Back Issue #88

COMIC MAGAZINES OF THE ’70s & ’80s

May 20

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The Punisher TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Marvel’s mags, from Savage Tales to Epic Illustrated t Kirby’s “Speak-Out Series” Eisner’s The Spirit magazine t The Unpublished Paul Gulacy t plus Atlas/Seaboard, Charlton, Skywald, & Warren mags t with Adams, Moench, Norem, Uslan, & more

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

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

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“Let’s Get Small!” Marvel’s Micronauts, The Atom in the Bronze Age, JAN STRNAD and GIL KANE’s Sword of the Atom, the rocky relationship of Ant-Man the Wasp, Gold Key’s Microbots, Super Jrs., DC Digests, and Marvel Value Stamps. Featuring the work of PAT BRODERICK, JACKSON GUICE, ELLIOT S! MAGGIN, BILL MANTLO, AL MILGROM, ALEX SAVIUK, ROGER STERN, LEN WEIN, & more. Cover by PAT BRODERICK!

“When Comics Were Fun!” HEMBECK cover and gallery, Plastic Man, Blue Devil, Marvel’s Star Comics imprint, VALENTINO’s normalman, Bronze Age’s goofiest Superman stories, and the Batman/Dick Tracy team-up you didn’t see! Featuring MAX ALLAN COLLINS, PARIS CULLINS, RAMONA FRADON, ALAN KUPPERBERG, MISHKIN & COHN, STEVE SKEATES, JOE STATON, CURT SWAN, and more!

“Weird Issue!” Batman’s Weirdest TeamUps, ORLANDO’s Weird Adventure Comics, Weird War Tales, Weird Mystery Tales, DITKO’s Shade the Changing Man and Stalker, CHAYKIN’s Iron Wolf, CRUMB’s Weirdo, and STARLIN and WRIGHTSON’s The Weird! Featuring JIM APARO, LUIS DOMINGUEZ, MICHAEL FLEISHER, BOB HANEY, PAUL LEVITZ, and more. Batman and Deadman cover by ALAN CRADDOCK.

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“Charlton Action Heroes in the Bronze Age!” DAVE GIBBONS on Charlton’s WATCHMEN connection, LEN WEIN and PARIS CULLINS’ Blue Beetle, CARY BATES and PAT BRODERICK’s Captain Atom, Peacemaker, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, and a look at Blockbuster Weekly! Featuring MIKE COLLINS, GIORDANO, KUPPERBERG, ALAN MOORE, PAT MORISI, ALEX ROSS, and more. Cover by AL MILGROM.

“Flash and Green Lantern in the Bronze Age” (crossover with ALTER EGO #132)! In-depth spotlights of their 1970s and 1980s adventures, MARK WAID’s look at the Flash/GL team, and PAUL KUPPERBERG’s Lost GL Fillins. Bonus: DC’s New York Office Memories, and Green Lantern: Ganthet’s Tale by LARRY NIVEN and JOHN BYRNE. With BARR, BATES, GIBBONS, GRELL, INFANTINO, WEIN, and more. Cover by GEORGE PÉREZ.

“DC Bronze Age Giants and Reprints!” An indepth exploration of DC’s 100-PAGE SUPER SPECTACULARS, plus: a history of comics giants, DC indexes galore, and a salute to “human encyclopedia” E. NELSON BRIDWELL. Featuring the work of PAT BRODERICK, RICH BUCKLER, FRANK FRAZETTA, JOE KUBERT, BOB ROZAKIS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and more. Super Spec tribute cover featuring classic art by NICK CARDY.

“Bronze Age Events!” With extensive coverage of the Avengers/Defenders War, JLA/JSA crossovers, Secret Wars, Crisis’ 30th anniversary, Legends, Millennium, Invasion, Infinity Gauntlet, and more! Featuring the work of SAL BUSCEMA, DICK DILLIN, TODD McFARLANE, GEORGE PÉREZ, JOE STATON, LEN WEIN, MARV WOLFMAN, MIKE ZECK, and more. Plus an Avengers vs. Defenders cover by JOHN BYRNE.

“International Heroes!” Alpha Flight, the New X-Men, Global Guardians, Captain Canuck, and Justice League International, plus SpiderMan in the UK and more. Also: exclusive interview with cover artists STEVE FASTNER and RICH LARSON. Featuring the work of JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAVE COCKRUM, RICHARD COMELY, KEITH GIFFEN, KEVIN MAGUIRE, and more! Alpha Flight vs. X-Men cover by FASTNER/LARSON.

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“Supergirl in the Bronze Age!” Her 1970s and 1980s adventures, including her death in Crisis on Infinite Earths and her many rebirths.

Plus: an ALAN BRENNERT interview, behind the scenes of the Supergirl movie starring HELEN SLATER, Who is Superwoman?, and a look at the DC Superheroes Water Ski Show.

With PAUL KUPPERBERG, ELLIOT MAGGIN, MARV WOLFMAN, plus a jam cover recreation of ADVENTURE COMICS #397!

“Christmas in the Bronze Age!” Go behind the scenes of comics’ best holiday tales of the 1970s through the early 1990s! And we revisit Superhero Merchandise Catalogs of the late ‘70s! Featuring work by SIMON BISLEY, CHRIS CLAREMONT, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍALÓPEZ, KEITH GIFFEN, the KUBERT STUDIO, DENNY O’NEIL, STEVE PURCELL, JOHN ROMITA, JR., and more. Cover by MARIE SEVERIN and MIKE ESPOSITO!

“Marvel Bronze Age Giants and Reprints!”

In-depth exploration of Marvel’s GIANT-SIZE series, plus indexes galore of Marvel reprint titles, Marvel digests and Fireside Books editions, and the last days of the “Old” X-Men! Featuring work by DAN ADKINS, ROSS ANDRU, RICH BUCKLER, DAVE COCKRUM, GERRY CONWAY, STEVE GERBER, STAN LEE, WERNER ROTH, ROY THOMAS, and more. Cover by JOHN ROMITA, SR.!

“Batman AND Superman!” Bronze Age World’s Finest, Super Sons, Batman/Superman Villain/Partner Swap, Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane go solo, Superman/Radio Shack giveaways, and JLA #200’s “A League Divided” (as a nod to Batman v. Superman)! Featuring work by BRIAN BOLLAND, RICH BUCKLER, GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, GEORGE PÉREZ, JIM STARLIN, and more. Cover by DICK GIORDANO!

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Volume 1, Number 88 May 2016 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTIST Gray Morrow (Cover painting originally produced for Marvel Preview #2, 1975. Original art scan courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions.)

COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS Neal Adams Richard J. Arndt Michael Aushenker John Bolton Jerry Boyd Frank Cirocco Chris Claremont Ben DuBay Jo Duffy Grand Comics Database Steven Grant Robert Greenberger Paul Gulacy Heritage Comics Auctions Tony Isabella John K. Kirk Henry Kujawa Evans Lee Dave Lemieux Alan Light Marvel Comics

Dave McDonnell Doug Moench John “Speak-Out” Morrow George Pérez Paul Sager Jim Starlin Roy Thomas Steven Thompson Michael Uslan Nicolas Waldmann George E Warner John Wells In memory of Earl Norem

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OFF MY CHEST Guest Editorial by John Morrow: Don’t Buy It, Just Ask . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 Our fearless leader laments DC’s half-hearted marketing of Kirby’s “Speak-Out Series” FLASHBACK: The Mighty Marvel Magazine Explosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 The evolution of Marvel’s magazine line, with comments from creators including Earl Norem GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD: The Shadow—The Magazine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 Former Shadow scribe Michael Uslan reveals DC’s unrealized plans to publish B&Ws FLASHBACK: Skywald and Seaboard: The Other B&W Mags of the ’70s . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 You might’ve overlooked these publications from Brodsky, Waldman, and Goodman FLASHBACK: Warren Publications’ Third Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 From Eisner’s The Spirit to the slap-happy superheroes of The Goblin, Warren’s Bronze Age mags BACK IN PRINT: The Revival of the Rook! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 Ben DuBay, Steven Grant, and Paul Gulacy discuss the character’s return GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD: The Unpublished Paul Gulacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44 A gorgeous gathering of uncommon Gulacy goodies FLASHBACK: Charlton Magazines of the 1970s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Charlton Spotlight publisher Michael Ambrose explores three TV tie-ins INTERVIEW: Neal Adams Discusses Charlton, Dick Giordano, and Continuity Studios . . . .53 Go behind the scenes with one of our favorite artists INTERVIEW: Continuity Memories by Frank Cirocco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 Ever wonder what it was like to work at Neal Adams’ studio?

BEYOND CAPES: Epic Illustrated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59 Jim Starlin, Chris Claremont, and Jo Duffy revisit Archie Goodwin’s magnum opus BACKSTAGE PASS: Comics Scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 Robert Greenberger reveals the story behind this fondly remembered ’80s fanzine BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78 Reader reactions BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Six-issue subscriptions: $67 Standard US, $85 Canada, $104 Surface International. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office.

Cover art by Gray Morrow. The Punisher and related characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2016 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing.

ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING. Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

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by

John Morrow

They Don’t Know Jack Two examples of DC’s attempts to market Jack Kirby.

TM & © DC Comics.

My background is in advertising. Long before TwoMorrows Publishing was an entity, TwoMorrows Advertising was servicing local and regional clients in the Southeast US. My wife Pam and I met in design school, and our first joint advertising project was a very non-traditional wedding invitation. It must’ve been effective; we had a great turnout for our nuptials, and that product is still going strong 29 years later.

(Take that, Madison Avenue!)

So it’s only natural that I would turn a critical eye to any and all ads I see, whether they be for widgets, cogs, or comic books. And nothing drives me crazier than seeing one where the creative director chose to ignore the most important rule that got beamed into our brains in art school: “Form FOLLOWS Function.” (For those unfamiliar with that phrase, it simply means that the look of something in advertising should ALWAYS be secondary to its sales purpose; i.e., never lose sight of the message you’re trying to get across in the search for an eye-catching visual.)

Jack Kirby was the King of both comic books, and of comics cover blurbs. I’d dare say his infamous “Don’t Ask, Just Buy It!” phrase from Jimmy Olsen #141 is probably as well remembered (and oft-repeated, even by those who don’t know its source) as any comics concepts from his 1970s tenure at DC Comics. It’s also the pinnacle of the lazy ad agency mentality of, “We don’t know how to market this product, so we’ll just toss something out there and see if it sticks.”

This perfectly describes DC Comics’ attitude toward Kirby’s shortlived “Speak-Out Series” of black-and-white magazines from the early

1970s. DC editorial director Carmine Infantino had just successfully lured Kirby away from Marvel Comics, with promises of unprecedented creative freedom and top billing at DC. But a quick look at their ads promoting Jack shows the company was at a complete loss of how to effectively market Kirby as a product.

Take the psychedelic ad “The Great One is Coming!” that was sprinkled liberally throughout DC’s Summer 1970 comics. While the copy sounds like something that would’ve sprung from Kirby’s head, and the lettering is beautifully done, how would ANYONE have any idea what this was promoting? As a kid, I saw it, read it, and immediately turned the page, never giving it a second thought. It was a wasted opportunity by DC to crow that they just hooked their competition’s biggest fish, and was completely ineffective.

While Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #133 (Kirby’s first DC release) got a small full-color ad billing Jack’s arrival, the dominant image was a Kirby Superman figure, with watered-down Vince Colletta inking and an Al Plastino face—not exactly a rousing endorsement of Jack and his work.

The subsequent full-page “Magic of Kirby!” ad for Jack’s Fourth World debut issues only merited black-and-white line art cover repros, with a cropped-off Mister Miracle #1 cover to boot. How excited could fans get about these new series, when DC wouldn’t put forth the effort to make the ad more effective with some color? (One wonders if the Olsen #133 cover only got color because of Superman’s prominent appearance on it.)

Still, Infantino had the top creator in comics, so the obvious and wise choice was to put him to work on every genre Kirby had success

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By all accounts, neither magazine made any impact with in the past. While superheroes were the immediate push, Kirby’s long track record with romance, crime, on newsstands, as they largely went un-displayed, and mystery comics were an inevitable next focus. and were returned by the distributor, unopened. DC Likewise, Jack was looking for new avenues to move the did send along a couple of promotional posters to be comics medium into uncharted territory, so he pitched displayed on newsstands, but again, brown and orange DC on the idea of upscale, full-color newsstand are not exactly eye-catching colors to use when you’re magazines that would delve into more adult topics, competing for attention against full-color Time and Life and appeal to untapped audiences. Through this magazines for rack space. To quote the 1975 Schlitz convergence, the “Speak-Out Series” of magazines beer commercial, “Go for the gusto, or don’t go at all.”

DC should’ve never gotten Jack’s hopes up. They was born—sort of.

Jack went right to work on three concepts that eventually used the Spirit World #2 leftover stories as touched on popular culture: First was In the Days of filler in a couple of mystery comics, while all the other the Mob (building off the success of Mario Puzo’s 1969 unused material languished in the files.

A January 1972 ad finally got it sort-of right, as DC novel The Godfather, then soon to be a major motion picture), focusing on the Roaring Thirties and gangsters. directly appealed to Kirby fans, in an attempt to unload Next came Spirit World (likely inspired by the successful the returned copies of the two Speak-Out issues that 1971 horror novel The Exorcist, also headed to saw print. The copy euphemistically said they’d sold out, Hollywood at the time), tapping into the burgeoning and were going back to press, to give Jack’s fans another audience for mystery and horror. Finally (and my chance to get them. (No one’s ever found a copy of personal favorite of the line) came the world’s first either that said “Second Printing.”)

But it’s really no surprise that the Speak-Out Series didn’t anti-romance comic, True Divorce Cases (a hot topic in America at the time, as divorce rates were rising during “speak” to anyone, or that Kirby went underappreciated a period when the feminist movement empowered by 1970s DC fans. When management adopted the attitude that the audience would magically pick up Kirby’s women to stand on their own). books, when they themselves didn’t make an The intent was good, but the execution by attempt to let readers know about their DC fell far short of what Kirby envisioned, existence—let alone what the actual and what they had promised. Instead of publications were about—you’ve got a full-color, In the Days of the Mob #1 recipe for failure. As a ten-year-old when was printed in black-and-white, with those Kirby publications were fresh off gray wash-tones added (not by the press, I had no earthly idea they Kirby) in a pale imitation of Warren existed (although I knew about, and Publishing’s successful B&W magazine salivated over, every 80-Page Giant line. Spirit World #1, apparently in an and Annual reprint issue, due to the effort to soothe Jack’s concerns over easy to read and understand, full-color the lack of color in Mob, was printed ads that permeated all the DC comics of in blue-and-white (“Hey, Jack, blue is a that era). When I did learn about them color, right?”). on my own only a couple of years later, Those two issues are the sum total jack “king” kirby I actively sought them out, and cherish of what was actually published in the them to this day. The product, in Speak-Out Series. True Divorce Cases hindsight, was solid, but the marketing #1 was fully penciled by Jack, but DC pulled the plug before it was inked, and instead took was pathetic. DC didn’t sell the steak or the sizzle; they its two-pager that featured an African-American couple just expected Kirby’s Marvel audience to climb aboard for dealing with their breakup and had Kirby build an the ride, with little encouragement or direction. I’m pretty entirely different romance magazine around it called sure there’s an important advertising lesson there.

Like most things Kirby, even if it didn’t initially Soul Love. As before, it was aimed at capitalizing on a topical trend—this time the blaxploitation movement in find an audience, the Speak-Out Series would one day. film, and the new Soul Train syndicated television show DC recently collected both In the Days of the Mob and that was hitting big in Kirby’s locale of Los Angeles and Spirit World in deluxe hardcover volumes (I helped other urban areas. But just as that full issue, along with assemble the Mob #2 unpublished material, and wrote Mob #2 and Spirit World #2, was inked, DC canceled the the intro). And Kirby may even have foretold the Rap whole line, well before they could’ve gotten any sales movement with his opening line from Soul Love #1’s story “Diary of the Disappointed Doll!” Gimme a beat: figures on the first issues. It was a complete abandonment “Cupid plays it CUTE when he decides to REFUTE of the concept of the Speak-Out Series, and the signs were there all along. In a move telling of their lack of what the computer COMPUTES!” Kirby may’ve been as far removed from the Black confidence, DC hadn’t even put their own name and logo on the two issues that saw print, instead opting to Experience as Lois Lane was in issue #109 of her own mag, but Jack knew the ghetto from his 1920s upbringing in hide behind the name “Hampshire Distributors, Ltd.” As with his Fourth World debut, DC’s advertising, New York’s Lower East Side. If he’d lived long enough, or lack thereof, tells the tale of how little support Kirby’s who knows? He might’ve combined In the Days of the magazine line received. A full-page Mob ad appeared Mob and Soul Love, and invented Gangsta Rap. Peace out. in some comics dated July 1971, but the weak layout (heavily reliant on type instead of Jack’s powerful visuals) JOHN MORROW, one of the TwoMorrows, is the publisher of fell short of exciting many fans. A tiny (again in murky this very publication, as well as editor of The Jack Kirby black-and-white) ad for Spirit World #1 appeared in a Collector magazine, now going on 22 years of documenting few (non-Kirby) comics, but there was no mention of Kirby’s life and career. While he did attend music school prior Kirby, and the cover shown wasn’t even by him. In this to switching to advertising and graphic design, he knows little sort of oddly reversed “Don’t buy it, just ask” promotion, to nothing about Rap, and respectfully asks his comics homies to no one could have slightest idea what “Spirit World” was, forgive any incorrect usage of terminology from that subgenre, or that Kirby was even involved with it—yet another all knowledge of which came from using the Google. Hail Sinfonia, Euryman! failed attempt at marketing their product.

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

Kirby’s Muzzled Mags (next page) (top left) Penciled page 31 of In the Days of the Mob #2. (top right) A big burnout, from Spirit World #2. (bottom left) A glimpse at what we would have seen in the King’s True Divorce Cases. (bottom right) Right on, Jack!

A look at Soul Love.

Courtesy of The Jack Kirby Collector (images 1–3) and Heritage Comics Auctions (image 4).

TM & © DC Comics.

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“Mighty Marvel is on the move again!!” This stirring proclamation became a mantra of the House of Ideas in the 1960s as “Merry” Martin Goodman’s company moved from triumph to triumph. Costumed, mighty-muscled superheroes and their equally colorful enemies, whether done seriously, silly, or “camp” (for sophisticated adults who were mildly intrigued) became all the rage. In the 1940s, Superman could leap a tall building in a single bound. In the 1960s, he could fly to other star systems, and he and his DC brethren, as well as a slew of other mystery men and women from other companies, followed suit. In deeds, the superhero boom knew no bounds. Comic magazines of the four-color variety were “hip” and “happening.” In the 1970s, the Marvel bigwigs would test those bounds again in the black-and-white arena in titles that would become some of the most memorable efforts in sequential-art history.

by

Jerry Boyd

All covers TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc., except for Conan TM & © Conan LLC, Planet of the Apes TM & © 20th Century Fox, and Doc Savage TM & © Condé Nast.

THE ORIGIN OF MARVEL COMICS (MAGAZINES, THAT IS…) As with many things of the Marvel persuasion, there’s an origin story.

It all started in the late 1960s, when their wildly popular Wall-Crawler debuted in B&W in the magazine The Spectacular Spider-Man (July 1968).

Spidey faced off against a deranged politician running for NYC mayor, whose hulking brute of an assistant was sent off to intimidate the candidate’s opponents. The Spectacular Spider-Man #2 (Nov. 1968) saw the return of the equally deranged Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin. The Goblin was “more dangerous than ever” as Stan Lee liked to put it. Since The Amazing Spider-Man #39 in ’66, Osborn had figured out that Peter Parker and Spider-Man were one and the same. This was one of the Web-Spinner’s tensest battles ever. A third issue was planned, but never came about. It was probably a tough sell. Even though the second issue was in full color, and put together with beautiful scripting

by Lee, and artwork by John Romita, Sr., Jim Mooney, and John Buscema, it didn’t find enough of a buying audience. J. Jonah Jameson might have asked this next question: “Why was Stan even interested in doing The Spectacular Spider-Man in the first place?” Roy Thomas graciously answers. “He wanted Marvel to escape the color comic book ghetto, the way it was then constructed … not have to go through the [Comics] Code … find ways to get more money for the work, too.”

At 35 cents a pop, TSS could’ve made for greater profits for all involved, but Omnipotent Odin willed it not to be. TSS appeared on magazine stands, away from the spinner racks that wild-eyed youngsters (like this fan) were used to … and 35 cents was a bit daunting back then. And I’m sure that many fans probably reasoned that they could get almost THREE 12-centers for one Spidey mag, soooo…

Fans had their own business sense going. Stan knew that new comic buyers were coming into the fold all the time, so Spidey’s origin was retold in TSS #1. Another origin would have to take place for Marvel’s next sojourn into B&W graphic excitement … and that would take three more years to come about.

SAVAGE BLACK-AND-WHITE TALES The Comics Code restrictions lessened to a degree in the late ’60s/ early ’70s, and it’s been reported that Jack Kirby mulled the possibility of a comic starring Dracula around that time. He wasn’t the only one.

Dracula was “alive and well,” so to speak, in B&W stories outside of the Comics Code and in new movies. His old movies were staples of late-night TV-show horror-host fare from sea to shining sea. Stan Lee was promoted to Marvel publisher near the end of 1971, but he wasn’t quite ready to pull the publishing trigger on Dracula … not just yet.

So, he pulled a sword. Conan the Cimmerian proved himself to be a sensation for the House of Ideas in 1970. A reaver, a slayer, a thief— a bloody-handed barbarian … and Robert E. Howard’s novel and short stories promised more to come—was an ideal choice for a B&W magazine.

Conan’s world was one of fear-fraught fantasies too wild, in some ways, for the Comics Code. Women were often scantily dressed, men killed and killed often (no Daredevil dragging the defeated Matador to the police here), and arcane spells and demonic monsters were the norm.

Conan was a new deal. Somehow, in the waning days of “peace and love,” a war-torn Vietnam, campus protests, and race riots, an indomitable

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

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Early Marvel Mags (top) The Spectacular Spider-Man covers, sumptuously served up by “Jazzy” Johnny Romita. The second issue’s cover is still just too much! (bottom) John Buscema’s Conan was every bit as savage as Frazetta’s!

This Buscema painting for Savage Tales #1 (May 1971) spoke the proverbial thousand words…

Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Conan TM & © Conan LLC.

hill-man from “an age undreamed of” won the hearts and minds of fandom and hacked his way to big success in 1970.

One Marvelite, writing in to the regular book, asked, “Is it real or fiction in the Baxter Building?” It didn’t matter.

Conan was here. His title quickly went monthly.

Savage Tales #1 (May 1971) would be his magazine showcase—with a large “M” aimed at “the Mature Reader.” Inside the covers was the Thomas/Smith tour-de-force adaptation of Howard’s “The Frost Giant’s Daughter.” While Frank Frazetta was THE Conan artist on paperback covers, very few who read “Bashful” Barry Smith’s rendition of this short story were dissatisfied. Smith’s early style had rapidly matured, merging the pre-Raphaelite school of art with dashes of Erte and a few flourishes of his hero, Jack “King” Kirby. And Roy’s writing was up to the task, also. Truly, this was the beginning of something big, it seemed. And it wasn’t all Conan. “Black Brother,”

by Dennis O’Neil (under a different name) and Gene Colan, gave us a look at racial struggles in a fictional African nation and its apartheid state. “Man-Thing” was executed by Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow, and the swamp came alive in the form of a muck-encrusted mess that lived after his human side was betrayed by his lover for the secret formula he’d been working on. Lee and Romita played to any feminist fans who may have taken a chance on ST with “The Femizons,” where warrior women ruled over men on a futuristic Earth. Mr. Romita wasn’t happy with there being no Femizons follow-up to ST #1. He told Roy in Alter Ego Presents John Romita – All That Jazz (2007), “That was supposed to be a 40-page epic, but we only published the first part. It was so long before Savage Tales [#2] came out that the momentum was lost. We even had a movie company interested in it at one point. It broke my heart not to be able to continue it.” Mr. Thomas’ assessment of ST #1 follows: “I think Savage Tales #1 was a good package, though my favorite stories were “Frost Giant’s Daughter” by Barry and me, and “Man-Thing,” which I co-plotted.”

However, this proud package didn’t do it for Marvel.

Perhaps the “M” label scared as many kids away as it enticed older readers. There was partial nudity and the type of violence outside the regular stun-guns and blast rays of the 15- and 25-centers—maybe those factors had something to do with it. In any case, it’d be another two years before this title would make a savage return.

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THE SAVAGE RETURN OF CONAN! By 1973, the once-upstart Marvel was the number-one comics publishing house.

Fandom was generally enraptured! Rival DC was also doing quite well, quality-wise, with Kirby’s gods-at-war tetralogy, O’Neil and Kaluta’s The Shadow, Kubert’s Tarzan, the stunning Wein/Wrightson Swamp Thing, and Batman by O’Neil and Adams. But the House of Ideas kept the overall quality of their ’60s flagship titles on a high level, and having that comfort zone, now stood poised to give B&W mainstays Warren Publishing and Skywald Magazines a run for their money.

Savage Tales #2 (Oct. 1973) was the icebreaker. Stan and Roy had determined that Conan was a big enough star on his own to have most of the content wrapped around his Hyborian Age, and hedging their bets, there were reprints from the ’50s that smacked of sword and sorcery. Reprints would loom large during the Marvel Magazine era and were welcome, introducing youngsters to the works of Joe Maneely, Russ Heath, Fred Kida, Dave Berg, Paul Reinman, Joe Sinnott, and others. If Thomas and Smith had blown out eyes with their contribution to ST #1, ST #2’s Conan story would truly be “senses-shattering,” as Stan might put it.

“Red Nails” went beyond superlatives, so I’ll have to stop here. Roy and Barry didn’t. They took Howard’s poem “Cimmeria” and gave it a visual style that’s not to be forgotten. Happily, there’d be a Savage Tales #3, concluding the “Red Nails” story, and the beat would go on.

Mr. Lee was enjoying the expansion in the color and non-color lineup, but his years of experience made him a prophet in some ways.

He told an interviewer in ’73, “I am glad to see Marvel expand into new areas. However, one big problem we’re having and will continue to have is with manpower. There are so many talented writers, artists, and inkers in the business right now and many of the ones we’re adding on are young and enthusiastic. Still, experience is needed … and deadline problems will be a big factor when you put out more titles. We have great veterans doing a number of our titles and wonderful youngsters, but people now are going from company to

Graphic Goings-On (below) Peeks at Savage Tales #1’s Man-Thing and Ka-Zar tales, in original art form.

Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

Shown at left, courtesy of Jerry Boyd, is a futuristic Femizon, captured in a Romita portrait.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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company more often … so how long we can keep them, I’m not sure.”

I asked Roy what made this incarnation of ST so important to readers. He observed, “The fact that Stan allowed me to handle it pretty much the way I wanted, so that I instantly turned it into a vehicle for Conan. That and Barry’s art (with Howard’s writing) made it a wonderful package.”

With Roy’s huge workload and Barry’s departure to work on other projects, ST got handed over to Ka-Zar with issue #6. Ka-Zar’s adventures in the Savage Land (where else?) went from #6–11. There were other highlights. Roy and Jim Starlin produced an exceptional Conan story in #5. Russ Heath did an outstanding Ka-Zar tale in #10.

ST lasted 11 issues, but Conan continued to persevere in The Savage Sword of Conan. An ad for this new title was shown in the back of ST #5. The Cimmerian freebooter had not yet fulfilled his destiny…

THE Conan Combo With all due respect to the many marvelous talents who have crafted Conan tales, really, has anyone done it better than this dynamic duo? Barry (not-quite-Windsor-) Smith, seen in 1974, produced this Conan illo a few years later. (right) This pic of “Rascally” Roy Thomas came out of the 1977 Baycon convention program in San Francisco.

Courtesy of Jerry Boyd.

barry smith

HORROR AS YOU LIKE IT! In 1972, Marvel signed with a new distributor that let them produce as many titles as they could come up with. The vampires, werewolves, demons, etc. of the long-ago 1950s could no longer be “destroyed” by PTA groups, judges, politicians, and biased psychiatrists uninterested in scientific random study samplings. Those creatures had already been bringing in solid profits for Skywald Magazines and Warren Publishing, so “Rascally” Roy Thomas, Marvel’s editor-in-chief as ’72 began, looked to those creature features as possible cash cows.

Those cash cows came out first in 20-cent, four-color periodicals.

Werewolf by Night was tested out in Marvel Spotlight #2 in 1972 and quickly earned his own title. Tomb of Dracula revived the bloodthirsty count and Victor Frankenstein’s The Monster of Frankenstein made their first appearances in their own fear-filled books. Yes, Virginia, they were successful all over again, and why not? “The Big Two Monsters,” as I’ll refer to them just this once, had been selling magazines for competitors and starring in movies for years. DC Comics and Skywald also put Big Frankie to work in The Phantom Stranger, as a backup feature, and an ongoing B&W strip by Tom Sutton for Psycho, respectively. Marvel’s first black-and-white horror titles were Dracula Lives! (my favorite then and now, beautifully executed in so many ways), Monsters Unleashed, Vampire Tales, and Tales of the Zombie (my second favorite).

DRACULA LIVES … AT THE HOUSE OF IDEAS!

Though Thor has lived a lot longer in his mythology than the bloodthirsty Transylvanian in his, the Thunderer’s storytellers hadn’t shown any interest in the Prince of Viking’s sojourns to our planet set in centuries past. But with Marv Wolfman shaping up the Vampire Lord’s terrors through time, DL! showed us the horrors of Dracula from his beginnings as a member of the undead through a superbly crafted origin story to present. DL! #1 (no month, 1973) didn’t begin with that origin story, Conan TM & © Conan LLC. however. That was coming. The first issue just gave off blood-gorged hints of things to come. Under an enticing Boris (Vallejo) cover, Marvelites were introduced to new sequential art tales written by Steve Gerber, Roy Thomas, and Gerry Conway. In them, the Count was visualized by Gene Colan (it just wouldn’t have been right without “Genial” Gene), Alan Weiss, Tom Palmer, Dick Giordano, Rich Buckler, and Pablo Marcos.

And how did Dracula get his magazine? For that matter, how did characters get parceled out to the new B&W lineup? Mr. Thomas tells me, “Stan Lee’s [choices], nobody else’s, title and format and all.”

As publisher, Stan saw the superheroes go into reprint format for the UK’s audiences and the newer characters got to dominate the magazine landscape—simple.

DL! #1 set the tone for what was to come.

There was even a text feature written by Marv Wolfman, exploring vampires on the silver screen. roy thomas In time, these more of these text features would be spread out among the various magazines, ably written by Doug Moench, Tony Isabella, and Chris Claremont, among others.

Still Savage After All These Years (opposite page, top) House ad touting Savage Tales’ comeback. (inset) “Big John” Buscema offered another dynamic cover painting for issue #2 (Oct. 1973). (bottom left) A magnificent Smith page from Savage Tales #3.

“Red Nails” was a new plateau for sequential art storytelling and Thomas and Smith paved the way. (bottom right) This cinematically composed wonder was illo’ed by the great team of Jim Starlin and Al Milgrom for ST #5.

Conan TM & © Conan LLC.

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This Magazine Bites The remarkable Boris Vallejo (seen in the headshot, courtesy of his website) provided this vampire-ific cover for 1973’s Dracula Lives! #1.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

through her heart and sees Dracula taken off under his guard.

Drac awakens in chains and Turac offers him a cruel choice: He can maintain his rule, albeit as a controlled puppet of the Turks, or see his small son killed in his cell before his eyes. Dracula agrees, seething with hatred. His beautiful wife, Maria, is brought to his dungeon hell, and sadly tells her shocked husband she was raped repeatedly by Turac and his men while he was out. Turac decides he’s not through with her, and tries to grab her arm. This time, Maria is able to pull free, but slips and hits her head on the stone column.

A split-second after her death, Dracula rips the restraining chains from the wall, crushes Turac’s men, and sinks his newfound fangs into Turac’s throat. He is now a vampire!

Shape-shifting into a huge bat, he swoops up his crying son, and delivers him to the safety of his people.

Dracula buries Maria, and swears that humankind will forever know his vengeance.

Ahhhh, would that Hollywood producers had this one (and its impressive follow-ups) brought to them back in the day. This masterpiece, called “That Dracula May Live Again!!” (DL! #2, 1973), showcased some of Neal Adams’ most exquisite horror artwork.

The serialized story, with Marv wonderfully shepherding the storyline, later aided by John Buscema and Syd Shores (#3) and others in #4, would’ve made boris vallejo a terrific movie. And while I’m dreaming, I’d have loved to have seen either John Carpenter, Wes Craven, or George Romero direct it for the big screen.

In DL! #3 (Oct. 1973), a still-furious Dracula spends most of the And shades of Fantasy Masterpieces, there were reprints taken from the pre-Code days of the 1950s! This would be the norm for their titles story in a battle with Nimrod, the king of the undead. The once-human of the abnormal during the three-year heyday of the Marvel horror warlord refuses to bow down and swear allegiance to Nimrod, and their magazines. In the Eisenhower era, Martin Goodman published many fight is to be fought with sharpened stakes. Dracula is new to the ways a horror comic of his own under the Atlas Comics label. His books of combat as an undead, and Nimrod gets the best of him early on. didn’t rival Bill Gaines’ triumvirate of EC terror tomes in overall quality, However, the manhandled prince remains steady enough to deliver the but there were outstanding efforts by regulars Joe Maneely, Dick Ayers, death stroke. He hurls Nimrod’s ashes to the wind, proclaiming his rule Russ Heath, Stan Lee, John Romita, Sr., Howie Post, Don Rico, Matt Fox, … and what a rule it would be!

DL!’s success had a lot to do with Marv and Gene supplying Carmine Infantino, and others whose names have since moved into legendry. The titles the stories came from were called Spellbound, Mystic writing and art together or separately at times. Tomb of Dracula was Tales, Adventures into Terror, Menace, Mystery Tales, Uncanny Tales, one of the company’s greatest achievements, and it was always a Suspense, and Marvel Tales. (WHEW! Marvel used the title Marvel bonus to see those two talents’ work in the magazine. Wolfman said Tales a lot, didn’t they?) These short shockers set in old scary houses, about Colan to The Scream Factory in ’97 to an interviewer: “Gene is cobweb-filled castles, and mysterious/futuristic planets gave Roy and a wonderful artist. I worked out all the stories, but his artwork is so his fellow staffers a needed respite. Vampire stories found their way into good and his ability with people so strong that I was able to cater the DL! and Vampire Tales, and sometimes Haunt of Horror and Monsters book exactly the way I wanted it. With Gene, I always knew I could Unleashed. Voodoo and zombie material was reserved for Tales of the do character stuff. I could take the time to not have people fighting Zombie, and so on. An editorial in DL! #1 explained, “…we dug into our each other because he could draw faces. He could have five pages past and came up with some of the best-written, best-drawn tales we of talk and make it interesting. Especially with horror, you need to could find from the halcyon days of the ‘horror’ comics…” And further develop mood and emotion, even more than the action, and because along, readers were assured, “They’re good stories, people—and we I could get that with Gene, it allowed me to write stuff that I couldn’t have done with another artist.” think you’re gonna groove on them.” We did.

Gene the Dean told a CAPS (Comic Art Professional Society) DL! #2 caught readers’ attention with a hauntingly beautiful painting by Penalva. Inside, chief writer Wolfman upped the ante audience which honored him in Los Angeles a few years before his by (finally!!) merging the legendary Transylvanian prince/warlord’s 2011 passing, “Marv Wolfman [after Stan] also fell victim to my decision known history with that of Bram Stoker’s monster. Soldiers of the to begin to slant the panels to create weight and realism. He’d occasionally Turkish Empire have invaded Transylvania and the feared commander appeal to me, reminding me how confusing it was to the reader. Nope! of that land is taken prisoner as his army is defeated. The Turks are On and on I’d go. Both Stan and Marv put up with my idiosyncrasies in awe of him, even as he lies unconscious. His terrible excesses are and never made me fear one minute for my job. I’m so grateful. I must recounted (yeah, you know the ones!). Dracula is taken prisoner, to be have been so annoying.”

DL! saw many top artists, but another “Young Turk” drew a story of used as a puppet ruler, and left temporarily with an old gypsy woman. the bygone days of Dracula that captivated this then pre-teen. In #1, It turns out she hates Dracula as much as his enemies do. However, she’s a vampire and can do more than just complain. She drinks his blood, Alan Weiss provided the visuals for a stunning Thomas-written tale of unbeknownst to the Turks, but goes too far later on, attempting to the undead lord’s travels to Puritanical America during the Salem Witch attack the hated Lord Turac, their chieftain. He drives a stake Hunts. As good as this one was/is, their team-up in the third issue was 10 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

neal adams

Neal and the Neck-Biter (top) Neal Adams’ preliminary (courtesy of Heritage) for the cover of Dracula Lives! #3 (Oct. 1973) and the published product. (bottom) Alan Weiss and the Crusty Bunkers served up the nightmarish atmosphere in this stupendous page from DL #3. Roy Thomas had Solomon Kane meet Dracula and the results were marvel-ous!

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Solomon Kane © REH.

even better. Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane (!!) rides along the shadowshrouded hills of Dracula’s domain. He seeks a young girl, a friend’s daughter who’s vanished mysteriously, and believed to be in the present vicinity. But large, ravenous wolves are attacking the dour Puritan, and his energies are flagging. Dracula saves him and hurls the beasts away, astounding the senses of the hero. Kane is shown the surrounding areas by his champion and asks about the girl in question. Dracula states that he is unfamiliar with her. He’s lying. She comes like a wraith with fangs to Kane’s bed that evening. Kane manages to slay her, and sensing that Dracula has been her seducer, hurls a sword at the fiend’s feet. A great battle sequence follows, and Kane pins the undead to the floor with silver coins, spared from theft by thieves in events told to Dracula before the wolves befell Kane. Dracula cleverly proclaims that Kane must spare him since Dracula saved his life! Kane leaves, amid mocking laughter, but comes back in a later issue to end the Transylvanian’s unholy existence.

Terrific job, Roy and Alan…

In later issues, Roy and Dick Giordano began the ambitious project of adapting the Stoker novel, but it wasn’t finished until 2004, and then in the traditional comic format.

DL! was short-lived, also. Readers may have felt that ToD was enough for the long haul, and the last DL! issue was #13 (July 1975). However, Dracula was far from finished, magazine-wise…

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Mo’ Monsters! (left) A risqué werewolf cover by Gray Morrow led off Monsters Unleashed #1 (July 1973). (right) Esteban Maroto’s cover painting helped launch Vampire Tales #1 (Aug. 1973), which featured a Morbius cover blurb that might’ve made DC editor Julius Schwartz see red.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MONSTERS AND MORE MONSTERS! Monsters Unleashed continued the trend of fang-faced fiends in black and white. MU #1 came out without a month listed on it, in ’73. It’s been described as a “hodgepodge” by some comic historians. Lou Mougin, observing the Marvel titles for The Scream Factory in ’97, noted that MU was “…more a showcase book than one built around a single character. It was the book where the Frankenstein Monster had his regular feature, and his was the face on the little ‘Marvel Monster Group’ trademark. But he didn’t appear in the first issue, and missed several others along the way. The covers were more likely to feature the Man-Thing, a werewolf, or another generic monster. Apparently Marvel was hedging its bets with Frankenstein, which may have been wise; his color comic only lasted 19 issues.”

Solomon Kane’s adventures were always welcome to me, and Roy Thomas and Ralph Reese put together a wonderfully atmospheric episode called “Skulls in the Stars” for that first issue. Monsters didn’t have to own the spotlight in this title, either. Kane was a sword-wielding do-gooder, and a nemesis of demonic forces in centuries past. Tigra the Were-Woman popped in for a guest appearance in #10. Gabriel, Devil-Hunter (a stalker of the creatures that stalked us) and science-fantasy swashbuckler Gullivar Jones showed up in #4 and 8. Yes, it was a hodgepodge, but a good one for those who couldn’t get enough of Marvel monsters and related horror heroes. On the covers and inside, we got Man-Thing by Adams (#3), the Wendigo (#9, by Norem), and a nice werewolf-prowling-thelovely-blonde offering by the underrated Gray Morrow for the first issue.

To some, MU was just an add-on, Marvel staffers milking the ’70s monster magazine craze for all it was worth—but there were many fine efforts within these pages. Doug Moench took over Frankenstein’s continuing terrors with #6 and stayed with it through #10. Val Mayerik did the art chores, and the team’s commitment stabilized the look of Mary Shelley’s manof-many-parts. A reprint Annual came out in 1975, and that was it.

The Haunt of Horror was another hodgepodge. It got off to a bad start.

This fan remembers picking up the first digest-sized issue in June of 1973.

Confusion reigned. It was mostly prose, and perhaps aimed at a more sophisticated audience than pre-teens like myself. I bought it and never finished it. By the first of its magazine entries (May 1974), it’d become a full-fledged Marvel horror showcase for various characters, artists, inkers, and writers. Still, like MU, it seemed unfocused, despite nice artwork by the veteran and newbie storytellers which abounded on these titles.

Gabriel, Devil-Hunter was the hunter of horrors in this one, and he was quickly joined by Satana, the Devil’s Daughter as a co-star. Neither found solid footing or inspired the readers to come back for more. Gabriel wore

an eye-patch and performed exorcisms, in accordance with all the rage from the supernatural film smash, The Exorcist. Satana was shipped over from Vampire Tales (#2, Oct. 1973). Her introduction there was penciled

by John Romita, Sr., and he was partially inspired by an old Kurtzman/ Wood story from MAD #3. Satana could’ve benefitted from more Thomas and Romita. There weren’t any standout moments for her in HoH. One bright light was Gerry Conway and Ralph Reese’s “The Rats,” which appeared in the first issue. Reese was getting a lot of work from National Lampoon, Skywald magazines, and Warren’s illustrated horrors.

Everything he did during the ’70s was gold.

Chris Claremont wrote very interesting text features during this period, and his examinations of exorcisms the world over for this particular vehicle were very good.

Satana, while alluring, was another of Vampirella’s rivals, and though a succubus and not a vampire, she wasn’t any more special than the small legion of demoniacal damsels crowding comic pages. It didn’t help that she and Gabriel had no regular artists or writers. HoH limped along for a short run, ending with #5 (Jan. 1975).

Vampire Tales #1 (Aug. 1973) went a big longer. It benefitted from the presence of Morbius the Living Vampire, created in ’71 to battle Spider-Man. Rich Buckler did a few of the scientifically created vampire’s tales, and his passion for the reluctant vampire showed. His work was very nice, as was the writing by Don McGregor. These creators stuck with the vampire anti-hero, and added a nice supporting star in Amanda Saint, an innocent beauty whose mother was part of the Demon-Fire cult. This cult had taken the lives of all the Saints … and wanted Amanda, also. This plot took up much of Morbius’ time and in the end, Amanda was saved amid a lot of violent acts in an Old West-style amusement park! After McGregor left, the prolific Doug Moench took over the series. He did two additional tales for VT, with a third installment ending up in Marvel Preview.

Other vampires and monster stalkers had their moments in VT, also.

Satana returned and returned. “Hodiah Twist” was a backup feature set in the 1930s. He was a Sherlock Holmes derivative who went after monsters. Dracula never crossed over into VT, but the editors and writers found coffin space for Lilith, Dracula’s daughter, and vampireslayer Blade. VT lasted for 11 issues and got the requisite Annual with its best reprints, and died in the rays of the sun.

Despite the gems among the new stuff, reprints, text writings, or inventory fillers, Marvel’s biggest problem was maintaining overall quality in these titles. Young Marvelites had grown up on Kirby/Sinnott/Lee on Fantastic Four in the ’60s, Ditko/Lee or Lee/Romita on Amazing Spider-Man,

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Thomas and Colan on Daredevil, Friedrich and Ayers on Sgt. Fury, Thomas and Buscema on The Avengers, and so on. We knew without flipping through any of the titles on the spinner racks during those years whose work would be inside. These teams weren’t there in the 1970s, but the Marvel decision makers kept the four-color standard bearers in pretty good shape. With the B&W mags, you could get anything! And unless there were the makings of a “Marvel Zombie” sprouting in your DNA, you could spend your hard-earned shekels on Creepy, Eerie, and/or Vampirella and not miss the whirling dervish of talents in VT, MU, and the like.

Still, each issue was worth flipping through. Esteban Maroto was one of Warren’s hottest new artists in the early ’70s, and he did Red Sonja and various creatures for Marvel. Pablo Marcos was another superstar in the making, and Dave Cockrum, a few short years from the new X-Men, was doing dynamic work. Even now, it’s worth hitting up www.comics.org and looking over the listings of talents on a given magazine. You may be missing a lot…

PACKAGING MEANS A LOT At this juncture, I must stop and sing the praises of the cover artists.

These towering talents invited readers not to pass up the possible goodies inside with their striking paintings. Neal Adams did stupendous work for The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Dracula Lives!, Monsters Unleashed, and Savage Tales. Adams had a talent for caricature and his faces for David Carradine from TV’s Kung Fu, actor Tom Laughlin from the Billy Jack movies, and Bruce Lee were real stand-outs.

The Devil’s Daughter John Romita, Sr. was inspired by V-Vampires in MAD #3 for this intro of Satana in Vampire Tales #2 (Oct. 1973).

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

1970s MIGHTY MARVEL B&W MAGAZINE INDEX [Editor’s notes: Several of these black-and-white magazines have been featured in articles in previous editions of BACK ISSUE. To learn more about them, please refer to the BI issues cited below. The movie adaptations comprising Marvel’s full-color magazine Marvel Super Special will be examined next issue.

Marvel Comics Super Special #1, starring KISS, and other Marvel KISS comic-book appearances will be covered in 2017 in a Rock Comics-themed issue of BI.] 1971 Savage Tales #1 1972 Monster Madness #1–3 (1972–1973) 1973 Crazy Magazine #1–94 (1973–1983) (see BI #31) Dracula Lives! #1–13 (1973–1975), plus one Annual in 1975 Haunt of Horror (prose digest) #1–2 (1973) (see BI #86) Monsters Unleashed #1–10 (1973–1975), plus one Annual in 1975 Savage Tales #2–11 (1973–1975) Tales of the Zombie #1–10 (1973–1975), plus one Annual in 1975 Vampire Tales #1–11 (1973–1975), plus one Annual in 1975 1974 Comix Book #1–3 (1974–1975) Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #1–33 (1974–1977), including Summer Annual #15 Haunt of Horror (magazine) #1–5 (1974–1975) Planet of the Apes #1–29 (1974–1977) (see BI #14 and 49) The Savage Sword of Conan #1–235 (1974–1995) (see BI #11) 1975 The Deadliest Heroes of Kung Fu #1 (1975) Doc Savage #1–8 (1975–1977) (see BI #10) Gothic Tales of Love #1–3 (1975) Kull and the Barbarians #1–3 (1975) The Legion of Monsters #1 (1975) Marvel Movie Premiere #1 (1975) Marvel Preview #1–24 (1975–1980), retitled to Bizarre Adventures #25–34 (1980–1983) Masters of Terror #1–2 (1975) Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1–6 (1975–1976), plus one Special (see BI #14) 1976 Marvel Super Action #1 (1976) 1977 The Rampaging Hulk #1–9 (1977–1978), retitled to full-color magazine The Hulk! #10–27 (1978–1981) (see BI #28) 1978 The Tomb of Dracula #1–6 (1979–1980) (see BI #6) 1979 Howard the Duck #1–9 (1979–1980) (see BI #31)

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Norem had been there all the time, but was a real “find” to those who were unfamiliar with his work!

I asked him if he’d ever wanted to do a story and he said he never considered doing sequential art inside the covers he did for The Rampaging Hulk or Dracula Lives!

Too bad for us—the finished products would’ve been “more triumphs for Marvel” (as their old ads said).

DEADLY HANDS OF MARVEL BULLPENNERS!

Masters of the Martial Arts This quartet of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu covers by the untouchable Neal Adams spotlights real-world martial artists Bruce Lee, Jim Kelly, Kung Fu’s David Carradine, and Billy Jack’s Tom Laughlin.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

The House of Ideas got them going and put them out.

Some lasted a while, others were short-lived. Without Conan, Ka-Zar couldn’t keep ST a top seller. And Barry Smith left. Marvel horror magazines had plenty of competition and some were interchangeable, failing to garner a core group of readers.

But in the martial-arts arena, Marvel kept one title going and it was a winner, lasting 33 issues, far more than almost all of the others. The “Chopsocky” trend, as some called the martial-arts craze, was inspired by the brutal yet balletic artistry of Bruce Lee. Deadly Hands of Kung Fu kicked off its first issue cover-dated April 1974. “Everybody was Kung Fu fighting!” the popular R&B dance song went, and as moviegoers marveled to Bruce Lee’s decimation of the bad guys in his films, ABC-TV showed Kung Fu on Thursday nights (I begged my father to let me stay up past my school night bedtime for this one, and he did and watched it with me!), and comic characters began a new kind of fist-fighting, with tiger kicks, monkey punches, and the like thrown in. Master of Kung Fu had been Mighty Marvel’s biggie, which Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin started in Special Marvel Edition #15 (Dec. 1973). This epic was reprinted in DHoKF #2, following a shorter version of this origin in #1 called “The Testing of Shang-Chi.” ShangChi is the son of the insidious would-be world conqueror Fu Manchu (created by Sax Rohmer) and receives his martial-arts training from priests in his father’s employ. The conniving parent sends his son to England to get rid of an old enemy, which Shang agrees to reluctantly.

He is successful in his mission, but Sir Denis Nayland Smith (another Sax Rohmer character) tells him the truth about his father. Shang-Chi returns to his father and denounces him and his ways. For this betrayal, Fu Manchu pledges himself to the destruction of his son. And the spirit and ongoing popularity of the now-deceased Bruce Lee were omnipresent. It was Bruce who led it all off, with his Boris Vallejo’s paint jobs for Tales of the Zombie, Savage image by Neal Adams on the first issue’s cover.

Sword of Conan, etc. were also mind-blowing. With The Sons of the Tiger (TSotT) were co-stars in this packaging like this, it was tough to walk away! magazine. TSotT, like many a Marvel hero/hero team, For this article, I was able to get in contact with came out of tragedy. Assassins employed by Sui Ti Earl Norem, who provided stunning scenarios Kama (operator of a ninja school that fronts for some of these titles. Mr. Norem wasn’t far for an opium den) severely wound Kung Fu from the Marvel offices when he switched Master Kee and Lin Sun’s adoptive father. over to doing covers for the new lineup.

As Kee is dying, he gives young Lin He’d been doing some top-flight magic tiger jewelry derived from jade covers for the “men’s sweats” (as these and tells him to join up with two of his adventure magazines were nicknamed former pupils, Abe Brown and Robert in the ’50s and ’60s). Earl Norem (who Diamond. Their task is to stop the signed his covers simply “Norem”) told assassins from further killings. The trio BACK ISSUE how he got the job in an are named “the Sons of the Tiger” and interview conducted shortly before his they stop Kama. But to keep things June 2015 passing: “I was delivering going, Kama turns out to be an agent a Men’s Adventure job to Magazine of a bigger, deadlier group known Management on Madison Avenue in doug moench as “the Silent Ones.” These avenging New York. Marvel Comics was downfighters were mask- and cape-free and stairs in the same building then. One of saw their first appearance early on in the Marvel editors came up with a cover painting by an the title, where they’d be mainstays of the magazine artist I didn’t know and asked if anyone could make a for most of its run. Paul Gulacy was pretty busy with the correction on a girl’s anatomy. The art director pointed to four-color title, but that too-prolific-for-words Doug me since I always carried a paint box in case I need to make Moench found time for writing chores on the comic and changes. Anyway, I didn’t like working on some other the magazine! Thankfully, however, Moench and Gulacy guy’s work, but I did it and the editor asked me to show got together for “Web of Bleeding Vipers” in DHoKF #3, my stuff to Stan Lee. That’s how I got into Marvel.”

14 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

Feet and Fists of Fury (top) An undated action pic of Shang-Chi by Paul Gulacy. (bottom) George Pérez teams up Sons of the Tiger with the White Tiger in this 1975 tableau.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

and it was a beaut! Moench would also work on later stories with Rudy Nebres and Mike Vosburg, among others. Gulacy’s Shang-Chi began to favor Bruce Lee. Gulacy’s early style matured quickly and was cinematically connected, beautiful, and well-suited for MoKF. It was nice to see his line work in B&W for the third issue.

How did it all begin for Doug Moench, who wrote for the horror magazines and the regular 20-cent titles as well as the Kung Fu material? Moench tells BI readers, “Marv Wolfman was editor at Warren Publishing and he got a job at Marvel. The phone rang one day and he called me. It was Marv, needing more people. He told me the thinking there was, ‘Oh, my God, we need a lot of writing!’ He kept things all very well-organized and I had fun doing them.”

Wolfman had become editor-in-chief as Marvel continued to expand and Roy Thomas had ended his tenure at the job. Doug was so prolific, Marv told other interviewers, laughing that some of the other young Bullpenners were envious of his check! Moench explains, “I wrote every issue of Shang-Chi, and one day, they told me I’d have to do the magazine.

I can’t believe how much Shang-Chi I was writing! Every two weeks, the production department was printing them up, so I had to do double the stories! I had Shang-Chi coming out of my ears!!”

Despite Shang-Chi dominating the mag’s page space, other “Chopsocky” heroes made their way there to add to the Tiger boys and Fu Manchu’s errant child. Iron Fist was a creation of Roy Thomas and artist Gil Kane.

Coming out of the pages of Marvel Premiere #15 (May 1974), Iron Fist was one of the many Marvel heroes with a decidedly different type of exciting edge for the new decade. Young Daniel Rand was only nine when his father decided to take his family with him to a remote place where he received Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

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We’re Number 1! (left) From a convention program from ’73, this ad boasted Marvel’s top spot in the comics industry and also promoted their new magazine lineup. (right) Stan Lee with attitude!

This picture was taken by Alan Light in ’75. Light is the man responsible for The Buyer’s Guide to Comic Fandom (later Comics Buyer’s Guide) newspaper so important to collectors in the pre-eBay days.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc., except Conan, TM & © Conan LLC.

his martial-arts training. This place, called K’un L’un, is known to very few and nestled deep within remote mountains in Asia. Though he left the martial-arts masters on good terms, he took his newfound disciplines into another arena and became quite wealthy. But he makes a huge mistake in inviting his business partner, Harold Meachum, with him. Meachum wants Rand’s wife and sets up “an accident” to get rid of her husband. The elder Rand falls from a great height, but the mother rejects Meachum. Priests from K’un L’un launch arrows at the killer, but he escapes and Rand’s mother falls to her death.

Rand is taken in by his rescuers and becomes adept at the martial arts, and eventually a master. He is given the rare opportunity to obtain the power of the iron fist. He succeeds, of course, and the iron fist comes from his unique ability to marshal his inner “chi” strengths into a solid, irresistible iron punch for short periods. With this power going for him, he could and did challenge Captain America, some of the X-Men, and even …. you guessed it! … Iron Man on occasion. Iron Fist’s stories appeared in #10, 18 (teamed up with the Sons of the Tiger), and in a sixchapter serial in #19–24 called “The Living Weapon.”

In the parallel world of four-color excitements, Danny Rand and his masked counterpart had gotten good buzz in Marvel Premiere, but it was a run in his own comic done by Chris Claremont and John Byrne that solidified his potential for greatness. [Editor’s note: Iron Fist is long overdue the BACK ISSUE treatment, and rest assured he will be featured in these pages in the foreseeable future.]

At that point, Claremont and Byrne had made X-Men a cult hit, and as collaborators they were a megahot team. Along the way, Danny fell in love with one of the Daughters of the Dragon, African-American Misty Knight, and their romance was one of the first interracial ones in comics. Claremont wrote black women very well, and his Storm in The X-Men was perfectly realized. It only made sense that the Daughters of the Dragon would show up in DHoKF, also, and they did in issues #32 and 33, shortly before the title ended, done

by Claremont and Marshall Rogers.

Back to the Sons of the Tiger: It was a very dependable co-feature, and they showed up around the same time as a young artist by name of George Pérez. George recalls, “Right after Man-Wolf in Creatures on the Loose, my first introduction to Marvel was Sons of the Tiger in DHoKF. I met Marv Wolfman at that time and we became good friends. Marv would piss me off with criticism of my artwork and I wanted to prove him

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wrong, but also impress him. His criticisms and challenges to me to improve did make me improve.

“On the White Tiger splash, I knocked myself out. Ten hours to do that one page—and I consider it to be the best page I ever did. I’m Puerto Rican and I named him Hector Ayala along with Bill Mantlo, my co-creator on the hero.

“The mags were a good move and it was a learning experience. My workload increased and it got me fired from my bank job, so I HAD to make it work—magazines and comics!”

Frank McLaughlin used to draw Judomaster for Charlton Comics in the 1960s, and at Marvel, he’d do text feature articles and art for readers who couldn’t get enough information on the martial arts. And readers of DHoKF were spared of the many reprints that abounded in the other B&W magazines! Marvel didn’t have any “Chopsocky” books in the ’50s and had to fill the page count with all-new material, though they really pushed it on at least one occasion with “The Blitzkrieg of Batroc” (can you believe it?) done in Lee/Kirby/Giacoia’s Captain America in Tales of Suspense #85! This worked out to all’s advantage. The unavailability of reprints meant longer, involved stories done by Moench and fellow workhorses Claremont, Englehart, and Mantlo, among others.

Along with text articles about Bruce Lee and TV’s Kung Fu (Neal Adams delivered yet another masterpiece for #4 with an action portrait of David Carradine as Kane, the show’s star), Billy Jack, the ex-Green Beret, proved to be yet another media star. Adams delineated him for the cover of #11, with an accompanying text article within

by Don McGregor. Billy Jack, played by the charismatic Tom Laughlin, was a biker-hero in a few movies and lived around a hippie commune where he served as a protector from vicious, racist establishment figures who hated the kids for their freedom and their holdings on the land. Billy Jack was partially Indian, and wore a flat-brimmed black hat with an eagle’s feather. He was a pacifist at his core, but Vietnam and the tumult of the 1960s had made him a realist. When the situation

demanded, he killed with deadly martial-arts skills or a rifle.

The films were brutally honest in their take on the socio-political attitudes of the time, but they were appealing.

By 1977, the martial-arts craze was deep into its closing stages. Bruce Lee died in ’73, and his many lookalikes couldn’t make fans forget the real thing. Deadly Hands #14 (July 1975) was a special Bruce Lee issue, and Adams responded with a very nice cover. The Daughters of the Dragon showed up for the last two issues in impressive stories by Claremont and Rogers, as mentioned, but even though these hard-kicking avengers could still leap and kick high, sales had gone down … and that was it.

Still, one of the big factors for Deadly Hands’ success (as I saw it) was the commitment of Moench to the magazine. His stories tended to be character-driven, which was a strong point of his writing and part of what made him a fan favorite. He wrote over 15 all-new tales of martial-arts mayhem for the mag’s 33-issue run, and if you craved Moench material, this was a great place to get it! After scribing his obligatory adventure of Shang-Chi in #18, Doug went on to other assignments, but he returned for a battle royal/team-up to come between Shang-Chi and Iron Fist in #29, captured under a marvelous Norem cover. Doug did it right.

And that leads me back to another prolific writer, and a certain sullen-eyed, bloody-handed barbarian who saw extended comic life in yet another B&W magazine…

HITHER CAME CONAN … IN BLACK AND WHITE “I enjoyed being THE Conan writer,” Roy Thomas tells BACK ISSUE, and legions of readers were pleased with his dedication to the character, both in comics and the new B&W magazine, The Savage Sword of Conan, which saw its first issue come out in June of 1974 with an August cover date. ST #5 promoted it with a full-page ad and the cover by Boris promised that Hyborian Age horrors, wars, and sorcerous schemes could be had within … for just a dollar. Yes, it was a dollar, but Red Sonja was on the cover and teamed up with Conan in the first story done by Thomas, Buscema, and Pablo Marcos. She went solo in another, drawn by Esteban Maroto (who was perhaps Warren Publishing’s greatest new treasure at the time), aided by Neal Adams and Ernie Chua.

Gil Kane’s Blackmark found a home in this sword-and-sorcery collection, and if anyone missed it, the reprinted-again Thomas/Smith masterwork “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” closed the proceedings. It was all well worth the dollar.

Fascinating text features clued readers in on the women of Robert E. Howard’s works and the pulp history of Robert E. Howard pertaining to Kull the Valusian, a.k.a. Kull the Conqueror. Roy’s editorial promised good times ahead: “These [REH-adapted] tales from the Conan canon will be adapted more or less in chronological order beginning next issue with a 35-page rendering of ‘Black Colossus,’ a tale of timeless terror which lurked in the trackless desert beyond Khoraja, adapted by two fine fantasy artists, John Buscema and Alfred Alcala, with script by Ye Editor.”

That story did follow, as did “A Witch Shall Be Born,” “The People of the Black Circle,” “Shadows in Zamboula” (TSSoC #14, and superbly visualized by Neal Adams!), “The Devil in Iron,” and many others, including Howard stories for Bran Mak Morn, his Pict king who defied the Romans. “Worms of the Earth” started off in issue #16 (Dec. 1974) and was done by Thomas, Barry Smith (!!), and Tim Conrad, proving you just couldn’t walk past a Marvel magazine without checking it out first! Bran Mak Morn looked great via Smith and Conrad’s execution. He was barbaric—almost a Neanderthal in appearance, but compact and deadly, with deep-set eyes and snarling lips. The grays and Zip-a-Tone used worked well for this opener. This one was another winner for Marvel!

Roy’s overseeing of TSSoC glowed with his passion for all things Howard. While “Big” John Buscema was the chief artist on the Cimmerian’s adventures, Roy got outstanding efforts from Frank Brunner for #30 (a 46-page delight!), Gene Colan, Adams, and others. And Big John’s work never got stale, thanks to the exquisite finished artwork by Alfred Alcala, Ernie Chan (a.k.a. Ernie Chua), and Tony DeZuniga. All of these inkers were fabulous, but Alcala was my favorite on the magazine. His work

Long-Running Title (top) Early The Savage Sword of Conan covers: #1 (Aug. 1974), by Boris, and #3 (Dec. 1974), by Michael Wm. Kaluta. (bottom) Alfredo Alcala’s excellent embellishing over Buscema’s penciling added to the longevity of TSSoC. This page hails from #16 (Dec. 1976).

Conan TM & © Conan LLC. Red Sonja © Dynamite Entertainment.

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Walking Dead (right) Another Boris shocker graced Tales of the Zombie #1 (Aug. 1973). (left) Conniving Gyps the gardener makes Simon Garth his zombie slave in TotZ #1. The art’s by John Buscema and Tom Palmer. (opposite page) Boris’ voodoodynamic original painted cover for TotZ #3, courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

was perfect for black and white (while Chan/Chua’s FOR A FEW MONSTERS MORE suited the regular comic spectacularly), and added a Simon Garth, like Man-Thing, was the strong, silent type. touch of antiquity and an otherworldly seasoning that But he spoke loudly to this collector. was suitable for Howard’s “dreaming cities.”

Tales of the Zombie debuted in 1973. Garth was Thomas had to love his job. He tells BI readers, “My an cruel businessman, dismissive of his beautiful favorite Marvel magazines to edit and write for were blonde daughter, Donna, and contemptuous of his TSSoC… and later, Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction.” TSSoC business rivals and his gardener, Gyps. Gyps takes his covered the Cimmerian wanderer in spectacular fashion. revenge after receiving a beating when he spies Conan’s “occupations” as a mercenary, thief, pirate, and young Donna Garth swimming nude in the mansion’s so on were all given well-deserved attention … as well as pool. Garth is knocked out and taken to a voodoo his uneasy time on the throne which sat Aquilonia’s king. ritual led by Layla, who’s not only the voodoo Earl Norem provided exquisite covers for this title, priestess, but his secretary! Layla also loves Simon also. Norem told me, “Sometimes a freelancer is between and sets him free. Gyps follows him and buries his assignments and has time to do some experimenting. shears into the scared, exhausted man. And then it I found a photo in a newspaper of a tennis star holding his gets worse. Not content for this small bit of trophy in his left hand and his racket in his right. I liked vengeance, he and Layla’s followers force her the pose and did some sketches and soon a to bring the businessman back to an composition evolved and became a full-color unholy life as a zombie. This “pleasing” painting. I showed it to the art director at yarn came from Steve Gerber, John Marvel and he had Roy Thomas write the Buscema, and Tom Palmer after a scene into the next story—see the cover co-plotting session by Roy Thomas. of The Savage Sword of Conan #164.”

It turns out Thomas was fond of Since there’d be some time before Bill Everett’s “Zombie” from a ’50s the barbarian swordsman would Atlas comic and used it as a assume the throne of the Hyborian launching pad. The original story Age’s greatest empire, Aquilonia, was reprinted between two new Thomas would sometimes dish up tales Zombie tales in #1. of King Conan and readers had no The Zombie was done mostly in complaint. Conan wandered, stole, following issues by Pablo Marcos killed, and put an end to despicable don mcgregor and Gerber, and done well. Brother wizards, flesh-eating creatures, thieving Voodoo’s concluding conflict with brigands, and conniving royals in the Black Talon from Strange Tales magnificently told tales until the last issue of the 1970s, #172–173 got moved over to TotZ. As a huge fan of #47 (Dec. 1979). But his history went on—as REH both of these characters, I was happier than a coldprobably wanted it. The magazine went well over an blooded swamp alligator on warm bayou mud! incredible 200 issues—ending in 1995!

And Claremont again wrote intriguing studies of the Norem not only painted covers for it long into its run, history of voodoo and its followers. James Bond fought he was a fan, also! He revealed to me, “Each month Marvel voodoo, of a sort, in Live and Let Die in ’73, and Marvel sent me a bunch of magazines. I liked Savage Sword best was on hand to promote it in a text and read it cover to cover. I kept the rest for reference.” feature. All things zombie-related showed up in this eight-issue run. Gerber and Marcos came through with winners, issue after issue. Only one story in #7 with

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Celebrated Creatures of Celluloid (left) Marvel launched the freaky fumetti Monster Madness in 1973. (right) Two years later, Monsters of the Movies borrowed liberally from another famous periodical. Issue #1 (June 1974) cover

by Luis Dominguez.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

the Zombie wasn’t penciled by Marcos. Alfredo Alcala did that one, and it was superb. Overall, the title was superb, also.

Stan Lee brought back the ’60s to the ’70s with his Monster Madness #1 (1972), a newer incarnation of his Monsters to Laugh With/Monsters Unlimited from the mid-’60s. Mostly photos from old horror flicks with humorous captions, it lasted three issues with a special King Kong issue set for the fourth, but it never came out. I was lucky enough to be around for all of them, and I love ’em still.

Monsters of the Movies was an attempt to move into Famous Monsters of Filmland’s territory, but creative differences between the writers and editors closed up this little shop of horrors. A special issue on vampires (#3, Oct. 1974) was a highlight and three unforgettable agents of Nosferatu, Jonathan Frid, William Marshall, and Christopher Lee, were seen in a magnificently executed shared cover portrait by Bob Larkin, and inside, in articles by Don Glut, Eric Hoffman, and Russ Jones, respectively.

Despite editorial disagreements, Doug Moench was there for it and did his usual great text examinations. It helped that he was

Beyond Conan (inset) Sword-and-sorcery-crazed Marvelites also got the B&W mag Kull and the Barbarians for their reading pleasure. Issue #1 (May 1975) cover by Michael Whelan. (left) This gorgeous page was but one of many by Alan Weiss and Neal Adams for Robert E. Howard’s (and Roy Thomas’) “Hills of the Dead” in Kull and the Barbarians #2.

Kull © Paradox Entertainment.

20 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

fan of fear-flicks. He tells BI, “I did one [article] on Vlad the Impaler and one on King Kong. I was a fan of FM and Shock Theater in Chicago and saw all the old, great ones. I’d get all camped up and watch the films in front of the TV set and wake up and see nothing but snow ’cause the programs were all off the air.” Monsters of the Movies ran nine issues.

Masters of Terror came out in ’75 and lasted two issues. By this time, the staff was probably being overworked and amid the greatness, too much mediocrity crept in.

A FISTFUL OF BARBARIANS It was only natural that King Kull got a magazine of his own, right? Kull and the Barbarians #1 (May 1975) hit the stands in March of 1975. For fans of the good king, it had to be somewhat of a disappointment! Three reprints filled the mag! For the second and third issues, things got a lot better with a Howard Solomon Kane story solidly adapted by Thomas and Weiss in two bloody installments. Red Sonja showed up, also. This mag was the mag for the other REH characters still in demand but unable to find room in Thomas’ dependably great TSSoC. Sadly, there’d only be three issues.

GROWING PAINS… To the Bullpen’s credit, they didn’t put all their hopes on heroes and monsters.

Marvel’s MAD-like Crazy Magazine started its long run in 1973. Comix Book was an adventurous attempt to combine the underground experience with mainstream comics. Stan approached Denis Kitchen in ’73 about his idea and Kitchen agreed to The Man’s proposal. It was supposed to eschew the explicit material prevalent in most underground comics and be suitable for newsstands. The first issue came out in with an October 1974 cover date.

Contributors for that issue and the following two included Skip Williamson, Justin Green, Kim Deitch, S. Clay Wilson, Kitchen, and Howard Cruse, among others. By this time, however, undergrounds were somewhat on the wane, and top artist/storytellers like Robert Crumb, Rich Corben, Rand Holmes, etc. were elsewhere. Potential readers may have been baffled.

Part of the underground books’ allure was its uncensored take on all things, and Comix Book came off like a watered-down riff on the material. And the wildly popular National Lampoon already had their own comix style with sophisticated humor for the college types and older. Where exactly did CB fit in? It lasted three issues and Stan pulled the plug. However, Denis got some interesting things going in this noble experiment: He got original artwork returned and copyrights kept for the artists’ creations. A precedent was set. Stan never regretted the move. Later on, he could say about CB, “Totally original and totally unique … one of the most courageous things I’ve ever done.” Kitchen later published two more issues under the Kitchen Sink Press logo for his company.

Marvel continued to publish their surviving mags and never gave up fully on the heroes and monsters who’d come before, even if their magazines or comics were short-lived. Readers became indifferent, however, and new up-and-comers on the regular titles meant decreased revenues to the potpourri you’d find in a typical Marvel magazine. Frank Miller and Roger McKenzie had heads turning and their Daredevil became a late 1970s sensation. The new X-Men, under Claremont, Cockrum, and later, John Byrne, was the book to have. And Tomb of Dracula remained one of the House of Ideas’ best. Even Doug Moench became somewhat unimpressed by it all. He explains for us, “There really wasn’t much of a difference, as I saw it, in Marvel’s magazines. Among the horrors, they were pretty much the same. TotZ was supposed to be all Zombie.

Dracula Lives! was all Dracula, pretty much—those stood out. When I was writing those, I didn’t have Monsters Unleashed on the mind over all the other ones. I just wrote the things and the editors put the stories where they wanted them.” During this time, Moench was also the scribe on a Marvel B&W magazine featuring a licensed property, Planet of the Apes, which enjoyed a 29-issue run.

Marvel Goes Underground The Marvel mag Comix Book was the House of Ideas’ attempt to court the counterculture. From 1974, (top) Comix Book #1’s cover by Peter Poplaski, and (bottom) Skip Williamson’s “Hallsted Street,” from issue #1’s back cover.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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A Showcase Magazine Three peeks at Marvel Preview: (top) John Romita, Sr.’s pencil prelim for the Punisher’s violent putdown of the mob. This illo became the cover for 1975’s Marvel Preview #2, painted by Gray Morrow (and repurposed as this issue’s BI cover). (bottom left) MP #4 (Jan. 1976), starring Star-Lord. Cover by Morrow. (bottom right) MP #10 (Winter 1977), starring Thor. Cover by Ken Barr.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Masters of Terror and The Legion of Monsters were last gasps. Dave Cockrum was called “The World’s Biggest Creature of the Black Lagoon Fan,” and the Manphibian was his take on the Gillman in TLoM. Despite nice artwork, the two titles came and went. Marvel Preview started off in 1975, and was the equivalent of DC’s Showcase, albeit in B&W. It ran for a respectable 24 issues, and highlights included an adaptation of Phillip Wylie’s Gladiator, the big one that may have led to the creations of Superman and Doc Savage.

Thomas and DeZuniga called this epic “Man-God.” Star-Lord met with readers’ approval and appeared in six issues before the ’80s began. The Punisher was in #2 (June 1975), and the readers loved this one! Blasting away the bad guys on the cover by Gray Morrow, he was a perfect character for the Death Wish crowd! [Editor’s note: If your wish is to see that cover again, you’ve got it, on the front of this very issue!]

Blade the Vampire Slayer got the solo spotlight in #3 (Sept. 1975), and this was another masterpiece. MP #6 (Fall 1978) came with the subtitle “Masters of Terror.” This one was a Colan art-lover’s dream. Gene had three stories inside.

Richard Marschall wrote Hodiah Twist for him. Gerber and Colan had Lilith invade and kill at a disco! (Why not?) With Wolfman, there was an intense, terse tale called “Voices.”

Blade also showed in #8 to face off against Morbius! And the surprises continued with Thor (!!) in #10 (Winter 1977).

In ’75, Marvel gave Gothic Tales of Love a try with three mostly prose issues with spot illustrations. Doc Savage got eight issues beginning that same year starring in mostly lackluster tales. Oh, if only Steranko had taken over that one! The anthology Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction started its brief run in that year.

Marvel Movie Premiere adapted The Land That Time Forgot movie with Doug McClure that same year. This mag would be a one-shot. Other one-shots— The Deadliest Hands of Kung Fu, a mag filled with instructional features, appeared on newsstands in ’75. A number of summertime magazine Annuals came out in 1975, also.

Marvel Super Action (inset) premiered in the bicentennial year of 1976. The Punisher was back and as dangerous as ever. Frank Castle would have to wait for the ’80s to become a hot property, though. Mike Ploog’s “Weirdworld” was of note, also.

AND IN THE END… By the end of the 1970s, Marvel was putting out magazines on the Hulk, Conan, Howard the Duck, Marvel Preview (which definitely owed some of its staying power to new characters in most issues) … and yeah, Dracula. The sinister vampire came back for six issues during the Jim Shooter era beginning with #1 in 1979. Colan was back, even doing covers this time, but Drac got sent off in a hideously terrific end in the regular comic, and this run didn’t quite seem right.

This time Tomb of Dracula, the magazine, stayed buried.

Color even found its way into a handful of Marvel mags, from its celebrated KISS comic of 1977 (published as Marvel Comics Super Special #1); to Marvel Super Special, which mostly adapted movies into comics form; to The Hulk!, a revamped, retitled Rampaging Hulk title.

MARVEL ASSESSMENTS It’s easy now to praise what happened and look at what didn’t happen with Marvel’s magazine line. I asked Roy Thomas if it’d have been possible to keep Barry Smith on TSSoC doing

22 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

Last Gasp Horror Mags By the mid-’70s, the horror craze was nearly as dead as many of its stars once were before their undead resurrections. Two of the last titles: (top left) Masters of Terror #1 (July 1975), cover by Jim Steranko and Gray Morrow, and (top right) Legion of Monsters #1 (Sept. 1975), cover

by Neal Adams.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Dick Does Drac (right) Original art to the title page of artist Dick Giordano and scribe Roy Thomas’ ongoing adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, first published in Legion of Monsters #1, which continued the serial from the pages of Dracula Lives! Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

an occasional adaptation of a REH story. Roy responds, “You’d have to ask Barry. I had my idea of how we should do Conan, and Barry and I fit together as long as we could.” George Pérez says, “I didn’t do much for the magazines because I got more assignments for the color titles, but it was nice to see my work in black-and-white and experiment with tones.” Earl Norem was pleased that his covers were well regarded by editors and fans: “Usually, I got to read the script or sometimes a synopsis of the story and visualized it from there. Maybe the editor would suggest a scene, but when I submitted two or three layout sketches, he usually picked my idea.”

Lou Mougin, overlooking the monster mags in the aforementioned magazine, observes, “Too many titles. Too many pages to fill.

Not enough quality work to fill them. Marvel flooded the market with black-and-whites, as they were filling the spinner racks with color books.” Roy Thomas agrees that there were probably too many magazines at a certain point. He says, “Yes, probably too many … but that was the Marvel way at the time.”

But for the most part, the Marvel magazines of the ’70s were done in a heck of a good way.

JERRY BOYD would like to extend special thanks to Roy Thomas, Doug Moench, Tony Isabella, George Pérez, and the other Bullpenners who worked so hard on these Bronze Age masterpieces. He wants to dedicate the article to the late, great Mr. Earl Norem.

Paul Sager and Michael Aushenker are to be thanked for contact information.

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GREATEST STORIES (IN B&W) NEVER TOLD Tony Isabella will now tell us about magazines that never were: “Godzilla was originally planned to be a black-and-white magazine. Even before I went to work for Marvel, I'd suggested to Roy Thomas that Marvel acquire the comic-book rights to the character. Negotiations with Toho Studios were going on during when I was on staff at Marvel but before I became the editor of a number of the black-and-white magazines. The plan was for me to write Godzilla with Dave Cockrum drawing some of the stories. Unfortunately, the deal with Toho fell apart.

By the time Marvel did get the rights, I was no longer on staff or living in New York.

“During my time as an editor of the black-and-white magazines, Iron Fist was going to be a companion magazine to the successful The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. I plotted what would have been the lead story for the first issue.

In addition, I came up with a backup strip called ‘Dragons Two.’ The lead characters were the teen grandchildren of the scientist who died saving Tony Stark in the first Iron Man story. I tapped Mark Evanier to write the series and hoped to get Dan Spiegle to draw it. The magazine was canceled before anything other than that Iron Fist plot was done. The story would later be completed by others for an issue of Deadly Hands. Don McGregor was the editor of the title by then.

“After I left staff, but while I was still living in New York, Roy wanted me to keep one foot in the editorial door.

That’s how the reprint magazine Masters of Terror and the inventory-burning The Legion of Monsters came to pass.

There were two issues of the first and one of the second. Had the magazines been more successful, they would have continued with new adaptations of classic horror stories by name authors in Masters and ongoing series in the latter.”

Norem Could Floor ’Em Earl Norem’s original cover painting to Savage Sword of Conan #58, courtesy of Heritage. The artist, seen at his drawing board in the inset photograph, dazzled Bronze Age readers with his spectacular painted covers for Marvel mags and collected editions. Up until his 2015 death at age 92, he gleefully shared anecdotes about his work with TwoMorrows publications. While Mr. Norem the artist is missed, his legacy endures through his incredible body of work.

This edition of BACK ISSUE is dedicated to his memory.

Conan TM & © Conan LLC. Photograph courtesy of EarlNorem.com.

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TM

by

Michael Eury

interview transcribed by Steven Thompson

The Shadow by Wrightson After Jim Steranko stepped away from DC Comics’ The Shadow early into its production, Berni(e) Wrightson was slated to do the series (as shown in this 1973 house ad) before Michael Wm. Kaluta eventually became DC’s Shadow artist (for a while). Had DC published a Shadow black-and-white magazine, would Wrightson or Steranko have been available? Hmm… The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

Back in October 2014, I chatted with Michael Uslan about DC Comics’ publishing deal with Fireside Books as part of our “DC Giants and Reprints” coverage for BACK ISSUE #81. During our conversation, Michael tossed out a tidbit about DC’s unrealized plans for a B&W magazine line, a dialogue I saved for this issue.

MICHAEL EURY: So why were there only three DC Fireside books when Marvel had so many Fireside titles?

MICHAEL USLAN: I think it was a case of DC just getting into the action too late. When Stan’s [Lee] Origins of Marvel Comics came out [in 1974], they should have jumped on. DC made the same mistake with the black-and-white magazines.

When I was there one day, Carmine [Infantino, DC publisher] made the announcement—this was in the ’70s—that DC was going to put out a line of black-and-white magazines to compete with Marvel which, at that time, had Savage Sword of Conan and Tales of the Zombie, Monsters Unleashed, Planet of the Apes— whatever they were michael uslan doing. Doc Savage, I think, © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. was one.

EURY: Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction. Quite a few.

USLAN: Yeah. It started with two or three and then they started to expand. Denny O’Neil called me into his office and said, “I’ve got good news. We’re gonna do a black-and-white, R-rated Shadow magazine.”

At that point, he and I were rotating [as Shadow scribes]. We were doing every other issue of DC’s The Shadow. I started with #9 and then he did #10 and then I did #11 and he did #12. Part of the thing was, we were going to start to drop some clues in, puzzling teaser clues, as to the origin of The Shadow, which I started to do in #9 and in #11, leading up to this long black-and-white Shadow magazine where we were going to do the whole origin story. Before anything could really happen, they canceled it before it even got underway. A decision was made that Marvel had TOO much of a jump and was commanding too much of the market there. I think DC wound up, at some point of time and I don’t remember the dates, putting Kirby’s In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World, which were financial and distribution disasters, I believe.

EURY: They were indeed. And even Charlton got into the magazine game and more or less beat DC. USLAN: Right. And right after that, [DC] canceled The Shadow after #12. It was done.

Michael Uslan returns to BACK ISSUE next issue in Philip Schweier’s in-depth, cover-featured article exploring The Shadow’s comic-book history.

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

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Creepy Magazines by

(left) From editor Sol Brodsky, Skywald’s Nightmare #1 (Dec. 1970). Cover art thought to be

by Brendan Lynch, according to the Grand Comics Database (www.comics.org). (right) A groovy, gruesome Jeff Jones cover highlights Seaboard’s Weird Tales of the Macabre #1 (Jan. 1975), from editor Jeff Rovin.

Steven Thompson

© 1970 Skywald. © 1975 Seaboard/Atlas.

When publisher James Warren premiered Creepy in 1964, it’s doubtful that he was expecting the high-quality publication he actually got. He was most likely looking for another inexpensive way to exploit the monstermania created by the release of the Universal horror films to television and fanned by his own Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Instead, with Creepy and its later companion magazines, Eerie and Vampirella, he almost literally got the second coming of EC Comics, the already legendary horror comics publisher that had gone out of business in the ’50s when the Comics Code came in.

Success breeds competition, and Warren had no shortage of that.

Former comic-book horror artist Myron Fass teamed up with Human Torch creator Carl Burgos to foist Eerie Publications on the market using a mixture of redrawn reprints and increasingly gory new artwork.

Despite contributions from a few mainstream comics creators, Fass was to Warren as Herschell Gordon Lewis movies were to Hammer Films.

There were others, too, such as the short-lived cult classic, Web of Horror, but the closest thing to a serious Warren competitor was Israel Waldman.

SKYWALD Israel Waldman was the man behind Skywald Publications. Previously, he had been the man behind the I.W./Super Comics reprints that were sold in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Since he had purchased a large number of printing plates, he apparently presumed he had the rights to publish Plastic Man, The Spirit, Phantom Lady, Blue Beetle, and many, many more characters and stories that were not his to legally publish.

His comics were not Comics Code-approved and were distributed via different channels (grocery stores, dime stores, etc.) than regular comic books. After a run of nearly a decade, though, Waldman disappeared from the scene for a few years, only to return with Skywald.

When Skywald came out with its first black-and-white comics magazine, Nightmare #1 (Dec. 1970), it was an odd hybrid of redrawn reprints and

new material. The “Sky” in “Skywald” referred to Sol Brodsky, a man so instrumental to the early days of Marvel Comics that when Jack Kirby would later do “What if the Original Marvel Bullpen Had Become the Fantastic Four?”, Brodsky would be the Human Torch. Thus, it was perhaps inevitable that the new work was from Marvel veterans like Syd Shores, Tom Palmer, Ross Andru, Bill Everett, and Don Heck. The reprints were seriously altered, with what appears to be Mike Esposito’s hand in completely redrawing a Wally Wood story originally published 20 years earlier and Bill Everett’s major retouching/reinking of a Vince Alascia story.

For some reason, they even felt the need to mess with a Joe Kubert reprint!

Sol Brodsky had been a bit of an also-ran as a penciler in comic books beginning early in the World War II era and continuing on unspectacularly until the late 1950s. By that point, though, Sol had also tried his hand at publishing and was, in fact, one of the men behind Cracked, which would end up as the longest-running MAD imitator.

Most of his time had been at Timely/Atlas, though, and Stan Lee put Brodsky on staff to be his “right-hand man” and production manager in the early 1960s just as Marvel began its rise to industry prominence.

Brodsky would continue to rise in the company—eventually being named a vice president—and is credited with a major role in its success, but it was during a relatively brief break from Marvel toward the end of the decade that he teamed with Israel Waldman to launch Skywald.

Having been the founding editor of Cracked, Sol Brodsky was no stranger to black-and-white mags. In fact, he had then most recently been heavily involved with Marvel’s 1968 attempt to do a blackand-white Spider-Man comic magazine, The Spectacular Spider-Man. Still, it would take a while before Skywald really found its footing and, by then, Sol would be back at Marvel. In the end, the new company would last less than five years.

The cover of that first issue of Nightmare looked almost like a late ’50s Atlas tale with its giant monster, but its pollution theme, its cyclist protagonist, and his semi-clad female companion looked like they’d

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

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BACK ISSUE • 27

Excedrin Headache #88 (top left) Brendan Lynch’s head-splitting cover to Skywald’s Psycho #1 (Jan. 1971). (top right) Psycho #2 (Mar. 1971) hoses off the Heap. Cover by Hector Varella. (bottom) Tom Palmer’s untouchably awesome shoot-’em-up cover to Skywald’s short-lived gangster mag, The Crime Machine. Issue #2 (May 1971). © 1971 Skywald.

motored over from the cover of an issue of Stag or Male.

It wasn’t a bad first issue cover, but the following issue offered an immediate upgrade with a cover by the soonto-be omnipresent Boris Vallejo.

Nightmare #2 (Feb. 1971), though, was literally more of the same as the previous issue with doctored Avon reprints by A. C. Hollingsworth and Gene Fawcette awkwardly sharing space with new material by Dan Adkins, Bill Everett, Ross Andru, and Mike Esposito. At the end of the issue, though, is a letter from the editors stating that things were moving faster than expected and that the following issue would be much improved in quality and at a level that would continue on from that point. They weren’t kidding.

Boris—aptly named for a horror magazine cover artist—was back with that next issue, too, covering a lot of sci-fi/fantasy ground with an overly muscled Neanderthal, a naked lady, alien monsters, and a spaceship.

Skywald had a plan right out of the gate. While Nightmare was a bimonthly, the publisher already had another magazine up its sleeve which would come out in the alternate months: Psycho. With Brodsky initially as editor of both periodicals, they were actually fairly interchangeable. The benefit of having two bimonthly mags rather than a sole monthly was that magazine retailers generally would keep an issue on the stands until the next issue came out. Thus, each issue of both Nightmare and Psycho would tend to get two months to sell rather than only one.

Psycho #1 (Jan. 1971) opens with a pulpy-looking Brendan Lynch cover strikingly similar to that of Famous Monsters of Filmland #29 (July 1964), which depicted the poster art from the movie, The Flesh Eaters. Here, we see the skull and the revealed brain of an unhappy-looking gentleman, a sort of scene from the book’s first story, “The Skin and Bones Syndrome.”

This 1950s-style sci-fi story, expertly illustrated by Gray Morrow, sets a high standard that the rest of the magazine has trouble maintaining. Once again, the reader is given poorly doctored pre-Code material and just a couple of so-so new stories. At this point, Skywald was already looking like an also-ran.

28 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

Skywald’s Editor (top left) Magazine editor Al Hewetson, author of the OOP book Skywald! The Complete Illustrated History of the HorrorMood. Photo courtesy of George E Warner, who tells BACK ISSUE, via Steven Thompson, that Skywald’s publisher, Israel Waldman, shunned photographers in connection to his comic book or magazine careers. (top right) Writer Gary Friedrich’s hell-raising superhero-cyclist Brick Reese hits the streets in Skywald’s Hell-Rider #1 (Aug. 1971). Cover by Harry Rosenbaum. (bottom) Hell-Rider’s backup featured comics’ first AfricanAmerican superheroine, the Butterfly. Script by Friedrich, with art by industry vets Ross Andru and Jack Abel. © 1971 Skywald.

It wasn’t all about horror, though. In an obvious effort to tap into the burgeoning detective magazine market—and possibly to cash in on the popularity of the original bestselling book version of The Godfather— Waldman and Brodsky also released the first of two issues of The Crime Machine just after the horror mags debuted.

This time, though, there were no new stories at all. One of Marvel’s top inkers, Tom Palmer, stretched his wings with a couple of suitably garish cover paintings, but, inside, the buyer found more retouched (and rather murkily printed) Avon crime comics stories. The only thing new was a decidedly weak attempt at creating a narrator for the tales in the form of a sideburned investigator named Matt Grover … or NAT Grover in the second and final issue. His entire existence consists of one full drawing (which the Grand Comics Database says is by Jack Abel but which could just as easily be by Win Mortimer or Syd Shores or some combination of the above) and a couple of headshots. If the intent was ever to do more with the character or move on to new stories as in the horror books, the cancellation of The Crime Machine after only two issues meant that was never to be.

The early failure of The Crime Machine may or may not have had something to do with the deep-sixing of an announced science-fiction mag to have been entitled Science Fiction Odyssey. Advertised in the fourth issue of Nightmare as “Coming Soon,” the cover shown highlighted Harry Harrison, Larry Niven, Terry Carr, and Gardner Fox with Jeff Jones art later recycled for use on Psycho #12 (May 1973). No issue ever appeared and the completed contents were gradually used up over time in the other Skywald mags.

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THE HEAP RETURNS

To Scream the Impossible Scream (top) Vicentes Segrelles’ cover to Skywald’s Scream #1 (Aug. 1973). (bottom) Scream #1’s back cover featured this onepage shocker by Al Hewetson and Zesar Lopez. © 1973 Skywald.

30 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

The cover of the second issue of Psycho (#2, Mar. 1971) showed an almost comical looking monster, its long, hanging tongue readily reminiscent of the pollution creature that had just been on the first cover of Nightmare mere months before. In fact, this was sort of an environmentally based monster as well, and one who was perhaps bizarrely chosen to be Skywald’s flagship character—the Heap!

Collectors and old-time comics fans knew the Heap— or at least the name—from Hillman Publications. Longtime Marvel writer/editor Roy Thomas was and is known for his revivals and updates of Golden Age comic-book characters for various publishers and he is on record as saying it was his idea—given to his old Marvel comrade Sol Brodsky— to revive a version of the Heap. In Alter Ego vol. 3, #81 (TwoMorrows, 2008), and quoted here by permission, Thomas told George Khoury, “I had lunch with Sol Brodsky soon after he left Marvel Comics to co-found Skywald.

He was looking for heroes to do. I couldn’t write for him, so he was kind of picking my brain, and I wanted to help without getting too involved, since Stan [Lee] wouldn't have liked that. I told Sol, ‘Well, we have the Man-Thing, so you ought to get someone to revive the Heap.’ He remembered the character since he was a comic-book artist in the 1940s.”

It’s unlikely that they had any rights to the original character, but that didn’t stop the plan from going forward.

But this Heap was hardly a hero in his first outing, credited to writer Chuck McNaughton with art by the team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. It’s a typical revenge story. A man named Jim Roberts is killed by rivals, returns to life as a monster, and kills those who conspired to kill him. The only difference here is that the monster is a mass of melted, rotting flesh created when a handsome crop-duster pilot’s plane crashes into a nerve-gas storage area improbably found on a military training ground and starts a forest fire. The mix of the nerve gas, pesticide, and heat makes him into the single ugliest “hero” in the history of comics—a super-strong, inarticulate, but still able to think intelligently … HEAP! Although Robert Kanigher and Tom Sutton would present a slightly more palatable, almost sponge-like version of the character in one of Skywald’s relatively few color comics, it’s the black-and-white Heap that would continue to be around for the next couple of years.

After his sci-fi origin, his sophomore story brought black magic into the picture immediately as our hero— such as he is—is captured by “the Horror Master,” who has revived decaying versions of history’s most depraved villains and murderers. This plotline continues into the following issue as the former Jim Roberts calls on an old scientist friend and succeeds in convincing him to try and help change him back to normal, only to end up lost in quicksand at the end. Artist Ross Andru took over the scripting beginning with this story as well, and later would take the mucky man-monster through an adventure where he meets a group of diseased people living underground and eventually DOES briefly morph back into a man!

Pablo Marcos, easily the most popular artist working there while he was at Skywald, took over first the inking and then all of the art chores for the Heap’s series, refining the protagonist’s look in the process to make it at least a tad less disgusting.

Andru’s scripting duties went to Al Hewetson, the new Skywald editor. The series was given a break for a couple of issues but returned in Psycho #10 and worked its way to a bizarre, almost-Grant Morrison style existentialist ending in which the murderous monster moves back in with his parents (!) and lives happily ever after. Some months down the line, in an editorial page of the Scream Winter Special (#11, Feb. 1975), Hewetson wrote, “What can we say, in all honesty, about those last two chapters that have (sic) not already been said—they were REALLY BAD!” Nevertheless, a poll was taken as to whether fans wanted more Heap and the answer was yes. But in spite of plans for young Gene Day—

just starting in the business as Skywald was finishing up— to do the strip, it was never to return.

It wasn’t just the Heap that made the second issue of Psycho important, though. The cover touted, “All New! All original material by the top talent of today!” and that’s just what we got that time out. No muddy reprints anymore—instead, the whole enterprise took on even more of a Marvel feel with work from not just the ubiquitous Andru/Esposito team but also Marv Wolfman, Rich Buckler, Chic Stone, Frank Giacoia, Tom Palmer, and Tom Sutton (the latter appearing here pseudonymously as “Sean Todd,” ostensibly so Warren wouldn’t get mad that he was working for “the enemy”). Jack Katz, another old-timer, was present as well and, in fact, would contribute a number of stories—both black and white and color—to Skywald before starting his own pioneering, serialized graphic novel, The First Kingdom.

The all-new stories began also in Nightmare #3 (Apr. 1971), and would be written at first by more names very familiar to comics fans of the day—Gary Friedrich, Jerry Siegel, Gardner Fox, and Gerry Conway among them. Al Hewetson also had a story in that third issue, though, and before long was, himself, writing the lion’s share of the company’s horror stories.

A “WITH IT” SUPERHERO But first came Hell-Rider, to many readers then (and collectors now) the most interesting Skywald publication.

Released in the summer of 1971, Hell-Rider #1 (Aug. 1971) started off with a painted Harry Rosenbaum cover of what appeared to be a masked hero turning a weaponized motorcycle’s flamethrower on several costumed criminals.

A superhero? If writer Gary Friedrich’s introduction in the issue is to be believed, the character of Brick Reese, a.k.a.

Hell-Rider, whose name itself wouldn’t even be allowed under the Comics Code, was a product by committee as Sol and Gary planned a “with it,” “now,” “realistic” superhero, and then the assigned artists, once again Andru and Esposito, brought in their own ideas as well.

The result is an odd mix indeed, in retrospect seeming well before its time, as the stories in the two published issues of Hell-Rider strongly resemble some of the grim, gritty comic books of two decades later. There’s adult language, there’s semi-nudity, there’s explicit mentions of drugs, there’s blood and violence. The title character would have fit right in at Marvel during the heyday of the Punisher.

The first issue is particularly interesting in that its four stories from three separate series are all intertwined.

The Claw, the hooded fascist head of a secret society out to restore the “real” America with the help of his inexplicably cat-costumed minions, is trying to get back a pair of boots that somehow have a large amount of heroin hidden in them. He runs afoul of Hell-Rider, but then tracks the boots to Las Vegas, where he also runs afoul of the Butterfly—the first black female superhero!

She escapes with the boots and passes them on to the Wild Bunch, a roving motorcycle gang of which Brick Reese—now her lawyer—had once been a part. The gang gets its own story but most of its members end up captured by the Big Bad, only to be rescued in the final story of the issue by—you guessed it—Hell-Rider.

Hell-Rider #2 (Oct. 1971) was a promising continuation, with more backstory on Reese and now with Rich Buckler work on the second Butterfly chapter. The stories were more standalone but continued a clear attempt at setting up a running continuity. Before the readers knew it, though, it was all over. A third issue—with a Gray Morrow cover—was advertised in the horror mags as “On Sale Now,” but it wasn’t and never has been since.

Everything in the two published issues was all very nicely drawn by Ross and Mike, Rich, former Tarzan artist John Celardo, Syd Shores, and a misspelled Dick Ayers, with tones credited to Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett. As far as the writing, Gary Friedrich—unlike many of the older generation trying to write hip dialogue in mainstream comics—was the real deal. He was an industry veteran but also still young, streetwise, and a motorcycle enthusiast, although oddly best known for his work on the World War II-era exploits of Marvel’s Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos.

After the quick demise of Hell-Rider, parts of the character would serve as apparent inspiration for Gary to create Marvel’s motorcycle-riding Ghost Rider.

Nightmare #4 (June 1971) is one of the best overall issues of that title, with some well-written stories featuring exceptional art from mainstream artists— most especially Ralph Reese on “Phantom of the Rock Era” and Jack Abel—rarely known for exceptional work—on “Shoot-Out at Satan’s Coffin.” Dick Ayers, “Sean Todd,” Bill Everett, and Tom Palmer also appear along with a hint of things to come from a new artist named Serg Moren illustrating a Gardner Fox shocker called “The Horror of the Chapel Wall.”

A lot of those same artists—along with Jonny Quest creator Doug Wildey, Chic Stone, and Carlos Garzon—returned for Nightmare #5 (Aug. 1971), with Ralph Reese again in particularly good form.

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

Somewhat Familiar Monsters Dead-on Greg Theakston monster portraits grace the covers of these early Seaboard magazines from 1974, Movie Monsters #1 and 2.

In a totally different vein, Seaboard’s single issue of Gothic Romances featured prose stories. © 1974 Seaboard.

© 1974 Seaboard.

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Psycho, on the other hand, had its next issue, #4 (Sept. 1971), delayed by two months for unknown reasons. When it appeared, though, it was a good one, highlighted by a full-page pinup of the Heap by Bill Everett and featuring part one of a two-part cosmic saga of demons by Marv Wolfman and Rich Buckler that would almost have felt at home at Marvel around that time.

Over its next few issues, Psycho would continue to add big-name comics creators, including legendary Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, Marvel’s Doug Moench, Denis Fujitake, Steve Englehart (as an artist!), and Jeff Jones.

The supposedly cloaked Tom Sutton did a Frankenstein’s Monster series reminiscent of Dick Briefer’s more serious early stories of the 1940s.

“HORROR-MOOD” It’s around this point, in particular with Psycho #8 (Sept. 1972), that Al Hewetson becomes THE pivotal figure in the Skywald story. A Canadian writer who had had short stories published at Marvel, DC, and Warren, Hewetson’s initial entry into comic books had been in the late 1960s when Sol Brodsky—then still at Marvel—had hired him to be Stan Lee’s personal assistant. It was Brodsky who hired him again at Skywald just before he—Sol—returned to Marvel. In what seemed like a very sudden development to readers, Al Hewetson suddenly became editor and head writer on both Nightmare and Psycho.

The difference was like night and day as the entire Skywald line quickly took on a new and different feel. Visually, that came from the fairly sudden influx of new and unfamiliar artists, a few of whom had also been slipped into Brodsky’s final issues of Nightmare. Hewetson, though— working from his home in Canada and only occasionally commuting to New York City—actually put some thought into what could make the line different from other black-and-white horror comics and came up with what he called the “Horror-Mood.”

An essential element of the Horror-Mood was that Skywald would attempt to adopt a more classical bent in its stories, presenting a number

of tales adapted from and/or inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, and actual legends of gargoyles, golems and such. Thus did Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster gradually replace the Heap. Comics blogger Henry Kujawa has posted a series of articles on the history of Poe adaptations in comic books and tells me, “Hewetson was determined to give Skywald’s horror line a more ‘literate’ feel than Warren’s had, resulting in, among other things, no less than 19 Edgar Allan Poe adaptations between 1972–1975.” There was even talk that Hewetson wanted to do a regular Poe-themed magazine.

With most of the stories now being written to that certain “Horror-Mood” style by Al Hewetson or Ed Fedory and 95% of the art coming from imported sources, Skywald finally took on a very artsy look and feel that was all its own.

A lot of magazines and comics ran reader surveys over the years, but one rarely saw any concrete results coming out of them. At Skywald, however, the results the company received from surveys run in Psycho and Nightmare were the basis of Scream, the third and final HorrorMood magazine (although others were planned and sometimes even announced, such as Tomb of Horror). Hewetson tells the readers inside Scream that this mag is different, based as it is entirely on reader input.

Scream’s stated goal would be to bring back true shock-value scares and not just visceral gore or the modern terror of day-to-day life.

Following in the EC footsteps of Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, “Archaic Al” himself acts as host and even a character in quite a number of the Skywald stories from that point on, including, notably, “The Comics Macabre” in Scream #1 (Aug. 1973), in which caricatures of the infamous comics-hating psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham and then-head of the Comics Code, Leonard Darvin, visit the Skywald offices and end up murdering the editor when he refuses to stop the horror stories (!).

According to Hewetson’s 2004 book, Skywald! The Complete Illustrated Guide to the Skywald Horror-Mood, Wertham was actually sent a copy of the issue, as he and Al had been longtime correspondents by that point. Al wrote that the doctor didn’t “get it.”

The art on the story mentioned above was by Maelo Cintron, a name not really known in US comics but which was quickly becoming familiar to Skywald readers. Like the later issues of Nightmare and Psycho, Scream would also be filled largely with a mixed bag of well-written tales illustrated by unfamiliar foreign names, many of whom worked through the Spanish art studio group known as La Floresta. Some of them were doing their level best to imitate Warren breakthrough artists like Esteban Maroto or Jose Bea or Luis Garcia, but others did bring their own styles to the table. Very few had any lasting impact on US comics, though: Dela Rosa, Zesar Lopez, Suso (Jesus Rego), Ferran Sostres, Domingo Gomez, Jose Martin Sauri. It wasn’t for lack of trying, as nearly every issue spotlighted one of the creators on its text pages. Jim Warren is known to have had a strong dislike for competitors and anyone associated with them, which probably explains why most of these artists stopped getting US work when Skywald went out of business.

Of the major Scream artists, only Ricardo Villamonte would continue on in the States, moving into both advertising and into more mainstream work at both DC and Marvel as an inker or a penciler.

It was Villamonte who co-created Lady Satan with Hewetson.

Making her debut in Scream #2 (Oct. 1973) Lady Satan is obviously Skywald’s version of a Vampirella—the sexy, supernatural woman.

In this case, she’s an ordinary African-American woman possessed by the spirit of Queen Anne, the ancient bride of Lucifer! The series would run for four issues here before moving over to Psycho for one last continued chapter that left fans hanging.

“Carrion of the Gods” Original art to the title page of writer/artist Pat Boyette’s contribution to Weird Tales of the Macabre #2 (Mar. 1975), clearly inspired by Erich von Daniken’s controversial but immensely popular Chariots of the Gods? Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © 1975 Seaboard.

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The only real, major breakout artist to come from Skywald, though, was Pablo Marcos. By the time he started with the company in 1972, the Peruvian-born cartoonist and commercial illustrator had been in the business for nearly a decade, even being the artist on a South American James Bond comic strip. Although he started with a handful of strips at Warren, it was at Skywald where Pablo’s star rose quickly with his wild layouts and loose but dense inking. In fact, he became so popular so quickly that Brodsky hired him at Marvel when he returned and Marcos went on to become a mainstay of their black-and-white horror line, as well as eventually working for just about every major comics company in the US and, even further on, becoming known to a whole new generation as the head of the Pablo Marcos Studio, illustrators of the popular Great Illustrated Classics line of books for children.

Besides Lady Satan, a number of continuing series such as “The Saga of the Victims,” “The Shoggoth Chronicles,” and “Tales of the Human Gargoyles” were begun with the intent to later publish collections as one-shots. The latter was actually advertised but never appeared.

Not everything was by Spanish artists, though.

In fact, Nightmare #20 (Aug. 1974) featured the professional comics debut of John Byrne, on what was essentially a two-page gag strip. Byrne would, of course, find greater fame in four-color pastures soon enough. Gene Day, a rising star at Marvel before his untimely death in 1982, also had work in several of the final Skywald issues.

In total, Nightmare ran 23 issues and an unnumbered special. Psycho managed 24 issues and two specials. Both Hell-Rider and Crime Machine stalled at two issues each and Scream limped along for 11 issues.

Stories were left unfinished and promised one-shots and new mags unpublished. It’s said that Warren and Marvel literally squeezed Skywald to death in the comics market.

Marvel Comics had long been intrigued by the concept of entering the Code-free black-and-white comics mag market and, in fact, had tried to do so with Spectacular Spider-Man as far back as 1968 and again with Savage Tales in the spring of 1971.

Publisher Martin Goodman is said to have been strongly against the idea of black-and-white comics— odd since he was still also publishing a number of black-and-white “men’s sweat” mags himself, some of which featured black-and-white comics such as Pussycat, done by Marvel creators including Jim Mooney, Larry Lieber, and Wally Wood. Pussycat’s adventures even got her a 1968 one-shot black-andwhite one-shot magazine credited to Marvel Comics!

In the summer of 1973, though, with Goodman by that point out of the picture (by virtue of his having sold the company), Marvel brought back Savage Tales and also created Dracula Lives, Monsters Unleashed, Vampire Tales, and Tales of the Zombie.

In time there would be even more. Intentionally or not, Marvel’s distribution of these mags began to get other comics magazines left behind when it came to shelf space. Given the choice between which ones to put out if space was limited, the average retailer would most likely go with a familiar brand name like Marvel. Or Warren. NOT Skywald.

In March of 1975, all the remaining Skywald titles were officially canceled, which Hewetson announced in a staff memo. The official reasons cited included the standard rising cost of production and printing.

All true, of course, as far as it goes, but Hewetson said in later interviews that the distributors had told him flat-out what was really happening.

“Female-Filled Fantasy” (top two) The wildly suggestive covers to Seaboard’s two issues of Devilina. Issue #1 (Jan. 1975) cover by Alberto Pujolar and #2 (May 1975) cover by George Torjussen. (middle) Ernie Colón’s cool but crowded cover to Thrilling Adventure Stories #1 (Feb. 1975). (bottom) Issue #2 (Aug. 1975) featured this Neal Adams beaut! © 1975 Seaboard.

Al Hewetson left the comics industry and become a successful publisher of regional magazines in the US and Canada, although not long before his 2003 passing, he reunited with both Maelo Cintron and Pablo Marcos for comics projects that remained sadly uncompleted.

THE RETURN OF MARTIN GOODMAN Surprisingly, another new competitor to Warren and Marvel was entering the market just as Skywald was leaving it: Martin Goodman.

The history of Marvel Comics shows that few of the company’s editorial concepts have ever been original.

It’s just that it so often did its versions better than the versions it based the concepts on in the first place! When Martin and his son Charles “Chip” Goodman re-created Atlas Comics in the 1970s, the policy of copying others was clearly continued … only without the success part.

Unlike its color comic-book line, the black-and-whites never adopted the Atlas name, sticking instead with the earlier-announced Seaboard Periodicals designation.

The first of the Seaboard magazines to debut came in late 1974. It was a clone of Warren’s Famous Monsters of Filmland called Movie Monsters. A second magazine was a hard-to-find one-shot called Gothic Romances that featured text stories illustrated by Howard Chaykin, Ernie Colón, and Neal Adams.

Apparently, Goodman had changed his mind about the future of black-and-white comics magazines because his new company planned them, too, right from the beginning. The first one was Weird Tales of the Macabre #1 (Jan. 1975), off to a promising start with an intriguingly unnerving cover painting by Jeff Jones, well-known to both Warren and Skywald fans and an artist who was by then already being looked at as having transcended the comic-book industry with his art in the way Frank Frazetta had done earlier.

Not a favorite of Goodman’s, though, according to the special Atlas/Seaboard issue of Comic Book Artist (#16, Dec. 2001), Jones’ admittedly more explicit painting planned for the second issue was not only dropped but the publisher insisted he never be used again! A Boris Vallejo painting was substituted, making Weird Tales of the Macabre #2 (Mar. 1975) look quite a bit like a Skywald mag!

Back to that first issue, though. Even editor-in-chief Jeff Rovin’s editorial introduction sounds suspiciously like Skywald’s Horror-Mood when he talks about Warren and then writes, “All the aforementioned magazines were and remain victim to grotesquery for its own sake, to disgust rather than frighten the reader. We, on the other hand, are looking simply to scare you.” Regarding that first issue’s contents, he goes on to say, “…we have collected intriguing, frightening stories and MOOD pieces of illustrated HORROR.” (Emphasis mine.)

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RECOMMENDED READING • For more reading on Skywald, check Amazon or eBay for overpriced copies of the late Al Hewetson’s out-of-print book, Skywald! The Complete Illustrated History of the Horror-Mood.

• George E Warner has a Skywald blog at superggraphics. blogspot.com and has reprinted the entire Human Gargoyles saga at www.thehumangargoyles.webcomic.ws.

• You can find a wonderfully obsessive Skywald checklist from Richard J. Arndt at www.enjolrasworld.com/Richard%20Arndt/ The%20Complete%20Skywald%20Checklist.html.

• Atlas/Seaboard editor Jeff Rovin talked about its black-andwhite mags in this interview from Comic Book Artist #16 (2001): twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/16rovin.html.

• BACK ISSUE will be devoting a future edition to the Seabord/Atlas comic-book line. Keep reading!

Unbroken A powerful Russ Heath original page from Thrilling Adventure Stories #1, courtesy of Heritage. © 1975 Seaboard.

The fact that the second issue was delayed two months was an early indicator that all was not well at Seaboard.

The third Seaboard black-and-white, Thrilling Adventure Stories, at least tried to be something different, seemingly a comics version of the so-called “men’s sweat” magazines.

The cover of issue #1 (Feb. 1975) was a bright and bloody mess by classic Richie Rich artist Ernie Colón, whose Atlas color comic character Tiger Man leads off Inside the issue, there is some genuinely first-class the issue. A war story from Russ Heath is an artistic comics art on view from former Charlton regular Pat highlight of the issue, as is Frank Thorne illustrating Boyette, along with sometime Warren regulars Ernie the first of a planned series starring the real-life Colón, Leo Summers, and Ramon Torrents. Writers Lawrence of Arabia. include Augustine Funnell, whose work turned up often So, naturally, since it was easily the best of the bunch, at Skywald. There’s also a full-page ad for Tales of the issue #2 of Thrilling Adventure Stories (Aug. 1975) didn’t Sorceress, the next Seaboard mag due out featuring show up until six months down the line, by which point Devilina, a scantily clad woman depicted with satanic no one really much cared about Atlas and the other imagery like Skywald’s Lady Satan, which was a jeff rovin Seaboard comics mags had all long since died. The second response to Vampirella and/or the similarly semi-naked issue cover is by Neal Adams—seemingly guaranteed Satana who had appeared more than a year earlier in Courtesy of Comic Book Artist. to sell books in those days, even though this was hardly the Marvel black-and-whites. Again, nothing really original. his best work. Jack Sparling’s “Kromag” saga from the first issue, written by Two months later saw the second and final issue of Tales of the Macabre John Albano, continued. Essentially a redo of Joe Kubert’s classic Tor, it was (Mar. 1975), and outside of the addition of some lovely art by EC veteran an excuse to draw naked and semi-naked people, which had become John Severin, it was more of the same, but nothing really special. pretty much expected in the black-and-white mags by that point.

In the interim, the announced Tales of the Sorceress was released The highlight of all the Seaboard magazines appears here, though, instead as Devilina, seemingly after an editorial decision to emphasize that too, as Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson, fresh from their nowcharacter. Why then does Devilina #1 (Jan. 1975) have a fairly generic classic revival of DC’s “Manhunter,” offer 11 pages of pure comics fantasy cover by Alberto Pujolar (whose name was misspelled inside) perfection called “The Temple of the Spider.” rather than the scary-sexy pinup type illustration of its own main character But it was too little, too late. Skywald was that one might logically expect. In fact, Pujolar’s cover is SO generic gone and Atlas/Seaboard soon followed, leaving that he sold it again eight years later, this time to the actual Vampirella, Warren and Marvel the waning market for blackissue #111 (Jan. 1983), where it ran in a mirror image to its original and-white horror mags. The arrival of the full-color printing, presumably with no one at Warren being the wiser. slick sci-fi/fantasy mag Heavy Metal in 1977 was Ric Estrada, a longtime utility man at DC Comics, mainly in war likely the beginning of the end for the genre, comics and romance comics, gets the credit for the title character, but, as they say, that’s another story. both writing and art. At this point in his career, though, his art was wildly stylized similarly to that of Jerry Grandenetti and hardly a fair STEVEN THOMPSON is Booksteve of Booksteve’s comparison to Vampirella’s sensual Jose Gonzalez illustration style.

Library (http://booksteveslibrary.blogspot.com) Other artists with work appearing in the two issues of Devilina and a dozen other blogs. He has written for include Pablo Marcos and Suso (again, shades of Skywald!), Leo Fantagraphics, TwoMorrows, Yoe Books, Bear Manor Media, and Time Capsule Productions. In 2015, Summers, Jack Sparling, Ralph Reese, and Frank Thorne, all veterans of he published Lost Girl in collaboration with Land of Warren and Marvel mags, giving the title the no doubt hoped for feel the Lost star Kathy Coleman. of familiarity to the casual reader.

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Warren Publications had three distinct waves of publication for its comic magazines. The initial wave of 1964–1966 saw the introduction of its flagship titles Creepy, Blazing Combat, and Eerie. The “comeback” wave of 1969, featuring Vampirella, highlighted Warren’s creative resurrection after a couple of very tough years that mostly featured good reprints mixed in with mediocre new stories. Then, finally there was the third wave that ran from 1974–1982, a wave which featured many new titles as Warren moved from being a publisher that created the next trend to a publisher looking for the next one.

WILL EISNER’S THE SPIRIT

by

Richard J. Arndt

This “third wave” began on a high note with the publication of Will Eisner’s The Spirit. Although largely a reprint title, Eisner’s 1940s work on the strip was so good that even 30 years later it looked like cutting-edge material.

Although the 1940s are called the Golden Age for a reason, the reality is that much of that period’s comic art and stories are, frankly, badly drawn and written. Those stories can be and often are exciting and fun to read, but even classics of the era rarely hold up as intelligent, thoughtful, beautifully illustrated adult stories, largely because they were never intended to be. The stories were aimed at children.

Eisner’s work on The Spirit, however, is all of those things an adult story should be and more. Even lesser Spirit tales loom over the best of the Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel Adventures, Captain America, etc. stories of the period. You’d have to go to such offbeat and wildly divergent efforts as George Carlson’s Jingle-Jangle Comics, John Stanley’s Little Lulu, or Walt Kelly’s Pogo (the Dell comic book, not the later comic strip) to find similar examples of excellence.

Each week, from June 2, 1940 to October 5, 1952, Eisner delivered a weekly 16-page comic book for Sunday papers, featuring the lead character “Denny Colt as the Spirit,” as well as a number of backup features.

He had assistants, some quite notable, but during the key pre-war years of 1940–1941 and the postwar years of 1945–1951, Eisner was the main writer and artist, overseeing everything. He did seven to eight pages of story and art every week, 52 times a year, for the better part of a decade!

And what art and stories! Hundreds of beautifully written and illustrated stories. Literally hundreds of them!

There’s a reason why the prestigious awards presented at the San Diego Comic-Con are named the Eisners. There are a lot of great comic artists and writers, but only a handful belong on comics’ Mt. Olympus, and head-and-shoulders above all the rest—including creators like Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Bill

Golden Age in Bronze 1973 poster promoting Will Eisner’s The Spirit, from Warren Publications. (inset) Eisner reinterpreted that image for the premier cover of The Spirit #1 (Apr. 1974).

The Spirit TM & © the Will Eisner Estate.

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Everett, Bernie Krigstein, Steve Ditko, Julie Schwartz, Robert Crumb, and Alan Moore—stands Will Eisner.

I’ll have to admit here that my favorite Warren magazine of the 1970s was The Spirit. My reaction to it was exactly the same as my reaction to getting glasses a decade earlier. I always knew there were trees, but now I could see and count the leaves! I knew there were comics, but The Spirit was something clearer, more defined, more there. Eisner’s 30-year-old work left that big an impression on me.

Warren previewed the upcoming magazine with a couple of Spirit stories that appeared in the color section of Eerie in 1973. These crime stories didn’t really fit Eerie’s horror- and science-fiction-themed series, but the reaction must have been good because the actual title followed shortly thereafter.

For 16 great issues, fans got seven or eight fantastic Eisner stories an issue.

And what stories! While largely a crime comic with a nod toward superheroes, Eisner’s imagination ran rampant over various genres. Tense crime tales appeared side-by-side with broad, low comedy. Pure science fiction existed snugly next to spy thrillers. Romance (some of the most mature and flat-out romantic comics ever done in the field) sat cheek-byjowl with religious fantasies, socio-political/economic tales, horror stories, an annual Christmas story, and terrific slice-of-life comics noir, all of them done with extraordinary flair and a firm understanding of the possibilities of comics as not just simple entertainment but as an art form.

Beyond the stories, which were never less than good and often were some of the best stories to ever appear in comics, were the characters. Villains and recurring characters were introduced whose names, as in the works by Charles Dickens, pointed to a part of their personal character: the Octopus, whose face was never seen but whose distinctly gloved hands were in every part of the criminal underworld; the lean con man Mr. Carrion and his pet buzzard Julia; Lonesome Cool; Dr. Cobra, who was the initial villain who inadvertently created the Spirit; and on and on.

Then there were the women, some good, some bad, and some you’re never quite sure are which, each slinky as all get-out: the is-she-a-jewel-thief-or-a-British-spy Silk Satin and her daughter Hildy; Silken Floss—the will eisner female surgeon who made glasses look extremely sexy; Photo by Alan Light.

Plaster of Paris (and perhaps only another carpenter’s son like yours truly could fully catch the silliness of naming a sexy Parisian assassin after a singularly unsexy construction material); Miss Paraffin; the siren Lorelai Rox; the Spirit’s boyhood love—Sand Saref; and the slinkiest female of them all, P’Gell—whose name I’ve never really figured out how to pronounce and whose husbands all seem to meet a deadly fate.

The regular cast of characters was just as good: Commissioner Dolan, a man never quite as slow of body or as thick of mind as he’d have you believe; his daughter Ellen—the pretty “girl next door” that the Spirit adored and who was quite likely the only recurring female in the 12-year-run to have an “ordinary” name; and Ebony White. Ebony’s appearance and initial dialect would cause Eisner some problems as the years went by for being a caricature of racial stereotypes. Yes, his look was based on prevailing prejudices of the time, but he was never written that way. In my opinion, Ebony was the perfect sidekick—tough, sweet-natured, often smarter than the Spirit himself, funny (much of the low comedy of the strip centered around Ebony’s various love affairs), and dedicated in every way possible to being a decent human being, regardless of race. After about 1950 he was largely replaced by Sammy, a white boy who looked and talked nearly identically to Ebony, but it just wasn’t the same. Sammy was okay, but Ebony? Ebony was cool.

Mind you, none of these stories were printed in order. At Warren, a 1951 story would precede a 1946 tale which would be followed by a tale set in 1947. The Spirit would mysteriously be on crutches in one story while the reason he would be on crutches wouldn’t appear for another six or seven

Ebony and Ivory (top) Cover to The Spirit #7 (Apr. 1975), an Ebony White spotlight. Note the bullet-riddled logo. (bottom) That issue’s back cover, teasing the contents of issue #8.

The Spirit TM & © the Will Eisner Estate.

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issues! Even continued stories would have gaps in continuance, often where a “back in Central City” story had been left out of an extended tale.

This haphazard way of scheduling the reprints had a wondrous and utterly unexpected effect on the reader. It created a memory mosaic, where the reader’s perception of the entire strip was colored by the knowledge that everything you’re reading points to a larger, more expansive, and, best of all, hidden history of the main character and his adventures. A history in which the reader was being given only bits and pieces of the whole story and left to wonder and speculate about the unexplained corners of the story’s universe. The reader had to put the bits and pieces together themselves, and what resulted was an enormous story, unfolding and stretching out in both time and space, which was created as much by the reader himself as by the actual writer or artist.

What Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (in the Watchmen) and Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson (in Astro City) would later try to consciously create was happening entirely by accident in the pages of Warren’s Spirit magazine! The later 1980s comic-book reprintings of the Spirit tales in chronological order by Kitchen Sink Press were welcome indeed, but that method of reprinting completely obliterated the memory-mosaic style that had filled the Warren and Kitchen Sink comic magazine reprints.

As mentioned, The Spirit lasted only 16 issues and was cancelled by Warren with the October 1976 issue. The title and numbering was then picked up by Kitchen Sink Press, which had earlier run two undergroundstyle reprint comics of the character in 1972–1973. They continued the stories-printed-out-of-continuance style of the Warren comic magazine for another 25 issues before canceling the magazine with #41 in 1981.

Kitchen Sink then started the aforementioned comic-book version which reprinted the entirety of the postwar tales in order. It wasn’t until DC Comics launched its Spirit Archives in the mid-2000s that the pre-war stories

by Eisner and the 1942–1945 wartime stories that were done by others while Eisner was in the service were reprinted in chronological order.

COMIX INTERNATIONAL Warren’s next title, Comix International, also debuted in 1974, cover-dated July. Comix International was a reprint title, collecting Warren’s eight-page color stories which had started appearing in all the Warren comic titles in 1973. This magazine featured thick, heavy, glossy paper pages to accommodate the groundbreaking coloring process. This time-consuming process, largely developed by Richard Corben (although other coloring techniques were tried as well), was, in the pre-computer coloring days, labor intensive but looked spectacular, especially compared to the four-color process that had been used on nearly all comics since the

1930s. When printed correctly, the result often looked as good as the far more expensive “Little Annie Fanny” pages in Playboy. Comix International lasted for five issues, featuring eight to ten stories per issue, and was largely sold via mail order. They’re fairly hard to obtain but are great-looking magazines. The use of the underground spelling of “comix” in the title is a bit puzzling, as none of the Warren titles (with one exception) had any real connection to the underground movement or its sensibility at all.

There were also a couple of one-shot specials that continued in the Comix International vein. The first—The Spirit Special—featured a collection of the color sections from The Spirit as well as the two color preview tales that had appeared in Eerie. The other—The Vampirella Special—featured Vamperilla tales that had originally appeared in black and white and were colored especially for this title.

The only genuinely underground title that Warren published came next, in 1977. The Odd World of Richard Corben was an actual graphic collection that featured underground work by Corben from 1970–1976 that had not originally been published by Warren. Half of the book appeared in color. This was a distinct and rare oddity in the history of Warren Publications and, frankly, a pretty cool collection of Corben tales.

It was described as an Adult Fantasy and sold only via mail order by Captain Company from the back pages in various Warren magazines. Captain Company was the Warren-owned mail-order company that sold back issues, horror and SF paperbacks, games, and various other items deemed to be of interest to Warren’s homegrown horror magazine readers.

WARREN PRESENTS Warren Presents was the next regular title, and its history is a curious one.

It started off in late 1977 as a series of four one-shot titles (called UFO and Alien Comix, Future World Comix, Starquest Comix, and Galactic War Comix). These four books all reprinted various SF stories that Warren had published over the years, and the titles were clearly influenced by the advent of the motion picture Star Wars, during a brief period in publishing when any comic book with a SF-sounding title sold like hotcakes. It was only in 1979, with #5, that the umbrella title of Warren Presents was debuted and the four earlier issues were declared to be part of a series.

Warren Presents continued reprinting mostly Warren’s science-fiction tales for the next three years, although two issues—#8 and 9—were largely composed of various film-related articles from Famous Monsters of Filmland. Three issues are rather noteworthy. Issue #6 featured the first collection of the Rook, a time-travel character that had been appearing in the pages of Eerie and which can be considered the prototype for the Rook’s later magazine. It featured an excellent original cover by Paul

Santa’s Got a Cleaver! (left) Comix International #1 (July 1974), spotlighting horrormaster Richard Corben. (right) Readers took their first look at the Rook in Eerie #82 (Mar. 1977).

Cover by Luis Bermejo and Bill DuBay. © 1974 Warren Publications. The Rook TM & © Time Castle Studios.

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Gulacy—a cover that, oddly enough, was not seen with the full detail (all of the Gulacy painted background is gone in the original printing) until it was used as the cover to Eerie Archives vol. 17 in 2014! [Editor’s note: See this issue’s “The Unpublished Paul Gulacy” for more info.]

Issue #11 (Oct. 1980) featured the first collection of Pantha, the stripper/ black panther changeling from the pages of Vampirella. The last issue, #14 (Nov. 1981), collected three (out of four) adventures of Jim Stenstrum’s amusing serial “Rex Havoc and the Asskickers of the Fantastic” from the pages of 1984. These stories were somewhat “cleaned up” for re-publication and the “Asskickers’” name was changed to “Raiders.” Apparently Warren was aiming at a somewhat-younger audience whose parents might not have appreciated the original name. Rex and crew, much like Michael Gilbert’s Mr. Monster, spent their time killing various horror clichés of the pulps and movies. The Rex tales are actually quite good and there’s a part of me that regrets that there’s only a few Rex Havoc tales. There’s a bigger part of me that really regrets his team’s name change. The “Asskickers of the Fantastic” is such a perfect name!

1984 1984, debuting in June 1978, was Warren’s somewhat panicked response to the unexpected and infuriating (to Jim Warren, who appeared to consider the full-size magazine rack as his personal comic domain) success of Heavy Metal the year earlier. Warren simply couldn’t afford to do an all-color original comic magazine, but for this title he did reinsert the eight-page color section, which had fallen out of regular use a couple of years earlier, as well as increase the page count from his average 64 pages to an 80-page book, and, finally, cut out all ads. Production-wise, this was possibly the best bang for the buck title that Warren ever put out.

1984 featured some of the best artwork to ever appear in a Warren magazine. Stunning and often innovative work appeared from the likes of Alex Nino, Richard Corben, Esteban Maroto, Wally Wood, Vic Catan, Luis Bermejo, Jose Gonzalez, and others. But all of it, all of it, was undercut by some of the worst, most demeaning, most juvenile and downright offensive stories to ever appear in comics.

Most of 1984’s best and worst attributes can be laid directly at editor Bill DuBay’s door. DuBay was a fair artist, a good writer, and a more than adequate editor and art director—all roles he’d served during his eight years of work at Warren. He’d actually greatly improved the look of the entire Warren line of magazines during his tenure as art director, and when he became editor, the stories being purchased also greatly improved.

However, in 1978, with the apparent okay of publisher Jim Warren, he seemed determined to have 1984 set out to pretty much confirm every parent’s, feminist’s, African American’s, Native American’s, liberal’s, conservative’s, and just plain ol’ American Joe or Jane’s worst fears about comics. The words juvenile, sleazy, scatological, racist, demeaning to women, heavy handed in its treatment of violence, and lame to the extreme in its sense of humor all aptly describe 1984. And that’s just the stories.

Behind the scenes, DuBay’s heavy editorial hand had him rewriting nearly every script submitted to make them even sleazier than they may have been originally. I own every copy of 1984/1994, and even today I cringe a little bit knowing they’re stored in my closet.

Wally Wood’s original and rather charming 12-page story “The End” was, without his knowledge or okay, split into two six-page stories with artwork and panels rearranged and presented in 1984 with new scripts by DuBay. The changes greatly changed the tenor of the original, which featured a much tamer story that still had a lot of nudity.

DuBay’s rewrite and rearrangement strongly highlighted, emphasized, and changed the tone of scenes depicting the bondage and whipping of naked women. A furious Wood denounced the changes, swore never to work for Warren again, and published his version of the story in his own newsletter, The Woods Gazette, to show his original intent.

A lawsuit was prompted when writer Harlan Ellison sued over an unauthorized (and disguised) adaptation of his award-winning story “A Boy and His Dog,” which was placed in the production line when it was thought Warren would get the rights to the story but was continued with redrawn pages and a new script when the negotiations for story rights fell through.

The expense of defending themselves against Ellison’s lawsuit, which Ellison won, may well have hastened Warren Publications’ eventual demise.

Perhaps no story displayed the open-sewer aspect of 1984 more than #3’s “The Harvest,” in which author DuBay and artist Jose Ortiz relate the happy adventures of a white father and son in a world where blacks are regarded as animals to be hunted. After the father/son team track down and kill a near-term pregnant black woman, the reader is treated to the “lovely” sight of them ripping her baby from her womb and holding the fetus above their heads in a spray of blood, while commenting on how they’re now going to have “some prime veal!” Absolutely disgusting and something I have no problem placing in that section of “literature” called “violent and unnecessary pornography.”

However, in its defense, 1984 published several stories that escaped DuBay’s heavy editorial hand, in particular the excellent Richard Corbendrawn and Corben/Jan Strnad-written full-color serial “Mutant World,” and every story that Jim Stenstrum wrote for the title. These stories would have been a proud addition to any magazine anthology in 1978–1979.

As mentioned earlier, Stenstrum’s “Rex Havoc and the Asskickers of the Fantastic” stories were very good spoofs of various iconic horror tales.

Several other writers—in particular, Nicola Cuti and Budd Lewis— delivered good scripts that appeared to be heavily rewritten to emphasize the tawdry humor running through nearly every other story. If one mentally edits the obvious editorial intrusions, you can often find a fairly good story under the rot.

With its 11th issue the title was changed to 1994. The letters’ page explained that this was done so that newsstand readers wouldn’t confuse it with George Orwell’s novel 1984. To the more cynical, it may have been changed so that the George Orwell estate wouldn’t sue Warren’s sleaziest title while said title was already embroiled in a lawsuit with Harlan Ellison. Orwell’s novel was also given a strong plug in the title change essay.

Invasion!

Warren Presents #4 (Sept. 1979), spotlighting movie aliens. Cover by John Stone. © 1979 Warren Publishing. Characters © their respective copyright owners.

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Regardless of the actual reason, the title change also ushered in an editorial change. Stories were greatly toned down, with much of the more disgusting aspects of the magazine eliminated. Ad pages had also begun appearing in #9, and the number of ads steadily increased after the title change. Bill DuBay also reinvented himself as Will Richardson, who was now listed as the editor.

The stories didn’t really get any better in general, though. The juvenile, heavy-handed sexist and racial humor continued. As DuBay had done years earlier with an AfricanAmerican character in Eerie which he called the Spook (the serial he then handed off to writer Doug Moench, who was completely unaware of the racial connotation), DuBay continued to use a racial slur against blacks to name an African-American character.

In this case the name was “Spearchucker Spade, Intergalactic Eye!” To be fair to DuBay, I don’t think he was deliberately trying to be racist. He’d earlier written a number of fairly sensitive stories focusing on African-American protagonists, including one that was an award winner.

At the same time as the stories in question in 1984/1994, he was writing serials for Eerie, which featured non-parody African-American leads. In fact, he was one of the few white writers of the 1970s (Don McGregor being another— who actually wrote very good stories in this vein) to routinely feature African-Americans as the lead-in various stories and serials, and most of these were fairly positive portrayals. I suspect he was trying to be cutting-edge funny, in the style of the often pointed parodies that ran in National Lampoon, which often used racial slurs as part of their satire. The difference was that the Lampoon writers were usually actually funny, while DuBay’s efforts rarely were.

Good aspects of 1994? Alex Nino’s artwork, always delightful and unusual, whether for Warren or DC, soared in the latter-day pages of 1994. Issue THE ROOK #22’s “Sigmund Pavlov” story, written The Rook debuted in November 1979,

by DuBay, featured a story designed featuring the time-traveling title to be seen as a long, dazzling, and character as its lead. The Rook had obscene single panel if the page were debuted in March 1977 in the pages laid end to end. The pun of that last richard corben of Eerie and had appeared in nearly sentence is fully intended. In fact, that every issue of that title after his debut. particular story featured probably the Self-caricature © Richard Corben.

Initially, DuBay’s decent scripts and most explicit artwork that either 1984 or 1994 ever Luis Bermejo’s excellent artwork had been quite exciting, produced. In #26, Nino’s art for “Young Sigmund, Sr.” but Bermejo soon had to take artistic shortcuts to make featured a ten-page story which was designed as a single his deadlines and lesser artists began drawing the panel that one could extend infinitely into space.

New writer Kevin Duane wrote some excellent SF adventures when he fell behind. The Rook soon fell from pieces, as did writer Bruce Jones. The artwork remained pretty good to fairly mediocre as DuBay’s decent scripts began being undercut by less-than-stunning artwork. high quality throughout the title’s existence, unlike the mind-numbingly static artwork appearing routinely However, Lee Elias drew the initial Rook adventures in in Eerie and occasionally in Warren’s other titles. Besides quite stunning fashion while the scripts by Budd Lewis Nino, Vic Catan, Alex Nino’s brother Delano Nino, Frank and DuBay featured a merging of the Rook’s universe Thorne, and Abel Laxamana provided some of the with various (out-of-copyright) characters from the SF better efforts. 1984/1994 lasted for 29 issues, concluding fantasies of Jules Verne. With #4, Bermejo returned with in February 1983 when Warren Publications ceased its more of his exquisite artwork, and things looked good.

For backup stories, editor DuBay gathered up some publishing efforts. great serials. Alfredo Alcala brought in his Voltar character Also in 1978, Warren released one of the first graphic in #2, which he’d invented in his native country of the albums (as they were called then) collecting 16 of the war stories from Blazing Combat in a squarebound edition Philippines in the 1960s, thus predating Conan’s comic that unfortunately had the habit of having the cover pull debut here in the States. Voltar debuted in America in Magic Carpet #1 (1977), with scripting by Manuel Auad. loose almost immediately after opening the book. Still, for many years, this was the only way to read the long-out- In The Rook, it was written by Bill DuBay. The American version of Voltar looked exactly like the John Buscema/ of-print stories from Blazing Combat.

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

Two Views of Corben According to Heritage Comics Auctions, contributor of this original art, Richard Corben produced the spaced-out cover for Warren’s 1984 #1 (June 1978) in graytones, then the art was colored prior to publication.

1984 © 1978 Warren Publishing.

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Spin-Off Stars (left) The Rook #1 (Oct. 1979). Corben cover. (right) Rudy Nebres cover art on the first issue (June 1982) of The Goblin.

The Rook TM & © Time Castle Studios. The Goblin TM & © 1982 Warren Publishing.

Alcala-illustrated version of Conan that appeared in Savage Sword of Conan and could even be considered as a Conan clone (or vice-versa), but Alcala’s art was spectacular here, with double-page spreads and individual panels of such startling clarity that it put much of the work being done on Conan at the same time to shame. If you’re an art lover, Voltar is something you’ve just got to have.

Alex Toth debuted his excellent “Bravo for Adventure” in #3. Toth had done the story in 1976 but had been unable to find a venue to serve as a home for it. This two-part tale, concluded in #4, totally justified giving the Rook his own title.

By #6, the Rook’s own strip was getting rather crowded. In addition to the lead character, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, O Henry, Al Jennings, the Cisco Kid, Pancho, Robur, and Sherlock Holmes were appearing in the storyline!

Joe Guy (the guy with the permanent grin) was the thinly disguised “son of Superman,” debuting in #7 with a script by Bill DuBay and art

by Abel Laxamana.

Issue #8 featured Lee Elias’ fine serial “Kronos.” The first two adventures had appeared in 1977 in Joe Kubert’s newspaper-format anthology title Sojourn. The first two episodes were reprinted from that title with new adventures concluding the story.

Don McGregor and artist Bill Draut launched “Dagger” in #12 (Dec. 1981), whose adventures mined much of the same territory as Alex Toth’s earlier “Bravo for Adventure.” It wasn’t up to the quality of that strip, but it was interesting, nonetheless. Writer Colin Dawkins and artist John Severin’s Western “Eagle” had also had its first two adventures printed in Sojourn #1–2 in 1977 and was reprinted and concluded in The Rook starting in #12. “Eagle” was clearly a rewrite/reinvention of Severin’s 1950s character American Eagle, but was very nicely done.

The Rook concluded its run with #14 (Apr. 1982). The Rook himself returned to Eerie, as did other regular serials that had been appearing in the magazine such as the new adventures of Sherlock Holmes, while the Goblin, who’d debuted in a Rook story in #11, actually got his own magazine, which took the place of The Rook on the publishing schedule.

in either The Rook or The Goblin. In truth, The Goblin was not a particularly interesting magazine, with only the lead character displaying any real interesting qualities, and that largely due to excellent art by Lee Elias and Alex Nino. The book was marred, as were other Warren titles of that time period, by wretched eight-page color sections that were a mockery of the superb color sections of 1973–1978. These looked like make-readies—coverless, untrimmed comics that the four-color press would send to DC or Marvel as early proofs before the actual trimmed comics with covers attached were printed. These latter-day sections were untrimmed, on shoddy paper with art that made some of the worst works of Charlton look good.

None of the other stories appearing in The Goblin were particularly good, just really a blah effort on the part of Warren. Within four months of its cancellation the entire company ceased publishing.

Warren also issued a number of one-shot titles during this period that reprinted various articles from Famous Monsters of Filmland that weren’t comics related, such as the Famous Monsters: Star Wars Spectacular and House of Horror, as well as several Warren Presents specials that weren’t in the regular numbering of that title and focused on specific then-new movies such as Alien, Meteor, Moonraker, and the animated version of The Lord of the Rings. None of these featured comics. There was also a Vampirella prose paperback series, written by Ron Goulart and based on Vampi’s comic adventures, that ran for six volumes, beginning in 1975.

THE GOBLIN

RICHARD ARNDT is a librarian and comic historian from Nevada. He’s written the books Horror Comics in Black and White and The Star*Reach Companion and is currently working on American War Comics: The Real Big Five with co-author Steve Fears.

Warren’s last new magazine, The Goblin, debuted in June 1982 and ran for only three issues, although a fourth was advertised. The Goblin character debuted in Eerie #71 (Jan. 1976) in a story that had nearly nothing except the character’s appearance to do with his appearances

With the exception of The Spirit, none of the Warren comic magazines of the late 1970s and early 1980s matched the quality of the best days of Creepy, Blazing Combat, or Eerie, but there were often quite good stories and beautifully rendered art behind the covers of Comix International, 1984/1994, and The Rook. Someday perhaps the Warren archive volumes will include these tales as well. I’ll be looking for them.

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TM

by

Richard J. Arndt

Information obtained both via email and by phone interview, June 2015

[Editor’s note: While publishing schedules did not allow this article to see print prior to the October 2015 revival of The Rook, we hope you’ll enjoy the behind-the-scenes stories connected to this new version of the late Bill DuBay’s durable creation.]

Only a day or so after I finished this issue’s Warren magazines article, Ben DuBay contacted editor Michael Eury to let him know about the impending revival of his uncle Bill DuBay’s time-traveling character, the Rook. The Rook and his cast of characters had been a mainstay of the late 1970s era of Eerie and had even headlined his own oftenexcellent magazine, The Rook, from 1979–1982. It’s with considerable joy and interest that we join overseer Ben DuBay, writer Steven Grant, and artist Paul Gulacy to discuss the impending (at this writing) and accomplished (by the time this article appears) return of the Rook.

Ben DuBay is the manager of the holding company William B. DuBay LLC and production company Time Castle Studios, which hold the rights of Bill DuBay’s estate interest in the character and has acquired the rights of Budd Lewis and negotiated with the others in the property. Before Bill DuBay’s death in 2010, Bill left certain instructions for nephew Ben, and Ben has followed his uncle’s instructions to the T. The Rook character is operated and guided under Time Castle Books, a company that was formed by Bill DuBay in the late 2000s to revive the character; unfortunately, Bill’s health problems at the time interfered with Time Castle’s original efforts to do so.

According to Ben, “Bill and Budd Lewis had gotten together in early 2009 to collect the original stories and maybe even create some new stories. They hadn’t gotten around to publishing the new comics when Bill became ill in July—he found out July 2nd—and things changed rapidly as the disease took control. It was a very aggressive disease.” Bill passed away the following April.

“People don’t realize that the Rook magazine, because it was canceled with issue #14 or so, was actually Warren’s bestselling magazine of the period,” Ben says. “It outsold all the other Warren books: Creepy, Eerie, 1994, Vampirella, Famous Monsters of Filmland, all of them. When the Rook left Eerie for his own book, Eerie had a 17% decline of sales.

By 1982 when The Rook was canceled, Uncle Bill, who was the editor and main writer, had gotten interested in doing animation and he’d been attending school for several years during that time period. His heart just wasn’t in comics anymore. He was only editing the horror books intermittently at the time because Jim Warren literally had no one experienced enough to take over the daily grind.

When he finally left all the various editor jobs in 1982, The Rook was outselling all the other Warren titles. He just didn’t want that particular book to go on without him because he owned most of the character.

It’s About Time!

Cover of Dark Horse Presents #14 (Sept. 2015), featuring the Rook’s return.

Art by Paul Gulacy, colors by Jesus Aburto. © Time Castle Studios.

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“The Rook wasn’t just good because the Rook was in it, mind you, there was also great material there from Alex Toth, Lee Elias, Alfredo Alcala, and John Severin, to name just a few,” Ben continues. “Alcala is often underrated as an artist. I was always a big fan of his and he was at the top of his form with his work in The Rook magazine, which Uncle Bill scripted. Someone should really do a volume of his work on Voltar. There’s not only the work he did for The Rook, but there was also a story that he did in the Philippines, which appeared in 1977 in Magic Carpet #1 in the US, that is top notch also.” Ben’s completely right about Voltar, which debuted in the Philippines in 1963 (seven years before Conan the Barbarian), so there may actually be quite a few more Voltar stories that have never appeared in the US. Alfredo’s artwork is stunning on the two stories that were published here in the States.

Ben continues, “The revival of the Rook will be coming out through Dark Horse, which is also republishing the original appearances through the Eerie Archives volumes. In fact, Eerie Archives vol. 17 (2014) featured the first-ever complete appearance of Paul Gulacy’s 1980s Rook cover that originally decorated a reprint of some of his adventures in one of the Warren Presents issues. The original appearance of the cover was heavily edited, cutting out nearly all of the Battle of the Alamo background.”

The Rook revival was co-financed by Dark Horse and William B. DuBay LLC, with script by Steven Grant and art by the legendary Paul Gulacy. According to Ben, “the initial miniseries is being released by Dark Horse on October 23rd, 2015, which happens to be ‘Back to the Future’ Day, preceded by an introduction story appearing in Dark Horse’s anthology series Dark Horse Presents in August of 2015.

Gulacy also does the cover for that DHP issue. The first miniseries [runs] for four issues and we hope to continue to produce new miniseries after that.”

Ben also hopes that he and Dark Horse can do Rook Archives volumes to supplement the Creepy and Eerie Archives. Those adventures that didn’t appear in Eerie but which made their first appearance in the Rook magazine “will be collected from the original magazine, as well as the Eerie and Vampirella stories.

We’re going to be collecting the Harris version of the Rook as well, as they’re an important part of the Rook’s history. We’ve negotiated that with Harris.

It’s about 1400 pages of material to reprint, so we’re going to break it up into 120-page increments. There be approximately ten to 11 volumes. The new material will also be bundled up after the original publication, of course, as well. This is not going to be a ‘one-and-done’ series. That’s for sure.”

DuBay gives kudos to the new Rook creative team: “Working with Steven Grant, who is a brilliant creator, has been great. Steven is just an incredible human being, besides being a great writer. Paul’s cinematic approach to art was so necessary for this series. I know he was somewhat frustrated when we started because there were so many Victorian Age settings and costumes and the like right away and the research was tough for him right off the bat. Then—,” but let’s steven grant let Paul tell that, shall we? “The research is endless,” Gulacy says. “I’ve said this many times over the years and I still live by Courtesy Legendary Comics. the creed. An artist is only as good as his references. You don’t want to get things wrong. The prequel in Dark Horse Presents actually takes place during and at the time of the Trojan War, so there was no room for error. I’m a big fan of that time period so I was totally geeked. I used to play the characters from the Illiad as a kid. We would hand make our swords and shields. I’m all over that kind of research and I think we’ve captured the flavor and look of the times.”

The work on the initial miniseries began some two years ago when Grant and Gulacy came on board. Ben DuBay again: “It took nearly a year to bring the thing together. Steven [Grant] is just a very through writer. He allowed me to collaborate and integrate some of Uncle Bill’s ideas for the final version of the story, which was very important to the family. The end product just looks so good!”

The connection between Steven Grant and Paul Gulacy had actually begun even before Ben DuBay brought them the Rook. Steven recalls that “Paul and I had been talking about working together for a few years, but as is often the case in comics, schedules and directions never quite aligned. We finally threw caution to the winds and co-created an original project we’re currently

DuBay’s Baby (top) Story page 1 from DHP #14’s Rook tale. By Grant/Gulacy/ Aburto. (bottom) Gulacy’s The Rook #1 cover art, undressed. © Time Castle Studios.

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The Next Phase Courtesy of Ben DuBay, cover for the proposed Rook follow-up. © Time Castle Studios.

shopping around. In the meantime, Paul was in contact with Ben DuBay, who asked him if he’d be interested in working on a Rook revival. Paul suggested me as writer, then with Ben’s blessing asked me to join the project.” In turn, Paul recalls, “Ben contacted me last summer [2014] after he and Mike Richardson had hammered out the plans to put the Rook back in comics. Much of this was the result of Ben actually moving his family into the Portland, Oregon, area (where Dark Horse is located) from another state. Ben was one determined man.”

Back to Steven: “I remember the Rook pretty well from his Warren days and liked the series, and thought reviving and updating it would be an interesting challenge which would also give Paul and I the chance to work together.” A win/win for both.

“Part of the appeal for me was that our Rook isn’t the more mature Rook from the Warren Days,” according to Gulacy. “Our new guy is college age. This is a whole new take on the character.” When asked if the often-goofy humor that permeated the original tales would be reproduced in the new series, Steven Grant says, “That’s up to the audience to decide. I can’t copy Bill DuBay’s sense of humor, and doubt anyone really could, or that it’d be any good if they tried. My sense of humor is in it, and Paul’s. We’re both trying to have as much fun with the story as we can.”

Grant cautioned that much of the original supporting cast will not immediately appear. “Manners is a presence throughout the first arc, but he isn’t in it. Adam Dane is a big part of the story and Cat will arrive in the final issue of the miniseries. Qwarb gets a lot of play, but in roles the audience may not be expecting. Our version is both a continuation of the Warren run and a total disruption of it. Effectively we’re starting from scratch without actually having to start from scratch. It’s a little weird, but, you know, it is time travel.” Paul Gulacy guarantees that “the script is so out there that I have trouble attempting to describe what was done and where we’ve gone and are going with this character and storyline.

Steven would write a scene off-the-wall nuts and I would follow suit with the visuals. I can guarantee you’ve never seen anything like this.

I personally have never gone into this type of void before. I would caution the reader not to look too hard for the old Rook in this series. This is a brand-new take and approach. The emphasis is on content, with my art being only a vehicle to carry the premise or idea. The merging of Steven’s script and my visuals are two parts making up a new whole.”

Both members of the creative team hope the initial miniseries does well and will be followed by more Rook tales. “It’s a little soon to know when or whether there’ll be a second series, though I know it’s under discussion and I’ve already got notes towards it, with two different threads set up in the first mini,” Steven says. “We’re game if it all comes together. Hopefully they’ll want us back.” Paul echoes those comments: “Nothing is carved in stone, but I will say the wheels are turning. If Mike and Ben invite me to tag along on another series, I’m there for them.

It’s a fun character and you really can’t beat time-traveling as a backdrop.

We hope everyone enjoys our take on the new Rook.”

From Ben DuBay: “The first miniseries begins in October of 2015 and finishes up in January of 2016. We also hope to have the archive material begin in October 2015 or thereabouts. It may be November.

The original art has all been digitized. It looks beautiful. We just have to schedule it and tie up loose ends. The archives will be in the original black-and-white pages, but there will be all of the original covers, where were usually painted.

“In fact, the story of Paul’s first painting of the Rook, back in 1979 or so, is a tale worth telling in and of itself. We knew that the Rook stories were rapidly coming up for reprinting in the Eerie Archives and we really wanted to control the cover for that volume since it would be many readers’ first look at the Rook. In the past, Bill and I had discussed what he considered to be the best Rook cover, and he mentioned this painting

by Paul. After Bill passed I couldn’t find a visual reference to this painting nor even where it was originally printed or used! It was really fortunate that I finally located a reprint version of it online and recognized it. As it turned out, the original painting had sold at auction a while ago. I tracked

down the person who bought it and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. I then called Paul and reminded him that it had never been used in its entirety and asked if he minded if I used it for the Eerie Archives volume. Paul was cool with the idea.” Gulacy comments, “I’m really glad that fans got to finally see the entire image. To this day, I still can’t figure out why [the art director at the time] cropped it so severely.

Why ask me to paint an Alamo battle scene and then drop out all the Alamo background?” DuBay again: “It was with that request to reuse that painting that allowed me to pitch Paul as the artist for the new miniseries. He then told me that if there was any writer in the universe that he would work with on this character it would be Steven Grant.

I found Steven and set up a lunch. He had a lot of ideas that I liked and so he came on board. The rest is well, the future now, and soon to be history. Rather appropriate for a time-traveling character.”

Ben continues, “If this venture goes well, there are other properties of Uncle Bill’s that we’d like to expand on. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the story ‘Daddy and the Pie,’ which Alex Toth drew from a Bill DuBay script, but that is one that I would like to see developed more.

It was a beautiful story, probably the most beautiful story I’ve ever read in comics, and I’m so proud that my uncle wrote it. There are also such characters as the Goblin and the Protectors, which, like the Pie, are 100% controlled by the family.”

The writer of this article could not be more excited about all of this news.

Paul Gulacy’s artwork has been a favorite of mine since his earliest days on Master of Kung Fu in the mid-1970s. and Steven Grant is a familiar name from those days as well, having played a pivotal role in bringing Michael Moorcock’s character Elric into comics (some of those adventures are also being currently reprinted—via Titan Books, featuring Alter Ego’s Roy Thomas as the scripter) as well as creating Whisper, one of the more interesting of the early-1980s independent comics. The revival of the Rook sounds like a great idea, in the hands of real pros, and I, for one, will be clamoring for my own copies and a long future.

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Many of you probably wonder from time to time about the ratio of published vs. unpublished artwork from your favorite artist.

To be fair, it takes a true collector to identify all the published work from any artist (Ah! the pleasure of getting one’s hands on an obscure drawing or fanzine we missed years ago!), and it takes a truly dedicated fan to thoroughly track the rarest and unpublished work from any artist.

A few years ago, I [Nicolas Waldmann] was fortunate enough to “e-meet” Dave Lemieux, a truly dedicated fan of Paul Gulacy and also a key contributor behind the Gulacy website (www.gulacy.com). Dave’s research and our respective exchanges with Paul over the past few years, combined with online monitoring, form the basis of this article.

What follows is not exactly a checklist but rather references, stories, pictures, and anecdotes about the unpublished body of work from Paul Gulacy, world-renowned artist extraordinaire of Batman, Master of Kung Fu, and Six from Sirius, and co-creator of Marvel’s Coldblood, among many others.

A few caveats, though: Firstly, we define “unpublished art” as work not published in the way or medium it was intended to be published in.

As you will read, some of this unpublished artwork actually made it to print, but in a different format or publication. Secondly, “unpublished” may also that the concept or the art never actually came to life, so no visual is available.

THE 1970s: THE MASTER OF KUNG FU YEARS Quick facts: Paul Gulacy’s major contribution to the 1970s is dominated by his legendary run on Master of Kung Fu, and his early years horror stories published in Dracula Lives! and Vampire Tales.

Paul reports that he completed an unused horror story for Marvel in the 1970s that was written by Marv Wolfman that is probably in a file cabinet somewhere at Marvel.

An unused Count Dracula cover was produced by Paul for Dracula Lives! magazine by Marvel. The pencils to this cover were reproduced in Marvel Preview #24 in 1980.

In the mid-1970s, Paul completed a Woman in Space painting for Now Magazine (in the UK) that went unused, as it was deemed too sexy for the content material of the magazine.

Two pages were completed by Paul (in black and white) for a story called “Cupid” that was to have appeared in a Warren magazine.

Page 1 of this delightful story is featured in this article.

In the late ’70s, two pages were completed by Paul (in black and white) for a short story entitled “Circle of Life,” intended for use in either Epic Illustrated or one of the Warren magazines. Due to its sexual content, we’re unable to share that art in this magazine but wanted to mention it for the record.

The 1979 published cover painting to Warren Presents #2 by Gulacy, which features the Rook at the Alamo, eliminated all of the background details including the soldiers engaged in a fierce battle and the scene of the Alamo itself under siege. Only the Rook and his robot were featured in the published version by Warren. The entire painting was published, in color, in 2005 in the book Spies, Vixens and Masters of Kung Fu: The Art of Paul Gulacy.

On the topic of the Rook, Paul also completed a 20-page story for the first issue of The Rook magazine, published by Warren in 1979.

The story was written by Bill DuBay but was never used. It was later

Woman in Space From the mid-1970s, a painting produced by Paul Gulacy for the UK’s Now Magazine considered too risqué for publication. Most art in this article is courtesy of its writers. © the respective copyright holder.

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and

by D a v e L e m i e u x Nicolas Waldmann

Missing in Action (top left) A ’70s page from the uncompleted Warren story, “Cupid.” (top right) Paul’s ripped rendition of Ol’ Greenskin, produced for The Rampaging Hulk. (inset) Gulacy’s cover art to Warren Presents #2 (May 1979), depicting an Eastwood-esque Rook, was truncated from his original printing. (bottom) Paul’s completed artwork finally got its due in 2014 once Dark Horse published vol. 17 of the Eerie Archives.

redrawn by Lee Elias for use in that issue. The story was titled “The Original Master of Time.”

Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy had also planned a Shang-Chi/Nick Fury crossover in the 1970s for either the Master of Kung Fu series or a one-shot special. It was to have included an underwater battle scene and the villains Fu Manchu and the Yellow Claw.

It never occurred, but we can just imagine.

An extensive article by Dave, which included interviews with Moench and Gulacy, was featured in BACK ISSUE #26 under the “Greatest Stories Never Told” section.

Presented with this article is a 2015 Shang-Chi/Nick Fury commission done by Paul that may be the closest thing we’ll ever get to seeing this project materialize.

There also exists an unpublished Hulk oil painting done by Paul in 1978–1979 that was intended for The Rampaging Hulk magazine from Marvel Comics.

Paul and Doug were scheduled to do a series of stories featuring Elric of Menibone in Marvel’s black-and-white magazine Kull and the Barbarians.

Paul only completed a pinup of Elric prior to the magazine being canceled after issue #3 in 1975.

This pinup later appeared in Supergraphics’ Mediascene #23 (1977) and TwoMorrows’ Comic Book Artist #7 (2000), Comic Book Artist Collection vol. 3 (2005), and Alter Ego #92 (2010).

“Cupid” and Eerie © Warren Publishing. Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. The Rook TM & © Time Castle Studios.

TM & © Dynamite Entertainment.

1980s: THE SIX FROM SIRIUS YEARS Quick facts: Paul’s key contributions to comicbookdom in the ’80s were his creator-owned series Six from Sirius I and II (1984) and Slash Maraud (1988).

In 1989, he also completed a nine-part serial in Marvel Comics Presents featuring the cyborg Coldblood, a.k.a. Eric Savin, a version of which appeared in the film Iron Man 3 (2013).

An unused cover for the Warren magazine Vampirella exists (at least in pencil form), done by Paul in 1980. It featured the Cult of Chaos and is different from the Vampirella vs.

The Cult of Chaos TPB cover he produced in 1991 for Harris Comics (at left).

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An unpublished cover exists for Epic Illustrated #3 from 1980 which Paul did prior to his final painted cover that was used for the Marvel magazine.

The alternate version of the cover is quite spectacular and slightly risqué as it features the main female character wearing a futuristic helmet and a webbed, see-through uniform top. In the published cover, this main character appears to be a princess leading an expeditionary force of futuristic soldiers, while in the unpublished version she appears to be more of a “road warrior” type ready to engage in battle.

A Gulacy cover to the unpublished Codename: Danger #5 by Lodestone Publishing also exists for a story entitled “Snow Job,” which was to have been a take-off on Miami Vice. This comic was solicited in 1986 prior to Lodestone going out of business. The story for that issue was written by Robert Loren Fleming with art by Jerry Ordway.

Paul completed the cover to the unpublished Justice Machine #6 by Noble Comics in 1983. It was later reproduced in the Justice Machine Sourcebook

by Palladium Books in 1985 in black and white.

Interestingly, Mike Gustovich later recreated Gulacy’s cover with only slight changes and used it as the cover to Justice Machine #27 by Comico in 1989. [Editor’s note: I was the editor of Comico’s Justice Machine #27 and wasn’t aware of this until now!

Incidentally, Justice Machine will be the subject of an article next year in BACK ISSUE #94.]

Paul was originally scheduled to do the covers for the Sabre ongoing comic series by Eclipse Comics in 1982. As it turned out, he only did the covers to the first two issues (which reprinted the Sabre GN in color).

No reason was ever given for his not continuing to provide covers.

Paul completed the cover to the unpublished Black Diamond graphic novelette titled “From Brazil with Vengeance” by Americomics (scheduled for 1985). A color ad featuring the cover was included in Black Diamond #5 in 1984. This cover was also later scheduled to be the cover for Black Diamond #6, although that issue never came out, either.

The Gulacy cover to the Colt Special #1 by Americomics in 1985 was originally scheduled to be the cover to Black Diamond #7. The drawing of Black Diamond was much larger on the planned Black Diamond #7 cover, than what appeared on the Colt Special #1 cover. Black Diamond was then billed as a guest in the Colt Special.

Paul has a half-painted Coldblood cover in his studio which was intended for the unpublished Coldblood TPB. It was supposed to collect the complete Coldblood series from Marvel Comics Presents #26–35. Marvel canceled the project.

An uncompleted fantasy cover painting of a barbarian with a knife fighting off three lizard women exists that was intended for use in either an issue of Warren’s Creepy or Eerie. Paul reported that it was unused because the story was rejected

by Warren. At that time, Paul had the cover about one-third finished. A full pencil sketch version of the cover had been posted by a fan on the Internet in 2000.

Epic Times Two (top) Paul Gulacy’s alternate, unpublished version of the cover for Epic Illustrated #3 (Fall 1980) and (inset) its published version. (bottom) Cover for Noble Comics’ Justice Machine #6, penciled by Paul Gulacy and inked by Mike Gustovich. (inset) Gustovich repurposed Gulacy’s principal cover figure, with Rick Magyar inks, for Comico’s JM #27.

Epic Illustrated TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Justice Machine TM & © Mark Ellis.

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1990s: THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS

Diamonds in the Rough

Sequels to DC’s Slash Maraud series by DC Comics and Marvel’s Coldblood series (from Marvel Comics Presents) were both approved by their respective companies.

Unfortunately, they never materialized, because of other commitments and priorities

by Doug Moench and Paul, and due to the 1990s revival of the Deathlok series, which featured Marvel’s other cyborg character.

The sequel to Coldblood was planned as a four-issue prestige format series and it was tentatively scheduled for 1990.

(Coldblood did appear in a crossover in Deathlok #20 and 21, although the art was

by Tom Raney, J.J. Birch, and Walter McDaniel.)

In 1992, Dark Horse Comics solicited two different T-shirts with Paul Gulacy Terminator artwork that ended up never being produced. The images were to have included the cover of Terminator: Secondary Objectives #1 (on a black T-shirt) and the cover of the Terminator: Secondary Objectives TPB (on a white T-shirt). Solicitations were made for these items (in color) in 1992 in the Diamond Comics’ Previews book.

Also in 1992, Paul was scheduled to provide the artwork for a four-issue Trouble with Girls miniseries entitled “Night of the Lizard” for Epic/Marvel Comics. Due to other commitments, Paul stepped away.

Instead, Bret Blevins did the art and the series was published in 1993. Gerard Jones wrote the series.

In 1993, Paul co-created and drew the Sanction character with Steve Mattson and Kurt Busiek for the Comic Future Stars trading card series by Majestic Entertainment. Only one series of 100 trading cards was released along with 20+ promo cards. Sanction was supposed to be part of Series 2 or 3, which were never released (inset above).

In 1994, Paul completed the first two covers for a revival of Captain Victory from Topps Comics, prior to the company getting out of the comic business in 1998. The company was unhappy with the artist who supplied the interior pages and decided not to publish the issues.

An unused X-Men painting (complete with cover copy) to the 24th edition of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide featuring the original X-Men was produced by Paul in 1994 (inset left).

(top) Paul’s cover art for AC Comics’ unpublished Black Diamond #6. (inset) Gulacy’s art for Colt Special #1 was originally produced for the unpublished Black Diamond #7. (bottom) Gulacy cover planned for Topps Comics’ Captain Victory #1.

Black Diamond TM & © AC Comics. Captain Victory TM & © the Jack Kirby Estate.

Sanction trading card art © 1993 Majestic Entertainment.

TM & © Gemstone Publishing. X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Quick facts: Paul achieved higher mainstream visibility with his run on multiple Batman series, followed by Dark Horse’s James Bond, Terminator: Secondary Objectives, and Star Wars: Crimson Empire in the late ’90s. He also imprinted his mark on Eternal Warrior (Valiant Comics) and co-created The Grackle with Mike Baron in 1997.

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

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Spies and Tough Guys From the collection of Evans Lee, Paul Gulacy’s 2015 commission starring Shang-Chi, Nick Fury, Leiko Wu, and friends facing off against the insidious Fu Manchu. Please join us with a jaw-dropping “Wow!” as we gush over this masterpiece!

An unused Gulacy cover to Eternal Warrior #38 exists that features a collage of Gilad’s various incarnations throughout history. It was quite impressive. A color ad of this cover was featured in the Previews and Advance Comics solicitation books for coming comics in 1995. Why Valiant didn’t use this awesome cover is anybody’s guess.

In 1996, Paul and Doug were originally scheduled to do the first three issues of Killer Instinct for Acclaim Comics, based on the video game. It never happened.

The first issue was solicited in the December 1995 Previews, with a full-page ad.

While Paul and Doug did not do the series, Gulacy did do the cover and art for a 13-page story in the small-sized Killer Instinct Preview Edition #1 (produced

by Acclaim Comics and written by Mark Moretti). This mini-comic was only available with the Nintendo Power Magazine that shipped in January of 1996 and with the video game itself. To date, this is a rare collectible item, hard to find.

Characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

48 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

2000s: RETURNS TO OLD FAVORITES Quick facts: This decade will go down in comics history for the return of Paul Gulacy to Batman and Master of Kung Fu, and for his spectacular run on Catwoman. The Art of Paul Gulacy is published by Vanguard in 2005.

Paul did at least two unused CD jacket illustrations for hip hop artist Necro, going back to the ’90s.

Eventually, another drawing was picked up and used for the cover of Ill Bill’s What’s Wrong with Bill, released and produced by Necro’s production company (Psycho+Logical Records) in 2004.

Several completed T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents stories exist with Gulacy pencils and Terry Austin inks that were originally intended for the now-defunct Nemesis imprint of Harvey Comics in 1994 and subsequently for Omni Comix (in a magazine format) by Penthouse Comics in 1996. The first chapter of the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents story entitled “The Kaleningrad Incident” was published in Omni Comix #3 in 1995. Parts 2 and 3 were reportedly completed, along with issue #0, before the magazine ceased publication. Gulacy and Austin were reported to have done most of the art. James Lyle inked the final chapter (Part 3). A trade paperback of the entire run had also been planned. TwoMorrows’ T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Companion in 2005 did print the five unpublished Gulacy pages from issue #0 in black and white, with Terry Austin inks.

Paul had originally intended to produce a new cover for BACK ISSUE #26 (published in 2008), which would have featured Shang-Chi and Nick Fury in a scene from that unproduced story. However, an editorial decision was made to go with an unpublished Black Widow illustration done by Paul instead, due to the appearance of several male Marvel heroes (including Dr. Strange and Iron Man) on the previous covers of BI. Paul completed a 20-page story featuring Sabre that was scheduled to be in The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #10 from Dark Horse Comics in 2006. The series was canceled by Dark Horse before Doctor Fate TM & © DC Comics. issue #10 ever came out. Jimmy Palmiotti did the inks for this story.

Paul was scheduled to provide the art for a new Doctor Fate series in 2007 from DC Comics, written by Steve Gerber. However, due to an editorial decision, Paul did not do the interior art for the series. He had completed two covers, though (see inset).

The planned cover to issue #1 appeared as the cover to the Comic Shop News 2007 Spring Preview issue and in promotional ads from DC Comics and Previews for the series, but never on an actual Doctor Fate comic. The second cover was used as the cover to Countdown to Mystery #2, which featured both Doctor Fate and Eclipso. The Doctor Fate series ended up being canceled by DC Comics and replaced with an eight-issue limited series instead.

Paul completed the cover to Nowhere Man #0 prior to Virgin Comics going out of business in 2008 and being sold to Liquid Comics. Gulacy was also scheduled to produce the 16-page Nowhere Man #0, which would have been a preview to the series written by Marc Guggenheim and Hugh Jackman.

An alternate cover was also produced by Marko Djurdjevic. Nowhere Man #1 was finally published in January 2012 by Dynamite Comics, but without the Gulacy cover.

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When Marvel and DC launched full-size comics magazines in the 1970s to capture an important slice of the newsstand, second-tier publisher Charlton Comics was not about to be left behind. But Charlton was cautious. Its magazine line would consist of a mere three titles, all licensed from popular television series of the time: Space: 1999, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Emergency!

Charlton was no stranger to magazine publishing.

Founded in 1942 with the first “legitimate” issue of Hit Parader, Charlton Publications’ main business was, first and last, magazines (“legitimate” because Charlton’s cofounder, John Santangelo, had spent a year in jail for ignoring copyrights and publishing unsanctioned song-lyric magazines for years). A sampling of Charlton’s 1970s magazine titles shows a wide range of popular interests served: alongside the venerable Hit Parader was such fare as Real West, Official Karate, 911 Detective, Country Song Roundup, Skyjack, Sick (another MAD imitator), a bushel basketful of crossword puzzle and craft magazines, and much, much more—whatever was topical. Unique among comics publishers then and now, Charlton was entirely self-contained: content, editorial, production, printing, advertising, and distribution were all literally under one factory roof in small-town Derby, Connecticut.

Charlton’s comic-book line, begun in 1944 and developed slowly and haphazardly over time, existed primarily to keep the presses running three full shifts. Nicola Cuti, Charlton assistant comics editor and staff writer in the early ’70s, recalled this about the comics in his interview in Charlton Spotlight #8 (2014): “They were just fodder to keep the presses going. They only closed the presses twice a year to clean them, so they were running continuously, 24 hours a day, and they needed material.” Magazines poured from those presses in a continuous flood for decades. Comic books filled unscheduled press time.

Over time the comics became a bigger concern and an important source of revenue, with worldwide licensing and distribution. By 1976, Charlton was publishing nearly 50 bimonthly comic titles, with per-issue print runs

Michael Ambrose

in the hundreds of thousands. It held licenses from King Features, Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward Productions, and others, alongside its own original titles in a variety of genres.

The comics had always served a younger and perhaps less sophisticated comics audience, though by then discerning comics fans were following innovative, offbeat Charlton offerings like E-Man, The Phantom, and Doomsday+1 by fresh young talents such as Cuti, Joe Staton, John Byrne, Mike Zeck, Paul Kupperberg, and Don Newton.

Charlton didn’t pay much, but it was friendly to up-andcomers, and to say the least it offered wide latitude to flex creative muscles on the comics page.

Charlton’s TV Magazines Photorealistic painted covers grace these three premiere issues: Space: 1999 #1 (Nov. 1975), cover by Gray Morrow; The Six Million Dollar Man #1 (July 1976), cover by Neal Adams; and Emergency! #1 (July 1976), cover

by Adams. Unless otherwise noted, all scans for this article are courtesy of Michael Ambrose.

SPACE: 1999 So what could be more natural than to expand the regular comic-book line to a comics-magazine line?

According to Cuti, as interviewed in Comic Book Artist #12 (Mar. 2001), the reasoning was “basically, to try and reach a more adult audience. … The biggest buyers of comics were not the kids anymore, but college students.”

In mid-1975, executive editor George Wildman dispatched Cuti to New York to watch the premiere of an interesting new science-fiction TV show and report back on its potential for comics adaptation. “I’ll never forget the time I sent Nick to New York, to see this new show coming up called Space: 1999,” Wildman recalled in Comic Book Artist #12. “I said, ‘When you get done, tell me if this is as good as—or equal to—Star Trek.’ He comes back, ‘Oh, man, it was off the wall. It was wonderful.’ ” British science-fiction TV series Space: 1999 ran for two seasons, originally airing from 1975 to 1977 with no regular network syndication, which often made it difficult to find in local TV programming, depending on where in the country (or the world) one lived. Created and developed by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson (known for such innovative “Supermarionation” series as Fireball XL5, Supercar, and Thunderbirds and the live-action show UFO), the series was coproduced with British ITV and Italian RAI and starred Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, and Barry Morse Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

Space: 1999 TM & © ITV Studios.

Six Million Dollar Man TM & © Universal Studios.

Emergency! TM & © Mark VII Ltd. & Universal Studios.

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struggling to survive on Moonbase Alpha after the Moon has been thrown out of orbit by an explosion and flung into deep space. Charlton secured the rights for both a regular comic book and a magazine version of the show.

According to Cuti, “The way it worked was we had gotten the license from Hanna-Barbera, of all people—they were the go-betweens with ITC. … We got the license through H-B, because we had been doing H-B comics.”

The first magazine issue of Space: 1999 was cover-dated November 1975, a painted cover by Gray Morrow fronting its 68 pages of full-length blackand-white comics stories and text features. “George and I were discussing who we’d like to get to be the artists on the [comic-book version],” Cuti recalled.

Joe Staton, John Byrne, and Pat Boyette would handle art on the comic book, with scripts by Cuti and Byrne. “But for the magazine, we wanted someone who had more of an illustrator’s style.” Cuti recommended Gray Morrow. “I left Gray to do it all on his own, and whatever he couldn’t handle himself, if there was too much work, he would hand it to some other artist.” Morrow contributed a majority of the story art, including painted covers for its entire run, with Vicente Alcazar, Adolfo Buylla, Carlos Pino, Ed Davis, Dick Ayers, Carl Potts, Doug Beekman, and Jack Sparling handling the overflow. Scripts were by Cuti, Joe Gill, and Mike Pellowski. The magazine offered an entertaining mix of SF adventures with close illustrative likenesses of the show’s stars, features on the show’s premise and cast, and even science articles. Space: 1999 would run eight issues from November 1975 to October 1976, bimonthly for the first four issues and monthly beginning with #5 (July 1976). The Space: 1999 comic book ran for seven bimonthly issues from November 1975 to November 1976.

ONE CYBORG AND TWO RESCUE RANGERS With Space: 1999 an apparent sales success, Charlton looked toward two more hot TV properties to expand into its new comics magazine line: The Six Million Dollar Man and Emergency! The Six Million Dollar Man, based on the Martin Caidin novel Cyborg, was produced by Universal Television and aired on the ABC network for five highly popular seasons from 1974 to 1978. It starred Lee Majors as Col. Steve Austin, rebuilt as a cyborg with various bionic powers after a deadly test-plane crash, and Richard Anderson as his boss at superspy agency O.S.I. Midway in the series the Bionic Woman was introduced, played

by Lindsay Wagner, who eventually received her own spinoff show. Both characters would feature in Charlton comics adaptations.

Emergency! was the brainchild of cop TV show giants Jack Webb and R. A. Cinader (Dragnet, Adam-12) and was a coproduction of Webb’s Mark VII Limited and Universal Television. It starred Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe as paramedics attached to a Los Angeles fire station, a new concept in both TV and reality at the time. It ran from 1972 to 1977 and, like The Six Million Dollar Man, had high audience ratings. Acquiring comics licenses for both series was a real coup for Charlton. Production for both the comicbook and magazine versions of the series would be handled, at least initially,

by Neal Adams’ and Dick Giordano’s Continuity Associates.

Recollections differ on how Charlton and Continuity came together on the deal. Giordano and Wildman, in their interviews in Comic Book Artist #9 (Aug. 2000) and 12, respectively, said that Charlton approached Continuity; it was the other way around, according to Adams in his interview with Jerry Boyd elsewhere in this magazine and also according to Cuti in his CBA #12

Gonna Moonbase Like It’s 1999 (top) From Space: 1999 #1 (Nov. 1975), “Seeds of Doubt,” page 1, art by Gray Morrow, script by Joe Gill. (bottom) Original painted cover art for Space: 1999 #5 (July 1976)

by Gray Morrow. Original art courtesy Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com). (opposite) A quartet of Charlton mag painted covers, in original art form from the Heritage archives: (top left) The Six Million Dollar Man (SMDM) #3 (Nov. 1976), cover by Jack Sparling; SMDM #4 (Jan. 1977), cover by Earl Norem; (bottom left) SMDM #5 (May 1977), cover by Norem; and (bottom right) Emergency! #4 (Jan. 1977), cover by Norem.

Space: 1999 TM & © ITV Studios. Six Million Dollar Man TM & © Universal Studios.

Emergency! TM & © Mark VII Ltd. & Universal Studios.

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“We can rebuild him” (left) From The Six Million Dollar Man #1 (July 1976), “The Cyborg is Born,” page 5, art by Continuity Associates, script by Joe Gill. (right) From Emergency! #1 (July 1976), “The Paramedics,” page 1, art by Continuity Associates, script

by Joe Gill.

Six Million Dollar Man TM & © Universal Studios. Emergency! TM & © Mark VII Ltd. & Universal Studios.

interview. However the deal was arranged, all agree it was a great match from the start. “George called us about doing Six Million Dollar Man and Emergency! B&W magazines,” Giordano recalled. “They were licenses purchased from Universal, a pretty big deal for Charlton, because they weren’t in the habit of buying high-priced licensing, and we said, ‘Well, we can do it in our studio, but we have to get at least $100 a page,’ which for Charlton was four times what they were paying. Neal somehow got the higher rate through, and we said, ‘We’d have to get the artwork back.’ ” Half of the page rate went to the artists and half to the company. According to Wildman, that rate was the highest Charlton ever paid anybody.

Continuity packaged each issue, providing finished story pages from scripts by the same Space: 1999 writing team of Cuti, Gill, and Pellowski.

Individual art credits are difficult, perhaps impossible, to pin down, but besides Adams and Giordano, who went over all pages to firm up the art to house style, any of the following artists probably worked on the stories: Jack Abel, Vicente Alcazar, Steve Austin, Terry Austin, Joe Barney, Cary Bates, Joe Brozowski, Rick Bryant, Frank Cirocco, Karin Daugherty, Ed Davis, Joe DeEsposito, Bill Draut, Russ Heath, Mike Hinge, Klaus Janson, Mike Netzer, Bruce Patterson, Carl Potts, Mark Rice, Ralph Reese, Marshall Rogers, Josef Rubinstein, and Jack Sparling. Adams provided painted covers for the first two issues of each title. “There were a lot of young artists who were working at the studio,” Cuti recalled. “They did great jobs. Everything that came out of Continuity was quality stuff.”

Continuity packaged the first three issues of each title, through the November 1976 cover date. Then things suddenly changed: Continuity was out and the Sparling Studio was in. Again, memories differ about what happened. Giordano said, “George found out … that Charlton’s contract with Universal, which he’d just gotten a copy of, prohibited him from giving us back the artwork. He let us know immediately, because he knew that he was reneging on his part of the deal. And we just stopped right there, canceled the agreement, and sent him back the reference material. Right in the middle of whatever job we were on!”

Wildman recalled a different scenario. At one point he called Adams and told him he needed some sample pages for display at a promotional event. “The Old Man [publisher Santangelo] has personally asked for it.

And [Adams] said, ‘You tell the Old Man if he wants it, he can pay for it. $200 a page.’ I said, ‘Forget it!’ And the Old Man says, ‘Who does he think he is?’ and all that. ‘Screw them. Get two other artists.’ That’s right.

So I got Jack Sparling.”

Sparling’s studio took over the remainder of the run of each title, completing the unfinished material in the third issue of The Six Million

Dollar Man. Artist Win Mortimer, most famous as one of DC’s Superman illustrators, largely drew the fourth and final Emergency! Remaining covers for both titles were provided by Sparling and Earl Norem, the prolific cover illustrator of scores of men’s magazines in the 1950s and ’60s as well as of ’70s comics magazines for Marvel.

The Six Million Dollar Man would run a total of seven mostly bimonthly issues from July 1976 to November 1977. The comic-book version ran for four bimonthly issues from July to December 1976 and then five additional issues on an erratic schedule from October 1977 to June 1978; stories and art were handled by Gill, Staton, Demetrio Sánchez, Gómez, Boyette, and Fred Himes. (A Bionic Woman spinoff comic-book series, produced by the Sparling Studio, saw five issues during that same time frame.)

Emergency! magazine had four bimonthly issues from July 1976 to January 1977 and four bimonthly comic-book issues from June to December 1976. Gill, Byrne, Demetrio, Staton, and Sparling produced the comic book.

It’s impossible to know at this late date exactly why the magazines ended, but it’s easy to speculate. Charlton largely halted production of original comics material in September 1976, resuming with a much-diminished line consisting almost entirely of reprints late the following year. A handful of titles carried on for a few more months before petering out, and then Charlton lost its licenses from King Features, Hanna-Barbera, and others, probably due to nonproduction. Also, original broadcasts of the TV series on which the magazines were based also finished up around the same time.

Space: 1999, always on an erratic schedule, ended by 1978, as did The Six Million Dollar Man. Emergency! wound up its final season in mid-1977. All the shows would eventually go into syndicated reruns, but without the immediacy of a TV tie-in, the magazines had lost an essential element of popular appeal.

Charlton’s limited experiment with blackand-white comics magazines may have been brief and erratic, but the stories are a lot of fun, and the involvement of Continuity Associates certainly provided a valuable training ground for many young artists who would go on to brighter careers.

MICHAEL AMBROSE publishes Charlton Spotlight, an occasionally published fanzine devoted to the history of the Derby, CT, comic-book publisher. For more information, visit www.charltonspotlight.net.

52 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

In the 1970s, Neal Adams was everywhere. He blew my mind and millions of others’ with brilliant work on Batman, Green Lantern, Detective Comics, and The Avengers.

Those were just the superheroes! He also made time for deliriously atmospheric mystery/horror tales that showed up in Tower of Shadows, House of Mystery, Dracula Lives!, and The Witching Hour, among others. Over at Warren Publishing, his work could be found in Creepy and Eerie Annuals and new work in Vampirella.

By the mid-’70s, however, the comic world was sorely missing Neal. He’d gone into business with Dick Giordano, and the pair mentored a number of young talents at Continuity Studios. From there, Neal’s Charlton Comics period began with work on The Six Million Dollar Man and Emergency! Both magazines were based on popular TV shows. Neal graciously consented to a phone interview conducted on July 31, 2013.

– Jerry Boyd

by

Jerry Boyd

JERRY BOYD: Charlton paid the lowest rates for art.

NEAL ADAMS: Not for us! Not for us! [laughter] BOYD: Why did you do Emergency! for them? Did you drive over to the Derby offices?

ADAMS: No, we didn’t drive up for them.

We contacted them by phone and they paid us well. We let them know it was a top priority job for us and that we’d please them with the project and the finished work. It was a lucrative project, probably neal adams because it was studio-generated. Charlton paid “double-normal.” We got $100 a page for that magazine. I believe our artists got $50 a page and $50 went into the company. We had the two things— Six Million Dollar Man and Emergency! There were about 55 pages and we knocked our butts off to do a very good job. These were, as you know, hot properties.

BOYD: Did you ever watch the shows? If so, what were your impressions?

ADAMS: I would guess our family would watch them on and off. As an artist, we had to get the likenesses right.

We had the photos the show provided, however, but no one ever asked, “Hey, did you see The Six Million Dollar Man or Emergency! last night?” We had notes on the shows, photos to work from, and written scripts. They weren’t difficult to do.

BOYD: Did you want the Emergency! and Six Million Dollar Man projects to continue?

ADAMS: I thought they were good projects for the studio, our studio, but I don’t know how profitable it was for Charlton. Our freelance assistant guys were making income beyond their regular projects. Art-wise, it was good for them. These were their first jobs and their samples, really. They could show copies of these finished pages around as their work, so from that standpoint, I was happy for them that they’d done these books.

BOYD: Any recollections of Pat Boyette, Steve Ditko, Tom Sutton, Sanho Kim, or others from Charlton?

ADAMS: No, those guys were essentially out of there by the time our studio was going strong. Steve Ditko came to DC, I believe…

Bionic Catfight An impressive action cover prelim by Neal Adams for Charlton’s The Six Million Dollar Man #2 (Sept. 1976).

Six Million Dollar Man TM & © Universal Studios.

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Check Under the Hood?

Steve Austin (inset, in a pencil prelim, provided for us by the good people at Continuity) does a job on a car filled with kidnappers, from the cover of Charlton’s The Six Million Dollar Man #1 (July 1976). (bottom left) The original cover painting for that issue.

Six Million Dollar Man TM & © Universal Studios.

BOYD: Yes, he did, in the late 1960s, and did some stunning work on The Creeper and The Hawk and the Dove. He kept on at DC with work on the mystery/horror books and Plop!

ADAMS: When Dick [Giordano] migrated to DC, he brought along Steve Skeates, Pat Boyette … and Pat had been up at DC in the early ’70s, also. Also, DC got Denny O’Neil and a few others.

BOYD: Jim Aparo…

ADAMS: Jim Aparo became a Neal Adams clone! [laughter] When he started to work on Batman, he asked if he could do it in my style and I said, “Sure.” He took my approach and it worked out well. DC had a few other Neal Adams clones like Bob Brown and Irv Novick when it came to Batman. That lightened my workload, somewhat. [laughter] Pat Bastienne came to work at Continuity after being Dick’s assistant. Dick’s hearing was bad. Pat translated for him.

I learned to modulate my voice to a tempo where Dick could understand me.

BOYD: Dick Giordano was a good friend of yours. How did Continuity get started? And how did you and Dick meet?

ADAMS: Continuity got started by DC letting me know that my coming in every day wasn’t a good idea.

BOYD: Really? Why was that?

ADAMS: I was making a lot of changes—revolutionary changes, and once they got on their feet and I established myself, I worked at other places. One was the I.F. Studio.

They suggested I take over a large space they had that wasn’t filled. Dick was on the outs with Carmine Infantino and Carmine was trying to edge him out.

Dick knew it wasn’t good and that the door was slowly being shut. He told me he had a space and we had, or ended with, a loose and comfortable studio.

It was a pretty good arrangement, as it turned out. The rent was reasonable and eventually the I.F. people left and we maintained that studio and it got bigger and more profitable over time.

BOYD: What was the selection process like regarding taking on clients?

ADAMS: We went out begging! [laughter] And we hoped businesses would give us work. Fortunately, we had client work at comics [companies]. Dick would get up early, at 4 o’clock, and he’d work at his schedule. We’d knock ourselves out and other businesses would see our stuff and more work would come in.

He’d keep his eyes open for new clients. We’d do storyboards, illustrations, etc. Our profits went like this: 50% went to the company and rent and 50% went to the freelancers.

BOYD: How many artists or combined personnel did you employ at Continuity?

Continuity, 1976 Neal Adams (seated) does some instruction for Continuity’s (left to right) Frank Cirocco, Gary Winnick, Brent Anderson, and Carl Potts.

Photo provided by Frank Cirocco.

54 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

ADAMS: None, actually. [laughter] Well, there was Pat, Dick’s secretary. We Neal Nails These Likenesses rented desks for $50 a month. Or we didn’t rent space and the freelancers (top) Adams produced these headshots of actors would do all of their work from home. It was a good system. The freelancers could meet, learn from each other, and so on. Pat was the one who had to Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe for cover be there to take phone calls, so our money went to her salary and Photostat graphics for Charlton’s Emergency! comic book machines, paper, that sort of thing.

BOYD: I know some of the fine talents that came out of Continuity. Could you give companion series to the B&W magazine. (bottom) A lot us a short list of names? of Continuity talents worked on The Six Million Dollar ADAMS: We had a lot. Let’s see … Ralph Reese, Carl Potts, Jack Abel, Ed Davis, Joe DeEsposito, Bill Draut, Cary Bates, Jack Sparling, Mike Hinge, Joe Barney, Man magazine. This is page 10 from 1976’s issue #2, Russ Heath, Vicente Alcazar, Joe Rubinstein, Mike Netzer for a short time.

Marshall Rogers was there for a little while. And lots of visitors—sometimes “Witch Hunt for an Alien.” Script by Mike Pellowski, we couldn’t tell the visitors from the freelancers. Our place was a hangout, also. pencils by Neal Adams and Carl Potts, and inks by BOYD: Dick took on a full-time editing post for DC. How did that affect Continuity?

Russ Heath, Terry Austin, Giordano, and Adams.

ADAMS: He was never at DC and Continuity at the same time. He was at Emergency! TM & © Mark VII Ltd. & Universal Studios. Six Million Dollar Man TM & DC before Continuity and then he returned after leaving DC. So there were © Universal Studios. no negative effects on Continuity at all.

Dick was very good at following his work schedule. He could put in a full day at Continuity or DC and then work on an independent project if he had to.

BOYD: What’s the best stuff your studio did, in your opinion?

ADAMS: Most of the stuff we did wasn’t comics. We did a ton of work for advertising agencies. New York had all the big ad agencies and we worked for a number of them. We did stuff for Pan-Am—drawings in black and white.

I did the high-end stuff, generally. Dick did comics and comps. There were 100 different ad agencies, offhand, that we worked for: KFC, Raisinets—all the agencies in the city. Superman vs. Muhammad Ali came out during the time in the studio. After that one, I did very little in comics for a while. In the 1980s, we put out comics like Skateman, CyberRad, Crazyman, Ms. Mystic, Shaman, Megalith, and others. We will be coming out with those titles again.

BOYD: I’d like to see them again.

ADAMS: People ask us about those Continuity titles from time to time, and I’ve assured them that we’ll be getting those books out again soon. [Editor’s note: BACK ISSUE has coverage of Continuity’s superheroes in the works— watch for an announcement soon!]

BOYD: In the late ’70s, you did some stunning covers for DC’s House of Mystery, The Superman Family, and so on. DC and Marvel really missed out by not having dick giordano interior work by you.

ADAMS: But comics became a drain. I put a lot into my work at DC and Marvel. It’s barely worth it. Never did make a lot of money on them, but it’s good now that the page rates have gotten much better.

BOYD: Did you and Dick fraternize much outside of the office? If so, what kinds of things did you and your families do together?

ADAMS: Not really. I was a city boy and my family lived in the Bronx.

Dick lived in Connecticut. You, meaning Dick, got on the train, got off the train, ate, went to bed, that was your day in Connecticut. It was probably the same for me going to the Bronx, but I never looked at it that way. [laughter] We did get up to his home once, I recall. Essentially, we went out to dinner, played ping pong, and generally had a nice time. Dick was a morning guy and I was a night guy. We got along well, of course, but we had different styles and separate lives.

BOYD: How would you sum up the early years at Continuity? What else would you like to say about Dick Giordano?

ADAMS: Those years were, incidentally, a lot of fun as I.F. Studio moved out.

It was a fun place and a good place for people to learn. The back of the studio didn’t have any windows, so the rent came out to $1200 a month like that. It seemed like a business but it didn’t seem like a business.

Things were loose and comfortable. Originals got returned, rates got better, and between my time at DC and Continuity, I got some big changes in the way freelancers were treated. Again, it was a hangout for artists—new and established talents. The DC offices closed at 5:30 and we became the hangout for talent. Freelancers wanted to hang out, Continuity stayed open all night! [laughter] We don’t do that no mo’!

BOYD: Anything else to add about Charlton Comics great Dick Giordano?

ADAMS: I like to think I’m a nice guy. Dick was always a nice guy. Dick was a good guy. It’s amazing that we were able to keep Continuity going after he passed, but I believe he generated such an amazing warmth over the years that people kept getting in touch with us and wanted to continue to work with us.

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Contributor’s note: Although he was raised and studied art in San Jose, California, Frank Cirocco began his professional career at Continuity Studios in New York in 1976. The following year he returned to California to open an art studio of his own, and he has worked as a freelance illustrator and art director ever since. His credits include fantasy-themed limited-edition art prints and portfolios, cover art for Marvel Comics, the co-creation of Marvel/Epic’s Alien Legion, art director of Rocket Science Games, and the co-creation of Lightsource Studios, a premiere commercial art house that has handled illustration, design, and animation assignments for a variety of companies including Dreamworks, Disney, LucasArts, Marvel Comics, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Electronic Arts, LeapFrog, Mattel, and Universal Studios.

– Jerry Boyd I was working at Continuity Associates during most of 1976. It was a pretty magical time for this 20-year-old aspiring artist and comic fan, “breaking into the business” by working for not one, but two of his childhood idols, Neal Adams and Dick Giordano. Although I knew a few of the other guys working there, Carl Potts was my main connection to the studio. He would also later become my “inside man” to Marvel Comics.

Wish I had more Charlton stories for you, but I can’t recall any specifics. Some of the very first projects I worked on for Neal were for the Peter Pan [Power] Records of Star Trek and The Six Million Dollar Man, where we inked some backgrounds on his pages. I learned how to control AD Markers by coloring storyboard and motion boards for clients like Panasonic, Purina, and Minute Maid. We basically filled in wherever Neal needed us and supplemented that work by doing our own comic-book gigs.

We worked hard and played hard at Continuity. There were occasionally times we had to pull all-nighters to meet a deadline, and creative guys need creative ways to blow off steam. As a result, lots of sophomoric antics happened around the office on an almost daily basis. Here’s a few of the more memorable instances I recall.

The Pinkowski Sketchbook: Jim Pinkowski was a friend and former work colleague of mine at Comics & Comix in San Jose. He took the opportunity to come out and visit during my tenure at Continuity so he could meet Neal. He was a huge Neal Adams fan and he had gathered together “All Things Adams” into a large, heavy, black sketchbook, which he decided to bring out and share with Neal.

This weighty volume had everything in it: magazine ads, newspaper articles, photos, artwork, and much, much more. You name it, if it was about Neal and was published somewhere, Jim had added it to his voluminous tribute book.

One day, Sergio Aragonés was visiting the Continuity offices, and he asked about the big book lying on top of some flat files.

Jim happened to be out, grabbing a bite of lunch, so we showed Sergio the book and explained what it was. I recall Neal was working at his drawing board in the front room, with the phone held between his ear and shoulder (as he often did), talking to some client as he worked.

Sergio began turning the pages of the book and was immediately fascinated. The deeper he got into the book, the more he couldn’t believe the sheer volume of info about Neal that Jim had collected.

He started muttering things aloud as he flipped past each new page, with ever-widening eyes.

“Theez is amazing…”

“Extraordinary…”

“I have never seen such hero worship in my life…”

Finally, when Sergio had finished looking through Jim’s book, he turned to us with a finger pointing skyward and shouted, “Wait!

Theez book is not yet complete!” He rushed into the front room and

TM

by

Frank Cirocco

On the Job Frank Cirocco at his Continuity workplace in 1976. We thank Frank for his photo scans from that period.

grabbed a pair of scissors from a nearby desk. While Neal was still chatting on the phone with his back to the action, Sergio crept up behind him and actually snipped a lock of his hair. I swear, he really did.

Neal half turned in a “WTF!” stance for a second, but he couldn’t interrupt his conversation and just continued talking.

Sergio took the prize over to Jim’s sketchbook and taped it onto a blank page in the back. He then proceeded to draw an awesome cartoon of himself sneaking up behind Neal and committing the crime.

He inscribed the page: “Jim, now your book is complete! Regards, Sergio Aragonés.” When Jim returned from lunch, Sergio was gone like a thief in the night, but Jim was elated at the new entry in his sketchbook. God only knows what he did with Neal’s DNA… The Inkblot Prank: There was an old practical joke that hung on the wall at Continuity. It was a solid inkblot made from black acrylic paint. People would place it on a piece of art someone was working on to scare them into thinking ink had been spilled on their work.

By the time I got to Continuity, it was old hat and no longer got the reaction desired. Mike Nasser (now Netzer) found a way to breathe new life into the prank.

One evening after Neal had left for the day, Nasser took an in-progress comic page (might have been from the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali book) from Neal’s table and copied it perfectly, redrawing every single crosshatch. I swear, you couldn’t tell the difference between Neal’s pencils and Mike’s. Next, he took the fake inkblot and traced its shape exactly over his pencils, then filled the inkblot shape in with black ink. Finally, he took the bogus page, put it on Neal’s drawing table, and positioned the fake acrylic inkblot perfectly on top of the other inkblot.

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When Neal came in the next morning we made sure we were all there to witness his reaction. At first, he looked down at the “old inkblot gag” and snickered, “Ha, ha, real funny…” But when he lifted the fake inkblot off his page and saw his beautiful pencils really did have an inkblot on them, he freaked.

I believe more than a few expletives issued forth, with Mike howling in the background. He spun around and snapped, “What did you do, Nasser?!”

Mike gleefully produced Neal’s real page, safe and sound, and described what he had done. Neal was impressed with the effort Nasser went through just to get a rise out of him. We all certainly thought it was worth it.

Shaving Cream Fight of the Century: There was a period of time that shaving-cream pranks were getting popular around the office. Because of this, sometimes there were a number of cans of shaving cream lying around. For reasons that escape me, Neal and Mike Nasser got into a friendly argument one day. The verbal barbs escalated back and forth, until one of them grabbed a can of shaving cream and let the other have it.

In a flash, both of them were armed and squirting shaving cream all over each other. I remember T-squares were grabbed and used as “swords” in the battle, garbage can lids as shields. The rest of us cleared out of the room as the two of them just went nuts.

Shaving cream was flying everywhere.

About 15 minutes into this episode, both Neal and Mike were literally covered with shaving cream. It looked as if we had constructed two snowmen in the front office. Right at this moment, the elevator door opens and out steps a fan from I believe it was Argentina who had set up a meeting with Neal that Neal had completely forgotten about. Apparently, when it came to adoring Neal Adams, this guy was the South American version of Jim Pinkowski. Neal looks at the wide-eyed fan and turns to us without missing a beat and says, “Give this man a tour while I go clean up.”

He walks past the stupefied visitor and into the bathroom.

I suppose we told the fan something like Neal was “off his meds” that day.

Continuity Matters (top) Neal Adams and Frank Cirocco in 1976. Frank dug up the picture for this magazine and he has our thanks. (inset) From the files of Frank Cirocco, here’s an office memo from Dick Giordano to Frank. (bottom) Frank penciled this nice illo of Red Sonja in the ’70s, which was inked by Neal.

Red Sonja © Dynamite Entertainment.

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by

John K.

When thinking about Marvel’s Epic Illustrated (1980–1986), what immediately comes to mind is the staggeringly innovative and daring art boasted by this magazine. While this phenomenal publication featured Kirk seasoned pros’ and emerging artists’ work, it included new writers, novel perspectives on existing characters from the Marvel stable, daring new story models, and topics that would have been impossible to cover under the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority.

Epic was a novel approach to graphic storytelling that required immense vision and imaginative conceptual ability in a framework that was light-years ahead of its time. At the time, Marvel editorin-chief Jim Shooter entrusted the care of this magazine to the person who epitomized these attributes: Archie Goodwin (1937–1998).

Looking at the formulation of this magazine lends not only insight into the creative abilities of this widely venerated editor and writer, but also archie goodwin into the wide range of fantastic talents that were at Marvel’s disposal during this time in the publisher’s history.

We need to visit each of these issues in order to gain a sense of the odyssey that Goodwin provided for Epic’s readers, and in this article I will survey some of the high points from each issue. But first, we need to understand a bit of Archie Goodwin’s vision.

In the March 1980 edition of Comics Feature, Goodwin was featured in an interview about Epic Illustrated. The first question involved how Epic would be different from the European graphic album Heavy Metal. Goodwin responded by pointing out how important it was that the stories reflected the same level of quality as the art. While Goodwin wanted Epic to be “visually spectacular,” there was a mix of storytelling in the magazine that was either straightforward serial stories or stories that were “wilder, in terms of layout and page design.” In short, Epic was designed to stand out from the competition and present a North American comicreading audience with something that had never really been seen before in the marketplace.

AN EPIC FIRST ISSUE Issue #1 (Spring 1980) certainly delivers with its swordand-sorcery cover, by legendary artist Frank Frazetta, featuring a squadron of heavily armed and well-hewed Roman Legionnaires ready for combat. As an opening shot in the first salvo that was to be Epic’s five-year barrage, Frazetta’s cover completely captures the imaginations of fantasy readers in the comic-reading audience.

“The Answer,” a tale of the Silver Surfer, is the first story we read in this issue, featuring art by John Buscema and story by Stan Lee himself, who also gives his endorsement of Marvel’s new experiment in an

“A New Experience” Epic Illustrated #1 (Spring 1980). Cover by Frank Frazetta. ’Nuff said!

Epic Illustrated TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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editorial titled “The Next Plateau.” Lee lauds the new publication as a “presager of a new form of publishing, a new form of art … [that] will lead us along the fascinating trail of fantasy and saga, perhaps further than we have ever gone before.” It is in this spirit that “The Answer” is a tale in which the Surfer puts the notion of the mysteries of the universe to the near-omnipotent Galactus. What is the answer? In Galactus’ mind, there is none, and the Surfer must discover this for himself.

Though the story is short, but compelling, as well as daring, to invite thought on as serious a notion as the existence of God and His relationship to the universe, we also see spectacular colorization in the form of the full-color offset process that was one of Goodwin’s ambitions for the magazine. The Silver Surfer has a luster in his reflective surface that rarely received justice prior to this rendition because of the limitation of typical four-color comics, and the wonders of space are revealed in a similar rich variety of color. In short, this story truly elevates the medium, making it simply wonderful to behold. Looking at the twopage spread on pages 14 and 15 gives one a sense of the artistry that was involved in the creation of this magazine.

Wendy Pini’s “Homespun” follows the Surfer’s discovery of the eternal question. Elfquest fans will recognize the fairy-like preservers in this rich but short tale. It is a story that would roughly coincide with the appearance of these tiny creatures in WaRP Graphics’ Elfquest and would hint at what their purpose was during the captivity stage in the story when the Wolfriders and their allies would discover the Blue Mountain. This story is unique from the contemporary Elfquest stories in that it is colorized, in contrast to the typical black-and-white format that Wendy and husband Richard Pini were putting out at the time. It also shows how diverse Epic was in its pursuit of stories that were outside of the typical Marvel Universe. [Editor’s note: For a detailed look at Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest saga, see BACK ISSUE #75.]

The first three chapters of Jim Starlin’s Metamorphosis Odyssey are featured in Epic Illustrated #1 as well. We are introduced to Aknaton, the Zygoteans, Za, and Juliet in a story of … epic proportions and stellar art without parallel.

In an interview with the author of this article, Jim Starlin recounts some of the process in producing such highquality work for this magazine: “Well, I started off drawing the series on gray paper, using that as the paintings mid ground. The darks were usually ink, with an occasional pencil thrown in.

The highlights were white paint with an occasional pastel being used. When we switched to full-color, I used various colored boards to work on and all sorts of mediums were used to illustrate the page: everything from pen and paint to colored tape.”

Starlin had the freedom to create stories for Epic in the way he wanted to. This was the atmosphere that Archie Goodwin was attempting to create for this magazine; by allowing creators more freedom outside of the typical Marvel “house style,” creators cared more about the work

“The Answer” (top) Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com), an original art page to the Silver Surfer story from Epic Illustrated #1.

By Stan Lee, John Buscema, and Rudy Nebres. (bottom) A two-page spread from the tale, with colors by Rick Veitch.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

60 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

they were putting into the magazine. Though smaller companies were experimenting with creator-owned product, Marvel, under Epic and Goodwin’s direction, was the first major company to try it. This approach was not lost on creators like Starlin, who respected Goodwin’s direction.

“Archie was, by far, the most professional editor I ever worked with,” Starlin says. “He knew if it wasn’t broke, don’t go bothering to fix it. The man had a great eye for the construction of a story, being a terrific writer himself. When I turned in a job, I knew if I didn’t hear anything from him afterwards, I’d done okay. If there was a problem, he’d present it to me, usually in a onesentence memo, and I’d know exactly what needed to be fixed. Straightforward, that was Archie.”

This issue also features work by Arthur Suydam, Ernie Colón, and Carl Potts.

Additionally, the inclusion of an excerpt from the fantasy novel Elfspire by John Pocsik (Ariel Press) is a fundamental change in the way comic readers traditionally viewed their fiction. More text and less comic frames for four pages out of the 98-page magazine is a welcome break and shifts the pace of reading for the audience.

YEAR ONE CONTINUES

of Aknaton’s weapon—his sword—and it reveals new abilities its creator did not foresee. It is an awkward process maintaining the pace of a serial, especially a rich story like Metamorphosis Odyssey, but there is an inherent power in Starlin’s story that makes its richness and details a perfect choice for Epic’s eclectic story format.

Originally, Metamorphosis Odyssey was conceived to be published in eight-page monthly chapters. Since Epic’s first year run was quarterly, Archie Goodwin made the decision to run the first three chapters in the first issue and end the serials where he liked. Clearly it was a story that fit perfectly within the “spectacular” format the editor had envisioned for the magazine.

This issue is also supplemented by stories by Goodwin himself. The three-page “Forest Magic,” illustrated by George Bush, and the five-page “Worker in the City,” illustrated by Terry Lindall, are featured.

The former story has a Brothers Grimm vibe to it in which the daughter of a witch plots the downfall of an aristocrat’s castle. The latter story also has a somewhat fable-like flavor in which the symbiosis between a city and its population is illustrated.

The Winter edition of Epic (#4) marks the last issue for 1980—and

An Epic Saga Begins Epic #1 also launched Jim Starlin’s celebrated Metamorphosis Odyssey. © Jim Starlin.

Issue #2 sees the beginning of Roy jim starlin Thomas’ adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s Almuric, with art by Tim Photo by Pat Loika.

Conrad. Howard’s pulp-fiction tale of an adventurer transported to another world to find fortune and glory is a perfect choice for the new magazine. As Conan was already featured in his own magazine and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter, Warlord of Mars in his own comic, this was a chance for a lesser-known REH character to receive his due recognition in a new and unique format.

Next appeared Marv Wolfman’s “Hope’s End,” a two-page short prose piece about the resilience of hope.

An untraditional six-paragraph piece by a comic writer, it had a place within Epic.

“Metamorphosis Odyssey” also continues in issue #2.

At this point, Aknaton returns to the planet where he created life to select a representative to assist him in his plan to rid the galaxy of the Zygotean evil. This is Whis’Par— the chosen one. Her role in this grand adventure would be revealed in further installments of the serial.

One of my favorite Epic stories appears in this issue: “Tarn’s World,” drawn by Robert Wakelin and written

by Archie Goodwin. In this story, we see the struggle between the dreamer and his inability to deal with the mundaneness of his own reality. It takes the intervention of the Reality Police to snap poor Tarn out of his fantasy world of myth and legend and return him to his regular life of suburban living—an excellent choice of story material that would appeal to the audience of Epic, a good many whom would be of the same mindset themselves.

The Autumn issue of Epic (#3) sees continuations of both Roy Thomas’ adaption of Alumric and Starlin’s Metamorphosis Odyssey. In Almuric, Esau Cairn has established himself as a man of Kosh, and Howard’s story really comes to life. Cairn’s status as a denizen of this new world gives him the freedom to interact with it more fully and to assume a mantle of leadership, very much in the same way as Howard’s other creation, but seeing this told in a comic format is a completely new experience.

Starlin’s Aknaton encounters Byfrexia’s first son, namely Vanth Dreadstar, in this issue, and we finally meet the Cold Man in all his power and fury. For the first time, this story is in full color. Vanth shows his mastery

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Wonders Three Editor Archie Goodwin pulled out all the stops in selecting cover artists for Epic Illustrated. (left) Issue #2 (Summer 1980), cover by Richard Corben. (center) Michael Wm. Kaluta’s 1977 painting “In the Twinkling of an Eye,” as the cover of Epic #4 (Winter 1980). (right) Greg and Tim Hildebrandt’s cover for Epic #5 (Apr. 1981).

Epic Illustrated TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Art © their respective artists.

the end of its quarterly run. After this year, editor FANTASY MASTERPIECES Goodwin and EIC Shooter agreed to switch the frequency …And beautiful pictures were what Goodwin provided. of the magazine to six times a year. This intensified The fifth issue (Apr. 1981) sees the inclusion of art by publishing deadlines and forced a greater deal of and an exclusive interview with the Brothers Hildebrandt. pressure on Goodwin and his assistant editor, Jo Duffy, Anyone who read fantasy in the early ’80s could not have but both were eager and up to the task. failed to recognize the amazing art found on the cover of This issue sees the continuation of Jim Starlin’s fantasy novels like Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara or Metamorphosis Odyssey and a double shot of Roy the amazing Tolkien calendar of 1976.

Thomas’ adaptation: the Elric of Melniboné saga by The June 1981 issue (#6) sees a continuation of the Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard’s Almuric.

Earth–Kyba War by Ellison, again with Steacy art. Starlin This was a hallmark of Epic: Both new artists and continues to delight us with Vanth Dreadstar’s exploits new science-fiction/fantasy works were included along in Metamorphosis: Odyssey as the wizard Aknaton begins with classic works of such high caliber that there was to doubt his own great endeavor. a sense of comparison. If the works of Howard and However, what is really striking about Epic Illustrated Moorcock were generally accepted to be the standard #6 is the amazing cover by Neal Adams, depicting a that Epic was looking to portray, as interpreted by space heroine battling for her life. This gives readers a contemporary comics writers and artists like chance to see a different side of Adams’ work.

Thomas and P. Craig Russell, then clearly Rather than a Batman or other superhero Jim Starlin was also in the same league. spread, here is a science-fiction image This was a subtle, yet telling level of dynamically and beautifully rendered in quality that Epic—and Goodwin—would a way that Goodwin wanted for Epic. come to be known for.

The seventh issue (Aug. 1981) allows Not to be outdone, Harlan us to see more of Neal Adams’ original Ellison’s Sleeping Dogs, chronicling work as well as an incredible cover by the Earth–Kyba War, is a wonderful Barry Windsor-Smith. Goodwin also inclusion in this issue as well. The classic conducts a 15-page interview with this science-fiction author’s work, visualized legendary artist titled “Vision and Quest:

by Ken Steacy in a combination The Art of Barry Windsor-Smith.” comic/prose format, also showcases Neal Adams’ Holocaust shows us the flexibility of both Goodwin’s tumultuous periods of American vision and what the magazine could Society: Vietnam, the expansion of the jo duffy do in presenting ways to appreciate American frontier, the ’60s drug culturethe genre. scene, in a way of exploring an aspect Jo Duffy recounts some of Goodwin’s perspective in of the human condition. Does humanity deserve the right to the early days of Epic: claim the stars if it hasn’t learned how to behave on Earth?

“Archie had a background in magazine publishing, Howard Chaykin provides the cover for Epic coming from Warren [Publishing] and Redbook. So he Illustrated #8 (Oct. 1981). Filled with images of opulence wasn’t just into superheroes … he was well experienced and decadence, this is Chaykin at his finest. and also had a great appreciation of Heavy Metal and Additionally, Charles Vess is featured in this issue with the European comics. [Editor] Rick Marschall didn’t last a look at his fantasy series, Children of the Stars, a true-toat Marvel, so Archie became the guy, and when the form fantasy tale that involves Celtic magic, lore, and magazine went to six issues, he needed one other otherworldly gods who seek to cross the barriers between person and he recruited me. I could not have been the world and their realms. It would not be the last time happier. Archie was an artist before he was a writer … Vess’ spectacular work would be featured in this magazine. he was a visual guy. He was looking for fine art and Starlin’s penultimate episode of Metamorphosis Odyssey beautifully rendered science fiction and fantasy. He continues in this issue; the location of the Infinity Horn is wanted the beautiful pictures.” reached by the heroes and they prepare to end the universe.

62 • BACK ISSUE • Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

John Bolton showcases his talent in a short piece titled The Llehs.

John demonstrates his love of painted panels.

Bolton received a great deal of recognition for his penciling skills.

Chris Claremont recounts that Bolton was inspired by real life. The characters in his stories were modeled after actual people and had an amazing level of accuracy. Even with brush work, Bolton’s ability to create believable and incredibly detailed characters was astounding.

“John would make real visualizations,” Claremont says. “He would find real skeletal structures, real features, real visualizations. You would look at a character on a page and think: ‘That’s cool. I’ve seen someone like that.’ And throw in crackerjack storytelling. You know, here’s a moment: in the first chapter of Marada, when she’s rescued and taken up north [to Donal’s castle]. She wakes from her own nightmare. Donal comes in and then Arionrhod comes in … and there’s this itty-bitty panel—in a multi-panel page. She’s standing in a doorway—she’s like this ten-yearold little girl, and she’s rubbing her eyes like she’s just woken up, and I just realized, ‘Holy cow! Not only is she rubbing her eyes, but she’s pigeon-toed!’ And … to me, as a reader and a writer, I look at that and think, ‘Oh, my God. That’s wonderful!’ It is a real moment. Anybody who has been 12 or has a daughter who was 12 can look at that and say, ‘Holy cow! I’ve seen someone in that pose. That’s a pose from life!’

And to me that takes on what everyone is used to thinking, ‘Well, it’s fantasy; it should be women with big hooters and guys with big guy hooters.’ It’s all cliché, but this is a moment of realism. If you look at this girl and think, ‘She reminds me of a real person—she might be a real person,’ then the events of the story can be that ever more real.”

In terms of non-fiction offerings, in this issue, Jo Duffy reviews Phillip Jose Farmer’s The Magic Labyrinth, Dennis O’Neil looks over the year’s assemblage of fantasy films, and Steven Grant looks at what was happening on the gaming front. Of course, this was when gaming meant Dungeons & Dragons, strategy board games, and other such sci-fi/fantasy-themed roundtable pursuits dominantly found in nerd culture of the 1980s. It is remarkable to note that this was one of the first incidences when science fiction and fantasy also became associated with gaming, creating a foundation of a culture that would survive well after the magazine. Comics readers became associated with highly active imaginations.

Issue #9 (Dec. 1981) sees the conclusion of Metamorphosis Odyssey.

In his amazing work, Starlin effectively creates and destroys not only the Earth but an entire universe to make way for another one. It is an amazing literary feat that could have only been included in a magazine like Epic. Epic in nature as well as in form, this is a story with the hallmarks of the content Archie Goodwin wanted to feature.

There is a lot of rage in this story. In an interview following the final installment in Epic, Starlin recounted that he tried to “bring out some stuff” that was in his psyche from the Vietnam War. At the end of the saga, Dreadstar discovers that not only has he destroyed an entire galaxy, but after a million-year suspended sleep, he wakes up in a new galaxy that is seemingly bent upon the same direction as the old. Within him is the power to deliver the destruction the last galaxy suffered, should its denizens follow the same pathway. Vance rejects this as the guilt of his actions overwhelms him, but unwilling to repeat his actions, he also embraces the role of possible savior instead of destroyer. The comparison to a Vietnam veteran’s state of mind adds poignancy to the work that elevated it beyond mere comic-book status.

In this interview, Starlin also revealed a very entertaining fact: a lot of the characters in his Metamorphosis Odyssey were directly inspired by some of the people in Starlin’s life. Vanth Dreadstar was copied after himself, but other comic creators like Walt Simonson, Frank Miller, and even Archie Goodwin appeared in Starlin’s art.

With the ending of one saga, a new one begins: a new tale of Doug Moench’s Weirdworld. Drawn by John Buscema and colored by Marie Severin, Weirdworld: The Dragonmaster of Klarn sees its start in this issue.

Altered States (top) Neal Adams’ electrifying sci-fi cover for Epic #6 (June 1981). (bottom) Conan the Barbarian makes the cover of Epic #7, courtesy of his first Marvel artist, Barry Windsor-Smith.

Epic Illustrated TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Conan TM & © Conan LLC.

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seemed like a pain in the neck at the time, which in John Bolton takes center stage in Epic #10 (Feb. 1982) retrospect we applauded with enthusiasm, lost the with an amazing cover. In this issue, writer Chris [Red Sonja] license. So there were John and I with Claremont and artist Bolton reveal the first part of umpty-bump pages of original material—beautiful original Marada, the She-Wolf, an amazing tale of sword and material, because John—to say John is a brilliant artist is like saying something obvious like the sun is sorcery. Marada weaves in Claremont’s love of shining. But we had nowhere to publish it. history by making Marada a daughter of “And so I sat down with Jim Shooter to Roman royalty. However, Claremont’s skill see if we could figure out what could be with fantasy makes her a swordswoman done. An idea was floating around in the at least the equal of another Marvel back of my head to the effect of, since fantasy heroine, Red Sonja. we had the whole idea behind the Claremont recounts Marada’s story itself, in sort of parallel to other origins: work I was doing at Marvel at the time, “Well, I guess Marada started out to present the character in a way with Ralph Macchio going to England that we had never seen before, severed and finding John [Bolton] and getting from the traditional presentation. In my him started on a Conan—I believe it was a case, for example, I couldn’t figure Conan story, for Savage Sword, possibly. out how [Red Sonja] could go It was wonderful that I wandered in and through her whole life in an armored saw the art that John was delivering chris claremont bikini, so I wanted to—especially when for the Conan material and I just went, you’re dealing with an artist of John’s ‘Holy cow—this guy is brilliant. I gotta do something.’ And what then developed was the caliber—get her a different set of costumes. So the two of us, John and I, putting together something character didn’t look like Sonja in the bulk of the story, that was originally intended as a Red Sonja story, which and the way I was pitching it to Jim was, ‘Why don’t we would be obviously in the Conan large-format magazine. just change it? Could it be within Marvel’s purview to let John and me buy back the pages and sell them to Archie At which point Marvel, in one of those twists of fate that Goodwin for Epic?’ And Jim being Jim finished the idea before I got five words into it.”

Along with Marada, this first issue of 1982 also shows us Rick Veitch’s bizarre tale of Abraxas and the Earthman. With clear influences from Herman Melville, this is a fantastically odd tale about two men abducted from Earth and surgically altered in odd ways by an alien press gang in search of a giant red space whale.

A favorite feature is another “Gameview” column by Steven Grant. In this installment he applies Jungian psychology to the experience of playing Dungeons & Dragons! Could there be any other magazine at this time that could even entertain such a notion? Epic fit a niche that no other contemporary publication could.

THE COMING OF THE SHE-WOLF

Cat Scratch Fever (left) Courtesy of Heritage, Howard Chaykin’s original painted cover to Epic Illustrated #8 (Oct. 1981). (right) Tim Conrad’s “The Last Centaur” was cover-featured on issue #9.

Epic #8 cover art © Howard Chaykin. “The Last Centaur” © Tim Conrad. Epic Illustrated TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Issue #11 sees “Run for the Stars,” another episode of Ellison and Steacy’s Earth–Kyba War. [Editor’s note: Their collaboration was collected in the 1988 graphic novel Night and the Enemy, published by Comico the Comic Company.] Weirdworld continues, and Archie Goodwin provides a testimonial to the pioneering art of Wally Wood, remembering the trailblazing artist who had recently taken his own life. Robert Rodi’s “Advice to a Barbarian” is a very entertaining short. Illustrated by Joe Jusko, this story puts a new twist on the typical strongarmed barbarian fantasy tale. All in all, not bad for the third anniversary issue of this astounding magazine.

Weirdworld continues in issue #12 (June 1982), as does Marada. However, this issue’s installment of “Gameview”

by Steven Grant talks about the rightwing attack on various aspects of fantasy and science fiction in American society. Grant cites Jerry Falwell’s objections to various titles (though he doesn’t list them) and the parent groups on the Phil Donahue Show that were dedicated to stamping out games like Dungeons & Dragons. It is a real time capsule of American societal reactions to sci-fi and fantasy literature in all its incarnations.

Now, to issue #13 (Aug. 1982): What made Epic so groundbreaking was its refusal to simply be an entertainment magazine. Not only did it include social topics (as in the “Gameview” article for the previous issue), but it also looked at relevant mainstream science fiction and fantasy.

For example, Archie Goodwin’s article in issue #13 on reviewing the comic adaptation of the cult favorite sci-fi film Blade Runner is not only informative and relevant, but also illustrates the breadth of Goodwin’s talent. Not only was he a superb creator in his own right, but he also showed himself to be an adaptable editor and critic as well.

Chris Claremont recalls working with Goodwin: “He was … the best. He was the best. You know, one of the best people, the best writers, the best editors.

Much like Stan, there was little he couldn’t do that he couldn’t do better than anybody. And he was a remarkably decent, nice guy. So you couldn’t argue with him even when he was wrong, because nine times out of ten he wasn’t, and he was so charming about it that you were just knocked off your feet.”

Epic #14 (Oct. 1982) continues to present Rick Veitch’s Abraxas and the Earthman saga. However, we also see Roy Thomas returning to Elric, illustrated by P. Craig Russell. Thomas adapts Moorcock’s While the Gods Laugh, in which we see a despondent Elric mourning the loss of his cousin and love.

However, Elric is filled with a new vigor after the visit of a seductive supplicant to recover a lost sorcerous tome, pointing him toward some answers to his own questions. Russell’s is a dynamic version of Elric.

What is really striking about this issue is its speculative coverage of the third installment of George Lucas’ Star Wars film trilogy, with its anticipated title of Revenge of the Jedi. This is of historical significance, of course, as the title was changed to Return of the Jedi, but the preview article, despite only showing three pre-production images painted

by Ralph McQuarrie, would have been enough to have had Star Wars fans slavering to get a hold of it.

The December 1982 issue (#15) is a real Christmas treat!

Not only do we see the return of Jim Starlin’s Vanth Dreadstar in a new adventure, but John Bolton and Graham Marks treat us to another tale of the underwater Llehs. We get an interview with legendary artist Boris Vallejo (who painted this issue’s cover), but we also get

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

Tantalizing Treehouse Original art (courtesy of Heritage) for a breathtaking double-page spread from writer Doug Moench’s Weirdworld saga The Dragonmaster of Klarn: “A Game the Gods Play,” from Epic #9. Art by John Buscema and Marie Severin. Weirdworld returned to Marvel Comics as part of 2015’s Secret Wars storyline.

Weirdworld TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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the beginning of a new fantasy adventure scripted by Dennis O’Neil, co-written and penciled by Carl Potts, inked by Terry Austin, and colored

by Marie Severin, titled The Last of the Dragons.

Abraxas and the Earthman continues in Epic #16 (Feb. 1983, despite its misprinted cover date of 1982), but what really makes this issue special is its incredible art focus on Barry Windsor-Smith. Not only are we treated to Smith’s art on the cover, but we also get “The Beguiling,” a thoroughly entertaining and spectacular eight-page short written and drawn by Barry that leaves you completely mesmerized. He also offers a second story, “A Path of Stars,” a delightfully cheeky tale. But the hat trick in this issue is “The Horde,” a sorcerous tale of an isolated batch of humanity defending itself against a ravaging undead throng, illustrated by Windsor-Smith and superbly written by Archie Goodwin.

Here, Goodwin again demonstrated his multi-talented versatility.

Not only was he capable of managing and editing Epic, but he also could also conduct interviews and write fiction with the best of them.

Goodwin attracted talent and was able to use that ability to make Epic a truly unique publication.

However, it was Archie’s touching tribute to artist Gene Day, who died at the young age of 31, that really showed Goodwin’s character. As Chris Claremont said earlier, Archie Goodwin was simply the best.

TEENAGE WASTELAND Epic Illustrated #17 (Apr. 1983) sees a new two-part adventure series begin: Generation Zero, drawn by Pepe Moreno and written by Goodwin, a post-apocalyptic story about exploring the ruined Earth. However, this exploration is a responsibility tasked to the rebellious young who were dissatisfied with their society.

Allegorically, it is a story about the tendency of the young to strike out and explore a dangerous world, only this time the danger was in the form of nuclear radiation, acid rain, and zombie-like survivors.

Will Brown’s “Mime” is a delightful little short about the irrepressibility of humor and mockery, even in a repressed totalitarian society. Rick Veitch’s Abraxas and the Earthman concludes in this issue.

Rotwang the Hunter finally meets his demise and the

Move Over, Red Sonja The She-Wolf cometh in Epic #10 (Feb. 1982), launching Chris Claremont and John Bolton’s Marada serial. Cover by Bolton.

Epic Illustrated TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Marada the She-Wolf © Chris Claremont and John Bolton.

oppressed humans discover a greater beauty in the cosmos and decide to stay with the pod of space whales rather than return to their home planet. The Last of the Dragons continues, and we are introduced to The Last Wanderer by Mike Kaluta and Archie Goodwin.

Issue #18 (June 1983) marks the return of the partnership of John Bolton and Chris Claremont in the short piece “Business Hours, Monday Through Friday, 9 to 5.” Delightfully funny, this story reveals a humorous side to this incredibly talented creative duo and shows that they were as talented in combining elements of comedy and the supernatural as well as creating dynamic fantasy fiction.

Carl Potts continues to enthrall readers with the continuation of his story The Last of the Dragons (dialogued by Denny O’Neil over Potts’ plot), and we see more humor in “Obsession,” Peter Kuper’s six-page tale, which was very appropriate for its time period in examining society’s fixation with nuclear weapons and how close the Doomsday Clock is to midnight.

To extend this fixation with the end of civilization, Pepe Moreno’s Generation Zero also continues in this issue. In this installment, the young explorers discover survivors who live in an isolated but functional society. This means that there are other survivors in the world to connect with, and our young punk heroes begin to experience a sense of community.

An early, noteworthy example of Japanese manga in an American publication is also featured in this issue.

“Oni,” by Go Nagai and Hiro Media Associates, is a short piece that creatively explains the origins of the Japanese mythological demon, the Oni. Legendary artist Jim Steranko provides the striking cover for Epic #19, showing a classic barbarian warrior posing with an accompanying swordswoman in the background.

Pepe Moreno’s Generation Zero explorers continue to see what is left of the world in this issue, making their way to what was the Sinai Desert and experiencing a fuel shortage. This adventure sees the crew try to steal fuel from an abandoned oil tanker that is converted into a makeshift military base.

Jo Duffy’s “Marghinee,” illustrated

by Kent Williams, follows, a sad fantasy tale of sundered lovers. Also, Bo Hampton and Garret Lavin provide a loose but fun adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, a classic poem for any lover of fantasy and whimsy. The twist at the end is a definite knee-slapper.

The Last of the Dragons takes on a remarkably innovative direction in #19’s installment. Japanese mythology and ninjas encounter North American natives as the dragons make their way across the Pacific Ocean. The creative efforts of Carl Potts and Terry Austin are definitely not to be missed in this issue. Another entertaining story in this issue

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Pepe Moreno’s Generation Zero delivers an unexis Rick Veitch’s “Bossy,” a familiar twist on relationships pected twist as the trio of punk explorers return to find in a fantasy setting with hilarious results.

We reach the conclusion of The Last of the Dragons Seahaven taken over by militants, seemingly commandin the October 1983 issue of Epic, #20. But this anthology ed by the hero’s own father. The great thing about writcollection never fails to disappoint, as when one series ing for an anthology format allows for great cliffhangers, ends, another begins. Epic #20 sees the beginning of and this revelation is where this episode ended.

The Sacred and the Profane, written by Dean Motter and Charles Vess’ “The Legend,” written by Laurie Sutton, drawn by Ken Steacy, a dramatic space opera that ties is featured in this issue. Following this piece, Jim Starlin in elements of space exploration and religion. Done delivers a tale from within Vanth Dreadstar’s new in the same spirit that readers of Walter M. universe, yet this is one completely unconnectMiller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz might ed to him. A dancer in the domain of the recognize, it was a stunning piece of Holy Instrumentality discovers a mystical work that boggles the imagination. dance and seeks to use it against her This issue also includes the last of nemesis, but fails in her task. It is an Steven Grant’s “Gameview” pieces. intriguing story and displays the depth In this column he discusses more of Starlin’s universe. Adolfo Buylla’s Ace gaming goodies like Iron Crown of Space is a tongue-in-cheek poke at Enterprise’s run of Tolkien role-playing heroic stereotypes and a delightful games. Anyone remember those? Truly, change of pace. this column was a gamer’s delight, and Epic Illustrated #23’s Marada cover it was sad to see it end. Grant had a

by John Bolton sets up the conclusion sense of humor when he examined to the Marada the She-Wolf: Wizard’s RPGs that was not lost on his likeMasque serial, ending the Marada tales. john bolton minded audience.

We also see a new artistic take on Courtesy of Vertigocomics.com.

Elric of Melniboné by Robert Gould. Berkley Fantasy Novels began its publishing run on the Elric saga around this time, and Epic ran a focus piece on the covers of the novels painted by Gould.

Roger Stern’s Chun-Tarr the Undaunted also begins in this issue, with art by Victor de la Fuente. It introduces Chun-Tarr of Muukeria, a hapless buffoon of a barbarian warrior who manages to cause more trouble than he gets into. This was a funny piece of work that made us appreciate anew the barbarian archetype.

George Bush’s cover issue #21 (Dec. 1983) is remarkably stunning: a warrior woman complete in chainmail bikini with leashed wolves by her side. The lead story is another episode of Pepe Moreno’s Generation Zero, in which the explorers have discovered South America. The storyline’s quest becomes more personally motivated with this installment.

More work by Charles Vess is also featured in “The Age of the Dragon,” a wonderful example of Vess’ ethereal painted art. Then, in a sudden change of tone that was quite common for Epic, we read James Fox’s “Recruiter,” an acerbic but well-taken and blackly humorous response to 1980s misogyny in the office place.

The Sacred and the Profane continues with the ignition of a holy war. The space combat sequences in this strip were simply fantastic.

Her Saga Continues Splash page to Claremont and Bolton’s Marada tale from Epic #11.

Marada the She-Wolf © Chris Claremont and John Bolton.

MARADA RETURNS … AND DEPARTS The first issue of 1984, Epic Illustrated #22 (Feb. 1984), launches the new year with a Marada the She-Wolf cover

by John Bolton. Bolton relates that Archie Goodwin remarked to him that he was the artist who had drawn the most covers for Epic, an honor that Bolton is particularly proud of. A brand-new adventure of the She-Wolf by Bolton and Claremont, Wizard’s Masque, was a highlight of this issue, and what was striking was that the adventure was painted, not drawn. Bolton prefers to paint rather than draw, yet he is always dismayed at comic conventions when his fans ask him if he was planning any more penciling work. In either case, Bolton’s work was clearly of the level of “beautiful pictures” that Archie Goodwin sought for inclusion in Epic.

Motter and Steacy’s The Sacred and the Profane continues, followed by—in another Epic tonal change of pace—the comedic short “The Scroll,” by Larry Glover.

Another highlight of the issue is an eight-page Frankenstein: The Illustrated Novel installment by Bernie Wrightson.

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Beguiling Barry (right) Barry Windsor-Smith’s lush, mesmerizing cover for Epic Illustrated #16 (Feb. 1983). (left) From inside that issue, the title page to BWS’s “The Beguiling.” (inset) Vaughn Bodé’s Cheech Wizard.

Epic Illustrated TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Story and art © Barry Windsor-Smith. Cheech Wizard © Vaughn Bodé estate.

Generation Zero continues with a real change in the characters. The young authority-resistant punks who left to find other survivors and their leader’s (Juan Falcon’s) father return to defend Seahaven and in doing so, become part of that authority. The Sacred and Profane also continues in this issue.

Epic #23 unveils a new/old feature: Cheech Wizard, starring the “greatest smartest wizard who ever lived,” whose appearance is hidden under an oversized, yellow Phrygian cap dotted by stars, and his lizard assistant Razzberry. Created by celebrated underground cartoonist Vaughn Bodé, this adult fantasy cartoon had earlier been a counterculture cult favorite in publications such as National Lampoon. Since Bodé died in 1975, his son, artist Mark Bodé, brought his father’s feature to Epic Illustrated by inking some of Vaughn’s works.

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Also in that issue, Bill DuBay and Lee Elias deliver a heart-wrenching tale of an elderly Auschwitz survivor who remembers his experiences in the camp, along with the rape and murder of his wife and the death of his daughter.

He sees a child who will become another incarnation of his daughter, whom he killed in fit of mercy to prevent her from being sadistically tortured. Then he is warned by a fortune-teller that another Adolf Hitler is coming, and he wrestles with his conscience in deciding to kill the child … again. Titled “Rebirth,” this heartbreaking tale is one of the most poignant pieces ever created for this magazine.

The ending of Generation Zero occurs in issue #24 (June 1984) with a climactic battle between father and son, with a surprise twist. With Seahaven destroyed, Juan Falcon leads the remaining population to the untouched land they found with Falcon’s father’s notes in South America, to begin the world again. We also see another Charles Vess/Laurie Sutton contribution, “Spirit.” In contrast to Vess’ ethereal tale of magic, John Bolton surprises us with another light-hearted story titled “Fighting Word,” in which two brawling ogres discover the fighting power of onomatopoeia!

Roger Zelazny’s The Game of Blood and Dust is adapted for Epic #24, illustrated by Peter Botsis. A story of immortals playing an eternal game throughout Earth’s history with events as moves, it is a thought-provoking offering.

Bernie Wrightson’s “The Potty’s Over” is a stand-out in Epic #25 (Aug. 1984). This disturbing tale of a woman’s obsession with her bathtub and eliminating the man who wants to interrupt is graphically violent, with Wrightson at his horrifying best.

Rick Veitch delivers an incredibly sharp and amusing tale of a planet’s life cycle in #25’s “Landmass.” It is simple, but inspired.

Two new tales start in this issue. One, Apocrypha by John and Laura Lakey, is a post-apocalyptic story about animal and human hybrids surviving a world epidemic to become

More Marada The She-Wolf returned in the story arc Wizard’s Masque, in Epic Illustrated #22 (Feb. 1984), featuring this Bolton cover.

Epic Illustrated TM © Marvel Characters.

Marada the She-Wolf © Chris Claremont and John Bolton.

the dominant form of life on Earth. Loaded with astounding art, it’s a compelling read. The other serial, Toadswart, a gothic tale of fantasy and horror by Tim Conrad, evokes Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Its reliance on stark and black imagery creates an atmosphere of dread and doom.

The Sacred and Profane also continues in this issue, offering background history for the major players of the story. But Jo Duffy’s and John Bolton’s “Did You Hear the One About the Travelling Ogre and the Mayor’s Daughter?” is a laugh-filled twist on the typical virgin sacrifice motif.

ENTER: THE WORLD-DEVOURER Epic Illustrated #26 (Oct. 1984) is one of the series’ most famous issues. Not only do we get a cover from Bill Sienkiewicz, who was arguably at the peak of his popularity at this time, but this issue also sees the beginning of the most well-known story to have ever been featured in Epic: The Last Galactus Story, written and penciled by John Byrne (with inks by Terry Austin). This storyline was featured back in BACK ISSUE #46, so a detailed description is hardly needed. But suffice it to say that The Last Galactus Story is still a hallmark feature of this amazing magazine that Marvel Comics collectors still search for.

Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark shows up in this issue as well. In Sim’s His First Fifth, we see a young Cerebus, before his adventuring days, getting into trouble and managing to place the blame on someone else.

Dean Motter and Ken Steacy’s The Sacred and the Profane completes its run in this issue. The St. Catherine’s mission fails in its attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life and the Church decides on no further missions.

Humanity, in its blind faith, has proved wanting.

Toadswart continues to weave a dark horror tale about Toadswart’s master in his attempt to fashion life out of lifeless materials. We also see the end of Apocrypha and the end of the war between the man-animals.

With issue #27 (right), Clyde Caldwell’s cover of a sultry, scantily clad sorceress complete with the suggestive wand, dagger, and giant pet serpent grabs your attention, in order to tempt you to buy the book.

Jo Duffy shares her thoughts on this matter: “The boobalicious cover babes to me seemed a step forward. A very short time before, there would still have seen ladies on the cover, screaming and being rescued.

I was thrilled to see ladies getting in on the fightingthe-good-fight action instead of only being damsels in distress. Or evil sorceresses.

“So, I took it as a sign of progress, narratively, as well as giving joy and motivation to the artists—who owned and selected the subjects of their work, after all, and were not under commission—and the male members of our audience an incentive to buy.”

Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier provide a story of Groo the Wanderer in this issue. Hilarious beyond belief, Groo was everyone’s favorite barbarian clown and never failed in displaying novel new lows in his intelligence in any situation. If there was a way to screw things up, Groo was your hero.

Vaughn and Mark Bodé appear again in Epic #27 with another new/old creation—Cobalt 60, a post-apocalyptic

serial set on a ruined Earth far, far in the future. Cobalt 60 is a renegade who rebels against the established radio authority that despises mutations and prizes racial purity.

However, Cobalt 60 is also the missing son of the heir to the throne in Radio City. The question is: Is he a man or a mutation? Epic #27 reprints a ten-page Cobalt 60 tale produced by Vaughn Bodé in 1968, then continues the saga as illustrated by Mark Bodé and scripted

by Larry Todd, starting with issue #27’s first new installment. Mark Bodé, also known for Miami Mice and The Lizard of Oz, has since optioned the Cobalt 60 property as a movie, with Zack Snyder at one time attached to direct.

Al Williamson and Archie Goodwin team up to craft a story titled “Relic” in this issue. An explorer past his exploring days discovers a forgotten city on an alien planet. Instead of seeing it destroyed for terra-formers, he decides to send his ship and partner back to Earth on autopilot and live out his days studying the ancient city. Two relics, together forever.

Toadswart continues as we see Toadswart’s master, Lord Waxwroth, bring his creation to life, only to lose the golem … and his son, the prince, to mysterious circumstances.

The next installment of The Last Galactus Story sees Galactus and his herald, Nova, discover the galaxy that houses her lost homeworld, Earth, that has aged millions of years, in the future.

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Epic Illustrated TM © Marvel Characters.

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TOWARD AN EPIC CONCLUSION

Hunger Games (left) Autographed original art page from Epic #29’s Chapter Four of writer/penciler John Byrne’s The Last Galactus Story. Inks by Terry Austin. (right) That issue’s fantastic fantasy cover, by Stephen Hickman.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

On the cover of the February 1985 issue, issue #28, four names are boasted: Bill Sienkiewicz, John Byrne, Dave Sim, and Terry Austin, an A-list of creators exemplifying the level of talent that Epic Illustrated was attracting at the time.

Unfortunately, it was to be for naught. This was to be the last full year that Epic would be in production.

Yet more and more talent continued to pour in, resulting in a glorious year that brought unparalleled comic art to its readers. The Last Galactus Story, Cobalt 60, Cerebus, and Rick Veitch’s “The Everlasting Tag” are among the contents of the rich and vibrant issue #28, as is Toadswart, which sees the funeral of the young prince and the vengeance of Lord Waxwroth.

What’s really cool about Epic #29 (Apr. 1985) is that we see John Byrne demonstrate his proficiency with the English language by scripting in iambic pentameter the dialogue of the robot Nova encounters in The Last Galactus Story’s “The Rhyming Robot.” Rick Veitch’s “Ghosts in the Machine” is a solid yarn about socializing

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anti-social behavior, but Zoran Vanjaka’s “Apes of a Cold God” serves up a reminder that we are really responsible for our own actions, and not to depend on the mercy of an external force. Among #29’s other contents are Ken Macklin’s Dr. Watchstop and a new chapter of Bode and Todd’s Cobalt 60.

However, a shining gem in this issue is Rich Buckler and Archie Goodwin’s fantasy “A Matter of Vengeance,” in which a trio of adventurers are introduced: Jihad Taun, a panther gladiator; Sheeva, a human female bent on revenge; and Morgan Stormmane, a lion barbarian warrior and the target of Sheeva’s vengeance. If only these three could have continued on more adventures together!

Bernie Wrightson provides the cover for issue #30 (June 1985). Apparently, as Archie Goodwin wrote, Bernie was in the neighborhood and just happened to have art that would have been appropriate for this issue. With the focus article in this issue on the connection between fantasy art and rock albums, it’s interesting to note that Wrightson had illustrated an album cover for Meat Loaf just a few years earlier.

Dave Sim offers readers two wonderful young Cerebus stories titled “Insurance” and “The Girl Next Door.” While these aren’t the typical Cerebus tales readers might be accustomed to, they are funny and give readers a real sense of Sim’s talent and sense of humor. Cobalt 60 continues in this issue, and Archie Goodwin’s and Alix Berenzy’s touching “Unicorn Autumn” conveys the futility of being the lone defender of a forgotten age. It is a true high point in the issue and is also an example of Goodwin’s ability to discern and select stellar talent for Epic.

Finally, Vanth Dreadstar returns as Jim Starlin provides a history of his hero’s adventures as they were originally presented in the early Epic issues to the later title in Epic Comics’ (a Marvel imprint) Dreadstar and Company.

It’s a great cross-promotional stunt, but it also shows Dreadstar’s appeal and growth as an independent comic title in its own right.

Issue #31 sees a new Marada, the She-Wolf cover by John Bolton for an issue that includes Cobalt 60, The Last

Galactus Story, and promotion of Chris Claremont and John Bolton’s collaboration, The Black Dragon, which was published in the Epic Comics line. In a preface, Goodwin recounted how much of a pleasure it was to see the John Bolton and his wife during their then-recent visit from London and how he regarded them very highly.

Jerry Bingham’s work is on the cover of Epic #32 (Oct. 1985), another scantily clad warrior woman holding a laser rifle, dressed in slips of clothing that would have certainly been considered overly daring for the 1980s. Goodwin’s provocative cover art choices were a stratagem to help boost sales, but by this time, Epic’s sales were sagging. Frequent advertisements for subscription orders began to run in the last few issues of the magazine. However, the decline in Marvel’s sales overall was endemic, and Epic, with its high price and costly production values, couldn’t survive in this new economic environment.

Nonetheless, a portfolio of Dave Sim’s Cerebus art and a perspective of the character are also featured in issue #32. Not only do we get alternate view of Cerebus throughout the ages, but some insight into why he was such a beloved character of the time.

A promotional piece on Larry Hama’s editorial initiative in renewing Savage Tales is also of significance to Marvel history buffs in this issue. That publication featured work by Russ Heath, Ralph Reese, and Michael Golden, who P. Craig Russell considered to be one of the shining talents of the period.

Issue #33 (Dec. 1985) sees the continuation of The Last Galactus Story. Byrne really laid out a treat with this story. By placing Galactus many years in the future, the World-Devourer sidestepped current Marvel continuity and became a more independent and interesting character.

Toadswart also sees its heartbreaking conclusion in this issue, as our diminutive hero manages to preserve his lord’s keep and heritage, yet see his lord fail against the

shadows. However, the surprising twist comes with the reappearance of the young heir and his thought-lost grandfather. The heritage of Amplestone is safe.

Between the October and December issues, it was announced that Epic Illustrated would close up shop.

The fan mail included in this issue’s letters column reflects a great deal of disappointment, regret, and even anger at this decision. A response to one fan’s letter from Goodwin also mirrored this sentiment: “We’re sorry, Buck, but the fate of Epic Illustrated is sealed and out of our hands. We’re pretty depressed about losing our first-born, too, but the rest of the family is thriving.

Thanks for the swell vote of confidence.”

Goodwin managed to achieve a surprisingly close level of intimacy with the fans of this fantastic magazine.

By including their opinions he was able to show that he cared about creating a high-quality magazine that true comic lovers could fully appreciate. He created this magazine to be the finest expression of comic literacy he could conceive, and to see it end was heartbreaking.

Issue #34 (Feb. 1986) was the final issue of Epic Illustrated.

Goodwin had the foresight and vision to assemble high-quality level of talent and artistry for this swansong. The credits on the final issue include: Terry Austin, John Byrne, Alan Moore, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jim Starlin, Arthur Suydam, Roy Thomas, Rick Veitch, Al Williamson, and Bernie Wrightson.

As promised on its cover by Suydam, this is an “Incredible Last Issue.” Among the contents is Roy Thomas’ “Death of a Legend,” where the historical end of Robert E. Howard comes to light in a relatable way and brings us closer to this amazing writer. Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson create a poignant tale of an imaginative man unable to cope with reality in “Out of Phase,” which underlines an issue most artists can empathize with. Alan Moore collaborates with Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

Issue #30somethings (left) Bernie Wrightson’s magnificent “Metal Man” painting, which became the cover of Epic Illustrated #30 (June 1985). (right) From inside that issue, a page from Tim Conrad’s Toadswart saga.

Original art courtesy of Heritage.

Metal Man © Bernie Wrightson.

Toadswart © Tim Conrad.

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Epic Endings (top) Epic #32 featured this sexy cover by Jerry Bingham. (bottom) Arthur Suydam’s Cholly and Flytrap, cover-featured on the final issue of Epic Illustrated, #34 (Feb. 1986).

Epic Illustrated TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Cholly and Flytrap © Arthur Suydam.

prolific Epic contributor Rick Veitch on “Love Doesn’t Last Forever.” As teased on the cover, Arthur Suydam produces a Cholly and Flytrap story. John Byrne’s unfinished serial The Last Galactus Story is a casualty in this decision to end Epic. If only it could have run for one more issue!

In the preface, Archie Goodwin thanked everyone who had been supportive of the magazine, but realized he couldn’t fit all of its supporters onto one page.

However, he did make specific mention of four people: Stan Lee, Jim Shooter, Michael Hobson, and Jo Duffy.

The last supporter, he made sure to note that her efforts were instrumental in “making sure everything is where it’s supposed to be when it’s supposed to be there at each and every stage, adding her creative input and considerable writing skills to the magazine’s contents, and in general making the gentleman whose name appears at the end of this column look far better than he would if left to his own devices.”

If Archie Goodwin was the saint of editors, then Jo Duffy had to be the one who venerated him, and summarizes what it was like to work with Archie in this anecdote: “One year I did not know what to get Archie for Christmas. I bought him this little gizmo that looked like a sculpture that could record a message that could be played by the next person who picked it up. Next to it on his desk was a candy jar—he was insanely hospitable.

Despite Archie’s trim young fighting weight, he had a bit of a sweet tooth. One evening, my younger sister came into my office—she and I were going out someplace. I was still working and Archie had left for the day.

She said that she couldn’t hold out for the evening and that she was starving. She grabbed his candy jar and a couple of candy bars and then picked up the sculpture wondering what it was.

“From out of the sculpture came Archie’s voice, saying: PUT THIS DOWN! IT’S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS WHAT THIS IS OR WHAT IT’S DOING ON MY DESK. NOW GET OUT OF HERE AND DON’T TAKE ANY OF MY CANDY EITHER! “She threw down the candy and ran for the hall.

The next day I told Archie what had happened and he laughed so hard that he slid under his desk. That was the epitome of working with Archie. It wasn’t about the magazine, it was about the experience. He had foresight enough to set up a joke like that. That was Archie.”

Looking back at Goodwin’s initial thoughts about Epic Illustrated in the inaugural edition of Comics Feature, it was his intention to make Epic succeed.

Though it was only a five-year run, its success was measured in quality rather than quantity of its duration.

Its quality was truly measurable in epic proportions.

Legendary creators, dazzling art, and relevant contemporary commentary on the nature and topics that mattered to its readers, Goodwin succeeded in making this magazine memorable in the hearts and minds of a generation of comic readers who saw its literary dimensions and potential. Goodwin had not only managed to make a magazine, but he had enabled a generation of dreamers to see his spectacular vision as well.

JOHN K. KIRK is a librarian and English teacher with the Toronto District School Board in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, who incorporates comics and comics history into his classroom teaching.

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TM

by

Robert Greenberger

Growing up a comics fan in the early 1970s meant you could learn about the doings in the comics business by subscribing to Don and Maggie Thompson’s Newfangles or Paul Levitz’s Etcetera and The Comic Reader. All offered news and commentary and fueled endless discussions when two or more fans got together. In 1973, Levitz sold TCR to Jerry Sinkovec and Mike Tiefenbacher, while Alan Light’s predominantly ad-based The Buyers’ Guide added news and commentary of their own.

After Newfangles faded away, the Thompsons moved their newsgathering to TBG under the headline Beautiful Balloons and in time wound up running the joint. They were soon after joined by Murray Bishoff’s “What Now?” column until he was succeeded by cat yronwode, with issue #329 (Mar. 7, 1980), who retitled the column “Fit to Print.” She was the Rich Johnston of her day.

Jim Steranko went beyond his two-volume history of the comics to introducing Comixscene in late 1972, widening its focus and changing its title a year later to Mediascene.

He covered movies, television, books, and comics with an insider’s knowledge, aided by reporters like Dave McDonnell (the former TBG news columnist who did “Media Report”) and Steranko’s right-hand man, Ken Bruzenak, before Ken became a premier letterer. In 1980, the publication was reimagined as a slick magazine, Prevue, but it limped along until it faded away for good in 1985.

Gary Groth went from producing the slick Fantastic Fanzine to owning The Nostalgia Journal, and in 1977 changed its title to The Comics Journal, launching the Fantagraphics publishing empire, aided by Kim Thompson and Michael Catron. The magazine’s increasing sophistication and coverage went beyond the four-color titles from the major publishers to the point in 1981 where they created the spinoff Amazing Heroes, which served up superhero creator interviews, previews, and reviews to satisfy the most rabid reader.

With the advent of comic shops and direct-sale distribution, more publishers were arriving with regularity, which increased demand for knowledge about them and their wares. Distributor-turned-publisher Hal Schuster launched Comics Feature in 1980, initially edited by Carol Kalish and Richard Howell. Formatted like TCJ yet with a more fannish sensibility, it sputtered along, ending after 57 issues in mid-1987.

Various retail chains started up their own newsletters for their readership, the best of the lot being Comics & Comix’s The Telegraph Wire handled by Diana Schutz, just before she began her august comics editorial career.

During this time, I, too, was in transition from fan to staffer at Starlog Press. Although hired to be Fangoria’s managing editor, I was also contributing to Starlog, and both magazines covered comic books to a degree.

The Men from Marvel Stan Lee and Jim Shooter, and friends, gather to celebrate the House of Ideas’ birthday on the cover of Comics Scene #1 (Jan. 1982).

Scan courtesy of John Wells.

Comics Scene © Comics World Corp.

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

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What in the World?!

Comics World #1 went as far as this first-issue ad—which appeared on The Comics Journal #67 and was scanned and contributed by our friend John Wells, Keeper of the Fanzine Archives— before another magazine with that title forced the new mag’s name change to Comics Scene. © Comics World Corp.

But soon after arriving there in September 1980, I saw the potential for more. After all, comics were starting to be adapted into film, with Superman II having just opened and other properties getting optioned with surprising regularity. There seemed to be a resurgence of animation, both Saturday morning shows but also syndicated afternoon offerings. Joni Levas, then the co-head mucketymuck at Seagate Distribution, the premier comics distributor at the time, would also visit the offices with regularity and bring by samplings of new things they were carrying, including this offbeat weekly from England, 2000 AD. Clearly, there was something happening, and we didn’t have the pages available to do it justice.

Sometime in the winter of 1980, I drafted a memo to Starlog publishers Norman Jacobs and Kerry O’Quinn outlining the need for a magazine to cover comic books, comic strips, and animation. I outlined the stuff coming down the pike and the need to put it into perspective by also looking back. There’d be news, some commentary, and feature interviews.

At some point, they were intrigued and suggested I come up with a first issue’s table of contents. Noting it was about to be Marvel’s 20th anniversary, I decided that would make a strong cover story, then cherry-picked some of this and that. When the duo was satisfied, they took the memo and contents to their distribution company, Kable News. In time, they said they liked the

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project but were concerned there wouldn’t be enough to cover after one issue.

I proceeded to write a three-page, single-spaced list of potential subjects to cover. When they saw that, they approved it. I was handed a 64-page bimonthly with the proviso that a mere 16 pages could be in color, severely hampering our ability to properly convey the gorgeous work being done at the time.

Suddenly, I had a magazine to edit all by my lonesome.

It needed a name and Kerry settled on Comics World, going so far as to personally create a logo and begin printing up stationary and mailing labels. At 23, I was feeling giddy and admittedly maybe in a little over my head. Kerry got the same feeling and insisted that Starlog editor Howard Zimmerman oversee my efforts as the new publication’s editor-in-chief. Howard, a longtime comics fan, was thrilled and brimming with his own ideas.

I began lining up press contacts, starting at Marvel where their main man was Mike Friedrich, just before he moved on to become an agent. He was thrilled at the cover story and we worked out interviews and pictures to be taken when Stan Lee was in town next. Stan and editor-in-chief Jim Shooter couldn’t have been more accommodating. Howard’s buddy, writer Don McGregor, suggested we use one-time Marvel illustrator Billy Graham to execute the cover. By this time, Kerry hit on the notion that to sell the magazine, we needed every cover to be a blend of photography and artwork. With that in mind, staff photographer John Clayton snapped a shot of Lee and Shooter in front of a birthday cake I brought with us.

Billy then worked his image before and behind the stalwarts, enlarging the cake. He added the three panels to the bottom, creating that comic-book feel.

Way back in my fanzine days, I published a one-off with my best friend Jeff Strell. It was intended to be more than that and we had lined up with an interview with Phantom artist Sy Barry (who lived in our neighborhood) for our second issue. Since that never happened, I commissioned Jeff to try again for my first issue. Longtime friend Adam Malin, co-president of Creation Conventions, was brought on to write about fandom. Starlog regular Sam Maronie looked at Saturday morning cartoons and staffer Stuart Matranga looked at comics about to become movies.

The magazine was also going to have regular columns including a rotating guest opinion and a personal op-ed.

For the latter, former Starlog art director Howard Cruse was more than happy to provide the words and illustrations, kicking things off with the first time he met Milton Caniff.

I turned to my future DC boss Mr. Levitz for the guest spot.

Mike Conroy inaugurated our look at international comics and Ron Goulart was perfect for the recurring nostalgia piece, exploring Scorchy Smith. I also insisted our news section always including something from the still-running underground comix market.

Cheh Nam Low, the company’s art director, worked to give the magazine its own look, celebrating its roots while being clean and neat. He left during production of the first issue and our new art director, Steven J. Plunkett, didn’t know comics but helped neaten things up.

House ads began to run and we immediately hit a problem. Someone else had the title Comics World and wouldn’t give it up. After much brainstorming we came up with Comics Scene and sent the word out only to hear from Steranko, who felt he had a prior claim. Norman’s lawyers talked to Steranko’s lawyers and somehow we were cleared to use the name.

The first issue isn’t perfect, not by a longshot. The news item introducing Atlan, dubbed Arion at the 11th hour, ran an illustration cutting his head off. Howard insisted on a piece of his own poetry illustrated by his friend Jack Katz (of First Kingdom fame) that had no business being there.

But in November 1981, Comics Scene #1 went on sale.

I happened to be in Boston shortly after it arrived and I popped into a con there and got some immediate feedback.

By then, though, the bimonthly’s second issue was well underway, featuring Jack Kirby and Captain Victory, then being published by Pacific Comics. Howard handled that interview while I focused on the rest of the issue.

Shooter sent in a lengthy letter of correction while Marv Wolfman offered up some positive constructive criticism.

Our news kicked off with the introduction of DC’s royalty plan and obits for Fredric Wertham and Wally Wood, complete with Joe Orlando’s Wood eulogy. I found underground fan Brian Sweeney to produce the news and commissioned a different artist for each issue’s header.

We introduced mainstream readers to Judge Dredd while letterhack Beppe Sabatini gave away secrets for getting your own missives into letters columns, with an illustration from cartoonist Fred Hembeck (the guy was everywhere back then). We even had a nice piece on Carl Barks at the end of his lovely career. The guest column was from John Byrne on the issue of creator’s rights, which was a hot topic as Marvel was just introducing its creator-owned line of publications.

His line, “I am a cog in the machine which is Marvel Comics and I rejoice in that” stirred up much discussion among his peers. Overall, issue #2 was stronger and slicker.

Issue #3 went commercial when we put Don Bluth and his Secret of Nimh on the cover, a bit of a risk. The contents were also a wee bit more esoteric with a long piece on Jack Katz and recording artist Lenny Kaye writing a tribute to Dick Tracy on its 50th anniversary.

More mainstream was my interview with Len Wein on the advent of the first Swamp Thing film and Frank Miller’s guest editorial. My new best buddy, Dave McDonnell, had begun writing for us and did a fun interview with Bob Layton on his Hercules miniseries.

Three issues and six months in, we were established.

People were coming to us for coverage, sending us product for review, from the first four Graphiti Designs T-shirts to graphic albums from Europe. With our Hollywood connections via Starlog and Fangoria, we were being asked to cover the comic-related films such as the imminent Conan the Barbarian. Under the gentle touch of assistant art director Neil Holmes, the magazine was looking better, and the use of original artwork gave each issue a unique touch.

During that first year, though, Howard and I would disagree over content as he played favorites to some degree which trumped commercial common sense. After risking #3’s cover on Don Bluth, he promised #5’s cover to Burne Hogarth for a Tarzan project. By then, Tarzan was no longer a major draw without a monthly domestic title, so it was a risk, despite Hogarth’s lush work. His best move, though, was having Don McGregor interview collaborator Gene Colan for a wonderful two-part piece. Of course, I was not immune to playing favorites of my own, tapping people I had been meeting at cons to write for the mag, including Sabatini, McDonnell, Richard and Wendy Pini, and even Jack C. Harris, who profiled Jim Aparo.

My biggest indulgence, though, may have been my “Creating the Comics” series. By Part Four we were up to inking, a tough thing to explain to those not steeped in the jargon. I was always mindful we were trying to appeal to a mass audience, via newsstand and direct sales shops.

When Joe Rubinstein asked me about the inkers piece, I explained when it was coming and he offered to arrange a roundtable. Marvel offered us a conference room and for several hours, I sat with Bob Layton, Klaus Janson, Tom Palmer, and Rubinstein. Shooter found a nice Hulk image penciled by Mike Zeck and each man took a copy of it home to ink so we could deftly show what an inker can bring to an artist’s pencils.

Start Me Up (left top) Bob Greenberger at Starlog editor-in-chief Howard Zimmerman’s desk, circa 1983. (left center) Bob and Comics Scene contributor Dave McDonnell (right) with a creature from the movie Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, in front of the Starlog offices, August 1983. Both photos by John Clayton. (left bottom) The magazine’s ad rate card prior to its title change. Images courtesy of Robert Greenberger. (right) The masthead from Comics Scene #2 (Mar. 1982). © Comics World Corp.

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Comics Scene Departments The magazine’s departments included (but were not limited to): the editorial “Word Balloons,” the lettercol “Lettering,” the news column “Comics Reporter,” the occasional “Loose Cruse” feature by Howard Cruse, and editor Greenberger’s pet feature, the educational “Creating the Comics.” © Comics World Corp., except “Loose Cruse,” © 1982 Howard Cruse.

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The piece ran across three issues, meaning it took readers six months to get the full story, which was, now that I look back, a sign of youthful exuberance, not editorial wisdom.

With issue #6, sales were steady but not great, but we were definitely established. As a result, I insisted on an experiment. By then it had become clear working in the three panels plus photo/art main image was becoming a cover design problem, especially with publisher Norm Jacobs’ penchant for filling every space with cover lines.

I was interviewing Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland about Camelot 3000 and Brian agreed to draw the cover.

I conceived of Arthur and Merlin gazing into the crystal ball where they’d see the picture of their creators. My wife Deb, who was a freelancer for the company at the time, snapped their picture. I hired series colorist Tom Ziuko to color the art, and insisted he color the original (what was I thinking?). Kerry agreed to drop the panels for one issue to see if it mattered. It was perhaps our cleanest cover yet, but also the sales dropped that issue. Why? Who knows?

We returned to panels after that but were more experimental with them as I got nice cover images from George Pérez and John Romita. Our coverage continued to be somewhat eclectic as issue #7 spotlighted Pérez, but also covered animator Sally Cruikshank. We introduced readers to the world of direct-sales outlets in a nice journalistic piece from Peter David, whom I met for the first time. (His interview with Carol Kalish went so well that she wound up hiring him.) And issue #8 began illustrating the letters columns with pieces from a young fan named Brian Pearce, who went on to be one of DC’s finer designers.

That September, Gene Day died at his drawing board, just before joining Doug Moench on a move to DC. Moench wrote a moving memorial for us and Zimmerman’s editorial blamed Shooter for overworking the man to death. Boy, did that ruffle more than few feathers and nearly cost us the Romita cover for the following issue!

Issue #8 is interesting in that Patrick Daniel O’Neill did a piece for me on Spider-Man, and we hit it off so well that when I was allowed to hire a managing editor, he got the gig. Unfortunately, it also didn’t last very long.

Longtime fan Jay Zilber explained APAs and Dave McDonnell was back introducing people to the phenomenon that was Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark. Our ninth issue is notable for being where Mike Grell finally admitted that his then-wife Sharon had been ghostwriting Warlord for him, while we went to the past with Terry and the Pirates and to distant lands with Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice. By this point, we were well into our second year and Norman kept telling me about poor sales. (He also carped about how text-heavy the mag was, but there was just so much to cover and it was a struggle to find the right balance, something I think I failed at.) By then, we had hired former Kable News exec Dick Brown to be our circulation director and he saw signs for worry, but not to the degree Norman did. As a result, I went commercial and put Darth Vader front and center on the tenth cover, backing it with an interview with Empire Strikes Back illustrator Al Williamson. It’s fun looking back at the news and to see all the different publishers showing up to be profiled, including that issue’s First Comics.

Thankfully, I could put Christopher Reeve on the cover to number #11, even though it was promoting Superman III, which didn’t look very strong at the time.

O’Neill had joined me then as managing editor and began a “CS Picks” column. We had Diana Schutz interviewing Chris Claremont at what may have been the height of X-Men fever. In a prophetic move, I had Dick Giordano address comic-book ratings for the “Guest Spot” column, and as Howard Cruse moved on from his column we welcomed in Martin Pasko, another old pal. He kicked off “Thought Balloons,” with the

When Universes Collide Coincide Boy, we wish we were allowed today to mix companies’ characters on covers like Comics Scene did! (left) A Romita Spidey dominates the cover of issue #8, while (right) a Reeve Superman III photo shares space with Marvel’s mutants on the cover of #11. © Comics World Corp.

subtitle “Messages from a Curmudgeon” (how some things don’t change).

My old college colleague Alan Breznick did a nice survey of the sunset of the romance comic. Overall, this was a strong issue with the last page promising interviews with Walt Simonson, Claremont Part Two, a look at the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and a spotlight on Darguad.

Shortly after this issue went to the printer, Norman came in and announced he was canceling the title. Pat would be fired and I would be assigned to work on the wrestling and boxing magazines until future plans could be made. He said sales continued to decline and he couldn’t wait for it to find its audience. It didn’t sound right and I checked with Dick Brown, who pointed out sales on #10 had gone up. In fact, we were finally gaining traction and improving sell-through issue over issue.

O’Neill fortunately later found a new post at a new magazine, Wizard. Gareb Shamus’ magazine did two things better than I did: He printed at the traditional comic-book trim size so it could be racked with the comics and he was all-color, something I could only envy.

To this day, I don’t know the real reason why the magazine was folded. But we had done something. Maybe we were early. Maybe the audience needed to grow a bit more before readers found us. Or maybe we needed to service the direct shops better, something Starlog Press never managed to accomplish during its existence. We never worked the conventions as we should have considering our titles appealed to the very audiences that were growing annually.

In the end, I wanted out. I spoke with Dick Giordano a few months later at San Diego and that December, he offered me a job. And as covered back in BACK ISSUE #80, I walked in on January 1984, a part of DC history. Later, I was joined by Brian Pearce and continued to work with so many people I first met through the pages of Comics Scene.

Dave McDonnell, who succeeded Zimmerman as Starlog’s editor, kept the Comics Scene name alive, using it as a regular column for the Starlog Log Entries section. He somehow convinced Norman to try again with a one-shot issue (again featuring a Christopher Reeve cover for Superman IV) in 1987, and this time managed a healthy 56-issue run that started bimonthly and went to a more relevant monthly (1987–1996).

By the way, to ensure that the initial Comics Scene one-shot test issue sold well, Dave frontloaded it with commercial interviews, many of them with then-red hot talents, any of which (conceivably) could have been the cover story. Besides Christopher Reeve, that volume two, #1 included chats with Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, Archie Goodwin, Denny O’Neil, Jim Salicrup (on Spider-Man’s wedding), Jonny Quest’s Doug Wildey, Dave Sim, Mike Grell, Moebius,

Adam West, Stan Lee (as in my issue #1), and ex-CS contributorturned-pro Peter David. It’s Dave McDonnell’s belief that this (literally) all-star lineup jumpstarted sales enough to super-successfully launch Comics Scene volume two on its nine-year run.

Revised in 2000 as Comics Scene 2000, it lasted three all-color bimonthly issues, but by then, management’s attentions were elsewhere and it never received the support it deserved.

Other than the original’s Peter David, Brian Pearce, and me, the two later Comics Scene revivals produced more people—six managing editors!— who went into the field. Eddie Berganza left the magazine for DC Comics, where he edited the Superman titles (among others) and still does as a group editor. Michael McAvennie followed Eddie to DC, eventually editing Legion of Super-Heroes before joining WWE (and dealing with wrestling’s oversize super-characters). Maureen McTigue also decamped for DC and became editor of Wonder Woman, later editing Vampirella for Harris Publications and working at Wizard’s website.

Meanwhile, Marvel Comics recruited Lia Pelosi Brown as an assistant editor, first of Marvel Age, later of comics like Spider-Man 2099; she’s currently at Chronicle Books (renowned for producing booklength studies of superheroes). Michael Stewart, while creating comics stories using his own and Disney characters for Disney Adventures and other magazines and digests, also worked for Marvel licensing. And Marc Bernardin moved to Entertainment Weekly (and later The Hollywood Reporter and now Playboy.com), specializing as a writer/editor in covering comics-oriented projects at all three outlets. Marc has also written comics for DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse. There are other Comics Scene veterans as well like a seventh managing editor—Carr D’Angelo, who tried to get comics movies like The Incredible Hulk made while a Universal Pictures production executive and now co-owns (with DC’s Geoff Johns) the popular West Coast comics shop Earth-2—and other freelancers such as Scott Lobdell, a prolific scribe for both Marvel and DC. They’re all part of the magazine’s enduring legacy.

We had the first nationally distributed newsstand magazine to cover comic books, comic strips, and animation. Not a bad thing to accomplish or legacy to enjoy.

When not tripping down memory lane, ROBERT GREENBERGER teaches high school English and continues to write new works of fiction. Special thanks to Dave McDonnell and John Wells for their assistance.

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STOPPING BY THE PET SHOP

Send your comments to: Email: euryman@gmail.com (subject: BACK ISSUE) Postal mail: Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief • BACK ISSUE 118 Edgewood Ave. NE • Concord, NC 28025

Thank you for another great issue. I was reading with interest the article on Captain Britain in #83 when I suddenly realized that the Neil Tennant quoted extensively in the piece is the same Neil Tennant who founded the pop group Pet Shop Boys.

Have you ever considered trying to score an interview with him?

I think it would be interesting to read of his experiences working for Marvel UK and his thoughts on the comics industry (British or otherwise) and how he went from comics to music.

– John Tripp John, we’re planning a Rock Comics issue for 2017 and are reaching out to Neil Tennant (as well as several other major music figures with comics connections) for interviews. Other than Neil, it’s too early to namedrop, but not too early to get you wondering…

Find BACK ISSUE on

GUARDING THE GLOBE

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS Our apologies to Luigi Novi for omitting his credit on our use of his photo of Peter David on page 72 of BACK ISSUE #84. We regret the oversight.

CATCHING UP It’s been awhile since I have given my two cents’ because my comic shop hasn’t received BI or AE in months, and then I ended up with three issues of BI and two of AE. I really liked BI #81. DC gets shortchanged sometimes; Marvel was doing better books; but it doesn’t mean DC’s were bad.

Those 100-Page Super Spectaculars were favorites of mine because I was able to find out about old Batman and Superman stories from way before my time. Your interview with Michael Uslan about the Fireside books was the best. I had no clue how those books were chosen.

BI #82 was good. JLA/JSA was something I wished I paid attention to when I was a kid. Best article in the issue. I liked Avengers vs.

Defenders, but it wasn’t a great love of mine. Loved Jim Starlin’s Infinity Gauntlet. It made such impression to me. One of comics’ all-time highlights. One thing I didn’t like was Secret Wars, because of the toys! (Not your article.) I know I’m in the minority with that one. Keep up the good work.

– Patrick John Moreau Patrick, those shipping and distribution snags which dumped back-to-back issues of BACK ISSUE and Alter Ego into shops with little break in-between have apparently been rectified. Thanks for your positive feedback about BI #81 and 82!

SECRET WARS II OMNIBUS LOST ISSUES The Secret Wars II article [in BI #82] made a mention about how Micronauts #16 (vol. 2) didn’t make it into the Secret Wars II Omnibus collection because of a copyright issue. For the sake of being thorough, it would have been nice had it also mentioned the same was the case for ROM: Spaceknight #72, because as far as I know those were the only two Marvel titles that were part of the Secret Wars II crossover collection that weren’t part of the Omnibus. And in regard to ROM #72, that was a real shame because in that issue the Beyonder cures Rick Jones of his terminal cancer, which obviously had far reaching effects in the Marvel Universe beyond the conclusion of the ROM: Spaceknight series, which happened only three issues later.

Ironically, a panel with a ROM cameo can be seen in the portion of the Omnibus that includes Secret Wars II #4, no doubt an editorial oversight.

– David Holsey

Huge BACK ISSUE fan, so I was somewhat disappointed in the article on the Global Guardians in the latest issue.

While it was interesting to examine their origin in the Super Friends comic (and consider the multiversal location of that book as a result), the writer misses a pretty sizable and memorable set of stories featuring the characters between Super Friends and their revival in Justice League Europe.

Several of the characters were featured prominently in Crisis on Infinite Earths (#12, in particular) and then the whole team was featured in Infinity, Inc. post-Crisis, where they teamed up with the group against Injustice Unlimited (a great few issues by Roy Thomas with some exceptional early pre-Spider-Man work from Todd McFarlane).

Both those stories I think establish the characters as part of the main Earth well ahead of the appearances in JLE (though I would give you that most of them appear in #12 after the multiverse was merged into a single Earth, so they coulda come from anywhere!). Now I want to go have a look at those Super Friends stories for other definitive signs...

I acknowledge the annoying level of geekiness inherent in this communiqué.

Cool issue, overall! Keep ’em coming!

– Linus (no last name given)

MORE GLOBAL GUARDIANS GAB I spent the morning devouring BI’s “International” issue and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks especially for the Fastner/Larson interview. I never owned any of those portfolios, but I wanted to and recall drooling over those lovely X-Men pieces in old catalogs.

Regarding Jack Abramowitz’s Global Guardians history, I never saw the idea of the Super Friends comic book existing on Earth-One as a “theory” since it had been clearly established as such several times.

DC Comics Presents #46 was one of them, of course, since (footnote or not) it referred to SF #45–46. Prior to that, we’d seen TNT follow his revival in Super Friends #12 with a cameo in Superman Family #190 [see inset] while, in JLA #155, Red Tornado recalled—with footnote— his time-travel experience in Super Friends. By contrast, the case against Super Friends being part of the Earth-One canon boils down to “it was based on a cartoon,” which isn’t a compelling argument.

I’ll point to Phil Jimenez’s and my own Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia as one latterday source that acknowledges the Super Friends series as Earth-One. And E. Nelson Bridwell himself, in a letter he wrote to me

TM & © DC Comics.

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in 1983, stated that “the Super Friends stories must be regarded as such. I always wrote them as part of the Earth-One continuity.”

Ultimately, though, we’re talking about fictional characters, so it really comes down to each person’s opinion. Everyone has their own personal canon, and that’s as it should be.

Regarding the Guardians specifically, Nelson added in that ’83 letter [see below—ed.] that he co-created the Little Mermaid with Nick Pascale, and that Pascale “helped design some of the Global Guardians’ costumes. In particular, the Rising Sun and Thunderlord costumes are entirely his.”

– John Wells

As I recall, and this is a long time ago, they illustrated their story with a picture from another unrelated comic—Warlord from Scottish publisher DC Thomson (and nothing to do with DC’s The Warlord).

Like the examples in Robert Menzies’ article, I suspect the production team illustrated their story with whatever they could find in the nearest shop, which had probably sold out of Action because the kids had already bought all available comics. Unlike the Wertham campaign of the ’50s, this was something of a passing storm.

Although questions were asked in Parliament, there was no ongoing interest from most politicians. The Captain Britain comic featured then Prime Minister James Callaghan in a storyline in 1977.

Given that he was portrayed sympathetically and that having current politicians in UK comics was relatively unusual at the time, I wondered if anyone showed the comic to Callaghan. He is no longer with us, so I wrote to Lord McNally, who worked for him at the time. He had not heard of the comic and didn’t think Callaghan had, either.

– Ian Millsted

WORLD VIEW

CALENDAR MAN Last weekend, I was just exploring a bit on the Internet and came across some images from the old DC Calendars (I had the 1977 one back in the day) and thought the subject of merchandising might be an interesting subject for discussion.

I realize the DC and Marvel calendars would be a damn short issue, but I thought a look back at the Power Records, including the ones that came with the comic itself, could make an article. Maybe a discussion about Mego toys? I know the 7-11 glasses has already been done. I saw on the BACK ISSUE Facebook page that someone had already mentioned the vehicles like the Supermobile, etc. I also fondly remember the cardboard Marvel City that came out with the Daily Bugle [building], Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum, and the Baxter Building, and they came with pop-outs of a lot of the Marvel characters. Hell, there was a Superhero Toy Catalogue that you could get which had all sort of good stuff. This is just off the top of my head. I just thought I would pass it on if you were interested.

– John Moret As you note, John, from time to time we dabble with Bronze Age superhero collectibles, recent examples being BI #84’s article on Supergirl merchandising and BI #85’s articles about Christmas Power Records and the Heroes World catalogues. We’ll keep peppering our issues with this fun stuff. And I do think that DC’s and Marvel’s calendars would make an interesting article.

THE CAPTAIN’S CONTROVERSY I enjoyed the article on Captain Britain in BI #83.

I do remember the furor about comics in Britain in 1976 sparked by the “Kids Rule OK” strip in Action. It even made it onto the BBC children’s news program Newsround.

The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast. BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

BACK ISSUE shines a spotlight on an interesting period in the history of comics, the last decades before the world was forever changed by the Internet. BI #83, “International Heroes,” served as a reminder of a time when every non-American hero was essentially depicted as a caricature of their home nation. Perhaps it was easier than giving them a personality, but the end result was that we got Shamrock, Ice, Little Mermaid, and quite a few others.

It was interesting to see which parts of the world didn’t have heroes as much as which ones did. Market forces presumably determined that great swathes of the world were ignored. So there were no Indian or Chinese superheroes to speak of, and none from the Arab world, while the most prominent African was rather feebly retconned into an American. How the focus changes in the coming years will be interesting to see.

As the world has shrunk, comicdom has become much less rooted in the preconceptions and stereotypes of old. One of the things that made Alan Moore’s Miracle(Marvel)man so refreshing to this reader was the mundane nature of the character’s alter ego. Perhaps for the first time ever in comics, a British superhero wasn’t secretly Lord this or Sir that.

There wasn’t, I’ll be honest, much that made we want to dash to the bargain bins—Captain Canuck I can quite happily live without— but as always, there were plenty of articles that both informed and entertained.

On other matters: I was intrigued by the rather cryptic comment by Keith Giffen, which is surely worthy of further explanation. In referring to a return to Justice League he said, “…it would look like I was reviving old rules that comic books have outgrown—though a lot of those rules comic books should have never outgrown.” Can you clarify what he means, and what those rules might be? I could try and guess, but I’d rather have a definitive answer.

– Simon Bullivant Simon, we reached out to Keith Giffen, but didn’t get an answer before press time.

Keith, can you fill us in?

Next issue: BRONZE AGE ADAPTATIONS! The Shadow, Korak – Son of Tarzan, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Worlds Unknown, and Marvel’s 1980s movie adaptations. Plus: PAUL KUPPERBERG surveys prose adaptations of comics! Featuring the work of HOWARD CHAYKIN, MICHAEL Wm. KALUTA, JACK KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL, FRANK ROBBINS, FRANK THORNE, LEN WEIN, and many more.

With an alternate cover produced for DC’s Shadow series by Kaluta. Don’t ask—just BI it! See you in sixty!

Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor-in-chief

Comic Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s Issue

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SPRING 2016 UPDATE

COMIC BOOK FEVER

GEORGE KHOURY (author of The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore and Kimota: The Miracleman Companion) presents a “love letter” to his personal golden age of comics, 1976-1986, covering all the things that made those comics great—the top artists, the coolest stories, and even the best ads! Remember the days when every comic book captured your imagination, and took you to new and exciting places? When you didn’t apologize for loving the comic books and creators that gave you bliss?

COMIC BOOK FEVER captures that era, when comics offered all different genres to any kid with a pocketful of coins, at local establishments from 7-Elevens to your local drug store. Inside this full-color hardcover are new articles, interviews, and images about the people, places, characters, titles, moments, and good times that inspired and thrilled us in the Bronze Age: NEAL ADAMS, JOHN ROMITA, GEORGE PÉREZ, MARV WOLFMAN, ALAN MOORE, DENNY O’NEIL, JIM STARLIN, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, THE HERNANDEZ BROTHERS, THE BUSCEMA BROTHERS, STAN LEE, JACK DAVIS, JACK KIRBY, KEVIN EASTMAN, CHRIS CLAREMONT, GERRY CONWAY, FRANK MILLER—and that’s just for starters. It covers the phenoms that delighted Baby Boomers, Generation X, and beyond: UNCANNY X-MEN, NEW TEEN TITANS, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, LOVE AND ROCKETS, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, SUPERMAN VS. SPIDER-MAN, ARCHIE COMICS, HARVEY COMICS, KISS, STAR WARS, ROM, HOSTESS CAKE ADS, GRIT(!), and other milestones! So take a trip back in time to re-experience those epic stories, and feel the heat of COMIC BOOK FEVER once again! With cover art and introduction by ALEX ROSS. (240-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-063-2 • SHIPS JUNE 2016!

GO TO www.twomorrows.com FOR A FREE PREVIEW!

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With a comics career dating back to 1941, including inking early issues of Captain America, AL PLASTINO was one of the last surviving penciler/inkers of his era. Laboring uncredited on SUPERMAN for two decades (1948-1968), he co-created SUPERGIRL, BRAINIAC, and the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, drawing those characters’ first appearances, and illustrating the initial comics story to feature KRYPTONITE. He was called upon to help maintain the DC Comics house-style by redrawing other artists’ Superman heads, most notoriously on JACK KIRBY’S JIMMY OLSEN series, much to his chagrin. His career even included working on classic daily and Sunday newspaper strips like NANCY, JOE PALOOKA, BATMAN, and others. With a Foreword by PAUL LEVITZ, this book (by EDDY ZENO, author of CURT SWAN: A LIFE IN COMICS) was completed just weeks before Al’s recent passing. In these pages, the artist remembers both his struggles and triumphs in the world of comics, cartooning and beyond. A near-century of insights shared by Al, his family, and contemporaries ALLEN BELLMAN, NICK CARDY, JOE GIELLA, and CARMINE INFANTINO—along with successors JON BOGDANOVE, JERRY ORDWAY, AND MARK WAID—paint a layered portrait of Plastino’s life and career. And a wealth of illustrations show just how influential a figure he is in the history of comics.

(112-page trade paperback) $17.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-066-3 • SHIPS APRIL 2016!

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AL PLASTINO: LAST SUPERMAN STANDING

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DON’T MISS YOUR FAVORITE MAGS!

Starting this month, all our new magazines will be listed in the COMICS section (ie. front half) of Diamond Comic Distributors’ PREVIEWS catalog with our books (instead of in the “Magazine” section as in the past). Look for the TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING section, alphabetically under the letter “T”—now with everything in one place, for easy ordering through your local comics shop.

BACK ISSUE #89

ALTER EGO #139

ALTER EGO #140

ALTER EGO #141

ALTER EGO #142

JIM AMASH interviews ROY THOMAS about his 1990s work on Conan, the stillborn Marvel/Excelsior line launched by STAN LEE, writing for Cross Plains, Topps, DC, and others! Art by KAYANAN, DITKO, BUSCEMA, MAROTO, GIORDANO, ST. AUBIN, SIMONSON, MIGNOLA, LARK, secrets of Dr. Strange’s sorcerous “177A Bleecker Street” address, and more! Cover

by RAFAEL KAYANAN!

Golden Age great IRWIN HASEN spotlight, adapted from DAN MAKARA’s film documentary on Hasen, the 1940s artist of the Justice Society, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Wildcat, Holyoke’s Cat-Man, and numerous other classic heroes—and, for 30 years, the artist of the famous DONDI newspaper strip! Bonus art by his buddies JOE KUBERT, ALEX TOTH, CARMINE INFANTINO, and SHELLY MAYER!

From Detroit to Deathlok, we cover the career of artist RICH BUCKLER: Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Black Panther, Ka-Zar, Dracula, Morbius, a zillion Marvel covers— Batman, Hawkman, and other DC stars— Creepy and Eerie horror—and that’s just in the first half of the 1970s! Plus Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, FCA, and comics expert HAMES WARE on fabulous Golden Age artist RAFAEL ASTARITA!

DAVID SIEGEL talks to RICHARD ARNDT about how, from 1991-2005, he brought the greatest artists of the Golden Age to the San Diego Comic-Con! With art and artifacts by FRADON, GIELLA, MOLDOFF, LAMPERT, CUIDERA, FLESSEL, NORRIS, SULLIVAN, NOVICK, SCHAFFENBERGER, GROTHKOPF, and others! Plus how writer JOHN BROOME got to the Con, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, FCA, and more!

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BACK ISSUE #90

BACK ISSUE #91

BACK ISSUE #92

BRICKJOURNAL #39

“Bronze Age Adaptations!” The Shadow, Korak: Son of Tarzan, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Worlds Unknown, and Marvel’s 1980s movie adaptations. Plus: PAUL KUPPERBERG surveys prose adaptations of comics! With work by JACK KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL, FRANK ROBBINS, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, FRANK THORNE, MICHAEL USLAN, and sporting an alternate Kaluta cover produced for DC’s Shadow series!

“Eighties Ladies!” MILLER & SIENKIEWICZ’s Elektra: Assassin, Dazzler, Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau), Lady Quark, DAN MISHKIN’s Wonder Woman, WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS and ADAM KUBERT’s Jezebel Jade, Somerset Holmes, and a look back at Marvel’s Dakota North! Featuring the work of BRUCE JONES, JOHN ROMITA JR., ROGER STERN, and many more, plus a previously unpublished cover by SIENKIEWICZ.

“All-Jerks Issue!” Guy Gardner, Namor in the Bronze Age, J. Jonah Jameson, Flash Thompson, DC’s Biggest Blowhards, the Heckler, Obnoxio the Clown, and Archie’s “pal” Reggie Mantle! Featuring the work of (non-jerks) RICH BUCKLER, KURT BUSIEK, JOHN BYRNE, STEVE ENGLEHART, KEITH GIFFEN, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and many more. Cover-featuring KEVIN MAGUIRE’s iconic Batman/Guy Gardner “One Punch”!

“Bronze Age Halloween!” The Swamp Thing revival of 1982, Swamp Thing in Hollywood, Phantom Stranger team-ups, KUPPERBERG & MIGNOLA’s Phantom Stranger miniseries, DC’s The Witching Hour, the Living Mummy, and an index of Marvel’s 1970s’ horror anthologies! Featuring the work of RICH BUCKLER, ANDY MANGELS, VAL MAYERIK, MARTIN PASKO, MICHAEL USLAN, TOM YEATES, and many more. Cover by YEATES.

LEGO DINOSAURS! Builder WILLIAM PUGH discusses building prehistoric creatures, a LEGO Jurassic World by DIEGO MAXIMINO PRIETO ALVAREZ, and dino bones by MATT SAILORS! Plus: Minifigure Customization by JARED K. BURKS, stepby-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, DIY Fan Art by BrickNerd TOMMY WILLIAMSON, MINDSTORMS robotics lessons, and more!

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships June 2016

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #12 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #13

DRAW! #32

KIRBY COLLECTOR #67

KIRBY COLLECTOR #68

JACK KIRBY’s mid-life work examined, from Fantastic Four and Thor at Marvel in the middle ’60s to the Fourth World at DC (including the real-life background drama that unfolded during that tumultuous era)!

Plus a career-spanning interview with underground comix pioneer HOWARD CRUSE, the extraordinary cartoonist and graphic novelist of the award-winning Stuck Rubber Baby! Cover by STEVE RUDE!

MICHAEL W. KALUTA feature interview covering his early fans days THE SHADOW, STARSTRUCK, the STUDIO, and Vertigo cover work! Plus RAMONA FRADON talks about her 65+ years in the comic book business on AQUAMAN, METAMORPHO, SUPER-FRIENDS, and SPONGEBOB! Also JAY LYNCH reveals the WACKY PACK MEN who created the Topps trading cards that influenced an entire generation!

Super-star DC penciler HOWARD PORTER demos his creative process, and JAMAL IGLE discusses everything from storyboarding to penciling as he gives a breakdown of his working methods. Plus there’s Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviewing art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY showing the Ord-Way of doing comics, and Comic Art Bootcamp lessons with BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

UP-CLOSE & PERSONAL! Kirby interviews you weren’t aware of, photos and recollections from fans who saw him in person, personal anecdotes from Jack’s fellow pros, LEE and KIRBY cameos in comics, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and more! Don’t let the photo cover fool you; this issue is chockfull of rare Kirby pencil art, from Roz Kirby’s private sketchbook, and Jack’s most personal comics stories!

KEY KIRBY CHARACTERS! We go decadeby-decade to examine pivotal characters Jack created throughout his career (including some that might surprise you)! Plus there’s a look at what would’ve happened if Kirby had never left Marvel Comics for DC, how Jack’s work has been repackaged over the decades, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and galleries of unseen Kirby pencil art!

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(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Summer 2016

MONSTER MASH

Time-trip back to the frightening era of 1957-1972, when monsters stomped into the American mainstream! Once Frankenstein and fiends infiltrated TV in 1957, an avalanche of monster magazines, toys, games, trading cards, and comic books crashed upon an unsuspecting public. This profusely illustrated full-color hardcover covers that creepy, kooky Monster Craze through features on Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, the #1 hit “Monster Mash,” Aurora’s model kits, TV shows (Shock Theatre, The Addams Family, The Munsters, and Dark Shadows), “Mars Attacks” trading cards, Eerie Publications, Planet of the Apes, and more! It features interviews with JAMES WARREN (Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella magazines), FORREST J ACKERMAN (Famous Monsters of Filmland), JOHN ASTIN (The Addams Family), AL LEWIS (The Munsters), JONATHAN FRID (Dark Shadows), GEORGE BARRIS (monster car customizer), ED “BIG DADDY” ROTH (Rat Fink), BOBBY (BORIS) PICKETT (Monster Mash singer/songwriter) and others, with a Foreword by TV horror host ZACHERLEY, the “Cool Ghoul.” Written by MARK VOGER (author of “The Dark Age”).

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $13.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-064-9

DON’T MISS YOUR FAVORITE MAGS!

Starting immediately, all our new magazines will be listed in the COMICS section (ie. front half) of Diamond Comic Distributors’ PREVIEWS catalog with our books (instead of in the “Magazine” section as in the past). Look for the TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING section, alphabetically under the letter “T”—now with everything in one place, for easy ordering through your local comics shop.

MLJ COMPANION

THE MLJ COMPANION documents the complete history of Archie Comics’ super-hero characters known as the “Mighty Crusaders”—THE SHIELD, BLACK HOOD, STEEL STERLING, HANGMAN, MR. JUSTICE, THE FLY, and many others.

It features in-depth examinations of each era of the characters’ extensive history: THE GOLDEN AGE (beginning with the Shield, the first patriotic super-hero, who pre-dated Captain America by a full year), THE SILVER AGE (spotlighting those offbeat, campy Mighty Comics issues, and The Fly and Jaguar), THE BRONZE AGE (with the Red Circle line, and the !mpact imprint published by DC Comics), up to THE MODERN AGE, with its Dark Circle imprint (featuring such fanfavorites series as “The Fox” by MARK WAID and DEAN HASPIEL). Plus: Learn what “MLJ” stands for! Uncover such rarities as the Mighty Crusaders board game, and the Shadow’s short-lived career as a spandex-clad superhero! Discover the ill-fated Spectrum line of comics, that was abruptly halted due to its violent content! See where the super-heroes crossed over into Archie, Betty, and Veronica’s world! And read interviews with IRV NOVICK, DICK AYERS, RICH BUCKLER, BILL DuBAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, JIM VALENTINO, JIMMY PALMIOTTI, KELLEY JONES, MICHAEL USLAN, and others who chronicled the Mighty Crusaders’ exploits from the 1940s to today! By RIK OFFENBERGER and PAUL CASTIGLIA, with a cover by IRV NOVICK and JOE RUBINSTEIN. INCLUDES 64 FULL-COLOR PAGES OF KEY MLJ STORIES! (288-page trade paperback with COLOR) $31.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-067-0 • SHIPS AUGUST 2016!

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The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze In America, 1957-1972