely interested in trying for more.

Superman scholar and occasional BACK ISSUE contributor EDDY ZENO is the author of the critically acclaimed book Curt Swan: A Life in Comics (Vanguard, 2002).

TM

by

Michael Aushenker

It came and went like a summer fling … yet lingered for many years afterwards like the old flame whom could not be extinguished.

Shortly before Eclipse Comics was totally eclipsed out of the business in 1994, the independent publisher released a four-book, “odd-format” miniseries, David Chelsea in Love, by the eponymous cartoonist.

As the title might suggest, this most unusual comic-book masterpiece was an autobiographical glimpse into creator David Chelsea’s bachelorhood, exquisitely illustrated in a seductive black-and-white fine line that allowed the writer/artist to travel to surreal places, rich with visual metaphor and fantasy sequences.

Later collected as a trade paperback, David Chelsea in Love, in short, told the true story of Chelsea’s volatile 1980s love affair in New York’s East Village with Minnie, a fickle, dissolute, promiscuous woman four years Chelsea’s senior who uses abortions like they’re birth control. Unfortunately for David, she is neurotic and saddled with an abusive boyfriend.

Depending on her mood, the mercurial Minnie breaks up and makes up with David, bouncing from lover to lover in-between. As a result, David becomes emotionally confused, reacting by looking for love in all the wrong places. Other girls enter the picture. Plenty of sexual montages ensue.

A precision snapshot of doomed romance, David Chelsea in Love (DCiL) may well be an amazing document capturing the moral confusion and emotional instability of the dating world post–Sexual Revolution (although it’s a much more fun read than that sounds). DCiL influenced and/or anticipated a good deal of the comic-book confessionals that cluttered alternative sections of comics shops for years to come (including my own 2003 book The Nine Loves of El Gato, Crime Mangler).

Chelsea grew up in Portland, Oregon, where he attended the Metropolitan Learning Center, a progressive school that nurtured his nascent cartooning. In 1977, he moved to New York City, and DCiL chronicles the events of his personal life that he experienced from age 21–24. He was 32 when Eclipse published DCiL in 1990, the same year that he married his wife, Eve. They left New York in 1995 to settle down in Chelsea’s hometown.

At 51, Chelsea resides in Portland with Eve and their two children, a son, 13, and a daughter, ten. He is miles away from the emotionally roiled, self-centered, swashbuckling lothario he exposed like an open sore in his whimsical, comical, and titillating DCiL series. Primarily an illustrator, Chelsea cartoons only on occasion, but still has a couple dozen good panels left in him, as you will discover.

(Interesting fact: At one point, Chelsea was supposed to illustrate the graphic novel American Widow, the autobiographical 9/11 saga by Alissa Torres published in 2008.

“But the difficulties of working long-distance and some creative differences led Alissa to replace me early on,” says Chelsea, who nevertheless appreciates Torres’ shout-out to him in her acknowledgments section.)

What better day than on Valentine’s Day (2008) to catch up with the creator and talk about the old flame he almost left behind—the comic-book industry—and the love child they created: David Chelsea in Love.

– Michael Aushenker

Love Stinks Writer/artist David Chelsea kept few secrets when chronicling the ups and downs of his relationship with sometimes-girlfriend Minnie.

TM & © David Chelsea.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 81

Modern Romance (top) A Chelsea sketchbook strip. (middle) Week 37 of the daily incarnation of David Chelsea in Love. (bottom) A flyer for DCiL. Scans courtesy of Michael Aushenker.

TM & © David Chelsea.

82 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

MICHAEL AUSHENKER: I remember stumbling onto David Chelsea in Love on the alternative shelves at Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles. On many levels, the book seemed so courageous, it was hilarious. I thought you had a lot of balls to not only present yourself as the protagonist of your comic and to lay bear your personal life, but to draw yourself often in full-frontal nudity.

DAVID CHELSEA: [laughs] Seems to me that the Joe Matt stuff was more out there. He was jerking off. I never showed myself doing that. Seeing what Crumb and Matt had done, I had to be as frank as possible to probably play in that league.

AUSHENKER: Visually, it looked like Winsor McCay’s wet dream.

CHELSEA: I was trying anything and everything I could think of. Harvey Pekar was an influence, some of the strips that Linda Barry was doing at the time. She was commenting on heartache and blasted love, Joe Matt, Justin Green. I had done comics before but this was the first ambitious thing I had ever done that was published.

AUSHENKER: How long after you broke up with “Minnie” did you embark upon DCiL? CHELSEA: I was working on a version of it in-between breaking up and getting together—published eight years after the final breakup. I sent her a note to let her know about it. She was a pretty good sport. And then, a year later, she got mad at it and we weren’t friends.

Then we were friends again.

AUSHENKER: Did your portrayal of her bother her?

CHELSEA: She blanched a little when she heard it was translated in French [laughs]. Every publisher that has published my work has gone out of business.

Eclipse folded shortly after publishing DCiL. [Chelsea’s other series] Welcome to the Zone barely got reviewed, hardly sold. It came out the year that I moved from New York to Portland, and Kitchen Sink immediately went out of business. It’s out of print in the States.

There’s no cult clamoring to translate Welcome to the Zone into French. A company put out a trade paperback of DCiL four years ago, and they went out of business, too. This did not lead to a fabulous permanent career in comics. I now do commercial illustration. However, practically everything I do leads back to an art director who saw DCiL. It was a great career move.

AUSHENKER: A glorified portfolio piece.

CHELSEA: Absolutely. I liken it to being an exotic dancer. In exotic dancing, there are a lot of strippers who are stars because they’ve been in porn films.

Getting your face onto a couple of video boxes is a great way to get a better price and raise your tips.

I’m out there selling myself. And I was out there selling myself in my 20s, too, and it was very difficult to stand out from the crowd. Being the artist of DCiL made me more of a high-profile commodity than being just an illustrator.

AUSHENKER: So was DCiL your first professional work?

CHELSEA: I don’t know if I was professional then because I made very little money from comics. Fewer than a dozen comic-book creators, outside of superhero comics and newspaper strips, can make a living at this.

AUSHENKER: This is your big opportunity to say that you are an artist and that David Chelsea in Love is a work of pure fiction with not a shred of truth whatsoever.

CHELSEA: [laughs] AUSHENKER: To what extent is the story real and to what extent is it exaggerated?

CHELSEA: I condensed dialogue.

AUSHENKER: [laughs] So let me get this straight: This isn’t a literal translation of your entire love life.

CHELSEA: [laughs] A literal translation. That would be kind of deadening. Something I realized years later–– and it kept me from doing more autobiographical comics––is that there’s a big thing that’s false about auto-bio. It’s very false to show yourself like a comic-book character from the viewpoint of the third person.

If you wanted to transcribe from your perspective, it would all be from your point of view.

AUSHENKER: Reminds me of that cornball device in movies when a character is having a flashback and we see it in the third person instead of from his POV. CHELSEA: Precisely. What’s even worse is dream sequences, you’re always looking at the guy who is supposed to be the dreamer. That never happens.

I’m locked in my head watching this but not watching myself having these experiences. That’s something that even Winsor McCay does wrong. Everyone gets this wrong. In fact, I did a 24-hour comic about it and called it “Everybody Gets It Wrong” [appeared in 24 x 2, published by Top Shelf, 2008].

AUSHENKER: You take on a lot of romantic partners in DCiL: Minnie, Vera, Valerie, Robin. Should a more accurate title have been David Chelsea in Lust?

CHELSEA: I wouldn’t have called it David Chelsea in Lust.

What rankled me about the whole episode was my maddening ex-girlfriend didn’t think that I was in love with her.

AUSHENKER: I like how you seemed to go pointillist for the white-hot sex montages.

CHELSEA: This is a problem with that clear line style— what are you going to do in very dim light? Either you’ll have everything in heavy black shadow or you do something like the pointillist thing. It was a kind of inconsistency, but I grew to live with it. I was kind of influenced by Drew Friedman. I had read RAW [Author’s note: There’s a panel in DCiL that depicts David reading a copy of RAW]. I had seen his illustrations in the Village Voice. It’s a little shaming because Friedman is a little younger than I am.

AUSHENKER: Talk about your interest in comics growing up. It seems as if you were influenced by Winsor McCay. CHELSEA: I wasn’t that aware of McCay when I was younger. I was very influenced of Crumb and M. K. Brown [Mary Kay Brown]. [Brown] did a few things for Arcade and a few strips that were in the Twisted Sisters collection; wonderfully surreal work for National Lampoon. Now she does children’s books.

You know, everybody began doing superheroes and that sort of stuff. Even alternative cartoonists. I grew up reading MAD and Zap and National Lampoon. Stuff like MAD way outsold Marvel in the ’70s when I was growing up. Millions read MAD and didn’t become cartoonists, but [many of] the people who read Spider-Man did.

I enjoyed a lot of newspaper strips—Pogo, Krazy Kat. I liked to read those old books about comic-book history. [I read international comics like] Asterix, Tintin.

It’s funny—a friend of mine, Arlen Shumer, did a whole series of interviews with Neal Adams, whom I only knew from his National Lampoon work. So I asked Arlen, “Did you talk about the Lampoon stuff he did?”

And he said, “No.” [laughs] AUSHENKER: Had you done anything that was published previous to DCiL? CHELSEA: I had done a card set: Blockbusters of Rhythm and Blues. Eclipse actually had a really big success with a [trading] card set at that time—I think it was called Master Criminals. People like Al Capone, Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger. They were selling very well.

It was somewhat notorious. Someone denounced it as celebrating crime. As if Edgar J. Hoover was criticizing them for corrupting America’s youth.

I had done a version of the strip that I was trying to market as an alternative weekly strip—strips that were four frames long. Someone suggested sending it to Fantagraphics. [Fantagraphics publisher] Gary Groth got in touch with me and said, “We’re not interested in this alt weekly thing. What we do is graphic novels.” He sent me some Love and Rockets, some stuff by Eddie Campbell.

I was pretty discouraged because I put so much work into this, and now I have to completely re-cast this, so I worked on a ten-page sequence. Groth liked it, he was very encouraging, and then … nothing happened.

He called me at one point and said he liked it. He told me, just be aware that there’s not a lot of money in it.

AUSHENKER: [laughs] That’s the line the publishers always tell you before they sign you. You get to a point where you’re like, “Okay! I’m aware, I’m aware!”

CHELSEA: I thought he was going to send me a contract and he didn’t. I was sending the finished pages of DCiL, one by one, to Groth, thinking that the cumulative effect would convince him to publish it. At some point he’ll say yes or he’ll say no. It got up to 30 pages and I thought, “Gee! Maybe I should send it to another publisher.”

Someone mentioned Eclipse and I sent it to them and they immediately accepted it. There was an announcement from Eclipse that they were going to publish DCIL, and Groth said, “Oh, gee! I guess I really screwed up.”

Looking back, perhaps I should’ve been calling him up every day or camping at his office in Seattle. But I actually give him full credit for getting me to turn it into a graphic novel.

April Fools Issue

Rainy Days and Minnies… …always get me down. Page 20 of David Chelsea in Love.

TM & © David Chelsea.

•

BACK ISSUE • 83

David Chelsea in Real Life (left top) David Chelsea’s bio photo, submitted by the artist. (left bottom) Chelsea the 24-Hour Comics marathon man. (right) Page 143 of DCiL. TM & © David Chelsea.

In hindsight, Fantagraphics is still in business and Eclipse is out of business. There was some very bad blood between Eclipse and Fantagraphics. After DCiL, I was shopping around Welcome to the Zone. I saw Groth at a convention, and he said, “Why isn’t Eclipse doing it?” and I said, “Well, they didn’t like my proposal.”

He was just kind of shocked that Eclipse wouldn’t have done my second book as a matter of course.

If Fantagraphics was with you, they would publish your laundry list, whereas Eclipse was more discriminating.

AUSHENKER: How did the retailers take to DCiL’s odd format?

CHELSEA: Okay, 8"x11" is not an exotic format. That is the Time format, the MAD format. That is the format of every magazine. I did not appreciate how ubiquitous the [standard comic book] format was in comic-book shops. I did my second book [Zone] as a square book and I had no excuse. With the third book [Perspectives], I was very careful to do it in a comics format because I wasn’t taking any chances. But that was a book that had no place in comics shops. It was for art material stores, the general market.

AUSHENKER: How did the trade-paperback collection of DCiL come about?

CHELSEA: Calvin Reed, the comics guy at Publishers Weekly, reviewed DCiL when it first came out. He had always done a comics imprint. Because he was an editor there, he saw to it that they had a graphic-novel line. What wound up happening is, Publishers Weekly pulled the plug on the imprint almost immediately.

I think three books were published. I was one of the three. The whole line ended. It came out in 2004.

By the end of that year, the graphic-novel line was over. Calvin was a big fan of the book and he had always wanted to see it back in print. This is a persistent

84 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

issue with me. As an illustrator, my editors kind of pay for me to be labor intensive. My pieces for the New York Times typically take two days. If I were doing a piece for Scholastic, they would also expect a level of finish. I think that’s one reason Drew Friedman [simplified] his style. The stippling was killing him.

It took an entire day for him to do a single frame.

AUSHENKER: Has doing all this illustration work made you hanker to come back and do comics as a creative outlet?

CHELSEA: For a long time, I wanted to get back in.

I kind of missed the attention. But it was very hard.

I knew it wouldn’t pay a lot of money, I knew it would take a lot of time. I also had an ambitious project that I spent a lot of time on. I had a projectus gigantus problem that it would have to be a 300-page graphic novel or nothing. I was way too busy and there wasn’t any other way. So doing 24-hour comics now––to grind it out and not have too much at stake––it made it fun again. I was scared to do all of this work and come out with a big nothing. But 24 hours out of my life is not a big nothing. It’s doable, just as long as I don’t go crazy with stippling and spend a lot of time scribbling, erasing, and redrawing. Maybe someday, I’ll do comics, but they won’t be 300-page graphic novels.

AUSHENKER: What did you use to draw DCiL? CHELSEA: Brushes, pens, a rapidograph for outlining, dip pens with the steel nib, fountain pens, brush dipped in acrylic, everything. I never found one method that kept me satisfied.

AUSHENKER: At the same time that Eclipse published DCiL, they printed the works of David Boswell, who also did some meticulous, stylized ink work in Heartbreak Comics and Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman. Did you read Boswell’s work?

CHELSEA: They didn’t make a strong impression on me. I was hardly aware of what else was going on.

They sent me what they considered their best book.

They sent me a lot of Zot!s. I thought those were pretty good. They didn’t inspire me to go in a direction.

I was working on my book all through 1990. It came out in 1991 and 1992. I enjoyed the work of Rick Geary. Love all his Victorian Murder books.

AUSHENKER: What was the reception for David Chelsea in Love? Did it sell well?

CHELSEA: Yes, but we’re talking on a very small scale.

The sales were never so much that I earned any royalties from the book. Something Eclipse did was they took those alternative strips and they ran it as part of the weekly guide, Comics Buyer’s Guide. They ran them for as long as they had them, enough to last a year.

That was very widely read.

AUSHENKER: You seem to enjoy trying different things aesthetically.

CHELSEA: I like what Woody Allen said—that he likes to be a moving target. If you look through the 24-hour comics I’ve done, one of them is an animal comic that’s worthless. One is sort of my version of Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, a guy climbing a building. I did a few strips where I bring Mugg into that. Oh, and I actually did a superhero strip. I did a superhero comic about a kid in which she makes a snow angel and she turns into a snow angel. She does trivial things, such as saving kitties out of trees. She shifts the poles so that the North Pole is in the Gulf of Mexico. l guess I know in the abstract that I’m swimming upstream, but it’s not like I’m making a conscious effort to be different. A local critic spent most of a review of DCiL harping on how the women l draw don’t fit the stereotype of the comic-book babe and how this defines me as a defiant outsider in the world of comics. It didn’t seem to occur to him that this may have more to do with the sort of women l meet and go to bed with than what I think of superhero aesthetics.

If Bobby McFerrin doesn’t record with accordions, does that make him a polka rebel?

AUSHENKER: Speaking of Mugg, what was the drive behind doing 1997’s Perspective, your how-to comic-book artist manual? I noticed that you wrote in the foreword how you were inspired by Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Was undertaking Perspective more ambitious than DCiL? CHELSEA: It was actually less ambitious. It was shorter and a lot simpler. There were a lot of minimal backgrounds. I’m really proud of it because it definitely filled the need. It really was a book that couldn’t work in another format. A lot of comics seem to be failed screenplays or stage plays, or seem to be pitched at another medium. This is something in which the subject and the format were really inseparable.

AUSHENKER: How did female readers react to DCiL? CHELSEA: Sometimes women would come up to me at conventions. I had just got married. They would see the ring on my finger and they would go, “Why are all the good ones taken?” And I would think to myself, “Why would you want to marry a cartoonist who would put you in his autobiographical comics?”

Every woman who I had been involved with since DCiL was published has made me solemnly promise not to put them in it.

AUSHENKER: Did you hear from any of the women depicted in DCiL who had stumbled onto your book? If so, what kind of response did you get?

CHELSEA: The ones I was in touch with, I was generally friendly with. No one was critical, except for my sister Annie. Some of them, I’ve never heard from since.

Either they’re not aware of it or it didn’t bother them.

AUSHENKER: When you started dating your wife, how did Eve react to DCiL? CHELSEA: She didn’t know my work before she met me. She may not have been entirely pleased that I drew strips about old girlfriends, but she appreciates that it made my career. She doesn’t appreciate when people come up to her and ask her if she’s Minnie.

AUSHENKER: Well, happy Valentine’s Day. So, let’s see how much you’ve evolved since the days depicted in DCiL. What are you planning to do for your wife today?

CHELSEA: I think we’re gonna get Indian take-out and watch a chick flick. [laughs]

Graphic Flirtation Chelsea shows his illustrative range on page 99 of David Chelsea in Love.

TM & © David Chelsea.

All things David Chelsea can be found at: www.dchelsea.com.

MICHAEL AUSHENKER is a Los Angeles-based writer and cartoonist.

His comic books include Cartoon Flophouse Featuring Greenblatt the Great!, the El Gato, Crime Mangler series, and Those Unstoppable Rogues. He is also the writer of the Gumby’s Gang series (WildCard Ink). Visit CartoonFlophouse.com and read cartoonflophouse.blogspot.com.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 85

®

AND

®

by BART SEARS

86 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

Batman TM & © DC Entertainment. Courageous Cat TM & © Telefeatures.

Our old pal Allen E. Miller recently shared with us these sketches, commissioned back in 1990, and what better issue to present them than our April Fools edition?? (And Allen—where’s the Atom and Atom Ant?)

AND

AND ®

®

AND ®

by PARIS CULLINS

by BRETT BREEDING

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 87

Martian Manhunter, Superman, and Hawkman TM & © DC Entertainment. Underdog TM & © Classic Media, Inc. Mighty Mouse TM & © CBS Interactive Inc. Fearless Fly TM & © Hal Seeger.

®

®

by ADAM HUGHES ®

No attachments, please!

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

© 2009 Paramount Pictures Corpo

ration.

WAR STORIES Before we examine our letters on BACK ISSUE #39— our “Comics Go to War” issue—I’d like to recommend author/comics historian Mike Conroy’s superb new book, War Stories: A Graphic History (Collins Design, 2009, $24.95). This lavishly illustrated, full-color, 192- © 2009 The Ilex Press Limited. page softcover opens with a bang with its Garth Ennis foreword, then marches through examinations of comics’ depictions of virtually every type of armed combat imaginable, beginning with Chapter 1’s “Historical Hostilities” (pirates, swashbucklers, gladiators, etc.) and concluding with Chapter 7’s “Modern Day Conflicts” (from 9/11 to political cartoonists). While mostly round-ups of various conflict-based comic-book series, War Stories also includes spotlights on real-life historical occurrences such as Golden Age (and later) artists whose careers were interrupted and/or shaped by their military service.

The editor of Comics International, Conroy adds into the mix looks at British war comics which might have escaped readers in the US, and designer Jon Raimes nicely complements Conroy’s histories with eye-catching imagery without overwhelming the text.

While I’m plugging new books, fans of the “Real American Hero” should pick up Paul Ruditis’ G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: Mission Dossier (Titan Books, 2009, $14.95), a fullcolor, image-loaded, softcover sourcebook for last year’s live-action G. I. Joe movie. This book caters not only to film buffs and Joe fans but also to fans of hardware specs and data.

And Titan Books has another film-related volume that will blow you away: bestselling author Mark Cotta Vaz’s Star Trek: The Art of the Film (2009, $29.95).

From pre-production paintings to character sketches to costume and

88 • BACK ISSUE • April Fools Issue

CATHOLIC COMICS I’ve been reading BACK ISSUE since #1 and have finally got around to sending you a comment about it.

I fell out of love with comics in the mid-’90s, but rediscovered my interest in them in the early ’00s and BACK ISSUE has played a significant part in retaining my interest in comics and their rich history.

I pretty much enjoy every issue, but found issue #37 to be particularly outstanding.

I enjoyed all the articles on comics at war, but found the article on Marvel’s religious comics to be the most interesting article. It’s great to see overlooked and important aspects of comics history covered so well.

I’d love to see an article, and cover as well if possible, on my favorite comics character, Ambush Bug. I’m sure there are some interesting tales to tell about good old Irwin Schwab. As I’m from the UK, I also look forward to any articles dealing either comics from here or featuring UK creators as well.

Keep up the excellent work. All the best.

– Matthew Jones

© 2009 Paramount Pictures Corporation

E-mail: euryman@gmail.com (subject: BACK ISSUE)

We’re happy you finally wrote us, Matthew.

Thanks for being such a loyal reader.

Yep, the Marvel Catholic comics article was a joy, we agree.

While Ambush Bug didn’t score the cover, he’s definitely made the scene this issue, so we hope you’re happy about that. And we’ve spotlighted UK creators and comics in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

– M.E.

WHAT ABOUT TINTIN? Further to the list of biographies of comic creators [in Bill Schelly’s “Off My Chest” editorial, “In Search of ‘True Bios’ of Comic-Book Creators”], there was a good biography about Tintin creator Hergé by Harry Thompson a few years ago.

– Ian Millsted Thanks for mentioning that, Ian (there are other Hergé bios available, by the way). Thompson’s book was released quite a few years ago, in 1992, and is now out of print and available only through used book dealers and auctions.

– M.E.

© 1992 Scepter.

Send your comments to:

set designs to lush behindthe-scenes photography, this astounding hardcover boldly goes into intricate detail behind filmmaker J. J. Abrams’ reimagining of the classic Gene Rodenberry sci-fi property.

And now, your letters….

TOUGH TIMES I want to say that I love BACK ISSUE because, in my opinion, it’s the best magazine on comics and I want it to continue for a very long time. I realize that the economy is hitting you guys hard, but TwoMorrows Publishing is going to be back on top.

Here are some article ideas for BACK ISSUE magazine for 2010: 1. The Captain Marvels of the 1970s and 1980s 2. Comics Scene magazine 3. Epic Comics 4. The Death of Captain Marvel 5. Batman: A Death in the Family 6. Interviews with Earl Norem, Jenette Kahn, and José Luis García-López 7. Phantom comic books by Marvel and DC Comics 8. Marvel Comics’ Star Comics imprint 9. The X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover 10. She-Hulk – Ricky T. Butler, Jr. It’s always good to hear from one of BI’s biggest fans, Ricky. Although TwoMorrows’ Write Now! and Rough Stuff magazines recently folded, have no fear, BI is here to stay (as are Alter Ego and Draw!). Just keep loyally buying each issue and recommending our magazine to your friends, and you’ll be reading BACK ISSUE for years to come.

Great suggestions! While we’ve already planned 2010’s issues (and some of 2011’s), in this very issue you got two of your wishes: Star Comics (at least one of them, Peter Porker) and She-Hulk (although we’ve yet to explore her original “Savage” incarnation). The Phantom (Charlton and DC incarnations) is in the works for an as-yet-undetermined issue, and I’ve been floating a “Death in Comics” theme which you’ll probably see in 2011—and what better place to remember the Death of Captain Marvel?

– M.E.

THREE CHEERS FOR GERRY TALAOC! The following letter was posted on BI writer Michael Aushenker’s blog: My name’s Rufus. I draw the new Tank Girl comics (at IDW, Image, and Titan Books) in London, UK. I just read your article on the Unknown Soldier in BACK ISSUE, which I thoroughly enjoyed, being a huge fan of the character, Mr. Kubert, and most particularly Gerry Talaoc.

I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to find out Mr. Talaoc is alive and well!

My friend David Roach wrote about the Filipino artists in Comic Book Artist—we are both huge fans!

Thank you so much for the wonderful article, and for showcasing the work of Mr. Talaoc, who is so often overlooked.

– Rufus Dayglo Next issue: “Cat People”! Catwoman’s Bronze Age good kitty/bad kitty conversion is explored, as are the histories of Spider-Man’s love-hate interest Black Cat, Patsy Walker—Hellcat, Vixen, Atlas Comics’ cat-heroes Tiger-Man and Cougar, Marvel’s kung-fu fightin’ White Tiger and the Sons of the Tiger, and comics’ punchiest pussycat, Wildcat! Plus: Thundercats, Josie and the Pussycats, the little-known movie superhero Pumaman, and a bonus beast, the Badger! With art by and/ or commentary from MIKE BARON, BRIAN BOLLAND, ALAN BRENNERT, ERNIE COLÓN, GERRY CONWAY, STEVE DITKO, STAN GOLDBERG, PAUL LEVITZ, AL MILGROM, Mystery Science Theater 3000’s MIKE NELSON, KEITH POLLARD, and more. All under a Catwoman cover purrrrfectly produced by JOE STATON and FREDDY LOPEZ, JR.! Don’t ask—just BI it! See you not in sixty, but in thirty!

Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor

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

Catwoman TM & © DC Entertainment. BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows.

April Fools Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 89

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

TM

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!

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL AVA

ILABLE

DIEGDITITIOANL AVA

ILABLE

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

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 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

BACK ISSUE #4

BACK ISSUE #5

BACK ISSUE #6

BACK ISSUE #7

BACK ISSUE #8

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

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

Covers by ALEX ROSS and ADAM HUGHES!

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(108-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL ONLY!

E

BACK ISSUE #9

BACK ISSUE #10

BACK ISSUE #11

BACK ISSUE #12

BACK ISSUE #13

MIKE BARON and STEVE RUDE on NEXUS past and present, a colossal GIL KANE pencil art gallery, a look at Marvel’s STAR WARS comics, secrets of DC’s unseen CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS SEQUEL, TIM TRUMAN on his GRIMJACK SERIES, MIKE GOLD editorial, THANOS history, TIME WARP revisited, and more! All-new STEVE RUDE COVER!

NEAL ADAMS and DENNY O’NEIL on RA’S AL GHUL’s history (with Adams art), O’Neil and MICHAEL KALUTA on THE SHADOW, MIKE GRELL on JON SABLE FREELANCE, HOWIE CHAYKIN interview, DOC SAVAGE in comics, BATMAN ART GALLERY by PAUL SMITH, SIENKIEWICZ, SIMONSON, BOLLAND, HANNIGAN, MAZZUCCHELLI, and others! New cover by ADAMS!

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(108-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

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

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIGITITIOANL

DIGITITIOANL

E

E

BL AVAILA

E

ED BLE AVAILA

ED BLE AVAILA

BACK ISSUE #14

BACK ISSUE #15

BACK ISSUE #16

BACK ISSUE #17

BACK ISSUE #18

DAVE COCKRUM and MIKE GRELL go “Pro2Pro” on the Legion, pencil art gallery

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

“Weird Heroes” of the 1970s and ‘80s!

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

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

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

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

by NEAL ADAMS!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(108-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIEGDITITIOANL

BL AVAILA

BLE AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

BACK ISSUE #19

BACK ISSUE #20

BACK ISSUE #21

BACK ISSUE #22

BACK ISSUE #23

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

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

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

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

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

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(104-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(108-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

DIGDITITIOANL E BLE AVAILA

DIGITITIOANL ED BLE AVAILA

DIGDITITIOANL E BLE AVAILA

DIGDITITIOANL E BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

BACK ISSUE #24

BACK ISSUE #25

BACK ISSUE #26

BACK ISSUE #27

BACK ISSUE #28

“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 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

BACK ISSUE #29

BACK ISSUE #30

BACK ISSUE #31

BACK ISSUE #32

BACK ISSUE #33

“Mutants” issue! CLAREMONT, BYRNE, SMITH, and ROMITA, JR.’s X-Men work, NOCENTI and ARTHUR ADAMS’ Longshot, McLEOD and SIENKIEWICZ’s New Mutants, the UK’s CAPTAIN BRITAIN series, lost Angel stories, Beast’s tenure with the Avengers, the return of the original X-Men in X-Factor, the revelation of Nightcrawler’s “original” father, a history of DC’s mutant, Captain Comet, and more! Cover by DAVE COCKRUM!

“Saturday Morning Heroes!” Interviews with TV Captain Marvels JACKSON BOSTWICK and JOHN DAVEY, MAGGIN and SAVIUK’s lost Superman/”Captain Thunder” sequel, Space Ghost interviews with GARY OWENS and STEVE RUDE, MARV WOLFMAN guest editorial, Super Friends, unproduced fourth wave Super Powers action figures, Astro Boy, ADAM HUGHES tribute to DAVE STEVENS, and a new cover by ALEX ROSS!

“STEVE GERBER Salute!” In-depth look at his Howard the Duck, Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, Defenders, Metal Men, Mister Miracle, Thundarr the Barbarian, and more!

Plus: Creators pay tribute to Steve Gerber, featuring art by and commentary from BRUNNER, BUCKLER, COLAN, GOLDEN, STAN LEE, LEVITZ, MAYERIK, MOONEY, PLOOG, SIMONSON, and others. Cover painting by FRANK BRUNNER!

“Tech, Data, and Hardware!” The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, WEIN, WOLFMAN, and GREENBERGER on DC’s Who’s Who, SAVIUK, STATON, and VAN SCIVER on Drawing Green Lantern, ED HANNIGAN Art Gallery, history of Rom: Spaceknight, story of BILL MANTLO, Dial H for Hero, Richie Rich’s Inventions, and a Spider-Mobile schematic cover by ELIOT BROWN and DUSTY ABELL!

“Teen Heroes!” Teen Titans in the 1970s & 1980s, with CARDY, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, PÉREZ, TUSKA, and WOLFMAN, BARON and GUICE on the Flash, interviews with TV Billy Batson MICHAEL GRAY and writer STEVE SKEATES, NICIEZA and BAGLEY’s New Warriors, Legion of Super-Heroes 1970s art gallery, James Bond Jr., and… the Archies! New Teen Titans cover by GEORGE PÉREZ and colored by GENE HA!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

DIGDITITIOANL E BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL AVA

ILABLE

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

BACK ISSUE #34

BACK ISSUE #35

BACK ISSUE #36

BACK ISSUE #37

BACK ISSUE #38

“New World Order!” Adam Warlock examined with JIM STARLIN and ROY THOMAS, the history of Miracleman with ALAN DAVIS & GARRY LEACH, JIM SHOOTER interview, Marvel’s post-STAN LEE editors-in-chief on New Universe, Logan’s Run, Star Hunters, BOB WIACEK on Star Wars and Star-Lord, DICK GIORDANO revisits Crisis on Infinite Earths and “The Post-Crisis DC Universe You Didn’t See,” new cover by JIM STARLIN!

“Villains!” MIKE ZECK and J.M. DeMATTEIS discuss “Kraven’s Last Hunt”, history of the Hobgoblin is exposed, the Joker’s short-lived series, Secret Society of Super-Villains and Kobra, a Magneto biography, Luthor and Brainiac’s malevolent makeovers, interview with Secret Society artist MIKE VOSBURG, plus contributions from BYRNE, CONWAY, FRENZ, NOVICK, ROMITA JR., STERN, WOLFMAN, and a cover by MIKE ZECK!

“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!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

Books by Back Issue editor MICHAEL EURY:

BATCAVE COMPANION

KRYPTON COMPANION

JUSTICE LEAGUE COMPANION

Unlocks the secrets of Batman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, from 1960s camp to 1970s creature of the night!

Unlocks the secrets of Superman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, when kryptonite came in multiple colors and super-pets flew the skies!

A comprehensive examination of the Silver Age JLA tracing the JLA’s development, history, imitators, and early fandom!

The missing link to primates in comics, spotlighting the history of a barrel of simian superstars, loaded with rare and classic artwork and interviews with artists & writers!

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

(128-page trade paperback) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905627 Diamond Order Code: JUN068194

(240-page trade paperback) $26.95

ISBN: 9781893905788 Diamond Order Code: FEB094471

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

COMICS GONE APE!

DICK GIORDANO CHANGING COMICS, ONE DAY AT A TIME

MICHAEL EURY’s biography of comics’ most prominent and affable personality!

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

C o l l e c t o r

The JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine (edited by JOHN MORROW) celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through INTERVIEWS WITH KIRBY and his contemporaries, FEATURE ARTICLES, RARE AND UNSEEN KIRBY ART, plus regular columns by MARK EVANIER and others, and presentation of KIRBY’S UNINKED PENCILS from the 1960s-80s (from photocopies preserved in the KIRBY ARCHIVES). Now in OVERSIZED TABLOID FORMAT, it showcases Kirby’s amazing art even larger!

Go online for an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

KIRBY COLLECTOR #42

KIRBY COLLECTOR #43

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

1970s DC WORK! Coverage of Jimmy Olsen, FF movie set visit, overview of all Newsboy Legion stories, KEVIN NOWLAN and MURPHY ANDERSON on inking Jack, never-seen interview with Kirby, MARK EVANIER on Kirby’s covers, Bongo Comics’ Kirby ties, complete ’40s gangster story, pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by NOWLAN and ANDERSON!

KIRBY AWARD WINNERS! STEVE SHERMAN and others sharing memories and neverseen art from JACK & ROZ, a never-published 1966 interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER on VINCE COLLETTA, pencils-toSinnott inks comparison of TALES OF SUSPENSE #93, and more! Covers by KIRBY (Jack’s original ’70s SILVER STAR CONCEPT ART) and KIRBY/SINNOTT!

KIRBY’S MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS! Coverage of DEMON, THOR, & GALACTUS, interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER, pencil art galleries of the Demon and other mythological characters, two never-reprinted BLACK MAGIC stories, interview with Kirby Award winner DAVID SCHWARTZ and F4 screenwriter MIKE FRANCE, and more!

Kirby cover inked by MATT WAGNER!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95

DIEGDITITIOANL AVA

ILABLE

DIEGDITITIOANL AVA

ILABLE

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

Jack’s vision of PAST AND FUTURE, with a never-seen KIRBY interview, a new interview with son NEAL KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’S column, two pencil galleries, two complete ’50s stories, Jack’s first script, Kirby Tribute Panel (with EVANIER, KATZ, SHAW!, and SHERMAN), plus an unpublished CAPTAIN 3-D cover, inked by BILL BLACK and converted into 3-D by RAY ZONE!

Focus on NEW GODS, FOREVER PEOPLE, and DARKSEID! Includes a rare interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’s column, FOURTH WORLD pencil art galleries (including Kirby’s redesigns for SUPER POWERS), two 1950s stories, a new Kirby Darkseid front cover inked by MIKE ROYER, a Kirby Forever People back cover inked by JOHN BYRNE, and more!

KIRBY’S SUPER TEAMS, from kid gangs and the Challengers, to Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Super Powers, with unseen 1960s Marvel art, a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, author JONATHAN LETHEM on his Kirby influence, interview with JOHN ROMITA, JR. on his Eternals work, and more!

KIRBYTECH ISSUE, spotlighting Jack’s hightech concepts, from Iron Man’s armor and Machine Man, to the Negative Zone and beyond! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, TOM SCIOLI interview, Kirby Tribute Panel (with ADAMS, PÉREZ, and ROMITA), and covers inked by TERRY AUSTIN and TOM SCIOLI!

WARRIORS, spotlighting Thor (with a look at hidden messages in BILL EVERETT’s Thor inks), Sgt. Fury, Challengers of the Unknown, Losers, and others! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, interviews with JERRY ORDWAY and GRANT MORRISON, MARK EVANIER’s column, pencil art gallery, a complete 1950s story, wraparound Thor cover inked by JERRY ORDWAY, and more!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital edition) $3.95

KIRBY FIVE-OH!

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE “KING” OF COMICS

The publication that started the TwoMorrows juggernaut presents KIRBY FIVE-OH!, a book covering the best of everything from Jack Kirby’s 50-year career in comics! The regular columnists from THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine have formed a distinguished panel of experts to choose and examine: The BEST KIRBY STORY published each year from 19381987! The BEST COVERS from each decade! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 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 powerful RAW PENCIL ART, and a DELUXE COLOR SECTION of photos and finished art from throughout his entire half-century oeuvre. This TABLOIDSIZED TRADE PAPERBACK features a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover inked by “DC: The New Frontier” artist DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, helping make this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! Takes the place of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50.

(168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 • Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

Bombastic EVERYTHING GOES issue, with a wealth of great submissions that couldn’t be pigeonholed into a “theme” issue!

Includes a rare KIRBY interview, new interviews with JIM LEE and ADAM HUGHES, MARK EVANIER’s column, huge pencil art galleries, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS, and more!

Spotlights Kirby’s most obscure work, like an UNUSED THOR STORY, his BRUCE LEE comic, animation work, stage play, and see original unaltered versions of pages from KAMANDI, DEMON, DESTROYER DUCK, and more, including a feature examining the last page of his final issue of various series BEFORE EDITORIAL TAMPERING (with lots of surprises)! Color Kirby covers inked by DON HECK and PAUL SMITH!

Spotlights THE MAGIC OF STAN & JACK! New interview with STAN LEE, a walking tour of New York showing where Lee & Kirby lived and worked, re-evaluation of the “Lost” FF #108 story (including a new missing page), 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 GEORGE PÉREZ!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 US (Digital edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 US (Digital edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital edition) $3.95

Edited by ROY THOMAS The greatest ‘zine of the 1960s is back, ALL-NEW, and focusing on GOLDEN AND SILVER AGE comics and creators with ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, UNSEEN ART, P.C. Hamerlinck’s FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America, featuring the archives of C.C. BECK and recollections by Fawcett artist MARCUS SWAYZE), Michael T. Gilbert’s MR. MONSTER, and more!

2007 EISNER AWARD WINNER Best Comics-Related Periodical

Go online for an ULTIMATE BUNDLE, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

ALTER EGO #80

ALTER EGO #81

ALTER EGO #82

SWORD-AND-SORCERY COMICS! Learn about Crom the Barbarian, Viking Prince, Nightmaster, Kull, Red Sonja, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser, Beowulf, Warlord, Dagar the Invincible, and more, with art by FRAZETTA, SMITH, BUSCEMA, KANE, WRIGHTSON, PLOOG, THORNE, BRUNNER, and more!

New cover by RAFAEL KAYANAN!

New FRANK BRUNNER Man-Thing cover, a look at the late-’60s horror comic WEB OF HORROR with early work by BRUNNER, WRIGHTSON, WINDSOR-SMITH, SIMONSON, & CHAYKIN, interview with comics & fine artist EVERETT RAYMOND KINTSLER, ROY THOMAS’ 1971 origin synopsis for the FIRST MAN-THING STORY, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

MLJ ISSUE! Golden Age MLJ index illustrated with vintage images of The Shield, Hangman, Mr. Justice, Black Hood,

by IRV NOVICK, JACK COLE, CHARLES BIRO, MORT MESKIN, GIL KANE, & others—behind a marvelous MLJ-heroes cover

by BOB McLEOD! Plus interviews with IRV NOVICK and JOE EDWARDS, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

BL AVAILA

E

ALTER EGO #83

ALTER EGO #84

ALTER EGO #85

ALTER EGO #86

ALTER EGO #87

SWORD & SORCERY PART 2! Cover by ARTHUR SUYDAM, in-depth art-filled look at Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian, DC’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Dagar the Invincible, Ironjaw & Wulf, and Arak, Son of Thunder, plus the never-seen Valda the Iron Maiden by TODD McFARLANE! Plus JOE EDWARDS (Part 2), FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

Unseen JIM APARO cover, STEVE SKEATES discusses his early comics work, art & artifacts by ADKINS, APARO, ARAGONÉS, BOYETTE, DITKO, GIORDANO, KANE, KELLER, MORISI, ORLANDO, SEKOWSKY, STONE, THOMAS, WOOD, and the great WARREN SAVIN! Plus writer CHARLES SINCLAIR on his partnership with Batman co-creator BILL FINGER, FCA, and more!

Captain Marvel and Superman’s battles explored (in cosmic space, candy stories, and in court, with art by WALLY WOOD, CURT SWAN, and GIL KANE), an in-depth interview with Golden Age great LILY RENÉE, overview of CENTAUR COMICS (home of BILL EVERETT’s Amazing-Man and others), FCA, MR. MONSTER, new RICH BUCKLER cover, and more!

Spotlighting the Frantic Four-Color MAD WANNABES of 1953-55 that copied HARVEY KURTZMAN’S EC smash (see Captain Marble, Mighty Moose, Drag-ula, Prince Scallion, and more) with art by SIMON & KIRBY, KUBERT & MAURER, ANDRU & ESPOSITO, EVERETT, COLAN, and many others, plus Part 1 of a talk with Golden/ Silver Age artist FRANK BOLLE, and more!

The sensational 1954-1963 saga of Great Britain’s MARVELMAN (decades before he metamorphosed into Miracleman), plus an interview with writer/artist/co-creator MICK ANGLO, and rare Marvelman/ Miracleman work by ALAN DAVIS, ALAN MOORE, a new RICK VEITCH cover, plus FRANK BOLLE, Part 2, FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

ALTER EGO #88

ALTER EGO #89

ALTER EGO #90

ALTER EGO #91

ALTER EGO #92

First-ever in-depth look at National/DC’s founder MAJOR MALCOLM WHEELERNICHOLSON, and early editors WHITNEY ELLSWORTH, VIN SULLIVAN, and MORT WEISINGER, with rare art and artifacts by SIEGEL & SHUSTER, BOB KANE, CREIG FLESSEL, FRED GUARDINEER, GARDNER FOX, SHELDON MOLDOFF, and others, plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, and more!

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!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

WRITE NOW! (edited by SpiderMan writer DANNY FINGEROTH), the magazine for writers of comics, animation, and sci-fi, puts you in the minds of today’s top writers and editors. Each issue features WRITING TIPS from pros on both sides of the desk, exclusive INTERVIEWS, SAMPLE SCRIPTS, REVIEWS, NUTS & BOLTS tutorials, and more!

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

BEST OF WRITE NOW! Features highlights from the acclaimed magazine, including in-depth interviews about writing from top talents, like WAID, BENDIS, EISNER, LOEB, STAN LEE, STRACZYNSKI, JOHNS, McFARLANE, LEVITZ, ALONSO, and others! There’s also “NUTS & BOLTS” tutorials featuring scripts from landmark comics and the pencil art that was drawn from them, how-to articles by the best comics writers and editors around, telling exactly what it takes to get hired, and more great tips to help you prepare for your big break, and appreciate comics on a new level. Introduction by STAN LEE! (160-page trade paperback with COLOR) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905926 • Diamond Order Code: FEB084082

DIEGDITITIOANL ONLY!

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

WRITE NOW! #9

WRITE NOW! #10

NEAL ADAMS on his writing (with art and a NEW COVER), GEOFF JOHNS on writing for comics, secrets of PITCHING COMICS IDEAS, MICHAEL OEMING and BATTON LASH on writing, plus more NUTS & BOLTS how-to’s on writing and sample scripts!

Interviews and lessons by DWAYNE McDUFFIE, interviews with PETER BAGGE, GERRY CONWAY,and PAUL BENJAMIN, plus more NUTS & BOLTS how-to’s on writing and sample scripts, and a JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED cover!

(80-page magazine) $5.95

(88-page magazine) $5.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

WRITE NOW! #11

WRITE NOW! #12

WRITE NOW! #13

WRITE NOW! #14

WRITE NOW! #15

STAN LEE, NEIL GAIMAN, MARK WAID, PETER DAVID, J.M. DeMATTEIS, TOM DeFALCO, DENNY O’NEIL, and 18 others reveal PROFESSIONAL WRITING SECRETS, plus DeFALCO and RON FRENZ on working together, JOHN OSTRANDER on creating characters, and an all-new SPIDER-GIRL cover by FRENZ and SAL BUSCEMA!

DC Comics president PAUL LEVITZ on the art, craft and business of comics writing, STEVE ENGLEHART’s thoughts on writing for today’s market, survey of TOP COMICS EDITORS on how to submit work to them, Marvel Editor ANDY SCHMIDT on how to break in, T. CAMPBELL on writing for webcomics, plus a new GEORGE PÉREZ cover!

X-MEN 3 screenwriter SIMON KINBERG interviewed, DENNIS O’NEIL on translating BATMAN BEGINS into a novel, Central Park Media’s STEPHEN PAKULA discusses manga writing, KURT BUSIEK on breaking into comics, MIKE FRIEDRICH on writers’ agents, script samples, new RON LIM /AL MILGROM cover, and more!

BRIAN BENDIS interview, STAN LEE, TODD McFARLANE, PETER DAVID and others on writing Spider-Man, pencil art and script from MARVEL CIVIL WAR #1 by MILLAR and McNIVEN, JIM STARLIN on Captain Comet and The Weird, LEE NORDLING on Comics in Hollywood, and a new ALEX MALEEV cover!

J.M. DeMATTEIS interview on Abadazad with MIKE PLOOG, DC’s 52 series scripting how-to by RUCKA/JOHNS/MORRISON/ WAID, KEITH GIFFEN breakdowns, pencil art by JOE BENNETT, JOHN OSTRANDER on writing, STAR TREK novelist BILL McCAY on dealing with editors, and more, plus a FREE ROUGH STUFF #4 PREVIEW!

(80-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

WRITE NOW! #16

WRITE NOW! #17

WRITE NOW! #18

WRITE NOW! #19

WRITE NOW! #20

Interview with Spawn’s TODD McFARLANE, Silver Surfer writers roundtable, script and pencil art from BRIAN BENDIS and FRANK CHO’s MIGHTY AVENGERS and from DAN SLOTT’s AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE, an interview, script and art by DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF on his acclaimed graphic novel TESTAMENT, cover by MIKE ZECK, plus a FREE DRAW #14 PREVIEW!

HEROES ISSUE featuring series creator/ writer TIM KRING, writer JEPH LOEB, and others, interviews with DC Comics’ DAN DiDIO and Marvel’s DAN BUCKLEY, PETER DAVID on writing STEPHEN KING’S DARK TOWER COMIC, MICHAEL TEITELBAUM, C.B. CEBULSKI, DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, Nuts & Bolts script and art examples, and more!

Celebration of STAN LEE’s 85th birthday, including rare examples of comics, TV, and movie scripts from the Stan Lee Archives, tributes by JOHN ROMITA, SR., JOE QUESADA, ROY THOMAS, DENNIS O’NEIL, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, JIM SALICRUP, TODD McFARLANE, LOUISE SIMONSON, MARK EVANIER, and others, plus art by KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, and more!

MICHAEL USLAN on film writing, Dennis O’Neil on adapting THE DARK KNIGHT movie to novel form, BRIAN BENDIS script and LEINIL YU pencils from SECRET INVASION #1, MAX ALAN COLLINS discusses his career, MARK MILLAR script and BRYAN HITCH FF pencils, DAN SLOTT script and STEVE McNIVEN pencils from Spider-Man’s BRAND NEW DAY, and more!

Focus on THE SPIRIT movie, showing how FRANK MILLER transformed WILL EISNER’s comics into the smash-hit film, with interviews with key players behind the making of the movie, a look at what made Eisner’s comics so special, and more. Plus: an interview with COLLEEN DORAN, writer ALEX GRECIAN on how to get a pitch green lighted, script and art examples, and more!

(80-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

Go online for ULTIMATE BUNDLES of Write Now, Draw! and Rough Stuff, with all the issues at HALF-PRICE!

DRAW! (edited by top comics artist MIKE MANLEY) is the professional “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic storytelling. NOTE: Contains nudity for purposes of figure drawing.

INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS.

DRAW! #4

DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

DRAW! #8

Features an interview and step-by-step demonstration from Savage Dragon’s ERIK LARSEN, KEVIN NOWLAN on drawing and inking techniques, DAVE COOPER demonstrates coloring techniques in Photoshop, BRET BLEVINS tutorial on Figure Composition, PAUL RIVOCHE on the Design Process, reviews of comics drawing papers, and more!

Interview and sketchbook by MIKE WIERINGO, BRIAN BENDIS and MIKE OEMING show how they create the series “Powers”, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw great hands”, “The illusion of depth in design” by PAUL RIVOCHE, must-have art books reviewed by TERRY BEATTY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, links, a color section and more! OEMING cover!

Interview, cover, and demo with BILL WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO interview and demo on cartooning and animation, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw the human figure in light and shadow,” a step-by-step Photo-shop tutorial by CELIA CALLE, expert inking tips by MIKE MANLEY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, links, a color section and more!

From comics to video games: an interview, cover, and demo with MATT HALEY, TOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY on character design, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” step-by-step demo by ALBERTO RUIZ, “Draping The Human Figure” by BRET BLEVINS, a new COMICS SECTION, International Spotlight on JOSÉ LOUIS AGREDA, a color section and more!

(88-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95

(88-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95

(96-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95

(96-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL ONLY!

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

DRAW! #14

RON GARNEY interview, step-by-step demo, and cover, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and other pros discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ with more Adobe Illustrator tips, interview with Banana Tail creator MARK McKENNA, links, a color section and more!

STEVE RUDE demonstrates his approach to comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, political cartoonist JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, plus DRAW!’s regular instructors BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On LIfe”, more Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

KYLE BAKER reveals his working methods and step-by-step processes on merging his traditional and digital art, Machine Teen’s MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, Adult Swim’s THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, a color section and more! New BAKER cover!

Step-by-step demo of painting methods by cover artist ALEX HORLEY (Heavy Metal, Vertigo, DC, Wizards of the Coast), plus interviews and demos by Banana Sundays’ COLLEEN COOVER, behind-the-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more, plus a FREE ROUGH STUFF #3 PREVIEW!

Features in-depth interviews and demos with DC Comics artist DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), plus Part 3 of editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, a new MAHNKE cover, and a FREE ALTER EGO #70 PREVIEW!

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95

(112-page magazine with COLOR) $5.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital edition) $2.95

(88-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

DRAW! #15

DRAW! #16

DRAW! #17

DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

BACK TO SCHOOL ISSUE, covering major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, featuring faculty, student, and graduate interviews in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with B.P.R.D.’S GUY DAVIS, MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, a FREE WRITE NOW #17 PREVIEW, and more!

In-depth interview and coverage of the creative process of HOWARD CHAYKIN, behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, more COMIC ART BOOTCAMP (this time focusing on HOW TO USE REFERENCE), and WORKING FROM PHOTOS by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY. Plus, reviews, resources and more!

An in-depth interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s creator and artist BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, plus learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates the fabulous work on his series. Also, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

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!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE 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 reveals the best art supplies and tool tech, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP gets your penciling in shape, plus Web links, reviews, and more!

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(80-page magazine with COLOR) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

ROUGH STUFF celebrates the ART of creating comics!

Edited by famed inker BOB McLEOD, each issue spotlights NEVER-BEFORE PUBLISHED penciled pages, preliminary sketches, detailed layouts, and even unused inked versions from artists throughout comics history. Included is commentary on the art, discussing what went right and wrong with it, and background information to put it all into historical perspective.

Plus, before-and-after comparisons let you see firsthand how an image changes from initial concept to published version. So don’t miss this amazing magazine, featuring galleries of NEVER-BEFORE SEEN art, from some of your favorite series of all time, and the top pros in the industry!

DIEGDITITIOANL AVA

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL

E

BL AVAILA

ROUGH STUFF #2

Our debut issue features galleries of UNSEEN ART by a who’s who of Modern Masters including: ALAN DAVIS, GEORGE PÉREZ, BRUCE TIMM, KEVIN NOWLAN, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, ARTHUR ADAMS, JOHN BYRNE, and WALTER SIMONSON, plus a KEVIN NOWLAN interview, art critiques, and a new BRUCE TIMM COVER!

The follow-up to our smash first issue features more galleries of UNSEEN ART by top industry professionals, including: BRIAN APTHORP, FRANK BRUNNER, PAUL GULACY, JERRY ORDWAY, ALEX TOTH, and MATT WAGNER, plus a PAUL GULACY interview, a look at art of the pros BEFORE they were pros, and a new GULACY “HEX” COVER!

(116-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

ROUGH STUFF #1

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIGDITITIOANL

ILABLE

BL AVAILA

BLE AVAILA

E BLE AVAILA

ROUGH STUFF #3

ROUGH STUFF #4

ROUGH STUFF #5

ROUGH STUFF #6

ROUGH STUFF #7

Still more galleries of UNPUBLISHED ART

by MIKE ALLRED, JOHN BUSCEMA, YANICK PAQUETTE, JOHN ROMITA JR., P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and LEE WEEKS, plus a JOHN ROMITA JR. interview, looks at the process of creating a cover (with BILL SIENKIEWICZ and JOHN ROMITA JR.), and a new ROMITA JR. COVER, plus a FREE DRAW #13 PREVIEW!

More NEVER-PUBLISHED galleries (with detailed artist commentaries) by MICHAEL KALUTA, ANDREW “Starman” ROBINSON, GENE COLAN, HOWARD CHAYKIN, and STEVE BISSETTE, plus interview and art by JOHN TOTLEBEN, a look at the Wonder Woman Day charity auction (with rare art), art critiques, before-&-after art comparisons, and a FREE WRITE NOW #15 PREVIEW!

NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED galleries (complete with extensive commentaries by the artists) by PAUL SMITH, GIL KANE, CULLY HAMNER, DALE KEOWN, and ASHLEY WOOD, plus a feature interview and art by STEVE RUDE, an examination of JOHN ALBANO and TONY DeZUNIGA’s work on Jonah Hex, new STEVE RUDE COVER, plus a FREE BACK ISSUE #23 PREVIEW!

Features a new interview and cover by BRIAN STELFREEZE, interview with BUTCH GUICE, extensive art galleries/commentary

by IAN CHURCHILL, DAVE COCKRUM, and COLLEEN DORAN, MIKE GAGNON looks at independent comics, with art and comments by ANDREW BARR, BRANDON GRAHAM, and ASAF HANUKA! Includes a FREE ALTER EGO #73 PREVIEW!

Features an in-depth interview and cover

by TIM TOWNSEND, CRAIG HAMILTON, DAN JURGENS, and HOWARD PORTER offer preliminary art and commentaries, MARIE SEVERIN career retrospective, graphic novels feature with art and comments by DAWN BROWN, TOMER HANUKA, BEN TEMPLESMITH, and LANCE TOOKS, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

E

DIGITITIOANL ED BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL

DIEGDITITIOANL BLE AVAILA

BLE AVAILA

DIEGDITITIOANL BL AVAILA

E

ROUGH STUFF #8

ROUGH STUFF #9

ROUGH STUFF #10

ROUGH STUFF #11

ROUGH STUFF #12

Features an in-depth interview and cover painting by the extraordinary MIKE MAYHEW, preliminary and unpublished art by ALEX HORLEY, TONY DeZUNIGA, NICK CARDY, and RAFAEL KAYANAN (including commentary by each artist), a look at the great Belgian comic book artists, a “Rough Critique” of MIKE MURDOCK’s work, and more!

Editor and pro inker BOB McLEOD features four interviews this issue: ROB HAYNES (interviewed by fellow professional TIM TOWNSEND), JOE JUSKO, MEL RUBI, and SCOTT WILLIAMS, with a new painted cover by JUSKO, and an article by McLEOD examining "Inkers: Who needs ’em?" along with other features, including a Rough Critique of RUDY VASQUEZ!

Interview with RON GARNEY, with copious examples of sketchwork and comments.

Also features on ANDY SMITH, MICHAEL JASON PAZ, and MATT HALEY, showing how their work evolves, excerpts from a new book on ALEX RAYMOND, secrets of teaching comic art by pro inker BOB McLEOD, new cover by GARNEY and McLEOD, newcomer critique, and more!

New cover by GREG HORN, plus interviews with HORN and TOM YEATES on how they produce their stellar work. Also features on GENE HA, JIMMY CHEUNG, and MIKE PERKINS, showing their sketchwork and commentary, tips on collecting sketches and commissions from artists, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, and more!

Interview and cover by comic painter CHRIS MOELLER, features on New Zealand comic artist COLIN WILSON, G.I. Joe artist JEREMY DALE, and fan favorite TERRY DODSON, plus "GOOD GIRL ART" (a new article about everyone's favorite collectible art) by ROBERT PLUNKETT, a "Rough Critique" of an aspiring artist's work, and more!

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 US (Digital edition) $2.95

(100-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital edition) $2.95

E

SPRING 2010 EDITION Hype and hullabaloo from the company celebrating the art & history of comics, LEGO®, and other fun stuff

TwoMorrows News Today

by publisher John Morrow

MORE, & MORE Pros@Cons!

COLORFUL, MAGS! In 2010, TwoMorrows plans to be exhibiting at the following comics conventions:

Big Book Update Instead of turning out a bunch of new books the first half of 2010, we’re working overtime to get some delayed projects off the ground.

Here’s an update on several: AGE OF TV HEROES A delay on final copyright approvals has held this one up, but the snags are about cleared up, and it should be shipping by March.

LOU SCHEIMER: CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION Filmation rights were sold in the midst of production on this book, so we had to start over on approvals. We’re shooting to have it out this Summer. Stay tuned!

MODERN MASTERS For the Modern Masters series, the GUY DAVIS and MARK BUCKINGHAM volumes should be out by late March. The JEFF SMITH volume has been rescheduled for July. Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts, we’ve been unable to complete the DARWYN COOKE volume as planned, and will be rescheduling it as work progresses.

BRAVE & BOLD ART OF JIM APARO New co-author JIM AMASH is working with ERIC NOLEN-WEATHINGTON toward an early 2011 release; we’re sure it’ll be worth the wait!

Please stay tuned to our website (www.twomorrows.com) for current release dates on all our upcoming items, and thanks for your patience.

Cover Switch For JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #54, we moved the KIRBY/TUSKA piece we planned for the BACK cover to the FRONT, as a long overdue tribute to the late Mr. Tuska (and thanks to MIKE GARTLAND, who conducted George’s final interview in that issue, and pointed out how remiss we were in not featuring Tuska’s work on a TJKC cover while he was still with us).

2010 is the YEAR OF THE MAGAZINE at TwoMorrows, with big changes in store! To paraphrase the DC Comics house ads from 1971, “Let’s rap. We owe you an explanation.”

The last couple of years, the economy’s affected everyone and everything, especially magazines. We’re not immune—we had to cancel ROUGH STUFF! and WRITE NOW! last year. But we’re glad to announce that both of those mags’ editors are now a part of DRAW! magazine, where BOB McLEOD will continue his “Rough Critiques” of newcomers’ work, and DANNY FINGEROTH is producing a new feature spotlighting top Writer/Artists in each issue.

Now the bad news: This Spring, ALTER EGO and BACK ISSUE join DRAW! by going to a $7.95 cover price (starting with issues #93 and #40, respectively). But since most comics shops offer a percentage discount to their customers, your actual increase will probably be less. And the per-copy subscription cost and price for Digital Editions remains the same as before—plus we’ve even LOWERED the price for Canadian and overseas subscribers!

Still, we wanted to give our readers something extra for that extra dollar, so we conducted an online poll and asked if they’d like to see AE and BI add color to its pages. The results were overwhelming; two-thirds of the respondents said they’d like us to add at least some color, even if it meant an increase of $1-2 in the cover price. But rather than take too big a price jump and go all color, we set out to find a solution that lets us stick with that $7.95 price, AND add 16 pages of color to each issue.

The answer? We normally feature a large section of house ads for our publications each issue, so we’re dropping all those ad pages (and, alas, a few pages of editorial matter), and standardizing on a new page count: 84 pages (16 of which are color) for $7.95—the same format DRAW! has had for a while now (but we’re replacing the ads currently in DRAW! with more editorial content, making it an even better value). Our house ads will now only be on the inside and back covers. It’s a gamble, but we’re betting our loyal readers will keep tabs on our website to stay updated on our new releases, and continue to order our back issues online, and through our free print catalog (and the free digital catalog they can download online). Once a year, we’ll also include our full print catalog in an issue of each mag, so be sure to save it to refer back to!

Also this year, BACK ISSUE! goes to 8 times a year (matching ALTER EGO’s frequency), and BRICKJOURNAL increases its output to bi-monthly. This all means more of the mags you love, and more color in some, but the same dedication to bring you the best publications about comics (and LEGO) ever produced. (And just wait’ll you see what we’ve got planned for ALTER EGO #100 and BACK ISSUE! #50 next year!)

HEROES CON (Charlotte, NC, June 4-6, 2010) COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL (San Diego, CA, July 21-25, 2010) NEW YORK COMICON (New York City, October 8-10, 2010) and these LEGO conventions: BRICKMAGIC (our own event!)

(Raleigh, NC, May 6-9, 2010 BRICKWORLD (Chicago, IL, June 17-20, 2010) BRICKFAIR (Washington, DC, August 5-8, 2010) BRICKCON (Seattle, WA, Sept. 30 - Oct. 3, 2010) If you’re there, be sure to stop by our booth!

COMING SOON: So you don’t think we’re only concerned with late books and LEGO, here’s a sneak peek at just a few of the comics-related books we’ve got in the works. See our Summer 2010 Catalog for details!

TED UPDAION! EDIT

New Lower Prices Our Own LEGO Festival in Raleigh!

Outside The USA!

For customers outside the US, we’ve just DRAMATICALLY CUT THE COST to get our mags. Canadians SAVE $1 PER ISSUE and other international subscribers SAVE $4-5 PER ISSUE! Plus we have new LOWER INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING RATES for online orders!

May 8-9 (with a private event for builders on May 6-7), TwoMorrows and BrickJournal are putting on BRICKMAGIC 2010, the ultimate Festival for LEGO Fans! The public will get to interact and build with pro LEGO builders, see hundreds of amazing LEGO creations, attend panels and workshops (and a LEGO Boat Race in the hotel pool!), and even build a LEGO rose for their Mom (since it’s held over Mother’s Day Weekend). Go to www.brickmagic.org for details; see you there? Festival for LEGO Fans ®

* Save $1 per issue **Save $4 per issue ***Save $5 per issue

www.twomorrows.com has FULL-COLOR DIGITAL EDITIONS of our magazines for $2.95-3.95!

Print subscribers get the digital edition FREE, before print copies hit stores!

2010 SUBSCRIPTION RATES: (with FREE Digital Editions)

Media Mail

1st Class Canada 1st Class Priority US Intl.

Intl.

Digital Only

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (4 issues)

$50

$68

$65*

$72

$150

$15.80

BACK ISSUE! (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85*

$107 **

$155

$23.60

DRAW! (4 issues)

$30

$40

$43*

$54 **

$78

$11.80

ALTER EGO (8 issues)

$60

$80

$85*

$107 **

$155

$23.60

BRICKJOURNAL (6 issues)

$57

$72

$75*

$86 ***

$128

$23.70

For the latest news from TwoMorrows Publishing, log on to www.twomorrows.com/tnt To get e-mail updates of what’s new from TwoMorrows, sign up for our mailing list! http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/twomorrows

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

TwoMorrows Publishing Update 15%

SAVE

BIG NEWS!

• Back Issue! goes 8x per year!

• BrickJournal goes 6x per year!

• Back Issue! & Alter Ego add color!

• Lower international shipping rates!

ORDER AT: www.twomorrows.com

ALTER EGO #93

ALTER EGO #94

BACK ISSUE #39

BACK ISSUE #40

BACK ISSUE #41

“April Fools”! GIFFEN and LOREN FLEMING on Ambush Bug, BYRNE’s She-Hulk, interviews with HEMBECK, ALAN KUPPERBERG, Flaming Carrot’s BOB BURDEN, and DAVID CHELSEA, Spider-Ham, Forbush-Man, Reid Fleming, MAD in the 1970s, art and commentary from DICK DeBARTOLO, TOM DeFALCO, AL FELDSTEIN, AL JAFFEE, STAN LEE, DAVE SIM, and a Spider-Ham cover by MIKE WIERINGO, inked by KARL KESEL!

(NOW 8x/YEAR, WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Cat People!” Catwoman, Black Cat, Hellcat, Vixen, Atlas’ Tiger-Man and Cougar, White Tiger and the Sons of the Tiger, Wildcat, Thundercats, Josie and the Pussycats, and the Badger! With art and commentary from BOLLAND, BRENNERT, COLON, CONWAY, DITKO, GOLDBERG, LEVITZ, MILGROM, MST3000’s MIKE NELSON, and more. Cover

by JOE STATON and FREDDY LOPEZ, JR.!

(NOW 8x/YEAR, WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “Red, White, and Blue” issue! Captain America and the Red Skull, CHAYKIN’s American Flagg, THOMAS and COLAN’s Wonder Woman, Freedom Fighters, and Team America! With art and commentary from JOHN BYRNE, STEVE ENGLEHART, ROGER STERN, CURT SWAN, MARK WAID, LEN WEIN, MIKE ZECK, and more.

Cover by HOWARD CHAYKIN!

(96-page magazine) $6.95 US Ships March 2010

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • Ships April 2010

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • Ships June 2010

ALTER EGO #95

ALTER EGO #96

DRAW! #20

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “EarthTwo—1961 to 1985!” with rare art by INFANTINO, GIL KANE, ANDERSON, DELBO, ANDRU, BUCKLER, APARO, GRANDENETTI, and DILLIN, interview with Golden/Silver Age DC editor GEORGE KASHDAN, plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, STEVE GERBER, FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), and a new cover by INFANTINO and AMASH!

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) “EarthTwo Companion, Part II!” More on the 19631985 series that changed comics forever!

The Huntress, Power Girl, Dr. Fate, Freedom Fighters, and more, with art by ADAMS, APARO, AYERS, BUCKLER, GIFFEN, INFANTINO, KANE, NOVICK, SCHAFFENBERGER, SIMONSON, STATON, SWAN, TUSKA, our GEORGE KASHDAN interview Part 2, FCA, and more! STATON & GIORDANO cover!

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) Marvel’s NOT BRAND ECHH madcap parody mag from 1967-69, examined with rare art & artifacts by ANDRU, COLAN, BUSCEMA, DRAKE, EVERETT, FRIEDRICH, KIRBY, LEE, the SEVERIN siblings, SPRINGER, SUTTON, THOMAS, TRIMPE, and more, GEORGE KASHDAN interview conclusion, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT and MR. MONSTER, and more! Cover by MARIE SEVERIN!

(NOW WITH 16 COLOR PAGES!) Focus on Archie’s 1960s MIGHTY CRUSADERS, with vintage art and artifacts by JERRY SIEGEL, PAUL REINMAN, SIMON & KIRBY, JOHN ROSENBERGER, tributes to the Crusaders

by BOB FUJITANE, GEORGE TUSKA, BOB LAYTON, and others! RON GOULART on 1940s MLJ! Interview with MELL LAZARUS, FCA, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and more!

Cover by MIKE MACHLAN!

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, Rough Stuff’s BOB McLEOD gives a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, Write Now’s DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights writer/artist AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the best art supplies and tool technology, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, plus Web links, comic and book reviews, and more!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • Ships May 2010

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • Ships June 2010

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • Ships July 2010

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • Ships August 2010

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • Ships Summer 2010

TwoMorrows.

Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. (& LEGO! ) ®

BRICKJOURNAL #9

BRICKJOURNAL #10

BRICKJOURNAL #11

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

BrickJournal looks at LEGO® DISNEY SETS, with features on the Disney LEGO sets of the past (MICKEY and MINNIE) and present (TOY STORY and PRINCE OF PERSIA)!

We also present models built by LEGO fans, and a look at the newest Master Build model at WALT DISNEY WORLD, plus articles and instructions on BUILDING AND CUSTOMIZATION, LEGO’S HISTORY, and more! Now bi-monthly!

BrickJournal goes undersea with looks at the creation of LEGO’s new 2010 ATLANTIS SETS, plus a spotlight on a fan-created underwater theme, THE SEA MONKEYS, with builder FELIX GRECO! Also, a report on the LEGO WORLD convention in the Netherlands, BUILDER SPOTLIGHTS, INSTRUCTIONS and ways to CUSTOMIZE MINIFIGURES, features on LEGO HISTORY, and more! Now bi-monthly!

“Racers” theme issue, with building tips on race cars by the ARVO BROTHERS, interviews with the LEGO Group on TOP SECRET UPCOMING SETS (we can’t say anything yet about them, except... camels), photos from NEW YORK TOY FAIR 2010 and other event reports, instructions and columns on MINIFIGURE CUSTOMIZATION and MICRO BUILDING, builder spotlights, LEGO HISTORY, and more! Now bi-monthly!

“Kirby Goes To Hollywood!” SERGIO ARAGONÉS and MELL LAZARUS recall Kirby’s BOB NEWHART TV show cameo, comparing the recent STAR WARS films to New Gods, RUBY & SPEARS interviewed, Jack’s encounters with FRANK ZAPPA, PAUL McCARTNEY, and JOHN LENNON, MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a Golden Age Kirby story, and more! Kirby cover inked by PAUL SMITH!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 Ships January 2010

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 Ships March 2010

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 Ships May 2010

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 US Ships Summer 2010

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com www.twomorrows.com

All characters TM & ©2010 their respective owners.

SPRING 2010

WHE N YO ORD U ONL ER INE!

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.

At

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

www.twomorrows.com TM

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