Comic Book Artist #10 by TwoMorrows Publishing

WALTER SIMONSON • JOHN WORKMAN TM

N o . 10 Oct . 2 0 00

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DRAW! #25

ALTER EGO #117

KIRBY COLLECTOR #61

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2

BRICKJOURNAL #24

JACK KIRBY: WRITER! Examines quirks of Kirby’s wordsmithing, from the FOURTH WORLD to ROMANCE and beyond! Lengthy Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, LARRY LIEBER’s scripting for Jack at 1960s Marvel Comics, RAY ZONE on 3-D work with Kirby, comparing STEVE GERBER’s Destroyer Duck scripts to Jack’s pencils, Kirby’s best promo blurbs, Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

JOE KUBERT double-size Summer Special tribute issue! Comprehensive examinations of each facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert School. Kubert interviews, rare art and artifacts, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, anecdotes, pin-ups and miniinterviews by faculty, students, fans, friends and family! Edited by JON B. COOKE.

LEGO TRAINS! Builder CALE LEIPHART shows how to get started building trains and train layouts, with instructions on building microscale trains by editor JOE MENO, building layouts with the members of the Pennsylvania LEGO Users Group (PennLUG), fan-built LEGO monorails minifigure customization by JARED BURKS, microscale building by CHRISTOPHER DECK, “You Can Build It”, and more!

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ALTER EGO #118

ALTER EGO #119

ALTER EGO #120

LEE WEEKS (Daredevil, Incredible Hulk) gives insight into the artform, YILDIRAY ÇINAR (Noble Causes, Fury of the Firestorms) interview and demo, inker JOE RUBINSTEIN shows how he works, “Comic Art Bootcamp” with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, “Rough Critique” of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, and “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and software! Mature readers only.

GOLDEN AGE ARTISTS L.B. COLE AND JAY DISBROW! DISBROW’s memoir of COLE and his work on CAT-MAN, art by BOB FUJITANI, CHARLES QUINLAN, IRWIN HASEN, FCA (Fawcett Collector’s of America) on the two-media career of Captain Video, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, BILL SCHELLY on comics fandom history, Cat-Man cover by L.B. COLE!

AVENGERS 50th ANNIVERSARY! WILL MURRAY on the group’s behind-thescenes origin, a look at its first decade with ROY THOMAS, STAN LEE, JACK KIRBY, THE BROTHERS BUSCEMA, TUSKA, ADAMS, COLAN, BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, MERRY MARVEL MARCHING SOCIETY, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, FCA, Golden Age Blue Beetle artist E.C. STONER, unused Avengers cover by DON HECK!

MARC SWAYZE TRIBUTE ISSUE, spotlighting FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America)! Salutes from Fawcett alumnus C.C. BECK and OTTO BINDER, interview with wife JUNE SWAYZE, a full Phantom Eagle story from Wow Comics, plus interview with 1950s Dell/Western artist MEL KEEFER, MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and a SWAYZE Marvel Family cover art from the 1940s!

X-MEN SALUTE! 1963-69 secrets, rare ‘60s BRAZILIAN X-MEN stories, lost ‘60s XMen “character sheet” by STAN LEE, ROY THOMAS on the 1970s revival, art and artifacts by KIRBY, ROTH, ADAMS, HECK, FRIEDRICH, and BUSCEMA—plus the MARVELMANIA fan club story, interview with Golden Age writer ED SILVERMAN, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, and JACK KIRBY’s unused X-Men #10 cover!

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BACK ISSUE #64

BACK ISSUE #65

BACK ISSUE #66

BACK ISSUE #67

BACK ISSUE #68

“Bronze Age Backup Series”! Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Metamorpho, GOODWIN and SIMONSON’s Manhunter, PASKO and GIFFEN’s Dr. Fate, “Whatever Happened To…?”, Nemesis, Rose and the Thorn, Seven Soldiers of Victory, art and commentary by CARY BURKETT, JOHN CALNAN, DICK GIORDANO, MIKE GRELL, ELLIOT S! MAGGIN, DAN SPIEGLE, cover by GRELL and JOE RUBINSTEIN.

“Bronze Age B-Teams”! Defenders issue-byissue overview, Champions, Guardians of the Galaxy, Inhumans, PETER DAVID’s X-Factor, Teen Titans West, Legion of Substitute Heroes, an all-star chatfest of Doom Patrol interviews, plus art and commentary by ROSS ANDRU, SAL BUSCEMA, KEITH GIFFEN, TONY ISABELLA, PAUL KUPPERBERG, ERIK LARSEN, GEORGE PÉREZ, BOB ROZAKIS, cover by KEVIN NOWLAN.

“Bronze Age Team-Ups”! Marvel Team-Up and Two-in-One, Super-Villain Team-Up, CLAREMONT and SIMONSON’s X-Men/New Teen Titans, DC Comics Presents, SuperTeam Family, HANEY and APARO’s Batman of Earth-B(&B), Superman/Captain Marvel smackdowns, plus art and commentary by BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, GIFFEN, LEVITZ, WEIN, and a classic GIL KANE cover inked anew by TERRY AUSTIN.

“Heroes Out of Time!” Batman: Gotham by Gaslight with MIGNOLA, WAID, and AUGUSTYN, Booster Gold with JURGENS, X-Men: Days of Future Past with CHRIS CLAREMONT, Bill & Ted with EVAN DORKIN, interview with P. CRAIG RUSSELL, “Pro2Pro” with Time Masters’ BOB WAYNE and LEWIS SHINER, Karate Kid, New Mutants: Asgardian Wars, and Kang. Mignola cover.

“1970s and ‘80s Legion of Super-Heroes!” LEVITZ interview, the Legion’s Honored Dead, the Cosmic Boy miniseries, a Time Trapper history, the New Adventures of Superboy, Legion fantasy cover gallery by JOHN WATSON, plus BATES, COCKRUM, CONWAY, COLON, GIFFEN, GRELL, JANES, KUPPERBERG, LaROCQUE, LIGHTLE, SCHAFFENBERGER, SHERMAN, STATON, SWAN, WAID, & more! COCKRUM cover!

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Last-minute bits about the Community of Comic Book Artists, Writers and Editors

T. MOTLEY’S NEPTOONS & TRUE FICTION Damned if I can’t find cartoonist T. Motley’s mini-comics, Neptoons and True Fiction #1 & 2, at presstime but please believe Ye Ed when I tell ya, Mr. T is a wonderful artist! Thankfully, I do have his letterhead on hand, so check out the detail at right on his endearing style (just hope it’s not too small). And his writing is way cool, too. The self-described cartoonologist has three minis available, and you can order them from Motley at P.O. Box 480463, Denver, CO 80248-0463. True Fiction #1 & 2 are a mere buck apiece, and Neptoons, his “doodle comic,” goes for two smackers, all postpaid. I became aware of Motley’s stylings coz’ he mailed me the comix out of the blue in the last few months. So if any of you would like to see a plug in CBA, be sure to send ’em to me. I can’t make any promises, but Ye Ed sure likes getting free stuff, and the material I likes, I plugs. Good luck, T., and tell me what’s happenin’ in the future!

EC for Me, See? Yet another quickie review: Indispensible. That’s the essence of my feeling about Tales of Terror, the EC Comics compendium volume by Fred von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman, co-published by Fantagraphics and Gemstone (hmmm… Groth and Geppi; there’s a match!). While the book’s design leaves much to be desired, overall it’s a superb tome of interviews, checklists, unseen art, and articles on probably the greatest comics line of all time. Almost 50 years in the making, it features so much stuff, ya just can’t do without it. Because EC has been so scrutinized by historians, forget a CBA devoted to the line—because, hell, Fred and Grant have already done a great job. A must-have! Background image ©2000 Al Feldstein

SDCC ANTICS! Boy, the sun was sure out for TwoMorrows at this year’s Comic-Con International: San Diego! Not only did John and Ye Ed snag an Eisner Award (look on our other Front Page for details), but our justreleased-at-SDCC books and mags were flying off our exhibit tables like there was no tomorrow! Streetwise seemed the buzz of the show as we went through copies of the nifty autobio comics anthology, hand over fist! (And much appreciation to Mark Waid who seemed to buy most of the copies sold, sharing them with pals!) Plus our Charlton issue and CBA Collection #1 sold quite well, too. Thanks, fellow con-folk! Covering the table and giving us old hands muchneeded relief this year out was that exhibit showman (and comics savant, natch) Tom Stewart, who dutifully announced to the crowd in ominous tone every time he tore an action figure from (gasp!) its mint-conditioned bubble card! Mr. Stewart (who appears in the River Phoenix flick, Dog Fight, albeit briefly, and is a close, personal friend of Brandon Frasier—woooo!) did a spectacular job hawking our wares and we applaud his help. We also had the opportunity to meet Tom’s lovely wife, Kenyatta, a more vivacious and personable woman you’ll never likely met. Also it was great to see Alter Ego editor (and CBA contributing ed) Roy Thomas and FCA editor Paul Hamerlinck at the booth. Jennifer Go, Paul’s sweetie, was also a delight to meet. And, Brian Saner Lamkin, you were missed, dude! Next year, right? Kudos to Gary Sassaman, programming

coordinator at SDCC, who did an exemplary job staging our TwoMorrows and Streetwise panels. Thanks to Bill Schelly, Sergio Aragonés, Nick Cardy, Scott Shaw!, Walter Simonson, Evan Dorkin, and Michael T. Gilbert for their participation. Overall, so much happens and with all the hustle-and-bustle it’s tough to recall all the stuff that went on at SDCC, but needless to say it was a great show. It was especially fun to have my brother, Andrew, hanging with me, as we went around stirring up interest in our shared property, Prime8™. My highlight? Well, at the risk of revealing that I’m a shameless, name-dropping suck-up, lemme tell you a tale: A few moments before the final closing of the show on Sunday, this guy is briskly passing by the table, a guy I have long admired and always wanted to meet, and he’s moving through the crowd with determination. Hey, there’s only a couple of minutes left, so I screw up the courage and call out his name. He stops, comes to the table, and a flash of recognition comes to his eyes as he glances over our table. “Cool,” he sez. “CBA’s one of my favorite magazines… Oh, Streetwise! I’ve been looking forward to that!” And this guy promptly hands us cash, buys our newest puppy, and I bathe in the glow. Hey, when the guy who created the best TV show ever—and has a nifty comics line, to boot—acknowledges our existence, we’ve a right to bask a minute, yeah? Thanks, Matt Groening. May The Farce be with you… always. (And might I interest you in this creative property me and my brother are hawking?).

Gaiman’s Last Angel Tour Benefits CBLDF I hope you hipsters don’t hold it against me that I never read a Neil Gaiman comic book—maybe I’m the last one in this Gen-X world—but it wasn’t because I never wanted to; it’s just, well, I was probably too cheap to buy Sandman, I guess. Someday, when I get a break (yeah, right!) I intend to rectify that shortcoming and catch up on the collections. But I am a huge fan of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and have long offered the organization gratis space in this mag for their promotion. Though they’ve been too busy over the last year or so to contribute to CBA, looks as if that’s changing through the efforts of Rebecca Wilson, CBLDF publicist, who set me up right with the following info: Neil Gaiman’s Guardian Angel Tours have always been special occasions, rare chances to spend an evening with a master storyteller. In small, intimate theatres across the country, Gaiman has mesmerized audiences with poems and tales of the macabre and the fantastic. And in the course of these tours, Gaiman has raised more than $100,000 to support the non-profit CBDLDF.

But now it’s the end of an era: Gaiman has announced that his 2000 reading series will be The Last Angel Tour. This October, Gaiman will give readings of his work on a cross-country tour from New York to Los Angeles in a massive benefit for the CBLDF: October 16: The Vic Theatre, Chicago. (773) 472-0449, or call Ticketmaster at (312) 559-1212 October 18: St. Mark’s Church, New York City. Call Ticketmaster at (212) 307-7171 October 24: The Aladdin Theatre, Portland OR. (503) 233-1994, or call Ticketmaster at (503) 224-4400 October 26: Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles. Call Ticketmaster at (213) 480-3232 Tickets go on sale September 1 and will also be available at <http://www.ticketmaster.com> For complete tour information, visit the CBLDF web-site at <http://www.cbldf.org> or call the Fund at 1-800-99-CBLDF.

Walter drew the characters he is no doubt most fondly recalled working on in this charity piece drawn for the 1998 Heroes Con art auction. Courtesy of the artist.

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NUMBER 10

CELEBRATING THE LIVES & WORK OF THE GREAT CARTOONISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE Publisher

OCTOBER 2000

DEPARTMENTS:

TWOMORROWS THE OTHER FRONT PAGE: MORE HYPE AND STUFF JOHN & PAM MORROW

Ye Ed gives us lots more hyperbole and plugs, stroking egos, making friends, and trying to kickstart trends....1-B

Cover Art WALTER SIMONSON

CBA COMMUNIQUES: CHARLTON CLARIFICATIONS Ye Ed, Joe Gill, Ed Konick, and others make clarifications and corrections on our Charlton comics issue.........3-B

Cover Color TOM ZIUKO

CBA COMMENTARY: ALEX TOTH—‘BEFORE I FORGET’ The master of sequential storytelling discusses panel layouts and keeping it simple ........................................4-B SPECIAL WALTER SIMONSON & JOHN WORKMAN SECTION:

Production JON B. COOKE GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS Logo Designer/ Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY by J.D. King

WALTER SIMONSON INTERVIEW: MAN OF TWO GODS CBA chats with the artist-writer in a career-spanning interview, from “Manhunter” to Thor to Orion ............6-B JOHN WORKMAN INTERVIEW: JOHN’S WORKMANSHIP Letterer, artist, art director, packager, commentator—is there anything the guy can’t do? We ask ’im. ..........40-B WOMEN AND THE COMICS: A CELEBRATION! Guest Editor Trina Robbins, Marie Severin, Ramona Fradon, Mary Fleener, Tarpe Mills and more!..........FLIP US! Visit CBA on our Website at: www.twomorrows.com All letters of comment, articles and artwork, please mail to: Jon B. Cooke, Editor, Comic Book Artist, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 Phone: (401) 783-1669 • Fax: (401) 783-1287 • E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com

N E X T

I S S U E

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A L E X

T O T H

S H E L D O N

M A Y E R !

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. Jon B. Cooke, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 USA • 401-783-1669 • Fax: 401-783-1287. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT the editorial office. Single issues: $6.95 ($8.00 Canada, $10.00 elsewhere). Yearly subscriptions: $30 US, $42 Canada, $54 elsewhere. First Printing. All characters are © their respective owners. All material is © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © their respective authors. ©2000 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. PRINTED IN CANADA. Cover acknowledgement: Orion ©2000 DC Comics. Thor ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Oct. 2000

CBA Communiques

Charlton Clarifications Joe Gill, Roger Broughton, Ron Frantz & Ed Konick Comment While generally very well received by readers, the last issue of CBA—#9, our first in-depth examination of those wonderfully wonky comics of Charlton—generated some concern from certain folk who insist they’re the proper copyright and trademark owners of material either vaguely or downright mistakenly identified as owned by others. First, let me express it is never CBA’s intention to infringe on copyright ownership. This magazine’s express purpose is be a scholarly journal, examining the history of comics through text and graphics, and in using copyrighted images, we stand behind the “Fair Use” doctrine as determined by law. Because Charlton sold off their copyrights and trademarks to various parties, our determination of ownership (to give proper credit in the accompanying captions) became a bit convoluted. Here are some clarifications: Except for the rights to Charlton material purchased by DC Comics of certain Action Hero characters, Pete Morisi’s purchase of Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, and Joe Staton’s ownership of E-Man, Roger Broughton tells us all the rights to all other characters and stories are owned by him. Most of those images labeled as “©2000 the respective copyright owner,” should have said “©2000 Roger Broughton.” Our apologies to Mr. Broughton (who will be interviewed about his Charlton material in our follow-up ish examining the company from 1968-91, coming in January). Our friend Ron Frantz also informs us that the caption on pg. 66 of Pete Morisi’s interview is mistaken; “The Face” is actually a character that goes back to the Golden Age and Ron’s Ace Comics imprint published an updated series of adventures in the late ’80s called What Is… The Face?, featuring great art by Steve Ditko, Alex Toth, and others. Ron tells us he purchased the trademark and copyright to the character in the mid-’80s. Our apologies to Ron. Finally (and thankfully not copyright-related), former Charlton General Manager Ed Konick called to clarify a few points made by Dick Giordano in the ish. While Ed remembers Dick very fondly (noting that Dick called Ed by the nickname “OKEK,” derived from Ed’s initialing proofs “okay” for press), he takes exception to Dick’s characterizing DC’s purchase of the Charlton Action Hero trademarks as being bought for “peanuts.” Ed (who as Charlton representative negotiated the deal with DC) told me, “We made a certain amount for licensing and were paid royalties between 1982 (when the contract was signed) and 1990, amounting to over three times the amount Dick said [$30,000]. Charlton earned pretty close to $100,000 on the deal, hardly ‘peanuts,’ by my thinking.” Ed also wanted to emphasize that the demise of the song lyric magazines was primarily due to the advent of recording devices by consumers, especially tape recorders. Joe Gill Seymour, Connecticut I think CBA #9 is a very fine magazine. My article is indeed well-placed near the front of the book and my fame is enhanced (to a dim glow) by the many times Joe Gill is mentioned throughout the magazine. But, like they say in the Vatican, mea culpa. My work seemed “pedestrian” when the final votes were in. In 1956, after the flood razed the plant, the esteemed founder, John Santangelo, bravely informed the staff of Charlton comics that the show would go on. He was going to defy disaster but if we wanted to keep our jobs, we’d have to work at half our former rates. My new rate was $2 a page. Pencilers got $6.50 and the inkers $6.50. There was light at the end of this economic tunnel. Each year, we received, deserving or not, a 25¢ raise! By 1976 when they stopped printing new comics, my rate was up to $6.75. Most of us had relocated to Derby, Conn. We had made new lives. The chancy business of returning to Brooklyn or the Bronx or Louisiana and finding new markets would be difficult. Oct. 2000

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

So, most of us stayed. I wrote. At $2 per page, I wrote fast. My assignments went from 30 or 40 pages a week very quickly to nearly 100, then rose even higher. I had to write, for awhile, under two names (Dave Gerrity, duly reported to the IRS) as I cranked out five or six comic books a week. Dawn to dark and beyond. Thanksgiving dinner was a brief interlude and Christmas was almost forgotten as the worn-out, second-hand presses of Charlton consumed the mush the comics department were feeding it. We tried. I never deliberately wrote a bad script, never plagerized, and often did truly excellent work. I’m a voracious reader and I have enormous respect for good writing. I’m ashamed of the sleep-deprived work that I sometimes produced. It was “pedestrian” they say. What a compliment! In my lexicon. pedestrian means ordinary, unremarkable, and achieving that level was an incredible accomplishment. I wrote Jungle Tales of Tarzan, probably the best Tarzan comic produced. Sam Glanzman must’ve felt some identification with the apes because he did a great job. Yet, when in your interview with Dick Giordano, Giordano attributed it to “good artwork.” He grudgingly admitted Gill had “a certain skill level.” Such fulsome praise! When Giordano had his own studio with Frank McLaughlin, he bought a lot of scripts from me. He also promised Frank and I all the work we could handle when he went to his vicepresidency at DC. A promise quickly forgotten. I never wrote super-heroes. I hated them. In 1945, Stan Lee at Timely (Marvel) Comics liked my work and asked me to write Human Torch, etc. Down the years, I worked for DC, Timely, St. John, Fawcett, etc. I refused to write super-heroes. At Western, I refused to write Frankenstein or whatever. As comics swung towards the super-heroes, Charlton went its own way. Anyway, I doubt if most of the smug critics would’ve survived those years at the Charlton shoe factory. I’m a little proud of what I did and I’m grateful for having worked with Pat Boyette, Toth, Severin, Rocke Mastroserio, “Reese” Whitman, and, yeah, Steve Ditko. I was pedestrian but I walked a long way. Pete Morisi Staten Island, New York Many thanks for turning out a quality issue of Comic Book Artist. Although I worked 20 years for the Charlton Comics Group, it was a labor of love that caused me to mix with editors Pat Masulli, Dick Giordano, Sal Gentile, and George Wildman, gentlemen all. The money was never good at Charlton, but the prospect of getting a “well done” from any of those guys meant a lot. Now, by doing the Charlton Comics story, you’ve provided a record, a service if you will, of a time when comics were fun, and strips like Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, Kid Montana, Lash LaRue, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, The Masked Rider, Gunmaster, The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, etc., etc., were the norm. You done good, Comic Book Artist.

Above: Look for our follow-up to last issue’s “The Charlton Comics Story: 1945-68,” with CBA #12, featuring the definitive examination of Charlton in the 1970s. With a new cover by Joe Staton, we’ll be including interviews with many who made that era great for the Derby, Conn. publisher. George Wildman, Nick Cuti, Joe Staton, Tom Sutton, Mike Zeck, Warren Sattler, Bob Layton, Dan Reed, Bill Black, Bill Pearson, and more are featured. Also look for an ALL-NEW E-MAN STRIP, courtesy of his creators, Nick Cuti and Joe Staton! This spectacular ships in January! E-Man is ©2000 Joe Staton We’re still desperately looking for the whereabouts of:

WAYNE HOWARD SANHO KIM Please contact us if you can help! 3-B

CBA Commentary

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

Oct. 2000

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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CBA Interview

Simonson Says

The Man of Two Gods Recalls His 25+ Years in Comics Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson

Below: Fuzzy photo by Ye Ed of Walter Simonson, taken at the artist’s cozy home, nestled in the woods off the Hudson River in New York. Still enamored with archosaurs, Walter is wearing a T-shirt riddled with dino images.

Though Walter Simonson had planned to be a paleontologist— that’s a person who studies dinosaurs, folks—as a college student in the 1960s, the Marvel comics of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko changed the would-be scientist’s mind and led him to pursue a career as a comic book artist. Frankly—and, no doubt, inconsequentially—Walter is my favorite comics personality, friendly, approachable, generous, funny, and smart. The artist-writer, though facing crunching deadlines with his hellish monthly schedule writing, penciling, and inking Orion for DC (never mind coordinating back-up strips for the title), allowed Ye Ed into his home for two four-hour interview sessions (on July 12th and August 17th), suffered my rummaging through his enormous personal art collection, and even took me out to lunch on both occasions. Gracias, Mr. S., and also many thanks to that other cool cat, Walter’s missus, Weezie. The artist copyedited this transcript. Comic Book Artist: Where are you from, Walter? Walter Simonson: I grew up in College Park, Maryland. It’s inside the Beltway, just a couple of miles from the Washington, D.C. line, maybe eight blocks from the University of Maryland. I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but my parents moved to College Park when I was two-anda-half, so I don’t remember a lot about Tennessee. CBA: What did your father do? Walter: He was a scientist, worked in soils. He was with the Soil Conservation Service in the Department of Agriculture. In his last job before he retired, he was the Director of Soil Classification and Correlation for the U.S. His work involved studying soils, gathering and assessing information on them that could be used in a variety of ways, from establishing the suitability of land for crop production to deciding what kind of soap the Army might use in the field somewhere. CBA: You obviously wanted to be a paleontologist for a while. Did you pick up an interest of the academic side? Walter: Sure. Dad taught college for five years in Iowa after grad school, and then he moved more directly into soil science. But I never thought about being an artist when I was a kid. I discovered dinosaurs in third grade, as a result of seeing Fantasia, and decided I wanted to be a paleontologist and study fossils—dinosaurs in particular. That desire stayed with me all

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through college. I majored in geology with the idea of going to graduate school for paleontology. However, I reached a point at the end of my senior year when I ended up deciding, after a long night, that paleo was not the direction I wanted to go in. I had no ideas about what else to do, really. I’d always drawn, but I didn’t have any concept of making a living at drawing. I ended up going to art school because art was the only real interest I’d had growing up outside of dinosaurs. As it happened, besides studying geology when I was in college, I got into Marvel comics. I discovered Thor in Journey into Mystery #120 and had my personal epiphany. [laughs] CBA: What made you pick up comics then? How old were you? Walter: I was a sophomore in college when I found that issue. I’d read comics when I was a kid; we had had a subscription to Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. I was a big Carl Barks fan, without having any idea who Barks was, or what his name was, or even that one guy did that stuff. But I knew the “Good Duck Artist,” I could recognize his work when I was ten. We had all kinds of comics… just off the cuff: Little Iodine, Cheyenne, some of the Western titles, the Warner stuff, some of the TV adaptations, 77 Sunset Strip with some Russ Manning jobs, I liked Jesse Marsh’s Tarzan work (without knowing who Marsh was either), and I liked the Manning “Brothers of the Spear” back-ups in Tarzan, too. I also had a subscription to Turok, Son of Stone. CBA: A subscription? Walter: Well, hey, dinosaurs! [laughter] The two comics we had subscriptions to when I was young were Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories for a while, and Turok. Actually, my brother gave me a subscription to Thor when I was in college, and I quit getting it after the year, because I discovered they sent the comics folded in half. When I was a kid, I didn’t care about it so much, but as a young adult, I didn’t like the crease down the middle—it broke the cover color with a white line down the center of the cover where it was folded—so I gave up on the subscription idea. But I read a lot of comics as a kid: Anthology stories, Westerns, detectives, super-heroes, Strange Adventures I think… I remember reading a DC comic where praying mantises take over the world, and they raise humans as racing animals or something. [laughs] Comics was my first introduction to Burroughs—before I knew who Burroughs was. One of my friends had a copy of Princess of Mars (the first John Carter book) in an adaptation by Jesse Marsh. I was fascinated by that comic; I thought it was really alien looking! It took me a long time to find out what the heck it was about, and who Jesse Marsh was, or Burroughs for that matter. But I read a lot of comics as a kid. My parents encouraged us, because they felt it helped develop the habit of reading, period. CBA: They didn’t look down upon it? Walter: Oh, no, not at all. CBA: Did they see the content of the stories? Walter: No idea. I’m young enough to be post-EC (I was probably three or four when that stuff was coming out), so the comics that we got were fairly sedate. My parents may very well have checked the contents. I didn’t think so then but when you’re a kid, you’re not paying attention. CBA: They didn’t object. Walter: We probably bought most of ’em with our allowance, rather than having our parents buy them for us. No, it was just that they thought we should be reading, and they didn’t care what we read, my brother and I, as long as we read. I have a younger brother named Bruce, and he is now a Professor of Geology at Oberlin College in Ohio. He got into geology and stayed with it. [laughs] COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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CBA: Are you guys tight? Walter: Yes. Bruce is both my brother and one of my very best friends. I’m very proud of him. We chat every so often. CBA: Do you send him your comics work? Walter: Nah. Well, I’ve sent stuff out there once in a while but I don’t push it. On the other hand, having been a geology major, it’s kind of cool, because when he tells me what he’s doing, even though I’m way out of geology, I still retain a bit of the jargon, so I can figure out what he’s doing. Very useful. CBA: Is he your only sibling? Walter: Yes. CBA: Were you social kids? Did you play baseball? Walter: No, I was lousy at sports. I was pretty much a loner and fairly quiet, although nobody who knows me now seems to believe that. [laughter] CBA: So what happened? Walter: I don’t know… college, I guess. Apparently I got louder in college. CBA: Were you a cartoonist then? Walter: I was, actually. I did a lot of drawings. I really drew from younger than I can remember. My mom thought it was very cool. But after a while, I quit drawing, which she was sorry about. Then, when I was about four years old—these are really acquired memories because my Mom told me this stuff—I had a mild case of mononucleosis. I was wiped out and in bed for four to six weeks. Of course, as a kid, you’re bored stiff. So, my Mom—among other things—just to give me something to do, got me some paper and pencils, and I began drawing again while I was ill, and I didn’t quit after that. CBA: Was there a pile of comics next to you, and were you swiping? Walter: Oh, at that age… I don’t remember for sure, I probably didn’t have a pile of comics when I was four, I don’t have that many comics going back that far. CBA: Oh, so you were just drawing. Oct. 2000

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Walter: I was just drawing. I drew whatever interested me. (I don’t have any drawings that survived from then.) I know I wasn’t doing a lot of continuity. CBA: Was it mostly fantasy stuff? Walter: Once I got interested in dinosaurs, I drew a lot of dinosaurs, but that was third grade on. I looked at stuff, but I rarely put other peoples’ art in front of me, trying to copy what I saw— a lot of World War I bi-planes. My first effort at trying to do any kind of comic book stuff was when I was in about fifth grade, and I started off doing “The Origin of Life.” [laughter] A modest little scientific comic about how life on Earth began. I did it on that kind of yellow manila paper we all used to have in school, and I used colored pencils to color it. I tried typing the captions, because I wanted them to look neat, and I couldn’t print as well as the typewriter could. CBA: Were you like 10, 11 years old then? Walter: No more than that. I was still in elementary school, for sure. I got about a page-and-a-half done, and then I burned out. I had a book when I was a kid, about that same age, entitled From Then ’Till Now in a Golden Book format. It was a history of life on earth with a oldstyle brontosaurus on the cover. I think I was inspired by that book to do the comic book version of it. “The Origin of Life.” Looking back now, I’m amazed at my… [laughter] ambition! CBA: So, your next attempt at handmade comics, did that strike in college?

Above: Walter penciled and inked this double-page spread for an anticipated Thor storyline featuring a war between the Frost Giants and the gods, but the artist left the series before the story’s realization. This piece was featured in a Marvel Age Annual. Thor & Co. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Orion detail from a Simonson trading card. Orion ©20000 DC Comics.

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Above: Dissatisfied with the abrupt climax of Steve Ditko’s final “Dr. Strange” story, young Walter wrote and drew his own version. Below: A pre-professional Iron Man story by the artist, a character Walter said he might like to render someday. ©2000 Walter Simonson. Characters ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Walter: Yeah. I read comics up to somewhere in high school, and at that point, you realize it just isn’t cool to be seen by girls when you’re hanging out at the spinner rack and reading comic books. At least, it wasn’t then… although I was a complete social retard, so I don’t know what the heck I was worried about. But I lost interest in comics, and that would’ve been, oh, I don’t know, somewhere around 1962. CBA: You weren’t really a collector, per se? Walter: No, not as a kid, certainly. We had a white shelf my dad built in the corner of the dining room where we kept a box of toys, and there was a pile of comics next to it. Of course, you know, like all good moms, my Mom threw out my old comics, so… well, they wouldn’t be worth any money if we didn’t have moms like that. She really rued the day later, and I did try to tell her, “It’s just fine, honestly! I don’t care.” [laughter] I didn’t! She felt bad, but it was all right. But I can remember that old stuff contained my initial introduction to Homer and The Iliad, a really nice adaptation of the movie Helen of Troy. Rosanna Podesta starred as Helen, I’ve forgotten who else was in it now. But it was a version of The Iliad, and the comic was apparently drawn by John Buscema (John thinks he inked it, but I’m not sure he’s right. It’s possible Sal inked it, but Sal isn’t sure at this point either). It was my first brush with Homer and I was ten years old when that movie came out. I’d read the comic, saw the movie. (Where we lived, Dell and DC comics were just about all that was available.) Dell comics did not have the [Comics] Code, but they carried this little “Dell’s Pledge to Parents,” which was actually more restrictive than the Code, I think. But in the Dell version of Helen of Troy, at the very end of the comic, Paris apparently gets away with Helen! In the last shot of the comic book, Paris and Helen are standing on the dock, ready to hop on the boat and escape as they watch Troy burning, and Helen’s looking back, saying, “From now on, I shall

always be known as… Helen of Troy!” I read the comic first, saw the movie second. And at the end of the movie, what happens is what happens in Homer! More or less. Paris gets killed in the sack of Troy. Honestly, I was this ten-year-old kid, my heart must’ve been on the floor of the theater! “What?!? What?!? What happened?!?! Paris!!! NO!!!” I was devastated, and I’ve never been reconciled to the classical ending that has Helen going back with the Greeks, or that Paris was kind of a yutz in the real story. All because of the first version I read in a Dell comic in which, I’m sure, the hero couldn’t be killed! [laughter] CBA: There’s that pledge! Walter: There it is! But I had Helen of Troy, and I had other comics in that period. The Land Unknown—mixing dinosaurs and hominids—was a great Alex Toth job in ‘56 that I loved. Dell had a wide variety of stories, and I read them all, so I wasn’t like, “I only love super-heroes,” or “I only love Westerns”! If it was in comic book form, I pretty much read it. CBA: What prompted you to do a story in comics in college? Walter: Between freshman and sophomore year during summer vacation, I discovered two issues of Journey into Mystery on the newsstand at the same time (because they hadn’t pulled the old one off the rack), which were the first half of a four-part story. I wasn’t really buying comics then and I hadn’t seen Marvel comics to speak of. I stood at the newsstand and read these “Thor” issues, and thought they were great. But I didn’t buy them, because I wasn’t really buying comics. I must’ve gone back to the same damn drugstore four times and re-read them, and I finally said, “Oh, this is stupid!” So I bought the comics. That was the beginning, and when I went back to college, it took me a while to discover that the only place locally where one could buy comic books was a place called Augie’s Tobacco Store which had tobacco, magazines, paperbacks, and a little stationery. They were also the only place in town with a big spinner rack, and they had all the Marvels (which at the time was maybe 11 titles a month) and DCs. So, I began to get into Marvel comics, I bought “Thor” and then broadened out, and eventually I was buying all 11 comics each month and reading them all. I followed Marvels then from around ’65 straight through to ’69 or ’70 when I gave up on them again. By that time, I was still reading comics, I just wasn’t reading any Marvels. CBA: You quit reading Marvels when Jack Kirby left the company? Walter: Pretty much. Even before Jack left, I felt they’d begun repeating a lot of the stories toward the end of the ’60’s. By the time Galactus comes back for the fourth time, I wasn’t that interested, I’m not the audience for it. You need fresh blood for the stuff to be new. And there were also some “Campus Unrest” stories Marvel did, which looked at the anti-war protest stuff, and it didn’t seem as genuine to me as it should have been, speaking from a modicum of first hand experience. Anachronisms like Peter Parker wanting a cup of java never bothered me, I always thought it was kind of funny, actually… we weren’t using that word in the ‘60s, but it was okay! [laughter] I just thought Marvel Comics were kind of treading water by the end of the ’60s. CBA: They’re not hip anymore? Walter: Well, if they’d still been fun to read, I wouldn’t have cared if they were hip or not. But they weren’t as much fun to read. Maybe being fun was what made them hip. But other stuff was starting to show up that I was noticing. I remember in the late ’60s seeing Bernie Wrightson’s “Nightmaster” come out in Showcase, so I was looking at other companies’ comics by then. I’d begun branching out. CBA: Did you recognize Bernie’s stuff? Walter: You know, it’s hard to say exactly. I graduated from college in ‘68, moved back home for a year, because I was really unsure what to do. I got a job in a bookstore, and I was also reading a lot of science-fiction by then. In the bookstore job, I began keeping track of the SF shelf; this would’ve been September ’68, and they had a SF shelf that was maybe three feet long. By the time I left for art school after working there for nine months, we had an entire shelf, and it was just huge. I tried to get a copy of every SF book in print into that store. The result was that a lot of guys who read SF began coming into the store, and I hooked up with what was called “WSFA,” the Washington Science-Fiction Association. They were an SF club in Washington, D.C. Through them I met a bunch of people, including COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Jack Chalker, who lived in Baltimore; he’s a prolific author now, but back then, he was publishing Mirage Press. He published books like The Conan Reader, and at least a couple of his covers were done by Bernie in ‘68 or ‘69. I don’t know if I saw “Nightmaster” before I saw Bernie’s covers but somewhere in there, I became aware of Bernie’s work. And I was starting to buy more DC books. They were trying new stuff. Right when I was kind of running out of gas on Marvel, DC had Beware The Creeper, The Hawk and The Dove, Angel and the Ape—all new stuff, and I read all of it. Some of it I wish they stayed with and kept going, though obviously not enough guys did. Of course, I knew Ditko from his Marvel work and I was tracking artists by then. CBA: Did you buy any Charltons? Walter: I did. I liked all their super-hero stuff. I have all the Peacemaker and… who else did they have? Pete Morisi’s Thunderbolt, um… and The Ghost (who I guess was a bad guy in Captain Atom), and Blue Beetle. I read it and I went back at some point and wrote a whole storyline connecting up the two Blue Beetles they had (which I’ve now forgotten so much about, it wouldn’t make any sense anymore, even to me)! CBA: Back then in the mid-’60s? Walter: That’s right. And I liked Sam Glanzman’s Hercules, which was more mythologically-based than a lot of the other myth related material in comics. I was looking at whatever I came across back then. CBA: Tower? Walter: Oh, yeah, I was in Montana in ’66, at geology field camp when Tower began coming out, so I bought all the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. CBA: Were you startled at how handsome the Tower comics were? Tower seemed to be a little bit different, starting with the cover designs which had no words. And the lush Wally Wood art…. Walter: I thought they were handsome. You know what they felt like? They felt almost like comics for kids again. Even though Tower had some of the soap opera elements of Marvel (bad girl Iron Maiden has a crush on good guy Dynamo), they seemed less inbred than Marvel comics at that point. A nice contrast at the time. CBA: Juvenile? Walter: Yeah, but the way Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels are juvenile. Not juvenile in the sense that they’re childish and not worth looking at, but juvenile in that they seemed to target a little younger audience. They still had enough stuff for an older audience, with ongoing plotlines, ongoing characters to whom things would happen. They’d got hurt for one thing. CBA: And one character was killed, Menthor. Walter: That’s right, Menthor died. I thought that was pretty startling at the time. The stuff of simple drama. I enjoyed Tower’s titles. I read ‘em as long as I could find ‘em. Toward the end, they became hard to locate, the distribution was pretty spotty, but I got them when I could. CBA: When you were going back to college, did you still go back and find Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooges, were you then a collector in your tastes? Did you read romance comics, for instance? Walter: I didn’t. The only romance comics I saw were the later ones, which were pretty saccharin. I never saw the Joe Simon & Jack Kirby stuff. Actually, Carol Kalish gave me one of those Simon & Kirby comics. I think it was “The Girl Who Tempted Me.” CBA: Hard to resist. [laughs] Walter: It’s a great story! If romance comics had all been like that, I’d have been reading them too. I didn’t read hot rod comics because they didn’t appeal to my interests. It was one area I didn’t get into. I remember comics with guys drag racing but for some reason, the drawing of races didn’t excite me. They seemed rather static. On the other hand, the Alex Toth [Hot Wheels #6] Cord story blew me away, so that just proves that if you know what you’re doing, you can do cars in comics and make them interesting. CBA: We were talking about your exposure to other artists through science-fiction. Walter: Through WSFA, I ended up discovering a lot of SF artists— Hugo winners and fan artists—and there was a lot of fan art in SF then. WSFA put out a regular ‘zine called The WSFA Journal and I did a bunch of covers for them. But I was still interested in comics Oct. 2000

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and trying my hand at continuity. My first effort to do any kind of real continuity was probably my sophomore year, right after I’d begun reading Marvels. It was with “Doctor Strange” [in Strange Tales], of all things. I started the strip just as Doctor Strange was defeating Dormammu (with those energy pincers on his wrists because Dormammu had decided to fight him man-to-man). Dormammu lost, and was really pissy about it. So, they had several issues where he was trying to kill Strange through intermediaries, and then finally, the last Ditko issue, Dormammu picks on Eternity (I can remember this stuff like it was yesterday; the stuff I wrote yesterday I can’t remember at all, but the stuff I read 35 years ago, not a problem!) and I remember being disappointed. It was one of the first times I was disappointed in a comic. It was the last “Doctor Strange” that Ditko did and the fight seemed so quick for such a cathartic event. I felt like it needed more space. So, I went back and began redrawing the ending, and I picked it right up from where Dormammu says, “In truth, it is not Doctor Strange I must humble, it is Eternity!” And then poof! he zaps Eternity, hops into the middle of him, and explodes, and everything goes to hell. I thought, “Eh, there ought to be more stuff going on here first,” and so I did about four pages. I still didn’t know about pen and ink, I knew about Rapid-O-Graph technical pens, but I didn’t use those. They weren’t flexible enough. By that time, I realized that comics had a more sinuous line. So I used early Pentels, because you could press on the point and change the thickness of the line. I did four pages of continuity where Dormammu calls up a bunch of his allies, various guys who come out of slit dimensional openings like Ditko used to draw. And they attack Eternity. I tried to draw it like Steve, because at the time, I really identified characters not only with who they were, but by the way they were drawn, and very much, of course, you’re imprinted by the first stuff you see. So, for me in a lot of ways, the Jack Kirby/Vinnie Colletta Thor, that’s the way Thor should look. A Bill Everett “Hulk,” of all things—because Bill did “The Hulk” briefly, or maybe inked some issues. I didn’t know Bill Everett from anybody at the time; it was strange looking stuff. Rather intense. I loved John Romita’s Daredevil. I know he was a great Spider-Man artist, but I saw the Daredevil stuff first, and there was a quality to his take on the character I liked. Gene Colan’s “Iron Man” was also lovely. In my early attempts, I wasn’t trying to copy individual panels, but I was trying to style-swipe. In other words, if I were doing Doctor Strange, I was trying to draw it the way Ditko would draw it. If I were doing a picture of Thor, it’d be Thor inked by Vinnie, with all those little lines. Iron Man was sort of this boneless guy inside the armor who could bend in every direction… it was just great! I can show you my faux-Ditko Dr. Strange pages. [laughter] And I was trying to write like Stan. The stuff is so horribly overwritten. Stan Lee on his worst day didn’t use this many words in his balloons. [laughter] I did him really, really badly! And of course, I did everything on typewriter paper, because I didn’t know that the original art was done larger. About a year later, I did a Titanium Man-Iron Man fight where I choreographed a whole fight sequence. I

Above: Walter also dug the revitalized DC comics line in the late ’60s, particularly Joe Kubert & Bob Kanigher’s memorable Enemy Ace strip. Here’s Walter’s take on the character. ©2000 Walter Simonson. Enemy Ace ©2000 DC Comics. Below: The late Carl Barks reportedly enjoyed Walter’s version of Scrooge McDuck. ©2000 Walt Disney.

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didn’t write dialogue for it; I didn’t really feel any confidence as a writer. I drew a bunch of pages, maybe six or seven. I did ink those. Again, the art was small. A year or two later, ‘69 or thereabouts, I did an “Enemy Ace” fragment. I loved “Enemy Ace”… that was part of the new DC that blew me away. DC has a poster up on the wall at the office of the first “Enemy Ace” cover, with a big Enemy Ace in the sky behind a S.P.A.D. being pursued by a triplane. It’s just such a gorgeous picture. So cool. It looks like Joe Kubert thought, “Oh, I’ll just knock this right out.” It doesn’t have an air of competence; it has an air of mastery. It’s so good. And the poster’s right in front of the men’s room at DC, so I stop and admire this thing every time I hit the can! I’ve already told Joe that. [laughter] Anyway, I did an Enemy Ace sequence with the strafing of a train. CBA: Where did you find time to do this? Walter: I just kind of took the time to do it between school work. CBA: Was that basically just to escape? It was an obsessive thing to do, right? Walter: Well, I think I was just very interested. I’d call it an interest rather than an obsession. But I think I lived in my own head a lot. CBA: Were you sharing your stories with anyone? Walter: I’m sure my friends were seeing the stuff as I was doing it. They knew I was into comics. They read most of mine but they didn’t get hooked the way I did. In my junior year, I lived in what was called a “social dorm.” We had one big living room, with four small single rooms off of it, and a common bathroom. The living room had a big blank wall, and we hung a picture on it. With my roommates help, I painted a lifesized Spider-Man on a 4’ by 8’ sheet of masonite using enamel paints, a big Ditko Spider-Man swinging on his web. Then, the following year, I did a landscape from Lord of the Rings! [laughs] I painted a 4’ by 8’ picture of Mordor, centered on Mount Doom. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep any photographs of them. CBA: There was a lot of pot smoke wafting through the dorm? [laughs] Walter: You know, believe it or not, I can go the Prez one better: Not Above: Teenaged Walter was endlessly fascinated with only did I not inhale, I Viking history and mythology, going so far as drawing page never tried any. [laughter] At after page of Norse artifacts, a fascination put to good use that time in the late-’60s, it was in his Thor work. Courtesy of and ©2000 Walter Simonson. 10-B

not impossible to walk into a college dorm room and get a contact high, because there’d be a lot of stuff blowing around, but I was never interested, so I didn’t indulge. In fact, a friend of mine—who was known to experiment with a variety of substances—once told me that I was the biggest freak he knew, and that I was completely straight. [laughter] It just blew his mind. [laughs] CBA: I was just wondering, what was your motive to do those homemade Marvel stories? Was it simply that you were unhappy with the Doctor Strange story, so you just wanted to create a satisfactory ending? Walter: Yes. CBA: I mean, you’re a maturing guy, you’re growing up. You weren’t doing it for an audience, you weren’t doing it to get a job, you were just doing it. Walter: I drew pictures from the age of four-on just for fun. I drew them because I wanted to draw. I drew comics because I wanted to draw comics. I’m not sure it’s any more complex than that. CBA: You did a really full-blown Thor annual at the time? Walter: I drew a chunk of one that I’d plotted, again without word balloons. That was in ‘69 and ‘70, when I was in art school. I went back to college, basically, as a sophomore, starting at the Rhode Island School of Design in the fall of ‘69. CBA: What was your plan? Walter: I didn’t really have one. When I graduated the first time, I had a degree in geology, and decided that geology/paleontology was not what I wanted to do. I graduated in ‘68, a year Vietnam was… well, one of the many years Vietnam was a major consideration if you were of draftable age. So I was not making a lot of long-range plans right then. I had friends who went to med school and got deferments, friends who went to ‘Nam, friends who went to Canada. It was not a great time to be getting out of college. But I was called up and flunked my physical, eventually got classified 4-F, because I’m legally blind. I’m correctable; I’m just very, very near-sighted. So, I flunked the physical, which then meant I could start thinking seriously about my future. I worked in the bookstore for nine months, then applied to art school, really because I didn’t know what else to do. My two big interests were dinosaurs and art, and I just never thought about art as a way of making a living. I applied, got in, and then while in art school, I began reading fewer comics, and started drawing them more. I was reading far fewer Marvels, and the DCs I liked didn’t last all that long (though I really liked them). But I became seriously interested in telling stories in the comics medium. While I was at RISD in my sophomore year, I wrote and drew a Thor comic that ran about 30 pages. The story was longer. I quit after 30, because by that time, I was inking, using a Rapid-O-Graph and I was unsatisfied. I’ll show you, you’ll be frightened! [laughter] CBA: The inking had the same line weight? Walter: No, I was faking all of it. I’d go over lines several times to get thick and thin lines. I didn’t know about brushes or any of that stuff, so in order to fill in blacks, I’d use a number four pen and just go back and forth over the page a million times. I didn’t know about white-out, so the panels where I have millions of stars, they’re all little circles and I inked around them. [laughter] It was truly insane. After about 30 pages or so, I concluded that I didn’t like my inking, and thought, “You know? I’m going to go back and finish this when I really like what I’m doing better.” CBA: You resolved to learn inking? Walter: In ‘69, I still didn’t know anything about how comics were produced in real life. I’d never done a comic in my life. Then I went to my first convention in ‘69, the World Science-Fiction Convention in St. Louis, and was illuminated. CBA: You traveled halfway across the country? Walter: Actually, I was out visiting a good friend from college who lived in St. Louis. I didn’t have hotel expenses and I rode out with friends as well. It was a cheap trip, and I was up four nights in a row at the con watching movies all night. I’d never been anywhere that had all-night movies, I just blew my brains out watching film after film after film… CBA: This was pre-VCR, kids! Walter: It was very nutty. And somewhere in there, I saw a page of original art for sale, a Joe Kubert “Viking Prince” page. I couldn’t afford the $40 to buy it, a lot of money to me in ‘69. So, when I COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Surtur from destroying the Nine Worlds CBA: It sounds familiar. Walter: That’s right. [laughter] So the idea was that he got the sword back in the first comic, and he set loose his demons on Earth, whose adventures would have been chronicled in the other Marvel titles that month. CBA: With Daredevil fighting a particular demon, for instance? Walter: Yeah, each comic would have their own story, so it wouldn’t necessarily mean you had to buy every comic in order to read them, but they’d all add up to the complete story of what happened in the invasion of Earth. I thought it could all be published during the summertime. Then a month later, the Summer Thor Annual would come out, and that would be the 64-page climax of the story. The comic that I drew was going to be the Annual. I didn’t want to draw all of the rest of them. So, I drew about 30 pages of what would’ve been my Annual, and then decided to wait until I got better at inking, and 14 years later, [laughter] my inking was better, I was doing Thor for Marvel, and I was able to do that story!

Left inset and below: Nothing if not ambitious, ’60s college student Walter Simonson wrote and drew up an entire Thor Annual for sheer pleasure, a storyline he later pilfered for his bonafide Thor run in the 1980s. Note the similarities of layout in these pages, drawn 14 years apart. Left art ©2000 Walter Simonson. Below & Thor ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

began the Thor story later, I knew how big pages were, and what they looked like. CBA: You studied Kubert’s page? Walter: I looked at it right there at the con, about as close as I ever got to it, but I could see it was in ink, bigger than normal. So I did the Thor comic in a spiral-bound art notebook that wasn’t quite as big as original pages are but was larger than printed size. My idea was that since Marvel only had about 11 monthly comics, it would be possible to do a big story running through all the monthly titles. My story was based on a Stan and Jack concept they had introduced in Thor called the Over-Sword (or as it came to be called, the Odinsword), which was a giant blade sitting in Asgard. The legend in the comic was that if it got pulled from the scabbard, the universe would end. That was pretty much it. I came up with the notion that it would turn out that the Odinsword really belonged to Surtur, a character who had already been in the comic by that time. I was going to do a big story about Surtur attacking Asgard to force the coming of Ragnarok. The basic notion was that the story would run through all eleven titles in a single month. It would start in Thor, and that would be the set up for the Odinsword and Surtur: One morning, everybody in Asgard wakes up, and the Odinsword is gone. It’s gone because Surtur is connected to his sword. I’d read Lord of the Rings by now and was familiar with Sauron and his One Ring. I drew a mystical bond between Surtur and the sword. Surtur, after millennia of accumulating magical spells and building up a giant mystical reservoir, taps it, breaking through the spells of the protective magic established by Odin, and pulling the sword back to himself. The Odinsword was in reality the great blade of Norse myth that Surtur would use to set the Nine Worlds on fire at the end of all things. But the trick is that Surtur now has to get to Asgard’s Eternal Flame to light the sword. Once it’s lit, nothing will be able to stop Oct. 2000

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Above: Page from Walter’s original version of Star Slammers, his creator-owned property first developed while as an art student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1970s. The concept later appeared as a Marvel/Epic graphic novel and even later as a Malibu comics series. Below: A Star Slammer. ©2000 Walter Simonson.

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CBA: Was your interest in Thor ethnocentric? Your ancestry stretches back to the Norse lands, right? Walter: It’s a nice fit, but I don’t think it is actually true. When I was a kid, I really liked mythological stories, and I wasn’t particular when I was young, I just liked all the stories. Eventually, I liked the Norse myths the best, but I think that wasn’t maybe so much the ethnocentric interest as it was the fact that they’re grim and fatalistic. When you’re young and you’re farther from dying than I am now, all that grim stuff has a lot more appeal to it! [laughter] But I still love them. When I was a kid, my parents had a couple of adult books, one retelling Norse and one retelling Greco-Roman myths. Nowadays, I do wonder where some of the information came from, and I think, “What was the scholarship on those books again?” But they were books from about 1898, in great shape. (I’ve got them upstairs, still in great shape.) The book on Norse myths had little fragments of the Eddas quoted in translation and other verse. They were pretty neat. The first story of any sort like that I can remember reading (not exactly mythology, but close) was a version of Beowulf I found in fifth grade. I thought it was really cool. I particularly liked the Scandinavian/northern European stuff, but I don’t know if that’s so much my ethnic background. CBA: Your ancestry’s from Scandinavia? Walter: Yeah, from Norway, with a bit of Sweden thrown in, as well. CBA: Your father was a first-generation American? Walter: That’s right. My paternal grandparents came over to the States separately, both fairly young when they arrived. They were part of the great Scandinavian migrations to Minnesota, where they

met. My grandfather homesteaded in North Dakota, and eventually built up a good-sized wheat farm. My dad was born up there on the farm along with seven other kids. But whether my real Norse myth interest comes out of that, or just because they’re cool stories, I couldn’t tell you. [laughs] CBA: Was there any encouragement or ambivalence from RISD about you pursuing comic book art as a career? Walter: My parents were completely encouraging. I was an illustration major. The head of the department was an artist/illustrator named Tom Sgouros. Tom did a lot of work in magazines, commercial venues, and he was a wonderful painter and draftsman, with a beautiful sense of color and design. When I was a junior, we were required to do not only weekly assignments, but also develop some sort of an over-arching two semester project. As it happened (and this was such a coincidence, it boggles my mind), it all worked out quite well. In 1970, I was living in D.C. at my parents’ house, a member of WSFA (the science fiction club), and WSFA was bidding to put on the World Science-Fiction Con, which was going to be in the East Coast in 1974. At that time, voting on the World Con sites was held two years in advance, so the vote was going to be at the ‘72 World Con, and the cities who wanted the con were running promotional campaigns to persuade people to vote for them. That year, Boston was the other major city in the competition, so it was D.C. or Boston, and it was a friendly rivalry. A lot of the fans knew each other from the different clubs. Somewhere along the way (and I don’t know where this really came from, it just was an idea) I thought about doing a comic that would be distributed on the freebie tables at conventions, to promote D.C. in ‘74. My original idea was to do a series of one-sheets, in a humorous style that was a cross between Robert Crumb and Vaughn Bodé. I introduced a bunch of space mercenaries named the Space Slammers… CBA: Not “Star Slammers”? Walter: At the time, it was the Space Slammers, who would go out, kick ass, take names and attack D.C. in ‘74… I didn’t say it was 1974 or 2174, I just put “‘74.” I did a single page in that style but very quickly, I moved away from the cartoony stuff and began taking a more realistic approach, beginning the kind of graphic stuff I do. Somewhere in there, the name changed to Star Slammers. I did one five-page episode that was never printed; it wasn’t part of the regular story, I just did it. Then I started working out a real story. When I did the graphic novel at Marvel years ago, I dug that original one sheet out, and they printed it in Marvel Age, which was kind of fun. CBA: It took life for you? Walter: Oh, yes, and I began doing little black-&white five page chapters, one every three or four months, and the club would print them up on a couple of sheets of legal-sized paper folded over. Jay Haldeman, president of the club at the time, had an offset press in his basement, and the club members would run them off, collate them, staple them together, and then put them on the freebie tables at cons, and that’s how it got distributed in fanzine form. (I like to call them early ashcans—as ashcans have been so hot—but that may be stretching it a bit.) At the same time, I began using Star Slammers as COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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my two-semester project for my junior year. I was obviously very serious about comics, and Tom had no problem with my direction. He was completely encouraging. None of the teachers there knew comics, but they knew drawing. They knew perspective, typography, fashion, design. They didn’t know the storytelling between individual panels on pages, but I could learn that myself. I got a lot out of my teachers on the art that I was doing. One of the benefits of going to art school is that you take courses that aren’t directly involved in your specific interest. The two unrelated courses I got the most out of were silk-screening and lithography. I don’t silk-screen or lithograph my comics but I applied what I learned in those courses. Lithography was done in the old-fashioned way, where you were actually drawing on slabs of limestone, and it was great; you could do all these wonderful textural things, scraping and rubbing and crayon and everything else, and I Oct. 2000

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learned a huge appreciation for texture. From silk-screening, I learned patience. I’d taken a painting course, and I was lousy at it, partly because I tried to put all the paint on the canvas at the same time and of course, it all turned a lovely shade of brown! But I found that in silk-screening, you have to lay down a color of ink, and then you have to let it dry completely. If you try to print the next color of ink before the first one’s completely dry, the second color can act as a solvent and you can actually pick up some of that initial layer of ink. In other words, you screw up your print. So, you have to let it dry for as long as it takes, and there’s no way around it! I learned that the hard way and in the end, I was actually a pretty good printmaker. I liked silk-screening a lot. I understood it and I ended up being one of the student teachers for a semester or two. CBA: That’s quite a discipline, isn’t it? Walter: What, silk-screening? I don’t know, it’s not brain surgery. Yes, you think about what you’re doing and where you’re going, and what’s going to happen. You can allow for a certain number of accidental improvements, but you have to really plan ahead, and you have to be methodical. In my painting, I had not been methodical, but the nature of the process of silk-screening forced me to be methodical, whether I wanted to be or not. CBA: And that translated onto a comics page? Walter: Well, the textures are a more obvious transfer, but learning patience was invaluable, and I learned a great deal about just taking my time and getting where I wanted to go from silk-screening. CBA: Would you call yourself spontaneous at times, or do you do a job, go away from it, come back, look at it… ? Walter: I’m spontaneously deliberate. [laughter] Or maybe I’m deliberately spontaneous. I try to get the work to look as though it were put down just as you see it. But to achieve that, it takes a lot of planning and quite a lot of patience. CBA: Who was teaching typography at RISD? Walter: Harry Beckwith.

Above: CBA contributor and Ye Ed’s pal Lancelot Falk has the most exquisite set of sketchbooks you could ever imagine—gorgeous fullcolor spreads rendered by the greatest names in comics. Sigh. Here’s hoping someday TwoMorrows gets rich and we can print them up proper! Courtesy of the artist, here’s Walter’s “star-slammin’” contribution to Lance’s dream books. Inset center and below: Promotional drawings for Walter’s 1982 Star Slammers graphic novel. Courtesy of and ©2000 Walter Simonson.

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Above: A Walter Simonson/Gerry Boudreau oddity, The Outsiders. Conceived as a joint production of RISD and the University of Rhode Island (where Walter was a student of the former and Gerry the latter), two undersized chapters appeared as separate issues. ©2000 Walter Simonson and the Estate of Gerry Boudreau.

CBA: Typography is almost a character in your stories. Walter: I learned the love of typography from Harry, and found out how much you could play with it. We did a lot of typographical exercises, manipulating letterforms, using them as elements of design. An appreciation for that was something I took way from RISD and from Harry, and it really informed my work afterwards. It made what I did quite different, graphically. I had a lot of teachers like that, and they could see that I knew what I wanted to do, so as I said, nobody thought I was wasting my time. In my junior year, I did maybe the first four or five chapters of Star Slammers. In my senior year, we were required to do a degree project and the school let me continue working on the Slammers. The senior illustration teacher was Edgar Blakney. He’d see each student individually on either Thursday and Friday. We’d bring in our work for the week and we’d have a half-hour critique with him, and go over the material. He and I really enjoyed shooting the breeze, so he made me the last guy on Friday. We’d spend an hour or two talking about illustration and comics and everything else, whatever he was interested in. I learned about the business of illustration, how it worked, how you got jobs. He’d tell me about New York and living the illustrator’s life. He was very laid-back, a very cool guy but I didn’t get a lot of specific critiques from him artistically. What I did was to take Star Slammers around to other teachers informally. For instance, I’d stop by Tom’s office and if he had a moment, he’d give me a critique of my drawing. He’d look it over, and instruct me. Once he had me go back and redraw a pair of eyes on a very large head. I’d faked the eyes, and of course, Tom knew that! He drew a quick cross-section of the eye, showing how it worked. I went back and redrew them and I learned not to fake it! I was showing my work to other teachers as well, and they would all critique their areas of expertise. So I was able to do what I wanted to do at RISD, and I did Star Slammers. The timing worked out so that I finished the last chapter of that story at the end of my senior year, and it was published just in time for the World Con in ‘72, when the bid was being voted on. I got my degree and DC won the bid! CBA: So those are the increments. Did you collect that original Slammers story? Walter: No, it was only printed in Jay’s basement, and given out as a freebie. It’s never been collected as a unit anywhere. CBA: Did you see a progression from the first chapter? Walter: Oh, clearly. The first issue is okay fan work, and the last issue is marginally professional. By the fourth issue, there are significant differences in my ability to draw and organize the page space. I had begun to get a much better handle on the work. CBA: Do you think it was a product of the times you were in, or was it an exceptional school that was willing to have an open mind about comic books? A lot of art schools would look down on comics, and this was obviously a time before you could ever make any real money, before there was any publicity about the value of comic books, or Todd McFarlane getting wicked rich… Walter: I don’t know how other art schools were, but I was clearly

very interested in doing the work, and RISD’s teachers responded to that. CBA: You were majoring in illustration at RISD. In the late ‘60s, wasn’t the writing on the wall for illustration jobs not being as readily available? Walter: It probably was, and even though I talked to Edgar about illustration, I never had any interest in pursuing it directly. As I went through RISD, it became clearer to me that comics were more and more the focus of my attention. But I knew so little about it as a business. Or even as a fan really. I hadn’t gone to comic conventions. Gary Groth used to live in the Washington, D.C. area, and he had a couple of Metro-Cons. This was about 1971. I went to one when I was back home for the summer. I know I met Howard Chaykin there, just when he was getting into comics, We had a competition at RISD that illustrators participated in, and we were asked to illustrate a Buckminster Fuller quotation. I’ve forgotten the quote but I believe it had to do with the wasting of the Earth’s natural resources. I did an illustration (it was not a great job I hasten to add) of the Earth. Then I made a toothpick construction over it of part of a geodesic dome—a Buckminster Fuller design. It was deliberately broken, a wrecked dome, and I used calligraphy to letter the actual quote on the illustration. Now, that was a pretty obscure idea in terms of illustration, but I was admonished for going about illustration the wrong way, because I’d put the words on the picture. The illustrator’s approach was to use the words as a springboard into an idea that would be clear in and of itself, without the words. And somewhere in there is when I began to figure out what I liked was having the words and the pictures combined graphically. Not doing pictures that spoke in place of words, but doing words and pictures in a way that made sense together, which is what comic books do! It was the visual combination of words and pictures that I found exciting, not just the illustration, but the whole graphic package. Everything— pictures, words, word balloons, tension between writing and drawing, all bound together. I think that’s one of the essential challenges I found in comics. CBA: Let me tell you this anecdote… You’re the first comic book professional I ever contacted. I was.. Walter: Now I’m really scared! CBA: [laughs] As a college student, I was editor of a magazine at the University of Rhode Island, The Great Swamp Gazette, and it was a hippie alternative-type magazine. [laughter] This was in the early ‘80s, and I’m sitting in the office (and I’ve been a comic fan since I was eleven) and I open up a filing cabinet drawer, [laughter] and there’s a sh*tload-this huge pile-of these comic books that I realized, just from glancing at them, that they were drawn by Walter Simonson and they were writ-

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ten by another person whose name I recognized, Gerry Boudreau. The undersized comics were called The Outsiders, and there were two separate issues, completing a story. I knew Walter Simonson did not attend URI, and I knew that Gerry had. Right in the blush of your Beta Ray Bill success, I had the nerve to call you up and ask you if I could sell them, and you said, “Sure, just sell them, son! [laughter] But I haven’t seen it in a long time; couldja send me some?” I made unfortunately no money, maybe because it didn’t have a glossy cover. It wasn’t a comic book proper, but it was fascinating for me to see the Rhode Island-RISD/URI-connection right there. Looking at that and looking at your early DC work, you had a strong emphasis on design and typography… Arlen Schumer says you are the first post-modern artist to come into comics. [laughter] You are one of the first true stylists in bringing all the comic-book conventions together—sound effects and Kirbyesque action—and you made it your own, you gave it your own approach. You seemed to have a very strong eye towards design and towards style. Were you trying to reach for something new? Walter: I don’t think I ever saw myself as a harbinger of revolution in comics, or even as a guy doing something that nobody’d done before. I was certainly interested in… let me back up a second. I was obviously drawing my own comics by the time I was a junior. For those who are reading this and aren’t asleep yet, Gerry was a student at the University of Rhode Island when I was at RISD, he was interested in writing comics, and he got ahold of me. In the end, the URI literary magazine [Perspectives] funded that comic book, and we did two chapters, black-&-white, small-5” X 8”, with paper covers. Gerry wrote it, I drew it. We did two chapters, and I tried a lot of different stuff graphically. I was drawing that comic by imitating and building on the work I’d seen from artists I liked. Jim Steranko, for example. Jim himself borrowed from guys like Eisner (whose work I really didn’t know at the time), but he brought a lot of very current thought into his pictures—Op Art and a powerful sense of page design and layout, an almost surreal approach to landscape. I remember his labyrinth page, for instance, in S.H.I.E.L.D. where the reader had to turn the book around to read it. It was all grist for the mill to me. But I’m sure I wasn’t thinking about taking comics places nobody’d gone before. I just didn’t want to go to the same old places myself! I taught for six years at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and I learned my real interest in comics, in a sense, is the story. Part of my RISD training as an illustrator—even though I wanted to combine words and pictures with illustration—was learning that it was my job to communicate. At RISD, the paradigm for this is problem-solving. You’re given a problem, here’s the emotion to convey, or the idea to illustrate, or whatever, and you try to strip the concept down to the core in some comprehensible way so you can make a visual representation that nails that idea clearly. And that is what still governs my approach to telling stories visually. It’s what I tried to teach. Every time you make a decision in a comic book, whether it’s something as simple as how many lines you’re rendering a head with, or how many panels are on the page, or the size of the sound effect, the basic question you always ask is, “Does this Oct. 2000

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make the story better?” Now, I don’t literally ask that every time I draw a line, but I think about it. I’ve internalized both the question and the search for the answers. I’m not sure all the things I tried in The Outsiders really worked; a lot of them were pretty goofy. At the time, because we were starting that book from scratch with new characters (super-heroes based on the four ancient elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water), I was trying to find some way to render those guys so that they wouldn’t just look like some Elseworlds version of the Thing for Earth, or the Human Torch for Fire, Aquaman or Namor for Water. I was hunting other solutions. And I tried to find them in graphics, rather than in rendering, because my inclination is toward graphics. I guess that’s why I liked typography so much. And I think it illustrates the problem-solving approach I got from RISD. In all the comics I’ve done since, I’ve tried to find graphic solutions to storytelling within the specific story that I’m telling. It takes four or five issues for me to begin to get a real handle on it. I used to think I could do it in two issues. Then I began thinking, “Well, maybe it’ll take three.” Now, I’m thinking maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get it in a year! [laughter] I’m getting slower at solving the problem. In a lot of the comics I’ve done, I could give you chapter and verse why certain things were done in certain ways, and not in other ways, because I was trying to find a specific approach to tell that particular story effectively. So perhaps, if I’m a comics post-modernist, or whatever, it derives from the way I try to solve the problems of storytelling in my work. [laughter] That goes back pretty close to the beginning, when we talked about my early fragmentary attempts at storytelling, done in the style

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Below and inset: The “many hands” Sword of Sorcery job (#3) penciled by Howard Chaykin and inked by, I believe, half the inhabitants of the island of Manhattan in 1972. Note the missing hand on the bon vivant to our right. ©2000 DC Comics.

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of Joe Kubert’s “Enemy Ace” and Steve Ditko’s “Dr. Strange.” I was trying those styles then, but maybe doing those earlier fragments—ever before I’d gone to art school—I was working my sources out of my system. Or internalizing them enough so I didn’t have to revisit them later, except for fun. Back in 1977-78, when I did layouts for Thor with Len Wein writing and Tony DeZuniga finishing, I was really trying to do a Kirby Thor. That was Thor’s identity to me at the time. I was drawing Kirby’s Asgard, with these science-fiction ramps and gleaming metal buildings, and abstract shapes that Jack always had floating around, and it was wonderful fun to do. But when I got a chance to do Thor five or six years later after Mark Gruenwald offered the book to me, I’d done Jack’s Thor already, so in some ways, I felt free of it. I mean, Thor is still the Stan and Jack character to me, but if I hadn’t done Thor before, maybe I wouldn’t have gone in the direction I did in 1983. You can’t go back and do it over again, you never know, but it did mean when I began to draw Asgard, for example, rather than drawing a Jack Kirby Asgard, I went for a different version. In the details of my Asgard, I researched the stave churches in Scandinavia, and began using those as the architectural models for Asgard visually. To my knowledge, no original Viking structures still exist—they were all wood. There’s some information in the sagas about how things looked, there are post holes, and there’ve been reconstructions. But a few of the post-Viking stave churches, from the Christian era, still do exist. And presumably, they were based on known architectural models; they weren’t simply designed from nothing. They had steep roofs, so the snow will slide off, and little dragon heads on the eaves—not a standard Christian motif, but they look exotic. [laughs] I feel that my first run on Thor freed me to rethink some stuff the second time around. And it’s a modest example of the approach to problem solving as applied to storytelling. Every detail should be considered and applied to enhance the story. CBA: You and Gerry tried to break into the comics field together? Walter: No. Gerry went to New York a little before me. He did, however, help get me my first interview with a DC editor. I had been doing The Outsiders concurrently with the Slammers and had completed those two issues of The Outsiders a bit before I finished the Slammers. I wrapped up the Star Slammers right at the end of my senior year, but didn’t go to New York right out of RISD, so we broke into comics separately. CBA: You didn’t bring The Outsiders with you? Walter: Well, I had the artwork, but I didn’t show it. It was done a little earlier than the last of the Slammers and the Slammers was all me. I bound the last half of the Slammers work, which was my best stuff, together in a volume, and then took that with me to DC when I was looking for work. CBA: So this was June 1972? Walter: I graduated at the end of May ‘72, and I had a summer job already lined up back at

my old college, working at the museum doing some interior design. Then I moved to New York in August of ‘72 and started hunting for work in comics. CBA: You moved before you secured a job? Walter: Well, I did, but the synchronicity worked out very well. One of my college buddies, Pete Rosenblum, was dating a girl whose parents lived in a really nice house in The Bronx. (When you think of the Bronx, you imagine a war zone, but not all the neighborhoods are like that.) Their home was in Riverside not too far from the Hudson River. It was a big old house, and they had a lot of Bonsai trees that needed looking after, and during August they were on vacation at their summer house in Maine. So they needed a housesitter. I got the house-sitting job, moved to New York, watered 250 bonsai trees, and had an Olympic-sized swimming pool out back. Not a bad way to live! I knew I would never live that well again. [laughter] And I never did. But it was great while it lasted! CBA: That lasted a month? Walter: Just for the month. What it meant was, I had a place to stay, and there were express buses into Manhattan, so I could live in New York really cheaply for about a month and go looking for work. Then, I actually had another house-sitting job for a couple of weeks after that (one of Peggy’s brothers had a townhouse, and so I stayed there for a couple of weeks). It gave me about six weeks of free living in New York City, and I could show my portfolio around and look for work. Pretty much right at the beginning of my stay, I got work and I met people in the business. Howard Chaykin was one of the first people I met in New York. He helped me find an apartment out in Brooklyn, so I was able to enter New York gradually, like getting into the pool at the shallow end. CBA: What was your plan when you hit the pavement? Did you open up a phone book looking for comic companies? Walter: I didn’t know much about comics. In ‘69, I took the Thor story I’d done, all 30 pages of inks, to New York to see what comics were about, because I had no clue. I went to DC—I must’ve looked pretty forlorn. They actually let me in and I believe it was Mark Hannerfeld who showed me around. I met Len and Marv there. Neal Adams was sitting there wearing a tie working away doing Green Lantern/Green Arrow; I saw some of the pages he was doing. I don’t remember who else I met, but because I knew Neal’s work (I was a huge Deadman fan) I remember Neal. Marv, Len and Mark were very sweet and nice to me. I found out that Warren Publishing was on 42nd Street, so I went down there and I went up to the office. Jim had a guy named Chuck McNaughton working for him back then. I talked with Chuck, Chuck showed me in to Jim, Jim looked over my Thor work and raked me over the coals for it. Then he offered me a job. And, because it was my first job, and because I was wasting his time looking at my stuff, he was going to pay me a little less on the first job than he paid for his normal page rate to make up for his wasted time. I mean, I was a rube at the time, and I think it’s funny now. It was just Jim being Jim; the thought of it still makes me laugh. The upshot was I went back to RISD and they sent me a job. It was a six- or eight-page Gardner Fox script. Now, with all due respect to Gardner, who was a phenomenal writer of comics and a mainstay, the kinds of stories he wrote were not the kinds of stories I wanted to do. Gardner’s SF stories, at least the few I’d seen, frequently had some sort of jargon included as a way of establishing that yes, we really are on an alien world. Everybody’s speaking English but somebody mentions that the sun’s going to set in five ‘tals’. And then a footnote indicates that a ‘tal’ is 1.5 Earth hours. And I always thought, you know, they’re all speaking English already; howcome they just don’t say the sun will set in seven-and-a-half hours?! It seemed a pretty thin layer of verisimilitude. Anyway, I got the story and there it was, right in the middle of it! It was a story about an alien on Earth with a horror element mixed in, and to prove the guy’s an alien, the script spent half a page examining his alien machinery, none of which had any significance in the context of the story except to prove the guy was an alien. “Look! Here’s a Thandok! And this over here is a Gimzip!” This guy had the head of a hawk, he was frozen in ice; I think his alien origins were covered. I could best describe my smile after I’d read the script as rueful. On the margins of the script, there was a little box drawn in the COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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proportions of the page, divided into panels. So I looked at this script, and I looked at these panel layouts and I used them. I penciled up the job, and sent it off to Warren. I got them back with a nice note from Chuck saying they couldn’t use them, and they were very disappointed, because they’d seen these wild layouts I’d done in my Thor samples, so what had happened? Well, it had never occurred to me that I wasn’t supposed to follow the little breakdowns on the side of the script. Nowadays, if somebody sent me a script with little drawings on the side, I wouldn’t look at them twice (or I’d look at them once; if I thought they worked, I might go with the flow). But at the time, having never seen a comic script, having never talked to anybody who did comics, I had no idea what the protocol was. I thought these were the directions I was supposed to follow! And they’d seemed kind of dull to me! So in the end, Warren rejected the story, and my first published story was not a Gardner Fox story. Probably just as well. It was an interesting experience. I didn’t get paid anything for my efforts, but I have the originals floating around somewhere in the pile. As an historical footnote, the story was eventually published, drawn by Syd Shores. CBA: When did your friendship with Howard Chaykin begin? Walter: The first day I went to DC, I walked into the coffee room there and, to the best of my memory, Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta and Howard Chaykin were sitting around talking together. I think Alan Weiss was also there, and they were all doing work for DC. I knew all their work, and for some reason, Howard and I just hit it off, maybe because we were so different. Howard was crabbier and feistier than he is now; we were younger then and had more energy. CBA: He was funny? Walter: Oh, he was very funny and very quick. He’s still very quick. But of course, he’s been in California for years now so he’s much more mellow than he used to be! Unfortunately, I’m not as

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quick as he is, so I just call him names and tell him to pipe down, and it generally works out okay. [laughter] At that time, Howard was working on Sword of Sorcery, and he was penciling the third issue. I actually went out to his place—way out in the hell of the middle of nowhere in Queens—and did some ghost penciling. I was really unsure about my ability to draw people, except for my own work, so I ended up drawing, oh, I don’t know, four or five panels, if that… little shots of a ship mast, and rigging, and a lot of objects and backgrounds, rather than people. Howard moved to Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York, and I followed him, moving into an apartment right across the street from him about six weeks later. That was my first apartment in New York. CBA: He found the place? Walter: Well, it was the same landlady—she owned a lot of apartments in that area apparently—and he introduced me to her after he got his. It worked out well. CBA: Did you go to Continuity Studios with him? Walter: Oh, I hung out at Continuity a lot. During that period, Continuity was the boys’ club for young guys doing comics. It was on East 48th and 5th Avenue, between Marvel and DC. So all my contemporaries drifted through. Dick Giordano and Neal Adams ran it. Continuity rented out rooms to individuals, I presume to help defray costs. Anyway, Jack Abel rented space, dispensing crabby wisdom from his office. And new guys would often come in, Terry Austin and Bob Wiacek arrived a year or two later. That’s where I first met Alex Jay, when he had a desk. Mike Hinge had space for a while. I met Wally Wood there; he’d come up to Continuity once in a while. It was also a time—unlike now—when there were only two companies doing those kind of comic books, and if you wanted to do them, you had to live in New York, because there was no FedEx, no faxes, no overnight mail, and if you wanted to break in, you lived here. Continuity was our clubhouse. CBA: Were you a Crusty Bunker? Walter: I never inked for the Crusty Bunkers. That was being done while I was there, but I just never happened to be in the studio at the right time. CBA: So they never put work in front of you to pencil or ink when you were visiting Continuity? Walter: No, they really didn’t. I just went out there and hung out. I got to know Neal, his daughter Kris, Dick, and a lot of the other guys who were there… Ralph Reese, Larry Hama, Joe Rubenstein, Pat Broderick later on. But I never touched a Crusty Bunkers job. The third issue of Sword of Sorcery, the “Many Hands” job, I don’t know why the Crusties couldn’t do that one. Bernie inked a few pages, then wasn’t able to do any more. The job was late

Above: Another Boudreau/ Simonson collaboration—and one of Walter’s first published stories—”UFM” was published as back-up in the Archie Goodwinedited Star Spangled War Stories #170. Left inset: The boys returned to Goodwin’s Star Spangled with a sequel, “Return” in SSWS #180. Howard Chaykin and his first wife, Daina, served as models for the main characters. Walter tells us there was a third installment of the science-fiction war tale, not drawn by Walter, in a ’70s issue of Gold Key’s Star Trek, written by Gerry. ©2000 DC Comics. Below: Walter’s first work for Marvel was spot illustrations for the digest fiction magazine Haunt of Horror in the early ’70s. Here’s an unused illo courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Walter Simonson.

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Above: Walter says Paul Kirk (a.k.a. Manhunter) was initially envisioned as a more middle-aged chap by the artist and writer, Archie Goodwin. Here’s an early study courtesy of the artist. Below: Preliminary pencil design of Manhunter by W.S., courtesy of the artist. Art ©2000 W. Simonson. Manhunter ©2000 DC Comics.

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by then, so anybody that could hold a pen or a brush got a page. Dan Green did some of his earliest work on that job; he was just getting into comics. I inked some, Chaykin inked some. Alan Weiss inked the cover. I had a friend of mine from RISD staying over, so Bret inked some. He was a photographer, he never got into comics. I said, “Here, ink that shrubbery!” So Bret inked a bunch of the shrubbery! I think there were nine inkers all told on that issue. CBA: Did you literally have to get that done overnight? Walter: Just about. If you go back and look, there’s a shot of one of the bad guys, Klipkerio, his name was, and I’m frightened that I can actually remember it! He’s gesturing… his sleeve’s up in the air waving, little tiny figure, but if you look, he has no hand. The page got passed around, and somebody missed the hand. It didn’t get inked, it got erased, he’s gesturing with an empty sleeve. At the end, the last two pages, or maybe a page-anda-half, were penciled by somebody else… I can’t remember his name, Ron something, I think his name was, out of Canada. He was somebody Howard knew. He penciled the last page-and-a-half, and it fell to me to ink it overnight. At that time, I was doing a complete page in a little less than a week. Ask me how I was making a living! I could do it now. I’m not sure it would be my best work, but it wouldn’t really be a major problem to ink a page-and-a-half overnight. But back then, it was trouble. So I inked it with a felt-tip pen; I simply wasn’t fast enough with ink then. It was a little gray, and a little bold. I got as thin a line as I could, but you do what you have to, and we had a job to get in. The book got printed, and Ron—God bless him wherever he is now—wasn’t real happy about what happened to his artwork. I can’t blame him. So one day, Howard got a little envelope in the mail from Ron, and he opens it up. It was a copy of the comic torn in half. [laughs] An expression of Ron’s displeasure! I appreciated it but there was nothing else I could have done at the time. I’ve never done less than the best work I could do but a lot depends on the circumstances. I’m not saying all the jobs were equally great, but I’ve never done a job that I just sloughed off. “Oh, I’ll just knock this out.” I mean, some jobs you only have a night to ink a page-and-a-half, and you know you can’t do it in pen so you use what you have to. [laughs] Sorry, Ron, wherever you are! CBA: I used to pick up every single comic at the newsstand— though I wouldn’t buy every one— and I’d look through each book to check out the art. One was an Archie Goodwin-edited Star-Spangled War Stories, and I opened it up, and here was the first Simonson story I encountered, a back-up called “UFM.” Was that your first published work? Walter: It was the third job that I drew, and the second to see print. I did a story called “Cyrano’s Army” that came out in Weird War Tales #10. That was my first published story, penciled, inked and lettered. It was a Len Wein-scripted story. When I went to DC

and got work, that was the first script I was handed. Then I did a four-page job for Twilight Zone at Gold Key. They paid a shade less per page, but they gave you the artwork back. They didn’t make it generally known, but if you asked for your art, they gave it back to you when they were done with it. I did three jobs for Twilight Zone for an editor named Frank Tedeschi. He was a fairly young guy then, but seemed old to me because I was so young. A friend of mine, John Warner, was a writer at that time, doing some work for Twilight Zone. Gerry Boudreau did some Gold Key work, writing Star Trek for a while. I ended up following them there and getting short jobs. I did two four-page stories, and one six-page story. Gold Key was much farther ahead in their schedules than anybody else was, so I did my first job for them in September, and it didn’t come out until the following Spring sometime, I think. “UFM” was a story I generated with Gerry and we sold to Archie, who was the editor of StarSpangled. CBA: There was actually a sequel called “Return.” Did you guys generate that on your own and pitch it to Archie? Walter: That’s right. Less than a year later. Howard Chaykin and his first wife, Daina, were the models for the lead characters in “Return.” Howard had big mutton chop sideburns, and Daina only posed for me once, so I did one head of her from life, the rest of it I had to fake. In fact, if you look in “Return,” you’ll see Gray Morrow and me as two supporting characters. I was using more reference by then. Gerry also did one of the first inter-company crossovers when he was writing Star Trek. He actually wrote a sequel to “Return” as a Star Trek story for Alberto Gioletti to draw. CBA: Prior to “Manhunter,” did you feel anybody was noticing your work? Walter: In 1972-73, there was no real direct market. And not much interaction with an audience except for letters. Basically, comics were losing sales every month, and we all thought comics were going to be gone by 1980, so we wanted to do them while they were still around. We just thought we’d all have to get real jobs in ten years. There wasn’t much feedback, especially doing little back-ups in the war books, which never got any mail. There was no sense of fans being any kind of group out there. The only people you wanted to have notice you were editors who actually hired you. What you did have was a sense of stiff competition. I remember coming into the coffee room in DC, and Bernie would bring in an issue of Swamp Thing with this giant werewolf drawing in it, and you’d go, “Oh my God! Aaaargh!” And Michael was doing “Carson of Venus” and then The Shadow. We wanted to sell more comics because we wanted comics to survive but we didn’t have a personal stake in the nature of royalties or anything. However, we were in competition with the other guys who were hanging out at DC. My first four years in comics were spent doing work there. So, I’d go into the coffee room, and see what everybody else was doing, and be inspired by it, and you wanted to be better than they were, and they wanted to be better than you were, and it was a real challenge. The competition was fierce, there were some really good young guys doing work there. It was an exciting time to do comics. CBA: When did you first meet Archie Goodwin? Walter: The first day I walked into DC in August ‘72. He was editing for them, doing some war books among others… as far as I knew he’d been there forever. I didn’t know any of the editors at the time. But he was there, Joe Orlando, Murray Boltinoff, Julie Schwartz, they were all there. Gerry helped get me in, because he’d already been in New York for about two months and gotten some writing assignments. So he helped me arrange appointments. I’d actually gone to New York three or four months earlier at Spring Break my senior year at RISD, staying with a friend of mine who was living right across from DC. I had written DC and got a letter back from Carol Fein [Carmine Infantino’s secretary], and set up an appointment. I went and they showed me to Sol Harrison, who was in charge of production. I’m not as baffled now as I was then as to why an artist would be sent to show his work to the head of production as opposed to an editor, but I didn’t know anything about comics at the time, who people were, so I just showed Star Slammers to Sol and the basic reaction I got was, “This is nice. What else can you do?” I really hadn’t gone expecting a job; I just wanted to get some sense of what comics were like, because I had so little knowlCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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edge. So, based on that meeting, I figured I’d better draw some other figures and super-heroes kicking things around. Back at school, I added some of that stuff to my portfolio, went back to New York in August, and showed my stuff to Archie. Archie looked it over, and pretty much said, “Well, this is nice. What else can you do?” Not knowing the vast gulf between Sol and Archie, their creative ways, their respective opinions, and what they were like in general, my first thought was, “Oh, my God! It’s company policy! I’m doomed! I’ll never get work!” That was my first meeting with Archie. I went down to the DC coffee room with Gerry and I was pretty depressed. I wanted to work with DC, because in ‘72, they were putting out the kind of comics I wanted to do including Jack’s Fourth World material. Marvel was putting out what I considered pretty much retread stuff. So I walked into the coffee room, and these guys, Howard and Alan and Michael and Bernie were all sitting around, and we started having a conversation. I showed them my stuff, they looked it over and seemed to like it. Michael asked if he could show it to the guy sitting behind me, Jack Adler, who was the second-in-command of production. I said “Sure,” so Jack looked it over, and he really liked it, and asked if he could show it to Carmine, who, at that time, was the publisher or editorial director at DC. Whatever. But he was the main man. I knew Carmine’s artwork, and who he was, so I said, “Hey, sure!” Jack took my book off to show it to Carmine, and I sat there talking to Bernie and the rest of them, and wondering what was going on. After about five minutes, Jack came back nearly at a run and said, “Carmine wants to see you; let’s go.” Like it was all one word! “Carminewantstoseeyouletsgo.” So, I found myself in Carmine’s office, talking about comics. I don’t remember the conversation now, except that he did ask if I was influenced by Bernie Kriegstein. At the time, I didn’t know Kriegstein’s stuff. I’m not sure I’d seen his work and I certainly hadn’t been influenced by it. CBA: You hadn’t seen “Master Race” yet? Walter: No, I don’t think so. I knew EC existed, and when I looked up Kriegstein’s work later, I could see why Carmine brought it up, because my work was very line-oriented and design-oriented and while it wasn’t much like Kriegstein’s, I understood the connection. So, we talked about comics, Carmine gave me his approval, and then he called three editors into his office—Joe Orlando, Julie Schwartz and Archie—and he made them all give me a job! [laughs] Fortunately, comics back then had back-up stories, so I got short assignments from each one of them. I got “Cyrano’s Army” from Joe, what turned out to be “UFM” from Archie (who helped us generate the job; he didn’t just hand me a script), and a Superman backup story about Krypton from Julie. I never did that third job and Julie never asked about it again, which was probably okay. I don’t think I was doing work Julie wanted to print back at the time. I did the job for Joe first, and then Archie. Gerry and I worked out the “UFM” story for SSWS. And Archie liked it enough to keep giving me a little work. I did a couple of “Battle Albums,” and a couple more back-up stories I did a little three-page Alamo story based on an actual event written by Don Krarr, a writer friend. He was doing some acting and I’ve always assumed that Don wrote comics to make a living while he pursued acting. He had a great radio voice. I kidded him that I was waiting for him to slip eventually so that his real squeaky voice would pop out someday! He wrote a nice little story about a real episode that took place at the Alamo, and I read an entire book about the Alamo prior to doing this three-page story to get some sense of the time and place. I was nuts apparently, but the art persuaded Archie I Oct. 2000

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could draw stuff besides science-fiction. I was working hard to find non-SF stories to draw. It was very clear to me early on that one of the reasons I’d gotten the “This is nice, but what else can you do?” reaction was that my samples were SF oriented. And that SF was one of the ghettos of comics. There wasn’t a lot of it around, the stuff didn’t sell all that well, and you got typed as an artist pretty quickly. They’d say, “This guy is good for SF stories, but not much else,” or “This guy’s good at Westerns but otherwise…” I saw some good artists get stuck that way. So, I tried to get work in other genres as fast as I could. CBA: I recently found a Young Love cover you did. Walter: That was a little later on, just for fun… arty decorative borders and hearts. If you’re working in one genre, it’s a nice change to do something elsewhere. But I worked hard to get other stories, and the Alamo story was the result of that. I didn’t find this out till years later but that job persuaded Archie that I could draw stuff besides SF, so when he was thinking about creating Manhunter in the back of Detective Comics (which he’d inherited from Julie), he thought of me as a possible artist. I really got the “Manhunter” gig out of this little three-page Alamo story. My secret plan had worked out just the way I was hoping it would out without my having a clue. [laughs] CBA: Were you familiar with Archie’s Warren work? Walter: Only in retrospect. I knew him from writing Iron Man when Johnny Craig drew it. CBA: So when you first met him, he was just another editor? Were you aware of his reputation? Walter: Not really. The Warren stuff I didn’t discover until Jim was cutting back on budgets, and there were some pretty wonky stories and artwork. I missed the early stuff with Archie. I knew the name and not a lot else. I hadn’t seen any Blazing Combats. I went back and bought copies later. CBA: After you’d met Archie? Walter: Yes. So, I didn’t really have a sense of who he was, but we got along very well. By the time I was doing “Manhunter,” we were really tight. Archie and his wife, Anne [T. Murphy], really helped keep me alive, because I was living by myself at the time over in Brooklyn. I can’t imagine what I was eating! I was not a cook then, I’m not a cook now. I do remember that Hamburger Helper was

Above: In preparation for the Manhunter series, Walter researched various weaponry for the character. Here’s his sketches of (top) the Mauser and (above) the notorious Bundi dagger. ©2000 Walter Simonson. Right: Paul Kirk takes aim in this 1976 drawing by Mr. Simonson. Art ©2000 W.Simonson, Manhunter ©2000 DC Comics.

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incredibly salty! Once or twice a week, I was getting supper at Archie and Anne’s, and we’d talk about “Manhunter’. We got to be good friends very rapidly and I was getting enough work to stay alive. When I was doing “Manhunter,” I penciled and inked a Sword of Sorcery for Denny O’Neil, in the middle of everything else along with other miscellaneous work here and there. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I was holding on. CBA: If you don’t mind, I’m going to gloss over “Manhunter” a little bit… Walter: No problem. Been there, done that. CBA: ..but it set your career? Walter: It did. You asked earlier about what fan reaction I got. There was no fan reaction, because there were no fans, at least, none that I had talked with then. There was no way to get that kind of feedback. But, what “Manhunter” did was to establish me professionally. Before “Manhunter,” I was one more guy doing comics; after “Manhunter,” people in the field knew who I was. It’d won a bunch of awards the year that it ran, and after that, I really had no trouble finding work. CBA: How many chapters were there? Walter: Seven. CBA: As the series progressed, did you start getting feedback? I know it was Archie’s decision, but the final issue, you were getting the whole book, with Batman and Manhunter teaming-up… Walter: Again, I don’t know what kind of feedback Archie was getting, I really don’t remember much except from my friends in the business. Maybe there were letters coming in, and I do remember one fan in a Manhunter costume at one of the cons. The last “Manhunter” issue was a full story for two reasons: One is we wanted to do it; it seemed natural that we do a Batman and

Manhunter team-up. They were in the same comic, they had different styles, in some ways, Archie had created Manhunter as a counterpoint to Batman, we thought it would make a neat story. The other thing was, from about chapter five on, we knew Archie was leaving DC. He’d been asked to go back to Warren, and decided to accept the offer. We also knew Julie would take over Detective Comics, and do Elongated Man or maybe Hawkman back-up stories. And really, I wouldn’t have done “Manhunter” with anybody else writing it. So, we knew we were going to wrap it up from about issue five on. With that in mind, we decided we would tie the series together and complete it. It seemed natural that we’d finish with a longer story, and also it gave us a chance to use Batman and make him part of the series before we left. That’s really why that 20-page story came about. CBA: You said you would do a page in a week, and that was a 20page story. Walter: Well, I was pretty close to my limit on that one. [laughter] I’d gotten faster, but I was pushing my deadlines. But I always do. In fact, during that last chapter, Archie had already left DC, so I was going down to Warren to trade “Manhunter” pages with him. CBA: You get accolades from doing “Manhunter.” Did you start getting work from other companies? Walter: I stayed with DC for about four years. I liked working for them. For one thing, back then, the view was that Marvel was an artists’ company, and DC was a writers’ company, and the reflection of this was that mostly artists got paid better at Marvel, and most writers got paid better at DC. CBA: With the “Marvel Method,” artists also had to write at Marvel. Walter: Yes, you had to do more work, but there was an additional degree of creative freedom. However, I presume because Carmine liked my stuff so much, my DC rate was higher than my Marvel rate. And hey, given an choice of equal jobs, if I’m getting more money over here, then that’s where I’m working! So, I worked at DC for about four years. I did two short jobs for Seaboard, one of which saw print, one didn’t, and that was about ‘74, ‘75. They were paying phenomenally well, double rates. CBA: Did Jeff Rovin or Larry Leiber contact you? Walter: No, Archie worked for Seaboard for a while. He was writing for them. The Destructor and some other stuff. (There was a real nice Toth job that came out of there.) I think probably Jeff was the editor at the time, so we did a Samurai job for him. I was getting paid double rate, so it was hard to turn that down! I did two jobs, the Samurai job called “Temple of the Spider,” which Archie wrote. It actually came out in the last Seaboard comic to make it into print, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Thrilling Adventure Stories #2. CBA: With the Neal Adams cover? Walter: Yes, and under that cover, there was a Russ Heath job, a Toth job, and a Severin job. It wasn’t bad company! [laughter] CBA: You did one of your best jobs for them! Walter: I’m not embarrassed by the story I had in there, even in that company. I think it is one of my best and I was still young, too, only two or three years in the business. CBA: And what’s the missing job? Walter: Oh, I did a monster job. Seaboard had been doing some kind of a pastiche of Rodan and Godzilla, all the Japanese monsters, and I did the third chapter of a continuing story but the company folded before it ever came out. I drew it, but the artwork disappeared when the company evaporated. I did get full-size stats of it. Jeff took care of that right before he left Atlas. CBA: And Archie wrote that? Walter: No, I think the writer’s name was Gabriel Levy. I’m not positive it was Gabe—I’ve never met him—and I worked from a full script, but that’s the name I’m remembering. There were three jobs completed in the series featuring these monsters. Enrico Romero, the guy who’s been doing the newspaper strip Modesty Blaise for years did the first one. Howard Nostrand, I believe, did number two, and I did the third one. Pretty goofy. We were doing the same monsters in the same story, and nobody drew the monsters the same, I mean, it was really funny! CBA: But you really liked that job, right? Walter: It was fun, yes, I did like that job a lot. I did some stuff in it that I really enjoyed, with both the storytelling and the drawing. These days, people sue at the drop of a hat, but back then, I drew a version of the monster Gorgo, including the folds in his costume when his arm bent. [laughter] I’m not sure I was that successful, but I tried to draw it like a guy in a rubber suit. [laughs] CBA: Were you starting to do other freelance work at the time? Any advertising? Walter: No. I’ve done a little non-comics work here and there but only when things came my way. The drawing upstairs of the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny and the Coyote was done through Continuity with Neal. CBS had hired them to do a promotional piece. He needed a drawing, and he thought I’d be a good artist for it, I’m not sure why. He’d probably seen my duck stuff. I did a pretty mean Carl Barks back then. One of my greatest honors, if you will, is that I’ve got a page of art in The Complete Carl Barks Library. A long time ago, it was a cover for a fanzine by Kim Weston, a friend of mine. He wrote a short duck gag and I drew it in my best Barks style. The publisher got hold of it from Kim, I guess, and asked us if they could print it there, and I said, “Oh, sure.” So I’ve got a page of duck stuff in Carl Barks Library, man! Can’t do better than that! Awesome, totally awesome! [laughter] And I designed a Grand Funk cover with Neal for Continuity, a three-dimensional cover with punch-out glasses on a photo montage. CBA: And it was bought? Walter: Oh, yes, it’s the cover on “Shinin’ On.” CBA: So you haven’t done much advertising work? Walter: Advertising, probably none. I did some drawings for Rankin-Bass for the Return of the King animated TV film, the Lord of the Rings version back in the mid-’70s, mostly presentation work, not stuff for publication. I don’t think the stuff I did was actually used anywhere. A friend of mine was the principal designer for it, and they needed a bunch of drawings for a presentation. And I did some of the illustrations in the Harry Abrams edition of The Hobbit. The book was illustrated primarily from cels taken from the Rankin-Bass cartoon but they needed some additional material and I did about 20 Oct. 2000

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drawings for the book in the style of the cartoon. In 1980, I did the cover for National Lampoon, that was out of the blue, a cartoony cover. I’ve done a few magazine illustrations. Mostly, I like doing comics. I prefer doing comics to other stuff. Like that great Barks quote, “I’m just a duck man, strictly a duck man.” Me? I’m just a comics guy, strictly a comics guy. CBA: Your First Issue Special with Dr. Fate was memorable, and you went to town on that. Walter: Well, I did. That was actually my attempt to out-Ditko Ditko. I wasn’t trying to draw like him, but to imitate his inspiration. One of the things I loved about Ditko’s “Doctor Strange” was the rather wonderful job he did creating a graphic system of magic. The dialogue was cool, but Steve created a complete visual system of magic based on vectors and circles that rendered the magical aspects of the strip visually coherent. The sorcerers weren’t just firing energy blasts but actual vectors that rendered the magic both visually exciting and intimated at the underlying existence of structure to it. Magic in comics is often depicted either verbally—”Oh, by the bristling hair of Flear; in my hand I find a beer!” with some rhyming baloney, or else guys are shooting special effects force blasts at each other. Could just be ray guns. There’s no sense, really, of an underlying reality to the magic. That’s one of the difficulties with writing magic well in a story; it’s easy to do anything you want to do. After all, it’s magic! To

Above: In the late ’70s, Archie Goodwin created a character used—in prose form—in Byron Preiss’s ambitious paperback book series, Weird Heroes. As a sample used to showcase the character in comics format, Walter penciled, inked, and lettered this page, a previously unpublished Goodwin/ Simonson collaboration. Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Archie Goodwin & Walter Simonson.

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Above: Splash page to Walter’s impressive First Issue Special #9, featuring the first-ever book-length Dr. Fate story. ©2000 DC Comics. Below: Before deciding to stick with the original helmet design, Walter contemplated a more Thor-like look for Dr. Fate.

make it work for me, there needs to be some sense of limits and parameters, otherwise, it’s just whatever you want to have happen. What Steve did, I think, was create a structured, system of graphics that answered these objections. Perfect for a visual medium like comics. A magician could say, “By the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak,” or whatever, but once he’d said that, you can see the Bands happen, and you can see how they worked. So, when I was doing Doctor Fate, I was trying to develop an alternative way to visualize structured magic. It grew out of my admiration for what Steve had done, of course, and owed a lot to it, but I was searching for a different visual basis. In the end, I came up with the idea of using the ankh as a symbol for Doctor Fate, the Egyptian symbol for life, which seemed appropriate for the character. And I used typography as my structure the way I’d learned at RISD, where we’d extract a letter from a specific typeface, and then play with it, make it a design element. We’d use it as a building block and make circles and spirals, geometric shapes, anything the form suggested. It was really a kind of play and exploration. And you discover negative space and positive space in ways you haven’t seen before and can build on. It must have worked out okay because everybody who’s drawn Fate since has used the ankh. CBA: Did you work Marvel style with writer Marty Pasko on that? Walter: I don’t remember precisely although Marty probably would. Most of my stuff’s been done Marvel style, I prefer that, and I’m guessing Dr. Fate was done that way as well. I do remember that we were right in the middle of doing the story when DC informed us they’d cut back their page count by two pages—I think from 22 to

20—so we had to shorten the story. That was why Kent Nelson’s wife, Inza, finds a little piece of pottery shard or whatever it is that’s got the bad guy’s name on it so quickly to help her husband. CBA: Was the hope to do a regular series? Walter: It wasn’t really a consideration. If they’d offered, we would’ve done it, but I don’t remember any rumblings in that direction. The story was designed for an issue of First Issue Special as a solo story. I think we just wanted to do a cool Doctor Fate story. As far as I know, we did the first full-length Doctor Fate story. CBA: With Metal Men, did you have any affection for the old Kanigher/Andru/Esposito stories? Walter: I actually had the first Showcase they were in, among the many other comics I’ve lost over the years. I bought ‘em occasionally, and I liked them. They were pretty goofy, and I enjoyed drawing them in my turn. It was weird because I ended up having three writers in five issues. Steve Gerber wrote the first story as a full script, so I didn’t work with Steve personally and he’d gone back to Marvel by then. It was one of the few full scripts I’ve done. After that, Gerry Conway—who was working at DC—got the nod to do a regular series, so he did two issues, and then I think he went back to Marvel as well. And Marty Pasko wrote the last two issues I did. Actually, all of those guys are good writers, and I enjoyed working with all of them. Each writer, of course, had a different take on the characters, and where he wanted them to go, and I found after three writers in five issues, I was beat, just really exhausted. By the end of the fifth issue, we had a couple of characters from earlier story plots hanging around the book with nowhere to go. Gerry and I had had the idea to take Tina’s brain out of her body and put it into a mortal body. We’d introduced a female character so we could bump her off in some brain dead fashion, and then make Tina a real girl for a while. Marty wanted to go somewhere else, which was cool. But we ended up with these extra characters I had to keep on drawing! [laughs] With the changes in writers and plots, by the end of the fifth issue, I felt “Oh, man, I think I’m done!” CBA: How long did you last on it? Walter: It was bi-monthly. I did five issues… almost a year that I was penciling and inking it. That may have been the first full length regular comic book I penciled and inked. CBA: When did the jump to Marvel kick in? Walter: I guess in ‘77 or thereabouts. I’d done a couple of illustrations for Haunt of Horror, a little Marvel pulp horror magazine, in ‘73 or so. That was the first stuff I did for Marvel. Then, I’m guessing The Rampaging Hulk was probably the first regular character continuity I did for them. CBA: Did Doug approach you about the assignment? Walter: Doug Moench was the writer but I expect Marvel got hold of me. John Warner was the editor, and he’d been a friend of mine over at DC and Gold Key. I imagine John got in touch to see if I wanted to do it. CBA: He was a black-&-white editor, right? Walter: That’s right. They had this black-&-white Hulk book coming up, and Alfredo Alcala was going to ink it. At that time, ‘77 or thereabouts, I’d already done stuff I hadn’t inked, Hercules Unbound for DC, which I did layouts for Wally Wood to ink. I had decided that I really wanted to learn to draw faster. I wanted to make decisions more quickly about storytelling. I needed to do a bigger volume of work for a while, to be able to figure out how to make those decisions more rapidly. So, the Hercules Unbound material was the first work I did that I wasn’t inking. I’d been doing comics three or four years by then. I took that gig because Woody was inking it. It was a chance to work with Wally Wood! I was delighted! Layouts? Sure, no problem! But I found that I could concentrate on storytelling problems just doing layouts that other people would finish. I didn’t care if it looked like my work or not when it was done. I didn’t expect it to just doing layouts. But it forced me to consider storytelling and scale more closely, to learn to storytell faster. It was really a sort of educational period for me. So I took The Rampaging Hulk assignment, I did layouts on Thor for a year with Len Wein writing, and some other oddball jobs here and there. CBA: Did you get paid full penciling? Walter: The layout rate was your pencil rate minus $20, and then the inker would get a finishing rate, his inking rate plus twenty COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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bucks. The company would spend the same amount of money for a finished page, but the division of money was a little different on layouts versus pencils. CBA: I thought Rampaging Hulk was very nice work. Walter: It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, pal! CBA: [laughs] Yeah, in the scheme of things. It hearkened back to the ‘62 Metal Master era [Incredible Hulk #6]… Walter: It was very silly, and it was a lot of fun. I didn’t have any real input in the stories. Doug would turn in these immense plots that we’d have to squeeze down to 40 pages or whatever it was, but they were enjoyable. I only did three issues, but they were double issues, around 40 pages or so. About six months worth of work, probably a little longer, knowing me. It was fun to go back and do the original X-Men, the Metal Master. We invented the Krylorians, really old Marvel monster-era villains. I tried doing a really over-thetop Hulk with those giant beetling brows, and flat head! CBA: What did you think of Alfredo’s inking on it? Walter: I thought he did a nice job with it. The only thing I’m really concerned about if somebody else is inking my layouts is that the inker is concentrating as much on his end as I am on mine—I’m doing less work overall on layouts that I’d do in pencils, but I’m not sloughing off, and I want an inker who doesn’t either. Alfredo was really excellent. The first and third stories were all ink wash, I think the second was maybe all line or something textural, I don’t remember exactly, but he was putting a lot of time and effort into it. It was real interesting, quite different than if I’d done the finishes myself, but that’s one of the neat things about these kind of collaborative efforts. CBA: You haven’t done Iron Man, have you? Walter: Iron Man I haven’t really done. Spider-Man, I haven’t really done. CBA: You did that Iron Man pin-up that harkened back to Gene Colan’s work. Walter: Oh, yeah, I could do a pretty good Gene Colan Iron Man right now. [laughter] The opportunity never came around, I guess, and I had good luck finding work. I’d be asked to do things, like Mark Gruenwald asking me to do Thor. But when I first read Marvel comics, I had four books that were my core favorites. They were Thor, Spider-Man, “Iron Man” and Fantastic Four. I liked the Hulk okay, but he was never one of my top favorites. I liked Spider-Man too, but I don’t know that I wanted to do him. The character felt far enough off from my own interests that I was never sure I could do a really decent Spider-Man. But it’s a character I really enjoyed, particularly in the Lee-Ditko stories. I think it’s some of Stan’s very best work—good stories, good character interactions, all that teenage angst he was doing, all those kids and their soap opera lives. I wouldn’t mind doing Iron Man sometime, although I’d explode every damned suit he’s had since Gene Colan’s work. Blow them all up and go back to Gene’s. To me, they all just look like bad versions of Gene’s suit! CBA: Then you did Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Walter: Yeah, it was somewhere in there, when the movie came out, ‘78 or so. Columbia Pictures was just awful about it, so that made it one of my less-great experiences in comic books. I made up for it a year or two later with Alien for Heavy Metal. That was a fabulous experience, the best licensed property I’ve worked on in comics. CBA: When did you meet Louise Jones? Walter: I met Weezie in ‘73. We started dating in August of ‘74. The first time I ever talked to her was on the phone. Weezie’s daughter, Juli, was friends with Archie and Anne’s daughter, Jennifer and they played together a lot. So one night, I called to talk to Archie about “Manhunter” and found that Archie and Anne were out that night and Weezie was looking after the kids. She answered the phone, and we had a nice conversation. She knew my work because she’d seen the “Manhunter” stuff sitting around Archie’s apartment, and she commented about how she particularly liked the way I drew the hands. I can still remember thinking, “Who is this again?” [laughter] Then at some point, when I was over there for dinner, Weezie—she was a single mom in the city—came by to pick up Julie and they stayed for supper. And that was how I met her. I don’t really remember the first time I actually saw her. But I still remember our Oct. 2000

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phone conversation and the first time we ever talked. A good phone call. CBA: Did you and Weezie hang out with Archie and Anne? Walter: Yes. At the time, Weezie was living close to Archie and Anne, over on the West Side. I was out in Queens; I’d moved in with Allen Milgrom in Rego Park about a year after I came to New York. It was a three-train ride to get from the West Side out to Queens. If I hit everything just right, I could get home in just an hour. If I missed a connection, it was an hour-and-a-half or longer. But we hung out back then. I had a lot meals at Archie and Anne’s. Like I said, they kept me alive! CBA: When did you first meet John Workman? Walter: The first time I remember talking to him was over Alien. I’d seen him at DC before but don’t remember that clearly. John was the art director of Heavy Metal, and he called me up about the possibility of doing the artwork on an adaptation of this movie, Alien, that was coming out. At the time, there weren’t any graphic novels in the States. I ended up doing a couple of sample pages of my own version of the Alien (not as good as Giger’s, I have to admit), based on the film script. And I got the gig. But John and I hadn’t worked Top: Initially drawn as the (ultimately-rejected) cover for First Issue Special #9, Walter decided to paste-on a revised head featuring his cool helmet design. The Book of Fate apparently was a (unpublished?) reprinting of FIS #9. Right: Another unused Dr. Fate helmet design. Both courtesy of and art ©2000 the artist. Dr. Fate ©2000 DC Comics. 23-B

Above: Walter contributed this pencil sketch of his sweetie, Louise “Weezie” Simonson, for a text page in the first issue of her memorable kid super-hero series, Power Pack. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: It’s Munchie, the poodlelike creature who yaps up a storm in the Simonson household but treats visiting magazine editors nice as pie.

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together before really. The Alien book was the first book we did with his lettering over my drawing. CBA: Were you impressed with the script? Walter: I was; it was neat. I didn’t read it and think, “Wow! This will be a franchise with four movies in 20 years!” But I liked it, I thought it’d be fun to draw. The Alien design was so fabulous and it was a good, scary movie. CBA: Ron Cobb’s designs. Walter: Yep, Ron Cobb, Moebius did the space suits I think. The whole thing came together very well. We also had three different revisions of the script to work from, a June revision, a September revision, a November revision. CBA: Was some of the stuff you already did negated? Walter: There were scenes that had been dropped by the last revision we had. We didn’t try to include negated scenes deliberately. Charlie Lippincott was our liaison with 20th Century Fox. Charlie was a comics fan, so he understood comics in a way that a lot of guys who work at movie companies have no clues about. He was really good about getting us reference material and information, letting us know what was going on. He understood the problems we had trying to get a comic together. He arranged for me to see a rough cut of the film in December (it came out the following May), maybe two-and-a-half hours long. We had a lot of information to work from, and 20th Century wasn’t on us to match the movie precisely. So Archie and I were given the latitude to do the best possible comic book version of the Alien story we could without any editorial interference at all and we used the information we had. CBA: And Heavy Metal released the book… Walter: Right when the movie came out. That meant we really had to get it in sometime in April in order to get it out in the stores by the middle of May, when the movie was actually released. But since they were editing the film right up to release, there’s one scene that’s in the comic that’s not in the movie, and there are a couple of other minor changes. One was deliberate, one wasn’t. One scene I saw in the rough cut came during the climax of the movie. Everybody else is dead, Ripley’s running for the lifeboat, she zips around a corner, and there in front of her in the corridor is a big box in the middle of the floor. She comes to a dead stop. The box is obviously out of place, and as she’s looking at it, very slowly, it begins to move. It roils around, and suddenly unfolds, and up comes that unmistakable head! It’s the Alien and it’s obviously been waiting for her there, which was really creepy! It implied an intelligence on the part of the Alien, because it was in the path to the lifeboats! And Ripley ran back down the corridor. Charlie kept us informed. The scene was in, it was out, it was in, it was out… by the time we got to that part of the comic book, I talked to Charlie and said, “Look, I’ve got to know now if I’m going to include this scene. Otherwise, I’ll have to re-break down the rest of the book because I’ve allowed room for it.” He said, “Well, right now, it’s in.” I said, “Okay, fine.” So I drew it, the movie came out, ffft! Gone! [laughter] The scene we changed deliberately was also at the end of the movie, when Ripley’s racing around spending what seemed like an hour-and-a-half looking for the damn cat. You know, your whole crew is dead, a rampaging alien is running around the ship, and you’re worryin’ about the cat? I understand that cats are wonderful—if you’re a cat lover, don’t write me any letters, please—but I thought—it’s life or death here! Forget the cat and get the hell out!! I’m sure the scene where she hunts for the cat was done partly for tension, and partly because after all, if they killed the cat in the movie, people would have written letters like crazy. Blowing away six or seven crewmen, no problem, but if

they’d blown up the cat, forget it! But in the story, I thought it made Ripley look like a jerk. There was so much at stake. It was the only time in the movie I thought, “This woman is not showing the native intelligence that she obviously has,” because really, if it’s her life or the cat’s—I’m sorry, fine! It’s “her” life! It’s not the cat! So in the comic book, she just finds the cat. It’s “Okay! Oh! Oh! Jones! Great!” Scoooooop! She’s out of three, and that’s the end of it. It also saved me some room, which I really needed anyway (another reason for the change actually), but it was funny. That was maybe the only change we made deliberately from what was in the movie. CBA: What made this license project such a pleasant experience? Walter: Because we were allowed to do our jobs. On a lot of licensed projects, especially these days, much of the creative energy in the project is siphoned off to get likeness approval. You’ve got to draw likenesses so that Bozo the Clown not only looks like Bozo the Clown, but so that the real Bozo the Clown will approve the likeness, which is not quite the same thing as drawing a likeness. While I appreciate approvals, and maybe if I were an actor, I’d want it, it means that a lot of the artist’s creative energy is going to be spent trying to make some guy look like what he thinks he looks like so he’ll sign off on the drawing. Which means, the artist is not spending as much time doing the comic book. There’s probably a middle ground here, somewhere, but I’ve heard too many stories about stuff like that. And really, I’m not doing comics for the thrill of getting Bozo the Clown to approve my drawing of him. What I want is to be able to draw Bozo so he works in my comic book. I thought Ripley pretty much looked like Sigourney Weaver. I had a lot of reference, and I thought she worked out pretty well. In fact, I thought they all worked out pretty well as characters in the book. If we’d had to have likeness approval on all those guys, I’m not sure what would’ve happened. 20 years ago, we were just basically allowed to do our jobs, which is to take this story and make a good comic book out of it. I think that was one of the principal reasons we were successful. And imitated. When Marvel decided to put out graphic novels, Archie was back working for them and they used the Heavy Metal Alien graphic novel as their template. Hence that particular graphic novel format in America. CBA: It was on the New York Times best-seller list. Walter: Oh, yes it was. As far as I know, the first comic to make the New York Times best-seller list. I think if trained monkeys could have done it, it would still have done pretty well. But you know, trained monkeys didn’t do it. Archie and I did. We got up to around #6, I think, and were on the list for about five or six weeks. CBA: That must be a cool experience! Walter: It was. You know what else I’ve got? This is something nobody else can claim! As far as I know, I have the first comic book in space! Thor #355 made it into space. I wrote it, I drew the cover, Sal Buscema pencils and inks. It’s

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a story about Thor and his great-grandfather, and what happened was this. Back when the comic came out, NASA was sending up space shuttles regularly. There was some group, the Young Astronauts I think, and they got to put some cargo on one of the shuttle flights. I believe their stuff went up on the Challenger in July of ‘85. And apparently, one of the things they put in their little space locker was a copy of that comic book. I only know this because in one of the executive offices at Marvel, there was a metal plaque hanging on the wall. On the plaque, under an engraving of that cover, it says “Sent up in the Challenger, July, 1985.” Of course, as the guys who did the actual comic book, Sal and I got zip out of it, but that’s just the way it works! [laughter] Maybe John Glenn had comics back in his capsule in ‘63, but as far as I know, Thor #355’s the first comic book to make it into space. CBA: So you first knew John as an editor? Walter: I think as the art director at Heavy Metal. He really hired me to do the pencils on Alien; he phoned me about doing it, and I did a couple of pages of samples for him. CBA: A relationship developed from there? Walter: Oh, yes. I penciled the book, he did the lettering, Archie wrote it. CBA: Did you ink it, too? Walter: Yes, I did. Not only that, we actually did the book a little differently from other comics I’d worked on. The color was done by painting photostats with watercolor. So, the printed book is photographed from the colored stats. But the lettering was all done on overlays, because if it had been photographed directly from the colored stats, the lettering would’ve broken up. There wouldn’t have been a good solid black line. So what we did is— somehow, John may remember the exact specifics, it seems insane to me now—I put tracing paper over the original, and I think I greeked in the lettering to see how big it was going to be. Then I drew a balloon border on the original artwork with the proper tail, and John would letter the balloon on an overlay to fit the space. That did two things: One, it meant we could photograph the lettering for line, which meant it’d be good and clear and black, as it wouldn’t have been if we’d done it on the artwork, and it also

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meant whenever foreign editions were done, Heavy Metal could ship out unlettered material with the balloons already there, and the lettering for the translations could just be dropped right in. It worked out pretty well. I think sound effects were actually on the originals. CBA: Did John do them? Walter: Yes. Up to that point, I’d done all my own sound effects, and my own panel borders, and my own balloon borders. Thanks to Alien, I discovered, “Oh, this guy can do this stuff better than I can, heck!” So, he’s done it ever since. CBA: Did you get royalties from Alien? Walter: No, actually, I didn’t. That was right before royalties came in, ‘78, ‘79. Royalties really began in comics about ‘81, or maybe ‘82. But I was offered a really good flat page rate for the artwork, and I said, “Hey, fine. I’ll take it.” That’s how it worked out. CBA: When you saw John’s work on Alien as a letterer, did you say, “This is the guy for me”? Walter: Oh, I thought it was just wonderful lettering. His sound effects were derived from both typographical and calligraphic sources, which means they were very structured. My own work is so design-oriented, there’s a real sense of organization underlying the work that I do, and John’s sense of design and the way he handled typography and calligraphy when he did the sound effects really complimented my artwork. I thought his small letterforms were quite beautiful. And they were slightly graphic as well, so it was a real good match. When you find something like that that works, you want to stay with it. CBA: Did you next work with him on Thor? What was next? Walter: Well… probably… no, he would’ve… he might’ve lettered the Star Slammers graphic novel, I’d have to go look. That was before Thor. Tom Orzechowski did the X-Men/Teen Titans. He was the regular letterer on X-Men, so he was the letterer on that project. The graphic novel, John might’ve lettered, that was ‘82. When I began doing Thor, John was the letterer on that for sure. CBA: Right. He’s been with you ever since, right? Walter: Not quite everything. The only major thing I’ve done he didn’t letter was Fantastic Four. I did that for about a year-and-ahalf, and at the time I was doing it, he was under contract with DC, and of course, that was a book for Marvel. So he was unavailable. Bill Oakley did the lettering, and Bill actually did a pretty good Workman job. He was the regular letterer on that, a very good guy and a good letterer. CBA: Did you have a studio set-up when you first worked in New York? Walter: At the very first place I stayed in New York, I was housesitting, so my first job was drawn on a ping-pong table. CBA: Did you angle the table at all? Walter: No, no, I just sat at the ping-pong table and drew flat. Then, I got an apartment in Brooklyn, afterwards one in Rego Park over in Queens, and eventually one with Weezie in Manhattan. I worked at home in all those apartments. I had a really nice drawing board by then, the same one I’ve still got. I didn’t work in a studio until I shared space with Howard Chaykin, Val Mayerik and Jim Starlin. The four of us rented a loft down on West 29th Street, and we called ourselves Upstart Associates. The studio opened in the fall of ‘78 but I wasn’t able to move in until May of ‘79,

Above and inset: To promote a signing at one of New England’s best comic stores, That’s Entertainment of Worcester, Mass., Walter drew up these portraits of himself and better half, Weezie. ©2000 Walter Simonson. Center inset: They’ve been called “Everyone’s Grandparents,” giving shelter (and tasty homemade waffles) to nieces, lost dogs, college chums, and wandering CBA interviewers; we present Weezie and Walter Simonson, two of the nicest and most talented folk in the comics biz. Weezie is not only a notable writer (of Superman, New Mutants, X-Factor, Galactus the Devourer, Steel, and Power Pack, among others), but, in our opinion, also one of comics’ greatest editors, evident by her accomplishments for Warren Publications in the 1970s. Look for a long interview with her in our Warren issue, CBA #4, soon to be seen as part of our hugely expanded reprint of that ish (with tons more material), The Warren Companion, due next year. Below: It’s Teaka, the Simonson’s other mutt, a cutie who also treats travelling comics historians very nicely.

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Above: At left is Walter’s splash for his early ’70s version of Star Slammers and, at right, his 1980s revise for the Marvel graphic novel. Background image: A Star Slammers pin-up image from the ’80s. ©2000 Walter Simonson.

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after I’d finished the Alien job. I was in that studio until late ‘86. Our membership rotated in and out, Starlin left fairly early, as did Val Mayerik. Jim went upstate, Val went back to Ohio, I believe. Jim Sherman came in place of Val, and Frank Miller came in place of Starlin. That was a pretty stable group, and we were there for several years. This was while Frank was working on Daredevil, Howard was on American Flagg!, and I was on Thor, so we were doing some fun stuff. Eventually Frank, and then Howard left, and Gary Hallgren came in. Gary was one of the original Air Pirates, and he did a lot of airbrush illustration outside comics. He was quite a craftsman with that airbrush. So it was just the three of us for a time. CBA: You were doing predominately comics work, right? Walter: Oh, it was all comics. My career is mostly comics. CBA: If anyone else in the studio was in a deadline jam would other studio mates pitch in to help? Walter: Well, oddball things would happen. I remember I had to do an illustration for a Marvel calendar of a Hulk/Spider-Man picture, and I was short on time, so Frank laid it out for me. I drew it all and rendered it up, but it was Frank who did the basic layout. Mostly, that didn’t happen, but stuff like that would occasionally come up. I inked at least one of Frank’s covers, some Spider-Man/samurai picture. CBA: Were you credited? Walter: I inked it, so it’s probably says “Miller/Simonson.” I didn’t ink much of Frank. I don’t think I really jammed with Howard on his stuff, or vice-versa; those guys weren’t helping me out on Thor. CBA: When did the studio end? 1985? Walter: Frank was gone by the mid-’80s, Howard left to go to the West Coast in Oct. ’85, and I think I was out by the end of ‘86. Gary and Jim kept it up for a while longer, though eventually that floor was taken over by a whole other concern. CBA: Wasn’t Battlestar Galactica a regular gig?

Walter: Yes, it was. Well, it was an irregular regular gig. [laughter] I took over with #6, doing the layout work, and Klaus Janson was doing the finishes. I’m pretty sure Roger McKenzie wrote all the ones I did, but I’m not positive. I did several issues, and then Alien came along, so I got off Galactica for what turned out to be five months, and then I went back to Galactica after that. I did most of the rest of the run, though there were a couple of fill-ins by others. I think with #17, Roger left as the writer, and I took over scripting and I wrote four of the last five Galacticas. Those issues were really my first concerted effort at writing in comics. Remember the “Battle Albums” from the old DC war books? I did a couple of those for Archie, where I wrote little captions for them. CBA: Did you do your own research for those? Walter: Yes, I did. I’m a big fan of the story of the battleship Bismarck—the story of that naval action is always fascinating to me—and, by extension I suppose, I was interested in the fate of the Tirpitz, the sister ship of the Bismarck, which never did very much, but was always a threat until it was finally sunk by the British. So, I did a double-page spread “Battle Album” on the Tirpitz, with a brief history caption. And I drew a Phantom jet, one of the major participants in the airwar in Vietnam. This is maybe ‘73. That’s my first actual writing in comics, if you want to get technical, but my first scripts were for Battlestar Galactica. CBA: With the Battlestar Galactica, was that the end of your layout period? Walter: I did layouts for that, and then for Star Wars. My Star Wars work was after the second movie, Tom Palmer did the finishes, and that was probably the last significant layout work, where I was just doing layouts and not tight pencils or inks. CBA: Did you say, “Okay, I’ve graduated”? Walter: I think by that time, I felt I had really learned what I wanted to learn doing layouts. Also at that point, I had a chance to do the COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Star Slammers graphic novel for Marvel. I did draw the X-Men/Teen Titans before, in ‘81-’82, that was right before the graphic novel. The X-Titans was probably closer to pencils rather than layouts. CBA: The X-Titans… [laughs] Walter: It was the short name! [laughter] Terry Austin inked it. I remember doing pencils, though my pencils aren’t tight compared to tight peoples’ pencils. But Terry could probably remember better exactly what he had to work with on art-wise. Beautiful work. I did that project, and after it was over, I had the option of doing the graphic novel, and of course, I wanted to finish the graphic novel myself! I did the pencils and inks, writing, and some of the coloring— I had some help, Weezie did a bunch—and while I was working on that, Mark Gruenwald offered me Thor. I really wanted to do finishes on Thor. Basically, I had two thoughts: First, I’d learned what I wanted about doing storytelling, drawing faster, and thinking rapidly about layouts. I did feel I’d gone to school on that and graduated. And, I was being offered work where I really wanted it to realize a particular vision. I was happy to work with really good inkers and good finishers like Klaus and Tom, and it was fun to see the work take on the mixed qualities of the artistic team, but on something like Thor, where I had the option, I was more interested in having it look like my stuff. I haven’t done a lot of work in the way of layouts since. Thor was 1983. CBA: Why did you work on licensed properties? Walter: I was a big science-fiction fan, so doing Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars or Alien wasn’t a chore. I didn’t think, “Oh, gee, if only I could get a real comic, like Spider-Man.” There wasn’t a real qualitative difference between doing licensed books or mainstream super-hero books at that time. It was all comics. Roger McKenzie was a good wordsmith, David Micheline’s a really good writer, Klaus is a good inker—that’s like damning with faint praise— but working with Klaus was a pleasure, and so was working with Tom Palmer. And Weezie and Milgrom were my editors on some of the stuff. I got to team up with folks I really liked! CBA: Was the Star Slammers graphic novel Archie’s idea, as he was editor of Epic? Walter: At the time, Marvel was doing graphic novels, and they were amenable to using creator-owned material. This was in ‘81 or ‘82, pretty early in the mainstream comics creator-owned phase. The Star Slammers were characters I’d created who already had a universe behind them, so I went there to look for a story, found one, and proposed it. I don’t remember now if Archie said, “Look, Walt, why don’t you do a Star Slammers story?” or if I said, “Hey, you guys are doing graphic novels; how about if I do one?” I do remember that I’m responsible for making the first New Mutants story a graphic novel. The Slammers was supposed to be the fourth graphic novel in the Marvel series (which was numbered back then), and I was running… ahem!… a tad late. So Jim Shooter, the editor-in-chief at Marvel, told Weezie [the series editor] that what would have been the first issue of the regular New Mutants series—a double-sized issue—was going to be published as a graphic novel instead. Thus New Mutants became the fourth Marvel graphic novel, and the Slammers became the fifth. CBA: Did you have aspirations for Star Slammers to be a regular, on-going comics series? Walter: If I had my druthers, I’d rather have seen it come out as a series of graphic novels, like Giraud’s Lt. Blueberry. I like that format a lot, I like the fact you’ve got 48 pages, a larger size to play with, and it only comes out about twice a year. It would’ve been fun to have had, at this point, 16 or 17 graphic novels of the Slammers behind me, but I was offered Thor when I was working on the first one. Mark Gruenwald knew I was a big Thor fan, as we had talked about Thor earlier a fair amount, and when he offered me the series I jumped at the chance. CBA: Did you have an eye on promoting creator-owned properties, especially when the royalty system kicked in? Walter: It’s kind of funny, because I see all these hip guys writing angry columns on the Web these days, being terribly cool, grousing about mainstream comics, and how guys like me are wasting our time doing shared-universe stuff for the mainstream companies. Which is all right; I’m not that cool, but I like playing in a shared universe. I got into comics because of characters like Thor and the New Oct. 2000

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Gods and shared universes. And I’ve had a chance to share in them. It may not have been the wisest financial decision in the long run, but it’s been rewarding in any number of ways. Back when we were still getting royalties, we did fine financially. Nowadays, I look back and think, “Gee, maybe I should’ve done more creator-owned stuff back then.” Although really, I just miss those giant royalty checks! [laughter] But I’ve loved the shared universe work, and I think I’m good at it, that that’s where some of my real strengths lie. I’ve been able to do all the characters I was really dying to do in comics, and The New Gods are probably the last ones I’ve always wanted to do, the way I wanted to do Thor. “Manhunter” was a dream job, but who knew that was going to work the way it did when I got the gig? So, I have some stuff I helped create, I have some stuff I’ve jumped in on as it’s been going along, and I’ve gotten to ride the train for a while, maybe take it someplace different and then get off again. I’ve enjoyed that immensely. I haven’t had a burning desire to do creatorowned comics the way that some of the people I know have. And I don’t share what I regard as that tad of condescension I see in some folks regarding this part of the field. CBA: When you first went to DC, like you said, you’d find in the coffee room, Howard Chaykin, Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta, just a whole bunch of guys who, by ‘75-’76, just took off to do their

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own things… Bernie went off to do Frankenstein, had really high aspirations, trying to do truly magnificent creatorowned stuff. You stayed in the trenches in the Big Two, stayed and worked at it, and you consistently make the top ten lists of creators… Walter: You must’ve seen different lists than I see! [laughs] I don’t think I’ve seen my name in the top ten lists anywhere. Well, not for some time, but that’s okay. CBA: Certainly in the generation from the ‘70s and on up. Sales of your books have been pretty good, right? Walter: You know, compared to the hot young guys at the time, I’m not sure say, X-Factor was ever “hot” in the way books are “hot,” and that was probably the best-selling monthly book I’ve done. There were “hot” books at the time we were outselling, but “hot”is a perceptual definition… it depends a lot on whether or not “they” are talking about you in the fanzines, or maybe nowadays on the Web, or whatever, and I don’t know my stuff was ever that way. I think I was hot for about eight seconds when Thor first came out. But we got votes that counted on XFactor. Readers bought us. CBA: You were hot with “Manhunter.” Certainly there was a buzz. Walter: Well, again, “Manhunter” was so early, there wasn’t much fandom back then. There was some, certainly, but we didn’t get a lot of letters; I think any buzzing we heard was just the crickets in the corners of the room. CBA: But you went to the cons, right? Walter: I went to some conventions, sure. Once I moved to New York I went to the Seuling cons. But I wasn’t mobbed. “Manhunter” was eight pages in the back of a bi-monthly book, a modest little strip. It’s had a long life. It’s good work, and it’s work I’m proud of. But “hot”? I was in San Diego this year, for the first time in seven or eight years. Back in the early-’90s, I’d get stopped every few feet or so for autographs. That wasn’t true this time around. Of course, the early ‘90’s were a nutty time in comics. But this time, nobody really recognized me, so I was able to walk around easily. Which I liked, because I could go check out dealers, hang out behind booths with friends shooting the breeze. I don’t

think I was ever a hot artist in the way we think of, say, Frank as hot. Chaykin swept—what?—seven or eight Eagle awards in ‘83 for American Flagg! The work I’ve done generally hasn’t won any awards, another definition of “hot” perhaps. “Manhunter” is my one award-winning work, and it won an award again this year as a reprint which I thought was very funny. I think the first issue of Thor I did picked up a CBG award to two. That’s about it. The stuff I do— as far as I can tell—is well thought-of professionally, and it certainly has its fans out there, but I don’t know there’s a perception of it as being hot stuff that you have to go out and buy. I don’t know, this is really beyond my ken. Mostly, I just try and do the comics. CBA: I see your impact as a reader, especially “Manhunter” and then “Dr. Fate” and some odd things here and there. You brought a sense of design into super-hero comic books that wasn’t often there before. Obviously, there have always been artists with a good sense of design—Alex Toth, of course, is the master—but you brought design into the forefront, happening right then. There seemed a lot of promise with your work. A quick question about Manhunter: Do you feel ambivalent now that probably the most recognized character you co-created was killed off inside of a year after being created? He came and went so quickly. Walter: No, not at all. It seemed like an appropriate decision then. And believe me, it was a long year while we were doing him. CBA: Did you ever think about doing something creator-owned with Archie? Walter: Well, “creator-owned,” I don’t know. We actually talked a year before he died about doing a new mini-series. Archie had some ideas. He liked characters who weren’t heavy hitters with super-powers. In his introduction to the Manhunter book—an introduction he wrote 20 years ago for an early reprinting—he talked about how instead of being a fan of the major characters back when he was a kid, he wanted to be the Green Lama, and second banana characters like that. I thought that was great. He had an idea for a character who was super-powered, but only nominally, like Manhunter. Manhunter had a healing factor, and that was about it. We discussed it a bit, and we actually talked to Mike Carlin about editing it as a miniseries, but we never got it off the ground. We started that last Manhunter story. And then my work on the Michael Moorcock Multiverse kept me busy for a year and by the time that was over, Archie was gone. I got to finish Manhunter finally but the other project? We did talk a little about getting together and working on something again, but it just didn’t happen. CBA: Do you have projects you’d like to get out besides Star Slammers? Walter: Well, I’ve got a bunch of stories floating around inside my head and in my computer, mainly, on other projects, other possible stories, other characters. I’ll get to as much of it as I can, as time goes by. Mostly, I pretty much focus on one thing at a time, I don’t usually think too far ahead. CBA: You’re now doing a monthly series with Orion! Walter: With Orion, I’m already two or three years ahead in my mind on stories, if the book lasts that long. I’ve got easily three years of stuff I have to do. As with Thor, I think in large stories, or large story sagas that I then break down into one-, two- and three-issue story arcs, occasionally four. I did one four-issue story arc in Thor, the Beta Ray Bill story, and the rest were shorter; this opening story with Orion was four issues. That’s really as long as I get. Longer than that, to me, seems too much for a monthly comic. So, I try to break my sagas into shorter units. I have two major stories lined up for Orion currently. One, I’m doing now, and one I’ll do after. The one I’m doing now is really a tale of the fall and redemption of Orion. That’s probably a year-and-a-half’s worth of stories, maybe a tad more by the time I’m done. I don’t have it really planned out issues in advance. I know where I’m going, I’m plotted out a few issues ahead, but not more than that. That way, I can let new ideas enter the story arcs if they seem appropriate. I have a specific plan for the here and now and a general plan for the future. I always have a little room for improvisation and new stuff, especially in these back-up stories I’m getting done for Orion. CBA: If DC and Marvel get out of doing comics completely, would you still see yourself as doing comics? Walter: Beats me. It would probably depend if I can make a living COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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at it. If I can’t, I’m not sure I would. I have to make a living first. There are a lot of places I could go, but I haven’t thought about it much, because I like doing comics, and that’s really my preferred job. I figure I’ll do comics, and if the time comes that I can’t do them anymore, I’ll look around. I might end up doing comics just at night on the side, but that would depend on how bushed I was finishing my day job. CBA: You did do Star Slammers as a color comic, right? Walter: Yes, about six or seven ago. I had a fiveissue story in mind, did it for Bravura-Malibu. They ran out of gas towards the end, and Legend over at Dark Horse eventually published the final issue about a year later. I hope one of these days I’ll be able to go back and republish it in a collection. CBA: Jack Kirby seems always to be a presence in your work. “Manhunter” was an off-shoot of Simon & Kirby’s character. [laughter] I’m trying to segue into the X-Titans. Were you part of the plotting of that, did you want to be on that job? Walter: Yes. The X-Titans book was a Marvel production, with Len Wein as DC liaison. Weezie ended up being the editor (because she was editing X-Men at the time), Chris was the writer. Right then, I didn’t have any monthly work. I happened to walk into Weezie’s office one day at Marvel while Chris was sitting there, and they were talking about the cross-over. They were discussing characters for the book, and one of the names that came up as I entered the room was Darkseid, because they wanted to use him as a major villain. I said, “If you’re doing Darkseid, I’m drawing the book,” and that’s pretty much how it happened. Weezie did offer the project first to Dave Cockrum because he was the regular X-Men artist at that time, doing his second run on the book. But he didn’t really have time for the cross-over and there I was. It was a book I really wanted to do, the minute I heard the name “Darkseid” go by! CBA: Is it nice to be married to the editor? Walter: It was very useful, and very convenient for me to be in the office right at that moment. So, that worked out very well. CBA: Was that a successful book? Walter: Very, at the time! CBA: Did you get any royalties on that? Walter: Well, we did, but only as a matter of luck. In the event, it sold somewhere around half a million copies. That’s at a time when books were selling 100,000 or so… the X-Men was selling more than that, but average sales probably 150,000—I’m not sure—but a half million then was a lot of comics! We knew it was going to sell well, and so Chris, Terry and I went in to talk to Jim Shooter about the possibility of getting royalties from the job. We thought, this was going to sell enough copies that it’s not going to cripple Marvel to cough some money up. Basically, we were told, “At this time, we don’t have enough money to give royalties.” I do understand that was just the company position. None of us were going to abandon the job because of that, but we felt a little nicked by it. Well, as it happened, royalties as a way of life came into comics between the time we went into Jim’s office and the time the book came out. So yes, we got royalties on the book. It was really a matter of timing and luck; it wasn’t because we were crabby and demanded them. But it was nice to see that the companies didn’t go broke when they began paying royalties. Maybe not entirely a surprise. CBA: You mentioned Mark Gruenwald offered you the Thor monthly assignment? Walter: Kind of out of the blue. We had talked earlier about my core favorite Marvels when I was a comics reader. Of those titles, the one I really wanted to do was Thor, because of my interest in Oct. 2000

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mythology. I had told Mark about the Thor “annual” I’d drawn up in the late ’60s. So he knew I liked the characters a lot. He wanted to bring something fresh into the book, and I’d done a little writing by that time. I had written not only Battlestar Galactica, but also the adaptation for Raiders of the Lost Ark, my second writing gig. CBA: Yeah? Just as a writer, or did you draw it? Walter: No, John Buscema did layouts, Klaus inked it, and I wrote it. I really did it because Archie gave it to me. I was passing Archie in the hall one day; for some reason, I even remember which hall it was in Marvel. Galactica was coming out, and Archie said some very nice things about it. He liked it, and he said he was supposed to write an adaptation of this upcoming movie, and he was booked for time, and would I be interested in doing the adaptation? “Hey! No problem!” I said, “Sure!” So, I ended up doing the three-issue adaptation, which

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Below: Aside from Beta Ray Bill, perhaps the most memorable event of Walter’s celebrated ’80s Thor run was the artist-writer’s audacity to make the Thunder God a… ummm… Thunder Frog for a few issues, #363-366. Inset: Aficionado Carol Bramstrup knitted up her version of The Mighty Kermit… that is, Thor… for the artist, handiwork that today holds a treasured perch in the Simonson guest bedroom. Courtesy of Walter.

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was really easy. John Buscema basically drew the film script—John’s one of the masters of storytelling, it made my job really easy—and it worked out very well. Archie liked that script too. CBA: Was it full script? Walter: No. John had the screenplay, and we’d just tell him, “Okay, draw the first issue up to here, and then draw this up to here,” and so on, and he drew it, sent it back to me, and I wrote it. CBA: You were good friends with one of the greatest comics writers, Archie Goodwin. Did you show him your writing and look for pointers? Walter: Well, I learned an awful lot from working with Archie right down the line. I helped a lot with plotting the last few chapters of “Manhunter.” How could I not learn from him? I don’t think I ever took a script to Archie and asked if he’d read it; that seems too much of an imposition, really. But I believe he edited Raiders. I know he read some of my other work after it came out; we talked about some of it. He didn’t really offer any pointers, like, “Gee, if you’d only done this, it’d be better,” but we discussed the work. Archie could be very gentle and would guide you in directions and I’m not sure you were even aware you were being guided. Besides Manhunter, we did one Star Wars together, and a few Star Wars chapters for Pizzazz magazine, so there was a little oddball stuff here and there. We did Close Encounters, and then of course, we did Alien, where we had such freedom. Working closely like that, I picked up an awful lot and just knowing Archie was looking over my shoulder, inspired me to try to do better work, to try to learn more about plotting and structuring stories. CBA: You’ve had an interesting line-up of artists working on the Orion back-up stories. Walter: The choices I’m making are on the basis of personal fiat, I guess. I’ve got a list of artists I’d love to see do back-ups. If this book runs for three or four years, and has a back-up in every damn issue, I still won’t get through the whole list. I want to see artists I like who mostly haven’t done the Fourth World stuff before do backups. Of course, I spoke to Mike Mignola, and I’d forgotten Mike did Cosmic Odyssey, which involved a lot of these characters, but you know? Tough! I don’t care! [laughter] It was a long time ago! But I’ve talked to artists who haven’t worked much on the Kirby stuff, guys like Frank Miller, Dave Gibbons, Erik Larsen—these guys were in the first batch of Orions—and it was nifty to see them draw those characters, and give them a different take. If the book lasts long enough, I’ve got some rather unorthodox guys I’d love to get to do it. But I’d like to let the book run for a bit, to see if it’s actually found an audience, and then I can afford to be a little more daring, at least for a mainstream comic. I’d love to see Eddie Campbell do a back-up, with all his work on Bacchus. I’ve spoken to him about the possibility, and he’s geared to do it. I want to get that in there somewhere. [laughter] Some of my thoughts are a little bit wonkier, but these are guys I haven’t spoken to yet, so I wouldn’t put it on the record as to whom I’m thinking about, but I’ve got my fingers crossed. The early issues, I’m going for more mainstream guys. But basically, I just think, “Oh, this guy is really good! I’d love to have this guy in this book doing these characters!” CBA: The back-ups make for fun comics. Was a consideration of yours, “Yes, I can commit to a monthly book, if I assign the back-ups”? Walter: Well, I said somewhere,

“I’m lazy now; I’d like to do a little less work.” [laughter] Of course, like everything else, some people take the cracks you make a little too seriously. But five pages less a month is almost a week’s worth of work. Now it turns out I’m writing most of the back-ups, so it’s not quite as much less time as I’d expected. They do enable me to showcase other people’s Fourth World work, which I like. I don’t know if this is going to be a huge commercial success in that regard, but I just think it’s a treat to work from guys like Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, Howard Chaykin and hopefully Mike Mignola. I’ve talked to Art Adams about doing something as well. Another reason for doing backups is that in a lot of the Fourth World books since Jack, I feel the titles have tried to include all of his material—New Gods, Mister Miracle, Forever People, Jimmy Olsen—into one monthly title. That’s more than I can cram into a monthly book. My feeling is, if I try that, I’ll dilute the central themes I’m working with. My comic is a version of Jack’s New Gods, which to me, was the adventures of Orion and his pal Lightray. I think all of the Fourth World characters are nifty characters, and they all deserve their own books, but I just can’t do them all the way Jack did. So, by doing the back-up stories, I’m hoping to suggest just a little of the flavor of those four books as well as imply a larger world. One of my major influences in writing is The Lord of the Rings, I read it when I was in college, and I’ve read it a few times since. Something I particularly like about it is the sense that there was a world out beyond the reader’s immediate vision; you’re sitting in the middle of a large woven carpet, and right where you are, all the skeins came together, and they make a thick, tight weave, but the further away they get from you, the looser the weave becomes until the threads run over the horizon. You can’t see over there, but you know if you could only walk over the horizon, you could follow them to other stories. I thought that was a wonderful method of construction, especially in a fantasy world. Of course, it turned out that Tolkien had written a ton of stuff, a whole history of Middle Earth beyond just the struggle for the Ring, but it really informed the work. That’s something I’ve tried to suggest in the comics I’ve done: to imply a larger world beyond just the hero I’m writing about, or his adventures. Back-ups help. CBA: On your second run, you had Beta Ray Bill destroying the old Thor logo. Were you also making a statement, “I’m going to do my thing now?” Walter: You know, “making a statement” sounds so much heavier than it really was. I mean, at the time, yeah, it was just a way of sayCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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ing, “Hey! It ain’t your father’s Thor!” I wasn’t really trying to say, “Hey, step aside you old guys; I’m taking over now!” so much as I was attempting to engage the reader’s curiosity, “Wow, what’s going on here?” Although I was going to do my own thing, certainly I tried doing a Thor that was as true in spirit to Stan and Jack’s work as I could manage. However, I’m not Stan and Jack, I don’t channel their stuff, but I love the work they did on the character. I don’t want to do work that’s not true to the spirit of the original material. But in breaking the logo up, I wanted to suggest that we were taking off in new directions, and doing things that hadn’t been done before, which was the reason I had somebody else pick up Thor’s hammer. These days, hefting Thor’s hammer is old news; it’s been done a number of times since 1983. But it really hadn’t been done before that, and that’s one of the main reasons I did it. I’ve already mentioned that when I was reading Marvels toward the end of the ‘60s, they mostly didn’t feel like they were going new places. And that felt true for me for much of the ‘70s as well. Then Len Wein, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, and John Byrne reinvented The X-Men anew from the old characters Jack and Werner Roth and other guys had done. They introduced new characters and new situations. That was at the end of the ’70s, and it took off. The title felt new. Same with Frank’s Daredevil afterwards. It felt like new possibilities were in the air. Which is what I really wanted to do with Thor; stories that Oct. 2000

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didn’t feel like you’d read them a thousand times. That’s all. That’s what I’m trying to do in comics generally. I don’t expect you to read every story I do, and think, “Wow, this is better than sliced bread!” But I really don’t want you to think, “Gee, this is the same stuff I’ve read a million times.” At the time, the Thor logo was the only logo Marvel had left unchanged from the ‘60s. Thor had the same logo since the beginning, so breaking that logo was symbolic in the sense of heralding in a new beginning. Alex Jay designed the new logo for me. He designed it, and I kind of art directed it (and that’s maybe giving me more credit than I deserve). But I did ask Alex to consider old Uncial lettering. I didn’t want to go to runes, because Viking runes are essentially straight lines designed for carving into stone. And Thor’s got an “o” in the middle of it. But I wanted to use an archaic typeface as the basis for a logo that would have a modern feel. I think Alex did an absolutely great job on it. CBA: It’s still being used. Walter: It’s come back… they got rid of it for a while, and now it’s back again, which cracks me up. CBA: When you were doing Thor there seemed to be elements of a franchise developing. Obviously it didn’t go very far, but you had the Balder miniseries going, Warriors Three, etc. Did you have a desire to expand it?

Above: Here’s Loki, Thor and Beta Ray Bill having at it in a print by Walter Simonson drawn for Mitch Itkowitz in 1986. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2000 Walter Simonson. Characters ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Above: Even Fin Fang Foom made it into Walter’s Thor run! Here’s the artist’s pencils for a Foom pinup in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry. Below: We had to get a Simonson dinosaur in here somewhere, so here’s Walter’s contribution to the 1994 Lunacon. Fin Fang Foom ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Art ©2000 W.S.

Walter: No, not in the sense I felt I could do more work. I like creating worlds that have larger implications and I think that’s what you’re reacting to in the Thor work I did. I said before I like shared universes. They give you the opportunity to craft stories with wider implications than a short 22 pages a month can generally support. I’ll do big stories— Orion and Thor are big guys, they deserve big stories—but I do want there to be a sense that there’s more out there beyond the confines of the comic. And once in a while you can make that implied world a bit more real. Makes the whole construction more persuasive. I did the Balder mini-series because of the way the relationship developed naturally between Balder and Karnilla in Thor. There seemed to be enough of an additional story there that it could be told separately. At the time, Marvel was flexible enough, and the business was good enough that I was able to do it. Balder was threaded through the actual Thor storyline. In other words, you could read Balder by itself, but it was partly designed so you’d read an issue of Thor, then you’d read an issue of Balder, then you could go back to Thor, and so on. Balder was in and out of the actual Thor continuity, a logical expansion of the Thor storyline through other characters. In some ways, that’s kind of what I’m doing right now with the back-ups threading in and out of my Orion storylines. Some of them, like the birth of Orion that Frank did, are historical vignettes that illuminate current events a little more clearly. Others, like the Lightray story Dave Gibbons did both reveal some of Lightray’s character (he left the old woman to die) and examine the question of Orion’s parentage a little further. I’m not really trying to create new franchises but rather to create a larger sense of a world that surrounds the comic story, something that’s bigger than just what you read in the 22 pages. When Archie and I did “Manhunter,” he worked up a long list of names for the character, including Paul Kirk’s. And we went with the old Kirby name partly because it was the old Kirby name, and partly because there didn’t seem to be any compelling reason to use anything else. But at the time, it was not because we were planning to go back and reconnect to the old Kirby character in some fashion. I only knew the old character vaguely myself. We didn’t really consider forging links to Jack’s character until our third issue. And then we began thinking that connecting the histories would be a interesting way to enlarge our character’s world. The development was organic, and that’s what all of the best stuff is; you give the work room to breathe as you go along and sometimes you get lucky. I read on the web 32-B

somewhere where a poster was crediting Jack with creating the Manhunter that Archie and I did, because we tied it back into his character. “Well, it’s the same character, they just…” Get a grip! I credit Jack for a lot of stuff, but he didn’t create the guy we did in the ’70s! But we did go back and tie our guy into that work, and that’s one of the reasons I like shared universe stuff, those options are available. Those universes are a large place to play, and if you do it right, there’re so many possibilities. CBA: Do you feel a kinship to Jack Kirby? Walter: I love Jack’s stuff, and I’m hugely influenced by it, but Jack is this promethean talent in the field, and I’m just doing comics. CBA: But you’re always playing in his playground! Walter: Well, I like his playground a lot, I really enjoy it, but I don’t have any desire to be Jack Kirby. I’m not channeling Jack Kirby when I do this stuff. And there’s a lot of stuff he did that I find it hard to imagine doing myself, like Bullseye, that Western character he did back in the ’50s. But of course, I’m very influenced by his work, and I think to some degree, we have parallel interests. There are some old pre-Marvel Kirby stories where he did a Thor variation a couple of times. He obviously had long-time mythological interests, and that’s clear from the Fourth World, and his work on Thor and The Eternals. My own interest in mythology predates my knowing Jack’s stuff. I was reading mythology back in junior high and high school. I can remember the first time I came across Beowulf in fifth grade. I didn’t discover Marvel comics until I was in college, but there’re some parallel interests there. What I would like to do, mainly, is use the stuff as a springboard and then go off in my own direction. CBA: I meant “kinship” in that you guys dig the same things, and while you’re not as prolific, or possess the genius of Kirby, but do you feel a connection to him that means something to your life? Walter: Oh, it does. Clearly. And I have to say that with the Fourth World stuff, I feel I “get it.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, and I’m not sure if anybody else feels that way, but I just read that stuff, I get it. I understand what he’s doing—at least, I think I do—I understand what the underlying thematic material is. I don’t go back and try to play out all the themes he explored in the Fourth World. There was such rich material there, and I’m just working on one monthly book. But it resonates with me in a way that makes it really interesting to go back and play with. CBA: You said when you were in fifth grade, you first read Beowulf. Is that the essence of your work in comics? You’re a guy who’s interested in mythology working in comics? Super-hero comics as a mythology? Walter: In some ways. I had two particular interests when I was younger: mythology and science-fiction and both of those inform my work. I’m certainly nowhere near as a big an SF fan now as I was 20 or 30 years ago. In the ‘60s and the early-’70s, I read a lot of SF, so I’m fairly well-versed in that material. And I had an interest in fantasy starting with the Lord of the Rings, I read a lot of fantasy in the ‘70s. Classic stuff: Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake. Later work by Michael Moorcock. Besides Tolkien, Ballantine published about 60 or 70 volumes of an Adult Fantasy series, and I read that entire series. So I have a real interest in what Tolkien called secondary world creation, one of the things we do in comics. Because mainstream comics has this large shared universe—even though we all curse continuity under our breaths and sometimes, deservedly so, as far as I’m concerned. I like part of what it bestows—a rich complexity in the material that you can really mine and work. In a way, that helps to create stories worth re-reading because it enlarges them. It depends on the writer of course and the way you use the material, but it’s such a fertile field for the imagination, I think it’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed with mainstream comics for a long time. CBA: A lot of creators—and you’ve expressed this, too—are essentially old fanboys who say, “I’d really like to do Iron Man,” for instance, but isn’t there a real world aspect to the conflicts Jack set up in his Fourth World? You say you “get” Kirby. What is it exactly that you “get”? Walter: Let’s be more precise about this. I “get” the New Gods; I’m not sure I “get” Kirby. [laughter] Michael Moorcock told me once that he thought that one of the things popular fiction did was retell old truths. I’m paraphrasing and hopefully, I’m not misstating Mike’s original intent. I thought COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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that was quite perceptive and not necessarily obvious. Jack’s Fourth World work seems a particularly good illustration to me of popular fiction retelling old truths. I think Jack took a great deal of “real world” material and subsumed it into his Fourth World fiction. A quick example—in Jack’s issues, the Anti-Life Equation, Darkseid’s Black Grail, is the outside control of all living thought. Not a bad comic book restatement of the essence of Fascism as a form of social organization where the will of the People is subordinated to the will of the State. A form of tyranny older than Fascism as a name but always remade, always renewed, always a threat. It’s that sort of thing I see in the Fourth World. Such evil will always exist. Which is why I think thematically, it’s possible to reinvent the material and still be true to what Jack was doing. But I’m not alone in thinking I “get” the Fourth World. There’s been an element of fan reaction to Orion I’ve found interesting. Most of the reaction has been positive, which pleases me a great deal, but of course, you always react more to the negative stuff. This is the first book I’ve worked on where I can see some of the readers clearly expressing negative reaction to five issues of Orion based on what I regard as external agendas. These are readers who also think they “get” the Fourth World. There seem to be two general sides to the reaction. There are those who find the New Gods dull/old hat/boring/out-moded (fill in your own pejorative here) so why do them at all (in other words, there’s nothing to “get” at this point), and there are those who find my Orion straying too far from what Jack himself did (another way of saying that I don’t “get” it). [laughs] I get e-mail, or see comments in fan-based magazines or websites where people dis the material with “Ah, it’s late Kirby after he’d lost it. He was burned out!” etc. I haven’t worked on any comics before, I think, where there was an actual contingent of the fan audience that felt that way about the material to start with. There’s a website of one writer where some fan was grousing, “How can a Oct. 2000

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grown man [me] even be doing the Newsboy Legion? Rahr rahr rahr!” The post was a tad more profane than that, because the poster was obviously too “cool” but it was funny! The answer is easy: Clearly, I’m not hip enough for this guy to be reading my stuff. He’s probably already figured that out. But I haven’t worked on material before where I’ve seen quite that sort of reaction. It’s a pretty small segment of the audience, but it’s vocal. Maybe that’s one of the blessings of the internet. Of course, those readers are just wrong. [laughter] On the other hand, what other 30-year-old characters do you know where anybody goes back and says, is this what the creator of these characters intended? I regard that is a fabulous tribute to the personal nature of Jack’s Fourth World vision, but it does suggest a straight-jacketed approach to the material that I have no intention of taking. Interestingly, I’ve caught a little flak (very little) for once again trotting out a Darkseid/Orion fight. Once again? In the last 30 years, they’ve only really fought maybe three times. And never in Jack’s work. How many times has Dr. Doom faced off against the FF? Just in the past five years let alone? So here’s a reaction to the events in the story, based on a flawed perception of their past, that’s not borne out by the actual comics. Somebody else wasn’t happy with the fight because he thought it didn’t live up to 30 years of waiting for it to happen. I don’t think anything could be worth 30 years of waiting! The past is so important to these readers, it acts as a lens through which the current comic book is seen in a way I can’t help but feel is unrealistic. And I plan to fiddle around with a lot of Jack’s stuff as I go along. Fortunately, most of the read-

Above: Pencils to Walter’s doublepage splash from the final Simonson penciled issue of the artist’s ’80s Thor run, #380, featuring the Thunder God’s battle with Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent. Courtesy of David “Hambone” Hamilton. Art ©2000 Walter Simonson. Characters ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Walter’s contribution to a DragonCon show poster, featuring six different artists’ images, composites that together reveal one tough looking serpent. From about five years ago. ©2000 W.S.

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Above: Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, as depicted by Walter Simonson in the 1997-98 DC/Helix comic series, Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse. Courtesy of the artist. Characters ©2000 Michael Moorcock.

Opposite page: The Apokolips/New Genesis gang by Walter as seen in a recent Secret Files and Origin Guide to the DC Universe 2000 (or something like that!). Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 DC Comics. 34-B

ers I hear from seem to be following what I’m doing without difficulty and enjoying it. A lot. If you ask fans familiar with the original Kirby material who their favorite character in the Fourth World is, one of the most frequent answers is Scott Free, Mister Miracle. I find that really interesting. I liked Scott and his comic book a lot, especially the early issues, with Scott and his duels with Granny Goodness and Doctor Bedlam, etc. At the same time, I find Scott Free one of the least interesting heroes in Jack’s Fourth World. Part of the problem is, he’s tremendously well adjusted. He’s so likable. Here’s a guy, the son of Heaven, who lost his birthright, was brought up in Hell, escapes, and he’s a really normal, pleasant fellow. Here’s Orion, the son of Hell, raised in Heaven, he’s really screwed up! [laughter] It’s one of the other themes that Jack worked on, nature versus nurture. Scott Free lost his seat in Heaven, and somehow, that didn’t seem to bother him! He’s the most centered guy in the Fourth World, which makes him very likable, but for me, not very interesting to write. CBA: No conflict? Walter: No conflict. But if Orion lasts long enough, I’m going to work on that. I have a Scott Free story I can’t wait to do. I’m not going to say anymore. I always thought Orion was fascinating, because of the tug between his two halves. He embodies the conflict between New Genesis and Apokolips, which is what makes him the fulcrum of all the action. And it makes him complex to me, a charac-

ter full of writing promise. It’s also interesting that there are so many divergent opinions about the original Fourth World material, even among pros. Some like me love it; others can’t read it. There’re so many characters, so many concepts, it’s tremendously rich material. Certainly parts of it have been mined like crazy. For books that didn’t last very long to start with, how many subsequent appearances has Darkseid made in the DC Universe? Come on! He’s the coolest villain DC’s got! So, rather than retire those characters, as some people have suggested, I think their spotty publishing history since they were created just makes them more attractive because there’s so much material to start with, and there’s so much room to fool around. Going back to the idea of the Anti-Life Equation as a comic book version of Fascism, it seems clear that Nazi Germany represented a very important element in Jack’s vision of evil. When Jack drew bad guys in troop formation, they’re goose-stepping. And while I’m not necessarily modeling my vision of evil after Nazis specifically, I’m keeping the theme of evil in mind. An old truth. You could say I’m using it in a story about evil’s effect on the individual, in this case, Orion. I’m doing one book a month instead of four bi-monthly titles as Jack was so I’m necessarily running on a somewhat smaller scale than Jack. I’m trying to make the book—for me, anyway—more personal, and more tightly focused on what’s happening with this one character. In that sense, I’m not trying to repeat Jack’s specific formula for events and characterization; I am trying to capture his broader intentions. Which is, I hope, what will make Orion work without making it seem like reading Jack Kirby redux. Partly I’m working on a tale of corruption, partly on a tale of redemption, partly on a tale of abstractions that become real, and what happens when they do. It’s challenging. CBA: So you’re obviously thinking of bigger themes in the book. There’s entertainment and there’s art. Entertainment might be defined as to provoke a response from an audience, and art is to seek the truth. Do you see a responsibility you have in being in an entertainment medium to reveal? Walter: I don’t think in big concepts like that. I’m cynical about art because it’s so easy to manipulate and bullsh*t about. Art as it’s mostly encountered, is one more business. I mean, in New York, art galleries, fine art—it’s just like any other business, depending a great deal on stuff that has nothing to do with the actual quality of or thought in the work. Mostly my feeling about whether or not we’re doing art—whatever that might mean—is that it’s not really a decision that’s up to us. This is a decision to be rendered by posterity. So, I put that aside. It’s too big a question to handle. If I think about those concepts, I’m going to freeze. Essentially, what I’m trying to do is: I’m trying to tell stories that have a degree of truth in them. Mostly old truths. Whether it’s light entertainment or heavy, I’m trying to tell stories I think will be interesting, wherever that may take me. I don’t want to paralyze myself trying to decide if I should be creating Art with a capital “A” this week. I’m just trying to tell stories that I would’ve enjoyed reading, stories that speak to me. The idea is, hopefully, because they speak to me, they will speak to others. A metaphor I’ve used in the past a lot is—it’s like telling a joke. If I hear a joke, and I don’t think it’s funny, I’m not going to tell it to you in the hope that you might find it amusing. If I hear a joke and I think it’s a riot, I’ll pass it on. In that sense, it’s the old idea of the Greek philosopher, Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things.” I’m the measure of the stories I tell. The idea is that if I can tell stories I feel have some validity, then they may find an audience who will be touched by them because they’ll strike a chord or a resonance within the reader. I don’t think in terms of the larger issues of Art and Truth and so on, mostly because I’m not convinced you can think about that stuff, and then go out and do it, at least not without a very large B.S. quotient. You have to work on the human scale; Art and Truth get decided on later. CBA: It’s said, “God is in the details.” You certainly have facility as a comic book artist who’s worked in the field over 25 years. You certainly have the talent to do, I believe, effective comic book stories, and yet you’re working in the medium of super-heroes. You said you don’t want to go there—into defining what you do as art— but why not? Walter: Because I’m not sure what purpose it would serve. I’m too COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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suspicious that such thoughts could easily become self-serving. And I don’t want to go around with the back of my hand nailed to my forehead, proclaiming my suffering for my Art. That’s probably the problem-solving nature of my RISD education speaking. Or perhaps an objective view after being brought up in a scientist’s home. I’d like to be commercial, because I want to have a job next week. I hope a lot of my work is commercial, but I don’t worry about it a lot either. If every comic I did folded after three issues, I’d probably sweat more. Of course, comics aren’t doing that well as a business right now, compared to what they were doing at one time but I haven’t yet begun to evaluate my work on the basis of, “Will this be a commercial job?” I don’t know how to describe it, really, in words. I might say that I work in comics because when I’m done, if I get it right, I find a deep satisfaction in the accomplishment. I probably can’t get any closer to what I do than that. When I’m done with the drawing, it rarely achieves what I saw in my mind before I laid the page out. There are two artists, Kirby and Bernie Wrightson, who I’ve seen draw, and they gave the impression that the drawing was already in their heads, that it was projected through their eyes onto the paper, and then they just traced it out. I don’t think it was really like that but it sure looked convincing. I can’t do that. When I start off, it’s like sculpting, I’m facing a blank sheet of paper and I know there’s a drawing in there somewhere, but I have to find it. I send a lot of lines flying out across that page, and I dig the drawing out of the paper, and eventually it emerges. Most of the time, the drawing as I realize it doesn’t quite match that Platonic ideal I had in my head before I began. But it’ll be close, and the closer I can get, the better I like it. Mostly, what I’m after is the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve done the best work I can do. I don’t have any jobs in my past that I regret doing; I don’t have any jobs where I felt I did less than my best work at the time. I’ve got some jobs I’m not lobbying to see reprinted, especially some early material, but I’m not embarrassed to see them again. I know what I put into them back then. One of the things about comic books, the problems always come around again. You solve some problem this week, if you don’t solve it quite right, a week from now, a month or a year from now, you’ll have to solve the same problem again. You get the chance to do it over, and you’ll do it better the next time. In the early days, when you’re young, your work improves by leaps and bounds very rapidly. I visualize it as a graph with an X/Y axis. The curve of your improvement goes shooting up towards the X axis—perfection—and then begins to flatten out. The closer it gets, the flatter it gets, but you’re improving incrementally toward infinity as you get older. Mostly as you get older, you don’t make those giant leaps you did in your youth, although some people do. In the beginning of my career, I saw all the drawings I did, the individual panels, as unique. Each one a singular piece of drawing. A woman riding a horse, a guy clocking Batman, the sunset on a jungle. Now that I’ve been doing this for a long time, I see all the work I’ve done as one big drawing, I don’t see it in pieces any more, even if it’s different books. I compose it in pieces, I put the fragments together, but now, in a sense, I have an enlarged vision, where I really see everything as a whole. I love the act of drawing itself, and perhaps my real ambition is to see this one long drawing continue to improve, so that by the time I’m done, the work at the end is going to be a lot better than the work at the beginning. I don’t talk about Art with a capital “A,” I don’t talk much about art with a small “a” either. Here’s one reason why. Bach died in 1750. Nowadays, Bach is top of the pops so to speak, but when he died, he was out of fashion. He had four sons who survived him, all composers, and they were popular. They were doing light, fluffy stuff that sounds pretty good, but it wasn’t the kind of work their dad was doing. So, for nearly 100 years, nobody cared about Bach, one of the greatest composers in Western music. Something like a third of his output was lost. I think it was Mendelssohn in the 1800s who rediscovered Bach’s compositions and said, “Who is this guy?”, began digging out his work, and Bach was re-discovered. But if somebody like Mendelssohn hadn’t come along, or if more of his work had been thrown away, one of the greatest composers we’ve got would remain unappreciated, probably remembered as an oldstyle, old-fashioned kind of guy. Who knew? Oct. 2000

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Above: Family portrait of Orion’s clan. Papa Darkseid, mama Tigra, and their raging boy, Orion. Cover art, sans logo, of the first issue of Walter’s dynamic new series, Orion, currently a monthly title from DC. While we’ve rarely endorsed contemporary super-hero comics, CBA is mightily impressed with Walter’s work on the series thus far—work that “gets” Jack Kirby’s Fourth World concepts and we urge you to see what you’re missing, good reader! Courtesy of Walter Simonson. ©2000 DC Comics.

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That’s sort of my take on where Art is at. I think when we’re looking at it in the here and now, there’s just too much clutter everywhere all the time, and it’s very difficult to sort the stuff out meaningfully. Certainly, there are a zillion critics on the web, and there’re a zillion magazines, all screaming at us about what’s good and what isn’t; eventually a lot of that stuff will settle out. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of good stuff that’ll disappear; nobody who’ll say, “Gee, who is this guy?” But I don’t think it’s really given to most of us to see that clearly, and a great deal of modern Art, practically speaking, is promotion. I’m not much for promotion. What I’m interested in is doing better comics. I want the comics I do this week to be better than the comics I did last week. Now, in a week’s time, it’s not going to change much, but I’d like the comics I do now to be better than the comics I did 10 or 20 years ago. Some of my audience won’t follow along. There are a number of fans who think that “Manhunter” was my best work. I have no problem with that. I’m proud of the work and for a certain segment of the audience, that’ll always be the best stuff I ever did. I’m pleased that they like it so well. There another segment of the audience who thinks the X-Titans book was the best thing I ever did, some folks who think Thor was the best… I feel that as long as I can keep finding a segment of the audience who feel what I’m doing now is the best thing I’ve done, then I’m okay. [laughs] If I reach a

point where it’s always, “Your old stuff was better”—which anybody who’s done comics more than five minutes has heard—then maybe I’ll be in trouble. Or maybe I’ll just be really far ahead of the curve! CBA: What do you perceive is your best work? Walter: I don’t. The guy that I am now is not the guy I was 25 years ago and vice versa. So the work I’m doing now is not work I was capable of doing 25 years ago. And the work I did then, I couldn’t do now. Not the same way. I did go back last year and do that new “Manhunter” story Archie and I had plotted out. And I revisited the old work and borrowed some of the style of the things I was doing back then, some of the disciplines. I think the new material is better drawn than the old material. But my storytelling’s no better. I told stories pretty well at the start, and my gift in comics, if anything, was to be able to put pictures together in a way that told a story. I was learning that when I was doing the earliest Star Slammers, the fan material. Seven chapters, the first couple of chapters are okay, but they’re strictly fan work. Yet during those seven issues over two years, you can see the work going from pretty much your basic fan type stuff to being something different, something with a vision behind it that was evolving as it went along. CBA: I have to confess, with the recent Manhunter book, I was really touched by the new story you did, probably because I really liked the original “Manhunter” series so much, and because of the poignancy that Archie is gone now, and he was very easy to love… as a comics reader, not ever personally knowing him—and I never met him face to face—he was very easy to love, because there was a kindness about him. What was touching was there are no words in the new story. Whose idea was that? Walter: It was Weezie’s suggestion, and it was not a happy accident. About the life and the work of Archie: One of the qualities Archie had as a writer is that tremendous ease of the reading in his words; there are no bumps. Conversations flow, exposition is all worked in very carefully, and you never felt that you were being handed a clunky block of exposition. Archie had a great gift that artists have—with or without a capital “A”—of creating the illusion apparently effortlessly. It seems so easy that you feel, “Oh, well, I could do that.” But of course, you can’t. That’s a measure of the great craft and skill in Archie’s work. There was such economy. The labor that fashioned it so was hidden. As far as that last “Manhunter” story goes , it’s wordless because Archie didn’t write a script, it was as simple as that. We were going to do that story Marvel style, which was to say, Archie had the idea for the plot, and we threshed it out in detail in his office one day. And it wasn’t all fixed. The last scene, for example, which takes place on the bridge, was still up in the air. We hadn’t decided if it would be on a bridge or in a railroad yard. We thought a railroad yard at the edge of Gotham might be a good place for the scene. In the end, I drew the bridge. It seemed a stronger visual border for the city limits of Gotham. But while bits of the plot were still flexible at the time I left his office, we had the main points nailed down. The idea was that I would do layouts—it was going to be an eight-page chapter as most of the chapters in “Manhunter” were—and it would be a prologue to reading the original series in a trade paperback reprint. Well, I was working on the Michael Moorcock Multiverse right then, and that was taking up most of my time, so I got some cover sketches done and gathered some reference material together, but I didn’t get the layouts done and Archie died before I did. I just had the plot in a page-and-a-half of notes I’d scribbled, a few doodles, that was about it. And I thought that was going to be the end of it. Then, a couple of months after he died, Weezie and I were talking about the story one day. I had the notes sitting on my drawing board where they’d been for a year, and Weezie wondered if maybe I could do it as a silent story. Although I’d written a lot of comics, I always felt that “Manhunter” was the combination of Archie and me. I wouldn’t have written him but I thought a silent story might be possible. So I talked with Denny O’Neil, the editor, and in the end, worked out a 23-page story that covered the plot Archie and I had developed. However, once there were no words, Denny’s feeling— and I agreed with him—was that a story without words could no longer work as a prologue. I was sorry to move it, because I wanted to be as true to Archie’s intentions as I could, but I felt Denny was right, you wouldn’t know who these guys were, and it made a better COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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epilog at that point. So, we moved it to its proper position chronologically. I had told DC when I began working on it that it would take longer than eight pages to do without words, and they said if I could do it, they would print it. It was very unusual for me not knowing how many pages are going to be in the job. I work to a 22page comic, or a 10-page backup, some specific format. So here, it was hard, especially in the beginning. I must’ve relaid the first eight pages out about eight or nine times, changing stuff, doing this, moving that. I had no sense of pacing, because I wasn’t sure what I was working against, and I found that difficult. Eventually, once I got past page eight, it began to pace itself out naturally, I could really see where I was going, and it worked out very well. DC was still game to publish it in that length. Archie, before he had died, had talked to Klaus about coloring it, because Klaus had colored the ‘83 Baxter reprint, and he did a beautiful job on this last story. I did my own sound effects again, because in the original “Manhunter,” I was drawing all my own at that time, and I felt that would harken back to the past visually. I tried to capture whatever I could of the original series, even though I draw somewhat differently now. It was interesting to go back and rethink my proportions and layouts, and still do it as a silent story. It was challenging, and it was a hard story to do, emotionally it was tough. It took me several months to do. I didn’t make a lot of money that year! [laughs] Fortunately, my wife had a job, so I could afford to take the time I needed to finish that story. CBA: Do you miss Archie? Walter: Oh, every day. Every day. CBA: Were you ambitious to take on Thor? Walter: I was looking forward to it. As I said, he was my favorite character when I was reading Marvel comics, but I don’t know that I really had ambitions about it; I just thought it would be fun to do, and I was glad to have the opportunity. I spoke earlier about doing Thor with Len Wein writing and me doing the layouts, and the advantage was, I’d done all my Kirby stuff at that time, so when I took the book over in 1983, I felt I had a shot at a fresh approach that I’m not sure I would’ve taken if I hadn’t done the book once already. I found I had a lot stories I could tell with that character, and I wrote a lot of notes, ideas I filed in my computer. I saved everything and now I’m finding that a few of the ideas I can actually bend and turn into Orion stories. I believe in recycling. It’s funny. Back with I was doing Thor and for years thereafter, the two stories that got the most mention among fans when I was at conventions were either Beta Ray Bill or turning Thor into a frog. Now, 15 years later, I still hear about Bill once in a while, but the frog story’s the one that gets mentioned the most. At the time, I didn’t get a lot of negative letters from fans, but I got a lot of ambivalent letters from readers who weren’t quite sure if I was making a joke or not. “Was this supposed to be funny? How do we take this story?” I thought that was funny in and of itself. That story was several things. It was a salute to Carl Barks. It was meant to be an interesting story on its own. It furthered my continuing story of Loki’s machinations. And, through the rat-frog war of Central Park, it was partly a parody of my own stuff, those grandly operatic Thor stories where the gods fight their foes while the fate of the universe hangs in the balance. I’d had the idea much earlier to do something in that direction. One Oct. 2000

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of the notes in my files was a single line about doing a tip of the hat to Carl Barks. I’m such a huge Carl Barks fan, I didn’t have any more idea than that. And then I reached a point in the Thor run where suddenly, I saw that I could do what amounted to a “straight” funny animal story in the context of Thor’s struggle with Loki. I thought about changing Thor into a duck to start with, because of Barks of course, but that seemed perhaps a little too absurdist. And upon reflection, I realized that frogs are really tied-in with folk tales. “The Frog Prince” and all that. So off I went. And I mixed in the old New York urban legend of alligators in the sewers and even a little X-Men continuity with the Piper. I did a lot of work in my run on Thor, such as the “Malekith the Accursed” story, that had some basis in and inspiration from Celtic fairy and folk tales. I read quite a bit when I was doing Thor—not only in Norse mythology, but about the Celtic fairy-faith and a lot of northern European folk stories, out of Britain, Scandinavia, Northern Europe. Great stuff and it was strongly related to the kind of feeling I wanted to give the book. One of the things I really got from the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Marvel comics, and also the early Ditko Strange stories, was that you could do almost anything in a super-hero comic, as long as you kept a straight face. I was not a big fan of the old Batman TV series, partly because my feeling is that it was inviting you to laugh at the material for its stupidity, rather than sharing the joke with you. It’s essentially a condescension to the material, inviting the viewer to think, “Well, we’re all really much brighter than this, isn’t this stupid? How amusing.” That might be good for one laugh, but then you’re done; you get the joke, so what’s the point? Whereas in the super-hero stuff I liked, you can do the most absurd things, and if you keep a straight face, you and the audience can share the joke, but you’re also still inside the story. As a storyteller, my interest is in sucking you in on page one, and spitting you out on page 22, and I really try not to do anything that will kick you out of the story somewhere in the middle. That being said, I also don’t mind asking the reader to work a little. For example, I’ve occasionally done some layouts where the reader has to work some to follow what I’m doing. I did a Doctor Doom/Reed Richards time fight in FF #352 where the reader has to read the comic twice, once in sequence by page number, and once in a sequence jumping backwards and forwards through the comic. It’s one of the comics I’m most proud of, actually. The reader has to flip back and forth through the comic, because Doom and Reed were jumping around fighting through time, and I laid the book out in a way that made the reader jump around through the comic in order to follow their fight. Essentially, the page layout created a physical metaphor for their time duel. CBA: Where did the design of Beta Ray Bill come from? Walter: A horse’s skull, basically. I knew what they looked like, from my old paleontology days. So, I picked the horse pretty early on. I think it was The Comics Journal who, years ago, made a

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Below: Pin-up of The Deep Six, Jack Kirby-created bad guys from Apokolips, in a Walter Simonson pin-up published in The Fourth World Gallery, a DC one-shot from 1996. Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 DC Comics.

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crack about Frank Miller’s work, accusing Frank of being a “symbolmonger.” It was not meant as a compliment. However, Weezie and I both thought that it was a fabulous expression. And dead on. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be a symbol-monger on the order of Frank Miller!” Because one of the things that Frank does better than anybody else is punch all the buttons. Comics is mainly a short form of entertainment in America; we’ve got 22 pages a month, and that isn’t much room, less than a prose short story so you use a lot of symbols to communicate information in a fast, effective way, as a shortcut to meaning. Done well, you can both use the symbols and transcend them. And the idea that Frank would be called on the carpet for this was hysterically funny. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. What a terrible thing to call anybody who’s doing comic books! [laughter] One of the symbols we use in mainstream super-hero comics, of course, is appearance. Good guys are handsome, bad guys are ugly. It’s not always true, but it’s generally true—the same way you can often tell the good girls and the bad girls by the kinds of clothes they’re wearing. So, when I began doing Thor, I wanted to tell stories that didn’t feel like they were the stories we read a lot of times. That’s generally my aim with stories: start off with the known, and then go somewhere unfamiliar, where you don’t know what’s going to happen to the characters. It shouldn’t feel like Galactus coming back to Earth for the 334th time. Who cares? If he does comes back, it better be for something different, something new. It occurred to me when I began my run on Thor as a

writer that nobody had ever really picked up Thor’s hammer. The rule of the hammer is, “Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.” That’s the rule. Now, Stan and Jack forgot that once, had Loki pick up the hammer when he had a little extra Norn enchantment on him, but I ignored that as merely a goof. I’m not a berserko continuity fanatic. Essentially, only Odin and Thor had held the hammer, and I thought that’d be a good place to start a story that was unfamiliar. I didn’t want to dig up some old character in the Marvel universe and discover, “Oh, look, gee after all these years—wow!—The Purple Windshield Wiper can lift Thor’s hammer! What a surprise!” I thought it would be cooler and more convincing to start with a new guy we’d never seen before, and he’d hold the hammer. Now, one of the things you want to do when you’re writing is misdirect your reader; not cheat, but misdirect. Which means you give them all the information, the ground rules, and you still surprise them. In the case of Bill, I wanted to create a character who would pick up the hammer. That means—by the rules—he has to be worthy. So I worked out a background for him where Bill was worthy, self-sacrificing, all that stuff. But I also thought, “I don’t want to have this guy pick up the hammer and readers go, ‘Oh, he picked up the hammer; big deal.’” So I made him look like a monster, because we tend to think of monsters as being bad guys. In the end, I chose a horse’s skull as the basis for his face because horses are such beautiful creatures. It’s the skull beneath the skin, the image of the monster lying right beneath beauty and yet, it’s the structure of beauty itself. By using that head, I hoped to give a double-meaning to Bill’s face, the underlying beauty of the horse, the skeletal framework of the monster. But you see the monster first. Then, I gave him a variation of Thor’s costume because comics are a visual medium—and I’ve seen this endlessly debated since—the idea is when he gets the hammer, he gets the power of Thor. The power of Thor, of course, means you can throw lightning around and beat things up with the hammer, but the visual realization of that is the costume, he gets new threads that are a variation of Thor. CBA: A symbol! Walter: A visual symbol! Me and Frank. [laughter] And there on the cover of my second issue where everybody could read it is the legend of the hammer: “Whosoever holds… etc.” In bold letters! But nobody wrote in and said, “Oh, so Bill’s really a good guy.” They all wrote in and said, “How can this evil guy pick up the hammer?!?!” They were screaming, they were freaking out! In the end, it turned out he really was a pretty good guy, and readers wrote in and said, “Oh, I knew that! Oh, sure, I’m hip, it was obvious.” Oh, please! You had no clue! A very few readers got it, but most didn’t. It was great! So that’s how Bill came about, and that’s why he looked like that. His hammer, incidentally, was based on old Norse models. I invented the name Beta Ray Bill, for which I’ve been both praised and castigated, because pulp science-fiction was an inspiration. One of the things I love about pulp SF is that guys travel to far distant planets, aliens start talking to them, they flip the switch on their universal translator, and everybody’s suddenly comprehensible. “Oh, hello there! How nice to meet you!” Probably speaking with a British accent, “Care for a spot of tea?” So my feeling is that the name “Beta Ray Bill” was the closest the universal translating machine could get to whatever his real name was. I made it alliterative because translating machines have simple joys and so do I. I chose the name Bill because it’s a common name; my intent was that though Bill would be very uncommon, even among his own people, he was also a symbol of Everyman in his own race. Originally, I’d thought of calling him Beta Ray Jones, because of Jones’ commonality as a name, and my feeling that the translator machine was working that angle. However, by the time I was writing the book, Marvel was publishing Indiana Jones, they had Rick Jones as a fictional character, they had Louise Jones as an editor [laughter]… seemed like there were a lot of Jones’s running around, so I decided not to use the name and went with “Bill.” And I wanted some slightly SF sense to the name as well, hence “Beta Ray.” Beta rays are electrons, fairly weak, as I recall. I would’ve used gamma rays, but of course, those COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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were already taken in the Marvel universe. In the end, the alliteration cinched it. CBA: After “Manhunter,” Thor was your second act, so to speak… Walter: It turned out to be. [laughs] CBA: Yeah, it took a lot of people by surprise. Certainly a lot of retailers were caught off-guard. Walter: [laughs] The success took all of us by surprise. Who knew? CBA: It felt like you were saving up a lot of concepts over the years and stuff like that, and BOOM! you just came out with a flood of new stuff! Was it a financial success for you? Walter: Oh, sure, we made royalties back then, but I didn’t get rich enough to retire. Certainly it did fine; I had a great time doing it. CBA: Did they go to a second printing for that issue? Walter: No. The funny thing about that issue is, on the newsstand, it had something like a 90% sell-through, very uncommon at the newsstand, which I think typically had about 30% sell-through back then. When the book got hot all of a sudden—nobody had any clues, least of all me—all the dealers ran out to the newsstands and bought all the copies they could find. I remember Mike Hobson chuckling about it when he told me. I think that first issue’s print run was only about 70,000 copies. So, it really sold out everywhere. CBA: At its peak, do you know what Thor’s print run was? Walter: I think our sales—because there were still newsstand sales then, so they’d get a lot of returns—I think the most it probably sold when I was doing it was somewhere around 170,00 to 190,00, 200,000 max. This was at a time when X-Men, Marvel’s best-selling book, had a sale of about 350,000. So, Thor was never a top seller the way X-Men was at that time and place, but it was a really solid upper-middle-level seller. CBA: It certainly rose from where it was. Walter: Oh, yeah, it went way up from what it was selling when I took it over. CBA: Why did you pass the penciling chores to Sal Buscema? Walter: I penciled and inked for about two-and-a-half years, and that was a lot of work! [laughs] I was getting tired! Also, I was offered X-Factor, with Weezie writing, and we thought it’d be fun to work together. I like the original X-Men, and I was ready to try something a little different for a while. CBA: But you continued to write Thor? Walter: I wrote Thor for another year or so, about three-and-ahalf years altogether. The second issue from the end of my run, #380, Thor fought the Midgard Serpent, and that was a story I’d really wanted to do for a long time. So Sal, very kindly, allowed me to pencil that issue. I was, after all, taking money away from him since he wasn’t doing the whole book. But I penciled that issue and Sal inked it. Lovely job too. CBA: You did about 50 issues of Thor? Walter: Well, #337-382. I think there were two fill-ins, and a couple of issues I didn’t ink here and there; I got some help when I needed it. CBA: I thought Sal did a tremendous job on it. Walter: Oh, I did, too. Sal did one fill-in, #355, which was my first break after I began in #337, that he penciled and inked. It was a story about Thor’s great-grandfather. Then I went back on the book for a while. Sal did such a beautiful job on #355 that when I quit penciling the book and started looking for someone else to do it, boy, he was choice #1. CBA: He did great inks. Thor was, I felt, the best job he’d done in an awful long time. This is just personal opinion, but a lot of the other assignments, Sal didn’t seem to be as jazzed as he was with Thor. Did you work closely with him? Walter: Oh, yeah, we talked all the time. I used to call him up and give him a hard time. I think he enjoyed doing Thor. If he didn’t, he did a great job of disguising it from me. I really enjoyed talking to Sal and his wife, Joan, who are very sweet. Sal has a real life outside comics, acting at the local theater down in Virginia where he lives, for instance. We’d shoot the breeze about lots of stuff that had nothing to do with our work. I went down and visited him a couple of times. My parents used to live not that far from where Sal was, so when I visited my parents, I’d go over and see them. I really enjoyed working with him. You just can’t beat working with pros. CBA: He did some Spider-Man stuff over the last few years, and it Oct. 2000

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was great. What a fine inker! Walter: Sal was always a good inker. He inked some beautiful John Buscema work on Silver Surfer at the end of the ‘60s. CBA: Did you work on Thor at home? Walter: I wrote it at home. I drew it mostly at Upstart. We moved out of New York back in 1987 so now, I work downstairs in my studio and Weezie works upstairs in her office. After working at Marvel as an editor for four years until the end of ‘83, she went freelance. By the time we were doing X-Factor, which was ‘86 or so, we were both working at home. It was very convenient; I’d do my rough thumbnails that hardly anybody but me can read, and Weezie would write scripts from those. If she had any problems figuring out what the heck I was drawing, she’d just come down and ask, “What is this, is this a pizza or a flying saucer?” [laughter] “That’s a guy’s head, honey.” But we’ve worked together really well. She was my editor when I was writer/artist on Battlestar Galactica; I was her penciler on a number of her issues of X-Factor. The best example I can give of the ease with which we work together is our work as co-writers on Meltdown, a Havok/Wolverine story Kent Williams and Jon Muth painted. When we were doing the script, one of us would be writing away, eventually get exhausted, and the other would just sit down sometimes in the middle of a sentence and continue typing. Weezie’s stronger on character motivation than I am, and I’m a little stronger on the snappy patter. We complimented each other, and we’ve never had any problems working together, it was just a treat. I’d like to work together again, I hope we can sometime. CBA: Did you debate things out? Walter: Well, we’d talk about stuff. I still run most of my plots past her before I send them in. Come on, I’m living with one of the very best editors comics ever had, and I’d be an idiot not to take advantage of it! [laughter] So I do! She’ll have comments or thoughts, and it’s a big help to me. And we’ll both do things where, if one of us is working on a project and gets stuck for an idea or a plot point, we’ll go out, grab some pizza, and talk it out. It works very well. CBA: And now the round-up question: Your legacy, what would you like it to be? Walter: [laughs] How about “Peace in the Middle East”? I’d like my legacy to be peace in the Middle East. [laughter] That seems like a good place to start. I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it. I like the work I do, and in the end… Oh, I know, bingo! There’s a movie called Ride the High Country that Archie turned me on to a long time ago. It’s early Sam Peckinpah, stars Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott as a couple of old gunslingers out on one last mission, helping some people by guarding their money as I recall. So of course as part of the story… SPOILER WARNING! SPOILER WARNING!… they have a falling out, because Randolph Scott sees that with this last job, they have a chance to score, but it will mean breaking their word. Basically, they can ditch their job, steal the money, and retire in luxury. Scott’s trying to get Joel McCrea to agree that robbing would be a good idea, even though it would be very dishonorable, but so what! They’d be comfortable in their dishonorability. “Look,” he says. “We’re two old gunfighters, we’ve got nothing. We’ve got our bedrolls and our guns and our horses, and that’s all we’ve got.” I’m paraphrasing; it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie. McCray isn’t buying it and finally, Scott asks him the $24 question “What do you want to be when you die?”— meaning, of course, that they could be rich. McCray thinks for a second, he says, “Justified.” What a great answer. That’s the legacy I’d like to leave, I’d like to be justified. When I’m done, when the work I’m doing is finished, that’s the answer I want it to give. Through its quality, its craft, its understanding, its exploration… fill in whatever descriptive terms you want there. I talked earlier about creating my one big drawing, and I’m still working on it so it isn’t finished yet. But that’s the answer. [laughs]

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CBA Interview

John’s Workmanship Artist? Letterer? Art Director? Just What Does the Guy Not Do? Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson A self-described man of many hats, John Workman may not be a familiar name in fan circles, but the guy goes way back in the comics industry—well, at least to the mid-1970s when he joined the production staff at DC Comics. A memorable art director (and de facto co-editor) during the glory years of Heavy Metal, and an insightful commentator on the state of the art form, John has also been Walter Simonson’s choice as letterer on many, many Simonson comics projects. We conducted a long interview with John in his New Jersey studio on July 12, 2000, but will be only using a very small portion of that wide-ranging talk as we hope to include a definitive, more complete Workman interview in our upcoming Comic Book Artist Annual #1, due to arrive next Summer, featuring a comprehensive look at the comics of National Lampoon and Heavy Metal. But because John’s lettering so complements Walter’s work on Thor and Orion, we couldn’t resist having a talk with him. John copyedited the transcript.

Below: John Workman’s Warner Communications identification card from his stint as DC Comics’ employee in the 1980s. This is about the best shot we could get out of him! Courtesy of John Workman.

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Comic Book Artist: Where are you from? John Workman: I was born in West Virginia, and I lived there until I was six years old. My dad was a coal miner, and he loved it! [laughter] I never could quite understand that. Oh, he loved going down in the ground and digging up coal! CBA: Did he do it for a long period of time? John: Until I was six, when the mines closed. He taught me something I’ve always remembered. I remember the look on his face when he realized that this job that he really loved was over, and so I’ve always thought of life and work as a situation where you’re out in the middle of a river, standing on a rock, and you’ve got to move to another rock, because the rock you’re on is starting to sink. I’ve always tried to be able to leap to another rock, just at the right time. Another thing that my dad did that I’ll always remember is the time when he got a piece of paper and he sat down, and he drew a picture of our car. I thought, “Wow! This is kind of neat! You can take something that’s real, and filter it through your own mind, and bring it out on paper!” So I started drawing after that, and I started writing these hokey little stories. But I didn’t put the two together! I would draw, and I would write, but I didn’t do comics. It wasn’t until I was 11 years old that I realized that you could put these two things together. CBA: How would you characterize yourself? John: The best advice that I ever got was from Basil Wolverton. He told me to learn to do everything. So I guess I’m the guy who at least tried to learn to do everything. I think the most fun I’ve had working in comics was when I was art director at Heavy Metal magazine, where I did everything: Edited, wrote, drew, colored, color separated, laid-out advertisements, designed covers and interior pages, and worked with artists on both foreign and American material. I was there for seven years, from 1977 through ‘84. CBA: About lettering, is it as time-consuming as any job? Does it fill up your day? John: I’ve found that something that should take an hour will magically use up three hours. I try to be efficient about what I do. Maybe

I’m slowing down, too. It seems to take longer on a lot of this stuff than it used to. Yeah, I get plenty of work, for the most part. Not like a few years ago; there were times then when I might have 200 pages lying around. Right now, I think I’ve got about 30 on hand. CBA: How many do you do a day? John: I try to do about eight, but I don’t always make that. I did five today, for instance.[laughs] Well, I’ve kind of goofed around a bit today. I’ll do probably one or two more before I hit the sack tonight. CBA: [Looking at a Wolverton original on the wall] Have you met Basil Wolverton? John: Yeah. I went to Clark College for a little while, and Basil Wolverton lived in Vancouver. I called him up, and went out to see him. He had the greatest sense of humor, and he could pull your leg like nobody could. He had me believing that he lived in a tent at the side of the highway. [laughs] I remember the first time that I saw him, it was like meeting an insurance salesman. [laughter] He wore a suit all the time! [laughter] He looked like anything but what he was. He had this wild imagination and all that… CBA: He’s a freelance artist, working at home, and he wore a suit? John: Every time! [laughter] I didn’t see him once when he wasn’t wearing a suit. I remember just seeing his wife very quickly, and then we’d sort of sit down and talk comics. He’d tell me these wonderful stories. He said of all the publishers that he’d dealt with over the years, one of the nicest was Jim Warren. He really liked Warren and got along well with him. So, I always wondered when people would tell me these outrageous stories. CBA: Did you visit Basil with any regularity over time? John: Oh, maybe four or five times when I was down there, and we wrote back and forth. Of course, the war in Vietnam was a big thing at that time, but we talked about everything but the war in Vietnam. Here’s this guy, he seems to be conservative. And, of course, he worked for the religious magazines. And I thought, “He must be a very conservative person, I’m not even going to mention Vietnam.” I was doing editorial cartoons and other things for a college paper. Of course, I was minoring in journalism, so I had to write actual articles,too. But I covered a really moving war protest at that time. These people met very peaceably, hundreds of them, and they lit candles, one candle for every person—every man, woman, nurse, soldier, whatever—from the area who had been killed in the war up to that time. A friend of mine, Gary Davis—he and I were going to college together then—took the photos, and I can’t remember if I wrote an article on that, or just kind of was there, but the next day, I went to see Basil Wolverton. When we began talking, he asked, “Were you at that protest last night?” I said, “Yeah, I covered it for the paper.” Basil said, “I should’ve gone.” Then I found out his feelings about the war. He was even against World War II! It was quite a surprise. Just a really kind, good person. I really liked him. With a strange sense of humor! We kind of lost touch… I stopped by to see him one time in 1976, and I guess he was ill at the time. But he liked comics, and he was very encouraging. He let me know that there was nothing specific that he could do to get me work as a comics artist. He couldn’t say to an editor or publisher, “Hey, use this John Workman guy!” It was all up to me. He told me one thing that was probably the most important advice that I ever got. He said, “Learn to do everything.” At that time, oh! I was so incredibly dumb. I thought I didn’t have to know anything about printing and all that. The college I was going to had the greatest printing classes, and I thought, “I don’t need those, I’m going to write and pencil and ink and all that other stuff.” COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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My lettering was horrible at that time, and I did take a class in calligraphy, which didn’t help me one bit. [laughter] I learned to letter by taking an old issue of Comic Calvacade from 1946 and going through and… “Oh, that’s the way they make a W,” and I’d do 900 “W’s” in order to get it down. I stole mercilessly from John Costanza and Ben Oda. CBA: Why were you pursuing lettering? To say, “Well, that’s another skill I can do”? John: Partially because of Wolverton’s advice, and partially because I wanted my stuff to really look like comics. I’d draw what I thought was an acceptable page, and then I’d mess it up with this lousy lettering, much too big and gawky and slanting backwards.. I remember in 1969, I bought my first page of original artwork at the Seuling convention. CBA: So you were published in Star*Reach in the mid-’70s. That was your first major exposure? John: That was how I felt, yeah. CBA: You had gone to the Seuling con in New York, cognizant of the community, with Neal Adams and Dick Giordano. Does that lead directly to a job at DC Comics? John: Kind of in a roundabout way. Bob Smith and I got here, I remember, on a Sunday in late July of 1975. We checked into this fleabag hotel out on Staten Island, and on Monday, we came in and went to Neal’s studio. It was amazing. There was Larry Hama—of course, I was aware of him—and several other people. The thing that I remember most was that Neal, when I shook his hand, said, “Oh, come on, shake hands!” and he made me sort of grip his hand and really shake it. He and Dick looked over our stuff, and they took us out to lunch, and it was… oh, I don’t know if Dick was along, but I remember Larry and Mike Friedrich. At some point, somebody came in and said Vaughn Bodé was dead, which was a real surprise. I really admired Bodé’s stuff. After lunch, Larry took us up to Marvel, where we met Archie Goodwin. Bob Smith and I just admired the heck out of Archie, and evidently he was just going over the Marvel sales figures and they were dismal. (They’d be wonderful now, but they were dismal at that time.) So Archie really couldn’t offer us anything, but we hung around and talked to him. Marie Severin came in, and she was so nice! You’ve never met a more wonderful person. She was just so kind to us, and they started kind of talking a little bit more to us, and before we knew it, they had stuff for us to do. Archie dug out some Crazy material… CBA: Did you just hang around until there was work? John: I don’t know what caused it, [laughter] they just liked us for some reason! CBA: Why did you make the jump to DC? John: After Bob and I got that little bit of artwork to do for Archie at Marvel, Larry Hama took us down to DC. He had some sort of feud going with them at the time, so he wouldn’t actually take us into DC, but he said, “You can go in there, up to that floor.” So, we did, and we saw Sol Harrison that day. Sol looked at our stuff, but he held our artwork as if it were soiled toilet paper, and he had nothing for us, so he said, “Well, go talk to Joe Orlando. Maybe he has something.” We went and talked to Joe, and I swear, Joe was asleep. What I didn’t know at the time was that Joe worked all the time. He was working, on the side, on these internationally-created comics aimed at a Black audience in South Africa. I worked with him later on those things. But Joe was so tired, he barely remembered that we were there. He kind of apologized about this later on, but he looked at our stuff, and we were so disappointed to not get anything from DC. I went to Continuity the next day, and we did a few things for Neal, including working on a Charlton Six Million Dollar Man magazine that I’d almost forgotten about. I had started to write a Plastic Man story when we were still out in Washington, and Bob had actually drawn the first page of it, and I’d lettered it, and I think he’d inked all of it. So, we figured, “Let’s show that to Gerry Conway.” So I called up and made an appointment with Gerry Conway, and we showed up at the time that we were supposed to be there, and the receptionist said, “He’s in a meeting, you’ll have to wait.” So we sat there, in the reception area, and Bob Rozakis came out. Bob had seen us that day, too, when we saw Sol and Joe. Both he and Jack Harris had looked at our stuff, and they really liked it. Bob said, “Oh, Oct. 2000

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you guys back again? Who are you here to see?” I said, “Conway.” Bob said, “Oh, he’s not doing anything, come on!” So we followed him down the hallway, and we walked right past Gerry Conway, who was in his office talking to a writer. I thought, “Wait a minute,” and I looked where Bob was taking us, and on the door it said, “Carmine Infantino.” I thought, “Carmine… Conway… huh?!?” I said, “Oh, no, no, no, no!” He said, “Oh, come on! He’s not doing anything!” We went in, and got hired because of my mumbling! Carmine looked at our stuff, and he told us that we reminded him of the days when he and Frank Giacoia would go around in the ‘40s [laughter] and show their stuff, and he hired us both that day. CBA: Can you describe Bob Smith? Is he tall? John: Mike Friedrich once called us the Mutt ‘n’ Jeff of the Northwest. [laughter] Bob is around six feet tall, kind of lean, and here I am, several inches down there from that… Bob worked for DC for over 20 years, he’s working now for Archie for the most part, inking for them. I worked for DC for two years, and it was enjoyable. It got boring in some ways. If you’ve done the art corrections and the lettering corrections on one book, you’ve pretty much done them all. But we had great times there, Steve Mitchell sat behind me, and we would talk movies all day long. We came up with this game of lines from movies, so one of us would throw out a line and the other one

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Above: John can’t remember who exactly wrote this riotous satire of Spider-Man, but he’s sure he penciled and lettered this strip which appeared in 1978’s National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody, the hilarious sequel to their 1964 High School Yearbook. Courtesy of John Workman. ©2000 the respective copyright holder.

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would guess what movie it was from until he finally got it. Steve really should’ve been a stand-up comedian… he and Sean Kelly. CBA: You say that Neal Adams got you the job at Heavy Metal? John: Well, I’d been trying to see somebody at National Lampoon for quite a while. I wanted to do a regular strip for them, and I came up with a thing called “B. J. Butterfly,” about this weird little girl from another dimension who is about nine inches tall, and is just wild over old movies. She comes from her dimension into ours in order to watch classic movies like Citizen Kane whenever they’re run on TV. I did up a sample page for them, and at that time Jeff Jones and Matty Simmons had had some sort of disagreement, so, Jeff Jones’ strip was no longer running in Lampoon. I thought, “Well this could be a replacement.” Joe Orlando gave me Peter Kleinman’s number, and I kept calling over there, but nothing happened. I remember, I didn’t want them to know at DC that I was looking around at other possibilities, so I’d go into the conference room and [laughs] call Peter Kleinman, or some of the other people that I was doing stuff for on the side. I was doing stuff for men’s magazines, New York-based ones, at the time. I met a fellow by the name of Jeff Goodman, who was also wild for comic books. He was a neat guy. He’d go from one zilch men’s magazine to another, and I would do comics material for him. Anyway, I was getting nowhere with Lampoon, and one day I got a call from Peter Kleinman, and he had no idea that I’d been trying to contact him! He was calling me because Neal Adams had recommended me for the art director job at Heavy Metal. CBA: You were working in production at DC, you were one of the rank-and-file at DC. Heavy Metal was a new magazine, heavily touted, prestige publication… John: You’d think so, but it really wasn’t. At least, at that time. It became a somewhat prestigious magazine, and it got to be more so as time went on, but when I went over there, I found out it was almost a one-man operation!

CBA: The work. John: The actual work. I was hired as art director, but they saw it— at least initially—as just someone who would put the magazine together and do the ads, and do the cover. CBA: So you were going from a production position to head of production, which was just you in the department? John: They had a production person, but I was doing all the grunt work, and the design stuff, and all that. That got old kind of quick, but the people were so much fun. Sean Kelly especially, Sean was the editor at the time. CBA: Had you been doing freelancing while you were at HM? John: I did a few things here and there. DC called up one time and wanted to know about lettering, and I told them, “I don’t know, I don’t really have the time for it,” but Walt wanted to know if I… I’d lettered Alien. CBA: That was the first time you guys worked together? John: I’m not sure. About the time that I went over to Lampoon, I lettered “Captain Fear” for him. It was a three-issue thing he did in the back of one of the DC books. It took a long time for Walt to finish it and for it to see print. I remember that I didn’t turn in a bill. It took me a year to get around to fixing up a bill for it, and in the year since then, they’d upped the lettering rate by another dollar. Walt still kids me sometimes about how I intentionally waited that year, knowing I could get an extra dollar out of it. [laughter] CBA: He’d forgotten that today, though. He thought Alien was the first time. John: Walter may be right. My memory is off sometimes about the timing of these things. CBA: But you’d worked together, you were editor of Alien? John: Well, I put it together. The official editor was Charlie Lippencott. Actually, there was no editor. I got Archie Goodwin and Walt together, got out of their way, and let them do whatever they COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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wanted to do. Why try to edit them? They knew what they were doing. CBA: Did you team them up? You’d mentioned to me that you considered another artist for it. John: Originally, I suggested Carmine Infantino. This was after he had left DC. I’d seen what he’d done at Warren, and everybody in the world inked him over there, including Walt. I thought, “Carmine and Walt… that could be pretty neat.” I could see the grittiness of the spaceship brought out by Walt. This is one of those weird things that just happened: I called up Carmine to see what he thought of the idea, and his phone was busy. So, I thought, “Well, I’ll talk to Walt, see what he thinks about inking Carmine for 64 pages.” I called Walt, and he said, “Well…I kind of enjoyed the eight-pager at Warren, but I don’t know… How about if I do the whole job?” And so, there was Walt. [laughs] CBA: Alien was quite successful? John: That’s a strange thing. It was on The New York Times bestseller list for seven weeks. But Len unfortunately decided, “Wow! We’ve got a runaway hit on our hands!” and went out and did a second printing that was way beyond all reason; I don’t know all the numbers on it. CBA: What did you do after you left Heavy Metal? John: While I was still up at Heavy Metal, Walt had asked me to letter Thor, and I thought, “Okay, this is kind of fun.” CBA: Was this your first lettering, regular lettering gig? John: No, I’d lettered stuff for DC, of course. I lettered a ton of different things for them from ‘75-’77. Outside of Heavy Metal, Thor was the first assignment I did on a regular basis. I was doing it because I liked what Walt was doing. It was a little extra money, too. Animal House was far in the past by that time, and Lampoon’s sales had really dipped. At one point, Heavy Metal made the profit for the year, between the movie and the magazine. If Heavy Metal had not existed, Lampoon would’ve lost money that year. Anyhow, I did this, and then somebody—maybe Mike Gold at First—thought that I might want to letter Grimjack, so I started doing that, too. So, by the time I was out of Lampoon, I had these other things going, and Len Wein said, “Come on up to DC! We’ll give you some stuff to do!” So, I lettered for them, and I did a little bit of drawing for them, for Who’s Who. They told me to pick some characters and draw them, and that was kind of neat. Mostly, it was the lettering. The lettering was easy! I do admit that I was a little bit wounded by all this at Heavy Metal. CBA: You wanted to chill out for a while. Was Thor easy work? John: It was challenging enough so that it wasn’t just bland stuff, and Walt’s writing was so good and so sharp that everything fell into place, and it was great fun to do. I know he had me redo some titles sometimes, because I hadn’t quite caught the spirit of what he wanted, and I didn’t mind it at all, because he knew what he wanted, and I liked that. In any comic thing, I would prefer that one person do everything, but that isn’t always possible, so there should be one person who knows what he wants. In the case of Thor, it was Walt. So, I thought we were doing just great stuff. CBA: You really worked well together. When I was reading Thor, Walter was the writer, penciler, inker, and you’re the letterer—you guys were a team! There was a good symmetry at work. The lettering was a part of the story. It had a consistency. John: I mentioned Stan Lee, about his ability to take these photographs and put in funny lines and make you really believe these guys were saying such incredible things. He could take what Kirby had brought him and add this killer dialogue to the existing visuals… that’s something I like to do—not specifically that, but to take something that already exists, and to go a step further, but basing what I do on what’s already there. If Walt had just phoned it in, I couldn’t have done anything, but he did this great stuff that made you want to do your best! Oh, golly, it was fun! It wasn’t quite as much fun when Walt got off the artwork, but he was still writing it, and Sal Buscema was doing some great stuff at the time, so I enjoyed that, too. If it went down, it went down half a notch. CBA: Was it exciting to get the pages of the Oct. 2000

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

first issue, Thor #237? John: For a long time, up in my office at Heavy Metal, I had a drawing Walt had done—I think it was a stat of that first cover. Maybe it was just a drawing of Beta Ray Bill, but it was just so neat. To know that you’re doing something that people have a chance to enjoy…. There had been a kind of blandness that came in at that time and here was Walt, bursting on the scene like the Beatles in 1964! CBA: Smashing the logo! John: Yeah! It was good and fun! So, I enjoyed it. There have been times when I’ve lettered stuff that I haven’t enjoyed, but this has never happened with Walt. You know what to expect with Walt, but he always tosses in a surprise. I’ve always liked that. The best people… Jack Benny, on his radio show, you got to know all the characters, you got to know what to expect from them, but you always got the surprise in there, too, something beyond what you’d expected. And Disney… everything Disney did, he wanted people to get more than they had expected. CBA: It’s funny. By that time, you’d worked professionally in comics for nine years, and obviously, as art director of Heavy Metal, you’ve dealt with an enormous number of creative people. In 1984, when Walt Simonson was doing Thor, you were entertained by it. John: Oh, yeah! CBA: You worked on those pages—directly involved in the creation of that final book—and yet you’re still a fan. John: I was talking to Al Williamson a couple of years ago, and we were having this long conversation, not about what we were working on, but about Alex Raymond and things like that.… He’s still a fan, after all these years! CBA: You’ve still got that sense of appreciation, obviously entertained by the work. A lot of people might think, “Oh, just another page,” and not appreciate the work. John: That has happened at times. I don’t want to name any person, but there was one guy whose work I really admired. I was working on some stuff that he did quite a few years back, and he was just phoning it in. I don’t know what happened, but it was so bad, and I felt that I could not bring anything to it, because there was nothing for me to work off of, so I actually got off the book. Now, I couldn’t do that since things are much tighter economically. CBA: If you get off a book, you could be in trouble? John: Well, every book is important now to me monetarily, whereas at one time, there was enough that, if I didn’t want to do something, I didn’t do it. Now, a lot of what I work on is mini-series, and when they come to an end, I have to look for something new. I’m working regularly on The Hulk

Above: A more recent shot of John Workman, courtesy of the artist.

Below: Basil Wolverton original, hanging on the wall at John Workman’s studio. For a time, John visited Basil and learned valuable lessons from the brilliant cartoonist. Courtesy of John Workman. ©2000 Monte Wolverton.

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Below: Our apologies to our readers and John Workman for the sparse and small illustrations accompanying this interview. Due to space considerations we had to seriously limit this interview and we hope to do John justice in the upcoming CBA National Lampoon/ Heavy Metal Special. Here’s a cover John did—one of the artist’s favorite works—for Sal Quatroccio. Courtesy of and ©2000 John Workman.

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and on Aquaman, but Aquaman ends in another two issues. So, you have to be realistic about things. Luckily, I’m still working! And I’m lucky because I’m working with people that I really like. Walt on Orion is almost as much fun as the Thor days. It’s the neatest stuff, because he really loves the Kirby characters, and he’s doing a great job on it. I work a lot with Tommy Lee Edwards, and I just admire the heck out of what he’s doing. John Paul Leon is another guy who is wonderful. I’m working with him on Static, an upcoming book for DC where they’re getting back to the Milestone character. I’ve been lucky enough lately, anyway, to not have to moan and groan when I see stuff showing up, The work is actually good. The Aquaman stuff I’m working on, I think, is the best Aquaman in 25 years, since the old Aparo-Skeates days. It’s a real shame that it’s been cancelled. That’s a sad thing, too… maybe this shouldn’t bother me, but the fact that somebody does something wonderful, and it sells less than 20,000… it really kills me. I would like to say a word about the future of comics. When I was at Heavy Metal, I thought that we were carrying the ball for comics in the United States. Joe Orlando came over, we had lunch one day, and he wanted to talk about color separations and how to go about doing different types of color. I didn’t know it, but this all had to do with Ronin, and when I saw Ronin, I thought, “Oh, good. They’re trying. They’re going in a better direction.” It hasn’t worked out, the promise of that. CBA: Why do you think that is? John: The are two things that have to be fixed in comics, and to fix only one is to do nothing. The distribution and the editorial approach have to be totally rebuilt. I don’t think they have a clue about distribution. With Ronin, they took a giant step in the right direction editorially, but they didn’t carry through. They actually kind of backslid, editorially. There’s more of the team mentality. Any idea has to go through 97 different people before it’s approved. The individuality… it’s funny, people always say they want originality, and then they turn to a committee. Everything good that’s ever been done has been done by one lone guy off in the corner. CBA: A maverick. John: Yeah, and that’s what Frank Miller was! But if none of this had ever happened, and he walked in today, I’d be willing to bet that none of that could happen. CBA: Do you think that’s a culture of fear? John: I noticed when I was up at DC in ‘88 and ‘89 that it was like a bunch of kids—and they were likable kids that I got along well with—but they were playing at being businessmen. And there were only a few of them here and there who were actually having fun doing comics. Andy Helfer always seemed to be the guy who was having fun doing comics, and Mark Waid also. But so many—I’m painting with a broad brush, and I’m not including everybody—but on almost all levels, there seemed to be this need, that everything be so… controlled. They did what they thought a businessman would

do, rather than, “Let’s do some neat stuff, and let’s handle the business so we make a profit! But let’s have some fun that’ll carry through to the readers!” CBA: But you don’t compromise the imaginative at the beginning by plopping business considerations on it. John: One of the worst things they did at DC—and this has happened at other companies, too, I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on DC—the idea that an editor cannot edit his own stuff. The reason for that was, a lot of people can’t. It has to be taken on an individual basis. You have to look at this guy and say, “Yeah, this person can do it, this one might need some help, and I don’t know about this one.” What they did was, in effect, declare, “Will Eisner? Nope, can’t do that here. The EC guys? Nah, can’t do that here. Stan Lee at Marvel in the ‘60s? No, can’t do that here.” By laying down essentially stupid rules, they limit their own possibilities, and so… I don’t know. Editorially, anyway, a lot of things need to be loosened up, and the possibility of one person coming up with something really interesting has to be acknowledged. But some wonderful things are being done at all the companies. People are doing top-notch work, but it’s getting nowhere because of the lousy distribution. Artists and writers and editors can’t do anything about the severe distribution problems. Walt can’t do anything about the distribution of Orion. There are only a handful of people in the business who can do anything about this very serious problem, and they’ve been hiding their heads in the sand for way too long. The answer, in a nutshell, is it’s economic. Pretend that you’re selling magazines; do you want to sell comics, too? If you don’t get as much money for them, and they take up valuable space, and there’re various problems to put up with, then you say “no” to comic books. But you’ll sell Heavy Metal. You’ll put it with the other magazines. You’ll get the same amount of money from Heavy Metal as you get on other magazines. It’s almost as if comics have never existed, and they’re starting over again. It’s 1935. CBA: It’s a time rife with possibilities? John: Yeah, it is. Last year, I met for the first time, a person who didn’t know what a comic book was. I’d met several people who’d never seen a comic book, but they knew about them. I’m sure that I’m going to run into a lot more people who don’t know what every child of 30 years ago knew. They’re out there, and there are more of them, and… CBA: It seems that in ‘93, we lost a generation of comics readers, and now, it’s 2000, we’re losing a second generation, too. John: It’s almost like starting over again. There are possibilities, though! I mentioned that I feel ashamed sometimes, when I talk to people at conventions, and they say they like my artwork, and all that. I’d like to be doing more, but at the same time, the lettering is easy to do. The money’s good. I’ve usually found that if I spend a lot of time drawing or writing something, I can be making exactly the same amount of money if I’m lettering, and it’s much easier to do. I’m not proud of that at all, I’d much rather be doing something worthwhile. Well, I shouldn’t say the lettering isn’t worthwhile, but something… CBA: More you? John: Yeah. I enjoy, generally, what I’m doing. It’s great fun working with Walt, and so many of these other guys, but I just wish we could do some things to get the comic book form out to a larger number of people. People want comics, they’re familiar with comics in newspapers, and all that, but again, it’s economics. We need to make them economically interesting, to get people to sell… and buy… the things, and we cannot do it with them as they currently are. I was thinking about this recently. When I was 14 years old or so, I actually sat down and figured out the per-page cost of a comic book to the reader/purchaser. Of course, it was less than half a penny. And what is it now, 11¢, 12¢ a page? The base price for a DC or Marvel is $2.25. So, I get something like American Heritage, where I can sit there and read for hours or even days, and what is it, $4.95? I still subscribe to Playboy after all these years. It’s not what it used to be, but every now and then there’ll be a Ray Bradbury story, but still, if you sat there and read it cover to cover, you’d be there for days. You can go through a comic in less than 15 minutes. I don’t know. There are things that have to be done. We just need to start doing them. H COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

Oct. 2000

SEVERIN FRADON ROBBINS FLEENER TERRY MILLS TIMMONS TM

N o . 10 Oct. 20 0 0

$6.95 In The U.S.

WOMEN & THE COMICS: A CELEBRATION!

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

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

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Last-minute bits about the Community of Comic Book Artists, Writers and Editors

What is it with Brett Warnock and Chris Staros? Is their imprint Top Shelf and Tom Devlin’s Highwater Books the future of comics or what? Seeing the busy traffic on the alternative/small press aisle at the San Diego con was a sight almost as gratifying as watching copies of Streetwise fly off of TwoMorrows’ tables! The levels of diversity, quality, and sheer formatting chutzpah of the comics these guys produce, just warm the cockles of this old fart’s heart, and the sooner we realize we need to make the contents of comics, not characters, the priority—printing stories that speak to real people, not the super-hero within; choosing clarity over convoluted continuities—the quicker we can truly re-invent comics and find that elusive Big Audience once again. Let’s face it: Those over-priced four-color pamphlets we call comics are probably dying, and new formats and alternative distribution is the answer. Think book and music stores. So, cheers to the small press folks, and let’s back ’em with bucks and word o’ mouth! (I’d like to extend our condolences to Chris Staros on the loss of his father-in-law, prompting Chris to leave SDCC early this year. I did get a chance to have a hilarious, albeit brief, chat with Brett Warnock at the show’s end, and I haveta say that boy has enthusiasm! Next to discovering, “Hey, here’s Paul Pope and Jay Stephens sitting next to me at the Eisner ceremony,” my yakking with Top Shelf’s most talented art director was a show highlight. Brett, you rock just right, man!)

CBA Editor Dies, Goes To Heaven After nudging my friend Eric Reynolds, Fantagraphics publicity dude, endlessly for a review copy of the first real collection, Jimmy Coorigan, The Smartest Boy on Earth, by that cartoonist god Chris Ware, the book finally arrived and upon reading, this lowly editor died, went to heaven, and was reprieved by Saint Pete to come back and type this scant review. The book is, simply, the most heartfelt and devastating book of comics I have ever read. Exquisitely designed, the volume is just overwhelming in its beauty, bringing to the reader’s eyes tears of joy (at the artistry of the work and consideration of presentation) and sadness over Jimmy’s pathetic plight to come to grips with his dad’s absence. And the tears just might flow after reading the endpaper’s “Apology,” a text piece I implore readers not to read until the end. Proof indeed that comics can be art. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Chip. Thank you, Fantagraphics and Pantheon.

CBA SCORES EISNER! Just when we thought us TwoMorrows folks would forever suffer the Susan Lucci syndrome— always bridesmaids but never brides at industry award shows—somebody messed up Big Time counting up the votes for the 2000 Eisner Awards allowing Comic Book Artist to snag the prize for Best Comics-Related Periodical this July at the San Diego comic con! Yee-oww, wotta honor! Fearless leader John Morrow’s nifty mag, The Jack Kirby Collector, had been rightfully nominated in the category for the last—what?—thirty-seven years or so, but some damned and obscure Seattle rant-zine always absconded with the plaque, so Eisner-wise things looked a bit bleak at Casa Morrow. But (snif) my pal John, gosh darn it, now has a nice bronze wall plaque to adorn his abode and TwoMorrows has finally made it in the ranks! Congrats and thanks, John and Pam! Without you two, there ain’t no way CBA could done it. While I only blurted out generic thanks to all readers and contributors at the ceremony (an intense state of shock will do that to you), I’d like to thank some folks specifically for their help and support of CBA over the last two years. As it was CBA #4, our investigation in “Empire of Horror: The Warren Publishing Story,” that apparently clinched the honor, my profound appreciation goes to David A. Roach and Cam Villar for their work as contributing editors on that ish. Sharing CBA for the first five issues, and contributing immeasurably to CBA proper quite often, A/E editor and CBA consulting editor Roy Thomas deserves my heartfelt gratitude. Also Fred Hembeck, Chris Knowles, Arlen Schumer, Richard Howell, Tom Ziuko, Bob

Coming: Sandy Plunkett I didn’t buy many mainstream super-hero comics in the early 1990s—except for a Moore & Co.’s 1963 title, or whatever Gil Kane was doing at the moment. I stuck to alternative and retro stuff mostly. But, just by chance, I picked up a Marvel Comics Presents (of all things!) and here’s this beautiful “Ant Man” job by an artist I never previously recognized, Sandy Inset: Nice, if tiny, example of Plunkett. So when contributor Tim Barnes told me Sandy’s lush linework, courtesy last year he’s a huge Plunkett fan in contact with of the artist. ©2000 Sandy Plunkett. the artist, you can bet your booties I greenlighted an interview pronto! Sandy just sent me a pile of simply gorgeous work and I’m raring to go on his special section to come in our “Love & Rocketeers” Dave Stevens/ Hernandez Bros. issue arriving in 2001! Thanks, Tim & Sandy!

Beerbohm, Jon B. Knutson, J.D. King, and everyone who contributes to and supports CBA. This one’s for you! (And that means you, too, Jim Warren!) I’m awed to have been nominated beside two of my favorite magazines of last—and any—year, The Comics Journal and The Imp, and lemme tell my pals at Fantagraphics— Gary, Kim, Scoop, Eric, Eric, and (did I miss any Erics?)— and Dan Raeburn that, sure it’s nice to win, but also most cool just to be considered in their distinguished company. (Now, Gary, about that CBA review… errr, slam, that is… tell Rich Kleiner to get his switchblade ready! It’s rumble-time!) I’m honestly doing CBA for fun, celebrating the good ol’ comics I liked as a kid, honoring those who toiled thanklessly in the field for the pleasure of squirts like me, and hopefully uncovering some hitherto unknown history in the process. Criticism of the present state of the industry is best left to TCJ and I can just hope CBA, by studying the mistakes and successes of the past, shares a lesson or two on what to do—and especially what not to do—for this rocky business and art form to survive. Finally, I’d like to thank that fellow, ol’ Will Eisner, himself. And not only because I’m currently getting blown away by looking at his rapid progression as a storyteller in the first Spirit Archive, or because I won an award named for him, or because I’ve had the opportunity to chat with Will any number of times. When I went on stage to grab my award, I shook hands with award coordinator Jackie Estrada, presenter Jeff Smith, and, sure, there’s Will Eisner. But—insert big Tex Avery double-take here—here’s Will-freakin’-Eisner extending his hand to congratulate me! You go, Mr. E!

RIDDLE ME THIS, NELSON! A fine time was had by Ye Ed and eldest son, Ben, when we attended the Big Apple Con’s September show. Thanks to Allan Rosenberg, Mike C., and all the great Charlton artists and writers who attended. Meeting Joe Gill was especially a hoot! But the coolest thing, by far, was when our tablemate, comics artist Nelson—a most def gentleman—gave my son a page of original art purely because my son admired it… or maybe because N. saw I was having more fun than Ben, digging through the boxes while my boy so ably covered the TwoMorrows’ table. Nelson, may you always have work and work at what you love. Gracias, dude. Above: Nelson sample page detail. Art ©2000 Nelson. Riddler ©2000 DC Comics.

NUMBER 10

Publisher

CELEBRATING THE LIVES & WORK OF THE GREAT CARTOONISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS

Editor/Designer JON B. COOKE

OCTOBER 2000

DEPARTMENTS: THE FRONT PAGE: LAST MINUTE BITS ON THE COMMUNITY OF COMIC BOOK ARTISTS, WRITERS & EDITORS ..........1

TWOMORROWS GUEST EDITORIAL: WHY A WOMEN’S ISSUE OF CBA? JOHN & PAM MORROW

Guest editor and comics legend Trina Robbins answers the question ..................................................................3

Guest Editor TRINA ROBBINS

UNABASHED PLUG DISCUSSION: WORDS OF THE STREETWISE Sergio Aragonés, Nick Cardy, Evan Dorkin, Scott Shaw!, and Walter Simonson on their Streetwise stories ..........4

Contributing Editors ROY THOMAS JOHN MORROW Proofreader JOHN MORROW Cover Art ANNE TIMMONS Cover Color CHRISTOPHER BUTCHER Production JON B. COOKE GREAT SWAMP GRAPHICS Transcribers JON B. KNUTSON BRIAN K. MORRIS Logo Designer/ Title Originator ARLEN SCHUMER Mascot WOODY by J.D. King Issue Theme Song EVERY KINDA PEOPLE Robert Palmer

MARGINALIA: GOSSAMER WHITE, FILLED WITH FRIGHT David A. Roach examines those odd early-’70s artifacts: The rise and fall of Gothic Romance comics ................7 WOMEN AND THE COMICS: A CELEBRATION TRINA ROBBINS INTERVIEW: WOMAN OF WONDER Our regular editor gets in a talk with our guest editor about her life in comics ....................................................8 CBA ROUNDTABLE: THE GREAT WOMEN CARTOONISTS’ SLUMBER PARTY OF 1999 Trina, Marie Severin and Ramona Fradon talk shop about their days in the comics biz ......................................20 MARIE SEVERIN INTERVIEW: MARY FLEENER TALKS TO SEVERIN The noted alternative artist chats with the renowned Marvel cartoonist & EC colorist........................................42 CBA COMMENTARY: WHAT DOES A WHITE DYKE WRITE LIKE? Borderlands and borders in Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Bitch and Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For ........50 HILDA TERRY INTERVIEW: “YOU DON’T DIE!” Teena’s creator talks to Trina Robbins about her comic strip career and past lives ..............................................54 FROM THE VAULT: TARPE MILLS, MISS FURY AND ALBINO JO Trina on the life and work of the artist with an exclusive peek at the unpublished Miss Fury graphic novel ......60 CBA COMMENTARY: CATWOMAN VS. HOTHEAD PAISAN—HEROES IN A MAN’S WORLD? Olga Abella examines two current female comics characters and how they reflect our world ............................62 WALTER SIMONSON INTERVIEW: THE MAN OF TWO GODS Our special flip section features talks with the artist and John Workman of Thor & Orion fame ..............FLIP US!

COMIC BOOK ARTIST™ is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Drive, Raleigh, NC 27605, USA. 919-833-8092. Jon B. Cooke, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 USA • 401-783-1669 • Fax: 401-783-1287. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT the editorial office. Single issues: $6.95 ($9.00 Canada, $10.00 elsewhere). Yearly subscriptions: $30 US, $42 Canada, $54 elsewhere. First Printing. All characters are © their respective owners. All material is © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter is © their respective authors. ©2000 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. PRINTED IN CANADA. Cover acknowledgement: Wonder Woman ©2000 DC Comics, GoGirl ©2000 Trina Robbins. Used with permission.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

Oct. 2000

Guest Editorial

Why A Women’s Issue of CBA? Guest editor and feminist cartoonist Trina Robbins explains Some of you are wondering why I would even ask that question. Others are thinking, “My thoughts precisely. Why do we need a special women’s issue of Comic Book Artist anyway? I’m tired of hearing about ‘women this and women that.’“ That’s an objection I’ve heard about women’s panels at comic conventions. Several years ago at a convention, a well-known comics writer asked me, “Don’t you agree that we no longer need a woman’s panel? I mean, it’s been done!” My answer: “Do you see the other panels bursting at the seams with women guests?” At some conventions, if there’s no women’s panel, no women will be on any panels. The same objections that are sometimes voiced against women’s panels, and my answers to those objections, also apply to this special women’s issue. Let’s try it: OBJECTION: Things like women’s panels and special women’s issues are ghettoizing women. ANSWER: I’ve seen anthologies of poetry by Native Americans; by Native American Women; by Native American single mothers; by Native American teenage single mothers; by Native American teenage single mothers with disabilities! The people in these anthologies don’t feel ghettoized; as a member of a usually unrecognized group, they have something special to say, and they welcome the opportunity to say it. OBJECTION: But you’re preaching to the converted (or, to the choir)! ANSWER: I’m not trying to convert anybody. There’ll always be people who’d be happier if the only females they saw in their world wore thong bikinis, had huge silicone breasts, and carried enormous guns. I talk to, and write for, people who are concerned that roughly 5% of comic readers are female, who’d like to see some balance in comics, and who believe, as I do, that diversity will save a dying indus-

try. These people are interested, as I am, in what a pioneer cartoonist like Hilda Terry has to say, or in the never-before seen work of Tarpe Mills, creator of America’s first costumed action heroine. These people are smart enough to be interested in the extremely un-fanboyish take on comics by academic women like Anne Thalheimer and Olga Abella. And hey, you can’t put together a woman’s issue without Marie Severin and Ramona Fradon, can you? But what if, instead of the usual interview, you have a woman cartoonist interviewing another woman

Contributors Marie Severin • Ramona Fradon Walter Simonson • John Workman Alex Toth • David A. Roach Anne Timmons • Chris Butcher Mary Fleener • Hilda Terry Tarpe Mills • Olga Abella Anne Thalheimer • Roy Thomas Joel Thingvall • Allen Milgrom David “Hambone” Hamilton Lancelot Falk • Louise Simonson Cathy Workman • Joey Cavalieri Sergio Aragonés • Scott Shaw! Nick Cardy • Evan Dorkin Michael T. Gilbert • Tom Ziuko Jerry Boyd • Bob Beerbohm Jim Guthrie • Sarge’s Comics Fred Hembeck • Arlen Schumer Dedicated to

Girls & Women Who Read Comics! and in loving memory of

Carl Barks

cartoonist? That’s what we have when Mary Fleener interviews Marie Severin, and when Marie Severin and Ramona Fradon interview each other! And what if you toss into the pot Ramona Fradon’s never-published art for The Cat, and tons of rarely-seen work by Marie Severin? Consider it done. So, dear reader, I’ve called you “concerned,” “interested,” and “smart.” I hope some day to call you part of a revitalized industry that includes men and women, kids, teenagers, and—hey, my cat would appreciate a comic done just for him!

Special Thanks To all of our readers and contributors, who helped to make Comic Book Artist the winner of the 2000 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Periodical. Foremost my appreciation goes to John & Pam Morrow, friends and publishers; my associate and contributing editors, Roy Thomas, Chris Knowles, David A. Roach; and to my wife and sons, and my brother, Andrew D. — JBC

Get GoGirl! and From Girls to Grrrlz! Just a few words from Ye Olde Editor this time out: My profound thanks to Trina Robbins for guest-editing this boffo “Women and The Comics” ish. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. While I don’t expect to be devoting too many issues to generic themes such as this, I think it’s vital to touch base with the contributions of those oft-neglected people in the field and I am delighted that a historian and professional of Trina’s celebrated stature agreed to helm an issue of my humble mag. You go, Trina! Speaking of that, I hope readers will check out Trina and Anne Timmons’ new comic title, GoGirl!, now on sale under the Image

imprint. Simple, fun, wholesome comics, just what this industry needs more of. And Trina’s latest book, From Girls to Grrrlz, is a thorough, enthusiastic, and enlightening foray into 60 years of girls’ comics, from Tess the Typist to Hothead Paisan. Lovingly designed and published by Chronicle Books, the book (subtitled “A History of Women’s Comics From Teens to Zines”) is available from your better comics stores and book shops, from amazon.com, or directly from Chronicle (www.chroniclebooks.com)—just use the ISBN #0-8118-2199-4 and have your $17.95 handy. Tell ’em CBA sent ya! —Jon B. Cooke

Visit CBA on our Website at: www.twomorrows.com All letters of comment, articles and artwork, please mail to: Jon B. Cooke, Editor, Comic Book Artist, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892-0204 Phone: (401) 783-1669 • Fax: (401) 783-1287 • E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com

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Panel Discussion

Words of The Streetwise Contributors to the Autobiographical Anthology Talk It Up

Sure, this feature is shameless self-promotion by Ye Ed and TwoMorrows to promote our first bona fide book of new comics stories , Streetwise, but we hope you’ll forgive us as we sincerely feel this anthology of autobiocomics stories is a landmark volume, giving comics pros a chance—most for the first time—for them to tell stories of their lives. Please seek out the ad in this issue for more details and how to order. Thanks!

Above: Steve Rude’s superb Streetwise cover depicts a young Jacob Kurtzberg—that’s Jack “The King” Kirby to us—first encountering a science-fiction pulp magazine in the streets of New York City’s Lower East Side. Jack credited this incident as a pivotal moment when he determined to seek a career as an artist. Art ©2000 Steve Rude, cover ©2000 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows.

Moderated by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by John Morrow Conducted on July 22, 2000 at Comic-Con International: San Diego, the following panel features Evan Dorkin, Sergio Aragonés, Michael T. Gilbert, Nick Cardy, Scott Shaw!, and Walter Simonson, six contributors to TwoMorrows’ latest book, Streetwise, the comics anthology of autobiographical stories by professionals. Here they discuss their submissions to the book and the stories behind their stories. Jon B. Cooke: I don’t know if everyone here knows about Streetwise, but it’s an autobiographical anthology. Just true stories; the idea for Streetwise came from Jack Kirby’s “Street Code” story, which I’ve always thought was Kirby’s most brilliant story. I was talking to Nick [Cardy] last Summer, interviewing him for [The Art of Nick Cardy], and we started talking about the way he draws city scenes, tenements—and [to Nick] you love doing that, right? Your contribution to Streetwise was a series of vignettes; not a sequential story, but more like snapshots. Nick Cardy: Well, the memories, the ones I did, were from age four to seven. I remember certain things, mainly impressions. In one of them, my mother was bathing me. In the time of the Depression, we lived in one of these long “railroad” flats. She put me in a porcelain basin on the counter neat the sink, and she was washing me. I don’t remember the washing as much as I do this big batch of Morning Glories. All these beautiful cerulean blues, and all the white light. That impressed me so much. That’s the earliest memory I have. There were a lot of things. When you came out of my house, there was a little place where you go down to the basement. During the Depression, some people didn’t have homes, and they were sleeping there in cardboard boxes, and stuff like that. So I drew myself peeking through the bars. Also, we used to salvage our skates; I’d cut one in half and put it on a board, and attach an orange crate. My kid sister says, “Yeah, I remember that; you put me in the back.” At that time there were a lot of homeless people, and we used to walk along the river. This is the East Side of New York City. They had a whole row of buildings from 15th Street up to Bellevue Hospital that were all demolished. But these guys had gotten sheets of corrugated metal, old doors, and were living in these... they looked like respectable men, but they really were worn out, y’know? The thing that hit me most was, everybody had a fire. They were all cooking or keeping warm. But the smoke kept going straight up, and

it stopped at a certain height, and formed like a big fog umbrella over this whole thing. Even as a kid I remembered that. To top it off, we walked along the pier, and there was a guy they had fished out of the river, and they put him on the pier, with all the seaweed hanging off him. Evan Dorkin: Was he dead? Cardy: Yeah, I hope so! [laughter] And I drew myself behind this cop; he was standing there with his baton behind his back, and I had to peek around his legs to see the corpse, and he said, “Get going, kid.” Just a lot of little things like that. There was this guy whose horse was pulling his wagon, filled with mattresses, about a story-and-a-half high. But the heat was over a hundred degrees, and the horse had collapsed. The guy that was driving the thing was trying to kick the horse, taking the whip to him. And people were throwing stuff at the guy; if they’d have had guns, they’d have shot him. Some people finally came with water and revived the horse, but it was so damn hot. That left an impression; it was all little things like that. Cooke: But that’s how the book got started. Nick obviously has a lot of memories of growing up in New York. I think Nick’s piece is real close to Kirby’s piece, in that it’s very reminiscent of growing up in the Lower East Side of New York. But other people took different approaches with their stories. Scott...? Scott Shaw!: I didn’t have much editorial input from you guys, other than I knew it was supposed to be autobiographical. I thought nobody’d care to hear how I got in the business; it’s more annoying to know that I’ve stayed in the business. [laughter] There’s nothing significant about me, but I am one of these people that’ve had such a weird life, I’ve got a lot of wacky little things that happened to me. I’m guess I’ve fallen in love with the nine-panel grid. It’s almost like how Big Little Books would have copy on one page, and an illustration on the next. It wasn’t as much storytelling, as picking the key moments. It’s kind of like what I do with advertising storyboards, where you’re not actually storyboarding for film or animation, as much as just hitting the key points of it. So I did something a little different; four one-page stories, and three of them are in the book. I had so much fun doing those, I’ve worked up a whole bunch more. I’m thinking about doing a book of them myself. My stories are just taken from crazy things that really happened to me. One’s about how, back in the late-1960s, I got punched out by a bunch of drunken jocks. The movie theater was showing a Popeye cartoon I really wanted to see, and they all got in my way, and I told them to sit down and shut up. They beat me up while watching Popeye get beaten up. [laughter] It was like an early version of “Sensurround.” [laughter] The story’s called “I Bled For Popeye.” [laughter] Then there’s one about when I was a little boy and dressed up as the Alien Superman from World’s Finest Comics. When I was a kid, I had the comics bug, and I lived a deluded life. This was the point that I realized not everybody reads comic books. I was walking around with an alien mask on and a Superman suit, because back then DC was doing all these crazy things, and in this one issue, there was a crazy Dick Sprang-looking Alien Superman. It never occurred to me Superman already was an alien. [laughter] I’m walking around, and people are saying, “What are you supposed to be, little boy?” “Oh, I’m the Alien Superman from World’s Finest #105.” [laughter] I assumed they read it like they read the newspaper or Time magazine. It was fun for me to solve the problem of how to tell these stoCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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ries on a single page, and also the fun of drawing in my own style for a change, instead of working in all the commercial styles I usually do. And it was just a pleasure to be in a book with Nick, and Sam Glanzman, and Jack Kirby, and Sergio (who did what I think is the funniest story he’s ever drawn). My son turned up in two different stories; one of mine, and Sergio’s, so now he’s walking around like he’s a big cartoon stud, so that’s kind of cool. [laughter] Dorkin: Maybe someday someone’ll wear a costume of him. [laughter] Cooke: Streetwise, in one way, I think is a surprising collection. We approached mainstream artists and asked them to tell the stories of their lives. Underground and alternative cartoonists have been doing it for years; Evan’s been doing it to some degree for a while now. An important autobiographical book came out in the early 1980s called Gates of Eden, from Fantaco. There was a Steve Leialoha story about the Altimont concert that was just amazing; I think you had a story in that one, didn’t you, Michael? Michael T. Gilbert: Yeah. I’ve been doing autobiographical stories for 20 years, really. I was inspired by some of Robert Crumb’s autobiographical stories; he’s been doing stories about himself since the 1960s. Harvey Pekar was doing some interesting stories about his life and the people he knows. It made me think about all the small incidents that go on around us all the time, and how they can be interesting if you put them down in an interesting way. You’re always an editor of your own story, and you can get some pretty fascinating things if you dig into it a little bit. The story I gave for Streetwise was called “Dinner Party.” I was living in California in the late-1970s with this old couple who had friends whose son had really gotten into LSD, and basically just fried his brains out. It’s kind of a scary, cautionary tale. I chose to show not only how if affected him, but how it affected his parents. They were this really nice, straight-laced older couple, and they had this kid who’s just babbling on like crazy. Cooke: Evan, your contribution to Streetwise, ”The Soda Thief,” was a true story? Dorkin: Well, yeah, it’s supposed to be true. [laughter] All comics are a lie to a degree, especially autobio comics. You’re not going to remember everything. With Streetwise, I had just done an autobiographical issue of my anthology Dork, which was very depressing. It was basically about a nervous breakdown I had for about two years, where I was having a lot of problems. I related my problems toward my childhood and my involvement with comics and fandom. It sort of touched a lot of nerves with a lot of people on the comic book fan/pro level, since you spend a lot of time in a room by yourself, either as a professional or a fan. We all seem to have this shared reason that we got into the genre of fantasy, and it all sort of spilled out in that issue. It was a bummer, and so depressing, that I didn’t want to do anything serious for Streetwise. When John [Morrow] invited me to contribute something, and told me who was going to be in it, I had panic attacks, because I couldn’t believe I was going to be in a book with these amazing people! So I thought about doing something serious to prove I’m an “artist,” but I decided I wanted to do something lighthearted. I thought if everyone took the tack of the serious “Street Code” story, maybe mine would be some comedy relief. And then, of course, you got funnier people. [laughter] I just tried to hold my end up, and instead of telling an important story, I tried to take a very trivial story, and place it in the context of what my life was like around age 13, and have some connection to comics and being a child, and being Jewish, and throw in as much detail and material as possible about what was a very trivial incident. About 1973 I decided to become a Camp Menace at summer camp by stealing everyone’s soda, which is an incredibly stupid thing to do. I should have gone for their money, [laughter] or their comic books, because everybody had Mad, and I was just getting into it. That’s when I was introduced to Kurtzman and Elder, because they’d reprint the comics, and I’d try to throw all these things in there; what my life was like at 13, just discovering girls, and just discovering that girls didn’t like me. [laughter] I guess I just needed to be noticed, so I went around stealing everyone’s soda. I would steal soda that people had drank from; if they turned around, I’d grab it. I’d take it out of their coolers. I’d gamble for money to go to the soda machines. It was like, “My Oct. 2000

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name is Evan Dorkin, and I am a sodaholic.” [laughter] I was a really energetic kid, and I just loved caffeine, and I decided to become this phantom menace; nobody knew I was doing it. I was playing cards and backgammon to win money to run down to my twin dealers by the camp commissary. One day I saw a can of soda, and I grabbed it like an idiot, and I downed it. It was half-filled with about a hundred tiny ants. [groans, laughter] It had been sitting there anywhere from six hours to a day; I realized too late that my fingers said, “Hot, the can is hot,” and I just spit out this black lump. [laughter] It was like a horror movie; it just wriggled, and then there’s ants, ants everywhere. They were black and they were sticky; it was Seven-Up, so they were in this clear liquid. It was creepy! [laughter] It was like I was in this William Castle movie, and I just got suckered with Emergo-Vision. [laughter] It cured me; I was cured! So I just decided to take this really trivial story, and see if I could tell it interestingly, and place it in context, and really over-dramatize it, sort of like a horror thing. So there’s some nods to EC, without doing an EC thing. I was actually going to try to do it in that mechanical EC lettering, but EC stuff’s been done to death, so I decided to just leave it alone and kind of hint at it. But I just tried to do something goofy, but with a payoff, I guess. Cooke: Walter, how did you come to the idea of doing “The Sparking Cruise” for Streetwise? Walter Simonson: Unlike everybody else here, I’ve had a really boring life. I just do comics; I don’t travel around a lot. Howard Chaykin once referred to me in print as “The Andy Hardy of Comics.” [laughter] I didn’t hate my parents, I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and I had a very boring childhood. Fine for me, it’s my cup of tea. I read comics as a kid, and quit reading them in high school. At

Above: It was with a casual conversation between Nick Cardy (whose Streetwise contribution is excerpted above) and the book’s co-editor, Jon B. Cooke which led to the conceptualizing of Streetwise, a landmark anthology featuring autobiographical comic stories by many of the top professionals in the field. ©2000 Nick Cardy. Below: Cartoonist Scott Shaw! contributes three one-page strips to Streetwise. Here’s a detail from his “I Was The Alien Superman!” ©2000 Scott Shaw.

that time, there weren’t comics shops; you had to go to spinner racks at the drugstore, and when you’re in high school, girls can see you reading the stuff, and that really wasn’t very cool. I never met any girls anyway, so I don’t know why I wasn’t just reading the comics. [laughter] But I didn’t get into comics professionally for a while. Originally, my interest in life was to be a paleontologist, and study dinosaurs. Well, you have to go to grad school for that, which means in college you had to major in Geology or Biology. In Biology you had to take Organic Chemistry, so I blew that off and was a Geology major in college. After my junior year, I hooked up for a summer job of what was supposed to be two weeks on what was called a “Sparking Cruise,” which is an oceanographic research cruise. South of the Hudson River, out of New York City, the water has carved a deep groove in the Continental Shelf, and it’s called the Hudson Canyon. The idea of the cruise was to go out in a small freighter with a generator and a long length of electrical cable. These big brass electrodes are screwed into the end of the cable, and you trail these behind the ship with a lead weight on them, and every few seconds you fire off a big spark out of your generator: Whack! The spark hits the bottom of the ocean floor and bounces back up, and you set these off every two or three seconds. You get a continuous trace of the ocean floor, sort of like a seismograph or an EKG. The neatest part was that, at night, every three seconds you’d get this big green glow that’d light up the surface of the water. It looks like Captain Nemo and the Nautilus are coming up behind you. The electrode burns off every so often, so you have to unscrew what’s left of it, and screw in a whole new one, and wrap it with rubber tape. Unfortunately, we hadn’t really gotten the tape on quite tight enough, and some seawater got into it. After we’d been out for about a day-and-a-half, we fired off an electrical spark, and it blew off the entire end of the sparker. We hauled it back in, and that was pretty much the end of the cruise. I thought that would be something most people would have no experience with, and I was really trying to tell a story that would be interesting in and of itself; that would be a little informative, and interesting, I hope. Before I was married, I used to walk around with my jeans rolled up to my knees; I was too embarrassed to wear shorts. [laughter] I got in the habit of wearing jeans like this, and on a ship in the ocean, this is a really bad idea. The Titanic movie hadn’t yet come out, but as the movie later pointed out, it’s really cool to go up and stand on the bow of the ship, and ride the bow. But what you’re not thinking about on those bright sunny days is all that water’s like a mirror, and I got really fried. [laughter] I could see the line from my socks for the entire rest of the Summer. I had about a foot of calf exposed, and it was just fried. I had that line for about six or eight months. Cooke: Sergio, do you regularly refer to your life when you create your stories? Sergio Aragonés: Well, doing magazine cartooning, my problem was identification—for people to recognize my work. Everybody would buy books if they love the characters, but when you do panels, you have to really be an excellent cartoonist for people to buy books based on your name. When I was starting out, I figured out that if I unify all my work by putting my face on it, I would be the character that sold the books. I was doing that even in Mexico. So I did the Mad books with my face on them, but it was just to tie the book to something, with an image that people would recognize. My life is completely opposite of Walter’s. I was born in Spain during the War, I was in refugee camps, we escaped from the Nazis, we went to France, we were refugees to another country. Everything was a total adventure. I love to travel; with Mad magazine alone, we took over 36 trips overseas, and right there I have 100 anecdotes with the guys. Everybody at Mad’s crazy, and all the writers are trying to outdo each other. So every minute of the trip is filled with these crazy things they’re doing. You didn’t want to be left out, so you do some crazy things, so they’ll think you’re funny too. So I have a million anecdotes. My problem was how to choose what to do for Streetwise. Autobiographical stories tend to be so overly dramatic, because they’re usually done by young people who are so down on the whole thing, because they can’t get out of their lousy apartment, 6

or they can’t get money for their stories, or the editors don’t like them. So they have all these horror stories; these poor kids, they’re only 20 years old, and they should, like, kill themselves. [laughter] And then you have all the people who also do comics, and they work in miserable jobs, and they tell these sad things, like in American Splendor. You get so sad about them. So I figured I’d do something with humor in it. And as I tell in my story, I’m having lunch with Scott Shaw!, and Scott loves gorillas, and he says, “Tell the gorilla story.” This really happened. Once I did aquatic ballet—not because I was a great swimmer. One day in college, I went to the swimming pool, which was my favorite hangout instead of class, and they wouldn’t let us in. They were auditioning girls for the aquatic ballet, and the whole pool is full of beautiful girls! Hundreds of them! I said, “They’re not going to stop me from going to that pool,” [laughter] so I go to the lady in charge and say, “Do you have a place for a man in your aquatic ballet?” She said, “Do you dive?” I said, “Sure I dive.” [laughter] She said, “Are you funny?” “Oh, that’s my specialty! [laughter] If you need a funny diver, I’m your man!” So I started doing silly diving, because I wanted to be there in the pool with hundreds of girls; it was great. And a professional team saw me and hired me to go with them. Cooke: With the girls? [laughter] Aragonés: We were two men; a serious diver and a clown diver, and about 24 girls. The dressing rooms were just one room for everybody. We’d do the silly jumps that everybody does; you run and kick the moon and you fall down with a big splat. We did that so the girls could change clothes for the different acts. Once we were at a pool, and it was made very tubular, very industrial. It had a great, modern, Italian diving board. And I thought this would be great to do a gorilla act. I can climb and go, “Ooohh, ooohh, oohhh,” and the other guy can be Tarzan and teach the gorilla to dive. Then of course I would try to push him, and he would jump, and I would fall into the water; a silly little routine. So I practiced; I could walk like a gorilla, and everything was just perfect. Then when we came to the budget to do it, the Tarzan suit was very cheap; just a bathing suit painted. But a gorilla suit was too expensive for the team to do. So that was it; we couldn’t do our act. I went walking in the city, and there was a costume rental place with a beautiful gorilla suit for rent. It was so great, with imported hair, [laughter] and the face was great. And the guy says, “Oh, be very careful with it. Don’t spill any soda on it at the party.” [laughter] I put it on, and they loved it, and I had my suit for the act. I went into the routine. I started by scaring the kids in the audience, and then I climbed the thing. And then I jump in the water, and go under, and drop to the bottom. And I couldn’t move! [laughter] The suit was filled with water! [laughter] So the only solution was to walk to the shallow end. [laughter] And all the hair fell out, and all the girls are swimming in a pool full of hair. [laughter] It was ridiculous; that suit disintegrated. [laughter] So I had to take it off, and all I had left on was the mask and the hands, and kids were crying. [laughter] It was awful. The lady that was in charge of the show was a former Miss Mexico, and she went with me to the rental place to calm the guy down. I didn’t get paid for a very long time, because they discounted it from my salary. [laughter] But that’s my story. I didn’t plan the length of it; I told it as it happened. I didn’t know how many pages it would be, but I didn’t want to skimp on the storytelling, and I did it the way I would have told it. Cooke: Are there any questions from the audience? Audience: Is the Jack Kirby piece a story of his childhood in the slums? What did he originally do it for? John Morrow: Yes, it’s a tenpage story he did in 1983. Richard Kyle was publishing Argosy, and he commissioned Jack to do the piece. Jack actually did the piece in 1983, but it wasn’t published until 1990 because Richard lost his financial backing. Cooke: Jack was telling Richard really dramatic stories of his youth, and Richard asked, “Can you do a comic book story about your life?” There’s a novel idea! It’s funny; Streetwise is like that. Most of these artists were never asked to do a comics story about their life until now.

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Marginalia

Gossamer White, Filled with Fright Part One of The Rise and Fall of Gothic Romance Comics by David A. Roach In 1971, romance was in the air. If the ’70s comics scene was about anything, it was about horror. And barbarians. And talking ducks, muck monsters, teenaged Presidents, cowboys, vampires, drag racers, and kung fu. Anything, in fact, except super-heroes. They were still there, of course, but their star was on the wane. The heroes of Showcase and The Brave and the Bold—Green Lantern, The Atom, Hawkman, The Challengers of the Unknown, and so many more had been cancelled, and at Marvel all the new heroes were monsters. But amongst all the blood and gore, the delicate flower of romance was blooming once more. At the turn of the decade, DC was still publishing seven regular romance comics and the whole line was undergoing a creative renaissance. New editors Joe Orlando, Dick Giordano and Murray Boltinoff brought a new relevance and a more contemporary edge to the comics. New creators like Tony DeZuniga, Sergio Aragonés, and Ric Estrada, along with the likes of Alex Toth, Mike Sekowsky, Art Saaf, and Vince Colletta, ensured that the strips looked and felt like they were set in the ’70s, perhaps moreso than any other DC books at that time. Elsewhere love was also taking off again: After a gap of almost a decade, Marvel revived their romance line with a pair of exquisitely drawn books—My Love and Our Love Story—while Charlton was regularly publishing an astonishing 11 titles. With love and horror seemingly sweeping all before them, it was surely inevitable that someone would have the imagination to combine the two. Odd combinations are nothing new in comics and collectors have long treasured such hybrids as Space Western, Range Romances, and Western Love, but other factors probably influenced DC as well. It is surely no coincidence that gothic romance paperbacks were beginning to take hold among female readers and DC probably saw an opportunity to tap

into that more mature (chronologically speaking, at least) audience. The success of the Dark Shadows TV show had also shown that a mainstream audience would accept at least the trappings of horror if wrapped in a romantic soap-opera setting. DC first explored the genre very tentatively with a number of archetypical gothic romance covers. Ever since their revival in 1968, the DC mystery books had featured Neal Adams covers starring an unidentified group of children coming across something peculiar or horrific. However, for House of Secrets #88, Adams drew a frightened long tressed damsel in elegantly wind-blown robes, fleeing from an ominous looking mansion (ringed by a coterie of demonic gargoyles). It was, in short, a classic gothic cover. The following issue sported an exquisite Gray Morrow illustration that could happily have graced any self-respecting Mills & Boan potboiler. HOS #90 rather confused things by placing Adams’ imperiled heroine in outer space, house and all! With that, the brief gothic flirtation was abandoned for six months until an ad in the August 1971 edition of House of Mystery heralded the imminent arrival of The House of Forbidden Love. Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love, as it was extravagantly titled, finally appeared in October of that year and was joined one month later by The Sinister House of Secret Love. Both sported similar logos, stunningly painted covers and luxuriated in DC’s 25¢ 48-page format which allowed their usually full-length stories the room to really grab the reader (or at least that was the idea). Several of the covers looked to have been taken directly from gothic paperbacks, and pointedly, the word “comic” is conspicuous by its absence. Indeed, Sinister House #2 declares itself to be a “graphic novel of gothic terror,” and it’s obvious that DC was reaching out to that vast untapped book reading market. From its very beginning, Dark Mansion #1 set the pattern for successive issues. In “The Mystery of the Missing Bride,” young Laura Chandler meets handsome, brooding Michael Langfrey and is whisked off to his decaying ancestral home. Once there, she is terrified by various demented old relatives, narrowly escapes death a few times, and gets to walk around in a transparent nightdress. Naturally in the end, her beau’s deranged family meets painful deaths and she gets to smooch her husband-to-be. With both titles having near identical contents and alternating bi-monthly schedules, DC effectively had a monthly comic with a revolving creative team. The projects’ initial editor was Dorothy Woolfolk, who was replaced on Sinister House of Secret Love (after its first issue) by Joe Orlando. These appointments made sense since Woolfolk had just taken over the entire romance line and Orlando had extensive experience in both romance and horror. That first Dark Mansion story was drawn by Tony DeZuniga, and he and Don Heck effectively alternated on titles with the art teams of Ernie Chua & Vince Colletta and Mike Sekowsky & Dick Giordano drawing one issue each. While most of the issues were solid enough, continued on page 58

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Left inset: Detail of Jeff Jones’s fine cover to The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love #3. (And yes, Virginia, there is the obligatory castle with a single lit window in the background of Jeff’s actual work!) ©2000 DC Comics. 7

CBA Interview

Trina, Woman of Wonder The artist/author talks about her life in comix & comics Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Brian K. Morris In a field where most stick to one area of expertise, Trina Robbins is all over the place… the ardent feminist artist/writer has been an underground cartoonist (since 1967), editor, commentator, advocate, mainstream comics creator, and historian, always promoting the participation of women in comics and working to increase female readership. CBA thanks Trina for being this issue’s guest editor and allowing us to interview her via phone on May 24, 2000. This transcript was copy-edited by Trina.

Above: Trina’s first stint as an editor came with It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, 1970, the first all-women comix anthology. Daringly, the cover featured copyrighted characters Olive Oyl, Wonder Woman, Mary Marvel, Little Lulu, Sheena, and Elsie the Cow on the cover. ©2000 the respective copyright holders.

Comic Book Artist: Where are you from? Trina Robbins: Queens, New York, South Ozone Park, which is the pits. If you ever saw All in the Family in the ’70s, that’s supposed to be where they lived. So that should tell you about my neighborhood. CBA: What kind of upbringing did you have? Trina: It was a mostly working class Irish and Italian Catholic neighborhood and we were the only Jews within miles. Plus, everybody was very politically conservative and we were radicals, so I stuck out like a sore thumb. CBA: Your father was a Socialist? Trina: Definitely. He was a Yiddish writer, which is a way to be even more obscure than an underground cartoonist. CBA: For the local papers? Trina: There were no local Yiddish papers in Queens, believe me. [chuckles] But there was one, I believe, that came out either in Brooklyn or Manhattan. He wrote for that. CBA: Did you have a lot of newspapers with comic strips coming into the house? Trina: Father bought The New York Times which, of course, had no comics and he bought this newspaper that was, indeed, quite left wing and it kept changing its name. It was named P.M., The Star, and The Compass but it was always the same newspaper. It just changed its name and it carried The Spirit section. So I got to grow up with Will Eisner’s The Spirit which was great. It carried the ones comics scholars argue were the best comics put out in the ’50s. It also carried Barnaby and Pogo. CBA: So you had exposure to the Good Stuff? Trina: Yes, but I just loved comics, period. The landlady who lived downstairs would get the other newspapers that carried the comics like the Journal-American or the Daily News (papers which my father wouldn’t allow in the house). Those were right wing rags. But the

landlady would put her papers out for recycling and I would steal the comic sections, bring them all home, read them in one lump and then put them back in her pile. So I got to read those comics too. CBA: Were comic books always around? Trina: Well, my sister was reading comics so they really were kind of always around. I used to see her read the teen comics I absolutely adore now—you know, those Timely teen comics like Patsy Walker and the others. It was through reading her Patsy Walkers that I discovered these great comics and soon was buying them myself. CBA: Do you recall encountering Wonder Woman? Trina: You know, I don’t remember where I first encountered Wonder Woman, but I sure bought the title, and I always bought Sensation Comics. I bought anything she was in but I remember being very disappointed with Sensation because there was only one Wonder Woman story and all the rest were a bunch of guys and they were very boring. So there I was, squandering my 10¢ on just a single Wonder Woman story. CBA: An important point you raised in From Girls to Grrrlzs was that the demographics of comics readership was, in the late ’40s, the majority of comics readers were female. Trina: Into the 1950s, also. Well, of course, that was because of those great teen comics and love comics which were really very popular. I didn’t buy the love comics because I was one of the smart kids; only the dumb girls read them. But the fact is that I would borrow them from the girls considered dumb and read them anyway. I read them under the desk in school. So even though I didn’t buy them, that way I could tell myself I was a smart kid and not a dumb girl. [laughter] And I’m still reading them. They were irresistible and they are still irresistible. Ask anyone who collects them today! CBA: I’ve been exposed to Kirby’s work for over 30 years but only recently have I discovered his great romance work. Trina: Oh, they’re fabulous, but no one talks about them. Well, I think I read one guy who talked about those books as though they were a really low point in Jack Kirby’s life. But, oh God, they were beautiful, with Joe Simon’s inking, of course. They were the perfect team, just wonderful. I’m probably going to get drummed out of the industry for saying this, but I don’t think that Jack Kirby’s ever been as good with another inker as he was with Joe Simon. CBA: So the mature subject matter of the romance books didn’t turn you off; you just secretly read them? Trina: Oh, yeah. Sure, I loved it. You know, it wasn’t all that mature, as you know. They would have provocative titles, you know, like “Back Street Girl.” But you know, nothing ever really happened. CBA: [laughter] Right! All the action was in the title. Did you pick up the pencil and start drawing from the word go? Trina: I was drawing as long as I could hold a crayon. I’ve always been drawing. And at about the age of nine or ten, I started drawing comics. I would just take an 8 1⁄ 2”x11” sheet of white paper, fold it in half, and then I had four pages. And I would do a four-page comic, you know. And I would start from the beginning, you know, like kids do when they don’t know how exactly, how you’re supposed to do it. You just do it panel by panel. CBA: And what kind of strips did you draw? Trina: Well, I can remember two of them. One of them was a jungle girl that I called Green Goddess because I had heard about Green Goddess Salad Dressing. And I thought, “Wow! A Green Goddess. That’s really cool!” So I had my jungle girl going into this temple and there’s this Green Goddess. I mean, the story was pretty simple. The jungle girl says, “Why, she’s green.” And the Goddess immediately COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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points a long fingernail at her followers and says, “Kill her!” You know, classic comic book stuff. The jungle girl has to fight all the bad guys. Somehow, the Green Goddess disappears in a puff of smoke and that’s the ending. [laughter] The other one was, I guess, a love comic, but I’m not sure. I think it was based on those comics that weren’t necessarily romances but were like girl’s adventures. For a while, Timely put out this great series blatantly called Girl Comics, and they weren’t so much love comics as real stories of adventures for girls. One was “I Was a Spy For the Communists.” The male leads might just as easily been the girl’s brother or her father who she saves from a train wreck. Mine was called “Liar!” because my heroine just lied her way into jobs, but then it caught up with her because she was working for this really important government position. She brought these papers home with her to work on because she didn’t want to finish them at work and they got stolen and she lied about it and, of course, she wound up in prison. That was the basic story. [laughter] CBA: So what did you do with the stories? Did you share them around the neighborhood? Trina: I must have kept them, you know. I remember the end of “Liar!,” with her standing there, clutching the bars with either hand, and staring through the bars, saying, “Don’t be like me. Always tell the truth!” CBA: [laughter] Simon & Kirby were an influence on you. Did you have encouragement at home for drawing? Trina: Oh God, yes. I had very supportive parents. My mother was a teacher and she taught me to read at the age of four, in fact. And the house was just filled with books. I was never told “Don’t be a writer; don’t be an artist. You have to get married and have kids.” I was never told that. CBA: You, obviously, had an attraction for not only girl comics, but empowered female protagonists? Trina: Oh, totally. I didn’t know when I was a kid reading comics that women weren’t empowered. It really came as a shock to me. [laughter] CBA: You didn’t realize a gender gap? Trina: Yeah, I didn’t know. Comics women could do anything. I didn’t know that in the Real World women couldn’t. CBA: When did the startling realization come through? Trina: It was in high school. CBA: So your parents obviously didn’t look down upon you reading comics. Trina: No, because I read everything. I wasn’t going to face “Oh, she’s only reading comics and not reading good books” because I read everything. I read every book in the house and used up the local public library. I never stopped reading. CBA: Were there particular authors you were interested in as a kid? Were they serial books like Nancy Drew? Trina: I definitely read Nancy Drew. I read any books with female heroines. One of them that I have never forgotten: My mother kept the books that she had as a girl. I read them too and they tended to be girls adventures. Of course, The Bobbsey Twins. But even earlier than Nancy Drew, and one of them that I have never forgotten and I’m still looking for this series—I would be just thrilled if I could even find one book in this series—the Maxie series. Maxie was the heroine and she was a high school-age girl, a young teenager. But she was a girl explorer. Her parents had been explorers and they had been lost in the jungles. I can’t remember now whether they were lost in Australia or the Congo or where, but they were lost somewhere. They disappeared in the jungle and so she was living with her parents’ best friends who were Venezuelans. She lived in Venezuela with this family, even though she was American, and they had a daughter who was Maxie’s age and was her best friend. Her name was Petra. So Maxie and Petra would have these great adventures, go everywhere, like when Maxie went to London. In one of the stories, Maxie actually goes back to the jungle where her parents disappeared and finds them. They were captured by Pygmies and the mother is being worshiped as a white goddess by the tribe. It would be considered racist today but who knew from racism? And she’s kept the father hidden because if the Pygmies knew about him, they would kill him. And she’s given birth to twins but she’s also had to Oct. 2000

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keep them hidden. So Maxie rescues them all and winds up with an infant brother and sister. [laughter] I loved those books so much. They were so great. And these were, like, even earlier because they’d been my mother’s. And they never said that a girl couldn’t do this. CBA: How many brothers and sisters do you have? Trina: Just one, a big sister. CBA: Were you two close? Trina: Oh, I adored and worshiped her and, of course, she thought I was a little pest. It’s the traditional big sister/little sister situation. But I got to read her comics. CBA: [laughter] Were you just specifically looking out for girls comics or did you read everything? Trina: Well, in Queens in those days, you could get comics at the corner candy store. There would be a rack that said, “Hey, kids! Comics!” And I would look at them all and immediately the ones that had guys in them like Superman and Batman, and all the others, just would bore me to tears. Just looking at them I would get bored. Instant boredom. So I just automatically went to the titles with female leads. CBA: Did you swap comics in the neighborhood? Trina: Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. So many more kids read comics in those days than now. In fact, I think every single kid I knew read comics. In our local grade school, on the last day of school (which meant you’d taken all your tests and everything was really done and you just had to pick up your report card), the tradition was kids could bring in their comic books and trade comics right there in the classroom. I’ll tell you that an awful lot of the boys read Archie. You know, it wasn’t just girls reading those comics.

Above: Trina poses for cartoonist Melinda Gebbie at a 1973 Wimmen’s Comix meeting. Courtesy of Trina Robbins.

Below: It’s Trina with infant daughter Casey (and unidentified feline) in a 1970 photo. Courtesy of Trina.

Above: Left to right, here’s women cartoonists Dori Seda, Trina, and Terri Boyce at the 1983 San Diego Comic-Con. Courtesy of Trina.

CBA: In the late-’40s and early-’50s, there was some pressure from parent and teacher’s groups against comics. Trina: Well, I knew there were parents and teachers who didn’t approve since they thought if we read comics we wouldn’t read good stuff and comics were not good literature. I knew that feeling existed, but not with my parents. CBA: So you came from an educated, enlightened household. Was there a point when you said, “I’m going to leave comics behind”? Trina: Well, my mother said that to me and I was always such a good girl that I listened to my mother. That was when I reached high school. My mother said, “Well, you’re not a kid any more; you’re a teenager in high school. Comics are for kids; they’re kid stuff. So you should stop reading them.” And I said, “Yeah, okay. You’re right.” And I gave my collection away to the neighborhood kids (which, of course, we all know how much that stuff would have been worth today!). But I didn’t really stop reading comics; I just stopped buying them. I would read other kids’ comics like the love titles. I started reading EC comics that other kids had. As a teen, I discovered Mad, but it was as though Mad wasn’t really a comic. Mad was different; it was satire and that was okay. CBA: Did it startle you to come across Kurtzman’s stuff? In hindsight, Mad had quite an impact on American culture. Trina: Oh, it was brilliant and I just adored it immediately. It was so funny. CBA: So from there, did you go to college from high school? Trina: I lasted a year in college. I wasn’t sure really what I wanted to do. I was going to be an English major with an Art minor. Really, I was going to write stories and illustrate them—which is what comics are but that didn’t occur to me at the time. CBA: Were you aware there were women creators in comics? Trina: No, I wasn’t. You know, at that point, I really didn’t—no, I take that back. There was only one artist I really knew, and that was Wally Wood. But most artists I didn’t know. I didn’t know who drew because they weren’t credited. Now Woody used to sign his name with that big, fancy gothic Wood. You knew his stuff and it just really stood out. He was my favorite artist and I was crazy about him. There were others who were my favorite artists but I didn’t know their names. CBA: Even though you weren’t buying comics at the time, and you were reading them because they were still around, did you feel that in the late-’50s, that the quality of comics dropped, that the heart went out of them? Was there anything of interest to you in them?

Trina: They did stop being interesting. I mean, some time around the late-’50s was when H.G. Peter stopped drawing Wonder Woman and I wasn’t the least bit interested in the new artists who took over. It just wasn’t interesting any more. The only thing that was still interesting was Mad and Pogo. CBA: When you saw Peter’s work and you read those stories, did they seem bizarre to you? Trina: Oh, I was crazy about them. It was such wonderful fantasies, you know. They always had lost kingdoms and a lot of myths. Sea creatures, outer space creatures, Venus women, seal men—they were almost fairy tale-like. And I adored fairy tales as a kid and, naturally, fell into fantasy as soon as I was old enough to discover science-fiction and fantasy. I never liked the hard science stuff but I loved the fantasy. They were wonderful because they were so fantastic, so full of fantasy and fairy tale elements, beautiful winged women. And of course, again, because I was so much more interested in females than males, Wonder Woman was like sometimes almost totally female. I mean, the males almost didn’t exist at all. You could read page after page and it was just filled with female characters. Goddesses and queens and princesses, it was just marvelous. CBA: [laughs] They were such weird, but endearing, books. The H.G. Peter stuff with this element of bondage that just comes through. It’s weird on a kid’s mind, but it—Trina: No. All the guys who write about Wonder Woman always talk about the bondage. But I have to tell you, honest to God, that as a little girl, I didn’t even see bondage. I mean, yes, she got tied up, but heroes always got tied up. As I pointed out in one of my books, Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel, and Captain Marvel Jr. always got bound and gagged. [laughs] They always had to find some way to loosen their gags so they could say the magic word, “Shazam!” or “Captain Marvel!” I was used to comics, and even in the B movie serials, I was used to characters being tied up and I didn’t see anything beyond that in Wonder Woman. What I saw was the fantasy elements. Now, guys have pointed it out, but I really and truly didn’t see it as a girl. I think you see what you’re looking for, and those guys are looking for bondage. CBA: One of my most treasured possessions is a Wonder Woman collection with a Gloria Steinem introduction. Trina: Oh, I have that one. The Ms. collection. CBA: Yeah, with that weird essay on Amazons that didn’t have anything to do with the Wonder Woman comic books. Trina: No connection at all. Very strange. Phyllis Chesler, huh? Very weird. CBA: So being exposed to that much H.G. Peter was like, “Wow. Now this is comics!” Trina: Exactly. I have to say, by the way, that Dr. William Moulton Marston, one of the most fascinating things I found out about him was he ended his letters with the phrase “Horses, horses.” I don’t know what it meant [laughter], but it was such a great way to end a letter. [laughter] I love that. It’s perfect. CBA: You went to college for a year. Did you work in the New York area? Trina: I had a part-time job while I was going to college because we were very poor. I had to support myself while going to college. CBA: And so you stayed at home? Trina: Yeah. CBA: And then did you pursue your art at all? Trina: Well, after Queens College—by the way, I was not really a dropout as much as a kind of a kick-out. I just lost interest, really. Instead, I learned the joys of hanging out with upper classmen on the campus and playing folk songs on acoustic guitars, so I stopped going to a lot of classes and that’s one reason they flunked me out. [laughter] After that I went to Cooper Union for a year and I didn’t last there either because—it’s like a major art school. It’s really good, too. You have to pass tests. [laughter] I even passed the test to get in. But I thought what would happen—I was just very young and naive, I thought they were going to teach me how to draw better. But they weren’t into that, and I’m not sure if they are even now. The only class that talked about drawing was life sketching and everything else was abstract. They were very into abstract and I wasn’t at all interested and, again, I lost interest and started cutting classes, and so they COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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threw me out. I felt that when that happened, they were saying, “Thou art not an artist! Begone!” So for many years, I went, “Okay, I’m not an artist. I just do these little drawings on paper but they don’t count.” [chuckles] As you know, of course, so many people feel that comics is not an art, so it’s the same kind of attitude. CBA: Did you still have an interest by the early-’60s in what was going on in comics? Trina: Well, I rediscovered comics in the mid-’60s. That was when the whole Pop Art thing started happening, Batman was on TV, and Marvel was in full swing—that’s when the college students and hippies were reading Fantastic Four and Spider-Man and it was all just suddenly new and different. That’s when I rediscovered them. CBA: Along with American society. Trina: Everyone, yeah. CBA: Didn’t you get published in [underground comix newspaper] Gothic Blimp Works, rather early in the game? Trina: Yes. Well, that was either 1968 or ’69. CBA: How about previous to that? Trina: Oh, yeah. I was first published in the East Village Other in 1966. CBA: What was it? A one-panel gag? Trina: It was a one-panel drawing with lots of word balloons, a proto-comic. After that, I started doing a strip that appeared irregularly in EVO. CBA: What was the subject? Trina: Well, actually, it advertised my boutique. I had a boutique on the Lower East Side. You have to understand that I had left home as soon as possible—Queens, that is—after being kicked out of two colleges and went to live in Los Angeles. I was married. I had a husband in L.A. and we were living Sunset Strip/rock ’n roll/hippie lives at the time. And I was making clothes for rock stars. And then we split up and I went to New York and I opened a boutique because the stuff I made was very clever and different and adventurous for those days. L.A. was always, of course, the clothes were much more far out than what they were wearing in New York. I came to New York and didn’t see anything that was as clever as what I was making and rents were really low on the Lower East Side. It was the hip and happening place so I opened a boutique there. The EVO strips I did were actually ads for my boutique done in trade for making clothes for the people who worked on the staff. Except that the strips were so subtle most people didn’t even know they were ads. [laughter] Readers thought these were great little psychedelic strips but really what I was doing was sponsoring a comic strip. CBA: In your books on comics, especially the latest, I notice an emphasis on paper dolls. Is there a connection between that and your clothes designing? Trina: Oh, sure. I love clothes. God, I love clothes. I also love paper dolls. [laughter] And not all, but lots of the early comics used to have paper dolls. It was an accepted thing. You know, Brenda Starr had paper dolls in the newspapers. But even some of them had paper dolls in the comics. Katy Keene, of course, is a great example and I grew up with Katy Keene. Millie the Model had paper dolls and some of the other teen comics had paper dolls. Miss Fury had paper dolls. (Now, I didn’t discover Miss Fury until later because she was in the ’40s. I found her later, when one day, in the ’70s at a convention, somebody said to me, “You should read Miss Fury. You’d love it.” And I said, “Oh, yeah?” and I discovered her. They were, of course, absolutely right. CBA: And that was a daily strip and then it was collected? Trina: It was a daily strip and it was collected in comic form. And in the comic books, it had paper dolls. So, like it was a real tradition to have paper dolls of comic characters. CBA: Did you send in paper doll designs? Trina: No, I was so young and naive, I didn’t realize that Bill Woggon redrew the art they received from submissions. I thought you had to draw those things, that what appeared was your art and that all these paper dolls were done by people who were such good artists that they could make it look exactly like Katy Keene. So I never sent anything in. [laughter] But I used to draw my own paper dolls. CBA: Obviously, by the ’60s, there weren’t paper dolls anymore. But you got to use real people instead of paper dolls: Your clothes designing, was it really just akin to cartooning? Oct. 2000

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Trina: Well, I don’t know how clothes designing could be the same as cartooning except that it was my own personal statement. CBA: How did you go about designing clothes? Trina: Oh, you can be shopping and find a fabric and say, “Oh, wouldn’t this look great in a style with really, really wide sleeves and a ruffle at the hem?” Or you can just sketch it out first and then go looking for the fabric. Either way, really. CBA: So it was you expressing very creatively at a time before you were fully involved in cartooning? Trina: Oh, yeah. Well, that started because I was very poor and loved clothing but couldn’t afford to buy them. So I made them and at a certain point, I had too many clothes and my wardrobe was too full. I still had the urge to make clothes because I had all these ideas in my head and wanted to create them, so the only thing to do was to make and sell them. CBA: When you were in L.A., did you have memorable clientele? Trina: Oh, yeah. Oh, God, yes. CBA: Can you drop any names? Trina: Oh, sure. I made a very short minidress for Joni Mitchell, a shirt for David Crosby and another for Donovan. And I made a couple of dresses for Mama Cass because she couldn’t find anything nice in her size. CBA: After your separation with your husband, did you come back to New York? Or did you have a thriving business in L.A. at the time? Trina: In L.A., I was just sewing from our home for these people, privately designing for them. Oh, I also made a dress for the guy who played Robin on TV, Burt Ward. It was for his wife to wear to the Academy Awards. Anyway, I didn’t have a store in L.A., but when I came to New York, like I say, the rents were so low on the Lower East Side anyway, nobody was doing what I was doing so I just had to do it. CBA: What was the name of the boutique? Trina: It was called Broccoli. Remember, this was back in the days when rock groups and stores had cute names. [laughter] CBA: How long did it last? Trina: From 1966 to ’69, roughly. CBA: When was your daughter Casey born? Trina: 1970. CBA: By that time, you were involved in cartooning? Trina: I was living in San Francisco doing underground comix, yes. CBA: When did you move to San Francisco? Trina: December, 1969. CBA: Were you attracted to what was coming out of underground comix? Trina: This was in the very, very earliest days of the undergrounds. It just seemed to have so much potential. You could do comics but they didn’t have to be Spider-Man or Fantastic Four. You could do it in your own style and say things that mattered to you—to us hippies, us counter-culture people. And, in the beginning, I really felt that this was so great that we were all together and doing the stuff we were making. They may have been silly comments like “Off the Pigs!” and “Sex and drugs and rock ’n roll,” but we were making our own comments. But at a certain point—certainly by 1970—I was seeing all this misogyny in comix drawn by men and, of course, most of the cartoonists were men which provoked a thing that hadn’t occurred to me in the beginning: I hadn’t realized that there was going to be a

Above: On the left, that’s cartoonist Lee Marrs looking over a book with Trina at an early ’90s San Diego Comic-Con. Courtesy of Trina. Below and opposite below: Egyptian King Tutankhamun and wife Ankhesenamun from Trina’s 1990 collection, Near Myths. ©2000 Trina Robbins.

difference between men and women and that maybe I might not be as accepted because I was female. It was really a bit of a shock that this all happened. CBA: Were there any other women cartoonists? Trina: In 1970, in San Francisco, there was one other woman cartoonist, Willy Mendes. CBA: And what did she do? Trina: She did very psychedelic stuff and she was having the same problem I was having. It was such a Boy’s Club. I mean, basically, they would call each other up, and say, “Hi, I’m putting together a book. Would you like to contribute?” But they never called us up and asked that. CBA: Previous to moving out to San Francisco, did you go over to First Fridays? Trina: Yes, I did. Flo Steinberg brought me. CBA: How did you get hooked up with Flo? Trina: I met her through Woody, through Wally Wood. Art spiegelman took me to Wood’s studio and that’s how I met Woody. CBA: Did you know art through EVO? Trina: You know, I met art just purely by coincidence. It might have been as early as ’67, maybe ’68, I can’t remember now. You get the years a bit confused when it’s that long ago, but it was when I had my boutique and, like I said, I was making clothes for the staff of EVO and one day, we decided to go out and just do a photo shoot. Some of them were wearing outfits that I had made. I guess the photographer was Walter Bredell because he took most of the photos for EVO. We went to some construction site and everybody posed on the steamshovels and stuff like that. And this guy came by and, I swear to you that for the first time I saw him, I thought he was a little old Jewish guy. He was wearing a long overcoat, like an old man’s overcoat, and he was passing out these comix he had done; Xeroxed,

photocopied comix, one-pages and they were cute, psychedelic things. And I took one. He was passing them out for free as he walked down the street. And I said, “This is great. Gosh, I draw comics, too.” And I told him where my store was and he dropped by a few days later and we became friends, and that was art. And, you know, I found out he was only 21 at the time, and he wasn’t a little old Jewish guy at all. [laughter] CBA: That must have been interesting to see that kind of direct sales distribution taking place! Trina: It was totally direct. It was just great. CBA: You were involved in Gothic Blimp Works? Trina: Yes. CBA: What did you do for them? Trina: I started in the second issue. CBA: It was a monthly? Trina: Yes, it was a monthly. Because all the guy cartoonists were focusing on sex as subject matter, I tried to think of sex from a woman’s point of view like what, to me, was the sexiest thing I could think of. And I was always such a cat lover, you know, so I came up with the idea of sex with a lion (which, obviously, would kill you). [laughter] But this was comix, so it was a nice lion. And the result was my character, Panthea, who was half-lion, half-woman. CBA: She was your first continuing character? Trina: My first continuing character, yes. CBA: You met Flo through Woody and you met Woody through art. Do you recall First Fridays at all and what they were like? Trina: Oh yeah, of course. They were really great. Roy Thomas was there and, of course, Ann and Archie Goodwin, and I remember various people, like Bill Everett, who was such a nice guy. I remember once Steve Ditko came, just this one time, and it was so weird. Even people like the Goodwins thought he was a little weird. He was just this strange little gray man in a gray suit standing all alone and not socializing with anyone. And Ann commented on that. She went up to him and asked, “Can I get you anything?” And he said, “No.” He left early. . CBA: Did you go to First Fridays every month? Trina: I think when I started going, I went every time. CBA: Was it at Roy’s at the time, do you recall? Trina: No, it was at the Goodwins. CBA: I guess Jeff and Weezie Jones took it over after that. In San Francisco, you were there about three years after 1967, the “Summer of Love.” It was certainly a hotbed for underground cartooning. Was that the attraction? Trina: I guess so. It seemed as though one year, or one month even, or within a few months, all the underground cartoonists in New York suddenly said, “Gee, let’s go to San Francisco.” And we all headed West like lemmings. CBA: And how long did you stay in San Francisco? Trina: Well, I’m still here. CBA: That was the start of it? And the end of it? Trina: Uh-huh. [laughter] CBA: Were you pretty much born a feminist? Trina: [laughter] When the doctor lifted me and said, “It’s a feminist.” [laughter] CBA: You were born into an enlightened, progressive household. Trina: Yes, I was and I didn’t know. I really and truly didn’t know that there were limits to what a woman could do. I just didn’t know. CBA: And your life seems to profess that there really aren’t any limits to what a woman can do. Trina: The only limits are what are imposed on by society. CBA: But yet you went into the All-Boys Club of underground cartoonists. Trina: Well, at the time, I didn’t know it was an All-Boys Club. CBA: That’s an important distinction. So you didn’t see any limits? Trina: Unfortunately, not as soon as I started doing it, but later, really, as it got bigger. Because in the beginning, because there were so few underground cartoonists, it really wasn’t an All-Boys Club. There weren’t enough people for it to be a Boy’s Club. But then as it got bigger, it became a boy’s club. But I wasn’t going to leave. For one thing, my reactions are never to just say, “Oh well, in that case I guess I’ll just leave.” CBA: You go ahead and do. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Trina: [laughter] Uh-huh. CBA: Did that closed-gender mentality also express itself with the comix publishers? Trina: Oh, no. That’s the weird thing: I never had any problems with getting published. I could do my own books and always get them published, because the publishers knew that people liked and bought my books. The publishers weren’t excluding; it was just the guys, the artists. CBA: By 1970 and ’71, suddenly it seemed girls stopped buying comics or they were buying Archie comics exclusively. The demise of love comics began; DC tried to recapture the female audience through gothic romance but failed. Trina: Yeah. Great stories but it was too little, too late. They’d already lost their audience. CBA: Where did the girls go? Trina: God knows. It’s not like girls stopped reading. I think they went to movie magazines, books. Girls have always read more books than boys. Not literally always, but within the last half of the 20th Century, at least. 75% of book buyers are female. They just went elsewhere. CBA: Perhaps the overall content wasn’t that appealing any more. Trina: Exactly. CBA: It was becoming super-hero dominated. Trina: Yes, they weren’t doing comics for girls so, of course, they lost their female audience. CBA: And I wonder if it had anything to do with the influx of, pardon the expression, fanboys coming into the business. Trina: Oh, of course it did. By then, these were guys who were second-generation comics people, having grown up on comics. The guys who entered the field in the early-’70s wanted to do what they had read when they were kids and what they had grown up on, of course. And it also became very incestuous because they were writing for themselves. They weren’t writing for an audience; they were writing for an audience that was themselves. CBA: Right, and not taking into consideration any mass market or mass appeal for the material and being so focussed upon doing super-heroes that the other genres fell simply fell off. Trina: Well, of course, what happened at the same time was the direct sales market and that was a fan thing. The direct sales market was definitely comics by fans for fans and that’s who went to the comic stores. CBA: Did you have any interest, in the late-’60s or up to the mid-’70s, in trying to break into mainstream comics? Trina: I just wasn’t working in that style and I never really have worked in that style so I didn’t even consider it. CBA: About your style, did you have any particular artists who influenced you or was it totally idiosyncratic? Trina: Well, Will Eisner influenced me to start with. Matt Baker influenced me (though I didn’t even know he was Matt Baker). CBA: That’s right. You had a real interest in Fiction House comics. Trina: Oh, yeah. I loved Fiction House. I loved the jungle girls. They had such strong female characters. And, of course, the teen comics influenced me. Not so much the Archie style but the Timely style or the Katy Keene style. CBA: Right, which persists to this day in your work. When did you consider, “Hey, I can edit my own comic and put an entire book out myself”? Trina: 1970. That was the first all-girl comic, It Ain’t Me, Babe. Here I was in San Francisco, basically being ignored by the guys. They weren’t calling me up and saying, “Will you be in my book?” I was really alone, I’d come all this way and I was just alone so I joined the staff of It Ain’t Me, Babe, an underground feminist newspaper. In those days we called it women’s liberation. I later found out it was the first women’s liberation paper on the West Coast but I’ve since found out it was the first women’s liberation newspaper, period, which I hadn’t realized at the time. Anyway, I joined their staff and I was their de facto art director. Because we believed in total equality, nobody got credit. I mean, I signed my work, of course, but I didn’t get credit as art director but I basically was the art director. And it was because I was working with them, that gave me the back-up, the strength, the emotional support to create my own book which was It Ain’t Me, Babe Comix, so I did it with them. Oct. 2000

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CBA: Was it a separate thing, or was it going to be used as an insert? Trina: No, no. It was a separate comic book but it was put out in conjunction with the staff which consisted of about four women. I mean, this was a very small thing, but it wasn’t published by them. It was published by Last Gasp. It was the very, very first ever all-women comics anthology. (I stress this because some obnoxious woman reporter from New York, about two years ago, interviewed me and I told her this. I said I did It Ain’t Me, Babe which was the first allwoman comic and when she wrote her article on women in comics, she said Trina Robbins produced one of the first all-woman anthologies and that just absolutely and totally infuriated me. It was like she was hedging her bets just in case there was another. Well, there hasn’t been another. This was the very first ever done.) CBA: What were the contents of the first issue? Trina: Well, of course, the artists were all feminists. Willy Mendes was in it, and she did the back cover, I did the front cover. Michelle Brand (now Michelle Wrightson) was in it. CBA: Michelle was an artist? Trina: Yes. There was a two-page spread by Hurricane Nancy Kalish who had originally done stuff for EVO using the pseudonym Panzika and whose comic, in fact, in 1966, was the first underground newspaper comic I’d ever seen and I didn’t know Panzika was a woman, but it so inspired me, it was very psychedelic. I thought it was just fantastic and never forgot it. Then two years later, in ’68, I met her and she turned out to be a woman. So it had two pages by her. I mean, it was all-woman.[chuckles] CBA: Was Lee Marrs involved? Trina: No, Lee came afterwards. It was really too bad. Lee showed up at my door after the entire book had already been delivered to Ron Turner. It was filled. CBA: The cover featured trademarked characters? Trina: Yes, it did. CBA: And did you ever get any heat from that? Trina: No. CBA: And you were involved in other anthologies coming out at the time? Trina: No, because the guys didn’t put me in their anthologies. But after It Ain’t Me, Babe, I did some stuff with Willy Mendes . We did a couple of books together and I did my own books and then, by 1972, Wimmens Comix came out. CBA: And was that your baby? Trina: No. Absolutely not. Wimmens Comix was also published by Last Gasp and it was because It Ain’t Me, Babe had done really well and Ron Turner wanted to do another. But I was feeling very picky and very touchy. I just wanted to produce the best book that had ever been produced. I wanted it to be better than anything that any of the guys had ever done and It Ain’t Me, Babe wasn’t that, and so I wasn’t happy with it because it wasn’t the best book ever produced. [laughter] And so I didn’t want to do another. But he still wanted to do a feminist comic. So Patty Moodian was working for Last Gasp at the time and she got together a whole group of women, including me. And she edited the very first Wimmens Comix and the whole group of us became the Wimmens Comix Collective. And after Patty, every single issue was coedited, with two editors working together and it was a rotating editorship so everyone got their chance. So it wasn’t anybody’s baby,

Below: Hey, whenever CBA gets a chance to feature a photog of one of our favoritest wimmen in comics, Fantabulous Flo Steinberg, you can bet we jump at the chance. Courtesy of Trina, here’s a late ’80s pic of Flo, Steve Leialoha, and our guest editor!

Above: Trina’s last comix anthology gig, 1990’s Choices, as close to self-publishing as the editor-artist ever wants to get. Below is Trina’s story contribution. ©2000 Trina Robbins. Cover ©2000 Lee Marrs.

it was all our baby. CBA: Right. And did you get to be co-editor of the book? Trina: Uh-huh. CBA: In the early ’70s, there were other outlets for material, right? Trina: Oh, yeah. CBA: So did you do work for High Times, for instance? Trina: I did. I did comics for High Times. I guess it was the later-’70s. And I also did stuff for National Lampoon through the ’80s. CBA: Did you work with Michael Gross over at NatLamp? Trina: Yes, I did. And he’s a swell guy. He’s a terrific guy. CBA: There was some extraordinary stuff that was coming out there. Trina: Just incredible and, of course, at a certain time, Sherry Flenniken became the cartoon editor there and she was wonderful. She was so supportive. She was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. CBA: So did you keep that in mind when you were talking about doing the best book you could possibly do; did that come to a realization or were you compiling a book over a period of time? Trina: Well, I did do my own books, sure. And they were the best I could possibly do. CBA: Was this Wet Satin? Trina: No, it was Girl Fight. Girl Fight came out after It Ain’t Me,

Babe. I had actually wanted to call it Girl Fight Comics, but the feminists on the staff of It Ain’t Me, Babe just would not allow me to use the term ‘girl’ because in those days, you just didn’t which is very ironic since today, all the best of the women's comics have the title ‘girl’ in them. So, I was, unfortunately, 30 years ahead of my time. [laughter] Because I like the idea of reclaiming ‘girl’ and using it in a fun context, but they didn’t go for it. So I did my own comix. I did two issues of Girl Fight and I think the first one was in ’71 and the second was ’73. In between, Wimmens Comix came out. CBA: You published them yourself? Trina: No, they were published by The Print Mint. CBA: Did you consider being a publisher? Trina: Well, I self-published once and that was in 1990, I guess. I self-published a comic book called Choices which was a pro-choice benefit comic and all the profits went to the National Organization of Women. 1990 was a bad time. We had a Republican President trying to take away our right to choose what we do with our own bodies, basically denying us our reproductive rights. The Supreme Court had passed the Webster Decision, which meant the rules of reproductive rights were up to each state which was really terrible because you had some of the really right wing Southern states which passed really, really strict laws. And it was very scary. So I did this book. I wanted to do this book and I did it with my partner. I don’t think I could have done it alone because numbers terrify me so. I did it with Liz Schiller who was the treasurer of East Bay NOW and who became the business person and I was the creative person. CBA: After that was published, how did you feel about the experience of self-publishing? Trina: Oh, I felt great about it. It’s a wonderful, excellent book. We got just the best work from all these really, really good cartoonists. I’m terribly proud of it. CBA: Would you like to self-publish again someday?

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Trina: No. [laughter] I did it once for a very good cause but it takes a lot of time and energy. And if I had not, in fact, had a business partner, I couldn’t have done it. And I would never do it, no. I just don’t have the time or the energy. CBA: As was the underground norm in those days, you maintained ownership over your own work, right? Trina: Oh, yes. CBA: Were you ever approached by advertising agencies, for instance, to do work? Trina: No. CBA: No? Because you had such a unique style, I would think you’d have been approached. It seemed to be very hip for the time. Trina: Never. They didn’t think so. CBA: So you were doing a lot of freelance work. Were you making…? Trina: I was making a semi-decent living, yeah. I mean, because of doing stuff for Lampoon and High Times. You know, they paid very nicely. And I even did a tiny bit of stuff for Heavy Metal, during the late-’70s I think, I was doing very well. I mean, for my standards, by freelance artist-underground cartoonist standards, I was doing well. CBA: Around 1973, when the Supreme Court decision came down about the definition of obscenity being defined at a local level, obviously there was a shockwave that went through the underground community with head shops closing or refusing to carry undergrounds for a period of time. Did you feel affected by that? Trina: I didn’t feel the least bit affected. CBA: You didn’t? Trina: Well, maybe it’s because what I did was just not as obscene as what the guys were doing. But I didn’t feel affected one bit. CBA: So did you feel a decline within the industry itself, within the underground field? It seemed to suddenly diversify within other elements. Trina: Well, that’s when ground-level comics popped up by the mid-’70s. CBA: Right. And so you were able to work in ground-levels? Trina: Not really. I didn’t do very much in ground-level comics. I was in them a little bit. CBA: But you continued doing your own work. And when did you start taking on the role of comics historian? Trina: In the mid-’80s, I did Women and the Comics with cat yronwode [of Eclipse]. I just really wanted to do it and I knew there had been women in comics. And every time I would mention this to the guys, I’d say I’m doing a book on women cartoonists, and they’d go, “Oh, that’ll be a slim volume.” You know, that was the cliché line, but I knew that wasn’t true. I knew there had been lots of women in comics. But at the time, in the mid-’80s, I just didn’t feel competent enough to do this myself. I had never done a book before so I asked cat if she would work on it with me. CBA: And what was the response from that book? Trina: Oh, it was very good except that, of course, the book went out of print immediately. The book was published and the first orders went out to the stores and then the Eclipse offices were in Guerneville, California. And that was the year of the Great Guerneville Flood, and all of Eclipse books were stashed in the basement of their building. That meant that all the books, including every single copy of Women and the Comics that wasn’t in the stores or that I didn’t have, were turned into paper maché. So that book went out of print quicker than any book could possibly go out of print. [chuckles] CBA: Oh, well. And did that go through a reprinting? Trina: No, it didn’t. And because it hadn’t been reprinted, and by the early-’90s, Eclipse was going through various problems… I don’t want to say bad things about them because I really like cat very much and because cat and Dean were very good to me… But anyway, they were not reprinting and so I went to Denis Kitchen [of Kitchen Sink]. Anyway, I now felt strong enough to do my own book. I had already done a children’s book in 1990 called Catswalk, and I felt much more competent. And what I wanted to do was a book just about the women cartoonists because Women and the Comics had been about women in every part of the comics; editing, publishing, you know, all of this. Coloring and lettering, as far as I’m concerned, has been a women’s ghetto. That hasn’t been the creative Oct. 2000

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part. And certainly, I can think of at least one woman publisher who hasn’t made the least bit of difference, the fact that she’s publishing new comics that are totally boy-oriented. And editing, well, you know there are some good editors. But then there are others who just, all they do is make sure the books come in on time. I haven’t seen a major difference because a woman or a man is an editor is what I’m trying to say. So I just wanted to do it just about the cartoonists themselves and that was very different from the one I did with cat. And, of course, that was A Century of Women Cartoonists. CBA: As I do CBA, it’s a continuing discovery process of “Wow! I didn’t know that, and I didn’t know that.” [laughter] Was A Century of Women Cartoonists the same type of experience? Were you just constantly discovering unknown stuff? Trina: Oh, yeah. Oh, God. All the books I’ve written have been like that. It’s been like archeology: I’ve had these incredible, really exciting discoveries about women that nobody has ever written about before. A very good example: Virginia Huget was a flapper cartoonist. She had a great style, an absolutely darling style, really, really good. Then, in the ’40s, she ghosted for people including Percy Crosby. She could ghost other people’s styles and was very good at that. She could draw however she wanted. In the ’40s, she took over a strip that had been drawn, I think, by Russell Patterson. I’m not sure, but it was called Oh, Diana and she took it over in a completely different style and she changed her name to Virginia Clark (actually her maiden name). So who knew this? Especially since it was even in a totally different style, right? And I had known nothing about Oh, Diana. The only thing I knew about Oh, Diana was in Coulton Waugh’s book, The Comics, from 1948, which everyone considers such a great book. And it is a fun book, you know. He mentioned Oh, Diana and shows like three panels from it which are by no means her best. In fact, they might be the least of her panels, these three that he shows. And nowhere does he ever say—even though 1948 was only 20 years after 1928, so he must have known—but he never said that she drew these flapper strips 20 years before under the name Virginia Huget. He hasn’t told us anything about Virginia Clark, just shows us these three very bad panels. And I have to find this all out myself. I made this amazing discovery that Virginia Clark and Virginia Huget were the same woman and that she had drawn in two completely

Above and below: Cover and splash page to Misty #5, Trina’s limited series published by Marvel in 1986, a short-lived attempt by the House of Ideas to attract a girl readership. Trina was creator, writer and artist of the series. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Trina’s late-’80s Eclipse title, California Girls (#5). Note that the outfit and painting were designed by a certain Florence Steinberg of New York City. Hmmmm… Below is an example of Trina’s paper dolls from the same issue. ©2000 Trina.

different styles. He doesn’t bother to tell us this. You know, Coulton is a perfectly good example of a guy who everyone says his book is so great, it’s seminal. And yet he barely mentions women at all. CBA: Right, and yet women have obviously been cartooning for well over a century. Trina: Yes, and Waugh remembered a lot of them, but he just doesn’t mention them. CBA: So did you go for firstperson oral history? Trina: Well, only when people were alive. CBA: Yes. [laughter] And through that, what did you find out? Are there any lessons to be derived from the experiences of women cartoonists? Trina: Well, in the early days, it wasn’t a boy’s club. This is very important. In the early days, nobody thought it was weird that a woman should draw comics. And nobody tried to keep women out of comics. It became a boy’s club later. CBA: Do you see a clear demarcation or was it subtle and insidious? Trina: I think subtle and insidious and I think starting after World War II really, because a lot of the guys who were of age to draw comics were off fighting overseas, and women stepped in and there were tons of women drawing comics in that period. But after the war, very slowly, as in every industry, the women got pushed out. And in the case of comics, judging from the women that I interviewed, it wasn’t as if they were suddenly fired. They were all freelancers, anyway. It was more like the work dried up and they weren’t given new work. So they were just gradually eased out. And women, in general, were encouraged to marry and raise families instead of going to work. And it’s what happened in comics. CBA: So a number of women left comics, never to come back? Trina: Oh yeah, oh definitely. And a lot of them, they did because they were young also. A majority of the men and women working in comics were in their twenties in those days, so the guys came home and the women married them. The tradition in those days, once you got married, was you quit work and stayed home to raise a family. And that's what a lot of them did, and they just never went back to the field. I mean, Ruth Atkinson, who I interviewed, had been art director for Fiction House comics in 1943. She drew for Fiction House in the early-’50s. In ’52, she drew love comics

for Lev Gleason. She did a couple of teen comics. She actually drew the first Patsy Walkers in 1945. She did the first Millie the Model in 1945. She’s actually seminal, she’s so important. But the guys don’t care, you know, because she didn’t draw Captain Whatsit. She drew Patsy Walker but Patsy Walker doesn’t matter to them. But anyway, she got married and around ’53 or so, had a baby. And then, the way she put it, she couldn’t stand it any more, staying home with the baby. She started hating herself and everybody started hating her. So she went and looked for work, but by then it was the late-’50s and the industry had dried up, and there was no work. There simply was no work by then. It was too late. So she didn’t stop being an artist, but she went into sculpting, jewelry design, and commercial art. CBA: How is the book From Girls to Grrrlz doing? Trina: I guess it’s doing well. I mean, I still see it everywhere and it got fabulous reviews when it came out. I get really nice e-mail fan letters from everyone, really, but what’s best is when I get responses from young women or teenage girls who were given the book as a gift and they tell me how much they love it. That’s just so great. CBA: I think the delightful thing about the book is that it seems to reflect your unbridled enthusiasm for the art form. Trina: Well, thank you. “Unbridled enthusiasm for the art form.” Very good. [laughter] CBA: And especially how well art directed it is, also. It’s just explosive to open up. Trina: Well, God bless Chronicle Books. Don’t they do beautiful books? CBA: Yes. I’m jealous. [laughter] What’s very interesting is that you don’t really have a demarcation of mainstream comics and underground comix and alternative comix. When it all comes together, it’s all comics. Overall, how do you see the future of comics? Trina: Ah well, you know, it could go either way. It could all just completely crumble because it’s doing so badly right now. It’s totally fallen apart. If that happens, then out of the ashes might rise a new and better kind of comics that are produced for everyone, not just boys between the ages of 14 and 19. So that could happen. Or, in a desperate move to survive, the industry might actually diversify and start doing stuff for women and girls, in which case it will survive. CBA: Do you have any opinions about distribution? Trina: Oh, yeah, we have to do something about distribution. I’m going to get in trouble again and I’m always told not to do this, because the retailers are the ones who carry my books. But that’s the problem in that no one but the retailers carry my books. I’m told not to say bad things about them, but [laughs] what can I tell you? I have to speak the truth. Until we learn to bypass the retailers, the comic book stores, we have to find another method of distribution or else comics will become this tiny, tiny, tiny little market for this little, bitty fraction of the population, which is what they are now. CBA: Right. I mean, it seems that if you blindly walk into a comic book shop you’re assaulted with images of misogyny and deathobsession. Trina: Oh God, I know. Women who don’t read comics have thought, “Well, I’d like to give it a try,” and they got as far as the door, looked in and they told me it was like being in a porn shop. So they never went in and forget about it if they’re little girls. They’re not going to get past the gore images and it’s all full of big boys. They’re not going to go in. CBA: Are you encouraged with books like Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting? Trina: Oh, yes. Castle Waiting is such a lovely book, isn’t it? Of course I’m always encouraged by the few good books that come out. CBA: And books that are specifically seem to attract children for an audience, whether it’s Patty Cake or Leave It To Chance, any number of books that are out there. I wonder how well they’re doing. Trina: Well, Leave It To Chance doesn’t seem to exist any more. That’s because, you know, if the only place it’s carried is in a comic book store, it’s not going to survive because boys go into comic book stores and they don’t want to buy books about girls, they just don’t want to. CBA: In a Comics Journal interview, you said, yes, there were female protagonists within the stories you enjoyed as a child but it COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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was the adventure that overall attracted you. It wasn’t merely the fact they were females. Trina: The fanboys of today, the young guys who are reading comics are not necessarily looking for the adventure, they are looking for violence. And there’s a difference between adventure and violence. They’re not interested in characters like Chance because she’s 13 years old and doesn’t wear size 44D cups. CBA: Right. Well, they ain’t supposed to be the audience, anyway, hopefully. [laughter] Trina: Yeah, but the trouble is, you see, that books like Leave It To Chance, as long as the only place they’re carried is in comic book stores, they are not reaching their audience. That’s why we have to find another method of distribution. If we’re going to do these books, we have to reach our audience and you can’t reach that audience in comic book stores. CBA: So do you see book stores as the answer? Trina: It certainly is one answer. Graphic novels sold in book stores is a definite answer. But another is, look, Archie has survived all this while and you can get Archie Digests at the checkout stand in Safeway. Now, how come they know this and the other publishers don’t know this? CBA: Maybe it has to do with the fact it’s so hard to get that coveted rack space? Trina: But other people can do it. Hard, schmard. What’s wrong with hard? The industry has redesigned itself and reconfigured itself before. We just have to do it again. Hard is not an answer. If that’s the excuse, what kind of excuse is that? “Hey, I didn’t do my homework because it was so hard.” You know, that’s not an excuse. That’s absurd. CBA: Touché. [laughter] So let’s fight for that space. What’s in the future for you, Trina? Trina: Well, I just finished and sent off to the publisher my most recent book, which is a biography of a forgotten woman illustrator/cartoonist who was a superstar at the early part of the 20th century. Her name was Nell Brinkley and she was nationally syndicated by the Hearst papers. And she made news, no matter what she did. She was really a superstar. She had popular songs written about her in 1908 and 1909. They did her characters in the Ziegfeld Follies and she’s now just been completely forgotten. CBA: What was her strip? Trina: It wasn’t a strip. She did a daily panel. It was, like, just a drawing although in the ’20s, she actually did things that had continuity and had panels. But mostly what she did was a daily panel and commentary beneath it. And her commentary itself is interesting because it really tells you about the state of things, it was very woman-oriented and her biggest fans were women. And you can really see the change in American woman in her commentary. And her art was incredible, there’s no way around it. Her art was just stupendous, absolutely gorgeous. And the women she drew were so beautiful. They were called the Brinkley Girls and they were considered to have superceded the Gibson Girls. And yet everyone still knows about the Gibson Girls but they’ve forgotten the Brinkley Girls. So I Above: Cover to Trina’s new title, GoGirl. ©2000 Trina Robbins. wrote her biography. CBA: And you have a comic book coming out? Trina: Yes, GoGirl!. Thanks for bringing it up. That’ll be out in August and it’s going to be a quarterly. It’s coming out from Image Comics and advance reaction has been so incredibly encouraging. People who have seen it just loved it. It’s drawn by Anne Timmons who basically draws the way I would draw if I could draw better. [laughter] So I found the perfect artist. The whole team is very good. They’re really into it, they’re just very enthusiastic about what they’re doing. The colorist who is only coloring the covers because it’s black-&-white interiors is Chris Butcher and he did coloring for Evil and Malice which is the same kind of coloring I want—really nice and bright. And the letterer is not just the letterer, he’s also the designer, a computer genius and that’s Sean Glumace. He’s really good. CBA: What’s the premise of the strip? Trina: GoGirl! is—surprise!—a teenage girl. Her mom was a super-heroine in the ’70s called Go-Go Girl who wore the white boots and the little white mini-dress. Then she got married and her husband felt threatened by having a wife who could fly so she stopped being a super-heroine in order to raise a baby Oct. 2000

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GoGirl Artist

Anne Timmons An E-Chat with Our Splendid Cover Artist Comic Book Artist: Anne, where are you from? Anne Timmons: Vancouver, Washington CBA: When did you get interested in comics? Anne: I got interested in comics with the Sunday comics. I loved the color!!! My favorites were Blondie, Prince Valiant, Peanuts, Apartment 3-G, Winnie Winkle, half a dozen more. When I was nine, I got my first comic book, Little Dot. I also enjoyed Archie and science-fiction comics, too. CBA: When did you start seeking a career as a professional artist? Anne: I have illustrated for a number of projects over the past years. Some were for educational software and others for advertising. One was for a children’s book. I haven’t been doing comic books for very long, although it seems to me like an eternity! I started sending samples to publishers about six years ago. My first paid gig was for a Star Trek comic that I illustrated for Malibu Comics [Deep Space Nine Special #1]. At that time, I was a little more familiar with the show than I was with superheroes. CBA: What were your aspirations in the field? Anne: I wanted to illustrate comics like Apartment 3-G or a story about a costume designer who worked in the movie industry. I figured that way I could draw all kinds fascinating people and backgrounds. I still would like to do a project like that someday, I think it would be a blast! CBA: Can you describe your professional experience? Anne: I’ve had the opportunity to work beside some really great people in the field. Last year I shared studio space with a group of artists in Portland, Oregon. We worked together on a couple of projects [CHIX] and I learned how a comic book is put together. CBA: Did you perceive any bias as a woman artist? Anne: I’m asked that a lot and I can tell you that sometimes when people ask me that, they think my answer is probably, “yes.” I like to put people at ease. I‘ve had the fortunate experience of getting a lot of support from both men and women creators. CBA: Any opinion on the continuing objectification of women in the “bad girl/good girl” comics which continue to proliferate? Anne: I think comics need to continue with more diversity. We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback on GoGirl. Most people really understand that it is targeted for a particular audience, young readers and both parent and child can pick it up and read it together. I would like to see the comic book industry produce more books like this. Television is certainly not all for one type of audience. Comics should not have one kind of audience either. It should have something for everybody. CBA: What was the genesis of GoGirl? Anne: Trina and I met at a San Diego Comic Book convention. She was giving a slide show on her book A Century of Women 17

Comics. I talked with her afterwards and told her I was interested in doing girl comics. We kept in touch via e-mail over the past year. I wanted to pitch it to Image Comics because they showed interest in creator owned projects and I thought Trina’s GoGirl was a wonderful idea. CBA: Can you describe your collaborative process with Trina? Anne: We work very well together. I like her writing and she likes my art. I think this past year has given us an opportunity to bounce off ideas and try new things. We knew going into this project that it would have its ups and downs but we wanted to give it our best shot. CBA: What was Dignifying Science and your contributions? Anne: Dignifying Science is best described as a collection of illustrated essays on the lives of several women scientists. All the stories are written by Jim Ottaviani, author of the previous science comic book, Two- Fisted Science. Dignifying Science was a very unique project to work on because I actually had to do some primate research on the story I worked on. My illustrations were of Biruté Galdikas life’s work with orangutans. She is a colleague and friend of Jane Goodall, Biruté was the first scientist to study orangutans in the wild. Other stories represented the work of other female scientists. All illustrated by female artists. CBA: What are your views on the current state of the medium and can you share any insight, particularly as a woman artist? Anne: I have a couple of friends that are comic book shop managers and one of their biggest concern is, “How can I keep my doors open?” I’ve offered some suggestions that might help: One idea is introducing comics to the customer who is looking over Pokémon cards. Collecting is great but sometimes it’s good to show other facets of the medium. Some shops sell toys, magazines and art materials as well as comics and I think that’s great! I think at one time, comic shops were reluctant to encourage kids to come in. From the outside there was sort of a “Boy’s Club” attitude to them which seemed to be amplified by the glut of Bad Girl comics and the gaming, since most of the players were guys. But I think that’s changing now. Retailers are realizing that they have an opportunity to get the voracious young readers into their shops, who enjoy a good story with pictures. Top: Anne Timmons’ cute self-portrait, swiped from her business card. ©2000 the artist. Right inset: Anne’s depiction of Lindsey, daughter of Go-Go Girl, and the super-hero GoGirl herself. ©2000 Trina Robbins & Anne Timmons. Below: Panels from Anne’s contribution to Dignifying Science depicting primatologist, Biruté Galdikas, and orangutan. ©2000 the respective copyright holder.

and be married but they split up anyway. After that, she was just too busy being a single mother to think about being a freelance super-heroine because freelance super-heroines really don’t make a lot of money. So, basically, she put it all behind her and she doesn’t even like to talk about it any more because it makes her feel bad. But she still has her scrapbook with all the newspaper articles. And her teenage daughter, Lindsay, has inherited her mom’s ability to fly but has never told her mom because she knows mom just doesn’t like to talk about it. But then her best friend gets kidnapped and in order to rescue her, she decides it’s time to be a super-heroine. And she knows where her mom has kept her old costume folded up in a bottom drawer, puts it on and goes off and becomes Go Girl. CBA: Do you have an audience in mind? Trina: Girls, grrrlz, women, and guys who like girls. CBA: [chuckles] Cool. That’s great. Is there anything else you’d like to mention about the future? Trina: Well, the book that I’m now writing since I finished the book on Nell Brinkley has absolutely nothing to do with comics. CBA: I’m aghast. [chuckles] Trina: Uh-huh. Exactly. It’s for Conari Press who are these wonderful Berkeley publishers who do books for grrrlz and it’s about goddesses. Except that it’s not about your nice, benevolent crystaltype New Age goddesses. It’s about the nasty goddesses, the down-and-dirty goddesses of the Lilith and Kali variety. It’s funny. I’m really having a good time talking about really bitchy goddesses. [laughter] CBA: Awhile back, I approached you about drawing the cover for this issue and you mentioned that you’re not drawing any more? Trina: That’s right. CBA: How can an artist retire? Trina: Well, I haven’t so much retired as it got beaten out of me because you know, really, you can only bang your head against a wall so long. And I really got such a negative response from the industry [laughs] about my art. I just did. And at a certain point, it became painful and I couldn’t draw any more. It’s not like I don’t draw for myself, I don’t doodle when I’m on the phone but I just don’t draw. It’s too painful. It hurts. I don’t mean physically, I mean emotionally. And writing doesn’t. Writing is thrilling. Writing is the exact opposite. Writing makes me feel so good. It sends all those good endorphins and hormones surging through my bloodstream and I get such good support for my writing. The book industry, they like what I do. They never say, “Well, we can’t do this because you draw like a girl,” or “It’s by a girl!” CBA: [laughs] “You draw like a girl”? Trina: And I do draw like a girl. CBA: Yeah. That’s the charm of it. [laughter] Trina: Exactly. CBA: And you did work in mainstream comics for awhile, right? I bought your Legend of Wonder Woman and you did a teenage comic… what was it? Trina: Oh, yeah. That was what I was happiest about, of course, were the teen comics and my attempts to bring back the girl comics. Misty, which I did six issues for Marvel and then California Girls which was eight whole issues for Eclipse. I was just in heaven when I was doing those. And, of course, I also wrote Barbie and The Little Mermaid for Marvel. CBA: Was your experience pretty much akin to what you had already been doing beforehand or were there heavy editorial hands in your work? Trina: No, not at all. I was never editorialized. CBA: Good. Do you maintain ownership of those? Trina: Marvel owns Misty, but I own California Girls. CBA: Was it frustrating that the books didn’t catch on? Trina: Of course it was frustrating. And I always felt that if Jim Shooter had been the father of a seven-year old girl, I’d still be doing Misty. CBA: You’re writing GoGirl!. Are you interested in doing other strips, other books too? Trina: Oh, sure. I have just tons of ideas for girls comics. When Anne Timmons approached me and said, “Let’s do a comic. You write it and I’ll draw it,” I kind of went through my mental files. I just got all these ideas for comics Above: It’s Anne Timmons, the artist who rendered our for girls. great cover, at a recent comics convention. Courtesy of the artist.

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CBA’s Jon Cooke is back in April! Make ready for COMIC BOOK CREATOR, the new voice of the comics medium! TwoMorrows is proud to debut our newest magazine, COMIC BOOK CREATOR, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics, focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. Behind an ALEX ROSS cover painting, our frantic FIRST ISSUE features an investigation of the oft despicable treatment JACK KIRBY endured from the very business he helped establish. From being cheated out of royalties in the ’40s and bullied in the ’80s by the publisher he made great, to his estate’s current fight for equitable recognition against an entertainment monolith where his characters have generated billions of dollars, we present Kirby’s cautionary tale in the eternal struggle for creator’s rights. Plus, CBC #1 interviews artist ALEX ROSS and writer KURT BUSIEK, spotlights the last years of writer/artist FRANK ROBBINS, remembers comics historian LES DANIELS, sports a color gallery of WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his beloved, showcases a joint talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL on their unforgettable collaborations, as well as throws a whole kit’n’caboodle of other creator-centric items atcha! Join us for the start of a new era as TwoMorrows welcomes back former Comic Book Artist editor JON B. COOKE, who helms the all-new, allcolor COMIC BOOK CREATOR!

80 pages • $8.95 All-color • Quarterly Digital Edition: $3.95 COMING THIS JULY: COMIC BOOK CREATOR #2 (double-size Summer Special) Former COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor JON B. COOKE returns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured through FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, rememberreturns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured through FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, remembertures: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY ing LES DANIELS, WILL EISNER’s Valentines to his beloved, a talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new ALEX ROSS cover, and more! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $17.95 (Digital Edition) $6.95 • Ships July 2013

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CBA Roundtable

The Great Women Cartoonists’ Ramona Fradon, Marie Severin and Trina Robbins Conducted by Trina Robbins Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Below: Trina Robbins in a photo courtesy of the artist.

Below: From left to right, here is Marie Severin and Ramona Fradon in a picture taken by Trina. Courtesy of Ms. Robbins.

In September, 1999, Marie Severin, Ramona Fradon and your guest editor got together in New York City to spend the weekend at the house of a friend and we recorded the event. I brought along the traditional accouterments of a slumber party: blue and green nail polish and cheap hair ornaments, while the more sophisticated Ms Fradon and Severin contributed wine. Ramona and Marie did most of the talking, with me popping in occasionally as agent provocateur. The start of the tape catches us already in mid-conversation… — TR Trina Robbins: Ramona, you were saying something about…? Marie Severin: The people there in production, stuff would come back from Chemical [the printing company] and if you were around, you could swipe something. Trina: And what people swiped, it was just because they wanted the art? There was no market then, was there? Marie: They wanted it for themselves. There were always collectors in comics and they usually worked in the industry. They managed to swipe art wherever it wasn’t nailed down; in warehouses where newspaper and comic book art usually was stored. In the 1960s, the

field was filling up with talent who were intense fans… the value was becoming known to a growing number. One older pro, rumor has it, walked out of the office with art before it was printed! Ramona Fradon: Some people were smart, they knew what they had, whereas I didn’t know from anything. Trina: In the beginning, was your work ever returned to you? Ramona: The Aquaman [art was] returned for a while, then they stopped doing it. Trina: And it didn’t even occur to you to ask, right? Marie: Where would you put them? Ramona: That’s right. Exactly. They were just meaningless stuff that you kept grinding out. But then, they began to return them…. Marie: You’re talking the ’70s, right? Ramona: Yeah, the ’70s. I think the thing that upsets me more than anything else are people who come and ask you for your autograph, and then they go sell it at an auction. That really upsets me! Not that I want to sell my autograph, but I don’t like to think that every part of me is a commodity that somebody’s going to snatch off and sell! Trina: So you have discovered this is happening? Ramona: Yeah. Somebody showed me one they bought at an auction, and I saw another one auctioned off at a convention. And one time I gave my work to a woman’s brother who was at Yale, and he was going to sell some drawings for me. Well, I never saw those drawings again, or any money. Every once in a while, somebody brings one of them to show me. I suppose that’s the way people feel who are in any kind of public life, they get parts of them taken away and sold. Marie: Oh, recording artists, it’s the same thing. Ramona: Oh, yeah, that’s even worse, sure. Trina: A question: Can we refuse to do free art, for that reason? Ramona: Well, I’d do it for kids, you know, when they come up. Marie: Oh, but the kids might be the very ones who are doing this! Ramona: Yeah, probably! [laughs] Smart little buggers! Marie: Kirby one time at a convention—I’d heard this story—that a little kid came up to him, a real cute little kid, and asked, “Please, could I have a drawing?” and Kirby did a little fast sketch… anything he did was great, you know? A half-hour later, the kid comes back, and he says, “See? I colored it!” Ramona: Well, I wouldn’t mind that, I really wouldn’t! Although, as you know… Trina: On the other hand, he means well, instead of taking it and selling it. Ramona: Yeah, exactly. Trina: He cared enough to color it. Ramona: I think that’s great. Marie: He’s not the normal fan, though. It’s not like he turned the corner and said, “How much do you want for it?” [laughter] Trina: But I know someone called my attention to some little Wonder Woman sketch I had done for someone at a convention was up for auction on eBay. I don’t even remember who I did it for, and personally, it was a lousy sketch. When I draw at conCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Slumber Party of 1999! Talk About Their Experiences in Comics ventions, I’m not that good. Ramona: It’s hard, because you’ve got that noise. That’s why I like to bring pre-drawn sketches. Marie: Same here. Ramona: And if they see something they’d like that’s already been sold, and I have a Xerox, I’d say, “If you’re coming back tomorrow, I’ll do it tonight at my hotel.” Marie: Take an order, yeah. Trina: Some guys can do it, and at auctions and conventions, these guys will get up and do it… in front of everyone, these incredible finished drawings! Marie: I can do it, but when I get away, I see it’s completely cockeyed. But most of the audience doesn’t care. Ramona: Oh, I sat and watched you at that convention drawing, and you draw effortlessly. It just comes tumbling… Marie: But sometimes it’s cockeyed. Ramona: Oh, it looks great. You really can do that. Marie: Well, I’ve done it in classrooms and halls a lot. Ramona: Well, you’re just good at it. She’s a performer. Marie: Oh, I’m a show-off. [laughter] Trina: So, Ramona, in the early days, nobody even asked for their work back? Ramona: As far as I know, they didn’t. Well, we were all so anonymous, we never had our name on anything, it was just total anonymity. I happen to think it made for some of the richness of comics in those days, because when you’re sitting all by yourself in a room, you’re going to think of things that you’re not going to think of if you think the whole world’s looking. You almost felt there was no audience, that’s the way I felt. Marie: I never experienced that. Ramona: Really? See, my father wanted me to be a fashion artist, out in the open in New York Times Lord & Taylor ads, that kind of thing. But when I went into comics, I had a very strong feeling of relief that this was anonymous, that nobody knew that I was doing this, they weren’t going to see my work, no adults were going to, that the public wouldn’t be aware of it. Trina: Not like you were proud of your work? Ramona: No, I was always embarrassed. I still am, I can’t stand to see my stuff in print. Marie: You always feel it wasn’t good enough? Ramona: Yeah. I never wanted anybody to look at it. Trina: Oh, Ramona, that’s not true. You’re an excellent… Ramona: I mean, one part of my brain knows that, I just hate to have… I mean, I think I’m over that now, fairly well, but I used to draw with one hand covering the drawing, [laughs] because I was so embarrassed by it. Marie: Oh, Ramona, it’s awful that you should feel that way. It should be enjoyable! Ramona: No, I don’t think I ever drew… now, when I’m drawing, I enjoy it. When people ask me to do drawings, and I draw what I want, I really enjoy it. But I don’t think I ever enjoyed it before that. It was something I was supposed to be doing, because my father wanted me to be an artist. So I did it. Went to art school, I had no idea why I was in art school, and I had no idea what I was going to do when I got out of art school. Marie: Both of us, I didn’t have that much ambition, and you… Ramona: I didn’t have any! Marie: You didn’t have any? Ramona: No, zero. Oct. 2000

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Marie: But you are proud of your work, aren’t you? Ramona: Well, I like what I’m doing now. Yeah, I look back on some of it… I keep the good stuff, you know? [laughter] Marie: Well, you have to! Ramona: I’ve gotten rid of all my other… it’s buried in the attic. Trina: Well, I was just going to say, can I have the bad stuff? [laughs] Marie: Yeah! I mean, people want it, there must be a lot to be said for it. Ramona: Well, for my own benefit, I just take out the good ones, and then I look at them and say, “Gee, I was really good, wasn’t I?” [laughs] And I don’t look at the bad ones. Marie: Yeah. Ramona: There are an awful lot of them. Marie: But you see the ambition in women is—at least, I find—is much less, usually.

Above: Ramona’s cover art (with Charles Paris inks) to the debut of Metamorpho in The Brave and The Bold #57, Jan. ’65. ©2000 DC Comics. Below: A commission job by Ramona featuring another fanfavorite character, Aquaman, a hero she depicted from the 1950s to early-’60s. Art ©2000 Ramona Fradon. Aquaman ©20000 DC Comics

Ramona: Like Trina, for instance… Marie: Oh, Trina is strong, and she’s fiery, because they put her down. The door was closed at times for me. With you and I, we just happened to fall into it. Ramona: Well, we were able to do what they wanted. Marie: You could do super-heroes. And we didn’t go in and hassle the boss for, “I want to do Superman, I don’t care what you do; I have to do Superman.” Ramona: Oh, no. I used to do just the opposite. Marie: I didn’t give a darn what they gave me, as long as I was being paid. If I could do it, well, it was a challenge. I loved the challenge of it, to do it, and then I’d feel, “I’m not doing this as good as Buscema, ooooohh.” I followed him on Sub-Mariner, I followed him on “The Incredible Hulk.” Ramona: See, you were interested enough to do that. Marie: Well, I wanted to show off! How can you show off if you don’t do it? I wasn’t that crazy to have my name on it, I don’t care. But for my own… Trina: But if you wanted to show off, then you did have ambition, you did have ambition. Marie: Maybe, but not for… I couldn’t be bothered fighting and competing, I just couldn’t. Trina: Couldn’t that be because both of you as women were brought up to be nice girls, and not to fight? Because that’s how girls were brought up? Ramona: Well, I’m a Libra, so I’m just naturally accommodating. Trina: [To Marie] You’re a Leo, right? Ramona: She’s a super Leo. Marie: Leos don’t like competition.

Trina: Plus, we try to eat up the competition. [laughter] Marie: Now, you’re going to pull your psychiatry on me. Trina: I think it’s interesting that you both worked in hospitals. Ramona: It is. Yeah. And we were both doing underwater characters at the same time. Marie: I thought of that, too. Ramona: We have these parallel lives. Trina: Yeah. Do you think it’s a thing about women and water? I mean… you’re the shrink… Ramona: I just thought of that. Marie: I ain’t havin’ no babies! You guys… Trina: Doesn’t matter, though, it’s in you… the woman and water combination. Ramona: I didn’t ask for “Aquaman”; it was inflicted on me. Trina: But you did it so well. Ramona: Because it was embarrassing not to. Trina: Ah-ha! Ramona: Did you like to see your work in print? Marie: Yeah, I did. I liked to see that it came out as well as could be expected, because some of the stuff you were following, it was so good. I mean, how can you draw after Kirby, how can you draw after Buscema? Trina: But you did! You did it after Ditko, too! Marie: But it satisfied me; it was the best I could do at the time. Ramona: You know, it’s funny, because you were holding yourself up to a different type of drawing than I was. At DC, when I was in Adventure Comics, I was working against the old Superboy drawings, and Green Arrow, so that was a relatively comic style, it wasn’t hard-driving, what I consider masculine style, and it wasn’t as proficient as, let’s say, illustrative. I was doing stories for younger readers which called for a simpler more open style. Marie: Yeah, boys had completely different… Trina’s type of book, the girls were being completely ignored. Now, we did have some girl fans that really liked what Roy Thomas was writing in The Avengers, and a few other guys that really wrote… I think Marv Wolfman had some people who were crazy about his [Tomb of] Dracula, this was all in the ’70s. When the young people were coming in, and they were… the stories were more and more for the guys, and the girls, I think, stopped reading when they were all of a sudden drawing girls that… these guys knew not woman! I mean… I often thought, what do they do with themselves, these poor little boys? They draw these—well, you all know what they look like. So, the guys were coming in in the ’70s, and they completely took over and they missed—as you really brought up, Trina—50% of the population has been ignored. If they had catered to women’s comics when this thing all fell through, they would have the Barbies and whatever, girl adventures making money! A lot of the new people coming into the States, all the Hispanic and Asian people, the love stories, the girls used to love those! The immigrants would love them! They’d be learning English, and I remember they had a lot of those photography [fumetti] books, love stories, they loved that stuff! It’s not out there. Unless they do it in underground stuff now. Trina: No, they don’t… it just doesn’t exist anymore. You were there, you were working at Marvel when they were still doing at least Millie the Model, and that ended in ‘72 or something. Ramona: It’s the same as the police or the firemen. The male unions try to keep the women out. The problem now is that the distribution networks are male-oriented. Trina: Of course, they have to change the distribution. Of course, because it’s all comic book stores, and it’s all boys. But what was the feeling about Millie the Model? Marie: I wasn’t drawing it, because I don’t know that style. I think I could probably emulate it, if I had to. Trina: Stan Goldberg was drawing it. Marie: Yes, and I remember when they knocked it out, I said, “Gee, Stan, I’m sorry about your book,” and he said, “Oh, there’s always something else.” He went over to Archie Comics. Ramona: They were like schools of fish, they’d go from one thing to another. Trina: They were flexible, which a lot of people aren’t. I really liked—if we missed that part of the tape—I think that’s great about you going to Bellevue with these kids. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

Oct. 2000

Marie: And repeat what you told about doing the portraits for these disfigured kids. Ramona: One little boy who had been a thalidomide baby, had tiny little arms, and I drew him flexing his muscles, with a Superman costume, and he loved that, he just really loved it. And there was a girl whose face looked like—I remember Truman Capote’s description of a killer whose face looked like an apple had been sliced and then put together crooked—that’s the way this girl’s face was. But she had beautiful eyes, so I made her look like kind of a princess, you know, with these beautiful eyes. They see what they want to see. You know, that was the thing that she focused on. I was able to do that with a lot of them, so they… they were just really delighted, and it made them feel good about themselves. Nobody had ever looked at them before, let alone drawn a picture of some of these poor kids. Trina: It gives them something to talk about, too. Ramona: You know, it’s a funny thing, too… when I was up there, there was one little girl from Columbia who had dark hair, she was a wild-looking little girl, in a very fierce, interesting kind of way. She had watched her mother be shot in the hallway of her building, her father had been murdered… her life had been a living horror, and I tended to identify with this kid. Somehow, there was something about her looks that made me think about myself. It was through her that I first experienced a feeling of compassionate love, you know? A compassionate love that I had never really… Trina: Earlier, you said this was you learned, really, about love. Ramona: Yeah. It was an extraordinary experience. But I was also saying there’s a very thin line between insanity and our daily lives, and when you go into a setting like that as a therapist, so to speak, you don’t hook into their stuff. You play the role of the disinterested, non-involved person. But the minute you walk out that door, you hook into everybody’s stuff. And you don’t have to do that, I realized that this is just a habit, getting down into the mud puddle with anybody who wants to drag you there. You know what I’m talking about? Trina: The horrors of everyday life, I think is what you’re talking about. Ramona: Well, it’s like if somebody you’re with begins acting like an idiot, you get right down on that level with him whereas a socalled crazy person acts that way, you don’t get involved. It’s a… you know, a role… Marie: Wait until you see how I start acting after a couple of glasses of wine! [laughter] Trina: With kids, it’s so easy to love kids, they need you. You know? Really, even if they’re crazy, even if there’s some really bad things over them, they’re still so young and so vulnerable. Marie: It’s the same with pets, too. What other situation do people have when we are elevated to the status of gods and goddesses? Their whole world revolves around you. How can anybody mistreat the poor thing? Ramona: Even worse, for the child who has a brain. Marie: Somebody ought to do a cartoon story about abused animals. Ramona: That would be great. Marie: … these pictures, they send you these pictures and you go, aaahhh! Poor animals, lying on the… geez, it’s terrible. If they did a drawing, they could do it and lead you into it verbally as well as pictorially, not showing blood and guts and stuff, but they could capture the emotion of the dog there. Ramona: I could do that, I would do a story like that. Marie: Oh, you would make big bucks with the animal leagues, who produce these calendars. If they could put out, like the deaf people read comic books. I have to talk about family output, that could be a whole topic, maybe I should bring it up later. One of the funniest things we had, Flo Steinberg—and I think she lost the file—she had a file on a family that was hysterical. They were always begging for comics, this was from down South. Kid was asking for comic books because they have no money to live in a farm, they’re in rags, nothing, they don’t even have a bed, nothing… “my father’s hurt,” and all of this, and he signs it with the address written very big, with “P.S. I’m also blind.” [laughter] Ramona: “And I have no hands!” Oct. 2000

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Trina: Are you familiar with Bill Loebs, William MessnerLoebs? He’s mostly a writer, because he’s one of those guys who has a style that Marvel and DC don’t want, and although his style is great, it’s too unusual for them, so he writes. Are either of you? Ramona: No. Trina: This was many years back, but I’ve never forgotten this story. He’s one of the best dog writers in the world. In comics, he’s the best dog writer. He did the loveliest comic about this dog that gets kidnapped by these people who keep dogs and train them to fight, you know? Marie: Oh, pit bulls? Trina: Not just pit bulls, but all dogs. It’s just… I can’t even talk about that story without crying, it’s such a heartbreaker. It’s so sweet and so good, and so… and yes, yes, it’s a good way to talk about animal abuse. Marie: It’s very satisfying to do something like that, because the people, the outfits that have these funds for these things are so… they have a new way of reaching the public. It’s so odd. People get this stuff in the mail, and they chuck it! Ramona: Every day, I get one of those things. Marie: I have about 20 calendars from everybody who has my name, you know? I give them to the hospitals and stuff, because people mark off the days, what’s happening. Today there’s an amputation here, [laughter] tomorrow… Ramona: Oh, my God… Marie: Anyway, charity begins at home. Ramona: Oh, yes. Well, Marie, I have to tell you: I really admire… I don’t know if it’s admire, but I’m in awe of your knowledge of the business. Marie: I was shut out of most information, even the slightest talent would come in to Marvel and know what was going on. Oh, sure. And yet, I was on staff so I’d see a lot of stuff, but it was on the peripheral. Ramona: You understand production, and the whole thing. Marie: Yeah. Trina: What I think Marie is saying is that she didn’t get to do the networking that all the guys did. Marie: I took what was handed to me, for the most part. It was only when something would happen in the office, like the time there were bad words in the margin, and I didn’t want that to get printed! I went in to Stan, “Stan, look at this! Suppose this wasn’t cropped off? Do you want this printed? We’d be up to here [in trouble]! All you need is for that to be printed, because maybe the printer would think it was a joke and wouldn’t cut it off, either. And… I have to look at this, and clean up pages and bring them in for stats, I don’t want it!” Well, he wrote a memo that anybody

Above: Marie Severin included this sketch of The Bulk in the material she shared with CBA, complete with editorial message. Art ©2000 Marie Severin. Below: Perhaps JBC’s most favoritest Marie Severin comic book, featuring her and brother John’s rendition of Robert E. Howard’s King Kull. Sometimes, in Marvel’s early-’70s line, gems could be found in the oddest places, including this, what was usually a monster reprint book! Kull ©2000 R.E. Howard Estate. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

who does this is going to be immediately fired, which is a marvel, because nobody got fired just for that. But he scared a few guys, because they were smartasses, you know? Not all of them, but the young ones would come in and be jolly with the editor, and “I met Jack Kirby twice, huh, huh, huh.” That sort of stuff. I was mad at Jack Kirby the first time I was there. Trina: Why were you mad at Jack Kirby? Marie: The first time I met him—this is going back almost 30 years ago—and I love the guy, he’s really nice, well… I always wanted to look like Mary Astor. Jack Kirby’s coming out of the room, and I almost bump into him, and they said, “Oh, Marie, this is Jack Kirby.” I said, “Oh, Jack Kirby! I’m John Severin’s sister.” He looked at me, and he says, “Judy Garland.” [laughter] I wanted him to say, “Mary Astor!” [laughter] Trina: I would’ve taken Judy Garland! I’d be okay with that. Above: Young Marie Severin in a mid-1950s photo taken at the EC Comics’ New York City offices. Courtesy of the artist.

Below: A more recent shot of Mirthful Marie, this one taken at the 1997 San Diego Comic-Con. Courtesy of Marie.

Marie: Well, I wouldn’t! Trina: I would have immediately burst into “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”! Marie: See my red shoes? Ramona: You were never scared of being in the bullpen with all these men, were you? Marie: No, because I grew up drawing and my father and my brother treated me great; they were just delighted that I drew, and it was a family thing. Ramona: Being the only woman, surrounded by all these men, it didn’t affect you at all, did it? Marie: At EC the times were different… at Marvel… no, they never intimidated me. I have disdain for the silly ones, and respect for the good ones. I always respected my boss, even if he was a loon. I’m not saying any particular one, but… [laughter] Ramona: As you were saying… I forgot what we were saying… Trina: It was the boys, working with the boys, it was networking that you never got to do, and you never did, either! Ramona: I never did any. I never knew anybody. Marie: Well, it was an entirely different work environment. Ramona: The few times I went in when I was working on Metamorpho, George Kashdan always used to have me go in the bullpen and sketch out covers. I used to dread doing that, I’d absolutely dread it. Trina: Why? Ramona: Because at that time, the bullpen was in the center of this building, and there were no windows. Marie: And there were no women in there, either. Ramona: There were no women in there. These guys in there were on the verge of insanity, sitting there drawing this stuff all day long, and after a while, they’d start hurling ethnic jokes and insults back and forth, throwing… Marie: So you were going down into the snake pit.

Ramona: … and I just crept into the back, huddled and tried to think, you know? It was terrifying! Marie: The bullpen people in my day were production people; the most artists we had in the ’70s was when Herb Trimpe—and then he started working at home—John Romita, and myself were there. Some artists would come in, and they’d think, “Oh, a rough sketcher, they’d work on something that had to be changed.” But it wasn’t going into a typists’ pool, like in those days, they did have comics like that, that I never worked in a place that was like a typists’ pool… Ramona: It was all production. Marie: Yeah, all artists working on stuff, and then production people would do paste-up and stuff. Ours was production and some artists, and I did a little bit of everything. That’s why I was designing covers. Ramona: That’s so amazing. You’re so versatile. Marie: Well, it always meant I got a job! Ramona: Yeah, but you always dismiss it that way, when you really have an enormous amount of versatility, and talent. You can do a lot of different things. Trina: What I always see, though, is they ask Marie to do all these things, and the guys didn’t have to do it. The guys didn’t have to be inkers and colorists and pencilers. Marie: They didn’t have to be because they couldn’t! But I could, and I’d do it. I didn’t consider that they didn’t have to. I wanted to do it; I was getting paid for it. There wasn’t anybody… sometimes [Stan] Goldberg would come in to color a cover, George Roussos was taking inks and excellent colors (I don’t like George’s scheme of coloring sometimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good. I don’t like Rembrandt, either, but he’s fantastic. It doesn’t mean it’s not good.) Trina: A little on the dark side, I know what you mean. Marie: I think I would be intimidated going into that atmosphere that Ramona describes, because first of all, they were all pieces of the chess game, and they all did work together, and then all of a sudden, this little flower of the universe… hah! It was a typical “all guy” daily atmosphere. Ramona: Oh, I just thought if they see me, and if they start turning their attention on me, and I’ll die, absolutely die. Marie: They wouldn’t do that, though. Ramona: I don’t know. Marie: Not before the ’60s, late-’60s. The guys wouldn’t… Ramona: This was in the ’70s… oh, no, it was the ’60s. Marie: They wouldn’t have done that. You were just intimidated because you didn’t know what they were talking about; they had their own jokes… Ramona: And sometimes they did decide to tease, you know? That used to scare me to death! Marie: They never teased me that I recall, because it never worked. Ramona: Well, you’re sassy. I was very shy. Marie: Oh, I’m shy, but… Ramona: You’re shy? Marie: Well, a little… well, like a guy came to me once—they were always trying to shock me—and he had the top of a pushpin in his hand with red, and he said, “Oh God, nobody will pull this out, Marie! Nobody will pull this out!” And I said, “Oh, gee whiz!” and then I looked and I see the rubber cement. I knew right away! Because if he had a thing in his hand, it would be, “Ow! Aiugh!” They’re babies! They’re babies! But it was so weird they couldn’t get me. I grew up with a brother who was always a big tease, and my father was funny. Ramona: Well, I had a big brother, and it hurt, [laughs] let me tell you. It didn’t always work that way. It was just a nightmare experience for me. Marie: The bullpen, not your brother. Ramona: Yeah, the bullpen. Marie: Now, does your brother draw? Ramona: He was a lettering man. My father was a lettering man. Marie: Ah-ha! That paid well. Ramona: Oh, he was tops. He designed the Camel, Chesterfield and Elizabeth Arden logos and the Dom Casual typeface that’s still being used. Marie: Really? My father worked for Elizabeth Arden. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

Oct. 2000

Ramona: Really? Marie: And he used to design things… He was her staff artist. Trina: Oh, my God! So both of your fathers were doing art for Elizabeth Arden? Marie: My father did beautiful lettering. He didn’t like to do it, but it was beautiful. Ramona: I wonder if he knew my father. Marie: I don’t know. My father worked for Arden for 30 years. Ramona: Is that right? Marie: Yeah. He was also mathematical, which is odd. I was too when I was a kid. My father had his own department for a while, and at Christmas parties, he would draw these things for their parties, and Elizabeth Arden would come, and she said, “Oh, where did you get these lovely decorations?” and they said, “Mr. Severin.” She said, “What is he doing at a desk?” So he was brought over to the salon, he had his own little studio. He was just used for stuff that she wanted right away, or if they didn’t have time—in those days, they didn’t have all the Xeroxes, etc… when they were photographing something for an ad, he would do an actual bottle of perfume, and he’d put the name “Blue Grass Hand Creme,” and “Elizabeth Arden,” and he’d do it actual size and they’d photograph it for the ad, and I’d think, “How do you do that, Dad? Your eyes must be fantastic!” I’d never have the patience. He was a Virgo. Ramona: Ah-ha, there you go. [laughter] Marie: I’m on the cusp of Leo. Trina: I think of you as Leo rather than Virgo. Ramona: Oh, yeah, clearly. No question. Trina: So what else? Oh, I wanted to get back to you with those kids. Did you ever get an outlet in comics that satisfied you like the art for the kids? Ramona: Oh, well, no… I mean, it’s a completely… Marie: You never had a job where they asked you to do it for a… Ramona: No, I didn’t. Trina: I know Marie has done some things the she’s really, really proud of, like you did that thing on Pope Paul, right? Marie: No, I colored that… I did St. Francis, but that was me just inking Buscema, which was a joy. That was just a job. I tell you, my personal satisfaction has always been Not Brand Ecch. All that I wanted to do… Trina: Oh, that cartoon stuff! Marie: …Not Brand Ecch was making fun of Marvel. Also, I loved Kull, that was my favorite all-time, because my brother inked it, and he put the masculine side in, and he made the figures even stronger. Kull was a property of Robert E. Howard. But that was the best thing I did, and it only lasted about six issues. Ramona: Well, I liked doing the mysteries when I was working for Joe Orlando, and I was really getting into doing them, and then they switched back to super-heroes. I knew my time was up… you used to go in and beg to do certain things, I used to beg not to do the super-heroes. I mean, I really did, and it didn’t work. Marie: I didn’t go in to bother them much, but when I did, I very carefully chose something—and I usually got it—but I didn’t go often, because there wasn’t much, frankly, that I wanted to do. I’d do what they told me, but I wasn’t that interested. It is so male, it is so male… and also, these fans, they had crushes on the artists, you know? There was a following with Neal Adams for example that was absolutely weird! He’s awfully good, but I think the situation with some of these people, they turned him into god. Ramona: But I see that even today, with some of the current big artists, you know? The kids come up to them, and they just hang around them all day long! They don’t worship girls that way. Marie: No. That’s the whole difference, too, and I don’t think people look at guys the same… they want to be like the guys, they want to be able to draw… . they don’t want to be like us, even though we can do it. They look at us like we’re so odd. Oct. 2000

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

Trina: I know that the feminist line has always been that men and women are exactly equal, and women can do anything men can do, yadda, yadda… Ramona: Oh, that is so true. Trina: … but I happen to disagree, and I feel like you’re both saying what I have always felt, which is women really don’t like superheroes, we don’t relate to them. I mean, do you feel that? Ramona: I think it’s absolutely stupid, one-dimensional characters constantly battling evil. What a world! But that doesn’t mean we can’t do it. Marie: I never took it that serious. I always wanted to fly as a kid. [laughter] Trina: Flying isn’t the same as super-heroes. We’d all like to fly, that’s what our dreams are all about. Marie: But that part of super-heroes I liked. Ramona: No, I feel as if I’m violating my nature, drawing this muscle-bound stuff and I’m probably reacting to some deep violence of my own that I don’t want to deal with. Marie: This psychology course you took, I didn’t think… [laughter] cut that out! [laughs] Ramona: Listen, I’ve given a lot of thought to this, Marie, and I have real issues around it: It wasn’t just a job, and it wasn’t just stupid; it was… I look at some of the stuff that I’ve drawn, and I think, “This is grotesque, and this is coming out of me,” and it horrifies me! Then, I get past that, and I get into enjoying it, and then I go back and forth from one attitude to another. Marie: Well, I’ve never done anything that I thought was horrific. Ramona: There’s a… I draw from my body, you know; I don’t draw intellectually, I have to feel what I’m doing, and when I’m feeling myself smashing somebody in the face, or somebody with grotesque features… I get really upset! Marie: I think it’s almost therapeutic with me. It’s never a particular person,

Above: That’s Ramona Fradon visiting Murray Boltinoff’s office at National Periodical Publications (later DC Comics) in the late-’50s or early-’60s. Surrounding the artist are (from left) DC editors George Kashdan, Murray Boltinoff, Mort Weisinger (with obscured head), and Jack Schiff, standing. Note the Batman comic on Murray’s desk. Courtesy of Ramona. Below: Paula Hopper’s picture of Ramona at work in 1980. Courtesy of the artist.

Above: Ramona’s work from an unpublished issue of The Cat. This is perhaps the only inked page (by Jim Mooney). Following three pages are Ramona’s pencils from thermo-photocopies. The Cat ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. 26

you know? Never! I feel a release… Ramona: Well, I guess I do too, but I fight it. Marie: … and I know it’s on a subliminal plane that I’ll hit if I have to draw like that. I know that I’m doing it in my dream, but it happens to be coming out on paper. I’m smashing somebody, that’s a very good release… I don’t like to do it often, though, and page after page after page… Once in a while, you want to give somebody a

good kick, you know? I like endings where somebody gets what they’re supposed to get. And the more viciously the better, but I couldn’t draw them being impaled or anything like that, that would be disgusting. Ramona: Now, that I wouldn’t mind as much. Marie: You see? [laughter] You probably, deep down, are worse than all of us. [laughter] You’d like to draw somebody being impaled? That’s terrible! Ramona: I could do it, I could get into that. [laughter] You know, the last time I saw Joe Orlando, he asked me if I’d be interested in doing a female version of Beavis and ButtHead.” [laughter] Marie: Wasn’t that an icky thing? Ramona: But I love Beavis and Butt-Head! I think they’re wonderful. They’re poor little neglected kids, you know, nobody ever took care of them. Marie: But they’re obnoxious! They’re super-hero fans! Ramona: And they probably smell! [laughter] Trina: Both of you are very tolerant of different things. Marie is tolerant of superheroes, and you’re tolerant to things like Beavis and Butt-head and Vlad the Impaler, which is amazing! Ramona: Here’s what I don’t like, this is it in a nutshell: I don’t like ugliness in drawings. That’s what I don’t like. When I see that I’m drawing something that’s ugly, it really, really upsets me. Now, you can draw somebody being impaled, and it can be a beautiful drawing. Trina: Gorgeously impaled. Ramona: Look at some of the Gothic painters. Trina: Oh, yes, some of the exquisitely twisted Christ suffering… Marie: Those things upset me. Ramona: And Hieronymous Bosch? I mean, it’s beautiful art, and the subject matter is absolutely gruesome. It’s not the subject matter that bothers me, it’s the rigidity. Marie: It’s not like Beavis and Butthead with snot on their faces. Ramona: That I don’t mind. That’s okay. Because I think the Beavis and Butthead drawing is fine. Trina: You’re talking on a plane that really is… Ramona: More of an aesthetic plane, really. That’s good, and I’m glad that it’s suddenly clarified for me. There’s a rigidity, a tight, mechanical, muscle-bound quality that I can’t stand. Trina: That’s what you see in super-hero comics. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

Oct. 2000

Ramona: Yeah. When I’m not doing good drawing, that’s how my drawing comes out, and I hate that. I don’t want to get psychological about it…. Marie: I think you’d like to do correct drawing, and so much of it has to be exaggerated. Trina: But you like the art on Beavis and Butthead? Ramona: I think it’s fine. Really, I do. It’s minimalist, but the characters are alive and expressive… and funny. The style is perfect for the subject matter. Marie: And it’s hard to emulate something like that if you don’t have that technique. Ramona: Right, [Mike Judge] designed that, and it works. Marie: I hate it, but I understand what you’re talking about. You don’t like something insincerely drawn. Ramona: Or there’s a stiffness, a lifelessness… Marie: Or they’re doing it just for money, not for personal… Trina: Maybe they’re just not talented, there are artists who aren’t… Marie: Oh, gee whiz, who? Who in the business isn’t talented? [laughter] Who? Ramona: I really am enjoying the drawings I’m doing now, especially the pencil drawings, because they’re soft. I’m drawing super-heroes, but the drawing is soft, it has a kind of flow, and it’s not that dead muscle-bound kind of a thing that really upsets me. Marie: You get really into your art, and I can separate myself from my art in a lot of cases, I can separate some things, and some things I don’t. One piece I did that was for a magazine that was coming out was sad things at Christmas, and it was right after a death in my family, and I drew something that they wouldn’t print. Ramona: Really? Marie: I figured… I’m glad they didn’t, now. Ramona: Why? Because you revealed yourself through it? Marie: It was my mourning, and it was a radiator, and a window with a hole in it, with the snow coming in, the radiator was off, and there was this kid sitting there with one leg, the kid was a skull practically, opening a shoebox with one shoe for Christmas. Ramona: Oh my god. Marie: Isn’t that terrible? Ramona: It’s not. Oct. 2000

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Marie: But I got rid of a big thing, and I couldn’t believe it. I have never before or since done something like that. [laughs] Ramona: You mean drawn from…? Marie: It just came out, it was something that had built up, and when I had the subject matter I had to do it at the office, and I just sat down and drew it, and—holy mackerel!—I thought, “Well, it’s an honest drawing.” But it’s just as well they didn’t print it. It’s the com-

Above: Ramona’s pencils from thermo-photocopies, intended for The Cat #4, which instead featured a story drawn by Jim Starlin and Alan Weiss. Art ©2000 Ramona Fradon. The Cat ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. 27

plete opposite of what I’d normally… Ramona: But why do you say it’s just as well they didn’t print it? Marie: Because it made people unhappy. Yes, it was private, but not too private. I gave it up, if they wanted to print it, but the bullpen all looked at it saying, “Oh, how sad!” Ramona: You did well. You did what you set out to do. Marie: When you have a good storyline and/or script it’s satisfying

to draw a good story—but when in a script it has within one panel, “...the hero grappling with someone on a rooftop; identify them, as the hero doesn’t know he has the wrong guy… show a particular gas station on the street, as the hero will blow it up next page; on the horizon it’s dawn and a helicopter is coming with the cast of Everybody Loves Raymond”— seriously, some writers do not make use of continuity— Ramona: It isn’t that; it’s that they grew up on television, they don’t think in stills, in graphic static images. Marie: They go too far and expect patience from the artist. Trina: Isn’t that just bad writing? Ramona: It is bad writing, or a failure to understand the limits of the medium. Marie: As Ramona said, they should be writing for television. Ramona: In all the time I was doing Brenda Starr, Dale Messick was the only writer I had who knew how to write for comics. She was brilliant, she knew the format. The other writers grew up on television, they were used to the moving image, and they would give me a scene with a close-up of a character saying four different things in one balloon, so what am I supposed to illustrate? Nowadays they solve it by putting 16 balloons in one panel and letting the drawing take care of itself. Trina: Dale was a real exception, she was a writer. Brenda Starr was her baby, her brainchild, drawn from life. She totally understood that strip. Ramona: She knew, she was a strip cartoonist, she knew. I mean, everything that she wrote was for a still picture that told the story, whereas the other writers I’ve had were more interested in the words. Marie: Also, another thing to think about: In the old days, we were brought up on movies. I think the continuity that we had watching the old black-&-white movies was a different continuity completely than TV. Ramona: Which is kaleidoscopic. Marie: I went to the movies, God, about three times a week! Ramona: And we also read the Sunday comics. Marie: And your favorite books. Ramona: And now, kids don’t read as much. Trina: You can see what you said about the movies, with Will Eisner, for instance, and I think also Milton Caniff, his influence was totally movies. I mean, I can see certain movies and they look like a COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Will Eisner comic, you know? Ramona: And yet, they turned around and influenced the movies, too, with the angles. Cross-pollination. Marie: Right, and there’s a page that Wally Wood did— because he had a bunch of clones that he worked with— and it was a panel of all the shortcuts of the page, how to do the heads, and a down shot, a side shot, the side of the head, and I mean, it’s basically movie shots. That was the best way, if you had talking heads… nobody could do a talking heads page better than Kirby… he’d make it so interesting! There’d be some gobbledygook machinery, there’d be an angle going down the spaceship as they’re talking, or pressing a dial and they’re talking, and there’s something really weird going on down there, and you really listened to what they were saying, and you were into it, you know? Ramona: I remember my favorite scene, probably, from all comics that I can ever remember was a close-up of Pat Ryan’s profile with his pipe in the foreground, and then in the background, the characters! [laughter] Trina: That was Terry and the Pirates. Ramona: Yes. That’s a camera angle. Except the movies weren’t doing stuff like that then! The movies were doing relatively flat, straight-on scenes back in the ’30s. Trina: But Caniff got a lot of stuff… I can see old movies and say, “Ah-ha, Caniff got something from that, he got something from that… ” Ramona: And the camera, by its nature, records depth. Trina: It’s like he went to see this movie called China Seas or something, and he went back and used it in Terry and the Pirates. Marie: There was a lot of things, like when they’d have somebody playing the piano, they’d have it taken from upstairs… or somebody coming down the staircase, you’d see her come out and down, and you felt you were walking down the stairs, or on a highway, terrified the cars were coming at you, it was very… and the trains, they’re going to hit me! I believed everything up to about three or four… Ramona: Yesterday. [Marie laughs] And then you’re supposed to get over it. Marie: Yes. [laughs] But we never do. Ramona: The movies have carried the angle shots to the nth Oct. 2000

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degree, you can’t go any farther. But comics have flattened out, and become less dynamic, more one-dimensional… more like posters. They’re not getting depth any more, or a sense of movement. Marie: They’re television people, and it goes so quickly, those scenes… Ramona: I wonder if that’s what it is. Marie: I don’t know what it could be, maybe a lack of imagina-

Above and below: Ramona was the artist for a number of year’s on Dale Messick’s Brenda Starr syndicated daily newspaper strip. Here’s are two examples of Ramona’s 1986 strips. Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

tion. Ramona: They’re getting… Marie: But I think reading a book is like working on track, running a track through your head, reading a book. Ramona: It’s linear. These drawings that a lot of the artists are making today are kaleidoscopic, with all the swirling lines and… you know, it’s art nouveau all over again, but they’re also static. They’re drawing posters … originals for sale. Marie: One of the biggest shocks to me in the early ’70s … Trimpe, Romita and myself worked in one room, a guy comes in— fairly new to it, I can’t remember who it was—and Romita says, “You’re putting so much stuff on the page! You’ve got spattering, you’ve got scratching, you’ve got Zip-A-Tone… your page rate doesn’t cover it!” And he says, “Oh, I don’t care how it looks in the book; this is for when I sell it at the conventions.” Aaaahhh! I thought, “That’s what they’re doing, they’re drawing for the conventions!” That’s when they started getting their artwork back. Neal Adams was pushing that, which everybody was very grateful for him having done, however, when Romita asked Neal, “What do you want with all your pages? What are you going to do, paper the bathroom?” [laughs] But he knew the market, Neal knew what people wanted, especially Neal’s work. There’s a market out there, and that’s when everybody went crazy. The untalented boobs that would do anything, they’d offer to clean the johns if they could say that they work at Marvel or DC, anything. Neal had a whole group of guys working for him, or with him. Ramona: Wasn’t he paying them? Marie: Some of them were very productive. Larry Hama is a great talent, he was there. But there were a couple of poor souls that just would do anything. I think one of them went nuts. Ramona: I think there’ve been more than one who went nuts during that time. [laughter] It’s true! I remember when I was working on “Aquaman,” one inker flipped out. He was working late into the night. I can’t remember who it was. Marie: I heard of something like that. What was he drawing? Ramona: I don’t know, it was something heavy. Marie: You’re constantly pulling from your guts, pulling all this

creativity and you’re tired! Ramona: I used to feel that way to some extent drawing Metamorpho. He was in the bowels of this pyramid, getting transmogrified… I mean, it’s very vivid stuff! Marie: And you’re thinking. Ramona: You’re not even thinking. You’re absorbing it! Marie: You just didn’t draw to just fill out the page, you had to get into it. Ramona: Yeah. Marie: I think the emotional impact in order to have a good story has got to be there. I mean, you can see the emotions, say, and the extreme would be Jack Kirby, you can see the emotion there. I’ve met people who can’t stand his stuff! Women who can’t stand it, because it’s so obviously wham! So male. Trina: But you just said it: I consider him the epitome of the male artists. Marie: And yet, he’s not offensive. I never got that from Kirby. Trina: A lot of that had to do with Jack himself, because he was really such a nice guy. Marie: He experienced life, he had a rough upbringing from what I understand. Trina: Hell’s Kitchen. Marie: And then he had experiences in the war! He told me one time—and I’ve also read it someplace, too—he used to tell stories once in a while in the office about one time he hid in a French oven (he was lagging behind the soldiers) and the Germans came in, and they were there overnight, and he had to stay in the oven, he was hoping they didn’t want to bake anything. Ramona: So he kept having to relive all of that stuff when he drew? Marie: Well, he had all the research first-hand. He was in the thick of it over there. Ramona: It’s amazing to me that men go to war. Marie: Isn’t it? And you feel so bad. I always felt guilty that all these guys in the VA hospital and all these guys had to stop their lives, and I didn’t have to do it. Ramona: I know.

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Marie: A boy I knew since I was five, was killed in the Korean War. He’s my age, and I identified with him… we used to be taken for brother and sister, because we looked so much alike. He lived up the street in Brooklyn. He was a nice kid, he played dopey games, and I had the best gun collection because my brother was older than I am, and I had all his toys around, and I used to come out with a belt and all those guns, and all the boys came over to play with me, because I had the best gun collection on the street! Ramona: So they let you play. Marie: They’d better have, else they wouldn’t have any guns! Trina: Okay, World War II: I always felt this was a war that had to be fought. But for the most part, wars don’t have to be fought. The fact that men fight them is wrong, they shouldn’t have to! Marie: Why are they so stupid? What’s happened all these years? Ramona: That’s what I want to know. Maybe it’s the same thing that makes them like super-heroes. Marie: I wouldn’t want to do it, I’d be scared to death! Ramona: I think that’s why we got rid of the draft. Now, we’ve got volunteers, people who are willing to do it. It was very smart of the powers-that-be to have a volunteer army. Now we can have more wars and the country doesn’t get so disrupted. Marie: Would you want to get into comics today? Ramona: Are you kidding?!? [laughs] Oh, my God! Marie: I couldn’t take it. Ramona: What are they paying now? How much a page? Marie: I have no idea. Hundreds. Ramona: My timing has always been bad. I left comics just before the pay rates tripled. What is it… $700 or so? Marie: Oh, not that much. I would say at least $250. The majority. Ramona: $250? I think Mad pays more. Marie: That would be the old rate, I’d bet it’s more now. I remember hearing Mad paid very well. I never did anything for Mad. Ramona: Although they’re not doing so well. Marie: Then there’s the royalties. Ramona: Marie, you’d be great for Mad, you know? Marie: Been there, I never thought of going back. I never drew for them, but I was on the staff of Mad. Ramona: It seems to me when you get to be 70, you shouldn’t be drawing for Mad. [laughter] Marie: Yes… although the craziness of humor lasts forever—but one really has to be aware of current trends, and I’ve lost interest in a lot of TV or rock. It’s funny though, sometimes an assignment brings out a lot of our talents, sometimes we underrate ourselves. Ramona: Maybe so, maybe so. Maybe I should charge more. Trina: Well, Ramona, I still remember the feeding frenzy when you needed pages inked for Brenda Starr [at a San Diego Comic con], and people were practically knocking each other out of the way for the honor of inking one of your strips! Ramona: Oh, I know, I loved that! I was so touched by it, you know? But just that they all got together and helped me out, my gosh! Trina: They were killing each other for the honor of inking your work. Ramona: One of the fellas came up to me at the convention this year and asked me if I could find the one that he did, and he should see my attic. Marie: Hey, listen, you should go through it, dearie, because you could make a fortune, and do it now. In the year 2000, people are making such a hullabaloo, just a number, but all this stuff is going to be in the 20th century… 20th century art! It’s going to be like 19th century art, and it’s going to be overnight! So go through it, and catalog everything. Ramona: Catalog, forget it. I’m totally disorganized. Marie: Oh, I sold a lot of mine for bitsy prices. Ramona: Me, too. Marie: Yeah, stupid. Ramona: I sold my Metamorphos for Oct. 2000

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$1.50 a page. Somebody told me there was one at auction for $6,000. Marie: Oh… oh! Ramona: I don’t believe it sold, but still somebody had the audacity to ask that for it… it hurts. Marie: Yeah, that would hurt me. Ramona: I have an attic full of Brenda; 15 years of Brenda. Marie: People would like that! Why don’t you bring it to the convention? Ramona: I do! I always bring some. I usually sell one or two. Mostly they’re after comic book, not newspaper stuff. Marie: You know, having sat next to you twice, and I’m so busy with my own stuff, I didn’t know what the heck you were doing. Trina: Oh, talk about Dale! Talk! Marie: Yeah, tell me about Dale. Trina: Oh, you know, she’s been doing Brenda Starr since 1941! She stopped in ’79, so she really has a lifetime of Brendas, many of them which she has sold, but she still has them for sale, and I was at a convention with her in the late ’80s, I guess ’88 or ’89, sitting at a table next to her, she had some pages, these beautiful Brenda Starr paper dolls pages, that she had hand-painted. She goes back to some of them and paint them… gorgeous! I looked at them, and I thought, “I’ll never be able to afford this,” so I didn’t even ask! Someone looks at it and says, “How much is that?” She says, “$200.” And they actually put it down and walked away! I grabbed my checkbook! I now have this gorgeous, hand-painted by her, paper doll page which she autographed to me… it is priceless! $200, my God! Marie: Is she still alive? Trina: She’s 95 years old. Ramona: She says she’s going to live forever. Trina: May she live forever, may she live forever. Ramona: She says she’s going to live so the syndicate will have to continue giving her a pension…

Above: For a short while, Ramona was the artist on the brief ’70s revival of Plastic Man. Here’s a commission piece of the India Rubber man. Art ©2000 Ramona Fradon. Plastic Man ©2000 DC Comics. Below: Commission work featuring Brenda Starr. Art ©2000 the artist. Brenda Starr ©2000 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Trina: Good, they should! Ramona: … and I’m rooting for her! Trina: I am, too. Ramona: Even though half of it came out of my pocket. Trina: I realize that, and that’s… the syndicates are such bastards. Ramona: They’re the worst. Marie: Mary Wilshire is doing a good job on it. Trina: No, not Mary Wilshire, June Brigman. Marie: Oh, that’s right. I knew it was one of the little girls that… Trina: Oh, “little girls”! That’s so goofy! Marie: … she was up at Marvel, both of them. I remember Mary Wilshire, she was a pretty young… Trina: Oh, Mary Wilshire is a good artist. Ramona: She’s very good. And versatile, too. Marie: I don’t know many of them, really, it’s a shame. But even at the Friends of Lulu, I don’t know who these people are. I do remember Amanda Connor, she’s wonderful! She knows how to draw. Ramona: Didn’t she have something in that book on women scientists? Marie: I don’t know. And there’s another one, is it Barr, who does something about homosexuals? Trina: Oh, Donna Barr! The Desert Peach. Yeah.

Marie: I never see the underground stuff, but there was something in a book I had that I was going through yesterday, since I was coming here, and then… Ramona: Is that the little sort of schlumpy girl who says… ? Trina: No, Donna is not schlumpy at all. Ramona: No, I don’t mean Donna, I mean the character that she does, a gay girl? Marie: I don’t know which one that is. Trina: Donna’s amazing. Marie: She has a beautiful—I’m going to forget unless I say something—like a French inking style; if you saw it, you’d really appreciate what it is. I don’t know whether she is versatile enough to go into… Trina: She is so damn versatile that I can’t believe it. She can draw quicker than you can talk. She would rather draw than write. When people ask her for comments and letters, she’ll do this whole incredible comic! She can just turn it out! It’s just incredible. She’s so fast! Ramona: She writes it herself? Marie: Is she making money? Is she successful? Trina: Well, she’s self-published, and self-published woman don’t make a lot of money, unfortunately. They put a lot of work into it, but they don’t draw super-heroes, so their work winds up in black&-white books, which are not… Ramona: [Referring back to the “schlumpy girl”] But it’s a very cute little strip. She’s sort of a loser… drags through her experiences, and she’s very funny. She’s like a lesbian Cathy. Marie: Where has it appeared? Ramona: I don’t know. I saw it this summer reproduced in a book. Trina: You’re not talking about Allison Bechdel? Ramona: Maybe. I don’t know. Trina: Could it be Bitchy Bitch? [laughter] Marie: I love all these people! Ramona: She was having trouble with relationships, and she’d go from one girl to another, and there was always some mess, or something awful happening. Trina: Is she drawn kind of cute, with a head that’s an oval with a little bit of hair on the top? Ramona: No. Marie: That sounds like a kewpie doll. A kewpie doll is not gay! [laughter] Ramona: Here, that’s what Dale used to send me for scripts. [hands Trina sketches by Dale Messick] Trina: Oh, wow! Oh, my God! Can I borrow this? Ramona: Yes, I brought it for you. Ramona: I believe that’s the last script she sent me, and then they fired her. Trina: This is fabulous! Marie: I didn’t know she was done like that, with the pencils… Trina: How did you… Ramona: … well, she never did a script when she was drawing the strip, so that’s the way she sent it to me: A page of drawings instead of a script. And so here, I’m having this identity crisis, because it was her drawing, and I was trying to draw… Marie: I would’ve just put it on a lightbox. Ramona: I couldn’t do that. Marie: Why not? Ramona: Because it’s just not me, I couldn’t do that! It would be cheating. Marie: No, it’s not, it’s following… you’d get the layout and the expressions, because she’s good. And then if you want to polish it in your own way, that’s not cheating. Ramona: That was the last script she sent me, and then they fired her because she was about to make Brenda pregnant again, and that was the last thing they wanted to have! Marie: I love it, I love it. I love this stuff, that’s great! [laughs] I didn’t know she was pregnant before, anyway. Trina: She had a baby. Ramona: Starr Twinkle. Trina: You know, her daughter is named Starr, that’s how much the strip meant to her. Marie: She was the strip. Ramona: Oh, absolutely. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Trina: She even dyed her hair bright orange. Ramona: Sure, and she had long eyelashes, and she wore gorgeous clothes, jewelry… Trina: She totally lived the experience. Ramona: No doubt. That’s why she could draw it the way she drew it, she was Brenda. I couldn’t draw it that way, it wasn’t me. Frankly, I think that her drawing of Brenda was far more interesting than mine, even though I think my Brenda was prettier in a more superficial way. Marie: That’s what they wanted. Ramona: She felt free to have Brenda do anything she wanted, look any way she wanted, her hair could be falling in her face and she’d still be this really interesting, glamorous character. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t feel that I knew that character, and I couldn’t make her that uninhibited. Trina: Well, you didn’t know her, because you hadn’t created her. But you did a very good job on her. Ramona: I would’ve made her a dowdy hausfrau! [laughter] Trina: But you did a very good job, you know, the way she would do the lips with the little lines and the stars in the eyes, you kept the major signature things. Ramona: Yeah, I did the eyelashes and the tears, but it was different. And then, every writer I had changed Brenda. Each writer made Brenda herself, and as her character and personality changed, I interpreted her differently. There’s a huge difference between the Brenda I drew in 1980 and the ones I did in ’85 or ’90. Bob Pollack [publisher of the Brenda Starr fanzine] gave me that to give you. [gives Trina an ad for a Brenda Starr doll] Trina: Oh, wow, thank you! I had no idea there was a Brenda Starr doll… God! Ramona: Yeah, Trina’s happy. [laughter] Marie: I missed out on so much. [laughter] Starr Twinkle, indeed! Trina: Are you guys into dolls, either of you? Ramona: No. Trina: I’m the only “girl,” is that it? Marie: I had a Lone Ranger and Tonto doll. Ramona: I had dolls… Marie: I had a mama doll. Ramona: … and I’d still dress them and stuff… Trina: But I mean, you don’t collect dolls now? Marie: No, I don’t have room, I’ve got too much else. Trina: I don’t have enough room, either, but I collect ‘em anyway, I can’t help it! Ramona: You must have a good… did you save your Barbies, I hope? Trina: No, I didn’t have Barbies, I was too old for Barbies. But I have… now I have Barbies. I have the first Midge and the first Skipper from like 1963 and ’62. I have an early Barbie from ’65. Ramona: My daughter was six years old in ’65, and she had every one of them. Trina: Did she keep them? Ramona: I threw them out. Trina: Aaahhh! Ramona: I was one of those bad mommies. Once a week, I hear about that from her. I mean, they would be worth a fortune now! Oct. 2000

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Trina: You could both retire on those Barbies. Ramona: Do you have them on shelves around the house? Trina: Of course I have them on shelves! Ramona: Where, in the living room? Trina: No, in the bedroom where I used to draw, but I hardly draw anymore, but that’s where I keep my doll collection. Marie: Mine has started to creep out into the dining room. Ramona: You have a doll collection? Marie: No, no, but little funny things… ugly gargoyles, Star Wars and Superman, like the DC things, even some good China figures. Darth Vader I was fascinated with. What’s the name of that new… the sword-and-sorcery thing… Xena. Trina: Oh, I love Xena! Marie: [To Ramona] Now, what do you think of Xena? Ramona: I haven’t seen it. No, I saw it once and thought, “Oy!” Marie: I bought this doll of Xena, it was on discount—I don’t know why, it’s so great—you press something, and her arm shoots up, and she’s got this sword that comes out, and I thought this was so funny! And it’s made well; it looks like her. So many times they make these plastic things, they don’t look like them… you know, like I was kidding on a poster I did for a fan: It’s Marvel Girl, and she’s saying, “Do you think they’ll make a plastic doll of me, too?” (because they were doing all this stuff with Wolverine), and her boyfriend, Cyclops, says to her, “You’d be lucky to get a Barbie head with a mask on it!” Trina: So what do you think of Xena? Do you watch it? Marie: Once in a great while, I think it’s a hoot. I think it’s a shame that they don’t have a good set-up for making a comic of it, because I think it might bring a lot of girls into comics, you know? Trina: Oh, yes. Marie: Some of the stories are really weird,

Left inset: Perhaps most diehard ’60s Marvel fans’ first introduction to Marie’s art was her rendition of Dr. Strange in the pages of Strange Tales. Here’s a Doc Strange commission piece (courtesy of Jerry “The K” Boyd) by Marie. Art ©2000 Marie Severin. Dr. Strange ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: A Marvel staffer as well as freelance artist, Marie often executed whatever promotional and licensing work was needed during the mid- to late-’60s. Here’s a Marie-penciled and Frank Giacoiainked Merry Marvel Marching Society Christmas card illo. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Trina: She’s six feet tall. Marie: Yeah, she’s a big girl. But you can’t help but watch it and laugh, it’s very entertaining. But I couldn’t take it if it was like a regular thing. Trina: I watch it all the time, I’m addicted to it. Ramona: Really? Marie: Well, it’s fun. Ramona: Trina, you really… you celebrate anything that women can do, don’t you? Trina: Yes. Ramona: Any attribute they can develop in themselves. Trina: I can’t help it. [laughter] Ramona: I think that’s good. I’m old-fashioned. I grew up thinking girls were supposed to be nurses and secretaries. So, I still haven’t really caught up… Trina: Even though you’ve never become a nurse or a secretary? Ramona: Yeah, exactly. Trina: And you did what the boys were supposed to do… Marie: What your father asked you to do. Ramona: I know, but … you know, when I see these girls playing basketball, I really root for them. Trina: Aren’t they great? Ramona: Yeah. And it’s wonderful to see the little girls at the games cheering for their heroes. They have so many more choices today than I felt I had. It’s really exciting. Marie: And you feel it! Ramona: Yeah. Marie: A well-developed female is really… no wonder men like to look at girls, because when they’re all grown-up, it’s a beautifully functioning instrument, really… I should take better care of mine, you know what I mean? When you look at these people, you think, “Oh, I wished I looked like that!” Trina: And the women runners? Marie: Oh, they go too far. Trina: Really? Marie: Yeah, and they get flat… Trina: All the muscles, and they just look so tough! [laughter] Marie: I don’t like tough! Ramona: That’s funny, Above: Courtesy of Bob Beerbohm, here’s a rarely-seen Marie Severin illo (apparently inked by Joe Sinnott) from Newsdealer magazine, trumpeting the Marvel line to dealers and newsagents. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. 34

but the scenery is fun, it’s photographed in New Zealand. She’s a real roughneck. And there’s lesbian suggestions, but you know… and [Xena’s sidekick] is funny, what’s-her-name… I don’t watch it all the time. Trina: Gabrielle. I love Gabrielle! Marie: Yeah. It’s a real super-hero girl, and she’s a roughneck, but it’s not… because it’s a film, and she is well-cast, because she’s a big girl.

because you’re not tough, Trina. Trina: No, I’m not tough at all. Ramona: But you can appreciate it. Trina: Oh, yes. Ramona: Interesting. Marie: You want to defend yourself. Trina: I’ve taken self-defense; you don’t have to be tough for selfdefense. [laughter] COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Marie: We’re all very interesting people. [laughter] Trina: How about Wonder Woman? How do both of you feel about Wonder Woman? Ramona: I don’t think about her. Marie: She came at a time when men, they wrote it and they drew it. Trina: But women like her. Or they have in the past… Gloria Steinem, for instance, grew up on Wonder Woman, and Wonder Woman formed her, you know? Ramona: I admire the women who are foreign correspondents, like Christiane Amanpour. Women who have exciting, exotic jobs. Trina: So you’re talking about real women, then? Ramona: Yeah. Marie: Do you consider yourself a realist? Ramona: I don’t know what you mean by that. Marie: Well, do you… the fantasy end of comics, does the fantasy appeal to you, or… Ramona: Not in comics, no. My own fantasies… Trina: Did either of you read Miss Fury when you were kids? Ramona: Yeah, I liked that. I liked the idea that she wore black and was so athletic, I thought that was so wonderful. Trina: She was the first super-heroine, really. Of course, you know she was done by a woman! Marie: Who did that? Trina: Tarpe Mills. Her real name was June Mills, she took her mother’s last name, Tarpe… June Tarpe Mills was her full name, she called herself Tarpe Mills because it was a sexually ambiguous name. She didn’t want people to know it was done by a woman. Of course, everyone knew anyway. Marie: You know what I think is interesting today—or say the last 20 years—you could tell a woman cartoonist… maybe not you and I; but nowadays, most of the time you can tell a woman’s art in the comics and everything, while years ago, they all… Ramona: Now they’re doing their own thing. Marie: But in the old days, you couldn’t tell a male artist from a female artist. Like in the old engravings and book illustrations, they were all done, they were all trained, they all went to school, and they all had to meet a certain thing, and you didn’t know one from the other. Ramona: That’s true. Marie: Once in a while, a very strong… but I’ve seen drawings that I think are absolutely darling old-fashioned drawings, and it’s by a guy! And you’d see these marvelous drawings… some of the flower fairy drawings, a woman did that, but some of them, you’d think, “The technique this guy is using…” and it’s a woman! Trina: Oh, yeah. Artemisia Gentilleschi’s stuff, if you ever see it, you’d never know… Marie: Pronouncing and spelling her name is an achievement! Trina: She was a Renaissance painter. Her favorite theme was Judith beheadOct. 2000

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ing Holofernes, which is really gruesome! She would draw the blood spurting out of his neck, and you’d never know this was a woman, but it was. Marie: I think it’s wonderful that you know that! Trina: I have a whole book on her, she was a very successful Renaissance artist. Ramona: I’ve got to do your chart sometimes and see why you’re like you are! [laughter] Marie: Order mine up, too, willya? [laughter] And send me yours! Ramona: You’re such an ardent, passionate advocate of women’s rights. Trina: I’m not the only one, I hope you realize that! [laughter] Marie: But you come on awful strong. Ramona: But you don’t hate men, which is nice. Trina: No, I’m a male-basher, but I don’t hate men. [laughter] It’s true! Ramona: Well, they could use a little bashing. Trina: Exactly. Ramona: I think it’s funny, though, that women… at least, Marie and I have always talked about how comical we thought superheroes were, they’re just funny, and you can’t take them seriously! Trina: And yet, the guys do take it seriously. But you guys don’t. Marie: Oh, they go into great lengths about this, and they intertwine their stories, and they can sit for hours… they never enjoyed doing story things with me, it wasn’t that they didn’t like our art so much… Trina: Why is there a difference?

Above: For a time during the late-’60s/early-’70s, Marie was also a de facto Marvel art director as she designed the covers for much of the publisher’s line. In the spirit of girl power this ish, here’s Marie’s sketch of Valkyrie and cohorts for the cover of The Avengers #83. Inset is the final published version as rendered by John Buscema and Tom Palmer. Courtesy of the artist. Art ©2000 Marie Severin. Characters, cover ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Inset left: Jon B. Cooke will never forget dropping a nickel in a gumball machine during the early-’70s and getting these four Marie Severin-drawn Dr. Strange stickers in return. Yeesh, was Marie all over the place or wot? ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. 35

Above: Just for jollies, Marie would often elicit laughs from fellow staffers by drawing up a quickie cartoon. Here’s one, courtesy of the artist, depicting the latest rage at early-’70s Marvel. Art ©2000 Marie Severin. Conan ©2000 Conan Properties, Inc. Below: We’re only able to reproduce a miniscule fraction of Marie’s wonderful internal cartoons done for fellow Marvel staffers but we just had to share one featuring a very well regarded compatriot, Herb Trimpe, here surrounded by the women in the office. Art ©2000 Marie Severin.

Marie: Well, their audience, for the most part, are their friends at the locker room or the drinking parties. Trina: Yeah, the locker room. Marie: I started to say before, the guys at Marvel… I want to finish my thought on that with the artwork… I think most of them only appreciated my humor stuff, they liked my humor stuff a lot. But then, when they want to start doing their own humor stuff, that was pretty much ignored, and the idiots were doing What Th—? I was still under contract, but I got maybe one or two stories. That didn’t bother me; I didn’t call up and say I wanted to work with it, because frankly, I was afraid of the kind of stuff they’d ask me to do! But before then, the young kids would prefer having a story conference with the guys. They talked easier together, and also, I was a lot older than they… it’s not an excuse for why I didn’t get work, it’s a fact. They felt uncomfortable talking with me, they couldn’t sit around, snort and whatever they’d do. Trina: So was that because of your age, or because you were female? Marie: Both. And my technique was not polished in the “modern” sense. Ramona: I think it’s the business, too. Marie: Oh, of course it was. I worked at the Federal Reserve Bank, one woman had a mental breakdown because she couldn’t get

ahead of the guys. Trina: You and John Romita are the same age. Marie: But I didn’t perfect my comic art the way he did. He may take three days to do one cover, and Stan likes it, and it’s very polished and comic book anatomically correct, and he can ink beautifully and painstakingly. People have asked,”Why didn’t you do more stuff?” Well I did a bit of everything and at 5:00 it was the end of it. Trina: You didn’t bring your work home? Marie: Only once in a while, Brand Ecch and stuff like that. My stuff in the latter part of the ’70s was not in demand as much as the new guys coming up, the new blood coming up, the new style of inking… they had all these fine, wonderful lines. I mean, we were into better paper, printing and color meant very involved art could be reproduced. The price of the comic went up. Mcfarlane would not have been printable in the old days. My style isn’t like that; my style is fairly crude in a way. Ramona: You were competing with some really good artists. Marie: Oh, yeah! Ramona: I mean, the Marvel guys were a lot better than the DC ones. Marie: I did some stuff that was okay, but they never liked my “Dr. Strange” as much, they’d skip it if they can. Trina: That’s funny, I love your “Dr. Strange.” Marie: I thought it was fun, because I helped do the stories then, that’s when I worked for Stan, and that was fun. I liked the weirdness of it. Trina: But you know, Marie, I think you only say, “Well, I don’t care. They didn’t include me in these things, but I don’t care.” I think you do care, I think you did care. Marie: Only if I wanted to do a particular type thing. But it was mostly just saying, not that they don’t like me personally, but they just prefer… I’m not in the club. Ramona: Marie, watch out: She’s trying to radicalize you! [laughter] Trina: Well, sure, after this meeting, what I’m going to do is lead us all in making some pipe bombs [laughter] and once we get to Marvel, we will hurl these bombs… [laughs] Marie: They know not what they do, because they’re so involved and they hope to produce a money-making project, and they succeeded in the ’70s. Ramona: Well, don’t you think part of the reason it fell apart was because nobody had a script they were working from? Trina: The writers… oh, you mean the Marvel Style? Ramona: The Marvel Style. Trina: I’ve worked in both styles, and I think they both work. Ramona: I can’t work that way, with one paragraph. I get off on dialogue. Trina: But no, maybe Marie knows, because she worked in the Marvel style. You would describe the whole thing, and the artists felt freer… don’t you think the artists felt freer? Marie: If they had that much to put on the paper, if it was within themselves. If they were… Trina: If they were good. Marie: A guy like Buscema, you could say to him, “Conan is coming into these weird, ancient ruins, and it’s a jungle, and it’s starting the overgrowth, and he’s coming in there, and there’s something stirring in the bushes, we don’t know what it is. On the next page, it’ll be a big dinosaur.” You’ll get the most gorgeous gobbledygook COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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stonework and ruins and foliage, and you can almost hear him walking in the wet damp, and there’s something moving, there’s a shadow. And he’ll get it in. Somebody else would not have the angle, and would have something from Coney Island as the ruins, you know? And still, they’d have a fancy inking technique that would show all the muscles and the sinews and the thighs, and the fancy costume, and have a half-naked woman there. Ramona: But I wonder if that hasn’t contributed to the state that comics are in now, the fact that the artists took over, in a sense. They began, I think, to get too full of themselves. Trina: But if it’s a good artist, like she said John Buscema is great. A good artist… I don’t think John Buscema got too full of himself, he was a professional. Ramona: I’m not talking about one artist specifically, but I think artists in general began to run away with the thing and now they’re doing posters! Trina: Now they’re doing posters, yes. But isn’t that just because they’re not good? Ramona: They’re very good; for posters they’re great. Marie: You know what it is? They do not have—in many cases, I’m always rationalizing—in many cases, there is lack of leadership and editorial direction. And everybody wanted to be Stan Lee, and not everybody is Stan Lee, and maybe Stan’s time has passed. But the fact is, you had control in the old days… the editor was the boss, and all of a sudden, these guys are on their own, and the editors are fighting to get a Joe Blow, because Joe Blow’s book sold a big thing, I want it, I’ll get some money, too. I’ll get the glory of him working with me, rather than somebody else. Ramona: But how can you have a good story where you’ve got a whole bunch of pictures, and then somebody comes along and sticks the words on? How can you have a story? But then they’re getting two for the price of one. They’re getting a writer and an artist for one salary. That’s fine if he’s a great storyteller, but you just cut artists loose and say, “Now go ahead and dramatize this paragraph over 17 pages…” Marie: Lee and Kirby worked that way all the time. Ramona: But they’re good! Trina: But that’s the magic word: They’re good! That’s the magic word. Ramona: But you don’t have to be that good if you’ve got a good writer. Marie: Well, that’s what I’m saying, not everybody can work that way; you need the control. In the old days, they controlled so much that a lot of guys never got the chance to let loose. They controlled Kirby at other companies, Stan let him run loose, because he either recognized it, or he figured, “Hey, let’s see what happens… it seems to be working; let him loose!” Also, Stan also had his name on everything anyway, so he didn’t care how overworked he might be or might not be. [laughs] But this current lack of editorial leadership… maybe it’s not the editor’s fault, it could be this guy got 50 million fan letters, and they’re afraid they’ll lose him to DC, so they’ll let him do whatever he wants, and they can ruin a good writer’s story. They can take a writer’s story and say, “I didn’t feel like doing this,” because he’s got the fans to back him up. Trina: But then, you see again, it comes down to is this person a professional? Marie: Of course not. He’s a spoiled brat. Ramona: Well, you’re talking about a script, and... I mean, I’m talking about one paragraph. Marie: You mean one paragraph for a whole story. Oh, I’ve gotten that. Ramona: I just don’t get it, unless you’ve got an artist who’s a writer. Then, you’ve got a writer writing it. Trina: I know you worked on—even though it was never published—you worked on Claws of The Cat. Marie: We both worked on The Cat. Trina: I know you worked Marvel style. Ramona: It was ridiculous! My mind started wandering, and I just… Marie: You know, I think she’s too honest. I really think that’s your problem: You spend so much time thinking of “Is this good?” Ramona: I’m limited. Oct. 2000

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Marie: I remember getting a paragraph—they were doing The Hulk annual thing [#1], and it wasn’t reprints, it was an annual, and the writer [Gary Friedrich]… he gave me a paragraph and disappeared! I had to draw it, and I had a whole book, and he said, “Hulk lands on this other world,” and I had to make up a bunch of characters. I did it, barely. But it was terrible, and I wasn’t compensated for that, but how I fixed it was I did a lot of it on staff, and the heck with them! I never could stand not being busy. I wasn’t invited into the little cliques with the boys and didn’t discuss the plots with anyone that I recall—and I can’t remember who finally wrote it! Trina: I do believe that this did bother you, because you’re aware of it, you’re very aware of it. Marie: Only because people have asked me about it; it’s what you want to hear. Trina: Sure, it’s what I want to hear. [laughter]

Above: One of Marie’s favorite assignments was to work on Marvel’s parody comic, Not Brand Echh. Below a page of Marie’s pencils to the Fury parody in ish #8. Courtesy of Jim Guthrie. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

[Pause to go out for dinner] Trina: Okay, after a good dinner… What were we talking about when we decided to hold? Marie was saying something? Ramona: It was something about men. Marie: Oh, that’s always a sure thing. We were going at them, we were killing them, and then we were loving them, and da da da da da… Trina: Didn’t a lot of comic artists go to the Art Students’ League? Marie: No, they really didn’t. I mean, I think some of them did after the war, because some of the guys after World War II got on the veterans’… . Ramona: I don’t think they went into the League, unless they wanted to do illustration. Marie: But probably if they had gone to the League, they would’ve been in advertising. If they couldn’t make it, they’d come back to the comics. Ramona: Yes, it’s a funny thing, I knew four people at the League who became New Yorker cartoonists, which is an amazing amount for one school. Trina: This is including your husband, right? Ramona: Yeah. But I don’t know anybody who was there at the time who became a comic book artist. Trina: Except you.

Ramona: Yeah, except me. Marie: You know, Ramona, I’m interested: Did you just walk straight into a comic-book outfit? Ramona: Yes. Marie: Tell me. Ramona: Well, I knew George Ward, who went on to work with Walt Kelly, and he was friends with Joe Maneely… Marie: Oh, I love Joe Maneely! Ramona: … and he used to tell us about Maneely. George was doing lettering at the time for comics. And he told us about the money Maneely was making, I mean, he could turn out a 20-page story in minutes. So, we didn’t have any money at the time, Dana and I had just gotten married, and Dana was a cartoonist, and he and George encouraged me to make some samples. So, I went out and bought a bunch of comic books and read them for about two weeks, I immersed myself in them. Marie: You do everything that way. Ramona: Well, I didn’t know anything about comics! I wanted to find out who was publishing, and where to go, and what they looked like. So, I read romances and Westerns, stuff like that, whatever was happening, and made up a page of Western vignettes… somebody socking somebody… Marie: Did it bother you to do that because it was a little violent? Ramona: Yes, but it also felt perfectly natural. Of course, having been at the League, a fine art school, I mean, the thought of being a cartoonist was just like… becoming a prostitute or something! [laughter] Marie: Was this a rebellion on your part, or was it the money-making? Ramona: There was money! I was never going to be a painter, I had no talent to be a painter. Trina: How do you know that? Ramona: Because I couldn’t mix two colors together except they’d come out brown. Marie: Well, you didn’t have anybody coloring in your house! Ramona: Well, I didn’t, but I took classes, I took painting classes, and I just didn’t have it. Marie: I can’t believe that, because I think you have some wonderful color concepts. Ramona: Well, that’s very good. [laughs] Marie: So continue: You started out, you went to this guy who knew Maneely… Ramona: Yeah, so I made up a page of samples, and somebody told me about this place called Fox Features, so I took my samples up there, and they gave me a 12-page script. Marie: Right off the bat? Ramona: Everywhere I went, I got a job! It was crazy! Trina: And you didn’t think you were any good. Ramona: No, I had no idea. I thought anybody could walk in and get a job in comics. Marie: You were a natural! Ramona: I guess I was. But see: What I appreciate is that you grew up knowing you were a cartoonist. Marie: And there wasn’t anything good or bad about it, you still enjoyed it. I loved sculpturing, they bought me clay, I played with that. But I knew if I was a sculptor, I’d have to have a whole basement or an attic to work in, because the stuff is massive. Oil painting is another thing, there’s plenty of oil painters, I mean, everybody did oil painting. So it was the money-making thing. Ramona: Right. Well, I guess you can tell from our conversations that I have mixed feelings about everything I do. Trina: Yeah. Ramona: I had that about this. I didn’t have any respect for comics, it just never figured in my scheme of things, you know? And there I was… Marie: I enjoyed them when I was a kid, but when I discovered movies, I was off into the movies. Ramona: Yeah, I loved them when I was a kid, but then I forgot COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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about them. You know, it was just something I could do, and I got these jobs. I got that script from Fox, and somebody told me they didn’t pay, so I sent the script back. It was a 12-pager. Trina: Do you remember who warned you about them? Ramona: No, no. But I was scared to death! I never expected to get this damn 12-page script, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with it! I’d never drawn comics! Trina: So you mean you never even drew the script, you sent it back undrawn. Ramona: I sent it back. Then I went up to Stan Lee at Magazine Management. Trina: Were they in the Empire State Building? Ramona: Empire State Building, was that Timely? I think it was Timely Comics or something. Marie: Atlas maybe. Ramona: No, it wasn’t Atlas. I think it was Timely. And I got a job, Stan gave me a script right away. He gave me one or two stories, and the second story was a war thing, and I happened to be really against the war that was going on, and I don’t know if it was an accident or what, but I spilled ink all over the pages. It was bad, it was really unprofessional you might say, and he didn’t give me any more scripts. Then, I went to DC and I got a job, and there was… it was like they wouldn’t leave me alone! [laughs] Trina: The gods were insisting that you had to draw comics. Ramona: Yes, exactly. So that was it, and I stayed at DC. Marie: You spilled ink on poor Stan Lee’s job? Ramona: Yeah. Marie: But his war stories were harmless! Ramona: Well, they were about war. [Trina is fumbling around in her backpack] Marie: What are you doing?!? Trina: I’m looking for my camera, and I think I left it at Flo [Steinberg]’s. So I’m going to have to call Flo. Marie: It’s too late. Trina: Well, I was thinking, “Camera, camera; take pictures!” I believe I left it at Flo’s. I can’t believe… well, I do believe I did this. It’s only 9:25, so she’s still awake. [Trina leaves to pick up her camera at Flo’s place. The remainder of the conversation consists solely of Marie and Ramona] Marie: I don’t remember not drawing. We moved from Long Island to Brooklyn when I was four. Well, my brother was always drawing, my parents were artistic and encouraged us—we always had paper—don’t know how my father could afford it in the Depression. Also I’m sure it kept us out of trouble. We always had books with illustrations and encyclopedias—I would look things up, costumes etc. Brother John led the way to self education… Ramona: You did a lot of that. Marie: Yeah, I just liked it. It was fun. And trees, different kinds of trees. I didn’t know what kind they were, but this kind of a tree had… Ramona: You mean you’d draw from life, or you’d draw from a book? Marie: From a book, from life, whatever. Ramona: Were you drawing from a model at all? Marie: When I attended Cartoonists & Illustrators’ School for about nine months. Ramona: How often did you draw from models? Marie: I think it was once or twice a week. But it was way uptown, I wouldn’t get home until 11 o’clock at night, and then I was working down at Wall Street. I enjoyed it, though. I was the only girl in the class! Ramona: Art school wasn’t a big part of your learning to draw, then. So how old were you, 19 or 20? Marie: It was after high school. I was working downtown, it was my first paying job, I didn’t want to go to Pratt, and I should’ve. Ramona: Why? Marie: I think I probably would’ve done much more of a worthwhile quality of work. I might’ve gotten into sculpting and other things. Not that comics are junk, but it’s not something that will live five centuries from now! But I always wanted to do stained glass. I wanted to sculpt. Ramona: But without any art training, you were prepared to take Oct. 2000

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a job, and to get a job and hold it in cartooning? That’s incredible. Marie: Yeah. Ramona: It really is. I worked three years at the League, and one year at Parsons and I believe I drew from models every day. Marie: But see, you weren’t drawing as a little child. Ramona: Yes, I was! In fact, when we were in Chicago, and I was four, my mother took us to the Art Institute to take drawing classes. Marie: Then you were doing the same stuff I was? Ramona: Oh, yeah, I was drawing all the time. My father had wanted to be an artist. We used to watch him at his drawing board all the time. I knew all about pens and white-out and all that stuff. Marie: Me, too. Ramona: But I think it sounds as if you, without any art training, were ready to draw figures and to be able to be a cartoonist. I could never have done that without those years of drawing from a model and learning how to move the figure around. Marie: I don’t know why, but I seem to have been able to move the figure very naturally. I was always fascinated, watching parades or animals moving, or people in sports, and boxing, I used to think, “Look at that! Look at that! What happens to the body?” Ballet, I was amazed! And I always thought, “Geez, there’s not enough pictures of women; I don’t know how to draw women that well.” But it was mostly that the sports stuff… real action when I went into comics, action, and I’d seen more of the sports by then, but now, I mean, there’s wonderful shots of women in sports, and you can see the real leaping and so forth, to move them around in a story. Ramona: So you drew from pictures a lot? Marie: Ah… no, I didn’t refer to pictures for people that much. I looked at people intently, but things like drapery and period costumes—art books in the house—we had a lot of children’s books with great illustrations: Pyle, Wyeth, that took you around the world. There was so much to learn from the masters but I didn’t grasp that till later. Ramona: I studied with a man named Robert Johnson, and he was teaching the Nicolaides method of drawing, which is to

Below: Marie related to JBC that when the cover art for The Cat #1 arrived in the Marvel Bullpen from inker Wally Wood’s studio, the main character (vignetted below) was rendered fully nude by Woody over Marie’s innocuous pencils. Marie sez they had to scramble with Snow-pake to insure code approval on the cover. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

draw 30-second poses, and one minute poses, so you were getting the full action of the figure, and you didn’t have to go into detail, but he wanted you to feel the movement. That was really valuable training. He didn’t do many long poses—we were constantly doing these short poses, and I think that’s what helped me draw comics. Marie: But you probably picked it up quickly. Ramona: Well, I did well, yes, I was one of the better students in that class. But you see, at one point, somebody looked at my drawing and said, “Oh, you should be a cartoonist,” and I was insulted! I was imbued with this fine arts snobbery; it was stupid! Marie: Well, the cave drawings were cartoons. Ramona: That’s true. Marie: You know what amazes me in the cave drawings? Anatomically, some of them drew animals so beautifully. Ramona: They were wonderfully stylized. 39

Above: Another oft-recalled Marie Severin assignment was her work on the Sub-Mariner title with writer Roy Thomas. Here’s her cover art on issue #19 as inked by former EC staffer Johnny Craig. Courtesy of Marie. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Marie: Weren’t they something? Ramona: Well, they weren’t as primitive as we think they were. Marie: No, they weren’t. I hope Trina is alive and well. I’m getting tired! Ramona: Oh, I’m sure she is. She likes to be looping all the time. Marie: Yeah. Ramona: So, your brother was up at Marvel, and he got you a job, or what? Marie: No, about 1953-54, John suggested me at EC comics for coloring, as they weren’t happy with the printer doing it, especially Kurtzman. They liked my work and taught me a lot in production. When all this business with the Kefauver thing [the Senate Investigations of comics in the 1950s], and the EC horror books and all that stuff got all ker-blooey; instead of going freelancing, Stan offered him a staff job up there. Ramona: This was Marvel? Marie: It was Atlas at the time. We’re talking about 1955, ’56, ’57, something like that. EC was just Mad magazine, so I left. I went to Stan Lee, because John was there, and Stan was delighted, because he was doing rip-offs of Mad magazine, so I was good on production there, and they needed colorists there and also production. Until they fell apart [in 1957], that’s what I was doing.

Ramona: When I went to DC, I kept hearing about you. People would say, “Do you know Marie Severin?” For all those years, I kept hearing about this other woman who was a cartoonist. Marie: I had no idea what you were like! Ramona: And I had this picture of what you looked like, which isn’t what you look like. [laughter]. It just seems like we were a couple of weirdos in this business. Marie: We were oddities, because we were working in a field that… no other women were there, and probably people were wondering why, and we were just paying bills, and I enjoyed the work, as I said earlier. Ramona: I figured out just recently that the reason I didn’t enjoy it all these years is because I hated drawing from a script, what somebody else wanted me to draw. These damn writers didn’t care what they told you to draw: They could have you draw 50 fish and 100 battleships in one panel… Marie: And they weren’t Spielberg, so their imagination wasn’t that rewarding. Ramona: And you had to draw it. They could think of it in two minutes, and then you’d be there for the next five hours drawing this thing. So, I always hated that, and now that I don’t have to draw from scripts anymore, I like to draw. It’s strange, I never realized that was the problem. Marie: A lot of times, it was very restricting. Ramona: It’s probably not finished yet, but…. Marie: Ramona, we were talking earlier about why you were intimidated about going into the bullpen. This is in an earlier time, when it was a bullpen of all artists sitting around. Ramona: They were doing production. Marie: You brought up something in our conversation off the tape that makes it all clear to me why you were so intimidated, and it was because… Ramona: I was talking about this one production guy who, every time I came up to deliver work, he would come up, sneak up behind me, and start kissing me on the back of the neck, and I could not stop him from doing it. [laughter] I always had this feeling that if I went in to the bullpen, there would be some kind of a disaster or something… Marie: These lechers running up to you with their pants falling off! Ramona: Yeah! That’s what it felt like! There were a couple of men up there who behaved that way, and they really.. it scared me, you know? I felt really vulnerable. Marie: You know, that’s funny, because with the smaller group at EC, the guys were all gentlemen, no one would dare do something like that! But in a big group like that, where they’re the majority, it’s the bullpen, and here comes a little calf in there making cover sketches! Wow. Ramona: That’s it, exactly. Marie: I would be intimidated, I’d be scared stiff with that. Ramona: I really was. They were deranged in there. [laughter] They were in this dark room with no windows, they’re in there working all day, looking at these nutty pictures, and around 3 o’clock they’d all get a little weird, and that’s when I’d come in. So it was scary, but for the most part, the men were quite gentlemanly, and treated me like everybody else, except as I’ve said, I always wondered if I made as much money as the men did. Marie: Probably not. Ramona: Someday I’ll find out. Marie: Yeah. See, unless there’s another woman for you to talk to about rates and stuff, the guys certainly aren’t going to tell you, because they’d be insulted if you made more than they. Ramona: Yeah, that’s true. Marie: That’s funny. But men don’t change. I remember a story my mother told me, when she came down from upstate New York, and she had a job in an office before she met my father—it was during World War I—this one guy came up in back of her… and remember, this is like 1917, 1918, and he came up and nuzzled her neck, and said, “You know, you have such nice perfume,” and my mother was tiny, but got up and smacked him! Ramona: No kidding! Marie: He was so embarrassed that he never brought it up, and sat right down and went right back to work, and nobody said Boo! COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Another time, when I was little, she said I was toddling at the time a guy came up… I don’t know where we lived at the time, it had a stoop… oh, no, it wasn’t me, it was my brother, it was in Jersey, and this guy came up the stoop, he was a salesman (and the lady across the street came over to her afterwards and said, “I’ve never seen anything so funny in all my life!”). This salesman comes up to her and tries to sell something—in those days, the ’20s, early-’30s, there were tons of salesmen—selling something, and she says, “No, thank you,” and he says, “How about a little kiss?” And she pushed him, and he fell down the whole flight of stairs, his suitcase flies all over the street, he gathered everything up and ran. Ramona: She didn’t take baloney. Marie: You’d never think it! She was the kindest, gentlest person. The neighbor came over and she said, “What did he say?” “He said, ‘How about a little kiss?’” Bong! But she was not rough; she was a perfect lady, you know? You’d never think something like that. Ramona: I think it’s more a question of what you think of yourself. Marie: Yeah, and the situation where she knew she was right. Ramona: I didn’t know what do to about that production guy, and I went to George Kashdan and Joe Orlando, and they sort of talked to him, but I couldn’t do it myself. I really felt quite… Marie: Well, you were ladylike, and you were intimidated! Ramona: I was intimidated. Marie: And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Those things go on! Another time, in a different circumstance, you might’ve gotten up… see, in those days, I think in the turn of the century, in some circumstances, a woman knew she could do something like that, and she wasn’t intimidated. He invaded her area. Ramona: I think that around that time, it was more gauche to do something like that than it was later on. Marie: And he was being a smart-aleck, showing off. It was completely out of line in those days. And Trina would be here saying, “Oh, my God! If something like that happened to me, I’d just faint dead away!” Or would she bite them? Ramona: Oh, she probably would. Smack them. I’m sure she would. Marie: Trina, I hope you’re getting your camera. I’m going to end

this, because if we start something at this point, we won’t finish it. [Pause while Marie changes tapes] What we were talking about here is, if we have some sensible thoughts on what’s the future of cartooning, and Ramona was just saying about reading, so…. Ramona: I’ve been reading that boys are playing more computer games and doing less reading these days, and it doesn’t seem as if there’s a very big future for comics. And yet, I still keep thinking somebody could have a product that might interest them. It’s so ingrown. In a sense, it’s like jazz these days, the musicians are talking to themselves; they’re not talking to the public anymore or entertaining them. I think that’s what’s happened to comics, there are too many people doing comics who grew up on comics, and they’re almost cut off from the rest of the culture. I think the future is probably in animation. Marie: Oh, the joy of sitting and reading a comic or a book or a novel, it’s paper… Trina’s back with the camera! We were taping a little bit. Trina: Good, good! [Recording stops and Trina takes photos] (Addition by Marie: And we all fall down.)

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Above: Also feature as a watermark on our contents page, this Marie Severin image appeared as a full-color cover for 1978 Delaware Valley Comicart Consortium Convention souvenir program, honoring Women in Comics. All characters ©2000 their respective copyright holders. Art ©2000 Marie Severin.

THE BEST OF ALTER EGO, VOLUME 2 is the new sequel to ALTER EGO: THE BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE, which presents more fantastic features from the fabled mag begun in 1961 by JERRY BAILS & ROY THOMAS—covering undiscovered gems from all 11 original issues published between 1961 and 1978! Editors ROY THOMAS and BILL SCHELLY uncover never-revealed secrets about the first super-hero fanzine ever published, with vintage articles about TOR, HAWKMAN, THE SPECTRE, BLACKHAWK, THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, THE ALL WINNERS SQUAD, ROBOTMAN, WONDER WOMAN, THE HEAP, THE LENSMEN/GREEN LANTERN CONNECTION, and so much more! Plus rarely-seen comics stories by JOE KUBERT (a gorgeous, unsold “Tor” newspaper strip), RONN FOSS (“The Eclipse”), and ROY THOMAS and SAM GRAINGER (adapting Gardner Fox’s novel “Warrior of Llarn”), as well as Roy’s entire “Bestest League of America” parody, collected for the first time ever! There’s even a never-before-reprinted 1977 interview with JEAN GIRAUD (“Moebius”), plus special sections on Bails’ adzine THE COMICOLLECTOR and on “the A/E #10 that almost was”! It’s all behind a classic cover of GARDNER FOX and his greatest creations by then-future Marvel artist SAM GRAINGER! (160-page trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $6.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-048-9 • Ships May 2013 STILL AVAILABLE: ALTER EGO: THE BEST OF THE LEGENDARY COMICS FANZINE • (192-page trade paperback) $21.95 • ISBN: 978-1-893905-88-7

CBA Interview

Fleener Talks To Severin Mary Chats With Marie About The EC & Marvel Bullpens Mary Fleener has been drawing underground comics since 1984, and her titles include Hoodoo, Slutburger, Fleener and a collection of her autobiographical work can be found in Life of the Party (Fantagraphics). She also makes ceramics, paints, does illustration work, surfs on a boogie board, plays bass in an all-girl band and is married to a smart man! Trina sez she is the best cubist artist on the world except for a buncha dead guys.

Below: Attending the Women’s show at the Words & Pictures Museum on Sept. 21, 1996, are (from left) Mary Fleener, Marie Severin, and Trina Robbins. Cool shirt, Fleener! Photo courtesy of Marie Severin.

Conducted by Mary Fleener Transcribed by Jon B. Knutson Marie Severin needs no introduction to anyone who read Marvel comics, and if you didn’t read Marvel, maybe a little publication called Mad might jog your memory. She is simply the most important colorist in the history of comics. She is also a respected pen & inker, and is still producing fabulous work today. I first met her in 1996, at an art show sponsored by the Words and Pictures Museum, and found we had a lot in common—mainly we were both border-line nut cases! I felt like I had known her all my life, and as someone who loves the color wheel, it was an honor to meet the woman who embellished the works of Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Bill Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, and the other EC legends. The following interview took place by phone in 1998. Mary Fleener: Last year you were at the San Diego Comic Con as an invited guest, and you were sitting over in Artists’ Alley. What did you think of the Freak Parade? Marie Severin: [laughs] It’s like what happened in the ’80s, what they were drawing in comics. They’re so desperate for attention, you’ve got to consider it like that. Mary: What kind of comics did you like? Marie: I never read a Marvel comic unless I had to work in the next issue, or design a cover. When I was little, I loved Batman… I had the first Superman in my generation, and of course our mothers threw them away. Mary: Your inheritance went down the drain, like so many others. [laughter] Marie: My brother John was older, so he was always ahead of stuff. I remember when Prince Valiant first came out. “There’s a surprise in the Journal-American paper.” (It was a Saturday edition). “There’s two of them!” And he wouldn’t give me the paper until he finished the whole comic section. I was always running around: ”Would somebody read these to me?” So, when I started school, I didn’t know how to read because I didn’t like it, and is the teacher going to read to me? No! You have to read for yourself!

Mary: This is funny, because though we have an age difference… Marie: Sort of? [laughs] Mary: It’s not that much! Marie: Look, I’m old enough to be your mother! [laughter] Mary: Well, I think you are my mother! [laughter]… but listen, I grew up reading the Sunday comics. My parents went to church every Sunday. Church for me was when the Sunday funnies came and there were 18 pages, and it took a long time to read them. That’s how I learned to draw and I absorbed the language of comics. To me, that was reading! When I went to school, I was a retard. Everybody realized, by the the fourth grade, I simply did not know how to read. I’d done a pretty good job of faking it, so my Dad had to spend a few months tutoring me. Is that what happened to you? Marie: Yeah. Well, they gave up on me because I was just a lazy head at this point. But, you know, on Sunday, I had to go to 9 A.M. mass, so I was in charge of bringing home the papers, so I talked everybody into buying all of them. I got the Daily News, the Daily Mirror, the Journal-American. And I could barely walk home! I was little, you know? And in the afternoon with them tucked under my arm, I’d bug them to read to me. Mary: My parents were always running late on Sunday, so we always attended high mass… Marie: Oh, no! Mary: …which is one hour and 45 minutes. Marie: I went to church by myself. Where else would I know where to go on a Sunday morning at that hour? Mary: Well, you were in New York. It would probably take you 15 minutes to walk there, right? Marie: It was where I went to grammar school, Our Lady of Angels. I picked up leaves. Oh God, I’d walk into class with an armful of leaves! They were beautiful. The teachers used to put them around the blackboard, and it looked so pretty the other teachers started doing it too. I liked that. Mary: Hey, you were a little kid that looked at everything. I think most artists, when they’re growing up, see a piece of rotting wood, and instead of seeing garbage, they go, “Wow! There’s a painting in there! And look! There’s a nail at a weird angle, and it looks like my sister!” Marie: Exactly! Mary: I did the same thing, I would pick up sticks or rocks, and talk about boys with terrible things in their pockets— my God, I had junk! Marie: The first time I discovered the magnifying glass—my brother got a chemistry set… and a microscope. It was primitive, but “Oh God, look what’s on my nose!” [laughs] “Look at this, a tooth came out! Look at the roots! Look at that!” Mary: Your family, when they read to you, were they actual comic books? Marie: Oh, sure! And whatever fairy tales. We always had books in the house. Mary: What kind of comic books? Marie: Superman didn’t come out until I was about 10. The early stuff was fairy tales and the newspaper reprints, like Mandrake and Prince Valiant when I was older. But in New York, there was Tarzan—I loved Tarzan—and I don’t remember half of this… oh, Krazy Kat… he was in the COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Sunday, all that stuff. And the Katzenjammer Kids. I liked the adventure stuff a little more than the humor stuff. Mary: Were there comic book racks at the shopping places? Marie: I’ll tell you, in those days, the comic books were kind of limited in display. We didn’t have the volume of stuff. I vaguely remember they were on some sort of stand, but the selection was not like today. It was mostly Blue Book, Redbook, Photoplay and movie magazines, and more adult—I don’t mean dirty, I mean more sensible stuff. Once I got to be 10 years old, I dumped comics and went into the movie magazines. I was a movie fan. I mean, every penny I could save, I went to the movies, and I think that’s where I learned continuity. Mary: A lot of cartoonists say the same thing. Like Bill Griffith, who does Zippy the Pinhead, he goes to movies, especially in the middle of the day, at least that’s what he told me! I don’t like theaters anymore because they seem so cramped. My grandparents took me to tons of movies and it seems the comfort and the lavishness has forever disappeared. I loved the Egyptian Theatre in L.A. Marie: When I was very little, on Saturdays, they had discounts, and mother was so glad to get you the heck out of the house… [laughter]. 9¢ to go to the Stanley Theater. My mother would let me go there alone. God help everybody if it rained because everybody sent the kids out to get rid of them, and the adults came with them to get something to do. They would come down, and because, in those days, everybody was so easy-going, and the children were obedient, the matron—they always had a matron for the children’s section, I guess so we weren’t assaulted or dribble on somebody, or throw up without attendants—she’d come down, a big fat lady, and she’d say, “Everybody double up!” You had to share a seat with somebody, which meant somebody was hanging off the seat. [laughter] But you doubled up on a rainy day when the crowd was big, Oct. 2000

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because that was the only thing you could do—there was no TV. When I came home and told my mother, “You know what? The matron said to double up.” She asked, “What does that mean?” I said, “They always do that when there’s a crowd, but today she made us go up and sit in the front on the floor, and I’ve got a pain in my neck from looking up!” [laughter] Mary: Did you ever come home from a movie and try to draw certain scenes? Marie: Oh, yeah. I went to the movies constantly. Even if I didn’t know what the movie was about, I went. I think the most exciting movie was Tarzan, the early Tarzan, you know? Mary: Weissmuller was terrific! Marie: And Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland in Robin Hood. Oh! My brother said, “Guess what’s coming to the Dyker Theater?” “What?” “Robin Hood!” Of course I knew the story… we always got fairy tale books and adventure books for our birthday. My brother was drawing all sorts of things… his were so good, though, because he would draw whole battle scenes. And great detail. He’s about eight years older than I am. Mary: My brother is about seven years older than me too, so I got to go to lots of places because he was with me. You, too?

Above: Auctioned off at the 1998 Friends of Lulu sale in San Diego, here’s Mary Fleener’s portrait of Marie Severin. Courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Mary Fleener. Below is Marie’s self-portrait done for Marvelmania in the late-’60s. ©2000 Marie Severin.

Above: Those two grinning kids are none other than (left) Johnny Severin (age 14 or 15) and sister Marie (age 6 or 7), sitting on a stoop with two unnamed cousins. Courtesy of Marie.

Marie: Yeah, poor guy had to drag this pesky kid! [laughter] I had to be pretty quiet, because I knew if I didn’t, he’d dump me some place. Mary: Seven or eight years, that’s a good difference. Marie: Yeah, he felt very brotherly/fatherly. Mary: You both just started drawing naturally? My brother had no interest in art. Marie: Yeah, it’s just what we did. Mary: I understand your whole family were artists. Marie: My father was excellent and my mother could draw. At one time, she was into making her own clothes. She could design things, she had a very wonderful space concept. Mary: This is too much! My mother loved making clothes, too. She studied fashion design in college. My grandmother was also a fabulous seamstress. Marie: Really? [laughs] Mary: My grandmother made all the costumes for this dance troupe called the Meglin Kiddies. They were popular in the ’30s. My mother danced with them for six years; in fact, Judy Garland was part of the group—she was with the Gumm Sisters. Marie: She knew her? Mary: Yes, but according to her, Judy’s mother was the typical “backstage” mom and didn’t allow her to cultivate strong friendships with anybody for long. Marie: I would love to meet Shirley Temple. I would love to meet her. Do you know this last Academy Awards, they had all the old awardees and I spotted her right away! I always watch the Academy Awards with somebody, except I don’t know most of the new movies, I don’t see most of ’em. I said “There’s Shirley Temple!” and my friends were saying, “She makes you feel good, because you have all these nice movie endings and pictures in your head, and she’s so comfortable.” She should run for president. I had a poster with “Shirley Temple for President.” I think it’d be great. Mary: She was the U.S. ambassador to Ghana, I believe, for many years, right? This ties into comics in a way… in both our generations, kids read a lot more. They read Greek mythology, classics… stories with

beginnings, middles and ends and movies usually had positive or happy closures. With the Vietnam War, things got very dark—in films, and traditional methods of creativity were challenged. It was a period of change and the comic book changed as well. Marie: Well, you never knew how the movies were going to end, and my mother started asking me, “Is that the end?” and I’d say, “Mom, what do you mean, ‘Is that the end?’” She’s say, “You never know these days; they have the dopiest endings sometimes.” Mary: And you saw this happening in the world of comics… Marie: Oh, yeah. You know what it was? Years ago, when comics started getting too big, we needed about five more Stan Lees. All we had were wanna-bes, except for a very few. Roy Thomas: He was good. Mary: What was his best stuff? Marie: Avengers, all kinds of Marvel stuff and he started the Conan bit. He also became the editor-in-chief when Stan went out. Mary: I was looking through some old Mad magazines. I’ll say this right now: I don’t think Mad or the ECs would’ve had the impact they had without your color. Marie: Wow! Thanks! Mary: Because the colors were totally off the wall. They were innovative because they were used differently. “Ping Pong”: The last panel where he’s sitting on the dock and there’s that wacky lady in the wheelchair, and a little baby is pushing the mother in the carriage and the mother’s laughing like a nutcase… you’ve got a yellow sky, blue buildings, lime green ocean and a purple dock, well, actually it’s lavender. But if you squint your eyes, all the characters pop out and the colors look like the most normal thing in the world. And you’ve got a pink smokestack on a blue ferry. Ow! Mad really influenced me, color-wise, and that’s how I got to know you—from your unconventional color realm. Marie: You know what it is? It’s clarifying… I wasn’t trying to be innovative; I was trying to clarify, to tell the story and think of the mood. That’s why I will not color a book unless they send me the whole story. I’ll wait until it all comes in, and then I’ll color it, because color in comics is like music in movies. EC had a very strong editorial team: Al [Feldstein] and Bill [Gaines]. They weren’t hacks and their stories were well thought-out, whether they were science-fiction or horror or humor. Color must clarify—it should be a subtle thing, you shouldn’t be aware of it unless you compare it to bad color in other comics. Mary: Do you think that’s because you watched so many movies as a kid ? Marie: What I mean is, music as well as color adds dimension— helps storytelling. Comics have no motion. They have no sound and the special effects or anything we’re used to, so the motion has to be in the thrill of the writing and drawing, and if the artist is a real animator, like a Kirby, a real mover… the EC artists often used the continuity of the panels, three or four little panels with something happening, whether that was somebody coming at you and stabbing you, or whether somebody was moving away. A movie technique. In those things, you don’t just put primary colors… you think about it, you color it as to what time of day best accommodates that feeling, the mood, or what really sets the feeling. People unconsciously notice this stuff. Mary: At the end of “Ping Pong.”,actually, throughout the whole story, you alternate the colors of the sky between a 30% yellow and a 30% blue [laughs], and it’s so funny, because up to the last few pages, the blue gets lighter, then it goes back to yellow, and it makes it look like afternoon, in a weird way. Marie: Well, part of that might’ve been to establish a timeline, but probably it was to clarify the art, because the main thing—especially with Will Elder’s stuff—is don’t hide anything. All of this garbage he put in there was hysterically funny. Mary: Oh, I know! All those little creatures… Marie: And the body language of his people, they were such funny little… goony stuff, great. I would color it for clarification. You must see what’s going on. In a scene with 50,000 things running around, you want to see all the goofy things he might’ve put in there, and to facilitate it, then you might need a yellow background. You couldn’t color it realistic, because it was so detailed in there, you’d lose it. COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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Mary: Yeah, and you did it in “The Face Upon the Floor”—they’re in the barroom and the crowd is all in yellow and I’d pay attention to them more for that reason. You could see what was going on— you had to look! Marie: And the main thing was to tell the story. In the recent past, some comic coloring had no distinction between foreground and background, and if the colorist didn’t know what they were doing, you couldn’t tell what was going on… and then they airbrushed everything, too! Also, if your penciling is weak and you don’t have the proper inking, you can’t pull the planes forward or distinguish depth even with thoughtful coloring. Color can only help clarify, which of course helps a story. Mary: I can always tell when someone has used a computer to color. 90% of the time, people aren’t keeping it simple. They go nuts with the gradations and end up with a flat mess. Marie: I’ve never used a computer. We had 48 colors, and we did pretty good, years ago. Mary: The style of Wally Wood was very different from Bill Elder… Elder’s lines all joined, everything was connected. Marie: He was very tight. Mary: Wood’s were a LOT looser. Was it easier or harder to color his work? Marie: He was the hardest one to color, for instance, in “Tecumseh” in Two-Fisted Tales, I’m coloring away, and I see a bandoleer on his chest, and I colored it a deep reddish-brown because he had so many buttons and bows and… you know, Woody would put all these pockets and zippers— even on the Indians! On the next page, he didn’t even have it on his chest! [laughter] It was gone! I learned that fast, you look at everything he does, and boy, does this eat up time… you’re thinking, “Okay, it’s on this page, but it’s not on that page,” so you color it the same color his sheep-skin jacket is, or you just ignore it, and put a little orange in there. And nobody noticed! Kurtzman would go crazy, because Kurtzman was an accuracy freak, but Woody was entertaining whether or not he was accurate or inaccurate. The fans loved his style—I think it was sexy. Mary: Yeah, but looking at Kurtzman’s stuff here: He draws so loosely, it’s hard to imagine he was a perfectionist. When I was a kid, I thought he was the least accomplished, because his style seemed so quickly drawn. Now I know better. Marie: Well, Kurtzman was a Humor Picasso. He was a stickler for accuracy. When he was doing war comics or even Mad magazine, if somebody had a stagecoach, they had to have an accurate stagecoach. If Harvey did a war story… He sent me out to do research. A girl had to wear heels in New York, or you’d be considered “not dressed”—I would be sent out with a duffel bag—which today would’ve been great, but in those days, a duffel bag!—and go to an armory, and have a guy disassemble a bazooka! [laughter]. The soldier would pull out all these manuals, and I’d put them in my duffel bag, and my next stop was the library and I’d get pictures of strange people, and I’d come back lugging this thing, and sometimes I’d say, “Harvey, I’ve got to take a cab, I’m so tired!” And one time I had all this crap in my duffel bag, and the cab breaks down. Here I am, I’m five blocks from the office… which wasn’t that long, but this was at 4:30 and my shoes were killing me and I’m cussing all the way, and Harvey’d gone home! [laughter] I said “I’ll kill him! I will kill him!” I learned later on, you kept two pairs of shoes in the office, and later I started wearing sneakers, and I didn’t care. Mary: Everybody was much more formal in Oct. 2000

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the ’40s and ’50s. Gloves and heels. And hats. Marie: They wore real shirts and ties. Mary: You were probably the only woman working in the office, right? Marie: Yeah, in the beginning, but later a couple of gals were hired for office stuff. Mary: You said you only had 48 colors available. How did it work? Did you cut the color? Marie: No, we had separators. The red plate, blue and yellow, in percentages of 25%, 50% and 100%. And you’d combine all of those, and I think it comes out to 48 if you multiply them all. The colors were coded in the margins and the separators would paint on acetate for each color percentage—25-50-100% for each page. The colors printed together gave the variations. Today, they have hundreds of colors, plus greytones. We didn’t have greytones in those days, except on covers. What I’d use was 20% red and 20% blue which came out to be a sort of grey. If the red was heavy that day, you’d get violet. To my knowledge, there were only women who did the separations on the inside stories, because men would never tolerate this kind of work… but I believe the covers were separated by guys (more money). Mary: Women’s work, huh? Marie: Sure. Oh, they wouldn’t have the patience! When I worked at the Federal Reserve Bank, do you know who separated the dirty money from the clean money? When the banks would deposit—they had to deposit a certain percentage of their intake every day if they were members of the Federal Reserve Bank. Thousands and millions of dollars would go through the bank, and the women would handle this, and they fed it into a machine: Good money, damaged money, and they’d credit the bank, and they’d take the dirty money and destroy it. Only women. First of all, their hands were more flexible, and most men couldn’t sit that long.

Below: Marie told Jon B. Cooke that the ’70s Kull portfolio pieces were feverishly penciled in a single day, because she was so jazzed with the work, later inked by brother John. Art ©2000 Marie & John Severin. Kull ©2000 Robert E. Howard Estate.

Mary: I’ve done that method of cut-color three times. That was enough! Marie: The only thing I ever separated was the EC Fan-Addict Club Certificate they gave out. This certificate, 9” x 12”, full color with the EC emblem, then there was a border of all the characters all around, and it said who you were and what number you were in the club. The EC-Fan-Addict Club was a funny thing—I don’t have one in front of me-but it was yellow background, and I did the separations, and God, I never want to ever do one again; it was so painstaking! I was cutting out and painting and I wasn’t satisfied with the way it came out, because I wasn’t professional at this, and it was so small! But they let me do it, and I said, “I don’t want to do it anymore.” I never did. From the very beginning, I learned the process of how it was printed: You color a story, you code it, and you see the way it comes out, and you see your mistakes, and then you really follow through the next time. Then I went to the plant, I went up to Bridgeport, and I looked at how they did it, and what would make it easier for them, and what would be a timesaver and everything. We were always late, in those days we didn’t have Federal Express or anything, you had Special Delivery, and you were lucky if it went to the right state! And it got there in three days. Mary: We have faxes now…

Marie: Instant gratification. Instant. In those days, come on, you’d lose original comic pages, and they’d show up a month later, guys were afraid to move too far from New York, because they wouldn’t get work, because the mail was so slow, so most of the guys lived in New York. Mary: Well, even with our hi-tech world, sometimes the inks are difficult to control. Marie: A comic where Captain America might have this very pale blue uniform, and the red is so dark, and you’re wondering what happened, then in the next comic book, the blue is so heavy and the red is pink! It was catch as catch can. Most of the time, EC was one of the few comics, I think, that corrected the proofs, and I was in charge of that, but that didn’t guarantee that the process would be of consistent value. It made me understand the coloring process. They would send from 225 Lafayette Street, New York City, up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and they’d send down the proofs, and I’d mark the corrections, and I got to be pretty lenient in coloring then, because I realized it was so hard. If you were doing a background of Y3-50% yellow and the guy in the foreground had an olive green Army uniform, and you had a solid yellow on him and you had a tree in the background with a solid heavy green leaf in the same panel, and you had a B3 color in it… sometimes, if the sky wasn’t that much of an area, I would accommodate it by making it the same yellow on the uniform, because I knew the separators could do it faster, and it didn’t matter if the intensity was off 25%. I would very often compromise if it was just a little bit off. If a guy like Jack Davis was inking it, it had so many blacks that it popped out anyway. Also, off register would be avoided a bit. Mary: And then there was the cheap paper… Marie: Oh, it was blotting paper. Oh, it’s so funny… when did Gaines come out with the reprints of the horror comics? He called me in and said “Marie, it’s printing so heavy!” I said, “It looks like a Puerto Rican calendar!” That’s no reflection on the Puerto Ricans. Mary: What’s a Puerto Rican calendar? Marie: Did you ever see those old Puerto Rican calendars from the ’60s? They were printed with the soles of their shoes stamping around… it’s an art form, like Mexican. Mary: Okay, I get it. I moved here 17 years ago, and we are less than an hour from the Mexican border and I’ve been so influenced by the Hispanic culture. I always yearned for more color in my environment, and it’s here. Turquoise houses, pink fences… Marie: Aren’t they a riot? Mary: I love it. It makes you feel more alive. The color I like in my art, I use in my home. I like red walls, purple walls… What’s your place look like? Marie: It’s very sedate. You’d be surprised. I don’t know what this denotes, but my stuff looks very much like the 1930s… not the furniture, I go for the old fashioned stuff, but I like prints in my living room and dining room. A couple of my father’s paintings, and Maxfield Parrish, stuff like that. Mary: You like greyed pastels and soft teals. Marie: Yeah, when it gets into my hallway—I have a long hallway— that’s where my comic stuff is out, and that’s where the craziness is, with the reprints and the original covers and splashy, bloody art! Mary: [laughs] You own a lot of comic art? Marie: I put a lot of my own up… naturally, showing off. Mary: Yeah, you should! I want to talk about your new stuff… The Big Book of Losers, you did the story about the oracle in there— Croseus. How long had it been since you drew a two-page story? Marie: I’ve always had little jobs in-between. I was always doing something, but not at the pace when I was under contract or on staff. Mary: At Marvel, you mean. Marie: As a matter of fact, Marvel used to call me up to do children’s books, like I did a couple of these little X-Men sound books for children. Mary: This was in the 80s’? Marie: Yeah. Of course, I was in The Muppets because that’s all they saw me as doing, which is fine by me. I didn’t like the heavyduty stories. The last serious story I did for Marvel was on Dr. Strange. Now, I had started on “Dr. Strange” right after Ditko quit. This thing was awful—I was so far behind on my contract—in other COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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words, they’d been paying me, and they didn’t send me any work, so they sent me this Dr. Strange piece, and I did it, and I thought, “I hope I get the heck out of here soon,” but I was not going to quit, I’d wait until they had to pay me. That would’ve been ’95. Mary: Have you been under contract all these years? Marie: I was on staff ’til about ’83, ’84, and then they put me on contract, and then I’d do all these poopy books that nobody was interested in. They wanted all these guys that did the ’90s thing with the big bodies. Mary: Oh yes, big bodies! [laughter] Marie: You know, everybody has their “time” and my time has passed, as far as the people “in the know” in comics. But I think they’re on the wrong track. Not that I think they should’ve kept using me, but I think they’re beating a dead horse. We need to change and there wasn’t a Stan Lee or Kirby in the modern time and the people deciding are just clones of something else, and it’s very sad, because I’m sure there’s somebody out there who knows what they’re doing. Mary: I know you’re working on something currently… Marie: I’m doing the coloring on Superman Adventures. It’s such a well-done book, it’s like the TV [animated] show with nice crisp art. Mary: Who’s the artist(s)? Marie: Lately, Neil Volkes and Terry Austin. I love the book. I love the storylines, they’re doing a great job and it’s not one of these “I’ll rip out your tonsils and hang them out on my wall,” you know? That stuff. It’s just a story and it’s good! Mary: You also just did a story for Dignifying Science [featuring stories about women scientists], edited by Jim Ottaviani… he sent me the story you did about Marie Curie. Marie: Oh, really. How’d you like that? Mary: It was awesome. In fact, the whole book is a “departure” from what is typical comic book art. Your story was especially poignant. It’s not just a story of Marie Curie, the disciplined scientist, but about Marie, woman, and her inner thoughts. Marie: She was some lady, and all the time I thought she was Greer Garson in the movie. [laughter] Mary: I met [Greer Garson] once. I went on a cruise ship with my mother and grandmother to Alaska. I was in my Indian jewelry phase, and she came up to me and admired all my pieces. Since she was decked out as well, we started talking. Both my mother and grandmother were standing with their mouths open going “Ohhhhh!” I didn’t even know who she was, but every day she’d come over to see what kind of Indian jewelry I was wearing and she had beautiful, expensive squash blossom necklaces, inlaid Hopi bracelets, and big chunks of turquoise. She was very grand. She was very friendly! Marie: She had a lovely smooth voice. Mary: Oh yes, she was very old school. So, who did the writing for this Marie Curie story? Marie: It was all [Jim Ottaviani]. Mary: Why did she sleep with a chair on her? [laughs] Marie: Don’t ask… this is actually what happened, he claims! And I can see myself doing something like that. Mary: You mean, for protection? Marie: No, she was so cold that anything she had, all the clothes she had in the trunk that would fit, and then she got into bed, and it was almost symbolic in her mind, the only thing else she could move to put on was the chair! Maybe it would cut the draft! Mary: The first part of the story shows the poverty she experienced, then you turn the page and there’s roses, and you can tell that she’s made it. Marie: She made it, but she still thinks small. Mary: I think you should go in the direction of drawing more stories. Are you doing that? Or are you just waiting for people to call you up? Marie: I’m not looking for it, Mary, to tell you the truth. What’s out there, and I’m getting lazy in my old age… all my friends keep saying. “I want to do something with you!” I missed the whole month of July, I was so busy, I said yes to a couple of things and I was really fouled up, working, and everybody… I’ve got one friend left, and on Friday, she’s going to Scotland. Somebody else, she left on Monday, she’s going to Southampton to pick up a cruise ship, Oct. 2000

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she’s going to Amsterdam and Paris, and I’m saying, “Shoot, I’m not doing anything this year!” I was working, for what? My washing machine went on the fritz, I’ve got to buy a new storm door, bed and fridge. Mary: [laughs] Well, the artist’s life is a lonely life… I’m real social too, and I need to get out in the world. A lot. Marie: I love when I’m with people. But then, I love to go in my studio and say “Nobody bother me, let me alone, let me do my thing!” Mary: I just got a kitten, his name is Wally Wood. [laughs] Marie: Wally Wood is a great name for a cat. Wally Wood looked like a dissipated Roy Rogers. Mary: Yeah, he did, didn’t he? Marie: You know, with those slitty eyes. A good talent, he was a great guy. Mary: I’ve never seen a picture of Jack Kamen. Marie: He’s a typical New York Jewish boy in the 1950s, and he told a good story. Mary: People seemed surprised when I say he’s my favorite EC artist. I thought his drawings of women and children were so cute, they were all the more demented! Marie: Yes, because they were doing all these degenerate, terrible

Above: As Marie marvels at in this interview, Mary Fleener (no slouch at cartooning herself) is quite the avid surfer. Here’s an excerpt from a Fleener strip depicting her surfing experiences. Courtesy and ©2000 Mary Fleener.

things, of course. That’s were the charm was. What was so great at EC was they had the diversification, and the editors—Bill and Al—recognized it, and recognized it’s great to have different ways of telling stories, and these days, everybody has to be a clone of whoever’s the latest. Jim Lee is fine, but we don’t need five of him, because the original is usually the best. It brings out the best in some of the artists to have a model, and then to branch off as they learn, you know? Mary: You see the same thing in the underground/ alternative market. Dan Clowes wanna-bes, young girls not only copying Julie Doucet, but redoing her stories. I used to get a lot of mini comics, people sending me their first efforts and you can immediately spot who they’ve been reading and who they’ve been looking at. Your parents were Catholic, you all went to church every Sunday… ? Marie: Didn’t think much about it—it was what you did. I’m comfortable with the Catholic church, not too keen on the charismatic stuff. Mary: Did you like it better when the mass was said in Latin? Marie: No, I like knowing what’s going on, but they seem to go a step further, now. Latin was nice in that I knew it was very formal and everything, and I loved the music and pageantry. Mary: In the ’70s, they started letting people bring their guitars… [laughs] Marie: Well, if they could play the guitar, that’s one thing, but if they can’t play… Mary: It was horrible. Talk about tone deaf. That’s was even worse, for me, than the fact I was bored stiff. Marie: … and then, some of these people, they’re singing to show off, and I don’t like that, because that’s not what it’s supposed to be. Mary: If you want to see Star Search on TV, you can tune to channel 39 to watch it, thank you very much. Marie: Exactly. I’m not into running around and hugging the people next to you in church! Mary: I had to go to a Catholic funeral a few years ago, and we had to shake the hands and hug the people next to us. I had to shake the hand of the woman who lives behind us who had these

dogs that barked all night and day and I hated her guts! Marie: I’m like: “I’m an old lady, leave me alone….” Mary: I’m trying to go somewhere with this religion stuff… I think my exposure to the Catholic religion is what contributed to my interest in drawing underground comix. There’s a very gothic, grotesque side to Catholic art in the churches and when I was a kid and one day, really looked at what was on the crosses that people wore, I was horrified. I still cannot understand why someone would want to wear such a thing around their neck. Marie: I have to tell you, this is my exact thing about the crucifix. I am sensitive to that, and I always have been. Maybe people aren’t as sensitive as we are. The goofy side of me compels me to tell that joke about the Jewish boy that was sent to Catholic school, because it was a small town and there wasn’t any other place to go. He came home, and his mother said, “You know, your teacher said you were very, very, well behaved,” and he says, “Gee, Mommy, you should see what they did to this other Jewish boy up on the wall!”[laughter] Mary: I know it’s supposed to remind everybody that someone sacrificed, but do ya have to wear the thing around your neck? Marie: Well, you’re too sensitive to the symbolism. Mary: How can you ignore it? When you walk in a church, there’s this huge figure with blood running down his hands… it’s disgusting! Marie: Are we realists, or are we fantasizing too much? Whatever it is, we feel too much. Mary: We’re visualists, we visualize things. Marie: We visualize, we almost smell it. Mary: Okay, here’s my joke: What’s the difference between a Catholic mother and a Jewish mother? Marie: Their husband. Mary: No! [laughs] A Catholic mother says to her child, “If you don’t go to college, I’ll kill you!.” A Jewish mother says to her kid, “If you don’t go to college, I’ll kill myself!” [laughter] Marie: The guilt is laid there. Mary: So, I was curious, did you ever go out with any of the EC guys? Marie: Most of them were older, and they were married. Al Williamson and I went out a couple of times. I think I’m a few months or a year older than he. We hit it off as far as being friends, but there was no real interest there. But we had a lot of fun, he was a great guy. He and his wife were at my house with Bill and all that stuff, but socializing—no, I didn’t date them. It was a workplace for me. Mary: I’m with you on that. If I was single now, I don’t think I’d get involved with any cartoonists I knew, because, it’s like you said, it’s almost a workplace. Marie: Sure! Sometimes, romances and marriages happen, but it can’t be based on the comics, which I found some of the romances at Marvel were. One exception was Herb Trimpe and his wife, Linda Fite, they met and they just paired off. She happened to be doing a fill-in job. Mary: I’m starting to think that artists, especially cartoonists, should be with someone who is in a completely opposite field. Marie: Artists need discipline and understanding, because we’re goofy, you know? The intensity of what we’re doing is time consuming and a lot of people can’t take that—and I don’t blame them! I mean, what man would put up with me? And I’m thinking of these women expecting a guy to take care of the kids and be home, and my god, these guys, they go through drawing sometimes until 10 o’clock at night. Mary: Yeah, if you have kids, that’s a whole other equation in the relationship. Marie: Very, very difficult. Mary: You never married, you never had kids? Marie: My mother said I never met anybody I liked better than myself [laughter] and I guess that’s true. Mary: I always knew I never wanted kids. How about you? Did you always know that? Marie: I wasn’t really interested. When my brother got married, he had enough for everybody! Mary: How many did he have? Marie: Six. Mary: OW! I didn’t even like dolls, or baby dolls. They weren’t in COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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my future. I could tell. [Actually now, I do have a collection of voodoo dolls and “Racial Stereotype Americana.”—MF]. Marie: Right. My mother and my father, and my aunts would buy me dolls when I was little. I still have my baby doll. But what I liked was Tonto and the Lone Ranger, and I have them still. Mary: When you are at comic conventions, are you overwhelmed with People With Portfolios [PWPs]? Marie: Not too much in San Diego. I think I had more at the convention in New York. Pollyanna, that’s me—and I always try and be nice to these guys and kids. Mary: Hey, you never know! You don’t want to discourage people, because, look at—Einstein, they all thought he was retarded when he was a kid in the fourth grade, he was finished! Marie: Exactly. I always say, “If you can’t get work, it’s not always your fault.” You never lose anything by studying this medium, because it is exercise for your mind—storytelling is orderly. If you aren’t storing some fuel in your head, you’re going to be dependent on looking at catalogs for all your ideas! Mary: There’s the importance of—a feeling of accomplishment. Something tells you, it’s time well spent—at least you tried—that’s cool! We have a friend who decided to play guitar at the ripe age of 43. I told him, “It’s easy. All you have to do is practice every day! You may be a genius, then again, you may not. But you’ll be able to play!” That’s all you have to do! Marie: All you have to do is be steady with it, and you’ve got to throw things into your head, and most people throw things into their mouths! Mary: Have you been doing anything for yourself lately? What kind of fuel have you been working on? Marie: I’m trying to think how I can enroll in this—I’m thinking of Norwegian woodcutting. I would love to try that. Also, I have always wanted to do stained glass windows. When I was a kid, I was fascinated in church by the colors, and instead of listening to the sermon, I was watching the colors slowly creep along the back of the pews and across the aisles. Mary: Me, too. It’s hard to concentrate when the little old man in front of you has blue hair for about a half hour! Marie: I love going to different countries and their cathedrals, like up in Montreal, they have one where they have all these relics, and they have little silver copies of—if somebody had their foot healed, they had a foot hanging up—little tiny two-inch foot or a head or an arm. It’d be wild to buy one, and go hang it up by the relics. Mary: In Greece, they do the same thing. Joyce Farmer goes to Greece all the time, and on one of her trips, I begged her to get me some of these. I wanted a house, hands, a male and female torso, a car and dogs and cats. and they are all silver and very cool, only I didn’t get any animals, because Joyce said the Greeks aren’t into pets like us! [laughs] Marie: Oh, at St. Francis, you can go anyplace and they bless the animals. Mary: Do you get much mail? Marie: Not too much. Enough to be annoying. Mary: Do you get any mail from aspiring cartoonists? Marie: No, they don’t know where to reach me. I had a P.O. number in Brooklyn, but I dropped that. Most of these kids that want to get into comics are interested in writing like whoever’s popular now, and for the most part they don’t even know me. That’s why, when I went to San Diego, the first year, I was astounded how many people remembered me, and they knew I wasn’t dead! [laughs] Mary: I noticed that too, when they had the women’s show at the Words and Pictures Museum in Northampton, a lot of people were very knowledgeable about your career. Remember the guy who talked to you about the Internet, and how your artwork is being sold for maybe ten times what you sold it for? What do you think about that? Marie: What’s done is done. I sold a lot of stuff for $10, $20, $30, $40 a page. Covers were usually $30-$40. I didn’t know any better! I don’t even remember the guys I sold it to, because I don’t care. It’s done. I was very happy to get the money at the time. Mary: Some of my stuff, I practically give away, but with other things, I’m holding out for the big bucks! [laughs] Marie: I think they might’ve had an idea they could sell it for more Oct. 2000

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later on, because they had a perspective on what the other artists did in the ’50s. I had no perspective, I had no idea. All this stuff! Get rid of it. Now I just have the dregs of anything of mine, and listen, I was happy to get the money then. Mary: Let’s end this with a discussion of the EC comics. As I’ve told you, I didn’t read them as a kid, but started buying the reprints in the last few years. To me, they are such cautionary tales, they’re all about greedy people, they’re all about reaping what you sow, and if you screw people over, it will come back to you. Why on Earth did Dr. Wertham think these were bad for the Youth of America? Marie: They were really fun for the most part. Mary: They taught people morals! Marie: I never thought of it as a bad influence on kids, it never came across that way to me. It was a grim fairy tale—they always got caught! What’s the problem? I colored them as violently, except if it was something so very intestinal or what have you, and then I would darken it, but never to obscure the artwork. Don’t look for anymore than you imagined. Mary: I like it when you use pink and yellow, that’s so ewwwwww! Marie: You know, the blood isn’t quite formed yet, hideous stuff. But it was a riot. There’s a dark side to us all, but it’s not so dark. Mary: I think people need to be scared, they need adventure, they need a challenge—that’s why I like to surf, you know? You have to be a little crazy to get out there and swim with the sharks! And after you’re done, you feel exhilarated! You’ve conquered your own enemy—fear. Marie: Speaking of this, when we got off the phone the other day, you were going surfing, and I was thinking, “Dude! Tell me all about it!”

Above: Inked by Herb Trimpe, here’s Marie Severin’s Crazy! #1 cover art (that’s the ’70s Marvel reprint color comic, not the b-&-w mag, effendi), courtesy of M.S. ©2000 Marvel Characters, Inc. Below: Featuring elements of her cubist approach, here’s a panel by Mary Fleener, courtesy of the artist. ©2000 Mary Fleener.

CBA Commentary

What Does A White Dyke Write Like? Borders and Borderlands in Naughty Bits and Dykes to Watch Out For by Anne Thalheimer

In his article “The Whiteness of Film Noir,” Eric Lott states that “[f]ilm noir is a cinematic mode defined by its border crossings”. Alternative feminist comix, and their creators, are also defined by their border crossings, by the simple fact that they exist despite the historically repressive environment of male-dominated comics publications. These women are crossing, not from white to black as Lott argues in film noir, but from outside of comix into the genre. Alternative feminist comix creators defy the stereotype of comix as strictly a boys’ club, but at the same time rarely achieve the relative fame of creators such as Roberta Gregory and Alison Bechdel. There has been much discussion of gendered writing, heralded by a new interest in writing opposite one’s gender; however, there does not seem to be much discussion of what it means to write white. White, in America, is never questioned because it is the dominant discourse and the position of power. The absence of racial definition for white women problematically creates an empty space that fosters the notion that some white women feel as if they need not address racism. Even if white women do address racism, social positioning makes it easy for these women to abandon issues of race, for any reason at any point, and fade back in with the dominant white culture, unlike women of color who are always defined against the vortex of whiteness. Whiteness retains its power as the dominant discourse because few people have called it into question. Race and sexual orientation differ in one fundamental way: the visual. One can look at a lesbian of color and immediately assume that she is not white, but will not be able to tell for certain her sexual orientation simply with a look. This is not to say that one can always guess race merely by looking. What I mean is that it is far “easier” to categorize someone into the binary of white/not white than it is to categorize the same person into heterosexual/not heterosexual. The white lesbian has a unique cultural space in that she is part of the dominant racial discourse but is at the same time also an outsider; as a lesbian, she will be tolerated by the dominant culture only if she does not deviate any further from social codes ascribed to women. Cultivating femininity markers gives rise to fetishized stereotypes of lesbians who “look heterosexual”—lipstick lesbians, Chasing Amy—while less “feminized” women are “butches” and

“dykes” under the same code. In the 1970s, a number of female comix creators—women writing comix for women, an act that Adrienne Rich would have called “lesbian”—began to create works reacting against racism, sexism, and classism in many underground comix. Feminism became a prominent element in much of this work. One of these comix creators was Roberta Gregory; one of her many current publications is called Naughty Bits, in which the central character is a white, heterosexual middle-class woman named Bitchy Bitch. Bitchy complains about everyone, especially different races, though her coworkers are quite often Bitchy’s target as well. Gregory’s main character’s given name is Midge McCracken, but in sequences where the “author” appears—when the artist makes herself a character within the text—Midge is always referred to as “Bitchy” or “Bitchy Bitch”. Already the reading audience is potentially polarized; this, like Whiteness Studies, is a place where people are forced to confront certain issues that many would rather leave alone. However, recycled ideology, no matter the form, does not advance debate—or even begin it—the trick, as Gregory herself states, is to “poke” what makes you uncomfortable and “see what oozes out of it”. Language becomes a site of power for Gregory, in reveling in the use of “bitch.” The choice of language is something that any reader may immediately find problematic. Alison Bechdel has chosen to use “dykes” very openly in the title of her series, Dykes to Watch Out For, and Gregory uses “bitch” just as frequently. Some women have reclaimed “bitch”—as well as “dyke”—as a word of power, and still others rankle at every utterance of the word. Bitchy, at one point, wins a trip to a resort, and it is clearly revealed that this occasional-heroine is harboring some deeply ingrained racist tendencies. On the other hand, Bitchy’s racist thoughts are present on the page; she may not be verbalizing them, but Gregory makes no pretensions about Bitchy’s views. The sequence begins with Bitchy throwing away a prize notification, later realizing that a co-worker won something from the same sweepstakes, and then climbing into a dumpster to retrieve her discarded letter. The sequence is COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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peppered with Bitchy’s inflammatory thoughts. During her time in Rosarita Shores, Bitchy constantly thinks racist and classist thoughts, such as when she haggles over prices with people selling tourist items on the street. How then does Bitchy or her creator challenge racism, rather than simply reproduce it? She thinks it—it is plainly stated above her head—but does not give these thoughts voice. Bitchy’s racist thoughts are consistent throughout the narrative—she thinks racist thoughts before she travels, she thinks disparaging comments while she is traveling, and upon her return she remains indoctrinated with racist ideology. But all of her racism appears in thought balloons, instead of in speech balloons. This “silence” holds true for most of the narrative. Bitchy’s nasty thoughts remain just that— thoughts. In this way, through Gregory’s being direct enough to put it on paper, the text of racism is both present and absent, thus reinscribing whiteness and thoughts of race as an empty cultural space. Gregory confronts racism by not dodging the issue, but also not making race the primary focus of her work. In contrast, Alison Bechdel’s series has always been made up of a multi-racial multi-ethnic cast of characters, nearly all of whom are lesbian. The group ranges from Mo, the protagonist, to Toni and Clarice, who marry and decide to have a child. Bechdel also includes characters such as an all-but-dissertation African-American graduate teaching assistant (Ginger), a Jewish bisexual (Naomi), a white woman with MS (Thea), an AfricanAmerican fat activist (Jezanna), a middle-class American white college-dropout pro-sex activist (Lois), a New-Age Chinese-American spiritualist (Sparrow), and a young Japanese-American college student (Yoshi). However, Bechdel and Gregory’s characters are in the same group of feminist comix characters even though one harbors racist tendencies, while the other’s characters are multi-ethnic and multiracial nearly to the point of parody. Part of the reason can be immediately found in the visual aspects of each work; Bechdel’s work is very detailed and realistic, calling attention to specific details such as newspaper headlines (which often connect to political issues and current events) and background details, while Gregory’s style is more surreal and comic. Bitchy’s eyes can leap directly out her eye sockets when she is surprised, and she sprouts fangs when enraged, while Bechdel’s characters never could. However, Bechdel’s characters can debate what the outcome of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial has on America and perceptions of race, but Bitchy Bitch and her co-workers are consumed by office politics and working-class life—that is, until an out lesbian (who turns out to be an old friend of Bitchy’s from Oct. 2000

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high school) comes to work in Bitchy’s office. Alison Bechdel’s characters generally do not go to the extremes that Bitchy Bitch goes to in terms of racism. Bechdel’s characters are multi-ethnic and multi-racial; interestingly, African-American women have “high status” employ: Ginger is working toward her doctoral degree, Jezanna owns and operates Madwimmin Books, and Clarice is a lawyer for an environmental protection agency. Three of the white women work for Jezanna: Mo, Lois, and Thea. Harriet, Mo’s partner, is the only primary white character in the text who is outside of this work circle: she works as an investigator for the state depart-

ment of human rights. Perhaps aware of this stratification, Bechdel recently introduced Sydney, a white lesbian professor in the women’s studies department of Ginger’s university, who is constantly spouting high theory and picking fights with the other characters Bechdel added her to the strip because, she says, “When I got a one-paragraph review in the Lambda Book Report which managed to use the phrase ‘politically correct’ three times, I knew I had to do something.” The larger questions loom like this: How can Bechdel and Gregory, two prominent feminist alternative comix creators, both be working with and against racism if one character, Gregory’s Bitchy Bitch, is visibly racist and homophobic? How is it relevant that these works in which white women both challenge and reproduce racism exist in one of the most culturally debased art forms in America? In essence, the culturally debased status of the comic book creates a borderland,

MATT BAKER: The Art of Glamour

tionalized misogyny. Both Gregory’s work and Bechdel’s deal with race; Gregory’s uses Bitchy Bitch’s blatant racism as a way of politicizing parody, and calling attention to race. Bechdel, on the other hand, creates a world in which lesbianism is the dominant discourse and race appears secondarily, though the spectrum of racial identification is addressed. Sexual orientation is more frequently debated; in Bechdel’s series it is the heterosexuals who are in the overwhelming minority, especially heterosexual males, while in Gregory’s work heterosexuality is the norm, but is the norm taken to such rabid extremes that it essentially becomes a parody. Ultimately, white womanhood, like sexuality, shapes women’s lives. This shaping indeed contributes to the ways in which women consider themselves, their worldview, and their work. For alternative feminist comix creators, these sites of discourse are augmented by the radical nature of their work and the fact that these texts exist in such a culturally debased format, which is part of the reason why these comix are so powerfully subversive, and why these works remain so marginalized in American culture. Americans may like whiteness—without knowing why they do—and can tolerate lesbians as long as they conform to a certain standard of commodification, but when dykes and bitches get together and throw standards and rules out of the mix, that’s when the real fun starts. WORKS CITED Bechdel, Alison. Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For. Ithaca: Firebrand Press, 1997. Eadie, Jo. “Quick Dirty Scrawly: An Interview with Roberta Gregory.” October 17, 1996, <http://bi.org/~bcn-issue1/09.html> 5 Dec. 1997. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Gregory, Roberta. At Work and Play With Bitchy Bitch. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1996. Joost, Wesley and Jon Randall. “Sing Lesbian Cat, Fly Lesbian Seagull: An Interview with Alison Bechdel.” <http//www.sonic.net/~goblin/9dyk.html> 1 Dec. 1997. Loft, Eric. “The Whiteness of Film Noir.” In Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Edited by Mike Hill. New York: NYU Press, 1997. Roof, Judith. Come As You Are—Sexuality & Narrative. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

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an empty space where indoctrinated racism, classism, and sexism run rampant simply because adults concerned with these issues rarely read comic books. Or, to frame it another way, Alison Bechdel has said in interviews that “cartoons are harmless in a way, which is their true subversiveness.” The immediate example in both Gregory and Bechdel’s cases is their use of language—bitches and dykes—which immediately puts some readers on the defensive, as well as sparks questions not only about the authors’ intent in writing a potentially inflammatory text, but their sexual orientation as well. The outsider status of comic books grants the medium a sort of free reign, especially those works unconcerned with the comics code. Is an author, as some critics and theorists have suggested, best off writing only what they know and are culturally, ethnically, racially familiar with, rather than to attempt to challenge boundaries for fear of being labeled by others—both within and outside of their own race—as racist? What role does the white, female author’s sexual orientation play in this creation of the text—she has license to write lesbian characters, but not lesbians of color? Or does her unique status as insider/outsider clear her a space to write oppression, regardless of the particulars? How then, if one believes that an author’s sexual orientation shapes a text the way it shapes their lives, does one consider the hyper-heterosexual Bitchy Bitch, written by someone who does not self-identify as heterosexual? Part of the answer can be found in the history of women in comics publications, exposing and exploring institu-

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CBA Interview

Hilda Terry: “You Don’t Die!” The Comic Strip Artist of Teena Talks to Trina Conducted by Trina Robbins

Below: Teena’s “mom,” Hilda Terry at a 1999 book signing. Courtesy of Trina Robbins.

Hilda Terry’s comic strip, Teena, made its debut in America’s newspapers on the auspicious day of December 7, 1941. Her teenage heroine survived the War and went on being cute and funny and very well drawn until she was cancelled in 1964. Ms. Terry, then 50 years old and jobless, picked herself up, dusted herself off and started all over again as an award-winning (the National Cartoonists Society named her 1979’s Best Animation Cartoonist) pioneer computer animator. In 1998 she was a guest at the second annual Friends of Lulu Conference in Newark, New Jersey, where I interviewed her. At the conference, Ms Terry handed out a folder titled God’s DNA. In it, she describes an experience she had, in which she believes she was visited by one of her past lives: Dorcas Goode, a five-year-old girl who was imprisoned in 17th century Salem along with her mother, who was hung for witchcraft. Research proved that Dorcas and her mother were a historic reality. My personal feeling is that Hilda is an intelligent, extremely sane woman, with no reason to make up such a story. Therefore, I have to believe that Ms Terry really did have these experiences. Hilda Terry was married to cartoonist Gregory D’Allessio for 55 years. Although he had passed away at the time of the interview, she referred to him in present tense, as though he were still alive. Of course, if you believe in reincarnation, this makes perfect sense. Trina Robbins: Hilda, I’m going start this the way everybody starts every interview for every cartoon, which is asking how you got into comics. Hilda Terry: Reading them, I grew up in a small town in New England, and the Sunday comics were the big event. I had a brother a year-and-a-half younger than I was, and we were a team, because I was bigger than he was, I was stronger, I could do everything that he and his friends needed someone on the team to be able to do, and I was into

sports with my brother. I could run faster than him, and I was going to be a sports cartoonist, but because it’s so hard to think of funny gags, I didn’t think I could do that. In sixth grade, I started drawing portraits of boys, snot coming out of their nose, and poo was running through their hair, and my father said, “That’s not nice. Draw me.” I still have that drawing, and it’s terrific. From then on, it was from life, everything from life. That, really, is the best thing anybody can do. I came to New York at 16, because I wanted to be an artist, and in my family, there were no artists… I was the only one, so I went to two art schools, and I started working in the garment district… and I still have those drawings, and they’re very good! Because I drew from life, and now I’m teaching drawing at the Art Institute, and how I learned is how I teach, and they learned in front of my eyes; it’s a knack, it’s just a magic kind of thing. So, I came to New York to be a cartoonist, and working in the garment district, and in those days, artists used to have a… they’d rent a loft in the Village, and they’d charge 10¢ every weekend for people to come from Brooklyn or the Bronx to mingle with the artists; the artists came in free, and I put potato chips and stuff out. So, one night, this friend said, “Come down Friday night, we have a friend who just sold a cartoon to Esquire, and I want you to meet him,” because he knew I wanted to be a cartoonist. I met Gregory D’Alessio that night, but he was in Brooklyn and I lived in the Bronx, and that was it. About two or three years later, I ran into him, and when we were introduced, we got into a conversation. And I told him what a terrible memory I had with names, “Do you remember my name?” “Oh, I’d never forget your name.” “What is it?” “Don’t tell me… George?” Well, when I ran into him three years later, then I remembered… Gregory D’Alessio. Eventually, we got married, and we stuck together for the rest of his life—55 years—which is kind of miraculous, too, because we were fighting every inch of the way. [laughter] Anyway, the main thing that I have to tell you is that there were six of us women cartoonists, and the only reason we made it is because we each had somebody in the business, a male, who could tell us what was going on! Not until I met my husband for the second time, I knew he sold a cartoon to Esquire, so Esquire was a new magazine then, and they may be looking for new cartoonists. So every two or three weeks, I’d think of one idea, draw a very elaborate rendering on a big piece of illustration board, and go up to Esquire, give it to the receptionist, she would take it in, bring it out, and I thought somebody looked at it at least. Well, of course, that’s not how you go about the business at all. After I started going out with Gregory, and started hanging out with him and the fellas, who talked shop all the time, they know what’s going on. The other five women also had lovers, boyfriends, or husbands who were in the business, and guided them. Otherwise women didn’t get a thing then, and this way, it’s so wonderful that you’re doing this, because I couldn’t believe there were 60 people coming! Not only was I impressed, because now you’ll have a way of knowing what’s going on, but we’re such a unique group! Nobody’s going to write for a woman, for an artist who isn’t selling, so you have to be able to write your own material before you can even get off the ground! That is not easy, I wrote copy for the guy I did strips… easy! Everything I write is easy! But gags, ideas… no. It’s hard. Trina: But you wrote gags for Teena, tell us how you started Teena. Hilda: After I was married to my husband, I was working on a chilCOMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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dren’s book, nothing happened, so we went up to New England, did a tour of all the relatives who gave us each $10 for a wedding present, and even God… that’s such an interesting story! When I was about 21, I was ready now to find a mate… up to now, I was only dating homosexuals, because I wanted to avoid these wrestling matches you always had! [laughs] Now, I’m looking, and I gave God the order… taller than me, I wanted to look up, make him six feet, just taller than me… brown eyes, an interesting nose, legs like Nermi—that was the Swedish runner in those days, there was a feature in the paper with his legs, running—and so forth and so on… should be an artist or a writer… somebody who can teach me something. And then that week, I ran into Gregory. I didn’t think it was necessary to tell God he must be a Jewish boy! But he was Italian! He took me home to his family, his father, the Jewish neighborhood was the census, and he bought a house right across the street from the synagogue. Now, they don’t know the difference, they see this guy coming out of the synagogue, he’s coming in and out of the shabbeth’s door, just what I asked for! Because everything else was just what I asked for! So, now…. Trina: Teena, we…. Hilda: I’m ready to go back to another story, “How God gets his money.” [laughter] When I came to New York, I got a job right away, as a waitress in Schrafft’s. Three dollars a week and tips… they did a monthly bill. Until you learned, and then they raised it to $5. I went down to 14th Street with my $5, because I had a roommate, and we were each paying $3 a week, and I had $2 to spend. So I went down to 14th Street, with my $5 bill, and the first thing I buy is a big bar of candy, a nickel, so that’s for my tips, so I’m walking with my $5 bill, and a thought comes into my head, “Why am I carrying around a bar of candy?” I let it go… halfway up the block, “That was my $5 bill!” I ran back, it’s gone… I looked around, it’s gone. So now, understand, this is the middle of the Depression. Okay, I understand, somebody behind me was desperate, they needed the $5. It’s okay, I understand. Now, we go up to New England for my honeymoon, everybody is giving us $10 for a wedding present, we’re walking down the street, a lonely road, and we find a wallet in the middle of the road with $10 in it and nothing else. We took it to the police station, nobody claimed it, it was ours. That was God’s gift, with interest! Because he was letting me know, “Yes, you were right about that, that’s how I get my money!” [laughter] So, anyway… that’s how we started, and we came home with a cousin, a teenage cousin, and right away, my husband and I got into a fight on the boat because I was allowing this cousin to talk to strange boys. My husband didn’t approve… see how lucky we were we never had children. Anyway, this cousin, we went to the World’s Fair, and she reminded me of my adolescence, which I missed, because I went to work right away, and I thought of all the funny things my friends and I did before I went to work, and I started that way. Trina: Aha, so it does come back to Teena. Hilda: What nobody knows… did anybody get my thing in the package? If anybody did, I have some samples. Anyway, you’ll read about my past life, which may not have been my past life, but nevertheless, I have a past life, and not only did, as I say in my thing, she put herself in a comic strip, I realize that now, even though I didn’t know it then, but she was doing the same thing I was doing, she was reliving her last sane year, and I was living my last free year in the comic strip! When my husband and I were courting, he said, “Why don’t you want to get married?” I said, “It’s not marriage, I don’t want to have children,” because I had baby-sat for a five-year-old cousin who wanted an open-grilled cheese sandwich, on her mother’s grill. Now, I know it was a grill, but that kid got her way, I ruined the grill, I made her an open-cheese sandwich, and I realized it was not for me. [laughter] So, I said, “I just don’t want to have children.” He said, “Well, neither do I.” So, it was good. Trina: But you’ve worked with children a lot! Hilda: Yes, I’m completely fulfilled with my Campfire Girls, but I send them home for their parents to fight over. Trina: How did you sell Teena? Did you have a hard time selling it? Hilda: No, this is interesting… it was in the ’30s. Now, I’m grateful Oct. 2000

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for the opportunity to say this, because everybody thinks that William Randolph Hearst is some kind of villain. He was looking for, first of all, a black cartoonist to open with, and he found it, and he hired Ethan Campbell, gave him a chance, and he couldn’t write, but he drew good. So, he had an opening for a colored cartoonist, and now he was looking for a woman. I didn’t take a boy’s name… Hilda Terry! I’m selling cartoons to King Features, maybe two or three weeks, and they called me in the office and showed me a telegram… “Get Hilda Terry!” So I heard he was looking for a woman. I have to say that it’s not just giving somebody a chance. Campbell could draw very well, people start writing for you when you’re selling, so he was okay. I could draw very well, even though I was only 18, … yeah… by 24 I was really doing very well. I’m drawing in the art classes, and I’m using the drawings to put clothes on [the models] when I was working in the garment district, $2 a dress. But I had real figures for them. Not only that, but everybody was impressed that I had real shoes, and when I started doing my comic strip, I had real dresses and real shoes [for Teena]. Trina: The clothes [in your strip] are great. Hilda: Yeah. Trina: The fashions are fabulous. Hilda: Yeah. My training. You know, you build up to such, you go in with a bag full of stuff, and it’s your stuff, and if you’ve got a good

bag, you’re in. You have to be able to hold the fort. You can’t just walk in with nothing. Trina: Of course. Do you want to tell us about the famous “blackballing” incident at the National Cartoonists’ Society? Hilda: Sure. To begin with, my husband was an odd man, a leader. Not an odd man, but a leader, and every year, in the beginning, a bunch of cartoonists, about 10-20, would get together, freelance cartoonists, and try to start an organization. And they railroaded us into the Secretaries’ Union. The next meeting, my husband was such a good sport, we went. We were the only [cartoonists] there! They got us into the union, that was their job, and that was it. They had three different efforts… an organization going, and one way or another, they ruined it. They ruined it with a strike against College Humor [a humor magazine of the period], and everybody spent a night in jail, and they were delighted, because they got the cops to hit one of them with a billy club. [laughter] Oh, this was great, this was what they were all happy with. So anyway, now, none of the comic strip artists would join these groups, because they wanted nothing to do with the comics. Then, one year, they started their own, and they immediately included Gregory, to do their newsletter…

Trina: And that was the National Cartoonists’ Society? Hilda: Yes, that was it. Now, the subject never came up when my husband was alone, because there was only me, as far as women were concerned. But with the National Cartoonists’ Society there were wives, and they didn’t want their wives coming to the meetings. So, no women. The way it was, two people nominated you, and then they blackballed, if they don’t want you. So I was blackballed. Well, actually, what I did, I cried. All of the men were such gentlemen, Al Capp, Lil Abner, got up and castigated the group, “You call yourself a group of professionals? You’re nothing but a bunch of schoolboys!” Then he, unfortunately, ruined the moment by tripping on his way out. [laughter] He resigned, and he didn’t come back. A number of them defended me, I don’t remember who blackballed me, I don’t want to, really, but they came around. As a matter of fact, why I did it was because my husband, being a member, knew what was going on, and I knew what was going on. This organization was representing all the cartoonists, now I know there are five more women in the country who are not being represented. So, after that, we got to go on USO tours and everything. I was the only woman in the group, the others didn’t go. But I got to do everything that the fellas were doing. Trina: Then, when you finally did join the National Cartoonists’ Society, what you told me was then you put up the names of the other women cartoonists, right? For membership? Hilda: I put them up, and… now, Dale Messick didn’t join. I was always curious, and I think the reason she didn’t join was she was so indignant, because they didn’t invite her in the first place. Trina: I know she wasn’t in, she’s told me she feels very bitter

about it. Hilda: It’s only a few… most of the men have always been very nice about… I’m up against a guy who does Peanuts animation? And the guy who does that… whatever, I forget the name, anyway, big guys, and I’m very flattered to be included in this company—nominated—and I won! Trina: And that was for computer animation. Hilda: Computer animation. Trina: So let’s get into that, because you are a pioneer, a computer pioneer! Hilda: Before Apple. Trina: When computers were enormous, right? That was in 1966? Hilda: 1964. Trina: ’64? Wow! So who had even heard of computers in ’64, except for you? Hilda: I went down to NYU to take a course on how to build them when they were two bits, and they said, “Wait, wait, next year they’re going to go to four bits.” [laughter] I waited, eventually I didn’t have to because this company that was designing school boards for computer generated graphics, they were looking for me, a cartoonist who was into computers. I was looking for jobs! What we had was a newspaper strike in New York, and that destroyed everybody who was writing or drawing or photographing or anything for the newspapers, because they destroyed the newspaper… three newspapers collapsed, the Times, the News, and the Post…. Trina: And the Times didn’t carry comics. Hilda: Right, so we were all looking for jobs. I thought, I was already over 50, this is great, I’m ready for something else. I have a lot of skills and abilities to offer! There’s this… over 40, you begin to be a burden, because you’re in line for the… you’re getting higher in cost for the medical, and you’re in line for the tombstone, for the pension, so over 40, you had to fire them, and I didn’t realize that until I had a very nice interview, and I’m on my way out, and see my application in the trash can. So, then I started… I answered an ad for a Varityper, because now I’m doing Varityping… cold type, warm, hot… I throw in the drawings for nothing. But it pays well, and this is an old style machine that’s gone now. I still have one. I answered an ad for a Varityper, and it was just my kind of thing, and the fellow, it was Friday night; he was having his Friday night drink, and he was mellow, and he was very friendly. So Monday morning I come in very early, I’m there working when he comes in… double-take: “I didn’t expect to find you here!” “I know, I thought I’d help you out until you find what you’re looking for,” because I knew what he was looking for. Well, he found what he was looking for. I worked for two weeks before he found them, and those two boys he hired, the whole month didn’t do what I did in one day, so he wanted to fire them and keep me, and I didn’t want to be hung up on one male again, so I said, “Kick one of them, and we’ll be partners.” So this boy Jim and I were partners in a work space arrangement, and Jim is on the phone, trying to arrange for an interview, and I’m opposite him not paying attention anyway, he’s trying to arrange an interview for me! I said, “They don’t want me, I’m too old!” He’s sitting there with bare feet, “Well, they don’t trust me, I’m too young.” [laughter] “Well, tell you what I’m going to do, you go buy trousers, let them give you a slightly-receding hairline, and I’ll get my face lifted, and we’ll both go.” [laughter] The guy who hadn’t hired me, and who knew I knew why, was standing there, and he says, “That’s not a bad idea.” So I always worked like that. I called Bellevue [a New York hospital] and volunteered my face for anyone who wanted to practice, and they took me up on it! I got a free facelift! [laughter] The next week, after I came out of the hospital, even with dark eyeglasses hiding the bruises… all the doors opened! So, I have been very strongly in favor of Medicare for face lifts… [applause] This man was looking for somebody to do the scoreboards, and I’m just what he’s looking for, a cartoonist who can show what it’s going to look like on these boards, when they build them. And I do the Varitype-up, which has bullets that you can put where you want, so I do a graph of this scoreboard, 50 lamps up and 60 lamps down, evenly spaced, and I did portraits of the Pirates that were so impressive that nobody believed that you could get such good likenesses on 50 lamps! So, COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

Oct. 2000

we sold that to the Pittsburgh Pirates, we sold another board, and now that the boards that I can work with… I was teaching, I took one my students to help me, and they go to him! Not me, they go to him! To help on this job, which he cannot do at all. So, this was before computers. After I got the pink slip, the owner of the Kansas City Royals came, and he hired me. Trina: That was animation for scoreboards in stadiums. Hilda: Yep. He knew I was no kid, but he was no kid either. Trina: So this was early computer animation, right? Hilda: Early computer animation. At that point, I did some work for the board in California, it was a long time ago. They had a system where the lights were fractions of letters, and you could use those fractions to build a graphic. Well, now, every board has compressed so rapidly, incredible! The next board could address each lamp individually, and there I was with the Kansas City Royals, with a great big portrait board, the size of a 5’4” poster, and oh, the fun! If I had a million dollars, I’d have paid them to let me do it, it was such fun, and of course, there’s nobody to teach me, I’m figuring it all out as I went. But I helped design the programs, being an artist, they were very anxious to know what an artist wanted to be able to do, and then they would explain to me what they did to make it possible to do it, so I was the only artist! I had this career for about 17 years. The only artist who knew, because each board progressed, what to do on the board, and how to do it, and some places, they muscled me out, but I had a lot of boards, I had a lot of fun. I grew with it and everything. Trina: And you’ve always liked sports anyway, so… Hilda: There I was, doing sports! My childhood ambition! Trina: Now, you’re teaching at the Art Students’ League. This is right? And you’re also… okay, tell us a little about how… because I want to get this clear, you told me a little bit about it, you’re turning your home… you’ve turned your house into a foundation, can you explain this a little? Hilda: In 1979, I had the idea, my husband was teaching at the Art Students’ League, he was doing… when he was a cartoonist, he painted very moody landscapes, and now he would start with his landscapes, and he was no longer doing cartoons, and he’d throw all this humor into the painting, and they were great! But because this is not the chic thing for today, even though he had friends in the Metropolitan, they couldn’t do a thing for him, he was not taken seriously. So, I said—he was doing what he called his “diary” paintings, he’d spend three or four years on them, and all the crazy stuff that was going on in his view, and these things—if you hang around for a hundred years, you’re going to be so appreciated, because it’s history! He is doing history! It’s not abstract art, it’s too accessible to be abstraction, and so I wanted his paintings to hang there forever, we have a great house. At the entrance to Cowshare’s Park, and Gracie Mansion, you can never find that location if you’re looking for a place to hang something, and so I set up the foundation. [The house] became very valuable, it’s now a $2 million home, and that was my problem, because I can’t stick the foundation with an asset, because it’s going to put them in a burden. I have to find an agent that’s going to give me a really low evaluation. It took me 20 years to do that, I had to wreck the house to do it, … and also, New York is really very behind in their paperwork, last June, it was approved, but the paperwork has not been done yet, I still don’t have it, but it has been approved, people have seen it. Trina: So is your work also going to be on display? Hilda: Oh, I have a little coffee room… my mother saved all my old cartoons, and I laminated them, because they were beginning to mold, and I have the whole collection on steel shelves, and that’s my work. Not to mention that my husband was always drawing me, and I have about 75 of his drawings of me. Trina: So this will be open to the public? Hilda: Yes, by reservation. Because you can’t open the door… Trina: You just can’t walk in… I think we just brought it up to the present, then. Do you feel like taking some questions? Hilda: You didn’t bring up the future! [laughs] Trina: Oh, the future! Okay, all right! [laughter] Hilda: Now, we have a membership drive, because the year that the foundation suddenly acquired a $500-600,000 property, it’s got to show public interest. I have a few members, but I need now to Oct. 2000

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

show enough to justify that asset, so now I’m doing all kinds of crazy things for a membership drive. We’re trying to think of new programs, because we have programs going, a lot of nice things. Trina: What are some of the programs? Hilda: Well, we have a writer’s program, everybody’s writing, and we have… Uri Geller, you may not know, is an old friend of mine. Trina: Oh, wow, the man who bends keys! [laughter] Hilda: When he first started, and was accused of being a phony magician, I read his story, and I wrote to him and said, “I think if you were a magician, you’d certainly have more than one trick!” [laughter] “If you’re that clever that you can invent a trick that nobody else has ever done, you would certainly have more such tricks!” So I believed in him, and he believes my story, and we have been friends ever since. So, for a while, I’m trying to get my house on some kind of a thing, and he wanted to take it over and make a thing of it, but not a profit thing… program. But, I managed without him, but I got programs in there, if anybody gets interested, if he ever wants to make use of the house, it’s there. Paranormal program. Trina: Great. Hilda: So, I have this pie slice which may not be my pie slice, but definitely after I found out… see, I was born the day of the Salem fire, the center of the city was destroyed, and everybody called it the “witch’s revenge.” Although, we knew nothing about the witch’s revenge. And long after I left the city of Salem, the WPA did the research on the witch trial, and now they have the witch trial research, and I found a book… now that I’ve had all these crazy experiences… where this kid in my head actually existed, 300 years

ago. Now, nobody has to believe me, but I know what happened. I know that this kid came into my head somehow, so I know, and it’s wonderful to know at my age… you don’t die! You don’t die! Believe me, if you want to believe this, because I know you don’t die. So, this kid is doing my gags for me, absolutely, I know that, I couldn’t do it. After I get all this information, and I have all this research data from the Public Library in Salem, she did a comic strip, and it’s in your thing, and it’s only six episodes, six little episodes, but I was having fun with it, nevertheless, and being in this milieu, being suddenly awakened, I tell you, until I came here, I couldn’t wait to find out what was on the other side, I really, and that’s true, I still can’t wait… but I can wait now, I’m going to do this. [laughter] I called home, and they’re all excited, too, because we’re going to introduce this comic character on our internet website, and add to our things that we have to offer, and I’m already getting gags for it. Trina: Can you… does anybody here have a pencil, can you give us your website address, please? Hilda: It’s very easy: It’s my address… www.8hendersonplace.org. Trina: Okay, do you want to tell us what week… is there any way we can join, if they’re interested, can join the foundation, or what we can do for the foundation? Hilda: Just send a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ll send you something, and you’ll be registered. Trina: That’s really easy! Hilda: The membership, with everything free, is $25. Trina: Sure, $25 for everything free sounds great to me! Are you finished? No, I won’t ask you if you’re finished with the future, but are you ready for any questions that anybody has? Hilda: Oh, yeah, sure! Audience: You said there were six women cartoonists. Who were the other five? Hilda: Dale Messick, to tell the truth… Gladys Parker, she was my friend… actually more came along. Trina: Did you know Tarpe Mills? Hilda: Yes, she loved shoes, she was always looking for platforms

Gothic Romances continued from page 7

DeZuniga’s issues were exceptionally attractive and he proved himself equally adept at both the romantic and the horrific elements in each of his four stories. By far, the best issue of either title was Sinister House #3 which featured the Frank Robbins scripted “Bride of the Falcon.” It was unusual for both its setting (Venice) and the fact that the brooding boyfriend, rather than his batty family, turned out to be the villain of the piece. More importantly, it was beautifully drawn by Alex Toth, complete with inks by Frank Giacoia and, remarkably, Doug Wildey. Any comic that can boast 36 pages of Toth artwork is one to be treasured. Its evocative cover, complete with a mist-shrouded gondolier in the background, was also one of the titles’ best, and was somewhat reminiscent of Warren cover painter Sanjulian (though there is no indication of who actually painted it). Other issues boasted terrific line and wash covers by Jeffrey Jones and Neal Adams but with Sinister House #4’s DeZuniga—drawn illustration, the lavishly painted covers were replaced with traditional line-drawn artwork, a sign perhaps the experiment was floundering. In June 1972, Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love became Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion, and one month later, its sister title became Secrets of Sinister House. With the August ’72 Forbidden Tales (#6), the experiment ended. Its lovely Alan Weiss cover may have shown a blushing bride being carried over a threshold by her dashing groom, but it was into a house of scowling demons. Inside, the comic was now only a traditional 32 pages, and filled with aging Giordano-edited horror inventory, and a strip originally intended for Jack Kirby’s unpublished second issue of Spirit World. It was also Dorothy Woolfolk’s last issue. With #7, Joe Orlando took over and the comic became indistinguishable from the rest of his horror line. It lasted 15 issues and Secrets of Sinister House (which “converted” with its sixth issue) managed 18. Both contained some terrific strips by DC’s usual horror artists such as Alex Niño, Alfredo Alcala, and Gerry Talaoc, as well as the odd strip by Neal Adams, Pete Morisi, and Gil Kane. As good as these issues were, they weren’t what the comics had originally set out to be, so why did the gothic romance idea fail? Two factors were probably central to its demise: Firstly, it fell between two camps and was maybe too romantic for the horror fans and too scary for the romance readers. Secondly, having established a formula for the genre, DC simply didn’t know what to do with it. In addition to Frank Robbins, stories were provided by Michael Fleischer, Jack Oleck, Dorothy Manning and Len Wein, but none managed to move the concept on any further than that first issue. Some years later, DC was again experimenting with formats and converted some

with ankle straps. Trina: Me, too. Okay, so that’s four, and you make five, so there was one more… could that have been Marty Links, or was she later? Audience: Violet Barclay? Trina: She didn’t do newspaper strips, we’re talking newspaper strips. Could it have been Edwina… Hilda: Edwina Dumm. Okay, great. Trina: Boy, I almost know as much as you! [laughter] Audience: Are you up with the current graphics software, do you use Photoshop, Quark? Hilda: Actually, about 10 years ago, I figured I was finished with this stuff, I didn’t want to see what’s on sale any more, and I just stopped looking. But now, I have to take it up again. So I’m picking it up again. Yes, we’ve got Photoshop, but I haven’t learned it yet. I have PageMaker and the upgrade and the upgrade… Audience: Is there a comic book god? Hilda: I’ll tell you, I grew up, my first five years, in the home of Orthodox grandparents, and their kids weren’t out of the house yet, and everybody was always reading to God… everybody is either reading to God, or has something to complain about. I know something’s up there, I always knew that. My orientation, I knew that you cannot raise kids without this, you can’t say put it aside until later. No, no, you get a thing going, a bonding, and it’s a lifelong thing, I know, now, in that thing I wrote, I have to tell you that I believe more now than my husband! [laughs] But, I know! He never left me, and he’s constantly letting me know that! So, in that thing I wrote I mentioned a computer I’d won for my birthday, and I know that is Greg, and instead of saying, “Thank God!” I say, “Thank Greg!” When you read that, you’ll understand that we are all the DNA cells in the eternal body of God, I think the soul is a blade of grass. Audience: There’s such a tradition in Judaism of stories, stories about God… Trina: If there are no more questions? Hilda, thank you so much… Hilda: That was fun.

of the comics to 60¢ 100-page issues which mixed new material with classic tales from the archives. One of these titles was House of Mystery and in #225 the Don Heck drawn “Curse of the Macintyres” was reprinted from Sinister House #11, a rather average story and something of a strange choice. However, it seems that before DC pulled the plug on its gothic books, it commissioned another story which didn’t see print during the experiment. So it was that House of Mystery #229 finally provided the world premiere of “Nightmare Castle” by Robert Kanigher and Nestor Redondo. This story was something special. Newlyweds Phil and Carol Landon find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere when their car runs out of fuel. As Phil goes off to find help, Carol is enticed away by a deformed butler and lead up to the mist-enshrouded Trull castle. Inside, she is confronted by Mrs. Trull and her son Laurence, who insists Carol is his long-lost bride. It seems that Carol had a twin sister who was raised by the Trulls to be Laurence’s bride, raised to be his evil wife (cue scene of the young girl attacking a bat with a snake (!) yelling, “Strike! Strike! You silent spawn of the darkness!”). Unfortunately, the evil twin died in a car crash and Laurence went (inevitably) mad. Naturally, Carol tries to escape but is recaptured and the next day undergoes a Satanic marriage to Laurence. This sequence goes on for page after page and reads very much as if Kanigher researched it from some frighteningly authentic sources. The ceremony climaxes with Carol being swept away, along with the rag-wearing lunatic wedding guests, up to a nearby graveyard where the dead rise up and dance around her! Repairing back to the mansion, Laurence seduces his new wife (“God forgive me—I can’t help myself!” she moans in confused passion), who hallucinates that she is being ravished by Satan himself. Suddenly her real husband pops up and, after a lengthy tussle, he drives an axe into Laurence’s skull. As the pair flees the castle, Madame Trull and her baying mob disintegrate into dust while hailing Carol as their queen. Back in the real world, the Landons rebuild their lives and nine months later, Carol gives birth… to Satan! Yup, in a staggering full-page splash, we see Carol being presented with a beatific child with horns on his brow and cloven hooves instead of tootsies. As one would expect, Rendondo’s art is stunning throughout but it’s the sheer audacity of Kanigher’s writing that really takes the breath away. The combination of Satanism and fevered sexuality would have given the Comics Code Authority a heart attack in earlier days but evidently, in the ’70s, anything goes! Sadly, this was to be DC’s last foray into the world of gothic romance (though, frankly, they could never top “Nightmare Castle”) but their efforts had not gone unnoticed because, as we’ll discover next time, Charlton, Atlas/Seaboard, and even Marvel would, for a time, enter in on that endearing and odd genre, gothic romance.

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From The Vault

Tarpe Mills, Miss Fury and Albino Jo Our Guest Editor Looks At The Golden Age Artist/Writer

In 1941, a beautiful young heiress inherits a panther skin from her famous explorer uncle. It’s reputed to have belonged to an African witch doctor and to carry a curse. She does what any redblooded heroine would do—puts it on—and it fits her like a second skin. As for the curse, it turns her into Miss Fury, America’s first costumed

down to the kids if they found out that the author of such virile and awesome characters was a gal.” But with Miss Fury’s growing popularity, her gender didn’t stay secret for long. The lovely creator of a dashing adventure strip was bound to

action heroine, plunging her into a film noir world of romance and danger, peopled with unforgettable characters like the ruthless German adventuress Baroness Erica Von Kampf; Brazilian Bombshell Era, a Carmen Miranda lookalike who leads a band of guerrillas; and the one-armed, one-eyed General Bruno, Rommelesque commander of a secret Nazi stronghold hidden deep in the Brazilian jungle. In its heyday during the mid-1940s, the newspaper strip Miss Fury was carried in over 100 newspapers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and South America. The twice-yearly comic book, reprinting her strips, sold over a million copies—something unheard of in today’s comic market—and the reason is evident. The story was fast paced, reading sometimes like an adventure novel, sometimes like a romance, and the art was excellent. Most intriguing of all, Miss Fury was written and drawn by a woman, Tarpe Mills, who was not merely as beautiful as her heroine—she was a dead ringer for her heroine. Mills, the first and, until recently, only woman creator of a costumed action heroine, lived her own fantasies on paper for 10 years by the simple method of putting herself into her comic. Should anyone think her exact resemblance to the main character was mere coincidence, Mills put her white Persian cat, Perri-Purr, into the strip, too. Tarpe Mills, born June Mills (“Tarpe” was her mother’s maiden name), changed her name in the late-1930s, while she was drawing boy-oriented comic book strips like The Purple Zombie and The Cat Man. In a ’40s newspaper interview, she explains, “It would have been a major let-

make news, and she did, from newspaper articles to a mention in a 1943 Time magazine article. Mills played her publicity for all it was worth. In 1945, she made headlines by donating her cat to the war effort, lending Perri-Purr to a warship as its mascot. One presumes that she got her pet back and that the fluffy little guy did not have to see actual combat. Mills’ syndicate, Bel, aimed Miss Fury at primarily male readers and stressed the strip’s pin-up qualities. “Recently,” reads one publicity packet, “a large Naval training unit picked out 20 of America’s top comic page beauties and voted to see which ‘had what it takes’ to be Number One in the book! It was a clean sweep for Miss Fury… not one dissenting vote! Now frankly, aren’t the reasons obvious?” Another ad, headed “Glamourous Beauty…,” goes on to state that in office tests, “100% of the men (and why not?); 90% of the women voted for Miss Fury! Why not make a test in your own office?” Of course, 90% female readership isn’t half bad (today it would be incredible!), and a newspaper article from those years states that a lot of the 533 letters received in one week by the New York Post from Miss Fury fans “were from girls who thought that Dan Carey, one of the heroes of the strip, was mighty brave and handsome, and if they ever met up with a type like him, well, their hearts would be faint and fluttery.” Mills’ typical pulp-style tough gal answer was, “Listen, sister, put your name on the waiting list. I got here first!” Indeed, Mills’ male characters are very much the product of a female mind, and it’s not hard to imagine that she may have been a little in love with some of them. Aside from the aforementioned Dan Carey, a hunky blond cop who harbored a secret passion for the heroine, she seems the most fascinated with Albino Jo, a Harvardeducated Brazilian albino indian. 40 years later, when she tried unsuccessfully to sell a graphic novel, Jo was her protagonist. It’s doubtful whether Mills had ever seen a real albino, since her hero (poetically nicknamed “the man with tiger eyes”) was drawn with white hair, pink eyes and dark skin. Although Mills never traveled anywhere more exotic than Florida (at the height of her strip’s popularity she

by Trina Robbins

Below: Detail of one of Tarpe’s Miss Fury graphic novel pages. The book was unfortunately never completed but CBA is proud to feature—for the first time ever—a glimpse into Tarpe’s lost work. ©2000 The Estate of Tarpe Mills.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10 Oct. 2000

wintered in Palm Springs), she seems equally fascinated by Brazil. Most of the strip’s first four years takes place there, as does her later unfinished graphic novel. Mills kept up the relentless pace of a syndicated strip as best she could, but she had health problems—a secret she kept from her public whom, she felt, wanted her to be glamorous. She suffered most un-glamorously from asthma, sometimes bad enough to be hospitalized, and she had troubles meeting her deadlines. The occasional strips that were “ghosted” by some anonymous artist stick out like a sore thumb—they completely lack Tarpe Mills’ elegance and flare. Towards the end of Miss Fury’s run, there are more and more obviously ghosted strips. Finally, in 1950, the adventures of the lovely panther-clad heroine end in one last ghosted episode. But Mills’ comic creator days were not quite over. In 1979, an Archival Press black-&-white reprint of the first Miss Fury comic book inspired her to attempt a comeback, aided by her longtime friend, Donald Goldsamt, who, as a 12-year-old fan in the ’40s, had corresponded with her. The result was her graphic novel, Albino Jo, The Man With the Tiger Eyes, started in 1979, and never finished. In her graphic novel, Mills returned to her two early loves: Brazil and that handsome albino indian. Despite the sideburns and collar-brushing hair she drew on the

men, Albino Jo looks like a product of the ’40s, but in the sexually liberated ’80s, Mills allowed herself to be moderately daring, even occasionally baring her heroine’s breast. This was quite a change from 1947, when an episode in which she dressed a female character in a bikini caused such a stir that it was banned from 37 newspapers. In 1984, Mills and Goldsamt submitted the unfinished work to the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. A letter, dated February 6 and signed by Meredith, hopes “We can soon begin work on your material.” He writes, “As a matter of fact we’re already very active in this field and have just sold a major new pictorial novel, Maus by Art Spiegelman, to Pantheon Books.” Meredith must have at least glanced at Mills’ pages long enough to see that Albino Jo was no Maus. Yet he asks for a $200 fee before proceeding any further. “You can send the payment in the enclosed return envelope,” he writes, “and then we’ll get right to work.” In a May 19 letter to Donald Goldsamt, Mills writes, “I know you disapproved of Scott Meredith’s methods and… so did I! However… he has written again that they’re anxious to get started with Albino Jo.” Finally Mills did send in the money, and of course her graphic novel was promptly rejected by Meredith, who must have known he would reject it the moment he set eyes on it…. Tarpe Mills, undaunted, continued to work on Albino Jo up to the time of her death in 1988, leaving it unfinished. Her art had lost nothing with the passage of time, and the pages are stylish and elegant. Incomplete and not particularly comprehensible, Albino Jo is nevertheless a haunting postscript to the career of one of the most outstanding women in comics.

Oct. 2000

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

CBA Commentary

Catwoman vs. Hothead Paisan Heroes in A Man’s World? Olga Abella Investigates by Olga Abella

If a million people were asked to close their eyes and picture a hero, the majority would likely envision a man. Among the brave rescuers of children from burning buildings, the machine-gun toting warriors, and the thick-necked players of sports, do we ever imagine women? When we do think of female heroes, do we imagine only those characters who are the replicas of male superheroes, such as Wonder Woman? Can women be heroes, then, only if they act like men? In their preface to The Female Hero, Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope emphasize that "the great works on the hero… all begin with the assumption that the hero is male." They further argue that "this prevailing bias has given the impression that in literature and life, heroism is a male phenomenon" and that "the culture has often been unable to recognize female heroism". The question we need to ask ourselves, then, is what exactly we consider a hero to be. The genre of super-hero comic books strictly defines heroism in terms of extraordinary action. Because the protagonist can be heroic only by confronting and defeating problems through physical means, the genre excludes the possibility of heroism being defined from a more feminist approach, such as resolving conflict through discussion and compromise instead of with fists and weapons. This is not surprising since, as Norma Goodrich points out in her book Heroines, the dictionary definition of a hero is "both originally and primarily a ‘Greek warrior,' an epic military man from that ‘heroic age' of Greece." As a result of this limitation on how a hero can act, female characters can be heroes only if they follow the same formula used for male characters. However, it seems that when a woman dons the leotards which define her character as heroic, she is noticed more for the curve in her breasts and hips than for her bravery or physical prowess. Her success as a hero seems to stem largely from her sexual appeal.

Female super-heroes, then, are more easily accepted by the predominantly male readers of comic books when they disarm male resistance to powerful women by playing into male sexual fantasies. Sadly, female super-heroes survive mainly through sex appeal because men fail to see women as being serious participants in the construction of culture. As Nadya Aisenberg recognizes in Ordinary Heroines, "within our male-dominated culture we experience great trouble conceiving a heroine." Pearson and Pope urge that "Unless the heroism that women demonstrate in the world is reflected in the literature and myth of the culture, women and men are left with the impression that women are not heroic." In DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes, Les Daniels states that Lois Lane is not only "the most controversial character in comics," but that she "is also very likely the best known woman (her only rival is Wonder Woman, who has the advantage of super powers)." What makes Lois Lane so popular among the readers of comic books (primarily male) is that she is the product of male imagination. Daniels explains that "Lois was created by young males for an audience composed largely of young males, and she reflects something of a boy's illusions and delusions about women." Lois Lane is both beautiful and a celebrated reporter, but she also has a caustic tongue that expresses contempt for Clark Kent. Daniels emphasizes, "The dream Lois and the demon Lois are both male projections." The hot pants and low-cleavage clad Amazon princess, Wonder Woman, also fits into this projection of male fantasy. In his article "It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's…" Michael Harrington describes Wonder Woman as "a breathtaking fusion of feminism and patriotism and kinky sex." Harrington laments that recent portrayals of Wonder Woman (which are not as heavily into bondage) have lost something of the allure: "Unfortunately, in the current comic series the charm and laughter seem to have gone out of Wonder Woman, and all we get now are storms and stress and battles and apocalypse." Fighting battles is not perceived to be so dull by male readers when the protagonist is male and requires only machismo to succeed. Harrington adds: "Perhaps as women do get more powerful in real life, the charm of a woman super-hero will eventually wane for the (mostly male) readers of comic books." Unfortunately, Harrington implies that for female super-heroes to survive, they will need to rely more and more heavily on their bodies as objects that please male voyeurs. In Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Richard Reynolds admits that "The costumed heroine may be frankly the object of sexual attraction… " Reynolds further assesses that "whilst for the super-hero the transformation into costume can best be achieved with something as instantaneous as Billy Batson's ‘Shazam,' which calls forth the invincible Captain Marvel, for the super-heroine the process can… be viewed as the performance of an uncompleted striptease." If, as Daniels, Harrington and Reynolds suggest, female comic book characters reflect male adolescent desires for and fears of women, then female heroes are either seductive or threatening to men, or both, as is the case of Catwoman, the recently recreated (1993) well-endowed, shrink-wrapped "bad girl" of female superheroes. The cover of the very first issue of the new Catwoman series juxtaposes these two restricting male views of women. Jim Balent's Catwoman jumps off the page in a purple body-hugging suit that accentuates voluminously protruding breasts, perfectly rounded buttocks, and hip high black boots. In her right hand she swings a lively COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

Oct. 2000

coiling whip while her hair frames her snarling face with snake-like coils of its own. The introductory caption reads, "When She's Bad, She's Very, Very Bad… " On the cover of the second issue the same hair and snarl set off her face, but her purple body suit is shredded at just the right titillating places. Her breasts are exposed just enough to avoid revealing the nipples, and pieces of her costumes are also missing from her shoulder, elbow, knee, thigh and hip, showing just enough skin to make many adolescent boys drool at the prospect of what else lies beneath the tattered remains. The covers of these comic books depict Catwoman in the same way male painters have represented nude women on canvasses. In a fan letter in Issue #8, a male reader at first seems disturbed by the way Catwoman is physically illustrated when he says, "the current depiction of her is the most endowed of the lot. Is this merely a reflection of the ’90s’ taste and attitudes or are you using sex to sell comics?" Further on, however, he condones and defends Catwoman's sexual appeal when he says, "artists need to present images graphically and utilize exaggeration of familiar images to achieve mass appeal… Comics use sex to sell their books like any other outlet in our culture." The assistant editor's response is not just disappointing but one could even say typical, as it evades the issue altogether, "The bottom line is that we are here to tell engaging stories, and distracting details which generate undue amounts of attention only detract from the achievement of this goal" (Jordan Gorfinkel). His statement is a prime example of illogical double-talk. On the one hand, Catwoman is an alluring sexual object. On the other, however, the drawn claws and threatening whip simultaneously evoke fear of mutilation. Therefore, in the very first visual image of the female super-hero, she is presented as both desirable and destructive, and thus the stereotypes of woman as sexual object and castrator are reinforced and perpetuated. This image of Catwoman is carried on in the storylines as well, but at a more complicated and complex level. A year after the Catwoman series started in August 1993, Issue #0 was released, which gave us the information on Catwoman's origins. Here we learn about her mother's suicide and about her father slowly drinking himself to death. Selina Kyle, who eventually becomes Catwoman, is essentially abandoned by her parents and is left to provide for herself, first at an all-girl school for delinquents and then alone on the streets. As the story tells us, "once, she was a child… once, she was innocent." Her solitude and suffering, however, make her become "cold… aloof and indifferent." At the end of this issue we are told that "She is a loner, a thief, a woman… and a cat." Catwoman is attractive in her cat tights and seductive even to Batman, who is disarmed by her and "never managed to stop her for good." But she is also ruthless, wrapping men up in her whip until they give her all their money, or stealing diamond collars from the cats of elderly rich ladies. As the narrative says, "she took what she wanted wherever she found it." Although Doug Moench, the writer of Issue #0, tries to create a sympathetic character by giving us the sad story of Catwoman's youth, he more successfully constructs the equivalent of the classical male hero prototype who is independent, separate from society, above the law, and carries out his own form of justice. However, unlike her male super-hero equivalent, Batman, who is also orphaned at an early age and has to fend for himself, Catwoman does not become an upholder of justice. She does not turn her misfortunes into a desire to do good, as Batman does. Batman's unfortunate loss of his parents leads to what Mark Cotta Vaz calls "his obsessive, intensely personal, all-out war against crime" (preface to Tales of the Dark Knight. Batman's First Fifty Years: 1939-1989). Catwoman, however, has hardened her heart against society. Instead of a superhero with whom we can identify, Moench depicts Catwoman as a femme fatale whose sexiness stimulates in male readers a desire etched with fear. Interestingly, Pearson and Pope point out that "Literature… tends to portray the woman who demonstrates initiative, strength, wisdom, and independent action--the ingredients of the heroic life--not as a hero but as a villain." Not surprisingly, Catwoman's manifestation as a super-hero changes when the writer of the story is a woman. Jo Duffy complicates Catwoman's character by making her walk the balance between indulging an instinct for self-preservation and expressing a Oct. 2000

COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

heart that cannot help but respond to those in need. True to her self-serving cat nature, in #1 Catwoman is a jewelry burglar who works for someone else but demands, "When do I get my share?" while keeping one of the jewels for herself because as she says, "I didn't take to crime so someone else could steal my loot and then toss me a cut." At the same time, however, she takes in and shelters a runaway girl who she later rescues from her burning apartment. As she runs through the flames and lifts burning beams to get to the girl, risking her own life, she claims in #2, "I must have been crazy, adopting this kid." Nevertheless, she urges, "Don't die on me." This caring side of Catwoman also emerges in #5 where she tries to save a nun who is about to be killed by a street gang. A character says to her, "Risking yourself won't help!" But Catwoman won't listen to him as she snarls back, "The girl's in danger!" and breaks free to help her. She again repeats this concern for others in various other issues. In #3, while she saves a poor man from being beaten by corrupt police in a drug-infested Caribbean island, she claims "I'm no saint… but sometimes you have to make a stand." Ironically, she has become such a defender of justice that she sarcastically adds, "I think I'm turning into Batman." In #8, she attacks policemen who are shooting at teenage boys for stealing. As she kicks a blow to the back of the one aiming the gun, she screams, "You can't go shooting children!" Duffy's portrayal of Catwoman defies Moench's rendition of the villainous female super-hero. Her version depicts a tension between putting the self first and sacrificing the self for others in need, which is actually the age-old dilemma with which women continually grapple. As Goodrich acknowledges, female heroes face the same problems all women face, not only sexism and victimization but also the equally serious problem of self-sacrifice, "Girls learn self-sacrifice and the sublimation of their own desires… " When a woman writes the character of a female super-hero, then, the dynamics of heroic behavior begin to change. The female super-hero becomes more emotionally complex and has less of the self-centered, onetrack mind of the male counterparts. So, how do male readers respond to this new vision of Catwoman? They seem to accept the complexity of her personality. One reader writes: "Self -preservation versus self-sacrifice, self-interest versus selflessness… to see them at work is one of the aspects of her character that makes her so fascinating." (#5) But do men accept this emotional tug-of-war more readily from a female character? If Batman as The Dark Knight were to worry about the vulnerability of teenagers and nuns, would male readers scoff at his unmanliness? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that he is never depicted in situations where he would have to reveal this potential side to him.

Above: Jim Balent’s cover art to Catwoman #1. ©2000 DC Comics. WORKS CITED Aisenberg, Nadya. Ordinary Heroines. New York: Continuum, ’94. Daniels, Les. DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. New York: Bullfinch, ’95. DiMassa, Diane. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist #13. New Haven: Giant Ass Pub., 1994. DiMassa, Diane. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1993. DiMassa Diane. The Revenge Of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, ’95. Duffy, Jo. Catwoman # 1-3, 5, 8. DC Comics 1993. Goodrich, Norma Lorre. Heroines. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Harrington, Michael. “It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s...” The Spectator 4 (1995): 8-9. Moench, Doug. Catwoman #0. DC Comics 1994. Pearson, Carol and Katherine Pope. The Female Hero in American and British Literature. New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1981. Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modem Mythology. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Vaz, Mark Cotta. Tales Of The Dark Knight. Batman’s First Fifty Years: 1939-1989. NY: DC Comics, 1989.

Duffy has created a protagonist who tries to "negotiate complex relations with the dominant culture," as Gayle Greene says certain female characters of novels tend to do (Changing the Story). Whether consciously or unconsciously, Duffy may be engaged in what Greene calls a "re-vision" of the tradition. However, it would be foolish to think that Duffy's more complicated portrayal of a female super-hero is what made readers buy Catwoman. It may be true, though, that more women may be encouraged to read this comic book since it depicts a strong, complex female hero, and therefore serves as a means of making the concept of heroism available to women by allowing them to envision themselves in the role of Catwoman. One female reader writes: "Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving a female comicbook reader like myself someone to look up to. In this consistently male-dominated field I now actually have a comics hero. She's tough and feminine." But she reminds us in a postscript, "why is Catwoman so busty?" (#8) While Duffy produces a strong female lead in her stories, the sexuality of Balent's drawing is the strategy used to recruit the majority of the readers who are male, and essentially this countermands Duffy's efforts. Catwoman's physical strength and feats must be counter-balanced by her sex appeal so that she can be accepted in this maledominated genre without threatening its male readers. So, what happens when a female comics writer appropriates the characteristics and behavior of the male hero prototype? We get a female super-hero who not only lacks sexual appeal to men but is a terrorist who preys on men and exhibits machismo. Is this subversion, a radical opposition to mainstream view of heroism, or just a donning of the same suit on the other gender? A female super-hero who does not have curvaceous hips and triple-E breasts is Hothead Paisan. One can assume that she is unappealing to men not only because she is flat-chested, has hairy legs and armpits and wears black army boots, but also because she mutilates and annihilates men who impose their patriarchal ideologies on the world. The writer, Diane DiMassa, calls her female super-hero a "homicidal lesbian terrorist." Although Hothead Paisan appeals to an audience different from that of other super-hero comics, she nevertheless succeeds in achieving her goals by using the tactics employed by traditional male heroes. So even though the primary audience of the comic book series Hothead Paisan is female, the super-hero resolves problems by resorting to violence. In the first collection of the comic book series, Hothead explains how she became a homicidal lesbian terrorist. She points out the power television has in reinforcing the stereotypes of women and men, "And don't lets forget the family sitcoms, where the boys fix the cars and the girls bake cakes and the boys laugh at the girls cause the girls are just silly cause the mother is a mom-bot and father is a dick and it runs in the family." DiMassa writes that message after message on television provides "… NO ESCAPE from the constant onslaught of WHITE HETEROSEXISM!" As Hothead struggles to

resist the television's brainwashing, a dark side of her psyche emerges that makes her ax the TV into dust particles. This same dark voice tells her "Don't listen to anyone again! Be really defensive all the time," and makes her scream, "DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!!" Thus the seeds for the shaping of an anarchist have been planted. In the very next story when a man walking down the sidewalk tells her she should move out of his way "Because I'm the one with the Penis, that's why!!!," Hothead blows his head off with a shot from her rifle. Then when a hairy thug with USMC tattooed on his penis calls her a dyke and claims, "You just ain't had da right one yet!!," Hothead pulls out her ax, chops off his penis, and eventually shoves it down the garbage disposal. The pervasiveness of anger manifested through acts of violence in Hothead Paisan definitely indicates that DiMassa's intentions are subversive. If she were merely creating a super-hero in the image of male super-heroes, then Hothead would not be so consumed with wrath at the male injustices in the world. In addition, DiMassa satirizes super-heroes in her second anthologized collection of the comic books, entitled The Revenge of Hothead Paisan. On one of her rampages, Hothead encounters Spider-Man, Batman and Superman. When she yells at them, "Get your Danskin asses out of here!" Batman and Spider-Man flee in terror, while Superman cowers in a phone booth. Hothead screams, “Take your stupid pimple-face audience and find another planet!!" Superman stutters, "But we gave you Superwoman an' Wonderwoman…" Mercilessly, Hothead kicks him in the groin and answers, "Tits -n- Ass!… My role models do not wear bikinis, got it?" After stomping Superman into submission, she drops him down a hole in the ground labeled, "Dead, Outmoded Patriarchal Propaganda." Clearly, DiMassa confronts and attacks the whole genre of super-hero comics because of its myopic representation of heroism at the expense of women. It is clear that Hothead's war is DiMassa's war, and also the war of women who are tired of suffering the consequences of living in a world where not only are they not appreciated but are also prevented from fully realizing themselves. DiMassa reinforces this message in the dedication of the anthology: "This Book is dedicated to all the women who are not afraid, and to all the women who are." The female readers of Hothead illustrate women's need for a voice that empowers them. One writes: "Thank you for making my life in a ‘spritz-head' office tolerable. It is disheartening to listen to co-dependent women, who have the potential to be so powerful, whine about all the things that they can't do…" Another writes, "I just want you to know that Hothead is one of my biggest heroes and sources of inspiration!" In a genre where muscled white males are the predominant symbols for our culture's image of heroism, there is no opportunity for women to be heroic in mainstream comics. Female characters seem to be accepted as heroes by men only if they are sexually interesting. Because super-hero comics serve to please a primarily adolescent male audience, their portrayal of heroism aims to satisfy an imagination that is titillated by sex and violence. What becomes appealing about male super-heroes then is their performance of physical feats, and about female super-heroes is how well their costumes accentuate their curves. This depiction of male and female super-heroes constantly reinforces two harmful stereotypes: heroism as an exclusively physical action carried out best by men, and women as sexual objects who matter only according to the way they look. When super-hero prototypes are adopted by alternative comics in an effort to subvert mainstream patriarchal values, these female counterparts can become just as violent if not more violent. As long as comic books continue to reinforce heroism as a male display of physical prowess, we will never be able to imagine heroic behavior in any other way, or to imagine women as heroes unless they behave as aggressively as men. Pearson and Pope state that "Freeing the heroic journey from the limiting assumptions about appropriate female and male behavior… is an important step in defining a truly human—and truly humane—pattern of heroic action… the recognition of female heroism is important, not only as a way of reclaiming women's heritage, but also as a corrective to the male bias implicit in traditional discussions of the hero. Until the heroic experience of all people… has been thoroughly explored… the hero will always be incomplete and inaccurate.” COMIC BOOK ARTIST 10

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #42

KIRBY COLLECTOR #43

FAN FAVORITES! Covering Kirby’s work on HULK, INHUMANS, and SILVER SURFER, TOP PROS pick favorite Kirby covers, Kirby ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT interview, MARK EVANIER, 2002 Kirby Tribute Panel (DICK AYERS, TODD McFARLANE, PAUL LEVITZ, HERB TRIMPE), pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by MIKE ALLRED and P. CRAIG RUSSELL!

WORLD THAT’S COMING! KAMANDI and OMAC spotlight, 2003 Kirby Tribute Panel (WENDY PINI, MICHAEL CHABON, STAN GOLDBERG, SAL BUSCEMA, LARRY LIEBER, and STAN LEE), P. CRAIG RUSSELL interview, MARK EVANIER, NEW COLUMN analyzing Jack’s visual shorthand, pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by ERIK LARSEN and REEDMAN!

1970s MARVEL WORK! Coverage of ’70s work from Captain America to Eternals to Machine Man, DICK GIORDANO & MARK SHULTZ interviews, MARK EVANIER, 2004 Kirby Tribute Panel (STEVE RUDE, DAVE GIBBONS, WALTER SIMONSON, and PAUL RYAN), pencil art gallery, unused 1962 HULK #6 KIRBY PENCILS, and more! Kirby covers inked by GIORDANO and SCHULTZ!

1970s DC WORK! Coverage of Jimmy Olsen, FF movie set visit, overview of all Newsboy Legion stories, KEVIN NOWLAN and MURPHY ANDERSON on inking Jack, never-seen interview with Kirby, MARK EVANIER on Kirby’s covers, Bongo Comics’ Kirby ties, complete ’40s gangster story, pencil art gallery, and more! Kirby covers inked by NOWLAN and ANDERSON!

KIRBY AWARD WINNERS! STEVE SHERMAN and others sharing memories and neverseen art from JACK & ROZ, a never-published 1966 interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER on VINCE COLLETTA, pencils-toSinnott inks comparison of TALES OF SUSPENSE #93, and more! Covers by KIRBY (Jack’s original ’70s SILVER STAR CONCEPT ART) and KIRBY/SINNOTT!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #44

KIRBY COLLECTOR #45

KIRBY COLLECTOR #46

KIRBY COLLECTOR #47

KIRBY COLLECTOR #48

KIRBY’S MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS! Coverage of DEMON, THOR, & GALACTUS, interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER, pencil art galleries of the Demon and other mythological characters, two never-reprinted BLACK MAGIC stories, interview with Kirby Award winner DAVID SCHWARTZ and F4 screenwriter MIKE FRANCE, and more! Kirby cover inked by MATT WAGNER!

Jack’s vision of PAST AND FUTURE, with a never-seen KIRBY interview, a new interview with son NEAL KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’S column, two pencil galleries, two complete ’50s stories, Jack’s first script, Kirby Tribute Panel (with EVANIER, KATZ, SHAW!, and SHERMAN), plus an unpublished CAPTAIN 3-D cover, inked by BILL BLACK and converted into 3-D by RAY ZONE!

Focus on NEW GODS, FOREVER PEOPLE, and DARKSEID! Includes a rare interview with KIRBY, MARK EVANIER’s column, FOURTH WORLD pencil art galleries (including Kirby’s redesigns for SUPER POWERS), two 1950s stories, a new Kirby Darkseid front cover inked by MIKE ROYER, a Kirby Forever People back cover inked by JOHN BYRNE, and more!

KIRBY’S SUPER TEAMS, from kid gangs and the Challengers, to Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Super Powers, with unseen 1960s Marvel art, a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, author JONATHAN LETHEM on his Kirby influence, interview with JOHN ROMITA, JR. on his Eternals work, and more!

KIRBYTECH ISSUE, spotlighting Jack’s hightech concepts, from Iron Man’s armor and Machine Man, to the Negative Zone and beyond! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, MARK EVANIER’s column, two pencil art galleries, complete 1950s story, TOM SCIOLI interview, Kirby Tribute Panel (with ADAMS, PÉREZ, and ROMITA), and covers inked by TERRY AUSTIN and TOM SCIOLI!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #49

KIRBY COLLECTOR #51

KIRBY COLLECTOR #52

WARRIORS, spotlighting Thor (with a look at hidden messages in BILL EVERETT’s Thor inks), Sgt. Fury, Challengers of the Unknown, Losers, and others! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, interviews with JERRY ORDWAY and GRANT MORRISON, MARK EVANIER’s column, pencil art gallery, a complete 1950s story, wraparound Thor cover inked by JERRY ORDWAY, and more!

Bombastic EVERYTHING GOES issue, with a wealth of great submissions that couldn’t be pigeonholed into a “theme” issue! Includes a rare KIRBY interview, new interviews with JIM LEE and ADAM HUGHES, MARK EVANIER’s column, huge pencil art galleries, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, two COLOR UNPUBLISHED KIRBY COVERS, and more!

Spotlights Kirby’s most obscure work: an UNUSED THOR STORY, BRUCE LEE comic, animation work, stage play, unaltered pages from KAMANDI, DEMON, DESTROYER DUCK, and more, including a feature examining the last page of his final issue of various series BEFORE EDITORIAL TAMPERING (with lots of surprises)! Color Kirby cover inked by DON HECK!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $9.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #55

KIRBY COLLECTOR #56

KIRBY COLLECTOR #57

KIRBY COLLECTOR #53

KIRBY COLLECTOR #54

THE MAGIC OF STAN & JACK! New interview with STAN LEE, walking tour of New York where Lee & Kirby lived and worked, re-evaluation of the “Lost” FF #108 story (including a new page that just surfaced), “What If Jack Hadn’t Left Marvel In 1970?,” plus MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, and more, behind a color Kirby cover inked by GEORGE PÉREZ!

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

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

KIRBY COLLECTOR #59

KIRBY COLLECTOR #60

“Kirby Goes To Hollywood!” SERGIO ARAGONÉS and MELL LAZARUS recall Kirby’s BOB NEWHART TV show cameo, comparing the recent STAR WARS films to New Gods, RUBY & SPEARS interviewed, Jack’s encounters with FRANK ZAPPA, PAUL McCARTNEY, and JOHN LENNON, MARK EVANIER’s regular column, a Kirby pencil art gallery, a Golden Age Kirby story, and more! Kirby cover inked by PAUL SMITH!

“Unfinished Sagas”—series, stories, and arcs Kirby never finished. TRUE DIVORCE CASES, RAAM THE MAN MOUNTAIN, KOBRA, DINGBATS, a complete story from SOUL LOVE, complete Boy Explorers story, two Kirby Tribute Panels, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, pencil art galleries, and more, with Kirby’s “Galaxy Green” cover inked by ROYER, and the unseen cover for SOUL LOVE #1!

“Legendary Kirby”—how Jack put his spin on classic folklore! TONY ISABELLA on SATAN’S SIX (with Kirby’s unseen layouts), Biblical inspirations of DEVIL DINOSAUR, THOR through the eyes of mythologist JOSEPH CAMPBELL, a complete Golden Age Kirby story, rare Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, pencil art from ETERNALS, DEMON, NEW GODS, THOR, and Jack’s ATLAS cover!

“Kirby Vault!” Rarities from the “King” of comics: Personal correspondence, private photos, collages, rare Marvelmania art, bootleg album covers, sketches, transcript of a 1969 VISIT TO THE KIRBY HOME (where Jack answers the questions YOU’D ask in ‘69), MARK EVANIER, pencil art from the FOURTH WORLD, CAPTAIN AMERICA, MACHINE MAN, SILVER SURFER GRAPHIC NOVEL, and more!

FANTASTIC FOUR FOLLOW-UP to #58’s THE WONDER YEARS! Never-seen FF wraparound cover, interview between FF inkers JOE SINNOTT and DICK AYERS, rare LEE & KIRBY interview, comparison of a Jack and Stan FF story conference to Stan’s final script and Jack’s penciled pages, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, gallery of KIRBY FF ART, pencils from BLACK PANTHER, SILVER SURFER, & more!

(84-page tabloid magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(104-page magazine with COLOR) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES, edited by John Morrow Each book contains over 30 PIECES OF KIRBY ART NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED!

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 6

VOLUME 7

KIRBY CHECKLIST

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #10-12, and a tour of Jack’s home!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #13-15, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #20-22, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #23-26, plus new art!

Reprints JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #27-30, plus new art!

Lists EVERY KIRBY COMIC, BOOK, UNPUBLISHED WORK and more!

(160-page trade paperback) $17.95 ISBN: 9781893905016 Diamond Order Code: MAR042974

(176-page trade paperback) $19.95 ISBN: 9781893905023 Diamond Order Code: APR043058

(224-page trade paperback) $24.95 ISBN: 9781893905573 Diamond Order Code: FEB063353

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490038 Diamond Order Code: JUN084280

(288-page trade paperback) $29.95 ISBN: 9781605490120 Diamond Order Code: DEC084286

(128-page trade paperback) $14.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 ISBN: 9781605490052 Diamond Order Code: MAR084008

NEW!

Lee & Kirby: THE WONDER YEARS

Celebrate the 50th ANNIVERSARY OF FANTASTIC FOUR #1 with this special squarebound edition (#58) of THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, about two pop-culture visionaries who created the Fantastic Four, and a decade in comics that was more tumultuous and awe-inspiring than any before or since. Calling on his years of research, plus new interviews conducted just for this book (with STAN LEE, FLO STEINBERG, MARK EVANIER, JOE SINNOTT, and others), regular Jack Kirby Collector contributor MARK ALEXANDER traces both Lee and Kirby’s history at Marvel Comics, and the remarkable series of events and career choices that led them to converge in 1961 to conceive the Fantastic Four. It also documents the evolution of the FF throughout the 1960s, with previously unknown details about Lee and Kirby’s working relationship, and their eventual parting of ways in 1970. With a wealth of historical information and amazing Kirby artwork, STAN LEE & JACK KIRBY: THE WONDER YEARS beautifully examines the first decade of the FF, and the events that put into motion the 1960s era that came to be known as the Marvel Age of Comics! (128-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781605490380 • Diamond Order Code: SEP111248

NEW!

SILVER STAR: GRAPHITE EDITION

First conceptualized in the 1970s as a movie screenplay, SILVER STAR was too far ahead of its time for Hollywood, so artist JACK KIRBY adapted it as a six-issue mini-series for Pacific Comics in the 1980s, making it his final, great comics series. Now the entire six-issue run is collected here, reproduced from his powerful, uninked PENCIL ART, showing Kirby’s work in its undiluted, raw form! Also included is Kirby’s ILLUSTRATED SILVER STAR MOVIE SCREENPLAY, never-seen SKETCHES, PIN-UPS, and an historical overview to put it all in perspective!

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR SPECIAL EDITION

(160-page trade paperback) $19.95 (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905559 Diamond Order Code: JAN063367

CAPTAIN VICTORY: GRAPHITE EDITION

Compiles the “extra” new material from COLLECTED JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR VOLUMES 1-7, in one huge Digital Edition! Includes a fan’s private tour of the Kirbys’ remarkable home, profusely illustrated with photos, and more than 200 pieces of Kirby art not published outside of those volumes. If you already own the individual issues and skipped the collections, or missed them in print form, now you can get caught up!

For the first time, JACK KIRBY’s original CAPTAIN VICTORY GRAPHIC NOVEL is presented as it was created in 1975 (before being broken up and modified for the 1980s Pacific Comics series), reproduced from copies of Kirby’s uninked pencil art! This first “new” Kirby comic in years features page after page of prime pencils, and includes Jack’s unused CAPTAIN VICTORY SCREENPLAY, unseen art, an historical overview to put it in perspective, and more! (52-page comic book) $5.95 • (Digital Edition) $2.95

(120-page Digital Edition) $4.95

NOTE: THIS IS ISSUE #58 OF THE KIRBY COLLECTOR!

KIRBY FIVE-OH! CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE “KING” OF COMICS

For its 50th issue, the publication that started TwoMorrows presents KIRBY FIVE-OH!, a BOOK covering the best of everything from Kirby’s 50-year career in comics! The regular KIRBY COLLECTOR columnists have formed a distinguished panel of experts to choose and examine: The BEST KIRBY STORY published each year from 1938-1987! The BEST COVERS from each decade! Jack’s 50 BEST UNUSED PIECES OF ART! His 50 BEST CHARACTER DESIGNS! And profiles of, and commentary by, the 50 PEOPLE MOST INFLUENCED BY KIRBY’S WORK! Plus there’s a 50-PAGE GALLERY of Kirby’s powerful RAW PENCIL ART, and a DELUXE COLOR SECTION of photos and finished art from throughout his entire half-century oeuvre. This TABLOID-SIZED TRADE PAPERBACK features a previously unseen Kirby Superman cover inked by “DC: The New Frontier” artist DARWYN COOKE, and an introduction by MARK EVANIER, helping make this the ultimate retrospective on the career of the “King” of comics! Takes the place of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #50. (168-page tabloid-size trade paperback) $19.95 • (Digital Edition) $5.95 ISBN: 9781893905894 Diamond Order Code: FEB084186

NOTE: THIS IS ISSUE #50 OF THE KIRBY COLLECTOR!

KIRBY UNLEASHED (REMASTERED)

Reprinting the fabled 1971 KIRBY UNLEASHED PORTFOLIO, completely remastered! Spotlights some of KIRBY’s finest art from all eras of his career, including 1930s pencil work, unused strips, illustrated World War II letters, 1950s pages, unpublished 1960s Marvel pencil pages and sketches, and Fourth World pencil art (done expressly for this portfolio in 1970)! We’ve gone back to the original art to ensure the best reproduction possible, and MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN have updated the Kirby biography from the original printing, and added a new Foreword explaining how this portfolio came to be! PLUS: We’ve recolored the original color plates, and added EIGHT NEW BLACK-&-WHITE PAGES, plus EIGHT NEW COLOR PAGES, including Jack’s four GODS posters (released separately in 1972), and four extra Kirby color pieces, all at tabloid size! (60-page tabloid with COLOR) SOLD OUT • (Digital Edition) $5.95

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • www.twomorrows.com

THE ORIGINAL GOES DIGITAL!

Go online for an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all print issues HALF-PRICE!

The forerunner to COMIC BOOK CREATOR, CBA is the 2000-2004 Eisner Award winner for BEST COMICS-RELATED MAG! Edited by CBC’s JON B. COOKE, it features in-depth articles, interviews, and unseen art, celebrating the lives and careers of the great comics artists from the 1970s to today. ALL BACK ISSUES NOW AVAILABLE AS DIGITAL EDITIONS FOR $3.95 FROM www.twomorrows.com!

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com

Order online at www.twomorrows.com COMIC BOOK ARTIST COLLECTION, VOLUME 3 Reprinting the Eisner Award-winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST #7-8 (spotlighting 1970s Marvel and 1980s indies), plus over 30 NEW PAGES of features and art! New PAUL GULACY portfolio, MR. MONSTER scrapbook, the story behind MARVEL VALUE STAMPS, and more! New MICHAEL T. GILBERT cover! (224-page trade paperback) $24.95 • ISBN: 9781893905429

#3: ADAMS AT MARVEL #4: WARREN PUBLISHING

#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

Era of “Artist as Editor” at National: New NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews, art, and articles with JOE KUBERT, JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ALEX TOTH, JULIE SCHWARTZ, and many more! Plus ADAMS thumbnails for a forgotten Batman story, unseen NICK CARDY pages from a controversial Teen Titans story, unpublished TOTH covers, and more!

STAN LEE AND ROY THOMAS discussion about Marvel in the 1970s, ROY THOMAS interview, BILL EVERETT’s daughter WENDY and MIKE FRIEDRICH on Everett, interviews with GIL KANE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, MIKE PLOOG, STERANKO’s Unknown Marvels, the real origin of the New X-Men, Everett tribute cover by GIL KANE, and more!

(80-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(76-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

#6: MORE MARVEL ’70s #7: ’70s MARVELMANIA

NEAL ADAMS interview about his work at Marvel Comics in the 1960s from AVENGERS to X-MEN, unpublished Adams covers, thumbnail layouts for classic stories, published pages BEFORE they were inked, and unused pages from his NEVER-COMPLETED X-MEN GRAPHIC NOVEL! Plus TOM PALMER on the art of inking Neal Adams, ADAMS’ MARVEL WORK CHECKLIST, & ADAMS wraparound cover!

Definitive JIM WARREN interview about publishing EERIE, CREEPY, VAMPIRELLA, and other fan favorites, in-depth interview with BERNIE WRIGHTSON with unpublished Warren art, plus unseen art, features and interviews with FRANK FRAZETTA, RICHARD CORBEN, AL WILLIAMSON, JACK DAVIS, ARCHIE GOODWIN, HARVEY KURTZMAN, ALEX NINO, and more! BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!

More on DC COMICS 1967-74, with art by and interviews with NICK CARDY, JOE SIMON, NEAL ADAMS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MIKE KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, MARV WOLFMAN, IRWIN DONENFELD, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GIL KANE, DENNY O’NEIL, HOWARD POST, ALEX TOTH on FRANK ROBBINS, DC Writer’s Purge of 1968 by MIKE BARR, JOHN BROOME’s final interview, and more! CARDY cover!

Unpublished and rarely-seen art by, features on, and interviews with 1970s Bullpenners PAUL GULACY, FRANK BRUNNER, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, MARIE and JOHN SEVERIN, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE COCKRUM, DON MCGREGOR, DOUG MOENCH, and others! Plus never-beforeseen pencil pages to an unpublished Master of Kung-Fu graphic novel by PAUL GULACY! Cover by FRANK BRUNNER!

Featuring ’70s Marvel greats PAUL GULACY, JOHN BYRNE, RICH BUCKLER, DOUG MOENCH, DAN ADKINS, JIM MOONEY, STEVE GERBER, FRANK SPRINGER, and DENIS KITCHEN! Plus: a rarely-seen Stan Lee P.R. chat promoting the ’60s Marvel cartoon shows, the real trials and tribulations of Comics Distribution, the true story behind the ’70s Kung Fu Craze, and a new cover by PAUL GULACY!

(60-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(116-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(100-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(128-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

#12: CHARLTON PART 2

Major independent creators and their fabulous books from the early days of the Direct Sales Market! Featured interviews include STEVE RUDE, HOWARD CHAYKIN, DAVE STEVENS, JAIME HERNANDEZ, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, DON SIMPSON, SCOTT McCLOUD, MIKE BARON, MIKE GRELL, and more! Plus plenty of rare and unpublished art, and a new STEVE RUDE cover!

Interviews with Charlton alumni JOE GILL, DICK GIORDANO, STEVE SKEATES, DENNIS O’NEIL, ROY THOMAS, PETE MORISI, JIM APARO, PAT BOYETTE, FRANK MCLAUGHLIN, SAM GLANZMAN, plus ALAN MOORE on the Charlton/ Watchmen Connection, DC’s planned ALLCHARLTON WEEKLY, and more! DICK GIORDANO cover!

Career-spanning SIMONSON INTERVIEW, covering his work from “Manhunter” to Thor to Orion, JOHN WORKMAN interview, TRINA ROBBINS interview, also Trina, MARIE SEVERIN and RAMONA FRADON talk shop about their days in the comics business, MARIE SEVERIN interview, plus other great women cartoonists. New SIMONSON cover!

Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes by KUBERT, SIMONSON, JIM LEE, BOLLAND, GIBBONS and others, TOTH on continuity art, TOTH checklist, plus SHELDON MAYER SECTION with a look at SCRIBBLY, interviews with Mayer’s kids (real-life inspiration for SUGAR & SPIKE), and more! Covers by TOTH and MAYER!

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983! Interviews with Charlton alumni GEORGE WILDMAN, NICOLA CUTI, JOE STATON, JOHN BYRNE, TOM SUTTON, MIKE ZECK, JACK KELLER, PETE MORISI, WARREN SATTLER, BOB LAYTON, ROGER STERN, and others, ALEX TOTH, a NEW E-MAN STRIP by CUTI AND STATON, and the art of DON NEWTON! STATON cover!

(108-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(108-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

1970s Marvel Horror focus, from Son of Satan to Ghost Rider! Interviews with ROY THOMAS, MARV WOLFMAN, GENE COLAN, TOM PALMER, HERB TRIMPE, GARY FRIEDRICH, DON PERLIN, TONY ISABELLA, and PABLOS MARCOS, plus a Portfolio Section featuring RUSS HEATH, MIKE PLOOG, DON PERLIN, PABLO MARCOS, FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE, and more! New GENE COLAN cover!

Interviews with Tower and THUNDER AGENTS alumni WALLACE WOOD, LOU MOUGIN, SAMM SCHWARTZ, DAN ADKINS, LEN BROWN, BILL PEARSON, LARRY IVIE, GEORGE TUSKA, STEVE SKEATES, and RUSS JONES, TOWER COMICS CHECKLIST, history of TIPPY TEEN, 1980s THUNDER AGENTS REVIVAL, and more! WOOD cover!

Interviews with ’80s independent creators DAVE STEVENS, JAIME, MARIO, AND GILBERT HERNANDEZ, MATT WAGNER, DEAN MOTTER, PAUL RIVOCHE, and SANDY PLUNKETT, plus lots of rare and unseen art from The Rocketeer, Love & Rockets, Mr. X, Grendel, other ’80s strips, and more! New cover by STEVENS and the HERNANDEZ BROS.!

’70s ATLAS COMICS HISTORY! Interviews with JEFF ROVIN, ROY THOMAS, ERNIE COLÓN, STEVE MITCHELL, LARRY HAMA, HOWARD CHAYKIN, SAL AMENDOLA, JIM CRAIG, RIC MEYERS, and ALAN KUPPERBERG, Atlas Checklist, HEATH, WRIGHTSON, SIMONSON, MILGROM, AUSTIN, WEISS, and STATON discuss their Atlas work, and more! COLÓN cover!

Discussion with ARTHUR ADAMS about his career (with an extensive CHECKLIST, and gobs of rare art), plus GRAY MORROW tributes from friends and acquaintances and a MORROW interview, Red Circle Comics Checklist, interviews with & remembrances of GEORGE ROUSSOS & GEORGE EVANS, Gallery of Morrow, Evans, and Roussos art, EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER interview, and more! New ARTHUR ADAMS cover!

(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(128-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

#20: ROMITAs & KUBERTs #21: ADAM HUGHES, ALEX #22: GOLD KEY COMICS & examinations: RUSS MANNING ROSS, & JOHN BUSCEMA Interviews & Magnus Robot Fighter, WALLY WOOD &

Roundtable with JIM STARLIN, ALAN WEISS and AL MILGROM, interviews with STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE LEIALOHA, and FRANK BRUNNER, art from the lost WARLOCK #16, plus a FLO STEINBERG CELEBRATION, with a Flo interview, tributes by HERB TRIMPE, LINDA FITE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, and others! STARLIN/ MILGROM/WEISS cover!

History of Harvey Comics, from Hot Stuf’, Casper, and Richie Rich, to Joe Simon’s “Harvey Thriller” line! Interviews with, art by, and tributes to JACK KIRBY, STERANKO, WILL EISNER, AL WILLIAMSON, GIL KANE, WALLY WOOD, REED CRANDALL, JOE SIMON, WARREN KREMER, ERNIE COLÓN, SID JACOBSON, FRED RHOADES, and more! New wraparound MITCH O’CONNELL cover!

Joint interview between Marvel veteran and superb Spider-Man artist JOHN ROMITA, SR. and fan favorite Thor/Hulk renderer JOHN ROMITA, JR.! On the flipside, JOE, ADAM & ANDY KUBERT share their histories and influences in a special roundtable conversation! Plus unpublished and rarely seen artwork, and a visit by the ladies VIRGINIA and MURIEL! Flip-covers by the KUBERTs and the ROMITAs!

ADAM HUGHES ART ISSUE, with a comprehensive interview, unpublished art, & CHECKLIST! Also, a “Day in the Life” of ALEX ROSS (with plenty of Ross art)! Plus a tribute to the life and career of one of Marvel’s greatest artists, JOHN BUSCEMA, with testimonials from his friends and peers, art section, and biographical essay. HUGHES and TOM PALMER flip-covers!

Total War M.A.R.S. Patrol, Tarzan by JESSE MARSH, JESSE SANTOS and DON GLUT’S Dagar and Dr. Spektor, Turok, Son of Stone’s ALBERTO GIOLITTI and PAUL S. NEWMAN, plus Doctor Solar, Boris Karloff, The Twilight Zone, and more, including MARK EVANIER on cartoon comics, and a definitive company history! New BRUCE TIMM cover!

(104-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(104-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

(122-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

Exhaustive MIGNOLA interview, huge art gallery (with never-seen art), and comprehensive checklist! On the flip-side, a careerspanning JILL THOMPSON interview, plus tons of art, and studies of Jill by ALEX ROSS, STEVE RUDE, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and more! Also, interview with JOSÉ DELBO, and a talk with author HARLAN ELLISON on his various forays into comics! New MIGNOLA HELLBOY cover!

GAHAN WILSON and NatLamp art director MICHAEL GROSS speak, interviews with and art by NEAL ADAMS, FRANK SPRINGER, SEAN KELLY, SHARY FLENNEKIN, ED SUBITSKY, M.K. BROWN, B.K. TAYLOR, BOBBY LONDON, MICHEL CHOQUETTE, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and more! Features new covers by GAHAN WILSON and MARK BODÉ!

Focus on AMERICA’S BEST COMICS! ALAN MOORE interview on everything from SWAMP THING to WATCHMEN to ABC and beyond! Interviews with KEVIN O’NEILL, CHRIS SPROUSE, JIM BAIKIE, HILARY BARTA, SCOTT DUNBIER, TODD KLEIN, JOSE VILLARRUBIA, and more! Flip-side spotlight on the amazing KEVIN NOWLAN! Covers by J.H. WILLIAMS III & NOWLAN!

(106-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(122-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

(122-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $3.95

Previously available only to CBA subscribers! Spotlights great DC Comics of the ’70s: Interviews with MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN on JACK KIRBY’s Fourth World, ALEX TOTH on his mystery work, NEAL ADAMS on Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, RUSS HEATH on Sgt. Rock, BRUCE JONES discussing BERNIE WRIGHTSON (plus a WRIGHTSON portfolio), and a BRUCE TIMM interview, art gallery, and cover!

Compiles the new “extras” from CBA COLLECTION VOL. 1-3: unpublished JACK KIRBY story, unpublished BERNIE WRIGHTSON art, unused JEFF JONES story, ALAN WEISS interview, examination of STEVE ENGLEHART and MARSHALL ROGERS’ 1970s Batman work, a look at DC’s rare Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, PAUL GULACY art gallery, Marvel Value Stamp history, Mr. Monster’s scrapbook, and more!

(76-page Digital Edition) $3.95

(112-page Digital Edition) $3.95